The Honorable Schoolboy

by John le Carré

  In order to silence the Cousins, Haydon had reversed his original lie. Deciphered, the lengthy computer print-out told the following enchanting story.

  Anxious lest the Cousins might have been duplicating the Circus’s enquiries into Indocharter Vientiane S.A., Bill Haydon, in his capacity as Head of London Station, had sent to the Annexe a pro-forma hands-off notice, under the standing bilateral agreement between the services. This advised the Americans that Indocharter Vientiane S.A. was presently under scrutiny by London and that the Circus had an agent in place. Accordingly, the Americans consented to drop any interest they might have in the case in exchange for a share of the eventual take. As an aid to the British operation, the Cousins did however mention that their link with the pilot Tiny Ricardo was extinct.

  In short, as neat an example of playing both ends against the middle as anybody had met with.

  “Thank you, Molly,” said Smiley politely, when everyone had had a chance to marvel. “Thank you very much indeed.”

  “Not at all,” said Molly, prim as a nursemaid. “And Ricardo is definitely dead, Mr. Smiley,” she ended, and she quoted the same date of death which Sam Collins had already supplied. With that, she snapped together the clasp of her handbag, pulled her skirt over her admirable knees, and walked delicately from the room, well observed once more by Peter Guillam.

  A different pace, a different mood entirely, now overtook the Circus. The frantic search for a trail, any trail, was over. They could march to a purpose, rather than gallop in all directions. The amiable distinctions between the two families largely fell away: the Bolshies and the yellow perils became a single unit under the joint direction of Connie and the Doc, even if they kept their separate skills. Joy after that, for the burrowers, came in bits, like water-holes on a long and dusty trek, and sometimes they all but fell at the wayside.

  Connie took no more than a week to identify the Soviet paymaster in Vientiane who had supervised the transfer of funds to Indocharter Vientiane S.A.—the Commercial Boris. He was the former soldier Zimin, a long-standing graduate of Karla’s private training school outside Moscow. Under the previous alias of Smirnov, this Zimin was on record as having played paymaster to an East German apparat in Switzerland six years ago. Using the name Kursky, he had surfaced before that in Vienna. As a secondary skill, he offered sound-stealing and entrapment, and some said he was the same Zimin who had sprung the successful honey-trap in West Berlin against a certain French senator who later sold half his country’s secrets down the river. He had left Vientiane exactly a month after Sam’s report had hit London.

  After that small triumph, Connie set herself the apparently impossible task of defining what arrangements Karla, or his paymaster Zimin, might have made to replace the interrupted gold seam. Her touchstones were several. First, the known conservatism of enormous intelligence establishments, and their attachment to proven trade routes. Second, Centre’s presumed need, since large payments were involved, to replace the old system with a new one fast. Third, Karla’s complacency, both before the fall, when he had the Circus tethered, and since the fall, when it lay gasping and toothless at his feet. Lastly, quite simply, she relied upon her own encyclopaedic grasp of the subject. Gathering together the heaps of unprocessed raw material which had lain deliberately neglected during the years of her exile, Connie’s team made huge arcs through the files, revised, conferred, drew charts and diagrams, pursued the individual handwriting of known operators, had migraines, argued, played Ping-Pong, and occasionally, with agonising caution and Smiley’s express consent, undertook timid investigations in the field. A friendly contact in the City was persuaded to visit an old acquaintance who specialised in offshore Hong Kong companies. A Cheapside currency broker opened his books to Toby Esterhase, the sharp-eyed Hungarian survivor who was all that remained of the Circus’s once glorious travelling army of couriers and pavement artists.

  So it went on, at a snail’s pace; but at least the snail knew where it wanted to go. Doc di Salis, in his distant way, took the overseas Chinese path, working his passage through the arcane connections of Indocharter Vientiane S.A. and its elusive echelons of parent companies. His helpers were as uncommon as himself, either language students or elderly recycled China hands. With time they acquired a collective pallor, like inmates of the same dank seminary.

  Meanwhile, Smiley himself advanced no less cautiously, if anything down yet more devious avenues, and through a greater number of doors.

