The Mission Song

by John le Carré

  “Two days. Call it three for safety. They'll pay good money, they expect to. Five K American would not be considered excessive.” And after further off-air consultation, in a tone of evident relief: “Clothing can be found, Salvo. Clothing I am told is not a problem.”

  Alerted by his use of the Passive Voice, I would have liked to enquire who they were who were offering me this totally unprecedented bonus instead of the modest retainer plus hours which normally is all you get for the honour of protecting your country, but a natural deference restrained me, which with Mr Anderson it usually did.

  “I'm due in the High Court on Monday, Mr Anderson. It's a big case,” I pleaded. And donning my uxorial hat for the third and final time, “I mean, what do I tell my wife?”

  “A replacement has already been found for you, Salvo, and the High Court is comfortable with the new arrangements, thank you.” He paused, and when Mr Anderson pauses, you pause too. “Regarding your wife, you may say that a longstanding corporate client requires your services as a matter of urgency, and you cannot afford to disappoint them.”

  “Right, sir. Understood.”

  “Further explanations will tie you in knots, so do not on any account attempt one. That's the whole caboosh you're wearing, is it? Shiny shoes, dress shirt, the lot?”

  Through the swirling mists of my perplexity I admitted that it was indeed the whole caboosh.

  “Why am I not hearing inane party chatter in the background?”

  I explained that I had removed myself to a corridor in order to take his call.

  “Do you have a separate exit within your reach?”

  A descending staircase lay open at my feet, and amid my confusion I must have said as much.

  “Then do not return to the party. When you emerge onto the street, look to your left and you will see a blue Mondeo parked outside a betting shop. Last three letters of the registration LTU, white driver name of Fred. What size shoes do you take?”

  No man on earth forgets his own shoe size, yet I had to reach deep into my memory to retrieve it. Nine.

  “Would that be a wide fitting or slim?”

  Wide, sir, I said. I might have added that Brother Michael used to say I had an African's feet, but I didn't. My mind was not with Brother Michael or my feet, African or other. Neither was it with Mr Anderson's mission of vital national importance, keen though I was, as ever, to be of service to my Queen and country. It was telling me that out of a clear Heaven I was being offered the key to my escape, plus a much needed decompression chamber providing two days of remunerative work and two nights of solitary meditation in a de luxe hotel while I pieced together my displaced universe. In the process of extricating my cellphone from the inner pocket of my dinner jacket and placing it against my ear, I had inhaled the reheated body odours of a black African hospital nurse named Hannah with whom I had been making unbridled love commencing shortly after 11 p.m. British Summer Time of the night before, and continuing up to the moment of my departure one hour and thirty-five minutes ago, which in my haste to arrive at Penelope's party on time I had failed to wash off.

  2

  I am not one to believe in portents, auguries, fetishes, or magic white or black, although you can bet your bottom dollar it's in there somewhere with my mother's blood. The fact remains that my path to Hannah was flagged all the way, if I'd only had eyes to see it, which I didn't.

  The first recorded signal occurred on the Monday evening preceding the fatal Friday in question, at the Trattoria Bella Vista in Battersea Park Road, our local greasy spoon, where I was not enjoying a solitary meal of recycled cannelloni and Giancarlo's weapons-grade Chianti. For self-improvement I had brought along with me a paperback copy of Antonia Fraser's Cromwell, Our Chief of Men, English history being a weak spot in my armoury, which I was endeavouring to repair under the gracious guidance of Mr Anderson, himself a keen student of our island story. The trattoria was empty but for two other tables: the big one in the bay which was occupied by a vocal party of out-of-towners, plus a small one earmarked for lonely-hearts and this evening occupied by a dapper professional gentleman, perhaps retired, and diminutive in stature. I noted his shoes which were highly polished. Ever since the Sanctuary I have set store by polished shoes. I had not intended to be eating recycled cannelloni. The day being the fifth anniversary of my marriage to Penelope, I had returned home early to prepare her favourite dinner, a coq au vin accompanied by a bottle of finest burgundy, plus a ripe Brie cut to size at our local deli. I should by now have become accustomed to the vagaries of the journalistic world, but when she called me in flagrante — it was me who was in flagrante, I had just flambé'd the chicken joints — to inform me that a crisis had arisen in the private life of a football star and she would not be home before midnight, I behaved in a manner that afterwards shocked me.

