Single & Single

by John le Carré

  The marriage decided upon, Brock gave much thought to how the couple should be named. The obvious solution was for Aggie to become Heather and for Oliver to remain Hawthorne. Credit cards, driving licenses and public records would then fall into line, not to mention Oliver’s notional past life in Australia. Anyone choosing to check them would come upon a wealth of corroboration and otherwise a brick wall. If they stumbled on the divorce, to hell with them: Oliver and Heather had got together again. Against this was the indisputable operational fact that the name Hawthorne must be considered blown, not only to Tiger, but to other persons unknown. Unusually, Brock went for the compromise. Oliver and Aggie would have two operational passports apiece, not one. In the first they would be Oliver and Heather Single, children’s entertainer and homemaker, British, married. In the second they would be Mark and Charmian West, commercial artist and homemaker, American, resident in Britain—these latter identities having already been cleared in advance for short-term operational use outside the United States. Credit cards and driving licenses and home addresses for the Wests were also available for restricted use. The decision about which passport to use would depend on the merits of each situation. Aggie would be issued travelers’ checks in both names and would also be responsible for the safekeeping of passports not in action. She would take care of all loose cash and do the paying.

  “You mean you’re not even trusting me with the housekeeping?” Oliver blubbered in mock protest. “Then I’m not marrying her. Send back the presents.”

  Aggie not liking the joke at all, Brock noticed. Squeezing her lips together and wrinkling her nose as if things were getting out of hand. Tanby drove them to the airport. The crew waved them off—all but Brock, who watched them from an upper window.

  The castle stood on a hump of the wooded Dolder hillside, where it had stood for a hundred years or more, a medieval keep with greentiled turrets and striped shutters and mullioned windows and a double garage, and a comically drawn fierce dog in red with its teeth bared, and a brass plate on the granite gatepost that said, LOTHAR STORM & CONRAD, Anwälte. And below this: Attorneys, Legal and Financial Counselors. Oliver ambled up to the iron gates and pressed the bell. Glancing downward through the trees, he saw shards of Lake Zurich and a children’s hospital with happy families painted on the walls and a helicopter on the roof. On a bench across the road from him sat Derek in student casuals, soaking up the sunshine and listening to a doctored Walkman. Up the hill in a parked yellow Audi with a fiery devil dangling in its rear window sat two longhaired girls, neither of them Aggie. “You’re his wife and you do what wives do when their men are doing business,” Brock had told her in Oliver’s hearing when she had pressed to be included in the surveillance team. “Mooch, read, shop, do the galleries, see a movie, get your hair done. What are you grinning at?” Nothing, Oliver said. The gate lock buzzed. Oliver was toting a black attaché case containing dummy files, an electronic diary, a cell phone and other grown-up toys. One of them—he was unclear which—doubled as a radio microphone.

  “Mr. Single, sir. Oliver! Five years. My God!” Plump Dr. Conrad welcomed him with the restrained enthusiasm of a fellow mourner, bustling out of his office with his chin up and pudgy arms held wide, then narrowing the gesture to a handshake of commiseration, which he achieved by clamping his doughy left palm over their two right hands, and piping, “Absolutely shocking—poor Mr. Winser—a tragedy, actually. You are not changed, I would say. Not smaller certainly! Also not fatter from all that excellent Chinese food.” And with this Dr. Conrad took Oliver by the arm and guided him past Frau Marty, his assistant, and other assistants and other doors to other partners, into a paneled study, where a sumptuous courtesan, naked but for her black stockings and gold frame, displayed herself center stage above a Gothic stone hearth. “You like her?”

  “She’s great.”

  “She is a little risqué for some of my clients, actually. I have a countess who lives in the Tessin and for her I change it for a Hodler. I like very much Impressionists. But I like also women who do not grow old.” The little confidences to make you feel special, Oliver remembered. The greedy surgeon’s chatter before he cuts you up. “You have married in the meantime, Oliver?”

  “Yes”—thinking of Aggie.

  “She is beautiful?”

  “I find her so.”

  “And not old?”

  “Twenty-five.”

  “Brunette?”

