“Why?”
The rain fell steadily.
“Why? Why? Why?” Luke echoed, furious. “Just hurry!”
The bamboos were out of scale, higher than the wall. A couple of orange-clad priests were sheltering against them, clapping cymbals. A third held an umbrella. There were flower stalls and hearses and from somewhere out of sight the sounds of leisurely incantation. The entrance lobby was a jungle swamp reeking of formaldehyde.
“Big Moo’s special envoy,” said Luke.
“Press,” said Jerry.
The police nodded them through, not looking at their cards.
“Where’s the Superintendent?” said Luke.
The smell of formaldehyde was awful. A young sergeant led them. They pushed through a glass door to a room where old men and women, maybe thirty of them, mostly in pyjama suits, waited phlegmatically as if for a late train, under shadowless neon lights and an electric fan. One old man was clearing out his throat, snorting onto the green tiled floor. Seeing the giant kwailos, they stared in polite amazement. The pathologist’s office was yellow. Yellow walls; yellow blinds, closed; an air-conditioner that wasn’t working. The same green tiles, easily washed down.
“Great smell,” said Luke.
“Like home,” Jerry agreed.
Jerry wished it was battle. Battle was easier. The sergeant told them to wait while he went ahead. They heard the squeak of trolleys, low voices, the clamp of a freezer door, the low hiss of rubber soles. A volume of Gray’s Anatomy lay next to the telephone. Jerry turned the pages, staring at the illustrations. Luke perched on a chair. An assistant in short rubber boots and overalls brought tea. White cups, green rims, and the Hong Kong monogram with a crown.
“Can you tell the sergeant to hurry, please?” said Luke. “You’ll have the whole damn town here in a minute.”
“Why us?” said Jerry again.
Luke poured some tea onto the tiled floor, and while it ran into the gutter he topped up the cup from his whisky flask. The sergeant returned, beckoning quickly with his slender hand. They followed him back through the waiting-room. This way there was no door, just a corridor, and a turn like a public lavatory, and they were there.
The first thing Jerry saw was the trolley chipped to hell; there’s nothing older or more derelict than worn-out hospital equipment, he thought. The walls were covered in green mould, green stalactites hung from the ceiling, a battered spittoon was filled with used tissues. They clean out the noses, he remembered, before they pull down the sheet to show you. It’s a courtesy, so that you aren’t shocked. The fumes of formaldehyde made his eyes run. A Chinese pathologist was sitting at the window, making notes on a pad. A couple of attendants were hovering, and more police. There seemed to be a general sense of apology around; Jerry couldn’t make it out.
The Rocker was ignoring them. He was in a corner, murmuring to the august-looking gentleman from the back of the patrol car, but the corner wasn’t far away and Jerry heard “slur on our reputation” spoken twice, in an indignant, nervous tone. Over the body lay a white sheet with a blue cross on it, made in two equal lengths. So that they can use it either way round, Jerry thought. It was the only trolley in the room. The only sheet. The rest of the exhibition was inside the two big freezers with the wooden doors, walk-in size, big as a butcher’s shop. Luke was going out of his mind with impatience.
“Jesus, Rocker!” he called across the room. “How much longer you going to keep the lid on this? We got work to do.”
No one bothered with him. Tired of waiting, Luke yanked back the sheet. Jerry looked, and looked away. The autopsy room was next door, and he could hear the sound of sawing, like the snarling of a dog.
No wonder they’re all so apologetic, Jerry thought stupidly. Bringing a round-eye corpse to a place like this.
“Jesus Christ,” Luke was saying. “Holy Christ. Who did it to him? How do you make those marks? That’s a triad thing. Jesus.”
The dampened window gave on to the courtyard. Jerry could see the bamboos rocking in the rain and the liquid shadows of an ambulance delivering another customer, but he doubted whether any of them looked like this. A police photographer had appeared and there were flashes. A telephone extension hung on the wall. The Rocker was talking into it. He still hadn’t looked at Luke, or at Jerry.
“I want him out of here,” the august gentleman said.
“Soon as you like,” said the Rocker. He returned to the telephone. “In the Walled City, sir. . . . Yes, sir. . . . In an alley, sir. Stripped. Lot of alcohol. . . . The forensic pathologist recognised him immediately, sir. . . . Yes, sir, the bank’s here already, sir.” He rang off. “Yes, sir, no, sir, three bags full, sir.” He dialled a number.
Luke was making notes. “Jesus,” he kept saying in awe. “Jesus. They must have taken weeks to kill him. Months.”
He had died twice, Jerry decided. Once to make him talk and once to shut him up. The things they had done to him first were all over his body, in big and small patches, the way fire hits a carpet, eats holes, then suddenly gives up. Then there was the thing round his neck, a different, faster death altogether. They had done that last, when they didn’t want him any more.
Luke called to the pathologist. “Turn him over, will you? Would you mind please turning him over, sir?”
The Superintendent had put down the phone.
“What’s the story?” said Jerry, straight at him. “Who is he?”
“Name of Frost,” the Rocker said, staring back with one eyelid drooping. “Senior official of the South Asian & China. Trustee Department.”
“Who killed him?” Jerry asked.
“Yeah, who did it? That’s the point,” said Luke, writing hard.
“Mice,” said the Rocker.
“Hong Kong has no triads, no Communists, and no Kuomintang. Right, Rocker?”
“And no whores,” the Rocker said.
The august gentleman spared the Rocker further reply. “A vicious case of mugging,” he declared over the policeman’s shoulder. “A filthy, vicious mugging, exemplifying the need for public vigilance at all times. He was a loyal servant of the bank.”
“That’s not a mugging,” said Luke, looking at Frost again. “That’s a party.”
“He certainly had some damned odd friends,” the Rocker said, still staring at Jerry.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” said Jerry.
“What’s the story so far?” said Luke.
“He was on the town till midnight. In the company of a couple of Chinese males. One cathouse after another. Then we lose him. Till tonight.”
“The bank’s offering a reward of fifty thousand dollars,” said the august man.
“Hong Kong or U.S.?” said Luke, writing.
The august man said, “Hong Kong,” very tartly.
“Now, you boys go easy,” the Rocker warned. “There’s a sick wife in Stanley Hospital, and there’s kids—”
“And there’s the reputation of the bank,” said the august man.
“That will be our first concern,” said Luke.
They left half an hour later, still ahead of the field.
“Thanks,” said Luke to the Superintendent.
“For nothing,” said the Rocker. His drooping eyelid, Jerry noticed, leaked when he was tired.
We’ve shaken the tree, thought Jerry as they drove away. Boy, oh, boy, have we shaken the tree!
They sat in the same attitudes, Smiley at his desk, Connie in her wheelchair, di Salis gazing into the languid smoke-coil of his pipe. Guillam stood at Smiley’s side, the grate of Martello’s voice still in his ears. Smiley, with a slight circular movement of his thumb, was polishing his spectacles with the fat end of his tie.
Di Salis, the Jesuit, spoke first. Perhaps he had the most to disown. “There is nothing in logic to link us with this incident. Frost was a libertine. He kept Chinese women, he was manifestly corrupt. He took our bribe without demur. Heaven knows what bribes he has not taken in the past. I will not ha
ve it laid at my door.”
“Oh, stuff,” Connie muttered. She sat expressionless and the dog lay sleeping on her lap. Her crippled hands lay over his brown back for warmth. In the background Fawn was pouring tea. Smiley took neither milk nor sugar.
Smiley spoke to the signal form. Nobody had seen his face since he had first looked down to read it.
“Connie, I want the arithmetic,” he said.
“Yes, dear.”
“Outside these four walls, who is conscious that we leaned on Frost?”
“Craw. Westerby. Craw’s policeman. And if they’ve any mind, the Cousins will have guessed.”
“Not Lacon, not Whitehall.”
“And not Karla, dear,” Connie declared, with a sharp look at the murky portrait.
“No. Not Karla. I believe that.” From his voice, they could feel the intensity of the conflict as his intellect forced its will upon his emotions. “For Karla, it would be a most exaggerated response. If a bank account is blown, all he need do is open another elsewhere. He doesn’t need this.” With the tips of his fingers, he precisely moved the signal form an inch up the glass. “The ploy went as planned. The response was simply—” He began again. “The response was more than we expected. Operationally nothing is amiss. Operationally we have advanced the case.”
