John Le Carré: Three Complete Novels

by John le Carré

  “It’s an aesthetic judgement as much as anything,” he explained, looking up. “Partly a moral one, of course.”

  “Of course,” said Smiley politely.

  From then on, he said, it was only a matter of time before he put his efforts where his convictions lay.

  That was the first day’s take. A white sediment had formed on Haydon’s lips, and he had begun weeping again. They agreed to meet tomorrow at the same time.

  “It would be nice to go into the detail a little, if we could, Bill,” Smiley said as he left.

  “Oh, and look—tell Jan, will you?” Haydon was lying on the bed, staunching his nose again. “Doesn’t matter a hoot what you say, long as you make it final.” Sitting up, he wrote out a cheque and put it in a brown envelope. “Give her that for the milk bill.”

  Realising, perhaps, that Smiley was not quite at ease with this brief, he added, “Well, I can’t take her with me, can I? Even if they let her come, she’d be a bloody millstone.”

  The same evening, following Haydon’s instructions, Smiley took a tube to Kentish Town and unearthed a cottage in an unconverted mews. A flat-faced fair girl in jeans opened the door to him; there was a smell of oil paint and baby. He could not remember whether he had met her at By water Street, so he opened with “I’m from Bill Haydon. He’s quite all right but I’ve got various messages from him.”

  “Jesus,” said the girl softly. “About bloody time and all.”

  The drawing-room was filthy. Through the kitchen door he saw a pile of dirty crockery and he knew she used everything until it ran out, then washed it all at once. The floorboards were bare except for long psychedelic patterns of snakes and flowers and insects painted over them.

  “That’s Bill’s Michelangelo ceiling,” she said conversationally. “Only he’s not going to have Michelangelo’s bad back. Are you government?” she asked, lighting a cigarette. “He works for government, he told me.” Her hand was shaking and she had yellow smudges under her eyes.

  “Oh, look, first I’m to give you that,” said Smiley, reaching in an inside pocket, and handing her the envelope with the cheque.

  “Bread,” said the girl, and put the envelope beside her.

  “Bread,” said Smiley, answering her grin; then something in his expression, or the way he echoed that one word, made her take up the envelope and rip it open. There was no note, just the cheque, but the cheque was enough; even from where Smiley sat, he could see it had four figures.

  Not knowing what she was doing, she walked across the room to the fireplace and put the cheque with the grocery bills in an old tin on the mantelpiece. She went into the kitchen and mixed two cups of Nescafé, but she came out with only one.

  “Where is he?” she said. She stood facing him. “He’s gone chasing after that snotty little sailor-boy again. Is that it? And this is the pay-off, is that it? Well, you bloody tell him from me—”

  Smiley had had scenes like this before, and now absurdly the old words came back to him.

  “Bill’s been doing work of national importance. I’m afraid we can’t talk about it, and nor must you. A few days ago he went abroad on a secret job. He’ll be away some while. Even years. He wasn’t allowed to tell anyone he was leaving. He wants you to forget him. I really am most awfully sorry.”

  He got that far before she burst out. He didn’t hear all she said, because she was blurting and screaming, and when the baby heard her it started screaming, too, from upstairs. She was swearing—not at him, not even particularly at Bill, just swearing dry-eyed—and demanding to know who the hell, who the bloody bloody hell believed in government any more? Then her mood changed. Round the walls, Smiley noticed Bill’s other paintings, mainly of the girl; few were finished, and they had a cramped, condemned quality by comparison with his earlier work.

  “You don’t like him, do you? I can tell,” she said. “So why do you do his dirty work for him?”

