Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

by John le Carré

  25

  “I won’t be quoted, George,” the Minister warned, in his lounging drawl. “No minutes, no pack-drill. I got voters to deal with. You don’t. Nor does Oliver Lacon, do you, Oliver?”

  He had also, thought Smiley, the American violence with auxiliary verbs. “Yes, I’m sorry about that,” he said.

  “You’d be sorrier still if you had my constituency,” the Minister retorted.

  Predictably, the mere question of where they should meet had sparked a silly quarrel. Smiley had pointed out to Lacon that it would be unwise to meet at his room in Whitehall, since it was under constant attack by Circus personnel, whether janitors delivering dispatch boxes or Percy Alleline dropping in to discuss Ireland. Whereas the Minister declined both the Islay Hotel and Bywater Street, on the arbitrary grounds that they were insecure. He had recently appeared on television and was proud of being recognised. After several more calls back and forth, they settled for Mendel’s semi-detached Tudor residence in Mitcham, where the Minister and his shiny car stuck out like a sore thumb. There they now sat, Lacon, Smiley, and the Minister, in the trim front room with net curtains and fresh salmon sandwiches, while their host stood upstairs watching the approaches. In the lane, children tried to make the chauffeur tell them whom he worked for.

  Behind the Minister’s head ran a row of books on bees. They were Mendel’s passion, Smiley remembered: he used the word “exotic” for bees that did not come from Surrey. The Minister was a young man still, with a dark jowl that looked as though it had been knocked off-true in some unseemly fracas. His head was bald on top, which gave him an unwarranted air of maturity, and a terrible Eton drawl. “All right, so what are the decisions?” He also had the bully’s art of dialogue.

  “Well first, I suppose, you should damp down whatever recent negotiations you’ve been having with the Americans. I was thinking of the untitled secret annexe which you keep in your safe,” said Smiley, “the one that discusses the further exploitation of Witchcraft material.”

  “Never heard of it,” said the Minister.

  “I quite understand the incentives, of course; it’s always tempting to get one’s hands on the cream of that enormous American service, and I can see the argument for trading them Witchcraft in return.”

  “So what are the arguments against?” the Minister enquired as if he were talking to his stockbroker.

  “If the mole Gerald exists,” Smiley began. Of all her cousins, Ann had once said proudly, only Miles Sercombe was without a single redeeming feature. For the first time, Smiley really believed she was right. He felt not only idiotic but incoherent. “If the mole exists, which I assume is common ground among us . . .” He waited, but no one said it wasn’t. “If the mole exists,” he repeated, “it’s not only the Circus that will double its profits by the American deal. Moscow Centre will, too, because they’ll get from the mole whatever you buy from the Americans.”

  In a gesture of frustration, the Minister slapped his hand on Mendel’s table, leaving a moist imprint on the polish.

  “God damn it, I do not understand,” he declared. “That Witchcraft stuff is bloody marvellous! A month ago it was buying us the moon. Now we’re disappearing up our orifices and saying the Russians are cooking it for us. What the hell’s happening?”

  “Well, I don’t think that’s quite as illogical as it sounds, as a matter of fact. After all, we’ve run the odd Russian network from time to time, and though I say it myself we ran them rather well. We gave them the best material we could afford. Rocketry, war planning. You were in on that yourself”—this to Lacon, who threw a jerky nod of agreement. “We tossed them agents we could do without; we gave them good communications, safed their courier links, cleared the air for their signals so that we could listen to them. That was the price we paid for running the opposition—what was your expression?—‘for knowing how they briefed their commissars.’ I’m sure Karla would do as much for us if he was running our networks. He’d do more, wouldn’t he, if he had his eye on the American market, too?” He broke off and glanced at Lacon. “Much, much more. An American connection—a big American dividend, I mean—would put the mole Gerald right at the top table. The Circus, too, by proxy of course. As a Russian, one would give almost anything to the English if . . . well, if one could buy the Americans in return.”

  “Thank you,” said Lacon quickly.

  The Minister left, taking a couple of sandwiches with him to eat in the car and failing to say goodbye to Mendel, presumably because he was not a constituent.

  Lacon stayed behind.

  “You asked me to look out for anything on Prideaux,” he announced at last. “Well, I find that we do have a few papers on him, after all.”

  He had happened to be going through some files on the internal security of the Circus, he explained, “Simply to clear my decks.” Doing so, he had stumbled on some old positive vetting reports. One of them related to Prideaux.

  “He was cleared absolutely, you understand. Not a shadow. However”—an odd inflexion of his voice caused Smiley to glance at him—“I think it might interest you, all the same. Some tiny murmur about his time at Oxford. We’re all entitled to be a bit pink at that age.”

  “Indeed, yes.”

  The silence returned, broken only by the soft tread of Mendel upstairs.

  “Prideaux and Haydon were really very close indeed, you know,” Lacon confessed. “I hadn’t realised.”

  He was suddenly in a great hurry to leave. Delving in his briefcase, he hauled out a large plain envelope, thrust it into Smiley’s hand, and went off to the prouder world of Whitehall; and Mr. Barraclough to the Islay Hotel, where he returned to his reading of Operation Testify.

  26

  It was lunchtime next day. Smiley had read and slept a little, read again and bathed, and as he climbed the steps to that pretty London house he felt pleased, because he liked Sam.

  The house was brown brick and Georgian, just off Grosvenor Square. There were five steps and a brass doorbell in a scalloped recess. The door was black, with pillars either side. He pushed the bell and he might as well have pushed the door; it opened at once. He entered a circular hallway with another door the other end, and two large men in black suits who might have been ushers at Westminster Abbey. Over a marble chimney-piece, horses pranced and they might have been Stubbs. One man stood close while he took off his coat; the second led him to a Bible desk to sign the book.

  “Hebden,” Smiley murmured as he wrote, giving a workname Sam could remember.

  “Adrian Hebden.”

  The man who had his coat repeated the name into a house telephone:

  “Mr. Hebden—Mr. Adrian Hebden.”

  “If you wouldn’t mind waiting one second, sir,” said the man by the Bible desk. There was no music, and Smiley had the feeling there should have been; also a fountain.

  “I’m a friend of Mr. Collins’s, as a matter of fact,” said Smiley. “If Mr. Collins is available. I think he may even be expecting me.”

  The man at the telephone murmured, “Thank you,” and hung it on the hook. He led Smiley to the inner door and pushed it open. It made no sound at all, not even a rustle on the silk carpet.

  “Mr. Collins is over there, sir,” he murmured respectfully. “Drinks are with the courtesy of the house.”

  The three reception rooms had been run together, with pillars and arches to divide them optically, and mahogany panelling. In each room was one table, the third was sixty feet away. The lights shone on meaningless pictures of fruit in colossal gold frames, and on the green baize tablecloths. The curtains were drawn, the tables about one third occupied, four or five players to each, all men, but the only sounds were the click of the ball in the wheel, the click of the chips as they were redistributed, and the very low murmur of the croupiers.

  “Adrian Hebden,” said Sam Collins, with a twinkle in his voice. “Long time no see.”

  “Hullo, Sam,” said Smiley, and they shook hands.

  “Come
down to my lair,” said Sam, and nodded to the only other man in the room who was standing, a very big man with blood pressure and a chipped face. The big man nodded, too.

  “Care for it?” Sam enquired as they crossed a corridor draped in red silk.

  “It’s very impressive,” said Smiley politely.

  “That’s the word,” said Sam. “Impressive. That’s what it is.” He was wearing a dinner jacket. His office was done in Edwardian plush, his desk had a marble top and ball-and-claw feet, but the room itself was very small and not at all well ventilated—more like the back room of a theatre, Smiley thought, furnished with leftover props.

  “They might even let me put in a few pennies of my own later, give it another year. They’re toughish boys, but very go-ahead, you know.”

  “I’m sure,” said Smiley.

  “Like we were in the old days.”

  “That’s right.”

