“Fawn and Collins,” Smiley said at last.
“You two boys take them to the aircraft carrier and hand them right over to the people there. Murphy comes back.”
A smoke cloud marked the place where Collins had been sitting. Where Fawn had stood, two squash-balls slowly rolled a distance before coming to a halt.
“God help us all,” somebody murmured fervently. It was Guillam, but Smiley ignored him.
The lion was three men long and the crowd was laughing because it nipped at them and because self-appointed picadors were prodding it with sticks while it lolloped in dance steps down the narrow path, to the clatter of the drums and cymbals. Reaching the headland, the procession slowly turned itself and started to retrace its steps, and at this point Jerry drew Lizzie quickly into the middle of it, bending low in order to make less of his height. At first the track was mud and full of puddles, but soon the dance was leading them past the temple and down concrete steps toward a sand beach where the suckling pigs were being roasted.
“Which way?” he asked her.
She led him quickly left, out of the dance, along the back of a shanty village and over a wooden bridge across an inlet. They climbed along a fringe of cypress trees, Lizzie leading, until they were alone again, standing over the perfect horseshoe bay, looking down on Ko’s Admiral Nelson where she lay at the very centre point, like a grand lady among the hundreds of pleasure boats and junks around her. There was nobody visible on deck, not even crew. A clutch of grey police boats, five or six of them, was anchored farther out to sea.
And why not, thought Jerry, since this was a festival?
She had let go his hand, and when he turned to her, she was still staring at Ko’s launch and he saw the shadow of confusion in her face.
“Is this really the way he brought you?” he asked.
It was the way, she said; and turned to him, to look; to confirm or weigh things in her mind. Then with her forefinger she gravely traced his lips as if examining the point where she had kissed them. “Jesus,” she said, and as gravely shook her head.
They started climbing again. Glancing up, Jerry saw the brown island peak deceptively near, and on the hillside groups of rice terraces gone to ruin. They entered a small village populated by nothing but surly dogs, and the bay vanished from sight. The schoolhouse was open and empty. Through the doorway they saw charts of fighting aircraft. Washing jars stood on the step. Cupping her hands, Lizzie rinsed her face. The huts were slung with wire and brick to anchor them against typhoons. The path turned to sand and the going grew harder.
“Still right?” he asked.
“It’s just up,” she said, as if she were sick of telling him. “It’s just up, and then the house, and bingo. I mean Christ, what do you think I am, a bloody nitwit?”
“I didn’t say a thing,” said Jerry. He put his arm round her and she pressed in to him, giving herself exactly as she had done on the dance floor.
They heard a blare of music from the temple as somebody tested the loudspeakers, and after it the wail of a slow tune. The bay was in view again. A crowd had gathered on the shore. Jerry saw more puffs of smoke and, in the windless heat of this side of the island, caught a whiff of joss. The water was blue and clear and calm. Round it, white lights burned on poles. The Ko launch had not stirred, nor had the police.
“See him?” he asked.
She stood apart from him. She was studying the crowd. She shook her head. “Probably having a kip after lunch,” she said.
The beating of the sun was ferocious. When they entered the shadow of the hillside it was like a sudden dusk, and when they reached the sunlight it stung their faces like the heat of a close fire. The air was alive with dragonflies, the hillside strewn with big boulders, but where bushes grew they wound and straggled, producing rich trumpets, red and white and yellow. Old picnic cans lay in profusion.
“And that’s the house?”
“I told you,” she said.
It was a ruin: a broken villa with gaping walls and a view. It had been built with some grandeur above a dried-up stream and was reached by a concrete foot-bridge. The mud stank and hummed with insects. Between palms and bracken the remains of a verandah gave a vast prospect of the sea and of the bay. As they crossed the foot-bridge, he took her arm.
“So let’s play it from here,” he said. “No interrogations. Just tell.”
