John Le Carré: Three Complete Novels

by John le Carré

  “No,” she said.

  “Put the bite on you about your wicked past, did they? Stick and carrot? Promised to wipe the slate clean? Silly girl, Lizzie. Not allowed a past in this game. Can’t have a future either. Verboten.”

  He turned back to Smiley. “That’s all it was, George. No philosophy to it. Old Lizzie got under my skin.”

  Tilting back his head, he studied Smiley’s face through half-closed eyes. And with the clarity which pain sometimes brings, he felt somehow that by his action he had put Smiley’s own existence under threat.

  “Don’t worry,” he said gently. “Won’t happen to you, that’s for sure.”

  “Jerry,” said Smiley.

  “Yes, sir,” said Jerry and made a show of sitting to attention.

  “Jerry, you don’t understand what’s going on. How much you could upset things. Billions of dollars and thousands of men could not obtain a part of what we stand to gain from this one operation. A war general would laugh himself silly at the thought of such a tiny sacrifice for such an enormous dividend.”

  “Don’t ask me to get you off the hook, old boy,” Jerry said, looking up into his face again. “You’re the owl, remember? Not me.”

  Sam Collins returned. Smiley glanced at him in question.

  “He’s not one of theirs either,” said Sam.

  “They were aiming for me,” said Jerry. “They got Lukie instead. He’s a big bloke. Or was.”

  “And he’s in your flat?” Smiley asked. “Dead. Shot. And in your flat?”

  “Been there some while.”

  Smiley to Collins: “We shall have to brush over the traces, Sam. We can’t risk a scandal.”

  “I’ll get back to them now,” Collins said.

  “And find out about planes,” Smiley called after him. “Two first-class seats.”

  Collins nodded.

  “Don’t like that fellow one bit,” Jerry confessed. “Never did. Must be his moustache.” He shoved a thumb toward Lizzie. “What’s she got that’s so hot for you all, anyway, George? Ko doesn’t whisper his inmost secrets to her. She’s a round-eye.” He turned to Lizzie. “Does he?”

  She shook her head.

  “If he did, she wouldn’t remember,” he went on. “She’s thick as hell about those things. She’s probably never even heard of Nelson.” He called to her again. “You. Who’s Nelson? Come on, who is he? Ko’s little dead son, isn’t he? That’s right. Named his boat after him, didn’t he? And his gee-gee.” He turned back to Smiley. “See? Thick. Leave her out of it, that’s my advice.”

  Collins had returned with a note of flight times. Smiley read it, frowning through his spectacles. “We shall have to send you home at once, Jerry,” he said. “Guillam’s waiting downstairs with a car. Fawn will go along as well.”

  “I’d just like to be sick again if you don’t mind.”

  Reaching upward, Jerry took hold of Smiley’s arm for support, and at once Fawn sprang forward, but Jerry shot out a warning finger at him as Smiley ordered him back.

  “You keep your distance, you poisonous little leprechaun,” Jerry advised. “You’re allowed one bite and that’s all. The next one won’t be so easy.”

  He moved in a crouch, trailing his feet slowly, hands latched over his groin. Reaching the girl, he stopped in front of her.

  “Did they have powwows up here, Ko and his lovelies? Ko bring his boy-friends up here for a natter, did he?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “And you helped with the mikes, did you, like the good little housewife? Let the sound boys in, tended the lamp? I bet you did.”

  She nodded.

  “Still not enough,” he objected as he hobbled to the bathroom. “Still doesn’t answer my question. Must be more to it than that. Far more.”

  In the bathroom he held his face under cold water, drank some, and immediately vomited. On the way back, he looked for the girl again. She was in the drawing-room, and in the way that people under stress look for trivial things to do, she was sorting the gramophone records, putting each in its proper sleeve. In a distant corner, Smiley and Collins were quietly conferring. Closer at hand Fawn was waiting at the door.

  “Bye, sport,” he said to her. Putting his hand on her shoulder, he drew her round till her grey eyes looked straight at him.

  “Goodbye,” she said and kissed him, not in passion exactly, but at least with more deliberation than the waiters got.

