The Mission Song

by John le Carré

  I drifted round the room; I was Haj after he had been tortured, peering at myself in mirrors, wondering what was left of me that was worth saving. I sat down on the edge of our bed and put my head in my hands. A good man knows when to sacrifice himself, Brother Michael liked to say. A bad man survives but loses his soul. There was still time, just. I had one last shot to play. And I must play it now, while Hannah was still safe in Bognor.

  18

  It was ten o'clock next morning. Calm in the knowledge that I had reached an irreversible decision, I strode my obligatory mile with near-reckless zest, my bobble hat pulled low and my shoulder-bag slapping gaily at my hip. In a secluded side street lined with cars stood a cheerful red phone box. I dialled the over-familiar number and got Megan, everybody's friend.

  “Hello, Salvo darling, well how are we today?” If you had the flu, Megan told you it was all around, dear. If you'd been on holiday, Megan hoped you'd had a nice one.

  “They say her party was just lovely. Wherever did she buy that outfit from? You spoil her, that's your trouble. We're engaged speaking at the moment, I'm afraid. What can I do you for? Put you on hold, dear? Voicemail? What's our preference today?”

  “It's not Penelope I'm after, actually, Megan. It's Fergus.”

  “Oh is it! Well, then! We are coming up in the world!”

  Waiting to be put through, I pictured the exchange that was taking place between Thorne the Horn and his notoriously loyal assistant regarding the best tactic to be adopted for handling an incoming call from yet another irate husband. Should Fergus be cloistered with the proprietor? On a long-distance conference call? Or should he be his own frank and fearless self and come out fighting?

  “Salvo, old chap! Jesus, where are you? Have you trashed any good flats recently?”

  “I've got a story for you, Fergus.”

  “Have you, by Heaven? Well, I'm not sure I want to hear that story, Salvo. Not if it's to the detriment of a certain young lady. Grown-up people make their own decisions in life. Some of us have to face up to that fact and move on.”

  “It's not about Penelope.”

  “I'm glad to hear that.”

  “It's a news story. A hot one.”

  “Salvo?”

  “Yes?”

  “Are you by any chance pulling my pisser?”

  “It's about Jack Brinkley. It's your chance to nail him. Him and Crispin Mellows and—” I reeled off the names of the great and good I had seen assembled in Berkeley Square, but as expected he had ears only for Jack Brinkley who had cost the paper a fortune, and Thorne nearly his career.

  “Nail the bastard how precisely? Not that I'm believing you, of course. That's a given.”

  “I'm not telling you over the phone.”

  “Salvo.”

  “What?”

  “Is it the money you're after?”

  “No. You can have him for free.”

  I had misjudged my man. If I'd said a hundred thousand pounds or no deal, he'd have felt more comfortable.

  “Is it some stupid game of sabotage you think you're playing, by any chance? Dragging us back into the libel courts for another million? Because, believe me, Salvo, if you're into that—”

  “You took us to some club once. In the Strand. A cellar. It must have been around the time that you and Penelope were—”

  “What about it?”

  “What's the address?” He gave it to me. “If you meet me there in an hour, you can have Brinkley's balls on a charger,” I assured him, using the language he understood.

  • • •

  The Casbah Club, though a stone's throw from the Savoy Hotel, was not a salubrious place at the best of times, but mid-morning was its low point. At its dungeon-like entrance, a despondent Asian man was plying a Boer War vacuum cleaner. The stone staircase reminded me of the descent to the boiler room. Amid pillars and embroidered cushions, Fergus Thorne was seated in the very alcove where, six months previously, at a cosy threesome dinner, Penelope had kicked off her shoe and worked his lower leg with her stockinged toes while he told me what an asset to the paper she was. This morning to my relief he was alone, with a tomato juice at his elbow, reading the early edition of his own newspaper. Two of his ace reporters sat a couple of tables away from him: the egregious Jellicoe, alias Jelly, who had pinched my bottom at Penelope's party, and an ageing virago named Sophie who had dared to put herself forward as Penelope's rival and paid the price. Uninvited, I sat myself at Thorne's side and wedged the shoulder-bag between my feet. He turned his mottled face to me, scowled, and went back to his newspaper. I drew the copy of J'Accuse! from my jacket and laid it on the table. He took a sideways glance at it, grabbed it, and disappeared again behind his paper. As he began to read it, I watched the shrewdness slowly drain from his face, to be replaced by a translucent greed.

