John Le Carré: Three Complete Novels

by John le Carré

  One day, it seemed, the General just lost patience with Charlie. He called together his bodyguard and came down from his hilltop in the Shans to a little opium town called Fang, not far inside the Thai border. There, after the fashion of patriarchs the world over, the General rebuked Charlie for his spendthrift ways.

  Charlie had a special squawk for his father and a special way of puffing out his wasted cheeks in military disapproval.

  “‘So you better do some proper damn work, for a change—hear me, you kwailo spider bastard? You better stay away from horse gambling, hear me, and strong liquor, and opium. And you better take those Commie stars off your tits and sack that stink friend Ricardo of yours. And you better cease financing his woman, hear me? Because I don’t gonna keep you one day more, not one hour, you spider bastard, and I hate you so much one day I kill you because you remind me of that Corsican whore your mother!’”

  Then to the job itself—Charlie’s father, the General, still speaking: “‘Certain very fine Chiu Chow gentlemen who are pretty good friends of pretty good friends of mine, hear me, happen to have a controlling interest in a certain aviation company. Also I got certain shares in that company. Also this company happens to bear the distinguished title of Indocharter Aviation. So these good friends, they do me a favour to assist me in my disgrace for my three-legged spider-bastard son and I pray sincerely you may fall out of the sky and break your kwailo neck.’”

  So Charlie flew his father’s opium for Indocharter—one, two flights a week at first, but regular, honest work and he liked it. His nerve came back, he steadied down, and he felt real gratitude toward his old man. He tried, of course, to get the Chiu Chow boys to take Ricardo too, but they wouldn’t. After a few months they did agree to pay Lizzie twenty bucks a week to sit in the front office and sweet-mouth the clients. These were the golden days, Charlie implied. Charlie and Lizzie earned the money, Ricardo wasted it on ever crazier enterprises, everybody was happy, everybody was employed.

  Till one evening, like a nemesis, Tiu appeared and screwed the whole thing up. He appeared just as they were locking up the company’s offices, straight off the pavement without an appointment, asking for Charlie Marshall by name and describing himself as part of the company’s Bangkok management. The Chiu Chow boys came out of the back office, took one look at Tiu, vouched for his good faith, and made themselves scarce.

  Charlie broke off in order to weep on Jerry’s shoulder.

  “Now listen to me carefully, sport,” Jerry urged. “Listen. This is the bit I like, okay? You tell me this bit carefully and I’ll take you home. Promise. Please.”

  But Jerry had it wrong. It was no longer a matter of making Charlie talk. Jerry was now the drug on which Charlie Marshall depended. It was no longer a matter of holding him down, either. Charlie Marshall clutched Jerry’s breast as if it were the last raft on his lonely sea, and their conversation had become a desperate monologue from which Jerry stole his facts while Charlie Marshall cringed and begged and howled for his tormentor’s attention, making jokes and laughing at them through his tears. Downriver one of Lon Nol’s machine-guns which had not yet been sold to the Khmer Rouge was firing tracer into the jungle by the light of another flare. Long golden bolts flowed in streams above and below the water, and lit a small cave where they disappeared into the trees.

  Charlie’s sweat-soaked hair was pricking Jerry’s chin and Charlie was gabbling and dribbling all at the same time.

  “Mr. Tiu don’t wanna talk in no office, Voltaire. Oh, no! Mr. Tiu don’t dress too good, either. Tiu very Chiu Chow person, he use Thai passport like Drake Ko, he use crazy name and keep very very low appearance when he come to Vientiane. ‘Captain Marshall,’ he say to me, ‘how you like earn a lot of extra cash by performing certain interesting and varied work outside the company’s hours, tell me? How you like fly a certain unconventional journey for me once? They tell me you some pretty damn fine pilot these days, very steady. How you like earn yourself not less than maybe four to five thousand U.S. for one day’s work, not even a whole day? How would that personally attract you, Captain Marshall?’ ‘Mr. Tiu,’ I tell him”—Charlie is shouting hysterically now—“‘without in any way prejudicing my negotiating position, Mr. Tiu, for five thousand bucks U.S. in my present serene mood I go down to hell for you and I bring you the devil’s balls back!’ Tiu say he come back one day and I gotta keep my damn mouth shut.”

