Honourable Schoolboy (65 page)

Old George. Super. Good morning.

He saw him as he liked to remember him best, the first time they met, at Sarratt, soon after the war. Jerry was still an army subaltern, his time nearly up and Oxford looming, and he was bored stiff. The course was for London Occasionals: people who, having done the odd bit of skulduggery without going formally on to the Circus payroll, were being groomed as an auxiliary reserve. Jerry had already volunteered for full-time employment, but Circus personnel had turned him down, which scarcely helped his mood. So when Smiley waddled into the paraffin-heated lecture hut in his heavy overcoat and spectacles, Jerry inwardly groaned and prepared himself for another creaking fifty minutes of boredom - on good places to look for dead letter boxes, most likely - followed by a sort of clandestine nature ramble through Rickmansworth trying to spot hollow trees in graveyards. There was comedy while the Directing Staff fought to crank the lectern lower so that George could see over the top. In the end, he stood himself a little fussily at the side of it and declared that his subject this afternoon was ‘problems of maintaining courier lines inside enemy territory’. Slowly it dawned on Jerry that he was talking not from the textbook but from experience: that this owlish little pedant with the diffident voice and the blinking, apologetic manner had sweated out three years in some benighted German town, holding the threads of a very respectable network, while he waited for the boot through the door panel or the pistol butt across the face that would introduce him to the pleasures of interrogation.

When the meeting was over, Smiley asked to see him. They met in a corner of an empty bar, under the antlers where the darts board hung.

‘I’m so sorry we couldn’t have you,’ he said. ‘I think our feeling was, you needed a little more time outside first.’ Which was their way of saying he was immature. Too late, Jerry remembered Smiley as one of the non-speaking members of the Selection Board which had failed him. ‘Perhaps if you could get your degree, and make your way a little in a different walk of life, they would change their way of thinking. Don’t lose touch, will you?’

After which, somehow, old George had always been there. Never surprised, never out of patience, old George had gently but firmly re-jigged Jerry’s life till it was Circus property. His father’s empire collapsed: George was waiting with his hands out to catch him. His marriages collapsed: George would sit all night for him, hold his head.

‘I’ve always been grateful to this service that it gave me a chance to pay,’ Smiley had said. ‘I’m sure one should feel that. I don’t think we should be afraid of… devoting ourselves. Is that old-fashioned of me?’

‘You point me, I’ll march,’ Jerry had replied. ‘Tell me the shots and I’ll play them.’

There was still time. He knew that. Train to Bangkok, hop on a plane home, and the worst he would get was a flea in his ear for jumping ship for a few days. Home, he repeated to himself. Bit of a problem. Home to Tuscany, and the yawning emptiness of the hilltop without the orphan? Home to old Pet, sorry about the bust teacup? Home to dear old Stubbsie, key appointment as desk jockey with special responsibility for the spike? Or home to the Circus: ‘We think you’d be happiest in Banking Section.’ Even - great thought - home to Sarratt, training job, winning the hearts and minds of new entrants while he commuted dangerously from a maisonette in Watford.

On the third or fourth morning he woke very early. Dawn was just rising over the river, turning it first red, then orange, now brown. A family of water-buffaloes wallowed in the mud, their bells jingling. In midstream, three sampans were linked in a long and complicated trawl. He heard a hiss and saw a net curl, then fall like hail on the water.

Yet it’s not for want of a future that I’m here, he thought. It’s for want of a present.

Home’s where you go when you run out of homes, he thought. Which brings me to Lizzie. Vexed issue. Shove it on the back burner. Spot of breakfast.

Sitting on the teak balcony munching eggs and rice Jerry remembered George breaking the news to him about Haydon. El Vino’s bar, Fleet Street, a rainy midday. Jerry had never found it possible to hate anyone for very long, and after the initial shock there had really not been much more to say.

‘Well, no point in crying in the old booze, is there, sport? Can’t leave the ship to the rats. Soldier on, that’s the thing.’

To which Smiley agreed: yes, that was the thing, to soldier on, grateful for the chance to pay. Jerry had even found a sort of rum comfort in the fact that Bill was one of the clan. He had never seriously doubted, in his vague way, that his country was in a state of irreversible decline, nor that his own class was to blame for the mess. ‘We made Bill,’ ran his argument, ’so it’s right we should carry the brunt of his betrayal.’ Pay in fact. Pay. What old George was on about.