“We walked up here. Like I said. Me, Drake, and bloody Tiu. The boys brought a basket and the booze. I said ‘Where are we going?’ and he said ‘Picnic.’ Tiu didn’t want me but Drake said I could come. ‘You hate walking,’ I said. ‘I’ve never even seen you even cross a road before!’ ‘Today we walk,’ he says, doing his Captain of Industry act. So I tag along and shut up.”
A thick cloud was already obscuring the peak above them and rolling slowly down the hill. The sun had vanished. In moments the cloud reached them and they were alone at the world’s end, unable to see even their feet. They groped their way into the house. She sat apart from him on a roof beam. Chinese slogans were daubed in red paint down the door pillars. The floor was littered with picnic refuse and long twists of lining paper.
“He tells the boys to hop it, so they hop it,” she went on. “Him and Tiu have a long earnest natter in whatever they’re speaking this week, and half-way through lunch he breaks into English and tells me Po Toi’s his island. It’s where he first landed when he left China. The boat people dumped him here. ‘My people,’ he calls them. That’s why he comes to the festival every year and that’s why he gives money to the temple, and that’s why we’ve sweated up the bloody hill for a picnic. Then they go back into Chinese and I get the feeling Tiu is tearing him off a strip for talking too much, but Drake’s all excited and little-boy and he won’t listen. Then they go on up.”
“Up?”
“Up to the top. ‘Old ways are the best,’ he says to me. ‘We shall stick to what is proven.’ Then his Baptist bit—‘Hold fast to that which is good, Liese. That is what God likes.’ ”
Jerry glanced into the fog-bank above him, and he could have sworn he heard the crackle of a small plane, but at that moment he didn’t mind too much whether it was there or not, because he had the two things he most badly needed. He had the girl with him, and he had the information: for now he finally understood exactly what she had been worth to Smiley and Sam Collins, and how she had unconsciously betrayed to them the vital clue to Ko’s intentions.
“So they went on to the top. Did you go with them?”
“No.”
“Did you see where they went?”
“To the top. I told you.”
“Then what?”
“They looked down the other side. Talked. Pointed. More talk, more pointing. Then down they come again and Drake’s even more excited, the way he gets when he’s brought off a big deal and Number One’s not there to disapprove. Tiu looks dead solemn, and that’s the way he gets when Drake acts fond of me. Drake wants to stay and have a couple of brandies, so Tiu goes back to Hong Kong in a huff. Drake gets amorous and decides we’ll spend the night on the boat and go home in the morning, so that’s what we do.”
“Where does he moor the boat? Here? In the bay?”
“No.”
“Where?”
“Off Lantau.”
“You went straight there, did you?”
She shook her head. “We did a round of the island.”
“This island?”
“There was a place he wanted to look at in the dark. A bit of coast round the other side. The boys had to shine the lamps on it. ‘That’s where I land in ’fifty-one,’ he says. ‘The boat people were frightened to put in to the main harbour. They were frightened of police and ghosts and pirates and customs men. They say the islanders will cut their throats.’ ”
“And in the night?” said Jerry. “While you were moored off Lantau?”
“He told me he had a brother and loved him.”
“That was the first time he told you?”
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She nodded.
“He tell you where the brother was?”
“No.”
“But you knew?”
This time she didn’t even nod.
From below, the clatter of the festival rose through the cloud. He lifted her gently to her feet.
“Bloody questions,” she muttered.
“They’re nearly over,” he promised. He kissed her and she let him, but did not otherwise take part.
“Let’s go up there and take a look,” he said.
Ten minutes more and the sunlight returned and blue sky opened above them. With Lizzie leading, they scrambled quickly over several false peaks toward the saddle. The sounds from the bay stopped and the colder air filled with screaming, wheeling gulls. They approached the crest, the path widened, they walked side by side. A few steps more and the wind hit them with a force that made them gasp and reel back. They were at the knife-edge, looking down into an abyss. At their very feet the cliff fell vertical to a boiling sea, and the foam smothered the headlands. Dumpling clouds were blowing from the east and behind them the sky was black. Two hundred metres down lay an inlet which the breakers did not cover. Fifty yards out from it, a shoal of rock checked the sea’s force, and the spume washed it in white rings.
“That it?” he yelled above the wind. “He landed there? That bit of coast?”
“Yes.”
“Shone the lights on it?”
“Yes.”
Leaving her where she stood, he moved slowly up the knifeedge, crouching almost double while the wind rushed over his ears and covered his face in a sticky salt sweat and his stomach screamed in pain from what he supposed was a punctured gut or internal bleeding or both. At the inmost point before the cliff cut back into the sea, he looked down once more, and now he thought he could just make out a skimpy path, sometimes no more than a seam of rock or a ridge of rough grass, ekeing its way cautiously toward the inlet. There was no sand in the inlet but some of the rocks looked dry. Returning to her, he led her away from the knife-edge. The wind dropped and they heard the din of the festival again, much louder than before. The snap of firecrackers made a toy war.
“It’s his brother Nelson,” he explained. “In case you hadn’t gathered. Ko’s bringing him out of China. Tonight’s the night. Trouble is, he’s a much sought-after character. Lot of people would like a chat with him. That’s where Mellon came in.” He took a breath. “My view is that you should get the hell out of here. How do you see that? Drake’s not going to want you around, that’s for sure.”
“Is he going to want you?” she asked.
“I think what you should do, you should go back to the harbour. Are you listening?”
She managed “Of course I am.”
“You look for a nice friendly-looking round-eye family. Choose the woman, for once, not the bloke. Tell her you’ve had a row with your boy-friend and can they take you home in their boat? If they’ll have you, stay the night with them; otherwise go to a hotel. Spin them one of your stories. Christ, that’s no problem, is it?”
A police helicopter pattered overhead in a long curve, presumably to observe the festival. Instinctively he grabbed her shoulders and drew her back to the rock.
“Remember the second place we went—the big-band sound— the bar?” He was still holding her.
She said, “Yes.”
“I’ll pick you up there tomorrow night.”
“I don’t know,” she said.
“Be there at seven. At seven, got it?”
She pushed him gently away from her, as if she were determined to stand alone.
“Tell him I kept faith,” she said. “It’s what he cares about most. I stuck to the deal. If you see him, tell him, ‘Liese stuck to the deal.’ ”
“Sure.”
“Not sure. Yes. Tell him. He did everything he promised. He said he’d look after me. He did. He said he’d let Ric go. He did that, too. He always stuck to a deal.”
She was looking down. He raised her head, holding it with both his hands, but she insisted on going on.
“And tell him—and tell him—tell him they made it impossible. They fenced me in.”
“Be there from seven on,” he said. “Even if I’m a bit late. Now come on, that’s not too difficult, is it? You don’t need a university degree to hoist that aboard.” He was gentling her, battling for a smile, striving for a last complicity before they separated.
She wanted to say something but it didn’t work. She took a few steps, turned and looked back at him, and he waved—one big flap of the arm. She took a few more and kept going till she was below the line of the hill, but he did hear her shout “Seven, then,” or thought he did. Having watched her out of sight, Jerry returned to the knife-edge, where he sat down for a bit of a breather before the Tarzan stuff. A snatch of John Donne came back to him, one of the few things he had picked up at school, though somehow he never got quotations completely right:
On a huge hill
Cragged and steep, Truth stands, and he that will
Reach her, about must, and about must go.
Or something.
For an hour, deep in thought—two hours—he lay in the lee of the rock and watched the daylight turn to dusk over the Chinese islands a few miles into the sea. Then he pulled off his buckskin boots and re-threaded the laces in a herring-bone, the way he used to thread them for his cricket boots. Then he put them on again and tied them as tight as they would go. It could be Tuscany again, he thought, and the five hills which he used to look at from the hornet field. Except that this time he wasn’t proposing to walk out on anyone. Not the girl. Not Luke. Not himself. Even if it took a lot of footwork.
