The Honorable Schoolboy

by John le Carré

  “Don’t be bloody stupid, we left it in town.”

  Shaking his head, he led her past the cars into a squalid open-air compound full of refuse and building junk, like the backyard at the Circus. From here, between walls of weeping concrete, a giddy stairway fell toward the town, overhung by black branches and cut into sections by the winding road. The jarring of the downward steps hurt his groin a lot. The first time they reached the road, Jerry took her straight across it. The second time, alerted by the blood-red flash of an alarm light in the distance, he hauled her into the trees to avoid the beam of a police car whining down the hill at speed. At the underpass they found a pak-pai and Jerry gave the address.

  “Where the hell’s that?” she asked.

  “Somewhere you don’t have to register,” said Jerry. “Just shut up and let me be masterful, will you? How much money have you got with you?”

  She opened her bag and counted from a fat wallet. “I won it off Tiu at mah-jong,” she said, and for some reason he sensed she was romancing.

  The driver dropped them at the end of the alley and they walked the short distance to the low gateway. The house had no lights, but as they approached the front door it opened and another couple flitted past them out of the darkness. They entered the hall and the door closed behind them, and they followed a hand-borne pin-light through a short maze of brick walls until they reached a smart interior lobby in which piped music played. On the serpentine sofa in the centre sat a trim Chinese lady with a pencil and a notebook on her lap, to all the world a model chatelaine. She saw Jerry and smiled; she saw Lizzie and her smile broadened.

  “For the whole night,” said Jerry.

  “Of course,” she replied.

  They followed her upstairs to a small corridor. The open doors gave glimpses of silk counterpanes, low lights, mirrors. The woman was murmuring prices in Jerry’s ear. Jerry chose the least suggestive, declined the offer of a second girl to make up the numbers, gave her money, and ordered a bottle of Rémy Martin. Lizzie followed him in, chucked her shoulder-bag on the bed, and, while the door was still open, broke into a taut laugh of relief.

  “Lizzie Worthington,” she announced, “this is where they said you’d end up, you brazen bitch, and blow me if they weren’t right!”

  There was a chaise longue and Jerry lay on it, staring at the ceiling, feet crossed, the brandy glass in his hand. Lizzie took the bed and for a time neither spoke. The place was very still. Occasionally, from the floor above, they heard a cry of pleasure or muffled laughter, once of protest. She went to the window and peered out.

  “What’s out there?” he asked.

  “Bloody brick wall, about thirty cats, stacks of empties.”

  “Foggy?”

  “Vile.”

  She sauntered to the bathroom, poked around, came out again.

  “Sport,” said Jerry quietly.

  She paused, suddenly wary.

  “Are you sober and of sound judgment?”

  “Why?”

  “I want you to tell me everything you told them. When you’ve done that, I want you to tell me everything they asked you, whether you could answer it or not. And when you’ve done that, we’ll try to take a little thing called a back-bearing and work out where those bastards all are in the scheme of the universe.”

  “It’s a replay,” she said finally.

  “What of?”

  “I don’t know: it’s all to be exactly the way it happened before.”

  “So what happened before?”

  “Whatever it was,” she said wearily, “it’s going to happen again.”

  21

  NELSON

  It was one in the morning. She had bathed. She came out of the bathroom wearing a white wrap and no shoes and her hair in a towel.

  “They’ve even got those bits of paper stretched across the loo,” she said. “And tooth-mugs in cellophane bags.”

  She dozed on the bed and he on the sofa, and once she said, “I’d like to, but it doesn’t work,” and he replied that after being kicked where Fawn had kicked him the libido tended to be a bit quiescent anyway. She told him about her schoolmaster—Mr. Bloody Worthington, she called him—and “her one shot at going straight,” and about the child she had borne him out of politeness. She talked about her terrible parents, and about Ricardo and what a sod he was, and how she had loved him, and how a girl in the Constellation bar had advised her to poison him with laburnum, so one day after he had beaten her half to death she put a “damn great dose in his coffee.” But perhaps she hadn’t got the right stuff, she said, because all that happened was that he was sick for days and “the one thing worse than Ricardo healthy was Ricardo at death’s door.” How another time she actually got a knife into him while he was in the bath, but all he did was stick a bit of plaster over it and swipe her again.

