A Legacy of Spies

by John le Carré

‘Karen? Listen, I know that girl. All I have to do, I go to her, I sing to her, the way I do, I talk about my soul, weep a bit maybe, I tell her I can’t go through with this thing after all, it’s all too painful to me, my dad’s memory, let the dead sleep. I got all the words. Karen’s sensitive. Trust me.’

  And when I don’t exhibit the necessary signs of trust:

  ‘Listen. I invented that fucking girl. She owes me. I did the work, I paid the people, I got the files. I went to her, I gave her the good news, told her where to find her mother’s grave. We go to the lawyers. Her lawyers. Pro bono, the worst. Where does she get them from? Like Amnesty. Some civil rights organization. The pro bono lawyers go to your Government, preach them a sermon. Your Government denies all responsibility, makes a back-door, your-ears-only, we-never-said-this, without prejudice offer of one million pounds sterling. One million! And that’s a base price, it’s negotiable. Personally I would not touch sterling today, but that’s a side issue. What do Karen’s lawyers do? Preach another sermon. We don’t want a million pounds, they say. We’re high-minded people, we want you to eat shit. And if you don’t eat shit, we will take you to court, and if necessary all the way to Strasbourg and the European Court of Fucking Human Rights. Your Government says okay, two million, but her pro bonos still won’t play. They are like Karen. They are holy. They are pure.’

  A metallic crash causes every head in the restaurant to turn. Christoph’s unwashed left hand with all its rings has landed palm down on the table in front of me. He is craning forward. His face raining sweat. A door marked Staff Only opens, a startled head appears and, at the sight of Christoph, vanishes.

  ‘You gonna want my bank details – okay, man? Here they are. And you tell this to your Government, man: one million euros on the day we withdraw, or we throw the fucking book at you.’

  He lifted his hand to reveal a folded piece of lined paper, and watched me thread it into my wallet.

  ‘Who’s Tulip?’ he demands in the same threatening tone.

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘Codename for Doris Gamp. Stasi woman, had a kid.’

  He had not announced his departure. I was still insisting that Gamp–Tulip was not a name to me. A brave waitress was scurrying over with the bill, but he was halfway down the stairs. By the time I reached the street all I saw of him was his huge shadow in the back of a departing cab, and his white hand flapping lazy goodbyes out of the window.

  I know I walked back to Dolphin Square. Somewhere along the way I must have remembered the piece of lined paper with his account number and chucked it into a litterbin, but I would be hard pressed to tell you which one.

  8

  The benign weather of yesterday had been driven off by a lateral rain that raked the streets of Pimlico like gunfire. Arriving late for my tryst at the Stables, I found Bunny standing alone on the doorstep under an umbrella.

  ‘We rather wondered whether you’d done a runner,’ he said, doing his shy-boy smile.

  ‘And if I had?’

  ‘Let’s just say you wouldn’t have got very far.’ Still smiling, he handed me a brown envelope marked On Her Majesty’s Service in red. ‘Congratulations. You are courteously requested to appear before our masters. The All-Party parliamentary committee of inquiry wants a word with you. Date to be announced.’

  ‘And a word with you too, I imagine.’

  ‘Marginally. But we’re not the stars, are we?’

  A black Peugeot draws up. He climbs into the back. The Peugeot drives away.

  ‘Got our reading boots on, Pete?’ Pepsi asks. She is already installed on her throne in the library. ‘Looks like we’re in for a heavy day.’

  She is referring to the thick buff folder that lies waiting for me on the trestle table: my unpublished masterpiece, forty pages of it.

  *

  ‘I am proposing that you draft an official report on the affair, Peter,’ Smiley is saying to me.

  It’s three in the morning. We’re sitting head to head in the front parlour of a council house on an estate in the New Forest.

  ‘I see you as the ideal person for the job,’ he continues, in the same deliberately impersonal tone. ‘A definitive report, please, overlong, rich in irrelevant detail and sparing us the one piece of information that only you and I and four other people in the world, God willing, may ever know. Something that will satisfy the prurient appetites of Joint Steering, and act as an obfuscation for the Head Office post-mortem – I use the word figuratively – that is sure to be called for. To be drafted for my sole approval in the first instance, please. My eyes only. Will you do that? Are you able? With Ilse sitting at your elbow, naturally.’

