A Delicate Truth

by John le Carré

  Crispin is rocking himself like someone on a swing, now leaning back, now gently landing with both shoes together on the thick carpet.

  ‘How’s about I spell it out?’ he asks, and spells it out anyway. ‘As far as the dear old FO is concerned, you’re fucked. Any time I choose to send them that recording, they’ll blow you out of the water. Say Wildlife loud enough to them, the poor dears will go wobbly at the knees. Look at what that idiot Probyn got for his trouble.’

  Abandoning levity, Crispin braked his rocking chair and frowned theatrically into the middle distance:

  ‘So let’s move to part two of our conversation, the constructive part. Here’s a package for you, take it or leave it. We have our own in-house lawyers, we do a standard contract. But we’re flexible, we’re not stupid, we take every case on its merits. Am I reaching you? Hard to tell. We also know all about you, obviously. You own your flat, got a bit from your grandfather, not a lot, not exactly fuck-you money, but you won’t starve. The FO currently pays you fifty-eight grand rising to seventy-five next year if you keep your nose clean; no major outstanding debts. You’re straight, you screw around where you can, but no wife and veg to tie you down. Long may it last. What else have you got that we like? A good health record, you enjoy outdoors, you’re fit, you’re solid Anglo-Saxon stock, low-born but you made it through the social lines. You’ve got three languages and a Class A Rolodex from every country where you’ve served Her Maj, and we can start you off at twice what she’s paying you. There’s a golden hullo of ten grand waiting for you on the day you join as an executive vice-president, car of your choice, all the trimmings, health insurance, business-class travel, entertainment expenses. Have I missed anything out?’

  ‘Yes, actually. You have.’

  Perhaps in order to avoid Toby’s gaze, Crispin treats himself to a 360º turn on the runners of his very modern rocking chair. But when he comes back, Toby is there, still staring at him.

  ‘You still haven’t told me why you’re frightened of me,’ he complains, in a tone of mystification rather than challenge. ‘Elliot presides over a fiasco in Gibraltar, but you don’t fire him, you keep him where you can see him. Shorty thinks he may want to go public, so you hire him too, although he’s a coke-head. Jeb wanted to go very public, and wouldn’t come aboard, so he had to be suicided. But what have I got to threaten you with? Fuck all. So why am I getting an offer I can’t refuse? It makes no sense to me. Maybe it does to you?’

  Establishing that Crispin prefers to keep his counsel, he rolls on:

  ‘So my reading of your situation would be this: Jeb’s death was a bridge too far, and whoever has been protecting you up till now is getting cold feet about protecting you in the future. You want me off the case because, for as long as I’m on it, I’m a danger to your comfort and safety. And actually that’s a good enough reason for me to stick with it. So do what you like with the recording. But my guess is you won’t do anything with it because you’re running scared.’

  *

  The world has gone into slow motion. For Crispin too? Or only for Toby? Rising to his feet, Crispin sadly assures Toby he’s got it all so, so wrong. But no hard feelings, and perhaps when Toby’s a few years older, he’ll understand the way the real world works. They avoid the embarrassment of shaking hands. And would Toby like a car home? No thank you. Toby would rather walk. And walk he does. Back down the O’Keeffe corridor with its terrazzo tiles, past the half-open doors with young men and women like himself sitting before their computers or bowed into their telephones. He receives his wristwatch, ballpoint pens and notebook from the polite men at the door, then strolls across the gravel circle and past the gatehouse through the open gates, with no sight of Elliot or Shorty or the Audi that brought him here, or of the chase car that followed it. He keeps walking. Somehow it is later than he thought. The afternoon sun is warm and kind, and the magnolias, as ever in St John’s Wood at this time of the year, are a perfect treat.

  *

  Toby never knew in any detail, then or afterwards, how he spent the next few hours, or how many of them there were. That he passed his life in review goes without saying. What else does a man do while he walks from St John’s Wood to Islington contemplating love, life and death and the probable end of his career, not to mention gaol?

