The Honorable Schoolboy

by John le Carré

  “This is Mr. Tiu,” said Grant quietly. “Mr. Tiu, meet Mr. Westerby, son of the famous one.”

  “You wanna talk to Mr. Ko, Mr. Wessby?”

  “If it’s convenient.”

  “Sure it’s convenient,” said Tiu euphorically. His chubby hands floated restlessly in front of his stomach. He wore a gold watch on his right wrist. His fingers were curled, as if to scoop water. He was sleek and shiny, and he could have been thirty or sixty. “Mr. Ko win a horse-race, everything’s convenient. I bring him over. Stay here. What your father’s name?”

  “Samuel,” said Jerry.

  “Lord Samuel,” said Grant firmly, and inaccurately.

  “Who is he?” Jerry asked aside, as plump Tiu returned to the noisy Chinese group.

  “Ko’s major-domo. Manager, chief bag-carrier, bottle-washer, fixer. Been with him since the start. They ran away from the Japanese together in the war.”

  And his chief crusher, too, Jerry thought, watching Tiu waddle back with his master.

  Grant began again with the introductions. “Sir,” he said, “this is Westerby, whose famous father had a lot of very slow horses. He also bought several racecourses for the bookmakers.”

  “What paper?” asked Ko. His voice was harsh and powerful and deep, yet to Jerry’s surprise he could have sworn he caught a trace of an English North Country accent, reminiscent of old Pet’s.

  Jerry told him.

  “That the paper with the girls!” Ko cried gaily. “I used to read that paper when I was in London, during my residence there for the purpose of legal study at the famous Gray’s Inn of Court. Do you know why I read your paper, Mr. Westerby? It is my sound opinion that the more papers which are printing pretty girls in preference to politics today, the more chance we get of a damn sight better world, Mr. Westerby,” Ko declared, in a vigorous mixture of misused idiom and boardroom English. “Kindly tell that to your paper from me, Mr. Westerby. I give it to you as free advice.”

  With a laugh, Jerry opened his notebook. “I backed your horse, Mr. Ko. How does it feel to win?”

  “Better than losing, I think.”

  “Doesn’t wear off?”

  “I like it better every time.”

  “Does the same go for business?”

  “Naturally.”

  “Can I speak to Mrs. Ko?”

  “She’s busy.”

  Jotting, Jerry was disconcerted by a familiar smell. It was of a musky, very pungent French soap, a blend of almonds and rosewater favoured by an early wife; and also, apparently, by the shiny Tiu for his greater allure.

  “What’s your formula for winning, Mr. Ko?”

  “Hard work. No politics. Plenty sleep.”

  “Are you a lot richer than you were ten minutes ago?”

  “I was pretty rich ten minutes ago. You may tell your paper also I am a great admirer of the British way of life.”

  “Even though we don’t work hard? And make a lot of politics?”

  “Just tell them,” Ko said straight at him, and that was an order.

  “What makes you so lucky, Mr. Ko?”

  Ko appeared not to hear this question, except that his smile slowly vanished. He was staring at Jerry, measuring him through his very narrow eyes, and his face had hardened remarkably.

  “What makes you so lucky, sir?” Jerry repeated.

  There was a long silence.

  “No comment,” Ko said, still into Jerry’s face.

  The temptation to press the question had become irresistible. “Play fair, Mr. Ko,” Jerry urged, grinning largely. “The world’s full of people who dream of being as rich as you are. Give them a clue, won’t you? What makes you so lucky?”

  “Mind your own damn business,” Ko told him, and without the smallest ceremony turned his back on him and walked away. At the same moment, Tiu took a leisurely half-pace forward, arresting Jerry’s line of advance with one soft hand on his upper arm.

  “You going to win next time round, Mr. Ko?” Jerry called over Tiu’s shoulder at his departing back.

  “You betta ask the horse, Mr. Wessby,” Tiu suggested with a chubby smile, his hand still on Jerry’s arm.

  He might as well have done so, for Ko had already rejoined his friend Mr. Arpego, the Filipino, and they were laughing and talking just as before. Drake Ko was very tough boy, Jerry remembered the witness saying. You don’t tell no fairy story to Drake Ko. Tiu doesn’t do so badly either, he thought.

  As they walked back toward the grandstand, Grant was laughing quietly to himself.

