Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

by Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy [lit]

  In those three hours, only three events had rewarded Mendel's vigil: one an hour is not much. At half past nine a blue Ford Transit delivered two men carrying what looked like an ammunition box. They unlocked the door for themselves and closed it as soon as they were inside, while Mendel murmured his commentary into the telephone. At ten o'clock the shuttle arrived: Guillam had warned him of this too. The shuttle collected hot documents from the out-stations and stored them for safekeeping at the Circus over the weekend. It called at Brixton, Acton and Sarratt in that order, said Guillam, lastly at the Admiralty, and it made the Circus by about ten. In the event it arrived on the dot of ten, and this time two men from inside the building came out to help unload; Mendel reported that too, and Smiley acknowledged with a patient 'Thank you'.

  Was Smiley sitting down? Was he in the darkness like Mendel? Mendel had a notion he was. Of all the odd coves he had known, Smiley was the oddest. You thought, to look at him, that he couldn't cross the road alone, but you might as well have offered protection to a hedgehog. Funnies, Mendel mused. A lifetime of chasing villains and how do I end up? Breaking and entering, standing in the dark and spying on the Funnies. He'd never held with Funnies till he met Smiley. Thought they were an interfering lot of amateurs and college boys; thought they were unconstitutional; thought the best thing the Branch could do, for its own sake and the public's, was say 'Yes, sir, no, sir' and lose the correspondence. Come to think of it, with the notable exception of Smiley and Guillam, that's exactly what he thought tonight.

  Shortly before eleven, just an hour ago, a cab arrived. A plain licensed London hackney cab, and it drew up at the theatre. Even that was something Smiley had warned him about: it was the habit within the service not to take taxis to the door. Some stopped at Foyles, some in Old Compton Street or at one of the shops; most people had a favourite cover destination and Alleline's was the theatre. Mendel had never seen Alleline but he had their description of him and as he watched him through the glasses he recognised him without a doubt, a big, lumbering fellow in a dark coat, even noticed how the cabby had pulled a bad face at his tip and called something after him as Alleline delved for his keys.

  The front door is not secured, Guillam had explained, it is only locked. The security begins inside once you have turned left at the end of the corridor. Alleline lives on the fifth floor. You won't see his windows light up but there's a skylight and the glow should catch the chimney stack. Sure enough, as he watched, a patch of yellow appeared on the grimy brickwork of the chimney: Alleline had entered his room.

  And young Guillam needs a holiday, thought Mendel. He'd seen that happen before, too: the tough ones who crack at forty. They lock it away, pretend it isn't there, lean on grown-ups who turn out not to be so grown up after all, then one day it's all over them, and their heroes come tumbling down and they're sitting at their desks with the tears pouring on to the blotter.

  He had laid the receiver on the floor. Picking it up, he said: 'Looks like Tinker's clocked in.'

  He gave the number of the cab, then went back to waiting. 'How did he look?' Smiley murmured.

  'Busy,' said Mendel.

  'So he should be.'

  That one won't crack, though, Mendel decided with approval; one of your flabby oak trees, Smiley was. Think you could blow him over with one puff but when it comes to the storm he's the only one left standing at the end of it. At this point in his reflections a second cab drew up, squarely at the front entrance, and a tall slow figure cautiously climbed the steps one at a time like a man who takes care of his heart.

  'Here's your Tailor,' Mendel murmured into the telephone. 'Hold on, here's Soldier-boy too. Proper gathering of the clans by the look of it. I say, take it easy.'

  An old Mercedes 190 shot out of Earlham Street, swung directly beneath his window, and held the curve with difficulty as far as the northern outlet of the Charing Cross Road, where it parked. A young heavy fellow with ginger hair clambered out, slammed the door and clumped across the street to the entrance without taking the key out of the dash. A moment later another light went up on the fourth floor as Roy Bland joined the party.

