Single & Single

by John le Carré

  “You a big friend of Massingham?”

  “He’s a bastard,” said Oliver, feeling this was no time for half truths. “He shafted my father.”

  “So what? We’re all bastards. Some bastards, they don’t even play chess.”

  Mirsky drew the car to a sickening halt in the middle of the road, lowered the window and waited. A snake track to their right zigzagged toward a cluster of winking antennae on the hill’s crest. The sky was drenched with stars, a brilliant moon had cleared the black saddle of the horizon, the Bosphorus twinkled below them. Still Mirsky waited, watching his mirrors, but no Aggie came down the hill behind them. With a muttered expletive, Mirsky slammed the car into gear, lurched off the road and onto the track, rounded a bend at speed, bumped five hundred yards over grass and rubble and stopped in a lay-by out of sight of the main road. Tall tree trunks rose round them. Oliver remembered his own secret place on the hilltop at Abbots Quay and wondered whether this was Mirsky’s.

  “I don’t know where your fucking father is, okay?” Mirsky said, in a voice of grudging complicity. “That’s the truth. I tell you the truth, then you get the hell out of my life, you stay away from my house, my wife, my kids, you go back to fucking England, I don’t give a shit where you go. I’m a family man. I’ve got family values. I liked your father, okay? Sorry he’s dead, okay? Sorry about that. So fuck off home and found a new dynasty and forget you ever knew him. I’m a respectable lawyer. It’s what I like to be. Not a crook anymore, not unless it’s necessary.”

  “Who killed him?”

  “Maybe they didn’t do it yet. Maybe they kill him tomorrow, tonight, what’s the difference? You find him, he’ll be dead. Then you’ll be dead too.”

  “Who will have killed him?”

  “All of them. The whole family. Yevgeny, Tinatin, Hoban, every cousin, uncle, nephew, what do I know who kills him? Yevgeny’s reinvented the blood feud, declared war on the whole fucking human race with no dispensations. He’s a Caucasus man. Everyone’s got to pay. Tiger, Tiger’s son, his son’s dog, his fucking canary.”

  “All because of the Free Tallinn?”

  “The Free Tallinn screwed everything. Till Christmas—okay, we do some things. Massingham, me, Hoban—we got a little tired of everybody else’s mistakes, thought it was time to reorganize, improve security, go modern.”

  “Get rid of the old men,” Oliver suggested. “Take over the shop.”

  “Sure,” said Mirsky generously. “Screw them all ways up. That’s business, what’s new? We try to pull a takeover. A bloodless coup. Why not? By peaceful means. I’m a peaceful guy. I made a long journey. Lousy little flea-kid from Lvov, studies to be a good Communist, learns to fuck in four languages at the age of fourteen, magna cum laude in law, gets to be a big Party guy, nice operation going, lot of influence, sees the way the wind is blowing, gets churchy a little bit, gets baptized, big champagne party, joins Solidarity, but the cure is not a hundred percent, the new guys think they ought to put me in jail, so I come to Turkey. I’m happy here. I build a new practice, I marry a goddess. Maybe I’m getting a little tired of the Holy Trinity. Maybe one day I convert to Islam. I’m flexible, and I’m peaceful,” he repeated emphatically. “Peaceful today, it’s the only way to go, till some crazy fucking Russian decides he’ll start the third fucking world war.”

  “Where have they taken him?”

  “Where they took him. How should I know? Where’s Yevgeny? Where they took the corpse. Where’s Alix? Where Yevgeny went. Where’s Tiger? Where Alix took him.”

  “Whose corpse?”

  “Mikhail’s fucking corpse! Who do you think? Yevgeny’s brother, Mikhail. You got rocks in your head or something? Mikhail, who was killed on the Free Tallinn, for Christ’s sake. Why else do you think Yevgeny needs to start a war? All he wanted was the body. Paid a fortune for it. ‘Get me my brother’s body. In a steel coffin, lots of fucking ice. Then I kill the world.’” Oliver noticed a lot of things concurrently. That his eyes were seeing negative instead of positive, so that for several seconds the moon shone black in a white sky. That he was under water, deprived of speech and hearing. That Aggie was reaching for him but he was drowning. When he recovered his faculties, Mirsky was talking about Massingham again. “Alix tells Randy about the load, Randy snitches to his old employers, the fucking British Secret Service. His old employers snitch to Moscow. Moscow calls out the whole fucking Russian navy, they make a new Pearl Harbor, kill four guys, seize the boat, three tons of the best shit go back to Odessa for the Customs boys to make themselves a fortune. Yevgeny goes crazy, has Winser’s head shot off. That’s for openers. Now they get down to business.”

  Oliver spoke stiffly ahead of him, through the trees to the city. “What was Mikhail doing on the Free Tallinn when it was boarded?”

  “Riding with the load. Protecting it. Doing his brother a favor. I told you. They’d been losing too much stuff. Too many mistakes round the place, too many accounts frozen, too much money going down the toilet. Everyone was pissed off. Everyone was blaming everyone. Mikhail wants to be a hero for his brother, so he goes on the boat, takes his Kalashnikov along with him. The Russian navy boards the ship, Mikhail shoots a couple of them, creates a bad atmosphere. They shoot him back, so everybody has to pay. It’s logical.”

  “Tiger came to see you,” Oliver said, in the same mechanical tone.

  “The fuck he did.”

  “He came here to Istanbul just days ago.”

  “Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t. He called me. At my office. That’s all I know. Didn’t sound like a normal telephone. Didn’t sound like a normal man. Like he’d got an onion in his mouth. Maybe it was a pistol. Listen, I’m sorry, okay? He’s your fucking father.”

  “What did he want?”

  “He insulted me. Said I’d tried to rob him last Christmas. ‘Rob you, I don’t know,’ I said. ‘At that time we had a bad feeling you were robbing us. Anyway, you won, so who gives a shit?’ Then he tells me I should call off this crazy demand for two hundred million pounds. Talk to Yevgeny, I tell him. Talk to Hoban. The demand is not my idea. Yell at the client, not me, I tell him. Those two guys together, they went off the reservation. Then he tells me, ‘If my son, Oliver, shows up, don’t talk to him, he’s a fucking lunatic. Tell him not to come any further, tell him not to follow me. Tell him to get the fuck out of Istanbul and go hide in a hole. Tell him the joke’s over.’”

  “That doesn’t sound like my father speaking.”

  “It’s his message. In my words. It’s my message too. I’m a lawyer. I give the essence. Get the fuck out now. You want to go somewhere? The airport? The train station? You got money? I take you to a cab rank.” He started the engine.

  “Who told you Massingham was a traitor?”

  “Hoban. Alix knows stuff. He’s got his people in Russia still, guys in the system. Spooks.” Without putting on his headlights, Mirsky released the hand brake and eased the car toward the road, letting the moon show him the way.

  “Why did Hoban tell you it was Massingham who betrayed the Free Tallinn?”

  “He told me, that’s why. Like we’re friends. Like we did stuff together in the bad times, pair of spooks, doing our best for Communism and making bucks on the side.”

  “Where’s Zoya?”

  “Off her screwball head. Don’t mess with her, hear me? Russian women are crazy. Alix has to come back to Istanbul, put her in a clinic or something. Alix is neglecting his marital duties.” He had reached the bottom of the hill. He was watching his mirrors all the way. Oliver was watching them too. He saw the Volkswagen come up behind them, and as Mirsky pulled up he saw Aggie, jaw set and both hands firmly on the top of the wheel as she rolled past them. “You’re a nice guy. I hope I never see your fucking face again.” He pulled the pistol out of his waistband. “You want one of these?”

  “No thanks,” said Oliver.

  Mirsky parked just short of a roundabout. Oliver stepped out and waited on the curb. Mirsky circled the
roundabout at racing speed and headed for home, not another glance for Oliver. He was succeeded after a suitable intermission by Aggie.

  “Mikhail was Yevgeny’s Sammy,” Oliver said, staring blindly ahead of him. They had parked close to the water. Oliver debriefed himself while Aggie listened.

  “Who’s Sammy?”—already calling Brock on her cell phone.

