John Le Carré: Three Complete Novels

by John le Carré

  Abercrombie? Sir. Astor? Sir. Blakeney? Sick, sir.

  Still watching, Jim saw the car door open and George Smiley climb cautiously out, wearing a heavy overcoat.

  Matron’s footsteps sounded in the corridor. He heard the squeak of her rubber heels and the rattle of thermometers in a paste pot.

  “My good Rhino, whatever are you doing in my sick-bay? And close that curtain, you bad boy—you’ll have the whole lot of them dying of pneumonia. William Merridew, sit up at once.”

  Smiley was locking the car door. He was alone and he carried nothing, not even a briefcase.

  “They’re screaming for you in Grenville, Rhino.”

  “Going, gone,” Jim retorted briskly and with a jerky “Night, all,” he humped his way to Grenville dormitory, where he was pledged to finish a story by John Buchan. Reading aloud, he noticed that there were certain sounds he had trouble pronouncing; they caught somewhere in his throat. He knew he was sweating, he guessed his back was seeping, and by the time he had finished there was a stiffness round his jaw that was not just from reading aloud. But all these things were small symptoms beside the rage that was mounting in him as he plunged into the freezing night air. For a moment, on the overgrown terrace, he hesitated, staring at the church. It would take him three minutes, less, to untape the gun from underneath the pew, shove it into the waistband of his trousers, left side, butt inward to the groin . . .

  But instinct advised him “no,” so he set course directly for the trailer, singing “Hey, diddle-diddle” as loud as his tuneless voice would carry.

  31

  Inside the motel room, the state of restlessness was constant. Even when the traffic outside went through one of its rare lulls, the windows continued vibrating. In the bathroom the tooth glasses also vibrated, while from either wall and above them they could hear music, thumps, and bits of conversation or laughter. When a car arrived in the forecourt, the slam of the door seemed to happen inside the room, and the footsteps too. Of the furnishings, everything matched. The yellow chairs matched the yellow pictures and the yellow carpet. The candlewick bedspreads matched the orange paintwork on the doors, and by coincidence the label on the vodka bottle. Smiley had arranged things properly. He had spaced the chairs and put the vodka on the low table, and now as Jim sat glaring at him he extracted a plate of smoked salmon from the tiny refrigerator, and brown bread already buttered. His mood in contrast to Jim’s was noticeably bright, his movements swift and purposeful.

  “I thought we should at least be comfortable,” he said, with a short smile, setting things busily on the table. “When do you have to be at school again? Is there a particular time?” Receiving no answer, he sat down. “How do you like teaching? I seem to remember you had a spell of it after the war—is that right? Before they hauled you back? Was that also a prep school? I don’t think I knew.”

  “Look at the file,” Jim barked. “Don’t you come here playing cat-and-mouse with me, George Smiley. If you want to know things, read my file.”

  Reaching across the table, Smiley poured two drinks and handed one to Jim.

  “Your personal file at the Circus?”

  “Get it from housekeepers. Get it from Control.”

  “I suppose I should,” said Smiley doubtfully. “The trouble is Control’s dead and I was thrown out long before you came back. Didn’t anyone bother to tell you that when they got you home?”

  A softening came over Jim’s face at this, and he made in slow motion one of those gestures which so amused the boys at Thursgood’s. “Dear God,” he muttered, “so Control’s gone,” and passed his left hand over the fangs of his moustache, then upward to his moth-eaten hair. “Poor old devil,” he muttered. “What did he die of, George? Heart? Heart kill him?”

  “They didn’t even tell you this at the debriefing?” Smiley asked.

  At the mention of a debriefing, Jim stiffened and his glare returned.

  “Yes,” said Smiley. “It was his heart.”

  “Who got the job?”

  Smiley laughed. “My goodness, Jim, what did you all talk about at Sarratt, if they didn’t even tell you that?”

  “God damn it, who got the job? Wasn’t you, was it—threw you out! Who got the job, George?”

  “Alleline got it,” said Smiley, watching Jim very carefully, noting how the right forearm rested motionless across the knees. “Who did you want to get it? Have a candidate, did you, Jim?” And after a long pause: “And they didn’t tell you what happened to the Aggravate network, by any chance? To Pribyl, to his wife, and brother-in-law? Or the Plato network? Landkron, Eva Krieglova, Hanka Bilova? You recruited some of those, didn’t you, in the old days before Roy Bland? Old Landkron even worked for you in the war.”

