Absolute Friends

by John le Carré

  “Teddy, this is total fascistic provocation. You have been at the bastards’ mercy for so long they can’t bear you to slip out of their grasp. I think you are being a little naive, actually.”

  “Then he asked me whether I’d ever had anything to do with anarchists at any point in my life. Or their supporters. He was talking about Euro-anarchists. People like the Red Army Fraktion and the Red Brigades.” He allows time for this disinformation to have its effect, but it has none at all. Sasha is watching him with the same shocked straight stare that he adopted from the moment Mundy started down this road.

  “And you?” Sasha inquires. “What did you say?”

  “I asked him what the hell that had got to do with anything.”

  “And he?”

  “Asked me why I was expelled from Berlin.”

  “And you?”

  Mundy would like to tell Sasha to shut up prompting him and just listen. I’m trying to sow alarm in you, damn you—draw you out, force an admission from you, and all you do is glower at me as if I’m the villain in this, and you’re the lily-white one.

  “I said that in my youth I had been a rebel, just like anybody else, but I didn’t think that fact had much to do with my present standing at the bank, or my fitness to receive cash from a reputable trust.” He flounders on. “They haven’t left me alone since. They gave me a whole bunch of forms to fill in, and yesterday I got a call from somebody describing herself as the bank’s special inquiries officer, asking me if I could name references who could vouch for me over the last ten years. Sasha, listen to me, please —”

  He is doing a Sasha in reverse: eyes wide, hands open, appealing to him the way Sasha did when he was begging him to go with him to the mountaintop.

  “Is there really nothing more you can tell me about Dimitri? I mean, just his real name would be a help, for Christ’s sake, a few scraps about his past—only the reputable bits, naturally—some idea of who he is and how he made his money—where he’s coming from politically?” And for good measure: “I’m in the hot seat, Sasha. This one isn’t going away.”

  Mundy is standing and Sasha, in his beggar’s crouch, is still staring up at him. But instead of fear and guilt or tears, his eyes are filled with pity for a friend.

  “Teddy. I think you are right. You should get out of this before it’s too late.”

  “Why?”

  “I asked you before we went up to see Dimitri. I ask you again now. Do you truly believe your own rhetoric? Are you really prepared to return to the intellectual barricades? Or are you like the little pipers when they march to war? The first sound of gunshot, they want to go home?”

  “Just as long as the barricades are intellectual and nothing else. What do I tell the bank?”

  “Nothing. Tear up their forms, don’t answer their calls. Leave them with their fantasies. You receive money from an Arab charity, and when you were a beardless child you were a pseudo-militant in Berlin. For their poor sick minds, that’s already enough. You are clearly a Euro-terrorist with pro-Islamist sympathies. Did they mention that you were a comrade of the notorious rabble-rouser Sasha?”

  “No.”

  “I am disappointed. I thought I would have star billing in their ridiculous scenario. Come, Teddy.” He is scrabbling busily about, gathering up food, putting it in the plastic boxes. “We have had enough of ill humor. We go back to your beautiful school, we drink a lot, we sleep in the attic like old times. And in the morning before I go to Hamburg you tell me whether you want me to find someone else to do the job, no problem. Or maybe by then we have our courage back, okay?”

  And with the okay, Sasha slings his arm round Mundy’s shoulders to cheer him up.

  They are cycling side by side the way they learned to cycle together: Mundy soft-pedaling, Sasha precariously at his own speed. Evening dew is falling. The river runs beside them, the red castle observes them darkly in the failing light.

  “You know what is bad about those bankers—actually wicked, I would say?” Sasha demands breathlessly, swerving into Mundy and righting himself in the nick of time.

  “Greed,” Mundy suggests.

  “Worse. Much worse.”

  “Power.”

  “Even worse than power. They are trying to put us into one bed. Liberals, socialists, Trotskyists, Communists, anarchists, antiglobalists, peace protesters: we are all Sympis, all pinkos. We all hate Jews and America and we are the secret admirers of Osama. You know what they dream of, your bankers?”

  “Sex.”

  “That one day a worthy policeman will walk into the offices of the antiglobalization movement in Berlin or Paris or London or Madrid or Milan and find a big box of anthrax with a label on it saying, From all your good friends in Al Qaeda. The liberal left will be exposed as the closet fascist bastards they’ve always been, and the petit bourgeoisie of Europe will go crawling to its American Big Brother, begging it to come to its protection. And the Frankfurt stock exchange will go up five hundred points. I’m thirsty.”

  A pit stop while they finish the red burgundy and Sasha waits for his chest to calm down.

  From the attic of the schoolhouse, if you stand in the man-sized dormer window, you can watch the early summer’s dawn steal along the red castle walls and down the river and over the bridges until the whole of Heidelberg has been taken without a shot fired.

  But if Mundy must as usual be up and doing, Sasha who could never rise early is sound asleep inside the heap of sofa cushions and blankets and dust-sheets that Mundy put together for him when they had drowned their differences in a second bottle of burgundy. The Party briefcase lies at Sasha’s feet beside his jeans and sneakers, he has one thin arm crooked beneath a cushion and his head on top of it, and if Mundy didn’t know him better he might wonder whether he was dead because of the discretion of his breathing. On the floor beside him sits Mundy’s alarm clock set for ten as Sasha asked, and beside the clock Mundy’s note saying, Cheerio, gone to Munich, give Hamburg a kiss from me, see you in church. And as a P.S.: Sorry to have been an arsehole.

  Carrying his shoes in his hands he pads down the big staircase and across the hall to the front door and sets off at a smart pace for the old town. It is by now half past eight. The tourist traps in the Hauptstrasse are still asleep and will remain so for another hour. But his business is not in the Hauptstrasse. In a glass and concrete side street not far distant from the railway station stands a Turkish travel agency that he has noticed on his wanderings. It seemed to be always open, and is open now. With cash that he has taken from a machine with the aid of his new bank card, he buys two excursion tickets from Munich to Ankara for Zara and Mustafa and, after a moment’s deliberation, a third for himself.

  With the tickets in his pocket, he walks again beside a busy road until he is the only pedestrian. He enters half countryside. A paved footpath across a wheat field brings him to a shopping complex where he finds what he is looking for: a line of public pay phones in semi-cubicles. In his pocket he has thirty euros in coin. He dials first to Britain, then to central London, then to God knows where, because never in his life has he dialed such an unlikely set of digits, or so many of them.

  And this is Edward’s panic button for a rainy day, Nick Amory is saying quietly over a farewell luncheon at his club, handing him a bit of card with a number to memorize. Whistle and I’ll come to you, but you’d better make it bloody good.

  Holding a fountain pen at the ready, he waits for the dial tone. It is interrupted by a woman’s electronic voice saying, Leave your message now. With the fountain pen he begins tapping on the mouthpiece: This for who I am, this for who I want to talk to, because why announce yourself to half the listening world by using your own stupid voice?

  The woman wants binary answers.

  Is your problem immediate?

  Tap.

  Can it wait twenty-four hours?

  Tap.

  Forty-eight hours?

  Tap.

  Seventy-two hours?

  Tap t
ap.

  Now select one of the following options. If the meeting you require may safely occur at your last recorded residence, press five.

  By the time she’s finished with him, he’s so exhausted that he has to sit on a bench and let himself dry out. A Roman Catholic priest eyes him, wondering whether to offer his services.

  14

  ON THE TRAIN back to Munich Mundy has offered up prayers of thanks to Zara’s beloved youngest sister, whose wedding will take place in her home village one week from today. He has also noted that tomorrow is Zara’s day off and, because it’s a Thursday, Mustafa will be home at lunchtime.

  The charter flight leaves two days from now at crack of dawn. Arriving at Munich’s main station Mundy seeks out a luggage shop and buys a new suitcase—green, Zara’s favorite color—and, from a department store close by, a long gray dress and matching headscarf that according to her cousin Dina, mother to Kamal, she has long coveted. Since living with Mundy, Zara has taken to locking herself up from head to toe as a sign that she has returned to her tradition; but also she is demonstrating her pride that Mundy alone has the key to her. For Mustafa, also on Dina’s advice, he buys a flash blue jacket and white trousers like Kamal’s: the boys are the same size. Dina, he has established, will also take charge of the dog Mo for the duration.

  He next calls on Zara’s kebab café. At eleven in the morning business is quiet. The manager, a tubby man in a skullcap, is at first disconcerted by the sight of Mundy bearing down on him with a green suitcase. Has Zara some complaint about her treatment? he inquires anxiously, from behind the safety of the counter. No, Mundy says, she has none. Now that you’ve learned to keep your hands off her, she’s happy in her work, he might have added, but he doesn’t. The manager insists Mundy accept a coffee on the house, and how about a slice of chocolate cake? Mundy accepts the coffee, declines the cake and proposes a deal: a month’s unpaid leave for Zara with immediate effect, and Mundy will subsidize a temporary replacement to the tune of five hundred euros. They settle for seven hundred.

  From a public phone box he calls Zara’s Turkish doctor. I’m a bit worried about Mustafa, he says. Adolescence seems to be weighing him down. He’s doing all right in class, no truancy, but he’s gone solitary, he’s sleeping ten hours a day and looking very gray. “It is the dusk of puberty,” says the doctor knowingly. So what Mundy is wondering, doctor, is this. If I can rustle up the money to send Mustafa and his mother back to Turkey for a big family beanfeast, could you see your way to providing a medical certificate that will satisfy the school authorities?

  The good doctor believes he can reconcile this with his conscience.

  Mundy calls the Linderhof and makes yet another excuse for not coming in, but it is not well received. He feels badly, but knows no remedy. Returning home, he lets Zara sleep until Mustafa comes back from school, then leads her by the hand to the tiny living room, where he has set the stage. The softness of her palms always amazes him. He has placed her youngest sister’s photograph prominently on the sideboard, and the green suitcase on the floor below it with the new dress and scarf draped over one corner. Mustafa wears his new blue jacket. Zara’s front teeth are repaired but in her apprehension she runs her tongue across them to make sure they are there.

  He has laid the tickets side by side on the table together with the written release in Turkish from the manager of the café. She sits down straight as a schoolgirl on the center chair, arms to her sides. She stares at the tickets, then at Mundy. She reads the letter from her Turkish employer, and without expression replaces it on the table. She takes up the nearer ticket, her own. She studies it with severity and only brightens when she discovers that she may return in three weeks. She seizes Mundy roughly by the waist and presses her forehead against his hip.

  Mundy has one more card to play. It’s the air ticket for himself. It takes him to Turkey for the last week of their trip, and brings him back with them on the same plane. Zara’s happiness is complete. The same afternoon, they make ecstatic love and Zara weeps with shame that she ever doubted him. Mundy’s shame is of a different order, but eased by the knowledge that she and Mustafa will soon be out of harm’s way.

  Driving Zara and Mustafa to Munich airport in the wee hours, he at first fears ground fog but by the time they arrive it’s lifting and there are few delays. Shuffling down the check-in line, Zara keeps her eyes down and clings so hard to Mundy that he imagines she is his daughter and he is sending her off to boarding school against her will. Mustafa holds her other arm and makes jokes to keep her spirits up.

  At the counter there is business about the trolley-load of gifts that Zara has bought for her sisters, brothers and cousins out of her savings. A container is found. Some of the parcels must be repacked. The distraction is helpful. In his last sight of her, Zara is standing at the passenger departure doors as they close on her. She is bent double like Rani at the roadside, choking over her folded arms, and Mustafa is trying to console her.

  Alone with his thoughts on the autobahn, heading north and isolated by a deluge of heavy rain, Mundy is brought back to time present by the trilling of his cellphone. That bloody man Rourke, he thinks, as he shoves it to his ear, and he is preparing to be short with him when to his astonishment he hears Amory, en clair, on an open line, chatting to him as if neither of them had a care in the universe.

  “Edward, dear boy. Have I woken you from your slumbers?”

  But he knows he hasn’t.

  “Received your message, and of course I’d love to,” he is saying breezily, in the manner of an old friend passing through town. “How would today suit?”

