Smiley's People

by John le Carré

  “Perhaps the treasure is not movable,” Smiley replied. “Perhaps Karla’s options have run out.”

  “But it would be daylight madness to leave that bank account intact!”

  “It was daylight madness to use a fool like Kirov,” Smiley said, with unusual harshness. “It was madness to let him recruit Leipzig and madness to approach Ostrakova, and madness to believe that by killing three people he could stop the leak. Presumptions of sanity are therefore not given. Why should they be?” He paused. “And Karla does believe it, apparently, or Grigoriev would not still be in Berne. Which you say he is, I gather?” The smallest glance at Collins.

  “As of today he’s sitting pretty,” Collins said through his all-weather grin.

  “Then moving the bank account would hardly be a logical step,” Smiley remarked. And he added: “Even for a madman.”

  And it was strange—as Collins and Enderby afterwards privily agreed—how everything that Smiley said seemed to pass through the room like a chill; how in some way that they failed to understand, they had removed themselves to a higher order of human conduct for which they were unfit.

  “So who’s his dark lady?” Enderby demanded outright. “Who’s worth ten grand a month and his whole damn career? Forcing him to use boobies instead of his own regular cut-throats? Must be quite a gal.”

  Again there is mystery about Smiley’s decision not to reply to this question. Perhaps only his wilful inaccessibility can explain it; or perhaps we are staring at the stubborn refusal of the born case man to reveal anything to his controller that is not essential to their collaboration. Certainly there was philosophy in his decision. In his mind already, Smiley was accountable to nobody but himself: why should he act as if things were otherwise? “The threads lead all of them into my own life,” he may have reasoned. “Why pass the ends to my adversary merely so that he can manipulate me?” Again, he may well have assumed—and probably with justice—that Enderby was as familiar as Smiley was with the complexities of Karla’s background; and that even if he was not, he had had his Soviet Research Section burrowing all night until they found the answers he required.

  In any case, the fact is that Smiley kept his counsel.

  “George?” said Enderby, finally.

  An aeroplane flew over quite low.

  “It’s simply a question of whether you want the product,” Smiley said at last. “I can’t see that anything else is ultimately of very much importance.”

  “Can’t you, by God!” said Enderby, and pulled his hand from his mouth and the matchstick with it. “Oh, I want him all right,” he went on, as if that were only half the point. “I want the Mona Lisa, and the Chairman of the Chinese People’s Republic, and next year’s winner of the Irish Sweep. I want Karla sitting in the hot seat at Sarratt, coughing out his life story to the inquisitors. I want the American Cousins to eat out of my hand for years to come. I want the whole ball game, of course I do. Still doesn’t get me off the hook.”

  But Smiley seemed curiously unconcerned by Enderby’s dilemma.

  “Brother Lacon told you the facts of life, I suppose? The stalemate and all?” Enderby asked. “Young, idealistic Cabinet, mustard for détente, preaching open government, all that balls? Ending the conditioned reflexes of the cold war? Sniffing Tory conspiracies under every Whitehall bed, ours specially? Did he? Did he tell you they’re proposing to launch a damn great Anglo-Bolshie peace initiative, yet another, which will duly fall on its arse around Christmas next?”

  “No. No, he didn’t tell me that part.”

  “Well, they are. And we’re not to jeopardise it, tra-la. Mind you, the very chaps who go hammering the peace-drums are the ones who scream like hell when we don’t deliver the goods. I suppose that stands to reason. They’re already asking what the Soviet posture will be, even now. Was it always like that?”

  Smiley took so long to answer that he might have been passing the Judgment of Ages. “Yes. I suppose it was. I suppose that in one form or another it always was like that,” he said at last, as if the answer mattered to him deeply.

  “Wish you’d warned me.”

  Enderby sauntered back towards the centre of the room and poured himself some plain soda from the sideboard; he stared at Smiley with what seemed to be honest indecision. He stared at him, he shifted his head and stared again, showing all the signs of being faced with an insoluble problem.

  “It’s a tough one, Chief, it really is,” said Sam Collins, unremarked by either man.

  “And it’s not all a wicked Bolshie plot, George, to lure us to our ultimate destruction—you’re sure of that?”

  “I’m afraid we’re no longer worth the candle, Saul,” Smiley said, with an apologetic smile.

  Enderby did not care to be reminded of the limitations of British grandeur, and for a moment his mouth set into a sour grimace.

  “All right, Maud,” he said finally. “Let’s go into the garden.”

  They walked side by side. Collins, on Enderby’s nod, had stayed indoors. Slow rain puckered the surface of the pool and made the marble angel glisten in the dusk. Sometimes a breeze passed and a chain of water slopped from the hanging branches onto the lawn, soaking one or the other of them. But Enderby was an English gentleman, and while God’s rain might be falling on the rest of mankind, he was damned if it was going to fall on him. The light came at them in bits. From Ben’s French windows, yellow rectangles fell across the pond. From over the brick wall, they had the sickly green glow of a modern street lamp. They completed a round in silence before Enderby spoke.

  “Led us a proper dance, you did, George, I’ll tell you that for nothing, Villem, Mikhel, Toby, Connie. Poor old Ferguson hardly had time to fill in his expense claims before you were off again. ‘Doesn’t he ever sleep?’ he asked me. ‘Doesn’t he ever drink?’”

  “I’m sorry,” said Smiley, for something to say.

  “Oh, no, you’re not,” said Enderby, and came to a sudden halt. “Bloody laces,” he muttered, stooping over his boot, “they always do this with suède. Too few eyeholes, that’s the problem. You wouldn’t think even the bloody Brits would manage to be mean with holes, would you?”

  Enderby replaced one foot and lifted the other.

  “I want his body, George, hear me? Hand me a live, talking Karla and I’ll accept him and make my excuses later. Karla asks for asylum? Well, um, yes, most reluctantly he can have it. By the time the Wise Men are loading their shot-guns for me, I’ll have enough out of him to shut them up for good. His body or nothing, you got me?”

  They were strolling again, Smiley trailing behind, but Enderby, though he was speaking, did not turn his head.

  “Don’t you ever go thinking they’ll go away, either,” he warned. “When you and Karla are stuck on your ledge on the Reichenbach Falls and you’ve got your hands round Karla’s throat, Brother Lacon will be right there behind you holding your coat-tails and telling you not to be beastly to the Russians. Did you get that?”

  Smiley said yes, he had got it.

  “What have you got on him so far? Misuse of the facilities of his office, I suppose. Fraud. Peculation of public funds, the very thing he topped that Lisbon fellow for. Unlawful operations abroad, including a couple of assassination jobs. I suppose there’s a whole bloody bookful when you work it out. Plus all those jealous beavers at Centre longing for an excuse to knife him. He’s right: blackmail’s a bloody sight better than bribery.”

  Smiley said yes, it seemed so.

  “You’ll need people. Baby-sitters, lamplighters, all the forbidden toys. Don’t talk to me about it, find your own. Money’s another matter. I can lose you in the accounts for years the way these clowns in Treasury work. Just tell me when and how much and where, and I’ll do a Karla for you and fiddle the accounts. How about passports and stuff? Need some addresses?”

  “I think I can manage, thank you.”

  “I’ll watch you day and night. If the ploy aborts and there’s a scandal, I’m not going to have peopl
e telling me I should have staked you out. I’ll say I suspected you might be slipping the leash on the Vladimir thing and I decided to have you checked in case. I’ll say the whole catastrophe was a ludicrous piece of private enterprise by a senile spy who’s lost his marbles.”

  Smiley said he thought that was a good idea.

  “I may not have much to put on the street, but I can still tap your phone, steam open your mail, and if I want to, I’ll bug your bedroom too. We’ve been listening in since Saturday as it is. Nothing, of course, but what do you expect?”

  Smiley gave a small nod of sympathy.

  “If your departure abroad strikes me as hasty or mysterious I shall report it. I also need a cover story for your visits to the Circus Registry. You’ll go at night but you may be recognised and I’m not having that catch up with me, either.”