  There was something terrible just then about the way Jim would not move forward and could not move back. His red face was twisted with the strain of indecision and the sweat had gathered in studs over his shaggy ginger eyebrows.

  “God damn you, George, what the devil do you want? I’ve drawn a line. That’s what they told me to do. Draw a line, make a new life, forget the whole thing.”

  “Which they is this, Jim? Roy? Bill, Percy?” He waited. “Did they tell you what happened to Max, whoever they were? Max is all right, by the way.” Rising, he briskly refreshed Jim’s drink, then sat again.

  “All right, come on, so what’s happened to the networks?”

  “They’re blown. The story is you blew them to save your own skin. I don’t believe it. But I have to know what happened.” He went on, “I know Control made you promise by all that’s holy, but that’s finished. I know you’ve been questioned to death and I know you’ve pushed some things so far down you can hardly find them any more or tell the difference between truth and cover. I know you’ve tried to draw a line under it and say it didn’t happen. I’ve tried that, too. Well, after tonight you can draw your line. I’ve brought a letter from Lacon and if you want to ring him he’s standing by. I don’t want to silence you. I’d rather you talked. Why didn’t you come and see me at home when you got back? You could have done. You tried to see me before you left, so why not when you got back? Wasn’t just the rules that kept you away.”

  “Didn’t anyone get out?” Jim said.

  “No. They seem to have been shot.”

  They had telephoned Lacon and now Smiley sat alone sipping his drink. From the bathroom he could hear the sound of running taps and grunts as Jim sluiced water in his face.

  “For God’s sake, let’s get somewhere we can breathe,” Jim whispered when he came back, as if it were a condition of his talking. Smiley picked up the bottle and walked beside him as they crossed the tarmac to the car.

  They drove for twenty minutes, Jim at the wheel. When they parked, they were on the plateau, this morning’s hilltop free of fog, and a long view down the valley. Scattered lights reached into the distance. Jim sat as still as iron, right shoulder high and hands hung down, gazing through the misted windscreen at the shadow of the hills. The sky was light and Jim’s face was cut sharp against it. Smiley kept his first questions short. The anger had left Jim’s voice and little by little he spoke with greater ease. Once, discussing Control’s tradecraft, he even laughed, but Smiley never relaxed; he was as cautious as if he were leading a child across the street. When Jim ran on, or bridled, or showed a flash of temper, Smiley gently drew him back until they were level again, moving at the same pace and in the same direction. When Jim hesitated, Smiley coaxed him forward over the obstacle. At first, by a mixture of instinct and deduction, Smiley actually fed Jim his own story.

  For Jim’s first briefing by Control, Smiley suggested, they had made a rendezvous outside the Circus? They had. Where? At a service flat in St. James’s, a place proposed by Control. Was anyone else present? No one. And to get in touch with Jim in the first place, Control had used MacFadean, his personal janitor? Yes, old Mac came over on the Brixton shuttle with a note asking Jim for a meeting that night. Jim was to tell Mac yes or no and g
ive him back the note. He was on no account to use the telephone, even the internal line, to discuss the arrangement. Jim had told Mac yes and arrived at seven.

  “First, I suppose, Control cautioned you?”

  “Told me not to trust anyone.”

  “Did he name particular people?”

  “Later,” said Jim. “Not at first. At first, he just said trust nobody. Specially nobody in the mainstream. George?”

  “Yes.”

  “They were shot all right, were they? Landkron, Krieglova, Bilova, the Pribyls? Straight shooting?”

  “The secret police rolled up both networks the same night. After that no one knows, but next of kin were told they were dead. That usually means they are.”

  To their left, a line of pine trees like a motionless army climbed out of the valley.

  “And then, I suppose, Control asked you what Czech identities you had running for you,” Smiley resumed. “Is that right?”

  He had to repeat the question.

  “I told him Hajek,” said Jim finally. “Vladimir Hajek, Czech journalist based on Paris. Control asked me how much longer the papers were good for. ‘You never know,’ I said. ‘Sometimes they’re blown after one trip.’ ” His voice went suddenly louder, as if he had lost his hold on it. “Deaf as an adder, Control was, when he wanted to be.”

