The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories From My Life Page 20

‘Darling,’ Endara cries down to her, in English for my benefit. ‘See who is here! You have heard of . . .’ et cetera.

  Still kneeling, the First Lady looks me cursorily up and down and resumes her building.

  ‘But darling, of course you have heard of him!’ the President implores her. ‘You have read his wonderful books! We both have!’

  Belatedly, the former diplomat in me stirs.

  ‘Madame President. There is no reason on earth why you should have heard of me. But you have surely heard of Sean Connery, the actor, who was in my recent film?’

  Long silence.

  ‘You are friend of Mr Connery?’

  ‘Indeed I am,’ I reply, though I scarcely know him.

  ‘You are very welcome in Panama,’ she says.

  In the Club Union, where Panama’s rich and famous have their presence here on earth, I enquire yet again after the Count Mario da Bernaschina, Ambassador to France, putative husband to the Countess, purveyor of unbranded Scotch. Nobody remembers him, or if they do, they prefer not to. It takes an indefatigable Panamanian friend called Roberto to report, after prolonged enquiry, that the Count had not only existed, but played an insignificant role in the volatile history of his country.

  The title of Count ‘came from Spain via Switzerland’, whatever that meant. He had been a friend of Arnulfo Arias, President of Panama. When Arias was toppled by Torrijos, Bernaschina had fled to the American Canal Zone, claiming to be Arias’ ex-Foreign Minister. He was nothing of the kind. Nevertheless, he lived large for several years until an evening when, dining at an American club, I like to think lavishly, he was kidnapped by Torrijos’ secret police. Incarcerated in the notorious La Modelo prison, he was charged with conspiracy against the state, treason and sedition. Three months later he was mysteriously released. Though in age he boasted of his twenty-five years as a Panamanian diplomat, he had never so much as belonged to the Panamanian foreign service. Least of all had he been Panama’s Ambassador to France. Of the Countess, if such she was, mercifully nothing: my boyhood fantasies could remain intact.

  As to that cask of unbranded whisky and the unsolved matter of who, if anyone, was owed five hundred pounds, of one thing only we may be certain: when conman meets conman, both sides will end up crying foul.

  Countries are characters too. After a walk-on part in The Night Manager, Panama is insisting on star billing in a new novel I am planning, although it is five years later. My hero-to-be is that much neglected denizen of the spy world, the intelligence fabricator or, as the trade jargon has it, pedlar. True, Graham Greene celebrated the fabricator’s calling in Our Man in Havana. But no sudden war resulted from poor Wormold’s fabrications. I wanted the farce to turn to tragedy. The United States had already achieved the remarkable feat of invading Panama while it still occupied the country. Then let it invade a second time, on the strength of my pedlar’s cooked-up intelligence.

  But who would play the part of my pedlar? He must be socially trivial, benign, innocent, lovable, a non-player in the world’s game, but a striver for all that. He must be loyal to whatever he loves most: his wife, his children, his profession. He must be a fantasist. Intelligence services are famously susceptible to fantasists. Many of its most famous children – Allen Dulles for one – have been fantasists in their own right. He must be engaged in a service industry where he rubs shoulders with the great, the good, the influential and the credulous. A fashionable hairdresser then, a Figaro? An antique dealer? A gallery owner?

  Or a tailor?

  There are only two or three books of mine of which I can truthfully say, ‘This is where it began.’ The Spy Who Came in from the Cold began in London airport, when a stocky man in his forties flopped on to a bar stool beside me, delved in his raincoat pocket and poured a handful of loose change in half-a-dozen currencies on to the bar. With a fighter’s thick hands, he raked through the coins till he had enough of one currency.

  ‘Large Scotch,’ he ordered. ‘No bloody ice.’

  It was all I ever heard him say, or so I now believe, but I fancied I caught a whiff of Irish in his voice. When his glass came, he ducked his lips to it in the practised movement of an habitual drinker and emptied it in two gulps. Then he shuffled off, looking at nobody. For all I’ll ever know he was a commercial traveller down on his luck. Whoever he was, he became my spy, Alec Leamas, in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.

  Then there was Doug.

  An American friend visiting London suggests we drop in on his tailor, Doug Hayward, who has his premises in Mount Street in the West End. We are in the mid-nineties. My friend is from Hollywood. Doug Hayward dresses a lot of film stars and actors, he says. Somehow you don’t expect tailors to be sitting down, but Doug when we find him is enthroned in a winged armchair, talking on the telephone. One reason he sat a lot, he later told me, was that he was tall and didn’t want to tower over his customers.

  He is talking to a woman, or I guess she’s a woman because there are a lot of dears and darlings and references to her old man. His voice is theatrical and authoritative, with the Cockney traces ironed out of it, but the cadences still there. When Doug was young, he had spent a lot of time practising his elocution so that he could talk posh in front of shop. Then the sixties came along, posh was out, regional came back in, and thanks not least to the actor Michael Caine, a client of Doug’s, Cockney was the flavour of the decade. But Doug wasn’t about to have learned his posh for nothing. So he stuck to it, while the posh blokes went off round the corner and learned how to talk common.

  ‘Now listen, darling,’ Doug is saying into the telephone. ‘I’m sorry to hear your old man’s playing around, because I like you both. But look at it this way. When you two got together, you were his bit on the side and he had a regular missus. Then he gets rid of his missus and he marries his bit on the side.’ Pause for effect, because by now he knows we’re listening. ‘So there’s a vacancy, isn’t there, darling?’

  ‘Tailoring is theatre,’ Doug tells us over lunch. ‘Nobody comes to me because they need a suit. They come for the buzz. They come to get their youth back, or have a natter. Do they know what they want? Of course they don’t. Anyone can dress a Michael Caine, but can you dress Charles Laughton? Somebody has to be in charge of a suit. I had a bloke the other day asking me why I don’t make suits like Armani. “Listen,” I told him. “Armani makes better Armani suits than I do. If you want an Armani, go down to Bond Street, save yourself six hundred quid and buy one.”’

  I named my tailor Pendel, not Hayward, and called the book The Tailor of Panama, with tacit acknowledgement to Beatrix Potter’s The Tailor of Gloucester. I gave him a half-Jewish background because, like the earliest American moviemakers, most of our tailoring families in those days were East End immigrants from middle Europe. And Pendel after the German word for pendulum, because I liked to think of him swinging back and forth between truth and fiction. All I needed now was a decadent, well-born British rascal who could recruit my Pendel and use him to line his own pocket. But for anyone who has taught at Eton, as I had, there were candidates galore.

  26

  Under deep cover

  It’s only a few years since we said our goodbyes to him, but I may not tell you when or where. I may not tell you whether we burned or buried him, whether we did it in the town or in the country, or whether his name was Tom, Dick or Harry, or the funeral was Christian or of another sort.

  I will call him Harry.

  Harry’s wife was at the funeral, standing very straight, the same wife he had had for fifty years. She had been spat on in the fish queue for him, jeered at by neighbours for him and had her house burgled by the police who thought they were doing their duty by shaking out the local Communist Party firebrand. There was a child there too, now grown, who had suffered similar humiliations at school and later. But I may not tell you whether this was a boy or a girl child, or whether he or she has found a safe c
orner in the world Harry believed he was protecting. The wife, now widow, stood as steady as she had always done under pressure, but the grown-up child was crumpled with grief, to the mother’s evident contempt. A life of hardship had taught her to value bearing, and she expected it of her offspring.

  I went to the funeral because long ago I had had the management of Harry, which was a sacred trust as well as a delicate one since all his energies from late childhood onward had been directed at frustrating his country’s perceived enemies by becoming one of them. Harry had absorbed the Party’s dogma until it was second nature to him. He had bent his mind until he scarcely knew its old shape any more. With our help he had schooled himself to think and react from the hip as one of its faithful. Yet he always managed to come up smiling for his weekly debriefings with his case officer:

  All right then, Harry? I would ask.

