The Secret Pilgrim

by John le Carré

  Was Brandt bad from the beginning? If so, I had unwittingly furthered his recruitment and our agents’ deaths. It is a dreadful thought and sometimes in the cold grey hours as I lie at Mabel’s side, it comes home to haunt me.

  And Bella? I think of her as my last love, as the right turning I never took. If Stefanie had unlocked the door of doubt in me, Bella pointed me towards the open world while there was still time. When I think of my women since, they are aftercare. And when I think of Mabel, I can only explain her as the lure of domesticity to a man returned from the front line. But the memory of Bella remains as fresh for me as on our first night in the safe flat overlooking the cemetery—though in my dreams she is always walking away from me, and there is reproach even in her back.

  5

  “Are you saying we could be housing another Haydon now?” a student named Maggs called out amid the groans of his colleagues. “What’s his motivation, Mr. Smiley? Who’s paying him? What’s his bag?”

  I had had my doubts about Maggs ever since he had joined. He was earmarked for a cover career in journalism, and already had the worst characteristics of his future trade. But Smiley was unruffled.

  “Oh well, I’m sure that in retrospect we owe Bill a great debt of thanks,” he replied calmly. “He administered the needle to a Service that had been far too long a-dying.” He made a fussy little frown of perplexity. “As to new traitors, I’m sure our present leader will have sown her discontents, won’t she? Perhaps I’m one. I do find I become a great deal more radical in my old age.”

  But believe me, we didn’t thank Bill at the time.

  There was Before the Fall and there was After the Fall and the Fall was Haydon, and suddenly there was not a man or woman in the Circus who could not tell you where he was and what he was doing when he heard the dreadful news. Old hands tell each other to this day of the silence in the corridors, the numbed, averted faces in the canteen, the unanswered telephones.

  The greatest casualty was trust. Only gradually, like dazed people after an air attack, did we step shyly, one by one, from our shattered houses, and set to work to reconstruct the citadel. A fundamental reform was deemed necessary, so the Circus abandoned its ancient nickname and the warren of Dickensian corridors and crooked staircases in Cambridge Circus that had housed its shame, and built itself instead a vile steel-and-glass affair not far from Victoria, where the windows still blow out in a gale and the corridors reek of stale cabbage from the canteen, and typewriter-cleaning fluid. Only the English punish themselves with quite such dreadful prisons. Overnight we became, in formal parlance, the Service, though the name “Circus” still occasionally crosses our lips in the same way as we speak of pounds, shillings and pence long after decimalisation.

  The trust was broken because Haydon had been part of it. Bill was no upstart with a chip on his shoulder and a pistol in his pocket. He was exactly who he had always sneeringly described himself to be: Church and Spy Establishment, with uncles who sat on Tory Party committees, and a rundown estate in Norfolk with tenant farmers who called him “Mr. William.” He was a strand of the finely spun web of English influence of which we had perceived ourselves the centre. And he had caught us in it.

  In my own case—I still claim a certain distinction for this—I actually succeeded in hearing the news of Bill’s arrest twenty-four hours after it had reached the rest of the Circus, for I was incarcerated in a windowless mediaeval cell at the back of a run of grand apartments in the Vatican. I was commanding a team of Circus eavesdroppers under the guidance of a hollow-eyed friar supplied to us by the Vatican’s own secret service, who would rather have gone to the Russians themselves than seek the assistance of their secular colleagues a mile up the road in Rome. And our mission was to winkle a probe microphone into the audience room of a corrupt Catholic bishop who had got himself involved in a drugs-for-arms deal with one of our disintegrating colonies—well, why be coy? It was Malta.

  With Monty and his boys flown in for the occasion, we had tiptoed through vaulted dungeons, up underground staircases, until we had reached this vantage point, from which we proposed to drill a fine hole through a course of old cement that ran between the blocks of a three-foot party wall. The hole by agreement was to be no more than two centimetres in diameter, wide enough for us to insert the elongated plastic drinking straw that would conduct the sound from the target room to our microphone, small enough to spare the hallowed masonry of the Papal palace. Today we would use more sophisticated equipment, but the seventies were the last of the steam age and probes were still the fashion. Besides, with the best will in the world, you don’t show off your prize gadgets to official Vatican liaison, let alone to a friar in a black habit who looks as though he has stepped straight out of the Inquisition.