  “There was a project once to commission an in-house history of the service,” Smiley said helpfully. “Nothing for publication, obviously, but some sort of continuing record which could be available to new entrants and certain liaison services.”

  “I’ll send you a formal letter,” Enderby said. “I’ll bloody well backdate it too. If you happen to misuse your licence while you’re inside the building, it’s no fault of mine. That chap in Berne whom Kirov mentioned. Grigoriev, Commercial Counsellor. The chap who’s been getting the cash?”

  Smiley seemed lost in thought. “Yes, yes, of course,” he said. “Grigoriev?”

  “I suppose he’s your next stop, is he?”

  A shooting star ran across the sky and for a second they both watched it.

  Enderby pulled a plain piece of folded paper from his inside pocket. “Well, that’s Grigoriev’s pedigree, far as we know it. He’s clean as a whistle. One of the very rare ones. Used to be an economics don at some Bolshie university. Wife’s a harridan.”

  “Thank you,” said Smiley politely. “Thank you very much.”

  “Meanwhile, you have my totally deniable blessing,” said Enderby as they started back towards the house.

  “Thank you,” said Smiley again.

  “Sorry you’ve become an instrument of the imperial hypocrisy but there’s rather a lot of it about.”

  “Not at all,” said Smiley.

  Enderby stopped to let Smiley draw up beside him.

  “How’s Ann?”

  “Well, thank you.”

  “How much—” He was suddenly off his stroke. “Put it this way, George,” he suggested, when he had savoured the night air for a moment. “You travelling on business, or for pleasure in this thing? Which is it?”

  Smiley’s reply was also slow in coming, and as indirect: “I was never conscious of pleasure,” he said. “Or perhaps I mean: of the distinction.”

  “Karla still got that cigarette-lighter she gave you? It’s true, isn’t it? That time you interviewed him in Delhi—tried to get him to defect—they say he pinched your cigarette-lighter. Still got it, has he? Still using it? Pretty grating, I’d find that, if it was mine.”

  “It was just an ordinary Ronson,” Smiley said. “Still, they’re made to last, aren’t they?”

  They parted without saying goodbye.

  20

  In the weeks that followed this encounter with Enderby, George Smiley found himself in a complex and variable mood to accompany his many tasks of preparation. He was not at peace; he was not, in a single phrase, definable as a single person, beyond the one constant thrust of his determination. Hunter, recluse, lover, solitary man in search of completion, shrewd player of the Great Game, avenger, doubter in search of reassurance—Smiley was by turns each one of them, and sometimes more than one. Among those who remembered him later—old Mendel, the retired policeman, one of his few confidants; a Mrs. Gray, the landlady of the humble bed-and-breakfast house for gentlemen only, in Pimlico, which for security reasons he made his temporary headquarters; or Toby Esterhase, alias Benati, the distinguished dealer in Arab art—most, in their various ways, spoke of an ominous going in, a quietness, an economy of word and glance, and they described it according to their knowledge of him, and their station in life.

  Mendel, a loping, dourly observant man with a taste for keeping bees, said outright that George was pacing himself before his big fight. Mendel had been in the amateur ring in his time, he had boxed middleweight for the Division, and he claimed to recognise the eve-of-match signs: a sobriety, a clarifying loneliness, and what he called a staring sort of look, which showed that Smiley was “thinking about his hands.” Mendel seems to have taken him in occasionally, and fed him meals. But Mendel was too perceptive not to observe the other sides of him also: the perplexity, often cloaked as social inhibition; his habit of slipping away, on a frail excuse, as if the sitting-still had suddenly become too long for him; as if he needed movement in order to escape himself.

  To his landlady, Mrs. Gray, Smiley was, quite simply, bereaved. She knew nothing of him as a man, except that his name was Lorimer and he was a retired librarian by trade. But she told her other gentlemen she could feel he had had a loss, which was why he left his bacon, why he went out a lot but always alone, and why he slept with his light on. He reminded her of her father, she said, “after Mother went.” And this was perceptive of Mrs. Gray, for the aftermath of the two violent deaths hung heavily on Smiley in the lull, though it did the very reverse of slow his hand. She was also right when she called him divided, constantly changing his mind about small things; like Ostrakova, Smiley found life’s lesser decisions increasingly difficult to take.

