John Le Carré: Three Complete Novels

by John le Carré

  Smiley drove to Taunton and from the Castle Hotel made a string of telephone calls. Though exhausted, he slept fitfully between visions of Karla sitting at Jim’s table with two crayons, and Cultural Attaché Polyakov alias Viktorov, fired by concern for the safety of his mole Gerald, waiting impatiently in the interrogation cell for Jim to break. Lastly of Toby Esterhase bobbing into Sarratt in place of the absent Haydon, cheerfully advising Jim to forget all about Tinker, Tailor, and his dead inventor, Control.

  The same night, Peter Guillam drove west, clean across England to Liverpool, with Ricki Tarr as his only passenger. It was a tedious journey in beastly conditions. For most of it, Tarr boasted about the rewards he would claim, and the promotion, once he had carried out his mission. From there he talked about his women: Danny, her mother, Irina. He seemed to envisage a ménage à quatre in which the two women would jointly care for Danny, and for himself.

  “There’s a lot of the mother in Irina. That’s what frustrates her, naturally.” Boris, he said, could get lost; he would tell Karla to keep him. As their destination approached, his mood changed again and he fell silent. The dawn was cold and foggy. In the suburbs they had to drop to a crawl and cyclists overtook them. A reek of soot and steel filled the car.

  “Don’t hang about in Dublin, either,” said Guillam suddenly. “They expect you to work the soft routes, so keep your head down. Take the first plane out.”

  “We’ve been through all that.”

  “Well, I’m going through it all again,” Guillam retorted. “What’s Mackelvore’s workname?”

  “For Christ’s sake,” Tarr breathed, and gave it.

  It was still dark when the Irish ferry sailed. There were soldiers and police everywhere: this war, the last, the one before. A fierce wind was blowing off the sea and the going looked rough. At the dockside, a sense of fellowship briefly touched the small crowd as the ship’s lights bobbed quickly into the gloom. Somewhere a woman was crying, somewhere a drunk was celebrating his release.

  He drove back slowly, trying to work himself out: the new Guillam who starts at sudden noises, has nightmares, and not only can’t keep his girl but makes up crazy reasons for distrusting her. He had challenged Camilla about Sand, and the hours she kept, and about her secrecy in general. After listening with her grave brown eyes fixed on him, she told him he was a fool, and left. “I am what you think I am,” she said, and fetched her things from the bedroom. From his empty flat he telephoned Toby Esterhase, inviting him for a friendly chat later that day.

  33

  Smiley sat in the Minister’s Rolls, with Lacon beside him. In Ann’s family the car was called the black bedpan, and hated for its flashiness. The chauffeur had been sent to find himself breakfast. The Minister sat in the front and everyone looked forward down the long bonnet, across the river to the foggy towers of Battersea Power Station. The Minister’s hair was full at the back, and licked into small black horns around the ears.

  “If you’re right,” the Minister declared, after a funereal silence. “I’m not saying you’re not, but if you are, how much porcelain will he break at the end of the day?”

  Smiley did not quite understand.

  “I’m talking about scandal. Gerald gets to Moscow. Right, so then what happens? Does he leap on a soap-box and laugh his head off in public about all the people he’s made fools of over here? I mean, Christ, we’re all in this together, aren’t we? I don’t see why we should let him go just so’s he can pull the bloody roof down over our heads and the competition sweep the bloody pool.”

  He tried a different tack. “I mean to say, just because the Russians know our secrets, doesn’t mean everyone else has to. We got plenty of other fish to fry apart from them, don’t we? What about all the black men: are they going to be reading the gory details in the Walla Walla News in a week’s time?”

  Or his constituents, Smiley thought.

  “I think that’s always been a point the Russians accept,” said Lacon. “After all, if you make your enemy look a fool, you lose the justification for engaging him.” He added, “They’ve never made use of their opportunities so far, have they?”

  “Well, make sure they toe the line. Get it in writing. No, don’t. But you tell them what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. We don’t go round publishing the batting order at Moscow Centre, so they can bloody well play ball, too, for once.”

