John Le Carré: Three Complete Novels

by John le Carré

  “You calm down,” she warned. She kissed him a third time, muttered “Yes,” as if her expectations had been fulfilled, then sat quiet for a while, looking at the deck but keeping hold of his hand.

  Jerry reckoned they were making five knots into the wind. A small plane zoomed overhead. Holding her out of sight, he looked up sharply, but was too late to read the markings.

  And good morning to you, he thought.

  They were rounding the last point, tossing and groaning in the spray. Once, the propellers lifted clean out of the water with a roar. As they hit the sea again, the engine faltered, choked, but decided to stay alive. Touching Lizzie’s shoulder, Jerry pointed ahead of them to where the bare, steep island of Po Toi loomed like a cut-out against the cloud-torn sky: two peaks, sheer from the water, the larger to the south, and a saddle between.

  The sea had turned iron blue and the wind ripped over it, slapping the breath from their mouths and hurling spray at them like hail. On the port bow lay Beaufort Island: a lighthouse, a jetty, no inhabitants. The wind dropped as though it had never been. Not a breeze greeted them as they entered the unruffled water of the island’s lee. The sun’s heat was direct and harsh. Ahead of them, perhaps a mile, lay the mouth of Po Toi’s main bay, and behind it the low brown ghosts of China’s islands.

  Soon they could make out a whole untidy fleet of junks and cruise boats jamming the bay. The first jingle of drums and cymbals and unco-ordinated chanting floated to them across the water. On the hill behind lay the shanty village, its tin roofs twinkling, and on its own small headland stood one solid building, the temple of Tin Hau, with a bamboo scaffold lashed round it in a rudimentary grandstand, and a large crowd with a pall of smoke hanging over it and dabs of gold between.

  “Which side was it?” he asked her.

  “I don’t know. We climbed to a house and walked from there.”

  Each time he spoke to her, he looked at her, but now she avoided his gaze. Tapping the coxswain on the shoulder, he pointed the course he wanted him to take. The boy at once began protesting. Squaring to him, Jerry showed him a bunch of money, pretty well all he had left. With an ill grace the boy swung across the mouth of the harbour, weaving between the boats toward a small granite headland where a tumbledown jetty offered a risky landing. The din of the festival was much louder. They could smell charcoal and suckling pig, and hear concerted bursts of laughter, but for the time being the crowd was out of sight to them, as they were to the crowd.

  “Here!” Jerry yelled. “Put in here. Now! Now!”

  The jetty leaned drunkenly as they clambered onto it. They had not even reached land before their boat had turned for home. Nobody said goodbye. They climbed up the rock hand in hand and walked straight into a money game that was being watched by a large and laughing crowd. At the centre stood a clownish old man with a bag of coins, and he was throwing them down the rock one by one while barefooted boys hurled themselves after them, pushing each other almost to the cliffedge in their zeal.

  “They took a boat,” Guillam said. “Rockhurst has interviewed the proprietor. The proprietor is a friend of Westerby’s, and yes it was Westerby and a beautiful girl, and they wanted to go to Po Toi for Tin Hau.”

  “And how did Rockhurst play that?” Smiley asked.

  “Said in that case it wasn’t the couple he was looking for. Bowed out. Disappointed. The harbour police have also belatedly reported sighting it on course for the festival.”

  “Want us to put up a spotter plane, George?” Martello asked nervously. “Navy int. have all sorts standing by.”

  Murphy had a bright suggestion: “Why don’t we just go right in with choppers and scoop Nelson off that end junk?” he demanded.

  “Murphy, shut up,” Martello said.

  “They’re making for the island,” Smiley said firmly. “We know they are. I don’t think we need air cover to prove it.”

  Martello was not satisfied. “Then maybe we should send a couple of people out to that island, George. Maybe we ought to do a little interfering, finally.”

  Fawn was standing stock-still. Even his fists had stopped working.

  “No,” said Smiley.

  At Martello’s side Sam Collins grinned a little thinly.

  “Any reason?” Martello asked.