  “This is total and utter bullshit, Salvo” — avidly turning a page — “you know that, don't you? Fabrication of the most blatant kind. Who wrote it?”

  “I did.”

  “And all these people at — where is it?”

  “Berkeley Square.”

  “You saw them?”

  “Yes.”

  “Personally. With your own eyes? Be careful now.”

  “Yes.”

  “Had you been drinking?”

  “No.”

  “Substances?”

  “I don't do them.”

  “Jelly. Sophie. Over here with you, please. I'm talking to a man who thinks he can bring us Big Jack's balls on a charger and I don't believe a word he's telling me.”

  We are head to head, the four of us. Whatever reservations I may have harboured regarding our great British press are temporarily suspended as Thorne disposes his troops.

  “Jasper Albin? — that Albin? He's the same Frog bastard who lied in his teeth to our Appeal judges! — and Big Jack has the arse to bring him back for this? — that is hubris of the first water! Jelly, I want you to drop everything, fly to Besançon and hold Albin's feet to the fire. If he needs buying, buy him.” Jelly scribbles officiously on his notepad.

  “Sophie. Flash your tits at the security firms. Who's Maxie? Colonel Maxie? Maxie who? If he's a mercenary, he's ex Special Forces. How ex? Who does he fuck? What schools did he go to? What dirty wars has he fought? And find me that house in Berkeley Square. Who does it belong to, who pays the heat and electricity, who hired it that evening, who from, how much for?”

  Sophie writes this down, her tongue shrewdly protruding.

  Her notepad is identical to certain others nestling at my feet.

  “And find me that island” — to both of them — “and who flew a helicopter from Battersea to Luton last Friday? Check non-commercial air traffic out of Luton, check any North Sea islands for hire. Look for one with a gazebo. And follow the Fortnum's hamper: who ordered it, paid for it, delivered it. Get me the invoice, SMOKED SALMON FOR CONGO INVADERS I love it.”

  “Me too,” Sophie murmurs.

  “Poetry,” says Jelly.

  “And steer clear of the big players. If Jackie boy gets wind of us, he'll slap an injunction on us faster than we can spit. The brazen hypocrisy of the fellow! One minute preaching debt relief for failed states, the next ripping off the suffering Congolese for every penny he can screw out of them. It's an outrage. It's beautiful.”

  While Thorne's enthusiasm is music to my ears, I feel it in cumbent on me to remind him of the larger purpose of the story.

  “It isn't just Jack we're after, Fergus.”

  “Don't you worry, man. We'll bring his chums tumbling down with him. If they blame him, all the better.”

  “I meant, there's a war to stop. The coup has to be called off.”

  Thorne's bloodshot eyes, always too small for his face, examined me in contemptuous disbelief. “You mean stop the coup and don't run the story? MAN FAILS TO BITE DOG. Is that what you mean?”

  “I mean that all the enquiries you're proposing — find the helicopter, the hamper, the island — the
y're going to take too long. We've only got nine more days.” I waxed bolder. “You either go with the story straight away or not at all, Fergus. That's the deal. After the coup's too late. The Eastern Congo could be in free fall.”

  “Impossible.” He shoved J'Accuse! across the table at me. “We need cast-iron evidence. Legalled every inch of the way. What you are offering me here is a fucking precis. I want Jack Brinkley with his knickers round his ankles and his hands in the till. Anything less and he will have me on my fucking knees before their Lordships, offering craven apologies for my impertinence.”

  The moment I had been waiting for, yet dreading, was upon me. “And if I had that evidence with me? Proof positive? Here and now?” He leaned forward, fists on the table. I leaned forward. So did Jelly and Sophie. I spoke in deliberate tones. “If I had Brinkley's voice — loud and clear on digital tape — authorising a bribe of three million dollars to one of the Congolese delegates — over the satellite phone — on behalf of the no-name Syndicate — would you call that sufficient evidence?”

  “Who's he talking to?”

  “Philip. The independent consultant. Philip needs to talk to whichever member of the Syndicate is empowered to say yes to three million dollars. The empowered member is Jack Brinkley. You can follow the dialogue all the way through from where the delegate demands the money to where Brinkley signs off on the bribe.”

  “Fuck you, man!”

  “It's the truth.”

  “I need to see that tape. I need to hear that tape. I need to have that tape verified by a board of fucking bishops.”

  “You will. You can. We can go back to your office now and play it. You can interview me and I'll tell you the whole story in my own words. You can photograph me and plaster my picture across your front page alongside Brinkley's. On one condition.” I closed my eyes and opened them. Was this really me talking? “Will you, on your word of honour, before these two witnesses, go with the story on Sunday? Yes or no?”

  In a silence that is with me to this day, I pulled the shoulder-bag from between my feet, but for security reasons kept it on my lap. The notepads were in the big compartment, the seven tapes in the smaller one. Clutching the bag against my stomach, I unzipped the smaller compartment, then waited for his answer.

  “Terms accepted,” he muttered.

  “So yes?”

  “So yes, damn you. We'll go on Sunday.”

  I turned to Jelly and Sophie, looking each straight in the eye. “You heard that. He'll run the story on Sunday as ever is. Yes?”

  “Yes.” “Yes.”

  I put my hand inside and fished. One by one I picked my way through the tapes, looking for tape number five which contained the Haj interrogation, and tape number six which contained Lord Brinkley's voice saying yes to three million dollars. As I watched my fingertips going back and forth across the stack I began, with no particular sense of revelation, to recognise, firstly that there were only five tapes, not seven, then that tapes number five and six were missing. I unzipped the large compartment and felt around among the notepads. For form's sake, I tried the little compartment at the back, which isn't a compartment in any real sense, more a purse for travel tickets or a bar of chocolate. They weren't in there either, and why should they be? They were in Bognor.

  By now my head was so busy reconstructing recent events that I wasn't really very interested in the reaction of my audience which, as I recall it, varied from the sceptical — Thorne to the effusively concerned Jelly. I made excuses — silly of me, must have left them at home, et cetera. I wrote down Sophie's cellphone number for when I found them. I ignored Thorne's scathing eye and his insinuations about wanting to make a fool of him. I said goodbye to them and see you later, but I don't think any of us believed me, and certainly I didn't. Then I hailed a cab and without bothering to give the driver a cover destination, drove home to Mr Hakim's.

  Did I blame Hannah? Quite the opposite. I felt such a surge of love for her that, even before I gained the privacy of our sanctum, I was marvelling at her courage in the face of adversity — me. Standing before the open wardrobe, I observed with pride, not indignation, that Haj's business card, with his e-mail address scrawled on the back, had gone the way of the tapes. She had known from the start that Brinkley was no good. She had no need of One-Day Courses in security to tell her that in Salvo she was dealing with the remnants of a misguided loyalty that was lodged like a virus in my system and needed to work itself out with time. She didn't want Noah spending his birthday in a war zone. She had gone her own way as I had gone mine. We had both veered from the same path, each in our separate directions, she to her people, I to mine. She had done nothing that required my forgiveness. Propped on the mantelpiece was a copy of the Sunday School kids' programme: 12 noon Picnic lunch and singalong at YMCA hostel . . . 2.30 p.m. Matinee performance of The Wind in the Willows by the Bognor Dance and Drama Club ... 5.30 p.m. Families Evening. Five hours. Five hours before I could return her message of total and undeviating love.

  I switched on the midday news. Laws are being framed to prosecute Islamist firebrands. Special tribunals to hear terrorist cases in secret. Suspected Egyptian bomber seized by US snatch team in Pakistan. Manhunt continues for thirty-year-old man of Afro-Caribbean origin whom police wish to interview in connection with — wait for it! — the suspected murder of two under-age girls.

