Single & Single

by John le Carré

  “There’s a single bed in the attic,” Aggie said. “It’s soaked.”

  “With blood?”

  She shook her head and wrinkled her nose.

  “How long did they keep him in the room?” Oliver asked Zoya.

  “Maybe one night, maybe longer. Maybe six, I do not know. Hoban is like Macbeth. He has murdered sleep.”

  “Where is he now?”—he meant his father again.

  “Hoban is saying all the time: I will kill him, let me kill him, he is a traitor. But Yevgeny has no will. He is destroyed. ‘Better we take him with us. I will speak to him.’ They bring him down. Somebody has beaten him, maybe Hoban. I put some bandages on him. He is so small. Yevgeny spoke to his honor. We shall take you on a journey, we have chartered a plane, we have to bury Mikhail, his body is not sanitary, you must not resist, you are our prisoner, you must go with us like a man, otherwise Hoban will shoot you or throw you out of the plane. I did not hear it. It is what Hoban told me. Maybe it is a lie.”

  “Where was the plane going?”

  “To Senaki, in Georgia. It is a secret. They will bury him in Bethlehem. Temur from Tbilisi arranges it. It will be a double funeral. When Hoban killed Mikhail, he killed also Yevgeny. It is normal.”

  “I thought Yevgeny wasn’t welcome in Georgia.”

  “It is precarious. If he is quiet, if he does not compete with the mafias, he is tolerated. If he sends much money, he is tolerated. Recently he has not been able to send much money. Therefore it is precarious.” She gave a great sigh and closed her eyes for a time, then slowly opened them. “Soon Yevgeny will be dead and Hoban will be the king of everything. But he will not be content. As long as there is one innocent man on earth he will not be content.” She gave a beautiful smile. “So take care, Oliver. You are the last innocent.”

  Responding to this easing of the atmosphere, Oliver stood up, and grinned, and stretched, and scratched his head and worked his arms round, and arched his back, and generally did the things he did when he had been sitting in one position for too long, or was thinking of so many things at once that the motors in his body needed to let off a bit of steam. He asked a few questions—carelessly—like what was Temur’s other name, and which day exactly did they fly on, did she remember? And while he was wandering round, and taking mental note of her answers, he couldn’t resist a little pilgrimage to the BMW in the adjoining room, where he lifted its shroud and smiled at its glistening contours—at the same time establishing, by way of the connecting doorway, that Aggie with her unflagging solicitude was making use of his absence to get more soup into her patient.

  Escaping from her eye line, he stepped nimbly to the French windows, grabbed the brass knob and, as softly as he dared, turned it until the doors were unlocked. Then he pushed them an inch, proving to his satisfaction that, like the windows in the drawing room, they opened outward into the garden. And here he was seized by an almost unbearable sense of guilt, which nearly drove him back to the drawing room, either to confess to what he had done or invite Aggie to come with him. But he couldn’t do either of those things because, if he did, he would no longer be protecting her, which, given the dangers of his undertaking, he considered the decent thing to do. Stealthily therefore, like a schoolboy playing truant, he took another look through the connecting doors and, having confirmed that Zoya and Aggie were engaged in a conversation of their own, opened the French windows, stole the dust sheet from the motorbike’s back, bumped the bike off its stand, mounted it, turned the ignition, pushed the starter button, and with a roar that seemed to rise from the very entrails of his being, flew into the starlit night and across the Conqueror’s Bridge on his way to Bethlehem.

  19

  Oliver had loved motorbikes ever since Tiger had decreed them lower class. In his sleep he had ridden away on them, awarded them wings and other magic powers; in the village next to Nightingales he had ridden behind farmers’ boys and tasted the elixir of speed; in adolescence he had dreamed of bare-legged girls riding pillion behind him. But though the ride to Ankara answered many of his most exotic expectations—a resplendent moon, the night firmament, the empty winding road to anywhere—it was haunted by the perils ahead of him, and by those he had left in his wake.

