The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories From My Life

by John le Carré

  Then Jack, my publisher, who’s a proud father as well as being Irish, says why doesn’t Ronnie finish whatever he’s drinking and let’s have a bottle of champagne. So we do, and Ronnie raises his glass and drinks to our book. Note the our. Then Jack says, hell Ronnie, why don’t you just sit here and eat with us too? So Ronnie lets himself be persuaded, and orders himself a nice mixed grill.

  Out on the pavement we have our obligatory bear-hug, and he weeps, which he does a lot: big, sobbing shrugs. I weep too, and ask him whether he’s all right for money, to which amazingly he replies that he is. Then he gives me some advice for life, in case I’m letting our book’s success go to our head:

  ‘You may be a successful writer, son,’ he says through more sobs, ‘but you’re not a celebrity.’

  And having left me with this incomprehensible warning, he sets off into the night without saying where he’s going, which I guess means he has a lady on the go, because he almost always has.

  Months afterwards, I’m able to piece together the back-story to this encounter. Ronnie was on the run, with no money and nowhere to live. However, New York City’s real estate agents were offering a month’s free accommodation to first-time tenants in new developments. Under different names Ronnie was flat-hopping: a free month here, a free month there, and so far they hadn’t caught up with him, but God help him when they did. It could only have been out of pride that he turned down my offer of money, because he was desperate and had already touched my elder brother for the better part of his savings.

  On the day after our dinner at the 21 Club, he had called up the sales department of my American publishing house, introduced himself as my father – and of course as a close friend of my publisher – ordered a couple of hundred copies of our book, charged them to the author’s account, and signed them in his own name for handing around as his business card.

  I have by now received a score of such books, with the owners’ requests that I add my signature to Ronnie’s. The standard version reads ‘Signed by the Author’s Father’, with an extra large F for Father. And mine in return reads, ‘Signed by the Author’s Father’s Son’, with an extra large S for Son.

  But try being Ronnie for a moment, as I have done too often. Try standing alone on the streets of New York, stony-broke. You’ve tapped whoever you can tap, milked your contacts dry. In England you’re on the Wanted list, and you’re on the Wanted list here in New York. You daren’t show your passport, you’re using false names to hop between apartments you can’t pay for, and all that stands between you and perdition is your animal wit and a double-breasted pinstripe from Berman of Savile Row that you home-press every evening. It’s the kind of situation they dream up for you at spy school: ‘Now let’s see how you talk your way out of this one.’ Allowing for the odd lapse now and then, Ronnie would have passed that test with flying colours.

  The ship that Ronnie always dreamed of came home shortly after his death, in one of those drowsy Dickensian law courts where complex disputes about money are thrashed out over a very long time. For caution’s sake, I will name the afflicted London suburb Cudlip, because it’s entirely possible that the same legal battle is rumbling to this day, just as it had rumbled through the last twenty-odd years of Ronnie’s life, then rumbled without him for another two.

  The facts of the case are simplicity itself. Ronnie had befriended Cudlip’s local council, notably its planning committee. How this had come about is easily imagined. They were fellow Baptists, or fellow Masons, or cricketers, or snooker players. Or they were married men in their prime who, until they met Ronnie, had never tasted the nocturnal pleasures of the West End. Perhaps they also looked forward to a slice of what Ronnie had assured them would be a big cake.

  However it had come about, there was no question in law or anywhere else that Cudlip Council had signed over to one of Ronnie’s eighty-three penniless companies the authorization to erect a hundred desirable houses in the middle of Cudlip’s green belt. And no sooner had they done this than Ronnie, who had bought the land for peanuts on the understanding that it could never be built on, sold it complete with planning consent to a large construction company for a large sum of money. Champagne flowed, the Court was jubilant. Ronnie had pulled off the deal of a lifetime. My brother Tony and I would never want for anything again.

