The Looking Glass War

by John le Carré

  ‘I’ll get him,’ the boy said, and disappeared.

  Haldane waited patiently, looking at the calendars and wondering whether it was the boy or Leiser who had hung them there. The door opened a second time. It was Leiser. Haldane recognised him from his photograph. There was really very little change. The twenty years were not drawn in forceful lines but in tiny webs beside each eye, in marks of discipline around the mouth. The light above him was diffuse and cast no shadow. It was a face which at first sight recorded nothing but loneliness. Its complexion was pale.

  ‘What can I do for you?’ Leiser asked. He stood almost at attention.

  ‘Hullo, I wonder if you remember me?’

  Leiser looked at him as if he were being asked to name a price, blank but wary.

  ‘Sure it was me?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It must have been a long time ago,’ he said at last. ‘I don’t often forget a face.’

  ‘Twenty years.’ Haldane coughed apologetically.

  ‘In the war then, was it?’

  He was a short man, very straight; in build he was not unlike Leclerc. He might have been a waiter. His sleeves were rolled up a little way, there was a lot of hair on the forearms. His shirt was white and expensive; a monogram on the pocket. He looked like a man who spent a good deal on his clothes. He wore a gold ring; a golden wristband to his watch. He took great care of his appearance; Haldane could smell the lotion on his skin. His long brown hair was full, the line along the forehead straight. Bulging a little at the sides, the hair was combed backwards. He wore no parting; the effect was definitely Slav. Though very upright, he had about him a certain swagger, a looseness of the hips and shoulders, which suggested a familiarity with the sea. It was here that any comparison with Leclerc abruptly ceased. He looked, despite himself, a practical man, handy in the house or starting the car on a cold day; and he looked an innocent man, but travelled. He wore a tartan tie.

  ‘Surely you remember me?’ Haldane pleaded.

  Leiser stared at the thin cheeks, touched with points of high colour, at the hanging, restless body and the gently stirring hands, and there passed across his face a look of painful recognition, as if he were identifying the remains of a friend.

  ‘You’re not Captain Hawkins, are you?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘God Christ,’ said Leiser, without moving. ‘You’re the people who’ve been asking about me.’

  ‘We’re looking for someone with your experience, a man like you.’

  ‘What do you want him for, sir?’

  He still hadn’t moved. It was very hard to tell what he was thinking. His eyes were fixed on Haldane.

  ‘To do a job, one job.’

  Leiser smiled, as if it all came back to him. He nodded his head towards the window. ‘Over there?’ He meant somewhere beyond the rain.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What about getting back?’

  ‘The usual rules. It’s up to the man in the field. The war rules.’

  He pushed his hands into his pockets, discovered cigarettes and a lighter. The budgerigar was singing.

  ‘The war rules. You smoke?’ He gave himself a cigarette and lit it, his hands cupped round the flame as if there were a high wind. He dropped the match on to the floor for someone else to pick up.

  ‘God Christ,’ he repeated. ‘Twenty years. I was a kid in those days, just a kid.’

  Haldane said, ‘You don’t regret it, I trust. Shall we go and have a drink?’ He handed Leiser a card. It was newly printed: Captain A. Hawkins. Written underneath was a telephone number.

  Leiser read it and shrugged. ‘I don’t mind,’ he said and went to fetch his jacket. Another smile, incredulous this time. ‘But you’re wasting your time, Captain.’

  ‘Perhaps you know someone. Someone else from the war who might take it on.’

  ‘I don’t know a lot of people,’ Leiser replied. He took the jacket from its peg and a nylon raincoat of dark blue. Going ahead of Haldane to the door, he opened it elaborately as if he valued formality. His hair was laid carefully upon itself like the wings of a bird.

  There was a pub on the other side of the Avenue. They reached it by crossing a footbridge. The rush hour traffic thundered beneath them; the cold, plump raindrops seemed to go with it. The bridge trembled to the drumming of the cars. The pub was Tudor with new horse brasses and a ship’s bell very highly polished. Leiser asked for a White Lady. He never drank anything else, he said. ‘Stick to one drink, Captain, that’s my advice. Then you’ll be all right. Down the hatch.’

