The Secret Pilgrim Part 17

"Irrelevant to what?" I asked.

"To our work."

"What work?"

"I have already described our work to you, Mr. n.o.body. I have told you of its aims, and of our motivations. Humanitarianism is not to be equated with non-violence. We must fight to be free. Sometimes even the highest causes can only be served by violent methods. Do you not know that? s.e.x also can be violent."

"What kind of violent methods was Seamus involved in?" I asked.

"We are speaking not of wanton acts but of the people's right of resistance against acts committed by the forces of repression. Are you a member of those forces or are you in favour of spontaneity, Mr. n.o.body? Perhaps you should free yourself and join us."

"He's a bomber," I said. "He blows up innocent people. His most recent target was a public house in southern England. He killed one elderly couple, the barman and the pianist, and I give you my word he didn't liberate a single deluded worker."

"Is that a question or a statement, Mr. n.o.body?"

"It's an invitation to you to tell me about his activities."

"The public house was close to a British military camp," she replied. "It was providing infrastructure and comfort to Fascistic forces of oppression."

Again her cool eyes held me in their playful gaze. Did I say she was attractive? What is attraction in such circ.u.mstances? She was wearing a calico tunic. She was an enforced penitent of crimes that she did not repent. She was alert in every part of herself, I could feel it, and she knew I felt it, and the divide between us enticed her.

"My department is considering offering you a sum of money on your release, payable, if you prefer, to somebody you nominate in the meantime," I said. "They want information that would lead to the arrest and conviction of your friend Seamus. They are interested in his past crimes, others he has yet to commit, safe addresses, contacts, habits and weaknesses."

She waited for me to go on, so, perhaps unwisely, I did. "Seamus is not a hero. He's a pig. Not what you call a pig. A real pig. n.o.body did bad things to him when he was young; his parents are decent people who run a tobacco shop in County Down. His grandfather was a policeman, a good one. Seamus is blowing people up for kicks because he's inadequate. That's why he treated you badly. He only exists when he's inflicting pain. The rest of the time he's a spoilt little boy."

I had not scratched the surface of her steady stare.

"Are you inadequate, Mr. n.o.body? I think perhaps you are. In your occupation, that is normal. You should join us, Mr. n.o.body. You should take lessons with us, and we shall convert you to our cause. Then you will be adequate."

You must understand that she did not raise her voice while she said this, or indulge in dramatics of any kind. She remained condescending and composed, even hospitable. The mischief in her lay deep and well-disguised. She had a healthy natural smile and it stayed with her all the time she spoke, while Captain Levi behind her continued to gaze into her own memories, perhaps because she did not understand what was being said.

The Colonel glanced at me in question. Not trusting myself to speak, I lifted my hands from the table, asking what's the point? The Colonel said something to Captain Levi, who in the disappointed manner of someone who has prepared a meal only to see it taken away uneaten, pressed a bell for the escort. Britta rose to her feet, smoothed her prison tunic over her b.r.e.a.s.t.s and hips and held out her hands for the handcuffs.

"How much money were they thinking of offering me, Mr. n.o.body?" she enquired.

"None," I said.

She dropped me another bob and walked between her guards towards the door, her hips flowing inside her calico tunic, reminding me of Monica's inside her dressing-gown. I was afraid she would speak again but she didn't. Perhaps she knew she had won the day, and anything more would spoil the effect. The Colonel followed her out and I was alone with Captain Levi. The half smile had not left her face.

"There," she said. "Now you know a little what it feels like to hear Britta's music."

"I suppose I do."

"Sometimes we communicate too much. Perhaps you should have spoken English to her. So long as she speaks English, I can care for her. She is a human being, she is a woman, she is in prison. And you may be sure she is in agony. She is courageous, and so long as she speaks English to me I can do my duty for her."

"And when she speaks German to you?"

"What would be the point, since she knows I cannot understand her?"

"But if she did - and if you could understand her? What then?"

Her smile twisted and became slightly shameful. "Then I think I would be frightened," she replied in her slow American. "I think if she ordered something of me, I would be tempted to obey her. But I do not let her order me. Why should I? I do not give her the power over me. I speak English and I stay the boss. I was for two years in concentration camp in Buchenwald, you see."

