Single & Single

by John le Carré

  “We can wait till tomorrow if you’re tired,” Brock had said without conviction.

  “I’m fine,” Oliver the nearly good soldier had replied.

  K. Altremont, he read, shielding his eyes from the rain while he studied the illuminated bell buttons. Apartment 18. He pressed the button, a light shone in his face and he heard a bisexual squawk. “It’s me,” he said into the beam. “Oliver. Wondered if I could take a cup of coffee off you. Won’t keep you long.”

  A metallic voice burst through the atmospherics. “Christ. It really is me. I buzz, you push. Ready?”

  But he pushed too early, and had to wait and push again before the glass doors yielded. In a futuristic lobby, gray-suited earthlings manned a white space desk. The younger wore a badge saying he was Mattie. The older, Joshua, was reading his Mail on Sunday.

  “Center lift,” Mattie lisped at Oliver. “And don’t touch anything because we do it all for you.”

  The lift rose, Mattie sank into the ground. At the eighth floor the door opened by itself and she was waiting for him, an eternal thirtysomething in stonewashed jeans and one of Tiger’s cream silk shirts rolled to the elbows, and a tangle of tiny gold bracelets on each wrist. She stepped forward, drawing the whole length of him against her, which was how she greeted all her men, chest to chest and groin to groin, except that with Oliver’s height the bits didn’t mesh the way they were meant to. Her long hair was brushed out and smelt of bath.

  “Oliver. Isn’t it awful? That poor Alfie—everything? Where’s Tiger gone?”

  “You tell me, Kat.”

  “Where have you been, for God’s sake? I thought he’d gone to find you or something.” She pushed him away, but only so that she could look at him more closely. Cracks forming at the stress points, he noticed. The same scamp’s smile, but more effort to keep it there. The eye as calculating, the voice as brittle. “Have you acquired responsibilities, darling?” she asked him when she had completed her examination.

  “Not really. No, I don’t think so.” Foolish giggle.

  “You’ve acquired something. I rather like it. But then I always did, didn’t I?” He followed her to the drawing room. A studio in search of an artist, he remembered. Cult sculpture, airport art, Kensington kilims. Property of a Liechtenstein foundation. I drew up the contract, Winser vetted it, Kat owned the foundation, mixture as before. “How about an alcohol, darling?”

  “Love one.”

  “Me too.” The drinks cupboard was a refrigerator disguised as a Spanish traveling chest. She drew out a silver-chased jug of dry martini, filled a frosted flute and half filled another. Suntanned arms; Kat goes to Nassau for February. Hands rifle-steady. “Boy’s size,” she said, handing him the full glass and keeping the girl’s size for herself.

  He took one sip and entered an altered state. If it had been tomato juice, he would still have been drunk. He took a second sip and recovered. “Business okay?” he asked.

  “Absolutely coining it, darling. We made a profit last year, which threw Tiger into a total tantrum.” She perched herself on a Bedouin saddle. He squatted at her feet on a pile of longhaired cushions. Her feet bare. Tiny toenails like spots of blood. “Tell, darling. Omitting no detail, however sordid.”

  He was lying, but with Katrina he found lying easy. He was in Hong Kong when he got the news, he said, quoting the cover story according to Brock. A fax from Pam Hawsley reported that Winser had been shot and Tiger had “left his desk to attend to urgent matters” and perhaps Oliver should consider coming home. It was the middle of the night in London, so rather than hang round, he found a Cathay Pacific to Gatwick, took a cab to Curzon Street, woke Gupta, raced down to Nightingales to see Nadia.

  “How is she, darling?” Katrina cut in, with the special concern that mistresses evince for lovers’ wives.

  “Bearing up remarkably well, thanks,” he replied uncomfortably. “Surprisingly so. Yes. Very feisty.”

  Her eyes, for all the time he had been talking, had not released him. “You haven’t been to our boys in blue, have you, darling?” she asked shrewdly—a bridge player, reading his face.

  “Which ones?” Oliver asked, reading hers.

  “I thought you might have called on darling Bernard’s services. Or aren’t you Bernard-friendly?”

  “Are you?”

