The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories From My Life

by John le Carré

  And there is even a bit of black comedy to be had in this stand-off. Back home in Czechoslovakia, Pucholt had fallen into serious disfavour, and been forbidden to act in any film for two years. He had been invited – ordered is a better word – to play the part of a Czech borstal boy who, after being inspired by his dedicated borstal teachers in the highest principles of Marxism-Leninism, finds himself unable to handle life in the less enlightened, bourgeois-oriented society to which he has been restored.

  Unimpressed by the script, Pucholt had asked to spend a few days as a borstal inmate. Having done so, he was more certain than ever that the play was rubbish and, to the dismay of his handlers, declined the part. Tempers flared, contracts were thrust at him, but he wouldn’t budge. The result: a two-year ban that in better circumstances he could perfectly well have used as grounds for claiming he was the victim of political persecution in his home country.

  A week passed before Pucholt was once more invited to the Home Office, this time to be informed by a conflicted official, in the best tradition of British compromise, that while he would not be forcibly repatriated to Czechoslovakia, he would have to leave Britain within ten days.

  Which is where we are now, seated round the Reisz table in a state of muted alarm. Either the ten days are up, or they’re about to be, so what do you suggest we do about it, David? And the short answer is, David has no idea what we do about it: and all the less so when somewhere in our circular discussions it emerges that Pucholt has not come to Britain in order to pursue his stellar acting career, but ‘because, David’ – as he earnestly explains to me across the table – ‘I wish to become doctor’.

  He concedes that becoming a doctor will take a bit of time. He calculates seven years. He has a few basic Czech qualifications, but doubts whether they will count for much in the United Kingdom.

  I hear him say all this. I recognize the fervour in his voice and the zeal in his expressive Slav features. I try my best to look wise and smile approvingly at this noble vision of self-dedication.

  But I know something about actors. And I know, as everyone round the table knows, how actors are able to latch on to a hypothetical version of themselves and become it; but only for as long as the show lasts. After that, it’s off they go again, in search of the next new person to become.

  ‘Well, that’s great, Vladimir,’ I exclaim, temporizing for all I’m worth. ‘Still, I guess that while you’re doing your medical training, you’ll keep one foot in the acting world, won’t you? Brush up your English, do a bit of theatre, take on the odd movie role that comes up?’ – casting an eye at our two film directors for support, and not getting any.

  Not so, David, he replies. He has been an actor since boyhood. He has been swept from one role to another – often roles for which he has no regard, for example the borstal boy – and now he intends to become a doctor, which is why he wishes to remain in Britain. I glance round the table. Nobody seems surprised. Everyone but me accepts that Vladimir Pucholt, Czech heart-throb of stage and screen, wishes only to become doctor. Do they ask themselves, as I do, whether this is an actor’s fantasy rather than a life’s ambition? I have no way to tell.

  But it barely matters, because by now I have agreed to be the man they think I am. I will speak to my people, I hear myself saying, even though I haven’t got any people. I will find the best way to bring this matter to a successful and speedy conclusion, as we backstairs apparatchiks have it. I will go home now, but I will be in touch. Exits left, head held high.

  In the half-century that has since elapsed, I have occasionally asked myself why on earth I offered to do all this when Anderson and Reisz, as world-class film directors, had many more people within their reach, more friends in high places than I ever had, not to mention smart lawyers. Reisz, I knew for a fact, was hugger-mugger with Lord Goodman, éminence grise and legal adviser to Prime Minister Harold Wilson. Anderson, for all his socialist rigour, had impeccable upper-class credentials and, like Reisz, close connections with the ruling Labour Party.

  I think the answer may be that, with my life in a God-awful mess, it was a relief to be sorting out someone else’s. As a young soldier in Austria, I had interrogated scores of refugees from Eastern Europe on the off chance that one or two of them were spies. None to my knowledge was, but quite a few were Czech. Here at least was one I could do something about.

