Call for the Dead

by John le Carré

  ‘Bastard,’ Mendel hissed, and walked slowly back towards the pub.

  The saloon bar was filling up. Scarr was ordering another drink. Mendel took him by the arm. Scarr turned and said:

  ‘Hullo, friend, back again. Have a little of what killed Auntie.’

  ‘Shut up,’ said Mendel; ‘I want another word with you. Come outside.’

  Mr Scarr shook his head and sucked his teeth sympathetically.

  ‘Can’t be done, friend, can’t be done. Company.’ He indicated with his head an eighteen-year-old blonde with off-white lipstick and an improbable bosom, who sat quite motionless at a corner table. Her painted eyes had a permanently startled look.

  ‘Listen,’ whispered Mendel; ‘in just two seconds I’ll tear your bloody ears off, you lying sod.’

  Scarr consigned his drinks to the care of the landlord and made a slow, dignified exit. He didn’t look at the girl.

  Mendel led him across the street towards the pre-fabs. The sidelights of Smiley’s car shone towards them eighty yards down the road.

  They turned into the yard. The MG was still there. Mendel had Scarr firmly by the arm, ready if necessary to force the forearm back and upwards, breaking or dislocating the shoulder joint.

  ‘Well, well,’ cried Scarr with apparent delight. ‘She’s returned to the bosom of her ancestors.’

  ‘Stolen, was it?’ said Mendel. ‘Stolen by a tall Scotsman with a walking stick and an address in Ealing. Decent of him to bring it back, wasn’t it? Friendly gesture, after all this time. You’ve mistaken your bloody market, Scarr.’ Mendel was shaking with anger. ‘And why are the sidelights on? Open the door.’

  Scarr turned to Mendel in the dark, his free hand slapping his pockets in search of keys. He extracted a bunch of three or four, felt through them and finally unlocked the car door. Mendel got in, found the passenger light in the roof and switched it on. He began methodically to search the inside of the car. Scarr stood outside and waited.

  He searched quickly but thoroughly. Glove tray, seats, floor, rear window-ledge: nothing. He slipped his hand inside the map pocket on the passenger door, and drew out a map and an envelope. The envelope was long and flat, grey-blue in colour with a linen finish. Continental, thought Mendel. There was no writing on it. He tore it open. There were ten used five-pound notes inside and a piece of plain postcard. Mendel held it to the light and read the message printed on it with a ball-point pen:

  FINISHED NOW. SELL IT.

  There was no signature.

  He got out of the car, and seized Scarr by the elbows. Scarr stepped back quickly. ‘What’s your problem, friend?’ he asked.

  Mendel spoke softly. ‘It’s not my problem, Scarr, it’s yours. The biggest bloody problem you ever had. Conspiracy to murder, attempted murder, offences under the Official Secrets Act. And you can add to that contravention of the Road Traffic Act, conspiracy to defraud the Inland Revenue, and about fifteen other charges that will occur to me while you nurse your problem on a cell bed.’

  ‘Just a minute, copper, let’s not go over the moon. What’s the story? Who the hell’s talking about murder?’

  ‘Listen, Scarr, you’re a little man, come in on the fringe of the big spenders, aren’t you? Well, now you’re the big spender. I reckon it’ll cost you fifteen years.’

  ‘Look, shut up, will you.’

  ‘No I won’t, little man. You’re caught between two big ones, see, and you’re the mug. And what will I do? I’ll bloody well laugh myself sick while you rot in the Scrubs and contemplate your fat belly. See that hospital, do you? There’s a bloke dying there, murdered by your tall Scotsman. They found him half an hour ago bleeding like a pig in your yard. There’s another one dead in Surrey, and for all I know there’s one in every bloody home county. So it’s your problem, you poor sod, not mine. Another thing – you’re the only one who knows who he is, aren’t you? He might want to tidy that up a bit, mightn’t he?’

  Scarr walked slowly round to the other side of the car.

  Mendel sat in the driving seat and unlocked the passenger door from the inside. Scarr sat himself beside him. They didn’t put the light on.

  ‘I’m in a nice way of business round here,’ said Scarr quietly, ‘and the pickings is small but regular. Or was till this bloke come along.’

  ‘What bloke?’