  Ilse, star linguist of Covert: prim, punctilious Ilse who has German, Czech, Serbo-Croat and Polish at her beautiful fingertips; who lives with her mother in Hampstead and plays the flute on Saturday evenings. Ilse will sit at my elbow, correct my transcriptions of German recordings. We will smile together at my little errors, discuss a choice of word or phrase together, send out for our sandwiches together. We shall lean over the tape recorder together, accidentally butt heads, apologize together. And punctually at half past five, Ilse will go back home to her mother and her flute in Hampstead.

  *

  DEFECTION AND EXFILTRATION OF SUB-SOURCE TULIP.

  Draft report assembled by P. Guillam, Asst to H/Covert Marylebone, to Bill Haydon H/Joint Steering and Oliver Lacon HM Treasury. For approval by H/Covert.

  FIRST INDICATIONS that sub-source Tulip might be at risk of exposure occurred in the course of a routine treff between Mayflower and his controller Leamas (PAUL) in West Berlin safe house K2 (Fasanenstrasse) on 16 January at approx 0730 hours.

  Using his Friedrich Leibach identity, Mayflower had cycled* across the sector border into West Berlin with the ‘morning cavalry’ of East Berlin workmen. A lavish ‘English breakfast’, including fried egg, bacon and baked beans, cooked by Leamas, has become traditional fare for these treffs, which take place at irregular intervals depending on operational need and Mayflower’s professional commitments. As usual, proceedings opened with a routine debriefing and random items of network news:

  Sub-source DAFFODIL has had a recurrence of illness, but insists on continuing to play his part, receiving and forwarding ‘rare books, brochures and personal mail’.

  Sub-source VIOLET’s report on the Soviet military build-up on the Czech border was well received by Whitehall customers. Violet to be granted the bonus she is demanding.

  Sub-source PETAL has a new boyfriend. He is a twenty-two-year-old Red Army corporal of signals, a cypher specialist from Minsk, recently attached to her unit. He is an obsessive stamp collector and Petal has told him that her ageing aunt (fictitious) has a collection of pre-Revolutionary Russian stamps that she is tired of, and may be willing to part with at a price. She intends that the price, negotiated in bed, will be a codebook. On advice from Leamas, Mayflower has assured her that London will supply an appropriate stamp collection.

  Only now does the conversation turn to sub-source Tulip.

  Verbatim:

  Leamas: And on the Doris front? Is she up or down?

  Mayflower: Paul, my friend, I don’t know and I can’t diagnose. With Doris, each day will be different.

  Leamas: You’re her lifeline, Karl.

  Mayflower: She has decided that her husband Mr Quinz is taking too much interest in her.

  Leamas: High bloody time. In what way?

  Mayflower: He suspects her. She doesn’t know what of. Asks her all the time where she’s going, who she meets. Where she’s been. Watches her while she cooks, dresses, goes about her life.

  Leamas: Maybe Doris has got herself a jealous husband finally.

  Mayflower: She refutes it. She says Quinz is jealous only of himself, his shining career and his ego. But with Doris, who knows?

  Leamas: How about life in the office
?

  Mayflower: She says Rapp dare not suspect her because his disciplinary transgressions do not allow him to. She says that if she were suspected by I.S., she would already be sitting in a cage in the detention house down the road.

  Leamas: I.S.?

  Mayflower: The Stasi’s internal security section. She walks past their door every morning on her way to Rapp’s suite.

  At midday of the same day, as a matter of routine, Leamas instructed de Jong to revisit existing contingency plans for the exfiltration of sub-source Tulip. De Jong confirmed that escape papers and resources for an eastward exfiltration via Prague were current. Having waited for the evening shift of workmen, Mayflower cycled back into East Berlin.

  Pepsi is being a fidget, repeatedly coming down from her throne to prowl the room for no reason, or stand behind me to peer over my shoulder. I am imagining Tulip in the same state of restlessness, now at home in Hohenschönhausen, now in her office next to Emmanuel Rapp’s in Stasi House Number 3 in the Magdalenenstrasse.

  THE SECOND INTIMATION came in the form of a doctor-to-doctor call. With the assistance of the West Berlin police, an emergency contact system had been put in place. If Mayflower called the Klinikum (West Berlin) from the Charité (East Berlin) and demanded to speak to his notional colleague Dr Fleischmann, the call would be immediately re-routed to Berlin Station. At 0920 hours on 21 Jan., the following re-routed conversation between Mayflower and Leamas took place under medical cover.