  “Sort of mousy blonde,” Oliver replied with mysterious diffidence. In his inner ear, meanwhile, Tiger is waxing fulsome on the subject of our gallant doctor: Our wizard of offshore, Oliver, the biggest name in no-name companies, the only man in Switzerland who can steer you blindfold through the tax laws of twenty different countries.

  “You take a coffee—filter, espresso? We have a machine now— everything by machine today! Decaffeinated also? Zwei Filterkaffee, bitte, Frau Marty, with poison, please! Sugar? Zucker nimmt er auch! Soon we lawyers will also be machines. Und kein Telefon, Frau Marty, not even if the queen calls, Tschüss!” All this while he waved Oliver to a chair across from him, extracted a pair of black-rimmed spectacles from a pocket of the cardigan that he wore to emphasize his informality, polished them with a chamois leather from a drawer, leaned forward in his chair and, raising his eyes over the black parapet of his spectacles, subjected Oliver to a second penetrating examination while he again lamented Winser’s passing. “All over the world, huh? No one is safe, not even here in Switzerland.”

  “It’s awful,” Oliver agreed.

  “Two days ago in Rapperswil,” Dr. Conrad went on, his intense gaze for some reason fixed on Oliver’s tie—a new one, bought by Aggie at the airport, because I’m not having you in that soupstained orange thing a moment longer—“a respectable woman shot dead by a very normal boy, a carpenter’s apprentice. The husband underdirector with a bank.”

  “Dreadful,” Oliver agreed again.

  “Maybe it was the same with poor Winser,” Dr. Conrad suggested, dropping his voice to give his theory a clandestine force. “We have many Turks here in Switzerland. In restaurants, driving taxis. They are behaving well, actually, on the whole, so far. But look out, huh? One never knows.”

  No, one really doesn’t, Oliver echoed heartily, and set his briefcase on the desk, snapping the locks as a wishful prelude to getting down to business, and at the same time guiding the right-hand lock to transmit.

  “And greetings from Dieter,” Dr. Conrad said.

  “Gosh, Dieter. How is he? Fantastic, you must give me his address!” Dieter the creamy-haired sadist who beat me twenty-one–love at Ping-Pong in the attic of Dr. Conrad’s millionaire’s gin palace in Küsnacht while our fathers talked mistresses and money over brandy in the sun lounge, he remembered.

  “Thank you, Dieter is now twenty-five, he is at Yale School of Management, he hopes he will never see his parents again, but that’s a phase actually,” said Dr. Conrad proudly. An anxious pause while Oliver forgot the name of Dr. Conrad’s wife, though it was clearly inscribed in Aggie’s hand on the goof sheet that she had pressed on him as he left the hotel, and was even now nestling against his heart. “And Charlotte is also very well,” Dr. Conrad volunteered, letting him off the hook. And drew a slim folder from his desk and laid it before him, then spread his elbows and set his fingertips along its two edges to make sure it didn’t fly away. Which was when Oliver realized that Dr. Conrad’s hands were shaking and that oily little beads of sweat had appeared like an unwelcome visitation on his upper lip.

  “So Oliver,” said Conrad, straightening himself up and making a new beginning. “I ask you a question, yes? An impertinent question, but we are old friends, so you don’t get angry. We are lawyers. Some questions must be asked. Not always answered, maybe, but asked. You don’t mind?”

  “Not at all,” said Oliver politely.

  Conrad puffed out his sweating lips and frowned in exaggerated concentration. “Who am I receiving today? In what capacity? Is it Tiger’s
anxious son I am receiving? Is it Oliver the Southeast Asian representative of the House of Single? Or the brilliant student of Asian languages perhaps? Is it the friend of Mr. Yevgeny Orlov? Or is it a fellow lawyer discussing legal aspects—and if so, who is his client? With whom do I have the honor of speaking this afternoon?”

  “How did my father describe me?” Oliver proposed, prevaricating. Every question a threat to you, he thought, watching Dr. Conrad’s fussy hands join and separate. Every gesture a decision.

  “He didn’t, actually. He said only that you would come,” Dr. Conrad replied too anxiously. “That you would come and when you came I should tell you what was necessary.”

  “Necessary to what?”

  Conrad tried to look amused, but fear curdled his smile. “To his survival, actually.”

  “He said that? In those words—his survival?”