Still smiling at me, she delivered the rest in German, in the clenched, hushed whisper of the campnik: "Man hort so scheussliche Ecbos in ihrer Stimme, wissen Sie. " One hears such dreadful echoes in her voice, you see.

The Colonel was standing in the doorway waiting for me. As we walked downstairs, he put his hand once more on my shoulder. This time I knew why.

"Is she like that with all the boys?" I asked him.

"Captain Levi?"

"Britta."

"Sure. With you a bit more, that's all. Maybe that's because you're English."

Maybe it is, I thought, and maybe it's because she saw more in me than just my Englishness. Maybe she read my unconscious signals of availability. But whatever she saw in me, or didn't, Britta had provided the summation of my confusion until now. She had articulated my sense of trying to hold on to a world that was slipping away from me, my susceptibility to every stray argument and desire.

The summons to find Hansen arrived the same night, in the middle of a jolly diplomatic party given by my British Emba.s.sy host in Herzliyya.

NINE.

EARNEST P E R I G R E W was quizzing Smiley about colonialism. Sooner or later, Perigrew quizzed everyone who came to Sarratt about colonialism, and his questions always hovered at the edge of outrage. He was a troubled boy, the son of British missionaries to West Africa, and one of those people the Service is almost bound to employ, on account of their rare knowledge and linguistic qualifications. He was sitting as usual alone, amid the shadows at the back of the library, his gaunt face thrust forward and one long hand held up as if to fend off ridicule. The question had started reasonably, then degenerated into a tirade against Britain's indifference towards her former enslaved subjects.

"Yes, well I think I rather agree with you," said Smiley courteously, to the general surprise, when he had heard Perigrew to the end. "The sad answer is, I'm afraid, that the Cold War produced in us a kind of vicarious colonialism. On the one hand we abandoned practically every article of our national ident.i.ty to American foreign policy. On the other we bought ourselves a stay of execution for our vision of our colonial selves. Worse still, we encouraged the Americans to behave in the same way. Not that they needed our encouragement, but they were pleased to have it, naturally."

Hansen had said much the same. And in much the same Language. But where Smiley had lost little of his urbanity, Hansen had glared into my face with eyes lit by the red h.e.l.ls from which he had returned.

I flew from Israel to Bangkok because Smiley said Hansen had gone mad and knew too many secrets: a decypher yourself signal, care of the Head of Station, Tel Aviv. Smiley had charge of Service security at the time, with the courtesy rank of deputy chief. Whenever I heard of him, he seemed to be scuttling round plugging another leak or another scandal. I spent the weekend in a heatwave sweating my way through the stack of hand-delivered files and an hour on the telephone placating Mabel, who had fallen at the last fence of her annual race to become ladies' captain of our local golf club and was scenting intrigue.

I don't know why they're so hard on Mabel. Perhaps it's her way of plain talking that puts them off. I did what I could. I told her that nothing I had come upon in the Service could compare with the skulduggery of those Kent wives. I promised her a splendid holiday when I returned. I forget where the holiday was going to be because we never took it.

Hansen's file gave me a portrait of a type I had grown familiar with because we used a good few of them. I was one myself and Ben was another: the crossbred Englishman who adopts the Service as his country and endows it with a bunch of qualities it hasn't really got.

Like myself, Hansen was half a Dutchman. Perhaps that was why Smiley had chosen me. He was born in the long night of the German Occupation of Holland and raised in the shadow of Delft Cathedral. His mother, a counter clerk at Thomas Cook's, was of English parents who urged her to go back to London with them when the war broke out. She refused, choosing instead to marry a Delft curate, who a year afterwards got himself shot by a German firing squad, leaving his pregnant wife to fend for herself. Undaunted, she joined a British escape line and, by the time the war ended, had charge of a fully fledged network, with its own communications, informants, safe houses and the usual appointments.

My mother's work with the Service had not been so different.