  Once more he sank from view. It was a time of waiting and he spent it in attending to the hundred other things that needed his urgent attention. His brief burst of team-work over, he withdrew to the inner regions of his solitary world. Whitehall saw him; so did Bloomsbury still; so did the Cousins. At other times the throne-room door stayed closed for days at a time, and only dark Fawn the factotum was permitted to flit in and out in his gym shoes, bearing steaming cups and plates of biscuits and occasional written memoranda, to or from his master.

  Smiley had always loathed the telephone, and now he would take no calls whatever, unless in Guillam’s view they concerned matters of great urgency, and none did. The only instrument Smiley could not switch off controlled the direct line from Guillam’s desk, but when he was in one of his moods he went so far as to put a tea-cosy over it in an effort to quell the ring. The invariable procedure was for Guillam to say that Smiley was out, or in conference, and would return the call in an hour’s time. He then wrote out a message, handed it to Fawn, and eventually, with the initiative on his side, Smiley would ring back.

  He conferred with Connie, sometimes with di Salis, sometimes with both, but Guillam was not required. The Karla file was transferred from Connie’s research section to Smiley’s personal safe for good—all seven volumes. Guillam signed for them and took them in to him, and when Smiley looked up from the desk and saw them, the quiet of recognition came over him, and he reached forward as if to receive an old friend. The door closed again, and more days passed.

  “Any word?” Smiley would ask occasionally of Guillam. He meant “Has Connie rung?”

  The Hong Kong residency was evacuated around this time, and, too late, Smiley was advised of the housekeepers’ elephantine efforts at repressing the High Haven story. He at once drew Craw’s dossier, and again called Connie in for consultation. A few days later, Craw himself appeared in London for a forty-eighthour visit. Guillam had heard him lecture at Sarratt and detested him.

  A couple of weeks afterwards, the old man’s celebrated article finally saw the light of day. Smiley read it intently, then passed it to Guillam, and for once he actually offered an explanation for his action: Karla would know very well what the Circus was up to, he said. Back-bearings were a time-honoured pastime. However, Karla would not be human if he didn’t sleep after such a big kill.

  “I want him to hear from everyone just how dead we are,” Smiley explained.

  Soon this broken-wing technique was extended to other spheres, and one of Guillam’s more entertaining tasks was to make sure that Roddy Martindale was well supplied with woeful stories about the Circus’s disarray.

  And still the burrowers toiled. They called it afterwards “the phoney peace.” They had the map, Connie said later, and they had the directions, but there were still mountains to be moved in spoonfuls. Waiting, Guillam took Molly Meakin to long and costly dinners, but they ended inconclusively. He played squash with her and admired her eye, he swam with her and admired her body, but she warded off closer contact with a mysterious and private smile, turning her head away and downward while she went on holding him.

  Under the continued pressure of idleness, Fawn the factotum took to acting strangely. When Smiley disappeared and left him behind, he literally pined for his master’s return. Catching him by surprise in his little den one evening, Guillam was shocked to find him in a near-foetal crouch, winding a handkerchief round and round his thumb like a ligature, in order to hurt himself.

  “For God’s sake, it’s nothing personal
, man!” Guillam cried. “George doesn’t need you for once, that’s all. Take a few days’ leave or something. Unwind.”

  But Fawn referred to Smiley as the Chief, and looked askance at those who called him George.

  It was toward the end of this barren phase that a new and wonderful gadget appeared on the fifth floor. It was brought in suitcases by two crew-cut technicians and installed over three days: a green telephone destined, despite his prejudices, for Smiley’s desk and connecting him directly with the Annexe. It was routed by way of Guillam’s room, and linked to all manner of anonymous grey boxes, which hummed without warning. Its presence only deepened the general mood of nervousness. What use was a machine, they asked each other, if they had nothing to put into it?

  But they had something.

  Suddenly the word was out. What Connie had found she wasn’t saying, but news of the discovery ran like wildfire through the building: “Connie’s home! The burrowers are home! They’ve found the new gold seam! They’ve traced it all the way through!”

