A Legacy of Spies

by John le Carré

  And the short answer turned out to be: immaculately. Skilled, deft, anonymous, purposeful. And I, as her blind courier, no less. A sunny day, a bustling street, two strangers, we advance on each other, are about to collide, I veer left, she right, there is momentary entanglement. I grunt an apology, she ignores it and sweeps on. I am richer by two cassettes of microfilm.

  A second brush in Warsaw Old Town four weeks later, although more demanding, also passes off without mishap, as witness my handwritten report to George, copy to Alec:

  PG to H/Covert Marylebone, copy to AL, Berlin.

  Subject: Sub-source TULIP blind treff.

  As on previous occasions we achieved early mutual recognition. Interbody contact was undetectable and swift. I do not believe that even close surveillance could have caught the moment of transfer.

  It was clear that Tulip had been excellently briefed by Mayflower. My subsequent offload to H/Stn Warsaw presented no difficulties.

  PG

  And Smiley’s handwritten response:

  Deftly done again, Peter! Bravo! GS

  But maybe not quite as deftly as Smiley thinks, or quite as uneventfully as my handwritten minute was so keen to suggest.

  *

  I am a French tourist from Brittany travelling with a Swiss tour group. My passport describes me as a company director but questioned by my fellow travellers I reveal myself to be a humble traveller in agricultural fertilizer. Together with my group, I am enjoying the sights of Warsaw’s splendidly restored Old Town. A well-grown young woman in baggy jeans and tartan waistcoat is striding towards us. Her hair, last seen hidden by a beret, is today flowing free and auburn. With each step it bounces in the sunshine. She wears a green neck scarf. No scarf means no handover. I am wearing a Party cloth cap with a red star, bought at a street stall. Shove the cap in my pocket, no handover. The Old Town is milling with other tour groups. Ours is less manageable than our Polish guide would wish. Three or four of us are already lost to her, chatting among ourselves instead of being lectured about the city’s miraculous rebirth after the Nazi bombing. A bronze statue has caught my eye. It has caught Tulip’s too because this is how our encounter has been choreographed. There will be no slowing down as we meet. Nonchalance is all, just not too much of it. No eye contact, but nothing too studied about the way we ignore each other. Warsaw is a very wired town. Tourist attractions head the watch list.

  So what’s this jaunty swinging of the hips she’s doing suddenly, what’s with the light of explicit welcome in the big, almond eyes? For a fleeting second – but less fleeting than I am prepared for – our right hands curl into each other. But instead of instantly parting, her fingers, having deposited their tiny contents, nestle in my palm, and would have gone on nestling there for longer if I hadn’t prised them free. Is she mad? Am I? And what’s with that flash of welcoming smile I caught? – or am I deluding myself?

  We go our separate ways: she to her conference of Warsaw Pact espiocrats, I with my group to a cellar bar, where the Cultural Secretary from the British Embassy and his wife happen to be regaling themselves at a corner table. I order a beer and adjourn to the men’s lavatory. The Cultural Secretary, known to me in another life as a fellow trainee at Sarratt, follows me. The offload is swift and wordless. I rejoin my group. But the flutter of Tulip’s fingers hasn’t gone away.

  And it hasn’t gone away now, as I read Stas de Jong’s hymn of praise to sub-source Tulip, brightest star of the Mayflower network:

  Tulip has been made fully conscious that she is reporting to this Service and that Mayflower is our unofficial assistant as well as her cut-out. She has decided she loves England unconditionally. She is particularly impressed by the high quality of our tradecraft, and singled out her most recent treff in Warsaw as an example of British excellence.

  Tulip’s terms of resettlement on termination of work, whenever that should occur, will be £1,000 per month of service completed, plus a one-time ex gratia payment of £10,000, as approved by H/Covert [GS]. But her greatest wish is that, when the time comes, whenever that is, she and her son Gustav will become British citizens.

