A Small Town in Germany

by John le Carré

  ‘Ever seen this key?’

  ‘Nope.’ He grinned affectionately. ‘One of Leo’s, was it? Screw anything in the old days, Leo would. Steadier now.’

  ‘Any names attached to that?’

  He continued staring at the key.

  ‘Try Myra Meadowes.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘She’s willing. She’s had one baby already. In London. They say half the drivers go through her every week.’

  ‘Did he ever mention a woman called Aickman? Someone he was going to marry?’

  Crabbe assumed an expression of puzzled recollection.

  ‘Aickman,’ he said. ‘Funny. That was one of the old lot. From Berlin. He did talk about her. When they worked with the Russkies. That’s it. She was another of those inbetweeners. Berlin, Hamburg, all that game. Stitched those bloody cushions for him. Care and attention.’

  ‘What was he doing with the Russians?’ Turner asked after a pause. ‘What work was it?’

  ‘Quadripartite, bi-partite … one of them. Berlin’s on its own, see. Different world, specially in those days. Island. Different sort of island.’ He shook his head. ‘Not like him,’ he added. ‘All that Communist kick. Not his book at all. Too bloody hard-nosed for all that balls.’

  ‘And this Aickman?’

  ‘Miss Brandt, Miss Etling and Miss Aickman.’

  ‘Who are they?’

  ‘Three dollies. In Berlin. Came out with them from England. Pretty as pictures, Leo said. Never seen girls like it. Never seen girls at all if you ask me. Emigré types going back to Germany. Join the Occupation. Same as Leo. Croydon airport, sitting on a crate, waiting for the plane, and these three dollies come along in uniform, waggling their tails. Miss Aickman, Miss Brandt and Miss Etling. Posted to the same unit. From then on he never looked back. Him and Praschko and another fellow. All went out together from England in forty-five. With these dollies. They made up a song about it: Miss Aickman, Miss Etling and Miss Brandt … drinking song, saucy rhymes. They sang it that night as a matter of fact. Going along in the car, happy as sandboys. Jesus.’

  He’d have sung it himself for two pins.

  ‘Leo’s girl was Aickman. His first girl. He’d always go back to her, that’s what he said. “There’ll never be another like the first one,” that’s what he said. “All the rest are imitations.” His very words. You know the way Huns talk. Introspective beggars.’

  ‘What became of her?’

  ‘Dunno, old boy. Fizzled away. What they all do, isn’t it? Grow old. Shrivel up. Whoopsadaisy.’ A piece of kidney fell from his fork and the gravy splashed on his tie.

  ‘Why didn’t he marry her?’

  ‘She took the other road, old boy.’

  ‘Which other road?’

  ‘She didn’t like him being English, he said. Wanted him to be a Hun again and face facts. Big on metaphysics.’

  ‘Perhaps he’s gone to find her.’

  ‘He always said he would one day. “I’ve drunk at a good few pools, Mickie,” he said. “But there’ll never be another girl like Aickman.” Still, that’s what we all say, isn’t it?’ He dived into the Moselle as if it were a refuge.

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘You married, old boy, by the by? Keep away from it.’ He shook his head. ‘It would be all right if I could manage the bedroom. But I can’t. It’s like a bloody grease-pot for me. I can’t make it.’ He sniggered. ‘Marry at fifty-five, my advice. Little sixteen-year-old dolly. Then they don’t know what they’re missing.’

  ‘Praschko was up there, was he? In Berlin? With the Russians and Aickman?’

  ‘Stable companions.’

  ‘What else did he tell you about Praschko?’

  ‘He was a Bolshie in those days. Nothing else.’

  ‘Was Aickman?’

  ‘Could be, old boy. Never said; didn’t interest him that much.’

  ‘Was Harting?’

  ‘Not Leo, old boy. Didn’t know his arse from his elbow where politics are concerned. Restful that was. Trout,’ he whispered. ‘I’d like trout next. Kidneys are just in between. If it’s on the secret vote, I mean.’

  The joke entertained him off and on for the remainder of the meal. Only once would he be drawn on the subject of Leo, and that was when Turner asked him whether he had had much to do with him in recent months.

  ‘Not bloody likely,’ Crabbe whispered.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘He was getting broody, old boy. I could tell. Sizing up for another crack at someone. Pugnacious little beast,’ he said, baring his teeth in a sudden grimace of alcoholic cramp. ‘He’d started leaving those buttons about.’

