Single & Single

by John le Carré

  “Are you pleased?”

  “Immensely.”

  “Not half as pleased as I shall be when the great day comes. Just remember. Your first child, five million pounds. A done thing. Will you remember that?”

  “Of course. Thanks. Really thanks.”

  “It’s not for your gratitude, Oliver. It’s to put a third S into Single & Single.”

  “Right. Great. A third S. Terrific.” Cautiously he takes back his arm and feels the blood return to it.

  “Nina’s a good girl. I’ve checked her out. Mother’s a tart, never bad if you’re looking for a bit of sport in bed. Small aristocrats on the father’s side, a dash of eccentricity but nothing to scare, healthy brothers and sisters. Not a penny to their name but with five million for our firstborn, who’s counting? You won’t find me standing in your way.”

  “Super. I’ll keep it in mind.”

  “And don’t tell her. About the money. It could affect her aim. When the day comes, let her find out for herself. That way you’ll know her heart was in the right place.”

  “Good thinking. Thanks again.”

  “Tell me, old boy”—confidingly, a hand on Oliver’s arm— “what are we running at these days?”

  “Running at?” Oliver repeats, mystified. He racks his mind, trying to call up turnover figures, profit margins, net and gross.

  “With Nina. How many times? Twice a night and once in the morning?”

  “Oh my God”—smirk, wipe of the forelock—“I’m afraid we sort of lose count.”

  “Good lad. Well done. Runs in the family.”

  10

  In the bleak attic bedroom to which Oliver had removed himself after taking tea in the garden with Brock—and where he had remained alone ever since except for a few well-managed interruptions from the crew to ascertain his welfare—there was an iron bedstead, a pine table with a parchment-shaded lamp, and a gangrenous bathroom with kids’ transfers on the mirror, which Oliver in his idleness had attempted unsuccessfully to pick off. There was a telephone socket, but prisoners were allowed no telephone. The crew had offered him food and company but he had declined both. Crew members occupied the rooms to either side of him: Brock’s distrust of Oliver was as absolute as his affection for him. It was by now approaching midnight and Oliver, after many perambulations about the room—which included a fruitless search for a bottle of whisky he had secreted among his shirts this morning when he packed—was once more stooped in the jailbird’s position on his bedstead, his tangled head lolling over his hands as they labored at a forty-five-inch balloon. He was wearing a bath towel and expensive town socks of midnight blue silk by Turnbull & Asser. Tiger had given him thirty pairs after catching him wearing one blue woolen sock and one gray cotton one. Balloons were Oliver’s sanity and Brearly was his mentor. When he could resolve nothing else in life, he could still set a box of balloons at his feet and recall Brearly on the arts of modeling, Brearly on how to inflate and knot, Brearly on skinnies, pencils and doodles, how to identify a willing balloon or spot a rogue. When his marriage was falling apart he would sit over Brearly’s demonstration videos all night long and Heather’s tearful reproaches could not get through to him. You’re onstage at one A.M. unless there’s a fumble, Brock had warned. And I want you looking like a gentleman again.

  Using available light from the uncurtained attic window, Oliver slightly deflated his balloon and nipped off a couple of inches to form a head before realizing he had not decided what animal to make. He did a twist, measured a handsbreadth, did another and discovered that his palms were sweating. He laid down the balloon, reverently wiped his hands on a handkerchief, then dipped them in a box of zinc stearate powder that sat beside him on the eiderdown—zinc stearate to keep the fingers smooth without slippiness, Brearly never went anywhere without it—and groped under the bed for a balloon he had previously inflated. Lock-twisting the two lengths together, he held them to the window to see their shape against the night sky, selected a point and pinched. The balloon burst, but Oliver—who in the normal way held himself responsible for every natural or unnatural disaster—did not scold himself. There was not a magician on earth, he was assured by Brearly, who could beat bad luck with a balloon, and Oliver believed this. You got a duff batch or they didn’t like the weather and it didn’t matter who you were, you could be Brearly himself, they were exploding in your face like firecrackers and before you knew it your cheeks were cut up with tiny razor blades, your eyes were streaming and your face felt as if you’d been shoved headlong into a nettle patch. And all you’d got, if you were Oliver, was your hero’s grin and Rocco’s one-liners to save you from fiasco: Well, that’s one way to blow up a balloon . . . He’ll be taking that one back to the shop tomorrow, won’t he?

