Honourable Schoolboy (21 page)

To Guillam, this last piece of intelligence was daylight madness. What the hell was the point to half a million dollar goldseam if the money was not even used when it reached the other end? To Connie Sachs and di Salis, on the other hand, it was patently of enormous significance. A crocodile smile spread slowly across Connie’s face and her baby eyes fixed on Smiley in silent ecstasy.

‘Oh George,’ she breathed at last, as the revelation gathered in her. ‘Darling. Lockaway! Well, that’s quite a different kettle of fish. Well of course it had to be, didn’t it! It had all the signs. From the very first day. And if fat, stupid Connie hadn’t been so blinkered and old and doddery and idle, she’d have read them off long ago! You leave me alone, Peter Guillam, you lecherous young toad.’ She was pulling herself to her feet, her crippled hands clamped over the chair arms. ‘But who can be worth so much? Would it be a network? No, no, they’d never do it for a network. No precedent. Not a wholesale thing, that’s unheard of. So who can it be? Whatever can he deliver that would be worth so much?’ She was hobbling toward the door, tugging the shawl over her shoulders, slipping already from their world to her own. ‘Karla doesn’t pay money out like that.’ They heard her mutterings follow her. She passed the mothers’ lane of covered typewriters, muffled sentinels in the gloom. ‘Karla’s such a mean prig he thinks his agents should work for him for nothing! Course he does. Pennies, that’s what he pays them. Pocket money. Inflation is all very well, but half a million dollars for one little mole. I never heard such a thing!’

In his quirkish way di Salis was no less impressed than Connie. He sat with the top part of his crabbed, uneven body tilted forward, and he was stirring feverishly in the bowl of his pipe with a silver knife as if it were a cookpot which had caught on the flame. His silver hair stood wry as a cockscomb over the dandruffed collar of his crumpled black jacket.

‘Well, well, no wonder Karla wanted the bodies buried,’ he blurted suddenly, as if the words had been jerked out of him. ‘No wonder. Karla’s a China hand too, you know. It is attested. I have it from Connie.’ He clambered to his feet, holding too many things in his little hands: pipe, tobacco tin, his penknife and his Thomas Traherne. ‘Not sophisticated naturally. Well one doesn’t expect that. Karla’s no scholar, he’s a soldier. But not blind either, not by a long chalk, she tells me. Ko.’ He repeated the name at several different levels. ‘Ko. Ko. I must see the character. It depends entirely on the characters. Height… Tree even, yes, I can see tree… or can I?… oh and several other concepts. Drake is mission school of course. Shanghainese mission boy: Well, well. Shanghai was where it all started you know. First Party cell ever was in Shanghai. Why did I say that? Drake Ko. Wonder what his real names are. We shall find that all out very shortly no doubt. Yes, good. Well I think I might go back to my reading too. Smiley, do you think I might have a coal-scuttle in my room? Without the heating on, one simply freezes up. I’ve asked the housekeepers a dozen times and had nothing but impertinence for my pains. Anno domini I’m afraid, but the winter is almost upon us I suppose. You’ll show us the raw material as soon as it arrives, I trust? One doesn’t like to work too long on potted versions. I shall make a curriculum vitae. That will be my first thing. Ko. Ah, thank you, Guillam.’

He had dropped his Thomas Traherne. Accepting it he dropped his tobacco tin, so Guillam picked up that as well. ‘Drake Ko. Shanghainese doesn’t mean a thing of course. Shanghai was the real melting pot. Chiu Chow’s the answer, judging by what we know. Still, mustn’t jump the gun. Baptist. Well, the Chiu Chow Christians mostly are, aren’t they? Swatownese: where did we have that? Yes, the intermediate company in Bangkok. Well, that figures well enough. Or Hakka. They’re not mutually exclusive, not by any means.’ He stalked after Connie into the corridor, leaving Guillam alone with Smiley, who rose and, going to an armchair, slumped into it staring sightlessly at the fire.

‘Odd,’ he remarked finally. ‘One has no sense of shock. Why is that, Peter? You know me. Why is it?’

Guillam had the wisdom to keep quiet.

‘A big fish. In Karla’s pay. Lockaway accounts, the threat of Russian spies at the very centre of the Colony’s life. So why no sense of shock?’

The green telephone was barking again. This time Guillam took the call. As he did so, he was surprised to see a fresh folder of Sam Collins’s Far Eastern reports lying open on the desk.

