PRAISE FOR JOHN LE CARRÉ

“Le Carré is more than just a great storyteller—he captures the Zeitgeist itself.”

—Tom Wolfe

“Le Carré is simply the world’s greatest fictional spymaster.”

—Newsweek

“He is one of the half-dozen best novelists now working in English.”

—The Chicago Sun-Times

“No other contemporary novelist has more durably enjoyed the twin badges of being both well-read and well-regarded.”

—Scott Turow

“For my money, le Carré is the equal of any novelist now writing in English.”

—The Guardian (U.K.)

“Le Carré is one of the best novelists—of any kind—we have.”

—Vanity Fair

PRAISE FOR JOHN LE CARRÉ’S

BESTSELLING THRILLERS

A MOST WANTED MAN

“Astounding, nearly perfect … beautifully paced, awesomely crafted … desperately readable.”

—San Francisco Chronicle

THE MISSION SONG

“Wrenching, necessary reading on a subject as urgent for us today as it was for Conrad’s readers more than 100 years ago.”

—The Globe and Mail

THE CONSTANT GARDENER

“The book breathes life, anger and excitement.”

—The Observer (U.K.)

SINGLE & SINGLE

“An adventure that takes us to the ends of the earth via the rich but often barren landscape of the human heart.”

—The Times (U.K.)

OUR GAME

“Furious in action … Takes us by the neck on page one and never lets go.”

—Chicago Sun-Times

THE RUSSIA HOUSE

“It is le Carré at his best, and that is the best there is.”

—The Gazette (Montreal)

A PERFECT SPY

“Le Carré is the perfect spy novelist. A first rate espionage novel.”

—The New York Times

THE NAIVE AND SENTIMENTAL LOVER

“Splendid, original … le Carré shows how endowed he is with the gift of storytelling.”

—The Times (U.K.)

A SMALL TOWN IN GERMANY

“Brilliant, unforgettable … a masterpiece.”

—New Statesman (U.K.)

THE LOOKING GLASS WAR

“A bitter, bleak, superlatively written novel.”

—Publishers Weekly

THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD

“The best spy story I have ever read.”

—Graham Greene

A MURDER OF QUALITY

“A beautifully intelligent, satiric and witty story.”

—Daily Telegraph (U.K.)

CALL FOR THE DEAD

“Intelligent, thrilling, surprising … makes most cloak-and-dagger stuff taste of cardboard.”

—Sunday Telegraph (U.K.)

PENGUIN CANADA

A MURDER OF QUALITY

CALL FOR THE DEAD

JOHN LE CARRÉ was born in 1931. After attending the universities of Berne and Oxford, he spent five years in the British Foreign Service. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, his third book, secured him a worldwide reputation. He is the author of twenty-one novels, including Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; A Perfect Spy; and The Constant Gardener. His books have been translated into thirty-six languages. He lives in England.

ALSO BY JOHN LE CARRÉ

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold

The Looking Glass War

A Small Town in Germany

The Naive and Sentimental Lover

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

The Honourable Schoolboy

Smiley’s People

The Little Drummer Girl

A Perfect Spy

The Russia House

The Secret Pilgrim

The Night Manager

Our Game

The Tailor of Panama

Single & Single

The Constant Gardener

Absolute Friends

The Mission Song

A Most Wanted Man

JOHN

LE CARRÉ

A MURDER

OF

QUALITY

CALL

FOR

THE DEAD

PENGUIN CANADA

Published by the Penguin Group

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A Murder of Quality copyright © Victor Gollancz Ltd and Le Carré Productions, 1962

Call for the Dead copyright © Victor Gollancz Ltd and Le Carré Productions, 1961

Copyright for this combined edition © Le Carré Productions and David Cornwell, 2010

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Manufactured in Canada.

LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

Le Carré, John, 1931–

A murder of quality; Call for the dead / John Le Carré.

ISBN 978-0-14-317139-3

I. Title.

PR6062.E42M87 2010      00823.914      C2010-902840-6

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A MURDER

OF QUALITY

To Ann

FOREWORD

There are probably a dozen great schools of whom it will be confidently asserted that Carne is their deliberate image. But he who looks among their common rooms for the D’Arcys, Fieldings and Hechts will search in vain.

JOHN LE CARRÉ

1

BLACK CANDLES

The greatness of Carne School has been ascribed by common consent to Edward VI, whose educational zeal is ascribed by history to the Duke of Somerset. But Carne prefers the respectability of the monarch to the questionable politics of his adviser, drawing strength from the conviction that Great Schools, like Tudor Kings, were ordained in Heaven.

And indeed its greatness is little short of miraculous. Founded by obscure monks, endowed by a sickly boy king, and dragged from oblivion by a Victorian bully, Carne had straightened its collar, scrubbed its rustic hands and face and presented itself shining to the courts of the twentieth century. And in the twinkling of an eye, the Dorset bumpkin was London’s darling: Dick Whittington had arrived. Carne had parchments in Latin, seals in wax, and Lammas Land behind the Abbey. Carne had property, cloisters and woodworm, a whipping block and a line in the Doomsday Book—then what more did it need to instruct the sons of the rich?

And they came; each Half they came (for terms are not elegant things), so that throughout a whole afternoon the trains would unload sad groups of black-coated boys on to the station platform. They came in great cars that shone with mournful purity. They came to bury poor King Edward, trundling handcarts over the cobbled streets or carrying tuck boxes like little coffins. Some wore gowns, and when they walked they looked like crows, or black angels come for the burying. Some followed singly like undertakers’ mutes, and you could hear the clip of their boots as they went. They were always in mourning at Carne; the small boys because they must stay and the big boys because they must leave, the masters because respectability was underpaid; and now, as the Lent Half (as the Easter term was called) drew to its end, the cloud of gloom was as firmly settled as ever over the grey towers of Carne.

Gloom and the cold. The cold was crisp and sharp as flint. It cut the faces of the boys as they moved slowly from the deserted playing fields after the school match. It pierced their black topcoats and turned their stiff, pointed collars into icy rings round their necks. Frozen, they plodded from the field to the long walled road which led to the main tuck shop and the town, the line gradually dwindling into groups, and the groups into pairs. Two boys who looked even colder than the rest crossed the road and made their way along a narrow path which led towards a distant but less populated tuck shop.

“I think I shall die if ever I have to watch one of those beastly rugger games again. The noise is fantastic,” said one. He was tall with fair hair, and his name was Caley.

“People only shout because the dons are watching from the pavilion,” the other rejoined; “that’s why each house has to stand together. So that the house dons can swank about how loud their houses shout.”

“What about Rode?” asked Caley. “Why does he stand with us and make us shout, then? He’s not a house don, just a bloody usher.”

“He’s sucking up to house dons all the time. You can see him in the quad between lessons buzzing round the big men. All the junior masters do.” Caley’s companion was a cynical red-haired boy called Perkins, Captain of Fielding’s house.

“I’ve been to tea with Rode,” said Caley.

“Rode’s hell. He wears brown boots. What was tea like?”

“Bleak. Funny how tea gives them away. Mrs Rode’s quite decent, though—homely in a plebby sort of way: doyleys and china birds. Food’s good: Women’s Institute, but good.”

“Rode’s doing Corps next Half. That’ll put the lid on it. He’s so keen, bouncing about all the time. You can tell he’s not a gentleman. You know where he went to school?”

“No.”

“Branxome Grammar. Fielding told my Mama, when she came over from Singapore last Half.”

“God. Where’s Branxome?”

“On the coast. Near Bournemouth. I haven’t been to tea with anyone except Fielding.” Perkins added after a slight pause, “You get roast chestnuts and crumpets. You’re never allowed to thank him, you know. He says emotionalism is only for the lower classes. That’s typical of Fielding. He’s not like a don at all. I think boys bore him. The whole house goes to tea with him once a Half, he has us in turn, four at a time, and that’s about the only time he talks to most men.”

They walked on in silence for a while until Perkins said:

“Fielding’s giving another dinner party tonight.”

“He’s pushing the boat out these days,” Caley replied, with disapproval. “Suppose the food in your house is worse than ever?”

“It’s his last Half before he retires. He’s entertaining every don and all the wives separately by the end of the Half. Black candles every evening. For mourning. Hells extravagant.”

“Yes. I suppose it’s a sort of gesture.”

“My Pater says he’s a queer.”

They crossed the road and disappeared into the tuck shop, where they continued to discuss the weighty affairs of Mr Terence Fielding, until Perkins drew their meeting reluctantly to a close. Being a poor hand at science, he was unfortunately obliged to take extra tuition in the subject.

The dinner party to which Perkins had alluded that afternoon was now drawing to a close. Mr Terence Fielding, senior housemaster of Carne, gave himself some more port and pushed the decanter wearily to his left. It was his port, the best he had. There was enough of the best to last the Half—and after that, be damned. He felt a little tired after watching the match, and a little drunk, and a little bored with Shane Hecht and her husband. Shane was so hideous. Massive and enveloping, like a faded Valkyrie. All that black hair. He should have asked someone else. The Snows for instance, but he was too clever. Or Felix D’Arcy, but D’Arcy interrupted. Ah well, a little later he would annoy Charles Hecht, and Hecht would get in a pet and leave early.

Hecht was fidgeting, wanting to light his pipe, but Fielding damn well wouldn’t have it. Hecht could have a cigar if he wanted to smoke. But his pipe could stay in his dinner-jacket pocket, where it belonged, or didn’t belong, and his athletic profile could remain unadorned.

“Cigar, Hecht?”

“No thanks, Fielding. I say, do you mind if I …”

“I can recommend the cigars. Young Havelake sent them from Havana. His father’s ambassador there, you know.”

“Yes, dear,” said Shane tolerantly; “Vivian Havelake was in Charles’s troop when Charles was commandant of the Cadets.”

“Good boy, Havelake,” Hecht observed, and pressed his lips together to show he was a strict judge.

“It’s amusing how things have changed.” Shane Hecht said this rapidly with a rather wooden smile, as if it weren’t really amusing. “Such a grey world we live in, now.

“I remember before the war when Charles inspected the Corps on a white horse. We don’t do that kind of thing now, do we? I’ve got nothing against Mr Iredale as commandant, nothing at all. What was his regiment, Terence, do you know? I’m sure he does it very nicely, whatever they do now in the Corps—he gets on so well with the boys, doesn’t he? His wife’s such a nice person … I wonder why they can never keep their servants. I hear Mr Rode will be helping out with the Corps next Half.”

“Poor little Rode,” said Fielding slowly; “running about like a puppy, trying to earn his biscuits. He tries so hard; have you seen him cheering at school matches? He’d never seen a game of rugger before he came here, you know. They don’t play rugger at grammar schools—it’s all soccer. Do you remember when he first came, Charles? It was fascinating. He lay very low at first, drinking us in: the games, the vocabulary, the manners. Then, one day it was as if he had been given the power of speech, and he spoke in our language. It was amazing, like plastic surgery. It was Felix D’Arcy’s work of course—I’ve never seen anything quite like it before.”

“Dear Mrs Rode,” said Shane Hecht in that voice of abstract vagueness which she reserved for her most venomous pronouncements: “So sweet … and such simple taste, don’t you think? I mean, whoever would have dreamed of putting those china ducks on the wall? Big ones at the front and little ones at the back. Charming, don’t you think? Like one of those teashops. I wonder where she bought them. I must ask her. I’m told her father lives near Bournemouth. It must be so lonely for him, don’t you think? Such a vulgar place; no one to talk to.”

Fielding sat back and surveyed his own table. The silver was good. The best in Carne, he had heard it said, and he was inclined to agree. This Half he had nothing but black candles. It was the sort of thing people remembered when you’d gone: “Dear old Terence—marvellous host. He dined every member of the staff during his last Half, you know, wives too. Black candles, rather touching. It broke his heart giving up his house.” But he must annoy Charles Hecht. Shane would like that. Shane would egg him on because she hated Charles, because within her great ugly body she was as cunning as a snake.

Fielding looked at Hecht and then at Hecht’s wife, and she smiled back at him, the slow rotten smile of a whore. For a moment Fielding thought of Hecht pasturing in that thick body: it was a scene redolent of Lautrec … yes, that was it! Charles pompous and top-hatted, seated stiffly upon the plush coverlet; she massive, pendulous and bored. The image pleased him: so perverse to consign that fool Hecht from the Spartan cleanliness of Carne to the brothels of nineteenth-century Paris …

Fielding began talking, pontificating rather, with an air of friendly objectivity which he knew Hecht would resent.

“When I look back on my thirty years at Carne, I realise I have achieved rather less than a road sweeper.” They were watching him now—“I used to regard a road sweeper as a person inferior to myself. Now, I rather doubt it. Something is dirty, he makes it clean, and the state of the world is advanced. But I—what have I done? Entrenched a ruling class which is distinguished by neither talent, culture, nor wit; kept alive for one more generation the distinctions of a dead age.”

Charles Hecht, who had never perfected the art of not listening to Fielding, grew red and fussed at the other end of the table.

“Don’t we teach them, Fielding? What about our successes, our scholarships?”

“I have never taught a boy in my life, Charles. Usually the boy wasn’t clever enough; occasionally, I wasn’t. In most boys, you see, perception dies with puberty. In a few it persists, though where we find it we take good care at Carne to kill it. If it survives our efforts the boy wins a scholarship … Bear with me, Shane; it’s my last Half.”

“Last Half or not, you’re talking through your hat, Fielding,” said Hecht, angrily.

“That is traditional at Carne. These successes, as you call them, are the failures, the rare boys who have not learned the lessons of Carne. They have ignored the cult of mediocrity. We can do nothing for them. But for the rest, for the puzzled little clerics and the blind little soldiers, for them the truth of Carne is written on the wall, and they hate us.”

Hecht laughed rather heavily.

“Why do so many come back, then, if they hate us so much? Why do they remember us and come and see us?”

“Because we, dear Charles, are the writing on the wall! The one lesson of Carne they never forget. They come back to read us, don’t you see? It was from us they learnt the secret of life: that we grow old without growing wise. They realised that nothing happened when we grew up: no blinding light on the road to Damascus, no sudden feeling of maturity.” Fielding put his head back and gazed at the clumsy Victorian moulding on the ceiling, and the halo of dirt round the light rose.

“We just got a little older. We made the same jokes, thought the same thoughts, wanted the same things. Year in, year out, Hecht, we were the same people, not wiser, not better; we haven’t had an original thought between us for the last fifty years of our lives. They saw what a trick it all was, Carne and us: our academic dress, our schoolroom jokes, our wise little offerings of guidance. And that’s why they come back year after year of their puzzled, barren lives to gaze fascinated at you and me, Hecht, like children at a grave, searching for the secret of life and death. Oh, yes, they have learned that from us.”

Hecht looked at Fielding in silence for a moment.

“Decanter, Hecht?” said Fielding, in a slightly conciliatory way, but Hecht’s eyes were still upon him.

“If that’s a joke …” he began, and his wife observed with satisfaction that he was very angry indeed.

“I wish I knew, Charles,” Fielding replied with apparent earnestness. “I really wish I knew. I used to think it was clever to confuse comedy with tragedy. Now I wish I could distinguish them.” He rather liked that.

They had coffee in the drawing-room, where Fielding resorted to gossip, but Hecht was not to be drawn. Fielding rather wished he had let him light his pipe. Then he recalled his vision of the Hechts in Paris, and it restored him. He had been rather good this evening. There were moments when he convinced himself.

While Shane fetched her coat, the two men stood together in the hall, but neither spoke. Shane returned, an ermine stole, yellow with age, draped over her great white shoulders. She inclined her head to the right, smiled and held out her hand to Fielding, the fingers down.

“Terence, darling,” she said, as Fielding kissed her fat knuckles; “so kind. And in your last Half. You must dine with us before you go. So sad. So few of us left.” She smiled again, half closing her eyes to indicate emotional disturbance, then followed her husband into the street. It was still bitterly cold and snow was in the air.

Fielding closed and carefully bolted the door behind them— perhaps a fraction earlier than courtesy required—and returned to the dining-room. Hecht’s port glass was still about half full. Fielding picked it up and carefully poured the contents back into the decanter. He hoped Hecht wasn’t too upset; he hated people to dislike him. He snuffed the black candles and damped their wicks between his forefinger and thumb. Switching on the light, he took from the sideboard a sixpenny notebook, and opened it. It contained his list of dining guests for the remainder of the Half. With his fountain pen he placed a neat tick against the name Hecht. They were done. On Wednesday he would have the Rodes. The husband was quite good value, but she, of course, was hell … It was not always the way with married couples. The wives as a rule were so much more sympathetic.

He opened the sideboard and took from it a bottle of brandy and a tumbler. Holding them both in the same hand, he shuffled wearily back to the drawing-room, resting his other hand on the wall as he went. God! He felt old, suddenly; that thin line of pain across the chest, that heaviness in the legs and feet. Such an effort being with people—on stage all the time. He hated to be alone, but people bored him. Being alone was like being tired, but unable to sleep. Some German poet had said that; he’d quoted it once, “You may sleep but I must dance.” Something like that.

“That’s how I am,” thought Fielding. “That’s how Carne is, too; an old satyr dancing to the music.” The music grew faster and their bodies older, but they must dance on—there were young men waiting in the wings. It had been funny once dancing the old dances in a new world. He poured himself some more brandy. He’d be pleased to leave in a way, even though he’d have to go on teaching somewhere else.

But it had its beauty, Carne … The Abbey Close in spring … the flamingo figures of boys waiting for the ritual of worship … the ebb and flow of children, like the seasons of the year, and the old men dying among them. He wished he could paint; he would paint the pageant of Carne in the fallow browns of autumn … What a shame, thought Fielding, that a mind so perceptive of beauty had no talent for creation.

He looked at his watch. Quarter to twelve. Nearly time to go out … to dance, and not to sleep.

2

THE THURSDAY FEELING

It was Thursday evening and the Christian Voice had just been put to bed. This was scarcely a historic event in Fleet Street. The pimply boy from Dispatch who took away the ragged pile of page-proofs showed no more ceremony than was strictly demanded by the eventual prospect of his Christmas bonus. And even in this respect he had learned that the secular journals of Unipress were more provident of material charity than the Christian Voice; charity being in strict relationship to circulation.

Miss Brimley, the journal’s editor, adjusted the air cushion beneath her and lit a cigarette. Her secretary and sub-editor— the appointment carried both responsibilities—yawned, dropped the aspirin bottle into her handbag, combed out her ginger hair and bade Miss Brimley good night, leaving behind her as usual the smell of strongly scented powder and an empty paper-tissue box. Miss Brimley listened contentedly to the clipping echo of her footsteps as it faded down the corridor. It pleased her to be alone at last, tasting the anticlimax. She never failed to wonder at herself, how every Thursday morning brought the same slight uneasiness as she entered the vast Unipress building and stood a little absurdly on one escalator after the other, like a drab parcel on a luxury liner. Heaven knows, she had run the Voice for fourteen years, and there were those who said its layout was the best thing Unipress did. Yet the Thursday feeling never left her, the wakeful anxiety that one day, perhaps today, they wouldn’t be ready when the dispatch boy came. She often wondered what would happen then. She had heard of failures elsewhere in that vast combine, of features disapproved and staff rebuked. It was a mystery to her why they kept the Voice at all, with its expensive room on the seventh floor and a circulation which, if Miss Brimley knew anything, hardly paid for the paper-clips.

The Voice had been founded at the turn of the century by old Lord Landsbury, together with a Nonconformist daily newspaper and the Temperance Gazette. But the Gazette and the daily were long since dead, and Landsbury’s son had woken one morning not long ago to find his whole business and every man and woman of it, every stick of furniture, ink, paper-clips, and galley-pins, bought by the hidden gold of Unipress.

That was three years ago and every day she had waited for her dismissal. But it never came; no directive, no question, no word. And so, being a sensible woman, she continued exactly as before and ceased to wonder.

And she was glad. It was easy to sneer at the Voice. Every week it offered humbly and without fanfares evidence of the Lord’s intervention in the world’s affairs, retold in simple and somewhat unscientific terms the early history of the Jews, and provided over a fictitious signature motherly advice to whomever should write and ask for it. The Voice scarcely concerned itself with the fifty-odd millions of the population who had never heard of it. It was a family affair, and rather than abuse those who were not members, it did its best for those who were. For them it was kind, optimistic, and informative. If a million children were dying of the plague in India, you may be sure that the weekly editorial described the miraculous escape from fire of a Methodist family in Kent. The Voice did not advise you how to disguise the encroaching wrinkles round your eyes, or control your spreading figure; did not dismay you, if you were old, by its own eternal youth. It was itself middle-aged and middle class, counselled caution to girls and charity to all. Nonconformity is the most conservative of habits and families which took the Voice in 1903 continued to take it in 1960.

Miss Brimley was not quite the image of her journal. The fortunes of war and the caprice of Intelligence work had thrown her into partnership with the younger Lord Landsbury, and for the six years of war they had worked together efficiently and inconspicuously in an unnamed building in Knightsbridge. The fortunes of peace rendered both unemployed, but Landsbury had the good sense, as well as the generosity, to offer Miss Brimley a job. The Voice had ceased publication during the war, and no one seemed anxious to renew it. At first Miss Brimley had felt a little ashamed at reviving and editing a journal which in no way expressed her own vague deism, but quite soon, as the touching letters came in and the circulation recovered, she developed an affection for her job—and for her readers—which outweighed her earlier misgivings. The Voice was her life and its readers her preoccupation. She struggled to answer their odd, troubled questions, sought advice of others where she could not provide it herself, and, in time, under a handful of pseudonyms, became, if not their philosopher, their guide, friend, and universal aunt.

Miss Brimley put out her cigarette, absently tidied the pins, paper-clips, scissors, and paste into the top right-hand drawer of her desk, and gathered together the afternoon mail from her in-tray which, because it was Thursday, she had left untouched. There were several letters addressed to Barbara Fellowship, under which name the Voice had, since its foundation, answered both privately and through its published columns the many problems of its correspondents. They could wait until tomorrow. She rather enjoyed the “problem post,” but Friday morning was when she read it. She opened the little filing cabinet at her elbow and dropped the letters into a box file at the front of the compartment. As she did so, one of them fell on its back and she noticed with surprise that the sealed flap was embossed with an elegant blue dolphin. She picked the envelope out of the cabinet and looked at it curiously, turning it over several times. It was of pale grey paper, very faintly lined. Expensive—perhaps hand-made. Beneath the dolphin was a tiny scroll on which she could just discern the legend, Regem defendere diem videre. The postmark was Carne, Dorset. That must be the school crest. But why was Carne familiar to her? Miss Brimley was proud of her memory, which was excellent, and she was vexed when it failed her. As a last resort she opened the envelope with her faded ivory paper knife and read the letter.

Dear Miss Fellowship,

I don’t know if you are a real person but it doesn’t matter, because you always give such good, kind answers. It was me who wrote last June about the pastry mix. I am not mad and I know my husband is trying to kill me. Could I please come and see you as soon as it’s convenient? I’m sure you’ll believe me, and understand that I am normal. Could it be as soon as possible please, I am so afraid of the long nights. I don’t know who else to turn to. I could try Mr Cardew at the Tabernacle but he wouldn’t believe me and Dad’s too sensible. I might as well be dead. There’s something not quite right about him. At night sometimes when he thinks I’m asleep he just lies watching the darkness. I know it’s wrong to think such wicked things and have fear in our hearts, but I can’t help it.

I hope you don’t get many letters like this.

Yours faithfully,

Stella Rode (Mrs)

née Glaston

She sat quite still at her desk for a moment, looking at the address in handsome blue engraving at the top of the page: “North Fields, Carne School, Dorset.” In that moment of shock and astonishment one phrase forced itself upon her mind. “The value of intelligence depends on its breeding.” That was John Landsbury’s favourite dictum. Until you know the pedigree of the information you cannot evaluate a report. Yes, that was what he used to say: “We are not democratic. We close the door on intelligence without parentage.” And she used to reply: “Yes, John, but even the best families had to begin somewhere.”

But Stella Rode had parentage. It all came back to her now. She was the Glaston girl. The girl whose marriage was reported in the editorial, the girl who won the summer competition; Samuel Glaston’s daughter from Branxome. She had a card in Miss Brimley’s index.

Abruptly she stood up, the letter still in her hand, and walked to the uncurtained window. Just in front of her was a contemporary window-box of woven white metal. It was odd, she reflected, how she could never get anything to grow in that window-box. She looked down into the street, a slight, sensible figure leaning forward a little and framed by the incandescent fog outside; fog made yellow from the stolen light of London’s streets. She could just distinguish the street lamps far below, pale and sullen. She suddenly felt the need for fresh air, and on an impulse quite alien to her usual calm, she opened the window wide. The quick cold and the angry surge of noise burst in on her, and the insidious fog followed. The sound of traffic was constant, so that for a moment she thought it was the turning of some great machine. Then above its steady growl she heard the newsboys. Their cries were like the cries of gulls against a gathering storm. She could see them now, sentinels among the hastening shadows.

It might be true. That had always been the difficulty. Right through the war it was the same restless search. It might be true. It was no use relating reports to probability when there was no quantum of knowledge from which to start. She remembered the first intelligence from France on flying bombs, wild talk of concrete runways in the depths of a forest. You had to resist the dramatic, you had to hold out against it. Yet it might be true. Tomorrow, the day after, those newsboys down there might be shouting it, and Stella Rode née Glaston might be dead. And if that was so, if there was the remotest chance that this man was plotting to kill this woman, then she, Ailsa Brimley, must do what she could to prevent it. Besides, Stella Glaston had a claim on her assistance if anyone did: both her father and her grandfather had taken the Voice, and when Stella married five years ago Miss Brimley had put a couple of lines about it in the editorial. The Glastons sent her a Christmas card every year. They were one of the original families to subscribe …

It was cold at the window, but she remained there, still fascinated by the half hidden shadows joining and parting beneath her, and the useless street lights burning painfully among them. She began to imagine him as one of those shadows, pressing and jostling, his murderer’s eyes turned to sockets of dark. And suddenly she was frightened and needed help.

But not the police, not yet. If Stella Rode had wanted that she would have gone herself. Why hadn’t she? For love? For fear of looking a fool? Because instinct was not evidence? They wanted fact. But the fact of murder was death. Must they wait for that?

Who would help? She thought at once of Landsbury, but he was farming in Rhodesia. Who else had been with them in the war? Fielding and Jebedee were dead, Steed-Asprey vanished. Smiley— where was he? George Smiley, the cleverest and perhaps the oddest of them all. Of course, Miss Brimley remembered now. He made that improbable marriage and went back to research at Oxford. But he hadn’t stayed there … The marriage had broken up … What had he done after that?

She returned to her desk and picked up the S–Z directory. Ten minutes later she was sitting in a taxi, heading for Sloane Square. In her neatly gloved hand she held a cardboard folder containing Stella Rode’s card from the index and the correspondence which had passed between them at the time of the summer competition. She was nearly at Piccadilly when she remembered she’d left the office window open. It didn’t seem to matter much.

“With other people it’s Persian cats or golf. With me it’s the Voice and my readers. I’m a ridiculous spinster, I know, but there it is. I won’t go to the police until I’ve tried something, George.”

“And you thought you’d try me?”

“Yes.”

She was sitting in the study of George Smiley’s house in Bywater Street; the only light came from the complicated lamp on his desk, a black spider of a thing shining brightly on to the manuscript notes which covered the desk.

“So you’ve left the Service?” she said.

“Yes, yes, I have.” He nodded his round head vigorously, as if reassuring himself that a distasteful experience was really over, and mixed Miss Brimley a whisky and soda. “I had another spell there after … Oxford. It’s all very different in peacetime, you know,” he continued.

Miss Brimley nodded.

“I can imagine it. More time to be bitchy.” Smiley said nothing, just lit a cigarette and sat down opposite her.

“And the people have changed. Fielding, Steed, Jebedee. All gone.” She said this in a matter-of-fact way as she took from her large sensible handbag Stella Rode’s letter. “This is the letter, George.”

When he had read it, he held it briefly towards the lamp, his round face caught by the light in a moment of almost comic earnestness. Watching him, Miss Brimley wondered what impression he made on those who did not know him well. She used to think of him as the most forgettable man she had ever met; short and plump, with heavy spectacles and thinning hair, he was at first sight the very prototype of an unsuccessful middle-aged bachelor in a sedentary occupation. His natural diffidence in most practical matters was reflected in his clothes, which were costly and unsuitable, for he was clay in the hands of his tailor, who robbed him.

He had put down the letter on the small marquetry table beside him, and was looking at her owlishly.

“This other letter she sent you, Brim. Where is it?”

She handed him the folder. He opened it and after a moment read aloud Stella Rode’s other letter:

Dear Miss Fellowship,

I would like to submit the following suggestion for your “Kitchen Hints” competition.

Make your basic batch of cake mixture once a month. Cream equal quantities of fat and sugar and add one egg for every six ounces of the mixture. For puddings and cakes, add flour to the required quantity of basic mixture.

This will keep well for a month.

I enclose stamped addressed envelope.

Yours sincerely,

Stella Rode (née Glaston)

PS – Incidentally, you can prevent wire wool from rusting by keeping it in a jar of soapy water. Are we allowed two suggestions? If so, please can this be my second?

“She won the competition,” Miss Brimley observed, “but that’s not the point. This is what I want to tell you, George. She’s a Glaston, and the Glastons have been reading the Voice since it started. Stella’s grandfather was old Rufus Glaston, a Lancashire pottery king; he and John Landsbury’s father built chapels and tabernacles in practically every village in the Midlands. When Rufus died the Voice put out a memorial edition and old Landsbury himself wrote the obituary. Samuel Glaston took on his father’s business, but had to move south because of his health. He ended up near Bournemouth, a widower with one daughter, Stella. She’s the last of all that family. The whole lot are as down to earth as you could wish, Stella included, I should think. I don’t think any of them is likely to be suffering from delusions of persecution.”

Smiley was looking at her in astonishment.

“My dear Brim, I can’t possibly take that in. How on earth do you know all this?”

Miss Brimley smiled apologetically.

“The Glastons are easy—they’re almost part of the magazine. They send us Christmas cards, and boxes of chocolates on the anniversary of our foundation. We’ve got about five hundred families who form what I call our Establishment. They were in on the Voice from the start and they’ve kept up ever since. They write to us, George; if they’re worried they write and say so; if they’re getting married, moving house, retiring from work, if they’re ill, depressed, or angry, they write. Not often, Heaven knows; but enough.”

“How do you remember it all?”

“I don’t. I keep a card index. I always write back you see … only …”

“Yes?”

Miss Brimley looked at him earnestly.

“This is the first time anyone has written because she’s frightened.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“I’ve only had one bright idea so far. I seem to remember Adrian Fielding had a brother who taught at Carne …”

“He’s a housemaster there, if he hasn’t retired.”

“No, he retires this Half—it was in The Times some weeks ago, in that little bit on the Court page where Carne always announces itself. It said: ‘Carne School reassembles today for the Lent Half. Mr T. R. Fielding will retire at the end of the Half, having completed his statutory fifteen years as a housemaster.’”

Smiley laughed.

“Really, Brim, your memory is absurd!”

“It was the mention of Fielding … Anyway, I thought you could ring him up. You must know him.”

“Yes, yes. I know him. At least, I met him once at Magdalen High Table. But—” Smiley coloured a little.

“But what, George?”

“Well, he’s not quite the man his brother was, you know.”

“How could he be?” Miss Brimley rejoined a little sharply. “But he can tell you something about Stella Rode. And her husband.”

“I don’t think I could do that on the telephone. I think I’d rather go and see him. But what’s to stop you ringing up Stella Rode?”

“Well, I can’t tonight, can I? Her husband will be in. I thought I’d put a letter in the post to her tonight telling her she can come to see me any time. But,” she continued, making a slight, impatient movement with her foot, “I want to do something now, George.”

Smiley nodded and went to the telephone. He rang directory inquiries and asked for Terence Fielding’s number. After a long delay he was told to ring Carne School central exchange, who would connect him with whomever he required. Miss Brimley, watching him, wished she knew a little more about George Smiley, how much of that diffidence was assumed, how vulnerable he was.

“The best,” Adrian had said. “The strongest and the best.”

But so many men learnt strength during the war, learnt terrible things, and put aside their knowledge with a shudder when it ended.

The number was ringing now. She heard the dialling tone and for a moment was filled with apprehension. For the first time she was afraid of making a fool of herself, afraid of becoming involved in unlikely explanations with angular, suspicious people.

“Mr Terence Fielding, please …” A pause.

“Fielding, good evening. My name is George Smiley; I knew your brother well in the war. We have in fact met … Yes, yes, quite right—Magdalen, was it not, the summer before last? Look, I wonder if I might come and see you on a personal matter … it’s a little difficult to discuss on the telephone. A friend of mine has received a rather disturbing letter from the wife of a Carne master … Well, I—Rode, Stella Rode; her husband …”

He suddenly stiffened, and Miss Brimley, her eyes fixed upon him, saw with alarm how his chubby face broke into an expression of pain and disgust. She no longer heard what he was saying. She could only watch the dreadful transformation of his face, the whitening knuckles of his hand clutching the receiver. He was looking at her now, saying something … it was too late. Stella Rode was dead. She had been murdered late on Wednesday night. They’d actually been dining with Fielding the night it happened.

3

THE NIGHT OF THE MURDER

The seven-five from Waterloo to Yeovil is not a popular train, though it provides an excellent breakfast. Smiley had no difficulty in finding a first-class compartment to himself. It was a bitterly cold day, dark and the sky heavy with snow. He sat huddled in a voluminous travelling coat of Continental origin, holding in his gloved hands a bundle of the day’s papers. Because he was a precise man and did not care to be hurried, he had arrived thirty minutes before the train was due to depart. Still tired after the stresses of the previous night, when he had sat up talking with Ailsa Brimley until Heaven knew what hour, he was disinclined to read. Looking out of the window on to an almost empty station, he caught sight, to his great surprise, of Miss Brimley making her way along the platform, peering in at the windows, a carrier bag in her hand. He lowered the window and called to her.

“My dear Brim, what are you doing here at this dreadful hour? You should be in bed.”

She sat down opposite him and began unpacking her bag and handing him its contents: thermos, sandwiches, and chocolate.

“I didn’t know whether there was a breakfast car,” she explained; “and besides, I wanted to come and see you off. You’re such a dear, George, and I wish I could come with you, but Unipress would go mad if I did. The only time they notice you is when you’re not there.”

“Haven’t you seen the papers?” he asked.

“Just briefly, on the way here. They seem to think it wasn’t him, but some madman …”

“I know, Brim. That’s what Fielding said, wasn’t it?” There was a moment’s awkward silence.

“George, am I being an awful ass, letting you go off like this? I was sure last night, but now I wonder …”

“After you left I rang Ben Sparrow of Special Branch. You remember him, don’t you? He was with us in the war. I told him the whole story.”

“George! At three in the morning?”

“Yes. He’s ringing the Divisional Superintendent at Carne. He’ll tell him about the letter, and that I’m coming down. Ben had an idea that a man named Rigby would be handling the case. Rigby and Ben were at police college together.” He looked at her kindly for a moment. “Besides, I’m a man of leisure, Brim. I shall enjoy the change.”

“Bless you, George,” said Miss Brimley, woman enough to believe him. She got up to go, and Smiley said to her:

“Brim, if you should need any more help or anything, and can’t get hold of me, there’s a man called Mendel who lives in Mitcham, a retired police inspector. He’s in the book. If you get hold of him and mention me, he’ll do what he can for you. I’ve booked a room at the Sawley Arms.”

Alone again, Smiley surveyed uneasily the assortment of food and drink which Miss Brimley had provided. He had promised himself the luxury of breakfast in the restaurant car. He would keep the sandwiches and coffee for later, that would be the best thing; for lunch, perhaps. And he would breakfast properly.

In the restaurant car Smiley read first the less sensational reports on the death of Stella Rode. It appeared that on Wednesday evening Mr and Mrs Rode had been guests at dinner of Mr Terence Fielding, the senior house-master at Carne and brother of the late Adrian Fielding, the celebrated French scholar who had vanished during the war while specially employed by the War Office. They had left Mr Fielding’s house together at about ten to eleven and walked the half mile from the centre of Carne to their house, which stood alone at the edge of the famous Carne playing fields. As they reached their house Mr Rode remembered that he had left at Mr Fielding’s house some examination papers which urgently required correction that night. (At this point Smiley remembered that he had failed to pack his dinner-jacket, and that Fielding would almost certainly ask him to dine.) Rode determined to walk back to Fielding’s house and collect the papers, therefore, starting back at about five past eleven. It appears that Mrs Rode made herself a cup of tea and sat down in the drawing-room to await his return.

Adjoining the back of the house is a conservatory, the inner door of which leads to the drawing-room. It was there that Rode eventually found his wife when he returned. There were signs of a struggle, and certain inexpensive articles of jewellery were missing from the body. The confusion in the conservatory was terrible. Fortunately there had been a fresh fall of snow on Wednesday afternoon, and detectives from Dorchester were examining the footprints and other traces early on Thursday morning. Mr Rode had been treated for shock at Dorchester Central Hospital. The police wished to interview a woman from the adjacent village of Pylle who was locally known as “Mad Janie” on account of her eccentric and solitary habits. Mrs Rode, who was well known in Carne for her energetic work on behalf of the International Refugee Year, had apparently shown a charitable interest in her welfare, and she had vanished without trace since the night of the murder. The police were currently of the opinion that the murderer had caught sight of Mrs Rode through the drawing-room window (she had not drawn the curtains) and that Mrs Rode had admitted the murderer at the front door in the belief that it was her husband returning from Mr Fielding’s house. The Home Office pathologist had been asked to conduct a post-mortem examination.

The other reports were not so restrained: “Murder most foul has desecrated the hallowed playing fields of Carne” one article began, and another, “Science teacher discovers murdered wife in blood-spattered conservatory.” A third screamed, “Mad woman sought in Carne murder.” With an expression of distaste, Smiley screwed up all the newspapers except the Guardian and The Times and tossed them on to the luggage rack.

He changed at Yeovil for a local line to Sturminster, Okeford and Carne. It was something after eleven o’clock when he finally arrived at Carne station.

He telephoned the hotel from the station and sent his luggage ahead by taxi. The Sawley Arms was only full at Commemoration and on St Andrew’s Day. Most of the year it was empty; sitting like a prim Victorian lady, its slate roof in the mauve of half-mourning, on ill-tended lawns midway between the station and Carne Abbey.

Snow still lay on the ground, but the day was fine and dry, and Smiley decided to walk into the town and arrange to meet the police officer conducting the investigation of the murder. He left the station, with its foretaste of Victorian austerity, and walked along the avenue of bare trees which led towards the great Abbey tower, flat and black against the colourless winter sky. He crossed the Abbey Close, a serene and beautiful square of medieval houses, the roofs snow-covered, the white lawns shaded with pin strokes of grass. As he passed the west door of the Abbey, the soft snow creaking where he trod, the clock high above him struck the half-hour, and two knights on horseback rode out from their little castle over the door, and slowly raised their lances to each other in salute. Then, as if it were all part of the same clockwork mechanism, other doors all round the Close opened too, releasing swarms of black-coated boys who stampeded across the snow towards the Abbey. One boy passed so close that his gown brushed against Smiley’s sleeve. Smiley called to him as he ran past:

“What’s going on?”

“Sext,” shouted the boy in reply, and was gone.

He passed the main entrance to the school and came at once upon the municipal part of the town, a lugubrious nineteenth-century fairyland in local stone, stitched together by a complexity of Gothic chimneys and crenel windows. Here was the town hall, and beside it, with the flag of St George floating at its masthead, the Carne Constabulary Headquarters, built ninety years ago to withstand the onslaughts of archery and battering rams.

He gave his name to the Duty Sergeant, and asked to see the officer investigating the death of Mrs Rode. The Sergeant, an elderly, inscrutable man, addressed himself to the telephone with a certain formality, as if he were about to perform a difficult conjuring trick. To Smiley’s surprise, he was told that Inspector Rigby would be pleased to see him at once, and a police cadet was summoned to show him the way. He was led at a spanking pace up the wide staircase in the centre of the hall, and in a matter of moments found himself before the Inspector.

He was a very short man, and very broad. He could have been a Celt from the tin-mines of Cornwall or the collieries of Wales. His dark grey hair was cut very close; it came to a point in the centre of his brow like a devil’s cap. His hands were large and powerful, he had the trunk and stance of a wrestler, but he spoke slowly, with a Dorset burr to his soft voice. Smiley quickly noticed that he had one quality rare among small men: the quality of openness. Though his eyes were dark and bright and the movements of his body swift, he imparted a feeling of honesty and straight dealing.

“Ben Sparrow rang me this morning, sir. I’m very pleased you’ve come. I believe you’ve got a letter for me.”

Rigby looked at Smiley thoughtfully over his desk, and decided that he liked what he saw. He had got around in the war and had heard a little, just a very little, of the work of George Smiley’s Service. If Ben said Smiley was all right, that was good enough for him—or almost. But Ben had said more than that.

“Looks like a frog, dresses like a bookie, and has a brain I’d give my eyes for. Had a very nasty war. Very nasty indeed.”

Well, he looked like a frog, right enough. Short and stubby, round spectacles with thick lenses that made his eyes big. And his clothes were odd. Expensive, mind, you could see that. But his jacket seemed to drape where there wasn’t any room for drape. What did surprise Rigby was his shyness. Rigby had expected someone a little brash, a little too smooth for Carne, whereas Smiley had an earnest formality of manner which appealed to Rigby’s conservative taste.

Smiley took the letter from his wallet and put it on the desk, while Rigby extracted an old pair of gold-rimmed spectacles from a battered metal case and adjusted the ends carefully over his ears.

“I don’t know if Ben explained,” said Smiley, “but this letter was sent to the correspondence section of a small Nonconformist journal to which Mrs Rode subscribed.”

“And Miss Fellowship is the lady who brought you the letter?”

“No; her name is Brimley. She is the editor of the magazine. Fellowship is just a pen-name for the correspondence column.”

The brown eyes rested on him for a moment.

“When did she receive this letter?”

“Yesterday, the seventeenth. Thursday’s the day they go to press, their busy day. The afternoon mail doesn’t get opened till the evening, usually. This was opened about six o’clock, I suppose.”

“And she brought it straight to you?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“She worked for me during the war, in my department. She was reluctant to go straight to the police—I was the only person she could think of who wasn’t a policeman,” he added stupidly. “Who could help, I mean.”

“May I ask what you yourself, sir, do for a living?”

“Nothing much. A little private research on seventeenth-century Germany.” It seemed a very silly answer.

Rigby didn’t seem bothered.

“What’s this earlier letter she talks about?”

Smiley offered him the second envelope, and again the big, square hand received it.

“It appears she won this competition,” Smiley explained. “That was her winning entry. I gather she comes from a family which has subscribed to the magazine since its foundation. That’s why Miss Brimley was less inclined to regard the letter as nonsense. Not that it follows.”

“Not that what follows?”

“I meant that the fact that her family had subscribed to a journal for fifty years does not logically affect the possibility that she was unbalanced.”

Rigby nodded, as if he saw the point, but Smiley had an uncomfortable feeling that he did not.

“Ah,” said Rigby, with a slow smile. “Women, eh?”

Smiley, completely bewildered, gave a little laugh. Rigby was looking at him thoughtfully.

“Know any of the staff, do you, sir?”

“Only Mr Terence Fielding. We met at an Oxford dinner some time ago. I thought I’d call round and see him. I knew his brother pretty well.”

Rigby appeared to stiffen slightly at the mention of Fielding, but he said nothing, and Smiley went on:

“It was Fielding I rang when Miss Brimley brought me the letter. He told me the news. That was last night.”

“I see.”

They looked at one another again in silence. Smiley discomfited and slightly comic, Rigby appraising him, wondering how much to say.

“How long are you staying?” he said at last.

“I don’t know,” Smiley replied. “Miss Brimley wanted to come herself, but she has her paper to run. She attached great importance, you see, to doing all she could for Mrs Rode, even though she was dead. Because she was a subscriber, I mean. I promised to see that the letter arrived quickly in the right hands. I don’t imagine there’s much else I can do. I shall probably stay on for a day or two just to have a word with Fielding … go to the funeral, I suppose. I’ve booked in at the Sawley Arms.”

“Fine hotel, that.”

Rigby put his spectacles carefully back into their case and dropped the case into a drawer.

“Funny place, Carne. There’s a big gap between the Town and Gown, as we say; neither side knows nor likes the other. It’s fear that does it, fear and ignorance. It makes it hard in a case like this. Oh, I can call on Mr Fielding and Mr D’Arcy and they say, ‘Good day, Sergeant,’ and give me a cup of tea in the kitchen, but I can’t get among them. They’ve got their own community, see, and no one outside it can get in. No gossip in the pubs, no contacts, nothing … just cups of tea and bits of seed cake, and being called Sergeant.” Rigby laughed suddenly, and Smiley laughed with him in relief. “There’s a lot I’d like to ask them, a lot of things; who liked the Rodes and who didn’t, whether Mr Rode’s a good teacher and whether his wife fitted in with the others. I’ve got all the facts I want, but I’ve got no clothes to hang on them.” He looked at Smiley expectantly. There was a very long silence.

“If you want me to help, I’d be delighted,” said Smiley at last. “But give me the facts first.”

“Stella Rode was murdered between about ten past eleven and quarter to twelve on the night of Wednesday the sixteenth. She must have been struck fifteen to twenty times with a cosh or bit of piping or something. It was a terrible murder … terrible. There are marks all over her body. At a guess I would say she came from the drawing-room to the front door to answer the bell or something, when she opened the door she was struck down and dragged to the conservatory. The conservatory door was unlocked, see?”

“I see … It’s odd that he should have known that, isn’t it?”

“The murderer may have been hiding there already: we can’t tell from the prints just there. He was wearing boots—Wellington boots, size 10½. We would guess from the spacing of the footprints in the garden that he was about six foot tall. When he had got her to the conservatory he must have hit her again and again—mainly on the head. There’s a lot of what we call travelled blood in the conservatory, that’s to say, blood spurted from an open artery. There’s no sign of that anywhere else.”

“And no sign of it on her husband?”

“I’ll come to that later, but the short answer is, no.” He paused a moment and continued:

“Now, I said there were footprints, and so there were. The murderer came through the back garden. Where he came from and went to, Heaven alone knows. You see, there are no tracks leading away— not Wellingtons. None at all. Of course, it’s possible the outgoing tracks followed the path to the front gate and got lost in all the to-ing and fro-ing later that night. But I don’t think we’d have lost them even then.” He glanced at Smiley, then went on:

“He left one thing behind him in the conservatory—an old cloth belt, navy blue, from a cheap overcoat by the look of it. We’re working on that now.”

“Was she … robbed or anything?”

“No sign of interference. She was wearing a string of green beads round her neck, and they’ve gone, and it looks as though he tried to get the rings off her finger, but they were too tight.” He paused.

“I need hardly tell you that we’ve had reports from every corner of the country about tall men in blue overcoats and gumboots. But none of them had wings as far as I know. Or seven-league boots for jumping from the conservatory to the road.”

They paused, while a police cadet brought in tea on a tray. He put it on the desk, looked at Smiley out of the corner of his eye and decided to let the Inspector pour out. He guided the teapot round so that the handle was towards Rigby and withdrew. Smiley was amused by the immaculate condition of the tray cloth, by the matching china and tea-strainer, laid before them by the enormous hands of the cadet. Rigby poured out the tea and they drank for a moment in silence. There was, Smiley reflected, something devastatingly competent about Rigby. The very ordinariness of the man and his room identified him with the society he protected. The nondescript furniture, the wooden filing cupboards, the bare walls, the archaic telephone with its separate earpiece, the brown frieze round the wall and the brown paint on the door, the glistening linoleum and the faint smell of carbolic, the burbling gas-fire, and the calendar from the Prudential—these were the evidence of rectitude and moderation; their austerity gave comfort and reassurance. Rigby continued:

“Rode went back to Fielding’s house for the examination papers. Fielding confirms that, of course. He arrived at Fielding’s house at about 11.35, near as Fielding can say. He hardly spent any time there at all—just collected his papers at the door—they were in a small writing-case he uses for carrying exercise books. He doesn’t remember whether he saw anyone on the road. He thinks a bicycle overtook him, but he can’t be sure. If we take Rode’s word for it, he walked straight home. When he got there he rang the bell. He was wearing a dinner-jacket and so he hadn’t got his key with him. His wife was expecting him to ring the bell, you see. That’s the devil of it. It was a moonlit night, mind, and snow on the ground, so you could see a mighty long way. He called her, but she didn’t answer. Then he saw footprints going round to the side of the house. Not just footprints, but blood marks and the snow all churned up where the body had been dragged to the conservatory. But he didn’t know it was blood in the moonlight, it just showed up dark, and Rode said afterwards he thought it was the dirty water from the gutters running over on to the path.

“He followed the prints round until he came to the conservatory. It was darker in there and he fumbled for the light switch, but it didn’t work.”

“Did he light a match?”

“No, he didn’t have any. He’s a non-smoker. His wife didn’t approve of smoking. He moved forward from the door. The conservatory walls are mainly glass except for the bottom three feet, but the roof is tiled. The moon was high that night, and not much light got in at all, except through the partition window between the drawing-room and the conservatory—but she’d only had the little table light on in the drawing-room. So he groped his way forward, talking all the time, calling Stella, his wife. As he went, he tripped over something and nearly fell. He knelt down and felt with his hands, up and down her body. He realised that his hands were covered in blood. He doesn’t remember much after that, but there’s a senior master living a hundred yards up the road— Mr D’Arcy his name is, lives with his sister, and he heard him screaming on the road. D’Arcy went out to him. Rode had blood all over his hands and face and seemed to be out of his mind. D’Arcy rang the police and I got there at about one o’clock that morning. I’ve seen some nasty things in my time, but this is the worst. Blood everywhere. Whoever killed her must have been covered in it. There’s an outside tap against the conservatory wall. The tap had been turned on, probably by the murderer to rinse his hands. The boffins have found traces of blood in the snow underneath it. The tap was lagged recently by Rode I gather …”

“And fingerprints?” Smiley asked. “What about them?”

“Mr Rode’s were everywhere. On the floor, the walls and windows, on the body itself. But there were other prints; smudges of blood, little more, made with a gloved hand probably.”

“And they were the murderer’s?”

“They had been made before Rode made his. In some cases Rode’s prints were partly superimposed on the glove prints.”

Smiley was silent for a moment.

“These examination papers he went back for. Were they as important as all that?”

“Yes. I gather they were. Up to a point anyway. The marks had to be handed in to Mr D’Arcy by midday on Friday.”

“But why did he take them to Fielding’s in the first place?”

“He didn’t. He’d been invigilating exams all afternoon and the papers were handed in to him at six o’clock. He put them in his little case and had them taken to Fielding’s by a boy— head boy in Mr Fielding’s house, name of Perkins. Rode was on Chapel duty last week, so he didn’t have time to return home before dinner.”

“Where did he change then?”

“In the Tutors’ Robing Room, next to the Common Room. There are facilities there, mainly for games tutors who live some distance from Carne.”

“The boy who brought this case to Fielding’s house—who was he?”

“I can’t tell you much more than I’ve said. His name is Perkins; he’s head of Mr Fielding’s house. Fielding has spoken to him and confirmed Rode’s statement … House tutors are very possessive about their boys, you know … don’t like them to be spoken to by rough policemen.” Rigby seemed to be slightly upset.

“I see,” Smiley said at last, helplessly, and then: “But how do you explain the letter?”

“It isn’t only the letter we’ve got to explain.”

Smiley looked at him sharply.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean,” said Rigby slowly, “that Mrs Rode did several pretty queer things in the last few weeks.’

4

TOWN AND GOWN

“Mrs Rode was Chapel, of course,” Rigby continued, “and we’ve quite a community in Carne. Truth to tell,” he added with a slow smile, “my wife belongs to it.

“A couple of weeks ago our Minister called round to see me. It was in the evening, about half past six, I suppose. I was just thinking of going home, see. He walked in here and sat himself down where you’re sitting now. He’s a big fellow, the Minister, a fine man; comes from up North, where Mrs Rode came from. Cardew, his name is.”

“The Mr Cardew in the letter?”

“That’s him. He knew all about Mrs Rode’s family before the Rodes ever came here. Glaston’s quite a name up North, and Mr Cardew was very pleased when he heard that Stella Rode was Mr Glaston’s daughter; very pleased indeed. Mrs Rode came to the Tabernacle regular as clockwork, you can imagine, and they like to see that round here. My wife was pleased as Punch, I can tell you. It was the first time, I suppose, that anyone from the School had done that. Most of the Chapel people here are tradespeople—what we call the locals.” Rigby smiled again. “It isn’t often that Town and Gown come together, so to speak. Not here.”

“How about her husband? Was he Chapel too?”

“Well, he had been, so she told Mr Cardew. Mr Rode was born and bred in Branxome, and all his family were Chapel people. That’s how Mr and Mrs Rode first met, I gather—at Branxome Tabernacle. Ever been there, have you? A fine church, Branxome, right up on the hill there, overlooking the sea.”

Smiley shook his head and Rigby’s wide brown eyes rested on him thoughtfully for a moment.

“You should,” he said, “you should go and see that. It seems,” he continued, “that Mr Rode turned Church of England when he came to Carne. Even tried to persuade his wife to do the same. They’re very strong at the School. I heard that from my wife, as a matter of fact. I never let her gossip as a rule, being a policeman’s wife and that, but Mr Cardew told her that himself.”

“I see,” said Smiley.

“Well now, Cardew came and saw me. He was all worried and bothered with himself. He didn’t know what he should make of it, but he wanted to talk to me as a friend and not as a policeman.” Rigby looked sour, “When people say that to me, I always know that they want to talk to me as a policeman. Then he told me his story. Mrs Rode had called to see him that afternoon. He’d been out visiting a farmer’s wife over in Okeford and didn’t come home until half past five or thereabouts, so Mrs Cardew had had to talk to her and hold the fort until the Minister came home. Mrs Rode was white as a sheet, sitting very still by the fire. As soon as the Minister arrived, Mrs Cardew left them alone and Stella Rode started talking about her husband.”

He paused. “She said Mr Rode was going to kill her. In the long nights. She seemed to have a kind of fixation about being murdered in the long nights. Cardew didn’t take it too seriously at first, but thinking about it afterwards, he decided to let me know.”

Smiley looked at him sharply.

“He couldn’t make out what she meant. He thought she was out of her mind. He’s a down-to-earth man, see, although he’s a Minister. I think he was probably a bit too firm with her. He asked her what put this dreadful thought into her head, and she began to weep. Not hysterical, apparently, but just crying quietly to herself. He tried to calm her down, promised to help her any way he could, and asked her again what had given her this idea. She just shook her head, then got up, walked over to the door, still shaking her head in despair. She turned to him, and he thought she was going to say something, but she didn’t. She just left.”

“How very curious,” said Smiley, “that she lied about that in her letter. She went out of her way to say she hadn’t told Cardew.”

Rigby shrugged his great shoulders.

“If you’ll pardon me,” he said, “I’m in a darned awkward position. The Chief Constable would sooner cut his throat than call in Scotland Yard. He wants an arrest and he wants one quick. We’ve got enough clues to cover a Christmas tree; footprints, time of the murder, indication of murderer’s clothing, and even the weapon itself.”

Smiley looked at him in surprise.

“You’ve found the weapon, then?”

Rigby hesitated. “Yes, we’ve found it. There’s hardly a soul knows this, sir, and I’ll trouble you to remember that. We found it the morning after the murder, four miles north of Carne on the Okeford road, tossed into a ditch. Eighteen inches of what they call coaxial cable. Know what that is, do you? It comes in all sizes, but this piece is about two inches in diameter. It has a copper rod running down the middle and plastic insulation between the rod and the outer cover. There was blood on it: Stella Rode’s blood group, and hairs from her head, stuck to the blood. We’re keeping that very dark indeed. By the Grace of God, it was found by one of our own men. It pinpoints the line of the murderer’s departure.”

“There’s no doubt, I suppose, that it is the weapon?” Smiley asked lamely.

“We found particles of copper in the wounds on the body.”

“It’s odd, isn’t it,” Smiley suggested reflectively, “that the murderer should have carried the weapon so far before getting rid of it? Specially if he was walking. You’d think he’d want to get rid of it as soon as he could.”

“It is odd. Very odd. The Okeford road runs beside the canal for half of those four miles; he could have pitched the cable into the canal anywhere along there. We’d never have been the wiser.”

“Was the cable old?”

“Not particularly. Just standard type. It could have come from almost anywhere.” Rigby hesitated a minute, then burst out:

“Look, sir, this is what I am trying to say. The circumstances of this case demand a certain type of investigation: wide-scale search, detailed laboratory work, mass inquiry. That’s what the Chief wants, and he’s right. We’ve no case against the husband at all, and to be frank he’s precious little use to us. He seems a bit lost, a bit vague, contradicting himself on little things that don’t matter, like the date of his marriage or the name of his doctor. It’s shock, of course, I’ve seen it before. I know all about your letter, sir, and it’s damned odd, but if you can tell me how he could have produced Wellington boots out of a hat and got rid of them afterwards, battered his wife to death without leaving more than a few smudges of blood on himself, and got the weapon four miles from the scene of the crime, all within ten minutes of being at Fielding’s house, I’ll be grateful to you. We’re looking for a stranger, six foot tall, wearing newish Dunlop Wellington boots size 10½, leather gloves and an old blue overcoat stained with blood. A man who travels on foot, who was in the area of North Fields between 11.10 and 11.45 on the night of the murder, who left in the direction of Okeford, taking with him one and a half feet of coaxial cable, a string of green beads and an imitation diamond clip, valued at twenty-three and six. We’re looking for a maniac, a man who kills for pleasure or the price of a meal.” Rigby paused, smiled wistfully and added, “Who can fly fifty feet through the air? But with information like this how else should we spend our time? What else can we look for? I can’t put men on to chasing shadows when there’s work like that to be done.”

“I understand that.”

“But I’m an old policeman, Mr Smiley, and I like to know what I’m about. I don’t like looking for people I can’t believe in, and I don’t like being cut off from witnesses. I like to meet people and talk to them, nose about here and there, get to know the country. But I can’t do that, not at the school. Do you follow me? So we’ve got to rely on laboratories, tracker dogs, and nation-wide searches, but somehow in my bones I don’t think it’s altogether one of those cases.”

“I read in the paper about a woman, a Mad Janie …”

“I’m coming to that. Mrs Rode was a kindly woman, easy to talk to. I always found her so, anyway. Some of the women at Chapel took against her, but you know what women are. It seems she got friendly with this Janie creature. Janie came begging, selling herbs and charms at the back door; you know the kind of thing. She’s queer, talks to birds and all that. She lives in a disused Norman chapel over Pylle. Stella Rode used to give her food and clothes— the poor soul was often as not half-starved. Now Janie’s disappeared. She was seen early Wednesday night on the lane towards North Fields and hasn’t been seen since. That don’t mean a thing. These people come and go in their own way. They’ll be all over the neighbourhood for years, then one day they’re gone like snow in the fire. They’ve died in a ditch, maybe, or they’ve took ill and crept away like a cat. Janie’s not the only queer one round here. There’s a lot of excitement because we found a spare set of footprints running along the fringe of trees at the far end of the garden. They were a woman’s prints by the look of them, and at one point they come quite close to the conservatory. Could be a gypsy or a beggar woman. Could be anything, but I expect it’s Janie right enough. I hope to Heaven it was, sir; we could do with an eyewitness, even a mad one.”

Smiley stood up. As they shook hands, Rigby said, “Good-bye, sir. Ring me any time, any time at all.” He scribbled a telephone number on the pad in front of him, tore off the sheet and gave it to Smiley. “That’s my home number.” He showed Smiley to the door, seemed to hesitate, then he said, “You’re not a Carnian yourself by any chance, are you, sir?”

“Good heavens, no.”

Again Rigby hesitated. “Our Chief’s a Carnian. Ex-Indian Army. Brigadier Havelock. This is his last year. He’s very interested in this case. Doesn’t like me messing around the school. Won’t have it.”

“I see.”

“He wants an arrest quickly.”

“And outside Carne, I suppose?”

“Good-bye, Mr Smiley. Don’t forget to ring me. Oh, another thing I should have mentioned. That bit of cable …”

“Yes?”

“Mr Rode used a length of the same stuff in a demonstration lecture on elementary electronics. Mislaid it about three weeks ago.”

Smiley walked slowly back to his hotel.

My dear Brim,

As soon as I arrived I handed your letter over to the CID man in charge of the case—it was Rigby, as Ben had supposed: he looks like a mixture of Humpty-Dumpty and a Cornish elf—very short and broad—and I don’t think he’s anyone’s fool.

To begin at the middle—our letter didn’t have quite the effect we expected; Stella Rode evidently told Cardew, the local Baptist Minister, two weeks ago, that her husband was trying to kill her in the long nights, whatever they are. As for the circumstances of the murder—the account in the Guardian is substantially correct.

In fact, the more Rigby told me, the less likely it became that she was killed by her husband. Almost everything pointed away from him. Quite apart from motive, there is the location of the weapon, the footprints in the snow (which indicate a tall man in Wellingtons), the presence of unidentified glove-prints in the conservatory. Add to that the strongest argument of all: whoever killed her must have been covered in blood—the conservatory was a dreadful sight, Rigby tells me. Of course, there was blood on Rode when he was picked up by his colleague in the lane, but only smears which could have resulted from stumbling over the body in the dark. Incidentally, the footprints only go into the garden and not out.

As things stand at the moment, there is, as Rigby points out, only one interpretation—the murderer was a stranger, a tramp, a madman perhaps, who killed her for pleasure or for her jewellery (which was worthless) and made off along the Okeford road, throwing the weapon into a ditch. (But why carry it four miles—and why not throw it into the canal the other side of the ditch? The Okeford road crosses Okemoor, which is all cross-dyked to prevent flooding.) If this interpretation is correct, then I suppose we attribute Stella’s letter and her interview with Cardew to a persecuted mind, or the premonition of death, depending on whether we’re superstitious. If that is so, it is the most monstrous co-incidence I have ever heard of. Which brings me to my final point.

I rather gathered from what Rigby didn’t say that his Chief Constable was treading on his tail, urging him to scour the country for tramps in bloodstained blue overcoats (you remember the belt). Rigby, of course, has no alternative but to follow the signs and do as his Chief expects—but he is clearly uneasy about something—either something he hasn’t told me, or something he just feels in his bones. I think he was sincere when he asked me to tell him anything I found out about the School end—the Rodes themselves, the way they fitted in, and so on. Carne’s monastery walls are still pretty high, he feels …

So I’ll just sniff around a bit, I think, and see what goes on. I rang Fielding when I got back from the police station and he’s asked me to supper tonight. I’ll write again as soon as I have anything to tell you.

George.

Having carefully sealed the envelope, pressing down the corners with his thumbs, Smiley locked his door and made his way down the wide marble staircase, treading carefully on the meagre coconut matting that ran down the centre. There was a red wooden letter box in the hall for the use of residents, but Smiley, being a cautious man, avoided it. He walked to the pillar box at the corner of the road, posted his letter and wondered what to do about lunch. There were, of course, the sandwiches and coffee provided by Miss Brimley. Reluctantly he returned to the hotel. It was full of journalists, and Smiley hated journalists. It was also cold, and he hated the cold. And there was something very familiar about sandwiches in a hotel bedroom.

5

CAT AND DOG

It was just after seven o’clock that evening when George Smiley climbed the steps which led up to the front door of Mr Terence Fielding’s house. He rang, and was admitted to the hall by a little plump woman in her middle fifties. To his right a log fire burned warmly on a pile of wood ash and above him he was vaguely aware of a minstrel gallery and a mahogany staircase, which rose in a spiral to the top of the house. Most of the light seemed to come from the fire, and Smiley could see that the walls around him were hung with a great number of paintings of various styles and periods, and the chimney-piece was laden with all manner of objets d’art. With an involuntary shudder, he noticed that neither the fire nor the pictures quite succeeded in banishing the faint smell of school—of polish bought wholesale, of cocoa and community cooking. Corridors led from the hall, and Smiley observed that the lower part of each wall was painted a dark brown or green according to the inflexible rule of school decorators. From one of these corridors the enormous figure of Mr Terence Fielding emerged.

He advanced on Smiley, massive and genial, with his splendid mane of grey hair falling anyhow across his forehead, and his gown billowing behind him.

“Smiley? Ah! You’ve met True, have you—Miss Truebody, my housekeeper? Marvellous this snow, isn’t it? Pure Bruegel! Seen the boys skating by the Eyot? Marvellous sight! Black suits, coloured scarves, pale sun; all there, isn’t it, all there! Bruegel to the life. Marvellous!” He took Smiley’s coat and flung it on to a decrepit deal chair with a rush seat which stood in the corner of the hall.

“You like that chair—you recognise it?”

“I don’t think I do,” Smiley replied in some confusion.

“Ah, you should, you know, you should! Had it made in Provence before the war. Little carpenter I knew. Place it now? Facsimile of Van Gogh’s yellow chair; some people recognise it.” He led the way down a corridor and into a large comfortable study adorned with Dutch tiles, small pieces of Renaissance sculpture, mysterious bronzes, china dogs and unglazed vases; and Fielding himself towering magnificent among them.

As senior housemaster of Carne, Fielding wore, in place of the customary academic dress, a wonderful confection of heavy black skirts and legal bib, like a monk in evening dress. All this imparted a suggestion of clerical austerity in noted contrast to the studied flamboyance of his personality. Evidently conscious of this, he sought to punctuate the solemnity of his uniform and give to it a little of his own temperament, by adorning it with flowers carefully chosen from his garden. He had scandalised the tailors of Carne, whose frosted windows carried the insignia of royal households, by having buttonholes let into his gown. These he would fill according to his mood with anything from hibernia to bluebells. This evening he wore a rose, and from its freshness Smiley deduced that he had this minute put it into place, having ordered it specially.

“Sherry wine or Madeira?”

“Thank you; a glass of sherry.”

“Tart’s drink, Madeira,” Fielding called, as he poured from a decanter, “but boys like it. Perhaps that’s why. They’re frightful flirts.” He handed Smiley a glass and added, with a dramatic modification of his voice:

“We’re all rather subdued at the moment by this dreadful business. We’ve never had anything quite like it, you know. Have you seen the evening papers?”

“No, I’m afraid I haven’t. But the Sawley Arms is packed with journalists of course.”

“They’ve really gone to town. They’ve got the Army out in Hampshire, playing about with mine-detectors. God knows what they expect to find.”

“How have the boys taken it?”

“They adore it! My own house has been particularly fortunate, of course, because the Rodes were dining here that night. Some oaf from the police even wanted to question one of my boys.”

“Indeed,” said Smiley innocently. “What on earth about?”

“Oh, God knows,” Fielding replied abruptly, and then, changing the subject, he asked, “You knew my brother well, didn’t you? He talked about you, you know.”

“Yes, I knew Adrian very well. We were close friends.”

“In the war, too?”

“Yes.”

“Were you in his crowd, then?”

“What crowd?”

“Steed-Asprey, Jebedee. All those people.”

“Yes.”

“I never really heard how he died. Did you?”

“No.”

“We didn’t see much of one another in later years, Adrian and I. Being a fraud, I can’t afford to be seen beside the genuine article,” Fielding declared, with something of his earlier panache. Smiley was spared the embarrassment of a reply by a quiet knock at the door, and a tall red-haired boy came timidly into the room.

“I’ve called the Adsum, sir, if you’re ready, sir.”

“Damn,” said Fielding, emptying his glass. “Prayers.” He turned to Smiley.

“Meet Perkins, my head prefect. Musical genius, but a problem in the schoolroom. That right, Tim? Stay here or come as you like. It only lasts ten minutes.”

“Rather less tonight, sir,” said Perkins. “It’s the Nunc Dimittis.”

“Thank God for small mercies,” Fielding declared, tugging briefly at his bib, as he led Smiley at a spanking pace out into the corridor and across the hall, with Perkins stalking along behind them. Fielding was speaking all the time without bothering to turn his head:

“I’m glad you’ve chosen this evening to come. I never entertain on Fridays as a rule because everyone else does, though none of us quite knows what to do about entertaining at the moment. Felix D’Arcy will be coming tonight, but that’s hardly entertaining. D’Arcy’s a professional. Incidentally, we normally dress in the evening, but it doesn’t matter.”

Smiley’s heart sank. They turned a corner and entered another corridor.

“We have prayers at all hours here. The Master’s revived the seven Day Hours for the Offices: Prime, Terce, Sext and so on. A surfeit during the Half, abstinence during the holidays, that’s the system, like games. Useful in the house for roll-calls, too.” He led the way down yet another corridor, flung open a double door at the end of it and marched straight into the dining-room, his gown filling gracefully behind him. The boys were waiting for him.

“More sherry? What did you think of prayers? They sing quite nicely, don’t they? One or two good tenors. We tried some plainsong last Half; quite good, really quite good. D’Arcy will be here soon. He’s a frightful toad. Looks like a Sickert model fifty years after—all trousers and collar. However, you’re lucky his sister isn’t accompanying him. She’s worse!”

“What’s his subject?” They were back in Fielding’s study.

“Subject! I’m afraid we don’t have subjects here. None of us has read a word on any subject since we left University.” He lowered his voice and added darkly, “That’s if we went to University. D’Arcy teaches French. D’Arcy is Senior Tutor by election, bachelor by profession, sublimated pansy by inclination …” he was standing quite still now, his head thrown back and his right hand stretched out towards Smiley, “ … and his subject is other people’s shortcomings. He is principally, however, self-appointed majordomo of Carne protocol. If you wear a gown on a bicycle, reply incorrectly to an invitation, make a fault in the placement of your dinner guests or speak of a colleague as ‘Mister,’ D’Arcy will find you out and admonish you.”

“What are the duties of Senior Tutor, then?” Smiley asked, just for something to say.

“He’s the referee between the classics and the scientists; arranges the timetable and vets the exam. results. But principally, poor man, he must reconcile the Arts with the Sciences.” He shook his head sagely. “And it takes a better man than D’Arcy to do that. Not, mind you,” he added wearily, “that it makes the least difference who wins the extra hour on Friday evenings. Who cares? Not the boys, poor dears, that’s certain.”

Fielding talked on, at random and always in superlatives, sometimes groping in the air with his hand as if to catch the more elusive metaphors; now of his colleagues with caustic derision, now of boys with compassion if not with understanding; now of the Arts with fervour—and the studied bewilderment of a lonely disciple.

“Carne isn’t a school. It’s a sanatorium for intellectual lepers. The symptoms began when we came down from University; a gradual putrefaction of our intellectual extremities. From day to day our minds die, our spirits atrophy and rot. We watch the process in one another, hoping to forget it in ourselves.” He paused, and looked reflectively at his hands.

“In me the process is complete. You see before you a dead soul, and Carne is the body I live in.” Much pleased by this confession, Fielding held out his great arms so that the sleeves of his gown resembled the wings of a giant bat; “the Vampire of Carne,” he declared, bowing deeply. “Alcoholique et poète!” A bellow of laughter followed this display.

Smiley was fascinated by Fielding, by his size, his voice, the wanton inconstancy of his temperament, by his whole big-screen style; he found himself attracted and repelled by this succession of contradictory poses; he wondered whether he was supposed to take part in the performance, but Fielding seemed so dazzled by the footlights that he was indifferent to the audience behind them. The more Smiley watched, the more elusive seemed the character he was trying to comprehend: changeful but sterile, daring but fugitive; colourful, unbounded, ingenuous, yet deceitful and perverse. Smiley began to wish he could acquire the material facts of Fielding—his means, his ambitions and disappointments.

His reverie was interrupted by Miss Truebody. Felix D’Arcy had arrived.

No candles, and a cold supper admirably done by Miss Truebody. Not claret, but hock, passed round like port. And at last, at long last, Fielding mentioned Stella Rode.

They had been talking rather dutifully of the Arts and the Sciences. This would have been dull (for it was uninformed) had not D’Arcy constantly been goaded by Fielding, who seemed anxious to exhibit D’Arcy in his worst light. D’Arcy’s judgements of people and problems were largely coloured by what he considered “seemly” (a favourite word) and by an effeminate malice towards his colleagues. After a while Fielding asked who was replacing Rode during his absence, to which D’Arcy said, “No one,” and added unctuously:

“It was a terrible shock to the community, this affair.”

“Nonsense,” Fielding retorted. “Boys love disaster. The further we are from death the more attractive it seems. They find the whole affair most exhilarating.”

“The publicity has been most unseemly,” said D’Arcy, “most. I think that has been prominent in the minds of many of us in the Common Room.” He turned to Smiley:

“The press, you know, is a constant worry here. In the past it could never have happened. Formerly our great families and institutions were not subjected to this intrusion. No, indeed not. But today all that is changed. Many of us are compelled to subscribe to the cheaper newspapers for this very reason. One Sunday newspaper mentioned no fewer than four of Hecht’s old boys in one edition. All of them in an unseemly context, I may say. And of course such papers never fail to mention that the boy is a Carnian. You know, I suppose, that we have the young Prince here. (I myself have the honour to supervise his French studies.) The young Sawley is also at Carne. The activity of the press during his parents’ divorce suit was deplorable. Quite deplorable. The Master wrote to the Press Council, you know. I drafted the letter myself. But on this tragic occasion they have excelled themselves. We even had the press at Compline last night, you know, waiting for the Special Prayer. They occupied the whole of the two rear pews on the west side. Hecht was doing Chapel Duty and tried to have them removed.” He paused, raised his eyebrows in gentle reproach and smiled. “He had no business to, of course, but that never stopped the good Hecht.” He turned to Smiley, “One of our athletic brethren,” he explained.

“Stella was too common for you, Felix, wasn’t she?”

“Not at all,” said D’Arcy quickly. “I would not have you say that of me, Terence. I am by no means discriminatory in the matter of class; merely of manners. I grant you, in that particular field, I found her wanting.”

“In many ways she was just what we needed,” Fielding continued, addressing Smiley and ignoring D’Arcy. “She was everything we’re forced to ignore—she was red-brick, council estates, new towns, the very antithesis of Carne!” He turned suddenly to D’Arcy and said, “But to you, Felix, she was just bad form.”

“Not at all; merely unsuitable.”

Fielding turned to Smiley in despair.

“Look,” he said. “We talk academic here, you know, wear academic dress and hold high table dinners in the Common Room; we have long graces in Latin that none of us can translate. We go to the Abbey and the wives sit in the hencoop in their awful hats. But it’s a charade. It means nothing.”

D’Arcy smiled wanly.

“I cannot believe, my dear Terence, that anyone who keeps such an excellent table as yourself can have so low an opinion of the refinements of social conduct.” He looked to Smiley for support and Smiley dutifully echoed the compliment. “Besides, we know Terence of old at Carne. I am afraid we are accustomed to his roar.”

“I know why you disliked that woman, Felix. She was honest, and Carne has no defence against that kind of honesty.”

D’Arcy suddenly became very angry indeed.

“Terence, I will not have you say this. I simply will not have it. I feel I have a certain duty at Carne, as indeed we all have, to restore and maintain those standards of behaviour which suffered so sadly in the war. I am sensible that this determination has made me on more than one occasion unpopular. But such comment or advice as I offer is never—I beg you to notice this—is never directed against personalities, only against behaviour, against unseemly lapses in conduct. I will acknowledge that more than once I was compelled to address Rode on the subject of his wife’s conduct. That is a matter quite divorced from personalities, Terence. I will not have it said that I disliked Mrs Rode. Such a suggestion would be disagreeable at all times, but under the present tragic circumstances it is deplorable. Mrs Rode’s own … background and education did not naturally prepare her for our ways; that is quite a different matter. It does, however, illustrate the point that I wish to emphasise, Terence: it was a question of enlightenment, not of criticism. Do I make myself clear?”

“Abundantly,” Fielding answered dryly.

“Did the other wives like her?” Smiley ventured.

“Not entirely,” D’Arcy replied crisply.

“The wives! My God!” Fielding groaned, putting his hand to his brow. There was a pause.

“Her clothes, I believe, were a source of distress to some of them. She also frequented the public laundry. This, too, would not make a favourable impression. I should add that she did not attend our church …”

“Did she have any close friends among the wives?” Smiley persisted.

“I believe young Mrs Snow took to her.”

“And you say she was dining here the night she was murdered?”

“Yes,” said Fielding quietly, “Wednesday. And it was Felix and his sister who took in poor Rode afterwards …” He glanced at D’Arcy.

“Yes, indeed,” said D’Arcy abruptly. His eyes were on Fielding, and it seemed to Smiley that something had passed between them. “We shall never forget, never … Terence, if I may talk shop for just one moment, Perkins’s construe is abysmal; I declare I have never seen work like it. Is he unwell? His mother is a most cultured woman, a cousin of the Samfords, I am told.”

Smiley looked at him and wondered. His dinner-jacket was faded, green with age. Smiley could almost hear him saying it had belonged to his grandfather. The skin of his face was so unlined that he somehow suggested fatness without being fat. His voice was pitched on one insinuating note, and he smiled all the time, whether he was speaking or not. The smile never left his smooth face, it was worked into the malleable fabric of his flesh, stretching his lips across his perfect teeth and opening the corners of his red mouth, so that it seemed to be held in place by the invisible fingers of his dentist. Yet D’Arcy’s face was far from unexpressive; every mark showed. The smallest movement of his mouth or nose, the quickest glance or frown, were there to read and interpret. And he wanted to change the subject. Not away from Stella Rode (for he returned to discussing her himself a moment later), but away from the particular evening on which she died, away from the precise narration of events. And what was more, there was not a doubt in Smiley’s mind that Fielding had seen it too, that in that look which passed between them was a pact of fear, a warning perhaps, so that from that moment Fielding’s manner changed, he grew sullen and preoccupied, in a way that puzzled Smiley long afterwards.

D’Arcy turned to Smiley and addressed him with cloying intimacy.

“Do forgive my deplorable descent into Carne gossip. You find us a little cut off, here, do you not? We are often held to be cut off, I know. Carne is a ‘Snob School,’ that is the cry. You may read it every day in the gutter press. And yet, despite the claims of the avant-garde,” he said, glancing slyly at Fielding, “I may say that no one could be less of a snob than Felix D’Arcy.” Smiley noticed his hair. It was very fine and ginger, growing from the top and leaving his pink neck bare.

“Take poor Rode, for instance. I certainly don’t hold Rode’s background against him in any way, poor fellow. The grammar schools do a splendid job, I am sure. Besides, he settled down here very well. I told the Master so. I said to him that Rode had settled down well; he does Chapel duty quite admirably—that was the very point I made. I hope I have played my part, what is more, in helping him to fit in. With careful instruction, such people can, as I said to the Master, learn our customs and even our manners; and the Master agreed.”

Smiley’s glass was empty and D’Arcy, without consulting Fielding, filled it for him from the decanter. His hands were polished and hairless, like the hands of a girl.

“But,” he continued, “I must be honest. Mrs Rode did not adapt herself so willingly to our ways.” Still smiling, he sipped delicately from his glass. He wants to put the record straight, thought Smiley.

“She would never really have fitted in at Carne; that is my opinion—though I am sure I never voiced it while she was alive. Her background was against her. The fault was not hers—it was her background which, as I say, was unfortunate. Indeed, if we may speak frankly and in confidence, I have reason to believe it was her past that brought about her death.”

“Why do you say that?” asked Smiley quickly, and D’Arcy replied with a glance at Fielding, “It appears she was expecting to be attacked.”

“My sister is devoted to dogs,” D’Arcy continued. “You may know that already perhaps. King Charles spaniels are her forte. She took a first at the North Dorset last year and was commended at Cruft’s shortly afterwards for her ‘Queen of Carne.’ She sells to America, you know. I dare say there are few people in the country with Dorothy’s knowledge of the breed. The Master’s wife found occasion to say the very same thing a week ago. Well, the Rodes were our neighbours, as you know, and Dorothy is not a person to neglect her neighbourly duties. Where duty is concerned, you will not find her discriminatory, I assure you. The Rodes also had a dog, a large mongrel, quite an intelligent animal, which they brought with them. (I have little idea where they came from, but that is another matter.) They appeared quite devoted to the dog, and I have no doubt they were. Rode took it with him to watch the football until I had occasion to advise him against it. The practice was giving rise to unseemly humour among the boys. I have found the same thing myself when exercising Dorothy’s spaniels.

“I shall come to the point presently. Dorothy uses a vet called Harriman, a superior type of person who lives over toward Sturminster. A fortnight ago she sent for him. ‘Queen of Carne’ was coughing badly and Dorothy asked Harriman to come over. A bitch of her quality is not to be taken lightly, I assure you.”

Fielding groaned, and D’Arcy continued, oblivious:

“I happened to be at home, and Harriman stayed for a cup of coffee. He is, as I say, a superior type of person. Harriman made some reference to the Rodes’ dog and then the truth came out; Mrs Rode had had the dog destroyed the previous day. She said it had bitten the postman. Some long and confused story; the Post Office would sue, the police had been round, and I don’t know what else. And, anyway, she said, the dog couldn’t really protect, it could only warn. She had said so to Harriman, ‘It wouldn’t do any good.’”

“Wasn’t she upset about losing the dog?” asked Smiley.

“Oh, indeed, yes. Harriman said she was in tears when she arrived. Mrs Harriman had to give her a cup of tea. They suggested she should give the dog another chance, put it in kennels for a while, but she was adamant, quite adamant. Harriman was most perplexed. So was his wife. When they discussed it afterwards they agreed that Mrs Rode’s behaviour had not been quite normal. Not normal at all, in fact. Another curious fact was the condition of the dog: it had been maltreated, seriously so. Its back was marked as if from beatings.”

“Did Harriman follow up this remark she made? About not doing any good? What did Harriman make of it?” Smiley was watching D’Arcy intently.

“She repeated it to Mrs Harriman, but she wouldn’t explain it. However, I think the explanation is obvious enough.”

“Oh?” said Fielding.

D’Arcy put his head on one side and plucked coyly at the lobe of his ear.

“We all have a little of the detective in us,” he said. “Dorothy and I talked it over after the—death. We decided that Stella Rode had formed some unsavoury association before coming to Carne, which had recently been revived … possibly against her will. Some violent ruffian—an old admirer—who would resent the improvement in her station.”

“How badly was the postman bitten by the dog?” Smiley asked.

D’Arcy turned to him again.

“That is the extraordinary thing. That is the very crux of the story, my dear fellow: the postman hadn’t been bitten at all. Dorothy inquired. Her whole story was an absolute string of lies from beginning to end.”

They rose from the table and made their way to Fielding’s study, where Miss Truebody had put the coffee. The conversation continued to wander back and forth over Wednesday’s tragedy. D’Arcy was obsessed with the indelicacy of it all—the persistence of journalists, the insensitivity of the police, the uncertainty of Mrs Rode’s origin, the misfortune of her husband. Fielding was still oddly silent, sunk in his own thoughts, from which he occasionally emerged to glance at D’Arcy with a look of hostility. At exactly a quarter to eleven D’Arcy pronounced himself tired, and the three of them went into the great hall, where Miss Truebody produced a coat for Smiley and a coat and muffler and cap for D’Arcy. Fielding accepted D’Arcy’s thanks with a sullen nod. He turned to Smiley:

“That business you rang me about. What was it exactly?”

“Oh—a letter from Mrs Rode just before she was murdered,” said Smiley vaguely, “the police are handling it now, but they do not regard it as … significant. Not significant at all. She seems to have had a sort of ”—he gave an embarrassed grin—“persecution complex. Is that the expression? However, we might discuss it some time. You must dine with me at the Sawley before I go back. Do you come to London at all? We might meet in London perhaps, at the end of the Half.”

D’Arcy was standing in the doorway, looking at the new fall of snow which lay white and perfect on the pavement before him.

“Ah,” he said, with a little knowing laugh, “the long nights, eh, Terence, the long nights.”

6

HOLLY FOR THE DEVIL

“What are the long nights?” Smiley asked, as he and D’Arcy walked briskly away from Fielding’s house through the new snow towards the Abbey Close.

“We have a proverb that it always snows at Carne in the long nights. That is the traditional term here for the nights of Lent,” D’Arcy replied. “Before the Reformation the monks of the Abbey kept a vigil during Lent between the Offices of Compline and Lauds. You may know that already perhaps. As there is no longer a religious order attached to the Abbey, the custom has fallen into disuse. We continue to observe it, however, by the saying of Compline during Lent. Compline was the last of the Canonical Day Hours and was said before retiring for the night. The Master, who has a great respect for traditions of this kind, has reintroduced the old words for our devotions. Prime was the dawn Office, as you are no doubt aware. Terce was at the third hour of daylight—that is to say at 9.00 a.m. Thus we no longer refer to Morning Prayer, but to Terce. I find it delightful. Similarly, during Advent and Lent we say Sext at midday in the Abbey.”

“Are all these services compulsory?”

“Of course. Otherwise it would be necessary to make arrangements for those boys who did not attend. That is not desirable. Besides, you forget that Carne is a religious foundation.”

It was a beautiful night. As they crossed the Close, Smiley looked up at the tower. It seemed smaller and more peaceful in the moonlight. The whiteness of the new snow lit the very sky itself; the whole Abbey was so sharply visible against it that even the mutilated images of saints were clear in every sad detail of their defacement, wretched figures, their purpose lost, with no eyes to see the changing world.

They reached the cross-roads to the south of the Abbey.

“The parting of the ways, I fear,” said D’Arcy, extending his hand.

“It’s a beautiful night,” Smiley replied quickly, “let me come with you as far as your house.”

“Gladly,” said D’Arcy dryly.

They turned down North Fields Lane. A high stone wall ran along one side; and on the other the great expanse of playing fields, twenty or more rugby pitches, bordered the road for over half a mile. They walked this distance in silence, until D’Arcy stopped and pointed with his stick past Smiley towards a small house on the edge of the playing fields.

“That’s North Fields, the Rodes’ house. It used to belong to the head groundsman, but the school added a wing a few years ago, and now it’s a staff house. My own house is rather larger, and lies farther up the road. Happily, I am fond of walking.”

“Was it along here that you found Stanley Rode that night?”

There was a pause, then D’Arcy said: “It was nearer to my house, about a quarter of a mile farther on. He was in a terrible condition, poor fellow, terrible. I am myself unable to bear the sight of blood. If I had known how he would look when I brought him into the house, I do not think I could have done it. Mercifully, my sister Dorothy is a most competent woman.”

They walked on in silence, until Smiley said: “From what you were saying at dinner, the Rodes were a very ill-assorted couple.”

“Precisely. If her death had happened any other way, I would describe it as providential: a blessed release for Rode. She was a thoroughly mischievous woman, Smiley, who made it her business to hold her husband up to ridicule. I believe it was intentional. Others do not. I do, and I have my reasons. She took pleasure in deriding her husband.”

“And Carne too, no doubt.”

“Just so. This is a critical moment in Carne’s development. Many public schools have conceded to the vulgar clamour for change— change at any price. Carne, I am pleased to say, has not joined these Gadarene swine. That makes it more important than ever that we protect ourselves from within as well as from without.” He spoke with surprising vehemence.

“But was she really such a problem? Surely her husband could have spoken to her?”

“I never encouraged him to do so, I assure you. It is not my practice to interfere between man and wife.”

They reached D’Arcy’s house. A high laurel hedge entirely concealed the house from the road, except for two multiple chimneystacks which were visible over the top of it, confirming Smiley’s impression that the house was large and Victorian.

“I am not ashamed of the Victorian taste,” said D’Arcy as he slowly opened the gate; “but then, I am afraid we are not close to the modern idiom at Carne. This house used to be the rectory for North Fields Church, but the church is now served by a priest-in-charge from the Abbey. The vicarage is still within the school’s gift, and I was fortunate enough to receive it. Good night. You must come for sherry before you go. Do you stay long?”

“I doubt it,” Smiley replied, “but I am sure you have enough worries at the moment.”

“What do you mean?” D’Arcy said sharply.

“The press, the police and all the attendant fuss.”

“Ah yes, just so. Quite so. Nevertheless, our community life must continue. We always have a small party in the middle of the Half, and I feel it is particularly important that we should do so on this occasion. I will send a note to the Sawley tomorrow. My sister would be charmed. Good night.” He clanged the gate to, and the sound was greeted by the frantic barking of dogs from somewhere behind the house. A window opened and a harsh female voice called:

“Is that you, Felix?”

“Yes, Dorothy.”

“Why do you have to make such a bloody noise? You’ve woken those dogs again.” The window closed with a significant thud, and D’Arcy, without so much as a glance in Smiley’s direction, disappeared quickly into the shadow of the house.

Smiley set off along the road again, back towards the town. After walking for about ten minutes he stopped and looked again towards the Rodes’ house a hundred yards across the playing fields. It lay in the shadow of a small coppice of fir trees, dark and secret against the white fields. A narrow lane led towards the house; there was a brick pillar-box on one corner and a small oak sign-post, quite new, pointed along the lane, which must, he decided, lead to the village of Pylle. The legend upon the sign was obscured by a film of snow, and Smiley brushed it away with his hand, so that he could read the words ‘North Fields,’ done in a contrived suburban Gothic script which must have caused D’Arcy considerable discomfort. The snow in the lane was untrodden; obviously more had fallen recently. There could not be much traffic between Pylle and Carne. Glancing quickly up and down the main road he began making his way along the lane. The hedge rose high on either side, and soon Smiley could see nothing but the pale sky above him, and the straggling willow wands reaching towards it. Once he thought he heard the sound of a footstep, close behind him, but when he stopped he heard nothing but the furtive rustle of the laden hedges. He grew more conscious of the cold: it seemed to hang in the still damp of the sunken road, to clutch and hold him like the chill air of an empty house. Soon the hedge on his left gave way to a sparse line of trees, which Smiley judged to belong to the coppice he had seen from the road. The snow beneath the trees was patchy, and the bare ground looked suddenly ugly and torn. The lane took him in a gradual curve to the left and, quite suddenly the house stood before him, gaunt and craggy in the moonlight. The walls were brick and flint, half obscured by the mass of ivy which grew in profusion across them, tumbling over the porch in a tangled mane.

He glanced towards the garden. The coppice which bordered the lane encroached almost as far as the corner of the house, and extended to the far end of the lawn, screening the house from the playing fields. The murderer had reached the house by a path which led across the lawn and through the trees to the lane at the farthest end of the garden. Looking carefully at the snow on the lawn, he was able to discern the course of the path. The white glazed door to the left of the house must lead to the conservatory … And suddenly he knew he was afraid—afraid of the house, afraid of the sprawling dark garden. The knowledge came to him like an awareness of pain. The ivy walls seemed to reach forward and hold him, like an old woman cosseting an unwilling child. The house was large, yet dingy, holding to itself unearthly shapes, black and oily in the sudden contrasts of moonlight. Fascinated despite his fear, he moved towards it. The shadows broke and reformed, darting swiftly and becoming still, hiding in the abundant ivy, or merging with the black windows.

He observed in alarm the first involuntary movement of panic. He was afraid, then suddenly the senses joined in one concerted cry of terror, where sight and sound and touch could no longer be distinguished in the frenzy of his brain. He turned round and ran back to the gate. As he did so, he looked over his shoulder towards the house.

A woman was standing in the path, looking at him, and behind her the conservatory door swung slowly on its hinges.

For a second she stood quite still, then turned and ran back towards the conservatory. Forgetting his fear, Smiley followed. As he reached the corner of the house he saw to his astonishment that she was standing at the door, rocking it gently back and forth in a thoughtful, leisurely way, like a child. She had her back to Smiley, until suddenly she turned to him and spoke, with a soft Dorset drawl, and the childish lilt of a simpleton:

“I thought you was the Devil, Mister, but you’m got no wings.”

Smiley hesitated. If he moved forward, she might take fright again and run. He looked at her across the snow, trying to make her out. She seemed to be wearing a bonnet or shawl over her head, and a dark cape over her shoulders. In her hand she held a sprig of leaves, and these she gently waved back and forth as she spoke to him.

“But you’m carn’t do nothin’, Mister, ’cos I got the holly fer to hold yer. So you do bide there, Mister, for little Jane can hold yer.” She shook the leaves vehemently towards him and began laughing softly. She still had one hand upon the door, and as she spoke her head lolled to one side.

“You bide away from little Jane, Mister, however pretty she’m do be.”

“Yes, Jane,” said Smiley softly, “you’re a very pretty girl, I can see that; and that’s a pretty cape you’re wearing, Jane.”

Evidently pleased with this, she clutched the lapels of her cape and turned slowly round, in a child’s parody of a fine lady.

As she turned, Smiley saw the two empty sleeves of an overcoat swinging at her sides.

“There’s some do laugh at Janie,” she said, a note of petulance in her voice, “but there’s not many seen the Devil fly, Mister. But Janie seed ’im, Janie seed ’im. Silver wings like fishes ’e done ’ad, Janie saw.”

“Where did you find that coat, Janie?”

She put her hands together and shook her head slowly from side to side.

“He’m a bad one. Ooh, he’m a bad one, Mister,” and she laughed softly. “I seed ’im flying, riding on the wind,” she laughed again, “and the moon be’ind ’im, lightin’ up the way! They’m close as sisters, moon and Devil.”

On an impulse Smiley seized a handful of ivy from the side of the house and held it out to her, moving slowly forward as he did so.

“Do you like flowers, Janie? Here are flowers for Janie; pretty flowers for pretty Janie.” He had nearly reached her when with remarkable speed she ran across the lawn, disappeared into the trees and ran off down the lane. Smiley let her go. He was drenched in sweat.

As soon as he reached the hotel he telephoned Detective Inspector Rigby.

7

KING ARTHUR’S CHURCH

The coffee lounge of the Sawley Arms resembled nothing so much as the Tropical Plants Pavilion at Kew Gardens. Built in an age when cactus was the most fashionable of plants and bamboo its indispensable companion, the lounge was conceived as the architectural image of a jungle clearing. Steel pillars, fashioned in segments like the trunk of a palm tree, supported a high glass roof whose regal dome replaced the African sky. Enormous urns of bronze or greenglazed earthenware contained all that was elegant and prolific in the cactus world, and between them very old residents could relax on sofas of spindly bamboo, sipping warm coffee and re-living the discomforts of safari.

Smiley’s efforts to obtain a bottle of whisky and a syphon of soda at half past eleven at night were not immediately rewarded. It seemed that, like carrion from the carcass, the journalists had gone. The only sign of life in the hotel was the night porter, who treated his request with remote disapproval and advised him to go to bed. Smiley, by no means naturally persistent, discovered a half-crown in his overcoat pocket and thrust it a little irritably into the old man’s hand. The result, though not magical, was effective, and by the time Rigby had made his way to the hotel, Smiley was seated in front of a bright gas fire in the coffee lounge with glasses and a whisky bottle before him.

Smiley retold his experiences of the evening with careful accuracy. “It was the coat that caught my eye. It was a heavy overcoat like a man’s,” he concluded. “I remembered the blue belt and …” He left the sentence unfinished. Rigby nodded, got up and walked briskly across the lounge and through the swing doors to the porter’s desk. Ten minutes later, he returned.

