The Honorable Schoolboy

by John le Carré

  Keller wasn’t very polite: “You some kinda spook or something these days, Westerby, slanting your stories, arse-licking for deep background and a pension on the side or something?” There were people who said that was roughly Keller’s position, but there are always people.

  “Sure,” said Jerry amiably. “Been at it for years.”

  The sandbags at the entrance were new and new anti-grenade wires glistened in the teeming sunlight. In the lobby, with the spine-breaking irrelevance which only diplomats can quite achieve, a big partitioned poster recommended “British High Performance Cars” to a city parched of fuel, and supplied cheerful photographs of several unavailable models.

  “I will tell the Counsellor you have accepted,” said the receptionist solemnly.

  The Mercedes still smelt a little warm from the blood, but the driver had turned up the air-conditioning.

  “What do they do in there, Westerby?” Keller asked. “Knit or something?”

  “Or something.” Jerry smiled, mainly to the Californian girl.

  Jerry sat in front, Keller and the girl in the back.

  “Okay. So hear this,” said Keller.

  “Sure,” said Jerry.

  Jerry had his notebook open and scribbled while Keller talked. The girl wore a short skirt and Jerry and the driver could see her thighs in the mirror. Keller had his good hand on her knee. Her name of all things was Lorraine and, like Jerry, she was formally taking a swing through the war zones for her group of Midwest dailies. Soon they were the only car. Soon even the cyclos stopped, leaving them peasants, and bicycles, and buffaloes, and the flowered bushes of the approaching countryside.

  “Heavy fighting on all the main highways,” Keller intoned at near dictation speed. “Rocket attacks at night, plastics during the day, Lon Nol still thinks he’s God, and the U.S. Embassy has hot flushes supporting him then trying to throw him out.” He gave statistics, ordnance, casualties, the scale of U.S. aid. He named generals known to be selling American arms to the Khmer Rouge, and generals who ran phantom armies in order to claim the troops’ pay, and generals who did both.

  “The usual snafu,” he went on. “Bad guys are too weak to take the towns, good guys are too crapped out to take the countryside, and nobody wants to fight except the Coms. Students ready to set fire to the place soon as they’re no longer exempt from the war, food riots any day now, corruption like there was no tomorrow, no one can live on his salary, fortunes being made, and the place bleeding to death. Palace is unreal and the Embassy is a nut-house, more spooks than straight guys and all pretending they’ve got a secret. Want more?”

  “How long do you give it?”

  “A week. Ten years.”

  “How about the airlines?”

  “Airlines is all we have. Mekong’s good as dead, so’s the roads. Airlines have the whole ballpark. We did a story on that. You see it? They ripped it to pieces. Jesus,” he said to the girl. “Why do I have to give a rerun for the poms?”

  “More,” said Jerry, writing.

  “Six months ago this town had five registered airlines. Last three months we got thirty-four new licences issued and there’s like another dozen in the pipeline. Going rate is three million riels to the Minister personally and two million spread around his people. Less if you pay gold, less still if you pay abroad. We’re working route thirteen,” he said to the girl. “Thought you’d like to take a look.”

  “Great,” said the girl and pressed her knees together, entrapping Keller’s good hand.

  They passed a statue with its arm shot off and after that the road followed the river bend.

  “That’s if Westerby here can handle it,” Keller added as an afterthought.

  “Oh, I think I’m in pretty good shape,” said Jerry, and the girl laughed, changing sides a moment.

  “K.R. got themselves a new position out on the far bank there, hon,” Keller explained, talking to the girl in preference. Across the brown, fast water, Jerry saw a couple of T-28s, poking around looking for something to bomb. There was a fire, quite a big one, and the smoke column rose straight into the sky like a virtuous offering.

  “Where do the overseas Chinese come in?” Jerry asked. “In Hong Kong no one’s heard of this place.”

  “Chinese control eighty percent of our commerce and that includes airlines. Old or new. Cambodian’s lazy, see, hon? Your Cambodian’s content to take his profit out of American aid. Your Chinese aren’t like that. Oh, no, siree. Chinese like to work, Chinese like to turn their cash over. They fixed our money market, our transport monopoly, our rate of inflation, our siege economy. War’s getting to be a wholly owned Hong Kong subsidiary. Hey, Westerby, you still got that wife you told me about, the cute one with the eyes?”