  Her own covert gifts are perhaps even more impressive. Her success in installing a sub-miniature camera in the base of the shower platform in the women’s toilet in her corridor relieves her of the stress of taking it in and out of House 3 in her handbag. Her Office-built Petschaft and key enable her to enter and leave Rapp’s safe whenever the coast is clear and she feels inclined. Last Saturday she confided to Mayflower that her most recurrent dream was of one day marrying a beautiful Englishman!

  ‘Something wrong then?’ Nelson demands, this time with intent.

  ‘I’ve hit a rosette,’ I reply, which happens to be true.

  *

  Bunny has brought a briefcase with him and wears a dark suit. He has come straight from a meeting at the Treasury, who with or why he doesn’t say. Laura lounges in Control’s chair with her legs crossed. Bunny takes a bottle of warm Sancerre from his briefcase and pours us all a glass. Then opens a packet of salted cashews, saying we’re to help ourselves.

  ‘Heavy going, Peter?’ he enquires genially.

  ‘What do you expect?’ I reply in the aggrieved tone I have decided to adopt. ‘Not exactly a happy walk down memory lane, is it?’

  ‘But helpful, I hope. Not too stressful, revisiting old times and faces?’

  I let this go. The interrogation begins, at first languidly:

  ‘Can I ask you first about Riemeck, an unusually attractive character for an agent, I would have thought?’

  Nod.

  ‘And a doctor. A pretty good one.’

  Nod again.

  ‘So why do Mayflower reports of the day, as distributed to lucky Whitehall customers, describe the source as – and I quote – a well-placed official employed in the mid-levels of the East German Socialist Unity Party with regular access to highly classified Stasi material?’

  ‘Disinformation,’ I reply.

  ‘Planted by?’

  ‘George, Control, Lacon in Treasury. They all knew the Mayflower material was going to cause a stir the moment it hit the stands. The first thing customers would be asking was who’s the source. So they cooked up a fictional source of equal weight.’

  ‘And your Tulip?’

  ‘What about Tulip?’

  Too fast. I should have waited. Is he goading me? Why else is he giving me that knowing, mirthless smirk that makes me want to hit him? And why is Laura smirking too? Is she getting her own back after our misfired Greek dinner?

  Bunny is reading from something on his lap, and his subject is still Tulip: ‘Sub-source is a senior secretary in the Interior Ministry with access to the highest circles. Isn’t that going it a bit?’

  ‘Going it how?’

  ‘Doesn’t it give her a bit more – well, respectability than she deserves? I mean, what about promiscuous senior secretary, for starters? Office nympho might be a better fit, if we’re looking for some sort of equivalence in the real world. Or holy whore, perhaps, in deference to her religious preferences?’

  He is watching me, waiting for my outburst of fury, indignation, denial. Somehow I manage to deny him the satisfaction.

  ‘Still, I suppose you should know your Tulip,’ he goes on. ‘You who serviced her so diligently.’

  ‘I did not service her, and she is not my Tulip,’ I reply with measured deliberation. ‘The entire time she was in the field, Tulip and I did not exchange a single word.’

  ‘Not one?’

  ‘Not in all our treffs. We brush-passed, we never spoke.’

  ‘So how come she knew your name?’ he enquires with his most charming, boyish smile.

  ‘She did not know my bloody name! How the hell could she, when we never said so much as hullo to each other?’

  ‘One of your names, put it that way,’ he persists, unruff
led.

  Laura’s cue: ‘Try Jean-François Gamay for size, Pete,’ she suggests, in the same jocular vein. ‘Partner in a French electronics company based in Metz, enjoying a package holiday beside the Black Sea with the Bulgarian State travel company. That’s a bit more than hullo.’

  My outburst of merry laughter is unconfined, and so it should be, since it’s the product of spontaneous and genuine relief.

  ‘Oh for Christ’s sake!’ I exclaim, joining in the fun. ‘That’s not what I told Tulip. That’s what I told Gustav!’

  *

  So here you are, Bunny and Laura, and I hope you’re sitting comfortably for this cautionary tale about how the most secretive and best-laid plans can founder on a child’s innocence.

  My workname is indeed Jean-François Gamay, and yes, I’m a member of a large, closely observed travel group enjoying low-cost sea and sun in a not very salubrious Bulgarian beach resort on the Black Sea.

