The Secret Pilgrim

by John le Carré

  And that, although in reality I was pursuing quite other goals and people among my eastward journey, all of them in retrospect seem to have been stages on my journey to him. I can put it no other way. Hansen in his Cambodian jungle was my Kurtz at the heart of darkness. And everything that happened to me on the way was a preparation for our meeting. Hansen’s was the voice I was waiting to hear. Hansen held the answer to the questions I did not know I was asking. Outwardly, I was my stolid, moderate, pipesmoking, decent self, a shoulder for weaker souls to rest their heads on. Inside, I felt a rampant incomprehension of my useless-ness; a sense that, for all my striving, I had failed to come to grips with life; that in struggling to give freedom to others, I had found none for myself. At my lowest ebb, I saw myself as ridiculous, a hero in the style not of Buchan but of Quixote.

  I took to writing down sardonic versions of my life, so that when, for instance, I reviewed the episodes I have described to you this far, I gave them picaresque titles that emphasised their futility: the Panda—I safeguard our Middle Eastern interests! Ben—I run to earth a British defector! Bella—I make the ultimate sacrifice! Teodor—I take part in a grand deception! Jerzy—I play the game to the end! Though with Jerzy, I had to admit, a positive purpose had been served, even if it was as shortlived as most intelligence, and as irrelevant to the human forces that have now engulfed his nation.

  Like Quixote, I had set out in life vowing to check the flow of evil. Yet in my lowest moments I was beginning to wonder whether I had become a contributor to it. But I still looked to the world to provide me with the chance to make my contribution— and I blamed it for not knowing how to use me.

  To understand this, you should know what has happened to me after Munich. Jerzy, whatever else he did to me, brought me a sort of prestige, and the Fifth Floor decided to invent a job for me as roving operational fixer, sent out on short assignments “to appraise, and where possible exploit opportunities outside the remit of the local Station”—thus my brief, signed and returned to maker.

  Looking back, I realise that the constant travel this entailed— Central America one week, Northern Ireland the next, Africa, the Middle East, Africa again—soothed the restlessness that was stalking me, and that Personnel in all likelihood knew this, for I had recently embarked on a senseless love affair with a girl called Monica, who worked in the Service’s Industrial Liaison Section. I had decided I needed an affair; I saw her in the canteen and cast her in the part. It was as banal as that. One night it was raining, and as I started to drive home, I saw her standing at a number 23 bus stop. Banality made flesh. I took her to her flat, I took her to her bed, I took her to dinner and we tried to work out what we had done, and came up with the convenient solution that we had fallen in love. It served us well for several months, until tragedy abruptly called me to my senses. By a mercy, I was back in London briefing myself for my next mission when word came that my mother was failing. By an act of divine ill taste, I was in bed with Monica when I took the call. But at least I was able to be present for the event, which was lengthy, but unexpectedly serene.

  Nevertheless, I found myself unprepared for it. Somehow I had taken for granted that, in the same way that I had managed to negotiate myself round awkward hurdles in the past, I would do the same in the case of my mother’s death. I could not have been more mistaken. Very few conspiracies, Smiley once remarked, survive contact with reality. And so it was with the conspiracy that I had made with myself to let my mother’s death slip past me as a timely and necessary release from pain. I had not taken into my calculations that the pain could be my own.

  I was orphaned and elated both at once. I can describe it no other way. My father had long been dead. Without my realising it, my mother had done duty for both parents. In her death I saw the loss, not only of my childhood, but of most of my adulthood as well. At last I stood unencumbered before life’s challenges, yet many of them were already behind me—fudged, missed or botched. I was free to love at last, but whom? Not, I am afraid, Monica, however much I might protest the contrary and expect the reality to follow. Neither Monica nor my marriage offered me the magic it was henceforth my duty as a survivor to pursue. And when I looked at myself in the mirror of the undertaker’s rose-tinted lavatory after my night’s vigil, I was horrified by what I saw. It was the face of a spy branded by his own deception.