  I did not scream, I am not the screaming kind. I'm a cool, assimilated, mid-brown Briton. I have reserve, often in greater measure than those with whom I have assimilated. I put the phone down gently. I then without further thought or premeditation consigned chicken, Brie and peeled potatoes to the waste-disposal unit, and put my finger on the GO button and kept it there, for how long I can't say, but for considerably longer than was technically necessary, given that it was a young chicken offering little resistance. I woke again, as it were, to find myself striding briskly westwards down Prince of Wales Drive with Cromwell stuffed into my jacket pocket.

  There were six diners at the oval table of the Bella Vista, three stalwart men in blazers and their equally heavy wives, all clearly accustomed to life's good things. They hailed from Rickmansworth, I quickly learned, whether I wished to or not, and they called it Ricky. They had been attending an open-air matinee of The Mikado in Battersea Park. The dominant voice, a wife's, disapproved of the production. She had never cared for the Japanese — had she, darling? — and giving them songs to sing did not, in her view, make them any nicer. Her monologue did not separate the topics but rolled on at the same level. Sometimes, pausing for what passed for thought, she would haw before resuming, but she need not have bothered because nobody had the temerity to interrupt her. From The Mikado she advanced without a breath or change of tone to her recent medical operation. The gynaecologist had made a total balls, but never mind, he was a personal friend and she had decided not to sue. From there she passed seamlessly to her daughter's unsatisfactory artist husband, a layabout if ever she knew one. She had other opinions, all strong, all peculiarly familiar to me, and she was expressing them at full volume when the little gentleman of the polished shoes punched together the two halves of his Daily Telegraph and, having folded the result lengthways, hammered his table with it: slap, bang, slap, and one more for luck.

  “I will speak,” he announced defiantly into the middle air. “I owe it to myself. Therefore I shall” — a statement of personal principle, addressed to himself and no one else.

  After which he set course for the largest of the three stalwart men. The Bella Vista, being Italian, has a terrazzo floor and no curtains. The plastered ceiling is low and sheer. If they hadn't heard his declaration of intent, at least they should have heard the ping of his polished shoes vibrating as he advanced, but the dominant wife was treating us to her views on modern sculpture which were not merciful. It took the little gentleman several loud Sirs to make his presence known.

  “Sir,” he repeated, speaking as a matter of protocol strictly to the Head of the Table. “I came here to enjoy my meal and read my newspaper” — holding up what was left of it, like a dog-chew, as court evidence. “Instead of which, I find myself subjected to a veritable deluge of dialogue so loud, so trivial, so strident, that I am — yes!” — the yes to acknowledge that he had obtained the attention of the table — “And there is one voice, sir, one voice above all the rest — I will not point the finger, I am a courteous man — sir, I entreat you to restrain it.”

  But having thus spoken, the little gentleman did not by any means quit the field. Rather he stood his
ground before them like a brave freedom-fighter facing the firing squad, chest out, polished shoes together, the dog-chew stowed neatly at his side, while the three stalwart men stared incredulously at him, and the offended woman stared at her husband.

  “Darling,” she murmured. “Do something.”

  Do what? And what will I do if they do it? The big men from Ricky were old athletes, it was plain. The crests on their blazers exuded an heraldic lustre. It was not hard to suppose they were sometime members of a policemen's rugby team. If they elected to beat the little gentleman to a pulp, what did one innocent brown bystander do, apart from get himself beaten into an even worse pulp, and arrested under the Anti-Terror laws into the bargain?

  In the event, the men did nothing. Instead of beating him to a pulp and throwing what was left of him into the street and me after him, they fell to examining their brawny hands, and agreeing among themselves in loud asides that the poor fellow was obviously in need of help. Deranged. Could be a danger to the public. Or himself. Call an ambulance, someone.

