The Secret Pilgrim

by John le Carré

  But then it was also hinted that Smiley himself was under sentence—or, put more tactfully—contemplating an academic appointment so that he could take more care of his marriage.

  Haydon looked jauntily at Smiley, but the jaunty look became a chill stare as he waited for Smiley to return it. The rest of us waited too. The embarrassment was that Smiley didn’t return it. He was like a man declining to acknowledge a salute. He sat on the chaise longue with his eyebrows lifted, and his long eyelids turned down, and his round head tilted, seeming to study the Persian prayer mat that was another eccentric feature of Bill’s room. And he simply went on studying it as if he were unaware of Haydon’s interest in him, though we all knew—even I knew—that he wasn’t. Then he puffed out his cheeks and pulled a frown of disapproval. And finally he stood—not dramatically, for George never had that far to go— and gathered up his papers.

  “Well, I think we’ve had the meat of this, don’t you, Bill?” he said. “Control will see indoctrinated officers in one hour, please, if that’s convenient, and we’ll try to take a view. Ned, you and I have a small piece of Zurich history to clear up. Perhaps you’d drop by when Bill has done with you.”

  Twenty minutes later I was sitting in Smiley’s office.

  “Do you believe that photograph?” he asked, with no pretense of talking about Zurich.

  “I suppose I have to.”

  “Why do you suppose that? Photographs can be faked. There is such a thing as disinformation. Moscow Centre has been known to go in for it now and then. They’ve even stooped to discrediting innocent people, I’m told. They have an entire department, as a matter of fact, devoted to little else. It runs to about five hundred officers.”

  “Then why frame Bella? Why not go for Brandt or one of the crew?”

  “What’s Bill told you to do?”

  “Nothing. He says I’ll get my orders in due course.”

  “You never answered his question. Do you think we should abort the network?”

  “It’s hard for me to say. I’m just the local link. The network’s run direct from London Station.”

  “Nevertheless.”

  “We can’t exfiltrate thirty agents. We’d start a war. If the supply lines are blown and the escape routes are closed, I don’t see there’s anything we can do for them at all.”

  “So they’re dead anyway,” he suggested, more in confirmation than question. A phone was ringing on his desk but he didn’t pick it up. He continued to look at me with a merciful concern. “Well, if they are dead, will you please remember it’s not your fault, Ned?” he added kindly. “Nobody expects you to take on Moscow Centre single-handed. It may be the Fifth Floor’s fault, it may be mine. It certainly isn’t yours.”

  He nodded me to the door. I closed it after me and heard his phone stop ringing.

  I returned to Hamburg the same night. Bella sounded excited when I rang, and sad that I wasn’t rushing round to her at once.

  “Where’s Brandt?” she asked. She had no notion of telephone security. I said Brandt was fine, just fine. I felt guilty talking to her when I knew so much and she so little. I was to be natural towards her, Haydon had said: “Whatever you did before, keep doing it or do it better. I don’t want her guessing anything.” I should tell her that Brandt loved her, which he was apparently insisting on. I guessed that in his travail he was asking to see me. I hoped so, because I trusted him and he was my responsibility.

  I tried not to feel upset for myself when there were so many larger tragedies round me, but it was hard. Until a few days ago, Brandt and the crew had been mine to care for. I had been their spokesman and champion. Now one of them was dead or worse, and the rest had been taken out of my hands. The network, though it had worked to London, had been my proxy family. Now it was like the remnants of a ghostly army, out of touch, floating between life and death.

  Worst of all was my sense of dislocation, of holding a dozen conflicting theories in my head at once, and favouring each in turn. One minute I was insisting to myself that Bella was innocent, just as I had maintained to Haydon. The next I was asking myself how she could have communicated with her masters. The answer was, only too easily. She shopped, she went to cinemas, she went to school. She could meet couriers, fill and empty dead-letter boxes to her heart’s content.

  But no sooner had I gone this far than I ran to her defence. Bella was not bad. The photograph was a plant and the story about her father amounted to nothing. Smiley had said as much. There were a hundred ways in which the mission could have been blown without Bella having the least thing to do with it. Our operational security was tight, but not as tight as I would have wished. My predecessor had turned out to be corrupt. Might he not, in addition to inventing agents, have sold a few as well? And even if he hadn’t, was it really so unreasonable of Brandt to suggest that the leak could have come from our side of the fence, not his?

  Now I would not have you think that, alone in his cot that night, the young Ned unravelled single-handed the skein of treachery that later took all George Smiley’s powers to expose. A source can be a plant, a plant can be ignored, an experienced intelligence officer can take a wrong decision—all without the assistance of a traitor within the Fifth Floor’s gates. I knew that. I was not a child, and not one of your grey-cheeked Circus conspiracy-theorists either.

  Nevertheless I did ponder, as any of us might when he is stretched to the limits of his allegiance to his Service. I pieced together from my worm’s-eye view all the rumours that had reached me on the Circus grapevine. Stories of unaccountable failure and repeated scandal, of the mounting anger of our American Cousins. Of meaningless reorganisations, wasteful rivalries between men who were today immortals and tomorrow had resigned. Horror stories of incompetence being taken as proof of grand betrayal—and unnerving evidence of betrayal dismissed as incompetence.