  The sweat had spread to his temples. “Maybe salvation. Salvation or survival. Otherwise he told me nothing regarding Oliver. Maybe he forgot. We had important matters to discuss.” He drew a deep breath. “So. Who are you today, please, Oliver?” he repeated in his singsong accent. “Answer my question, please. I am actually very curious to know.”

  Frau Marty brought coffee and sugar biscuits. Oliver waited till she had left, then calmly, not a lie out of place, retold the gospel according to Brock as he had related it to Kat, until he came to the point where he arrived in England. “After I’d looked at the situation and spoken to the staff I knew that somebody had to take over the shop and it had better be me. I didn’t have Winser’s experience, or his legal know-how. But I was the only other partner, I was on the spot, I knew his methods of working and I knew Tiger’s. I knew where the bodies were buried.” Dr. Conrad’s eyes widened to register terror. “I mean that I was conversant with the inside workings of the firm,” Oliver explained kindly. “If I didn’t step into Winser’s shoes, who else was going to?” He was sitting his full height. Master of his fictions, he looked boldly down on Conrad for approval and obtained a noncommittal nod. “My problem is, there’s nobody left in the House that I can consult, and next to nothing written down. Deliberately so. Tiger’s off the air. Half the staff have taken sick leave—”

  “And Mr. Massingham?” Dr. Conrad interrupted, in a voice cleansed of all inflection.

  “Massingham’s on a whistle-stop tour to reassure investors. If I pull him off the job I create the exact impression we’re trying to forestall. Besides, Massingham’s not much use on the legal side.” Conrad’s features reflected nothing but flatulent discomfort. “Then there’s the question of my father’s own state of mind—health—whatever you call it”—he permitted himself a decent hesitation—“He’s been under severe stress since before Christmas.”

  “Stress,” Dr. Conrad repeated.

  “He can take an awful lot—as you can, I’m sure—but there’s such a thing as having a nervous breakdown in place. The tougher a man is, the longer he holds out. But the signs are there for those who can read them. The man ceases to function on all cylinders.”

  “Please?”

  “He stops performing rationally. And he’s not aware of it.”

  “You are a psychologist?”

  “No, but I’m Tiger’s son, and his partner, and his greatest fan, and as you say, he’s relying on my help. And you’re his lawyer.” But even this, to judge by the rigidity of Dr. Conrad’s expression, was more than he was prepared to own to. “My father’s desperate. I’ve spoken to the people who were nearest to him in the hours before he did his disappearing act. The one thing he wanted was to talk to Kaspar Conrad. You. It had to be you. Before he talked to anyone else in the world. He kept his visit here secret. Even from me.”

  “Then how do you know he came to see me, Oliver?”

  Oliver managed not to hear this unpleasantly perspicacious question. “I have to get to him urgently. Give him whatever help I can. I don’t know where he is. He needs me.” Get Conrad to tell you the Christmas story, Brock had said. Why did Tiger visit him nine times in December and January alone? “Some months ago, my father was caught up in a major crisis. He wrote to me complaining of a conspiracy to unseat him. He said the only other person he could trust apart from myself was you. ‘Kaspar Conrad is our boy.’ And together you won. You fought them off, whoever they were. Tiger was cock-a-hoop. A couple of weeks ago Winser has his head blown off and again my father rushes over to see you. Then he disappears. Where’s he gone? He must have said where he was going. What’s his next move?”

  14

  It’s a replay, Oliver was thinking, as Conrad began to talk. It’s five years ago and Tiger is standing at this very desk and I am stationed obediently in his shadow, sated after last night’s father-son dinner of chopped veal and Rösti and house red at the Kronenhalle, followed by the more private pleasures of the minibar in my hotel suite. Tiger is giving one of his state-of-the-nation addresses and I as usual am the nation:

  “Kaspar, good friend, allow me to present Oliver, my son and newly inducted partner and as of today your valued client. We have an instruction for you, Kaspar. Are you ready to receive it?”

  “From you, Tiger, I am ready for anything, actually.”

  “Ours is a sweetheart partnership, Kaspar. Oliver has the key to all my secrets and I to his. Agreed and understood?”

  “Agreed and understood, Tiger.”

