John LeCarre - A New Collection of Three Novels Part 38

"Gone. It isn't anything. It's nothing."

Leaving Syd sitting in his chair, Brotherhood ran up the narrow stairs two at a time. The bathroom was ahead of him. He looked inside then stepped to the main bedroom left. A frilly pink divan filled most of the room. He looked under it, felt beneath the pillows, looked under them. He pulled open the wardrobe and swept aside rows of camel-hair coats and costly women's dresses. Nothing. A second bedroom lay across the landing but it contained no piece of heavy furniture two feet by two, just heaps of very beautiful white hide suitcases. Returning to the ground floor he inspected the dining-room and kitchen and, from the rear window, the tiny garden leading to the embankment. There was no hut, no garage. He returned to the parlour. Another train was pa.s.sing. He waited for the sound of it to fade before he spoke. Syd was sitting hard forward in his chair. His hands were clasped over the handle of his blackthorn, his chin rested pa.s.sively upon them.

"And the tyre marks in your drive," said Brotherhood. "Did the fairies make them too?"

Then Syd spoke. His lips were tight and the words seemed to hurt him. "Do you swear to me, Scout's honour, copper, that this is for his country?"

"Yes."

"Is what he done, which I don't believe and don't want to know, unpatriotic or could be?"

"It could be. The most important thing for all of us is to find him."

"And may you rot if you're lying to me?"

"And may I rot."

"You will, copper. Because I love that boy but I never did wrong by my country. He come here to con me, that's true. He wanted the filing cabinet. Old green filing cabinet Rick gave me to look after when he went off on his travels. 'Now Rick's dead, you can release his papers. It's all right,' he says. It's legal. They're mine. I'm his heir, aren't I?'"

"What papers?"

"His dad's life. All his debts. His secrets, you might say. Rickie always kept them in this special cabinet. What he owed us all. One day he was going to see everybody right, we'd never want for anything again. I said no at first. I'd always said no when Rickie was alive, and I didn't see nothing had changed it. 'He's dead,' I said. 'Let him have his peace. n.o.body never had a better pal than your old dad and you know it, so just you stop asking questions and get on with your own life,' I says. There's some bad things in that cabinet. Wentworth was one of them. I don't know the other names you said. Maybe they're in there too."

"Maybe they are."

"He argued around and so finally I said 'Take it.' If Meg had been here, he'd never have had it off me, legal heir or not, but she's gone. I couldn't refuse him, that's the truth. I never could, no more than what I could his dad. He was going to write a book. I didn't like that either. 'Your dad never held with books, t.i.tch,' I said. 'You know that. He was educated in the university of the world.' He didn't listen. He never would when he wanted something. 'All right,' I said. 'Take it. And maybe that'll get him off your back. Shove it in the car and p.i.s.s off,' I said, 'I'll get the big Mick from next door to help you lift it.' He wouldn't. 'The car's not right for it,' he says. 'It's not going where the cabinet's going.' 'All right,' I says, 'then leave it here and shut up.'"

"Did he leave anything else here?"

"No."

"Was he carrying a briefcase?"

"A black airy-fairy job with the Queen's badge on it and two keyholes."

"How long did he stay?"

"Long enough to con me. An hour, half an hour, what do I know? Wouldn't even sit down. Couldn't. He walked back and forth all the time in his black tie, smiling. Kept looking out of the window. 'Here,' I said, 'which bank have you robbed, then? I'll go and take my money out.' He used to laugh at jokes like that. He didn't, but he was smiling all the time. Well, funerals, they take you in a lot of ways, don't they? I could have done without his smiling all the same."

"So then he left. With the cabinet?"

"Course he didn't. He sent the lorry, didn't he?"

"Of course he did," said Brotherhood, cursing himself for his stupidity.

He was seated close to Syd and he had put his whisky beside Syd's on the beaten-bra.s.s Indian table that Syd kept polished till it shone like the Eastern sun. Syd was speaking very reluctantly, and his voice had almost died.

"How many?"

"Two blokes."

"Did you give them a cup of tea?"

"Course I did."

"See their lorry?"

"Course I did. I was looking out for them, wasn't I? That's a major entertainment, that is, round here, a lorry."