  “Boy I knew. Helped me with my magic.”

  Elsie Watmore heard the doorbell in her sleep, and after the doorbell she heard her late husband, Jack, telling her Oliver was wanted down at the bank again. After that it wasn’t Jack but Sammy in his dressing gown with the landing light on, saying two plainclothes policemen were standing on the doorstep, somebody must have been murdered and one of them was bald. Sammy’s thoughts had taken a gory turn recently. Death and disaster, he couldn’t get enough of them.

  “If they’re plainclothes, how can you be so sure they’re policemen?” she asked him while she pulled on her housecoat. “Whatever time is it?”

  “They’ve got a police car,” Sammy replied, following her down the stairs. “With POLICE on it.”

  “I don’t want you round me, Sammy, so don’t be. You’re to stay upstairs, it’s better.”

  “I won’t,” Sammy said, which was another thing that worried her: his rebelliousness, just in the few days since Oliver had left. It went with his bed-wetting and wanting everybody killed in disasters. She looked through the fish-eye. The near one wore a trilby hat. The other was bare-headed and bald like a wrestler and Elsie had never seen a stone-bald copper before. His scalp glistened in the lamplight of the porch and she had a notion he rubbed it with a special oil. Behind them, parked bang next to Oliver’s magic van, stood their white Rover car. She opened the door but kept it on the chain.

  “It’s quarter past one in the morning,” she said through the gap.

  “Very sorry, Mrs. Watmore, I’m sure. You are Mrs. Watmore, aren’t you?”

  The one with the hat talking, the bald one watching. A London voice, educated, but not as much as he’d like. “What if I am?” she said.

  “I’m Detective Sergeant Jennings, this is Detective Constable Ames.” He waved a cellophane-backed card at her but it could have been his bus pass. “We’re acting on information regarding a person we’d like to talk to before they commit another felony. We think you may be able to help us with our inquiries.”

  “It’s about Oliver, Mum!” Sammy croaked in a gravelly whisper from her left elbow, and Elsie almost rounded on him and told him to shut his stupid mouth. She unchained the door and the policemen stepped into the hall, one close behind the other. It’s that ex-wife of his, she’s put the law on him for his maintenance, she thought. He’s been on one of his benders and belted somebody. She had a vision of Oliver curled on his side, the way she had found him on his bedroom floor that time, staring at a prison wall.

  The policeman with the hat took it off. Leaky eyes like a drinker. Ashamed of himself somehow. But the shiny bald one wasn’t ashamed of anything. He had spotted the Rest registration book and was stooped over it and flipping through the pages as if he owned them. Bully-boy shoulders. Arse too small for the rest of you.

  “Name of West,” said the bald constable, licking his thumb and flipping another page. “Know a West at all?”

  “I expect we’ve had one here and there. It’s a common enough name.”

  “Show her,” the constable said, and went on turning pages while the sergeant with the hat extracted a greaseproof paper envelope from his wallet and presented her with a photograph of Oliver looking like Elvis Presley with his hair marcelled and his eyelids fatty from the time when he was doing whatever he had run away from. Sammy was standing on his toes trying to get a look and saying, “Me, me.”

  “First name Mark,” said the sergeant. “Mark West. Six foot, dark hair.”

  Elsie Watmore had only instinct, and the memory of Oliver’s stifled phone calls coming in like SOS messages from a sinking ship: How are you, Elsie, how’s Sammy? I’m all right, Elsie, don’t worry about me, I’ll be back to see you soon. Sammy had changed his plea to “Show me, show me,” and was snapping his fingers under her nose.

  “It’s not him,” she said coarsely, like a formal declaration she had rehearsed too often.

  “Not who?” said the bald constable, straightening and barging round on her at the same time. “Who’s not who?”

  His eyes were water pale and empty, and it was the emptiness that scared her: the knowledge that whatever amount of kindness anyone poured into them, it was wasted. He could be watching his own mother dying, he wouldn’t look any different, she thought.

  “I don’t know the man in the photograph, so it’s not him, is it?” she said, handing back the photograph. “You ought to be ashamed of yourselves, waking decent people up like this.”