  Have you seen it too, around you? On you? That face? In my case it was so much my everyday companion that I had ceased to notice it until the shock of death brought it home to me. We smile, but our withholding makes our smile false. When we are exhilarated, or drunk—or, even as I am told, make love—the reserve does not dissolve, the gyroscope stays vertical, the monitory voice reminds us of our calling. Until gradually our very withholding becomes so strident it is almost a security risk by itself. So that today—if I go to a reunion, say, or we have a Sarratt old-boys’ night—I can actually look round the room and see how the secret stain has come out in every one of us. I see the overbright face or the underlit one, but inside each I see the remnants of a life withheld. I hear the hoot of supposedly abandoned laughter and I don’t have to mark down the source of it to know that nothing has been abandoned—not its owner, nor its interior restrictions, nothing. In my younger days, I used to think it was just the inhibited British ruling classes who became that person. “They were born into captivity and had no option from then on,” I would tell myself as I listened to their unconvincing courtesies, and returned their good-chap smiles. But, as only half a Briton, I had exempted myself from their misfortune—until that day in the undertaker’s pink-tiled lavatory when I saw that the same shadow that falls across us all had fallen across me.

  From that day on, I now believe, I saw only the horizon. I am starting too late! I thought. And from so far back! Life was to be searched, or nothing! But it was the fear that it was nothing that drove me forward. That’s how I see it now. And so, please, must you see it, in the fragmented recollections that belong to this surreal passage of my life. In the eyes of the man I had become, every encounter was an encounter with myself. Every stranger’s confession was my own, and Hansen’s the most accusing—and therefore, ultimately, the most consoling. I buried my mother, I said goodbye to Monica and Mabel. The next day I departed for Beirut. Yet even that simple departure was attended by a disconcerting episode.

  To brief myself for my mission, I had been sharing a room with a rather clever man called Giles Latimer, who had made a corner for himself in what was known as the “Mad Mullah department,” studying the intricate and seemingly indecypherable web of Muslim fundamentalist groups operating out of Lebanon. The notion so beloved of the amateur terror industry that these bodies are all part of a super plot is nonsense. If only it were so, for then there might be some way to get at them! As it is, they slip about, grouping and regrouping like drops of water on a wet wall, and they are about as easy to pin down.

  But Giles, who was an Arabist and a distinguished bridge player, had come as near to achieving the impossible as any one was likely to, and my job was to sit at his feet in order to prepare myself for my mission. He was tall, angular and woolly. He was of my intake. His boyish manner was given extra youthfulness by the redness of his cheeks, though this was actually the consequence of clusters of tiny broken blood vessels. He was indefatigably, painfully gentlemanly, forever opening doors and leaping to his feet for women. In the spring weather I twice saw him get drenched to the skin on account of his habit of lending his umbrella to whoever was proposing to venture out of doors without one. He was rich but frugal, and a thoroughly good man, with a thoroughly good wife, who organised Service bridge drives and remembered the names of the junior staff and their families. Which made it all the more bizarre when his files started disappearing.

  It was I, inadvertently, who first noticed the phenomenon. I was tracking a German girl called Britta on her odyssey through the terrorist training camps in the Shuf Mountains, and I requested a contingent file which contained sensitive
intercept material about her. The material was American and limited by a subscription list, but when I had gone through the rigmarole of signing myself in, nobody could find it. Nominally it was marked to Giles, but so was almost everything, because Giles was Giles and his name was on every list around.

  But Giles knew nothing of it. He remembered reading it, he could quote from it; he thought he had passed it on to me. It must have gone to the Fifth Floor, he said, or back to Registry. Or somewhere.

  So the file was posted missing and the Registry bloodhounds were informed, and everything ran along normally for a couple of days until the same thing happened again, though this time it was Giles’s own secretary who started the hunt when Registry called in all three volumes on a misty group called the Brothers of the Prophet, supposedly based in Damour.

  Once again, Giles knew nothing: he had neither seen nor touched them. The Registry bloodhounds showed him his signature on the receipt. He flatly disowned it. And when Giles denied something, you didn’t feel like challenging him. As I say, he was a man of transparent rectitude.

  By now, the hunt was up in earnest and inventories were being taken left and right. Registry was in its last days before computerisation, and could still find what it was looking for, or know for sure that it was lost. Today somebody would shake his head and phone for an engineer.

