John Le Carré: Three Complete Novels

by John le Carré

  “After enduring so much at Communist hands,” one culprit told his interrogators, “the least we could do was make a little money out of them.”

  Another was more aggressive: “The Hong Kong fat cats are making millions out of this war. Who sells the Reds their electronic equipment, their penicillin, their rice?”

  In ’51 there were two methods open to them, said the report. One was to bribe the frontier guards and truck the oil across the New Territories and over the border. The other was taking it by ship, which meant bribing the harbour authorities.

  An informant again: “Us Hakka know the sea. We find boat, three hundred tons, we rent. We fill with drums of oil, make false manifest and false destination. We reach international waters, run like hell for Amoy. Reds call us brother, profit one hundred percent. After a few runs we buy boat.”

  “Where did the original money come from?” the interrogator demanded.

  “Ritz Ballroom” was the disconcerting answer. The Ritz was a high-class pick-up spot right down the King’s Road on the waterfront, said a footnote. Most of the girls were Shanghainese. The same footnote named members of the gang. Drake Ko was one.

  “Drake Ko was very tough boy,” said a witness’s statement given in fine print in the appendix. “You don’t tell no fairy story to Drake Ko. He don’t like politician people one piece. Chiang Kai-shek. Mao. He say they all one person. He say he keen supporter of Chiang Mao-shek. One day Mr. Ko lead our gang.”

  As to gangs, the investigation turned up nothing. It was a matter of history that Shanghai, by the time it fell to Mao in’49, had emptied three-quarters of its underworld into Hong Kong; that the Red Gang and the Green Gang had fought enough battles over the Hong Kong protection rackets to make Chicago in the twenties look like child’s play. But not a witness could be found who admitted to knowing anything about gangs, triads, or any other criminal organisation.

  Not surprisingly, by the time Saturday came round and Jerry was on his way to Happy Valley races, he possessed quite a detailed portrait of his quarry.

  The taxi charged double because it was the races, and Jerry paid because he knew it was the form. He had told Craw he was going and Craw had not objected. He had brought Luke along for the ride, knowing that sometimes two are less conspicuous than one. He was nervous of bumping into Frost, because round-eye Hong Kong is a very small city indeed. At the main entrance, he telephoned the management to raise some influence, and in due course a Captain Grant appeared, a young official to whom Jerry explained that this was work: he was writing the place up for the comic.

  Grant was a witty, elegant man who smoked Turkish cigarettes through a holder, and everything Jerry said seemed to amuse him in a fond, if rather remote way.

  “You’re the son, then,” he said finally.

  “Did you know him?” said Jerry, grinning.

  “Only of him,” Captain Grant replied; but he seemed to like what he had heard.

  He gave them badges and offered them drinks later. The second race was just over. While they talked, they heard the roar of the crowd set to and rise and die like an avalanche. Waiting for the lift, Jerry checked the notice-board to see who had taken the private boxes. The hardy annuals were the Peak mafia: The Bank—as the Hong Kong & Shanghai Bank liked to call itself—Jardine Matheson, the Governor, the Commander British Forces. Mr. Drake Ko, O.B.E., though a Steward of the Club, was not among them.

  “Westerby! Good God, man, who the hell ever let you in here? Listen, is it true your dad went bust before he died?”

  Jerry hesitated, grinning, then belatedly drew the card from his memory: Clive Somebody, pigs-in-clover solicitor, house in Repulse Bay, overpowering Scot, all false affability and an open reputation for crookedness. Jerry had used him for background in a Macao-based gold swindle and concluded that Clive had had a slice of the cake.

  “Gosh, Clive, super, marvellous.”

  They exchanged banalities, still waiting for the lift.

  “Here. Give us your card. Come on! I’ll make your fortune yet.” Porton, thought Jerry; Clive Porton. Tearing the racecard from Jerry’s hand, Porton licked his big thumb, turned to a centre page, and ringed a horse’s name in ballpoint. “Number seven in the third—you can’t go wrong,” he breathed. “Put your shirt on it, okay? Not every day I give away money, I’ll tell you.”

  “What did the slob sell you?” Luke enquired when they were clear of him.

  “Thing called Open Space.”

