Absolute Friends

by John le Carré

  Their dinners at Eaton Place have a different, but equally infectious sort of intimacy. The routine never varies. My house is swept weekly, Rourke assures Mundy, and I’m not talking about the cleaning lady. After a couple of martinis—Rourke calls them belts—they get down to the nitty-gritty of the Sasha-Mundy operation. Come on, Ted, I need it all. This time there’s no messing around with circumlocutions. Rourke will have selected a recent coup, some nugget Sasha has procured. The content hardly matters since Rourke’s interest is purely technical. Say it concerns the GDR’s relations with China, no big deal, but all grist to the intelligence mill.

  “I’m a nuts and bolts man, Ted. Let’s just follow the yellow brick road through the system, if you don’t mind. Let’s hear Sasha’s story about how he got his hands on it.”

  He means let’s track this same little piece of film about the GDR’s relations with China from Stasi headquarters to Bedford Square. Tell me what concealment device Sasha used and where he got it from. Does he really have that kind of access to Stasi operational stores? Can he really just march in, sneak a doctored bar of Yardley’s soap and finagle a roll of undeveloped microfilm into it without somebody yelling “Hey!”? And then let’s do the moment when he hands that same roll of film to his friend Teddy.

  And finally, Ted, let’s do the bit when you palm the film to Amory’s man on the spot. Or—since there have also been times when a covert handover to the local representative was reckoned more risky than having Ted smuggle the product out of Badland himself—let’s have what happened when you hit the frontier.

  And Mundy beats his brains to provide Rourke with every last detail. Perhaps it’s just vanity, but he has a feeling he may be handing down his knowledge for posterity. This isn’t the Professor trying to fault him. This is about young fellows new to the game who will one day turn up the Sasha-Mundy case history, by then released for general reading, and marvel at its brilliance, its simple beauty. And Rourke is not the Professor. Rourke can monitor both flow and contraflow, whereas the Professor—pray God—can only monitor the contraflow.

  “Ted.”

  It has been one of those dinners. They are at the Calvados stage. Calvados is Rourke’s favorite tipple. One of his many fights with the Agency bean counters over the years was when he put down five hundred bucks for a bottle of eighty-year-old. It was for a joe, for Christ’s sake! What was he supposed to give the poor bastard? Perrier water?

  “You did the right thing,” Mundy pronounces, from the depths of his balloon glass.

  “Ted, when you were in Taos, searching for your soul, do you recall coming across an artist friend of mine called Luger? Bernie Luger? Big canvases, mixed media, visions of the apocalypse, played guitar?”

  Luger? Bernie? Of course Mundy bloody does! And not with a lot of pride, if he is honest, given his afternoons in bed with Nita while Bernie is up his ladder, napalming Minnesota. But he recovers himself. He doesn’t yell out or blush. He’s a spy, Edinburgh-trained, he can dissemble.

  “Bernie Luger, coke-head and Yale dropout,” he muses lightly through his Calvados. “Forsook dictatorship of the bourgeoisie in favor of half a million a year from the family trust fund. How could I forget?”

  “Ever go to one of his parties?”

  “You bet I did. And lived to tell the tale.”

  “Was Bernie political in Taos?”

  “When he remembered to be. When he wasn’t too high or too low.”

  “Way out there, still? Wild? Communist?”

  “Well, not real Communist, not as such. More contrary than Communist, I’d say. If you were for it, Bernie was agin it.” And he puts his hand to his mouth because he has a momentary feeling he may be letting Bernie down.

  “You ever meet his girl? Cuban girl?”

  “Nita? Sure.” So it’s Nita, he thinks.

  “She Communist too?”

  “I assume so. But only with a small c,” he adds.

  “Love Castro?”

  “Probably. She loved most chaps.”

  “Did Bernie or Nita ever try to get you to do anything for them? Like meet somebody they knew, hand them a letter, talk to someone when you got home to England? Why are you laughing?”

  “I wondered for a minute whether you were going to ask me if I’d packed my own suitcase.”

  So Rourke laughs too, good rich laughter while he refreshes their glasses.

