John Le Carré: Three Complete Novels

by John le Carré

  In Czecho, said Jim, surveillance was not usually a problem. The security services knew next to nothing about street-watching, probably because no administration in living memory had ever had to feel shy about it. The tendency, said Jim, was still to throw cars and pavement artists around like Al Capone, and that was what Jim was looking for: black Skodas and trios of squat men in trilbies. In the cold, spotting these things is marginally harder because the traffic is slow, the people walk faster, and everyone is muffled to the nose. All the same, till he reached Masaryk Station—or Central, as they’re pleased to call it these days—he had no worries. But at Masaryk, said Jim, he got a whisper, more instinct than fact, about two women who’d bought tickets ahead of him.

  Here, with the dispassionate ease of a professional, Jim went back over the ground. In a covered shopping arcade beside Wenceslaus Square he had been overtaken by three women, of whom the one in the middle was pushing a pram. The woman nearest the curb carried a red plastic handbag and the woman on the inside was walking a dog on a lead. Ten minutes later two other women came towards him, arm in arm, both in a hurry, and it crossed his mind that if Toby Esterhase had had the running of the job, an arrangement like this would be his handwriting; quick profile changes from the pram, backup cars standing off with short-wave radio or bleep, with a second team lying back in case the forward party overran. At Masaryk, looking at the two women ahead of him in the ticket queue, Jim was faced with the knowledge that it was happening now. There is one garment that a watcher has neither time nor inclination to change, least of all in sub-Arctic weather, and that is his shoes. Of the two pairs offered for his inspection in the ticket queue, Jim recognised one: furlined plastic, black, with zips on the outside and soles of a thick brown composition that sang slightly in the snow. He had seen them once already that morning, in the Sterba passage, worn with different top clothes by the woman who had pushed past him with the pram. From then on, Jim didn’t suspect. He knew, just as Smiley would have known.

  At the station bookstall, Jim bought himself a Rude Pravo and boarded the Brno train. If they had wanted to arrest him, they would have done so by now. They must be after the branch lines: they were following Jim in order to house his contacts. There was no point in looking for reasons, but Jim guessed that the Hajek identity was blown and they’d primed the trap the moment he booked himself on the plane. As long as they didn’t know he had flushed them, he still had the edge, said Jim; and for a moment Smiley was back in occupied Germany, in his own time as a field agent, living with terror in his mouth, naked to every stranger’s glance.

  He was supposed to catch the thirteen-eight arriving Brno sixteen-twenty-seven. It was cancelled, so he took some wonderful stopping train, a special for the football match, which called at every other lamp-post, and each time Jim reckoned he could pick out the hoods. The quality was variable. At Chocen, a one-horse place if ever he saw one, he got out and bought himself a sausage, and there were no fewer than five, all men, spread down the tiny platform with their hands in their pockets, pretending to chat to one another and making damn fools of themselves.

  “If there’s one thing that distinguishes a good watcher from a bad one,” said Jim, “it’s the gentle art of doing damn all convincingly.”

  At Svitavy two men and a woman entered his carriage and talked about the big match. After a while Jim joined the conversation; he had been reading up the form in his newspaper. It was a club replay, and everyone was going crazy about it. By Brno, nothing more had happened, so he got out and sauntered through shops and crowded areas where they had to stay close for fear of losing him.

  He wanted to lull them, demonstrate to them that he suspected nothing. He knew now that he was the target of what Toby would call a grand-slam operation. On foot they were working teams of seven. The cars changed so often he couldn’t count them. The over-all direction came from a scruffy green van driven by a thug. The van had a loop aerial and a chalk star scrawled high on the back where no child could reach. The cars, where he picked them out, were declared to one another by a woman’s handbag on the gloveboard and a passenger sun visor turned down. He guessed there were other signs but those two were good enough for him. He knew from what Toby had told him that jobs like this could cost a hundred people and were unwieldy if the quarry bolted. Toby hated them for that reason.