  “So then he told you what he wanted you to do,” Smiley suggested.

  “First, we discussed deniability. He said if I was caught, I should keep Control out of it. A scalp-hunter ploy, bit of private enterprise. Even at the time I thought, Who the hell will ever believe that? Every word he spoke was letting blood,” said Jim. “All through the briefing, I could feel his resistance to telling me anything. He didn’t want me to know but he wanted me well briefed. ‘I’ve had an offer of service,’ Control says. ‘Highly placed official, cover name Testify.’ ‘Czech official?’ I ask. ‘On the military side,’ he says. ‘You’re a military minded man, Jim, you two should hit it off pretty well.’ That’s how it went, the whole damn way. I thought, If you don’t want to tell me, don’t, but stop dithering.”

  After more circling, said Jim, Control announced that Testify was a Czech general of artillery. His name was Stevcek; he was known as a pro-Soviet hawk in the Prague defence hierarchy, whatever that was worth; he had worked in Moscow on liaison and was one of the very few Czechs the Russians trusted. Stevcek had conveyed to Control, through an intermediary whom Control had personally interviewed in Austria, his desire to talk to a ranking officer of the Circus on matters of mutual interest. The emissary must be a Czech speaker, somebody able to take decisions. On Friday, October 20th, Stevcek would be inspecting the weapon research station at Tisnov, near Brno, about a hundred miles north of the Austrian border. From there he would be visiting a hunting-lodge for the weekend, alone. It was a place high up in the forests not far from Racice. He would be willing to receive an emissary there on the evening of Saturday, the twenty-first. He would also supply an escort to and from Brno.

  Smiley asked, “Did Control have any suggestions about Stevcek’s motive?”

  “A girlfriend,” Jim said. “Student he was going with, having a last spring, Control said; twenty years’ age difference between them. She was shot during the uprising of summer ’68. Till then, Stevcek had managed to bury his anti-Russian feelings in favour of his career. The girl’s death put an end to all that: he was out for their blood. For four years he’d lain low acting friendly and salting away information that would really hurt them. Soon as we gave him assurances and fixed the trade routes, he was ready to sell.”

  “Had Control checked any of this?”

  “What he could. Stevcek was well enough documented. Hungry desk general with a long list of staff appointments. Technocrat. When he wasn’t on courses, he was sharpening his teeth abroad: Warsaw, Moscow, Peking for a year, spell of military attaché in Africa, Moscow again. Young for his rank.”

  “Did Control tell you what you were to expect in the way of information?”

  “Defence material. Rocketry. Ballistics.”

  “Anything else?” said Smiley, passing the bottle.

  “Bit of politics.”

  “Anything else?”

  Not for the first time, Smiley had the distinct sense of stumbling not on Jim’s ignorance but on the relic of a willed determination not to remember. In the dark, Jim Prideaux’s breathing became suddenly deep and greedy. He had lifted his hands to the top of the wheel and was resting his chin on them, peering blankly at the frosted windscreen.

  “How long were they in the bag before being shot?” Jim demanded to know.

  “I’m afraid, a lot longer than you were,” Smiley confessed.

  “Holy God,” said Jim. With a handkerchief taken from his sleeve, he wiped away the perspiration and whatever else was glistening on his face.

  “The intelligence Control was hoping to get out of Stevcek,” Smiley prompted, ever so softly.

  “That’s what they asked me at the interrogation.”

  “At Sarratt?”

  Jim shook his head. “Over there.” He nodded his untidy head towards the hills. “They knew it was Control’s operation from the start. There was nothing I could say to persuade them it was mine. They laughed.”

  Once again Smiley waited patiently till Jim was ready to go on.

  “Stevcek,” said Jim. “Control had this bee in his bonnet: Stevcek would provide the answer, Stevcek would provide the key. ‘What key?’ I asked. ‘What key?’ Had his bag, that old brown music case. Pulled out charts, annoted all in his own handwriting. Charts in coloured inks, crayons. ‘Your visual aid,’ he says. ‘This is the fellow you’ll be meeting.’ Stevcek’s career plotted year by year: took me right through it. Military academies, medals, wives. ‘He’s fond of horses,’ he says. ‘You used to ride yourself, Jim. Something else in common—remember it.’ I thought, That’ll be fun, sitting in Czecho with the dogs after me, talking about breaking thoroughbred mares.” He laughed a little strangely, so Smiley laughed, too.