  Sammy could bear his exclusion no longer. Emerging from her skirts, he marched up to the sergeant and boldly struck out his arm.

  “Sammy, go up to bed, please. I’m serious. You’ve got school tomorrow.”

  “Show it to him,” the constable commanded, though his lips never moved. A constable, giving orders to a sergeant.

  The sergeant handed Sammy the photograph and Sammy made a show of examining it, first one eye, then both.

  “No Mark West here,” he pronounced, and shoved it back into the man’s hand as if it were a dud, before stomping upstairs to bed, not looking back.

  “How about Hawthorne?” the bald constable asked, back at the registration book. “O. Hawthorne. Who’s he?”

  “That’s Oliver,” she said.

  “What is?”

  “Oliver Hawthorne. He’s a lodger here. He’s an entertainer. For children. Uncle Ollie.”

  “Is he here now?”

  “No.”

  “Where is he?”

  “He’s gone to London.”

  “What for?”

  “To entertain. He had an engagement. An old customer. A special.”

  “How about Single?”

  “You just say ‘how about’ all the time. I don’t know what you’re asking. Single rooms? They’re all double.” She had found her anger. The clear strong kind that served her best. “You’ve no right. You’ve no warrant. Get out.”

  She pulled open the door and held it for them and she thought she could feel her tongue swelling the way her father always said it would if she lied. The bald constable had come up close to her and was breathing whisky and ginger straight into her face.

  “Has anybody from this establishment, a male, recently gone abroad to Switzerland, either on business or on holiday?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “Then why should someone write a picture postcard of a Swiss peasant swinging a flag on a mountaintop to your son, Samuel, saying he’ll be back home shortly, and why should the stamp on the said postcard be charged to the room account of Mr. Mark West?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve not seen a postcard, have I?”

  The empty eyes closer, the whisky fumes stronger and warmer. “If you’re lying to me, madam, which I think you are, you and that big-mouth son of yours will wish you’d never been born,” said the constable. Then he put his cap on and smiled good night to her before walking with his colleague to the car.

  Sammy was waiting in her bed.

  “I did all right, didn’t I, Mum?” he said.

  “They was more frightened than what we ever was, Sammy,” she assured him forgetting her grammar, and began to shiver.

  18

  Once, long ago, in the fire of youth, Nat Brock had beaten a man until he cried. The tears, so unexpected, had disconcerted Brock and shamed him. Entering Pluto’s Kennel less than an hour after his conversation with Aggie, he remembered this incident, as he always did whenever the temptation returned, and swore that he would abide by its lessons. Carter opened the steel door and saw from Brock’s face that something was afoot. Mace, trapped in the corridor, pressed himself respectfully against the wall to
let Brock sweep past. Down in the street, Tanby was waiting in his tame cab, with his meter running and his operational radio on receive. It was ten o’clock at night and Massingham was seated in an armchair eating Chinese take-in with a plastic fork and watching a bunch of sniggering television journalists congratulating one another on their wit. Brock unplugged the set at the door and ordered Massingham to stand, which he did. The weakness in Massingham’s face was like a stain that in the last days had deepened with each interrogation. Brock locked the door and put the key in his pocket. Why he did this he could never afterward explain.

  “Here’s the situation, Mr. Massingham,” he said, sweet and calm, which was what he was determined to be. “Mikhail Ivanovich Orlov was shot dead on the Free Tallinn. You knew that, but you didn’t see fit to tell us.” The pause he made was not intended as an invitation to Massingham to speak, but rather to let the accusation sink in. “Why not, I wonder?” And receiving no reply beyond an unconvincing shrug: “It is also my information that Yevgeny Orlov blames you and Tiger Single jointly for his brother’s death. Is that your information also?”

  “Hoban did it.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Hoban pinned it on me.”

  “Did he, then? And how did that information reach you, may I ask?”

  A protracted silence, ended by the muttered words “My business.”

  “Was it something that was said to you in your personalized version of the videotape of Alfred Winser’s killing, by any chance? Some tailored message or P.S. that made you aware of the danger you were in?”