Single & Single

by John le Carré

  As usual he blamed no one but himself. Like Aggie he felt he had been shown the obvious signs and drawn none of the obvious conclusions. I was pushing him, but Tiger was pulling him, and Tiger’s pull was harder than my push. Only the imminence of battle consoled him, the prospect that after all the weaving and ducking and backroom calculation, a date and place had been set, the seconds had been appointed and the choice of weapons agreed. As to the risk he was taking on his own account, he and Lily had discussed this in their devious way, and had agreed that he had no choice in the matter:

  “There’s this young man,” he had told Lily on the telephone an hour ago. “And I’ve put him to a lot of trouble, you see, and I’m not sure that I did right.”

  “Oh yes? So what’s happened to him, Nat?”

  “Well, he’s taken himself for a bit of walk, you see, and fallen into some bad company on my account.”

  “Then you must go and get him, mustn’t you, Nat? That won’t do at all, not a young man.”

  “Yes, well, I thought you’d see it that way, Lily, and I’m grateful,” he replied. “Because it’s not a pushover, if you follow me.”

  “Of course it isn’t. Nothing worth doing is. You’ve always done the right thing, Nat, ever since I’ve known you. You can’t stop now, not if you’re wanting to stay who you are. So you just go off and do it.”

  But she had more pressing matters to discuss with him, for which he loved her dearly. That flighty daughter of the postmistress had run off with Palmer the builder, leaving his poor wife with all those children to cope with. Lily was going to have a word with young Palmer the next time she saw him. She’d a good mind to make a special journey to his yard, and tell him what she thought of him. And as for that postmistress, throwing her daughter at the richest man in the village and then sitting there behind her bulletproof counter thinking nothing can touch her . . .

  “Well, you take care now, Lily,” Brock warned her. “Young people aren’t respectful like they used to be.”

  The snatch team was eight strong. Aiden Bell said any more would be a crowd, given the liaison problems when they got to the other end. “If the Russians bring a howitzer, I shan’t be surprised,” he predicted grimly. They sat three and four down the fuselage, dressed in light battle gear and war paint and black track shoes and black balaclavas. “We take the last man aboard when we change ships at Tbilisi,” Bell had told them, omitting to mention that the last man was a woman. Brock and Bell sat apart, a high command of two. Brock wore black denims and a flak jacket with HM CUSTOMS like a medal ribbon over his heart. He had refused a handgun. Better dead than face an internal inquiry about why he’d shot one of his own men. Bell wore flashes of glitter paint on his tunic to mark him as leader, but you saw them only if you were wearing the right goggles. The plane shook and grunted but seemed to make no progress until they were above the clouds in no-man’s-land.

  “We’ll do the dirty work,” Bell growled at Brock. “You handle the social side.”

  20

  The first thing Oliver noticed as he took his place between the two hard-eyed young men in jeans who were waiting at the helicopter pad was tractors. Yellow agricultural tractors. If I’m ever short of a yellow tractor or two, I can always borrow them from Bethlehem and they’ll never notice, he thought jauntily. He was forcing his thoughts outward. He had sworn to do that. On the approach he had admired the majesty of the mountains. Landing, he had admired the four hamlets, the cruciform of the valley, the rim of gold on the snowcaps. Walking, it was the tractors. Look at anything you like, he was telling himself, as long as you look out, not in.

  Abandoned tractors. Tractors to build new roads that had suddenly stopped being roads and turned into fields again. Tractors to flatten land for housing, lay out irrigation and drainage pipes, break fields, tow away cut timber, except that there were no new houses, the pipes were stacked but not laid, and the timber was lying where it fell. Tractors sticking like slugs to their smear trails. Tractors peering wistfully upward at the glistening peaks. But idle. Not one of them moving, anywhere, not by a tremor. Relinquished at a stroke to the half-planted vineyards, half-completed pipelines. Crashed against invisible buffers, and not a driver anywhere.

