John le Carre - Our kind of traitor

'Which was?'

'If the certain people in London were who I thought they were, tread carefully. I wanted to tell him not to touch them with a bargepole, but didn't feel I could say that. It was his choice, not mine. Am I right?'

'What about?'

'That you recruit for them. You talent-spot.'

'Them being who, exactly?'

'The spies. Dick Benson didn't know which lot he was up for, so how should I? I'm not accusing you. I'm asking you. Is it true? That you're in touch with them? Or was Benson fantasizing?'

'Why are you here and what do you want?'

At this point Perry nearly left the room. He wished he had. He actually turned and headed for the door, then stopped himself and turned back.

'I need to be put in touch with your certain people in London,' he said, keeping the crimson notebook under his arm and waiting for the question 'why?'

'Thinking of joining them? I know they take all sorts these days but Christ, you?'

Again Perry nearly headed for the door. Again he wished he had. But no, he checked himself and took a breath and this time managed to find the right words:

'I have stumbled by chance on some information' – with his long, uneasy fingers administering a tap to the notebook, which emitted a ping – 'unsolicited, unwanted and -' he hesitated a long time before using the word – 'secret.'

'Who says so?'

'I do.'

'Why?'

'If true, it could put lives at risk. Maybe save lives as well. It's not my subject.'

'Neither is it mine, I'm glad to say. I talent-spot. I baby-snatch. My certain people have a perfectly good website. They also put cretinous advertisements about themselves in the heritage press. Either route is open to you.'

'My material is too urgent for that.'

'Urgent as well as secret?'

'If it's anything at all, it's very urgent indeed.'

'The nation's fortunes hang by a thread? And that's the Little Red Book you're clutching under your arm, presumably.'

'It's a document of record.'

They surveyed each other in mutual distaste.

'You're not seriously proposing to give it to me, are you?'

'I am. Yes. Why not?'

'Dump your urgent secrets on Flynn? Who will stick a postage stamp on them and send them to his certain people in London?'

'Something like that. Why should I know how you people operate?'

'While you go off in search of your immortal soul?'

'I'll do what I do. They can do what they do. What's wrong with that?'

'Everything is wrong with it. In this game, which isn't a game at all, the messenger is at least half as important as the message, and sometimes he's the whole message on his own. Where are you off to now? I mean, this minute?'

'Back to my rooms.'

'Do you have a mobile telephone?'

'Of course I bloody do.'

'Write the number down for me here, please' – handing him a piece of paper – 'I never commit anything to memory, it's insecure. You have a satisfactory signal for your mobile telephone in your rooms, I trust? The walls are not too thick or anything?'

'I get a perfectly good signal, thank you.'

'Take your Little Red Book. Go back to your rooms and you will receive a call from somebody calling himself or herself Adam. A Mr or Ms Adam. I shall need a soundbite.'

'Need what?'

'Something to make them horny. I can't just say, "I've got a Bollinger Bolshevik on my hands who thinks he's stumbled on a world conspiracy." I've got to tell them what it's about.'

Swallowing his outrage, Perry made his first conscious effort to produce a cover story.

'Tell them it's about a crooked Russian banker who calls himself Dima,' he said, after other routes had mysteriously failed him. 'He wants to cut a deal with them. It's short for Dmitri, in case they don't know.'

'Sounds irresistible,' said Flynn sarcastically, picking up a pencil and scribbling on the same piece of paper.

Perry had been back in his room only an hour before his mobile was ringing, and he was listening to the same skittish, slightly husky male voice that had this minute addressed him here in the basement room.

'Perry Makepiece? Marvellous. Name of Adam. Just got your message. Mind if I ask you a couple of quickie questions to make sure we're both worrying at the same bone? No need to mention our chum's name. Just need to make sure he's the same chum. Does he have a wife by any chance?'

'He does.'

'Fat, blonde party? Barmaid sort of type?'

'Dark-haired and emaciated.'

'And the precise circumstances of your bumping into our chum? The when and how?'

'Antigua. On a tennis court.'

'Who won?'

'I did.'

'Marvellous. Third quickie coming up. How soon can you get up to London on our tab, and how soon can we get our hands on this dodgy dossier of yours?'

'Door to door, about two hours, I suppose. There's also a small package. I've pasted it inside the dossier.'

'Firmly?'

'I think so.'

'Well make sure you have. Write ADAM on the outside cover in large black letters – use a laundry marker or something. Then wave it around at reception till somebody notices you.'

Laundry marker? The voice of an old bachelor? Or a sly reference to Dima's dubious financial practices?

*

Enlivened by the presence of Hector lounging four feet from him, Perry was speaking swiftly and intensely, not into the middle air where academics find their traditional refuge, but straight into Hector's eagle-eyed face; and less directly to dapper Luke, seated to attention at Hector's side.

With no Gail to restrain him, he felt free to relate to both men. He was confessing himself to them as Dima had confessed himself to Perry: man to man and face to face. He was creating a synergy of confession. He was retrieving dialogue with the accuracy with which he retrieved all writing, good or bad, not pausing to correct himself.

Unlike Gail, who loved nothing better than to take off people's voices, he either couldn't, or some foolish pride wouldn't let him. But in his memory he still heard Dima's clotted Russian accents; and in his inner eye saw the sweated face so close to his own that, any nearer, the two of them would have been banging foreheads. He was smelling, even as he described them, the fumes of vodka on Dima's rasping breath. He was watching him refill his glass, glower at it, then pounce and empty it at a swallow. He was feeling himself slide into involuntary kinship with him: the swift and necessary bonding that comes of emergency on the cliff face.

'But not what we'd call rat-arsed?' suggested Hector, taking a sip of his malt. 'More your social drinker at the top of his form, you'd say?'

Absolutely, Perry agreed: not muddled, maudlin, slurred, just comfortable:

'If we'd been playing tennis next morning, I'll bet he'd have played his usual game. He's got a huge engine and it runs on alcohol. He's proud of that.'

Perry sounded as if he was proud of it too.

'Or if we misquote the Master' – Hector, it turned out, was a fellow devotee of P. G. Wodehouse – 'the kind of chap who was born a couple of drinks below par?'

'Precisely, Bertie,' Perry agreed in his best Wodehousian, and they found time for a quick laugh, supported by B-list Luke who with Hector's arrival had otherwise assumed the role of silent partner.

*

'Mind if I interject a question here regarding the immaculate Gail?' Hector inquired. 'Not a tough one. Medium soft.'

Tough, medium soft – Perry was on his guard.

'When you two arrived back in England from Antigua,' Hector began – 'Gatwick, wasn't it?'

Gatwick it was, Perry agreed.

'You parted company. Am I right? Gail to her legal responsibilities and her flat in Primrose Hill, and you to your rooms in Oxford, there to pen your immortal prose.'

Also correct, Perry conceded.

'So what sort of deal had the two of you struck between you at this point – understanding is a prettier word – as regards the way forward?'