  I am not sure any more where Vladimir slept over the next few nights, whether it was at Reisz’s house, or the house of his companion, or Lindsay Anderson’s house, or even mine. But I do remember that he spent long daylight hours in my ugly penthouse, pacing or standing at the big picture window and staring out.

  Meanwhile, I am pulling every string I know to have the Home Office decision overturned. I ring my genial British publisher. He suggests I phone the Home Affairs correspondent of the Guardian newspaper. I do. The Home Affairs correspondent has no direct line to the Home Secretary, who is Roy Jenkins, but he does happen to know Mrs Jenkins. Or rather his wife does. He will talk to his wife now, and call me back.

  My hopes rise. Roy Jenkins is a brave and outspoken liberal. The Guardian correspondent calls me back. So here’s what you do. You write the Home Secretary a strictly formal letter, no flattery, no schmaltz. ‘Dear Home Secretary.’ You type it, you set out the facts and sign it. If your man wants to be a doctor, say so in the letter and don’t pretend he’s going to be God’s gift to the National Theatre. But here’s the difference. You address the envelope not to Roy Jenkins, Esquire, but to Mrs Jenkins, his wife. She will make sure the letter is sitting on his breakfast table tomorrow morning, next to his boiled egg. And you hand-deliver it. Tonight. To this address.

  I don’t type. I have never typed. The penthouse contains an electric typewriter, but there’s nobody around to use it. I call Jane. In those days, Jane and I are circling round each other. Today she is my wife. With Pucholt staring out at the London skyline, I write a ‘Dear Home Secretary’ letter and Jane types it. I address the envelope to Mrs Jenkins, seal it, and we set off for Notting Hill, or wherever Mr & Mrs Jenkins live.

  Forty-eight hours later, Vladimir Pucholt is granted leave to remain in Britain indefinitely. No evening newspaper crows about a celebrated Czech movie star defecting to the Western cause. He may start his medical studies as soon, and as quietly, as he wishes. The news reaches me while I am lunching with my literary agent. I return to the penthouse to find Vladimir no longer staring out of the window, but standing out on the balcony in jeans and trainers. It’s a warm, sunny afternoon. From a sheet of A4 paper on my desk, he has cut himself a paper glider. Leaning too far forward over the railings for my comfort, he waits for a favourable breeze, launches it and watches it potter away over the London rooftops. Up till now, he later explained to me, he hadn’t been able to fly. But now that he had permission to stay, it was all right.

  This is not about to become a story about my boundless generosity. It’s about Vladimir’s achievement in becoming one of Toronto’s best-loved and most dedicated paediatricians.

  Somehow or other – and to this day I’m not sure how – I became responsible for footing the bill for his medical training in Britain. Even at the time, that seemed an entirely natural thing to do. I was at the height of my earning power, Vladimir was at the nadir of his. My offer of support deprived me of nothing. It caused me and my family not one second of hardship, then or ever. Vladimir’s financial needs, by his own insistence, were frighteningly modest. His determination to repay every penny as soon as possible was ferocious. To spare the two of us awkward discussion, I left it to my accountant to settle the figures with him: this much to live on, this much to study, this much for transport, rent, and so on. The negotiations went into reverse. I pressed for more, Vladimir for less.

  His first medical job was as a laboratory assistant in London. From London he moved to a teaching hospital in Sheffield. In painstaking letters of lyrical, greatly improved English, h
e extolled the miracle of medicine, of surgery, of healing and of the human body as a work of creation. His specializations are in paediatric medicine and neonatal intensive care. With unabashed enthusiasm, he writes even today of the thousands of children and babies who have passed through his care.

  I have always found it humbling, and slightly embarrassing, to have played the role of angel at so little sacrifice to myself and to such extraordinary benefit to others. And more embarrassing still that, almost to the day of his qualification, I never entirely believed that he would make it.