  “Not as friendly as he’d like me to be, thank God. My girls won’t touch him. Five grand he offered Angela to go on holiday with him to his fuck hutch in the sun. She told him she wasn’t that sort of girl, which gave us all a bit of a laugh.”

  “I haven’t been to anyone. The firm’s desperate to keep it quiet that Tiger’s gone missing. They’re terrified of a run on the House.”

  “So why’ve you come to me, darling?”

  He gave a large shrug, but could not shake off her gaze. “Thought I’d get it from the horse’s mouth,” he said.

  “And I’m the horse.” Her toe prodded his flank. “Or was it for a bit of TLC in the midst of our tribulations?”

  “Well, you’re his best pal, Kat, aren’t you?” he replied, grinning and shifting away from her.

  “Apart from you, darling.”

  “Plus you were the first person he came to see when he heard the news about Alfie.”

  “Was I?”

  “According to Gupta, you were.”

  “Then where did he go?”

  “To see Nadia. Well, she said he did. I mean, she wouldn’t make it up. What would be the point?”

  “And after Nadia? Who did he go and see then? Some special little friend I don’t know about?”

  “I thought he might have come back here.”

  “Darling. Whatever for?”

  “Well, he’s not that bright at handling his own arrangements, is he? Not if he wants to go abroad. I’m sort of surprised he didn’t take you with him.”

  She lit a cigarette, which amazed him. What else does she do when Tiger isn’t here? “I was asleep,” she said, closing her eyes to exhale, “wearing nothing but my modesty. We’d had a perfectly bloody night at the Cradle. Some air charterers brought an Arab prince and he got the hots for Vora. You remember Vora”—another prod of the toe, this time in the flesh of his backside—“drop-dead gorgeous blonde, dreamy bosom, endless legs. Well she remembers you, darling—as I do. Ahmed wanted to sweep her off to Paris in his jet but Vora’s boyfriend’s only just been let out and she didn’t dare. There was a fuss, and it was four A.M. before I got back here, switched off the phone, took a bomb and crashed. The next thing I know, it’s lunchtime and Tiger’s standing over me in his beastly brown overcoat, saying, ‘They’ve shot Winser’s head off for a punishment.’”

  “Shot his head off? How did Tiger know that?”

  “Search me, darling. Turn of phrase, probably. It was certainly more than I needed in my frail condition. ‘Why on earth should anyone shoot Alfie, for God’s sake?’ I said. ‘Who’s they? How do you know it wasn’t a jealous husband?’ No, he said, it was a plot, and they were all in it, Hoban, Yevgeny, Mirsky and the whole guards armored. He wanted to know where I’d put the shoe brushes. You know how he gets when he’s in one of his panics. He’s got to die with his boots clean.” Oliver, who did not know that his father was prone to panic, nodded wisely all the same. “The next thing he wanted was change for the telephone. He was gibbering, so I thought at first he was telling me I’d got to change my telephone line. No, no, money, he said. Pound coins, fifty-pences, what had I got? ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ I said, ‘you pay the phone bill here. Use mine.’ Not good enough. It had to be a proper coin box. Everywhere else was tapped by his enemies. ‘Get hold of Randy,’ I said. No good. Got to find the shillings.‘Ring Bernard,’ I said. ‘If you’re in trouble, that’s what Bernard’s for.’ Not from here, he said. ‘But, darling, he’s police,’ I said. ‘Police don’t tap police.’ Shook his head. Did his little woman stuff. Said I couldn’t see the whole picture, and he could.”

  “Poor you,” said Oliver, still trying to ge
t used to the idea of Tiger gibbering.

  “So of course we couldn’t find any bloody change, could we? My parking change was in the car. My car was in the basement. Quite honestly, I thought your revered papa was going round the twist— what is it, darling? You look as though you’ve eaten something.”

  Oliver had eaten nothing. He was adding events together in his head and making no sense of them. He was calculating that it could only have been minutes since Tiger had received Yevgeny’s letter asking him for two hundred million sterling. Yet when Gupta saw Tiger leave Curzon Street he was still apparently composed. And Oliver was wondering what could have happened between Curzon Street and Kat to panic his father and make him gibber.