  Declining a lift, Smiley said the walk would do him good.

  It was Thursgood’s day for duty and he felt it badly. Headmasters, in his opinion, should be above the menial tasks; they should keep their minds clear for policy and leadership. The flourish of his Cambridge gown did not console him, and as he stood in the gymnasium watching the boys file in for morning line-up, his eye fixed on them balefully, if not with downright hostility. It was Marjoribanks, though, who dealt the death-blow.

  “He said it was his mother,” he explained, in a low murmur to Thursgood’s left ear. “He’d had a telegram and proposed to leave at once. He wouldn’t even stay for a cup of tea. I promised to pass on the message.”

  “It’s monstrous, absolutely monstrous,” said Thursgood.

  “I’ll take his French, if you like. We can double up Five and Six.”

  “I’m furious,” said Thursgood. “I can’t think, I’m so furious.”

  “And Irving says he’ll take the rugger final.”

  “Reports to be written, exams, rugger finals to play off. What’s supposed to be the matter with the woman? Just a flu, I suppose, a seasonal flu. Well, we’ve all got that, so have our mothers. Where does she live?”

  “I rather gathered from what he said to Sue that she was dying.”

  “Well, that’s one excuse he won’t be able to use again,” said Thursgood, quite unmollified, and with a sharp bark quelled the noise and read the roll.

  “Roach?”

  “Sick, sir.”

  That was all he needed to fill his cup. The school’s richest boy having a nervous breakdown about his wretched parents, and the father threatening to remove him.

  34

  It was almost four o’clock on the afternoon of the same day. Safe houses I have known, thought Guillam, looking round the gloomy flat. He could write of them the way a commercial traveller could write about hotels: from your five-star hall of mirrors in Belgravia, with Wedgwood pilasters and gilded oak leaves, to this two-room scalp-hunters’ shakedown in Lexham Gardens, smelling of dust and drains, with a three-foot fire extinguisher in the pitch-dark hall. Over the fireplace, cavaliers drinking out of pewter. On the nest of tables, sea-shells for ashtrays; and in the grey kitchen, anonymous instructions to “Be Sure and Turn Off the Gas Both Cocks.” He was crossing the hall when the house bell rang, exactly on time. He lifted the phone and heard Toby’s distorted voice howling in the earpiece. He pressed the button and heard the clunk of the electric lock echoing in the stairwell. He opened the front door but left it on the chain till he was sure Toby was alone.

  “How are we?” said Guillam cheerfully, letting him in.

  “Fine, actually, Peter,” said Toby, pulling off his coat and gloves.

  There was tea on a tray: Guillam had prepared it, two cups. To safe houses belongs a certain standard of catering. Either you are pretending that you live there or that you are adept anywhere; or simply that you think of everything. In the trade, naturalness is an art, Guillam decided. That was something Camilla could not appreciate.

  “Actually, it’s quite strange weather,” Esterhase announced, as if he had really been analysing its qualities. Safe-house small-talk was never much better. “One walks a few steps and is completely exhausted already. So we are expecting a Pole?” he said, sitting down. “A Pole in the fur trade who you think might run courier for us.”

  “Due here any minute.”

  “Do we know him? I had my people look up the name but they found no trace.”

  My people, thought Guillam: I must remember to use that one. “The Free Poles made a pass at h
im a few months back and he ran a mile,” he said. “Then Karl Stack spotted him round the warehouses and thought he might be useful to the scalp-hunters.” He shrugged. “I liked him but what’s the point? We can’t even keep our own people busy.”

  “Peter, you are very generous,” said Esterhase reverently, and Guillam had the ridiculous feeling he had just tipped him. To his relief, the front doorbell rang and Fawn took up his place in the doorway.

  “Sorry about this, Toby,” Smiley said, a little out of breath from the stairs. “Peter, where shall I hang my coat?”

  Turning him to the wall, Guillam lifted Toby’s unresisting hands and put them against it, then searched him for a gun, taking his time. Toby had none.

  “Did he come alone?” Guillam asked. “Or is there some little friend waiting in the road?”

  “Looked all clear to me,” said Fawn.

