John Le Carré: Three Complete Novels

by John le Carré

  “No takers,” said Sam Collins, the gambler, through his grin.

  Martello stuck to his guns: “Are we going to let him rob us of the prize, George, sit here passively asking one another how it came about that Jesus Christ was born on Christmas Day and not on December twenty-sixth or twenty-seventh?”

  Smiley peered at Martello at last, then up at Guillam, who stood stiffly at his side, tipping back his shoulders to support the sling, and finally he looked downward at his own, locked, conflicting hands, and for a period quite meaningless in time he studied himself in his mind, and reviewed his quest for Karla, whom Ann called his “black Grail.” He thought of Ann and her repeated betrayals of him in the name of her own Grail, which she called love. He recalled how against his better judgment he had tried to share her faith and, like a true believer, renew it each day, despite her anarchic interpretations of its meaning. He thought of Haydon, steered at Ann by Karla. He thought of Jerry and the girl, and he thought of Peter Worthington, her husband, and the dog-like look of kinship which Worthington had bestowed on him when he called to interview him in the terrace house in Islington: “You and I are the ones they leave behind,” ran the message.

  He thought of Jerry’s other tentative loves along his untidy trail, the half-paid bills the Circus had picked up for him, and it would have been handy to lump Lizzie in with them as just one more, but he couldn’t do that. He was not Sam Collins, and he had not the smallest doubt that at this moment Jerry’s feeling for the girl was a cause Ann would warmly have espoused. But he was not Ann either. For a cruel moment nevertheless, as he sat still locked in indecision, he did honestly wonder whether Ann was right and his striving had become nothing other than a private journey among the beasts and villains of his own insufficiency, in which he ruthlessly involved simplistic minds like Jerry’s.

  You’re wrong, sport. Don’t know how, don’t know why, but you’re wrong.

  The fact that I am wrong, Smiley had once replied to Ann, in the mid-stream of one of their endless arguments, does not make you right.

  He heard Martello again, speaking in present time: “George, we have people waiting with open arms for what we can give them. What Nelson can.”

  A phone was ringing. Murphy took the call and relayed the message to the silent room: “Land-line from the aircraft carrier, sir. Navy int. has the junks dead on schedule, sir. South wind favourable and good fishing along the way. Sir, I don’t even think Nelson’s riding with them. I don’t see why he should.”

  The focus shifted abruptly to Murphy, who had never before been heard to express an opinion.

  “What the hell’s that, Murphy?” Martello demanded quite astonished. “You been to the fortune-teller too, son?”

  “Sir, I was down on the carrier this morning and those people have a lot of data. They can’t figure why anybody who lives in Shanghai would ever want to exit out of Swatow. They would do it all different, sir. They would fly or train to Canton, then take the bus maybe to Waichow. They say that’s a lot safer, sir.”

  “These are Nelson’s people,” Smiley said as the heads swung sharply back on him. “They’re his clan. He would rather be at sea with them, even if he’s at risk. He trusts them.” He turned to Guillam. “We’ll do this,” he said. “Tell Rockhurst to distribute a description of Westerby and the girl together. You say he hired the car under his work name? Used his escape papers?”

  “Yes.”

  “Worrell?”

  “Yes.”

  “The police are looking for a Mr. and Mrs. Worrell then, British. No photographs, and make sure the descriptions are vague enough not to arouse suspicion. Marty.”

  Martello was all attentiveness.

  “Is Ko still on his boat?” Smiley asked.

  “Nestled right in there with Tiu, George.”

  “It’s just possible Westerby may try to reach him. You have a static post at the quayside. Put more men down there.”

  “What are they looking for?”

  “Trouble. The same goes for surveillance on his house. Tell me—” He sank into his thoughts a moment, but Guillam need not have worried. “Tell me, can you simulate a fault on Ko’s home telephone line?”

  Martello glanced at Murphy.

  “Sir, we don’t have the apparatus handy,” Murphy said, “but I guess we could. . . .”

  “Then cut it,” Smiley said simply. “Cut the whole cable if necessary. Try and do it near some road-works.”

  Having dispensed his orders, Martello came lightly across the room and sat himself at Smiley’s side.

