But on the third—or was it the fifth?—day she took a different and harsher view of her supposed protectors. She stopped playing the little girl. On whichever day it was, leaving her apartment early in order to check a particular consignment to the warehouse, she had stepped out of the sanctuary of her abstractions straight into the streets of Moscow, as she had too often known them in her years with Glikman. The ill-lit, cobbled street was empty but for one black car parked twenty metres from her doorway. Most likely it had arrived that minute. She had a notion, afterwards, of having seen it pull up, presumably in order to deliver the sentries to their beat. Pull up sharply, just as she came out. And douse its headlights. Resolutely she had begun walking down the pavement. “Danger most of all to you,” she kept remembering; “danger to all of us who know.”
The car was following her.
They think I am a whore, she thought vainly, one of those old ones who work the early-morning market.
Suddenly her one aim had been to get inside a church. Any church. The nearest Russian Orthodox church was twenty minutes away, and so small that to pray in it at all was like a séance; the very proximity of the Holy Family offered a forgiveness by itself. But twenty minutes was a lifetime. Non-Orthodox churches she eschewed, as a rule, entirely—they were a betrayal of her nationhood. That morning, however, with the car crawling along behind her, she had suspended her prejudice and ducked into the very first church she came to, which turned out to be not merely Catholic, but modern Catholic as well, so that she heard the whole Mass twice through in bad French, read by a worker-priest who smelt of garlic and worse. But by the time she left, the men were nowhere to be seen and that was all that mattered—even though when she arrived at the warehouse she had to promise two extra hours to make up for the inconvenience she had caused by her lateness.
Then for three days nothing, or was it five? Ostrakova had become as incapable of hoarding time as money. Three or five, they had gone, they had never existed. It was all her “decoration,” as the magician had called it, her stupid habit of seeing too much, looking too many people in the eye, inventing too much incident. Till today again, when they were back. Except that today was about fifty thousand times worse, because today was now, and the street today was as empty as on the last day or the first, and the man who was five metres behind her was drawing closer, and the man who had been under Mercier’s outrageously dangerous awning was crossing the street to join him.
What happened next, in such descriptions or imaginings as had come Ostrakova’s way, was supposed to happen in a flash. One minute you were upright, walking down the pavement, the next, with a flurry of lights and a wailing of horns, you were wafted to the operating table surrounded by surgeons in various coloured masks. Or you were in Heaven, before the Almighty, mumbling excuses about certain lapses that you did not really regret; and neither—if you understood Him at all—did He. Or worst of all, you came round, and were returned, as walking wounded, to your apartment, and your boring half-sister Valentina dropped everything, with an extremely ill grace, in order to come up from Lyons and be a non-stop scold at your bedside.
Not one of these expectations was fulfilled.
What happened took place with the slowness of an underwater ballet. The man who was gaining on her drew alongside her, taking the right, or inside, position. At the same moment, the man who had crossed the road from Mercier’s came up on her left, walking not on the pavement but in the gutter, incidentally splashing her with yesterday’s rain-water as he strode along. With her fatal habit of looking into people’s eyes Ostrakova stared at her two unwished-for companions and saw faces she had already recognised and knew by heart. They had hunted Ostrakov, they had murdered Glikman, and in her personal view they had been murdering the entire Russian people for centuries, whether in the name of the Czar, or God, or Lenin. Looking away from them, she saw the black car that had followed her on her way to church heading slowly down the empty road towards her. Therefore she did exactly what she had planned to do all night through, what she had lain awake picturing. In her shopping bag she had put an old flat-iron, a bit of junk that Ostrakov had acquired in the days when the poor dying man had fancied he might make a few extra francs by dealing in antiques. Her shopping bag was of leather—green and brown in a patchwork—and stout. Drawing it back, she swung it round her with all her strength at the man in the gutter—at his groin, the hated centre of him. He swore—she could not hear in which language—and crumpled to his knees. Here her plan went adrift. She had not expected a villain on either side of her, and she needed time to recover her own balance and get the iron swinging at the second man. He did not allow her to do this. Throwing his arms round both of hers, he gathered her together like the fat sack she was, and lifted her clean off her feet. She saw the bag fall and heard the chime as the flat-iron slipped from it onto a drain cover. Still looking down, she saw her boots dangling ten centimetres from the ground, as if she had hanged herself like her brother Niki—his feet, exactly, turned into each other like a simpleton’s. She noticed that one of her toe-caps, the left, was already scratched in the scuffle. Her assailant’s arms now locked themselves even harder across her breast and she wondered whether her ribs would crack before she suffocated. She felt him draw her back, and she presumed that he was shaping to swing her into the car, which was now approaching at a good speed down the road: that she was being kidnapped. This notion terrified her. Nothing, least of all death, was as appalling to her at that moment as the thought that these pigs would take her back to Russia and subject her to the kind of slow, doctrinal prison death she was certain had killed Glikman. She struggled with all her force, she managed to bite his hand. She saw a couple of bystanders who seemed as scared as she was. Then she realised that the car was not slowing down, and that the men had something quite different in mind: not to kidnap her at all, but to kill her.
