John Le Carré: Three Complete Novels

by John le Carré

  Jerry trod very carefully now. His instinct for cover was stronger than ever. The Honourable Gerald Westerby, the distinguished hack, reports on the siege economy. When you’re my size, sport, you have to have a hell of a good reason for whatever you’re doing. So he put out smoke, as the jargon goes.

  At the enquiry desk, watched by several quiet men, he asked for the names of the best hotels in town and wrote down a couple while he continued to study the groupings of planes and buildings. Meandering from one office to another, he asked what facilities existed to air-freight news copy to Phnom Penh and no one had the least idea. Continuing his discreet reconnaissance, he waved his cable card around and enquired how to get to the governor’s palace, implying that he might have business with the great man personally. By now he was the most distinguished reporter who had ever been to Battambang. Meanwhile he noted the doors marked “Crew” and the doors marked “Private,” and the position of the men’s rooms, so that later, when he was clear, he could make himself a sketch plan of the entire concourse, with emphasis on the exits to the wired-off part of the airfield.

  Finally he asked who was in town just now among the pilots. He was friendly with several, he said, so his simplest plan—should it become necessary—was probably to ask one of them to take his copy in his flight-bag. A stewardess gave names from a list, and while she did this Jerry gently turned the list round and read off the rest. The Indocharter flight was listed but no pilot was mentioned.

  “Captain Andreas still flying for Indocharter?” he enquired.

  “Le capitaine qui, Monsieur?”

  “Andreas. We used to call him André. Little fellow, always wore dark glasses. Did the Kampong Cham run.”

  She shook her head. Only Captain Marshall and Captain Ricardo, she said, flew for Indocharter, but Captain Ric had immolated himself in an accident. Jerry affected no interest but established in passing that Captain Marshall’s Carvair was due to take off in the afternoon, as forecast in last night’s signal, but there was no freight space available; everything was taken, Indocharter was always fully contracted.

  “Know where I can reach him?”

  “Captain Marshall never flies in the mornings, Monsieur.”

  He took a cab into town. The best hotel was a flea-bitten dug-out in the main street. The street itself was narrow, stinking, and deafening: an Asian boom town in the making, pounded by the din of Hondas and crammed with the frustrated Mercedes of the quick rich. Keeping his cover going, he took a room and paid for it in advance, to include service spécial, which meant nothing more exotic than clean sheets as opposed to those which still bore the marks of other bodies. He told his driver to return in an hour. By force of habit he secured an inflated receipt. He showered, changed, and listened courteously while the houseboy showed him where to climb in after curfew; then he went out to find breakfast because it was still only nine in the morning.

  He carried his typewriter and shoulder-bag with him. He saw no other round-eyes. He saw basket-makers, skin-sellers, and fruit-sellers, and once again the inevitable bottles of stolen petrol laid along the pavement waiting for an attack to touch them off. In a mirror hung in a tree he watched a dentist extract teeth from a patient tied in a high chair, and he watched the red-tipped tooth being solemnly added to the thread that displayed the day’s catch.

  All of these things Jerry recorded in his notebook, as became a zealous reporter of the social scene. And from a pavement café, as he consumed cold beer and fresh fish, he watched the dingy half-glazed offices marked “Indocharter” across the road and waited for someone to come and unlock the door. No one did. Captain Marshall never flies in the mornings, Monsieur.

  At a chemist’s shop that specialised in children’s bicycles, he bought a roll of sticking-plaster and back in his room taped the Walther to his ribs rather than have it waving around in his waistband. Thus equipped, the intrepid journalist set forth to live some more cover, which sometimes, in the psychology of a fieldman, is no more than a gratuitous act of self-legitimisation as the heat begins to gather.

  The governor lived on the edge of town, behind a verandah and French colonial portals, and a secretariat seventy strong. The vast concrete hall led to a waiting-room never finished, and to much smaller offices behind, and in one of these, after a fifty-minute wait, Jerry was admitted to the presence of a tiny, very senior black-suited Cambodian sent by Phnom Penh to handle noisome correspondents. Word said he was the son of a general and managed the Battambang end of the family opium business. His desk was much too big for him. Several attendants lounged about and they all looked very severe. One wore a uniform with a lot of medal ribbons.

