Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

by John le Carré

  By the time he had graduated from the Nursery, the Malayan emergency had broken. Tarr was played back into gunrunning. Almost the first people he bumped into were his old Belgian friends. They were too busy supplying guns to the Communists to bother where he had been, and they were shorthanded. Tarr ran a few shipments for them in order to blow their contacts, then one night got them drunk, shot four of them, including Rose, and set fire to their boat. He hung around Malaya and did a couple more jobs before being called back to Brixton and refitted for special operations in Kenya—or, in less sophisticated language, hunting Mau Mau for bounty.

  After Kenya, Smiley pretty much lost sight of him, but a couple of incidents stuck in his memory because they might have become scandals and Control had to be informed. In 1964, Tarr was sent to Brazil to make a crash offer of a bribe to an armaments minister known to be in deep water. Tarr was too rough; the minister panicked and told the press. Tarr had Dutch cover and no one was wiser except Netherlands intelligence, who were furious. In Spain a year later, acting on a tip-off supplied by Bill Haydon, Tarr blackmailed—or burned, as the scalp-hunters would say—a Polish diplomat who had lost his heart to a dancer. The first yield was good; Tarr won a commendation and a bonus. But when he went back for a second helping the Pole wrote a confession to his ambassador and threw himself, with or without encouragement, from a high window.

  In Brixton, they used to call him accident-prone. Guillam, by the expression on his immature but aging face, as they sat in their half-circle round the meagre fire, called him a lot worse than that.

  “Well, I guess I’d better make my pitch,” Tarr said pleasantly as he settled his easy body into the chair.

  5

  “It happened around six months ago,” Tarr began.

  “April,” Guillam snapped. “Just keep it precise, shall we, all the way along?”

  “April, then,” Tarr said equably. “Things were pretty quiet in Brixton. I guess there must have been half a dozen of us on standby. Pete Sembrini, he was in from Rome; Cy Vanhofer had just made a hit in Budapest”—he gave a mischievous smile—“Ping-Pong and snooker in the Brixton waiting room. Right, Mr. Guillam?”

  “It was the silly season.”

  When out of the blue, said Tarr, came a flash requisition from Hong Kong residency.

  “They had a low-grade Soviet trade delegation in town, chasing up electrical goods for the Moscow market. One of the delegates was stepping wide in the nightclubs. Name of Boris; Mr. Guillam has the details. No previous record. They’d had the tabs on him for five days, and the delegation was booked in for fourteen more. Politically it was too hot for the local boys to handle but they reckoned a crash approach might do the trick. The yield didn’t look that special, but so what? Maybe we’d just buy him for stock—right, Mr. Guillam?”

  Stock meant sale or exchange with another intelligence service: a commerce in small-time defectors handled by the scalp-hunters.

  Ignoring Tarr, Guillam said, “South East Asia was Tarr’s parish. He was sitting around with nothing to do, so I ordered him to make a site inspection and report back by cable.”

  Each time someone else spoke, Tarr sank into a dream. His gaze settled upon the speaker, a mistiness entered his eyes, and there was a pause like a coming back before he began again.

  “So I did what Mr. Guillam ordered,” he said. “I always do, don’t I, Mr. Guillam? I’m a good boy really, even if I am impulsive.”

  He flew the next night—Saturday, March 31st—with an Australian passport describing him as a car salesman and with two virgin Swiss escape passports hidden in the lining of his suitcase. These were contingency documents to be filled in as circumstances demanded: one for Boris, one for himself. He made a car rendezvous with the Hong Kong resident not far from his hotel, the Golden Gate on Kowloon.

  Here Guillam leaned over to Smiley and murmured, “Tufty Thesinger, buffoon. Ex-major, King’s African Rifles. Percy Alleline’s appointment.”

  Thesinger produced a report on Boris’s movements based on one week’s surveillance.

  “Boris was a real oddball,” Tarr said. “I couldn’t make him out. He’d been boozing every night without a break. He hadn’t slept for a week and Thesinger’s watchers were folding at the knees. All day he trailed round after the delegation, inspecting factories, chiming in at discussions, and being the bright young Soviet official.”