  “Ah, George, about tomorrow, now. Do you think we might, ah, put a little hardware on stand-by as well?” From the desk where he was telephoning Rockhurst, Guillam watched the dialogue most intently. From across the room so did Sam Collins. “Just seems there’s no telling what your man Westerby might do, George. We have to be prepared for all emergencies, right?”

  “By all means stand anything by. But for the time being, if you don’t mind, we’ll leave the interception plans as they are. And the competence with me.”

  “Sure, George. Sure,” said Martello fulsomely, and with the same church-like reverence tiptoed back to his own camp.

  “What did he want?” Guillam demanded in a low voice, crouching at Smiley’s side. “What’s he trying to get you to agree to?”

  “I will not have it, Peter,” Smiley warned, also under his breath. He was suddenly very angry. “I shall not hear you again. I shall not tolerate your Byzantine notions of a palace plot. These people are our hosts and our Allies. We have a written agreement with them. We have quite enough to worry about already without grotesque and—I may tell you honestly—paranoid fancies. Now please—”

  “I tell you!” Guillam began, but Smiley closed him down.

  “I want you to get hold of Craw. Call on him, if necessary. Perhaps the journey would do you good. Tell him Westerby’s on the rampage. He’s to let us know at once if he has word of him. He’ll know what to do.”

  Still walking the line of seats, Fawn watched Guillam leave, while his fists continued restlessly kneading whatever was inside them.

  In Jerry’s world it was also three in the morning, and the madame had found him a razor, but no fresh shirt. He had shaved and cleaned himself up as best he could, but his body still ached from head to toe. He stood over Lizzie where she lay on the bed and promised to be back in a couple of hours, but he doubted whether she even heard him. The more papers which are printing pretty girls in preference to politics today, he remembered Ko saying, the more chance we get of a damn sight better world.

  He took pak-pais, knowing they were less under the thumb of the police. Otherwise he walked, and the walking helped his body and his mystical process of decision-taking, because back there on the divan it had suddenly become impossible. He needed to move in order to find direction. He was heading for Deep Water Bay, and he knew he was entering badland. Now that he was on the loose, they would be on to that launch like leeches. He wondered who they had, what they were using. If it was the Cousins, he would look for too much hardware, and overmanning.

  Rain was coming on and he feared it would clear the fog. Above him the moon was already partly free, and as he padded silently down the hill he could make out by its pale light the nearest stock-broker junks groaning and tugging at their moorings. A south-east wind, he noticed, and rising. If it’s a static observation post, they’ll go for height, he thought, and sure enough there on the promontory to his right he saw a battered-looking Mercedes van tucked between the trees, and the aerial with its Chinese streamers.

  He waited, watching the fog roll, till a car came down the hill with its lights full on, and as soon as it was past him he darted across the road, knowing that not all the hardware in the world would enable them to see him behind the advancing head-lights. At the water’s level the visibility was down to zero, and he had to grope in order to pick out the rickety wooden causeway he remembered from his previous reconnaissance.

 
Then he found what he was looking for. The same toothless old woman sat in her sampan, grinning up at him through the fog.

  “Ko,” he whispered. “Admiral Nelson. Ko?”

  The echo of her cackle bounded away across the water. “Po Toi!” she shouted. “Tin Hau! Po Toi!”

  “Today?”

  “Today!”

  “Tomorrow?”

  “Tomollow!”

  He tossed her a couple of dollars and her laughter followed him as he crept away.

  I’m right, Lizzie’s right, we’re right, he thought. He’s going to the festival. He hoped to God Lizzie was staying put. If she woke up, he wouldn’t put it past her to wander.

  He walked, trying to stamp away the aching in his groin and back. Take it stage by stage, he thought. Nothing big. Just play it as it comes. The fog was like a corridor leading to different rooms. Once he met an invalid car crawling along the curb as its owner exercised his dog. Once he saw two old men in undervests performing their morning exercises. In a public garden small children stared at him from a rhododendron bush they seemed to have made their home, for their clothes were draped over the branches and they were as naked as the refugee kids in Phnom Penh.

