Single & Single

by John le Carré

  “Shut up,” said Oliver.

  Undeterred, Brock gave a rueful shake of his head. “Then there’s me, isn’t there?”

  “What about you?”

  “I hunt a man for fifteen years. I conspire against him, hair goes white, I neglect my wife. Fret and worry how to catch him with his pants down. Next thing I know, he’s cringing in a ditch with the hounds after him and all I want to do is reach out for him, give him a hot cup of tea and offer him a total amnesty.”

  “Bullshit,” said Oliver, while Brock’s clever eyes twinkled and measured him from beneath the brim of the straw hat.

  “And you’re twice the man I am, Oliver, when it comes to fine feeling, I’ve seen it. So when you boil it down, it’s a question of who finds him first. You, or the Orlov brothers and their merry men.”

  Oliver peered across the lawn to where the girl had stood, but she was long gone. He squidged up his big face, registering a countryman’s irritation at the din of city traffic. Then he spoke loudly and precisely, each word cleared well ahead with himself. “I’m not doing any more. I’ve done all I’ll ever do for you. I want Carmen and her mother protected. That’s all I care about. I’ll get another name and set myself up in some other bloody place. I won’t do any more.”

  “So who finds him?”

  “You do.”

  “We’re not equipped. We’re small and British and poor.” “Balls. You’re a bloody great secret army. I’ve worked with you.” But Brock shook his head in equally stern rejection. “I can’t send squads of my kids round the world on a wild-goose chase, Oliver. I can’t advertise my interest to every foreign policeman in the phone book. If Tiger’s in Spain I’ve got to go on my knees to the Spaniards, and by the time they notice me he’s skedaddled and I’m reading about myself in the Spanish newspapers, except I don’t read Spanish.”

  “Learn it,” Oliver said rudely.

  “If he’s in Italy it’s the Italians, Germany the Germans, Africa the Africans, Pakistan the Paks, Turkey the Turks, and the story’s the same every time. Greasing palms as I go and never knowing whether the brothers have greased them better and earlier. If he’s gone to ground in the Caribbean, it’s scour every island and bribe every telegraph pole before I get a phone tap.”

  “So hound someone else. There’s enough of them about.”

  “But you”—Brock sat back and surveyed Oliver with a kind of rueful envy. “You can feel him, guess him, live him, just by breathing in. You know him better than you know yourself. You know his houses, his footwork, his women and what he has for breakfast before he orders it. You’ve got him here”—he patted his own chest with one neat palm while Oliver groaned, no, no. “You’re three-quarters of the way to him before you even start. Have I said something?”

  Oliver was rolling his head like Sammy Watmore. You kill your father once and that’s it, he was thinking. I’m not doing any of it, hear me? I’ve had it. I’d had it four years ago, I’d had it before I ever started. “Find some other poor sod,” he said gruffly.

  “It’s the old song, Oliver. Brother Brock will meet him anytime, anyplace, nothing up my sleeve. That’s my message to him. If he doesn’t remember me, remind him. Young Customs Officer Brock from Liverpool, the one he advised to look for other employment after the Turkish ingot trial. Brock’s willing if he is, tell him. Brock’s door’s open twenty-four hours a day. He has my word.”

  Flinging his arms round his chest, Oliver hugged himself in some private ritual of prayer. “Never,” he muttered.

  “What’s never?”

  “Tiger would never do it. Never betray. That’s my job, not his.”

  “Bollocks, frankly, and you know it. Tell him Brock believes in creative negotiation, same as he always did. I’ve wide powers and one of them is forgetting. It’s a memory game, tell him. I forget, he remembers. No public inquisition, no trial, no prison, no confiscation of assets, provided he does his remembering right. All private and between ourselves, and an immunity guarantee at the end of it. Say hullo to Aggie.”

  The tall girl had brought fresh tea.

  “Hi,” said Oliver.

  “Hi,” said Aggie.

  “What’s he got to remember?” Oliver asked when she was out of earshot.

  “I’ve forgotten,” said Brock. But he added, “He’ll know. So will you. I want the Hydra. I want those less-than-perfect coppers and overpaid white-collar civil servants who signed up with him for their second pensions. The bent MPs and silk-shirt lawyers and dirty traders with smart addresses. Not abroad. Abroad can look after itself. In England. Up and down the road. Next door.” Oliver released his knees, then promptly rearrested them, locking his fingers round them while he stared into the grass as if it were his grave. “Tiger’s your Everest, Oliver. You’ll not climb him by walking away from him,” said Brock piously, extracting from his inner pocket a worn leather wallet that his wife, Lily, had given him for his thirtieth birthday. “Ever seen this fellow on your travels?” he inquired lightly. And he handed Oliver a black-and-white photograph of a heavy-built, naked-headed man emerging from a nightclub with an underdressed young woman on his arm. “Old chum of your dad’s from Liverpool days. Currently a very senior bent officer at Scotland Yard with excellent connections across the country.”

  “Why doesn’t he wear a wig?” said Oliver facetiously.

  “Because he’s bloody brazen,” Brock retorted savagely. “Because he does in public what other villains wouldn’t do in private. That’s how he gets his kicks. What’s his name, Oliver? You’ve clocked him, I can tell.”

  “Bernard,” said Oliver, handing back the photograph.

  “Bernard is correct. Bernard who?”

  “Not given. He came to Curzon Street a couple of times. Tiger brought him down to Legal Department and we fixed him up with a villa in the Algarve.”

  “For his holiday?”

  “As a gift.”

  “You’re bloody joking. What for?”

  “How should I know? My job was to do the conveyancing. It was got up as a sale at first. We were poised to exchange, then Alfie said there’s no money involved, just shut up and sign it over. So I shut up and signed it over.”

  “So it’s Bernard.”

  “Bernard the bald,” Oliver agreed. “He got lunch afterwards too.”

  “At Kat’s Cradle?”

  “Where else?”

  “It’s not like you to forget a surname, is it?”

  “He didn’t have one. He’s Bernard, an offshore company.”

  “Called what?”

  “It wasn’t a company, it was a foundation. The foundation owned the company. Arm’s length, then another arm.”

  “A foundation called what?”

  “Dervish, domiciled in Vaduz. The Dervish Foundation. Tiger made a funny joke about it. ‘Meet Bernard, our whirling dervish.’ Bernard owns Dervish, Dervish owns the company, the company owns the house.”

  “So what was the name of the company owned by the Dervish Foundation?”

  “Something flighty. Skylight, Skylark, Skyflier.”

  “Skyblue?”

  “Skyblue Holdings, Antigua.”

  “Then why the hell didn’t you tell me at the time?”

  “Because you never bloody well asked me,” Oliver came back just as angrily. “If you’d asked me to look out for Bernard, I’d have looked out for Bernard.”

  “Did Single’s make a point of doling out free villas?”

  “Not that I’m aware of.”

  “Did anybody else get a free villa, apart from Bernard?”

  “No, but Bernard got a motorboat as well. One of those superlight, long-nosed jobs. We had a joke about not rocking it too hard if he was obliging a lady on the high seas.”

  “Whose joke was that?”

  “Winser’s. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to practice.”

  Watched by Brock, Oliver stretched, ruffled his head with both hands as if his scalp were itching and ambled off toward the house.
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  7

  “Oliver! Step up here, please. Certain very distinguished gentlemen would like to meet you. New clients brimming with new ideas. Just up your street. At the double, if you please.”

  It is not Elsie Watmore calling Oliver to arms but Tiger himself, on the internal office telephone. It is not Pam Hawsley, our fifty-thousand-a-year Ice Maiden, or Randy Massingham, our chief of staff and raddled Cassius. It is the Man, live onstage, impersonating the Voice of Destiny. The season is spring, as now, five years ago. And it is springtime in the young life of our budding junior and only partner, fresh from law school, our czarevitch, our heir apparent to the royal House of Single. Oliver has been in Single’s three months. It is his promised land, his hard-won goal after the buffetings of a privileged English education. Whatever humiliations and deprivals he has suffered until now, whatever scars have been inflicted by a seemingly interminable procession of crammers, tutors and boarding schools of a descending order, he has reached the distant shore, a qualified barrister like his father, a mover and a shaker designate, brimming with the zeal of his young years, wet-eyed, in love with all of it.

  And there is much to fire him. The Single’s of the early nineties is not just another venture capital investment house; witness the financial columns: Single’s is the “knight errant of Gorbachev’s New East”—Financial Times—“boldly going where lesser houses dither.” Single’s is the “risk-taker extraordinaire”—Telegraph—“quartering the nations of the new-look Communist bloc in search of opportunity, sound development and mutual profit in the spirit of perestroika”— Independent. Single’s, to quote its dynamic founder, aptly dubbed the Tiger, is “willing to listen to anyone, anytime, anywhere,” in its determination to meet the “greatest challenge to the commercial world today.” Tiger is speaking of nothing less than the “appearance of a market-oriented Soviet Union.” Single’s uses “a different set of tools, is nimbler, braver, smaller, younger, travels lighter” than the hoary juggernauts of yesteryear—Economist. And if there are those who say that Oliver should have been packed off to Kleinwort, Chase or Barings to brown his knees, Tiger has a word for them also: “We’re a pioneering house. We want the best of him, and we want it now.”

  What Oliver wants of Single’s is no less admirable. “Working alongside my father will be an added dividend for me,” he explains to a sympathetic woman diarist from the Evening Standard at a rooftop reception in Park Lane to celebrate his induction into the firm. “Dad and I have always had the greatest respect for each other. It’s going to be a fantastic learning curve in every way.” Asked what he thinks he will be bringing to Single’s, the young scion shows he too is not afraid to talk from the hip: “Unashamed idealism with its head screwed on,” he replies, to her delight. “The emerging Socialist nations need all the help, know-how and finance we can bring to the table.” To the Tatler he cites yet another Single verity: “We’re offering solid long-term partnership without exploitation. Anybody hoping to make a fast ruble will be disappointed.”

  A war party, Oliver thinks excitedly as he enters the presence. He asks nothing better. After three months of deviling in the backwaters of Alfred Winser’s Legal Department he is beginning to have fears of stagnation. His professed intention of “learning the workings of every nut and bolt in the house” has landed him in a labyrinth of offshore companies from which there seems no prospect of escape in one zealous young man’s lifetime. But today Winser is in Bedfordshire buying a Malaysian glove factory; and Oliver is his own master. A dingy back staircase leads from Legal Department to the top floor. Likening it in his imagination to a secret passage in the days of the Medici, Oliver takes it three steps at a time. Weightless, eyeless for everything but his goal, he skims through secretarial anterooms and paneled waiting rooms until he attains the famous Wedgwood double doors. He opens them and for a second the divine glow is too bright for him.

  “You called, Father,” he murmurs, seeing nothing but his own smile mysteriously projected on the brilliance ahead of him.

  The light clears. Six men await him and they are standing, which is not what Tiger likes, given he was born eight inches shorter than most of his opponents. They are a group photograph and Oliver is the camera, and they might as well be saying “cheese” to order because all of them are smiling simultaneously, having apparently just risen from the conference table. But Tiger’s smile is as usual the most radiant and energetic. It bestows a glow of saintly purpose over the unlikely company. Oliver loves this smile. It is the sun from which he draws his strength to grow. All through his childhood he has believed that if he can once wriggle past its rays and peek behind the doting eyes he will attain to the magic kingdom of which his father is benign and absolute ruler. It’s the Orlov brothers! he exclaims silently in a tidal wave of excitement and anticipation. In the flesh! Randy Massingham has hooked them at last! For days now, Tiger has been telling Oliver to stand by, wait for orders, keep his engagement book clear, be sure to wear a decent suit. But only now has he unveiled the reason.

  Tiger as team captain holds center stage. In his latest doublebreasted blue pinstripe suit by Hayward of Mount Street, his raised black brogue shoes by Lobb of St. James’s and haircut by Trumper’s down the road, he is your perfect West End gentleman rendered in exquisite miniature, a jewel, a sparkler in the window, drawing every passing eye. Striving upward as ever, Tiger has one arm round the shoulders of a barrel-built military-looking man of sixty-plus with a cherub’s double eyelashes, cropped brown hair and pumice-stone complexion. And though Oliver has never met him in his life, he recognizes immediately the fabled Yevgeny Orlov, Moscow’s patriarchal fixer, power broker, traveling plenipotentiary and cupbearer to the Throne of Power itself.

  To Tiger’s other side but free of his embrace stands a mustachioed, bandy-legged, fierce-eyed figure in a Bible-black suit that fits him nowhere, and pointed orange-colored shoes perforated for ventilation. With his tribesman’s mute glower and slouched shoulders, and his wintery hands hanging forward of him, he resembles an emaciated Cossack slumped over a slack rein. With a second leap of recognition Oliver identifies this unlikely soul as Yevgeny’s younger brother, Mikhail, described variously by Massingham as Yevgeny’s keeper, axman and dimmer brother Mycroft.

  And posed possessively behind this trio, and looking as if he has joined them together in holy matrimony, which in effect he has, hovers Tiger’s indefatigable Soviet bloc consultant and chief of staff, the honorable Ranulf, alias Randy Massingham himself, lately of the Foreign Office, ex-guardsman, ex–lobbyist and public relations whiz kid, Russian speaker, Arabic speaker, sometime adviser to the governments of Kuwait and Bahrain, whose primary remit in his most recent incarnation at Single’s consists of whipping in new clients for a finder’s fee. How one man can have had so many careers by the age of forty is a riddle Oliver has yet to solve. Nevertheless he envies Massingham his buccaneering past and today he envies him also his success, because for months now, Tiger has had the Orlov brothers obsessively and irrationally in his sights. At in-house policy conferences and focus sessions, Tiger has alternately poured scorn on Massingham, goaded and cajoled him: “Where are my Orlovs, Randy, heavens above? Why do I have to put up with second best?”—referring to other, inferior Russian facilitators who have been found wanting and unceremoniously set aside. “If the Orlovs are the boys, why aren’t they sitting here at this table talking to me?”—and then the whiplash, because when Tiger is deprived, everybody must share his discomfort: “You’re looking old, Randy. Take the day off. Come in on Monday when you’re younger.”

  But today, as Oliver sees at a glance, sitting at Tiger’s table is exactly what the Orlovs have been doing. No longer need Massingham champ restively, waiting in vain for the summons to fly off to Leningrad, Moscow, Tbilisi, Odessa or wherever else the Orlovs have their itinerant being. Today the Twin Peaks have come to Muhammad, and they are accompanied—Oliver spots them immediately at either wing of the group photograph—by two men whom he cor
rectly casts as bag carriers: the one blond, hard bodied and milky skinned and Oliver’s age at most, the other tubby and fifty with all three buttons of his jacket fastened.

  And cigar smoke, palls of it! Improbable, impossible cigar smoke! And unfamiliar ashtrays on the conference table amid the strewn papers! To Oliver nothing in the room, not even the Orlov brothers, is as momentous as this hated, bannedto-all-eternity cigar smoke coiling through the rarefied air of the sanctum, forming itself into a mushroom-shaped cloud above the groomed head of “tobacco’s bitterest foe”—Vogue. Tiger abominates smoking more than failure or contradiction. Each year before accounting day he donates ostentatious sums of taxable income to its banishment. Yet today on the sideboard resides a brand-new silver-bound humidor by Asprey of New Bond Street containing the Most Expensive Cigars in the Universe. Yevgeny is smoking one, so is the bag carrier with three buttons. Nothing else could have driven home to Oliver so effectively the unprecedented significance of the occasion.

  Tiger’s opening shot is teasing, but Oliver sees teasing as an indivisible part of his relationship with his father. If you stand five feet three in your Lobb’s raised heels, and if your son is six feet three, it is only natural that you should wish to bring him down to scale in front of others—and only meet, right and Oliver’s bounden duty that he should collaborate in his reduction.