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

"Please. Before I shoot you, Mr. Winser, I am instructed to ask you couple of questions."

Winser made nothing of this. He didn't hear it. He was dead.

"You are friendly with Mr. Randy Massingham?" Hoban asked. "I know him."

"How friendly?"

Which do they want? Winser was screaming to himself. Very friendly? Scarcely at all? Middling friendly? Hoban was repeating his question, yelling it insistently.

"Describe, please, the exact degree of your friendship with Mr. Randy Massingham. Very clearly, please. Very loudly."

"I know him. I am his colleague. I do legal work for him. We are on formal, perfectly pleasant terms, but we are not intimate," Winser mumbled, keeping his options open.

"Louder, please."

Winser said some of it again, louder.

"You are wearing a fashionable cricket tie, Mr. Winser. Describe to us what is represented by this tie, please."

"This isn't a cricket tie!" Unexpectedly Winser had found his spirit. "Tiger's the cricketer, not me! You've got the wrong man, you idiot!"

"Testing," Hoban said to someone up the hill.

"Testing what?" Winser demanded gamely.

Hoban was reading from a Gucci prayer book of maroon leather that he held open before his face, at an angle not to obstruct the barrel of the automatic.

"Question," he declaimed, festive as a town crier. "Who was responsible, please, for arrest at sea last week of SS Free Tallinn out of Odessa, bound for Liverpool?"

"What do I know of shipping matters?" Winser demanded truculently, his courage still up. "We're financial consultants, not shippers. Someone has money, they need advice, they come to Single's. How they make the money is their affair. As long as they're adult about it."

Adult to sting. Adult because Hoban was a pink piglet, hardly born. Adult because Mirsky was a bumptious Polish show-off, however many Doctors he put before his name. Doctor of where, anyway? Of what? Hoban again glanced up the hill, licked a finger and turned to the next page of his prayer book.

"Question. Who provided information to the Italian police authorities concerning a special convoy of trucks returning from Bosnia to Italy on March thirtieth this year, please?"

"Trucks? What do I know of special trucks? As much as you know of cricket, that's how much! Ask me to recite the names and dates of the kings of Sweden, you'd have more chance."

Why Sweden? he wondered. What had Sweden to do with anything? Why was he thinking of Swedish blondes, deep white thighs, Swedish crispbread, pornographic films? Why was he living in Sweden when he was dying in Turkey? Never mind. His courage was still up there. Screw the little runt, gun or no gun. Hoban turned another page of his prayer book but Winser was ahead of him. Like Hoban, he was bellowing at the top of his voice: "I don't know, you stupid idiot! Don't ask me, do you hear?" -- until an immense blow to the left side of his neck from Hoban's foot sent him crashing to the ground. He had no sense of traveling, only of arriving. The sun went out; he saw the night and felt his head nestled against a friendly rock and knew that a piece of time had gone missing from his consciousness and it was not a piece he wanted back.

Hoban, meanwhile, had resumed his reading: "Who implemented seizure in six countries simultaneously of all assets and shipping held directly or indirectly by First Flag Construction Company of Andorra and subsidiaries? Who provided information to international police authorities, please?"

Copyright © 1999 by David Cornwell. Reproduced with permission of the publisher.