  And off to lunch at Jacky’s.

  It is three months later and this time we are a crowd: Tiger, Mikhail, Yevgeny, Winser, Hoban, Shalva, Massingham and me. We are sharing a coffee-driven feast of friendship, to be followed by a more substantial feast at the Dolder Grand just up the road. Last night in Chelsea I made love to Nina and my left shoulder inside my Turnbull & Asser shirt is lacerated with her teeth marks. Yevgeny is silent and perhaps asleep. Mikhail is watching squirrels through the window, wishing he could shoot them. Massingham dreams of William, Hoban hates us all and Dr. Conrad is describing perfect harmony. We shall be one—almost. One unlimited offshore company—almost. We shall be preferred shareholders—almost, though some of us will be more preferred than others. Such trivial differences occur in the best of happy families. We shall be tax efficient— meaning we shan’t pay any. We shall be Bermudian and Andorran, we shall be the almost-equal beneficiaries of an archipelago of companies reaching from Guernsey to Grand Cayman to Liechtenstein, and Dr. Conrad the great international lawyer will be our confessor, keeper of the company purse and chief navigator, patrolling the movement of our capital and income in accordance with hands-off, no-name instructions conveyed to him from time to time by the House of Single. And everything is going swimmingly—lunch is only a few paragraphs of Dr. Conrad’s brilliant working paper away— when to Oliver’s stupefaction, Randy Massingham calmly inserts one elegant suede toe cap into the middle of this intricate, deniable, arm’slength machinery, and from his chosen place of influence between Hoban and Yevgeny drawls:

  “Kaspar, I’m sure I sound as if I’m speaking against House of Single’s interests here. But wouldn’t it be a teeny bit more democratic all round if our instructions to your splendid self were thrashed out jointly by Tiger and Yevgeny, rather than handed down to you by my incomparable chairman alone? Just trying to head off frictions in advance, Ollie,” Massingham explains in an outrageously relaxed aside. “Iron out our differences now, rather than have ’em bite us in the backside later. If you follow my reasoning.”

  Oliver follows it effortlessly. Massingham is playing all ends against the middle and portraying himself as Mr. Nice Guy while he does it. But he is not fast enough for Tiger, who is onto him almost before he has finished speaking:

  “Randy, may I thank you enormously for having the foresight, presence of mind and—dare I say it?—courage to make an absolutely vital point ahead of time? Yes, we must have a democratic partnership. Yes to power sharing, not just in principle but on the ground. However, we’re not talking power here. We’re talking one clear voice and one clear order handed down the line
to Dr. Conrad. Dr. Conrad can’t take orders from a Babel! Can you, Kaspar? He can’t take orders from a committee, not even one as harmonious as ours! Kaspar, tell them I’m right. Or wrong. I don’t mind.”

  And of course he is right, and remains right all the way up to the Dolder Grand.

  Dr. Conrad was talking about false courtiers. Conspiring courtiers. Courtiers who banded together and turned on their benefactor. Dr. Conrad’s fear of them had become palpable and it was thickened by indignation. Russian courtiers. Polish courtiers. English ones. He was talking elliptically and partly in whispers, his piggy eyes were growing larger and rounder. His courtiers were no-name courtiers engaging in no-name conspiracies, he was personally absolutely not engaged in them himself, his word of honor. But the courtiers were emerging nonetheless and their ringleader this Christmas was Dr. Mirsky—“who, I may tell you in absolute confidence, has a terrible reputation and a beautiful wife with long legs, assuming she is his wife because with Dr. Mirsky, who is a Pole, one cannot be sure.” He expelled a rush of breath, produced a blue silk handkerchief and dabbed his sweated brow. “I shall tell you what I may tell you, Oliver. I shall not tell you all, but I shall tell you the maximum that I can reconcile with my professional conscience. Do you accept this?”

  “I shall have to.”

  “I shall not decorate, I shall not speculate, I shall accept no supplementary questions. Even if the behavior of certain persons has been completely outrageous. So. We are lawyers. We are paid to respect the instruments of law. We are not paid to prove that black is black or white is white.” Another mop of the brow. “Maybe Dr. Mirsky is not the locomotive of this train,” he suggested, in a whisper.