John Le Carré: Three Complete Novels

by John le Carré

  Next day, with variations, Tiu agreed to the terms. Rather than advance Ricardo twenty thousand dollars, Tiu and his associates proposed to buy Ricardo’s debts directly from his creditors. That way, he explained, they would feel more comfortable. The same day, the arrangement was sanctified—Ricardo’s religious convictions were never far away—by a formidable contract, drawn in English and signed by both parties. Ricardo—Jerry silently recorded—had just sold his soul.

  “What did Lizzie think of the deal?” Jerry asked.

  He shrugged his smooth shoulders. “Women,” Ricardo said.

  “Sure,” said Jerry, returning his knowing smile.

  Ricardo’s future thus secured, he resumed a “suitable professional life-style,” as he called it. A scheme to float an all-Asian football pool claimed his attention, so did a fourteen-year-old girl in Bangkok named Rosie, whom on the strength of his Indocharter salary he periodically visited for the purpose of training her for life’s great stage.

  Occasionally but not often, he flew the odd run for Indocharter, but nothing demanding: “Chiang Mai couple of times. Saigon. Couple of times into the Shans, visit Charlie Marshall’s old man, collect a little mud maybe, take him a few guns, rice, gold. Battambang maybe.”

  “Where’s Lizzie meanwhile?” Jerry asked in the same easy, man-to-man tone as before.

  The same contemptuous shrug: “Sitting in Vientiane. Does her knitting. Scrubs a little at the Constellation. That’s an old woman already, Voltaire. I need youth. Optimism. Energy. People who respect me. It is my nature to give. How can I give to an old woman?”

  “Until?” Jerry repeated.

  “Huh?”

  “So when did the kissing stop?”

  Misunderstanding the phrase, Ricardo looked suddenly very dangerous, and his voice dropped to a low warning: “What the hell you mean?”

  Jerry soothed him with the friendliest of smiles. “How long did you draw your pay and kick around before Tiu collected on the contract?”

  Six weeks, said Ricardo, recovering his composure. Maybe eight. Twice the trip was on, then cancelled. Once, it seemed, he was ordered to Chiang Mai and loafed for a couple of days till Tiu called to say the people at the other end weren’t ready. Increasingly Ricardo had the feeling he was mixed up in something deep, he said, but history, he implied, had always cast him for the great rôles of life and at least the creditors were off his back.

  Ricardo broke off and once more studied Jerry closely, scratching his beard in contemplation. Finally he sighed and, pouring them both a whisky, pushed a glass across the table. Below them the perfect day was preparing its own slow death. The green trees had grown heavy; the wood-smoke from the girls’ cook pot smelt damp.

  “Where you go from here, Voltaire?”

  “Home,” said Jerry.

  Ricardo let out a fresh burst of laughter. “You stay the night, I send you one of my girls.”

  “I’ll make my own damn way, actually, sport,” Jerry said. Like fighting animals, the two men surveyed each other, and for a moment the spark of battle was very close indeed.

  “You some crazy fellow, Voltaire,” Ricardo muttered.

  But Sarratt man prevailed. “Then one day the trip was on, right?” Jerry said. “And nobody cancelled. Then what? Come on sport, let’s have the story.”

  “Sure,” said Ricardo. “Sure, Voltaire,” and drank, still watching him. “How it happened,” he said. “Listen, I tell you how it happened, Voltaire.”

  And then I’ll kill you, said his eyes.

  Ricardo was in Bangkok. Rosie was being demanding. Tiu had insisted Ricardo should always be within reach, and one morning early, maybe five o’clock, a messenger arrived at their love-nest summoning him to the Erawan immediately. Ricardo was impressed by the suite. He would have wished it for himself.

  “Ever seen Versailles, Voltaire? A desk so big as a B-52. This Tiu is a very different human individual to the cat-scent coolie who came to Vientiane, okay? This is a very influential person. ‘Ricardo,’ he tell me. ‘This time is for certain. This time we deliver.’”

  Tiu’s orders were simple. In a few hours there was a commercial flight to Chiang Mai. Ricardo should take it. Rooms had been booked for him at the Hotel Rincome. He should stay the night there. Alone. No drink, no women, no society.

