"They all did. There's a special index for the best people. Practically everyone in the Department knows Fred Leiser. Even the new ones. You can't have a record like yours and get forgotten, you know." He smiled. "You're part of the furniture, Fred."
"Tell me something else, John. I don't want to rock the boat, see, but tell me this . . . Would I be any good on the inside?"
"The inside?"
"In the Office, with you people. I suppose you've got to be born to it really, like the Captain."
"I'm afraid so, Fred."
"What cars do you use up there, John?"
"Humbers."
"Hawk or Snipe?"
"Hawk."
"Only four-cylinder? The Snipe's a better job, you know."
"I'm talking about nonoperational transport," Avery said. "We've a whole range of stuff for the special work."
"Like the van?"
"That's it."
"How long before . . . how long does it take to train you? You, for instance; you just did a run. How long before they let you go?"
"Sorry, Fred. I'm not allowed … not even you."
"Not to worry."
They passed a church set back on a rise above the road, skirted a plowed field and returned, tired and radiant, to the cheerful embrace of the Mayfly house and the gas fire playing on the golden roses.
In the evening, they had the projector for visual memory: they would be in a car, passing a marshaling yard; or in a train beside an airfield; they would be taken on a walk through a town, and suddenly they would become aware that a vehicle or a face had reappeared, and they had not remembered its features. Sometimes a series of disconnected objects were flashed in rapid succession on the screen, and there would be voices in the background, like the voices on the tape, but the conversation was not related to the film, so that the student must consult both his senses and retain what was valuable from each.
Thus the first day ended, setting the pattern for those that followed: carefree, exciting days for them both, days of honest labor and cautious but deepening attachment as the skills of boyhood became once more the weapons of war.
For the unarmed combat they had rented a small gymnasium near Headington which they had used in the war. An instructor had come by train. They called him Sergeant.
"Will he be carrying a knife at all? Not wanting to be curious," he asked respectfully. He had a Welsh accent.
Haldane shrugged. "It depends what he likes. We don't want to clutter him up."
"There's a lot to be said for a knife, sir." Leiser was still in the changing room. "If he knows how to use it. And the Jerries don't like them, not one bit." He had brought some knives in a handcase, and he unpacked them in a private way, like a salesman unpacking his samples. "They never could take cold steel," he explained. "Nothing too long, that's the trick of it, sir. Something flat with the two cutting edges." He selected one and held it up. "You can't do much better than this as a matter of fact." It was wide and flat like a laurel leaf, the blade unpolished, the handle waisted like an hourglass, crosshatched to prevent slip. Leiser was walking toward them, smoothing a comb through his hair.
"Used one of these, have you?"
Leiser examined the knife and nodded. The sergeant looked at him carefully. "I know you, don't I? My name's Sandy Lowe. I'm a bloody Welshman."
"You taught me in the war."
"Christ," said Lowe softly, "so I did. You haven't changed much, have you?" They grinned shyly at one another, not knowing whether to shake hands. "Come on then, see what you remember." They walked to the coconut matting in the center of the floor. Lowe threw the knife at Leiser's feet and he snatched it up, grunting as he bent.
Lowe wore a jacket of torn tweed, very old. He stepped quickly back, took it off and with a single movement wrapped it around his left forearm, like a man preparing to fight a dog.
Drawing his own knife as he moved slowly around Leiser, keeping his weight steady but riding a little from one foot to the other. He was stooping, his bound arm held loosely in front of his stomach, fingers outstretched, palm facing the ground. He had gathered his body behind the guard, letting the blade play restlessly in front of it while Leiser kept steady, his eyes fixed upon the sergeant. For a time they feinted back and forth; once Leiser lunged and Lowe sprang back, allowing the knife to cut the cloth of the jacket on his arm. Once Lowe dropped to his knees, as if to drive the knife upward beneath Leiser's guard, and it was Leiser's turn to spring back, but too slowly it seemed, for Lowe shook his head, shouted "Halt!" and stood upright.
