A Legacy of Spies

by John le Carré

  *

  ‘George had a tame lawyer,’ I said, as the sinful relief of confession rose in me despite myself. ‘The one you call chichi. A distant relative of Ann’s. He or she agreed to play cut-out. It’s not a safe flat, it’s a safe house three floors high, and it was leased by an offshore trust registered in the Dutch Antilles.’

  ‘Spoken like a hero’ – Bunny’s approval – ‘and the safe house keeper?’

  ‘Millie McCraig. A former agent of George’s. She’d kept for him before. Had all the skills. When Windfall started up, she was keeping a Circus safe house for Joint in the New Forest. Place called Camp 4. George told her to resign, then reapply to Covert. He transferred her to the reptile fund and set her up in the Stables.’

  ‘Which is situate where, may we now know?’ – still Bunny.

  So I told them that too, complete with the Stables phone number, which tripped off my tongue as lightly as if it had been straining to come out all along. Then there was stage business while Bunny and Laura made themselves a gully through the files on the table between us, and Bunny plonked a broad-bottomed telephone of a complexity that was totally beyond me in the gap and, having touched a succession of keys at lightning speed, handed me the receiver.

  At a tenth of Bunny’s speed, I touched in the Stables phone number and was startled to hear the dialling tone blaring out all over the room, which wasn’t just grossly insecure to my guilty ear, but an act of outright betrayal, as if I’d been blown, captured and turned in a single move. The phone bawled out its ringing tone. We waited. Still no answer. And I was thinking, either Millie’s at church, because she used to do a lot of that, or she’s out bicycling, or she’s a sight less agile than she used to be, like the rest of us. But more likely she’s dead and buried because, beautiful and unattainable though she was, she had a good five years on me.

  The ringing stopped. There was a rustle and I assumed the call was going over to answerphone. Then, to my astonishment and disbelief, I heard Millie’s voice, the same voice, the same saw-edge of puritanical Scottish disapproval that I would mimic to make George laugh when he was feeling low:

  ‘Yes? Hullo?’ – and when I hesitated – ‘Who is that, please?’ – indignantly, as if it was midnight rather than seven in the evening.

  ‘It’s me, Peter Weston, Millie,’ I said. And throwing in Smiley’s cover name for good measure: ‘Friend of Mr Barraclough’s, if you remember.’

  I was expecting, even hoping, that for once in her life Millie McCraig would need time to collect herself, but she came back so sharply that it was I, not she, who was disconcerted.

  ‘Mr Weston?’

  ‘Himself, Millie, not his shadow.’

  ‘Kindly identify yourself, Mr Weston.’

  Identify myself? Hadn’t I just given her two cover names? Then I realized: she wants my pinpoint, which was a form of obscure coded communication more often used over Moscow’s telephone system than London’s, but Smiley in our darkest days had insisted on it. So I grabbed a brown wooden pencil that was lying on the desk in front of me and, feeling a total idiot, stooped over Bunny’s super-elaborate telephone and tapped my thousand-year-old pinpoint code on to the speaker, hoping it would have the same effect as if I’d tapped it on to the mouthpiece, three taps, pause, one tap, pause, two taps. And evidently it did, because no sooner had I delivered the last tap than Millie was back, all sweet and accommodating, saying it was nice to hear my voice after all these years, Mr Weston, and what could she be doing to help me at all?

  To which I might have replied: Well, since you ask, Millie, could you kindly confirm that these events are playing out in the real world and not in some murky corner of the middle world reserved for unsleeping spies of yesterday?

  4

  On my arrival from Brittany the previous morning, I had booked myself into a dismal hotel near Charing Cross station and forked out ninety pounds in advance for a room the size of a hearse. On my way there, I had also paid a courtesy call on my old friend and former joe Bernie Lavendar, Gentlemen’s Tailor to the Diplomatic Corps, whose cutting rooms were situated in a minuscule semi-basement off Savile Row. But size had never mattered to Bernie. What had mattered to him – and to the Circus – was getting inside the diplomatic parlours of Kensington Palace Gardens and St John’s Wood, and doing his bit for England, with a modest tax-free income on the side.

  We embraced, he drew the blind and dropped the latch on the door. For old times’ sake I tried on a couple of his uncollecteds: jackets and suits made for foreign diplomats who for unknown reasons had failed to collect them. And finally, also in the spirit of old times, I entrusted him with a sealed envelope to pop in his safe until my return. It contained my French passport, but if it had contained the plans for the D-Day landings, Bernie couldn’t have treated it with greater reverence.

  Now I have come to reclaim it.

  ‘And how’s Mr Smiley, then?’ he asks, dropping his voice out of reverence, or an exaggerated sense of security. ‘Have we heard of him at all, Mister G?’

  We haven’t. Has Bernie? Alas, Bernie hasn’t either, so we make do with a chuckle about George’s habit of disappearing for long periods without explaining himself.

  But inside, I wasn’t chuckling. Was it possible George was dead? And that Bunny knew he was dead and wasn’t telling? But not even George could die in secret. And how about Ann, his ever-faithless wife? Word had reached me a while back that, tiring of her many adventures, she had espoused a fashionable charity. But whether the attachment had endured any longer than its predecessors was anybody’s guess.

  With my French passport back in my pocket, I took myself to Tottenham Court Road and invested in a couple of disposable mobile phones with ten pounds’ worth of phone time apiece. And, as an afterthought, the bottle of Scotch I had neglected to buy at Rennes airport, which probably accounts for the merciful fact that I have no memory of the night that somehow passed.

  Rising with the dawn, I walked for an hour through drizzle, and ate a bad breakfast in a sandwich bar. Only then, with a sense of resignation tinged with disbelief, did I pluck up the courage to hail a black cab and give the driver the address that for two years had been the scene of more rejoicing, stress and human anguish than any other place in my life.

  *

  As I remembered it, No. 13 Disraeli Street, alias the Stables, had been a shabby, unrestored Victorian end-of-terrace house in a Bloomsbury side street. And to my astonishment, that is the house that stands before me now: unchanged, unrepentant, a standing reproach to its shiny, prinked-up neighbours. The time is nine a.m., the appointed hour, but the doorstep has been commandeered by a slender woman in jeans, sneakers and leather jacket who is talking vituperatively into her mobile phone. I’m about to begin another circuit when I realize she is Laura-who-is-History in modern dress.

  ‘Sleep well, Pete?’

  ‘Like an angel.’

  ‘Which bell do I press without catching gangrene?’

  ‘Try Ethics.’

  Ethics being Smiley’s own choice for the least alluring doorbell he could think of. The front door swung open and there in the half-darkness stood the ghost of Millie McCraig, her once jet-black hair as white as mine, her athlete’s body bent with age, but the same zealous light burning in the moist blue eyes as she allowed me one air kiss on each frugal Celtic cheek.

  Laura brushed past us into the hall. The two women squared up to each other like boxers before the fight, while I underwent such turbulent feelings of recognition and remorse that my one desire was to steal back into the street, close the door after me and pretend I’d never been here. What I was seeing around me would have surpassed the dreams of the most demanding archaeologist: a scrupulously preserved burial chamber, its seals unbroken, dedicated to Operation Windfall and all who had sailed in her, complete with every original artefact, from my pizza-delivery gear hanging from its hook to Millie McCraig�
�s upright ladies’ bicycle, a vintage model even in its day, with wicker basket, ting-a-ling bell and Rexine carrier bag, parked on its stand in the hallway.

  ‘Will you be wishing to look around at all?’ Millie is saying to Laura, as indifferently as if she is talking to a potential purchaser.

  ‘There’s a back door,’ says Laura to Millie, producing an architect’s plan of the building; and where in God’s name had she got that from?

  We stand at the glazed kitchen door. Below us, a handkerchief-sized garden, and at its centre, Millie’s vegetable patch. Oliver Mendel and I gave it its first dig. The washing line bare, but Millie was expecting us. The birdhouse, the same one. Mendel and I had cobbled it together one midnight out of bits of spare timber. Mendel, under my slightly drunken guidance, had embellished it with a pokerwork plaque declaring No bird turned away. And there it stood, as proud and upright as on the birthday it had celebrated. A stone path weaves between the vegetable beds to the kissing gate that leads to the private car park that leads to the side street. No safe house George countenanced was complete without a rear entrance.

