The Secret Pilgrim

by John le Carré

  “Now don’t do that, son, this gentleman was before you,” he said in a matter-of-fact voice. “He’s got a little confidential business to transact, haven’t you, sir?”

  He had indeed. And Monty’s grasp did not release me until I had observed the nature of it. The monkey was speaking. Not to the Panda, not to her retinue, but to the two floorwalkers in striped trousers who were inclining their heads to listen to him, at first condescendingly, then with startled interest as their gaze switched to the Panda.

  “Alas, gentlemen, Her Royal Highness prefers to make her purchases informally, you see,” he was saying. “Without the inconvenience of a wrapping or an invoice, let us put it that way. It is her time of life. Three and four years ago, she was a most expert bargainer, you know. Oh yes. She would negotiate a most competitive discount for everything she wished to buy. But today, at her time of life, she is taking matters most literally into her own hands, you see. Or should I say into her sleeve, oh dear? I am therefore charged by His Royal Highness to make a most bountiful settlement for all such informal purchases, on the very clear understanding that no breath of publicity reaches the public ear, gentlemen, whether in the written or the spoken word, if you understand me.”

  Then from his pocket he drew not, alas, a deadly Walther automatic, not a Heckler & Koch sub-machine gun, not even one of our beloved standard Browning 9-millimetres, but a tooled Moroccan leather wallet stuffed with his master’s banknotes in a variety of denominations.

  “I counted, I believe, three fine rings, sir, one in artificial emerald, two in paste diamond, also a fine artificial ruby necklace, gentlemen, three strings. It is the wish of His Royal Highness that our settlement should take generous account of any inconvenience suffered by your most excellent staff, you see. Also commission to your good selves, on the understanding already stated regarding publicity.”

  Monty’s grip on me had at last relaxed, and as we walked towards the hall I dared to glance at him, and saw to my relief that his expression, though thoughtful, was surprisingly gentle.

  “That’s the trouble in our job, Ned,” he explained contentedly, using my Christian name for the first time. “Life’s looking one way, we’re looking the other. I like an honest-to-God enemy myself sometimes, I don’t mind admitting. Take a lot of finding, though, don’t they? Too many nice blokes about.”

  3

  “Now do please remember,” Smiley piously exhorted his young audience, in much the tone he might have selected if he had been asking them to put their offerings in the collection box as they were leaving, “that the privately educated Englishman—and Englishwoman, if you will allow me—is the greatest dissembler on earth.” He waited for the laughter to subside. “Was, is now and ever shall be for as long as our disgraceful school system remains intact. Nobody will charm you so glibly, disguise his feelings from you better, cover his tracks more skilfully or find it harder to confess to you that he’s been a damned fool. Nobody acts braver when he’s frightened stiff, or happier when he’s miserable; nobody can flatter you better when he hates you than your extrovert Englishman or woman of the supposedly privileged classes. He can have a Force Twelve nervous breakdown while he stands next to you in the bus queue, and you may be his best friend, but you’ll never be the wiser. Which is why some of our best officers turn out to be our worst. And our worst, our best. And why the most difficult agent you will ever have to run is yourself.”

  In his own mind, I had no doubt, Smiley was talking about the greatest deceiver of us all, Bill Haydon. But for me, he was talking about Ben—and yes, though it’s harder to admit, about the young Ned, and perhaps the old one too.

  It was the afternoon of the day I had failed to immolate the Panda’s bodyguard. Tired and dispirited, I arrived at my flat in Battersea to find the door on the latch and two men in grey suits sifting through the papers in my desk.

  They barely looked at me as I burst in. The nearer of them was Personnel and the second an owlish, ageless, tubby man in circular spectacles who eyed me with a sort of baleful commiseration.

  “When did you last hear from your friend Cavendish?” said Personnel, scarcely glancing at me before returning to my papers.

  “He is your friend, isn’t he?” said the owlish man unhappily while I struggled to collect myself. “Ben? Arno? Which do you call him?”

