John Le Carré: Three Complete Novels

by John le Carré

  He drew a long breath. “And now he’s dead I pray for his soul, same as I do for your mother’s,” he said, sounding strangely less convinced. “If that’s popery, I don’t care.”

  Connie had actually risen to go. She knew the limits, she had the eye, and she was scared of the way di Salis was hammering on. But di Salis on the scent knew no limits at all.

  “So it was a violent death, was it? Politics and the sword, you said. Which politics? Did Drake tell you that? Actual killings were relatively rare, you know. I think you’re holding out on us!”

  Di Salis also was standing, but at Mr. Hibbert’s side, and he was yapping these questions down at the old man’s white head as if he were acting in a Sarratt playlet on interrogation.

  “You’ve been so very kind,” said Connie gushingly to Doris. “Really, we’ve all we could possibly need and more. I’m sure it will all go through with the knighthood,” she said, in a voice pregnant with message for di Salis. “Now, away we go and thank you both enormously.”

  But this time it was the old man himself who frustrated her. “And the year after, he lost his other Nelson, too, God help him, his little boy,” he said. “He’ll be a lonely man, will Drake. That was his last letter to us, wasn’t it, Doris? ‘Pray for my little Nelson, Mr. Hibbert,’ he wrote. And we did.

  “Wanted me to fly over and conduct the funeral. I couldn’t do it, I don’t know why. I never much held with money spent on funerals, to be honest.”

  At this di Salis literally pounced, and with a truly terrible glee. He stooped right over the old man, and he was so animated that he grabbed a fistful of shawl in his feverish little hand.

  “Ah! Ah, now! But did he ever ask you to pray for Nelson senior? Answer me that.”

  “No,” the old man said simply. “No, he didn’t.”

  “Why not? Unless he wasn’t really dead, of course! There are more ways than one of dying in China, aren’t there, and not all of them fatal! ‘Disgraced’—is that a better expression?”

  His squeaky words flew about the firelit room like ugly spirits.

  “They’re to go, Doris,” the old man said calmly to the sea. “See that driver right, won’t you, dear? I’m sure we should have taken out to him, but never mind.”

  They stood in the hall, making their goodbyes. The old man had stayed in his chair, and Doris had closed the door on him.

  Sometimes Connie’s sixth sense was frightening. “The name Liese doesn’t mean anything to you, does it, Miss Hibbert?” she asked, buckling her enormous plastic coat. “We have a reference to a Liese in Mr. Ko’s life.”

  Doris’s powdered face made an angry scowl.

  “That’s Mum’s name,” she said. “She was German Lutheran. The swine stole that too, did he?”

  With Toby Esterhase at the wheel, Connie Sachs and Doc di Salis hurried home to George with their amazing news. At first, on the way, they squabbled about di Salis’s lack of restraint. Toby Esterhase particularly was shocked, and Connie seriously feared the old man might write to Ko. But soon the import of their discovery overwhelmed their apprehensions, and they arrived triumphant at the gates of their secret city.

  Safely inside the walls, it was now di Salis’s hour of glory. Summoning his family of yellow perils once more, he set in motion a whole variety of enquiries, which sent them scurrying all over London on one false pretext or another, and to Cambridge too. At heart di Salis was a loner: no one knew him, except Connie perhaps; and if Connie didn’t care for him, then no one liked him either. Socially, he was discordant and frequently absurd. But neither did anyone doubt his hunter’s will.

  He scoured old records of the Shanghai University of Communications—in Chinese the Chiao Tung—which had a reputation for student Communist militancy after the 1939 – 45 war, and concentrated his interest upon the Department of Marine Studies, which included both administration and shipbuilding in its curriculum. He drew lists of Party cadre members of both before and after ’49, and pored over the scant details of those entrusted with the take-over of big enterprises where technological know-how was required—in particular the Kiangnan shipyard, a massive affair from which the Kuomintang elements had repeatedly to be purged.

  Having drawn up lists of several thousand names, he opened files on all those who were known to have continued their studies at Leningrad University and afterwards reappeared at the shipyard in improved positions. A course of shipbuilding at Leningrad took three years. By di Salis’s computation, Nelson should have been there from ’53 to ’56, and afterwards formally assigned to the Shanghai municipal department in charge of marine engineering, which would then have returned him to the Kiangnan.

