The Pigeon Tunnel by John le Carré

head to head in an open lorry with their feet bare. Somebody had stolen their boots, along no doubt with theirpay-books, wristwatches and any spare money they had taken into battle with them. The lorry was parked beside an artillery battery that was firing with seeming aimlessness into the jungle. Around the guns, small children, deaf from the blasts, drifted in bewilderment. Around the children sat young mothers whose men were fighting in the jungle. They were waiting for them to come back in the knowledge that if they didn’t their commanders would not report them missing but go on collecting their pay.
    Bowing, smiling, making her wais , Yvette sat among the women and gathered the children to herself. What she could possibly have said to them over the thunder of the guns I’ll never know, but the next minute they were laughing, mothers and children both. Even the men at the guns were sharing the joke. Back in the city, small boys and girls sat cross-legged in the dust of the pavement beside litre bottles filled with the petrol they had filched from the fuel tanks of wrecked cars. If a bomb went off, the petrol ignited and the children got burned. And Yvette, hearing the explosion from the balcony of her house, would leap into the dreadful little car that she drove like a tank, and comb the streets in search of survivors.

    I made a couple more journeys to Phnom Penh before the city finally fell. By the time I left for the last time, the Indian shopkeepers and the girls in their rickshaws were shaping to be the last to get out: the traders because the greater the shortages, the higher the prices; the girls because in their innocence they believed their services would be in demand whoever won. In the event, they were recruited to the Khmer Rouge, or died of deprivation in the killing fields. From Saigon, as it still was, I had written to Graham Greene to tell him that I had reread The Quiet American , and that it stood up wonderfully. Improbably the letter reached him, and he wrote back urging me to visit the museum in Phnom Penh and admire the bowler hat with ostrich feathers with which Khmer kings had been crowned. I had totell him that not only was there no bowler hat; there was no museum any more.
    Yvette has become the subject of many wild tales, some apocryphal but many, despite their improbability, true. My favourite, which I heard from her own mouth – not always a guarantee of veracity – tells how in Phnom Penh’s final days she marched a troop of orphaned Khmer children into the French Consulate and demanded passports, one for each child.
    â€˜But whose children are they?’ the besieged consular official protested.
    â€˜They are mine. I am their mother.’
    â€˜But they’re all the same age!’
    â€˜And I had many quadruplets, you idiot!’
    Defeated, perhaps complicit, the Consul demanded to know their names. Yvette reeled them off: ‘ Lundi, Mardi, Mercredi, Jeudi, Vendredi  . . .’

    In April 1999, while on a mission to the refugees of Kosovo, Yvette Pierpaoli was killed, along with David and Penny McCall of Refugees International, when their Albanian driver skidded off a mountain road and their car crashed hundreds of feet into a ravine. By then, with much help from my wife, she had written her own book, * which was translated into several languages. The title in English was Woman of a Thousand Children. She was sixty-one. I was in Nairobi at the time, researching my novel The Constant Gardener , which had as its central character a woman who was prepared to go to any lengths to help people unable to help themselves: in this case, African tribal women who were being used as human guinea pigs in clinical trials. Yvette had by then worked extensively in Africa, as well as in Guatemala and – her nemesis – Kosovo. In my novel, thefemale character, whose name is Tessa, dies. I had always intended her to die, and I suppose that, after