  “Took the other road,” Jerry said.

  “Too bad. She sounded real great. He had this great wife,” said Keller to the girl.

  “How about you?” asked Jerry.

  Keller shook his head and smiled at the girl. “Care if I smoke, hon?” he asked confidingly.

  There was a gap in Keller’s welded claw which could have been drilled specially to hold a cigarette, and the rim of it was brown with nicotine. Keller put his good hand back on her thigh. The road turned to track, and deep ruts appeared where the convoys had passed. They entered a short tunnel of trees, and as they did so a thunder of shell-fire opened to their right and the trees arched like trees in a typhoon.

  “Wow!” the girl yelled. “Can we slow down a little?” And she began hauling at the straps of her camera.

  “Be my guest. Medium artillery,” said Keller. “Ours,” he added as a joke. The girl lowered the window and shot off some film. The barrage continued, the trees danced, but the peasants in the paddy didn’t even lift their heads. When it died, the bells of the water-buffaloes went on ringing like an echo. They drove on. On the near river-bank, two kids had an old bike and were swapping rides. In the water, a shoal of them were diving in and out of an inner tube, brown bodies glistening. The girl photographed them too.

  “You still speak French, Westerby? Me and Westerby did a thing together in the Congo awhile back,” he explained to the girl.

  “I heard,” she said knowingly.

  “Poms get education,” Keller explained. Jerry hadn’t remembered him so talkative. “They get raised. That right, Westerby? Specially lords, right? Westerby’s some kind of lord.”

  “That’s us, sport. Scholars to a man. Not like you hayseeds.”

  “Well, you speak to the driver, right? We got instructions for him, you do the saying. He hasn’t had time to learn English yet. Go left.”

  “A gauche,” said Jerry.

  The driver was a boy, but he already had the guide’s boredom.

  In the mirror Jerry noticed that Keller’s white claw was shaking as he drew on the cigarette. He wondered if it always did. They passed through a couple of villages. It was very quiet. He thought of Lizzie and the claw marks on her chin. He longed to do something plain with her, like taking a walk over English fields. Craw said she was a suburban drag-up. It touched him that she had a fantasy about horses.

  “Westerby.”

  “Yes, sport?”

  “That thing you have with your fingers. Drumming them. Mind not doing that? Bugs me. It’s repressive, somehow.” He turned to the girl. “They been pounding this place for years, hon,” he said expansively. “Years.” He blew out a gust of cigarette smoke.

  “About the airline thing,” Jerry suggested, pencil ready to write again. “What’s the arithmetic?”

  “Most of the companies take dry-wing leases out of Vientiane. That includes maintenance, pilot, depreciation, but not fuel. Maybe you knew that. Best is own your own plane. That way you have the two things. You milk the siege and you get your ass out when the end comes. Watch for the kids, hon,” he told the girl as he drew again on his cigarette. “While there’s kids around there won’t be trouble. When the kids disappear it’s bad news. Means they’ve hidden them. Always watch for
kids.”

  The girl Lorraine was fiddling with her camera again. They had reached a rudimentary check-point. A couple of sentries peered in as they passed, but the driver didn’t even slow down. They approached a fork and the driver stopped.

  “The river,” Keller ordered. “Tell him to stay on the riverbank.”

  Jerry told him. The boy seemed surprised; seemed even about to object, then changed his mind.

  “Kids in the villages,” Keller was saying, “kids at the front. No difference. Either way, kids are a weather-vane. Khmer soldiers take their families with them to war as a matter of course. If the father dies, there’ll be nothing for the family anyway, so they might as well come along with the military where there’s food. Another thing, hon, another thing is, the widows must be right on hand to claim evidence of the father’s death, right? That’s a human-interest thing for you—right, Westerby? If they don’t claim, the commanding officer will deny it and steal the man’s pay for himself. Be my guest,” he said as she wrote. “But don’t think anyone will print it. This war’s over. Right, Westerby?”