  ‘It’s got to be someone who knows the tricks,’ Haldane observed. They sat in a corner near the fire. They might have been talking about trade. ‘It’s a very important job. They pay far more than in the war.’ He gave a gaunt smile. ‘They pay a lot of money these days.’

  ‘Still, money’s not everything, is it?’ A stiff phrase, borrowed from the English.

  ‘They remembered you. People whose names you’ve forgotten, if you even knew them.’ An unconvincing smile of reminiscence crossed his thin lips: it might have been years since he had lied. ‘You left quite an impression behind you, Fred; there weren’t many as good as you. Even after twenty years.’

  ‘They remember me then, the old crowd?’ He seemed grateful for that, but shy, as if it were not his place to be held in memory. ‘I was only a kid then,’ he repeated. ‘Who’s there still, who’s left?’

  Haldane, watching him, said, ‘I warned you: we play the same rules, Fred. Need to know, it’s all the same.’ It was very strict.

  ‘God Christ,’ Leiser declared. ‘All the same. Big as ever, then, the outfit?’

  ‘Bigger.’ Haldane fetched another White Lady. ‘Take much interest in politics?’

  Leiser lifted a clean hand and let it fall.

  ‘You know the way we are,’ he said. ‘In Britain, you know.’ His voice carried the slightly impertinent assumption that he was as good as Haldane.

  ‘I mean,’ Haldane prompted, ‘in a broad sense.’ He coughed his dusty cough. ‘After all, they took over your country, didn’t they?’ Leiser said nothing. ‘What did you think of Cuba, for instance?’

  Haldane did not smoke, but he had bought some cigarettes at the bar, the brand Leiser preferred. He removed the Cellophane with his slim, ageing fingers, and offered them across the table. Without waiting for an answer, he continued, ‘The point was, you see, in the Cuba thing the Americans knew. It was a matter of information. Then they could act. Of course they made overflights. One can’t always do that.’ He gave another little laugh. ‘One wonders what they would have done without them.’

  ‘Yes, that’s right.’ He nodded his head like a dummy. Haldane paid no attention.

  ‘They might have been stuck,’ Haldane suggested and sipped his whisky. ‘Are you married, by the way?’

  Leiser grinned, held his hand out flat, tipped it briskly to left and right, like a man talking about aeroplanes. ‘So, so,’ he said. His tartan tie was fastened to his shirt with a heavy gold pin in the shape of a riding crop against a horse’s head. It was very incongruous.

  ‘How about you, Captain?’

  Haldane shook his head.

  ‘No,’ Leiser observed thoughtfully. ‘No.’

  ‘Then there have been other occasions,’ Haldane went on, ‘where very serious mistakes were made because they hadn’t the right information, or not enough. I mean not even we can have people permanently everywhere.’

  ‘No, of course,’ Leiser said politely.

  The bar was filling up.

  ‘I wonder whether you know of a different place where we might talk?’ Haldane inquired. ‘We could eat, chat about some of the old gang. Or have you another engagement?’ The lower classes eat early.

  Leiser glanced at his watch. ‘I’m all right till eight,’ he said. ‘You want to do something about that cough, sir. It can be dangerous, a cough like that.’ The watch was of gold; it had a black face and a compartment for indicating pha
ses of the moon.

  The Under Secretary, similarly conscious of the time, was bored to be kept so late.

  ‘I think I mentioned to you,’ Leclerc was saying, ‘that the Foreign Office has been awfully sticky about providing operational passports. They’ve taken to consulting the Circus in every case. We have no status, you understand; it’s hard for me to make myself unpleasant about these things – they have only the vaguest notion of how we work. I wondered whether the best system might not be for my Department to route passport requisitions through your Private Office. That would save the bother of going to the Circus every time.’

  ‘What do you mean, sticky?’

  ‘You will remember we sent poor Taylor out under another name. The Office revoked his operational passport a matter of hours before he left London. I fear the Circus made an administrative blunder. The passport which accompanied the body was therefore challenged on arrival in the United Kingdom. It gave us a lot of trouble. I had to send one of my best men to sort it out,’ he lied. ‘I’m sure that if the Minister insisted, Control would be quite agreeable to a new arrangement.’

