The Pigeon Tunnel (9 page)

I met her for the first time in the house of a German diplomat in the besieged city of Phnom Penh, over a dinner served to the clatter of outgoing gunfire from Lon Nol's palace a hundred yards down the road. She was accompanied by Kurt. Their trading company was called Suisindo, and operated from an old wooden house in the centre of town. She was sparky, tough, brown-eyed and in her late thirties, by turns vulnerable and raucous, never the one thing for long. She could spread her elbows and upbraid you like a bargee. She could tip you a smile to melt your heart. She could cajole, flatter and win you in any way you needed to be won. But it was all for a cause.

And the cause, you quickly learned, was to get food and money to the starving by any method and at any price: medicines to the sick, shelter for the homeless, papers for the stateless and, in the most secular, businesslike, down-to-earth way, perform miracles. This did not in the least prevent her from being a resourceful and frequently shameless businesswoman, particularly when she was pitched against people whose cash, in her unshakeable opinion, would be better in the pockets of the needy. Suisindo made good profits, as it had to, since much of the money that came through the front door flowed straight out of the back, earmarked for whatever good purpose Yvette had set her heart on. And Kurt, the wisest and most long-suffering of men, smiled and nodded it on its way.

A Swedish aid official, enamoured of her, invited Yvette to his private island off the coast of Sweden. Phnom Penh had fallen. Kurt and Yvette, having relocated to Bangkok, were on their financial uppers. A contract was at stake: would they or would they not win the
Swedish aid agency's commission to buy and deliver several million dollars' worth of rice to starving Cambodian refugees on the Thai border? Their nearest competitor was a ruthless Chinese merchant who Yvette was convinced, probably on no greater evidence than her intuition, was plotting to short-change both the aid agency and the refugees.

Under Kurt's urging, she set off for the Swedish island. The beach house was a love-nest prepared for her arrival. Scented candles, she swore, were burning in the bedroom. Her lover-to-be was ardent, but she entreated patience. Might they not first take a romantic walk on the beach? Of course! For you, anything! It's freezing cold, so they must wrap up warm. As they stumble over the sand dunes in the darkness, Yvette proposes a childhood game:

‘Stand still. So. Now you place yourself close behind me. Closer. So. That is very nice. Now I close my eyes and you put your hands over them. You are comfortable? I too. Now you may ask me one question, any question in the world, one only, and I must answer the absolu
te truth. If I do not, I am not worthy of you. You will play this game? Good. I too. So what is your question?'

His question, predictably, concerns her most intimate desires. She describes them, I am sure with brazen falsehood: she dreams, she says, of a certain handsome, virile Swede making love to her in a perfumed bedroom on a lonely island in the midst of a turbulent sea. Then it's her turn. She spins him round, and perhaps with less tenderness than the poor fellow might have expected, claps her hands over his eyes and yells in his ear:

‘What is the nearest competitive tender to Suisindo's for the delivery of one thousand tons of rice to the refugees on the Thai–Cambodian border?'

It was Yvette's work, I now realize, that I wished to celebrate when I embarked on
The Constant Gardener.
Probably I realized it from the start, whenever the start was. Probably she did. And it was Yvette's presence that, before and after the moment of her death, steered me through the book. To all of which, she would say: of course.

11

Bumping into Jerry Westerby

In a ground-floor cellar in Fleet Street that is full of wine barrels, George Smiley sits with Jerry Westerby over a very large pink gin. I am quoting from my novel
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.
Whose pink gin it is we're not told, but we assume it's Jerry's. A page later, Jerry orders a Bloody Mary, we assume for Smiley. He is a sports correspondent of the old school. He is built large and is a former wicket keeper for a county cricket team. He has ‘enormous' hands cushioned with muscle, a mop of sandy grey hair, and a red face that in embarrassment turns scarlet. He wears a famous cricketing tie – which one, the text does not reveal – over a cream silk shirt.

In addition to being a seasoned sports correspondent, Jerry Westerby is a British intelligence agent and worships the ground Smiley walks on. He is also a perfect witness. He has no malice, no axe to grind. He does what the best secret agents do. He gives you chapter and verse, and leaves the theorizing to the Secret Service's analysts – or, as he fondly calls them, the
owls.

While being gently debriefed by Smiley in an Indian restaurant of Jerry's choice, he orders himself the hottest curry on the menu, shatters a poppadom over it – again with his ‘enormous' hands, repeated  then spreads a crimson sauce on it, we assume a lethally hot chilli, to give it bite. It is Jerry's little joke that the restaurant manager keeps the sauce in his deep shelter. In sum then, Jerry comes over as a shy, lumbering, puppyish, endearing fellow who, in his shyness, has a tic of resorting to what he would call Red Indian-speak, even to the point of saluting Smiley with
How!
before ‘padding off into his own reserves'.

End of scene. And end of Jerry Westerby's cameo part in the novel. His job is to give Smiley disturbing intelligence about one of the suspected moles inside the Circus: Toby Esterhase. He hates doing it, but knows it's his duty. And that's all we learn about Jerry Westerby from
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
, and it's all I knew about him too, until I set off for South Asia to research
The Honourable Schoolboy
, and took Jerry along with me as my secret sharer.