  Toby Esterhase, on the other hand, who dealt with him a great deal, took a more informed view, and one that was naturally brightened by Toby’s own excitement at being back in the field. The prospect of playing Karla “at the big table,” as he insisted on describing it, had made a new man of Toby. Mr. Benati had become international indeed. For two weeks, he toured the byways of Europe’s seedier cities, mustering his bizarre army of discarded specialists—the pavement artists, the sound-thieves, the drivers, the photographers—and every day, from wherever he happened to be, using an agreed word code, he telephoned Smiley at a succession of numbers within walking distance of the boarding-house in order to report his progress. If Toby was passing through London, Smiley would drive to an airport hotel and debrief him in one of its now familiar bedrooms. George—Toby declared—was making a Flucht nach vorn, which nobody has ever quite succeeded in translating. Literally it means “an escape forward,” and it implies a desperation certainly, but also a weakness at one’s back, if not an actual burning of boats. Quite what this weakness was, Toby could not describe. “Listen,” he would say. “George always bruised easy, know what I mean? You see a lot—your eyes get very painful. George saw too much, maybe.” And he added, in a phrase which found a modest place in Circus folklore—“George has got too many heads under his hat.” Of his generalship, on the other hand, Toby had no doubt whatever. “Meticulous to a fault,” he declared respectfully—even if the fault included checking Toby’s imprest down to the last Swiss Rappen, a discipline he accepted with a rueful grace. George was nervous, he said, as they all were; and his nervousness came to a natural head as Toby began concentrating his teams, in twos and threes, on the target city of Berne, and very, very cautiously taking the first steps towards the quarry. “He got too detailed,” Toby complained. “Like he wanted to be on the pavement with us. A case man, he finds it hard to delegate, know what I mean?”

  Even when the teams were all assembled, all accounted for and briefed, Smiley from his London base still insisted on three days of virtual inactivity while everybody “took the temperature of the city,” as he called it, acquired local clothes and transport, and rehearsed the systems of communication. “It’s lace curtain all the way, Toby,” he repeated anxiously. “For every week that nothing happens, Karla will feel that much more secure. But frighten the game just once, and Karla will panic and we’re done for.” After the first operational swing Smiley summoned Toby home to report yet again: “Are you sur
e there was no eye contact? Did you ring the changes enough? Do you need more cars, more people?” Then, said Toby, he had to take him through the whole manoeuvre yet again, using street maps and still photographs of the target house, explaining exactly where the static posts were laid, where the one team had peeled off to make room for the next. “Wait till you’ve got his pattern,” said Smiley as they parted. “When you’ve got his behaviour pattern, I’ll come. Not before.”

  Toby says he made damn sure to take his time.

  Of Smiley’s visits to the Circus during this trying period there is, naturally, no official memory at all. He entered the place like his own ghost, floating as if invisible down the familiar corridors. At Enderby’s suggestion he arrived at a quarter past six in the evening, just after the day-shift had ended, and before the night staff had got into its stride. He had expected barriers; he had queasy notions of janitors he had known for twenty years telephoning the fifth floor for clearance. But Enderby had arranged things differently, and when Smiley presented himself, passless, at the hardboard chicane, a boy he had never seen before nodded him carelessly to the open lift. From there, he made his way unchallenged to the basement. He got out, and the first thing he saw was the welfare club notice-board and they were the same notices from his own days exactly, word for word: free kittens available to good home; the junior staff drama group would read The Admirable Crichton, misspelt, on Friday in the canteen. The same squash competition, with players enrolled under worknames in the interest of security. The same ventilators emitting their troubled hum. So that, by the time he pushed the wired-glass door of Registry and scented the printing-ink and library dust, he half expected to see his own rotund shape bowed over the corner desk in the glow of the chipped green reading-lamp, as it had been often enough in the days when he was charting Bill Haydon’s rampages of betrayal, and trying, by a reverse process of logic, to point to the weaknesses in Moscow Centre’s armour.