  He got back to the Adler at four; he was fairly drunk. The lift was occupied so he used the stairs. That’s it, he thought. That is the sweet end. He would go on drinking through the afternoon and he would drink on the plane and with any luck by the time he saw Lumley he would be speechless. The Crabbe answer: snails, kidneys, trout and Scotch and keep your head down while the big wheels roll over. As he reached his own floor he noticed vaguely that the lift had been wedged with a suitcase and he supposed the porter was collecting more luggage from someone’s bedroom. We’re the only lucky people in the place, he thought. We’re leaving. He tried to open the door to his room but the lock was jammed; he wrestled with the key but it wouldn’t give. He stepped back quite quickly when he heard the footsteps, but he didn’t really have much chance. The door was pulled open from inside. He had a glimpse of a pale round face and fair hair carefully combed back, a bland brow furrowed with anxiety; he saw the stitching of the leather as it moved down on him in slow motion and he wondered whether the stitches cut the scalp the way they cut the face. He felt the nausea strike him and his stomach fold, and the wooden club buffet at the back of his knees; he heard the soft surgeon’s voice calling from the darkness as the warm grass of the Yorkshire Dales prickled against his child’s face. He heard the taunting voice of Tony Willoughby, soft as velvet, clinging like a lover, saw his pianist’s hands drift over her white hips, and heard Leo’s music whining to God in every red-timber tabernacle of his own childhood. He smelt the smoke of the Dutch cigars, and there was Willoughby’s voice again offering him a hair-dryer: I’m only a temporary, Alan old boy, but there’s ten per cent off for friends of the family. He felt the pain again, the thudding as they began slapping him and he saw the wet black granite of the orphanage in Bournemouth and the telescope on Constitution Hill. ‘If there’s one thing I really hate,’ Lumley observed, ‘it’s a cynic in search of God.’ He had a moment’s total agony as they hit him in the groin, and as it slowly subsided he saw the girl who had left him drifting in the black streets of his own defiant solitude. He heard the screaming of Myra Meadowes as he broke her down, lie for lie, the scream as they took her from her Polish lover, and the scream as she parted from her baby; and he thought he might be crying out himself until he recognised the towel they had shoved into his mouth. He felt something cold and iron hard hit the back of his head and stay there like a lump of ice, he heard the door slam and knew he was alone; he saw the whole damned trail of the deceived and the uncaring; heard the fool voice of an English Bishop praising God and war; and fell asleep. He was in a coffin, a smooth cold coffin. On a marble slab with polished tiles and the glint of chrome at the far end of a tunnel. He heard de Lisle muttering to him in kindly moderation and Jenny Pargiter’s sobbing like the moan of every woman he had left; he heard the fatherly tones of Meadowes exhorting him to charity and the cheerful whistling of unencumbered people. Then Meadowes and Pargiter slipped away, lost to other funerals, and only de Lisle remained, and only de Lisle’s voice offered any comfort.

  ‘My dear fellow,’ he was saying, as he peered curiously downward, ‘I dropped in to say goodbye, but if you’re going to take a bath, you might at least take off that dreadful suit.’

  ‘Is it Thursday?’

  De Lisle had taken a napkin from the rail and was soaking it under the hot tap.

  ‘Wednesday.
Wednesday as ever was. Cocktail time.’

  He bent over him and began gently dabbing the blood from his face.

  ‘That football field. Where you saw him. Where he took Pargiter. Tell me how I get there.’

  ‘Keep still. And don’t talk or you’ll wake the neighbours.’

  With the gentlest possible movements he continued touching away the caked blood. Freeing his right hand Turner cautiously felt in the pocket of his jacket for the gunmetal key. It was still there.

  ‘Have you ever seen this before?’

  ‘No. No, I haven’t. Nor was I in the greenhouse at 3 a.m. on the morning of the second. But how like the Foreign Office,’ he said, standing back and critically surveying his handiwork, ‘to send a bull to catch a matador. You won’t mind my reclaiming my dinner jacket, will you?’

  ‘Why did Bradfield ask me?’

  ‘Ask you what?’

  ‘To dinner. To meet Siebkron. Why did he invite me on Tuesday?’

  ‘Brotherly love; what else?’

  ‘What’s in that despatch box that Bradfield’s so frightened of?’

  ‘Poisonous snakes.’

