John Le Carré: Three Complete Novels

by John le Carré

  “Well, well, no wonder Karla wanted the bodies buried,” he blurted suddenly, as if the words had been jerked out of him. “No wonder. Karla’s a China hand, too, you know. It’s attested. I have it from Connie.” He clambered to his feet, holding too many things in his hands: pipe, tobacco tin, his penknife, and his Thomas Traherne. “Not sophisticated, naturally. Well, one doesn’t expect that. Karla’s no scholar, he’s a soldier. But not blind, either—not by a long chalk, she tells me. Ko.” He repeated the name at several different levels: “Ko. Ko. I must see the character. It depends entirely on the character. Height . . . Tree even, yes I can see tree . . . or can I? . . . oh, and several other concepts. ‘Drake’ is mission school, of course. Shanghainese mission boy. Well, well. Shanghai was where it all started, you know. First party cell ever was in Shanghai. Why did I say that? Drake Ko. Wonder what his real names are. We shall find that all out very shortly, no doubt. Yes, good. Well, I think I might go back to my reading, too. Smiley, do you think I might have a coal-scuttle in my room? Without the heating on, one simply freezes up. I’ve asked the housekeepers a dozen times and had nothing but impertinence for my pains. Anno Domini, I’m afraid, but the winter is almost upon us, I suppose. You’ll show us the raw material as soon as it arrives, I trust? One doesn’t like to work too long on potted versions. I shall make a curriculum vitae. That will be my first thing. Ko. Ah, thank you, Guillam.”

  He had dropped his Thomas Traherne. Accepting it, he dropped his tobacco tin, so Guillam picked that up as well. “Drake Ko. Shanghainese doesn’t mean a thing, of course. Shanghai was the real melting-pot. Chiu Chow’s the answer, judging by what we know. Still, mustn’t jump the gun. Baptist. Well, the Chiu Chow Christians mostly are, aren’t they? Swatownese: where did we have that? Yes, the intermediate company in Bangkok. Well, that figures well enough. Or Hakka. They’re not mutually exclusive, not by any means.”

  He stalked after Connie into the corridor, leaving Guillam alone with Smiley, who rose and, going to an armchair, slumped into it staring sightlessly at the fire.

  “Odd,” he remarked finally. “One has no sense of shock. Why is that, Peter? You know me. Why is it?”

  Guillam had the wisdom to keep quiet.

  “A big fish. In Karla’s pay. Lock-away accounts, the threat of Russian spies at the very centre of the Colony’s life. So why no sense of shock?”

  The green telephone was barking again; this time Guillam took the call. As he did so, he was surprised to see a fresh folder of Sam Collins’s Far Eastern reports lying open on the desk.

  That was the weekend. Connie and di Salis sank without trace; Smiley set to work preparing his submission; Guillam smoothed feathers, called in the mothers, and arranged for typing in shifts. On the Monday, carefully briefed by Smiley, he telephoned Lacon’s private secretary. He did it very well. “No drum-beats,” Smiley had warned. “Keep it very idle.” And Guillam did just that. There had been talk over dinner the other evening—he said—of a prima-facie case for convening the Intelligence Steering Group.

  “The case has firmed up a little, so perhaps it would be sensible to fix a date. Give us the batting order and we’ll circulate the document in advance.”

  “A batting order? Firmed up? Where ever do you people learn your English?”

  Lacon’s private secretary was a fat voice called Pym. Guillam had never met him, but he loathed him quite unreasonably.

  “I can only tell him,” Pym warned. “I can tell him and I can see what he says and I can ring you back. His card is very heavily marked this month.”

  “It’s just one little waltz, if he can manage it,” said Guillam, and rang off in a fury.

  You bloody well wait and see what hits you, he thought.

  When London is having its baby, the folklore says, the fieldman can only pace the waiting-room. Airline pilots, newshounds, spies—Jerry was back with the bloody inertia.

  “We’re in moth-balls,” Craw announced. “The word is well done and hold your water.”

  They talked every two days at least, limbo calls between two third-party telephones, usually one hotel lobby to another. They disguised their language with a mix of Sarratt word code and journalistic mumbo-jumbo.

  “Your story is being checked out on high,” Craw said. “When our editors have wisdom, they will impart it in due season. Meanwhile, slap your hand over it and keep it there. That’s an order.”

  Jerry had no idea how Craw talked to London and he didn’t care as long as it was safe. He assumed some co-opted official from the huge, untouchable above-the-line intelligence fraternity was playing linkman; but he didn’t care.

  “Your job is to put in mileage for the comic and tuck some spare copy under your belt, which you can wave at Brother Stubbs when the next crisis comes,” Craw said to him. “Nothing else, hear me?”

  Drawing on his jaunts with Frost, Jerry bashed out a piece on the effect of the American military pull-out upon the nightlife of Wanchai: “What’s happened to Susie Wong since warweary G.I.s with bulging wallets have ceased to flock in for rest and recreation?” He fabricated a “dawn interview” with a disconsolate and fictitious bar-girl who was reduced to accepting Japanese customers, air-freighted his piece, and got Luke’s bureau to wire through the number of the way-bill, all as Stubbs had ordered.

  Jerry was by no means a bad reporter, but just as pressure brought out the best in him, sloth brought out the worst. Astonished by Stubbs’s prompt and even gracious acceptance (a “herogram,” Luke called it, phoning through the text from the bureau), he cast around for other heights to scale. A couple of sensational corruption trials were attracting good houses, starring the usual crop of misunderstood policemen, but after taking a look at them, Jerry concluded they hadn’t the scale to travel. England had her own these days. A “please-matcher” ordered him to chase a story floated by a rival comic about the alleged pregnancy of Miss Hong Kong, but a libel suit got there ahead of him.

  He attended an arid government press briefing by Shallow Throat, himself a humourless reject from a Northern Irish daily; idled away a morning researching successful stories from the past that might stand re-heating; and, on the strength of a rumour about army economy cuts, spent an afternoon being trailed round the Gurkha garrison by a public-relations major who looked about eighteen. And no, the major didn’t know, thank you, in reply to Jerry’s cheerful enquiry, what his men would do for sex when their families were sent home to Nepal. They would be visiting their villages about once every three years, he thought; and he seemed to think that was quite enough for anyone. Stretching the facts till they read as if the Gurkhas were already a community of military grass widowers (“COLD SHOWERS IN A HOT CLIMATE FOR BRITAIN’S MERCENARIES”), Jerry triumphantly landed himself an inside lead. He banked a couple more stories for a rainy day, lounged away the evenings at the Club, and inwardly gnawed his head off while he waited for the Circus to produce its baby.

  “For Christ’s sake,” he protested to Craw. “The bloody man’s practically public property.”

  “All the same,” said Craw firmly.

  So Jerry said “Yes, sir,” and a few days later, out of sheer boredom, began his own entirely informal investigation into the life and loves of Mr. Drake Ko, O.B.E., Steward of the Royal Hong Kong Jockey Club, millionaire, and citizen above suspicion. Nothing dramatic; nothing, in Jerry’s book, disobedient ; for there is not a fieldman born who does not at one time or another stray across the borders of his brief. He began tentatively, like journeys to a forbidden biscuit box. As it happened, he had been considering proposing to Stubbs a three-part series on the Hong Kong super-rich. Browsing in the reference shelves of the Foreign Correspondents’ Club before lunch one day, he unconsciously took a leaf from Smiley’s book and turned up “Ko, Drake” in the current edition of Who’s Who in Hong Kong: married; one son, died 1968; sometime law student of Gray’s Inn, London, but not a successful one, apparently, for there was no record of his having been called to the bar. Then a run-down
of his twenty-odd directorships. Hobbies: horseracing, cruising, and jade. Well, whose aren’t? Then the charities he supported, including a Baptist church, a Chiu Chow Spirit Temple, and the Drake Ko Free Hospital for Children. Backed all the possibilities, Jerry reflected with amusement. The photograph showed the usual soft-eyed, twenty-year-old beautiful soul, rich in merit as well as goods, and was otherwise unrecognisable.

  The dead son’s name was Nelson, Jerry noticed: Drake and Nelson, British admirals. He couldn’t get it out of his mind that the father should be named after the first British sailor to enter the China Seas, and the son after the hero of Trafalgar.

  Jerry had a lot less difficulty than Peter Guillam in making the connection between China Airsea in Hong Kong and Indocharter S.A. in Vientiane, and he was amused to read in the China Airsea company prospectus that its business was described as a “wide spread of trading and transportation activities in the South East Asian theatre”—including rice, fish, electrical goods, teak, real estate, and shipping.

  Devilling at Luke’s bureau, he took a bolder step; the sheerest accident shoved the name of Drake Ko under his nose. True, he had looked up Ko in the card index. Just as he had looked up a dozen or twenty other wealthy Chinese in the Colony; just as he had asked the Chinese clerk, in perfectly good faith, who she thought were the most exotic Chinese millionaires for his purpose. And while Drake might not have been one of the absolute front runners, it took very little to draw the name from her, and consequently the papers. Indeed, as he had already protested to Craw, there was something flattening, not to say dream-like, about pursuing by hole-and-corner methods a man so publicly evident. Soviet intelligence agents, in Jerry’s limited experience of the breed, normally came in more modest versions. Ko seemed king-sized by comparison.

  Reminds me of old Sambo, Jerry thought. It was the first time this intimation struck him.

  The most detailed offering appeared in a glossy periodical called Golden Orient, now out of print. In one of its last editions, an eight-page illustrated feature titled “The Red Knights of Nanyang” concerned itself with the growing number of overseas Chinese with profitable trade relations with Red China, commonly known as “fat cats.” Nanyang, as Jerry knew, meant the realms south of China, and implied to the Chinese a kind of eldorado of peace and wealth. To each chosen personality the feature devoted a page and a photograph, generally shot against a background of personal possessions. The hero of the Hong Kong interview—there were pieces from Bangkok, Manila, and Singapore as well—was that “much-loved sporting personality and Jockey Club Steward,” Mr. Drake Ko, President, Chairman, Managing Director, and chief shareholder of China Airsea Ltd., and he was shown with his horse Lucky Nelson at the end of a successful season in Happy Valley. The horse’s name momentarily arrested Jerry’s Western eye. He found it macabre that a father should christen a horse after his dead son.

  The accompanying photograph revealed much more than the spineless mug shot in Who’s Who. Ko looked jolly, even exuberant, and he appeared, despite his hat, to be hairless. The hat was at this stage the most interesting thing about Ko, for it was one which no Chinese, in Jerry’s firm opinion, had ever been seen to wear before. It was a beret, worn sloping, putting Ko somewhere between a British soldier and a French onion seller; but above all, it had, for a Chinese, the rarest quality of all—self-mockery. He was apparently tall, he was wearing a Burberry, and his long hands stuck out of the sleeves like twigs. He seemed genuinely to like the horse, and one arm rested easily on its back.

  Asked why he still ran a junk-fleet when these were commonly held to be unprofitable, he replied: “My people are Hakka from Chiu Chow. We breathed the water, farmed the water, slept on the water. Boats are my element.” He was fond also of describing his journey from Shanghai to Hong Kong in 1951. At that time, the border was still open and there were no effective restrictions on immigration. Nevertheless, Ko chose to make the trip by fishing junk—pirates, blockades, and bad weather notwithstanding—which was held at the very least to be eccentric.

  “I’m a very lazy fellow,” he was reported as saying. “If the wind will blow me for nothing, why should I walk? Now I’ve got a sixty-foot cruiser but I still love the sea.”

  Famous for his sense of humour, said the article.

  A good agent must have entertainment value, say the Sarratt bearleaders; that was something Moscow Centre also understood.

  There being no one watching, Jerry ambled over to the card index and a few minutes later had taken possession of a thick folder of press cuttings, the bulk of which concerned a share scandal in 1965, in which Ko and a group of Swatownese had played a shady part. The Stock Exchange enquiry, not surprisingly, proved inconclusive and was shelved. The following year Ko got his O.B.E. “If you buy people,” old Sambo used to say, “buy them thoroughly.”

  In Luke’s bureau they kept a bunch of Chinese researchers, among them a convivial Cantonese named Jimmy who often appeared at the Club and was paid at Chinese rates to be the oracle on Chinese matters. Jimmy said the Swatownese were a people apart, “like Scots or Jews,” hardy, clannish, and notoriously thrifty, who lived near the sea so that they could run for it when they were persecuted or starving or in debt. He said their women were sought-after, being beautiful, diligent, frugal, and lecherous.

  “Writing yourself another novel, your Lordship?” the dwarf asked endearingly, coming out of his office to find out what Jerry was up to. Jerry had wanted to ask why a Swatownese should have been brought up in Shanghai, but he thought it wiser to bend course toward a less delicate topic.

  Next day Jerry borrowed Luke’s battered car. Armed with a standard-size 35-millimetre camera, he drove to Headland Road, a millionaire’s ghetto between Repulse Bay and Stanley, where he made a show of rubbernecking at the outside of the villas there, as many idle tourists do. His cover story was still that feature for Stubbs on the Hong Kong super-rich; even now, even to himself, he would scarcely have admitted going there on account of Drake Ko.

  “He’s raising Cain in Taipei,” Craw had told him casually in one of their limbo calls. “Won’t be back till Thursday.” Once again, Jerry accepted without question Craw’s lines of communication.

  He did not photograph the house called Seven Gates, but he took several long, stupid gazes at it. He saw a low, pantiled villa set well back from the road, with a big verandah on the seaward side and a pergola of white-painted pillars cut against the blue horizon. Craw had told him that Drake must have chosen the name because of Shanghai, whose old city walls were pierced with seven gates. “Sentiment, my son. Never underrate the power of sentiment upon a slant-eye, and never count on it either. Amen.” He saw lawns—including, to his amusement, a croquet lawn. He saw a fine collection of azaleas and hibiscus. He saw a model junk about ten feet long set on a concrete sea, and he saw a garden bar, round like a bandstand, with a blue-and-white striped awning over it, and a ring of empty white chairs presided over by a boy in a white coat and trousers and white shoes. The Kos were evidently expecting company. He saw other houseboys washing a tobacco-coloured Rolls-Royce Phantom saloon. The long garage was open, and he recorded a Chrysler station-wagon of some kind, and a Mercedes, black, with the licence plates removed, presumably as part of some repair. But he was meticulous about giving equal attention to the other houses in Headland Road, and photographed three of them.

  Continuing to Deep Water Bay, he stood on the shore gazing at the small armada of stockbroker junks and launches which bobbed at anchor on the choppy sea, but was not able to pick out Admiral Nelson, Ko’s celebrated ocean-going cruiser—the ubiquity of the name Nelson was becoming positively oppressive. About to give up, he heard a cry from below him, and walking down a rickety wooden causeway, he found an old woman in a sampan grinning up at him and pointing to herself with a yellow chicken leg she had been sucking with her toothless gums.

  Clambering aboard, he indicated the boats and she took him on a tour of them, laughing and chanting while she skulled, and k
eeping the chicken leg in her mouth. Admiral Nelson was sleek and low-lined. Three more boys in white ducks were diligently scouring the decks. Jerry tried to calculate Ko’s monthly housekeeping bill, just for staff alone.

  On the drive back he paused to examine the Drake Ko Free Hospital for Children and established, for what it was worth, that that too was in excellent repair.

  Next morning early, Jerry placed himself in the lobby of a chintzy high-rise office building in Central, and read the brass plates of the business companies housed there. China Airsea Ltd. and its affiliates occupied the top three floors, but somewhat predictably there was no mention of Indocharter Vientiane S.A., the former recipient of twenty-five thousand U.S. dollars on the last Friday of every month.

  The cuttings folder in Luke’s bureau had contained a cross-reference to U.S. Consulate archives. Jerry called there next day, ostensibly to check out his story on the American troops in Wanchai. Under the eyes of an unreasonably pretty girl, Jerry drifted, picked at a few things, then settled on some of the oldest stuff they had, which dated from the very early fifties when Truman had put a trade embargo on China and North Korea. The Hong Kong Consulate had been ordered to report infringements, and this was the record of what they had unearthed. The favourite commodity, next to medicines and electrical goods, was oil, and “the United States Agencies,” as they were styled, had gone for it in a big way, setting traps, putting out gunboats, interrogating defectors and prisoners, and finally placing huge dossiers before Congressional and Senate sub-committees.

  The year in question was 1951, two years after the Communist take-over in China and the year Ko sailed to Hong Kong from Shanghai without a cent to his name. The operation to which the bureau’s reference directed him was Shanghainese, and to begin with, that was the only connection it had with Ko. Many Shanghainese immigrants in those days lived in a crowded, insanitary hotel on the Des Voeux Road. The introduction said that they were like one enormous family, welded together by shared suffering and squalor. Some had escaped together from the Japanese before escaping from the Communists.