A Legacy of Spies

by John le Carré

  ‘I don’t know what they’ve put where, Peter,’ she confides. ‘I don’t trust my telephone. Well, I never did. I don’t trust my walls either. I don’t know what they’ve got these days, nor where they put it.’

  ‘You heard what Tabitha said to me about evidence?’

  ‘Part, I did. Enough.’

  ‘Have you still got everything we gave you? The original statements, correspondence, whatever else George asked you to hide away?’

  ‘Microdotted by myself. Cached. I have too.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘In my garden. In my birdhouse. In their cassettes. In oilskins. In that’ – that being the remnants of her bicycle. ‘They don’t know where to look these days, Peter. They’ve no proper training,’ she adds indignantly.

  ‘Including George’s interview with Windfall at Camp 4? The recruitment interview? The deal?’

  ‘I do. As part of my classic collection of gramophone records. Transferred for me by Oliver Mendel. I listen to them now and then. For George’s voice. I still love it. Are you married at all, Peter?’

  ‘Just the farm and the animals. Who have you got, Millie?’

  ‘I’ve my memories. And my Maker. The new lot have given me till Monday to get out. I’ll not keep them waiting.’

  ‘Where will you go?’

  ‘I’ll die. Same as you. I’ve a sister in Aberdeen. I’ll not let you have them, Peter, if that’s what you’ve come for.’

  ‘Not for the greater good?’

  ‘There’s no greater good without George’s say-so. There never was.’

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘I don’t know. And I’d not tell you if I did. Alive, for sure. The cards I get on my birthday and at Christmas. He never forgets. Always to my sister, never here, security. Same as always.’

  ‘If I had to find him, who would I go to? There’s someone, Millie. You know who it is.’

  ‘Maybe Jim. If he’ll tell you.’

  ‘Can I call him? What’s his number?’

  ‘Jim’s not a telephone man. Not any more.’

  ‘But he’s in the same place?’

  ‘So I believe.’

  Without another word she grasps my shoulders in her fierce, spindly hands and grants me one stern kiss of her sealed lips.

  *

  I got as far as Reading that night, and lay up in a hostel near the railway station where no one bothered with names. If I hadn’t by now been reported missing from Dolphin Square, the first person to notice my absence would be Tabitha at ten next morning, not nine. If there was going to be a hue and cry, I didn’t see it breaking before midday. I breakfasted at leisure, bought a ticket to Exeter and stood in the corridor of an overcrowded train as far as Taunton. By way of the car park, I headed for the outskirts of town and hung around waiting for the dusk to fall.

  I hadn’t clapped eyes on Jim Prideaux since Control had sent him on the abortive mission to Czecho that had cost him a bullet in the back and the unsleeping attention of a Czech torture team. By birth, we were both mongrels: Jim part Czech and part Norman, where I’m Breton. But there the comparison stopped. The Slav in Jim ran deep. As a boy, he had run messages and cut German throats for Czech Resistance. Cambridge may have educated him, but it never tamed him. When he joined the Circus, even Sarratt’s close-combat instructors learned to be wary of him.

  A cab dropped me at the main gates. A muddy green sign read NOW OPEN FOR GIRLS. A pitted drive wound towards a dilapidated stately home surrounded by low prefabricated buildings. Picking my way between potholes, I passed a playing field, a tumbledown cricket pavilion, a couple of labourers’ cottages and a group of shaggy ponies grazing in a paddock. Two boys on bicycles rode by, the larger with a violin on his back, the smaller a cello. I waved them down.

  ‘I’m looking for Mr Prideaux,’ I said. They peered blankly at each other. ‘A member of your staff here, I’m told. Teaches languages. Or used to.’

  The larger boy shook his head and started to ride on.

  ‘You don’t mean Jim, do you?’ the younger one said. ‘Old bloke with a limp. Lives in a caravan in the Dip. Does French Extra and Junior Rugby.’

  ‘What’s the Dip?’

  ‘Keep left past School House, down the track till you see an old Alvis. We’re late actually.’

