John Le Carré: Three Complete Novels

by John le Carré

  Yet Smiley kept his head. He resisted all recriminations, both of his own handling of the case and of Jerry’s. The tree had been shaken, he maintained, Drake Ko was running scared, and time would show they were right. He refused to be hustled into some dramatic gesture to Martello, and he held resolutely to the terms of the deal that he had outlined in his letter, and of which a copy now lodged with Lacon. He also refused, as his charter allowed him, to enter into any discussion of operational detail, either with the Steering Group or with Enderby personally, except where issues of protocol or local mandate were concerned. To give way on this, he knew very well, would only have meant providing the doubters with fresh ammunition with which to shoot him down.

  He held this line for five weeks, and on the thirty-sixth day, either God or the forces of logic—or better, the forces of Ko’s human chemistry—delivered to Smiley a substantial if mysterious consolation. Ko took to the water. Accompanied by Tiu and an unknown Chinese later identified as the lead captain of Ko’s junk-fleet, he spent the better part of three days touring the Hong Kong out-islands, returning each evening at dusk. Where they went, there was as yet no telling. Martello proposed a series of helicopter over-flights to observe their course, but Smiley turned down the suggestion flat. Static surveillance from the quayside confirmed that they apparently left and returned by a different route each day, and that was all. And on the last day, the fourth, the boat did not return at all.

  Panic. Where had it gone? Martello’s masters in Langley, Virginia, flew into a complete spin and decided that Ko and the Admiral Nelson had deliberately strayed into China waters. Even that they had been abducted. Ko would never be seen again, and Enderby, going downhill fast, actually telephoned Smiley and told him it would be “your damn fault if Ko pops up in Peking yelling the odds about Secret Service persecution.” Even Smiley, for one agonising day, secretly wondered whether, against all reason, Ko had indeed gone to join his brother.

  Then of course, next morning early, the launch sailed back into the main harbour looking as if it had just returned from a regatta, and Ko gaily disembarked, following his beautiful Liese down the gangway.

  It was this intelligence which, after very long thought and a renewed and detailed reading of Ko’s file—not to mention much tense debate with Connie and di Salis—determined Smiley to take two decisions at once or, in gambler’s terms, to play the only two cards that were left to him.

  One: Jerry should advance to the “last stage,” by which Smiley meant Ricardo. He hoped by this step to maintain the pressure on Ko, and provide Ko, if he needed it, with the final proof that he must act.

  Two: Sam Collins should “go in.”

  This second decision was reached in consultation with Connie Sachs alone. It finds no mention in Jerry’s main dossier, but only in a secret appendix later released, with deletions, for wider scrutiny.

  The fragmenting effect upon Jerry of these delays and hesitations was something not the greatest intelligence chief on earth could have included in his calculations. To be aware of it was one thing—and Smiley undoubtedly was, and even took one or two steps to forestall it. To be guided by it, to set it on the same plane as the factors of high policy which he was having daily fired at him, would have been downright irresponsible. A general is nothing without priorities.

  The fact remains that Saigon was the worst place on earth for Jerry to be kicking his heels. Periodically, as the delays dragged on, there was talk at the Circus of sending him somewhere more salubrious—for instance, to Singapore or Kuala Lumpur—but the arguments of expediency and cover always kept him where he was; besides, tomorrow everything might change. There was also the matter of his personal safety. Hong Kong was not to be considered, and in both Singapore and Bangkok, Ko’s influence was sure to be strong. Then, cover again: with the collapse approaching, where more natural than Saigon?

