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

"What seizure? Where? When? Nothing has been seized! No one provided anything. You're mad, Hoban! Barking mad. Do you hear me? Mad!"

Winser was still recumbent but in his frenzy he was trying to writhe his way back onto his knees, kicking and twisting like a felled animal, struggling to wedge his heels under him, half rising, only to topple back again onto his side. Hoban was asking other questions but Winser refused to hear them -- questions about commissions paid in vain, about supposedly friendly port officials who had proved unfriendly, about sums of money transferred to bank accounts days before the said accounts were seized. But Winser knew nothing of such matters.

"It's lies!" he shouted. "Single's is a dependable and honest house. Our customers' interests are paramount."

"Listen up, and kneel up," Hoban ordered.

And somehow Winser with his newfound dignity knelt up and listened up. Intently. And more intently still. As intently as if Tiger himself had been commanding his attention. Never in his life had he listened so vigorously, so diligently to the sweet background music of the universe as he did now, in his effort to blank out the one sound he absolutely declined to hear, which was Hoban's grating American-Russian drone. He noted with delight a shrieking of gulls vying with the distant wall of a muezzin, a rustle of the sea as a breeze blew over it, a tink-tink of pleasure boats in the bay as they geared themselves for the season. He saw a girl from his early manhood, kneeling naked in a field of poppies, and was too scared, now as then, to reach a hand toward her. He adored with the terrified love that was welling in him all the tastes, touches and sounds of earth and heaven, as long as they weren't Hoban's awful voice booming out his death sentence.

"We are calling this 'exemplary punishment,'" Hoban was declaring, in a prepared statement from his prayer book.

"Louder," Monsieur François ordered laconically from up the hill, so Hoban said the sentence again.

"Sure, it's a vengeance killing too. Please. We would not be human if we did not exact vengeance. But also we intend this gesture will be interpreted as formal request for recompense." Louder still. And clearer. "And we sincerely hope, Mr. Winser, that your friend Mr. Tiger Single, and the international police, will read this message and draw the appropriate conclusion."

Then he bawled out what Winser took to be the same message in Russian, for the benefit of those members of his audience whose English might not be up to the mark. Or was it Polish, for the greater edification of Dr. Mirsky?

* * *

Winser, who had momentarily lost his power of speech, was now gradually recovering it, even if at first he was capable only of such half-made scraps as "out of your wits" and "judge and jury in one" and "Single not a house to mess with." He was filthy, he was a mess of sweat and piss and mud. In his fight for the survival of his species he was wrestling with irrelevant erotic visions that belonged to some unlivable underlife, and his fall to the ground had left him coated in red dust. His locked arms were a martyrdom and he had to crane his head back to speak at all. But he managed. He held the line.

His case was that, as previously stated, he was de facto and de jute immune. He was a lawyer, and the law was its own protection. He was a healer, not a destroyer, a passive facilitator of unlimited goodwill, the legal director and a board member of the House of Single, with offices in London's West End; he was a husband and father who, despite a weakness for women and two unfortunate divorces, had kept the love of his children. He had a daughter who was even now embarking on a promising career on the stage. At the mention of his daughter he choked, though no one joined him in his grief.

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