  Emily would still be in surgery, by his calculation, and it was therefore too early to call her, and he didn’t know what he was going to say to her if he did, and anyway he had taken the precaution of leaving the silver burner at home, and he absolutely didn’t trust phone boxes, even if they worked.

  So he didn’t call Emily, and Emily later confirmed that he hadn’t.

  There is no doubt that he stopped at a couple of pubs, but only for the company of ordinary people, since in crisis or despair he refused to drink, and he had a sense of being in the grip of both conditions. A cash ticket later turned up in the pocket of his anorak, indicating that he had bought a pizza with extra cheese. But when and where he had bought it was not given, and he had no recollection of eating it.

  And for sure, wrestling with his disgust and anger, and determined as usual to reduce them to a manageable level, he gave due thought to Hannah Arendt’s concept of the banality of evil, and launched into a debate with himself about where Crispin fitted into her scheme of things. Was Crispin, in his own perception, merely one of society’s faithful servants, obeying market pressures? Maybe that was how he saw himself, but Toby didn’t. As far as Toby was concerned, Jay Crispin was your normal, rootless, amoral, plausible, half-educated, nicely spoken frozen adolescent in a bespoke suit, with an unappeasable craving for money, power and respect, regardless of where he got them from. So far, so good. He had met embryonic Crispins in every walk of life and every country where he had served: just never until now one who had made his mark as a trader in small wars.

  In a half-hearted effort to find excuses for Crispin, Toby even wondered whether, deep down, the man was just plain stupid. How else to explain the cock-up that was Operation Wildlife? And from there, he wandered off into an argument with Friedrich Schiller’s grandiose statement that human stupidity was what the gods fought in vain. Not so, in Toby’s opinion, and no excuse for anybody, whether god or man. What the gods and all reasonable humans fought in vain wasn’t stupidity at all. It was sheer, wanton, bloody indifference to anybody’s interests but their own.

  And that, so far as will ever be known, was where his mind was drifting as he entered his house, climbed the stairs to his flat, unlocked the door and reached for the light switch, only to have a bundle of wet rag shoved down his throat and his hands wrenched behind his back and bound with plastic strip, and possibly – though he could never be sure, he never saw or afterwards found it, and only remembered it, if at all, by its gluey smell – a piece of prisoner-quality sacking pulled over his head, as a prelude to the worst beating he could have imagined.

  Or perhaps – only an afterthought – the sacking was there to mark some sort of no-go area for his assailants, because the one part of his body they left intact turned out to be his face. And if there was any clue, then or later, as to who was administering the beating, it was the unfamiliar male voice with no identifiable regional accent saying ‘Don’t mark the cunt’ in a tone of self-assured, military command.

  The first blows were undoubtedly the most painful and the most surprising. When his assailants held him in the lock-grip, he thought his spine was going to snap, then that his neck was. And there was a period when they decided to strangle him, then changed their minds at the last moment.

  But it was the hail of blows to his stomach, kidneys, groin and then his groin again that seemed never to end, and for all he knew it continued after he had lost consciousness. But not before the same unidentified voice had breathed into his ear in the same tone of command:

  ‘Don’t think this is over, son. This is for appetizers. Remember that.’

  *

  They could have dumped him on the hall carpet or tossed him o
n the kitchen floor and left him there but, whoever they were, they had their standards. They needed to lay him out with the respectful care of morticians, pull off his trainers and help him out of his anorak, and make sure there was a jug of water and a tumbler beside him on the bedside locker.

  His wristwatch said five o’clock but it had been saying it for some while, so he supposed it had suffered collateral damage during the skirmish. The date was stuck between two numbers, and certainly Thursday was the day he’d fixed to meet Shorty, and therefore the day on which he’d been hijacked and driven to St John’s Wood, and perhaps – but who could be sure? – today was Friday, in which case Sally, his assistant, was going to wonder how long his wisdom tooth was going to be acting up. The darkness in the uncurtained window suggested night-time, but whether it was night-time just for him or everybody else as well seemed to be in the balance. His bed was coated with vomit and there was vomit on the floor, both old and recent. He also had a memory of half rolling, half crawling to the bathroom in order to vomit into the lavatory, only to discover, like so many intrepid mountaineers before him, that the journey down was worse than the journey up.

