The Secret Pilgrim Part 14

He was trying to light a fresh cigarette, but the wind kept putting out his matches. So he took his hat off and lit the cigarette inside the crown, lowering his fat face to it as if he were drinking water from a stream.

"Your people will wish to know my motive," he continued when he had taken a deep draught of cigarette smoke. "Tell them-" Suddenly at a loss, he sank his head into his shoulders and peered round at me as if pleading for advice on how to deal with idiots. "Tell them I'm bored. Tell them I'm sick of the work. Tell them the Party's a bunch of crooks. They know that anyway, but tell them. I'm a Catholic. I'm a Jew. I'm a Tartar. Tell them whatever the h.e.l.l they want to hear."

"They may want to know why you have chosen to come to the Dutcb," I said. "Rather than to the Americans, or the French or whoever."

He thought about that too, puffing at his cigarette in the darkness. "You Dutch had some good joes," he said ruminatively. "I got to know some of them pretty well. They did a good job till that b.a.s.t.a.r.d Haydon came along."

An idea occurred to him. "Tell them my father was a Battle of Britain pilot," he suggested. "Got himself shot down over Kent. That should please them. You know Kent?"

"Why should a Dutchman know Kent?" I said.

If I had weakened, I could have told him that, before our so called "friendly" separation, Mabel and I had bought a house in Tunbridge Wells. But I didn't, which was as well, because when Head Office came to check the story out, there was no record of Jerzy's father having flown anything larger than a paper kite. And when I put this to Jerzy several years later - long after his loyalty to the perfidious British had been demonstrated beyond all doubt he just laughed, and said his father was an old fool who cared for nothing but vodka and potatoes.

So why? For five years Jerzy was my secret university of espionage, but his contempt for motive - his own particularly - never relaxed. First we idiots do what we want to do, he said; then we look round for justifications for having done it. All men were idiots to him, he told me, and we spies were the biggest idiots of all.

At first I suspected that he was spying for vengeance, and drew him out on the people above him in the hierarchy who might have slighted him. He hated them all, himself the most.

Then I decided he was spying for ideological reasons, and that his cynicism was a disguise for the finer yearnings he had discovered in his middle age. But when I attempted to use my wiles to break his cynicism down - "Your family, Jerzy, your mother, Jerzy. Admit you're proud to have become a grandfather" - I found only more cynicism beneath. He felt nothing for any of them, he retorted, but so icily that I concluded that he did indeed, as he maintained, hate the entire human race, and that his savagery, and perhaps his betrayal too, were the simple expression of this hatred.

As to the West, it was run by the same idiots who ran everything in the world, so what's the difference? And when I told him this simply was not so, he became as defensive of his nihilist creed as any other zealot, and I had to rein myself in for fear of angering him seriously.

So why? Why risk his neck, his life, his livelihood and the family he hated, to do something for a world he despised? The Church? I asked him that too, and significantly, as I think now, he bridled. Christ was a manic depressive, he retorted. Christ needed to commit suicide in public, so he provoked the authorities until they did him the favour. "Those G.o.d-thumper guys are all the same," he said with contempt. "I've tortured them. I know."

Like most cynics, he was a Puritan, and this paradox repeated itself in him in several ways. When we offered to drop money for him, open a Swiss bank account, the usual, he flew into a rage and declared he was not some "cheap informant."

When I picked a moment - on the instruction of Head Office-to a.s.sure him that if ever things went wrong, we would spare no effort to get him out and provide him with a new ident.i.ty in the West, his contempt was absolute: "I'm a Polish creep, but I would rather face a firing squad of my fellow creeps than die a traitor in some capitalist pigsty."

As to life's other comforts, we could offer him nothing he had not got. His wife was a scold, he said, and going home after a heavy day at the office bored him. His mistress was a young fool, and after an hour with her he preferred a game of billiards to her conversation.

Then why? I kept asking myself when I had exhausted my checklist of the Service's standard-issue motives.

Meanwhile, Jerzy continued to fill our coffers. He was turning his Service inside out as neatly as Haydon had ever done with ours.

When Moscow Centre gave him orders, we knew of them before he pa.s.sed them to his underlings. He photographed everything that came within his reach; he took risks I begged him not to take. He was so heedless that sometimes he left me wondering whether, like the Christ he was so determined to deny, he was looking for a public death. It was only the unflagging efficiency of what we were pleased to call his cover work that protected him from suspicion. For that was the dark side of his balancing act: G.o.d help the Western agent, real or imagined, who was invited to make his voluntary confession at Jerzy's hands.