  “Finito,” Jerry agreed.

  She would be funny, he decided. If Lizzie were here, she would definitely see a funny side and laugh at it. Somewhere among all her imitations, he reckoned, there was a lost original, and he definitely intended to find it. The driver drew up beside an old woman and asked her something in Khmer, but she put her face in her hands and turned her head away.

  “Why’d she do that, for God’s sakes?” the girl cried angrily. “We didn’t want anything bad. Jesus!”

  “Shy,” said Keller in a flattening voice.

  Behind them the artillery barrage fired another salvo and it was like a door slamming, barring the way back. They passed a wat and entered a market square made of wooden houses. Saffron-clad monks stared at them, but the girls tending the stalls ignored them and the babies went on playing with the bantams.

  “So what was the check-point for?” the girl asked as she photographed. “Are we somewhere dangerous now?”

  “Getting there, hon, getting there. Now shut up.”

  Ahead of them Jerry could hear the sound of automatic fire, M-16s and AK-47s mixed. A jeep raced at them out of the trees and at the last second veered, banging and tripping over the ruts. At the same moment the sunshine went out. Till now they had accepted it as their right, a liquid, vivid light washed clean by the rainstorms. This was March and the dry season; this was Cambodia, where war, like cricket, was played in decent weather. But now black clouds collected, the trees closed round them like winter, and the wooden houses pulled into the dark.

  “What do the Khmer Rouge dress like?” the girl asked in a quieter voice. “Do they have uniforms?”

  “Feathers and a G-string,” Keller roared. “Some are even bottomless.” As he laughed, Jerry heard the taut strain in his voice, and glimpsed the trembling claw as he drew on his cigarette. “Hell, hon, they dress like farmers, for Christ’s sake. They just have these black pyjamas.”

  “Is it always so empty?”

  “Varies,” said Keller.

  “And Ho Chi Minh sandals,” Jerry put in distractedly.

  A pair of green water birds lifted across the track. The sound of firing was no louder.

  “Didn’t you have a daughter or something? What happened there?” Keller said.

  “She’s fine. Great.”

  “Called what?”

  “Catherine,” said Jerry.

  “Sounds like we’re going away from it,” Lorraine said, disappointed. They passed an old corpse with no arms. The flies had settled on the face wounds in a black lava.

  “Do they always do that?” the girl asked, curious.

  “Do what, hon?”

  “Take off the boots?”

  “Sometimes they take the boots off, sometimes they’re the wrong damn size,” said Keller in another queer snap of anger. “Some cows got horns, some cows don’t, and some cows is horses. Now shut up, will you? Where you from?”

  “Santa Barbara,” said the girl.

  Abruptly the trees ended. They turned a bend and were in the open again, with the brown river right beside them. Unbidden, the driver stopped, then gently backed into the trees.

  “Where’s he going?” the girl asked. “Who told him to do that?” “I think he’s worried about his tyres, sport,” said Jerry, making a joke of it.

  “At thirty bucks a day?” said Keller, also as a joke.

  They had found a little battle. Ahead of them, dominating the river bend, stood a smashed village on high waste ground without a living tree near it. The ruined walls were white and the torn edges yellow. With so little vegetation the place looked like the remnants of a Foreign Legion fort, and perhaps it was just that. Inside the walls brown lorries clustered, like lorries at a building site. They heard a few shots, a light rattle. It could have been huntsmen shooting at the evening flight. Tracer flashed, a trio of mortar bombs struck, the ground shook, the car vibrated, and the driver quietly unwound his window while Jerry did the same. But the girl had opened her door and was getting out, one classic leg after the other. Rummaging in a black air-bag, she produced a telefoto lens, screwed it into her camera, and studied the enlarged image.

  “That’s all there is?” she asked doubtfully. “Shouldn’t we see the enemy as well? I don’t see anything but our guys and a lot of dirty smoke.”

  “Oh, they’re out on the other side there, hon,” Keller said.

  “Can’t we see?” There was a small silence while the two men conferred without speaking.