  If there is such a thing as growing up, you may say that sometime that night I made one of those leaps into maturity. I realised that the Circus was much the same as any other British institution, except that it was more so, since it played its games in the safety of sealed rooms, with other people’s lives for counters. Yet I was pleased to have made my recognition. It gave me back the responsibility for my actions, which hitherto I had been a little too willing to lay at other people’s feet. If my career till now had been a constant battle between submission and identity, then you might say that submission had maintained the upper hand. But that night I crossed some sort of border. I decided that from then on, I would pay more heed to my own instincts and desires, and less to the harness that I seemed unable to dispense with.

  We met at the safe flat. If there was neutral ground to be found anywhere, it was there. She still knew nothing of the catastrophe. I had told her only that Brandt had been summoned to England. We made love at once, blindly and hungrily; then I waited for the clarity of after-love to begin my interrogation.

  I began playfully stroking her hair, smoothing it against her head. Then I swept it back with both my hands, and scooped it into a rough bun.

  “This way you look very stern,” I said, and kissed her, still holding it in place. “Have you ever worn it like this?” I kissed her again.

  “When I was a girl.”

  “When was that?” I said, between our joined lips. “You mean before Tadeo? When?”

  “Until I went to the forest. Then I cut it off. Another woman did it with a knife.”

  “Have you got a photograph of yourself like this?”

  “In the forest we did not take photographs.”

  “I mean before. When you wore it like a stern lady.”

  She sat up. “Why?”

  “Just tell me.”

  She was watching me with her almost colourless eyes. “At school, they took our photographs. Why?”

  “In groups? In classes? What sort of photographs?”

  “Why?”

  “Just tell me, Bella. I need to know.”

  “They took photographs of us in our
class, and they took photographs for our documents.”

  “What documents?”

  “For identity. For our passports.”

  She did not mean a passport as we understand it. She meant a passport for moving about inside the Soviet Union. No free citizen could cross the road without one.

  “A full-face photograph? Not smiling?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did you do with your old passport, Bella?”

  She didn’t remember.

  “What did you wear for it—for the photograph?” I kissed her breasts. “Not these. What did you wear?”

  “A blouse and tie. What nonsense are you talking?”

  “Bella, listen to me. Is there anyone you can think of, back at home, a schoolfriend, an old boyfriend, a relation, who would have a photograph of you with your hair back? Someone you could write to, perhaps, who could be contacted?”

  She considered for a moment, staring at me. “My aunt,” she said grumpily.

  “What’s her name?”

  She told me.

  “Where does she live?”

  In Riga, she said. With Uncle Janek. I seized an envelope, sat her still naked at a table and made her write out their full address. Then I put a piece of plain writing paper before her and dictated a letter which she translated as she wrote.

  “Bella.” I lifted her to her feet and kissed her tenderly. “Bella, tell me something else. Did you ever go to any school, of any kind, except the schools in your own town?”

  She shook her head.

  “No holiday schools? Special schools? Language schools?” “No.”

  “Did you learn English at school?”

  “Of course not. Otherwise I would speak English. What’s happening to you, Ned? Why are you asking me these stupid questions?”

  “The Daisy sailed into trouble,” I said, still face to face with her. “There was shooting. Brandt wasn’t hurt but others were. That’s all I’m allowed to tell you. We’re to fly back to London tomorrow, you and I together. They need to ask us some questions and find out what went wrong.”

  She closed her eyes and began shaking. She opened her mouth and made a silent scream.

  “I believe in you,” I said. “I want to help you. And Brandt. That’s the truth.”

  Gradually she came back to me and put her head on my chest while she wept. She was a child again. Perhaps she had always been one. Perhaps, by helping me to grow up, she had increased the distance between us. I had brought a British passport for her. She had no nationality of her own. I made her stay the night with me and she clutched me like a drowning girl. Neither of us slept.

  On the plane she held my hand but we were already continents apart. Then she spoke in a voice that I had not heard from her before. A firm, adult voice of sadness and disillusionment that reminded me of Stefanie’s when she had delivered her Sibyl’s warning to me on the island.

  “Es ist ein reiner Unsinn,” she said. It is a pure nonsense.

  “What is?”

  She had taken away her hand. Not in anger, but in a kind of worldly despair. “You tell them to put their feet into the water and you wait to see what happens. If they are not shot, they are heroes. If they are shot, they are martyrs. You gain nothing that is worth having and you encourage my people to kill themselves. What do you want us to do? Rise up and kill the Russian oppressor? Will you come and help us if we try? I don’t think so. I think you are doing something because you cannot do nothing. I think you are not useful to us at all.”

  I could never forget what Bella said, for it was also a dismissal of my love. And today I think of her each morning as I listen to the news before walking my dog. I wonder what we thought we were promising to those brave Balts in those days, and whether it was the same promise which we are now so diligently breaking.