  “I was a sort of accessory before the fact,” he explained. “I’m sorry about that. I’m not sorry about anything else. You’d better look after that sod Ko too. Because if they don’t manage to kill him, I may.”

  He touched the lines on her chin, then shuffled toward the door where Fawn stood, and turned round to take his leave of Smiley, who was alone again; Collins had been sent off to telephone. Smiley stood as Jerry remembered him best, his short arms slightly lifted from his sides, his head back a little, his expression at once apologetic and enquiring, as if he’d just left his umbrella on the underground. The girl had turned away from both of them and was still sorting the records.

  “Love to Ann, then,” Jerry said.

  “Thank you.”

  “You’re wrong, sport. Don’t know how, don’t know why, but you’re wrong. Still, too late for that, I suppose.” He felt sick again and his head was shrieking from the pains in his body. “You come any nearer than that,” he said to Fawn, “and I will definitely break your bloody neck, you understand?” He turned back to Smiley, who stood in the same posture and gave no sign of having heard.

  “Season of the year to you, then,” said Jerry.

  With a last nod, but none to the girl, Jerry limped into the corridor, Fawn following. Waiting for the lift, he saw the elegant American standing at his open doorway, watching his departure.

  “Ah, yeah, I forgot about you,” he called very loudly. “You’re running the bug on her flat, aren’t you? The Brits blackmail her and the Cousins bug her—lucky girl gets it all ways.”

  The American vanished, closing the door quickly after him. The lift came and Fawn shoved him in.

  “Don’t do that,” Jerry warned him. “This gentleman’s name is Fawn,” he told the other occupants of the lift in a very loud voice. They mostly wore dinner-jackets and sequinned dresses. “He’s a member of the British Secret Service and he’s just kicked me in the balls. The Russians are coming,” he added, to their doughy, indifferent faces. “They’re going to take away all your bloody money.”

  “Drunk,” said Fawn in disgust.

  In the lobby Lawrence the porter watched with keen interest. In the forecourt a Peugeot saloon waited, blue. Peter Guillam was sitting in the driving seat.

  “Get in,” he snapped.

  The passenger door was locked. He climbed into the back, Fawn after him.

  “What the hell do you think you’re up to?” Guillam demanded through clenched teeth. “Since when did half-arsed London Occasionals cut anchor in mid-operation?”

  “Keep clear,” Jerry warned Fawn. “Just the hint of a frown from you right now is enough to get me going. I mean that. I warn you. Official.”

  The ground fog had returned, rolling over the bonnet. The passing city offered itself like the framed glimpses of a junk yard: a painted sign, a shop-window, strands of cable strung across a neon sign, a clump of suffocated foliage; the inevitable building site, floodlit. In the mirror Jerry saw a black Mercedes following, male passenger, male driver.

  “Cousins bringing up the tail,” he announced.

  A spasm of pain in the abdomen almost blacked him out, and for a moment he actually thought Fawn had hit him again, but it was only an after-effect of the first time. In Central he made Guillam pull up and was sick in the gutter in full public view, leaning his head through the window while Fawn crouched tensely over him. Behind them the Mercedes stopped too.

  “Nothing like a spot of pain,” he exclaimed, settling in the car again, “for getting the old brain out of moth-balls once in a while. Eh,
Peter?”

  Guillam made an obscene answer.

  You don’t understand what’s going on, Smiley had said. How much you could upset things. Billions of dollars and thousands of men could not obtain a part of what we stand to gain . . .

  How? he kept asking himself. Gain what? His knowledge of Nelson’s position inside Chinese affairs was sketchy. Craw had told him only the minimum he needed to know: Nelson has access to the Crown jewels of Peking, Your Grace. Whoever gets his hooks on Nelson has earned a lifetime’s merit for himself and his noble house.

  They were skirting the harbour, heading for the tunnel. From sea-level the American aircraft carrier looked strangely small against the merry backdrop of Kowloon.

  “How’s Drake getting him out, by the way?” he asked Guillam chattily. “Not trying to fly him again, that’s for sure. Ricardo put the lid on that one for good, didn’t he?”

  “Suction,” Guillam snapped—which was very silly of him, thought Jerry jubilantly; he should have kept his mouth shut.