  “‘You better take plenty to read, Mr. Ricardo,’ he tell me. ‘Mr. Tiu,’ I tell him. ‘You tell me where to fly. You don’t tell me where to read. Okay?’ This guy is very arrogant behind his big desk—understand me, Voltaire? I am obliged to teach him manners.”

  Next morning, someone would call for Ricardo at six o’clock at his hotel announcing himself as a friend of Mr. Johnny. Ricardo should go with him.

  Things went as planned. Ricardo flew to Chiang Mai, spent an abstemious night at the Rincome, and at six o’clock two Chinese, not one, called for him and drove him north for some hours till they came to a Hakka village. Leaving the car, they walked for half an hour till they reached an empty field with a hut at one end of it. Inside the hut stood “a dandy little Beechcraft,” brand new, and inside the Beechcraft sat Tiu, with a lot of maps and documents on his lap, in the seat beside the pilot’s. The rear seats had been removed to make space for the gunny bags. A couple of Chinese crushers stood off watching, and the over-all mood, Ricardo implied, was not all he would have liked.

  “First I got to empty my pockets. My pockets are very personal to me, Voltaire. They are like a lady’s handbag. Mementoes. Letters. Photographs. My Madonna. They retain everything. My passport, my pilot’s licence, my money . . . even my bracelets,” he said and lifted his brown arms so that the gold links jingled.

  After that, he said with a frown of disapproval, there were yet more documents to sign. Such as a power of attorney, signing over whatever bits of Ricardo’s life were left to him after his Indocharter contract. Such as various confessions to “previous technically illegal undertakings,” several of them—Ricardo asserted in considerable outrage—performed on behalf of Indocharter. One of the Chinese crushers even turned out to be a lawyer. Ricardo considered this particularly unsporting.

  Only then did Tiu unveil the maps, and the instructions, which Ricardo now reproduced in a blend of his own style and Tiu’s: “‘You head north, Mr. Ricardo, and you keep heading north. Maybe you clip the edge off Laos, maybe you stay over the Shans, I don’t give a damn. Flying is your business, not mine. Fifty miles inside the China border you pick up the Mekong and follow it. Then you keep going north till you find a little hill town called Tienpao stuck on a tributary of that very famous river. Head due east twenty miles, you find a landing-strip—one white flare, one green—you do me a favour please. You land there. A man will be waiting for you. He speaks very lousy English, but he speaks it. Here is half one-dollar bill. This man will have the other half. Unload the opium. This man will give you a package, and certain particular instructions. The package is your receipt, Mr. Ricardo. When you return, bring it with you and obey all instructions most absolutely, including especially your place of landing. Do you understand me entirely, Mr. Ricardo?’”

  “What kind of package?” Jerry asked.

  “He don’t say and I don’t care. ‘You do that,’ he tell me, ‘and keep your big mouth shut, Mr. Ricardo, and my associates will look after you all your life like you are their son. Your children, they look after—your girls. Your girl in Bali. All your life they will be grateful men. But you screw them, or you go big-mouthing round town, they definitely kill you, Mr. Ricardo, believe me. Not tomorrow maybe, not the next day, but they definitely kill you. We got a contract, Mr. Ricardo. My associates don’t never break a contract. They are very legal men.’ I got sweat on me, Voltaire. I am in perfect condition, a fine athlete, but I sweat. ‘Don’t you worry, Mr. Tiu,’ I tell him. ‘Mr. Tiu, sir. Any time you want to fly opium into Red China, Ricardo’s your man.’ Voltaire, believe me, I was very concerned.”

  Ricardo squeezed his nose as if it were smarting with sea water.
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  “Hear this, Voltaire. Listen most attentively. When I was young and crazy, I flew twice into Yunnan Province for the Americans. To be a hero, one must do certain crazy things, and if you crash, maybe one day they get you out. But each time I flew, I look down at the lousy brown earth and I see Ricardo in a wood cage. No women, extremely lousy food, no place to sit, no place to stand or sleep, chains on my arms, no status or position assured to me. ‘See the imperialist spy and running dog.’ Voltaire, I do not like this vision. To be locked all my life in China for running opium? I am not enthusiastic. ‘Sure, Mr. Tiu! Bye-bye! See you this afternoon!’ I have to consider most seriously.”

