John Le Carré: Three Complete Novels

by John le Carré

  Waking with a jolt, clear-headed at dawn, to the screaming of roosters and the clatter of the river traffic, Jerry would force himself to think long and generously of his chum and mentor, George Smiley. It was an act of will that made him do this, almost an act of obedience. He wished, quite simply, to rehearse the articles of his creed, and his creed till now had been old George. At Sarratt they have a very worldly and relaxed attitude to the motives of a fieldman, and no patience at all for the fiery-eyed zealot who grinds his teeth and says, “I hate Communism.” If he hates it that much, they argue, he’s most likely half-way in love with it already. What they really like—and what Jerry possessed, what he was, in effect—was the fellow who hadn’t a lot of time for flannel but loved the service and knew—though God forbid he should make a fuss of it—that we were right. We being a necessarily flexible notion, but to Jerry it meant George and that was that.

  Old George. Super. Good morning.

  He saw him as he liked to remember him best, the first time they met, at Sarratt soon after the war. Jerry was still an army subaltern, his time nearly up and Oxford looming, and he was bored stiff. The course was for London Occasionals: people who, having done the odd bit of skulduggery without going formally onto the Circus payroll, were being groomed as an auxiliary reserve. Jerry had already volunteered for fulltime employment, but Circus personnel had turned him down, which scarcely helped his mood.

  So when Smiley waddled into the paraffin-heated lecture hut in his heavy overcoat and spectacles, Jerry inwardly groaned and prepared himself for another creaking fifty minutes of boredom—on good places to look for dead-letter boxes, most likely, followed by a sort of clandestine nature ramble through Rickmansworth, trying to spot hollow trees in graveyards. There was comedy while the Directing Staff cranked the lectern lower so that George could see over the top. In the end he stood himself a little fussily at the side of it and declared that his subject this afternoon was “Problems of Maintaining Courier Lines Inside Enemy Territory.” Slowly it dawned on Jerry that he was talking not from the textbook but from experience: that this little pedant with the diffident voice and the blinking, apologetic manner had sweated out three years in some benighted German town, holding the threads of a very respectable network, while he waited for the boot through the door panel or the pistol butt across the face that would introduce him to the pleasures of interrogation.

  When the meeting was over, Smiley asked to see him. They met in a corner of an empty bar, under the antlers where the darts board hung.

  “I’m so sorry we couldn’t have you,” Smiley said. “I think our feeling was you needed a little more time outside first.” Which was their way of saying he was immature. Too late, Jerry remembered Smiley as one of the non-speaking members of the Selection Board that had failed him. “Perhaps if you could get your degree and make your way a little in a different walk of life, they would change their way of thinking. Don’t lose touch, will you?”

  After which, somehow, old George had always been there. Never surprised, never out of patience, old George had gently but firmly rejigged Jerry’s life till it was Circus property. His father’s empire collapsed: George was waiting with his hands out to catch him. His marriages collapsed: George would sit all night for him, hold his head.

  “I’ve always been grateful to this service that it gave me a chance to pay,” Smiley had said. “I’m sure one should feel that. I don’t think we should be afraid of . . . devoting ourselves. Is that old-fashioned of me?”

  “You point me, I’ll march,” Jerry had replied. “Tell me the shots and I’ll play them.”

  There was still time. He knew that. Train to Bangkok, hop on a plane home, and the worst he would get was a flea in his ear for jumping ship for a few days. “Home,” he repeated to himself. Bit of a problem. Home to Tuscany and the yawning emptiness of the hilltop without the orphan? Home to old Pet, sorry about the teacup? Home to dear old Stubbsie, key appointment as desk jockey with special responsibility for the spike? Or home to the Circus: “We think you’d be happiest in Banking Section.” Even—great thought—home to Sarratt, training job, winning the hearts and minds of new entrants while he commuted dangerously from a maisonette in Watford.

  On the third or fourth morning he woke very early. Dawn was just rising over the river, turning it first red, then orange, now brown. A family of water-buffaloes wallowed in the mud, their bells jingling. In mid-stream three sampans were linked in a long and complicated trawl. He heard a hiss and saw a net curl, then fall like hail on the water.

