Excerpt from Absolute Friends by John Le Carre, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

It is his tonight.

Standing his full height beneath the frugal ceiling lamp, Mundy extracts a penlight from his pocket, unfolds the note until it becomes a rectangle of plain white paper, and sees what he expects to see: Sasha's handwriting, as it always was and ever shall be: the same spiky Germanic e's and r's, the same adamant downstrokes that declare the man. The expression on Mundy's face as he reads its message is hard to parse. Resignation, anxiety and pleasure all play a part. A rueful excitement dominates. Thirty-four bloody years, he thinks. We're men of three decades. We meet, we fight a war, we separate for a decade. We meet again, and for a decade we're indispensable to each other while we fight another. We part forever, and a decade later you come back.

Fishing in his jacket pockets he takes out a scuffed book of matches from Zara's kebab café. He plucks a match, strikes it and holds the note in the flame by one corner then another until it's a twisted flake of ash. He lets it fall to the flagstones and grinds it to black dust with his heel, a necessary observance.

He looks at his watch and does the arithmetic. One hour and twenty minutes to kill. No point to ringing her yet. She'll just have started work. Her boss goes crazy when the staff take personal calls in peak hours. Mustafa will be at Dina's house with Kamal. Mustafa and Kamal are bosom pals, leading lights of the Westend's all-Turkish national cricket league, president, Mr. Edward Mundy. Dina is Zara's cousin and good friend. Scrolling through a mildewed cellphone, he locates her number and dials it.

"Dina. Greetings. The bloody management have called a meeting of tour guides for tonight. I totally forgot. Can Mustafa sleep over at your place in case I'm late?" "Ted?" Mustafa's croaking voice.

"Good evening to you, Mustafa! How are you doing?" Mundy asks, slowly and emphatically. They are speaking the English that Mundy is teaching him.

"I - am - doing - very - very - well, Ted!" "Who is Don Bradman?"

"Don - Bradman - is - greatest - batsman - ever - the - world - was - seen, Ted!"

"Tonight you stay at Dina's house. Yes?" "Ted?"

"Did you understand me? I have a meeting tonight. I will be late."

"And - I - sleep - at - Dina." "Correct. Well done. You sleep at Dina's house."

"Ted?"
"What?"

Mustafa is laughing so much he can hardly speak. "You - very - bad - bad - man, Ted!"

"Why am I a bad man?"
"You - love - other - woman! I - tell - Zara!" "How did you guess my dark secret?" He has to repeat this.

"I - know - this! I - have - big - big - eyes!" "Would you like a description of the other woman I love? To tell to Zara?"

"Please?" "This other woman I've got. Shall I tell you what she looks like?"

"Yes, yes! You - tell - me! You - bad - man!" More hoots of laughter.

"She's got very beautiful legs-" "Yes, yes!"

"She's got four beautiful legs, actually - very furry legs - and a long golden tail - and her name is-?" "Mo! You love Mo! I tell Zara you love Mo more!"

Mo the stray Labrador, thus named by Mustafa in honor of himself. She took up residence with them at Christmas, to the initial horror of Zara, who has been brought up to believe that touching a dog makes her too dirty to pray. But under the concerted pressure of her two men, Zara's heart melted, and now Mo can do no wrong.

He rings the apartment and hears his own voice on the answering machine. Zara loves Mundy's voice. Sometimes, when she's missing him in the daytime, she says, she plays the tape for company. I may be late, darling, he warns her in their common German over the machine. There's a meeting of staff tonight and I forgot all about it. Lies like this, told protectively and from the heart, have their own integrity, he tells himself, wondering whether the enlightened young imam would agree. And I love you quite as much as I loved you this morning, he adds severely: so don't go thinking otherwise.

Copyright © 2004 by David Cornwell