The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories From My Life

by John le Carré

  ‘You may sit down now, Brigitte.’

  So Brigitte sits, prim and upright like the good German schoolgirl she has evidently decided to be. I have planned to exchange a few opening banalities with her, but discover I have none to hand. So I go straight to the point with a couple of cumbersome questions such as: ‘Do you in retrospect regret your actions, Brigitte?’ And: ‘What actually set you on the path to radicalism?’ To neither of which she has anything to say, preferring instead to sit stock still with her hands flat on the table and stare at me in a mixture of puzzlement and contempt.

  Major Kaufmann comes to my rescue:

  ‘Maybe you like to tell him how you joined the group, Brigitte,’ she suggests, speaking like an English schoolmistress with a foreign accent.

  Brigitte seems not to hear this. She is looking me up and down, methodically, if not insolently. When she has completed her examination, her expression tells me all I need to know: I am just another unenlightened lackey of the repressive bourgeoisie, a terror tourist, half a man at best. Why should she bother with me? She bothers all the same. She will make a brief mission statement, she says, if not for my sake, then her own. Intellectually she is probably a communist, she concedes, analysing herself objectively, but not necessarily a communist in the Soviet sense. She prefers to think of herself as not confined by any single doctrine. Her mission is to the unawakened bourgeoisie of whom she considers her parents prime examples. Her father shows signs of enlightenment, her mother as yet none. West Germany is a Nazi country run by bourgeois state fascists of the Auschwitz generation. The proletariat merely follows their example.

  She returns to the subject of her parents. She has hopes of converting them, her father especially. She has given much thought to how she will break down the subconscious barriers in them, left behind by Nazism. Is this a coded way of saying she misses her parents, I wonder? Even that she loves them? That she worries herself sick about them day and night? As if to correct any such bourgeois-sentimental thoughts, she launches off on a list of her guiding prophets: Habermas, Marcuse, Frantz Fanon and a couple I haven’t heard of. From there, she discourses on the evils of armed capitalism, the remilitarization of West Germany, imperialist America’s support of fascist dictators such as the Shah of Iran, and other issues where I might have agreed with her were she faintly interested in my opinions, but she isn’t.

  ‘And now I would like to go back to my cell, please, Major Kaufmann.’

  With another ironic bob and a handshake for me, she indicates to the wardresses that they may take her away.

  Major Kaufmann has not left her place in the corner of the room, and I have not left mine at the table opposite Brigitte’s empty chair. The silence between us is a little strange. It’s as if we’re both emerging from the same bad dream.

  ‘Did you get what you came for?’ Major Kaufmann asks.

  ‘Yes, thank you. It was very interesting.’

  ‘Brigitte is a little confused today, I would say.’

  To which I reply, yes, well, to be honest, I’m a little confused myself. And it’s only now, in my self-absorption, that I realize we are speaking German, and that Major Kaufmann’s German has no distinguishing traces, Yiddish or other. She notices my surprise, and answers my unspoken question.

  ‘I only ever speak English with her,’ she explains. ‘German, never. Not one word. When she speaks German, I cannot trust myself.’ And as if further explanation were needed: ‘You see, I was in Dachau.’

  15

  Theatre of the Real: a question of guilt

  On a hot summer’s night in Jerusalem, I am sitting in the house of Michael Elkins the American broadcaster, who worked first with CBS, then for seventeen years with the BBC. I had gone to him because, like millions of my generation, I’d grown up in the company of his stentorian New York growl, delivered in perfect sentences, usually from some inhospitable war front; but also, in another part of my head, because I was on the lookout for two fictional Israeli intelligence officers I had arbitrarily named Joseph and Kurtz. Joseph was the young one, Kurtz the old hand.

  What precisely I hoped to find in Elkins I can’t say from here with clarity, and probably I couldn’t have said at the time. He was in his seventies. Was it a bit of my Kurtz that I was after? I knew that Elkins had done more than his share of this and that, although I had yet to learn quite how much: worked for the OSS; and, while he was about it, run illegal arms shipments into Palestine for the Jewish Haganah before the creation of Israel; which was how he came to be fired from the OSS and go to ground in a kibbutz with his wife, whom he subsequently divorced. But I hadn’t read his book, which I should have done: Forged in Fury, published in 1971.

  I knew also that Elkins, like Kurtz, was of East European stock, and had grown up in Lower East Side New York where his immigrant parents had worked in the garment trade. So yes, maybe I was looking for a bit of Kurtz in him: not for his appearance or mannerisms, because I already had a perfectly good physical image of my own Kurtz and wasn’t about to let Elkins steal it, but for the odd pearl of wisdom that he might let fall as he reminisced about vanished times. In Vienna I had sat at the feet of Simon Wiesenthal, the celebrated if controversial Nazi hunter, and although he had told me nothing I didn’t already know, the memory had never left me.

  But, mostly, I wanted to meet him because he was Mike Elkins, owner of the toughest, most beguiling voice I had ever heard on radio. His vivid, carefully structured sentences, told in a deep-brown Bronx drawl, made you sit up, listen and believe. So when he called me at my hotel and told me he had heard I was in Jerusalem, I leapt at the chance to meet him.

  The Jerusalem night is unusually oppressive and I’m sweating, but I don’t think Mike Elkins ever sweated. He has a lank, powerful body and a physical presence as strong as his voice. He is large-eyed and hollow-cheeked and long-limbed, and he sits in silhouette to my left side, whisky glass in one hand, the other fastened over the arm of his deckchair, and a huge moon behind his head. The radio-perfect voice is as reassuring and carefully phrased as it always was, even if the sentences come a bit shorter. And sometimes he breaks off and considers himself, as if from afar, before taking another pull of Scotch.

  He’s not talking directly at me, but ahead of himself into the darkness, to a microphone that isn’t there, and it’s clear he still cares about syntax and cadence while he speaks. We started indoors, but the night was so beautiful that we carried our glasses on to the balcony. I’m not sure when or how we began talking about Nazi hunting. Perhaps I had mentioned my visit to Wiesenthal. But Mike is talking about it now. And he’s not talking about the hunting, but about the killings.

  Sometimes we didn’t have the time to explain our business, he says. We just killed them and walked away. Other times we’d take them somewhere and then we’d explain. A field, a warehouse. Some wept and confessed. Some blustered. Some implored us. Some couldn’t come out with anything much. If a man had a garage, maybe we’d take him to his garage. Noose round his neck, fix it to the rafters. Stand him on the top of his car, drive it out of the garage. Then we’d go back in and make sure he’s dead.

  We, I am hearing? What kind of we is this exactly? Are you telling me that you, Mike, personally, were one of the avengers? Or is this a general sort of we, like we Jews, and you’re just counting yourself among them?

  He describes other ways of killing, still using the we that I’m not entirely understanding, until his thoughts wander to the moral justification of killing Nazi war criminals who, because they have concealed their identities and gone to ground – for instance in South America – would not otherwise face justice in this life. From there he drifts to guilt in general: no longer the guilt of the men who were killed, but the guilt, if any, of the men who killed them.

  Too late, I dig out Mike’s book. Its publication caused quite a stir, particularly among the Jews themselves. In tone and content it is as fearsome
as the title suggests. Mike was exhorted to write it, he says, by one Malachi Wald, in a kibbutz in Galilee. He describes his own Jewish awakening, prompted by American anti-Semitism in his childhood, and then made absolute by the monstrosities of the Holocaust and his own experiences as a member of the OSS in occupied Germany. The style of writing is one minute intensely personal, the next scathingly ironic. In meticulous detail, he describes unthinkable acts of Nazi savagery perpetrated against Jews in the ghettos, and in the camps: and just as vividly the heroism of the martyrs of the Jewish resistance.

  But most significantly – and controversially – he reveals for us the existence of a Jewish organization named DIN, Hebrew for judgement, of which the founder was the same Malachi Wald who, in the kibbutz in Galilee, had urged him to write the book in the first place.

  In the years 1945 and 1946 alone, he tells us, DIN hunted down and killed no fewer than a thousand Nazi war criminals. Its work, which continued into the seventies, included a plan, mercifully never completed, to poison the water supply of 250,000 German households with the aim of killing a million German men, women and children in recompense for the six million murdered Jews. DIN, Mike tells us, enjoyed the support of Jews across the world. Its original membership of fifty came from all walks of life: businessmen, men of religion, poets.

  But also, Mike adds without comment, journalists.

  16

  Theatre of the Real: terms of endearment

  The Commodore Hotel in those tense days – and it’s hard to remember a time when days in Beirut were not tense – was the favoured watering hole of every real or pretended war correspondent, arms dealer, drug merchant and bogus or real aid worker in the hemisphere. Its aficionados liked to compare it with Rick’s joint in Casablanca, but I never saw the comparison. Casablanca wasn’t an urban battlefield, it was just a clearing station, whereas people came to Beirut to make money, or trouble, or even peace, but not because they wanted to escape.

  The Commodore was no great looker. Or it wasn’t in 1981, and today it doesn’t exist. It was a boring, straight-up-and-down building of no architectural merit, unless you included the four-foot-thick welcome desk of hardened concrete in the entrance lobby, which in troubled times doubled as a gun emplacement. Its most revered resident was an elderly parrot named Coco that ruled over the cellar bar with a rod of iron. As the techniques of urban warfare became ever more sophisticated – from semi-automatic to rocket-propelled, from light to medium, or whatever the correct vocabulary is – so Coco updated his repertoire of battle sounds to a point where the uninitiated guest grazing at the bar would be roused by the whoosh of an incoming missile and a shriek of ‘Hit the deck, dumb bastard, get your ass down now!’ And nothing better pleased the war-weary hacks returning from another hellish day in paradise than the sight of some poor neophyte disappearing under a table while they go on sipping nonchalantly at their mahogany whiskies.

  Coco is also credited with the first bars of the Marseillaise and the opening chords of Beethoven’s Fifth. His leaving is shrouded in mystery: he was smuggled to a safe haven where he sings to this day; he was shot by Syrian militia; he finally succumbed to the alcohol in his feed.

  I made several trips to Beirut and South Lebanon that year, partly for my novel, partly for the ill-starred film that resulted from it. In my memory they form a single, unbroken chain of surreal experiences. For the timid, Beirut did fear round the clock, whether you were dining on the Corniche to the clatter of gunfire, or listening carefully to the words of a Palestinian teenager who is holding a Kalashnikov to your head and describing his dream of getting himself to university in Havana to study international relations, and can you help?

  As a new boy to the Commodore, I had been drawn to Mo on sight. He had seen more death and dying in an afternoon than I had in a lifetime. He had filed scoops from the worst hearts of darkness the world has to offer. You had only to glimpse him at the end of yet another day at the battlefront, with a tattered khaki carry-bag slung over his shoulder, loping across the crowded lobby on his way to the press office, to recognize his apartness. Mo has the brownest knees in town, they said. Seen it all, done it all, no bullshit, and nobody better in a tight corner, that was Mo, ask anyone who knew him. A little depressed sometimes, a little droll, maybe. And given to locking himself in his room with a bottle for a day or two, why not? And the only known companion of his recent life, a cat, which according to Commodore folklore had hurled itself in despair from a top-floor window.

  So when Mo casually suggested, on the second or third day of my very first Beirut visit, that I might care to join him on a little road trip he had in mind, I jumped at the chance. I had been picking the brains of all the other journalists, but Mo had kept himself aloof. I was flattered.

  ‘Take a ride out to the sands? Say hullo to a coupla crazies I know?’

  I said I could wish for nothing better.

  ‘Lookin’ for colour, right?’

  I was looking for colour.

  ‘Driver’s a Druze. Druze ass’ls don’t give a rat’s fart for any ass’l ’cept themselves. Right?’

  Very right indeed, Mo, thank you.

  ‘Other ass’ls – Shia, Sunni, Christian – they go lookin’ for trouble. Druze ass’ls don’t go lookin’ for trouble.’

  Sounds really good.

  It’s a checkpoint trip. I hate airports, lifts, crematoria, national borders and frontier guards. But checkpoints are in a league of their own. It’s not your passport they’re checking, it’s your hands. Then it’s your face. Then it’s your charisma or lack of it. And even if one checkpoint decides you’re okay, the last thing it’s going to do is pass on the happy news to the next one, because no checkpoint is going to let itself be sold short on its own suspicions. We have stopped at a barber’s pole balanced between two oil drums. The boy pointing his Kalashnikov at us wears yellow Wellingtons and frayed jeans cut short at the knee, and has a Manchester United supporters’ club badge stitched to his breast pocket.

  ‘Ass’l Mo!’ this apparition cries delightedly in welcome. ‘Hullo indeed, sir! And how are you today?’ – in studiously practised English.

  ‘I’m just fine, thank you, Ass’l Anwar, just fine,’ Mo drawls easily. ‘Is Ass’l Abdullah receiving today? Proud to introduce my good friend, Ass’l David.’

  ‘Ass’l David, you are most extremely welcome, sir.’

  We wait while he bawls joyously into his Russian walkie-talkie. The rickety red-and-white pole lifts. I have only a hazy picture of our conference with Ass’l Abdullah. His headquarters was a pile of brick and rock, pitted by gunfire and daubed with slogans. He sat behind a gigantic mahogany desk. Fellow ass’ls lolled around him, fingering their semi-automatics. Above his head hung a framed photograph of a Swissair Douglas DC-8 being blown apart on an airstrip. I remember knowing exactly that the airstrip was called Dawson’s Field, and that the DC-8 had been hijacked by Palestinian fighters with the assistance of the Baader–Meinhof Group. In those days, I flew Swissair a lot. I remember wondering who had gone to the trouble of taking the photograph to the framer and choosing the frame. But most of all I remember thanking my maker that our exchanges were being conducted through an interpreter whose grasp of English was at best uneven, and praying it would remain uneven long enough for our Druze driver who didn’t go looking for trouble to return us to the sweet sanity of the Commodore Hotel. And I remember the happy smile on Abdullah’s bearded face as he laid his hand over his heart and cordially thanked Ass’l Mo and Ass’l David for their visit.

  ‘Mo likes to take guys to the edge,’ a kind person warned me when it was too late. But the subtext was clear: in Mo’s world, war tourists get what they deserve.

  Did the phone call from outer space happen to me that same night? If it didn’t, it should have done. And certainly it happened at the outset of my Beirut period, because only a first-time guest could have been fool enough to accept a compl
imentary upgrade to a bridal suite on the Commodore’s mysteriously empty top floor. The Beirut nocturnal orchestra in 1981 was not up to the quality of later years, but it was coming on. A standard performance would start around 10 p.m. and hit its climax in the small hours. Guests upgraded to the top floor would be treated to the entire spectacle: flashes like a false dawn, the clatter of incoming and outgoing artillery fire – but which is which? – and the rattle of small-arms fire followed by eloquent silence. And all of it, to the untrained ear, happening in the next-door room.

  My hotel phone was ringing. I had been considering lying underneath the bed, but now I was sitting upright on it with the receiver to my ear.

  ‘John?’

  John? Me? Well, a few people, mainly journalists who don’t know me, do sometimes call me John. So I say, yes, and who’s this? – and in return receive a blast of abuse. My caller is a woman, she’s American, and she’s cross about something.

  ‘What the fuck d’you mean, who’s this? Don’t pretend you don’t recognize my fucking voice! You are one slimy British bastard, okay? You are an utter weak, cheating – just don’t fucking interrupt, all right?’ – now furiously shouting down my protestations. ‘Just don’t give me that blasé British shit like we’re taking tea in Buckingham fucking Palace! I counted on you, okay? It’s called trust. Just fucking listen. I go to the fucking hairdresser. I pack my shit in a nice little bag. I stand on the sidewalk like a hooker for like two fucking hours. I eat my heart out thinking you’re lying dead in a ditch, and where are you? In fucking bed!’ – her voice drops as a sudden thought strikes her – ‘Are you fucking some woman up there? Because if – stop! – just don’t give me that fucking voice, you British bastard!’

  Slowly, but only slowly, I disabuse her. I explain that she has the wrong John; that I’m not actually a John at all, I’m a David – pause for a lively exchange of gunfire – and that John, the real John, whoever he may be, must have checked out – boom-boom again – because the hotel made me a gift of this fine suite earlier in the day. And I’m sorry, I say, I’m really sorry, that she has suffered the humiliation of blasting off at the wrong man. And I really appreciate her distress – because by now I’m grateful to be talking to a fellow human being instead of dying alone under the bed in a complimentary hotel suite. And how rotten to be stood up like that, I go on chivalrously – because by now her problem is my problem and I really want us to be friends. And perhaps the real John has a perfectly sound reason for not appearing, I suggest, because after all, in this town anything can happen at any moment, can’t it? – boom-boom again.