The Honorable Schoolboy

by John le Carré

  “Season of the year to you, then,” said Jerry.

  With a last nod, but none to the girl, Jerry limped into the corridor, Fawn following. Waiting for the lift, he saw the elegant American standing at his open doorway, watching his departure.

  “Ah, yeah, I forgot about you,” he called very loudly. “You’re running the bug on her flat, aren’t you? The Brits blackmail her and the Cousins bug her—lucky girl gets it all ways.”

  The American vanished, closing the door quickly after him. The lift came and Fawn shoved him in.

  “Don’t do that,” Jerry warned him. “This gentleman’s name is Fawn,” he told the other occupants of the lift in a very loud voice. They mostly wore dinner-jackets and sequinned dresses. “He’s a member of the British Secret Service and he’s just kicked me in the balls. The Russians are coming,” he added, to their doughy, indifferent faces. “They’re going to take away all your bloody money.”

  “Drunk,” said Fawn in disgust.

  In the lobby Lawrence the porter watched with keen interest. In the forecourt a Peugeot saloon waited, blue. Peter Guillam was sitting in the driving seat.

  “Get in,” he snapped.

  The passenger door was locked. He climbed into the back, Fawn after him.

  “What the hell do you think you’re up to?” Guillam demanded through clenched teeth. “Since when did half-arsed London Occasionals cut anchor in mid-operation?”

  “Keep clear,” Jerry warned Fawn. “Just the hint of a frown from you right now is enough to get me going. I mean that. I warn you. Official.”

  The ground fog had returned, rolling over the bonnet. The passing city offered itself like the framed glimpses of a junk yard: a painted sign, a shop-window, strands of cable strung across a neon sign, a clump of suffocated foliage; the inevitable building site, floodlit. In the mirror Jerry saw a black Mercedes following, male passenger, male driver.

  “Cousins bringing up the tail,” he announced.

  A spasm of pain in the abdomen almost blacked him out, and for a moment he actually thought Fawn had hit him again, but it was only an after-effect of the first time. In Central he made Guillam pull up and was sick in the gutter in full public view, leaning his head through the window while Fawn crouched tensely over him. Behind them the Mercedes stopped too.

  “Nothing like a spot of pain,” he exclaimed, settling in the car again, “for getting the old brain out of moth-balls once in a while. Eh, Peter?”

  Guillam made an obscene answer.

  You don’t understand what’s going on, Smiley had said. How much you could upset things. Billions of dollars and thousands of men could not obtain a part of what we stand to gain . . .

  How? he kept asking himself. Gain what? His knowledge of Nelson’s position inside Chinese affairs was sketchy. Craw had told him only the minimum he needed to know: Nelson has access to the Crown jewels of Peking, Your Grace. Whoever gets his hooks on Nelson has earned a lifetime’s merit for himself and his noble house.

  They were skirting the harbour, heading for the tunnel. From sea-level the American aircraft carrier looked strangely small against the merry backdrop of Kowloon.

  “How’s Drake getting him out, by the way?” he asked Guillam chattily. “Not trying to fly him again, that’s for sure. Ricardo put the lid on that one for good, didn’t he?”

  “Suction,” Guillam snapped—which was very silly of him, thought Jerry jubilantly; he should have kept his mouth shut.

  “Swimming?” Jerry asked. “Nelson on the Mirs Bay ticket. That’s not Drake’s way, is it? Nelson’s too old for that one, anyway. Freeze to death, even if the sharks didn’t get his whatnots. How about the pig train, come out with the grunters? Sorry you’ve got to miss the big moment, sport, all on account of me.”

  “So am I, as a matter of fact. I’d like to kick your teeth in.”

  Inside Jerry’s brain, the sweet music of rejoicing sounded. It’s true! he told himself. That’s what’s happening! Drake’s bringing Nelson out and they’re all queueing up for the finish!