He threw her.
She reeled but did not fall, and as the car swerved to knock her down, she thanked God and all His angels that she had, after all, decided on the winter boots, because the front bumper hit her at the back of the shins, and when she saw her feet again, they were straight up in front of her face, and her bare thighs were parted as for childbirth. She flew for a while, then hit the road with everything at once—with her head, her spine, and her heels—then rolled like a sausage over the cobbles. The car had passed her but she heard it screech to a stop and wondered whether they were going to reverse and drive over her again. She tried to move but felt too sleepy. She heard voices and car doors slamming, she heard the engine roaring, and fading, so that either it was going away or she was losing her hearing.
“Don’t touch her,” someone said.
No, don’t, she thought.
“It’s a lack of oxygen,” she heard herself say. “Lift me to my feet and I’ll be all right.”
Why on earth did she say that? Or did she only think it?
“Aubergines,” she said. “Get the aubergines.” She didn’t know whether she was talking about her shopping, or the female traffic wardens for whom aubergine was the Paris slang.
Then a pair of woman’s hands put a blanket over her, and a furious Gallic argument started about what one did next. Did anyone get the number? she wanted to ask. But she was really too sleepy to bother, and besides she had no oxygen—the fall had taken it out of her body for good. She had a vision of half-shot birds she had seen in the Russian countryside, flapping helplessly on the ground, waiting for the dogs to reach them. General, she thought, did you get my second letter? Drifting off, she willed him, begged him to read it, and to respond to its entreaty. General, read my second letter.
She had written it a week before in a moment of despair. She had posted it yesterday in another.
7
There are Victorian terraces in the region of Paddington Station that are painted as white as luxury liners on the outside, and inside are dark as tombs. Westbourne Terrace that Saturday morning gleamed as brightly as any of them, but
the service road that led to Vladimir’s part of it was blocked at one end by a heap of rotting mattresses, and by a smashed boom, like a frontier post, at the other.
“Thank you, I’ll get out here,” said Smiley politely, and paid the cab off at the mattresses.
He had come straight from Hampstead and his knees ached. The Greek driver had spent the journey lecturing him on Cyprus, and out of courtesy he had crouched on the jump seat in order to hear him over the din of the engine. Vladimir, we should have done better by you, he thought, surveying the filth on the pavements, the poor washing trailing from the balconies. The Circus should have shown more honour to its vertical man.
It concerns the Sandman, he thought. Tell him I have two proofs and can bring them with me.
He walked slowly, knowing that early morning is a better time of day to come out of a building than go into it. A small queue had gathered at the bus-stop. A milkman was going his rounds, so was a newspaper boy. A squadron of grounded sea-gulls scavenged gracefully at the spilling dustbins. If sea-gulls are taking to the cities, he thought, will pigeons take to the sea? Crossing the service road, he saw a motor-cyclist with a black official-looking side-car parking his steed a hundred yards down the kerb. Something in the man’s posture reminded him of the tall messenger who had brought the keys to the safe flat—a similar fixity, even at that distance; a respectful attentiveness, of an almost military kind.