  The brown haze of the sinking sun suddenly filled the room. On Ricardo’s chest, despite the perfection of his condition, the same sweat had gathered. It lay in beads over the matted black hair and on his oiled shoulders.

  “Where was Lizzie in all this?” Jerry asked again.

  Ricardo’s answer was nervous and already angry. “In Vientiane! On the moon! In bed with Charlie! What the hell do I care?”

  “Did she know of the deal with Tiu?”

  Ricardo gave only a scowl of contempt.

  Time to go, Jerry thought. Time to light the last fuse and run. Below, Mickey was making a great hit with Ricardo’s women. Jerry could hear his singsong chattering, broken by their high-pitched laughter, like the laughter of a whole class at girls’ school.

  “So away you flew,” he said. He waited, but Ricardo remained lost in thought.

  “You took off and headed north,” Jerry said.

  Lifting his eyes a little, Ricardo held Jerry in a bullish, furious stare, till the invitation to describe his own heroic feat finally got the better of him.

  “I never flew so good in my life. Never. I was magnificent. That little black Beechcraft. North a hundred miles because I don’t trust nobody. Maybe those clowns have got me locked on a radar screen somewhere? I don’t take no chances. Then east, but very slowly, very low over the mountains, Voltaire. I fly between the cow’s legs, okay? In the war we have little landing-strips up there, crazy listening places in the middle of badland. I flew those places, Voltaire. I know them. I find one right at the top of a mountain, you can reach it only from the air. I take a look, I see the fuel dump, I land, I refuel, I take a sleep, it’s crazy. But Jesus, Voltaire, it’s not Yunnan Province, okay? It’s not China—and Ricardo, the American war criminal and opium smuggler, is not going to spend the rest of his life hanging from a hen-hook in Peking, okay? Listen, I brought that plane back south again. I know places, I know places I could lose a whole air force, believe me.”

  Ricardo became suddenly very vague about the next few months of his life. He had heard of the Flying Dutchman, and he said that was what he became; he flew, hid again, flew, resprayed the Beechcraft, changed the registration once a month, sold the opium in small lots in order not to be conspicuous, a kilo here, fifty there, bought a Spanish passport from an Indian but had no faith in it, kept away from everyone he knew, including Rosie in Bangkok, and even Charlie Marshall. It was also the time, Jerry remembered from his briefing by old Craw, when Ricardo sold Ko’s opium to the Enforcement heroes but got the cold shoulder on his story. On Tiu’s orders, said Ricardo, the Indocharter boys had been quick to post him dead, and changed his flight route southwards to distract attention. Ricardo heard of this and did not object to being dead.

  “What did you do about Lizzie?” Jerry asked.

  Again Ricardo flared. “Lizzie, Lizzie! You got some fixation about that scrubber, Voltaire, that you throw Lizzie in my face all the time? I never knew a woman so irrelevant. Listen, I give her to Drake Ko, okay? I make her fortune.”

  Seizing his whisky glass, he drank from it, still glowering.

  She was lobbying for him, Jerry thought. She and Charlie Marshall. Plodding the pavements trying to buy Ricardo’s neck for him.

  “You referred boastingly to other lucrative aspects of the case,” Ricardo said in a peremptory resumption of his business-school English. “Kindly advise me what they are, Voltaire.”

  Sarratt man had this part off pat. “Number one: Ko was being paid large sums by the Russian Embassy in Vientiane. The money was syphoned through Indocharter and ended up in a slush account in Hong Kong. We’ve got the proof. We’ve got photostats of the bank statements.”

  Ricardo pulled a face as if his whisky didn’t taste right, then went on drinking.

  “Whether the money was for reviving the opium habit in Red China or for some other service, we don’t yet know,” said Jerry. “But we will. Point two. Do you want to hear it or am I keeping you awake?”

  Ricardo had yawned.

  “Point two,” Jerry continued. “Ko has a younger brother in Red China. Used to be called Nelson. Ko pretends he’s dead but he’s a big beef with the Peking administration. Ko’s been trying to get him out for years. Your job was to take in opium and bring out a package. The package was brother Nelson. That’s why Ko was going to love you like his own son if you brought him back. And that’s why he was going to kill you if you didn’t. If that’s not a five-million-dollar touch, what is?”

