The Confidential Agent Read online

  THE CONFIDENTIAL AGENT

  Graham Greene was born in 1904. On coming down from Balliol College, Oxford, he worked for four years as sub-editor on The Times. He established his reputation with his fourth novel, Stamboul Train. In 1935 he made a journey across Liberia, described in Journey Without Maps, and on his return was appointed film critic of the Spectator. In 1926 he was received into the Roman Catholic Church and visited Mexico in 1938 to report on the religious persecution there. As a result he wrote The Lawless Roads and, later, his famous novel The Power and the Glory. Brighton Rock was published in 1938 and in 1940 he became literary editor of the Spectator. The next year he undertook work for the Foreign Office and was stationed in Sierra Leone from 1941 to 1943. This later produced the novel, The Heart of the Matter, set in West Africa.

  As well as his many novels, Graham Greene wrote several collections of short stories, four travel books, six plays, three books of autobiography – A Sort of Life, Ways of Escape and A World of My Own (published posthumously) – two of biography and four books for children. He also contributed hundreds of essays, and film and book reviews, some of which appear in the collections Reflections and Mornings in the Dark. Many of his novels and short stories have been filmed and The Third Man was written as a film treatment. Graham Greene was a member of the Order of Merit and a Companion of Honour. He died in April 1991.

  ALSO BY GRAHAM GREENE

  Novels

  The Man Within

  It’s a Battlefield

  A Gun for Sale

  The Ministry of Fear

  The Third Man

  The End of the Affair

  Loser Takes All

  The Quiet American

  A Burnt-Out Case

  Travels with my Aunt

  Dr Fischer of Geneva or

  The Bomb Party

  The Human Factor

  The Tenth Man

  Stamboul Train

  England Made Me

  Brighton Rock

  The Power and the Glory

  The Heart of the Matter

  The Fallen Idol

  Our Man in Havana

  The Comedians

  The Honorary Consul

  Monsignor Quixote

  The Captain and the Enemy

  Short Stories

  Collected Stories

  The Last Word and Other Stories

  May We Borrow Your Husband?

  Travel

  Journey Without Maps

  The Lawless Roads

  In Search of a Character

  Getting to Know the General

  Essays

  Yours etc.

  Reflections

  Mornings in the Dark

  Collected Essays

  Plays

  Collected Plays

  Autobiography

  A Sort of Life

  Ways of Escape

  Fragments of an Autobiography

  A World of my Own

  Biography

  Lord Rochester’s Monkey

  An Impossible Woman

  Children’s Books

  The Little Train

  The Little Horse-Bus

  The Little Steamroller

  The Little Fire Engine

  GRAHAM GREENE

  The Confidential Agent

  VINTAGE BOOKS

  London

  This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  Epub ISBN: 9781409020486

  Version 1.0

  www.randomhouse.co.uk

  Published by Vintage 2006

  8 10 9

  Copyright © Graham Greene 1978

  Introduction copyright © John Rebus Ltd 2006

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  First published in Great Britain by William Heinemann 1939

  First published by Vintage in 2002

  Vintage

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  London SW1V 2SA

  www.vintage-classics.info

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  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 9780099286196

  The Random House Group Limited supports The Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), the leading international forest certification organisation. All our titles that are printed on Greenpeace approved FSC certified paper carry the FSC logo. Our paper procurement policy can be found at: www.rbooks.co.uk/environment

  Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Cox & Wyman, Reading RG1 8EX

  To Dorothy Craigie

  Contents

  Cover Page

  About the Author

  Also by Graham Greene

  The Confidential Agent

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Part One: The Hunted

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Part Two: The Hunter

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Part Three: The Last Shot

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Part Four: The End

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  The History of Vintage

  PART ONE

  The Hunted

  [1]

  The gulls swept over Dover. They sailed out like flakes of the fog, and tacked back towards the hidden town, while the siren mourned with them: other ships replied, a whole wake lifted up their voices – for whose death? The ship moved at half speed through the bitter autumn evening. It reminded D. of a hearse, rolling slowly and discreetly towards the ‘garden of peace’, the driver careful not to shake the coffin, as if the body minded a jolt or two. Hysterical women shrieked among the shrouds.

  The third-class bar was jammed; a rugger team was returning home and they scrummed boisterously for their glasses, wearing striped ties. D. couldn’t always understand what they were shouting: perhaps it was slang – or dialect. It would take a little time for his memory of English completely to return; he had known it very well once, but now his memories were rather literary. He tried to stand apart, a middle-aged man with a heavy moustache and a scarred chin and worry like a habit on his forehead, but you couldn’t go far in that bar – an elbow caught him in the ribs and a mouth breathed bottled beer into his face. He was filled with a sense of amazement at these people; you could never have told from their smoky good fellowship that there was a war on – not merely a war in the country from which he had come, but a war here, half a mile outside Dover breakwater. He carried the war with him. Wherever D. was, there was the war. He could never understand that people were unaware of it.

