Smiley's People

by Smiley's People [lit]

  'The best I ever met,' old Mendel, the Superintendent's one-time superior, had told him over a friendly pint not long ago. Mendel was retired now, like Smiley. But Mendel knew what he was talking about and didn't like Funnies any better than the Superintendent did - interfering la-di-da amateurs most of them, and devious with it. But not Smiley. Smiley was different, Mendel had said. Smiley was the best - simply the best case man Mendel had ever met - and old Mendel knew what he was talking about.

  An abbey, the Superintendent decided. That's what he was, an abbey. He would work that into his sermon the next time his turn came around. An abbey, made up of all sorts of conflicting ages and styles and convictions. The Superintendent liked that metaphor the more he dwelt on it. He would try it out on his wife when he got home : man as God's architecture, my dear, moulded by the hand of ages, infinite in his striving and diversity... But at this point the Superintendent laid a restraining hand upon his own rhetorical imagination. Maybe not, after all, he thought. Maybe we're flying a mite too high for the course, my friend.

  There was another thing about that face the Superintendent wouldn't easily forget either. Later, he talked to old Mendel about it, as he talked to him later about lots of things. The moisture. He'd taken it for dew at first - yet if it was dew why was the Superintendent's own face bone dry? It wasn't dew and it wasn't grief either, if his hunch was right. It was a thing that happened to the Superintendent himself occasionally and happened to the lads too, even the hardest; it crept up on them and the Superintendent watched for it like a hawk. Usually in kids' cases, where the pointlessness suddenly got through to you your child batterings, your criminal assaults, your infant rapes. You didn't break down or beat your chest or any of those histrionics. No. You just happened to put your hand to your face and find it damp and you wondered what the hell Christ bothered to die for, if He ever died at all.

  And when you had that mood on you, the Superintendent told himself with a slight shiver, the best thing you could do was give yourself a couple of days off and take the wife to Margate, or before you knew where you were you found yourself getting a little too rough with people for your own good health.

  'Sergeant!' the Superintendent yelled.

  The bearded figure loomed before him.

  'Switch the lights on and get it back to normal,' the Superintendent ordered. 'And ask Inspector Hallowes to slip up here and oblige. At the double.'

  FOUR

  They had unchained the door to him, they had questioned him even before they took his coae tersely and intently. Were there any compromising materials on the body, George? Any that would link him with us? My God, you've been a time! They had shown him where to wash, forgetting that he knew already. They had sat him in an armchair and there Smiley remained, humble and discarded, while Oliver Lacon, Whitehall's Head Prefect to the intelligence services, prowled the threadbare carpet like a man made restless by his conscience, and Lauder Strickland said it all again in fifteen different ways to fifteen different people, over the old upright telephone in the far comer of the room - 'Then get me back to police liaison, woman, at once' - either bullying or fawning, depending on rank and clout. The Superintendent was a life ago, but in time ten minutes. The flat smelt of old nappies and stale cigarettes and was on the top floor of a scrolled Edwardian apartment house not two hundred yards from Hampstead Heath. In Smiley's mind, visions of Vladimir's burst face mingled with these pale faces of the living, yet death was not a shock to him just now, but merely an affirmation that his own existence too was dwindling; that he was living against the odds. He sat without expectation. He sat like an old man at a country railway station, watching the express go by. But watching all the same. And remembering old journeys.

  This is how crises always were, he thought; ragtag conversations with no centre. One man on the telephone, another dead, a third prowling. The nervous idleness of slow motion.

  He peered around, trying to fix his mind on the decaying things outside himself. Chipped fire extinguishers, Ministry of Works issue. Prickly brown sofas - the stains a little worse. But safe flats, unlike old generals, never die. he thought. They don't even fade away.

  On the table before him lay the cumbersome apparatus of agent hospitality, there to revive the unrevivable guest. Smiley took the inventory. In a bucket of melted ice, one bottle of Stolichnaya vodka, Vladimir's recorded favourite brand. Salted herrings, still in their tin. Pickled cucumber, bought loose and already drying. One mandatory loaf of black bread. Like every Russian Smiley had known, the old boy could scarcely drink his vodka without it. Two Marks & Spencer vodka glasses, could be cleaner. One packet of Russian cigarettes, unopened : if he had come, he would have smoked the lot; he had none with him when he died.

