Smiley's People

by John le Carré

  3

  “Knew him personally at all, did you, sir?” the Detective Chief Superintendent of Police asked respectfully in a voice kept deliberately low. “Or perhaps I shouldn’t enquire.”

  The two men had been together for fifteen minutes but this was the Superintendent’s first question. For a while Smiley did not seem to hear it, but his silence was not offensive, he had the gift of quiet. Besides, there is a companionship about two men contemplating a corpse. It was an hour before dawn on Hampstead Heath, a dripping, misty, no-man’s hour, neither warm nor cold, with a heaven tinted orange by the London glow, and the trees glistening like oilskins. They stood side by side in an avenue of beeches and the Superintendent was taller by a head: a young giant of a man, prematurely grizzled, a little pompous perhaps, but with a giant’s gentleness that made him naturally befriending. Smiley was clasping his pudgy hands over his belly like a mayor at a cenotaph, and had eyes for nothing but the plastic-covered body lying at his feet in the beam of the Superintendent’s torch. The walk this far had evidently winded him, for he puffed a little as he stared. From the darkness round them, police receivers crackled in the night air. There were no other lights at all; the Superintendent had ordered them extinguished.

  “He was just somebody I worked with,” Smiley explained after a long delay.

  “So I was given to understand, sir,” the Superintendent said.

  He waited hopefully but nothing more came. “Don’t even speak to him,” the Deputy Assistant Commissioner (Crime and Ops) had said to him. “You never saw him and it was two other blokes. Just show him what he wants and drop him down a hole. Fast.” Till now, the Detective Chief Superintendent had done exactly that. He had moved, in his own estimation, with the speed of light. The photographer had photographed, the doctor had certified life extinct, the pathologist had inspected the body in situ as a prelude to conducting his autopsy—all with an expedition quite contrary to the proper pace of things, merely in order to clear the way for the visiting irregular, as the Deputy Assistant Commissioner (Crime and Ops) had liked to call him. The irregular had arrived—with about as much ceremony as a meter-reader, the Superintendent noted—and the Superintendent had led him over the course at a canter. They had looked at footprints, they had tracked the old man’s route till here. The Superintendent had made a reconstruction of the crime, as well as he was able in the circumstances, and the Superintendent was an able man. Now they were in the dip, at the point where the avenue turned, where the rolling mist was thickest. In the torchbeam the dead body was the centre-piece of everything. It lay face downward and spread-eagled, as if it had been crucified to the gravel, and the plastic sheet emphasized its lifelessness. It was the body of an old man, but broad-shouldered still, a body that had battled and endured. The white hair was cut to stubble. One strong, veined hand still grasped a sturdy walking-stick. He wore a black overcoat and rubber overshoes. A black beret lay on the ground beside him, and the gravel at his head was black with blood. Some loose change lay about, and a pocket handkerchief, and a small penknife that looked more like a keepsake than a tool. Most likely they had started to search him and given up, sir, the Superintendent had said. Most likely they were disturbed, Mr. Smiley, sir; and Smiley had wondered what it must be like to touch a warm body you had just shot.

  “If I might possibly take a look at his face, Superintendent,” Smiley said.

  This time it was the Superintendent who caused the delay. “Ah, now are you sure about that, sir?” He sounded slightly embarrassed. “There’ll be better ways of identifying him than that, you know.”

  “Yes. Yes, I am sure,” said Smiley earnestly, as if he really had given the matter great thought.

  The Superintendent called softly to the trees, where his men stood among their blacked-out cars like a next generation waiting for its turn.

  “You there. Hall. Sergeant Pike. Come here at the double and turn him over.”

  Fast, the Deputy Assistant Commissioner (Crime and Ops) had said.

  Two men slipped forward from the shadows. The elder wore a black beard. Their surgical gloves of elbow length shone ghostly grey. They wore blue overalls and thigh-length rubber boots. Squatting, the bearded man cautiously untucked the plastic sheet while the younger constable laid a hand on the dead man’s shoulder as if to wake him up.

  “You’ll have to try harder than that, lad,” the Superintendent warned in an altogether crisper tone.