  What Registry discovered was that thirty-two files marked out to Giles were missing. Twenty-one of them were standard top secret, five had higher gradings and six were of a category called RETAIN, which meant, I am afraid, that nobody of strong pro-Jewish sentiments should be admitted as a signatory. Parse that how you will. It was a squalid limitation and there were few of us who were not embarrassed by it. But this was the Middle East.

  My first intimation of the scale of the crisis came from Personnel. It was a Friday morning. Personnel always like the shelter of the weekend when he was about to wield his axe.

  “Has Giles been well lately, Ned?” he asked me, with old boy intimacy.

  “Perfectly,” I said.

  “He’s a Christian, isn’t he? Christian sort of chap. Pious.”

  “I believe so.”

  “Well, I mean we all are in a way, but he is a heavy sort of Christian, would you say, Ned? What’s your opinion?”

  “We’ve never discussed it? “Are you?”

  “No.”

  “Would you say, for example, he could be sympathetic to something like—say—the British-Israelite sect, or one of those sort of things, at all? Nothing against them, mind. Every man to his convictions, me.”

  “Giles is very orthodox, very down the middle, I am sure. He’s some sort of lay dignitary at his parish church. I believe he gives the odd Lenten Address, and that’s about it.”

  “That’s what I’ve got down here,” Personnel complained, tapping his knuckles on a closed file. “That’s the picture I’ve got of him exactly, Ned. So what’s up? Not always easy, my job, you know. Not always pleasant at all.

  “Why don’t you ask him yourself?”

  “Oh I know, I know, I must. Unless you would, of course. You could take him out to lunch—my expense, obviously. Feel his bones. Tell me what you think.”

  “No,” I said.

  His old-boy manner gave way to something a lot harder. “I thought you’d say that. I worry about you sometimes, Ned. You’re putting yourself about with the women and you’re a touch stubborn for your health. It’s the Dutch blood in you. Well, keep your mouth shut. That’s an order.”

  In the end it was Giles who took me out to lunch. Probably Personnel had played the game both ways, pitching some tale to Giles in reverse. Whether he had or not, at twelve-thirty Giles sprang suddenly to his feet and said, “To hell with it, Ned. It’s Friday. Come on, I’ll give you lunch. Haven’t had a pissy lunch for years.”

  So we went to the Travellers’, and sat at a table by the window and we drank a bottle of Sancerre very fast. And suddenly Giles began talking about a liaison trip he’d made recently to the FBI in New York. He kicked off quite normally. Then his voice seemed to get stuck on one note, and his eyes got fixed on something only he could see. I put it down to the wine at first. Giles didn’t look like a drinker and didn’t drink like one. Yet there was great conviction in the way he spoke and—as he continued—a visionary intensity.

  “Peculiar chaps actually, the Americans, Ned, you want to watch out for them. One doesn’t think they’re after one at first. One’s hotel, for instance. You can always read the clues in a hotel. Too much smiling when you sign in. Too much interest in your luggage. They’re watching you. Damned great highrise greenhouse. Swimming pool on the top floor. You can look down on the helicopters going up the river. ‘Welcome, Mr. Lambert, and have a nice day, sir.’ I was using Lambert. I always do for America. The fourteenth floor they’d put me on. I’m a methodical chap. Always have been. Shoetrees and that kind of thing. Can’t help it. My father was the same. Shoes here, shirts there. Socks there. Suits in a certain order. We never have lightweight suits, do we, the English? You think they’re lightweight. You choose lightweight. Your tailor tells you they’re lightweight. ‘Lightest we’ve got, sir. We don’t go any lighter.’ You’d think they’d have learned by now, the amount of American business they do. But they haven’t. Cheers.”

  He drank and I drank with him. I poured him some mineral water. He was sweating.

  “Next day I come back to the hotel. Meetings all day long. Lot of trying to like each other. And I do, I mean they’re nice chaps. Just— well, different. Different attitudes. Carry guns. Want results. There can’t be any, though, can there? We all know that. The more fanatics you kill, the more there are of them. I know that, they don’t. My father was an Arabist too, you know.”