  “The appointments in red were for Stevcek’s Soviet liaison work. Green were his intelligence work. Stevcek had had a finger in everything. Fourth man in Czech army intelligence, chief boffin on weaponry, secretary to the national internal security committee, military counsellor of some sort to the Praesidium, Anglo-American desk in the Czech military intelligence set-up. Then Control comes to this patch in the mid-sixties, Stevcek’s second spell in Moscow, and it’s marked green and red fifty-fifty. Ostensibly, Stevcek was attached to the Warsaw Pact Liaison staff as a colonel general, says Control, but that was just cover. ‘He’d nothing to do with the Warsaw Pact Liaison staff. His real job was in Moscow Centre’s England section. He operated under the workname of Minin,’ he says. ‘His job was dovetailing Czech efforts with Centre’s. This is the treasure,’ Control says. ‘What Stevcek really wants to sell us is the name of Moscow Centre’s mole inside the Circus.’ ”

  It might be only one word, Smiley thought, remembering Max, and felt again that sudden wave of apprehension. In the end, he knew, that was all it would be: a name for the mole Gerald, a scream in the dark.

  “ ‘There’s a rotten apple, Jim,’ Control said, ‘and he’s infecting all the others.’ ” Jim was going straight on. His voice had stiffened, his manner also. “Kept talking about elimination, how he’d backtracked and researched and was nearly there. There were five possibilities, he said. Don’t ask me how he dug them up. ‘It’s one of the top five,’ he says. ‘Five fingers to a hand.’ He gave me a drink and we sat there like a pair of schoolboys making up a code, me and Control. We used Tinker, Tailor. We sat there in the flat putting it together, drinking that cheap Cyprus sherry he always gave. If I couldn’t get out, if there was any fumble after I’d met Stevcek, if I had to go underground, I must get the one word to him, even if I had to go to Prague and chalk it on the Embassy door or ring the Prague resident and yell it at him down the phone. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Sailor. Alleline was Tinker
, Haydon was Tailor, Bland was Soldier, and Toby Esterhase was Poorman. We dropped Sailor because it rhymed with Tailor. You were Beggarman,” Jim said.

  “Was I, now? And how did you take to it, Jim, to Control’s theory? How did the idea strike you, over-all?”

  “Damn silly. Poppycock.”

  “Why?”

  “Just damn silly,” he repeated in a tone of military stubbornness. “Think of any one of you—mole—mad!”

  “But did you believe it?”

  “No! Lord alive, man, why do you—”

  “Why not? Rationally we always accepted that sooner or later it would happen. We always warned one another: be on your guard. We’ve turned up enough members of other outfits: Russians, Poles, Czechs, French. Even the odd American. What’s so special about the British, all of a sudden?”

  Sensing Jim’s antagonism, Smiley opened his door and let the cold air pour in.

  “How about a stroll?” he said. “No point in being cooped up when we can walk around.”

  With movement, as Smiley had anticipated, Jim found a new fluency of speech.

  They were on the western rim of the plateau, with only a few trees standing and several lying felled. A frosted bench was offered, but they ignored it. There was no wind, the stars were very clear, and as Jim took up his story they went on walking side by side, Jim adjusting always to Smiley’s pace, now away from the car, now back again. Occasionally they drew up, shoulder to shoulder, facing down the valley.

  First Jim described his recruitment of Max and the manoeuvres he went through in order to disguise his mission from the rest of the Circus. He let it leak that he had a tentative lead to a high-stepping Soviet cypher clerk in Stockholm, and booked himself to Copenhagen in his old workname Ellis. Instead, he flew to Paris, switched to his Hajek papers, and landed by scheduled flight at Prague airport at ten on Saturday morning. He went through the barriers like a song, confirmed the time of his train at the terminus, then took a walk because he had a couple of hours to kill and thought he might watch his back a little before he left for Brno. That autumn there had been freak bad weather. There was snow on the ground and more falling.