Only once in the five years that I ran him did he seem to let slip the clue I was searching for. He was tired to death. He had been attending a conference of Warsaw Pact Intelligence chiefs in Bucharest, in the midst of fighting off charges of brutality and corruption against his Service at home. We met in West Berlin, in a pension on the Kurfurstendamm which catered to the better type of representative. He was a really tired torturer. He sat on my bed, smoking and answering my follow-up questions about his last batch of material. He was red-eyed. When we had finished, he asked for a whisky, then another.

"No danger is no life," he said, tossing three more rolls of film on the counterpane. "No danger is dead."

He took out a grimy brown handkerchief and carefully wiped his heavy face with it. "No danger, you do better stay home, look after the baby."

I preferred not to believe it was danger he was talking about. What he was talking about, I decided, was feeling, and his terror that by ceasing to feel he was ceasing to exist-which perhaps was, why he was so devoted to instilling feeling in others. For that moment, I thought I caught a glimpse of why he was sitting with me in the room breaking every rule in his book. He was keeping his spirit alive at a time of his life when it was beginning to look like dying.

The same night I dined with Stefanie at an Armenian restaurant ten minutes' walk from the pension where Jerzy and I had met. I had w.a.n.gled her telephone number from a sister in Munich. She was as tall and beautiful as I remembered her, and determined to convince me she was happy. Oh, life was perfect, Ned, she declared. She was living with this terribly distinguished academic, not in his first youth any more - but look here, nor are we - and completely adorable and wise. She told me his name. It meant nothing to me. She said she was pregnant by him. It didn't show.

"And you, Ned, how did it go for you?" she asked, as if we were two generals reporting to each other from successful, but separate, campaigns.

I gave her my most confident smile, the one that had earned me the trust of my joes and colleagues in the years since I had seen her.

"Oh, I think it worked out pretty well actually, thanks, yes," I said, with seeming British understatement. "After all, you can't expect one person to be everything you need, can you? It's a pretty good partners.h.i.+p, I'd say. Good parallel living."

"And you still do that work?" she said. "Ben's work?"

"Yes."

It was the first time either of us had mentioned him. He was living in Ireland, she said. A cousin of his had bought a tumbledown estate in County Cork. Ben sort of caretook for him while he wasn't there, stocking the river and looking after the farm and so on.

I asked whether she ever saw him.

"No," she said. "He won't."

I would have driven her home, but she preferred a cab. We waited in the street till it came, and it seemed to take a terribly long time. As I closed the door on her, her head tipped forward as if she had dropped something on the floor. I waved her out of sight but she didn't wave back.

The nine-o'clock news was showing us an outdoor meeting of Solidarity in Gdansk, where a Polish Cardinal was exhorting an enormous crowd to moderation. Losing interest, Mabel settled the Daily Telegraph on her lap and resumed her crossword. At first the crowd heard the Cardinal noisily. Then, with the devotion Poles are famous for, they fell silent. After his address, the Cardinal moved among his flock, bestowing blessings and accepting homage. And as one dignitary after another was brought to him, I picked out Jerzy hovering in the background, like the ugly boy excluded from the feast. He had lost a lot of weight since he had retired, and I guessed that the social changes had not been kind to him. His jacket hung on him like someone else's; his once-formidable fists were hardly visible inside the sleeves.

Suddenly the Cardinal has spotted him, just as I had.

The Cardinal freezes as if in doubt of his own feelings, and for a moment makes himself neater somehow, almost in obedience, pressing in his elbows and drawing back his shoulders to attention. Then slowly his arms lift again and he gives an order to one of his attendants, a young priest who seems reluctant to obey it. The Cardinal repeats the order, the priest clears a path to Jerzy; the two men face each other, the secret policeman and the Cardinal. Jerzy winces, as if he has digestion pains. The Cardinal leans forward and speaks in Jerzy's ear. Awkwardly, Jerzy kneels to receive the Cardinal's blessing.

