Single & Single

by John le Carré

  “Bravely. With his chin up. The way a fighter should. He would do exactly what he’d said he’d do. You should be proud to be following in his footsteps.”

  “I meant transport.”

  “His taxi came back. He’d have walked to the station if he hadn’t had his bag. ‘It’s day one again, Nadia,’ he said. ‘We’re in Liverpool with our backs to the wall. I said I’d never let you go and I never will.’ He was his old self again. He didn’t wave. He just rode away. Why did you do it, Ollie? Why did you tell silly Nadia if you didn’t want Tiger to know?”

  Because I was a besotted father and Carmen was three days old, he thought hopelessly. Because I loved my daughter, and assumed you’d like to love her too. She sat stiffly at the table, clutching her cold tea mug in both hands. “Mother.”

  “No, darling. No more.”

  “If the ports are being watched and he’s got a carry-on and he’s going off to confound his enemies, how does he propose to get round? What’s he got for a passport, for instance?”

  “No one’s, darling. You’re being theatrical again.”

  “Why do you say ‘no one’s’? Why does it have to be someone else’s passport he isn’t using?”

  “Shut up, Ollie! You think you’re a great barrister like your father. You’re not.”

  “Whose passport has he got, Mother? I can’t help him if I don’t know what name he’s using, can I?”

  She gave a great sigh. She shook her head and the action got her weeping again, but she recovered. “Ask Massingham. Tiger relies on his underlings too much. Then they stab him in the back, like you.”

  “Is it a British passport?”

  “It’s real, that’s all he told me. It’s not a fake. It belongs to a real person who doesn’t need it. He didn’t say which country and I didn’t ask.”

  “Did he show it to you?”

  “No. He just boasted.”

  “When? Not this time, was it? He wasn’t in a boasting mood.”

  “A year ago last March”—she who hated dates—“he’d got some business to attend to in Russia or somewhere and didn’t want people knowing who he was. So he’d got himself this passport. Randy got it for him. And the birth certificate to back it up. It makes him five years younger. It was a joke between us that he’d got a five-year rebate from the Great Tax Man in the Sky.” Her voice turned deadly cold, like his. “That’s all I’ve got for you, Ollie. All I’ll ever have. Every last drop. You ruined it for us. You always did.”

  At first Oliver walked slowly down the drive. He was carrying his gray-wolf coat over his arm. Walking he pulled it over him, one arm then the other as he gathered speed. By the time he reached the gates he was running. The electricity company van was in the same place but its folding ladder was retracted and two figures sat inside the cab. He kept running until he reached the fork and saw the lights of the parked Ford wink at him, and the cheerful figure of Aggie waving at him from the driver’s seat. The passenger door swung open. He clambered in beside her.

  “Can you get Brock on that thing?” he shouted.

  She was already holding out the phone to him.

  “So he was never in Australia,” Heather said. “Australia was a lie too.”

  “Cover, put it that way,” Brock suggested.

  He had a priestly tone for these occasions. It went with a deep-felt sense of caring. When you take on a joe, you take on his problems, he would preach to his newcomers. You’re not Machiavelli, you’re not James Bond, you’re the overworked welfare officer who’s got to hold everybody’s life together or somebody will run amok.

  They sat very still in the little country police station in Northamptonshire, Brock on one side of the plain table and Heather on the other, with her head in her hand and her eyes wide but not fixed on anything, as she stared away from him into the dusky corner of the interviewing room. It was evening and the room was poorly lit. From the shadowy walls, wanted men and missing children watched them like a silent chorus of the damned. Through the partition wall came the jeering of an incarcerated drunk, the monotone of a police radio and the pat-pat of darts hitting a board. Brock wondered what Lily would make of her. With women he always did. “A nice girl, Nat,” she would have said. “Nothing wrong with her that a good husband couldn’t put right in a week.” Lily thought everyone should have a good husband. It was her way of flattering him.

  “He actually told me about the seafood in Sydney,” Heather said, marveling. “Said it was the best he’d had anywhere in the world. Said we’d go there one day. Eat a grand meal at all the restaurants where he’d been a waiter.”

  “I don’t think he’s been a waiter in his life,” said Brock.

  “He’s been a waiter for you, though, hasn’t he? Still is.”

  Brock didn’t rise to this. “He doesn’t like what he’s doing, Heather. He sees it as his duty. He needs to know we’re on his side. All of us. Carmen specially. She’s the world to him, is Carmen. He wants her to know he’s all right as a bloke. He hopes you’ll put in a good word for him now and then, while she grows up. He wouldn’t want her thinking he walked out on her without a reason.”

  “ ‘Your father lied his way into my life but he’s a good man’— like that?”

  “Better than that, if you can.”

  “So give me the spiel.”

  “I don’t think there is a spiel, Heather. I think it’s more a case of smiling when you talk about him. And letting him be the father to her that he dreams of.”

  12

  For his visit to Pluto’s Kennel, a safe flat known only to a half dozen members of the Hydra team, Brock first took the tube south across the river, then jumped on an eastbound bus and dawdled in a sandwich bar with a good view of the pavement. Hopping a second bus, he got out two stops early and covered the final couple of hundred yards on foot, moving with neither too much purpose nor too little, and pausing to enjoy such features of the dockland landscape as caught his fancy—a row of rusted cranes, a rotting barge, a dump for used tires—until he arrived by stages at a row of brick arches like a viaduct, with each cave a shifty metal workshop of some kind. Selecting a pair of stout black doors numbered 8 and embellished with the encouraging message GONE TO SPAIN, FUCK OFF, he pressed a buzzer and announced himself into the speaker as Alf’s brother come to see about the Aston Martin.

  Admitted, he crossed a warehouse containing car parts, old fireplaces and a large assortment of vehicle license plates, and climbed a rickety wooden staircase to a newly installed steel door, which for decency’s sake had been daubed and scratched with appropriate graffiti. There he stood, waiting for the eyehole to go black, which it duly did, and the door to be opened by a spectral man in blue jeans, track shoes, a check shirt and a leather shoulder holster containing a nine-millimeter Smith & Wesson automatic with a piece of old sticking plaster round the butt, as if it had cut itself in some forgotten escapade. Brock stepped inside and the door closed after him.

  “How’s he been, Mr. Mace?” he inquired. There was breathy tension in him, like a case of first-night nerves.

  “Depends what you’re into, really, sir,” said Mace, matching his quiet to Brock’s. “Reads a bit when he’s got the concentration. Plays chess, which is a help. Otherwise he’s down to crosswords, the upper-class sort.”

  “Still scared?”

  “Shitless, sir.”

  Brock moved down the corridor, passing a tiny galley, a bunk room and a bathroom, till he came face-to-face with a second, chubby man with long hair knotted at the nape. His holster was of canvas and rigged like a baby’s Snugli round his neck.

  “All well, Mr. Carter?”

  “Very nice, thank you, sir. Just finished a nice game of whist.” “Who won?”

  “Pluto, sir. He cheats.”

  Mace and Carter because, for as long as the operation ran, Aiden Bell had arbitrarily named the two men after the discoverers of Tutankhamen’s tomb. And Pluto after the king of the nether regions. Pushing open a wooden door, Broc
k entered a long attic room with skylights covered with iron grilles. Two corduroy-covered armchairs had been pulled up to a stove. Between them lay a packing case strewn with newspapers and playing cards. One armchair was empty and in the other sat the honorable Ranulf, alias Randy Massingham, alias Pluto, lately of the British Foreign Service and other questionable addresses, clad in a homey blue zip-up cardigan from Marks & Spencer and, instead of his customary buckskin shoes, a pair of orange bedroom slippers lined with imitation fleece. He was crouching forward and clutching the arms of his chair, but when he saw Brock he linked his hands behind his head, crossed his slippered feet on the packing case and leaned backward in an attitude of fake ease. “It’s my uncle Nat again,” he drawled. “Look, have you brought me my stay-out-of-jail card? Because if you haven’t you’re wasting your time.”

  Brock appeared greatly entertained by this question. “Now come along, sir. We’re both civil servants at heart. When did ministers ever sign immunity certificates at weekends? If I push any harder I’m going to start annoying people. Who’s Dr. Mirsky when he’s at home?” he asked, on the principle that an interrogator’s best questions are those to which he already knows the answers.

