Free The Mission Song by John le Carré Page B

of high-level conferences I am occasionally privileged to attend where platform speeches are delivered in English, but your off-stage discussions are conducted in the tongues of individual delegates, with the interpreters acting as the essential bridges between God’s striving souls.
    There was one voice, however, that seemed to be addressing me personally. It was native English, upper-class, and compelling in its tonal rise and fall. So finely were my antennae tuned that after a couple of minutes of what I call my third ear I had convinced myself it was the voice of a gentleman I was familiar with and respected, even if I hadn’t caught a single word of what it was saying. And I was still hunting in my memory for its owner when my attention was diverted by a thunderclap below me as the door to the lobby flew open to admit the cadaverous, breathless figure of Mr Julius Bogarde, alias Bogey, my late mathematics teacher and chief luminary of the Sanctuary’s ill-fated Outward Bound Club. The fact that Bogey had perished ten years ago while leading a party of terrified schoolchildren up the wrong side of a mountain in the Cairngorms only compounded my surprise at his reincarnation.
    ‘
Maxie
,’ I heard Bridget breathe in reproachful awe as she sprang to her feet. ‘You mad sod. Who’s the lucky girl this time?’
    And all right, he wasn’t Bogey.
    And I doubt whether Bogey’s girls, if he had any, counted themselves lucky, rather the reverse. But he had Bogey’s gangly wrists, and Bogey’s manic stride and hellbent look about him, and Bogey’s haywire mop of sandy hair blown to one side by a prevailing wind and stuck there, and rosy bursts of colour on his upper cheeks. And Bogey’s sun-bleached khaki canvas bag, like a wartime gas-mask case in old movies, swinging from his shoulder. His spectacles, like Bogey’s, doubled the circumference of his faraway blue eyes, switching on and off as he loped towards us under the chandelier. And if Bogey had ever come to London, which was against his principles, this was undoubtedly the outfit he would have selected: a mangled go-anywhere, wash-it-yourself, fawn-coloured tropical suit with a Fair Isle sleeveless pullover and buckskin shoes with the nap worn off. And if Bogey had ever had to storm the regal staircase to our waiting area, this was how he would have done it: three weightless bounds with his gas-mask case slapping at his side.
    ‘My
fucking
pushbike,’ he complained furiously, giving Bridget a perfunctory kiss which seemed to mean more to her than it did to him. ‘Slap in the middle of Hyde Park. Back tyre shot to pieces. Couple of tarts laughed themselves sick. Are you the languages?’
    He had swung suddenly round on me. I’m not used to words of that strength from clients, nor to repeating them in the presence of ladies, but I will say at once that the man described by Mr Anderson as my fellow genius in the field was like no client I’d ever met, which I knew even before he fixed me with Bogey’s diluted stare.
    ‘He’s Brian, darling,’ Bridget said quickly, fearing perhaps that I might say something different. ‘Brian
Sinclair
. Jack knows all about him.’
    A man’s voice was yelling up at us and it was the same voice I had been relating to.
    ‘Maxie! Hell are you, man? It’s all hands to the pump.’
    But Maxie paid the voice no attention and by the time I looked down, its owner had once more disappeared.
    ‘Know what this caper’s about, Sinclair?’
    ‘Not yet, sir.’
    ‘That old fart Anderson didn’t tell you?’
    ‘
Darling
,’ Bridget protested.
    ‘He said he didn’t know either, sir.’
    ‘And it’s French, Lingala and Swahili-plus, right?’
    ‘Correct, sir.’
    ‘Bembe?’
    ‘Is not a problem, sir.’
    ‘Shi?’
    ‘I also have Shi.’
    ‘Kinyarwanda?’
    ‘Ask him what he doesn’t speak, darling,’ Bridget advised. ‘It’s quicker.’
    ‘I was interpreting Kinyarwanda only yesterday evening, sir,’ I replied,