Smiley's People

by John le Carré

  Otto’s story figured, she had insisted. This far, it couldn’t be faulted. She had shown her workings:

  Her own Soviet Research Section had confirmed from printed sources that one Oleg Kursky, a law student, was at Tallinn Polytechnic during the relevant period, she said.

  Foreign Office contemporary archives spoke of unrest in the docks.

  A defector report from the American Cousins gave a Kursky query Karsky, lawyer, first name Oleg, as graduating from a Moscow Centre training course at Kiev in 1971.

  The same source, though suspect, suggested Kursky had later changed his name on the advice of his superiors, “owing to his previous field experience.”

  Routine French liaison reports, though notoriously unreliable, indicated that for a Second Secretary, Commercial, in Paris, Kirov did indeed enjoy unusual freedoms, such as shopping alone and attending Third World receptions without the customary fifteen companions.

  All of which, in short—Connie had ended, far too vigorously for the fifth-floor taste—all of which confirmed the Leipzig story, and the suspicion that Kirov had an intelligence rôle. Then she had slapped the file on the table and passed round her photographs—the very stills, picked up as a matter of routine by French surveillance teams, that had caused the original uproar in the Riga Group headquarters in Paris. Kirov enters an Embassy car. Kirov emerges from the Moscow Narodny carrying a brief-case. Kirov pauses at the window of a saucy bookshop in order to scowl at the magazine covers.

  But none, Smiley reflected—returning to the present—none showing Oleg Kirov and his erstwhile victim Otto Leipzig disporting themselves with a pair of ladies.

  “So that was the case, darling,” Connie announced when she had taken a long pull at her drink. “We had the evidence of little Otto with plenty on his file to prove him right. We had a spot of collateral from other sources—not oodles, I grant you, but a start. Kirov was a hood, he was newly appointed, but what sort of hood was anybody’s guess. And that made him interesting, didn’t it, darling?”

  “Yes,” Smiley said distractedly. “Yes, Connie, I remember that it did.”

  “He wasn’t residency mainstream, we knew that from day one. He didn’t ride about in residency cars, do night-shifts or twin up with identified fellow hoods, or use their cipher room or attend their weekly prayer-meetings or feed the residency cat or whatever. On the other hand, Kirov wasn’t Karla’s man either, was he, heart? That was the rum thing.”

  “Why not?” Smiley asked, without looking at her.

  But Connie looked at Smiley all right. Connie made one of her long pauses in order to consider him at her leisure, while outside in the dying elms, the rooks wisely chose the sudden lull to sound a Shakespearean omen of screams. “Because Karla already had his man in Paris, darling,” she explained patiently. “As you are very well aware. That old stickler Pudin, the assistant military attaché. You remember how Karla always loved a soldier. Still does, for all I know.” She broke off, in order once more to study his impassive face. He had put his chin in his hands. His eyes, half closed, were turned towards the floor. “Besides, Kirov was an idiot, and the one thing Karla never did like was idiots, did he? You weren’t too kindly towards them either, come to think of it. Oleg Kirov was foul-mannered, stank, sweated, and stuck out like a fish in a tree wherever he went. Karla would have run a mile before hiring an oaf like that.” Again she paused. “So would you,” she added.

  Lifting a palm, Smiley placed it against his brow, fingers upward, like a child at an exam. “Unless,” he said.

  “Unless what? Unless he’d gone off his turnip, I suppose! That’ll be the day, I must say.”

  “It was the time of the rumours,” Smiley said from far inside his thoughts.

  “What rumours? There were always rumours, you dunderhead.”

  “Oh, just defector reports,” he said disparagingly. “Stories of strange happenings in Karla’s court. Secondary sources, of course. But didn’t they—”

  “Didn’t they what?”

  “Well, didn’t they suggest that he was taking rather strange people onto his pay-roll? Holding interviews with them at dead of night? It was all low-grade stuff, I know. I only mention it in passing.”

  “And we were ordered to discount them,” Connie said very firmly. “Kirov was the target. Not Karla. That was the fifth-floor ruling, George, and you were party to it. ‘Stop moongazing and get on with earthly matters,’ says you.” Twisting her mouth and putting back her head, she produced an uncomfortably realistic likeness of Saul Enderby: “‘This service is in the business of collectin’ intelligence,’” she drawled. “‘Not conductin’ feuds again the opposition.’ Don’t tell me he’s changed his tune, darling. Has he? George?” she whispered. “Oh, George, you are bad!”

  He fetched her another drink and when he came back he saw her eyes glistening with mischievous excitement. She was plucking at the tufts of her white hair the way she used to when she wore it long.

  “The point is, we licensed the operation, Con,” said Smiley, in a factual tone intended to rein her in. “We overruled the doubters, and we gave you permission to take Kirov to first base. How did it run after that?”