  Across the bay from our dismal hotel sits the Party Workers’ Hostel, a brutalist hulk of Soviet-style concrete covered in Communist flags and we can hear its martial music booming at us over the water, punctuated with uplifting messages of peace and goodwill from a battery of loudspeakers. Somewhere within its walls, Tulip and her five-year-old son Gustav are taking a workers’ collective holiday, thanks to the influential connections of the odious Comrade Lothar, Tulip’s husband, who has mysteriously overcome the Stasi’s reluctance to allow its members to romp on foreign sands. She is accompanied by her sister, Lotte, the schoolteacher from Potsdam.

  On the beach, between four and four-fifteen, Tulip and I will undertake a brush pass, and this time it will include her son Gustav. Lotte will be safely confined to the hostel, attending a workers’ council. The initiative lies with the agent in the field, in this case Tulip. My job will be to respond to her creatively. And here she is now, coming towards me through the surf, clad in a Mother Hubbard beach robe with a rope shoulder bag. As she advances she directs Gustav’s eye to a seashell or precious stone for his bucket. She has the same skittish swing of the hips that I had refused to acknowledge in Warsaw Old Town – except that I am careful not to mention her hips to Bunny and Laura, who are following my every light-hearted word with undisguised scepticism.

  Drawing closer, she forages in her rope shoulder bag. Other sun-worshippers, other children, are splashing, sunbathing, eating sausage sandwiches and playing chess, and Tulip on stage is not beyond a smile or a word for this or that comrade. I don’t know by what ruse she persuades Gustav to approach me, or what she says to him that makes him laugh out loud and scamper towards me in a dare, and thrust into my hand a chunk of blue, white and pink coconut fudge.

  But I know that I must be charming, I must express delight. I must pretend to eat some of the fudge, I must drop the rest in my pocket, sink into a crouch, discover magically in the surf the seashell that was already secreted in my hand and offer it to Gustav as payment in return.

  To all of which Tulip laughs gaily – rather too gaily, but I don’t tell Laura and Bunny that bit either – and beckons him, come back now, darling, and leave the nice comrade alone.

  But Gustav doesn’t want to leave the nice comrade alone, which is the whole point of my witty story to Bunny and Laura. Gustav, who’s a sassy kid by anybody’s standards, has gone way off script. He reckons he has cut a deal with the nice comrade, fudge for shell, and he needs to get to know his new trading partner socially and commercially.

  ‘What’s your name?’ he demands.

  ‘Jean-François. What’s yours?’

  ‘Gustav. Jean-François who?’

  ‘Gamay.’

  ‘And your age?’

  ‘A hundred-and-twenty-eight. What’s yours?’

  ‘Five. Where does the comrade come from?’

  ‘Metz, France. What about you?’

  ‘Berlin, Democratic Germany. Would you like to hear a song?’

  ‘Very much.’

  So Gustav stands himself to attention in the surf and sticks his chest out and gives me the benefit of a school song thanking our beloved Soviet soldiers for shedding their blood for a Socialist Germany. Meanwhile his mother, who is standing behind him, coolly unfastens the girdle of her beach robe and, with her gaze fixed on me, displays her naked body in its undoubted glory before languidly retying the girdle and joining me in my lavish applause for her son’s performance; then looks on like the proud mother she is as I shake Gustav’s hand, take a smart pace back and, right fist raised, return his Communist salute.

  But the glory of Tulip’s naked body is also something I keep to myself, while I ponder a question that has been burning in me before I ever embarked on my amusing story: how the devil did you know that Tulip knew my name?

  7

  I don’t know what particular variety of fugue swept over me as, released early from my labours, I stepped out of the gloom of the Stables into the afternoon bustle of Bloomsbury and, on no impulse I was aware of, headed south-west towards Chelsea. Humiliation, certainly. Frustration, bewilderment, no question. Outrage at having my past dug up and thrown in my face. Guilt, shame, apprehension, any amount. And all directed in a single blast of pain and incomprehension at George Smiley for making himself unfindable.

