Smiley's People

by John le Carré

  Lacon, who had stayed uncharacteristically quiet these last minutes, now chimed in: “There’s an important point here, George. The Circus were not the suitors here. He was. The ex-agent. He was doing all the pressing, making all the running. If he’d accepted our suggestion, written out his information, none of this need ever have happened. He brought it on himself entirely. George, I insist you take the point!”

  Strickland was lighting himself a fresh cigarette.

  “Whoever heard of Moscow Rules in the middle of bloody Hampstead anyway?” Strickland asked, waving out the match.

  “Bloody Hampstead is right,” Smiley said quietly.

  “Mostyn, wrap the story up,” Lacon commanded, blushing scarlet.

  They had agreed a time, Mostyn resumed woodenly, now staring at his left palm as if he were reading his own fortune in it: “Ten-twenty, sir.”

  They had agreed Moscow Rules, he said, and the usual contact procedures, which Mostyn had established earlier in the afternoon by consulting the Oddbins encounter index.

  “And what were the contact procedures exactly?” Smiley asked.

  “A copy-book rendezvous, sir,” Mostyn replied. “The Sarratt training course all over again, sir.”

  Smiley felt suddenly crowded by the intimacy of Mostyn’s respectfulness. He did not wish to be this boy’s hero, or to be caressed by his voice, his gaze, his “sir”s. He was not prepared for the claustrophobic admiration of this stranger.

  “There’s a tin pavilion on Hampstead Heath, ten minutes’ walk from East Heath Road, overlooking a games field on the south side of the avenue, sir. The safety signal was one new drawing-pin shoved high in the first wood support on the left as you entered.”

  “And the counter-signal?” Smiley asked.

  But he knew the answer already.

  “A yellow chalk line,” said Mostyn. “I gather yellow was the sort of Group trade mark from the old days.” He had adopted a tone of ending. “I put up the pin and came back here and waited. When he didn’t show up, I thought, ‘Well, if he’s secrecy-mad I’ll have to go up to the hut again and check out his counter-signal, then I’ll know whether he’s around and proposes to try the fallback.’ ”

  “Which was what?”

  “A car pick-up near Swiss Cottage underground at eleven-forty, sir. I was about to go out and take a look when Mr. Strickland rang through and ordered me to sit tight until further orders.” Smiley assumed he had finished but this was not quite true. Seeming to forget everyone but himself, Mostyn slowly shook his handsome head. “I never met him,” he said, in amazement. “He was my first agent, I never met him, I’ll never know what he was trying to tell me,” he said. “My first agent, and he’s dead. It’s incredible. I feel like a complete Jonah.” His head continued shaking long after he had finished speaking.

  Lacon added a brisk postscript: “Yes, well, Scotland Yard has a computer these days, George. The Heath Patrol found the body and cordoned off the area and the moment the name was fed into the computer a light came up or a lot of digits or something, and immediately they knew he was on our special watch list. From then on it went like clockwork. The Commissioner phoned the Home Office, the Home Office phoned the Circus—”

  “And you phoned me,” said Smiley. “Why, Oliver? Who suggested you bring me in on this?”

  “George, does it matter?”

  “Enderby?”

  “If you insist, yes, it was Saul Enderby. George, listen to me.”

  It was Lacon’s moment at last. The issue, whatever it might be, was before them, circumscribed if not yet actually defined. Mostyn was forgotten. Lacon was standing confidently over Smiley’s seated figure and had assumed the rights of an old friend.

  “George, as things now stand, I can go to the Wise Men and say: ‘I have investigated and the Circus’s hands are clean.’ I can say that. ‘The Circus gave no encouragement to these people, nor to their leader. For a whole year they have neither paid nor welfared him!’ Perfectly honestly. They don’t own his flat, his car, they don’t pay his rent, educate his bastards, send flowers to his mistress, or have any other of the old—and lamentable—connections with him or his kind. His only link was with the past. His case officers have left the stage for good—yourself and Esterhase, both old ’uns, both off the books. I can say that with my hand on my breast. To the Wise Men, and if necessary to my Minister personally.”