  The Under Secretary jabbed a pencil at the door which led to his Private Office. ‘Talk to them in there. Work something out. It sounds very stupid. Who do you deal with at the Office?’

  ‘De Lisle,’ said Leclerc with satisfaction, ‘in General Department. He’s the Assistant. And Smiley at the Circus.’

  The Under Secretary wrote it down. ‘One never knows who to talk to in that place; they’re so top-heavy.’

  ‘Then I may have to approach the Circus for technical resources. Wireless and that kind of thing. I propose to use a cover story for security reasons: a notional training scheme is the most appropriate.’

  ‘Cover story? Ah yes: a lie. You mentioned it.’

  ‘It’s a precaution, no more.’

  ‘You must do as you think fit.’

  ‘I imagined you would prefer the Circus not to know. You said yourself: no monolith. I have proceeded on that assumption.’

  The Under Secretary glanced again at the clock above the door. ‘He’s been in rather a difficult mood: a dreary day with the Yemen. I think it’s partly the Woodbridge by-election: he gets so upset about the marginals. How’s this thing going, by the way? It’s been very worrying for him, you know. I mean, what’s he to believe?’ He paused. ‘It’s these Germans who terrify me … You mentioned you’d found a fellow who fitted the bill.’ They moved to the corridor.

  ‘We’re on to him now. We’ve got him in play. We shall know tonight.’

  The Under Secretary wrinkled his nose very slightly, his hand on the Minister’s door. He was a churchman and disliked irregular things.

  ‘What makes a man take on a job like that? Not you; him, I mean.’

  Leclerc shook his head in silence, as if the two of them were in close sympathy. ‘Heaven knows. It’s something we don’t even understand ourselves.’

  ‘What kind of person is he? What sort of class? Only generally, you appreciate.’

  ‘Intelligent. Self-educated. Polish extraction.’

  ‘Oh, I see.’ He seemed relieved. ‘We’ll keep it gentle, shall we? Don’t paint it too black. He loathes drama. I mean any fool can see what the dangers are.’

  They went in.

  Haldane and Leiser took their places at a corner table, like lovers in a coffee bar. It was one of those restaurants which rely on empty Chianti bottles for their charm and on very little else for their custom. It would be gone tomorrow, or the next day, and scarcely anyone would notice, but while it was there and new and full of hope, it was not at all bad. Leiser had steak, it seemed to be habit, and sat primly while he ate it, his elbows firmly at his side.

  At first Haldane pretended to ignore the purpose of his visit. He talked badly about the war and the Department; about operations he had half forgotten until that afternoon, when he had refreshed his memory from the files. He spoke – no doubt it seemed desirable – mainly of those who had survived.

  He referred to the courses Leiser had attended; had he kept up his interest in radio at all? Well, no, as a matter of fact. How about unarmed combat? There hadn’t been the opportunity, really.

  ‘You had one or two rough moments in the war, I remember,’ Haldane prompted. ‘Didn’t you have some trouble in Holland?’ They were back to vanity and old times’ sake.

  A stiff nod. ‘I had a spot of trouble,’ he conceded. ‘I was younger then.’

  ‘What happened exactly?’

  Leiser looked at Haldane, blinking, as if the other had woken him, then began to talk. It was one of those wartime stories which have been told with variations since war began, as remote from the neat little restaurant as hunger or poverty, less credible for being articulate. He seemed to tell it at second hand. It might have been a big fight he had heard on the wireless. He had been caught, he had escaped, he had lived for days without food, he had killed, been taken into refuge and smuggled back to England. He told it well; perhaps it was what the war meant to him now, perhaps it was true, but as with a Latin widow relating the manner of her husband’s death, the passion had gone out of his heart and into the telling. He seemed to speak because he had been told to; his affectations, unlike Leclerc’s, were designed less to impress others than to protect himself. He seemed a very private man whose speech was exploratory; a man who had been a long time alone and had not reckoned with society; poised, not settled. His accent was good but exclusively foreign, lacking the slur and the elision which escapes even gifted imitators; a voice familiar with its environment, but not at home there.

