The Honourable Schoolboy

by John le Carré

  The hotel used to be the Royal. Now it was the Phnom. A flag was flying from the mast-head, but its grandeur looked already desperate. Signing himself in, he saw living flesh basking round the courtyard pool and once more thought of Lizzie. For the girls, this was the hard school, and if she'd carried little packets for Ricardo then ten to one she'd been through it. The prettiest belonged to the richest and the richest were Phnom Penh's Rotarian crooks: the gold and rubber smugglers, the police chiefs, the big-fisted Corsicans who made neat deals with the Khmer Rouge in mid-battle. There was a letter waiting for him, the flap not sealed. The receptionist, having read it himself, politely watched Jerry do the same. A gilt-edged invitation card with an Embassy crest invited him to dinner. His host was someone he had never heard of. Mystified he turned the card over. A scrawl on the back read 'Knew your friend George of the Guardian', and guardian was the word that introduced. Dinner and deadletter boxes, he thought: what Sarratt scathingly called the great Foreign Office disconnection.

  'Téléphone?' Jerry enquired.

  'Il est foutu, monsieur.'

  'Electricité?'

  'Aussi foutue, monsieur, mais nous avons beaucoup de l'eau.'

  'Keller?' said Jerry with a grin.

  'Dans la cour, monsieur.'

  He walked into the gardens. Among the flesh sat a bunch of warries from the Fleet Street heavies, drinking Scotch and exchanging hard stories. They looked like boy pilots in the Battle of Britain fighting a borrowed war, and they watched him in collective contempt for his upper-class origins. One wore a white kerchief, and lank hair bravely tossed back.

  'Christ, it's the Duke,' he said. 'How'd you get here? Walk on the Mekong?'

  But Jerry didn't want them, he wanted Keller. Keller was permanent. He was a wireman and he was American and Jerry knew him from other wars. More particularly no uitlander newsman came to town without putting his cause at Keller's feet and if Jerry was to have credibility, then Keller's chop would supply it and credibility was increasingly dear to him. He found Keller in the carpark. Broad shoulders, grey-headed, one sleeve rolled down. He was standing with his sleeved arm stuffed into his pocket, watching a driver hose out the inside of a Mercedes.

  'Max. Super.'

  'Ripping,' said Keller, after glancing at him, then went back to his watching. Beside him stood a pair of slim Khmer boys looking like fashion photographers in high-heeled boots and bell-bottoms and cameras dangling over their glittering, un-buttoned shirts. As Jerry looked on, the driver stopped hosing and began scrubbing the upholstery with an army pack of lint which turned brown the more he rubbed. Another American joined the group and Jerry guessed he was Keller's newest stringer. Keller went through stringers fairly fast.

  'What happened?' said Jerry, as the driver began hosing again.

  'Two-dollar hero caught a very expensive bullet,' said the stringer. 'That's what happened.' He was a pale Southerner with an air of being amused and Jerry was prepared to dislike him.

  'Right, Keller?' Jerry said.

  'Photographer,' Keller said.

  Keller's wire service ran a stable of them. All the big services did: Cambodian boys, like the couple standing here. They paid them two US to go to the front and twenty for every photo printed. Jerry had heard that Keller was losing them at the rate of one a week.

  'Took it clean through the shoulder while he was running and stooping,' said the stringer. 'Lost it through the lower back. Went through him like grass through a goose.' He seemed impressed.

  'Where is he?' said Jerry for something to say, while the driver continued to mop and hose and scrub.

  'Dying right up the road there. What happened, see, couple of weeks back those bastards in the New York bureau dug their toes in about medication. We used to ship them to Bangkok. Not now. Man, not now. Know something? Up the road they lie on the floor and have to bribe the nurses to take them water. Right, boys?'

  The two Cambodians smiled politely.

  'Want something, Westerby?' Keller asked.

  Keller's face was grey and pitted. Jerry knew him best from the Sixties in the Congo where Keller burned his hand pulling a kid out of a lorry. Now the fingers were welded like a webbed claw, but otherwise he looked the same. Jerry remembered that incident best because he had been holding the other end of the kid.

  'Comic wants me to take a look round,' Jerry said.

  'Can you still do that?'

  Jerry laughed and Keller laughed and they drank Scotch in the bar till the car was ready, chatting about old times. At the main entrance they picked up a girl who had been waiting all day, just for Keller, a tall Californian with too much camera and long, restless legs. As the phones weren't working Jerry insisted on stopping off at the British Embassy so that he could reply to his invitation. Keller wasn't very polite.

  'You some kinda spook or something these days, Westerby, slanting your stories, ass-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 smelt a little warm still from the blood but the driver had turned up the airconditioning.

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

  'Or something,' Jerry smiled, mainly to the Californian girl.

  Jerry sat in the 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 mid-West 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 US Embassy has hot flushes supporting him then trying to throw him out.' He gave statistics, ordnance, casualties, the scale of US 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. 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 re-run 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 thir
teen,' 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 one 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.

  'KR got themselves a new position out on the far bank there, hun,' Keller explained, talking to the girl in preference. Across the brown, fast water, Jerry saw a couple of T28s, 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 per cent of our commerce and that includes airlines. Old or new.

  Cambodian's lazy, see, hun? 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.

  'How about you?' asked Jerry.

  Keller shook his head and smiled at the girl. 'Care if I smoke, hun?' 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 shellfire 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 a while back,' he explained to the girl.

  'I heard,' she said knowingly.

  'Poms get education, hun,' 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 your 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 burnt hand 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, hun,' 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 drywing 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, hun,' 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 checkpoint. 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 river bank.'

  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 weathervane. 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, hun, 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 checkpoint for?' the girl asked, as she photographed. 'Are we somewhere dangerous now?'

  'Getting there, hun, getting there. Now shut up.'

  Ahead of them, Jerry could hear the sound of automatic fire, M16's and AK47s 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, hun, 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 sewed on the face-wou
nds in a black lava.

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

  'Do what, hun?'

  '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 airbag, 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 the other side there, hun,' Keller began.

  'Can't we see?'

  There was a small silence while the two men conferred without speaking.