  “Never heard of him,” Massingham retorted sulkily. “And I want some decent clothes from my house. I can give you a key. William’s in the country. He’ll stay there till I tell him not to. Just don’t go on Tuesdays and Thursdays when Mrs. Ambrose is scrubbing.”

  Brock was once more shaking his head. “I’m afraid that’s a total no-no, sir, at present. They may be watching the house. The last thing on earth I’m having is a trail leading from there to here, thank you.” This was a small lie. In his panic to surrender, Massingham had failed to provide himself with a change of clothes. Brock, knowing his ward’s fondness for fine plumage, had seized the opportunity to humble him with shapeless boiler suits and woolly trousers with elastic at the waist. “Now then, sir,” said Brock, sitting down and opening a notebook and taking out Lily’s pen. “A little bird is telling me that you and the said Dr. Mirsky played chess together at Nightingales this last November as ever is.”

  “Then your little bird talkie lie,” said Massingham, who liked to fall into pidgin English when he felt threatened.

  “Exchanging ribald jokes and the like, you and Dr. Mirsky were, I’m told. He’s not of your persuasion, is he?”

  “Never met him, never heard of him, never played chess with him. And no he’s not, since you ask. He’s quite the other thing,” Massingham replied. He picked up a copy of the Spectator, shook it and pretended to read. “And I adore it here. The boys are darling, the food’s to die for, location’s divine. I’m thinking of buying the place.”

  “You see, the trouble is, sir, with these immunity deals always,” Brock explained, still in the friendliest of tones, “my minister and his cohorts have to know what they’re immunizing a person from, and therein lies the worm.”

  “I’ve had that sermon already.”

  “Then perhaps if I repeat it, you’ll take it to heart. It’s no good, with respect, you just picking up the phone to some grand fellow you know in the Foreign Office or wherever it was and saying, ‘Randy Massingham would like to trade a spot of information for a guarantee of immunity, so wave a wand for us, will you, old boy?’ That doesn’t answer, not in the long run. My masters are picky people. ‘Immunity what from?’ they ask themselves. ‘Is Mr. Massingham tunneling into the Bank of England or molesting underage schoolgirls? Is he in league with Beelzebub? Because if he is, we’d prefer he apply elsewhere.’ But when I ask you that question, I ask in vain. Because what you’ve told me so far, frankly, that’s peanuts. We’ll protect you if that’s what you want. We’re very happy to protect you. The accommodation won’t be as comfortable as what it is at the moment, but you’ll be protected all right. Because if you carry on like this, my masters will not only withhold their favor, but throw in a charge of obstructing the course of justice as well. Sir.” Carter came in with tea. “Has Mr. Massingham telephoned his office today, Mr. Carter?”

  “Seventeen-forty-five, sir.”

  “Where from?”

  “New York.”

  “Who was with him?”

  “Me and Mace, sir.”

  “Did he behave himself?”

  Massingham slammed down his newspaper. “Like a bloody lamb, he did. He gave it everything he’s got, didn’t I, Carter? Admit it.”

  “He sounded fine, sir,” Carter said. “A bit too camp for my taste but he always is.”

  “Listen to the tape if you don’t believe me. I was in New York, the weather was bliss, I’d just come away from breathing new hope into the hearts and minds of our wavering Wall Street investors, and I was off to do the same thing all over again in Toronto, and did anybody have news of our poor wandering Tiger? Answer, a tearful no. Right or wrong, Carter?”

  “I’d say that was a fair depiction, sir, as far as it goes.”

  “Who did he talk to?”

  “Angela, his secretary, sir.”

  “Do you reckon she swallowed it?”

  “She always swallows it,” Massingham drawled. With a face of stone Carter made his exit. “Oh dear, was I too blue?”

  “Well, Mr. Carter is quite a churchman, you see, sir. Very big on the boys’ club and the football teams.”

  Massingham was crestfallen. “Oh Lord. Oh damn. How vulgar of me. Oh do tell him I’m sorry.”

  Brock was back at his notebook, benignly shaking his white head like everybody’s dream daddy. “Now, sir. Can I ask you, please, a little more about these very threatening telephone calls you’ve been receiving?”