  The boy pulled, the bearded sergeant helped him, and the body reluctantly rolled over, one arm stiffly waving, the other still clutching the stick.

  “Oh, Christ,” said the constable. “Oh, bloody hell!”—and clapped a hand over his mouth. The sergeant grabbed his elbow and shoved him away. They heard the sound of retching.

  “I don’t hold with politics,” the Superintendent confided to Smiley inconsequentially, staring downward still. “I don’t hold with politics and I don’t hold with politicians either. Licensed lunatics most of them, in my view. That’s why I joined the Force, to be honest.” The sinewy mist curled strangely in the steady beam of his torch. “You don’t happen to know what did it, do you, sir? I haven’t seen a wound like that in fifteen years.”

  “I’m afraid ballistics is not my province,” Smiley replied after another pause for thought.

  “No, I don’t expect it would be, would it? Seen enough, sir?”

  Smiley apparently had not.

  “Most people expect to be shot in the chest really, don’t they, sir?” the Superintendent remarked brightly. He had learned that small talk sometimes eased the atmosphere on such occasions. “Your neat round bullet that drills a tasteful hole. That’s what most people expect. Victim falls gently to his knees to the tune of celestial choirs. It’s the telly that does it, I suppose. Whereas your real bullet these days can take off an arm or a leg, so my friends in brown tell me.” His voice took on a more practical tone. “Did he have a moustache at all, sir? My sergeant fancied a trace of white whisker on the upper jaw.”

  “A military one,” said Smiley after a long gap, and with his thumb and forefinger absently described the shape upon his own lip while his gaze remained locked upon the old man’s body. “I wonder, Superintendent, whether I might just examine the contents of his pockets, possibly?”

  “Sergeant Pike.”

  “Sir!”

  “Put that sheet back and tell Mr. Murgotroyd to have his pockets ready for me in the van, will you, what they’ve left of them. At the double,” the Superintendent added, as a matter of routine.

  “Sir!”

  “And come here.” The Superintendent had taken the sergeant softly by the upper arm. “You tell that young Constable Hall that I can’t stop him sicking up but I won’t have his irreverent language.” For the Superintendent on his home territory was a devoutly Christian man and did not care who knew it. “This way, Mr. Smiley, sir,” he added, recovering his gentler tone.

  As they moved higher up the avenue, the chatter of the radios faded, and they heard instead the angry wheeling of rooks and the growl of the city. The Superintendent marched briskly, keeping to the left of the roped-off area. Smiley hurried after him. A windowless van was parked between the trees, its back doors open, and a dim light burning inside. Entering, they sat on hard benches. Mr. Murgotroyd had grey hair and wore a grey suit. He crouched before them with a plastic sack like a transparent pillowcase. The sack had a knot at the throat, which he untied. Inside, smaller packages floated. As Mr. Murgotroyd lifted them out, the Superintendent read the labels by his torch before handing them to Smiley to consider.

  “One scuffed leather coin purse Continental appearance. Half inside his pocket, half out, left-side jacket. You saw the coins by his body—seventy-two pence. That’s all the money on him. Carry a wallet at all, did he, sir?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Our guess is they helped themselves to the wallet, started on the purse, then ran. One bunch keys domestic and various, right-hand trousers. . . .”He r
an on but Smiley’s scrutiny did not relax. Some people act a memory, the Superintendent thought, noticing his concentration, others have one. In the Superintendent’s book, memory was the better half of intelligence, he prized it highest of all mental accomplishments; and Smiley, he knew, possessed it. “One Paddington Borough Library Card in the name of V. Miller, one box Swan Vesta matches partly used, overcoat left. One Aliens’ Registration Card, number as reported, also in the name of Vladimir Miller. One bottle tablets, overcoat left. What would the tablets be for, sir, any views on that at all? Name of Sustac, whatever that is, to be taken two or three times a day?”

  “Heart,” said Smiley.

  “And one receipt for the sum of thirteen pounds from the Straight and Steady Minicab Service of Islington, North.”

  “May I look?” said Smiley, and the Superintendent held it out so that Smiley could read the date and the driver’s signature, J. Lamb, in a copy-book hand wildly underlined.

  The next bag contained a stick of school chalk, yellow and miraculously unbroken. The narrow end was smeared brown as if by a single stroke, but the thick end was unused.