  Mundy considers asking Amory where he’s speaking from but sees no point since Amory wouldn’t tell him.

  “Sounds great,” he says instead. “What sort of time d’you have in mind?”

  “How about one-ish?”

  “Fine. Where?”

  “How about your place?”

  “In Heidelberg?”

  “The school. Why not?”

  Because it’s bugged from ear to ear is why not. Because it’s been surveyed for a whole day by polite young men and women. Because Rourke believes it’s being prepared as a terrorist nest for Euro-anarchists who would like to split Germany from America.

  “Our chum’s in Hamburg, isn’t he?” Amory continues, when Mundy still doesn’t answer.

  “Yes. He is.” If he’s still our chum, thinks Mundy.

  “Until late tonight, right?”

  “So he says.”

  “And today’s Saturday, right?”

  “So I’m told.”

  “So there are no workmen tearing the place apart.”

  “No.” Or putting it back together.

  “So what’s wrong with meeting at the school?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Family get off all right?”

  “Like a breeze.”

  “See you around lunchtime then. Can’t wait. Masses to talk about. Tschüss.”

  A salvo of torrential rain sets his car shuddering. Long bursts of summer lightning fill the sky. The Beetle needs time out, and so does Mundy. Crouched head in hand at a roadside restaurant, he picks the hidden signals out of Amory’s message or—as Dimitri would have it—the flyshit out of the pepper. In his laborious dialogue with Amory’s electronic lady Mundy had suggested they meet at a remote service station ten miles out of Heidelberg. Instead they are to stage a jolly reunion at the scene of the crime, with Rourke listening to their every word.

  So what has Amory told me so far—Amory who never says anything without a purpose?

  That he is speaking for the record, over an open line, with nothing up his sleeve. But whose record is he speaking for?

  That he is being kept informed of my movements, and Sasha’s, and my family’s. But who by?

  That he has masses to report to me, but only within the hearing of the people he got it from. Amory like Dimitri is an artist of the unobserved life. But this time he’s telling me that he’
s observed.

  Mundy returns his thoughts to where they were before Amory interrupted them. Where is she now? Overflying Romania, headed for the Black Sea. Thank heaven for Mustafa. He longs for Jake but can’t reach him. He never could.

  Mundy is back at his place in the bay window on the first floor of the schoolhouse, staring down the brick path the way he stared down it when he was keeping an eye out for Sasha and his consignment of core library books. He has parked his Beetle outside the front gates, the time is twelve-thirty of the same Saturday and, yes, Sasha is in Hamburg: amazingly for him, he has actually called Mundy to inquire whether he is still of stout heart, or would he after all prefer Sasha to find a replacement for him, because “Look here, Teddy, we are both completely adult, I would say.” And Mundy for his part has assured Sasha that he is one hundred percent committed to the great project, he believes in it. And perhaps in a way he does, since he has no option. To walk out on Sasha is to leave him to Dimitri and Rourke, whatever that means.

  While he is waiting, Mundy has also done the stupid, anxious things that joes do when they’re waiting for their case officers to show up: shaved and showered and pushed his dirty clothes behind a curtain, and prepared a sitting area in one of the classrooms, and put a hand towel and a cake of new soap beside the handbasin, and made a thermos flask of coffee in case Amory no longer drinks Scotch the way he used to. He had actually to stop himself from going into the garden and picking wild flowers to put in a jam jar.

  And he is still going through these ridiculous acts of overpreparation in his mind, while at the same time picturing the arrival of Zara and Mustafa at Ankara airport and the vast reception committee of her ecstatic relations, when he realizes that a tan-colored BMW with a Frankfurt registration has parked itself behind the Beetle, and that Nick Amory, younger by far than the years between that should have aged him, is emerging from the driver’s side, locking the car, opening the gate and setting course for the front door.

  Mundy gets only one quick look at him before bounding down the stairs, but it’s enough to tell him that Nick’s nearly sixty years sit well on him, that the old shagginess has acquired an unmistakable air of authority, and that the habitual smile, if that’s what it ever was—though magically resurfacing the moment Mundy opens the door to him—was not on parade when he started up the path.