  They crossed a railroad track. Weeds poked from the wheels of deserted dump trucks. Goats ambled between the sleepers. It is precarious, Zoya is saying. If he sends much money, he is tolerated. Recently he has not been able to send much money. Therefore it is precarious. From the doorways of stone cottages the occupants eyed him malevolently. His escorts were no more friendly. The boy to his left was scarred and elderly in manner. The boy to his right had a limp and was grunting to the rhythm of it. Both carried automatic rifles. Both had the air of belonging to a secret order. They were leading him to the farmhouse, but by an unfamiliar route. Trenches, waterlogged foundations and a collapsed walkway blocked the old path. Cows and donkeys grazed amid a colony of silent cement mixers. But the farmhouse when they came upon it was much as he remembered it: the fretted steps, the oak veranda, the wide-open doors and the same darkness inside. The boy with the limp gestured him up the steps. Oliver climbed to the balcony, listening to the clump of his feet echoing in the evening air. He knocked on the open door but no one answered. He stepped into the darkness and stood still. Not a sound, no smells of Tinatin’s cooking. Only a musty sweetness, testifying to the recent presence of the dead. He made out Tinatin’s rocking chair, the drinking horns, the metal stove. Then the brick fireplace and the painting of the sad old woman in her battered gesso frame. He swung round. A young cat had sprung from the rocking chair and was arching its back at him, reminding him of Jacko, Nadia’s Siamese.

  He called out: “Tinatin?” He waited. “Yevgeny?”

  Slowly a door opened at the back of the room and a shaft of evening sunlight spread along the floor. At the center of the shaft he made out the crooked shadow of a goblin. It was followed in the fullness of time by Yevgeny, frail beyond Oliver’s worst expectation, wearing bedroom slippers and a fleecy cardigan and leaning on a stick. White stubble grew where his brown hair had been, and it had spread over his cheeks and jaw in a downy silver dust. The wily old eyes that four years ago had twinkled from between double fringes were slashed cavities of dark. And behind Yevgeny, part manservant, part devil, loomed the bland unblemished figure of Alix Hoban in a white summer jacket and dark blue trousers and the witch’s black box of his portable telephone dangling like a handbag from his wrist. And perhaps, as Zoya insisted, he was indeed the devil, for, like the devil, he cast no shadow, until belatedly it placed itself beside Yevgeny’s goblin.

  Yevgeny spoke first and his voice was as firm and fierce as it had ever been. “What are you doing here, Post Boy? Do not come here. You are mistaken. Go home.” And he turned to repeat the order angrily to Hoban, but had no time because Oliver was speaking.

  “I came to find my father, Yevgeny. My other father. Is he here?”

  “He is here.”

  “Alive?”

  “He is alive. Nobody has shot him. Not yet.”

  “Then may I greet you?” He moved bravely forward, arms lifted for the embrace. And Yevgeny was about to reciprocate, for he whispered, “Welcome,” and raised his hands before catching Hoban’s eye and lowering them again. His head dropped, he shuffled backward until there was room for Oliver to pass. Which Oliver did, briskly, refusing to acknowledge the slight and, in his relief at knowing that Tiger was alive, he peered happily and nostalgically round the room until, much later than was somehow natural, his gaze fell on Tinatin, thirty years older, seated in a tall rush chair, with her hands folded on her lap in a cross, and another cross at her throat, and an icon of the Christ child above her, suckling himself at the covered bosom of his mother. Oliver knelt beside her and took her hand. Her face, he noticed, as he moved to kiss her, had been redrawn. New lines ran vertically and diagonally across her forehead and down her cheeks.

  “Where have you been, Oliver?”

  “Hiding.”


  “From whom?”

  “Myself.”

  “We cannot,” she said.

  He heard a click and peered round. Sauntering to a rear door, Hoban had pushed it open with his fingertips and, tilting his head to Oliver, was inviting him to follow.

  “You will go to him,” Yevgeny ordered.

  On Hoban’s heels, Oliver crossed a courtyard to a low stone stable guarded by two armed boys of the same unlovely stamp as those who had brought him to the farmhouse. The door was barred with wooden beams dropped into iron brackets.

  “Too bad you missed the funeral,” Hoban remarked. “How did you find this place? Zoya send you?”

  “No one sent me.”

  “That woman can’t hold her tongue for five minutes. Did you invite anybody else to join you?”

  “No.”

  “If you did, we kill your father, then we kill you also. I shall be personally involved in that operation.”

  “I’m sure you will.”

  “Did you fuck her?”

  “No.”

  “Not this time, huh?” He banged on the door. “Anyone home? Mr. Tiger, sir, we brought you a visitor.”

