A Perfect Spy

John le Carre — A PERFECT SPY

For R, who shared the journey, lent me his dog,

and tossed me a few pieces of his life

A man who has two women loses his soul.

But a man who has two houses loses his head.

Proverb

INTRODUCTION

JOHN LE CARRÉ

November 2000

With the exception perhaps of the much later The Constant Gardener, A Perfect Spy remains for me the preferred novel of all my work, the one I sweated blood for, and ultimately, for that reason, the most rewarding.

All my writing life until then I had lived with the unexpressed memories of an extraordinary childhood, endured and sometimes enjoyed at the hands of an extraordinary father whose zigzag life is mirrored in my fictional character Rick Pym, father to my hero Magnus. Those members of my real-life family who had known my father and were able to read the novel were for the greater part amused and relieved by the portrait I had painted of him, though all of us knew of a darker side that is only hinted at in the novel and which today still haunts me.

Not so long ago, when The Constant Gardener was still only a twinkle in my eye, I had an idea that in the event proved abortive: I would write an autobiography, but of an experimental kind. On the left side of each double page I would write my life as I remember it now, with all the evasions and self-exculpations that are inherent in all our memories — and my own, I am sure, is no exception. And on the right side I would print the historical record wherever it could be traced, for my father had left some pretty heavy footprints in his wake, from court records and press cuttings of his first criminal conviction, to police and prison records of countries as far flung as Singapore, Indonesia, Hong Kong, Switzerland, and Austria. In addition, there would be the living memory, whatever was still to be found, of those who had brushed up against him, loved him, as many did, or been stung by him financially, as many were. And these were not necessarily different people, for on one point they were all likely to agree: Ronnie Cornwell was a most beguiling and persuasive con artist.

To this end, I went to the unusual lengths of hiring a pair of highly recommended private investigators who I felt were better equipped than I was to get their hands on documents that had never been put into the public domain and which, though perhaps scheduled for destruction, were still in my wishful imagination hovering between life and death in the dusty pigeonhole of some neglected official archive.

As to living memory, I had every reason to believe there were splendid riches to be found. In Hong Kong in the early eighties, while I was enjoying the hospitality of the trading house of Jardine Matheson — in those days the taipans of the Colony — in the company’s box at Happy Valley racecourse, a burly English gentleman of the official sort shyly plucked at my sleeve. He had been my father’s gaoler while the Colony was waiting to deport him, he confided to me in a murmur, and he had never in his life encountered a finer, more inspiring gentleman, let alone prisoner. “I am retiring soon,” he said. “And when I get back to Blighty, your dad is going to fix me up in a business.” Did I warn the poor fellow to watch his step? I doubt it. My father did not care for unbelievers, and neither did his disciples. Somewhere in their hearts, they were taking part in the process of their own delusion. Where is the gaoler now? If I had written down his name, I had long ago lost the bit of paper. But surely, I thought, my investigators could get onto the Hong Kong police and track him down.

On another occasion, I was staying at the Royal Hotel in Copenhagen, as it was then called, and the manager summoned me to his office, where two Danish Special Branch detectives proceeded to interview me. My father, they said, had made an illegal entry into Denmark with the connivance of two senior pilots of the Scandinavian Airlines System, and had since disappeared. Did I know where to find him? I didn’t, but they were reluctant to believe me. Ronnie, it transpired, had picked up the hapless SAS men in a bar in New York, and won a lot of money from them at poker. Rather than collect the debt, he had proposed that they fly him to Copenhagen, which unwisely they had proceeded to do. The Danish police had since established that Ronnie was wanted in New York for fraud, and now he was wanted in Denmark for illegal entry and half a dozen other offences, from corruption to evading Customs and I don’t remember what else. Surely, once again, my investigators could track down the Danish papers and even, perhaps, the unfortunate airmen — or so I wanted to believe.