Free The Mission Song by John le Carré

ring of corrupt customs officers and policemen operating in Liverpool’s dockland. He speaks only meagre English, his mother tongue being a classical Tanzanian-flavoured Swahili. Our ace crime reporter and her editor are caught in the muckraker’s proverbial cleft stick: check out your source with the authorities and compromise the scoop; accept your source on trust and let the libel lawyers take you to the cleaners.
    With Penelope’s consent I assume command of the interrogation. As the questioning flies back and forth, our supergrass alters and refines his story, adds new elements, retracts old ones. I make the rascal repeat himself. I point out his many discrepancies until, under my persistent cross-examination, he admits all. He is a con-artist, a fabricator. For fifty quid he will go away. The editor is jubilant in his gratitude. In one stroke, he says, I have spared their blushes and their bank account. Penelope, having overcome her humiliation, declares that she owes me a very large drink.
    ‘People expect their interpreters to be small, studious and bespectacled,’ I explained to Bridget modestly, laughing away Penelope’s rapt and, in retrospect, somewhat blatant interest in me from the start. ‘I suppose I just failed to come up to expectation.’
    ‘Or she just totally freaked out,’ Bridget suggested, tightening her grip on my hand.
    Did I bubble out the rest to Bridget too? Appoint her my substitute confessor in Hannah’s absence? Unveil to her how, until I met Penelope, I was a twenty-three-year-old closet virgin, a dandy in my personal appearance but, underneath my carefully constructed façade, saddled with enough hang-ups to fill a walk-in cupboard?—that Brother Michael’s attentions and Père André’s before him had left me in a sexual twilight from which I feared to emerge?—that my dear late father’s guilt regarding his explosion of the senses had transferred itself wholesale and without deductions to his son?—and how as our taxi sped towards Penelope’s flat I had dreaded the moment when she would literally uncover my inadequacy, such was my timidity regarding the female sex?—and that thanks to her knowhow and micro-management all ended well?—
extremely
well—more well than she could ever have imagined, she assured me, Salvo being her dream mustang—the best in her stable, she might have added—her starred Alpha Male Plus? Or, as she later put it to her friend Paula when they thought I wasn’t listening, her
chocolate soldier
always standing to attention? And that one calendar week later, so blown away was he in all respects by his newfound and unquenchable prowess in the bedroom, so overwhelmed with gratitude and ready to confuse sexual accomplishment with great love, that Salvo with his customary impulsiveness and naivety proposed marriage to Penelope, only to be accepted on the spot? No. By a mercy, in that regard at least I managed to restrain myself. Neither did I get round to telling Bridget the price I had since paid, year by year, for this much needed therapy, but only because we had by then passed the Connaught Hotel and turned into the top end of Berkeley Square.

    In my expansiveness of heart I was assuming, for no reason beyond the expectations we have of natural gravity, that our path would then take us down towards Piccadilly. But suddenly Bridget’s grip on my arm tightened and she wheeled me left up some steps to a grand front door that I failed to get the number of. The door closed behind us and there we were, standing in a velvet-curtained lobby occupied by two identical blond boys in blazers. I don’t remember her ringing a bell or knocking, so they must have been watching out for us on their closed-circuit screen. I remember they both wore grey flannels like mine, and their blazers had all three buttons fastened. And I remember wondering whether, in the world that they inhabited, this was regulation and I ought to be doing up the buttons of my Harris