Smiley's People

by John le Carré

  “Here we go. I’m Kirov. ‘As a finance officer working in Moscow Centre from 1970 to 1974, it was my duty to unearth irregularities in the accounts of overseas residencies and bring the culprits to book.’” He broke off and peered over his glasses again. “This is all before Kirov was posted to Paris, right?”

  “Dead right,” said Collins keenly and glanced at Smiley for support, but got none.

  “Just working it out, you see, George,” Enderby explained. “Just getting my ducks in a row. Haven’t got your little grey cells.”

  Sam Collins smiled brightly at his chief’s show of modesty.

  Enderby continued: “‘As a result of conducting these extremely delicate and confidential enquiries, which in some cases led to the punishment of senior officers of Moscow Centre, I made the acquaintance of the head of the independent Thirteenth Intelligence Directorate, subordinated to the Party’s Central Committee, who is known throughout Centre only by his workname Karla. This is a woman’s name and is said to belong to the first network he controlled.’ That right, George?”

  “It was during the Spanish Civil War,” said Smiley.

  “The great playground. Well, well. To continue. ‘The Thirteenth Directorate is a separate service within Moscow Centre, since its principal duty is the recruitment, training, and placing of illegal agents under deep cover in Fascist countries, known also as moles . . . blah . . . blah . . . blah. Often a mole will take many years to find his place inside the target country before he becomes active in secret work.’ Shades of Bloody Bill Haydon. ‘The task of servicing such moles is not entrusted to normal overseas residencies but to a Karla representative, as he is known, usually a military officer, whose daywork is to be an attaché of an embassy. Such representatives are handpicked by Karla personally and constitute an élite... blah... blah... enjoying privileges of trust and freedom not given to other Centre officers, also travel and money. They are accordingly objects of jealousy to the rest of the service.’”

  Enderby affected to draw breath: “Christ, these translators!” he exclaimed. “Or maybe it’s just Kirov being a perishing little bore. You’d think a man making his deathbed confession would have the grace to keep it brief, wouldn’t you? But not our Kirov, oh no. How you doing, Sam?”

  “Fine, Chief, fine.”

  “Here we go again,” said Enderby, and resumed his ritual tone: “‘In the course of my general investigations into financial irregularities, the integrity of a Karla resident came into question, the resident in Lisbon, Colonel Orlov. Karla convened a secret tribunal of his own people to hear the case, and as a result of my evidence Colonel Orlov was liquidated in Moscow on June 10, 1973.’ That checks, you say, Sam?”

  “We have an unconfirmed defector report that he was shot by firing-squad,” said Collins breezily.

  “Congratulations, Comrade Kirov, the embezzler’s friend. Jesus. What a snake-pit. Worse than us.” Enderby continued: “‘For my part in bringing the criminal Orlov to justice I was personally congratulated by Karla, and also sworn to secrecy, since he considered the irregularity of Colonel Orlov a shame on his Directorate, and damaging to his standing within Moscow Centre. Karla is known as a comrade of high standards of integrity, and for this reason has many enemies among the ranks of the self-indulgent.’”

  Enderby deliberately paused, and yet again glanced at Smiley over the top of his half-lenses.

  “We all spin the ropes that hang us, right, George?”

  “We’re a bunch of suicidal spiders, Chief,” said Collins heartily, and flashed an even broader smile at a place somewhere between the two of them.

  But Smiley was lost in his reading of Kirov’s statement and not accessible to pleasantries.

  “Skip the next year of Brother Kirov’s life and loves, and let’s come to his next meeting with Karla,” Enderby proposed, undeterred by Smiley’s taciturnity. “The nocturnal summons . . . that’s standard, I gather.” He turned a couple of pages. Smiley, following Enderby, did the same. “Car pulls up outside Kirov’s Moscow apartment—why can’t they say flat for God’s sake, like anyone else?—he’s hauled out of bed and driven to an unknown destination. They lead a rum life, don’t they, those gorillas in Moscow Centre, never knowing whether they’re getting a medal or a bullet.” He referred to the report again. “All that tallies, does it, George? The journey and stuff? Half an hour by car, small plane, and so forth?”

  “The Thirteenth Directorate has three or four establishments, including a large training camp near Minsk,” Smiley said.

  Enderby turned some more pages.

  “So here’s Kirov back in Karla’s presence again: middle of nowhere, the same night. Karla and Kirov totally alone. Small wooden hut, monastic atmosphere, no trimmings, no witnesses—or none visible. Karla goes straight to the nub. How would Kirov like a posting to Paris? Kirov would like one very much, sir—” He turned another page. “Kirov always admired the Thirteenth Directorate, sir, blah, blah—always been a great fan of Karla’s—creep, crawl, creep. Sounds like you, Sam. Interesting that Kirov thought Karla looked tired—notice that point?—twitchy. Karla under stress, smoking like a chimney.”

  “He always did that,” said Smiley.

  “Did what?”

  “He was always an excessive smoker,” Smiley said.

  “Was he, by God? Was he?”

  Enderby turned another page. “Now Kirov’s brief,” he said. “Karla spells it out for him. ‘For my daywork I should have the post of a Commercial officer of the Embassy, and for my special work I would be responsible for the control and conduct of financial accounts in all outstations of the Thirteenth Directorate in the following countries . . .’ Kirov goes on to list them. They include Bonn, but not Hamburg. With me, Sam?”

  “All the way, Chief.”

  “Not losing you in the labyrinth?”

  “Not a bit, Chief.”

  “Clever blokes, these Russkies.”

  “Devilish.”

  “Kirov again: ‘He impressed upon me the extreme importance of my task—blah, blah—reminded me of my excellent performance in the Orlov case, and advised me that in view of the great delicacy of the matters I was handling, I would be reporting directly to Karla’s private office and would have a separate set of ciphers . . .’ Turn to page fifteen.”

  “Page fifteen it is, Chief,” Collins said.

  Smiley had already found it.

  “‘In addition to my work as West European auditor to the Thirteenth Directorate outstations, however, Karla also warned me that I would be required to perform certain clandestine activities with a view to finding cover backgrounds, or legends for future agents. All members of his Directorate took a hand in this, he said, but legend work was extremely secret nevertheless, and I should not under any circumstances discuss it with anybody at all. Not my Ambassador, nor with Major Pudin, who was Karla’s permanent operational representative inside our Embassy in Paris. I naturally accepted the appointment and, having attended a special course in security and communications, took up my post. I had not been in Paris long when a personal signal from Karla advised me that a legend was required urgently for a female agent, age about twenty-one years.’ Now we’re at the bone,” Enderby commented with satisfaction. “‘Karla’s signal referred me to several émigré families who might be persuaded by pressure to adopt such an agent as their own child, since blackmail is considered by Karla a preferable technique to bribery.’ Damn right it is,” Enderby assented heartily. “At the present rate of inflation, blackmail’s about the only bloody thing that keeps its value.”

  Sam Collins obliged with a rich laugh of appreciation.

  “Thank you, Sam,” said Enderby pleasantly. “Thanks very much.”

  A lesser man than Enderby—or a less thick-skinned one—might have skated over the next few pages, for they consisted mainly of a vindication of Connie Sachs’s and Smiley’s pleas of three years ago that the Leipzig-Kirov relationship should be exploited.

  “Kirov dutifully t
rawls the émigrés, but without result,” Enderby announced, as if he were reading out subtitles at the cinema. “Karla exhorts Kirov to greater efforts, Kirov strives still harder, and goofs again.”

  Enderby broke off, and looked at Smiley, this time very straight. “Kirov was no bloody good, was he, George?” he said.

  “No,” said Smiley.

  “Karla couldn’t trust his own chaps, that’s your point. He had to go out into the sticks and recruit an irregular like Kirov.”

  “Yes.”

  “A clod. Sort of bloke who’d never make Sarratt.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Having set up his apparatus, in other words, trained it to accept his iron rules, you might say, he didn’t dare use it for this particular deal. That your point?”

  “Yes,” said Smiley. “That is my point.”

  Thus, when Kirov bumped into Leipzig on the plane to Vienna—Enderby resumed, paraphrasing Kirov’s own account now—Leipzig appeared to him as the answer to all his prayers. Never mind that he was based in Hamburg, never mind that there’d been a bit of nastiness back in Tallinn: Otto was an émigré, in with the groups, Otto the Golden Boy. Kirov signalled urgently to Karla proposing that Leipzig be recruited as an émigré source and talent-spotter. Karla agreed.

  “Which is another rum thing, when you work it out,” Enderby remarked. “Jesus, I mean who’d back a horse with Leipzig’s record when he was sober and of sound mind? Specially for a job like that?”

  “Karla was under stress,” Smiley said. “Kirov said so and we have it from elsewhere also. He was in a hurry. He had to take risks.”

  “Like bumping chaps off?”

  “That was more recent,” Smiley said, in a tone of such casual exoneration that Enderby glanced at him quite sharply.

  “You’re bloody forgiving these days, aren’t you, George?” said Enderby suspiciously.

  “Am I?” Smiley sounded puzzled by the question. “If you say so, Saul.”

  “And bloody meek too.” He returned to the transcript. “Page twenty-one and we’re home free.” He read slowly to give the passage extra point. “Page twenty-one,” he repeated. “‘Following the successful recruitment of Ostrakova, and the formal issuing of a French permit to her daughter Alexandra, I was instructed to set aside immediately ten thousand American dollars a month from the Paris imprest for the purpose of servicing this new mole, who was henceforth awarded the workname KOMET. The agent KOMET also received the highest classification of secrecy within the Directorate, requiring all communications regarding her to be sent to the Director personally, using person-to-person ciphers, and without intermediaries. Preferably, however, such communications should go by courier, since Karla is an opponent of the excessive use of radio.’ Any truth in that one, George?” Enderby asked casually.

  “It was how we caught him in India,” said Smiley without lifting his head from the script. “We broke his codes and he later swore that he would never use radio again. Like most promises, it was subject to review.”

  Enderby bit off a bit of matchstick, and smeared it onto the back of his hand. “Don’t you want to take your coat off, George?” he asked. “Sam, ask him what he wants to drink.”

  Sam asked, but Smiley was too absorbed in the script to answer.

  Enderby resumed his reading aloud: “‘I was also instructed to make sure that no reference to KOMET appeared on the annual accounts for Western Europe which, as auditor, I was obliged to sign and present to Karla for submission to the Collegium of Moscow Centre at the close of each financial year. . . . No, I never met the agent KOMET, nor do I know what became of her, or in which country she is operating. I know only that she is living under the name of Alexandra Ostrakova, the daughter of naturalised French parents. . . .’” More turning of pages. “‘The monthly payment of ten thousand dollars was not expended by myself, but transferred to a bank in Thun in the Swiss canton of Berne. The transfer is made by standing orders to the credit of a Dr. Adolf Glaser. Glaser is the nominal account holder, but I believe that Dr. Glaser is only the workname for a Karla operative at the Soviet Embassy in Berne, whose real name is Grigoriev. I believe this because once when I sent money to Thun, the sending bank made an error and it did not arrive; when this became known to Karla, he ordered me to send a second sum immediately to Grigoriev personally while bank enquiries were continuing. I did as I was ordered and later recovered the duplicated amount. This is all I know. Otto, my friend, I beg you to preserve these confidences, they could kill me.’ He’s bloody right. They did.” Enderby chucked the transcript onto a table, and it made a loud slap. “Kirov’s last will and testament, as you might say. That’s it. George?”

  “Yes, Saul.”

  “Really no drink?”

  “Thank you, I’m fine.”

  “I’m still going to spell it out because I’m thick. Watch my arithmetic. It’s nowhere near as good as yours. Watch my every move.” Recalling Lacon, he held up a white hand and spread the fingers as a prelude to counting on them.

  “One, Ostrakova writes to Vladimir. Her message rings old bells. Probably Mikhel intercepted and read it, but we’ll never know. We could sweat him, but I doubt if it would help, and it would most certainly put the cat among Karla’s pigeons in a big way if we did.” He grabbed a second finger. “Two, Vladimir sends a copy of Ostrakova’s letter to Otto Leipzig, urging him to rewarm the Kirov relationship double-quick. Three, Leipzig roars off to Paris, sees Ostrakova, gets himself alongside his dear old buddy Kirov, tempts him to Hamburg—where Kirov is free to go, after all, since Leipzig is still down in Karla’s books as Kirov’s agent. Now there’s a thing, George.”

  Smiley waited.

  “In Hamburg, Leipzig burns Kirov rotten. Right? Proof right here in our sweaty hands. But I mean—how?”

  Did Smiley really not follow, or was he merely intent upon making Enderby work a little harder? In either case, he preferred to take Enderby’s question as rhetorical.

  “How does Leipzig burn him precisely?” Enderby insisted. “What’s the pressure? Dirty pix—well, okay. Karla’s a puritan, so’s Kirov. But I mean, Christ, this isn’t the fifties, is it? Everyone’s allowed a bit of leg-sliding these days, what?”

  Smiley offered no comment on Russian mores; but on the subject of pressure he was as precise as Karla might have been: “It’s a different ethic to ours. It suffers no fools. We think of ourselves as more susceptible to pressure than the Russians. It’s not true. It’s simply not true.” He seemed very sure of this. He seemed to have given the matter a lot of recent thought:

  “Kirov had been incompetent and indiscreet. For his indiscretion alone, Karla would have destroyed him. Leipzig had the proof of that. You may remember that when we were running the original operation against Kirov, Kirov got drunk and talked out of turn about Karla. He told Leipzig that it was Karla personally who had ordered him to compose the legend for a female agent. You discounted the story at the time, but it was true.”

  Enderby was not a man to blush, but he did have the grace to pull a wry grin before fishing in his pocket for another matchstick.

  “And he that rolleth a stone, it will return upon him,” he remarked contentedly, though whether he was referring to his own dereliction or to Kirov’s was unclear. “Tell us the rest, buddy, or I’ll tell Karla what you’ve told me already, says little Otto to the fly. Jesus, you’re right, he really did have Kirov by the balls!”

  Sam Collins ventured a soothing interjection. “I think George’s point meshes pretty neatly with the reference on page two, Chief,” he said. “There’s a passage where Leipzig actually refers to ‘our discussions in Paris.’ Otto’s twisting the Karla knife there, no question. Right, George?”

  But Sam Collins might have been speaking in another room for all the attention either of them paid him.

  “Leipzig also had Ostrakova’s letter,” Smiley added. “Its contents did not speak well for Kirov.”

  “Another thing,” said Enderby.
/>   “Yes, Saul?”

  “Four years, right? It’s fully four years since Kirov made his original pass at Leipzig. Suddenly he’s all over Ostrakova, wanting the same thing. Four years later. You suggesting he’s been swanning around with the same brief from Karla all this time, and got no forrarder?”

  Smiley’s answer was curiously bureaucratic. “One can only suppose that Karla’s requirement ceased and was then revived,” he replied primly, and Enderby had the sense not to press him.

  “Point is, Leipzig burns Kirov rotten and gets word to Vladimir that he’s done so,” Enderby resumed as the spread fingers came up again for counting. “Vladimir dispatches Villem to play courier. Meanwhile back at the Moscow ranch, Karla is either smelling a rat or Mikhel has peached, probably the latter. In either case, Karla calls Kirov home under the pretext of promotion and swings him by his ears. Kirov sings, as I would, fast. Karla tries to put the toothpaste back in the tube. Kills Vladimir while he’s on the way to our rendezvous armed with Ostrakova’s letter. Kills Leipzig. Takes a pot at the old lady, and fluffs it. What’s his mood now?”

  “He’s sitting in Moscow waiting for Holmes or Captain Ahab to catch up with him,” Sam Collins suggested, in his velvet voice, and lit yet another of his brown cigarettes.

  Enderby was unamused. “So why doesn’t Karla dig up his treasure, George? Put it somewhere else? If Kirov has confessed to Karla what he’s confessed to Leipzig, Karla’s first move should be to brush over the traces!”