Absolute Friends

by John le Carré

  “Then money may play a discreet part in your motivation. My masters will be reassured. Ideology without greed embarrasses them. Do you covet the beautiful companion we provided for you today, or do you intend to remain stubbornly faithful to your wife?”

  Mundy must have spoken up for marriage, because Sasha is already withdrawing his offer of the beautiful interpreter.

  “It is immaterial. A dalliance would place you more firmly in my masters’ grasp, but we can do without it. You will insist on working to me exclusively, however, Teddy. You too will be a one-man dog. It is said by one of your English writers that with double agents one never knows whether one is getting the fat or the lean. I shall supply Mr. Arnold with the lean. In return you and he will supply Comrade Sasha with the fat.”

  “How on earth did you get here, Sasha? Why do they trust you? I don’t understand.” In a dream, one asks the questions too late, with no expectation of a reply.

  “Did you have an opportunity to visit Buchenwald concentration camp during your stay in Weimar?”

  “It was offered but there wasn’t time.”

  “And just eight kilometers up the road. What a pity. In addition to Goethe’s celebrated beech tree, the camp’s crematorium is particularly noteworthy. You didn’t even have to be dead to be burned in it. Did you know the Russians kept the camp running after they liberated it from fascism?”

  “I don’t think I did.”

  “Oh yes. And provided us with a fine example of socialist realism while they were about it. We call it Buchenwald Two. They brought in their own prisoners and treated them much as their predecessors had done before them. Their victims weren’t all Nazis by any means. Most were social democrats and other anti-Party elements who wished to revive capitalism and restore the rule of the bourgeoisie. Tyranny is like the electric wiring in an old house. A tyrant dies, the new tyrant takes possession, and all he has to do is drop the switch. Do you not agree?”

  Mundy supposes he does.

  “The British Council is a hive of antisocialist propaganda, I hear, a factory for counterrevolutionary lies. I am shocked that you should be associated with it.”

  In a dream, protests are futile, but we make them all the same. “That’s nonsense! How can capsule Shakespeare be counterrevolutionary?”

  “Never underrate our paranoia, Teddy. You will soon be a vital tool in the people’s constant struggle against ideological subversion. A little imagination on the part of Mr. Arnold, and you will realize that your poor Council exists only to provide cover for the perpetrators of antiproletarian sabotage. I hear poor Macbeth crying his last. I shall see you at the reception. Will you remember to be astonished?”

  An elderly London bus barging its way through peaceful Communist countryside, belching out offensive Western rock music and diesel fumes and flaunting crazy-daisies and colored balloons, is asking to be arrested, whether or not a two-hundred-pound Valkyrie with her hair in a twisted loaf is sitting beside you on the box seat. Every village they pass through, old people scowl and press their hands to their ears and kids leap around and wave as if the circus has come to town. The exhaust pipe must be stoved or else it’s the muffler, because the engine’s din has gone up several decibels—which perhaps explains why a police car with its lights on has been following the bus for the last half hour and a police motorcycle is dawdling out ahead of it. Any moment now, thinks Mundy, we’re going to be pulled over and charged with about fifteen offenses under the Workers’ Paradise Transport Act, including possession of a lovesick Polish actor rolled up in the backdrop on the roof, a pottery box full of unopenable walnuts, and a pack of unexposed Kodak film to be handed to the head of British Intelligence immediately on arrival in West Berlin.

  They are driving across drab yellow fields. The only visual relief is the occasional cluster of broken-down farmhouses, decaying churches, or a brutalist Soviet-style pylon positioned to cause maximum offense to the eye. Steve, their toothless driver, is at the helm, Mundy sits in his usual place on the box beside him with the passports and visas and permits and insurance papers in an attaché case wedged between his knees. Erna sits next to him. From the back of the bus come bursts of jolly singing that die without explanation until Sally the Needle strikes up on her squeezebox to get everybody going again. In the mirror above him he can watch the blue fishtail of the backdrop flapping in the rear window, and the trailer bobbing along behind it. And a hundred yards behind the trailer he can watch the police car keeping the same distance all the time, slowing down when we slow down and putting on the speed if we get a straight stretch. When the bus goes into a corner he hears the backdrop creaking on its moorings. When he clambers up to the top deck to check you’re all okay up here, he tries not to look too hard at the brown-paper bundles in the luggage racks and the muscled silver arm of the socialist worker’s statuette sticking out of its wrapping.

