The Secret Pilgrim

by John le Carré

  And occasionally, as the covert history of the Pool records, great things were born, and are still occasionally born today, of these inauspicious beginnings, though business is not a patch on what it used to be, and much of the Pool’s work is now given over to such chores as unsolicited offers of service, anonymous denunciations like the one levelled at poor Frewin and even—in support of the despised security services—positive vetting enquiries, which are the worst Siberias of all, and about as far as you can get from the high-wire operations of the Russia House without quitting the Service altogether.

  All the same, there is more than mere humility to be learned from these chastisements. An intelligence officer is nothing if he has lost the will to listen, and George Smiley, plump, troubled, cuckolded, unassuming, indefatigable George, forever polishing his spectacles on the lining of his tie, puffing to himself and sighing in his perennial distraction, was the best listener of us all.

  Smiley could listen with his hooded, sleepy eyes; he could listen by the very inclination of his tubby body, by his stillness and his understanding smile. He could listen because with one exception, which was Ann, his wife, he expected nothing of his fellow souls, criticised nothing, condoned the worst of you long before you had revealed it. He could listen better than a microphone because his mind lit at once upon essentials; he seemed able to spot them before he knew where they were leading.

  And that was how George had come to be listening to Mr. Arthur Wilfred Hawthorne of 12, The Dene, Ruislip, half a lifetime before me, in the very same Room 909 where I now sat, curiously turning the yellowed pages of a file marked “Destruction Pending” which I had unearthed from the shelves of the Pool’s strongroom.

  I had begun my quest idly—you may even say frivolously— much as one might pick up an old copy of the Tatler in one’s club. And suddenly I realised I had stumbled on page after page of Smiley’s familiar, guarded handwriting, with its sharp little German t’s and twisted Greek e’s, and signed with his legendary symbol. Where he was forced to appear in the drama in person— and you could feel him seeking any means to escape this vulgar ordeal—he referred to himself merely as “D.O.,” short for Duty Officer. And since he was notorious for his hatred of initials, you are made once more aware of his reclusive, if not downright fugitive nature. If I had discovered a missing Shakespeare folio, I could not have been more excited. Everything was there: Hawthorne’s original letter, transcripts of the microphoned interviews, initialled by Smiley himself, even Hawthorne’s signed receipts for his travel money and out-of-pocket expenses.

  My dull care was gone. My relegation no longer oppressed me, neither did the silence of the great empty house to which I was condemned. I was sharing them with George, waiting for the clip of Arthur Hawthorne’s loyal boots as he was marched down the corridor and into Smiley’s presence.

  “Dear Sir,” he had written to “The Officer in Charge of Intelligence, Ministry of Defence.” And already, because we are British, his class is branded on the page—if only by the strangely imperious use of capitals so dear to uneducated people. I imagined much effort in the penning, and perhaps a dictionary at the elbow. “I wish, Sir, to Request an Interview with your Staff regarding a Person who has done Special Work for British Intelligence at the highest Level, and whose Name is as Important to my Wife and myself as it may be to your good Selves, and which I am accordingly forbidden to Mention in this Letter.”

  That was all. Signed “Hawthorne, A. W., Warrant Officer Class II, retired.” Arthur Wilfred Hawthorne, in other words, as Smiley’s researches revealed when he consulted the voters’ list, and followed up his findings with an examination of the War Office files. Born 1915, Smiley painstakingly recorded on Hawthorne’s personal particulars sheet. Enlisted 1939, served with the Eighth Army from Egypt to Italy. Ex-Sergeant Major Arthur Wilfred Hawthorne, twice wounded in battle, three commendations and one gallantry medal for his trouble, demobilised without a stain on his character, “the best example of the best fighting man in the world,” wrote his commandant, in a glowing if hyperbolic commendation.