  ‘Hunky-dory, thanks. How’s your good self and the missus?’

  Harry had taken on all the Party’s dirty jobs, in the evenings and on weekends, that other comrades were only too glad to be relieved of. He had sold or failed to sell the Daily Worker at street corners, ditched his unsold copies and turned in the cash we gave him to cover them. He had acted as runner and talent-spotter for visiting Soviet cultural attachés and third secretaries of the KGB, and accepted their dreary assignments to collect tittle-tattle about technical industries in the area where he lived. And if no tittle-tattle came his way, we provided him with that too, having first made sure it was harmless.

  Gradually, through diligence and devotion to the cause, Harry rose to become a valued comrade, entrusted with semi-conspiratorial errands that, though he played them for all they were worth, and so did we, seldom amounted to anything of substance in the intelligence market place. But this lack of success didn’t matter, we assured Harry, because he was the right man in the right place, the essential listening post. If you didn’t hear anything, Harry, we told him, that’s fine too because it means we can sleep a little easier at night. And Harry would remark cheerfully that, well, John – or whatever I called myself – somebody has to clean out the drains, don’t they? And we’d say, somebody has to, Harry, and thank you for being the one.

  From time to time, perhaps to bolster his morale, we’d enter the virtual world of staybehind: if those Reds ever do come, Harry, and you happen to wake up to find yourself the Party’s grand poobah for your district – that’s when you’ll become the link man for the resistance movement that’s going to have to drive those bastards back into the sea. In earnest of which fantasy, we would dig his radio transmitter out of its hiding place in his attic, blow the dust off it and watch him send dummy messages to an imaginary underground headquarters, and receive dummy orders in return, all by way of practice for the imminent Soviet occupation of Britain. We felt a little awkward doing this, and so did Harry, but it was part of the job, so we got on with it.

  Ever since I left the secret world, I pondered the motives of Harry and his wife, and of other Harrys and their wives. Shrinks would have had a field day with Harry, but Harry would have had one with the shrinks, too. ‘So what am I supposed to do, then?’ he’d have asked them. ‘Let the Party steal the bloody country from underneath my nose?’

  Harry took no delight in his duplicity. He bore it as a necessary burden of his calling. We paid him a pittance, and if we’d paid him more, he’d have been embarrassed. Besides, he could never have enjoyed his money. So we gave him a tiny private income and a tiny pension and called it his alimony, and we threw in all the respect and friendship that security allowed. With time, furtively, Harry and his wife, who posed as the good comrade’s wife, became mildly religious. The minister of the religion they espoused seems never to have asked why two such avid communists came to him to pray.

  When the funeral was over, and the friends and family and Party comrades had dispersed, a pleasant-faced man in a raincoat and black tie walked over to my car and shook my hand. ‘I’m from the Office,’ he murmured shyly. ‘Harry’s my third this month. They all seem to be dying off at the same time.’

  Harry was one of the poor bloody infantry of honourable men and women who believed that the communists were set on destroying the country they loved, and felt they’d better do something about it. He thought the Reds were a nice enough bunch in their way, idealistic but a bit warped. So he put his life where his convictions were and died an unknown soldier of the Cold War. The practice of infiltrating spies into supposedly subversive organizations is as ancient as the hills. As J. Edgar Hoover reportedly said with unusual wit when told the news that Kim Philby was a Soviet double agent:

  ‘Tell ’em, Jesus Christ only had twelve, and one of them was a double.’

  Today, when we read of undercover policemen worming their way into peace and animal-rights organizations, taking lovers and fathering children under false identities, we are repelled because we know at once that the targets never justified the deception or the human cost. Harry, thank God, did not operate that way, and he believed absolutely that his work was morally justified. He saw international communism as his country’s enemy, and its British manifestation as the enemy inside the home camp. No British communist I ever met would have subscribed to that view. The British establishment emphatically did, and that was good enough for Harry.

  27

  Hunting for warlords

  The novel had everything, even a title: The Mission Song. It was set in London and the Eastern Congo, and had a central character called Salvo, short for Salvador, the son of an erring Irish missionary and a Congolese headman’s daughter. Salvo had been brainwashed by zealous Christian missionaries from infancy, and punished as an outcast for his father’s supposed sins, so it wasn’t hard for me to cry in my beer and identify with him.

  I had three Congolese warlords, each a standard-bearer of the tribe or social group that had spawned him. I had separately wined and dined a small platoon of British and South African mercenaries, and devised a plot flexible enough to respond to the needs and whims of its characters as the story developed on the page.

  I had a beautiful, young female Congolese nurse, a daughter of Kivu, working in an East London hospital and longing only to return to her own people. I had walked her hospital’s corridors, sat in its waiting rooms, and watched the doctors and nurses come and go. I had staked out the changing of the shifts, and from a respectful distance followed groups of weary female nurses as they trekked back to their sleeping quarters and hostels. In London and Ostend I had spent long hours head to head with huddles of Congo’s secret exiles, listening to tales of mass rape and persecution.

  But there was one small snag. I didn’t know anything at first hand about the country I was describing, and knew next to nothing about its indigenous people. The three Congolese warlords that Maxie, my head mercenary, had embroiled in an operation to seize the reins of power in Kivu, were not real characters at all: just identikit men, cobbled together from hearsay and my uninformed imagination. As to the great province of Kivu itself and its capital city Bukavu, they were fantasy places to me, conjured out of old guidebooks and the internet. The whole construct had been dreamed up at a moment in my life when, for family reasons, I had been unable to travel. Only now was I free to do what in better circumstances I would have done a year ago: go there.

  The lure was irresistible. Bukavu, built in the early twentieth century by Belgian colonialists at the southern end of Lake Kivu, the highest and coolest of Africa’s great lakes, read like a lost paradise. I had visions of a misted Shangri-La of wide, bougainvillea-laden streets, and villas with lush gardens sloping to the lake’s shore. The volcanic soil of the surrounding hillsides is so fertile, the same guidebooks told me, and the climate so benign, that there is scarcely a fruit, flower or vegetable that doesn’t thrive there.

  The Eastern Congo was also a death trap. I had read about that too. Its riches had for centuries lured every species of human predator, from
roaming Rwandan militias to corporate carpetbaggers with shiny offices in London, Houston, Petersburg or Beijing. Since the Rwandan genocide, Bukavu had been in the front line of the refugee crisis. Hutu insurgents, fleeing across the border from Rwanda, had used the town as a base to get their own back on the government that had driven them out. In what became known as the First Congo War, the town had been laid waste.

  So what did it all look like now? And what did it feel like? Bukavu was the town of my hero Salvo’s birth. Somewhere close by in the bush lurked the Roman Catholic seminary that had housed Salvo’s father, the big-hearted, fallible Irish priest who had yielded to the charms of a tribal woman. It would be nice to find the seminary too.

  I had read In the Footsteps of Mr Kurtz by Michela Wrong, and greatly admired it. Wrong had lived in the Congolese capital, Kinshasa, and spent altogether twelve years on the African continent. She had covered Rwanda for Reuters and the BBC in the aftermath of the genocide. I invited her to lunch. Might she help? She might. Might she even accompany me to Bukavu? She might, but on terms. Jason Stearns would have to come too.

  At twenty-nine, Jason Stearns, polyglot and African scholar, was a senior analyst with the International Crisis Group. Almost unbelievably, from my point of view, he had actually served three years in the city of Bukavu as political adviser to the United Nations. He spoke immaculate French, Swahili and an unknown number of other African languages. He was one of the West’s leading authorities on the Congo.

  Amazingly also, it turned out that both Jason and Michela had their own professional purposes in East Congo. They agreed to coincide their visits with mine. They ploughed through an embarrassing early draft of my novel and pinpointed its many transgressions. Nevertheless, it gave them an idea of the people I was keen to meet and the places I needed to see. At the top of my list came the three warlords; after them, the Catholic missionaries, seminaries and schools of Salvo’s childhood.