  ‘Bit by bit, copper, don’t rush me. That was four years ago. I didn’t believe in Father Christmas till I met him. Dutch, he said he was, in the diamond business. I’m not pretending I thought he was straight, see, because you’re not barmy and nor am I. I never asked what he done and he never told me, but I guessed it was smuggling. Money to burn he had, came off him like leaves in autumn. “Scarr,” he said; “you’re a man of business. I don’t like publicity, never did, and I hears we’re birds of a feather. I want a car. Not to keep, but to borrow.” He didn’t put it quite like that because of the lingo, but that’s the sense of it. “What’s your proposition?” I says. “Let’s have a proposition.”

  ‘“Well,” he says; “I’m shy. I want a car that no one can ever get on to, supposing I had an accident. Buy a car for me, Scarr, a nice old car with something under the bonnet. Buy it in your own name,” he says, “and keep it wrapped up for me. There’s five hundred quid for a start, and twenty quid a month for garaging. And there’s a bonus, Scarr, for every day I take it out. But I’m shy, see, and you don’t know me. That’s what the money’s for,” he says. “It’s for not knowing me.”

  ‘I’ll never forget that day. Raining cats and dogs it was, and me bent over an old taxi I’d got off a bloke in Wandsworth. I owed a bookie forty quid, and the coppers were sensitive about a car I’d bought on the never never and flogged in Clapham.’

  Mr Scarr drew breath, and let it out again with an air of comic resignation.

  ‘And there he was, standing over me like my own conscience, showering old singles on me like used tote tickets.’

  ‘What did he look like?’ asked Mendel.

  ‘Quite young he was. Tall, fair chap. But cool – cool as charity. I never saw him after that day. He sent me letters posted in London and typed on plain paper. Just “Be ready Monday night”, “Be ready Thursday night”, and so on. We had it all arranged. I left the car out in the yard, full of petrol and teed up. He never said when he’d be back. Just ran it in about closing time or later, leaving the lights on and the doors locked. He’d put a couple of quid in the map pocket for each day he’d been away.’

  ‘What happened if anything went wrong, if you got pinched for something else?’

  ‘We had a telephone number. He told me to ring and ask for a name.’

  ‘What name?’

  ‘He told me to choose one. I chose Blondie. He didn’t think that was very funny but we stuck to it. Primrose 0098.’

  ‘Did you ever use it?’

  ‘Yes, a couple of years ago I took a bint to Margate for ten days. I thought I’d better let him know. A girl answered the phone – Dutch too, by the sound of her. She said Blondie was in Holland, and she’d take a message. But after that I didn’t bother.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I began to notice, see. He came regular once a fortnight, the first and third Tuesdays except January and February. This was the first January he come. He brought the car back Thursday usually. Odd him coming back tonight. But this is the end of him, isn’t it?’ Scarr held in his enormous hand the piece of postcard he had taken from Mendel.

  ‘Did he miss at all? Away long periods?’

  ‘Winters he kept away more. January he never come, nor February. Like I said.’

  Mendel still had the £50 in his hand. He tossed them into Scarr’s lap.

  ‘Don’t think you’re lucky. I wouldn’t be in your shoes for ten times that lot. I’ll be back.’

  Mr Scarr seemed worried.

  ‘I wouldn’t have peached,’ he said; ‘but I don’t want to be mixed up in nothing, see. Not if the old country’s going to suffer, eh, squire?’
>
  ‘Oh, shut up,’ said Mendel. He was tired. He took the postcard back, got out of the car and walked away towards the hospital.

  There was no news at the hospital. Smiley was still un-conscious. The CID had been informed. Mendel would do better to leave his name and address and go home. The hospital would telephone as soon as they had any news. After a good deal of argument Mendel obtained from the sister the key to Smiley’s car.

  Mitcham, he decided, was a lousy place to live.

  8

  Reflections in a Hospital Ward

  He hated the bed as a drowning man hates the sea. He hated the sheets that imprisoned him so that he could move neither hand nor foot.