  “So we schlepp round the flat for ten minutes, me in my kimono, looking for loose change. Made me wish I was back in my bedsit with a tin of ten-pences for the gas meter. We came up with two quid. Well, that wasn’t going to be enough, was it, not for phoning abroad. But then of course he hadn’t said it was abroad, not till we’d finished looking. ‘For God’s sake,’ I said, ‘have Mattie go round to the newsagent and buy you some phone cards.’ That wouldn’t do either. Porters weren’t to be trusted. He’d rather buy them for himself. So off he went, never called me Mother. It took me absolutely hours to get back to sleep and dream about you.” A huge drag on the cigarette, followed by a discontented sigh. “Oh, and it’s all your fault, you’ll be pleased to hear, it’s not just Mirsky and the Borgias. We’re all in league against him, we’re all betraying him, but you’ve betrayed him rottenest. I was rather jealous. Have you?”

  “How?”

  “God knows, darling. He said you left a trail behind you and he’d tracked it back to the source and the source was you. First time I’d heard of trails having sources, but it’s what he said.”

  “He didn’t say who he needed to phone?”

  “Course not, darling. I’m not to be trusted, am I? He was waving his little Filofax thingy about, so he obviously didn’t have the number in his head.”

  “But it was abroad.”

  “So he said.”

  And it was lunchtime, Oliver thought. “Where’s the newsagent’s?” he asked.

  “Out of the door, turn right for fifty yards and it’s staring at you. Are you being Hercule Poirot, darling? He said you were Iscariot. I think you’re scrumptious,” she added.

  “I’m just getting the picture,” he said. A picture he has never dreamed of until now: of a Tiger frenzied, irrational and on the run, huddled in a phone box in his brown Raglan and polished shoes while his mistress goes back to sleep. “He got into a big shoot-out with somebody last Christmas,” he said. “A bunch of people tried to do the dirty on him. He flew to Zurich and beat them off. Does that ring any bells with you?”

  She yawned. “Vaguely. He was going to sack Randy. He’s always going to sack Randy. And they’re all crooks, Mirsky included.”

  “Yevgeny too?”

  “Yevgeny wobbles. He’s too much under the influence.”

  “Who of?”

  “God knows, darling. How’s your alcohol?” He drank his martini. Katrina smoked and watched him while one bare foot thoughtfully massaged the other. “You’re the one who slipped through his fingers, aren’t you, you naughty boy,” she said reflectively. “He never talks about you, do you know that? Only when he’s roused. Well, not roused, exactly, because that only happens on leap years. First you were on overseas study leave, then you were bringing in the foreign business, then you were back at studying again. He’s still proud of you, in his way. He just thinks you’re a traitor and a shit.”

  “He’ll probably show up in a few days,” Oliver said.

  “Oh, if he’s alone he’ll come running back. He can’t stand his own company, never could. That’s why one rather assumes the little friend. He certainly doesn’t get enough out of me to keep him going. Or vice versa, frankly. Perhaps he needs a change of bowling. Par for the course at his age. Par for the course at mine, come to think of it”—her toe prodded him again, this time closer to the groin. “Have you got a little friend, darling? Someone who knows how to drive you mad?”

  “Sort of between two stools really.”

  “That nice Nina came to see me at the Cradle once. She couldn’t understand why you told Tiger you were going to marry her and never told her.”

  “Yeah, well, sorry about that.”

  “Don’t apologize to me, darling. What was the matter with her? Not lively enough in the sack? She’s got a dishy little body, what I could see of it. Super bum. Lovely wraparound hips. Made me wish I was a man.”

  Oliver shifted farther away from her. “Nadia says Mirsky’s been round a lot,” he said, changing the subject. “Showed up at Nightingales, playing chess with Randy.” Everything you can get on Mirsky, Brock had ordered.

  “That’s not the only thing he plays, I can tell you, darling. He’d play me if he got half a chance. Not for want of trying. He’s worse than Bernard. We’re not allowed to call him Mirsky, by the by. His passport’s temperamental. I’m not surprised.”

  “What do you call him, then?”

  “Dr. Münster from Prague. Some doctor. I’m his personal private secretary, in case you didn’t know. Dr. Münster needs a helicopter to Nightingales? Get old Kat onto it. Dr. Münster needs the bridal suite at the Grand Ritz Palace? Old Kat’ll fix it. Dr. Münster needs three tarts and a blind violinist by yesterday? Kat’ll pimp for him, no problem. He’s too hot for the Ice Maiden to handle, I gather.”

