A SMALL TOWN IN GERMANY by John le Carré

‘Fuck off.’

Pulling back the chair, he tipped the little cushion to the floor and sat down at the desk. Resting his chin in his hand, he waited for the room to steady. He was alone. He was alone like Harting, contraband smuggled in, living like Harting on borrowed time; hunting, like Harting, for a missing truth. There was a tap beside the window and he filled the tea machine and played with the knobs until it began to hiss. As he returned to the desk he nearly tripped over a green box. It was the size of a narrow briefcase, but stiff and rectangular, made of the kind of reinforced leather-cloth used for bridge­sets and shot-gun cases. It had the Queen’s initials just beneath the handle and reinforced corners of thin steel; the locks had been ripped open and it was empty. That’s what we’re all doing, isn’t it? Looking for something that isn’t there?

He was alone, with only the files for company and the stink of warm damp from the electric fire; and the pale breeze of the plastic fan and the muttering of the tea machine. Slowly he began turning the pages. Some of the files were old, taken from the shelves, half in English and half in a cruel Gothic script jagged as barbed wire. The names were set out like athletes, surname first and Christian name second, with only a couple of lines at the top and a hasty signature at the bottom to authorise their ultimate disposal. The files on the trolley were new, and the paper was rich and smooth, and the minutes signed with familiar names. And some were folders, records of mail despatched and mail received, with titles underlined and margins ruled.

He was alone, at the beginning of Harting’s journey, with only his track for company, and the sullen grumbling of the water pipes in the corridor outside, like the shuffling of clogs upon a scaffold. Are they like horses? Hazel Bradfield’s voice enquired. Do they sleep standing up? He was alone. And whatever he found there was the other part of coming alive.

Meadowes was asleep. He would not for a moment have admit­ted it; and Cork would not, in charity, for a moment have accused him of it; and it is true that technically, like Hazel Bradfield’s horses, his eyes were open. He was reclining in his upholstered library chair in an attitude of well-deserved retirement, while the sounds of dawn floated through the open window.

‘I’m handing over to Bill Sutcliffe,’ Cork said, loud and deliberately careless. ‘Nothing you want, is there, before I knock off? We’re brewing a cup of tea if you fancy it.’

‘It’s all right,’ Meadowes said indistinctly, sitting forward with a jerk. ‘Be all right in a minute.’ Cork, staring down through the open window into the car park, allowed him time to collect himself.

‘We’re brewing a cup of tea if you fancy it,’ he repeated. ‘Valerie’s got the kettle on.’ He was clutching a folder of telegrams. ‘There hasn’t been a night like that since Bremen. Talk, that’s all it is. Words. By four this morning they’d forgot­ten about security altogether. H.E. and the Secretary of State were just chatting direct on the open line. Fantastic. Blown the lot I should think: codes, cyphers, the whole bloody orchestra.’

‘They’re blown already,’ Meadowes replied, more for him­self than for Cork; and came to join him at the window. ‘By Leo.’

No dawn is ever wholly ominous. The earth is too much its own master; the cries, the colours and the scents too confident to sustain our grim foreboding. Even the guard at the front gate, doubled since evening, had a restful, domestic look. The morning light which glistened on their long leather coats was soft and strangely harmless; their pace as they slowly walked the perimeter was measured and wise. Cork was moved to optimism.

‘I reckon today might be the day,’ he said. ‘A father by lunchtime: how’s that, Arthur?’

‘They’re never that quick,’ Meadowes said, ‘not the first ones,’ and they fell to counting off the cars.

‘Full house, near as nothing,’ Cork declared; and it was true. Bradfield’s white Jaguar, de Lisle’s red sports car, Jenny Pargiter’s little Wolseley, Gaveston’s shooting-brake with the baby chair mounted on the passenger seat, Jackson’s rugged Two Thousand; even Crabbe’s broken down Kapitan, twice personally banished from the car park by the Ambassador, had crept back in the crisis, its wings bent outward like crooked claws.

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