The Honorable Schoolboy

by John le Carré

  “I just do the captions,” Jerry said, jamming a thumb over his shoulder. “Spike here does the pictures.” He walked into the reception room peering round him, grinning extravagantly, waving at whoever caught his eye.

  The pyramid of champagne glasses was six feet tall, with black satin steps so that the waiters could take them from the top. In sunken ice coffins lay magnums awaiting burial. There was a wheelbarrow full of cooked lobsters and a wedding cake of pâté de foie gras, with “Maison Flaubert” done in aspic on the top. Space music was playing and there was even conversation under it, if only the bored drone of the extremely rich. The catwalk stretched from the foot of the long window to the centre of the room. The window faced the harbour but the fog broke the view into patches. The air-conditioning was turned up so that the women could wear their mink without sweating. Most of the men wore dinner-jackets but the young Chinese playboys sported New York-style slacks and black shirts and gold chains. The British taipans stood in one sodden circle with their womenfolk, like bored officers at a garrison get-together.

  Feeling a hand on his shoulder, Jerry swung fast, but all he found in front of him was a little Chinese queer called Graham who worked for one of the local gossip rags. Jerry had once helped him out with a story he was trying to sell to the comic. Rows of armchairs faced the catwalk in a rough horseshoe, and Lizzie was sitting in the front between Mr. Arpego and his wife or paramour. Jerry recognised them from Happy Valley. They looked as though they were chaperoning Lizzie for the evening. The Arpegos talked to her, but she seemed barely to hear them. She sat straight and beautiful and she had taken off her cape, and from where Jerry sat she could have been stark naked except for her pearl collar and her pearl earrings. At least she’s still intact, he thought. She hasn’t rotted or got cholera or had her head shot off. He remembered the line of gold hairs running down her spine as he stood over her that first evening in the lift. Queer Graham sat next to Jerry, and Phoebe Wayfarer sat two along. He knew her only vaguely but gave her a fat wave.

  “Gosh. Super. Pheeb. You look terrific. Should be up there on the catwalk, sport, showing a bit of leg.”

  He thought she was a bit tight, and perhaps she thought he was, though he’d drunk nothing since the plane. He took out a pad and wrote on it, playing the professional, trying to rein himself in. Easy as you go. Don’t frighten the game. When he read what he had written, he saw the words “Lizzie Worthington” and nothing else. Chinese Graham read it too, and laughed.

  “My new byline,” said Jerry, and they laughed together, too loud, so that people in front turned their heads as the lights began to dim. But not Lizzie, though he thought she might have recognised his voice.

  Behind them the doors were being closed, and as the lights went lower Jerry had a mind to fall asleep in this soft and kindly chair. The space music gave way to a jungle beat brushed out on a cymbal, till only a single chandelier flickered over the black catwalk, answering the churned and patchy lights of the harbour in the window behind. The drum-beat rose in a slow crescendo from amplifiers everywhere. It went on a long time, just drums very well played, very insistent, till gradually grotesque human shadows became visible against the harbour window. The drumbeats stopped. In a wracked silence two black girls strode flank against flank down the catwalk, wearing nothing but jewels. Their skulls were shaven and they wore round ivory earrings and diamond collars like the iron rings of slave girls. Their oiled limbs shone with clustered diamonds, pearls, and rubies. They were tall, and beautiful, and lithe, and utterly unexpected, and for a moment they cast over the whole audience the spell of absolute sexuality. The drums recovered and soared, spotlights raced over jewels and limbs. They writhed out of the steaming harbour and advanced on the spectators with the anger of sensuous enslavement. They turned and walked slowly away, challenging and disdaining with their haunches.

  Lights came on, there was a crash of nervous applause followed by laughter and drinks. Everyone was talking at once and Jerry was talking loudest: to Miss Lizzie Worthington, the well-known aristocratic society beauty whose mother couldn’t even boil an egg, and to the Arpegos who owned Manila and one or two of the out-islands, as Captain Grant of the Jockey Club had once assured him. Jerry was holding his notebook like a headwaiter.