Shedding chestnut trees darkened the pillared doorway, a scarred cat eyed him warily. The doorbell was the topmost of thirty, but Smiley didn’t press it and when he shoved the double doors they swung open too freely, revealing the same gloomy corridors painted very shiny to defeat graffiti writers, and the same linoleum staircase that squeaked like a hospital trolley. He remembered it all. Nothing had changed, and now nothing ever would. There was no light switch and the stairs grew darker the higher he climbed. Why didn’t Vladimir’s murderers steal his keys? he wondered, feeling them nudging against his hip with every step. Perhaps they didn’t need them. Perhaps they had their own set already. He reached a landing and squeezed past a luxurious perambulator. He heard a dog howling and the morning news in German and the flushing of a communal lavatory. He heard a child screaming at its mother, then a slap and the father screaming at the child. Tell Max it concerns the Sandman. There was a smell of curry and cheap fat frying, and disinfectant. There was a smell of too many people with not much money jammed into too little air. He remembered that too. Nothing had changed.
If we’d treated him better, it would never have happened, Smiley thought. The neglected are too easily killed, he thought, in unconscious affinity with Ostrakova. He remembered the day they had brought him here, Smiley the vicar, Toby Esterhase the postman. They had driven to Heathrow to fetch him: Toby the fixer, dyed in all the oceans, as he would say of himself. Toby drove like the wind but they were almost late, even then. The plane had landed. They hurried to the barrier and there he was: silvered and majestic, towering stock-still in the temporary corridor from the arrivals bay, while the common peasants swept past him. He remembered their solemn embrace—“Max, my old friend, it is really you?” “It’s me, Vladimir, they’ve put us together again.” He remembered Toby spiriting them through the large back alleys of the immigration service, because the enraged French police had confiscated the old boy’s papers before throwing him out. He remembered how they had lunched at Scott’s, all three of them, the old boy too animated even to drink but talking grandly of the future they all knew he didn’t have: “It will be Moscow all over again, Max. Maybe we even get a chance at the Sandman.” Next day they went flat-hunting, “just to show you a few possibilities, General,” as Toby Esterhase had explained. It was Christmas time and the resettlement budget for the year was used up. Smiley appealed to Circus Finance. He lobbied Lacon and the Treasury for a supplementary estimate, but in vain. “A dose of reality will bring him down to earth,” Lacon had pronounced. “Use your influence with him, George. That’s what you’re there for.” Their first dose of reality was a tart’s parlour in Kensington, their second overlooked a shunting-yard near Waterloo. Westbourne Terrace was their third, and as they squeaked up these same stairs, Toby leading, the old man had suddenly halted, and put back his great mottled head, and wrinkled his nose theatrically.
Ah! So if I get hungry I have only to stand in the corridor and sniff and my hunger is gone! he had announced in his thick French. That way I don’t have to eat for a week!
By then even Vladimir had guessed they were putting him away for good.
Smiley returned to the present. The next landing was musical, he noticed, as he continued his solitary ascent. Through one door came rock music played at full blast, through another Sibelius and the smell of bacon. Peering out of the window, he saw two men loitering between the chestnut trees who were not there when he had arrived. A team would do that, he thought. A team would post look-outs while the others went inside. Whose team was another question. Moscow’s? The Superintendent’s? Saul Enderby’s? Farther down the road, the tall motor-cyclist had acquired a tabloid newspaper and was sitting on his bike reading it.
At Smiley’s side a door opened and an old woman in a dressing-gown came out holding a cat against her shoulder. He could smell last night’s drink on her breath even before she spoke to him.
“Are you a burglar, dearie?” she asked.
“I’m afraid not,” Smiley replied with a laugh. “Just a visitor.”
“Still, it’s nice to be fancied, isn’t it, dearie?” she said.
“It is indeed,” said Smiley politely.
