Absolute Friends

by John le Carré

  He pulls open the drawers. Empty. He drops to his knees on the deep-pile carpet and lifts the edge. No tacks, no Smooth Edge, no easy-grip or underlay: just deep, expensive, crudely cut carpet to cover the wiring underneath it.

  What wiring? Richard had no telephone and no computer. Richard was sitting at a bareback desk. The ends of the wires are taped off. He follows the wires under the carpet to a painted chest of drawers beneath the window. He pulls out the chest. The wires run up the wall and across the sill and through a freshly drilled hole in the window frame.

  To Mundy the homebuilder, the hole is cowboy work. The window frame is of fine old wood. The bastards might as well have shot a bullet through it. He opens the window and leans out. The wire goes down the wall for six feet and ducks back into the house: there. No staples, of course, which is typical. Just let it dangle till the next foehn wind slings it into the forest.

  He returns to the staircase, descends a flight and makes for the living room where the philanthropist and his acolytes received their latest novice. Early dawn light is filling the windows on the valley side. At the spot where he watched Dimitri in his tracksuit bearing down on him, Mundy pauses. Dimitri came in through that door and went out through it.

  Making the same diagonal traverse, Mundy reaches the door, shoves it open and enters not a greenroom but a glazed lean-to kitchen tacked onto the north side of the house. It is part of a covered balcony—the same balcony, no doubt, where Dimitri invited Sasha to name today’s stars.

  The wires from upstairs are poking through the window. This time, instead of putting a bullet hole through the window frame, the cowboys have bashed out a pane of glass. The wires’ ends are once more taped.

  So this is where Dimitri hid after delivering his great soliloquy. This is where he held his breath and waited till I’d left the auditorium. Or did he amuse himself by playing with some clever piece of machinery, something that connected him with Richard upstairs? What for, for heaven’s sake? Why stoop to humble wires in our modern high-tech age? Because low-tech wires that aren’t tapped are a bloody sight safer than high-tech signals that are, Ted, the sages of Edinburgh reply.

  With a sense that he is outstaying his welcome, Mundy returns upstairs and climbs down the slate roof to hard ground. He remembers the dangerous dogs and wonders why they haven’t bitten him yet, and why they have left the roe deer in peace. Perhaps they decamped with the rest of the philanthropists. At the bit of flattened perimeter fence he makes a halfhearted effort to persuade the deer to come with him, but they dip their heads and eye him reproachfully. Maybe when I’ve gone, he thinks.

  Flare-paths of orange cloud sweep across the sky. Mundy bounds down the steep track, trusting in physical exertion to produce some kind of enlightenment. With each stride the voices in his head grow more emphatic: abort, send the moneyback, say no—but who to? He needs to talk to Sasha, but has no route to him: I am required immediately in Paris . . . I am personally charged with the composition of our college libraries . . . Yes, damn you, but what’s your phone number? I didn’t ask.

  “Checkpoint,” he says aloud, and feels the rat give a bite at his abdomen.

  A line of frontier guards or policemen—he can’t tell which—is strung across the goat path twenty yards below him. He counts nine men. They wear blue-gray trousers and black jackets with red piping, and Mundy guesses they are Austrian not German because he’s never seen uniforms like that in Germany before. They are aiming their rifles at him. Plainclothesmen are hovering behind them.

  Some of the guns are aimed at his head, the rest at his midriff, all with a marksman’s concentration. A loudspeaker is booming at him in German to put his hands on his head now. As he does so, he sees more men to his left and right, as many as a dozen on each side. And he notes that they have had the sense to stagger their positions so that when they shoot at him they won’t shoot each other by mistake. The loudspeaker belongs to the group below him, and its voice is bouncing all over the valley like a ricochet that won’t lie down. Deep Bavarian accent, could be Austrian.

  “Take your hands off your head and stretch your arms above you.”

  He does as he is told.

  “Shake your hands around.”

  He shakes them.

  “Take off your watch. Drop it on the ground. Roll back your shirtsleeves. Further. All the way to the shoulders.”

  He pushes his sleeves up as far as they’ll go.

  “Keep your hands in the air and turn round. Keep turning. Stand still. What have you got in your vest?”

  “My passport and some money.”

  “Anything else?”

  “No.”

  “Anything inside the vest?”

  “No.”

  “No gun?”

  “No.”

  “No bomb?”

  “No.”

  “Sure?”

  “Positive.”

  Mundy has pinpointed him. He’s the odd one out in the middle of the nine. Peaked cap, mountain boots. No rifle, but a pair of field glasses. Each time he speaks he has to drop the glasses and pick up the microphone.

  “Before you take off your vest, I’m going to tell you something. Are you ready?”

  “Yes.”

  “If you touch the pockets of the vest or put your hand inside it, we’ll kill you. Understood?”

  “Understood.”

  “With one hand only you take off the vest. Slowly, slowly. No fast movements or we shoot you. It’s not a problem. We kill people. We don’t mind. Maybe you kill people too, yes?”

  Using his left hand and punching his right stiffly in the air, Mundy finds the zipper at his neck and draws it gingerly downward.

  “Okay. Now.”

  He slithers out of the vest and lets it flop to the ground.

  “Put your hands back on your head. Good boy. Now you take five big paces to your left. Stop.”

  Mundy takes his five paces and sees out of the side of his right eye a brave young gendarme approach his vest, prod it with the barrel of his rifle, then turn it over.

  “All clear, captain!” he reports.

  As a supreme act of courage, the boy shoulders his rifle, picks up the vest and takes it down the hill to his leader, where he dumps it like dead game at his feet.

  “Take off your shirt.”

  Mundy takes it off. He wears no undershirt. Zara says he’s too thin. Mustafa says he’s too fat.

  “Take off your left shoe. Slowly!”

  He takes off his left shoe. Slowly.

  “Right shoe.”

  He stoops and takes off his right shoe. Equally slowly.

  “Now socks. Good boy. Now take five paces to your right.”

  He’s back where he started, standing barefoot in thistles.

  “Unbuckle your belt. Slowly. Put it on the ground. Strip naked—yes, your underpants too. Now put your hands back on your head. What’s your name?”

  “Mundy. Edward Arthur. British subject.”

  “Born?”

  The captain is holding Mundy’s passport in the hand that doesn’t hold the field glasses, and he is checking Mundy’s answers against it. He must have fished it out of the pocket of the vest.

  “August 15, 1947.”

  “Where?”

  “Lahore, Pakistan.”

  “Why do you have a British passport if you’re from Pakistan?”

  The question is too large for one unarmed naked man to answer. When my mother began her labor the sun was still Indian. By the time she was dead it was Pakistani, but you wouldn’t understand that.

  “My father was British.” And my mother was Irish, he might add, but he doesn’t feel the need.

  An old trooper with Father Christmas eyebrows is waddling up the hill to him, pulling on a pair of rubber gloves. He is accompanied by the brave young gendarme carrying a pair of crimson pajamas.

  “Bend over, please, son,” the old trooper says quietly. “You make any problems, they’ll shoot us all, so be a good fellow.”
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br />   The last time anyone did this to me was in the early days of my recruitment to the secret flag. Kate decided I had prostate cancer because I was peeing too often, but it was nerves. The old trooper has his fingers so far up Mundy’s arse he wants to cough, but he doesn’t find whatever he is looking for, because he shouts “Nix” to the captain. The crimson shirt has no buttons so Mundy must haul it over his head. The trousers are too big for him, even after he has drawn the tapes as tight as they’ll go.

  Two men have grabbed his arms and are pinning them behind his back. Leg irons snap round his ankles. A gumshield forces his teeth apart. Blackened goggles descend over his eyes. He would like to shout but he can only gurgle. He would like to fall over but he can’t do that either, because a dozen hands are toppling him crablike down the hill. His mouth fills with exhaust fumes as more hands shove him facedown on a throbbing steel floor between a gauntlet of toe caps. He is back in the Steel Coffin, heading for the marshaling yards, but without Sasha’s monkey wrench to look forward to. The floor jerks forward and his feet crash against the rear doors. This act of indiscipline earns him what, despite the darkness, is a blinding kick over the left eye. Change of reference: he is Sasha in the dog van on his way to lunch with the Professor. Then he’s Ted Mundy again, in the grüne Minna, being driven to the police station to make another voluntary statement.

  The van bumps to a halt. He is hopping up an iron ladder under the churning rotaries of an unseen helicopter. He is flat on the floor again, this time chained to the deck. The helicopter lifts off. He feels sick. The helicopter flies, he doesn’t know for how long. It lands, he is grappled down more steps, across tarmac and through a succession of clanging doors. He is chained to a dunce’s chair in a gray brick room with no windows and a steel door, but it takes him a while to realize he can see.

  After that, in his later memory, it is only a matter of a few hours and several lifetimes before he is a free man again, wearing his own clothes and sitting in a flowered armchair in a pleasantly furnished office with rosewood furniture and regimental trophies and photographs of heroic pilots waving from their cockpits and an eternal gas-fired log burning cheerfully in the grate. With one hand he holds a warm poultice to his eye. In the other, a king-sized dry martini. And across the room from him sits his old friend and confidant Orville J. Rourke—call me Jay—of the Central Intelligence Agency in Langley, Virginia—and dammit, Ted, you don’t look a day older than when you and I took those crazy walks through darkest London all those years ago.

  Mundy’s return to life, now that he is able to reconstruct it, came in three set pieces.

  There was Mundy the Terrorist Prisoner, chained to a chair and being asked a lot of aggressive questions about his movements by two young American men and one matronly American woman. The matronly woman kept gabbling Arabic at him, presumably in the hope of catching him out.

  Then there was Mundy the Object of Concern—initially to a young male doctor, also American and by his demeanor military. This doctor was accompanied by an orderly bearing Mundy’s clothes on a hanger. The doctor needed to take a look at this eye of yours, if I may, sir.

  The orderly also called Mundy sir. “Sir, there’s a restroom right across the corridor here, also a razor for your convenience,” he said, hanging Mundy’s clothes on the handle of the open cell door.

  The doctor advised Mundy that the eye was nothing to worry about. Just rest it. If it gets sore, put a patch over it. Mundy, ever the wag, said thanks, he had one over it not long ago.

  And after that there was Mundy the Magnanimous, holding court in the same room where he is now sitting, being plied with hot coffee and cookies, and Camel cigarettes he didn’t want, while he received the apologies of people he didn’t recognize and assured them that he had no hard feelings, everything’s forgiven and forgotten. And these embarrassed young men and women had names like Hank and Jeff and Nan and Art, and they wanted Mundy to know that our chief of ops was on his way from Berlin right now, and meanwhile—well, jeez, sir—all we can say is, we’re so sorry, we had no idea who you were and—this is Art speaking now—I am truly proud to meet you, Mr. Mundy, sir, they taught your fine record on my training course. By which was meant, Mundy assumed, his fine record as a Cold War spy rather than as a language tutor on the skids or a loyal servant of the late King Ludwig. Though how on earth Art was able to put Mundy’s name to a standard case history taught at his CIA training school was another mystery, unless Jay Rourke in his outrage had used it to rub their noses in the mess they’d made. Because Mr. Rourke is really pissed with us, sir, and he needs Mr. Mundy to know that before he gets here.

  “I guess the best we can say for those kids is, they were obeying orders.” Rourke is summing up, with a doleful shake of his head, an hour later.

  Mundy says he knows, he knows. Rourke hasn’t changed either, he’s thinking. Which is a pity. With people, you see in them what you think you already know, so Mundy sees the same droll, spare, good-looking, lazy-spoken Bostonian shit that Rourke always was, with his Dublin suit and Harvard shoes with heavy treads and easy Irish charm.