  ‘Anybody ever come in that way?’ Laura enquires.

  ‘Control,’ I reply, sparing Millie the need to answer. ‘Wouldn’t have come in by the front to save his life.’

  ‘And the rest of you?’

  ‘Used the front door. Once Control had decided the back way was his, it became his private lift.’

  Be generous in small things, I am advising myself. Keep the rest in your memory locked, and throw away the key. Next on her itinerary is the winding wooden staircase, a miniature replica of every dingy staircase at the Circus. We are about to ascend it when, to the tinkle of a small bell, a cat appears: a large, black, long-haired, malign-looking animal with a red collar. It sits, yawns and stares at us. Laura stares back at it, then turns to Millie.

  ‘Is she on the budget too?’

  ‘She’s a he, and I pay for him myself, thank you.’

  ‘Does he have a name?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But it’s classified?’

  ‘Yes.’

  With Laura striding ahead and the cat cautiously following, we ascend to the half-landing and come to a halt before the green-baize door with its combination lock. Beyond it lies the cypher room. When George first took the place, the door was glazed, but Ben the cypher clerk wouldn’t allow his fingers to be watched, hence the baize.

  ‘Right. Who’s got the combination?’ – Laura in scout-mistress mode.

  Since Millie again says nothing, I reluctantly recite the combination: 21 10 05, the date of the Battle of Trafalgar.

  ‘Ben was Royal Navy,’ I explain, but if Laura understands the reference, she gives no sign of it.

  Parking herself in the swivel chair, she glowers at the array of dials and switches. Flips a switch. Nothing. Turns a dial. Nothing.

  ‘Power’s been off ever since,’ Millie murmurs to me, not to Laura.

  Swinging round in Ben’s chair, Laura jabs a finger at a green Chubb wall safe.

  ‘Right. Has that thing got a key?’

  The rights are getting on my nerves. They’re like Pete. From a bunch at her side, Millie selects a key. The lock turns, the safe door swings open, Laura peers in and with a scything movement of her arm sweeps the contents on to the coconut matting: codebooks blazoned Top Secret and Beyond, pencils, reinforced envelopes, faded one-time pads in cellophane packs of twelve.

  ‘We leave everything as it is, right?’ she announces, swinging back to us. ‘Nobody touches anything anywhere. Got that? Pete? Millie?’

  She is midway up the next flight of stairs when Millie with an ‘Excuse me!’ stops her in her tracks.

  ‘Would that be my personal quarters you’re proposing to enter at all?’

  ‘And if I am?’

  ‘You are welcome to make an inspection of my apartment and personal possessions provided I have advance notice in writing and in good time signed by the appropriate authority at Head Office,’ Millie pronounces in a single unmodulated sentence, which I suspect she has been rehearsing. ‘In the meantime, I’ll trouble you to respect my personal privacy as becomes my age and station.’

  To which Laura comes back with a heresy that not even Oliver Mendel would have risked on a good day:

  ‘Why’s that, Mill? You got someone tucked away up there?’

  *

  The classified cat has removed itself. We stand in the Middle Room, so called from the day Mendel and I cleared away the old hardboard partitions. Look at it from the street, all you got was another dingy net-curtained ground-floor window. But on the inside there was no window, because one snow-swept Saturday afternoon in February we bricked it up, consigning the room to eternal darkness until you switched on the green-shaded gamblers’ lights we bought from a shop in Soho.

  Two cumbersome Victorian desks filled the centre, the one Smiley’s, the other – but only occasionally – Control’s. Their origin had remained a mystery until an evening when Smiley revealed to us over a Scotch that a cousin of Ann’s was selling off a country pile in Devon to pay death duties.

  ‘What in the name of all that’s holy is that hideous thing when it’s at home?’