  The drink, the memories, the revived excitement of the chase were driving her at a speed he could not control. Her breathing had quickened. She was rasping like an old engine with the restraints dangerously removed. He realised she was telling Leipzig’s story the way Leipzig had told it to Vladimir. He had thought he was in the Circus with her still, with the operation against Kirov just about to be launched. But in her imagination she had leapt instead to the ancient city of Tallinn more than a quarter of a century earlier. In her extraordinary mind, she had been there; she had known both Leipzig and Kirov in the time of their friendship. A love story, she insisted. Little Otto and fat Oleg. This was the pivot, she said; let the old fool tell it the way it was, she said, and you pursue your wicked purposes as I go along, George.

  “The tortoise and the hare, darling, that’s who they were. Kirov the big sad baby, reading away at his law books at the Poly, and using the beastly secret police as Daddy; and little Otto Leipzig the proper devil, a finger in all the rackets, bit of prison behind him, working in the docks all day, at night preaching sedition to the unaligned. They met in a bar and it was love at first sight. Otto pulled the girls, Oleg Kirov slip-streamed along behind him, picking up his leavings. What are you trying to do, George? Joan-of-Arc me?”

  He had lighted a fresh cigarette for her and put it into her mouth in the hope of calming her, but her feverish talking had already burned it low enough to scorch her. Taking it quickly from her, he stubbed it on the tin lid she used for an ashtray.

  “They even shared a girl-friend for a time,” she said, so loud she was nearly yelling. “And one day, if you can believe it, the poor ninny came to little Otto and warned him outright. ‘Your fat friend is jealous of you and he’s a toady of the secret police,’ says she. ‘The unaligned discussion club is for the high jump. Beware the Ides of March!’”

  “Go easy, Con,” Smiley warned her anxiously. “Con, come down!”

  Her voice grew still louder: “Otto threw the girl out and a week later the whole bunch were arrested. Including fat Oleg, of course, who’d set them up—but they knew. Oh, they knew!” She faltered as if she had lost her way. “And the fool girl who’d tried to warn him died,” she said. “Missing, believed interrogated. Otto combed the forests for her till he found someone who’d been with her in the cells. Dead as a dodo. Two dodos. Dead as I’ll be, damn soon.”

  “Let’s go on later,” Smiley said.

  He would have stopped her, too—made tea, talked weather, anything to halt the mounting speed of her. But she had taken a second leap and was already back in Paris, describing how Otto Leipzig, with the fifth floor’s grudging approval and the old General’s passionate help, set about arranging the reunion, after all those lost years, with Second Secretary Kirov, whom she dubbed the Ginger Pig. Smiley supposed it was h
er name for him at the time. Her face was scarlet and her breath was not enough for her story, so that it kept running out in a wheeze, but she forced herself to continue.

  “Connie,” he begged her again, but it was not enough either, and perhaps nothing would have been.

  First, she said, in search of the Ginger Pig, little Otto trotted along to the various Franco-Soviet friendship societies that Kirov was known to frequent.

  “That poor little Otto must have seen The Battleship Potemkin fifteen times, but the Ginger Pig never showed up once.”

  Word came that Kirov was showing a serious interest in émigrés, and even representing himself as their secret sympathiser, enquiring whether, as a junior official, there was anything he could do to help their families in the Soviet Union. With Vladimir’s help Leipzig tried to put himself in Kirov’s path, but once more luck was against him. Then Kirov started travelling—travelling everywhere, my dear, a positive Flying Dutchman—so that Connie and her boys began to wonder whether he was some sort of clerical administrator for Moscow Centre, not on the operational side at all: the accountant-auditor for a group of Western residencies, for instance, with Paris as their centre—Bonn, Madrid, Stockholm, Vienna.

  “For Karla or for the mainstream?” Smiley asked quietly.

  Whisper who dares, said Connie, but for her money, it was for Karla. Even though Pudin was already there. Even though Kirov was an idiot, and not a soldier; it still had to be for Karla, Connie said, perversely doubling back upon her own assertions to the contrary. If Kirov had been visiting the mainstream residencies, he would have been entertained and put up by identified intelligence officers. But instead, he lived his cover, and stayed only with his national counterparts in the Commercial sections, she said.

  Anyway, the flying did it, said Connie. Little Otto waited till Kirov had booked himself on a flight to Vienna, made sure he was travelling alone, then boarded the same flight, and they were in business.

  “A straight copybook honey-trap, that’s what we were aiming for,” Connie sang, very loud indeed. “Your real old-fashioned burn. A big operator might laugh it off, but not Brother Kirov, least of all if he was on Karla’s books. Naughty photographs and information with menaces, that was what we were after. And when we’d done with him, and found out what he was up to, and who his nasty friends were, and who was giving him all that heady freedom, we’d either buy him in as a defector or bung him back in the pond, depending on how much was left of him!”

  She stopped dead. She opened her mouth, closed it, drew some breath, held out her glass to him.

  “Darling, get the old soak another drinkie, double-quick, will you? Connie’s getting her lurgies. No, don’t. Stay where you are.”

  For a fatal second, Smiley was lost.

  “George?”

  “Connie, I’m here! What is it?”

  He was fast but not fast enough. He saw the stiffening of her face, saw her distorted hands fly out in front of her, and her eyes screw up in disgust, as if she had seen a horrible accident.

  “Hils, quick!” she cried. “Oh, my hat!”