  “Right up to the last minute, Ko has one sanction. He can signal his brother not to come ashore,” Smiley said. “The merest hint of a disturbance on the island could persuade him to do that.”

  Martello gave a nervous, angry sigh. He had put aside the pipe he sometimes smoked and was drawing heavily on Sam’s supply of brown cigarettes, which seemed to be endless.

  “George, what does this man want?” he demanded in exasperation. “Is this a blackmail thing now, a disruption? I don’t see a category here.” A dreadful thought struck him. His voice dropped and he pointed with the full length of his arm across the room. “Now just don’t tell me we got one of these new ones on our hands, for Christ’s sakes! Don’t tell me he’s one of those cold-war converts with a middle-aged mission to wash his soul in public. Because if he is, and if we are going to read this guy’s frank life story in the Washington Post next week, George, I personally am going to put the whole Fifth Fleet on that island, if that’s what it takes to hold him down.” He turned to Murphy. “I have contingencies, right?”

  “Right.”

  “George, I want a landing party on stand-by. You guys can come aboard or stay home. Please yourselves.”

  Smiley stared at Martello, then at Guillam, with his strapped and useless arm, then at Fawn, who was poised like a diver at the end of a spring-board, eyes half closed and heels together, while he lifted himself slowly up and down on his toes.

  “Fawn and Collins,” Smiley said at last.

  “You two boys take them to the aircraft carrier and hand them right over to the people there. Murphy comes back.”

  A smoke cloud marked the place where Collins had been sitting. Where Fawn had stood, two squash-balls slowly rolled a distance before coming to a halt.

  “God help us all,” somebody murmured fervently. It was Guillam, but Smiley ignored him.

  The lion was three men long and the crowd was laughing because it nipped at them and because self-appointed picadors were prodding it with sticks while it lolloped in dance steps down the narrow path, to the clatter of the drums and cymbals. Reaching the headland, the procession slowly turned itself and started to retrace its steps, and at this point Jerry drew Lizzie quickly into the middle of it, bending low in order to make less of his height. At first the track was mud and full of puddles, but soon the dance was leading them past the temple and down concrete steps toward a sand beach where the suckling pigs were being roasted.

  “Which way?” he asked her.

  She led him quickly left, out of the dance, along the back of a shanty village and over a wooden bridge across an inlet. They climbed along a fringe of cypress trees, Lizzie leading, until they were alone again, standing over the perfect horseshoe bay, looking down on Ko’s Admiral Nelson where she lay at the very centre point, like a grand lady among the hundreds of pleasure boats and junks around her. There was nobody visible on deck, not even crew. A clutch of grey police boats, five or six of them, was anchored farther out to sea.

  And why not, thought Jerry, since this was a festival?

  She had let go his hand, and when he turned to her, she was still staring at Ko’s launch and he saw the shadow of confusion in her face.

  “Is this really the way he brought you?” he asked.

  It was the way, she said; and turned to him, to look; to confirm or weigh things in her mind. Then with her forefinger she gravely traced his lips as if examining the point where she had kissed them. “Jesus,” she said, and as gravely shook her head.

  They started climbing again. Glancing up, Jerry saw the brown island peak deceptively near, and on the hillside groups of rice terraces gone to ruin. They entered a small village populated by nothing but surly dogs, and the bay
vanished from sight. The schoolhouse was open and empty. Through the doorway they saw charts of fighting aircraft. Washing jars stood on the step. Cupping her hands, Lizzie rinsed her face. The huts were slung with wire and brick to anchor them against typhoons. The path turned to sand and the going grew harder.

  “Still right?” he asked.

  “It’s just up,” she said, as if she were sick of telling him. “It’s just up, and then the house, and bingo. I mean Christ, what do you think I am, a bloody nitwit?”

  “I didn’t say a thing,” said Jerry. He put his arm round her and she pressed in to him, giving herself exactly as she had done on the dance floor.

  They heard a blare of music from the temple as somebody tested the loudspeakers, and after it the wail of a slow tune. The bay was in view again. A crowd had gathered on the shore. Jerry saw more puffs of smoke and, in the windless heat of this side of the island, caught a whiff of joss. The water was blue and clear and calm. Round it, white lights burned on poles. The Ko launch had not stirred, nor had the police.