  “Lizzie Worthington, gosh, all Hong Kong at your feet, Madame, if I may say so. My paper is doing an exclusive on this event, Miss Worth or Worthington, and we’re hoping to feature you, your dresses, your fascinating life-style, and your even more fascinating friends. My photographers are bringing up the rear.” He bowed to the Arpegos. “Good evening, Madame. Sir. Proud to have you with us, I’m sure. This your first visit to Hong Kong?”

  He was doing his big-puppy number, the boyish soul of the party. A waiter brought champagne and he insisted on transferring the glasses to their hands rather than let them help themselves. The Arpegos were much amused by this performance. Craw said they were crooks. Lizzie was staring at him and there was something in her eyes he couldn’t make out, something real and appalled, as if she, not Jerry, had just opened the door on Luke.

  “Mr. Westerby has already done one story on me, I understand,” she said. “I don’t think it was ever printed, was it, Mr. Westerby?”

  “Who you write for?” Mr. Arpego demanded suddenly. He wasn’t smiling any more. He looked dangerous and ugly, and she had clearly reminded him of something he had heard about and didn’t like. Something Tiu had warned him of, for instance.

  Jerry told him.

  “Then go write for them. Leave this lady alone. She don’t give interviews. You got work to do, you work somewhere else. You didn’t come here to play. Earn your money.”

  “Couple of questions for you then, Mr. Arpego. Just before I go. How can I write you down, sir? As a rude Filipino millionaire? Or only half a millionaire?”

  “For God’s sake,” Lizzie breathed, and by a mercy the lights went out again, the drum-beat began, everyone went back to his corner, and a woman’s voice with a French accent began a soft commentary on the loudspeaker. At the back of the catwalk the two black girls were performing long insinuating shadow dances. As the first model appeared, Jerry saw Lizzie stand up ahead of him in the darkness, pull her cape over her shoulders, and walk fast and softly up the aisle past him and toward the doors, head bowed. Jerry went after her. In the lobby she half turned as if to look at him, and it crossed his mind she was expecting him. Her expression was the same and it reflected his own mood. She looked haunted and tired and utterly confused.

  “Lizzie!” he called as if he had just sighted an old friend, and ran quickly to her side before she could reach the powder-room door. “Lizzie! My God! It’s been years! A lifetime! Super!”

  A couple of security guards looked on meekly as he flung his arms round her for the kiss of long friendship. He had slipped his left hand under her cape, and as he bent his laughing face to hers he laid the small revolver against the bare flesh of her back, the barrel just below her nape, and in that way, linked to her with bonds of old affection, led her straight into the street, chatting gaily all the way, and hailed a cab. He hadn’t wanted to produce the gun but he couldn’t risk having to manhandle her. That’s the way it goes, he thought: you come back to tell her you love her and end up by marching her at gunpoint.

  She was shivering and furious but he didn’t think she was afraid, and he didn’t even think she was sorry to be leaving that awful gathering.

  “That’s all I need,” she said as they wound up the hill again, through the fog. “Perfect. Bloody perfect.”

  She wore a scent that was strange to him, but it smelt a deal better than Juice of the Vine.

  Guillam was not bored exactly, but neither was his capacity for concentration infinite, as George’s appeared to be. When he wasn’t wondering what the devil Jerry Westerby was up to, he found himself basking in the erotic deprival of Molly Meakin or else remembering the Chinese boy with his arms inside out, whining like a half-shot hare after the disappearing car.
Murphy’s theme was now the island of Po Toi and he was dilating on it remorselessly.

  Volcanic, sir, he said.

  Hardest rock substance of the whole Hong Kong group, sir, he said.

  And the most southerly of the islands, he said.

  Seven hundred and ninety feet high, sir; fishermen use it as a navigation point from far out to sea, sir, he said.

  Technically not one island but a group of six islands, the other five being barren and treeless and uninhabited.

  Fine temple, sir. Great antiquity. Fine wood carvings but little natural water.

  “Jesus Christ, Murphy, we’re not buying the damn place, are we?” Martello expostulated. With action close and London far away, Martello had lost a lot of his gloss, Guillam noticed, and all his Englishness. His tropical suits were honest-to-cornball American, and he needed to talk to people, preferably his own. Guillam suspected that even London was an adventure for him, and Hong Kong was already enemy territory. Whereas under stress Smiley went quite the other way; he became private and rigidly polite.