  He had paused at the Volkswagen only long enough to collect money from the suitcase and scribble a note and wedge it in the wiper blade—Sorry, didn’t feel I could drag you into this, Oliver. This text now struck him as so inadequate that he yearned for some way to pick up the telephone to her, or turn back and explain himself more fully. Their clothes, her cell phone, the Single passports, the rest of the money—he had left them undisturbed. He had taken the road to Ankara because he had seen the signpost and he guessed that the first thing Brock would do when he heard the news was slap a watch on flights from Istanbul. But that did not mean that Ankara was safe, or that he was free to grab a flight from Ankara to Tbilisi. Also, Mr. West had no Georgian visa and Oliver had a hunch he needed one. But all these cares together were as nothing beside the image he had fixed in his head of Tiger with his arm twisted up his back, being frog-marched by Alix Hoban—of Tiger beaten, Tiger bleeding, Tiger forced to look at Mikhail’s mangled body, Tiger wetting himself in terror while he waited to be carted off to Bethlehem and shot. He is so small, Zoya had said.

  At first he kept to the motorway; he had no choice. He rode fast but the potholes were a constant fear to him. To either side of him flowed black hills punctuated with satellite high-rise towns like lighted oil rigs. A tunnel had him. He raced through it and emerged to see a horizontal blue beam with white lights and numbers spring toward him at head height. It was a tollgate. Somehow he braked in time, tossed a fifty-million-lira note at an astonished man in a window and raced on. Twice, perhaps more often, he was stopped at police checkpoints by men in plastic yellow smocks with silver glitter bands across their chests. Armed with torches, they studied his face and passport for signs of Kurdishness or some similar disorder. Once, flying blind, he hit a huge pothole and the bike nearly bucked him off. Once he found himself skidding to a halt at the very lip of an immense ravine. Running out of fuel, he cadged a lift, only to discover a filling station five hundred yards away round the corner. But these travails passed by him in a dream, and when he woke he was standing at the information desk at Ankara airport being told that the only way to fly to Tbilisi was to return to Istanbul and pick up a plane that left at eight P.M. tonight, which was fourteen hours away. But Istanbul was where he had left Aggie, and by eight o’clock tonight Hoban might have put Tiger out of his misery.

  Then Oliver remembered that he was rich, and had brought some of his riches with him, and that money, Tiger liked to say, was the best general-purpose tool in the world. So he wandered away into the airport’s administrative catacombs and, with five one-hundred-dollar bills lying on the table between them, spoke slow English to a fat gentleman with worry beads, who finally opened a door and yelled at a menial who returned with a haggard man in grimy green overalls with wings on the pocket whose name was Farouk, and Farouk owned and flew a transport plane that was currently under repair in the hangar, but would be ready in one hour, which became three. And Farouk would accept the charter for a mere ten thousand dollars provided Oliver would not be sick in his plane or tell anybody Farouk had flown him to Tbilisi. Oliver trailed the idea of Senaki but Farouk would not be tempted by Senaki, even for an extra five thousand dollars.

  “Senaki too forbidden. Too many Russians. Too much militaries. Abkhazia make big trouble.”

  With the contract struck, the fat gentleman with worry beads became unhappy. Some deep-rooted bureaucratic instinct told him that things had gone too smoothly and too fast. “You must write paper,” he told Oliver, offering him a bunch of aged forms in Turkish. Oliver declined. The fat gentleman hunted for other reasons to detain him, but in the end gave up.

