A Legacy of Spies

by John le Carré

  A silence for the dead. Broken by Tabitha in a voice of casual enquiry.

  ‘You know what I dreamed last night?’

  ‘Why the hell should I?’

  ‘I was doing my due diligence, wading through that endless draft report that Smiley made you write and decided not to circulate. And I got to wondering about that peculiar Swiss ornithologist who turned out to be an undercover member of the Circus’s domestic security arm. And then I asked myself why didn’t Smiley want your report circulated? So I did some more due diligence, and nosed around wherever I was allowed to nose, and for the life of me I couldn’t turn up a single thing about anybody testing the defences of Camp 4 over that period. And absolutely nothing about an overzealous undercover operator who punched out Camp 4’s security guards. So it didn’t exactly take an epiphany to stitch together the rest. No death certificate for Tulip. Well, we know the poor girl hadn’t landed officially, but not many doctors like putting their names to a bogus death certificate, even Circus doctors.’

  I glowered into the distance, and tried to pretend I thought she was mad.

  ‘So my reading is: Mundt was sent over to murder Tulip. He murdered her, but the good Lord wasn’t on his side and he got caught. George put the hard word on him. Spy for us or else. He does. Cornucopia of lovely intelligence, suddenly at risk. Fiedler looks like rumbling him. Enter Control with his revolting plan. George may not have cared for it but, as ever with George, duty called. Nobody reckoned on Liz and Alec getting shot. That would have been Mundt’s big idea: shoot the messengers and get a better night’s sleep. Not even Control could have spotted that one on the horizon. Your George went straight into retirement, vowing never to spy again. Which we love him for, although it didn’t last. He still had to come back and catch Bill Haydon, which he did wonderfully well, bless him. And you were for him all the way, which we can only applaud.’

  Nothing came to mind, so I said nothing.

  ‘And to twist the knife in what was already a very large wound, no sooner had the Star Chamber done its business than Hans-Dieter was summoned to a power conference in Moscow, never to be seen again. So goodbye to any last hopes that he might get his nose under the wire at Centre, and tell us who the Circus traitor was. Presumably Bill Haydon had got there ahead of him. Can we talk a little more about you?’

  I couldn’t stop her, so why try?

  ‘If I was allowed to argue that Windfall was not the cock-up of all time but a fiendishly clever operation that was wildly productive of top-grade intelligence and only went off the rails at the last minute, I have very little doubt that the All-Partygoers would roll over and put their paws in the air. Liz and Alec? Tragic, yes, but in the circumstances, acceptable losses in the cause of the greater good. Am I winning? I’m not. Oh dear. Only suggesting. Because I don’t think I can defend you any other way. In fact I’m quite sure I can’t.’

  She had started to pack her things together: spectacles, cardigan, paper tissues, Special Branch reports, Stasi reports.

  ‘You spoke, heart?’

  Did I? Neither of us is sure. She’s called a halt to her packing. She’s holding her briefcase open on her lap, waiting for me to speak. Eternity ring on second finger. Odd I haven’t noticed it till now. Wonder who the husband is. Probably dead.

  ‘Look here.’

  ‘Still looking, heart.’

  ‘Accepting for one moment your absurd hypothesis—’

  ‘That the fiendishly clever operation worked—?’

  ‘Accepting it, theoretically, which I absolutely do not – are you seriously telling me that – in the impossible event that documentary proof to that effect should ever come to light—’

  ‘Which we know it won’t, but if it ever did, it would have to be cast iron—’

  ‘Are you telling me that in such an improbable eventuality, the charges – the accusations – litigation – the whole bang shooting-match against whomever – me, George, if he can be found, even the Service – would go away?’

  ‘You find me the evidence, I’ll find you the judge. The vultures are gathering as we speak. If you don’t show up for the hearing, the All-Partygoers will fear the worst, and act accordingly. I asked Bunny for your passport. The brute won’t part with it. But he will extend your stay at Dolphin Square on the same miserly terms. All to be discussed. Will same time tomorrow morning suit you?’

  ‘Could we make it ten?’

  ‘I’ll be on the dot,’ she replied, and I said I would too.

