John Le Carré: Three Complete Novels

by John le Carré

  He selected a facetious tone: “That’s right, Chief. Tarr and I have tea at Fortnum’s every afternoon.”

  Alleline was sucking at his empty pipe, testing the packing of the tobacco.

  “Peter Guillam,” he said deliberately, in his pert brogue. “You may not be aware of this, but I am of an extremely forgiving nature. I am positively seething with goodwill, in fact. All I require is the matter of your discussion with Tarr. I do not ask for his head, nor any other part of his damned anatomy, and I will restrain my impulse personally to strangle him. Or you.” He struck a match and lit his pipe, making a monstrous flame. “I would even go so far as to consider hanging a gold chain about your neck and bringing you into the palace from hateful Brixton.”

  “In that case, I can’t wait for him to turn up,” said Guillam.

  “And there’s a free pardon for Tarr till I get my hands on him.”

  “I’ll tell him. He’ll be thrilled.”

  A great cloud of smoke rolled out over the table.

  “I’m very disappointed with you, young Peter. Giving ear to gross slanders of a divisive and insidious nature. I pay you honest money and you stab me in the back. I consider that extremely poor reward for keeping you alive. Against the entreaties of my advisers, I may tell you.”

  Alleline had a new mannerism, one that Guillam had noticed often in vain men of middle age: it involved taking hold of a tuck of flesh under the chin and massaging it between finger and thumb in the hope of reducing it.

  “Tell us some more about Tarr’s circumstances just now,” said Alleline. “Tell us about his emotional state. He has a daughter, has he not? A wee daughter name of Danny. Does he talk of her at all?”

  “He used to.”

  “Regale us with some anecdotes about her.”

  “I don’t know any. He was very fond of her, that’s all I know.”

  “Obsessively fond?” His voice rose suddenly in anger. “What’s that shrug for? What the hell are you shrugging at me like that for? I’m talking to you about a defector from your own damn section; I’m accusing you of playing hookey with him behind my back, of taking part in damn-fool parlour games when you don’t know the stakes involved, and all you do is shrug at me down the table. There’s a law, Peter Guillam, against consorting with enemy agents. Maybe you didn’t know that. I’ve a good mind to throw the book at you!”

  “But I haven’t been seeing him,” said Guillam as anger came also to his rescue. “It’s not me who’s playing parlour games. It’s you. So get off my back.”

  In the same moment he sensed the relaxation round the table, like a tiny descent into boredom, like a general recognition that Alleline had shot off all his ammunition and the target was unmarked. Skordeno was fidgeting with a bit of ivory, some lucky charm he carried round with him. Bland was reading again and Bill Haydon was drinking his coffee and finding it terrible, for he made a sour face at Mo Delaware and put down the cup. Toby Esterhase, chin in hand, had raised his eyebrows and was gazing at the red cellophane that filled the Victorian grate. Only the Russians continued to watch him unblinkingly, like a pair of terriers not wanting to believe that the hunt was over.

  “So he used to chat to you about Danny, eh? And he told you he loved her,” said Alleline, back at the document before him. “Who’s Danny’s mother?”

  “A Eurasian girl.”

  Now Haydon spoke for the first time. “Unmistakably Eurasian, or could she pass for something nearer home?”

  “Tarr seems to think she looks full European. He thinks the kid does, too.”

  Alleline read aloud: “Twelve years old, long blond hair, brown eyes, slim. Is that Danny?”

  “I should think it could be. It sounds like her.”

  There was a long silence and not even Haydon seemed inclined to break it.

  “So if I told you,” Alleline resumed, choosing his words extremely carefully: “if I told you that Danny and her mother were due to arrive three days ago at London Airport on the direct flight from Singapore, I may take it you would share our perplexity.”

  “Yes, I would.”

  “You would also keep your mouth shut when you got out of here. You’d tell no one but your twelve best friends?”

  From not far away came Phil Porteous’s purr: “The source is extremely secret, Peter. It may sound to you like ordinary flight information but it isn’t that at all. It’s ultra, ultra sensitive.”

  “Ah, well, in that case I’ll try to keep my mouth ultra shut,” said Guillam to Porteous, and while Porteous coloured Bill Haydon gave another schoolboy grin.

  Alleline came back. “So what would you make of this information? Come on, Peter—” the banter again—“Come on, you were his boss, his guide, philosopher, and his friend. Where’s your psychology, for God’s sake? Why is Tarr coming to England?”

  “That’s not what you said at all. You said Tarr’s girl and her daughter Danny were expected in London three days ago. Perhaps she’s visiting relations. Perhaps she’s got a new boyfriend. How should I know?”

  “Don’t be obtuse, man. Doesn’t it occur to you that where little Danny is, Tarr himself is unlikely to be far behind? If he’s not here already, which I’m inclined to believe he is, that being the manner of men to come first and bring their impedimenta later. Pardon me, Mo Delaware, a lapse.”

  For the second time, Guillam allowed himself a little temperament. “Till now it had not occurred to me, no. Till now Tarr was a defector. Housekeepers’ ruling as of seven months ago. Right or wrong, Phil? Tarr was sitting in Moscow and everything he knew should be regarded as blown. Right, Phil? That was also held to be a good enough reason for turning the lights out in Brixton and giving one chunk of our workload to London Station and another to Toby’s lamplighters. What’s Tarr supposed to be doing now, redefecting to us?”

  “Redefecting would be a damned charitable way of putting it, I’ll tell you that for nothing,” Alleline retorted, back at the paper before him. “Listen to me. Listen exactly, and remember. Because I’ve no doubt that, like the rest of my staff, you’ve a memory like a sieve—all you prima donnas are the same. Danny and her mother are travelling on fake British passports in the name of Poole, like the harbour. The passports are Russian fakes. A third went to Tarr himself, the well-known Mr. Poole. Tarr is already in England but we don’t know where. He left ahead of Danny and her mother and came here by a different route; our investigations suggest a black one. He instructed his wife or mistress or whatever”—he said this as if he had neither—“pardon again, Mo, to follow him in one week, which they have not yet done, apparently. This information only reached us yesterday, so we’ve a lot of footwork to do yet. Tarr instructed them, Danny and her mother, that if by any chance he failed to make contact with them, they should throw themselves on the mercy of one Peter Guillam. That’s you, I believe.”

  “If they were due three days ago, what’s happened to them?”

  “Delayed. Missed their plane. Changed their plans. Lost their tickets. How the hell do I know?”

  “Or else the information’s wrong,” Guillam suggested.

  “It isn’t,” Alleline snapped.

  Resentment, mystification: Guillam clung to them both. “All right. The Russians have turned Tarr round. They’ve sent his family over—God knows why; I’d have thought they’d put them in the bank—and they’ve sent him, too. Why’s it all so hot? What sort of plant can he be when we don’t believe a word he says?”

  This time, he noticed with exhilaration, his audience was watching Alleline, who seemed to Guillam to be torn between giving a satisfactory but indiscreet answer or making a fool of himself.

  “Never mind what sort of plant! Muddying pools. Poisoning wells, maybe. That damn sort. Pulling the rug out when we’re all but home and dry.” His circulars read that way, too, thought Guillam. Metaphors chasing each other off the page. “But just you remember this. At the first peep, before the first peep, at the first whisper of him or his lady or his wee daughter, you
ng Peter Guillam, you come to one of us grown-ups. Anyone you see at this table. But not another damn soul. Do you follow that injunction perfectly? Because there are more damn wheels within wheels here than you can possibly guess or have any right to know . . .”

  It became suddenly a conversation in movement. Bland had plugged his hands into his pockets and slouched across the room to lean against the far door. Alleline had relit his pipe and was putting out the match with a long movement of his arm while he glowered at Guillam through the smoke. “Who are you courting these days, Peter—who’s the lucky wee lady?” Porteous was sliding a sheet of paper down the table for Guillam’s signature. “For you, Peter, if you please.” Paul Skordeno was whispering something into the ear of one of the Russians, and Esterhase was at the door giving unpopular orders to the mothers. Only Mo Delaware’s brown, unassuming eyes still held Guillam in their gaze.

  “Read it first, won’t you,” Porteous advised silkily.

  Guillam was halfway through the form already: “I certify that I have today been advised of the contents of Witchcraft Report No. 308, Source Merlin,” ran the first paragraph. “I undertake not to divulge any part of this report to other members of the service, nor will I divulge the existence of Source Merlin. I also undertake to report at once any matter which comes to my notice which appears to bear on this material.”

  The door had stayed open and, as Guillam signed, the second echelon of London Station filed in, led by the mothers with trays of sandwiches. Diana Dolphin, Lauder Strickland looking taut enough to blow up, the girls from distribution, and a sour-faced old war-horse called Haggard, who was Ben Thruxton’s overlord. Guillam left slowly, counting heads because he knew Smiley would want to know who was there. At the door, to his surprise, he found himself joined by Haydon, who seemed to have decided that the remaining festivities were not for him.

  “Stupid bloody cabaret,” Bill remarked, waving vaguely at the mothers. “Percy’s getting more insufferable every day.”

  “He does seem to,” said Guillam heartily.

  “How’s Smiley these days? Seen much of him? You used to be quite a chum of his, didn’t you?”

  Guillam’s world, which was showing signs till then of steadying to a sensible pace, plunged violently. “Afraid not,” he said; “he’s out of bounds.”

  “Don’t tell me you take any notice of that nonsense,” Bill said, snorting. They had reached the stairs. Haydon went ahead.

  “How about you?” Guillam called. “Have you seen much of him?”

  “And Ann’s flown the coop,” said Bill, ignoring the question. “Pushed off with a sailor-boy or a waiter or something.” The door to his room was wide open, the desk heaped with secret files. “Is that right?”

  “I didn’t know,” said Guillam. “Poor old George.”

  “Coffee?”

  “I think I’ll get back, thanks.”

  “For tea with Brother Tarr?”

  “That’s right. At Fortnum’s. So long.”

  In Archives Section, Alwyn was back from lunch. “Bag’s all gone, sir,” he said gaily. “Should be over in Brixton by now.”

  “Oh, damn,” said Guillam, firing his last shot. “There was something in it I needed.”

  A sickening notion had struck him: it seemed so neat and so horribly obvious that he could only wonder why it had come to him so late. Sand was Camilla’s husband. She was living a double life. Now whole new vistas of deceit opened before him. His friends, his loves, even the Circus itself; joined and re-formed in endless patterns of intrigue. A line of Mendel’s came back to him, dropped two nights ago as they drank beer in some glum suburban pub: “Cheer up, Peter, old son. Jesus Christ only had twelve, you know, and one of them was a double.”

  Tarr, he thought. That bastard Ricki Tarr.

  22

  The bedroom was long and low, once a maid’s room, built into the attic. Guillam was standing at the door; Tarr sat on the bed motionless, his head tilted back against the sloped ceiling, hands to either side of him, fingers wide. There was a dormer window above him, and from where Guillam stood he could see long reaches of black Suffolk countryside and a line of black trees traced against the sky. The wallpaper was brown with large red flowers. The one light hung from a black oak truss, lighting their two faces in strange geometric patterns, and when either one of them moved, Tarr on the bed or Smiley on the wooden kitchen chair, they seemed by their movement to take the light with them a distance before it resettled.

  Left to himself, Guillam would have been very rough with Tarr, he had no doubt of it. His nerves were all over the place, and on the drive down he had touched ninety before Smiley sharply told him to go steady. Left to himself, he would have been tempted to beat the daylights out of Tarr, and if necessary he would have brought Fawn in to lend a hand; driving, he had a very clear picture of opening the front door of wherever Tarr lived and hitting him in the face several times, with love from Camilla and her ex-husband, the distinguished doctor of the flute. And perhaps in the shared tension of the journey Smiley had received the same picture telepathically, for the little he said was clearly directed to talking Guillam down. “Tarr has not lied to us, Peter. Not in any material way. He has simply done what agents do the world over: he has failed to tell us the whole story. On the other hand, he has been rather clever.” Far from sharing Guillam’s bewilderment, he seemed curiously confident—even complacent—to the extent of allowing himself a sententious aphorism from Steed-Asprey on the arts of double-cross; something about not looking for perfection, but for advantage, which again had Guillam thinking about Camilla. “Karla has admitted us to the inner circle,” Smiley announced, and Guillam made a bad joke about changing at Charing Cross. After that Smiley contented himself with giving directions and watching the wing mirror.

  They had met at Crystal Palace, a van pick-up with Mendel driving. They drove to Barnsbury, straight into a car-body repair shop at the end of a cobbled alley full of children. There they were received with discreet rapture by an old German and his son, who had stripped the plates off the van almost before they got out of it and led them to a souped-up Vauxhall ready to drive out of the far end of the workshop. Mendel stayed behind with the Testify file, which Guillam had brought from Brixton in his night-bag; Smiley said, “Find the A12.” There was very little traffic but short of Colchester they hit a cluster of lorries and Guillam suddenly lost patience. Smiley had to order him to pull in. Once they met an old man driving at twenty in the fast lane. As they overtook him on the inside, he veered wildly towards them, drunk or ill, or just terrified. And once, with no warning, they hit a fog wall; it seemed to fall on them from above. Guillam drove clean through it, afraid to brake because of black ice. Past Colchester they took small lanes. On the signposts were names like Little Horkesley, Wormingford, and Bures Green; then the signposts stopped and Guillam had a feeling of being nowhere at all.

  “Left here and left again at the dower house. Go as far as you can but park short of the gates.”

  They reached what seemed to be a hamlet but there were no lights, no people, and no moon. As they got out, the cold hit them and Guillam smelt a cricket field and wood-smoke and Christmas all at once; he thought he had never been anywhere so quiet or so cold or so remote. A church tower rose ahead of them, a white fence ran to one side, and up on the slope stood what he took to be the rectory, a low rambling house, part thatched; he could make out the fringe of gable against the sky. Fawn was waiting for them; he came to the car as they parked, and climbed silently into the back.

  “Ricki’s been that much better today, sir,” he reported. He had evidently done a lot of reporting to Smiley in the last few days. He was a steady, soft-spoken boy with a great will to please, but the rest of the Brixton pack seemed to be afraid of him, Guillam didn’t know why. “Not so nervy—more relaxed, I’d say. Did his pools this morning—loves the pools, Ricki does—this afternoon we dug up fir trees for Miss Ailsa, so’s she could drive them into market. This evening we ha
d a nice game of cards and early bed.”

  “Has he been out alone?” asked Smiley.

  “No, sir.”

  “Has he used the telephone?”

  “Gracious, no, sir, not while I’m around, and I’m sure not while Miss Ailsa was, either.”

  Their breath had misted the windows of the car, but Smiley would not have the engine on, so there was no heater and no de-mister.

  “Has he mentioned his daughter Danny?”

  “Over the weekend he did a lot. Now he’s sort of cooled off about them. I think he’s shut them out of his mind, in view of the emotional side.”

  “He hasn’t talked about seeing them again?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Nothing about arrangements for meeting when all this is over?”