  We drilled, Monty drilled, the friar watched. We poured water onto red-hot drill-heads, and onto our sweating hands and faces. We muffled the drone of our drills with liquid foam, and every few minutes we took readings to make sure we hadn’t drilled our way into the holy man’s apartment by mistake. For the aim was to stop the drill-head a centimetre short of entry, and listen from inside the membrane of the wallpaper or surface plaster.

  Suddenly we were through, but worse than through. We were in thin air. A hasty sampling by vacuum produced only exotic threads of silk. A bemused silence descended on us. Had we struck furniture? Drapes? A bed? Or the hem of some unsuspecting prelate’s robe? Had the audience room been altered since we had taken the reconnaissance photographs?

  At which low point the friar was inspired to remember, in an appalled whisper, that the good bishop was a collector of priceless needlework, and we realised that the shreds of cloth we were staring at were not pieces of sofa or curtain, or even some priest’s finery, but fragments of Gobelin tapestry. Excusing himself, the friar fled.

  Now the scene changes to the old Kentish town of Rye, where two sisters named the Misses Quayle ran a tapestry-restoration business, and by a mercy—or, you may say, by the ineluctable laws of English social connection—their brother Henry was a retired member of the Service. Henry was run to earth, the sisters were roused from their beds, an RAF jet plane wafted them to Rome’s military airport, from where a car sped them to our side. Then Monty calmly returned to the front of the building and ignited a smoke bomb which cleared half the Vatican and gave our augmented team four desperate hours in the target room. By midafternoon of the same day, the Gobelin was passably patched and our probe microphone snugly in place.

  The scene changes yet again to the grand dinner given by our Vatican hosts. Swiss Guards stand menacingly at the doors. Monty, a white napkin at his throat, is seated between the sedate Misses Quayle and wiping the last of his cannelloni from his plate with a piece of bread while he regales them with accounts of his daughter’s latest accomplishments at her riding school.

  “Now you won’t know this, Rosie, and there’s no reason why you should, but my Beckie has the best pair of hands for her age in the whole of South Croydon—”

  Then Monty stops dead in his tracks. He is reading the note I have passed him, delivered to me by hand of a messenger from our Rome Station: Bill Haydon, Director of Circus Clandestine Operations, has confessed to being a Moscow Centre spy.

  Sometimes I wonder whether that was the greatest of all Bill’s crimes: to steal for good the lightness we had shared.

  I returned to London to be told that when there was more to tell me I would be told. A few mornings later Personnel informed me that I had been classified “Tailor Halftone,” which was Circus jargon for “unpostable to all but friendly countries.” I was like being told I would spend the rest of my life in a wheelchair. I had done nothing wrong, I was in no disgrace, quite the contrary. But in the trade, cover is virtue, and mine was blown.

  I packed up my desk and gave myself the rest of the day off. I drove into the country and I still don’t remember the drive, but there is a walk I do on the Sussex Downs, over whaleback chalk hills with cliffs five hundred feet high. />
  It took another month before I heard my sentence. “You’ll be back with the émigrés, I’m afraid,” Personnel said, with his customary distaste. “And it’s Germany again. Still, the allowances are quite decent, and the skiing isn’t bad either, if you go high enough.”

  6

  It was approaching midnight but Smiley’s good spirits had increased with every fresh heresy. He’s like a jolly Father Christmas, I thought, who hands round seditious leaflets with his gifts.