  Suddenly Charlie had changed to his father’s voice, and he was calling himself a spider bastard and the son of a Corsican whore—till gradually it dawned on Jerry that Charlie was describing the next episode in the story.

  Amazingly, it turned out, Charlie had kept to himself the secret of Tiu’s offer until he next saw his father, this time in Chiang Mai for a celebration of the Chinese New Year. He had not told Ric and he had not even told Lizzie—maybe because at this point they weren’t getting on too well any more, and Ric was having himself a lot of women on the side.

  The General’s counsel was not encouraging: “‘Don’t you touch that horse! That Tiu, he got some pretty highly big connections, and they all a bit too special for a crazy little spider bastard like you, hear me! Jesus Christ, who ever heard of a Swatownese give five thousand dollar to a lousy half-kwailo to improve his mind with travel!’”

  “So you passed the deal to Ric, right?” said Jerry quickly. “Right, Charlie? You told Tiu, ‘Sorry, but try Ricardo.’ Is that how it went?”

  But Charlie Marshall was missing—believed dead. He had fallen straight off Jerry’s chest and lay flat in the mud with his eyes closed, and only his occasional gulps for breath—greedy, rasping draughts of it—and the crazy beating of his pulse where Jerry held his wrist testified to the life inside the frame.

  “Voltaire,” Charlie whispered. “On the Bible, Voltaire. You’re a good man. Take me home. Jesus, take me home, Voltaire.”

  Stunned, Jerry stared at the prone and broken figure and knew that he had to ask one more question, even if it was the last in both their lives. Reaching down, he dragged Charlie to his feet for the last time. And there for an hour in the black road, struggling on his arm, while more aimless barrages stabbed the darkness, Charlie Marshall screamed, and begged, and swore he would love Jerry always if only he didn’t have to reveal what arrangements his friend Ricardo had made for his survival. But Jerry explained that without that, the mystery was not even half revealed. And perhaps Charlie Marshall, in his ruin and despair, as he sobbed out the forbidden secrets, understood Jerry’s reasoning: that in a city about to be given back to the jungle, there was no destruction unless it was complete.

  As gently as he could, Jerry carried Charlie Marshall down the road, back to the villa and up the steps, where the same silent faces gratefully received him. I should have got more, he thought. I should have told him more as well; I didn’t tend the two-way traffic in the way they ordered. I stayed too long with the business of Lizzie and Sam Collins. I did it upside down, I foozled my shopping list, I loused it up like Lizzie. He tried to feel sorry about that but he couldn’t, and the things he remembered best were the things that weren’t on the list at all, and they were the same things that stood up in his mind like monuments while he typed his message to dear old George.

  He typed with the door locked and the gun in his belt. There was no sign of Luke, so Jerry assumed he had gone off to a whore-house, still in his drunken sulk. It was a long signal, the longest of his career: “Know this much in case you don’t hear from me again.” He reported his contact with the Counsellor, he gave his next port of call and gave Ricardo’s address, and a portrait of Charlie Marshall and of the three-sided household in the flea-hut, but only in the most formal terms, and he left out entirely his new-found knowledge regarding the rôle played by the unsavoury Sam Collins. After all, if they knew it already what was the point of telling it to them again? He left out the place-names and the proper names and made a separate key of them, then spent another hour putting the two messages into a first-base cod
e that wouldn’t fool a cryptographer for five minutes, but was beyond the ken of ordinary mortals, and of mortals like his host the British Counsellor. He ended with a reminder to housekeepers to check whether Blatt & Rodney had made that latest money draft to Cat. He burned the en clair texts, rolled the encoded versions into a newspaper, then lay on the newspaper and dozed, the gun awkwardly at his side.

  At six he shaved, transferred his signals to a paperback novel which he felt able to part with, and took himself for a walk in the morning quiet. In the place, the Counsellor’s car was parked conspicuously. The Counsellor himself was parked equally conspicuously on the terrace of a pretty bistro, wearing a Riviera straw hat reminiscent of Craw’s, and treating himself to hot croissants and café au lait. Seeing Jerry, he gave an elaborate wave.

  Jerry wandered over to him: “Morning,” he said.