  Laura’s eye has lighted, not to my surprise, on the garish three-foot-by-two-foot wall chart hanging behind Control’s desk. Hideous? Not to my eyes. But life-threatening, yes indeed. Before I knew it, I had grabbed the ash walking stick hanging over the back of Control’s chair and embarked on an explanation designed not to enlighten, but divert.

  ‘This section here, Laura’ – waving the stick at a maze of coloured lines and cover names resembling a crazy London Underground map – ‘is a homemade representation of the Circus’s East European network, codenamed Mayflower, as it stood before Operation Windfall was conceived. Here we have the great man himself, source Mayflower, the network’s inspiration, founder, cut-out and hub, here his sub-sources, and here, in descending order, their sub-sources, conscious or otherwise, together with a capsule description of their product, its rating in the Whitehall market place, and our own in-house assessment of the sources’ and sub-sources’ reliability on a scale of one to ten.’

  With which I hung the stick back on its chair. But Laura didn’t appear quite as diverted or confused as I would have wished. She was examining the chart’s cover names one by one, checking them off. Behind me, Millie is sidling from the room.

  ‘Well, now we do know a couple of things about Operation Mayflower, as it happens,’ Laura remarked in a superior tone. ‘From the odd file you were kind enough to leave behind in the General Archive. Plus a couple of other sources of our own.’ And having let this sink in: ‘What’s with naming everybody after garden plants, anyway?’

  ‘Ah well, that’s from the days when we used themes, Laura,’ I replied, maintaining as best I could the lofty tone. ‘Mayflower, so flowers, not the ship.’

  But again I had lost her.

  ‘What the hell are these stars for?’

  ‘Sparks, Laura. Not stars. Figurative sparks. In cases where field agents have been issued with radio sets. Red for active, yellow for cached.’

  ‘Cached?’

  ‘Buried. In oilskins usually.’

  ‘If I hide something, I hide it, right?’ she informs me, still hunting among the cover names. ‘I don’t cache. I don’t do spy-speak and I’m not a boys’ club. What are these plus signs anyway?’ – stabbing her fingertip at the bubble around a sub-source and keeping it there.

  ‘They’re not plus signs, actually, Laura. They’re crosses.’

  ‘You mean they’re doubles? They’ve been double-crossed?’

  ‘I mean they’re extinct.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Blown. Resigned. A raft of reasons.’

  ‘What happened to this man?’

  ‘Codename Violet?’
/>   ‘Yeah. What happened to Violet?’

  Was she closing in on me? I was beginning to suspect she was.

  ‘Missing, believed interrogated. Based East Berlin 1956 to 1961. Ran a team of train-watchers. It’s all in the bubble’ – meaning, read it for yourself.

  ‘And this fellow? Tulip?’

  ‘Tulip’s a woman.’

  ‘And the hashtag?’

  Has she been waiting all this time for her fingertip to land where it is now?

  ‘The hashtag, as you call it, is a symbol.’

  ‘I think I got that. What of?’

  ‘Tulip was a Russian Orthodox convert, so they gave her a Russian Orthodox cross.’ My voice steady as she goes.

  ‘Who did?’

  ‘The women. The two senior secretaries who worked here.’

  ‘Did every agent who had religion get a cross?’

  ‘Tulip’s Orthodoxy was part of her motivation to work for us. The cross marked that.’

  ‘What happened to her?’

  ‘Disappeared from our screens, alas.’

  ‘You didn’t have screens.’

  ‘Our assumption was that she had decided to call it a day. Some joes do that. Break off contact and disappear.’

  ‘Her actual name was Gamp, right? Like umbrella. Doris Gamp?’

  This is absolutely not a wave of nausea I am feeling. That was not any kind of lurch of the stomach.

  ‘Probably. Gamp. Yes, I think it was. I’m surprised you know.’

  ‘Maybe you didn’t steal enough files. Was it a big loss?’

  ‘Was what?’

  ‘Her decision to call it a day.’

  ‘I’m not sure she announced her decision. Just ceased to operate. Still, yes, over time it was a loss. Tulip was a major source. Substantial. Yes.’