  “See him?” he asked.

  She stood apart from him. She was studying the crowd. She shook her head. “Probably having a kip after lunch,” she said.

  The beating of the sun was ferocious. When they entered the shadow of the hillside it was like a sudden dusk, and when they reached the sunlight it stung their faces like the heat of a close fire. The air was alive with dragonflies, the hillside strewn with big boulders, but where bushes grew they wound and straggled, producing rich trumpets, red and white and yellow. Old picnic cans lay in profusion.

  “And that’s the house?”

  “I told you,” she said.

  It was a ruin: a broken villa with gaping walls and a view. It had been built with some grandeur above a dried-up stream and was reached by a concrete foot-bridge. The mud stank and hummed with insects. Between palms and bracken the remains of a verandah gave a vast prospect of the sea and of the bay. As they crossed the foot-bridge, he took her arm.

  “So let’s play it from here,” he said. “No interrogations. Just tell.”

  “We walked up here. Like I said. Me, Drake, and bloody Tiu. The boys brought a basket and the booze. I said ‘Where are we going?’ and he said ‘Picnic.’ Tiu didn’t want me but Drake said I could come. ‘You hate walking,’ I said. ‘I’ve never even seen you even cross a road before!’ ‘Today we walk,’ he says, doing his Captain of Industry act. So I tag along and shut up.”

  A thick cloud was already obscuring the peak above them and rolling slowly down the hill. The sun had vanished. In moments the cloud reached them and they were alone at the world’s end, unable to see even their feet. They groped their way into the house. She sat apart from him on a roof beam. Chinese slogans were daubed in red paint down the door pillars. The floor was littered with picnic refuse and long twists of lining paper.

  “He tells the boys to hop it, so they hop it,” she went on. “Him and Tiu have a long earnest natter in whatever they’re speaking this week, and half-way through lunch he breaks into English and tells me Po Toi’s his island. It’s where he first landed when he left China. The boat people dumped him here. ‘My people,’ he calls them. That’s why he comes to the festival every year and that’s why he gives money to the temple, and that’s why we’ve sweated up the bloody hill for a picnic. Then they go back into Chinese and I get the feeling Tiu is tearing him off a strip for talking too much, but Drake’s all excited and little-boy and he won’t listen. Then they go on up.”

  “Up?”

  “Up to the top. ‘Old ways are the best,’ he says to me. ‘We shall stick to what is proven.’ Then his Baptist bit—‘Hold fast to that which is good, Liese. That is what God likes.’”

  Jerry glanced into the fog-bank above him, and he could have sworn he heard the crackle of a small plane, but at that moment he didn’t mind too much whether it was there or not, because he had the two things he most badly needed. He had the girl with him, and he had the information: for now he finally understood exactly what she had been worth to Smiley and Sam Collins, and how she had unconsciously betrayed to them the vital clue to Ko’s intentions.

  “So they went on to the top. Did you go with them?”

  “No.”

  “Did you see where they went?”

  “To the top. I told you.”

  “Then what?”

  “They looked down the other side. Talked. Pointed. More talk, more pointing. Then down they come again and Drake’s even more excited, the way he gets when he’s brought off a big deal and Number One’s not there to disapprove. Tiu looks dead solemn, and that’s the way he gets when Drake acts fond of me. Drake wants to stay and have a couple of brandies, so Tiu goes back to Hong Kong in a huff. Drake gets amorous and decides we’ll spend the night on the boat and go home in the morning, so that’s what we do.”

  “Where does he moor the boat? Here? In the bay?”

  “No.”

  “Where?”

  “Off Lantau.”

  “You went straight there, did you?”

  She shook her head. “We did a round of the island.”

  “This island?”

  “There was a place he wanted to look at in the dark. A bit of coast round the other side. The boys had to shine the lamps on it. ‘That’s where I land in ’fifty-one,’ he says. ‘The boat people were frightened to put in to the main harbour. They were frightened of police and ghosts and pirates and customs men. They say the islanders will cut their throats.’”