  Yet it’s not for want of a future that I’m here, he thought. It’s for want of a present.

  Home’s where you go when you run out of homes, he thought. Which brings me to Lizzie. Vexed issue. Shove it on the back burner. Spot of breakfast.

  Sitting on the teak balcony munching eggs and rice, Jerry remembered George breaking the news to him about Haydon: El Vino’s bar, Fleet Street, a rainy midday. Jerry had never found it possible to hate anyone for very long, and after the initial shock there had really not been much more to say.

  “Well, no point in crying in the old booze, is there, sport? Can’t leave the ship to the rats. Soldier on, that’s the thing.”

  To which Smiley agreed; yes, that was the thing, to soldier on, grateful for the chance to pay. Jerry had even found a sort of rum comfort in the fact that Bill was one of the clan. He had never seriously doubted, in his vague way, that his country was in a state of irreversible decline, or that his own class was to blame for the mess. “We made Bill,” ran his argument, “so it’s right we should carry the brunt of his betrayal.” Pay, in fact. Pay. What old George was on about.

  Pottering beside the river again, breathing the free warm air, Jerry chucked flat stones to make them bounce.

  Lizzie, he thought. Lizzie Worthington, suburban bolter. Ricardo’s pupil and punch-ball. Charlie Marshall’s big sister and earth mother and unattainable whore. Drake Ko’s cagebird. My dinner companion for all of four hours. And to Sam Collins—to repeat the question—what had she been to him? For Mr. Mellon, Charlie’s “creepy English trader” of eighteen months ago, she was a courier working the Hong Kong heroin trail. But she was more than that. Somewhere along the line, Sam had shown her a bit of ankle and told her she was working for Queen and country. Which glad news Lizzie had promptly shared with her admiring circle of friends. To Sam’s fury, and he dropped her like a hot brick. So Sam had set her up as a patsy of some kind. A coat-trailer on probation. In one way this thought amused Jerry very much, for Sam had a reputation as an ace operator, whereas Lizzie Worthington might well star at Sarratt as the archetypal Woman Never to Be Recruited as Long as She Can Speak or Breathe.

  Less funny was the question of what she meant to Sam now. What kept him skulking in her shadow like a patient murderer, smiling his grim iron smile? That question worried Jerry very much. Not to put too fine a point on it, he was obsessed by it. He definitely did not wish to see Lizzie taking another of her dives. If she went anywhere from Ko’s bed, it was going to be into Jerry’s. For some while, off and on—ever since he had met her, in fact—he had been thinking how much Lizzie would benefit from the bracing Tuscan air. And while he didn’t know how or why Sam Collins came to be in Hong Kong, or even what the Circus at large intended for Drake Ko, he had the strongest possible impression—and here was the nub of the thing—that by pushing off to London at this moment, far from carting Lizzie away on his white charger, Jerry was leaving her sitting on a very large bomb.

  Which struck him as unacceptable. In other times, he might have been prepared to leave that problem to the owls, as he had left so many other problems in his day. But these were not other times. This time, as he now realised, it was the Cousins who were paying the piper, and while Jerry had no particular quarrel with the Cousins, their presence made it a much rougher ball game. So that whatever vague notions he had about George’s humanity did not apply.

  Also he cared about Lizzie. Urgently. There was nothing i
mprecise in his feelings at all. He ached for her, warts and all. She was his kind of loser, and he loved her. He had worked it out and drawn the line, and that, after several days of counting on beads, was his net unalterable solution. He was a little awed, but very pleased by it.

  Gerald Westerby, he told himself. You were present at your birth. You were present at your several marriages and at some of your divorces, and you will certainly be present at your funeral. High time, in our considered view, that you were present at certain other crucial moments in your history.

  Taking a bus up-river a few miles, he walked again, rode on cyclos, sat in bars, made love to the girls, thinking only of Lizzie. The inn where he stayed was full of children and one morning he woke to find two of them sitting on his bed, marvelling at the enormous length of the farang’s legs and giggling at the way his bare feet hung over the end. Maybe I’ll just stay here, he thought. But by then he was fooling, because he knew that he had to go back and ask her, even if the answer was a custard pie. From the balcony he launched paper aeroplanes for the children, and they clapped and danced, watching them float away.