“I think we’d better go and pull her in,” he said simply. “I’ve sent for a car.”

“We?” asked Smiley.

“Yes, if you wouldn’t mind. What’s the matter? Are you frightened?”

“Yes,” he replied. “Yes, I am.”

The village of Pylle lies to the south of North Fields, upon a high spur which rises steeply from the flat, damp pastures of the Carne valley. It consists of a handful of stone cottages and a small inn where you may drink beer in the landlord’s parlour. Seen from Carne playing fields, the village could easily be mistaken for an outcrop of rock upon a tor, for the hill on which it stands appears conical from the northern side. Local historians claim that Pylle is the oldest settlement in Dorset, that its name is Anglo-Saxon for harbour, and that it served the Romans as a port when all the lowlands around were covered by the sea. They will tell you, too, that King Arthur rested there after seven months at sea, and paid homage to Saint Andrew, the patron saint of sailors, on the site of Pylle Church, where he burned a candle for each month he had spent afloat; and that in the church, built to commemorate his visit and standing to this day lonely and untended on the hillside, there is a bronze coin as witness to his visit—the very one King Arthur gave to the verger before he set sail again for the Isle of Avalon.

Inspector William Rigby, himself a keen local historian, gave Smiley a somewhat terse précis of Pylle’s legendary past as he drove cautiously along the snow-covered lanes.

“These small, out-of-the-way villages are pretty strange places,” he concluded. “Often only three or four families, all so inbred you can no more sort them out than a barnful of cats. That’s where your village idiots come from. They call it the Devil’s Mark; I call it incest. They hate to have them in the village, you know—they’ll drive them away at any price, like trying to wash away their shame, if you follow me.”

“I follow you.”

“This Jane’s the religious sort. There’s one or two of them turn that way. The villagers at Pylle are all Chapel now, see, so there’s been no use for King Arthur’s Church since Wesley. It’s empty, falling to bits. There’s a few from the valley go up to see it, for its history, like, but no one cares for it, or didn’t, not till Janie moved in.”

“Moved in?”

“Yes. She’s taken to cleaning the church out night and day, bringing in wild flowers and such. That’s why they say she’s a witch.”

They passed Rode’s house in silence and after turning a sharp bend began climbing the long steep hill that led to Pylle village. The snow in the lane was untouched and apart from occasional skidding they progressed without difficulty. The lower slopes of the hill were wooded, and the lane dark, until suddenly they emerged to find themselves on a smooth plateau, where a savage wind blew the fine snow like smoke across the fields, whipping it against the car. The snow had risen in drifts to one side of the lane, and the going became increasingly difficult.

Finally Rigby stopped the car and said:

“We’ll walk from here, sir, if you don’t mind.”

“How far is it?”

“Short and sour, I’d say. That’s the village straight ahead.”

Through the windscreen, Smiley could discern behind the drifting veils of blown snow two low buildings about a quarter of a mile away. As he looked, a tall, muffled figure advanced towards them along the lane.

“That’s Ted Mundy,” said Rigby with satisfaction, “I told him to be here. He’s the sergeant from Okeford.” He leaned out of the car window and called merrily:

“Hullo, Ted there, you old buzzard, how be?” Rigby opened the back door of the car and the sergeant climbed in. Smiley and Mundy were briefly introduced.

“There’s a light in the church,” said Mundy, “but I don’t know whether Janie’s there. I can’t ask no one in the village, see, or I’d have the whole lot round me. They thought she’d gone for good.”

“Does she sleep there then, Ted? She got a bed there or something?” Rigby asked, and Smiley noticed with pleasure that his Dorset accent was more pronounced when he spoke to Mundy.

“So they say, Bill. I couldn’t find no bed when I looked in there Saturday. But I tell you an odd thing, Bill. It seems Mrs Rode used to come up here sometimes, to the chapel, to see Janie.”

“I heard about that,” said Rigby shortly. “Now which way’s the church, Ted?”

“Over the hill,” said Mundy. “Outside the village, in a paddock.” He turned to Smiley. “That’s quite common round here, sir, as I expect you know.” Mundy spoke very slowly, choosing his words. “You see, when they had the plague they left their dead in the villages and moved away; not far though, on account of their land and the church. Terrible it was, terrible.” Somehow Mundy managed to imply that the Black Death was a fairly recent disaster in those parts, if not actually within living memory.

They got out of the car, forcing the doors against the strong wind, and made their way towards the village, Mundy leading and Smiley in third place. The driven snow, fine and hard, stung their faces. It was an unearthly walk, high on that white hill on such a night. The curve of the bleak hill’s crest and the moaning of the wind, the snow cloud which sped across the moon, the dismal, unlit cottages so cautiously passed, belonged to another corner of the world.

Mundy led them sharply to the left, and Smiley guessed that by avoiding the centre of the village he hoped to escape the notice of its inhabitants. After about twenty minutes’ walking, often through deep snow, they found themselves following a low hedge between two fields. In the furthest corner of the right-hand field they saw a pale light glimmering across the snow, so pale that at first Smiley had to look away from it, then run his eyes back along the line of that distant hedge to make sure he was not deceived. Rigby stopped, beckoning to the others.

“I’ll take over now,” he said. He turned to Smiley. “I’d be obliged, sir, if you’d stand off a little. If there’s any trouble we don’t want you mixed up in it, do we?”

“Of course.”

“Ted Mundy, you come up by me.”

They followed the hedge until they came to a stile. Through the gap in the hedge they saw the church clearly now, a low building more like a tithe barn than a church. At one end a pale glow, like the uncertain light of a candle, shone dimly through the leaded windows.

“She’s there,” said Mundy, under his breath, as he and Rigby moved forward, Smiley following some distance behind.

They were crossing the field now, Rigby leading, and the church drawing ever closer. New sounds disturbed the moaning of the storm: the parched creak of a door, the mutter of a crumbling roof, the incessant sigh of wind upon a dying house. The two men in front of Smiley had stopped, almost in the shadow of the church wall, and were whispering together. Then Mundy walked quietly away, disappearing round the corner of the church. Rigby waited a moment, then approached the narrow entrance in the rear wall, and pushed the door.

It opened slowly, creaking painfully on its hinges. Then he disappeared into the church. Smiley was waiting outside when suddenly above all the sounds of night he heard a scream, so taut and shrill and clear that it seemed to have no source, but to ride everywhere upon the wind, to mount the ravaged sky on wings; and Smiley had a vision of Mad Janie as he had seen her earlier that night, and he heard again in her demented cry the dreadful note of madness. For a moment he waited. The echo died. Then slowly, terrified, he walked through the snow to the open doorway.

Two candles and an oil lamp on the bare altar shed a dim light over the tiny chapel. In front of the altar, on the sanctuary step, sat Jane, looking vaguely towards them. Her vacuous face was daubed with stains of green and blue, her filthy clothes were threaded with sprigs of evergreen and all about her on the floor were the bodies of small animals and birds.

The pews were similarly decorated with dead creatures of all kinds; and on the altar, broken twigs and little heaps of holly leaves. Between the candles stood a crudely fashioned cross. Stepping forward past Rigby, Smiley walked quickly down the aisle, past the lolling figure of Jane, until he stood before the altar. For a moment he hesitated, then turned and called softly to Rigby.

On the cross, draped over its three ends like a crude diadem, was a string of green beads.

8

FLOWERS FOR STELLA

He woke with the echo of her scream in his ears. He had meant to sleep late, but his watch said half past seven. He put on his bedside lamp, for it was still half-dark, and peered owlishly round the room. There were his trousers, flung over the chair, the legs still sodden from the snow. There were his shoes; he’d have to buy another pair. And there beside him were the notes he had made early that morning before going to sleep, transcriptions from memory of some of Mad Jane’s monologue on the journey back to Carne, a journey he would never forget. Mundy had sat with her in the back. She spoke to herself as a child does, asking questions and then in the patient tones of an adult for whom the reply is self-evident, providing the answer.

One obsession seemed to fill her mind: she had seen the devil. She had seen him flying on the wind, his silver wings stretched out behind him. Sometimes the recollection amused her, sometimes inflated her with a sense of her own importance or beauty, and sometimes it terrified her, so that she moaned and wept and begged him to go away. Then Mundy would speak kindly to her, and try to calm her. Smiley wondered whether policemen grew accustomed to the squalor of such things, to clothes that were no more than stinking rags wound round wretched limbs, to puling imbeciles who clutched and screamed and wept. She must have been living on the run for nights on end, finding her food in the fields and dustbins since the night of the murder … What had she done that night? What had she seen? Had she killed Stella Rode? Had she seen the murderer, and fancied him to be the devil flying on the wind? Why should she think that? If Janie did not kill Stella Rode, what had she seen that so frightened her that for three long winter nights she prowled in terror like an animal in the forest? Had the devil within taken hold of Janie and given power to her arm as she struck down Stella? Was that the devil who rode upon the wind?

But the beads and the coat and the footprints which were not hers—what of them? He lay there thinking, and achieving nothing. At last it was time to get up: it was the morning of the funeral.

As he was getting out of bed the telephone rang. It was Rigby. His voice sounded strained and urgent. “I want to see you,” he said. “Can you call round?”

“Before or after the funeral?”

“Before, if possible. What about now?”

“I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

Rigby looked, for the first time since Smiley had met him, tired and worried.

“It’s Mad Janie,” he said. “The Chief thinks we should charge her.”

“What for?”

“Murder,” Rigby replied crisply, pushing a thin file across the table. “The old fool’s made a statement … a sort of confession.”

They sat in silence while Smiley read the extraordinary statement. It was signed with Mad Janie’s mark—J. L.—drawn in a childish hand in letters an inch high. The constable who had taken it down had begun by trying to condense and simplify her account, but by the end of the first page he had obviously despaired. At last Smiley came to the description of the murder:

So I tells my darling, I tells her: “You are a naughty creature to go with the devil,” but her did not hearken, see, and I took angry with her, but she paid no call. I can’t abide them as go with devils in the night, and I told her. She ought to have had holly, mister, there’s the truth. I told her, mister, but she never would hearken, and that’s all Janie’s saying, but she drove the devil off, Janie did, and there’s one will thank me, that’s my darling and I took her jewels for the saints I did, to pretty out the church, and a coat for to keep me warm.

Rigby watched him as he slowly replaced the statement on the desk.

“Well, what do you think of it?”

Smiley hesitated. “It’s pretty good nonsense as it stands,” he replied at last.

“Of course it is,” said Rigby, with something like contempt. “She saw something, Lord knows what, when she was out on the prowl; stealing, I shouldn’t wonder. She may have robbed the body, or else she picked up the beads where the murderer dropped them. We’ve traced the coat. Belonged to a Mr Jardine, a baker in Carne East. Mrs Jardine gave it to Stella Rode last Wednesday morning for the refugees. Janie must have pinched it from the conservatory. That’s what she meant by ‘a coat for to keep me warm.’ But she no more killed Stella Rode than you or I did. What about the footprints, the glove-marks in the conservatory? Besides, she’s not strong enough, Janie isn’t, to heave that poor woman forty feet through the snow. This is a man’s work, as anyone can see.”

“Then what exactly … ?”

“We’ve called off the search, and I’m to prepare a case against one Jane Lyn of the village of Pylle for the wilful murder of Stella Rode. I wanted to tell you myself before you read it all over the papers. So that you’d know how it was.”

“Thanks.”

“In the meantime, if there’s any help I can give you, we’re still willing.” He hesitated, seemed about to say something, then to change his mind.

As he made his way down the wide staircase Smiley felt useless and very angry, which was scarcely the right frame of mind in which to attend a funeral.

It was an admirably conducted affair. Neither the flowers nor the congregation exceeded what was fitting to the occasion. She was not buried at the Abbey, out of deference perhaps to her simplicity of taste, but in the parish churchyard not far from North Fields. The Master was detained that day, as he was on most days, and had sent instead his wife, a small, very vague woman who had spent a long time in India. D’Arcy was much in evidence, fluttering here and there before the ceremony like an anxious beadle; and Mr Cardew had come to guide poor Stella through the unfamiliarities of High Anglican procedure. The Hechts were there, Charles all in black, scrubbed and shining, and Shane in dramatic weeds, and a hat with a very broad brim.

Smiley, who, like the others, had arrived early in anticipation of the unwholesome public interest which the ceremony might arouse, found himself a seat near the entrance of the church. He watched each new arrival with interest, waiting for his first sight of Stanley Rode.

Several tradesmen arrived, pressed into bulging serge and black ties, and formed a small group south of the aisle, away from the staff and their wives. Soon they were joined by other members of the town community, women who had known Mrs Rode at the Tabernacle; and then by Rigby, who looked straight at Smiley and gave no sign. Then on the stroke of three a tall old man walked slowly through the doorway, looking straight before him, neither knowing nor seeing anyone. Beside him was Stanley Rode.

It was a face which at first sight meant nothing to Smiley, seeming to have neither the imprint of temperament nor the components of character; it was a shallow, ordinary face, inclining to plumpness, and lacking quality. It matched his short, ordinary body and his black, ordinary hair; it was suitably compressed into an expression of sorrow. As Smiley watched him turn into the centre aisle and take his place among the principal mourners, it occurred to him that Rode’s very walk and bearing successfully conveyed something entirely alien to Carne. If it is vulgar to wear a pen in the breast pocket of your jacket, to favour Fair Isle pullovers and brown ties, to bob a little and turn your feet out as you walk, then Rode beyond a shadow of doubt was vulgar, for though he did not now commit these sins, his manner implied them all.

They followed the coffin into the churchyard and gathered round the open grave. D’Arcy and Fielding were standing together, seemingly intent upon the service. The tall, elderly figure who had entered the churchyard with Rode was now visibly moved, and Smiley guessed that he was Stella’s father, Samuel Glaston. As the service ended, the old man walked quickly away from the crowd, nodding briefly to Rode, and disappeared into the church. He seemed to struggle as he went, like a man walking against a strong wind.

The little group moved slowly away from the graveside, until only Rode remained, an oddly stiff figure, taut and constrained, his eyes wide but somehow sightless, his mouth set in a strict, pedagogic line. Then, as Smiley watched, Rode seemed to wake from a dream; his body suddenly relaxed and he too walked slowly but quite confidently away from the grave towards the small group which by now had reassembled at the churchyard gate. As he did so, Fielding, at the edge of the group, caught sight of him approaching and, to Smiley’s astonishment, walked deliberately and quite quickly away with an expression of strong distaste. It was not the calculated act of a man wishing to insult another, for it attracted the notice neither of Rode nor of anyone else standing by. Terence Fielding, for once, appeared to be in the grip of a genuine emotion, and indifferent to the impression he created.

Reluctantly Smiley approached the group. Rode was rather to one side, the D’Arcys were there, and three or four members of the staff. No one was talking much.

“Mr Rode?” he inquired.

“That’s right, yes.” He spoke slowly, a trace of an accent carefully avoided.

“I’m representing Miss Brimley of the Christian Voice.”

“Oh, yes.”

“She was most anxious that the journal should be represented. I thought you would like to know that.”

“I saw your wreath; very kind, I am sure.”

“Your wife was one of our most loyal supporters,” Smiley continued. “We regarded her almost as one of the family.”

“Yes, she was very keen on the Voice.” Smiley wondered whether Rode was always as impassive as this, or whether bereavement had made him listless.

“When did you come?” Rode asked suddenly.

“Yesterday.”

“Making a week-end of it, eh?”

Smiley was so astonished that for a moment he could think of nothing to say. Rode was still looking at him, waiting for an answer.

“I have one or two friends here … Mr Fielding …”

“Oh, Terence.” Smiley was convinced that Rode was not on Christian-name terms with Fielding.

“I would like, if I may,” Smiley ventured, “to write a small obituary for Miss Brimley. Would you have any objection?”

“Stella would have liked that.”

“If you are not too upset, perhaps I could call round tomorrow for one or two details?”

“Certainly.”

“Eleven o’clock?”

“It will be a pleasure,” Rode replied, almost pertly, and they walked together to the churchyard gate.

9

THE MOURNERS

It was a cheap trick to play on a man who had suddenly lost his wife. Smiley knew that. As he gently unlatched the gate and entered the drive, where two nights ago he had conducted his strange conversation with Jane Lyn, he acknowledged that in calling on Rode under any pretext at such a time he was committing a thoroughly unprincipled act. It was a peculiarity of Smiley’s character that throughout the whole of his clandestine work he had never managed to reconcile the means to the end. A stringent critic of his own motives, he had discovered after long observation that he tended to be less a creature of intellect than his tastes and habits might suggest; once in the war he had been described by his superiors as possessing the cunning of Satan and the conscience of a virgin, which seemed to him not wholly unjust.

He pressed the bell and waited.

Stanley Rode opened the door. He was very neatly dressed, very scrubbed.

“Oh hullo,” he said, as if they were old friends. “I say, you haven’t got a car, have you?”

“I’m afraid I left it in London.”

“Never mind.” Rode sounded disappointed. “Thought we might have gone out for a drive, had a chat as we went. I get a bit fed-up, kicking around here on my own. Miss D’Arcy asked me to stay over at their place. Very good people they are, very good indeed; but somehow I didn’t wish it, not yet.”

“I understand.”

“Do you?” They were in the hall now, Smiley was getting out of his overcoat, Rode waiting to receive it. “I don’t think many do— the loneliness I mean. Do you know what they’ve done, the Master and Mr D’Arcy? They meant it well, I know. They’ve farmed out all my correcting—my exam correcting, you understand. What am I supposed to do here, all on my own? I’ve no teaching, nothing; they’ve all taken a hand. You’d think they wanted to get rid of me.”

Smiley nodded vaguely. They moved towards the drawing-room, Rode leading the way.

“I know they did it for the best, as I said. But after all, I’ve got to spend the time somehow. Simon Snow got some of my division to correct. Have you met him by any chance? Sixty-one per cent he gave one boy—sixty-one. The boy’s an absolute fool; I told Fielding at the beginning of the Half that he wouldn’t possibly get his remove. Perkins his name is, a nice enough boy; head of Fielding’s house. He’d have been lucky to get thirty per cent … sixty-one, Snow gave him. I haven’t seen the papers yet, of course, but it’s impossible, quite impossible.”

They sat down.

“Not that I don’t want the boy to get on. He’s a nice enough boy, nothing special, but well-mannered. Mrs Rode and I meant to have him here to tea this Half. We would have done, in fact, if it hadn’t been for …” There was a moment’s silence. Smiley was going to speak when Rode stood up and said:

“I’ve a kettle on the stove, Mr …”

“Smiley.”

“I’ve a kettle on the stove, Mr Smiley. May I make you a cup of coffee?” That little stiff voice with the corners carefully defined, like a hired morning suit, thought Smiley.

Rode returned a few minutes later with a tray and measured their coffee in precise quantities, according to their taste.

Smiley found himself continually irritated by Rode’s social assumptions, and his constant struggle to conceal his origin. You could tell at the time, from every word and gesture, what he was; from the angle of his elbow as he drank his coffee, from the swift, expert pluck at the knee of his trouser leg as he sat down.

“I wonder,” Smiley began, “whether perhaps I might now …”

“Go ahead, Mr Smiley.”

“We are, of course, largely interested in Mrs Rode’s association with … our Church.”

“Quite.”

“You were married at Branxome, I believe.”

“Branxome Hill Tabernacle; fine church.” D’Arcy wouldn’t have liked the way he said that; cocksure lad on a motor-bike. Pencils in the outside pocket.

“When was that?”

“September, fifty-one.”

“Did Mrs Rode engage in charitable work in Branxome? I know she was very active here.”

“No, not at Branxome, but a lot here. She had to look after her father at Branxome, you see. It was refugee relief she was keen on here. That didn’t get going much until late 1956—the Hungarians began it, and then this last year …”

Smiley peered thoughtfully at Rode from behind his spectacles, forgot himself, blinked, and looked away.

“Did she take a large part in the social activities of Carne? Does the staff have its own Women’s Institute and so on?” he asked innocently.

“She did a bit, yes. But, being Chapel, she kept mainly with the Chapel people from the town … you should ask Mr Cardew about that; he’s the Minister.”

“But may I say, Mr Rode, that she took an active part in school affairs as well?”

Rode hesitated.

“Yes, of course,” he said.

“Thank you.”

There was a moment’s silence, then Smiley continued: “Our readers will, of course, remember Mrs Rode as the winner of our Kitchen Hints competition. Was she a good cook, Mr Rode?”

“Very good, for plain things, not fancy.”

“Is there any little fact that you would specially like us to include, anything she herself would like to be remembered by?”

Rode looked at him with expressionless eyes. Then he shrugged.

“No, not really. I can’t think of anything. Oh, you could say her father was a magistrate up North. She was proud of that.”

Smiley finished his coffee and stood up.

“You’ve been very patient with me, Mr Rode. We’re most grateful, I assure you. I’ll take care to send you an advance copy of our notice …”

“Thanks. I did it for her, you see. She liked the Voice; always did. Grew up with it.”

They shook hands.

“By the way, do you know where I can find old Mr Glaston? Is he staying in Carne or has he returned to Branxome?”

“He was up here yesterday. He’s going back to Branxome this afternoon. The police wanted to see him before he left.”

“I see.”

“He’s staying at the Sawley.”

“Thank you. I might try and see him before I go.”

“When do you leave, then?”

“Quite soon, I expect. Good-bye, then, Mr Rode. Incidentally—” Smiley began.

“Yes?”

“If ever you’re in London and at a loose end, if ever you want a chat … and a cup of tea, we’re always pleased to see you at the Voice, you know. Always.”

“Thanks. Thanks very much, Mr—”

“Smiley.”

“Thanks, that’s very decent. No one’s said that to me for a long time. I’ll take you up on that one day. Very good of you.”

“Good-bye.” Again they shook hands; Rode’s was dry and cool. Smooth.

He returned to the Sawley Arms, sat himself at a desk in the empty residents’ lounge and wrote a note to Mr Glaston:

Dear Mr Glaston,

I am here on behalf of Miss Brimley of the Christian Voice. I have some letters from Stella which I think you would like to see. Forgive me for bothering you at this sad moment: I understand you are leaving Carne this afternoon and wondered if I might see you before you left.

He carefully sealed the envelope and took it to the reception desk. There was no one there, so he rang the bell and waited. At last a porter came, an old turnkey with a grey, bristly face, and after examining the envelope critically for a long time, he agreed, against an excessive fee, to convey it to Mr Glaston’s room. Smiley stayed at the desk, waiting for his answer.

Smiley himself was one of those solitaries who seem to have come into the world fully educated at the age of eighteen. Obscurity was his nature, as well as his profession. The byways of espionage are not populated by the brash and colourful adventurers of fiction. A man who, like Smiley, has lived and worked for years among his country’s enemies learns only one prayer: that he may never, never be noticed. Assimilation is his highest aim, he learns to love the crowds who pass him in the street without a glance; he clings to them for his anonymity and his safety. His fear makes him servile— he could embrace the shoppers who jostle him in their impatience, and force him from the pavement. He could adore the officials, the police, the bus conductors, for the terse indifference of their attitudes.

But this fear, this servility, this dependence, had developed in Smiley a perception for the colour of human beings: a swift, feminine sensitivity to their characters and motives. He knew mankind as a huntsman knows his cover, as a fox the wood. For a spy must hunt while he is hunted, and the crowd is his estate. He could collect their gestures and their words, record the interplay of glance and movement, as a huntsman can record the twisted bracken and the broken twig, or as a fox detects the signs of danger.

Thus, while he waited patiently for Glaston’s reply and recalled the crowded events of the last forty-eight hours, he was able to order and assess them with detachment. What was the cause of D’Arcy’s attitude to Fielding, as if they were unwilling partners to a shabby secret? Staring across the neglected hotel gardens towards Carne Abbey, he was able to glimpse behind the lead roof of the Abbey the familiar battlements of the school: keeping the new world out and the old world secure. In his mind’s eye he saw the Great Court now, as the boys came out of Chapel: the black-coated groups in the leisured attitudes of eighteenth-century England. And he remembered the other school beside the police station: Carne High School; a little tawdry place like a porter’s lodge in an empty graveyard, as detached from the tones of Carne as its brick and flint from the saffron battlements of School Hall.

Yes, he reflected, Stanley Rode had made a long, long journey from the Grammar School at Branxome. And if he killed his wife, then the motive, Smiley was sure, and even the means, were to be found in that hard road to Carne.

“It was kind of you to come,” said Glaston; “kind of Miss Brimley to send you. They’re good people at the Voice; always were.” He said this as if “good” were an absolute quality with which he was familiar.

“You’d better read the letters, Mr Glaston. The second one will shock you, I’m afraid, but I’m sure you’ll agree that it would be wrong of me not to show it to you.” They were sitting in the lounge, the mammoth plants like sentinels beside them.

He handed Glaston the two letters, and the old man took them firmly and read them. He held them a good way from him to read, thrusting his strong head back, his eyes half closed, the crisp line of his mouth turned down at the corners. At last he said:

“You were with Miss Brimley in the war, were you?”

“I worked with John Landsbury, yes.”

“I see. That’s why she came to you?”

“Yes.”

“Are you Chapel?”

“No.”

He was silent for a while, his hands folded on his lap, the letters before him on the table.

“Stanley was Chapel when they married. Then he went over. Did you know that?”

“Yes.”

“Where I come from in the North, we don’t do that. Chapel was something we’d stood up for and won. Almost like the Vote.”

“I know.”

His back was as straight as a soldier’s. He looked stern rather than sad. Quite suddenly, his eyes turned towards Smiley, and he looked at him long and carefully.

“Are you a schoolmaster?” he asked, and it occurred to Smiley that in his day Samuel Glaston had been a very shrewd man of business.

“No … I’m more or less retired.”

“Married?”

“I was.”

Again the old man fell silent, and Smiley wished he had left him alone.

“She was a great one for chatter,” he said at last.

Smiley said nothing.

“Have you told the police?”

“Yes, but they knew already. That is, they knew that Stella thought her husband was going to murder her. She’d tried to tell Mr Cardew …”

“The Minister?”

“Yes. He thought she was overwrought and … deluded.”

“Do you think she wasn’t?”

“I don’t know. I just don’t know. But from what I have heard of your daughter I don’t believe she was unbalanced. Something roused her suspicions, something frightened her very much. I don’t believe we can just disregard that. I don’t believe it was a coincidence that she was frightened before she died. And therefore I don’t believe that the beggar-woman murdered her.”

Samuel Glaston nodded slowly. It seemed to Smiley that the old man was trying to show interest, partly to be polite, and partly because if he did not it would be a confession that he had lost interest in life itself.

Then, after a long silence, he carefully folded up the letters and gave them back. Smiley waited for him to speak, but he said nothing.

After a few moments Smiley got up and walked quietly from the room.

10

LITTLE WOMEN

Shane Hecht smiled, and drank some more sherry. “You must be dreadfully important,” she said to Smiley, “for D’Arcy to serve decent sherry. What are you, Almanach de Gotha?”

“I’m afraid not. D’Arcy and I were both dining at Terence Fielding’s on Friday night and D’Arcy asked me for sherry.”

“Terence is wicked, isn’t he? Charles loathes him. I’m afraid they see Sparta in quite different ways … Poor Terence. It’s his last Half, you know.”

“I know.”

“So sweet of you to come to the funeral yesterday. I hate funerals, don’t you? Black is so insanitary. I always remember King George V’s funeral. Lord Sawley was at Court in those days, and gave Charles two tickets. So kind. I always think it’s spoilt us for ordinary funerals in a way. Although I’m never quite sure about funerals, are you? I have a suspicion that they are largely a lowerclass recreation; cherry brandy and seed cake in the parlour. I think the tendency of people like ourselves is for a quiet funeral these days; no flowers, just a short obituary and a memorial service later.” Her small eyes were bright with pleasure. She finished her sherry and held out her empty glass to Smiley.

“Would you mind, dear? I hate sherry, but Felix is so mean.”

Smiley filled her glass from the decanter on the table.

“Dreadful about the murder, wasn’t it? That beggar- must be mad. Stella Rode was such a nice person, I always thought … and so unusual. She did such clever things with the same dress … But she had such curious friends. All for Hans the woodcutter and Pedro the fisherman, if you know what I mean.”

“Was she popular at Carne?”

Shane Hecht laughed gently: “No one is popular at Carne … but she wasn’t easy to like … She would wear black crêpe on Sundays … Forgive me, but do the lower classes always do that? The townspeople liked her, I believe. They adore anyone who betrays Carne. But then she was a Christian Scientist or something.”

“Baptist, I understand,” said Smiley unthinkingly.

She looked at him for a moment with unfeigned curiosity. “How sweet,” she murmured. “Tell me, what are you?”

Smiley made some facetious reply about being unemployed, and realised that it was only by a hair’s-breadth that he had avoided explaining himself to Shane Hecht like a small boy. Her very ugliness, her size and voice, coupled with the sophisticated malice of her conversation, gave her the dangerous quality of command. Smiley was tempted to compare her with Fielding, but for Fielding other people scarcely existed. For Shane Hecht they did exist: they were there to be found wanting in the minute tests of social behaviour, to be ridiculed, cut off and destroyed.

“I read in the paper that her father was quite well off. From the North. Second generation. Remarkable really how unspoilt she was … so natural … You wouldn’t think she needed to go to the launderette or to make friends with beggars … Though, of course, the Midlands are different, aren’t they? Only about three good families between Ipswich and Newcastle. Where did you say you came from, dear?”

“London.”

“How nice. I went to tea with Stella once. Milk in first and Indian. So different,” and she looked at Smiley suddenly and said, “I’ll tell you something. She almost aroused an admiration in me, I found her so insufferable. She was one of those tiresome little snobs who think that only the humble are virtuous.” Then she smiled and added, “I even agreed with Charles about Stella Rode, and that’s saying something. If you’re a student of mankind, do go and have a look at him, the contrast is riveting.” But at that moment they were joined by D’Arcy’s sister, a bony, virile woman with untidy grey hair and an arrogant, hunting mouth.

“Dorothy darling,” Shane murmured; “such a lovely party. So kind. And so exciting to meet somebody from London, don’t you think? We were talking about poor Mrs Rode’s funeral.”

“Stella Rode may have been damn’ bad form, Shane, but she did a lot for my refugees.”

“Refugees?” asked Smiley innocently.

“Hungarians. Collecting for them. Clothes, furniture, money. One of the few wives who did anything.” She looked sharply at Shane Hecht, who was smiling benignly past her towards her husband: “Busy little creature, she was; didn’t mind rolling her sleeves up, going from door to door. Got her little women on to it too at the Baptist chapel and brought in a mass of stuff. You’ve got to hand it to them, you know. They’ve got spirit. Felix, more sherry!”

There were about twenty in the two rooms, but Smiley, who had arrived a little late, found himself attached to a group of about eight who stood nearest the door: D’Arcy and his sister; Charles and Shane Hecht; a young mathematician called Snow and his wife; a curate from the Abbey and Smiley himself, bewildered and mole-like behind his spectacles. Smiley looked quickly round the room, but could see no sign of Fielding.

“… Yes,” Dorothy D’Arcy continued, “she was a good little worker, very … right to the end. I went over there on Friday with that parson man from the tin tabernacle—Cardew—to see if there was any refugee stuff to tidy up. There wasn’t a thing out of place—every bit of clothing she had was all packed up and addressed; we just had to send it off. She was a damn’ good little worker, I will say. Did a splendid job at the bazaar, you know.”

“Yes, darling,” said Shane Hecht sweetly. “I remember it well. It was the day I presented her to Lady Sawley. She wore such a nice little hat—the one she wore on Sundays, you know. And so respectful. She called her ‘my lady.’” She turned to Smiley and breathed: “Rather feudal, don’t you think, dear? I always like that: so few of us left.”

The mathematician and his wife were talking to Charles Hecht in a corner and a few minutes later Smiley managed to extricate himself from the group and join them.

Ann Snow was a pretty girl with a rather square face and a turned-up nose. Her husband was tall and thin, with an agreeable stoop. He held his sherry glass between straight, slender fingers as if it were a chemical retort and when he spoke he seemed to address the sherry rather than his listener; Smiley remembered them from the funeral. Hecht was looking pink and rather cross, sucking at his pipe. They talked in a desultory way, their conversation dwarfed by the exchanges of the adjoining group. Hecht eventually drifted away from them, still frowning and withdrawn, and stood ostentatiously alone near the door.

“Poor Stella,” said Ann Snow after a moment’s silence. “Sorry,” she added. “I can’t get her out of my mind yet. It seems mad, just mad. I mean why should she do it, that Janie woman?”

“Did you like Stella?” Smiley asked.

“Of course we did. She was sweet. We’ve been here four Halves now, but she was the only person here who’s ever been kind to us.” Her husband said nothing, just nodded at his sherry. “Simon wasn’t a boy at Carne, you see—most of the staff were—so we didn’t know anyone and no one was really interested. They all pretended to be terribly pleased with us, of course, but it was Stella who really …”

Dorothy D’Arcy was descending on them. “Mrs Snow,” she said crisply, “I’ve been meaning to talk to you. I want you to take over Stella Rode’s job on the refugees.” She cast an appraising look in Simon’s direction: “The Master’s very keen on refugees.”

“Oh, my goodness!” Ann Snow replied, aghast. “I couldn’t possibly, Miss D’Arcy, I …”

“Couldn’t? Why couldn’t you? You helped Mrs Rode with her stall at the bazaar, didn’t you?”

“So that’s where she got her clothes from,” breathed Shane Hecht behind them. Ann was fumbling on:

“But … well I haven’t quite got Stella’s nerve, if you understand what I mean; and besides, she was a Baptist: all the locals helped her and gave her things, and they all liked her. With me it would be different.”

“Lot of damn’ nonsense,” declared Miss D’Arcy, who spoke to all her juniors as if they were grooms or erring children; and Shane Hecht beside her said: “Baptists are the people who don’t like private pews, aren’t they? I do so agree—one feels that if one’s paid one simply has to go.”

The curate, who had been talking cricket in a corner, was startled into mild protest: “Oh, come, Mrs Hecht, the private pew had many advantages …” and embarked on a diffuse apologia for ancient custom, to which Shane listened with every sign of the most assiduous interest. When at last he finished she said: “Thank you, William dear, so sweet,” turned her back on him and added to Smiley in a stage whisper: “William Trumper—one of Charles’s old pupils—such a triumph when he passed his Certificate.”

Smiley, anxious to dissociate himself from Shane Hecht’s vengeance on the curate, turned to Ann Snow, but she was still at the mercy of Miss D’Arcy’s charitable intentions, and Shane was still talking to him:

“The only Smiley I ever heard of married Lady Ann Sercombe at the end of the war. She left him soon afterwards, of course. A very curious match. I understand he was quite unsuitable. She was Lord Sawley’s cousin, you know. The Sawleys have been connected with Carne for four hundred years. The present heir is a pupil of Charles; we often dine at the Castle. I never did hear what became of Ann Sercombe … she went to Africa, you know … or was it India? No, it was America. So tragic. One doesn’t talk about it at the Castle.” For a moment the noise in the room stopped. For a moment, no more, he could discern nothing but the steady gaze of Shane Hecht upon him, and knew she was waiting for an answer. And then she released him as if to say: “I could crush you, you see. But I won’t, I’ll let you live,” and she turned and walked away.

He contrived to take his leave at the same time as Ann and Simon Snow. They had an old car and insisted on running Smiley back to his hotel. On the way there, he said:

“If you have nothing better to do, I would be happy to give you both dinner at my hotel. I imagine the food is dreadful.”

The Snows protested and accepted, and a quarter of an hour later they were all three seated in a corner of the enormous dining-room of the Sawley Arms, to the great despondency of three waiters and a dozen generations of Lord Sawley’s forebears, puffy men in crumbling pigment.

“We really got to know her our second Half,” Ann Snow ran on. “Stella didn’t do much mixing with the other wives—she’d learnt her lesson by then. She didn’t go to coffee parties and things, so it was really luck that we did meet. When we first came there wasn’t a staff house available for us: we had to spend the first Half in a hotel. We moved in to a little house in Bread Street at the end of our second Half. Moving was chaos—Simon was examining for the scholarships and we were terribly broke, so we had to do everything we possibly could for ourselves. It was a wet Thursday morning when we moved. The rain was simply teeming down; but none of our good pieces would get in through the front door, and in the end Mulligan’s just dumped me on the doorstep and let me sort it out.” She laughed, and Smiley thought what an agreeable child she was. “They were absolutely foul. They would have just driven off, I think, but they wanted a cheque as soon as they’d done the delivery, and the bill was pounds more than the estimate. I hadn’t got the cheque-book, of course. Simon had gone off with it. Mulligan’s even threatened to take all the stuff away again. It was monstrous. I think I was nearly in tears.” She nearly is now, thought Smiley. “Then out of the blue Stella turned up. I can’t think how she even knew we were moving—I’m sure no one else did. She’d brought an overall and an old pair of shoes and she’d come to help. When she saw what was going on she didn’t bother with the men at all, just went to a phone and rang Mr Mulligan himself. I don’t know what she said to him, but she made the foreman talk to him afterwards and there was no more trouble after that. She was terribly happy—happy to help. She was that sort of person. They took the door right out and managed to get everything in. She was marvellous at helping without managing. The rest of the wives,” she added bitterly, “are awfully good at managing, but don’t help at all.”

Smiley nodded, and discreetly filled their glasses.

“Simon’s leaving,” Ann said, suddenly confidential. “He’s got a grant and we’re going back to Oxford. He’s going to do a DPhil and get a University job.”

They drank to his success, and the conversation turned to other things until Smiley asked: “What’s Rode himself like to work with?”

“He’s a good schoolmaster,” said Simon, slowly, “but tiring as a colleague.”

“Oh, he was quite different from Stella,” said Ann; “terribly Carne-minded. D’Arcy adopted him and he got the bug. Simon says all the grammar school people go that way—it’s the fury of the convert. It’s sickening. He even changed his religion when he got to Carne. Stella didn’t, though; she wouldn’t dream of it.”

“The Established Church has much to offer Carne,” Simon observed, and Smiley enjoyed the dry precision of his delivery.

“Stella can’t exactly have hit it off with Shane Hecht,” Smiley probed gently.

“Of course she didn’t!” Ann declared angrily. “Shane was horrid to her, always sneering at her because she was honest and simple about the things she liked. Shane hated Stella—I think it was because Stella didn’t want to be a lady of quality. She was quite happy to be herself. That’s what really worried Shane. Shane likes people to compete so that she can make fools of them.”

“So does Carne,” said Simon, quietly.

“She was awfully good at helping out with the refugees. That was how she got into real trouble.” Ann Snow’s slim hands gently rocked her brandy glass.

“Trouble?”

“Just before she died. Hasn’t anyone told you? About her frightful row with D’Arcy’s sister?”

“No.”

“Of course, they wouldn’t have done. Stella never gossiped.”

“Let me tell you,” said Simon. “It’s a good story. When the Refugee Year business started, Dorothy D’Arcy was fired with charitable enthusiasm. So was the Master. Dorothy’s enthusiasms always seem to correspond with his. She started collecting clothes and money and packing them off to London. All very laudable, but there was a perfectly good town appeal going, launched by the Mayor. That wasn’t good enough for Dorothy, though: the school must have its own appeal; you can’t mix your charity. I think Felix was largely behind it. Anyway, after the thing had been going for a few months the refugee centre in London apparently wrote to Dorothy and asked whether anyone would be prepared to accommodate a refugee couple. Instead of publicising the letter, Dorothy wrote straight back and said she would put them up herself. So far so good. The couple turned up, Dorothy and Felix pointed a proud finger at them and the local press wrote it all up as an example of British humanity.

“About six weeks later, one afternoon, these two turned up on Stella’s doorstep. The Rodes and the D’Arcys are neighbours, you see, and anyway Stella had tried to take an interest in Dorothy’s refugees. The woman was in floods of tears and the husband was shouting blue murder, but that didn’t worry Stella. She had them straight into the drawing-room and gave them a cup of tea. Finally, they managed to explain in basic English that they had run away from the D’Arcys because of the treatment they received. The girl was expected to work from morning till night in the kitchen, and the husband was acting as unpaid kennel-boy for those beastly spaniels that Dorothy breeds. The ones without noses.”

“King Charles,” Ann prompted.

“It was about as awful as it could be. The girl was pregnant and he was a fully qualified engineer, so neither of them were exactly suited to domestic service. They told Stella that Dorothy was away till the evening—she’d gone to a dog show. Stella advised them to stay with her for the time being, and that evening she went round and told Dorothy what had happened. She had quite a nerve, you see. Although it wasn’t nerve really. She just did the simple thing. Dorothy was furious, and demanded that Stella should return ‘her refugees’ immediately. Stella replied that she was sure that they wouldn’t come, and went home. When Stella got home she rang up the refugee people in London and asked their advice. They sent a woman down to see Dorothy and the couple, and the result was that they returned to London the following day … You can imagine what Shane Hecht would have made of that story.”

“Didn’t she ever find out?”

“Stella never told anyone except us, and we didn’t pass it on. Dorothy just let it be known that the refugees had gone to some job in London, and that was that.”

“How long ago did this happen?”

“They left exactly three weeks ago,” said Ann to her husband. “Stella told me about it when she came to supper the night you were in Oxford for your interview. That was three weeks ago tonight.” She turned to Smiley:

“Poor Simon’s been having an awful time. Felix D’Arcy unloaded all Rode’s exam. correcting on to him. It’s bad enough doing one person’s correction—two is frantic.”

“Yes,” replied Simon reflectively. “It’s been a bad week. And rather humiliating in a way. Several of the boys who were up to me for science last Half are now in Rode’s forms. I’d regarded one or two of them as practically unteachable, but Rode seems to have brought them on marvellously. I corrected one boy’s paper— Perkins—sixty-one per cent for elementary science. Last Half he got fifteen per cent in a much easier paper. He only got his remove because Fielding raised hell. He was in Fielding’s house.”

“Oh I know—a red-haired boy, a prefect.”

“Good Lord,” cried Simon. “Don’t say you know him?”

“Oh, Fielding introduced us,” said Smiley vaguely. “Incidentally— no one else ever mentioned that incident to you about Miss D’Arcy’s refugees, did they? Confirmed it, as it were?”

Ann Snow looked at him oddly. “No. Stella told us about it, but of course Dorothy D’Arcy never referred to it at all. She must have hated Stella, though.”

He saw them to their car, and waited despite their protests while Simon cranked it. At last they drove off, the car bellowing down the silent street. Smiley stood for a moment on the pavement, an odd, lonely figure peering down the empty road.

11

A COAT TO KEEP HER WARM

A dog that had not bitten the postman; a devil that rode upon the wind; a woman who knew that she would die; a little, worried man in an overcoat standing in the snow outside his hotel, and the laborious chime of the Abbey clock telling him to go to bed.

Smiley hesitated, then with a shrug crossed the road to the hotel entrance, mounted the step and entered the cheap, yellow light of the residents’ hall. He walked slowly up the stairs.

He detested the Sawley Arms. That muted light in the hall was typical: inefficient, antiquated and smug. Like the waiters in the dining-room and the lowered voices in the residents’ lounge, like his own hateful bedroom with its blue and gilt urns, and the framed tapestry of a Buckinghamshire garden.

His room was bitterly cold; the maid must have opened the window. He put a shilling in the meter and lit the gas. The fire bubbled grumpily and went out. Muttering, Smiley looked around for some paper to write on, and discovered some, much to his surprise, in the drawer of the writing desk. He changed into his pyjamas and dressing-gown and crawled miserably into bed. After sitting there uncomfortably for some minutes he got up, fetched his overcoat and spread it over the eiderdown. A coat for to keep her warm …

How did her statement read? “There’s one will thank me, that’s my darling and I took her jewels for the saints I did, and a coat for to keep me warm …” The coat had been given to Stella last Wednesday for the refugees. It seemed reasonable to assume from the way the statement read that Janie had taken the coat from the outhouse at the same time as she took the beads from Stella’s body. But Dorothy D’Arcy had been round there on Friday morning—of course she had, with Mr Cardew—she was talking about it at her party that very evening: “There wasn’t a thing out of place—every bit of clothing she had was all packed up and addressed—a damn’ good little worker, I will say …” Then why hadn’t Stella packed the overcoat? If she packed everything else, why not the overcoat too?

Or had Janie stolen the coat earlier in the day, before Stella made her parcel? If that was so, it went some way to weakening the case against her. But it was not so. It was not so because it was utterly improbable that Janie should steal a coat in the afternoon and return to the house the same evening.

“Start at the beginning,” Smiley muttered, a little sententiously, to the crested paper on his lap. “Janie stole the coat at the same time as she stole the beads—that is, after Stella was dead. Therefore either the coat was not packed with the other clothes, or …”

Or what? Or somebody else, somebody who was not Stella Rode, packed up the clothes after Stella had died and before Dorothy D’Arcy and Mr Cardew went round to North Fields on Friday morning. And why the devil, thought Smiley, should anyone do that?

It had been one of Smiley’s cardinal principles in research, whether among the incunabula of an obscure poet or the laboriously gathered fragments of intelligence, not to proceed beyond the evidence. A fact, once logically arrived at, should not be extended beyond its natural significance. Accordingly he did not speculate with the remarkable discovery he had made, but turned his mind to the most obscure problem of all: motive for murder.

He began writing:

“Dorothy D’Arcy—resentment after refugee fiasco. As a motive for murder—definitely thin.” Yet why did she seem to go out of her way to sing Stella’s praises?

“Felix D’Arcy—resented Stella Rode for not observing Carne’s standards. As a motive for murder—ludicrous.”

“Shane Hecht—hatred.”

“Terence Fielding—in a sane world, no conceivable motive.”

Yet was it a sane world? Year in year out they must share the same life, say the same things to the same people, sing the same hymns. They had no money, no hope. The world changed, fashion changed; the women saw it second-hand in the glossy papers, took in their dresses and pinned up their hair, and hated their husbands a little more. Shane Hecht—did she kill Stella Rode? Did she conceal in the sterile omniscience of her huge body not only hatred and jealousy, but the courage to kill? Was she frightened for her stupid husband, frightened of Rode’s promotion, of his cleverness? Was she really so angry when Stella refused to take part in the rat race of gentility?

Rigby was right—it was impossible to know. You had to be ill, you had to be sick to understand, you had to be there in the sanatorium, not for weeks, but for years, had to be one in the line of white beds, to know the smell of their food and the greed in their eyes. You had to hear it and see it, to be part of it, to know their rules and recognise their transgressions. This world was compressed into a mould of anomalous conventions: blind, pharisaical but real.

Yet some things were written plain enough: the curious bond which tied Felix D’Arcy and Terence Fielding despite their mutual dislike; D’Arcy’s reluctance to discuss the night of the murder; Fielding’s evident preference for Stella Rode rather than her husband; Shane Hecht’s contempt for everyone.

He could not get Shane out of his mind. If Carne were a rational place, and somebody had to die, then Shane Hecht should clearly be the one. She was a depository of other people’s secrets, she had an infallible sense of weakness. Had she not found even Smiley out? She had taunted him with his wretched marriage, she had played with him for her own pleasure. Yes, she was an admirable candidate for murder.

But why on earth should Stella die? Why and how? Who tied up the parcel after her death? And why?

He tried to sleep, but could not. Finally, as the Abbey clock chimed three, he put the light on again and sat up. The room was much warmer and at first Smiley wondered if someone had switched on the central heating in the middle of the night, after it had been off all day. Then he became aware of the sound of rain outside; he went to the window and parted the curtains. A steady rain was falling; by tomorrow the snow would be washed away. Two policemen walked slowly down the road; he could hear the squelch of their boots as they trod in the melting snow. Their wet capes glistened in the arc of the street lamp.

And suddenly he seemed to hear Rigby’s voice: “Blood everywhere. Whoever killed her must have been covered in it.” And then Mad Janie calling to him across the moonlit snow: “Janie seed ’im … silver wings like fishes … flying on the wind … there’s not many seen the devil fly …” Of course: the parcel! He remained a long time at the window, watching the rain. Finally, content at last, he climbed back into bed and fell asleep.

He tried to telephone Miss Brimley throughout the morning. Each time she was out and he left no message. Eventually, at about midday, he spoke to her:

“George, I’m terribly sorry—some missionary is in London— I had to go for an interview and I’ve got a Baptist Conference this afternoon. They’ve both got to be in this week. Will first thing tomorrow do?”

“Yes,” said Smiley. “I’m sure it will.” There was no particular hurry. There were one or two ends he wanted to tie up that afternoon, anyway.

12

UNCOMFORTABLE WORDS

He enjoyed the bus. The conductor was a very surly man with a great deal to say about the bus company, and why it lost money. Gently encouraged by Smiley, he expanded wonderfully so that by the time they arrived at Sturminster he had transformed the Directors of the Dorset and General Traction Company into a herd of Gadarene swine charging into the abyss of voluntary bankruptcy. The conductor directed Smiley to the Sturminster kennels, and when he alighted in the tiny village, he set out confidently towards a group of cottages which stood about a quarter of a mile beyond the church, on the Okeford road.

He had a nasty feeling he wasn’t going to like Mr Harriman. The very fact that D’Arcy had described him as a superior type of person inclined Smiley against him. Smiley was not opposed to social distinctions but he liked to make his own.

A notice stood at the gate: “Sturminster Kennels, proprietor, C. J. Reid-Harriman, Veterinary Surgeon. Breeder of Alsatian and Labrador Dogs. Boarding.”

A narrow path led to what seemed to be a backyard. There was washing everywhere, shirts, underclothes, and sheets, most of it khaki. There was a rich smell of dog. There was a rusted hand-pump with a dozen or so dog leads draped over it, and there was a small girl. She watched him sadly as he picked his way through the thick mud towards the door. He pulled on the bell-rope and waited. He tried again, and the child said:

“It doesn’t work. It’s bust. It’s been bust for years.”

“Is anyone at home?” Smiley asked.

“I’ll see,” she replied coolly, and after another long look at him she walked round the side of the house and disappeared from view. Then Smiley heard from inside the house the sound of someone approaching, and a moment later the door opened.

“Good day to you.” He had sandy hair and a moustache. He wore a khaki shirt and a khaki tie of a lighter shade; old Service dress trousers and a tweed jacket with leather buttons.

“Mr Harriman?”

“Major,” he replied lightly. “Not that it matters, old boy. What can we do for you?”

“I’m thinking of buying an Alsatian,” Smiley replied, “as a guard dog.”

“Surely. Come in, won’t you. Lady wife’s out. Ignore the child: she’s from next door. Just hangs around; likes the dogs.” He followed Harriman into the living-room and they sat down. There was no fire.

“Where are you from?” Harriman asked.

“I’m staying at Carne at the moment; my father lives over at Dorchester. He’s getting on and he’s nervous, and he wants me to find him a good dog. There’s a gardener to look after it in the daytime, feed it and exercise it and so on. The gardener doesn’t live in at night, of course, and it’s at night that the old man gets so worried. I’ve been meaning to get him a dog for some time—this recent business at Carne rather brought it home to me.” Harriman ignored the hint.

“Gardener good chap?”

“Yes, very.”

“You don’t want anything brilliant,” said Harriman. “You want a good, steady type. I’d take a bitch if I were you.” His hands were dark brown, his wrists too. His handkerchief was tucked into his cuff. Smiley noticed that his wrist-watch faced inwards, conforming with the obscure rites of the military demi-monde from which he seemed to come.

“What will it do, a dog like that? Will it attack, or what?”

“Depends how she’s trained, old boy; depends how she’s trained. She’ll warn, though; that’s the main thing. Frighten the fellers away. Shove a notice up, ‘Fierce Dog,’ let her sniff at the tradesmen a bit and the word will get around. You won’t get a burglar within a mile of the place.”

They walked out into the garden again, and Harriman led the way to an enclosure with half a dozen Alsatian puppies yapping furiously at them through the wire.

“They’re good little beasts, all of them,” he shouted. “Game as hell.” He unlocked the door and finally emerged with a plump bitch puppy chewing fiercely at his jacket.

“This little lady might do you,” he said. “We can’t show her— she’s too dark.”

Smiley pretended to hesitate, allowed Harriman to persuade him and finally agreed. They went back into the house.

“I’d like to pay a deposit,” said Smiley, “and collect her in about ten days. Would that be all right?” He gave Harriman a cheque for five pounds and again they sat down, Harriman foraging in his desk for inoculation certificates and pedigrees. Then Smiley said:

“It’s a pity Mrs Rode didn’t have a dog, isn’t it? I mean, it might have saved her life.”

“Oh, she had a dog, but she had it put down just before she was killed,” said Harriman. “Damned odd story between ourselves. She was devoted to the beast. Odd little mongrel, bit of everything, but she loved it. Brought it here one day with some tale about it biting the postman, got me to put it down—said it was dangerous. It wasn’t anything of the sort. Some friends of mine in Carne made inquiries. No complaints anywhere. Postman liked the brute. Damned silly sort of lie to tell in a small community. Bound to be found out.”

“Why on earth did she tell it then?”

Harriman made a gesture which particularly irritated Smiley. He ran his forefinger down the length of his nose, then flicked either side of his absurd moustache very quickly. There was something shamefaced about the whole movement, as if he were assuming the ways of senior officers, and fearful of rebuke.

“She was trouble,” he said crisply. “I can spot ’em. I’ve had a few in the regiment, wives who are trouble. Little simpering types. Butter-wouldn’t-melt, holier-than-thou. Arrange the flowers in the church and all that—pious as you please. I’d say she was the hysterical kind, self-dramatising, weeping all over the house for days on end. Anything for a bit of drama.”

“Was she popular?” Smiley offered him a cigarette.

“Shouldn’t think so. Thanks. She wore black on Sundays, I gather. Typical. We used to call them ‘crows’ out East, the ones who wore black—Sunday virgins. They were OD mostly—other denominations. Not C of E—some were Romans, mind … I hope I’m not …”

“Not at all.”

“You never know, do you? Can’t stand ’em myself; no prejudice, but I don’t like Romans—that’s what my old father used to say.”

“Did you know her husband?”

“Not so well, poor devil, not so well.”

Harriman, Smiley reflected, seemed to have a great deal more sympathy for the living than the dead. Perhaps soldiers were like that. He wouldn’t know.

“He’s terribly cut up, I hear. Dreadful shock—fortunes of war, eh?” he added and Smiley nodded. “He’s the other type. Humble origin, good officer qualities, credit to the mess. Those are the ones that cut up most, the ones women get at.”

They walked along the path to the gate. Smiley said good-bye, and promised to return in a week or so to collect the puppy. As he walked away Harriman called to him:

“Oh—incidentally …”

Smiley stopped and turned round.

“I’ll pay that cheque in, shall I, and credit you with the amount?”

“Of course,” said Smiley. “That will do very well,” and he made his way to the bus stop pondering on the strange byways of the military mind.

The same bus took him back to Carne, the same conductor railed against his employers, the same driver drove the entire distance in second gear. He got out at the station and made his way to the red-brick Tabernacle. Gently opening the Gothic door, made of thickly varnished ochre pine, he stepped inside. An elderly woman in an apron was polishing the heavy brass chandelier which hung over the centre aisle. He waited a moment, then tiptoed up to her and asked for the Minister. She pointed towards the vestry door. Obeying her mimed directions, he crossed to it, knocked and waited. A tall man in a clerical collar opened the door.

“I’m from the Christian Voice,” said Smiley quietly. “Can I have a word with you?”

Mr Cardew led him through the side entrance and into a small vegetable garden, carefully tilled, with bright yellow paths running between the empty beds. The sun shone through the crisp air. It was a cold, beautiful day. They crossed the garden and entered a paddock. The ground was hard despite last night’s rain, and the grass short. They strolled side by side, talking as they went.

“This is Lammas Land, belonging to the School. We hold our fêtes here in the summer. It’s very practical.”

Cardew seemed a little out of character. Smiley, who had a rather childish distrust of clergymen, had expected a Wesleyan hammer, a wordy, forbidding man with a taste for imagery.

“Miss Brimley, our editor, sent me,” Smiley began. “Mrs Rode subscribed to our journal; her family has taken it since it began. She was almost a part of the family. We wanted to write an obituary about her work for the Church.”

“I see.”

“I managed to have a word with her husband; we wanted to be sure to strike the right note.”

“What did he say?”

“He said I should speak to you about her work—her refuge work particularly.”

They walked on in silence for a while, then Cardew said, “She came from up North, near Derby. Her father used to be a man of substance in the North—though money never altered him.”

“I know.”

“I’ve known the family for years, off and on. I saw her old father before the funeral.”

“What may I say about her work for the Church, her influence on the Chapel community here? May I say she was universally loved?”

“I’m afraid,” said Cardew, after a slight pause, “that I don’t hold much with that kind of writing, Mr Smiley. People are never universally loved, even when they’re dead.” His North Country accent was strong.

“Then what may I say?” Smiley persisted.

“I don’t know,” Cardew replied evenly. “And when I don’t know, I usually keep quiet. But since you’re good enough to ask me, I’ve never met an angel, and Stella Rode was no exception.”

“But was she not a leading figure in refugee work?”

“Yes. Yes, she was.”

“And did she not encourage others to make similar efforts?”

“Of course. She was a good worker.”

They walked on together in silence. The path across the field led downwards, then turned and followed a stream which was almost hidden by the tangled gorse and hawthorn on either side. Beyond the stream was a row of stark elm trees, and behind them the familiar outline of Carne.

“Is that all you wanted to ask me?” said Cardew suddenly.

“No,” replied Smiley. “Our editor was very worried by a letter she received from Mrs Rode just before her death. It was a kind of … accusation. We put the matter before the police. Miss Brimley reproaches herself in some way for not having been able to help her. It’s illogical, perhaps, but there it is. I would like to be able to assure her that there was no connexion between Stella Rode’s death and this letter. That is another reason for my visit …”

“Whom did the letter accuse?”

“Her husband.”

“I should tell your Miss Brimley,” said Cardew slowly, and with some emphasis, “that she has nothing whatever for which to reproach herself.”

13

THE JOURNEY HOME

It was Monday evening. At about the time that Smiley returned to his hotel after his interview with Mr Cardew, Tim Perkins, the Head of Fielding’s house, was taking his leave of Mrs Harlowe, who taught him the ’cello. She was a kindly woman, if neurotic, and it distressed her to see him so worried. He was quite the best pupil that Carne had sent her, and she liked him.

“You played foully today, Tim,” she said as she wished him good-bye at the door, “quite foully. You needn’t tell me—you’ve only got one more Half and you still haven’t got three passes in A Level and you’ve got to get your remove, and you’re in a tizz. We won’t practise next Monday if you don’t want—just come and have buns and we’ll play some records.”

“Yes, Mrs Harlowe.” He strapped his music-case on to the carrier of his bicycle.

“Lights working, Tim?”

“Yes, Mrs Harlowe.”

“Well, don’t try and beat the record tonight, Tim. You’ve plenty of time till Boys’ Tea. Remember the lane’s still quite slippery from the snow.”

Perkins said nothing. He pushed the bicycle on to the gravel path and started towards the gate.

“Haven’t you forgotten something, Tim?”

“Sorry, Mrs Harlowe.”

He turned back and shook hands with her in the doorway. She always insisted on that.

“Look, Tim, what is the matter? Have you done something silly? You can tell me, can’t you? I’m not Staff, you know.”

Perkins hesitated, then said:

“It’s just exams, Mrs Harlowe.”

“Are your parents all right? No trouble at home?”

“No, Mrs Harlowe; they’re fine.” Again he hesitated, then: “Good night, Mrs Harlowe.”

“Good night.”

She watched him close the gate behind him and cycle off down the narrow lane. He would be in Carne in a quarter of an hour; it was downhill practically all the way.

Usually he loved the ride home. It was the best moment of the week. But tonight he hardly noticed it. He rode fast, as he always did; the hedge raced against the dark sky and the rabbits scuttled from the beam of his lamp, but tonight he hardly noticed them.

He would have to tell somebody. He should have told Mrs Harlowe; he wished he had. She’d know what to do. Mr Snow would have been all right, but he wasn’t up to him for science any longer, he was up to Rode. That was half the trouble. That and Fielding.

He could tell True—yes, that’s who he’d tell, he’d tell True. He’d go to Miss Truebody tonight after evening surgery and he’d tell her the truth. His father would never get over it, of course, because it meant failure and perhaps disgrace. It meant not getting to Sandhurst at the end of next Half, it meant more money they couldn’t afford …

He was coming to the steepest part of the hill. The hedge stopped on one side and instead there was a marvellous view of Sawley Castle against the night sky, like a backcloth for Macbeth. He loved acting—he wished the Master let them act at Carne.

He leant forward over the handlebars and allowed himself to gather speed to go through the shallow ford at the bottom of the hill. The cold air bit into his face, and for a moment he almost forgot … Suddenly he braked; felt the bike skid wildly beneath him.

Something was wrong; there was a light ahead, a flashing light, and a familiar voice calling to him urgently across the darkness.

14

THE QUALITY OF MERCY

The Public Schools Committee for Refugee Relief (Patroness: Sarah, Countess of Sawley) has an office in Belgrave Square. It is not at all clear whether this luxurious situation is designed to entice the wealthy or encourage the dispossessed—or, as some irreverent voices in Society whispered, to provide the Countess of Sawley with an inexpensive pied-à-terre in the West End of London. The business of assisting refugees has been suitably relegated to the south of the river, to one of those untended squares in Kennington which are part of London’s architectural schizophrenia. York Gardens, as the square is called, will one day be discovered by the world, and its charm lost, but go there now, and you may see real children playing hopscotch in the road, and their mothers, shod in bedroom slippers, abusing them from doorways.

Miss Brimley, dispatched on her way by Smiley’s telephone call the previous morning, had the rare gift of speaking to children as if they were human beings, and thus discovered without difficulty the dilapidated, unnamed house which served the Committee as a collecting centre. With the assistance of seven small boys, she pulled on the bell and waited patiently. At last she heard the clatter of feet descending an uncarpeted staircase, and the door was opened by a very beautiful girl. They looked at one another with approval for a moment.

“I’m sorry to be a nuisance,” Miss Brimley began, “but a friend of mine in the country has asked me to make some inquiries about a parcel of clothes that was sent up a day or two ago. She’s made rather a stupid mistake.”

“Oh, goodness, how awful,” said the girl pleasantly. “Would you like to come in? Everything’s frightfully chaotic, I’m afraid, and there’s nothing to sit on, but we can give you powdered coffee in a mug.”

Miss Brimley followed her in, closing the door firmly on the seven children, who were edging gently forward in her wake. She was in the hall, and everywhere she looked there were parcels of every kind, some wrapped in jute with smart labels, some in brown paper, torn and clumsy, some in crates and laundry baskets, old suitcases and even an antiquated cabin trunk with a faded yellow label on it which read: “Not wanted on voyage.”

The girl led the way upstairs to what was evidently the office, a large room containing a deal table littered with correspondence, and a kitchen chair. An oil stove sputtered in one corner, and an electric kettle was steaming in a melancholy way beside it. “I’m sorry,” said the girl as they entered the room, “but there just isn’t anywhere to talk downstairs. I mean, one can’t talk on one leg like the Incas. Or isn’t it Incas? Perhaps it’s Afghans. However did you find us?”

“I went to your West End office first,” Miss Brimley replied, “and they told me I should come and see you. I think they were rather cross. After that I relied on children. They always know the way. You are Miss Dawney, aren’t you?”

“Lord, no. I’m the sort of daily help. Jill Dawney’s gone to see the Customs people at Rotherhithe—she’ll be back at tea time if you want to see her.”

“Gracious, my dear, I’m sure I shan’t keep you two minutes. A friend of mine who lives in Carne—(“Goodness! How grand,” said the girl) she’s a sort of cousin really, but it’s simpler to call her a friend, isn’t it?—gave an old grey dress to the refugee people last Thursday and now she’s convinced she left her brooch pinned to the bodice. I’m sure she hasn’t done anything of the sort, mind you—she’s a scatter-brain creature—but she rang me yesterday morning in a dreadful state and made me promise to come round at once and ask. I couldn’t come yesterday, unfortunately—tied to my little paper from dawn till dusk. But I gather you’re a bit behind, so it won’t be too late?”

“Gosh, no! We’re miles behind. That’s all the stuff downstairs, waiting to be unpacked and sorted. It comes from the voluntary reps. at each school—sometimes boys and sometimes Staff—and they put all the clothes together and send them up in big parcels, either by train or ordinary mail, usually by train. We sort them here before sending abroad.”

“That’s what I gathered from Jane. As soon as she realised she’d made this mistake she got hold of the woman doing the collecting and sending, but of course it was too late. The parcel had gone.”

“How frantic … Do you know when the parcel was sent off?”

“Yes. On Friday morning.”

“From Carne? Train or post?”

Miss Brimley had been dreading this question, but she made a guess:

“Post, I believe.”

Darting past Miss Brimley, the girl foraged among the pile of papers on her desk and finally produced a stiff-backed exercise book with a label on it marked “Ledger.” Opening it at random, she whisked quickly back and forth through the pages, licking the tip of one finger now and then in a harassed sort of way.

“Wouldn’t have arrived till yesterday at the earliest,” she said. “We certainly won’t have opened it yet. Honestly, I don’t know how we shall ever cope, and with Easter coming up we shall just get worse and worse. On top of that, half our stuff is rotting in the Customs sheds—hullo, here we are!” She pushed the ledger over to Miss Brimley, her slim finger pointing to a pencilled entry in the central column: “Carne, parcel post, 27 lb.”

“I wonder,” said Miss Brimley, “whether you would mind awfully if we had a quick look inside?”

They went downstairs to the hall.

“It’s not quite as hideous as it looks,” the girl called over her shoulder. “All the Monday lot will be nearest the door.”

“How do you know where they come from if you can’t read the postmark?” asked Miss Brimley as the girl began to forage among the parcels.

“We issue volunteer reps. with our printed labels. The labels have an originator’s number on. In other cases we just ask them to write the name of the school in capitals on the outside. You see, we simply can’t allow covering letters; it would be too desperate. When we get a parcel all we have to do is send off a printed card acknowledging with thanks receipt of a parcel of such and such a date weighing so and so much. People who aren’t reps. won’t send parcels to this address, you see—they’ll send to the advertised address in Belgrave Square.”

“Does the system work?”

“No,” replied the girl, “it doesn’t. The reps. either forget to use our labels or they run out and can’t be bothered to tell us. Ten days later they ring up in a rage because they haven’t had an acknowledgement. Reps. change, too, without letting us know, and the packing and labelling instructions don’t get passed on. Sometimes the boys will suddenly decide to do it themselves, and no one tells them the way to go about it. Lady Sarah gets as mad as a snake if parcels turn up at Head Office—they all have to be carted over here for repacking and inventories.”

“I see.” Miss Brimley watched anxiously as the girl foraged among the parcels, still talking.

“Did you say your friend actually taught at Carne? She must be terribly grand. I wonder what the Prince is like: he looks rather soft in his photographs. My cousin went to Carne—he’s an utter wet. Do you know what he told me? During Ascot week they all … Hello! Here we are!” The girl stood up, a large square parcel in her arms, and carried it to a table which stood in the shadow of the staircase. Miss Brimley, standing beside her as she began carefully to untie the stout twine, looked curiously at the printed label. In its top left-hand corner was stamped the symbol which the Committee had evidently allocated to Carne: C4. After the four the letter B had been written in with ballpoint pen.

“What does the B mean?” asked Miss Brimley.

“Oh, that’s a local arrangement at Carne. Miss D’Arcy’s the rep. there, but they’ve done so well recently that she coopted a friend to help with dispatch. When we acknowledge we always mention whether it was A or B. B must be terribly keen, whoever she is.”

Miss Brimley forbore from inquiring what proportion of the parcels from Carne had originated from Miss D’Arcy, and what proportion from her anonymous assistant.

The girl removed the string and turned the parcel upside down in order to liberate the overlap of wrapping paper. As she did so Miss Brimley caught sight of a faint brown smudge, no more, about the size of a shilling, near the join. It was consistent with her essential rationalism that she should search for any explanation other than that which so loudly presented itself. The girl continued the work of unwrapping, saying suddenly: “I say, Carne was where they had that dreadful murder, wasn’t it—that master’s wife who got killed by the gipsy? It really is awful, isn’t it, how much of that kind of thing goes on? Hm! Thought as much,” she remarked, suddenly interrupting herself. She had removed the outer paper, and was about to unwrap the bundle inside when her attention was evidently arrested by the appearance of the inner parcel.

“What?” Miss Brimley said quickly.

The girl laughed. “Oh, only the packing,” she said. “The C4Bs are usually so neat—quite the best we get. This is quite different. Not the same person at all. Must be a stand-in. I thought so from the outside.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“Oh, it’s like handwriting. We can tell.” She laughed again, and without more ado removed the last wrapping. “Grey dress, you said, didn’t you? Let’s see.” With both hands she began picking clothes from the top of the pile and laying them to either side. She was nearly half-way through when she exclaimed, “Well, honestly! They must be having a brain-storm,” and drew from the bundle of partworn clothes a transparent plastic mackintosh, a very old pair of leather gloves, and a pair of rubber overshoes.

Miss Brimley was holding the edge of the table very tightly. The palms of her hands were throbbing.

“Here’s a cape. Damp, too,” the girl added in disgust, and tossed the offending articles on to the floor beside the table. Miss Brimley could only think of Smiley’s letter: “Whoever killed her must have been covered in blood.” Yes, and whoever killed her wore a plastic cape and a hood, rubber overshoes and those old leather gloves with the terra-cotta stains. Whoever killed Stella Rode had not chanced upon her in the night, but had plotted long ahead, had waited. “Yes,” thought Miss Brimley, “had waited for the long nights.”

The girl was talking to her again: “I’m afraid it really isn’t here.”

“No, my dear,” Miss Brimley replied, “I see that. Thank you. You’ve been very sweet.” Her voice faltered for a moment, then she managed to say: “I think, my dear, you should leave the parcel exactly as it is now, the wrapping and everything in it. Something very dreadful has happened, and the police will want to … know about it and see the parcel … You must trust me, my dear—things aren’t quite what they seem …” And somehow she escaped to the comforting freedom of York Gardens and the large-eyed wonder of its waiting children.

She went to a telephone box. She got through to the Sawley Arms and asked a very bored receptionist for Mr Smiley. Total silence descended on the line until the Trunks operator asked her to put in another three and sixpence. Miss Brimley replied sharply that all she had so far had for her money was a three-minute vacuum; this was followed by the unmistakable sound of the operator sucking her teeth, and then, quite suddenly, by George Smiley’s voice:

“George, it’s Brim. A plastic mackintosh, a cape, rubber overshoes, and some leather gloves that look as though they’re stained with blood. Smudges on some of the wrapping paper too by the look of it.”

A pause.

“Handwriting on the outside of the parcel?”

“None. The Charity organisers issue printed labels.”

“Where is the stuff now? Have you got it?”

“No. I’ve told the girl to leave everything exactly as it is. It’ll be all right for an hour or two … George, are you there?”

“Yes.”

“Who did it? Was it the husband?”

“I don’t know. I just don’t know.”

“Do you want me to do anything—about the clothes, I mean? Phone Sparrow or anything?”

“No. I’ll see Rigby at once. Good-bye, Brim. Thanks for ringing.”

She put back the receiver. He sounded strange, she thought. He seemed to lose touch sometimes. As if he’d switched off.

She walked north-west towards the Embankment. It was long after ten o’clock—the first time she’d been late for Heaven knows how long. She had better take a taxi. Being a frugal woman, however, she took a bus.

Ailsa Brimley did not believe in emergencies, for she enjoyed a discipline of mind uncommon in men and even rarer in women. The greater the emergency, the greater her calm. John Landsbury had remarked upon it: “You have sales resistance to the dramatic, Brim; the rare gift of contempt for what is urgent. I know of a dozen people who would pay you five thousand a year for telling them every day that what is important is seldom urgent. Urgent equals ephemeral, and ephemeral equals unimportant.”

She got out of the bus, carefully putting the ticket in the rubbish compartment. As she stood in the warm sunlight of the street she caught sight of the hoardings advertising the first edition of the evening papers. If it hadn’t been for the sun, she might never have looked; but the sun dazzled her and made her glance downwards. And so she did see; she read it in the plump black of the wet newsprint, in the prepacked hysteria of Fleet Street: “All-night search for missing Carne boy.”

15

THE ROAD TO FIELDING

Smiley put down the receiver and walked quickly past the reception desk towards the front door. He must see Rigby at once. Just as he was leaving the hotel he heard his name called. Turning, he saw his old enemy, the night porter, braving the light of day, beckoning to him like Charon with his grey hand.

“They’ve been on to you from the police station,” he observed with undisguised pleasure. “Mr Rigby wants you, the Inspector. You’re to go there at once. At once, see?”

“I’m on my way there now,” Smiley replied irritably, and as he pushed his way through the swing doors he heard the old man repeat; “At once, mind; they’re waiting for you.”

Making his way through the Carne streets, he reflected for the hundredth time on the obscurity of motive in human action: there is no true thing on earth. There is no constant, no dependable point, not even in the purest logic or the most obscure mysticism; least of all in the motives of men when they are moved to act violently.

Had the murderer, now so near discovery, found contentment in the meticulous administration of his plans? For now it was clear beyond a doubt; this was a murder devised to the last detail, even to the weapon inexplicably far from the place of its use; a murder with clues cast to mislead, a murder planned to look unplanned, a murder for a string of beads. Now the mystery of the footprints was solved: having put the overshoes into the parcel, the murderer had walked down the path to the gate, and his own prints had been obscured by the subsequent traffic of feet.

Rigby looked tired.

“You’ve heard the news, sir, I suppose?”

“What news?”

“About the boy, the boy in Fielding’s house, missing all night?”

“No.” Smiley felt suddenly sick. “No, I’ve heard nothing.”

“Good Lord, I thought you knew! Half past eight last night Fielding rang us here. Perkins, his head boy, hadn’t come back from a music lesson with Mrs Harlowe, who lives over to Longemede. We put out an alert and started looking for him. They sent a patrol car along the road he should have come back on—he was cycling, you see. The first time they didn’t see anything, but on the way back the driver stopped the car at the bottom of Longemede Hill, just where the water-splash is. It occurred to him the lad might have taken a long run at the water-splash from the top of the hill, and come to grief in the dip. They found him half in the ditch, his bike beside him. Dead.”

“Oh, my dear God.”

“We didn’t let on to the press at first. The boy’s parents are in Singapore. The father’s an Army officer. Fielding sent them a telegram. We’ve got on to the War Office, too.”

They were silent for a moment, then Smiley asked, “How did it happen?”

“We’ve closed the road and we’ve been trying to reconstruct the accident. I’ve got a detective over there now, just having a look. Trouble is, we couldn’t do much till the morning. Besides, the men trampled everywhere; you can’t blame them. It looks as though he must have fallen near the bottom of the hill and hit his head on a stone: his right temple.”

“How did Fielding take it?”

“He was very shaken. Very shaken indeed. I wouldn’t have believed it, to be quite honest. He just seemed to … give up. There was a lot that had to be done—telegraph the parents, get in touch with the boy’s uncle at Windsor, and so on. But he just left all that to Miss Truebody, his housekeeper. If it hadn’t been for her, I don’t know how he’d have managed. I was with him for about half an hour, then he just broke down, completely, and asked to be left alone.”

“How do you mean, broke down?” Smiley asked quickly.

“He cried. Wept like a child,” said Rigby evenly. “I’d never have thought it.”

Smiley offered Rigby a cigarette and took one himself.

“I suppose,” he ventured, “it was an accident?”

“I suppose so,” Rigby replied woodenly.

“Perhaps,” said Smiley, “before we go any farther, I’d better give you my news. I was on my way to see you when you rang. I’ve just heard from Miss Brimley.” And in his precise, rather formal way he related all that Ailsa Brimley had told him, and how he had become curious about the contents of the parcel.

Smiley waited while Rigby telephoned to London. Almost mechanically, Rigby described what he wanted done: the parcel and its contents were to be collected and arrangements made to subject them immediately to forensic examination; the surfaces should be tested for fingerprints. He would be coming up to London himself with some samples of a boy’s handwriting and an examination paper; he would want the opinion of a handwriting expert. No, he would be coming by train on the 4.25 from Carne, arriving at Waterloo at 8.05. Could a car be sent to the station to collect him? There was silence, then Rigby said testily, “All right, I’ll take a ruddy taxi,” and rang off rather abruptly. He looked at Smiley angrily for a moment, then grinned, plucked at his ear and said:

“Sorry, sir; getting a bit edgy.” He indicated the far wall with his head and added, “Fighting on too many fronts, I suppose. I shall have to tell the Chief about that parcel, but he’s out shooting at the moment—only pigeon, with a couple of friends, he won’t be long—but I haven’t mentioned your presence here in Carne, as a matter of fact, and if you don’t mind I’ll …”

“Of course,” Smiley cut in quickly. “It’s much simpler if you keep me out of it.”

“I shall tell him it was just a routine inquiry. We shall have to mention Miss Brimley later … but there’s no point in making things worse, is there?”

“No.”

“I shall have to let Janie go, I suppose … She was right, wasn’ she? Silver wings in the moonlight.”

“I wouldn’t—no, I wouldn’t let her go, Rigby,” said Smiley with unaccustomed vehemence. “Keep her with you as long as you can possibly manage. No more accidents, for heaven’s sake. We’ve had enough.”

“Then you don’t believe Perkins’s death was an accident?”

“Good Lord, no,” cried Smiley suddenly, “and nor do you, do you?”

“I’ve put a detective on to it,” Rigby replied coolly. “I can’t take the case myself. I shall be needed on the Rode murder. The Chief will have to call the Yard in now; there’ll be hell to pay, I can tell you. He thought it was all over bar the shouting.”

“And in the meantime?”

“In the meantime, sir, I’m going to do my damnedest to find out who killed Stella Rode.”

“If,” said Smiley slowly, “if you find fingerprints on that mackintosh, which I doubt, will you have anything … local … to compare them with?”

“We’ve got Rode’s, of course, and Janie’s.”

“But not Fielding’s?”

Rigby hesitated.

“As a matter of fact, we have,” he said at last. “From long ago. But nothing to do with this kind of thing.”

“It was during the war,” said Smiley. “His brother told me. Up in the North. It was hushed up, wasn’t it?”

Rigby nodded. “So far as I heard, only the D’Arcys knew; and the Master, of course. It happened in the holidays—some Air Force boy. The Chief was very helpful …”

Smiley shook hands with Rigby and made his way down the familiar pine staircase. He noticed again the vaguely institutional smell of floor polish and carbolic soap, like the smell at Fielding’s house.

He walked slowly back towards the Sawley Arms. At the point where he should have turned left to his hotel, however, he hesitated, then seemed to change his mind. Slowly, almost reluctantly, he crossed the road to the Abbey Close, and walked along the southern edge towards Fielding’s house. He looked worried, almost frightened.

16

A TASTE FOR MUSIC

Miss Truebody opened the door. The rims of her eyes were pink, as though she had been weeping.

“I wonder if I might see Mr Fielding? To say good-bye.”

She hesitated: “Mr Fielding’s very upset. I doubt whether he’ll want to see anyone.” He followed her into the hall and watched her go to the study door. She knocked, inclined her head, then gently turned the handle and let herself in. It was a long time before she returned. “He’ll be out shortly,” she said, without looking at him. “Will you take off your coat?” She waited while he struggled out of his overcoat, then took it from him and hung it beside the Van Gogh chair. They stood together in silence, both looking towards the study door.

Then, quite suddenly, Fielding was standing in the half-open doorway, unshaven and in his shirt-sleeves. “For Christ’s sake,” he said thickly. “What do you want?”

“I just wanted to say good-bye, Fielding, and to offer you my condolences.”

Fielding looked at him hard for a moment; he was leaning heavily against the doorway. “Well, good-bye. Thank you for calling.” He waved one hand vaguely in the air. “You needn’t have bothered really, need you?” he added rudely. “You could have sent me a card, couldn’t you?”

“I could have done, yes; it just seemed so very tragic, when he was so near success.”

“What do you mean? What the devil do you mean?”

“I mean in his work … the improvement. Simon Snow was telling me all about it. Amazing really, the way Rode brought him on.”

A long silence, then Fielding spoke: “Good-bye, Smiley. Thanks for coming.” He was turning back into the study as Smiley called:

“Not at all … not at all. I suppose poor Rode must have been bucked with those exam. results, too. I mean it was more or less a matter of life and death for Perkins, passing that exam, wasn’t it? He wouldn’t have got his remove next Half if he’d failed in science. They might have superannuated him, I suppose, even though he was head of the house; then he couldn’t have sat for the Army. Poor Perkins, he had a lot to thank Rode for, didn’t he? And you, too, Fielding, I’m sure. You must have helped him wonderfully … both of you did, you and Rode; Rode and Fielding. His parents ought to know that. They’re rather hard up, I gather; the father’s in the Army, isn’t he, in Singapore? It must have been a great effort keeping the boy at Carne. It will comfort them to know how much was done for him, won’t it, Fielding?”

Smiley was very pale. “You’ve heard the latest, I suppose,” he continued. “About that wretched gipsy woman who killed Stella Rode? They’ve decided she’s fit to plead. I suppose they’ll hang her. That’ll be the third death, won’t it? You know, I’ll tell you an odd thing—just between ourselves, Fielding. I don’t believe she did it. Do you? I don’t believe she did it at all.”

He was not looking at Fielding. He had clasped his little hands tightly behind his back, and he stood with his shoulders bowed and his head inclined to one side, as though listening for an answer.

Fielding seemed to feel Smiley’s words like a physical pain. Slowly he shook his head:

“No,” he said; “no. Carne killed them; it was Carne. It could only happen here. It’s the game we play: the exclusion game. Divide and rule!” He looked Smiley full in the face, and shouted: “Now for God’s sake go! You’ve got what you want, haven’t you? You can pin me on your little board, can’t you?” And then, to Smiley’s distress, he began sobbing in great uncontrollable gulps, holding his hand across his brow. He appeared suddenly grotesque, stemming the childish tears with his chalky hand, his cumbersome feet turned inwards. Gently, Smiley coaxed him back into the study, gently sat him before the dead fire. Then he began talking to him softly and with compassion.

“If what I think is true, there isn’t much time,” he began. “I want you to tell me about Tim Perkins—about the exam.”

Fielding, his face buried in his hands, nodded.

“He would have failed, wouldn’t he? He would have failed and not got his remove; he’d have had to leave.” Fielding was silent. “After the exam that day, Rode gave him the writing-case to bring here, the case that contained the papers; Rode was doing chapel duty that week and wouldn’t be going home before dinner, but he wanted to correct the papers that night, after his dinner with you.”

Fielding took his hands from his face and leant back in his chair, his great head tilted back, his eyes closed. Smiley continued:

“Perkins came home, and that evening he brought the case to you, as Rode told him to, for safe keeping. Perkins, after all, was head of your house, a responsible boy … He gave you the case and you asked him how he’d done in the exam.”

“He wept,” said Fielding suddenly. “He wept as only a child can.”

“And after breaking down he told you he had cheated? That he had looked up the answers and copied them on to his paper. Is that right? And after the murder of Stella Rode he remembered what else he had seen in the suitcase?”

Fielding was standing up. “No! Don’t you see? Tim wouldn’t have cheated to save his life! That’s the whole point, the whole bloody irony of it,” he shouted. “He never cheated at all. I cheated for him.”

“But you couldn’t! You couldn’t copy his handwriting!”

“He wrote with a ball-pen. It was only formulae and diagrams. When he’d gone, and left me alone with the case, I looked at his paper. It was hopeless—he’d only done two out of seven questions. So I cheated for him. I just cribbed them from the science book, and wrote them with blue ballpoint, the kind we all use. Abbots’ sell them. I copied his hand as best I could. It only needed about three lines of figures. The rest was diagrams.”

“Then it was you who opened the case? You who saw …”

“Yes. It was me, I tell you, not Tim! He couldn’t cheat to save his life! But Tim paid for it, don’t you see? When the marks were published. Tim must have known something was wrong with them. After all, he’d only attempted two questions out of seven and yet he’d got sixty-one per cent. But he knew nothing else, nothing!”

For a long time neither spoke. Fielding was standing over Smiley, exultant with the relief of sharing his secret, and Smiley was looking vaguely past him, his face drawn in deep concentration.

“And of course,” he said finally, “when Stella was murdered, you knew who had done it.”

“Yes,” replied Fielding. “I knew that Rode had killed her.”

Fielding poured himself a brandy and gave one to Smiley. He seemed to have recovered his self-control. He sat down and looked at Smiley thoughtfully for a time.

“I’ve got no money,” he said at last. “None. Nobody knows that except the Master. Oh, they know I’m more or less broke, but they don’t know how broke. Long ago I made an ass of myself. I got into trouble. It was in the war, when staff was impossible. I had a boys’ house and was practically running the school—D’Arcy and I. We were running it together, and the Master running us. Then I made an ass of myself. It was during the holidays. I was up North at the time, giving a course of talks at an RAF educational place. And I stepped out of line. Badly. They pulled me in. And along came D’Arcy wearing his country overcoat and bringing the Master’s terms: Come back to Carne, my dear fellow, and we’ll say no more about it; go on running your house, my dear fellow, and giving of your wisdom. There’s been no publicity. We know it will never happen again, my dear fellow, and we’re dreadfully hard up for staff. Come back as a temporary. So I did, and I’ve been one ever since, going cap in hand to darling D’Arcy every December asking for my contract to be renewed. And, of course—no pension. I shall have to teach at a crammer’s. There’s a place in Somerset where they’ll take me. I’m seeing their Headmaster in London on Thursday. It’s a sort of breaker’s yard for old dons. The Master had to know, because he gave me a reference.”

“That was why you couldn’t tell anyone? Because of Perkins?”

“In a way, yes. I mean they’d want to know all sorts of things. I did it for Tim, you see. The Governors wouldn’t have liked that much … inordinate affection … It looks bad, doesn’t it? But it wasn’t that kind of affection, Smiley, not any more. You never heard him play the ’cello. He wasn’t marvellous, but just sometimes he would play so beautifully, with a kind of studious simplicity, that was indescribably good. He was an awkward boy, and when he played well it was such a surprise. You should have heard him play.”

“You didn’t want to drag him into it. If you told the police what you had seen it would ruin Tim too?”

Fielding nodded. “In the whole of Carne, he was the one thing I loved.”

“Loved?” asked Smiley.

“For God’s sake,” said Fielding in an exhausted voice, “why not?”

“His parents wanted him to go to Sandhurst; I didn’t, I’m afraid. I thought that if I could keep him here another Half or two I might be able to get him a music scholarship. That’s why I made him Head of House: I wanted his parents to keep him on because he was doing so well.” Fielding paused. “He was a rotten Head of House,” he added.

“And what exactly was in the writing-case,” Smiley asked, “when you opened it that evening to look at Tim’s exam. paper?”

“A sheet of transparent plastic … it may have been one of those pack-away cape things—an old pair of gloves, and a pair of homemade galoshes.”

“Home-made?”

“Yes. Hacked from a pair of Wellington boots, I should think.”

“That’s all?”

“No. There was a length of heavy cable, I presumed for demonstrating something in his science lessons. It seemed natural enough in winter to carry waterproofs about. Then, after the murder, I realised how he had done it.”

“Did you know,” Smiley asked him, “why he had done it?”

Fielding seemed to hesitate: “Rode’s a guinea-pig,” he began, “the first man we’ve had from a grammar school. Most of us are old Carnians ourselves, in fact. Focused when we start. Rode wasn’t, and Carne thrilled him. The very name Carne means quality, and Rode loved quality. His wife wasn’t like that. She had her standards and they were different, but just as good. I used to watch Rode in the Abbey sometimes on Sunday mornings. Tutors sit at the end of pews, right by the aisle, you know. I used to watch his face as the choir processed past him in white and scarlet, and the Master in his doctor’s robes and the Governors and Guardians behind him. Rode was drunk—drunk with the pride of Carne. We’re heady wine for the grammar school men, you know. It must have hurt him terribly that Stella wouldn’t share any of that. You could see it did. The night they came to dinner with me, the night she died, they argued. I never told anyone, but they did. The Master had preached a sermon at Compline that evening: ‘Hold fast to that which is good.’ Rode talked about it at dinner; he couldn’t take much drink, you know, he wasn’t used to it. He was full of this sermon and of the eloquence of the Master. She never came to the Abbey—she went to that drab tabernacle by the station. He went on and on about the beauty of the Abbey service, the dignity, the reverence. She kept quiet till he’d finished, then laughed, and said: ‘Poor old Stan. You’ll always be Stan to me.’ I’ve never seen anyone so angry as he was then. He went quite pale.”

Fielding swept his white hair from his eyes and went on, with something like the old panache: “I’ve watched her, too, at meals. Not just here, but at dinner parties elsewhere, when we’ve both been invited. I’ve watched her do the simplest things—like eating an apple. She’d peel it in one piece, round and round till the whole peel fell off. Then she’d cut the apple and dice the quarters, getting it all ready before she ate it. She might have been a miner’s wife preparing it for her husband. She must have seen how people do things here, but it never occurred to her that she ought to copy them. I admire that. So do you, I expect. But Carne doesn’t—and Rode didn’t; above all, Rode didn’t. He’d watch her, and I think he grew to hate her for not conforming. He came to see her as the bar to his success, the one factor which would deprive him of a great career. Once he’d reached that conclusion, what could he do? He couldn’t divorce her—that would do him more harm than remaining married to her. Rode knew what Carne would think of divorce; we’re a Church foundation, remember. So he killed her. He plotted a squalid murder, and with his little scientist’s mind he gave them all the clues they wanted. Fabricated clues. Clues that would point to a murderer who didn’t exist. But something went wrong; Tim Perkins got sixty-one per cent. He’d got an impossible mark—he must have cheated. He’d had the opportunity—he’d had the papers in the case. Rode put his little mind to it and decided what had happened: Tim had opened the case and he’d seen the cape and the boots and the gloves. And the cable. So Rode killed him too.”

With surprising energy, Fielding got up and gave himself more brandy. His face was flushed, almost exultant.

Smiley stood up. “When did you say you’ll be coming to London? Thursday, wasn’t it?”

“Yes. I had arranged to lunch with my crammer man at one of those dreadful clubs in Pall Mall. I always go into the wrong one, don’t you? But I’m afraid there’s not much point in my seeing him now, is there, if all this is going to come out? Not even a crammer’s will take me then.”

Smiley hesitated.

“Come and dine with me that evening. Spend the night if you want. I’ll ask one or two other people. We’ll have a party. You’ll feel better by then. We can talk a bit. I might be able to help you … for Adrian’s sake.”

“Thank you. I should like to. Interview apart, I’ve got some odds and ends to clear up in London, anyway.”

“Good. Quarter to eight. Bywater Street, Chelsea, number 9A.” Fielding wrote it down in his diary. His hand was quite steady.

“Black tie?” asked Fielding, his pen poised, and some imp made Smiley reply:

“I usually do, but it doesn’t matter.” There was a moment’s silence.

“I suppose,” Fielding began tentatively, “that all this will come out in the trial, about Tim and me? I’ll be ruined if it does, you know, ruined.”

“I don’t see how they can prevent it.”

“I feel much better now, anyway,” said Fielding; “much.”

With a cursory good-bye, Smiley left him alone. He walked quickly back to the police station, reasonably confident that Terence Fielding was the most accomplished liar he had met for a long time.

17

RABBIT RUN

He knocked on Rigby’s door and walked straight in.

“I’m awfully afraid you’ll have to arrest Stanley Rode,” he began, and recounted his interview with Fielding.

“I shall have to tell the Chief,” said Rigby doubtfully. “Would you like to repeat all that in front of him? If we’re going to pull in a Carne master, I think the Chief had better know first. He’s just come back. Hang on a minute.” He picked up the telephone on his desk and asked for the Chief Constable. A few minutes later they were walking in silence down a carpeted corridor. On either wall hung photographs of rugby and cricket teams, some yellow and faded from the Indian sun, others done in a sepia tint much favoured by Carne photographers in the early part of the century. At intervals along the corridor stood empty buckets of brilliant red, with FIRE printed carefully in white on the outside. At the far end of the corridor was a dark oak door. Rigby knocked and waited. There was silence. He knocked again and was answered with a cry of “Come!”

Two very large spaniels watched them come in. Behind the spaniels, at an enormous desk, Brigadier Havelock, OBE, Chief Constable of Carne, sat like a water rat on a raft.

The few strands of white hair which ran laterally across his otherwise bald head were painstakingly adjusted to cover the maximum area. This gave him an oddly wet look, as if he had just emerged from the river. His moustache, which lavishly compensated for the scarcity of other hair, was yellow and appeared quite solid. He was a very small man, and he wore a brown suit and a stiff white collar with rounded corners.

“Sir,” Rigby began, “may I introduce Mr Smiley from London?”

He came out from behind his desk as if he were giving himself up, unconvinced but resigned. Then he pushed out a little, knobbly hand and said, “From London, eh? How d’you do, sir,” all at once, as if he’d learnt it by heart.

“Mr Smiley’s here on a private visit, sir,” Rigby continued. “He is an acquaintance of Mr Fielding.”

“Quite a card, Fielding, quite a card,” the Chief Constable snapped.

“Yes, indeed, sir,” said Rigby, and went on:

“Mr Smiley called on Mr Fielding just now, sir, to take his leave before returning to London.” Havelock shot a beady glance at Smiley, as if wondering whether he were fit to make the journey.

“Mr Fielding made a kind of statement, which he substantiated with new evidence of his own. About the murder, sir.”

“Well, Rigby?” he said challengingly. Smiley intervened:

“He said that the husband had done it; Stanley Rode. Fielding said that when his head boy brought him Rode’s writing-case containing the examination papers …”

“What examination papers?”

“Rode was invigilating that afternoon, you remember. He was also doing chapel duty before going on to dinner at Fielding’s house. As an expediency, he gave the papers to Perkins to take …”

“The boy who had the accident?” Havelock asked.

“Yes.”

“You know a lot about it,” said Havelock darkly.

“Fielding said that when Perkins brought him the case, Fielding opened it. He wanted to see how Perkins had done in the science paper. It was vital to the boy’s future that he should get his remove,” Smiley went on.

“Oh, work’s the only thing now,” said Havelock bitterly. “Wasn’t the way when I was a boy here, I assure you.”

“When Fielding opened the case, the papers were inside. So was a plastic cape, an old pair of leather gloves, and a pair of rubber overshoes, cut from Wellingtons.”

A pause.

“Good God! Good God! Hear that, Rigby? That’s what they found in the parcel in London. Good God!”

“Finally, there was a length of cable, heavy cable, in the case as well. It was this writing-case that Rode went back for, you remember, on the night of the murder,” Smiley concluded. It was like feeding a child—you couldn’t overload the spoon.

