The Pigeon Tunnel (29 page)

‘Still watching Pivot, of course,' he replies contentedly.

Why do I tell this story? Maybe because I like to remind myself that, amid all the ballyhoo, this was a night of my life to remember. Of all the interviews I gave, and the many I regret, this is one I'll never take back.

32

Lunching with prisoners

There were six of us gathered round the lunch table that summer's day in Paris in the early days of the new millennium. Our host was a French publisher, and we were assembled to celebrate the success of my friend François Bizot, who had recently published a prize-winning memoir.
*

Bizot, a Buddhist scholar and a fluent Khmer-speaker, remains the only Westerner to have been taken prisoner by Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge and survive. In October 1971, while working at the Angkor Conservation Centre, he was captured by the Khmer Rouge, kept in barbarous circumstances and subjected to three months of intense interrogation by the notorious Douch, who wished him to confess to being a
CIA
spy.

Somehow interrogator and prisoner developed a mysterious affinity, derived partly from Bizot's deep knowledge of ancient Buddhist culture, and partly, I suspect, from his sheer power of personality. Then, in what was surely a similarly extraordinary act of courage, Douch wrote a report to the Khmer Rouge high command exonerating Bizot from the charge of espionage. Extraordinarily also, Bizot was released, and Douch went on to manage one of Pol Pot's largest torture and execution centres. In my novel
The Secret Pilgrim
, there is a story about ‘Jungle Hansen', where at several removes I attempt – unsuccessfully I fear – to do justice to Bizot's experience.

As we sat at table, it was a full thirty years since Bizot's ordeal, yet the fate of Douch still hung in the balance, his trial repeatedly
delayed by political apathy and intrigue. And Bizot, we were now learning, had meanwhile rallied to his cause. His argument, vigorously expressed as ever, was that many of Douch's accusers in the present Khmer government were themselves steeped in blood, and wished only to make Douch responsible for all their sins.

Bizot was therefore conducting a one-man campaign, not in defence of Douch, but to demonstrate that he was neither more nor less guilty than those who were presuming to judge him.

While Bizot set out his case we all listened attentively, save for one guest who remained curiously unmoved. He was sitting directly across the table from me, a small, intense man with a wide brow and a dark, alert gaze that kept returning to mine. He had been introduced to me as the writer Jean-Paul Kauffmann, and I had read his recent book
The Dark Room at Longwood
with great pleasure. Longwood was the house in St Helena where Napoleon had spent his last humiliating years of exile. Kauffmann had made the long sea journey to St Helena, and described with impressive empathy the solitude, claustrophobia and systematic degradation of the world's most famous, admired and reviled prisoner.

Not having been told in advance that I was about to meet the author, I was able to express my spontaneous pleasure. So why on earth was he now eyeing me with such disfavour? Had I misspoken in some way? Did he know something disgraceful about me, always possible? Or had we met before and I'd clean forgotten, which even in those days was a racing possibility?

Either I must have asked him something to this effect, or my body language asked it for me. In a sudden reversal of roles, it was my turn to do the staring.

In May 1985, Jean-Paul Kauffmann, French foreign correspondent, had been taken hostage in Beirut by Hezbollah, whose secret prisoner he remained for three years. When his captors needed to move
him from one safe house to another, they gagged him, bound him from head to foot and rolled him up in an oriental blanket in which he nearly died of asphyxia. He had been staring at me across the lunch table because in one of the hideouts where he was confined he had come upon a crumpled paperback novel of mine and devoured it over and over again, investing in it, I am sure, greater profundities than it had ever contained. He explained this to me in the matter-of-fact tone that I was familiar with in other victims of torture, for whom the unbanished experience has become part of the daily grind of life.

And I, speechless in response. For what, after all, was there to say? ‘Thank you for reading me'? ‘Sorry if my profundities were a bit on the shallow side'?

So probably I just tried to sound as humble as I felt, and probably after we parted I went back to
The Dark Room at Longwood
and made the connection I ought to have made when I'd read it: that this was one haunted prisoner writing about another – perhaps the greatest prisoner of all time.