  Or was he? Was Bunny lying to me, as I was lying to him, and was George not quite as unfindable as he protested? Had they already found him and wrung him dry, as if that were ever possible? If Millie McCraig knew the answer – and I suspected she did – she was also bound to silence by her own version of the Official Secrets Act which laid down that, alive or dead, George Smiley was undiscussable.

  Approaching Bywater Street, once a quiet cul-de-sac for the not-so-well-off and now just another of London’s millionaires’ ghettos, I refuse to acknowledge the wave of nostalgia sweeping over me, or make the obligatory mental note of parked cars, scan them for occupants or run a careless eye over doors and windows of the houses opposite. When was the last occasion I had come here? My memory stops at the night I circumvented George’s little wiles with wooden wedges in the front door and lay in wait to whisk him off to Oliver Lacon’s sprawling red castle in Ascot on the first leg of his anguished journey to his dear old friend Bill Haydon, arch-traitor and his wife’s lover.

  But on this late, idle, autumnal afternoon, No. 9 Bywater Street knows nothing and has seen nothing of these things. Blinds drawn, front garden overgrown with weeds, occupants gone away or dead. I climb the four steps to the front door, press the bell, hear no familiar ring, no footstep light or heavy. No George, blinking his pleasure as he polishes his spectacles on the inside lining of his tie – ‘hullo, Peter, you look as though you need a drink, come on in.’ No Ann in a flurry with only half her make-up on – ‘just about to go out, Peter darling – kiss, kiss – but do come in and sort the world out with poor George.’

  I return at military pace to the King’s Road, hail a cab to Marylebone High Street and have myself dropped opposite Daunt’s bookshop, but in Smiley’s day Messrs Francis Edwards, founded 1910, where he whiled away many a happy lunch hour. I plunge into a maze of cobbled alleys and mews cottages that once comprised the Circus’s outstation for Covert Operations – or in the parlance, simply Marylebone.

  Unlike the Stables, which was only ever a safe house dedicated to a single operation, Marylebone with its three front doors was a Service to itself: its own desk officers, cyphers, cypher clerks, couriers, and its own grey army of Occasionals, never known to one another and drawn from all walks of life, who had only to hear the call to down tools and rally to the cause.

  So was it remotely conceivable that Covert still had its being here? In my fugue, I chose to believe it was. And does George Smiley still skulk behind its shuttered windows? In my fugue I must have persuaded myself that he did. Of the nine doorbells only one worked. You had to be one of the faithful to know which. I press it. No response. I press the other two buttons in the same d
oorway. I move to the next doorway and press all three. A woman’s voice screeches at me.

  ‘She’s not bloody here, Sammy! She’s buggered off with Wally and the kid. You ring again, I’ll call the Law, I swear I will.’

  Her advice sobers me. The next thing I know, I am seated in the quiet of Devonshire Street, drinking elderflower cordial in a café full of medics in suits, murmuring head to head. I wait for my breathing to come down. As my head clears, so also does my sense of purpose. For the last couple of days and nights, despite every distraction, the image of Christoph, delinquent, criminal, clever son of Alec, brutally interrogating my Catherine on the doorstep of my house in Brittany, has remained with me. Never until that morning had I heard the ring of fear in Catherine’s voice. Not fear for herself: fear for me. He was not agreeable, Pierre . . . farouche . . . big like a boxer . . . he asked, do you stay in a hotel in London . . . what is the address?

  I say my Catherine because ever since the death of her father I have regarded her as my ward, and to hell with Bunny’s insinuations to the contrary. I watched her grow from infancy. She watched my women come and go until none remained. When she appointed herself the village bad-girl in defiance of her more beautiful sister, and slept with every man-jack she could lay her hands on, I paid no attention to the pompous representations of the village priest, who probably fancied her for himself. I am uneasy with children, but when Isabelle was born I was as happy for Catherine as she was. I never told her what I did for a living. She never told me who the father was. In all the village, I was the only one who didn’t know or care. If she wishes it, one day the farmstead will be hers, and Isabelle will trot along beside her, and perhaps there will be a younger man for Catherine, and perhaps little Isabelle will be willing to look him in the eye.