  Jerry asked for deep background and made a list of several charming dreams: that the Communist enemy was all but beaten; that there was serious discussion about reopening the entire national road system; that tourism was the growth industry of the province. The general’s son spoke slow and beautiful French, and it clearly gave him great pleasure to hear himself, for he kept his eyes half closed and smiled as he spoke, as if listening to beloved music.

  “I may conclude, Monsieur, with a word of warning to your country. You are American?”

  “English.”

  “It is the same. Tell your government, sir. If you do not help us to continue the fight against the Communists, we shall go to the Russians and ask them to replace you in our struggle.”

  Oh, Mother, thought Jerry. Oh, boy. Oh, God.

  “I will give them that message,” he promised, and made to go.

  “Un instant, Monsieur,” said the senior official sharply, and there was a stirring among his dozing courtiers. He opened a drawer and pulled out an imposing folder. Frost’s will, Jerry thought. My death warrant. Stamps for Cat.

  “You are a writer?”

  “Yes.”

  Ko’s putting the arm on me. Prison tonight, and wake up with my throat cut tomorrow.

  “You were at the Sorbonne, Monsieur?” the official enquired.

  “Oxford.”

  “Oxford in London?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you have read the great French poets, Monsieur?”

  “With intense pleasure,” Jerry replied fervently. The courtiers were looking extremely grave.

  “Then perhaps Monsieur will favour me with his opinion of the following few verses.” In his dignified French, the little official began to read aloud, slowly conducting with his palm.

  “Deux amants assis sur la terre

  Regardaient la mer,”

  he began, and continued for perhaps twenty excruciating lines while Jerry listened in mystification.

  “Voilà,” said the official finally and put the file aside. “Vous l’aimez?” he enquired, severely fixing his eye upon a neutral part of the room.

  “Superbe,” said Jerry with a gush of enthusiasm. “Merveilleux. The sensitivity.”

  “They are by whom, would you think?”

  Jerry grabbed a name at random: “By Lamartine?”

  The senior official shook his head. The courtiers were observing Jerry even more closely.

  “Victor Hugo?” Jerry ventured.

  “They are by me,” said the official, and with a sigh returned his poems to the drawer. The courtiers relaxed. “See that this literary person has every facility,” he ordered.

  Jerry returned to the airport to find it a milling, dangerous chaos. Mercedes raced up and down the approach as if someone had invaded their nest, the forecourt was a turmoil of beacons, motorcycles, and sirens; and the hall, when he argued his way through the cordon, was jammed with scared people fighting to read notice-boards, yell at each other, and hear the blaring loudspeakers all at the same time.

  Forcing a path to the information desk, Jerry found it closed. He leapt on the counter and saw the airfield through a hole in the anti-blast board. A squad of armed soldiers was jog-trotting down the empty runway toward a group of white poles where the national flags drooped in the windless air. They lowered two of the flags
to half-mast, and inside the hall the loudspeakers interrupted themselves to blare a few bars of the national anthem. Over the seething heads Jerry searched for someone he might talk to. He selected a lank missionary with cropped yellow hair and glasses and a six-inch silver cross pinned to the pocket of his brown shirt. A pair of Cambodians in dog-collars stood miserably beside him.

  “Vous parlez français?”

  “Yes, but I also speak English!”

  A lilting, corrective tone. Jerry guessed he was a Dane.

  “I’m press. What’s the fuss?” He was shouting at the top of his voice.

  “Phnom Penh is closed,” the missionary bellowed in reply. “No planes may leave or land.”

  “Why?”

  “Khmer Rouge have hit the ammunition dump in the airport. The town is closed till morning at the least!”

  The loudspeaker began chattering again. The two priests listened. The missionary stooped nearly double to catch their murmured translation.