  “I don’t follow you,” Smiley said with deliberate obtuseness. “Vladimir was our agent. He was trying to tell us something.”

  “Our ex-agent, George. How do we know he was trying to tell us something? We gave him no brief. He spoke of urgency—even of Soviet Intelligence—so do a lot of ex-agents when they’re holding out their caps for a subsidy!”

  “Not Vladimir,” Smiley said.

  But sophistry was Lacon’s element. He was born to it, he breathed it, he could fly and swim in it, nobody in Whitehall was better at it.

  “George, we cannot be held responsible for every ex-agent who takes an injudicious nocturnal walk in one of London’s increasingly dangerous open spaces!” He held out his hands in appeal. “George. What is it to be? Choose. You choose. On the one hand, Vladimir asked for a chat with you. Retired buddies—a chin-wag about old times—why not? And in order to raise a bit of wind, as any of us might, he pretended he had something for you. Some nugget of information. Why not? They all do it. On that basis my Minister will back us. No heads need roll, no tantrums, Cabinet hysteria. He will help us bury the case. Not a cover-up, naturally. But he will use his judgment. If I catch him in the right mood, he may even decide that there is no point in troubling the Wise Men with it at all.”

  “Amen,” Strickland echoed.

  “On the other hand,” Lacon insisted, mustering all his persuasiveness for the kill, “if things were to come unstuck, George, and the Minister got it into his head that we were engaging his good offices in order to clean up the traces of some unlicensed adventure which has aborted”—he was striding again, skirting an imaginary quagmire—“and there was a scandal, George, and the Circus were proved to be currently involved—your old service, George, one you still love, I am sure—with a notoriously revanchist émigré outfit—volatile, talkative, violently anti-détente—with all manner of anachronistic fixations—a total hangover from the worst days of the cold war—the very archetype of everything our masters have told us to avoid”—he had reached his corner again, a little outside the circle of light—“and there had been a death, George—and an attempted cover-up, as they would no doubt call it—with all the attendant publicity—well, it could be just one scandal too many. The service is a weak child still, George, a sickly one, and in the hands of these new people desperately delicate. At this stage in its rebirth, it could die of the common cold. If it does, your generation will not be least to blame. You have a duty, as we all do. A loyalty.”

  Duty to what? Smiley wondered, with that part of himself which sometimes seemed to be a spectator to the rest. Loyalty to whom? “There is no loyalty without betrayal,” Ann liked to tell him in their youth when he had ventured to protest at her infidelities.

  For a time nobody spoke.

  “And the weapon?” Smiley asked finally, in the tone of someone testing a theory. “How do you account for that, Oliver?”

  “What weapon? There was no weapon. He was shot. By his own buddies most likely, knowing their cabals. Not to mention his appetite for other people’s wives.”

  “Yes, he was shot,” Smiley agreed. “In the face. At extremely close range. With a soft-nosed bullet. And cursorily searched. Had his wallet taken. That is the police diagnosis. But our diagnosis would be different, wouldn’t it, Lauder?”

  “No way,” said Strickland, glowering at him through a cloud of cigarette smoke.

  “Well, mine would.”

  “Then let’s hear it, George,” said Lacon handsomely.

  “The weapon used to kill Vladimir was a standard Moscow Centre assassination device,” Smiley said
. “Concealed in a camera, a brief-case, or whatever. A soft-nosed bullet is fired at point-blank range. To obliterate, to punish, and to discourage others. If I remember rightly, they even had one on display at Sarratt in the black museum next to the bar.”

  “They still have. It’s horrific,” said Mostyn.

  Strickland vouchsafed Mostyn a foul glance.

  “But, George!” Lacon cried.

  Smiley waited, knowing that in this mood Lacon could swear away Big Ben.

  “These people—these émigrés—of whom this poor chap was one—don’t they come from Russia? Haven’t half of them been in touch with Moscow Centre—with or without our knowledge? A weapon like that—I’m not saying you’re right, of course—a weapon like that, in their world, could be as common as cheese!”

  Against stupidity, the gods themselves fight in vain, thought Smiley; but Schiller had forgotten the bureaucrats. Lacon was addressing Strickland.

  “Lauder. There is the question of the D-notice to the Press outstanding.” It was an order. “Perhaps you should have another shot at them, see how far it’s got.”

  In his stockinged feet, Strickland obediently padded down the room and dialled a number.

  “Mostyn, perhaps you should take these things out to the kitchen. We don’t want to leave needless traces, do we?”

  With Mostyn also dismissed, Smiley and Lacon were suddenly alone.

  “It’s a yes or no, George,” Lacon said. “There’s cleaning up to be done. Explanations to be given to tradesmen, what do I know? Mail. Milk. Friends. Whatever such people have. No one knows the course as you do. No one. The police have promised you a head start. They will not be dilatory but they will observe a certain measured order about things and let routine play its part.” With a nervous bound Lacon approached Smiley’s chair and sat awkwardly on the arm. “George. You were their vicar. Very well, I’m asking you to go and read the Offices. He wanted you, George. Not us. You.”

  From his old place at the telephone, Strickland interrupted: “They’re asking for a signature for that D-notice, Oliver. They’d like it to be yours, if it’s all the same to you.”

  “Why not the chief’s?” Lacon demanded warily.

  “Seem to think yours will carry a spot more weight, I fancy.”

  “Ask him to hold a moment,” Lacon said, and with a wind-mill gesture drove a fist into his pocket. “I may give you the keys, George?” He dangled them in front of Smiley’s face. “On terms. Right?” The keys still dangled. Smiley stared at them and perhaps he asked “What terms?” or perhaps he just stared; he wasn’t really in a mood for conversation. His mind was on Mostyn, and missing cigarettes; on phone calls about neighbours; on agents with no faces; on sleep. Lacon was counting. He attached great merit to numbering his paragraphs. “One, that you are a private citizen, Vladimir’s executor, not ours. Two, that you are of the past, not the present, and conduct yourself accordingly. The sanitised past. That you will pour oil on the waters, not muddy them. That you will suppress your old professional interest in him, naturally, for that means ours. On those terms may I give you the keys? Yes? No?”

  Mostyn was standing in the kitchen doorway. He was addressing Lacon, but his earnest eyes veered constantly towards Smiley.

  “What is it, Mostyn?” Lacon demanded. “Be quick!”

  “I just remembered a note on Vladimir’s card, sir. He had a wife in Tallinn. I wondered whether she should be informed. I just thought I’d better mention it.”

  “The card is once more not accurate,” said Smiley, returning Mostyn’s gaze. “She was with him in Moscow when he defected, she was arrested and taken to a forced-labour camp. She died there.”

  “Mr. Smiley must do whatever he thinks fit about such things,” Lacon said swiftly, anxious to avoid a fresh outbreak, and dropped the keys into Smiley’s passive palm. Suddenly everything was in movement. Smiley was on his feet, Lacon was already half-way down the room, and Strickland was holding out the phone to him. Mostyn had slipped to the darkened hallway and was deftly unhooking Smiley’s raincoat from the stand.

  “What else did Vladimir say to you on the telephone, Mostyn?” Smiley asked quietly, dropping one arm into the sleeve.

  “He said, ‘Tell Max that it concerns the Sandman. Tell him I have two proofs and can bring them with me. Then perhaps he will see me.’ He said it twice. It was on the tape but Strickland erased it.”

  “Do you know what Vladimir meant by that? Keep your voice down.”

  “No, sir.”

  “Nothing on the card?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Do they know what he meant?” Smiley asked, tilting his hand swiftly towards Strickland and Lacon.

  “I think Strickland may. I’m not sure.”

  “Did Vladimir really not ask for Esterhase?”

  “No, sir.”

  Lacon was finishing on the phone. Strickland took back the receiver from him and spoke into it himself. Seeing Smiley at the door, Lacon bounded down the room to him.

  “George! Good man! Fare you well! Listen. I want to talk to you about marriage some time. A seminar with no holds barred. I’m counting on you to tell me the art of it, George!”

  “Yes. We must get together,” Smiley said.

