Single & Single

by John le Carré

  “They told me I was next on the list. Mikhail was dead, I’d betrayed him. I and those I loved, but William in particular, would pay for it in blood,” Massingham said in a parched voice. “It was a setup. Hoban two-timed me.”

  “Three-timed, wasn’t it? You were already two-timing Tiger.”

  No answer, but no denial either.

  “You had played an enthusiastic part in an earlier plan, round about last Christmas, to strip your employer, Single, of his assets and create a new entity controlled by Hoban, Mirsky and yourself. Is that a nod, Mr. Massingham? Will you say yes, please?”

  “Yes.”

  “Thank you. In a minute I shall ask Mr. Mace and Mr. Carter to come in here and I shall formally charge you with a number of criminal offenses. They will include obstructing the course of justice by withholding information and destroying evidence, and conspiring with persons known and unknown to import proscribed substances. If you collaborate with me now, I shall go into the witness box at your trial and plead for a reduction in the draconian sentence that awaits you. If you don’t collaborate with me now, I shall so represent your part in this matter as to obtain maximum sentences on all charges, and I’ll put William in the dock beside you as an accessory before and after and during the fact. I shall also deny under oath that I said what I just said. Which is it to be, Mr. Massingham? Yes, I collaborate, or no, I don’t?”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes what?”

  “Yes, I collaborate.”

  “Where is Tiger Single?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Where is Alix Hoban?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do I see William in the dock beside you?”

  “No, you bloody well don’t. It’s the truth.”

  “Who betrayed the Free Tallinn to the Russian authorities? Be very careful how you answer, please, because you will not have a later opportunity to correct your story.”

  A whisper. “The bastard dropped me in it.”

  “The bastard in this case being who?”

  “I told you, damn you. Hoban.”

  “I’d like the reasoning behind this, please. I’m not seeing everything as clearly as I should tonight. What was to be gained, from the point of view of Hoban and yourself, from the seizure of the Free Tallinn and a few tons of best-refined heroin by the Russian authorities—not to mention the killing of Mikhail?”

  “I didn’t know Mikhail was on the bloody boat! Hoban never told me. If I’d known Mikhail was going to be aboard I’d never have dreamed of playing along with him!”

  “Playing along with him in what way?”

  “He wanted a last straw. A last spectacular failure of a long line.

  Hoban did.”

  “But you did too.”

  “All right, we both did! He suggested it, I saw the logic of the idea. I went along with it. I was a fool. Does that satisfy you? If the Free Tallinn was seized, that would be the clincher and Hoban would be able to deliver Yevgeny.”

  “Deliver in what sense? Speak up, if you please. I’m having trouble hearing you.”

  “Deliver like persuade. Don’t you know English? Hoban’s got some hold on Yevgeny. He’s married to Zoya. He’s the father of Yevgeny’s only grandson. He can play on him. If the Free Tallinn was blown, there’d be no more resistance, no more last-minute changes of heart from Yevgeny. Not even Tiger would be able to sweet-talk him round.”

  “Then for good measure Hoban put Mikhail on the boat and didn’t tell you. You’re going all faint again, I’m afraid.”

  “Put him there, I don’t know. Mikhail decided to go on the boat. Hoban knew in advance the cargo was betrayed but didn’t stop him going.”

  “So Mikhail was killed, and instead of a paper putsch you had a five-star Georgian blood feud on your hands.”

  “It was a trick. I’m the traitor, so I’m the prime target. The way Hoban spins it to Yevgeny, Tiger put me up to being the traitor, so he goes with me.”

  “You’re losing me again. Why are you the traitor? How did you get yourself in that position? Why didn’t Hoban blow the whistle on the Free Tallinn for himself? Why couldn’t Hoban do his own dirty work?”

  “The tip-off had to come from England. If it came from Hoban, his old pals in the business would tumble to it and Yevgeny would find out.”

  “That was the logic as purveyed to you by Hoban?”

  “Yes! And it made sense. If the tip-off came from England, then by inference it came from Tiger. If I did it, I did it on Tiger’s orders. Tiger was double-crossing Yevgeny. It was part of the plot to finger Tiger.”

  “But it fingered you as well.”

  “In the event—turned round—yes. Played Hoban’s way—yes. Played my way—no.” He had recovered his voice and with it a kind of self-righteous indignation.

  “So you went along with him?”

  No answer. Brock took half a step toward him, and the half step was enough.

  “Yes. I went along with him. But I didn’t know Mikhail was aboard. I didn’t know Hoban would turn the tables on us. How could I?”

  Brock appeared lost in thought. He was nodding, holding his chin, vaguely agreeing. “So you agreed to snitch,” he mused. “Snitch how?” No answer. “Let me guess. Mr. Massingham went to his old friends in the what-we-call the Foreign Office.” Still no answer. “Anyone I know? I said, anyone I know?” Massingham was shaking his head. “Why not?”

  “How the hell was I supposed to have found out what the Free Tallinn was carrying out of Odessa? Overheard it in a pub? Picked up a crossed line on the telephone? They’d have had me under the bright lights in seconds.”

  “Yes, they would,” Brock conceded, after due reflection. “They’d be more curious about you than about the Free Tallinn. That wouldn’t do at all, would it? You wanted a no-questions-asked passive ally, not a thinking intelligence officer. So who did we go to, Mr. Massingham?” Brock was so close to him by now, and his demeanor so thoughtful, that it was neither necessary nor appropriate for either man to speak above a murmur. His sudden shout was therefore all the more shocking. “Mr. Mace! Mr. Carter! In here, if you please! At the double!” And they must have been hovering the other side of the door, for finding it locked, and suspecting Brock was under threat, they smashed it down and were standing to either side of Massingham almost before Brock had finished speaking the command. “Mr. Massingham,” Brock resumed. “I wish you, please, to tell me, in front of these two gentlemen: which British enforcement agency did you advise—in great secrecy—of the illegal cargo that was to be found aboard SS Free Tallinn departing Odessa?”

  “Porlock,” Massingham whispered, between breathy gaps. “Tiger said to me . . . if I ever needed anything from the police, go to Porlock . . . Porlock had a network . . . It could fix anything . . . if I’d raped someone . . . if William was caught snorting . . . if somebody was blackmailing somebody or I needed someone out of the way . . . Whatever it was, Porlock would cooperate, Porlock was his man.”

  Then to the common embarrassment he began weeping, accusing Brock with his tears. But Brock had no time for remorse. Tanby was hovering in the doorway with a message to impart, and Aiden Bell was on standby at Northolt airport with a bunch of very hard men.

  They had crossed a long bridge over water and were exploring, to Oliver’s conflicting instructions, another set of hills—“Left here, no right . . . hang on a minute, left here!”—but Aggie was not objecting, she was doing her best to give his intuition its head as he craned forward in his seat like a great bloodhound, scenting and frowning and trying to remember. It was past midnight and there were no venerable old gentlemen anymore. There were villages and hilltop restaurants and night revelers in fast cars who swept down on them like attacking fighter planes and peeled away into the valley. There were black bowls of empty field, and puffs of sudden mist that enveloped and released them.

  “A blue tile,” he told her. “A sort of Muslim tile with squirlly calligraphy on it, and three-fiv
e in white.”

  He had written down several approximations of the address, and he and Aggie had sat shoulder to shoulder in lay-bys, poring over a road map, then a street map, hunting through the gazetteer— could it be this one, Oliver? how about that one, Oliver?—and she had barely used their new intimacy except to guide his finger on the map occasionally and, once, to kiss his temple, which was damp and shivery with cold sweat. From a phone box she had fought and failed to find an English-speaking inquiries operator who could give them the address and telephone number of Orlov, Yevgeny Ivanovich or Hoban, Alix, patronymic unknown. But it must have been a holiday or a birthday or just another early night for Istanbul telephone operators, because all she got was promises in broken English, and courteous requests to call again tomorrow.

  “Try the view from the French windows,” she urged him, pulling up at a tourists’ lookout spot and switching off the engine. “Something you saw, a landmark. It was on the European side. You looked at Asia. What did you see?”

  He was so remote from her, so inward. He was Oliver on the day she first saw him march into the Camden house in his gray-wolf overcoat, hurt, fierce-eyed and trusting nobody.

  “Snow,” he said. “It was snowy. Palaces on the opposite shore. Boats, fairy lights. There was a gate,” he said as the images began forming for him. “A gatehouse,” he corrected himself. “At the bottom of the garden. There were terraces, and at the bottom of the garden there was a stone wall with a gate, and this gatehouse above it. And a narrow street the other side. Cobbled. We walked there.”

  “Who did?”

  “Yevgeny and me and Mikhail.” A pause for Mikhail. “We took a turn round the garden. Mikhail was proud of it. He enjoyed having a big spread. ‘Like Bethlehem,’ he kept saying. There was a light in the gatehouse. Someone lived there. Hoban’s people. Guards or whatever. Mikhail didn’t care for them. Scowled and spat when he caught sight of them in the window.”

  “What shape?”

  “I didn’t see them.”

  “Not the people, Oliver. The gatehouse.”

  “Crenellated.”

  “What on earth does that mean?”—jocular, hoping to bump him out of himself.

  “Turrets. Stone teeth.” Vaguely, he sketched the shape in the moisture on the windscreen. “Crenellated,” he repeated.

  “And the cobbled street,” she said.

  “What about it?”

  “Was it in a village? Cobble sounds village to me. Were there streetlights, the other side of the gatehouse, when you looked down the garden in the snow?”

  “Traffic lights,” he conceded, his mind still far away. “Bottom left of the gatehouse. The villa in an angle between two roads. Cobbled lane at the bottom, serious road to one side, traffic lights where the lane met the road. Why did he say he talked as if he had an onion in his mouth?” he mused while she searched the map. “Why did he think I’d come after him? I suppose he knew I’d go to Nadia.” Stick to the job in hand, she advised. “There were two roads. A coast road and a hill road. Mikhail liked the hill road because he could show off his driving. There was a china shop and a supermarket. And a lighted beer ad.”

  “What beer?”

  “Efes. Turkish. And a mosque. With an old minaret with an aerial on it. We heard the muezzin.”

  “And saw the aerial,” she said, starting the car. “At night. Stuck above a wall with an inhabited gatehouse and a cobbled street and a village and the Bosphorus below it and Asia across the way and it’s number thirty-five. Come on with you, Oliver. I need your eyes. Don’t die on me, it’s not the time.”

  “The china shop,” he said.

  “What about it?”

  “It was called Jumbo Jumbo Jumbo. I had this mental picture of three elephants in a china shop.”

  In another phone box they found a tattered directory and an address for Jumbo Jumbo Jumbo, but when they looked at the map the street didn’t exist, or if it did, it had changed its name. They quartered the hillside, weaving between potholes, until Oliver’s head jerked forward and his hand grabbed her shoulder. They had reached a junction. A cobbled street faced them. Along its left side ran a brick wall. Halfway down it, the pointed black teeth of an ancient turret bit into the starry sky. To their right rose a mosque. There was even an aerial on the minaret, except that Aggie wondered whether it was a lightning conductor. Ahead of them down the lane a pair of traffic lights glowed red. Using sidelights only, Aggie advanced on them under the shadow of the crenellated gatehouse. No light shone in the arched window. At the traffic lights she turned left up the hill, passing a signpost to Ankara.

  “Left again here,” Oliver ordered. “Now stop. We’ve got a hundred yards, then there’s a pair of high gates and a forecourt. Where the trees are. The house is below the trees.”

  She parked gingerly on a sand verge, avoiding tin cans and bottles. She switched out the lights. They were two lovers looking for privacy. The Bosphorus once more lay below them.

  “I’m going in alone,” Oliver said.

  “Me too,” said Aggie. She had her shoulder bag on her lap and was delving in it. She took out her cell phone and stowed it under the driving seat. “Give me your Turkish money.”

  He handed her a wad and she gave him back half and put the rest under the seat together with the Single passports. She took the ignition key out of the lock and freed it from its ring and hirer’s tag. She got out of the car. He did the same. She opened the bonnet, took out the tool kit and, from the tool kit, a wheel brace, which she stuffed jimmy-end first into her belt. She closed the bonnet and set to work searching the ground with a pinlight hand torch.

  “I’ve got my Swiss army knife if you want it,” he said.

  “Shut up, Oliver.” She stooped and came up with a rusted can with no lid. She locked the car and held up the key and the rusted can. “See this? If we get split up or hit trouble, the first to reach the car takes it. No waiting.” She laid the key in the can, and the can against the inside wall of the front left wheel. “Rendezvous, the base of the minaret. Fallback, the main railway station concourse every two hours starting at six A.M. They did train you, Oliver.”

  “I’m all right. I’m fine.”

  “Assuming we’re separated. Whoever gets to the car first, as soon as he can, he reports to Nat on the hot line. Press one and send. Switch on the power first, okay? Are you following me, Oliver? I’ve a feeling I’m talking to myself. Come here.” She cupped his ear with her hands. “This is an operational instruction. Kindly bear it in mind throughout all that follows. Most people, when they do the wrong thing, they think they’re heroes when in fact they’re total pricks. Whereas you—you do all the right things, and you think you’re a total prick. That’s a major error. Are you hearing me, Oliver? You go first, you’re on home ground. Mush.”

  He led, she followed. The track was of beaten mud with rain holes. From behind him, the pen torch lit the way. He smelt fox or badger and falling dew. Her hand was on his shoulder. He stopped and turned to her, unable to see her clearly in the darkness, but sensing the caring in her eyes. It’s in mine too, he thought. He heard an owl, then a cat, then dance music. An opulent villa appeared high up on the hill to his right, all its lights on and a flock of cars parked round its drive. Shadows of revelers danced in the windows.

  “Who’s that?” she whispered.

  “Crooked millionaires.”

  He wanted her terribly. He wished they could take the Orient Express from the old railway station in Istanbul and make love all the way to Paris. Then he remembered that the Orient Express no longer came to Istanbul. A white-winged owl clattered out of the elaeagnus bushes, scaring him out of his wits. He was approaching the gates, Aggie close behind him. The gates were set fifteen yards from the track at the foot of a steep tarmac ramp. A sentry box stood one side of them. Security lights shone on them, heavy chains bound them, razor wire capped them. On each gatepost the figures 35 gleamed large and white against a swirling Moorish background. Scurrying across t
he ramp with Aggie on his heels, Oliver came to a second, humbler entrance for staff and deliveries. Two steel-panel gates, six feet high and mounted with spikes for impaling Christian martyrs, barred their way. Behind them lay the back of the villa, a mess of drainpipes, chimney pots and gargoyles. Not a light showed in any of the windows. Aggie inspected the lock with her pen torch, then inserted the jimmy end of the wheel brace into the gap between the gates, tested it, and cautiously withdrew it. An electric wire was protruding from a small hole beside the lock. She licked her finger, put it to the wire and shook her head. She shoved the wheel brace into Oliver’s waistband, placed her back against the wall and linked her hands, palms upward, across her stomach.

  “Like this,” she whispered.

  He did as she ordered. She stepped into his hands but spent no time there. He felt a brief pressure as she ascended, saw her fly over the martyr’s spikes and into the stars. He heard a scuffle as she landed and panic seized him. How do I follow her? How does she get back? A man-gate squeaked and opened. He slipped through the gap. Suddenly he knew the way. A flagstoned alley took them between the villa and the wall. He had played chase games here with Yevgeny’s granddaughters. A flying buttress made an arch against the sky, huge drainpipes lay like old cannon along the path. The children had used them as stepping-stones. Oliver led, keeping one hand on the wall for balance. He remembered the glazed corridor to Tiger’s penthouse, and limping on one shoe. They had reached the front of the villa. In the moonlight, the descending terraces of the garden lay flat as playing cards. At their foot, the wall and gatehouse resembled the cutout ramparts of a children’s fort.

  Aggie put her arms round him and gently recovered the wheel brace. “Wait here,” she signaled. He had no choice. She was already sidling along the front of the villa, peering in at the French windows one by one, darting in catlike bounds, peeking and moving, then freezing again before she peeked. She beckoned, so he began following her, conscious of his clumsiness. The moonlight was like day in black-and-white. The first window was not familiar to him. The room was bare. Dead flowers were strewn over the floor: old roses, carnations, orchids, bits of silver foil. A pair of battens, nailed crosswise, were propped in one corner. He noticed an extra batten lower down the upright and remembered the Orthodox cross. A painter’s narrow trestle stood at the center but he saw no brushes or pots. She was signaling: Come on.