  “I thought Tiger said Mirsky was in the plot against him.”

  “That was this month, darling. Last month he was the angel Gabriel. Then bingo, Mirsky’s joined the bad guys and Yevgeny’s a soft old fool to listen to a smooth-tongued Pole and Randy’s the creep who put him up to it—and for all I know you did too, didn’t you? Where are you living, darling?”

  “Singapore mainly.”

  “I meant tonight.”

  “Camden. Friend from law school.”

  “A he-friend?”

  “Yes.”

  “Isn’t that rather a waste? Unless you’re a Randy, which you definitely aren’t.” He was about to laugh when he caught her eye and saw a different, darker glow. “There’s a spare bed here if you like. Mine. Satisfaction guaranteed,” she said.

  Oliver considered this proposal, and realized it did not surprise him. “I suppose I ought to take a squiz round his pad,” he objected, as if this were a hindrance of some kind. “Find out if there are any papers or anything. Before anyone else does.”

  “You can take a squiz round his pad, then you can come back to my pad. Can’t you?”

  “Only, I haven’t got his keys,” he explained, with a shabby grin. They stood side by side in the lift and flank against flank. Her keys were looped together with elephant hair. She took his palm and laid them on it, then folded his fingers over them. She drew him to her and kissed him and kept kissing him and fondling him until he returned her embraces. Her breasts were naked under Tiger’s shirt. She feathered her tongue against his while her hands skimmed and dived round his crotch. She took his hand and opened it and selected a key which together they put into the keyhole and turned. They put in a second key. The lift rose and stopped and the doors opened onto a glazed rooftop corridor like a parked railway coach with chimney pots one side and the lights of London the other. Still without speaking she chose a long, brass-stemmed key and another key that was attached to it, and arranged them suggestively between his finger and thumb so that they were pointing outward and upward at their imaginary target. She kissed him again, and with her hand on his bottom urged him down the corridor in the direction of a mahogany door with electric coaching lamps burning to either side of it.

  “Hurry,” she whispered. “Promise?”

  He waited till the lift had disappeared, then to be sure he pressed the call button and waited till it returned empty. Then he took off one sneaker and wedged the doors open to prevent the lift from going anywhere, because
he knew that of the three that served the building this was the only lift to serve the penthouse, and that therefore the only person who might logically be wishing to come up here at this hour apart from Tiger was Katrina deciding after all to keep him company. Keys in hand, one shoe off and one shoe on, he hobbled down the corridor. The mahogany door yielded at once and he stepped into an eighteenth-century gentleman’s London house, except that it had been built fifteen years ago on a rooftop. Oliver had never slept here, never laughed here, never washed up or made love or played here. Sometimes on lonely evenings Tiger had required his attendance and they had sat watching mind-reducing television over too many nightcaps. The only other recollections he had of the place were Tiger raging against the city authorities for refusing to let him have a helicopter pad, and summer parties catered by Katrina for all the friends that Tiger didn’t have:

  “Oliver! Nina, over here, please! Oliver, tell us again that joke about the scorpion that wanted to get across the Nile. But slowly. His Highness wishes to write it down . . .”

  “Oliver! A moment of your time, dear boy, if I may detach you from your delightful companion! Describe to His Excellency once more the legal basis of the project you presented to us so fluently this morning. Since we are off the record you may wish to use a somewhat less inhibited terminology . . .”

  He was standing in the hall, his crotch aching from Katrina’s caresses. He advanced into the house, his senses still on fire. The rooms confused him and he no longer knew his way, but that was Katrina’s fault. He turned a corner and passed through a drawing room, a billiards room and a study. He returned to the hall, delved in overcoats and raincoats in search of Brock’s treasured scraps of paper. Something seemed to be written in Tiger’s hand on the jotting pad beside the telephone. Still lusting after Katrina, he shoved the pad into his pocket. In one room he had spotted something, but he couldn’t remember which. He hovered in the drawing room, waiting for inspiration, trying to shake off memories of Katrina’s breast nestling in his palm and the pressure of her mound against his thigh.