  Verbatim:

  Mayflower (calling from the Charité, East Berlin): Dr Fleischmann?

  Leamas: Speaking.

  Mayflower: This is Dr Riemeck. You have a patient. Frau Lisa Sommer.*

  Leamas: What about her?

  Mayflower: Last night Frau Sommer reported herself to my Casualty unit suffering from delusions. We sedated her but she discharged herself during the night.

  Leamas: Delusions of what?

  Mayflower: She fantasizes that her husband suspects her of betraying State secrets to Fascist anti-Party elements.

  Leamas: Thanks. Noted. Unfortunately I am required in theatre.

  Mayflower: Understood.

  Two hours intervene during which Mayflower uncached his Theatre* equipment, tuned it to the recommended specifications, and finally obtained a weak signal. Sound quality patchy throughout the ensuing conversation. Substance:

  Early that same morning Tulip had made an unprecedented crisis call to Mayflower in his surgery, consisting of an agreed series of pinpoint taps on the mouthpiece of a third-party telephone (in this case a callbox). In return Mayflower had signalled his assent: two taps, pause, three taps.

  The emergency rendezvous [rv] was a spinney outside Köpenick: fortuitously the same spinney that he had previously chosen to cache his Theatre equipment. Both parties arrived by bicycle within minutes of each other. Tulip’s initial mood, according to Mayflower, was ‘triumphalist’. Quinz was ‘neutralized’, he was ‘good as dead’. Mayflower should rejoice with her. God had been at her side. Then the following narrative:

  Returning home from work late last night, Quinz had grabbed the Zenit camera hanging from its strap behind the front door, opened its back, muttered something, snapped it shut and returned it to its hook. He had then demanded to inspect the contents of Tulip’s handbag. When she resisted he threw her across the room and searched it anyway. When Gustav ran to his mother’s defence, Quinz hit him across the face, causing bleeding from the mouth and nose. Evidently not finding what he was looking for, Quinz then ransacked kitchen cupboards and drawers, frenetically patted the soft furniture, and stormed through Tulip’s clothes, and finally Gustav’s toy cupboard, all without success.

  In Gustav’s hearing he then in a loud tone challenged Tulip to explain, in questions counted on his spread fingers: number one, why the family Zenit camera contained no film; number two, why there was only one unused film in the pocket of the camera case, although a week ago there had been two; and number three, why a film that only last Sunday had been sitting in the Zenit with two frames exposed was also missing.

  And by way of subsidiary questions what had she photographed with the remaining eight frames? Where had she taken the film to be developed? Where were the results? And what had happened to the missing unused film? Or had she – his personal conviction – been photographing the classified documents he brought home and selling them to Western spies?

  The true facts of the situation, as Tulip well knew, were as follows. Since caching a Minox under the shower stand in the women’s toilet of her corridor in House 3, Tulip had on principle kept no Minox either in the fastening of her shoulder bag or at home. If Quinz brought documents of interest home from the GDR Foreign Office, Tulip would wait till he was asleep or engrossed with his male friends and photograph the documents with the family Zenit. On the previous Sunday, she had taken two snaps of Gustav on a swing in the playground. The same evening, while Quinz sat drinking with friends, she had used the remaining frames of the same film to photograph documents from his briefcase. She had then removed the film from the Zenit, buried it in a flowerpot pending her next treff with Mayflower, but had neglected to put a fresh film into the camera, let alone put her finger over the lens and shoot off a couple of frames to represent two misfires of Gustav. Despite all this, Tulip contrived to mount what she considered to be a devastating counter-attack against her husband. She informed Quinz, in case he didn’t know, that there were many in the Stasi who remained suspicious of him on account of his odious father and reputed homosexuality; that nobody in the Stasi was taken in by his exaggerated professions of Party loyalty; and yes, she had indeed photographed whatever she could get her hands on from his briefcase, not in order to sell to the West or anyone else, but to blackmail him in the event of a custody battle over Gustav, which she considered imminent. Because one thing was for sure, she told him: if it were ever to come out that Lothar Quinz took home classified documents to obsess over during off-duty hours, his dreams of becoming a GDR ambassador abroad would be over.

  Return to tape:

  Leamas to Mayflower: So how do things stand?