And each time I replay this moment I see Jerzy's eyes close apparently in pain. But what is he repenting? His brutality? His loyalty to a vanished cause? Or his betrayal of it? Or is squeezing the eyes shut merely the instinctive response of a torturer receiving the forgiveness of a victim? I fish. I drop into my little reveries. My love of English landscape has, if possible, increased. I think of Stefanie and Bella, and my other half-had women. I lobby our Member of Parliament about the filthy river. He's a Conservative, but what on earth does he imagine he's conserving? I've joined one of the sounder environmentalist groups; I collect signatures on pet.i.tions. The pet.i.tions are ignored. I won't play golf, I never would. But I'll walk round with Mabel on a Wednesday afternoon, provided she's playing alone. I encourage her. The dog enjoys himself. Retirement is no time to be wandering lost, or puzzling how to reinvent mankind.

EIGHT.

MY STUDENTS had decided to give Smiley a rough ride, just as they'd done to me from time to time. We'd be running along perfectly smoothly - a double session on natural cover, say, in the late afternoon - when one of them would start hectoring me, usually by adopting an anarchic stance which n.o.body in his right mind could sustain. Then a second would chime in, then all of them, so that if I didn't have my sense of humour s.h.i.+ning-ready-and I'm only human they'd be trampling me till the bell rang for close of play. And next day all would be forgotten: they'd have fed whatever little demon had got hold of them, and now they'd like to go back to learning, please, so where were we? At first I used to brood over these occasions, suspect conspiracy, hunt for ringleaders. Then cautiously I came to recognise them as spontaneous expressions of resistance to the unnatural harness that these children had chosen to put on.

But when they started in on Smiley, their guest of honour and mine, even questioning the entire purpose of his life's work, my tolerance ended with a snap. And this time the offender was not Maggs, either, but the demure Clare, his girlfriend, who had sat so adoringly opposite Smiley throughout dinner.

"No, no, Ned," Smiley protested, as I leapt angrily to my feet. "Clare has a valid point. Nine times out of ten a good journalist can tell us quite as much about a situation as the spies can. Very often they're sharing the same sources anyway. So why not sc.r.a.p the spies and subsidise the newspapers? It's a point that should be answered in these changeable times. Why not?"

Reluctantly I resumed my seat, while Clare, snuggling close against Maggs, continued to gaze angelically at her victim, while her colleagues smothered their grins.

But where I would have taken refuge in humour, Smiley elected to treat her sally seriously: "It is perfectly true," he agreed, "that most of our work is either useless, or duplicated by overt sources. The trouble is, the spies aren't there to enlighten the public, but governments."

And slowly I felt his spell re-unite them. They had moved their chairs to him in a disordered half-circle. Some of the girls were sprawled becomingly on the floor.

"And governments, like anyone else, trust what they pay for, and are suspicious of what they don't," he said. Thus delicately pa.s.sing beyond Clare's provocative question, he addressed a larger one: "Spying is eternal," he announced simply. "If governments could do without it, they never would. They adore it. If the day ever comes when there are no enemies left in the world, governments will invent them for us, so don't worry. Besides - who says we only spy on enemies? All history teaches us that today's allies are tomorrow's rivals. Fas.h.i.+on may dictate priorities, but foresight doesn't. For as long as rogues become leaders, we shall spy. For as long as there are bullies and liars and madmen in the world, we shall spy. For as long as nations compete, and politicians deceive, and tyrants launch conquests, and consumers need resources, and the homeless look for land, and the hungry for food, and the rich for excess, your chosen profession is perfectly secure, I can a.s.sure you."

And with the topic thus neatly turned back to their own future, he once more warned them of its perils: "There's no career on earth more c.o.c.keyed than the one you've picked," he a.s.sured them, with every sign of satisfaction. "You'll be at your most postable while you're least experienced, and by the time you've learned the ropes, no one will be able to send you anywhere without a trade description round your necks. Old athletes know they've played their best games when they were in their prime. But spies in their prime are on the shelf, which is why they take so ungraciously to middle age, and start counting the cost of living how they've lived."

Though his hooded gaze to all appearance remained fixed upon his brandy, I saw him cast a sideways glance at me. "And then, at a certain age, you want the answer," he continued. "You want the rolled-up parchment in the inmost room that tells you who runs your lives and why. The trouble is, that by then you're the very people who know best that the inmost room is bare. Ned, you're not drinking. You're a brandy traitor. Fill him up, someone."

It is an uncomfortable truth of the period of my life that follows that I recall it as a single search the object of which was unclear to me. And that the object, when I found him, turned out to be the lapsed spy Hansen.

