John Le Carré: Three Complete Novels

by John le Carré

  “No.” He added, “Not at first. No.”

  Thinking inside out, Steed-Asprey used to call it. They knew because the mole Gerald had told them, thought Smiley. The mole knew what the housekeepers had succeeded in getting out of old MacFadean. The Circus conducts its postmortem: Karla has the benefit of its findings in time to use them on Jim.

  “So I suppose by now you were beginning to think Control was right: there was a mole,” said Smiley.

  Jim and Smiley were leaning on a wooden gate. The ground sloped sharply away from them in a long sweep of bracken and fields. Below them lay another village, a bay, and a thin ribbon of moonlit sea.

  “They went straight to the heart of it. ‘Why did Control go it alone? What did he hope to achieve?’ ‘His come-back,’ I said. So they laugh: ‘With tinpot information about military emplacements in the area of Brno? That wouldn’t even buy him a square meal in his club.’ ‘Maybe he was losing his grip,’ I said. If Control was losing his grip, they said, who was stamping on his fingers? Alleline, I said, that was the buzz; Alleline and Control were in competition to provide intelligence. But in Brixton we only got the rumours, I said. ‘And what is Alleline producing that Control is not producing?’ ‘I don’t know.’ ‘But you just said that Alleline and Control are in competition to provide intelligence.’ ‘It’s rumour. I don’t know.’ Back to the cooler.”

  Time, said Jim, at this stage lost him completely. He lived either in the darkness of the hood, or in the white light of the cells. There was no night or day, and to make it even more weird they kept the noises going most of the time.

  They were working him on the production-line principle, he explained: no sleep, relays of questions, a lot of disorientation, a lot of muscle, till the interrogation became to him a slow race between going a bit dotty, as he called it, and breaking completely. Naturally, he hoped he’d go dotty but that wasn’t something you could decide for yourself, because they had a way of bringing you back. A lot of the muscle was done electrically.

  “So we start again. New tack. ‘Stevcek was an important general. If he asked for a senior British officer, he could expect him to be properly informed about all aspects of his career. Are you telling us you did not inform yourself?’ ‘I’m saying I got my information from Control.’ ‘Did you read Stevcek’s dossier at the Circus?’ ‘No.’ ‘Did Control?’ ‘I don’t know.’ ‘What conclusions did Control draw from Stevcek’s second appointment in Moscow? Did Control speak to you about Stevcek’s role in the Warsaw Pact Liaison Committee?’ ‘No.’ They stuck to that question and I suppose I stuck to my answer, because after a few more ‘no’s they got a bit crazy. They seemed to lose patience. When I passed out, they hosed me down and had another crack.”

  Movement, said Jim. His narrative had become oddly jerky. Cells, corridors, car . . . at the airport V.I.P. treatment and a mauling before the aeroplane . . . on the flight, dropped off to sleep and was punished for it. “Came round in a cell again, smaller, no paint on the walls. Sometimes I thought I was in Russia. I worked out by the stars that we had flown east. Sometimes I was in Sarratt, back on the interrogation resistance course.”

  For a couple of days they let him alone. Head was muzzy. He kept hearing the shooting in the forest and he saw the tattoo again, and when finally the big session started—the one he remembered as the marathon—he had the disadvantage of feeling half defeated when he went in.

  “Matter of health, much as anything,” he explained, very tense now.

  “We could take a break if you want,” Smiley said, but where Jim was, there were no breaks, and what he wanted was irrelevant.

  That was the long one, Jim said. Sometime in the course of it, he told them about Control’s notes and his charts and the coloured inks and crayons. They were going at him like the devil and he remembered an all-male audience, at one end of the room, peering like a lot of damn medicos and muttering to one another, and he told them about the crayons just to keep the talk alive, to make them stop and listen. They listened but they didn’t stop.

  “Once they had the colours, they wanted to know what the colours meant. ‘What did blue mean?’ ‘Control didn’t have blue.’ ‘What did red mean? What did red stand for? Give us an example of red on the chart. What did red mean? What did red mean? What did red mean?’ Then everybody clears out except a couple of guards and one cold little fellow, stiff back, seemed to be head boy. The guards take me over to a table, and this little fellow sits beside me like a bloody gnome with his hands folded. He’s got two crayons in front of him, red and green, and a chart of Stevcek’s career.”