  How when Ricardo did his disappearing act she and Charlie Marshall refused to accept that he was dead, and mounted a “Ricardo Lives!” campaign as they called it, and how Charlie went and badgered his old man, all just as he had described to Jerry. And how Lizzie packed up her rucksack and went down to Bangkok, where she barged straight into the China Airsea suite at the Erawan, intending to beard Tiu, and found herself face to face with Ko instead, having met him only once before, very briefly—at a bun-fight in Hong Kong given by one Sally Cale, an old bull-dyke in the antique trade who pushed heroin on the side. And how that was quite a scene she played, beginning with Ko’s sharp instruction to get out, and ending with “nature taking her course,” as she put it cheerfully: “Another step on Lizzie Worthington’s unswerving road to perdition.” So that slowly and deviously, with Charlie Marshall’s old man pulling, “and Lizzie pushing, as you might say,” they put together a very Chinese contract, to which the main signatories were Ko and Charlie’s old man, and the commodities to be transacted were, one, Ricardo and, two, his recently retired life partner, Lizzie.

  In which said contract, Jerry learned with no particular surprise, both she and Ricardo gratefully acquiesced.

  “You should have let him rot,” said Jerry, remembering the twin rings on his right hand, and the Ford car blown to bits.

  But Lizzie hadn’t seen it that way at all, and she didn’t now. “He was one of us,” she said. “Although he was a sod.”

  But having bought his life, she felt free of him.

  “Chinese arrange marriages every day. So why shouldn’t Drake and Liese?”

  What was all the “Liese” stuff? Jerry asked. Why Liese instead of Lizzie?

  She didn’t know. Something Drake didn’t talk about, she said. There had once been a Liese in his life, he told her, and his fortune-teller had promised him that one day he would get another, and he reckoned Lizzie was near enough, so they gave it a shove and called it Liese and while she was about it she pared her surname to plain Worth.

  “Blond bird,” she said absently.

  The name-change had a practical purpose, too, she said. Having chosen a new name for her, Ko took the trouble to have the local police record of her old one destroyed. “Till that sod Mellon marches in and says he’ll get them to rewrite it, with a special mention about me carrying his bloody heroin,” she said.

  Which brought them back to where they were now. And why.

  To Jerry, their sleepy wanderings occasionally had the calm of after-love. He lay on the divan, wide awake, but Lizzie talked between dozes, taking up her story dreamily where she had left it when she fell asleep, and he knew that near enough she was telling him the truth, because it made nothing of her that he did not already know, and understand. He realised also that with time Ko had become another anchor for her, somewhat as the schoolmaster had. He gave her the authority from which to survey her odyssey.

  “Drake never broke a promise in his life,” she said once, as she rolled over and sank back into a fitful sleep. Jerry remembered the orphan: just never lie to me.

  Hours, lifetimes later, she was woken by a squawk of ecstasy next door.

&nb
sp; “Christ,” she declared appreciatively, “she really hit the moon.” The squawk repeated itself. She changed her mind. “No go,” she said disapprovingly. “She’s faking it.” Silence. “You awake?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Tomorrow?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “Join the club,” she whispered, and seemed to fall asleep again.

  I need that Sarratt brief again, he thought. Very badly I need it. Put in a limbo call to Craw, he thought. Ask dear old George for a spot of that philosophical advice he’s taken to doling out these days. He must be around. Somewhere.