"Remember that?" He indicated his own belly and groin, pressing his arms and elbows in as if to reduce the width of his body. "Keep the target small." He made Leiser put his knife away and showed him holds, crooking his left arm around Leiser's neck and pretending to stab him in the kidneys or the stomach. Then he asked Avery to stand as a dummy, and the two of them moved around him with detachment, Lowe indicating the places with his knife and Leiser nodding, smiling occasionally when a particular trick came back to him.
"You didn't weave with the blade enough. Remember, thumb on top, blade parallel to the ground, forearm stiff, wrist loose. Don't let his eye settle on it, not for a moment. And left hand in over your own target, whether you've got the knife or not. Never be generous about offering the body, that's what I say to my daughter." They laughed dutifully, all but Haldane.
After that, Avery had a turn. Leiser seemed to want it. Removing his glasses, he held the knife as Lowe showed him, hesitant, alert, while Leiser trod crabwise, feinted and darted lightly back, the sweat running off his face, his small eyes alight with concentration. All the time Avery was conscious of the sharp grooves of the shaft against the flesh of his palm, the aching in his calves and buttocks as he kept his weight forward on his toes, and Leiser's angry eyes searching his own. Then Leiser's foot had hooked around his ankle; as he lost balance he felt the knife being wrenched from his hand; he fell back, Leiser's full weight upon him, Leiser's hand clawing at the collar of his shirt.
They helped him up, all laughing, while Leiser brushed the dust from Avery's clothes. The knives were put away while they did physical training; Avery took part.
When it was over, Lowe said, "We'll just have a spot of unarmed combat and that will do nicely."
Haldane glanced at Leiser. "Have you had enough?"
"I'm all right."
Lowe took Avery by the arm and stood him in the center of the gym mat. "You sit on the bench," he called to Leiser, "while I show you a couple of things."
He put a hand on Avery's shoulder. "We're only concerned with five marks, whether we got a knife or not. What are they?"
"Groin, kidneys, belly, heart and throat," Leiser replied wearily.
"How do you break a man's neck?"
"You don't. You smash his windpipe at the front."
"What about a blow on the back of the neck?"
"Not with the bare hands. Not without a weapon." He had put his face in his hands.
"Correct." Lowe moved his open palm in slow motion toward Avery's throat. "Hand open, fingers straight, right?"
"Right," Leiser said.
"What else do you remember?"
A pause. "Tiger's Claw. An attack on the eyes."
"Never use it," the sergeant replied shortly. "Not as an attacking blow. You leave yourself wide open. Now for the strangleholds. All from behind, remember? Bend the head back, so, hand on the throat, so, and squeeze." Lowe looked over his shoulder: "Look this way, please, I'm not doing this for my own benefit… Come on, then, if you know it all, show us some throws!"
Leiser stood up, locking arms with Lowe, and for a while they struggled back and forth, each waiting for the other to offer an opening. Then Lowe gave way, Leiser toppled and Lowe's hand slapped the back of his head, thrusting it down so that Leiser fell face forward heavily onto the mat.
"You fall a treat," said Lowe with a grin, and then Leiser was upon him, twisting Lowe's arm savagely back and throwing him very hard so that his little body h
it the carpets like a bird hitting the windshield of a car.
"You play fair!" Leiser demanded, "or I'll damn well hurt you."
"Never lean on your opponent," Lowe said shortly. "And don't lose your temper in the gym." He called across to Avery. "You have a turn now, sir; give him some exercise."
Avery stood up, took off his jacket and waited for Leiser to approach him. He felt the strong grasp upon his arms and was suddenly conscious of the frailty of his body when matched against this adult force. He tried to seize the forearms of the older man, but his hands could not encompass them; he tried to break free, but Leiser held him; Leiser's head was against his own, filling his nostrils with the smell of hair oil. He felt the damp stubble of his cheek and the close, rank heat of his thin, straining body. Putting his hands on Leiser's chest he forced himself back, throwing all his energy into one frantic effort to escape the suffocating constriction of the man's embrace. As he drew away they caught sight of one another, it might have been for the first time, across the heaving cradle of their entangled arms; Leiser's face, contorted with exertion, softened into a smile; the grip relaxed.