  It is now 2007, a full forty years since Vladimir launched his paper glider from the balcony of the penthouse that I have long since got rid of. I am living half in Cornwall, half in Hamburg, while I write a novel called A Most Wanted Man about a young asylum seeker, not from Czechoslovakia as was, but from today’s Chechnya. He is only half a Slav; the other half of him is Chechen. His name is Issa, meaning Jesus, and he is a Muslim, not a Christian. His one ambition is to study to become a great doctor and cure the suffering people of his homeland, children a speciality.

  Imprisoned in the attic of a Hamburg warehouse while the spies fight over his future, he fashions paper gliders from a roll of unused wallpaper and makes them fly across the room to freedom.

  Sooner than I could have believed possible, Vladimir repaid every penny he ever borrowed from me. What he didn’t know – and neither did I until I came to write A Most Wanted Man – was that he had made me the non-returnable gift of a fictional character.

  36

  Stephen Spender’s credit card

  I think it was in 1991 that I was invited to a private dinner in Hampstead to meet Stephen Spender, essayist, dramatist, novelist, disillusioned communist, knight of the realm, former Poet Laureate of America – need I go on?

  We were six at table and Spender was holding the floor. At eighty-two, he cut a fine figure: white-haired, leonine, vigorous, full of wit. His theme was the evanescence of fame – his own, presumably, but I couldn’t help thinking he was slipping me a veiled warning – and the need on the part of those touched by it to accept with grace their return to obscurity. By way of illustration he then told us the following story:

  He had recently returned from a coast-to-coast car journey across the United States. Crossing the Nevada desert, he spotted a rare gas station and thought it prudent to fill up. A handwritten notice, presumably intended to discourage thieves, advised that the owner accepted credit cards only.

  Spender presented his credit card. The garage owner scrutinized it in silence. Finally, he vented his concern:

  ‘Only Stephen Spender I ever heard of is a poet,’ he objected. ‘And he’s dead.’

  37

  Advice to an aspiring novelist

  ‘Before I finish writing for the day I make sure I’ve left something under my belt for tomorrow. Sleep works wonders.’

  Source: Graham Greene to self, Vienna, 1965

  38

  The last official secret

  When I was a young and carefree spy it was only natural that I should believe that the nation’s hottest secrets were housed in a chipped green Chubb safe that was tucked away at the end of a labyrinth of dingy corridors on the top floor of 54 Broadway, opposite St James’s Park tube station, in the private office occupied by the Chief of the Secret Service.

  Broadway, as we called it, was old and dusty and, as a matter of Service philosophy, inconvenient. Of the three creaky lifts, the Chief had one to himself which conveyed him, in its own sweet time, directly to the hallowed heights of the top floor. Only the chosen few had a key to it. We lesser mortals made our ascent to him by way of a narrow wooden staircase watched over by a fish-eye mirror and, on our arrival on the top-floor landing, by a stone-faced janitor seated on a kitchen chair.

  I think it was we young entrants who loved the building most: for its perpetual twilight, its smell of the wars we hadn’t fought and the intrigues we could only dream of; for the poky invitation-only bar, where old hands fell silent as you walked past; and for its dark, dusty library of espionage literature, presided over by an elderly librarian with flowing white hair who, as a young spy himself, had run with the Bolshevik revolutionaries in the streets of Petersburg, and tapped out his secret messages from a cellar next to the Winter Palace. Both the movie of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and the BBC version of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy capture something of this atmosphere. But neither came close to the mysteries of that old Chubb safe.

  The Chief’s private office was an attic room with layers of grimy netting over the windows and the unsettling quality of seeming to be underground. If he wanted to address you formally he remained seated behind his bare desk, shielded by portraits of his family – and, in my day, of Allen Dulles and the Shah of Persia. If he wished for a more relaxed atmosphere, there were the cracked leather armchairs. But wherever you sat, the green safe was always somewhere in your eye-line, staring at you inscrutably across the room.

  What on earth could it contain? I had heard that there existed documents so secret that they were only ever touched by the Chief himself. If he chose to share them with another person, that person must first sign his life away, read them in the Chief’s presence and hand them back.