  Behind Guillam’s lapse—just one word, but in Sarratt terms totally unforgivable, indivisibly wrong—there lay nevertheless a revelation as dazzling as anything which Jerry was presently enduring, and in some respects vastly more bitter. If anything mitigates the crime of indiscretion, and in Sarratt terms nothing does, then Guillam’s experiences of the last hour—half of it spent driving Smiley frantically through rush-hour traffic and half of it waiting, in desperate indecision, in the car outside Star Heights—would surely qualify. Everything he had feared in London, the most Gothic of his apprehensions regarding the Enderby-Martello connection, and the supporting rôles of Lacon and Sam Collins, had in these sixty minutes been proved to him beyond all reasonable doubt as right and true and justified—and if anything somewhat understated.

  They had driven first to Bowen Road in the Midlevels, to an apartment block so blank and featureless and large that even those who lived there must have had to look twice at the number before they were sure they were entering the right one. Smiley pressed a bell marked “Mellon,” and, idiot that he was, Guillam asked “Who’s Mellon?” at the same moment he remembered that it was Sam Collins’s work name. Then he did a double take and asked himself—but not Smiley; they were in the lift by now—what maniac, after Haydon’s ravages, could conceivably award himself the same work name which he had used before the fall? Then Collins opened the door to them, wearing his Thai silk dressing-gown, a brown cigarette jammed into a holder, and his washable non-iron smile, and the next thing was they were grouped in a parquet drawing-room with bamboo chairs and Sam had switched two transistor radios to different programmes, one voice, the other music, to provide rudimentary anti-bug security while they talked. Sam listened, ignoring Guillam entirely, then promptly phoned Martello direct—Sam had a direct line to him, please note, no dialling, nothing; a straight land-line, apparently—to ask in veiled language how things stood with chummy. Chummy—Guillam learned later—being gambling slang for a mug. Martello replied that the surveillance van had just reported in. Chummy and Tiu were presently sitting in Causeway Bay aboard the Admiral Nelson, said the watchers, and the directional mikes (as usual) were picking up so much bounce from the water that the transcribers would need days, if not weeks, to clean off the extraneous sound and find out whether the two men had ever said anything interesting. Meanwhile they had dropped one man at the quayside as a static post, with orders to advise Martello immediately should the boat weigh anchor or either of the two quarries disembark.

  “Then we must go there at once,” said Smiley, so they piled back into the car, and while Guillam drove the short distance to Star Heights, seething and listening impotently to their terse conversation, he became with every moment more convinced that he was looking at a spider’s web, and that only George Smiley, obsessed by the promise of the case and the image of Karla, was myopic enough, and trusting enough—and, in his own paradoxical way, innocent enough—to bumble straight into the middle of it.

  George’s age, thought Guillam. Enderby’s political ambitions, his fondness for the hawkish, pro-American stance—not to mention the crate of champagne and his outrageous courtship of the fifth floor. Lacon’s tepid support of Smiley, while he secretly cast around for a successor. Martello’s stopover in Langley. Enderby’s attempt only days ago to prise Smiley away from the case and hand it to Martello on a plate. And now, most eloquent and ominous of all, the reappearance of Sam Collins as the joker in the pack with a private line to Martello! And Martello, heaven help us, acting dumb about where George got his information from—the direct line notwithstanding.

  To Guillam all these threads added up to one thing only, and he could not wait to take Smiley aside and, by any means at his command, deflect him sufficiently from the operation, just for one moment, for him to see where he was heading. To tell him about the letter. About Sam’s visit to Lacon and Enderby in Whitehall.

  Instead of which? He was to return to Engla
nd. Why was he to return to England? Because a genial thick-skulled hack named Westerby had had the gall to slip the leash.

  Even without his crying awareness of impending disaster, the disappointment to Guillam would have been scarcely supportable. He had endured a great deal for this moment. Disgrace and exile to Brixton under Haydon, poodling for old George instead of getting back to the field, putting up with George’s obsessive secretiveness, which Guillam privately considered both humiliating and self-defeating—but at least it had been a journey with a destination, till Jerry bloody Westerby, of all people, had robbed him even of that. But to return to London knowing that, for the next twenty-two hours at least, he was leaving Smiley and the Circus to a bunch of wolves, without even the chance to warn him—to Guillam it was the crowning cruelty of a frustrated career, and if blaming Jerry helped, then damn him, he would blame Jerry or anybody else.

  “Send Fawn!”

  “Fawn’s not a gentleman,” Smiley would have replied—or words that meant the same.

