Absolute Friends

by John le Carré

  “And you found the letter totally convincing? You didn’t feel it was—like —”

  “Like what?”

  Rourke gives one of his sophisticated shrugs. “That it was written for the record, maybe. In case his pal Teddy was thinking of passing it to any of his connections in British Intelligence.”

  “No, I didn’t,” Mundy says hotly to Rourke’s back, and waits for him to turn round, but he doesn’t.

  “Ted, when you were in Berlin with Sasha all those years ago, did he have explicit views on direct action?”

  “He was dead against it. All the way.”

  “Did he have a reason?”

  “Sure he did. Violence plays into the hands of the reactionaries. It’s self-defeating. He said it over and over again. Dozen different ways.”

  “So he was practical. Violence doesn’t work, so let’s go for something that does. If it had worked he’d have gone for it.”

  “You can call it practical. You can call it moral. It was an article of faith for him. If he’d believed in bombs, he’d have thrown bombs. That’s who he is. He didn’t believe in them, so the bomb-throwers hijacked the protest movement and he made the mistake of a lifetime and jumped over the Wall the wrong way.”

  Mundy is protesting too much and knows it, but Rourke’s insinuations are setting off alarm bells in him that need shouting down.

  “So if I told you he’d jumped over another wall, would you really be so surprised?” Rourke asks languidly.

  “Depends which one you’re talking about.”

  “No, it doesn’t. You know damn well, Ted Mundy”—more languidly still. “We’re talking about going the black road. We’re talking about a crippled obsessive who must either play in the Super Bowl or he’s a nobody.” Rourke opens his hands and appeals to the eternal gas-fired log. “I’m Sasha, fundamentalist. Fly me! I divert rivers and move mountains. I sit at the feet of great philosophers and turn their words into deeds. Know who Dimitri is, when he’s not being Dimitri?”

  Mundy’s fingers are mangling whatever facial expression he might otherwise have. “No. I don’t. Who?”

  Rourke has come close: so close that he is able to put his hands on the two arms of Mundy’s chair and lean down on him and peer into his face with awe at the secret he is about to unveil.

  “Ted, this isn’t just off the record. That plane I came in. It came here empty. I never left my fucking desk in Berlin and I have six witnesses who will swear to that. Did Dimitri tell you he is an artist of the unobserved life?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’d sooner trail Lucifer. He doesn’t use telephones worth a fuck, won’t touch a cellphone. Computers, e-mails, electronic typewriters, the humble post, forget it.” Mundy remembers the low-tech wiring in the farmhouse. “He’ll travel five thousand miles to whisper into a man’s ear in the middle of the Sahara desert. If he sends you a postcard, look at the picture, because that’s where the message is. He lives big or small, he doesn’t give a shit. He never sleeps two nights running in the same bed. He’ll take a house in someone else’s name—in Vienna, Paris, Tuscany or up in the mountains—move in, make like he’s going to live there for the rest of his life and the next night he’s sitting in a cave in fucking Turkey.”

  “In aid of what?”

  “The bomb in the marketplace. He bombed for the Spanish anarchists against Franco, the Basques against the Spanish and the Red Brigades against the Italian Communists. He ran with the Tupamaros and all fifty-seven varieties of Palestinian, and played both sides of the net for Ireland. May I tell you, please, what his message to the faithful of Old Europe is, right now? You’ll love this.”

  Waiting for the payoff, Mundy reflects that Rourke takes private pleasure in contrasting life’s obscenity with his own elegance. The more disgraceful a proposition, the more courtly his manner. As if to demonstrate this, he has reclaimed his armchair and stretched out his legs and treated himself to another little sip of dry martini.

  “‘Folks,’ he’s saying, ‘it’s time for us Euro-angries to stop all being so damned squeamish. How’s about a little solidarity for a change with the perpetrators of the most sensational act of anticapitalism since the invention of gunpowder? How’s about extending the hand of friendship to our brothers and sisters in arms around the globe, instead of muttering about certain little hang-ups they may have about democracy? Are we not all united in our hatred of the common enemy? These Al Qaeda boys have brought off just about everything Mikhail Bakunin dreamed of. If antifascists can’t accept human diversity within their ranks, tell me who can!”

  He sets down his glass, catches Mundy’s eye, and smiles.

  “That’s who Dimitri is, Ted. When he’s being himself and not Dimitri, of course. And that’s Sasha’s latest Svengali. So let us proceed to my next question, Ted. Who is Ted Mundy in this equation?”

  “You know bloody well who I am,” Mundy bursts out. “You spent months sniffing through my underclothes, damn you.”

  “Oh, come on, Ted! That was then. This is live ammunition time. Are you for us or against us?”

  Now it is Mundy’s turn to stalk around the room and bring his temper back under control.

  “I still don’t understand what Dimitri wants,” he says.

  “You tell me, Ted. We know everything and we know zilch. He’s in touch with people who are in touch with anarchist groups around the European circuit. Big deal. He flirts with the leading European professors of anti-American studies. He’s talking up a storm about nailing the Big Lie. He has a retinue. He insists they dress like the enemy. It’s an old saw of his: Fascists think twice before they shoot a hole in a good suit. Did he tell you that story?”

  “No.”

  Settling back in his armchair, Rourke permits himself a diversion. “It’s too amusing. He got caught in a firefight with the Greek police one time, and he’s wearing this seven-hundred-dollar suit. He was out of ammo, standing in this open square in the middle of Athens with an empty gun in his hand and he’s looking straight into the barrel of this sniper up on the roof who’s taking a bead on him. He puts a fedora on his head and walks out of the square before the sniper gets up the nerve to put a bullet through his seven-hundred-dollar suit. Sure he didn’t tell you that one?”

  “Where does he get his money from?” Mundy wants to know, staring into the whited-out window.

  “All around. Small parcels, no two the same. Coming in from everywhere. It bothers us sick: the too-much money. This time round it was the Middle East. Last time it was South America. Who gives it to him? What for? What the fuck does he want with it? Everybody in the world will tell the truth suddenly? Like bears eat candy in the forest. He’s getting old. He’s calling in the promises he’s owed from everywhere. Why? What’s his endgame? We think he wants to go out with a bang.”

  “What kind of bang?”

  “What other kind is there? Heidelberg’s where Germany meets America. It’s the pretty city we didn’t bomb in ’forty-five so that America would have somewhere to put her headquarters when the war was over. Mark Twain went nuts about the place; America began its post-Hitler, anti-Soviet existence there. It has the U.S. Mark Twain Village and the U.S. Patrick Henry Village with a population of God knows how many thousands of U.S. personnel. It’s home to Headquarters U.S. Army Europe, and a bunch of other major commands. Back in ’seventy-two, the Baader-Meinhof crowd killed some U.S. soldiers and wiped out the staff car of a U.S. NATO general with a bazooka, and they damn near wiped out the general with it. If you want to blow America and Germany apart, Heidelberg’s not a bad place to make your point. You like the city?”

  “Love it.”

  “Then maybe you’d like to help us save it.”

  Mundy has decided what it is he feels about Rourke. There is something fundamentally untouched about him, something offensively virginal. The lines Mundy previously mistook for life experience are the lines of an overindulged child who has never been beaten up by anybody’s police, or crossed bad b
orders, or been locked away in the White Hotel, or hog-tied and chained to the floor of a helicopter. In this respect he embodies what Mundy considers the least attractive characteristic of both our Western leaders and their spokesmen: a levitational self-belief that nimbly transcends the realities of human suffering.

  He wakes to discover that Rourke is recruiting him. Not desperately like Sasha, or subliminally like Amory, or blatantly like the Professor, and not with any of the messianic flair of a Dimitri. But eloquently, nonetheless.

  “You do what you did before, Ted. You become our man. You pretend to be their man. You stay aboard. You wait. You watch and listen. You make nice to Sasha and Dimitri and whoever else comes into your life. And you find out what the fuck everybody is at.”

  “Maybe Sasha doesn’t know.”

  “Oh, he knows, Ted. Sasha’s a traitor, remember.”

  “Who to?”

  “Didn’t he spy on his own people? Maybe you have a sweeter word for that. Wasn’t his father a turncoat twice over? Sasha’s been a prominent person to us these last few years. We don’t lose sight of people like that. Not even when they go wandering in the wilderness looking for some new god to put the sparkle back into their eyes.” He pauses to allow Mundy to dispute this, but Mundy doesn’t oblige. “And when you’re done waiting, you wait again. Because that’s how this game is played: by seeing it all the way through, until the magic moment when Special Agent Ted Mundy jumps up on the table and flashes his badge, and says, ‘Okay, boys, we’ve all had a good time, but now it’s curtains. So drop your guns and put your hands in the air because we have you surrounded.’ Ted, you wish to ask a question.”

  “What guarantees do I get?”

  Rourke does his most hospitable smile. “If this thing breaks the way we think it will, total witness protection for you and yours, resettlement, a cash sum in millions and you get to keep the real estate. Retraining, but you’re a little far gone for that. Want to talk numbers?”

  “I’ll take your word for it.”

  “You’ll be saving lives. Maybe a lot. Want time to think it over? I’ll count to ten.”

  “What’s the alternative?”

  “I don’t see one, Ted. I try, I rack my brains, I search my heart. You could go to the German police. They might help. They did before. You’re a British expatriate and former Berlin anarchist living with a retired Turkish hooker. I can see you engaging their concern.”

  Does Mundy speak? Probably not.

  “Basically, my guess is the German police would push you straight over to the German spooks, who would push you on to us. I don’t think anybody’s going to leave you alone. That’s not what we’re in business for. You’re just too, too desirable.” He cocks his ear. “Do I hear a yes? Is that a nod I see?”

  Apparently it is. But a distracted one, naturally, because Mundy’s mind, or what’s left of it, is far away in Paris with Sasha and his fellow scholars of the library committee. We are indivisible, Teddy. That is my conviction. We have endured together. . . . Long ago you saved me. Allow me at least the chance to be the road to your salvation.

  Mundy waits.

  And having waited, he waits again.

  No two things happen simultaneously. Everything is linear while he waits. He waits at the Linderhof and at home: for the envelope in Sasha’s familiar spiky handwriting, for Sasha’s clotted voice on the phone.

  He makes a day trip to Heidelberg, three hours in the train each way, and talks to cleaners, builders and decorators, but no message from Sasha greets him, and when he returns home at midnight he discovers that Zara has broken bounds and come home early.

  She knows he knows something that he’s not telling her. Her suspicions were aroused when he stayed in Heidelberg that night. She doesn’t believe he had a second meeting with the bankers next morning. And look at his black eye.

  It was just a bit of builder’s scaffolding, he tells her, not for the first time. I was walking down a narrow street when this bit of plank jumped out and hit me in the eye. It’s the price I pay for being tall. I should have looked where I was going.

  What do they want you for, those bankers that I don’t believe in? she demands. Stay away from them. They’re worse than the police.

  He tries telling her a little of what they want. These bankers are all right, he assures her. They’re trying to help me. They’re putting up some money, and if I can get the school back on its feet, they may even let me run it again. Anyway, it’s worth a shot.

  Her German is serviceable at best, his Turkish nonexistent. They can trade facts, and they can call in Mustafa, who is always proud to interpret. But for their feelings they must consult each other’s faces, eyes and bodies. What Zara rightly reads in him is evasion. What Mundy reads in her is fear.

  Next morning at the Linderhof he makes a sortie to the plant room and unearths Richard’s thousand dollars cash. The same evening, in controlled desperation, he hands the money to the dental clinic. Her broken teeth may finally be capped. But when he shows Zara the receipt she is at first radiant, then relapses into her former gloom. Through Mustafa she accuses Mundy of stealing the money. It takes all his wits to dissuade her. They’ve paid me a bonus, Zara. It’s for the extra tours I did when people were away, a sort of tip. For an experienced liar he makes a lousy job of it, and when he reaches out to her in bed she shrinks away from him. You don’t love me anymore, she says. A day later Mustafa teases him about his nonexistent girlfriend once too often. Mundy snaps at him and is ashamed. By way of reparation he slaves at their Dome of the Rock and places an order for Mustafa’s longed-for computer.

