The Mission Song

by John le Carré

  “But how the hell did Mr and Mrs Right ever find each other in the first place? That's what I want to know,” Bridget protested, in the aggrieved tones of one who has followed the instructions on the packet without success. “Bridget,” an alien voice inside me answered, “here is how.”

  • • •

  It is eight in the evening in Salvo's dingy bachelor bedsit in Ealing, I tell her as we wait arm-in-arm for the pedestrian lights to change. Mr Amadeus Osman of the WorldWide and Legal Translation Agency is calling me from his malodorous office in the Tottenham Court Road. I am to go direcdy to Canary Wharf where a Great National Newspaper is offering megabucks for my services. These are still my days of struggle, and Mr Osman owns half of me.

  In an hour I am seated in the newspaper's luxurious offices with its editor one side of me and its shapely ace reporter — guess who? — the other. Before us squats her supergrass, a bearded Afro-Arab merchant seaman who for the price of what I'm earning in a year will dish the dirt on a ring of corrupt customs officers and policemen operating in Liverpool's dockland. He speaks only meagre English, his mother tongue being a classical Tanzanian-flavoured Swahili. Our ace crime reporter and her editor are caught in the muckraker's proverbial cleft stick: check out your source with the authorities and compromise the scoop; accept your source on trust and let the libel lawyers take you to the cleaners.

  With Penelope's consent I assume command of the interrogation. As the questioning flies back and forth, our supergrass alters and refines his story, adds new elements, retracts old ones. I make the rascal repeat himself. I point out his many discrepancies until, under my persistent cross-examination, he admits all. He is a con-artist, a fabricator. For fifty quid he will go away. The editor is jubilant in his gratitude. In one stroke, he says, I have spared their blushes and their bank account.

  Penelope, having overcome her humiliation, declares that she owes me a very large drink.

  “People expect their interpreters to be small, studious and bespectacled,” I explained to Bridget modesdy, laughing away Penelope's rapt and, in retrospect, somewhat blatant interest in me from the start. “I suppose I just failed to come up to expectation.”

  “Or she just totally freaked out,” Bridget suggested, tightening her grip on my hand.

  Did I bubble out the rest to Bridget too? Appoint her my substitute confessor in Hannah's absence? Unveil to her how, until I met Penelope, I was a twenty-three-year-old closet virgin, a dandy in my personal appearance but, underneath my carefully constructed facade, saddled with enough hang-ups to fill a walk-in cupboard? — that Brother Michael's attentions and Pere Andre's before him had left me in a sexual twilight from which I feared to emerge? — that my dear late father's guilt regarding his explosion of the senses had transferred itself wholesale and without deductions to his son? — and how as our taxi sped towards Penelope's flat I had dreaded the moment when she would literally uncover my inadequacy, such was my timidity regarding the female sex? — and that thanks to her knowhow and micro-management all ended well? — extremely well — more well than she could ever have imagined, she assured me, Salvo being her dream mustang — the best in her stable, she might have added — her starred Alpha Male Plus? Or, as she later put it to her friend Paula when they thought I wasn't listening, her chocolate soldier always standing to attention? And that one calendar week later, so blown away was he in all respects by his newfound and unquenchable prowess in the bedroom, so overwhelmed with gratitude and ready to confuse sexual accomplishment with great love, that Salvo with his customary impulsiveness and naivety proposed marriage to Penelope, only to be accepted on the spot? No. By a mercy, in that regard at least I managed to restrain myself. Neither did I get round to telling Bridget the price I had since paid, year by year, for this much needed therapy, but only because we had by then passed the Connaught Hotel and turned into the top end of Berkeley Square.

  • • •

  In my expansiveness of heart I was assuming, for no reason beyond the expectations we have of natural gravity, that our path would then take us down towards Piccadilly. But suddenly Bridget's grip on my arm tightened and she wheeled me left up some steps to a grand front door that I failed to get the number of. The door closed behind us and there we were, standing in a velvet-curtained lobby occupied by two identical blond boys in blazers. I don't remember her ringing a bell or knocking, so they must have been watching out for us on their closed-circuit screen. I remember they both wore grey flannels like mine, and their blazers had all three buttons fastened. And I remember wondering whether, in the world that they inhabited, this was regulation and I ought to be doing up the buttons of my Harris Tweed.

  “Skipper's been delayed,” the seated boy told Bridget without lifting his eyes from the black-and-white image of the door we had just passed through. “He's on his sweet way, right? Ten to fifteen. Want to leave him here with us or wait it out?”

  “Wait,” said Bridget. The boy stretched out his hand for my bag. On Bridget's nod I passed it to him. The grand hall that we entered had a painted dome for a ceiling, with white nymphs, and white babies blowing trumpets, and a regal staircase that halfway up itself divided into two more staircases curving to a balcony with a row of doors, all closed. And at the foot of the staircase, on either side, two more doors, grand ones, capped by golden eagles with their wings spread. The right-hand door was closed off by a red silk rope with brass fittings. I never saw anyone go in or out of it. On the left-hand door a lighted red sign said SILENCE CONFERENCE IN PROGRESS without any punctuation, because I always notice punctuation. So if you wanted to be pedantic, you could interpret it as meaning that people were having a conference about silence: which only shows you how my personal state of mind was alternating between post-coital, skittish, out of it, and totally hyper. I've never done drugs, but if I had, this is how I imagine I would have been, which is why I needed to pin down everything around me before it transmogrified itself into something else.

  Guarding the grand door stood a grey-headed bouncer who could have been Arab and must have been older than the two blond boys put together but was still very much a member of the pugilistic classes, having a flattened nose and dropped shoulders and hands cupped over his balls. I don't remember climbing the regal staircase. If Bridget had been ahead of me in her skin-tight jeans I would have remembered, so we must have climbed side by side. And Bridget had been in this house before. She knew the geography and she knew the boys. She knew the Arab bouncer too, because she smiled at him and he smiled back at her in a soft, adoring manner before resuming his pugilistic glower. She knew without being told where you waited, which was halfway up the staircase before it divided, something you could never have guessed from below.

  There were two easy chairs, a leather sofa with no arms, and glossy magazines offering private islands in the Caribbean and charter yachts complete with crew and helicopter, price on application. Picking one up, Bridget leafed through it, inviting me to do the same. Yet even while fantasising about which Fram Hannah and I would sail away on, I was tuning my mind's ear to the boomy voices coming out of the conference room, because I'm a listener by nature and trained to it, not just by the Chat Room. No matter how confused I am, I listen and remember, it's my job. Plus the fact that secret children in far-flung Mission houses learn to keep their ears pinned back if they want to know what's likely to hit them next.

  And as I listened I began to pick up the see-saw whine of fax machines working overtime in the rooms above us and the chirp of telephones too quickly smothered, and the fraught silences when nothing happened but the whole house held its breath. Each couple of minutes or less, a young female assistant came scuttling past us down our staircase to deliver a message to the bouncer, who opened his door six inches and slipped the message to someone inside before shutting it and putting his hands back over his balls.

  Meanwhile the voices were still coming out of the conference room. They were male voices and each was important in the sense that this was a
meeting of men who punched at their own weight, as opposed to one supremo talking to his underlings. I also noted that, although the sound of the words was English, the voices speaking them were of varying nationalities and cadences, now from the Indian subcontinent, now Euro-American or white African colonial, much in the manner of high-level conferences I am occasionally privileged to attend where platform speeches are delivered in English, but your off stage discussions are conducted in the tongues of individual delegates, with the interpreters acting as the essential bridges between God's striving souls.

  There was one voice, however, that seemed to be addressing me personally. It was native English, upper-class, and compelling in its tonal rise and fall. So finely were my antennae tuned that after a couple of minutes of what I call my third ear I had convinced myself it was the voice of a gentleman I was familiar with and respected, even if I hadn't caught a single word of what it was saying. And I was still hunting in my memory for its owner when my attention was diverted by a thunderclap below me as the door to the lobby flew open to admit the cadaverous, breathless figure of Mr Julius Bogarde, alias Bogey, my late mathematics teacher and chief luminary of the Sanctuary's ill-fated Outward Bound Club. The fact that Bogey had perished ten years ago while leading a party of terrified schoolchildren up the wrong side of a mountain in the Cairngorms only compounded my surprise at his reincarnation.

  “Maxie,” I heard Bridget breathe in reproachful awe as she sprang to her feet. “You mad sod. Who's the lucky girl this time?”

  And all right, he wasn't Bogey.

  And I doubt whether Bogey's girls, if he had any, counted themselves lucky, rather the reverse. But he had Bogey's gangly wrists, and Bogey's manic stride and hellbent look about him, and Bogey's haywire mop of sandy hair blown to one side by a prevailing wind and stuck there, and rosy bursts of colour on his upper cheeks. And Bogey's sun-bleached khaki canvas bag, like a wartime gasmask case in old movies, swinging from his shoulder. His spectacles, like Bogey's, doubled the circumference of his faraway blue eyes, switching on and off as he loped towards us under the chandelier. And if Bogey had ever come to London, which was against his principles, this was undoubtedly the outfit he would have selected: a mangled go-anywhere, wash-it-yourself, fawn-coloured tropical suit with a Fair Isle sleeveless pullover and buckskin shoes with the nap worn off. And if Bogey had ever had to storm the regal staircase to our waiting area, this was how he would have done it: three weightless bounds with his gasmask case slapping at his side.

  “My fucking pushbike,” he complained furiously, giving Bridget a perfunctory kiss which seemed to mean more to her than it did to him. “Slap in the middle of Hyde Park. Back tyre shot to pieces. Couple of tarts laughed themselves sick. Are you the languages?”

  He had swung suddenly round on me. I'm not used to words of that strength from clients, nor to repeating them in the presence of ladies, but I will say at once that the man described by Mr Anderson as my fellow genius in the field was like no client I'd ever met, which I knew even before he fixed me with Bogey's diluted stare.

  “He's Brian, darling,” Bridget said quickly, fearing perhaps that I might say something different. “Brian Sinclair. Jack knows all about him.”

  A man's voice was yelling up at us and it was the same voice I had been relating to.

  “Maxie! Hell are you, man? It's all hands to the pump.”

  But Maxie paid the voice no attention and by the time I looked down, its owner had once more disappeared.

  “Know what this caper's about, Sinclair?”

  “Not yet, sir.”

  “That old fart Anderson didn't tell you?”

  “Darling,” Bridget protested.

  “He said he didn't know either, sir.”

  “And it's French, Lingala and Swahili-plus, right?”

  “Correct, sir.”

  “Bembe?”

  “Is not a problem, sir.”

  “Shi?”

  “I also have Shi.”

  “Kinyarwanda?”

  “Ask him what he doesn't speak, darling,” Bridget advised. “It's quicker.”

  “I was interpreting Kinyarwanda only yesterday evening, sir,” I replied, sending messages of love to Hannah.

  “Fucking marvellous,” he mused, continuing to peer at me as if I were some exciting new species. “Where does it all come from?”

  “My father was an African missionary,” I explained, remembering too late that Mr Anderson had told me I was the son of a mining engineer. It was on the tip of my tongue to add Catholic so that he would know the whole story, but Bridget was looking daggers at me so I decided to hold it back for later.

  “And your French is a hundred per cent, right?”

  Flattered as I was by the positive nature of his interrogation, I had to demur. “I never claim a hundred per cent, sir. I strive for perfection, but there's always room for improvement” which is what I say to all my clients, from the mightiest to the humblest, but when I said it to Maxie, it acquired a brave ring for me.