  To this question also there seemed no immediate answer. Returning to Bywater Street, he again had the impression of being followed, and tried to telephone Mendel with the number of a cab which had twice caught his eye, and to ask him to make immediate enquiries. For once, Mendel was out till after midnight: Smiley slept uneasily and woke at five. By eight he was back at Sarratt, to find Haydon in a festive mood. The inquisitors had not bothered him; he had been told by Craddox that the exchanges had been agreed and he should expect to travel tomorrow or the next day. His requests had a valedictory ring: the balance of his salary and the proceeds of any odd sales made on his behalf should be forwarded to him care of the Moscow Narodny Bank, which would also handle his mail. The Arnolfini Gallery in Bristol had a few pictures of his, including some early water-colours of Damascus, which he coveted. Could Smiley please arrange? Then, the cover for his disappearance:

  “Play it long,” he advised. “Say I’ve been posted, lay on the mystery, give it a couple of years, then run me down . . .”

  “Oh, I think we can manage something, thank you,” Smiley said.

  For the first time since Smiley had known him, Haydon was worried about clothes. He wanted to arrive looking like someone, he said; first impressions were so important. “Those Moscow tailors are unspeakable. Dress you up like a bloody beadle.”

  “Quite,” said Smiley, whose opinion of London tailors was no better.

  Oh, and there was a boy, he added carelessly, a sailor friend, lived in Notting Hill. “Better give him a couple of hundred to shut him up. Can you do that out of the reptile fund?”

  “I’m sure.”

  He wrote out an address. In the same spirit of good fellowship, Haydon then entered into what Smiley had called the details.

  He declined to discuss any part of his recruitment or of his lifelong relationship with Karla. “Lifelong?” Smiley repeated quickly. “When did you meet?” The assertions of yesterday appeared suddenly nonsensical; but Haydon would not elaborate.

  From about 1950 onwards, if he was to be believed, Haydon had made Karla occasional selected gifts of intelligence. These early efforts were confined to what he hoped would directly advance the Russian cause over the American; he was “scrupulous not to give them anything harmful to ourselves,” as he put it, or harmful to our agents in the field.

  The Suez adventure in ’56 finally persuaded him of the inanity of the British situation, and of the British capacity to spike the advance of history while not being able to offer anything by way of contribution. The sight of the Americans sabotaging the British action in Egypt was, paradoxically, an additional incentive. He would say therefore that from ’56 on, he was a committed, full-time Soviet mole with no holds barred. In 1961 he formally received Soviet citizenship, and over the next ten years two Soviet medals—quaintly, he would not say which, though he insisted that they were “top stuff.” Unfortunately, overseas postings during this period limited his access; and since he insisted on his information being acted upon wherever possible—“rather than being chucked into some daft Soviet archive”—his work was dangerous as well as uneven. With his return to London, Karla sent him Polly (which seemed to be the house name for Polyakov) as a helpmate, but Haydon found the constant pressure of clandestine meetings difficult to sustain, particularly in view of the quantity of stuff he was photographing.

  He declined to discuss cameras, equipment, pay, or tradecraft during this pre-Merlin period in London, and Smiley was conscious all the while that even the little Haydon was telling him was selected with meticulous care from a greater, and perhaps somewhat different truth.

  Meanwhile both Karla and Haydon were receiving signals that Control was smelling a rat. Control was ill, of course, but clearly he would never willingly give up the reins while there was a chance that he was making Karla a present of the service. It was a race between Control’s researches and his health. Twice he had very nearly struck gold—again Haydon declined to say how—and if Karla had not been quick on his feet, the mole Gerald would have been trapped. It was out of this nervy situati
on that first Merlin and finally Operation Testify were born. Witchcraft was conceived primarily to take care of the succession: to put Alleline next to the throne, and hasten Control’s demise. Secondly, of course, Witchcraft gave Centre absolute autonomy over the product flowing into Whitehall. Thirdly—and in the long run most important, Haydon insisted—it brought the Circus into position as a major weapon against the American target.

  “How much of the material was genuine?” Smiley asked.

  Obviously the standard varied according to what one wanted to achieve, said Haydon. In theory, fabrication was very easy: Haydon had only to advise Karla of Whitehall’s areas of ignorance and the fabricators would write for them. Once or twice, for the hell of it, said Haydon, he had written the odd report himself. It was an amusing exercise to receive, evaluate, and distribute one’s own work. The advantages of Witchcraft in terms of tradecraft were, of course, inestimable. It placed Haydon virtually out of Control’s reach, and gave him a cast-iron cover story for meeting Polly whenever he wished. Often months would pass without their meeting at all. Haydon would photograph Circus documents in the seclusion of his room—under cover of preparing Polly’s chicken-feed—hand it over to Esterhase with a lot of other rubbish, and let him cart it down to the safe house in Lock Gardens.