By what route the infant Hansen found his way to the Jesuits, the file did not relate. Perhaps the mother converted. Those were dark years still, and if expediency required it, she may have swallowed her Protestant convictions to buy the boy a decent education. Give the Jesuits his soul, she may have reasoned, and they will give him a brain. Or perhaps she sensed in her son from early on the mercurial nature that later ruled his life, and she determined to subordinate him to a stronger religious discipline than was offered by the easy-going Protestants. If so, she was wise. Hansen embraced the faith as he embraced everything else, with pa.s.sion. The nuns had him, the brothers had him, the priests had him, the scholars had him. Till at twenty-one, schooled and devout but still a novice, he was packed off to a seminary in Indonesia to learn the ways of the heathen: Sumatra, Molucca, Java. The Orient seems to have been an instinctive love of Hansen's as it is for many Dutchmen. The good Dutch, like Heine's proverbial pine tree, can stand on the sh.o.r.es of their flat little country and sniff the Asian scents of lemon gra.s.s and cooking pots on the chill sea air. Hansen arrived, he saw; he was conquered. Buddhism, Islam, the rites and superst.i.tions of the remotest savages - he flung himself on all of them with a fervour that only intensified the deeper he penetrated into the jungle.

Languages also came naturally to him. To his native Dutch and English he had effortlessly added French and German. Now he acquired Tamil, Khmer, Thai, Sanskrit and more than a smattering of Cantonese, often hiking hundreds of miles of hill country in his quest for a missing dialect or ritualistic link. He wrote papers on philology, marriage rites, illumination and monkeys. He discovered lost temples in the depths of the jungle, and won prizes the Society forbade him to accept. After six years of fearless exploring and enquiring, he was not only the kind of academic showpiece Jesuits are famous for; he was also a full priest.

But few secrets can survive six years. Gradually the stories about him began to acquire a seamy edge. Hansen the skin artist. Hansen's appet.i.tes. Don't look now but here comes one of Hansen's girls.

It was the scale as well as the duration that did for him: the fact that once they started probing, they found no corner to his life that was immune, no journey that did not have its detour. A woman here or there - a boy or two - well, from what I have seen of priesthood round the globe, such peccadilloes are to be found more in the observance than the breach.

But this wholesale indulgence, in every kampong, in every tawdry sidestreet, this indefatigable debauchery, flaunted, as they now discovered, beneath their noses for more than a decade, with girls who by Western standards were barely eligible for their First Communion, let alone the marriage bed - and many of them under the Church's own protection - made Hansen suddenly and dramatically untenable. Faced with the evidence of such prolonged and dedicated sinning, his Superior responded more in grief than indignation. He ordered Hansen to return to Rome, and sent a letter ahead of him to the General of the Society. From Rome, he told Hansen sadly, he would most likely go to Loyola in Spain, where qualified Jesuit psychotherapists would help him come to terms with his regrettable weakness. After Loyola - well, a new beginning, perhaps a different hemisphere, a different decade.

But Hansen, like his mother before him, stubbornly declined to leave the place of his adoption.

At a loss, the Father Guardian packed him off to a distant mission in the hills run by a traditionalist of the sterner school. There Hansen suffered the barbarities of house arrest. He was watched over like a madman. He was forbidden to pa.s.s beyond the precincts of the house, denied books, paper, company, laughter. Men take to confinement in different ways, as they take differently to heights or cold or dying. Hansen took to it terribly, and after three months could bear no more. As his brother guardians escorted him to Ma.s.s, he hurled one of them down a staircase while the other fled. Then he headed back to Djakarta and, with neither money nor pa.s.sport, went to ground in the brothels he knew well. The girls took him into their care, and in return he worked as pimp and bouncer. He gave out beer, washed gla.s.ses, ejected the unruly, heard confessions, gave succour, played with the children in the back room. I see him, as I know him now, doing all those things without fuss or complication. He was barely thirty and his desires burned bright as ever.

Until one day, yielding as so often to an impulse, Hansen shaved, put on a clean s.h.i.+rt, and presented himself to the British Consul to claim his British soul.

And the Consul, being neither deaf nor blind, but a longstanding member of the Service, listened to Hansen's story, asked a humdrum question or two and, from behind a mask of apathy, sprang to action. For years he had been looking for a man of Hansen's gifts. Hansen's waywardness did not deter the Consul in the least. He liked it. He signalled London for background; he lent Hansen cautious sums of cash against receipts in triplicate, for he did not wish to show undue enthusiasm. When London came back with a white trace on Hansen's mother, indicating she was a former agent of the Service, the Consul's cup brimmed over.