  Run a bath. Lie in it. Catch myself attempting to reproduce Haj's Mission school jingle. Why does a tortured man sing? she had asked me. Her patients didn't sing, so why did Haj? Why does a grown man chant a dirge about a little girl's virtue when he's been beaten up? Get out of bath. Clutching my transistor radio, I stand obliquely at the window, clad in my bath towel. Through the net curtains, I contemplate a no-name green van parked close to Mr Hakim's front gate. Exceptional rainfall in southern India. Reports of landslides. Many feared dead. Now for the cricket.

  Five o'clock. I walk my mile but contrary to One-Day instructors' advice I use the same phone box. I put in a pound and keep another ready, but the best I get is Grace's answering service. If I'm Latzi, I should ring her after 10 p.m. when she'll be in bed alone. Hoots of laughter. If I'm Salvo, I should be her welcome guest and leave a love-message for Hannah. I attempt to rise to her invitation:

  “Hannah darling, I love you.” But I do not, for security reasons, add, as I might have done: I know what you've done and you were right to do it.

  Using side roads I make my desultory way back to Mr Hakim's. Post-bombing bicycles tick past me like ghostly horsemen. The no-name green van is still parked in front of the gates. It displays no parking permit. Listen to six o'clock news. The world remains where it was at two.

  Food as diversion. In the postage-stamp-sized fridge, find half a two-day-old pizza, garlic sausage, pumpernickel bread, gherkins, Marmite for me. When Hannah first arrived in London from Uganda she shared digs with a German nurse and consequently assumed that all English people ate Knackwurst and sauerkraut and drank peppermint tea. Hence a silver packet of same in Mr Hakim's fridge. Like all nurses, Hannah puts everything in the fridge whether or not it is perishable. If you can't sterilise it freeze it, is her axiom. Warm up butter as prelude to spreading on pumpernickel bread. Spread Marmite. Eat slowly. Swallow with caution.

  The seven o'clock news is identical to the six o'clock. Can the world really have done nothing for five whole hours? Careless of security considerations, I go online and scroll through the day's trivia. Suicide bombers in Baghdad have killed forty and injured hundreds — or is it the other way round? The newly appointed US Ambassador to the United Nations has filed another fifty objections to proposed reforms. The French President is entering hospital, or coming out. His ailments are subject to France's Official Secrets Act — but it sounds as though he's got a bad eye. Unconfirmed reports from the Congolese capital Kinshasa speak of a spontaneous outbreak of fighting between rival militias in the eastern region of the country.

  Hannah's rainbow cellphone is ringing. I bound acros
s the room, grab her phone and return to my computer.

  “Salvo?”

  “Hannah. Marvellous. Hi.”

  Sources close to the Congolese government in Kinshasa blame “imperialist elements in Rwanda”. Rwanda denies involvement.

  “You okay, Salvo? I love you so much.” In French, the language of our love.

  “Fine. Great. Just longing for you to come back. How about you?”

  “I love you so much it's stupid, Salvo. Grace says she never saw anyone so normal go so lovesick.”

  The border area with Rwanda is described as peaceful with no unusual traffic.

  I'm fighting on three fronts at once, which Maxie would not approve of. I'm trying to listen and speak and decide whether to tell her what I'm seeing when I don't know whether it's our war or someone else's.

  “You know what, Salvo?”

  “What, my darling?”

  “Since I met you I lost three pounds.”

  I have to digest this, reason it out.

  “Blame the unaccustomed exercise!” I cry. “Blame me!”

  “Salvo?”

  “What, my love?”

  “I did something bad, Salvo. Something I've got to tell you about.”

  A British Embassy official in Kinshasa describes rumours of British-led mercenaries in the region as “fanciful and absurd”.

  Of course they are! They must be! The coup is nine days off! Or did Brinkley fire the starting pistol the moment I walked out of his house?

  “Listen. You haven't. It's all right. Truly! Whatever it is! Nothing matters! I know all about it. Tell me when you come back!”

  Shrill kiddie noises off.

  “I've got to go back in there, Salvo.”

  “I understand! Go! I love you!”

  End of endearments. End of phone call.

  Four Swiss aviation technicians who were caught in the crossfire have requested the protection of Bukavu's UN commander.

  Seated in the wicker chair with the transistor radio on the table beside me, I embark on a study of Mrs Hakim's wallpaper while I listen to Gavin, our Central Africa correspondent, giving us the story so far: