Smiley's People

by John le Carré

  The kennel sign was like a painted grin: “MERRILEE BOARDING ALL PETS WELCOME EGGS.” A daubed yellow dog wearing a top hat pointed one paw down a cart-track; the track, when he took it, led so steeply downward that it felt like a free fall. He passed a pylon and heard the wind howling in it; he entered the plantation. First came the young trees; then the old ones darkened over him and he was in the Black Forest of his German childhood heading for some unrevealed interior. He switched on his headlights, rounded a steep bend, and another, and a third, and there was the cabin much as he had imagined it—her dacha, as she used to call it. Once she had had the house in Oxford and the dacha as a place away from it. Now there was only the dacha; she had quitted towns for ever. It stood in its own clearing of tree trunks and trodden mud, with a ramshackle veranda and a wood-shingle roof and a tin chimney with smoke coming out of it. The clapboard walls were blackened with creosote, a galvanised iron feed-tub almost blocked the front porch. On a bit of lawn stood a home-made bird-table with enough bread to feed an ark, and dotted round the clearing, like allotment huts, stood the asbestos sheds and wire runs that held the chickens and all the pets welcome without discrimination.

  Karla, he thought. What a place to look for you.

  He parked, and his arrival set loose a bedlam as dogs sobbed in torment and thin walls thundered to desperate bodies. He walked to the house, carrier-bag in hand, the bottles bumping against his legs. Above the din he heard his own feet rattling up the six steps of the veranda. A notice on the door read: “If OUT do NOT leave pets on spec.” And underneath, seemingly added in a fury, “No bloody monkeys.”

  The bell-pull was a donkey’s tail in plastic. He reached for it but the door had already opened and a frail pretty woman peered at him from the interior darkness of the cabin. Her eyes were timid and grey, she had that period English beauty which had once been Ann’s: accepting, and grave. She saw him and stopped dead. “Oh, Lord,” she whispered. “Gosh.” Then looked downward at her brogues, brushing back her forelock with one finger, while the dogs barked themselves hoarse at him from behind their wire.

  “I’m sorry, Hilary,” said Smiley, with great gentleness. “It’s only for an hour, I promise. That’s all it is. An hour.”

  A deep, masculine voice, very slow, issued out of the darkness behind her. “What is it, Hils?” growled the voice. “Bogweevil, budgie, or giraffe?”

  The question was followed by a slow thud like the movement of cloth over something hollow.

  “It’s human, Con,” Hilary called over her shoulder, and went back to looking at her brogues.

  “She human or the other thing?” the voice demanded.

  “It’s George, Con. Don’t be cross, Con.”

  “George? Which George? George the Lorry, who waters my coal, or George the Meat, who poisons my dogs?”

  “It’s just some questions,” Smiley assured Hilary in the same deeply compassionate tone. “An old case. Nothing momentous, I promise you.”

  “It doesn’t matter, George,” Hilary said, still looking downward. “Honestly. It’s fine.”

  “Stop all that flirting!” the voice from inside the house commanded. “Unhand her, whoever you are!”

  As the thudding drew gradually nearer, Smiley leaned past Hilary and spoke into the doorway. “Connie, it’s me,” he said. And once again, his voice did everything possible to signal his goodwill.

  First came the puppies—four of them, probably whippets—in a fast pack. Next came a mangy old mongrel with barely life enough to reach the veranda and collapse. Then the door shuddered open to its fullest extent and revealed a mountainous woman propped crookedly between two thick wooden crutches, which she did not seem to hold. She had white hair clipped short as a man’s, and watery, very shrewd eyes that held him fiercely in their stare. So long was her examination of him, in fact, so leisured and minute—his earnest face, his baggy suit, the plastic carrier-bag dangling from his left hand, his whole posture of waiting meekly to be admitted—that it gave her an almost regal authority over him, to which her stillness, and her troubled breathing, and her crippled state only contributed greater strength.

  “Oh, my giddy aunts,” she announced, still studying him, and blew out a stream of air. “Jumping whatevers. Damn you, George Smiley. Damn you and all who sail in you. Welcome to Siberia.”

  Then she smiled, and her smile was so sudden, and fresh, and little-girl, that it almost washed away the long questioning that had gone before it.

  “Hullo, Con,” said Smiley.

  Her eyes, notwithstanding her smile, stayed on him still. They had the pallor of a new-born baby’s.

  “Hils,” she said, at last. “I said Hils!”