  “Yes. He is. Ben is. What is this?”

  “So when did you last hear from him?” Personnel repeated, shoving aside a pile of letters from my girlfriend of the time. “Does he ring you? How do you keep in touch?”

  “I had a postcard from him a week ago. Why?”

  “Where is it?”

  “I don’t know. I destroyed it. If it isn’t in the desk. Will you kindly tell me what’s going on?”

  “Destroyed it?”

  “Threw it away.”

  “Destroy sounds deliberate, doesn’t it? What did it look like?” Personnel said, pulling out another drawer. “Stay where you are.”

  “It had a picture of a girl on one side and a couple of lines from Ben on the other. What does it matter what it had on it? Please get out of here.”

  “Saying?”

  “Nothing. It said, this is my latest acquisition. “Dear Ned, this is my new catch, so glad you’re not here. Love, Ben.” Now get out!”

  “What did he mean by that?”—pulling out another drawer.

  “Glad I wouldn’t cut him out with the girl, I suppose. It was a joke.”

  “Do you usually cut him out with his women?”

  “We’ve no women in common. We never have had.”

  “What do you have in common?”

  “Friendship,” I said angrily. “What the hell are you looking for actually? I think you’d better leave at once. Both of you.”

  “I can’t find it,” Personnel complained to his fat companion as he tossed aside another wad of my private letters. “No postcard of any kind. You’re not lying, are you, Ned?”

  The owlish man had not taken his eyes off me He continued to regard me with a wretched empathy, as if to say it comes to all of us and there’s nothing we can do. “How was the postcard delivered, Ned?” he asked. His voice, like his demeanour, was tentative and regretful.

  “By post, how else?” I replied rudely.

  “The open mail, you mean?” the owlish man suggested sadly.

  “Not by Service bag, for instance?”

  “By Forces mail,” I replied. “Field Post Office. Posted Berlin with a British stamp on it. Delivered by the local postman.”

  “Do you remember the Field Post Office number, by any chance, Ned?” the owlish man enquired with enormous diffidence. “On the postmark, I mean?”

  “It was the ordinary Berlin number, I imagine,” I retorted, struggling to keep up my indignation in the face of someone so exquisitely deferential. “Forty, I think. Why’s it so important? I’ve had enough of this.”

  “But you’d say it was definitely posted in Berlin anyway? I mean, that was your impression at the time? So far as you recall it now? The Berlin number—you’re sure?”

  “It looked exactly like the others he’d sent me. I didn’t submit it to a minute examination,” I said, my anger rising again as I saw Personnel yank yet another drawer from my desk and tip out its contents.

  A pin-up sort of girl, Ned?” the owlish man enquired, with a hangdog smile, which was evidently intended to apologise for Personnel as well as for himself.

  “A nude, yes. A tart, I assume, looking over her bare backside. That’s why. I threw it away. Because of my cleaning lady.”

  “Oh, so you remember now!” Personnel cried, swinging round to face me. “I threw it away.” Pity you didn’t bloody say so at once!”

  “Oh, I don’t know, Rex,” said the owlish man placatingly. “Ned was very confused when he came in. Who wouldn’t be?” His worried gaze settled once more upon myself. “You’re doing a stint with the watchers, isn’t that right? Monty says you’re rather good. Was she in colour, by the way? Y
our nude?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did he always send postcards, or sometimes letters?”

  “Only postcards.”

  “How many?”

  “Three or four since he’s been there.”

  “Always in colour?”

  “I don’t remember. Probably. Yes.”

  “And always of girls?”

  “I think so.”

  “Oh, but you remember, really. Of course you do. And always naked too, I expect?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where are the others?”

  “I must have thrown them away too.”

  “Because of your cleaning lady?”

  “Yes.”

  “To protect her sensitivities?”

  “Yes!”

  The owlish man took his time to consider this. “So the dirty postcards—forgive me, I don’t mean that offensively, really not— they were a sort of running joke between you?”