And that, although in reality I was pursuing quite other goals and people along my eastward journey, all of them in retrospect seem to have been stages on my journey to him. I can put it no other way. Hansen in his Cambodian jungle was my Kurtz at the heart of darkness. And everything that happened to me on the way was a preparation for our meeting. Hansen's was the voice I was waiting to hear. Hansen held the answer to the questions I did not know I was asking. Outwardly, I was my stolid, moderate, pipesmoking, decent self, a shoulder for weaker souls to rest their heads on. Inside, I felt a rampant incomprehension of my uselessness; a sense that, for all my striving, I had failed to come to grips with life; that in struggling to give freedom to others, I had found none for myself. At my lowest ebb, I saw myself as ridiculous, a hero in the style not of Buchan but of Quixote.

I took to writing down sardonic versions of my life, so that when, for instance, I reviewed the episodes I have described to you this far, I gave them picaresque t.i.tles that emphasised their futility: the Panda - I safeguard our Middle Eastern interests! Ben - I run to earth a British defector! Bella - I make the ultimate sacrifice! Teodor - I take part in a grim deception! Jerz - I play the game to the end! Though with Jerzy, I had to admit, a positive purpose had been served, even if it was as short lived as most intelligence, and as irrelevant to the human forces that have now engulfed his nation.

Like Quixote, I had set out in life vowing to check the flow of evil. Yet in my lowest moments I was beginning to wonder whether I had become a contributor to it. But I still looked to the world to provide me with the chance to make my contribution-and I blamed it for not knowing how to use me.

To understand this, you should know what had happened to me after Munich. Jerzy, whatever else he did to me, brought me a sort of prestige, and the Fifth Floor decided to invent a job for me as roving operational fixer, sent out on short a.s.signments "to appraise, and where possible exploit opportunities outside the remit of the local Station" - thus my brief, signed and returned to maker.

Looking back, I realise that the constant travel this entailed - Central America one week, Northern Ireland the next, Africa, the Middle East, Africa again - soothed the restlessness that was stalking me, and that Personnel in all likelihood knew this, for I had recently embarked on a senseless love affair with a girl called Monica, who worked in the Service's Industrial Liaison Section. I had decided I needed an affair; I saw her in the canteen and cast her in the part. It was as ba.n.a.l as that. One night it was raining, and as I started to drive home, I saw her standing at a number 23 bus stop. Ba.n.a.lity made flesh. I took her to her flat, I took her to her bed, I took her to dinner and we tried to work out what we had done, and came up with the convenient solution that we had fallen in love. It served us well for several months, until tragedy abruptly called me to my senses. By a mercy, I was back in London briefing myself for my next mission when word came that my mother was failing. By an act of divine ill taste, I was in bed with Monica when I took the call. But at least I was able to be present for the event, which was lengthy, but unexpectedly serene.

Nevertheless, I found myself entirely unprepared for it. Somehow I had taken for granted that, in the same way that I had managed to negotiate myself round awkward hurdles in the past, I would do the same in the case of my mother's death. I could not have been more mistaken. Very few conspiracies, Smiley once remarked, survive contact with reality. And so it was with the conspiracy that I had made with myself to let my mother's death slip past me as a timely and necessary release from pain. I had not taken into my calculations that the pain could be my own.

I was orphaned and elated both at once. I can describe it no other way. My father had long been dead. Without my realising it, my mother had done duty for both parents. In her death I saw the loss, not only of my childhood, but of most of my adulthood as well. At last I stood unenc.u.mbered before life's challenges, yet many of them were already behind me - fudged, missed or botched. I was free to love at last, but whom? Not, I am afraid, Monica, however much I might protest the contrary and expect the reality to follow. Neither Monica nor my marriage offered me the magic it was henceforth my duty as a survivor to pursue. And when I looked at myself in the mirror of the undertaker's rosetinted lavatory after my night's vigil, I was horrified by what I saw. It was the face of a spy branded by his own deception.

Have you seen it too, around you? On you? That face? In my case it was so much my everyday companion that I had ceased to notice it until the shock of death brought it home to me. We smile, but our withholding makes our smile false. When we are exhilarated, or drunk-or, even as I am told, make love - the reserve does not dissolve, the gyroscope stays vertical, the monitory voice reminds us of our calling. Until gradually our very withholding becomes so strident it is almost a security risk by itself. So that today - if I go to a reunion, say, or we have a Sarratt old-boys' night - I can actually look round the room and see how the secret stain has come out in every one of us. I see the overbright face or the underlit one, but inside each I see the remnants of a life withheld. I hear the hoot of supposedly abandoned laughter and I don't have to mark down the source of it to know that nothing has been abandoned-not its owner, not its interior restrictions, nothing. In my younger days, I used to think it was just the inhibited British ruling cla.s.ses who became that person. "They were born into captivity and had no option from then on," I would tell myself as I listened to their unconvincing courtesies, and returned their goodchap smiles. But, as only half a Briton, I had exempted myself from their misfortune - until that day in the undertaker's pink-tiled lavatory when I saw that the same shadow that falls across us all had fallen across me.

