Free The Secret Pilgrim by John le Carré

opposite bank. The frog as double agent, pretending to buy the scorpion’s cover story, then blowing it to his paymasters.
    And in the morning he was gone, leaving behind him a one-line note saying, “See you at Borstal,” which was his name for Sarratt. “Love, Ben.”
    Had we talked about Stefanie on those occasions? We hadn’t. Stefanie was someone we discussed in motion, glancingly, not side by side through a stationary wall. Stefanie was a phantom shared on the run, an enigma too delightful to dissect. So perhaps that’s why I didn’t think of her. Or not yet. Not knowingly. There was no dramatic moment when a great light went up and I sprang from my bath shouting, “ Stefanie!” It simply didn’t happen that way, for the reason I’m trying to explain to you; somewhere in the no-man’s-land between confession and self-preservation, Stefanie floated like a mythic creature who only existed when she was owned up to. As best I remember, the notion of her first came back to me as I was tidying up the mess left by Personnel. Stumbling on my last year’s diary, I began flipping through it, thinking how much more of life we live than we remember. And in the month of June, I came on a line drawn diagonally through the two middle weeks, and the numeral “8” written neatly beside it—meaning Camp 8, North Argyll, where we did our paramilitary training. And I began to thank—or perhaps merely to sense—yes, of course, Stefanie.
    And from there, still without any sudden Archimedean revelation, I found myself reliving our night drive over the moonlit Highlands. Ben at the wheel of the open Triumph roadster, and myself beside him making chatty conversation in order to keep him awake, because we were both happily exhausted after a week of pretending we were in the Albanian mountains raising a guerrilla army. And the June air rushing over our faces.
    The rest of the intake were travelling back to London on the Sarratt bus. But Ben and I had Stefanie’s Triumph roadsterbecause Steff was a sport, Steff was selfless, Steff had driven it all the way from Oban to Glasgow just so that Ben could borrow it for the week and bring it back to her when the course restarted. And that was how Stefanie came back to me—exactly as she had come to me in the car—amorphously, a titillating concept, a shared woman—Ben’s.
    â€œSo who or what is Stefanie, or do I get the usual loud silence?” I asked him as I pulled open the glove compartment and looked in vain for traces of her.
    For a while I got the loud silence.
    â€œStefanie is a light to the ungodly and a paragon to the virtuous,” he replied gravely. And then, more deprecatingly: “Steff’s from the Hun side of the family.” He was from it himself, he liked to say in his more acerbic moods. Steff was from the Arno side, he was saying.
    â€œIs she pretty?” I asked.
    â€œDon’t be vulgar.”
    â€œBeautiful?”
    â€œLess vulgar, but still not there.”
    â€œWhat is she, then?”
    â€œShe is perfection. She is luminous. She is peerless.”
    â€œSo beautiful, then?”
    â€œNo, you lout. Exquisite. Sans pareil. Intelligent beyond the dreams of Personnel.”
    â€œAnd otherwise—to you—what is she? Apart from being Hun and the owner of this car?”
    â€œShe is my mother’s eighteenth cousin dozens of time removed. After the war she came and lived with us in Shropshire and we grew up together.”
    â€œSo she’s your age, then?”
    â€œIf the eternal is to be measured, yes.”
    â€œYour proxy sister, as it were?”
    â€œShe was. For a few years. We ran wild together, pick mushrooms in the dawn, touched wee-wees. Then I went to boardingschool and she returned to Munich to resume being a Hun. End of childhood idyll and back to Daddy and England.”
    I had never known him so forthcoming about any woman,