  Yet it was a half-life Jerry lived, and in a half-town. For forty years, give or take, war had been Saigon’s staple industry, but the American pull-out of ’73 had produced a slump from which, to the end, the city never properly recovered, so that even this long-awaited final act, with its cast of millions, was playing to quite poor audiences. Even when he took his obligatory rides to the sharp end of the fighting, Jerry had a sense of watching a rained-off cricket match where the contestants wanted only to go back to the pavilion. The Circus forbade him to leave Saigon on the grounds that he might be needed elsewhere at any moment, but the injunction, literally observed, would have made him look ridiculous, and he ignored it. Xuan Loc was a boring French rubber town fifty miles out, on what was now the city’s tactical perimeter. For this was a different war entirely from Phnom Penh’s, more technical and more European in inspiration. Where the Khmer Rouge had no armour, the North Vietnamese had Russian tanks and 130 millimetre artillery, which they drew up on the classic Russian pattern, wheel to wheel, as if they were about to storm Berlin under Marshal Zhukov, and nothing would move till the last gun was laid and primed. He found the town half deserted, and the Catholic church empty except for one French priest.

  “C’est terminé,” the priest explained to him simply. The South Vietnamese would do what they always did, he said. They would stop the advance, then turn and run.

  They drank wine together staring at the empty square.

  Jerry filed a story saying the rot this time was irreversible, and Stubbsie shoved it on the spike with a laconic “PREFER PEOPLE TO PROPHECIES STUBBS.”

  Back in Saigon, on the steps of the Hotel Caravelle, begging children peddled useless garlands of flowers. Jerry gave them money and to save them face took their flowers, then dumped them in the waste-paper basket in his room. When he sat downstairs, they tapped on the window and sold him Stars & Stripes. In the almost empty bars where he drank, the girls collected to him desperately as if he were their last chance before the end. Only the police were in their element. They stood at every corner in white helmets and fresh white gloves, as if already waiting to direct the victorious enemy traffic when it arrived. They rode like monarchs past the refugees in their bird-coops on the pavement.

  Jerry returned to his hotel room and Hercule rang, his favourite Vietnamese, whom he had been avoiding for all he was worth. Hercule, as he called himself, was anti-establishment and anti-Thieu and had made a quiet living supplying British journalists with information on the Vietcong, on the questionable grounds that the British were not involved in the war. “The British are my friends!” he begged into the phone. “Get me out! I need papers, I need money!”

  Jerry said, “Try the Americans,” and rang off hopelessly.

  The Reuters office, when Jerry filed his stillborn copy, was a monument to forgotten heroes and the romance of failure. Under the glass desk-tops lay the photographed heads of tousled boys, on the walls famous rejection slips and samples of editorial fury; in the air a stink of old newsprint, and the Somewhere-in-England sense of makeshift habitation which enshrines the secret nostalgia of every exiled correspondent. There was a travel agent just round the corner, and later it turned out that Jerry had twice in that period booked himself passages to Hong Kong, then not appeared at the airport. He was serviced by an earnest young Cousin named Pike, who had Information cover and occasionally came to the hotel with signals in yellow envelopes marked “RUSH PRESS” for authenticity. But the message inside was the same: no decision, stand by, no decision. He read Ford Madox Ford and a truly terrible novel about old Hong Kong. He read Greene and Conrad and T. E. Lawrence, and still no word came. The shellings sounded worst at night, and the panic was everywhere, like a spreading plague. In search of Stubbsie’s people not prophecies, he went down to the American Embassy where ten thousand-odd Vietnamese were beating at the doors in an effort to prove their American citizenship. As he watched, a South Vietnamese officer rode up in a jeep, leapt out, and began yelling at the women, calling them whores and traitors—picking, as it happened, a group of bona-fide U.S. wives to bear the brunt.

  Again Jerry fil
ed and again Stubbs threw his story out, which no doubt added to his depression. A few days later the Circus planners lost their nerve. As the rout continued, and worsened, they signalled Jerry to fly at once to Vientiane and keep his head down till ordered otherwise by a Cousins’ postman. So he took a room at the Constellation, where Lizzie had liked to hang out, and he drank at the bar where Lizzie had liked to drink, and he occasionally chatted to Maurice the proprietor, and he waited. The bar was of concrete, two feet deep, so that if the need arose it could do duty as a bomb shelter or firing position. Each night in the gloomy dining room attached to it, one old colon ate and drank fastidiously, a napkin tucked into his collar. Jerry sat reading at another table. They were the only diners ever, and they never spoke. In the streets, the Pathet Lao—not long down from the hills—walked righteously in pairs and in great number, wearing Maoist caps and tunics and avoiding the glances of the girls. They had commandeered the corner villas and the villas along the road to the airport. They had camped in immaculate tents which peeked over the walls of overgrown gardens.

