The Secret Pilgrim by John le Carré Page A

district prison and met him in a barred interviewing room: a caged giant in a roll-neck pullover who called himself Sea Captain Brandt, which seemed to be his personal version of Kapitän zur See.
    â€œYou’re a long way from the sea,” I said as I shook his great, padded hand.
    As far as the Swiss were concerned, he had everything wrong with him. He had swindled a hotel, which in Switzerland is such a heinous crime it gets its own paragraph in the criminal code. He had caused a disturbance, he was penniless and his West German passport did not bear examination—though the Swiss refused to say this out loud, since a fake passport could prejudice their chances of getting rid of him to another country. He had been picked up drunk and vagrant and he blamed it on a girl. He had broken someone’s jaw. He insisted on speaking to me alone.
    â€œYou British?” he asked in English, presumably in order to disguise our conversation from the Swiss, though they spoke better English than he did.
    â€œYes.”
    â€œProve, please.”
    I showed him my official identity card, describing me as Vice-Consul for Economic Affairs.
    â€œYou work for British Intelligence?” he asked.
    â€œI work for the British government.”
    â€œOkay, okay,” he said, and in sudden weariness sank his head into his hand so that his long blond hair flopped forward, and he had to toss it back again with a sweep of his arm. His face was chipped and pitted like a boxer’s.
    â€œYou ever been in prison?” he asked, staring at the scrubbed white table.
    â€œNo, thank God.”
    â€œJesus,” he said, and in bad English told me his story. He was a Latvian, born in Riga of Latvian and Polish parents. He spoke Latvian, Russian, Polish and German. He was born to the sea, which I sensed immediately, for I was born to it myself. His father and grandfather had been sailors, he had served six years in the Soviet navy, sailing the Arctic out of Archangel, and the Sea of Japan out of Vladivostok. A year back he had returned to Riga, bought a small boat and taken up smuggling along the Baltic coast, running cheap Russian vodka into Finland with the help of Scandinavian fishermen. He was caught and put in prison near Leningrad, escaped and stowed away to Poland, where he lived illegally with a Polish girl student in Cracow. I tell you this exactly as he told it to me, as if stowing away to Poland from Russia were as self-evident as catching a number II bus or popping down the road for a drink. Yet even with my limited familiarity with the obstacles he had overcome, I knew it was an extraordinary feat—and no less so when he performed it a second time. For when the girl left him to marry a Swiss salesman, he headed back to the coast and got himself a ride to Malmö, then down to Hamburg where he had a distant cousin, but the cousin was distant indeed, and told him to go to hell. So he stole the cousin’s passport and headed south to Switzerland, determined to get back his Polish girl. When her new husband wouldn’t let her go, Brandt broke the poor man’s jaw for him, so here he was, a prisoner of the Swiss police.
    All this still in English, so I asked him where he’d learned it. From the BBC, when he was out smuggling, he said. From his Polish girl—she was a language student. I had given him a packet of cigarettes and he was devouring them one after another, making a gas chamber of our little room.
    â€œSo what’s this information you’ve got for us?” I asked him.
    As a Latvian, he said in preamble, he felt no allegiance to Moscow. He had grown up under the lousy Russian tyranny in Latvia, he had served under lousy Russian officers in the navy, he had been sent to prison by lousy Russians and hounded by lousy Russians, and he hadno compunction about betraying them. He hated Russians. I asked him the names of the ships he had served on and he told me. I asked him what