  He embraced her and felt her forearms lock over the back of his neck to hold him tighter. Her skin was cold, she was shaking, but from terror not from chill. He stayed against her, smelling Scotch and medicated powder and old lady, trying to comfort her. Her tears were all over his cheeks, he could feel them and taste their salty sting as she pushed him away from her. He found her handbag and opened it for her, then went quickly back to the veranda and called to Hilary. She ran out of the darkness with her fists half clenched, elbows and hips rotating, in a way that makes men laugh. She hurried past him, grinning with shyness, and he stayed on the veranda, feeling the night cold pricking his cheeks while he stared at the gathering rain clouds and the pine trees silvered by the rising moon. The dogs’ screaming had subsided. Only the wheeling rooks sounded their harsh warnings. Go, he told himself. Get out of here. Bolt. The car waited not a hundred feet from him, frost already forming on the roof. He imagined himself leaping into it and driving up the hill, through the plantation, and away, never to return. But he knew he couldn’t.

  “She wants you back now, George,” Hilary said sternly from the doorway, with the special authority of those who nurse the dying.

  But when he went back, everything was fine.

  15

  Everything was fine. Connie sat powdered and austere in her rocking-chair, and her eyes, as he entered, were as straight upon him as when he had first come here. Hilary had calmed her, Hilary had sobered her, and now Hilary stood behind her with her hands on Connie’s neck, thumbs inward, while she gently massaged the nape.

  “Spot of timor mortis, darling,” Connie explained. “The leech prescribes Valium but the old fool prefers the juice. You won’t mention that bit to Saul Enderby when you report back, will you, heart?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “When will you be reporting back, by the by, darling?”

  “Soon,” said Smiley.

  “Tonight, when you get home?”

  “It depends what there is to tell.”

  “Con did write it all up, you know, George. The old fool’s accounts of the case were very full, I thought. Very detailed. Very circumstantial, for once. But you haven’t consulted them.” Smiley said nothing. “They’re lost. Destroyed. Eaten by mealy-bugs. You haven’t had time. Well, well. And you such a devil for the paperwork. Higher, Hils,” she ordered, without taking her gleaming eyes away from Smiley. “Higher, darling. The bit where the vertebrae get stuck in the tonsils.”

  Smiley sat down on the old wicker sofa.

  “I used to love those double-double games,” Connie confessed dreamily, rolling her head in order to caress Hilary’s hands with it. “Didn’t I, Hils? All human life was there. You wouldn’t know that any more, would you? Not since you blew your gasket.”

  She returned to Smiley. “Want me to go on, dearie?” she asked in her East End tart’s voice.

  “If you could just take me through it briefly,” Smiley said. “But not if it’s—”

  “Where were we? I know. Up in that aeroplane with the Ginger Pig. He’s on his way to Vienna, he’s got his trotters in a trough of beer. Looks up, and who does he see standing in front of him like his own bad conscience but his dear old buddy of twenty-five years ago, little Otto, grinning like Old Nick. What does Brother Kirov né Kursky feel? we ask ourselves, assuming he’s got any feelings. Does Otto know—he wonders—that it was naughty me who sold him into the Gulag? So what does he do?”

  “What does he do?” said Smiley, not responding to her banter.

  “He decides to play it hearty, dearie. Doesn’t he, Hils? Whistles up the caviare, and says ‘Thank God.’” She whispered something and Hilary bent her head to catch it, then giggled. “‘Champagne!’ he says. And my God they have it, and the Ginger Pig pays for it, and they drink it, and they share a taxi into town, and they even have a quick snifter in a café before the Ginger Pig goes about his furtive duties. Kirov likes Otto,” Connie insisted. “Loves him, doesn’t he, Hils? They’re a proper pair of raving whatsits, same as us. Otto’s sexy, Otto’s fun, Otto’s dishy, and anti-authoritarian, and light on his feet—and—oh, everything the Ginger Pig could never be, not in a thousand years! Why did the fifth floor always think people had to have one motive only?”

  “I’m sure I didn’t,” said Smiley fervently.

  But Connie was back talking to Hilary, not to Smiley at all. “Kirov was bored, heart. Otto was life for him. Same as you are for me. You put the spring into my stride, don’t you, lovey? Hadn’t prevented him from shopping Otto, of course, but that’s only nature, isn’t it?”

  Still gently swaying at Connie’s back, Hilary nodded in vague assent.

  “And what did Kirov mean to Otto Leipzig?” Smiley asked.

  “Hate, my darling,” Connie replied, without hesitation. “Pure, undiluted hatred. Plain, honest-to-God black loathing. Hate and money. Those were Otto’s two best th
ings. Otto always felt he was owed for all those years he’d spent in the slammer. He wanted to collect for the girl, too. His great dream was that one day he would sell Kirov né Kursky for lots of money. Lots and lots and lots of money. Then spend it.”

  A waiter’s anger, Smiley thought, remembering the contact print. Remembering the tartan room again, at the airport, and Otto’s quiet German voice with its caressing edge; remembering his brown, unblinking eyes that were like windows on his smouldering soul.