  “I’ve told you everything I know.”

  “Yes, well, we’re still having a spot of difficulty in tracing them, you see. Only, when we take on a request like this we’re obliged to show jeopardy. It’s what I call the golden twain. There’s jeopardy, and there’s the tangible evidence that you’re willing to cooperate with the authorities once immunity has been granted.” A pause to signal the harder tone: “Your firm impression, as per your testimony to my officers, was that the calls came from abroad. Correct?”

  “There was foreign noise in the background. Trams, that sort of thing.”

  “And you still can’t place the voice. You’ve thought about it day and night, but you’re stuck.”

  “I’d tell you otherwise, Nat.”

  “I’d like to think that, sir. And it was the same voice each time and there were four calls in quick succession and they always said the same thing. And always from abroad.”

  “There were the same—atmospherics—hollowness. It’s hard to describe.”

  “It wasn’t Dr. Mirsky, for instance?”

  “It could have been. If he’d shoved a handkerchief in the mouthpiece or whatever they do.”

  “Hoban?” Throwing out these names, Brock was marking how each one hit the target.

  “Not American enough. Alix talks as if he’d had a nose job done an hour ago.”

  “Shalva? Mikhail? It wasn’t Yevgeny himself, was it?”

  “English too good.”

  “And the old boy would have spoken Russian to you, too, I suppose—except that perhaps it mightn’t have sounded so threatening.” He was reading from his notebook. “ ‘You are next on the list, Mr. Massingham. You cannot hide from us. We can blow up your house or shoot you anytime we want.’ No advance on that?”

  “It wasn’t as dramatic as that. You make it sound ridiculous. It wasn’t ridiculous, it was terrifying.”

  “It’s such a shame your mysterious caller didn’t ring again after you’d thrown yourself on our mercy and we’d had your phone rerouted,” Brock lamented with sweet patience. “Four calls in as many hours, then he goes off the air the minute you come to us. It makes you wonder if he knows more than what’s good for him.”

  “It wasn’t good for me, is all I know.”

  “I’m sure it wasn’t, sir. What passport’s Tiger using, by the by?”

&n
bsp; “British, I assume. You asked me last time.”

  “And you are aware, I take it, as a former foreign servant yourself, that it’s a felony in this country to aid or abet the procurement of a false or doctored passport, of whatever nationality?”

  “Of course I am.”

  “And that accordingly, if I was able to demonstrate that an honorable Mr. Ranulf Massingham did knowingly and with intent provide such a fraudulent passport—backed up by a purloined birth certificate, what’s more—you might very well find yourself changing this extremely comfortable accommodation for a prison cell.”

  Massingham was sitting upright, one hand plucking at his lower lip. His eyes were turned downward, and with the frown of concentration that he wore, he might have been contemplating a crucial chess move. “You can’t put me in prison. You can’t arrest me either.”

  “Why can’t I?”

  “You’d blow your operation sky high. You’re in the same boat as us. You want business as usual for as long as you can get it.”

  Inwardly, Brock was not at all cheered by this accurate appraisal of his situation. Outwardly, his demeanor continued to radiate a simple decency. “You’re dead right, sir. It’s in my interest to keep you out of harm’s way. But I can’t lie to my superiors and you mustn’t lie to me. So will you kindly tell me, without further prevarication, the name that is on the false passport that you personally provided for Mr. Tiger Single?”

  “Smart. Tommy Smart. T.S. to match his rather common gold cuff links.”

  “So now let’s talk a little more about the good Dr. Mirsky,” Brock suggested, concealing his victory under a bureaucratic frown of hard necessity; and he managed to keep himself sitting there for another twenty minutes before rushing his news to the crew.

  But to Tanby he confessed his most secret anxiety. “He’s giving me the big lie, Tanby. Everything he tells me is chicken feed.”

  The surveillance team had reported that Subject was home alone. The telephone monitors had confirmed that Subject had resisted two supper invitations, pleading first a bridge date, then a previous engagement. It was ten o’clock at night in Park Lane. A warm, straight rain was dancing on the pavement. Tanby had driven him here, Aggie had ridden with him in the back of Tanby’s cab, chattering about Chinese nosh in Glasgow.