  “There’s yellow chalk powder on his left hand too,” Mr. Murgotroyd said, speaking for the first time. His complexion was like grey stone. His voice too was grey, and mournful as an undertaker’s. “We did wonder whether he might be in the teaching line, actually,” Mr. Murgotroyd added, but Smiley, either by design or oversight, did not answer Mr. Murgotroyd’s implicit question, and the Superintendent did not pursue it.

  And a second cotton handkerchief, proffered this time by Mr. Murgotroyd, part blooded, part clean, and carefully ironed into a sharp triangle for the top pocket.

  “On his way to a party, we wondered,” Mr. Murgotroyd said, this time with no hope at all.

  “Crime and Ops on the air, sir,” a voice called from the front of the van.

  Without a word the Superintendent vanished into the darkness, leaving Smiley to the depressed gaze of Mr. Murgotroyd.

  “You a specialist of some sort, sir?” Mr. Murgotroyd asked after a long sad scrutiny of his guest.

  “No. No, I’m afraid not,” said Smiley.

  “Home Office, sir?”

  “Alas, not Home Office either,” said Smiley with a benign shake of his head, which somehow made him party to Mr. Murgotroyd’s bewilderment.

  “My superiors are a little worried about the press, Mr. Smiley,” the Superintendent said, poking his head into the van again. “Seems they’re heading this way, sir.”

  Smiley clambered quickly out. The two men stood face to face in the avenue.

  “You’ve been very kind,” Smiley said. “Thank you.”

  “Privilege,” said the Superintendent.

  “You don’t happen to remember which pocket the chalk was in, do you?” Smiley asked.

  “Overcoat left,” the Superintendent replied in some surprise.

  “And the searching of him—could you tell me again how you see that exactly?”

  “They hadn’t time or didn’t care to turn him over. Knelt by him, fished for his wallet, pulled at his purse. Scattered a few objects as they did so. By then they’d had enough.”

  “Thank you,” said Smiley again.

  And a moment later, with more ease than his portly figure might have suggested him capable of, he had vanished among the trees. But not before the Superintendent had shone the torch full upon his face, a thing he hadn’t done till now for reasons of discretion. And taken an intense professional look at the legendary features, if only to tell his grandchildren in his old age: how George Smiley, sometime Chief of the Secret Service, by then retired, had one night come out of the woodwork to peer at some dead foreigner of his who had died in highly nasty circumstances.

  Not one face at all actually, the Superintendent reflected. Not when it was lit by the torch like that indirectly from below. More your whole range of faces. More your patchwork of different ages, people, and endeavours. Even—thought the Super-intendent—of different faiths.

  “The best I ever met,” old Mendel, the Superintendent’s onetime superior, had told him over a friendly pint not long ago. Mendel was retired now, like Smiley. But Mendel knew what he was talking about and didn’t like Funnies any better than the Superintendent did—interfering la-di-da amateurs most of them, and devious with it. But not Smiley. Smiley was different, Mendel had said. Smiley was the best—simply the best case man Mendel had ever met—and old Mendel knew what he was talking about.

  An abbey, the Superintendent decided. That’s what he was, an abbey. He would work that into his sermon the next time his turn came around. An abbey, made up of all sorts of conflicting ages and styles and convictions. The Superintendent liked that metaphor the more he dwelt on it. He would try it out on his wife when he got home: man as God’s architecture, my dear, moulded by the hand of ages, infinite in his striving and diversity. . . . But at this point the Superintendent laid a restraining hand upon his own rhetorical imagination. Maybe not, after all, he thought. Maybe we’re flying a mite too high for the course, my friend.

  There was another thing about that face the Superintendent wouldn’t easily forget either. Later, he talked to old Mendel about it, as he talked to him later about lots of things. The moisture. He’d taken it for dew at first—yet if it was dew why was the Superintendent’s own face bone dry? It wasn’t dew and it wasn’t grief either, if his hunch was right. It was a thing that happened to the Superintendent himself occasionally and happened to the lads too, even the hardest; it crept up on them and the Superintendent watched for it like a hawk. Usually in kids’ cases, where the pointlessness suddenly got through to you—your child batterings, your criminal assaults, your infant rapes. You didn’t break down or beat your chest or any of those histrionics. No. You just happened to put your hand to your face and find it damp and you wondered what the hell Christ bothered to die for, if He ever died at all.