  Their ways divided. Luke went off to place bets and wangle his way into the American Club upstairs. Jerry, on an impulse, took a hundred dollars’ worth of Lucky Nelson and set a hasty course for the Hong Kong Club’s luncheon room. If I lose, he thought drily, I’ll chalk it up to George.

  The double doors were open and he walked straight in. The atmosphere was of dowdy wealth: a Surrey golf-club on a wet weekend, except that those brave enough to risk the pickpockets wore real jewels. A group of wives sat apart, like expensive unused equipment, scowling at the closed-circuit television and moaning about servants and muggings. There was a smell of cigar smoke and sweat and departed food. Seeing him shamble in—the awful suit, the buckskin boots, “press” written all over him—their scowls darkened. The trouble with being exclusive in Hong Kong, their faces said, was that not enough people are thrown out.

  A school of serious drinkers had gathered at the bar, mainly carpet-baggers from the London merchant banks, with curdled accents, beer bellies, and fat necks before their time. With them, the Jardine Matheson second eleven, not yet grand enough for the firm’s private box: groomed, unloveable innocents for whom heaven was money and promotion. Apprehensively, he glanced round for Frostie, but either the gee-gees hadn’t drawn him today or he was with some other crowd.

  With one grin and a vague flap of the hand for all of them, Jerry winkled out the under-manager, saluted him like a lost friend, talked airily of Captain Grant, slipped him twenty bucks for himself, signed up for the day in defiance of every regulation, and stepped gratefully onto the balcony with eighteen minutes still before the “off”: sun, the stink of dung, the feral rumble of a Chinese crowd, and Jerry’s own quickening heartbeat that whispered “horses.”

  For a moment Jerry hung there, grinning, taking in the view, because every time he saw it was the first time.

  The grass at Happy Valley Racecourse must be the most valuable crop on earth. There was very little of it. A narrow ring ran round the edge of what looked like a London borough recreation ground which sun and feet have beaten into dirt. Eight scuffed football pitches, one rugger pitch, one hockey gave an air of municipal neglect. But the thin green ribbon which surrounded this dingy package in that year alone was likely to attract a cool hundred million sterling through legal betting, and the same amount again in the shade. The place was less a valley than a fire-bowl—glistening white stadium one side, brown hills the other—while ahead of Jerry and to his left lurked the other Hong Kong: a card-house Manhattan of grey skyscraper slums crammed so tight they seemed to lean on one another in the heat. From each tiny balcony, a bamboo pole stuck out like a pin put in to brace the structure; from each pole hung innumerable flags of black laundry, as if something huge had brushed against the building leaving these tatters in its wake. It was from places like these, for all but the tiniest few that day, that Happy Valley offered the gambler’s dream of instantaneous salvation.

  Away to the right of Jerry shone newer, grander buildings. There, he remembered, the illegal bookies pitched their offices and by a dozen obscure methods—tic-tac, walkie-talkie, flashing lights; Sarratt would have been entranced by them—kept up their dialogue with legmen round the course. Higher again ran the spines of shaven hilltop slashed by quarries and littered with the ironmongery of electronic eavesdropping. Jerry had heard somewhere that the saucers had been put there for the Cousins, so that they could track the sponsored over-flights of Taiwanese U-2s. Above the hills, dumplings of white cloud which no weather ever seemed to clear away. And abo
ve the cloud, that day, the bleached China sky aching in the sun, and one hawk slowly wheeling. All this Jerry took in at a single, grateful draught.

  For the crowd it was the aimless time. The focus of attention, if anywhere, was on the four fat Chinese women in fringed Hakka hats and black pyjama suits who were marching down the track with rakes, prinking the precious grass where the galloping hoofs had mussed it. They moved with the dignity of total indifference; it was as if the whole of Chinese peasantry were depicted in their gestures. For a second, in the way crowds have, a tremor of collective affinity reached out to them, and was forgotten.

  The betting put Clive Porton’s Open Space third favourite. Drake Ko’s Lucky Nelson was in with the field at forty to one, which meant nowhere. Edging his way past a bunch of festive Australians, Jerry reached the corner of the balcony and, craning, peered steeply downward over the tiers of heads to the owners’ box, cut off from the common people by a green iron gate and a security guard. Shading his eyes and wishing he had brought binoculars, he made out one fat, hard-looking man in a suit and dark glasses, accompanied by a young and very pretty girl. He looked half Chinese, half Latin, and Jerry put him down as Filipino. The girl was the best that money could buy.