Pottering beside the river again, breathing the free warm air, Jerry chucked flat stones to make them bounce.

Lizzie, he thought. Lizzie Worthington, suburban bolter. Ricardo’s pupil and punchball. Charlie Marshall’s big sister and earth mother and unattainable whore. Drake Ko’s cagebird. My dinner companion for all of four hours. And to Sam Collins - to repeat the question - what had she been to him? For Mr Mellon, Charlie’s ‘creepy British trader’ of eighteen months ago, she was a courier working the Hong Kong heroin trail. But she was more than that. Somewhere along the line Sam had shown her a bit of ankle and told her she was working for Queen and country. Which glad news Lizzie had promptly shared with her admiring circle of friends. To Sam’s fury, and he dropped her like a hot brick. So Sam had set her up as a patsy of some kind. A coat-trailer on probation. In one way this thought amused Jerry very much, for Sam had a reputation as an ace operator, whereas Lizzie Worthington might well star at Sarratt as the archetypal Woman Never to Be Recruited as Long as She Can Speak or Breathe.

Less funny was the question of what she meant to Sam now. What kept him skulking in her shadow like a patient murderer, smiling his grim iron smile? That question worried Jerry very much. Not to put too fine a point on it, he was obsessed by it. He definitely did not wish to see Lizzie taking another of her dives. If she went anywhere from Ko’s bed, it was going to be into Jerry’s. For some while, off and on - ever since he had met her, in fact - he had been thinking how much Lizzie would benefit from the bracing Tuscan air. And while he didn’t know the hows and whys of Sam Collins’s presence in Hong Kong, nor even what the Circus at large intended for Drake Ko, he had the strongest possible impression - and here was the nub of the thing - that by pushing off to London at this moment, far from carting Lizzie away on his white charger, Jerry was leaving her sitting on a very large bomb.

Which struck him as unacceptable. In other times, he might have been prepared to leave that problem to the owls, as he had left so many other problems in his day. But these were not other times. This time, as he now realised, it was the Cousins who were paying the piper, and while Jerry had no particular quarrel with the Cousins, their presence made it a much rougher ball-game. So that whatever vague notions he had about George’s humanity did not apply.

Also, he cared about Lizzie. Urgently. There was nothing imprecise in his feelings at all. He ached for her, warts and all. She was his kind of loser, and he loved her. He had worked it out and drawn the line, and that, after several days of counting on beads, was his net, unalterable solution. He was a little awed, but very pleased by it.

Gerald Westerby, he told himself. You were present at your birth. You were present at your several marriages and at some of your divorces and you will certainly be present at your funeral. High time, in our considered view, that you were present at certain other crucial moments in your history.

Taking a bus up-river a few miles, he walked again, rode on cyclos, sat in bars, made love to the girls, thinking only of Lizzie. The inn where he stayed was full of children and one morning he woke to find two of them sitting on his bed, marvelling at the enormous length of the farang’s legs and giggling at the way his bare feet hung over the end. Maybe I’ll just stay here, he thought. But by then he was fooling, because he knew that he had to go back and ask her; even if the answer was a custard pie. From the balcony he launched paper aeroplanes for the children, and they clapped and danced, watching them float away.

He found a boatman and when evening came he crossed the river to Vientiane, avoiding the formalities of immigration. Next morning, also without formality, he wangled himself aboard an unscheduled Royal Air Lao DC8, and by afternoon he was airborne, and in possession of a delicious warm whisky and chatting merrily to a couple of friendly opium dealers. As they landed, black rain was falling and the windows of the airport bus were foul with dust. Jerry didn’t mind at all. For the first time in his life, returning to Hong Kong was quite like coming home after all,

Inside the reception area, nevertheless, Jerry played a cautious hand. No trumpets, he told himself: definitely. The few days’ rest had done wonders for his presence of mind. Having taken a good look round he made for the men’s room instead of the immigration desks and lay up there till a big load of Japanese tourists arrived, then barged over to them and asked who spoke English. Having cut out four of them, he showed them his Hong Kong press card and while they stood in line waiting for their passport check he besieged them with questions about why they were here and what they proposed to do, and with whom, and wrote wildly on his pad before choosing four more, and repeating the process. Meanwhile he waited for the police on duty to change watch. At four o’clock they did and he at once made for a door signed ‘No Entry’ which he had marked earlier. He banged on it till it was opened, and started to walk through to the other side.