  “Look,” said Keller. “This was just a tour, okay, hon? The detail of the thing gets very varied. Okay?”

  “I just think it would be great to see the enemy. I want confrontation, Max. I really do. I like it.”

  They started walking.

  Sometimes you do it to save face, thought Jerry, other times you just do it because you haven’t done your job unless you’ve scared yourself to death. Other times again, you go in order to remind yourself that survival is a fluke. But mostly you go because the others go—for machismo—and because in order to belong you must share.

  In the old days perhaps, Jerry had gone for more select reasons. In order to know himself: the Hemingway game. In order to raise his threshold of fear. Because in battle, as in love, desire escalates. When you have been machine-gunned, single rounds seem trivial. When you’ve been shelled to pieces, the machinegunning’s child’s play, if only because the impact of plain shot leaves your brain in place, where the clump of a shell blows it through your ears. And there is a peace: he remembered that too. At bad times in his life—money, children, women all adrift— there had been a sense of peace that came from realising that staying alive was his only responsibility. But this time, he thought, this time it’s the most damn-fool reason of all, and that’s because I’m looking for a drugged-out pilot who knows a man who used to have Lizzie Worthington for his mistress.

  They were walking slowly because the girl in her short skirt had difficulty picking her way over the slippery ruts.

  “Great chick,” Keller murmured.

  “Made for it,” Jerry agreed dutifully.

  With embarrassment Jerry remembered how in the Congo they used to be confidants, confessing their loves and weaknesses. To steady herself on the rutted ground, the girl was swinging her arms about.

  Don’t point, thought Jerry; for Christ’s sake, don’t point. That’s how photographers get theirs.

  “Keep walking, hon,” Keller said shrilly. “Don’t think of anything. Walk. Want to go back, Westerby?”

  They stepped round a little boy playing privately with stones in the dust. Jerry wondered whether he was gun-deaf. He glanced back. The Mercedes was still parked in the trees. Ahead he could pick out men in low firing positions among the rubble, more men than he had realised.

  The noise rose suddenly. On the far bank a couple of bombs exploded in the middle of the fire: the T-28s were trying to spread the flames. A ri
cochet tore into the bank below them, flinging up wet mud and dust. A peasant rode past them on his bicycle, serenely. He rode into the village, through it, and out again, slowly past the ruins and into the trees beyond. No one shot at him, no one challenged him. He could be theirs or ours, thought Jerry. He came into town last night, tossed a plastic into a cinema, and now he’s returning to his kind.

  “Jesus,” cried the girl, with a laugh, “why didn’t we think of bicycles?”

  With a clatter of bricks falling, a volley of machine-gun bullets slapped all round them. Below them in the river-bank, by the grace of God, ran a line of empty leopard spots, shallow firing positions dug into the mud. Jerry had picked them out already. Grabbing the girl, he threw her down. Keller was already flat. Lying beside her, Jerry discerned a deep lack of interest. Better a bullet or two here than getting what Frostie got.

  The bullets threw up screens of mud and whined off the road. They lay low, waiting for the firing to tire. The girl was looking excitedly across the river, smiling. She was blue-eyed and flaxen and Aryan. A mortar bomb landed behind them on the verge, and for the second time Jerry shoved her flat. The blast swept over them, and when it was past feathers of earth drifted down like a propitiation. But she came up smiling. When the Pentagon thinks of civilization, thought Jerry, it thinks of you.

  In the fort the battle had suddenly thickened. The lorries had disappeared, a dense pall had gathered, the flash and din of mortar was incessant, light machine-gun fire challenged and answered itself with increasing swiftness. Keller’s pocked face appeared white as death over the edge of his leopard spot.

  “K.R.’s got them by the balls!” he yelled. “Across the river, ahead, and now from the other flank. We should have taken the other lane!”

  Christ, Jerry thought, as the rest of the memories came back to him, Keller and I once fought over a girl too. He tried to remember who she was and who had won.

  They waited, the firing died. They walked back to the car and gained the fork in time to meet the retreating convoy. Dead and wounded were littered along the roadside, and women crouched among them, fanning the stunned faces with palm leaves.