  A thump on the door and the sound of Aggie’s Glasgow voice brought him guiltily to his feet, for in another of his many heads he had been agonizing over Carmen: Is she in Northampton yet? How’s the sore place on her eyebrow? Does she think of me as often as I think of her? And in yet another head: Tiger, where are you? Are you hungry? Are you tired? But since Oliver’s anxieties were never mutually exclusive, and he had never learned the knack of addressing each one on its own, he also worried about Yevgeny, and Mikhail, and Tinatin, and about Zoya and whether she knew she was married to a murderer. He feared she did.

  “Was that a pistol shot we heard downstairs, Oliver?” Aggie was inquiring skittishly through the door. Oliver produced an unintelligible grunt, part concurrence, part embarrassment, and rubbed his nose with his wrist. “Only, I’ve got your fash suit here, pressed and ready to go. May I hand it over, please?” He switched on the light, secured his towel round his waist and opened the door. She was wearing a black tracksuit and sneakers and had fastened her hair in a stern knot. He took his suit from her and made to close the door again, but she was looking past him in mock horror at the bedstead. “Oliver, what in hell is that object? I mean, should I be seeing that? Have you discovered a new vice or something?”

  He turned and stared with her. “It’s half a giraffe,” he confessed. “The bit that didn’t bust.”

  She was amazed, she was incredulous. To appease her he sat down on the bed and completed the giraffe and, because she insisted, a bird and a mouse as well. She needed to know how long they would last and would he make one for her four-year-old niece in Paisley? She was all chat and admiration and he duly acknowledged her good intentions. No one could have been nicer to him or more appropriately dressed while he waited to be hanged.

  “The Gnat’s called a war party in twenty minutes, in case there’s any recent developments,” she said. “Are those the city shoes you’ll be wearing, Oliver?”

  “They’re fine as they are.”

  “Not for the Gnat, they aren’t. He’d kill me.”

  A meeting of eyes—hers because the crew had orders to befriend him, Oliver’s because, as usual when a pretty girl looked at him, he was contemplating a lifelong relationship.

  They dropped him by cab in Park Lane. Tanby drove it, Derek pretended to pay Tanby off, Derek and another boy sauntered alongside him into Curzon Street—presumably in case he thought of bolting—before wishing him a cheerful good night and trailing him for the remaining fifty yards. This is what happens when I die, thought Oliver. My life is a bunch of unjoined ends, there’s a pair of closed doors in front of me and a bunch of kids in black urging me forward from across the street. He wished he was back home at Mrs. Watmore’s, watching late television with Sammy.

  “There’s been no arrivals or departures since Friday close of play and no outgoing phone calls,” Brock had said at the briefing. “There’s lights in the Trading Room but no one’s trading. Incoming calls are taken by machine and the message says the office will be open for business eight A.M. Monday. They’re playing busy, but with Winser dead and Tiger on the loose, nobody’s moving a finger.”

  “Where’s Massingham?”

  “In Washington, headed for New York. Phoned in yesterday.�
��

  “How about Gupta?”—worried about Tiger’s Indian manservant, who occupied the basement flat.

  “The Guptas watch television till eleven, lights out eleven-thirty. It’s what they do every night and it’s what they did tonight. Gupta and his wife sleep in the boiler room, his son and daughter-in-law get the bedroom, kids in the corridor. There’s no alarm system in the basement. When Gupta goes downstairs he locks the steel door and it’s good-bye, world. He’s been weeping and shaking his head all day, according to the watchers. Any more questions?”

  Gupta who loved Tiger as no other, Oliver remembered sadly. Gupta whose three brothers were fitted up by the Liverpool police a hundred years ago, but as legend had it were saved by the fearless intervention of St. Tiger of All Singles. Gupta who begged only to serve, weeping and shaking his head all day. A valiant moon had risen to the twentieth floor of a monstrous hotel driven like a spike of Manhattan into the London skyline. A powdery mist was falling, half rain, half dew. Sodium streetlights shed a sticky glow over familiar landmarks: the banks of Riyadh and Qatar, Chase Asset Management and an heroic little shop called Tradition that sold model soldiers of yesteryear—Oliver used to dawdle at its window when he was stoking up his courage to enter the House of Single. He mounted the five stone steps he had sworn he would never climb again, slapped his pockets for his key and realized he was clutching it in his hand. He shuffled forward, key leading. Same pillars. Same brass tablet proclaiming farflung outposts of Single empire: Single Leisure Limited, Antigua . . . Banque Single & Cie . . . Single Resorts Monaco Ltd. . . . Single Sun Valley of Grand Cayman . . . Single Marcelo Land of Madrid . . . Single Seebold Löwe of Budapest . . . Single Malanski of St. Petersburg . . . Single Rinaldo Investments of Milan . . . Oliver could recite the whole bogus batting order blindfold while his gaze skidded everywhere and stayed on nothing.

