John Le Carré: Three Complete Novels

by John le Carré

  “No, sir.”

  “Or bringing them to England?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Nor about providing them with documents?”

  “No, sir.”

  Guillam chimed in irritably: “So what has he talked about, for heaven’s sake?”

  “The Russian lady, sir. Irina. He likes to read her diary. He says when the mole’s caught, he’s going to make Centre swap him for Irina. Then we’ll get her a nice place, sir—like Miss Ailsa’s but up in Scotland where it’s nicer. He says he’ll see me right, too. Give me a big job in the Circus. He’s been encouraging me to learn another language to increase my scope.”

  There was no telling, from the flat voice behind them in the dark, what Fawn made of this advice.

  “Where is he now?”

  “In bed, sir.”

  “Close the doors quietly.”

  Ailsa Brimley was waiting in the front porch for them: a grey-haired lady of sixty with a firm, intelligent face. She was old Circus, Smiley said, one of Lord Landsbury’s coding ladies from the war, now in retirement but still formidable. She wore a trim brown suit. She shook Guillam by the hand and said “How do you do,” bolted the door, and when he looked again she had gone. Smiley led the way upstairs. Fawn should wait on the lower landing in case he was needed.

  “It’s Smiley,” he said knocking on Tarr’s door. “I want a chat with you.”

  Tarr opened the door fast. He must have heard them coming, and been waiting just the other side. He opened it with his left hand, holding the gun in his right, and he was looking past Smiley down the corridor.

  “It’s only Guillam,” said Smiley.

  “That’s what I mean,” said Tarr. “Babies can bite.”

  They stepped inside. He wore slacks and some sort of cheap Malay wrap. Spelling cards lay spread over the floor and in the air hung a smell of curry that he had cooked for himself on a ring.

  “I’m sorry to be pestering you,” said Smiley with an air of sincere commiseration. “But I must ask you again what you did with those two Swiss escape passports you took with you to Hong Kong.”

  “Why?” said Tarr at last.

  The jauntiness was all gone. He had a prison pallor; he had lost weight and as he sat on the bed with the gun on the pillow beside him, his eyes sought them out nervously, each in turn, trusting nothing.

  Smiley said, “Listen. I want to believe your story. Nothing is altered. Once we know, we’ll respect your privacy. But we have to know. It’s terribly important. Your whole future stands by it.”

  And a lot more besides, thought Guillam, watching; a whole chunk of devious arithmetic was hanging by a thread, if Guillam knew Smiley at all.

  “I told you I burned them. I didn’t fancy the numbers. I reckoned they were blown. Might as well put a label round your neck ‘Tarr, Ricki Tarr, Wanted’ soon as use those passports.”

  Smiley’s questions were terribly slow in coming. Even to Guillam it was painful waiting for them in the deep silence of the night.

  “What did you burn them with?”

  “What the hell does that matter?”

  But Smiley apparently did not feel like giving reasons for his enquiries; he preferred to let the silence do its work, and he seemed confident that it would. Guillam had seen whole interrogations conducted that way: a laboured catechism swathed in deep coverings of routine; wearying pauses as each answer was written down in longhand and the suspect’s brain besieged itself with a thousand questions to the interrogator’s one; and his hold on his story weakened from day to day.

  “When you bought your British passport in the name of Poole,” Smiley asked, after another age, “did you buy any other passports from the same source?”

  “Why should I?”

  But Smiley did not feel like giving reasons.

  “Why should I?” Tarr repeated. “I’m not a damn collector, for Christ’s sake; all I wanted was to get out from under.”

  “And protect your child,” Smiley suggested, with an understanding smile. “And protect her mother, too, if you could. I’m sure you gave a lot of thought to that,” he said in a flattering tone. “After all, you could hardly leave them behind to the mercy of that inquisitive Frenchman, could you?”

  Waiting, Smiley appeared to examine the lexicon cards, reading off the words longways and sideways. There was nothing to them: they were random words. One was misspelt; Guillam noticed “epistle” with the last two letters back to front. What’s he been doing up there, Guillam wondered, in that stinking flea-pit of a hotel? What furtive little tracks has his mind been following, locked away with the sauce bottles and the commercial travellers?

  “All right,” said Tarr sullenly, “so I got passports for Danny and her mother. Mrs. Poole, Miss Danny Poole. What do we do now, cry out in ecstasy?”

  Again it was the silence that accused.

  “Now why didn’t you tell us that before?” Smiley asked in the tone of a disappointed father. “We’re not monsters. We don’t wish them harm. Why didn’t you tell us? Perhaps we could even have helped you,” and went back to his examination of the cards. Tarr must have used two or three packs; they lay in rivers over the coconut carpet. “Why didn’t you tell us?” he repeated. “There’s no crime in looking after the people one loves.”

  If they’ll let you, thought Guillam, with Camilla in mind. To help Tarr answer, Smiley was making helpful suggestions: “Was it because you dipped into your operational expenses to buy these British passports? Was that the reason you didn’t tell us? Good heavens, no one here is worried about money. You’ve brought us a vital piece of information. Why should we quarrel about a couple of thousand dollars?” And the time ticked away again without anyone using it.

  “Or was it,” Smiley suggested, “that you were ashamed?”

  Guillam stiffened, his own problems forgotten.

  “Rightly ashamed in a way, I suppose. It wasn’t a very gallant act, after all, to leave Danny and her mother with blown passports, at the mercy of that so-called Frenchman who was looking so hard for Mr. Poole? While you yourself escaped to all this V.I.P. treatment? It is horrible to think of,” Smiley agreed, as if Tarr, not he, had made the point. “It is horrible to contemplate the lengths Karla would go to in order to obtain your silence. Or your services.”

  The sweat on Tarr’s face was suddenly unbearable. There was too much of it; it was like tears all over. The cards no longer interested Smiley; his eye had settled on a different game. It was a toy, made of two steel rods like the shafts of a pair of tongs. The trick was to roll a steel ball along them. The further you rolled it, the more points you won when it fell into one of the holes underneath.

  “The other reason you might not have told us, I suppose, is that you burnt them. You burnt the British passports, I mean, not the Swiss ones.”

  Go easy, George, thought Guillam, and softly moved a pace nearer to cover the gap between them. Just go easy.

  “You knew that Poole was blown, so you burnt the Poole passports you had bought for Danny and her mother, but you kept your own because there was no alternative. Then you made travel bookings for the two of them in the name of Poole in order to convince everybody that you still believed in the Poole passports. By everybody, I think I mean Karla’s footpads, don’t I? You doctored the Swiss escapes, one for Danny, one for her mother, took a chance that the numbers wouldn’t be noticed, and you made a different set of arrangements which you didn’t advertise. Arrangements which matured earlier than those you made for the Pooles. How would that be? Such as staying out East, but somewhere else, like Djakarta: somewhere you have friends.”

  Even from where he stood, Guillam was too slow. Tarr’s hands were at Smiley’s throat; the chair toppled and Tarr fell with him. From the heap, Guillam selected Tarr’s right arm and flung it into a lock against his back, bringing it very near to breaking as he did so. From nowhere Fawn appeared, took the gun from the pillow, and walked back to Tarr as if to give him a hand. Then Smiley was straigh
tening his suit and Tarr was back on the bed, dabbing the corner of his mouth with a handkerchief.

  Smiley said, “I don’t know where they are. As far as I know, no harm has come to them. You believe that, do you?”

  Tarr was staring at him, waiting. His eyes were furious, but over Smiley a kind of calm had settled, and Guillam guessed it was the reassurance he had been hoping for.

  “Maybe you should keep a better eye on your own damn woman and leave mine alone,” Tarr whispered, his hand across his mouth. With an exclamation, Guillam sprang forward but Smiley restrained him.

  “As long as you don’t try to communicate with them,” Smiley continued, “it’s probably better that I shouldn’t know. Unless you want me to do something about them. Money or protection or comfort of some sort?”

  Tarr shook his head. There was blood in his mouth, a lot of it, and Guillam realised Fawn must have hit him but he couldn’t work out when.

  “It won’t be long now,” Smiley said. “Perhaps a week. Less, if I can manage it. Try not to think too much.”

  By the time they left, Tarr was grinning again, so Guillam guessed that the visit, or the insult to Smiley or the smash in the face, had done him good.

  “Those football-pool coupons,” Smiley said quietly to Fawn as they climbed into the car: “You don’t post them anywhere, do you?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Well, let’s hope to God he doesn’t have a win,” Smiley remarked in a most unusual fit of jocularity, and there was laughter all round.

  The memory plays strange tricks on an exhausted, overladen brain. As Guillam drove, one part of his conscious mind upon the road and another still wretchedly grappling with even more gothic suspicions of Camilla, odd images of this and other long days drifted freely through his memory. Days of plain terror in Morocco as one by one his agent lines went dead on him, and every footfall on the stair had him scurrying to the window to check the street; days of idleness in Brixton when he watched that poor world slip by and wondered how long before he joined it. And suddenly the written report was there before him on his desk: duplicated on blue flimsy because it was traded, source unknown, and probably unreliable, and every word of it came back to him in letters a foot high:According to a recently released prisoner from Lubianka, Moscow Centre held a secret execution in the punishment block in July. The victims were three of its own functionaries. One was a woman. All three were shot in the back of the neck.

  “It was stamped ‘internal,’ ” Guillam said dully. They had parked in a layby beside a roadhouse hung with fairy lights. “Somebody from London Station had scribbled on it: ‘Can anyone identify the bodies?’ ”

  By the coloured glow of the lights, Guillam watched Smiley’s face pucker in disgust.

  “Yes,” he agreed at last. “Yes, well now, the woman was Irina, wasn’t she? Then there was Ivlov and then there was Boris, her husband, I suppose.” His voice remained extremely matter-of-fact. “Tarr mustn’t know,” he continued, as if shaking off lassitude. “It is vital that he should have no wind of this. God knows what he would do, or not do, if he knew that Irina was dead.” For some moments neither moved; perhaps for their different reasons neither had the strength just then, or the heart.

  “I ought to telephone,” said Smiley, but he made no attempt to leave the car.

  “George?”

  “I have a phone call to make,” Smiley muttered. “Lacon.”

  “Then make it.”

  Reaching across him, Guillam pushed open the door. Smiley clambered, walked a distance over the tarmac, then seemed to change his mind and came back.

  “Come and eat something,” he said through the window, in the same preoccupied tone. “I don’t think even Toby’s people would follow us in here.”

  It was once a restaurant, now a transport café with trappings of old grandeur. The menu was bound in red leather and stained with grease. The boy who brought it was half asleep.

  “I hear the coq au vin is always reliable,” said Smiley, with a poor effort at humour as he returned from the telephone booth in the corner. And in a quieter voice, that fell short and echoed nowhere: “Tell me, how much do you know about Karla?”

  “About as much as I know about Witchcraft and Source Merlin, and whatever else it said on the paper I signed for Porteous.”

  “Ah, well, now, that’s a very good answer, as it happens. You meant it as a rebuke, I expect, but as it happens, the analogy was most apt.” The boy reappeared, swinging a bottle of Burgundy like an Indian club. “Would you please let it breathe a little?”

  The boy stared at Smiley as if he were mad.

  “Open it and leave it on the table,” said Guillam curtly.

  It was not the whole story Smiley told. Afterwards Guillam did notice several gaps. But it was enough to lift his spirits from the doldrums where they had strayed.

  23

  “It is the business of agent runners to turn themselves into I legends,” Smiley began, rather as if he were delivering a trainee lecture at the Nursery. “They do this first to impress their agents. Later they try it out on their colleagues and, in my personal experience, make rare asses of themselves in consequence. A few go so far as to try it on themselves. Those are the charlatans and they must be got rid of quickly, there’s no other way.”

  Yet legends were made and Karla was one of them. Even his age was a mystery. Most likely Karla was not his real name. Decades of his life were not accounted for, and probably never would be, since the people he worked with had a way of dying off or keeping their mouths shut.

  “There’s a story that his father was in the Okhrana and later reappeared in the Cheka. I don’t think it’s true but it may be. There’s another that he worked as a kitchen boy on an armoured train against Japanese Occupation troops in the East. He is said to have learnt his tradecraft from Berg—to have been his ewe lamb, in fact—which is a bit like being taught music by . . . oh, name a great composer. So far as I am concerned, his career began in Spain in 1936, because that at least is documented. He posed as a White Russian journalist in the Franco cause and recruited a stable of German agents. It was a most intricate operation, and for a young man remarkable. He popped up next in the Soviet counter-offensive against Smolensk in the autumn of 1941 as an intelligence officer under Konev. He had the job of running networks of partisans behind the German lines. Along the way he discovered that his radio operator had been turned round and was transmitting radio messages to the enemy. He turned him back and from then on played a radio game which had them going in all directions.”

  That was another part of the legend, said Smiley: at Yelnya, thanks to Karla, the Germans shelled their own forward line.

  “And between these two sightings,” he continued, “in 1936 and 1941, Karla visited Britain; we think he was here six months. But even today we don’t know—that’s to say, I don’t know—under what name or cover. Which isn’t to say Gerald doesn’t. But Gerald isn’t likely to tell us, at least not on purpose.”

  Smiley had never talked to Guillam this way. He was not given to confidences or long lectures; Guillam knew him as a shy man, for all his vanities, and one who expected very little of communication.

  “In ’48-odd, having served his country loyally, Karla did a spell in prison and later in Siberia. There was nothing personal about it. He simply happened to be in one of those sections of Red army intelligence which, in some purge or other, ceased to exist.”

  And certainly, Smiley went on, after his post-Stalin reinstatement, he went to America; because when the Indian authorities in the summer of ’55 arrested him in Delhi on vague immigration charges, he had just flown in from California. Circus gossip later linked him with the big treason scandals in Britain and the States.

  Smiley knew better: “Karla was in disgrace again. Moscow was out for his blood, and we thought we might persuade him to defect. That was why I flew to Delhi. To have a chat with him.”

  There was a pause while the weary boy slouched over and enqu
ired whether everything was to their satisfaction. Smiley, with great solicitude, assured him that it was.

  “The story of my meeting with Karla,” he resumed, “belonged very much to the mood of the period. In the mid-fifties, Moscow Centre was in pieces on the floor. Senior officers were being shot or purged wholesale and its lower ranks were seized with a collective paranoia. As a first result, there was a crop of defections among Centre officers stationed overseas. All over the place—Singapore, Nairobi, Stockholm, Canberra, Washington, I don’t know where—we got this same steady trickle from the residencies: not just the big fish, but the legmen, drivers, cypher clerks, typists. Somehow we had to respond—I don’t think it’s ever realised how much the industry stimulates its own inflation—and in no time I became a kind of commercial traveller, flying off one day to a capital city, the next to a dingy border outpost—once even to a ship at sea—to sign up defecting Russians. To seed, to stream, to fix the terms, to attend to debriefing and eventual disposal.”

  Guillam was watching him all the while, but even in that cruel neon glow Smiley’s expression revealed nothing but a slightly anxious concentration.

  “We evolved, you might say, three kinds of contract for those whose stories held together. If the client’s access wasn’t interesting, we might trade him to another country and forget him. Buy him for stock, as you would say, much as the scalp-hunters do today. Or we might play him back into Russia—that’s assuming his defection had not already been noticed there. Or, if he was lucky, we took him; cleaned him of whatever he knew and resettled him in the West. London decided, usually. Not me. But remember this. At that time Karla—or Gerstmann, as he called himself—was just another client. I’ve told his story back to front; I didn’t want to be coy with you, but you have to bear in mind now, through anything that happened between us—or didn’t happen, which is more to the point—that all I or anyone in the Circus knew when I flew to Delhi was that a man calling himself Gerstmann had been setting up a radio link between Rudnev, head of illegal networks at Moscow Centre, and a Centre-run apparatus in California that was lying fallow for want of a means of communication. That’s all. Gerstmann had smuggled a transmitter across the Canadian border and lain up for three weeks in San Francisco breaking in the new operator. That was the assumption, and there was a batch of test transmissions to back it up.”