  Must be with his horse, thought Jerry, recalling old Sambo. Most likely in the paddock, briefing his trainer and the jockey.

  Striding back through the luncheon room to the main lobby, he dropped into a wide back-stairway for two floors and crossed a hall to the viewing gallery, which was filled with a vast and thoughtful Chinese crowd, all men, staring downward in devotional silence into a covered sand-pit filled with noisy sparrows and three horses, each led by his permanent male groom, the mafoo. The mafoos held their charges miserably, as if sick with nerves. The elegant Captain Grant was looking on; so was an old White Russian trainer called Sacha, whom Jerry loved. Sacha sat on a tiny folding chair, leaning slightly forward as if he were fishing. Sacha had trained Mongolian ponies in the treaty days of Shanghai, and Jerry could listen to him all night: how Shanghai had had three racecourses, British, International, and Chinese; how the British merchant princes kept sixty—even a hundred—horses apiece and sailed them up and down the coast, competing like madmen with each other from port to port. Sacha was a gentle, philosophical fellow with far-away blue eyes and an all-in wrestler’s jaw. He was also the trainer of Lucky Nelson. He sat alone, watching what Jerry took to be a doorway out of his own line of sight.

  A sudden hubbub from the stands caused Jerry to turn sharply toward the sunlight. A roar sounded, then one high, strangled shriek as the crowd on one tier swayed and an axehead of grey-and-black uniforms tore into it. An instant later and a swarm of police was dragging some wretched pickpocket, bleeding and coughing, into the tunnel stairway for a voluntary statement. Dazzled, Jerry returned his gaze to the interior darkness of the sand-paddock, and took a moment to focus on the fogged outline of Mr. Drake Ko.

  The identification was nowhere near immediate. The first person Jerry noticed was not Ko at all, but the young Chinese jockey standing at old Sacha’s side: tall boy, thin as wire where his silks were nipped into his breeches. He was slapping his whip against his boot as if he had seen the gesture in an English sporting print; he was wearing Ko’s colours—“sky blue and sea grey, quartered,” said the article in Golden Orient—and, like Sacha, he was staring at something out of Jerry’s sight.

  Next, from under the platform where Jerry stood, came a bay griffin, led by a giggly fat mafoo in filthy grey overalls. His number was hidden by a rug, but Jerry knew the horse already from its photograph, and he knew it even better now; he knew it really well, in fact. There are some horses that are simply superior to their class, and Lucky Nelson, to Jerry’s eye, was one. Bit of quality, he thought, nice long rein, a bold eye. None of your jail-bait chestnut with a light mane and tail that take the women’s vote in every race. Given the local form, which is heavily restricted by the climate, Lucky Nelson was as sound as anything he’d seen here. Jerry was sure of it. For one bad moment he was anxious about the horse’s condition: sweating, too much gloss on the flanks and quarters. Then he looked again at the bold eye, and the slightly unnatural sweat lines, and his heart revived. Cunning devil’s had him hosed down to make him look poorly, he thought, in joyous memory of old Sambo.

  It was only at that late point, therefore, that Jerry moved his eye from the horse to its owner.

  Mr. Drake Ko, O.B.E., the recipient to date of a cool half million of Moscow Centre’s American dollars, the avowed supporter of Chiang Mao-shek, stood apart from everyone, in the shadow of a white concrete pillar ten feet in diameter: an ugly but inoffensive figure at first glance, tall, with a stoop that should have been occupational—a dentist, or a cobbler. He was dressed in an English way, in baggy grey flannels and a black double-breasted blazer too long in the waist, so that it emphasised the disjointedness of his legs and gave a crumpled look to his spare body. His face and neck were as polished as old leather and as hairless, and the many creases looked sharp as ironed pleats. His complexion was darker than Jerry had expected; he would almost have suspected Arab or Indian blood. He wore the same unsuitable hat of the photograph, a dark blue beret, and his ears stuck out from under it like pastry roses. His very narrow eyes were stretched still finer by its pressure. Brown Italian shoes, white shirt, open neck. No props, not even binoculars : but a marvellous half-million-dollar smile, ear to ear, partly gold, that seemed to relish everyone’s good fortune as well as his own.

  Except there was a hint—some men have it, it is like a tension; headwaiters, doormen, journalists can spot it at a glance; old Sambo almost had it—there was a hint of resources instantly available. If things were needed, hidden people would bring them at the double.

  The picture sprang to life. Over the loudspeaker the clerk of the course ordered the jockeys to mount. The giggly mafoo pulled off the rug, and Jerry, to his pleasure, noticed that Ko had had the bay’s coat back-brushed to emphasise his supposedly poor condition. The thin jockey made the long awkward journey to the saddle and, with nervous friendliness, called down to Ko on the other side of him.

  Ko, already moving away, swung round and snapped something back, one inaudible syllable, without looking where he spoke or who picked it up. A rebuke? An encouragement? An order to a servant? The smile had lost none of its exuberance, but the voice was hard as a whipcrack. Horse and rider took their leave. Ko took his. Jerry raced back up the stairs, through the lunch-room to the balcony, waded to the corner, and looked down.

  By then Ko was no longer alone, but married.

  Whether they arrived together on the stand, whether she followed him at a moment’s distance, Jerry was never sure. She was so small. He spotted a glitter of black silk and a movement round it as men deferred—the stand was filling up—but at first he looked too high and missed her. Her head was at the level of their chests. He picked her up again at Ko’s side, a tiny, immaculate Chinese wife, sovereign, elderly, pale, so groomed you could never imagine she had been any other age or worn any clothes but these Paris-tailored black silks, frogged and brocaded like a hussar’s. Wife’s a handful, Craw had said, extemporising as they sat bemused in front of the tiny projector. Pinches from the big stores. Ko’s people have to get in ahead of her and promise to pay for whatever she nicks.

  The article in Golden Orient referred to her as “an early business partner.” Reading between the lines, Jerry guessed she’d been one of the girls at the Ritz Ballroom.

  The crowd’s roar had gathered throat.

  “Did you do him, Westerby? Did you do him, man?” Scottish Clive Porton was bearing down on him, sweating heavily from drink. “Open Space, for God’s sake! Even at those odds you’ll make a dollar or two! Go on, man, it’s a cert!”

  The “off” spared him a reply. The roar choked, lifted, and swelled. All round him a pitter-patter of names and numbers fluttered in the stands; the horses sprang from their traps, drawn forward by the din. The lazy first furlong had be
gun. Wait: frenzy will follow the inertia. In the dawn light when they train, Jerry remembered, their hoofs are muffled in order to spare the residents their slumbers. Sometimes in the old days, drying out between war stories, Jerry would get up early and come down here just to watch them and, if he was lucky and found an influential friend, go back with them to the air-conditioned, multi-storey stables where they lived, to watch the grooming and the cosseting. Whereas, by day the howl of traffic drowned their thunder entirely and the glittering cluster that advanced so slowly made no sound at all, but floated on the thin emerald river.

  “Open Space all the way,” Clive Porton announced uncertainly as he watched through his glasses. “The favourite’s done it. Well done, Open Space, well done, lad.” They began the long turn before the final straight. “Come on, Open Space, stretch for it man, ride! Use your whip, you cretin!” Porton screamed, for by now it was clear even to the naked eye that the sky-blue and sea-grey colours of Lucky Nelson were heading for the front, and that his competitors were courteously making way for him. A second horse put up a show of challenging, then flagged, but Open Space was already three lengths behind while his jockey worked furiously with his whip on the air around his mount’s quarters.

  “Objection!” Porton was shouting. “Where’s the stewards, for God’s sake? That horse was pulled! I never saw a horse so pulled in my life!”

  As Lucky Nelson loped gracefully past the post, Jerry quickly turned his gaze to the right again, and down. Ko appeared unmoved. It was not Oriental inscrutability; Jerry had never subscribed to that myth. Certainly it was not indifference. It was merely that he was observing the satisfactory unfolding of a ceremony: Mr. Drake Ko watches a march-past of his troops. His little mad wife stood poker-backed beside him as if, after all the struggles of her life, they were finally playing her anthem. For a second Jerry was reminded of old Pet in her prime. Just the way Pet looked, thought Jerry, when Sambo’s pride came in a good eighteenth. Just the way she stood, and coped with failure.