  There is one store in Brno main square that sells everything, said Jim. Shopping in Czecho is usually a bore because there are so few retail outlets for each state industry, but this place was new and quite impressive. He bought children’s toys, a scarf, some cigarettes, and tried on shoes. He guessed his watchers were still waiting for his clandestine contact. He stole a fur hat and a white plastic raincoat and a carrier bag to put them in. He loitered at the men’s department long enough to confirm that two women who formed the forward pair were still behind him but reluctant to come too close. He guessed they had signalled for men to take over, and were waiting. In the men’s lavatory he moved very fast. He pulled the white raincoat over his overcoat, stuffed the carrier bag into the pocket, and put on the fur hat. He abandoned his remaining parcels, then ran like a madman down the emergency staircase, smashed open a fire door, pelted down an alley, strolled up another, which was one-way, stuffed the white raincoat into the carrier bag, sauntered into another store, which was just closing, and there bought a black raincoat to replace the white one. Using the departing shoppers for cover, he squeezed into a crowded tram, stayed aboard till the last stop but one, walked for an hour, and made the fallback with Max to the minute.

  Here he described his dialogue with Max and said they nearly had a standing fight.

  Smiley asked, “It never crossed your mind to drop the job?”

  “No. It did not,” Jim snapped, his voice rising in a threat.

  “Although, right from the start, you thought the idea was poppycock?” There was nothing but deference in Smiley’s tone. No edge, no wish to score: only a wish to have the truth, clear under the night sky. “You just kept marching. You’d seen what was on your back, you thought the mission absurd, but you still went on, deeper and deeper into the jungle.”

  “I did.”

  “Had you perhaps changed your mind about the mission? Did curiosity draw you, after all—was that it? You wanted passionately to know who the mole was, for instance? I’m only speculating, Jim.”

  “What’s the difference? What the hell does my motive matter in a damn mess like this?”

  The half-moon was free of cloud and seemed very close. Jim sat on the bench. It was bedded in loose gravel, and while he spoke he occasionally picked up a pebble and flicked it backhand into the bracken. Smiley sat beside him, looking nowhere but at Jim. Once, to keep him company, he took a pull of vodka and thought of Tarr and Irina drinking on their hilltop in Hong Kong. It must be a habit of the trade, he decided: we talk better when there’s a view.

  Through the window of the parked Fiat, said Jim, the word code passed off without a hitch. The driver was one of those stiff, muscle-bound Czech Magyars with an Edwardian moustache and a mouthful of garlic. Jim didn’t like him but he hadn’t expected to. The two back doors were locked and there was a row about where he should sit. The Magyar said it was insecure for Jim to be in the back. It was also undemocratic. Jim told him to go to hell. He asked Jim whether he had a gun, and Jim said no, which was not true, but if the Magyar didn’t believe him he didn’t dare say so. He asked whether Jim had brought instructions for the General. Jim said he had brought nothing. He had come to listen.

  Jim felt a bit nervy, he said. They drove and the Magyar said his piece. When they reached the lodge, there would be no lights and no sign of life. The General would be inside. If there was any sign of life—a bicycle, a car, a light, a dog—if there was any sign that the hut was occupied, then the Magyar would go in first and Jim would wait in the car. Otherwise Jim should go in alone and the Slav would do the waiting. Was that clear?

  Why didn’t they just go in together? Jim aske
d. Because the General didn’t want them to, said the Slav.

  They drove for half an hour by Jim’s watch, heading north east at an average of thirty kilometres an hour. The track was winding and steep and tree-lined. There was no moon and he could see very little except occasionally against the skyline more forest, more hilltops. The snow had come from the north, he noticed; it was a point that was useful later. The track was clear but rutted by heavy lorries. They drove without lights. The Magyar had begun telling a dirty story and Jim guessed it was his way of being nervous. The smell of garlic was awful. He seemed to chew it all the time. Without warning, he cut the engine. They were running downhill, but more slowly. They had not quite stopped when the Magyar reached for the handbrake and Jim smashed his head against the window-post and took his gun. They were at the opening to a side-path. Thirty yards down this path lay a low wooden hut. There was no sign of life.

