John Le Carré: Three Complete Novels

by John le Carré

  “No change?” said the first.

  “No change,” the second confirmed.

  “No change,” the first repeated into the radio-telephone, and heard the assuring voice of Murphy at the other end, acknowledging the message.

  “Maybe they’re waxworks,” said the first, still watching. “Maybe we should go give them a prod and see if they holler.”

  “Maybe we should, at that,” said the second.

  In all their professional lives, they were agreed, they had never followed anything that kept so still. Ko stood where he always stood, at the end of the rose-arbour, his back to them as he stared out to sea. His little wife sat apart from him, dressed as usual in black, on a white garden chair, and she seemed to be staring at her husband. Only Tiu made any movement. He also was sitting, but to Ko’s other side, and he was munching what looked like a doughnut.

  Reaching the main road, the lorry lumbered toward Stanley, pursuing for cover reasons its fictional reconnaissance of the region.

  20

  Liese’s Lover

  Her apartment was big and unreconciled: a mix of hotel lounge, executive suite, and tart’s boudoir. The drawing-room ceiling was raked to a lopsided point like the nave of a subsiding church. The floor changed levels restlessly; the carpet was as thick as grass, and Lizzie and Jerry left shiny footprints where they walked. The enormous windows gave limitless but lonely views, and when she closed the blinds and drew the curtains, the two of them were suddenly in a suburban bungalow with no garden. The amah had gone to her room behind the kitchen, and when she appeared Lizzie sent her back there. She crept out scowling and hissing. “Wait till I tell the master,” she was saying.

  He put the chains across the front door, and after that he took her with him, steering her from room to room, making her walk a little ahead of him on his left side, open the doors for him and even the cupboards. The bedroom was a television stage-set for a femme fatale, with a round, quilted bed and a sunken round bath behind Spanish screens. He looked through the bedside lockers for a small-arm because, though Hong Kong is not particularly gun-ridden, people who have lived in Indo-China usually have something. Her dressing-room looked as though she’d emptied one of the smart Scandinavian décor shops in Central by telephone. The dining-room was done in smoked glass, polished chrome and leather, with fake Gainsborough ancestors staring at the empty chairs—all the mummies who couldn’t boil eggs, he thought. Black tiger-skin steps led to Ko’s den, and here Jerry lingered, staring round, fascinated despite himself, seeing the man in everything, and—for all his rather awful crimes at first remove—his kinship with old Sambo. The king-sized desk with the bombé legs and ball-and-claw feet, the Presidential cutlery. The ink-wells, the sheathed paper-knife and scissors, the untouched works of legal reference, the very ones old Sambo trailed around with him: Simons on tax, Charlesworth on company law. The framed testimonials on the wall. The citation for his Order of the British Empire, beginning “Elizabeth the Second by the Grace of God . . .” The medal itself, embalmed in satin like the arms of a dead knight. Group photographs of Chinese elders on the steps of a spirit temple. Victorious racehorses. Lizzie laughing to him. Lizzie in a swim-suit, looking stunning. Lizzie in Paris.

  Gently he pulled open the desk drawers and discovered the embossed stationery of a dozen different companies. In the cupboards, empty files, an I.B.M. electric typewriter with no plug on it, an address book with no addresses entered. Lizzie naked from the waist up, glancing round at him over her long back. Lizzie, God help her, in a wedding dress, clutching a posy of gardenias. Ko must have sent her to a bridal parlour for the photograph.

  There were no photographs of gunny bags of opium.

  The executive sanctuary, thought Jerry, still standing there. Old Sambo had several, he remembered: girls who had flats from him—one even a house—yet saw him only a few times a year. But always this one secret special room, with the desk and the unused telephones and the instant mementoes, a physical corner carved off someone else’s life, a shelter from his other shelters.

  “Where is he?” Jerry asked, remembering Luke again.

  “Drake?”

  “No, Father Christmas.”

  “You tell me.”

  He followed her to the bedroom. “Do you often not know?” he asked.