  And now the sad day is upon us when the final curtain will be rung down on Broadway Buildings, and the Service and all its chattels transferred to new accommodation in Lambeth. Is the Chief’s safe exempt? Will cranes, crowbars and silent men convey it bodily to the next stage in its life’s long journey?

  After a debate at the highest levels, it is reluctantly ruled that the safe, however venerable, is no longer fit for purpose in our modern world. It will be opened. Whatever is inside will be examined by sworn officers, minutely documented and granted all the handling procedures appropriate to its sensitivity.

  So who’s got the bloody key?

  Not the reigning Chief, apparently. He has made a point of never venturing inside the safe or needlessly familiarizing himself with its secrets. What you don’t know you can’t reveal. His surviving predecessors are urgently consulted. On the same principle, they too resisted trespassing on such holy ground. And they don’t know where the bloody key is. Nobody, not Registry, not the Secretariat, not the department for in-house security, not even the stone-faced janitor on his kitchen chair, nobody has seen or touched a key, or knows where it is, or who last had it. All that is known is that the safe itself was installed at the command of the revered and pathologically secretive Sir Stewart Menzies, who served as Chief of the Service from 1939 until 1952.

  So did Menzies take the key with him? Was he buried with it? Did he literally take his secret to the grave? He had every excuse. He was one of the founding fathers of Bletchley Park. He had conducted a thousand private interviews with Winston Churchill. He had negotiated with anti-Nazi resistance movements inside Germany, and with Admiral Canaris, the conflicted head of the German secret service, the Abwehr. Heaven alone knew what wasn’t in that green safe.

  In my novel A Perfect Spy, it appears as the chipped green filing cabinet that accompanies Ronnie’s alter ego, Rick, on his life’s journey. It is said to contain the sum of his debts to society, but it too is never opened.

  Meanwhile, time is running out. Any day now, the new tenant will be asserting his legal rights. An executive decision is urgently called for. Very well, the Service has picked a few locks in its day, so it looks like time to pick another: send for the Service burglar.

  The Service burglar knows his business. With disconcerting speed, the lock yields. The burglar hauls back the creaking iron door. Like the treasure seekers Carter and Mace before the open tomb of Tutankhamun, the spectators crane their necks for a first glimpse of the marvels within. There are none. The safe is empty, bare, innocent of even the most mundane secret.

  But wait! These are sophisticated conspirators, not easily fooled. Is this a decoy safe,
a dummy, a false grave, an outer bailey to protect an inner sanctum? A crowbar is sent for. The safe is gently prised from the wall. The most senior officer present peers behind it, gives out a muffled exclamation, gropes in the space between safe and wall, and extracts a very dusty, very thick, very old pair of grey trousers, with a label attached to them with a nappy pin. The typed inscription declares that these are the trousers worn by Rudolph Hess, Adolf Hitler’s deputy, when he flew to Scotland to negotiate a separate peace with the Duke of Hamilton in the mistaken belief that the Duke shared his fascist views. Beneath the inscription runs a handwritten scrawl in the traditional green ink of the Chief:

  Please analyse because may give an idea of the state of the German textile industry.

  Sources

  The publisher gratefully acknowledges the following sources. Some of these articles have been reproduced as they appeared at the time. Many have been used only in part.

  Chapter 10: Going out into the field

  here: ‘The Constant Muse’ was first published in the USA in the New Yorker in 2000, and in the UK in the Observer and in the Guardian in 2001.

  Chapter 24: His brother’s keeper

  here: ‘His Brother’s Keeper’ originally appeared in different form as the Afterword to A Spy Among Friends by Ben Macintyre, published in the USA by Crown Publishing Group and in the UK by Bloomsbury in 2014.

  Chapter 25: Quel Panama!

  here: ‘Quel Panama!’ was first published in the USA in The New York Times and is used here with permission, and was first published in the UK in the Daily Telegraph in 1996.