  “Just too bad we never got to say a decent goodbye,” Rourke recalls, as if he feels there is something else he needs to get off his chest. “Some bushfire crisis blew up so fast there wasn’t time to pack my toothbrush. And dammit, for the life of me, Ted, I don’t believe I remember what it was. Still, I guess hullo is always better than goodbye. Even in these circumstances.”

  Mundy guesses it is too, and takes a pull of his martini.

  “We tell Austrian liaison we’re interested in a certain house—we suspect a terrorist connection and we want first look at anybody acting suspiciously around the place—well, I guess that’s what we asked for and that’s what we have to live with these days. Overcompliance from our friends and allies, and a disregard for innocent people’s human rights.”

  And you’re still peddling the same spurious sedition, Mundy notes.

  “Enjoy the war?” Rourke asks.

  “Hated it,” Mundy retorts, whacking the ball back as hard as his weightless condition allows.

  “Me too. Agency never gave those fucking Washington evangelists one scrap of encouragement, you have my word.”

  Mundy says he can well believe it.

  “Ted, can we stop pissing around?”

  “If that’s what we’re doing.”

  “Then why don’t you just explain what you were doing up there, Ted, four in the morning for Christ’s sake, taking bearings in an empty house that we have a certain very specific interest in? I mean, frankly, between you and me, getting on that plane and flying down here, I couldn’t help asking myself whether we weren’t right to pull you in.”

  13

  MUNDY HAS BEEN GIVING a lot of thought to how he will answer Rourke’s questions, and has come to the reluctant conclusion that he must tell him the truth. He has examined the problem from Sasha’s point of view, and from his own. He has carefully considered Sasha’s exhortation to confidentiality and Richard’s thousand-dollar contract, but he has decided that in the circumstances neither is binding. It’s only on the matter of Dimitri’s grand design, and his declared war on the corrupting power of corporate America, that he feels any compunction to sweeten his story. For the rest, he is happy to fall back on his old confessive ways.

  After all, what’s a bit of burning joss between old pals?

  And Rourke, exactly as in their Eaton Place days, hears him out with just that blend of broad tolerance and disrespect for authority that made frank talking with him such a pleasure. And when Mundy has finished his narrative, Rourke remains motionless and chin in hand for quite some while, staring ahead of him and allowing himself only the odd little nod now and then and a grim pursing of the lips, before he rises from his chair and, headmaster-like, patrols the room with his hands jammed deep into the pockets of his gabardine trousers.

  “Ted, do you have any idea what Sasha got up to in the last ten years?” he asks, placing so much empha
sis on the word idea that Mundy can only have the worst expectations. “The people he rode with, the bad places he was in?”

  “Not a lot.”

  “Sasha didn’t tell you where he’d been? Who he’d played with?”

  “We haven’t talked that much. He wrote to me a bit while he was in the wilderness. Nothing very revealing.”

  “Wilderness? He used that word?”

  “No, I did.”

  “Up there in the safe flat at the lakeside—he told you Dimitri was this great, good man?”

  “He’s pretty smitten with him.”

  “And you find no change in him, after all these years of separation—no quantum change, no feeling he’s moved on, moved away from you, in some intangible sense?”

  “Same weird little bugger he always was, far as I can see,” says Mundy awkwardly, beginning not to like the trend of this conversation.

  “Has Sasha given you any indication at all of how he feels about 9/11, for instance?”

  “He thought it was a foul act.”

  “Not even ‘They had it coming to them’ kind of thing?”

  “Not a murmur of it, rather surprisingly.”

  “Surprisingly?”

  “Well, given the stuff he used to chuck at America, and the stuff he’s seen while he’s been out on the stomp, it wouldn’t exactly have surprised me if he’d said, ‘Serves the bastards right.’”

  “But he didn’t?”

  “Quite the reverse.”

  “And this was in a letter?”

  “Sure.”

  “A solus letter—dedicated to the subject?”

  “One of a long line.”

  “Written when?”

  “A couple of days after the event. Maybe one day. Don’t think I noticed.”

  “From where?”

  “Sri Lanka, probably. He had some kind of lectureship in Kandy.”