  Smiley was at the window, gazing down into the street. “Put the light out a minute, will you?” he said.

  “Wait in the hall,” Guillam ordered, and Fawn withdrew, carrying Smiley’s coat. “Seen something?” he asked Smiley, joining him at the window.

  Already the London afternoon had taken on the misty pinks and yellows of evening. The square was Victorian residential; at the centre, a caged garden, already dark. “Just a shadow, I suppose,” said Smiley with a grunt, and turned back to Esterhase. The clock on the mantelpiece chimed four. Fawn must have wound it up.

  “I want to put a thesis to you, Toby. A notion about what’s going on. May I?”

  Esterhase didn’t move an eyelash. His little hands rested on the wooden arms of his chair. He sat quite comfortably, but slightly to attention, toes and heels of his polished shoes together.

  “You don’t have to speak at all. There’s no risk to listening, is there?”

  “Maybe.”

  “It’s two years ago. Percy Alleline wants Control’s job, but he has no standing in the Circus. Control has made sure of that. Control is sick and past his prime but Percy can’t dislodge him. Remember the time?”

  Esterhase gave a neat nod.

  “One of those silly seasons,” said Smiley, in his reasonable voice. “There isn’t enough work outside so we start intriguing around the service, spying on one another. Percy’s sitting in his room one morning with nothing to do. He has a paper appointment as Operational Director, but in practice he’s a rubber stamp between the regional sections and Control, if that. Percy’s door opens and somebody walks in. We’ll call him Gerald—it’s just a name. ‘Percy,’ he says, ‘I’ve stumbled on a major Russian source. It could be a gold-mine.’ Or perhaps he doesn’t say anything till they’re outside the building, because Gerald is very much a fieldman; he doesn’t like to talk with walls and telephones around. Perhaps they take a walk in the park or a drive in a car. Perhaps they eat a meal somewhere, and at this stage there isn’t much Percy can do but listen. Percy’s had very little experience of the European scene, remember, least of all Czecho or the Balkans. He cut his teeth in South America and after that he worked the old possessions: India, the Middle East. He doesn’t know a lot about Russians or Czechs or what you will; he’s inclined to see red as red and leave it at that. Unfair?”

  Esterhase pursed his lips and frowned a little, as if to say he never discussed a superior.

  “Whereas Gerald is an expert on those things. His operational life has been spent weaving and ducking round the Eastern markets. Percy’s out of his depth but keen. Gerald’s on his home ground. This Russian source, says Gerald, could be the richest the Circus has had for years. Gerald doesn’t want to say too much but he expects to be getting some trade samples in a day or two, and when he does, he’d like Percy to run his eye over them just to get a notion of the quality. They can go into source details later. ‘But why me?’ says Percy. ‘What’s it all about?’ So Gerald tells him. ‘Percy,’ he says, ‘some of us in the regional sections are worried sick by the level of operational losses. There seems to be a jinx around. Too much loose talk inside the Circus and out. Too many people being cut in on distribution. Out in the field, our agents are going to the wall, our networks are being rolled up or worse, and every new ploy ends up a street accident. We want you to help us put that right.’ Gerald is not mutinous, and he’s careful not to suggest that there’s a traitor inside the Circus who’s blowing all the operations, because you and I know that once talk like that gets around the machinery grinds to a halt. Anyway the last thing Gerald wants is a witch-hunt. But he does say that the place is leaking at the joints, and that slovenliness at the top is leading to failures lower down. All balm to Percy’s ear. He lists the recent scandals and he’s careful to lean on Alleline’s own Middle East adventure, which went so wrong and nearly cost Percy his career. Then he makes his proposal. This is what he says. In my thesis, you understand—it’s just a thesis.”

  “Sure, George,” said Toby, and licked his lips.

  “Another thesis would be that Alleline was his own Gerald, you see. It just happens that I don’t believe it; I don’t believe Percy is capable of going out and buying himself a top Russian spy and manning his own boat from then on. I think he’d mess it up.”

  “Sure,” said Esterhase, with absolute confidence.