  “They have made a great damage and devastated half a dozen planes already. They have laid them waste entirely. The authority is also suspecting sabotage. Maybe she also takes some prisoners. Why are they putting an ammunition house inside the airport in the first case? That was most dangerous. What is the reason here?”

  “Good question,” Jerry agreed.

  He ploughed across the hall. His master plan was already dead, as his master plans usually were. The “Crew Only” door was guarded by a pair of very serious crushers, and in the tension he saw no chance of brazening his way through. The thrust of the crowd was toward the passenger exit, where harassed ground staff were refusing to accept boarding tickets, and harassed police were being besieged with letters of laissez-passer designed to put the prominent outside their reach. He let it carry him. At the edges, a team of French traders was screaming for a refund, and the elderly were preparing to settle for the night. But the centre pushed and peered and exchanged fresh rumours, and the momentum carried him steadily to the front. Reaching it, Jerry discreetly took out his cable card and climbed over the improvised barrier. The senior policeman was sleek and well covered and he watched Jerry disdainfully while his subordinates toiled. Jerry strode straight up to him, his shoulder-bag dangling from his hand, and pressed the cable card under his nose.

  “Sécurité américaine,” he roared in awful French and, with a snarl at the two men on the swing-doors, barged his way onto the tarmac and kept going, while his back waited all the time for a challenge or a warning shot or, in the trigger-happy atmosphere, a shot that was not even a warning. He walked angrily, with rough authority, swinging his shoulder-bag Sarratt-style to distract. Ahead of him—sixty yards, soon fifty—stood a row of single-engined military trainers without insignia. Beyond lay the caged enclosure and the freight huts, numbered nine to eighteen, and beyond the freight huts Jerry saw a cluster of hangars and park-bays marked “Prohibited” in just about every language except Chinese.

  Reaching the trainers, Jerry strode imperiously along the line of them as if he were carrying out an inspection. They were anchored with bricks on wires. Pausing but not stopping, he stabbed irritably at a brick with his buckskin boot, yanked at an aileron, and shook his head. From their sandbagged emplacement, to his left, an anti-aircraft gun crew watched him indolently.

  “Qu’est-ce que vous faites?”

  Half turning, Jerry cupped his hands to his mouth. “Watch the damn sky, for Christ’s sakes,” he yelled in good American, pointing angrily to heaven, and kept going till he reached the high cage. It was open and the huts lay ahead of him. Once past them he would be out of sight of both the terminal and the control tower. He was walking on smashed concrete with couch-grass in the cracks. There was nobody in sight. The huts were weather-board, thirty feet long, ten high, with palm roofs. He reached the first. The boarding on the windows read “Bomb Cluster Fragmentation Without Fuses.” A trodden dust path led to the hangars on the other side. Through the gap Jerry glimpsed the parrot colours of parked cargo planes.

  “Got you,” Jerry muttered aloud as he emerged on the safe side of the huts, because there ahead of him, clear as day, like a first sight of the enemy after months of lonely marching, a battered blue-grey DC-4 Carvair, fat as a frog, squatted on the crumbling tarmac with her nose-cone open. Diesel oil was dripping in a fast black rain from both her starboard engines, and a spindly Chinese in a sailing cap laden with military insignia stood smoking under the loading bay while he marked an inventory. Two coolies scurried back and forth with sacks, and a third worked the ancient loading lift. At his feet, chickens scrabbled petulantly. And on the fuselage, in flaming crimson against Drake Ko’s faded racing colours, ran the letters “OCHART.” The others had been lost in a repair job.

  Oh, Charlie’s indestructible, completely immortal! Charlie Marshall, Mr. Tiu, a fantastic half-Chinese, all skin and bones and opium and a completely brilliant pilot. . . .

  He’d bloody well better be, sport, thought Jerry with a shudder, as the coolies loaded sack after sack through the open nose and into the battered belly of the plane.