  It wasn’t that Jim broke exactly; he just ran out of invention. He couldn’t think up any more stories. The truths that he had locked away so deeply were the only things that suggested themselves.

  “So you told him about the rotten apple,” Smiley suggested. “And you told him about Tinker, Tailor.”

  Yes, Jim agreed, he did. He told him that Control believed Stevcek could identify a mole inside the Circus. He told him about the Tinker, Tailor code and who each of them was, name by name.

  “What was his reaction?”

  “Thought for a bit, then offered me a cigarette. Hated the damn thing.”

  “Why?”

  “Tasted American. Camel, one of those.”

  “Did he smoke one himself?”

  Jim gave a short nod. “Bloody chimney,” he said.

  Time, after that, began once more to flow, said Jim. He was taken to a camp, he guessed outside a town, and lived in a compound of huts with a double perimeter of wire. With the help of a guard, he was soon able to walk; one day they even went for a stroll in the forest. The camp was very big; his own compound was only a part of it. At night he could see the glow of a city to the east. The guards wore denims and didn’t speak, so he still had no way of telling whether he was in Czecho or in Russia, but his money was heavily on Russia, and when the surgeon came to take a look at his back he used a Russian-English interpreter to express his contempt for his predecessor’s handiwork. The interrogation continued sporadically, but without hostility. They put a fresh team on him but it was a leisurely crowd by comparison with the first eleven. One night he was taken to a military airport and flown by R.A.F. fighter to Inverness. From there he went by small plane to Elstree, then by van to Sarratt; both were night journeys.

  Jim was winding up fast. He was already launched on his experiences at the Nursery, in fact, when Smiley asked, “And the headman, the little cold one: you never saw him again?”

  Once, Jim conceded; just before he left.

  “What for?”

  “Gossip.” Much louder. “Lot of damned tripe about Circus personalities, matter of fact.”

  “Which personalities?”

  Jim ducked that question. Tripe about who was on the up staircase, he said, who was on the down. Who was next in line for Chief: “ ‘How should I know,’ I said. ‘Bloody janitors hear it before Brixton does.’ ”

  “So who came in for the tripe, precisely?”

  Mainly Roy Bland, said Jim sullenly. How did Bland reconcile his left-wing leanings with his work at the Circus? He hasn’t got any left-wing leanings, said Jim, that’s how. What was Bland’s standing with Esterhase and Alleline? What did Bland think of Bill’s paintings? Then how much Roy drank and what would become of him if Bill ever withdrew his support for him? Jim gave meagre answers to these questions.

  “Was anyone else mentioned?”

  “Esterhase,” Jim snapped, in the same taut tone. “Bloody man wanted to know how anyone could trust a Hungarian.”

  Smiley’s next question seemed, even to himself, to cast an absolute silence over the whole black valley.

  “And what did he say about me?” He repeated: “What did he say about me?”

  “Showed me a cigarette lighter. Said it was yours. Present from Ann. ‘With all my love.’ Her signature. Engraved.”

  “Did he mention how he came by it? What did he say, Jim? Come on, I’m not goin
g to weaken at the knees just because some Russian hood made a bad joke about me.”

  Jim’s answer came out like an army order. “He reckoned that after Bill Haydon’s fling with her, she might care to redraft the inscription.” He swung away towards the car. “I told him,” he shouted furiously. “Told him to his wrinkled little face. You can’t judge Bill by things like that. Artists have totally different standards. See things we can’t see. Feel things that are beyond us. Bloody little man just laughed. ‘Didn’t know his pictures were that good,’ he said. I told him, George. ‘Go to hell. Go to bloody hell. If you had one Bill Haydon in your damned outfit, you could call it set and match.’ I said to him: ‘Christ Almighty,’ I said, ‘what are you running over here? A service or the bloody Salvation Army?’ ”

  “That was well said,” Smiley remarked at last, as if commenting on some distant debate. “And you’d never seen him before?”

  “Who?”