  ‘That key wouldn’t open it?’

  ‘No.’

  De Lisle sat down on the edge of the bath. ‘You shouldn’t be doing this,’ he said. ‘I know what you’ll tell me: somebody had to get their hands dirty. Just don’t expect me to be pleased it’s you. You’re not just somebody: that’s your trouble. Leave it to the people who were born with blinkers.’ His grey, tender eyes were shadowed with concern. ‘It is totally absurd,’ he declared. ‘People crack up every day under the strain of being saints. You’re cracking up under the strain of being a pig.’

  ‘Why doesn’t he go? Why does he hang around?’

  ‘They’ll be asking that about you tomorrow.’

  Turner was stretched out on de Lisle’s long sofa. He held a whisky in his hand and his face was covered in yellow antiseptic from de Lisle’s extensive medicine chest. His canvas bag lay in a corner of the room. De Lisle sat at his harpsichord, not playing it but stroking the keys. It was an eighteenth-century piece, satinwood, and the top was bleached by tropical suns.

  ‘Do you take that thing everywhere?’

  ‘I had a violin once. It fell to pieces in Leopoldville. The glue melted. It’s awfully hard,’ he observed dryly, ‘to pursue culture when the glue melts.’

  ‘If Leo’s so damn clever, why doesn’t he go?’

  ‘Perhaps he likes it here. He’d be the first, I must say.’

  ‘And if they’re so damned clever, why don’t they take him away?’

  ‘Perhaps they don’t know he’s on the loose.’

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘I said perhaps they don’t know he’s run for it. I’m not a spy, I’m afraid, but I am human and I do know Leo. He’s extremely perverse. I can’t imagine for a moment he would do exactly what they told him. If there is a “they”, which I doubt. He wasn’t a natural servant.’

  Turner said, ‘I try all the time to force him into the mould. He won’t fit.’

  De Lisle struck a couple of notes with his finger.

  ‘Tell me, what do you want him to be? A goodie or a baddie? Or do you just want the freedom of the search? You want something, don’t you? Because anything’s better than nothing. You’re like those beastly students: you can’t stand a vacuum.’

  Turner had closed his eyes and was lost in thought.

  ‘I expect he’s dead. That would be very macabre.’

  ‘He wasn’t dead this morning, was he?’ Turner said.

  ‘And you don’t like him to be in limbo. It annoys you. You want him to land or take off. There are no shades for you, are there? I suppose that’s the fun of searching for extremists: you search for their convictions, is that it?’

  ‘He’s still on the run,’ Turner continued. ‘Who’s he running from? Us or them?’

  ‘He could be on his own.’

  ‘With fifty stolen box files? Oh sure. Sure.’

  De Lisle examined Turner over the top of the harpsichord.

  ‘You complement one another. I look at you and I think of Leo. You’re Saxon. Big hands, big feet, big heart and that lovely reason that grapples with ideals. Leo’s the other way round. He’s a performer. He wears our clothes, uses our language but he’s only half tamed. I suppose I’m on your side, really: you and I are the concert audience.’ He closed the harpsichord. ‘We’re the ones who glimpse, and reach, and fall back. There’s a Leo in all of us but he’s usually dead by the time we’re twenty.’

  ‘What are you then?’

  ‘Me? Oh, reluctantly, a conductor.’ Standing up, he carefully locked the keyboard with a small brass key from his chain. ‘I can’t even play the thing,’ he said, tapping the bleached lid with his elegant fingers. ‘I tell myself I will one day; I’ll take lessons or get a book. But I don’t really care: I’ve learnt to live with being half-finished. Like most of us.’

  ‘Tomorrow’s Thursday,’ Turner said. ‘If they don’t know he’s defected, they’ll be expecting him to turn up, won’t they?’

  ‘I suppose so,’ de Lisle yawned. ‘But then they know where to go, don’t they, whoever they are? And you don’t. That is something of a drawback.’

  ‘It might not be.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘We know where you saw him, at least, that Thursday afternoon, don’t we, when he was supposed to be at the Ministry? Same place as he took Pargiter. Seems quite a hunting-ground for him.’

  De Lisle stood very still, the keychain still in his hand.

  ‘It’s no good telling you not to go, I suppose?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Asking you? You’re acting against Bradfield’s instructions.’

  ‘Even so.’

  ‘And you’re sick. All right. Go and look for your untamed half. And if you do find that file, we shall expect you to return it unopened.’