If the Jerry of my novel was loosely descended from anyone in my real life, then it was probably one Gordon, an upper-class drifter of vaguely aristocratic origin whom my father had relieved of his family fortune. Later, in despair, he took his own life, which I suppose is why the detail of him remains so clearly imprinted on my memory. His aristocratic origins entitled him to put the absurd ‘Honourable' before his name, and this was the ‘Honourable' that I had awarded to my Jerry in
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
 – although nothing on God's earth would ever persuade him to use it, old boy. As to the ‘Schoolboy' part – well, Jerry might be a case-hardened front-line reporter and British secret agent, but when it came to matters of the heart he was forty going on fourteen.

So that was the Jerry of my imagining, and that – in surely one of the eeriest encounters of my writing life – was the Jerry I bumped into at Raffles Hotel in Singapore: not a pen-portrait, but the man himself, right down to the huge cushioned hands and ‘enormous' shoulders. His name wasn't Westerby, but by then it wouldn't have surprised me if it had been. It was Peter Simms. He was a veteran British foreign correspondent and also, as is now generally known, though at the time I knew it no better than anyone else, a veteran British secret agent. He was six foot three with sandy hair and a schoolboy grin, and a habit of barking
Supah!
when he fervently shook your hand in greeting.

Nobody who met him could forget that first instantaneous surge of sheer good fellowship that swept you off your feet. And I shall never forget my sense of awed disbelief tinged with guilt that I was standing face to face with a man I had created out of adolescent memories and thin air, and here he was in the flesh, all six foot three of him.

Here's what I didn't know about Peter at the time, but picked up along the way – some of it, sadly, too late. In the Second World War, Simms serves in India with the Bombay Sappers and Miners. I had always assumed there was a bit of empire in Westerby's early life. Here it was. Afterwards, at Cambridge University, Simms studies Sanskrit and falls in love with Sanda, a beautiful princess from the Shan States who in childhood has sailed the Burmese lakes in a ceremonial boat shaped like a golden bird. Westerby would have fallen just as hard. Already in love with Asia, Simms converts to Buddhism. He and Sanda marry in Bangkok. They remain fiercely and triumphantly together all their lives, sharing all manner of adventures, either by their own choice or on Her Majesty's Secret Service. Peter teaches at Rangoon University, works for
Time
magazine in Bangkok and Singapore and later for the Sultan of Oman, and finally for the intelligence branch of the Hong Kong police while Hong Kong was still a colony. At each stage of his life, Sanda is at his side.

In a word, there was not one detail of Simms' life that I would not have awarded to Jerry Westerby, save perhaps the happy marriage, because I needed him to be a loner, still in search of love. But all this only in retrospect. When I bumped into Peter Simms at the Raffles Hotel in Singapore – where else? – I knew none of it. I knew that here was my Jerry Westerby incarnate, so full of energy and dreams, so ardently British, yet so identified with Asian culture, that if he wasn't already working for British Intelligence, it was sheer carelessness on their part.

We met again in Hong Kong, again in Bangkok and again in Saigon. Finally I popped the question: might Peter by any chance be willing to accompany me around the stickier corners of South-east Asia? I need not have been so hesitant. Nothing would please him better, old boy. Then might he also, I asked, stoop to accepting a professional fee as my researcher and guide? You jolly well bet he would! His job with the Hong Kong police was running down, and the old cashflow could do with a spot of topping up, no question. We set off on our journeyings. With Peter's unquenchable energy, Asian
erudition and Asian soul, how could I not complete the full-colour version of the Westerby that I had lightly sketched in
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy?

In 2002, Peter died in France. An elegant obituary headed ‘Journalist, Adventurer, Spy & Friend', written by David Greenway – I lifted his cry of
Supah!
from it – rightly describes him as the model of Jerry Westerby in
The Honourable Schoolboy.
But my Westerby was there ahead of Peter Simms. What Peter did, incurable romantic, generous to the last, was seize hold of Jerry with both enormous hands, and make him boisterously his own.

12

Lonely in Vientiane

We lay side by side in an upstairs opium den in Vientiane, on rush beach mats and wooden neck pillows that made you look straight up at the ceiling. A wizened coolie in a Hakka hat crouched between us in the half-darkness, replenishing our pipes or, in my case, rather irritably relighting it when it went out. If a movie script had read,
INTERIOR
.
OPIUM DEN
.
LAOS
.
LATE SEVENTIES
.
NIGHT
., this was the scene the set designer would have come up with, and we smokers were exactly the mix that the time and place would have required: an old French colonial planter called Monsieur Edouard, now dispossessed by the secret war that was raging away in the north, a brace of Air America pilots, a quartet of war correspondents, a Lebanese arms trader and his lady companion, and the reluctant war tourist who was myself. And Sam, my recumbent neighbour, who had kept up a soporific monologue ever since I had lain down beside him. The
fumerie
had a certain prickly nervousness about it because the Laotian authorities officially disapproved of opium, and we had been warned by an over-earnest correspondent that at any moment we might be required to find our way over the rooftops, down a ladder, into a side street. But Sam who lay beside me said don't give it a second thought, it's all bullshit. Who Sam was or is, I'll never know. My guess would be, he was some kind of English remittance man who had come East to find his soul and, after five years of kicking around the war fronts of Cambodia and Vietnam and now Laos, was still searching for it. That at least was what his amiable stream-of-consciousness seemed to be telling me.