  “Ah, you’ve got it! Good man!” the Counsellor cried, bounding to his feet. “Been longing to read it ever since it came out!”

  Parting with the signal, conscious only of its omissions, Jerry had a feeling of end-of-term. He might come back, he might not, but things would never be quite the same again.

  The exact circumstances of Jerry’s departure from Phnom Penh are relevant because of Luke, later.

  For the first part of the morning that remained, Jerry pursued his obsessional search for cover, which was the natural antidote, perhaps, to his increasing sense of nakedness. Diligently he went on the stomp for refugee and orphan stories, which he filed through Keller at midday, together with a quite decent atmosphere piece on his visit to Battambang, which, though never used, has at least a place in his dossier. There were two refugee camps at that time, both blossoming, one in an enormous hotel on the Bassac, Sihanouk’s personal and unfinished dream of paradise; one in the railway-yards near the airport, two or three families packed into each carriage. He visited both and they were the same: young Australian heroes struggling with the impossible, the only water filthy, a rice hand-out twice a week, and the children chirruping “Hi” and “Bye-bye” after him while he trailed his Cambodian interpreter up and down their lines, besieging everyone with questions, acting large, and looking for that extra something that would melt Stubbsie’s heart.

  At a travel office he noisily booked a passage to Bangkok. Making for the airport, he had a sudden sense of déjà vu. Last time I was here, I went water-skiing, he thought. The round-eye traders kept houseboats moored along the Mekong. And for a moment he saw himself—and the city—in the days when the Cambodian war still had a certain ghastly innocence: ace operator Westerby, risking mono, bouncing boyishly over the brown water of the Mekong, towed by a jolly Dutchman in a speed launch that burned enough petrol to feed a family for a week. The greatest hazard was the two-foot wave, he remembered, which rolled down the river every time the guards on the bridge let off a depth-charge to prevent the Khmer Rouge divers from blowing it up. But now the river was theirs, so was the jungle. And so, tomorrow or the next day, was the town.

  At the airport, he ditched the Walther in a rubbish bin and at the last minute bribed his way aboard a plane to Saigon, which was his destination. Taking off, he wondered who had the longer expectation of survival, himself or the city.

  Luke, on the other hand, with the key to Deathwish the Hun’s flat nestling in his pocket, flew to Bangkok, and as luck had it he flew under Jerry’s name, since Jerry was on the flight list and Luke was not, and the remaining places were all taken. In Bangkok he attended a hasty bureau conference at which the magazine’s local manpower was carved up between various bits of the crumbling Vietnam front. Luke got Hué and Danang and accordingly left for Saigon next day, thence north by connecting midday plane.

  Contrary to later rumour, the two men did not meet in Saigon.

  Nor did they meet in the course of the northern roll-back.

  The last they saw of each other, in any mutual sense, was on that final evening in Phnom Penh, when Jerry had bawled Luke out and Luke had sulked: and that’s fact—a commodity which was afterwards notoriously hard to come by.

  17

  RICARDO

  At no time in the entire case did George Smiley hold the ring with such tenacity as now. In the Circus, nerves were stretched to snapping-point. The bloody inertia and the bouts of frenzy which Sarratt habitually warned against became one and the same. Each day that brought no hard news from Hong Kong was another day of disaster. Jerry’s long signal was put under the microscope and held to be ambiguous, then neurotic.

  Why had he not pressed Marshall harder? Why had he not raised the Russian spectre again? He should have grilled Charlie about the gold seam; he should have carried on where he left off with Tiu. Had he forgotten that his main job was to sow alarm and only afterwards to obtain information? As to his obsession with that wretched daughter of his—God Almighty, doesn’t the fellow know what signals cost? (They seemed to forget it was the Cousins who were footing the bill.) And what was all this about having no more to do with British Embassy officials standing proxy for the absent Circus resident? All right, there had been a delay in the pipeline in getting the signal across from the Cousins’ side of the house. Jerry had still run Charlie Marshall to earth, hadn’t he? It was absolutely no part of a fieldman’s job to dictate the “do”s and “don’t”s to London. Housekeeping Section, who had arranged the contact, wanted him rebuked by return.

