An Imperfect Spy

by Amanda Cross

  When Kate had returned with the much-admired scotch, when they had both taken a sip, and Harriet had yet again praised the libation, Kate leaned back in her chair and took up the threads of their earlier, more mundane conversation.

  “Are you going back to the Boston part of the world?” she asked.

  “Only for a visit. I’m staying here. I’m hoping Betty will let me stand by her during the times ahead. Hell, I’m counting on it. Anyway, I’m staying. Do you still want to know me, or is this a farewell drink?”

  Kate ignored this. “Are you going to keep up this cash economy business? Are you going to go on being someone without a real identity or your own name?”

  “Well, I can’t, can I, not if Betty lets me help her. Then I’ll be her mother, so I’ll have to have a name, and pay taxes, and be altogether proper and accounted for. And don’t say that I cheated the government, because on Schuyler’s generous salary, I always stayed at the poverty line and didn’t owe the government a damn thing.”

  “And after Betty is released …”

  “I’m glad you say after, not if.”

  “And after Betty is released, will you go back to Boston then?”

  “Probably. She may come with me or she may not. That’s up to her. I’ll be available when she needs me; she’ll know that, and I hope will think on it. But I have to say that Massachusetts is more my home than New York, privileged as I have been to know all you New Yorkers. I’ll get some sort of legitimate job, if I don’t go to jail for impersonation and all that rot, and decide on what comes next.”

  “Well,” Kate said, “the next time you take a name, what about Smiley?”

  “What about Fansler? Would you mind if there were two female Fanslers; you haven’t any female relatives of that name, have you?”

  “Only three sisters-in-law, and endless nephews and nieces, also complete with in-laws. I don’t think it’s advisable.”

  “You’re probably right. The reason I rather like the name Fansler, Kate, is that we are in many ways the same person. Oh, not superficially, heaven forfend. I don’t claim your slimness or your money or your excellently subdued taste in clothes. But essentially, we are the same—in spirit, you might say. I am what you may be in time, if you play your cards right.”

  “I won’t have a daughter.”

  “Not biologically, no. I can’t say I think a lot of the usual mother-daughter connection. We may work it out someday; we haven’t so far, not in most cases. But you’ll have an honorary daughter or two, I hope not in prison, but somewhere, needing you just to exist and encourage.”

  “You’re a bloody romantic, Harriet. But I guess I already knew that. Only I called you a spy instead.”

  “I’m not a romantic, damn it,” Harriet said, “but speaking of romantics, don’t think I didn’t see you giving our Blair the once-over—he’s cute, I’ll admit that. But for you and me, we knew that none of that’s to do with life, really. Sex is fine if you want it, if you have it, if you do it right. But it’s not what I was ever all about, and it’s certainly not what I’m all about now, and that means I’m not a bloody romantic. Do you know what le Carré said about Smiley on the subject?”

  “Oh, God, how I wish I did remember, and could quote it to you on the spot.” Just as I wish I’d remembered Demeter, Kate thought.

  “Well, you can’t, so I’ll tell you. He said: ‘Each morning as he got out of bed, each evening as he went back to it, usually alone, he had reminded himself that he never was and never had been indispensable.’ Well, maybe not. But he and you and I are more indispensable than most people, and don’t you forget it.”

  “I can never forget you, or Smiley either, for that matter,” Kate said, “and I shall feel a surge of pleasure when I think of either of you. And you’re wrong about Blair.”

  “No I’m not, but you’re too intelligent to launch into that, and too aware of the value of what you’ve got.”

  “So now you’re a marriage counselor.” Kate laughed.

  “Chuckle on. When Betty’s habeas is over, I’ll be gone from your life; but as age creeps on, as you say to yourself, is this all there is? What the hell is this crazy time? Well, when that happens, you think of me. Not how I look, or exactly how I acted, but how I did things, how I made things happen, how I risked a lot for what I decided needed to be done, how I remembered Demeter, above all, how I helped to change and even maybe transform one moldy institution. Somewhere in your psyche you’ll be worrying about growing old. Think of me, and remember that it’s fun.”

  “Okay,” Kate said. “I’ll try to remember, when all is wrinkles and liver spots and ubiquitous sagging. Meanwhile all I have to say to you is that you’re not Demeter, you’re a witch, you’re not a spy, either, although you may have made spies of the rest of us, you’re a witch and I think you had better climb onto your broomstick and fly away.”

  “Not till I’ve had another shot of that single-malt scotch,” Harriet said, holding out her glass.

  I do find I become a great deal more radical in my old age.

  —JOHN LE CARRÉ

  THE SECRET PILGRIM

  Epilogue

  AND at last the semester ended.

  “Would you like to have one last dinner at the Oak Room, to celebrate the successful conclusion of our course and our institutional revolution?” Blair asked Kate as she was finally clearing out all her belongings from his office.

  She paused a moment, holding her purse and briefcase, with her jacket over her arm. “Thank you for asking,” she said. “That was nice of you. But I think I’ll just go home and try to sneak back into my old self. Not all of my old self, actually, but the part that just teaches literature to people who signed up to learn it, not to lawyers.”

  “It’s no use trying to fool yourself or lull yourself, you know,” Blair said. “Not that I’m urging you to have dinner with me, however pleasant that would be. I understand about dinner. But do try to bear in mind that we live in new and frightening times. We live with corporate rot and a total loss of purpose, whether we mean nationally, internationally, or in institutions. That’s why extreme right-wingers succeed, if they come along when the rest of us are closing our eyes, going on with what we usually, comfortably do, and waiting for something nice to happen. Sorry,” he added. “I didn’t know I was going to make a speech.”

  “You’re right,” Kate said. “You must come and teach law and literature on my turf sometime; I think that’s an excellent idea. But I don’t think I care for spying, if that’s what I was doing. That’s what Harriet would call it. Well, spy or not, I feel as though I got pushed into a fight I hadn’t meant to be in.”

  “We can only fight the wars we inherit, whether we’re nations or individuals,” Blair said. “We inherited this fight, and we fought it—honorably, I think. Don’t delude yourself you’re too good for such fights; that’s a liberal delusion that has devoured our causes, if I’m allowed to assume we have the same causes.”

  “Well, you saw the danger and took on the fight and I think you deserve a lot of credit. But I shall never be able to square with myself the thought of being a spy.”

  “That’s nonsense,” Blair said. “Think back, my dear; think back. We all become spies as children; that’s the only way we know to make sense of the world.”

  * * *

  Harriet said much the same thing when she came sometime later for a farewell drink with Kate and Reed.

  “We learn from childhood to take refuge in secrecy,” she said. “How else could we survive? And it’s very easy to translate that into spying.”

  “Perhaps,” Kate said. “But I still have a sense of having come to Schuyler as a spy, or at least under false pretenses—saying I would teach law and literature, not foment a revolution.”

  “But it wasn’t false pretenses,” Harriet insisted. “You told the school exactly what you were going to do. And you did it. What’s spying about that?”

  “We hoped the students would wake up and do somet
hing to change the school.”

  “Isn’t that what teaching always is, or should be? Hoping the students will wake up and question their surroundings and the conditions they live in? I can’t see what’s spying about that.”

  “Well, what about Reed, then?”

  “Reed was doing exactly what he said he would do—operating the first real clinic at Schuyler Law,” Harriet said. “In this case, helping prisoners to appeal. No false pretenses.”

  Reed smiled at her. “On the face of it, no false pretenses,” he said. “I agreed to do a clinic and I did it. But I had my reasons, unknown to Schuyler Law. I wanted to shake myself up a bit and please Kate. Yes, I’m convinced of the merit of the clinic I ran; I hope it continues running without me there. But I had my secret aims, and I, too, ended up changing the Schuyler Law School. Hardly all clear and beyond suspicion.”

  “You’re all disenchanted romantics,” Harriet said, chuckling. “You all have a great hunger for goodness. You saw a chance to correct a wrong, and you took it. That’s not what spies do, not according to le Carré or anyone else. I think you are both trying to make yourselves out to be moles. Hell, we all have agendas, we all have hopes for change; but you didn’t lie to anyone, you and Kate. You didn’t even keep secrets from each other, which proves you’re not spies, if anything could.”

  “Didn’t we?” Kate asked.

  “No,” Reed said. “We didn’t. And in a way, Harriet’s right. Without us, they would have gone on. It’s not that we did anything dramatic. We just frightened them as a result of being there. We didn’t infiltrate; we were ourselves. Spies infiltrate.”

  “To be a le Carré spy,” Harriet announced firmly, “you have to belong to a government agency, probably secret and certainly lying to the public and everybody else. You have to talk yourself into a dirty frame of mind. You have to think anything you do, any lies you tell, are justified. I’d say you’re all exonerated; you’re not spies.”

  “But you are,” Kate said. “You lied about your connection to Reed’s client. Well, you lied by silence, which is the worst kind. You lied to me when we met, or damn near. I don’t think you get off not being a spy.”

  “Okay. As I said so often, I’m like Smiley. I have a trained, observant mind. I notice things. I have his guarded, watchful way of looking at the world. But, unlike him, I’m not in a secret service, so I haven’t lost my center, which he damn near did.”

  “But he turned up with different names, claiming to be different people, not admitting to being himself,” Kate argued, not that she knew why. A warm contentment had come over her, the sort you sometimes get at a certain point in an illness, when you feel cared for and somehow safe.

  “Of course,” Harriet said, ignoring this, “I might be said to have been on a mission of vengeance, as Smiley was, against Karla. But it wasn’t really vengeance, it was rescue. You know, at the end, when Smiley has caught Karla, saved him, really, him and his daughter, given Karla a chance to be someone else, Peter Guillam says to Smiley, ‘You won,’ and Smiley says, ‘Did I? Yes, I guess I did.’ Well, I guess I did; I won. Betty’s going to have another chance.”

  “Let’s drink to that,” Reed said.

  So, in the end, Harriet flew back to Boston. She went coach this time, and the man sitting next to her paid no attention to her or her book, which was, of course, the latest novel by her favorite author, a gift from Kate. He’s carrying on without the secret service, she told herself, so I guess we all can.

  The truth was that Harriet had discovered a great desire in herself to fight deception, and intolerance, and bigotry, and as she readily recognized, hers was a desire not easily slaked or ignored. Damn those bastards anyway and all who sail with them, she said to herself. The man next to her, seeing her smile, smiled back.