There was a very long silence indeed. Then Rigby, who seemed to know his man, said:

“Motive was self-advancement in the profession, sir. Mrs Rode showed no desire to improve her station, dressed in a slovenly manner and took no part in the religious life of the school.”

“Just a minute,” said Havelock. “Rode planned the murder from the start, correct?”

“Yes, sir.”

“He wanted to make it look like robbery with violence.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Having collected the writing-case, he walked back to North Fields. Then what does he do?”

“He puts on the plastic cape and hood, overshoes and gloves. He arms himself with the weapon, sir. He lets himself in by the garden gate, crosses the back garden, goes to the front door and rings the bell, sir. His wife comes to the door. He knocks her down, drags her to the conservatory and murders her. He rinses the clothes under the tap and puts them in the parcel. Having sealed the parcel, he walks down the drive this time to the front gate, following the path, sir, knowing that his own footprints will soon be obscured by other people’s. Having got to the road, where the snow was hard and showed no prints, he turned round and re-entered the house, playing the part of the distressed husband, taking care, when he discovers the body, sir, to put his own finger-prints over the glove-marks. There was one article that was too dangerous to send, sir. The weapon.”

“All right, Rigby. Pull him in. Mr Borrow will give you a warrant if you want one; otherwise I’ll ring Lord Sawley.”

“Yes, sir. And I’ll send Sergeant Low to take a full statement from Mr Fielding, sir?”

“Why the devil didn’t he speak up earlier, Rigby?”

“Have to ask him that, sir,” said Rigby woodenly, and left the room.

“You a Carnian?” Havelock asked, pushing a silver cigarette-box across the desk.

“No. No, I’m afraid not,” Smiley replied.

“How d’you know Fielding?”

“We met at Oxford after the war.”

“Queer card, Fielding, very queer. Say your name was Smiley?” “Yes.”

“There was a fellow called Smiley married Ann Sercombe, Lord Sawley’s cousin. Damned pretty girl, Ann was, and went and married this fellow. Some funny little beggar in the Civil Service with an OBE and a gold watch. Sawley was damned annoyed.” Smiley said nothing. “Sawley’s got a son at Carne. Know that?”

“I read it in the press, I think.”

“Tell me—this fellow Rode. He’s a grammar school chap, isn’t he?”

“I believe so, yes.”

“Damned odd business. Experiments never pay, do they? You can’t experiment with tradition.”

“No. No, indeed.”

“That’s the trouble today. Like Africa. Nobody seems to understand you can’t build society overnight. It takes centuries to make a gentleman.” Havelock frowned to himself and fiddled with the paper-knife on his desk.

“Wonder how he got his cable into that ditch, the thing he killed her with. He wasn’t out of our sight for forty-eight hours after the murder.”

“That,” said Smiley, “is what puzzles me. So does Jane Lyn.”

“What d’you mean?”

“I don’t believe Rode would have had the nerve to walk back to the house after killing his wife knowing that Jane Lyn had seen him do it. Assuming, of course, that he did know, which seems likely. It’s too cool … too cool altogether.”

“Odd, damned odd,” muttered Havelock. He looked at his watch, pushing his left elbow outwards to do so, in a swift equestrian movement which Smiley found comic, and a little sad. The minutes ticked by. Smiley wondered if he should leave, but he had a vague feeling that Havelock wanted his company.

“There’ll be a hell of a fuss,” said Havelock. “It isn’t every day you arrest a Carne tutor for murder.” He put down the paper-knife sharply on the desk.

“These bloody journalists ought to be horsewhipped!” he declared. “Look at the stuff they print about the Royal Family. Wicked, wicked!” He got up, crossed the room and sat himself in a leather armchair by the fire. One of the spaniels went and sat at his feet.

“What made him do it, I wonder. What the devil made him do it? His own wife, I mean; a fellow like that.” Havelock said this simply, appealing for enlightenment.

“I don’t believe,” said Smiley slowly, “that we can ever entirely know what makes anyone do anything.”

“My God, you’re dead right … What do you do for a living, Smiley?”

“After the war I was at Oxford for a bit. Teaching and research. I’m in London now.”

“One of those clever coves, eh?”

Smiley wondered when Rigby would return.

“Know anything about this fellow’s family? Has he got people, or anything?”

“I think they’re both dead,” Smiley answered, and the telephone on Havelock’s desk rang sharply. It was Rigby. Stanley Rode had disappeared.

18

AFTER THE BALL

He caught the 1.30 train to London. He just made it after an argument at his hotel about the bill. He left a note for Rigby giving his address and telephone number in London and asking him to telephone that night when the laboratory tests were completed. There was nothing else for him to do in Carne.

As the train pulled slowly out of Carne and one by one the familiar landmarks disappeared into the cold February mist, George Smiley was filled with a feeling of relief. He hadn’t wanted to come, he knew that. He’d been afraid of the place where his wife had spent her childhood, afraid to see the fields where she had lived. But he had found nothing, not the faintest memory, neither in the lifeless outlines of Sawley Castle, nor in the surrounding countryside, to remind him of her. Only the gossip remained, as it would while the Hechts and the Havelocks survived to parade their acquaintance with the first family in Carne.

He took a taxi to Chelsea, carried his suitcase upstairs and unpacked with the care of a man accustomed to living alone. He thought of having a bath, but decided to ring Ailsa Brimley first. The telephone was by his bed. He sat on the edge of the bed and dialled the number. A tinny model-voice sang: “Unipress, good afternoon,” and he asked for Miss Brimley. There was a long silence, then, “Ah’m afraid Miss Brimley is in conference. Can someone else answer your query?”

Query, thought Smiley. Good God! Why on earth query—why not question or inquiry?

“No,” he replied. “Just tell her Mr Smiley rang.” He put back the receiver and went into the bathroom and turned on the hot tap. He was fiddling with his cuff-links when the telephone rang. It was Ailsa Brimley:

“George? I think you’d better come round at once. We’ve got a visitor. Mr Rode from Carne. He wants to talk to us.” Pulling on his jacket, he ran out into the street and hailed a taxi.

19

DISPOSAL OF A LEGEND

The descending escalator was packed with the staff of Unipress, homebound and heavy-eyed. To them, the sight of a fat, middle-aged gentleman bounding up the adjoining staircase provided unexpected entertainment, so that Smiley was hastened on his way by the jeers of office-boys and the laughter of typists. On the first floor he paused to study an enormous board carrying the titles of a quarter of the national dailies. Finally, under the heading of “Technical and Miscellaneous,’ he spotted the Christian Voice, Room 619. The lift seemed to go up very slowly. Formless music issued from behind its plush, while a boy in a monkey jacket flicked his hips on the heavier beats. The golden doors parted with a sigh, the boy said “Six,” and Smiley stepped quickly into the corridor. A moment or two later he was knocking on the door of Room 619. It was opened by Ailsa Brimley.

“George, how nice,” she said brightly. “Mr Rode will be dreadfully pleased to see you.” And without any further introduction she led him into her office. In an armchair near the window sat Stanley Rode, tutor of Carne, in a neat black overcoat. As Smiley entered he stood up and held out his hand. “Good of you to come, sir,” he said woodenly. “Very.” The same flat manner, the same cautious voice.

“How can I help you?” asked Smiley.

They all sat down. Smiley offered Miss Brimley a cigarette and lit it for her.

“It’s about this article you’re writing about Stella,” he began. “I feel awful about it really, because you’ve been so good to her, and her memory, if you see what I mean. I know you wish well, but I don’t want you to write it.”

Smiley said nothing, and Ailsa was wise enough to keep quiet. From now on it was Smiley’s interview. The silence didn’t worry him, but it seemed to worry Rode.

“It wouldn’t be right; it wouldn’t do at all. Mr Glaston agreed; I spoke to him yesterday before he left and he agreed. I just couldn’t let you write that stuff.”

“Why not?”

“Too many people know, you see. Poor Mr Cardew, I asked him. He knows a lot; and a lot about Stella, so I asked him. He understands why I gave up Chapel too; I couldn’t bear to see her going there every Sunday and going down on her knees.” He shook his head. “It was all wrong. It just made a fool of your faith.”

“What did Mr Cardew say?”

“He said we should not be the judges. We should let God judge. But I said to him it wouldn’t be right, those people knowing her and knowing what she’d done, and then reading all that stuff in the Voice. They’d think it was crazy. He didn’t seem to see that, he just said to leave it to God. But I can’t, Mr Smiley.”

Again no one spoke for a time. Rode sat quite still, save for a very slight rocking movement of his head. Then he began to talk again:

“I didn’t believe old Mr Glaston at first. He said she was bad, but I didn’t believe it. They lived up on the hill then, Gorse Hill, only a step from the Tabernacle; Stella and her father. They never seemed to keep servants for long, so she did most of the work. I used to call in Sunday mornings sometimes after church. Stella looked after her father, cooked for him and everything, and I always wondered how I’d ever have the nerve to ask Mr Glaston for her. The Glastons were big people in Branxome. I was teaching at Grammar School in those days. They let me teach part-time while I read for my degree, and I made up my mind that if I passed the exam. I’d ask her to marry me.

“The Sunday after the results came out I went round to the house after morning service. Mr Glaston opened the door himself. He took me straight into the study. You could see half the potteries in Poole from the window, and the sea beyond. He sat me down and he said: ‘I know what you’re here for, Stanley. You want to marry Stella. But you don’t know her,’ he said, ‘you don’t know her.’ ‘I’ve been visiting two years, Mr Glaston,’ I said, ‘and I think I know my mind.’ Then he started talking about her. I never thought to hear a human being talk like that of his own child. He said she was bad—bad in her heart. That she was full of malice. That was why no servants would stay at the Hill. He told me how she’d lead people on, all kind and warm, till they’d told her everything, then she’d hurt them, saying wicked, wicked things, half true, half lies. He told me a lot more besides, and I didn’t believe it, not a word. I think I lost my head; I called him a jealous old man who didn’t want to lose his housekeeper, a lying, jealous old man who wanted his child to wait on him till he died. I said it was him who was bad, not Stella, and I shouted at him liar, liar. He didn’t seem to hear, just shook his head, and I ran out into the hall and called Stella. She’d been in the kitchen, I think, and she came to me and put her arms round me and kissed me.

“We were married a month later, and the old man gave her away. He shook my hand at the wedding and called me a fine man, and I thought what an old hypocrite he was. He gave us money—to me, not her—two thousand pounds. I thought perhaps he was trying to make up for the dreadful things he’d said, and later I wrote to him and said I forgave him. He never answered and I didn’t see him often after that.

“For a year or more we were happy enough at Branxome. She was just what I thought she’d be, neat and simple. She liked to go for walks and kiss at the stiles; she liked to be a bit grand sometimes, going to the Dolphin for dinner all dressed up. It meant a lot to me then, I don’t mind admitting, going to the right places with Mr Glaston’s daughter. He was Rotary and on the Council and quite a figure in Branxome. She used to tease me about it—in front of other people too, which got me a bit. I remember one time we went to the Dolphin, one of the waiters there was a bloke called Johnnie Raglan. We’d been to school together. Johnnie was a bit of a tear-about and hadn’t done anything much since he’d left school except run after girls and get into trouble. Stella knew him, I don’t know how, and she waved to him as soon as we’d sat down. Johnnie came over and Stella made him bring another chair and sit with us. The Manager looked daggers, but he didn’t dare to do anything because she was Samuel Glaston’s daughter. Johnnie stayed there all the meal and Stella talked to him about school and what I was like. Johnnie was pleased as punch and got cheeky, saying I’d been a swat and a good boy and all the rest, and how Johnnie had knocked me about—lies most of it, and she egged him on. I went for her afterwards and said I didn’t pay good money at the Dolphin to hear Johnnie Raglan tell a lot of tall stories, and she turned on me fast like a cat. It was her money, she said, and Johnnie was as good as me any day. Then she was sorry and kissed me and I pretended to forgive her.”

Sweat was forming on his face; he was talking fast, the words tripping over each other. It was like a man recalling a nightmare, as if the memory were still there, the fear only half gone. He paused and looked sharply at Smiley as if expecting him to speak, but Smiley seemed to be looking past him, his face impassive, its soft contours grown hard.

“Then we went to Carne. I’d just started reading The Times and I saw the advert. They wanted a science tutor and I applied. Mr D’Arcy interviewed me and I got the job. It wasn’t till we got to Carne that I knew that what her father had said was true. She hadn’t been very keen on Chapel before, but as soon as she got here she went in for it in a big way. She knew it would look wrong, that it would hurt me. Branxome’s a fine big church, you see; there was nothing funny about going to Branxome Tabernacle. But at Carne it was different; Carne Tabernacle’s a little out-of-the-way place with a tin roof. She wanted to be different, to spite the school and me, by playing the humble one. I wouldn’t have minded if she’d been sincere, but she wasn’t, Mr Cardew knew that. He got to know Stella, Mr Cardew did. I think her father told him; anyway, Mr Cardew was up North before, and he knew the family well. For all I know he wrote to Mr Glaston, or went and saw him or something.

“She began there well enough. The townspeople were all pleased enough to see her—a wife from the School coming to the Tabernacle, that had never happened before. Then she took to running the appeal for the refugees—to collecting clothes and all that. Miss D’Arcy was running it for the school, Mr D’Arcy’s sister, and Stella wanted to beat her at her own game—to get more from the Chapel people than Miss D’Arcy got from the School. But I knew what she was doing, and so did Mr Cardew, and so did the townspeople in the end. She listened. Every drop of gossip and dirt, she hoarded it away. She’d come home of an evening sometimes—Wednesdays and Fridays she did her Chapel work—and she’d throw off her coat and laugh till I thought she’d gone mad.

“‘I’ve got them! I’ve got them all,’ she’d say, ‘I know all their little secrets and I’ve got them in the hollow of my hand, Stan.’ That’s what she’d say. And those that realised grew to be frightened of her. They all gossiped, Heaven knows, but not to profit from it, not like Stella. Stella was cunning; anything decent, anything good, she’d drag it down and spoil it. There were a dozen she’d got the measure of. There was Mulligan the furniture man; he’s got a daughter with a kid near Leamington. Somehow she found out the girl wasn’t married—they’d sent her to an aunt to have her baby and begin again up there. She rang up Mulligan once, something to do with a bill for moving Simon Snow’s furniture, and she said ‘Greetings from Leamington Spa, Mr Mulligan. We need a little co-operation.’ She told me that—she came home laughing her head off and told me. But they got her in the end, didn’t they? They got their own back!”

Smiley nodded slowly, his eyes now turned fully upon Rode.

“Yes,” he said at last, “they got their own back.”

“They thought Mad Janie did it, but I didn’t. Janie’d as soon have killed her own sister as Stella. They were as close as moon and stars, that’s what Stella said. They’d talk together for hours in the evenings when I was out late on Societies or Extra Tuition. Stella cooked food for her, gave her clothes and money. It gave her a feeling of power to help a creature like Janie, and have her fawning round. Not because she was kind, but because she was cruel.

“She’d brought a little dog with her from Branxome, a mongrel. One day a few months ago I came home and found it lying in the garage whimpering, terrified. It was limping and had blood on its back. She’d beaten it. She must have gone mad. I knew she’d beaten it before, but never like that; never. Then something happened— I shouted at her and she laughed and then I hit her. Not hard, but hard enough. In the face. I gave her twenty-four hours to have the dog destroyed or I’d tell the police. She screamed at me—it was her dog and she’d damn well do what she liked with it—but next day she put on her little black hat and took the dog to the vet. I suppose she told him some tale. She could spin a good tale about anything, Stella could. She kind of stepped into a part and played it right through. Like the tale she told the Hungarians. Miss D’Arcy had some refugees to stay from London once and Stella told them such a tale they ran away and had to be taken back to London. Miss D’Arcy paid for their fares and everything, even had the welfare officer down to see them and try and put things right. I don’t think Miss D’Arcy ever knew who’d got at them, but I did—Stella told me. She laughed, always that same laugh: ‘There’s your fine lady, Stan. Look at her charity now.’

“After the dog, she took to pretending I was violent, cringing away whenever I came near, holding her arm up as though I was going to hit her again. She even made out I was plotting to murder her: she went and told Mr Cardew I was. She didn’t believe it herself; she’d laugh about it sometimes. She said to me: ‘It’s no good killing me now, Stan; they’ll all know who’s done it.’ But other times she’d whine and stroke me, begging me not to kill her. ‘You’ll kill me in the long nights!’ She’d scream it out—it was the words that got her, the long nights, she liked the sound of them the way an actor does, and she’d build a whole story round them. ‘Oh, Stan,’ she’d say, ‘keep me safe in the long nights.’ You know how it is when you never meant to do anything anyway, and someone goes on begging you not to do it? You think you might do it after all, you begin to consider the possibility.”

Miss Brimley drew in her breath rather quickly. Smiley stood up and walked over to Rode.

“Why don’t we go back to my house for some food?” he said. “We can talk this over quietly. Among friends.”

They took a taxi to Bywater Street. Rode sat beside Ailsa Brimley, more relaxed now, and Smiley, opposite him on a drop-seat, watched him and wondered. And it occurred to him that the most important thing about Rode was that he had no friends. Smiley was reminded of Büchner’s fairy tale of the child left alone in an empty world who, finding no one to talk to, went to the moon because it smiled at him, but the moon was made of rotten wood. And when the sun and moon and stars had all turned to nothing, he tried to go back to the earth, but it had gone.

Perhaps because Smiley was tired, or perhaps because he was getting a little old, he felt a movement of sudden compassion towards Rode, such as children feel for the poor and parents for their children. Rode had tried so hard—he had used Carne’s language, bought the right clothes, and thought as best he could the right thoughts, yet remained hopelessly apart, hopelessly alone.

He lit the gas-fire in the drawing-room while Ailsa Brimley went to the delicatessen in the King’s Road for soup and eggs. He poured out whisky and soda and gave one to Rode, who drank it in short sips, without speaking.

“I had to tell somebody,” he said at last. “I thought you’d be a good person. I didn’t want you to print that article, though. Too many knew, you see.”

“How many really knew?”

“Only those she’d gone for, I think. I suppose about a dozen townspeople. And Mr Cardew, of course. She was terribly cunning, you see. She didn’t often pass on gossip. She knew to a hair how far she could go. Those who knew were the ones she’d got on the hook. Oh, and D’Arcy, Felix D’Arcy, he knew. She had something special there, something she never told me about. There were nights when she’d put on her shawl and slip out, all excited as if she was going to a party. Quite late sometimes, eleven or twelve. I’d never ask her where she was going because it only bucked her, but sometimes she’d nod at me all cunning and say, ‘You don’t know, Stan, but D’Arcy does. D’Arcy knows and he can’t tell,’ and then she’d laugh again and try and look mysterious, and off she’d go.”

Smiley was silent for a long time, watching Rode and thinking. Then he asked suddenly: “What was Stella’s blood group, do you know?”

“Mine’s B. I know that. I was a donor at Branxome. Hers was different.”

“How do you know that?”

“She had a test before we were married. She used to suffer from anaemia. I remember hers being different, that’s all. Probably A. I can’t remember for sure. Why?”

“Where were you registered as a donor?”

“North Poole Transfusion Centre.”

“Will they know you there still? Are you still recorded there?”

“I suppose so.”

The front door bell rang. It was Ailsa Brimley, back from her shopping.

Ailsa installed herself in the kitchen, while Rode and Smiley sat in the warm comfort of the drawing-room.

“Tell me something else,” said Smiley, “about the night of the murder. Why did you leave the writing-case behind? Was it absent-mindedness?”

“No, not really. I was on Chapel duty that night, so Stella and I arrived separately at Fielding’s house. She got there before I did and I think Fielding gave the case to her—right at the start of the evening so that it wouldn’t get forgotten. He said something about it later that evening. She’d put the case beside her coat in the hall. It was only a little thing about eighteen inches by twelve. I could have sworn she was carrying it as we stood in the hall saying good-bye, but I must have been mistaken. It wasn’t till we got to the house that she asked me what I’d done with it.”

“She asked you what you’d done with it?”

“Yes. Then she threw a temper and said I expected her to remember everything. I didn’t particularly want to go back, I could have rung Fielding and arranged to collect it first thing next morning, but Stella wouldn’t hear of it. She made me go. I didn’t like to tell the police all this stuff about us quarrelling, it didn’t seem right.”

Smiley nodded. “When you got back to Fielding’s you rang the bell?”

“Yes. There’s the front door, then a glass door inside, a sort of french window to keep out draughts. The front door was still open, and the light was on in the hall. I rang the bell and collected the case from Fielding.”

They had finished supper when the telephone rang.

“Rigby here, Mr Smiley. I’ve got the laboratory results. They’re rather puzzling.”

“The exam. paper first: it doesn’t tally?”

“No, it doesn’t. The boffins here say all the figures and writing were done with the same ballpoint pen. They can’t be sure about the diagrams but they say the legend on all the diagrams corresponds to the rest of the script on the sheet.”

“All done by the boy after all in fact?”

“Yes. I brought up some other samples of his handwriting for comparison. They match the exam. paper right the way through. Fielding couldn’t have tinkered with it.”

“Good. And the clothing? Nothing there either?”

“Traces of blood, that’s all. No prints on the plastic.”

“What was her blood group, by the way?”

“Group A.”

Smiley sat down on the edge of the bed. Pressing the receiver to his ear, he began talking quietly. Ten minutes later he was walking slowly downstairs. He had come to the end of the chase, and was already sickened by the kill.

It was nearly an hour before Rigby arrived.

20

THE DROSS OF THE RIVER

Albert Bridge was as preposterous as ever; bony steel, rising to Wagnerian pinnacles, against the patient London sky; the Thames crawling beneath it with resignation, edging its filth into the wharves of Battersea, then sliding towards the mist down river.

The mist was thick. Smiley watched the driftwood, as it touched it, turning first to white dust, then seeming to lift, dissolve and vanish.

This was how it would end, on a foul morning like this when they dragged the murderer whimpering from his cell and put the hempen rope round his neck. Would Smiley have the courage to recall this two months from now, as the dawn broke outside his window and the clock rang out the time? When they broke a man’s neck on the scaffold and put him away like the dross of the river?

He made his way along Beaumont Street towards the King’s Road. The milkman chugged past him in his electric van. He would breakfast out this morning, then take a cab to Curzon Street and order the wine for dinner. He would choose something good. Fielding would like that.

Fielding closed his eyes and drank, his left hand held lightly across his chest.

“Divine,” he said, “divine!” And Ailsa Brimley, opposite him, smiled gently.

“How are you going to spend your retirement, Mr Fielding?” she asked. “Drinking Frankenwein?”

His glass still held before his lips, he looked into the candles. The silver was good, better than his own. He wondered why they were only dining three. “In peace,” he replied at last. “I have recently made a discovery.”

“What’s that?”

“That I have been playing to an empty house. But now I’m comforted to think that no one remembers how I forgot my words or missed an entry. So many of us wait patiently for our audience to die. At Carne no one will remember for more than a Half or two what a mess I’ve made of life. I was too vain to realise that until recently.” He put the glass down in front of him and smiled suddenly at Ailsa Brimley. “That is the peace I mean. Not to exist in anyone’s mind, but my own; to be a secular monk, safe and forgotten.”

Smiley gave him more wine: “Miss Brimley knew your brother Adrian well in the war. We were all in the same department,” he said. “She was Adrian’s secretary for a while. Weren’t you, Brim?”

“It’s depressing how the bad live on,” Fielding declared. “Rather embarrassing. For the bad, I mean.” He gave a little gastronomic sigh. “The moment of truth in a good meal! Übergangsperiode between entremets and dessert,” and they all laughed, and then were silent. Smiley put down his glass, and said:

“The story you told me on Thursday, when I came and saw you …”

“Well?” Fielding was irritated.

“About cheating for Tim Perkins … how you took the paper from the case and altered it …”

“Yes?”

“It isn’t true.” He might have been talking about the weather. “They’ve examined it and it isn’t true. The writing was all one person’s … the boy’s. If anyone cheated, it must have been the boy.”

There was a long silence. Fielding shrugged.

“My dear fellow, you can’t expect me to believe that. These people are practically moronic.”

“Of course, it doesn’t necessarily signify anything. I mean you could be protecting the boy, couldn’t you? By lying for him, for his honour so to speak. Is that the explanation?”

“I’ve told you the truth,” he replied shortly. “Make what you want of it.”

“I mean, I can see a situation where there might have been collusion, where you were moved by the boy’s distress when he brought you the papers; and on the spur of the moment you opened the case and took out his paper and told him what to write.”

“Look here,” said Fielding hotly, “why don’t you keep off this? What’s it got to do with you?” And Smiley replied with sudden fervour:

“I’m trying to help, Fielding. I beg you to believe me, I’m trying to help. For Adrian’s sake. I don’t want there to be … more trouble than there need, more pain. I want to get it straight before Rigby comes. They’ve dropped the charge against Janie. You know that, don’t you? They seem to think it’s Rode, but they haven’t pulled him in. They could have done, but they haven’t. They just took more statements from him. So you see, it matters terribly about the writing-case. Everything hangs by whether you really saw inside it; and whether Perkins did. Don’t you see that? If it was Perkins who cheated after all, if it was only the boy who opened the case and not you, then they’ll want to know the answer to a very important question: they’ll want to know how you knew what was inside it.”

“What are you trying to say?”

“They’re not really moronic, you know. Let’s start from the other end for a moment. Suppose it was you who killed Stella Rode, suppose you had a reason, a terribly good reason, and they knew what that reason might be; suppose you went ahead of Rode after giving him the case that night—by bicycle, for instance, like Janie said, riding on the wind. If that were really so, none of those things you saw would have been in the case at all. You could have made it up. And when later the exam. results came out and you realised that Perkins had cheated, then you guessed he had seen inside the case, had seen that it contained nothing, nothing but exam. papers. I mean that would explain why you had to kill the boy.” He stopped and glanced towards Fielding. “And in a way,” he added almost reluctantly, “it makes better sense, doesn’t it?”

“And what, may I ask, was the reason you speak of?”

“Perhaps she blackmailed you. She certainly knew about your conviction in the war from when she was up North. Her father was a magistrate, wasn’t he? I understand they’ve looked up the files. The police, I mean. It was her father who heard the case. She knew you’re broke and need another job and she kept you on a hook. It seems D’Arcy knew too. She told him. She’d nothing to lose; he was in on the story from the start, he’d never allow the papers to get hold of it; she knew that, she knew her man. Did you tell D’Arcy as well, Fielding? I think you may have done. When she came to you and told you she knew, jeered and laughed at you, you went to D’Arcy and told him. You asked him what to do. And he said—what would he say?—perhaps he said find out what she wants. But she wanted nothing; not money at least, but something more pleasing, more gratifying to her twisted little mind: she wanted to command and own you. She loved to conspire, she summoned you to meetings at absurd times and places; in woods, in disused churches, and above all at night. And she wanted nothing from you but your will, she made you listen to her boasts and her mad intrigues, made you fawn and cringe, then let you run away till the next time.” He looked up again. “They might think along those lines, you see. That’s why we need to know who saw inside the case. And who cheated in the exam.” They were both looking at him, Ailsa in horror, Fielding motionless, impassive.

“If they think that,” asked Fielding at last, “how do they suppose I knew Rode would come back for the case that night?”

“Oh, they knew she was expecting you to meet her that night, after the dinner at your house.” Smiley threw this off as if it were a tedious detail, “It was part of the game she liked to play.”

“How do they know that?”

“From what Rode says,” Smiley continued, “Stella was carrying the case in the hall, actually had it in her hand. When they arrived at North Fields she was without it; she flew into a rage and accused him of forgetting it. She made him go back for it. You see the inference?”

“Oh, clearly,” said Fielding, and Smiley heard Ailsa Brimley whisper his name in horror.

“In other words, when Stella devised this trick to gratify her twisted will, you saw it as an opportunity to kill her, putting the blame on a non-existent tramp, or, failing that, on Rode, as a second line of defence. Let us suppose you had been meaning to kill her. You had meant, I expect, to ride out there one night when Rode was teaching late. You had your boots and your cape, even the cable stolen from Rode’s room, and you meant to lay a false trail. But what a golden opportunity when Perkins turned up with the hand-case! Stella wanted her meeting—the forgotten hand-case was agreed upon as the means of achieving it. That, I fear, is the way their minds may work. And you see, they know it wasn’t Rode.”

“How do they know? How can they know? He’s got no alibi.” Smiley didn’t seem to hear. He was looking towards the window, and the heavy velvet curtains stirring uneasily.

“What’s that? What are you looking at?” Fielding asked with sudden urgency, but Smiley did not answer.

“You know, Fielding,” he said at last, “we just don’t know what people are like, we can never tell; there isn’t any truth about human beings, no formula that meets each one of us. And there are some of us—aren’t there?—who are nothing, who are so labile that we astound ourselves; we’re the chameleons. I read a story once about a poet who bathed himself in cold fountains so that he could recognise his own existence in the contrast. He had to reassure himself, you see, like a child being hateful to its parents. You might say he had to make the sun shine on him so that he could see his shadow and feel alive.”

Fielding made an impatient movement with his hand. “How do you know it wasn’t Rode?”

“The people who are like that—there really are some, Fielding— do you know their secret? They can’t feel anything inside them, no pleasure or pain, no love or hate; they’re ashamed and frightened that they can’t feel. And their shame, this shame, Fielding, drives them to extravagance and colour; they must make themselves feel that cold water, and without that they’re nothing. The world sees them as showmen, fantasists, liars, as sensualists perhaps, not for what they are: the living dead.”

“How do you know? How do you know it wasn’t Rode?” Fielding cried with anger in his voice, and Smiley replied: “I’ll tell you.”

“If Rode murdered his wife, he had planned to do so long ago. The plastic cape, the boots, the weapon, the intricate timing, the use of Perkins to carry the case to your house—these are evidence of long premeditation. Of course one could ask: if that’s so, why did he bother with Perkins at all—why didn’t he keep the case with him all the time? But never mind. Let’s see how he does it. He walks home with his wife after dinner, having deliberately forgotten the writing-case. Having left Stella at home, he returns to your house to collect it. It was a risky business, incidentally, leaving that case behind. Quite apart from the fact that one would expect him to have locked it, his wife might have noticed he hadn’t got it as they left—or you might have noticed, or Miss Truebody—but luckily no one did. He collects the case, hurries back, kills her, fabricating the clues which mislead the police. He thrusts the cape, boots and gloves into the refugees’ parcel, ties it up and prepares to make good his escape. He is alarmed by Mad Janie, perhaps, but reaches the lane and re-enters the house as Stanley Rode. Five minutes later he is with the D’Arcys. From then on for the next forty-eight hours he is under constant supervision. Perhaps you didn’t know this, Fielding, but the police found the murder weapon four miles down the road in a ditch. They found it within ten hours of the murder being discovered, long before Rode had a chance to throw it there.

“This is the point, though, Fielding. This is what they can’t get over. I suppose it would be possible to make a phoney murder weapon. Rode could have taken hairs from Stella’s comb, stuck them with human blood to a length of coaxial cable and planted the thing in a ditch before he committed the murder. But the only blood he could use was his own—which belongs to a different blood group. The blood on the weapon they found belonged to Stella’s blood group. He didn’t do it. There’s a rather more concrete piece of evidence, to do with the parcel. Rigby had a word with Miss Truebody yesterday. It seems she telephoned Stella Rode on the morning of the day she was murdered. Telephoned at your request, Fielding, to say a boy would be bringing some old clothes up to North Fields on Thursday morning—would she be sure to keep the parcel open till then? … What did Stella threaten to do, Fielding? Write an anonymous letter to your next school?”

Then Smiley put his hand on Fielding’s arm and said: “Go now, in God’s name go now. There’s very little time, for Adrian’s sake go now,” and Ailsa Brimley whispered something he could not hear.

Fielding seemed not to hear. His great head was thrown back, his eyes half closed, his wine glass still held between his thick fingers.

And the front-door bell rang out, like the scream of a woman in an empty house.

Smiley never knew what made the noise, whether it was Fielding’s hands on the table as he stood up, or his chair, falling backwards. Perhaps it was not a noise at all, but simply the shock of violent movement when it was least expected; the sight of Fielding, who a moment before had sat lethargic in his chair, springing forward across the room. Then Rigby was holding him, had taken Fielding’s right arm and done something to it so that Fielding cried out in pain and fear, swinging round to face them under the compulsion of Rigby’s grip. Then Rigby was saying the words, and Fielding’s terrified gaze fell upon Smiley.

“Stop him, stop him, Smiley, for God’s sake! They’ll hang me.” And he shouted the last two words again and again: “Hang me, hang me,” until the detectives came in from the street, and shoved him without ceremony into a waiting car.

Smiley watched the car go. It didn’t hurry, just picked its way down the wet street and disappeared. He remained there long after it had gone, looking towards the end of the road, so that passers-by stared oddly at him, or tried to follow his gaze. But there was nothing to see. Only the half-lit street, and the shadows moving along it.

CALL FOR

THE DEAD

1

A BRIEF HISTORY OF GEORGE SMILEY

When Lady Ann Sercomb married George Smiley towards the end of the war she described him to her astonished Mayfair friends as breathtakingly ordinary. When she left him two years later in favour of a Cuban motor racing driver, she announced enigmatically that if she hadn’t left him then, she never could have done; and Viscount Sawley made a special journey to his club to observe that the cat was out of the bag.

This remark, which enjoyed a brief season as a mot, can only be understood by those who knew Smiley. Short, fat, and of a quiet disposition, he appeared to spend a lot of money on really bad clothes, which hung about his squat frame like skin on a shrunken toad. Sawley, in fact, declared at the wedding that “Sercomb was mated to a bullfrog in a sou’wester.” And Smiley, unaware of this description, had waddled down the aisle in search of the kiss that would turn him into a Prince.

Was he rich or poor, peasant or priest? Where had she got him from? The incongruity of the match was emphasized by Lady Ann’s undoubted beauty, its mystery stimulated by the disproportion between the man and his bride. But gossip must see its characters in black and white, equip them with sins and motives easily conveyed in the shorthand of conversation. And so Smiley, without school, parents, regiment or trade, without wealth or poverty, travelled without labels in the guard’s van of the social express, and soon became lost luggage, destined, when the divorce had come and gone, to remain unclaimed on the dusty shelf of yesterday’s news.

When Lady Ann followed her star to Cuba, she gave some thought to Smiley. With grudging admiration she admitted to herself that if there were an only man in her life, Smiley would be he. She was gratified in retrospect that she had demonstrated this by holy matrimony.

The effect of Lady Ann’s departure upon her former husband did not interest society—which indeed is unconcerned with the aftermath of sensation. Yet it would be interesting to know what Sawley and his flock might have made of Smiley’s reaction; of that fleshy, bespectacled face puckered in energetic concentration as he read so deeply among the lesser German poets, the chubby wet hands clenched beneath the tumbling sleeves. But Sawley profited by the occasion with the merest of shrugs by remarking partir c’est courir un peu, and he appeared to be unaware that though Lady Ann just ran away, a little of George Smiley had indeed died.

That part of Smiley which survived was as incongruous to his appearance as love, or a taste for unrecognized poets: it was his profession, which was that of intelligence officer. It was a profession he enjoyed, and which mercifully provided him with colleagues equally obscure in character and origin. It also provided him with what he had once loved best in life: academic excursions into the mystery of human behaviour, disciplined by the practical application of his own deductions.

Some time in the twenties when Smiley had emerged from his unimpressive school and lumbered blinking into the murky cloisters of his unimpressive Oxford College, he had dreamt of Fellowships and a life devoted to the literary obscurities of seventeenth-century Germany. But his own tutor, who knew Smiley better, guided him wisely away from the honours that would undoubtedly have been his. On a sweet July morning in 1928, a puzzled and rather pink Smiley had sat before an interviewing board of the Overseas Committee for Academic Research, an organization of which he had unaccountably never heard. Jebedee (his tutor) had been oddly vague about the introduction: “Give these people a try, Smiley, they might have you and they pay badly enough to guarantee you decent company.” But Smiley was annoyed and said so. It worried him that Jebedee, usually so precise, was so evasive. In a slight huff he agreed to postpone his reply to All Souls until he had seen Jebedee’s “mysterious people.”

He wasn’t introduced to the Board, but he knew half of its members by sight. There was Fielding, the French medievalist from Cambridge, Sparke from the School of Oriental Languages, and Steed-Asprey who had been dining at High Table the night Smiley had been Jebedee’s guest. He had to admit he was impressed. For Fielding to leave his rooms, let alone Cambridge, was in itself a miracle. Afterwards Smiley always thought of that interview as a fan dance; a calculated progression of disclosures, each revealing different parts of a mysterious entity. Finally Steed-Asprey, who seemed to be Chairman, removed the last veil, and the truth stood before him in all its dazzling nakedness. He was being offered a post in what, for want of a better name, Steed-Asprey blushingly described as the Secret Service.

Smiley had asked for time to think. They gave him a week. No one mentioned pay.

That night he stayed in London at somewhere rather good and took himself to the theatre. He felt strangely light-headed and this worried him. He knew very well that he would accept, that he could have done so at the interview. It was only an instinctive caution, and perhaps a pardonable desire to play the coquette with Fielding, which prevented him from doing so.

Following his affirmation came training: anonymous country houses, anonymous instructors, a good deal of travel and, looming ever larger, the fantastic prospect of working completely alone.

His first operational posting was relatively pleasant: a two-year appointment as englischer Dozent at a provincial German university: lectures on Keats and vacations in Bavarian hunting lodges with groups of earnest and solemnly promiscuous German students. Towards the end of each long vacation he brought some of them back to England, having already earmarked the likely ones and conveyed his recommendations by clandestine means to an address in Bonn; during the entire two years he had no idea of whether his recommendations had been accepted or ignored. He had no means of knowing even whether his candidates were approached. Indeed he had no means of knowing whether his messages ever reached their destination; and he had no contact with the Department while in England.

His emotions in performing this work were mixed, and irreconcilable. It intrigued him to evaluate from a detached position what he had learnt to describe as “the agent potential” of a human being; to devise minuscule tests of character and behaviour which could inform him of the qualities of a candidate. This part of him was bloodless and inhuman—Smiley in this role was the international mercenary of his trade, amoral and without motive beyond that of personal gratification.

Conversely it saddened him to witness in himself the gradual death of natural pleasure. Always withdrawn, he now found himself shrinking from the temptations of friendship and human loyalty; he guarded himself warily from spontaneous reaction. By the strength of his intellect, he forced himself to observe humanity with clinical objectivity, and because he was neither immortal nor infallible he hated and feared the falseness of his life.

But Smiley was a sentimental man and the long exile strengthened his deep love of England. He fed hungrily on memories of Oxford; its beauty, its rational ease, and the mature slowness of its judgements. He dreamt of windswept autumn holidays at Hartland Quay, of long trudges over the Cornish cliffs, his face smooth and hot against the sea wind. This was his other secret life, and he grew to hate the bawdy intrusion of the new Germany, the stamping and shouting of uniformed students, the scarred, arrogant faces and their cheapjack answers. He resented, too, the way in which the Faculty had tampered with his subject—his beloved German literature. And there had been a night, a terrible night in the winter of 1937, when Smiley had stood at his window and watched a great bonfire in the university court: round it stood hundreds of students, their faces exultant and glistening in the dancing light. And into the pagan fire they threw books in their hundreds. He knew whose books they were: Thomas Mann, Heine, Lessing and a host of others. And Smiley, his damp hand cupped round the end of his cigarette, watching and hating, triumphed that he knew his enemy.

Nineteen thirty-nine saw him in Sweden, the accredited agent of a well-known Swiss small-arms manufacturer, his association with the firm conveniently backdated. Conveniently, too, his appearance had somehow altered, for Smiley had discovered in himself a talent for the part which went beyond the rudimentary change to his hair and the addition of a small moustache. For four years he had played the part, travelling back and forth between Switzerland, Germany and Sweden. He had never guessed it was possible to be frightened for so long. He developed a nervous irritation in his left eye which remained with him fifteen years later; the strain etched lines on his fleshy cheeks and brow. He learnt what it was never to sleep, never to relax, to feel at any time of day or night the restless beating of his own heart, to know the extremes of solitude and self-pity, the sudden unreasoning desire for a woman, for drink, for exercise, for any drug to take away the tension of his life.

Against this background he conducted his authentic commerce and his work as a spy. With the progress of time the network grew, and other countries repaired their lack of foresight and preparation. In 1943 he was recalled. Within six weeks he was yearning to return, but they never let him go.

“You’re finished,” Steed-Asprey said: “train new men, take time off. Get married or something. Unwind.”

Smiley proposed to Steed-Asprey’s secretary, the Lady Ann Sercomb.

The war was over. They paid him off, and he took his beautiful wife to Oxford to devote himself to the obscurities of seventeenth-century Germany. But two years later Lady Ann was in Cuba, and the revelations of a young Russian cypher-clerk in Ottawa had created a new demand for men of Smiley’s experience.

The job was new, the threat elusive and at first he enjoyed it. But younger men were coming in, perhaps with fresher minds. Smiley was no material for promotion and it dawned on him gradually that he had entered middle age without ever being young, and that he was—in the nicest possible way—on the shelf.

Things changed. Steed-Asprey was gone, fled from the new world to India, in search of another civilization. Jebedee was dead. He had boarded a train at Lille in 1941 with his radio operator, a young Belgian, and neither had been heard of again. Fielding was wedded to a new thesis on Roland—only Maston remained, Maston the career man, the war-time recruit, the Ministers’ Adviser on Intelligence; “the first man,” Jebedee had said, “to play power tennis at Wimbledon.” The NATO alliance, and the desperate measures contemplated by the Americans, altered the whole nature of Smiley’s Service. Gone for ever were the days of Steed-Asprey, when as like as not you took your orders over a glass of port in his rooms at Magdalen; the inspired amateurism of a handful of highly qualified, under-paid men had given way to the efficiency, bureaucracy and intrigue of a large Government department—effectively at the mercy of Maston, with his expensive clothes and his knighthood, his distinguished grey hair and silver-coloured ties; Maston, who even remembered his secretary’s birthday, whose manners were a by-word among the ladies of the registry; Maston, apologetically extending his empire and regretfully moving to even larger offices; Maston, holding smart house-parties at Henley and feeding on the success of his subordinates.

They had brought him in during the war, the professional civil servant from an orthodox department, a man to handle paper and integrate the brilliance of his staff with the cumbersome machine of bureaucracy. It comforted the Great to deal with a man they knew, a man who could reduce any colour to grey, who knew his masters and could walk among them. And he did it so well. They liked his diffidence when he apologized for the company he kept, his insincerity when he defended the vagaries of his subordinates, his flexibility when formulating new commitments. Nor did he let go the advantages of a cloak and dagger man malgré lui, wearing the cloak for his masters and preserving the dagger for his servants. Ostensibly, his position was an odd one. He was not the nominal Head of Service, but the Ministers’ Adviser on Intelligence, and Steed-Asprey had described him for all time as the Head Eunuch.

This was a new world for Smiley: the brilliantly lit corridors, the smart young men. He felt pedestrian and old-fashioned, homesick for the dilapidated terrace house in Knightsbridge where it had all begun. His appearance seemed to reflect this discomfort in a kind of physical recession which made him more hunched and frog-like than ever. He blinked more, and acquired the nickname of “Mole.” But his débutante secretary adored him, and referred to him invariably as “My darling teddy-bear.”

Smiley was now too old to go abroad. Maston had made that clear: “Anyway, my dear fellow, as like as not you’re blown after all the ferreting about in the war. Better stick at home, old man, and keep the home fires burning.”

Which goes some way to explaining why George Smiley sat in the back of a London taxi at two o’clock on the morning of Wednesday, 4 January, on his way to Cambridge Circus.

2

WE NEVER CLOSED

He felt safe in the taxi. Safe and warm. The warmth was contraband, smuggled from his bed and hoarded against the wet January night. Safe because unreal: it was his ghost that ranged the London streets and took note of their unhappy pleasure-seekers, scuttling under commissionaires’ umbrellas; and of the tarts, gift-wrapped in polythene. It was his ghost, he decided, which had climbed from the well of sleep and stopped the telephone shrieking on the bedside table … Oxford Street … why was London the only capital in the world that lost its personality at night? Smiley, as he pulled his coat more closely about him, could think of nowhere, from Los Angeles to Berne, which so readily gave up its daily struggle for identity.

The cab turned into Cambridge Circus, and Smiley sat up with a jolt. He remembered why the Duty Officer had rung, and the memory woke him brutally from his dreams. The conversation came back to him word for word—a feat of recollection long ago achieved.

“Duty Officer speaking, Smiley. I have the Adviser on the line …”

“Smiley; Maston speaking. You interviewed Samuel Arthur Fennan at the Foreign Office on Monday, am I right?”

“Yes … yes I did.”

“What was the case?”

“Anonymous letter alleging Party membership at Oxford. Routine interview, authorized by the Director of Security.”

(Fennan can’t have complained, thought Smiley; he knew I’d clear him. There was nothing irregular, nothing.)

“Did you go for him at all? Was it hostile, Smiley, tell me that?”

(Lord, he does sound frightened. Fennan must have put the whole Cabinet on to us.)

“No. It was a particularly friendly interview; we liked one another, I think. As a matter of fact I exceeded my brief in a way.”

“How, Smiley, how?”

“Well, I more or less told him not to worry.”

“You what?”

“I told him not to worry; he was obviously in a bit of a state, and so I told him.”

“What did you tell him?”

“I said I had no powers and nor had the Service; but I could see no reason why we should bother him further.”

“Is that all?”

Smiley paused for a second; he had never known Maston like this, never known him so dependent.

“Yes, that’s all. Absolutely all.” (He’ll never forgive me for this. So much for the studied calm, the cream shirts and silver ties, the smart luncheons with Ministers.)

“He says you cast doubts on his loyalty, that his career in the FO is ruined, that he is the victim of paid informers.”

“He said what? He must have gone stark mad. He knows he’s cleared. What else does he want?”

“Nothing. He’s dead. Killed himself at ten-thirty this evening. Left a letter to the Foreign Secretary. The police rang one of his secretaries and got permission to open the letter. Then they told us. There’s going to be an inquiry. Smiley, you’re sure, aren’t you?”

“Sure of what?”

“… never mind. Get round as soon as you can.”

It had taken him hours to get a taxi. He rang three cab ranks and got no reply. At last the Sloane Square rank replied, and Smiley waited at his bedroom window wrapped in his overcoat until he saw the cab draw up at the door. It reminded him of the air raids in Germany, this unreal anxiety in the dead of night.

At Cambridge Circus he stopped the cab a hundred yards from the office, partly from habit and partly to clear his head in anticipation of Maston’s febrile questioning.

He showed his pass to the constable on duty and made his way slowly to the lift.

The Duty Officer greeted him with relief as he emerged, and they walked together down the bright cream corridor.

“Maston’s gone to see Sparrow at Scotland Yard. There’s a squabble going on about which police department handles the case. Sparrow says Special Branch, Evelyn says CID and the Surrey police don’t know what’s hit them. Bad as a will. Come and have coffee in the DO’s glory hole. It’s out of a bottle but it does.”

Smiley was grateful it was Peter Guillam’s duty that night. A polished and thoughtful man who had specialized in satellite espionage, the kind of friendly spirit who always has a timetable and a penknife.

“Special Branch rang at twelve five. Fennan’s wife went to the theatre and didn’t find him till she got back alone at quarter to eleven. She eventually rang the police.”

“He lived down in Surrey somewhere.”

“Walliston, off the Kingston by-pass. Only just outside the Metropolitan area. When the police arrived they found a letter to the Foreign Secretary on the floor beside the body. The Superintendent rang the Chief Constable, who rang the Duty Officer at the Home Office, who rang the Resident Clerk at the Foreign Office, and eventually they got permission to open the letter. Then the fun started.”

“Go on.”

“The Director of Personnel at the Foreign Office rang us. He wanted the Adviser’s home number. Said this was the last time Security tampered with his staff, that Fennan had been a loyal and talented officer, blah … blah … blah …”

“So he was. So he was.”

“Said the whole affair demonstrated conclusively that Security had got out of hand—Gestapo methods which were not even mitigated by a genuine threat … blah …

“I gave him the Adviser’s number and dialled it on the other phone while he went on raving. By a stroke of genius I got the FO off one line and Maston on the other and gave him the news. That was at twelve twenty. Maston was here by one o’clock in a state of advanced pregnancy—he’ll have to report to the Minister tomorrow morning.”

They were silent for a moment, while Guillam poured coffee essence into the cups and added boiling water from the electric kettle.

“What was he like?” he asked.

“Who? Fennan? Well, until tonight I could have told you. Now he doesn’t make sense. To look at, obviously a Jew. Orthodox family, but dropped all that at Oxford and turned Marxist. Perceptive, cultured … a reasonable man. Soft spoken, good listener. Still educated; you know, facts galore. Whoever denounced him was right of course: he was in the Party.”

“How old?”

“Forty-four. Looks older really.” Smiley went on talking as his eyes wandered round the room. “ … sensitive face—mop of straight dark hair undergraduate fashion, profile of a twenty-year-old, fine dry skin, rather chalky. Very lined too—lines going all ways, cutting the skin into squares. Very thin fingers … compact sort of chap; self-contained unit. Takes his pleasures alone. Suffered alone too, I suppose.”

They got up as Maston came in.

“Ah, Smiley. Come in.” He opened the door and put out his left arm to guide Smiley through first. Maston’s room contained not a single piece of Government property. He had once bought a collection of nineteenth-century watercolours, and some of these were hanging on the walls. The rest was off the peg, Smiley decided. Maston was off the peg too, for that matter. His suit was just too light for respectability; the string of his monocle cut across the invariable cream shirt. He wore a light grey woollen tie. A German would call him flott, thought Smiley; chic, that’s what he is—a barmaid’s dream of a real gentleman.

“I’ve seen Sparrow. It’s a clear case of suicide. The body has been removed and beyond the usual formalities the Chief Constable is taking no action. There’ll be an inquest within a day or two. It has been agreed—I can’t emphasize this too strongly, Smiley—that no word of our former interest in Fennan is to be passed to the Press.”

“I see.” (You’re dangerous, Maston. You’re weak and frightened. Anyone’s neck before yours, I know. You’re looking at me that way—measuring me for the rope.)

“Don’t think I’m criticizing, Smiley; after all if the Director of Security authorized the interview you have nothing to worry about.”

“Except Fennan.”

“Quite so. Unfortunately the Director of Security omitted to sign off your minute suggesting an interview. He authorized it verbally, no doubt?”

“Yes. I’m sure he’ll confirm that.”

Maston looked at Smiley again, sharp, calculating; something was beginning to stick in Smiley’s throat. He knew he was being uncompromising, that Maston wanted him nearer, wanted him to conspire.

“You know Fennan’s office has been in touch with me?”

“Yes.”

“There will have to be an inquiry. It may not even be possible to keep the Press out. I shall certainly have to see the Home Secretary first thing tomorrow.” (Frighten me and try again … I’m getting on … pension to consider … unemployable, too … but I won’t share your lie, Maston.) “I must have all the facts, Smiley. I must do my duty. If there’s anything you feel you should tell me about that interview, anything you haven’t recorded, perhaps, tell me now and let me be the judge of its significance.”

“There’s nothing to add, really, to what’s already on the file, and what I told you earlier tonight. It might help you to know (the ‘you’ was a trifle strong, perhaps)—it might help you to know that I conducted the interview in an atmosphere of exceptional informality. The allegation against Fennan was pretty thin—university membership in the thirties and vague talk of current sympathy. Half the Cabinet were in the Party in the thirties.” Maston frowned. “When I got to his room in the Foreign Office it turned out to be rather public—people trotting in and out the whole time, so I suggested we should go out for a walk in the park.”

“Go on.”

“Well, we did. It was a sunny, cold day and rather pleasant. We watched the ducks.” Maston made a gesture of impatience. “We spent about half an hour in the park—he did all the talking. He was an intelligent man, fluent and interesting. But nervous, too, not unnaturally. These people love talking about themselves, and I think he was pleased to get it off his chest. He told me the whole story— seemed quite happy to mention names—and then we went to an espresso café he knew near Millbank.”

“A what?”

“An espresso bar. They sell a special kind of coffee for a shilling a cup. We had some.”

“I see. It was under these … convivial circumstances that you told him the Department would recommend no action.”

“Yes. We often do that, but we don’t normally record it.” Maston nodded. That was the kind of thing he understood, thought Smiley; goodness me, he really is rather contemptible. It was exciting to find Maston being as unpleasant as he expected.

“And I may take it therefore that his suicide—and his letter, of course—come as a complete surprise to you? You find no explanation?”

“It would be remarkable if I did.”

“You have no idea who denounced him?”

“No.”

“He was married, you know.”

“Yes.”

“I wonder … it seems conceivable that his wife might be able to fill in some of the gaps. I hesitate to suggest it, but perhaps someone from the Department ought to see her and, so far as good feeling allows, question her on all this.”

“Now?” Smiley looked at him, expressionless.

Maston was standing at his big flat desk, toying with the businessman’s cutlery—paper knife, cigarette box, lighter—the whole chemistry set of official hospitality. He’s showing a full inch of cream cuff, thought Smiley, and admiring his white hands.

Maston looked up, his face composed in an expression of sympathy.

“Smiley, I know how you feel, but despite this tragedy you must try to understand the position. The Minister and the Home Secretary will want the fullest possible account of this affair and it is my specific task to provide one. Particularly any information which points to Fennan’s state of mind immediately after his interview with … with us. Perhaps he spoke to his wife about it. He’s not supposed to have done but we must be realistic.”

“You want me to go down there?”

“Someone must. There’s a question of the inquest. The Home Secretary will have to decide about that of course, but at present we just haven’t the facts. Time is short and you know the case, you made the background inquiries. There’s no time for anyone else to brief himself. If anyone goes it will have to be you, Smiley.”

“When do you want me to go?”

“Apparently Mrs Fennan is a somewhat unusual woman. Foreign. Jewish, too, I gather, suffered badly in the war, which adds to the embarrassment. She is a strong-minded woman and relatively unmoved by her husband’s death. Only superficially, no doubt. But sensible and communicative. I gather from Sparrow that she is proving cooperative and would probably see you as soon as you can get there. Surrey police can warn her you’re coming and you can see her first thing in the morning. I shall telephone you there later in the day.”

Smiley turned to go.

“Oh—and Smiley …” He felt Maston’s hand on his arm and turned to look at him. Maston wore the smile normally reserved for the older ladies of the Service. “Smiley, you can count on me, you know; you can count on my support.”

My God, thought Smiley; you really do work round the clock. A twenty-four-hour cabaret, you are—“We Never Closed.” He walked out into the street.

3

ELSA FENNAN

Merridale Lane is one of those corners of Surrey where the inhabitants wage a relentless battle against the stigma of suburbia. Trees, fertilized and cajoled into being in every front garden, half obscure the poky “Character dwellings” which crouch behind them. The rusticity of the environment is enhanced by the wooden owls that keep guard over the names of houses, and by crumbling dwarfs indefatigably poised over goldfish ponds. The inhabitants of Merridale Lane do not paint their dwarfs, suspecting this to be a suburban vice, nor, for the same reason, do they varnish the owls; but wait patiently for the years to endow these treasures with an appearance of weathered antiquity, until one day even the beams on the garage may boast of beetle and woodworm.

The lane is not exactly a cul-de-sac although estate agents insist that it is; the further end from the Kingston by-pass dwindles nervously into a gravel path, which in turn degenerates into a sad little mud track across Merries Field—leading to another lane indistinguishable from Merridale. Until about 1920 this path had led to the parish church, but the church now stands on what is virtually a traffic island adjoining the London road, and the path which once led the faithful to worship provides a superfluous link between the inhabitants of Merridale Lane and Cadogan Road. The strip of open land called Merries Field has already achieved an eminence far beyond its own aspirations; it has driven a wedge deep into the District Council, between the developers and the preservers, and so effectively that on one occasion the entire machinery of local government in Walliston was brought to a standstill. A kind of natural compromise has now established itself: Merries Field is neither developed nor preserved by the three steel pylons, placed at regular intervals across it. At the centre is a cannibal hut with a thatched roof called “The War Memorial Shelter,” erected in 1951 in grateful memory to the fallen of two wars, as a haven for the weary and old. No one seems to have asked what business the weary and old would have in Merries Field, but the spiders have at least found a haven in the roof, and as a sittingout place for pylon-builders the hut was unusually comfortable.

Smiley arrived there on foot just after eight o’clock that morning, having parked his car at the police station, which was ten minutes’ walk away.

It was raining heavily, driving cold rain, so cold it felt hard upon the face.

Surrey police had no further interest in the case, but Sparrow had sent down independently a Special Branch officer to remain at the police station and act if necessary as liaison between Security and the police. There was no doubt about the manner of Fennan’s death. He had been shot through the temple at point blank range by a small French pistol manufactured in Lille in 1957. The pistol was found beneath the body. All the circumstances were consistent with suicide.

Number fifteen Merridale Lane was a low, Tudor-style house with the bedrooms built into the gables, and a half-timbered garage. It had an air of neglect, even disuse. It might have been occupied by artists, thought Smiley. Fennan didn’t seem to fit here. Fennan was Hampstead and au-pair foreign girls.

He unlatched the gate and walked slowly up the drive to the front door, trying vainly to discern some sign of life through the leaded windows. It was very cold. He rang the bell.

Elsa Fennan opened the door.

“They rang and asked me if I minded. I didn’t know what to say. Please come in.” A trace of a German accent.

She must have been older than Fennan. A slight, fierce woman in her fifties with hair cut very short and dyed to the colour of nicotine. Although frail, she conveyed an impression of endurance and courage, and the brown eyes that shone from her crooked little face were of an astonishing intensity. It was a worn face, racked and ravaged long ago, the face of a child grown old on starving and exhaustion, the eternal refugee face, the prison-camp face, thought Smiley.

She was holding out her hand to him—it was scrubbed and pink, bony to touch. He told her his name.

“You’re the man who interviewed my husband,” she said; “about loyalty.” She led him into the low, dark drawing-room. There was no fire. Smiley felt suddenly sick and cheap. Loyalty to whom, to what. She didn’t sound resentful. He was an oppressor, but she accepted oppression.

“I liked your husband very much. He would have been cleared.”

“Cleared? Cleared of what?”

“There was a prima facie case for investigation—an anonymous letter—I was given the job.” He paused and looked at her with real concern. “You have had a terrible loss, Mrs Fennan … you must be exhausted. You can’t have slept all night …”

She did not respond to his sympathy: “Thank you, but I can scarcely hope to sleep today. Sleep is not a luxury I enjoy.” She looked down wryly at her own tiny body; “My body and I must put up with one another twenty hours a day. We have lived longer than most people already.

“As for the terrible loss. Yes, I suppose so. But you know, Mr Smiley, for so long I owned nothing but a toothbrush, so I’m not really used to possession, even after eight years of marriage. Besides, I have the experience to suffer with discretion.”

She bobbed her head at him, indicating that he might sit, and with an oddly old-fashioned gesture she swept her skirt beneath her and sat opposite him. It was very cold in that room. Smiley wondered whether he ought to speak; he dared not look at her, but peered vaguely before him, trying desperately in his mind to penetrate the worn, travelled face of Elsa Fennan. It seemed a long time before she spoke again.

“You said you liked him. You didn’t give him that impression, apparently.”

“I haven’t seen your husband’s letter, but I have heard of its contents.” Smiley’s earnest, pouchy face was turned towards her now: “It simply doesn’t make sense. I as good as told him he was … that we would recommend that the matter be taken no further.”

She was motionless, waiting to hear. What could he say: “I’m sorry I killed your husband, Mrs Fennan, but I was only doing my duty. (Duty to whom for God’s sake?) He was in the Communist Party at Oxford twenty-four years ago; his recent promotion gave him access to highly secret information. Some busybody wrote us an anonymous letter and we had no option but to follow it up. The investigation induced a state of melancholia in your husband, and drove him to suicide.” He said nothing.

“It was a game,” she said suddenly, “a silly balancing trick of ideas; it had nothing to do with him or any real person. Why do you bother yourself with us? Go back to Whitehall and look for more spies on your drawing boards.” She paused, showing no sign of emotion beyond the burning of her dark eyes. “It’s an old illness you suffer from, Mr Smiley,” she continued, taking a cigarette from the box; “and I have seen many victims of it. The mind becomes separated from the body; it thinks without reality, rules a paper kingdom and devises without emotion the ruin of its paper victims. But sometimes the division between your world and ours is incomplete; the files grow heads and arms and legs, and that’s a terrible moment, isn’t it? The names have families as well as records, and human motives to explain the sad little dossiers and their make-believe sins. When that happens I am sorry for you.” She paused for a moment, then continued:

“It’s like the State and the People. The State is a dream too, a symbol of nothing at all, an emptiness, a mind without a body, a game played with clouds in the sky. But States make war, don’t they, and imprison people? To dream in doctrines—how tidy! My husband and I have both been tidied now, haven’t we?” She was looking at him steadily. Her accent was more noticeable now.

“You call yourself the State, Mr Smiley; you have no place among real people. You dropped a bomb from the sky: don’t come down here and look at the blood, or hear the scream.”

She had not raised her voice, she looked above him now, and beyond.

“You seem shocked. I should be weeping, I suppose, but I’ve no more tears, Mr Smiley—I’m barren; the children of my grief are dead. Thank you for coming, Mr Smiley; you can go back, now— there’s nothing you can do here.”

He sat forward in his chair, his podgy hands nursing one another on his knees. He looked worried and sanctimonious, like a grocer reading the lesson. The skin of his face was white and glistened at the temples and on the upper lip. Only under his eyes was there any colour: mauve half-moons bisected by the heavy frame of his spectacles.

“Look, Mrs Fennan; that interview was almost a formality. I think your husband enjoyed it, I think it even made him happy to get it over.”

“How can you say that, how can you, now this …”

“But I tell you it’s true: why, we didn’t even hold the thing in a Government office—when I got there I found Fennan’s office was a sort of right of way between two other rooms, so we walked out into the park and finished up at a café—scarcely an inquisition, you see. I even told him not to worry—I told him that. I just don’t understand the letter—it doesn’t …”

“It’s not the letter, Mr Smiley, that I’m thinking of. It’s what he said to me.”

“How do you mean?”

“He was deeply upset by the interview, he told me so. When he came back on Monday night he was desperate, almost incoherent. He collapsed in a chair and I persuaded him to go to bed. I gave him a sedative which lasted him half the night. He was still talking about it the next morning. It occupied his whole mind until his death.”

The telephone was ringing upstairs. Smiley got up.

“Excuse me—that will be my office. Do you mind?”

“It’s in the front bedroom, directly above us.”

Smiley walked slowly upstairs in a state of complete bewilderment. What on earth should he say to Maston now?

He lifted the receiver, glancing mechanically at the number on the apparatus.

“Walliston 2944.”

“Exchange here. Good morning. Your eight-thirty call.” “Oh—Oh yes, thank you very much.”

He rang off, grateful for the temporary respite. He glanced briefly round the bedroom. It was the Fennans’ own bedroom, austere but comfortable. There were two armchairs in front of the gas fire. Smiley remembered now that Elsa Fennan had been bedridden for three years after the war. It was probably a survival from those years that they still sat in the bedroom in the evenings. The alcoves on either side of the fireplace were full of books. In the furthest corner, a typewriter on a desk. There was something intimate and touching about the arrangement, and perhaps for the first time Smiley was filled with an immediate sense of the tragedy of Fennan’s death. He returned to the drawing-room.

“It was for you. Your eight-thirty call from the exchange.”

He was aware of a pause and glanced incuriously towards her. But she had turned away from him and was standing looking out of the window, her slender back very straight and still, her stiff, short hair dark against the morning light.

Suddenly he stared at her. Something had occurred to him which he should have realized upstairs in the bedroom, something so improbable that for a moment his brain was unable to grasp it. Mechanically he went on talking; he must get out of there, get away from the telephone and Maston’s hysterical questions, get away from Elsa Fennan and her dark, restless house. Get away and think.

“I have intruded too much already, Mrs Fennan, and I must now take your advice and return to Whitehall.”

Again the cold, frail hand, the mumbled expressions of sympathy. He collected his coat from the hall and stepped out into the early sunlight. The winter sun had just appeared for a moment after the rain, and it repainted in pale, wet colours the trees and houses of Merridale Lane. The sky was still dark grey, and the world beneath it strangely luminous, giving back the sunlight it had stolen from nowhere.

He walked slowly down the gravel path, fearful of being called back.

He returned to the police station, full of disturbing thoughts. To begin with it was not Elsa Fennan who had asked the exchange for an eight-thirty call that morning.

4

COFFEE AT THE FOUNTAIN

The CID Superintendent at Walliston was a large, genial soul who measured professional competence in years of service and saw no fault in the habit. Sparrow’s Inspector Mendel on the other hand was a thin, weasel-faced gentleman who spoke very rapidly out of the corner of his mouth. Smiley secretly likened him to a gamekeeper—a man who knew his territory and disliked intruders.

“I have a message from your Department, sir. You’re to ring the Adviser at once.” The Superintendent indicated his telephone with an enormous hand and walked out through the open door of his office. Mendel remained. Smiley looked at him owlishly for a moment, guessing his man.

“Shut the door.” Mendel moved to the door and pulled it quietly to.

“I want to make an inquiry of the Walliston telephone exchange. Who’s the most likely contact?”

“Assistant Supervisor normally. Supervisor’s always in the clouds; Assistant Supervisor does the work.”

“Someone at 15 Merridale Lane asked to be called by the exchange at eight-thirty this morning. I want to know what time the request was made and who by. I want to know whether there’s a standing request for a morning call, and if so let’s have the details.”

“Know the number?”

“Walliston 2944. Subscriber Samuel Fennan, I should think.”

Mendel moved to the telephone and dialled 0. While he waited for a reply he said to Smiley: “You don’t want anyone to know about this, do you?”

“No one. Not even you. There’s probably nothing in it. If we start bleating about murder we’ll …”

Mendel was through to the exchange, asking for the Assistant Supervisor.

“Walliston CID here, Superintendent’s office. We have an inquiry … yes, of course … ring me back then … CID outside line, Walliston 2421.”

He replaced the receiver and waited for the exchange to ring him. “Sensible girl,” he muttered, without looking at Smiley. The telephone rang and he began speaking at once.

“We’re investigating a burglary in Merridale Lane. Number fifteen. Just possible they used number fifteen as an observation point for a job on the opposite house. Have you got any way of finding out whether calls were originated or received on Walliston 2944 in the last twenty-four hours?”

There was a pause. Mendel put his hand over the mouthpiece and turned to Smiley with a very slight grin. Smiley suddenly liked him a good deal.

“She’s asking the girls,” said Mendel; “and she’ll look at the dockets.” He turned back to the telephone and began jotting down figures on the Superintendent’s pad. He stiffened abruptly and leant forward on the desk.

“Oh yes.” His voice was casual, in contrast to his attitude; “I wonder when she asked for that?” Another pause … “19.55 hours … a man, eh? The girl’s sure of that, is she? … Oh, I see, oh, well, that fixes that. Thanks very much indeed all the same. Well, at least we know where we stand … not at all, you’ve been very helpful … just a theory, that’s all … have to think again, won’t we? Well, thanks very much. Very kind, keep it under your hat … Cheerio.” He rang off, tore the page from the pad, and put it in his pocket.

Smiley spoke quickly: “There’s a beastly café down the road. I need some breakfast. Come and have a cup of coffee.” The telephone was ringing; Smiley could almost feel Maston on the other end. Mendel looked at him for a moment and seemed to understand. They left it ringing and walked quickly out of the police station towards the High Street.

The Fountain Café (Proprietor Miss Gloria Adam) was all Tudor and horse brasses and local honey at sixpence more than anywhere else. Miss Adam herself dispensed the nastiest coffee south of Manchester and spoke of her customers as “My Friends.” Miss Adam did not do business with friends, but simply robbed them, which somehow added to the illusion of genteel amateurism which Miss Adam was so anxious to preserve. Her origin was obscure, but she often spoke of her late father as “The Colonel.” It was rumoured among those of Miss Adam’s friends who had paid particularly dearly for their friendship that the colonelcy in question had been granted by the Salvation Army.

Mendel and Smiley sat at a corner table near the fire, waiting for their order. Mendel looked at Smiley oddly: “The girl remembers the call clearly; it came right at the end of her shift— five to eight last night. A request for an eight-thirty call this morning. It was made by Fennan himself—the girl is positive of that.”

“How?”

“Apparently this Fennan had rung the exchange on Christmas Day and the same girl was on duty. Wanted to wish them all a Happy Christmas. She was rather bucked. They had quite a chat. She’s sure it was the same voice yesterday, asking for the call. ‘Very cultured gentleman,’ she said.”

“But it doesn’t make sense. He wrote a suicide letter at ten-thirty. What happened between eight and ten-thirty?”

Mendel picked up a battered old briefcase. It had no lock— more like a music case, thought Smiley. He took from it a plain buff folder and handed it to Smiley. “Facsimile of the letter. Super said to give you a copy. They’re sending the original to the FO and another copy straight to Marlene Dietrich.”

“Who the devil’s she?”

“Sorry, sir. What we call your Adviser, sir. Pretty general in the Branch, sir. Very sorry, sir.”

How beautiful, thought Smiley, how absolutely beautiful. He opened the folder and looked at the facsimile. Mendel went on talking: “First suicide letter I’ve ever seen that was typed. First one I’ve seen with the time on it, for that matter. Signature looks OK, though. Checked it at the station against a receipt he once signed for lost property. Right as rain.”

The letter was typed, probably a portable. Like the anonymous denunciation; that was a portable too. This one was signed with Fennan’s neat, legible signature. Beneath the printed address at the head of the page was typed the date, and beneath that the time: 10.30 p.m.:

Dear Sir David,

After some hesitation I have decided to take my life. I cannot spend my remaining years under a cloud of disloyalty and suspicion. I realize that my career is ruined, that I am the victim of paid informers.

Yours sincerely,

Samuel Fennan

Smiley read it through several times, his mouth pursed in concentration, his eyebrows raised a little as if in surprise. Mendel was asking him something:

“How d’you get on to it?”

“On to what?”

“This early call business.”

“Oh, I took the call. Thought it was for me. It wasn’t—it was the exchange with this thing. Even then the penny didn’t drop. I assumed it was for her, you see. Went down and told her.”

“Down?”

“Yes. They keep the telephone in the bedroom. It’s a sort of bed-sitter, really … she used to be an invalid, you know, and they’ve left the room as it was then, I suppose. It’s like a study, one end; books, typewriter, desk and so forth.”

“Typewriter?”

“Yes. A portable. I imagine he did this letter on it. But you see when I took that call I’d forgotten it couldn’t possibly be Mrs Fennan who’d asked for it.”

“Why not?”

“She’s an insomniac—she told me. Made a sort of joke of it. I told her to get some rest and she just said: ‘My body and I must put up with one another twenty hours a day. We have lived longer than most people already.’ There was more of it—something about not enjoying the luxury of sleep. So why should she want a call at eight-thirty?”

“Why should her husband—why should anyone? It’s damn nearly lunch-time. God help the Civil Service.”

“Exactly. That puzzles me too. The Foreign Office admittedly starts late—ten o’clock, I think. But even then Fennan would be pushed to dress, shave, breakfast and catch the train on time if he didn’t wake till eight-thirty. Besides, his wife could call him.”

“She might have been shooting a line about not sleeping,” said Mendel. “Women do, about insomnia and migraine and stuff. Makes people think they’re nervous and temperamental. Cock, most of it.”

Smiley shook his head: “No, she couldn’t have made the call, could she? She wasn’t home till ten forty-five. But even supposing she made a mistake about the time she got back, she couldn’t have gone to the telephone without seeing her husband’s body first. And you’re not going to tell me that her reaction on finding her husband dead was to go upstairs and ask for an early call?”

They drank their coffee in silence for a while.

“Another thing,” said Mendel.

“Yes?”

“His wife got back from the theatre at quarter to eleven, right?”

“That’s what she says.”

“Did she go alone?”

“No idea.”

“Bet she didn’t. I’ll bet she had to tell the truth there, and times the letter to give herself an alibi.”

Smiley’s mind went back to Elsa Fennan, her anger, her submission. It seemed ridiculous to talk about her in this way. No: not Elsa Fennan. No.

“Where was the body found?” Smiley asked.

“Bottom of the stairs.”

“Bottom of the stairs?”

“True. Sprawled across the hall floor. Revolver underneath him.”

“And the note. Where was that?”

“Beside him on the floor.”

“Anything else?”

“Yes. A mug of cocoa in the drawing-room.”

“I see. Fennan decides to commit suicide. He asks the exchange to ring him at eight-thirty. He makes himself some cocoa and puts it in the drawing-room. He goes upstairs and types his last letter. He comes down again to shoot himself, leaving the cocoa undrunk. It all hangs together nicely.”

“Yes, doesn’t it. Incidentally, hadn’t you better ring your office?”

He looked at Mendel equivocally. “That’s the end of a beautiful friendship,” he said. As he walked towards the coin box beside a door marked “Private” he heard Mendel saying: “I bet you say that to all the boys.” He was actually smiling as he asked for Maston’s number.

Maston wanted to see him at once.

He went back to their table. Mendel was stirring another cup of coffee as if it required all his concentration. He was eating a very large bun.

Smiley stood beside him. “I’ve got to go back to London.”

“Well, this will put the cat among the pigeons.” The weasel face turned abruptly towards him; “Or will it?” He spoke with the front of his mouth while the back of it continued to deal with the bun.

“If Fennan was murdered, no power on earth can prevent the Press from getting hold of the story,” and to himself added: “I don’t think Maston would like that. He’d prefer suicide.”

“Still, we’ve got to face that, haven’t we?”

Smiley paused, frowning earnestly. Already he could hear Maston deriding his suspicions, laughing them impatiently away. “I don’t know,” he said, “I really don’t know.”

Back to London, he thought, back to Maston’s Ideal Home, back to the rat-race of blame. And back to the unreality of containing a human tragedy in a three-page report.

It was raining again, a warm incessant rain now, and in the short distance between the Fountain Café and the police station he got very wet. He took off his coat and threw it into the back of the car. It was a relief to be leaving Walliston—even for London. As he turned on to the main road he saw out of the corner of his eye the figure of Mendel stoically trudging along the pavement towards the station, his grey trilby shapeless and blackened by the rain. It hadn’t occurred to Smiley that he might want a lift to London, and he felt ungracious. Mendel, untroubled by the niceties of the situation, opened the passenger door and got in.

“Bit of luck,” he observed. “Hate trains. Cambridge Circus you going to? You can drop me Westminster way, can’t you?”

They set off and Mendel produced a shabby green tobacco tin and rolled himself a cigarette. He directed it towards his mouth, changed his mind and offered it to Smiley, lighting it for him with an extraordinary lighter that threw a two-inch blue flame. “You look worried sick,” said Mendel.

“I am.”

There was a pause. Mendel said: “It’s the devil you don’t know that gets you.”

They had driven another four or five miles when Smiley drew the car in to the side of the road. He turned to Mendel.

“Would you mind awfully if we drove back to Walliston?”

“Good idea. Go and ask her.”

He turned the car and drove slowly back to Walliston, back to Merridale Lane. He left Mendel in the car and walked down the familiar gravel path.

She opened the door and showed him into the drawing-room without a word. She was wearing the same dress, and Smiley wondered how she had passed the time since he had left her that morning.

Had she been walking about the house or sitting motionless in the drawing-room? Or upstairs in the bedroom with the leather chairs? How did she see herself in her new widowhood? Could she take it seriously yet, was she still in that secretly elevated state which immediately follows bereavement? Still looking at herself in mirrors, trying to discern the change, the horror in her own face, and weeping when she could not?

Neither of them sat down—both instinctively avoided a repetition of that morning’s meeting.

“There was one thing I felt I must ask you, Mrs Fennan. I’m very sorry to have to bother you again.”

“About the call, I expect; the early morning call from the exchange.”

“Yes.”

“I thought that might puzzle you. An insomniac asks for an early morning call.” She was trying to speak brightly.

“Yes. It did seem odd. Do you often go to the theatre?”

“Yes. Once a fortnight. I’m a member of the Weybridge Reperrory Club, you know. I try and go to everything they do. I have a seat reserved for me automatically on the first Tuesday of each run. My husband worked late on Tuesdays. He never came; he’d only go to classical theatre.”

“But he liked Brecht, didn’t he? He seemed very thrilled with the Berliner Ensemble performances in London.”

She looked at him for a moment, and then smiled suddenly— the first time he had seen her do so. It was an enchanting smile; her whole face lit up like a child’s.

Smiley had a fleeting vision of Elsa Fennan as a child—a spindly, agile tomboy like George Sand’s “Petite Fadette”—half woman, half glib, lying girl. He saw her as a wheedling Backfisch, fighting like a cat for herself alone, and he saw her too, starved and shrunken in prison camp, ruthless in her fight for self-preservation. It was pathetic to witness in that smile the light of her early innocence, and a steeled weapon in her fight for survival.

“I’m afraid the explanation of that call is very silly,” she said. “I suffer from a terrible memory—really awful. Go shopping and forget what I’ve come to buy, make an appointment on the telephone and forget it the moment I replace the receiver. I ask people to stay the week-end and we are out when they arrive. Occasionally, when there is something I simply have to remember, I ring the exchange and ask for a call a few minutes before the appointed time. It’s like a knot in one’s handkerchief, but a knot can’t ring a bell at you, can it?”

Smiley peered at her. His throat felt rather dry, and he had to swallow before he spoke.

“And what was the call for this time, Mrs Fennan?”

Again the enchanting smile: “There you are. I completely forget.”

5

MASTON AND CANDLELIGHT

As he drove slowly back towards London Smiley ceased to be conscious of Mendel’s presence.

There had been a time when the mere business of driving a car was a relief to him; when he had found in the unreality of a long, solitary journey a palliative to his troubled brain, when the fatigue of several hours’ driving had allowed him to forget more sombre cares.

It was one of the subtler landmarks of middle age, perhaps, that he could no longer thus subdue his mind. It needed sterner measures now: he even tried on occasion to plan in his head a walk through a European city—to record the shops and buildings he would pass, for instance, in Berne on a walk from the Münster to the university. But despite such energetic mental exercise, the ghosts of time present would intrude and drive his dreams away. It was Ann who had robbed him of his peace, Ann who had once made the present so important and taught him the habit of reality, and when she went there was nothing.

He could not believe that Elsa Fennan had killed her husband. Her instinct was to defend, to hoard the treasures of her life, to build about herself the symbols of normal existence. There was no aggression in her, no will but the will to preserve.

But who could tell? What did Hesse write? “Strange to wander in the mist, each is alone. No tree knows his neighbour. Each is alone.” We know nothing of one another, nothing, Smiley mused. However closely we live together, at whatever time of day or night we sound the deepest thoughts in one another, we know nothing. How am I judging Elsa Fennan? I think I understand her suffering and her frightened lies, but what do I know of her? Nothing.

Mendel was pointing at a sign-post.

“… That’s where I live. Mitcham. Not a bad spot really. Got sick of bachelor quarters. Bought a decent little semidetached down here. For my retirement.”

“Retirement? That’s a long way off.”

“Yes. Three days. That’s why I got this job. Nothing to it; no complications. Give it to old Mendel; he’ll muck it up.”

“Well, well. I expect we shall both be out of a job by Monday.”

He drove Mendel to Scotland Yard and went on to Cambridge Circus.

He realized as he walked into the building that everyone knew. It was the way they looked; some shade of difference in their glance, their attitude. He made straight for Maston’s room. Maston’s secretary was at her desk and she looked up quickly as he entered.

“Adviser in?”

“Yes. He’s expecting you. He’s alone. I should knock and go in.” But Maston had opened the door and was already calling him. He was wearing a black coat and pinstripe trousers. Here goes the cabaret, thought Smiley.

“I’ve been trying to get in touch with you. Did you not receive my message?” said Maston.

“I did, but I couldn’t possibly have spoken to you.”

“I don’t quite follow?”

“Well, I don’t believe Fennan committed suicide—I think he was murdered. I couldn’t say that on the telephone.”

Maston took off his spectacles and looked at Smiley in blank astonishment.

“Murdered? Why?”

“Well, Fennan wrote his letter at ten-thirty last night, if we are to accept the time on his letter as correct.”

“Well?”

“Well, at seven fifty-five he rang up the exchange and asked to be called at eight-thirty the next morning.”

“How on earth do you know that?”

“I was there this morning when the exchange rang. I took the call thinking it might be from the Department.”

“How can you possibly say that it was Fennan who ordered the call?”

“I had inquiries made. The girl at the exchange knew Fennan’s voice well; she was sure it was he, and that he rang at five to eight last night.”

“Fennan and the girl knew each other, did they?”

“Good heavens no. They just exchanged pleasantries occasionally.”

“And how do you conclude from this that he was murdered?”

“Well, I asked his wife about this call …”

“And?”

“She lied. Said she ordered it herself. She claimed to be frightfully absent-minded—she gets the exchange to ring her occasionally, like tying a knot in a handkerchief, when she has an important appointment. And another thing—just before shooting himself he made some cocoa. He never drank it.”

Maston listened in silence. At last he smiled and got up.

“We seem to be at cross-purposes,” he said. “I send you down to discover why Fennan shot himself. You come back and say he didn’t. We’re not policemen, Smiley.”

“No. I sometimes wonder what we are.”

“Did you hear of anything that affects our position here—anything that explains his action at all? Anything to substantiate the suicide letter?”

Smiley hesitated before replying. He had seen it coming.

“Yes. I understood from Mrs Fennan that her husband was very upset after the interview.” He might as well hear the whole story. “It obsessed him, he couldn’t sleep after it. She had to give him a sedative. Her account of Fennan’s reaction to my interview entirely substantiates the letter.” He was silent for a minute, blinking rather stupidly before him. “What I am trying to say is that I don’t believe her. I don’t believe Fennan wrote that letter, or that he had any intention of dying.” He turned to Maston. “We simply cannot dismiss the inconsistencies. Another thing,” he plunged on, “I haven’t had an expert comparison made but there’s a similarity between the anonymous letter and Fennan’s suicide note. The type looks identical. It’s ridiculous I know but there it is. We must bring the police in—give them the facts.”

“Facts?” said Maston. “What facts? Suppose she did lie—she’s an odd woman by all accounts, foreign, Jewish. Heaven knows the tributaries of her mind. I’m told she suffered in the war, persecuted and so forth. She may see in you the oppressor, the inquisitor. She spots you’re on to something, panics and tells you the first lie that comes into her head. Does that make her a murderess?”

“Then why did Fennan make the call? Why make himself a nightcap?”

“Who can tell?” Maston’s voice was richer now, more persuasive. “If you or I, Smiley, were ever driven to that dreadful point where we were determined to destroy ourselves, who can tell what our last thoughts on earth would be? And what of Fennan? He sees his career in ruins, his life has no meaning. Is it not conceivable that he should wish, in a moment of weakness or irresolution, to hear another human voice, feel again the warmth of human contact before he dies? Fanciful, sentimental, perhaps; but not improbable in a man so overwrought, so obsessed that he takes his own life.”

Smiley had to give him credit—it was a good performance and he was no match for Maston when it came to this. Abruptly he felt inside himself the rising panic of frustration beyond endurance. With panic came an uncontrollable fury with this posturing sycophant, this obscene cissy with his greying hair and his reasonable smile. Panic and fury welled up in a sudden tide, flooding his breast, suffusing his whole body. His face felt hot and red, his spectacles blurred and tears sprang to his eyes, adding to his humiliation.

Maston went on, mercifully unaware: “You cannot expect me to suggest to the Home Secretary on this evidence that the police have reached a false conclusion; you know how tenuous our police liaison is. On the one hand we have your suspicions: that in short Fennan’s behaviour last night was not consistent with the intent to die. His wife has apparently lied to you. Against that we have the opinion of trained detectives, who found nothing disturbing in the circumstances of death, and we have Mrs Fennan’s statement that her husband was upset by his interview. I’m sorry, Smiley, but there it is.”

There was complete silence. Smiley was slowly recovering himself, and the process left him dull and inarticulate. He peered myopically before him, his pouchy, lined face still pink, his mouth slack and stupid. Maston was waiting for him to speak, but he was tired and suddenly utterly disinterested. Without a glance at Maston he got up and walked out.

He reached his own room and sat down at the desk. Mechanically he looked through his work. His in-tray contained little—some office circulars and a personal letter addressed to G. Smiley Esq., Ministry of Defence. The handwriting was unfamiliar; he opened the envelope and read the letter.

Dear Smiley,

It is essential that I should lunch with you tomorrow at the Compleat Angler at Marlow. Please do your best to meet me there at one o’clock. There is something I have to tell you.

Yours,

Samuel Fennan

The letter was handwritten and dated the previous day, Tuesday, 3 January. It had been postmarked in Whitehall at 6.00 p.m.

He looked at it stodgily for several minutes, holding it stiffly before him and inclining his head to the left. Then he put the letter down, opened a drawer of the desk and took out a single clean sheet of paper. He wrote a brief letter of resignation to Maston, and attached Fennan’s invitation with a pin. He pressed the bell for a secretary, left the letter in his out-tray and made for the lift. As usual it was stuck in the basement with the registry’s tea trolley, and after a short wait he began walking downstairs. Halfway down he remembered that he had left his mackintosh and a few bits and pieces in his room. Never mind, he thought, they’ll send them on.

He sat in his car in the car park, staring through the drenched windscreen.

He didn’t care, he just damn well didn’t care. He was surprised certainly. Surprised that he had so nearly lost control. Interviews had played a great part in Smiley’s life, and he had long ago come to consider himself proof against them all: disciplinary, scholastic, medical and religious. His secretive nature detested the purpose of all interviews, their oppressive intimacy, their inescapable reality. He remembered one deliriously happy dinner with Ann at Quaglino’s when he had described to her the Chameleon–Armadillo system for beating the interviewer.

They had dined by candlelight; white skin and pearls—they were drinking brandy—Ann’s eyes wide and moist, only for him; Smiley playing the lover and doing it wonderfully well; Ann loving him and thrilled by their harmony.

“… and so I learned first to be a chameleon.”

“You mean you sat there burping, you rude toad?”

“No, it’s a matter of colour. Chameleons change colour.”

“Of course they change colour. They sit on green leaves and go green. Did you go green, toad?”

His fingers ran lightly over the tips of hers. “Listen, minx, while I explain the Smiley Chameleon–Armadillo technique for the impertinent interviewer.” Her face was very close to his and she adored him with her eyes.

“The technique is based on the theory that the interviewer, loving no one as well as himself, will be attracted by his own image. You therefore assume the exact social, temperamental, political and intellectual colour of your inquisitor.”

“Pompous toad. But intelligent lover.”

“Silence. Sometimes this method founders against the idiocy or ill-disposition of the inquisitor. If so, become an armadillo.”

“And wear linear belts, toad?”

“No, place him in a position so incongruous that you are superior to him. I was prepared for confirmation by a retired bishop. I was his whole flock, and received on one half holiday sufficient guidance for a diocese. But by contemplating the bishop’s face, and imagining that under my gaze it became covered in thick fur, I maintained the ascendancy. From then on the skill grew. I could turn him into an ape, get him stuck in sash windows, send him naked to Masonic banquets, condemn him, like the serpent, to go about on his belly …”

“Wicked lover-toad.”

And so it had been. But in his recent interviews with Maston the power of detachment had left him; he was getting too involved. When Maston made the first moves, Smiley had been too tired and disgusted to compete. He supposed Elsa Fennan had killed her husband, that she had some good reason and it just did not bother him any more. The problem no longer existed; suspicion, experience, perception, common sense—for Maston these were not the organs of fact. Paper was fact, Ministers were fact, Home Secretaries were hard fact. The Department did not concern itself with the vague impressions of a single officer when they conflicted with policy.

Smiley was tired, deeply, heavily tired. He drove slowly homewards. Dinner out tonight. Something rather special. It was only lunch-time now—he would spend the afternoon pursuing Olearius across the Russian continent on his Hansa voyage. Then dinner at Quaglino’s, and a solitary toast to the successful murderer, to Elsa perhaps, in gratitude for ending the career of George Smiley with the life of Sam Fennan.

He remembered to collect his laundry in Sloane Street, and finally turned into Bywater Street, finding a parking space about three houses down from his own. He got out carrying the brown paper parcel of laundry, locked the car laboriously, and walked all round it from habit, testing the handles. A thin rain was still falling. It annoyed him that someone had parked outside his house again. Thank goodness Mrs Chapel had closed his bedroom window, otherwise the rain would have …

He was suddenly alert. Something had moved in the drawing-room. A light, a shadow, a human form; something, he was certain. Was it sight or instinct? Was it the latent skill of his own tradecraft which informed him? Some fine sense or nerve, some remote faculty of perception warned him now and he heeded the warning.

Without a moment’s thought he dropped his keys back into his overcoat pocket, walked up the steps to his own front door and rang the bell.

It echoed shrilly through the house. There was a moment’s silence, then came to Smiley’s ears the distinct sound of footsteps approaching the door, firm and confident. A scratch of the chain, a click of the Ingersoll latch and the door was opened, swiftly, cleanly.

Smiley had never seen him before. Tall, fair, handsome, thirtyfive odd. A light grey suit, white shirt and silver tie—habillé en diplomate. German or Swede. His left hand remained nonchalantly in his jacket pocket.

Smiley peered at him apologetically:

“Good afternoon. Is Mr Smiley in, please?”

The door was opened to its fullest extent. A tiny pause.

“Yes. Won’t you come in?”

For a fraction of a second he hesitated. “No thanks. Would you please give him this?” He handed him the parcel of laundry, walked down the steps again, to his car. He knew he was still being watched. He started the car, turned and drove into Sloane Square without a glance in the direction of his house. He found a parking space in Sloane Street, pulled in and rapidly wrote in his diary seven sets of numbers. They belonged to the seven cars parked along Bywater Street.

What should he do? Stop a policeman? Whoever he was, he was probably gone by now. Besides there were other considerations. He locked the car again and crossed the road to a telephone kiosk. He rang Scotland Yard, got through to Special Branch and asked for Inspector Mendel. But it appeared that the Inspector, having reported back to the Superintendent, had discreetly anticipated the pleasures of retirement and left for Mitcham. Smiley got his address after a good deal of prevarication, and set off once more in his car, covering three sides of a square and emerging at Albert Bridge. He had a sandwich and a large whisky at a new pub overlooking the river and a quarter of an hour later was crossing the bridge on the way to Mitcham, the rain still beating down on his inconspicuous little car. He was worried, very worried indeed.

6

TEA AND SYMPATHY

It was still raining as he arrived. Mendel was in his garden wearing the most extraordinary hat Smiley had ever seen. It had begun life as an Anzac hat but its enormous brim hung low all the way round, so that he resembled nothing so much as a very tall mushroom. He was brooding over a tree stump, a wicked-looking pick-axe poised obediently in his sinewy right hand.

He looked at Smiley sharply for a moment, then a grin slowly crossed his thin face as he extended his hand.

“Trouble,” said Mendel.

“Trouble.”

Smiley followed him up the path and into the house. Suburban and comfortable.

“There’s no fire in the living-room—only just got back. How about a cup of tea in the kitchen?”

They went into the kitchen. Smiley was amused to notice the extreme tidiness, the almost feminine neatness of everything about him. Only the police calendar on the wall spoilt the illusion. While Mendel put a kettle on and busied himself with cups and saucers, Smiley related dispassionately what had happened in Bywater Street. When he had finished Mendel looked at him for a long time in silence.

“But why did he ask you in?”

Smiley blinked and coloured a little. “That’s what I wondered. It put me off my balance for a moment. It was lucky I had the parcel.”

He took a drink of tea. “Though I don’t believe he was taken in by the parcel. He may have been, but I doubt it. I doubt it very much.”

“Not taken in?”

“Well, I wouldn’t have been. Little man in a Ford delivering parcels of linen. Who could I have been? Besides, I asked for Smiley and then didn’t want to see him—he must have thought that was pretty queer.”

“But what was he after? What would he have done with you? Who did he think you were?”

“That’s just the point, that’s just it, you see. I think it was me he was waiting for, but of course he didn’t expect me to ring the bell. I put him off balance. I think he wanted to kill me. That’s why he asked me in: he recognized me but only just, probably from a photograph.”

Mendel looked at him in silence for a while.

“Christ,” he said.

“Suppose I’m right,” Smiley continued, “all the way. Suppose Fennan was murdered last night and I did nearly follow him this morning. Well, unlike your trade, mine doesn’t normally run to a murder a day.”

“Meaning what?”

“I don’t know. I just don’t know. Perhaps before we go much further you’d check on these cars for me. They were parked in Bywater Street this morning.”

“Why not do it yourself?”

Smiley looked at him, puzzled, for a second. Then it dawned on him that he hadn’t mentioned his resignation.

“Sorry. I didn’t tell you, did I? I resigned this morning. Just managed to get it in before I was sacked. So I’m free as air. And about as employable.”

Mendel took the list of numbers from him and went into the hall to telephone. He returned a couple of minutes later.

“They’ll ring back in an hour,” he said. “Come on. I’ll show you round the estate. Know anything about bees, do you?”

“Well, a very little, yes. I got bitten with the natural history bug at Oxford.” He was going to tell Mendel how he had wrestled with Goethe’s metamorphoses of plants and animals in the hope of discovering, like Faust, “what sustains the world at its inmost point.” He wanted to explain why it was impossible to understand nineteenth-century Europe without a working knowledge of the naturalistic sciences, he felt earnest and full of important thoughts, and knew secretly that this was because his brain was wrestling with the day’s events, that he was in a state of nervous excitement. The palms of his hands were moist.

Mendel led him out of the back door: three neat beehives stood against the low brick wall which ran along the end of the garden. Mendel spoke as they stood in the fine rain.

“Always wanted to keep them, see what it’s all about. Been reading it all up—frightens me stiff, I can tell you. Odd little beggars.” He nodded a couple of times in support of this statement, and Smiley looked at him again with interest. His face was thin but muscular, its expression entirely uncommunicative; his iron-grey hair was cut very short and spiky. He seemed quite indifferent to the weather, and the weather to him. Smiley knew exactly the life that lay behind Mendel, had seen in policemen all over the world the same leathern skin, the same reserves of patience, bitterness and anger. He could guess the long, fruitless hours of surveillance in every kind of weather, waiting for someone who might never come … or come and go too quickly. And he knew how much Mendel and the rest of them were at the mercy of personalities—capricious and bullying, nervous and changeful, occasionally wise and sympathetic. He knew how intelligent men could be broken by the stupidity of their superiors, how weeks of patient work night and day could be cast aside by such a man.

Mendel led him up the precarious path laid with broken stone to the beehives and, still oblivious of the rain, began taking one to pieces, demonstrating and explaining. He spoke in jerks, with quite long pauses between phrases, indicating precisely and slowly with his slim fingers.

At last they went indoors again, and Mendel showed him the two downstairs rooms. The drawing-room was all flowers: flowered curtains and carpet, flowered covers on the furniture. In a small cabinet in one corner were some Toby jugs and a pair of very handsome pistols beside a cup for target shooting.