  As to the little gentleman, he returned to his table, laid a twenty-pound note on it and with a dignified “I give you goodnight, sir” directed at the bay and nothing at all at me, strode like a miniature colossus into the street, leaving me to draw comparisons between a man who says, “Yes, dear, I completely understand,” and puts his coq au vin into the waste disposal, and the man who braves the lions' den while I sit there pretending to read my Cromwell, Our Chief of Men.

  • • •

  The second recorded signal was transmitted next evening, the Tuesday. Returning to Battersea after a four-hour stint in the Chat Room protecting our great nation, I astonished myself by jumping from my moving bus three stops early and striking out at full running speed, not across the park towards Prince of Wales Drive which would have been the logical direction, but back over the bridge to Chelsea whence I had just come.

  Why on earth? All right, I'm impulsive. But what was impelling me? The rush hour was at its height. I detest, at any time, walking alongside slow-moving traffic, especially these days. I don't need the faces in the cars giving me the looks. But running — flat out in my best town shoes with leather soles and heels and rubber quarters running, if you're my colour, build and age, and carrying a briefcase — running at full pelt in bomb-shocked London and looking straight ahead of you, manically, not asking anyone for help and bumping into people in your haste — that kind of running, at any time of day, is frankly unhinged, and at rush hour, demented.

  Did I need the exercise? I did not. Penelope has her personal trainer, I have my morning jog around the park. The only thing in the world that explained me to myself as I charged down the crowded pavement and across the bridge was the frozen child I had spotted from the top of the bus. He was six or seven years old and he was stuck halfway up a granite wall that separated the road from the river, his heels to the wall and his arms spread, and his head twisted sideways because he was too scared to look up or down. There was traffic hurtling below him, and above him a narrow parapet that could have been designed for older bully-boys who wanted to show off, and there were two of them up there now, jeering down at him, prancing and catcalling, daring him to come on up. But he can't, because he's even more terrified of heights than he is of traffic, and he knows that on the other side of the parapet, if he ever manages to reach it, there's a sixty-foot drop waiting for him, to the towpath and the river, and he can't do heights and he can't swim, which is why I'm running for all I'm worth.

  Yet when I arrive, panting, drenched in sweat, what do I see? No child, frozen or unfrozen. And the topography has undergone a transformation. No granite parapet. No giddying walk with hurtling traffic one side and fast-flowing Thames the other. And on the central reservation, one benign policewoman directing traffic.

  “You mustn't talk to me, darling,” she says as she semaphores.

  “Did you see three kids fooling here just now? They could have died.”

  “Not here, darling.”

  “I saw them, I swear I did! There was a small kid stuck against the wall.”

  “I'll have to book you in a minute, darling. Now bugger off.”

  So I did. I walked back across the bridge I'd had no business crossing in the first place, and all night long while I waited for Penelope to come home I thought about that frozen child in his make-believe hell. And in the morning when I tiptoed to the bathroom so as not to wake her, he was still bothering me, the child who wasn't there. And throughout the day while I was interpreting for a Dutch diamond consortium, I kept him locked in my head where a lot was going on without my knowledge. And he was still in there the next evening, arms outstretched and knuckles jammed against the granite wall when, responding to an urgent request from the North London District Hospital, I presented myself at 7.45 p.m. at the tropical diseases ward, for the purpose of interpreting for a dying African man of unidentifiable age who is refusing to speak a word of any known language except his native-born Kinyarwanda.

  • • •

  Blue night-lights have pointed me down endless corridors. Fancy signposts have told me which way to turn. Certain beds are screened off, denoting the most critical cases. Ours is such a bed. On one side of it crouches Salvo, on the other side with only a pair of dying man's knees between us, this degree nurse. And this degree nurse, whom I deduce to be of Central African origin, has knowledge and responsibilities that exceed most doctors', although this is not how she comes over, being lissom and imposing in her gait, with the unlikely first name of HANNAH on her left bosom, and a gold cross displayed at her throat, not to mention a long, slender body buttoned sternly into a blue-white uniform, but when she gets up and moves around the ward, fluid as a dancer's, plus neatly braided hair receding from her brow in furrows to the point where it is permitted to grow naturally, though cut short for practicality.