  “Well, my French is failed O level,” he riposted. His floating gaze had not left mine for an instant. “And you're game, right? You don't mind pushing the envelope?”

  “Not if it's good for the country, sir,” I replied, echoing my response to Mr Anderson. “Good for the country, good for Congo, good for Africa,” he assured me.

  And was gone, but not before I had notched up other points of interest regarding my new employer. He wore a diver's watch on his left wrist and on the other a bracelet of gold links. His right hand, judging by its texture, was bulletproof. A woman's lips brushed my temple and for a moment I convinced myself they were Hannah's but they were Bridget's, kissing me goodbye. I don't know how long I waited after that. Or what I found to think about that lasted more than two seconds. Naturally I was pasturing on my newfound leader and all that had passed between us in our brief exchange. Bembe, I kept repeating to myself. Bembe always made me smile. It was what we Mission school kids yelled at each other, out on the red mud-patch, playing splash-soccer in the teeming rain.

  I also remember feeling piqued at being deserted by Maxie and Bridget simultaneously, and there was a low moment when I wished I was back at Penelope's party, which was what made me jump to my feet, determined to phone Hannah from the lobby, come what may. I was already descending the staircase — it had a highly polished brass handrail and I felt guilty putting my sweaty palm on it — and I was bracing myself to cross the hall under the eye of the grizzly bouncer, when the doors to the conference room parted in slow motion, and out poured its occupants in twos and threes until some sixteen of them were assembled.

  • • •

  I must exercise caution here. When you walk in on a large, buzzing group containing partly public faces, you take your mental snapshots and you start fitting names to them. But are they the right names? Of the ten or eleven white men, I am able here and now positively to identify two high-profile corporate chieftains from the City of London, one ex-Downing Street spin-doctor turned freelance consultant, one septuagenarian corporate raider, knighted, and one evergreen pop-star and intimate of the younger royals who had recently been the target of drugs-and-sex allegations in Penelope's great newspaper. The faces of these five men are engraved in my memory for good. I recognised them as soon as they emerged. They remained in a bunch and talked in a bunch, not three yards from where I was standing. I was privy to fragments of their conversation.

  Neither of the two Indian men was known to me, although I have since identified the more boisterous of the two as the founder of a multi-billion-pound clothing empire with headquarters in Manchester and Madras. Of the three black Africans, the only one familiar to me was the exiled former finance minister of a West African republic which, given my present circumstances, I will refrain from naming further. Like his two companions, he appeared relaxed and Westernised in clothing and demeanour.

  Delegates emerging from a conference tend in my experience to be in one of two moods: resentful, or
ebullient. These were ebullient, but bellicose. They had extravagant hopes, but also enemies. One such enemy was Tabby, like Tabby the cat, spat out between the yellowed teeth of the seventy-something corporate raider. Tabby was a slimy bastard, even by the standards of his trade, he was telling his Indian audience; it would be a real pleasure to slip one past him when the opportunity arose. Such fleeting impressions were swept from my mind, however, by the belated emergence from the conference room of Maxie, and at his side, as tall as Maxie but more elegant in dress and deportment, the owner of the voice that had seemed to speak to me while I was waiting on the staircase: Lord Brinkley of the Sands, art lover, entrepreneur, socialite, former New Labour minister and — always his strong suit where I personally was concerned — long-time defender and champion of all things African.

  And I will say at once that my impression of Lord Brinkley in the flesh amply confirmed my high regard for him as seen on television and heard on my preferred medium, radio. The clean-cut features with firm jaw and flying mane mirrored precisely the sense of high purpose I had always associated with him. How often had I not cheered him to the echo when he was berating the Western world for its want of an African conscience? If Maxie and Lord Brinkley were linking arms in a hush-hush pro-Congolese endeavour — and they were linking them now, literally, as they came towards me — then I was honoured indeed to be a part of it!