THE SPY KNOWN AS JOHN LE CARRE : ESPIONAGE NOVELIST DAVID CORNWELL EXPOSED AT LAST.

Byline: Margaria Fichtner Knight-Ridder Tribune News Wire

``At least he doesn't look like a spy,'' says Jane Cornwell, eyes locked on her husband as he poses for a photograph by a large tree in Central Park.

In fact, on this brisk fall morning, David Cornwell - the tall, dapper former spook who, as John le Carre, has spent more than 30 years defining the literature of international paranoia - could be said to resemble, oh, you know, a slightly more mature version of Harry Pendel. As readers of le Carre's new novel, ``The Tailor of Panama'' (Knopf; $25), are well aware, Harry is the book's title character, the Pendel of Pendel & Braithwaite Limitada, ``Tailors to Royalty, formerly of Savile Row, London, and presently of the Via Espaa, Panama City.''

The fearlessly cheerful sports jacket Cornwell has selected for this morning and the somber gray suit (``I thought I would dress like a president'') he had worn the previous night for an appearance at the 92nd Street Y are the handiwork of London tailor Doug Hayward, from whom Cornwell borrowed some of Harry's notions about shop decor and client comfort. The truth is that Harry needs all the help he can get. His blue-ribbon customers include presidents, military honchos, playboys and business thugs, and his clever tongue, rococo imagination and elastic ambitions soon will vault him from his carefully crafted respectability into the swirling intrigue of the twilight of U.S. control of the Panama Canal.

``Gossip,'' le Carre writes, ``is what Panama has instead of politics,'' and Harry, dear boy, is everyone's confidant, but, at least when we first meet him, seldom anyone's fool:

``(He) walks with an air of power restrained. He is broad as well as tall, with grizzled hair cropped short. He has a heavy chest and the thick sloped shoulders of a boxer. Yet his walk is statesmanlike and disciplined. ... It is a walk to inspect a guard of honour or face assassination with dignity. In his imagination Pendel has done both.''

But why a tailor in the first place? Why not ``The Balloonist of Panama'' or ``The Heart Surgeon of Panama'' or some rich man, poor man, beggar man or thief?

``I like service industries,'' says Cornwell, settling even deeper into his comfy chair in this suite at the Carlyle. ``I've done hoteliers (Jonathan Pine of ``The Night Manager''), and I've done spies (the unsurpassable George Smiley plus Alec Leamus, Magnus Pym et al). I wanted a good listening post. I thought of hairdressing, and that would have been fun, too. ... But tailoring is heaven. I could have done it with hair and how people want to look and so on, but it wasn't as powerful as selling all that English bullshit that Harry does. It was so arcane, and above all it appealed to the male pride, the Latin male pride and ego. It created a club. I couldn't imagine a club of men who went to the same hairdresser, but Pendel & Braithwaite I could imagine.''

Less obscure is Cornwell's preoccupation with his setting. Since the Cold War thawed, le Carre's spies, counterspies and various shady emigres, embittered intellectuals, secret-sharers and wharf rats no longer are locked into the threadbare old boxing arena of East vs. West. Now they are free to show up wherever the money passes, the blood spatters and the headlines scream.

Cornwell first visited post-Noriega Panama seven years ago on the advice of U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency contacts in Miami when he was scouting settings for the covert hijinks of ``The Night Manager.'' Now, as the Dec. 31, 1999, deadline for ending the U.S. presence looms, the country he calls ``a Casablanca without heroes'' still scrapes at his imagination and his soul.

``It's never boring,'' he says. ``It's second, perhaps, only to Israel, (where) you feel you never meet a fool. ... Everybody's arguing and having a ball, and everybody's ideas are important. It's not quite the same atmosphere in Panama, because actually it's all small talk. There isn't much big talk. But it's tremendously lively, and the ethnic mix is heaven, and the scale of the skulduggery is delightful. For a novelist, it's fascinating. The rug keeps getting pulled out from under you. You think you've got it straight, but you haven't.''