  And all we're doing, this degree nurse Hannah and myself, is we're catching each other's eye for exponentially long periods of time while she fires her questions at our patient with what I sense to be a protective severity and I duly render them into Kinyarwanda and we both wait — sometimes for minutes on end, it seems to me — for the poor man's answers delivered in the mumbled accents of the African childhood which he is determined will be his last memory of life.

  But this is not to take account of other acts of mercy that degree nurse Hannah is performing for him with the assistance of a second nurse, Grace, whom I know from her cadences to be Jamaican, and who is standing at his head, mopping up his vomit, checking his drips and worse, and Grace is a good woman too and by their interaction and the looks they exchange a good comrade to Hannah.

  And you should know that I'm a man who hates, really hates hospitals, and is by religion allergic to the health industry. Blood, needles, bedpans, trolleys with scissors on them, surgical smells, sick people, dead dogs and run-over badgers at the roadside, I only have to enter their presence and I'm freaking out, which is no more than any other normal man would do who has been relieved of his tonsils, appendix and foreskin in a succession of insanitary African hill clinics.

  And I have met her before, this degree nurse. Once. Yet for the last three weeks, I now realise, she has been an unconscious imprint on my memory, and not just as the presiding angel in this unhappy place. I have spoken to her, although she probably doesn't remember. On my very first visit here, I asked her to sign my completion document certifying that I had performed to her satisfaction the duties I had been contracted for. She had smiled, put her head on one side as if deliberating whether in all honesty she could admit to being satisfied, then casually drawn a fibre-tipped pen from behind her ear. The gesture, though doubtless innocent on her part, had affected me. In my over-fertile imagination, it was a prelude to undressing.

  But this evening I am entertaining no such improper fantasies. This evening it is all work, and we are sitting on a dying man's bed. And Hannah the health professional, who for all I know does this three times a day before lunch
time, has set her jaw against extraneous feeling, so I have done the same.

  “Ask him his name, please,” she commands me, in French-scented English.

  His name, he informs us after prolonged thought, is Jean-Pierre. And for good measure adds, with as much truculence as he can muster in his reduced circumstances, that he is a Tutsi and proud of it, a piece of gratuitous information that both Hannah and I tacitly agree to ignore, not least because we could have told as much, Jean-Pierre being despite his tubes of classical Tutsi appearance, with high cheekbones, protruding jaw and a long back to his head, exactly as Tutsis are supposed to look in the popular African imagination, although a lot don't. “Jean-Pierre who?” she enquires with the same severity, and I again render her.

  Can Jean-Pierre not hear me or does he prefer to have no surname? The delay while Degree Nurse Hannah and I wait for his answer is the occasion for the first long look that we exchange, or long in the sense that it was longer than a look needs to be if you're merely checking that the person you are rendering for is listening to what you're saying, because neither of us was saying anything, nor was he.

  “Ask him where he lives, please,” she says, delicately clearing her throat of an obstruction similar to my own; except this time, to my surprise and delight, she is addressing me as a fellow African in Swahili. As if that wasn't enough, she is speaking in the accents of a woman of the Eastern Congo!

  But I am here to work. The degree nurse has asked our patient another question so I must render it. I do. From Swahili into Kinyarwanda. I then render the answer to it, from Jean-Pierre's Kinyarwanda straight into her deep brown eyes, while I replicate, if not exactly mimic, her deliciously familiar accents.

  “I live on the Heath,” I inform her, repeating Jean-Pierre's words as if they were our own, “under a bush. And that's where I'm going back to when I get out of this” — pause — “place” omitting for decency's sake the epithet he uses to describe it. “Hannah,” I go on, speaking English, perhaps in order to relieve the pressure slightly. “For goodness' sake. Who are you? Where do you come from?”