  “The little frosty chap. He wasn’t familiar to you—from long ago, for instance? Well, you know how we are. We’re trained, we see a lot of faces, photographs of Centre personalities, and sometimes they stick. Even if we can’t put a name to them any more. This one didn’t, anyway. I just wondered. It occurred to me you had a lot of time to think,” he went on, conversationally. “You lay there recovering, waiting to come home, and what else had you to do, but think?” He waited. “So what did you think of, I wonder? The mission. Your mission, I suppose.”

  “Off and on.”

  “With what conclusions? Anything useful? Any suspicions, insights, any hints for me to take away?”

  “Damn all, thank you,” Jim snapped, very hard. “You know me, George Smiley. I’m not a juju man, I’m a—”

  “You’re a plain fieldman who lets the other chaps do his thinking. Nevertheless, when you know you have been led into a king-sized trap, betrayed, shot in the back, and have nothing to do for months but lie or sit on a bunk, or pace a Russian cell, I would guess that even the most dedicated man of action”—his voice had lost none of its friendliness—“might put his mind to wondering how he landed in such a scrape. Let’s take Operation Testify a minute,” Smiley suggested to the motionless figure before him. “Testify ended Control’s career. He was disgraced and he couldn’t pursue his mole, assuming there was one. The Circus passed into other hands. With a sense of timeliness, Control died. Testify did something else, too. It revealed to the Russians—through you, actually—the exact reach of Control’s suspicions. That he’d narrowed the field to five, but apparently no further. I’m not suggesting you should have fathomed all that for yourself in your cell, waiting. After all, you had no idea, sitting in the pen, that Control had been thrown out—though it might have occurred to you that the Russians laid on that mock battle in the forest in order to raise a wind. Did it?”

  “You’ve forgotten the networks,” said Jim dully.

  “Oh, the Czechs had the networks marked down long before you came on the scene. They only rolled them up in order to compound Control’s failure.”

  The discursive, almost chatty tone with which Smiley threw out these theories found no resonance in Jim. Having waited in vain for him to volunteer some word, Smiley let the matter drop. “Well, let’s just go over your reception at Sarratt, shall we? To wrap it up?”

  In a rare moment of forgetfulness, he helped himself to the vodka bottle before passing it to Jim.

  To judge by his voice, Jim had had enough. He spoke fast and angrily, with that same military shortness which was his refuge from intellectual incursions.

  For four days Sarratt was limbo, he said: “Ate a lot, drank a lot, slept a lot. Walked round the cricket ground.” He’d have swum, but the pool was under repair, as it had been six months before: damned inefficient. He had a medical, watched television in his hut, and played a bit of chess with Cranko, who was running reception.

  Meanwhile he waited for Control to show up, but he didn’t. The first person from the Circus to visit him was the resettlement officer, talking about a friendly teaching agency; next came some pay wallah to discuss his pension entitlement; then the doctor again to assess him for a gratuity. He waited for the inquisitors to appear but they never did, which was a relief because he didn’t know what he would have told them until he had the green light from Control and he’d had enough of questions. He guessed Control was holding them off. It seemed mad that he should keep from the inquisitors what he had already told the Russians and the Czechs, but until he heard from Control, what else could he do? When Control still sent no word, he formed notions of presenting himself to Lacon and telling his story. Then he decided that Control was waiting for him to get clear of the Nursery before he contacted him. He had a relapse for a few days, and when it was over Toby Esterhase turned up in a new suit, apparently to shake him by the hand and wish him luck. But in fact to tell him how things stood.

  “Bloody odd fellow to send, but he seemed to have come up in the world. Then I remembered what Control said about only using chaps from outstations.”

  Esterhase told him that the Circus had very nearly gone under as a result of Testify and that Jim was currently the Circus’s Number One leper. Control was out of the game and a reorganisation was going on in order to appease Whitehall.

  “Then he told me not to worry,” said Jim.

  “In what way not worry?”

  “About my special brief. He said a few people knew the real story, and I needn’t worry because it was being taken care of. All the facts were known. Then he gave me a thousand quid in cash to add to my gratuity.”

  “Who from?”

  “He didn’t say.”

  “Did he mention Control’s theory about Stevcek? Centre’s spy inside the Circus?”