  ‘Pass here, pass here,’ a player screamed at the barman, and somebody snatched his glass of beer and shouted, ‘Offside.’ ‘Scrum,’ they all screamed together.

  D. said, ‘With your permission. With your permission
,’ edging out. He turned up the collar of his mackintosh and went up on to the cold and foggy deck where the gulls were mourning, blowing over his head towards Dover. He began to tramp – up and down beside the rail – to keep warm, his head down, the deck like a map marked with trenches, impossible positions, salients, deaths: bombing planes took flight from between his eyes, and in his brain the mountains shook with shell-bursts.

  He had no sense of safety walking up and down on this English ship sliding imperceptibly into Dover. Danger was part of him. It wasn’t like an overcoat you sometimes left behind: it was your skin. You died with it; only corruption stripped it from you. The one person you trusted was yourself. One friend was found with a holy medal under the shirt, another belonged to an organisation with the wrong initial letters. Up and down the cold unsheltered third-class deck, into the stern and back, until his walk was interrupted by the little wooden gate with a placard: ‘First-Class Passengers Only.’ There had been a time when the class distinction would have read like an insult, but now the class divisions were too subdivided to mean anything at all. He stared up the first-class deck. There was only one man out in the cold like himself: collar turned up, he stood in the bow looking out towards Dover.

  D. went back into the stern, and again, as regular as his tread, the bombing planes took off. You could trust nobody but yourself, and sometimes you were uncertain whether after all you could trust yourself. They didn’t trust you, any more than they had trusted the friend with the holy medal; they were right then, and who was to say whether they were not right now? You – you were a prejudiced party; the ideology was a complex affair; heresies crept in. . . . He wasn’t certain that he wasn’t watched at this moment; he wasn’t certain that it wasn’t right for him to be watched. After all, there were aspects of economic materialism which, if he searched his heart, he did not accept. . . . And the watcher – was he watched? He was haunted for a moment by the vision of an endless distrust. In an inner pocket, a bulge over the breast, he carried what were called credentials, but credence no longer meant belief.

  He walked slowly back – the length of his chain; through the fog a young female voice cried harshly and distinctly, ‘I’m going to have one more. I will have one more’: somewhere a lot of glass broke. Somebody was crying behind a lifeboat – it was a strange world wherever you were. He walked cautiously round the bow of the boat and saw a child, wedged in a corner. He stood and looked at it. It didn’t mean a thing to him – it was like writing so illegible you didn’t even try to decipher it. He wondered whether he would ever again share anybody’s emotion. He said to it in a gentle dutiful way, ‘What is the matter?’

  ‘I bumped my head.’

  He said, ‘Are you alone?’

  ‘Dad stood me here.’

  ‘Because you bumped your head?’

  ‘He said it wasn’t any cause to take on.’ The child had stopped crying; it began to cough, the fog in the throat: dark eyes stared out of their cave between boat and rail, defensively. D. turned and walked on. It occurred to him that he shouldn’t have spoken: the child was probably watched – by a father, or a mother. He came up to the barrier – ‘First-Class Passengers Only’ – and looked through. The other man was approaching through the fog, walking the longer length of his chain. D. saw first the pressed trousers, then the fur collar, and last the face. They stared at each other across the low gate. Taken by surprise they had nothing to say. Besides, they had never spoken to each other; they were separated by different initial letters, a great many deaths – they had seen each other in a passage years ago, once in a railway station and once on a landing-field. D. couldn’t even remember his name.

  The other man was the first to move away; thin as celery inside his thick coat, tall, he had an appearance of nerves and agility; he walked fast on legs like stilts, stiffly, but you felt they might fold up. He looked as if he had already decided on some action. D. thought: he will probably try to rob me, perhaps he will try to have me killed. He would certainly have more helpers and more money and more friends. He would bear letters of introduction to peers and ministers – he had once had some kind of title himself, years ago, before the republic . . . count, marquis . . . D. had forgotten exactly what. It was a misfortune that they were both travelling on the same boat and that they should have seen each other like that at the barrier between the classes, two confidential agents wanting the same thing.

  The siren shrieked again and suddenly out of the fog, like faces looking through a window, came ships, lights, a wedge of breakwater. They were one of a crowd. The engine went half speed and then stopped altogether. D. could hear the water slap, slap the side. They drifted, apparently, sideways. Somebody shouted invisibly – as though from the sea itself. They sidled forward and were there: it was as simple as all that. A rush of people carrying suitcases were turned back by sailors who seemed to be taking the ship to pieces. A bit of rail came off, as it were, in their hands.