  The human and traffic sounds in the street below his window were turned low, but again he needed to know whether this was a general truth or one confined to him alone. Certainly the sounds he was getting were muted sounds, rather than the raucous evening variety – assuming that it was indeed evening. So the more rational solution might be: it was a grey dawn and he had been lying here for anything between, say, twelve to fourteen hours, dozing and vomiting or simply dealing with the pain, which was an activity in itself, unrelated to the passage of time.

  It was also the reason why he was only now, by stages, identifying and gradually locating the caterwauling that was issuing from beneath his bed. It was the silver burner howling at him. He had secreted it between the springs and the mattress before setting out to meet Shorty, and why on earth he’d left it switched on was another mystery to him, as it was apparently to the burner, because its howl was losing conviction and quite soon it wouldn’t have a howl at all.

  Which was why he found it necessary to rally all his remaining strength and roll himself off the bed and crash to the floor where, if in his mind only, he lay dying for a while before making a grab for the springs, then hooking a finger round them and pulling himself up with his left hand, while his right hand – which was numb and probably broken – raked around for the burner, found it and clutched it against his chest, at the same moment as his left hand let go and he thumped back on to the floor.

  After that it was only a matter of pressing green and saying ‘Hi’ with all the brightness he could muster. And when nothing came back and his patience ran out, or his energy did, he said:

  ‘I’m fine, Emily. A bit knackered, that’s all. Just don’t come round. Please. I’m toxic’ – by which he meant broadly that he was ashamed of himself; Shorty had been a washout; he had achieved nothing except the beating of a lifetime; he’d fucked up just like her father; and for all he knew the house was under surveillance and he was the last person on earth that she should be visiting, whether in her capacity as a doctor or anything else.

  Then as he rang off he realized that she couldn’t come anyway, because she didn’t know where he lived, he’d never mentioned it apart from saying Islington, and Islington covered quite a few square miles of dense real estate, so he was safe. And so was she, whether she liked it or not. He could switch the bloody thing off and doze, which he did, only to be woken again, not by the burner but by a thunderous hammering on the front door – done, he suspected, not by human hand but a heavy instrument – which stopped only to allow for Emily’s raised voice, sounding very like her mother’s.

  ‘I’m standing at your front door, Toby,’ she was saying, quite unnecessarily, for the second or third time now. ‘And if you don’t open it soon, I’m going to ask your downstairs neighbour to help me break into your flat. He knows I’m a doctor and he heard heavy thuds coming through the ceiling. Are you hearing me, Toby? I’m pressing the bell, but it’s not ringing so far as I can hear.’

  She was right. All the bell was emitting was a graceless burp.

  ‘Toby, can you please come to the door? Just answer, Toby. I really don’t want to break in.’ Pause. ‘Or have you got somebody with you?’

  It was the last of these questions that was too much for him, so he said ‘Coming’ and made sure the zip of his fly was closed before rolling off the bed again and half shuffling, half crawling down the passage on his left side, which was the relatively comfortable one.

  Reaching the door, he pulled himself into a semi-kneeling position long enough to get his key out of his pocket and into the lock and double-turn it with his left hand.

  *

  In the kitchen, a stern silence reigned. The bed sheets were turning quietly in the washing machine. Toby was sitting nearly upright in his dressing gown and Emily with her back to him was heating a tin of chicken soup she had fetched, along with her own prescriptions from the chemist.

  She had stripped him and bathed his naked body with professional detachment, noting without comment his grossly swollen genitals. She had listened to his heart, taken his pulse, run her hands over his abdomen, checked him for fractures and damaged ligaments, paused at the chequered lacerations round his neck where they had thought to strangle him and then thought better of it, put ice packs on his bruises and given him Paracetamol for his pain, and helped him limp along the corridor while she held his left arm round her neck and over her shoulder and with her right arm clutched his right hip.