  Haldane listened courteously. When it was over he asked, ‘How did they pick you up in the first place, do you know?’ The space between them was very great.

  ‘They never told me,’ he said blankly, as if it were not proper to inquire.

  ‘Of course you are the man we need. You’ve got the German background, if you understand me. You know them, don’t you; you have the German experience.’

  ‘Only from the war,’ Leiser said.

  They talked about the training school. ‘How’s that fat one? George somebody. Little sad bloke.’

  ‘Oh … he’s well, thank you.’

  ‘He married a pretty girl.’ He laughed obscenely, raising his right forearm in an Arab gesture of sexual prowess. ‘God Christ,’ he said, laughing again. ‘Us little blokes! Go for anything.’ It was an extraordinary lapse. It seemed to be what Haldane had been waiting for.

  He watched Leiser for a long time. The silence became remarkable. Deliberately he stood up; he seemed suddenly very angry; angry at Leiser’s silly grin and this whole cheap, incompetent flirtation; at these meaningless repetitive blasphemies and this squalid derision of a person of quality.

  ‘Do you mind not saying that? George Smiley happens to be a friend of mine.’

  He called the waiter and paid the bill, stalked quickly from the restaurant, leaving Leiser bewildered and alone, his White Lady held delicately in his hand, his brown eyes turned anxiously towards the doorway through which Haldane had so abruptly vanished.

  Eventually he left, making his way back by the footbridge, slowly through the dark and the rain, staring down on the double alley of streetlamps and the traffic passing between them. Across the road was his garage, the line of illuminated pumps, the tower crowned with its neon heart of sixty-watt bulbs alternating green and red. He entered the brightly lit office, said something to the boy, walked slowly upstairs towards the blare of music.

  Haldane waited till he had disappeared from sight, then hurried back to the restaurant to order a taxi.

  She had put the gramophone on. She was listening to dance music, sitting in his chair, drinking.

  ‘Christ, you’re late,’ she said. ‘I’m starving.’

  He kissed her.

  ‘You’ve eaten,’ she said. ‘I can smell the food.’

  ‘Just a snack, Bett. I had to. A man called; we had a drink.’

  ‘Liar.’

&
nbsp; He smiled. ‘Come off it, Betty. We’ve got a dinner date, remember?’

  ‘What man?’

  The flat was very clean. Curtains and carpets were flowered, the polished surfaces protected with lace. Everything was protected; vases, lamps, ashtray, all were carefully guarded, as if Leiser expected nothing from nature but stark collision. He favoured a suggestion of the antique: it was reflected in the scrolled woodwork of the furniture and the wrought iron of the lamp brackets. He had a mirror framed in gold and a picture made of fretwork and plaster; a new clock with weights which turned in a glass case.

  When he opened the cocktail cabinet it played a brief tune on a music box.

  He mixed himself a White Lady, carefully, like a man making up medicine. She watched him, moving her hips to the record, holding her glass away to one side as if it were her partner’s hand, and the partner were not Leiser.

  ‘What man?’ she repeated.

  He stood at the window, straight-backed like a soldier. The flashing heart on the roof played over the houses, caught the staves of the bridge and quivered in the wet surface of the Avenue. Beyond the houses was the church, like a cinema with a spire, fluted brick with vents where the bells rang. Beyond the church was the sky. Sometimes he thought the church was all that remained, and the London sky was lit with the glow of a burning city.

  ‘Christ, you’re really gay tonight.’

  The church bells were recorded, much amplified to drown the noise of traffic. He sold a lot of petrol on Sundays. The rain was running harder against the road; he could see it shading the beams of the car lights, dancing green and red on the tarmac.

  ‘Come on, Fred, dance.’

  ‘Just a minute, Bett.’

  ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake, what’s the matter with you? Have another drink and forget it.’

  He could hear her feet shuffling across the carpet to the music; the tireless jingle of her charm bracelet.

  ‘Dance, for Christ’s sake.’

  She had a slurred way of talking, slackly dragging the last syllable of a sentence beyond its natural length; it was the same calculated disenchantment with which she gave herself, sullenly, as if she were giving money, as if men had all the pleasure and women the pain.