Lowe walked over to Haldane. "He's foreign, isn't he?"
"A Pole. What's he like?"
"I'd say he was quite a fighter in his day. Nasty. He's a good build. Fit too, considering."
"I see," Haldane said.
"How are you these days, sir, in yourself? All right, then?"
"Yes, thank you."
"That's right. Twenty years. Amazing, really. Kiddies all grown up."
"I'm afraid I have none."
"Mine, I mean."
"Ah."
"See any of the old crowd, then, sir? How about Mr. Smiley?"
"I'm afraid I have not kept in touch. I am not a gregarious kind of person. Shall we settle up?"
Lowe stood lightly to attention while Haldane prepared to pay him: traveling money, salary, and thirty-seven and six for the knife, plus twenty-two shillings for the sheath, a flat metal one with a spring to facilitate extraction. Lowe wrote him a receipt, signing it S. L. for reasons of security. "I got the knife at cost," he explained. "It's a fiddle we work through the Sports Club." He seemed proud of that.
Haldane gave Leiser a trench coat and Wellingtons and Avery took him for a walk. They went by bus as far as Headington, sitting on the top deck.
"What happened this morning?" Avery asked.
"I thought we were fooling about, that's all. Then he threw me."
"He remembered you, didn't he?"
"Of course he did: then why did he hurt me?"
"He didn't mean to."
"Look, it's all right, see." He was still upset.
They got out at the end of the line and began trudging through the rain. Avery said, "It's because he wasn't one of us; that's why you didn't like him."
Leiser laughed, slipped his arm through Avery's. The rain, drifting in slow waves across the empty street, ran down their faces and trickled into the collars of their mackintoshes. Avery pressed his arm to his side, holding Leiser's hand captive, and they continued their walk in shared contentment, forgetting the rain, or playing with it, treading in the deepest parts and not caring about their clothes.
"Is the Captain pleased, John?"
"Very. He says it's going fine. We begin the wireless soon, just the elementary stuff. Jack Johnson's expected tomorrow."
"It's coming back to me, John, the shooting and that. I hadn't forgotten." He smiled. "The old three eight."
"Nine millimeter. You're doing fine, Fred. Just fine. The Captain said so."
"Is that what he said, John, the Captain?"
"Of course. And he's told London. London's pleased too. We're only afraid you're a bit too …"
"Too what?"
"Well—too English."
Leiser laughed. "Not to worry, John."
The inside of Avery's arm, where he held Leiser's hand, felt dry and warm.
They spent a morning on ciphers. Haldane acted as instructor. He had brought pieces of silk cloth imprinted with a cipher of the type Leiser would use, and a chart backed with cardboard for converting letters into numerals. He put the chart on the mantelpiece, wedging it behind the marble clock, and lectured them rather as Leclerc would have done, but without affectation. Avery and Leiser sat at the table, pencil in hand, and under Haldane's tuition converted one passage after another into numbers according to the chart, deducted the result from figures on the silk cloth, finally retranslating into letters. It was a process which demanded application rather than concentration, and perhaps because Leiser was trying too hard he became bothered and erratic.
"We'll have a timed run over twenty groups," Haldane said, and dictated from the sheet of paper in his hand a message of eleven words with the signature Mayfly. "From next week you will have to manage without the chart. I shall put it in your room and you must commit it to memory. Go!"
He pressed the stopwatch and walked to the window while the two men worked feverishly at the table, muttering almost in unison while they jotted elementary calculations on the scrap paper in front of them. Avery could detect the increasing flurry of Leiser's movements, the suppressed sighs and imprecations, the angry erasures; deliberately slowing down, he glanced over the other's arm to ascertain his progress and noticed that the stub of pencil buried in his little hand was smeared with sweat.
Without a word, he silently changed his paper for Leiser's. Haldane, turning around, might not have seen.
Even in these first few days, it had become apparent that Leiser looked to Haldane as an ailing man looks to his doctor; a sinner to his priest. There was something terrible about a man who derived his strength from such a sickly body.
Haldane affected to ignore him. He adhered stubbornly to the habits of his private life. He never failed to complete his crossword. A case of Burgundy was delivered from the town, half bottles, and he drank one alone at each meal while they listened to the tapes. So complete, indeed, was his withdrawal that one might have thought him revolted by the man's proximity. Yet the more elusive, the more aloof Haldane became, the more surely he drew Leiser after him. Leiser, by some obscure standards of his own, had cast him as the English gentleman, and whatever Haldane did or said only served, in the eyes of the other, to fortify him in the part.
Haldane grew in stature. In London he was a slow-walking man; he picked his way pedantically along the corridors as if he were looking for footholds; clerks and secretaries would hover impatiently behind him, lacking the courage to pass. In Oxford he betrayed an agility which would have astonished his London colleagues. His parched frame had revived, he held himself erect. Even his hostility acquired the mark of command. Only the cough remained, that racked, abandoned sob too heavy for such a narrow chest, bringing dabs of red to his thin cheeks and causing Leiser the mute concern of a pupil for his admired master.
"Is the Captain sick?" he once asked Avery, picking up an old copy of Haldane's Times.
"He never speaks of it."
"I suppose that would be bad form." His attention was suddenly arrested by the newspaper. It was unopened. Only the crossword had been done, the margins around it sparsely annotated with permutations of a nine-letter anagram. He showed it to Avery in bewilderment.
"He doesn't read it," he said. "He's only done the competition."
That night, when they went to bed, Leiser took it with him, furtively as if it contained some secret which study could reveal.
So far as Avery could judge, Haldane was content with Leiser's progress. In the great variety of activities to which Leiser was now subjected, they had been able to observe him more closely; with the corrosive perception of the weak they discovered his failing and tested his power. He acquired, as they gained his trust, a disarming frankness; he loved to confide. He was their creature; he gave them everything, and they stored it away as the poor do. They saw that the Department had provided direction for his energy: like a man of uncommon sexual appetite, Leiser had found in his new employment a
love which he could illustrate with his gifts. They saw that he took pleasure in their command, giving in return his strength as homage for fulfillment. They even knew perhaps that between them they constituted for Leiser the poles of absolute authority: the one by his bitter adherence to standards which Leiser could never achieve; the other by his youthful accessibility, the apparent sweetness and dependence of his nature.
He liked to talk to Avery. He talked about his women or the war. He assumed—it was irritating for Avery, but nothing more—that a man in his middle thirties, whether married or not, led an intense and varied love life. Later in the evening when the two of them had put on their coats and hurried to the pub at the end of the road, he would lean his elbows on the small table, thrust his bright face forward and relate the smallest detail of his exploits, his hand beside his chin, his slim fingertips rapidly parting and closing in unconscious imitation of his mouth. It was not vanity which made him thus, but friendship. These betrayals and confessions, whether truth or fantasy, were the simple coinage of their intimacy. He never mentioned Betty.
Avery came to know Leiser's face with an accuracy no longer related to memory. He noticed how its features seemed structurally to alter shape according to his mood, how when he was tired or depressed at the end of a long day the skin on his cheekbones was drawn upward rather than down, and the corners of his eyes and mouth rose tautly so that his expression was at once more Slav and less familiar.
He had acquired from his neighborhood or his clients certain turns of phrase which, though wholly without meaning, impressed his foreign ear. He would speak, for instance, of "some measure of satisfaction," using an impersonal construction for the sake of dignity. He had assimilated also a variety of cliches. Expressions like "not to worry," "don't rock the boat," "let the dog see the rabbit," came to him continually, as if he were aspiring after a way of life which he only imperfectly understood, and these were the offerings that would buy him in. Some expressions, Avery remarked, were out of date.
Once or twice Avery suspected that Haldane resented his intimacy with Leiser. At other times it seemed that Haldane was deploying emotions in Avery over which he himself no longer disposed. One evening at the beginning of the second week, while Leiser was engaged in that lengthy toilet which preceded almost any recreational engagement, Avery asked Haldane whether he did not wish to go out himself.
Le Carre, John - The Looking Glass War (v1.0) Page 15