  Rourke rings his new agent daily on the mildewed cellphone promptly at twelve-thirty, Mundy’s lunch break. During their postrecruitment discussion, Rourke tried his damnedest to persuade Mundy to accept the Agency’s latest supersecure, hot-and-cold-running model, but Mundy wasn’t having any of it. I’m the last Luddite in the spy trade, Jay. Awfully sorry. He has read, but does not say so, that cellphones in the wrong hands can blow people’s heads off. As usual, Rourke starts straight in: no Hi, Ted, or This is Jay.

  “Michael and his friends have about finished their homework,” he announces. Michael is Sasha. “He could be heading your way in a couple of days from now.”

  So wait. For Michael.

  A couple of days become four. Rourke says relax, Michael bumped into some old friends.

  On the fifth, strolling past the administrative offices, Mundy observes a white envelope addressed to him in electronic type, postmark Vienna. The letter is on plain paper, dated but unsigned. No sender’s address. The text is in English.

  Dear Mr. Mundy,

  An important consignment of books will be delivered to your school on Wednesday, June 11, between 1700 and 1900 hours. You should kindly make yourself available to receive them. Our representative will be in attendance.

  No reply required, none possible. Rourke says relax, Michael will be your representative.

  Standing obliquely to the first-floor bay window of the Heidelberg schoolhouse and peering down the brick path towards the iron front gates, Mundy feels profound relief that his thoughts and actions are at last one. He is in the place where his mind has been for the last two weeks. Michael is on his sweet way, Rourke has confirmed over the cellphone. Michael’s train is suffering a minor delay, he expects to be with you in half an hour. Rourke’s disembodied bulletins are snide and imperious. Mundy hates them. He is wearing an old leather jacket and corduroys: nothing that he wore or took off during his captivity. He is assuming saturation surveillance but has no desire to be a walking microphone. The time is coming up to five-twenty. The last workman left ten minutes ago. Those Counter-University chaps think of everything.

  In his days of waiting Mundy has gone over his predicament from every angle he can think of, and come to no conclusion. As Dr. Mandelbaum would say, he has assembled the information, but where is the knowledge? Spurred by the imminence of Sasha’s arrival, he once more reviews the possibilities, st
arting with the most attractive.

  Rourke and his Agency are deceiving themselves, and me. In the great tradition of their trade, they are turning fantasy into self-fulfilling prophecy. Dimitri has a shady past, as he admits, but he is reformed and his noble intentions are as he describes them.

  In support of the above argument: Rourke is the same idiot who spent four months trying to prove that Sasha and Mundy were working for the Kremlin.

  Against the above argument: the fly-by-night nature of Dimitri’s circus, his murky money, the improbability of his Grand Vision, and his alleged advocacy of an alliance between Euro-anarchists and Islamic fundamentalists.

  Rourke and his Agency have got it right, Dimitri is bad to very bad, but Sasha is his innocent dupe.

  In support of the above argument: Sasha’s gullibility is well attested. He is intelligent and perceptive, but as soon as his ideals are appealed to, he abandons his otherwise well-developed critical faculties and goes barmy.

  Against the above argument: unfortunately, very little.

  Dimitri is as bad as Rourke says he is, and—to quote the sages of Edinburgh—Sasha is complicit, conscious and aware. Dimitri and Sasha together are taking me for a ride because they want my school for their own nefarious purposes.

  In support: During Sasha’s thirteen years in the wilderness he has witnessed at first hand the rape of the earth and the destruction of indigenous cultures by Western-led industrialization. He has suffered great personal humiliation, and kept some pretty steamy company. In theory, these are all good reasons why Sasha should sign up to what Rourke calls the black road.

  Against: Sasha never lied to me in his life.

  Mundy has carried these unresolved arguments around like warring children inside his head for every unsleeping hour of the last fortnight, on his walks with Mo, or while earnestly helping Mustafa with his Dome, or striving to calm Zara’s apprehensions, or marching his English Spokens round Mad Ludwig’s castle. And they are in his head now as he watches the white, unmarked van pull up outside the gates.