  “And in the night?” said Jerry. “While you were moored off Lantau?”

  “He told me he had a brother and loved him.”

  “That was the first time he told you?”

  She nodded.

  “He tell you where the brother was?”

  “No.”

  “But you knew?”

  This time she didn’t even nod.

  From below, the clatter of the festival rose through the cloud. He lifted her gently to her feet.

  “Bloody questions,” she muttered.

  “They’re nearly over,” he promised. He kissed her and she let him, but did not otherwise take part.

  “Let’s go up there and take a look,” he said.

  Ten minutes more and the sunlight returned and blue sky opened above them. With Lizzie leading, they scrambled quickly over several false peaks toward the saddle. The sounds from the bay stopped and the colder air filled with screaming, wheeling gulls. They approached the crest, the path widened, they walked side by side. A few steps more and the wind hit them with a force that made them gasp and reel back. They were at the knife-edge, looking down into an abyss. At their very feet the cliff fell vertical to a boiling sea, and the foam smothered the headlands. Dumpling clouds were blowing from the east and behind them the sky was black. Two hundred metres down lay an inlet which the breakers did not cover. Fifty yards out from it, a shoal of rock checked the sea’s force, and the spume washed it in white rings.

  “That it?” he yelled above the wind. “He landed there? That bit of coast?”

  “Yes.”

  “Shone the lights on it?”

  “Yes.”

  Leaving her where she stood, he moved slowly up the knife-edge, crouching almost double while the wind rushed over his ears and covered his face in a sticky salt sweat and his stomach screamed in pain from what he supposed was a punctured gut or internal bleeding or both. At the inmost point before the cliff cut back into the sea, he looked down once more, and now he thought he could just make out a skimpy path, sometimes no more than a seam of rock or a ridge of rough grass, ekeing its way cautiously toward the inlet. There was no sand in the inlet but some of the rocks looked dry. Returning to her, he led her away from the knife-edge. The wind dropped and they heard the din of the festival again, much louder than before. The snap of firecrackers made a toy war.

  “It’s his brother Nelson,” he explained. “In case you hadn’t gathered. Ko’s bringing him out of China. Tonight’s the night
. Trouble is, he’s a much sought-after character. Lot of people would like a chat with him. That’s where Mellon came in.” He took a breath. “My view is that you should get the hell out of here. How do you see that? Drake’s not going to want you around, that’s for sure.”

  “Is he going to want you?” she asked.

  “I think what you should do, you should go back to the harbour. Are you listening?”

  She managed “Of course I am.”

  “You look for a nice friendly-looking round-eye family. Choose the woman, for once, not the bloke. Tell her you’ve had a row with your boy-friend and can they take you home in their boat? If they’ll have you, stay the night with them; otherwise go to a hotel. Spin them one of your stories. Christ, that’s no problem, is it?”

  A police helicopter pattered overhead in a long curve, presumably to observe the festival. Instinctively he grabbed her shoulders and drew her back to the rock.

  “Remember the second place we went—the big-band sound—the bar?” He was still holding her.

  She said, “Yes.”

  “I’ll pick you up there tomorrow night.”

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “Be there at seven. At seven, got it?”

  She pushed him gently away from her, as if she were determined to stand alone.

  “Tell him I kept faith,” she said. “It’s what he cares about most. I stuck to the deal. If you see him, tell him, ‘Liese stuck to the deal.’”

  “Sure.”

  “Not sure. Yes. Tell him. He did everything he promised. He said he’d look after me. He did. He said he’d let Ric go. He did that, too. He always stuck to a deal.”

  She was looking down. He raised her head, holding it with both his hands, but she insisted on going on.

  “And tell him—and tell him—tell him they made it impossible. They fenced me in.”

  “Be there from seven on,” he said. “Even if I’m a bit late. Now come on, that’s not too difficult, is it? You don’t need a university degree to hoist that aboard.” He was gentling her, battling for a smile, striving for a last complicity before they separated.