  Vladimir had none with him when he died, he repeated to himself, and made a little mental stammer of it, a knot in his handkerchief.

  A clatter interrupted Smiley's reverie. In the kitchen, Mostyn the boy had dropped a plate. At the telephone Lauder Strickland wheeled round. demanding quiet. But he already had it again. What was Mostyn preparing anyway? Dinner? Breakfast? Seed-cake for the funeral? And what was Mostyn? Who was Mostyn? Smiley had shaken his damp and trembling hand, then promptly forgotten what he looked like except that he was so young. And yet for some reason Mostyn was known to him, if only as a type. Mostyn is our grief, Smiley decided arbitrarily. Lacon, in the middle of his prowling, came to a sudden halt.

  'George! You look worried. Don't be. We're all in the clear on this. All of us!'

  'I'm not worried, Oliver.'

  'You look as though you're reproaching yourself. I can tell!'

  'When agents die-' said Smiley, but left the sentence incomplete, and anyway Lacon couldn't wait for him. He strode off again, a hiker with miles to go. Lacon, Strickland, Mostyn, thought Smiley as Strickland's Aberdonian brogue hammered on. One Cabinet Office factotum, one Circus fixer, one scared boy. Why not real people? Why not Vladimir's case officer, whoever he is? Why not Saul Enderby, their Chief?

  A couplet of Auden's rang in his mind from the days when he was Mostyn's age : let us honour if we can the vertical man, though we value none but the horizontal one. Or something.

  And why Smiley? he thought. Above all, why me? Of all people, when as far as they're concerned I'm deader than old Vladimir.

  'Will you have tea, Mr Smiley, or something stronger?' called Mostyn through the open kitchen doorway. Smiley wondered whether he was naturally so pale.

  'He'll have tea only, thank you, Mostyn!' Lacon blurted, making a sharp about-turn. 'After shock, tea is a deal safer. With sugar, right, George? Sugar replaces lost energy. Was it gruesome, George? How perfectly awful for you.'

  No, it wasn't awful, it was the truth, thought Smiley. He was shot and I saw him dead. Perhaps you should do that too.

  Apparently unable to leave Smiley alone, Lacon had come back down the room and was peering at him with clever, uncomprehending eyes. He was a mawkish creature, sudden but without spring, with youthful features cruelly aged and a raw unhealthy rash around his neck where his shirt had scuffed the skin. In the religious light between dawn and morning his black waistcoat and white collar had the glint of the soutane.

  'I've hardly said hullo,' Lacon complained, as if it were Smiley's fault. 'George. Old friend. My goodness.'

  'Hullo, Oliver,' said Smiley.

  Still Lacon remained there, gazing down at him, his long head to one side, like a child studying an insect. In his memory Smiley replayed Lacon's fervid phone call of two hours before.

  It's an emergency, George. You remember Vladimir? George, are you awake? You remember the old General, George? Used to live in Paris?

  Yes, I remember the General, he had replied. Yes, Oliver, I remember Vladimir.

  We need someone from his past, George. Someone who knew his little ways, can identify him, damp down potential scandal. We need you, George. Now. George, wake up.

  He had been trying to. Just as he had been trying to transfer the receiver to h
is better ear, and sit upright in a bed too large for him. He was sprawling in the cold space deserted by his wife, because that was the side where the telephone was.

  You mean he's been shot? Smiley had repeated.

  George, why can't you listen? Shot dead. This evening. George, for Heaven's sake wake up, we need you!

  Lacon loped off again, plucking at his signet ring as if it were too tight. I need you, thought Smiley, watching him gyrate. I love you, I hate you, I need you. Such apocalyptic statements reminded him of Ann when she had run out of money or love. The heart of the sentence is the subject, he thought. It is not the verb, least of all the object. It is the ego, demanding its feed.

  Need me what for? he thought again. To console them? Give them absolution? What have they done that they need my past to redress their future?

  Down the room, Lauder Strickland was holding up an arm in Fascist salute while he addressed Authority.

  'Yes, Chief, he's with us at this moment, sir... I shall tell him that, sir... Indeed, sir... I shall convey to him that message... Yes, sir...'

