Smiley's People

by John le Carré

  The table drawer contained sheets of plain paper, a stapler, a chewed pencil, some elastic bands, and a recent quarterly telephone bill, unpaid, for the sum of seventy-eight pounds, which struck him as uncharacteristically high for Vladimir’s frugal lifestyle. He opened the stapler and found nothing. He put the phone bill in his pocket to study later and kept searching, knowing it was not a real search at all, that a real search would take three men several days before they could say with certainty they had found whatever was to be found. If he was looking for anything in particular, then it was probably an address book or a diary or something that did duty for one, even if it was only a scrap of paper. He knew that sometimes old spies, even the best of them, were a little like old lovers; as age crept up on them, they began to cheat, out of fear that their powers were deserting them. They pretended they had it all in the memory, but in secret they were hanging on to their virility, in secret they wrote things down, often in some home-made code, which, if they only knew it, could be unbuttoned in hours or minutes by anyone who knew the game. Names and addresses of contacts, sub-agents. Nothing was holy. Routines, times and places of meetings, worknames, phone numbers, even safe combinations written out as social-security numbers and birthdays. In his time Smiley had seen entire networks put at risk that way because one agent no longer dared to trust his head. He didn’t believe Vladimir would have done that, but there was always a first time.

  Tell him I have two proofs and can bring them with me. . . .

  He was standing in what the old man would have called his kitchen: the window-sill with the gas ring on it, the tiny home-made food-store with holes drilled for ventilation. We men who cook for ourselves are half-creatures, he thought as he scanned the two shelves, tugged out the saucepan and the frying-pan, poked among the cayenne and paprika. Anywhere else in the house—even in bed—you can cut yourself off, read your books, deceive yourself that solitude is best. But in the kitchen the signs of incompleteness are too strident. Half of one black loaf. Half of one coarse sausage. Half an onion. Half a pint of milk. Half a lemon. Half a packet of black tea. Half a life. He opened anything that would open, he probed with his finger in the paprika. He found a loose tile and prised it free, he unscrewed the wooden handle of the frying-pan. About to pull open the clothes cupboard, he stopped as if listening again, but this time it was something he had seen that held him, not something he had heard.

  On top of the food-store lay a parcel of Gauloises Caporal cigarettes, Vladimir’s favourites when he couldn’t get his Russians. Tipped, he noticed, reading the different legends. “Duty Free.” “Filtre.” Marked “Exportation” and “Made in France.” Cellophane-wrapped. He took them down. Of the ten original packets, one already missing. In the ashtray, three stubbed-out cigarettes of the same brand. In the air, now that he sniffed for it over the smell of food and putty, a faint aroma of French cigarettes.

  And no cigarettes in his pocket, he remembered.

  Holding the blue parcel in both hands, slowly turning it, Smiley tried to understand what it meant to him. Instinct—or better, a submerged perception yet to rise to the surface—signalled to him urgently that something about these cigarettes was wrong. Not their appearance. Not that they were stuffed with microfilm or high explosive or soft-nosed bullets or any other of those weary games.

  Merely the fact of their presence, here and nowhere else, was wrong.

  So new, so free of dust, one packet missing, three smoked.

  And no cigarettes in his pocket.

  He worked faster now, wanting very much to leave. The flat was too high up. It was too empty and too full. He had a growing sense of something being out of joint. Why didn’t they take his keys? He pulled open the cupboard. It held clothes as well as papers but Vladimir possessed few of either. The papers were mostly cyclostyled pamphlets in Russian and English and in what Smiley took to be one of the Baltic languages. There was a folder of letters from the Group’s old headquarters in Paris, and posters reading “REMEMBER LATVIA,”“REMEMBER ESTONIA,”“REMEMBER LITHUANIA,”presumably for display at public demonstrations. There was a box of school chalk, yellow, a couple of pieces missing. And Vladimir’s treasured Norfolk jacket, lying off its hook on the floor. Fallen there, perhaps, as Vladimir closed the cupboard door too fast.

  And Vladimir so vain? thought Smiley. So military in his appearance? Yet dumps his best jacket in a heap on the cupboard floor? Or was it that a more careless hand than Vladimir’s had not replaced it on the hanger?

  Picking the jacket up, Smiley searched the pockets, then hung it back in the cupboard and slammed the door to see if it fell off its hook.

  It did.

  They didn’t take the keys, and they didn’t search his flat, he thought. They searched Vladimir, but in the Superintendent’s opinion they had been disturbed.

  Tell him I have two proofs and can bring them with me.

  Returning to the kitchen area, he stood before the food-store and took another studied look at the blue parcel lying on top of it. Then peered in the waste-paper basket. At the ashtray again, memorising. Then in the garbage bucket, just in case the missing packet, crumpled up, was there. It wasn’t, which for some reason pleased him.

  Time to go.

  But he didn’t, not quite. For another quarter of an hour, with his ear cocked for interruptions, Smiley delved and probed, lifting and replacing, still on the look-out for the loose floor-board, or the favoured recess behind the shelves. But this time he wanted not to find. This time, he wanted to confirm an absence. Only when he was as satisfied as circumstance allowed did he step quietly onto the landing and lock the door behind him. At the bottom of the first flight he met a temporary postman wearing a GPO armband emerging from another corridor. Smiley touched his elbow.

  “If you’ve anything at all for flat 6B, I can save you the climb,” he said humbly.

  The postman rummaged and produced a brown envelope. Postmark Paris, dated five days ago, the 15th district. Smiley slipped it into his pocket. At the bottom of the second flight stood a fire-door with a push-bar to open it from the inside only. He had made a mental note of it on his way up. He pushed, the door yielded, he descended a vile concrete staircase and crossed an interior courtyard to a deserted mews, still pondering the omission. Why didn’t they search his flat? he wondered. Moscow Centre, like any other large bureaucracy, had its fixed procedures. You decide to kill a man. So you station pickets outside his house, you stake out his route with static posts, you put in your assassination team, and you kill him. In the classic method. Then why not search his flat as well?—Vladimir, a bachelor, living in a building constantly overrun with strangers?—why not send in the pickets the moment he is on his way? Because they knew he had it with him, thought Smiley. And the body search, which the Superintendent regarded as so cursory? Suppose they were not disturbed, but had found what they were looking for?

  He hailed a taxi, telling the driver, “Bywater Street in Chelsea, please, off Kings Road.”

  Go home, he thought. Have a bath, think it through. Shave. Tell him I have two proofs and can bring them with me.

  Suddenly, leaning forward, he tapped on the glass partition and changed his destination. As they made the U-turn, the tall motor-cyclist screeched to a stop behind them, dismounted, and solemnly shunted his large black bike and side-car into the opposite lane. A footman, thought Smiley, watching him. A footman, wheeling in the trolley for tea. Like an official escort, arch-backed and elbows spread, the motor-cyclist followed them through the outer reaches of Camden, then, still at a regulation distance, slowly up the hill. The cab drew up, Smiley leaned forward to pay his fare. As he did so, the dark figure proceeded solemnly past them, one arm lifted from the elbow in a mail-fist salute.

  8

  He stood at the mouth of the avenue, gazing into the ranks of beech trees as they sank away from him like a retreating army into the mist. The darkness had departed reluctantly, leaving an indoor gloom. It could have been dusk already: tea-time in an
old country house. The street lights either side of him were poor candles, illuminating nothing. The air felt warm and heavy. He had expected police still, and a roped-off area. He had expected journalists or curious bystanders. It never happened, he told himself, as he started slowly down the slope. No sooner had I left the scene than Vladimir clambered merrily to his feet, stick in hand, wiped off the gruesome make-up, and skipped away with his fellow actors for a pot of beer at the police station.

  Stick in hand, he repeated to himself, remembering something the Superintendent had said to him. Left hand or right hand? “There’s yellow chalk powder on his left hand too,” Mr. Murgotroyd had said inside the van. “Thumb and first two fingers.”

  He advanced and the avenue darkened round him, the mist thickened. His footsteps echoed tinnily ahead of him. Twenty yards higher, brown sunlight burned like a slow bonfire in its own smoke. But down here in the dip the mist had collected in a cold fog, and Vladimir was very dead after all. He saw tyre marks where the police cars had parked. He noticed the absence of leaves and the unnatural cleanness of the gravel. What do they do? he wondered. Hose the gravel down? Sweep the leaves into more plastic pillowcases?

  His tiredness had given way to a new and mysterious clarity. He continued up the avenue wishing Vladimir good morning and good night and not feeling a fool for doing so, thinking intently about drawing-pins and chalk and French cigarettes and Moscow Rules, looking for a tin pavilion by a playing field. Take it in sequence, he told himself. Take it from the beginning. Leave the Caporals on their shelf. He reached an intersection of paths and crossed it, still climbing. To his right, goal-posts appeared, and beyond them a green pavilion of corrugated iron, apparently empty. He started across the field, rain-water seeping into his shoes. Behind the hut ran a steep mud bank scoured with children’s slides. He climbed the bank, entered a coppice, and kept climbing. The fog had not penetrated the trees and by the time he reached the brow it had cleared. There was still no one in sight. Returning, he approached the pavilion through the trees. It was a tin box, no more, with one side open to the field. The only furniture was a rough wood bench slashed and written on with knives, the only occupant a prone figure stretched on it, with a blanket pulled over his head and brown boots protruding. For an undisciplined moment Smiley wondered whether he too had had his face blown off. Girders held up the roof; earnest moral statements enlivened the flaking green paint. “Punk is destructive. Society does not need it.” The assertion caused him a moment’s indecision. “Oh, but society does,” he wanted to reply; “society is an association of minorities.” The drawing-pin was where Mostyn had said it was, at head height exactly, in the best Sarratt tradition of regularity, its Circus-issue brass head as new and as unmarked as the boy who had put it there.