  And I knew that Smiley, as a good professional, would have taken up his post well ahead of his client’s arrival, just as I myself had done these last months: at the same a scuffed yellow desk of wartime pine, singed brown along the leading edge—legend has it by the Hun; with the same mossy telephone, letters as well as numbers on the dial; the same hand-tinted photograph of the Queen, sitting on a horse when she was twenty. I see George frowning studiously at his watch, then pulling a sour face as he peered round him at the usual mess, for there had been a running battle for as long as anyone could remember about who was supposed to clean the place, the Ministry or ourselves. I see him tug a handkerchief from his sleeve—laboriously again, for no gesture ever came to George without a struggle—and wipe the grime off the seat of his wooden chair, then do the same in advance for Hawthorne on the other side of the desk. Then, as I had done myself a few times, perform a similar service for the Queen, setting her frame straight and bringing back the sparkle to her young, idealistic eyes.

  For I imagined George already studying the feelings of his subject, as any good intelligence officer must. An ex-sergeant-major would expect a certain order about him, after all. Then I see Hawthorne himself, punctual to the minute, as the janitor showed him in, his best suit buttoned like a battledress, the polished toecaps of his boots glistening like conkers in the gloom. Smiley’s description of him on the encounter sheet was sparse but trenchant: height five seven, grey hair close cut, cleanshaven, groomed appearance, military bearing. Other characteristics: suppressed limp of the left leg, army boots.

  “Hawthorne, sir,” he snapped, and held himself to attention till Smiley with difficulty persuaded him to sit.

  Smiley was Major Nottingham that day and had an impressive card with his photograph to prove it. In my pocket as I read his account of the case lay a similar card in the name of Colonel Ned Ascot. Don’t ask me why Ascot except to note that, in choosing a place-name for my alias, I was yet again unconsciously copying one of Smiley’s little habits.

  “What regiment are you from, sir, if you don’t mind my asking?” Hawthorne enquired of Smiley as he sat.

  “The General List, I’m afraid,” said Smiley, which is the only way we are allowed to answer.

  But I am sure it came hard to Smiley, as it would to me, to have to describe himself as some kind of non-combatant.

  As evidence of his loyalty, Hawthorne had brought his medals wrapped in a piece of gun cloth. Smiley obligingly went through them for him.

  “It’s about our son, sir,” the old man said. “I’ve got to ask you. The wife—well, she won’t hear of it any more, she says it’s a load of his nonsense. But I told her I’ve got to ask you. Even if you refuse to answer, I told her, I won’t have done my duty by my son if I didn’t ask on his account.”

  Smiley said nothing but I am sure his silence was sympathetic.

  “Ken was our only boy, you see, Major, so it’s natural,” said Hawthorne apologetically.

  And still Smiley let him take his time. Did I not say he was a listener? Smiley could draw answers from you to questions he had never put, just by the sincerity of his listening.

  “We’re not asking for secrets, Major. We’re not asking to know what can’t be known. But Mrs. Hawthorne is failing, sir, and she needs to know whether it’s true before she goes.” He had prepared the question exactly. Now he put it. “Was our boy, or was he not— was Ken—in the course of what appeared to be a criminal career, operating behind enemy lines in Russia?”

  And here you might say that for once I was ahead of Smiley, if only because after five years in the Russia House I had a pretty good idea of the operations we had conducted in the past. I felt a smile come to my face, and my interest in the story, if it was possible, increased.

  But to Smiley’s face, I am sure, came nothing at all. I imagine features settling into a Mandarin immobility. Perhaps he fiddled with his spectacles, whic
h always gave the impression of belonging to a larger man. Finally he asked Hawthorne—but earnestly, never a hint of scepticism—why he supposed this might be the case.

  “Ken told me he was, sir, that’s why.” And still nothing on Smiley’s side, except an ever-open door. “Mrs. Hawthorn wouldn’t visit Ken in prison, you see. I would. Every month. He was doing five years for grievous bodily harm, plus three more for being habitual. We had PD in those days, preventive detention. We’re in the prison canteen there, me and Ken sitting together at a table. And suddenly Ken puts his head close to mine, and he says to me in this low voice he’s got, ‘Don’t come here again, Dad. It’s difficult for me. I’m not really locked up, you see. I’m in Russia. They had to bring me back special, just to show me to you. I’m working behind the lines, but don’t tell Mum. Write to me—that’s not a problem, they’ll send it on. And I’ll write back same as if was a prisoner here, which is what I pretend to be, because you can’t get better cover than a prison. But the truth is, Dad, I’m serving the old country just like you did when you was with the Desert Rats, which is why the best of us are put on earth.’ I didn’t ask to see Ken after that. I felt I had to obey orders. I wrote to him, of course. In the prison. Hawthorn and then his number. And three months later he’d write back on prison paper like it was a different boy writing to me every time. Sometimes the big heavy writing, like he was angry, sometimes small and quick, like he hadn’t had the time. Once or twice there was even the foreign words in there that I didn’t understand, crossed out mainly, like he was having a difficulty with his own language. Sometimes he’d drop me a clue. ‘I’m cold but safe,’ he’d say. ‘Last week I had a bit more exercise than I needed,’ he’d say. I didn’t tell the wife because he said I wasn’t to. Besides, she wouldn’t have believed him. When I offered her his letters, she pushed them away—they hurt too much. But when Ken died we went and saw his body all cut to pieces in the prison morgue. Twenty stab wounds and nobody to blame. She didn’t weep, she doesn’t, but they might as well have stabbed her. And on the way home on the bus I couldn’t help it. ‘Ken’s a hero,’ I said to her. I was trying to wake her up because she’d gone all wooden. I got hold of her by the sleeve and gave her a bit of a shake to make her listen. ‘He’s not a dirty convict,’ I said. ‘Not our Ken. He never was. And it wasn’t convicts who done him in, either. It was the Red Russians.’ I told her about the cufflinks too. ‘Ken’s romancing,’ she said. ‘Same as he always did. He doesn’t know the difference, he never did, which has been his trouble all along.’”

  Interrogators, like priests and doctors, have a particular advantage when it comes to concealing their feelings. They can ask another question, which is what I would have done myself.

  “What cufflinks, Sergeant Major?” Smiley said, and I see him lowering his long eyelids and sinking his head into his neck as he once more prepared himself to listen to the old man’s tale.

  “‘There’s no medals, Dad,’ Ken says to me. ‘Medals wouldn’t be secure. You have to be gazetted to get a medal, there’d be too many in the know. Otherwise I’d have a medal same as you. Maybe an even better one, if I’m honest, like the Victoria Cross, because they stretch us as far as we can go and sometimes further. But if you do right in the job, you earn your cufflinks and they keep them for you in a special safe. Then once a year there’s this big dinner at a certain place I’m not allowed to mention, with the champagne and butlers you wouldn’t believe, and all us Russia boys go to it. And we put on our tuxedos and we wear the cufflinks, same as a uniform but secret. And we have this party, with the speeches and the handshakes, like a special investiture, same as you had for your medals, I expect, in this place I’m not allowed to mention. And when the party’s over, we hand the cufflinks back. We have to, for the security. So if ever I go missing, or if something happens to me, just you write to them at the Secret Service and ask them for the Russia cufflinks for your Ken. Maybe they’ll say they never heard of me, maybe they’ll say, “What cufflinks?” But maybe they’ll make you a compassionate exception and let you have them, because they sometimes do. And if they do—you’ll know that everything I ever did wrong was more right than you can imagine. Because I’m my dad’s boy, right down the line, and the cufflinks will prove it to you That’s all I’m saying, and it’s more than I’m allowed.’”

  Smiley asked first for the boy’s full name. Then for the boy’s date of birth. Then he asked about his schooling and qualifications, which were predictably dismal, both. I see him acting quiet and businesslike as he takes down the details: Kenneth Branham Hawthorne, the old soldier told him—Branham, that was his mother’s maiden name, sir; he sometimes used it for what they called his crimes— born Folkestone, July 14, 1946, sir, twelve months after I came back from the war. I wouldn’t have a child earlier, although the wife wanted it, sir, I didn’t think it right. I wanted our boy brought up in peace, sir, with both his living parents to look after him, Major, which is the right of any child, I say, even if it’s not as usual as it ought to be.

  Smiley’s next task was not half as easy as it might seem, whatever the improbabilities of Kenneth Hawthorne’s story. Smiley was never one to deny a good man, or even a bad one, the benefit of the doubt. The Circus of those days possesses no such thing as a reliable central index of its resources, and what passed for one was shamefully and often deliberately incomplete, for rival outfits guarded their sources jealously and poached from their neighbours when they saw the chance.

  True, the old man’s story bristled with unlikelihoods. In purist terms it was grotesque, for example, to imagine a group of secret agents meeting once a year to dine, thus breaking the most elementary rule of “need to know.” But worse things could happen in the lawless world of the irregulars, as Smiley was aware. And it took all his powers of ingenuity and persuasion to satisfy himself that Hawthorne was nowhere on their books: not as a runner, not as a lamplighter or a scalphunter, not as a signalman and not as any other of the beloved tradenames with which these seedy operators glamourised their ranks.

  And when he had exhausted the irregulars he returned to the armed services, the security services and the Royal Ulster Constabulary, any one of which might conceivably have employed— if on some much more modest basis than the boy described—a violent criminal of Ken Hawthorne’s character.

  For one thing at least seemed certain: the boy’s criminal record was a nightmare. It would have been hard to imagine a grimmer record of persistent and often bestial behaviour. As Smiley crossed and recrossed the boy’s history, through childhood to adolescence, reform school to prison, there seemed to be no transgression, from pilfering to sadistic assault, that Kenneth Branham Hawthorne, born Folkestone 1946, had not stooped to.

  Till at the end of a full week, Smiley appears reluctantly to have admitted to himself what in another part of his head he must have known all along. Kenneth Hawthorne, for whatever sad reasons, had been an unredeemable and habitual monster. The death he had suffered at the hands of his fellow prisoners was no more than he deserved. His past was written and complete, and his tales of heroism on behalf of some mythical British intelligence service were merely the last chapter in his lifelong effort to steal his father’s glory.

  It was mid-winter. It was a foul grey, sleet-driven evening on which to drag an old soldier back across London to a barren interviewing room in Whitehall. And Whitehall in the meagre lighting of those days was a citadel still at war, even if its guns were somewhere else. It was a place of military austerity, heartless and imperial, of lowered voices and blacked windows, of rare and hurried footsteps and averted eyes. Smiley was in the War too, remember, even if he was sitting behind German lines. I can hear the puttering of the paraffin Aladdin stove which the Circus had grudgingly approved to supplement the faulty ministerial radiators. It has the sound of a wireless transmitter operated by a freezing hand.

  Hawthorne had not come alone to hear Major Nottingham’s reply. The old soldier had brought his wife, and I can even tel
l you how she looked, for Smiley had written of her in his log and my imagination has long painted in the rest.

  She had a buckled sick body wrapped in Sunday best. She wore a brooch in the design of her husband’s regimental badge. Smiley invited her to sit, but she preferred her husband’s arm. Smiley stood across the desk from them, the same burned, yellowed desk where I had sat in exile these last months. I see him standing almost to attention, with his rounded shoulders uncharacteristically straightened. His stubby fingers curled at the seams of his trousers in tradition army manner.

  Ignoring Mrs. Hawthorne, he addressed the old soldier man to man. “You understand I have absolutely nothing to say to you at all, Sergeant Major?”

  “I do, sir.”

  “I never heard of your son, you understand? Kenneth Hawthorne is not a name to me, nor to any of my colleagues.”

  “Yes, sir.” The old man’s gaze was fixed parade-ground style above Smiley’s head. But his wife had her eyes fiercely turned on Smiley’s all the time, even if she found it hard to fix on them through the thick lenses of his spectacles.

  “He has never in his life worked for any British department of government, whether secret or otherwise. He was a common criminal all his life. Nothing more. Nothing at all.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I deny absolutely that he was ever a secret agent in the service of the Crown.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You understand also that I can answer no questions, give you no explanations, and that you will never see me again or be received at this building?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You understand finally that you may never speak of this moment to a living soul? However proud you may be of your son? That there are others still alive who must be protected.”