“Navy int. has the junk-fleet making around six knots and dead on course,” Murphy announced. “Quit the beds right on one one hundred, just like they were following our projection.”
From somewhere he had scrounged a set of bakelite toy boats which he could fix to the chart. Standing, he pointed them proudly in a single column at Po Toi island.
Murphy had returned but his colleague had stayed with Sam Collins and Fawn, so they were four.
“And Rockhurst has found the girl,” said Guillam quietly, putting down the other phone. His shoulder was acting up and he was extremely pale.
“Where?” said Smiley.
Still at the chart, Murphy turned.
At his desk, where he was keeping a log of events, Martello put down his pen.
“Picked her up at Aberdeen harbour as she landed,” Guillam went on. “She’d cadged a lift back from Po Toi with a clerk and his wife from the Hong Kong & Shanghai Bank.”
“So what’s the story?” Martello demanded before Smiley could speak. “Where’s Westerby?”
“She doesn’t know,” said Guillam.
“Ah, come on!” Martello protested.
“She says they had a row and left in different boats. Rockhurst says give him another hour with her.”
Smiley spoke. “And Ko?” he asked. “Where’s he?”
“His launch is still in Po Toi harbour,” Guillam replied. “Most of the other boats have already left. But Ko’s is where it was this morning. Sitting pretty, Rockhurst says, and everyone below.”
Smiley peered at the sea chart, then at Guillam, then at the map of Po Toi.
“If she told Westerby what she told Collins,” he said, “then he’s stayed on the island.”
“With what in mind?” Martello demanded very loud. “George, for what purpose is that man remaining on that island?”
An age went by for all of them.
“He’s waiting,” Smiley said.
“For what, may I enquire?” Martello persisted in the same determined tone.
Nobody saw Smiley’s face. It had found its own bit of shadow. They saw his shoulders hunch, they saw his hand rise to his spectacles as if to remove them, they saw it fall back empty in defeat onto the rosewood table.
“Whatever we do, we must let Nelson land,” he said firmly.
“Please don’t shout at me,” Smiley said.
Martello ignored him. “Which is it going to be, that’s all? The conspiracy or the fuck-up?”
Guillam was standing his height, barring the way, and for an extraordinary moment it seemed possible that, broken shoulder notwithstanding, he proposed physically to restrain Martello from coming any closer to where Smiley sat.
“Peter,” Smiley said quietly. “I see there’s a telephone behind you. Perhaps you’d be good enough to pass it to me.”
With the full moon, the wind had dropped and the sea settled. Jerry had not descended all the way to the inlet but made a last camp thirty feet above it, in the cover of a shrub, where he had protection. His hands and knees were cut, and a branch had grazed his cheek, but he felt good: hungry and alert. In the sweat and danger of the scramble he had forgotten his pain. The inlet was larger than he had imagined when he looked down on it from higher up, and the granite cliffs at sea-level were pierced with caves. He was trying to guess Ko’s plan. He had been trying all day. What Ko had to do he would do from the sea, because he was not capable of the nightmarish climb down the cliff. Jerry had wondered at first whether Ko might try to intercept Nelson before he landed, but could see no safe way for Nelson to slip the fleet and make a sea-meeting with his brother.
The sky darkened, the stars came, and the path of the moon grew brighter. And Westerby? he thought. What does A do now? A was one hell of a long way from the syndicate solutions of Sarratt, that was for sure.
Ko would also be a fool to attempt to bring his launch to this side of the island, he decided. She was unwieldy and drew too much water to come inshore on a windward coast. A small boat was better, and a sampan or a rubber dinghy best. Clambering down the cliff till his boots hit pebbles, Jerry huddled against the rock, watching the breakers thump and the sparks of phosphorus riding with the spume.
The Honorable Schoolboy Page 60