The Pigeon Tunnel by John le Carré Page A

my travels with Yvette, I had known that her luck too couldn’t last. As a child Yvette had been raped, abused and discarded. As a young woman she had taken refuge in Paris, and in penury resorted to prostitution. When she discovered she was pregnant by a Cambodian man, she went to Phnom Penh to find him, only to discover he had another life. In a bar she met Kurt and they became partners in business as in life.
    I met her for the first time in the house of a German diplomat in the besieged city of Phnom Penh, over a dinner served to the clatter of outgoing gunfire from Lon Nol’s palace a hundred yards down the road. She was accompanied by Kurt. Their trading company was called Suisindo, and operated from an old wooden house in the centre of town. She was sparky, tough, brown-eyed and in her late thirties, by turns vulnerable and raucous, never the one thing for long. She could spread her elbows and upbraid you like a bargee. She could tip you a smile to melt your heart. She could cajole, flatter and win you in any way you needed to be won. But it was all for a cause.
    And the cause, you quickly learned, was to get food and money to the starving by any method and at any price: medicines to the sick, shelter for the homeless, papers for the stateless and, in the most secular, businesslike, down-to-earth way, perform miracles. This did not in the least prevent her from being a resourceful and frequently shameless businesswoman, particularly when she was pitched against people whose cash, in her unshakeable opinion, would be better in the pockets of the needy. Suisindo made good profits, as it had to, since much of the money that came through the front door flowed straight out of the back, earmarked for whatever good purpose Yvette had set her heart on. And Kurt, the wisest and most long-suffering of men, smiled and nodded it on its way.
    A Swedish aid official, enamoured of her, invited Yvette to his private island off the coast of Sweden. Phnom Penh had fallen. Kurt and Yvette, having relocated to Bangkok, were on their financial uppers. A contract was at stake: would they or would they not win theSwedish aid agency’s commission to buy and deliver several million dollars’ worth of rice to starving Cambodian refugees on the Thai border? Their nearest competitor was a ruthless Chinese merchant who Yvette was convinced, probably on no greater evidence than her intuition, was plotting to short-change both the aid agency and the refugees.
    Under Kurt’s urging, she set off for the Swedish island. The beach house was a love-nest prepared for her arrival. Scented candles, she swore, were burning in the bedroom. Her lover-to-be was ardent, but she entreated patience. Might they not first take a romantic walk on the beach? Of course! For you, anything! It’s freezing cold, so they must wrap up warm. As they stumble over the sand dunes in the darkness, Yvette proposes a childhood game:
    â€˜Stand still. So. Now you place yourself close behind me. Closer. So. That is very nice. Now I close my eyes and you put your hands over them. You are comfortable? I too. Now you may ask me one question, any question in the world, one only, and I must answer the absolu te truth. If I do not, I am not worthy of you. You will play this game? Good. I too. So what is your question?’
    His question, predictably, concerns her most intimate desires. She describes them, I am sure with brazen falsehood: she dreams, she says, of a certain handsome, virile Swede making love to her in a perfumed bedroom on a lonely island in the midst of a turbulent sea. Then it’s her turn. She spins him round, and perhaps with less tenderness than the poor fellow might have expected, claps her hands over his eyes and yells in his ear:
    â€˜What is the nearest competitive tender to Suisindo’s for the delivery of one thousand tons of rice to the refugees on the Thai–Cambodian border?’
    It was Yvette’s work, I now realize,