  She was pulling off her earrings, dropping them in a jewellery box. Then her clasp, her necklace and bracelets.

  “He rings me wherever he is, night or day, we never care. This is the first time he’s cut himself off.”

  “Can you ring him?”

  “Any bloody time,” she said with savage sarcasm. “ ’Course I can. Number One Wife and me get on just great.”

  “What about at the office?”

  “He’s not going to the office.”

  “What about Tiu?”

  “Sod Tiu.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he’s a pig,” she snapped, pulling open a cupboard.

  “He could pass on messages for you.”

  “If he felt like it, which he doesn’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “How the hell should I know?” She hauled out a pullover and some jeans and chucked them on the bed. “Because he resents me. Because he doesn’t trust me. Because he doesn’t like round-eyes horning in on Big Sir. Get out while I change.”

  So he wandered into the dressing-room again, keeping his back to her, hearing the rustle of silk and skin.

  “I saw Ricardo,” he said. “We had a full and frank exchange of views.”

  He needed very much to hear whether they had told her. He needed to absolve her from Luke. He listened, then went on:

  “Charlie Marshall gave me his address, so I popped up and had a chat with him.”

  “Great. So now you’re family.”

  “They told me about Mellon. Said you carried dope for him.”

  She didn’t speak so he turned to look at her, and she was sitting on the bed with her head in her hands. In the jeans and pullover she looked about fifteen years old, and half a foot shorter.

  “What the hell do you want?” she whispered at last, so quietly she might have been putting the question to herself.

  “You,” he said. “For keeps.”

  He didn’t know whether she heard because all she did was let out a long breath and whisper “Oh, Jesus” at the end of it.

  “Mellon a friend of yours?” she asked finally.

  “No.”

  “Pity. He needs a friend like you.”

  “Does Arpego know where Ko is?”

  She shrugged.

  “When did you last hear from him?”

  “A week.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He had things to arrange.”

  “What things?”

  “For Christ’s sake, stop asking questions! The whole sodding world is asking questions, so just don’t join the queue, right?”

  He stared at her and her eyes were alight with anger and despair. He opened the balcony door and stepped outside.

  I need a brief, he thought bitterly. Sarratt bearleaders, where are you now I need you? It hadn’t dawned on him till now that when he cut the cable, he was also dropping the pilot.

  The balcony ran along three sides. The fog had temporarily cleared. Behind him hung the Peak, its shoulders festooned in gold lights. Banks of running cloud made changing caverns round the moon. The harbour had dug out all its finery. At its centre an American aircraft carrier, floodlit and dressed over-all, basked like a pampered woman amid a cluster of attendant launches. On her deck, a line of helicopters and small fighters reminded him of the air base in Northern Thailand. A column of ocean-going junks drifted past her, headed for Canton.

  “Jerry,” she called.

  She was standing in the open doorway, watching him down a line of tub trees.

  “Come on in. I’m hungry,” she said.

  It was a kitchen where nobody cooked or ate, but it had a Bavarian corner, with pine set
tles, Chinese-style alpine pictures, and ashtrays saying “Carlsberg.” She gave him coffee from an ever-ready percolator, and he noticed how when she was on guard she kept her shoulders forward and her forearms across her body, the way the orphan used to. She was shivering. He thought she had been shivering ever since he laid the gun on her and he wished he hadn’t done that, because it was beginning to dawn on him that she was in as bad a state as he was, and perhaps a damn sight worse, and that the mood between them was like two people after a disaster, each in a separate hell. He made her a brandy and soda and the same for himself and sat her in the drawing-room where it was warmer, and he watched her while she hugged herself and drank the brandy, staring at the carpet.

  “Music?” he asked.

  She shook her head.

  “I represent myself,” he said. “No connection with any other firm.”

  She might not have heard.

  “I’m free and willing,” he said. “It’s just that a friend of mine died.”

  He saw her nod, but only in sympathy; he was sure it rang no bell with her at all.