The lunch took place at the beginning of the century, but the memory remains fresh although I have not met Kauffmann since, or corresponded with him. So while writing this book I looked him up on the internet, established that he was alive, and after some asking around, got his email address, with the warning that he might not respond.

I had by then also noted, I confess in some surprise, that the book that by a miracle of chance had saved him from despair and madness had been Leo Tolstoy's
War and Peace
which, like my own novel apparently, he had also devoured; and surely he had drawn from it a great deal more spiritual and intellectual nourishment than anything mine had to offer. Were there then two lucky finds? Or was one of our memories playing tricks with us?

Cautiously, I wrote to him, and after a few weeks this is what he generously wrote in reply:

During my captivity I missed books enormously. Occasionally our jailers would bring them. The arrival of a book brought a sense of
indescribable happiness. I would read it not just once, twice, forty times, but also reread it by starting at the end or in the middle. I hoped that this game might occupy me for at least two months. During my three years of misery, I experienced intense moments of joy.
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
was one of those moments. I saw it as a nod from fate; our jailers brought us any old thing: cheap novels, the second volume of Tolstoy's
War and Peace
, incomprehensible treatises. But this time, here was a writer I admired . . . I had read all of your books including
The Spy
but in my new circumstances it was not the same book. It didn't even seem to have anything to do with my memory of it. Everything had changed. Each line was fraught with meaning. In a situation like mine, reading became a serious and even dangerous business because the slightest fact felt connected to this game of double or quits, which is the very existence of a hostage. The opening of a cell door, announcing the arrival of a Hezbollah official, could mean freedom or death. Every sign, every allusion became an omen, symbol or parable. There are many in
The Spy.

With this book, I felt that climate of concealment and manipulation (the Shiite
taqiyya
) in my innermost being. Our captors were far from having the professionalism of the men of the
KGB
or the
CIA
but, like them, they were conceited fools, brutal cynics who used religion and the credulity of young militants to satisfy their appetite for power.

Like your characters, my captors were experts in paranoia: pathological mistrust, manic rage, false judgement, delusions, systematic aggression, a neurotic appetite for lies. Leamas' arid and absurd world, where human lives are nothing but pawns, was our world. How often have I felt like an abandoned man, forsaken. And above all, exhausted. This duplicitous world also taught me to reflect on my profession as a journalist. In the end, we are double agents. Or triple. We must empathize with others to understand and be accepted, then we betray.

Your vision of mankind is pessimistic. We are pitiful creatures; individually we don't count for much. Happily, this doesn't apply to everyone (see the character of Liz).

In this book I found reasons to hope. The most important is a voice, a presence. Yours. The jubilation of a writer who describes a cruel and colourless world and delights in rendering it so grey and hopeless. You feel it almost physically. Someone is talking to you, you are no longer alone. In my jail, I was no longer abandoned. A man came into my cell with his words and his vision of the world. Someone shared their power with me. I would make it through . . .
*

And there you are; that's human memory for you, Kauffmann's, mine, both. I could have sworn the book he was talking about over lunch was
Smiley's People
, not
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
, and that seems to be my wife's memory too.

33

Son of the author's father

It took me a long while to get on writing terms with Ronnie, conman, fantasist, occasional jailbird, and my father.

From the day I made my first faltering attempts at a novel, he was the one I wanted to get to grips with, but I was light years away from being up to the job. My earliest drafts of what eventually became
A Perfect Spy
dripped with self-pity: cast your eye, gentle reader, upon this emotionally crippled boy, crushed underfoot by his tyrannical father. It was only when he was safely dead and I took up the novel again that I did what I should have done at the beginning, and made the sins of the son a whole lot more reprehensible than the sins of the father.

With that settled, I was able to honour the legacy of his tempestuous life: a cast of characters to make the most blasé writer's mouth water, from eminent legal brains of the day and stars of sport and screen to the finest of London's criminal underworld and the beautiful creatures who trailed in their wake. Wherever Ronnie went, the unpredictable went with him. Are we up or down? Can we fill up the car on tick at the local garage? Has he fled the country or will he be proudly parking the Bentley in the drive tonight? Or hiding it in the back garden, turning out the house lights, checking doors and windows, and murmuring into the telephone if it hasn't been cut off? Or is he enjoying the safety and comfort of one of his alternative wives?