  And when you had that mood on you, the Superintendent told himself with a slight shiver, the best thing you could do was give yourself a couple of days off and take the wife to Margate, or before you knew where you were you found yourself getting a little too rough with people for your own good health.

  “Sergeant!” the Superintendent yelled.

  The bearded figure loomed before him.

  “Switch the lights on and get it back to normal,” the Superintendent ordered. “And ask Inspector Hallowes to slip up here and oblige. At the double.”

  4

  They had unchained the door to him, they had questioned him even before they took his coat: tersely and intently. Were there any compromising materials on the body, George? Any that would link him with us? My God, you’ve been a time! They had shown him where to wash, forgetting that he knew already. They had sat him in an armchair and there Smiley remained, humble and discarded, while Oliver Lacon, Whitehall’s Head Prefect to the intelligence services, prowled the threadbare carpet like a man made restless by his conscience, and Lauder Strickland said it all again in fifteen different ways to fifteen different people, over the old upright telephone in the far corner of the room—“Then get me back to police liaison, woman, at once”—either bullying or fawning, depending on rank and clout. The Superintendent was a life ago, but in time ten minutes. The flat smelt of old nappies and stale cigarettes and was on the top floor of a scrolled Edwardian apartment house not two hundred yards from Hampstead Heath. In Smiley’s mind, visions of Vladimir’s burst face mingled with these pale faces of the living, yet death was not a shock to him just now, but merely an affirmation that his own existence too was dwindling; that he was living against the odds. He sat without expectation. He sat like an old man at a country railway station, watching the express go by. But watching all the same. And remembering old journeys.

  This is how crises always were, he thought; ragtag conversations with no centre. One man on the telephone, another dead, a third prowling. The nervous idleness of slow motion.

  He peered around, trying to fi
x his mind on the decaying things outside himself. Chipped fire extinguishers, Ministry of Works issue. Prickly brown sofas—the stains a little worse. But safe flats, unlike old generals, never die, he thought. They don’t even fade away.

  On the table before him lay the cumbersome apparatus of agent hospitality, there to revive the unrevivable guest. Smiley took the inventory. In a bucket of melted ice, one bottle of Stolichnaya vodka, Vladimir’s recorded favourite brand. Salted herrings, still in their tin. Pickled cucumber, bought loose and already drying. One mandatory loaf of black bread. Like every Russian Smiley had known, the old boy could scarcely drink his vodka without it. Two Marks & Spencer vodka glasses, could be cleaner. One packet of Russian cigarettes, unopened: if he had come, he would have smoked the lot; he had none with him when he died.

  Vladimir had none with him when he died, he repeated to himself, and made a little mental stammer of it, a knot in his handkerchief.

  A clatter interrupted Smiley’s reverie. In the kitchen, Mostyn the boy had dropped a plate. At the telephone Lauder Strickland wheeled round, demanding quiet. But he already had it again. What was Mostyn preparing anyway? Dinner? Breakfast? Seedcake for the funeral? And what was Mostyn? Who was Mostyn? Smiley had shaken his damp and trembling hand, then promptly forgotten what he looked like, except that he was so young. And yet for some reason Mostyn was known to him, if only as a type. Mostyn is our grief, Smiley decided arbitrarily.

  Lacon, in the middle of his prowling, came to a sudden halt.

  “George! You look worried. Don’t be. We’re all in the clear on this. All of us!”

  “I’m not worried, Oliver.”

  “You look as though you’re reproaching yourself. I can tell!”

  “When agents die—” said Smiley, but left the sentence incomplete, and anyway Lacon couldn’t wait for him. He strode off again, a hiker with miles to go. Lacon, Strickland, Mostyn, thought Smiley as Strickland’s Aberdonian brogue hammered on. One Cabinet Office factotum, one Circus fixer, one scared boy. Why not real people? Why not Vladimir’s case officer, whoever he is? Why not Saul Enderby, their Chief?