Smiley followed him upstairs. There was a smell of paraffin from the stove on the landing, and a surly bubbling from the cistern in the lavatory.

Mendel showed him his own bedroom.

“Bridal chamber. Bought the bed at a sale for a quid. Box spring mattress. Amazing what you can pick up. Carpets are ex-Queen Elizabeth. They change them every year. Bought them at a store in Watford.”

Smiley stood in the doorway, somehow rather embarrassed. Mendel turned back and passed him to open the other bedroom door.

“And that’s your room. If you want it.” He turned to Smiley. “I wouldn’t stay at your place tonight if I were you. You never know, do you? Besides, you’ll sleep better here. Air’s better.”

Smiley began to protest.

“Up to you. You do what you like.” Mendel grew surly and embarrassed. “Don’t understand your job, to be honest, any more than you know police work. You do what you like. From what I’ve seen of you, you can look after yourself.”

They went downstairs again. Mendel had lit the gas fire in the drawing-room.

“Well, at least you must let me give you dinner tonight,” said Smiley.

The telephone rang in the hall. It was Mendel’s secretary about the car numbers.

Mendel came back. He handed Smiley a list of seven names and addresses. Four of the seven could be discounted; the registered addresses were in Bywater Street. Three remained: a hired car from the firm of Adam Scarr and Sons of Battersea, a trade van belonging to the Severn Tile Company, Eastbourne; and the third was listed specially as the property of the Panamanian Ambassador.

“I’ve got a man on the Panamanian job now. There’ll be no difficulty there—they’ve only got three cars on the Embassy strength.

“Battersea’s not far,” Mendel continued. “We could pop over there together. In your car.”

“By all means, by all means,” Smiley said quickly; “and we can go into Kensington for dinner. I’ll book a table at the Entrechat.”

It was four o’clock. They sat for a while talking in a rather desultory way about bees and house-keeping, Mendel quite at ease and Smiley still bothered and awkward, trying to find a way of talking, trying not to be clever. He could guess what Ann would have said about Mendel. She would have loved him, made a person of him, had a special voice and face for imitating him, would have made a story of him until he fitted into their lives and wasn’t a mystery any more: “Darling, who’d have thought he could be so cosy! The last man I’d ever thought would tell me where to buy cheap fish. And what a darling little house—no bother—he must know Toby jugs are hell and he just doesn’t care. I think he’s a pet. Toad, do ask him to dinner. You must. Not to giggle at but to like.” He wouldn’t have asked him, of course, but Ann would be content—she’d found a way to like him. And having done so, forgotten him.

That was what Smiley wanted, really—a way to like Mendel. He was not as quick as Ann at finding one. But Ann was Ann— she practically murdered an Etonian nephew once for drinking claret with fish, but if Mendel had lit a pipe over her crêpe Suzette, she probably would not have noticed.

Mendel made more tea and they drank it. At about a quarter past five they set off for Battersea in Smiley’s car. On the way Mendel bought an evening paper. He read it with difficulty, catching the light from the street lamps. After a few minutes he spoke with sudden venom:

“Krauts. Bloody Krauts. God, I hate them!”

“Krauts?”

“Krauts. Huns. Jerries. Bloody Germans. Wouldn’t give you sixpence for the lot of them. Carnivorous ruddy sheep. Kicking Jews about again. Us all over. Knock ’em down, set ’em up. Forgive and forget. Why bloody well forget, I’d like to know? Why forget theft, murder and rape just because millions committed it? Christ, one poor little sod of a bank clerk pinches ten bob and the whole of the Metropolitan’s on to him. But Krupp and all that mob—oh no. Christ, if I was a Jew in Germany I’d …”

Smiley was suddenly wide awake: “What would you do? What would you do, Mendel?”

“Oh, I suppose I’d sit down under it. It’s statistics now, politics. It isn’t sense to give them H-bombs so it’s politics. And there’s the Yanks—millions of ruddy Jews in America. What do they do? Damn all: give the Krauts more bombs. All chums together— blow each other up.”

Mendel was trembling with rage, and Smiley was silent for a while, thinking of Elsa Fennan.

“What’s the answer?” he asked, just for something to say.

“Christ knows,” said Mendel savagely.

They turned into Battersea Bridge Road and drew up beside a constable standing on the pavement. Mendel showed his police card.

“Scarr’s garage? Well, it isn’t hardly a garage, sir, just a yard. Scrap metal he handles mostly, and secondhand cars. If they won’t do for one they’ll do for the other, that’s what Adam says. You want to go down Prince of Wales Drive till you come to the hospital. It’s tucked in there between a couple of pre-fabs. Bomb site it is really. Old Adam straightened it out with some cinders and no one’s ever moved him.”

“You seem to know a lot about him,” said Mendel.

“I should do, I’ve run him in a few times. There’s not much in the book that Adam hasn’t been up to. He’s one of our hardy perennials, Scarr is.”

“Well, well. Anything on him at present?”

“Couldn’t say, sir. But you can have him any time for illegal betting. And Adam’s practically under the Act already.”

They drove towards Battersea Hospital. The park on their right looked black and hostile behind the street lamps.

“What’s under the Act?” asked Smiley.

“Oh, he’s only joking. It means your record’s so long you’re eligible for Preventive Detention—years of it. He sounds like my type,” Mendel continued. “Leave him to me.”

They found the yard as the constable had described, between two dilapidated pre-fabs in an uncertain row of hutments erected on the bomb site. Rubble, clinker and refuse lay everywhere. Bits of asbestos, timber and old iron, presumably acquired by Mr Scarr for resale or adaptation, were piled in a corner, dimly lit by the pale glow which came from the further pre-fab. The two men looked round them in silence for a moment. Then Mendel shrugged, put two fingers in his mouth and whistled shrilly.

“Scarr!” he called. Silence. The outside light on the far pre-fab went on, and three or four pre-war cars in various stages of dilapidation became dimly discernible.

The door opened slowly and a girl of about twelve stood on the threshold.

“Your dad in, dear?” asked Mendel.

“Nope. Gone to the Prod, I ’spect.”

“Righto, dear. Thanks.”

They walked back to the road.

“What on earth’s the Prod, or daren’t I ask?” said Smiley. “Prodigal’s Calf. Pub round the corner. We can walk it—only a hundred yards. Leave the car here.”

It was only just after opening time. The public bar was empty, and as they waited for the landlord to appear the door swung open and a very fat man in a black suit came in. He walked straight to the bar and hammered on it with a half-crown.

“Wilf,” he shouted. “Take your finger out, you got customers, you lucky boy.” He turned to Smiley; “Good evening, friend.”

From the rear of the pub a voice replied: “Tell ’em to leave their money on the counter and come back later.”

The fat man looked at Mendel and Smiley blankly for a moment, then suddenly let out a peal of laughter: “Not them, Wilf—they’re busies!” The joke appealed to him so much that he was finally compelled to sit on the bench that ran along the side of the room, with his hands on his knees, his huge shoulders heaving with laughter, the tears running down his cheeks. Occasionally he said, “Oh dear, Oh dear,” as he caught his breath before another outburst.

Smiley looked at him with interest. He wore a very dirty stiff white collar with rounded edges, a flowered red tie carefully pinned outside the black waistcoat, army boots and a shiny black suit, very threadbare and without a vestige of a crease in the trousers. His shirt cuffs were black with sweat, grime, and motor oil and held in place by paper-clips twisted into a knot.

The landlord appeared and took their orders. The stranger bought a large whisky and ginger wine and took it at once to the saloon bar, where there was a coal fire. The landlord watched with disapproval.

“That’s him all over, mean sod. Won’t pay saloon prices, but likes the fire.”

“Who is he?” asked Mendel.

“Him? Scarr his name is. Adam Scarr. Christ knows why Adam. See him in the Garden of Eden: bloody grotesque, that’s what it is. They say round here that if Eve gave him an apple he’d eat the ruddy core.” The landlord sucked his teeth and shook his head. Then he shouted to Scarr: “Still, you’re good for business, aren’t you, Adam? They come bloody miles to see you, don’t they? Teenage monster from outer space, that’s what you are. Come and see. Adam Scarr: one look and you’ll sign the pledge.”

More hilarious laughter. Mendel leant over to Smiley. “You go and wait in the car—you’re better out of this. Got a fiver?”

Smiley gave him five pounds from his wallet, nodded his agreement and walked out. He could imagine nothing more frightful than dealing with Scarr.

“You Scarr?” said Mendel.

“Friend, you are correct.”

“TRX 0891. That your car?”

Mr Scarr frowned at his whisky and ginger. The question seemed to sadden him.

“Well?” said Mendel.

“She was, squire, she was.”

“What the hell do you mean?”

Scarr raised his right hand a few inches then let it gently fall. “Dark waters, squire, murky waters.”

“Listen, I’ve got bigger fish to fry than ever you dreamt of. I’m not made of glass, see? I couldn’t care bloody less about your racket. Where’s that car?”

Scarr appeared to consider this speech on its merits. “I see the light, friend. You wish for information.”

“Of course I bloody well do.”

“These are hard times, squire. The cost of living, dear boy, is a rising star. Information is an item, a saleable item, is it not?”

“You tell me who hired that car and you won’t starve.”

“I don’t starve now, friend. I want to eat better.”

“A fiver.”

Scarr finished his drink and replaced his glass noisily on the table. Mendel got up and bought him another.

“It was pinched,” said Scarr. “I had it a few years for self-drive, see. For the deepo.”

“The what?”

“The deepo—the deposit. Bloke wants a car for a day. You take twenty quid deposit in notes, right? When he comes back he owes you forty bob, see? You give him a cheque for thirty-eight quid, show it on your books as a loss and the job’s worth a tenner. Got it?”

Mendel nodded.

“Well, three weeks ago a bloke come in. Tall Scotsman. Well-to-do, he was. Carried a stick. He paid the deepo, took the car and I never see him nor the car again. Robbery.”

“Why not report it to the police?”

Scarr paused and drank from his glass. He looked at Mendel sadly.

“Many factors would argue against, squire.”

“Meaning you’d pinched it yourself?”

Scarr looked shocked. “I have since heard distressing rumours about the party from which I obtained the vehicle. I will say no more,” he added piously.

“When you rented him the car he filled in forms, didn’t he? Insurance, receipt and so on? Where are they?”

“False, all false. He gave me an address in Ealing. I went there and it didn’t exist. I have no doubt the name was also fictitious.”

Mendel screwed the money into a roll in his pocket, and handed it across the table to Scarr. Scarr unfolded it and, quite unselfconscious, counted it in full view of anyone who cared to look.

“I know where to find you,” said Mendel; “and I know a few things about you. If that’s a load of cock you’ve sold me I’ll break your bloody neck.”

It was raining again and Smiley wished he had brought a hat. He crossed the road, entered the side street which accommodated Mr Scarr’s establishment and walked towards the car. There was no one in the street, and it was oddly quiet. Two hundred yards down the road Battersea General Hospital, small and neat, shed multiple beams of light from its uncurtained windows. The pavement was very wet and the echo of his own footsteps was crisp and startling.

He drew level with the first of the two pre-fabs which bordered Scarr’s yard. A car was parked in the yard with its sidelights on. Curious, Smiley turned off the street and walked towards it. It was an old MG saloon, green probably, or that brown they went in for before the war. The number-plate was barely lit, and caked in mud. He stooped to read it, tracing the letters with his forefinger: TRX 0891. Of course—that was one of the numbers he had written down this morning.

He heard a footstep behind him and stood up, half turning. He had begun to raise his arm as the blow fell.

It was a terrible blow—it seemed to split his skull in two. As he fell he could feel the warm blood running freely over his left ear. Not again, oh Christ, not again, thought Smiley. But he hardly felt the rest—just a vision of his own body, far away, being slowly broken like rock; cracked and split into fragments, then nothing. Nothing but the warmth of his own blood as it ran over his face into the cinders, and far away the beating of the stonebreakers. But not here. Far away.

7

MR SCARR’S STORY

Mendel looked at him and wondered whether he was dead. He emptied the pockets of his own overcoat and laid it gently over Smiley’s shoulders, then he ran, ran like a madman towards the hospital, crashed through the swing-doors of the out-patients’ department into the bright, twenty-four-hour interior of the hospital. A young coloured doctor was on duty. Mendel showed him his card, shouted something to him, took him by the arm, tried to lead him down the road. The doctor smiled patiently, shook his head and telephoned for an ambulance.

Mendel ran back down the road and waited. A few minutes later the ambulance arrived and skilful men gathered Smiley up and took him away.

Bury him, thought Mendel; I’ll make the bastard pay.

He stood there for a moment, staring down at the wet patch of mud and cinders where Smiley had fallen; the red glow of the car’s rear lights showed him nothing. The ground had been hopelessly churned by the feet of the ambulance men and a few inhabitants from the pre-fabs who had come and gone like shadowy vultures. Trouble was about. They didn’t like trouble.

“Bastard,” Mendel hissed, and walked slowly back towards the pub.

The saloon bar was filling up. Scarr was ordering another drink. Mendel took him by the arm. Scarr turned and said:

“Hullo, friend, back again. Have a little of what killed Auntie.”

“Shut up,” said Mendel; “I want another word with you. Come outside.”

Mr Scarr shook his head and sucked his teeth sympathetically.

“Can’t be done, friend, can’t be done. Company.” He indicated with his head an eighteen-year-old blonde with off-white lipstick and an improbable bosom, who sat quite motionless at a corner table. Her painted eyes had a permanently startled look.

“Listen,” whispered Mendel; “in just two seconds I’ll tear your bloody ears off, you lying sod.”

Scarr consigned his drinks to the care of the landlord and made a slow, dignified exit. He didn’t look at the girl.

Mendel led him across the street towards the pre-fabs. The sidelights of Smiley’s car shone towards them eighty yards down the road.

They turned into the yard. The MG was still there. Mendel had Scarr firmly by the arm, ready if necessary to force the forearm back and upwards, breaking or dislocating the shoulder joint.

“Well, well,” cried Scarr with apparent delight. “She’s returned to the bosom of her ancestors.”

“Stolen, was it?” said Mendel. “Stolen by a tall Scotsman with a walking stick and an address in Ealing. Decent of him to bring it back, wasn’t it? Friendly gesture, after all this time. You’ve mistaken your bloody market, Scarr.” Mendel was shaking with anger. “And why are the sidelights on? Open the door.”

Scarr turned to Mendel in the dark, his free hand slapping his pockets in search of keys. He extracted a bunch of three or four, felt through them and finally unlocked the car door. Mendel got in, found the passenger light in the roof and switched it on. He began methodically to search the inside of the car. Scarr stood outside and waited.

He searched quickly but thoroughly. Glove tray, seats, floor, rear window-ledge: nothing. He slipped his hand inside the map pocket on the passenger door, and drew out a map and an envelope. The envelope was long and flat, grey-blue in colour with a linen finish. Continental, thought Mendel. There was no writing on it. He tore it open. There were ten used five-pound notes inside and a piece of plain postcard. Mendel held it to the light and read the message printed on it with a ball-point pen:

FINISHED NOW SELL IT.

There was no signature.

He got out of the car, and seized Scarr by the elbows. Scarr stepped back quickly. “What’s your problem, friend?” he asked.

Mendel spoke softly. “It’s not my problem, Scarr, it’s yours. The biggest bloody problem you ever had. Conspiracy to murder, attempted murder, offences under the Official Secrets Act. And you can add to that contravention of the Road Traffic Act, conspiracy to defraud the Inland Revenue, and about fifteen other charges that will occur to me while you nurse your problem on a cell bed.”

“Just a minute, copper, let’s not go over the moon. What’s the story? Who the hell’s talking about murder?”

“Listen, Scarr, you’re a little man, come in on the fringe of the big spenders, aren’t you? Well, now you’re the big spender. I reckon it’ll cost you fifteen years.”

“Look, shut up, will you.”

“No I won’t, little man. You’re caught between two big ones, see, and you’re the mug. And what will I do? I’ll bloody well laugh myself sick while you rot in the Scrubs and contemplate your fat belly. See that hospital, do you? There’s a bloke dying there, murdered by your tall Scotsman. They found him half an hour ago bleeding like a pig in your yard. There’s another one dead in Surrey, and for all I know there’s one in every bloody home county. So it’s your problem, you poor sod, not mine. Another thing—you’re the only one who knows who he is, aren’t you? He might want to tidy that up a bit, mightn’t he?”

Scarr walked slowly round to the other side of the car.

Mendel sat in the driving seat and unlocked the passenger door from the inside. Scarr sat himself beside him. They didn’t put the light on.

“I’m in a nice way of business round here,” said Scarr quietly, “and the pickings is small but regular. Or was till this bloke come along.”

“What bloke?”

“Bit by bit, copper, don’t rush me. That was four years ago. I didn’t believe in Father Christmas till I met him. Dutch, he said he was, in the diamond business. I’m not pretending I thought he was straight, see, because you’re not barmy and nor am I. I never asked what he done and he never told me, but I guessed it was smuggling. Money to burn he had, came off him like leaves in autumn. ‘Scarr,’ he said; ‘you’re a man of business. I don’t like publicity, never did, and I hears we’re birds of a feather. I want a car. Not to keep, but to borrow.’ He didn’t put it quite like that because of the lingo, but that’s the sense of it. ‘What’s your proposition?’ I says. ‘Let’s have a proposition.’

“‘Well,’ he says; ‘I’m shy. I want a car that no one can ever get on to, supposing I had an accident. Buy a car for me, Scarr, a nice old car with something under the bonnet. Buy it in your own name,’ he says, ‘and keep it wrapped up for me. There’s five hundred quid for a start, and twenty quid a month for garaging. And there’s a bonus, Scarr, for every day I take it out. But I’m shy, see, and you don’t know me. That’s what the money’s for,’ he says. ‘It’s for not knowing me.’

“I’ll never forget that day. Raining cats and dogs it was, and me bent over an old taxi I’d got off a bloke in Wandsworth. I owed a bookie forty quid, and the coppers were sensitive about a car I’d bought on the never never and flogged in Clapham.”

Mr Scarr drew breath, and let it out again with an air of comic resignation.

“And there he was, standing over me like my own conscience, showering old singles on me like used tote tickets.”

“What did he look like?” asked Mendel.

“Quite young he was. Tall, fair chap. But cool—cool as charity. I never saw him after that day. He sent me letters posted in London and typed on plain paper. Just ‘Be ready Monday night,’ ‘Be ready Thursday night,’ and so on. We had it all arranged. I left the car out in the yard, full of petrol and teed up. He never said when he’d be back. Just ran it in about closing time or later, leaving the lights on and the doors locked. He’d put a couple of quid in the map pocket for each day he’d been away.”

“What happened if anything went wrong, if you got pinched for something else?”

“We had a telephone number. He told me to ring and ask for a name.”

“What name?”

“He told me to choose one. I chose Blondie. He didn’t think that was very funny but we stuck to it. Primrose 0098.”

“Did you ever use it?”

“Yes, a couple of years ago I took a bint to Margate for ten days. I thought I’d better let him know. A girl answered the phone—Dutch too, by the sound of her. She said Blondie was in Holland, and she’d take a message. But after that I didn’t bother.”

“Why not?”

“I began to notice, see. He came regular once a fortnight, the first and third Tuesdays except January and February. This was the first January he come. He brought the car back Thursday usually. Odd him coming back tonight. But this is the end of him, isn’t it?” Scarr held in his enormous hand the piece of postcard he had taken from Mendel.

“Did he miss at all? Away long periods?”

“Winters he kept away more. January he never come, nor February. Like I said.”

Mendel still had the £50 in his hand. He tossed them into Scarr’s lap.

“Don’t think you’re lucky. I wouldn’t be in your shoes for ten times that lot. I’ll be back.”

Mr Scarr seemed worried.

“I wouldn’t have peached,” he said; “but I don’t want to be mixed up in nothing, see. Not if the old country’s going to suffer, eh, squire?”

“Oh, shut up,” said Mendel. He was tired. He took the postcard back, got out of the car and walked away towards the hospital.

There was no news at the hospital. Smiley was still unconscious. The CID had been informed. Mendel would do better to leave his name and address and go home. The hospital would telephone as soon as they had any news. After a good deal of argument Mendel obtained from the sister the key to Smiley’s car.

Mitcham, he decided, was a lousy place to live.

8

REFLECTIONS IN A HOSPITAL WARD

He hated the bed as a drowning man hates the sea. He hated the sheets that imprisoned him so that he could move neither hand nor foot.

And he hated the room because it frightened him. There was a trolley by the door with instruments on it, scissors, bandages and bottles, strange objects that carried the terror of the unknown, swathed in white linen for the last Communion. There were jugs, tall ones half covered with napkins, standing like white eagles waiting to tear at his entrails, little glass ones with rubber tubing coiled inside them like snakes. He hated everything, and he was afraid. He was hot and the sweat ran off him, he was cold and the sweat held him, trickling over his ribs like cold blood. Night and day alternated without recognition from Smiley. He fought a relentless battle against sleep, for when he closed his eyes they seemed to turn inwards on the chaos of his brain; and when sometimes by sheer weight his eyelids drew themselves together he would summon all his strength to tear them apart and stare again at the pale light wavering somewhere above him.

Then came a blessed day when someone must have drawn the blinds and let in the grey winter light. He heard the sound of traffic outside and knew at last that he would live.

So the problem of dying once more became an academic one— a debt he would postpone until he was rich and could pay in his own way. It was a luxurious feeling, almost of purity. His mind was wonderfully lucid, ranging like Prometheus over his whole world; where had he heard that: “the mind becomes separated from the body, rules a paper kingdom …”? He was bored by the light above him, and wished there was more to look at. He was bored by the grapes, the smell of honeycomb and flowers, the chocolates. He wanted books, and literary journals; how could he keep up with his reading if they gave him no books? There was so little research done on his period as it was, so little creative criticism on the seventeenth century.

It was three weeks before Mendel was allowed to see him. He walked in holding a new hat and carrying a book about bees. He put his hat on the end of the bed and the book on the bedside table. He was grinning.

“I bought you a book,” he said; “about bees. They’re clever little beggars. Might interest you.”

He sat on the edge of the bed. “I got a new hat. Daft really. Celebrate my retirement.”

“Oh yes, I forgot. You’re on the shelf too.” They both laughed, and were silent again.

Smiley blinked. “I’m afraid you’re not very distinct at the moment. I’m not allowed to wear my old glasses. They’re getting me some new ones.” He paused. “You don’t know who did this to me, do you?”

“May do. Depends. Got a lead, I think. I don’t know enough, that’s the trouble. About your job, I mean. Does the East German Steel Mission mean anything to you?”

“Yes, I think so. It came here four years ago to try and get a foot in the Board of Trade.”

Mendel gave an account of his transactions with Mr Scarr. “… Said he was Dutch. The only way Scarr had of getting in touch with him was by ringing a Primrose telephone number. I checked the subscriber. Listed as the East German Steel Mission, in Belsize Park. I sent a bloke to sniff round. They’ve cleared out. Nothing there at all, no furniture, nothing. Just the telephone, and that’s been ripped out of its socket.”

“When did they go?”

“The third of January. Same day as Fennan was murdered.” He looked at Smiley quizzically. Smiley thought for a minute and said:

“Get hold of Peter Guillam at the Ministry of Defence and bring him here tomorrow. By the scruff of the neck.”

Mendel picked up his hat and walked to the door.

“Good-bye,” said Smiley; “thank you for the book.”

“See you tomorrow,” said Mendel, and left.

Smiley lay back in bed. His head was aching. Damn, he thought, I never thanked him for the honey. It had come from Fortnum’s, too.

Why the early morning call? That was what puzzled him more than anything. It was silly, really, Smiley supposed, but of all the unaccountables in the case, that worried him most.

Elsa Fennan’s explanation had been so stupid, so noticeably unlikely. Ann, yes; she would make the exchange stand on its head if she’d felt like it, but not Elsa Fennan. There was nothing in that alert, intelligent little face, nothing in her total independence to support the ludicrous claim to absent-mindedness. She could have said the exchange had made a mistake, had called the wrong day, anything. Fennan, yes; he had been absent-minded. It was one of the odd inconsistencies about Fennan’s character which had emerged in the inquiries before the interview. A voracious reader of Westerns and a passionate chess player, a musician and a sparetime philosopher, a deep thinking man—but absent-minded. There had been a frightful row once about him taking some secret papers out of the Foreign Office, and it turned out that he had put them in his despatch case with his Times and the evening paper before going home to Walliston.

Had Elsa Fennan, in her panic, taken upon herself the mantle of her husband? Or the motive of her husband? Had Fennan asked for the call to remind him of something, and had Elsa borrowed the motive? Then what did Fennan need to be reminded of—and what did his wife so strenuously wish to conceal?

Samuel Fennan. The new world and the old met in him. The eternal Jew, cultured, cosmopolitan, self-determinate, industrious and perceptive: to Smiley, immensely attractive. The child of his century; persecuted, like Elsa, and driven from his adopted Germany to university in England. By the sheer weight of his ability he had pushed aside disadvantage and prejudice, finally to enter the Foreign Office. It had been a remarkable achievement, owed to nothing but his own brilliance. And if he was a little conceited, a little disinclined to bide the decision of minds more pedestrian than his own, who could blame him? There had been some embarrassment when Fennan pronounced himself in favour of a divided Germany, but it had all blown over, he had been transferred to an Asian desk, and the affair was forgotten. For the rest, he had been generous to a fault, and popular both in Whitehall and in Surrey, where he devoted several hours each week-end to charity work. His great love was skiing. Every year he took all his leave at once and spent six weeks in Switzerland or Austria. He had visited Germany only once, Smiley remembered—with his wife about four years ago.

It had been natural enough that Fennan should join the Left at Oxford. It was the great honeymoon period of university Communism, and its causes, heaven knows, lay close enough to his heart. The rise of Fascism in Germany and Italy, the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, the Franco rebellion in Spain, the slump in America, and above all the wave of anti-Semitism that was sweeping across Europe: it was inevitable that Fennan should seek an outlet for his anger and revulsion. Besides, the Party was respectable then; the failure of the Labour Party and the Coalition Government had convinced many intellectuals that the Communists alone could provide an effective alternative to Capitalism and Fascism. There was the excitement, an air of conspiracy and comradeship which must have appealed to the flamboyance in Fennan’s character and given him comfort in his loneliness. There was talk of going to Spain; some had gone, like Cornford from Cambridge, never to return.

Smiley could imagine Fennan in those days—volatile and earnest, no doubt bringing to his companions the experience of real suffering, a veteran among cadets. His parents had died—his father had been a banker with the foresight to keep a small account in Switzerland. There had not been much, but enough to see him through Oxford, and protect him from the cold wind of poverty.

Smiley remembered so well that interview with Fennan; one among many, yet different. Different because of the language. Fennan was so articulate, so quick, so sure. “Their greatest day,” he had said, “was when the miners came. They came from the Rhondda, you know, and to the comrades it seemed the spirit of Freedom had come down with them from the hills. It was a hunger march. It never seemed to occur to the Group that the marchers might actually be hungry, but it occurred to me. We hired a truck and the girls made stew—tons of it. We got the meat cheap from a sympathetic butcher in the market. We drove the truck out to meet them. They ate the stew and marched on. They didn’t like us really, you know, didn’t trust us.” He laughed. “They were so small— that’s what I remember best—small and dark like elves. We hoped they’d sing and they did. But not for us—for themselves. That was the first time I had met Welshmen.

“It made me understand my own race better, I think—I’m a Jew, you know.”

Smiley had nodded.

“They didn’t know what to do when the Welshmen had gone. What do you do when a dream has come true? They realized then why the Party didn’t much care about intellectuals. I think they felt cheap, mostly, and ashamed. Ashamed of their beds and their rooms, their full bellies and their clever essays. Ashamed of their talents and their humour. They were always saying how Keir Hardie taught himself shorthand with a piece of chalk on the coal face, you know. They were ashamed of having pencils and paper. But it’s no good just throwing them away, is it? That’s what I learnt in the end. That’s why I left the Party, I suppose.”

Smiley wanted to ask him how Fennan himself had felt, but Fennan was talking again. He had shared nothing with them, he had come to realize that. They were not men, but children, who dreamt of freedom-fires, gipsy music, and one world tomorrow, who rode on white horses across the Bay of Biscay or with a child’s pleasure bought beer for starving elves from Wales; children who had no power to resist the Eastern sun, and obediently turned their tousled heads towards it. They loved each other and believed they loved mankind, they fought each other and believed they fought the world.

Soon he found them comic and touching. To him, they might as well have knitted socks for soldiers. The disproportion between the dream and reality drove him to a close examination of both; he put all his energy into philosophical and historical reading, and found, to his surprise, comfort and peace in the intellectual purity of Marxism. He feasted on its intellectual ruthlessness, was thrilled by its fearlessness, its academic reversal of traditional values. In the end it was this and not the Party that gave him strength in his solitude, a philosophy which exacted total sacrifice to an unassailable formula, which humiliated and inspired him; and when he finally found success, prosperity and integration, he turned his back sadly upon it as a treasure he had outgrown and must leave at Oxford with the days of his youth.

This was how Fennan had described it and Smiley had understood. It was scarcely the story of anger and resentment that Smiley had come to expect in such interviews, but (perhaps because of that) it seemed more real. There was another thing about that interview: Smiley’s conviction that Fennan had left something important unsaid.

Was there any factual connection between the incident in Bywater Street and Fennan’s death? Smiley reproached himself for being carried away. Seen in perspective, there was nothing but the sequence of events to suggest that Fennan and Smiley were part of a single problem.

The sequence of events, that is, and the weight of Smiley’s intuition, experience or what you will—the extra sense that had told him to ring the bell and not use his key, the sense that did not, however, warn him that a murderer stood in the night with a piece of lead piping.

The interview had been informal, that was true. The walk in the park reminded him more of Oxford than of Whitehall. The walk in the park, the café in Millbank—yes, there had been a procedural difference too, but what did it amount to? An official of the Foreign Office walking in the park, talking earnestly with an anonymous little man … Unless the little man was not anonymous!

Smiley took a paper-back book and began to write in pencil on the fly-leaf:

“Let us assume what is by no means proven: that the murder of Fennan and the attempted murder of Smiley are related. What circumstances connected Smiley with Fennan before Fennan’s death?

1.  Before the interview on Monday, 2 January, I had never met Fennan. I read his file at the Department and I had certain preliminary inquiries made.

2.  On 2 January I went alone to the Foreign Office by taxi. The FO arranged the interview, but did not, repeat not, know in advance who would conduct it. Fennan therefore had no prior knowledge of my identity, nor had anyone else outside the Department.

3.  The interview fell into two parts; the first at the FO, when people wandered through the room and took no notice of us at all, the second outside when anyone could have seen us.”

What followed? Nothing, unless …

Yes, that was the only possible conclusion: unless whoever saw them together recognized not only Fennan but Smiley as well, and was violently opposed to their association.

Why? In what way was Smiley dangerous? His eyes suddenly opened very wide. Of course—in one way, in one way only—as a security officer.

He put down his pencil.

And so whoever killed Sam Fennan was anxious that he should not talk to a security officer. Someone in the Foreign Office, perhaps. But essentially someone who knew Smiley too. Someone Fennan had known at Oxford, known as a communist, someone who feared exposure, who thought that Fennan would talk, had talked already, perhaps? And if he had talked already then of course Smiley would have to be killed—killed quickly before he could put in his report.

That would explain the murder of Fennan and the assault on Smiley. It made some sense, but not much. He had built a cardhouse as high as it would go, and he still had cards in his hand. What about Elsa, her lies, her complicity, her fear? What about the car and the 8.30 call? What about the anonymous letter? If the murderer was frightened of contact between Smiley and Fennan, he would scarcely call attention to Fennan by denouncing him. Who then? Who?

He lay back and closed his eyes. His head was throbbing again. Perhaps Peter Guillam could help. He was the only hope. His head was going round. It hurt terribly.

9

TIDYING UP

Mendel showed Peter Guillam into the ward, grinning hugely.

“Got him,” he said.

The conversation was awkward; strained for Guillam at least, by the recollection of Smiley’s abrupt resignation and the incongruity of meeting in a hospital ward. Smiley was wearing a blue bedjacket, his hair was spiky and untidy above the bandages and he still had the trace of a heavy bruise on his left temple.

After a particularly awkward pause, Smiley said: “Look, Peter, Mendel’s told you what happened to me. You’re the expert—what do we know about the East German Steel Mission?”

“Pure as the driven snow, dear boy, except for their sudden departure. Only about three men and a dog in the thing. They hung out in Hampstead somewhere. No one quite knew why they were here when they first came but they’ve done quite a decent job in the last four years.”

“What are their terms of reference?”

“God knows. I think they thought when they arrived that they were going to persuade the Board of Trade to break the European steel rings, but they got the cold shoulder. Then they went in for consular stuff with the accent on machine tools and finished products, exchange of industrial and technical information and so on. Nothing to do with what they came for but rather more acceptable, I gather.”

“Who were they?”

“Oh—couple of technicians—Professor Doktor someone and Doktor someone else—couple of girls and a general dogsbody.”

“Who was the dogsbody?”

“Don’t know. Some young diplomat to iron out the wrinkles. We have them recorded at the Department. I can send you details, I suppose.”

“If you don’t mind.”

“No, of course not.”

There was another awkward pause. Smiley said: “Photographs would be a help, Peter. Could you manage that?”

“Yes, yes, of course.” Guillam looked away from Smiley in some embarrassment. “We don’t know much about the East Germans really, you know. We get odd bits here and there, but on the whole they’re something of a mystery. If they operate at all they don’t do it under Trade or Diplomatic cover—that’s why, if you’re right about this chap, it’s so odd him coming from the Steel Mission.”

“Oh,” said Smiley flatly.

“How do they operate?” asked Mendel.

“It’s hard to generalize from the very few isolated cases we do know of. My impression is that they run their agents direct from Germany with no contact between controller and agent in the operational zone.”

“But that must limit them terribly,” cried Smiley. “You may have to wait months before your agent can travel to a meeting place outside his own country. He may not have the necessary cover to make the journey at all.”

“Well, obviously it does limit him, but their targets seem to be so insignificant. They prefer to run foreign nationals—Swedes, expatriate Poles and what not, on short-term missions, where the limitations of their technique don’t matter. In exceptional cases where they have an agent resident in the target country, they work on a courier system, which corresponds to the Soviet pattern.”

Smiley was listening now.

“As a matter of fact,” Guillam went on, “the Americans intercepted a courier quite recently, which is where we learnt the little we do know about GDR technique.”

“Such as what?”

“Oh well, never waiting at a rendezvous, never meeting at the stated time but twenty minutes before; recognition signals—all the usual conjuring tricks that give a gloss to low-grade information. They muck about with names, too. A courier may have to contact three or four agents—a controller may run as many as fifteen. They never invent cover names for themselves.”

“What do you mean? Surely they must.”

“They get the agent to do it for them. The agent chooses a name, any name he likes, and the controller adopts it. A gimmick really—” He stopped, looking at Mendel in surprise.

Mendel had leapt to his feet.

Guillam sat back in his chair and wondered if he were allowed to smoke. He decided reluctantly that he wasn’t. He could have done with a cigarette.

“Well?” said Smiley. Mendel had described to Guillam his interview with Mr Scarr.

“It fits,” said Guillam. “Obviously it fits with what we know. But then we don’t know all that much. If Blondie was a courier, it is exceptional—in my experience at least—that he should use a trade delegation as a staging post.”

“You said the Mission had been here four years,” said Mendel. “Blondie first came to Scarr four years ago.”

No one spoke for a moment. Then Smiley said earnestly: “Peter, it is possible, isn’t it? I mean they might under certain operational conditions need to have a station over here as well as couriers.”

“Well, of course, if they were on to something really big they might.”

“Meaning if they had a highly placed resident agent in play?”

“Yes, roughly.”

“And assuming they had such an agent, a Maclean or Fuchs, it is conceivable that they would establish a station here under trade cover with no operational function except to hold the agent’s hand?”

“Yes, it’s conceivable. But it’s a tall order, George. What you’re suggesting is that the agent is run from abroad, serviced by courier and the courier is serviced by the Mission, which is also the agent’s personal guardian angel. He’d have to be some agent.”

“I’m not suggesting quite that—but near enough. And I accept that the system demands a high-grade agent. Don’t forget we only have Blondie’s word for it that he came from abroad.”

Mendel chipped in: “This agent—would he be in touch with the Mission direct?”

“Good Lord, no,” said Guillam. “He’d probably have an emergency procedure for getting in touch with them—a telephone code or something of the sort.”

“How does that work?” asked Mendel.

“Varies. Might be on the wrong number system. You dial the number from a call box and ask to speak to George Brown. You’re told George Brown doesn’t live there so you apologize and ring off. The time and the rendezvous are prearranged—the emergency signal is contained in the name you ask for. Someone will be there.”

“What else would the Mission do?” asked Smiley.

“Hard to say. Pay him probably. Arrange a collecting place for reports. The controller would make all those arrangements for the agent, of course, and tell him his part of it by courier. They work on the Soviet principle a good deal, as I told you—even the smallest details are arranged by control. The people in the field are allowed very little independence.”

There was another silence. Smiley looked at Guillam and then at Mendel, then blinked and said:

“Blondie didn’t come to Scarr in January and February, did he?”

“No,” said Mendel; “this was the first year.”

“Fennan always went skiing in January and February. This was the first time in four years he’d missed.”

“I wonder,” said Smiley, “whether I ought to go and see Maston again.”

Guillam stretched luxuriously and smiled: “You can always try. He’ll be thrilled to hear you’ve been brained. I’ve a sneaking feeling he’ll think Battersea’s on the coast, but not to worry. Tell him you were attacked while wandering about in someone’s private yard— he’ll understand. Tell him about your assailant, too, George. You’ve never seen him, mind, and you don’t know his name, but he’s a courier of the East German Intelligence Service. Maston will back you up; he always does. Specially when he’s got to report to the Minister.”

Smiley looked at Guillam and said nothing.

“After your bang on the head, too,” Guillam added; “he’ understand.”

“But, Peter—”

“I know, George, I know.”

“Well, let me tell you another thing. Blondie collected his car on the first Tuesday of each month.”

“So?”

“Those were the nights Elsa Fennan went to the Weybridge Rep. Fennan worked late on Tuesdays, she said.”

Guillam got up. “Let me dig about, George. Cheerio, Mendel, I’ll probably give you a ring tonight. I don’t see what we can do now, anyway, but it would be nice to know, wouldn’t it?” He reached the door. “Incidentally, where are Fennan’s possessions—wallet, diary and so forth? Stuff they found on the body?”

“Probably still at the Station,” said Mendel; “until after the inquest.”

Guillam stood looking at Smiley for a moment, wondering what to say.

“Anything you want, George?”

“No thanks—oh, there is one thing.”

“Yes?”

“Could you get the CID off my back? They’ve visited me three times now and of course they’ve got nowhere locally. Could you make this an Intelligence matter for the time being? Be mysterious and soothing?”

“Yes, I should think so.”

“I know it’s difficult, Peter, because I’m not—”

“Oh, another thing just to cheer you up. I had that comparison made between Fennan’s suicide note and the anonymous letter. They were done by different people on the same machine. Different pressures and spacing but identical typeface. So long, old dear. Tuck into the grapes.”

Guillam closed the door behind him. They heard his footsteps echoing crisply down the bare corridor.

Mendel rolled himself a cigarette.

“Lord,” said Smiley; “does nothing frighten you? Haven’t you seen the Sister here?”

Mendel grinned and shook his head.

“You can only die once,” he said, putting the cigarette between his thin lips. Smiley watched him light it. He produced his lighter, took the hood off it and rotated the wheel with his stained thumb, swiftly cupping both hands around it and nursing the flame towards the cigarette. There might have been a hurricane blowing.

“Well, you’re the crime expert,” said Smiley. “How are we doing?”

“Messy,” said Mendel. “Untidy.”

“Why?”

“Loose ends everywhere. No police work. Nothing checked. Like algebra.”

“What’s algebra got to do with it?”

“You’ve got to prove what can be proved, first. Find the constants. Did she really go to the theatre? Was she alone? Did the neighbours hear her come back? If so, what time? Was Fennan really late Tuesdays? Did his Missus go to the theatre regularly every fortnight like she said?”

“And the 8.30 call. Can you tidy that for me?”

“You’ve got that call on the brain, haven’t you?”

“Yes. Of all the loose ends, that’s the loosest. I brood over it, you know, and there just isn’t any sense in it. I’ve been through his train timetable. He was a punctual man—often got to the FO before anyone else, unlocked his own cupboard. He would have caught the 8.54, the 9.08, or at worst the 9.14. The 8.54 got him in at 9.38—he liked to be at his office by a quarter to ten. He couldn’t possibly want to be woken at 8.30.”

“Perhaps he just liked bells,” said Mendel, getting up.

“And the letters,” Smiley continued. “Different typists but the same machine. Discounting the murderer two people had access to that machine: Fennan and his wife. If we accept that Fennan typed the suicide note—and he certainly signed it—we must accept that it was Elsa who typed the denunciation. Why did she do that?”

Smiley was tired out, relieved that Mendel was going.

“Off to tidy up. Find the constants.”

“You’ll need money,” said Smiley, and offered him some from the wallet beside his bed. Mendel took it without ceremony, and left.

Smiley lay back. His head was throbbing madly, burning hot. He thought of calling the nurse and cowardice prevented him. Gradually the throbbing eased. He heard from outside the ringing of an ambulance bell as it turned off Prince of Wales Drive into the hospital yard. “Perhaps he just liked bells,” he muttered, and fell asleep.

He was woken by the sound of argument in the corridor—he heard the Sister’s voice raised in protest; he heard footsteps and Mendel’s voice, urgent in contradiction. The door opened suddenly and someone put the light on. He blinked and sat up, glancing at his watch. It was a quarter to six. Mendel was talking to him, almost shouting. What was he trying to say? Something about Battersea Bridge … the river police … missing since yesterday … He was wide awake. Adam Scarr was dead.

10

THE VIRGIN’S STORY

Mendel drove very well, with a kind of schoolma’amish pedantry that Smiley would have found comic. The Weybridge road was packed with traffic as usual. Mendel hated motorists. Give a man a car of his own and he leaves humility and common sense behind him in the garage. He didn’t care who it was—he’d seen bishops in purple doing seventy in a built-up area, frightening pedestrians out of their wits. He liked Smiley’s car. He liked the fussy way it had been maintained, the sensible extras, wing mirrors and reversing light. It was a decent little car.

He liked people who looked after things, who finished what they began. He liked thoroughness and precision. No skimping. Like this murderer. What had Scarr said? “Young, mind, but cool. Cool as charity.” He knew that look, and Scarr had known it too … the look of complete negation that reposes in the eyes of a young killer. Not the look of a wild beast, not the grinning savagery of a maniac, but the look born of supreme efficiency, tried and proven. It was a stage beyond the experience of war. The witnessing of death in war brings a sophistication of its own; but beyond that, far beyond, is the conviction of supremacy in the heart of the professional killer. Yes, Mendel had seen it before: the one that stood apart from the gang, pale eyed, expressionless, the one the girls went after, spoke of without smiling. Yes, he was a cool one all right.

Scarr’s death had frightened Mendel. He made Smiley promise not to go back to Bywater Street when he was released from hospital. With any luck they’d think he was dead, anyway. Scarr’s death proved one thing, of course: the murderer was still in England, still anxious to tidy up. “When I get up,” Smiley had said last night, “we must get him out of his hole again. Put out bits of cheese.” Mendel knew who the cheese would be: Smiley. Of course if they were right about the motive there would be other cheese too: Fennan’s wife. In fact, Mendel thought grimly, it doesn’t say much for her that she hasn’t been murdered. He felt ashamed of himself and turned his mind to other things. Such as Smiley again.

Odd little beggar, Smiley was. Reminded Mendel of a fat boy he’d played football with at school. Couldn’t run, couldn’t kick, blind as a bat but played like hell, never satisfied till he’d got himself torn to bits. Used to box, too. Came in wide open swinging his arms about: got himself half killed before the referee stopped it. Clever bloke, too.

Mendel stopped at a roadside café for a cup of tea and a bun, then drove into Weybridge. The Repertory Theatre was in a one-way street leading off the High Street where parking was impossible. Finally he left the car at the railway station and walked back into the town.

The front doors of the theatre were locked. Mendel walked round to the side of the building under a brick archway. A green door was propped open. It had push bars on the inside and the words “stage door” scribbled in chalk. There was no bell; a faint smell of coffee issued from the dark green corridor within. Mendel stepped through the doorway and walked down the corridor, at the end of which he found a stone staircase with a metal handrail leading upwards to another green door. The smell of coffee was stronger, and he heard the sound of voices.

“Oh rot, darling, frankly. If the culture vultures of blissful Surrey want Barrie three months running let them have it, say I. It’s either Barrie or A Cuckoo in the Nest for the third year running and for me Barrie gets it by a short head”—this from a middle-aged female voice.

A querulous male replied: “Well, Ludo can always do Peter Pan, can’t you, Ludo?”

“Bitchie, bitchie,” said a third voice, also male, and Mendel opened the door.

He was standing in the wings of the stage. On his left was a piece of thick hardboard with about a dozen switches mounted on a wooden panel. An absurd rococo chair in gilt and embroidery stood beneath it for the prompter and factotum.

In the middle of the stage two men and a woman sat on barrels smoking and drinking coffee. The décor represented the deck of a ship. A mast with rigging and rope ladders occupied the centre of the stage, and a large cardboard cannon pointed disconsolately towards a backcloth of sea and sky.

The conversation stopped abruptly as Mendel appeared on the stage. Someone murmured: “My dear, the ghost at the feast,” and they all looked at him and giggled.

The woman spoke first: “Are you looking for someone, dear?”

“Sorry to butt in. Wanted to talk about becoming a subscriber to the theatre. Join the club.”

“Why yes, of course. How nice,” she said, getting up and walking over to him. “How very nice.” She took his left hand in both of her own and squeezed it, stepping back at the same time and extending her arms to their full length. It was her chatelaine gesture—Lady Macbeth receives Duncan. She put her head on one side and smiled girlishly, retained his hand and led him across the stage to the opposite wing. A door led into a tiny office littered with old programmes and posters, greasepaint, false hair and tawdry pieces of nautical costume.

“Have you seen our panto this year? Treasure Island. Such a gratifying success. And so much more social content, don’t you think, than those vulgar nursery tales?”

Mendel said: “Yes, wasn’t it,” without the least idea of what she was talking about, when his eye caught a pile of bills rather neatly assembled and held together by a bulldog clip. The top one was made out to Mrs Ludo Oriel and was four months overdue.

She was looking at him shrewdly through her glasses. She was small and dark, with lines on her neck and a great deal of make-up. The lines under her eyes had been levelled off with greasepaint but the effect had not lasted. She was wearing slacks and a chunky pullover liberally splashed with distemper. She smoked incessantly. Her mouth was very long, and she held her cigarette in the middle of it in a direct line beneath her nose, her lips formed an exaggerated convex curve, distorting the lower half of her face and giving her an ill-tempered and impatient look. Mendel thought she would probably be difficult and clever. It was a relief to think she couldn’t pay her bills.

“You do want to join the club, don’t you?”

“No.”

She suddenly flew into a rage: “If you’re another bloody tradesman you can get out. I’ve said I’ll pay and I will, just don’t pester me. If you let people think I’m finished I will be and you’ll be the losers, not me.”

“I’m not a creditor, Mrs Oriel. I’ve come to offer you money.”

She was waiting.

“I’m a divorce agent. Rich client. Like to ask you a few questions. We’re prepared to pay for your time.”

“Christ,” she said with relief. “Why didn’t you say so in the first place?” They both laughed. Mendel put five pounds on top of the bills, counting them down.

“Now,” said Mendel; “how do you keep your club subscription list? What are the benefits of joining?”

“Well, we have watery coffee on stage every morning at eleven sharp. Members of the club can mix with the cast during the break between rehearsals from 11.00 to 11.45. They pay for whatever they have, of course, but entry is strictly limited to club members.”

“Quite.”

“That’s probably the part that interests you. We seem to get nothing but pansies and nymphos in the morning.”

“It may be. What else goes on?”

“We put on a different show each fortnight. Members can reserve seats for a particular day of each run—the second Wednesday of each run, and so on. We always begin a run on the first and third Mondays of the month. The show begins at 7.30 and we hold the club reservations until 7.20. The girl at the box office has the seating plan and strikes off each seat as it’s sold. Club reservations are marked in red and aren’t sold off till last.”

“I see. So if one of your members doesn’t take his usual seat, it will be marked off on the seating plan.”

“Only if it’s sold.”

“Of course.”

“We’re not often full after the first week. We’re trying to do a show a week, you see, but it’s not easy to get the—er—facilities. There isn’t the support for two-week runs really.”

“No, no, quite. Do you keep old seating plans?”

“Sometimes, for the accounts.”

“How about Tuesday the third of January?”

She opened a cupboard and took out a sheaf of printed seating plans. “This is the second fortnight of our pantomime, of course. Tradition.”

“Quite,” said Mendel.

“Now who is it you’re so interested in?” asked Mrs Oriel, picking up a ledger from the desk.

“Small blonde party, aged about forty-two or three. Name of Fennan, Elsa Fennan.”

Mrs Oriel opened her ledger. Mendel quite shamelessly looked over her shoulder. The names of club members were entered neatly in the left-hand column. A red tick on the extreme left of the page indicated that the member had paid his subscription. On the right-hand side of the page were notes of standing reservations made for the year. There were about eighty members.

“Name doesn’t ring a bell. Where does she sit?”

“No idea.”

“Oh, yes, here we are. Merridale Lane, Walliston. Merridale!—I ask you. Let’s look. A rear stall at the end of a row. Very odd choice, don’t you think? Seat number R2. But God knows whether she took it on the third of January. I shouldn’t think we’ve got the plan any more, though I’ve never thrown anything away in my life. Things just evaporate, don’t they?” She looked at him out of the corner of her eye, wondering whether she’d earned her five pounds. “Tell you what, we’ll ask the Virgin.” She got up and walked to the door; “Fennan … Fennan …” she said. “Half a sec, that does ring a bell. I wonder why. Well, I’m damned—of course—the music case.” She opened the door. “Where’s the Virgin?” she said, talking to someone on the stage.

“God knows.”

“Helpful pig,” said Mrs Oriel, and closed the door again. She turned to Mendel: “The Virgin’s our white hope. English rose, local solicitor’s stage-struck daughter, all lisle stockings and get-me-if-you-can. We loathe her. She gets a part occasionally because her father pays tuition fees. She does seating in the evenings sometimes when there’s a rush—she and Mrs Torr, the cleaner, who does cloaks. When things are quiet, Mrs Torr does the whole thing and the Virgin mopes about in the wings hoping the female lead will drop dead.” She paused. “I’m damned sure I remember ‘Fennan.’ Damned sure I do. I wonder where that cow is.” She disappeared for a couple of minutes and returned with a tall and rather pretty girl with fuzzy blonde hair and pink cheeks—good at tennis and swimming.

“This is Elizabeth Pidgeon. She may be able to help. Darling, we want to find out a Mrs Fennan, a club member. Didn’t you tell me something about her?”

“Oh, yes, Ludo.” She must have thought she sounded sweet. She smiled vapidly at Mendel, put her head on one side and twined her fingers together. Mendel jerked his head towards her.

“Do you know her?” asked Mrs Oriel.

“Oh yes, Ludo. She’s madly musical; at least I think she must be because she always brings her music. She’s madly thin and odd. She’s foreign, isn’t she, Ludo?”

“Why odd?” asked Mendel.

“Oh, well, last time she came she got in a frightful pet about the seat next to her. It was a club reservation, you see, and simply hours after twenty past. We’d just started the panto season and there were millions of people wanting seats so I let it go. She kept on saying she was sure the person would come because he always did.”

“Did he?” asked Mendel.

“No. I let the seat go. She must have been in an awful pet because she left after the second act, and forgot to collect her music case.”

“This person she was sure would turn up,” said Mendel, “is he friendly with Mrs Fennan?”

Ludo Oriel gave Mendel a suggestive wink.

“Well, gosh, I should think so, he’s her husband, isn’t he?”

Mendel looked at her for a minute and then smiled: “Couldn’t we find a chair for Elizabeth?” he said.

“Gosh, thanks,” said the Virgin, and sat on the edge of an old gilt chair like the prompter’s chair in the wings. She put her red, fat hands on her knees and leant forward, smiling all the time, thrilled to be the centre of so much interest. Mrs Oriel looked at her venomously.

“What makes you think he was her husband, Elizabeth?” There was an edge to his voice which had not been there before.

“Well, I know they arrive separately, but I thought that as they had seats apart from the rest of the club reservations, they must be husband and wife. And of course he always brings a music case too.”

“I see. What else can you remember about that evening, Elizabeth?”

“Oh, well, lots really because, you see, I felt awful about her leaving in such a pet and then later that night she rang up. Mrs Fennan did, I mean. She said her name and said she’d left early and forgotten her music case. She’d lost the ticket for it, too, and was in a frightful state. It sounded as if she was crying. I heard someone’s voice in the background, and then she said someone would drop in and get it if that would be all right without the ticket. I said of course, and half an hour later the man came. He’s rather super. Tall and fair.”

“I see,” said Mendel; “thank you very much, Elizabeth, you’ve been very helpful.”

“Gosh, that’s OK.” She got up.

“Incidentally,” said Mendel. “This man who collected her music case—he wasn’t by any chance the same man who sits beside her in the theatre, was he?”

“Rather. Gosh, sorry, I should have said that.”

“Did you talk to him?”

“Well, just to say here you are, sort of thing.”

“What kind of voice had he?”

“Oh, foreign, like Mrs Fennan’s—she is foreign, isn’t she? That’s what I put it down to—all her fuss and state—foreign temperament.”

She smiled at Mendel, waited a moment, then walked out like Alice.

“Cow,” said Mrs Oriel, looking at the closed door. Her eyes turned to Mendel. “Well, I hope you’ve got your five quids’ worth.”

“I think so,” said Mendel.

11

THE UNRESPECTABLE CLUB

Mendel found Smiley sitting in an armchair fully dressed. Peter Guillam was stretched luxuriously on the bed, a pale green folder held casually in his hand. Outside, the sky was black and menacing.

“Enter the third murderer,” said Guillam as Mendel walked in. Mendel sat down at the end of the bed and nodded happily to Smiley, who looked pale and depressed.

“Congratulations. Nice to see you on your feet.”

“Thank you. I’m afraid if you did see me on my feet you wouldn’t congratulate me. I feel as weak as a kitten.”

“When are they letting you go?”

“I don’t know when they expect me to go—”

“Haven’t you asked?”

“No.”

“Well, you’d better. I’ve got news for you. I don’t know what it means but it means something.”

“Well, well,” said Guillam; “everyone’s got news for everyone else. Isn’t that exciting. George has been looking at my family snaps”—he raised the green folder a fraction of an inch—“and recognizes all his old chums.”

Mendel felt baffled and rather left out of things. Smiley intervened: “I’ll tell you all about it over dinner tomorrow evening. I’m getting out of here in the morning, whatever they say. I think we’ve found the murderer and a lot more besides. Now let’s have your news.” There was no triumph in his eyes. Only anxiety.

Membership of the club to which Smiley belonged is not quoted among the respectable acquisitions of those who adorn the pages of Who’s Who. It was formed by a young renegade of the Junior Carlton named Steed-Asprey, who had been warned off by the Secretary for blaspheming within the hearing of a South African bishop. He persuaded his former Oxford landlady to leave her quiet house in Hollywell and take over two rooms and a cellar in Manchester Square which a monied relative put at his disposal. It had once had forty members who each paid fifty guineas a year. There were thirty-one left. There were no women and no rules, no secretary and no bishops. You could take sandwiches and buy a bottle of beer, you could take sandwiches and buy nothing at all. As long as you were reasonably sober and minded your own business, no one gave twopence what you wore, did or said, or whom you brought with you. Mrs Sturgeon no longer devilled at the bar, or brought you your chop in front of the fire in the cellar, but presided in genial comfort over the ministrations of two retired sergeants from a small border regiment.

Naturally enough, most of the members were approximate contemporaries of Smiley at Oxford. It had always been agreed that the club was to serve one generation only, that it would grow old and die with its members. The war had taken its toll of Jebedee and others, but no one had ever suggested they should elect new members. Besides, the premises were now their own, Mrs Sturgeon’s future had been taken care of and the club was solvent.

It was a Saturday evening and only half a dozen people were there. Smiley had ordered their meal, and a table was set for them in the cellar, where a bright coal fire burned in a brick hearth. They were alone, there was sirloin and claret; outside the rain fell continuously. For all three of them the world seemed an untroubled and decent place that night, despite the strange business that brought them together.

“To make sense of what I have to tell you,” began Smiley at last, addressing himself principally to Mendel, “I shall have to talk at length about myself. I’m an intelligence officer by trade as you know—I’ve been in the Service since the Flood, long before we were mixed up in power politics with Whitehall. In those days we were understaffed and underpaid. After the usual training and probation in South America and Central Europe, I took a job lecturing at a German university, talent spotting for young Germans with an agent potential.” He paused, smiled at Mendel and said: “Forgive the jargon.” Mendel nodded solemnly and Smiley went on. He knew he was being pompous, and didn’t know how to prevent himself.

“It was shortly before the last war, a terrible time in Germany then, intolerance run mad. I would have been a lunatic to approach anyone myself. My only chance was to be as nondescript as I could, politically and socially colourless, and to put forward candidates for recruitment by someone else. I tried to bring some back to England for short periods on students’ tours. I made a point of having no contact at all with the Department when I came over because we hadn’t any idea in those days of the efficiency of German Counter Intelligence. I never knew who was approached, and of course it was much better that way. In case I was blown, I mean.

“My story really begins in 1938. I was alone in my rooms one summer evening. It had been a beautiful day, warm and peaceful. Fascism might never have been heard of. I was working in my shirt sleeves at a desk by my window, not working very hard because it was such a wonderful evening.”

He paused, embarrassed for some reason, and fussed a little with the port. Two pink spots appeared high on his cheeks. He felt slightly drunk though he had had very little wine.

“To resume,” he said, and felt an ass. “I’m sorry, I feel a little inarticulate … Anyway, as I sat there, there was a knock on the door and a young student came in. He was nineteen, in fact, but he looked younger. His name was Dieter Frey. He was a pupil of mine, an intelligent boy and remarkable to look at.” Smiley paused again, staring before him. Perhaps it was his illness, his weakness, which brought the memory so vividly before him.

“Dieter was a very handsome boy, with a high forehead and a lot of unruly black hair. The lower part of his body was deformed, I think by infantile paralysis. He carried a stick and leant heavily upon it when he walked. Naturally he cut a rather romantic figure at a small university; they thought him Byronic and so on. In fact I could never find him romantic myself. The Germans have a passion for discovering young genius, you know, from Herder to Stefan George— somebody lionized them practically from the cradle. But you couldn’t lionize Dieter. There was a fierce independence, a ruthlessness about him which scared off the most determined patron. This defensiveness in Dieter derived not only from his deformity, but his race, which was Jewish. How on earth he kept his place at university I could never understand. It was possible that they didn’t know he was a Jew—his beauty might have been southern, I suppose, Italian, but I don’t really see how. To me he was obviously Jewish.

“Dieter was a socialist. He made no secret of his views even in those days. I once considered him for recruitment, but it seemed futile to take on anyone who was so obviously earmarked for concentration camp. Besides he was too volatile, too swift to react, too brightly painted, too vain. He led all the societies at the university—debating, political, poetry and so on. In all the athletic guilds he held honorary positions. He had the nerve not to drink in a university where you proved your manhood by being drunk most of your first year.

“That was Dieter, then: a tall, handsome, commanding cripple, the idol of his generation; a Jew. And that was the man who came to see me that hot summer evening.

“I sat him down and offered him a drink, which he refused. I made some coffee, I think, on a gas ring. We spoke in a desultory way about my last lecture on Keats. I had complained about the application of German critical methods to English poetry, and this had led to some discussion—as usual—on the Nazi interpretation of ‘decadence’ in art. Dieter dragged it all up again and became more and more outspoken in his condemnation of modern Germany and finally of Nazism itself. Naturally, I was guarded— I think I was less of a fool in those days than I am now. In the end he asked me point blank what I thought of the Nazis. I replied rather pointedly that I was disinclined to criticize my hosts, and that anyway I didn’t think politics were much fun. I shall never forget his reply. He was furious, struggled to his feet and shouted at me: ‘Von Freude ist nicht die Rede!’—‘We’re not talking about fun!’” Smiley broke off and looked across the table to Guillam: “I’m sorry, Peter, I’m being rather long-winded.”

“Nonsense, old dear. You tell the story in your own way.” Mendel grunted his approval; he was sitting rather stiffly with both hands on the table before him. There was no light in the room now except the bright glow of the fire, which threw tall shadows on the roughcast wall behind them. The port decanter was three parts empty; Smiley gave himself a little and passed it on.

“He raved at me. He simply did not understand how I could apply an independent standard of criticism to art and remain so insensitive to politics, how I could bleat about artistic freedom when a third of Europe was in chains. Did it mean nothing to me that contemporary civilization was being bled to death? What was so sacred about the eighteenth century that I could throw the twentieth away? He had come to me because he enjoyed my seminars and thought me an enlightened man, but he now realized that I was worse than all of them.

“I let him go. What else could I do? On paper he was suspect anyway—a rebellious Jew with a university place still mysteriously free. But I watched him. The term was nearly over and the long vacation soon to begin. In the closing debate of the term three days later he was dreadfully outspoken. He really frightened people, you know, and they grew silent and apprehensive. The end of the term came and Dieter departed without a word of farewell to me. I never expected to see him again.

“It was about six months before I did. I had been visiting friends near Dresden, Dieter’s home town, and I arrived half an hour early at the station. Rather than hang around on the platform I decided to go for a stroll. A couple of hundred metres from the station was a tall, rather grim seventeenth-century house. There was a small courtyard in front of it with tall iron railings and a wrought-iron gate. It had apparently been converted into a temporary prison: a group of shaven prisoners, men and women, were being exercised in the yard, walking round the perimeter. Two guards stood in the centre with tommy guns. As I watched I caught sight of a familiar figure, taller than the rest, limping, struggling to keep up with them. It was Dieter. They had taken his stick away.

“When I thought about it afterwards, of course, I realized that the Gestapo would scarcely arrest the most popular member of the university while he was still up. I forgot about my train, went back into the town and looked for his parents in the telephone book. I knew his father had been a doctor so it wasn’t difficult. I went to the address and only his mother was there. The father had died already in a concentration camp. She wasn’t inclined to talk about Dieter, but it appeared that he had not gone to a Jewish prison but to a general one, and ostensibly for ‘a period of correction’ only. She expected him back in about three months. I left him a message to say I still had some books of his and would be pleased to return them if he would call on me.

“I’m afraid the events of 1939 must have got the better of me, because I don’t believe I gave Dieter another thought that year. Soon after I returned from Dresden my Department ordered me back to England. I packed and left within forty-eight hours, to find London in a turmoil. I was given a new assignment which required intensive preparation, briefing and training. I was to go back to Europe at once and activate almost untried agents in Germany who had been recruited against such an emergency. I began to memorize the dozen-odd names and addresses. You can imagine my reaction when I discovered Dieter Frey among them.

“When I read his file I found he had more or less recruited himself by bursting in on the consulate in Dresden and demanding to know why no one lifted a finger to stop the persecution of the Jews.” Smiley paused and laughed to himself; “Dieter was a great one for getting people to do things.” He glanced quickly at Mendel and Guillam. Both had their eyes fixed on him.

“I suppose my first reaction was pique. The boy had been right under my nose and I hadn’t considered him suitable— what was some ass in Dresden up to? And then I was alarmed to have this firebrand on my hands, whose impulsive temperament could cost me and others our lives. Despite the slight changes in my appearance and the new cover under which I was operating, I should obviously have to declare myself to Dieter as plain George Smiley from the university, so he could blow me sky high. It seemed a most unfortunate beginning, and I was half resolved to set up my network without Dieter. In the event I was wrong. He was a magnificent agent.

“He didn’t curb his flamboyance, but used it skilfully as a kind of double bluff. His deformity kept him out of the Services and he found himself a clerical job on the railways. In no time he worked his way to a position of real responsibility and the quantity of information he obtained was fantastic. Details of troop and ammunition transports, their destination and date of transit. Later he reported on the effectiveness of our bombing, pinpointed key targets. He was a brilliant organizer and I think that was what saved him. He did a wonderful job on the railways, made himself indispensable, worked all hours of the night and day; became almost inviolate. They even gave him a civilian decoration for exceptional merit and I suppose the Gestapo conveniently lost his file.

“Dieter had a theory that was pure Faust. Thought alone was valueless. You must act for thought to become effective. He used to say that the greatest mistake man ever made was to distinguish between the mind and the body: an order does not exist if it is not obeyed. He used to quote Kleist a great deal: ‘if all eyes were made of green glass, and if all that seems white was really green, who would be the wiser?’ Something like that.

“As I say, Dieter was a magnificent agent. He even went so far as to arrange for certain freights to be transported on good flying nights for the convenience of our bombers. He had tricks all his own—a natural genius for the nuts and bolts of espionage. It seemed absurd to suppose it could last, but the effect of our bombing was often so widespread that it would have been childish to attribute it to one person’s betrayal—let alone a man so notoriously outspoken as Dieter.

“Where he was concerned my job was easy. Dieter put in a lot of travelling as it was—he had a special pass to get him around. Communication was child’s play by comparison with some agents. Occasionally we would actually meet and talk in a café, or he would pick me up in a Ministry car and drive me sixty or seventy miles along a main road, as if he were giving me a lift. But more often we would take a journey in the same train and swap briefcases in the corridor or go to the theatre with parcels and exchange cloakroom tickets. He seldom gave me actual reports but just carbon copies of transit orders. He got his secretary to do a lot—he made her keep a special float which he ‘destroyed’ every three months by emptying it into his briefcase in the lunch hour.

“Well, in 1943 I was recalled. My trade cover was rather thin by then I think, and I was getting a bit shopsoiled.” He stopped and took a cigarette from Guillam’s case.

“But don’t let’s get Dieter out of perspective,” he said. “He was my best agent, but he wasn’t my only one. I had a lot of headaches of my own—running him was a picnic by comparison with some. When the war was over I tried to find out from my successor what had become of Dieter and the rest of them. Some were resettled in Australia and Canada, some just drifted away to what was left of their home towns. Dieter hesitated, I gather. The Russians were in Dresden, of course, and he may have had doubts. In the end he went—he had to really, because of his mother. He hated the Americans, anyway. And of course he was a socialist.

“I heard later that he had made his career there. The administrative experience he had picked up during the war got him some Government job in the new republic. I suppose that his reputation as a rebel and the suffering of his family cleared the way for him. He must have done pretty well for himself.”

“Why?” asked Mendel.

“He was over here until a month ago running the Steel Mission.”

“That’s not all,” said Guillam quickly. “In case you think your cup is full, Mendel, I spared you another visit to Weybridge this morning and called on Elizabeth Pidgeon. It was George’s idea.” He turned to Smiley: “She’s a sort of Moby Dick, isn’t she—big white man-eating whale.”

“Well?” said Mendel.

“I showed her a picture of that young diplomat by the name of Mundt they kept in tow there to pick up the bits. Elizabeth recognized him at once as the nice man who collected Elsa Fennan’s music case. Isn’t that jolly?”

“But—”

“I know what you’re going to ask, you clever youth. You want to know whether George recognized him too. Well, George did. It’s the same nasty fellow who tried to lure him into his house in Bywater Street. Doesn’t he get around?”

Mendel drove to Mitcham. Smiley was dead tired. It was raining again and cold. Smiley hugged his greatcoat round him and, despite his tiredness, watched with quiet pleasure the busy London night go by. He had always loved travelling. Even now, if he had the choice, he would cross France by train rather than fly. He could still respond to the magic noises of a night journey across Europe, the oddly cacophonous chimes and the French voices suddenly waking him from English dreams. Ann had loved it too and they had twice travelled overland to share the dubious joys of that uncomfortable journey.

When they got back Smiley went straight to bed while Mendel made some tea. They drank it in Smiley’s bedroom.

“What do we do now?” asked Mendel.

“I thought I might go to Walliston tomorrow.”

“You ought to spend the day in bed. What do you want to do there?”

“See Elsa Fennan.”

“You’re not safe on your own. You’d better let me come. I’ll sit in the car while you do the talking. She’s a Yid, isn’t she?”

Smiley nodded.

“My dad was Yid. He never made such a bloody fuss about it.’

12

DREAM FOR SALE

She opened the door and stood looking at him for a moment in silence.

“You could have let me know you were coming,” she said.

“I thought it safer not to.”

She was silent again. Finally she said: “I don’t know what you mean.” It seemed to cost her a good deal.

“May I come in?” said Smiley. “We haven’t much time.”

She looked old and tired, less resilient perhaps. She led him into the drawing-room and with something like resignation indicated a chair.

Smiley offered her a cigarette and took one himself. She was standing by the window. As he looked at her, watched her quick breathing, her feverish eyes, he realized that she had almost lost the power of self-defence.

When he spoke, his voice was gentle, concessive. To Elsa Fennan it must have seemed like a voice she had longed for, irresistible, offering all strength, comfort, compassion and safety. She gradually moved away from the window and her right hand, which had been pressed against the sill, trailed wistfully along it, then fell to her side in a gesture of submission. She sat opposite him, her eyes upon him in complete dependence, like the eyes of a lover.

“You must have been terribly lonely,” he said. “No one can stand it for ever. It takes courage, too, and it’s hard to be brave alone. They never understand that, do they? They never know what it costs—the sordid tricks of lying and deceiving, the isolation from ordinary people. They think you can run on their kind of fuel—the flag waving and the music. But you need a different kind of fuel, don’t you, when you’re alone? You’ve got to hate, and it needs strength to hate all the time. And what you must love is so remote, so vague when you’re not part of it.” He paused. Soon, he thought, soon you’ll break. He prayed desperately that she would accept him, accept his comfort. He looked at her. Soon she would break.

“I said we hadn’t much time. Do you know what I mean?”

She had folded her hands on her lap and was looking down at them. He saw the dark roots of her yellow hair and wondered why on earth she dyed it. She showed no sign of having heard his question.

“When I left you that morning a month ago I drove to my home in London. A man tried to kill me. That night he nearly succeeded— he hit me on the head three or four times. I’ve just come out of hospital. As it happens I was lucky. Then there was the garage man he hired the car from. The river police recovered his body from the Thames not long ago. There were no signs of violence—he was just full of whisky. They can’t understand it—he hadn’t been near the river for years. But then we’re dealing with a competent man, aren’t we? A trained killer. It seems he’s trying to remove anyone who can connect him with Samuel Fennan. Or his wife, of course. Then there’s that young blonde girl at the Repertory Theatre …”

“What are you saying?” she whispered. “What are you trying to tell me?”

Smiley suddenly wanted to hurt her, to break the last of her will, to remove her utterly as an enemy. For so long she had haunted him as he had lain helpless, had been a mystery and a power.

“What games did you think you were playing, you two? Do you think you can flirt with power like theirs, give a little and not give all? Do you think that you can stop the dance—control the strength you give them? What dreams did you cherish, Mrs Fennan, that had so little of the world in them?”

She buried her face in her hands and he watched the tears run between her fingers. Her body shook with great sobs and her words came slowly, wrung from her.

“No, no dreams. I had no dream but him. He had one dream, yes … one great dream.” She went on crying, helpless, and Smiley, half in triumph, half in shame, waited for her to speak again. Suddenly she raised her head and looked at him, the tears still running down her cheeks. “Look at me,” she said. “What dream did they leave me? I dreamt of long golden hair and they shaved my head, I dreamt of a beautiful body and they broke it with hunger. I have seen what human beings are, how could I believe in a formula for human beings? I said to him, oh I said to him a thousand times: ‘Only make no laws, no fine theories, no judgements, and the people may love, but give them one theory, let them invent one slogan, and the game begins again.’ I told him that. We talked whole nights away. But no, that little boy must have his dream, and if a new world was to be built, Samuel Fennan must build it. I said to him, ‘Listen,’ I said. ‘They have given you all you have, a home, money and trust. Why do you do it to them?’ And he said to me: ‘I do it for them. I am the surgeon and one day they will understand.’ He was a child, Mr Smiley, they led him like a child.”

He dared not speak, dared put nothing to the test.

“Five years ago he met that Dieter. In a ski hut near Garmisch. Freitag told us later that Dieter had planned it that way—Dieter couldn’t ski anyway because of his legs. Nothing seemed real then; Freitag wasn’t a real name. Fennan christened him Freitag like Man Friday in Robinson Crusoe. Dieter found that so funny and afterwards we never talked of Dieter but always of Mr Robinson and Freitag.” She broke off now and looked at him with a very faint smile: “I’m sorry,” she said; “I’m not very coherent.”

“I understand,” said Smiley.

“That girl—what did you say about that girl?”

“She’s alive. Don’t worry. Go on.”

“Fennan liked you, you know. Freitag tried to kill you … why?”

“Because I came back, I suppose, and asked you about the eight-thirty call. You told Freitag that, didn’t you?”

“Oh, God,” she said, her fingers at her mouth.

“You rang him up, didn’t you? As soon as I’d gone?”

“Yes, yes. I was frightened. I wanted to warn him to go, him and Dieter, to go away and never come back, because I knew you’d find out. If not today then one day, but I knew you’d find out in the end. Why would they never leave me alone? They were frightened of me because they knew I had no dreams, that I only wanted Samuel, wanted him safe to love and care for. They relied on that.”

Smiley felt his head throbbing erratically. “So you rang him straight away,” he said. “You tried the Primrose number first and couldn’t get through.”

“Yes,” she said vaguely. “Yes, that’s right. But they’re both Primrose numbers.”

“So you rang the other number, the alternative …”

She drifted back to the window, suddenly exhausted and limp; she seemed happier now—the storm had left her reflective and, in a way, content.

“Yes. Freitag was a great one for alternative plans.”

“What was the other number?” Smiley insisted. He watched her anxiously as she stared out of the window into the dark garden.

“Why do you want to know?”

He came and stood beside her at the window, watching her profile. His voice was suddenly harsh and energetic.

“I said the girl was all right. You and I are alive, too. But don’t think that’s going to last.”

She turned to him with fear in her eyes, looked at him for a moment, then nodded. Smiley took her by the arm and guided her to a chair. He ought to make her a hot drink or something. She sat down quite mechanically, almost with the detachment of incipient madness.

“The other number was 9747.”

“Any address—did you have an address?”

“No, no address. Only the telephone. Tricks on the telephone. No address,” she repeated, with unnatural emphasis, so that Smiley looked at her and wondered. A thought suddenly struck him—a memory of Dieter’s skill in communication.

“Freitag didn’t meet you the night Fennan died, did he? He didn’t come to the theatre?”

“No.”

“That was the first time he had missed, wasn’t it? You panicked and left early.”

“No … yes, yes, I panicked.”

“No you didn’t! You left early because you had to, it was the arrangement. Why did you leave early? Why?”

Her hands hid her face.

“Are you still mad?” Smiley shouted. “Do you still think you can control what you have made? Freitag will kill you, kill the girl, kill, kill, kill. Who are you trying to protect, a girl or a murderer?”

She wept and said nothing. Smiley crouched beside her, still shouting.

“I’ll tell you why you left early, shall I? I’ll tell you what I think. It was to catch the last post that night from Weybridge. He hadn’t come, you hadn’t exchanged cloakroom tickets, had you, so you obeyed the instructions, you posted your ticket to him and you have got an address, not written down but remembered, remembered for ever: ‘If there is a crisis, if I do not come, this is the address’: is that what he said? An address never to be used or spoken of, an address forgotten and remembered for ever? Is that right? Tell me!”

She stood up, her head turned away, went to the desk and found a piece of paper and a pencil. The tears still ran freely over her face. With agonizing slowness she wrote the address, her hand faltering and almost stopping between the words.

He took the paper from her, folded it carefully across the middle and put it in his wallet.

Now he would make her some tea.

She looked like a child rescued from the sea. She sat on the edge of the sofa holding the cup tightly in her frail hands, nursing it against her body. Her thin shoulders were hunched forward, her feet and ankles pressed tightly together. Smiley, looking at her, felt he had broken something he should never have touched because it was so fragile. He felt an obscene, coarse bully, his offerings of tea a futile recompense for his clumsiness.

He could think of nothing to say. After a while, she said: “He liked you, you know. He really liked you … he said you were a clever little man. It was quite a surprise when Samuel called anyone clever.” She shook her head slowly. Perhaps it was the reaction that made her smile: “He used to say there were two forces in the world, the positive and the negative. ‘What shall I do then?’ he would ask me. ‘Let them ruin their harvest because they give me bread? Creation, progress, power, the whole future of mankind waits at their door: shall I not let them in?’ And I said to him: ‘But Samuel, maybe the people are happy without these things?’ But you know he didn’t think of people like that.

“But I couldn’t stop him. You know the strangest thing about Fennan? For all that thinking and talking, he had made up his mind long ago what he would do. All the rest was poetry. He wasn’t coordinated, that’s what I used to tell him …”

“… and yet you helped him,” said Smiley.

“Yes, I helped him. He wanted help so I gave it him. He was my life.”

“I see.”

“That was a mistake. He was a little boy, you know. He forgot things just like a child. And so vain. He had made up his mind to do it and he did it so badly. He didn’t think of it as you do, or I do. He simply didn’t think of it like that. It was his work and that was all.

“It began so simply. He brought home a draft telegram one night and showed it to me. He said: ‘I think Dieter ought to see that’—that was all. I couldn’t believe it to begin with—that he was a spy, I mean. Because he was, wasn’t he? And gradually, I realized. They began to ask for special things. The music case I got back from Freitag began to contain orders, and sometimes money. I said to him: ‘Look at what they are sending you—do you want this?’ We didn’t know what to do with the money. In the end we gave it away mostly, I don’t know why. Dieter was very angry that winter, when I told him.”

“What winter was that?” asked Smiley.

“The second winter with Dieter—1956 in Mürren. We met him first in January 1955. That was when it began. And shall I tell you something? Hungary made no difference to Samuel, not a tiny bit of difference. Dieter was frightened about him then, I know, because Freitag told me. When Fennan gave me the things to take to Weybridge that November I nearly went mad. I shouted at him: ‘Can’t you see it’s the same? The same guns, the same children dying in the streets? Only the dream has changed, the blood is the same colour. Is that what you want?’ I asked him: ‘Would you do this for Germans, too? It’s me who lies in the gutter, will you let them do it to me?’ But he just said: ‘No, Elsa, this is different.’ And I went on taking the music case. Do you understand?”

“I don’t know. I just don’t know. I think perhaps I do.”

“He was all I had. He was my life. I protected myself, I suppose. And gradually I became a part of it, and then it was too late to stop … And then you know,” she said, in a whisper; “there were times when I was glad, times when the world seemed to applaud what Samuel was doing. It was not a pretty sight for us, the new Germany. Old names had come back, names that had frightened us as children. The dreadful, plump pride returned, you could see it even in the photographs in the papers, they marched with the old rhythm. Fennan felt that too, but then thank God he hadn’t seen what I saw.

“We were in a camp outside Dresden, where we used to live. My father was paralysed. He missed tobacco more than anything and I used to roll cigarettes from any rubbish I could find in the camp—just to pretend with. One day a guard saw him smoking and began laughing. Some others came and they laughed too. My father was holding the cigarette in his paralysed hand and it was burning his fingers. He didn’t know, you see.

“Yes, when they gave guns to the Germans again, gave them money and uniforms, then sometimes—just for a little while— I was pleased with what Samuel had done. We are Jews, you know, and so …”

“Yes, I know, I understand,” said Smiley. “I saw it too, a little of it.”

“Dieter said you had.”

“Dieter said that?”

“Yes. To Freitag. He told Freitag you were a very clever man. You once deceived Dieter before the war, and it was only long afterwards that he found out, that’s what Freitag said. He said you were the best he’d ever met.”

“When did Freitag tell you that?”

She looked at him for a long time. He had never seen in any face such hopeless misery. He remembered how she had said to him before: “The children of my grief are dead.” He understood that now, and heard it in her voice when at last she spoke:

“Why, isn’t it obvious? The night he murdered Samuel.

“That’s the great joke, Mr Smiley. At the very moment when Samuel could have done so much for them—not just a piece here and a piece there, but all the time—so many music cases—at that moment their own fear destroyed them, turned them into animals and made them kill what they had made.

“Samuel always said: ‘They will win because they know and the others will perish because they do not: men who work for a dream will work for ever’—that’s what he said. But I knew their dream, I knew it would destroy us. What has not destroyed? Even the dream of Christ.”

“It was Dieter then, who saw me in the park with Fennan?”

“Yes.”

“And thought—”

“Yes. Thought that Samuel had betrayed him. Told Freitag to kill Samuel.”

“And the anonymous letter?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know who wrote it. Someone who knew Samuel, I suppose, someone from the office who watched him and knew. Or from Oxford, from the Party. I don’t know. Samuel didn’t know either.”

“But the suicide letter—”

She looked at him, and her face crumpled. She was almost weeping again. She bowed her head:

“I wrote it. Freitag brought the paper, and I wrote it. The signature was already there. Samuel’s signature.”

Smiley went over to her, sat beside her on the sofa and took her hand. She turned on him in a fury and began screaming at him:

“Take your hands off me! Do you think I’m yours because I don’t belong to them? Go away! Go away and kill Freitag and Dieter, keep the game alive, Mr Smiley. But don’t think I’m on your side, d’you hear? Because I’m the wandering Jewess, the no-man’s land, the battlefield for your toy soldiers. You can kick me and trample on me, see, but never, never touch me, never tell me you’re sorry, d’you hear? Now get out! Go away and kill.”

She sat there, shivering as if from cold. As he reached the door he looked back. There were no tears in her eyes.

Mendel was waiting for him in the car.

13

THE INEFFICIENCY OF SAMUEL FENNAN

They arrived at Mitcham at lunch-time. Peter Guillam was waiting for them patiently in his car.

“Well, children; what’s the news?”

Smiley handed him the piece of paper from his wallet. “There was an emergency number, too—Primrose 9747. You’d better check it but I’m not hopeful of that either.”

Peter disappeared into the hall and began telephoning. Mendel busied himself in the kitchen and returned ten minutes later with beer, bread and cheese on a tray. Guillam came back and sat down without saying anything. He looked worried. “Well,” he said at last, “what did she say, George?”

Mendel cleared away as Smiley finished the account of his interview that morning.

“I see,” said Guillam. “How very worrying. Well, that’s it, George, I shall have to put this on paper today, and I’ll have to go to Maston at once. Catching dead spies is a poor game really—and causes a lot of unhappiness.”

“What access did he have at the FO?” asked Smiley.

“Recently a lot. That’s why they felt he should be interviewed, as you know.”

“What kind of stuff, mainly?”

“I don’t know yet. He was on an Asian desk until a few months ago but his new job was different.”

“American, I seem to remember,” said Smiley. “Peter?”

“Yes.”

“Peter, have you thought at all why they wanted to kill Fennan so much? I mean, supposing he had betrayed them, as they thought, why kill him? They had nothing to gain.”

“No; no, I suppose they hadn’t. That does need some explaining, come to think of it … or does it? Suppose Fuchs or Maclean had betrayed them, I wonder what would have happened. Suppose they had reason to fear a chain reaction—not just here but in America— all over the world? Wouldn’t they kill him to prevent that? There’s so much we shall just never know.”

“Like the 8.30 call?” said Smiley.

“Cheerio. Hang on here till I ring you, will you? Maston’s bound to want to see you. They’ll be running down the corridors when I tell them the glad news. I shall have to wear the special grin I reserve for bearing really disastrous tidings.”

Mendel saw him out and then returned to the drawing-room. “Best thing you can do is put your feet up,” he said. “You look a ruddy mess, you do.”

“Either Mundt’s here or he’s not,” thought Smiley as he lay on the bed in his waistcoat, his hands linked under his head. “If he’s not, we’re finished. It will be for Maston to decide what to do with Elsa Fennan, and my guess is he’ll do nothing.

“If Mundt is here, it’s for one of three reasons: A, because Dieter told him to stay and watch the dust settle; B, because he’s in bad odour and afraid to go back; C, because he has unfinished business.

“A is improbable because it’s not like Dieter to take needless risks. Anyway, it’s a woolly idea.

“B is unlikely because, while Mundt may be afraid of Dieter, he must also, presumably, be frightened of a murder charge here. His wisest plan would be to go to another country.

“C is more likely. If I was in Dieter’s shoes I’d be worried sick about Elsa Fennan. The Pidgeon girl is immaterial—without Elsa to fill in the gaps she presents no serious danger. She was not a conspirator and there is no reason why she should particularly remember Elsa’s friend at the theatre. No, Elsa constitutes the real danger.”

There was, of course, a final possibility, which Smiley was quite unable to judge: the possibility that Dieter had other agents to control here through Mundt. On the whole he was inclined to discount this, but the thought had no doubt crossed Peter’s mind.

No … it still didn’t make sense—it wasn’t tidy. He decided to begin again.

What do we know? He sat up to look for pencil and paper and at once his head began throbbing. Obstinately he got off the bed and took a pencil from the inside pocket of his jacket. There was a writing pad in his suitcase. He returned to the bed, shaped the pillows to his satisfaction, took four aspirin from the bottle on the table and propped himself against the pillows, his short legs stretched before him. He began writing. First he wrote the heading in a neat, scholarly hand, and underlined it.

What do we know?

Then he began, stage by stage, to recount as dispassionately as possible the sequence of events hitherto:

“On Monday, 2 January, Dieter Frey saw me in the park talking to his agent and concluded …” Yes, what did Dieter conclude? That Fennan had confessed, was going to confess? That Fennan was my agent? “… and concluded that Fennan was dangerous, for reasons still unknown. The following evening, the first Tuesday in the month, Elsa Fennan took her husband’s reports in a music case to the Weybridge Repertory Theatre, in the agreed way, and left the case in the cloakroom in exchange for a ticket. Mundt was to bring his own music case and do the same thing. Elsa and Mundt would then exchange tickets during the performance. Mundt did not appear. Accordingly she followed the emergency procedure and posted the ticket to a prearranged address, having left the theatre early to catch the last post from Weybridge. She then drove home to be met by Mundt, who had, by then, murdered Fennan, probably on Dieter’s orders. He had shot him at point blank range as soon as he met him in the hall. Knowing Dieter, I suspect that he had long ago taken the precaution of keeping in London a few sheets of blank writing paper signed with samples, forged or authentic, of Sam Fennan’s signature, in case it was ever necessary to compromise or blackmail him. Assuming this to be so, Mundt brought a sheet with him in order to type the suicide letter over the signature on Fennan’s own typewriter. In the ghastly scene which must have followed Elsa’s arrival, Mundt realized that Dieter had wrongly interpreted Fennan’s encounter with Smiley, but relied on Elsa to preserve her dead husband’s reputation—not to mention her own complicity. Mundt was therefore reasonably safe. Mundt made Elsa type the letter, perhaps because he did not trust his English. (Note: But who the devil typed the first letter, the denunciation?)

“Mundt then, presumably, demanded the music case he had failed to collect, and Elsa told him that she had obeyed standing instructions and posted the cloakroom ticket to the Hampstead address, leaving the music case at the theatre. Mundt reacted significantly: he forced her to telephone the theatre and to arrange for him to collect the case that night on his way back to London. Therefore either the address to which the ticket was posted was no longer valid, or Mundt intended at that stage to return home early the next morning without having time to collect the ticket and the case.

“Smiley visits Walliston early on the morning of Wednesday, 4 January, and during the first interview takes an 8.30 call from the exchange which (beyond reasonable doubt) Fennan requested at 7.55 the previous evening. WHY?

“Later that morning S. returns to Elsa Fennan to ask about the 8.30 call—which she knew (on her own admission) would ‘worry me’ (no doubt Mundt’s flattering description of my powers had had its effect). Having told S. a futile story about her bad memory she panics and rings Mundt.

“Mundt, presumably equipped with a photograph or a description from Dieter, decides to liquidate S. (on Dieter’s authority?) and later that day nearly succeeds. (Note: Mundt did not return the car to Scarr’s garage till the night of the 4th. This does not necessarily prove that Mundt had no plans for flying earlier in the day. If he had originally meant to fly in the morning he might well have left the car at Scarr’s earlier and gone to the airport by bus.)

“It does seem pretty likely that Mundt changed his plans after Elsa’s telephone call. It is not clear that he changed them because of her call.” Would Mundt really be panicked by Elsa? Panicked into staying, panicked into murdering Adam Scarr, he wondered.

The telephone was ringing in the hall …

“George, it’s Peter. No joy with the address or the telephone number. Dead end.”

“What do you mean?”

“The telephone number and the address both led to the same place—furnished apartment in Highgate village.”

“Well?”

“Rented by a pilot in Lufteuropa. He paid his two months’ rent on the fifth of January and hasn’t come back since.”

“Damn.”

“The landlady remembers Mundt quite well. The pilot’s friend. A nice polite gentleman he was, for a German, very open-handed. He used to sleep on the sofa quite often.”

“Oh God.”

“I went through the room with a toothcomb. There was a desk in the corner. All the drawers were empty except one, which contained a cloakroom ticket. I wonder where that came from … Well, if you want a laugh, come round to the Circus. The whole of Olympus is seething with activity. Oh, incidentally—”

“Yes?”

“I dug around at Dieter’s flat. Another lemon. He left on the fourth of January. Didn’t tell the milkman.”

“What about his mail?”

“He never received any, apart from bills. I also had a look at Comrade Mundt’s little nest: couple of rooms over the Steel Mission. The furniture went out with the rest of the stuff. Sorry.”

“I see.”

“I’ll tell you an odd thing though, George. You remember I thought I might get on to Fennan’s personal possessions—wallet, notebook and so on? From the police.”

“Yes.”

“Well, I did. His diary’s got Dieter’s full name entered in the address section with the Mission telephone number against it. Bloody cheek.”

“It’s more than that. It’s lunacy. Good Lord.”

“Then for the fourth of January the entry is ‘Smiley C.A. Ring 8.30.’ That was corroborated by an entry for the third which ran ‘request call for Wed. morning.’ There’s your mysterious call.”

“Still unexplained.” A pause.

“George, I sent Felix Taverner round to the FO to do some ferreting. It’s worse than we feared in one way, but better in another.”

“Why?”

“Well, Taverner got his hands on the registry schedules for the last two years. He was able to work out what files have been marked to Fennan’s section. Where a file was particularly requested by that section they still have a requisition form.”

“I’m listening.”

“Felix found that three or four files were usually marked in to Fennan on a Friday afternoon and marked out again on Monday morning; the inference is that he took the stuff home at week-ends.”

“Oh my Lord!”

“But the odd thing is, George, that during the last six months, since his posting in fact, he tended to take home unclassified stuff which wouldn’t have been of interest to anyone.”

“But it was during the last months that he began dealing mainly with secret files,” said Smiley. “He could take home anything he wanted.”

“I know, but he didn’t. In fact you’d almost say it was deliberate. He took home very low-grade stuff barely related to his daily work. His colleagues can’t understand it now they think about it—he even took back some files handling subjects outside the scope of his section.”

“And unclassified.”

“Yes—of no conceivable intelligence value.”

“How about earlier, before he came into his new job? What kind of stuff went home then?”

“Much more what you’d expect—files he’d used during the day, policy and so on.”

“Secret?”

“Some were, some weren’t. As they came.”

“But nothing unexpected—no particularly delicate stuff that didn’t concern him?”

“No. Nothing. He had opportunity galore quite frankly and didn’t use it. Windy, I suppose.”

“So he ought to be if he puts his controller’s name in his diary.”

“And make what you like of this: he’d arranged at the FO to take a day off on the fourth—the day after he died. Rather an event apparently—he was a glutton for work, they say.”

“What’s Maston doing about all this?” asked Smiley, after a pause.

“Going through the files at the moment and rushing in to see me with bloody fool questions every two minutes. I think he gets lonely in there with hard facts.”

“Oh, he’ll beat them down, Peter, don’t worry.”

“He’s already saying that the whole case against Fennan rests on the evidence of a neurotic woman.”

“Thanks for ringing, Peter.”

“Be seeing you, dear boy. Keep your head down.”

Smiley replaced the receiver and wondered where Mendel was. There was an evening paper on the hall table, and he glanced vaguely at the headline “Lynching: World Jewry Protests” and beneath it the account of the lynching of a Jewish shopkeeper in Düsseldorf. He opened the drawing-room door—Mendel was not there. Then he caught sight of him through the window wearing his gardening hat, hacking savagely with a pick-axe at a tree stump in the front garden. Smiley watched him for a moment, then went upstairs again to rest. As he reached the top of the stairs the telephone began ringing again.

“George—sorry to bother you again. It’s about Mundt.”

“Yes?”

“Flew to Berlin last night by BEA. Travelled under another name but was easily identified by the air hostess. That seems to be that. Hard luck, chum.”

Smiley pressed down the cradle with his hand for a moment, then dialled Walliston 2944. He heard the number ringing the other end. Suddenly the dialling tone stopped and instead he heard Elsa Fennan’s voice:

“Hullo … Hullo … Hullo?”

Slowly he replaced the receiver. She was alive.

Why on earth now? Why should Mundt go home now, five weeks after murdering Fennan, three weeks after murdering Scarr; why had he eliminated the lesser danger—Scarr—and left Elsa Fennan unharmed, neurotic and embittered, liable at any moment to throw aside her own safety and tell the whole story? What effect might that terrible night not have had upon her? How could Dieter trust a woman now so lightly bound to him? Her husband’s good name could no longer be preserved; might she not, in God knows what mood of vengeance or repentance, blurt out the whole truth? Obviously, a little time must elapse between the murder of Fennan and the murder of his wife, but what event, what information, what danger, had decided Mundt to return last night? A ruthless and elaborate plan to preserve the secrecy of Fennan’s treason had now apparently been thrown aside unfinished. What had happened yesterday that Mundt could know of? Or was the timing of his departure a coincidence? Smiley refused to believe it was. If Mundt had remained in England after the two murders and the assault on Smiley, he had done so unwillingly, waiting upon some opportunity or event that would release him. He would not stay a moment longer than he need. Yet what had he done since Scarr’s death? Hidden in some lonely room, locked away from light and news. Then why did he now fly home so suddenly?

And Fennan—what spy was this who selected innocuous information for his masters when he had such gems at his fingertips? A change of heart, perhaps? A weakening of purpose? Then why did he not tell his wife, for whom his crime was a constant nightmare, who would have rejoiced at his conversion? It seemed now that Fennan had never shown any preference for secret papers—he had simply taken home whatever files currently might occupy him. But certainly a weakening of purpose would explain the strange summons to Marlow and Dieter’s conviction that Fennan was betraying him. And who wrote the anonymous letter?