  “So no, right? You did them no favors? No little errands. I’m relieved.”

  There is no way out. He has to ask “Why? What have they done?”

  “Oh, they haven’t done it yet. But they will. Thirty years apiece for spying for the Sovs. No kids, thank God. It’s always hardest on the kids.”

  Mundy watches Rourke smile into his balloon glass while he cradles it in his palm. But in his mind’s eye it is Nita he sees, stretched beside him in the hacienda, and bearded little Bernie leaning wild-eyed across her, boasting that he is riding on the revolutionary train.

  “But Bernie’s a fantasist,” he manages to protest. “He’d say anything that came into his head, just for effect. What could they possibly know that would be useful to the Russians? You’d have to be a fool to believe anything Bernie told you.”

  “Oh, they never got to the Russians, we made sure of that. Bernie called up the Sov consulate in Miami, gave a funny name, said he was pro-Cuban and would like to serve the cause. Sovs didn’t take him up on his offer. We did. Sweetest little sting I ever saw. Ran for six long months before it dawned on Bernie that he was working for Uncle Sam and not the Sovs.”

  “Where does Nita come in?”

  Rourke shakes his head in happy reminiscence. “Carried for him. Smarter than he was by a mile. Women usually are.”

  He rolls genially on.

  “Ted.”

  “Jay.”

  “Can I ask you this one more question before you tear me limb from limb? A really bad one.”

  “If you must.”

  “You’re public school, right?”

  “Not my choice actually.”

  “A lost boy.”

  “In those days. Probably.”

  “Parentless.”

  “Well, not always.”

  “But by the time you got to Berlin.”

  “Yes.”

  “So we have one Brit, one Kraut, both parentless, even if Sasha wants to be but isn’t. Both lost boys, both—I don’t know—mouvementé, kinetic, thirsting for life. You mentioned Isherwood. I liked that. Can I go on?”

  “Can I stop you?” He already wishes he could.

  “And you bond. You’re creating a perfect society together. You share your dreams. You share a radical lifestyle. You share a room. You share a girl—okay, okay, calm down, you share her consecutively, not concurrently. There’s a difference, I respect that. But Ted, hand on Bible, no taboos, no microphones, man-to-man within these four well-swept walls—are you really telling me you and Sasha never shared each other?”

  “Didn’t happen,” Mundy barks, blushing. “Didn’t anywhere near happen. Never on the cards. That answer your question?” And puts his hand to his mouth again to cover his embarrassment.

  “Good session with Jay last night?” Amory asks next afternoon.

  “Fine. Great.”

  “Did he call you a scream?”

  “Once.”

  “Bubbled yourself dry yet?”

  “Probably. He wants to take me to Glyndebourne next week. I thought I should clear it with you.”

  “Ever been?”

  “No.”

  “Well, now’s your chance then, isn’t it?”

  But Glyndebourne never comes. A few days later—following a trying weekend in Doncaster devoted to persuading Jake’s headmaster to give him another chance while Kate conducts her parliamentary candidate’s clinic—Mundy arrives at Bedford Square to find Rourke’s desk gone, his room empty and the door wide open as if to air it. A burning joss stick in a milk bottle stands in the center of the bare floor.

 
For a month and more Amory refuses to remark on Rourke’s disappearance. In itself this has no significance. Other members of the team have disappeared from time to time with as little explanation. But Rourke’s different. Rourke, detached, urbane, easy to talk to and cleared for access, is the closest thing Mundy has had in recent years to a confidant, apart from Amory himself.

  “He’s done his job and gone home. That’s all you need to know.”

  “So what was his job?” Mundy insists, refusing to back down. “Why couldn’t he at least say goodbye?”

  “You’ve passed,” Amory replies tersely. “Be thankful and shut up.”

  “I’ve what?”

  “On the advice of Orville J. Rourke, the CIA has of its goodness decreed that you are a loyal British agent, a double but not a triple, and that Sasha, though German and mad, is another.” Then most unusually his anger gets the better of him. “And for Christ’s sake stop looking as if somebody’s stolen your fluffy dog. It was a legitimate concern. He did a good job. You’re white as snow.”