  Jim told the Magyar what he would like him to do. He would like him to wear Jim’s fur hat and Jim’s coat and take the walk for him. He should take it slowly, keeping his hands linked behind his back, and walking at the centre of the path. If he failed to do either of those things, Jim would shoot him. When he reached the hut, he should go inside and explain to the General that Jim was indulging in an elementary precaution. Then he should walk back slowly, report to Jim that all was well, and that the General was ready to receive him. Or not, as the case might be.

  The Magyar didn’t seem very happy about this but he didn’t have much choice. Before he got out, Jim made him turn the car round and face it down the path. If there was any monkey business, Jim explained, he would put on the headlights and shoot him along the beam, not once but several times, and not in the legs. The Magyar began his walk. He had nearly reached the hut when the whole area was floodlit: the hut, the path, and a large space around. Then a number of things happened at once. Jim didn’t see everything, because he was busy turning the car. He saw four men fall out of the trees, and so far as he could work out, one of them had sandbagged the Magyar. Shooting started but none of the four paid it any attention; they were standing back while somebody took photographs. The shooting seemed to be directed at the clear sky behind the floodlights. It was very theatrical. Flares exploded, Very lights went up, even tracers, and as Jim raced the Fiat down the track, he had the impression of leaving a military tattoo at its climax. He was almost clear—he really felt he was clear—when from the woods to his right someone opened up with a machine-gun at close quarters. The first burst shot off a back wheel and turned the car over. He saw the wheel fly over the bonnet as the car took to the ditch on the left. The ditch might have been ten feet deep but the snow let him down kindly. The car didn’t burn so he lay behind it and waited, facing across the track hoping to get a shot at the machine-gunner. The next burst came from behind him and threw him up against the car. The woods must have been crawling with troops. He knew that he had been hit twice. Both shots caught him in the right shoulder and it seemed amazing to him, as he lay there watching the tattoo, that they hadn’t taken off the arm. A klaxon sounded, maybe two or three. An ambulance rolled down the track and there was still enough shooting to frighten the game for years. The ambulance reminded him of those old Hollywood fire engines, it was so upright. A whole mock battle was taking place, yet the ambulance boys stood gazing at him without a care in the world. He was losing consciousness as he heard a second car arrive, and men’s voices, and more photographs were taken, this time of the right man. Someone gave orders, but he couldn’t tell what they were because they were given in Russian. His one thought, as they dumped him on the stretcher and the lights went out, concerned going back to London. He imagined himself in the St. James’s flat, with the coloured charts and the sheaf of notes, sitting in the armchair and explaining to Control how in their old age the two of them had walked into the biggest sucker’s punch in the history of the trade. His only consolation was that they had sandbagged the Magyar, but looking back Jim wished very much he’d broken his neck for him: it was a thing he could have managed very easily, and without compunction.

  32

  The describing of pain was to Jim an indulgence to be dispensed with. To Smiley, his stoicism had something awesome about it, the more so because he seemed unaware of it. The gaps in his story came mainly where he passed out, he explained. The ambulance drove him, so far as he could fathom, further north. He guessed this from the trees when they opened the door to let the doctor in: the snow was heaviest when he looked back. The surface was good and he guessed they were on the road to Hradec. The doctor gave him an injection; he came round in a prison hospital with barred windows high up, and three men watching him. He came round again after the operation, in a different cell with no windows at all, and he thought probably the first questioning took place there, about seventy-two hours after they’d patched him up, but time was already a problem and of course they’d taken away his watch.