  They flew and bumped and scraped over the mountaintops and for the second part of the journey Oliver providentially slept, and perhaps Faro
uk did too, for they landed with such a bang at Tbilisi, and taxied for such a short distance, that it was as if the pilot had pulled out of a sound sleep at the last minute. At Tbilisi airport a valid entry visa was mandatory and the law was not to be trifled with. Neither the field marshal of Immigration, nor his colleague the admiral of Security, nor any of their many aides-de-camp, adjutants and fellow mariners could consider allowing Oliver into the country for less than five hundred dollars cash, large bills not accepted. It was by then evening. Oliver took a taxi to Temur’s address, which was a doorway with ten bell buttons to press and no names in the panels beside the buttons. He pressed one, then another, then pressed all of them at once, but though there were lights in some of the windows nobody came down to him and when he shouted “Temur” some of the lights went out. He telephoned from a café, but in vain. He walked. An arctic north wind was whipping off the Caucasus and tearing through the town. The wooden houses creaked and rattled like old ships. In side streets men and women in topcoats and balaclavas huddled round burning car tires for warmth. He returned to Temur’s house and pressed the bell buttons again. Nothing. Again he walked, keeping to the center of the narrow streets because in the pitch darkness he was suddenly, unreasonably scared. He descended a hill and to his relief recognized an illuminated gold mosaic doorway that marked the ancient mineral baths. An old woman took his money and showed him to an empty white-tiled room. A skinny man in jockey shorts dunked him in a sulfur bath, stretched him naked on a meat counter and scoured him with a loofah until he was raw from neck to toe. Burning all over, he went to a discotheque and, having again failed to raise Temur on the telephone, had himself directed to a boardinghouse that had no name. Though it was only two blocks away, the streets were so dark he nearly lost the way. He passed a line of ghostly trolley buses and remembered that in Tbilisi trolley buses stopped dead whenever there was a power cut, which happened for large parts of each day. He beat on the door and waited, listening to the unfastening of locks. An old man in a dressing gown and hair net appeared and spoke to him in Georgian but Nina’s lessons were too long ago. The old man switched to Russian, which was worse, so Oliver laid his hands together, and his head on them in simulated sleep. The old man showed him to an attic cell with an army cot in it, and a parchment lamp shade with cavorting nymphs, and a piece of army soap and a hand basin, and either a very large face flannel or a very small bath towel. All night long the sirens rose and fell. A fire? A coup? An assassination? Or a little girl killed in a car smash and her name is Carmen? Somehow nonetheless he slept, with his shirt and pants and socks on, and the rest of his clothes heaped on the bed for extra warmth, and his barked skin aching and itching, and the wind cracking in the wooden eaves while he longed for Aggie and feared terribly for Tiger, and in his dreams watched him being led whimpering from one corner of Bethlehem to another while Hoban and Yevgeny argued about the best place to blow his head off. He woke and discovered he was freezing. He woke again and he was sweating sulfur. He woke a third time and rang Temur’s number and he answered immediately, the soul of efficiency. A taxi and a helicopter? No problem, Oliver. Three thousand dollars cash, come round at ten.

  “Those guys expect you up there?” Temur inquired.

  “No.”

  “Maybe I tell them. That way they don’t get nervous.”

  Of all the things Brock might have ordered Aggie to do at that moment, the absolute total worst, she decided, was to sit tight and wait for further instructions. If he had told her to jump in the Bosphorus, if he had uttered one solid word of rebuke, if he had ordered her to present herself, shaven headed in disgrace and forthwith, at the embassy back door for immediate transportation back to Britain, she might at least have felt some easing of her humiliation. But all she got in wise, even-tempered Scouse accents was: “Where are you, Charmian? . . . Are you free to talk to us? . . . So what time did this happen, d’you remember? . . . Well, stay exactly where you are, please, Charmian, and don’t do anything further till you hear from your mother or me . . .” Which was why she had been caged these last two hours in a tin-roofed café with empty benches and barenecked chickens and a scrofulous yellow dog called Apollo who rested his chin on her knee and made eyes at her until she bought him another beefburger.

  And it’s all my own stupid fault, she kept telling herself. It was an accident waiting to happen, in slow motion, with my consent, so it did. She’d spotted the motorbike, she’d recognized the signs in him, she’d watched him being solicitous with Zoya but she knew he was broody. And when she watched him lolloping away like a big silver hare across the moonlit lawn, onto the drive and out of her sight behind the house, her first thought was you impatient bastard, if you’d waited a moment I’d have been on there with you.