  13

  When the truth catches up with you, don’t be a hero, run. But I took care to walk, slowly, into Dolphin Square and up to the safe flat I knew I would never sleep in again. Draw curtains, sigh resignedly for the television set, close bedroom door. Extract French passport from dead letter box behind fire precautions notice. There is a calming ritual to escape. Don clean set of clothes. Shove razor in raincoat pocket, leave the rest in place. Make my way down to grill room, order light meal, settle to my boring book like a man reconciled to a solitary evening. Chat up Hungarian waitress in case she has reporting responsibility. Actually I live in France, I tell her, but I’m over here to talk business with a bunch of English lawyers, can she imagine anything worse, ha ha? Pay bill. Saunter into courtyard with retired ladies in white hats and croquet skirts, seated in pairs along garden benches, enjoy the unseasonable sunshine. Prepare to join exodus to Embankment, never to return.

  Except that I do neither of these last two things, because by now I have spotted Christoph, son of Alec, in his long black coat and Homburg hat, lounging twenty yards away on a bench all to himself, with one arm thrown affectionately along the back of it, and one large leg slung over the other for leisure, and his right hand buried, ostentatiously to my eye, in his overcoat pocket. He is staring straight at me and he is smiling, which is not something I have seen him do before, whether as a child watching a football match or as a man eating steak and chips. And perhaps the smile is new to him too, because it comes with a peculiar whiteness in the face, intensified by the blackness of his hat, and there is a flicker to his smile like a faulty light bulb that doesn’t know whether it’s on or off.

  And I am as much at a loss as he appears to be. A tiredness has come over me which I suspect is fear. Ignore him? Give him a cheery wave and continue with my planned escape? He will come after me. He will raise a hue and cry. He’s got a plan too, but what is it?

  The sickly-pale smile continues to flicker. There is something about his lower jaw, an irritation he seems unable to control. And has he actually broken his right arm? Is that why it’s jammed so awkwardly in his coat pocket? He makes no effort to get up. I set out towards him, closely observed by the seated ladies in white hats. In the whole courtyard, we are the only two males and Christoph cuts an eccentric, not to say gargantuan figure, occupying a whole stage to himself. What is my business with him? they are wondering. So am I. I come to a halt in front of him. Nothing of him moves. He could be one of those bronze statues of great men you see seated in public places: a Churchill, a Roosevelt. The same moist complexion, the same unconvincing smile.

  The statue comes slowly to life in a way that other statues don’t. He uncrosses his legs, then with his right shoulder high and his right hand still jammed in his overcoat pocket, shuffles his big body until there is space on the bench for me at his left side. And yes, he is sickly pale, and agitated around the jaw, now smiling, now grimacing, and his gaze is feverish.

  ‘Who told you where to find me, Christoph?’ I ask him as cheerfully as I may, because by now I am grappling with the far-fetched notion that Bunny or Laura, or even Tabitha, has put him on to me, with the aim of negotiating some other kind of underhand deal between the Service and its litigants.

  ‘I remembered’ – the smile widening with dreamy pride – ‘I’m a memory genius, okay? The brain of fucking Germany. So we have our nice meal and you tell me to go fuck myself. Okay, yo
u didn’t tell me. I go away. I sit down with my friends. I smoke a little, I snort a little, I listen. Who do I hear? Want a guess?’

  I shake my head. I’m smiling too.

  ‘My daddy. I hear my daddy. His voice. On one of our little walks together round the prison courtyard. I’m doing time, he’s trying to play catch-up, be the ever-faithful father he never was. So he’s talking about himself, entertaining me, telling me about the years we didn’t spend together, like pretending we did. What it was like to be a spook. How special you all were, how dedicated. Such naughty boys you were. And you know what? He’s talking about Hood House. The house of hoods. This joke you all had. How the Circus owned these crappy safe flats in a place called Hood House. We’re all hoods, so that’s where they put us.’ The smile becomes a scowl of indignation. ‘You know your shit Service has even got you registered here under your own name, for fuck’s sake? P. Guillam. How’s that for security? Did you know that?’ he demanded.

  No. I didn’t know. Neither was I marvelling, as I should have done, that in more than half a century, the Service hadn’t thought to change its habits.

  ‘So why don’t you tell me what you’ve come for?’ I asked him, unsettled by his smile, which he seemed unable to shake off.

  ‘To kill you, Pierrot,’ he explained, with no lift or variation to his voice. ‘To shoot your fucking head off. Bingo. You’re dead.’

  ‘Here?’ I asked. ‘In front of all these people? How?’

  With a Walther P38 semi-automatic pistol: the one he has drawn from the right-hand pocket of his overcoat and is now brandishing in plain sight; and only after plenty of time for me to admire it does he restore it to his overcoat pocket while keeping his hand on it and, in the best tradition of gangster movies, pointing the barrel at me through the folds of his coat. What the ladies in white hats make of this display, if anything at all, I shall never know. Perhaps we’re a film unit. Perhaps we’re just silly grown-up boys, playing a game with a toy gun.

  ‘Good gracious me,’ I exclaim – a term I had never consciously used in my life until now – ‘wherever did you get that from?’

  The question annoyed him, extinguishing the smile.

  ‘You think I don’t know wise guys in this fucking town? People who will lend me a gun like that?’ he demanded, flicking the thumb and forefinger of his free hand in my face.

  Prompted by the word lend, I peered instinctively round for the rightful owner, since I was not imagining a long-term loan: which was how my eye came to settle on a Volvo saloon repaired in various colours and parked on a double yellow line directly opposite the archway on the Embankment side; and its one bald male driver with both hands on the wheel, staring hard ahead of him through the windscreen.

  ‘Do you have a particular reason for killing me, Christoph?’ I asked him, maintaining as best I could the same note of casual enquiry. ‘I’ve told the powers that be of your offer, if that’s what you’re worried about,’ I threw in mendaciously. ‘They’re thinking about it. Her Majesty’s bean-counters don’t cough up a million euros overnight, naturally.’

  ‘I was the best thing in his lousy rotten life. He told me that.’

  Spoken in a low tone, forced from between rigid teeth.

  ‘I never doubted that he loved you,’ I said.

  ‘You killed him. You lied to my dad and you killed him. Your friend, my dad.’

  ‘Christoph, that’s not true. Your dad and Liz Gold weren’t killed by me or anyone else in the Circus. They were killed by Hans-Dieter Mundt of the Stasi.’

  ‘You’re all sick. All you spies. You’re not the cure, you’re the fucking disease. Jerk-off artists, playing jerk-off games, thinking you’re the biggest fucking wise guys in the universe. You’re nothings, hear me? You live in the fucking dark because you can’t handle the fucking daylight. Him too. He told me that.’

  ‘He did? When?’

  ‘In prison, where the fuck d’you think? My first prison. Kids’ prison. Pervs, cokeheads and me. Somebody to see you, Christoph. Says he’s your best pal. They cuff me and take me to him. It’s my dad. Hear this, he says. You’re a lost cause and there’s fuck all that I or anybody else can do for you any more. But Alec Leamas loves his son, so don’t fucking forget it. You speak?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Stand the fuck up. Walk. That way. Through the archway. Like the rest of the people. You fuck with me, I kill you.’

  I stand up. I walk towards the archway. He follows me, his right hand still in his pocket and the gun pointed at me through the cloth. There are things you’re supposed to do in these cases, like wheel round and catch him with your elbow before he has time to fire. We rehearsed it with water pistols at Sarratt, and more often than not the water squirted past you on to the gym mat. But this isn’t a water pistol, and it isn’t Sarratt. Christoph’s walking four feet behind me, which is where the well-taught gunman should be.

  We have passed through the archway. The bald man sitting in the multi-coloured Volvo still has his hands on the steering wheel and although we’re walking straight towards him he pays us no attention, he’s too busy staring ahead. Does Christoph intend to take me for the proverbial ride before he puts me out of my misery? If he does, my best chance of breaking free will come when he tries to get me into the Volvo. I’d done that once long ago: broken a man’s hand for him with the car door when he was trying to get me to climb into the back seat.

  Other cars are passing in both directions, and we have to wait for a gap in the traffic before we cross the road, and I’m wondering whether I’ll get a chance to grapple with him and in the worst case shove him at an oncoming car. We’ve reached the opposite pavement and I’m still wondering. We’ve also walked past the Volvo without a sign or word passing between Christoph and its bald driver, so maybe I’ve got it wrong and they’re nothing to do with each other, and whoever lent Christoph the Walther is sitting in Hackney or somewhere, playing a game of cards with his fellow wise guys.

  We are standing on the Embankment and there’s a brick parapet about five feet high and I’m standing facing it, with the river in front of me and the lights of Lambeth on the other bank because it’s dusk already, still mild for the time of day, a nice breeze coming up and quite big boats gliding by, and I have my hands on the parapet and my back to him and I’m hoping that he’ll come close enough for me to try the water-pistol trick, but I can’t feel his presence, and he’s not talking.

  Keeping my hands wide where he can see them, I turn slowly round and he’s standing six feet away from me, still with his hand in his pocket. He’s breathing in gulps and his big pale face is moist and luminous in the half-light. People pass us by, but they don’t pass between us. Something about us tells them to step around us. More accurately it’s something about Christoph’s bulk, overcoat and Homburg hat. Is he brandishing the gun again, or is it in his pocket? Is he still adopting his gangster posture? It occurs to me, late in the day, that the man who dresses like that wants to be feared; and the man who wants to be feared is afraid himself, and perhaps this is what gives me the bravado to challenge him.

  ‘Come on, Christoph, do it,’ I say, as a middle-aged couple scurry past. ‘Shoot me, if that’s what you’ve come for. What’s another year to a man of my age? I’ll settle for a good clean death any time. Shoot me. Then spend the rest of your life congratulating yourself while you rot in jail. You’ve seen old men die in prison. Be another.’

  By now the muscles in my back are squirming and there’s a pulse beating in my ears and I couldn’t have told you whether it came from a passing barge or was something going on inside my own head. My mouth had gone dry from all the speaking and my gaze must have misted over, because it took me a while to acknowledge that Christoph was beside me, slouched over the parapet, retching and sobbing in gulps of pain and anger.

  I put an arm across his back and eased his right hand free of his pocket. When it came ou
t with no gun in it, I drew out the gun for him and slung it as far as I could into the river, but heard nothing in reply. He had his arms on the parapet and had sunk his head into them. I fished around in his other pocket, on the off-chance that he had provided himself with a spare magazine to embolden him, and sure enough he had. I had just thrown that into the river too when the bald man from the multi-coloured Volvo, who by contrast with Christoph was very small and looked half starved, seized him by the waist from behind and hauled at him, to no effect.

  Between us we prised him away from the parapet and between us we manhandled him as far as the Volvo. As we did so, he began to howl. I made to open the passenger door, but my companion-in-arms had already opened the back door. Between us we bundled him in and slammed the door after him, damping but not silencing the howls. The Volvo drove away. I stood alone on the pavement. Slowly the traffic and the sounds returned. I was alive. I hailed a cab and asked the driver to take me to the British Museum.

  *

  First the cobbled alley. Then the private car park that stank of rotting rubbish. Then the six kissing gates: ours was the end one on the right. If Christoph’s howls were still ringing in my head, I refused to hear them. The fastener on the gate squeaked. I heard that all right. It always had done, however many times we oiled it. If we knew Control was coming we’d leave the gate open so we wouldn’t have to listen to the old devil’s sour comment about being heralded by the clashing of cymbals. Slabs of York stone. Mendel and I had laid them. And sowed grass between. Our birdhouse. No bird turned away. Three steps to the kitchen door, and Millie McCraig’s motionless shadow looking down on me through the window, holding her hand up, forbidding me to enter.

  We stand in an improvised garden shed, built against the wall to shelter her dustbins and the remnants of her ladies’ upright bicycle, exiled from the house by Laura, draped in a tarpaulin and stripped of its wheels for security. We are speaking in murmurs. Perhaps we always did. The classified cat watches from the kitchen window.