  “So this, in my thesis, is what Gerald says to Percy next. ‘We—that is, myself and those like-minded souls who are associated with this project—would like you to act as our father figure, Percy. We’re not political men, we’re operators. We don’t understand the Whitehall jungle. But you do. You handle the committees, we’ll handle Merlin. If you act as our cut-out, and protect us from the rot that’s set in, which means in effect limiting knowledge of the operation to the absolute minimum, we’ll supply the goods.’ They talk over ways and means in which this might be done; then Gerald leaves Percy to fret for a bit. A week, a month, I don’t know. Long enough for Percy to have done his thinking. One day Gerald produces the first sample. And of course it’s very good. Very, very good. Naval stuff, as it happens, which couldn’t suit Percy better, because he’s very well in at the Admiralty; it’s his supporters’ club. So Percy gives his naval friends a sneak preview and they water at the mouth. ‘Where does it come from? Will there be more?’ There’s plenty more. As to the identity of the source—well, that’s a big big mystery at this stage, but so it should be. Forgive me if I’m a little wide of the mark here and there, but I’ve only the file to go by.”

  The mention of a file, the first indication that Smiley might be acting in some official capacity, produced in Esterhase a discernible response. The habitual licking of the lips was accompanied by a forward movement of the head and an expression of shrewd familiarity, as if Toby by all these signals was trying to indicate that he, too, had read the file, whatever file it was, and entirely shared Smiley’s conclusions. Smiley had broken off to drink some tea.

  “More for you, Toby?” he asked over his cup.

  “I’ll get it,” said Guillam with more firmness than hospitality.

  “Tea, Fawn,” he called through the door. It opened at once and Fawn appeared on the threshold, cup in hand.

  Smiley was back at the window. He had parted the curtain an inch, and was staring into the square.

  “Toby?”

  “Yes, George?”

  “Did you bring a baby-sitter?”

  “No.”

  “No one?”

  “George, why should I bring baby-sitters if I am just going to meet Peter and a poor Pole?”

  Smiley returned to his chair. “Merlin as a source,” he resumed. “Where was I? Yes, well, conveniently Merlin wasn’t just one source, was he, as little by little Gerald explained to Percy and the two others he had by now drawn into the magic circle. Merlin was a Soviet agent, all right, but, rather like Alleline, he was also the spokesman of a dissident group. We love to see ourselves in other people’s situations, and I’m sure Percy warmed to Merlin from the start. This group, this caucus of which Merlin was the leader, was made up of, say, half a dozen lik
e-minded Soviet officials, each in his way well-placed. With time, I suspect, Gerald gave his lieutenants, and Percy, a pretty close picture of these sub-sources, but I don’t know. Merlin’s job was to collate their intelligence and get it to the West, and over the next few months he showed remarkable versatility in doing just that. He used all manner of methods, and the Circus was only too willing to feed him the equipment. Secret writing, microdots stuck over full stops on innocent-looking letters, dead letter-boxes in Western capitals, filled by God knows what brave Russian, and dutifully cleared by Toby Esterhase’s brave lamplighters. Live meetings, even, arranged and watched over by Toby’s baby-sitters”—a minute pause as Smiley glanced again towards the window—“a couple of drops in Moscow that had to be fielded by the local residency, though they were never allowed to know their benefactor. But no clandestine radio; Merlin doesn’t care for it. There was a proposal once—it even got as far as the Treasury—to set up a permanent long-arm radio station in Finland, just to service him, but it all foundered when Merlin said, ‘Not on your nelly.’ He must have been taking lessons from Karla, mustn’t he? You know how Karla hates radio. The great thing is, Merlin has mobility: that’s his biggest talent. Perhaps he’s in the Moscow Trade Ministry and can use the travelling salesmen. Anyway, he has the resources and he has the leads out of Russia. And that’s why his fellow conspirators look to him to deal with Gerald and agree to the terms, the financial terms. Because they do want money. Lots of money. I should have mentioned that. In that respect, secret services and their customers are like anyone else, I’m afraid. They value most what costs most, and Merlin costs a fortune. Ever bought a fake picture?”