That was the weekend. Connie and di Salis sank without trace; Smiley set to work preparing his submission; Guillam smoothed feathers, called in the mothers and arranged for typing in shifts. On the Monday, carefully briefed by Smiley, he telephoned Lacon’s private secretary. He did it very well. ‘No drumbeats,’ Smiley had warned. ‘Keep it very idle.’ And Guillam did just that. There had been talk over dinner the other evening - he said - of convening the Intelligence Steering Group to consider certain prima facie evidence:

‘The case has firmed up a little, so perhaps it would be sensible to fix a date. Give us the batting order and we’ll circulate the document in advance.’

‘A batting order? Firmed up? Where ever do you people learn your English?’

Lacon’s private secretary was a fat voice called Pym. Guillam had never met him, but he loathed him quite unreasonably.

‘I can only tell him,’ Pym warned. ‘I can tell him and I can see what he says and I can ring you back. His card is very heavily marked this month.’

‘It’s just one little waltz if he can manage it,’ said Guillam and rang off in a fury.

You bloody well wait and see what hits you, he thought.

When London is having its baby, the folklore says, the fieldman can only pace the waiting room. Airline pilots, newshounds, spies: Jerry was back with the bloody inertia.

‘We’re in mothballs,’ Craw announced. ‘The word is well done and hold your water.’

They talked every two days at least, limbo calls between two third-party telephones, usually one hotel lobby to another. They disguised their language with a mix of Sarratt wordcode and journalistic mumbo-jumbo.

‘Your story is being checked out on high,’ Craw said. ‘When our editors have wisdom, they will impart it in due season. Meanwhile, slap your hand over it and keep it there. That’s an order.’

Jerry had no idea how Craw talked to London and he didn’t care as long as it was safe. He assumed some co-opted official from the huge, untouchable, above-the-line intelligence fraternity was playing linkman: but he didn’t care.

‘Your job is to put in mileage for the comic and tuck some spare copy under your belt which you can wave at Brother Stubbs when the next crisis comes,’ Craw said to him. ‘Nothing else, hear me?’

Drawing on his jaunts with Frost, Jerry bashed out a piece on the effect of the American military pullout on the nightlife of Wanchai: ‘What’s happened to Susie Wong since war-weary GIs with bulging wallets have ceased to flock in for rest and recreation?’ He fabricated - or, as journalists prefer it, hyped - a ‘dawn interview’ with a disconsolate and fictitious bar-girl who was reduced to accepting Japanese customers, air-freighted his piece and got Luke’s bureau to telex the number of the waybill, all as Stubbs had ordered. Jerry was by no means a bad reporter, but just as pressure brought out the best in him, sloth brought out the worst. Astonished by Stubbs’s prompt and even gracious acceptance - a ‘herogram’ Luke called it, phoning through the text from the bureau - he cast around for other heights to scale. A couple of sensational corruption trials were attracting good houses, starring the usual crop of misunderstood policemen, but after taking a look at them, Jerry concluded they hadn’t the scale to travel. England had her own these days. A ‘please-matcher’ ordered him to chase a story floated by a rival comic about the alleged pregnancy of Miss Hong Kong but a libel suit got there ahead of him. He attended an arid government press briefing by Shallow Throat, himself a humourless reject from a Northern Irish daily, idled away a morning researching successful stories from the past that might stand re-heating; and on the strength of rumour about army economy cuts, spent an afternoon being trailed round the Gurkha garrison by a public relations major who looked about eighteen. And no the major didn’t know, thank you, in reply to Jerry’s cheerful enquiry, what his men would do for sex when their families were sent home to Nepal. They would be visiting their villages about once every three years, he thought; and he seemed to think that was quite enough for anyone. Stretching the facts till they read as if the Gurkhas were already a community of military grass widowers, ‘Cold Showers in a Hot Climate for Britain’s Mercenaries’, Jerry triumphantly landed himself an inside lead. He banked a couple more stories for a rainy day, lounged away the evenings at the Club and inwardly gnawed his head off while he waited for the Circus to produce its baby.

‘For Christ’s sake,’ he protested to Craw. ‘The bloody man’s practically public property.’

‘All the same,’ said Craw firmly.

