A Delicate Truth by John le Carré Page A

sleek as a cat and about as trustworthy.
    ‘Berlin. Madrid. Cairo,’ Toby
     replies with deliberate carelessness, fully aware that he’s supposed to be
making his mark
, and determined not to. ‘Wherever I’m sent,
     really’ –
you’re too fucking close. Get out of my airspace
.
    ‘Tobe was posted out of Egypt just
     when Mubarak’s little local difficulties started to appear on the horizon,
     weren’t you, Tobe?’
    ‘As it were.’
    ‘See much of the old boy?’ –
     Crispin enquires genially, his face puckering in earnest sympathy.
    ‘On a couple of occasions. From a
     distance’ –
mainly I dealt with his torturers
.
    ‘What do you reckon to his chances?
     Sits uneasy on his throne, from all one hears. Army a broken reed, Muslim Brotherhood
     rattling at the bars: I’m not sure I’d like to be in poor Hosni’s
     shoes right now.’
    Toby is still hunting for a suitably anodyne
     reply when Miss Maisie rides to his rescue:
    ‘
Mr Bell
. Colonel Hosni
     Mubarak is
my friend
. He is America’s friend, and he was
put on earth
     by God to make peace with the Jews
, to fight communism and jihadist terror.
     Anybody seeking the downfall of Hosni Mubarak in his hour of need is an Iscariot, a
     liberal and a surrender monkey, Mr Bell.’
    ‘So how about
Berlin
?’
     Crispin suggests, as if this outburst has not taken place. ‘Toby was in
Berlin
, darling. Stationed there. Where we were just days ago.
     Remember?’ – back to Toby – ‘what dates are we talking here?’
    In a wooden voice, Toby recites for him the
     dates he was in Berlin.
    ‘What sort of work, actually, or
     aren’t you allowed to say?’ – innuendo.
    ‘Jack of all trades, really. Whatever
     came up,’ Toby replies, with assumed casualness.
    ‘But you’re straight – not one
     of
them
?’ – tipping Toby the insider’s smile. ‘You must be,
     or you wouldn’t be here, you’d be the other side of the river’ –
     knowing glance for the one and only Miss Maisie of Houston, Texas.
    ‘Political Section, actually. General
     duties,’ Toby replies in the same wooden voice.
    ‘Well, I’m damned’ –
     turning delightedly to Miss Maisie – ‘Darling, the cat’s out of the bag.
     Young Toby here was one of Giles Oakley’s bright boys in Berlin during the run-up
     to
Iraqi Freedom
.’
    Boys? Fuck you.
    ‘Do I
know
Mr Oakley?’
     Miss Maisie enquires, coming closer to give Toby another look.
    ‘No, darling, but you’ve heard
     of him. Oakley was the brave chap who led the in-house Foreign Office revolt. Got up the
     round robin to our Foreign Secretary urging him not to go after Saddam. Did you draft it
     for him, Toby, or did Oakley and his chums cobble it together all by
     themselves?’
    ‘I certainly didn’t draft
     anything of the sort, and I’ve never heard of such a letter, if it ever existed,
     which I seriously doubt,’ the astonished Toby snaps in perfect truth as elsewhere
     in his mind he grapples, not for the first time, with the enigma that is Giles
     Oakley.
    ‘Well, jolly good luck to you,
     anyway,’ says Crispin dismissively and, turning to Quinn, leaves Toby to
     contemplate at his leisure the same straight, suspect back that he glimpsed through the
     frosted glass of his minister’s hotel suite in Brussels, and again through the
     castle window in Prague.
     
    *
     
    Urgently google Mrs Spencer Hardy of Houston,
     Texas, widow and sole heiress of the late Spencer K. Hardy III, founder of Spencer Hardy
     Incorporated, a Texas-based multinational corporation trading in pretty well everything.
     Under her preferred sobriquet of Miss Maisie voted Republican Benefactress of the Year;
     Chairperson, the Americans for Christ Legion; Honorary President of a cluster of
     not-for-profit pro-life and family-value organizations; Chair of the American Institute
     for Islamic Awareness. And, in what looked almost like a recent add-on: President and
     CEO of an otherwise undescribed body calling itself