  But until now, the only words they’d exchanged had been in the order of ‘Do please try to keep still, Toby’ or ‘This may hurt a bit’ and, more recently, ‘Give me your door key and stay exactly where you are till I come back.’

  Now she was asking the tough questions.

  ‘Who did this to you?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Do you know why they did it to you?’

  For appetizers, he thought. To warn me off. To punish me for being nosy and stop me being nosy in future. But it was all too woolly, and too much to say, so he said nothing.

  ‘Well, whoever did it must have used a knuckleduster,’ she pronounced, when she had got tired of waiting.

  ‘Maybe just rings on his fingers,’ he suggested, remembering Elliot’s hands on the steering wheel.

  ‘I shall need your permission before I call the police. Can I call them?’

  ‘No point.’

  ‘Why no point?’

  Because the police aren’t the solution, they’re part of the problem. But again that’s something you can’t easily put across, so best just let it go.

  ‘It’s very possible that you’re suffering internal bleeding of the spleen, which can be life-threatening,’ Emily continued. ‘I need to get you to a hospital for a scan.’

  ‘I’m fine. I’m in one piece. You should go home. Please. They may come back. Honestly.’

  ‘You are not in one piece, and you need treatment, Toby,’ she replied tartly, and the conversation might have continued along these unproductive lines had not the front doorbell chosen that moment to emit its croak from the rusted tin box above Emily’s head.

  She stopped stirring the soup and glanced up at the box, then enquiringly at Toby, who started to shrug, thought better of it.

  ‘Don’t answer it,’ he said.

  ‘Why not? Who is it?’

  ‘No one. Nobody good. Please.’

  And seeing her pick up his house keys from the draining board and start towards the kitchen door:

  ‘Emily. It’s my house. Just let it ring!’

  But it was ringing anyway: a second croak, longer than the first.

  ‘Is it a woman?’ she asked, still at the kitchen door.

  ‘There is no woman!’

  ‘I can’t hide, Toby. And I can’t be this afraid. Would you answer it if you were fit and I wasn’t here?’

&nb
sp; ‘You don’t know these people! Look at me!’

  But she refused to be impressed. ‘Your neighbour from downstairs probably wants to ask how you are.’

  ‘Emily, for Christ’s sake! This isn’t about good neighbours.’

  But she had gone.

  Eyes closed, he held his breath and listened.

  He heard his key turn, he heard her voice, then a much softer male voice, like a hushed voice in church, but not one that in his over-attentive state he recognized, although he felt he should.

  He heard the front door close.

  She’s stepped outside to talk to him.

  But who the hell is he? Has he pulled her outside? Are they coming back to apologize, or to finish the job? Or did they think they might have killed me by mistake, and Crispin has sent them to find out? In the rush of terror that has taken hold of him, all of it is possible.

  Still out there.

  What’s she doing?

  Does she think she’s fireproof?

  What have they done to her? Minutes like hours. Jesus Christ!

  The front door opening. Closing again. Slow, deliberate footsteps approaching down the corridor. Not hers. Definitely not Emily’s. Too heavy by half.

  They’ve grabbed her and now they’re coming for me!

  But they were Emily’s footsteps after all: Emily being all hospital and purposeful. By the time she reappeared, he had got up from his chair and was using the table to punt himself towards the kitchen drawer to find a carving knife. Then he saw her standing in the doorway, looking puzzled and holding a brown-paper parcel bound in string.

  ‘Who was it?’

  ‘I don’t know. He said you’ll know what it’s about.’

  ‘For fuck’s sake!’

  Grabbing the parcel, he turned his back on her – actually with the futile intention of protecting her in the event of an explosion – and set to work feverishly feeling the packet for detonators, timers, nails or whatever else they might have thought to add for maximum effect, very much in the manner in which he had approached Kit’s nocturnal letter, but with a greater sense of peril.