  All we need to know now is who comes out, thought Mendel.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  Lock Gardens, which presumably drew its name from the Camden and Hampstead Road Locks nearby, was a terrace of four flat-fronted nineteenth-century houses built at the centre of a crescent, each with three floors and a basement and a strip of walled back garden running down to the Regent's Canal. The numbers ran two to five: number one had either fallen down or never been built. Number five made up the north end and as a safe house it could not have been improved, for there were three approaches in thirty yards and the canal towpath offered two more. To the north lay Camden High Street for joining traffic; south and west lay the parks and Primrose Hill. Better still, the neighbourhood possessed no social identity and demanded none. Some of the houses had been turned into one-roomed flats, and had ten door bells laid out like a typewriter. Some were got up grandly and had only one. Number five had two: one for Millie McCraig and one for her lodger Mr Jefferson.

  Mrs McCraig was churchy and collected for everything, which was incidentally an excellent way of keeping an eye on the locals, though that was scarcely how they viewed her zeal. Jefferson, her lodger, was known vaguely to be foreign and in oil and away a lot. Lock Gardens was his pied-à-terre. The neighbours, when they bothered to notice him, found him shy and respectable. They would have formed the same impression of George Smiley if they happened to spot him in the dim light of the porch at nine that evening as Millie McCraig admitted him to her front room and drew the pious curtains.

  She was a wiry Scottish widow with brown stockings and bobbed hair and the polished, wrinkled skin of an old man. In the interest of God and the Circus she had run Bible Schools in Mozambique and a seamen's mission in Hamburg and though she had been a professional eavesdropper for twenty years since then, she was still inclined to treat all menfolk as transgressors. Smiley had no way of telling what she thought. Her manner, from the moment he arrived, had a deep and lonely stillness; she showed him round the house like a chatelaine whose guests had long since died.

  First the semi-basement where she lived herself, full of plants and that medley of old postcards, brass table tops and carved black furniture which seems to attach itself to travelled British ladies of a certain age and class. Yes, if the Circus wanted her at night they rang her on the basement phone. Yes, there was a separate line upstairs, but it was only for outgoing calls. The basement phone had an extension in the upstairs dining room. Then up to the ground floor, a veritable shrine to the costly bad taste of the housekeepers: loud Regency stripes, gilded reproduction chairs, plush sofas with roped corners. The kitchen was untouched and squalid. Beyond it lay a glass outhouse, half conservatory, half scullery, which looked down to the rough garden and the canal. Strewn over the tiled floor: an old mangle, a copper and crates of tonic water.

  'Where are the mikes, Millie?' Smiley had returned to the drawing room.

  They were in pairs, Millie murmured, bedded behind the wallpaper, two pairs to each room on the ground floor, one to each room upstairs. Each pair was connected with a separate recorder. He followed her up the steep stairs. The top floor was unfurnished, save for an attic bedroom which contained a grey steel frame with eight tape machines, four up, four down.

  'And Jefferson knows all about this?'

  'Mr Jefferson,' said Millie primly, 'is run on a basis of trust.' That was the nearest she came to expressing her disapproval of Smiley, or her devotion to Christian ethics.

  Downstairs again, she showed him the switches which controlled the system. An extra switch was fitted in each finger panel. Any time Jefferson or one of the boys, as she put it, wanted to go over to record, he had only to get up and turn down the left-hand light switch. From then on, the system was voice-activated; that is to say, the tape deck did not turn unless somebody was speaking.

  'And where a
re you while all this goes on, Millie?'

  She remained downstairs, she said, as if that were a woman's place.

  Smiley was pulling open cupboards, lockers, walking from room to room. Then back to the scullery again, with its view to the canal. Taking out a pocket torch he signalled one flash into the darkness of the garden.

  'What are the safety procedures?' Smiley asked, as he thoughtfully fingered the end light switch by the drawing-room door.

  Her reply came in a liturgical monotone: 'Two full milk bottles on the doorstep, you may come in and all's well. No milk bottles and you're not to enter.'

  From the direction of the sunroom came a faint tapping. Returning to the scullery Smiley opened the glazed door and after a hastily murmured conversation reappeared with Guillam.

  'You know Peter, don't you, Millie?'

  Millie might, she might not, her little hard eyes had fixed on him with scorn. He was studying the switch panel, feeling in his pocket as he did so.