  “The Ko thing is getting very grubby,” he said. “It’s not going to work out well. They’re very rough boys you’re mixed up with. I thought maybe you’d like a leg out of it all. That’s why I came back. My Galahad act. It’s just I don’t quite know what’s gathering round you. Mellon—all that. Maybe we should unbutton it together and see what’s there.”

  After which not very articulate explanation, the telephone rang. It had one of those throttled croaks designed to spare the nerves.

  The telephone was across the room on a gilded trolley. A pin-light winked on it with each dull note, and the rippled glass shelves picked up the reflection. She glanced at it, then at Jerry, and her face was at once alert with hope. Jumping to his feet, he pushed the trolley over to her and its wheels stammered in the deep pile. The wire uncoiled behind him as he walked, till it was like a child’s scribble across the room. She lifted the receiver quickly and said “Worth” in the slightly rude tone women learn when they live alone. He thought of telling her the line was bugged but he didn’t know what he was warning her against; he had no position any more, this side or that side. He didn’t know what the sides were, but his head was suddenly full of Luke again and the hunter in him was wide awake.

  She had the telephone to her ear but she hadn’t spoken. Once she said “Yes,” as if she were acknowledging instructions, and once she said “No” strongly. Her expression had turned blank, her voice told him nothing. But he sensed obedience and he sensed concealment, and as he did so, the anger lit in him completely and nothing else mattered.

  “No,” she said to the phone. “I left the party early.”

  He knelt beside her, trying to listen, but she kept the receiver pressed hard against her.

  Why didn’t she ask him where he was? Why didn’t she ask when she would see him? Whether he was all right? Why he hadn’t phoned? Why did she look at Jerry like this, show no relief?

  His hand on her cheek, he forced her head round and whispered to the other ear.

  “Tell him you must see him! You’ll come to him. Anywhere.”

  “Yes,” she said again into the phone. “All right. Yes.”

  “Tell him! Tell him you must see him!”

  “I must see you,” she said finally. “I’ll come to you wherever you are.”

  The receiver was still in her hand. She made a shrug, asking for instruction, and her eyes were still turned to Jerry—not as her Sir Galahad but as just another part of a hostile world that encircled her.

  “I love you!” he whispered. “Say what you say!”

  “I love you,” she said shortly, with her eyes closed, and rang off before he could stop her.

  “He’s coming here,” she said. “And damn you.”

  Jerry was still kneeling beside her. She stood up in order to get clear of him.

  “Does he know?” Jerry asked.

  “Know what?”

  “That I’m here?”

  “Perhaps.” She lit a cigarette.

  “Where is he now?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “When will he be here?”

  “He said soon.”

  “Is he alone?”

  “He didn’t say.”

  “Does he carry a gun?”

  She was across the room from him. Her strained grey eyes still held him in their furious, frightened glare. But Jerry was indifferent to her mood. A feverish urge for action had overcome all other feelings.

  “Drake Ko. The nice man who set you up here. Does he carry a gun? Is he going to shoot me? Is Tiu with him? Just questions, that’s all.”

  “He doesn’t wear it in bed, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “I thought you two men would prefer to be left alone.”

  Leading her back to the sofa, he sat her facing the double doors at the far end of the room. They were panelled with frosted glass, and on the other side of them lay the hall and the front entrance. He opened them, clearing her line of view to anybody coming in.

  “Do you have rules about letting people in, you two?” She didn’t follow his question. “There’s a peep-hole here. Does he insist you check every time before you open?”

  “He’ll ring on the house phone from downstairs. Then he’ll use his door key.”

  The front door was laminated hardboard, not solid, but solid enough. Sarratt folklore said, “If you are taking a lone intruder unawares, don’t get behind the door or you’ll never get out again.” For once Jerry was inclined to agree. Yet to keep to the open side was to be a sitting duck for anyone aggressively inclined, and Jerry was by no means sure that Ko was either unaware or alone. He considered going behind the sofa, but if there was to be shooting he didn’t want the girl to be in the line of it; he definitely didn’t. Her passivity, her lethargic stare did nothing to reassure him. His brandy glass was beside hers on the table, and he put it quietly out of sight behind a vase of plastic orchids. He emptied the ashtray and set an open copy of Vogue in front of her on the table.

  “You play music when you’re alone?”

  “Sometimes.”

  He chose Ellington.

  “Too loud?”

  “Louder,” she said. Suspicious, he turned down the sound, watching her. As he did so, the house phone whistled twice from the hall.

  “Take care,” he warned and, gun in hand, moved to the open side of the front door, the sitting-duck position, three feet from the arc, close enough to spring forward, far enough to shoot and throw himself, which was what he had in mind as he dropped into a half-crouch. He held the gun in his left hand and nothing in his right, because at that distance he couldn’t miss with either hand, whereas if he had to strike he wanted his right hand free. He remembered the way Tiu carried his hands curled, and he warned himself not to get in close. Whatever he did, to do it from a distance. A groin kick but don’t follow it in; stay outside those hands.

  “You say ‘Come on up,’” he told her.

  “Come on up,” Lizzie repeated into the phone. She rang off and unhooked the chain.

  “When he comes in, smile for the camera. Don’t shout.”

  “Go to hell,” she said.

  From the lift-well, to his sharpened ear, came the clump of a lift arriving and the monotonous “ping” of the bell. He heard footsteps approaching the door, one pair only, steady, and remembered Drake Ko’s comic, slightly ape-like gait at Happy Valley, how the knees tipped through the grey flannels. A key slid into the lock, one hand came round the door, and the rest with no apparent forethought followed. By then Jerry had sprung with all his weight, flattening the unresisting body against the wall. A picture of Venice fell, the glass smashed, he slammed the door, all in the same moment that he found a throat and jammed the barrel of the pistol straight into the deep flesh. Then the door was unlocked a second time from outside, very fast, the wind went out of his body, his feet flew upward, a crip
pling shock of pain spread from his kidneys and felled him on the thick carpet, a second blow caught him in the groin and made him gasp as he jerked his knees to his chin. Through his streaming eyes he saw the little, furious figure of Fawn the baby-sitter standing over him, shaping for a third strike, and the rigid grin of Sam Collins as he peered calmly over Fawn’s shoulder to see what the damage was. And still in the doorway, wearing an expression of grave apprehension as he straightened his collar after Jerry’s unprovoked assault on him, the flustered figure of his one-time guide and mentor, Mr. George Smiley, breathlessly calling his leash-dogs to order.

  Jerry was able to sit, but only if he leaned forward. He held both hands in front of him, his forearms jammed into his lap. The pain was all over his body, like poison spreading from a central source. The girl watched from the hall doorway. Fawn was lurking, hoping for another excuse to hit him. Sam Collins was at the other end of the room, sitting in a winged armchair with his legs crossed as if he were at home here and the chair his favourite. Smiley had poured Jerry a neat brandy and was stooping over him, poking the glass into his hand.

  “What are you doing here, Jerry?” Smiley said. “I don’t understand.”

  “Courting,” said Jerry and closed his eyes as a wave of black pain swept over him. “Developed an unscheduled affection for our hostess, here. Sorry about that.”

  “That was a very dangerous thing to do, Jerry,” Smiley objected. “You could have wrecked the entire operation. Suppose I had been Ko. The consequences would have been disastrous.”

  “I’ll say they would.” He drank some brandy. “Luke’s dead. Lying in my flat with his head shot off.”

  “Who’s Luke?” Smiley asked, forgetting their meeting at Craw’s house.

  “No one. Just a friend.” He drank again. “American journalist. A drunk. No loss to anyone.”

  Smiley glanced at Sam Collins, but Sam shrugged. “Nobody we know,” he said.

  “Ring them, all the same,” said Smiley.

  Sam picked up the mobile telephone and walked out of the room with it because he knew the layout.

  “Put the burn on her, have you?” Jerry said, with a nod of his head toward Lizzie. “About the only thing left in the book that hasn’t been done to her, I should think.” He called over to her. “How are you doing there, sport? Sorry about the tussle. Didn’t break anything, did we?”