  And that, quite suddenly, was an order.

  14

  Thursday’s Child

  The weather on the plateau was stolen from other seasons and other places. It was a sea wind from March which sang in the wire netting, bending the tufts of coarse grass and crashing into the forest behind him; and if some mad aunt had planted a monkey-puzzle in the sandy earth, Turner could have hopped straight down the path and caught the trolley-bus to Bournemouth Square. It was the frost of November whose icy pipes encased the bracken stems; for there the cold had hidden from the wind and it gripped like arctic water at his ankles; the frost of a stone crevice on a north face, when only fear will set your hands to work, and life is treasured because it is won. The last strips of an Oxford sun lay bravely dying on the empty playing-field; and the sky was a Yorkshire evening in autumn, black and billowing and fringed with grime. The trees were curved from childhood, bent by the blustering wind, Mickie Crabbe’s boyhood bent at the taps in the washroom, and when the gusts had gone they waited still, backs arched for the next assault.

  The cuts on his face were burning raw and his pale eyes were bright with sleepless pain. He waited, staring down the hill. Far below to his right lay the river, and for once the wind had silenced it, and the barges called in vain. A car was climbing slowly towards him; a black Mercedes, Cologne registration, woman driver; and did not slow down as it passed. On the other side of the wire, a new hut was shuttered and padlocked. A rook had settled on the roof and the wind tugged at its feathers. A Renault, French diplomatic registration, woman driver, one male passenger: Turner noted the number in his black book. His script was stiff and childish, and the letters came to him unnaturally. He must have hit back after all, for two knuckles on his right hand were badly cut, as if he had punched an open mouth and caught the front teeth. Harting’s handwriting was neat, rounding the rough corners, but Turner’s was big and downright, promising collision.

  ‘You are both movers, you and Leo,’ de Lisle had said some time last night, as they sat in their deep armchairs. ‘Bonn is stationary but
you are movers … You are fighting one another, but it is you against us … The opposite of love is not hate but apathy … You must come to terms with apathy.’

  ‘For Christ’s sake,’ Turner complained.

  ‘This is your stop,’ de Lisle had said, opening the car door for him. ‘And if you’re not back by tomorrow morning I shall tell the coastguards.’

  He had bought a spanner in Bad Godesberg, a monkey wrench, heavy at the head, and it lay like a lead weight against his hip. A Volkswagen bus, dark grey, Registration SU, full of children, stopping at the changing hut. Their noise came at him suddenly, a flock of birds racing with the wind, a tattered jingle of laughter and complaint. Someone blew a whistle. The sun hit them low down, like torch beams shining along a corridor. The hut swallowed them. ‘I have never known anyone,’ de Lisle had cried in despair, ‘make such a meal of his disadvantages.’

  He drew back quickly behind the tree. One Opel Rekord; two men. Registration Bonn. The spanner nudged him as he wrote. The men were wearing hats and overcoats and were professionally without expression. The side windows were of smoked glass. The car continued, but at a walking pace. He saw their blank blond faces turned towards him, twin moons in the artificial dark. Your teeth? Turner wondered. Was it your teeth I knocked in? I can’t tell you apart. Trust you to come to the ball. All the way up the hill, they could not have touched ten miles an hour. A van passed, followed by two lorries. Somewhere a clock chimed; or was it a school bell? Or Angelus, or Compline, or sooty sheep in the Dales, or the ring of the ferry from the river? He would never hear it again; yet there is no truth, as Mr Crail would say, that cannot be confirmed. No, my child; but the sins of others are a sacrifice to God. Your sacrifice. The rook had left the roof. The sun had gone. A little Citroën was wandering into sight. A deux chevaux, dirty as fog, with one bashed wing, one illegible number plate, one driver hidden in the shadow, and one headlight flashing on and off and one horn blaring for the hunt. The Opel had disappeared. Hurry, moons, or you will miss His coming. The wheels jerk like dislocated limbs as the little car turns off the road and bumps towards him over the frozen mud ruts of the timber track, the pert tail rocking on its axle. He hears the blare of dance music as the door opens, and his mouth is dry from the tablets, and the cuts on his face are a screen of twigs. One day, when the world is free, his fevered mind assured him, clouds will detonate as they collide and God’s angels will fall down dazed for the whole world to look at. Silently he dropped the spanner back into his pocket.