  Po Toi itself has a shrinking population of one hundred and eighty farmers and fishermen, mostly Communist, three living villages and three dead ones, sir, said Murphy. He droned on. Smiley continued to listen intently but Martello impatiently doodled on his pad.

  “And tomorrow, sir,” said Murphy, “tomorrow is the night of Po Toi’s annual festival intended to pay homage to Tin Hau, the goddess of the sea, sir.”

  Martello stopped doodling: “These people really believe that crap?”

  “Everybody has a right to his religion, sir.”

  “They teach you that at training college too, Murphy?” Martello returned to his doodling.

  There was an uncomfortable silence before Murphy valiantly took up his pointer and laid the tip on the southern edge of the island’s coastline.

  “This festival of Tin Hau, sir, is concentrated in the one main harbour, sir, right here on the south-west point where the ancient temple is situated. Mr. Smiley’s informed prediction, sir, has the Ko landing operation taking place here, away from the main bay, in a small cove on the east side of the island. By landing on that side of the island, which has no habitation, no natural access to the sea, at a point in time when the diversion of the island festival in the main bay—”

  Guillam never heard the ring. He just heard the voice of Martello’s other quiet man answering the call: “Yes, Mac,” then the squeak of his airport chair as he sat bolt upright, staring at Smiley. “Right, Mac. Sure, Mac. Right now. Yes. Hold it. Right beside me. Hold everything.”

  Smiley was already standing over him, his hand held out for the phone. Martello was watching Smiley. On the podium Murphy had his back turned while he pointed out further intriguing features of Po Toi, not quite registering the interruption.

  “This island is also known to seamen as Ghost Rock, sir,” he explained, in the same dreary voice. “But nobody seems to know why.”

  Smiley listened briefly then put down the telephone. “Thank you, Murphy,” he said courteously. “That was very interesting.”

  He stood dead still a moment, his fingers to his upper lip in a Pickwickian posture of deliberation. “Yes,” he repeated. “Yes, very.”

  He walked as far as the door then paused again.

  “Marty, forgive me, I shall have to leave you for a while. Not above an hour or two, I trust. I shall telephone you in any event.” He reached for the door handle, then turned to Guillam. “Peter, I think you had better come along too—would you mind? We may need a car and you seem admirably unmoved by the Hong Kong traffic. Did I see Fawn somewhere? Ah, there you are.”

  On Headland Road the flowers had a hairy brilliance, like ferns sprayed for Christmas. The pavement was narrow and seldom used, except by amahs to exercise the children, which they did without talking to them, as if they were walking dogs. The Cousins’ surveillance van was a deliberately forgettable brown Mercedes lorry, battered-looking, with clay dust on the wings and “H. K. DEVP. & BLDG. SURVEY LTD.” sprayed on one side. An old aerial with Chinese streamers trailing from it drooped over the cab, and as the lorry nosed its lugubrious way past the Ko residence—for the second, or was it the fourth time that morning?—nobody gave it a thought. In Headland Road, as everywhere in Hong Kong, somebody is always building.

  Stretched inside the lorry on leather bunks fitted for the purpose, the two men watched intently from among a forest of lenses, cameras, and radio-telephone appliances. For them also, their progress past Seven Gates was becoming something of a routine.

  “No change?” said the first.

  “No change,” the second confirmed.

  “No change,” the first repeated into the radio-telephone, and heard the assuring voice of Murphy at the other end, acknowledging the message.

  “Maybe they’re waxworks,” said the first, still watching. “Maybe we should go give them a prod and see if they holler.”

  “Maybe we should, at that,” said the second.

  In all their professional lives, they were agreed, they had never followed anything that kept so still. Ko stood where he always stood, at the end of the rose-arbour, his back to them as he stared out to sea. His little wife sat apart from him, dressed as usual in black, on a white garden chair, and she seemed to be staring at her husband. Only Tiu made any movement. He also was sitting, but to Ko’s other side, and he was munching what looked like a doughnut.

  Reaching the main road, the lorry lumbered toward Stanley, pursuing for cover reasons its fictional reconnaissance of the region.

  20

  LIESE’S LOVER

  Her apartment was big and unreconciled: a mix of hotel lounge, executive suite, and tart’s boudoir. The drawing-room ceiling was raked to a lopsided point like the nave of a subsiding church. The floor changed levels restlessly; the carpet was as thick as grass, and Lizzie and Jerry left shiny footprints where they walked. The enormous windows gave limitless but lonely views, and when she closed the blinds and drew the curtains, the two of them were suddenly in a suburban bungalow with no garden. The amah had gone to her room behind the kitchen, and when she appeared Lizzie sent her back there. She crept out scowling and hissing. “Wait till I tell the master,” she was saying.

  He put the chains across the front door, and after that he took her with him, steering her from room to room, making her walk a little ahead of him on his left side, open the doors for him and even the cupboards. The bedroom was a television stage-set for a femme fatale, with a round, quilted bed and a sunken round bath behind Spanish screens. He looked through the bedside lockers for a small-arm because, though Hong Kong is not particularly gun-ridden, people who have lived in Indo-China usually have something. Her dressing-room looked as though she’d emptied one of the smart Scandinavian décor shops in Central by telephone. The dining-room was done in smoked glass, polished chrome and leather, with fake Gainsborough ancestors staring at the empty chairs—all the mummies who couldn’t boil eggs, he thought. Black tiger-skin steps led to Ko’s den, and here Jerry lingered, staring round, fascinated despite himself, seeing the man in everything, and—for all his rather awful crimes at first remove—his kinship with old Sambo. The king-sized desk with the bombé legs and ball-and-claw feet, the Presidential cutlery. The ink-wells, the sheathed paper-knife and scissors, the untouched works of legal reference, the very ones old Sambo trailed around with him: Simons on tax, Charlesworth on company law. The framed testimonials on the wall. The citation for his Order of the British Empire, beginning “Elizabeth the Second by the Grace of God . . .” The medal itself, embalmed in satin like the arms of a dead knight. Group photographs of Chinese elders on the steps of a spirit temple. Victorious racehorses. Lizzie laughing to him. Lizzie in a swim-suit, looking stunning. Lizzie in Paris.

  Gently he pulled open the desk drawers and discovered the embossed stationery of a dozen different companies. In the cupboards, empty files, an I.B.M. electric typewriter with no plug on it, an address book with no addresses e
ntered. Lizzie naked from the waist up, glancing round at him over her long back. Lizzie, God help her, in a wedding dress, clutching a posy of gardenias. Ko must have sent her to a bridal parlour for the photograph.

  There were no photographs of gunny bags of opium.

  The executive sanctuary, thought Jerry, still standing there. Old Sambo had several, he remembered: girls who had flats from him—one even a house—yet saw him only a few times a year. But always this one secret special room, with the desk and the unused telephones and the instant mementoes, a physical corner carved off someone else’s life, a shelter from his other shelters.

  “Where is he?” Jerry asked, remembering Luke again.

  “Drake?”

  “No, Father Christmas.”

  “You tell me.”

  He followed her to the bedroom. “Do you often not know?” he asked.

  She was pulling off her earrings, dropping them in a jewellery box. Then her clasp, her necklace and bracelets.

  “He rings me wherever he is, night or day, we never care. This is the first time he’s cut himself off.”

  “Can you ring him?”

  “Any bloody time,” she said with savage sarcasm. “’Course I can. Number One Wife and me get on just great.”

  “What about at the office?”

  “He’s not going to the office.”

  “What about Tiu?”

  “Sod Tiu.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he’s a pig,” she snapped, pulling open a cupboard.

  “He could pass on messages for you.”

  “If he felt like it, which he doesn’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “How the hell should I know?” She hauled out a pullover and some jeans and chucked them on the bed. “Because he resents me. Because he doesn’t trust me. Because he doesn’t like roundeyes horning in on Big Sir. Get out while I change.”

  So he wandered into the dressing-room again, keeping his back to her, hearing the rustle of silk and skin.