  * * *

  Smiley was around, but at that moment he could not have given Jerry any help at all. He would have traded all his knowledge for a little understanding. The isolation ward had no night-time, so they lay or lounged under the punctured daylight of the ceiling, the three Cousins and Sam on one side of the room, Smiley and Guillam on the other, and Fawn striding up and down the line of the cinema seats, looking caged and furious and squeezing what appeared to be a squash-ball in each fist. His lips were black and swollen and one eye was shut. A clot of blood under his nose refused to go away. Guillam had his right arm strapped to his shoulder and his eyes were on Smiley all the while. But so were the eyes of everyone—or everyone but Fawn. A phone rang, but it was the communications room upstairs saying Bangkok had reported Jerry traced for certain as far as Vientiane.

  “Tell them the trail’s cold, Murphy,” Martello ordered, his eyes still on Smiley. “Tell them any damn thing. Just get them off our backs. Right, George?”

  Smiley nodded.

  “Right,” said Guillam firmly, speaking for him.

  “The trail’s cold, honey,” Murphy echoed into the phone. The “honey” came as a surprise. Murphy had not till now shown such signs of human tenderness. “You want to make a signal or do I have to do it for you? We’re not interested, right? Kill it.”

  He rang off.

  “Rockhurst has found her car,” Guillam said for the second time, while Smiley still stared ahead of him. “In an underground car-park in Central. There is a hire-car down there too. Westerby rented it. Today. In his work name. George?”

  Smiley gave a nod so slight it might have been no more than an attack of sleepiness he had staved away.

  “At least he’s doing something, George,” said Martello pointedly down the room from his own small caucus of Collins and the quiet men. “Some people would say, when you have a rogue elephant, best thing to do is go out there and shoot him.”

  “You have to find him first,” snapped Guillam, whose nerves were at breaking-point.

  “I’m not even sure George wants to do that, Peter,” Martello said, in a reprise of his avuncular style. “I think George may be lifting his eye from the ball a little on this, to the grave peril of our common enterprise.”

  “What do you want George to do?” Guillam rejoined tartly. “Walk the streets till he finds him? Have Rockhurst circulate his name and description, so that every journalist in town knows there’s a man-hunt for him?”

  At Guillam’s side Smiley remained hunched and inert like an old man.

  “Westerby’s a professional,” Guillam insisted. “He’s not a natural, but he’s good. He can lie up for months in a town like this and Rockhurst wouldn’t get a scent of him.”

  “Not even with the girl in tow?” said Murphy.

  His strapped arm notwithstanding, Guillam stooped to Smiley: “It’s your operation,” he whispered urgently. “If you say we’ve got to wait, we’ll wait. Just give the order. All these people want is an excuse to take over. Anything but a vacuum. Anything.”

  Prowling the line of the cinema chairs, Fawn gave vent to a sarcastic murmur: “Talk, talk, talk. That’s all they can do.”

  Martello tried again: “George. Is this island British or is it not? You guys can shake this town out any time.” He pointed to a windowless wall. “We have a man out there—your man—who seems bent on running amok. Nelson Ko is the biggest catch you or I are ever likely to land. The biggest of my career, and—I will stake my wife, my grandmother, and the deeds of my plantation—the biggest even of yours.”

  “No takers,” said Sam Collins, the gambler, through his grin.

  Martello stuck to his guns: “Are we going to let him rob us of the prize, George, sit here passively asking one another how it came about that Jesus Christ was born on Christmas Day and not on December twenty-sixth or twenty-seventh?”

  Smiley peered at Martello at last, then up at Guillam, who stood stiffly at his side, tipping back his shoulders to support the sling, and finally he looked downward at his own, locked, conflicting hands, and for a period quite meaningless in time he studied himself in his mind, and reviewed his quest for Karla, whom Ann called his “black Grail.” He thought of Ann and her repeated betrayals of him in the name of her own Grail, which she called love. He recalled how against his better judgment he had tried to share her faith and, like a true believer, renew it each day, despite her anarchic interpretations of its meaning. He thought of Haydon, steered at Ann by Karla. He thought of Jerry and the girl, and he thought of Peter Worthington, her husband, and the dog-like look of kinship which Worthington had bestowed on him when he called to interview him in the terrace house in Islington: “You and I are the ones they leave behind,” ran the message.

  He thought of Jerry’s other tentative loves along his untidy trail, the half-paid bills the Circus had picked up for him, and it would have been handy to lump Lizzie in with them as just one more, but he couldn’t do that. He was not Sam Collins, and he had not the smallest doubt that at this moment Jerry’s feeling for the girl was a cause Ann would warmly have espoused. But he was not Ann either. For a cruel moment nevertheless, as he sat still locked in indecision, he did honestly wonder whether Ann was right and his striving had become nothing other than a private journey among the beasts and villains of his own insufficiency, in which he ruthlessly involved simplistic minds like Jerry’s.

  You’re wrong, sport. Don’t know how, don’t know why, but you’re wrong.

  The fact that I am wrong, Smiley had once replied to Ann, in the mid-stream of one of their endless arguments, does not make you right.

  He heard Martello again, speaking in present time: “George, we have people waiting with open arms for what we can give them. What Nelson can.”

  A phone was ringing. Murphy took the call and relayed the message to the silent room: “Land-line from the aircraft carrier, sir. Navy int. has the junks dead on schedule, sir. South wind favourable and good fishing along the way. Sir, I don’t even think Nelson’s riding with them. I don’t see why he should.”

  The focus shifted abruptly to Murphy, who had never before been heard to express an opinion.

  “What the hell’s that, Murphy?” Martello demanded quite astonished. “You been to the fortune-teller too, son?”

  “Sir, I was down on the carrier this morning and those people have a lot of data. They can’t figure why anybody who lives in Shanghai would ever want to exit out of Swatow. They would do it all different, sir. They would fly or train to Canton, then take the bus maybe to Waichow. They say that’s a lot safer, sir.”

  “These are Nelson’s people,” Smiley said as the heads swung sharply back on him. “They’re his clan. He would rather be at sea with them, even if he’s at risk. He trusts them.” He turned to Guillam. “We’ll do this,” he said. “Tell Rockhurst to distribute a description of Westerby and the girl together. You say he hired the car under his work name? Used his escape papers?”

  “Yes.”

  “Worrell?”

  “Yes.”

  “The police are looking for a Mr. and Mrs. Worrell then, British. No photographs, and make sure the descriptions are vague enough not to arouse suspicion. Marty.”

  Martello was all attentiveness.

  “Is Ko still on his boat?” Smiley as
ked.

  “Nestled right in there with Tiu, George.”

  “It’s just possible Westerby may try to reach him. You have a static post at the quayside. Put more men down there.”

  “What are they looking for?”

  “Trouble. The same goes for surveillance on his house. Tell me—” He sank into his thoughts a moment, but Guillam need not have worried. “Tell me, can you simulate a fault on Ko’s home telephone line?”

  Martello glanced at Murphy.

  “Sir, we don’t have the apparatus handy,” Murphy said, “but I guess we could. . . .”

  “Then cut it,” Smiley said simply. “Cut the whole cable if necessary. Try and do it near some road-works.”

  Having dispensed his orders, Martello came lightly across the room and sat himself at Smiley’s side.

  “Ah, George, about tomorrow, now. Do you think we might, ah, put a little hardware on stand-by as well?” From the desk where he was telephoning Rockhurst, Guillam watched the dialogue most intently. From across the room so did Sam Collins. “Just seems there’s no telling what your man Westerby might do, George. We have to be prepared for all emergencies, right?”

  “By all means stand anything by. But for the time being, if you don’t mind, we’ll leave the interception plans as they are. And the competence with me.”

  “Sure, George. Sure,” said Martello fulsomely, and with the same church-like reverence tiptoed back to his own camp.

  “What did he want?” Guillam demanded in a low voice, crouching at Smiley’s side. “What’s he trying to get you to agree to?”

  “I will not have it, Peter,” Smiley warned, also under his breath. He was suddenly very angry. “I shall not hear you again. I shall not tolerate your Byzantine notions of a palace plot. These people are our hosts and our Allies. We have a written agreement with them. We have quite enough to worry about already without grotesque and—I may tell you honestly—paranoid fancies. Now please—”