  And as so often in his life, Ronnie was nearly right, had it not been for the citizens of Cudlip who, roused to action by their local newspaper, declared with one voice that any attempt to build houses or anything else on their precious green belt – their football field, their tennis courts, their children’s playground, their picnic area – would take place over their dead bodies. And such was their passion that in no time they had obtained a court order leaving Ronnie clutching a signed contract with the construction company, but not a penny piece of their money.

  Ronnie was as outraged as the citizens of Cudlip. Like them, he had never known such perfidy. It wasn’t the money, he insisted, it was the principle. He rallied a team of lawyers, nothing but the best. They concluded he had a strong case, and agreed to take it on. No win, no fee. The Cudlip land thereafter became the gold standard of our faith in Ronnie. For the next twenty years and more, any temporary setback would be as nothing once the great day of reckoning came. Ronnie could be writing to me from Dublin, or Hong Kong, or Penang, or Timbuctoo, the mantra with its strange capital letters never varied: ‘One day, Son, and it may well come After I am Judged, British Justice will Prevail.’

  And sure enough, within months of his death, justice did indeed prevail. I was not in court to hear the verdict. My lawyer had advised me not to display a flicker of interest in Ronnie’s estate lest I be stuck with its enormous debts. The courtroom was packed, according to my sources. The barristers’ benches were particularly full. Three judges were sitting, but one spoke for all, and his language was so convoluted that for a while no layman could catch his drift.

  Then gradually the news seeped through. The court had found for the plaintiff: for Ronnie. Outright. The jackpot. No ifs or buts. No on-the-one-hand and on-the-other-hand. Ronnie from the grave had won the slam-dunk victory that he had always insisted would be his: a People’s victory over twerps and airy-fairies, for which read unbelievers and intellectuals, the posthumous vindication of all his striving.

  Then a quiet falls. Amid the rejoicing a clerk has once more called the court to order. The handshaking and backslapping give way to a collective unease. A barrister who has not so far addressed the court craves the attention of their Lordships. I have my own arbitrary picture of him. He is puffy and pompous and pimply and his wig is too small for his head. He represents the Crown, he tells their Lordships. Specifically, he represents Her Majesty’s Inland Revenue, which he describes as ‘a preferential creditor’ in the matter upon which their Lordships have just passed judgement. And to be precise, and not to waste their Lordships’ precious time, he would like, with infinite respect, to petition that the entire sum awarded to the plaintiff’s estate be sequestered in order to defray, if only in small part, the far larger sums, reaching back over a great number of years, owed by the deceased to Her Majesty’s Inland Revenue.

  Ronnie is dead, and I am revisiting Vienna in order to breathe the city air while I write him into the semi-autobiographical novel I am at last free to ponder. Not the Sacher again; I have a dread that the waiters will remember Ronnie crashing down on to the table and me half carrying him out. My plane into Schwechat is delayed, and the reception desk of the small hotel that I have chosen at random is in the charge of an elderly night porter. He looks on silently as I fill in the registration form. Then he speaks in soft, venerable Viennese German.

  ‘Your father was a great man,’ he says. ‘You treated him disgracefully.’

  34

  To Reggie with thanks

  You have to be closer to my age, I suppose, to remember Reginald Bosanquet, the impish, hard-living, hard-drinking
television newsreader who captured the nation’s heart and died ridiculously early, I never knew quite what of. Reggie was my contemporary at Oxford and had all the things I didn’t: a private income, a sports car, beautiful women and a kind of premature adulthood to go with them.

  We liked each other, but there is only so much time you can spend with a man who lives the life you dream of and can afford it when you can’t. Besides, I was a shadowy fellow in those days, earnest and a bit haunted. Reggie was neither. Also, I wasn’t just broke, but – halfway through my second year – seriously insolvent, since my father had recently made one of his spectacular bankruptcies, and his cheque for my term’s fees had bounced. And though my College was behaving with exemplary forbearance, I really saw no way to remain in Oxford for the rest of the academic year.