  He was trim and lighthearted in his manner and he had a trim black moustache. Smiley couldn’t imagine him without it. He was probably fifty. He had spent a lot of time out East, where they had once worked together on a catch-and-carry job against a Chinese radio operator. His complexion and hair were greying but he still looked thirty-five. His smile was warm and he had a confiding, messroom friendliness. He kept both hands on the table as if he were at cards, and he looked at Smiley with a possessive fondness that was paternal or filial or both.

  “If chummy goes over five,” he said, still smiling, “give me a buzz, Harry, will you? Otherwise keep your big mouth shut; I’m chatting up an oil king.” He was talking into a box on his desk. “Where is he now?”

  “Three up,” said a gravel voice. Smiley guessed it belonged to the chipped man with blood pressure.

  “Then he’s got eight to lose,” said Sam blandly. “Keep him at the table, that’s all. Make a hero of him.” He switched off and grinned. Smiley grinned back.

  “Really, it’s a great life,” Sam assured him. “Better than selling washing machines, anyway. Bit odd, of course, putting on the dinner jacket at ten in the morning. Reminds one of diplomatic cover.” Smiley laughed. “Straight, too, believe it or not,” Sam added with no change to his expression. “We get all the help we need from the arithmetic.”

  “I’m sure you do,” said Smiley, once more with great politeness.

  “Care for some music?”

  It was canned and came out of the ceiling. Sam turned it up as loud as they could bear.

  “So what can I do you for?” Sam asked, the smile broadening.

  “I want to talk to you about the night Jim Prideaux was shot. You were duty officer.”

  Sam smoked brown cigarettes that smelt of cigar. Lighting one, he let the end catch fire, then watched it die to an ember. “Writing your memoirs, old boy?” he enquired.

  “We’re reopening the case.”

  “What’s this we, old boy?”

  “I, myself, and me, with Lacon pushing and the Minister pulling.”

  “All power corrupts but some must govern, and in that case Brother Lacon will reluctantly scramble to the top of the heap.”

  “It hasn’t changed,” said Smiley.

  Sam drew ruminatively on his cigarette. The music switched to phrases of Noël Coward.

  “It’s a dream of mine, actually,” said Sam Collins through the smoke. “One of these days Percy Alleline walks through that door with a shabby brown suitcase and asks for a flutter. He puts the whole of the secret vote on red and loses.”

  “The record’s been filleted,” said Smiley. “It’s a matter of going to people and asking what they remember. There’s almost nothing on file at all.”

  “I’m not surprised,” said Sam. Over the phone he ordered sandwiches. “Live on them,” he explained. “Sandwiches and canapés. One of the perks.”

  He was pouring coffee when the red pinlight glowed between them on the desk.

  “Chummy’s even,” said the gravel voice.

  “Then start counting,” said Sam, and closed the switch.

  He told it plainly but precisely, the way a good soldier recalls a battle, not to win or lose any more, but simply to remember. He had just come back from abroad, he said; a three-year stint in Vientiane. He’d checked in with personnel and cleared himself with the Dolphin; no one seemed to have any plans for him, so he was thinking of taking off for the South of France for a month’s leave when MacFadean, that old janitor who was practically Control’s valet, scooped him up in the corridor and marched him to Control’s room.

  “This was which day, exactly?” said Smiley.

  “October 19th.”

  “The Thursday.”

  “The Thursday. I was thinking of flying to Nice on Monday. You were in Berlin. I wanted to buy you a drink but the mothers said you were occupé, and when I checked with Movements they told me you’d gone to Berlin.”

  “Yes, that’s true,” Smiley said simply. “Control sent me there.”

  To get me out of the way, he might have added; it was a feeling he had had even at the time.

  “I hunted round for Bill but Bill was also in baulk. Control had packed him up-country somewhere,” said Sam, avoiding Smiley’s eye.

  “On a wild goose chase,” Smiley murmured. “But he came back.”

  Here Sam tipped a sharp, quizzical glance in Smiley’s direction, but he added nothing on the subject of Bill Haydon’s journey.

  “The whole place seemed dead. Damn nearly caught the first plane back to Vientiane.”