“We’ve drawn them, dear,” Connie said firmly.
Di Salis blew up completely. “I insist you do not speak as if we were all of us accomplices here. There is no proven link and I consider it invidious that you should suggest there is.”
Smiley remained remote in his response: “I would consider it invidious if I suggested anything else. I ordered this initiative. I refuse not to look at the consequences merely because they are ugly. Put it on my head. But don’t let’s deceive ourselves.”
“Poor devil didn’t know enough, did he?” Connie mused, seemingly to herself. At first nobody took her up. Then Guillam did: what did she mean by that?
“Frost had nothing to betray, darling,” she explained. “That’s the worst that can happen to anyone. What could he give them? One zealous journalist, name of Westerby. They had that already, little dears. So of course, they went on. And on.” She turned to Smiley’s direction. He was the only one who shared so much history with her. “We used to make it a rule—remember, George—when the boys went in? We always gave them something they could confess.”
With loving care, Fawn set down a paper cup on Smiley’s desk, a slice of lemon floating on the tea. His skull-like grin moved Guillam to repressed fury.
“When you’ve handed that round, get out,” he snapped in his ear. Still smirking, Fawn left.
“Where is Ko, in his mind, at this moment?” Smiley asked, still talking to the signal form. He had locked his fingers under his chin and might have been praying.
“Funk and fuzzy-headedness,” Connie declared with confidence. “Fleet Street on the prowl, Frost dead and he’s still no further forward.”
“Yes. Yes, he’ll dither. ‘Can he hold the dam? Can he plug the leaks? Where are the leaks, anyway?’ . . . That’s what we wanted. We’ve got it.” He made the smallest movement of his bowed head, and it pointed toward Guillam. “Peter, you will please ask the Cousins to step up their surveillance on Tiu. Static posts only, tell them. No street-work, no frightening the game, no nonsense of that kind. Telephone, mail, the easy things only. Doc, when did Tiu last visit the mainland?”
Di Salis grudgingly gave a date.
“Find out the route he travelled and where he bought his ticket. In case he does it again.”
“It’s on record already,” di Salis retorted sulkily and made a most unpleasing sneer, looking to heaven and writhing with his lips and shoulders.
“Then kindly be so good as to make me a separate note of it,” Smiley replied with unshakeable forbearance. “Westerby,” he went on in the same flat voice, and for a second Guillam had the sickening feeling that Smiley was suffering from some kind of hallucination, and thought that Jerry was in the room with him, to receive his orders like the rest of them. “I pull him out—I can do that. His paper recalls him, why shouldn’t it? Then what? Ko waits. He listens. He hears nothing. And he relaxes.”
“And enter the narcotics heroes,” Guillam said, glancing at the calendar.
“Or I pull him out and I replace him, and another fieldman takes up the trail. Is he any less at risk than Westerby is now?”
“It never works,” Connie muttered. “Changing horses. Never. You know that. Briefing, training, re-gearing, new relationships. Never.”
“I don’t see that he is at risk!” di Salis asserted shrilly.
Swinging angrily round, Guillam started to slap him down, but Smiley spoke ahead of him: “Why not, Doc?”
“Accepting your hypothesis—which I don’t—Ko is not a man of violence. He’s a successful businessman and his maxims are face, and expediency, and merit, and hard work. I won’t have him spoken of as if he were some kind of thug. I grant you he has people, and perhaps his people are less nice than he when it comes to method. Much as we are Whitehall’s people. That doesn’t make blackguards of Whitehall, I trust.”
For Christ’s sake, out with it! thought Guillam.
“Westerby is not a Frost,” di Salis persisted, in the same didactic, nasal whine. “Westerby is not a dishonest servant. Westerby has not betrayed Ko’s confidence, or Ko’s money, or Ko’s brother. In Ko’s eyes, Westerby represents a large newspaper. And Westerby has let it be known—both to Frost and to Tiu, I understand—that his paper possesses a greater degree of knowledge in the matter than he himself. Ko understands the world. By removing one journalist, he will not remove the risk. To the contrary, he will bring out the whole pack.”
“Then what is in his mind?” said Smiley.