  “Sometimes I think the most vulgar thing about the Cold War was the way we learned to gobble up our own propaganda,” he said, with the most benign of smiles. “I don’t mean to sound didactic, and of course in a way we’d done it all through our history. But in the Cold War, when our enemies lied, they lied to conceal the wretchedness of their system. Whereas when we lied, we concealed our virtues. Even from ourselves. We concealed the very things that made us right. our respect for the individual, our love of variety and argument, our belief that you can only govern fairly with the consent of the governed, our capacity to see the other fellow’s view—most notably in the countries we exploited, almost to death, for our own ends. In our supposed ideological rectitude, we sacrificed our compassion to the great god of indifference. We protected the strong against the weak, and we perfected the art of the public lie. We made enemies of decent reformers and friends of the most disgusting potentates. And we scarcely paused to ask ourselves how much longer we could defend our society by these means and remain a society worth defending.” A glance to me again. “So it wasn’t much wonder, was it, Ned, if we opened our gates to every con-man and charlatan in the anti-Communist racket? We got the villains we deserved. Ned knows. Ask Ned.”

  At which Smiley, to the general delight, burst out laughing— and I, after a moment’s hesitation, joined in and assured my students that I would tell them about it some day.

  Perhaps you caught the show, as they say in the States. Perhaps you were part of the appreciative audience at one of the many rousing performances they gave on their tireless trail through the American mid-West, as they pressed the flesh and worked the rubber-chicken luncheons of the lecture circuit, a hundred dollars a plate and every plate a sell-out. We called it the Teodor-Latzi show. Teodor was the Professor’s first name.

  Perhaps you joined in one of the numberless standing ovations as our two heroes humbly took centre stage, the Professor tall and resplendent in one of several costly new suits purchased for his tour, and the diminutive Latzi his chubby mute, his shallow eyes brimming with ideals. There were ovations before they started speaking and ovations when they had finished. No applause was loud enough for “two great American Hungarians who, single-handed, kicked themselves a hole in the Iron Curtain.” I am quoting the Tulsa Herald.

  Perhaps your all-American daughter dressed herself in the becoming costume of a Hungarian peasant girl and put flowers in her hair for the occasion—such things happened too. Perhaps you sent a donation to the League for the Liberation, Post Box something or other, Wilmington. Or did you read about our heroes in the Reader’s Digest in your dentist’s waiting room?

  Or perhaps, like Peter Guillam, who was based in Washington at the time, you were honoured to be present at the grand world première, jointly stage-managed by our American Cousins, the Washington city police and the FBI, at no less a shrine of rightthinking than the austere and panelled Hay-Adams Hotel, just across the square from the White House. If so, you must have been rated a serious influence-maker. You had to be a front-line journalist or lobbyist at least to be admitted to the hushed conference room where every understated word had the authority of an engraved tablet, and men in bulging blazers watched tautly over your comfort and convenience. For who knew when the Kremlin would strike back? It was still that kind of time.

  Or maybe you read their book, slipped by the Cousins to an obedient publisher on Madison Avenue and launched to a fanfare of docile critical acclaim before occupying the lower end of the nonfiction bestseller list for a spectacular two weeks. I hope you did, for though it appeared over their joint names, the fact is I wrote a slice of it myself, even if the Cousins took exception to my original title. The title of record was The Kremlin’s Killer. I’ll tell you what mine was later.

  As usual, Personnel had got it wrong. For anybody who has lived in Hamburg, Munich is not Germany at all. It is another country. I never felt the remotest connection between the two cities, but when it came to spying, Munich like Hamburg was one of the unsung capitals of Europe. Even Berlin ran a poor second when it came to the size and visibility of Munich’s invisible community. The largest and nastiest of our organisations was a body known best by the place that housed it, Pullach, where much too soon after 1945 the Americans had installed an unlovely assembly of old Nazi officers under a former general of Hitler’s military intelligence. Their brief was to pay court to other old Nazis in East Germany and, by bribery, blackmail or an appeal to comradely sentiment, procure them for the West. It never seemed to occur to the Americans that the East Germans might be doing the same thing in reverse, though they did more of it and better.