  You can say that again too, thought Guillam, remembering the broken arms.

  Jerry was equally conscious of abandoning someone to the wolves, even if it was Lizzie Worthington rather than George Smiley. As he gazed through the rear window of the car, it seemed to him that the very world that he was moving through had also been abandoned. The street markets were deserted, the pavements, even the doorways. Above them the Peak loomed fitfully, its crocodile spine daubed by a ragged moon.

  It’s the Colony’s last day, he decided: Peking has made its proverbial telephone call. “Get out, party over.” The last hotel was closing; he saw the empty Rolls-Royces lying like scrap around the harbour, and the last blue-rinse round-eye matron, laden with her tax-free furs and jewellery, tottering up the gangway of the last cruise ship; the last China-watcher frantically feeding his last miscalculations into the shredder; the looted shops, the empty city waiting like a carcass for the hordes. For a moment it was all one vanishing world; here, Phnom Penh, Saigon, London—a world on loan, with the creditors standing at the door, and Jerry himself, in some unfathomable way, a part of the debt that was owed.

  I’ve always been grateful to this service, that it gave me a chance to pay. Is that how you feel?

  Yes, George, he thought. Put the words into my mouth, old boy. That’s exactly how I feel, sport. But perhaps not quite in the sense you mean it, however. He saw Frost’s cheerful, fond little face as they drank and fooled. He saw it the second time, locked in that awful scream. He felt Luke’s friendly hand upon his shoulder and saw the same hand lying on the floor, flung back over his head to catch a ball that would never come, and he thought, Trouble is, sport, the paying is actually done by the other poor sods.

  Like Lizzie, for instance.

  He’d mention that to George one day, if they ever, over a jar, should get back to that sticky little matter of just why we climb the mountain. He’d make a point there—nothing aggressive, not rocking the boat, you understand, sport—about the selfless and devoted way in which we sacrifice other people, such as Luke and Frost and Lizzie. George would have a perfectly good answer, of course. Reasonable. Measured. Apologetic. George saw the bigger picture. Understood the imperatives. Of course he did. He was an owl.

  The harbour tunnel was approaching and he was thinking of her shivering last kiss, and remembering the drive to the mortuary all at the same time, because the scaffold of a new building rose ahead of them out of the fog and, like the scaffold on the way to the mortuary, it was floodlit and glistening coolies were swarming over it in yellow helmets.

  Tiu doesn’t like her either, he thought. Doesn’t like roundeyes who spill the beans on Big Sir.

  Forcing his mind in other directions, he tried to imagine what they would do with Nelson: stateless, homeless, a fish to be devoured or thrown back into the sea at will. Jerry had seen a few of those fish before: he had been present for their capture; at their swift interrogation. He had led more than one of them back across the border they had so recently crossed, for hasty recycling, as the Sarratt jargon had it—“quick before they notice he has left home.” And if they didn’t put him back? If they kept him, this great prize they all so coveted? Then after the years of his debriefing—two, three even; he had heard some ran for five— Nelson would become one more Wandering Jew of the spy-trade, to be hidden, and moved again, and hidden, to be loved not even by those to whom he had betrayed his trust.

  And what will Drake do with Lizzie, he wondered, while that little drama unfolds? Which particular scrap-heap is she headed for this time?

  They were at the mouth of the tunnel and they had slowed almost to a halt. The Mercedes lay right behind them. Jerry let his head fall forward. He put both hands over his groin while he rocked himself and grunted in pain. From an improvised police box, like a sentry post, a Chinese constable watched curiously.

  “If he comes over to us, tell him we’ve got a drunk on our hands,” Guillam snapped. “Show him the sick on the floor.”

  They crawled into the tunnel. Two lanes of north-bound traffic were bunched nose to bumper by the bad weather. Guillam had taken the right-hand stream. The Mercedes drew up beside them on their left. In the mirror, through half-closed eyes, Jerry saw a brown lorry grind down the hill after them.

  “Give me some change,” Guillam said. “I’ll need change as I come out.”

  Fawn delved in his pockets, but using one hand only.