  And he hated the room because it frightened him. There was a trolley by the door with instruments on it, scissors, bandages and bottles, strange objects that carried the terror of the unknown, swathed in white linen for the last Communion. There were jugs, tall ones half covered with napkins, standing like white eagles waiting to tear at his entrails, little glass ones with rubber tubing coiled inside them like snakes. He hated everything, and he was afraid. He was hot and the sweat ran off him, he was cold and the sweat held him, trickling over his ribs like cold blood. Night and day alternated without recognition from Smiley. He fought a relentless battle against sleep, for when he closed his eyes they seemed to turn inwards on the chaos of his brain; and when sometimes by sheer weight his eyelids drew themselves together he would summon all his strength to tear them apart and stare again at the pale light wavering somewhere above him.

  Then came a blessed day when someone must have drawn the blinds and let in the grey winter light. He heard the sound of traffic outside and knew at last that he would live.

  So the problem of dying once more became an academic one – a debt he would postpone until he was rich and could pay in his own way. It was a luxurious feeling, almost of purity. His mind was wonderfully lucid, ranging like Prometheus over his whole world; where had he heard that: ‘the mind becomes separated from the body, rules a paper kingdom …’? He was bored by the light above him, and wished there was more to look at. He was bored by the grapes, the smell of honeycomb and flowers, the chocolates. He wanted books, and literary journals; how could he keep up with his reading if they gave him no books? There was so little research done on his period as it was, so little creative criticism on the seventeenth century.

  It was three weeks before Mendel was allowed to see him. He walked in holding a new hat and carrying a book about bees. He put his hat on the end of the bed and the book on the bedside table. He was grinning.

  ‘I bought you a book,’ he said; ‘about bees. They’re clever little beggars. Might interest you.’

  He sat on the edge of the bed. ‘I got a new hat. Daft really. Celebrate my retirement.’

  ‘Oh yes, I forgot. You’re on the shelf too.’ They both laughed, and were silent again.

  Smiley blinked. ‘I’m afraid you’re not very distinct at the moment. I’m not allowed to wear my old glasses. They’re getting me some new ones.’ He paused. ‘You don’t know who did this to me, do you?’

  ‘May do. Depends. Got a lead, I think. I don’t know enough, that’s the trouble. About your job, I mean. Does the East German Steel Mission mean anything to you?’

  ‘Yes, I think so. It came here four years ago to try and get a foot in the Board of Trade.’

  Mendel gave an account of his transactions with Mr Scarr. ‘… Said he was Dutch. The only way Scarr had of getting in touch with him was by ringing a Primrose telephone number. I checked the subscriber. Listed as the East German Steel Mission, in Belsize Park. I sent a bloke to sniff round. They’ve cleared out. Nothing there at all, no furniture, nothing. Just the telephone, and that’s been ripped out of its socket.’

  ‘When did they go?’

  ‘The third of January. Same day as Fennan was murdered.’ He looked at Smiley quizzically. Smiley thought for a minute and said:

  ‘Get hold of Peter Guillam at the Ministry of Defence and bring him here tomorrow. By the scruff of the neck.’

  Mendel picked up his hat and walked to the door.

  ‘Good-bye,’ said Smiley; ‘thank you for the book.’

  ‘See you tomorrow,’ said Mendel, and left.

  Smiley lay back in bed. His head was aching. Damn, he thought, I never thanked him for the honey. It had come from Fortnum’s, too.

  Why the early morning call? That was what puzzled him more than anything. It was silly, really, Smiley supposed, but of all the unaccountables in the case, that worried him most.

  Elsa Fennan’s explanation had been so stupid, so noticeably unlikely. Ann, yes; she would make the exchange stand on its head if she’d felt like it, but not Elsa Fennan. There was nothing in that alert, intelligent little face, nothing in her total in-dependence to support the ludicrous claim to absent-mindedness. She could have said the exchange had made a mistake, had called the wrong day, anything. Fennan, yes; he had been absent-minded. It was one of the odd in-consistencies about Fennan’s character which had emerged in the inquiries before the interview. A voracious reader of Westerns and a passionate chess player, a musician and a spare-time philosopher, a deep thinking man – but absent-minded. There had been a frightful row once about him taking some secret papers out of the Foreign Office, and it turned out that he had put them in his despatch case with his Times and the evening paper before going home to Walliston.

  Had Elsa Fennan, in her panic, taken upon herself the mantle of her husband? Or the motive of her husband? Had Fennan asked for the call to remind him of something, and had Elsa borrowed the motive? Then what did Fennan need to be reminded of – and what did his wife so strenuously wish to conceal?

  Samuel Fennan. The new world and the old met in him. The eternal Jew, cultured, cosmopolitan, self-determinate, industrious and perceptive: to Smiley, immensely attractive. The child of his century; persecuted, like Elsa, and driven from his adopted Germany to university in England. By the sheer weight of his ability he had pushed aside disadvantage and prejudice, finally to enter the Foreign Office. It had been a remarkable achievement, owed to nothing but his own brilliance. And if he was a little conceited, a little disinclined to bide the decision of minds more pedestrian than his own, who could blame him? There had been some embarrassment when Fennan pronounced himself in favour of a divided Germany, but it had all blown over, he had been transferred to an Asian desk, and the affair was forgotten. For the rest, he had been generous to a fault, and popular both in Whitehall and in Surrey, where he devoted several hours each weekend to charity work. His great love was skiing. Every year he took all his leave at once and spent six weeks in Switzerland or Austria. He had visited Germany only once, Smiley remembered – with his wife about four years ago.

  It had been natural enough that Fennan should join the Left at Oxford. It was the great honeymoon period of university Communism, and its causes, heaven knows, lay close enough to his heart. The rise of Fascism in Germany and Italy, the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, the Franco rebellion in Spain, the slump in America, and above all the wave of anti-Semitism that was sweeping across Europe: it was inevitable that Fennan should seek an outlet for his anger and revulsion. Besides, the Party was respectable then; the failure of the Labour Party and the Coalition Government had convinced many intellectuals that the Communists alone could provide an effective alternative to Capitalism and Fascism. There was the excitement, an air of conspiracy and comradeship which must have appealed to the flamboyance in Fennan’s character and given him comfort in his loneliness. There was talk of going to Spain; some had gone, like Cornford from Cambridge, never to return.

  Smiley could imagine Fennan in those days – volatile and earnest, no doubt bringing to his companions the experience of real suffering, a veteran among cadets. His parents had died – his father had been a banker with the foresight to keep a small account in Switzerland. There had not been much, but enough to see him through Oxford, and protect him from the cold wind of po
verty.

  Smiley remembered so well that interview with Fennan; one among many, yet different. Different because of the language. Fennan was so articulate, so quick, so sure. ‘Their greatest day,’ he had said, ‘was when the miners came. They came from the Rhondda, you know, and to the comrades it seemed the spirit of Freedom had come down with them from the hills. It was a hunger march. It never seemed to occur to the Group that the marchers might actually be hungry, but it occurred to me. We hired a truck and the girls made stew – tons of it. We got the meat cheap from a sympathetic butcher in the market. We drove the truck out to meet them. They ate the stew and marched on. They didn’t like us really, you know, didn’t trust us.’ He laughed. ‘They were so small – that’s what I remember best – small and dark like elves. We hoped they’d sing and they did. But not for us – for themselves. That was the first time I had met Welshmen.

  ‘It made me understand my own race better, I think – I’m a Jew, you know.’

  Smiley had nodded.

  ‘They didn’t know what to do when the Welshmen had gone. What do you do when a dream has come true? They realized then why the Party didn’t much care about intellectuals. I think they felt cheap, mostly, and ashamed. Ashamed of their beds and their rooms, their full bellies and their clever essays. Ashamed of their talents and their humour. They were always saying how Keir Hardie taught himself shorthand with a piece of chalk on the coal face, you know. They were ashamed of having pencils and paper. But it’s no good just throwing them away, is it? That’s what I learnt in the end. That’s why I left the Party, I suppose.’

  Smiley wanted to ask him how Fennan himself had felt, but Fennan was talking again. He had shared nothing with them, he had come to realize that. They were not men, but children, who dreamt of freedom-fires, gipsy music, and one world tomorrow, who rode on white horses across the Bay of Biscay or with a child’s pleasure bought beer for starving elves from Wales; children who had no power to resist the Eastern sun, and obediently turned their tousled heads towards it. They loved each other and believed they loved mankind, they fought each other and believed they fought the world.