John Le Carré: Three Complete Novels

by John le Carré

  “And it was in Prague that you heard this story? The story you referred to in your letter to me?”

  At the bar a florid man in a black suit was predicting the imminent collapse of the nation. He gave it three months, he said, then curtains.

  “Rum chap, Toby Esterhase,” said Jerry.

  “But good,” said Smiley.

  “Oh, my God, old boy, first rate. Brilliant, my view. But rum, you know. How.” They drank again, and Jerry Westerby loosely poked a finger behind his head, in imitation of an Apache feather.

  “Trouble is,” the florid man at the bar was saying over the top of his drink, “we won’t even know it’s happened.”

  They decided to lunch straight away, because Jerry had a story to file for tomorrow’s edition about some top footballer who’d been caught shoplifting. They went to a curry house where the management was content to serve beer at teatime, and they agreed that if anyone bumped into them Jerry would introduce George as his bank manager, a notion that tickled him repeatedly throughout his hearty meal. There was background music, which Jerry called the connubial flight of the mosquito, and at times it threatened to drown the fainter notes of his husky voice. Which was probably just as well, for while Smiley made a brave show of enthusiasm for the curry, Jerry was launched, after his initial reluctance, upon quite a different story, concerning one Jim Ellis: the story that dear old Toby Esterhase had refused to let him print.

  Jerry Westerby was that extremely rare person, the perfect witness. He had no fantasy, no malice, no personal opinion. Merely, the thing was rum. He couldn’t get it off his mind and, come to think of it, he hadn’t spoken to Toby since.

  “Just this card, you see, ‘Happy Christmas, Toby’—picture of Leadenhall Street in the snow.” He gazed in great perplexity at the electric fan. “Nothing special about Leadenhall Street, is there, old boy? Not a spy-house or a meeting place or something, is it?”

  “Not that I know of,” said Smiley, with a laugh.

  “Couldn’t think why he chose Leadenhall Street for a Christmas card. Damned odd, don’t you think?”

  Perhaps he just wanted a snowy picture of London, Smiley suggested; Toby, after all, was quite foreign in lots of ways.

  “Rum way to keep in touch, I must say. Used to send me a crate of Scotch regular as clockwork.” Jerry frowned and drank from his krug. “It’s not the Scotch I mind,” he explained with that puzzlement that often clouded the greater visions of his life; “buy my own Scotch any time. It’s just that when you’re on the outside, you think everything has a meaning, so presents are important—see what I’m getting at?”

  It was a year ago—well, December. The Restaurant Sport in Prague, said Jerry Westerby, was a bit off the track of your average Western journalist. Most of them hung around the Cosmo or the International, talking in low murmurs and keeping together because they were jumpy. But Jerry’s local was the Sport, and ever since he had taken Holotek, the goalie, along after the winning match against the Tartars, Jerry had had the big hand from the barman, whose name was Stanislaus or Stan.

  “Stan’s a perfect prince. Does just what he damn well pleases. Makes you suddenly think Czecho’s a free country.”

  Restaurant, he explained, meant bar. Whereas bar in Czecho meant nightclub, which was rum. Smiley agreed that it must be confusing.

  All the same, Jerry always kept an ear to the ground when he went there; after all, it was Czecho, and once or twice he’d been able to bring back the odd snippet for Toby or put him onto the track of someone.

  “Even if it was just currency-dealing, black-market stuff. All grist to the mill, according to Tobe. These little scraps add up—that’s what Tobe said, anyway.”

  Quite right, Smiley agreed. That was the way it worked.

  “Tobe was the owl, what?”

  “Sure.”

  “I used to work straight to Roy Bland, you see. Then Roy got kicked upstairs, so Tobe took me over. Bit unsettling, actually, changes. Cheers.”

  “How long had you been working to Toby when this trip took place?”

  “Couple of years, not more.”

  There was a pause while food came and krugs were refilled and Jerry Westerby with his enormous hands shattered a popadam onto the hottest curry on the menu, then spread a crimson sauce over the top. The sauce, he said, was to give it bite. “Old Khan runs it up for me specially,” he explained, aside. “Keeps it in a deep shelter.”

  So anyway, he resumed, that night in Stan’s bar there was this young boy with the pudding-bowl haircut and the pretty girl on his arm.

  “And I thought, Watch out, Jerry, boy; that’s an army haircut. Right?”

  “Right,” Smiley echoed, thinking that in some ways Jerry was a bit of an owl himself.

  It turned out the boy was Stan’s nephew, and very proud of his English. “Amazing what people will tell you if it gives them a chance of showing off their languages.” He was on leave from the army and he’d fallen in love with this girl; he’d eight days to go and the whole world was his friend, Jerry included. Jerry particularly, in fact, because Jerry was paying for the booze.

  “So we’re all sitting hugger-mugger at the big table in the corner—students, pretty girls, all sorts. Old Stan had come round from behind the bar and some laddie was doing a fair job with a squeeze-box. Bags of Gemütlichkeit, bags of booze, bags of noise.”

  The noise was specially important, Jerry explained, because it let him chat to the boy without anyone else paying attention. The boy was sitting next to Jerry; he’d taken a shine to him from the start. He had one arm slung round the girl and one arm round Jerry.

  “One of those kids who can touch you without giving you the creeps. Don’t like being touched, as a rule. Greeks do it. Hate it, personally.”

  Smiley said he hated it, too.

  “Come to think of it, the girl looked a bit like Ann,” Jerry reflected. “Foxy—know what I mean? Garbo eyes, lots of oomph.”

  So while everyone was carrying on, singing and drinking and playing kiss-in-the-ring, this lad asked Jerry whether he would like to know the truth about Jim Ellis.

  “Pretended I’d never heard of him,” Jerry explained to Smiley. “ ‘Love to,’ I said. ‘Who’s Jim Ellis when he’s at home?’ And the boy looks at me as if I’m daft and says, ‘A British spy.’ Only no one else heard, you see; they were all yelling and singing saucy songs. He had the girl’s head on his shoulder, but she was half cut and in her seventh heaven, so he just went on talking to me, proud of his English, you see.”

  “I get it,” said Smiley.

  “ ‘British spy.’ Yells straight into my ear-hole. ‘Fought with Czech partisans in the war. Came here calling himself Hajek and was shot by the Russian secret police.’ So I just shrugged and said, ‘News to me, old boy.’ Not pushing, you see. Mustn’t be pushy, ever. Scares them off.”

  “You’re absolutely right,” said Smiley wholeheartedly, and for an interlude patiently parried further questions about Ann, and what it was like to love—really to love—the other person all your life.

  “I am a conscript,” the boy began, according to Jerry Westerby. “I have to serve in the army or I can’t go to university.” In October he had been on basic-training manoeuvres in the forests near Brno. There was always a lot of military in the woods there; in summer the whole area was closed to the public for a month at a time. He was on a boring infantry exercise that was supposed to last two weeks, but on the third day it was called off for no reason and the troops were ordered back to town. That was the order: pack now and get back to barracks. The whole forest was to be cleared by dusk.

  “Within hours, every sort of daft rumour was flying around,” Jerry went on. “Some fellow said the ballistics research station at Tisnov had blown up. Somebody else said the training battalions had mutinied and were shooting up the Russian soldiers. Fresh uprising in Prague, Russians taken over the government, the Germans had attacked—God knows what hadn’t happened. You know what soldiers are. Same ev
erywhere, soldiers. Gossip till the cows come home.”

  The reference to the army moved Jerry Westerby to ask after certain acquaintances from his military days, people Smiley had dimly known, and forgotten. Finally they resumed.

  “They broke camp, packed the lorries, and sat about waiting for the convoy to get moving. They’d gone half a mile when everything stopped again and the convoy was ordered off the road. Lorries had to duckshuffle into the trees. Got stuck in the mud, ditches, every damn thing. Chaos, apparently.”

  It was the Russians, said Westerby. They were coming from the direction of Brno, and they were in a very big hurry and everything that was Czech had to get out of the light or take the consequences.

  “First came a bunch of motorcycles tearing down the track with lights flashing and the drivers screaming at them. Then a staff car and civilians—the boy reckoned six civilians altogether. Then two lorryloads of special troops armed to the eyebrows and wearing combat paint. Finally a truck full of tracker dogs. All making a most God-awful row. Not boring you am I, old boy?”

  Westerby dabbed the sweat from his face with a handkerchief and blinked like someone coming round. The sweat had come through his silk shirt as well; he looked as if he had been under a shower. Curry not being a food he cared for, Smiley ordered two more krugs to wash away the taste.

  “So that was the first part of the story. Czech troops out, Russian troops in. Got it?”

  Smiley said yes, he thought he had his mind round it so far.

  Back in Brno, however, the boy quickly learned that his unit’s part in the proceedings was nowhere near done. Their convoy was joined up with another, and the next night for eight or ten hours they tore round the countryside with no apparent destination. They drove west to Trebic, stopped and waited while the signals section made a long transmission; then they cut back south east nearly as far as Znojmo on the Austrian border, signalling like mad as they went. No one knew who had ordered the route; no one would explain a thing. At one point they were ordered to fix bayonets; at another they pitched camp, then packed up all their kit again and pushed off. Here and there they met up with other units: near Breclav marshalling-yards, tanks going round in circles, once a pair of self-propelled guns on pre-laid track. Everywhere the story was the same: chaotic, pointless activity. The older hands said it was a Russian punishment for being Czech. Back in Brno again, the boy heard a different explanation. The Russians were after a British spy called Hajek. He’d been spying on the research station and tried to kidnap a general and the Russians had shot him.

  “So the boy asked, you see,” said Jerry. “Sassy little devil asked his sergeant, ‘If Hajek is already shot, why do we have to tear round the countryside creating an uproar?’ And the sergeant told him, ‘Because it’s the army.’ Sergeants all over the world, what?”

  Very quietly Smiley asked, “We’re talking about two nights, Jerry. Which night did the Russians move into the forest?”

  Jerry Westerby screwed up his face in perplexity. “That’s what the boy wanted to tell me, you see, George. That’s what he was trying to put over in Stan’s bar. What all the rumours were about. The Russians moved in on Friday. They didn’t shoot Hajek till Saturday. So the wise lads were saying: there you are, Russians were waiting for Hajek to turn up. Knew he was coming. Knew the lot. Lay in wait. Bad story, you see. Bad for our reputation—see what I mean? Bad for big chief. Bad for tribe. How.”

  “How,” said Smiley, into his beer.

  “That’s what Toby felt, too, mind. We saw it the same way; we just reacted differently.”

  “So you told all to Toby,” said Smiley lightly, as he passed Jerry a large dish of dal. “You had to see him anyway to tell him you’d dropped the package for him in Budapest, so you told him the Hajek story, too.”

  Well, that was just it, said Jerry. That was the thing that had bothered him, the thing that was rum, the thing that made him write to George, actually. “Old Tobe said it was tripe. Got all regimental and nasty. First he was keen as mustard, clapping me on the back, and Westerby for mayor. He went back to the shop, and next morning he threw the book at me. Emergency meeting, drove me round and round the park in a car, yelling blue murder. Said I was so plastered these days I didn’t know fact from fiction. All that stuff. Made me a bit shirty, actually.”

  “I expect you wondered who he’d been talking to in between,” said Smiley sympathetically. “What did he say exactly,” he asked, not in any intense way but as if he just wanted to get it all crystal clear in his mind.

  “Told me it was most likely a put-up ploy. Boy was a provocateur. Disruption job to make the Circus chase its own tail. Tore my ears off for disseminating half-baked rumours. I said to him, George: ‘Old boy,’ I said. ‘Tobe, I was only reporting, old boy. No need to get hot under the collar. Yesterday you thought I was the cat’s whiskers. No point in turning round and shooting the messenger. If you’ve decided you don’t like the story, that’s your business.’ Wouldn’t sort of listen any more—know what I mean? Illogical, I thought it was. Bloke like that. Hot one minute and cold the next. Not his best performance—know what I mean?”

  With his left hand Jerry rubbed the side of his head, like a schoolboy pretending to think. “ ‘Okie-dokie,’ I said, ‘forget it. I’ll write it up for the rag. Not the part about the Russians getting there first. The other part. “Dirty work in the forest,” that sort of tripe.’ I said to him, ‘If it isn’t good enough for the Circus, it’ll do for the rag.’ Then he went up the wall again. Next day some owl rings the old man. Keep that baboon Westerby off the Ellis story. Rub his nose in the D notice: formal warning. ‘All further references to Jim Ellis alias Hajek against the national interest, so put ’em on the spike.’ Back to women’s Ping-Pong. Cheers.”

  “But by then you’d written to me,” Smiley reminded him.

  Jerry Westerby blushed terribly. “Sorry about that,” he said. “Got all xenophobe and suspicious. Comes from being on the outside: you don’t trust your best friends. Trust them—well, less than strangers.” He tried again: “Just that I thought old Tobe was going a bit haywire. Shouldn’t have done it, should I? Against the rules.” Through his embarrassment he managed a painful grin. “Then I heard on the grapevine that the firm had given you the heave-ho, so I felt an even bigger damn fool. Not hunting alone, are you, old boy? Not . . .” He left the question unasked; but not, perhaps, unanswered.

  As they parted, Smiley took him gently by the arm.

  “If Toby should get in touch with you, I think it better if you don’t tell him we met today. He’s a good fellow but he does tend to think people are ganging up on him.”

  “Wouldn’t dream of it, old boy.”

  “And if he does get in touch in the next few days,” Smiley went on—in that remote contingency, his tone suggested—“you could even warn me, actually. Then I can back you up. Don’t ring me, come to think of it, ring this number.”

  Suddenly Jerry Westerby was in a hurry; that story about the shoplifting footballer couldn’t wait. But as he accepted Smiley’s card he did ask with a queer, embarrassed glance away from him, “Nothing untoward going on is there, old boy? No dirty work at the crossroads?” The grin was quite terrible. “Tribe hasn’t gone on the rampage or anything?”

  Smiley laughed and lightly laid a hand on Jerry’s enormous, slightly hunched shoulder.

  “Any time,” said Westerby.

  “I’ll remember.”

  “I thought it was you, you see: you who telephoned the old man.”

  “It wasn’t.”

  “Maybe it was Alleline.”

  “I expect so.”

  “Any time,” said Westerby again. “Sorry, you know. Love to Ann.” He hesitated.

  “Come on, Jerry, out with it,” said Smiley.

  “Toby had some bad story about her and Bill the Brain. I told him to stuff it up his shirt-front. Nothing to it, is there?”

  “Thanks, Jerry. So long. How.”

  “I knew there was
n’t,” said Jerry, very pleased, and lifting his finger to denote the feather, padded off into his own reserves.

  29

  Waiting that night, alone in bed at the Islay but not yet able to sleep, Smiley once more took up the file that Lacon had given him in Mendel’s house. It dated from the late fifties, when the Circus, like other Whitehall departments, was being pressed by the competition to take a hard look at the loyalty of its staff. Most of the entries were routine: telephone intercepts, surveillance reports, endless interviews with dons, friends, and nominated referees. But one document held Smiley like a magnet; he could not get enough of it. It was a letter, entered baldly on the index as “Haydon to Fanshawe, February 3, 1937.” More precisely it was a handwritten letter, from the undergraduate Bill Haydon to his tutor Fanshawe, a Circus talent-spotter, introducing the young Jim Prideaux as a suitable candidate for recruitment to British intelligence. It was prefaced by a wry explication de texte. The Optimates were “an upper-class Christ Church Club, mainly old Etonian,” wrote the unknown author. Fanshawe (P.R. de T. Fanshawe, Légion d’Honneur, O.B.E., Personal File so-and-so) was its founder; Haydon (countless cross-references) was in that year its leading light. The political complexion of the Optimates, to whom Haydon’s father had also in his day belonged, was unashamedly conservative. Fanshawe, now long dead, was a passionate Empire man and “the Optimates were his private selection tank for The Great Game,” ran the preface. Curiously enough, Smiley dimly remembered Fanshawe from his own day: a thin eager man with rimless spectacles, a Neville Chamberlain umbrella, and an unnatural flush to his cheeks as if he were still teething. Steed-Asprey called him the fairy godfather.

  “My dear Fan, I suggest you stir yourself to make a few enquiries about the young gentleman whose name is appended on the attached fragment of human skin.” [Inquisitors’ superfluous note: Prideaux] “You probably know Jim—if you know him at all—as an athleticus of some accomplishment. What you do not know but ought to is that he is no mean linguist nor yet a total idiot either . . .” [Here followed a biographical summary of surprising accuracy: . . . Lycée Lakanal in Paris, put down for Eton, never went there, Jesuit day-school Prague, two semesters Strasbourg, parents in European banking, small aristo, live apart . . . ]