  Accepting that Nelson not only possessed Chinese forenames which were still unknown, but quite possibly had chosen a new surname for himself into the bargain, di Salis warned his helpers that Nelson’s biography might be split into two parts, each under a different name. They should watch for dovetailing. He cadged lists of graduates and lists of enrolled students both at Chiao Tung and at Leningrad and set them side by side.

  China-watchers are a fraternity apart, and their common interests transcend protocol and national differences. Di Salis had connections not only in Cambridge, and in every Oriental archive, but in Rome, Tokyo, and Munich as well. He wrote to all of them, concealing his goal in a welter of other questions. Even the Cousins, it turned out later, had unwittingly opened their files to him. He made other enquiries even more devious. He dispatched burrowers to the Baptists, to delve among records of old pupils at the mission schools, on the off chance that Nelson’s Chinese names had, after all, been taken down and filed. He tracked down any chance records of the deaths of middle-ranking Shanghai officials in the shipping industry.

  That was the first leg of his labours. The second began with what Connie called the Great Beastly Cultural Revolution of the mid-sixties and the names of such Shanghainese officials who, in consequence of criminal pro-Russian leanings, had been officially purged, humiliated, or sent to a May 7th school to rediscover the virtues of peasant labour. He also consulted lists of those sent to labour reform camps, but with no great success. He looked for any references among the Red Guards’ harangues to the wicked influence of a Baptist upbringing upon this or that disgraced official, and he played complicated games with the name of Ko, for it was at the back of his mind that, in changing his name, Nelson might have hit upon a different character which retained an internal kinship with the original—either homophonic or symphonetic. But when he tried to explain this to Connie, he lost her.

  For Connie Sachs was pursuing a different line entirely. Her interest centred on the activities of known Karla-trained talent-spotters working among overseas students at the University of Leningrad in the fifties; and on rumours, never proven, that Karla, as a young Comintern agent, had been lent to the Shanghai Communist underground after the war to help them rebuild their secret apparatus.

  It was in the middle of all this fresh burrowing that a small bombshell was delivered from Grosvenor Square. Mr. Hibbert’s intelligence was still fresh from the presses, in fact, and the researchers of both families were still frantically at work when Peter Guillam walked in on Smiley with an urgent message. He was, as usual, deep in his own reading, and as Guillam entered he slipped a file into a drawer and closed it.

  “It’s the Cousins,” Guillam said gently. “About Brother Ricardo, your favourite pilot. They want to meet with you at the Annexe as soon as possible. I’m to ring back by yesterday.”

  “They want what?”

  “To meet you. But they use the preposition.”

  “Do they? Do they really? Good Lord. I suppose it’s the German influence. Or is it Old English? Meet with. Well, I must say.” And he lumbered off to his bathroom to shave.

  Returning to his own room, Guillam found Sam Collins sitting in the soft chair, smoking one of his beastly brown cigarettes, and smiling his washable smile.

  “Something up?” Sam asked, very leisurely.
/>   “Get the hell out of here,” Guillam snapped. Sam was nosing around a lot too much for Guillam’s liking, but that day he had a firm reason for distrusting him. Calling on Lacon at the Cabinet Office to deliver the Circus’s monthly imprest account for his inspection, he had been astonished to see Sam emerging from his private office, joking easily with Lacon and Saul Enderby of the Foreign Office.

  12

  The Resurrection of Ricardo

  Before the fall, studiously informal meetings of intelligence partners to the special relationship were held as often as monthly and followed by what Smiley’s predecessor Alleline had liked to call “a jar.” If it was the American turn to play host, then Alleline and his cohorts—among them the popular Bill Haydon—would be shepherded to a vast roof-top bar, known within the Circus as “the planetarium,” to be regaled with dry martinis and a view of West London they could not otherwise have afforded. If it was the British turn, then a trestle-table was set up in the rumpus room, and a darned damask table-cloth spread over it, and the American delegates were invited to pay homage to the last bastion of clubland spying, and incidentally the birthplace of their own service, while they sipped South African sherry disguised by cut-glass decanters on the grounds that they wouldn’t know the difference. For the discussions there was no agenda and by tradition no notes were taken. Old friends had no need of such devices, particularly since hidden microphones stayed sober and did the job better.