  But by then Oliver had pushed past Hoban and the guards and was himself manhandling the wooden bars from their housings. He hammered on the door, then kicked it till it yielded. He called, “Father,” and strode in, smelling sweet hay and horse. He heard a plaintive call, like an invalid waking, and it was followed by a rustle of straw. There were three stalls. All had straw in them. From a nail beside the third hung Tiger’s brown Raglan coat, and in the straw lay his father, half naked, on his side, the way Oliver himself lay when he was sad, in black city socks and white underpants and a filthy blue Turnbull & Asser shirt with what had once been a white collar, his knees to his chest and his arms round them, and his face blackened with bruises, and his puffy eyes pink from fear of the world into which he had been so recently reborn. He was bound with one chain. It joined his feet, then his hands, then passed to an iron ring embedded in a wooden pillar. He was trying to stand up as Oliver approached, and not quite managing it, and going down again, and on the point of having another try. So Oliver, instead of keeping a respectful distance for fear of towering over him, put his hands under his arms and lifted him the rest of the way, remarking, as Zoya had done, what a lightly made little creature he was, and how skinny under the Turnbull & Asser shirt. He looked into his father’s bashed face and was reminded of Mrs. Watmore’s drowned husband, Jack, though he knew him only from photographs and hearsay: in the water for ten days, she had once confessed to him, and me having to go to Plymouth to identify him. He thought about giving the kiss of life to people you didn’t want to kiss. He thought about dead Jeffrey, and he wondered how a man who owned Nightingales and a penthouse and a Rolls-Royce coped with being chained hand and foot in a stable with no view and no secretary.

  “I’ve seen Nadia,” he said, feeling he ought to be bringing news of some kind. “She sends her love.”

  And he had no idea why he selected this particular item of news, except that Tiger was embracing him with a fervor that was unprecedented, and some kind of fudged kiss was taking place at an angle between their cautiously averted cheeks—except that no sooner had they achieved it than Tiger pushed him away again, and said, with a hasty practicality designed for Hoban’s hearing:

  “And they reached you all right, wherever you were, did they— Hong Kong or somewhere?”

  “Yes. They did. Hong Kong. Understood.”

  “I wasn’t quite sure where you’d be, d’you see? You flit about so. I never know whether you’re studying or drumming up business. I suppose that’s the prerogative of the young: to be elusive. What?”

  “I should have kept in touch more,” Oliver agreed. And to Hoban: “Take this chain off. My father is coming with us to the house.” Seeing that Hoban was smirking contemptuously, Oliver grasped him by the elbow and, watched by the guards, guided him out of earshot. “You’re dead in the water, Alix,” he told him, on the strength of little except bluff and supposition. “Conrad’s going public with the Swiss police, Mirsky’s cutting a deal with the Turks, Massingham’s retired to his deep shelter and your face is on every wanted list as the man who shot Alfred Winser. I don’t think it’s a very good time for you to get fresh blood on your hands. It could be that my father and I are the only bargaining chips you’ve got left to play with.”

  “Who are you in this comedy, Post Boy?”

  “I’m a dirty informant. I betrayed you to the British authorities four years ago. I betrayed my father, and Yevgeny, and the whole shooting match. My masters are just a bit slow about sharpening the knife. But they’ll get to you very soon, I promise.”

  There was a delay while Hoban conferred with Yevgeny’s household. He returned and gave an order to the guards, who unlocked the chain and looked on while Oliver first sponged his father down with water from a bucket, trying to remember when Tiger had last done this to him when he was a child, then deciding he never had. He dragged Tiger’s suit from the hayrack where it had been tossed, and made the best of it before helping him to put it on, leg by leg, arm by arm, then doing up his shoes.

  In the farmhouse a kind of wakening was under way, or perhaps it was a going back to sleep, a restoration of life’s comforting routines in the aftermath of death. Under Hoban’s skeptical eye, Oliver sat his father in a chair across the fire from Yevgeny’s and poured each a glass of cuvée Bethlehem from a flagon on the table. And though Yevgeny refused to acknowledge Tiger’s presence, preferring to set his gaze firmly at the flames, some tacit complicity obliged them to take their first sip in unison and, by ignoring each other so intently, to accord each other mutual recognition. And Oliver, observing them, bent every fiber to foster this atmosphere of conviviality, however artificially arrived at. Acting the part that came most naturally to him—the adopted prodigal returned—he lent a hand to Tinatin with paring vegetables, shifted saucepans on and off the flame for her, found candles, matches, set plates and cutlery on the table and generally deported himself, if not with levity, then with an insistent busyness that was like a spell. “Yevgeny, can I top this up for you?” He could, and earned a muttered “Thank you, Post Boy” for his trouble. “It won’t be long now, Father, how about a bit of sausage to keep you going?”—and Tiger, though he was ashamed of his grimy fingernails, woke from his daze and took a piece, and chewed at it with his bruised mouth, and declared it the best, while he pulled jerky, self-congratulatory smiles and, in the relief of his partial liberation, began to preen himself, and follow Oliver round the room with his bruised eyes.