I hadn't smoked opium before and haven't afterwards, but ever since that night I have cherished the irresponsible belief that opium is one of those proscribed drugs with a dire reputation that, smoked by sensible people in sensible proportions, does you nothing but good. You stretch out on the rush mat, you feel apprehensive and a bit of a fool. It's your first time. You take a puff under instruction, mess it up, the coolie shakes his head and you feel an even bigger fool. But once you've got the hang of it, which is about breathing in, long and slow, and at the right moment, your benign self takes over, you're not drunk or silly or aggressive, and you're not impelled by sudden sexual urges. You're just the contented, free-associating fellow you always knew you were. And best of all, come morning, there's no hangover, no remorse, no anguished coming-down, just a good night's sleep behind you and welcome to the day. Or so Sam assured me when he discovered I was a novice, and so I have believed ever since.

Sam's early life, I gathered from his meanderings, had run a pretty conventional course – nice English country house, boarding schools, Oxbridge, marriage, children: until the balloon went up. What or whose balloon, I never fathomed. Either Sam expected me to know, or he preferred I didn't, and I wasn't going to be so ill-mannered as to ask. It went up. And it must have been a pretty drastic balloon because Sam shook the dust of England from his feet that same day and, vowing never to return, went to ground in Paris, which he loved until he lost his heart to a French woman who refused him. So up went the balloon again.

Sam's first thought is to join the Foreign Legion, but either they're not recruiting that day or he sleeps late or goes to the wrong address, because by now I'm beginning to suspect that what's easy for most of us isn't necessarily easy for Sam. There's a disconnect about him that makes you wary of assuming that one thing will follow naturally on another. So instead of the Foreign Legion, he signs up with a French-based South-east Asia news agency. They don't pay your travel or expenses or anything like that, Sam explains, but if you happen to file anything faintly useful they pay you a pittance. And since
Sam still has this little bit of his own, as he puts it, he reckons this is a pretty fair deal.

So for the last five years he has been trailing round the war zones, and here and there he's got lucky and even earned himself a byline or two in the big French rags, either because he's had a tip-off from one of the real journalists, or because he's made the stuff up. He's always rather fancied his chances at fiction, what with the life he's led, and he'd like to make a thing of it: short stories, the novel, the whole bit. It's just the loneliness that holds him back, he explains: the thought of sitting down at a desk in the jungle and bashing away for days on end, with no editor to chivvy you and no deadline.

But he's getting there. And looking over his output recently, there's absolutely no question in his mind that the stories he's made up out of thin air for his French-based news agency are streets better than anything that's strictly what you'd call fact-based. And come a day not too far off, he's going to sit down at that desk in the jungle and, regardless of the loneliness involved and the absence of a deadline or an editor to chivvy him, he's going to let rip, believe him. It's just the loneliness that puts him off, he repeats, in case I haven't got his point by now. It eats into him, especially in Vientiane where there's nothing to do but smoke, get laid and listen to drunk Mexican Air America pilots boasting about their kills while they get a blow-job at the White Rose.

Then he tells me how he deals with this loneliness, which is no longer strictly related to his writing ambitions, he confesses, but embraces his entire lifestyle. What he misses most in the world is Paris. Ever since his great love turned him down and the balloon went up again, Paris has been a no-go area for him, and it always will be. He'll never go back there, not after the girl, he couldn't. Every street, every building, every bend in the river shouts of her, he explains earnestly in a rare, if somnolent, literary flourish. Or is he remembering a song by Maurice Chevalier? All the same, Paris is where his soul is. His heart too, he adds after due consideration. Hear me? I hear you, Sam.

So what he likes to do when he's had a pipe or two, he goes on – deciding to admit me to his great secret because I'm by now his closest friend and the only person in the world who gives a fuck about him, as he adds in parenthesis – what he's going to do just as soon as he feels the need on him, which could be any minute now that he's got his head straight, he's going to go down to the White Rose where they know him, and he's going to slip Madame Lulu a twenty-dollar bill and have himself a three-minute phone call to the Café de Flore in Paris. And when the waiter at the Flore picks up the phone, he's going to ask to speak to Mademoiselle Julie Delassus, which is a made-up name so far as he knows, not one he's used before. Then he's going to listen to them yelling for her all across the tables and out on to the boulevard:
Mademoiselle Delassus . . . Mademoiselle Julie Delassus . . . au téléphone s'il vous plaît!

And while they call her name, over and over till it fades into the ether, or his time is up, whichever is the later, he'll be listening to twenty dollars' worth of Paris.