  “Yes, Con?”

  “Go feed the doggie-wogs, darling. When you’ve done that, feed the filthy chickadees. Glut the brutes. When you’ve done that, mix tomorrow’s meal, and when you’ve done that, bring me the humane killer so that I can dispatch this interfering whatsit to an early Paradise. George, follow me.”

  Hilary smiled but seemed unable to move till Connie softly pushed an elbow into her to get her going.

  “Hoof it, darling. There’s nothing he can do to you now. He’s shot his bolt, and so have you, and, God knows, so have I.”

  It was a house of day and night at once. At the centre, on a pine table littered with the remains of toast and Marmite, an old oil lamp shed a globe of yellow light, intensifying the darkness round it. The gleam of blue rain clouds, streaked by sunset, filled the far French windows. Gradually, as Smiley followed Connie’s agonisingly slow procession, he realised that this one wooden room was all there was. For an office, they had the roll-top desk laden with bills and flea powder; for a bedroom the brass double bedstead with its heap of stuffed toy animals lying like dead soldiers between the pillows; for a drawing-room Connie’s rocking-chair and a crumbling wicker sofa; for a kitchen a gas ring fired from a cylinder; and for decoration the unclearable litter of old age.

  “Connie’s not coming back, George,” she called as she hobbled ahead of him. “Wild horses can puff and blow their snivelling hearts out, the old fool has hung up her boots for good.” Reaching her rocking-chair, she began the ponderous business of turning herself round until she had her back to it. “So if that’s what you’re after, you can tell Saul Enderby to shove it up his smoke and pipe it.” She held out her arms to him and he thought she wanted him to kiss her. “Not that, you sex maniac. Batten on to my hands!”

  He did so, and lowered her into the rocking-chair.

  “That’s not what I came for, Con,” said Smiley. “I’m not trying to woo you away, I promise.”

  “For one good reason, she’s dying,” she announced firmly, not seeming to notice his interjection. “The old fool’s for the shredder, and high time too. The leech tries to fool me, of course. That’s because he’s a funk. Bronchitis. Rheumatism. Touch of the weather. Balls, the lot of it. It’s death, that’s what I’m suffering from. The systematic encroachment of the big D. Is that booze you’re toting in that bag?”

  “Yes. Yes, it is,” said Smiley.

  “Goody. Let’s have lots. How’s the demon Ann?”

  On the draining-board, amid a permanent pile of washing-up, he found two glasses, and half filled them.

  “Flourishing, I gather,” he replied.

  Reciprocating, by his own kindly smile, her evident pleasure at his visit, he held out a glass to her and she grappled it between her mittened hands.

  “You gather,” she echoed. “Wish you would gather. Gather her up for good is what you should do. Or else put powdered glass in her coffee. All right, what are you after?” she demanded, all in the same breath. “I never knew you yet to do anything without a reason. Mud in your eye.”

  “And in yours, Con,” said Smiley.

  To drink, she had to lean her whole trunk towards the glass. And as her huge head lurched into the glare of the lamplight, he saw—he knew from too much experience—that she was telling no less than the truth, and h
er flesh had the leprous whiteness of death.

  “Come on. Out with it,” she ordered, in her sternest tone. “I’m not sure I’ll help you, mind. I’ve discovered love since we parted. Addles the hormones. Softens the teeth.”

  He had wanted time to know her again. He was unsure of her.

  “It’s one of our old cases, Con, that’s all,” he began apologetically. “It’s come alive again, the way they do.” He tried to raise the pitch of his voice to make it sound casual. “We need more details. You know how you used to be about keeping records,” he added, teasingly.

  Her eyes did not stir from his face.

  “Kirov,” he went on, pronouncing the name very slowly. “Kirov, first name Oleg. Ring a bell? Soviet Embassy, Paris, three or four years ago, Second Secretary? We thought he was some sort of Moscow Centre man.”

  “He was,” she said, and sat back a little, still watching him.

  She motioned for a cigarette. A packet of ten lay on the table. He wedged one between her lips and lit it, but still her eyes would not leave his face.

  “Saul Enderby threw that case out of the window,” she said and, forming her lips as if to play a flute, blew a lot of smoke straight downward in order to avoid his face.

  “He ruled it should be dropped,” Smiley corrected her.

  “What’s the difference?”

  Smiley had not expected to find himself defending Saul Enderby.