  “On his side, yes.”

  “But you didn’t send him any in return? Please say if you did.

  Don’t be embarrassed. There isn’t time.”

  “I’m not embarrassed! I didn’t send him any. Yes, they were a running joke. And they were getting increasingly risqué. If you want to know, I was becoming slightly bored with seeing them laid out on the hall table for my collection. So was Mr. Simpson. He’s the landlord. He suggested I write to Ben and tell him to stop sending them. He said it was getting the house a bad name. Now will you please, one of you, tell me what the hell’s going on?”

  This time Personnel replied. “Well, that’s what we thought you might be able to tell us,” he said in a mournful voice. “Ben Cavendish has disappeared. So have his agents, in a manner of speaking. A couple of them are featured in this morning’s Neues Deutschland. British spy ring caught red-handed. The London evening papers are running the story in their late editions. He hasn’t been seen for three days. This is Mr. Smiley. He wants to talk to you. You’re to tell him whatever you know. And that means anything. I’ll see you later.”

  I must have lost my bearings for a moment, because when I saw Smiley again he was standing at the centre of my carpet, gloomily peering round him at the havoc he and Personnel had wreaked.

  “I’ve a house across the river in Bywater Street,” he confessed, as if it were a great burden to him. “Perhaps we ought to pop round there, if it’s all the same to you. It’s not terribly tidy, but it is better than this.”

  We drove there in Smiley’s humble little Austin, so slowly you would have supposed he was conveying an invalid, which was perhaps how he regarded me. It was dusk. The white lanterns of Albert Bridge floated at us like waterborne coachlights. Ben, I thought desperately, what have we done? Ben, what have they done to you?

  Bywater Street was jammed, so we parked in a mews. Parking for Smiley was as complicated as docking a liner, but he managed it and we walked back. I remember how impossible it was to keep alongside him, how his thrusting roundarm waddle somehow ignored my existence. I remember how he steeled himself to turn the key of his own front door, and his alertness as he stepped into the hall. As if home were a dangerous place for him, as I know now that it was. There was a couple of days’ milk in the hall and a halfeaten plate of chop and peas in the drawing room. The turntable of a gramophone was silently revolving. It didn’t take a genius to surmise that he had been called out in a hurry—presumably by Personnel yesterday evening—while he was tucking into his chop and listening to a spot of music.

  He wandered off to the kitchen in search of soda for our whiskies. I followed him. There was something about Smiley that made you responsible for his solitude. Open tins of food lay about and the sink was crammed with dirty plates. While he mixed our whiskies, I started clearing up, so he fished a teacloth from the back of the door and set to work drying and putting away.

  “You and Ben were considerable partners, weren’t you?” he asked.

  “We shared a cabin at Sarratt, yes.”

  “So that’s what—kitchen, couple of bedrooms, bathroom?”

  “No kitchen.”

  “But you were twinned for your training course as well?”

  “For the last year of it. You choose an oppo and learn to work to each other.”

  “Choose? Or have chosen for you?”

  “Choose first, then they approve or break you up.”

  “And after that, you’re landed with each other for better for worse?”

  “Pretty much, yes.”

  “For the whole of the last year? For half the course, in fact? Day and night, as it were? A total marriage?”

  I could not understand why he was pressing me about things he must have known.

  “And you do everything together?” he continued. “Forgive me but it’s some time since I was trained. Written, practical, physical, you mess together, share a cabin—a whole life, in fact.”

  “We do the syndicate work together, and the strongarm stuff. That’s automatic. It begins with being roughly the same weight and physical aptitude.” Despite the disturbing tendency of his questions, I was beginning to feel a great need talk to him. “Then the rest sort of follows naturally.”

  “Ah.”

  “Sometimes they split us up—say, for a special exercise if they think one person is relying too much on his oppo. But as long as it’s fifty-fifty they’re happy for you to keep together.”