  “The facts were known,” Jim repeated, glaring. “He ordered me not to approach anyone or try to get my story heard, because it was all being taken care of at the highest level and anything I did might spoil the kill. The Circus was back on the road. I could forget Tinker, Tailor and the whole damn game—moles, everything. ‘Drop out,’ he said. ‘You’re a lucky man, Jim,’ he kept saying. ‘You’ve been ordered to become a lotus-eater.’ I could forget it. Right? Forget it. Just behave as if it had never happened.” He was shouting. “And that’s what I’ve been doing: obeying orders and forgetting!”

  The night landscape seemed to Smiley suddenly innocent; it was like a great canvas on which nothing bad or cruel had ever been painted. Side by side, they stared down the valley over the clusters of lights to a tor raised against the horizon. A single tower stood at its top and for a moment it marked for Smiley the end of the journey.

  “Yes,” he said. “I did a bit of forgetting, too. So Toby actually mentioned Tinker, Tailor to you. However did he get hold of that story, unless . . . And no word from Bill?” he went on. “Not even a postcard.”

  “Bill was abroad,” said Jim shortly.

  “Who told you that?”

  “Toby.”

  “So you never saw Bill; since Testify, your oldest, closest friend, he disappeared.”

  “You heard what Toby said. I was out of bounds. Quarantine.”

  “Bill was never much of a one for regulations, though, was he?” said Smiley, in a reminiscent tone.

  “And you were never one to see him straight,” Jim barked.

  “Sorry I wasn’t there when you called on me, before you left for Czecho,” Smiley remarked after a small pause. “Control had pushed me over to Germany to get me out of the light and when I came back—what was it that you wanted, exactly?”

  “Nothing. Thought Czecho might be a bit hairy. Thought I’d give you the nod, say goodbye.”

  “Before a mission?” cried Smiley in mild surprise. “Before such a special mission?” Jim showed no sign that he had heard. “Did you give anyone else the nod? I suppose we were all away. Toby, Roy—Bill; did he get one?”

  “No one.”

  “Bill was on leave, wasn’t he? But I gather he was around, all the same.”
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  “No one,” Jim insisted, as a spasm of pain caused him to lift his right shoulder and rotate his head. “All out,” he said.

  “That’s very unlike you, Jim,” said Smiley in the same mild tone, “to go round shaking hands with people before you go on vital missions. You must have been getting sentimental in your old age. It wasn’t . . .” he hesitated. “It wasn’t advice or anything that you wanted, was it? After all, you did think the mission was poppycock, didn’t you? And that Control was losing his grip. Perhaps you felt you should take your problem to a third party? It all had rather a mad air, I agree.”

  Learn the facts, Steed-Asprey used to say, then try on the stories like clothes.

  With Jim still locked in a furious silence, they returned to the car.

  At the motel Smiley drew twenty postcard-sized photographs from the recesses of his coat and laid them out in two lines across the ceramic table. Some were snaps, some portraits; all were of men and none of them looked English. With a grimace Jim picked out two and handed them to Smiley. He was sure of the first, he muttered, less sure of the second. The first was the headman, the cool little man. The second was one of the swine who watched from the shadows while the thugs took Jim to pieces. Smiley returned the photographs to his pocket. As he topped up their glasses for a nightcap, a less tortured observer than Jim might have noticed a sense not of triumph but of ceremony about him; as though the drink were putting a seal on something.

  “So when was the last time you saw Bill, actually? To talk to,” Smiley asked, just as one might about any old friend. He had evidently disturbed Jim in other thoughts, for he took a moment to lift his head and catch the question.

  “Oh, round about,” he said carelessly. “Bumped into him in the corridors, I suppose.”

  “And to talk to? Never mind.” For Jim had returned to his other thoughts.

  Jim would not be driven all the way to school. Smiley had to drop him short, at the top of the tarmac path that led through the graveyard to the church. He had left some workbooks in the antechapel, he said. Momentarily, Smiley felt disposed to disbelieve him, but could not understand why. Perhaps because he had come to the opinion that after thirty years in the trade, Jim was still a rather poor liar. The last Smiley saw of him was that lopsided shadow striding towards the Norman porch as his heels cracked like gunshot between the tombs.