Of Ronnie's dealings with organized crime, if any, I know lamentably little. Yes, he rubbed shoulders with the notorious Kray twins,
but that may just have been celebrity-hunting. And yes, he did business of a sort with London's worst-ever landlord Peter Rachman, and my best guess would be that when Rachman's thugs had got rid of Ronnie's tenants for him, he sold off the houses and gave Rachman a piece.

But a full-on criminal partnership? Not the Ronnie I knew. Conmen are aesthetes. They wear nice suits, have clean fingernails and are well spoken at all times. Policemen in Ronnie's book were first-rate fellows who were open to negotiation. The same could not be said of ‘the boys' as he called them, and you messed with the boys at your peril.

Tension? Ronnie's entire life was spent walking on the thinnest, slipperiest layer of ice you can imagine. He saw no paradox between being on the Wanted list for fraud and sporting a grey topper in the Owners' enclosure at Ascot. A reception at Claridge's to celebrate his second marriage was interrupted while he persuaded two Scotland Yard detectives to put off arresting him until the party was over – and meanwhile, come in and join the fun, which they duly did.

But I don't think Ronnie could have lived any other way. I don't think he wanted to. He was a crisis addict, a performance addict, a shameless pulpit orator and a scene-grabber. He was a delusional enchanter and a persuader who saw himself as God's golden boy, and he wrecked a lot of people's lives.

Graham Greene tells us that childhood is the credit balance of the writer. By that measure at least, I was born a millionaire.

For the last third of Ronnie's life – he died suddenly at the age of sixty-nine – we were estranged or at loggerheads. Almost by mutual consent, there were terrible obligatory scenes, and when we buried the hatchet we always remembered where we'd put it. Do I feel more kindly towards him today than I did then? Sometimes I walk round him, sometimes he's the mountain I still have to climb. Either way,
he's always there, which I can't say for my mother, because to this day I have no idea what sort of person she was. The versions of her that have been offered me by those who were close to her and loved her have not been enlightening. Perhaps I didn't want them to be. I ran her to earth when I was twenty-one, and thereafter broadly attended to her needs, not always with good grace. But from the day of our reunion until she died, the frozen child in me showed not the smallest sign of thawing out. Did she love animals? Landscape? The sea that she lived beside? Music? Painting? Me? Did she read books? Certainly she had no high opinion of mine, but what about other people's?

In the nursing home where she stayed during her last years, we spent much of our time deploring or laughing at my father's misdeeds. As my visits continued, I came to realize that she had created for herself – and for me – an idyllic mother–son relationship that had flowed uninterrupted from my birth till now.

Today, I don't remember feeling any affection in childhood except for my elder brother, who for a time was my only parent. I remember a constant tension in myself that even in great age has not relaxed. I remember little of being very young. I remember the dissembling as we grew up, and the need to cobble together an identity for myself, and how in order to do this I filched from the manners and lifestyle of my peers and betters, even to the extent of pretending I had a settled home life with real parents and ponies. Listening to myself today, watching myself when I have to, I can still detect traces of the lost originals, chief among them obviously my father.

All this no doubt made me an ideal recruit to the secret flag. But nothing lasted: not the Eton schoolmaster, not the
MI
5 man, not the
MI
6 man. Only the writer in me stuck the course. If I look over my life from here, I see it as a succession of engagements and escapes, and I thank goodness that the writing kept me relatively straight and largely sane. My father's refusal to accept the simplest truth about himself set me on a path of enquiry from which I never returned. In the absence of a mother or sisters I learned women late, if ever, and we all paid a price for that.

In my childhood, everyone around me tried to sell me the Christian God in one form or another. I got the low church from my aunts, uncles and grandparents, and the high church from my schools. When I was brought to the bishop to be confirmed, I tried my hardest to feel pious, and felt nothing. For another ten years I went on trying to acquire some sort of religious conviction, then gave it up as a bad job. Today, I have no god but landscape, and no expectation of death but extinction. I rejoice constantly in my family and the people who love me, and whom I love in return. Walking the Cornish cliffs, I am overtaken with surges of gratitude for my life.