"What was the firm?"

"I don't know. It wasn't written, was it? It was a plain lorry. More like a hired one."

"Colour?"

"Green."

"Hired from who?"

"How should I know?"

"Did you sign anything?"

"Me? You're daft. They had a tea, loaded up, and b.u.g.g.e.red off."

"Where were they taking it?"

"The depot, weren't they?"

"Where's the depot?"

"Canterbury."

"You sure?"

"Course I'm sure. Canterbury. Package for Canterbury. Then they complained about the weight. They always do that, they think it gets them more dropsy."

"Did they say package for Pym?"

"Canterbury. I told you."

"Did they have a name at all?"

"Lemon. Call at Lemon's, get the package for Canterbury. I'm Lemon. The answer is a Lemon."

"Did you see the number of the lorry?"

"Oh yes. Wrote it down. I mean that's my hobby, lorry numbers."

Brotherhood managed a smile. "Well, can you at least remember what make of lorry it might have been?" he asked. "Distinguis.h.i.+ng marks and whatnot?"

It was a harmless enough question, harmlessly put. Brotherhood himself had little expectation of it. It was the kind of question that unasked leaves a gap, but asked produces no dividend: part of the necessary luggage of the interrogator's trade. Yet it was the last that Brotherhood put to Syd on that dying autumn evening, and as a matter of fact it was the last in his short but desperate search for Magnus Pym, because after it he had only answers to concern him. Yet Syd refused point-blank to address himself to it. He started to speak, but then he changed his mind and clapped his mouth shut with a little pop. His chin came off his hands, his head lifted, then by degrees his whole little body lifted too, painfully but strictly from the chair, as if a distant bugle had summoned him to a last parade. His back arched, he held his stick to his side.

"I don't want that boy doing prison," he said with a husk to his voice. "Do you hear me? And I'm not going to help you put him there. His dad did prison. I did prison. And I don't want the boy there. It bothers me. Nothing personal, copper, but on your way."

It's over, thought Brotherhood calmly, staring round the crowded conference table in Brammel s suite on the Fifth Floor. This is my last feast with you. I shall walk out of this door a gamekeeper's son of sixty. A dozen pairs of hands lay under the downlight like corpses waiting to be identified. To his left languished the tailor-made worsted sleeves of the Foreign Office representative named Dorney. Heraldic lions postured on his gold cufflinks. Beyond Dorney reposed the unspoiled fingertips of his master Brammel, whose mid-Surrey heredity needed no advertis.e.m.e.nt. Beyond Bo sat Mountjoy from Cabinet. Then the rest. In his mood of increasing alienation Brotherhood found it difficult to put the voices to the hands. Not that it mattered any more because tonight they were one voice and one dead hand. They are the body corporate I once believed was greater than the sum of its parts, he thought. In my lifetime I have witnessed the birth of the jet airplane and the atom bomb and the computer, and the demise of the British inst.i.tution. We have nothing to clear away but ourselves. The musty midnight air smelt of decay. Nigel was reading the death certificate.

"They waited outside the Lumsden house till six-twelve, then telephoned the house from a callbox down the road. Mrs. Lumsden replied that she and her maid were looking for Mrs. Pym at this moment. Mary had taken herself for a walk in the back garden and not returned. She'd been out more than an hour. The garden was empty. Lumsden himself was at the Residence. The Amba.s.sador apparently required him."

"I hope n.o.body's going to try and blame the Lumsdens for this," said Dorney.

"I'm sure not," said Bo.

"She left no note, no word to anyone," Nigel continued. "She'd been preoccupied during the day but that was natural. We checked the airlines and found she was booked to London on tomorrow morning's British Airways flight club cla.s.s. She gave her address as the Imperial Hotel, Vienna."

"This morning's," somebody corrected, and Brotherhood saw Nigel's gold watch tilt sharply towards him.

"This morning's flight then," Nigel agreed testily. "When we checked the Imperial she wasn't in her room and when we tried the airport a second time we established she'd taken a standby seat on the last flight of the day, Lufthansa to Frankfurt. Unfortunately we did not come by this information until after the Frankfurt flight had landed at its destination."

She diddled you, thought Brotherhood with a satisfaction bordering on pride. She's a good girl and knows the game.

"Isn't it rather a pity you couldn't have found out about Frankfurt the first time you went to the airport?" said an unbeliever boldly from the end of the table.

"Of course it's a pity," Nigel snapped. "But if you had been listening a little more closely, I think you would have heard me say that she took a standby seat. The official flight list bearing her name was therefore not complete until literally the moment when the plane took off."

"Sounds a bit of a muddle all the same," said Mountjoy. "What about the unofficial flight list?"

No, thought Brotherhood. It is not a muddle. To make a muddle you must first have order. This is inertia, this is normality. What was once a great service has become an immovable hybrid--half bureaucrat, half freebooter, and using the arguments of the one to negate the other.

"So where is she?" somebody asked.

"We don't know," said Nigel with satisfaction. "And short of asking the Germans--and incidentally of course the Americans--to search every hotel in Frankfurt, which seems a long shot to say the least, I fail to see what more we can do. Or could have done. Frankly."

"Jack?" said Brammel.

Brotherhood heard an older version of his own voice ebb into the darkness. "G.o.d knows," he said. "Probably sitting on her backside in Prague by now."

Nigel again. "She's done nothing wrong as far as anyone knows. We can't keep her prisoner against her will, you know. She's a free citizen. If her son wants to join her there next week there's not much we can do about that either."

Mountjoy voiced a previous worry. "I do think the telephone intercept from the American Emba.s.sy is fairly extraordinary. This woman Lederer, sitting in Vienna, screaming to her husband in London about two people exchanging messages in church. That was our church she was talking about. Mary was there. Couldn't we have made a few deductions from that?"

Nigel had his answer pat: "Only long after the event, I'm afraid. Perfectly understandably, the transcribers saw nothing dramatic in the intercept and pa.s.sed it to us twenty-four hours after the phone call had taken place. The information that would have put us on the alert--namely that Mary had been seen possibly emerging from a Czech safe flat where this man Petz and so forth had previously been housed-- therefore reached us before the intercept. You can hardly blame us because we didn't put the cart before the horse, can you?"

n.o.body seemed to know whether they could or couldn't.

Mountjoy said it was time to take a view. Dorney said they really must decide whether to call in the police and circulate Pym's photograph, and be d.a.m.ned. At this Brammel came sharply to life.

"If we do that, we may as well put up the shutters," he said. "We're so nearly there. We're so warm, aren't we, Jack?"

"I'm afraid we're not," said Brotherhood.

"But of course we are!"

"It's guesswork. Still. We need the furniture van. That won't be a simple job either. He'll have used cut-outs, halfway houses. The police know how to do those things. We don't have a chance. He's using the name of Canterbury. Or we think he is. That's because in the past all his worknames have been places--he's got a tic about that. Colonel Manchester, Mr. Hull, Mr. Gulworth. On the other hand they just may have taken the cabinet to Canterbury and Canterbury is where he is. Or they've taken it to Canterbury and Canterbury is where he isn't. We need a square beside the sea and a house with a woman in it whom he apparently loves. She's not in Scotland or Wales because that's where he says she is. We are not in a position to comb every seaside town in the United Kingdom. The police are."

"He's mad," said a ghost.

"Yes, he's mad. He's been betraying us for more than thirty years and so far we have failed to certify him. Our error. So we may as well agree that he makes a pretty decent show of being sane when he needs to, and that his tradecraft is d.a.m.n good. Is anybody nearer to him than I am?"

The door opened and closed. Kate was standing before them with an armful of red striped folders. She was pale and very steady, like a sleepwalker. She laid one folder before each guest.

"These have just come up from Sig. Int.," she said, to Bo only. "They ran the Simplicissimus bookcode across the Czech transmissions. The results are positive."

At seven in the morning the London streets were empty but Brotherhood marched in them as if they were full, keeping a straight back among the falterers and weaklings, a man of bearing in a crowd. A solitary policeman wished him good morning. Brotherhood was the kind of man policemen greeted. Thank you, Officer, he thought, striding yet more purposefully. You have just smiled on the man who befriended tomorrow's newest traitor--the man who fought off criticism of him until the case became unanswerable, then fought off his apologists when it became unfaceable. Why do I begin to understand him? he wondered, marvelling at his own tolerance. Why is it that in my heart if not my intellect I sense a stirring of sympathy for the man who all his life has made a failure of my successes? What I made him do, he made me pay for.