  “What if they’ve changed the lock?” he had asked Brock.

  “If they have, we’ve changed it back.”

  Key in hand, Oliver stole a last look up and down the street and fancied he saw Tiger in his black overcoat with velvet tabs on the lapels charming him from each of several doorways. A man and woman stood necking in the shadow of an awning. A human bundle lay on the threshold of an estate agent’s. I’m giving you a three on the street for emergencies, Brock had said. Emergency meaning the untimely return of the Tiger to his cage. He was sweating and there was sweat in his eyes. I shouldn’t have worn the bloody waistcoat. His suit was one of six run up by Hayward’s for the day the young master was inducted as junior partner. It had come with a dozen custom-made shirts, and a pair of gold links by Cartier with a tiger on one leaf and a cub on the other, and a maroon Mercedes sports car with quadraphonic sound and TS on the registration plates. He was sweating and his eyes were beginning to fog over, and if his waistcoat wasn’t weighing him to the ground, the key was. The lock yielded without a murmur, he pushed the door, it opened twelve inches and stopped. He pushed again and felt Saturday’s mail slide before him. He stepped high and forward, the door closed behind him and the howling ghosts of hell leapt forward to receive him.

  Good morning, Mr. Oliver!—Pat the commissionaire facetiously snapping to attention.

  Mr. Tiger’s ringing all over for you, Oliver—Sarah the receptionist, from her switchboard.

  Gave her one for breakfast, did we, Ollie boy?—Archie, cockney whiz kid of the Trading Room, having his bit of sport with the young master.

  “You never left the shop,” Brock had told Oliver as they sat waiting for the quiet hours. “Not in the gospel according to Tiger. You never resigned your partnership, you never disappeared into thin air. You’re on overseas study leave, collecting foreign qualifications, whipping up client contacts. You’re paid full salary, according to the company’s reports. Remunerations to full-time partners last year totaled five million eight hundred thousand. Tiger filed a tax return for three million gross, which leaves you a couple of million tucked away in some offshore account. Congratulations. You also sent the House a telegram on the occasion of its Christmas party, which was nice of you. Tiger read it out loud.”

  “Where was I?”

  “Jakarta. Maritime law.”

  “Who believes that crap?”

  “Anyone who wants to keep his job.”

  Wan street light filtered through the fan window above the door. The famous gilded cage stood open to waft distinguished visitors to the top floor. “The Single’s lift goes up and never comes down!” a fawning financial correspondent had written breathlessly, after being lunched at Kat’s. Tiger had had the article framed and hung beside the button panel. Oliver ignored the lift and took the staircase, stepping lightly, not feeling his feet on the carpet, wondering whether they were there at all, letting his fingers trail up the mahogany handrail but not grasping it because the patina was Mrs. Gupta’s pride. Reaching a half landing, he dithered. The Trading Room lay to his left behind a double swing door that banged like a bistro kitchen. Delicately he pushed it and peered inside. Boxed neon lights blazed from the ceiling. Ranks of computer screens fluttered wakefully. Dave, Fuong, Archie, Sally, Mufta, where are you? It’s me, big Ollie the prince regent. No answer. They’ve jumped overboard. Welcome to the Marie Celeste.

  Across the landing ran the long corridor of the Administration Department, home of embargoed secretaries in career suits and a trio of clerical accountants known as wet-nappy boys because they handled the dirty work that the superrich expect of their paid help: cars, dogs, houses, horses, yachts, boxes at Ascot, paying off unwanted lovers and conducting whispered negotiations with disaffected menservants who have gone to earth with the Rolls, a case of whisky and the clients’ chihuahua. The doyen of the wet nappies was a shy old giant called Mortimer who lived in Rickmansworth and reveled in the excesses of his awful wards. Plus she’s humping the butler, he would murmur out of the corner of his mouth, riding his shoulder against Oliver’s for extra confidentiality. Plus she’s flogging off hubby’s Renoirs and hanging up repros because the old boy’s going blind. Plus she’s cutting his children out of his will and getting planning permission for twenty semis in his walled garden . . .