  Pressure from outside the Circus was even fiercer. Colonial Wilbraham’s faction had not been idle, and the Steering Group, in a startling about-turn, decided that the Governor of Hong Kong should after all be informed of the case, and soon. There was high talk of calling him back to London on a pretext. The panic had arisen because Ko had once more been received at Government House, this time at one of the Governor’s talk-in suppers, at which influential Chinese were invited to air their opinions off the record.

  By contrast Saul Enderby and his fellow hard-liners pulled the opposite way: “To hell with the Governor. What we want is full partnership with the Cousins immediately!” George should go to Martello today, said Enderby, and make a clean breast of the whole case and invite them to take over the last stage of development. He should stop playing hide-and-seek about Nelson, he should admit that he had no resources, he should let the Cousins compute the possible intelligence dividend for themselves, and if they brought the job off, so much the better: let them claim the credit on Capitol Hill, to the confusion of their enemies. The result of this generous and timely gesture, Enderby argued—coming bang in the middle of the Vietnam fiasco—would be an indissoluble intelligence partnership for years to come, a view which in his shifty way Lacon seemed to support. Caught in the cross-fire, Smiley suddenly found himself saddled with a double reputation. The Wilbraham set branded him as anti-Colonial and pro-American, while Enderby’s men accused him of ultra-conservatism in the handling of the special relationship.

  Much more serious however was Smiley’s impression that some hint of the row had reached Martello by other routes, and that he would be able to exploit it. For example, Molly Meakin’s sources spoke of a burgeoning relationship between Enderby and Martello at the personal level, and not just because their children were all being educated at the Lycée in South Kensington. It seemed that the two men had taken to fishing together at weekends in Scotland, where Enderby had a bit of water. Martello supplied the plane, said the joke later, and Enderby supplied the fish. Smiley also learned around this time, in his unworldly way, what everyone else had known from the beginning and assumed he knew too. Enderby’s third and newest wife was American and rich. Before their marriage she had been a considerable hostess of the Washington establishment, a rôle she was now repeating with some success in London.

  But the underlying cause of everybody’s agitation was finally the same. On the Ko front, nothing ultimately was happening. Worse still, there was an agonising shortage of operational intelligence. Every day now, at ten o’clock, Smiley and Guillam presented themselves at the Annexe and every day came aw
ay less satisfied. Tiu’s domestic telephone line was tapped, so was Lizzie Worthington’s. The tapes were locally monitored, then flown back to London for detailed processing. Jerry had sweated Charlie Marshall on a Wednesday. On the Friday, Charlie was sufficiently recovered from his ordeal to ring Tiu from Bangkok and pour out his heart to him. But after listening for less than thirty seconds, Tiu cut him short with an instruction to “get in touch with Harry right away,” which left everybody mystified: nobody had a Harry anywhere.

  On the Saturday there was drama because the watch on Ko’s home number had him cancelling his regular Sunday-morning golf date with Mr. Arpego. Ko pleaded a pressing business engagement. This was it! This was the breakthrough! Next day, with Smiley’s consent, the Hong Kong Cousins locked a surveillance van, two cars, and a Honda on to Ko’s Rolls-Royce as it entered town. What secret mission at five-thirty on a Sunday morning was so important to Ko that he would abandon his weekly golf? The answer turned out to be his fortune-teller, a venerable old Swatownese who operated from a seedy spirit temple in a side-street off the Hollywood Road. Ko spent more than an hour with him before returning home, and though some zealous child inside the Cousins’ van trained a concealed directional microphone on the temple window for the entire session, the only sounds he recorded apart from the traffic turned out to be cluckings from the old man’s hen-house. Back at the Circus, di Salis was called in. What on earth would anyone be going to the fortune-teller at six in the morning for, least of all a millionaire?

  Greatly amused by their perplexity, di Salis twirled his hair in delight. A man of Ko’s standing would insist on being the first client in a fortune-teller’s day, he said, while the great man’s mind was still clear to receive the intimations of the spirits.

  Then nothing happened for five weeks. Nothing. The mail and phone checks spewed out wads of indigestible raw material which, when refined, produced not a single intelligence lead. Meanwhile the artificial deadline imposed by the Enforcement Agency drew steadily nearer, on which day Ko should become open game for whoever could pin something on him soonest.