The Secret Pilgrim

by John le Carré

  “Then what about the chap in Vienna, Ned?” said Barnaby, still determined to patronise me. “The chap who gave him his money and his hardware? Eh? Eh?”

  “They never met. We showed Latzi the photograph and he was delighted. ‘That’s the man,’ he said. Oh sure: he’d seen a photograph somewhere else. Ask Helena, she knows. She’s not telling at the moment, but if we put pressure on her, I’m sure she will.”

  Toby came briefly alive. “Pressure, Ned? Helena? Pressure, that’s something you use when you know you can squeeze harder than the other fellow. That woman is crazy about her husband. She defends him to the grave actually.”

  “The Professor’s fallen foul of the Americans,” I said. “They’re rolling up his red carpet. He’s desperate. If he didn’t set up the assassination himself, Latzi did. The whole ploy is a device for him to cut his losses and make a new life.”

  They waited for me to continue, all of them. It was as if they were waiting for the punchline. Finally Toby spoke. He had rediscovered his form.

  “Nedike, how long since you slept actually?” he asked with an indulgent smile. “Tell us, please.”

  “What’s that got to do with it?”

  Toby was ostentatiously studying his watch. “I think you have been now thirty hours without sleep, Ned. You took some pretty damn big decisions in that time—all good ones I would say. I don’t think we can blame you for having a bit of a reaction.”

  It was as if I had never spoken. All heads had turned back to Toby.

  “Well, I think it’s rather important we take a peek at the cast,” Barnaby was saying as I headed for the door. “Can we whistle them down, Toby? Question of how they’ll shape up under the spotlights.”

  “I think there’s news value in doing this thing straight away, Barnaby,” Palfrey was saying, as I headed for the garden and sanity. “Strike while the iron is hot. With me?”

  “With you all the way, Harry. Hundred percent.”

  I refused to be present for the first audition. I sulked in the kitchen and let Arnold minister to me while I pretended to listen to some story about his mother walking out on the fellow she’d been with for twenty years and shacking up with her childhood sweetheart. I watched Toby skip upstairs to fetch his champions, and scowled when the three men descended some minutes later, Latzi with his black hair slicked into a parting, the Professor with his jacket outside his shoulders, his seer’s head struck forward in contemplation and his white mane flowing becomingly.

  Then Helena came into the kitchen with tears streaming down her cheeks, so Arnold gave her a hug and fetched a blanket for her, because the spring morning was crisp and she was shivering. Then Arnold made her a camomile tea, and sat with his arm round her till Toby bustled in to say we were all expected at the American Consulate in two hours.

  “Russell Sheriton is flying in from London, Pete de May from Bonn. They are mustard for it, Ned. Totally mustard. Washington throws its cap in the air, completely.” I do not recall whether Pete de May was grander than Sheriton or less grand. But grand enough. “Ned, that Teodor’s fantastic,” Toby assured me privately.

  “Really? In what way?”

  “You know what they told him? ‘What you are doing is damn risky, Professor. Do you think you can handle it?’ You know what he replied? ‘Mr. Ambassador, risks are what we all take to protect civilised society.’ He’s quiet, he’s dignified. Latzi too. Ned, after this you get some sleep, okay? I phone Mabel.”

  We rode in two cars, Toby with the Hungarians, myself with Palfrey and the Foreign Office. Opening the car door for me, Palfrey touched my arm and offered me some steel-edged advice. “I think from now on, it’s all hands pulling together, Ned. Tired is one thing. Talk about con-tricks is something else. Yes? Agreed?”

  We must have numbered twenty head. The Consul General presided. He was a pallid mid-Westerner, an ex-lawyer like Palfrey, and kept talking anxiously about “reprocussions.” Milton Wagner was seated between Sheriton and de May. It was clear to me that, whatever their private thoughts, Sheriton and Wagner had orders to keep their scepticism to themselves. Perhaps they too had recognised that there were worse ways of getting rid of useless agents than off-loading them onto the U.S. Information Services, who were represented by a quartet of troubled believers whose names I never learned.

  Pullach was spoken for, naturally. Though not involved, they had sent their own observer, so we could be confident that our determinations would be the gossip of Potsdam by afternoon. They also insisted on making a voluble complaint about Vienna. It seemed that Pullach had a running battle with the Austrian police about forged passports, and suspected them of selling them to the Hungarians. Quite a lot of the meeting was taken up by an Oberst von-und-zu somewhere or other moaning about Austrian duplicity.

  The three champions did not, of course, attend our deliberations, but sat in the waiting room. When sandwiches were passed round, a generous plate was sent out to them. And when they were finally called in, several of the lay members of the meeting broke into applause, which must have been the first of many times from then on when they heard the roar of the greasepaint.

  But it was Helena’s tears that stole the show. The Professor said his few words, and his halting dignity worked its predictable magic. Latzi followed him, and a cold chill fell over the room as he explained why he had carried the two garottes, which were then passed gingerly round the table with the rest of the exhibits. But when Helena stepped forward on the Professor’s arm, I felt a lump rise to my throat, and knew that everyone in the room was feeling the same.

  “I support my husband,” was all the great actress could declaim. But it was enough to bring the room to its feet.

  It was late evening before I managed to speak to her alone. We were washed out by then; even the irrepressible Latzi was exhausted. The captains and the kings had departed, Toby had departed. I was sitting with Arnold in the drawing room of the lake house. An American van, with blackened windows and two plainclothes marines aboard, was waiting in the drive, but our stars were learning to keep their public waiting. The day had been spent preparing afternoon press announcements and signing Palfrey’s releases, which he turned out to have brought with him in his briefcase.

  She entered hesitantly, as if she expected me to strike her, but the anger had been drained out of me.

  “We shall get our passports,” she said, sitting down. “It is the new world.”

  Arnold slipped tactfully from the room, closing the door behind him.

  “Who’s Latzi?” I said.

  “He is a friend of Teodor.”

  “What else is he?”

  “He is an actor. A bad, oh a bad actor from Debrecen.”

  “Did he ever work for the secret police?”

  She made a gesture of deprecation. “He had connections. When Teodor needed to arrange himself with the authorities, Latzi was the go-between.”

  “You mean, when Teodor needed to inform on his students?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did Latzi supply Teodor with his information while you were in Munich?”

  “At first only a little. But when none came from other sources, more. Then much more. Latzi prepared the material for Teodor. Teodor sold it to the British and Americans. Otherwise we would have had no money.”

  “Was Latzi getting help from the secret police to do this?”

  “It was private. Things are changing in Hungary. It is no longer prudent to be involved with the authorities.”

  I unlocked the door and watched her make her exit, head erect.

  A few weeks later, back in London, I faced Toby with her story. He was neither surprised nor contrite.

  “Women, Ned, that’s a criminal class actually. Better we eat the soup, not stir it.”

  A few weeks more and the Teodor-Latzi show was riding high. So was Toby. How much was he a part of it? How much did he know when? The whole of it? Did he dream up the entire piece of theatre in order to make the best of his imperilled agent and
get him off his hands? I have often secretly suspected that the play was a three-hander, at the least, with Helena as the reluctant audience.

  “Know what, Nedike?” Toby declared, throwing an affectionate arm around my shoulder. “If you can’t ride two horses at once, you better stay out of the Circus.”

  You remember the pseudonymous Colonel Weatherby in the book? The master of disguises, at ease in seven European languages? Pimpernel leader of the East European resistance fighters? The man who “flitted back and forth across the Iron Curtain as if it were of frailest gossamer’? That was me. Ned. I didn’t write that part, thank God. It was the work of some venal sports journalist from Baltimore recruited by the Cousins. Mine was the introductory pen portrait of the great man, printed under the caption “The Real Professor Teodor as I Knew Him,” and gouged out of me by Toby and the Fifth Floor. My working title for the book was Tricks of the Trade, but the Fifth Floor said that might be misunderstood. They promoted me instead.

  But not before I had taken my indignation to George Smiley, who had just given up his job as acting chief and was on the point of removing himself for the nearly last time to the shadows of academia. I was back in London on a mid-tour break. It was a Friday evening and I ran him to earth in Bywater Street, packing for the weekend. He heard me out, he gave a small chuckle, then a larger chuckle. He muttered, “Oh Toby,” affectionately under his breath.

  “But then they do assassinate, don’t they, Ned,” he objected as he laboriously folded a tweed suit. “The Hungarians, I mean. Even by East European standards, they’re one of the foulest mobs there are, surely?”

  Yes, I conceded, the Hungarians killed and tortured pretty much at will. But that didn’t alter the fact that Latzi was a fake and Teodor was Latzi’s accomplice, and as to Toby—

  Smiley cut me short. “Now, Ned, I think you’re being a little bit prissy. Every church needs its saints. The anti-Communist church is no exception. And saints as a bunch are a pretty bogus lot, when you come down to it. But no one would pretend they don’t have their uses, once they get the job. Do you think this shirt will do, or must I give it another iron?”

  We sat in his drawing room sipping our Scotches and listening to the clamour of party-goers in Bywater Street.

  “And did the ghost of Stefanie stalk the Munich pavements for you, Ned?” Smiley enquired tenderly, just when I was beginning to wonder whether be had dozed off.

  I had long ceased to marvel at his capacity to put himself in my shoes.

  “Now and then,” I replied.

  “But not in the flesh? How sad.”

  “I once rang one of her aunts,” I said. “I’d had some silly row with Mabel and gone to a hotel. It was late. I expect I was a bit drunk.” I found myself wondering whether Smiley already knew, and decided I was being fanciful. “Or I think it was an aunt. It could have been a servant. No, it was an aunt.”

  “What did she say?”

  “‘Fräulein Stefanie is not at home.’”

  A long silence, but this time I did not make the mistake of thinking he had gone to sleep.

  “Young voice?” he enquired thoughtfully.

  “Quite.”

  “Then perhaps it was Stefanie who answered.”

  “Perhaps it was.”

  We listened again to the raised voices in the street. A girl was laughing. A man was cross. Somebody hooted a horn and drove away. The sounds died. Stefanie’s my Ann, I thought, as I walked back across the river to Battersea, where I had kept my little flat: the difference is, I never had the courage to let her disappoint me.

  7

  Smiley had interrupted himself—some tale of a Central American diplomat with a passion for British model railways of a certain generation, and how the Circus had bought the man’s lifelong allegiance with a Hornby Double-O shunting engine stolen from a London toy museum by Monty Arbuck’s team. Everyone was laughing until this sudden reflective silence, while Smiley’s troubled gaze fixed itself upon some point outside the room.

  “And just occasionally we meet the reality we’ve been playing with,” he said quietly. “Until it happens, we’re spectators. The joes live out our dreams for us, and we case officers sit safe and snug behind our one-way mirrors, telling ourselves that seeing is feeling. But when the moment of truth strikes—if ever it does for you— well, from then on we become a little more humble about what we ask people to do for us.”

  He never once glanced at me as he said this. He gave no hint of who was in his mind. But I knew, and he knew. And each knew the other knew that it was Colonel Jerzy.

  I saw him and I said nothing to Mabel. Perhaps I was too surprised. Or perhaps the old habits of dissembling die so hard that even today my first response at any unexpected event is to suppress the spontaneous reaction. We were watching the nine-o’clock news on television, which for Mabel and myself has become a kind of Evensong these days, don’t ask me why. And suddenly I saw him. Colonel Jerzy. And instead of leaping from my chair and shouting, “My God! Mabel! Look, that fellow in the back there! That’s Jerzy!”—which would have been the healthy reaction of any ordinary man—I went on watching the screen and sipping my whisky and soda. Then, as soon as I was alone, I slipped a fresh tape into the video machine so that I could be sure of catching the repeat when it came round on “Newsnight.” Since when—the incident is now six weeks old—I must have watched it a dozen more times, for there is always some extra nuance to be relished.

  But I shall leave that part of the story to the end where it belongs. Better to give you the events in the order they occurred, for there was more to Munich than Professor Teodor, and there was more to spying in the wake of Bill Haydon’s exposure than waiting for the wounds to heal.

  Colonel Jerzy was a Pole and I have never understood why so many Poles have a soft spot for us. Our repeated betrayals of their country have always seemed to me so disgraceful that if I were Polish, I would spit on every passing British shadow, whether I had suffered under the Nazis or the Russians—the British in their time having abandoned the poor Poles to both. And I would certainly be tempted to plant a bomb under the so-called “competent department” of the British Foreign Office. Dear heaven, what a phrase! As I write, the Poles are once more squeezed between the unpredictable Russian Bear and the rather more predictable German Ox. But you may be quite sure that if they should ever need a good friend to help them out, the same “competent department” of the British Foreign Office will send its treacly regrets and plead a more enticing function up the road.

  Nevertheless, the record of my Service boasts a disproportionate rate of success in Poland, and an almost embarrassing number of Polish men and women who, with reckless Polish courage, have risked their necks and those of their families in order to spy for “England.” No wonder then if, in the aftermath of Haydon, the casualty rate among our Polish networks was correspondingly high. Thanks to Haydon, the British had added yet another betrayal to their long list. As each new loss followed the previous one with sickening inevitability, the air of mourning in our Munich Station became almost palpable, and our sense of shame was compounded by our helplessness. None of us had any doubt of what had happened. Until the Fall, Polish Security—ably led by their Chief of Operations, Colonel Jerzy—had held Haydon’s treachery close to their chests, contenting themselves with penetrating our existing networks and using them as channels of disinformation—or, where they succeeded in turning them, playing them back at us with skill.

  But After the Fall, the Colonel felt no further need of delicacy, and in the course of a few days savagely silenced those of our loyal agents whom till then he had allowed to remain in place. “Jerzy’s hitlist,” we called it as the tally rose almost daily, and in our frustration we developed a personal hatred of the man who had murdered our beloved joes, sometimes not bothering with the formalities of a trial, but letting his interrogators have their fun until the end.

  It may seem odd to think of Munich as a springboard to Poland. Yet for decades Munic
h had been the command centre for a range of Polish operations. From the roof of our Consular annexe in a leafy suburb, our antennae had listened night and day for our Polish agents’ signals—often no more than a blip compressed between words spoken on the open radio. And in return, on pre-determined schedules, we had transmitted comfort and fresh orders to them. From Munich we had despatched our Polish letters, impregnated with secret writing. And if our sources managed to travel outside Poland, it was from Munich again that we flew off to debrief and feast them and listen to their worries.

  It was from Munich also, when the need was great enough, that our Station officers would cross into Poland, always singly and usually in the guise of a visiting businessman bound for a trade fair or exhibition. And in some roadside picnic spot or backstreet café, our emissaries would come briefly face to face with our precious joes, transact their business and depart, knowing they had refilled the lamp. For nobody who has not led a joe’s life can imagine what loneliness of faith it brings. A well-timed cup of bad coffee shared with a good case officer can raise a joe’s morale for months.

  Which is how it happened that, one winter’s day soon after the beginning of the second half of my tour in Munich (and the welcome departure of Professor Teodor and his appendages to America), I found myself flying into Gdansk on a LOT Polish Airlines flight from Warsaw, with a Dutch passport in my pocket describing me as Franz Joost of Nijmegen, born forty years before. According to my businessman’s visa application, my mission was to inspect prefabricated agricultural buildings on behalf of a West German farming consortium. For I have some basic grounding as an engineer, and certainly enough to exchange visiting cards with officials from their Ministry of Agriculture.

  My other mission was more complicated. I was looking for a joe named Oskar, who had returned to life six months after being given up for dead. Out of the blue, Oskar had sent us a letter to an old cover address, using his secret writing equipment and describing everything he had done and not done from the day he had first heard of the arrests till now. He had kept his nerve. He had remained at his job. He had anonymously denounced some blameless apparatchik in his Archives Section in order to divert suspicion. He had waited, and after a few weeks the apparatchik disappeared. Encouraged, he waited again. Rumour reached him, that the apparatchik had confessed. Given Colonel Jerzy’s tender ministrations, this was not surprising. As the weeks went by, he began to feel safe again. Now he was ready to resume work if someone would tell him what to do. In earnest of this, he had stuck microdots to the third, fifth and seventh full stop of the letter, which were the prearranged positions. Blown up, they amounted to sixteen pages of top secret orders from the Polish Defence Ministry to Colonel Jerzy’s department. The Circus analysts declared them “likely and presumed reliable,” which, coming from them, was an ecstatic declaration of faith.