  So the German Service sat in Pullach, and the Americans sat with them, egging them on, then getting cold feet and egging them off. And where the Americans sat, there sat everybody else. And now and then frightful scandals broke, usually when one or other of this company of clowns literally forgot which side he was working for, or made a tearful confession in his cups, or shot his mistress or his boyfriend or himself, or popped up drunk on the other side of the Curtain to declare his loyalty to whomever he had not been loyal to so far. I never in my life knew such an intelligence bordello.

  After Pullach came the codebreakers and security artists, and after these came Radio Liberty, Radio Free Europe and Radio Free Everywhere Else, and inevitably, since they were largely the same people, the émigré conspirators, who by now were feeling a little down on their luck but dared not say it. And much time was spent among these exiled bodies arguing out niceties about who would be Master of the Royal Horse when the monarchy was restored; and who would be awarded the Order of Saint Peter and the Hedgehog; or succeed to the Grand Duke’s summer palace once the Communist chickens had been removed from its drawing rooms; or who would recover the crock of gold that had been sunk to the bottom of the Whatnotsee, always forgetting that the said lake had been drained thirty years ago by the Bolshevik usurpers, who had built a six-acre hydro-electric plant on the site before running out of water.

  As if this were not enough, Munich played host to the wildest sort of All German aspiration, whose adherents regarded even the 1939 borders as a mere prelude to Greater German needs. East Prussians, Saxons, Pomeranians, Silesians, Baits and Sudeten Germans all protested the terrible injustice done to them, and drew fat paypackets from Bonn for their grief. There were nights, as I trudged home to Mabel through the beery streets, when I fancied I could hear them singing their anthems behind Hitler’s marching ghost.

  Are they still in business as I write? Oh, I fear they are, and looking a lot less mad than in the days when it was my job to move among them. Smiley once quoted Horace Walpole to me, not a name that would otherwise have sprung naturally to my mind: This world is a comedy to those that think, said Walpole, a tragedy to those that feel. Well, for comedy Munich has her Bavarians. And for tragedy, she has her past.

  My memory is patchy nearly twenty years later regarding the Professor’s political antecedents. At the time, I fancied I understood them—indeed, I must have done, for most of my evenings with him were spent listening to his recitations of Hungarian history between the wars. And I am sure we put them into the book too— a chapter’s worth, at least, if I could only lay my hands on a copy.

  The problem was, he was so much happier evoking Hungary’s past than her present. Perhaps he had learned, in a life of continual adjustment, that it is wise to limit one’s concerns to issues safely consigned to history. There were the Legitimists, I remember, and they supported King Charles, wh
o made a sudden return to Hungary in 1921, much to the consternation of the Allies, who ordered him smartly from the stage. I don’t think the Professor could have been a day above five years old when this moving event occurred, but he spoke of it with tears in his enlightened eyes, and there was much in his bearing to suggest the transitory touch of monarchy. And when he mentioned the Treaty of Trianon, the refined white hand that held his wine glass trembled in restrained outrage.

  “It was a Diktat, Herr Ned,” he protested to me in courtly reproof. “Imposed upon us by you victors. You robbed us of two-thirds of our land under the Crown! You gave it to Czechoslovakia, Romania, Yugoslavia. Such scum you gave it to, Herr Ned! And we Hungarians were cultivated people! Why did you do it to us? For what?”

  I could only apologise for my country’s had behaviour, just as I could only apologise for the League of Nations, which destroyed the Hungarian economy in 1931. Quite how the League achieved this reckless act I never understood, but I remember it had something to do with the wheat market, and the League’s rigid policy of orthodox deflation.

  Yet when we approached more contemporary matters, the Professor became strangely reticent in his opinions.

  “It is another catastrophe” was all he would say. “It is all a consequence of Trianon and the Jews.”

  Shafts of evening sunlight sloped through the garden window on to Teodor’s superb white head. He was a lion of a fellow, believe me, wide-browed and Socratic, like a grand conductor close to genius all the time, with sculpted hands and flowing locks, and a stoop of intellectual profundity. Nobody who looked so venerable could be shallow—not even when the learned eyes appeared a mite too small for their sockets, or slipped furtively to one side in the manner of a diner in a restaurant who catches sight of a better meal passing by.