Yes, I have seen the house where I was born. Cheerful aunts pointed it out to me a hundred times as we skimmed by. But the house of my birth that I prefer is a different one, built in my imagination. It's red brick and clattery and due for demolition, with broken windows, a ‘For Sale' sign, and an old bath in the garden. It stands in a plot of weeds and builders' junk, with a bit of stained glass in the smashed front door – a place for kids to hide in, rather than be born. But born there I was, or so my imagination insists, and what's more I was born in the attic, among a stack of brown boxes that my father always carted round with him when he was on the run.

When I made my first clandestine inspection of those boxes, some time around the outbreak of the Second World War – for by the age of eight I was already a well-trained spy – they contained only personal stuff: his Masonic regalia, the barrister's wig and gown with which he proposed to astonish a waiting world as soon as he had got round to studying law, and such top-secret items as his plans for selling fleets of airships to the Aga Khan. But once war finally broke out, the brown boxes offered more substantial fare: black-market Mars bars, Benzedrine inhalers for shooting stimulant up your nose and, after D-Day, nylon stockings and ballpoint pens.

Ronnie had a penchant for weird commodities provided they were
rationed or not available. Two decades later, when Germany was still divided and I was a British diplomat living on the banks of the River Rhine in Bonn, he appeared unannounced in my gateway, his ample frame squeezed inside a steel coracle with wheels attached. It was an amphibious motorcar, he explained. A prototype. He had acquired the British patent from its manufacturers in Berlin, and it was about to make our fortunes. He had driven it down the interzonal corridor under the gaze of East German frontier guards, and now he proposed to launch it, with my help, into the Rhine, which happened to be swollen at the time, and very fast flowing.

I dissuaded him despite my children's enthusiasm and gave him lunch instead. Refreshed, he set off in great excitement for Ostend and England. How far he got I don't know, for the car was not spoken of again. I assume that somewhere along the journey creditors caught up with him and removed it.

But that didn't stop him from popping up in Berlin two years later, announcing himself as my ‘professional adviser', in which capacity he received a
VIP
tour of West Berlin's largest film studio, and no doubt a great deal of the studio's hospitality and a starlet or two, and a lot of sales patter about tax breaks and subsidies on offer to foreign filmmakers, and notably to the makers of the movie of my recent novel,
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.

It goes without saying that neither I nor Paramount Pictures, who had already made their deal with Ardmore Studios in Ireland, had the smallest idea of what he was up to.

There's no electricity in the house of my birth, and no heating, so the light comes from the gas lamps on Constitution Hill, which give the attic a creamy glow. My mother lies on a camp bed, pitifully doing her best, whatever her best may entail – I was not conversant with the niceties of childbirth when I first pictured this scene. Ronnie is champing in the doorway, wearing a snappy gent's
double-breasted and the brown-and-white brogues he played golf in, keeping an eye to the street while in pounding cadences he urges my mother to greater efforts:

‘God in Heaven, Wiggly, why can't you get a move on for once? It's a damned shame is what it is, and no two ways about it. There's poor old Humphries, sitting in the car out there, catching his death and all you do is shilly-shally.'

Though my mother's first name was Olive, my father called her Wiggly, rain or shine. Later, when technically I grew up, I too gave women silly nicknames in order to make them less formidable.

Ronnie's voice when I was young was still Dorset, with heavy ‘r's and long ‘a's. But the self-laundering was in progress and by the time I was an adolescent he was almost – but never quite – well spoken. Englishmen, we are told, are branded on the tongue, and in those days being well spoken could gain you a military commission, bank credit, respectful treatment from policemen and a job in the City of London. And it's one of the ironies of Ronnie's mercurial life that, by realizing his ambition of sending my brother and me to posh schools, he placed himself socially below us by the cruel standards of the time. Tony and I were whisked effortlessly through the class sound barrier, while Ronnie remained stuck the other side.

Not that he exactly paid for our education – or not always, so far as I can make out – but either way he fixed it. One school, after a taste of his ways, bravely demanded its fees up front. It received them at Ronnie's leisure in deferred black-market dried fruit – figs, bananas, prunes – and a case of unobtainable gin for the staff.