So Jerry said ‘Yes, sir,’ and a couple of days later, out of sheer boredom, began his own entirely informal investigation into the life and loves of Mr Drake Ko, OBE, Steward of the Royal Hong Kong Jockey Club, millionaire and citizen above suspicion. Nothing dramatic; nothing, in Jerry’s book; disobedient; for there is not a field man born who does not at one time or another stray across the borders of his brief. He began tentatively, like journeys to a forbidden biscuit box. As it happened, he had been considering proposing to Stubbs a three-part series on the Hong Kong super-rich. Browsing in the reference shelves of the Foreign Correspondents’ Club before lunch one day, he unconsciously took a leaf from Smiley’s book and turned up Ko, Drake, in the current edition of Who’s Who in Hong Kong: married, one son, died 1968; sometime law student of Gray’s Inn, London, but not a successful one, apparently, for there was no record of his having been called to the Bar. Then a rundown of his twenty-odd directorships. Hobbies: horseracing, cruising and jade. Well, whose aren’t? Then the charities he supported, including a Baptist church, a Chiu Chow Spirit Temple and the Drake Ko Free Hospital for Children. Backed all the possibilities, Jerry reflected with amusement. The photograph showed the usual soft-eyed, twenty-year-old beautiful soul, rich in merit as well as goods, and was otherwise unrecognisable. The dead son’s name was Nelson. Jerry noticed: Drake and Nelson, British admirals. He couldn’t get it out of his mind that the father should be named after the first British sailor to enter the China Seas, and the son after the hero of Trafalgar.

Jerry had a lot less difficulty than Peter Guillam in making the connection between China Airsea in Hong Kong and Indocharter SA in Vientiane, and he was amused to read in the China Airsea company prospectus that its business was described as a ‘wide spread of trading and transportation activities in the South East Asian theatre’ - including rice, fish, electrical goods, teak, real estate and shipping.

Devilling at Luke’s bureau, he took a bolder step: the sheerest accident shoved the name of Drake Ko under his nose. True, he had looked up Ko in the card index. Just as he had looked up a dozen or twenty other wealthy Chinese in the Colony; just as he had asked the Chinese clerk, in perfectly good faith who she thought were the most exotic Chinese millionaires for his purpose. And while Drake might not have been one of the absolute front runners, it took very little to draw the name from her, and consequently the papers. Indeed, as he had already protested to Craw, there was something flattening, not to say dream-like, about pursuing by hole-and-corner methods a man so publicly evident. Soviet intelligence agents, in Jerry’s limited experience of the breed, normally came in more modest versions. Ko seemed king-sized by comparison.

Reminds me of old Sambo, Jerry thought. It was the first time this intimation struck him.

The most detailed offering appeared in a glossy periodical called Golden Orient, now out of print. In one of its last editions, an eight-page illustrated feature titled ‘The Red Knights of Nanyang’ concerned itself with the growing number of overseas Chinese with profitable trade relations with Red China, commonly known as fat-cats. Nanyang, as Jerry knew, meant the realms south of China; and implied to the Chinese a kind of Eldorado of peace and wealth. To each chosen personality the feature devoted a page and a photograph, generally shot against a background of his possessions. The hero of the Hong Kong interview - there were pieces from Bangkok, Manila, and Singapore as well - was that ‘much-loved sporting personality and Jockey Club Steward’, Mr Drake Ko, President, Chairman, Managing Director and chief shareholder of China Airsea Ltd, and he was shown with his horse Lucky Nelson at the end of a successful season in Happy Valley. The horse’s name momentarily arrested Jerry’s Western eye. He found it macabre that a father should christen a horse after his dead son.

The accompanying photograph revealed rather. more than the spineless mugshot in Who’s Who. Ko looked jolly, even exuberant, and he appeared, despite his hat, to be hairless. The hat was at this stage the most interesting thing about Ko, for it was one which no Chinese, in Jerry’s limited experience, had ever been seen to wear. It was a beret, worn sloping, and putting Ko somewhere between a British soldier and a French onion seller. But above all, it had for a Chinese the rarest quality of all: self mockery. He was apparently tall, he was wearing a Burberry, and his long hands stuck out of the sleeves like twigs. He seemed genuinely to like the horse, and one arm rested easily on its back. Asked why he still ran a junk fleet when these were commonly held to be unprofitable, he replied: ‘My people are Hakka from Chiu Chow. We breathed the water, farmed the water, slept on the water. Boats are my element.’ He was fond also of describing his journey from Shanghai to Hong Kong in 1951. At that time the border was still open and there were no effective restrictions on immigration. Nevertheless, Ko chose to make the trip by fishing junk, pirates, blockades and bad weather notwithstanding: which was held at the very least to be eccentric.

‘I’m a very lazy fellow,’ he was reported as saying. ‘If the wind will blow me for nothing, why should I walk? Now I’ve got a sixty-foot cruiser but I still love the sea.’