  “It pretty much was dead,” Smiley confessed, and thought, Except for Witchcraft.

  And Control, said Sam, looked as though he’d had a five-day fever. He was surrounded by a sea of files, his skin was yellow, and as he talked he kept breaking off to wipe his forehead with a handkerchief. He scarcely bothered with the usual fan-dance at all, said Sam. He didn’t congratulate him on three good years in the field, or make some snide reference to his private life, which was at that time messy; he simply said he wanted Sam to do weekend duty instead of Mary Masterman; could Sam swing it?

  “ ‘Sure I can swing it,’ I said. ‘If you want me to do duty officer, I’ll do it.’ He said he’d give me the rest of the story on Saturday. Meanwhile I must tell no one. I mustn’t give a hint anywhere in the building, even that he’d asked me this one thing. He needed someone good to man the switchboard in case there was a crisis, but it had to be someone from an outstation or someone like me who’d been away from head office for a long time. And it had to be an old hand.”

  So Sam went to Mary Masterman and sold her a hard-luck story about not being able to get the tenant out of his flat before he went on leave on Monday; how would it be if he did her duty for her and saved himself the hotel? He took over at nine on Saturday morning with his toothbrush and six cans of beer in a briefcase, which still had palm-tree stickers on the side. Geoff Agate was slated to relieve him on Sunday evening.

  Once again Sam dwelt on how dead the place was. Back in the old days, Saturdays were much like any other day, he said. Most regional sections had a deskman working weekends, some even had night staff, and when you took a tour of the building you had the feeling that, warts and all, this was an outfit that had a lot going. But that Saturday morning the building might have been evacuated, said Sam; which in a way, from what he heard later, it had been—on orders from Control. A couple of wranglers toiled on the second floor; the radio and code rooms were going strong, but those boys worked all the hours anyway. Otherwise, said Sam, it was the big silence. He sat around waiting for Control to ring but nothing happened. He fleshed out another hour teasing the janitors, whom he reckoned the idlest lot of so-and-so’s in the Circus. He checked their attendance lists and found two typists and one desk officer marked in but absent, so he put the head janitor, a new boy called Mellows, on report. Finally he went upstairs to see if Control was in.

  “He was sitting all alone, except for MacFadean. No mothers, no you—just old Mac peeking around with jasmine tea and sympathy. Too m
uch?”

  “No, just go on, please. As much detail as you can remember.”

  “So then Control peeled off another veil. Half a veil. Someone was doing a special job for him, he said. It was of great importance to the service. He kept saying that: to the service. Not Whitehall or sterling or the price of fish, but us. Even when it was all over, I must never breathe a word about it. Not even to you. Or Bill or Bland or anyone.”

  “Nor Alleline?”

  “He never mentioned Percy once.”

  “No,” Smiley agreed. “He scarcely could at the end.”

  “I should regard him, for the night, as Director of Operations. I should see myself as cut-out between Control and whatever was going on in the rest of the building. If anything came in—a signal, a phone call, however trivial it seemed—I should wait till the coast was clear, then whip upstairs and hand it to Control. No one was to know, now or later, that Control was the man behind the gun. In no case should I phone him or minute him; even the internal lines were taboo. Truth, George,” said Sam, helping himself to a sandwich.

  “Oh, I do believe you,” said Smiley with feeling.

  If outgoing telegrams had to be sent, Sam should once more act as Control’s cut-out. He need not expect much to happen till this evening; even then it was most unlikely anything would happen. As to the janitors and people like that, as Control put it, Sam should do his damnedest to act natural and look busy.

  The séance over, Sam returned to the duty room, sent out for an evening paper, opened a can of beer, selected an outside telephone line, and set about losing his shirt. There was steeplechasing at Kempton, which he hadn’t watched for years. Early evening, he took another walk around the lines and tested the alarm pads on the floor of the general registry. Three out of fifteen didn’t work, and by this time the janitors were really loving him. He cooked himself an egg, and when he’d eaten it he trotted upstairs to take a pound off old Mac and give him a beer.