  Since the fall, these niceties had for a while stopped dead. Under orders from Martello’s headquarters at Langley, Virginia, the “British liaison,” as they knew the Circus, was placed on the arm’s-length list, equating it with Yugoslavia and Lebanon, and for a while the two services in effect passed each other on opposite sidewalks, scarcely lifting their eyes. They were like an estranged couple in the middle of divorce proceedings. But by the time that grey winter’s morning had come along when Smiley and Guillam, in some haste, presented themselves at the front doors of the Legal Advisor’s Annexe in Grosvenor Square, a marked thaw was already discernible everywhere, even in the rigid faces of the two Marines who frisked them.

  The doors, incidentally, were double, with black grilles over black iron, and gilded feathers on the grilles. The cost of them alone would have kept the entire Circus ticking over for a couple of days at least. Once inside them, Smiley and Guillam had the sensation of coming from a hamlet to a metropolis.

  Martello’s room was very large. There were no windows and it could have been midnight. Above an empty desk, an American flag, unfurled as if by a breeze, occupied half the end wall. At the centre of the floor, a ring of airport chairs was clustered round a fake rosewood table, and in one of these sat Martello himself, a burly, cheerful-looking Yale man in a country suit which seemed always out of season. Two quiet men flanked him, each as sallow and sincere as the other.

  “George, this is good of you,” said Martello heartily, in his warm, confiding voice, as he came quickly forward to receive them. “I don’t need to tell you. I know how busy you are. I know.

  “Sol,” he said, turning to two strangers sitting across the room so far unnoticed: the one young like Martello’s quiet men, if less smooth; the other squat and tough and much older, with a slashed complexion and a crew cut, a veteran of something. “Sol,” Martello repeated in a voice of hushed ceremony, “I want you to meet one of the true legends of our profession. Sol: Mr. George Smiley. George, this is Sol Eckland, who’s high in our fine Drug Enforcement Administration, formerly the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, now rechristened—right, Sol? Sol, say hello to Pete Guillam.”

  The elder of the two men put out a hand, and Smiley and Guillam each shook it, and it felt like dried bark.

  “Sure,” said Martello, looking on with the satisfaction of a matchmaker. “George, ah, remember Ed Ristow, also in narcotics, George? Paid a courtesy call on you over there a few months back? Well, Sol has taken over from Ristow. He has the South East Asian sphere. Cy here is with him.”

  Nobody remembers names like the Americans, thought Guillam.

  Cy was the young one of the two. He had sideburns and a gold watch and he looked like a Mormon missionary: devout, but defensive. He smiled as if smiling had been part of his course, and Guillam smiled in return.

  “What happened to Ristow?” Smiley asked as they sat down.

  “Coronary,” growled Sol in a voice as dry as his hand. His hair was like wire wool crimped into small trenches. When he scratched it, which he did a lot, it rasped.

  “I’m sorry,” said Smiley.

  “Could be permanent,” said Sol, not looking at him, and drew on his cigarette.

  Here, for the first time, it passed through Guillam’s mind that something fairly momentous was in the air. He caught a hint of real tension between the two American camps. Unheralded replacements, in Guillam’s experience of the American scene, were seldom caused by anything as banal as illness. He went so far as to wonder in what way Sol’s predecessor might have blotted his copy-book.

  “Enforcement, ah, naturally has a strong interest in our little joint venture, ah, George,” Martello said, and with this unpromising fanfare the Ricardo connection was indirectly announced, though Guillam detected there was still a mysterious urge, on the American side, to pretend their meeting was about something different—as witness Martello’s vacuous opening comments.

  “George, our people in Langley like to work very closely indeed with their good friends in narcotics,” he declared, with all the warmth of a diplomatic note verbale.

  “Cuts both ways,” Sol, the veteran, said in confirmation and expelled more cigarette smoke while he scratched his iron-grey hair. He seemed to Guillam at root a shy man, not comfortable here at all. Cy, his young sidekick, was a lot smoother.