  Through what? To whom? Where did it end? Connie and di Salis still kept mum. For a day and a night, they trailed in and out of the throne-room laden with files, no doubt once more in order to show Smiley their workings.

  Then Smiley disappeared for three days, and Guillam only learned much later that “in order to screw down every bolt,” as he called it, he had visited both Hamburg and Amsterdam for discussions with certain eminent bankers of his acquaintance. These gentlemen spent a great while explaining to him that the war was over and they could not possibly offend against their code of ethics; and then they gave him the information he so badly needed, though it was only the final confirmation of all that the burrowers had deduced. Smiley returned, but Peter Guillam still remained shut out, and he might well have continued in this private limbo indefinitely had it not been for dinner at the Lacons’.

  Guillam’s inclusion was pure chance. So was the dinner. Smiley had asked Lacon for an afternoon appointment at the Cabinet Office, and spent several hours in cahoots with Connie and di Salis preparing for it. At the last moment, Lacon was summoned by his parliamentary masters, and proposed potluck at his ugly mansion at Ascot instead. Smiley detested driving and there was no duty car. In the end, Guillam offered to chauffeur him in his draughty old Porsche, having first put a rug over him, which he was keeping in case Molly Meakin consented to a picnic.

  On the drive Smiley attempted small talk, which came hard to him, but he was nervous. They arrived in rain and there was muddle on the doorstep about what to do with the unexpected underling. Smiley insisted that Guillam would make his own way and return at ten-thirty; the Lacons that he must stay, there was simply masses of food.

  “It’s up to you,” said Guillam to Smiley.

  “Oh, of course. No, I mean really, if it’s all right with the Lacons, naturally,” said Smiley huffily, and in they went.

  So a fourth place was laid, and the over-cooked steak was cut into bits till it looked like dry stew, and a daughter was dispatched on her bicycle with a pound to fetch a second bottle of wine from the pub up the road. Mrs. Lacon was doe-like and fair and blushing, a child bride who had become a child mother. The table was too long for four. She sat Smiley and her husband one end and Guillam next to her. Having asked him whether he liked madrigals, she embarked on an endless account of a concert at her daughters’ private school. She said it was absolutely ruined by the rich foreigners they were taking in to balance the books. Half of them couldn’t sing in a Western way at all.

  “I mean who wants one’s child brought up with a lot of Persians when they all have six wives apiece?” she said.

  Stringing her along, Guillam strove to catch the dialogue at the other end of the table. Lacon seemed to be bowling and batting at once.

  “First, you petition me,” he boomed. “You are doing that now, very properly. At this stage, you should give no more than a preliminary outline. Traditionally, Ministers like nothing that cannot be written on a postcard. Preferably a picture postcard,” he said, and took a prim sip at the vile red wine.

  Mrs. Lacon, whose intolerance had a beatific innocence about it, began complaining about Jews.

  “I mean they don’t even eat the same food as we do,” she said. “Penny says they get special herring things for lunch.”

  Guillam again lost the thread till Lacon raised his voice in warning.

  “Try to keep ‘Karla’ out of this, George. I’ve asked you before. Learn to say ‘Moscow’ instead, will you? They don’t like personalities—however dispassionate your hatred of him. Nor do I.”

  “Moscow, then,” Smiley said.

  “It’s not that one dislikes them,” Mrs. Lacon said. “They’re just different.”

  Lacon picked up some earlier point: “When you say a large sum, how large is large?”

  “We are not yet in a position to say,” Smiley replied.

  “Good. More enticing. Have you no panic factor?”

  Smiley didn’t follow that question any better than Guillam did.

  “What alarms you most about your discovery, George? What do you fear for here, in your rôle of watch-dog?”

  “The security of a British Crown Colony?” Smiley suggested after some thought.

  “They’re talking about Hong Kong,” Mrs. Lacon explained to Guillam. “My uncle was Political Secretary. On Daddy’s side,” she added. “Mummy’s brothers never did anything brainy at all.”

  She said Hong Kong was nice but smelly.