  Nothing much happened to Ricardo as Jerry watched him in the failing light, except that the slumbering animal in him visibly woke. To set down his glass, he leaned forward slowly, but he couldn’t conceal the tautness of his shoulders or the knotting of the muscles of his stomach. To flash a smile of exceptional good will at Jerry, he turned quite languidly, but his eyes had a brightness that was like a signal to attack. So that when he reached out and patted Jerry’s cheek affectionately with his right hand, Jerry was quite ready to fall straight back with it if necessary, on the off chance he would manage to throw Ricardo across the room.

  “Five million bucks, Voltaire!” Ricardo exclaimed with steely-bright excitement. “Five million! Listen—we got to do something for poor old Charlie Marshall, okay? For love. Charlie’s always broke. Maybe we put him in charge of the football pool once. Wait a minute. I get some more Scotch, we celebrate.” He stood up, his head tilted to one side; he held out his naked arms. “Voltaire,” he said softly. “Voltaire!” Affectionately, he took Jerry by the cheeks and kissed him. “Listen, that’s some research you guys did! That’s some pretty smart editor you work for. You be my business partner. Like you say. Okay? I need an Englishman in my life. I got to be like Lizzie once, marry a schoolmaster. You do that for Ricardo, Voltaire? You hold me down a little?”

  “No problem,” said Jerry, smiling back.

  “You play with the guns a minute, okay?”

  “Sure.”

  “I got to tell those girls some little thing.”

  “Sure.”

  “Personal family thing.”

  “I’ll be here.”

  From the top of the trap Jerry looked urgently down after him. Mickey, the driver, was dandling the baby on his arm, chucking it under the ear. In a mad world you keep the fiction going, he thought; stick to it till the bitter end and leave the first bite to him. Returning to the table, Jerry took Ricardo’s pencil and his pad of paper and wrote out a non-existent address in Hong Kong where he could be reached at any time. Ricardo had still not returned, but when Jerry stood he saw him coming out of the trees behind the car. He likes contracts, he thought; give him something to sign. He took a fresh sheet of paper. “I, Jerry Westerby, do solemnly swear to share with my friend Captain Tiny Ricardo all proceeds relating to our joint exploitation of his life story,” he wrote, and signed his name.

  Ricardo was coming up the steps. Jerry thought of helping himself from the private armoury, but he guessed Ricardo was waiting for him to do just that. While Ricardo poured more whisky, Jerry handed him the two sheets of paper.

  “I’ll draft a legal deposition,” he said, looking straight into Ricardo’s burning eyes. “I have an English lawyer in Bangkok whom I trust entirely. I’ll have him check it over and bring it back to you to sign. After that we’ll plan the march route and I’ll talk to Lizzie. Okay?”


  “Sure. Listen, it’s dark out there. They got a lot of bad guys in that forest. You stay the night. I talk to the girls. They like you. They say you very strong man. Not so strong as me, but strong.”

  Jerry said something about not wasting time. He’d like to make Bangkok by tomorrow, he said. To himself he sounded as lame as a three-legged mule—good enough to get in maybe, but never to get out. But Ricardo seemed content to the point of serenity. Maybe it’s the ambush deal, thought Jerry, something the colonel is arranging.

  “Go well, horse-writer. Go well, my friend.”

  Ricardo put both hands on the back of Jerry’s neck and let his thumb-prints settle into Jerry’s jaw, then drew Jerry’s head forward for another kiss, and Jerry let it happen. Though his heart thumped and his wet spine felt sore against his shirt, Jerry let it happen.

  Outside it was half dark. Ricardo did not see them to the car but watched them indulgently from under the stilts, the girls sitting at his feet, while he waved with both naked arms.

  From the car Jerry turned and waved back. The last sun lay dying in the teak trees. My last ever, he thought.

  “Don’t start the engine,” he told Mickey quietly. “I want to check the oil.”

  Perhaps it’s just me who’s mad. Perhaps I really got myself a deal, he thought.

  Sitting in the driver’s seat, Mickey released the catch and Jerry pulled up the bonnet but there was no little plastic, no leaving-present from his new friend and partner. He pulled up the dipstick and pretended to read it.

  “You want oil, horse-writer?” Ricardo yelled down the dust path.

  “No, we’re all right. So long!”