  The tunnel pounded to the roar of engines. A hooting match started. Others began joining in. To the encroaching fog was added the stench of exhaust fumes. Fawn closed his window. The din rose and echoed till the car trembled to it.

  Jerry put his hands to his ears. “Sorry, sport. Going to bring up again, I’m afraid.”

  But this time he leaned toward Fawn, who, with a muttered “Filthy bastard,” started hastily to wind his window down again, until Jerry’s head crashed into the lower part of his face and Jerry’s elbow hacked down in his groin. For Guillam, caught between driving and defending himself, Jerry had one pounding chop on the point where the shoulder socket meets the collarbone. He started the strike with the arm quite relaxed, converting the speed into power at the last possible moment. The impact made Guillam scream “Christ!” and lifted him straight out of his seat as the car veered to the right.

  Fawn had an arm round Jerry’s neck and with his other hand he was trying to press Jerry’s head over it, which would definitely have killed him. But there is a blow they teach at Sarratt for cramped spaces that is called “the tiger’s claw” and is delivered by driving the heel of the hand upwards into the opponent’s windpipe, keeping the arm crooked and the fingers pressed back for tension. Jerry did that now, and Fawn’s head hit the back window so hard that the safety glass starred. In the Mercedes the two Americans went on looking ahead of them, as if they were driving to a state funeral. He thought of squeezing Fawn’s windpipe with his finger and thumb but it didn’t seem necessary. Recovering his gun from Fawn’s waistband, Jerry opened the right-hand door. Guillam made one desperate dive for him, ripping the sleeve of his faithful but very old suit to the elbow. Jerry swung the gun onto his arm and saw his face contort with pain. Fawn got a leg out, but Jerry slammed the door on it and heard him shout “Bastard!” again, and after that he just kept running back toward town, against the stream.

  Bounding and weaving between the land-locked cars, he pelted out of the tunnel and up the hill until he reached the little sentry hut. He thought he heard Guillam yelling. He thought he heard a shot, but it could have been a car backfiring. His groin was hurting amazingly, but he seemed to run faster under the impetus of the pain. A policeman on the curb shouted at him, another held out his arms, but Jerry brushed them aside, and they gave him the final indulgence of the round-eye. He ran until he found a cab. The driver spoke no English so he had to point the way. “That’s it, sport. Up there. Left, you bloody idiot. That’s it—” until they reached her block.

  He didn’t know whether Smiley
and Collins were still there, or whether Ko had turned up, perhaps with Tiu, but there was very little time to play games finding out. He didn’t ring the bell because he knew the mikes would pick it up. Instead he fished a card from his wallet, scribbled on it, shoved it through the letterbox, and waited in a crouch, shivering and sweating and panting like a dray-horse while he listened for her tread and nursed his groin. He waited an age, and finally the door opened and she stood there staring at him while he tried to get upright.

  “Christ, it’s Galahad,” she muttered. She wore no make-up and Ricardo’s claw marks were deep and red. She wasn’t crying; he didn’t think she did that, but her face looked older than the rest of her. To talk, he drew her into the corridor and she didn’t resist. He showed her the door leading to the fire steps.

  “Meet me the other side of it in five seconds flat, hear me? Don’t telephone anybody, don’t make a clatter leaving, and don’t ask any bloody silly questions. Bring some warm clothes. Now do it, sport. Don’t dither. Please.”

  She looked at him, at his torn sleeve, and sweat-stained jacket; at his mop of forelock hanging over one eye.

  “It’s me or nothing,” he said. “And believe me, it’s a big nothing.”

  She walked back to her flat alone, leaving the door ajar. But she came out much faster, and for safety’s sake she didn’t even close the door. On the fire stairs he led the way. She carried a shoulder-bag and wore a leather coat. She had brought a cardigan for him to replace the torn jacket—he supposed Drake’s, because it was miles too small, but he managed to squeeze into it. He emptied his jacket pockets into her bag and chucked the jacket down the rubbish chute.

  She was so quiet following him that he twice looked back to make sure she was still there. Reaching the ground floor, he peered through the window and drew back in time to see the Rocker in person, accompanied by a heavy subordinate, approach the porter in his kiosk and show him his police pass. They followed the stair as far as the car-park, and she said, “Let’s take the red canoe.”