  'What's he doing? He's not to do that. Stop him.'

  If she was worried, said Smiley, she should ring Lacon on the basement phone. Millie McCraig didn't stir, but two red bruises had appeared on her leathery cheeks and she was snapping her fingers in anger. With a small screwdriver Guillam had cautiously removed the screws from either side of the plastic panel, and was peering at the wiring behind. Now, very carefully, he turned the end switch upside down, twisting it on its wires, then screwed the plate back in position, leaving the remaining switches undisturbed.

  'We'll just try it,' said Guillam, and while Smiley went upstairs to check the tape deck, Guillam sang 'Old Man River' in a low Paul Robeson growl.

  'Thank you,' said Smiley with a shudder, coming down again, 'that's more than enough.'

  Millie had gone to the basement to ring Lacon. Quietly, Smiley set the stage. He put the telephone beside an armchair in the drawing room, then cleared his line of retreat to the scullery. He fetched two bottles of milk from the Coca-Cola ice-box in the kitchen and placed them on the doorstep to signify, in the eclectic language of Millie McCraig, that you may come in and all's well. He removed his shoes and left them in the scullery, and having put out all the lights, took up his post in the armchair just as Mendel made his connecting call.

  On the canal towpath, meanwhile, Guillam had resumed his vigil of the house. The footpath is closed to the public one hour before dark: after that it can be anything from a trysting place for lovers to a haven for down-and-outs; both, for different reasons, are attracted by the darkness of the bridges. That cold night Guillam saw neither. Occasionally an empty train raced past, leaving a still greater emptiness behind. His nerves were so taut, his expectations so varied, that for a moment he saw the whole architecture of that night in apocalyptic terms: the signals on the railway bridge turned to gallows, the Victorian warehouses to gigantic prisons, their windows barred and arched against the misty sky. Closer at hand, the ripple of rats and the stink of still water. Then the drawing room lights went out; the house stood in darkness except for the chinks of yellow to either side of Millie's basement window. From the scullery a pin of light winked at him down the unkempt garden. Taking a pen torch from his pocket he slipped out the silver hood, sighted it with shaking fingers at the point from which the light had come, and signalled back. From now on they could only wait.

  Tarr tossed the incoming telegram back to Ben, together with the one-time pad from the safe.

  'Come on,' he said, 'earn your pay. Unbutton it.'

  'It's personal for you,' Ben objected. 'Look. "Personal from Alleline decypher yourself." I'm not allowed to touch it. It's the tops.'

  'Do as he asks, Ben,' said Mackelvore, watching Tarr.

  For ten minutes no word passed between the three men. Tarr was standing across the room from them, very nervous from the waiting. He had jammed the gun in his waistband, butt inward to the groin. His jacket lay over a chair. The sweat had stuck his shirt to his back all the way down. Ben was using a ruler to read off the number groups, then carefully writing his findings on the block of graph paper before him. To concentrate he put his tongue against his teeth, and now he made a small click as he withdrew it. Putting aside his pencil, he offered Tarr the tearsheet.

  'Read it aloud,' Tarr said.

  Ben's voice was kindly, and a little fervent. ' "Personal for Tarr from Alleline decypher yourself. I positively require clarification and/or trade samples before meeting your request. Quote information vital to safeguarding of the Service unquote does not qualify. Let me remind you of your bad position here following your disgraceful disappearance stop urge you confide Mackelvore immediately repeat immediately stop Chief."'

  Ben had not quite finished before Tarr began laughing in a strange, excited way.

  'That's the way, Percy boy!' he cried. 'Yes repeat no! Know why he's stalling, Ben, darling? He's sizing up to shoot me in the bloody back! That's how he got my Russki girl. He's playing the same tune, the bastard.' He was ruffling Ben's hair, shouting at him, laughing. 'I warn you Ben: there's some damn lousy people in this outfit, so don't you trust the one of them, I'm telling you, or you'll never grow up strong!'