  “And you won everything,” Smiley suggested approvingly, helping himself to another wet plate. “You were the best pair. You and Ben.”

  “It was just that Ben was the best student,” I said. “Whoever had him would have won.”

  “Yes, of course. Well, we all know people like that. Did you know each other before you joined the Service?”

  “No. But we’d run parallel. We were at the same school, different houses. We were at Oxford, different colleges. We both read languages but we still never met. He did a short service commission in the army, I did the same in the navy. It took the Circus to bring us together.”

  Taking up a delicate bone-china cup, he peered doubtfully into it, as if searching for something I had missed. “Would you have sent Ben to Berlin?”

  “Yes, of course I would. Why not?”

  “Well, why?”

  “He’s got perfect German from his mother. He’s bright. Resourceful. People do what he wants them to do. His father had this terrific war.”

  “So did your mother, as I remember.” He was referring to my mother’s work with the Dutch Resistance. “What did he do—Ben’s father, I mean?” he continued, as if he really didn’t know.

  “He broke codes,” I said, with Ben’s pride. “He was a wrangler. A mathematician. A genius, apparently. He helped organise the double-cross system against the Germans—recruit their agents and play them back. My mother was very small beer by comparison.”

  “And Ben was impressed by that?”

  “Who wouldn’t be?”

  “He talked of it, I mean,” Smiley insisted. “Often? It was a big matter for him. You had that impression?”

  “He just said it was something he had to live up to. He said it was the up-side of having a German mother.”

  “Oh dear,” said Smiley unhappily. “Poor man. And those were his words? You’re not embellishing?”

  “Of course I’m not! He said that with a background like his, in England you had to run twice as fast as everyone else, just to keep up.”

  Smiley seemed genuinely upset. “Oh dear,” he said again. “How unkind. And do you think he has the stamina, would you say?”

  He had once more stopped me short. At our age, we really didn’t think of stamina as being limited.

  “What for?” I asked

  “Oh, I don’t know. What kind of stamina would one need for running twice as fast as everyone else in Berlin? A double ration of nerves, I suppose—always a strain. A doubly good head for alcohol—and where women are concerned—never easy.”

  “I’m sure he’s got whatever it
takes,” I said loyally.

  Smiley hung his teacloth on a bent nail which looked like his own addition to the kitchen. “Did you ever talk politics, the two of you?” he asked as we took our whiskies to the drawing room.

  “Never.”

  “Then I’m sure he’s sound,” he said, with a sad little laugh, and I laughed too.

  Houses always seem to me, at first acquaintance, to be either masculine or feminine, and Smiley’s was undoubtedly feminine, with pretty curtains and carved mirrors and clever woman’s touches. I wondered who he was living with, or wasn’t. We sat down.

  “And is there any reason why you mightn’t have sent Ben to Berlin?” he resumed, smiling kindly over the top of his glass.

  “Well, only that I wanted to go myself. Everybody wants a Berlin break. It’s the front line.”

  “He simply disappeared,” Smiley explained, settling back and appearing to close his eyes. We’re not keeping anything from you. I’ll tell you what we know. Last Thursday he crossed into East Berlin to meet his head agent, a gentleman named Hans Seidl— you can see his photograph in Neues Deutschland. It was Ben’s first solo meeting with him. A big event. Ben’s superior in the Berlin Station is Haggarty. Do you know Haggarty?”

  “No.”

  “Have you heard of him?”

  “No.”

  Ben never mentioned him to you?”

  “No. I told you. I’ve never heard his name.”

  “Forgive me. Sometimes an answer can vary with a context, if you follow me.”

  I didn’t.

  “Haggarty is second man in the Station under the Station Commander. Did you not know that either?”

  “No.”

  “Has Ben a regular girlfriend?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “Irregular?”

  “You only had to go to a dance with him, they were all over him.”

  “And after the dance?”

  “He didn’t brag. He doesn’t. If he slept with them, he wouldn’t say. He’s not that kind of man.”