  “It was a classic,” Haydon said simply. “Percy made the running, I slipstreamed behind him, Roy and Toby did the legwork.”

  Here Smiley asked politely whether Karla had ever thought of having Haydon actually take over the Circus himself: why bother with a stalking-horse at all? Haydon stalled and it occurred to Smiley that Karla, like Control, might well have considered Haydon better cast as a subordinate.

  Operation Testify, said Haydon, was rather a desperate throw. Haydon was certain that Control was getting very warm indeed. An analysis of the files he was drawing produced an uncomfortably complete inventory of the operations that Haydon had blown, or otherwise caused to abort. He had also succeeded in narrowing the field to officers of a certain age and rank . . .

  “Was Stevcek’s original offer genuine, by the way?” Smiley asked.

  “Good Lord, no,” said Haydon, actually shocked. “It was a fix from the start. Stevcek existed, of course. He was a distinguished Czech general. But he never made an offer to anyone.”

  Here Smiley sensed Haydon falter. For the first time, he actually seemed uneasy about the morality of his behaviour. His manner became noticeably defensive.

  “Obviously, we needed to be certain Control would rise, and how he would rise . . . and who he would send. We couldn’t have him picking some half-arsed little pavement artist; it had to be a big gun to make the story stick. We knew he’d only settle for someone outside the mainstream and someone who wasn’t Witchcraft-cleared. If we made it a Czech, he’d have to choose a Czech speaker, naturally.”

  “Naturally.”

  “We wanted old Circus: someone who could bring down the temple a bit.”

  “Yes,” said Smiley, remembering that heaving, sweating figure on the hilltop. “Yes, I see the logic of that.”

  “Well, damn it, I got him back,” Haydon snapped.

  “Yes, that was good of you. Tell me, did Jim come to see you before he left on that Testify mission?”

  “Yes, he did, as a matter of fact.”

  “To say what?”

  For a long, long while Haydon hesitated, then did not answer. But the answer was written there, all the same: in the sudden emptying of his eyes, in the shadow of guilt that crossed his face. He came to warn you, Smiley thought; because he loved you. To warn you; just as he came to tell me that Control was mad, but couldn’t find me because I was in Berlin. Jim was watching your back for you right till the end.

  Also, Haydon resumed, it had to be a country with a recent history of counter-revolution: Czecho was honestly the only place.

  Smiley appeared not quite to be listening.

  “Why did you bring him back?” he asked. “For friendship’s sake? Because he was harmless and you held all the cards?”

  It wasn’t just that, Haydon explained. As long as Jim was in a Czech prison (he didn’t say Russian), people would agitate for him and see him as some sort of key. But once he was back, everyone in Whitehall would conspire to keep him quiet; that was the way of it with repatriations.

  “I’m surprised Karla didn’t just shoot him. Or did he hold back out of delicacy towards you?”

  But Haydon had drifted away again into half-baked political assertions.

  Then he began speaking about himself, and already, to Smiley’s eye, he seemed visibly to be shrinking to something quite small and mean. He was touched to hear that Ionesco had recently promised us a play in which the hero kept silent and everyone round him spoke incessantly. When the psychologists and fashionable historians came to write their apologias for him, he hoped they would remember that that was how he saw himself. As an artist he had said all he had to say at the age of seventeen, and one had to do something with one’s later years. He was awfully sorry he couldn’t take some of his friends with him. He hoped Smiley would remember him with affection.

  Smiley wanted at that point to tell him that he would not remember him in those terms at all, and a good deal more besides, but there seemed no point and Haydon was having another nosebleed.

  “Oh, I’m to ask you to avoid publicity, by the way. Miles Sercombe made quite a thing of it.”