  Proceed to the rendezvous, it said; no danger sighted.

  Moscow Rules, thought Smiley yet again. Moscow, where it could take a fieldman three days to post a letter to a safe address. Moscow, where all minorities are punk.

  Tell him I have two proofs and can bring them with me. . . .

  Vladimir’s chalked acknowledgment ran close beside the pin, a wavering yellow worm of a message scrawled all down the post. Perhaps the old man was worried about rain, thought Smiley. Perhaps he was afraid it could wash his mark away. Or perhaps in his emotional state he leaned too heavily on the chalk, just as he had left his Norfolk jacket lying on the floor. A meeting or nothing, he had told Mostyn . . . Tonight or nothing . . . Tell him I have two proofs and can bring them with me. . . . Nevertheless only the vigilant would ever have noticed that mark, heavy though it was, or the shiny drawing-pin either, and not even the vigilant would have found them odd, for on Hampstead Heath people post bills and messages to each other ceaselessly, and not all of them are spies. Some are children, some are tramps, some are believers in God, some have lost pets, and some are looking for variations of love and having to proclaim their needs from a hilltop. And not all of them, by any means, get their faces blown off at point-blank range by a Moscow Centre assassination weapon.

  And the purpose of this acknowledgment? In Moscow, when Smiley from his desk in London had had the ultimate responsibility for Vladimir’s case—in Moscow these signs were devised for agents who might disappear from hour to hour; they were the broken twigs along a path that could always be their last. I see no danger and am proceeding as instructed to the agreed rendezvous, read Vladimir’s last—and fatally mistaken—message to the living world.

  Leaving the hut, Smiley moved a short distance back along the route he had just come. And as he walked, he meticulously called to mind the Superintendent’s reconstruction of Vladimir’s last journey, drawing upon his memory as if it were an archive.

  Those rubber overshoes are a Godsend, Mr. Smiley, the Superintendent had declared piously: North British Century, diamond-pattern soles, sir, and barely walked on—why, you could follow him through a football crowd if you had to!

  “I’ll give you the authorised version,” the Superintendent had said, speaking fast because they were short of time. “Ready, Mr. Smiley?”

  Ready, Smiley had said.

  The Superintendent changed his tone of voice. Conversation was one thing, evidence another. As he spoke, he shone his torch in phases onto the wet gravel of the roped-off area. A lecture with magic lantern, Smiley had thought; at Sarratt I’d have taken notes. “Here he is, coming down the hill now, sir. See him there? Normal pace, nice heel and toe movement, normal progress, everything above-board. See, Mr. Smiley?”

  Mr. Smiley had seen.

  “And the stick mark there, do you, in his right hand, sir?”

  Smiley had seen that too, how the rubber-ferruled walking-stick had left a deep round rip with every second footprint.

  “Whereas of course he had the stick in his left when he was shot, correct? You saw that, too, sir, I noticed. Happen to know which side his bad leg was at all, sir, if he had one?”

  “The right,” Smiley had said.

  “Ah. Then most likely the right was the side he normally held the stick, as well. Down here, please, sir, that’s the way! Walking normal still, please note,” the Superintendent had added, making a rare slip of grammar in his distraction.

  For five more paces the regular diamond imprint, heel and toe, had continued undisturbed in the beam of the Superintendent’s torch. Now, by daylight, Smiley saw only the ghost of them. The rain, other feet, and the tyre tracks of illicit cyclists had caused large parts to disappear. But by night, at the Superintendent’s lantern show, he had seen them vividly, as vividly as he saw the plastic-covered corpse in the dip below them, where the trail had ended.

  “Now,”the Superintendent had declared with satisfaction, and halted, the cone of his torchbeam resting on a single scuffed area of ground.

  “How old did you say he was, sir?” the Superintendent asked.

  “I didn’t, but he owned to sixty-nine.”

  “Plus your recent heart attack, I gather. Now, sir. First he stops. In sharp order. Don’t ask me why, perhaps he was spoken to. My guess is he heard something. Behind him. Notice the way the pace shortens, notice the position of the feet as he makes the half-turn, looks over his shoulder, or whatever? Anyway he turns and that’s why I say ‘behind him.’ And whatever he saw or didn’t see—or heard or didn’t hear—he decides to run. Off he goes, look!” the Superintendent urged, with the sudden enthusiasm of the sportsman. “Wider stride, heels not hardly on the ground at all. A new print entirely, and going for all he’s worth. You can even see where he shoved himself off with his stick for the extra purchase.”

  Peering now by daylight, Smiley no longer with any certainty could see, but he had seen last night—and in his memory saw again this morning—the sudden desperate gashes of the ferrule thrust downward, then thrust at an angle.

  “Trouble was,” the Superintendent commented quietly, resuming his courtroom style, “whatever killed him was out in front, wasn’t it? Not behind him at all.”