  He found a boatman and, when evening came, crossed the river to Vientiane, avoiding the formalities of immigration. Next morning, also without formality, he wangled himself aboard an unscheduled Royal Air Lao DC-8, and by afternoon he was airborne and in possession of a delicious warm whisky and chatting merrily to a couple of friendly opium dealers. As they landed, black rain was falling and the windows of the airport bus were foul with dust. Jerry didn’t mind at all. For the first time in his life, returning to Hong Kong was quite like coming home after all.

  Inside the reception area nevertheless, Jerry played a cautious hand. No trumpets, he told himself: definitely. The few days’ rest had done wonders for his presence of mind. Having taken a good look round, he made for the men’s room instead of the immigration desks and lay up there till a big load of Japanese tourists arrived, then barged over to them and asked who spoke English. Having cut out four of them, he showed them his Hong Kong press card, and while they stood in line waiting for their passport check he besieged them with questions about why they were here and what they proposed to do, and with whom, and wrote wildly on his pad before choosing four more and repeating the process. Meanwhile he waited for the police on duty to change watch. At four o’clock they did, and he at once made for a door marked “No Entry,” which he had noted earlier. He banged on it till it was opened, and started to walk through to the other side.

  “Where the hell are you going?” asked an outraged Scottish police inspector.

  “Home to the comic, sport. Got to file the dirt on our friendly Japanese visitors.”

  He showed his press card.

  “Well go through the damn gates, like everyone else.”

  “Don’t be bloody silly. I haven’t got my passport. That’s why your distinguished colleague brought me through this way in the first place.”

  Bulk, a ranking voice, a patently British appearance, an affecting grin, won him a space in a city-bound bus five minutes later. Outside his apartment block he dawdled but saw no one suspicious, but this was China and who could tell?

  The lift as usual emptied for him. Riding in it, he hummed Deathwish the Hun’s one record in anticipation of a hot bath and change of clothes. At his front door he had a moment’s anxiety when he noticed the tiny wedges he had left in place lying on the floor, till he belatedly remembered Luke and smiled at the prospect of their reunion. He unlocked the burglar door, and as he did so he heard the sound of humming from inside, a droning monotone, which could have been an air-conditioner but not Deathwish’s. Bloody idiot Luke has left the gramophone on, he thought, and it’s about to brew up. Then he thought, I’m doing him an injustice; it’s that fridge.

  Then he opened the door and saw Luke’s dead body strewn across the floor with half his head shot to pieces, and half the flies in Hong Kong swarming over it and round it; and all he could think of to do, as he quickly closed the door behind him and jammed his handkerchief over his mouth, was run into the kitchen in case there was still someone there. Returning to the living-room, he pushed Luke’s feet aside and dug up the parquet brick where he had cached his forbidden side-arm and his escape kit, and put them in his pocket before he vomited.

  Of course, he thought. That’s why Ricardo was so certain the horse-writer was dead.

  Join the club, he thought, as he stood out in the street again, with rage and grief pounding in his ears and eyes: Nelson Ko’s dead, but he’s running China. Ricardo’s dead, but Drake Ko says he can stay alive as long as he sticks to the shady side of the street. Jerry Westerby the horse-writer is also completely dead, except that Ko’s stupid pagan vicious bastard of a henchman, Mr. Tiu, was so thick he shot the wrong round-eye.

  19

  Golden Thread

  The inside of the American Consulate in Hong Kong could have been the inside of the Annexe, right down to the ever-present fake rosewood and the bland courtesy and the airport chairs and the heartening portrait of the President, even if this time it was Ford. Welcome to your Howard Johnson spookhouse, Guillam thought. The section they worked in was called the isolation ward and had its own doorway to the street, guarded by two Marines. They had passes in false names—Guillam’s was Gordon—and for the duration of their stay there, except on the telephone, they never spoke to a soul inside the building except one another. “We’re not just deniable, gentlemen,” Martello had told them proudly in the briefing, “we’re also invisible.” That was how it was going to be played, he said. The U.S. Consul General could put his hand on the Bible and swear to the Governor they weren’t there and his staff were not involved, said Martello; “Blind eye right down the line.” After that, he handed over to George, because “George, this is your show from soup to nuts.”