  Why are Scots so attracted to the secret world? Smiley wondered, not for the first time in his career. Ships' engineers, Colonial administrators, spies... Their heretical Scottish history drew them to distant churches, he decided.

  'George! ' Strickland, suddenly much louder, calling Smiley's name like an order. 'Sir Saul sends you his warmest personal salutations, George! ' He had swung round, still with his arm up. 'At a quieter moment he will express his gratitude to you more fittingly.' Back to the phone : 'Yes, Chief, Oliver Lacon is also with me and his opposite number at the Home Office is at this instant in parley with the Commissioner of Police regarding our former interest in the dead man and the preparation of the D-Notice for the press.'

  Former interest, Smiley recorded. A former interest with his face shot off and no cigarettes in his pocket. Yellow chalk. Smiley studied Strickland frankly : the awful green suit, the shoes of brushed pigskin got up as suede leather. The only change he could observe in him was a russet moustache not half as military as Vladimir's when he had still had one.

  'Yes, sir, "an extinct case of purely historic concern", sir,' Strickland went on, into the telephone. Extinct is right, thought Smiley. Extinct, extinguished, put out. 'That is precisely the terminology,' Strickland continued. 'And Oliver Lacon proposes to have it included word for word in the D-Notice. Am I on target there, Oliver?'

  'Historical,' Lacon corrected him irritably. 'Not historic concern. That's the last thing we want! Historical.' He stalked across the room, ostensibly to peer through the window at the coming day.

  'It is still Enderby in charge, is it, Oliver?' Smiley asked, of Lacon's back.

  'Yes, yes, it is still Saul Enderby, your old adversary, and he is doing marvels,' Lacon retorted impatiently. Pulling at the curtain, he unseated it from its Tunners. 'Not your style, I grant you - why should he be? He's an Atlantic man.' He was trying to force the casement. 'Not an easy thing to be under a government like this one, I can tell you.' He gave the handle another savage shove. A freezing draught raced round Smiley's knees. 'Takes a lot of footwork. Mostyn, where's tea? We seem to have been waiting for ever.'

  All our lives, thought Smiley.

  Over the sound of a lorry grinding up the hill, he heard Strickland again, interminably talking to Saul Enderby. 'I think the point with the press is not to play him down too far, Chief. Dullness is all, in a case like this. Even the private-life angle is a dangerous one, here. What we want is absolute lack of contemporary relevance of any sort. Oh true, true, indeed, Chief, right -' On he droned, sycophantic but alert.

  'Oliver-' Smiley began, losing patience. 'Oliver, do you mind, just-'

  But Lacon was talking, not listening : 'How's Ann?' he asked vaguely, at the window, stretching his forearms on the sill. 'With you and so forth, I trust? Not roaming, is she? God, I hate autumn.'

  'Fine, thank you. How's-' He struggled without success to remember the name of Lacon's wife.

  'Abandoned me, dammit. Ran off with her pesky riding instructor, blast her. Left me with the children. The girls are farmed out to boarding-schools, thank God.' Leaning over his hands, Lacon was staring up at the lightening sky. 'Is that Orion up there, stuck like a golf ball between the chimney pots.' he asked.

  Which is another death, thought Smiley sadly, his mind staying briefly with Lacon's broken marriage. He remembered a pretty, unworldly woman and a string of daughters jumping ponies in the garden of their rambling house in Ascot.

  'I'm sorry, Oliver,' he said.

  'Why should you be? Not your wife. She's mine. It's every man for himself in love.'

  'Could you close that window, please! ' Strickland called, dialling again. 'It's bloody arctic down this end.'

  Irritably slamming the window. Lacon strode back into the room.

  Smiley tried a second time : 'Oliver, what's going on?' he asked. 'Why did you need me?'

  'Only one who knew him for a start. Strickland, are you nearly done? He's like one of those airport announcers.' he told Smiley with a stupid grin. 'Never done.'

  You could break, Oliver, thought Smiley, noticing the estrangement of Lacon's eyes as he came under the light. You've had too much, he thought in unexpected sympathy. We both have.

  From the kitchen the mysterious Mostyn appeared with tea : an earnest, contemporary-looking child with flared trousers and a mane of brown hair. Seeing him set down the tray, Smiley finally placed him in the terms of his own past. Ann had had a lover like him once, an ordinand from Wells Theological College. She gave him a lift down the M4 and later claimed to have saved him from going queer.

