A Legacy of Spies

by John le Carré

Sometimes I wonder whether it is possible to be born secret, in the way people are born rich, or tall, or musical. Markus was not mean, or tight, or unkind. He was just secret.

‘We were wondering, you see,’ he said in a faraway voice, ‘whether you’d ever considered signing up with us on a more regular basis? People who have worked on the outside for us don’t always fit well on the inside. But in your case, we think you might. We don’t pay a lot, and careers tend to be interrupted. But we do feel it’s an important job, as long as one cares about the end, and not too much about the means.’

The Berlin Wall has been down a month. Germany is ecstatic, our village in Brittany a little less so. And I seem to be hovering somewhere between the two, one minute rejoicing that peace of a sort has broken out, then lapsing into introspection as I think of the stuff we did and the sacrifices we made, not least of other people’s lives, in the long years when we thought the Wall was going to be there for ever.

I am a young French commercial traveller named Marcel Lafontaine, presently based in an Indian-owned boarding house in Hackney, East London, and I have the documents to prove it. It’s day five. Each morning at crack of dawn, I take a bus to the memorial park and run. Most mornings there are six or seven of us. We run, we stand panting on the sports hall steps, we check our times, we compare. We exchange a couple of words, divide to the shower rooms, say cheers and see you tomorrow maybe. My companions are vaguely amused by my French name, but disappointed that I have no French accent. I explain that I had an English mother, now dead. In a cover story, kill off any loose thread before it gets out of hand.