  “Swimming?” Jerry asked. “Nelson on the Mirs Bay ticket. That’s not Drake’s way, is it? Nelson’s too old for that one, anyway. Freeze to death, even if the sharks didn’t get his whatnots. How about the pig train, come out with the grunters? Sorry you’ve got to miss the big moment, sport, all on account of me.”

  “So am I, as a matter of fact. I’d like to kick your teeth in.”

  Inside Jerry’s brain, the sweet music of rejoicing sounded. It’s true! he told himself. That’s what’s happening! Drake’s bringing Nelson out and they’re all queueing up for the finish!

  Behind Guillam’s lapse—just one word, but in Sarratt terms totally unforgivable, indivisibly wrong—there lay nevertheless a revelation as dazzling as anything which Jerry was presently enduring, and in some respects vastly more bitter. If anything mitigates the crime of indiscretion, and in Sarratt terms nothing does, then Guillam’s experiences of the last hour—half of it spent driving Smiley frantically through rush-hour traffic and half of it waiting, in desperate indecision, in the car outside Star Heights—would surely qualify. Everything he had feared in London, the most Gothic of his apprehensions regarding the Enderby-Martello connection, and the supporting rôles of Lacon and Sam Collins, had in these sixty minutes been proved to him beyond all reasonable doubt as right and true and justified—and if anything somewhat understated.

  They had driven first to Bowen Road in the Midlevels, to an apartment block so blank and featureless and large that even those who lived there must have had to look twice at the number before they were sure they were entering the right one. Smiley pressed a bell marked “Mellon,” and, idiot that he was, Guillam asked “Who’s Mellon?” at the same moment he remembered that it was Sam Collins’s work name. Then he did a double take and asked himself—but not Smiley; they were in the lift by now—what maniac, after Haydon’s ravages, could conceivably award himself the same work name which he had used before the fall? Then Collins opened the door to them, wearing his Thai silk dressing-gown, a brown cigarette jammed into a holder, and his washable non-iron smile, and the next thing was they were grouped in a parquet drawing-room with bamboo chairs and Sam had switched two transistor radios to different programmes, one voice, the other music, to provide rudimentary anti-bug security while they talked. Sam listened, ignoring Guillam entirely, then promptly phoned Martello direct—Sam had a direct line to him, please note, no dialling, nothing; a straight land-line, apparently—to ask in veiled language how things stood with chummy. Chummy—Guillam learned later—being gambling slang for a mug. Martello replied that the surveillance van had just reported in. Chummy and Tiu were presently sitting in Causeway Bay aboard the Admiral Nelson, said the watchers, and the directional mikes (as usual) were picking up so much bounce from the water that the transcribers would need days, if not weeks, to clean off the extraneous sound and find out whether the two men had ever said anything interesting. Meanwhile they had dropped one man at the quayside as a static post, with orders to advise Martello immediately should the boat weigh anchor or either of the two quarries disembark.

  “Then we must go there at once,” said Smiley, so they piled back into the car, and while Guillam drove the short distance to Star Heights, seething and listening impotently to their terse conversation, he became with every moment more convinced that he was looking at a spider’s web, and that only George Smiley, obsessed by the promise of the case and the image of Karla, was myopic enough, and trusting enough—and, in his own paradoxical way, innocent enough—to bumble straight into the middle of it.

  George’s age, thought Guillam. Enderby’s political ambitions, his fondness for the hawkish, pro-American stance—not to mention the crate of champagne and his outrageous courtship of the fifth floor. Lacon’s tepid support of Smiley, while he secretly cast around for a successor. Martello’s stopover in Langley. Enderby’s attempt only days ago to prise Smiley away from the case and hand it to Martello on a plate. And now, most eloquent and ominous of all, the reappearance of Sam Collins as the joker in the pack with a private line to Martello! And Martello, heaven help us, acting dumb about where George got his information from—the direct line notwithstanding.

  To Guillam all these threads added up to one thing only, and he could not wait to take Smiley aside and, by any means at his command, deflect him sufficiently from the operation, just for one moment, for him to see where he was heading. To tell him about the letter. About Sam’s visit to Lacon and Enderby in Whitehall.