Another month and Hansen was semi-conscious, which means he knew, but only half knew, but then again might not know, that he just could be half in touch with what one might loosely refer to as British Intelligence. Another two months and, restless as ever, he was taking a swing through southern Java ostensibly in search of ancient scrolls, in reality to report back to the Consul the strength of Communist subversion, which was his newly adopted anti Christ. By the end of the year he was headed for London with the brand-new British pa.s.sport he had wanted in his pocket, though not in his own name.

I turned to his potted training record, all six months of it. Clive Bellamy, a gangly, mischievous Etonian, was in charge of Sarratt. "Excellent at all things practical," he wrote in Hansen's end-of-course report. "Has a first-rate memory, fast reactions, is self-sufficient. Needs to be ridden hard. If there's ever a mutiny on my s.h.i.+p, Hansen will be the first man I'll flog. Needs a big canvas and a first-rate controller."

I turned to the operational record. No madness there either. Since Hansen was still Dutch, Head Office decided to keep him that way and play down his Englishness. Hansen bridled but they overruled him. At a time when the British abroad were being seen by everyone except themselves as Americans without the clout, Head Office would kill for a Swede and steal for a West German. Even Canadians, though more easily manufactured, were smiled on. Back in Holland, Hansen formalised his severance from the Jesuits and set about looking for new employment back East. A score of Oriental academic bodies were spread around the capitals of Western Europe in those days. Hansen did his rounds of them, gaining a promise here and a commitment there. A French Oriental news agency took him on as a stringer. A London weekly, nudged by Head Office, made a berth for him on condition they got him free. Till bit by bit his cover was complete - wide enough for him to have a reason to go anywhere and ask what questions he wanted, varied enough to be financially inscrutable, since no one would ever be able to tell which of his several employers were paying him how much for what. He was ready to be launched. British interests in South East Asia might have dwindled with her Empire, but the Americans were in there knee-deep with an official war running in Vietnam, an unofficial one in Cambodia and a secret one in Laos. In our unlovely role as camp follower, we were delighted to offer them Hansen's precious talents.

Espionage technology can do a lot. It can photograph crops and trenches, tanks and rocket sites and tyre-marks and the migration of the reindeer. It can flinch at the sound of a Russian fighter pilot breaking wind at forty thousand feet or a Chinese general belching in his sleep. But it can't replace human understanding. It can't tell you what's in the heart of a Cambodian farmer whose hill crops have been blown to smithereens by Dr. Kissinger's unmarked bombers, whose daughters have been sold into prost.i.tution in the city, and whose sons have been lured into leaving the fields and fighting for an American puppet army, or urged, by way of family insurance, into the ranks of the Khmer Rouge. It can't read the lips of jungle fighters in black pyjamas whose most powerful weapon is the perverted Marxism of a blood-hungry Sorbonne-educated Cambodian psychopath. It can't sniff the exhaust fumes of an army that is unmechanised. Or break the codes of an army without radio. Or calculate the supplies of men who can nourish themselves on ground beetles and wood bark; or the morale of those who, having lost all they possess, have only the future to win.

But Hansen could. Hansen, the adopted Asian, could trek without food for a week, squat in the kampongs and listen to the murmur of the villagers, and Hansen could read the rising wind of their resistance long before it stirred the Stars and Stripes on the Emba.s.sy roofs of Phnom Penh and Saigon. And he could tell the bombers and, to his later remorse, he did - he could tell the American bombers which villages were playing host to the Vietcong. He was a fisher of men, too. He could recruit helpers from every walk of life and instruct them how to see and hear and remember and report. He knew how little to tell them and how much, how to reward them and when not to.

For months, then years, Hansen functioned that way in the so-called "liberated areas" of northern Cambodia where the Khmer Rouge nominally held sway, until the day he vanished from the village he had made his home. Vanished soundlessly, taking the inhabitants with him. Soon to be given up for dead, another jungle disappearance.

And remained dead until a short time ago, when he had come alive in a brothel in Bangkok.

"Take your time, Ned," Smiley had urged me on the telephone to Tel Aviv. "If you want to add a couple of days for jet-lag, it's quite all right by me."