From that day on, I now believe, I saw only the horizon. I am starting so late! I thought. And from so far back! Life was to be a search, or nothing! But it was the fear that it was nothing that drove me forward. That's how I see it now. And so, please, must you see it, in the fragmented recollections that belong to this surreal pa.s.sage of my life. In the eyes of the man I had become, every encounter was an encounter with myself. Every stranger's confession was my own, and Hansen's the most accusing-and therefore, ultimately, the most consoling. I buried my mother, I said goodbye to Monica and Mabel. The next day I departed for Beirut. Yet even that simple departure was attended by a disconcerting episode.

To brief myself for my mission, I had been sharing a room with a rather clever man called Giles Latimer, who had made a corner for himself in what was known as "the Mad Mullah department," studying the intricate and seemingly indecypherable web of Muslim fundamentalist groups operating out of Lebanon. The notion so beloved of the amateur terror industry that these bodies are all part of a superplot is nonsense. If only it were so - for then there might be some way to get at them! As it is, they slip about, grouping and regrouping like drops of water on a wet wall, and they are about as easy to pin down.

But Giles, who was an Arabist and a distinguished bridge player, had come as near to achieving the impossible as anyone was likely to, and my job was to sit at his feet in order to prepare myself for my mission. He was tall, angular and woolly. He was of my intake. His boyish manner was given extra youthfulness by the redness of his cheeks, though this was actually the consequence of cl.u.s.ters of tiny broken blood vessels. He was indefatigably, painfully gentlemanly, forever opening doors and leaping to his feet for women. In the spring weather I twice saw him get drenched to the skin on account of his habit of lending his umbrella to whoever was proposing to venture out of doors without one. He was rich but frugal, and a thoroughly good man, with a thoroughly good wife, who organised Service bridge drives and remembered the names of the junior staff and their families. Which made it all the more bizarre when his files started disappearing.

It was I, inadvertently, who first noticed the phenomenon. I was tracking a German girl called Britta on her odyssey through the terrorist training camps in the Shuf Mountains, and I requested a contingent file which contained sensitive intercept material about her. The material was American and limited by a subscription list, but when I had gone through the rigmarole of signing myself in, n.o.body could find it. Nominally it was marked to Giles, but so was almost everything, because Giles was Giles and his name was on every list around.

But Giles knew nothing of it. He remembered reading it, he could quote from it; he thought he had pa.s.sed it on to me. It must have gone to the Fifth Floor, he said, or back to Registry. Or somewhere.

So the file was posted missing and the Registry bloodhounds were informed, and everything ran along normally for a couple of days until the same thing happened again, though this time it was Giles's own secretary who started the hunt when Registry called in all three volumes on a misty group called the Brothers of the Prophet, supposedly based in Damour.

Once again, Giles knew nothing: he had neither seen nor touched them. The Registry bloodhounds showed him his signature on the receipt. He flatly disowned it. And when Giles denied something, you didn't feel like challenging him. As I say, he was a man of transparent rect.i.tude.

By now, the hunt was up in earnest and inventories were being taken left and right. Registry was in its last days before computerisation, and could still find what it was looking for, or know for sure that it was lost. Today somebody would shake his head and phone for an engineer.

What Registry discovered was that thirty-two files marked out to Giles were missing. Twenty-one of them were standard top secret, five had higher gradings, and six were of a category called RETAIN, which meant, I am afraid, that n.o.body of strong pro-Jewish sentiments should be admitted as a signatory. Pa.r.s.e that how you will. It was a squalid limitation and there were few of us who were not embarra.s.sed by it. But this was the Middle East.

My first intimation of the scale of the crisis came from Personnel. It was a Friday morning. Personnel always liked the shelter of the weekend when he was about to wield his axe.

"Has Giles been well lately, Ned?" he asked me, with old-boy intimacy.

"Perfectly," I said.