  “Will the coalition hold?” Jerry asked Maurice once.

  Maurice was not a political man. He gave a huge shrug. “It’s the way it is,” he replied in a stage French accent, and in silence handed Jerry a ballpoint pen as a consolation. It had “Läwenbröu” written on it: Maurice owned the concession for the whole of Laos, selling—it was said—several bottles a year. Jerry avoided absolutely the street that housed the Indocharter offices, just as he restrained himself from taking a look, out of curiosity, at the flea-hut on the edge of town which, on Charlie Marshall’s testimony, had housed their ménage à trois. When asked, Maurice said there were very few Chinese left in town these days: “Chinese do not like,” he said with another smile, tilting his head at the Pathet Lao on the pavement outside.

  There remains the mystery of the telephone transcripts. Did Jerry ring Lizzie from the Constellation, or not? And if he did ring her, did he mean to talk to her, or only to listen to her voice? And if he intended to talk to her, then what did he propose to say? Or was the very act of making the phone call—like the act of booking airline passages in Saigon—in itself sufficient catharsis to hold him back from the reality?

  What is certain is that nobody—neither Smiley nor Connie nor anyone else who read the crucial transcripts—can be seriously accused of failing in their duty, for the entry was at best ambivalent: 0055 hrs HK time. Incoming overseas call, personal for subject. Operator on the line. Subject accepts call, says “hullo” several times.

  Operator: “Speak up, please, caller!”

  (repeated in French and ? Lao)

  Subject: “Hullo? Hullo?”

  Operator: “Can you hear me, caller? Speak up, please!”

  (repeated in French and ? Lao)

  Subject: “Hullo? Liese Worth here. Who’s calling, please?”

  Call disconnected from caller’s end.

  The transcript nowhere mentions Vientiane as the place of origin and it is even doubtful whether Smiley saw it, since his cryptonym does not appear in the signing panel.

  Anyway, whether it was Jerry who made that call or someone else, the next day a pair of Cousins, not one, brought him his marching orders and at long long last the welcome relief of action. The bloody inertia, however many interminable weeks of it, had ended—as it happened for good.

  Jerry spent the afternoon fixing himself visas and transport, and next morning at dawn he crossed the Mekong into North East Thailand, carrying his shoulder-bag and his typewriter. The long wooden ferry boat was crammed with peasants and shrieking pigs. At the shack that controlled the crossing point, he pledged himself to return to Laos by the same route. Documentation would otherwise be impossible, the officials warned him severely. If I return at all, he thought. Looking back to the receding shores of Laos, he saw an American car parked on the tow-path, and beside it two slender, stationary figures watching. The Cousins we have always with us.

  On the Thai bank everything was immediately impossible. Jerry’s visa was not enough, his photographs bore no likeness, the whole area was forbidden to farangs. Ten dollars secured a revised opinion. After the visa, the car. Jerry had insisted on an English-speaking driver and the rate had been fixed accordingly, but the old man who waited for him spoke nothing but Thai, and little of that. By bawling English phrases into the nearby rice shop, Jerry finally hooked a fat supine boy who had some English and said he could drive.

  A laborious contract was drawn up. The old man’s insurance did not cover another driver, and anyway it was out of date. An exhausted travel clerk issued a new policy while the boy went home to make his arrangements. The car was a clapped-out red Ford with bald tyres. Of all the ways Jerry didn’t intend to die in the next day or two, this was one of them. They haggled, Jerry put up another twenty dollars. At a garage full of chickens he watched every move of the mechanics till the new tyres were in place.

  Having thus wasted an hour, they set out at a breakneck speed south-eastwards over flat farm country. The boy played “The lights are always out in Massachusetts” five times before Jerry asked for silence.

  The road was tarmac but deserted. Occasionally a yellow bus came side-winding down the hill toward them, and at once the driver accelerated and stayed on the crown till the bus had yielded a foot and thundered past. Once while he was dozing, Jerry was startled by the crunch of bamboo fencing and woke in time to see a fountain of splinters lift into the sunlight just ahead of him, and a pick-up truck rolling into the ditch in slow motion. He saw the door float upward like a leaf and the flailing driver follow it through the fence and into the high grass. The boy hadn’t even slowed down, though his laughter made them swerve all over the road. Jerry shouted “Stop!” but the boy would have none of it.

  “You want to get blood on your suit? You leave that to the doctors,” he advised sternly. “I look after you, okay? This very bad country here. Lot of Commies.”

  “What’s your name?” said Jerry resignedly.

  It was unpronounceable, so they settled on Mickey.

  It was two more hours before they hit the first barrier. Jerry dozed again, rehearsing his lines. There’s always one more door you have to put your foot in, he thought. He wondered whether a day would come—for the Circus—for the comic—when the old entertainer would not be able to pull the gags any more; when just the sheer energy of bare-arsing his way over the threshold would defeat him, and he would stand there flaccid, sporting his friendly salesman’s grin while the words died in his throat. Not this time, he thought hastily. Dear God, not this time please.

  They stopped, and a young monk scurried out of the trees with a wat bowl and Jerry dropped a few baht into it. Mickey opened the boot. A police sentry peered inside, then ordered Jerry out and led him and Mickey over to a captain, who sat in a shaded hut all his own. The captain took a long while to notice Jerry at all.

  “He ask you American?” said Mickey.

  Jerry produced his papers.

  On the other side of the barrier the perfect tarmac road ran straight as a pencil over the flat scrub land.

  “He says what you want here?” Mickey said.

  “Business with the colonel.”

  Driving on, they passed a village and a cinema. Even the latest films up here are silents, Jerry recalled. He had once done a story about them. Local actors made the voices and invented whatever plots came into their heads. He remembered John Wayne with a squeaky Thai voice, and the audience ecstatic, and the interpreter explaining to him that they were hearing an imitation of the local mayor, who was a famous queen.

  They were passing forest, but the shoulders of the road had been cleared fifty yards on either side to cut the risk of ambush. Occasionally they came on sharp white lines which had nothing to do with earth-bound traffic. The road had been laid by the Americans with an eye to auxiliary landing-strips.

  “You know this colonel guy?” Mickey asked.

  “No,” said Jerry.

  Mi
ckey laughed in delight. “Why you want?”

  Jerry didn’t bother to answer.

  The second road-block came twenty miles later, in the centre of a small village given over to police. A cluster of grey trucks stood in the courtyard of the wat; four jeeps were parked beside the road-block. The village lay at a junction. At right angles to their road a yellow dust path crossed the plain and snaked into the hills on either side.

  This time Jerry took the initiative, leaping from the car immediately with a merry cry of “Take me to your leader!” Their leader turned out to be a nervous young captain with the anxious frown of a man trying to keep abreast of matters beyond his learning. He sat in the police station with his pistol on the desk. The police station was temporary, Jerry noticed. Out of the window he saw the bombed ruins of what he took to be the last one.

  “My colonel is a busy man,” the captain said, through Mickey the driver.

  “He is also a very brave man,” Jerry said.

  There was dumb show till they had established “brave.”

  “He has shot many Communists,” Jerry said. “My paper wishes to write about this brave Thai colonel.”

  The captain spoke for quite a while, and suddenly Mickey began hooting with laughter: “The captain say we don’t got no Commies. We only got Bangkok! Poor people up here don’t know nothing, because Bangkok don’t give them no schools, so the Commies come talk to them in the night and the Commies tell them all their sons go Moscow, learn be big doctors, so they blow up the police station.”

  “Where can I find the colonel?”