  Lacon had become a little pink and erratic. “Colony—my

  God, hear that, Val?” he called down the table, taking time off to educate her. “Richer than we are by half, I should think, and from where I sit, enviably more secure as well. A full twenty years their treaty has to run, even if the Chinese enforce it. More. At this rate, they should see us out in comfort!”

  “Oliver thinks we’re doomed,” Mrs. Lacon explained to Guillam excitedly, as if she were admitting him to a family secret, and shot her husband an angelic smile.

  Lacon resumed his former confiding tone, but he continued to blurt, and Guillam guessed he was showing off to his squaw. “You would also make the point to me, wouldn’t you—as background to the postcard, as it were—that a major Soviet intelligence presence in Hong Kong would be an appalling embarrassment to the Colonial government in her relations with Peking?”

  “Before I went as far as that—”

  “On whose magnanimity,” Lacon pursued, “she depends from hour to hour for her survival—correct?”

  “It’s because of these very implications—” Smiley said.

  “Oh, Penny, you’re naked!” Mrs. Lacon cried indulgently.

  Providing Guillam with a glorious respite, she bounded off to calm an unruly small daughter who had appeared at the doorway. Lacon meanwhile had filled his lungs for an aria.

  “We are therefore not only protecting Hong Kong from the Russians—which is bad enough, I grant you, but perhaps not quite bad enough for some of our higher-minded Ministers—we are protecting her from the wrath of Peking, which is universally held to be awful. Right, Guillam? However,” said Lacon, and to emphasise the volte-face went so far as to arrest Smiley’s arm with his long hand so that he had to put down his glass. “However,” he warned, as his erratic voice swooped and rose again, “whether our masters will swallow all that is quite another matter altogether.”

  “I would not consider asking them to until I had obtained corroboration of our data,” Smiley said sharply.

  “Ah, but you can’t, can you?” Lacon warned, changing hats. “You can’t go beyond domestic research. You haven’t the charter.”

  “Without a reconnaissance of the information—”

  “Ah, but what does that mean, George?”

  “Putting in an agent.”

  Lacon lifted his eyebrows and turned away his head, reminding Guillam irresistibly of Molly Meakin.

  “Method is not my affair, nor are the details. Clearly you can do
nothing to embarrass, since you have no money and no resources.” He poured more wine, spilling some. “Val!” he yelled. “Cloth!”

  “I do have some money.”

  “But not for that purpose.” The wine had stained the tablecloth. Guillam poured salt on it while Lacon lifted the cloth and shoved his napkin-ring under it to spare the polish.

  A long silence followed, broken by the slow pat of wine falling on the parquet floor.

  Finally Lacon said, “It is entirely up to you to define what is chargeable under your mandate.”

  “May I have that in writing?”

  “No, sir.”

  “May I have your authority to take what steps are needed to corroborate the information?”

  “No, sir.”

  “But you won’t block me?”

  “Since I know nothing of method, and am not required to, it is hardly my province to dictate to you.”

  “But since I make a formal approach—” Smiley began.

  “Val, do bring a cloth! Once you make a formal approach, I shall wash my hands of you entirely. It is the Intelligence Steering Group, not myself, who determine your scope of action. You will make your pitch. They will hear you out. From then on, it’s between you and them. I am just the midwife. Val, bring a cloth—it’s everywhere!”

  “Oh, it’s my head on the block, not yours,” said Smiley, almost to himself. “You’re impartial. I know all about that.”

  “Oliver’s not impartial,” said Mrs. Lacon gaily as she returned with the girl over her shoulder, brushed and wearing a nightdress. “He’s terrifically in favour of you, aren’t you, Olly?” She handed Lacon a cloth and he began mopping. “He’s become a real hawk these days. Better than the Americans. Now say good night to everyone, Penny, come on.” She was offering the child to each of them in turn. “Mr. Smiley first . . . Mr. Guillam . . . now Daddy. . . . How’s Ann, George; not off to the country again, I hope?”

  “Oh, very bonny, thank you.”

  “Well, make Oliver give you what you want. He’s getting terribly pompous, aren’t you, Olly?”