  Ascending weightlessly to the next landing, Oliver hovered long enough at the door to the Directors’ Boardroom to compose a tableau of Tiger enthroned one end of the rosewood table and Oliver the other while Massingham the headwaiter deals out leather-bound spurious accounts to a rabble of derelict peers, deposed government ministers, silk-shirt City editors, overpaid lawyers and rented strangers. He reached another half landing and saw above him the castored feet of a janitor’s desk and the lower half of a fisheye mirror. He was approaching what Massingham, to the ribaldry of the clerks, insisted on calling the Sensitive Area.

  “There’s a white side and a black side,” Oliver had told Brock in the papier-mâché interviewing room at Heathrow. “The white side pays the rent, the black side starts on the third floor.” “Which side are you on, then, son?” Brock had asked. “Both,” Oliver had replied after long thought, and from then on Brock stopped calling him son.

  He heard a thump and died. A burglar. Pigeons. Tiger. A heart attack. He climbed faster, escaping forward, preparing his lines for the obligatory encounter:

  It’s me, Father. Oliver. I’m terribly sorry I’m four years late, only I met this girl and we got talking and one thing led to another and I overslept . . .

  Oh hullo, Father, sorry to be a bore, only I had a crisis of conscience, you see, or I suppose it was conscience. No shining light on the road to Damascus or anything like that, I simply woke up at Heathrow after a rather taxing whistle-stop tour of major clients and decided it was about time I declared some of the contraband I had accumulated inside my head . . .

  Father! Fab! Great to see you! Just happened to be passing, thought I’d drop by . . . Only, I heard about poor old Alfie Winser, you see, and I naturally couldn’t help wondering how you were getting along . . .

  Oh Father, look here, thanks tons fo
r Carmen’s five-million-odd. She’s a bit young to thank you herself, but Heather and I greatly appreciate the gesture . . .

  Oh, and by the way, Father, Nat Brock says that if by any chance you’re on the run he’d very much appreciate the opportunity of cutting a deal with you. Apparently he met you once in Liverpool and was able to admire your skills at first hand . . .

  Well, the other thing is, Father, actually, if it’s all right by you I’ve come to smuggle you to safety. No, no, no, I’m your friend! I mean, it’s true I betrayed you, but that was necessary surgery. Deep down I’m still tremendously loyal . . .

  He was standing before an inner bailey door, uselessly studying a panel of numbers that controlled the lock. An ambulance was screaming up South Audley Street, but from the din it was making it could have been coming up the stairs. A police car followed it, then a fire engine. Great, he thought, a fire’s exactly what I need. “What we are dealing with here, gentlemen, is what I call our rolling combination,” a grim-jawed security consultant is explaining in his bitten-off, ex-policeman’s voice to the reluctantly assembled senior executives, of whom Oliver is one. “Our first four digits are constant and we all know what they are.” We do indeed. They are one-nine-three-six, the blessed year of our Lord Tiger’s birth. “Our last two figures are what we call the rollers and these are achieved by subtracting the day’s date from the number fifty. Thus if our date today is the thirteenth of the month, which my spies reliably inform me it is, ha-ha, I touch in the digits three seven like thus. If our date is the first of the month, then I touch in the digits four nine like thus. Have we all absorbed that, gentlemen? I am well aware that I am addressing an above-average and extremely busy audience this morning, so I will not detain you beyond the necessary. No questions? Thank you, gentlemen, you may smoke, ha-ha.”

  With a recklessness that startled him, Oliver touched in Tiger’s birth year, followed it with the day’s rollers and shoved the door away from him. It yelped and opened, admitting him to Legal Department. You are legal, Post Boy? Yevgeny is asking him incredulously. You are legal? Random early-English watercolors portrayed Jerusalem, Lake Windermere and the Matterhorn. Tiger once had a bankrupt client who dealt in them. A door stood ajar. Fingertips again, Oliver poked it open. My room. My cell. My Pirelli calendar, four years older. This is where our legal Post Boy learned the ropes. Ropes like trading companies that had never traded in their lives and never would. Ropes like holding companies that held nothing for longer than five minutes because it was too damn hot. Ropes like selling bum stock to the bank in order to make the bank the buyer. Then buying said stock back through other companies because the bank happens to be yours. Ropes like proposing theoretical scenarios for a client’s general information, never intending, naturally, that said client should be so unprincipled as to treat the information as professional advice. Such ropes being the cherished preserve of none other than the late, murdered, penis-driven Alfie Winser in his stay-brown hair and Tiger-inspired suits. Alfie, terror of the typists’ pool, unsafe in corridors, my immoral tutor: