John Le Carré: Three Complete Novels

by John le Carré

  Spots of rain were falling but he couldn’t see them. He had travelled by rail and walked from the station, making detours all the way: Blackwell’s, his old college, anywhere, then north. Dusk had come here early because of the trees.

  Reaching a cul-de-sac, he once more dawdled, once more took stock. A woman in a shawl rode past him on a push-bike, gliding through the beams of the streetlamps where they pierced the swathes of mist. Dismounting, she pulled open a gate and vanished. Across the road a muffled figure was walking a dog—man or woman, he couldn’t tell. Otherwise the road was empty, so was the phone box. Then abruptly two men passed him, talking loudly about God and war. The younger one did most of the talking. Hearing the older one agree, Smiley supposed he was the don.

  He was following a high paling that bulged with shrubs. The gate of number 15 was soft on its hinges, a double gate but only one side used. When he pushed it, the latch was broken. The house stood a long way back; most of the windows were lit. In one, high up, a young man stooped over a desk. At another, two girls seemed to be arguing; at a third, a very pale woman was playing the viola but he couldn’t hear the sound. The ground-floor windows were also lit but the curtains were drawn. The porch was tiled, the front door panelled with stained glass; on the jamb was pinned an old notice: “After 11 P.M. use side door only.” Over the bells, more notices: “Prince, three rings,” “Lumby, two rings,” “Buzz: out all evening, see you, Janet.” The bottom bell said “Sachs” and he pressed it. At once dogs barked and a woman started yelling.

  “Flush, you stupid boy, it’s only a dunderhead. Flush, shut up, you fool. Flush!”

  The door opened part way, held on a chain; a body swelled into the opening. While Smiley in the same instant gave his whole effort to seeing who else was inside the house, two shrewd eyes, wet like a baby’s, appraised him, noted his briefcase and his spattered shoes, flickered upward to peer past his shoulder down the drive, then once more looked him over. Finally the white face broke into a charming smile, and Miss Connie Sachs, formerly queen of research at the Circus, registered her spontaneous joy.

  “George Smiley,” she cried, with a shy trailing laugh as she drew him into the house. “Why, you lovely darling man, I thought you were selling me a Hoover, bless you, and all the time it’s George!”

  She closed the door after him, fast.

  She was a big woman, bigger than Smiley by a head. A tangle of white hair framed her sprawling face. She wore a brown jacket like a blazer and trousers with elastic at the waist and she had a low belly like an old man’s. A coke fire smouldered in the grate. Cats lay before it and a mangy grey spaniel, too fat to move, lounged on the divan. On a trolley were the tins she ate from and the bottles she drank from. From the same adapter she drew power for her radio, her electric ring, and her curling tongs. A boy with shoulder-length hair lay on the floor, making toast. Seeing Smiley, he put down his brass trident.

  “Oh, Jingle, darling, could it be tomorrow?” Connie implored. “It’s not often my oldest, oldest lover comes to see me.” He had forgotten her voice. She played with it constantly, pitching it at all odd levels. “I’ll give you a whole free hour, dear, all to himself: will you? One of my dunderheads,” she explained to Smiley, long before the boy was out of earshot. “I still teach, I don’t know why. George,” she murmured, watching him proudly across the room as he took the sherry bottle from his briefcase and filled two glasses. “Of all the lovely darling men I ever knew. He walked,” she explained to the spaniel. “Look at his boots. Walked all the way from London, didn’t you, George? Oh, bless, God bless.”

  It was hard for her to drink. Her arthritic fingers were turned downward, as if they had all been broken in the same accident, and her arm was stiff. “Did you walk alone, George?” she asked, fishing a loose cigarette from her blazer pocket. “Not accompanied, were we?”

  He lit the cigarette for her and she held it like a peashooter, fingers along the top, then watched him down the line of it with her shrewd, pinkish eyes. “So what does he want from Connie, you bad boy?”

  “Her memory.”

  “What part?”

  “We’re going back over some old ground.”

  “Hear that, Flush?” she yelled to the spaniel. “First they chuck us out with an old bone, then they come begging to us. Which ground, George?”

  “I’ve brought a letter for you from Lacon. He’ll be at his club this evening at seven. If you’re worried, you’re to call him from the phone box down the road. I’d prefer you not to do that, but if you must he’ll make the necessary impressive noises.”

  She had been holding him, but now her hands flopped to her sides and for a good while she floated round the room, knowing the places to rest and the holds to steady her, and cursing, “Oh, damn George Smiley and all who sail in him.” At the window, perhaps out of habit, she parted the edge of the curtain but there seemed to be nothing to distract her.

  “Oh, George, damn you so,” she muttered. “How could you let a Lacon in? Might as well let in the competition, while you’re about it.”

  On the table lay a copy of the day’s Times, crossword uppermost. Each square was inked in laboured letters. There were no blanks.

  “Went to the soccer today,” she sang from the dark under the stairs as she cheered herself up from the trolley. “Lovely Will took me. My favourite dunderhead, wasn’t that super of him?” Her little-girl voice; it went with an outrageous pout: “Connie got cold, George. Froze solid, Connie did, toes an’ all.”

  He guessed she was crying, so he fetched her from the dark and led her to the sofa. Her glass was empty and he filled it half. Side by side on the sofa, they drank while Connie’s tears ran down her blazer onto his hands.

  “Oh, George,” she said. “Do you know what she told me when they threw me out? That personnel cow?” She was holding one point of Smiley’s collar, working it between her finger and thumb while she cheered up. “You know what the cow said?” Her sergeant-major voice: “ ‘You’re losing your sense of proportion, Connie. It’s time you got out into the real world.’ I hate the real world, George. I like the Circus and all my lovely boys.” She took his hands, trying to interlace her fingers with his.

  “Polyakov,” he said quietly, pronouncing it in accordance with Tarr’s instruction. “Aleksey Aleksandrovich Polyakov, cultural attaché, Soviet Embassy, London. He’s come alive again, just as you predicted.”

  A car was drawing up in the road; he heard only the sound of the wheels, the engine was already switched off. Then footsteps, very lightly.

  “Janet, smuggling in her boyfriend,” Connie whispered, her pink-rimmed eyes fixed on his while she shared his distraction. “She thinks I don’t know. Hear that? Metal quarters on his heels. Now, wait.” The footsteps stopped, there was a small scuffle. “She’s giving him the key. He thinks he works it more quietly than she can. He can’t.” The lock turned with a heavy snap. “Oh, you men,” Connie breathed with a hopeless smile. “Oh, George. Why do you have to drag up Aleks?” And for a while she wept for Aleks Polyakov.

  Her brothers were dons, Smiley remembered; her father was a professor of something. Control had met her at bridge and invented a job for her.

  She began her story like a fairy-tale: “Once upon a time, there was a defector called Stanley, way back in 1963,” and she applied to it the same spurious logic—part inspiration, part intellectual opportunism—born of a wonderful mind that had never grown up. Her formless white face took on the grandmother’s glow of enchanted reminiscence. Her memory was as compendious as her body and surely she loved it more, for she had put everything aside to listen to it: her drink, her cigarette, even for a while Smiley’s passive hand. She sat no longer slouched but strictly, her big head to one side as she dreamily plucked the white wool of her hair. He had assumed she would begin at once with Polyakov, but she began with Stanley; he had forgotten her passion for family trees. Stanley, she said; the inquisitors’ cover name for a fifth-rate defector from Moscow Centre. March
, 1963. The scalp-hunters bought him second-hand from the Dutch and shipped him to Sarratt, and probably if it hadn’t been the silly season and if the inquisitors hadn’t happened to have time on their hands—well, who knows whether any of it would ever have come to light? As it was, Brother Stanley had a speck of gold on him, one teeny speck, and they found it. The Dutch missed it but the inquisitors found it, and a copy of their report came to Connie, “which was a whole other miracle in itself,” Connie bellowed huffily, “considering that everyone, and specially Sarratt, made an absolute principle of leaving research off their distribution lists.”

  Patiently Smiley waited for the speck of gold, for Connie was of an age where the only thing a man could give her was time.

  Now, Stanley had defected while he was on a mailfist job in The Hague, she explained. He was by profession an assassin of some sort and had been sent to Holland to murder a Russian émigré who was getting on Centre’s nerves. Instead, he decided to give himself up. “Some girl had made a fool of him,” said Connie with great contempt. “The Dutch set him a honey trap, my dear, and he barged in with his eyes wide shut.”

  To prepare him for the mission, Centre had posted him to one of their training camps outside Moscow for a brush-up in the black arts: sabotage and silent killing. The Dutch, when they had him, were shocked by this and made it the focal point of their interrogation. They put his picture in the newspapers and had him drawing pictures of cyanide bullets and all the other dreary weaponry Centre so adored. But at the Nursery the inquisitors knew that stuff by heart, so they concentrated on the camp itself, which was a new one, not much known: “Sort of a millionaires’ Sarratt,” she explained. They made a sketch-plan of the compound, which covered several hundred acres of forest and lakeland, and put in all the buildings Stanley could remember: laundries, canteens, lecture huts, ranges, all the dross. Stanley had been there several times and remembered a lot. They thought they were about finished when Stanley went very quiet. He took a pencil and in the north west corner he drew five more huts and a double fence round them for the guard dogs, bless him. These huts were new, said Stanley, built in the last few months. You reached them by a private road; he had seen them from a hilltop when he was out walking with his instructor, Milos. According to Milos (who was Stanley’s friend, said Connie with much innuendo), they housed a special school recently founded by Karla for training military officers in conspiracy.

  “So, my dear, there we were,” Connie cried. “For years we’d been hearing rumours that Karla was trying to build a private army of his own inside Moscow Centre but, poor lamb, he hadn’t the power. We knew he had agents scattered round the globe, and naturally he was worried that as he grew older and more senior he wouldn’t be able to manage them alone. We knew that, like everyone else, he was dreadfully jealous of them and couldn’t bear the idea of handing them over to the legal residencies in the target countries. Well, naturally he wouldn’t: you know how he hated residencies—overstaffed, insecure. Same as he hated the old guard. ‘Flat- earthers,’ he called them. Quite right. Well, now he had the power and he was doing something about it, as any real man would. March, 1963,” she repeated, in case Smiley had missed the date.

  Then nothing, of course. “The usual game: sit on your thumbs, get on with other work, whistle for a wind.” She sat on them for three years, until Major Mikhail Fedorovich Komarov, assistant military attaché in the Soviet Embassy in Tokyo, was caught in flagrante taking delivery of six reels of top-secret intelligence procured by a senior official in the Japanese Defence Ministry. Komarov was the hero of her second fairy-tale: not a defector but a soldier with the shoulder boards of the artillery.

  “And medals, my dear! Medals galore!”

  Komarov himself had to leave Tokyo so fast that his dog got locked in his flat and was later found starved to death, which was something Connie could not forgive him for. Whereas Komarov’s Japanese agent was, of course, duly interrogated and by a happy chance the Circus was able to buy the report from the Toka.

  “Why, George, come to think of it, it was you who arranged the deal!”

  With a quaint pout of professional vanity, Smiley conceded that it might well have been.

  The essence of the report was simple. The Japanese defence official was a mole. He had been recruited before the war in the shadow of the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, by one Martin Brandt, a German journalist who seemed to be connected with the Comintern. Brandt, said Connie, was one of Karla’s names in the nineteen-thirties. Komarov himself had never been a member of the official Tokyo residency inside the Embassy; he’d worked solo, with one legman and a direct line to Karla, whose brother officer he had been in the war. Better still, before he arrived in Tokyo he had attended a special training course at a new school outside Moscow set up specially for Karla’s handpicked pupils. “Conclusion,” Connie sang. “Brother Komarov was our first and, alas, not very distinguished graduate of the Karla training school. He was shot, poor lamb,” she added, with a dramatic fall of her voice. “They never hang, do they: too impatient, the little horrors.”

  Now Connie had felt able to go to town, she said. Knowing what signs to look for, she tracked back through Karla’s file. She spent three weeks in Whitehall with the army’s Moscow-gazers combing Soviet Army posting bulletins for disguised entries until, from a host of suspects, she reckoned she had three new, identifiable Karla trainees. All were military men, all were personally acquainted with Karla, all were ten to fifteen years his junior. She gave their names as Bardin, Stokovsky, and Viktorov—all colonels.

  At the mention of this third name, Smiley’s eyes turned very tired, as if he were staving off boredom.

  “So what became of them all,” he asked.

  “Bardin changed to Sokolov, then Rusakov. Joined the Soviet Delegation to the United Nations in New York. No overt connection with the local residency, no involvement in bread-and-butter operations, no coat-trailing, no talent-spotting—a good solid cover job. Still there, for all I know.”

  “Stokovsky?”

  “Went illegal, set up a photographic business in Paris as Grodescu, French Rumanian. Formed an affiliate in Bonn, believed to be running one of Karla’s West German sources from across the border.”

  “And the third? Viktorov?”

  “Sunk without trace.”

  “Oh, dear,” said Smiley, and his boredom seemed to deepen.

  “Trained and disappeared off the face of the earth. May have died, of course. One does tend to forget the natural causes.”

  “Oh, indeed,” Smiley agreed; “oh, quite.”

  He had that art, from miles and miles of secret life, of listening at the front of his mind; of letting the primary incidents unroll directly before him while another, quite separate faculty wrestled with their historical connection. The connection ran through Tarr to Irina, through Irina to her poor lover who was so proud of being called Lapin, and of serving one Colonel Gregor Viktorov “whose workname at the Embassy is Polyakov.” In his memory, these things were like part of a childhood: he would never forget them.

  “Were there photographs, Connie?” he asked glumly. “Did you land physical descriptions at all?”

  “Of Bardin at the United Nations, naturally. Of Stokovsky, perhaps. We had an old press picture from his soldiering days, but we could never quite nail the verification.”

  “And of Viktorov, who sank without trace?” Still, it might have been any name. “No pretty picture of him, either?” Smiley asked, going down the room to fetch more drink.

  “Viktorov, Colonel Gregor,” Connie repeated with a fond distracted smile. “Fought like a terrier at Stalingrad. No, we never had a photograph. Pity. They said he was yards the best.” She perked up: “Though, of course, we don’t know about the others. Five huts and a two-year course: well, my dear, that adds up to a sight more than three graduates after all these years!”

  With a tiny sigh of disappointment, as if to say there was nothing so far in that whole narrative, let alone i
n the person of Colonel Gregor Viktorov, to advance him in his laborious quest, Smiley suggested they should pass to the wholly unrelated phenomenon of Polyakov, Aleksey Aleksandrovich, of the Soviet Embassy in London, better known to Connie as dear Aleks Polyakov, and establish just where he fitted into Karla’s scheme of things and why it was that she had been forbidden to investigate him further.

  13

  She was much more animated now. Polyakov was not a fairy-tale hero; he was her lover Aleks, though she had never spoken to him, probably never seen him in the flesh. She had moved to another seat closer to the reading lamp, a rocking-chair that relieved certain pains: she could sit nowhere for long. She had tilted her head back so that Smiley was looking at the white billows of her neck and she dangled one stiff hand coquettishly, recalling indiscretions she did not regret; while to Smiley’s tidy mind her speculations, in terms of the acceptable arithmetic of intelligence, seemed even wilder than before.

  “Oh, he was so good,” she said. “Seven long years Aleks had been here before we even had an inkling. Seven years, my dear, and not so much as a tickle! Imagine!”

  She quoted his original visa application, those nine years ago: Polyakov, Aleksey Aleksandrovich, graduate of Leningrad State University, cultural attaché with second-secretary rank, married but not accompanied by wife, born March 3, 1922, in the Ukraine, son of a transporter, early education not supplied. She ran straight on, a smile in her voice as she gave the lamplighters’ first routine description: “Height, five foot eleven; heavy build; colour of eyes, green; colour of hair, black; no other visible distinguishing marks. Jolly giant of a bloke,” she declared with a laugh. “Tremendous joker. Black tuft of hair, here, over the right eye. I’m sure he was a bottom pincher, though we never caught him at it. I’d have offered him one or two bottoms of our own if Toby had played ball, which he wouldn’t. Not that Aleksey Aleksandrovich would have fallen for that, mind. Aleks was far too artful,” she said proudly. “Lovely voice. Mellow like yours. I often used to play the tapes twice, just to listen to him speaking. Is he really still around, George? I don’t even like to ask, you see. I’m afraid they’ll all change and I won’t know them any more.”