  “It ran awhile, then in the transition time between my tenure and his, he ruled, quite understandably, that it was unproductive,” Smiley said, picking his words with measured care.

  “And now he’s changed his mind,” she said.

  “I’ve got bits, Con. I want it all.”

  “You always did,” she said. “George,” she muttered. “George Smiley. Lord alive. Lord bless us and preserve us. George.” Her gaze was half possessive, half disapproving, as if he were an erring son she loved. It held him awhile longer, then switched to the French windows and the darkening sky outside.

  “Kirov,” he said again, reminding her, and waited, wondering seriously whether it was all up with her; whether her mind was dying with her body, and this was all there was.

  “Kirov, Oleg,” she repeated, in a musing tone. “Born Leningrad October, 1929, according to his passport, which doesn’t mean a damn thing except that he probably never went near Leningrad in his life.” She smiled, as if that were the way of the wicked world. “Arrived Paris June 1, 1974, in the rank and quality of Second Secretary, Commercial. Three to four years ago, you say? Dear Lord, it could be twenty. That’s right, darling, he was a hood. ’Course he was. Identified by the Paris lodge of the poor old Riga Group, which didn’t help us any, specially not on the fifth floor. What was his real name? Kursky. Of course it was. Yes, I think I remember Oleg Kirov né Kursky all right.” Her smile returned, and was once more very pretty. “Must have been Vladimir’s last case, near enough. How is the old stoat?” she asked, and her moist clever eyes waited for his answer.

  “Oh, fighting fit,” said Smiley.

  “Still terrifying the virgins of Paddington?”

  “I’m sure he is.”

  “Bless you, darling,” said Connie, and turned her head till it was in profile to him, very dark except for the one fine line from the oil lamp, while she again stared out of the French windows.

  “Go and see how the mad bitch is, will you, heart?” she asked fondly. “Make sure the idiot hasn’t thrown herself into the millrace or drunk the universal weed-killer.”

  Stepping outside, Smiley stood on the veranda, and in the thickening gloom made out the figure of Hilary loping awkwardly among the coops. He heard the clanking of her spoon on the bucket, and shreds of her well-bred voice on the night air as she called out childish names: “Come on Whitey, Flopsy, Bo.”

  “She’s fine,” said Smiley, coming back. “Feeding the chickens.”

  “I should tell her to bugger off, shouldn’t I, George?” she remarked, ignoring his information entirely. “‘Go forth into the world, Hils, my dear.’ That’s what I should say. ‘Don’t tie yourself to a rotting old hulk like Con. Marry a chinless fool, spawn brats, fulfil your foul womanhood.’” She had voices for everybody, he remembered: even for herself. She had them still. “I’ll be damned if I will, George. I want her. Every gorgeous bit of her. I’d take her with me if I’d half a chance. You want to try it some time.” A break. “How are all the boys and girls?”

  For a second, he didn’t understand her question; his thoughts were with Hilary still, and Ann.

  “His Grace Saul Enderby is still top of the heap, I take it? Eating well, I trust? Not moulting?”

  “Oh, Saul goes from strength to strength, thanks.”

  “That toad Sam Collins still head of Operations?”

  There was an edge to her questions, but he had no choice except to answer.

  “Sam’s fine too,” he said.

  “Toby Esterhase still oiling round the corridors?”

  “It’s all pretty much as usual.”

  Her face was now so dark to him that he could not tell whether she was proposing to speak again. He heard her breathing and the rasp of her chest. But he knew he was still the object of her scrutiny.

  “You’d never work for that bunch, George,” she remarked at last, as if it were the most self-evident of platitudes. “Not you. Give me another drink.”

  Glad of the movement, Smiley went down the room again.

  “Kirov, you said?” Connie called to him.

  “That’s right,” said Smiley cheerfully, and returned with her glass replenished.

  “That little ferret Otto Leipzig was the first hurdle,” she remarked with relish, when she had taken a deep draught. “The fifth floor wouldn’t believe him, would they? Not our little Otto—oh, no! Otto was a fabricator, and that was that!”

  “But I don’t think Leipzig ever lied to us about the Moscow target,” Smiley said, taking up her tone of reminiscence.

  “No, darling, he did not,” she said with approval. “He had his weaknesses, I’ll grant you. But when it came to the big stuff he always played a straight bat. And you understood that, alone of all your tribe, I’ll say that for you. But you didn’t get much support from the other barons, did you?”

  “He never lied to Vladimir, either,” Smiley said. “It was Vladimir’s escape lines that got him out of Russia in the first place.”

  “Well, well,” said Connie, after another long silence. “Kirov né Kursky, the Ginger Pig.”

  She said it again—“Kirov né Kursky”—a rallying call spoken to her own mountainous memory. As she did so, Smiley saw in his mind’s eye the airport hotel room again, and the two strange conspirators seated before him in their black overcoats: the one so huge, the other tiny; the old General using all his bulk to enforce his passionate imploring; little Leipzig, an angry leash-dog at his side.

  She was seduced.

  The glow of the oil lamp had grown into a smoky light-ball, and Connie in her rocking-chair sat at the edge of it, Mother Russia herself, as they had called her in the Circus, her wasting face hallowed with reminiscence as she unfolded the story of just one of her unnumbered family of erring children. Whatever suspicions she was harbouring about Smiley’s motive in coming here, she had suspended them: this was what she had lived for; this was her song, even if it was her last; these monumental acts of recollection were her genius. In the old days, Smiley remembered, she would have teased him, flirted with her voice, taken huge arcs through seemingly extraneous chunks of Moscow Centre history, all to lure him nearer. But tonight her narrative had acquired an awesome sobriety, as if she knew she had very little time.

  Oleg Kirov arrived in Paris direct from Moscow, she repeated—that June, darling, same as I told you—the one when it poured and poured and the annual Sarratt cricket match had to be scrapped three Sundays in a row. Fat Oleg was listed as single, and he didn’t replace anyone. His desk was on the second floor overlooking the Rue Saint-Simon—tr
afficky but nice, darling—whereas the Moscow Centre Residency hogged the third and fourth, to the rage of the Ambassador, who felt he was being squeezed into a cupboard by his unloved neighbours. To outward appearances, therefore, Kirov looked at first sight like that rare creature of the Soviet diplomatic community—namely, a straight diplomat. But it was the practice in Paris in those days—and for all Connie knew in these days too, heart—whenever a new face showed up at the Soviet Embassy, to distribute his photograph among the émigré tribal chiefs. Brother Kirov’s photograph duly found its way to the groups, and in no time that old devil Vladimir was banging on his case officer’s door in a state of fine excitement—Steve Mackelvore had Paris in those days, bless him, and dropped dead of a heart attack soon after, but that’s another story—insisting that “his people” had identified Kirov as a former agent provocateur named Kursky, who, while a student at Tallinn Polytechnical Institute, had formed a circle of dissident Estonian dock workers, something called “the unaligned discussion club,” then shopped its members to the secret police. Vladimir’s source, presently visiting Paris, had been one of those unfortunate workers, and for his sins he had personally befriended Kursky right up to the moment of his betrayal.

  So far so good, except that Vladi’s source—said Connie—was none other than wicked little Otto, which meant that the fat was in the fire from the start.

  As Connie went on speaking, Smiley’s memory once again began to supplement her own. He saw himself in his last months as caretaker Chief of the Circus, wearily descending the rickety wooden staircase from the fifth floor for the Monday meeting, a bunch of dog-eared files jammed under his arm. The Circus in those days was like a bombed-out building, he remembered; its officers scattered, its budget hamstrung, its agents blown or dead or laid off. Bill Haydon’s unmasking was an open wound in everyone’s mind: they called it the Fall and shared the same sense of primeval shame. In their secret hearts, perhaps, they even blamed Smiley for having caused it, because it was Smiley who had nailed Bill’s treachery. He saw himself at the head of the conference, and the ring of hostile faces already set against him as one by one the week’s cases were introduced, and subjected to the customary questions: Do we or do we not develop this? Shall we give it another week? Another month? Another year? Is it a trap, is it deniable, is it within our Charter? What resources will be needed and are they better applied elsewhere? Who will authorise? Who will be informed? How much will it cost? He remembered the intemperate outburst that the mere name, or workname, of Otto Leipzig immediately called forth among such uncertain judges as Lauder Strickland, Sam Collins, and their kind. He tried to recall who else would have been there apart from Connie and her cohorts from Soviet Research. Director of Finance, director Western Europe, director Soviet Attack, most of them already Saul Enderby’s men. And Enderby himself, still nominally a Foreign Servant, put in by his own palace guard in the guise of Whitehall linkman, but whose smile was already their laughter, whose frown their disapproval. Smiley saw himself listening to the submission—Connie’s own—much as she now repeated it, together with the results of her preliminary researches.