  “Last time Ko won, he wouldn’t even lead the horse into the paddock after the race,” he recalled. “Waved it away. Didn’t want it.”

  “Why the hell not?”

  “Hadn’t expected it to win, that’s why. Hadn’t told his Chiu Chow friends. Bad face. Maybe he felt the same when you asked him about his luck.”

  “How did he get to be a Steward?”

  “Oh, had Tiu buy the votes for him, no doubt. The usual thing. Cheers. Don’t forget your winnings.”

  Then it happened: Ace Westerby’s unforeseen scoop.

  The last race was over, Jerry was four thousand dollars to the good, and Luke had disappeared. Jerry tried the American Club, the Club Lusitano, and a couple of others, but either they hadn’t seen him or they’d thrown him out. From the enclosure there was only one gate, so Jerry joined the march. The traffic was chaotic. Rolls-Royces and Mercedes vied for curb space and the crowds were shoving from behind.

  Deciding not to join the fight for taxis, Jerry started along the narrow pavement and saw, to his surprise, Drake Ko alone, emerging from a gateway across the road. Reaching the roadside, he seemed undecided whether to cross, then settled for where he was, gazing at the on-coming traffic. He’s waiting for the Rolls-Royce Phantom, thought Jerry, remembering the fleet in the garage at Headland Road. Or the Merc, or the Chrysler.

  Suddenly Jerry saw him whip off the beret and, clowning, hold it into the road as if to draw rifle fire. The wrinkles flew up around his eyes and jaw, his gold teeth glittered in welcome; but instead of a Rolls-Royce, or a Merc, or a Chrysler, a long red Jaguar E-type with a soft top folded back screeched to a stop beside him, oblivious of the other cars. Jerry couldn’t have missed it if he’d wanted to; the noise of the tyres alone turned every head along the pavement. His eye read the number, his mind recorded it. Ko climbed aboard with all the excitement of someone who might never have ridden in an open car before, and he was already talking and laughing before they pulled away.

  But not before Jerry had seen the driver: her fluttering blue headscarf, dark glasses, long blond hair, and enough of her body, as she leaned across Drake to lock his door, to know that she was a hell of a lot of woman. Drake’s hand was resting on her bare back, fingers splayed; his spare hand was waving about while he no doubt gave her a blow-by-blow account of his victory, and as they set off together he planted a very un-Chinese kiss on her cheek, and then for good measure two more: but all somehow with a great deal more sincerity than he had brought to the business of kissing Mr. Arpego’s escort.

  On the other side of the road stood the gateway Ko had just come out of, and the iron gate was still open. His mind spinning, Jerry dodged the traffic and walked through. He was in the old Colonial Cemetery, a lush place scented with flowers and shaded by heavy overhanging trees. Jerry had never been here and he was shocked to enter such seclusion. It was built up an opposing slope round an old chapel that was gently falling into disuse. Its cracking walls glinted in the speckled evening light. Beside it, from a chicken-wire kennel, an emaciated Alsatian dog howled at him in fury.

  Jerry peered round, not knowing why he was here or what he was looking for. The graves were of all ages and races and sects. There were White Russian graves, and their orthodox headstones were dark and scrolled with Czarist grandeur. Jerry imagined heavy snow on them and their shape still coming through. Another stone described a restless sojourn of a Russian princess and Jerry paused to read it: Tallin to Peki
ng, with dates; Peking to Shanghai, dates again; to Hong Kong in ’49, to die. “And estates in Sverdlovsk,” the inscription ended defiantly. Was Shanghai the connection? Was Drake here on some pilgrimage to old friends?

  He rejoined the living: three old men in blue pyjama suits sat on a shaded bench, not talking. They had hung their cage-birds in the branches overhead, close enough to hear one another’s song above the noise of traffic and cicadas. Two grave-diggers in steel helmets were filling a new grave. No mourners watched. Still not knowing what he wanted, Jerry reached the chapel steps. He peered through the door. Inside was pitch dark after the sunlight. An old woman glared at him. He drew back. The Alsatian dog howled at him still louder. A sign said “Verger” and he followed it. The shriek of the cicadas was deafening, even drowning the dog’s barking. The scent of flowers was steamy and a little rotten. An idea had struck him, almost an intimation. He was determined to pursue it.