  “How young?” Smiley asked.

  Guillam threw in: “His visa application gave him born Minsk 1946.”

  “Evening time, he’d go back to the Alexandra Lodge, an old shanty house out on North Point where the delegation had holed out. He’d eat with the crew; then around nine he’d ease out the side entrance, grab a taxi, and belt down to the mainline night spots around Pedder Street. His favourite haunt was the Cat’s Cradle in Queen’s Road, where he bought drinks for local businessmen and acted like Mr. Personality. He might stay there till midnight. From the Cradle he cut right down to Aberdeen Harbour, a place called Angelika’s, where the drink was cheaper. Alone. It’s mainly floating restaurants and the big spenders down there, but Angelika’s is a landbound café with a hellhole in the basement. He’d have three or four drinks and keep the receipts. Mainly he drank brandy but now and then he’d have a vodka to vary his diet. He’d had one tangle with a Eurasian girl along the way, and Thesinger’s watchers got after her and bought the story. She said he was lonely and sat on the bed moaning about his wife for not appreciating his genius. That was a real breakthrough,” he added sarcastically as Lacon noisily swooped on the little fire and stirred it, one coal against the other, into life. “That night I went down to the Cradle and took a look at him. Thesinger’s watchers had been sent to bed with a glass of milk. They didn’t want to know.”

  Sometimes as Tarr spoke, an extraordinary stillness came over his body, as if he were hearing his own voice played back to him.

  “He arrived ten minutes after me and he brought his own company, a big blond Swede with a Chinese broad in tow. It was dark, so I moved into a table nearby. They ordered Scotch, Boris paid, and I sat six feet away watching the lousy band and listening to their conversation. The Chinese kid kept her mouth shut and the Swede was doing most of the running. They talked English. The Swede asked Boris where he was staying, and Boris said the Excelsior, which was a damn lie because he was staying at the Alexandra Lodge with the rest of the church outing. All right, the Alexandra is down the list; the Excelsior sounds better. About midnight the party breaks up. Boris says he’s got to go home and tomorrow’s a busy day. That was the second lie, because he was no more going home than—what’s the one, Jekyll and Hyde, right!—the regular doctor who dressed up and went on the razzle. So Boris was who?”

  For a moment no one helped him.

  “Hyde,” said Lacon to his scrubbed red hands. Sitting again, he had clasped them on his lap.

  “Hyde,” Tarr repeated. “Thank you, Mr. Lacon; I always saw you as a literary man. So they settle the bill and I traipse down to Aberdeen to be there ahead of him when he hits Angelika’s. By this time I’m pretty sure I’m in the wrong ball game.”

  On dry long fingers, Tarr studiously counted off the reasons: first, he never knew a Soviet delegation that didn’t carry a couple of security gorillas whose job was to keep the boys out of the fleshpots. So how did Boris slip the leash night after night? Second, he didn’t like the way Boris pushed his foreign currency around. For a Soviet official, that was against nature, he insisted: “He just doesn’t have any damn currency. If he does, he buys beads for his squaw. And three, I didn’t like the way he lied. He was a sight too glib for decency.”

  So Tarr waited at the Angelika, and sure enough half an hour later his Mr. Hyde turned up all on his own. “He sits down and calls for a drink. That’s all he does. Sits and drinks like a damn wallflower!”

  Once more it was Smiley’s turn to receive the heat of Tarr’s charm: “So what’s it all about, Mr. Smiley? See what I mean? It’s little things I’m notic
ing,” he confided, still to Smiley. “Just take the way he sat. Believe me, sir, if we’d been in that place ourselves we couldn’t have sat better than Boris. He had the pick of the exits and the stairway; he had a fine view of the main entrance and the action; he was right-handed and he was covered by a left-hand wall. Boris was a professional, Mr. Smiley; there was no doubt of it whatsoever. He was waiting for a connect, working a letter-box, maybe, or trailing his coat and looking for a pass from a mug like me. Well, now listen: it’s one thing to burn a small-time trade delegate. It’s quite a different ball game to swing your legs at a Centre-trained hood—right, Mr. Guillam?”