  Then why the joss? Mundy wonders.

  Is there room, among all these Mundys, for another? The answer, unfortunately, is that since the door to his life is wide open, everyone is invited in and no one who has made himself at home there is ever turned away.

  Enter then Ted Mundy, hero of the Helmstedt autobahn and the Steel Coffin. He is so scared of what these versions of himself get up to that it’s like opening the bowling for the public schools’ cricket team every time, multiplied by about a hundred.

  The logic is simple enough. Sometimes there just aren’t enough East European arts festivals and book fairs and academic seminars to keep up with Sasha’s rate of productivity. Sometimes Sasha has an important scoop in his sights, and the Communist culture circuit can’t deliver soon enough to satisfy Amory’s customers in London. Sometimes the prudent side of Amory decides that the frequency of Mundy’s eastern jaunts is making things a little bit too easy for the Professor, and that it’s time for Mundy to go sick, throw a tantrum at having to live out of a suitcase, or be lent to some other, harmless section pending a reshuffle among the Black Propaganda espiocrats.

  But Sasha will accept no substitutes. He wants Mundy and nobody but Mundy, if only for as long as it takes to pass a matchbox from hand to hand. Sasha is a one-man dog but, unlike Mundy, a real one. So every few months an altogether different kind of meeting must be achieved between the players. The instructions are Sasha’s, conveyed by way of the most recent batch of microfilm, and executed with due professionalism by Amory and his team.

  It is thus that Mundy finds himself at dead of night, wearing night-vision glasses and wading over a boggy strip of borderland that for a few hours has been left unguarded for the convenience of some unknown Stasi agent from West Germany who requires a moment with his controller—only for Sasha to get wind of the arrangement, and exploit it for his own purposes.

  Or Mundy is a humble soldier for a day, his father’s son at last, wrapped in a Tommy’s greatcoat and riding in the back of a fifteen-hundredweight truck that is part of a convoy of British troops making its way up the corridor from Helmstedt to the Berlin garrison. The convoy slows down, its tail crawls, a dispatcher slaps Mundy on the shoulder. Masked by trucks behind and in front of him, he tears off his greatcoat and, dressed as an East German laborer, leaps from the moving truck and in the best Edinburgh tradition hits the ground running. A bicycle is flung after him, he rides hell for leather down an unpaved lane until a pin light winks at him from a cattle shed. The two men embrace, Sasha hands over his package. Leaving the bicycle to look after itself, Mundy returns by hidden paths to wait in a ditch for the truck or car that, with false papers and a recently vacated seat, will smuggle him to safety.

  But worst by far is the Steel Coffin, his Room 101, his ultimate nightmare come true. Like the Major in his final days, Mundy has a living horror of enclosure. Perhaps his fear is commensurate with the length of him that has to be enclosed. To climb into the coffin, lie facedown with his mouth over the airholes while Amory’s dispatchers screw him in, takes more courage than he thought he possessed. Staring wide-eyed into the pitch darkness as he is clamped underneath the railway car, he commends his sinner’s soul to heaven, and reminds himself of Dr. Mandelbaum’s advice not to live in a bubble. And though there’s an abort button, and it’s only a few sweltering, bone-breaking minutes across the border to the marshaling yard where Sasha will be waiting with a monkey wrench to receive him, he can’t help feeling there are better ways to spend a summer’s evening in the prime of his confusing life.

  10

  A MOOD OF MUTED festivity informs Mundy’s forty-ninth mission behind the Iron Curtain, and all Bedford Square shares it.

  “One more trip, Ted, and you’ll have notched up the half-ton,” says Paul, the head dispatcher, as he makes a last check of Mundy’s pockets, suitcase, wallet and diary for the nightmare clue that could spell the end of ten years of alpha double plus material. “And after that, you won’t want to know us, will you?”

  At the door, the girls give him a kiss and Amory, as usual, tells him to watch his arse.