  'What section are you in, Mostyn?' Smiley asked him quietly.

  'Oddbins. sir.' He crouched, level to the table, displaying an Asian suppleness. 'Since your day, actually, sir. It's a sort of operational pool. Mainly probationers waiting for overseas postings.'

  'I see.'

  'I heard you lecture at the Nursery at Sarratt, sir. On the new entrants' course. "Agent handling in the field." It was the best thing of the whole two years.'

  'Thank you.'

  But Mostyn's calf eyes stayed on him intently.

  'Thank you,' said Smiley again, more puzzled than before.

  'Milk, sir, or lemon, sir? The lemon was for him,' Mostyn added in a low aside, as if that were recommendation for the lemon.

  Strickland had rung off and was fiddling with the waistband of his trousers, making it looser or tighter.

  'Yes, well, we have to temper truth, George! ' Lacon bellowed suddenly, in what seemed to be a declaration of personal faith. 'Sometimes people are innocent but the circumstances can make them appear quite otherwise. There was never a golden age. There's only a golden mean. We have to remember that. Chalk it on our shaving mirrors.'

  In yellow, Smiley thought.

  Strickland was waddling down the room : 'You. Mostyn. Young Nigel. You, sir!'

  Mostyn lifted his grave brown eyes in reply.

  'Commit nothing to paper whatever,' Strickland warned him, wiping the back of his hand on his moustache as if one or the other were wet. 'Hear me? That's an order from on high. There was no encounter so you've no call to fill in the usual encounter sheet or any of that stuff. You've nothing to do but keep your mouth shut. Understand? You'll account for your expenses as general petty-cash disbursements. To me, direct. No file reference. Understand?'

  'I understand,' said Mostyn.

  'And no whispered confidences to those little tarts in Registry, or I'll know. Hear me? Give us some tea.'

  Something happened inside George Smiley when he heard this conversation. Out of the formless indirection of these dialogues, out of the horror of the scene upon the Heath, a single shocking truth struck him. He felt a pull in his chest somewhere and he had the sensation of momentary disconnection from the room and the three haunted people he had found in it. Encounter? Encounter between Mostyn and Vladimir? God in Heaven, he thought, squaring the mad circle. The Lo
rd preserve, cosset and protect us. Mostyn was Vladimir's case officer! That old man, a General, once our glory, and they farmed him out to this uncut boy! Then another lurch, more violent still, as his surprise was swept aside in an explosion of internal fury. He felt his lips tremble, he felt his throat seize up in indignation, blocking his words, and when he turned to Lacon his spectacles seemed to mist over from the heat :

  'Oliver, I wonder if you'd mind finally telling me what I'm doing here,' he heard himself suggesting for the third time, hardly above a murmur.

  Reaching out an arm he removed the vodka bottle from its bucket. Still unbidden, he broke the cap and poured himself a rather large tot.

  Even then, Lacon dithered, pondered, hunted with his eyes, delayed. In Lacon's world, direct questions were the height of bad taste but direct answers were worse. For a moment, caught in mid-gesture at the centre of the room, he stood staring at Smiley in disbelief. A car stumbled up the hill, bringing news of the real world outside the window. Lauder Strickland slurped his tea. Mostyn was seating himself gingerly on a piano-stool to which there was no piano. But Lacon with his jerky gestures could only scratch about for words sufficiently elliptical to disguise his meaning.

  'George,' he said. A shower of rain crashed against the window, but he ignored it. 'Where's Mostyn?' he asked.

  Mostyn, no sooner settled, had flitted from the room to cope with a nervous need. They heard the thunder of the flush, loud as a brass band, and the gurgle of pipes all down the building.

  Lacon raised a hand to his neck, tracing the raw patches. Reluctantly, he began : 'Three years ago, George - let us start there - soon after you left the Circus - your successor Saul Enderby - your worthy successor - under pressure from a concerned Cabinet - by concerned I mean newly formed - decided on certain far-reaching changes of intelligence practice. I'm giving you the background, George,' he explained, interrupting himself. 'I'm doing this because you're who you are, because of old times, and because-' he jabbed a finger at the window - 'because of out there.'