  “It’s parameters, Mr. Smiley, sir. On a deal like this, you get some areas, they overlap entirely.” Cy’s voice was a little too high for his size.

  “Cy and Sol have hunted with us before, George,” Martello said, offering yet further reassurance. “Cy and Sol are family—take my word for it. Langley cuts Enforcement in, Enforcement cuts Langley in. That’s the way it goes. Right, Sol?”

  “Right,” said Sol.

  If they don’t go to bed together soon, thought Guillam, they just may claw each other’s eyes out instead. He glanced at Smiley and saw that he too was conscious of the strained atmosphere. He sat like his own effigy, a hand on each knee, eyes almost closed as usual, and he seemed to be willing himself into invisibility while the explanation was acted out for him.

  “Maybe we should all just get ourselves up to date on the latest details first,” Martello now suggested, as if he were inviting everyone to wash.

  First before what? Guillam wondered.

  One of the quiet men used the work name Murphy. Murphy was so fair he was nearly albino. Taking a folder from the rosewood table, Murphy began reading from it aloud with great respect in his voice. He held each page singly between his clean fingers.

  “Sir, Monday subject flew to Bangkok with Cathay Pacific Airlines, flight details given, and was picked up at the airport by Tan Lee, our reference given, in his personal limousine. They proceeded directly to the Airsea permanent suite at the Hotel Erawan.” He glanced at Sol. “Tan is managing director of Asian Rice & General, sir, that’s Airsea’s Bangkok subsidiary, file references appended. They spent three hours in the suite and—”

  “Ah, Murphy,” said Martello, interrupting.

  “Sir?”

  “All that ‘reference given,’ ‘reference appended.’ Leave that out, will you? We all know we have files on these guys. Right?”

  “Right, sir.”

  “Ko alone?” Sol demanded.

  “Sir, Ko took his manager Tiu along with him. Tiu goes with him most everywhere.”

  Here, chancing to look at Smiley again, Guillam intercepted an enquiring glance from him directed at Martello. Guillam had a notion he was thinking of the girl—had she gone, too?—but Martello’s
indulgent smile didn’t waver, and after a moment Smiley seemed to accept this, and resumed his attentive pose.

  Sol meanwhile had turned to his assistant and the two of them had a brief private exchange.

  “Why the hell doesn’t somebody bug the damn hotel suite, Cy? What’s holding everyone up?”

  “We already suggested that to Bangkok, Sol, but they’ve got problems with the party walls—they’ve got no proper cavities or something.”

  “Those Bangkok clowns are drowsy with too much ass. That the same Tan we tried to nail last year for heroin?”

  “No, that was Tan Ha, Sol. This one’s Tan Lee. They have a lot of Tans out there. Tan Lee’s just a front man. He plays link to Fatty Hong in Chiang Mai. It’s Hong who has the connections to the growers and the big brokers.”

  “Somebody ought to go out and shoot that bastard,” Sol said. Which bastard wasn’t quite clear.

  Martello nodded at pale Murphy to go on.

  “Sir, the three men then drove down to Bangkok port—that’s Ko and Tan Lee and Tiu, sir—and they looked at twenty or thirty small coasters tied up along the bank. Then they drove back to Bangkok airport and subject flew to Manila, Philippines, for a cement conference at the Hotel Eden and Bali.”

  “Tiu didn’t go to Manila?” Martello asked, buying time.

  “No, sir. Flew home,” Murphy replied, and once more Smiley glanced at Martello.

  “Cement, my ass,” Sol exclaimed. “Those the boats that do the run up to Hong Kong, Murphy?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “We know those boats,” expostulated Sol. “We’ve been going for those boats for years. Right, Cy?”

  “Right.”

  Sol had rounded on Martello as if he were personally to blame: “They leave harbour clean. They don’t take the stuff aboard till they’re at sea. Nobody knows which boat will carry, not even the captain of the selected vessel, until the launch pulls alongside, gives them the dope. When they hit Hong Kong waters, they drop the dope overboard with markers and the junks scoop it in.” He spoke slowly, as if speaking hurt him, forcing each word out hoarsely. “We’ve been screaming at the Brits for years to shake those junks out, but the bastards are all on the take.”