  Guillam said, “Since the reorganisation, scalp-hunters have no brief to trawl for double agents. They must be turned over to London Station on sight. The boys have a standing order, over Bill Haydon’s own signature. If there’s even a smell of the opposition, abandon.” He added, for Smiley’s special ear, “Under lateralism our autonomy is cut to the bone.”

  “And I’ve been in double-double games before,” Tarr confessed in a tone of injured virtue. “Believe me, Mr. Smiley, they are a can of worms.”

  “I’m sure they are,” said Smiley, and gave a prim tug at his spectacles.

  Tarr cabled Guillam “no sale,” booked a flight home, and went shopping. However, since his flight didn’t leave till Thursday, he thought that before he left, just to pay his fare, he might as well burgle Boris’s room.

  “The Alexandra’s a real ramshackle old place, Mr. Smiley, off Marble Road, with a stack of wooden balconies. As for the locks—why, sir, they give up when they see you coming.”

  In a very short time, therefore, Tarr was standing inside Boris’s room with his back against the door, waiting for his eyes to grow accustomed to the dark. He was still standing there when a woman spoke to him in Russian drowsily from the bed.

  “It was Boris’s wife,” Tarr explained. “She was crying. Look, I’ll call her Irina, right? Mr. Guillam has the details.”

  Smiley was already objecting: wife was impossible, he said. Centre would never let them both out of Russia at the same time; they’d keep one and send the other—

  “Common-law marriage,” Guillam said dryly. “Unofficial but permanent.”

  “There’s a lot that are the other way round these days,” said Tarr with a sharp grin at no one, least of all Smiley, and Guillam shot him another foul look.

  6

  From the outset of this meeting, Smiley had assumed for the main a Buddha-like inscrutability from which neither Tarr’s story nor the rare interjections of Lacon and Guillam could rouse him. He sat leaning back with his short legs bent, head forward, and plump hands linked across his generous stomach. His hooded eyes had closed behind the thick lenses. His only fidget was to polish his glasses on the silk lining of his tie, and when he did this his eyes had a soaked, naked look that was embarrassing to those who caught him at it. His interjection, however, and the donnish, inane sound that followed Guillam’s explanation, now acted like a signal upon the rest of the gathering, bringing a shuffling of chairs and a clearing of throats.

  Lacon was foremost: “George, what are your drinking habits? Can I get you a Scotch or anything?” He offered drink solicitously, like aspirin for a headache. “I forgot to say it earlier,” he explained. “George, a bracer: come. It’s winter, after all. A nip of something?”

  “I’m fine, thank you,” Smiley said.

  He would have liked a little coffee from the percolator but somehow he didn’t feel able to ask. Also he remembered it was terrible.

  “Guillam?” Lacon proceeded. No; Guillam also found it impossible to accept alcohol from Lacon.

  He didn’t offer anything to Tarr, who went straight on with his narrative.

  Tarr took Irina’s presence calmly, he said. He had worked up his fallback before he entered the building, and now he went straight into his act. He didn’t pull a gun or slap his hand over her mouth or any of that tripe, as he put it, but he said he had come to speak to Boris on a private matter; he was sorry and he was damn well going to sit there till Boris showed up. In good Australian, as became an outraged car salesman from down under, he explained that while he didn’t want to barge into anyone’s business he was damned if he was going to have his girl and his money stolen in a single night by a lousy Russian who couldn’t pay for his pleasures. He worked up a lot of outrage but managed to keep his voice down, and then he waited to see what she did.

  And that, said Tarr, was how it all began.

  It was eleven-thirty when he made Boris’s room. He left at one-thirty with a promise of a meeting next night. By then the situation was all the other way: “We weren’t doing anything improper, mind. Just pen friends—right, Mr. Smiley?”

  For a moment, that bland sneer seemed to lay claim to Smiley’s most precious secrets.

  “Right,” he assented vapidly.

  There was nothing exotic about Irina’s presence in Hong Kong and no reason why Thesinger should have known of it, Tarr explained. Irina was a member of the delegation in her own right. She was a trained textile buyer: “Come to think of it, she was a sight better qualified than her old man, if I can call him that. She was a plain kid, a bit blue-stocking for my taste, but she was young and she had one hell of a pretty smile when she stopped crying.” Tarr coloured quaintly. “She was good company,” he insisted, as if arguing against a trend. “When Mr. Thomas from Adelaide came into her life, she was at the end of the line from worrying what to do about the demon Boris. She thought I was the Angel Gabriel. Who could she talk to about her husband who wouldn’t turn the dogs on him? She’d no chums on the delegation; she’d no one she trusted even back in Moscow, she said. Nobody who hadn’t been through it would ever know what it was like trying to keep a ruined relationship going while all the time you’re on the move.” Smiley was once more in a deep trance. “Hotel after hotel, city after city, not even allowed to speak to the natives in a natural way or get a smile from a stranger—that’s how she described her life. She reckoned it was a pretty miserable state of affairs, Mr. Smiley, and there was a lot of God-thumping and an empty vodka bottle beside the bed to show for it. Why couldn’t she be like normal people? she kept saying. Why couldn’t she enjoy the Lord’s sunshine like the rest of us? She loved sightseeing, she loved foreign kids; why couldn’t she have a kid of her own? A kid born free, not in captivity. She kept saying that: born in captivity, born free. ‘I’m a jolly person, Thomas. I’m a normal, sociable girl. I like people: why should I deceive them when I like them?’ And then she said, the trouble was that long ago she had been chosen for work that made her frozen like an old woman and cut her off from God. So that’s why she’d had a drink and why she was having a cry. She’d kind of forgotten her husband by then; she was apologising for having a fling, more.” Again he faltered. “I could scent it, Mr. Smiley. There was gold in her. I could scent it from the start. Knowledge is power, they say, sir, and Irina had the power, same as she had the quality. She was hellbent maybe, but she could still give her all. I can sense generosity in a woman where I meet it, Mr. Smiley. I have a talent for it. And this lady was generous. Jesus, how do you describe a hunch? Some people can smell water under the ground . . .”

  He seemed to expect some show of sympathy, so Smiley said, “I understand,” and plucked at the lobe of his ear.

  Watching him with a strange dependence in his expression, Tarr kept silent a stretch longer. “First thing next morning, I cancelled my flight and changed my hotel,” he said finally.

  Abruptly Smiley opened his eyes wide. “What did you tell London?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because he’s a devious fool,” said Guillam.

  “Maybe I thought Mr. Guillam would say, ‘Come home, Tarr,’” he replied, with a knowing glance at Guillam that was not returned. “You see, long ago when I was a little boy I made a mistake and walked into a honey trap.”

  “He made an ass of himself with a Polish girl,
” said Guillam.

  “He sensed her generosity, too.”

  “I knew Irina was no honey trap, but how could I expect Mr. Guillam to believe me? No way.”

  “Did you tell Thesinger?”

  “Hell, no.”

  “What reason did you give London for postponing your flight?”

  “I was due to fly Thursday. I reckoned no one back home would miss me till Tuesday. Specially with Boris being a dead duck.”

  “He didn’t give a reason and the housekeepers posted him absent without leave on the Monday,” said Guillam. “He broke every rule in the book. And some that aren’t. By the middle of that week, even Bill Haydon was beating his war drums. And I was having to listen,” he added tartly.

  However that was, Tarr and Irina met next evening. They met again the evening after that. The first meeting was in a café and it limped. They took a lot of care not to be seen, because Irina was frightened stiff not just of her husband but of the security guards attached to the delegation—the gorillas, as Tarr called them. She refused a drink and she was shaking. The second evening Tarr was still waiting on her generosity. They took the tram up to Victoria Peak, jammed between American matrons in white socks and eyeshades. The third he hired a car and drove her round the New Territories till she suddenly got the heebies about being so close to the Chinese border, so they had to run for harbour. Nevertheless she loved that trip, and often spoke of the tidy beauty of it, the fish ponds and the paddy fields. Tarr also liked the trip because it proved to both of them that they weren’t being watched. But Irina had still not unpacked, as he put it.