John le Carré - The Honourable Schoolboy

'Is he going to want you?' she asked.

'I think, what you should do, you should go back to the harbour,' he said. 'Are you listening?'

She managed, 'Of course I am.'

'You look for a nice friendly-looking roundeye family. Choose the woman for once and not the bloke. Tell her you've had a row with your boyfriend and can they take you home in their boat? If they'll have you, stay the night with them, otherwise go to a hotel. Spin them one of your stories. Christ, that's no problem, is it?'

A police helicopter pattered overhead in a long curve, presumably to observe the festival. Instinctively he grabbed her shoulders and drew her into the rock.

'Remember the second place we went — the big band sound — the bar?' He was still holding her.

She said, 'Yes.'

'I'll pick you up there tomorrow night.'

'I don't know,' she said.

'Be there anyway at seven. At seven, got it?'

She pushed him gently away from her, as if she were determined to stand alone.

'Tell him I kept faith,' she said. 'It's what he cares about most. I stuck to the deal. If you see him, tell him, Liese stuck to the deal. '

'Sure.'

'Not sure. Yes, Tell him. He did everything he promised. He said he'd look after me. He did. He said he'd let Ric go. He did that too. He always stuck to a deal.'

He lifted her head, holding it with both his hands, but she insisted on going on.

'And tell him — and tell him — tell him they made it impossible. They fenced me in.'

'Be there from seven on,' he said. 'Even if I'm a bit late. Now come on, that's not too difficult, is it? You don't need a university degree to hoist that aboard.' He was gentling her, battling for a smile, striving for a last complicity before they separated.

She nodded.

She wanted to say something else but it didn't work. She took a few steps, turned and looked back at him and he waved — one big flap of the arm. She took a few more and kept going till she was below the line of the hill, but he did hear her shout 'Seven then', or thought he did. Having watched her out of sight, Jerry returned to the knife-edge, where he sat down for a bit of a breather before the Tarzan stuff. A snatch of John Donne came back to him, one of the few things he had picked up at school, though somehow he never got quotations completely right, or thought he didn't:

Or something. For an hour, deep in thought, two hours, he lay in the lee of the rock and watched the daylight turn to dusk over the Chinese islands a few miles into the sea. Then he pulled off his buckskin boots, and re-threaded the laces in a herringbone, the way he used to thread them for his cricket boots. Then he put them on again and tied them as tight as they would go. It could be Tuscany again, he thought, and the five hills which he used to gawp at from the hornet field. Except that this time he wasn't proposing to walk out on anyone. Not the girl. Not Luke. Not even himself. Even if it took a lot of footwork.

'Navy int. has the junk fleet making around six knots and slap on course,' Murphy announced. 'Quit the beds right on one one hundred, just like they were following our projection.'

From somewhere he had scrounged a set of bakelite toy boats which he could fix to the chart. Standing, he pointed them proudly in a single column at Po Toi island.

Murphy had returned, but his colleague had stayed with Sam Collins and Fawn, so they were four.

'And Rockhurst has found the girl,' said Guillam quietly, putting down the other phone. His shoulder was playing up, and he was extremely pale.

'Where?' said Smiley.

Still at the chart, Murphy turned. At his desk, where he was keeping a log of events, Martello put down his pen.

'Picked her up at Aberdeen harbour as she landed,' Guillam went on. 'She'd cadged a lift back from Po Toi with a clerk and his wife from the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank.'

'So what's the story?' Martello demanded before Smiley could speak. 'Where's Westerby?'

'She doesn't know,' said Guillam.

'Ah come on', Martello protested. 'She says they had a row and left in different boats. Rockhurst says give him another hour with her.'

Smiley spoke. 'And Ko?' he asked. 'Where's he?'

'His launch is still in Po Toi harbour,' Guillam replied. 'Most of the other boats have already left. But Ko's is where it was this morning. Sitting pretty, Rockhurst says, and everyone below.'

Smiley peered at the sea chart, then at Guillam, then at the map of Po Toi.

'If she told Westerby what she told Collins,' he said, 'then he's stayed on the island.'

'With what in mind?' Martello demanded, very loud. 'George, for what purpose is that man remaining on that island?'

An age went by for all of them.

'He's waiting,' Smiley said.

'For what, may I enquire?' Martello persisted in the same determined tone.

Nobody saw Smiley's face. It had found its own bit of shadow. They saw his shoulders hunch, they saw his hand rise to his spectacles as if to remove them, they saw it fall back empty in defeat, onto the rosewood table.

'Whatever we do, we must let Nelson land,' he said firmly.

'And whatever do we do?' Martello demanded, getting up and coming round the table. 'Weatherby's not here, George. He never entered the Colony. He can leave by the same damn route!'

'Please don't shout at me,' Smiley said.

Martello ignored him. 'Which is it going to be, that's all? The conspiracy or the fuck-up?'

Guillam was standing his height, barring the way, and for an extraordinary moment it seemed possible that, broken shoulder notwithstanding, he proposed physically to restrain Martello from coming any closer to where Smiley sat.

'Peter,' Smiley said quietly. 'I see there's a telephone behind you. Perhaps you'd be good enough to pass it to me.'

With the full moon, the wind had dropped and the sea settled. Jerry had not descended all the way to the inlet but made a last camp thirty feet above it, in the cover of a shrub, where he had protection. His hands and knees were cut to ribbons and a branch had grazed his cheek, but he felt good: hungry and alert. In the sweat and danger of the scramble he had forgotten his pain. The inlet was larger than he imagined when he had looked down on it from higher up, and the granite cliffs at sea level were pierced with caves. He was trying to guess Drake's plan — for since Lizzie, he now thought of him as Drake. He had been trying all day. What Drake had to do, he would do from the sea because he was not capable of the nightmarish climb down the cliff. Jerry had wondered at first whether Drake might try to intercept Nelson before he landed, but could see no safe way for Nelson to slip the fleet and make a sea-meeting with his brother.

The sky darkened, the stars came, and the moon-path grew brighter. And Westerby? he thought: what does A do now? A was one hell of a long way from the syndicate solutions of Sarratt, that was for sure.

Drake would also be a fool to attempt to bring his launch to this side of the island, he decided. She was unwieldy and drew too much water to come inshore on a windward coast. A small boat was better and a sampan or a rubber dinghy best. Clambering down the cliff till his boots hit pebbles, Jerry huddled against the rock, watching the breakers thump and the sparks of phosphorus riding with the spume.

'She'll be back by now,' he thought. With any luck she's talked her way into someone's house and is charming the kids and wrapping herself round a cup of Bovril. Tell him I kept faith, she said.

The moon lifted, and still Jerry waited, training his eyes on the darkest spots in an effort to improve his vision. Then over the clatter of the sea he could have sworn he heard the awkward slap of water on a wooden hull and the short grumble of an engine switched on and off again. He saw no light. Edging his way along the shadowed rock he crept as close to the water's edge as he dared and once more crouched, waiting. As the wave of surf soaked him to his thighs, he saw what he was waiting for: against the path of the moon, not twenty yards from him, the arched cabin and curled prow of a single sampan rocking on its anchor. He heard a splash and a muffled order, and as he sank as low as the slope allowed, he picked out against the star-strewn sky the unmistakable shape of Drake Ko in his Anglo-French beret wading cautiously ashore, followed by Tiu carrying an M16 machine gun across both arms. So there you are, thought Jerry, addressing himself, rather than Drake Ko. End of the long trail. Luke's killer, Frostie's killer — whether by proxy or in the flesh is immaterial — Lizzie's lover, Nelson's father, Nelson's brother. Welcome to the man who never broke a deal in his life.