Along with ringing similes and spiraling plots, things got straight are hallmarks of le Carre's 16 novels. From his 1963 classic, ``The Spy Who Came In From the Cold,'' he served notice: James Bond to the contrary, the world of espionage is a relentlessly bleak, blue place in which love does not last, sex is intended not as a pleasure but as a weapon or a betrayal, and truth is equally hard to discern and to conceal.

``I want there to be no truth,'' Cornwell says. ``I'm afraid that in ... the intelligence business we pretend that there are objective truths, that Noriega was a totally bad man, for instance, but the more you look, the more doubt raises its ugly head in the more unlikely places. And certainly in the intelligence business, as the United States has experienced it, the distortion of truth by intelligence officers in order to please the existing policy is a serious problem. When you're trying to look for reasons to invade Cuba, and the White House is saying, `I need reasons,' it's very hard to say, `There aren't any.' It takes a very strong man to say, `Mr. President, I don't think you should be invading Cuba.' And the truth is relative to whom one is talking, just as secrets are what you tell one person at a time.''

The bottom line, then, is not so much figuring out who is good and who is evil but how anyone of principle can toil in the service of grand causes amid constantly changing politics and shifting values. In fiction, moral collusion and collisions can make for superb entertainment; in real life, they mean ``you either have to laugh or cry or end yourself,'' Cornwell says.

His view of the world, whether experienced straight on or through the filter of fiction, tends toward the apocalyptic. Although he believes that ``most of us in our streets are good neighbors, and I think when people move in we tend to want to get to know them, make them comfortable, lend them a corkscrew,'' he eagerly devotes much of a one-hour conversation to a laundry list of dismal topics ranging from global pollution, hunger and terrorism to the skewed values of lunar exploration, the cracked ideals of the global village, the false hopes clinging to the notion of a Cuba minus Castro, the unhealthy vacuum that will be left when the United States departs the Canal Zone and the problems of the farmers and fishermen of Cornwall, England, where he lives with his face to the sea.

Still, even in his most murky moments, Cornwell is unflaggingly charming and courteous. His pinkish face and plumy O's evoke images of the well-scrubbed public schoolboy he once was, and during flashes of high merriment or mimicry, his thick white eyebrows skitter about like manic caterpillars.

Asked whom in history he would like to have met, he says: ``I think Conrad,'' although in lieu of that, the Soviet physicist and dissident Andrei Sakharov was ``just fascinating,'' and there have been too many heads of state, cabinet ministers and party leaders to bother mentioning.

``I do get in to see people,'' Cornwell says. ``My face was on the cover of Time magazine once, and in the extreme case, I take an old copy and send it as a kind of visiting card, and it works.'' Whatever worked with Yassir Arafat, Cornwell found the Palestinian leader ``completely unexpected and fascinating. He said,'' and here Cornwell's voice descends to a husky whisper, `` `David, why have you come to see meeee?' So I said,'' more whispering, `` `Mr. Chairman' - fired by his dramatic sense - `Mr. Chairman, I've come to put my hand on the Palestinian heart.' He seized my hand'' - as Cornwell now seizes your own and drags it to his chest - `` `It is here. It is here.'

``It was absolutely extraordinary. And that stubble is baby fluff. It's not beard. ... And when you go into an Arab embrace, you get this wonderful soft lining against you and the smell of baby powder.''

Cornwell's own powdered babyhood was spent in Poole, ``a really gloomy spot'' in Dorset where his grandfather, a bricklayer, once served as mayor. His home life, though on the surface privileged, suffered from the erosions of Dickensian emotional rot. Cornwell's mother, Olive, ran off with another man, and Cornwell did not see her from the age of 5 until they held an odd reunion when he was 21. ``I took the train, and there were a bunch of women with white hair who were eligible mothers standing at the barrier. And I waited, and then she stepped forward because she recognized me. I didn't recognize her. It was a very curious embrace, and a very curious relationship thereafter.''

Cornwell's ``peculiar papa,'' Ronald, was a spectacularly pathological liar, cheat and con man who drifted in and out of his son's life on an ebb and flow dictated by his current state of fortune and affection. He ran for Parliament. He also served time in prison. No one was safe from his duplicity and thievery, and his family was the least immune of all.