  Mayflower to Leamas: She is convinced she has reduced him to silence. He went to work as normal this morning. He was calm, even affectionate.

  Leamas: Where is she now?

  Mayflower: At home, waiting for Emmanuel Rapp. At midday precisely he will pick her up in his car and they will drive to Dresden for a full session of the Domestic Security Soviet. He has promised her that this time she will attend the meeting as his assistant. It will be an honour for her.

  [Fifteen-second pause.]

  Leamas: All right. So here’s what she does. She phones Rapp’s office now. She’s been sick as a dog all night, she’s got a barking temperature and she’s too ill to travel, she’s heartbroken. Then she aborts. She knows the procedure. She gets to the rendezvous. She waits.

  Leamas then informed Head Office by crash telegram that the requirement for an emergency exfiltration of sub-source Tulip had advanced from amber to red, and that since she was fully conscious to source Mayflower, the entire Mayflower network must be considered at risk. Since the escape plan required the collaboration of both Prague and Paris Stations, the resources of Joint Steering were essential. He also requested immediate permission to undertake the exfiltration ‘in person’, in the full knowledge that, under standing Circus orders, a serving officer possessing information of high sensitivity who proposes to enter denied territory without diplomatic protection must obtain the advance consent of Head Office in writing – in this case, Joint Steering. Ten minutes later he had his answer: ‘Your request refused. Confirm. J.S.’ The telegram was otherwise unsigned in accordance with H/JS [Haydon’s] policy of collective decision-making. Simultaneously, Signals Intelligence reported a surge on all Stasi wavelengths, while the British Military Mission in Potsdam noted a tightening of security at all crossing points into West Ber
lin, all along the GDR–West German border. At 1505 GMT, GDR radio announced a nationwide search for an unnamed female lackey of Fascist imperialism answering the following description. The description was of Tulip.

  Leamas had in the meantime taken steps of his own, in defiance of Joint Steering’s instruction. He makes no apology for this, claiming only that he wasn’t going to ‘sit on his arse and watch Tulip and the entire Mayflower network going up in smoke’. When Joint Steering urged that at least Mayflower himself should immediately be exfiltrated, Leamas’s retort was uncompromising: ‘He can come out any time he wants, but he won’t. He’d rather stand trial like his father.’ Less clear is the part played by the Station’s recently upgraded Assistant Officer, Stavros de Jong, and Ben Porter, the Station’s security guard and driver.

  Testimony of Ben Porter (security guard, Berlin Station) to PG, verbatim:

  Alec’s at his desk on the secure blower to Joint Steering. I’m standing at the door. He puts down the phone and he turns to me and he says, ‘Ben,’ he says, ‘we’re on. It’s a rolling job. Get the Land Rover out and tell Stas I want him in full drag in the courtyard in five minutes,’ he says. At no time did Mr Leamas say to me, ‘Ben, I have to inform you we are doing this in direct contravention of Head Office instructions.’

  Testimony of Stavros de Jong (probationer attached to H/Covert Berlin) to PG, verbatim:

  I asked Head of Covert, ‘Alec, are we sure Head Office is behind us on this one?’ To which he replied, ‘Stas, take my word for it.’ So I did.

  Their protestations of innocence were mine, not theirs. Since I had no doubt that Smiley had encouraged Leamas to undertake the exfiltration of Tulip himself, I was careful to supply Porter and de Jong with get-out-of-jail statements in case they were forced to give an account of themselves by Percy Alleline or one of his henchmen.

  *

  It is three days later. The story is taken up by Alec himself. It is ten o’clock at night and he is being debriefed across a plywood table in the safe room at the British Embassy in Prague where he holed out an hour earlier. He is talking into a tape recorder and on the other side of it sits the Head of Prague Station, one Jerry Ormond, husband to the redoubtable Sally who is also the Station’s number two in a his-and-hers Circus partnership. Also on the table, if only in my informed imagination, a bottle of the Scotch whisky, and one glass only – Alec’s – which Jerry intermittently replenishes. By the lifeless tone of Alec’s voice it is clear that he is exhausted, which as far as Ormond is concerned is all to the good, since his task as debriefer is to take down his subject’s story before his memory has had a chance to edit it. In my imagination again, Alec is unshaven and wearing a borrowed dressing gown after the hasty shower he has been allowed to take. The Irish comes through his voice in irregular bursts.