Which was Smiley-speak for "Get to him as fast as you can and tell me I haven't got another king-sized scandal on my hands."

Our Station Head in Bangkok was a bald, rude, moustachioed little tyrant called Rumbelow, whom I had never warmed to. The Service offers precious few prospects for men of fifty. Most are blown; many are too tired and disenchanted to care whether they are or not. Others head for private banking or big business, but the marriage seldom lasts. Something has happened to their way of thinking that unsuits them to the overt life. But a very few, of whom Toby Esterhase was one and Rumbelow another, pull off the trick of holding the Service hostage to their supposed a.s.sets.

Exactly what Rumbelow's were I never knew. Seedy, I am sure, for if he specialised in anything, it was human baseness. One rumour said he owned a couple of corrupt Thai generals who would work to him and to no one else. Another that he had managed to perform a grimy favour for a member of the royal household that was not transferable. Whatever his hold on them, the barons of the Fifth Floor would hear no ill of him. "And for G.o.d's sake, don't rub up Rumbelow the wrong way, Ned," Smiley had begged me. "I'm sure he's a pain in the neck, but we do need him."

I met him in my hotel room. To the overt world I was Mark Seymour, occupation accountant, and had no wish to parade myself at the Emba.s.sy or his house. I had been flying twenty hours. It was early evening. Rumbelow spoke like an Etonian bookmaker. Come to think of it, he looked like one as well.

"It was sheerest b.l.o.o.d.y coincidence we b.u.mped into the b.a.s.t.a.r.d at all," he told me huffily. "One puts out one's feelers, naturally. One keeps one's ear to the proverbial ground. One knows the score. One's heard of other cases. One isn't insensitive. One doesn't like to think of one's joe trussed to a stick, being carted through the jungle for weeks on end, while the Khmer Rouge torture the h.e.l.l out of him, naturally. Not an ostrich. Know the score. Your brown man doesn't obey the Queensberry Rules, you know," he a.s.sured me, as if I had implied the opposite. And, plucking a handkerchief from the sleeve of his sweat-patched suit, he pummelled his stupid moustache with it. "Your average joe would be yelling for a quick bullet after one night of it."

"Are you sure that's what happened to him?"

"Not sure of anything, thank you, old boy. Rumour, that's all. How can I be sure, if the b.a.s.t.a.r.d won't even talk to us? Threatens violence if we try! For all I know, the KR never had sight nor sound of him. Never did trust a Dutchman, not out here-they think they own the b.l.o.o.d.y place. Hansen wouldn't be the first joe to lie doggo when things got too hot for him, then come bouncing back when it's all over, asking for his gong and his pension, not by any means. Still in possession of all his fingers and thumbs, by all accounts. Not missing any other part of his anatomy either, to judge by where he's holed out. Duffy Marchbanks spotted him. Remember Duffy? Good chap."

With a sinking heart, yes, I remembered Duffy. I had remembered him when I saw his name in the file. He was a flamboyant crook based in Hong Kong, with a taste for fast deals in anything from opium to sh.e.l.l cases. For a few misguided years we had financed his office.

"Purest chance, it was, on Duffy's part. He'd popped up here on a flying visit. One day, that's all. One day, one night, then back to the missus and a book. Offsh.o.r.e leisure consortium wanted him to buy a hundred acres of prime coastland for them. Did his business, then off they all go to this girlie restaurant, Duffy and a bunch of his traders - Duffy's not averse to a bit of the other, never has been. Place called The Sea of Happiness, slap in the middle of the red-light quarter. Upmarket sort of establishment, as they go, I'm told. Private rooms, decent food if you like Hunanese, a straight deal and the girls leave you alone unless you tell 'em not to."

At girlie restaurants, he explained, somehow contriving to suggest he had never personally been to one, young hostesses, dressed or undressed, sat between the guests and fed them food and drink while the men talked high matters of business. In addition, The Sea of Happiness offered a ma.s.sage parlour, a discotheque and a live theatre on the ground floor.