You brought it on yourself, Belinda had said. Then why was it that, as with his dangling arm at the moment it was shot to pieces, he had yet to feel the pain?

He's in Prague, he thought. The chase game of the last few days was a Czech fan dance to keep us looking the wrong way while they smuggled him to safety. Mary would never have gone there unless Magnus was ahead of her. Mary would never have gone there, period.

Would she? Wouldn't she? He didn't know and he wouldn't have trusted anybody who said they did. To leave Plush and all her Englishness behind? For Magnus now?

She'd never do it.

She'd do it for Magnus.

Tom will come first for her.

She'll stay.

She'll take Tom with her.

I need a woman.

An all-night coffee shop stood at the corner of Half Moon Street and on other early mornings Brotherhood might have stopped there and let the tired wh.o.r.es make a fuss of his dog, and Brotherhood in return would have made a fuss of the wh.o.r.es, bought them a coffee and chatted them up, because he liked their tradecraft and their guts and their mixture of human canniness and stupidity. But his dog was dead and so for the time being was his sense of fun. He unlocked his door and headed for the sideboard where the vodka was. He poured himself a warm half tumbler and drank it down. He ran a bath, switched on his transistor radio and took it to the bathroom. The news reported disasters everywhere but no British diplomatic couple surfacing in Prague. If the Czechs want to blow the whistle they'll do it at midday in order to catch the evening television and tomorrow's papers, he thought. He began shaving. The phone was ringing. It's Nigel saying we've found him, he was at his club all the time. It's the duty officer reporting that the Prague Foreign Ministry has put out a midday press call for foreign correspondents. It's Steggie, saying he likes strong men.

He switched off the radio, walked naked to the drawing-room, s.n.a.t.c.hed up the receiver, said "Yes?" and heard a ping, then nothing. He pressed his lips together as a warning to himself not to speak. He was praying. He was definitely praying. Speak, he prayed. Say something. Then he heard it: three short taps of a coin or a nail-file on the drum of the mouthpiece: Prague procedures. Casting round for something metal, he saw his fountain pen on the writing table and managed to seize it without relinquis.h.i.+ng the telephone. He tapped once in return: 1 am reading you. Two more taps, then three again. Stay where you are, said the message. I have information for you. With his pen he gave four taps to the mouthpiece and heard two in reply before the caller rang off. He ran his fingers through his stubble hair. He took his vodka to the desk and sat down, put his face in his hands. Keep alive, he prayed. It's the networks. It's Pym, putting it all right. Keep clever. I'm here, if that's what you're asking. I'm here and waiting for your next signal. Don't call again until you're ready.

The phone screamed a second time. He lifted the receiver but it was only Nigel. Pym's description and photograph were on their way to every police station in the country, he said. The Firm was switching to the operational telephone lines only. Bo had ordered the Whitehall lines disconnected. The press contacts were already beating down the doors. Why is he talking to me? Brotherhood wondered. Is he lonely or is he giving me a chance to say I've just had this funny phone call from a Joe using Prague procedures? It's the funny call, he decided.

"Some joker just phoned me with a Czech call sign," he said. "I gave him the signal to speak but he wouldn't. G.o.d alone knows what it was about."

"Well if anything comes through, let us know at once. Use the operational line."

"So you said," said Brotherhood.

Waiting again. Thinking of every Joe who had ever come through badland. Take your time. Move carefully and with confidence. Don't panic. Don't run. Take your time. Pick your phone box. He heard a knock at the door. It's some b.l.o.o.d.y hawker. Kate's taken her overdose. It's that fool Arab boy who lives downstairs and always thinks my bathroom's leaking on him. He pulled on a dressing-gown, opened the door and saw Mary. He hauled her inside and slammed the door. Whatever seized him after that he didn't know. Relief or fury, remorse or indignation. He slapped her once, then he slapped her again and on a clear day he would have taken her straight to bed.

"There's a place called Farleigh Abbott near Exeter," she said.