  “This place is very clearly Yevgeny’s Nightingales,” he called out, above the clatter. He had a front tooth missing, which made him lisp.

  “Yes, indeed,” Oliver agreed, setting knives.

  “You could have told me. I didn’t realize. You should have given me advance warning.”

  “I thought I did, actually.”

  “I like to be informed. Couple of holiday villages wouldn’t do it any harm. Four, come to think of it. One in each valley.”

  “Might go very well. Four’s a good idea.”

  “Hotel in the middle, disco and nightclub, Olympic-sized pool.”

  “Made for it.”

  “You’ve tried the wine, I take it?”—sternly, despite the missing tooth.

  “Any amount of it.”

  “Good. What do you make of it?”

  “I like it. I’m fond of it.”

  “You should be. It’s palatable. I see an opening for us here, Oliver. I’m surprised you didn’t spot it. You know I’ve always been interested in food and beverages. It’s a natural adjunct to our leisure interests. You’ve seen all those tractors out there, busily doing nothing?”

  “Of course”—cutting up flat bread with an ancient guillotine.

  “What did you think when you saw them?”

  “I suppose I was a bit sad.”

  “You should have tho
ught of your father. It’s the type of situation where I excel. Bankrupt stock, a defunct enterprise. Everything waiting for the creative flair. Buy the plant for a song, apply modern methods, rationalize the infrastructure, quarter the workforce, turn the whole thing round in three years.”

  “Brilliant,” said Oliver.

  “The banks will love it.”

  “Bound to.”

  “Good food, good wine, good service. The simple pleasures of life. It’s what the next millennium is about. Is that not so, Yevgeny?” No answer while Tiger allowed himself another appreciative pull of his cuvée Bethlehem. “I’m going to tell old Kat to add this one to the list,” he announced once more to Oliver. “A perfectly acceptable cabernet. Little heavy on the tannin.” Sips. “A few more years in the bottle would help. But up there with the greats, no question.” Swallows. Ruminates. “A blind tasting, that’s the trick. Kat’ll do it superbly. There’ll be a few red faces I don’t mind betting you. I can think of one or two names right now who rather fancy themselves as connoisseurs. Always good to see the mighty tumble.” Another long sip. Rinse the wine round the teeth. Swallow. Smack the lips. “We’ll need a designer. Have a word with Randy. Get a clever label done, stylize the bottle. Those long-necks always look good. Château Argonaut, how’s that? The Spaniards won’t like it, I’ll tell you that for a start.” He chuckled. “Oh dear me, no.”

  “The Spaniards can do the other thing,” Oliver said over his shoulder while he set the table; at which Tiger burst out clapping in a crazed exhilaration.

  “Spoken like a true Englishman, sir! I was telling Gupta only the other day. There’s no more arrogant fellow on earth than a Spaniard when he’s above himself. You can have your German, your Frenchman, your Italian. Is that not so, Yevgeny?” No answer. “Caused us a lot of aggravation, the Spaniards have, down the centuries, I can tell you.” He drank again, bravely setting his little jaw for combat as his faltering gaze once more sought out Yevgeny, but without success. Undaunted, he slapped a hand on his own knee in inspiration. “My goodness me, Yevgeny, I nearly forgot! Tinatin, dear lady, this will delight you no end! Too much bad news about sometimes, one forgets the good news—Oliver’s a father. A very beautiful young lady by the name of Carmen—raise a glass with us, Yevgeny—Alix, you cut a gloomy figure this evening—Tinatin, my dear—to Carmen Single—long life and health and happiness—and prosperity—Oliver, I congratulate you. Fatherhood becomes you. You’re a bigger man than you were. Carmen.”