"Duffy clinches the deal with the consortium, a cheque is pa.s.sed, he's feeling his oats. So he decides to do himself a favour with one of the girls. Terms agreed, off they go to a cubicle. Girl says she's thirsty, how about a bottle of champagne to get her going? She's on, commission, naturally - they all are. Never mind. Duffy's feeling expansive, so he says why not? Girl presses a bell, squawks into the intercom, next thing Duffy knows, in marches this b.l.o.o.d.y great European chap with an ice bucket and a tray. Sets it down, Duffy gives him twenty baht for himself, fellow says 'Thank you' in English, polite enough but no smiles, clears out. It's Hansen. Jungle Hansen. Not a portrait . . . himself!"

"How does Duffy know that?"

"Seen his photograph, hasn't he?"

"Why?"

"Because we showed Duffy the b.l.o.o.d.y photograph, for heaven's sake, when Hansen went missing! We showed it to everyone we knew, all over the b.l.o.o.d.y hemisphere! We didn't say why - we just said if you spot this man, holler. Head Office's orders, thank you, not my idea. I thought it was b.l.o.o.d.y insecure."

To calm himself, Rumbelow poured us both another whisky. "Duffy roars back to his hotel, phones me at home straight away. Three in the morning. 'It's your fellow,' he tells me. 'What fellow?'

I say. 'Fellow you sent me that pretty picture of, back in Hongkers a year ago or more. He's potboy at a wh.o.r.ehouse called The Sea of Happiness.'

You know how old Duffy talks. Loose. I sent Henry round next day. b.l.o.o.d.y fool made a hash of it. You heard about that, I hope? Typical."

"Did Duffy speak to Hansen? Ask him who he was? Anything?"

"Not a d.i.c.kie bird. Looked clean through him. Duffy's a trouper. Salt of the earth. Always was."

"Where's Henry?"

"Sitting downstairs in the lobby."

"Call him up."

Henry was Chinese, the son of a Kuomintang warlord in the Shan States and our resident chief agent, though I suspect he had long ago taken out reinsurance with the Thai police and was earning a quiet living playing both ends against the middle.

He was a podgy, over-eager, s.h.i.+ny fellow and he smiled too much. He wore a gold chain round his neck and carried a smart leather notebook with a gold pen in it. His cover work was translator. No translator I had ever met sported a Gucci notebook, but Henry was different.

"Tell Mark how you made a b.l.o.o.d.y fool of yourself at The Sea of Happiness last Thursday evening," Rumbelow ordered menacingly.

"Sure, Mike."

"Mark," I said.

"Sure, Mark."

"His orders were to take a look. That's all he was to do," Rumbelow barged in before Henry could tell anything at all. "Take a look, sniff, get out, call me. Right, Henry? He was to spin the tale, sniff, see if he could spot Hansen anywhere, not approach him, report back to me. A discreet, nocontact reconnaissance. Sniff and tell. Now tell Mark what you did."

First Henry had had a drink at the bar, he said; then he had watched the show. Then he had sent for the Mama San, who hurried over a.s.suming he had a special wish. The Mama San was a Chinese lady from the same province as Henry's father, so they had an immediate bond.

He had shown the Mama San his translator's card and said he was writing an article about her establishment - the superb food, the romantic girls, the high standards of sensitivity and hygiene, particularly the hygiene. He said he had a commission from a German travel magazine that recommended only the best places.

The Mama San took the bait and offered him the run of the house. She showed him the private dining rooms, the kitchens, cubicles, toilets. She introduced him to the girls-and offered him one on the house, which he declined-to the head chef, the doorman and the bouncers, but not, as it happened, to the enormous roundeye whom Henry had by then spotted three times, once as he carried a tray of gla.s.ses from the private dining rooms to the kitchens, once crossing a corridor pus.h.i.+ng a trolley of bottles and once emerging from an open steel doorway which apparently led to the drinks store.

"But who is your farang who carries the bottles for you?"

Henry had cried out with amus.e.m.e.nt to the Mama San. "Must he stay behind and work because he cannot pay his bill?"

The Mama San laughed also. Against farangs, or Westerners, all Asians feel naturally united. "The farang lives with one of our Cambodian girls," she replied with contempt, for Cambodians are rated even lower than farangs and Vietnamese in the Thai zoology. "He met her here and fell in love with her, so he tried to buy her and make a lady out of her. But she refused to leave us. So he brings her, to work every day, and stays until she is free to go home again."