Our Game Read online

  PRAISE FOR OUR GAME

  “Vintage le Carré. A splendid thriller [with] characters among [his] best psychological creations.”

  —The Globe and Mail

  “Timely and compelling.”

  —GQ

  “No contemporary novelist tells the story of a chase with greater suspense and dramatic power.”

  —The Sunday Telegraph (London)

  “Everything you expect from a towering writer in his prime. As timely as they come . . . A terrific book. If you’ve never read le Carré, this is a fine introduction. If you’re already a fan, you won’t be able to put this one down.”

  —Edmonton Journal

  “Our Game keeps the pages turning with pleasure.”

  —The Washington Post

  “John le Carré is not merely the finest of thriller writers . . . but also a writer with a genius gift of anticipation of the real-life dramas of the same age . . . Our Game is a wonderful book.”

  —Financial Times

  “[Le Carré] knows how to make you turn the pages . . . A splendid achievement.”

  —The Financial Post

  “[Le Carré] reveals to us the moral confusion that is the consequence of the need to guard our security . . . We hear in le Carré the essential voice of our time.”

  —The Daily Telegraph (London)

  “A reader who feared that the end of the Cold War would deprive Mr. le Carré of his subject can now feel a measure of relief. If anything his understanding of East-West misunderstanding has grown richer, and he now possesses vast new territories to mine.”

  —The New York Times

  “Irresistible . . . There is a sinuous plot, leisurely introduced, whose coils become increasingly constricting. There is crisp, intelligent dialogue, much of it riding an undercurrent of menace. And there is a hero who does not see himself as heroic but who struggles with inner demons as much as with the forces arrayed against him.”

  —Time

  “Furious in action . . . Takes us by the neck on page one and never lets go.”

  —Chicago Sun-Times

  “Our Game is an absorbing and thought-provoking piece of work.

  ” —Times Literary Supplement

  “While [villainy and subterfuge] endure, an author with John le Carré’s gift for irony and instinct for the secrets of the human heart will never lack for stories to tell . . . [The] straightforward first-person narration takes the reader into the heart of a tale as emotionally resonant as it is compelling.”

  —Entertainment Weekly

  “Le Carré continues to stay ahead of the news, and his latest novel is smashingly up to date . . . His skill as a narrator, [his] dialogue, and scene-setting are incomparable . . . Le Carré is moving into much tougher territory cut[ting] deeply into the dour contemporary world.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “[Le Carré is] a swift, superlative scene-setter . . . The plot advances and deepens musically, with recapitulations brief and elaborate, keeping the reader alerted, sending alarm signals of unease into past, present, and future . . . It’s an extraordinary novel.”

  —The Observer Review

  “Frightening . . . brilliant . . . surprising . . . Draws superbly on the human and ethical conundrums of Bosnia and Chechenya.”

  —Booklist

  “The arrival of a new John le Carré novel is always a major literary event . . . [Our Game is] immaculately researched . . . A cracking thriller . . . A novel of adventure and suspense in the grand tradition.

  —Sunday Independent (U.K.)

  “Unsettingly timely . . . Le Carré has never written more subtly or tellingly of the fate of agents doomed by their own success.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Observations, tragic and comic by turn, reveal le Carré . . . as a consummate chronicler of the human condition. The blisteringly convoluted mind games and the sparkling interchanges of cat-and-mouse dialogue proclaim le Carré’s genius. The Cold War may be over but the master of spy fiction can still warm to his theme with aplomb.”

  —Yorkshire Post

  “[Le Carré’s] strength is in the tough use of language to conjure up a scene so extraordinarily vivid that it stays in the memory.”

  —The Times (U.K.)

  “Exciting and adventurous.”

  —The Sunday Times

  PENGUIN CANADA

  OUR GAME

  JOHN LE CARRÉ was born in 1931. After attending the universities of Berne and Oxford, he spent five years in the British Foreign Service. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, his third book, secured him a worldwide reputation. He is the author of twenty-one novels, including Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; A Perfect Spy; and The Constant Gardener. His books have been translated into thirty-six languages. He lives in England.

  ALSO BY JOHN LE CARRÉ

  Call for the Dead

  A Murder of Quality

  The Spy Who Came in from the Cold

  The Looking Glass War

  A Small Town in Germany

  The Naïve and Sentimental Lover

  Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

  The Honourable Schoolboy

  Smiley’s People

  The Little Drummer Girl

  A Perfect Spy

  The Russia House

  The Secret Pilgrim

  The Night Manager

  The Tailor of Panama

  Single & Single

  The Constant Gardener

  Absolute Friends

  The Mission Song

  A Most Wanted Man

  JOHN

  LE CARRÉ

  OUR GAME

  PENGUIN CANADA

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

  M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

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  (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)

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  (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published in Canada in Viking Canada hardcover by Penguin Group (Canada),

  a division of Pearson Canada Inc., 1995

  Published in Penguin paperback by Penguin Group (Canada),

  a division of Pearson Canada Inc., 1996

  Published in this edition, 2009

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 (WEB)

  Copyright © David Cornwell, 1995

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  Publisher’s note: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Manufactured in Canada.

  * * *

  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATA
LOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  Le Carré, John, 1931–

  Our game / John le Carré.

  ISBN 978-0-14-317109-6

  I. Title.

  PR6062.E42087 2009 823’.914 C2009-902357-1

  * * *

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

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  He who thinks of the consequences

  cannot be brave.

  Ingush proverb

  Who gathers knowledge

  gathers pain.

  Ecclesiastes 1:18

  If I were living in the Caucasus,

  I would be writing fairy tales there.

  Chekhov, 1888

  1

  Larry went officially missing from the world on the second Monday of October, at ten minutes past eleven, when he failed to deliver his opening lecture of the new academic year.

  I am able to set the scene exactly because it was not so very long ago, in the same dreary Bath weather, that I had dragged Larry down to see the wretched place for the first time. To this day I have the most accusing memory of the brutalist slab barracks closing in on him like the walls of his new confinement. And of Larry’s ever youthful back walking reproachfully away from me down the concrete canyon like a man going to his nemesis. If I had had a son, I thought as I stared after him, this was how it would feel to be dumping him at his first boarding school.

  “Hey, Timbo,” he whispers over his shoulder, the way Larry can speak to you from miles away.

  “Yes, Larry.”

  “This is it, is it?”

  “This is what?”

  “The future. Where it all ends. Leftover life.”

  “It’s a new beginning,” I say loyally.

  But loyal to whom? To him? To me? To the Office?

  “We have to scale down,” I say. “Both of us do.”

  The day of his disappearance was by all accounts equally depressing. A cloying mist envelops the hideous grey university campus and breathes a sticky pall over the alloy-framed windows of Larry’s grimy lecture room. Twenty students sit at desks facing the empty lectern, which is of a particularly violent yellow pitch pine, very scratched. The subject of his lecture has been chalked on the blackboard by a mysterious hand, probably a doting pupil’s. Karl Marx in the Supermarket: Revolution and Modern Materialism. There is a bit of laughter. Students are the same everywhere. On the first day of term they will laugh at anything. But gradually they fall quiet and content themselves with smirking at each other, peering at the door, and listening for Larry’s footsteps. Until, having allowed him the full ten minutes’ grace, they self-consciously put away their pens and notebooks and clank along the rocking concrete pavement to the canteen.

  Over coffee, the freshers are duly appalled by this first experience of Larry’s unpredictability. This never happened to us at school! How will we catch up? Will we be given notes? Oh, God! But the hardened ones, Larry’s fans, only laugh. That’s Larry for you, they explain happily; next time round he’ll bat on for three hours and you’ll be so hooked you’ll forget lunch. They speculate about what might have kept him: a bumper hangover, or an out-rageous love affair, of which they ascribe any number to him, for in his mid-forties Larry is still a lover just to look at: he has the lost-boy appeal of a poet who never grew up.

  The university authorities took an equally relaxed view of Larry’s reluctance to appear. Common Room colleagues, not all from the friendliest of motives, had reported the offence within the hour. Nonetheless the administrators waited for another Monday, and another no-show, before mustering the energy to telephone his landlady and, on receiving no satisfaction from her, the Bath police. It was a further six days before the police called on me: a Sunday, if you can believe it, ten o’clock at night. I had spent a wearisome afternoon escorting a coachload of our village elderlies on a trip to Longeat, and a frustrating evening in the winery wrestling with a German grape press, which my late uncle Bob had christened The Sulky Hun. Nevertheless, when I heard their ring my heart leapt while I pretended to myself that it was Larry, hovering on my doorstep with his accusing brown eyes and dependent smile: “Come on, Timbo, fix us a bloody big Scotch, and who gives a damn about women anyway?”

  Two men.

  It was pelting rain, so they had huddled themselves into the porch while they waited for me to open up. Plain clothes of the deliberately recognisable kind. Parked their car in my drive, a Peugeot 306 diesel, very shiny under the downpour, marked POLICE and fitted out with the usual array of mirrors and aerials. As I peered through the fish-eye, their hatless faces stared back at me like bloated corpses: the elder man coarse and moustached, the younger goatish, with a long, sloped head like a coffin and small, round eyes like bullet holes shot through it.

  Wait, I told myself. Add a beat. That’s what being calm is all about. This is your own house, late at night. Only then did I consent to unchain the door to them. Seventeenth-century, iron-bound, and weighs a ton. The night sky restless. A capricious wind snapping at the trees. The crows still shifting and complaining, despite the darkness. During the day we had had a crazy fall of snow. Ghostly grey lines of it lay on the drive.

  “Hullo,” I said. “Don’t stand there freezing. Come on in.”

  My entrance lobby is a late addition by my grandfather, a glass-and-mahogany box like a vast elevator that serves as an antechamber to the Great Hall. For a moment, there we stood, all three, under the brass lantern, going neither up nor down while we looked each other over.

  “This is Honeybrook Manor, is it, sir?” said the moustache, a smiler. “Only we didn’t seem to see a sign at all.”

  “We call it the Vineyard these days,” I said. “What can I do for you?” But if my words were polite, my tone was not. I was speaking the way I speak to trespassers: Excuse me. Can I help you?

  “Then you would be Mr. Cranmer, am I correct, sir?” the moustache suggested, still with his smile. Why I say smile, I don’t know, for his expression, though technically benign, was devoid of humour or of semblance of goodwill.

  “Yes, I’m Cranmer,” I replied, but preserving the note of question in my voice.

  “Mr. Timothy Cranmer? Just routine, sir, if you don’t mind. Not disturbing you, I trust?” His moustache hid a vertical white scar, I guessed a harelip operation. Or perhaps someone had smashed a broken bottle into him, for he had a patchy, reconstructed complexion.

  “Routine?” I echoed, in open disbelief. “At this time of night? Don’t tell me my car licence is out of date.”

  “No, sir, it’s not about your car licence. We’re enquiring about a Dr. Lawrence Pettifer, of Bath University.”

  I allowed myself a chastened pause, then a frown midway between amusement and vexation. “You mean Larry? Oh my Lord. What’s he been up to now?” And when I received no answer but the stare: “Nothing bad, is it, I trust?”

  “We’re given to understand you’re an acquaintance of the Doctor’s, not to say close friend. Or isn’t that correct?”

  It’s a little too correct, I thought.

  “Close?” I repeated, as if the notion of proximity were new to me. “I don’t think I’d go that far.”

  As one man, they handed me their coats and watched me while I hung them up, then watched me again while I opened the inner door for them. Most first-time visitors to Honeybrook make a reverent pause at this point while they take in the minstrels’ gallery, the great fireplace, the portraits, and the wagon roof with its armorial bearings. Not the moustache. And n
ot the coffinhead, who, having until now lugubriously observed our exchanges from behind his older colleague’s shoulder, elected to address me in a deprived and snappish monotone:

  “We heard you and Pettifer were bosom pals,” he objected. “Winchester College was what we heard, no less. You were schoolmates.”

  “There were three years between us. For schoolboys that’s a lifetime.”

  “Nonetheless, in public school circles, as we hear, such things make a bond. Plus you were students together at Oxford,” he added accusingly.

  “What’s happened to Larry?” I said.

  My question drew an insolent silence from both of them. They seemed to be deliberating whether I rated an answer. It fell to the elder man, as their official spokesman, to reply. His technique, I decided, was to play himself in caricature. And in slow motion too.

  “Yes, well, your doctor friend has gone a bit missing, to tell you the truth, Mr. Cranmer, sir,” he confessed, in the tones of a reluctant Inspector Plod. “No foul play suspected, not at this stage. However, he’s missing from his lodgings and his place of work. And so far as we can gauge”—how he loved that word; his frown said so—“he’s not written anybody a goodbye billy-doo. Unless he wrote you one, of course. He’s not here, is he, by any chance, sir? Upstairs, sleeping it off, so to speak?”

  “Of course not. Don’t be ridiculous.”

  His scarred moustache abruptly widened, revealing anger and bad teeth. “Oh? Now, why am I being ridiculous, Mr. Cranmer, sir?”

  “I would have told you at once. I’d have said, He’s upstairs. Why should I waste your time, or mine, pretending he isn’t here if he is?”

  Again he didn’t answer me. He was clever in that way. I was beginning to suspect he was clever in other ways as well. I had a prejudiced view of policemen that I was trying to unlearn at the same time that he was deliberately playing on it. Partly it was a class thing; partly it stemmed from my former profession, which treated them as poor relations. And partly it was Larry agitating in me, because, as we used to say in the Office, Larry only had to be in the same borough as a policeman to be arrested for obstructing him in his lawful duties.