The Russia House by John le Carré Read Free Book Online Page B

perhaps-bags are made of string. Hers was brown plastic. “Now Niki,” I said to myself, “today is not the day, but if you were ever thinking of having a tumble with this lady at a future date, which you might, you could always bring her a nice blue handbag from London to match her blue dress, couldn’t you?” That’s how I remember, you see. I have the connection in my head, sir.’
    And it is always an oddity of the tapes when I replay them that Landau called Walter ‘sir’, while he never called Ned anything but Ned. But this was no great sign of respect in Landau so much as of a certain squeamishness that Walter inspired. After all, Landau was a ladies’ man and Walter was quite the opposite.
    ‘And the hair black , you say?’ Walter sang, as if black hair strained credulity.
    ‘Black, sir. Black and silky. Verging towards the raven. Definitely.’
    ‘Not dyed, you don’t think?’
    ‘I know the difference, sir,’ said Landau, touching his own head, for he wanted to give them everything by now, even the secret of his eternal youth.
    ‘You said earlier she was Leningrad. Why did you say that?’
    ‘The bearing, sir. I saw quality, I saw a Russian woman of Rome. That’s how I think of her. Petersburg.’
    ‘But you didn’t see Armenian? Or Georgian? Or Jewish, for example?’
    Landau dwelt on the last suggestion but rejected it. ‘I’m Jewish myself, you see. I won’t say it takes one to know one but I’ll say I didn’t go ting-a-ling inside.’
    A silence that could have been embarrassment seemed to encourage him to continue. ‘I think being Jewish is overdone, to be frank. If that’s what you want to be, good luck I say. But if you don’t need it, nobody should make you have it. Myself, I’m a Brit first, a Pole second and everything else comes afterwards. Never mind there’s a lot would have it the other way round. That’s their problem.’
    ‘Oh well said!’ Walter cried energetically, flapping his fingers and giggling. ‘Oh that does put it in a nutshell. And you say her English was really rather good?’
    ‘More than good, sir. Classic. A lesson to us all.’
    ‘Like a schoolteacher, you said.’
    ‘That was my impression,’ said Landau. ‘A teacher, a professor. I felt the learning. The intellect. The will.’
    ‘Could she not be an interpreter, you see?’
    ‘Good interpreters efface themselves, in my opinion, sir. This lady projected herself.’
    ‘Oh well I say, that’s rather a good answer,’ said Walter, shooting his pink cuffs. ‘And she was wearing a wedding ring. Well done.’
    ‘She certainly was, sir. A betrothal ring and a marriage ring. That’s the first thing I look at after the usual, and in Russia it’s not England, you have to look the wrong way round because the girls wear their wedding rings on the right hand. Single Russian women are a pest and divorce is off the peg. Give me a nice solid hubby and a couple of little ones for them to go home to any day. Then I might oblige.’
    ‘Let’s ask you about that. You think she had children as well, do you, or not?’
    ‘I am convinced of it, sir.’
    ‘Oh come, you can’t be,’ Walter said peevishly, with a sudden downturn of the mouth. ‘You’re not psychic, are you?’
    ‘The hips, sir. The hips, the dignity even when she was scared. She was not a Juno, she was not a sylph. She was a mother.’
    ‘Height?’ Walter shrieked in a descant as his hairless eyebrows bucked upwards in alarm. ‘Can you do her height for us? Think of yourself. Measure her against you. Are you looking up or down?’
    ‘Above the normal. I told you.’
    ‘Taller than you, then?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Five six? Five seven?’
    ‘More like the second,’ said Landau sullenly.
    ‘And her age again? You fumbled it before.’
    ‘If she’s over thirty-five, she doesn’t know it. A lovely skin, a fine form, a fine woman in her prime, especially the spirit, sir,’ Landau replied with a defeated grin, for while he might find