``I never told him the truth unless there was no way out,'' Cornwell says. ``I mean, it was the very last thing one told him, because he was intrusive about every part of one's life. Even when I was a boy, if a letter arrived for me in the house, he always read it and then just left it on the side table. So I used clandestine methods and fantasy and those things in order to deal with that impossible world. I think that that kind of childhood enormously serves the imagination, sharpens it, makes it inventive.''

Cornwell exorcised the demons of their relationship in his 1986 thriller, ``A Perfect Spy,'' and has drawn much of Harry Pendel's character on his father's ``court of hangers-on. ... A lot of wonderful, flawed characters came through our lives in those days. Many of them were first generation, and they were in a hurry to make money. And the one thing my father did generate, for better or worse, was quick money, and they were in the racing business and the property business and the rackets. And really, those voices and those people are a wonderfully rich resource that I can draw on. ... And therefore I felt quite close to Harry, because living under a tyrannical, wayward and completely incomprehensible father, I was a great fabulist myself.''

He found an outlet for his fiction at 12. His first story ``was about about a racehorse. ... The jockey loaded his whip with lead shot. The horse was beaten, and I persuaded Miss Keough, the headmaster's secretary, to type it out in her spare time. And Mr. Robertson-Glasgow, the headmaster, seized me by the hair, which was his way of addressing you, and said `Have you been giving work to my secretary?' So I said, `Well, she said she'd do it in her spare time,' to which he said, dragging me to his study, `There is only one thing for cheek,' and he beat me and told me not to write trash. And that's how the arts were encouraged in England, and to a great extent still are, I should think.''

It was an indelible lesson for a writer. Or a spy. Cornwell, who attended university in Berne and at Oxford and taught for a while at Eton, remains vague, ``out of some residual sense of loyalty,'' about the seven or eight years he spent in ``what was politely called the Foreign Service.'' But he does say that in the 1950s he was in Austria, charged with rooting out fake refugees from among those still displaced by World War II, and by 1961, he had moved on to Bonn when word came that the Berlin Wall's first barriers were being erected. ``I got on the first available flight to Berlin and for three days and nights really didn't sleep at all. We were just trying to save the wreck in whatever way we could.''

In hindsight, Cornwell characterizes his time with the government as ``my little university for the purposes of writing spy fiction. I think if I'd gone to sea, I would have written about the sea.'' He adopted his now-famous pseudonym because Foreign Service operatives were not permitted to publish under their own names. The popular legend is that he plucked John le Carre off a shop he had spotted from a bus, but not even he is sure anymore if that is true. As time passes, ``Memory eludes me, and the lie takes over.''

Today, he says, the relationship between David Cornwell and John le Carre is part schizophrenia, part compromise.

``David is in charge of the talent, and the talent stays outside the door in ordinary society. That's actually Graham Greene's metaphor: `I leave the talent outside.' But John has to be watered and fed and pampered and taken for walks and treated very kindly. David can look after himself.''

During the previous night's program at the Y, moderator George Plimpton was meticulous always to address Cornwell as ``Mr. le Carre,'' and there are times when people chummily call him John. ``I find it terribly funny. I go along with it. It always makes me giggle.''

On Oct. 19, Cornwell turned 65. He is grateful that despite a childhood that left him epically unprepared for the obligations of paternity (``I had tremendous good will but no skill''), his four sons ``have made wonderful marriages, and they're great parents.''

Professionally, he believes he is still at the top of his form and is plainly delighted with the comic aspects of his new book: ``Another string to my bow, and I gave it a twang.'' He thinks ``Tailor's'' major female characters, Louisa and Marta, prove ``I'm getting women better now. I grew up without them, and they have always been strangers to me, and I made a lot of messes in my middle life simply because I'd never grown up. I'm better, but to have to wait till you're 65 to draw a decent female character is a bit sad.''

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Photo: ``I want there to be no truth,'' David Cornwell - who writes under the name John le Carre - says of the shadowy, shifting world he describes in his famous spy novels.

Knight-Ridder Tribune Photo Service