  This time it was Peter Guillam who was waiting at the airport, which was a relief to me, because his good looks and breezy manners seemed to give her confidence. For a chaperone he had brought Nancy from the watchers, and Nancy had made herself motherly for the occasion. Between them they led Bella through immigration to a grey van which belonged to the Sarratt inquisitors. I wished that someone could have thought to send a less formidable vehicle, because when she saw the van she stopped and looked back to me in accusation before Nancy grabbed her by the arm and shoved her in.

  In the turbulent life of a case officer, I was learning, there was not always such a thing as an elegant goodbye.

  I can only tell you what I next did, and what I later heard. I made for Smiley’s office, and spent most of my day trying to catch him between meetings. Circus protocol required me to go first to Haydon, but I had already exceeded Haydon’s brief by the questions I had put to Bella, and suspected Smiley would give me a more sympathetic hearing. He listened to me; he took charge of Bella’s letter and examined it.

  “If we have it posted in Moscow and give a Finnish safe address for them to write back to, it might just work,” I urged him.

  But, as so often with Smiley, I had the impression that he was thinking beyond me into realms from which I was excluded. He dropped the letter in a drawer and closed it.

  “I rather think it won’t be necessary,” he said. “Let us hope not anyway.”

  I asked him what they would do with Bella.

  “I suppose much the same as they have done with Brandt,” he replied, waking sufficiently from his absorption to give me a sad smile. “Take her through every detail of her life. Try to trip her up. Wear her down. They won’t hurt her. Not physically. They won’t tell her what they have against her. They’ll just hope to break her cover. It seems that most of the men who looked after her in the forest were rounded up recently. That won’t speak well for her, naturally.”

  “What will they do with her afterwards?”

  “Well, I think we can still prevent the worst, even if we can’t prevent much else these days,” he replied, returning to his papers. “Time you went on to Bill, isn’t it? He’ll be wondering what you’re up to.”

  And I remember the expression on his face as he dismissed me: the pain and frustration in it, and the anger.

  Did Smiley have the letter posted as I suggested? Did the letter produce a photograph and did the photograph turn out to be the very one that Moscow Centre’s forgers had dropped into their group photograph? I wish it were so neat, but in reality it never is, though I like to believe that my efforts on Bella’s behalf had some influence on her release and resettlement in Canada, which occurred a few months later in circumstances that are a puzzle to me.

  For Brandt refused to take her back, let alone go with her. Had Bella told him of our affair? Had someone else? I hardly think it possible, unless Haydon himself did it out of mischief. Bill hated all women and most men too, and liked nothing better than to turn people’s affections inside out.

  Brandt too was given a clean ticket and, after some resistance from the Fifth Floor, a gratuity to start him in a respectable walk of life. That is to say, he was able to buy a boat and take himself to the West Indies, where he resumed his old trade of smuggling, except that this time he chose arms to Cuba.

  And the betrayal? The Brandt network had simply been too efficient for Haydon’s stomach, Smiley told me later, so Bill had betrayed it as he had betrayed its predecessor, and tried to fix the blame on Bella. He had arranged for Moscow Centre to fake the evidence against her, which he then presented as coming from his spurious source Merlin, the provider of the Witchcraft material. Hard on the mole’s tracks by then, Smiley had voiced his suspicions in high places, only to be sent into exile for being right. It took another two years for him to be brought back to clean the stable.

  And there the story stood until our own internal perestroika began in earnest—in the winter of ’89—when Toby Esterhase, the ubiquitous survivor, conducted a middle-ranking Circus delegation to Moscow Centre as a first step to what our blessed Foreign Office insisted on calling a “normalisation of the relationship between the two serv
ices.”

  Toby’s team was welcomed at Dzerzhinsky Square and shown many of the appointments, though not, one gathers, the torture chambers of the old Lubyanka, or the roof on which certain careless prisoners had occasionally lost their footing. Toby and his men were wined and dined. They were shown, as the Americans say, a time. They bought fur hats and pinned facetious badges on them and had themselves photographed in Dzerzhinsky Square.

  And on the last day, as a special gesture of goodwill, they were escorted to the gallery of Centre’s huge communications hall, where reports from all sources are received and processed. And it was here, as they were leaving the gallery, says Toby, that he and Peter Guillam in the same moment spotted a tall, flaxen, thickset fellow in half silhouette at the further end of the corridor, emerging from what was apparently the men’s lavatory, for there was only one other door in that part of the corridor, and it was marked for women.

  He was a man of some age, yet he strode out of the doorway like a bull. He paused, and for a long beat stared straight at them, as if in two minds whether to come towards them and greet them or retreat. Then he lowered his head and, as it seemed to them, with a smile, swung away from them and disappeared into another corridor. But not before they had ample opportunity to remark his seamanly roll and wrestler’s shoulders.

  Nothing goes away in the secret world; nothing goes away in the real one. If Toby and Peter are right—and there are those who still maintain that Russian hospitality had got the better of them— then Haydon had an even stronger reason to point the finger of suspicion at Bella, and away from Sea Captain Brandt.