  But that was to reckon without Reggie, who drifted into my room one day, probably with a hangover, shoved an envelope at me and drifted out. It contained a cheque made out to me by his Trustees, large enough to pay off my debts and keep me at university for the next six months. The accompanying letter was also from the Trustees. They said that Reggie had told them of my misfortune, that the money came from his own resources, and that I should pay it back at my convenience and only when I was able. And that it was Reggie’s wish that, on all matters relating to the loan, I should correspond directly with the Trustees, since he didn’t hold with mixing money with friendship.

  It was several years before I was able to repay the last instalment, and with it the interest that I reckoned the capital would have earned. His Trustees sent me a polite note of thanks, and returned the interest. Reggie, they explained, didn’t feel interest was appropriate in the circumstances.*

  35

  The most wanted man

  The mysterious early-morning phone call came from Karel Reisz, the Czech-born British film director best known at that time for Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. It is 1967, and I am trying my hardest to live alone in an ugly penthouse in Maida Vale. Reisz and I have been working together, unsuccessfully as it turned out, on a screenplay of a novel of mine called The Naive and Sentimental Lover, not everybody’s cup of tea to say the least. But Reisz isn’t calling about our movie script, as I can tell from his voice, which is sonorous and conspiratorial.

  ‘David, are you alone?’

  Yes, Karel, very.

  ‘Then if you could pop round here just as soon as possible, that would be a help.’

  The Reisz family lived no great distance away in a red-brick Victorian house in Belsize Park. Probably I walked there. When your marriage is failing, you walk. Reisz opened the front door so fast he must have been watching out for me. Having dropped the lock, he led me to the big kitchen, which was where life in the Reisz household was lived: seated round a thick, circular pine table with sugar biscuits on a rotating lazy susan, with pots of tea and coffee strewn over it, and jugs of fruit juice, and a busy telephone on a long cord, and in those days lots of ashtrays; all this in part for the convenience of such improbable habitués as Vanessa Redgrave, Simone Signoret and Albert Finney, who would drift in, help themselves, chat a bit and drift out. I have always imagined that before Reisz’s parents were murdered in Auschwitz, this was the way they had lived.

  I sat down. There were five faces staring at me: the actress Betsy Blair, who was Reisz’s wife, for once not talking on the telephone; the movie director Lindsay Anderson of This Sporting Life fame, which Reisz had produced for him. And seated between these two film directors, a smiling, nervous, charismatic younger man of classically Slav looks whom I had never seen before.

  ‘David, this is Vladimir,’ Reisz said gravely, at which the young man sprang to his feet and shook my hand vigorously – I could almost say desperately – across the table.

  And seated close behind this effusive young man, a young woman who, judging by her studious concern for him, had more the appearance of a minder than a lover, or – in that setting – of a theatrical agent or casting director, for the young man, even at a glance, had presence.

  ‘Vladimir is a Czech actor,’ Reisz announced.

  Great.

  ‘And he wants to remain in Britain.’

  Oh, really. I see – or something of the kind from me.

  Anderson’s turn: ‘We thought that with your sort of background you’d know the people who handle this stuff.’

  General silence round the table. Everyone waits for me to say something.

  ‘So defect,’ I suggest lamely. ‘Vladimir wants to defect.’

  ‘If that’s what you want to call it,’ Anderson says disparagingly, and the silence returns.

  It is becoming apparent to me that Anderson has some sort of proprietorial interest in Vladimir, and that Reisz, the bilingual fellow Czech, is more intermediary than prime mover. This made for a certain awkwardness. I had met Anderson on three occasions at best, none of them comfortable. For some unexplained reason, we had got off on the wrong foot, and stayed there. Born to a military family in India, Anderson had been educated at a British public school (Cheltenham, which he later punished with his film If . . . ) and at Oxford. In the war he had served in military intelligence in Delhi. And it was this last, I believe, that from the outset had disposed him against me. As an avowed socialist who was at daggers drawn with the Establishment that had spawned him, he had cast me as some kind of backstairs apparatchik in the class struggle, and there wasn’t much I could usefully do about it.