"He's a Christian, isn't he? Christian sort of chap. Pious."

"I believe so."

"Well, I mean we all are in a way, but is he a heavy sort of Christian, would you say, Ned? What's your opinion?"

"We've never discussed it."

"Are you?"

"No."

"Would you say, for example, he could be sympathetic to something like-say-the British-Israelite sect, or one of those sort of things, at all? Nothing against them, mind. Every man to his convictions, me."

"Giles is very orthodox, very down the middle, I am sure. He's some sort of lay dignitary at his parish church. I believe he gives the odd Lenten Address, and that's about it."

"That's what I've got down here," Personnel complained, tapping his knuckles on a closed file. "That's the picture I've got of him exactly, Ned. So what's up? Not always easy, my job, you know. Not always pleasant at all."

"Why don't you ask him yourself?"

"Oh I know, I know, I must. Unless you would, of course. You could take him out to lunch-my expense, obviously. Feel his bones. Tell me what you think."

"No," I said.

His old-boy manner gave way to something a lot harder. "I thought you'd say that. I worry about you sometimes, Ned. You're putting yourself about with the women and you're a touch stubborn for your health. It's the Dutch blood in you. Well, keep your mouth shut. That's an order."

In the end it was Giles who took me out to lunch. Probably Personnel had played the game both ways, pitching some tale to Giles in reverse. Whether he had or not, at twelve-thirty Giles sprang suddenly to his feet and said, "To h.e.l.l with it, Ned. It's Friday. Come on, I'll give you lunch. Haven't had a p.i.s.sy lunch for years."

So we went to the Travellers', and sat at a table by the window and we drank a bottle of Sancerre very fast. And suddenly Giles began talking about a liaison trip he'd made recently to the FBI in New York. He kicked off quite normally; then his voice seemed to get stuck on one note, and his eyes got fixed on something only he could see. I put it down to the wine at first. Giles didn't look like a drinker and didn't drink like one. Yet there was great conviction in the way he spoke and-as he continued-a visionary intensity.

"Peculiar chaps actually, the Americans, Ned, you want to watch out for them. One doesn't think they're after one at first. One's hotel, for instance. You can always read the clues in a hotel. Too much smiling when you sign in. Too much interest in your luggage. They're watching you. d.a.m.ned great highrise greenhouse. Swimming pool on the top floor. You can look down on the helicopters going up the river. 'Welcome, Mr. Lambert, and have a nice day, sir.'

I was using Lambert. I always do for America. The fourteenth floor they'd put me on. I'm a methodical chap. Always have been. Shoe-trees and that kind of thing. Can't help it. My father was the same. Shoes here, s.h.i.+rts there. Socks there. Suits in a certain order. We never have lightweight suits, do we, the English? You think they're lightweight. You choose lightweight. Your tailor tells you they're lightweight. 'Lightest we've got, sir. We don't go any lighter.'

You'd think they'd have learned by now, the amount of American business they do. But they haven't. Cheers."

He drank and I drank with him. I poured him some mineral water. He was sweating.

I "Next day I come back to the hotel. Meetings all day long. Lot of trying to like each other. And I do, I mean they're nice chaps. Just - well, different. Different att.i.tudes. Carry guns. Want results. There can't be any, though, can there? We all know that. The more fanatics you kill, the more there are of them. I know that, they don't. My father was an Arabist too, you know."

I said I didn't. I said, "Tell me about him."

I wanted to deflect him. I felt I would feel much better if he talked about his father instead of the hotel.

"So I walk in and they hand me my key. 'Hey, hang on,' I say. 'This isn't floor fourteen. This is floor twenty-one. Mistake.'

I smile, naturally. Anyone can make a mistake. It's a woman this time. Very strong-looking woman. 'It is not a mistake, Mr. Lambert. You're on the twenty-first floor. Your room is 2109.'

'No, no,' I say. 'It's 1409. Look here.'

I had this ident.i.ty car they give you somewhere and I looked for it. Turned out my pockets while she watched, but couldn't find it. 'Look,' I said. 'Believe me. I have that kind of memory. My room is 1409.'

She gets out the guest list, shows it to me. Lambert, 2109. I go up in the lift, unlock the room, it's all there. Shoes here. s.h.i.+rts there. Socks there. Suits in the same order. Everything where I'd put it in the other room, down on the fourteenth floor. Know what they'd done?"

Again I said I didn't.

"Photographed it. Polaroid."

"Why would they do that?"