  I said I didn’t. I said, “Tell me about him.” I wanted to deflect him. I felt I would feel much better if he talked about his father instead of the hotel.

  “So I walk in and they hand me the key. ‘Hey, hang on,’ I say. ‘This isn’t floor fourteen. This is floor twenty-one. Mistake.’ I smile, naturally. Anyone can make a mistake. It’s a woman this time. Very strong-looking woman. ‘It is not mistake, Mr. Lambert. You’re on the twenty-first floor. You room is 2109.’ ‘No, no,’ I say. ‘It’s 1409. Look here.’ I had this identity card they give you somewhere and I looked for it. Turned out my pockets while she watched, but couldn’t find it. ‘Look,’ I said. ‘Believe me. I have that kind of memory. My room is 1409.’ She gets out the guest list, shows it to me. Lambert, 2109. I go up in the lift, unlock the room, it’s all there. Shoes here. Shirts there. Socks there. Suits in the same order. Everything where I’d put it in the other room down on the fourteenth floor. Know what they’d done?”

  Again I said I didn’t.

  “Photographed it. Polaroid.”

  “Why would they do that?”

  “They wanted to mike me—2109 was miked, 1409 was clean. No good to them, so they moved me up. They thought I was an Arab spy.”

  “Why would they think that?”

  “Because of my father. He was a Lawrence man. They knew that. They’d decided. That’s what they do. Photograph your room.”

  I scarcely remember the rest of lunch. I don’t remember what we ate or what else we drank or anything at all. I have a recollection of Giles extolling Mabel at great length as the perfect Service wife, but perhaps that was my conscience. All I really remember is the two of us side by side in Giles’s room back at Head Office, and Personnel standing in front of Giles’s steel cupboard with the door removed, and the thirty-two missing files crammed higgledypiggledy into the shelves—all the files Giles hadn’t been able to cope with while he was having what Smiley called his “Force Twelve nervous breakdown” in place.

  And the reason for it, as I learned later? Giles too had found his Monica. What had unhinged him, ostensibly, was his passion for a twenty-year-old girl in his village. His love for her, his guilt and despair had dictated that he could no longer function. He had continued going throug
h the day’s motions—naturally, he was a soldier—but his mind wouldn’t play anymore. It had acquired its own preoccupations, even if he wouldn’t own to them.

  What else had unhinged him, I leave that to you, and to our in-house shrinks who seem to be daily gaining ground. Something to do, perhaps, with the gap between our dreams and our realities. Something to do with the gap between what Giles longed for when he was young, and what he’d got now that he was nearly old. And the hard truth was, Giles had frightened me. I felt he had gone ahead of me down the road I myself was treading. I felt it as I drove to the airport; I felt it on the plane while I thought about my mother. And downed several in-flight whiskies in order not to feel it more.

  I was still feeling it as I set out my own meagre wardrobe in Room 607 at the Commodore Hotel, Beirut, and the telephone began ringing a few inches from my head. As I picked up the receiver, I had a wayward fancy I was going to hear Ahmed at the front desk telling me I had been allocated a new room on floor twenty-one. I was wrong. Surreal episode number two had just announced itself.

  Shooting had started, semi-automatic on the move. Most likely a bunch of kids in a Japanese pickup hosing down the neighbourhood with AK 47s. It was one of those seasons in Beirut when you could set your watch by the first excitement of the evening. But I had never minded too much about the shooting. Shooting has a logic, if a haphazard one. It’s directed at you, or away from you. My personal phobia was car bombs—never knowing, as you hurried along a pavement or dawdled in the sweating, crawling traffic, whether a parked car was going to take out the entire block with one huge heave, and leave you in such tiny shreds that there was nothing worth a body bag, let alone a burial. The thing you noticed about car bombs—I mean afterwards—was shoes. People blown clean out of them, but the shoes intact. So that even after the bits of body had been picked out and taken away, there was still the odd pair or two of wearable shoes among the broken glass and smashed false teeth and shreds of someone’s suit. A little machine-gun fire, like now, or the odd hand-held rocket, didn’t trouble me as much as it did some people.