‘Where the hell are you going?’ asked an outraged Scottish police inspector.

‘Home to a comic, sport. Got to file the dirt on our friendly Japanese visitors.’

He showed his press card.

‘Well go through the damn gates like everyone else.’

‘Don’t be bloody silly. I haven’t got my passport. That’s why your distinguished colleague brought me through this way in the first place.’

Bulk, a ranking voice, a patently British appearance, an affecting grin, won him a space in a city-bound bus five minutes later. Outside his apartment block, he dawdled but saw no one suspicious, but this was China and who could tell? The lift as usual emptied for him. Riding in it he hummed Deathwish the Hun’s one record in anticipation of a hot bath and change of clothes. At his front door, he had a moment’s anxiety when he noticed the tiny wedges he had left in place lying on the floor, till he belatedly remembered Luke, and smiled at the prospect of their reunion. He unlocked the burglar door and as he did so he heard the sound of humming from inside, a droning monotone, which could have been an airconditioner, but not Deathwish’s, it was too useless and inefficient. Bloody idiot Luke has left the gramophone on, he thought, and it’s about to blow up. Then he thought: I’m doing him an injustice, it’s that fridge. Then he opened the door and saw Luke’s dead body strewn across the floor with half his head shot to pieces, and half the flies in Hong Kong swarming over it and round it; and all he could think to do, as he quickly closed the door behind him, and jammed his handkerchief over his mouth, was run into the kitchen in case there was still someone there. Returning to the living room, he pushed Luke’s feet aside and dug up the parquet brick where he cached his forbidden side-arm and his escape kit, and put them in his pocket before he vomited.

Of course, he thought. That’s why Ricardo was so certain the horse-writer was dead.

Join the club, he thought, as he stood out in the street again, with the rage and grief pounding in his ears and eyes. Nelson Ko’s dead but he’s running China. Ricardo’s dead, but Drake Ko says he can stay alive as long as he sticks to the shady side of the street. Jerry Westerby the horse-writer is also completely dead, except that Ko’s stupid pagan vicious bastard of a henchman, Mr bloody Tiu, was so thick he shot the wrong roundeye.

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The inside of the American Consulate in Hong Kong could have been the inside of the Annexe, right down to the ever-present fake rosewood and bland courtesy and the airport chairs and the heartening portrait of the President, even if this time it was Ford. Welcome to your Howard Johnson spookhouse, Guillam thought. The section they worked in was called the isolation ward and had its own doorway to the street, guarded by two marines. They had passes in false names - Guillam’s was Gordon and for the duration of their stay there, except on the telephone, they never spoke to a soul inside the building except one another. ‘We’re not just deniable, gentlemen,’ Martello had told them proudly in the briefing, ‘we’re also invisible as well.’ That was how it was going to be played, he said. The US Consul General could put his hand on the Bible and swear to the Governor they weren’t there and his staff were not involved, said Martello. ‘Blindeye right down the line.’ After that, he handed over to George because: ‘George this is your show from soup to nuts.’

Downhill they had five minutes’ walk to the Hilton, where Martello had booked them rooms. Uphill, though it would have been hard going, they had ten minutes’ walk to Lizzie Worth’s apartment block. They had been here five days and now it was evening, but they had no way of telling because there were no windows in the operations room. There were maps and sea-charts instead, and a couple of telephones manned by Martello’s quiet men, Murphy and his friend. Martello and Smiley had a big desk each. Guillam, Murphy and his friend shared the table with the telephones and Fawn sat moodily at the centre of an empty row of cinema chairs along the back wall, like a bored critic at a preview, sometimes picking his teeth and sometimes yawning but refusing to take himself off, as Guillam repeatedly advised him. Craw had been spoken to and ordered to keep clear of everything: a total duck dive. Smiley was frightened for him since Frost’s death, and would have preferred him evacuated, but the old boy wouldn’t leave.