John le Carré - The Honourable Schoolboy
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- Название:The Honourable Schoolboy
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- Год:1977
- ISBN:0-340-49490-5
- Рейтинг книги:5 / 5. Голосов: 1
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'Super,' Jerry agreed. 'Marvellous. Charlie's a prince.'
'Liese some pretty utterly fantastic character herself, Mr Wessby,' Tiu remarked handsomely, so on Jerry's insistence they drank to that — to her fantastic character.
'Hey what's all this Liese thing actually?' Jerry asked as he put down his glass. 'You're Lizzie. Who's this Liese? Mr Tiu, I don't know the lady. Why am I left out of the joke?'
Here Lizzie did definitely turn to Tiu for guidance, but Tiu had ordered himself some raw fish and was eating it rapidly and with total devotion.
'Some horse-writer ask pretty damn questions,' he remarked through a full mouth.
'New town, new leaf, new name,' Lizzie said finally, with an unconvincing smile. 'I wanted a change, so I chose a new name. Some girls get a new hair-do, I get a new name.'
'Got a new fellow to go with it?' Jerry asked.
She shook her head, eyes down, while Tiu let out a whoop of laughter.
'What's happened to this town, Mr Tiu?' Jerry demanded, instinctively covering for her. 'Chaps all gone blind or something? Crikey, I'd cross continents for her, wouldn't you? Whatever she calls herself, right?'
'Me I go from Kowloonside to Hong Kongside, no further!' said Tiu, hugely entertained by his own wit. 'Or maybe I stay Kowloonside and call her up, tell her come over see me one hour!'
At which Lizzie's eyes stayed down and Jerry thought it would be quite fun, on another occasion when they all had more time, to break Tiu's fat neck in several places.
Unfortunately, however, breaking Tiu's neck was not at present on Craw's shopping list.
The money, Craw had said. When the moment's right, open up one end of the goldseam and that's your grand finale.
So he started her off about Indocharter. Who were they, what was it like to work for them? She rose to it so fast he began to wonder whether she enjoyed this knife-edge existence more than he had realised.
'Oh it was a fabulous adventure, Jerry! You can't begin to imagine it, I assure you,' Ric's multinational accent again: 'Airline! Just the word is so absurd. I mean don't for a minute think of your bright new planes and your glamorous hostesses and champagne and caviar or anything like that at all. This was work. This was pioneering, which is what drew me in the first place. I could perfectly well have simply lived off Daddy, or my aunts, I mean mercifully I'm totally independent, but who can resist challenge? All we started out with was a couple of dreadful old DC3s literally stuck together with string and chewing gum. We even had to buy the safety certificate. Nobody would issue them. After that we flew literally anything. Hondas, vegetables, pigs — oh the boys had such a story about those poor pigs. They broke loose, Jerry. They came into the first class, even into the cabin, imagine!'
'Like passengers,' Tiu explained, with his mouth full. 'She fly first-class pigs, okay, Mr Wessby?'
'What routes?' Jerry asked when they had recovered from their laughter.
'You can see how he interrogates me, Mr Tiu? I never knew I was so glamorous! So mysterious!
We flew everywhere, Jerry. Bangkok, Cambodia sometimes. Battambang, Phnom Penh, Kampong Cham when it was open. Everywhere. Awful places.'
'And who were your customers? Traders, taxi jobs — who were the regulars?'
'Absolutely anyone we could get. Anyone who could pay. Preferably in advance, naturally.'
Pausing from his Kobe beef, Tiu felt inspired to offer social chitchat.
'Your father some big lord, okay, Mr Wessby?'
'More or less,' said Jerry.
'Lords some pretty rich fellows. Why you gotta be a horse-writer, okay?'
Ignoring Tiu entirely, Jerry played his trump card and waited for the ceiling mirror to crash on to their table. 'There's a story that you people had some local Russian embassy link,' he said easily, straight at Lizzie. 'That ring a bell at all, sport? Any Reds under your bed at all, if I may ask?'
Tiu was taking care of his rice, holding the bowl under his chin and shovelling it nonstop. But this time, significantly, Lizzie didn't give him half a glance.
'Russians?' she repeated, puzzled. 'Why on earth should Russians come to us? They had regular Aeroflot flights in and out of Vientiane every week.'
He would have sworn, then and later, that she was telling the truth. But toward Lizzie herself he acted not quite satisfied. 'Not even local runs?' he insisted. 'Fetching and carrying, courier service or whatever?'
'Never. How could we? Besides, the Chinese simply loathe the Russians, don't they, Mr Tiu?'
'Russians pretty bad people, Mr Wessby,' Tiu agreed. 'They smell pretty bad.'
So do you, thought Jerry, catching that first-wife's scent again.
Jerry laughed at his own absurdity: 'I've got editors like other people have stomach ache,' he protested. 'He's convinced we can do a Red-under-the-bed job. Ricardo's Soviet Paymasters... Did Ricardo take a dive for the Kremlin? '
'Paymaster?' Lizzie repeated, utterly mystified. 'Ric never received a penny from the Russians. What are they talking about?'
Jerry again. 'But Indocharter did, didn't they? — Unless my lords and masters have been sold a total pup, which I suspect they have been, as usual. They drew money from the local Embassy and piped it down to Hong Kong in US dollars. That's London's story and they're sticking to it.'
'They're mad.' she said confidently. 'I've never heard such nonsense.'
To Jerry she seemed even relieved that the conversation had taken this improbable course. Ricardo alive — there, she was drifting through a minefield. Ko as her lover — that secret was Ko's or Tiu's to dispense, not hers. But Russian money — Jerry was as certain as he dared be that she knew nothing and feared nothing about it.
He offered to ride back with her to Star Heights, but Tiu lived that way, she said.
'See you again pretty soon, Mr Wessby,' Tiu promised.
'Look forward to it, sport,' said Jerry.
'You wanna stick to horse-writing, hear that? In my opinion, you get more money that way, Mr Wessby, okay?' There was no menace in his voice, nor in the friendly way he patted Jerry's upper arm. Tiu did not even speak as if he expected his advice to be taken as any more than a confidence between friends.
Then suddenly it was over. Lizzie kissed the headwaiter, but not Jerry. She sent Jerry, not Tiu, for her coat, so that she wouldn't be alone with him. She scarcely looked at him as she said goodbye.
Dealing with beautiful women, your Grace, Craw had warned, is like dealing with known criminals, and the lady you are about to solicit undoubtedly falls within that category. Wandering home through the moonlit streets — the long trek, beggars, eyes in doorways notwithstanding — Jerry subjected Craw's dictum to closer scrutiny. On criminal he really couldn't rule at all: criminal seemed a pretty variable sort of standard at the best of times, and neither the Circus nor its agents existed to uphold some parochial concept of the law. Craw had told him that in slump periods Ricardo had made her carry little parcels for him over frontiers. Big deal. Leave it to the owls. Known criminal however was quite a different matter. Known he would go along with absolutely. Remembering Elizabeth Worthington's caged stare at Tiu, he reckoned he had known that face, that look and that dependence, in one guise or another, for the bulk of his waking life.
It has been whispered once or twice by certain trivial critics of George Smiley that at this juncture he should somehow have seen which way the wind was blowing with Jerry, and hauled him out of the field. Effectively, Smiley was Jerry's case officer, after all. He alone kept Jerry's file, welfared and briefed him. Had he been in his prime, they say, instead of halfway down the other side, he would have read the warning signals between the lines of Craw's reports, and headed Jerry off in time. They might just as well have complained that he was a second-rate fortune-teller. The facts, as they came to Smiley, are these:
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