  It’s a beautiful day, six in the morning. Spring is in the air and so is Gorbachev’s perestroika. The marionette dictatorships of Eastern Europe are under serious threat at last. A few months earlier in New York, Gorbachev unilaterally volunteered massive tank and troop withdrawals, and repudiated the Brezhnev doctrine of intervention in the affairs of client states. The old oligarchs, he was telling them, are on their own. Though on the surface relations between Washington and the Evil Empire remain as frozen as ever, the stirrings beneath the ice are enough to persuade the wishful that one day, maybe not in our generation but the next, sanity will break through. And Mundy, as he sets course for Victoria station air terminal on his way to the International Convention of Medieval Archaeologists in Gdansk, is one of the wishful. Maybe Sasha and I have played a part, he thinks. Maybe we’ve helped the thaw. Amory says they have, but then he would.

  True, Mundy has the usual predeparture butterflies—when didn’t he? Amory and the sages of Edinburgh will never let him forget that the longer an operation runs, the hairier it gets and the more there is to lose. But as soon as he starts to compare his lot with Sasha’s—which he does every time he embarks on one of these journeys, and on this day particularly—he sees himself as the spoiled dilettante and Sasha as the real thing.

  Who briefs Sasha? he argues. Nobody does. Who grooms him, dispatches him? Nobody. Who dresses the shot for him when he steals his photographs? Nobody. The finger shadows and the camera-shake and the misfires happen in the heat of battle while he waits for the footfall in the corridor that could lead straight to a bullet in the back of the head.

  And look at the sheer distance the man’s covered, the miles and miles of impossible achievement! How in heaven’s name did he ever get from there to here? How does a lame East German child-refugee turned West German anarchist recross the border and emerge as the improbable provider of information vital to the national security—theirs as well as ours—all in the space of a few years?

  All right, thanks to the Herr Pastor, the Professor adopted him as his favorite son, and for love of his old chum gave him a head start in the family business. But that doesn’t include a free pass to roam the Stasi’s archives at will, cherry-picking whatever he reckons will do most damage to his employers.

  Mundy’s British delegation of medievalists is traveling independently to Gdansk. Tomorrow he will field them as they land. Sipping his Bloody Mary in the departure lounge, or seated in the half-empty plane and staring out of the window at a white nothing, he pieces together as much as he knows of the pilgrim Sasha’s progress over the last decade. The picture is far from complete. Sasha does not take gracefully to being questioned about how he obtains his information. Perhaps his prickliness conceals a certain shame.

  In the beginning was the anger. That much Sasha admits.

  And the source of Sasha’s a
nger was the revelation that he had been lured across the border under false pretenses and had been hating his father for the wrong reasons.

  And after the anger, hatred.

  Hatred of the malodorous and heartless bureaucracy that by its size and weight squeezed the very breath out of its citizenry in the name of democracy.

  Of the police state that posed as the cradle of liberty. Of its craven subservience to Moscow.

  Above all, of its systematic, wholesale betrayal of the sacred socialist dream.

  And with the anger and the hatred came the cunning. Sasha was a prisoner in a bourgeois fascist state posing as a workers’ paradise. To prevail against his captors he would use their own perfidious weapons. He would dissemble, lie and ingratiate himself. To strike at the very source of their unlawful power, he would steal what they loved most: their secrets.

  His plan at the outset was modest.

  He would bear witness.

  He would steal their secrets and make of them an archive for posterity.

  Working entirely alone, he would make sure that the lies, deceptions and hypocrisies that were being perpetrated all round him by the Nazis in red shirts could not be hidden from later generations.

  And that was all. The sole beneficiaries of his endeavors would be future German historians. That was the limit of his ambition.

  The only question was how to achieve it. For enlightenment he availed himself of the Stasi library and consulted the leading authorities on guerrilla warfare. To float on the enemy’s current . . . to conceal yourself among his hordes . . . to use the enemy’s weight to bring him down.

  Following his incarceration in the White Hotel, Sasha passed weeks of unlikely recuperation lounging around the Professor’s house in Potsdam, walking the Professor’s German shepherds in the People’s Park, weeding the Professor’s flowerbeds, chauffeuring his wife when she went shopping. For yes, the Professor, who was not after all homosexual, possessed a wife, a veritable dragon of a wife, whose single merit in Sasha’s eyes was that she detested her husband.