  The Reverend Ricardo’s lifelong Sancho Panza, Your Grace, Craw had said, in extension of Lizzie’s description. Half Chow, as the good lady advised us, and the proud veteran of many futile wars.

  Jerry remained standing, making no attempt to conceal himself, dangling the bag from his fist, and wearing the apologetic grin of an English stray. Coolies now seemed to be converging on the plane from several points at once: there were many more than two. Turning his back on them, Jerry repeated his routine of strolling along the line of huts, much as he had walked along the line of trainers, or along the corridor toward Frost’s room, peering through cracks in the weather-board and seeing nothing but the occasional broken packing-case. The concession to operate out of Battambang costs half a million U.S. renewable, Keller had said. At that price, who pays for redecoration?

  The line of huts broke and he came on four army lorries loaded high with fruit, vegetables, and unmarked gunny bags. Their tailboards faced the plane and they sported artillery insignia. Two soldiers stood in each lorry, handing the gunny bags down to the coolies. The sensible thing would have been to drive the lorries onto the tarmac, but a mood of discretion prevailed. The army likes to be in on things, Keller had said. The navy can make millions out of one convoy down the Mekong, the air force is sitting pretty. Bombers fly fruit and the choppers can airlift the rich Chinese instead of the wounded out of the siege towns. Only the fighter boys go hungry, because they have to land where they take off. But the army really has to scratch around to make a living.

  Jerry was closer to the plane now and could hear the squawking as Charlie Marshall fired commands at the coolies.

  The huts began again. Number 18 had double doors and the name “Indocharter” daubed in green down the woodwork so that from any distance the letters looked like Chinese characters. In the gloomy interior a Chinese peasant couple squatted on the dust floor. A tethered pig lay with its head on the old man’s slippered foot. Their other possession was a long rush parcel meticulously bound with string. It could have been a corpse. A water jar stood in one corner with two rice-bowls at its base. There was nothing else in the hut. Welcome to the Indocharter transit lounge, Jerry thought. With the sweat running down his ribs he tagged himself to the line of coolies till he drew alongside Charlie Marshall, who went on squawking in Khmer at the top of his voice while his shaking pen checked each load on the inventory.

  He wore an oily white short-sleeved shirt with enough gold stripes on the epaulettes to make a full general in anybody’s air force. Two American combat patches were stitched to his shirt front, amid an amazing collection of medal ribbons and Communist red stars. One patch read “Kill a Commie for Christ,” and the other “Christ Was a Capitalist at Heart.” His head was turned down and his face was in the shadow of his huge sailing cap, which slopped freely over his ears.

  Jerry waited for him to look up. The coolies were already yelling for
Jerry to move on, but Charlie Marshall kept his head turned stubbornly down while he added and wrote on the inventory and squawked furiously back at them.

  “Captain Marshall, I’m doing a story on Ricardo for a London newspaper,” said Jerry quietly. “I want to ride with you as far as Phnom Penh and ask you some questions.”

  As he spoke, he gently laid the volume of Candide on top of the inventory, with three one-hundred-dollar bills poking outward in a discreet fan. When you want a man to look one way, says the Sarratt school of illusionists, always point him in the other.

  “They tell me you like Voltaire,” he said.

  “I don’t like anybody,” Charlie Marshall retorted in a scratchy falsetto at the inventory, while the cap slipped still lower over his face. “I hate the whole human race, hear me?” His vituperation, despite its Chinese cadence, was unmistakeably French-American. “Jesus Christ, I hate mankind so damn much that if it don’t hurry and blow itself to pieces, I’m personally going to buy some bombs and go out there myself!”

  He had lost his audience. Jerry was half-way up the steel ladder before Charlie Marshall had completed his thesis.

  “Voltaire didn’t know a damn bloody thing!” he screamed at the next coolie. “He fought the wrong damn war, hear me? Put it over there, you lazy coon, and grab another handful! Dépêche-toi, crétin, oui?”

  But all the same he jammed Voltaire into the back pocket of his baggy trousers.