  They moved him a lot. Either to different rooms, depending on what they were going to do with him, or to other prisons, depending on who was questioning him. Sometimes they just moved to keep him awake, walking him down cell corridors at night. He was also moved in lorries, and once by a Czech transport plane, but he was trussed for the flight and hooded, and passed out soon after they took off. The interrogation which followed this flight was very long. Otherwise he had little sense of progression from one questioning to another and thinking didn’t get it any straighter for him—rather the reverse. The thing that was still strongest in his memory was the plan of campaign he formed while he waited for the first interrogation to begin. He knew silence would be impossible and that for his own sanity, or survival, there had to be a dialogue, and at the end of it they had to think he had told them what he knew, all he knew. Lying in hospital, he prepared his mind into lines of defence behind which, if he was lucky, he could fall back stage by stage until he had given the impression of total defeat. His forward line, he reckoned, and his most expendable, was the bare bones of Operation Testify. It was anyone’s guess whether Stevcek was a plant, or had been betrayed. But whichever was the case, one thing was certain: the Czechs knew more about Stevcek than Jim did. His first concession, therefore, would be the Stevcek story, since they had it already; but he would make them work for it. First he would deny everything and stick to his cover. After a fight, he would admit to being a British spy and give his workname Ellis, so that if they published it, the Circus would at least know he was alive and trying. He had little doubt that the elaborate trap and the photographs augured a lot of ballyhoo. After that, in accordance with his understanding with Control, he would describe the operation as his own show, mounted without the consent of his superiors, and calculated to win him favour. And he would bury, as deep as they could go and deeper, all thoughts of a spy inside the Circus.

  “No mole,” said Jim, to the black outlines of the Quantocks. “No meeting with Control, no service flat in St. James’s.”

  “No Tinker, Tailor.”

  His second line of defence would be Max. He proposed at first to deny that he had brought a legman at all. Then he might say he had brought one but didn’t know his name. Then, because everyone likes a name, he would give them one: the wrong one first, then the right one. By that time Max must be clear, or underground, or caught.

  Now came in Jim’s imagination a succession of less strongly held positions: recent scalp-hunter operations, Circus tittle-tattle—anything to make his interrogators think he was broken and talking free and that this was all he had, they had passed the last trench. He would rack his memory for back scalp-hunter cases, and if necessary he would give them the names of one or two Soviet and satellite officials who had recently been turned or burned; of others who in the past had made a one-time sale of assets and, since they had not defected, might now be considered to be in line for burning or a second bite. He would throw them any bone he could think of—sell them, if necessary, the entire Brixton stable. And all of this would be the smokescreen to dis
guise what seemed to Jim to be his most vulnerable intelligence, since they would certainly expect him to possess it: the identity of members of the Czech end of the Aggravate and Plato networks.

  “Landkron, Krieglova, Bilova, the Pribyls,” said Jim.

  Why did he choose the same order for their names? Smiley wondered.

  For a long time Jim had had no responsibility for these networks. Years earlier, before he took over Brixton, he had helped establish them, recruited some of the founder members; since then, a lot had happened to them in the hands of Bland and Haydon of which he knew nothing. But he was certain that he still knew enough to blow them both sky high. And what worried him most was the fear that Control, or Bill, or Percy Alleline, or whoever had the final say these days, would be too greedy, or too slow, to evacuate the networks by the time Jim, under forms of duress he could only guess at, had no alternative but to break completely.

  “So that’s the joke,” said Jim, with no humour whatever. “They couldn’t have cared less about the networks. They asked me half a dozen questions about Aggravate, then lost interest. They knew damn well that Testify wasn’t my private brain-child and they knew all about Control buying the Stevcek pass in Vienna. They began exactly where I wanted to end: with the briefing in St. James’s. They didn’t ask me about a legman; they weren’t interested in who had driven me to the rendezvous with the Magyar. All they wanted to talk about was Control’s rotten-apple theory.”

  One word, thought Smiley again, it might be just one word. He said, “Did they actually know the St. James’s address?”

  “They knew the brand of the bloody sherry, man.”

  “And the charts?” asked Smiley quickly. “The music case?”