  She was sitting up waiting for him when he returned, and she looked terrible.

  “Don’t do that again,” she warned, and shoved her arm through his as they set out to find some breakfast and a boat. “Don’t ever bloody walk out on me without waving.”

  Hong Kong at first possessed no boats at all that day. Jerry would not contemplate the big out-island ferries which took the trippers. He knew the Rocker would have them sewn up. He refused to go down to the bays and make conspicuous enquiries. When he telephoned the listed water-taxi firms, whatever they had was either rented or too small for the voyage. Then he remembered Luigi Tan, the fixer, who was a myth at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club; Luigi could get you anything from a Korean dance troupe to a cut-price air ticket faster than any fixer in town. They took a taxi to the other side of Wanchai, where Luigi had his lair, then walked. It was eight in the morning but the hot fog had not lifted. The unlit signs sprawled over the narrow lanes like spent fireworks: “Happy Boy,” “Lucky Place,” “Americana.” The crowded food-stalls added their warm smells to the reek of petrol fumes and soot. Through splits in the wall they sometimes glimpsed a canal. “Anyone tell you where to find me,” Luigi Tan liked to say. “Ask for the big guy with one leg.”

  They found him behind the counter of his shop, just tall enough to look over it, a tiny, darting half-Portuguese who had once earned a living Chinese-boxing in the grimy booths of Macao. The front of the shop was six feet wide. His wares were new motor-bikes and relics of the old China service, which he called antiques: daguerreo-types of hatted ladies in tortoiseshell frames, a battered travelling box, an opium clipper’s log.

  Luigi knew Jerry already but he liked Lizzie much better, and insisted that she go ahead so that he could study her hind quarters while he ushered them under a washing line to an outhouse marked “Private,” with three chairs and a telephone on the floor. Crouching till he was rolled into a neat ball, Luigi talked Chinese to the telephone and English to Lizzie. He was a grandfather, he said, but virile, and had four sons, all good. Even Number Four son was off his hands. All good drivers, good workers, and good husbands. Also, he said to Lizzie, he had a Mercedes complete with stereo.

  “Maybe I take you ride in it one day,” he said.

  Jerry wondered whether she realised that he was proposing marriage, or perhaps something slightly less.

  And yes, Luigi thought he had a boat as well.

  After two phone calls he knew he had a boat, which he only ever lent to friends, at a nominal cost. He gave Lizzie his credit-card case to count the number of cards, then his wallet to admire the family snaps, one of which showed a lobster caught by Number Four son on the day of his recent wedding, though the son was not visible.

  “Po Toi bad place,” said Luigi Tan to Lizzie, still on the telephone. “Very dirty place. Rough sea, lousy festival, bad food. Why you want to go there?”

  For Tin Hau of course, Jerry said patiently, answering for her. For the famous temple and the festival.

  Luigi Tan preferred to speak to Lizzie.

  “You go Lantau,” he advised. “Lantau good island. Nice food, good fish, nice people. I tell them you go Lantau, eat at Charlie’s. Charlie my friend.”

  “Po Toi,” said Jerry firmly.

  “Po Toi hell of a lot of cash.”

  “We’ve got a hell of a lot of cash,” said Lizzie with a lovely smile, and Luigi looked at her again, contemplatively, the long up-and-down look.

  “Maybe I come with you,” he said to her.

  “No,” said Jerry.

  Luigi drove them to Causeway Bay and rode with them on the sampan. The boat was a fourteen-foot power boat, common as driftwood, but Jerry reckoned she was sound and Luigi said she had a deep keel. A boy lounged on the stern, trailing one foot in the water.

  “My nephew,” said Luigi, ruffling the boy’s hair proudly. “He got mother in Lantau. He take you Lantau, eat Charlie’s place, give you good time. You pay me later.”

  “Old boy,” said Jerry patiently. “Sport. We don’t want Lantau. We want Po Toi. Only Po Toi. Po Toi or nothing. Drop us there and go.”

  “Po Toi bad weather, bad festival. Bad place. Too near China. Lot of Commies.”

  “Po Toi or nothing,” Jerry said.

  “Boat too small,” said Luigi with a frightful loss of face, and it took all Lizzie’s charm to build him up again.

  For another hour the boys primed the boat, and all Jerry and Lizzie could do was sit in the half-cabin keeping out of sight and sip judicious shots of Rémy Martin. Periodically one or the other of them sank into a private reverie. When Lizzie did this, she hugged herself and rocked slowly on her haunches, head down. Whereas Jerry yanked at his forelock, and once he yanked so hard she touched his arm to stop him, and he laughed.

  Almost carelessly they pulled away from the harbour.

  “Stay out of sight,” Jerry ordered and for safety’s sake put his arm round her to keep her in the meagre shelter of the open cabin.

  The American aircraft carrier had stripped off her ornamental garb and lay grey and menacing, like an unsheathed knife, above the water. At first they had nothing but the same sticky calm. On the shore, shelves of fog pressed on the grey high-rises, and brown smoke columns slid into a white expressionless sky. On the flat water their boat felt high as a balloon. But as they slipped the shelter and headed east, the waves slapped her sides hard enough to wind her, the bow pitched and cracked, and they had to brace themselves to keep upright. With the little bow lifting and tugging like a bad horse, they tumbled past cranes and godowns and factories and the stumps of quarried hillsides.

  They were running straight into the wind and spray was flying on all sides. The coxswain at the wheel was laughing and crowing to his mate, and Jerry supposed it was the mad round-eyes they were laughing at, who chose to do their courting in a pitching tub. A giant tanker passed them, not seeming to move, brown junks running in her wake. From the dockyards, where a freighter was laid to, the white flashes of the welders’ lamps signalled to them across the water.

  The boys’ laughter eased and they began to talk sensibly because they were at sea. Looking back between the swaying walls of transport ships, Jerry saw the Island drawing slowly away from him, cut like a table mountain by the cloud. Once more Hong Kong was ceasing to exist.

  They passed another headland. As the sea roughened, the pitching steadied and the cloud above them dropped until its base was only a few feet above their mast, and for a while they stayed in this lower, unreal world, advancing under cover of its protective blanket. The fog ended suddenly and left them in dancing sunlight. Southward, on hills of violent lushness, an orange navigation lamp winked at them through the clear air.

  “What do we do now?” she asked softly, looking through the porthole.

>   “Smile and pray,” said Jerry.

  A pilot’s launch was pulling alongside and for a moment he definitely expected to see the hideous face of the Rocker glowering down on him, but the crew ignored them entirely.

  “Who are they?” she whispered. “What do you think?”

  “It’s routine,” said Jerry. “It’s meaningless.”

  The launch veered away. That’s it, thought Jerry, with no particular feeling; they’ve spotted us.

  “You sure it was just routine?” she asked.

  “Hundreds of boats go to the festival,” he said.

  The boat bucked violently and kept bucking. Great seaworthiness, he thought, hanging on to Lizzie. Great keel. If this goes on, we won’t have anything to decide. The sea will do it for us. It was one of those trips where if you made it, nobody noticed, and if you didn’t, they’d say you threw your life away. The east wind could swirl right round on itself at any moment, he thought. In the season between monsoons, nothing was ever sure. He listened anxiously to the erratic galloping of the engine. If it gives up, we’ll finish on the rocks.

  Suddenly his nightmares multiplied unreasonably. The butane, he thought; Christ, the butane! While the boys were preparing the boat, he had glimpsed two cylinders stowed in the front hold beside the water tanks, presumably for cooking Luigi’s lobsters. Fool that he was, he had made nothing of them till now. He worked it out. Butane is heavier than air. All cylinders leak. It’s just a question of degree. With this sea pounding the bows, they leak faster, and the escaped gas will now be lying in the bilge about two feet from the spark of the engine, with a nice blend of oxygen to assist combustion.

  Lizzie had slipped from his grasp and stood astern. The sea was suddenly crowded. Out of nowhere, a fleet of fishing junks had gathered, and she was gazing at them earnestly. Grabbing her arm, he hauled her back to the cover of the cabin.

  “Where do you think you are?” he shouted. “Bloody Cowes?”

  She studied him a moment, then gently kissed him, then kissed him again.