The last flight was steep and very narrow and lit by real daylight from a wired skylight on the slant. There were two doors on the top landing, both closed, both very cramped. On one, a typed notice faced him: “MR. V. MILLER, TRANSLATIONS.” Smiley remembered the argument about Vladimir’s alias now he was to become a Londoner and keep his head down. “Miller” was no problem. For some reason, the old boy found Miller rather grand. “Miller, c’est bien,” he had declared. “Miller I like, Max.” But “Mr.” was anything but good. He pressed for General, then offered to settle for Colonel. But Smiley in his rôle as vicar was on this point unbudgeable: Mr. was a lot less trouble than a bogus rank in the wrong army, he had ruled.
He knocked boldly, knowing that a soft knock is more conspicuous than a loud one. He heard the echo, and nothing else. He heard no footfall, no sudden freezing of a sound. He called “Vladimir” through the letter-box as though he were an old friend visiting. He tried one Yale from the bunch and it stuck, he tried another and it turned. He stepped inside and closed the door, waiting for something to hit him on the back of the head but preferring the thought of a broken skull to having his face shot off. He felt dizzy and realised he was holding his breath. The same white paint, he noticed; the same prison emptiness exactly. The same queer hush, like a phone-box; the same mix of public smells.
This is where we stood, Smiley remembered—the three of us, that afternoon. Toby and myself like tugs, nudging at the old battleship between us. The estate agent’s particulars had said “penthouse.”
“Hopeless,” Toby Esterhase had announced in his Hungarian French, always the first to speak, as he turned to open the door and leave. “I mean completely awful. I mean, I should have come and taken a look first, I was an idiot,” said Toby when Vladimir still didn’t budge. “General, please accept my apologies. This is a complete insult.”
Smiley added his own assurances. We can do better for you than this, Vladi; much. We just have to persist.
But the old man’s eyes were on the window, as Smiley’s were now, on this dotty forest of chimney-pots and gables and slate roofs that flourished beyond the parapet. And suddenly he had thumped a gloved paw on Smiley’s shoulder.
“Better you keep your money to shoot those swine in Moscow, Max,” he had advised.
With the tears running down his cheeks, and the same determined smile, Vladimir had continued to stare at the Moscow chimneys; an
d at his fading dreams of ever again living under a Russian sky.
“On reste ici,” he had commanded finally as if he were drawing up a last-ditch defence.
A tiny divan bed ran along one wall, a cooking ring stood on the sill. From the smell of putty Smiley guessed that the old man had kept whiting the place himself, painting out the damp and filling the cracks. On the table he used for typing and eating lay an old Remington upright and a pair of worn dictionaries. His translating work, he thought; the few extra pennies that fleshed out his allowance. Pressing back his elbows as if he were having trouble with his spine, Smiley drew himself to his full if diminutive height and launched himself upon the familiar death rites for a departed spy. An Estonian Bible lay on the pine bedside locker. He probed it delicately for cut cavities, then dangled it upside down for scraps of paper or photographs. Pulling open the locker drawer, he found a bottle of patent pills for rejuvenating the sexually jaded and three Red Army gallantry medals mounted on a chrome bar. So much for cover, thought Smiley, wondering how on earth Vladimir and his many paramours had managed on such a tiny bed. A print of Martin Luther hung at the bedhead. Next to it, a coloured picture called “The Red Roofs of Old Tallinn,” which Vladimir must have torn from something and backed on cardboard. A second picture showed “The Kazari Coast,” a third “Windmills and a Ruined Castle.” He delved behind each. The bedside light caught his eye. He tried the switch and when it didn’t work he unplugged it, took out the bulb, and fished in the wood base, but without result. Just a dead bulb, he thought. A sudden shriek from outside sent him pulling back against the wall but when he had collected himself he realised it was more of those land-borne sea-gulls: a whole colony had settled round the chimney-pots. He glanced over the parapet into the street again. The two loiterers had gone. They’re on their way up, he thought; my head start is over. They’re not police at all, he thought; they’re assassins. The motor bike with its black side-car stood unattended. He closed the window, wondering whether there was a special Valhalla for dead spies where he and Vladimir would meet and he could put things right; telling himself he had lived a long life and that this moment was as good as any other for it to end. And not believing it for one second.
John Le Carré: Three Complete Novels Page 107