  Here Haydon managed a laugh. Having messed up the Circus in private, he said, he had no wish to repeat the process in public.

  Before he left, Smiley asked the one question he still cared about.

  “I’ll have to break it to Ann. Is there anything particular you want me to pass on to her?”

  It required discussion for the implication of Smiley’s question to get through to him. At first, he thought Smiley had said “Jan,” and couldn’t understand why he had not yet called on her.

  “Oh, your Ann,” he said, as if there were a lot of Ann’s around.

  It was Karla’s idea, he explained. Karla had long recognised that Smiley represented the biggest threat to the mole Gerald. “He said you were quite good.”

  “Thank you.”

  “But you had this one price: Ann. The last illusion of the illusionless man. He reckoned that if I were known to be Ann’s lover around the place you wouldn’t see me very straight when it came to other things.” His eyes, Smiley noticed, had become very fixed. Pewtery, Ann called them. “Not to strain it or anything but, if it was possible, join the queue. Point?”

  “Point,” said Smiley.

  For instance, on the night of Testify, Karla was adamant that if possible Haydon should be dallying with Ann. As a form of insurance.

  “And wasn’t there in fact a small hitch that night?” Smiley asked, remembering Sam Collins and the matter of whether Ellis had been shot. Haydon agreed that there had been. If everything had gone according to plan, the first Czech bulletins should have broken at ten-thirty. Haydon would have had a chance to read his club ticker-tape after Sam Collins had rung Ann, and before he arrived at the Circus to take over. But because Jim had been shot, there was fumble at the Czech end and the bulletin was released after his club had closed.

  “Lucky no one followed it up,” he said, helping himself to another of Smiley’s cigarettes. “Which one was I, by the way?” he asked conversationally. “I forget.”

  “Tailor. I was Beggarman.”

  By then Smiley had had enough, so he slipped out, not bothering to say goodbye. He got into his car and drove for an hour anywhere, till he found himself on a side road to Oxford doing eighty, so he stopped for lunch and headed back for London. He still couldn’t face Bywater Street, so he went to a cinema, dined somewhere, and got home at midnight, slightly drunk, to find both Lacon and Miles Sercombe on the doorstep, and Sercombe’s fatuous Rolls, the black bedpan, all fifty feet of it, shoved up on the curb in everyone’s way.

  They drove to Sarratt at a mad speed, and there, in the open night
under a clear sky, lit by several hand torches and stared at by several white-faced inmates of the Nursery, sat Bill Haydon on a garden bench facing the moonlit cricket field. He was wearing striped pyjamas under his overcoat; they looked more like prison clothes. His eyes were open and his head was propped unnaturally to one side, like the head of a bird when its neck has been expertly broken.

  There was no particular dispute about what had happened. At ten-thirty Haydon had complained to his guards of sleeplessness and nausea: he proposed to take some fresh air. His case being regarded as closed, no one thought to accompany him and he walked out into the darkness alone. One of the guards remembered him making a joke about “examining the state of the wicket.” The other was too busy watching the television to remember anything. After half an hour they became apprehensive, so the senior guard went off to take a look while his assistant stayed behind in case Haydon should return. Haydon was found where he was now sitting; the guard thought at first that he had fallen asleep. Stooping over him, he caught the smell of alcohol—he guessed gin or vodka—and decided that Haydon was drunk, which surprised him since the Nursery was officially dry. It wasn’t till he tried to lift him that his head flopped over, and the rest of him followed as dead weight. Having vomited (the traces were over there by the tree), the guard propped him up again and sounded the alarm.

  Had Haydon received any messages during the day? Smiley asked.

  No. But his suit had come back from the cleaners and it was possible a message had been concealed in it—for instance inviting him to a rendezvous.

  “So the Russians did it,” the Minister announced with satisfaction to Haydon’s unresponsive form. “To stop him peaching, I suppose. Bloody thugs.”

  “No,” said Smiley. “They take pride in getting their people back.”

  “Then who the hell did?”