“Uncertainty. Much as Connie said. He cannot gauge the threat. The Chinese have little place for abstracts, less still for abstract situations. He would like the threat to blow over, and if nothing concrete occurs, he will assume it has done so. That is not a habit confined to the Occident. I am extending your hypothesis.” He stood up. “I am not endorsing it. I refuse to. I dissociate myself from it absolutely.”
He stalked out. On Smiley’s nod, Guillam followed him. Only Connie stayed behind.
Smiley had closed his eyes and his brow was drawn into a rigid knot above the bridge of his nose. For a long while Connie said nothing at all. Trot lay as dead across her lap, and she gazed down at him, fondling his belly.
“Karla wouldn’t give two pins, would he, dearie?” she murmured. “Not for one dead Frost, nor for ten. That’s the difference, really. We can’t write it much larger than that, can we, not these days? Who was it who used to say, ‘We’re fighting for the survival of Reasonable Man’? Steed-Asprey? Or was it Control? I loved that. It covered it all. Hitler. The new thing. That’s who we are: reasonable. Aren’t we, Trot? We’re not just English. We’re reasonable.”
Her voice fell a little. “Darling, what about Sam? Have you had thoughts?”
It was still a long while before Smiley spoke, and when he did so, his voice was harsh, like a voice to keep her at a distance.
“He’s to stand by. Do nothing till he has the green light. He knows that. He’s to wait till the green light.” He drew in a deep breath and let it out again. “He may not even be needed. We may quite well manage without him. It all depends how Ko jumps.”
“George, darling, dear George.”
In silent ritual, she pushed herself to the grate, took up the poker, and with a huge effort stirred the coals, clinging to the dog with her free hand.
Jerry stood at the kitchen window, watching the yellow dawn cut up the harbour mist. Last night there had been a storm, he remembered. Must have hit an hour before Luke telephoned. He had watched it from the mattress while the girl lay snoring along his leg. First the smell of vegetation, then the wind rustling guiltily in the palm trees, dry hands rubbed together. Then the hiss of rain like tons of molten shot being shaken in
to the sea. Finally the sheet lightning rocking the harbour in long slow breaths while salvos of thunder cracked over the dancing roof-tops. I killed him, he thought. Give or take a little, it was me who gave him the shove. “It’s not just the generals, it’s every man who carries a gun.” Quote source and context.
The phone was ringing. Let it ring, he thought. Probably Craw, wetting his pants. He picked up the receiver. Luke, sounding even more than usually American.
“Hey, man! Big drama! Stubbsie just came through on the wire. Personal for Westerby. Eat before reading. Want to hear it?”
“No.”
“A swing through the war zones. Cambodia’s airlines and the siege economy. Our man amid shot and shell! You’re in luck, sailor! They want you to get your ass shot off!”
And leave Lizzie to Tiu, he thought, ringing off.
And for all I know, to that bastard Collins too, lurking in her shadow like a white slaver. Jerry had worked to Sam a couple of times while Sam was plain Mr. Mellon of Vientiane, an uncannily successful trader, headman of the local round-eye crooks. He reckoned him one of the most unappetising operators in the game.
He returned to his place at the window thinking of Lizzie again, up there on her own giddy roof-top. Thinking of little Frost, and of his fondness for being alive. Thinking of the smell that had greeted him when he returned here, to his flat. It was everywhere. It overrode the reek of the girl’s deodorant, the stale cigarette smoke, the smell of gas, and the smell of cooking oil from the mah-jong players next door. It even overrode the memory of Frost’s formaldehyde. Catching it, Jerry had actually charted in his imagination the route Tiu had taken as he foraged: where he had lingered, and where he had skimped on his journey through Jerry’s clothes, Jerry’s pantry, and Jerry’s few possessions. A smell of rose-water and almonds mixed, favoured by an early wife.
15
Siege Town
When you leave Hong Kong, it ceases to exist. When you have passed the last Chinese policeman in British ammunition boots and puttees, and held your breath as you race sixty feet above the roofs of the grey slums, when the out-islands have dwindled into the blue mist, you know that the curtain has been rung down, the props cleared away, and the life you lived there was all illusion. But this time for once, Jerry couldn’t rise to that feeling: he carried the memory of the dead Frost and the live girl with him, and they were still beside him as he reached Bangkok.
John Le Carré: Three Complete Novels Page 74