  Downhill they had five minutes’ walk to the Hilton, where Martello had booked them rooms. Uphill, though it would have been hard going, they had ten minutes’ walk to Lizzie Worth’s apartment block. They had been here five days and now it was evening, but they had no way of telling because there were no windows in the operations room; there were maps and sea charts instead, and a couple of telephones manned by Martello’s quiet men, Murphy and his friend. Martello and Smiley had a big desk each; Guillam, Murphy, and his friend shared the table with the telephones, and Fawn sat moodily at the centre of an empty row of cinema chairs along the back wall, like a bored critic at a preview, sometimes picking his teeth and sometimes yawning but refusing to take himself off as Guillam repeatedly advised him. Craw had been spoken to but ordered to keep clear of everything—a total duck-dive. Smiley was frightened for him since Frost’s death and would have preferred him evacuated, but the old boy wouldn’t leave.

  It was also for once the hour of the quiet men: “Our final detailed briefing,” Martello had called it. “Ah, that’s if it’s okay by you, George.” Pale Murphy, wearing a white shirt and blue trousers, was standing on the raised podium before a wall chart, soliloquising from pages of detailed notes. The rest of them sat at his feet and listened mainly in silence, including Smiley and Martello. Murphy could have been describing a vacuum cleaner, and to Guillam that made his monologue the more hypnotic.

  The chart showed largely sea, but at the top and to the left hung a lace-fringe of the South China coast. Behind Hong Kong the spattered outskirts of Canton were just visible below the batten which held the chart in place, and due south of Hong Kong at the very mid-point of the chart stretched the green outline of what looked to be a cloud divided into four sections, marked A, B, C, and D. These, said Murphy reverently, were the fishing beds and the cross at the centre was Centre Point, sir. Murphy spoke only to Martello, whether it was George’s show from soup to nuts or not.

  “Sir, basing on the last occasion Drake exited Red China, sir, and updating our assessment to the situation as of now, we and navy int. between us, sir—”

  “Murphy, Murphy,” put in Martello quite kindly, “ease off a
little, will you, friend? This isn’t training school any more, okay? Loosen your girdle, will you, son?”

  “Sir. One. Weather,” Murphy said, quite untouched by this appeal. “April and May are the transitional months, sir, between the north-east monsoons and the beginning of the south-west monsoons. Forecasts day-to-day are unpredictable, sir, but no extreme conditions are foreseen for the trip.” He was using the pointer to show the line from Swatow southward to the fishing beds, then from the fishing beds north-west past Hong Kong up the Pearl River to Canton.

  “Fog?” Martello said.

  “Fog is traditional for the season, and cloud is anticipated at six to seven oktas, sir.”

  “What the hell’s an okta, Murphy?”

  “One okta is one eighth of sky area covered, sir. Oktas have replaced the former tenths. No typhoons have been recorded in April for over fifty years and navy int. calls typhoons unlikely. Wind is easterly, nine to ten knots, but any fleet that runs with it must count on periods of calm—also contrary winds too, sir. Humidity around eighty percent, temperature fifteen to twenty-four centigrade. Sea conditions calm with a small swell. Currents around Swatow tend to run north-east through the Taiwan Strait, at around three sea miles per day. But farther westward—on this side, sir—”

  “That’s one thing I do know, Murphy,” Martello put in sharply. “I know where west is, dammit.” Then he grinned at Smiley as if to say “these young whipper-snappers.”

  Murphy was again unmoved. “We have to be prepared to calculate the speed factor and consequently the progress of the fleet at any one point in its journey, sir.”

  “Sure, sure.”

  “Moon, sir,” Murphy continued. “Assuming the fleet to have exited Swatow on the night of Friday, April twenty-fifth, the moon would be three days off of full—”