  The verger was a kindly distant man and spoke no English. The ledgers were very old; the entries resembled old bank accounts. Jerry sat at a desk slowly turning the heavy pages, reading the names, the dates of birth, death, and burial; lastly the map reference—the zone and the number. Having found what he was looking for, he stepped into the air again and made his way along a different path, through a cloud of butterflies, up the hill toward the cliff-side. A bunch of schoolgirls watched him from a foot-bridge, giggling. He took off his jacket and trailed it over his shoulder.

  He passed between high shrubs and entered a slanted coppice of yellow grass where the headstones were very small, the mounds only a foot or two long. Jerry sidled past them, reading the numbers, till he found himself in front of a low iron gate marked 728. The gate was part of a rectangular perimeter, and as Jerry lifted his eyes he found himself looking at the statue of a small boy in Victorian knickerbockers and an Eton jacket, life size, with tousled stone curls and rosebud stone lips, reading or singing from an open stone book while real butterflies dived giddily round his head. He was an entirely English child, and the inscription read “Nelson Ko in loving memory.” A lot of dates followed, and it took Jerry a second to understand their meaning: ten successive years with none left out, and the last 1968. Then he realised they were the ten years the boy had lived, each one to be relished. On the bottom step of the plinth lay a large bunch of orchids, still in their paper.

  Ko was thanking Nelson for his win. Now, at least, Jerry understood why he did not care to be invaded with questions about his luck.

  There is a kind of fatigue, sometimes, which only fieldmen know: a temptation to gentleness that can be the kiss of death. Jerry lingered a moment longer, staring at the orchids and the stone boy, and setting them in his mind beside everything he had seen and learned of Ko till now. And he had an overwhelming feeling—only for a moment, but dangerous at any time—of completeness, as if he had met a family, only to discover it was his own. He had a feeling of arrival. Here was a man, housed this way, married that way, striving and playing in ways Jerry effortlessly understood. A man of no particular persuasion, yet Jerry saw him in that moment more clearly than he had ever seen himself. A Chiu Chow poor-boy who becomes a Jockey Club Steward with an O.B.E., and hoses down his horse before a race. A Hakka water-gypsy who gives his child a Baptist burial and an English effigy. A capitalist who hates politics. An incomplete lawyer, a gang boss, a builder of hospitals who runs an opium airline. A supporter of spirit temples who plays croquet and rides about in a Rolls-Royce. An American bar in his Chinese garden, and Russian gold in his trust account.

  Such complex and conflicting insights did not at that moment alarm Jerry in the least; they presaged no foreboding or paradox. Rather he saw them welded by Ko’s own harsh endeavour into a single but many-sided man not too unlike old Sambo. Stronger still—for the few seconds that it lasted—he had an irresistible feeling of being in good company, a thing he had always liked. He returned to the gate in a mood of calm munificence, as if he, not Ko, had won the race.

  The traffic had cleared and he found a taxi straight away. They had driven a hundred yards when he saw Luke performing lonely pirouettes along the curb. Jerry coaxed him aboard and dumped him outside the Foreign Correspondents’ Club. From the Furama Hotel he rang Craw’s home number, let it ring twice, rang it again, and heard Craw’s voice demanding “Who the bloody hell is that?” He asked for a Mr. Savage, received a foul rebuke and the information that he was ringing the wrong number, allowed Craw half an hour to get to another phone, then walked over to the Hilton to field the return call.

  Our friend had surfaced in person, Jerry told him. Been put on public view on account of a big win. When it was over, a very nice blond party gave him a lift in her sports car. Jerry gave the licence number. They were definitely friends, he said. Very demonstrative and un-Chinese. At least friends, he would say.

  “Round-eye?”

  “Of course she was bloody well round-eye! Who the hell ever heard of a—”

  “Jesus,” said Craw softly, and rang off before Jerry even had a chance to tell him about little Nelson’s shrine.

  8

  THE BARONS CONFER

  The waiting-room of the pretty Foreign Office conference house in Carlton Gardens was slowly filling up. People in twos and threes, ignoring each other, like mourners for a funeral. A printed notice hung on the wall saying “Warning, no confidential matter to be discussed.” Smiley and Guillam perched disconsolately beneath it, on a bench of salmon velvet. The room was oval, the style Ministry of Works Rococo. Across the painted ceiling Bacchus pursued nymphs who were a lot more willing to be caught than Molly Meakin. Empty fire-buckets stood against the wall, and two government messengers guarded the door to the interior. Outside the curved sash windows, autumn sunlight filled the park, making each leaf crisp against the next.

  Saul Enderby strode in, leading the Foreign Office contingent. Guillam knew him only by name. He was a former Ambassador to Indonesia, now chief pundit on South East Asia and said to be a great supporter of the American hard line. In tow, one obedient Parliamentary Under-Secretary, a trade-union appointment, and one flowery, overdressed figure who advanced on Smiley on tiptoe, hands held horizontal, as if he had caught him napping.

  “Can it be?” he whispered exuberantly. “Is it? It is! George Smiley, all in your feathers. My dear, you’ve lost simply pounds. Who’s your nice boy? Don’t tell me. Peter Guillam. I’ve heard all about him. Quite unspoilt by failure, I’m told.”

  “Oh, no!” Smiley cried involuntarily. “Oh, Lord. Roddy.”

  “What do you mean ‘Oh, no. Oh, Lord. Roddy,’ ” Martindale demanded, wholly undeterred, in the same vibrant murmur. “ ‘Oh, yes’ is what you mean! ‘Yes, Roddy. Divine to see you, Roddy!’ Listen. Before the riff-raff come. How is the exquisite Ann? For my very own ears. Can I make a dinner for the two of you? You shall choose the guests. How’s that? And yes, I am on the list, if that’s what’s going through your rat-like little mind, young Peter Guillam. I’ve been translated, I’m a goodie, our new masters adore me. So they should, the fuss I’ve made of them.”

  The interior doors opened with a bang. One of the messengers shouted “Gentlemen!” and those who knew the form stood back to let the women file ahead. There were two. The men followed and Guillam brought up the tail. For a few yards it might have been the Circus: a makeshift bottle-neck at which each face was checked by janitors, then a makeshift corridor leading to what resembled a builders’ cabin parked at the centre of a gutted stair-well—except that it had no windows and was suspended from wires and held tight by guy-ropes. Guillam had lost sight of Smiley entirely, and as he climbed the hardboard steps and entered the safe room he saw only shadows hovering under a blue night-light.

  “Do do something, somebody,” Enderby growled, in the tones of a bored diner complaining about the service. “Lights, for God’s sake. Bloody little men.”

  The door slammed behind Guillam’s back, a key turned in the lock, an electronic hum did the scale and whined out o
f earshot, and three strip-lights stammered to life, drenching everyone in their sickly pallor.

  “Hoorah,” said Enderby, and sat down. Later Guillam wondered how he had been so sure it was Enderby calling in the darkness, but there are voices you can hear before they speak.

  The conference table was covered in a ripped green baize like a billiards table in a youth club. The Foreign Office sat one end, the Colonial Office at the other. The separation was visceral rather than legal. For six years, the two departments had been formally married under the grandiose awnings of the Diplomatic Service, but no one in his right mind took the union seriously.

  Guillam and Smiley sat at the centre, shoulder to shoulder, each with empty chairs to the other side of him. Examining the cast, Guillam was absurdly aware of costume. The Foreign Office had come sharply dressed in charcoal suits and the secret plumage of privilege: both Enderby and Martindale wore Old Etonian ties. The Colonialists had the home-weave look of country people come to town, and the best they could offer in the way of ties was one Royal Artilleryman: honest Wilbraham, their leader, a fit lean schoolmasterly figure with crimson veins on his weather-beaten cheeks. A tranquil woman in church-organ brown supported him, and to the other side a freshly minted boy with freckles and a shock of ginger hair.

  The rest of the committee sat across from Smiley and Guillam and had the air of seconds in a duel they disapproved of. They had come in twos for protection: dark Pretorius of the Security Service with one nameless woman bag-carrier; two grim warriors from Defence; two Treasury bankers, one of them Welsh Hammer. Oliver Lacon was alone and had set himself apart from everyone, for all the world the person least engaged.

  Before each pair of hands lay Smiley’s submission in a pinkand-red folder marked “Top Secret Withhold,” like a souvenir programme. The “Withhold” meant keep it away from the Cousins. Smiley had drafted it, the mothers had typed it, Guillam himself had watched the eighteen pages come off the duplicators and supervised the hand-stitching of the twenty-four copies. Now their handiwork lay tossed around the torn baize, among the water-glasses and the ashtrays. Lifting a copy six inches above the table, Enderby let it fall with a slap.