  Alone in the darkness of the drawing room Smiley also waited, sitting in the housekeeper's uncomfortable chair, his head propped awkwardly against the earpiece of the telephone. Occasionally he would mutter something and Mendel would mutter back, most of the time they shared the silence. His mood was subdued, even a little glum. Like an actor he had a sense of approaching anti-climax before the curtain went up, a sense of great things dwindling to a small, mean end; as death itself seemed small and mean to him after the struggles of his life. He had no sense of conquest that he knew of. His thoughts, as often when he was afraid, concerned people. He had no theories or judgments in particular. He simply wondered how everyone would be affected; and he felt responsible. He thought of Jim and Sam and Max and Connie and Jerry Westerby and personal loyalties all broken; in a separate category he thought of Ann and the hopeless dislocation of their talk on the Cornish cliffs; he wondered whether there was any love between human beings that did not rest upon some sort of self-delusion; he wished he could just get up and walk out before it happened, but he couldn't. He worried, in a quite paternal way, about Guillam, and wondered how he would take the late strains of growing up. He thought again of the day he buried Control. He thought about treason and wondered whether there was mindless treason in the same way, supposedly, as there was mindless violence. It worried him that he felt so bankrupt; that whatever intellectual or philosophical precepts he clung to broke down entirely now that he was faced with the human situation.

  'Anything?' he asked Mendel, into the telephone.

  'A couple of drunks,' said Mendel, 'singing "See the jungle when it's wet with rain".'

  'Never heard of it.'

  Changing the telephone to his left side he drew the gun from the wallet pocket of his jacket, where it had already ruined the excellent silk lining. He discovered the safety catch and for a moment played with the idea that he didn't know which way was on and which way off. He snapped out the magazine and put it back, and remembered doing this hundreds of times on the trot, in the night range at Sarratt before the war; he remembered how you always shot with two hands, sir, one to hold the gun and one the magazine, sir; and how there was a piece of Circus folklore which demanded that he should lay his finger along the barrel and pull the trigger with his second. But when he tried it the sensation was ridiculous and he forgot about it.

  'Just taking a walk,' he murmured, and Mendel said 'Righty ho.'

  The gun still in his hand he returned to the scullery, listening for a creak in the floorboards that might give him away, but the floor must have been concrete under the tatty carpet; he could have jumped and caused not even a vibration. With his torch he signalled two short flashes, a long delay then two more. At once Guillam replied with three short.

  'Back again.'

  'Got you,' said Mendel.

  He settled, thinki
ng glumly of Ann: to dream the impossible dream. He put the gun in his pocket. From the canal side, the moan of a hooter. At night? Boats moving at night? Must be a car. What if Gerald has a whole emergency procedure which we know nothing about? A callbox to callbox, a car pick-up? What if Polyakov has after all a legman, a helper whom Connie never identified. He'd been through that already. This system was built to be watertight, to accommodate meetings in all contingencies. When it comes to tradecraft, Karla is a pedant.

  And his fancy that he was being followed? What of that? What of the shadow he never saw, only felt, till his back seemed to tingle with the intensity of his watcher's gaze; he saw nothing, heard nothing, only felt. He was too old not to heed the warning. The creak of a stair that had not creaked before; the rustle of a shutter when no wind was blowing; the car with a different number plate but the same scratch on the offside wing; the face on the underground that you know you have seen somewhere before: for years at a time these were signs he had lived by; any one of them was reason enough to move, change towns, identities. For in that profession there is no such thing as coincidence.

  'One gone,' said Mendel suddenly. 'Hullo?'

  'I'm here.'

  Somebody had just come out of the Circus, said Mendel. Front door but he couldn't be certain of the identification. Mackintosh and hat. Bulky and moving fast. Must have ordered a cab to the door and stepped straight into it.

  'Heading north, your way.'

  Smiley looked at his watch. Give him ten minutes, he thought. Give him twelve, he'll have to stop and phone Polyakov on the way. Then he thought: don't be silly, he's done that already from the Circus.

  'I'm ringing off,' said Smiley.

  'Cheers,' said Mendel.

  On the footpath, Guillam read three long flashes. The mole is on his way.