A Legacy of Spies by John Le Carré

Author:John Le Carré [Carré, John le]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: fiction, kindle, espionage
ISBN: 9780241981238
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2017-09-06T23:00:00+00:00

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Was it purely for reasons of economy that in my later transcript, which I am now reading, I departed from Alec’s spoken words at this point, preferring to paraphrase them for greater – shall we say objectivity? From the moment of leaving Gustav in the care of the two Sorbs, Alec clung to minor roads wherever the snow permitted. His problem, he explained, was ‘knowing too bloody much’ about the perils of the terrain they were crossing. The whole area was awash with Military Intelligence and KGB listening stations, and he knew them all by heart. He spoke of traversing empty, dead-straight minor roads with six inches of virgin snow on them, only the tree-lines to guide him; of his relief at entering forest until Tulip gave a yell of horror. She had spotted the former Nazi hunting lodge where the GDR elite brought visiting dignitaries to shoot deer and wild boar and get drunk. They made a hasty detour, lost their bearings and saw a light burning in a remote farmhouse. Leamas thumped on the door. It was opened by a terrified peasant woman clutching a knife. Having obtained directions from her, he persuaded her to sell him bread, sausage and a bottle of slivovitz, and on his way back to the Trabant tripped over a sagging telephone cable, he assumed for sounding a fire alarm. He cut it anyway.

The day was darkening, the snow thickening, the piebald Trabant was on her last legs: ‘clutch shot, heater shot, gearbox shot, smoke belching out of the bonnet’. He reckoned that they were about ten kilometres from Bad Schandau and fifteen from the crossing point on the smugglers’ map. Having confirmed their position as best he could by compass, he selected an eastbound timber track and drove until they hit a snowdrift. Huddled together in the Trabi in freezing cold, they ate the bread and Wurst, drank the slivovitz, froze and watched the deer go by while Tulip, half asleep with her head on Alec’s shoulder, languidly described her hopes and dreams for her new life with Gustav in England.

She would not wish Gustav to go to Eton. She had heard that English boarding schools were run by pederasts like his father. She would prefer a proletarian State school with girls, much sport, not too strict. Gustav would start learning English from the day he arrived. She would see to that. For his birthday she would buy him an English bicycle. She had heard Scotland was beautiful. They would bicycle together in Scotland.

She was still talking in this vein, dozing, when Alec became aware of four silent male figures with Kalashnikovs standing like sentinels round the car. Ordering Tulip to remain where she was, he opened the door and slowly got out while they watched him. None was above seventeen, he reckoned, and they seemed as scared as he was. Seizing the initiative, he demanded to know what they thought they were doing, sneaking up on a courting couple. At first nobody answered.

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