  Looking down, he saw that Lacon was shaking his hand.

  A bizarre postscript to this meeting confounds its conspiratorial purpose. Standard Circus tradecraft requires that hidden microphones be installed in safe houses. Agents in their strange way accept this, even though they are not informed of it, even though their case officers go through motions of taking notes. For his rendezvous with Vladimir, Mostyn had quite properly switched on the system in anticipation of the old man’s arrival, and nobody, in the subsequent panic, thought to turn it off. Routine procedures brought the tapes to transcriber section, who in good faith put out several texts for the general Circus reader. The luckless head of Oddbins got a copy, so did the Secretariat, so did the heads of Personnel, Operations, and Finance. It was not till a copy landed in Lauder Strickland’s in-tray that the explosion occurred and the innocent recipients were sworn to secrecy under all manner of dreadful threats. The tape is perfect. Lacon’s restless pacing is there; so are Strickland’s sotto voce asides, some of them obscene. Only Mostyn’s flustered confessions in the hall escaped.

  As to Mostyn himself, he played no further part in the affair. He resigned of his own accord a few months later, part of the wastage rate that gets everyone so worried these days.

  6

  The same uncertain light that greeted Smiley as he stepped gratefully out of the safe flat into the fresh air of that Hampstead morning greeted Ostrakova also, though the Paris autumn was further on, and only a last few leaves clung to the plane trees. Like Smiley’s too, her night had not been restful. She had risen in the dark and dressed with care, and she had deliberated, since the morning looked colder, whether this was the day on which to get out her winter boots, because the draught in the warehouse could be cruel and affected her legs the most. Still undecided, she had fished them out of the cupboard and wiped them down, and even polished them, but she still had not been able to make up her mind whether to wear them or not. Which was how it always went with her when she had one big problem to grapple with: the small ones became impossible. She knew all the signs, she could feel them coming on, but there was nothing she could do. She would mislay her purse, botch her bookkeeping at the warehouse, lock herself out of the flat and have to fetch the old fool of a concierge, Madame la Pierre, who pecked and snuffled like a goat in a nettle patch. She could quite easily, when the mood was on her, after fifteen years of taking the same route, catch the wrong bus and finish up, furious, in a strange neighbourhood. She pulled on the boots finally—muttering to herself “old fool, cretin,” and the like—and, carrying the heavy shopping bag that she had prepared the previous night, she set off along her usual route, passing her three usual shops and neglecting to enter any of them, while she tried to work out whether or not she was
going off her head.

  I am mad. I am not mad. Somebody is trying to kill me, somebody is trying to protect me. I am safe. I am in mortal danger. Back and forth.

  In the four weeks since she had received her little Estonian confessor, Ostrakova had been aware of many changes in herself and for most of them she was not at all ungrateful. Whether she had fallen in love with him was neither here nor there: his appearance was timely, and the piracy in him had revived her sense of opposition at a moment when it was in danger of going out. He had rekindled her, and there was enough of the alley cat in him to remind her of Glikman and other men as well; she had never been particularly continent. And since, on top of this, she thought, the magician is a man of looks, and knows women, and steps into my life armed with a picture of my oppressor and the determination, apparently, to eliminate him—why then, it would be positively indecent, lonely old fool that I am, if I did not fall in love with him on the spot!

  But it was his gravity that had impressed her even more than his magic. “You must not decorate,” he had told her, with uncharacteristic sharpness, when for the sake of entertainment or variety she had allowed herself to deviate just a little from the version she had written to the General. “Merely because you yourself feel more at ease, do not make the mistake of supposing that the danger is over.”

  She had promised to improve herself.

  “The danger is absolute,” he had told her as he left. “It is not yours to make greater or make less.”

  People had talked to her about danger before, but when the magician talked about it, she believed him.

  “Danger to my daughter?” she had asked. “Danger to Alexandra?”

  “Your daughter plays no part in this. You may be sure she knows nothing of what is going on.”

  “Then danger to whom?”

  “Danger to all of us who have knowledge of this matter,” he had replied as she happily conceded, in the doorway, to their one embrace. “Danger most of all to you.”