  Then they all surged over with their suitcases, labelled with Swiss Hotels and pensions in Biarritz. D. let the rush go by. He had nothing but a leather wallet containing a brush and comb, a tooth-brush, a few oddments. He had got out of the way of wearing pyjamas: it wasn’t really worth while when you were likely to be disturbed twice in a night by bombs.

  The stream of passengers divided into two for the passport examination: aliens and British subjects. There were not many aliens; a few feet away from D. the tall man from the first class shivered slightly inside his fur coat. Pale and delicate, he didn’t seem to go with this exposed and windy shed upon the quay. But he was wafted quickly through – one glance at his papers had been enough. Like an antique he was very well authenticated. D. thought without enmity: a museum piece. They all on that side seemed to him museum pieces – their lives led in big cold houses like public galleries hung with rather dull old pictures and with buhl cabinets in the corridors.

  D. found himself at a standstill. A very gentle man with a fair moustache said, ‘But do you mean that this photograph is – yours?’

  D. said, ‘Of course.’ He looked down at it; it had never occurred to him to look at his own passport for – well, years. He saw a stranger’s face – that of a man much younger and, apparently, much happier than himself: he was grinning at the camera. He said, ‘It’s an old photograph.’ It must have been taken before he went to prison, before his wife was killed, and before the air raid of December 23 when he was buried for fifty-six hours in a cellar. But he could hardly explain all that to the passport officer.

  ‘How old?’

  ‘Two years perhaps.’

  ‘But your hair is quite grey now.’

  ‘Is it?’

  The detective said, ‘Would you mind stepping to one side and letting the others pass?’ He was polite and unhurried. That was because this was an island. At home soldiers would have been called in: they would immediately have assumed that he was a spy, the questioning would have been loud and feverish and long drawn out. The detective was at his elbow. He said, ‘I’m sorry to have kept you. Would you mind just coming in here a moment?’ He opened the door of a room. D. went in. There was a table, two chairs and a picture of King Edward VII naming an express train ‘Alexandra’: extraordinary period faces grinned over high white collars: an engine-driver wore a bowler hat.

  The detective said, ‘I’m sorry about this. Your passport seems to be quite correct, but this picture – well – you know you’ve only to look at yourself, sir.’

  He looked in the only glass there was – the funnel of the engine and King Edward’s beard rather spoilt the view – but he had to confess that the detective was not unreasonable. He did look different now. He said, ‘It never occurred to me that I had changed so much.’ The detective watched him closely. There was the old D. – he remembered now: it was just three years ago. He was forty-two, but a young forty-two. His wife had come with him to the studio; he had been going to take six months’ leave from the university and travel – with her, of course. The
civil war broke out exactly three days later. He had been six months in a military prison – his wife had been shot – that was a mistake, not an atrocity – and then. . . . He said, ‘You know war changes people. That was before the war.’ He had been laughing at a joke – something about pineapples: it was going to be the first holiday together for years. They had been married for fifteen. He could remember the antiquated machine and the photographer diving under a hood; he could remember his wife only indistinctly. She had been a passion, and it is difficult to recall an emotion when it is dead.

  ‘Have you got any more papers ?’ the detective asked. ‘Or is there anyone in London who knows you ? Your Embassy?’

  ‘Oh no, I’m a private citizen – of no account at all.’

  ‘You are not travelling for pleasure?’

  ‘No. I have a few business introductions.’ He smiled back at the detective. ‘But they might be forged.’

  He couldn’t feel angry; the grey moustache, the heavy lines around the mouth – they were all new – and the scar on his chin. He touched it. ‘We have a war on, you know.’ He wondered what the other was doing now: he wouldn’t be losing any time. Probably there was a car waiting. He would be in London well ahead of him – there might be trouble. Presumably he had orders not to allow anyone from the other side to interfere with the purchase of coal. Coal used to be called black diamonds before people discovered electricity. Well, in his own country it was more valuable than diamonds, and soon it would be as rare.

  The detective said, ‘Of course your passport’s quite in order. Perhaps if you’d let me know where you are staying in London . . .’

  ‘I have no idea.’

  The detective suddenly winked at him. It happened so quickly D. could hardly believe it. ‘Some address,’ the detective said.

  ‘Oh, well, there’s a hotel, isn’t there, called the Ritz?’

  ‘There is, but I should choose something less expensive.’

  ‘Bristol. There’s always a Bristol.’