  ‘Vladimir is actually Vladimir Pucholt,’ I hear Reisz explain. And when my reaction falls short of whatever they all expect of me – which is to say, I do not give out a gasp of admiration, or cry ‘not the Vladimir Pucholt’ – Reisz hurries in with an explanation, to be quickly enlarged upon by the rest of the table. Vladimir Pucholt, I learn to my humiliation, is a shining Czech star of stage and screen, best known for his leading role in Miloš Forman’s A Blonde in Love (also translated, irritatingly, as Loves of a Blonde), which enjoyed international success. Forman also used him in his earlier films, and has declared Vladimir to be his favourite actor.

  ‘Which means in short’ – Anderson again, aggressively, as if I have questioned Pucholt’s worth and he feels obliged to correct me – ‘that any country that takes him can count itself bloody lucky. Which I trust you will make clear to your people.’

  But I haven’t got any people. The only people I have of the official or nearly official variety are my former colleagues in the spy world. And God forbid that I should call up one or other of them and tell him I have a potential Czech defector on my hands. I can readily imagine the kind of solicitous question that Pucholt would be invited to answer, like: are you a plant by Czech Intelligence and, if so, can you be turned? Or: name for us other Czech dissidents presently in Czechoslovakia who might be interested in working for us. And, assuming you haven’t already bubbled your intentions to your twelve best friends, might you consider returning to Czechoslovakia and doing a little of this and that for us?

  But Pucholt, I am beginning to sense, would have given them short shrift. He is no kind of fugitive, or not in his own eyes. He arrived in England legally, with the blessing of the Czech authorities. Before leaving, he discreetly put his affairs in order, fulfilling all outstanding film and theatre contracts and taking care to sign no new ones. He has visited Britain before, and the Czech authorities had no reason to suppose that this time he won’t be coming back.

  On his arrival in Britain, it seems, he at first went to ground. By some indistinct route, Lindsay Anderson then got to hear of his intentions and offered help. Pucholt and Anderson knew each other from Prague and London. Anderson then turned to his friend Reisz, and between the three of them a plan of sorts was drawn up. Pucholt had made clear from the outset that in no circumstance would he apply for political asylum. To do so, he argued, would bring down the wrath of the Czech authorities on those he had left behind – friends, family, teachers, fellow profes
sionals. Perhaps he had in mind the example of the Soviet ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev, whose defection six years earlier had been trumpeted as a victory for the West. As a result, Nureyev’s friends and family in Russia had been cast into outer darkness.

  With this stipulation foremost in their minds, Reisz, Anderson and Pucholt put their plan into effect. There would be no fanfares, no special-case treatment. Pucholt would be just one more disaffected young East European man walking off the street and seeking the indulgence of the British authorities. Together, Anderson and Pucholt set out for the Home Office and took their places in the queue for those seeking to extend their United Kingdom visas. Arriving at the desk of the Home Office clerk, Pucholt shoved his Czech passport through the little window.

  ‘For how long?’ the clerk asked, his rubber stamp poised.

  To which Anderson, never one to mince his words, least of all when addressing a lackey of the class system he abhors, retorts ‘For ever.’

  I have a clear picture of the lengthy exchanges that now took place between Pucholt and the senior Home Office official assigned to his case.

  In the one corner we have the laudable confusion of a ranking civil servant determined to do the right thing by the applicant, but also by the rulebook. All he asks is that Pucholt state unequivocally that were he to return to his home country, he would be persecuted. Once he’s done that, fine, box ticked, visa extended indefinitely, and welcome to Britain, Mr Pucholt.

  And in the other corner we have the laudable obstinacy of Pucholt, who flatly refuses to say what is asked of him, because by saying it he will have claimed political asylum, and thereby imperilled the people he has vowed not to imperil. So, no sir, I would not be persecuted, thank you. I am a popular Czech actor, and I would be welcomed back with open arms. I might be rebuked, I might suffer some token retribution. But I would not be persecuted, and I am not seeking political asylum, thank you.