  But it was a crisis, and Aggie had risen to it as she always did. She did everything she was supposed to do, meticulously and conscientiously, as if she were about to set off on her longest journey ever, which for some reason was how she felt. She ran to the car and read Oliver’s note, which duly drove her mad till she remembered his voice at its least affected, telling Zoya, “I’m in love with her.” She phoned Brock’s direct number, got Tanby and gave him the stark minimum in her most dispassionate tones: “Primo’s stolen a motorbike and is believed to be heading for Georgia. Further information in two hours. Over and out.” She ran back to Zoya, whose mood appeared to have been lightened by Oliver’s departure, for she was smiling to herself in a self-congratulatory way that in other circumstances could have annoyed Aggie considerably. But Aggie had work to do and promises to keep, if only to herself. She marched Zoya upstairs, stood over her while she washed, and together they found her a nightdress and a change of clothes for the morning. Busying herself on Zoya’s behalf in this way, Aggie was also obliged to listen to snatches of questionable wisdom about Oliver and herself, which Zoya imparted with the authority of the deranged. Promising to take her advice to heart, Aggie pondered what more she should do for her. A daubed note of Mirsky’s home number on the wall beside the telephone provided her with an answer. She dialed and got the Mirsky message machine. She described herself as a friend of Zoya’s from New Zealand who happened to have dropped by, and though she didn’t wish to interfere, would it be possible for the Mirskys to give Zoya some fairly urgent attention—like getting her to a doctor, and taking her away for a few days? She took the bolt out of the Kalashnikov and put it in her shoulder bag, she went back upstairs to make sure Zoya was in bed, and to her pleasure found her asleep. She jogged back to the Volkswagen.

  Driving to Istanbul airport she was tormented by a fresh nightmare. Had Oliver simply headed east into Turkey’s mountainous badland? She put nothing beyond him. At the departures terminal, having returned the Volkswagen to the hire company, she threw a calculated force-twelve tantrum of remorse and despair. She put her whole heart into it, which wasn’t difficult. She was Charmian West and she was in hell, she told the sensitive-eyed young clerk behind the desk at Turkish Airlines. She showed him her passport and her most appealing smile. She and Mark had been married exactly six days, and last night they’d had this awful row about nothing, their first, and when she woke up this morning, there was this note saying he was getting out of her life forever . . . Tenderly tapping the keys of his computer, the clerk told her what she had feared to be the case: no flight list of this morning showed a West departing from Istanbul for anywhere. No reservations list had him leaving later in the day.

  “All right,” said Aggie, meaning, not all right at all. “Suppose he took a bus to Ankara and flew from there?”

  But here the clerk regretted, rather severely, that Ankara’s flight lists were outside the scope of his romanticism. So Aggie withdrew herself from the precincts of the airport to this last-chance café, where, with Apollo’s participation, she made her promised call to Brock on her cell phone. After which there was nothing to do but wait, and go on waiting to hear from your mother or me, which was what she was doing now.

  So what w
ould my real mother say—she who is never happy unless her own interests are being ignored? Do whatever you want with him, Mary Agnes, as long as you don’t cause him any harm . . .

  And my father, the paragon Scottish schoolmaster? You’re a strong girl, Mary Agnes. You’ll have to tone down your act a wee bit for Mr. Right . . .

  Her phone was ringing. It was neither her mother nor her father but the central message exchange in the person of a 15 r.p.m. woman with social pretensions:

  “Following for Archangel.”

  That’s me.

  “You have a seat booked for you on the flight to Toytown.” That’s Tbilisi.

  “You will be met on arrival. Fallback, your local uncle.”

  Alleluia! That’s a reprieve!

  Leaping to her feet, Aggie tossed a wad of money on the table, gave Apollo a last fond embrace, and with joy in her heart set course for the departures terminal. On her way she remembered the bolt from the Kalashnikov and the clip of ammunition and just summoned enough common sense to drop them in a rubbish bin before she passed through the X-ray check.

  Brock stepped into the camouflaged military transport plane at Northolt airport feeling he had done all the unimportant things in his life well and all the important things badly. He had arrested Massingham but Massingham had never been his primary target. He had identified Porlock as the rottenest apple but lacked the court-proof evidence that would send him down. For that he needed Tiger and he reckoned that his chances of obtaining him were next to nil. When Brock had cut his deal with Russian and Georgian liaison that morning, it had been agreed that he could have Tiger if the Russians could have Hoban and Yevgeny. Yet the chances of Tiger being alive by the time Brock got to him were in his private judgment zero, and what gnawed at his entrails was the knowledge that, in his determination to nail the father, he had sent the son to his destruction too. I should never have put him on a long rein, he told himself. I should have been there myself, on the spot, round the clock.