John Le Carré: Three Complete Novels

by John le Carré

  The séance over, Sam returned to the duty room, sent out for an evening paper, opened a can of beer, selected an outside telephone line, and set about losing his shirt. There was steeplechasing at Kempton, which he hadn’t watched for years. Early evening, he took another walk around the lines and tested the alarm pads on the floor of the general registry. Three out of fifteen didn’t work, and by this time the janitors were really loving him. He cooked himself an egg, and when he’d eaten it he trotted upstairs to take a pound off old Mac and give him a beer.

  “He’d asked me to put him a quid on some nag with three left feet. I chatted with him for ten minutes, went back to my post, wrote some letters, watched a rotten movie on the telly, then turned in. The first call came just as I was getting to sleep. Eleven-twenty, exactly. The phones didn’t stop ringing for the next ten hours. I thought the switchboard was going to blow up in my face.”

  “Arcadi’s five down,” said a voice over the box.

  “Excuse me,” said Sam, with his habitual grin and, leaving Smiley to the music, slipped upstairs to cope.

  Sitting alone, Smiley watched Sam’s brown cigarette slowly burning away in the ashtray. He waited, Sam didn’t return, and he wondered whether he should stub it out. Not allowed to smoke on duty, he thought; house rules.

  “All done,” said Sam.

  The first call came from the Foreign Office resident clerk on the direct line, said Sam. In the Whitehall stakes, you might say, the Foreign Office won by a curled lip.

  “The Reuters headman in London had just called him with a story of a shooting in Prague. A British spy had been shot dead by Russian security forces, there was a hunt out for his accomplices, and was the F.O. interested? The duty clerk was passing it to us for information. I said it sounded bunkum, and rang off just as Mike Meakin, of wranglers, came through to say that all hell had broken out on the Czech air: half of it was coded, but the other half was en clair. He kept getting garbled accounts of a shooting near Brno. Prague or Brno? I asked. Or both? Just Brno. I said keep listening, and by then all five buzzers were going. Just as I was leaving the room, the resident clerk came back on the direct. The Reuters man had corrected his story, he said: for Prague read Brno. I closed the door and it was like leaving a wasps’ nest in your drawing-room. Control was standing at his desk as I came in. He’d heard me coming up the stairs. Has Alleline put a carpet on those stairs, by the way?”

  “No,” said Smiley. He was quite impassive. “George is like a swift,” Ann had once told Haydon in his hearing. “He cuts down his body temperature till it’s the same as the environment. Then he doesn’t lose energy adjusting.”

  “You know how quick he was when he looked at you. He checked my hands to see whether I had a telegram for him, and I wished I’d been carrying something but they were empty. ‘I’m afraid there’s a bit of a panic,’ I said. I gave him the gist, he looked at his watch; I suppose he was trying to work out what should have been happening if everything had been plain sailing. I said, ‘Can I have a brief, please?’ He sat down; I couldn’t see him too well—he had that low green light on his desk. I said again, ‘I’ll need a brief. Do you want me to deny it? Why don’t I get someone in?’ No answer. Mind you, there wasn’t anyone to get, but I didn’t know that yet. ‘I must have a brief.’ We could hear footsteps downstairs and I knew the radio boys were trying to find me. ‘Do you want to come down and handle it yourself?’ I said. I went round to the other side of the desk, stepping over these files, all open at different places; you’d think he was compiling an encyclopaedia. Some of them must have been pre-war. He was sitting like this.”

  Sam bunched the fingers of one hand, put the tips to his forehead, and stared at the desk. His other hand was laid flat, holding Control’s imaginary fob watch. “‘Tell MacFadean to get me a cab, then find Smiley.’ ‘What about the operation?’ I asked. I had to wait all night for an answer. ‘It’s deniable,’ he says. ‘Both men had foreign documents. No one could know they were British at this stage.’ ‘They’re only talking about one man,’ I said. Then I said, ‘Smiley’s in Berlin.’ That’s what I think I said, anyway. So we have another two-minute silence. ‘Anyone will do. It makes no difference.’ I should have been sorry for him, I suppose, but just then I couldn’t raise much sympathy. I was having to hold the baby and I didn’t know a damn thing. MacFadean wasn’t around so I reckoned Control could find his own cab, and by the time I got to the bottom of the steps I must have looked like Gordon at Khartoum. The duty harridan from monitoring was waving bulletins at me like flags, a couple of janitors were yelling at me, the radio boy was clutching a bunch of signals, the phones were going—not just my own, but half a dozen of the direct lines on the fourth floor. I went straight to the duty room and switched off all the lines while I tried to get my bearings. The monitor—what’s that woman’s name, for God’s sake, used to play bridge with the Dolphin?”

  “Purcell. Molly Purcell.”

  “That’s the one. Her story was at least straightforward. Prague radio was promising an emergency bulletin in half an hour’s time. That was quarter of an hour ago. The bulletin would concern an act of gross provocation by a Western power, an infringement of Czechoslovakia’s sovereignty, and an outrage against freedom-loving people of all nations. Apart from that,” said Sam dryly, “it was going to be laughs all the way. I rang Bywater Street, of course; then I made a signal to Berlin telling them to find you and fly you back by yesterday. I gave Mellows the main phone numbers and sent him off to find an outside line and get hold of whoever was around of the top brass. Percy was in Scotland for the weekend and out to dinner. His cook gave Mellows a number; he rang it, spoke to his host. Percy had just left.”

  “I’m sorry,” Smiley interrupted. “Rang Bywater Street, what for?” He was holding his upper lip between his finger and thumb, pulling it out like a deformity, while he stared into the middle distance.

  “In case you’d come back early from Berlin,” said Sam.

  “And had I?”

  “ No.”

  “So who did you speak to?”

  “Ann.”

  Smiley said, “Ann’s away just now. Could you remind me how it went, that conversation?”

  “I asked for you and she said you were in Berlin.”

  “And that was all?”

  “It was a crisis, George,” Sam said, in a warning tone.

  “So?”

  “I asked her whether by any chance she knew where Bill Haydon was. It was urgent. I gathered he was on leave but might be around. Somebody once told me they were cousins.” He added: “Besides, he’s a friend of the family, I understood.”

  “Yes. He is. What did she say?”

  “Gave me a shirty ‘no’ and rang off. Sorry about that, George. War’s war.”

  “How did she sound?” Smiley asked, after letting the aphorism lie between them for some while.

  “I told you: shirty.”

  Roy Bland was at Leeds University talent-spotting, said Sam, and not available.

  Between calls, Sam was getting the whole book thrown at him. He might as well have invaded Cuba. The military were yelling about Czech tank movements along the Austrian border; the wranglers couldn’t hear themselves think for the radio traffic round Brno; and as for the Foreign Office, the resident clerk was having the vapours and yellow fever all in one. “First Lacon, then the Minister were baying at the doors, and at half past twelve we had the promised Czech news bulletin, twenty minutes late but none the worse for that. A British spy named Jim Ellis, travelling on false Czech papers and assisted by Czech counter-revolutionaries, had attempted to kidnap an unnamed Czech general in the forests near Brno and smuggle him over the Austrian border. Ellis had been shot but they didn’t say killed; other arrests were imminent. I looked Ellis up in the workname index and found Jim Prideaux. And I thought, just as Control must have thought, If Jim is shot and has Czech papers, how the hell do they know his workname, and how do they know he’s British? Then Bill Haydon arr
ived, white as a sheet. Picked up the story on the ticker-tape at his club. He turned straight round and came to the Circus.”

  “At what time was that, exactly?” Smiley asked, with a vague frown. “It must have been rather late.”

  Sam looked as if he wished he could make it easier. “One-fifteen,” he said.

  “Which is late, isn’t it, for reading club ticker-tapes.”

  “Not my world, old boy.”

  “Bill’s the Savile, isn’t he?”

  “Don’t know,” said Sam doggedly. He drank some coffee. “He was a treat to watch, that’s all I can tell you. I used to think of him as an erratic sort of devil. Not that night, believe me. All right, he was shaken. Who wouldn’t be? He arrived knowing there’d been a God-awful shooting party and that was about all. But when I told him that it was Jim who’d been shot, he looked at me like a madman. Thought he was going to go for me. ‘Shot. Shot how? Shot dead?’ I shoved the bulletins into his hand and he tore through them one by one—”

  “Wouldn’t he have known already from the ticker-tape?” Smiley asked, in a small voice. “I thought the news was everywhere by then: Ellis shot. That was the lead story, wasn’t it?”

  “Depends which news bulletin he saw, I suppose,” Sam shrugged it off. “Anyway, he took over the switchboard and by morning he’d picked up what few pieces there were and introduced something pretty close to calm. He told the Foreign Office to sit tight and hold its water; he got hold of Toby Esterhase and sent him off to pull in a brace of Czech agents, students at the London School of Economics. Bill had been letting them hatch till then; he was planning to turn them round and play them back into Czecho. Toby’s lamplighters sandbagged the pair of them and locked them up in Sarratt. Then Bill rang the Czech head resident in London and spoke to him like a sergeant major: threatened to strip him so bare he’d be the laughing-stock of the profession if a hair of Jim Prideaux’s head was hurt. He invited him to pass that on to his masters. I felt I was watching a street accident and Bill was the only doctor. He rang a press contact and told him in strict confidence that Ellis was a Czech mercenary with an American contract; he could use the story unattributably. It actually made the late editions. Soon as he could, he slid off to Jim’s rooms to make sure he’d left nothing around that a journalist might pick on if a journalist were clever enough to make the connection, Ellis to Prideaux. I guess he did a thorough cleaning-up job. Dependents, everything.”

  “There weren’t any dependents,” Smiley said. “Apart from Bill, I suppose,” he added, half under his breath.

  Sam wound it up: “At eight o’clock Percy Alleline arrived; he’d cadged a special plane off the Air Force. He was grinning all over. I didn’t think that was very clever of him, considering Bill’s feelings, but there you are. He wanted to know why I was doing duty, so I gave him the same story I’d given to Mary Masterman: no flat. He used my phone to make a date with the Minister, and was still talking when Roy Bland came in, hopping mad and half plastered, wanting to know who the hell had been messing on his patch and practically accusing me. I said, ‘Christ, man, what about old Jim? You could pity him while you were about it,’ but Roy’s a hungry boy and likes the living better than the dead. I gave him the switchboard with my love, went down to the Savoy for breakfast, and read the Sundays. The most any of them did was run the Prague radio reports and a pooh-pooh denial from the Foreign Office.”

  Finally Smiley said, “After that you went to the South of France?”

  “For two lovely months.”

  “Did anyone question you again—about Control, for instance?”

  “Not till I got back. You were out on your ear by then; Control was ill in hospital.” Sam’s voice deepened a little. “He didn’t do anything silly, did he?”

  “He just died. What happened?”

  “Percy was acting head boy. He called for me and wanted to know why I’d done duty for Masterman and what communication I’d had with Control. I stuck to my story and Percy called me a liar.”

  “So that’s what they sacked you for: lying?”

  “Alcoholism. The janitors got a bit of their own back. They’d counted five beer cans in the waste-basket in the duty officer’s lair and reported it to the housekeepers. There’s a standing order: no booze on the premises. In the due process of time, a disciplinary body found me guilty of setting fire to the Queen’s dockyards so I joined the bookies. What happened to you?”

  “Oh, much the same. I didn’t seem to be able to convince them I wasn’t involved.”

  “Well, if you want anyone’s throat cut,” said Sam as he saw him quietly out through a side door into a pretty mews, “give me a buzz.” Smiley was sunk in thought. “And if you ever want a flutter,” Sam went on, “bring along some of Ann’s smart friends.”

  “Sam, listen. Bill was making love to Ann that night. No, listen. You phoned her, she told you Bill wasn’t there. As soon as she’d rung off, she pushed Bill out of bed and he turned up at the Circus an hour later knowing that there had been a shooting in Czecho. If you were giving me the story from the shoulder—on a postcard—that’s what you’d say?”

  “Broadly.”

  “But you didn’t tell Ann about Czecho when you phoned her—”

  “He stopped at his club on the way to the Circus.”

  “If it was open. Very well: then why didn’t he know that Jim Prideaux had been shot?”

  In the daylight, Sam looked briefly old, though the grin had not left his face. He seemed about to say something, then changed his mind. He seemed angry, then thwarted, then blank again. “Cheeribye,” he said. “Mind how you go,” and withdrew to the permanent night-time of his elected trade.

  27

  When Smiley had left the Islay for Grosvenor Square that morning, the streets had been bathed in harsh sunshine and the sky was blue. Now as he drove the hired Rover past the unlovable façades of the Edgware Road, the wind had dropped, the sky was black with waiting rain, and all that remained of the sun was a lingering redness on the tarmac. He parked in St. John’s Wood Road, in the forecourt of a new tower block with a glass porch, but he did not enter by the porch. Passing a large sculpture describing, as it seemed to him, nothing but a sort of cosmic muddle, he made his way through icy drizzle to a descending outside staircase marked “Exit Only.” The first flight was of terrazzo tile and had a bannister of African teak. Below that, the contractor’s generosity ceased. Rough-rendered plaster replaced the earlier luxury and a stench of uncollected refuse crammed the air. His manner was cautious rather than furtive, but when he reached the iron door he paused before putting both hands to the long handle and drew himself together as if for an ordeal. The door opened a foot and stopped with a thud, to be answered by a shout of fury, which echoed many times like a shout in a swimming pool.

  “Hey, why you don’t look out once?”

  Smiley edged through the gap. The door had stopped against the bumper of a very shiny car, but Smiley wasn’t looking at the car. Across the garage two men in overalls were hosing down a Rolls-Royce in a cage. Both were looking in his direction.

  “Why you don’t come other way?” the same angry voice demanded. “You tenant here? Why you don’t use tenant lift? This stair for fire.”

  It was not possible to tell which of them was speaking, but whichever it was, he spoke in a heavy Slav accent. The light in the cage was behind them. The shorter man held the hose.

  Smiley walked forward, taking care to keep his hands clear of his pockets. The man with the hose went back to work, but the taller stayed watching him through the gloom. He wore white overalls and he had turned the collar-points upwards, which gave him a rakish air. His black hair was swept back and full.

  “I’m not a tenant, I’m afraid,” Smiley conceded. “But I wonder if I might just speak to someone about renting a space. My name’s Carmichael,” he explained, in a louder voice. “I’ve bought a flat up the road.”

  He made a gesture as if to produce a card, as if his documents w
ould speak better for him than his insignificant appearance. “I’ll pay in advance,” he promised. “I could sign a contract or whatever is necessary, I’m sure. I’d want it to be above-board, naturally. I can give references, pay a deposit, anything within reason. As long as it’s above-board. It’s a Rover. A new one. I won’t go behind the company’s back, because I don’t believe in it. But I’ll do anything else within reason. I’d have brought it down, but I didn’t want to presume. And—well, I know it sounds silly but I didn’t like the look of the ramp. It’s so new, you see.”

  Throughout this protracted statement of intent, which he delivered with an air of fussy concern, Smiley had remained in the downbeam of a bright light strung from the rafter: a supplicant, rather abject figure, one might have thought, and easily visible across the open space. The attitude had its effect. Leaving the cage, the white figure strode towards a glazed kiosk, built between two iron pillars, and with his fine head beckoned Smiley to follow. As he went, he pulled the gloves off his hands. They were leather gloves, hand-stitched and quite expensive.

  “Well, you want mind out how you open door,” he warned in the same loud voice. “You want use lift, see, or maybe you pay couple pounds. Use lift you don’t make no trouble.”

  “Max, I want to talk to you,” said Smiley once they were inside the kiosk. “Alone. Away from here.”

  Max was broad and powerful with a pale boy’s face, but the skin of it was lined like an old man’s. He was handsome and his brown eyes were very still. He had altogether a rather deadly stillness.

  “Now? You want talk now?”

  “In the car. I’ve got one outside. If you walk to the top of the ramp, you can get straight into it.”

  Putting his hand to his mouth, Max yelled across the garage. He was half a head taller than Smiley and had a roar like a drum major’s. Smiley couldn’t catch the words. Possibly they were Czech. There was no answer, but Max was already unbuttoning his overall.