  “Does everyone around here get a police escort?” he asks Erna, resuming his place beside her.

  “Only if they are very distinguished, Ted.”

  Mundy has taken refuge in his own thoughts. The staged reunion of two old friends at the official farewell reception passed off exactly as Sasha forecast. They catch sight of each other at the same moment, their eyes widen simultaneously. Sasha is the first to find the words to express his astonishment: “Good God—Teddy!—my dear friend—the fellow who saved my life—whatever are you doing here in Weimar?” And Mundy, looking suitably confused, which in the circumstances is not a problem to him, comes back with: “Sasha—my old cellmate. Of all the people—this is plain daft—explain!” After the embraces and the backslapping, the pained separation is just as smooth, with its ostentatious exchange of addresses and telephone numbers and imprecise talk of a get-together in the near future. Then back to the hostel with the troupe, to toss on his iron school bed and listen to the whisperings of his wards through the paper-thin walls and hope to goodness nobody else is listening because how many times has he told them already that careless talk costs lives?

  All night he lies awake turning the unanswerable questions round and round in his head. When he tries to sleep he dreams of Jan the Pole slipping a hand grenade into the bus’s gas tank. When he stays awake, his nightmares are worse. If Sasha is to be believed, their Polish stowaway and the packages will get through and that will be the end of it. But is he to be believed? And assuming he is to be believed, is the game he is playing going to work? At six o’clock while it’s still dark Mundy sits bolt upright and bangs on the partition walls to either side of him and yells, “All right, gang, wakey-wakey! To hell with breakfast and let’s get this show on the road!” in the sort of gung-ho military voice he would never normally use. But what he means is clear to all of them: we smuggle the little bastard out exactly the way we planned it, and we do it now and get it over. For his operational team he has selected Lexham, Viola and Sally the Needle.

  “The rest of you act natural, arse around and try to look relaxed,” he has told them, none too kindly.

  Whatever you say, Pop.

  At crack of dawn, with Viola leading, Mundy, Sally and Lexham cross the courtyard, climb to the upper deck of the bus and shake Jan from his slumbers. They strip him naked and smear him from head to toe with axle grease. The aim is to confuse the sniffer dogs. Viola, you do the close work for us. Next they wind him in mothball-scented stage curtains and pack layers of kapok over his heart and pulse points. Crossing into East Germany, Mundy remembers seeing frontier guards armed with earphones and oversized stethoscopes for listening to suspicious objects. When they’ve finished wrapping him, Mundy presses his ear against the place where Jan’s heart should be and hears nothing. Probably hasn’t got one, he tells Sally under his breath. By now their stowaway looks like an Egyptian mummy. They have given him an airhole, but in case it closes by mistake Mundy shoves a piece of metal tubing in his mouth before rolling him up in a dusty carpet.

  They are still on the upper deck and Jan is no longer Jan but a carpet standing
on its end. Half toppling and half carrying him, they feed him down the staircase to the courtyard, where the blue-painted canvas backdrop is spread out on the ground awaiting them. It has veins of red puddle water running over it, and its trawlerlike stink of size and fish-glue hits them before they reach it. Erna has yet to arrive. They told her seven-thirty, and it’s only quarter past. While Viola looks on, Mundy and Lexham dump the carpet with the boy inside it along one edge of the backdrop, and roll. And keep on rolling until Jan and the carpet are inside a thirty-foot blue sausage which, to sailorlike cries of “There she blows” and “Heave, lads, heave,” Mundy and a bunch of willing helpers manhandle onto the roof of the bus, then strap lengthwise down the rack with its tail drooping over the end.

  To the shriek of worn brakes and bald tires, black smoke fills the window on Mundy’s left. Ten yards short of a red-and-white boom the psychedelic bus staggers to a halt. They have reached their first checkpoint. Not your five-star number, but the country version: half a dozen armed Vopos, a sniffer dog, a grüne Minna, the police motorcyclist who till now was riding out ahead of them, and the police car with its lights on that’s been following them since Weimar. Mundy bounds from the bus, briefcase in hand. Erna, serene on the box seat, remains aloof to all of it.

  “Gentlemen—Colonel—comrades—a very good day to you all!” he cries facetiously. But he keeps his distance because the colonel who is actually a captain is, like Sasha, short of stature, and Mundy doesn’t want to fan his insecurity by towering over him.

  The guards board the bus, offer gruff salutations to Erna and scowl at the festively dressed girls in their funny hats before ordering everyone out while they rip the tarpaulins off the trailer, rummage through suitcases, and leave everything for the hated Westerners to clear up. The captain broods over the passports, hunting for irregularities while he fires questions at Mundy in a thick Silesian accent. How long have you been in Weimar, comrade? When did you arrive in the GDR, comrade? How long did you spend in Czecho, Hungary, Romania, Poland? He compares Mundy’s answers with the stamps in the passports, eyes the psychedelic bus and, more severely, the vamped-up girls. He glowers up at the blue sausage on the roof with its balloons and streamers, and at the lump that has developed in the middle, which to Mundy’s eye resembles a swallowed mouse halfway down the body of a boa constrictor. At last he makes the gesture Mundy has learned to recognize: a sullen and contemptuous tip of the head, a grimace, part hatred, part warning and part envy. Go, damn you. Mundy and the troupe pile back into the bus, Sally’s squeezebox strikes up “It’s a long, long way to Tipperary” and—damn them—they go.

  Erna appears to have seen nothing. Her small round eyes are peering out of the window. “There was a problem?” she asks Mundy.

  “Everything in order. Nice chaps,” Mundy assures her.

  With variations of landscape, the scene is enacted three more times. With each search the tension is cranked up a notch, and by the third, nobody is singing anymore, nobody is bothering to speak. Do whatever the hell you want with us, we can’t take any more, we surrender. Erna suddenly stands up, gives them all a jovial wave, dismounts from the bus and keeps on waving till she is out of sight. Did anybody wave back? Mundy doubts it. They pass through a chicane, he looks glumly down. American soldiers are grinning at them through the windows, bystanders gawp at the crazy-painted giant horse that has emerged from the darkness of over there, a couple of cameras flash and all the lights of Las Vegas are winking at them from the wet cobbles. They are safe in West Berlin but nobody inside the bus has anything to say. Except Lexham possibly, who is doing some heavy cursing—all the worst words as usual, but without the energy we expect. And Viola, who is quietly sobbing her heart out and saying, “Thank you, everyone, thank you, oh Christ.”

  Up on the top deck, one of the boys is having hysterics, and that will be Polonius.

  The overtall British arts diplomat with a thirty-six-hour beard who strides into the British political advisor’s office close to Our Dear Führer’s old Olympic stadium armed with two bulky shopping bags and a briefcase looks as if he has just come off the sea and the deck is still rolling under him, which is how he feels. The receptionist is a middle-aged Englishwoman with graying hair and nice, stern manners. She could be a schoolmistress like Kate.

  “I need to speak to Mr. Arnold,” Mundy blurts, slapping his passport on the counter, together with his British Council visiting card. “I’ve got a double-decker bus parked in your courtyard with twenty very tired young actors on board and your sentries are telling the driver to get lost.”

  “Now which Mr. Arnold would that be, sir?” the receptionist inquires as she leafs her way through Mundy’s passport.

  “The one who arrived at Tempelhof yesterday evening.”

  “Ah. That one. Thank you. The sergeant will show you to the waiting room, and we’ll see what we can do about your poor actors. Are those useful bags for Mr. Arnold or would you be wanting to leave them with me?” She has pressed a bell and is speaking into an internal telephone. “For Mr. Arnold, please, Jack. As soon as he can manage would be best. And there’s a bus full of impatient actors in the courtyard to be cared for. Always the same on a Monday morning, isn’t it?”

  The sergeant is a benign version of the sergeant who guarded Mundy in the military hospital ten years ago. He wears a sports jacket, gray flannels and highly polished toe caps. The waiting room is Mundy’s private ward without the bed: white walls, frosted windows, the same photograph of our dear young Queen. And the same chrysanthemums, courtesy of the West Berlin police. It is therefore not at all surprising to Mundy when the same vice consul ambles in—shaggy-elegant Nick Amory, wearing the same suede shoes and tweed suit that he wears for his hospital visits, and the same clever, self-deprecating smile. He is a decade older, but in a bad light he could, like Sasha, play the age he has remained in Mundy’s memory. A deeper tan, perhaps, a wider brow where the hair has started to recede. A touch of frost on the ginger sideburns. A new, intangible authority. It takes Mundy a moment to realize that Amory is conducting a similar inspection of his visitor.

  “Well, you look a damn sight better than when last seen, I must say,” says Amory carelessly. “What’s the story?”

  “We’ve got a Polish defector on the roof of our bus.”

  “Who put him there?”

  “We all did.”

  “All being your acting troupe?”

  “Yes.”

  “When?”

  “This morning. In Weimar. We had a gig there.”

  Amory goes to the window and cautiously parts the net curtain. “He’s lying very still for a liberated stowaway. You sure he’s alive?”

  “I’ve told him to shut up and lie still till we say it’s safe to come out.”

  “You told him.”

  “Yes.”

  “You run a pretty tight ship then.”

  “Somebody had to.”

  And for a while nothing but Amory’s shaggy grin and the sounds of shunting traffic in the courtyard outside.

  “You don’t seem very pleased about it,” he remarks at last. “Why are we all just sitting here? Why aren’t we dancing in the streets and whistling up the champagne?”

  “The boy says his family will suffer if he’s identified. We’ve all agreed to keep mum.”

  “Who told you to ask for Arnold?”

  “Sasha.”

  The smile is not a smile, Mundy realizes. If it were, it would have gone by now. The smile is what he wears while he watches you and thinks.

  “Sasha,” Amory repeats, after an age. “The chap you roomed with while you were playing at being a pinko. That Sasha. The one who came here that day and made a stink.”

  “He’s in the East now. He’s some kind of spy.”

  “Yes, I think we heard that, actually. Do you know what kind?”

  “No.”

  “Did he also tell you I flew into Tempelhof yesterday evening?”

  “Yes. Why?”

  �
��It’s a sort of silly code we have, when one side wants to tell the other side something frightfully important. What’s in the bags?”

  “Secrets, according to him. And he says the Pole’s a plant but it wouldn’t be sensible to do anything about him.”

  “For risk of compromising Comrade Sasha?”

  “He said the police searches of the bus would be a sham to let the boy get through. The stuff in the bags would be safer that way.”

  “Well, that makes a fair amount of sense, doesn’t it? Is this all he’s giving us, or are we looking at trade samples with a view to placing a serious order?”

  “He says he’s got more.”

  “With you in the loop?”

  “He says he’s written to you. It’s in the stuff.”

  “Is he asking for money?”

  “He didn’t say so. Not to me, anyway. It would be a first if he is.”

  “Are you?”

  “No, I bloody well am not.”

  “What’s your next move? Now? This minute?”

  “Home to England.”

  “This afternoon as ever is?”

  “Yes.”

  “With your actors?”

  “Yes.”

  “Mind if I unpack my stocking? I’m going to call you Edward, if you don’t mind. I think I did that before, didn’t I? I’ve got an Uncle Ted I simply can’t abide.”

  Still smiling, Amory empties the shopping bags onto the white plastic coffee table: the virile socialist worker, the book on the Bolshoi, the pack of Kodak film and the blue pottery box. He examines the socialist worker’s glued edges, sniffs the book, turns the pack of film over with his fingertips, studies the use-by date, the customs duty stamps, holds the blue pottery box to his ear and gently rattles it, but doesn’t pick at the tape that binds the lid to the base.

  “And these are walnuts inside?”

  “So he says.”

  “Well, well. It’s been done before, of course. But then most things have, haven’t they?” Setting the box on the table beside the rest, he lays a hand flat on the top of his head while he admires the collection. “You must have been shitting bricks.”