  I keep left. Behind tall windows, small boys and girls crouch at desks under white neon lights. Reaching the other side of the building, I passed through an avenue of temporary classrooms. A track descended towards a clump of pine trees. In front of them, under a tarpaulin, the outlines of a vintage car; and beside it a caravan with one light burning in the curtained window. Strains of Mahler issued from it. I knocked on the door and a gruff voice responded in fury.

  ‘Go away, boy! Fous-moi la paix! Look it up.’

  I went round to the curtained window and, with a pen from my pocket, reached up and tapped out my pinpoint, then gave him time to put away his gun, if that’s what he was doing, because with Jim you never knew.

  *

  A bottle of slivovitz on the table, half drunk. Jim has produced a second glass and switched off his record player. By the paraffin lamp his craggy face is crooked with pain and age, his uneven back propped against the meagre upholstery. The tortured are a class apart. You can imagine – just – where they’ve been, but never what they’ve brought back.

  ‘Bloody school collapsed,’ he barks, with a burst of hectic laughter. ‘Thursgood, fellow’s name was. Headmaster. Perfectly good wife. Couple of kids. Turned out to be a bloody pansy,’ he declared, with exaggerated derision. ‘Did a moonlight flit with the school chef. Took the fees with him. New Zealand or somewhere. Not enough in the kitty to pay the staff till the end of the week. Never thought he had it in him. Well’ – chuckling, as he tops up our glasses – ‘what to do, eh? Can’t leave the kids in the lurch, middle of a school year. Exams coming up. First Eleven fixtures. School prizes. I had my pension, plus a bit of extra for getting myself knocked about. Couple of parents chipped in. George knew a banker. Well, after that, school’s not going to sling me out, is it?’ He drank, eyeing me over his glass. ‘Not going to pack me off to Czecho on another wild goose chase, are you? Not now they’re cosying up to Moscow again.’

  ‘I need to talk to George,’ I said.

  For a while nothing happened. From the darkening world outside, just the rustle of trees and the moan of cattle. And in front of me, Jim’s lopsided body hoisted motionless against the wall of the little caravan, and his Slav gaze glowering at me from under ragged black brows.

  ‘Been bloody good to me over the years, old George has. Welfaring a clapped-out joe, not everybody’s taste. Not sure he needs you, frankly. Have to ask him.’

  ‘How would you do that?’

  ‘Not a natural player of the spying game, George. Don’t know how he got himself into it. Took it all on his own shoulders. Can’t do that in our trade. Can’t feel all the other chaps’ pain as well as your own. Not if you want to carry on. That bloody wife of his had a lot to answer for, my view. Hell she think she was up to?’ he demanded, and once again fell silent, grimacing, daring me to answer his question.

  But Jim had never cared much for women, and there was no answer I could offer him that didn’t include the name of his nemesis and former lover Bill Haydon, who had recruited him to the Circus, betrayed him to his masters and slept with Smiley’s wife for cover along the way.

  ‘Got himself all cut up about Karla, of all people,’ he was complaining, still on the subject of Smiley. ‘The clever bastard in Moscow Centre who recruited all those long-term joes against us.’

  Of whom Bill Haydon was the most spectacular, he might have added, if he could have brought himself to speak the name of the man whose neck he had reputedly broken with his bare hands while Haydon was languishing at Sarratt, waiting to be shipped to Moscow as part of an agent
-swapping deal.

  ‘First, old George persuades Karla to come over to the West. Finds his weak spot, works on it, all credit to him. Debriefs the fellow. Gets him a name and a job in South America. Teaching Russian Studies to Latinos. Resettles him. Nothing too much trouble. Year later the bloody man shoots himself and breaks George’s heart. How the devil did that happen? I said to him: hell’s got into you, George? Karla topped himself. Good luck to him. Always George’s problem, seeing both sides of everything. Wore him out.’

  With a grunt of pain or censure, he poured us both another shot of slivovitz.

  ‘You on the run, by any chance?’ he enquired.

  ‘I am.’

  ‘To France?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What sort of passport?’

  ‘British.’

  ‘Has the Office put your name about yet?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’m gambling it hasn’t.’

  ‘Southampton’s your best bet. Keep your head down, take a crowded midday ferry.’

  ‘Thanks. That’s what I’m planning.’

  ‘Not about Tulip, is it? Not dragging that stuff up, are you?’ – clenching a fist and driving it across his mouth as if to punch away an intolerable recollection.

  ‘It’s the whole Windfall operation,’ I said. ‘There’s a king-sized parliamentary inquiry getting its knife into the Circus. In George’s absence, they’ve cast me as the villain of the piece.’

  I had barely got the words out before he slammed his fist on the table between us, setting the glasses chiming.

  ‘Bugger all to do with George! That bastard Mundt killed her! Killed them all! Killed Alec, killed his girl!’

  ‘Well, that’s something we need to be able to say in court, Jim. They’re throwing the whole book at me. Maybe at you too, if they can dig your name out of the files. So I need George badly.’ And when he still didn’t respond: ‘So how do I get in touch with him?’

  ‘You can’t.’

  ‘How do you?’

  Another angry silence.

  ‘Phone boxes, if you want to know. Nothing local, I wouldn’t touch ’em. Never the same one twice. Always agree the next treff in advance.’

  ‘You to him? Him to you?’

  ‘Bit of both.’

  ‘Is his own telephone number the same one each time?’

  ‘Could be.’

  ‘Is it a landline?’

  ‘Could be.’

  ‘Then you know where to find him, don’t you?’

  Grabbing a school exercise book from a heap at his elbow, he ripped a blank page from it. I handed him a pencil.

  ‘Kollegiengebäude drei,’ he intoned as he wrote. ‘Library. Woman called Friede. Good enough for you?’ – and having handed me the page, sat back with his eyes closed, waiting for me to leave him in peace.

  *

  It was not true that I proposed to catch a crowded midday ferry from Southampton. It was not true that I was travelling on a British passport. I didn’t like deceiving him, but with Jim you never quite knew.

  An early-morning flight from Bristol took me to Le Bourget. Stepping down the gangway, I was assailed by memories of Tulip: this was my last sight of you alive; this was where I promised you that you would soon be reunited with Gustav; this was where I prayed for you to turn your head, but you never did.

  From Paris, I took a train to Basel. By the time I got out at Freiburg, all the anger and perplexity I had suppressed over the days of my inquisition came racing to the surface. Who was to blame for my lifetime of dutiful dissembling, if not George Smiley? Was it I who had suggested I should befriend Liz Gold? Was it my idea to lie to Alec, our tethered goat, as Tabitha had called him – then watch him walk into the trap George had set for Mundt?

  Well, now for the reckoning at last. Now for some straight answers to hard questions, like: did you, George, consciously set out to suppress the humanity in me, or was I just collateral damage too? Like: what about your humanity, and why did it always have to play second fiddle to some higher, more abstract cause that I can’t quite put my finger on any more, if I ever could?

  Or put another way: how much of our human feeling can we dispense with in the name of freedom, would you say, before we cease to feel either human or free? Or were we simply suffering from the incurable English disease of needing to play the world’s game when we weren’t world players any more?

  The library of Kollegiengebäude Number Three, the helpful lady called Friede at reception told me with some vigour, was in the building straight across the courtyard, through the big doorway, and turn right. It wasn’t marked LIBRARY, and actually it wasn’t a library, just a long, quiet reading room set aside for visiting scholars.

  And would I kindly bear in mind that silence was the rule?

  *

  I don’t know whether Jim had somehow told George I was on my way to him, or whether he simply sensed my presence. He was sitting at a desk strewn with papers, in a window bay with his back to me, an angle that gave him light to read by and, when he needed it, a view of the surrounding hills and forests. There was nobody else in the room so far as I could see: just a row of timbered alcoves with desks and empty, comfortable chairs. I moved round until we could see each other. And since George had always seemed older than his years, I was relieved to see that no unpleasant surprise awaited me. It was the same George, just grown into the age he had always seemed to be: but George in red pullover and bright-yellow corduroys, which startled me because I’d only ever seen him in a bad suit. And if his features in repose retained their owlish sadness, there was no sadness in his greeting as, with a burst of energy, he bounded to his feet and grasped my hand in both of his.

  ‘So whatever are you reading there?’ I protest erratically, keeping my voice low because silence was the rule.

  ‘Oh my dear boy, don’t even ask. An old spy in his dotage seeks the truth of ages. You look disgracefully young, Peter. Have you been up to your usual mischief?’

  He is gathering up his books and papers and loading them into a locker. Out of old habit, I give him a helping hand.

  And since this is no sort of place for my planned confrontation, I ask him instead how Ann is.

  ‘She is well, thank you, Peter. Yes. Very well, considering’ – locking the cupboard and slipping the key into his pocket. ‘She visits now and then. We walk. In the Black Forest. Not quite the marathons of old, I admit. But we walk.’

  Our hushed exchanges come to an end as an elderly woman enters and, having with difficulty detached herself from her shoulder bag, spreads out her papers, puts on her reading spectacles, ear by ear, and with a loud sigh settles herself in an alcove. And I think it was her sigh that undermined the last of my resolve.

  *

  We sit in George’s spartan bachelor flat on a hillside overlooking the city. He listens like nobody I ever knew. His little body goes into a kind of hibernation. The long eyelids half close. Not a frown, not a nod, not so much as a raising of the eyebrows until you have done. And when you have done – and he has made sure you have, by holding you to account on some obscure point you have omitted or fudged – still no surprise, no judgemental moment of approval or the other thing. All the more surprising then that when I ground to the end of my overlong narrative – dusk falling and the city beneath us disappearing under shrouds of evening mist with the lights poking through – he should with great energy slam shut the curtains on the world and give vent to such unbridled fury as I had never heard in him.

  ‘The cowards. The utter cowards. Peter, this is damnable. Karen, you say her name is? I shall seek Karen out at once. Perhaps she will let me come and talk to her. Better I fly her over, if she’ll agree. And if Christoph wishes to speak to me, he’d better do it.’ And after a somewhat unnerving pause: ‘And Gustav too, of course. A date has been set for the hearing, you tell me? I shall make a
deposition. I shall swear to it. I shall offer myself as a witness to the truth. In whatever court they choose.’

  ‘I knew nothing of this,’ he went on, in the same furious tone. ‘Nothing. Nobody sought me out, nobody informed me. I have been eminently findable, even in retreat,’ he insisted, without explaining what he was retreating from. ‘The Stables?’ he ran on indignantly. ‘I had assumed they were long closed. When I departed the Circus I returned my power of attorney to the lawyers. What happened after that, I can’t imagine. Nothing, apparently. Of parliamentary inquiries? Lawsuits? Not a word, not a whisper. Why not? I’ll tell you why not. Because they didn’t wish me to know. I was too high up in the pecking order for their taste. I see it all. A former Head of Covert in the dock? Admitting he sacrificed a fine agent and an innocent woman in a cause the world barely remembers? And all of it planned and condoned by the Chief of the Service personally? That wouldn’t sit at all well with our modern masters. Nothing must sully the hallowed image of the Service. Dear God. It goes without saying that I shall immediately instruct Millie McCraig to release all papers and whatever else we entrusted to her care,’ he resumed in a calmer voice. ‘Windfall haunts me to this day. It will always haunt me. I blame myself entirely. I counted on Mundt’s ruthlessness, but I underrated it. The temptation to kill off the witnesses was simply too much for him.’

  ‘But George,’ I protest. ‘Windfall was Control’s operation. You just went along with it.’

  ‘Which is by far the greater sin, I fear. I may offer you the sofa, Peter?’

  ‘I’ve booked myself a room in Basel, actually. It’s only a hop. Take the Paris train in the morning.’

  It was a lie, and I think he guessed it was.

  ‘Then your last train is at ten minutes past eleven. I may give you dinner before you go on your way?’

  For reasons too deep in me to contest, I had not seen fit to tell him about Christoph’s abortive attempt to kill me, still less about his father Alec’s tirade against the Service that he nonetheless loved. Yet George’s next words might have been devised as an answer to Christoph’s peroration: