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

He glances at his watch - one hour and ten minutes to go. He advances on a worm-eaten gilded chair and puts it in front of a dilapidated Biedermeier wardrobe. Balancing on the chair, he gropes behind the wardrobe's pediment and extracts an ancient khaki knapsack thick with dust. He pats the dust off, sits down on the chair, sets the knapsack on his lap, yanks the webbing straps free of their tarnished buckles, lifts the flap and peers dubiously inside as if uncertain what to expect.

Gingerly he unpacks the contents onto a bamboo table: one ancient group photograph of an Anglo-Indian family with its many native servants posed on the steps of a grand colonial house; one buff folder marked FILE in aggressive hand-inked capitals; one bundle of ill-written letters of a similar period; one twist of woman's hair, dark brown, bound round a sprig of dried heather.

But these objects attract only a curt acknowledgment from him. What he is looking for, and has perhaps deliberately left till last, is a plastic folder in which float as many as twenty unopened letters addressed to Mr. Teddy Mundy care of his bank in Heidelberg in the same black ink and spiky hand as the note he has this minute burned. No sender's name is supplied, but none is needed.

Floppy blue air-letters. Coarse-grained Third World envelopes reinforced with sticky tape and blazoned with stamps as radiant as tropical birds from places as far apart as Damascus, Jakarta and Havana.

First he sorts them into chronological order according to their postmarks. Then he slits them open, one by one, with an old tin penknife, also from the knapsack. He starts reading. For what? When you are reading something, Mr. Mundy, first ask yourself why you are reading it. He is hearing the accented voice of his old German teacher, Dr. Mandelbaum, forty years ago. Are you reading something for information?

That is one reason. Or are you reading it for knowledge? Information is only the path, Mr. Mundy. The goal is knowledge.

I'll settle for knowledge, he's thinking. And I promise I won't fall for dangerous ideology, he adds, with a mental doff of the cap to the imam. I'll settle for knowing what I didn't want to know, and I'm still not sure I want to. How did you find me, Sasha? Why must I not recognize you? Who are you avoiding this time, and why?

Folded among the letters are press clippings torn impatiently from newspapers and bearing Sasha's byline. The salient passages are highlighted, or indicated by exclamation marks.

He reads for an hour, returns the letters and press clippings to the knapsack and the knapsack to its hiding place.

The mixture as expected, he silently tells himself. No quarter given. One man's war continues as planned. Age is not an excuse. It never was and never will be.

He puts the gilded chair where he found it, sits down again and remembers he's wearing his bowler hat. He takes it off, turns it upside down and peers into it, a thing he does in pensive moments. The maker Steinmatzky's first name is Joseph. He owns to sons, no daughters. His firm's address in Vienna is No. 19 Dürerstrasse above the Baker's. Or it was, because old man Joseph Steinmatzky liked to date his handiwork and this example boasts a vintage year: 1938.

Staring into the hat, he watches the scene unfold. The cobbled alley, the little shop above the baker's. The smashed glass, the blood between the cobblestones as Joseph Steinmatzky, his wife and many sons are dragged away to the vociferous approval of Vienna's proverbially innocent bystanders.

He rises, squares his shoulders, lowers them and wriggles his hands around to loosen himself up. He steps into the stairwell, relocks the door, mounts the stone steps. Strips of dew hover over the palace lawns. The fresh air smells of mown grass and damp cricket field. Sasha, you mad bastard, what do you want now?

Copyright © 2004 by David Cornwell