  Instead of which? He was to return to England. Why was he to return to England? Because a genial thick-skulled hack named Westerby had had the gall to slip the leash.

  Even without his crying awareness of impending disaster, the disappointment to Guillam would have been scarcely supportable. He had endured a great deal for this moment. Disgrace and exile to Brixton under Haydon, poodling for old George instead of getting back to the field, putting up with George’s obsessive secretiveness, which Guillam privately considered both humiliating and self-defeating—but at least it had been a journey with a destination, till Jerry bloody Westerby, of all people, had robbed him even of that. But to return to London knowing that, for the next twenty-two hours at least, he was leaving Smiley and the Circus to a bunch of wolves, without even the chance to warn him—to Guillam it was the crowning cruelty of a frustrated career, and if blaming Jerry helped, then damn him, he would blame Jerry or anybody else.

  “Send Fawn!”

  “Fawn’s not a gentleman,” Smiley would have replied—or words that meant the same.

  You can say that again too, thought Guillam, remembering the broken arms.

  Jerry was equally conscious of abandoning someone to the wolves, even if it was Lizzie Worthington rather than George Smiley. As he gazed through the rear window of the car, it seemed to him that the very world that he was moving through had also been abandoned. The street markets were deserted, the pavements, even the doorways. Above them the Peak loomed fitfully, its crocodile spine daubed by a ragged moon.

  It’s the Colony’s last day, he decided: Peking has made its proverbial telephone call. “Get out, party over.” The last hotel was closing; he saw the empty Rolls-Royces lying like scrap around the harbour, and the last blue-rinse round-eye matron, laden with her tax-free furs and jewellery, tottering up the gangway of the last cruise ship; the last China-watcher frantically feeding his last miscalculations into the shredder; the looted shops, the empty city waiting like a carcass for the hordes. For a moment it was all one vanishing world; here, Phnom Penh, Saigon, London—a world on loan, with the creditors standing at the door, and Jerry himself, in some unfathomable way, a part of the debt that was owed.

  I’ve always been grateful to this service, that it gave me a chance to pay. Is that how you feel?

  Yes, George, he thought. Put the words into my mouth, old boy. That’s exactly how I feel, sport. But perhaps not quite in the sense you mean it, however. He saw Frost’s cheerful, fond little face as they drank a
nd fooled. He saw it the second time, locked in that awful scream. He felt Luke’s friendly hand upon his shoulder and saw the same hand lying on the floor, flung back over his head to catch a ball that would never come, and he thought, Trouble is, sport, the paying is actually done by the other poor sods.

  Like Lizzie, for instance.

  He’d mention that to George one day, if they ever, over a jar, should get back to that sticky little matter of just why we climb the mountain. He’d make a point there—nothing aggressive, not rocking the boat, you understand, sport—about the selfless and devoted way in which we sacrifice other people, such as Luke and Frost and Lizzie. George would have a perfectly good answer, of course. Reasonable. Measured. Apologetic. George saw the bigger picture. Understood the imperatives. Of course he did. He was an owl.

  The harbour tunnel was approaching and he was thinking of her shivering last kiss, and remembering the drive to the mortuary all at the same time, because the scaffold of a new building rose ahead of them out of the fog and, like the scaffold on the way to the mortuary, it was floodlit and glistening coolies were swarming over it in yellow helmets.

  Tiu doesn’t like her either, he thought. Doesn’t like round-eyes who spill the beans on Big Sir.

  Forcing his mind in other directions, he tried to imagine what they would do with Nelson: stateless, homeless, a fish to be devoured or thrown back into the sea at will. Jerry had seen a few of those fish before: he had been present for their capture; at their swift interrogation. He had led more than one of them back across the border they had so recently crossed, for hasty recycling, as the Sarratt jargon had it—“quick before they notice he has left home.” And if they didn’t put him back? If they kept him, this great prize they all so coveted? Then after the years of his debriefing—two, three even; he had heard some ran for five—Nelson would become one more Wandering Jew of the spy-trade, to be hidden, and moved again, and hidden, to be loved not even by those to whom he had betrayed his trust.