Nothing made sense, nothing. Fennan himself—brilliant, fluent and attractive—had deceived so naturally, so expertly. Smiley had really liked him. Why then had this practised deceiver made the incredible blunder of putting Dieter’s name in his diary—and shown so little judgement or interest in the selection of intelligence?

Smiley went upstairs to pack the few possessions which Mendel had collected for him from Bywater Street. It was all over.

14

THE DRESDEN GROUP

He stood on the doorstep and put down his suitcase, fumbling for his latchkey. As he opened the door he recalled how Mundt had stood there looking at him, those very pale blue eyes calculating and steady. It was odd to think of Mundt as Dieter’s pupil. Mundt had proceeded with the inflexibility of a trained mercenary— efficient, purposeful, narrow. There had been nothing original in his technique: in everything he had been a shadow of his master. It was as if Dieter’s brilliant and imaginative tricks had been compressed into a manual which Mundt had learnt by heart, adding only the salt of his own brutality.

Smiley had deliberately left no forwarding address and a heap of mail lay on the door mat. He picked it up, put it on the hall table and began opening doors and peering about him, a puzzled, lost expression on his face. The house was strange to him, cold and musty. As he moved slowly from one room to another he began for the first time to realize how empty his life had become.

He looked for matches to light the gas fire, but there were none. He sat in an armchair in the living-room and his eyes wandered over the bookshelves and the odds and ends he had collected on his travels. When Ann had left him he had begun by rigorously excluding all trace of her. He had even got rid of her books. But gradually he had allowed the few remaining symbols that linked his life with hers to reassert themselves: wedding presents from close friends which had meant too much to be given away. There was a Watteau sketch from Peter Guillam, a Dresden group from Steed-Asprey.

He got up from his chair and went over to the corner cupboard where the group stood. He loved to admire the beauty of those figures, the tiny rococo courtesan in shepherd’s costume, her hands outstretched to one adoring lover, her little face bestowing glances on another. He felt inadequate before that fragile perfection, as he had felt before Ann when he first began the conquest which had amazed society. Somehow those little figures comforted him: it was as useless to expect fidelity of Ann as of this tiny shepherdess in her glass case. Steed-Asprey had bought the group in Dresden before the war, it had been the prize of his collection and he had given it to them. Perhaps he had guessed that one day Smiley might have need of the simple philosophy it propounded.

Dresden: of all German cities, Smiley’s favourite. He had loved its architecture, its odd jumble of medieval and classical buildings, sometimes reminiscent of Oxford, its cupolas, towers and spires, its copper-green roofs shimmering under a hot sun. Its name meant “town of the forest-dwellers” and it was there that Wenceslas of Bohemia had favoured the minstrel poets with gifts and privilege. Smiley remembered the last time he had been there, visiting a university acquaintance, a Professor of Philology he had met in England. It was on that visit that he had caught sight of Dieter Frey, struggling round the prison courtyard. He could see him still, tall and angry, monstrously altered by his shaven head, somehow too big for that little prison. Dresden, he remembered, had been Elsa’s birthplace. He remembered glancing through her personal particulars at the Ministry: Elsa née Freimann, born 1917 in Dresden, Germany, of German parents; educated Dresden: imprisoned 1938–45. He tried to place her against the background of her home, the patrician Jewish family living out its life amid insult and persecution. “I dreamed of long golden hair and they shaved my head.” He realized with sickening accuracy why she dyed her hair. She might have been like this shepherdess, round-bosomed and pretty. But the body had been broken with hunger so that it was frail and ugly, like the carcass of a tiny bird.

He could picture her on the terrible night when she found her husband’s murderer standing by his body: hear her breathless, sobbing explanation of why Fennan had been in the park with Smiley: and Mundt unmoved, explaining and reasoning, compelling her finally to conspire once more against her will in this most dreadful and needless of crimes, dragging her to the telephone and forcing her to ring the theatre, leaving her finally tortured and exhausted to cope with the inquiries that were bound to follow, even to type that futile suicide letter over Fennan’s signature. It was inhuman beyond belief and, he added to himself, for Mundt a fantastic risk.

She had, of course, proved herself a reliable enough accomplice in the past, cool-headed and, ironically, more skilful than Fennan in the techniques of espionage. And, heaven knows, for a woman who had been through such a night as that, her performance at their first meeting had been a marvel.

As he stood gazing at the little shepherdess, poised eternally between her two admirers, he realized dispassionately that there was another quite different solution to the case of Samuel Fennan, a solution which matched every detail of circumstance, reconciled the nagging inconsistencies apparent in Fennan’s character. The realization began as an academic exercise without reference to personalities; Smiley manoeuvred the characters like pieces in a puzzle, twisting them this way and that to fit the complex framework of established facts—and then, in a moment, the pattern had suddenly reformed with such assurance that it was a game no more.

His heart beat faster, as with growing astonishment Smiley retold to himself the whole story, reconstructed scenes and incidents in the light of his discovery. Now he knew why Mundt had left England that day, why Fennan chose so little that was of value to Dieter, had asked for the eight-thirty call and why his wife had escaped the systematic savagery of Mundt. Now at last he knew who had written the anonymous letter. He saw how he had been the fool of his own sentiment, had played false with the power of his mind.

He went to the telephone and dialled Mendel’s number. As soon as he had finished speaking to him he rang Peter Guillam. Then he put on his hat and coat and walked round the corner to Sloane Square. At a small newsagent’s beside Peter Jones he bought a picture postcard of Westminster Abbey. He made his way to the underground station and travelled north to Highgate, where he got out. At the main post office he bought a stamp and addressed the postcard in stiff, continental capitals to Elsa Fennan. In the panel for correspondence he wrote in spiky longhand: “Wish you were here.” He posted the card and noted the time, after which he returned to Sloane Square. There was nothing more he could do.

He slept soundly that night, rose early the following morning, a Saturday, and walked round the corner to buy croissants and coffee beans. He made a lot of coffee and sat in the kitchen reading The Times and eating his breakfast. He felt curiously calm and when the telephone rang at last he folded his paper carefully together before going upstairs to answer it.

“George, it’s Peter”—the voice was urgent, almost triumphant: “George, she’s bitten, I swear she has!”

“What happened?”

“The post arrived at exactly 8.35. By 9.30 she was walking briskly down the drive, booted and spurred. She made straight for the railway station and caught the 9.52 to Victoria. I put Mendel on the train and hared up by car, but I was too late to meet the train this end.”

“How will you make contact with Mendel again?”

“I gave him the number of the Grosvenor Hotel and I’m there now. He’s going to ring me as soon as he gets a chance and I’ll join him wherever he is.”

“Peter, you’re taking this gently, aren’t you?”

“Gentle as the wind, dear boy. I think she’s losing her head. Moving like a greyhound.”

Smiley rang off. He picked up his Times and began studying the theatre column. He must be right … he must be.

After that the morning passed with agonizing slowness. Sometimes he would stand at the window, his hands in his pockets, watching leggy Kensington girls going shopping with beautiful young men in pale blue pullovers, or the car-cleaning brigade toiling happily in front of their houses, then drifting away to talk motoring shop and finally setting off purposefully down the road for the first pint of the week-end.

At last, after what seemed an interminable delay, the frontdoor bell rang and Mendel and Guillam came in, grinning cheerfully, ravenously hungry.

“Hook, line and sinker,” said Guillam. “But let Mendel tell you— he did most of the dirty work. I just got in for the kill.”

Mendel recounted his story precisely and accurately, looking at the ground a few feet in front of him, his thin head slightly on one side.

“She caught the 9.52 to Victoria. I kept well clear of her on the train and picked her up as she went through the barrier. Then she took a taxi to Hammersmith.”

“A taxi?” Smiley interjected. “She must be out of her mind.”

“She’s rattled. She walks fast for a woman anyway, mind, but she damn nearly ran going down the platform. Got out at the Broadway and walked to the Sheridan Theatre. Tried the doors to the box office but they were locked. She hesitated a moment then turned back and went to a café a hundred yards down the road. Ordered coffee and paid for it at once. About forty minutes later she went back to the Sheridan. The box office was open and I ducked in behind her and joined the queue. She bought two rear stalls for next Thursday, Row T, 27 and 28. When she got outside the theatre she put one ticket in an envelope and sealed it up. Then she posted it. I couldn’t see the address but there was a sixpenny stamp on the envelope.”

Smiley sat very still. “I wonder,” he said; “I wonder if he’ll come.”

“I caught up with Mendel at the Sheridan,” said Guillam. “He saw her into the café and then rang me. After that he went in after her.”

“Felt like a coffee myself,” Mendel went on. “Mr Guillam joined me. I left him there when I joined the ticket queue, and he drifted out of the café a bit later. It was a decent job and no worries. She’s rattled, I’m sure. But not suspicious.”

“What did she do after that?” asked Smiley.

“Went straight back to Victoria. We left her to it.”

They were silent for a moment, then Mendel said:

“What do we do now?”

Smiley blinked and gazed earnestly into Mendel’s grey face.

“Book tickets for Thursday’s performance at the Sheridan.”

They were gone and he was alone again. He still had not begun to cope with the quantity of mail which had accumulated in his absence. Circulars, catalogues from Blackwells, bills and the usual collection of soap vouchers, frozen pea coupons, football pool forms and a few private letters still lay unopened on the hall table. He took them into the drawing-room, settled in an armchair and began opening the personal letters first. There was one from Maston, and he read it with something approaching embarrassment.

My dear George,

I was so sorry to hear from Guillam about your accident, and I do hope that by now you have made a full recovery.

You may recall that in the heat of the moment you wrote me a letter of resignation before your misfortune, and I just wanted to let you know that I am not, of course, taking this seriously. Sometimes when events crowd in upon us our sense of perspective suffers. But old campaigners like ourselves, George, are not so easily put off the scent. I look forward to seeing you with us again as soon as you are strong enough, and in the meantime we continue to regard you as an old and loyal member of the staff.

Smiley put this on one side and turned to the next letter. Just for a moment he did not recognize the handwriting; just for a moment he looked bleakly at the Swiss stamp and the expensive hotel writing paper. Suddenly he felt slightly sick, his vision blurred and there was scarcely strength enough in his fingers to tear open the envelope. What did she want? If money, she could have all he possessed. The money was his own, to spend as he wished; if it gave him pleasure to squander it on Ann, he would do so. There was nothing else he had to give her—she had taken it long ago. Taken his courage, his love, his compassion, carried them jauntily away in her little jewel case to fondle occasionally on odd afternoons when the time hung heavy in the Cuban sun, to dangle them perhaps before the eyes of her newest lover, to compare them even with similar trinkets which others before or since had brought her.

My darling George,

I want to make you an offer which no gentleman could accept. I want to come back to you.

I’m staying at the Baur-au-Lac at Zurich till the end of the month. Let me know.

Ann

Smiley picked up the envelope and looked at the back of it: “Madame Juan Alvida.” No, no gentleman could accept that offer. No dream could survive the daylight of Ann’s departure with her saccharine Latin and his orange-peel grin. Smiley had once seen a news film of Alvida winning some race in Monte Carlo. The most repellent thing about him, he remembered, had been the hair on his arms. With his goggles and the motor oil and that ludicrous laurel-wreath he had looked exactly like an anthropoid ape fallen from a tree. He was wearing a white tennis shirt with short sleeves, which had somehow remained spotlessly clean throughout the race, setting off those black monkey arms with repulsive clarity.

That was Ann: Let me know. Redeem your life, see whether it can be lived again and let me know. I have wearied my lover, my lover has wearied me, let me shatter your world again: my own bores me. I want to come back to you … I want, I want …

Smiley got up, the letter still in his hand, and stood again before the porcelain group. He remained there several minutes, gazing at the little shepherdess. She was so beautiful.

15

THE LAST ACT

The Sheridan’s three-act production of Edward II was playing to a full house. Guillam and Mendel sat in adjacent seats at the extreme end of the circle, which formed a wide U facing the stage. The left-hand end of the circle afforded a view of the rear stalls, which were otherwise concealed. An empty seat separated Guillam from a party of young students buzzing with anticipation.

They looked down thoughtfully on a restless sea of bobbing heads and fluttering programmes, stirring in sudden waves as later arrivals took their places. The scene reminded Guillam of an Oriental dance, where the tiny gestures of hand and foot animate a motionless body. Occasionally he would glance towards the rear stalls, but there was still no sign of Elsa Fennan or her guest.

Just as the recorded overture was ending he looked again briefly towards the two empty stalls in the back row and his heart gave a sudden leap as he saw the slight figure of Elsa Fennan sitting straight and motionless, staring fixedly down the auditorium like a child learning deportment. The seat on her right, nearest the gangway, was still empty.

Outside in the street taxis were drawing up hastily at the theatre entrance and an agreeable selection of the established and the disestablished hurriedly over-tipped their cabmen and spent five minutes looking for their tickets. Smiley’s taxi took him past the theatre and deposited him at the Clarendon Hotel, where he went straight downstairs to the dining-room and bar.

“I’m expecting a call any moment,” he said. “My name’s Savage. You’ll let me know, won’t you?”

The barman turned to the telephone behind him and spoke to the receptionist.

“And a small whisky and soda, please; will you have one yourself?”

“Thank you sir, I never touch it.”

The curtain rose on a dimly lit stage and Guillam, peering towards the back of the auditorium, tried at first without success to penetrate the sudden darkness. Gradually his eyes accustomed themselves to the faint glow cast by the emergency lamps, until he could just discern Elsa in the half-light; and still the empty seat beside her.

Only a low partition separated the rear stalls from the gangway which ran along the back of the auditorium, and behind it were several doors leading to the foyer, bar and cloakrooms. For a brief moment one of these opened and an oblique shaft of light was cast as if by design upon Elsa Fennan, illuminating with a thin line one side of her face, making its hollows black by contrast. She inclined her head slightly, as if listening to something behind her, half rose in her seat, then sat down again, deceived, and resumed her former attitude.

Guillam felt Mendel’s hand on his arm, turned, and saw his lean face thrust forward, looking past him. Following Mendel’s gaze, he peered down into the well of the theatre, where a tall figure was slowly making his way towards the back of the stalls; he was an impressive sight, erect and handsome, a lock of black hair tumbling over his brow. It was he whom Mendel watched with such fascination, this elegant giant limping up the gangway. There was something different about him, something arresting and disturbing. Through his glasses Guillam watched his slow and deliberate progress, admired the grace and measure of his uneven walk. He was a man apart, a man you remember, a man who strikes a chord deep in your experience, a man with the gift of universal familiarity: to Guillam he was a living component of all our romantic dreams, he stood at the mast with Conrad, sought the lost Greece with Byron, and with Goethe visited the shades of classical and medieval hells.

As he walked, thrusting his good leg forward, there was a defiance, a command, that could not go unheeded. Guillam noticed how heads turned in the audience, and eyes followed him obediently.

Pushing past Mendel, Guillam stepped quickly through the emergency exit into the corridor behind. He followed the corridor down some steps and arrived at last at the foyer. The box office had closed down, but the girl was still poring hopelessly over a page of laboriously compiled figures, covered with alterations and erasions.

“Excuse me,” said Guillam; “but I must use your telephone— it’s urgent, do you mind?”

“Ssh!” She waved her pencil at him impatiently, without looking up. Her hair was mousy, her oily skin glistened from the fatigue of late nights and a diet of chipped potatoes. Guillam waited a moment, wondering how long it would be before she found a solution to that tangle of spidery numerals which would match the pile of notes and silver in the open cash box beside her.

“Listen,” he urged; “I’m a police officer—there’s a couple of heroes upstairs who are after your cash. Now will you let me use that telephone?”

“Oh Lord,” she said in a tired voice, and looked at him for the first time. She wore glasses and was very plain. She was neither alarmed nor impressed. “I wish they’d perishing well take the money. It sends me up the wall.” Pushing her accounts to one side she opened a door beside the little kiosk and Guillam squeezed in.

“Hardly decent, is it?” the girl said with a grin. Her voice was nearly cultured—probably a London undergraduate earning pin-money, thought Guillam. He rang the Clarendon and asked for Mr Savage. Almost immediately he heard Smiley’s voice.

“He’s here,” said Guillam, “been here all the time. Must have bought an extra ticket; he was sitting in the front stalls. Mendel suddenly spotted him limping up the aisle.”

“Limping?”

“Yes, it’s not Mundt. It’s the other one, Dieter.”

Smiley did not reply and after a moment Guillam said: “George—are you there?”

“We’ve had it, I’m afraid, Peter. We’ve got nothing against Frey. Call the men off, they won’t find Mundt tonight. Is the first act over yet?”

“Must be just coming up for the interval.”

“I’ll be round in twenty minutes. Hang on to Elsa like grim death—if they leave and separate Mendel’s to stick to Dieter. You stay in the foyer for the last act in case they leave early.”

Guillam replaced the receiver and turned to the girl. “Thanks,” he said, and put four pennies on her desk. She hastily gathered them together and pressed them firmly into his hand.

“For God’s sake,” she said, “don’t add to my troubles.”

He went outside into the street and spoke to a plain-clothes man loitering on the pavement. Then he hurried back and rejoined Mendel as the curtain fell on the first act.

Elsa and Dieter were sitting side by side. They were talking happily together, Dieter laughing, Elsa animated and articulate like a puppet brought to life by her master. Mendel watched them in fascination. She laughed at something Dieter said, leant forward and put her hand on his arm. He saw her thin fingers against his dinner jacket, saw Dieter incline his head and whisper something to her, so that she laughed again. As Mendel watched, the theatre lights dimmed and the noise of conversation subsided as the audience quickly prepared for the second act.

Smiley left the Clarendon and walked slowly along the pavement towards the theatre. Thinking about it now, he realized that it was logical enough that Dieter should come, that it would have been madness to send Mundt. He wondered how long it could be before Elsa and Dieter discovered that it was not Dieter who had summoned her, not Dieter who had sent the postcard by a trusted courier. That, he reflected, should be an interesting moment. All he prayed for now was the opportunity of one more interview with Elsa Fennan.

A few minutes later he slipped quietly into the empty seat beside Guillam. It was a long time since he had seen Dieter.

He had not changed. He was the same improbable romantic with the magic of a charlatan; the same unforgettable figure which had struggled over the ruins of Germany, implacable of purpose, satanic in fulfilment, dark and swift like the Gods of the North. Smiley had lied to them that night in his club; Dieter was out of proportion, his cunning, his conceit, his strength and his dream— all were larger than life, undiminished by the moderating influence of experience. He was a man who thought and acted in absolute terms, without patience or compromise.

Memories returned to Smiley that night as he sat in the dark theatre and watched Dieter across a mass of motionless faces, memories of dangers shared, of mutual trust when each had held in his hand the life of the other … Just for a second Smiley wondered whether Dieter had seen him, had the feeling that Dieter’s eyes were upon him, watching him in the dim half-light.

Smiley got up as the second half drew to a close; as the curtain fell he made quickly for the side exit and waited discreetly in the corridor until the bell rang for the last act. Mendel joined him shortly before the end of the interval, and Guillam slipped past them to take up his post in the foyer.

“There’s trouble,” Mendel said. “They’re arguing. She looks frightened. She keeps on saying something and he just shakes his head. She’s panicking, I think, and Dieter looks worried. He’s started looking round the theatre as if he was trapped, getting the measure of the place, making plans. He glanced up to where you’d been sitting.”

“He won’t let her leave alone,” said Smiley. “He’ll wait and get out with the crowd. They won’t leave before the end. He probably reckons he’s surrounded: he’ll bargain on flustering us by parting from her suddenly in the middle of a crowd—just losing her.”

“What’s our game? Why can’t we go down there and get them?”

“We just wait; I don’t know what for. We’ve no proof. No proof of murder and none of espionage until Maston decides to do something. But remember this: Dieter doesn’t know that. If Elsa’s jumpy and Dieter’s worried, they’ll do something—that’s certain. So long as they think the game is up, we’ve a chance. Let them bolt, panic, anything. So long as they do something …”

It was dark in the theatre again, but out of the corner of his eye Smiley saw Dieter leaning over Elsa whispering to her. His left hand held her arm, his whole attitude was one of urgent persuasion and reassurance.

The play dragged on, the shouts of soldiers and the screams of the demented king filled the theatre, until the dreadful climax of his foul death, when an audible sigh rose from the stalls beneath them. Dieter had his arm round Elsa’s shoulders now, he had gathered the folds of her thin wrap about her neck and protected her as if she were a sleeping child. They remained like this until the final curtain. Neither applauded, Dieter looked about for Elsa’s handbag, said something reassuring to her and put it on her lap. She nodded very slightly. A warning roll of the drums brought the audience to its feet for the national anthem—Smiley rose instinctively and noticed to his surprise that Mendel had vanished. Dieter slowly stood up and as he did so Smiley realized that something had happened. Elsa was still sitting and though Dieter gently prevailed on her to rise, she made no answering sign. There was something oddly dislocated in the way she sat, in the way her head lolled forward on her shoulders …

The last line of the anthem was beginning as Smiley rushed to the door, ran down the corridor, down the stone stairs to the foyer. He was just too late—he was met by the first crowd of anxious theatre-goers hastening towards the street in search of taxis. He looked wildly among the crowd for Dieter and knew it was hopeless—that Dieter had done what he himself would have done, had chosen one of the dozen emergency exits which led to the street and safety. He pushed his bulky frame gradually through the middle of the crowd towards the entrance to the stalls. As he twisted this way and that, forcing himself between oncoming bodies, he caught sight of Guillam at the edge of the stream searching hopelessly for Dieter and Elsa. He shouted to him, and Guillam turned quickly.

Struggling on, Smiley at last found himself against the low partition and he could see Elsa Fennan sitting motionless as all around her men stood up and women felt for their coats and handbags. Then he heard the scream. It was sudden, short and utterly expressive of horror and disgust. A girl was standing in the gangway looking at Elsa. She was young and very pretty, the fingers of her right hand were raised to her mouth, her face was deathly white. Her father, a tall cadaverous man, stood behind her. He grasped her shoulders quickly and drew her back as he caught sight of the dreadful thing before him.

Elsa’s wrap had slipped from her shoulders and her head was lolling on to her chest.

Smiley had been right. “Let them bolt, panic, anything … so long as they do something …” And this was what they had done: this broken, wretched body was witness to their panic.

“You’d better get the police, Peter. I’m going home. Keep me out of it, if you can. You know where to find me.” He nodded, as if to himself; “I’m going home.”

It was foggy, and a fine rain was falling as Mendel quickly darted across the Fulham Palace Road in pursuit of Dieter. The headlights of cars came suddenly out of the wet mist twenty yards from him; the noise of traffic was high-pitched and nervous as it groped its uncertain way.

He had no choice but to keep close on Dieter’s heels, never more than a dozen paces behind him. The pubs and cinemas had closed but the coffee bars and dance halls still attracted noisy groups crowding the pavements. As Dieter limped ahead of him Mendel staged his progression by the street lamps, watching his silhouette suddenly clarify each time it entered the next cone of light.

Dieter was walking swiftly despite his limp. As his stride lengthened his limp became more pronounced, so that he seemed to swing his left leg forward by a sudden effort of his broad shoulders.

There was a curious expression on Mendel’s face, not of hatred or iron purpose but of frank distaste. To Mendel, the frills of Dieter’s profession meant nothing. He saw in his quarry only the squalor of a criminal, the cowardice of a man who paid others to do his killing. When Dieter had gently disengaged himself from the audience and moved towards the side exit, Mendel saw what he had been waiting for: the stealthy act of a common criminal. It was something he expected and understood. To Mendel there was only one criminal class, from pickpocket and sneak-thief to the big operator tampering with company law; they were outside the law and it was his distasteful but necessary vocation to remove them to safe keeping. This one happened to be German.

The fog grew thick and yellow. Neither of them wore a coat. Mendel wondered what Mrs Fennan would do now. Guillam would take care of her. She hadn’t even looked at Dieter when he slunk off. She was an odd one, that, all skin and bones and good works by the look of her. Lived on dry toast and Bovril.

Dieter turned abruptly down a side street to the right then another to the left. They had been walking for nearly an hour and he showed no sign of slowing down. The street seemed empty: certainly Mendel could hear no other footsteps but their own, crisp and short, the echo corrupted by the fog. They were in a narrow street of Victorian houses with hastily contrived Regency-style façades, heavy porches and sash windows. Mendel guessed they were somewhere near Fulham Broadway, perhaps beyond it, nearer the King’s Road. Still Dieter’s pace did not flag, still the crooked shadow thrust forward into the fog, confident of its path, urgent in its purpose.

As they approached a main road Mendel heard again the plaintive whine of traffic, brought almost to a standstill by the fog. Then from somewhere above them a yellow street light shed a pale glow, its outline clearly drawn like the aura of a winter sun. Dieter hesitated a moment on the kerb, then, chancing the ghostly traffic that nosed its way past them from nowhere, he crossed the road and plunged at once into one of the innumerable side streets that led, Mendel was certain, towards the river.

Mendel’s clothes were soaking wet, and the thin rain ran over his face. They must be near the river now; he thought he could detect the smell of tar and coke, feel the insidious cold of the black water. Just for a moment he thought Dieter had vanished. He moved forward quickly, nearly tripped on a kerb, went forward again and saw the railings of the embankment in front of him. Steps led upwards to an iron gate in the railings and this was slightly open. He stood at the gate and peered beyond, down into the water. There was a stout wooden gangway and Mendel heard the uneven echo as Dieter, hidden by the fog, followed his strange course to the water’s edge. Mendel waited, then, wary and silent, he made his way down the gangway. It was a permanent affair with heavy pine handrails on either side. Mendel reckoned it had been there some time. The low end of the gangway was joined to a long raft made of duckboard and oil-drums. Three dilapidated houseboats loomed in the fog, rocking gently on their moorings.

Noiselessly Mendel crept on to the raft, examining each of the houseboats in turn. Two were close together, connected by a plank. The third was moored some fifteen feet away, and a light was burning in her forward cabin. Mendel returned to the embankment, closing the iron gate carefully behind him.

He walked slowly down the road, still uncertain of his bearings. After about five minutes the pavement took him suddenly to the right and the ground rose gradually. He guessed he was on a bridge. He lit his cigarette lighter, and its long flame cast a glow over the stone wall on his right. He moved the lighter back and forth, and finally came upon a wet and dirty metal plate bearing the words “Battersea Bridge.” He made his way back to the iron gate and stood for a moment, orientating himself in the light of his knowledge.

Somewhere above him and to his right the four massive chimneys of Fulham Power Station stood hidden in the fog. To his left was Cheyne Walk with its row of smart little boats reaching to Battersea Bridge. The place where he now stood marked the dividing line between the smart and the squalid, where Cheyne Walk meets Lots Road, one of the ugliest streets in London. The southern side of this road consists of vast warehouses, wharves and mills, and the northern side presents an unbroken line of dingy houses typical of the side streets of Fulham.

It was in the shadow of the four chimneys, perhaps sixty feet from the Cheyne Walk mooring, that Dieter Frey had found a sanctuary. Yes, Mendel knew the spot well. It was only a couple of hundred yards up river from where the earthly remains of Mr Adam Scarr had been recovered from the unyielding arms of the Thames.

16

ECHOES IN THE FOG

It was long after midnight when Smiley’s telephone rang. He got up from the armchair in front of the gas fire and plodded upstairs to his bedroom, his right hand gripping the banisters tightly as he went. It was Peter, no doubt, or the police, and he would have to make a statement. Or even the Press. The murder had taken place just in time to catch today’s papers and mercifully too late for last night’s news broadcast. What would this be? “Maniac killer in theatre”? “Death-lock murder—woman named”? He hated the Press as he hated advertising and television, he hated mass-media, the relentless persuasion of the twentieth century. Everything he admired or loved had been the product of intense individualism. That was why he hated Dieter now, hated what he stood for more strongly than ever before: it was the fabulous impertinence of renouncing the individual in favour of the mass. When had mass philosophies ever brought benefit or wisdom? Dieter cared nothing for human life: dreamt only of armies of faceless men bound by their lowest common denominators; he wanted to shape the world as if it were a tree, cutting off what did not fit the regular image; for this he fashioned blank, soulless automatons like Mundt. Mundt was faceless like Dieter’s army, a trained killer born of the finest killer breed.

He picked up the telephone and gave his number. It was Mendel.

“Where are you?”

“Near Chelsea Embankment. Pub called the Balloon, in Lots Road. Landlord’s a chum of mine. I knocked him up … Listen, Elsa’s boyfriend is lying up in a houseboat by Chelsea flour mill. Bloody miracle in the fog, he is. Must have found his way by Braille.”

“Who?”

“Her boyfriend, her escort at the theatre. Wake up, Mr Smiley; what’s eating you?”

“You followed Dieter?”

“Of course I did. That was what you told Mr Guillam, wasn’t it? He was to stick to the woman and me the man … How did Mr Guillam get on, by the way? Where did Elsa get to?”

“She didn’t get anywhere. She was dead when Dieter left. Mendel, are you there? Look, for God’s sake, how do I find you? Where is this place, will the police know it?”

“They’ll know. Tell them he’s in a converted landing craft called Sunset Haven. She’s lying against the eastern side of Sennen Wharf, between the flour mills and Fulham Power Station. They’ll know … but the fog’s thick, mind, very thick.”

“Where can I meet you?”

“Cut straight down to the river. I’ll meet you where Battersea Bridge joins the north bank.”

“I’ll come at once, as soon as I’ve rung Guillam.”

He had a gun somewhere, and for a moment he thought of looking for it. Then, somehow, it seemed pointless. Besides, he reflected grimly, there’d be the most frightful row if he used it. He rang Guillam at his flat and gave him Mendel’s message: “And, Peter, they must cover all ports and airfields; order a special watch on river traffic and seabound craft. They’ll know the form.”

He put on an old mackintosh and a pair of thick leather gloves and slipped quickly out into the fog.

Mendel was waiting for him by the bridge. They nodded to one another and Mendel led him quickly along the embankment, keeping close to the river wall to avoid the trees that grew along the road. Suddenly Mendel stopped, seizing Smiley by the arm in warning. They stood motionless, listening. Then Smiley heard it too, the hollow ring of footsteps on a wooden floor, irregular like the footsteps of a limping man. They heard the creak of an iron gate, the clang as it was closed, then the footsteps again, firm now upon the pavement, growing louder, coming towards them. Neither moved. Louder, nearer, then they faltered, stopped. Smiley held his breath, trying desperately at the same time to see an extra yard into the fog, to glimpse the waiting figure he knew was there.

Then suddenly he came, rushing like a massive wild beast, bursting through them, knocking them apart like children and running on, lost again, the uneven echo fading in the distance. They turned and chased after him, Mendel in front and Smiley following as best he could, the image vivid in his mind of Dieter, gun in hand, bursting on them out of the night fog. Ahead, the shadow of Mendel turned abruptly to the right, and Smiley followed blindly. Then suddenly the rhythm had changed to the scuffle of fighting. Smiley ran forward, heard the unmistakable sound of a heavy weapon striking a human skull, and then he was upon them: saw Mendel on the ground, and Dieter stooping over him, raising his arm to hit him again with the heavy butt of an automatic pistol.

Smiley was out of breath. His chest was burning from the bitter, rank fog, his mouth hot and dry, filled with a taste like blood. Somehow he summoned breath, and he shouted desperately:

“Dieter!”

Frey looked at him, nodded and said:

“Servus, George,” and hit Mendel a hard, brutal blow with the pistol. He got up slowly, holding the pistol downwards and using both hands to cock it.

Smiley ran at him blindly, forgetting what little skill he had ever possessed, swinging with his short arms, striking with his open hands. His head was against Dieter’s chest and he pushed forward, punching Dieter’s back and sides. He was mad and, discovering in himself the energy of madness, pressed Dieter back still further towards the railing of the bridge while Dieter, off balance and hindered by his weak leg, gave way. Smiley knew Dieter was hitting him, but the decisive blow never came. He was shouting at Dieter; “Swine, swine!” and as Dieter receded still further Smiley found his arms free and once more struck at his face with clumsy, childish blows. Dieter was leaning back and Smiley saw the clean curve of his throat and chin, as with all his strength he thrust his open hand upwards. His fingers closed over Dieter’s jaw and mouth and he pushed further and further. Dieter’s hands were at Smiley’s throat, then suddenly they were clutching at his collar to save himself as he sank slowly backwards. Smiley beat frantically at his arms, and then he was held no more and Dieter was falling, falling into the swirling fog beneath the bridge, and there was silence. No shout, no splash. He was gone; offered like a human sacrifice to the London fog and the foul black river lying beneath it.

Smiley leant over the bridge, his head throbbing wildly, blood pouring from his nose, the fingers of his right hand feeling broken and useless. His gloves were gone. He looked down into the fog and could see nothing.

“Dieter!” he cried in anguish. “Dieter!”

He shouted again, but his voice choked and tears sprang to his eyes. “Oh dear God what have I done, oh Christ, Dieter, why didn’t you stop me, why didn’t you hit me with the gun, why didn’t you shoot?” He pressed his clenched hands to his face, tasting the salt blood in the palms mixed with the salt of his tears. He leant against the parapet and cried like a child. Somewhere beneath him a cripple dragged himself through the filthy water, lost and exhausted, yielding at last to the stenching blackness till it held him and drew him down.

He woke to find Peter Guillam sitting on the end of his bed pouring out tea.

“Ah, George. Welcome home. It’s two in the afternoon.”

“And this morning—?”

“This morning, dear boy, you were carolling on Battersea Bridge with Comrade Mendel.”

“How is he … Mendel, I mean?”

“Suitably ashamed of himself. Recovering fast.”

“And Dieter—?”

“Dead.”

Guillam handed him a cup of tea and some ratafia biscuits from Fortnum’s.

“How long have you been here, Peter?”

“Well, we came here in a series of tactical bounds, as it were. The first was to Chelsea Hospital where they licked your wounds and gave you a fairly substantial tranquillizer. Then we came back here and I put you to bed. That was disgusting. Then I did a spot of telephoning and, so to speak, went round with a pointed stick tidying up the mess. I looked in on you now and again. Cupid and Psyche. You were either snoring like a saddleback or reciting Webster.”

“God.”

“Duchess of Malfi, I think it was. ‘I bade thee, when I was distracted of my wits, go kill my dearest friend, and thou hast done it!’ Dreadful nonsense, George, I’m afraid.”

“How did the police find us—Mendel and me?”

“George, you may not know it but you were bellowing pejoratives at Dieter as if—”

“Yes, of course. You heard.”

“We heard.”

“What about Maston? What does Maston say about all this?”

“I think he wants to see you. I have a message from him asking you to drop in as soon as you feel well enough. I don’t know what he thinks about it. Nothing at all, I should imagine.”

“What do you mean?”

Guillam poured out more tea.

“Use your loaf, George. All three principals in this little fairy tale have now been eaten by bears. No secret information has been compromised for the last six months. Do you really think Maston wants to dwell on the details? Do you really think he is bursting to tell the Foreign Office the good tidings—and admit that we only catch spies when we trip over their dead bodies?”

The front-door bell rang and Guillam went downstairs to answer it. In some alarm Smiley heard him admit the visitor to the hall, then the subdued sound of voices, footsteps coming up the stairs. There was a knock on the door and Maston came in. He was carrying an absurdly large bunch of flowers and looked as though he had just been to a garden party. Smiley remembered it was Friday: no doubt he was going to Henley this week-end. He was grinning. He must have been grinning all the way up the stairs.

“Well, George, in the wars again!”

“Yes, I’m afraid so. Another accident.”

He sat on the edge of the bed, leaning across it, one arm supporting him the other side of Smiley’s legs.

There was a pause and then he said:

“You got my note, George?”

“Yes.”

Another pause.

“There has been talk of a new section in the Department, George. We (your Department, that is) feel we should devote more energy to technique research, with particular application to satellite espionage. That is also the Home Office view, I’m pleased to say. Guillam has agreed to advise on terms of reference. I wondered if you’d take it on for us. Running it. I mean, with the necessary promotion of course and the option of extending your service after the statutory retirement age. Our personnel people are right behind me on this.”

“Thank you … perhaps I could think about it, may I?”

“Of course … of course,” Maston looked slightly put out. “When will you let me know? It may be necessary to take on some new men and the question of space arises … Have the week-end to think about it, will you, and let me know on Monday. The Secretary was quite willing for you to—”

“Yes, I’ll let you know. It’s very good of you.”

“Not at all. Besides I am only the Adviser, you know, George. This is really an internal decision. I’m just the bringer of good news, George; my usual function of errand boy.”

Maston looked at Smiley hard for a moment, hesitated and then said: “I’ve put the Ministers in the picture … as far as is necessary. We discussed what action should be taken. The Home Secretary was also present.”

“When was this?”

“This morning. Some very grave issues were raised. We considered a protest to the East Germans and an extradition order for this man Mundt.”

“But we don’t recognize East Germany.”

“Precisely. That was the difficulty. It is, however, possible to lodge a protest with an intermediary.”

“Such as Russia?”

“Such as Russia. In the event, however, certain factors militated against this. It was felt that publicity, whatever form it took, would ultimately rebound against the nation’s interests. There is already considerable popular hostility in this country to the rearmament of Western Germany. It was felt that any evidence of German intrigue in Britain—whether inspired by the Russians or not—might encourage this hostility. There is, you see, no positive evidence that Frey was operating for the Russians. It might well be represented to the public that he was operating on his own account or on behalf of a united Germany.”

“I see.”

“So far very few people indeed are aware of the facts at all. That is most fortunate. On behalf of the police the Home Secretary has tentatively agreed that they will do their part in playing the affair down as far as possible … Now this man Mendel, what’s he like? Is he trustworthy?”

Smiley hated Maston for that.

“Yes,” he said.

Maston got up. “Good,” he said, “good. Well, I must get along. Anything you want at all, anything I can do?”

“No, thank you. Guillam is looking after me admirably.”

Maston reached the door. “Well, good luck, George. Take the job if you can.” He said this quickly in a subdued voice with a pretty, sidelong smile as if it meant rather a lot to him.

“Thank you for the flowers,” said Smiley.

Dieter was dead, and he had killed him. The broken fingers of his right hand, the stiffness of his body and the sickening headache, the nausea of guilt, all testified to this. And Dieter had let him do it, had not fired the gun, had remembered their friendship when Smiley had not. They had fought in a cloud, in the rising stream of the river, in a clearing in a timeless forest; they had met, two friends rejoined, and fought like beasts. Dieter had remembered and Smiley had not. They had come from different hemispheres of the night, from different worlds of thought and conduct. Dieter, mercurial, absolute, had fought to build a civilization. Smiley, rationalistic, protective, had fought to prevent him. “Oh God,” said Smiley aloud, “who was then the gentleman …?”

Laboriously he got out of bed and began to dress. He felt better standing up.

17

DEAR ADVISER

Dear Adviser,

I am at last able to reply to Personnel’s offer of a higher appointment in the Department. I am sorry that I have taken so long to do this, but as you know, I have not been well recently, and have also had to contend with a number of personal problems outside the scope of the Department.

As I am not entirely free of my indisposition, I feel it would be unwise for me to accept their offer. Kindly convey this decision to Personnel.

I am sure you will understand.

Yours,

George Smiley

Dear Peter,

I enclose a note on the Fennan Case. This is the only copy. Please pass it to Maston when you have read it. I thought it would be valuable to record the events—even if they did not take place.

Ever,

George

The Fennan Case

On Monday, 2 January, I interviewed Samuel Arthur Fennan, a senior member of the Foreign Office, in order to clarify certain allegations made against him in an anonymous letter. The interview was arranged in accordance with the customary procedure, that is to say with the consent of the FO. We knew of nothing adverse to Fennan beyond communist sympathy while at Oxford in the thirties, to which little significance was attached. The interview was therefore in a sense a strictly routine affair.

Fennan’s room at the Foreign Office was found to be unsuitable and we agreed to continue our discussion in St James’s Park, availing ourselves of the good weather.

It has subsequently transpired that we were recognized and observed in this by an agent of the East German Intelligence Service, who had cooperated with me during the war. It is not certain whether he had placed Fennan under some kind of surveillance, or whether his presence in the park was coincidental.

On the night of 3 January it was reported by Surrey police that Fennan had committed suicide. A typewritten suicide note signed by Fennan claimed that he had been victimized by the security authorities.

The following facts, however, emerged during investigation, and suggested foul play:

1.  At 7.55 p.m. on the night of his death Fennan had asked the Walliston exchange to call him at 8.30 the following morning.

2.  Fennan had made himself a cup of cocoa shortly before his death, and had not drunk it.

3.  He had supposedly shot himself in the hall, at the bottom of the stairs. The note was beside the body.

4.  It seemed inconsistent that he should type his last letter, as he seldom used a typewriter, and even more remarkable that he should come downstairs to the hall to shoot himself.

5.  On the day of his death he posted a letter inviting me in urgent terms to lunch with him at Marlow the following day.

6.  Later it also transpired that Fennan had requested a day’s leave for Wednesday, 4 January. He did not apparently mention this to his wife.

7.  It was also noted that the suicide letter had been typed on Fennan’s own machine—and that it contained certain peculiarities in the typescript similar to those in the anonymous letter. The laboratory report concluded, however, that the two letters had not been typed by the same hand, though originating from the same machine.

Mrs Fennan, who had been to the theatre on the night her husband died, was invited to explain the 8.30 call from the exchange and falsely claimed to have requested it herself. The exchange was positive that this was not the case. Mrs Fennan claimed that her husband had been nervous and depressed since his security interview, which corroborated the evidence of his final letter.

On the afternoon of 4 January, having left Mrs Fennan earlier in the day, I returned to my house in Kensington. Briefly observing somebody at the window, I rang the front-door bell. A man opened the door who has since been identified as a member of the East German Intelligence Service. He invited me into the house but I declined his offer and returned to my car, noting at the same time the numbers of cars parked nearby.

That evening I visited a small garage in Battersea to inquire into the origin of one of these cars which was registered in the name of the proprietor of the garage. I was attacked by an unknown assailant and beaten senseless. Three weeks later the proprietor himself, Adam Scarr, was found dead in the Thames near Battersea Bridge. He had been drunk at the time of drowning. There were no signs of violence and he was known as a heavy drinker.

It is relevant that Scarr had for the last four years provided an anonymous foreigner with the use of a car, and had received generous rewards for doing so. Their arrangements were designed to conceal the identity of the borrower even from Scarr himself, who only knew his client by the nickname “Blondie” and could only reach him through a telephone number. The telephone number is of importance: it was that of the East German Steel Mission.

Meanwhile, Mrs Fennan’s alibi for the evening of the murder had been investigated and significant information came to light:

1.  Mrs Fennan attended the Weybridge Repertory Theatre twice a month, on the first and third Tuesdays. (N.B. Adam Scarr’s client had collected his car on the first and third Tuesdays of each month.)

2.  She always brought a music case and left it in the cloakroom.

3.  When visiting the theatre she was always joined by a man whose description corresponded with that of my assailant and Scarr’s client. It was even mistakenly assumed by a member of the theatre staff that this man was Mrs Fennan’s husband. He too brought a music case and left it in the cloakroom.

4.  On the evening of the murder Mrs Fennan had left the theatre early after her friend had failed to arrive and had forgotten to reclaim her music case. Late that night she telephoned the theatre to ask if the case could be called for at once. She had lost her cloakroom ticket. The case was collected—by Mrs Fennan’s usual friend.

At this point the stranger was identified as an employee of the East German Steel Mission named Mundt. The principal of the Mission was Herr Dieter Frey, a wartime collaborator of our Service, with extensive operational experience. After the war he had entered Government service in the Soviet zone of Germany. I should mention that Frey had operated with me during the war in enemy territory and had shown himself to be a brilliant and resourceful agent.

I now decided to conduct a third interview with Mrs Fennan. She broke down and confessed to having acted as an intelligence courier for her husband, who had been recruited by Frey on a skiing holiday five years ago. She herself had cooperated unwillingly, partly in loyalty to her husband and partly to protect him from his own carelessness in performing his espionage role. Frey had seen Fennan talking to me in the park. Assuming I was still operationally employed, he had concluded that Fennan was either under suspicion or a double agent. He instructed Mundt to liquidate Fennan, and his wife had been compelled into silence by her own complicity. She had even typed the text of the suicide letter on Fennan’s typewriter over a specimen of her husband’s signature.

The means whereby she passed to Mundt the intelligence procured by her husband is relevant. She placed notes and copied documents in a music case, which she took to the theatre. Mundt brought a similar case containing money and instructions and, like Mrs Fennan, left it in the cloakroom. They had only to exchange cloakroom tickets. When Mundt failed to appear at the theatre on the night in question, Mrs Fennan obeyed standing instructions and posted the ticket to an address in Highgate. She left the theatre in order to catch the last post from Weybridge. When later that night Mundt demanded the music case she told him what she had done. Mundt insisted on collecting the case that night, for he did not wish to make another journey to Weybridge.

When I interviewed Mrs Fennan the following morning, one of my questions (about the 8.30 call) alarmed her so much that she telephoned Mundt. This accounts for the assault upon me later that day.

Mrs Fennan provided me with the address and telephone number she used when contacting Mundt—whom she knew by the cover name of Freitag. Both led to the apartment of a “Lufteuropa” pilot who often entertained Mundt and provided accommodation for him when he required it. The pilot (presumably a courier of the East German Intelligence Service) has not returned to this country since 5 January.

This, then, was the sum of Mrs Fennan’s revelations, and in a sense they led nowhere. The spy was dead, his murderers had vanished. It only remained to assess the extent of the damage. An official approach was now made to the Foreign Office and Mr Felix Taverner was instructed to calculate from Foreign Office schedules what information had been compromised. This involved listing all files to which Fennan had had access since his recruitment by Frey. Remarkably, this revealed no systematic acquisition of secret files. Fennan had drawn no secret files except those which directly concerned him in his duties. During the last six months, when his access to sensitive papers was substantially increased, he had actually taken home no files of secret classification. The files he took home over this period were of universally low grade, and some treated subjects actually outside the scope of his section. This was not consistent with Fennan’s role as a spy. It was, however, possible that he had lost heart for his work, and that his luncheon invitation to me was a first step to confession. With this in mind he might also have written the anonymous letter which could have been designed to put him in touch with the Department.

Two further facts should be mentioned at this point. Under an assumed name and with a fake passport, Mundt left the country by air on the day after Mrs Fennan made her confession. He evaded the notice of the airport authorities, but was retrospectively identified by the air hostess. Secondly, Fennan’s diary contained the full name and official telephone number of Dieter Frey—a flagrant breach of the most elementary rule of espionage.

It was hard to understand why Mundt had waited three weeks in England after murdering Scarr, and even harder to reconcile Fennan’s activities as described by his wife with the obviously unplanned and unproductive selection of files. Re-examination of the facts led repeatedly to this conclusion: the only evidence that Fennan was a spy came from his wife. If the facts were as she described them, why had she been allowed to survive the determination of Mundt and Frey to eliminate those in possession of dangerous knowledge?

On the other hand, might she not herself be the spy?

This would explain the date of Mundt’s departure: he left as soon as he had been reassured by Mrs Fennan that I had accepted her ingenious confession. It would explain the entry in Fennan’s diary: Frey was a chance skiing acquaintance and an occasional visitor to Walliston. It would make sense of Fennan’s choice of files—if Fennan deliberately chose unclassified papers at a time when his work was mainly secret there could be only one explanation: he had come to suspect his wife. Hence the invitation to Marlow, following naturally upon our encounter the previous day. Fennan had decided to tell me of his apprehensions and had taken a day’s leave to do so—a fact of which his wife was not apparently aware. This would also explain why Fennan denounced himself in an anonymous letter: he wished to put himself in touch with us as a preliminary to denouncing his wife.

Continuing the supposition it was remarkable that in matters of tradecraft Mrs Fennan alone was efficient and conscientious. The technique used by herself and Mundt recalled that of Frey during the war. The secondary arrangement to post the cloakroom ticket if no meeting took place was typical of his scrupulous planning. Mrs Fennan, it seemed, had acted with a precision scarcely compatible with her claim to be an unwilling party to her husband’s treachery.

While logically Mrs Fennan now came under suspicion as a spy, there was no reason to believe that her account of what happened on the night of Fennan’s murder was necessarily untrue. Had she known of Mundt’s intention to murder her husband she would not have taken the music case to the theatre, and would not have posted the cloakroom ticket.

There seemed no way of proving the case against her unless it was possible to reactivate the relationship between Mrs Fennan and her controller. During the war Frey had devised an ingenious code for emergency communication by the use of snapshots and picture postcards. The actual subject of the photograph contained the message. A religious subject such as a painting of a Madonna or a church conveyed a request for an early meeting. The recipient would send in reply an entirely unrelated letter, making sure to date it. A meeting would take place at a prearranged time and place exactly five days after the date on the letter.

It was just possible that Frey, whose tradecraft had evidently altered so little since the war, might have clung to this system— which, after all, would only seldom be needed. Relying on this I therefore posted to Elsa Fennan a picture postcard depicting a church. The card was posted from Highgate. I hoped somewhat forlornly that she would assume it had come to her through the agency of Frey. She reacted at once by sending to an unknown address abroad a ticket for a London theatre performance five days ahead. Mrs Fennan’s communication reached Frey, who accepted it as an urgent summons. Knowing that Mundt had been compromised by Mrs Fennan’s “confession” he decided to come himself.

They therefore met at the Sheridan Theatre, Hammersmith, on Tuesday, 14 February.

At first each assumed that the other had initiated the meeting, but when Frey realized they had been brought together by a deception he took drastic action. It may be that he suspected Mrs Fennan of luring him into a trap, that he realized he was under surveillance. We shall never know. In any event, he murdered her. His method of doing this is best described in the coroner’s report at the inquest: “a single degree of pressure had been applied on the larynx, in particular to the horns of the thyroid cartilage, causing almost immediate death. It would appear that Mrs Fennan’s assailant was no layman in these matters.”

Frey was pursued to a houseboat moored near Cheyne Walk, and while violently resisting arrest he fell into the river, from which his body has now been recovered.

18

BETWEEN TWO WORLDS

Smiley’s unrespectable club was usually empty on Sundays, but Mrs Sturgeon left the door unlocked in case any of her gentlemen chose to call in. She adopted the same stern, possessive attitude towards her gentlemen as she had done in her landlady days at Oxford, when she had commanded from her fortunate boarders more respect than the entire assembly of dons and proctors. She forgave everything, but somehow managed to suggest on each occasion that her forgiveness was unique, and would never, never happen again. She had once made Steed-Asprey put ten shillings in the poor box for bringing seven guests without warning, and afterwards provided the dinner of a lifetime.

They sat at the same table as before. Mendel looked a shade sallower, a shade older. He scarcely spoke during the meal, handling his knife and fork with the same careful precision which he applied to any task. Guillam supplied most of the conversation, for Smiley, too, was less talkative than usual. They were at ease in their companionship and no one felt unduly the need to speak.

“Why did she do it?” Mendel asked suddenly.

Smiley shook his head slowly: “I think I know, but we can only guess. I think she dreamt of a world without conflict, ordered and preserved by the new doctrine. I once angered her, you see, and she shouted at me: ‘I’m the wandering Jewess,’ she said; ‘the no-man’s land, the battlefield for your toy soldiers.’ As she saw the new Germany rebuilt in the image of the old, saw the plump pride return, as she put it, I think it was just too much for her; I think she looked at the futility of her suffering and the prosperity of her persecutors and rebelled. Five years ago, she told me, they met Dieter on a skiing holiday in Germany. By that time the re-establishment of Germany as a prominent western power was well under way.”

“Was she a communist?”

“I don’t think she liked labels. I think she wanted to help build one society which could live without conflict. Peace is a dirty word now, isn’t it? I think she wanted peace.”

“And Dieter?” asked Guillam.

“God knows what Dieter wanted. Honour, I think, and a socialist world.” Smiley shrugged. “They dreamt of peace and freedom. Now they’re murderers and spies.”

“Christ Almighty,” said Mendel.

Smiley was silent again, looking into his glass. At last he said: “I can’t expect you to understand. You only saw the end of Dieter. I saw the beginning. He went the full circle. I don’t think he ever got over being a traitor in the war. He had to put it right. He was one of those world-builders who seem to do nothing but destroy: that’s all.”

Guillam gracefully intervened: “What about the 8.30 call?”

“I think it’s pretty obvious. Fennan wanted to see me at Marlow and he’d taken a day’s leave. He can’t have told Elsa he was having a day off or she’d have tried to explain it away to me. He staged a phone call to give himself an excuse for going to Marlow. That’s my guess, anyway.”

The fire crackled in the wide hearth.

He caught the midnight plane to Zurich. It was a beautiful night, and through the small window beside him he watched the grey wing, motionless against the starlit sky, a glimpse of eternity between two worlds. The vision soothed him, calmed his fears and his doubts, made him fatalistic towards the inscrutable purpose of the universe. It all seemed to matter so little—the pathetic quest for love, or the return to solitude.

Soon the lights of the French coast came in sight. As he watched, he began to sense vicariously the static life beneath him; the rank smell of Gauloises Bleues, garlic and good food, the raised voices in the bistro. Maston was a million miles off, locked away with his arid paper and his shiny politicians.

Smiley presented an odd figure to his fellow passengers—a little fat man, rather gloomy, suddenly smiling, ordering a drink. The young, fair-haired man beside him examined him closely out of the corner of his eye. He knew the type well—the tired executive out for a bit of fun. He found it rather disgusting.

PRAISE FOR THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD

Winner of the 1963 Gold Dagger Award: Best Crime Novel
Winner of the 1965 Edgar Award: Best Mystery Novel
Selected as one of the ‘All-TIME 100 Novels’ by Time magazine
Winner of the 2005 CWA Dagger of Daggers Award

‘Le Carré is one of the best novelists—of any kind—we have.’

—Vanity Fair

‘First-rate and tremendously exciting.’

—Daphne du Maurier

‘Le Carré is simply the world’s greatest fictional spymaster.’

—Newsweek

‘A topical and terrible story . . . [Le Carré] can communicate emotion, from sweating to fear to despairing love, with terse and compassionate conviction. Above all he can tell a tale. Formidable equipment for a rare and disturbing writer.’

—The Sunday Times

‘The best spy story I have ever read.’

—Graham Greene

‘The book breathes life, anger, and excitement.’

—The Observer (U.K.)

‘A cracking thriller.’

—The Economist

‘Superbly constructed, with an atmosphere of chilly hell.’

—J.B. Priestley

‘The quintessential Cold War spy novel . . . [which] packs in its climactic revelation one of the most powerful plot twists of modern times. The writing, atmosphere, and moral debate are all leanly, ambiguously, and thrillingly effective . . . Le Carré at his best.’

—Kirkus (U.K.)

‘[The] best spy novel of all-time.’

—Publishers Weekly

‘The master storyteller . . . has lost none of his cunning.’

—Daily Mail (U.K.)

‘Nobody writing today manipulates suspense better. Nobody constructs a more tantalisingly complex plot . . . Essential reading.’

—Sunday Telegraph (U.K.)

PENGUIN CANADA

THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD

JOHN LE CARRÉ was born in 1931. After attending the universities of Berne and Oxford, he spent five years in the British Foreign Service. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, his third book, secured him a worldwide reputation. He is the author of twenty-one novels, including Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; A Perfect Spy; and The Constant Gardener. His books have been translated into thirty-six languages. He lives in England.

ALSO BY JOHN LE CARRÉ

Call for the Dead

A Murder of Quality

The Looking Glass War

A Small Town in Germany

The Naïve and Sentimental Lover

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

The Honourable Schoolboy

Smiley’s People

The Little Drummer Girl

A Perfect Spy

The Russia House

The Secret Pilgrim

The Night Manager

Our Game

The Tailor of Panama

Single & Single

The Constant Gardener

Absolute Friends

The Mission Song

A Most Wanted Man

JOHN
LE CARRÉ

THE SPY WHO
CAME IN FROM
THE COLD

PENGUIN CANADA

Published by the Penguin Group

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(a division of Pearson Canada Inc.)

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First published in Great Britain by Victor Gollancz Limited, 1963
Published in Penguin Canada paperback by Penguin Group (Canada),
a division of Pearson Canada Inc., 1989, 2001
Published in this edition, 2009

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Copyright © le Carré Productions, 1963

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this
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LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

Le Carré, John, 1931–

The spy who came in from the cold / John le Carré.

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INTRODUCTION

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, my third book, changed my life and put me on bare-knuckle terms with my abilities. Until its publication I had written literally in secret, from inside the walls of the secret world, under another name, and free of serious critical attention. Once this book hit the stands, my time of quiet and gradual development was over for good, however much I tried to re-create it by, for example, fleeing with my family to a remote Greek island. Therefore, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold is the last book of my period of innocence, and after it, for better or worse, my experimentations would have to take place in public. For years to come there would be no such thing, for the publishing industry, as a “small” le Carré book—a distortion both longed for and abhorred by any artist worth his salt.

I wrote the book in a great rush over a period of about five weeks. I wrote it in the small hours of the morning, in my British Embassy hiring in Königswinter, in odd moments at my desk in the Embassy, and even at the wheel of my car as I crossed the Rhine back and forth by ferry, sometimes parked alongside Chancellor Adenauer’s huge armoured Mercedes (or was it a BMW?) as he made his own stately way to work. There was excitement in Chancery when I was able to report what newspaper he was reading, and the Embassy Press Section was always quick to deduce which leader-writers might have influenced the great man’s mind, but I suspect none did: he was long past being influenced. Sometimes I caught his eye, and occasionally it seemed to me he even smiled at me in my little Hillman Huskie with diplomatic plates. But he resembled by then an ancient Red Indian chief, and his expressions did not follow the patterns of other mortals.

It was the Berlin Wall that had got me going, of course: I had flown from Bonn to take a look at it as soon as it started going up. I went with a colleague from the Embassy and as we stared back at the weasel faces of the brainwashed little thugs who guarded the Kremlin’s latest battlement, he told me to wipe the grin off my face. I was not aware I had been grinning, so it must have been one of those soupy grins that comes over me at dreadfully serious moments. There was certainly nothing to grin at in what I saw, and inside myself I felt nothing but disgust and terror, which was exactly what I was supposed to feel: the Wall was perfect theatre as well as a perfect symbol of the monstrosity of ideology gone mad.

We forget the terror too easily. In my house at Königswinter, workmen had been painting the dining-room walls when the news of the first barricades came through. As good Germans they quietly washed their brushes and, as good family men, went home. In secret conclave, the Embassy discussed its evacuation plans. But where do you evacuate to when the world is about to end? At Checkpoint Charlie, as the Friedrichstrasse crossing point quickly came to be known, American and Soviet Bloc tanks faced each other across a hundred-yard strip of road, their guns trained on one another’s turrets. Now and then they roared at each other with their engines, supposedly to keep them warm and ready to advance, but in reality they were psyching each other like boxers before the big fight. Somewhere beyond the Wall, networks of British and American and French and West German secret agents had been caught napping. None, to my knowledge, had forecast the event, and now they would have to live with their lack of success. Many of them probably had other allegiances anyway. Others would become what are called stay-behind agents, who would henceforth have to communicate by means of hidden radios and prearranged methods of secret writing, set up just for this eventuality. With the Wall, the espionage industry was going to become more clandestine, more perilous, more questionable, and certainly more over-crowded than ever before. What the Soviet agents thought—those who were now stuck in West Germany—I can only imagine. But of course they were not really stuck, merely condemned to greater inconveniences in the administration of their secret lives.

And the Wall stayed up. It was strengthened and heightened. It was protected by mined strips and earth brushed so fine you could trace a rabbit’s paws across it. Occasionally someone climbed over it or crashed through it or dug under it, or made himself a glider and flew through it. There is a whole long history of tales of derring-do and all those men and women who succeeded in escaping were heroes, perhaps because they were so few, certainly because they were so brave. Reading today’s news from East Germany, those who remember the Wall can draw a direct line between the heroism of the few and the approaching liberation of the many. Our Western propaganda was in that sense entirely true: the East German régime was indeed hated by those it governed. The escapers were the vanguard of what is now a great popular army, and almost every accusation that was levelled against the corrupt barons of the East German leadership turns out to have been justified. Which perhaps makes my novel the more chilling.

What prompted me to write it? Where did the notion spring from? Oh, at this distance almost any answer is likely to be tendentious. I know that I was deeply unhappy in my professional life, and that I was enduring the extremes of loneliness and personal confusion. Perhaps some of that solitude and bitterness found its way into Alec Leamas. I know that I wanted to be in love, and that my own past, and my own inwardness, made this impossible. So perhaps the barbed wire and the machinations of the plot did duty for other obstacles that stood between myself and freedom. I had been poor too long, I was drinking a lot, I was beginning to doubt, in the deepest of ways, the wisdom of my choice of job. The familiar process of embracing an institution, then fighting my way clear of it, was taking over my relationship to my marriage and to my work. Staring at the Wall was like staring at frustration itself, and it touched an anger in me that found its way into the book. In interviews at the time, I am sure, I said none of this. Perhaps I was still too much of the spy, or perhaps I didn’t know myself well enough to understand that, by telling an ingenious tale, I was making some kind of bitter order out of my own chaos.

Certainly I never wrote this way again, and for a while the smart thing to say of me was that I was a one-book man, that The Spy Who Came in from the Cold was a grand fluke, and all the rest was aftercare. The book that followed it—The Looking Glass War—being much nearer to the reality and pain I had experienced, was dismissed by British critics as boring and unreal. And perhaps it was, for I don’t remember a single kindly British voice.

But the acclaim for The Spy had been so great that I was in for a hiding anyway, and knew it. My marriage broke up, I went through most of the withdrawal symptoms that fame instills in writers, even if they pretend it doesn’t. I found a new wise wife and put myself together. I had survived after all. I had no more excuses for not writing as well as I could, for not going each time to the edge of my talent, and seeing what was or wasn’t beyond.

But of course I will never forget the time when a disgusting gesture of history coincided with some desperate mechanism inside myself, and in six weeks gave me the book that altered my life.

JOHN LE CARRÉ

1

CHECKPOINT

The American handed Leamas another cup of coffee and said, ‘Why don’t you go back and sleep? We can ring you if he shows up.’

Leamas said nothing, just stared through the window of the checkpoint, along the empty street.

‘You can’t wait for ever, sir. Maybe he’ll come some other time. We can have the polizei contact the Agency: you can be back here in twenty minutes.’

‘No,’ said Leamas, ‘it’s nearly dark now.’

‘But you can’t wait for ever; he’s nine hours over schedule.’

‘If you want to go, go. You’ve been very good,’ Leamas added. ‘I’ll tell Kramer you’ve been damn’ good.’

‘But how long will you wait?’

‘Until he comes.’ Leamas walked to the observation window and stood between the two motionless policemen. Their binoculars were trained on the Eastern checkpoint.

‘He’s waiting for the dark,’ Leamas muttered. ‘I know he is.’

‘This morning you said he’d come across with the workmen.’ Leamas turned on him.

‘Agents aren’t aeroplanes. They don’t have schedules. He’s blown, he’s on the run, he’s frightened. Mundt’s after him, now, at this moment. He’s only got one chance. Let him choose his time.’

The younger man hesitated, wanting to go and not finding the moment.

A bell rang inside the hut. They waited, suddenly alert. A policeman said in German, ‘Black Opel Rekord, Federal registration.’

‘He can’t see that far in the dusk, he’s guessing,’ the American whispered and then he added: ‘How did Mundt know?’

‘Shut up,’ said Leamas from the window. One of the policemen left the hut and walked to the sandbag emplacement two feet short of the white demarcation which lay across the road like the base line of a tennis court. The other waited until his companion was crouched behind the telescope in the emplacement, then put down his binoculars, took his black helmet from the peg by the door and carefully adjusted it on his head. Somewhere high above the checkpoint the arclights sprang to life, casting theatrical beams on to the road in front of them.

The policeman began his commentary. Leamas knew it by heart.

‘Car halts at the first control. Only one occupant, a woman. Escorted to the Vopo hut for document check.’ They waited in silence.

‘What’s he saying?’ said the American. Leamas didn’t reply. Picking up a spare pair of binoculars, he gazed fixedly towards the East German controls.

‘Document check completed. Admitted to the second control.’

‘Mr Leamas, is this your man?’ the American persisted. ‘I ought to ring the Agency.’

‘Wait.’

‘Where’s the car now? What’s it doing?’

‘Currency check, Customs,’ Leamas snapped.

Leamas watched the car. There were two Vopos at the driver’s door, one doing the talking, the other standing off, waiting. A third was sauntering round the car. He stopped at the boot, then walked back to the driver. He wanted the key. He opened the boot, looked inside, closed it, returned the key and walked thirty yards up the road to where, midway between the two opposing checkpoints, a solitary East German sentry was standing, a squat silhouette in boots and baggy trousers. The two stood together talking, selfconscious in the glare of the arclight.

With a perfunctory gesture they waved the car on. It reached the two sentries in the middle of the road and stopped again. They walked round the car, stood off and talked again; finally, almost unwillingly, they let it continue across the line to the Western sector.

‘It is a man you’re waiting for, Mr Leamas?’ asked the American.

‘Yes, it’s a man.’

Pushing up the collar of his jacket, Leamas stepped outside into the icy October wind. He remembered the crowd then. It was something you forgot inside the hut, this group of puzzled faces. The people changed but the expressions were the same. It was like the helpless crowd that gathers round in a traffic accident, no one knowing how it happened, whether you should move the body. Smoke or dust rose through the beam of the arclamps, a constant shifting pall between the margins of light.

Leamas walked over to the car, and said to the woman, ‘Where is he?’

‘They came for him and he ran. He took the bicycle. They can’t have known about me.’

‘Where did he go?’

‘We had a room near Brandenburg, over a pub. He kept a few things there, money, papers. I think he’ll have gone there. Then he’ll come over.’

‘Tonight?’

‘He said he would come tonight. The others have all been caught—Paul, Viereck, Ländser, Salomon. He hasn’t got long.’

Leamas stared at her for a moment in silence.

‘Ländser too?’

‘Last night.’

A policeman was standing at Leamas’ side.

‘You’ll have to move away from here,’ he said. ‘It’s forbidden to obstruct the crossing point.

Leamas half turned.

‘Go to hell,’ he snapped. The German stiffened, but the woman said:

‘Get in. We’ll drive down to the corner.’

He got in beside her and they moved slowly down the road to a side turning.

‘I didn’t know you had a car,’ he said.

‘It’s my husband’s,’ she replied indifferently. ‘Karl never told you I was married, did he?’ Leamas was silent. ‘My husband and I work for an optical firm. They let us over to do business. Karl only told you my maiden name. He didn’t want me to be mixed up with . . . you.’

Leamas took a key from his pocket.

‘You’ll want somewhere to stay,’ he said. His voice sounded flat. ‘There’s an apartment in the Albrecht-Dürer-Strasse, next to the Museum. Number 28A. You’ll find everything you want. I’ll telephone you when he comes.’

‘I’ll stay here with you.’

‘I’m not staying here. Go to the flat. I’ll ring you. There’s no point in waiting here now.’

‘But he’s coming to this crossing point.’

Leamas looked at her in surprise.

‘He told you that?’

‘Yes. He knows one of the Vopos there, the son of his landlord. It may help. That’s why he chose this route.’

‘And he told you that?’

‘He trusts me. He told me everything.’

‘Christ.’

He gave her the key and went back to the checkpoint hut, out of the cold. The policemen were muttering to each other as he entered; the larger one ostentatiously turned his back.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Leamas. ‘I’m sorry I bawled you out.’ He opened a tattered briefcase and rummaged in it until he found what he was looking for: a half bottle of whisky. With a nod the elder man accepted it, half filled each coffee mug and topped them up with black coffee.

‘Where’s the American gone?’ asked Leamas.

‘Who?’

‘The CIA boy. The one who was with me.’

‘Bed time,’ said the elder man and they all laughed.

Leamas put down his mug and said:

‘What are your rules for shooting to protect a man coming over? A man on the run.’

‘We can only give covering fire if the Vopos shoot into our sector.

‘That means you can’t shoot until a man’s over the boundary?’

The older man said, ‘We can’t give covering fire, Mr . . .’

‘Thomas,’ Leamas replied, ‘Thomas.’ They shook hands, the two policemen pronouncing their own names as they did so.

‘We can’t give covering fire. That’s the truth. They tell us there’d be war if we did.’

‘It’s nonsense,’ said the younger policeman, emboldened by the whisky. ‘If the allies weren’t here the Wall would be gone by now.’

‘So would Berlin,’ muttered the elder man.

‘I’ve got a man coming over tonight,’ said Leamas abruptly.

‘Here? At this crossing point?’

‘It’s worth a lot to get him out. Mundt’s men are looking for him.’

‘There are still places where you can climb,’ said the younger policeman.

‘He’s not that kind. He’ll bluff his way through; he’s got papers, if the papers are still good. He’s got a bicycle.’

There was only one light in the checkpoint, a reading lamp with a green shade, but the glow of the arclights, like artificial moonlight, filled the cabin. Darkness had fallen, and with it silence. They spoke as if they were afraid of being overheard. Leamas went to the window and waited, in front of him the road and to either side the Wall, a dirty, ugly thing of breeze blocks and strands of barbed wire, lit with cheap yellow light, like the backdrop for a concentration camp. East and west of the Wall lay the unrestored part of Berlin, a half-world of ruin, drawn in two dimensions, crags of war.

That damned woman, thought Leamas, and that fool Karl who’d lied about her. Lied by omission, as they all do, agents the world over. You teach them to cheat, to cover their tracks, and they cheat you as well. He’d only produced her once, after that dinner in the Schürzstrasse last year. Karl had just had his big scoop and Control had wanted to meet him. Control always came in on success. They’d had dinner together—Leamas, Control and Karl. Karl loved that kind of thing. He turned up looking like a Sunday School boy, scrubbed and shining, doffing his hat and all respectful. Control had shaken his hand for five minutes and said: ‘I want you to know how pleased we are, Karl, damn’ pleased.’ Leamas had watched and thought, ‘That’ll cost us another couple of hundred a year.’ When they’d finished dinner Control pumped their hands again, nodded significantly and implying that he had to go off and risk his life somewhere else, got back into his chauffeur-driven car. Then Karl had laughed, and Leamas had laughed with him, and they’d finished the champagne, still laughing about Control. Afterwards they’d gone to the ‘Alter Fass’, Karl had insisted on it and there Elvira was waiting for them, a forty-year-old blonde, tough as nails.

‘This is my best kept secret, Alec,’ Karl had said, and Leamas was furious. Afterwards they’d had a row.

‘How much does she know? Who is she? How did you meet her?’ Karl sulked and refused to say. After that things went badly. Leamas tried to alter the routine, change the meeting places and the catch words, but Karl didn’t like it. He knew what lay behind it and he didn’t like it.

‘If you don’t trust her it’s too late anyway,’ he’d said, and Leamas took the hint and shut up. But he went carefully after that, told Karl much less, used more of the hocus-pocus of espionage technique. And there she was, out there in her car, knowing everything, the whole network, the safe house, everything; and Leamas swore, not for the first time, never to trust an agent again.

He went to the telephone and dialled the number of his flat. Frau Martha answered.

‘We’ve got guests at the Dürer-Strasse,’ said Leamas, ‘a man and a woman.’

‘Married?’ asked Martha.

‘Near enough,’ said Leamas, and she laughed that frightful laugh. As he put down the receiver one of the policemen turned to him.

‘Herr Thomas! Quick!’ Leamas stepped to the observation window.

‘A man, Herr Thomas,’ the younger policeman whispered, ‘with a bicycle.’ Leamas picked up the binoculars.

It was Karl, the figure was unmistakable even at that distance, shrouded in an old Wehrmacht macintosh, pushing his bicycle. He’s made it, thought Leamas, he must have made it, he’s through the document check, only currency and Customs to go. Leamas watched Karl lean his bicycle against the railing, walk casually to the Customs hut. Don’t overdo it, he thought. At last Karl came out, waved cheerfully to the man on the barrier, and the red and white pole swung slowly upwards. He was through, he was coming towards them, he had made it. Only the Vopo in the middle of the road, the line and safety.

At that moment Karl seemed to hear some sound, sense danger, he glanced over his shoulder, began to pedal furiously, bending low over the handlebars. There was still the lonely sentry on the bridge, and he had turned and was watching Karl. Then, totally unexpected, the searchlights went on, white and brilliant, catching Karl and holding him in their beam like a rabbit in the headlights of a car. There came the see-saw wail of a siren, the sound of orders wildly shouted. In front of Leamas the two policemen dropped to their knees, peering through the sandbagged slits, deftly flicking the rapid load on their automatic rifles.

The East German sentry fired, quite carefully, away from them, into his own sector. The first shot seemed to thrust Karl forward, the second to pull him back. Somehow he was still moving, still on the bicycle, passing the sentry, and the sentry was still shooting at him. Then he sagged, rolled to the ground, and they heard quite clearly the clatter of the bike as it fell. Leamas hoped to God he was dead.

2

THE CIRCUS

He watched the Tempelhof runway sink beneath him. Leamas was not a reflective man and not a particularly philosophical one. He knew he was written off—it was a fact of life which he would henceforth live with, as a man must live with cancer or imprisonment. He knew there was no kind of preparation which could have bridged the gap between then and now. He met failure as one day he would probably meet death, with cynical resentment and the courage of a solitary. He’d lasted longer than most; now he was beaten. It is said a dog lives as long as its teeth; metaphorically, Leamas’ teeth had been drawn: and it was Mundt who had drawn them.

Ten years ago he could have taken the other path—there were desk jobs in that anonymous government building in Cambridge Circus which Leamas could have taken and kept till he was God knows how old; but Leamas wasn’t made that way. You might as well have asked a jockey to become a totalisator clerk as expect Leamas to abandon operational life for the tendentious theorising and clandestine self-interest of Whitehall. He had stayed on in Berlin, conscious that Personnel had marked his file for review at the end of every year—stubborn, wilful, contemptuous of instruction, telling himself that something would turn up. Intelligence work has one moral law—it is justified by results. Even the sophistry of Whitehall paid court to that law, and Leamas got results. Until Mundt came.

It was odd how soon Leamas had realised that Mundt was the writing on the wall.

Hans-Dieter Mundt, born forty-two years ago in Leipzig. Leamas knew his dossier, knew the photograph on the inside of the cover; the blank, hard face beneath the flaxen hair; knew by heart the story of Mundt’s rise to power as second man in the Abteilung and effective head of operations. Mundt was hated even within his own department. Leamas knew that from the evidence of defectors, and from Riemeck, who as a member of the SED Praesidium sat on security committees with Mundt, and dreaded him. Rightly as it turned out, for Mundt had killed him.

Until 1959 Mundt had been a minor functionary of the Abteilung, operating in London under the cover of the East German Steel Mission. He returned to Germany in a hurry after murdering two of his own agents to save his skin and was not heard of for more than a year. Quite suddenly he reappeared at the Abteilung’s headquarters in Leipzig as head of the Ways and Means Department, responsible for allocating currency, equipment and personnel for special tasks. At the end of that year came the big struggle for power within the Abteilung. The number and influence of Soviet liaison officers were drastically reduced, several of the old guard were dismissed on ideological grounds and three men emerged: Fiedler as head of counter intelligence, Jahn took over from Mundt as head of facilities, and Mundt himself got the plum—deputy director of operations—at the age of forty-one. Then the new style began. The first agent Leamas lost was a girl. She was only a small link in the network; she was used for courier jobs. They shot her dead in the street as she left a West Berlin cinema. The police never found the murderer and Leamas was at first inclined to write the incident off as unconnected with her work. A month later a railway porter in Dresden, a discarded agent from Peter Guillam’s network, was found dead and mutilated beside a railway track. Leamas knew it wasn’t coincidence any longer. Soon after that two members of another network under Leamas’ control were arrested and summarily sentenced to death. So it went on: remorseless and unnerving.

And now they had Karl, and Leamas was leaving Berlin as he had come—without a single agent worth a farthing. Mundt had won.

Leamas was a short man with close, iron-grey hair, and the physique of a swimmer. He was very strong. This strength was discernible in his back and shoulders, in his neck, and in the stubby formation of his hands and fingers.

He had a utilitarian approach to clothes, as he did to most other things, and even the spectacles he occasionally wore had steel rims. Most of his suits were of artificial fibre, none of them had waistcoats. He favoured shirts of the American kind with buttons on the points of the collars, and suede shoes with rubber soles.

He had an attractive face, muscular, and a stubborn line to his thin mouth. His eyes were brown and small; Irish, some said. It was hard to place Leamas. If he were to walk into a London club the porter would certainly not mistake him for a member; in a Berlin night club they usually gave him the best table. He looked like a man who could make trouble, a man who looked after his money, a man who was not quite a gentleman.

The air hostess thought he was interesting. She guessed he was North Country, which he might have been, and rich, which he was not. She put his age at fifty, which was about right. She guessed he was single, which was half true. Somewhere long ago there had been a divorce; somewhere there were children, now in their teens, who received their allowance from a rather odd private bank in the City.

‘If you want another whisky,’ said the air hostess, ‘you’d better hurry. We shall be at London airport in twenty minutes.’

‘No more.’ He didn’t look at her; he was looking out of the window at the grey-green fields of Kent.

Fawley met him at the airport and drove him to London.

‘Control’s pretty cross about Karl,’ he said, looking sideways at Leamas. Leamas nodded.

‘How did it happen?’ asked Fawley.

‘He was shot. Mundt got him.’

‘Dead?’

‘I should think so, by now. He’d better be. He nearly made it. He should never have hurried, they couldn’t have been sure. The Abteilung got to the checkpoint just after he’d been let through. They started the siren and a Vopo shot him twenty yards short of the line. He moved on the ground for a moment, then lay still.’

‘Poor bastard.’

‘Precisely,’ said Leamas.

Fawley didn’t like Leamas, and if Leamas knew he didn’t care. Fawley was a man who belonged to Clubs and wore representative ties, pontificated on the skills of sportsmen and assumed a service rank in office correspondence. He thought Leamas suspect, and Leamas thought him a fool.

‘What section are you in?’ asked Leamas.

‘Personnel.’

‘Like it?’

‘Fascinating.’

‘Where do I go now? On ice?’

‘Better let Control tell you, old boy.’

‘Do you know?’

‘Of course.’

‘Then why the hell don’t you tell me?’

‘Sorry, old man,’ Fawley replied, and Leamas suddenly very nearly lost his temper. Then he reflected that Fawley was probably lying anyway.

‘Well, tell me one thing, do you mind? Have I got to look for a bloody flat in London?’

Fawley scratched at his ear: ‘I don’t think so, old man, no.’

‘No? Thank God for that.’

They parked near Cambridge Circus, at a parking meter, and went together into the hall.

‘You haven’t got a pass, have you? You’d better fill in a slip, old man.’

‘Since when have we had passes? McCall knows me as well as his own mother.’

‘Just a new routine. Circus is growing, you know.’

Leamas aid nothing, nodded at McCall and got into the lift without a pass.

Control shook his hand rather carefully, like a doctor feeling the bones.

‘You must be awfully tired,’ he said apologetically, ‘do sit down.’ That same dreary voice, the donnish bray.

Leamas sat down in a chair facing an olive green electric fire with a bowl of water balanced on the top of it.

‘Do you find it cold?’ Control asked. He was stooping over the fire rubbing his hands together. He wore a cardigan under his black jacket, a shabby brown one. Leamas remembered Control’s wife, a stupid little woman called Mandy who seemed to think her husband was in the Coal Board. He supposed she had knitted it.

‘It’s so dry, that’s the trouble,’ Control continued. ‘Beat the cold and you parch the atmosphere. Just as dangerous.’ He went to the desk and pressed a button. ‘We’ll try and get some coffee,’ he said, ‘Ginnie’s on leave, that’s the trouble. They’ve given me some new girl. It really is too bad.’

He was shorter than Leamas remembered him: otherwise, just the same. The same affected detachment, the same donnish conceits; the same horror of draughts; courteous according to a formula miles removed from Leamas’ experience. The same milk-and-water smile, the same elaborate diffidence, the same apologetic adherence to a code of behaviour which he pretended to find ridiculous. The same banality.

He brought a packet of cigarettes from the desk and gave one to Leamas.

‘You’re going to find these more expensive,’ he said, and Leamas nodded dutifully. Slipping the cigarettes into his pocket, Control sat down. There was a pause; finally Leamas said:

‘Riemeck’s dead.’

‘Yes, indeed,’ Control declared, as if Leamas had made a good point. ‘It is very unfortunate. Most . . . I suppose the girl blew him—Elvira?’

‘I suppose so.’ Leamas wasn’t going to ask him how he knew about Elvira.

‘And Mundt had him shot,’ Control added.

‘Yes.’

Control got up and drifted round the room looking for an ash-tray. He found one and put it awkwardly on the floor between their two chairs.

‘How did you feel? When Riemeck was shot, I mean? You saw it, didn’t you?’

Leamas shrugged. ‘I was bloody annoyed,’ he said.

Control put his head on one side and half closed his eyes. ‘Surely you felt more than that? Surely you were upset? That would be more natural.’

‘I was upset. Who wouldn’t be?’

‘Did you like Riemeck—as a man?’

‘I suppose so,’ said Leamas helplessly. ‘There doesn’t seem much point in going into it,’ he added.

‘How did you spend the night, what was left of it, after Riemeck had been shot?’

‘Look, what is this?’ Leamas asked hotly; ‘what are you getting at?’

‘Riemeck was the last,’ Control reflected, ‘the last of a series of deaths. If my memory is right it began with the girl, the one they shot in Wedding, outside the cinema. Then there was the Dresden man, and the arrests at Jena. Like the ten little niggers. Now Paul, Viereck and Ländser—all dead. And finally Riemeck.’ He smiled deprecatingly; ‘that is quite a heavy rate of expenditure. I wondered if you’d had enough.’

‘What do you mean—enough?’

‘I wondered whether you were tired. Burnt out.’ There was a long silence.

‘That’s up to you,’ Leamas said at last.

‘We have to live without sympathy, don’t we? That’s impossible of course. We act it to one another, all this hardness; but we aren’t like that really, I mean . . . one can’t be out in the cold all the time; one has to come in from the cold . . . d’you see what I mean?’

Leamas saw. He saw the long road outside Rotterdam, the long straight road beside the dunes, and the stream of refugees moving along it; saw the little aeroplane miles away, the procession stop and look towards it; and the plane coming in, nearly over the dunes; saw the chaos, the meaningless hell, as the bombs hit the road.

‘I can’t talk like this, Control,’ Leamas said at last. ‘What do you want me to do?’

‘I want you to stay out in the cold a little longer.’ Leamas said nothing, so Control went on: ‘The ethic of our work, as I understand it, is based on a single assumption. That is, we are never going to be aggressors. Do you think that’s fair?’

Leamas nodded. Anything to avoid talking.

‘Thus we do disagreeable things, but we are defensive. That, I think, is still fair. We do disagreeable things so that ordinary people here and elsewhere can sleep safely in their beds at night. Is that too romantic? Of course, we occasionally do very wicked things’; he grinned like a schoolboy. ‘And in weighing up the moralities, we rather go in for dishonest comparisons; after all, you can’t compare the ideals of one side with the methods of the other, can you, now?’

Leamas was lost. He’d heard the man talked a lot of drivel before getting the knife in, but he’d never heard anything like this before.

‘I mean you’ve got to compare method with method, and ideal with ideal. I would say that since the war, our methods—ours and those of the opposition—have become much the same. I mean you can’t be less ruthless than the opposition simply because your government’s policy is benevolent, can you now?’ He laughed quietly to himself: ‘That would never do,’ he said.

For God’s sake, thought Leamas, it’s like working for a bloody clergyman. What is he up to?

‘That is why,’ Control continued, ‘I think we ought to try and get rid of Mundt . . . Oh really,’ he said, turning irritably towards the door, ‘Where is that damned coffee?’

Control crossed to the door, opened it and talked to some unseen girl in the outer room. As he returned he said:

‘I really think we ought to get rid of him if we can manage it.’

‘Why? We’ve got nothing left in East Germany, nothing at all. You just said so—Riemeck was the last. We’ve nothing left to protect.’

Control sat down and looked at his hands for a while.

‘That is not altogether true,’ he said finally; ‘but I don’t think I need to bore you with the details.’

Leamas shrugged.

‘Tell me,’ Control continued, ‘are you tired of spying? Forgive me if I repeat the question. I mean that is a phenomenon we understand here, you know. Like aircraft designers . . . metal fatigue, I think the term is. Do say if you are.’

Leamas remembered the flight home that morning and wondered.

‘If you were,’ Control added, ‘we would have to find some other way of taking care of Mundt. What I have in mind is a little out of the ordinary.’

The girl came in with the coffee. She put the tray on the desk and poured out two cups. Control waited till she had left the room.

‘Such a silly girl,’ he said, almost to himself. ‘It seems extraordinary they can’t find good ones any more. I do wish Ginnie wouldn’t go on holiday at times like this.’ He stirred his coffee disconsolately for a while.

‘We really must discredit Mundt,’ he said. ‘Tell me, do you drink a lot? Whisky and that kind of thing?’

Leamas had thought he was used to Control.

‘I drink a bit. More than most I suppose.’

Control nodded understandingly. ‘What do you know about Mundt?’

‘He’s a killer. He was here a year or two back with the East German Steel Mission. We had an Adviser here then: Maston.’

‘Quite so.’

‘Mundt was running an agent, the wife of an FO man. He killed her.’

‘He tried to kill George Smiley. And of course he shot the woman’s husband. He is a very distasteful man. Ex Hitler-Youth and all that kind of thing. Not at all the intellectual kind of Communist. A practitioner of the cold war.’

‘Like us,’ Leamas observed drily. Control didn’t smile.

‘George Smiley knew the case well. He isn’t with us any more, but I think you ought to ferret him out. He’s doing things on seventeenth-century Germany. He lives in Chelsea, just behind Sloane Square. Bywater Street, do you know it?’

‘Yes.’

‘And Guillam was on the case as well. He’s in Satellites Four, on the first floor. I’m afraid everything’s changed since your day.’

‘Yes.’

‘Spend a day or two with them. They know what I have in mind. Then I wondered if you’d care to stay with me for the weekend. My wife,’ he added hastily, ‘is looking after her mother, I’m afraid. It will be just you and I.’

‘Thanks. I’d like to.’

‘We can talk about things in comfort then. It would be very nice. I think you might make a lot of money out of it. You can have whatever you make.’

‘Thanks.’

‘That is, of course, if you’re sure you want to . . . no metal fatigue or anything?’

‘If it’s a question of killing Mundt, I’m game.’

‘Do you really feel that?’ Control enquired politely. And then, having looked at Leamas thoughtfully for a moment he observed:

‘Yes, I really think you do. But you mustn’t feel you have to say it. I mean in our world we pass so quickly out of the register of hate or love—like certain sounds a dog can’t hear. All that’s left in the end is a kind of nausea; you never want to cause suffering again. Forgive me, but isn’t that rather what you felt when Karl Riemeck was shot? Not hate for Mundt, nor love for Karl, but a sickening jolt like a blow on a numb body . . . They tell me you walked all night—just walked through the streets of Berlin. Is that right?’

‘It’s right that I went for a walk.’

‘All night?’

‘Yes.’

‘What happened to Elvira?’

‘God knows . . . I’d like to take a swing at Mundt,’ he said.

‘Good . . . good. Incidentally, if you should meet any old friends in the meantime, I don’t think there’s any point in discussing this with them. In fact,’ Control added after a moment, ‘I should be rather short with them. Let them think we’ve treated you badly. It’s as well to begin as one intends to continue, isn’t it?’

3

DECLINE

It surprised no one very much when they put Leamas on the shelf. In the main, they said, Berlin had been a failure for years, and someone had to take the rap. Besides, he was old for operational work, where your reflexes often had to be as quick as those of a professional tennis player. Leamas had done good work in the war, everyone knew that. In Norway and Holland he had somehow remained demonstrably alive, and at the end of it they gave him a medal and let him go. Later, of course, they got him to come back. It was bad luck about his pension, decidedly bad luck. Accounts Section had let it out, in the person of Elsie. Elsie said in the canteen that poor Alec Leamas would only have £400 a year to live on because of his interrupted service. Elsie felt it was a rule they really ought to change; after all, Mr Leamas had done the service, hadn’t he? But there they were with Treasury on their backs, not a bit like the old days, and what could they do? Even in the bad days of Maston they’d managed things better.

Leamas, the new men were told, was the old school; blood, guts and cricket and School Cert. French. In Leamas’ case this happened to be unfair, since he was bilingual in German and English and his Dutch was admirable; he also disliked cricket. But it was true that he had no degree.

Leamas’ contract had a few months to run, and they put him in Banking to do his time. Banking Section was different from Accounts; it dealt with overseas payments, financing agents and operations. Most of the jobs in Banking could have been done by an office boy were it not for the high degree of secrecy involved, and thus Banking was one of several Sections of the Service which were regarded as laying-out places for officers shortly to be buried.

Leamas went to seed.

The process of going to seed is generally considered to be a protracted one, but in Leamas this was not the case. In the full view of his colleagues he was transformed from a man honourably put aside to a resentful, drunken wreck—and all within a few months. There is a kind of stupidity among drunks, particularly when they are sober, a kind of disconnection which the unobservant interpret as vagueness and which Leamas seemed to acquire with unnatural speed. He developed small dishonesties, borrowed insignificant sums from secretaries and neglected to return them, arrived late or left early under some mumbled pretext. At first his colleagues treated him with indulgence; perhaps his decline scared them in the same way as we are scared by cripples, beggars and invalids because we fear we could ourselves become them; but in the end his neglect, his brutal, unreasoning malice isolated him.

Rather to people’s surprise, Leamas didn’t seem to mind being put on the shelf. His will seemed suddenly to have collapsed. The débutante secretaries, reluctant to believe that Intelligence Services are peopled by ordinary mortals, were alarmed to notice that Leamas had become definitely seedy. He took less care of his appearance and less notice of his surroundings, he lunched in the canteen which was normally the preserve of junior staff, and it was rumoured that he was drinking. He became a solitary, belonging to that tragic class of active men prematurely deprived of activity; swimmers barred from the water or actors banished from the stage.

Some said he had made a mistake in Berlin, and that was why his network had been rolled up; no one quite knew. All agreed that he had been treated with unusual harshness, even by a personnel department not famed for its philanthropy. They would point to him covertly as he went by, as men will point to an athlete of the past, and say: ‘That’s Leamas. He put up a black in Berlin. Pathetic the way he’s let himself go.’

And then one day he had vanished. He said good-bye to no one, not even, apparently, Control. In itself that was not surprising. The nature of the Service precluded elaborate farewells and the presentation of gold watches, but even by these standards Leamas’ departure seemed abrupt. So far as could be judged, his departure occurred before the statutory termination of his contract. Elsie, of Accounts Section, offered one or two crumbs of information: Leamas had drawn the balance of his pay in cash, which, if Elsie knew anything, meant he was having trouble with his bank. His gratuity was to be paid at the turn of the month, she couldn’t say how much but it wasn’t four figures, poor lamb. His National Insurance card had been sent on. Personnel had an address for him, Elsie added with a sniff, but of course they weren’t revealing it, not Personnel.

Then there was the story about the money. It leaked out—no one, as usual, knew where from—that Leamas’ sudden departure was connected with irregularities in the accounts of Banking Section. A largish sum was missing (not three figures but four, according to a lady with blue hair who worked in the telephone room) and they’d got it back, nearly all of it, and they’d stuck a lien on his pension. Others said they didn’t believe it—if Alec had wanted to rob the till, they said, he’d know better ways of doing it than fiddling with HQ accounts. Not that he wasn’t capable of it—he’d just have done it better. But those less impressed by Leamas’ criminal potential pointed at his large consumption of alcohol, at the expense of maintaining a separate household, at the fatal disparity between pay at home and allowances abroad and above all at the temptations put in the way of a man handling large sums of hot money when he knew that his days in the Service were numbered. All agreed that if Alec had dipped his hands in the honey pot he was finished for all time—the Resettlement people wouldn’t look at him and Personnel would give him no reference—or one so icy cold that the most enthusiastic employer would shiver at the sight of it. Peculation was the one sin Personnel would never let you forget—and they never forgot it themselves. If it was true that Alec had robbed the Circus, he would take the wrath of Personnel with him to the grave—and Personnel would not so much as pay for the shroud.

For a week or two after his departure, a few people wondered what had become of him. But his former friends had already learnt to keep clear of him. He had become a resentful bore, constantly attacking the Service and its administration, and what he called the ‘Cavalry boys’ who, he said, managed its affairs as if it were a regimental club. He never missed an opportunity of railing against the Americans and their intelligence agencies. He seemed to hate them more than the Abteilung, to which he seldom, if ever, referred. He would hint that it was they who had compromised his network; this seemed to be an obsession with him, and it was poor reward for attempts to console him, it made him bad company, so that those who had known and even tacitly liked him, wrote him off. Leamas’ departure caused only a ripple on the water; with other winds and the changing of the seasons it was soon forgotten.

His flat was small and squalid, done in brown paint with photographs of Clovelly. It looked directly on to the grey backs of three stone warehouses, the windows of which were drawn, for aesthetic reasons, in creosote. Above the warehouse there lived an Italian family, quarrelling at night and beating carpets in the morning. Leamas had few possessions with which to brighten his rooms. He bought some shades to cover the light bulbs, and two pairs of sheets to replace the hessian squares provided by the landlord. The rest Leamas tolerated: the flower pattern curtains, not lined or hemmed, the fraying brown carpets and the clumsy darkwood furniture, like something from a seamen’s hostel. From a yellow, crumbling geyser he obtained hot water for a shilling.

He needed a job. He had no money, none at all. So perhaps the stories of embezzlement were true. The offers of resettlement which the Service made had seemed to Leamas lukewarm and peculiarly unsuitable. He tried first to get a job in commerce. A firm of industrial adhesive manufacturers showed interest in his application for the post of assistant manager and personnel officer. Unconcerned by the inadequate reference with which the Service provided him, they demanded no qualifications, and offered him six hundred a year. He stayed for a week, by which time the foul stench of decaying fish oil had permeated his clothes and hair, lingering in his nostrils like the smell of death. No amount of washing would remove it, so that in the end Leamas had his hair cut short to the scalp and threw away two of his best suits. He spent another week trying to sell encyclopaedias to suburban housewives, but he was not a man that housewives liked or understood; they did not want Leamas, let alone his encyclopaedias. Night after night he returned wearily to his flat, his ridiculous sample under his arm. At the end of a week he telephoned the company and told them he had sold nothing. Expressing no surprise, they reminded him of his obligation to return the sample if he discontinued acting on their behalf, and rang off. Leamas stalked out of the telephone booth in a fury, leaving the sample behind him, went to a pub and got very drunk at a cost of twenty-five shillings, which he could not afford. They threw him out for shouting at a woman who tried to pick him up. They told him never to come back, but they’d forgotten all about it a week later. They were beginning to know Leamas there.

They were beginning to know him elsewhere too, the grey, shambling figure from the Mansions. Not a wasted word did he speak, not a friend, neither man, woman nor beast did he have. They guessed he was in trouble, run away from his wife like as not. He never knew the price of anything, never remembered it when he was told. He patted all his pockets whenever he looked for change, he never remembered to bring a basket, always buying carrier bags. They didn’t like him in the Street, but they were almost sorry for him. They thought he was dirty too, the way he didn’t shave weekends, and his shirts all grubby. A Mrs McCaird from Sudbury Avenue cleaned for him for a week, but having never received a civil word from him withdrew her labour. She was an important source of information in the Street, where tradesmen told one another that they needed to know in case he asked for credit. Mrs McCaird’s advice was against credit. Leamas never had a letter, she said, and they agreed that that was serious. He’d no pictures and only a few books; she thought one of the books was dirty but couldn’t be sure because it was in foreign writing. It was her opinion he had a bit to live on, and that that bit was running out. She knew he drew Benefit on Thursdays. Bayswater was warned, and needed no second warning. They heard from Mrs McCaird that he drank like a fish: this was confirmed by the publican. Publicans and charwomen are not in the way of accommodating their clients with credit; but their information is treasured by those who are.

4

LIZ

Finally he took the job in the library. The Labour Exchange had put him on to it each Thursday morning as he drew his unemployment benefit, and he’d always turned it down.

‘It’s not really your cup of tea,’ Mr Pitt said, ‘but the pay’s fair and the work’s easy for an educated man.’

‘What sort of library?’ Leamas asked.

‘It’s the Bayswater Library for Psychic Research. It’s an endowment. They’ve got thousands of volumes, all sorts, and they’ve been left a whole lot more. They want another helper.’

He took his dole and the slip of paper. ‘They’re an odd lot,’ Mr Pitt added, ‘but then you’re not a stayer anyway, are you? I think it’s time you gave them a try, don’t you?’

It was odd about Pitt. Leamas was certain he’d seen him before somewhere. At the Circus, during the war.

The library was like a church hall, and very cold. The black oil stoves at either end made it smell of paraffin. In the middle of the room was a cubicle like a witness-box and inside it sat Miss Crail, the librarian.

It had never occurred to Leamas that he might have to work for a woman. No one at the Labour Exchange had said anything about that.

‘I’m the new help,’ he said; ‘my name’s Leamas.’

Miss Crail looked up sharply from her card index, as if she had heard a rude word. ‘Help? What do you mean, help?’

‘Assistant. From the Labour Exchange. Mr Pitt.’ He pushed across the counter a roneoed form with his particulars entered in a sloping hand. She picked it up and studied it.

‘You are Mr Leamas.’ This was not a question, but the first stage of a laborious fact-finding investigation.

‘And you are from the Labour Exchange.’

‘No. I was sent by the Exchange. They told me you needed an assistant.’

‘I see.’ A wooden smile.

At that moment the telephone rang: she lifted the receiver and began arguing with somebody, fiercely. Leamas guessed they argued all the time; there were no preliminaries. Her voice just rose a key and she began arguing about some tickets for a concert. He listened for a minute or two and then drifted towards the bookshelves. He noticed a girl in one of the alcoves standing on a ladder sorting large volumes.

‘I’m the new man,’ he said, ‘my name’s Leamas.’

She came down from the ladder and shook his hand a little formally.

‘I’m Liz Gold. How d’you do. Have you met Miss Crail?’

‘Yes, but she’s on the phone at the moment.’

‘Arguing with her mother I expect. What are you going to do?’

‘I don’t know. Work.’

‘We’re marking at the moment; Miss Crail’s started a new index.’

She was a tall girl, ungainly, with a long waist and long legs. She wore flat, ballet-type shoes to reduce her height. Her face, like her body, had large components which seemed to hesitate between plainness and beauty. Leamas guessed she was twenty-two or three, and Jewish.

‘It’s just a question of checking that all the books are in the shelves. This is the reference bit, you see. When you’ve checked you pencil in the new reference and mark it off on the index.’

‘What happens then?’

‘Only Miss Crail’s allowed to ink in the reference. It’s the rule.’ ‘Whose rule?’

‘Miss Crail’s. Why don’t you start on the archaeology?’

Leamas nodded and together they walked to the next alcove where a shoe-box full of cards lay on the floor.

‘Have you done this kind of thing before?’ she asked.

‘No.’ He stooped and picked up a handful of cards and shuffled through them. ‘Mr Pitt sent me. From the Exchange.’ He put the cards back.

‘Is Miss Crail the only person who can ink the cards, too?’ Leamas enquired.

‘Yes.’

She left him there, and after a moment’s hesitation he took out a book and looked at the fly-leaf. It was called Archaeological Discoveries in Asia Minor, Volume four. They only seemed to have volume four.

It was one o’clock and Leamas was hungry, so he walked over to where Liz Gold was sorting and said:

‘What happens about lunch?’

‘Oh, I bring sandwiches.’ She looked a little embarrassed. ‘You can have some of mine if that would help. There’s no café for miles.’

Leamas shook his head.

‘I’ll go out, thanks. Got some shopping to do.’ She watched him push his way through the swing doors.

It was half past two when he came back. He smelt of whisky. He had one carrier bag full of vegetables and another containing groceries. He put them down in a corner of the alcove and wearily began again on the archaeology books. He’d been marking for about ten minutes when he became aware that Miss Crail was watching him.

‘Mister Leamas.’ He was half-way up the ladder, so he looked down over his shoulder and said:

‘Yes?’

‘Do you know where these carrier bags come from?’ ‘They’re mine.’

‘I see. They are yours.’ Leamas waited. ‘I regret,’ she continued at last, ‘that we do not allow it, bringing shopping in to the library.’

‘Where else can I put it? There’s nowhere else I can put it.’

‘Not in the library,’ she replied. Leamas ignored her, and returned his attention to the archaeology section.

‘If you only took the normal lunch break,’ Miss Crail continued, ‘you would not have time to go shopping. Neither of us does, Miss Gold or myself; we do not have time to shop.’

‘Why don’t you take an extra half-hour?’ Leamas asked, ‘you’d have time then. If you’re pushed you can work another half-hour in the evening. If you’re pressed.’

She stayed for some moments, just watching him and obviously thinking of something to say. Finally she announced:

‘I shall discuss it with Mr Ironside,’ and went away.

At exactly half past five Miss Crail put on her coat and, with a pointed: ‘Good night, Miss Gold’, left. Leamas guessed she had been brooding on the carrier bags all afternoon. He went in to the next alcove where Liz Gold was sitting on the bottom rung of her ladder reading what looked like a tract. When she saw Leamas she dropped it guiltily into her handbag and stood up.

‘Who’s Mr Ironside?’ Leamas asked.

‘I don’t think he exists,’ she replied. ‘He’s her big gun when she’s stuck for an answer. I asked her once who he was. She went all shifty and mysterious and said “Never mind”. I don’t think he exists.’

‘I’m not sure Miss Crail does,’ said Leamas and Liz Gold smiled.

At six o’clock she locked up and gave the keys to the curator, a very old man with First War shellshock who, said Liz, sat awake all night in case the Germans made a counterattack. It was bitterly cold outside.

‘Got far to go?’ asked Leamas.

‘Twenty minutes’ walk. I always walk it. Have you?’

‘Not far,’ said Leamas. ‘Good night.’

He walked slowly back to the flat. He let himself in and turned the light switch. Nothing happened. He tried the light in the tiny kitchen and finally the electric fire that plugged in by his bed. On the door mat was a letter. He picked it up and took it out into the pale, yellow light of the staircase. It was the electricity company, regretting that the area manager had no alternative but to cut off the electricity until the outstanding account of nine pounds four shillings and eightpence had been settled.

He had become an enemy of Miss Crail, and enemies were what Miss Crail liked. Either she scowled at him or she ignored him, and when he came close, she began to tremble, looking to left and right, either for something with which to defend herself, or perhaps for a line of escape. Occasionally she would take immense umbrage, such as when he hung his macintosh on her peg, and she stood in front of it shaking, for fully five minutes, until Liz spotted her and called Leamas. Leamas went over to her and said:

‘What’s troubling you, Miss Crail?’

‘Nothing,’ she replied in a breathy, clipped way, ‘nothing at all.’

‘Something wrong with my coat?’

‘Nothing at all.’

‘Fine,’ he replied, and went back to his alcove. She quivered all that day, and conducted a telephone call in a stage whisper for half the morning.

‘She’s telling her mother,’ said Liz. ‘She always tells her mother. She tells her about me too.’

Miss Crail developed such an intense hatred for Leamas that she found it impossible to communicate with him. On pay days he would come back from lunch and find an envelope on the third rung of his ladder with his name misspelt on the outside. The first time it happened he took the money over to her with the envelope and said, ‘It’s L-E-A, Miss Crail, and only one S,’ whereupon she was seized with a veritable palsy, rolling her eyes and fumbling erratically with her pencil until Leamas went away. She conspired into the telephone for hours after that.

About three weeks after Leamas began work at the library Liz asked him to supper. She pretended it was an idea that had come to her quite suddenly, at five o’clock that evening; she seemed to realise that if she were to ask him for tomorrow or the next day he would forget or just not come, so she asked him at five o’clock. Leamas seemed reluctant to accept, but in the end he did.

They walked to her flat through the rain and they might have been anywhere—Berlin, London, any town where paving stones turn to lakes of light in the evening rain, and the traffic shuffles despondently through wet streets.

It was the first of many meals which Leamas had at her flat. He came when she asked him, and she asked him often. He never spoke much. When she discovered he would come, she took to laying the table in the morning before leaving for the library. She even prepared the vegetables beforehand and had the candles on the table, for she loved candlelight. She always knew that there was something deeply wrong with Leamas, and that one day, for some reason she could not understand, he might break and she would never see him again. She tried to tell him she knew; she said to him one evening:

‘You must go when you want. I’ll never follow you, Alec,’ and his brown eyes rested on her for a moment: ‘I’ll tell you when,’ he replied.

Her flat was just a bed-sitting-room and a kitchen. In the sitting-room were two armchairs, a divan bed, and a bookcase full of paperback books, mainly classics which she had never read.

After supper she would talk to him, and he would lie on the divan, smoking. She never knew how much he heard, she didn’t care. She could kneel by the bed holding his hand against her cheek, talking.

Then one evening she said to him:

‘Alec, what do you believe in? Don’t laugh—tell me.’ She waited and at last he said:

‘I believe an eleven bus will take me to Hammersmith. I don’t believe it’s driven by Father Christmas.’

She seemed to consider this and at last she asked again:

‘But what do you believe in?’

Leamas shrugged.

‘You must believe in something,’ she persisted: ‘something like God—I know you do, Alec; you’ve got that look sometimes, as if you’d got something special to do, like a priest. Alec, don’t smile, it’s true.’

He shook his head.

‘Sorry, Liz, you’ve got it wrong. I don’t like Americans and public schools. I don’t like military parades and people who play soldiers.’ Without smiling he added, ‘And I don’t like conversations about Life.’

‘But, Alec, you might as well say—’

‘I should have added,’ Leamas interrupted, ‘that I don’t like people who tell me what I ought to think.’ She knew he was getting angry but she couldn’t stop herself any more.

‘That’s because you don’t want to think, you don’t dare! There’s some poison in your mind, some hate. You’re a fanatic, Alec. I know you are, but I don’t know what about. You’re a fanatic who doesn’t want to convert people, and that’s a dangerous thing. You’re like a man who’s . . . sworn vengeance or something.’ The brown eyes rested on her. When he spoke she was frightened by the menace in his voice.

‘If I were you,’ he said roughly, ‘I’d mind my own business.’

And then he smiled, a roguish smile. He hadn’t smiled like that before and Liz knew he was putting on the charm.

‘What does Liz believe in?’ he asked, and she replied:

‘I can’t be had that easy, Alec.’

Later that night they talked about it again. Leamas brought it up—he asked her whether she was religious.

‘You’ve got me wrong,’ she said, ‘all wrong. I don’t believe in God.’

‘Then what do you believe in?’

‘History.’

He looked at her in astonishment for a moment, then laughed.

‘Oh, Liz . . . oh no. You’re not a bloody Communist?’ She nodded, blushing like a small girl at his laughter, angry and relieved that he didn’t care.

She made him stay that night and they became lovers. He left at five in the morning. She couldn’t understand it; she was so proud and he seemed ashamed.

He left her flat and turned down the empty street towards the park. It was foggy. Some way down the road—not far, twenty yards, perhaps a bit more—stood the figure of a man in a raincoat, short and rather plump. He was leaning against the railings of the park, silhouetted in the shifting mist. As Leamas approached, the mist seemed to thicken, closing in around the figure at the railings, and when it parted the man was gone.

5

CREDIT

Then one day about a week later, he didn’t come to the library. Miss Crail was delighted; by half-past eleven she had told her mother, and on returning from lunch she stood in front of the archaeology shelves where he had been working since he came. She stared with theatrical concentration at the rows of books and Liz knew she was pretending to work out whether Leamas had stolen anything.

Liz entirely ignored her for the rest of the day, failed to reply when she addressed her and worked with assiduous application. When the evening came she walked home and cried herself to sleep.

The next morning she arrived early at the library. She somehow felt that the sooner she got there, the sooner Leamas might come; but as the morning dragged on her hopes faded, and she knew he would never come. She had forgotten to make sandwiches for herself that day so she decided to take a bus to the Bayswater Road and go to the ABC. She felt sick and empty, but not hungry. Should she go and find him? She had promised never to follow him, but he had promised to tell her; should she go and find him?

She hailed a taxi and gave his address.

She made her way up the dingy staircase and pressed the bell of his door. The bell seemed to be broken; she heard nothing. There were three bottles of milk on the mat and a letter from the electricity company. She hesitated a moment, then banged on the door, and she heard the faint groan of a man. She rushed downstairs to the flat below, hammered and rang at the door. There was no reply so she ran down another flight and found herself in the back room of a grocer’s shop. An old woman sat in a corner, rocking back and forth in her chair.

‘The top flat,’ Liz almost shouted, ‘somebody’s very ill. Who’s got a key?’

The old woman looked at her for a moment, then called towards the front room, where the shop was.

‘Arthur, come in here, Arthur, there’s a girl here!’

A man in a brown overall and grey trilby hat looked round the door and said:

‘Girl?’

‘There’s someone seriously ill in the top flat,’ said Liz, ‘he can’t get to the front door to open it. Have you got a key?’

‘No,’ replied the grocer, ‘but I’ve got a hammer,’ and they hurried up the stairs together, the grocer, still in his trilby, carrying a heavy screwdriver and a hammer. He knocked on the door sharply, and they waited breathless for an answer. There was none.

‘I heard a groan before, I promise I did,’ Liz whispered.

‘Will you pay for this door if I bust it?’

‘Yes.’

The hammer made a terrible noise. With three blows he had wrenched out a piece of the frame and the lock came with it. Liz went in first and the grocer followed. It was bitterly cold in the room and dark, but on the bed in the corner they could make out the figure of a man.

‘Oh God,’ thought Liz, ‘if he’s dead I don’t think I can touch him,’ but she went to him and he was alive. Drawing the curtains, she knelt beside the bed.

‘I’ll call you if I need you, thank you,’ she said without looking back, and the grocer nodded and went downstairs.

‘Alec, what is it, what’s making you ill? What is it, Alec?’

Leamas moved his head on the pillow. His sunken eyes were closed. The dark beard stood out against the pallor of his face.

‘Alec, you must tell me, please, Alec.’ She was holding one of his hands in hers. The tears were running down her cheeks. Desperately she wondered what to do; then, getting up, she ran to the tiny kitchen and put on a kettle. She wasn’t quite clear what she would make, but it comforted her to do something. Leaving the kettle on the gas she picked up her handbag, took Leamas’ key from the bedside table and ran downstairs, down the four flights into the street, and crossed the road to Mr Sleaman, the Chemist. She bought some calves-foot jelly, some essence of beef and a bottle of aspirin. She got to the door, then went back and bought a packet of rusks. Altogether it cost her sixteen shillings, which left four shillings in her handbag and eleven pounds in her post office book, but she couldn’t draw any of that till tomorrow. By the time she returned to his flat the kettle was just boiling.

She made the beef tea like her mother used to, in a glass with a teaspoon in to stop it cracking, and all the time she glanced towards him, as if she were afraid he was dead.

She had to prop him up to make him drink the tea. He only had one pillow and there were no cushions in the room, so taking his overcoat down from the back of the door she made a bundle of it and arranged it behind the pillow. It frightened her to touch him, he was drenched in sweat, so that his short grey hair was damp and slippery. Putting the cup beside the bed she held his head with one hand, and fed him the tea with the other. After he had taken a few spoonfuls, she crushed two aspirin and gave them to him in the spoon. She talked to him as if he were a child, sitting on the edge of the bed looking at him, sometimes letting her fingers run over his head and face, whispering his name over and over again, ‘Alec, Alec.’

Gradually his breathing became more regular, his body more relaxed as he drifted from the taut pain of fever to the calm of sleep; Liz, watching him, sensed that the worst was over. Suddenly she realised it was almost dark.

Then she felt ashamed, because she knew she should have cleaned and tidied. Jumping up, she fetched the carpet sweeper and a duster from the kitchen, and set to work with feverish energy. She found a clean teacloth and spread it neatly on the bedside table and she washed up the odd cups and saucers which lay around the kitchen. When everything was done she looked at her watch and it was half past eight. She put the kettle on and went back to the bed. Leamas was looking at her.

‘Alec, don’t be cross, please don’t,’ she said. ‘I’ll go. I promise I will, but let me make you a proper meal. You’re ill, you can’t go on like this, you’re . . . oh, Alec,’ and she broke down and wept, holding both hands over her face, the tears running between her fingers like the tears of a child. He let her cry, watching her with his brown eyes, his hands holding the sheet.

She helped him wash and shave and she found some clean bedclothes. She gave him some calves-foot jelly, and some breast of chicken from the jar she’d bought at Mr Sleaman’s. Sitting on the bed she watched him eat, and she thought she had never been so happy before.

Soon he fell asleep, and she drew the blanket over his shoulders and went to the window. Parting the threadbare curtains, she raised the sash and looked out. Two other windows in the courtyard were lit. In one she could see the flickering blue shadow of a television screen, the figures round it held motionless in its spell; in the other a woman, quite young, was arranging curlers in her hair. Liz wanted to weep at the crabbed delusion of their dreams.

She fell asleep in the armchair and did not wake until it was nearly light, feeling stiff and cold. She went to the bed: Leamas stirred as she looked at him and she touched his lips with the tip of her finger. He did not open his eyes but gently took her arm and drew her down on to the bed and suddenly she wanted him terribly, and nothing mattered, and she kissed him again and again and when she looked at him he seemed to be smiling.

She came every day for six days. He never spoke to her much and once, when she asked him if he loved her, he said he didn’t believe in fairy tales. She would lie on the bed, her head against his chest, and sometimes he would put his thick fingers in her hair, holding it quite tight, and Liz laughed and said it hurt. On the Friday evening she found him dressed but not shaved and she wondered why he hadn’t shaved. For some imperceptible reason she was alarmed. Little things were missing from the room—his clock and the cheap portable wireless that had been on the table. She wanted to ask and did not dare. She had bought some eggs and ham and she cooked them for their supper while Leamas sat on the bed and smoked one cigarette after another. When it was ready he went to the kitchen and came back with a bottle of red wine.

He hardly spoke at supper, and she watched him, her fear growing until she could bear it no more and she cried out suddenly:

‘Alec . . . oh, Alec . . . what is it? Is it good-bye?’

He got up from the table, took her hands, and kissed her in a way he’d never done before and spoke to her softly for a long time, told her things she only dimly understood, only half heard because all the time she knew it was the end and nothing mattered any more.

‘Good-bye, Liz,’ he said. ‘Good-bye,’ and then: ‘Don’t follow me. Not again.’

Liz nodded and muttered: ‘Like we said.’ She was thankful for the biting cold of the street and for the dark which hid her tears.

It was the next morning, the Saturday, that Leamas asked at the grocer’s for credit. He did it without much artistry, in a way not calculated to ensure him success. He ordered half a dozen items—they didn’t come to more than a pound—and when they had been wrapped and put into the carrier bag he said:

‘You’d better send me that account.’

The grocer smiled a difficult smile and said:

‘I’m afraid I can’t do that’; the ‘Sir’ was definitely missing.

‘Why the hell not?’ asked Leamas, and the queue behind him stirred uneasily.

‘Don’t know you,’ replied the grocer.

‘Don’t be bloody silly,’ said Leamas, ‘I’ve been coming here for four months.’ The grocer coloured.

‘We always ask for a banker’s reference before giving credit,’ he said, and Leamas lost his temper.

‘Don’t talk bloody cock,’ he shouted; ‘Half your customers have never seen the inside of a bank and never bloody well will.’ This was heresy beyond bearing, since it was true.

‘I don’t know you,’ the grocer repeated thickly, ‘and I don’t like you. Now get out of my shop.’ And he tried to recover the parcel which unfortunately Leamas was already holding. Opinions later differed as to what happened next. Some said the grocer, in trying to recover the bag, pushed Leamas; others say he did not. Whether he did or not, Leamas hit him, most people think twice, without disengaging his right hand, which still held the carrier bag. He seemed to deliver the blow not with the fist but with the side of the left hand, and then, as part of the same phenomenally rapid movement, with the left elbow; and the grocer fell straight over and lay as still as a rock. It was said in court later, and not contested by the defence, that the grocer had two injuries—a fractured cheek bone from the first blow and a dislocated jaw from the second. The coverage in the daily press was adequate, but not overelaborate.

6

CONTACT

At night he lay on his bunk listening to the sounds of the prisoners. There was a boy who sobbed and an old lag who sang ‘On Ilkley Moor bar t’at’ beating out the time on his food tin. There was a warder who shouted, ‘Shut up, George, you miserable sod’, after each verse, but no one took any notice. There was an Irishman who sang songs about the IRA, though the others said he was in for rape.

Leamas took as much exercise as he could during the day in the hope that he would sleep at night; but it was no good. At night you knew you were in prison: at night there was nothing, no trick of vision or self-delusion which saved you from the nauseating enclosure of the cell. You could not keep out the taste of prison, the smell of prison uniform, the stench of prison sanitation heavily disinfected, the noises of captive men. It was then, at night, that the indignity of captivity became urgently insufferable, it was then that Leamas longed to walk in the friendly sunshine of a London park. It was then that he hated the grotesque steel cage that held him, had to force back the urge to fall upon the bars with his bare fists, to split the skulls of his gaolers and burst into the free, free space of London. Sometimes he thought of Liz. He would direct his mind towards her briefly like the shutter of a camera, recall for a moment the soft-hard touch of her long body, then put her from his memory. Leamas was not a man accustomed to living on dreams.

He was contemptuous of his cell mates, and they hated him. They hated him because he succeeded in being what each in his heart longed to be: a mystery. He preserved from collectivisation some discernible part of his personality; he could not be drawn at moments of sentiment to talk of his girl, his family or his children. They knew nothing of Leamas; they waited, but he did not come to them. New prisoners are largely of two kinds—there are those who for shame, fear or shock wait in fascinated horror to be initiated into the lore of prison life, and there are those who trade on their wretched novelty in order to endear themselves to the community. Leamas did neither of these things. He seemed pleased to despise them all, and they hated him because, like the world outside, he did not need them. After about ten days they had had enough. The great had had no homage, the small had had no comfort, so they crowded him in the dinner queue. Crowding is a prison ritual akin to the eighteenth-century practice of jostling. It has the virtue of an apparent accident, in which the prisoner’s mess tin is upturned, and its contents spilt on his uniform. Leamas was barged from one side, while from the other an obliging hand descended on his forearm, and the thing was done. Leamas said nothing, looked thoughtfully at the two men on either side of him, and accepted in silence the filthy rebuke of a warder who knew quite well what had happened.

Four days later, while working with a hoe on the prison flower-bed, he seemed to stumble. He was holding the hoe with both hands across his body, the end of the handle protruding about six inches from his right fist. As he strove to recover his balance the prisoner to his right doubled up with a grunt of agony, his arms across his stomach. There was no more crowding after that.

Perhaps the strangest thing of all about prison was the brown paper parcel when he left. In a ridiculous way it reminded him of the marriage service—with this ring I thee wed, with this paper parcel I return thee to society. They handed it to him and made him sign for it, and it contained all he had in the world. There was nothing else. Leamas felt it the most dehumanising moment of the three months, and he determined to throw the parcel away as soon as he got outside.

He seemed a quiet prisoner. There had been no complaints against him. The Governor, who was vaguely interested in his case, secretly put the whole thing down to the Irish blood he swore he could detect in Leamas.

‘What are you going to do,’ he asked, ‘when you leave here?’ Leamas replied, without a ghost of a smile, that he thought he would make a new start, and the Governor said that was an excellent thing to do.

‘What about your family?’ he asked. ‘Couldn’t you make it up with your wife?’

‘I’ll try,’ Leamas had replied indifferently; ‘but she’s remarried.’

The probation officer wanted Leamas to become a male nurse at a mental home in Buckinghamshire and Leamas agreed to apply. He even took down the address and noted the train times from Marylebone.

‘The rail’s electrified as far as Great Missenden, now,’ the probation officer added, and Leamas said that would be a help. So they gave him the parcel and he left. He took a bus to Marble Arch and walked. He had a bit of money in his pocket and he intended to give himself a decent meal. He thought he would walk through Hyde Park to Piccadilly, then through Green Park and St James’s Park to Parliament Square, then wander down Whitehall to the Strand where he could go to the big café near Charing Cross station and get a reasonable steak for six shillings.

London was beautiful that day. Spring was late and the parks were filled with crocuses and daffodils. A cool, cleaning wind was blowing from the south; he could have walked all day. But he still had the parcel and he had to get rid of it. The litter baskets were too small; he’d look absurd trying to push his parcel into one of those. He supposed there were one or two things he ought to take out—his wretched pieces of paper—insurance card, driving licence and his E.93 (whatever that was) in a buff OHMS envelope, but suddenly he couldn’t be bothered. He sat down on a bench and put the parcel beside him, not too close, and moved a little away from it. After a couple of minutes he walked back towards the footpath, leaving the parcel where it lay. He had just reached the footpath when he heard a shout; he turned, a little sharply perhaps, and saw a man in an army macintosh beckoning to him, holding the brown paper parcel in the other hand.

Leamas had his hands in his pockets and he left them there, and stood, looking back over his shoulder at the man in the macintosh. The man hesitated, evidently expecting Leamas to come to him or give some sign of interest, but Leamas gave none. Instead, he shrugged and continued along the footpath. He heard another shout and ignored it, and he knew the man was coming after him. He heard the footsteps on the gravel, half running, approaching rapidly, and then a voice, a little breathless, a little aggrieved:

‘Here, you—I say!’ and then he had drawn level, so that Leamas stopped, turned and looked at him.

‘Yes?’

‘This is your parcel, isn’t it? You left it on the seat. Why didn’t you stop when I called you?’

Tall, with rather curly brown hair; orange tie and pale green shirt; a little bit petulant, a little bit of a pansy, thought Leamas. Could be a schoolmaster, ex LSE and runs a suburban drama club. Weak-eyed.

‘You can put it back,’ said Leamas. ‘I don’t want it.’

The man coloured:

‘You can’t just leave it there,’ he said, ‘it’s litter.’

‘I bloody well can,’ Leamas replied. ‘Somebody will find a use for it.’ He was going to move on, but the stranger was still standing in front of him, holding the parcel in both arms as if it were a baby. ‘Get out of the light,’ said Leamas. ‘Do you mind?’

‘Look here,’ said the stranger, and his voice had risen a key, ‘I was trying to do you a favour; why do you have to be so damned rude?’

‘If you’re so anxious to do me a favour,’ Leamas replied, ‘why have you been following me for the last half hour?’

He’s pretty good, thought Leamas. He hasn’t flinched, but he must be shaken rigid.

‘I thought you were somebody I once knew in Berlin, if you must know.’

‘So you followed me for half an hour?’

Leamas’ voice was heavy with sarcasm, his brown eyes never left the other’s face.

‘Nothing like half an hour. I caught sight of you in Marble Arch and I thought you were Alec Leamas, a man I borrowed some money from. I used to be in the BBC in Berlin and there was this man I borrowed some money from. I’ve had a conscience about it ever since and that’s why I followed you. I wanted to be sure.’

Leamas went on looking at him, not speaking, and thought he wasn’t all that good but he was good enough. His story was scarcely plausible—that didn’t matter. The point was that he’d produced a new one and stuck to it after Leamas had wrecked what promised to be a classic approach.

‘I’m Leamas,’ he said at last, ‘who the hell are you?’

He said his name was Ashe, with an ‘E’ he added quickly, and Leamas knew he was lying. He pretended not to be quite sure that Leamas really was Leamas, so over lunch they opened the parcel and looked at the National Insurance card like, thought Leamas, a couple of cissies looking at a dirty post card. Ashe ordered lunch with just a fraction too little regard for expense, and they drank some Frankenwein to remind them of the old days. Leamas began by insisting he couldn’t remember Ashe, and Ashe said he was surprised. He said it in the sort of tone that suggested he was hurt. They met at a party, he said, which Derek Williams gave in his flat off the Kudamm (he got that right) and all the press boys had been there; surely Alec remembered that? No, Leamas did not. Well, surely he remembered Derek Williams from the Observer, that nice man who gave such lovely pizza parties? Leamas had a lousy memory for names, after all they were talking about fifty-four; a lot of water had flowed under the bridge since then . . . Ashe remembered (his christian name was William, by the by, most people called him Bill). Ashe remembered vividly. They’d been drinking stingers, brandy and crème de menthe, and were all rather tiddly, and Derek had provided some really gorgeous girls, half the cabaret from the Malkasten, surely Alec remembered now? Leamas thought it was probably coming back to him, if Bill would go on a bit.

Bill did go on, ad lib. no doubt, but he did it well, playing up the sex side a little, how they’d finished up in a night club with three of these girls; Alec, a chap from the political adviser’s office and Bill, and Bill had been so embarrassed because he hadn’t any money on him and Alec had paid, and Bill had wanted to take a girl home and Alec had lent him another tenner . . .

‘Christ,’ said Leamas, ‘I remember now, of course I do.’

‘I knew you would,’ said Ashe happily, nodding at Leamas over his glass, ‘look, do let’s have the other half, this is such fun.’

Ashe was typical of that stratum of mankind which conducts its human relationships according to a principle of challenge and response. Where there was softness, he would advance; where he found resistance, retreat. Having himself no particular opinions or tastes he relied upon whatever conformed with those of his companion. He was as ready to drink tea at Fortnum’s as beer at the Prospect of Whitby; he would listen to military music in St James’s Park or jazz in a Compton Street cellar; his voice would tremble with sympathy when he spoke of Sharpeville, or with indignation at the growth of Britain’s coloured population. To Leamas this observably passive role was repellent; it brought out the bully in him, so that he would lead the other gently into a position where he was committed, and then himself withdraw, so that Ashe was constantly scampering back from some cul-de-sac into which Leamas had enticed him. There were moments that afternoon when Leamas was so brazenly perverse that Ashe would have been justified in terminating their conversation—not least since he was paying for it; but he did not. The little sad man with spectacles who sat alone at the neighbouring table, deep in a book on the manufacture of ball bearings, might have deduced, had he been listening, that Leamas was indulging a sadistic nature—or perhaps (if he had been a man of particular subtlety) that Leamas was proving to his own satisfaction that only a man with a strong ulterior motive would put up with that kind of treatment.

It was nearly four o’clock before they ordered the bill and Leamas tried to insist on paying his half. Ashe wouldn’t hear of it, paid the bill and took out his cheque book in order to settle his debt to Leamas.

‘Twenty of the best,’ he said, and filled in the date on the cheque form.

Then he looked up at Leamas, all wide-eyed and accommodating.

‘I say, a cheque is all right by you, isn’t it?’

Colouring a little, Leamas replied:

‘I haven’t got a bank at the moment—only just back from abroad, something I’ve got to fix up. Better give me a cheque and I’ll cash it at your bank.’

‘My dear chap, I wouldn’t dream of it! You’d have to go to Rotherhithe to cash this one!’ Leamas shrugged and Ashe laughed, and they agreed to meet at the same place on the following day, at one o’clock, when Ashe would have the money in cash.

Ashe took a cab at the corner of Compton Street, and Leamas waved at it until it was out of sight. When it was gone, he looked at his watch. It was four o’clock. He guessed he was still being followed, so he walked down to Fleet Street and had a cup of coffee in the Black and White. He looked at bookshops, read the evening papers displayed in the show windows of newspaper offices, and then quite suddenly, as if the thought had occurred to him at the last minute, he jumped on a bus. The bus went to Ludgate Hill, where it was held up in a traffic jam near a tube station; he dismounted and caught a tube. He bought a sixpenny ticket, stood in the end carriage and alighted at the next station. He caught another train to Euston, trekked back to Charing Cross. It was nine o’clock when he reached the station and it had turned rather cold. There was a van waiting in the forecourt; the driver was fast asleep. Leamas glanced at the number, went over and called through the window:

‘Are you from Clements?’ The driver woke up with a start and asked:

‘Mr Thomas?’

‘No,’ replied Leamas. ‘Thomas couldn’t come. I’m Amies from Hounslow.’

‘Hop in, Mr Amies,’ the driver replied, and opened the door. They drove west, towards the King’s Road. The driver knew the way.

Control opened the door.

‘George Smiley’s out,’ he said. ‘I’ve borrowed his house. Come in.’ Not until Leamas was inside and the front door closed, did Control put on the hall light.

‘I was followed till lunch time,’ Leamas said. They went into the little drawing-room. There were books everywhere. It was a pretty room; tall, with eighteenth-century mouldings, long windows and a good fireplace.

‘They picked me up this morning. A man called Ashe.’ He lit a cigarette. ‘A pansy. We’re meeting again tomorrow.’

Control listened carefully to Leamas’ story, stage by stage, from the day he hit Ford, the grocer, to his encounter that morning with Ashe.

‘How did you find prison?’ Control enquired. He might have been asking whether Leamas had enjoyed his holiday. ‘I am sorry we couldn’t improve conditions for you, provide little extra comforts, but that would never have done.’

‘Of course not.’

‘One must be consistent. At every turn one must be consistent. Besides, it would be wrong to break the spell. I understand you were ill. I am sorry. What was the trouble?’

‘Just fever.’

‘How long were you in bed?’

‘About ten days.’

‘How very distressing; and nobody to look after you, of course.’

There was a very long silence.

‘You know she’s in the Party, don’t you?’ Control asked quietly.

‘Yes,’ Leamas replied. Another silence. ‘I don’t want her brought into this.’

‘Why should she be?’ Control asked sharply and for a moment, just for a moment, Leamas thought he had penetrated the veneer of academic detachment. ‘Who suggested she should be?’

‘No one,’ Leamas replied, ‘I’m just making the point. I know how these things go—all offensive operations. They have by-products, take sudden turns in unexpected directions. You think you’ve caught one fish and you find you’ve caught another. I want her kept clear of it.’

‘Oh, quite, quite.’

‘Who’s that man in the Labour Exchange—Pitt? Wasn’t he in the Circus during the war?’

‘I know no one of that name. Pitt, did you say?’

‘Yes.’

‘No, not a name to me. In the Labour Exchange?’

‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ Leamas muttered audibly.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Control, getting up, ‘I’m neglecting my duties as deputy host. Would you care for a drink?’

‘No. I want to get away tonight, Control. Go down to the country and get some exercise. Is the House open?’

‘I’ve arranged a car,’ he said. ‘What time do you see Ashe tomorrow—one o’clock?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’ll ring Haldane and tell him you want some squash. You’d better see a doctor, too. About that fever.’

‘I don’t need a doctor.’

‘Just as you like.’

Control gave himself a whisky and began looking idly at the books in Smiley’s shelf.

‘Why isn’t Smiley here?’ Leamas asked.

‘He doesn’t like the operation,’ Control replied indifferently. ‘He finds it distasteful. He sees the necessity but he wants no part in it. His fever,’ Control added with a whimsical smile, ‘is recurrent.’

‘He didn’t exactly receive me with open arms.’

‘Quite. He wants no part in it. But he told you about Mundt; gave you the background?’

‘Yes.’

‘Mundt is a very hard man,’ Control reflected. ‘We should never forget that. And a good intelligence officer.’

‘Does Smiley know the reason for the operation? The special interest?’

Control nodded and took a sip of whisky.

‘And he still doesn’t like it?’

‘It isn’t a question of moralities. He is like the surgeon who has grown tired of blood. He is content that others should operate.’

‘Tell me,’ Leamas continued, ‘how are you so certain this will get us where we want? How do you know the East Germans are on to it—not the Czechs or the Russians?’

‘Rest assured,’ Control said a little pompously, ‘that that has been taken care of.’

As they got to the door, Control put his hand lightly on Leamas’ shoulder.

‘This is your last job,’ he said. ‘Then you can come in from the cold. About that girl—do you want anything done about her, money or anything?’

‘When it’s over. I’ll take care of it myself then.’

‘Quite. It would be very insecure to do anything now.’

‘I just want her left alone,’ Leamas repeated with emphasis. ‘I just don’t want her to be messed about. I don’t want her to have a file or anything. I want her forgotten.’

He nodded to Control and slipped out into the night air. Into the cold.

7

KIEVER

On the following day Leamas arrived twenty minutes late for his lunch with Ashe, and smelt of whisky. Ashe’s pleasure on catching sight of Leamas was, however, undiminished. He claimed that he had himself only that moment arrived, he’d been a little late getting to the bank. He handed Leamas an envelope.

‘Singles,’ said Ashe. ‘I hope that’s all right.’

‘Thanks,’ Leamas replied, ‘let’s have a drink.’ He hadn’t shaved and his collar was filthy. He called the waiter and ordered drinks, a large whisky for himself and a pink gin for Ashe. When the drinks came Leamas’ hand trembled as he poured the soda into the glass, almost slopping it over the side.

They lunched well, with a lot of drink, and Ashe made most of the running. As Leamas had expected he first talked about himself, an old trick but not a bad one.

‘To be quite frank, I’ve got on to rather a good thing recently,’ said Ashe; ‘free-lancing English features for the foreign press. After Berlin I made rather a mess of things at first—the Corporation wouldn’t renew the contract and I took a job running a dreary toffee-shop weekly about hobbies for the over-sixties. Can you imagine anything more frightful? That went under in the first printing strike—I can’t tell you how relieved I was. Then I went to live with my mamma in Cheltenham for a time; she runs an antique shop, does very nicely thank you, as a matter of fact. Then I got a letter from an old friend, Sam Kiever his name is actually, who was starting up a new agency for small features on English life specially slanted for foreign papers. You know the sort of thing—six hundred words on Morris dancing. Sam had a new gimmick, though; he sold the stuff already translated and do you know, it makes a hell of a difference. One always imagines anyone can pay a translator or do it themselves, but if you’re looking for a half column in-fill for your foreign features you don’t want to waste time and money on translation. Sam’s gambit was to get in touch with the editors direct—he traipsed round Europe like a gypsy, poor thing, but it’s paid hands down.’

Ashe paused, waiting for Leamas to accept the invitation to speak about himself, but Leamas ignored it. He just nodded dully and said: ‘Bloody good’. Ashe had wanted to order wine, but Leamas said he’d stick to whisky and by the time the coffee came he’d had four large ones. He seemed to be in bad shape; he had the drunkard’s habit of ducking his mouth towards the rim of his glass just before he drank, as if his hand might fail him and the drink escape.

Ashe fell silent for a moment.

‘You don’t know Sam, do you?’ he asked.

‘Sam?’

A note of irritation entered Ashe’s voice.

‘Sam Kiever, my boss. The chap I was telling you about.’

‘Was he in Berlin too?’

‘No. He knows Germany well, but he’s never lived in Berlin. He did a bit of devilling in Bonn, free-lance stuff. You might have met him. He’s a dear.’

‘Don’t think so.’ A pause.

‘What do you do these days, old chap?’ asked Ashe.

Leamas shrugged.

‘I’m on the shelf,’ he replied, and grinned a little stupidly. ‘Out of the bag and on the shelf.’

‘I forget what you were doing in Berlin? Weren’t you one of the mysterious cold warriors?’ My God, thought Leamas, you’re stepping things up a bit.

Leamas hesitated, then coloured and said savagely, ‘Office boy for the bloody Yanks, like the rest of us.’

‘You know,’ said Ashe, as if he had been turning the idea over for some time, ‘you ought to meet Sam. You’d like him,’ and then, all of a bother, ‘I say, Alec—I don’t even know where to get hold of you!’

‘You can’t,’ Leamas replied listlessly.

‘I don’t get you, old chap. Where are you staying?’

‘Around the place. Roughing it a bit. I haven’t got a job. Bastards wouldn’t give me a proper pension.’

Ashe looked horrified.

‘But, Alec, that’s awful; why didn’t you tell me? Look, why not come and stay at my place? It’s only tiny but there’s room for one more if you don’t mind a camp bed. You can’t just live in the trees, my dear chap!’

‘I’m all right for a bit,’ Leamas replied, tapping at the pocket which contained the envelope. ‘I’m going to get a job,’ he nodded with determination; ‘get one in a week or so. Then I’ll be all right.’

‘What sort of job?’

‘Oh, I don’t know. Anything.’

‘But you can’t just throw yourself away, Alec! You speak German like a native, I remember you do. There must be all sorts of things you can do!’

‘I’ve done all sorts of things. Selling encyclopaedias for some bloody American firm, sorting books in a psychic library, punching work tickets in a stinking glue factory. What the hell can I do?’ He wasn’t looking at Ashe but at the table before him, his agitated lips moving quickly. Ashe responded to his animation, leaning forward across the table, speaking with emphasis, almost triumph.

‘But Alec, you need contacts, don’t you see? I know what it’s like, I’ve been on the breadline myself. That’s when you need to know people. I don’t know what you were doing in Berlin, I don’t want to know, but it wasn’t the sort of job where you could meet people who matter, was it? If I hadn’t met Sam at Poznan five years ago I’d still be on the breadline. Look, Alec, come and stay with me for a week or so. We’ll ask Sam round and perhaps one or two of the old press boys from Berlin if any of them are in town.’

‘But I can’t write,’ said Leamas. ‘I couldn’t write a bloody thing.’ Ashe had his hand on Leamas’ arm: ‘Now, don’t fuss,’ he said soothingly; ‘let’s just take things one at a time. Where are your bits and pieces?’

‘My what?’

‘Your things: clothes, baggage and what not?’

‘I haven’t got any. I’ve sold what I had—except the parcel.’

‘What parcel?’

‘The brown paper parcel you picked up in the park. The one I was trying to throw away.’

Ashe had a flat in Dolphin Square. It was just what Leamas had expected—small and anonymous with a few hastily assembled curios from Germany: beer mugs, a peasant’s pipe and a few pieces of second-rate Nymphenburg.

‘I spend the weekends with my mother in Cheltenham,’ he said. ‘I just use this place mid-week. It’s pretty handy,’ he added deprecatingly. They fixed the camp bed up in the tiny drawing-room. It was about four-thirty.

‘How long have you been here?’ asked Leamas.

‘Oh—about a year or more.’

‘Find it easily?’

‘They come and go, you know, these flats. You put your name down and one day they ring you up and tell you you’ve made it.’

Ashe made tea and they drank it, Leamas sullen, like a man not used to comfort. Even Ashe seemed a little piano. After tea Ashe said: ‘I’ll go out and do a spot of shopping before the shops close, then we’ll decide what to do about everything. I might give Sam a tinkle later this evening—I think the sooner you two get together the better. Why don’t you get some sleep—you look all in.’

Leamas nodded. ‘It’s bloody good of you—’ he made an awkward gesture with his hand, ‘—all this.’ Ashe gave him a pat on the shoulder, picked up his army macintosh and left.

As soon as Leamas reckoned Ashe was safely out of the building, he put the front door of the flat carefully on the latch and made his way downstairs to the centre hall where there were two telephone cabins. He dialled a Maida Vale number and asked for Mr Thomas’ secretary. Immediately a girl’s voice said, ‘Mr Thomas’ secretary speaking.’

‘I’m ringing on behalf of Mr Sam Kiever,’ Leamas said, ‘he has accepted the invitation and hopes to contact Mr Thomas personally this evening.’

‘I’ll pass that on to Mr Thomas. Does he know where to get in touch with you?’

‘Dolphin Square,’ Leamas replied, and gave the address. ‘Good-bye.’

After making some enquiries at the reception desk he returned to Ashe’s flat, and sat on the camp bed looking at his clasped hands. After a while he lay down. He decided to accept Ashe’s advice and get some rest. As he closed his eyes he remembered Liz lying beside him in the flat in Bayswater, and he wondered vaguely what had become of her.

He was woken up by Ashe, accompanied by a small, rather plump man with long, greying hair swept back and a doublebreasted suit. He spoke with a slight central European accent; German perhaps, it was hard to tell. He said his name was Kiever—Sam Kiever.

They had a gin and tonic, Ashe doing most of the talking. It was just like old times, he said, in Berlin: the boys together and the night their oyster. Kiever said he didn’t want to be too late; he had to work tomorrow. They agreed to eat at a Chinese restaurant that Ashe knew of—it was opposite Limehouse police station and you brought your own wine. Oddly enough Ashe had some Burgundy in the kitchen, and they took that with them in the taxi.

Dinner was very good and they drank both bottles of wine. Kiever opened up a little on the second: he’d just come back from a tour of West Germany and France. France was in a hell of a mess, de Gaulle was on the way out and God alone knew what would happen then. With a hundred thousand demoralised colons returning from Algeria he reckoned Fascism was on the cards.

‘What about Germany?’ asked Alec, prompting him.

‘It’s just a question of whether the Yanks can hold them.’ Kiever looked invitingly at Leamas.

‘What do you mean?’ asked Leamas.

‘What I say. Dulles gave them a foreign policy with one hand, Kennedy takes it away with the other. They’re getting waspish.’

Leamas nodded abruptly and said, ‘Bloody typical Yank.’

‘Alec doesn’t seem to like our American cousins,’ said Ashe, stepping in heavily, and Kiever, with complete disinterest, murmured, ‘Oh, really?’ Kiever played it, Leamas reflected, very long. Like someone used to horses, he let you come to him. He conveyed to perfection a man who suspected that he was about to be asked a favour, and was not easily won.

After dinner Ashe said, ‘I know a place in Wardour Street—you’ve been there, Sam. They do you all right there. Why don’t we summon a barouche and go along?’

‘Just a minute,’ said Leamas, and there was something in his voice which made Ashe look at him quickly; ‘just tell me something will you? Who’s paying for this jolly?’

‘I am,’ said Ashe quickly, ‘Sam and I.’

‘Have you discussed it?’

‘Well—no.’

‘Because I haven’t got any bloody money; you know that, don’t you? None to throw about anyway.’

‘Of course, Alec. I’ve looked after you up till now, haven’t I?’

‘Yes,’ Leamas replied; ‘yes, you have.’

He seemed to be going to say something else, and then to change his mind. Ashe looked worried, not offended, and Kiever as inscrutable as before.

Leamas refused to speak in the taxi. Ashe attempted some conciliatory remark and he just shrugged irritably. They arrived at Wardour Street and dismounted, neither Leamas nor Kiever making any attempt to pay for the cab. Ashe led them past a shop window full of ‘girlie’ magazines, down a narrow alley, at the far end of which shone a tawdry neon sign: ‘Pussywillow Club. Members Only.’ On either side of the door were photographs of girls, and pinned across each was a thin, hand-printed strip of paper which read, ‘Nature Study. Members only.’

Ashe pressed the bell. The door was at once opened by a very large man in a white shirt and black trousers.

‘I’m a member,’ Ashe said. ‘These two gentlemen are with me.’

‘See your card?’

Ashe took a buff card from his wallet and handed it over.

‘Your guests pay a quid a head temporary membership. Your recommendation, right?’ He held out the card and as he did so, Leamas stretched past Ashe and took it. He looked at it for a moment, then handed it back to Ashe.

Taking two pounds from his hip pocket Leamas put them into the waiting hand of the man at the door.

‘Two quid,’ said Leamas, ‘for the guests,’ and ignoring the astonished protests of Ashe he guided them through the curtained doorway into the dim hallway of the club. He turned to the doorman.

‘Find us a table,’ said Leamas, ‘and a bottle of Scotch. And see we’re left alone.’ The doorman hesitated for a moment, decided not to argue, and escorted them downstairs. As they descended they heard the subdued moan of unintelligible music.

They got a table on their own at the back of the room. A two-piece band was playing and girls sat around in twos and threes. Two got up as they came in but the big doorman shook his head.

Ashe glanced at Leamas uneasily while they waited for the whisky. Kiever seemed slightly bored. The waiter brought a bottle and three tumblers and they watched in silence as he poured a little whisky into each glass. Leamas took the bottle from the waiter and added as much again to each. This done, he leant across the table and said to Ashe, ‘Now perhaps you’ll tell me what the bloody hell’s going on?’

‘What do you mean?’ Ashe sounded uncertain. ‘What do you mean, Alec?’

‘You followed me from prison the day I was released,’ he began quietly, ‘with some bloody silly story of meeting me in Berlin. You gave me money you didn’t owe me. You’ve bought me expensive meals and you’re putting me up in your flat.’

Ashe coloured and said, ‘If that’s the . . .’

‘Don’t interrupt,’ said Leamas fiercely. ‘Just damn’ well wait till I’ve finished, do you mind? Your membership card for this place is made out for someone called Murphy. Is that your name?’

‘No, it is not.’

‘I suppose a friend called Murphy lent you his membership card?’

‘No he didn’t as a matter of fact. If you must know I come here occasionally to find a girl; I used a phoney name to join the club.’

‘Then why,’ Leamas persisted ruthlessly, ‘is Murphy registered as the tenant of your flat?’

It was Kiever who finally spoke.

‘You run along home,’ he said to Ashe. ‘I’ll look after this.’

A girl performed a striptease, a young, drab girl with a dark bruise on her thigh. She had that pitiful, spindly nakedness which is embarrassing because it is not erotic; because it is artless and undesiring. She turned slowly, jerking sporadically with her arms or legs as if she only heard the music in snatches, and all the time she looked at them with the precocious interest of a child in adult company. The tempo of the music increased abruptly, and the girl responded like a dog to the whistle, scampering back and forth.

Removing her brassière on the last note, she held it above her head, displaying her meagre body with its three tawdry patches of tinsel hanging from it like old Christmas decorations.

They watched in silence, Leamas and Kiever.

‘I suppose you’re going to tell me that we’ve seen better in Berlin,’ Leamas suggested at last, and Kiever saw that he was still very angry.

‘I expect you have,’ Kiever replied pleasantly. ‘I have often been to Berlin, but I am afraid I dislike night clubs.’

Leamas said nothing.

‘I’m no prude, mind, just rational. If I want a woman I know cheaper ways of finding one; if I want to dance I know better places to do it.’ Leamas might not have been listening.

‘Perhaps you’ll tell me why that cissy picked me up,’ he suggested. Kiever nodded.

‘By all means. I told him to.’

‘Why?’

‘I am interested in you. I want to make you a proposition, a journalistic proposition.’

There was a pause.

‘Journalistic,’ Leamas repeated, ‘I see.’

‘I run an agency, an international feature service. It pays well—very well—for interesting material.’

‘Who publishes the material?’

‘It pays so well, in fact, that a man with your kind of experience of . . . the international scene, a man with your background, you understand, who provided convincing, factual material, could free himself in a comparatively short time from further financial worry.’

‘Who publishes the material, Kiever?’ There was a threatening edge to Leamas’ voice, and for a moment, just for a moment, a look of apprehension seemed to pass across Kiever’s smooth face.

‘International clients. I have a correspondent in Paris who disposes of a good deal of my stuff. Often I don’t even know who does publish. I confess,’ he added with a disarming smile, ‘that I don’t awfully care. They pay and they ask for more. They’re the kind of people, you see, Leamas, who don’t fuss about awkward details; they pay promptly, and they’re happy to pay into foreign banks, for instance, where no one bothers about things like tax.’

Leamas said nothing. He was holding his glass with both hands, staring into it.

Christ, they’re rushing their fences, Leamas thought; it’s indecent. He remembered some silly music-hall joke—‘This is an offer no respectable girl could accept—and besides, I don’t know what it’s worth.’ Tactically, he reflected, they’re right to rush it. I’m on my uppers, prison experience still fresh, social resentment strong. I’m an old horse, I don’t need breaking in; I don’t have to pretend they’ve offended my honour as an English gentleman. On the other hand they would expect practical objections. They would expect him to be afraid; for his Service pursued traitors as the eye of God followed Cain across the desert.

And finally, they would know it was a gamble. They would know that inconsistency in human decision can make nonsense of the best-planned espionage approach; that cheats, liars and criminals may resist every blandishment while respectable gentlemen have been moved to appalling treasons by watery cabbage in a Departmental canteen.

‘They’d have to pay a hell of a lot,’ Leamas muttered at last. Kiever gave him some more whisky.

‘They are offering a down-payment of fifteen thousand pounds. The money is already lodged at the Banque Cantonale in Bern. On production of a suitable identification, with which my clients will provide you, you can draw the money. My clients reserve the right to put questions to you over the period of one year on payment of another five thousand pounds. They will assist you with any . . . resettlement problems that may arise.’

‘How soon do you want an answer?’

‘Now. You are not expected to commit all your reminiscences to paper. You will meet my client and he will arrange to have the material . . . ghost written.’

‘Where am I supposed to meet him?’

‘We felt for everybody’s sake it would be simplest to meet outside the United Kingdom. My client suggested Holland.’

‘I haven’t got my passport,’ Leamas said dully.

‘I took the liberty of obtaining one for you,’ Kiever replied suavely; nothing in his voice or his manner indicated that he had done other than negotiate an adequate business arrangement. ‘We’re flying to the Hague tomorrow morning at nine forty-five. Shall we go back to my flat and discuss any other details?’

Kiever paid and they took a taxi to a rather good address not far from St James’s Park.

Kiever’s flat was luxurious and expensive, but its contents somehow gave the impression of having been hastily assembled. It is said that there are shops in London which will sell you bound books by the yard, and interior decorators who will harmonise the colour scheme of the walls with that of a painting. Leamas, who was not particularly receptive to such subtleties, found it hard to remember that he was in a private flat and not an hotel. As Kiever showed him to his room (which looked on to a dingy inner courtyard and not on to the street) Leamas asked him:

‘How long have you been here?’

‘Oh, not long,’ Kiever replied lightly, ‘a few months, not more.’

‘Must cost a packet. Still, I suppose you’re worth it.’

‘Thanks.’

There was a bottle of Scotch in his room and a syphon of soda on a silver-plated tray. A curtained doorway at the further end of the room led to a bathroom and lavatory.

‘Quite a little love nest. All paid for by the great Worker State?’

‘Shut up,’ said Kiever savagely, and added, ‘If you want me, there’s an internal telephone to my room. I shall be awake.’

‘I think I can manage my buttons now,’ Leamas retorted.

‘Then good night,’ said Kiever shortly, and left the room. He’s on edge, too, thought Leamas.

Leamas was woken by the telephone at his bedside. It was Kiever.

‘It’s six o’clock,’ he said, ‘breakfast at half past.’

‘All right,’ Leamas replied, and rang off. He had a headache.

Kiever must have telephoned for a taxi because at seven o’clock the door bell rang and Kiever asked, ‘Got everything?’

‘I’ve no luggage,’ Leamas replied, ‘except a toothbrush and a razor.’

‘That is taken care of. Are you ready otherwise?’

Leamas shrugged. ‘I suppose so. Have you got any cigarettes?’

‘No,’ Kiever replied, ‘but you can get some on the plane. You’d better look through this,’ he added, and handed Leamas a British passport. It was made out in his name with his own photograph mounted in it, embossed by the deep press Foreign Office seal running across the corner. It was neither old nor new; it described Leamas as a clerk, and gave his status as single. Holding it in his hand for the first time, Leamas was a little nervous. It was like getting married: whatever happened, things would never be the same again.

‘What about money?’ Leamas asked.

‘You won’t need any. It’s on the firm.’

8

LE MIRAGE

It was cold that morning; the light mist was damp and grey, pricking the skin. The airport reminded Leamas of the war: machines, half hidden in the fog, waiting patiently for their masters; the resonant voices and their echoes, the sudden shout and the incongruous clip of a girl’s heels on a stone floor; the roar of an engine that might have been at your elbow. Everywhere that air of conspiracy which generates among people who have been up since dawn—of superiority almost, derived from the common experience of having seen the night disappear and the morning come. The staff had that look which is informed by the mystery of dawn and animated by the cold, and they treated the passengers and their baggage with the remoteness of men returned from the front: ordinary mortals had nothing for them that morning.

Kiever had provided Leamas with luggage. It was a nice detail: Leamas admired it. Passengers without luggage attracted attention, and it was not part of Kiever’s plan to do that. They checked in at the airline desk and followed the signs to passport control. There was a ludicrous moment when they lost the way and Kiever was rude to a porter. Leamas supposed Kiever was worried about the passport—he needn’t be, thought Leamas, there’s nothing wrong with it.

The passport officer was a youngish, little man with an Intelligence Corps tie and some mysterious badge in his lapel. He had a ginger moustache, and a North Country accent which was his life’s enemy.

‘Going to be away for a long time, Sir?’ he asked Leamas.

‘A couple of weeks,’ Leamas replied.

‘You’ll want to watch it, Sir. Your passport’s due for renewal on the 31st.’

‘I know,’ said Leamas.

They walked side by side into the passengers’ waiting room. On the way Leamas said: ‘You’re a suspicious sod, aren’t you, Kiever,’ and the other laughed quietly.

‘Can’t have you on the loose, can we! Not part of the contract,’ he replied.

They still had twenty minutes to wait. They sat down at a table and ordered coffee. ‘And take these things away,’ Kiever added to the waiter, indicating the used cups, saucers and ash-trays, on the table. ‘There’s a trolley coming round,’ the waiter replied.

‘Take them,’ Kiever repeated, angry again. ‘It’s disgusting, leaving dirty crockery there like that.’

The waiter just turned and walked away. He didn’t go near the service counter and he didn’t order their coffee. Kiever was white, ill with anger. ‘For Christ’s sake,’ Leamas muttered, ‘let it go. Life’s too short.’

‘Cheeky bastard, that’s what he is,’ said Kiever.

‘All right, all right, make a scene; you’ve chosen a good moment. They’ll never forget us here.’

The formalities at the airport at The Hague provided no problem. Kiever seemed to have recovered from his anxieties. He became jaunty and talkative as they walked the short distance between the plane and the Customs sheds. The young Dutch officer gave a perfunctory glance at their luggage and passports and announced in awkward throaty English: ‘I hope you have a pleasant stay in the Netherlands.’

‘Thanks,’ said Kiever, almost too gratefully, ‘thanks very much.’

They walked from the Customs shed along the corridor to the reception hall on the other side of the airport buildings. Kiever led the way to the main exit, between the little groups of travellers staring vaguely at kiosk displays of scent, cameras and fruit. As they pushed their way through the revolving glass door, Leamas looked back. Standing at the newspaper kiosk, deep in a copy of the Continental Daily Mail, stood a small, frog-like figure in glasses, an earnest, worried little man. He looked like a civil servant. Something like that.

A car was waiting for them in the car park, a Volkswagen with a Dutch registration, driven by a woman who ignored them. She drove slowly, always stopping if the lights were amber, and Leamas guessed she had been briefed to drive that way and that they were being followed by another car. He watched the off-side wing mirror, trying to recognise the car, but without success. Once he saw a black Peugeot with a CD number, but when they turned the corner there was only a furniture van behind them. He knew The Hague quite well from the war, and he tried to work out where they were heading. He guessed they were travelling northwest towards Scheveningen. Soon they had left the suburbs behind them and were approaching a colony of villas bordering the dunes along the sea front.

Here they stopped. The woman got out, leaving them in the car, and rang the front door bell of a small cream-coloured bungalow which stood at the near end of the row. A wrought iron sign hung on the porch with the words ‘Le Mirage’ in pale blue Gothic script. There was a notice in the window which proclaimed that all the rooms were taken.

The door was opened by a kindly, plump woman who looked past the driver towards the car. Her eyes still on the car, she came down the drive towards them, smiling with pleasure. She reminded Leamas of an old aunt he once had who beat him for wasting string.

‘How nice that you have come,’ she declared; ‘we are so pleased that you have come!’ They followed her into the bungalow, Kiever leading the way. The driver got back into the car. Leamas glanced down the road which they had just travelled; three hundred yards away a black car, a Fiat perhaps, or a Peugeot, had parked. A man in a raincoat was getting out.

Once in the hall the woman shook Leamas warmly by the hand. ‘Welcome, welcome to Le Mirage. Did you have a good journey?’

‘Fine,’ Leamas replied.

‘Did you fly or come by sea?’

‘We flew,’ Kiever said; ‘a very smooth flight.’ He might have owned the airline.

‘I’ll make your lunch,’ she declared; ‘a special lunch. I’ll make you something specially good. What shall I bring you?’

‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ said Leamas under his breath, and the door bell rang. The woman went quickly into the kitchen; Kiever opened the front door.

He was wearing a macintosh with leather buttons. He was about Leamas’ height, but older. Leamas put him at about fifty-five. His face had a hard, grey hue and sharp furrows; he might have been a soldier. He held out his hand.

‘My name is Peters,’ he said. The fingers were slim and polished.

‘Did you have a good journey?’

‘Yes,’ said Kiever quickly, ‘quite uneventful.’

‘Mr Leamas and I have a lot to discuss; I do not think we need to keep you, Sam. You could take the Volkswagen back to town.’

Kiever smiled. Leamas saw the relief in his smile.

‘Good-bye, Leamas,’ said Kiever, his voice jocular; ‘good luck, old man.’

Leamas nodded, ignoring Kiever’s hand.

‘Good-bye,’ Kiever repeated and let himself quietly out of the front door.

Leamas followed Peters into a back room. Heavy lace curtains hung on the window, ornately fringed and draped. The window-sill was covered with potted plants; great cacti, a tobacco plant and some curious tree with wide, rubbery leaves. The furniture was heavy, pseudo-antique. In the centre of the room was a table with two carved chairs. The table was covered with a rust-coloured counterpane more like a carpet; on it before each chair was a pad of paper and a pencil. On a sideboard there was whisky and soda. Peters went over to it and mixed them both a drink.

‘Look,’ said Leamas suddenly, ‘from now on I can do without the goodwill; do you follow me? We both know what we’re about; both professionals. You’ve got a paid defector—good luck to you. For Christ’s sake don’t pretend you’ve fallen in love with me.’ He sounded on edge, uncertain of himself.

Peters nodded. ‘Kiever told me you were a proud man,’ he observed dispassionately. Then he added without smiling, ‘After all, why else does a man attack tradesmen?’

Leamas guessed he was Russian, but he wasn’t sure. His English was nearly perfect, he had the ease and habits of a man long used to civilised comforts.

They sat at the table.

‘Kiever told you what I am going to pay you?’ Peters enquired.

‘Yes. Fifteen thousand pounds to be drawn on a Bern bank.’

‘Yes.’

‘He said you might have follow-up questions during the next year,’ said Leamas, ‘you would pay another five thousand if I kept myself available.’

Peters nodded.

‘I don’t accept that condition,’ Leamas continued. ‘You know as well as I do it wouldn’t work. I want to draw the fifteen thousand and get clear. Your people have a rough way with defected agents; so have mine. I’m not going to sit on my fanny in St Moritz while you roll up every network I’ve given you. They’re not fools; they’d know who to look for. For all you and I know they’re on to us now.’

Peters nodded: ‘You could, of course, come somewhere . . . safer, couldn’t you?’

‘Behind the Curtain?’

‘Yes.’

Leamas just shook his head and continued: ‘I reckon you’ll need about three days for a preliminary interrogation. Then you’ll want to refer back for a detailed brief.’

‘Not necessarily,’ Peters replied.

Leamas looked at him with interest:

‘I see,’ he said, ‘they’ve sent the expert. Or isn’t Moscow Centre in on this?’

Peters was silent; he was just looking at Leamas, taking him in. At last he picked up the pencil in front of him and said:

‘Shall we begin with your war service?’

Leamas shrugged:

‘It’s up to you.’

‘That’s right. We’ll begin with your war service. Just talk.’

‘I enlisted in the Engineers in 1939. I was finishing my training when a notice came round inviting linguists to apply for specialist service abroad. I had Dutch and German and a good deal of French and I was fed up with soldiering, so I applied. I knew Holland well; my father had a machine tool agency at Leiden; I’d lived there for nine years. I had the usual interviews and went off to a school near Oxford where they taught me the usual monkey tricks.’

‘Who was running that set-up?’

‘I didn’t know till later. Then I met Steed-Asprey, and an Oxford don called Fielding. They were running it. In forty-one they dropped me into Holland and I stayed there nearly two years. We lost agents quicker than we could find them in those days—it was bloody murder. Holland’s a wicked country for that kind of work—it’s got no real rough country, nowhere out of the way you can keep a headquarters or a radio set. Always on the move, always running away. It made it a very dirty game. I got out in forty-three and had a couple of months in England, then I had a go at Norway—that was a picnic by comparison. In forty-five they paid me off and I came over here again, to Holland, to try and catch up on my father’s old business. That was no good, so I joined up with an old friend who was running a travel agency business in Bristol. That lasted eighteen months then we were sold up. Then out of the blue I got a letter from the Department: would I like to go back? But I’d had enough of all that, I thought, so I said I’d think about it and rented a cottage on Lundy Island. I stayed there a year contemplating my stomach, then I got fed up again so I wrote to them. By late forty-nine I was back on the payroll. Broken service of course—reduction of pension rights and the usual crabbing. Am I going too fast?’

‘Not for the moment,’ Peters replied, pouring him some more whisky; ‘we’ll discuss it again of course, with names and dates.’

There was a knock at the door and the woman came in with lunch, an enormous meal of cold meats and bread and soup. Peters pushed his notes aside and they ate in silence. The interrogation had begun.

Lunch was cleared away. ‘So you went back to the Circus,’ said Peters.

‘Yes. For a while they gave me a desk job, processing reports, making assessments of military strengths in Iron Curtain countries, tracing units and that kind of thing.’

‘Which section?’

‘Satellites Four. I was there from February fifty to May fifty-one.’

‘Who were your colleagues?’

‘Peter Guillam, Brian de Grey and George Smiley. Smiley left us in early fifty-one and went over to Counter Intelligence. In May fifty-one I was posted to Berlin as DCA—Deputy-Controller of Area. That meant all the operational work.’

‘Who did you have under you?’ Peters was writing swiftly. Leamas guessed he had some home-made shorthand.

‘Hackett, Sarrow and de Jong. De Jong was killed in a traffic accident in fifty-nine. We thought he was murdered but we could never prove it. They all ran networks and I was in charge. Do you want details?’ he asked drily.

‘Of course, but later. Go on.’

‘It was late fifty-four when we landed our first big fish in Berlin: Fritz Feger, second man in the DDR Defence Ministry. Up till then it had been heavy going—but in November fifty-four we got on to Fritz. He lasted almost exactly two years then one day we never heard any more. I hear he died in prison. It was another three years before we found anyone to touch him. Then, in 1959, Karl Riemeck turned up. Karl was on the Praesidium of the East German Communist Party. He was the best agent I ever knew.’

‘He is now dead,’ Peters observed.

A look of something like shame passed across Leamas’ face:

‘I was there when he was shot,’ he muttered. ‘He had a mistress who came over just before he died. He’d told her everything—she knew the whole damned network. No wonder he was blown.’

‘We’ll return to Berlin later. Tell me this. When Karl died you flew back to London. Did you remain in London for the rest of your service?’

‘What there was of it, yes.’

‘What job did you have in London?’

‘Banking section; supervision of agents’ salaries, overseas payments for clandestine purposes. A child could have managed it. We got our orders and we signed the drafts. Occasionally there was a security headache.’

‘Did you deal with agents direct?’

‘How could we? The Resident in a particular country would make a requisition. Authority would put a hoofmark on it and pass it to us to make the payment. In most cases we had the money transferred to a convenient foreign bank where the Resident could draw it himself and hand it to the agent.’

‘How were agents described? By cover names?’

‘By figures. The Circus calls them combinations. Every network was given a combination; every agent was described by a suffix attached to the combination. Karl’s combination was eight A stroke one.’

Leamas was sweating. Peters watched him coolly, appraising him like a professional gambler across the table. What was Leamas worth? What would break him, what attract or frighten him? What did he hate, above all, what did he know? Would he keep his best card to the end and sell it dear? Peters didn’t think so; Leamas was too much off balance to monkey about. He was a man at odds with himself, a man who knew one life, one confession, and had betrayed them. Peters had seen it before. He had seen it, even in men who had undergone a complete ideological rehearsal, who in the secret hours of the night had found a new creed, and alone, compelled by the internal power of their convictions, had betrayed their calling, their families, their countries. Even they, filled as they were with new zeal and new hope, had had to struggle against the stigma of treachery; even they wrestled with the almost physical anguish of saying that which they had been trained never, never to reveal. Like apostates who feared to burn the Cross, they hesitated between the instinctive and the material; and Peters, caught in the same polarity, must give them comfort and destroy their pride. It was a situation of which they were both aware; thus Leamas had fiercely rejected a human relationship with Peters, for his pride precluded it. Peters knew that for those reasons, Leamas would lie; lie perhaps only by omission, but lie all the same, for pride, from defiance or through the sheer perversity of his profession; and he, Peters, would have to nail the lies. He knew, too, that the very fact that Leamas was a professional could militate against his interests, for Leamas would select where Peters wanted no selection; Leamas would anticipate the type of intelligence which Peters required—and in doing so might pass by some casual scrap which could be of vital interest to the evaluators. To all that, Peters added the capricious vanity of an alcoholic wreck.

‘I think,’ he said, ‘we will now take your Berlin service in some detail. That would be from May 1951 to March 1961. Have another drink.’

Leamas watched him take a cigarette from the box on the table, and light it. He noticed two things: that Peters was left-handed, and that once again he had put the cigarette in his mouth with the maker’s name away from him, so that it burnt first. It was a gesture Leamas liked: it indicated that Peters, like himself, had been on the run.

Peters had an odd face, expressionless and grey. The colour must have left it long ago—perhaps in some prison in the early days of the Revolution—and now his features were formed and Peters would look like that till he died. Only the stiff, grey hair might turn to white, but his face would not change. Leamas wondered vaguely what Peters’ real name was, whether he was married. There was something very orthodox about him which Leamas liked. It was the orthodoxy of strength, of confidence. If Peters lied there would be a reason. The lie would be a calculated, necessary lie, far removed from the fumbling dishonesty of Ashe.

Ashe, Kiever, Peters; that was a progression in quality, in authority, which to Leamas was axiomatic of the hierarchy of an intelligence network. It was also, he suspected, a progression in ideology. Ashe, the mercenary, Kiever the fellow traveller, and now Peters, for whom the end and the means were identical.

Leamas began to talk about Berlin. Peters seldom interrupted, seldom asked a question or made a comment, but when he did, he displayed a technical curiosity and expertise which entirely accorded with Leamas’ own temperament. Leamas even seemed to respond to the dispassionate professionalism of his interrogator—it was something they had in common.

It had taken a long time to build a decent East Zone network from Berlin, Leamas explained. In the earlier days the city had been thronging with second-rate agents: intelligence was discredited and so much a part of the daily life of Berlin that you could recruit a man at a cocktail party, brief him over dinner and he would be blown by breakfast. For a professional it was a nightmare: dozens of agencies, half of them penetrated by the opposition, thousands of loose ends; too many leads, too few sources, too little space to operate. They had their break with Feger in 1954, true enough. But by ’56 when every Service department was screaming for high-grade intelligence, they were becalmed. Feger had spoilt them for second-rate stuff that was only one jump ahead of the news. They needed the real thing—and they had to wait another three years before they got it.

Then one day de Jong went for a picnic in the woods on the edge of East Berlin. He had a British military number plate on his car, which he parked, locked, in an unmade road beside the canal. After the picnic his children ran on ahead, carrying the basket. When they reached the car they stopped, hesitated, dropped the basket and ran back. Somebody had forced the car door—the handle was broken and the door was slightly open. De Jong swore, remembering that he had left his camera in the glove compartment. He went and examined the car. The handle had been forced; de Jong reckoned it had been done with a piece of steel tubing, the kind of thing you can carry in your sleeve. But the camera was still there, so was his coat, so were some parcels, belonging to his wife. On the driving seat was a tobacco tin, and in the tin was a small nickel cartridge. De Jong knew exactly what it contained: it was the film cartridge of a sub-miniature camera, probably a Minox.

De Jong drove home and developed the film. It contained the minutes of the last meeting of the Praesidium of the East German Communist Party, the SED. By an odd coincidence there was collateral from another source; the photographs were genuine.

Leamas took the case over then. He was badly in need of a success. He’d produced virtually nothing since arriving in Berlin, and he was getting past the usual age limit for full-time operational work. Exactly a week later he took de Jong’s car to the same place and went for a walk.

It was a desolate spot that de Jong had chosen for his picnic: a strip of canal with a couple of shell-torn pill-boxes, some parched, sandy fields and on the Eastern side a sparse pine wood, lying about two hundred yards from the gravel road which bordered the canal. But it had the virtue of solitude—something that was hard to find in Berlin—and surveillance was impossible. Leamas walked in the woods. He made no attempt to watch the car because he did not know from which direction the approach might be made. If he was seen watching the car from the woods, the chances of retaining his informant’s confidence were ruined. He need not have worried.

When he returned there was nothing in the car so he drove back to West Berlin, kicking himself for being a damned fool; the Praesidium was not due to meet for another fortnight. Three weeks later he borrowed de Jong’s car and took a thousand dollars in twenties in a picnic case. He left the car unlocked for two hours and when he returned there was a tobacco tin in the glove compartment. The picnic case had gone.

The films were packed with first grade documentary stuff. In the next six weeks he did it twice more, and the same thing happened.

Leamas knew he had hit a gold mine. He gave the source the cover name of ‘Mayfair’ and sent a pessimistic letter to London. Leamas knew that if he gave London half an opening they would control the case direct, which he was desperately anxious to avoid. This was probably the only kind of operation which could save him from superannuation and it was just the kind of thing that was big enough for London to want to take over for itself. Even if he kept them at arm’s length there was still the danger that the Circus would have theories, make suggestions, urge caution, demand action. They would want him to give only new dollar bills in the hope of tracing them, they would want the film cartridges sent home for examination, they would plan clumsy tailing operations and tell the Departments. Most of all they would want to tell the Departments; and that, said Leamas, would blow the thing sky-high. He worked like a madman for three weeks. He combed the personality files of each member of the Praesidium. He drew up a list of all the clerical staff who might have had access to the minutes. From the distribution list on the last page of the facsimiles he extended the total of possible informants to thirty-one, including clerks and secretarial staff.

Confronted with the almost impossible task of identifying an informant from the incomplete records of thirty-one candidates, Leamas returned to the original material, which, he said, was something he should have done earlier. It puzzled him that in none of the photostat minutes he had so far received were the pages numbered, that none was stamped with a security classification, and that in the second and fourth copy words were crossed out in pencil or crayon. He came finally to an important conclusion: that the photocopies related not to the minutes themselves, but to the draft minutes. This placed the source in the Secretariat and the Secretariat was very small. The draft minutes had been well and carefully photographed: that suggested that the photographer had had time and a room to himself.

Leamas returned to the personality index. There was a man called Karl Riemeck in the Secretariat, a former corporal in the Medical Corps, who had served three years as a prisoner of war in England. His sister had been living in Pomerania when the Russians overran it, and he had never heard of her since. He was married and had one daughter named Carla.

Leamas decided to take a chance. He found out from London Riemeck’s prisoner of war number, which was 29012, and the date of his release which was November 10th, 1945. He bought an East German children’s book of science fiction and wrote in the fly leaf in German in an adolescent hand: ‘This book belongs to Carla Riemeck, born December 10th, 1945, in Bideford, North Devon. Signed Moonspacewoman 29012’, and, underneath, he added, ‘Applicants wishing to make space flights should present themselves for instruction to C. Riemeck in person. An application form is enclosed. Long live the People’s Republic of Democratic Space!’

He ruled some lines on a sheet of writing paper, made columns of name, address and age, and wrote at the bottom of the page:

‘Each candidate will be interviewed personally. Write to the usual address stating when and where you wish to be met. Applications will be considered in seven days. C.R.’

He put the sheet of paper inside the book. Leamas drove to the usual place, still in de Jong’s car, and left the book on the passenger seat with five used one-hundred dollar bills inside the cover. When Leamas returned the book had gone, and there was a tobacco tin on the seat instead. It contained three rolls of film. Leamas developed them that night: one film contained as usual the minutes of the Praesidium’s last meeting; the second showed a draft revision of the East Germans’ relationship to COMECON and the third a breakdown of the East German Intelligence Service, complete with functions of departments and details of personalities.

Peters interrupted: ‘Just a minute,’ he said. ‘Do you mean to say all this intelligence came from Riemeck?’

‘Why not? You know how much he saw.’

‘It’s scarcely possible,’ Peters observed, almost to himself; ‘he must have had help.’

‘He did have later on; I’m coming to that.’

‘I know what you are going to tell me. But did you never have the feeling he got assistance from above as well as from the agents he afterwards acquired?’

‘No. No, I never did. It never occurred to me.’

‘Looking back on it now, does it seem likely?’

‘Not particularly.’

‘When you sent all this material back to the Circus, they never suggested that even for a man in Riemeck’s position, the intelligence was phenomenally comprehensive.’

‘No.’

‘Did they ever ask where Riemeck got his camera from, who instructed him in document photography?’

Leamas hesitated.

‘No . . . I’m sure they never asked.’

‘Remarkable,’ Peters observed drily. ‘I’m sorry—do go on. I did not mean to anticipate you.’

Exactly a week later, Leamas continued, he drove to the canal and this time he felt nervous. As he turned into the unmade road he saw three bicycles lying in the grass and two hundred yards down the canal, three men fishing. He got out of the car as usual and began walking towards the line of trees on the other side of the field. He had gone about twenty yards when he heard a shout. He looked round and caught sight of one of the men beckoning to him. The other two had turned and were looking at him too. Leamas was wearing an old macintosh; he had his hands in the pockets, and it was too late to take them out. He knew that the men on either side were covering the man in the middle and that if he took his hands out of his pockets they would probably shoot him; they would think he was holding a revolver in his pocket. Leamas stopped ten yards from the centre man.

‘You want something?’ Leamas asked.

‘Are you Leamas?’ He was a small, plump man, very steady. He spoke English.

‘Yes.’

‘What is your British national identity number?’

‘PRT stroke L 58003 stroke one.’

‘Where did you spend VJ night?’

‘At Leiden in Holland in my father’s workshop, with some Dutch friends.’

‘Let’s go for a walk, Mr Leamas. You won’t need your macintosh. Take it off and leave it on the ground where you are standing. My friends will look after it.’

Leamas hesitated, shrugged and took off his macintosh. Then they walked together briskly towards the wood.

‘You know as well as I do who he was,’ said Leamas wearily, ‘third man in the Ministry of the Interior, Secretary to the SED Praesidium, head of the Co-ordinating Committee for the Protection of the People. I suppose that was how he knew about de Jong and me: he’d seen our counter intelligence files in the Abteilung. He had three strings to his bow: the Praesidium, straightforward internal political and economic reporting and access to the files of the East German Security Service.’

‘But only limited access. They’d never give an outsider the run of all their files,’ Peters insisted.

Leamas shrugged.

‘They did,’ he said.

‘What did he do with his money?’

‘After that afternoon I didn’t give him any. The Circus took that over straight away. It was paid into a West German bank. He even gave me back what I’d given him. London banked it for him.’

‘How much did you tell London?’

‘Everything after that. I had to; then the Circus told the Departments. After that,’ Leamas added venomously, ‘it was only a matter of time before it packed up. With the Departments at their backs, London got greedy. They began pressing us for more, wanted to give him more money. Finally we had to suggest to Karl that he recruited other sources and we took them on to form a network. It was bloody stupid, it put a strain on Karl, endangered him, undermined his confidence in us. It was the beginning of the end.’

‘How much did you get out of him?’

Leamas hesitated.

‘How much? Christ, I don’t know. It lasted an unnaturally long time. I think he was blown long before he was caught. The standard dropped in the last few months; think they’d begun to suspect him by then and kept him away from the good stuff.’

‘Altogether, what did he give you?’ Peters persisted.

Piece by piece, Leamas recounted the full extent of all Karl Riemeck’s work. His memory was, Peters noted approvingly, remarkably precise considering the amount he drank. He could give dates and names, he could remember the reaction from London, the nature of corroboration where it existed. He could remember sums of money demanded and paid, the dates of the conscription of other agents into the network.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Peters at last, ‘but I do not believe that one man, however well placed, however careful, however industrious, could have acquired such a range of detailed knowledge. For that matter, even if he had he would never have been able to photograph it.’

‘He was able,’ Leamas persisted, suddenly angry, ‘he bloody well did and that’s all there is to it.’

‘And the Circus never told you to go into it with him, exactly how and when he saw all this stuff.’

‘No,’ snapped Leamas, ‘Riemeck was touchy about that, and London was content to let it go.’

‘Well, well,’ Peters mused.

After a moment Peters said: ‘You heard about that woman, incidentally?’

‘What woman?’ Leamas asked sharply.

‘Karl Riemeck’s mistress, the one who came over to West Berlin the night Riemeck was shot.’

‘Well?’

‘She was found dead a week ago. Murdered. She was shot from a car as she left her flat.’

‘It used to be my flat,’ said Leamas mechanically.

‘Perhaps,’ Peters suggested, ‘she knew more about Riemeck’s network than you did.’

‘What the hell do you mean?’ Leamas demanded.

Peters shrugged.

‘It’s all very strange,’ he observed. ‘I wonder who killed her.’

When they had exhausted the case of Karl Riemeck, Leamas went on to talk of other less spectacular agents, then of the procedure of his Berlin office, its communications, its staff, its secret ramifications—flats, transport, recording and photographic equipment. They talked long into the night and throughout the next day and when at last Leamas stumbled into bed the following night he knew he had betrayed all that he knew of Allied Intelligence in Berlin, and drunk two bottles of whisky in two days.

One thing puzzled him: Peters’ insistence that Karl Riemeck must have had help—must have had a high-level collaborator. Control had asked him the same question—he remembered now—Control had asked about Riemeck’s access. How could they both be so sure Karl hadn’t managed alone? He’d had helpers, of course; like the guards by the canal the day Leamas met him. But they were small beer—Karl had told him about them. But Peters—and Peters, after all, would know precisely how much Karl had been able to get his hands on—Peters had refused to believe Karl had managed alone. On this point, Peters and Control were evidently agreed.

Perhaps it was true. Perhaps there was somebody else. Perhaps this was the Special Interest whom Control was so anxious to protect from Mundt. That would mean that Karl Riemeck had collaborated with this special interest and provided what both of them had together obtained. Perhaps that was what Control had spoken to Karl about, alone, that evening in Leamas’ flat in Berlin.

Anyway, tomorrow would tell. Tomorrow he would play his hand.

He wondered who had killed Elvira. And he wondered why they had killed her. Of course—here was a point, here was a possible explanation—Elvira, knowing the identity of Riemeck’s special collaborator, had been murdered by that collaborator . . . No, that was too far-fetched. It overlooked the difficulty of crossing from East to West: Elvira had after all been murdered in West Berlin.

He wondered why Control had never told him Elvira had been murdered. So that he would react suitably when Peters told him? It was useless speculating. Control had his reasons; they were usually so bloody tortuous it took you a week to work them out.

As he fell asleep he muttered, ‘Karl was a damn’ fool. That woman did for him, I’m sure she did.’ Elvira was dead now, and serve her right. He remembered Liz.

9

THE SECOND DAY

Peters arrived at eight o’clock the next morning, and without ceremony they sat down at the table and began.

‘So you came back to London. What did you do there?’

‘They put me on the shelf. I knew I was finished when that ass in Personnel met me at the airport. I had to go straight to Control and report about Karl. He was dead—what else was there to say?’

‘What did they do with you?’

‘They said at first I could hang around in London and wait till I was qualified for a proper pension. They were so bloody decent about it I got angry—I told them that if they were so keen to chuck money at me why didn’t they do the obvious thing and count in all my time instead of bleating about broken service. Then they got cross when I told them that. They put me in Banking with a lot of women. I can’t remember much about that part—I began hitting the bottle a bit. Had rather a bad patch.’

He lit a cigarette. Peters nodded.

‘That was why they gave me the push, really. They didn’t like me drinking.’

‘Tell me what you do remember about Banking Section,’ Peters suggested.

‘It was a dreary set-up. I never was cut out for desk work, I knew that. That’s why I hung on in Berlin. I knew when they recalled me I’d be put on the shelf, but, Christ . . . !’

‘What did you do?’

Leamas shrugged.

‘Sat on my behind in the same room as a couple of women. Thursby and Larrett. I called them Thursday and Friday.’ He grinned rather stupidly. Peters looked uncomprehending.

‘We just pushed paper. A letter came down from Finance: “the payment of seven hundred dollars to so and so is authorised with effect from so and so. Kindly get on with it”—that was the gist of it. Thursday and Friday would kick it about a bit, file it, stamp it and I’d sign a cheque or get the bank to make a transfer.’

‘What bank?’

‘Blatt and Rodney, a chichi little bank in the City. There’s a sort of theory in the Circus that Etonians are discreet.’

‘In fact, then, you knew the names of agents all over the world?’

‘Not necessarily. That was the cunning thing. I’d sign the cheque, you see, or the order to the bank, but we’d leave a space for the name of the payee. The covering letter or what have you was all signed and then the file would go back to Special Despatch.’

‘Who are they?’

‘They’re the general holders of agents’ particulars. They put in the names and posted the order. Bloody clever, I must say.’

Peters looked disappointed.

‘You mean you had no way of knowing the names of the payees?’ ‘

Not usually, no.’

‘But occasionally?’

‘We got pretty near the knuckle now and again. All the fiddling about between Banking, Finance and Special Despatch led to cockups, of course. Too elaborate. Then occasionally we came in on special stuff which brightened one’s life a bit.’

Leamas got up. ‘I’ve made a list,’ he said, ‘of all the payments I can remember. It’s in my room. I’ll get it.’

He walked out of the room, the rather shuffling walk he had affected since arriving in Holland. When he returned he held in his hand a couple of sheets of lined paper torn from a cheap notebook.

‘I wrote these down last night,’ he said; ‘I thought it would save time.’

Peters took the notes and read them slowly and carefully. He seemed impressed.

‘Good,’ he said, ‘very good.’

‘Then I remembered best a thing called Rolling Stone. I got a couple of trips out of it. One to Copenhagen and one to Helsinki. Just dumping money at banks.’

‘How much?’

‘Ten thousand dollars in Copenhagen, forty thousand D-Marks in Helsinki.’

Peters put down his pencil.

‘Who for?’ he asked.

‘God knows. We worked Rolling Stone on a system of deposit accounts. The service gave me a phoney British passport; I went to the Royal Scandinavian Bank in Copenhagen and the National Bank of Finland in Helsinki, deposited the money and drew a pass book on a joint account—for me in my alias and for someone else—the agent, I suppose, in his alias. I gave the banks a sample of the co-holder’s signature. I’d got that from Head Office. Later the agent was given the pass book and a false passport which he showed at the bank when he drew the money. All I knew was the alias.’ He heard himself talking and it all sounded so ludicrously improbable.

‘Was this procedure common?’

‘No. It was a special payment. It had a subscription list.’ ‘What’s that?’

‘It had a code name known to very few people.’

‘What was the code name?’

‘I told you—Rolling Stone. The operation covered irregular payments of ten thousand dollars in different currencies and in different capitals.’

‘Always in capital towns?’

‘Far as I know. I remember reading in the file that there had been other Rolling Stone payments before I came to the section, but in those cases Banking Section got the local Resident to do it.’

‘These other payments that took place before you came, where were they made?’

‘One in Oslo. I can’t remember where the other was.’

‘Was the alias of the agent always the same?’

‘No. That was an added security precaution. I heard later we pinched the whole technique from the Russians. It was the most elaborate payment scheme I’d met. In the same way I used a different alias and of course a different passport for each trip.’ That would please him; help him to fill in the gaps.

‘These faked passports the agent was given so that he could draw the money: did you know anything about them: how they were made out and despatched?’

‘No. Oh, except that they had to have visas in them for the country where the money was deposited. And entry stamps.’

‘Entry stamps?’

‘Yes. I assumed the passports were never used at the border—only presented at the bank for identification purposes. The agent must have travelled on his own passport, quite legally entered the country where the bank was situated, then used the faked passport at the bank. That was my guess.’

‘Do you know of a reason why earlier payments were made by the Residents, and later payments by someone travelling out from London?’

‘I know the reason. I asked the women in Banking Section, Thursday and Friday. Control was anxious that—’

‘Control? Do you mean to say Control himself was running the case?’

‘Yes, he was running it. He was afraid the Resident might be recognised at the bank. So he used a postman: me.’

‘When did you make your journeys?’

‘Copenhagen on the fifteenth of June. I flew back the same night. Helsinki at the end of September. I stayed two nights there, flew back around the twenty-eighth. I had a bit of fun in Helsinki.’ He grinned but Peters took no notice.

‘And the other payments—when were they made?’

‘I can’t remember. Sorry.’

‘But one was definitely in Oslo?’

‘Yes, in Oslo.’

‘How much time separated the first two payments, the payments made by the Residents?’

‘I don’t know. Not long, I think. Maybe a month. A bit more perhaps.’

‘Was it your impression that the agent had been operating for some time before the first payment was made? Did the file show that?’

‘No idea. The file simply covered actual payments. First payments early ’59. There was no other data on it. That is the principle that operates where you have a limited subscription. Different files handle different bits of a single case. Only someone with the master file would be able to put it all together.’

Peters was writing all the time now. Leamas assumed there was a tape recorder hidden somewhere in the room but the subsequent transcription would take time. What Peters wrote down now would provide the background for this evening’s telegram to Moscow, while in the Soviet Embassy in The Hague the girls would sit up all night telegraphing the verbatim transcript on hourly schedules.

‘Tell me,’ said Peters; ‘these are large sums of money. The arrangements for paying them were elaborate and very expensive. What did you make of it yourself?’

Leamas shrugged.

‘What could I make of it? I thought Control must have a bloody good source, but I never saw the material so I don’t know. I didn’t like the way it was done—it was too high-powered, too complicated, too clever. Why couldn’t they just meet him and give him the money in cash? Did they really let him cross borders on his own passport with a forged one in his pocket? I doubt it,’ said Leamas. It was time he clouded the issue, let him chase a hare.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean, that for all I know the money was never drawn from the bank. Supposing he was a highly placed agent behind the Curtain—the money would be on deposit for him when he could get at it. That was what I reckoned anyway. I didn’t think about it all that much. Why should I? It’s part of our work only to know pieces of the whole set-up. You know that. If you’re curious, God help you.’

‘If the money wasn’t collected, as you suggest, why all the trouble with passports?’

‘When I was in Berlin we made an arrangement for Karl Riemeck in case he ever needed to run and couldn’t get hold of us. We kept a bogus West German passport for him at an address in Düsseldorf. He could collect it any time by following a pre-arranged procedure. It never expired—Special Travel renewed the passport and the visas as they expired. Control might have followed the same technique with this man. I don’t know—it’s only a guess.’

‘How do you know for certain that passports were issued?’

‘There were minutes on the file between Banking section and Special Travel. Special Travel is the section which arranges false identity papers and visas.’

‘I see.’ Peters thought for a moment and then he asked: ‘What names did you use in Copenhagen and Helsinki?’

‘Robert Lang, electrical engineer from Derby. That was in Copenhagen.’

‘When exactly were you in Copenhagen?’ Peters asked.

‘I told you, June the fifteenth. I got there in the morning at about eleven-thirty.’

‘Which bank did you use?’

‘Oh, for Christ’s sake, Peters,’ said Leamas, suddenly angry, ‘the Royal Scandinavian. You’ve got it written down.’

‘I just wanted to be sure,’ the other replied evenly, and continued writing. ‘And for Helsinki, what name?’

‘Stephen Bennett, marine engineer from Plymouth. I was there,’ he added sarcastically, ‘at the end of September.’

‘You visited the bank on the day you arrived?’

‘Yes. It was the 24th or 25th, I can’t be sure, as I told you.’

‘Did you take the money with you from England?’

‘Of course not. We just transferred it to the Resident’s account in each case. The Resident drew it, met me at the airport with the money in a suitcase and I took it to the bank.’

‘Who’s the Resident in Copenhagen?’

‘Peter Jensen, a bookseller in the University bookshop.’

‘And what were the names which would be used by the agent?’

‘Horst Karlsdorf in Copenhagen. I think that was it, yes it was, I remember. Karlsdorf. I kept on wanting to say Karlshorst.’

‘Description?’

‘Manager, from Klagenfurt in Austria.’

‘And the other? The Helsinki name?’

‘Fechtmann. Adolf Fechtmann from St Gallen, Switzerland. He had a title—yes, that’s right: Doctor Fechtmann, archivist.’

‘I see; both German-speaking?’

‘Yes, I noticed that. But it can’t be a German.’

‘Why not?’

‘I was head of the Berlin set-up, wasn’t I? I’d have been in on it. A high-level agent in East Germany would have to be run from Berlin. I’d have known.’ Leamas got up, went to the sideboard and poured himself some whisky. He didn’t bother about Peters.

‘You said yourself there were special precautions, special procedures in this case. Perhaps they didn’t think you needed to know.’

‘Don’t be bloody silly,’ Leamas rejoined shortly; ‘of course I’d have known.’ This was the point he would stick to through thick and thin; it made them feel they knew better, gave credence to the rest of his information. ‘They will want to deduce in spite of you,’ Control had said. ‘We must give them the material and remain sceptical to their conclusions. Rely on their intelligence and conceit, on their suspicion of one another—that’s what we must do.’

Peters nodded as if he were confirming a melancholy truth. ‘You are a very proud man, Leamas,’ he observed once more.

Peters left soon after that. He wished Leamas good day and walked down the road along the sea-front. It was lunchtime.

10

THE THIRD DAY

Peters didn’t appear that afternoon, nor the next morning. Leamas stayed in, waiting with growing irritation for some message, but none came. He asked the housekeeper but she just smiled and shrugged her heavy shoulders. At about eleven o’clock the next morning he decided to go out for a walk along the front, bought some cigarettes and stared dully at the sea.

There was a girl standing on the beach throwing bread to the seagulls. Her back was turned to him. The sea wind played with her long black hair and pulled at her coat, making an arc of her body, like a bow strung towards the sea. He knew what it was then that Liz had given him; the thing that he would have to go back and find if ever he got home to England: it was the caring about little things—the faith in ordinary life; the simplicity that made you break up a bit of bread into a paper bag, walk down to the beach and throw it to the gulls. It was this respect for triviality which he had never been allowed to possess; whether it was bread for the seagulls or love, whatever it was he would go back and find it; he would make Liz find it for him. A week, two weeks perhaps, and he would be home. Control had said he could keep whatever they paid—and that would be enough. With fifteen thousand pounds, a gratuity and a pension from the Circus, a man—as Control would say—can afford to come in from the cold.

He made a detour and returned to the bungalow at a quarter to twelve. The woman let him in without a word, but when he had gone into the back room he heard her lift the receiver and dial a telephone number. She only spoke for a few seconds. At half past twelve she brought him lunch, and, to his pleasure, some English newspapers, which he read contentedly until three o’clock. Leamas who normally read nothing, read newspapers slowly and with concentration. He remembered details, like the names and addresses of people who were the subject of small news items. He did it almost unconsciously as a kind of private pelmanism, and it absorbed him entirely.

At three o’clock Peters arrived, and as soon as Leamas saw him he knew that something was up. They did not sit at the table; Peters did not take off his macintosh.

‘I’ve got bad news for you,’ he said, ‘they’re looking for you in England. I heard this morning. They’re watching the ports.’

Leamas replied impassively: ‘On what charge?’

‘Nominally for failing to report to a police station within the statutory period after release from prison.’

‘And in fact?’

‘The word is going around that you’re wanted for an offence under the Official Secrets Act. Your photograph’s in all the London evening papers. The captions are very vague.’

Leamas was standing very still.

Control had done it. Control had started the hue and cry. There was no other explanation. If Ashe or Kiever had been pulled in, if they had talked—even then, the responsibility for the hue and cry was still Control’s. ‘A couple of weeks,’ he’d said; ‘I expect they’ll take you off somewhere for the interrogation—it may even be abroad. A couple of weeks should see you through, though. After that, the thing should run itself. You’ll have to lie low over here while the chemistry works itself out; but you won’t mind that I’m sure. I’ve agreed to keep you on operational subsistence until Mundt is eliminated: that seemed the fairest way.’

And now this.

This wasn’t part of the bargain; this was different. What the hell was he supposed to do? By pulling out now, by refusing to go along with Peters, he was wrecking the operation. It was just possible that Peters was lying, that this was the test—all the more reason that he should agree to go. But if he went, if he agreed to go east, to Poland, Czechoslovakia or God knows where, there was no good reason why they should ever let him out—there was no good reason (since he was notionally a wanted man in the West) why he should want to be let out.

Control had done it—he was sure. The terms had been too generous, he’d known that all along. They didn’t throw money about like that for nothing—not unless they thought they might lose you. Money like that was a douceur for discomfort and dangers Control would not openly admit to. Money like that was a warning; Leamas had not heeded the warning.

‘Now how the devil,’ he asked quietly, ‘could they get on to that?’ A thought seemed to cross his mind and he said, ‘Your friend Ashe could have told them, of course, or Kiever . . .’

‘It’s possible,’ Peters replied. ‘You know as well as I do that such things are always possible. There is no certainty in our job. The fact is,’ he added with something like impatience, ‘that by now every country in Western Europe will be looking for you.’

Leamas might not have heard what Peters was saying. ‘You’ve got me on the hook now, haven’t you, Peters?’ he said. ‘Your people must be laughing themselves sick. Or did they give the tip-off themselves?’

‘You overrate your own importance,’ Peters said sourly.

‘Then why do you have me followed, tell me that? I went for a walk this morning. Two little men in brown suits, one twenty yards behind the other, trailed me along the sea front. When I came back the housekeeper rang you up.’

‘Let us stick to what we know,’ Peters suggested. ‘How your own authorities have got on to you does not at the moment acutely concern us. The fact is, they have.’

‘Have you brought the London evening papers with you?’

‘Of course not. They are not available here. We received a telegram from London.’

‘That’s a lie. You know perfectly well your apparatus is only allowed to communicate with Centre.’

‘In this case a direct link between two outstations was permitted,’ Peters retorted angrily.

‘Well, well,’ said Leamas with a wry smile, ‘you must be quite a big wheel. Or’—a thought seemed to strike him—‘isn’t Centre in on this?’

Peters ignored the question.

‘You know the alternative. You let us take care of you, let us arrange your safe passage, or you fend for yourself—with the certainty of eventual capture. You’ve no false papers, no money, nothing. Your British passport will have expired in ten days.’

‘There’s a third possibility. Give me a Swiss passport and some money and let me run. I can look after myself.’

‘I am afraid that is not considered desirable.’

‘You mean you haven’t finished the interrogation. Until you have I am not expendable?’

‘That is roughly the position.’

‘When you have completed the interrogation, what will you do with me?’

Peters shrugged. ‘What do you suggest?’

‘A new identity. Scandinavian passport perhaps. Money.’

‘It’s very academic,’ Peters replied, ‘but I will suggest it to my superiors. Are you coming with me?’ Leamas hesitated then he smiled a little uncertainly and asked:

‘If I didn’t, what would you do? After all I’ve quite a story to tell, haven’t I?’

‘Stories of that kind are hard to substantiate. I shall be gone tonight. Ashe and Kiever . . .’ he shrugged, ‘what do they add up to?’

Leamas went to the window. A storm was gathering over the grey North Sea. He watched the gulls wheeling against the dark clouds. The girl had gone.

‘All right,’ he said at last, ‘fix it up.’

‘There’s no plane East until tomorrow. There’s a flight to Berlin in an hour. We shall take that. It’s going to be very close.’

Leamas’ passive role that evening enabled him once again to admire the unadorned efficiency of Peters’ arrangements. The passport had been put together long ago—Centre must have thought of that. It was made out in the name of Alexander Thwaite, travel agent, and filled with visas and frontier stamps—the old, well-fingered passport of the professional traveller. The Dutch frontier guard at the airport just nodded and stamped it for form’s sake—Peters was three or four behind him in the queue and took no interest in the formalities.

As they entered the ‘passengers only’ enclosure Leamas caught sight of a bookstall. A selection of international newspapers was on show: Figaro, Monde, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Die Welt and half a dozen British dailies and weeklies. As he watched, the girl came round to the front of the kiosk and pushed an Evening Standard into the rack. Leamas hurried across to the bookstall and took the paper from the rack.

‘How much?’ he asked. Thrusting his hand into his trouser pocket he suddenly realised that he had no Dutch currency.

‘Thirty cents,’ the girl replied. She was rather pretty; dark and jolly.

‘I’ve only got two English shillings. That’s a guilder. Will you take them?’

‘Yes, please,’ she replied, and Leamas gave her the florin. He looked back; Peters was still at the passport desk, his back turned to Leamas. Without hesitation he made straight for the men’s lavatory. There he glanced rapidly but thoroughly at each page, then shoved the paper in the litter basket and re-emerged. It was true: there was his photograph with the vague little passage underneath. He wondered if Liz had seen it. He made his way thoughtfully to the passengers’ lounge. Ten minutes later they boarded the plane for Hamburg and Berlin. For the first time since it all began, Leamas was frightened.

11

FRIENDS OF ALEC

The men called on Liz the same evening.

Liz Gold’s room was at the northern end of Bayswater. It had two single beds in it, and a gas fire, rather a pretty one in charcoal grey, which made a modern hiss instead of an old fashioned bubble. She used to gaze into it sometimes when Leamas was there, when the gas fire shed the only light in the room. He would lie on the bed, hers, the one furthest from the door, and she would sit beside him and kiss him, or watch the gas fire with her face pressed against his. She was afraid to think of him too much now because then she forgot what he looked like, so she let her mind think of him for brief moments like running her eyes across a faint horizon, and then she would remember some small thing he had said or done, some way he had looked at her, or, more often, ignored her. That was the terrible thing, when her mind dwelled on it: she had nothing to remember him by—no photograph, no souvenir, nothing. Not even a mutual friend—only Miss Crail in the library, whose hatred of him had been vindicated by his spectacular departure. Liz had been round to his room once and seen the landlord. She didn’t know why she did it quite, but she plucked up courage and went. The landlord was very kind about Alec; Mr Leamas had paid his rent like a gentleman, right till the end, then there’d been a week or two owing and a chum of Mr Leamas had dropped in and paid up handsome, no queries or nothing. He’d always said it of Mr Leamas, always would, he was a gent. Not public school, mind, nothing arsy-tarsy but a real gent.

He liked to scowl a bit occasionally, and of course he drank a drop more than was good for him, though he never acted tight when he came home. But this little bloke who come round, funny little shy chap with specs, he said Mr Leamas had particularly requested, quite particularly, that the rent owing should be settled up. And if that wasn’t gentlemanly the landlord was damned if he knew what was. Where he got the money from Heaven knows, but that Mr Leamas was a deep one and no mistake. He only did to Ford the grocer what a good many had been wanting to do ever since the war. The room? Yes, the room had been taken—a gentleman from Korea, two days after they took Mr Leamas away.

That was probably why she went on working at the library—because there, at least, he still existed; the ladders, shelves, the books, the card index, were things he had known and touched, and one day he might come back to them. He had said he would never come back, but she didn’t believe it. It was like saying you would never get better, to believe a thing like that. Miss Crail thought he would come back: she had discovered she owed him some money—wages underpaid—and it infuriated her that her monster had been so unmonstrous as not to collect it. After Leamas had gone, Liz had never given up asking herself the same question; why had he hit Mr Ford? She knew he had a terrible temper, but that was different. He had intended to do it right from the start as soon as he had got rid of his fever. Why else had he said good-bye to her the night before? He knew that he would hit Mr Ford on the following day. She refused to accept the only other possible interpretation: that he had grown tired of her and said good-bye, and the next day, still under the emotional strain of their parting, had lost his temper with Mr Ford and struck him. She knew, she had always known, that there was something Alec had got to do. He’d even told her that himself. What it was she could only guess.

First, she thought he had a quarrel with Mr Ford, some deeprooted hatred going back for years. Something to do with a girl, or Alec’s family perhaps. But you only had to look at Mr Ford and it seemed ridiculous. He was the archetypal petit-bourgeois, cautious, complacent, mean. And anyway, if Alec had a vendetta on with Mr Ford, why did he go for him in the shop on a Saturday, in the middle of the weekend shopping rush, when everyone could see?

They’d talked about it in the meeting of her party branch. George Hanby, the branch treasurer, had actually been passing Ford the grocer’s as it happened. He hadn’t seen much because of the crowd, but he’d talked to a bloke who’d seen the whole thing. Hanby had been so impressed that he’d rung the Worker, and they’d sent a man to the trial—that was why the Worker had given it a middle page spread as a matter of fact. It was just a straight case of protest—of sudden social awareness and hatred against the boss class, as the Worker said. This bloke that Hanby spoke to (he was just a little ordinary chap with specs, white collar type) said it had been so sudden—spontaneous was what he meant—and it just proved to Hanby once again how incendiary was the fabric of the capitalist system. Liz had kept very quiet while Hanby talked: none of them knew, of course, about her and Leamas. She realised then that she hated George Hanby; he was a pompous, dirty-minded little man, always leering at her and trying to touch her.

Then the men called.

She thought they were a little too smart for policemen: they came in a small black car with an aerial on it. One was short and rather plump. He had glasses and wore odd, expensive clothes; he was a kindly, worried little man and Liz trusted him somehow without knowing why. The other was smoother, but not glossy—rather a boyish figure, although she guessed he wasn’t less than forty. They said they came from Special Branch, and they had printed cards with photographs in cellophane cases. The plump one did most of the talking.

‘I believe you were friendly with Alec Leamas,’ he began. She was prepared to be angry, but the plump man was so earnest that it seemed silly.

‘Yes,’ Liz answered. ‘How did you know?’

‘We found out quite by chance the other day. When you go to . . . prison, you have to give next of kin. Leamas said he hadn’t any. That was a lie as a matter of fact. They asked him whom they should inform if anything happened to him in prison. He said you.’

‘I see.’

‘Does anyone else know you were friendly with him?’

‘No.’

‘Did you go to the trial?’

‘No.’

‘No press men called, creditors, no one at all?’

‘No, I’ve told you. No one else knew. Not even my parents, no one. We worked together in the library, of course—the Psychical Research Library—but only Miss Crail, the librarian, would know that. I don’t think it occurred to her that there was anything between us. She’s queer,’ Liz added simply.

The little man peered very seriously at her for a moment, then asked:

‘Did it surprise you when Leamas beat up Mr Ford?’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘Why did you think he did it?’

‘I don’t know. Because Ford wouldn’t give him credit, I suppose. But I think he always meant to.’ She wondered if she was saying too much, but she longed to talk to somebody about it, she was so alone and there didn’t seem any harm.

‘But that night, the night before it happened, we talked together. We had supper, a sort of special one; Alec said we should and I knew that it was our last night. He’d got a bottle of red wine from some where; I didn’t like it much. Alec drank most of it. And then I asked him, “Is this good-bye”—whether it was all over.’

‘What did he say?’

‘He said there was a job he’d got to do. I didn’t really understand it all, not really.’

There was a very long silence and the little man looked more worried than ever. Finally he asked her:

‘Do you believe that?’

‘I don’t know.’ She was suddenly terrified for Alec, and she didn’t know why. The man asked:

‘Leamas has got two children by his marriage, did he tell you?’ Liz said nothing. ‘In spite of that he gave your name as next of kin. Why do you think he did that?’ The little man seemed embarrassed by his own question. He was looking at his hands, which were pudgy and clasped together on his lap. Liz blushed.

‘I was in love with him,’ she replied.

‘Was he in love with you?’

‘Perhaps. I don’t know.’

‘Are you still in love with him?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did he ever say he would come back?’ asked the younger man.

‘No.’

‘But he did say good-bye to you?’ the other asked quickly.

‘Did he say good-bye to you?’ The little man repeated his question slowly, kindly. ‘Nothing more can happen to him, I promise you. But we want to help him, and if you have any idea of why he hit Ford, if you have the slightest notion from something he said, perhaps casually, or something he did, then tell us for Alec’s sake.’

Liz shook her head.

‘Please go,’ she said, ‘please don’t ask any more questions. Please go now.’

As he got to the door, the elder man hesitated, then took a card from his wallet and put it on the table, gingerly, as if it might make a noise. Liz thought he was a very shy little man.

‘If you ever want any help—if anything happens about Leamas or . . . ring me up,’ he said. ‘Do you understand?’

‘Who are you?’

‘I’m a friend of Alec Leamas.’ He hesitated. ‘Another thing,’ he added, ‘one last question. Did Alec know you were . . . did Alec know about the Party?’

‘Yes,’ she replied, hopelessly, ‘I told him.’

‘Does the Party know about you and Alec?’

‘I’ve told you. No one knew.’ Then, white-faced, she cried out suddenly, ‘Where is he; tell me where he is. Why won’t you tell me where he is? I can help him, don’t you see; I’ll look after him . . . even if he’s gone mad, I don’t care, I swear I don’t . . . I wrote to him in prison; I shouldn’t have done, I know. I just said he could come back any time. I’d wait for him always . . .’ She couldn’t speak any more, just sobbed and sobbed, standing there in the middle of the room, her broken face buried in her hands; the little man watching her.

‘He’s gone abroad,’ he said gently. ‘We don’t quite know where he is. He isn’t mad, but he shouldn’t have said all that to you. It was a pity.’

The younger man said:

‘We’ll see you’re looked after. For money and that kind of thing.’

‘Who are you?’ Liz asked again.

‘Friends of Alec,’ the young man repeated; ‘good friends.’

She heard them go quietly down the stairs and into the street. From her window she watched them get into the small black car and drive away in the direction of the park.

Then she remembered the card. Going to the table she picked it up and held it to the light. It was expensively done, more than a policeman could afford, she thought. Engraved. No rank in front of the name, no police station or anything. Just the name with ‘Mister’—and whoever heard of a policeman living in Chelsea?’

‘Mr George Smiley. 9 Bywater Street, Chelsea.’ Then the telephone number underneath.

It was very strange.

12

EAST

Leamas unfastened his seat-belt.

It is said that men condemned to death are subject to sudden moments of elation; as if, like moths in the fire, their destruction were coincidental with attainment. Following directly upon his decision, Leamas was aware of a comparable sensation; relief, short-lived but consoling, sustained him for a time. It was followed by fear and hunger.

He was slowing down. Control was right.

He’d noticed it first during the Riemeck case, early last year. Karl had sent a message: he’d got something special for him and was making one of his rare visits to Western Germany; some legal conference at Karlsruhe. Leamas had managed to get an air passage to Cologne, and picked up a car at the airport. It was still quite early in the morning and he’d hoped to miss most of the autobahn traffic to Karlsruhe but the heavy lorries were already on the move. He drove seventy kilometres in half an hour, weaving between the traffic, taking risks to beat the clock, when a small car, a Fiat probably, nosed its way out into the fast lane forty yards ahead of him. Leamas stamped on the brake, turning his headlights full on and sounding his horn, and by the grace of God he missed it; missed it by a fraction of a second. As he passed the car he saw out of the corner of his eye four children in the back, waving and laughing, and the stupid, frightened face of their father at the wheel. He drove on, cursing, and suddenly it happened; suddenly his hands were shaking feverishly, his face was burning, his heart palpitating wildly. He managed to pull off the road into a lay-by, scrambled out of the car and stood breathing heavily, staring at the hurtling stream of giant lorries. He had a vision of the little car caught among them, pounded and smashed, until there was nothing left, nothing but the frenetic whine of klaxons and the blue lights flashing; and the bodies of the children, torn, like the murdered refugees on the road across the dunes.

He drove very slowly the rest of the way and missed his meeting with Karl.

He never drove again without some corner of his memory recalling the tousled children waving to him from the back of that car, and their father grasping the wheel like a farmer at the shafts of a hand plough.

Control would call it fever.

He sat dully in his seat over the wing. There was an American woman next to him wearing high-heeled shoes in polythene wrappers. He had a momentary notion of passing her some note for the people in Berlin, but he discarded it at once. She’d think he was making a pass at her, Peters would see it. Besides, what was the point? Control knew what had happened; Control had made it happen. There was nothing to say.

He wondered what would become of him. Control hadn’t talked about that—only about the technique:

‘Don’t give it to them all at once, make them work for it. Confuse them with detail, leave things out, go back on your tracks. Be testy, be cussed, be difficult. Drink like a fish; don’t give way on the ideology, they won’t trust that. They want to deal with a man they’ve bought; they want the clash of opposites, Alec, not some half-cock convert. Above all, they want to deduce. The ground’s prepared; we did it long ago, little things, difficult clues. You’re the last stage in the treasure hunt.’

He’d had to agree to do it; you can’t back out of the big fight when all the preliminary ones have been fought for you.

‘One thing I can promise you: it’s worth it. It’s worth it for our special interest, Alec. Keep alive and we’ve won a great victory.’

He didn’t think he could stand torture. He remembered a book by Koestler where the old revolutionary had conditioned himself for torture by holding lighted matches to his fingers. He hadn’t read much but he’d read that and he remembered it.

It was nearly dark as they landed at Tempelhof. Leamas watched the lights of Berlin rise to meet them, felt the thud as the plane touched down, saw the Customs and immigration officials move forward out of the half light.

For a moment Leamas was anxious lest some former acquaintance should chance to recognise him at the airport. As they walked side by side, Peters and he, along the interminable corridors, through the cursory Customs and immigration check, and still no familiar face turned to greet him, he realised that his anxiety had in reality been hope; hope that somehow his tacit decision to go on would be revoked by circumstance.

It interested him that Peters no longer bothered to disown him; it was as if Peters regarded West Berlin as safe ground, where vigilance and security could be relaxed; a mere technical staging post to the East.

They were walking through the big reception hall to the main entrance when Peters suddenly seemed to alter his mind, abruptly changed direction and led Leamas to a smaller side entrance which gave on to a car park and taxi rank. There Peters hesitated a second, standing beneath the light over the door, then put his suitcase on the ground beside him, deliberately removed his newspaper from beneath his arm, folded it, pushed it into the left pocket of his raincoat and picked up his suitcase again. Immediately, from the direction of the car park, a pair of headlights sprang to life, were dipped and then extinguished.

‘Come on,’ said Peters and started to walk briskly across the tarmac, Leamas following more slowly. As they reached the first row of cars the rear door of a black Mercedes was opened from the inside, and the courtesy light went on. Peters, ten yards ahead of Leamas, went quickly to the car, spoke softly to the driver, then called to Leamas.

‘Here’s the car. Be quick.’

It was an old Mercedes 180 and he got in without a word. Peters sat beside him in the back. As they pulled out they overtook a small DKW with two men sitting in the front. Twenty yards down the road there was a telephone kiosk. A man was talking into the telephone, and he watched them go by, talking all the time. Leamas looked out of the back window and saw the DKW following them. Quite a reception, he thought.

They drove quite slowly. Leamas sat with his hands on his knees, looking straight in front of him. He didn’t want to see Berlin that night. This was his last chance, he knew that. The way he was sitting now he could drive the side of his right hand into Peters’ throat, smashing the promontory of the thyrax. He could get out and run, weaving to avoid the bullets from the car behind. He would be free—there were people in Berlin who would take care of him—he could get away.

He did nothing.

It was so easy crossing the sector border. Leamas had never expected it to be quite that easy. For about ten minutes they dawdled, and Leamas guessed that they had to cross at a pre-arranged time. As they approached the West German checkpoint, the DKW pulled out and overtook them with the ostentatious roar of a laboured engine, and stopped at the police hut. The Mercedes waited thirty yards behind. Two minutes later the red and white pole lifted to let through the DKW and as it did so both cars drove over together, the Mercedes engine screaming in second gear, the driver pressing himself back against his seat, holding the wheel at arms’ length.

As they crossed the fifty yards which separated the two checkpoints, Leamas was dimly aware of the new fortifications on the Eastern side of the wall—dragons’ teeth, observation towers and double aprons of barbed wire. Things had brightened up.

The Mercedes didn’t stop at the second checkpoint; the booms were already lifted and they drove straight through, the Vopos just watching them through binoculars. The DKW had disappeared, and when Leamas sighted it ten minutes later it was behind them again. They were driving fast now—Leamas had thought they would stop in East Berlin, change cars perhaps, and congratulate one another on a successful operation, but they drove on eastwards through the city.

‘Where are we going?’ he asked Peters.

‘We are there. The German Democratic Republic. They have arranged accommodation for you.’

‘I thought we’d be going further east.’

‘We are. We are spending a day or two here first. We thought the Germans ought to have a talk with you.’

‘I see.’

‘After all, most of your work has been on the German side. I sent them details from your statement.’

‘And they asked to see me?’

‘They’ve never had anything quite like you, nothing quite so . . . near the source. My people agreed that they should have the chance to meet you.’

‘And from there? Where do we go from Germany?’

‘East again.’

‘Who will I see on the German side?’

‘Does it matter?’

‘Not particularly. I know most of the Abteilung people by name, that’s all. I just wondered.’

‘Who would you expect to meet?’

‘Fiedler,’ Leamas replied promptly, ‘deputy head of security. Mundt’s man. He does all the big interrogations. He’s a bastard.’

‘Why?’

‘A savage little bastard. I’ve heard about him. He caught an agent of Peter Guillam’s and bloody nearly killed him.’

‘Espionage is not a cricket game,’ Peters observed sourly and after that they sat in silence. So it is Fiedler, Leamas thought.

Leamas knew Fiedler all right. He knew him from the photographs on the file and the accounts of his former subordinates. A slim, neat man, quite young, smooth-faced. Dark hair, bright brown eyes; intelligent and savage, as Leamas had said. A lithe, quick body containing a patient, retentive mind; a man seemingly without ambition for himself but remorseless in the destruction of others. Fiedler was a rarity in the Abteilung—he took no part in its intrigues, seemed content to live in Mundt’s shadow without prospect of promotion. He could not be labelled as a member of this or that clique; even those who had worked close to him in the Abteilung could not say where he stood in its power complex. Fiedler was a solitary; feared, disliked and mistrusted. Whatever motives he had were concealed beneath a cloak of destructive sarcasm.

‘Fiedler is our best bet,’ Control had explained. They’d been sitting together over dinner—Leamas, Control and Peter Guillam—in the dreary little seven-dwarfs house in Surrey where Control lived with his beady wife, surrounded by carved Indian tables with brass tops. ‘Fiedler is the acolyte who one day will stab the high priest in the back. He’s the only man who’s a match for Mundt’—here Guillam had nodded—‘and he hates his guts. Fiedler’s a Jew of course, and Mundt is quite the other thing. Not at all a good mixture. It has been our job,’ he declared, indicating Guillam and himself, ‘to give Fiedler the weapon with which to destroy Mundt. It will be yours, my dear Leamas, to encourage him to use it. Indirectly, of course, because you’ll never meet him. At least I certainly hope you won’t.’

They’d all laughed then, Guillam too. It had seemed a good joke at the time; good by Control’s standards anyway.

It must have been after midnight.

For some time they had been travelling an unmade road, partly through a wood and partly across open country. Now they stopped and a moment later the DKW drew up beside them. As he and Peters got out Leamas noticed that there were now three people in the second car. Two were already getting out. The third was sitting in the back seat looking at some papers by the light from the car roof, a slight figure half in shadow.

They had parked by some disused stables; the building lay thirty yards back. In the headlights of the car Leamas had glimpsed a low farmhouse with walls of timber and whitewashed brick. They got out. The moon was up, and shone so brightly that the wooded hills behind were sharply defined against the pale night sky. They walked to the house, Peters and Leamas leading and the two men behind. The other man in the second car had still made no attempt to move; he remained there, reading.

As they reached the door Peters stopped, waiting for the other two to catch them up. One of them carried a bunch of keys in his left hand, and while he fiddled with them the other stood off, his hands in his pockets, covering him.

‘They’re taking no chances,’ Leamas observed to Peters, ‘what do they think I am?’

‘They are not paid to think,’ Peters replied, and turning to one of them he asked in German:

‘Is he coming?’

The German shrugged and looked back towards the car.

‘He’ll come,’ he said; ‘he likes to come alone.’

They went into the house, the man leading the way. It was got up like a hunting lodge, part old, part new. It was badly lit with pale overhead lights. The place had a neglected, musty air as if it had been opened for the occasion. There were little touches of officialdom here and there—a notice of what to do in case of fire, institutional green paint on the door and heavy spring-cartridge locks; and in the drawing-room, which was quite comfortably done, dark, heavy furniture, badly scratched, and the inevitable photographs of Soviet leaders. To Leamas these lapses from anonymity signified the involuntary identification of the Abteilung with bureaucracy. That was something he was familiar with in the Circus.

Peters sat down, and Leamas did the same. For ten minutes, perhaps longer, they waited, then Peters spoke to one of the two men standing awkwardly at the other end of the room.

‘Go and tell him we’re waiting. And find us some food, we’re hungry.’ As the man moved towards the door Peters called, ‘And whisky—tell them to bring whisky and some glasses.’ The man gave an unco-operative shrug of his heavy shoulders and went out, leaving the door open behind him.

‘Have you been here before?’ asked Leamas.

‘Yes,’ Peters replied, ‘several times.’

‘What for?’

‘This kind of thing. Not the same, but our kind of work.’

‘With Fiedler?’

‘Yes.’

‘Is he good?’

Peters shrugged. ‘For a Jew, he’s not bad,’ he replied, and Leamas, hearing a sound from the other end of the room, turned and saw Fiedler standing in the doorway. In one hand he held a bottle of whisky, and in the other, glasses and some mineral water. He couldn’t have been more than five foot six. He wore a dark blue single-breasted suit; the jacket was cut too long. He was sleek and slightly animal; his eyes were brown and bright. He was not looking at them but at the guard beside the door.

‘Go away,’ he said. He had a slight Saxonian twang: ‘Go away and tell the other one to bring us food.’

‘I’ve told him,’ Peters called; ‘they know already. But they’ve brought nothing.’

‘They are great snobs,’ Fiedler observed drily in English. ‘They think we should have servants for the food.’

Fiedler had spent the war in Canada. Leamas remembered that, now that he detected the accent. His parents had been German Jewish refugees, Marxists, and it was not until 1946 that the family returned home, anxious to take part, whatever the personal cost, in the construction of Stalin’s Germany.

‘Hello,’ he added to Leamas, almost by the way, ‘glad to see you.’

‘Hello, Fiedler.’

‘You’ve reached the end of the road.’

‘What the hell d’you mean?’ asked Leamas quickly.

‘I mean that contrary to anything Peters told you, you are not going further east. Sorry.’ He sounded amused.

Leamas turned to Peters.

‘Is this true?’ His voice was shaking with rage. ‘Is it true? Tell me!’

Peters nodded: ‘Yes. I am the go-between. We had to do it that way. I’m sorry,’ he added.

‘Why?’

‘Force majeure,’ Fiedler put in. ‘Your initial interrogation took place in the West, where only an embassy could provide the kind of link we needed. The German Democratic Republic has no embassies in the West. Not yet. Our liaison section therefore arranged for us to enjoy facilities and communications and immunities which are at present denied to us.’

‘You bastard,’ hissed Leamas, ‘you lousy bastard! You knew I wouldn’t trust myself to your rotten Service; that was the reason, wasn’t it? That was why you used a Russian.’

‘We used the Soviet Embassy at The Hague. What else could we do? Up till then it was our operation. That’s perfectly reasonable. Neither we nor anyone else could have known that your own people in England would get on to you so quickly.’

‘No? Not even when you put them on to me yourselves? Isn’t that what happened, Fiedler? Well, isn’t it?’ Always remember to dislike them, Control had said. Then they will treasure what they get out of you.

‘That is an absurd suggestion,’ Fiedler replied shortly. Glancing towards Peters he added something in Russian. Peters nodded and stood up.

‘Good-bye,’ he said to Leamas. ‘Good luck.’

He smiled wearily, nodded to Fiedler, then walked to the door. He put his hand on the door handle, then turned and called to Leamas again:

‘Good luck.’ He seemed to want Leamas to say something, but Leamas might not have heard. He had turned very pale, he held his hands loosely across his body, the thumbs upwards as if he were going to fight. Peters remained standing at the door.

‘I should have known,’ said Leamas, and his voice had the odd, faulty note of a very angry man, ‘I should have guessed you’d never have the guts to do your own dirty work, Fiedler. It’s typical of your rotten little half-country and your squalid little Service that you get big uncle to do your pimping for you. You’re not a country at all, you’re not a government, you’re a fifth-rate dictatorship of political neurotics.’ Jabbing his finger in Fiedler’s direction, he shouted:

‘I know you, you sadistic bastard; it’s typical of you. You were in Canada in the war, weren’t you; a bloody good place to be then, wasn’t it? I’ll bet you stuck your fat head into Mummy’s apron any time an aeroplane flew over. What are you now? A creeping little acolyte to Mundt and twenty-two Russian divisions sitting on your mother’s doorstep. Well, I pity you, Fiedler, the day you wake up and find them gone. There’ll be a killing then, and not Mummy or big uncle will save you from getting what you deserve.’

Fiedler shrugged.

‘Regard it as a visit to the dentist, Leamas. The sooner it’s all done, the sooner you can go home. Have some food and go to bed.’

‘You know perfectly well I can’t go home,’ Leamas retorted. ‘You’ve seen to that. You blew me sky high in England, you had to, both of you. You knew damn well I’d never come here unless I had to.’

Fiedler looked at his thin, strong fingers.

‘This is hardly the time to philosophise,’ he said, ‘but you can’t really complain, you know. All our work—yours and mine—is rooted in the theory that the whole is more important than the individual. That is why a Communist sees his secret service as the natural extension of his arm, and that is why in your own country intelligence is shrouded in a kind of pudeur anglaise. The exploitation of individuals can only be justified by the collective need, can’t it? I find it slightly ridiculous that you should be so indignant. We are not here to observe the ethical laws of English country life. After all,’ he added silkily, ‘your own behaviour has not, from the purist’s point of view, been irreproachable.’

Leamas was watching Fiedler with an expression of disgust.

‘I know your set-up. You’re Mundt’s poodle, aren’t you? They say you want his job. I suppose you’ll get it now. It’s time the Mundt dynasty ended; perhaps this is it.’

‘I don’t understand,’ Fiedler replied.

‘I’m your big success, aren’t I?’ Leamas sneered. Fiedler seemed to reflect for a moment, then he shrugged and said, ‘The operation was successful. Whether you were worth it is questionable. We shall see. But it was a good operation. It satisfied the only requirement of our profession: it worked.’

‘I suppose you take the credit?’ Leamas persisted, with a glance in the direction of Peters.

‘There is no question of credit,’ Fiedler replied crisply, ‘none at all.’ He sat down on the arm of a sofa, looked at Leamas thoughtfully for a moment and then said:

‘Nevertheless you are right to be indignant about one thing. Who told your people we had picked you up? We didn’t. You may not believe me, but it happens to be true. We didn’t tell them. We didn’t even want them to know. We had ideas then of getting you to work for us later—ideas which I now realise to be ridiculous. So who told them? You were lost, drifting around, you had no address, no ties, no friends. Then how the devil did they know you’d gone? Someone told them—scarcely Ashe or Kiever, since they are both now under arrest.’

‘Under arrest?’

‘So it appears. Not specifically for their work on your case, but there were other things . . .’

‘Well, well.’

‘It is true, what I said just now. We would have been content with Peters’ report from Holland. You could have had your money and gone. But you hadn’t told us everything; and I want to know everything. After all, your presence here provides us with problems too, you know.’

‘Well, you’ve boobed. I know damn’ well—and you’re welcome to it.’

There was a silence, during which Peters, with an abrupt and by no means friendly nod in Fiedler’s direction, quietly let himself out of the room.

Fiedler picked up the bottle of whisky and poured a little into each glass.

‘We have no soda, I’m afraid,’ he said. ‘Do you like water? I ordered soda, but they brought some wretched lemonade.’

‘Oh, go to hell,’ said Leamas. He suddenly felt very tired.

Fiedler shook his head.

‘You are a very proud man,’ he observed, ‘but never mind. Eat your supper and go to bed.’

One of the guards came in with a tray of food—black bread, sausage and cold, green salad.

‘It is a little crude,’ said Fiedler, ‘but quite satisfying. No potato, I’m afraid. There is a temporary shortage of potato.’

They began eating in silence, Fiedler very carefully, like a man who counted his calories.

The guards showed Leamas to his bedroom. They let him carry his own luggage—the same luggage that Kiever had given him before he left England—and he walked between them along the wide central corridor which led through the house from the front door. They came to a large double door, painted dark green, and one of the guards unlocked it; they beckoned to Leamas to go first. He pushed open the door and found himself in a small barrack bedroom with two bunk beds, a chair and a rudimentary desk. It was like something in prison camp. There were pictures of girls on the walls and the windows were shuttered. At the far end of the room was another door. They signalled him forward again. Putting down his baggage he went and opened the door. The second room was identical to the first, but there was one bed and the walls were bare.

‘You bring those cases,’ he said; ‘I’m tired.’ He lay on the bed, fully dressed, and within a few minutes he was fast asleep.

A sentry woke him with breakfast: black bread and ersatz coffee. He got out of bed and went to the window.

The house stood on a high hill. The ground fell steeply away from beneath his window, the crowns of pine trees visible above the crest. Beyond them, spectacular in their symmetry, unending hills, heavy with trees, stretched into the distance. Here and there a timber gully or fire-break formed a thin brown divide between the pines, seeming like Aaron’s rod miraculously to hold apart massive seas of encroaching forest. There was no sign of man; not a house or church, not even the ruin of some previous habitation—only the road, the yellow unmade road, a crayon line across the basin of the valley. There was no sound. It seemed incredible that anything so vast could be so still. The day was cold but clear. It must have rained in the night; the ground was moist, and the whole landscape so sharply defined against the white sky that Leamas could distinguish even single trees on the furthest hills.

He dressed slowly, drinking the sour coffee meanwhile. He had nearly finished dressing and was about to start eating the bread when Fiedler came into the room.

‘Good morning,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Don’t let me keep you from your breakfast.’ He sat down on the bed. Leamas had to hand it to Fiedler; he had guts. Not that there was anything brave about coming to see him—the sentries, Leamas supposed, were still in the adjoining room. But there was an endurance, a defined purpose in his manner which Leamas could sense and admire.

‘You have presented us with an intriguing problem,’ he observed.

‘I’ve told you all I know.’

‘Oh no.’ He smiled. ‘Oh no, you haven’t. You have told us all you are conscious of knowing.’

‘Bloody clever,’ Leamas muttered pushing his food aside and lighting a cigarette—his last.

‘Let me ask you a question,’ Fiedler suggested with the exaggerated bonhomie of a man proposing a party game. ‘As an experienced intelligence officer, what would you do with the information you have given us?’

‘What information?’

‘My dear Leamas, you have only given us one piece of intelligence. You have told us about Riemeck: we knew about Riemeck. You have told us about the dispositions of your Berlin organisation, about its personalities and its agents. That, if I may say so, is old hat. Accurate—yes. Good background, fascinating reading, here and there good collateral, here and there a little fish which we shall take out of the pool. But not—if I may be crude—not fifteen thousand pounds’ worth of intelligence. Not,’ he smiled again, ‘at current rates.’

‘Listen,’ said Leamas, ‘I didn’t propose this deal—you did. You, Kiever and Peters. I didn’t come crawling to your cissy friends, peddling old intelligence. You people made the running, Fiedler; you named the price and took the risk. Apart from that, I haven’t had a bloody penny. So don’t blame me if the operation’s a flop.’ Make them come to you, Leamas thought.

‘It isn’t a flop,’ Fiedler replied, ‘it isn’t finished. It can’t be. You haven’t told us what you know. I said you had given us one piece of intelligence. I’m talking about Rolling Stone. Let me ask you again—what would you do if I, if Peters or someone like us, had told you a similar story?’

Leamas shrugged:

‘I’d feel uneasy,’ he said; ‘it’s happened before. You get an indication, several perhaps, that there’s a spy in some department or at a certain level. So what? You can’t arrest the whole government service. You can’t lay traps for a whole department. You just sit tight and hope for more. You bear it in mind. In Rolling Stone you can’t even tell what country he’s working in.’

‘You are an operator, Leamas,’ Fiedler observed with a laugh, ‘not an evaluator. That is clear. Let me ask you some elementary questions.’

Leamas said nothing.

‘The file—the actual file on operation Rolling Stone. What colour was it?’

‘Grey with a red cross on it—that means limited subscription.’

‘Was anything attached to the outside?’

‘Yes, the Caveat. That’s the subscription label. With a legend saying that any unauthorised person not named op this label finding the file in his possession must at once return it unopened to Banking Section.’

‘Who was on the subscription list?’

‘For Rolling Stone?’

‘Yes.’

‘PA to Control, Control, Control’s secretary; Banking Section, Miss Bream of Special Registry and Satellites Four. That’s all, I think. And Special Despatch, I suppose—I’m not sure about them.’

‘Satellites Four? What do they do?’

‘Iron Curtain countries excluding the Soviet Union and China. The Zone.’

‘You mean the GDR?’

‘I mean the Zone.’

‘Isn’t it unusual for a whole section to be on a subscription list?’ ‘Yes, it probably is. I wouldn’t know—I’ve never handled limited subscription stuff before. Except in Berlin, of course; it was all different there.’

‘Who was in Satellites Four at that time?’

‘Oh, God. Guillam, Haverlake, de Jong, I think. De Jong was just back from Berlin.’

‘Were they all allowed to see this file?’

‘I don’t know, Fiedler,’ Leamas retorted irritably; ‘and if I were you . . .’

‘Then isn’t it odd that a whole section was on the subscription list while all the rest of the subscribers are individuals.’

‘I tell you I don’t know—how could I know? I was just a clerk in all this.’

‘Who carried the file from one subscriber to another?’

‘Secretaries, I suppose—I can’t remember. It’s bloody months since . . .’

‘Then why weren’t the secretaries on the list? Control’s Secretary was.’ There was a moment’s silence.

‘No, you’re right; I remember now,’ Leamas said, a note of surprise in his voice; ‘we passed it by hand.’

‘Who else in Banking dealt with that file?’

‘No one. It was my pigeon when I joined the section. One of the women had done it before, but when I came I took it over and they were taken off the list.’

‘Then you alone passed the file by hand to the next reader?’

‘Yes . . . yes, I suppose I did.’

‘To whom did you pass it?’

‘I . . . I can’t remember.’

‘Think!’ Fiedler had not raised his voice, but it contained a sudden urgency which took Leamas by surprise.

‘To Control’s PA, I think, to show what action we had taken or recommended.’

‘Who brought the file?’

‘What do you mean?’ Leamas sounded off balance.

‘Who brought you the file to read? Somebody on the list must have brought it to you.’

Leamas’ fingers touched his cheek for a moment in an involuntary nervous gesture.

‘Yes, they must. It’s difficult, you see, Fiedler; I was putting back a lot of drink in those days’; his tone was oddly conciliatory. ‘You don’t realise how hard it is to . . .’

‘I ask you again. Think. Who brought you the file?’

Leamas sat down at the table and shook his head.

‘I can’t remember. It may come back to me. At the moment I just can’t remember, really I can’t. It’s no good chasing it.’

‘It can’t have been Control’s girl, can it? You always handed the file back to Control’s PA. You said so. So those on the list must all have seen it before Control.’

‘Yes, that’s it, I suppose.’

‘Then there is Special Registry, Miss Bream.’

‘She was just the woman who ran the strong room for subscription list files. That’s where the file was kept when it wasn’t in action.’

‘Then,’ said Fiedler silkily, ‘it must have been Satellites Four who brought it, mustn’t it?’

‘Yes, I suppose it must,’ said Leamas helplessly, as if he were not quite up to Fiedler’s brilliance.

‘Which floor did Satellites Four work on?’

‘The second.’

‘And Banking?’

‘The fourth. Next to Special Registry.’

‘Do you remember who brought it up? Or do you remember, for instance, going downstairs ever to collect the file from them?’

In despair, Leamas shook his head; then suddenly he turned to Fiedler and cried:

‘Yes, yes I do! Of course I do! I got it from Peter!’ Leamas seemed to have woken up, his face was flushed, excited. ‘That’s it: I once collected the file from Peter in his room. We chatted together about Norway. We’d served there together, you see.’

‘Peter Guillam?’

‘Yes, Peter—I’d forgotten about him. He’d come back from Ankara a few months before. He was on the list! Peter was—of course! That’s it. It was Satellite Four and PG in brackets, Peter’s initials. Someone else had done it before and Special Registry had glued a bit of white paper over the old name and put Peter’s initials.’

‘What territory did Guillam cover?’

‘The Zone. East Germany. Economic stuff; ran a small section, sort of backwater. He was the chap. He brought the file up to me once too, I remember that now. He didn’t run agents though: I don’t quite know how he came into it—Peter and a couple of others were doing some research job on food shortages. Evaluation really.’

‘Did you not discuss it with him?’

‘No, that’s taboo. It isn’t done with subscription files. I got a homily from the woman in Special Registry about it—Bream—no discussion, no questions.’

‘But taking into account the elaborate security precautions surrounding Rolling Stone, it is possible, is it not, that Guillam’s so-called research job might have involved the partial running of this agent, Rolling Stone?’

‘I’ve told Peters,’ Leamas almost shouted, banging his fist on the desk, ‘it’s just bloody silly to imagine that any operation could have been run against East Germany without my knowledge—without the knowledge of the Berlin organisation. I would have known, d’you see? How many times do I have to say that? I would have known!’

‘Quite so,’ said Fiedler softly, ‘of course you would.’ He stood up and went to the window.

‘You should see it in the Autumn,’ he said, looking out; ‘it’s magnificent when the beeches are on the turn.’

13

PINS OR PAPER CLIPS

Fiedler loved to ask questions. Sometimes, because he was a lawyer, he asked them for his own pleasure alone, to demonstrate the discrepancy between evidence and perfective truth. He possessed, however, that persistent inquisitiveness which for journalists and lawyers is an end in itself.

They went for a walk that afternoon, following the gravel road down into the valley, then branching into the forest along a broad, pitted track lined with felled timber. All the time, Fiedler probed, giving nothing. About the building in Cambridge Circus, and the people who worked there. What social class did they come from, what parts of London did they inhabit, did husbands and wives work in the same Department? He asked about the pay, the leave, the morale, the canteen; he asked about their love-life, their gossip, their philosophy. Most of all he asked about their philosophy.

To Leamas that was the most difficult question of all.

‘What do you mean, a philosophy?’ he replied; ‘we’re not

Marxists, we’re nothing. Just people.’

‘Are you Christians, then?’

‘Not many, I shouldn’t think. I don’t know many.’

‘What makes them do it, then?’ Fiedler persisted; ‘they must have a philosophy.’

‘Why must they? Perhaps they don’t know; don’t even care. Not everyone has a philosophy,’ Leamas answered, a little helplessly.

‘Then tell me what is your philosophy?’

‘Oh for Christ’s sake!’ Leamas snapped, and they walked on in silence for a while. But Fiedler was not to be put off.

‘If they do not know what they want, how can they be so certain they are right?’

‘Who the hell said they were?’ Leamas replied irritably.

‘But what is the justification then? What is it? For us it is easy, as I said to you last night. The Abteilung and organisations like it are the natural extension of the Party’s arm. They are in the vanguard of the fight for Peace and Progress. They are to the party what the party is to socialism: they are the vanguard. Stalin said so’—he smiled drily, ‘it is not fashionable to quote Stalin—but he said once “half a million liquidated is a statistic, and one man killed in a traffic accident is a national tragedy.” He was laughing, you see, at the bourgeois sensitivities of the mass. He was a great cynic. But what he meant is still true: a movement which protects itself against counter-revolution can hardly stop at the exploitation—or the elimination, Leamas—of a few individuals. It is all one, we have never pretended to be wholly just in the process of rationalising society. Some Roman said it, didn’t he, in the Christian Bible—it is expedient that one man should die for the benefit of many.’

‘I expect so,’ Leamas replied wearily.

‘Then what do you think? What is your philosophy?’

‘I just think the whole lot of you are bastards,’ said Leamas savagely.

Fiedler nodded, ‘That is a viewpoint I understand. It is primitive, negative and very stupid—but it is a viewpoint, it exists. But what about the rest of the Circus?’

‘I don’t know. How should I know?’

‘Have you never discussed philosophy with them?’

‘No. We’re not Germans.’ He hesitated, then added vaguely: ‘I suppose they don’t like Communism.’

‘And that justifies, for instance, the taking of human life? That justifies the bomb in the crowded restaurant; that justifies your write-off rate of agents—all that?’

Leamas shrugged. ‘I suppose so.’

‘You see, for us it does,’ Fiedler continued, ‘I myself would have put a bomb in a restaurant if it brought us further along the road. Afterwards I would draw the balance—so many women, so many children; and so far along the road. But Christians—and yours is a Christian society—Christians may not draw the balance.’

‘Why not. They’ve got to defend themselves, haven’t they?’

‘But they believe in the sanctity of human life. They believe every man has a soul which can be saved. They believe in sacrifice.’

‘I don’t know. I don’t much care,’ Leamas added. ‘Stalin didn’t either, did he?’

Fiedler smiled; ‘I like the English,’ he said, almost to himself; ‘my father did too. He was very fond of the English.’

‘That gives me a nice, warm feeling,’ Leamas retorted, and relapsed into silence.

They stopped while Fiedler gave Leamas a cigarette and lit it for him.

They were climbing steeply now. Leamas liked the exercise, walking ahead with long strides, his shoulders thrust forward. Fiedler followed, slight and agile, like a terrier behind his master. They must have been walking for an hour, perhaps more, when suddenly the trees broke above them and the sky appeared. They had reached the top of a small hill, and could look down on the solid mass of pine broken only here and there by grey clusters of beech. Across the valley Leamas could glimpse the hunting lodge, perched below the crest of the opposite hill, low and dark against the trees. In the middle of the clearing was a rough bench beside a pile of logs and the damp remnants of a charcoal fire.

‘We’ll sit down for a moment,’ said Fiedler, ‘then we must go back.’ He paused. ‘Tell me: this money, these large sums in foreign banks—what did you think they were for?’

‘What do you mean? I’ve told you, they were payments to an agent.’

‘An agent from behind the Iron Curtain?’

‘Yes, I thought so,’ Leamas replied wearily.

‘Why did you think so?’

‘First, it was a hell of a lot of money. Then the complications of paying him; the special security. And of course, Control being mixed up in it.’

‘What did you think the agent did with the money?’

‘Look, I’ve told you—I don’t know. I don’t even know if he collected it. I didn’t know anything—I was just the bloody office boy.’

‘What did you do with the pass books for the accounts?’

‘I handed them in as soon as I got back to London—together with my phoney passport.’

‘Did the Copenhagen or Helsinki banks ever write to you in London—to your alias, I mean?’

‘I don’t know. I suppose any letters would have been passed straight to Control anyway.’

‘The false signatures you used to open the accounts—Control had a sample of them?’

‘Yes. I practised them a lot and they had samples.’

‘More than one?’

‘Yes. Whole pages.’

‘I see. Then letters could have gone to the banks after you had opened the accounts. You need not have known. The signatures could have been forged and the letters sent without your knowledge.’

‘Yes. That’s right. I suppose that’s what happened. I signed a lot of blank sheets too. I always assumed someone else took care of the correspondence.’

‘But you never did actually know of such correspondence?’

Leamas shook his head: ‘You’ve got it all wrong,’ he said; ‘you’ve got it all out of proportion. There was a lot of paper going around—this was just part of the day’s work. It wasn’t something I gave much thought to. Why should I? It was hush-hush, but I’ve been in on things all my life where you only know a little and someone else knows the rest. Besides, paper bores me stiff. I didn’t lose any sleep on it. I liked the trips of course—I drew operational subsistence which helped. But I didn’t sit at my desk all day, wondering about Rolling Stone. Besides,’ he added a little shamefacedly, ‘I was hitting the bottle a bit.’

‘So you said,’ Fiedler commented, ‘and of course, I believe you.’ ‘I don’t give a damn whether you believe me or not,’ Leamas rejoined hotly.

Fiedler smiled.

‘I am glad. That is your virtue,’ he said, ‘that is your great virtue. It is the virtue of indifference. A little resentment here, a little pride there, but that is nothing: the distortions of a tape recorder. You are objective. It occurred to me,’ Fiedler continued after a slight pause, ‘that you could still help us to establish whether any of that money was ever drawn. There is nothing to stop you writing to each bank and asking for a current statement. We could say you were staying in Switzerland; use an accommodation address. Do you see any objection to that?’

‘It might work. It depends on whether Control has been corresponding with the bank independently, over my forged signature. It might not fit in.’

‘I do not see that we have much to lose.’

‘What have you got to win?’

‘If the money has been drawn, which I agree is doubtful, we shall know where the agent was on a certain day. That seems to be a useful thing to know.’

‘You’re dreaming. You’ll never find him, Fiedler, not on that kind of information. Once he’s in the West he can go to any Consulate, even in a small town, and get a visa for another country. How are you any the wiser? You don’t even know whether the man is East German. What are you after?’

Fiedler did not answer at once. He was gazing distractedly across the valley.

‘You said you are accustomed to knowing only a little, and I cannot answer your question without telling you what you should not know.’ He hesitated, ‘but Rolling Stone was an operation against us, I can assure you.’

‘Us?’

‘The GDR.’ He smiled. ‘The Zone if you prefer. I am not really so sensitive.’

He was watching Fiedler now, his brown eyes resting on him reflectively.

‘But what about me?’ Leamas asked. ‘Suppose I don’t write letters?’ His voice was rising. ‘Isn’t it time to talk about me, Fiedler!’

Fiedler nodded.

‘Why not?’ he replied, agreeably. There was a moment’s silence, then Leamas said:

‘I’ve done my bit, Fiedler. You and Peters between you have got all I know. I never agreed to write letters to banks—it could be bloody dangerous, a thing like that. That doesn’t worry you, I know. As far as you’re concerned I’m expendable.’

‘Now let me be frank,’ Fiedler replied. ‘There are, as you know, two stages in the interrogation of a defector. The first stage in your case is nearly complete: you have told us all we can reasonably record. You have not told us whether your Service favours pins or paper clips because we haven’t asked you, and because you did not consider the answer worth volunteering. There is a process on both sides of unconscious selection. Now it is always possible—and this is the worrying thing, Leamas—it is always entirely possible that in a month or two we shall unexpectedly and quite desperately need to know about the pins and paper clips. That is normally accounted for in the second stage—that part of the bargain which you refused to accept in Holland.’

‘You mean you’re going to keep me on ice?’

‘The profession of defector,’ Fiedler observed with a smile, ‘demands great patience. Very few are suitably qualified.’

‘How long?’ Leamas insisted.

Fiedler was silent.

‘Well?’

Fiedler spoke with sudden urgency. ‘I give you my word that as soon as I possibly can, I will tell you the answer to your question. Look—I could lie to you, couldn’t I? I could say one month or less, just to keep you sweet. But I am telling you I don’t know because that is the truth. You have given us some indications: until we have run them to earth I cannot listen to talk of letting you go. But afterwards if things are as I think they are, you will need a friend and that friend will be me. I give you my word as a German.’

Leamas was so taken aback that for a moment he was silent.

‘All right,’ he said finally, ‘I’ll play, Fiedler, but if you are stringing me along, somehow I’ll break your neck.’

‘That may not be necessary,’ Fiedler replied evenly.

A man who lives apart, not to others but alone, is exposed to obvious psychological dangers. In itself, the practice of deception is not particularly exacting; it is a matter of experience, of professional expertise, it is a facility most of us can acquire. But while a confidence trickster, a play-actor or a gambler can return from his performance to the ranks of his admirers, the secret agent enjoys no such relief. For him, deception is first a matter of self-defence. He must protect himself not only from without but from within, and against the most natural of impulses; though he earn a fortune, his role may forbid him the purchase of a razor, though he be erudite, it can befall him to mumble nothing but banalities; though he be an affectionate husband and father, he must under all circumstances withhold himself from those in whom he should naturally confide.

Aware of the overwhelming temptations which assail a man permanently isolated in his deceit, Leamas resorted to the course which armed him best; even when he was alone, he compelled himself to live with the personality he had assumed. It is said that Balzac on his deathbed enquired anxiously after the health and prosperity of characters he had created. Similary Leamas, without relinquishing the power of invention, identified himself with what he had invented. The qualities he exhibited to Fiedler, the restless uncertainty, the protective arrogance concealing shame, were not approximations but extensions of qualities he actually possessed; hence also the slight dragging of the feet, the aspect of personal neglect, the indifference to food, and an increasing reliance on alcohol and tobacco. When alone, he remained faithful to these habits. He would even exaggerate them a little, mumbling to himself about the iniquities of his Service.

Only very rarely, as now, going to bed that evening, did he allow himself the dangerous luxury of admitting the great lie he lived.

Control had been phenomenally right. Fiedler was walking like a man led in his sleep, into the net which Control had spread for him. It was uncanny to observe the growing identity of interest between Fiedler and Control: it was as if they had agreed on the same plan, and Leamas had been despatched to fulfil it.

Perhaps that was the answer. Perhaps Fiedler was the special interest Control was fighting so desperately to preserve. In matters of that kind he was wholly uninquisitive: he knew that no conceivable good could come of his deductions. Nevertheless, he hoped to God it was true. It was possible, just possible in that case, that he would get home.

14

LETTER TO A CLIENT

Leamas was still in bed the next morning when Fiedler brought him the letters to sign. One was on the thin, blue writing paper of the Seiler Hotel Alpenblick, Lake Spiez, Switzerland, the other from the Palace Hotel, Gstaad.

Leamas read the first letter:

To the Manager,

The Royal Scandinavian Bank Ltd.,

Copenhagen.

Dear Sir,

I have been travelling for some weeks and have not received any mail from England. Accordingly I have not had your reply to my letter of March 3rd requesting a current statement of the deposit account of which I am a joint signatory with Herr Karlsdorf. To avoid further delay, would you be good enough to forward a duplicate statement to me at the following address, where I shall be staying for two weeks beginning April 21st:

c/o Madame Y. de Sanglot,

13 Avenue des Colombes,

Paris XII,

France.

I apologise for this confusion,

Yours faithfully,

(Robert Lang)

‘What’s all this about a letter of March 3rd?’ he asked. ‘I didn’t write them any letter.’

‘No, you didn’t. As far as we know, no one did. That will worry the bank. If there is any inconsistency between the letter we are sending them now and letters they have had from Control, they will assume the solution is to be found in the missing letter of March 3rd. Their reaction will be to send you the statement as you ask, with a covering note regretting that they have not received your letter of the third.’

The second letter was the same as the first; only the names were different. The address in Paris was the same. Leamas took a blank piece of paper and his fountain pen and wrote half a dozen times in a fluent hand ‘Robert Lang’, then signed the first letter. Sloping his pen backwards he practised the second signature until he was satisfied with it, then wrote ‘Stephen Bennett’ under the second letter.

‘Admirable,’ Fiedler observed, ‘quite admirable.’

‘What do we do now?’

‘They will be posted in Switzerland tomorrow, in Interlaken and Gstaad. Our people in Paris will telegraph the replies to me as soon as they arrive. We shall have the answer in a week.’

‘And until then?’

‘We shall be constantly in one another’s company. I know that is distasteful to you, and I apologise. I thought we could go for walks, drive round in the hills a bit, kill time. I want you to relax and talk; talk about London, about Cambridge Circus and working in the Department; tell me the gossip, talk about the pay, the leave, the rooms, the paper and the people. The pins and the paper clips. I want to know all the little things that don’t matter. Incidentally . . .’ A change of tone.

‘Yes?’

‘We have facilities here for people, who . . . for people who are spending some time with us. Facilities for diversion and so on.’

‘Are you offering me a woman?’ he asked.

‘Yes.’

‘No, thank you. Unlike you, I haven’t reached the stage where I need a pimp.’

Fiedler seemed indifferent to his reply. He went on quickly.

‘But you had a woman in England, didn’t you—the girl in the library?’

Leamas turned on him, his hands open at his sides.

‘One thing!’ he shouted. ‘Just that one thing—don’t ever mention that again, not as a joke, not as a threat, not even to turn the screws, Fiedler, because it won’t work, not ever; I’d dry up, d’you see, you’d never get another bloody word from me as long as I lived. Tell that to them, Fiedler, to Mundt and Stammberger or whichever little alley-cat told you to say it—tell them what I said.’

‘I’ll tell them,’ Fiedler replied; ‘I’ll tell them. It may be too late.’

In the afternoon they went walking again. The sky was dark and heavy, and the air warm.

‘I’ve only been to England once,’ Fiedler observed casually, ‘that was on my way to Canada, with my parents before the war. I was a child then of course. We were there for two days.’

Leamas nodded.

‘I can tell you this now,’ Fiedler continued. ‘I nearly went there a few years back. I was going to replace Mundt on the Steel Mission—did you know he was once in London?’

‘I knew,’ Leamas replied cryptically.

‘I always wondered what it would have been like, that job.’ ‘Usual game of mixing with the other Bloc Missions I suppose. Certain amount of contact with British business—not much of that.’ Leamas sounded bored.

‘But Mundt got about all right: he found it quite easy.’

‘So I hear,’ said Leamas; ‘he even managed to kill a couple of people.’

‘So you heard about that too?’

‘From Peter Guillam. He was in on it with George Smiley. Mundt bloody nearly killed George as well.’

‘The Fennan case,’ Fiedler mused. ‘It was amazing that Mundt managed to escape at all, wasn’t it?’

‘I suppose it was.’

‘You wouldn’t think that a man whose photograph and personal particulars were filed at the Foreign Office as a member of a Foreign Mission would have a chance against the whole of British Security.’

‘From what I hear,’ Leamas said, ‘they weren’t too keen to catch him anyway.’

Fiedler stopped abruptly.

‘What did you say?’

‘Peter Guillam told me he didn’t reckon they wanted to catch Mundt, that’s all I said. We had a different set-up then—an Adviser instead of an Operational Control—a man called Maston. Maston had made a bloody awful mess of the Fennan case from the start, that’s what Guillam said. Peter reckoned that if they’d caught Mundt it would have made a hell of a stink—they’d have tried him and probably hanged him. The dirt that came out in the process would have finished Maston’s career. Peter never knew quite what happened, but he was bloody sure there was no full-scale search for Mundt.’

‘You are sure of that, you are sure Guillam told you that in as many words? No full-scale search?’

‘Of course I am sure.’

‘Guillam never suggested any other reason why they might have let Mundt go?’

‘What do you mean?’

Fiedler shook his head and they walked on along the path.

‘The Steel Mission was closed down after the Fennan case,’ Fiedler observed a moment later, ‘that’s why I didn’t go.’

‘Mundt must have been mad. You may be able to get away with assassination in the Balkans—or here—but not London.’

‘He did get away with it though, didn’t he?’ Fiedler put in quickly. ‘And he did good work.’

‘Like recruiting Kiever and Ashe? God help him.’

‘They ran the Fennan woman for long enough.’

Leamas shrugged.

‘Tell me something else about Karl Riemeck,’ Fiedler began again. ‘He met Control once, didn’t he?’

‘Yes, in Berlin about a year ago, maybe a bit more.’

‘Where did they meet?’

‘We all met together in my flat.’

‘Why?’

‘Control loved to come in on success. We’d got a hell of a lot of good stuff from Karl—I suppose it had gone down well with London. He came out on a short trip to Berlin and asked me to fix up for them to meet.’

‘Did you mind?’

‘Why should I?’

‘He was your agent. You might not have liked him to meet other operators.’

‘Control isn’t an operator; he’s head of Department. Karl knew that and it tickled his vanity.’

‘Were you all three together, all the time?’

‘Yes. Well, not quite. I left them alone for a quarter of an hour or so—not more. Control wanted that—he wanted a few minutes alone with Karl, God knows why, so I left the flat on some excuse, I forget what. Oh—I know, I pretended we’d run out of Scotch. I actually went and collected a bottle from de Jong in fact.’

‘Do you know what passed between them while you were out?’

‘How could I? I wasn’t that interested, anyway.’

‘Didn’t Karl tell you afterwards?’

‘I didn’t ask him. Karl was a cheeky sod in some ways, always pretending he had something over me. I didn’t like the way he sniggered about Control. Mind you, he had every right to snigger—it was a pretty ridiculous performance. We laughed about it together a bit, as a matter of fact. There wouldn’t have been any point in pricking Karl’s vanity; the whole meeting was supposed to give him a shot in the arm.’

‘Was Karl depressed then?’

‘No, far from it. He was spoilt already. He was paid too much, loved too much, trusted too much. It was partly my fault, partly London’s. If we hadn’t spoilt him he wouldn’t have told that bloody woman of his about his network.’

‘Elvira?’

‘Yes.’ They walked on in silence for a while, until Fiedler interrupted his own reverie to observe:

‘I’m beginning to like you. But there’s one thing that puzzles me. It’s odd—it didn’t worry me before I met you.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Why you ever came. Why you defected.’ Leamas was going to say something when Fiedler laughed. ‘I’m afraid that wasn’t very tactful, was it?’ he said.

They spent that week walking in the hills. In the evenings they would return to the lodge, eat a bad meal washed down with a bottle of rank white wine, sit endlessly over their Steinhäger in front of the fire. The fire seemed to be Fiedler’s idea—they didn’t have it to begin with, then one day Leamas overheard him telling a guard to bring logs. Leamas didn’t mind the evenings then; after the fresh air all day, the fire and the rough spirit, he would talk unprompted, rambling on about his service. Leamas supposed it was recorded. He didn’t care.

As each day passed in this way Leamas was aware of an increasing tension in his companion. Once they went out in the DKW—it was late in the evening—and stopped at a call-box. Fiedler left him in the car with the keys and made a long phone call. When he came back Leamas said:

‘Why didn’t you ring from the house?’ But Fiedler just shook his head.

‘We must take care,’ he replied; ‘you too, you must take care.’

‘Why? What’s going on?’

‘The money you paid into the Copenhagen bank—we wrote, you remember?’

‘Of course I remember.’

Fiedler wouldn’t say any more, but drove on in silence into the hills. There they stopped. Beneath them, half screened by the ghostly patchwork of tall pine trees, lay the meeting point of two great valleys. The steep wooded hills on either side gradually yielded their colours to the gathering dusk until they stood grey and lifeless in the twilight.

‘Whatever happens,’ Fiedler said, ‘don’t worry. It will be all right, do you understand?’ His voice was heavy with emphasis, his slim hand rested on Leamas’ arm. ‘You may have to look after yourself a little, but it won’t last long, do you understand?’ he asked again.

‘No. And since you won’t tell me I shall have to wait and see. Don’t worry too much for my skin, Fiedler.’ He moved his arm, but Fiedler’s hand still held him. Leamas hated being touched.

‘Do you know Mundt?’ asked Fiedler. ‘Do you know about him?’

‘We’ve talked about Mundt.’

‘Yes,’ Fiedler repeated, ‘we’ve talked about him. He shoots first and asks questions afterwards. The deterrent principle. It’s an odd system in a profession where the questions are always supposed to be more important than the shooting.’ Leamas knew what Fiedler wanted to tell him. ‘It’s an odd system unless you’re frightened of the answers,’ Fiedler continued under his breath.

Leamas waited. After a moment Fiedler said:

‘He’s never taken on an interrogation before. He’s left it to me before, always. He used to say to me—“You interrogate them, Jens, no one can do it like you. I’ll catch them and you make them sing.” He used to say that people who do counter-espionage are like painters—they need a man with a hammer standing behind them to strike when they have finished their work, otherwise they forget what they’re trying to achieve. “I’ll be your hammer,” he used to say to me. It was a joke between us, at first, then it began to matter; when he began to kill, kill them before they sang, just as you said; one here, another there, shot or murdered. I asked him, I begged him, “Why not arrest them? Why not let me have them for a month or two? What good to you are they when they are dead?” He just shook his head at me and said there was a law that thistles must be cut down before they flower. I had the feeling that he’d prepared the answer before I ever asked the question. He’s a good operator, very good. He’s done wonders with the Abteilung—you know that. He’s got theories about it; I’ve talked to him late at night. Coffee he drinks—nothing else—just coffee all the time. He says Germans are too introspective to make good agents, and it all comes out in counter-intelligence. He says counter-intelligence people are like wolves chewing dry bones—you have to take away the bones and make them find new quarry—I see all that, I know what he means. But he’s gone too far. Why did he kill Viereck? Why did he take him away from me? Viereck was fresh quarry, we hadn’t even taken the meat from the bone, you see. So why did he take him? Why, Leamas, why?’ The hand on Leamas’ arm was clasping it tightly; in the total darkness of the car Leamas was aware of the frightening intensity of Fiedler’s emotion.

‘I’ve thought about it night and day. Ever since Viereck was shot, I’ve asked for a reason. At first it seemed fantastic. I told myself I was jealous, that the work was going to my head, that I was seeing treachery behind every tree; we get like that, people in our world. But I couldn’t help myself, Leamas, I had to work it out. There’d been other things before. He was afraid—he was afraid that we would catch one who would talk too much!’

‘What are you saying? You’re out of your mind,’ said Leamas, and his voice held the trace of fear.

‘It all held together, you see. Mundt escaped so easily from England; you told me yourself he did. And what did Guillam say to you? He said they didn’t want to catch him! Why not? I’ll tell you why—he was their man; they turned him, they caught him, don’t you see and that was the price of his freedom—that and the money he was paid.’

‘I tell you you’re out of your mind!’ Leamas hissed. ‘He’ll kill you if he ever thinks you make up this kind of stuff. It’s sugar candy, Fiedler. Shut up and drive us home.’ At last the hot grip on Leamas’ arm relaxed.

‘That’s where you’re wrong. You provided the answer, you yourself, Leamas. That’s why we need one another.’

‘It’s not true!’ Leamas shouted. ‘I’ve told you again and again, they couldn’t have done it. The Circus couldn’t have run him against the Zone without my knowing! It just wasn’t an administrative possibility. You’re trying to tell me Control was personally directing the deputy head of the Abteilung without the knowledge of the Berlin station. You’re mad, Fiedler, you’re just bloody well off your head!’ Suddenly he began to laugh quietly. ‘You may want his job, you poor bastard; that’s not unheard of, you know. But this kind of thing went out with bustles.’ For a moment neither spoke.

‘That money,’ Fiedler said, ‘in Copenhagen. The bank replied to your letter. The manager is very worried lest there has been a mistake. The money was drawn by your co-signatory exactly one week after you paid it in. The date it was drawn coincides with a two-day visit which Mundt paid to Denmark in February. He went there under an alias to meet an American agent we have who was attending a world scientists’ conference.’ Fiedler hesitated, then added, ‘I suppose you ought to write to the bank and tell them everything is quite in order?’

15

COME TO THE BALL

Liz looked at the letter from Party Centre and wondered what it was about. She found it a little puzzling. She had to admit she was pleased, but why hadn’t they consulted her first? Had the District Committee put up her name, or was it Centre’s own choice? But no one in Centre knew her, so far as she was aware. She’d met odd speakers of course, and at District Congress she’d shaken hands with the Party Organiser. Perhaps that man from Cultural Relations had remembered her—that fair, rather effeminate man who was so ingratiating. Ashe, that was his name. He’d taken a bit of interest in her and she supposed he might have handed her name on, or remembered her when the Scholarship came up. An odd man, he was; took her to the Black and White for coffee after the meeting and asked her about her boy-friends. He hadn’t been amorous or anything—she’d thought he was a bit queer to be honest—but he asked her masses of questions about herself. How long had she been in the Party, did she get homesick living away from her parents? Had she lots of boy-friends or was there a special one she carried a torch for? She hadn’t cared for him much but his talk had gone down quite well—the worker-state in the German Democratic Republic, the concept of the worker-poet and all that stuff. He certainly knew all about Eastern Europe, he must have travelled a lot. She’d guessed he was a schoolmaster, he had that rather didactic, fluent way with him. They’d had a collection for the Fighting Fund afterwards, and Ashe had put a pound in; she’d been absolutely amazed. That was it, she was sure now: it was Ashe who’d remembered her. He’d told someone at London District, and District had told Centre or something like that. It still seemed a funny way to go about things, but then the Party always was secretive—it was part of being a revolutionary party, she supposed. It didn’t appeal to Liz much, the secrecy, it seemed dishonest. But she supposed it was necessary, and Heaven knows, there were plenty who got a kick out of it.

She read the letter again. It was on Centre’s writing paper, with the thick red print at the top and it began ‘Dear Comrade’, it sounded so military to Liz, and she hated that; she’d never quite got used to ‘Comrade’.

Dear Comrade,

We have recently had discussions with our Comrades in the Socialist Unity Party of the German Democratic Republic on the possibility of effecting exchanges between party members over here and our comrades in democratic Germany. The idea is to create a basis of exchange at the rank and file level between our two parties. The SUP is aware that the existing discriminatory measures by the British Home Office make it unlikely that their own delegates will be able to come to the United Kingdom in the immediate future, but they feel that an exchange of experiences is all the more important for this reason. They have generously invited us to select five Branch Secretaries with good experience and a good record of stimulating mass action at street level. Each selected comrade will spend three weeks attending Branch discussions, studying progress in industry and social welfare and seeing at first hand the evidence of fascist provocation by the West. This is a grand opportunity for our comrades to profit from the experience of a young socialist system.

We therefore asked District to put forward the names of young Cadre workers from your areas who might get the biggest advantage from the trip, and your name has been put forward. We want you to go if you possibly can, and carry out the second part of the scheme—which is to establish contact with a Party Branch in the GDR whose members are from similar industrial backgrounds and have the same kind of problems as your own. The Bayswater South Branch has been paired with Neuenhagen, a suburb of Leipzig. Freda Lüman, Secretary of the Neuenhagen branch, is preparing a big welcome. We are sure you are just the Comrade for the job, and that it will be a terrific success. All expenses will be paid by the GDR Cultural Office.

We are sure you realise what a big honour this is, and are confident you will not allow personal considerations to prevent you from accepting. The visits are due to take place at the end of next month, about the 23rd, but the selected Comrades will travel separately as their invitations are not all concurrent. Will you please let us know as soon as possible whether you can accept, and we will let you know further details.

The more she read it, the odder it seemed. Such short notice for a start—how could they know she could get away from the Library? Then to her surprise she recalled that Ashe had asked her what she did for her holidays, whether she had taken her leave this year, and whether she had to give a lot of notice if she wanted to claim free time. Why hadn’t they told her who the other nominees were? There was no particular reason why they should, perhaps, but it somehow looked odd when they didn’t. It was such a long letter, too. They were so hard up for secretarial help at Centre they usually kept their letters short, or asked Comrades to ring up. This was so efficient, so well typed it might not have been done at Centre at all. But it was signed by the Cultural Organiser; it was his signature all right, no doubt of that. She’d seen it at the bottom of roneoed notices masses of times. And the letter had that awkward, semi-bureaucratic, semi-Messianic style she had grown accustomed to without ever liking. It was stupid to say she had a good record of stimulating mass action at street level. She hadn’t. As a matter of fact she hated that side of party work—the loudspeakers at the factory gates, selling the Daily Worker at the street corner, going from door to door at the local elections. Peace Work she didn’t mind so much, it meant something to her, it made sense. You could look at the kids in the street as you went by, at the mothers pushing their prams and the old people standing in doorways, and you could say, ‘I’m doing it for them.’ That really was fighting for peace.

But she never quite saw the fighting for votes and the fighting for sales in the same way. Perhaps that was because it cut them down to size, she thought. It was easy when there were a dozen or so together at a Branch meeting to rebuild the world, march at the vanguard of socialism and talk of the inevitability of history. But afterwards she’d go out into the streets with an armful of Daily Workers, often waiting an hour, two hours, to sell a copy. Sometimes she’d cheat, as the others cheated, and pay for a dozen herself just to get out of it and go home. At the next meeting they’d boast about it—forgetting they’d bought them themselves—‘Comrade Gold sold eighteen copies on Saturday night—eighteen!’ It would go in the Minutes then, and the Branch bulletin as well. District would rub their hands, and perhaps she’d get a mention in that little panel on the front page about the Fighting Fund. It was such a little world, and she wished they could be more honest. But she lied to herself about it all, too. Perhaps they all did. Or perhaps the others understood more why you had to lie so much. It seemed so odd they’d made her Branch Secretary. It was Mulligan who’d proposed it—‘Our young, vigorous and attractive comrade—’ He’d thought she’d sleep with him if he got her made secretary. The others had voted for her because they liked her, and because she could type. Because she’d do the work and not try and make them go canvassing at weekends. Not too often anyway. They’d voted for her because they wanted a decent little club, nice and revolutionary and no fuss. It was all such a fraud. Alec had seemed to understand that; he just hadn’t taken it seriously. ‘Some people keep canaries, some people join the Party,’ he’d said once, and it was true. In Bayswater South it was true anyway, and District knew that perfectly well. That’s why it was so peculiar that she had been nominated; that was why she was extremely reluctant to believe that District had even had a hand in it. The explanation, she was sure, was Ashe. Perhaps he had a crush on her, perhaps he wasn’t queer but just looked it.

Liz made a rather exaggerated shrug, the kind of over-stressed gesture people do make when they are excited and alone. It was abroad anyway, it was free and it sounded interesting. She had never been abroad, and she certainly couldn’t afford the fare herself. It would be rather fun. She had reservations about Germans, that was true. She knew, she had been told, that West Germany was militarist and revanchist, and that East Germany was democratic and peace-loving. But she doubted whether all the good Germans were on one side and all the bad ones on the other. And it was the bad ones who had killed her father. Perhaps that was why the Party had chosen her—as a generous act of reconciliation. Perhaps that was what Ashe had had in mind when he asked her all those questions. Of course—that was the explanation. She was suddenly filled with a feeling of warmth and gratitude towards the Party. They really were decent people and she was proud and thankful to belong. She went to the desk and opened the drawer where, in an old school satchel, she kept the Branch stationery and the dues stamps. Putting a sheet of paper into her old Underwood typewriter—they’d sent it down from District when they heard she could type: it jumped a bit but otherwise was fine—she typed a neat, grateful letter of acceptance. Centre was such a wonderful thing—stern, benevolent, impersonal, perpetual. They were good, good people. People who fought for peace. As she closed the drawer she caught sight of Smiley’s card.

She remembered the little man with the earnest, puckered face, standing at the doorway of her room and saying: ‘Did the Party know about you and Alec?’ How silly she was. Well, this would take her mind off it.

16

ARREST

Fiedler and Leamas drove back the rest of the way in silence. In the dusk the hills were black and cavernous, the pinpoint lights struggling against the gathering darkness like the lights of distant ships at sea.

Fiedler parked the car in a shed at the side of the house and they walked together to the front door. They were about to enter the lodge when they heard a shout from the direction of the trees, followed by someone calling Fiedler’s name. They turned, and Leamas distinguished in the twilight twenty yards away three men standing, apparently waiting for Fiedler to come.

‘What do you want?’ Fiedler called.

‘We want to talk to you. We’re from Berlin.’

Fiedler hesitated. ‘Where’s that damn’ guard?’ he asked Leamas; ‘there should be a guard on the front door.’

Leamas shrugged.

‘Why aren’t the lights on in the hall?’ he asked again: then, still unconvinced, he began walking slowly towards the men.

Leamas waited a moment, then, hearing nothing, made his way through the unlit house to the annexe behind it. This was a shoddy barrack hut attached to the back of the building and hidden from all sides by close plantations of young pine trees. The hut was divided into three adjoining bedrooms; there was no corridor. The centre room had been given to Leamas, and the room nearest to the main building was occupied by two guards. Leamas never knew who occupied the third. He had once tried to open the connecting door between it and his own room, but it was locked. He had only discovered it was a bedroom by peering through a narrow gap in the lace curtains early one morning as he went for a walk. The two guards, who followed him everywhere at fifty yards’ distance, had not rounded the corner of the hut, and he looked in at the window. The room contained a single bed, made, and a small writing-desk with papers on it. He supposed that someone, with what passes for German thoroughness, watched him from that bedroom. But Leamas was too old a dog to allow himself to be bothered by surveillance. In Berlin it had been a fact of life—if you couldn’t spot it so much the worse: it only meant they were taking greater care, or you were losing your grip. Usually, because he was good at that kind of thing, because he was observant and had an accurate memory—because, in short, he was good at his job—he spotted them anyway. He knew the formations favoured by a shadowing team, he knew the tricks, the weaknesses, the momentary lapses that could give them away. It meant nothing to Leamas that he was watched, but as he walked through the improvised doorway from the lodge to the hut, and stood in the guards’ bedroom, he had the distinct feeling that something was wrong.

The lights in the annexe were controlled from some central point. They were put on and off by an unseen hand. In the mornings he was often woken by the sudden blaze of the single overhead light in his room. At night he would be hastened to bed by perfunctory darkness. It was only nine o’clock as he entered the annexe, and the lights were already out. Usually they stayed on till eleven, but now they were out and the shutters had been lowered. He had left the connecting door from the house open, so that the pale twilight from the hallway reached, but scarcely penetrated, the guards’ bedroom, and by it he could just see the two empty beds. As he stood there peering into the room, surprised to find it empty, the door behind him closed. Perhaps by itself, but Leamas made no attempt to open it. It was pitch dark. No sound accompanied the closing of the door, no click nor footstep.

To Leamas, his instinct, suddenly alert, it was as if the sound-track had stopped. Then he smelt the cigar smoke. It must have been hanging in the air but he had not noticed it till now. Like a blind man, his senses of touch and smell were sharpened by the darkness.

There were matches in his pocket but he did not use them. He took one pace sideways, pressed his back against the wall and remained motionless. To Leamas there could only be one explanation—they were waiting for him to pass from the guards’ room to his own and therefore he determined to remain where he was. Then from the direction of the main building whence he had come he heard clearly the sound of a footstep. The door which had just closed was tested, the lock turned and made fast. Still Leamas did not move. Not yet. There was no pretence: he was a prisoner in the hut. Very slowly, Leamas now lowered himself into a crouch, putting his hand in the side pocket of his jacket as he did so. He was quite calm, almost relieved at the prospect of action, but memories were racing through his mind. ‘You’ve nearly always got a weapon: an ash-tray, a couple of coins, a fountain-pen—anything that will gouge or cut.’ It was the favourite dictum of the mild little Welsh sergeant at that house near Oxford in the war; ‘Never use both hands at once, not with a knife, a stick or a pistol; keep your left arm free, and hold it across the belly. If you can’t find anything to hit with, keep the hands open and the thumbs stiff. Taking the box of matches in his right hand he clasped it longways, and deliberately crushed it, so that the small, jagged edges of boxwood protruded from between his fingers. This done, he edged his way along the wall until he came to a chair which he knew was in the corner of the room. Indifferent now to the noise he made, he shoved the chair into the centre of the floor. Counting his footsteps as he moved back from the chair, he positioned himself in the angle of the two walls. As he did so, he heard the door of his own bedroom flung open. Vainly he tried to discern the figure who must be standing in the doorway, but there was no light from his own room either. The darkness was impenetrable. He dared not move forward to attack, for the chair was now in the middle of the room; it was his tactical advantage, for he knew where it was, and they did not. They must come for him, they must; he could not let them wait until their helper outside had reached the master switch and put on the lights.

‘Come on, you windy bastards,’ he hissed in German; ‘I’m here, in the corner. Come and get me, can’t you?’ Not a move, not a sound.

‘I’m here, can’t you see me? What’s the matter then? What’s the matter, children, come on, can’t you?’ And then he heard one stepping forward, and another following; and then the oath of a man as he stumbled on the chair, and that was the sign that Leamas was waiting for. Tossing away the box of matches he slowly, cautiously crept forward, pace by pace, his left arm extended in the attitude of a man warding off twigs in a wood until, quite gently, he had touched an arm and felt the warm prickly cloth of a military uniform. Still with his left hand Leamas deliberately tapped the arm twice—two distinct taps—and heard a frightened voice whisper close to his ear in German:

‘Hans, is it you?’

‘Shut up, you fool,’ Leamas whispered in reply, and in that same moment reached out and grasped the man’s hair, pulling his head forward and down, then in a terrible cutting blow drove the side of his right hand on to the nape of the neck, pulled him up again by the arm, hit him in the throat with an upward thrust of his open fist, then released him to fall where the force of gravity took him. As the man’s body hit the ground, the lights went on.

In the doorway stood a young captain of the People’s Police smoking a cigar, and behind him two men. One was in civilian clothes, quite young. He held a pistol in his hand. Leamas thought it was the Czech kind with a loading lever on the spine of the butt. They were all looking at the man on the floor. Somebody unlocked the outer door and Leamas turned to see who it was. As he turned, there was a shout—Leamas thought it was the captain—telling him to stand still. Slowly he turned back and faced the three men.

His hands were still at his side as the blow came. It seemed to crush his skull. As he fell, drifting warmly into unconsciousness, he wondered whether he had been hit with a revolver, the old kind with a swivel on the butt where you fastened the lanyard.

He was woken by the lag singing and the warder yelling at him to shut up. He opened his eyes and like a brilliant light the pain burst upon his brain. He lay quite still, refusing to close them, watching the sharp, coloured fragments racing across his vision. He tried to take stock of himself: his feet were icy cold and he was aware of the sour stench of prison denims. The singing had stopped and suddenly Leamas longed for it to start again, although he knew it never would. He tried to raise his hand and touch the blood that was caked on his cheek, but his hands were behind him, locked together. His feet too must be bound: the blood had left them, that was why they were cold. Painfully he looked about him, trying to lift his head an inch or two from the floor. To his surprise he saw his own knees in front of him. Instinctively he tried to stretch his legs and as he did so his whole body was seized with a pain so sudden and terrible that he screamed out a sobbing agonised cry of self-pity, like the last cry of a man upon the rack. He lay there panting, attempting to master the pain, then through the sheer perversity of his nature, he tried again, quite slowly, to straighten his legs. At once the agony returned, but Leamas had found the cause: his hands and feet were chained together behind his back. As soon as he attempted to stretch his legs the chain tightened, forcing his shoulders down and his damaged head on to the stone floor. They must have beaten him up while he was unconscious, his whole body was stiff and bruised and his groin ached. He wondered if he’d killed the guard. He hoped so.

Above him shone the light, large, clinical and fierce. No furniture, just whitewashed walls, quite close all round, and the grey steel door, a smart charcoal grey, the colour you see on clever London houses. There was nothing else. Nothing at all. Nothing to think about, just the savage pain.

He must have lain there hours before they came. It grew hot from the light, he was thirsty but he refused to call out. At last the door opened and Mundt stood there. He knew it was Mundt from the eyes. Smiley had told him about them.

17

MUNDT

They untied him and let him try to stand. For a moment he almost succeeded, then, as the circulation returned to his hands and feet, and as the joints of his body were released from the contraction to which they had been subject, he fell. They let him lie there, watching him with the detachment of children looking at an insect. One of the guards pushed past Mundt and yelled at Leamas to get up. Leamas crawled to the wall and put the palms of his throbbing hands against the white brick. He was half-way up when the guard kicked him and he fell again. He tried once more and this time the guard let him stand with his back against the wall. He saw the guard move his weight on to his left leg and he knew he would kick him again. With all his remaining strength Leamas thrust himself forward, driving his lowered head into the guard’s face. They fell together, Leamas on top. The guard got up and Leamas lay there waiting for the pay-off. But Mundt said something to the guard and Leamas felt himself being picked up by the shoulders and feet and heard the door of his cell close as they carried him down the corridor. He was terribly thirsty.

They took him to a small comfortable room, decently furnished with a desk and armchairs. Swedish blinds half covered the barred windows. Mundt sat at the desk and Leamas in an armchair, his eyes half closed. The guards stood at the door.

‘Give me a drink,’ said Leamas. ‘Whisky?’

‘Water.’

Mundt filled a carafe from a basin in the corner, and put it on the table beside him with a glass.

‘Bring him something to eat,’ he ordered, and one of the guards left the room, returning with a mug of soup and some sliced sausage. He drank and ate, and they watched him in silence.

‘Where’s Fiedler?’ Leamas asked finally.

‘Under arrest,’ Mundt replied curtly.

‘What for?’

‘Conspiring to sabotage the security of the people.’

Leamas nodded slowly. ‘So you won,’ he said. ‘When did you arrest him?’

‘Last night.’

Leamas waited a moment, trying to focus again on Mundt.

‘What about me?’ he asked.

‘You’re a material witness. You will of course stand trial yourself later.’

‘So I’m part of a put-up job by London to frame Mundt, am l?’

Mundt nodded, lit a cigarette and gave it to one of the sentries to pass to Leamas. ‘That’s right,’ he said. The sentry came over, and with a gesture of grudging solicitude, put the cigarette between Leamas’ lips.

‘A pretty elaborate operation,’ Leamas observed, and added stupidly, ‘clever chaps these Chinese.’

Mundt said nothing. Leamas became used to his silences as the interview progressed. Mundt had rather a pleasant voice, that was something Leamas hadn’t expected, but he seldom spoke. It was part of Mundt’s extraordinary self-confidence perhaps, that he did not speak unless he specifically wished to, that he was prepared to allow long silences to intervene rather than exchange pointless words. In this he differed from professional interrogators who set store by initiative, by the evocation of atmosphere and the exploitation of that psychological dependency of a prisoner upon his inquisitor. Mundt despised technique: he was a man of fact and action. Leamas preferred that.

Mundt’s appearance was fully consistent with his temperament. He looked an athlete. His fair hair was cut short. It lay matt and neat. His young face had a hard, clean line, and a frightening directness; it was barren of humour or fantasy. He looked young but not youthful; older men would take him seriously. He was well built. His clothes fitted him because he was an easy man to fit. Leamas found no difficulty in recalling that Mundt was a killer. There was a coldness about him, a rigorous self-sufficiency which perfectly equipped him for the business of murder. Mundt was a very hard man.

‘The other charge on which you will stand trial, if necessary,’ Mundt added quietly, ‘is murder.’

‘So the sentry died, did he?’ Leamas replied.

A wave of intense pain passed through his head.

Mundt nodded: ‘That being so,’ he said, ‘your trial for espionage is somewhat academic. I propose that the case against Fiedler should be publicly heard. That is also the wish of the Praesidium.’

‘And you want my confession?’

‘Yes.’

‘In other words you haven’t any proof.’

‘We shall have proof. We shall have your confession.’ There was no menace in Mundt’s voice. There was no style, no theatrical twist.

‘On the other hand, there could be mitigation in your case. You were blackmailed by British Intelligence; they accused you of stealing money and then coerced you into preparing a revanchist trap against myself. The court would have sympathy for such a plea.’

Leamas seemed to be taken off his guard.

‘How did you know they accused me of stealing money?’ But Mundt made no reply.

‘Fiedler has been very stupid,’ Mundt observed. ‘As soon as I read the report of our friend Peters I knew why you had been sent, and I knew that Fiedler would fall into the trap. Fiedler hates me so much.’ Mundt nodded, as if to emphasise the truth of his observation. ‘Your people knew that of course. It was a very clever operation. Who prepared it, tell me. Was it Smiley? Did he do it?’ Leamas said nothing.

‘I wanted to see Fiedler’s report of his own interrogation of you, you see. I told him to send it to me. He procrastinated and I knew I was right. Then yesterday he circulated it among the Praesidium, and did not send me a copy. Someone in London has been very clever.’

Leamas said nothing.

‘When did you last see Smiley?’ Mundt asked casually. Leamas hesitated, uncertain of himself. His head was aching terribly.

‘When did you last see him?’ Mundt repeated.

‘I don’t remember,’ Leamas said at last, ‘he wasn’t really in the outfit any more. He’d drop in from time to time.’

‘He is a great friend of Peter Guillam, is he not?’

‘I think so, yes.’

‘Guillam, you thought, studied the economic situation in the GDR. Some odd little section in your Service, you weren’t quite sure what it did.’

‘Yes.’ Sound and sight were becoming confused in the mad throbbing of his brain. His eyes were hot and painful. He felt sick.

‘Well, when did you last see Smiley?’

‘I don’t remember . . . I don’t remember.’

Mundt shook his head.

‘You have a very good memory—for anything that incriminates me. We can all remember when we last saw somebody. Did you for instance see him after you returned from Berlin?’

‘Yes, I think so. I bumped into him . . . in the Circus once, in London.’ Leamas had closed his eyes and he was sweating. ‘I can’t go on, Mundt . . . not much longer, Mundt; I’m sick,’ he said.

‘After Ashe had picked you up, after he had walked into the trap that had been set for him, you had lunch together, didn’t you?’

‘Yes. Lunch together.’

‘Lunch ended at about four o’clock. Where did you go then?’

‘I went down to the City, I think. I don’t remember for sure . . .for Christ’s sake, Mundt,’ he said holding his head with his hand, ‘I can’t go on. My bloody head’s . . .’

‘And after that where did you go? Why did you shake off your followers, why were you so keen to shake them off?’

Leamas said nothing: he was breathing in sharp gasps, his head buried in his hands.

‘Answer this one question, then you can go. You shall have a bed. You can sleep if you want. Otherwise you must go back to your cell, do you understand? You will be tied up again and fed on the floor like an animal, do you understand? Tell me where you went.’

The wild pulsation of his brain suddenly increased, the room was dancing; he heard voices around him and the sound of footsteps; spectral shapes passed and re-passed, detached from sound and gravity; someone was shouting, but not at him; the door was open, he was sure someone had opened the door. The room was full of people, all shouting now, and then they were going, some of them had gone, he heard them marching away, the stamping of their feet was like the throbbing of his head; the echo died and there was silence. Then like the touch of mercy itself, a cool cloth was laid across his forehead, and kindly hands carried him away.

He woke on a hospital bed, and standing at the foot of it was Fiedler, smoking a cigarette.

18

FIEDLER

Leamas took stock. A bed with sheets. A single ward with no bars in the windows, just curtains and frosted glass. Pale green walls, dark green linoleum; and Fiedler watching him, smoking.

A nurse brought him food: an egg, some thin soup and fruit. He felt like death, but he supposed he’d better eat it. So he did and Fiedler watched.

‘How do you feel?’ he asked.

‘Bloody awful,’ Leamas replied.

‘But better?’

‘I suppose so.’ He hesitated, ‘Those sods beat me up.’

‘You killed a sentry, you know that?’

‘I guessed I had . . . What do they expect if they mount such a damn’ stupid operation. Why didn’t they pull us both in at once? Why put all the lights out? If anything was over-organised, that was.’

‘I am afraid that as a nation we tend to over-organise. Abroad that passes for efficiency.’

Again there was a pause.

‘What happened to you?’ Leamas asked.

‘Oh, I too was softened for interrogation.’

‘By Mundt’s men?’

‘By Mundt’s men and Mundt. It was a very peculiar sensation!’

‘That’s one way of putting it.’

‘No, no; not physically. Physically it was a nightmare, but you see Mundt had a special interest in beating me up. Apart from the confession.’

‘Because you dreamed up that story about—’

‘Because I am a Jew.’

‘Oh Christ,’ said Leamas softly.

‘That is why I got special treatment. All the time he whispered to me. It was very strange.’

‘What did he say?’

Fiedler didn’t reply. At last he muttered:

‘That’s all over.’

‘Why? What’s happened?’

‘The day we were arrested I had applied to the Praesidium for a civil warrant to arrest Mundt as an enemy of the people.’

‘But you’re mad—I told you, you’re raving mad, Fiedler! He’ll never—’

‘There was other evidence against him apart from yours. Evidence I have been accumulating over the last three years, piece by piece. Yours provided the proof we need; that’s all. As soon as that was clear I prepared a report and sent it to every member of the Praesidium except Mundt. They received it on the same day that I made my application for a warrant.’

‘The day we were pulled in.’

‘Yes. I knew Mundt would fight. I knew he had friends on the Praesidium, or yes-men at least, people who were sufficiently frightened to go running to him as soon as they got my report. And in the end, I knew he would lose. The Praesidium had the weapon it needed to destroy him; they had the report, and for those few days while you and I were being questioned they read it and re-read it until they knew it was true and each knew the others knew. In the end they acted. Herded together by their common fear, their common weakness and their common knowledge they turned against him and ordered a Tribunal.’

‘Tribunal?’

‘A secret one, of course. It meets tomorrow. Mundt is under arrest.’

‘What is this other evidence? The evidence you’ve collected.’

‘Wait and see,’ Fiedler replied with a smile. ‘Tomorrow you will see.’

Fiedler was silent for a time, watching Leamas eat.

‘This Tribunal,’ Leamas asked, ‘how is it conducted?’

‘That is up to the President. It is not a People’s Court—it is important to remember that. It is more in the nature of an enquiry—a committee of enquiry, that’s it, appointed by the Praesidium to investigate and report upon a certain . . . subject. Its report contains a recommendation. In a case like this the recommendation is tantamount to a verdict, but remains secret, as part of the proceedings of the Praesidium.’

‘How does it work? Are there counsel and judges?’

‘There are three judges,’ Fiedler said; ‘and in effect, there are counsel. Tomorrow I myself shall put the case against Mundt. Karden will defend him.’

‘Who’s Karden?’

Fiedler hesitated.

‘A very tough man,’ he said. ‘Looks like a country doctor, small and benevolent. He was at Buchenwald.’

‘Why can’t Mundt defend himself?’

‘It was Mundt’s wish. It is said that Karden will call a witness.’

Leamas shrugged.

‘That’s your affair,’ he said. Again there was silence. At last Fiedler said reflectively:

‘I wouldn’t have minded—I don’t think I would have minded, not so much anyway—if he had hurt me for myself, for hate or jealousy. Do you understand that? That long, long pain and all the time you say to yourself, “Either I shall faint or I shall grow to bear the pain, nature will see to that” and the pain just increases like a violinist going up the E string. You think it can’t get any higher and it does—the pain’s like that, it rises and rises, and all that nature does is bring you on from note to note like a deaf child being taught to hear. And all the time he was whispering Jew . . . Jew. I could understand, I’m sure I could, if he had done it for the idea, for the Party, if you like, or if he had hated me. But it wasn’t that; he hated—’

‘All right,’ said Leamas shortly, ‘you should know. He’s a bastard.’

‘Yes,’ said Fiedler, ‘he is a bastard.’ He seemed excited; he wants to boast to somebody, thought Leamas.

‘I thought a lot about you,’ Fiedler added. ‘I thought about that talk we had—you remember—about the motor.’

‘What motor?’

Fiedler smiled. ‘I’m sorry, that is a direct translation. I mean “Motor”, the engine, spirit, urge; whatever Christians call it.’

‘I’m not a Christian.’

Fiedler shrugged. ‘You know what I mean.’ He smiled again, ‘the thing that embarrasses you . . . I’ll put it another way. Suppose Mundt is right. He asked me to confess, you know; I was to confess that I was in league with British spies who were plotting to murder him. You see the argument—that the whole operation was mounted by British Intelligence in order to entice us—me, if you like—into liquidating the best man in the Abteilung. To turn our own weapon against us.’

‘He tried that on me,’ said Leamas indifferently. And he added, ‘As if I’d cooked up the whole bloody story.’

‘But what I mean is this: suppose you had done that, suppose it were true—I am taking an example, you understand, a hypothesis, would you kill a man, an innocent man—’

‘Mundt’s a killer himself.’

‘Suppose he wasn’t. Suppose it were me they wanted to kill: would London do it?’

‘It depends . . . it depends on the need . . .’

‘Ah,’ said Fiedler contentedly, ‘it depends on the need. Like Stalin, in fact. The traffic accident and the statistics. That is a great relief.’

‘Why?’

‘You must get some sleep,’ said Fiedler. ‘Order what food you want. They will bring you whatever you want. Tomorrow you can talk.’ As he reached the door he looked back and said, ‘We’re all the same, you know, that’s the joke.’

Soon Leamas was asleep, content in the knowledge that Fiedler was his ally and that they would shortly send Mundt to his death. That was something which he had looked forward to for a very long time.

19

BRANCH MEETING

Liz was happy in Leipzig. Austerity pleased her—it gave her the comfort of sacrifice. The little house she stayed in was dark and meagre, the food was poor and most of it had to go to the children. They talked politics at every meal, she and Frau Ebert, Branch Secretary for the Ward Branch of Leipzig-Hohengrün, a small, grey woman whose husband managed a gravel quarry on the outskirts of the city. It was like living in a religious community, Liz thought; a convent or a kibbutz or something. You felt the world was better for your empty stomach. Liz had some German which she had learnt from her aunt, and she was surprised how quickly she was able to use it. She tried it on the children first and they grinned and helped her. The children treated her oddly to begin with, as if she were a person of great quality or rarity value, and on the third day one of them plucked up courage and asked her if she had brought any chocolate from ‘drüben’—from ‘over there’. She’d never thought of that and she felt ashamed. After that they seemed to forget about her.

In the evenings there was Party Work. They distributed literature, visited Branch members who had defaulted on their dues or lagged behind in their attendance at meetings, called in at District for a discussion on ‘Problems connected with the centralised distribution of agricultural produce’ at which all local Branch Secretaries were present, and attended a meeting of the Workers’ Consultative Council of a machine tool factory on the outskirts of the town.

At last, on the fourth day, the Thursday, came their own Branch Meeting. This was to be, for Liz at least, the most exhilarating experience of all; it would be an example of all that her own Branch in Bayswater could one day be. They had chosen a wonderful title for the evening’s discussions—‘Coexistence after two wars’—and they expected a record attendance. The whole ward had been circularised, they had taken care to see that there was no rival meeting in the neighbourhood that evening; it was not a late shopping day.

Seven people came.

Seven people and Liz and the Branch Secretary and the man from District. Liz put a brave face on it but she was terribly upset. She could scarcely concentrate on the speaker, and when she tried he used long German compounds that she couldn’t work out anyway. It was like the meetings in Bayswater, it was like mid-week evensong when she used to go to church—the same dutiful, little group of host faces, the same fussy self-consciousness, the same feeling of a great idea in the hands of little people. She always felt the same thing—it was awful, really, but she did—she wished no one would turn up, because that was absolute and it suggested persecution, humiliation—it was something you could react to.

But seven people were nothing: they were worse than nothing, because they were evidence of the inertia of the uncapturable mass. They broke your heart.

The room was better than the schoolroom in Bayswater, but even that was no comfort. In Bayswater it had been fun trying to find a room. In the early days they had pretended they were something else, not the Party at all. They’d taken back rooms in pubs, a committee room at the Ardena Café, or met secretly in one another’s houses. Then Bill Hazel had joined from the Secondary School and they’d used his classroom. Even that was a risk—the headmaster thought Bill ran a drama group, so theoretically at least they might still be chucked out. Somehow that fitted better than this Peace Hall in pre-cast concrete with the cracks in the corners and the picture of Lenin. Why did they have that silly frame thing all round the picture? Bundles of organ pipes sprouting from the corners and the bunting all dusty. It looked like something from a fascist funeral. Sometimes she thought Alec was right—you believed in things because you needed to; what you believed in had no value of its own, no function. What did he say: ‘A dog scratches where it itches. Different dogs itch in different places. No, it was wrong, Alec was wrong—it was a wicked thing to say. Peace and freedom and equality—they were facts, of course they were. And what about history—all those laws the Party proved. No, Alec was wrong: truth existed outside people, it was demonstrated in history, individuals must bow to it, be crushed by it if necessary. The Party was the vanguard of history, the spearpoint in the fight for Peace . . . she went over the rubric a little uncertainly. She wished more people had come. Seven was so few. They looked so cross; cross and hungry.

The meeting over, Liz waited for Frau Ebert to collect the unsold literature from the heavy table by the door, fill in her attendance book and put on her coat, for it was cold that evening. The speaker had left—rather rudely, Liz thought—before the general discussion. Frau Ebert was standing at the door with her hand on the light switch when a man appeared out of the darkness, framed in the doorway. Just for a moment Liz thought it was Ashe. He was tall and fair and wore one of those raincoats with leather buttons.

‘Comrade Ebert?’ he enquired.

‘Yes?’

‘I am looking for an English Comrade, Gold. She is staying with you?’

‘I’m Elizabeth Gold,’ Liz put in, and the man came into the hall, closing the door behind him, so that the light shone full upon his face.

‘I am Holten from District.’ He showed some paper to Frau Ebert who was still standing at the door, and she nodded and glanced a little anxiously towards Liz.

‘I have been asked to give a message to Comrade Gold from the Praesidium,’ he said. ‘It concerns an alteration in your programme; an invitation to attend a special meeting.’

‘Oh,’ said Liz rather stupidly. It seemed fantastic that the Praesidium should even have heard of her.

‘It is a gesture,’ Holten said. ‘A gesture of goodwill.’

‘But I—but Frau Ebert . . .’ Liz began helplessly.

‘Comrade Ebert, I am sure, will forgive you under the circumstances.’

‘Of course,’ said Frau Ebert quickly.

‘Where is the meeting to be held?’

‘It will necessitate your leaving tonight,’ Holten replied. ‘We have a long way to go. Nearly to Görlitz.’

‘To Görlitz . . . Where’s that?’

‘East,’ said Frau Ebert quickly. ‘On the Polish border.’

‘We can drive you home now. You can collect your things and we will continue the journey at once.’

‘Tonight? Now?’

‘Yes.’ Holten didn’t seem to consider Liz had much choice.

A large black car was waiting for them. There was a driver in the front and a flagpost on the bonnet. It looked rather a military car.

20

TRIBUNAL

The court was no larger than a schoolroom. At one end, on the mere five or six benches which were provided, sat guards and warders and here and there among them spectators—members of the Praesidium and selected officials. At the other end of the room sat the three members of the Tribunal on tall-backed chairs at an unpolished oak table. Above them, suspended from the ceiling by three loops of wire, was a large red star made of plywood. The walls of the courtroom were white like the walls of Leamas’ cell.

On either side, their chairs a little forward of the table, and turned inwards to face one another, sat two men; one was middle-aged, sixty perhaps, in a black suit and a grey tie, the kind of suit they wear in church in German country districts. The other was Fiedler.

Leamas sat at the back, a guard on either side of him. Between the heads of the spectators he could see Mundt, himself surrounded by police, his fair hair cut very short, his broad shoulders covered in the familiar grey of prison uniform. It seemed to Leamas a curious commentary on the mood of the court—or the influence of Fiedler—that he himself should be wearing his own clothes, while Mundt was in prison uniform.

Leamas had not long been in his place when the president of the Tribunal, sitting at the centre of the table, rang the bell. The sound directed his attention towards it, and a shiver passed over him as he realised that the president was a woman. He could scarcely be blamed for not noting it before. She was fiftyish, small-eyed and dark. Her hair was cut short like a man’s, and she wore the kind of functional dark tunic favoured by Soviet wives. She looked sharply round the room, nodded to a sentry to close the door, and began at once without ceremony to address the court.

‘You all know why we are here. The proceedings are secret, remember that. This is a Tribunal convened expressly by the Praesidium. It is to the Praesidium alone that we are responsible. We shall hear evidence as we think fit.’ She pointed perfunctorily towards Fiedler. ‘Comrade Fiedler, you had better begin.’

Fiedler stood up. Nodding briefly towards the table he drew from the brief-case beside him a sheaf of papers held together in one corner by a piece of black cord.

He talked quietly and easily, with a diffidence which Leamas had never seen in him before. Leamas considered it a good performance, well adjusted to the role of a man regretfully hanging his superior.

‘You should know first, if you do not know already,’ Fiedler began, ‘that on the day that the Praesidium received my report on the activities of Comrade Mundt I was arrested, together with the defector Leamas. Both of us were imprisoned and both of us . . . invited, under extreme duress, to confess that this whole terrible charge was a fascist plot against a loyal comrade.

‘You can see from the report I have already given you how it was that Leamas came to our notice: we ourselves sought him out, induced him to defect and finally brought him to Democratic Germany. Nothing could more clearly demonstrate the impartiality of Leamas than this: that he still refuses, for reasons I will explain, to believe that Mundt was a British agent. It is therefore grotesque to suggest that Leamas is a plant: the initiative was ours, and the fragmentary but vital evidence of Leamas provides only the final proof in a long chain of indications reaching back over the last three years.

‘You have before you the written record of this case. I need do no more than interpret for you facts of which you are already aware.

‘The charge against Comrade Mundt is that he is the agent of an imperialist power. I could have made other charges—that he passed information to the British Secret Service, that he turned his Department into the unconscious lackey of a bourgeois state, that he deliberately shielded revanchist anti-Party groups and accepted sums of foreign currency in reward. These other charges would derive from the first; that Hans-Dieter Mundt is the agent of an imperialist power. The penalty for this crime is death. There is no crime more serious in our penal code, none which exposes our state to greater danger, nor demands more vigilance of our Party organs.’ Here he put the papers down.

‘Comrade Mundt is forty-two years old. He is deputy head of the Department for the Protection of the People. He is unmarried. He has always been regarded as a man of exceptional capabilities, tireless in serving the Party’s interests, ruthless in protecting them.

‘Let me tell you some details of his career. He was recruited into the Department at the age of twenty-eight and underwent the customary instruction. Having completed his probationary period he undertook special tasks in Scandinavian countries—notably Norway, Sweden and Finland—where he succeeded in establishing an intelligence network which carried the battle against fascist agitators into the enemy’s camp. He performed this task well, and there is no reason to suppose that at that time he was other than a diligent member of his Department. But, Comrades, you should not forget this early connection with Scandinavia. The networks established by Comrade Mundt soon after the war provided the excuse, many years later, for him to travel to Finland and Norway, where his commitments became a cover enabling him to draw thousands of dollars from foreign banks in return for his treacherous conduct. Make no mistake: Comrade Mundt has not fallen victim to those who try to disprove the arguments of history. First cowardice, then weakness, then greed were his motives; the acquirement of great wealth his dream. Ironically, it was the elaborate system by which his lust for money was satisfied that brought the forces of justice on his trail.’

Fiedler paused, and looked round the room, his eyes suddenly alight with fervour. Leamas watched, fascinated.

‘Let that be a lesson,’ Fiedler shouted, ‘to those other enemies of the state, whose crime is so foul that they must plot in the secret hours of the night!’ A dutiful murmur rose from the tiny group of spectators at the back of the room.

‘They will not escape the vigilance of the people whose blood they seek to sell!’ Fiedler might have been addressing a large crowd rather than the handful of officials and guards assembled in the tiny, white-walled room.

Leamas realised at that moment that Fiedler was taking no chances: the deportment of the Tribunal, prosecutors and witnesses must be politically impeccable. Fiedler, knowing no doubt that the danger of a subsequent counter-charge was inherent in such cases, was protecting his own back: the polemic would go down in the record and it would be a brave man who set himself to refute it.

Fiedler now opened the file that lay on the desk before him.

‘At the end of 1956 Mundt was posted to London as a member of the East German Steel Mission. He had the additional special task of undertaking counter-subversionary measures against emigré groups. In the course of his work he exposed himself to great dangers—of that there is no doubt—and he obtained valuable results.’

Leamas’ attention was again drawn to the three figures at the centre table. To the President’s left a youngish man, dark. His eyes seemed to be half closed. He had lank, unruly hair and the grey, meagre complexion of an ascetic. His hands were slim, restlessly toying with the corner of a bundle of papers which lay before him. Leamas guessed he was Mundt’s man; he found it hard to say why. On the other side of the table sat a slightly older man, balding, with an open agreeable face. Leamas thought he looked rather an ass. He guessed that if Mundt’s fate hung in the balance the young man would defend him and the woman condemn. He thought the second man would be embarrassed by the difference of opinion and side with the President.

Fiedler was speaking again.

‘It was at the end of his service in London that recruitment took place. I have said that he exposed himself to great dangers; in doing so he fell foul of the British secret police, and they issued a warrant for his arrest. Mundt, who had no diplomatic immunity (NATO Britain does not recognise our sovereignty), went into hiding. Ports were watched, his photograph and description were distributed throughout the British Isles. Yet, after two days in hiding, Comrade Mundt took a taxi to London Airport and flew to Berlin. “Brilliant,” you will say, and so it was. With the whole of Britain’s police force alerted, her roads, railways, shipping and air routes under constant surveillance, Comrade Mundt takes a plane from London Airport. Brilliant indeed. Or perhaps you may feel, Comrades, with the advantage of hindsight, that Mundt’s escape from England was a little too brilliant, a little too easy, that without the connivance of the British authorities it would never have been possible at all!’ Another murmur, more spontaneous than the first, rose from the back of the room.

‘The truth is this: Mundt was taken prisoner by the British; in a short historic interview they offered him the classic alternative. Was it to be years in an imperialist prison, the end of a brilliant career, or was Mundt to make a dramatic return to his home country, against all expectation, and fulfil the promise he had shown? The British, of course, made it a condition of his return that he should provide them with information, and they would pay him large sums of money. With the carrot in front and the stick behind, Mundt was recruited.

‘It was now in the British interest to promote Mundt’s career. We cannot yet prove that Mundt’s success in liquidating minor Western intelligence agents was the work of his imperialist masters betraying their own collaborators—those who were expendable—in order that Mundt’s prestige should be enhanced.

We cannot prove it, but it is an assumption which the evidence permits.

‘Ever since 1960—the year Comrade Mundt became Head of the Counter Espionage section of the Abteilung—indications have reached us from all over the world that there was a highly-placed spy in our ranks. You all know Karl Riemeck was a spy; we thought when he was eliminated that the evil had been stamped out. But the rumours persisted.

‘In late 1960 a former collaborator of ours approached an Englishman in the Lebanon known to be in contact with their Intelligence Service. He offered him—we found out soon afterwards—a complete breakdown of the two sections of the Abteilung for which he had formerly worked. His offer, after it had been transmitted to London, was rejected. That was a very curious thing. It could only mean that the British already possessed the intelligence they were being offered, and that it was up to date.

‘From mid-1960 onwards we were losing collaborators abroad at an alarming rate. Often they were arrested within a few weeks of their despatch. Sometimes the enemy attempted to turn our own agents back on us, but not often. It was as if they could scarcely be bothered.

‘And then—it was early 1961 if my memory is correct—we had a stroke of luck. We obtained by means I will not describe, a summary of the information which British Intelligence held about the Abteilung. It was complete, it was accurate, and it was astonishingly up to date. I showed it to Mundt, of course—he was my superior. He told me it came as no surprise to him: he had certain enquiries in hand and I should take no action for fear of prejudicing them. And I confess that at that moment the thought crossed my mind, remote and fantastic as it was, that Mundt himself could have provided the information. There were other indications too . . .

‘I need hardly tell you that the last, the very last person to be suspected of espionage is the head of the Counter Espionage section. The notion is so appalling, so melodramatic that few would entertain it, let alone give expression to it! I confess that I myself have been guilty of excessive reluctance in reaching such a seemingly fantastic deduction. That was erroneous.

‘But, Comrades, the final evidence has been delivered into our hands. I propose to call that evidence now.’ He turned, glancing towards the back of the room. ‘Bring Leamas forward.’

The guards on either side of him stood up and Leamas edged his way along the row to the rough gangway which ran, not more than two feet wide, down the middle of the room. A guard indicated to him that he should stand facing the table. Fiedler stood a bare six feet away from him. First the President addressed him.

‘Witness, what is your name?’ she asked.

‘Alec Leamas.’

‘What is your age?’

‘Fifty.’

‘Are you married?’

‘No.’

‘But you were.’

‘I’m not married now.’

‘What is your profession?’

‘Assistant librarian.’

Fiedler angrily intervened. ‘You were formerly employed by British Intelligence, were you not?’ he snapped.

‘That’s right. Till a year ago.’

‘The Tribunal has read the reports of your interrogation, Fiedler continued. ‘I want you to tell them again about the conversation you had with Peter Guillam some time in May last year.’

‘You mean when we talked about Mundt?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’ve told you. I was at the Circus, the office in London, our headquarters in Cambridge Circus. I bumped into Peter in the corridor. I knew he was mixed up with the Fennan case and I asked him what had become of George Smiley. Then we got talking about Dieter Frey, who died, and Mundt, who was mixed up in the thing. Peter said he thought that Maston—Maston was effectively in charge of the case then—had not wanted Mundt to be caught.’

‘How did you interpret that?’ asked Fiedler.

‘I knew Maston had made a mess of the Fennan case. I supposed he didn’t want any mud raked up by Mundt appearing at the Old Bailey.’

‘If Mundt had been caught, would he have been legally charged?’ the President put in.

‘It depends who caught him. If the police got him they’d report it to the Home Office. After that no power on earth could stop him being charged.’

‘And what if your Service had caught him?” Fiedler enquired.

‘Oh, that’s a different matter. I suppose they would either have interrogated him and then tried to exchange him for one of our own people in prison over here; or else they’d have given him a ticket.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘Get rid of him.’

‘Liquidate him?’ Fiedler was asking all the questions now, and the members of the Tribunal were writing diligently in the files before them.

‘I don’t know what they do. I’ve never been mixed up in that game.’

‘Might they not have tried to recruit him as their agent?’

‘Yes, but they didn’t succeed.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘Oh, for God’s sake, I’ve told you over and over again. I’m not a bloody performing seal . . . I was head of the Berlin Command for four years. If Mundt had been one of our people, I would have known. I couldn’t help knowing.’

‘Quite.’

Fiedler seemed content with that answer, confident perhaps that the remainder of the Tribunal was not. He now turned his attention to Operation ‘Rolling Stone’; took Leamas once again through the special security complexities governing the circulation of the file, the letters to the Copenhagen and Helsinki banks and the one reply which Leamas had received. Addressing himself to the Tribunal, Fiedler commented:

‘We had no reply from Helsinki. I do not know why. But let me recapitulate for you. Leamas deposited money at Copenhagen on June 15th. Among the papers before you there is the facsimile of a letter from the Royal Scandinavian Bank addressed to Robert Lang. Robert Lang was the name Leamas used to open the Copenhagen deposit account. From that letter (it is the twelfth serial in your files) you will see that the entire sum—ten thousand dollars—was drawn by the co-signatory to the account one week later. I imagine,’ Fiedler continued, indicating with his head the motionless figure of Mundt in the front row, ‘that it is not disputed by the Defendant that he was in Copenhagen on June 21st, nominally engaged on secret work on behalf of the Abteilung.’ He paused and then continued:

‘Leamas’ visit to Helsinki—the second visit he made to deposit money—took place on about September 24th.’ Raising his voice he turned and looked directly at Mundt. ‘On the third of October Comrade Mundt made a clandestine journey to Finland—once more allegedly in the interests of the Abteilung.’ There was silence. Fiedler turned slowly and addressed himself once more to the Tribunal. In a voice at once subdued and threatening he asked:

‘Are you complaining that the evidence is circumstantial? Let me remind you of something more.’ He turned to Leamas.

‘Witness, during your activities in Berlin you became associated with Karl Riemeck, formerly Secretary to the Praesidium of the Socialist Unity Party. What was the nature of that association?’

‘He was my agent, until he was shot by Mundt’s men.’

‘Quite so. He was shot by Mundt’s men. One of several spies who were summarily liquidated by Comrade Mundt before they could be questioned. But before he was shot by Mundt’s men he was an agent of the British Secret Service?’

Leamas nodded.

‘Will you describe Riemeck’s meeting with the man you call Control.’

‘Control came over to Berlin from London to see Karl. Karl was one of the most productive agents we had, I think, and Control wanted to meet him.’

Fiedler put in: ‘He was also one of the most trusted?’

‘Yes, oh yes. London loved Karl; he could do no wrong. When Control came out I fixed up for Karl to come to my flat and the three of us dined together. I didn’t like Karl coming there really, but I couldn’t tell Control that. It’s hard to explain but they get ideas in London, they’re so cut off from it and I was frightened stiff they’d find some excuse for taking over Karl themselves—they’re quite capable of it.’

‘So you arranged for the three of you to meet,’ Fiedler put in curtly, ‘what happened?’

‘Control asked me beforehand to see that he had a quarter of an hour alone with Karl, so during the evening I pretended to have run out of Scotch. I left the flat and went over to de Jong’s place. I had a couple of drinks there, borrowed a bottle and came back.’

‘How did you find them?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Were Control and Riemeck talking still? If so, what were they talking about?’

‘They weren’t talking at all when I came back.’

‘Thank you. You may sit down.’

Leamas returned to his seat at the back of the room. Fiedler turned to the three members of the Tribunal and began:

‘I want to talk first about the spy Riemeck, who was shot: Karl Riemeck. You have before you a list of all the information which Riemeck passed to Alec Leamas in Berlin, so far as Leamas can recall it. It is a formidable record of treachery. Let me summarise it for you. Riemeck gave to his masters a detailed breakdown of the work and personalities of the whole Abteilung. He was able, if Leamas is to be believed, to describe the workings of our most secret sessions. As secretary to the Praesidium he gave minutes of its most secret proceedings.

‘That was easy for him; he himself compiled the record of every meeting. But Riemeck’s access to the secret affairs of the Abteilung is a different matter. Who at the end of 1959 co-opted Riemeck on to the Committee for the Protection of the People, that vital sub-committee of the Praesidium which co-ordinates and discusses the affairs of our security organs? Who proposed that Riemeck should have the privilege of access to the files of the Abteilung? Who at every stage in Riemeck’s career since 1959 (the year Mundt returned from England, you remember) singled him out for posts of exceptional responsibility? I will tell you,’ Fiedler proclaimed. ‘The same man who was uniquely placed to shield him in his espionage activities: Hans-Dieter Mundt. Let us recall how Riemeck contacted the Western Intelligence Agencies in Berlin—how he sought out de Jong’s car on a picnic and put the film inside it. Are you not amazed at Riemeck’s foreknowledge? How could he have known where to find that car, and on that very day? Riemeck had no car himself, he could not have followed de Jong from his house in West Berlin. There was only one way he could have known—through the agency of our own Security police, who reported de Jong’s presence as a matter of routine as soon as the car passed the Inter Sector checkpoint. That knowledge was available to Mundt, and Mundt made it available to Riemeck. That is the case against Hans-Dieter Mundt—I tell you, Riemeck was his creature, the link between Mundt and his imperialist masters!’

Fiedler paused, then added quietly:

‘Mundt—Riemeck—Leamas: that was the chain of command, and it is axiomatic of intelligence technique the whole world over that each link of the chain be kept, as far as possible, in ignorance of the others. Thus it is right that Leamas should maintain he knows nothing to the detriment of Mundt: that is no more than the proof of good security by his masters in London.

‘You have also been told how the whole case known as “Rolling Stone” was conducted under conditions of special secrecy, how Leamas knew in vague terms of an intelligence section under Peter Guillam which was supposedly concerned with economic conditions in our Republic—a section which surprisingly was on the distribution list of “Rolling Stone”. Let me remind you that that same Peter Guillam was one of several British security officers who were involved in the investigation of Mundt’s activities while he was in England.’

The youngish man at the table lifted his pencil, and looking at Fiedler with his hard, cold eyes wide open he asked:

‘Then why did Mundt liquidate Riemeck, if Riemeck was his agent?’

‘He had no alternative. Riemeck was under suspicion. His mistress had betrayed him by boastful indiscretion. Mundt gave the order that he be shot on sight, got word to Riemeck to run, and the danger of betrayal was eliminated. Later, Mundt assassinated the woman.

‘I want to speculate for a moment on Mundt’s technique. After his return to Germany in 1959 British Intelligence played a waiting game. Mundt’s willingness to co-operate with them had yet to be demonstrated, so they gave him instructions and waited, content to pay their money and hope for the best. At that time Mundt was not a senior functionary of our Service—nor of our party—but he saw a good deal, and what he saw he began to report. He was, of course, communicating with his masters unaided. We must suppose that he was met in West Berlin, that on his short journeys abroad to Scandinavia and elsewhere he was contacted and interrogated. The British must have been wary to begin with—who would not be?—they weighed what he gave them with painful care against what they already knew, they feared that he would play a double game. But gradually they realised they had hit a gold mine. Mundt took to his treacherous work with the systematic efficiency for which he is renowned. At first—this is my guess, but it is based, Comrades, on long experience of this work and on the evidence of Leamas—for the first few months they did not dare to establish any kind of network which included Mundt. They let him be a lone wolf, they serviced him, paid and instructed him independently of their Berlin organisation. They established in London, under Guillam (for it was he who recruited Mundt in England), a tiny undercover section whose function was not known even within the Service save to a select circle. They paid Mundt by a special system which they called Rolling Stone, and no doubt they treated the information he gave them with prodigious caution. Thus, you see, it is consistent with Leamas’ protestations that the existence of Mundt was unknown to him although—as you will see—he not only paid him, but in the end actually received from Riemeck and passed to London the intelligence which Mundt obtained.

‘Towards the end of 1959 Mundt informed his London masters that he had found within the Praesidium a man who would act as intermediary between them and Mundt. That man was Karl Riemeck.

‘How did Mundt find Riemeck? How did he dare to establish Riemeck’s willingness to co-operate? You must remember Mundt’s exceptional position: he had access to all the security files, could tap telephones, open letters, employ watchers; he could interrogate anyone with undisputed right, and had before him the most detailed picture of their private life. Above all he could silence suspicion in a moment by turning against the people the very weapon’—Fiedler’s voice was trembling with fury—‘which was designed for their protection.’ Returning effortlessly to his former rational style, he continued:

‘You can see now what London did. Still keeping Mundt’s identity a close secret, they connived at Riemeck’s enlistment and enabled indirect contact to be established between Mundt and the Berlin command. That is the significance of Riemeck’s contact with de Jong and Leamas. That is how you should interpret Leamas’ evidence, that is how you should measure Mundt’s treachery.’ He turned and, looking Mundt full in the face, he shouted:

‘There is your saboteur, terrorist! There is the man who has sold the people’s right!

‘I have nearly finished. Only one more thing needs to be said. Mundt gained a reputation as a loyal and astute protector of the people, and he silenced for ever those tongues that could betray his secret. Thus he killed in the name of the people to protect his fascist treachery and advanced his own career within our Service. It is not possible to imagine a crime more terrible than this. That is why—in the end—having done what he could to protect Karl Riemeck from the suspicion which was gradually surrounding him he gave the order that Riemeck be shot on sight. That is why he arranged for the assassination of Riemeck’s mistress. When you come to give your judgement to the Praesidium, do not shrink from recognising the full bestiality of this man’s crime. For Hans-Dieter Mundt, death is a judgement of mercy.’

21

THE WITNESS

The President turned to the little man in the black suit sitting directly opposite Fiedler.

‘Comrade Karden, you are speaking for Comrade Mundt. Do you wish to examine the witness Leamas?’

‘Yes, yes, I should like to in one moment,’ he replied, getting laboriously to his feet and pulling the end of his gold-rimmed spectacles over his ears. He was a benign figure, a little rustic, and his hair was white.

‘The contention of Comrade Mundt,’ he began—his mild voice was rather pleasantly modulated—‘is that Leamas is lying; that Comrade Fiedler either by design or ill chance has been drawn into a plot to disrupt the Abteilung, and thus bring into disrepute the organs for the defence of our socialist state. We do not dispute that Karl Riemeck was a British spy—there is evidence for that. But we dispute that Mundt was in league with him, or accepted money for betraying our Party. We say there is no objective evidence for this charge, that Comrade Fiedler is intoxicated by dreams of power and blinded to rational thought. We maintain that from the moment Leamas returned from Berlin to London he lived a part; that he simulated a swift decline into degeneracy, drunkenness and debt, that he assaulted a tradesman in full public view and affected anti-American sentiment—all solely in order to attract the attention of the Abteilung. We believe that British Intelligence has deliberately spun around Comrade Mundt a mesh of circumstantial evidence—the payment of money to foreign banks, its withdrawal to coincide with Mundt’s presence in this or that country, the casual hearsay evidence from Peter Guillam, the secret meeting between Control and Riemeck at which matters were discussed that Leamas could not hear: these all provided a spurious chain of evidence and Comrade Fiedler, on whose ambitions the British so accurately counted, accepted it; and thus he became party to a monstrous plot to destroy—to murder in fact, for Mundt now stands to lose his life—one of the most vigilant defenders of our Republic.

‘Is it not consistent with their record of sabotage, subversion and human trafficking that the British should devise this desperate plot? What other course lies open to them now that the rampart has been built across Berlin and the flow of Western spies has been checked? We have fallen victim to their plot; at best Comrade Fiedler is guilty of a most serious error; at worst of conniving with imperialist spies to undermine the security of the worker state, and shed innocent blood.

‘We also have a witness.’ He nodded benignly at the court. ‘Yes. We too have a witness. For do you really suppose that all this time Comrade Mundt has been in ignorance of Fiedler’s fevered plotting? Do you really suppose that? For months he has been aware of the sickness in Fiedler’s mind. It was Comrade Mundt himself who authorised the approach that was made to Leamas in England: do you think he would have taken such an insane risk if he were himself to be implicated?

‘And when the reports of Leamas’ first interrogation in The Hague reached the Praesidium, do you suppose Comrade Mundt threw his away unread? And when, after Leamas had arrived in our country and Fiedler embarked on his own interrogation, no further reports were forthcoming, do you suppose Comrade Mundt was then so obtuse that he did not know what Fiedler was hatching? When the first reports came in from Peters in The Hague, Mundt had only to look at the dates of Leamas’ visits to Copenhagen and Helsinki to realise that the whole thing was a plant—a plant to discredit Mundt himself. Those dates did indeed coincide with Mundt’s visits to Denmark and Finland: they were chosen by London for that very reason. Mundt had known of those “earlier indications” as well as Fiedler—remember that. Mundt too was looking for a spy within the ranks of the Abteilung . . .

‘And so by the time Leamas arrived in Democratic Germany, Mundt was watching with fascination how Leamas nourished Fiedler’s suspicions with hints and oblique indications—never overdone, you understand, never emphasised, but dropped here and there with perfidious subtlety. And by then the ground had been prepared . . . the man in the Lebanon, the miraculous scoop to which Fiedler referred, both seeming to confirm the presence of a highly placed spy within the Abteilung . . .

‘It was wonderfully well done. It could have turned—it could still turn—the defeat which the British suffered through the loss of Karl Riemeck into a remarkable victory.

‘Comrade Mundt took one precaution while the British, with Fiedler’s aid, planned his murder.

‘He caused scrupulous enquiries to be made in London. He examined every tiny detail of that double life which Leamas led in Bayswater. He was looking, you see, for some human error in a scheme of almost superhuman subtlety. Somewhere, he thought, in Leamas’ long sojourn in the wilderness, he would have to break faith with his oath of poverty, drunkenness, degeneracy, above all of solitude. He would need a companion, a mistress perhaps; he would long for the warmth of human contact, long to reveal a part of the other soul within his breast. Comrade Mundt was right you see. Leamas, that skilled, experienced operator, made a mistake so elementary, so human that . . .’ He smiled. ‘You shall hear the witness, but not yet. The witness is here; procured by Comrade Mundt. It was an admirable precaution. Later I shall call—that witness.’ He looked a trifle arch, as if to say he must be allowed his little joke. ‘Meanwhile I should like, if I may, to put one or two questions to this reluctant incriminator, Mr Alec Leamas.’

‘Tell me,’ he began, ‘are you a man of means?’

‘Don’t be bloody silly,’ said Leamas shortly; ‘you know how I was picked up.’

‘Yes, indeed,’ Karden declared, ‘it was masterly. I may take it, then, that you have no money at all?’

‘You may.’

‘Have you friends who would lend you money, give it to you perhaps? Pay your debts?’

‘If I had I wouldn’t be here now.’

‘You have none? You cannot imagine that some kindly benefactor, someone perhaps you have almost forgotten about, would ever concern himself with putting you on your feet . . . settling with creditors and that kind of thing?’

‘No.’

‘Thank you. Another question: do you know George Smiley?’

‘Of course I do. He was in the Circus.’

‘He has now left British Intelligence?’

‘He packed it up after the Fennan case.’

‘Ah—the case in which Mundt was involved. Have you ever seen him since?’

‘Once or twice.’

‘Have you seen him since you left the Circus?’

Leamas hesitated.

‘No,’ he said.

‘He didn’t visit you in prison?’

‘No. No one did.’

‘And before you went to prison?’

‘No.’

‘After you left prison—the day of your release in fact—you were picked up, weren’t you, by a man called Ashe?’

‘Yes.’

‘You had lunch with him in Soho. After the two of you had parted,

where did you go?’

‘I don’t remember. Probably I went to a pub. No idea.’

‘Let me help you. You went to Fleet Street eventually and caught a bus. From there you seem to have zigzagged by bus, tube and private car, rather inexpertly for a man of your experience, to Chelsea. Do you remember that? I can show you the report if you like, I have it here.’

‘You’re probably right. So what?’

‘George Smiley lives in Bywater Street, just off the King’s Road, that is my point. Your car turned into Bywater Street and our agent reported that you were dropped at number nine. That happens to be Smiley’s house.’

‘That’s drivel,’ Leamas declared. ‘I should think I went to the Eight Bells; it’s a favourite pub of mine.’

‘By private car?’

‘That’s nonsense too. I went by taxi, I expect. If I have money I spend it.’

‘But why all the running about beforehand?’

‘That’s just cock. They were probably following the wrong man. That would be bloody typical.’

‘Going back to my original question, you cannot imagine that Smiley would have taken any interest in you after you left the Circus?’

‘God, no.’

‘Nor in your welfare after you went to prison, nor spent money on your dependants, nor wanted to see you after you had met Ashe?’

‘No. I haven’t the least idea what you’re trying to say, Karden, but the answer’s no. If you’d ever met Smiley you wouldn’t ask. We’re about as different as we could be.’

Karden seemed rather pleased with this, smiling and nodding to himself as he adjusted his spectacles and referred elaborately to his file.

‘Oh yes,’ he said, as if he had forgotten something; ‘when you asked the grocer for credit, how much money had you?’

‘Nothing,’ said Leamas carelessly. ‘I’d been broke for a week. Longer, I should think.’

‘What had you lived on?’

‘Bits and pieces. I’d been ill; some fever. I’d hardly eaten anything for a week. I suppose that made me nervous too—tipped the scales.’

‘You were, of course, still owed money at the library, weren’t you?’

‘How did you know that?’ asked Leamas sharply. ‘Have you been—’

‘Why didn’t you go and collect it? Then you wouldn’t have had to ask for credit, would you, Leamas?’

He shrugged.

‘I forget. Probably because the library was closed on Saturday mornings.’

‘I see. Are you sure it was closed on Saturday mornings?’

‘No, it’s just a guess.’

‘Quite. Thank you, that is all I have to ask.’ Leamas was sitting down as the door opened, and a woman came in. She was large and ugly, wearing a grey overall with chevrons on one sleeve. Behind her stood Liz.

22

THE PRESIDENT

She entered the court slowly, looking around her, wide-eyed, like a half-woken child entering a brightly-lit room. Leamas had forgotten how young she was. When she saw him sitting between two guards she stopped.

‘Alec.’

The guard beside her put his hand on her arm and guided her forward to the spot where Leamas had stood. It was very quiet in the courtroom.

‘What is your name, child?’ the President asked abruptly. Liz’s long hands hung at her sides, the fingers straight.

‘What is your name?’ she repeated, loudly this time.

‘Elizabeth Gold.’

‘You are a member of the British Communist Party?’

‘Yes.’

‘And you have been staying in Leipzig?’

‘Yes.’

‘When did you join the Party?’

‘1955. No—fifty-four, I think it was—’

She was interrupted by the sound of movement; the screech of furniture forced aside, and Leamas’ voice, hoarse, high-pitched, ugly, filling the room.

‘You bastards! Leave her alone!’

Liz turned in terror and saw him standing, his white face bleeding and his clothes awry, saw a guard hit him with his fist, so that he half fell; then they were both upon him, had lifted him up, thrusting his arms high behind his back. His head fell forward on his chest, then jerked sideways in pain.

‘If he moves again, take him out,’ the President ordered, and she nodded to Leamas in warning, adding: ‘You can speak again later if you want. Wait.’ Turning to Liz she said sharply, ‘Surely you know when you joined the Party?’

Liz said nothing, and after waiting a moment the President shrugged. Then leaning forward and staring at Liz intently she asked:

‘Elizabeth, have you ever been told in your Party about the need for secrecy?’

Liz nodded.

‘And you have been told never, never to ask questions of another Comrade on the organisation and dispositions of the Party?’

Liz nodded again. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘of course.’

‘Today you will be severely tested in that rule. It is better for you, far better, that you should know nothing. Nothing,’ she added with sudden emphasis. ‘Let this be enough: we three at this table hold very high rank in the Party. We are acting with the knowledge of our Praesidium, in the interests of Party security. We have to ask you some questions, and your answers are of the greatest importance. By replying truthfully, and bravely, you will help the cause of Socialism.’

‘But who,’ she whispered, ‘who is on trial? What’s Alec done?’

The President looked past her at Mundt and said, ‘Perhaps no one is on trial. That is the point. Perhaps only the accusers. It can make no difference who is accused,’ she added, ‘it is a guarantee of your impartiality that you cannot know.’

Silence descended for a moment on the little room; and then, in a voice so quiet that the President instinctively turned her head to catch her words, she asked:

‘Is it Alec? Is it Leamas?’

‘I tell you,’ the President insisted, ‘it is better for you—far better—you should not know. You must tell the truth and go. That is the wisest thing you can do.’

Liz must have made some sign or whispered some words the others could not catch, for the President again leant forward and said, with great intensity:

‘Listen, child, do you want to go home? Do as I tell you and you shall. But if you . . .’ She broke off, indicated Karden with her hand and added cryptically, ‘this Comrade wants to ask you some questions, not many. Then you shall go. Tell the truth.’

Karden stood again, and smiled his kindly, church-warden smile.

‘Elizabeth,’ he enquired, ‘Alec Leamas was your lover, wasn’t he?’.

She nodded.

‘You met at the library in Bayswater, where you work.’

‘Yes.’

‘You had not met him before?’

She shook her head: ‘We met at the library,’ she said.

‘Have you had many lovers, Elizabeth?’

Whatever she said was lost as Leamas shouted again: ‘Karden, you swine,’ but as she heard him she turned and said, quite loud:

‘Alec, don’t. They’ll take you away.’

‘Yes,’ observed the President drily; ‘they will.’

‘Tell me,’ Karden resumed smoothly, ‘was Alec a Communist?’

‘No.’

‘Did he know you were a Communist?’

‘Yes. I told him.’

‘What did he say when you told him then, Elizabeth?’

She didn’t know whether to lie, that was the terrible thing. The questions came so quickly she had no chance to think. All the time they were listening, watching, waiting for a word, a gesture, perhaps, that could do terrible harm to Alec. She couldn’t lie unless she knew what was at stake; she would fumble on and Alec would die—for there was no doubt in her mind that Leamas was in danger.

‘What did he say then?’ Karden repeated.

‘He laughed. He was above all that kind of thing.’

‘Do you believe he was above it?’

‘Of course.’

The young man at the Judges’ table spoke for the second time. His eyes were half closed:

‘Do you regard that as a valid judgement of a human being? That he is above the course of history and the compulsion of dialectic?’

‘I don’t know. It’s what I believed, that’s all.’

‘Never mind,’ said Karden; ‘tell me, was he a happy person, always laughing and that kind of thing?’

‘No. He didn’t often laugh.’

‘But he laughed when you told him you were in the Party. Do you know why?’

‘I think he despised the Party.’

‘Do you think he hated it?’ Karden asked casually.

‘I don’t know,’ Liz replied pathetically.

‘Was he a man of strong likes and dislikes?’

‘No . . . no; he wasn’t.’

‘But he assaulted a grocer. Now why did he do that?’

Liz suddenly didn’t trust Karden any more. She didn’t trust the caressing voice and the good-fairy face.

‘I don’t know.’

‘But you thought about it?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, what conclusion did you come to?’

‘None,’ said Liz flatly.

Karden looked at her thoughtfully, a little disappointed perhaps, as if she had forgotten her catechism.

‘Did you,’ he asked—it might have been the most obvious of questions—‘did you know that Leamas was going to hit the grocer?’

‘No,’ Liz replied, perhaps too quickly, so that in the pause that followed Karden’s smile gave way to a look of amused curiosity.

‘Until now, until today,’ he asked finally, ‘when had you last seen Leamas?’

‘I didn’t see him again after he went to prison,’ Liz replied.

‘When did you see him last, then?’—the voice was kind but persistent. Liz hated having her back to the court; she wished she could turn and see Leamas, see his face perhaps; read in it some guidance, some sign telling how to answer. She was becoming frightened for herself; these questions which proceeded from charges and suspicions of which she knew nothing. They must know she wanted to help Alec, that she was afraid, but no one helped her—why would no one help her?

‘Elizabeth, when was your last meeting with Leamas until today?’ Oh that voice, how she hated it, that silken voice.

‘The night before it happened,’ she replied, ‘the night before he had the fight with Mr Ford.’

‘The fight? It wasn’t a fight, Elizabeth. The grocer never hit back, did he—he never had a chance. Very unsporting!’ Karden laughed, and it was all the more terrible because no one laughed with him.

‘Tell me, where did you meet Leamas that last night?’

‘At his flat. He’d been ill, not working. He’d been in bed and I’d been coming in and cooking for him.’

‘And buying the food? Shopping for him?’

‘Yes.’

‘How kind. It must have cost you a lot of money,’ Karden observed sympathetically. ‘Could you afford to keep him?’

‘I didn’t keep him. I got it from Alec. He . . .’

‘Oh,’ said Karden sharply, ‘so he did have some money?’

Oh God, thought Liz, oh God, oh dear God, what have I said?

‘Not much,’ she said quickly, ‘not much, I know. A pound, two pounds, not more. He didn’t have more than that. He couldn’t pay his bills—his electric light and his rent—they were all paid afterwards, you see, after he’d gone, by a friend. A friend had to pay, not Alec.’

‘Of course,’ said Karden quietly, ‘a friend paid. Came specially and paid all his bills. Some old friend of Leamas, someone he knew before he came to Bayswater perhaps. Did you ever meet this friend, Elizabeth?’

She shook her head.

‘I see. What other bills did this good friend pay, do you know?’

‘No . . . no.’

‘Why do you hesitate?’

‘I said I don’t know,’ Liz retorted fiercely.

‘But you hesitated,’ Karden explained, ‘I wondered if you had second thoughts.’

‘No.’

‘Did Leamas ever speak of this friend? A friend with money who knew where Leamas lived?’

‘He never mentioned a friend at all. I didn’t think he had any friends.’

‘Ah.’

There was a terrible silence in the courtroom, more terrible to Liz because like a blind child among the seeing she was cut off from all those around her; they could measure her answers against some secret standard, and she could not know from the dreadful silence what they had found.

‘How much money do you earn, Elizabeth?’

‘Six pounds a week.’

‘Have you any savings?’

‘A little. A few pounds.’

‘How much is the rent of your flat?’

‘Fifty shillings a week.’

‘That’s quite a lot, isn’t it, Elizabeth? Have you paid your rent recently?’

She shook her head helplessly.

‘Why not,’ Karden continued. ‘Have you no money?’

In a whisper she replied: ‘I’ve got a lease. Someone bought the lease and sent it to me.’

‘Who?’

‘I don’t know.’ Tears were running down her face, ‘I don’t know . . . Please don’t ask any more questions. I don’t know who it was . . . six weeks ago they sent it, a bank in the City . . . some Charity had done it . . . a thousand pounds. I swear I don’t know who . . . a gift from a Charity they said. You know everything—you tell me who . . .’

Burying her face in her hands she wept, her back still turned to the court, her shoulders moving as the sobs shook her body. No one moved, and at length she lowered her hands but did not look up.

‘Why didn’t you enquire?’ Karden asked simply, ‘or are you used to receiving anonymous gifts of a thousand pounds?’

She said nothing and Karden continued: ‘You didn’t enquire because you guessed. Isn’t that right?’

Raising her hand to her face again, she nodded.

‘You guessed it came from Leamas, or from Leamas’ friend, didn’t you?’

‘Yes,’ she managed to say. ‘I heard in the street that the grocer had got some money, a lot of money from somewhere after the trial. There was a lot of talk about it, and I knew it must be Alec’s friend . . .’

‘How very strange,’ said Karden almost to himself. ‘How odd.’ And then: ‘Tell me, Elizabeth, did anyone get in touch with you after Leamas went to prison?’

‘No,’ she lied. She knew now, she was sure they wanted to prove something against Alec, something about the money or his friends; something about the grocer.

‘Are you sure?’ Karden asked, his eyebrows raised above the gold rims of his spectacles.

‘Yes.’

‘But your neighbour, Elizabeth,’ Karden objected patiently, ‘says that men called—two men—quite soon after Leamas had been sentenced; or were they just lovers, Elizabeth? Casual lovers, like Leamas, who gave you money?’

‘Alec wasn’t a casual lover,’ she cried, ‘how can you . . .’

‘But he gave you money. Did the men give you money, too?’

‘Oh God,’ she sobbed, ‘don’t ask . . .’

‘Who were they?’ She did not reply, then Karden shouted, quite suddenly; it was the first time he had raised his voice. ‘Who?’

‘I don’t know. They came in a car. Friends of Alec.’

‘More friends? What did they want?’

‘I don’t know. They kept asking me what he had told me . . . they told me to get in touch with them if . . .’

‘How? How get in touch with them?’

At last she replied:

‘He lived in Chelsea . . . his name was Smiley . . . George Smiley . . . I was to ring him.’

‘And did you?’

‘No!’

Karden had put down his file. A deathly silence had descended on the court. Pointing towards Leamas, Karden said, in a voice more impressive because it was perfectly under control:

‘Smiley wanted to know whether Leamas had told her too much. Leamas had done the one thing British Intelligence had never expected him to do: he had taken a girl and wept on her shoulder.’ Then Karden laughed quietly, as if it were all such a neat joke:

‘Just as Karl Riemeck did. He’s made the same mistake.’

‘Did Leamas ever talk about himself?’ Karden continued.

‘No.’

‘You know nothing about his past?’

‘No. I knew he’d done something in Berlin. Something for the government.’

‘Then he did talk about his past, didn’t he? Did he tell you he had been married?’

There was a long silence. Liz nodded.

‘Why didn’t you see him after he went to prison? You could have visited him.’

‘I didn’t think he’d want me to.’

‘I see. Did you write to him?’

‘No. Yes, once . . . just to tell him I’d wait. I didn’t think he’d mind.’

‘You didn’t think he would want that either?’

‘No.’

‘And when he had served his time in prison, you didn’t try and get in touch with him?’

‘No.’

‘Did he have anywhere to go, did he have a job waiting for him—friends who would take him in?’

‘I don’t know . . . I don’t know.’

‘In fact you were finished with him, were you?’ Karden asked with a sneer. ‘Had you found another lover?’

‘No! I waited for him . . . I’ll always wait for him.’ She checked herself. ‘I wanted him to come back.’

‘Then why had you not written? Why didn’t you try and find out where he was?’

‘He didn’t want me to, don’t you see? He made me promise . . . never to follow him . . . never to . . .’

‘So he expected to go to prison, did he?’ Karden demanded triumphantly.

‘No . . . I don’t know. How can I tell what I don’t know . . .’

‘And on that last evening,’ Karden persisted, his voice harsh and bullying, ‘on the evening before he hit the grocer, did he make you renew your promise? . . . Well, did he?’

With infinite weariness, she nodded in a pathetic gesture of capitulation. ‘Yes.’

‘And you said good-bye?’

‘We said good-bye.’

‘After supper, of course. It was quite late. Or did you spend the night with him?’

‘After supper. I went home . . . not straight home . . . I went for a walk first, I don’t know where. Just walking.’

‘What reason did he give for breaking off your relationship?’

‘He didn’t break it off,’ she said. ‘Never. He just said there was something he had to do; someone he had to get even with, whatever it cost, and afterwards, one day perhaps, when it was all over . . . he would . . . come back, if I was still there and . . .’

‘And you said,’ Karden suggested with irony, ‘that you would always wait for him, no doubt? That you would always love him?’

‘Yes,’ Liz replied simply.

‘Did he say he would send you money?’

‘He said . . . he said things weren’t as bad as they seemed, that I would be . . . looked after.’

‘And that was why you didn’t enquire, wasn’t it, afterwards, when some charity in the City casually gave you a thousand pounds?’

‘Yes! Yes, that’s right. Now you know everything—you knew it all already . . . Why did you send for me if you knew?’

Imperturbably Karden waited for her sobbing to stop.

‘That,’ he observed finally to the Tribunal before him, ‘is the evidence of the defence. I am sorry that a girl whose perception is clouded by sentiment, and whose alertness is blunted by money, should be considered by our British comrades a suitable person for Party office.’

Looking first at Leamas and then at Fiedler he added brutally:

‘She is a fool. It is fortunate, nevertheless, that Leamas met her.

This is not the first time that a revanchist plot has been uncovered through the decadence of its architects.’

With a little precise bow towards the Tribunal, Karden sat down.

As he did so, Leamas rose to his feet, and this time the guards left him alone.

London must have gone raving mad. He’d told them—that was the joke—he’d told them to leave her alone. And now it was clear that from the moment, the very moment he left England—before that, even, as soon as he went to prison—some bloody fool had gone round tidying up—paying the bills, settling the grocer, the landlord; above all, Liz. It was insane, fantastic. What were they trying to do—kill Fiedler, kill their agent? Sabotage their own operation? Was it just Smiley—had his wretched little conscience driven him to this? There was only one thing to do—get Liz and Fiedler out of it and carry the can. He was probably written off anyway. If he could save Fiedler’s skin—if he could do that—perhaps there was a chance that Liz would get away.

How the hell did they know so much? He was sure, he was absolutely sure, he hadn’t been followed to Smiley’s house that afternoon. And the money—how did they pick up the story about him stealing money from the Circus?

That was designed for internal consumption only . . . then how? For God’s sake, how?

Bewildered, angry and bitterly ashamed he walked slowly up the gangway, stiffly, like a man going to the scaffold.

23

CONFESSION

‘All right, Karden,’ his face was white and hard as stone, his head tilted back, a little to one side, in the attitude of a man listening to some distant sound. There was a frightful stillness about him, not of resignation but of self-control, so that his whole body seemed to be in the iron grip of his will.

‘All right, Karden, let her go.’

Liz was staring at him, her face crumpled and ugly, her dark eyes filled with tears.

‘No, Alec . . . no,’ she said. There was no one else in the room—just Leamas tall and straight like a soldier.

‘Don’t tell them,’ she said, her voice rising, ‘whatever it is, don’t tell them just because of me . . . I don’t mind any more, Alec; I promise I don’t.’

‘Shut up, Liz,’ said Leamas awkwardly. ‘It’s too late now.’ His eyes turned to the President.

‘She knows nothing. Nothing at all. Get her out of here and send her home. I’ll tell you the rest.’

The President glanced briefly at the men on either side of her. She deliberated, then said:

‘She can leave the court; but she cannot go home until the hearing is finished. Then we shall see.’

‘She knows nothing, I tell you,’ Leamas shouted. ‘Karden’s right, don’t you see? It was an operation, a planned operation. How could she know that! She’s just a frustrated little girl from a crackpot library—she’s no good to you!’

‘She is a witness,’ replied the President shortly. ‘Fiedler may want to question her.’ It wasn’t Comrade Fiedler any more.

At the mention of his name, Fiedler seemed to wake from the reverie into which he had sunk, and Liz looked at him consciously for the first time. His deep brown eyes rested on her for a moment, and he smiled very slightly, as if in recognition of her race. He was a small, forlorn figure, oddly relaxed she thought.

‘She knows nothing,’ Fiedler said. ‘Leamas is right, let her go.’ His voice was tired.

‘You realise what you are saying?’ the President asked. ‘You realise what this means? Have you no questions to put to her?’

‘She has said what she had to say.’ Fiedler’s hands were folded on his knees and he was studying them as if they interested him more than the proceedings of the court. ‘It was all most cleverly done.’ He nodded. ‘Let her go. She cannot tell us what she does not know.’ With a certain mock formality he added, ‘I have no questions for the witness.’

A guard unlocked the door and called into the passage outside. In the total silence of the court they heard a woman’s answering voice, and her ponderous footsteps slowly approaching. Fiedler abruptly stood up and taking Liz by the arm, he guided her to the door. As she reached the door she turned and looked back towards Leamas, but he was staring away from her like a man who cannot bear the sight of blood.

‘Go back to England,’ Fiedler said to her. ‘You go back to England.’ Suddenly Liz began to sob uncontrollably. The wardress put an arm round her shoulder, more for support than comfort, and led her from the room. The guard closed the door. The sound of her crying faded gradually to nothing.

‘There isn’t much to say,’ Leamas began. ‘Karden’s right. It was a put-up job. When we lost Karl Riemeck we lost our only decent agent in the Zone. All the rest had gone already. We couldn’t understand it—Mundt seemed to pick them up almost before we’d recruited them. I came back to London and saw Control. Peter Guillam was there and George Smiley. George was in retirement really, doing something clever. Philology or something.

‘Anyway, they’d dreamed up this idea. Set a man to trap himself, that’s what Control said. Go through the motions and see if they bite. Then we worked it out—backwards so to speak. “Inductive” Smiley called it. If Mundt were our agent how would we have paid him, how would the files look, and so on. Peter remembered that some Arab had tried to sell us a breakdown of the Abteilung a year or two back and we’d sent him packing. Afterwards we found out we’d made a mistake. Peter had the idea of fitting that in—as if we’d turned it down because we already knew. That was clever.

‘You can imagine the rest. The pretence of going to pieces; drink, money troubles, the rumours that Leamas had robbed the till. It all hung together. We got Elsie in Accounts to help with the gossip, and one or two others. They did it bloody well,’ he added with a touch of pride. ‘Then I chose a morning—a Saturday morning, lots of people about—and broke out. It made the local press—it even made the Worker I think—and by that time you people had picked it up. From then on,’ he added with contempt, ‘you dug your own graves.’

‘Your grave,’ said Mundt quietly. He was looking thoughtfully at Leamas with his pale, pale eyes. ‘And perhaps Comrade Fiedler’s.’

‘You can hardly blame Fiedler,’ said Leamas indifferently, ‘he happened to be the man on the spot; he’s not the only man in the Abteilung who’d willingly hang you, Mundt.’

‘We shall hang you, anyway,’ said Mundt reassuringly. ‘You murdered a guard. You tried to murder me.’

Leamas smiled drily.

‘All cats are alike in the dark, Mundt . . . Smiley always said it could go wrong. He said it might start a reaction we couldn’t stop. His nerve’s gone—you know that. He’s never been the same since the Fennan case—since the Mundt affair in London. They say something happened to him then—that’s why he left the Circus. That’s what I can’t make out, why they paid off the bills, the girl and all that. It must have been Smiley wrecking the operation on purpose, it must have been. He must have had a crisis of conscience, thought it was wrong to kill or something. It was mad after all that preparation, all that work, to mess up an operation that way.

‘But Smiley hated you, Mundt. We all did, I think, although we didn’t say it. We planned the thing as if it was all a bit of a game . . . it’s hard to explain now. We knew we had our backs to the wall: we’d failed against Mundt and now we were going to try and kill him. But it was still a game.’ Turning to the Tribunal he said: ‘You’re wrong about Fiedler; he’s not ours. Why would London take this kind of risk with a man in Fiedler’s position? They counted on him, I admit. They knew he hated Mundt—why shouldn’t he? Fiedler’s a Jew, isn’t he? You know, you must know, all of you, what Mundt’s reputation is, what he thinks about Jews.

‘I’ll tell you something, no one else will, so I’ll tell you: Mundt had Fiedler beaten up, and all the time, while it was going on, Mundt baited him and jeered at him for being a Jew. You all know what kind of man Mundt is, and you put up with him because he’s good at his job. But . . .’ he faltered for a second, then continued: ‘But for God’s sake . . . enough people have got mixed up in all this without Fiedler’s head going into the basket. Fiedler’s all right, I tell you . . . ideologically sound, that’s the expression, isn’t it?’

He looked at the Tribunal. They watched him impassively, curiously almost, their eyes steady and cold. Fiedler, who had returned to his chair and was listening with rather studied detachment, looked at Leamas blandly for a moment:

‘And you messed it all up, Leamas, is that it?’ he asked. ‘An old dog like Leamas, engaged in the crowning operation of his career, falls for a . . . what did you call her? . . . a frustrated little girl in a crackpot library? London must have known; Smiley couldn’t have done it alone.’ Fiedler turned to Mundt: ‘Here’s an odd thing, Mundt; they must have known you’d check up on every part of his story. That was why Leamas lived the life. Yet afterwards they sent money to the grocer, paid up the rent; and they bought the lease for the girl. Of all the extraordinary things for them to do . . . people of their experience . . . to pay a thousand pounds, to a girl—to a member of the Party—who was supposed to believe he was broke. Don’t tell me Smiley’s conscience goes that far. London must have done it. What a risk!’

Leamas shrugged.

‘Smiley was right. We couldn’t stop the reaction. We never expected you to bring me here—Holland yes—but not here.’ He fell silent for a moment, then continued. ‘And I never thought you’d bring the girl. I’ve been a bloody fool.’

‘But Mundt hasn’t,’ Fiedler put in quickly. ‘Mundt knew what to look for—he even knew the girl would provide the proof—very clever of Mundt I must say. He even knew about that lease—amazing really. I mean, how could he have found out; she didn’t tell anyone. I know that girl; I understand her . . . she wouldn’t tell anyone at all.’ He glanced towards Mundt. ‘Perhaps Mundt can tell us how he knew?’

Mundt hesitated, a second too long, Leamas thought.

‘It was her subscription,’ he said; ‘a month ago she increased her Party contribution by ten shillings a month. I heard about it. And so I tried to establish how she could afford it. I succeeded.’

‘A masterly explanation,’ Fiedler replied coolly. There was silence.

‘I think,’ said the President, glancing at her two colleagues, ‘that the Tribunal is now in a position to make its report to the Praesidium. That is,’ she added, turning her small, cruel eyes on Fiedler, ‘unless you have anything more to say.’

Fiedler shook his head. Something still seemed to amuse him.

‘In that case,’ the President continued, ‘my colleagues are agreed that Comrade Fiedler should be relieved of his duties until the disciplinary committee of the Praesidium has considered his position.

‘Leamas is already under arrest. I would remind you all that the Tribunal has no executive powers. The people’s prosecutor, in collaboration with Comrade Mundt, will no doubt consider what action is to be taken against a British agent provocateur and murderer.’

She glanced past Leamas at Mundt. But Mundt was looking at Fiedler with the dispassionate regard of a hangman measuring his subject for the rope.

And suddenly, with the terrible clarity of a man too long deceived, Leamas understood the whole ghastly trick.

24

THE COMMISSAR

Liz stood at the window, her back to the wardress, and stared blankly into the tiny yard outside. She supposed the prisoners took their exercise there. She was in somebody’s office; there was food on the desk beside the telephone but she couldn’t touch it. She felt sick and terribly tired; physically tired. Her legs ached, her face felt stiff and raw from weeping. She felt dirty and longed for a bath.

‘Why don’t you eat?’ the woman asked again. ‘It’s all over now.’ She said this without compassion, as if the girl were a fool not to eat when the food was there.

‘I’m not hungry.’

The wardress shrugged: ‘You may have a long journey,’ she observed, ‘and not much the other end.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘The workers are starving in England,’ she declared complacently. ‘The capitalists let them starve.’

Liz thought of saying something but there seemed no point. Besides, she wanted to know; she had to know, and this woman could tell her.

‘What is this place?’

‘Don’t you know?’ the wardress laughed. ‘You should ask them over there,’ she nodded towards the window. ‘They can tell you what it is.’

‘Who are they?’

‘Prisoners.’

‘What kind of prisoners?’

‘Enemies of the state,’ she replied promptly. ‘Spies, agitators.’

‘How do you know they are spies?’

‘The Party knows. The Party knows more about people than they know themselves. Haven’t you been told that?’ The wardress looked at her, shook her head and observed, ‘The English! The rich have eaten your future and your poor have given them the food—that’s what’s happened to the English.’

‘Who told you that?’

The woman smiled and said nothing. She seemed pleased with herself.

‘And this is a prison for spies?’ Liz persisted.

‘It is a prison for those who fail to recognise Socialist reality; for those who think they have the right to err; for those who slow down the march. Traitors,’ she concluded briefly.

‘But what have they done?’

‘We cannot build Communism without doing away with individualism. You cannot plan a great building if some swine builds his sty on your site.’

Liz looked at her in astonishment.

‘Who told you all this?’

‘I am Commissar here,’ she said proudly, ‘I work in the prison.’

‘You are very clever,’ Liz observed, approaching her.

‘I am a worker,’ the woman replied acidly. ‘The concept of brain workers as a higher category must be destroyed. There are no categories, only workers; no antithesis between physical and mental labour. Haven’t you read Lenin?’

‘Then the people in this prison are intellectuals?’

The woman smiled. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘they are reactionaries who call themselves progressive: they defend the individual against the state. Do you know what Khrushchev said about the counter-revolution in Hungary?’

Liz shook her head. She must show interest, she must make the woman talk.

‘He said it would never have happened if a couple of writers had been shot in time.’

‘Who will they shoot now?’ Liz asked quickly. ‘After the trial?’

‘Leamas,’ she replied indifferently, ‘and the Jew, Fiedler.’ Liz thought for a moment she was going to fall but her hand found the back of a chair and she managed to sit down.

‘What has Leamas done?’ she whispered. The woman looked at her with her small, cunning eyes. She was very large; her hair was scant, stretched over her head to a bun at the nape of her thick neck. Her face was heavy, her complexion flaccid and watery.

‘He killed a guard,’ she said.

‘Why?’

The woman shrugged.

‘As for the Jew,’ she continued, ‘he made an accusation against a loyal comrade.’

‘Will they shoot Fiedler for that?’ asked Liz incredulously.

‘Jews are all the same,’ the woman commented. ‘Comrade Mundt knows what to do with Jews. We don’t need their kind here. If they join the Party they think it belongs to them. If they stay out, they think it is conspiring against them. It is said that Leamas and Fiedler plotted against Mundt. Are you going to eat that?’ she enquired, indicating the food on the desk. Liz shook her head. ‘Then I must,’ she declared, with a grotesque attempt at reluctance. ‘They have given you potato. You must have a lover in the kitchen.’ The humour of this observation sustained her until she had finished the last of Liz’s meal.

Liz went back to the window.

In the confusion of Liz’s mind, in the turmoil of shame and grief and fear there predominated the appalling memory of Leamas, as she had last seen him in the courtroom, sitting stiffly in his chair, his eyes averted from her own. She had failed him and he dared not look at her before he died; would not let her see the contempt, the fear perhaps, that was written on his face.

But how could she have done otherwise? If Leamas had only told her what he had to do—even now it wasn’t clear to her—she would have lied and cheated for him, anything, if he had only told her! Surely he understood that; surely he knew her well enough to realise that in the end she would do whatever he said, that she would take on his form and being, his will, life, his image, his pain, if she could; that she prayed for nothing more than the chance to do so? But how could she have known, if she was not told, how to answer those veiled, insidious questions? There seemed no end to the destruction she had caused. She remembered, in the fevered condition of her mind, how, as a child, she had been horrified to learn that with every step she made, thousands of minute creatures were destroyed beneath her foot; and now, whether she had lied or told the truth—or even, she was sure, had kept silent—she had been forced to destroy a human being; perhaps two, for was there not also the Jew, Fiedler, who had been gentle with her, taken her arm and told her to go back to England? They would shoot Fiedler; that’s what the woman said. Why did it have to be Fiedler—why not the old man who asked the questions, or the fair one in the front row between the soldiers, the one who smiled all the time; whenever she turned round she had caught sight of his smooth, blond head and his smooth, cruel face smiling as if it were all a great joke. It comforted her that Leamas and Fiedler were on the same side. She turned to the woman again and asked:

‘Why are we waiting here?’

The wardress pushed the plate aside and stood up.

‘For instructions,’ she replied. ‘They are deciding whether you must stay.’

‘Stay?’ repeated Liz blankly.

‘It is a question of evidence. Fiedler may be tried, I told you: they suspect conspiracy between Fiedler and Leamas.’

‘But who against? How could he conspire in England? How did he come here? He’s not in the Party.’

The woman shook her head.

‘It is secret,’ she replied. ‘It concerns only the Praesidium. Perhaps the Jew brought him here.’

‘But you know,’ Liz insisted, a note of blandishment in her voice, ‘you are Commissar at the prison. Surely they told you?’

‘Perhaps,’ the woman replied, complacently. ‘It is very secret,’ she repeated.

The telephone rang. The woman lifted the receiver and listened. After a moment she glanced at Liz.

‘Yes, Comrade. At once,’ she said, and put down the receiver.

‘You are to stay,’ she said shortly. ‘The Praesidium will consider the case of Fiedler. In the meantime you will stay here. That is the wish of Comrade Mundt.’

‘Who is Mundt?’

The woman looked cunning.

‘It is the wish of the Praesidium,’ she said.

‘I don’t want to stay,’ Liz cried. ‘I want . . .’

‘The Party knows more about us than we know ourselves,’ the woman replied. ‘You must stay here. It is the Party’s wish.’

‘Who is Mundt?’ Liz asked again, but still she did not reply.

Slowly Liz followed her along endless corridors, through grilles manned by sentries, past iron doors from which no sound came, down endless stairs, across whole courtyards far beneath the ground, until she thought she had descended to the bowels of hell itself, and no one would even tell her when Leamas was dead.

She had no idea what time it was when she heard the footsteps in the corridor outside her cell. It could have been five in the evening—it could have been midnight. She had been awake, staring blankly into the pitch darkness, longing for a sound. She had never imagined that silence could be so terrible. Once she had cried out, and there had been no echo, nothing. Just the memory of her own voice. She had visualised the sound breaking against the solid darkness like a fist against a rock. She had moved her hands about her as she sat on the bed, and it seemed to her that the darkness made them heavy, as if she were groping in the water. She knew the cell was small; that it contained the bed on which she sat, a handbasin without taps and a crude table: she had seen them when she first entered. Then the light had gone out, and she had run wildly to where she knew the bed had stood, and struck it with her shins, and had remained there, shivering with fright. Until she heard the footsteps, and the door of her cell was opened abruptly.

She recognised him at once, although she could only discern his silhouette against the pale blue light in the corridor. The trim, agile figure, the clear line of the cheek and the short fair hair just touched by the light behind him.

‘It’s Mundt,’ he said. ‘Come with me, at once.’ His voice was contemptuous yet subdued, as if he were not anxious to be overheard.

Liz was suddenly terrified. She remembered the wardress: ‘Mundt knows what to do with Jews.’ She stood by the bed, staring at him, not knowing what to do.

‘Hurry, you fool.’ Mundt had stepped forward and seized her wrist. ‘Hurry.’ She let herself be drawn into the corridor. Bewildered, she watched Mundt quietly relock the door of her cell. Roughly he took her arm and forced her quickly along the first corridor, half running, half walking. She could hear the distant whirr of air conditioners; and now and then the sound of other footsteps from passages branching from their own. She noticed that Mundt hesitated, drew back even, when they came upon other corridors, would go ahead and confirm that no one was coming, then signal her forward. He seemed to assume that she would follow, that she knew the reason. It was almost as if he was treating her as an accomplice.

And suddenly he had stopped, was thrusting a key into the keyhole of a dingy metal door. She waited, panic-stricken. He pushed the door savagely outwards and the sweet, cold air of a winter’s evening blew against her face. He beckoned to her again, still with the same urgency, and she followed him down two steps on to a gravel path which led through a rough kitchen garden.

They followed the path to an elaborate Gothic gateway which gave on to the road beyond. Parked in the gateway was a car. Standing beside it was Alec Leamas.

‘Keep your distance,’ Mundt warned her as she started to move forward:

‘Wait here.’

Mundt went forward alone and for what seemed an age she watched the two men standing together, talking quietly between themselves. Her heart was beating madly, her whole body shivering with cold and fear. Finally Mundt returned.

‘Come with me,’ he said, and led her to where Leamas stood. The two men looked at one another for a moment.

‘Good-bye,’ said Mundt indifferently. ‘You’re a fool, Leamas,’ he added. ‘She’s trash, like Fiedler.’ And he turned without another word and walked quickly away into the twilight.

She put her hand out and touched him, and he half turned from her, brushing her hand away as he opened the car door. He nodded to her to get in, but she hesitated.

‘Alec,’ she whispered, ‘Alec, what are you doing? Why is he letting you go?’

‘Shut up!’ Leamas hissed. ‘Don’t even think about it, d’you hear? Get in.’

‘What is it he said about Fiedler? Alec, why is he letting us go?’

‘He’s letting us go because we’ve done our job. Get into the car, quick!’ Under the compulsion of his extraordinary will she got into the car and closed the door. Leamas got in beside her.

‘What bargain have you struck with him?’ she persisted, suspicion and fear rising in her voice. ‘They said you had tried to conspire against him, you and Fiedler. Then why is he letting you go?’

Leamas had started the car and was soon driving fast along the narrow road. On either side, bare fields; in the distance, dark monotonous hills were mingling with the gathering darkness. Leamas looked at his watch.

‘We’re five hours from Berlin,’ he said. ‘We’ve got to make Köpenick by quarter to one. We should do it easily.’

For a time Liz said nothing; she stared through the windscreen down the empty road, confused and lost in a labyrinth of half formed thoughts. A full moon had risen and the frost hovered in long shrouds across the fields. They turned on to an autobahn.

‘Was I on your conscience, Alec?’ she said at last. ‘Is that why you made Mundt let me go?’

Leamas said nothing.

‘You and Mundt are enemies, aren’t you?’

Still he said nothing. He was driving fast now, the needle showed a hundred and twenty kilometres; the autobahn was pitted and bumpy. He had his headlights on full, she noticed, and didn’t bother to dip for oncoming traffic on the other lane. He drove roughly, leaning forward, his elbows almost on the wheel.

‘What will happen to Fiedler?’ Liz asked suddenly and this time Leamas answered.

‘He’ll be shot.’

‘Then why didn’t they shoot you?’ Liz continued quickly. ‘You conspired with Fiedler against Mundt, that’s what they said. You killed a guard. Why has Mundt let you go?’

‘All right!’ Leamas shouted suddenly. ‘I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you what you were never, never to know, neither you nor I. Listen: Mundt is London’s man, their agent; they bought him when he was in England. We are witnessing the lousy end to a filthy, lousy operation to save Mundt’s skin. To save him from a clever little Jew in his own department who had begun to suspect the truth. They made us kill him, d’you see, kill the Jew. Now you know, and God help us both.’

25

THE WALL

‘If that is so, Alec,’ she said at last, ‘what was my I part in all this?’ Her voice was quite calm, almost matter-of-fact.

‘I can only guess, Liz, from what I know and what Mundt told me before we left. Fiedler suspected Mundt; had suspected him ever since Mundt came back from England; he thought Mundt was playing a double game. He hated him, of course—why shouldn’t he—but he was right too: Mundt was London’s man. Fiedler was too powerful for Mundt to eliminate alone, so London decided to do it for him. I can see them working it out, they’re so damned academic; I can see them sitting round a fire in one of their smart bloody clubs. They knew it was no good just eliminating Fiedler—he might have told friends, published accusations: they had to eliminate suspicion. Public rehabilitation, that’s what they organised for Mundt.’

He swung into the left-hand lane to overtake a lorry and trailer. As he did so the lorry unexpectedly pulled out in front of him, so that he had to brake violently on the pitted road to avoid being forced into the crash-fence on his left.

‘They told me to frame Mundt,’ he said simply; ‘they said he had to be killed, and I was game. It was going to be my last job. So I went to seed, and punched the grocer . . . you know all that.’

‘And made love?’ she asked quietly. Leamas shook his head. ‘But this is the point, you see,’ he continued, ‘Mundt knew it all; he knew the plan; he had me picked up, he and Fiedler. Then he let Fiedler take over, because he knew in the end Fiedler would hang himself.

My job was to let them think what in fact was the truth: that Mundt was a British spy.’ He hesitated. ‘Your job was to discredit me. Fiedler was shot and Mundt was saved, mercifully delivered from a fascist plot. It’s the old principle of love on the rebound.’

‘But how could they know about me; how could they know we would come together?’ Liz cried. ‘Heavens above, Alec, can they even tell when people will fall in love?’

‘It didn’t matter—it didn’t depend on that. They chose you because you were young and pretty and in the Party, because they knew you would come to Germany if they rigged an invitation. That man in the Labour Exchange, Pitt, he sent me up there; they knew I’d work at the Library. Pitt was in the Service during the war and they squared him, I suppose. They only had to put you and me in contact, even for a day, it didn’t matter; then afterwards they could call on you, send you the money, make it look like an affair even if it wasn’t, don’t you see? Make it look like an infatuation, perhaps. The only material point was that after bringing us together they should send you money as if it came at my request. As it was, we made it very easy for them . . .’

‘Yes, we did.’ And then she added, ‘I feel dirty, Alec, as if I’d been put out to stud.’

Leamas said nothing.

‘Did it ease your Department’s conscience at all? Exploiting . . .somebody in the Party, rather than just anybody?’ Liz continued.

Leamas said, ‘Perhaps. They don’t really think in those terms. It was an operational convenience.’

‘I might have stayed in that prison, mightn’t I? That’s what Mundt wanted, wasn’t it? He saw no point in taking the risk—I might have heard too much, guessed too much. After all, Fiedler was innocent, wasn’t he? But then he’s a Jew,’ she added excitedly. ‘So that doesn’t matter so much, does it?’

‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ Leamas exclaimed.

‘It seems odd that Mundt let me go, all the same—even as part of the bargain with you,’ she mused. ‘I’m a risk now, aren’t I? When we get back to England, I mean: a Party member knowing all this . . . It doesn’t seem logical that he should let me go.’

‘I expect,’ Leamas replied, ‘he is going to use our escape to demonstrate to the Praesidium that there are other Fiedlers in his department who must be hunted down.’

‘And other Jews?’

‘It gives him a chance to secure his position,’ Leamas replied curtly. ‘By killing more innocent people? It doesn’t seem to worry you much.’

‘Of course it worries me. It makes me sick with shame and anger and . . . But I’ve been brought up differently, Liz; I can’t see it in black and white. People who play this game take risks. Fiedler lost and Mundt won. London won—that’s the point. It was a foul, foul operation. But it’s paid off, and that’s the only rule.’ As he spoke his voice rose, until finally he was nearly shouting.

‘You’re trying to convince yourself,’ Liz cried. ‘They’ve done a wicked thing. How can you kill Fiedler—he was good, Alec; I know he was. And Mundt . . .’

‘What the hell are you complaining about,’ Leamas demanded roughly. ‘Your Party’s always at war, isn’t it? Sacrificing the individual to the mass. That’s what it says. Socialist reality: fighting night and day—that relentless battle—that’s what they say, isn’t it? At least you’ve survived. I never heard that Communists preached the sanctity of human life—perhaps I’ve got it wrong,’ he added sarcastically. ‘I agree, yes, I agree, you might have been destroyed. That was in the cards. Mundt’s a vicious swine; he saw no point in letting you survive. His promise—I suppose he gave a promise to do his best by you—isn’t worth a great deal. So you might have died—today, next year or twenty years on—in a prison in the worker’s paradise. And so might I. But I seem to remember the Party is aiming at the destruction of a whole class. Or have I got it wrong?’ Extracting a packet of cigarettes from his jacket he handed her two, together with a box of matches. Her fingers trembled as she lit them and passed one back to Leamas.

‘You’ve thought it all out, haven’t you?’ she asked.

‘We happened to fit the mould,’ Leamas persisted, ‘and I’m sorry. I’m sorry for the others too—the others who fit the mould. But don’t complain about the terms, Liz; they’re Party terms. A small price for a big return. One sacrificed for many. It’s not pretty, I know, choosing who it’ll be—turning the plan into people.’

She listened in the darkness, for a moment scarcely conscious of anything except the vanishing road before them, and the numb horror in her mind.

‘But they let me love you,’ she said at last. ‘And you let me believe in you and love you.’

‘They used us,’ Leamas replied pitilessly. ‘They cheated us both because it was necessary. It was the only way. Fiedler was bloody nearly home already, don’t you see? Mundt would have been caught; can’t you understand that?’

‘How can you turn the world upside down?’ Liz shouted suddenly. ‘Fiedler was kind and decent; he was only doing his job, and now you’ve killed him. Mundt is a spy and a traitor and you protect him. Mundt is a Nazi, do you know that? He hates Jews . . . what side are you on? How can you . . .?’

‘There’s only one law in this game,’ Leamas retorted. ‘Mundt is their man; he gives them what they need. That’s easy enough to understand, isn’t it? Leninism—the expediency of temporary alliances. What do you think spies are: priests, saints and martyrs? They’re a squalid procession of vain fools, traitors too, yes; pansies, sadists and drunkards, people who play cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten lives. Do you think they sit like monks in London balancing the rights and wrongs? I’d have killed Mundt if I could, I hate his guts; but not now. It so happens that they need him. They need him so that the great moronic mass that you admire can sleep soundly in their beds at night. They need him for the safety of ordinary, crummy people like you and me.’

‘But what about Fiedler—don’t you feel anything for him?’

‘This is a war,’ Leamas replied. ‘It’s graphic and unpleasant because it’s fought on a tiny scale, at close range; fought with a wastage of innocent life sometimes, I admit. But it’s nothing, nothing at all beside other wars—the last or the next.’

‘Oh God,’ said Liz softly. ‘You don’t understand. You don’t want to. You’re trying to persuade yourself. It’s far more terrible, what they are doing; to find the humanity in people, in me and whoever else they use, to turn it like a weapon in their hands, and use it to hurt and kill . . .’

‘Christ Almighty!’ Leamas cried. ‘What else have men done since the world began? I don’t believe in anything, don’t you see—not even destruction or anarchy. I’m sick, sick of killing but I don’t see what else they can do. They don’t proselytise; they don’t stand in pulpits or on party platforms and tell us to fight for Peace or for God or whatever it is. They’re the poor sods who try to keep the preachers from blowing each other sky high.’

‘You’re wrong,’ Liz declared hopelessly; ‘they’re more wicked than all of us.’

‘Because I made love to you when you thought I was a tramp?’ Leamas asked savagely.

‘Because of their contempt,’ Liz replied; ‘contempt for what is real and good; contempt for love, contempt for . . .’

‘Yes,’ Leamas agreed, suddenly weary. ‘That is the price they pay; to despise God and Karl Marx in the same sentence. If that is what you mean.’

‘It makes you the same,’ Liz continued; ‘the same as Mundt and all the rest . . . I should know, I was the one who was kicked about, wasn’t I? By them, by you because you don’t care. Only Fiedler didn’t . . . But the rest of you . . . you all treated me as if I was . . . nothing . . . just currency to pay with . . . You’re all the same, Alec.’

‘Oh, Liz,’ he said desperately, ‘for God’s sake believe me. I hate it, I hate it all; I’m tired. But it’s the world, it’s mankind that’s gone mad. We’re a tiny price to pay . . . but everywhere’s the same, people cheated and misled, whole lives thrown away, people shot and in prison, whole groups and classes of men written off for nothing. And you, your party—God knows it was built on the bodies of ordinary people. You’ve never seen men die as I have, Liz . . .’

As he spoke Liz remembered the drab prison courtyard, and the wardress saying: ‘It is a prison for those who slow down the march . . . for those who think they have the right to err.’

Leamas was suddenly tense, peering forward through the windscreen. In the headlights of the car Liz discerned a figure standing in the road. In his hand was a tiny light which he turned on and off as the car approached. ‘That’s him,’ Leamas muttered; switched off the headlights and engine, and coasted silently forward. As they drew up, Leamas leant back and opened the rear door.

Liz did not turn round to look at him as he got in. She was staring stiffly forward, down the street at the falling rain.

‘Drive at thirty kilometres,’ the man said. His voice was taut, frightened. ‘I’ll tell you the way. When we reach the place you must get out and run to the wall. The searchlight will be shining at the point where you must climb. Stand in the beam of the searchlight. When the beam moves away begin to climb. You will have ninety seconds to get over. You go first,’ he said to Leamas; ‘and the girl follows. There are iron rungs in the lower part—after that you must pull yourself up as best you can. You’ll have to sit on top and pull the girl up. Do you understand?’

‘We understand,’ said Leamas. ‘How long have we got?’

‘If you drive at thirty kilometres we shall be there in about nine minutes. The searchlight will be on the wall at five past one exactly. They can give you ninety seconds. Not more.’

‘What happens after ninety seconds?’ Leamas asked.

‘They can only give you ninety seconds,’ the man repeated; ‘otherwise it is too dangerous. Only one detachment has been briefed. They think you are being infiltrated into West Berlin. They’ve been told not to make it too easy. Ninety seconds are enough.’

‘I bloody well hope so,’ said Leamas drily. ‘What time do you make it?’

‘I checked my watch with the sergeant in charge of the detachment,’ the man replied. A light went on and off briefly in the back of the car. ‘It is twelve forty-eight. We must leave at five to one. Seven minutes to wait.’

They sat in total silence save for the rain pattering on the roof. The cobble road reached out straight before them, staged by dingy street lights every hundred metres. There was no one about. Above them the sky was lit with the unnatural glow of arclights. Occasionally the beam of a searchlight flickered overhead, and disappeared. Far to the left Leamas caught sight of a fluctuating light just above the sky-line, constantly altering in strength, like the reflection of a fire.

‘What’s that?’ he asked, pointing towards it.

‘Information Service,’ the man replied. ‘A scaffolding of lights. It flashes news headlines into East Berlin.’

‘Of course,’ Leamas muttered. They were very near the end of the road.

‘There is no turning back,’ the man continued; ‘he told you that? There is no second chance.’

‘I know,’ Leamas replied.’

‘If something goes wrong—if you fall or get hurt—don’t turn back. They shoot on sight within the area of the wall. You must get over.’

‘We know,’ Leamas repeated; ‘he told me.’

‘From the moment you get out of the car you are in the area.’

‘We know. Now shut up,’ Leamas retorted. And then he added: ‘Are you taking the car back?’

‘As soon as you get out of the car I shall drive it away. It is a danger for me, too,’ the man replied.

‘Too bad,’ said Leamas drily.

Again there was silence; then Leamas asked: ‘Have you got a gun?’

‘Yes,’ said the man; ‘but I can’t give it to you; he said I shouldn’t give it to you . . . that you were sure to ask for it.’

Leamas laughed quietly. ‘He would,’ he said.

Leamas pulled the starter. With a noise that seemed to fill the street the car moved slowly forward.

They had gone about three hundred yards when the man whispered excitedly, ‘Go right here, then left.’ They swung into a narrow side street. There were empty market stalls on either side so that the car barely passed between them.

‘Left here, now!’

They turned again, fast, this time between two tall buildings into what looked like a cul-de-sac. There was washing across the street, and Liz wondered whether they would pass under it. As they approached what seemed to be the dead end the man said: ‘Left again—follow the path.’ Leamas mounted the curb, crossed the pavement, and they followed a broad footpath bordered by a broken fence to their left, and a tall, windowless building to their right. They heard a shout from somewhere above them, a woman’s voice, and Leamas muttered: ‘Oh, shut up,’ as he steered clumsily round a right-angle bend in the path and came almost immediately upon a major road.

‘Which way?’ he demanded.

‘Straight across—past the chemist—between the chemist and the post office—there!’ The man was leaning so far forward that his face was almost level with theirs. He pointed now, reaching past Leamas, the tips of his fingers pressed against the windscreen.

‘Get back,’ Leamas hissed. ‘Get your hand away. How the hell can I see if you wave your hand around like that?’ Slamming the car into first gear he drove fast across the wide road. Glancing to his left he was astonished to glimpse the plump silhouette of the Brandenburg Gate three hundred yards away, and the sinister grouping of military vehicles at the foot of it.

‘Where are we going?’ asked Leamas suddenly.

‘We’re nearly there. Go slowly now . . . left, left, go left!’ he cried, and Leamas jerked the wheel in the nick of time; they passed under a narrow archway into a courtyard. Half the windows were missing or boarded up; the empty doorways gaped sightlessly at them. At the other end of the yard was an open gateway. ‘Through there,’ came the whispered command; urgent in the darkness; ‘then hard right. You’ll see a street lamp on your right. The one beyond it is broken. When you reach the second lamp switch off the engine and coast until you see a fire hydrant. That’s the place.’

‘Why the hell didn’t you drive yourself?’

‘He said you should drive; he said it was safer.’

They passed through the gate and turned sharply to the right. They were in a narrow street, pitch dark.

‘Lights out!’

Leamas switched off the car lights, drove slowly forwards towards the first street lamp. Ahead, they could just see the second. It was unlit. Switching off the engine they coasted silently past it, until twenty yards ahead of them they discerned the dim outline of the fire hydrant. Leamas braked; the car rolled to a standstill.

‘Where are we?’ Leamas whispered. ‘We crossed the Lenin-Allee, didn’t we?’

‘Greifswalder Strasse. Then we turned north. We’re north of Bernauerstrasse.’

‘Pankow?’

‘Just about. Look,’ the man pointed down a side street to the left. At the far end they saw a brief stretch of wall, grey-brown in the weary arclight. Along the top ran a triple strand of barbed wire.

‘How will the girl get over the wire?’

‘It is already cut where you climb. There is a small gap. You have one minute to reach the wall. Good-bye.’

They got out of the car, all three of them. Leamas took Liz by the arm, and she started from him as if he had hurt her.

‘Good-bye,’ said the German.

Leamas just whispered: ‘Don’t start that car till we’re over.’

Liz looked at the German for a moment in the pale light.

She had a brief impression of a young, anxious face; the face of a boy trying to be brave.

‘Good-bye,’ said Liz. She disengaged her arm and followed Leamas across the road and into the narrow street that led towards the wall.

As they entered the street they heard the car start up behind them, turn and move quickly away in the direction they had come.

‘Pull up the ladder, you bastard,’ Leamas muttered, glancing back at the retreating car.

Liz hardly heard him.

26

IN FROM THE COLD

They walked quickly, Leamas glancing over his shoulder from time to time to make sure she was following. As he reached the end of the alley, he stopped, drew into the shadow of a doorway and looked at his watch.

‘Two minutes,’ he whispered.

She said nothing. She was staring straight ahead towards the wall, and the black ruins rising behind it.

‘Two minutes,’ Leamas repeated.

Before them was a strip of thirty yards. It followed the wall in both directions. Perhaps seventy yards to their right was a watch tower; the beam of its searchlight played along the strip. The thin rain hung in the air, so that the light from the arclamps was sallow and chalky, screening the world beyond. There was no one to be seen; not a sound. An empty stage.

The watch tower’s searchlight began feeling its way along the wall towards them, hesitant; each time it rested they could see the separate bricks and the careless lines of mortar hastily put on. As they watched the beam stopped immediately in front of them. Leamas looked at his watch.

‘Ready?’ he asked.

She nodded.

Taking her arm he began walking deliberately across the strip. Liz wanted to run, but he held her so tightly that she could not. They were half-way towards the wall now, the brilliant semi-circle of light drawing them forward, the beam directly above them. Leamas was determined to keep Liz very close to him, as if he were afraid that Mundt would not keep his word and somehow snatch her away at the last moment.

They were almost at the wall when the beam darted to the north leaving them momentarily in total darkness. Still holding Liz’s arm, Leamas guided her forward blindly, his left hand reaching ahead of him until suddenly he felt the coarse, sharp contact of the cinder brick. Now he could discern the wall and, looking upwards, the triple strand of wire and the cruel hooks which held it. Metal wedges, like climbers’ pitons, had been driven into the brick. Seizing the highest one, Leamas pulled himself quickly upwards until he had reached the top of the wall. He tugged sharply at the lower strand of wire and it came towards him, already cut.

‘Come on,’ he whispered urgently, ‘start climbing.’

Laying himself flat he reached down, grasped her up-stretched hand and began drawing her slowly upwards as her foot found the first metal rung.

Suddenly the whole world seemed to break into flame; from everywhere, from above and beside them, massive lights converged, bursting upon them with savage accuracy.

Leamas was blinded, he turned his head away, wrenching wildly at Liz’s arm. Now she was swinging free; he thought she had slipped and he called frantically, still drawing her upwards. He could see nothing—only a mad confusion of colour dancing in his eyes.

Then came the hysterical wail of sirens, orders frantically shouted. Half kneeling astride the wall he grasped both her arms in his, and began dragging her to him inch by inch, himself on the verge of falling.

Then they fired—single rounds, three or four, and he felt her shudder. Her thin arms slipped from his hands. He heard a voice in English from the Western side of the wall:

‘Jump, Alec! Jump, man!’

Now everyone was shouting, English, French and German mixed; he heard Smiley’s voice from quite close:

‘The girl, where’s the girl?’

Shielding his eyes he looked down at the foot of the wall and at last he managed to see her, lying still. For a moment he hesitated, then quite slowly he climbed back down the same rungs, until he was standing beside her. She was dead; her face was turned away, her black hair drawn across her cheek as if to protect her from the rain.

They seemed to hesitate before firing again; someone shouted an order, and still no one fired. Finally they shot him, two or three shots. He stood glaring round him like a blinded bull in the arena. As he fell, Leamas saw a small car smashed between great lorries, and the children waving cheerfully through the window.

Praise for John le Carré

“There are those writer[s] . . . who themselves should be immortal. . . . I would suggest immortality for John le Carré, who I believe one of the most intelligent and entertaining writers. . . . May he write forever!”

—Alan Cheuse, Chicago Tribune

“No other contemporary novelist has more durably enjoyed the twin badges of being both well-read and well-regarded.”

—Scott Turow

“A brilliant linguistic artist with a keen eye for the exotic and not-so-exotic locale, a crafty moralizer.”

—The Wall Street Journal

“Le Carré is simply the world’s greatest fictional spymaster.”

—Newsweek

“Le Carré’s work is . . . the gold standard of espionage fiction and the author is . . . a master of any sort of fiction, no matter the genre.”

—The Seattle Times

“Le Carré’s execution is perfect.”

—The New York Times Book Review

“Le Carré has a great talent for entangling his audience in the sticky tape of complexity, paradox, and irony, and much of the pleasure in his stories is following the same dense, dark path as his characters.”

—New York Daily News

“He has reinvented the realistic spy story as the supreme theater of paradox, where heroism breeds vice, and virtue is a quite accidental by-product of impudent crimes.”

—Time

“John le Carré . . . [is] not just today’s gold standard, but the best there ever was.”

—The Huffington Post

“Le Carré [is] the world’s most reliable witness to the vicissitudes of international paranoia.”

—The New York Review of Books

PENGUIN BOOKS

THE LOOKING GLASS WAR

JOHN LE CARRÉ, was born in 1931 and attended the universities of Bern and Oxford. He taught at Eton and served briefly in British Intelligence during the Cold War. For the last 50 years he has lived by his pen. He divides his time between London and Cornwall.

ALSO BY JOHN LE CARRÉ

AND AVAILABLE FROM PENGUIN

Call for the Dead

A Delicate Truth

The Honourable Schoolboy

The Little Drummer Girl

The Looking Glass War

A Murder of Quality

The Naïve and Sentimental Lover

Our Kind of Traitor

A Perfect Spy

A Small Town in Germany

Smiley’s People

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

AVAILABLE FROM VIKING

The Pigeon Tunnel

PENGUIN BOOKS

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) Penguin Group (Australia), 707 Collins Street, Melbourne, Victoria 3008, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi–110 017, India Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) Penguin Books (South Africa), Rosebank Office Park, 181 Jan Smuts Avenue, Parktown North 2193, South Africa Penguin China, B7 Jiaming Center, 27 East Third Ring Road North, Chaoyang District, Beijing 100020, China

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices:

80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

First published in Great Britain by William Heinemann Ltd. 1965

First published in the United States of America by Coward-McCann, Inc. 1965

Published in Penguin Books 2012

Copyright © le Carré Productions, 1965

Copyright renewed © David Cornwell, 1993

All rights reserved

PUBLISHER’S NOTE

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Le Carré, John, 1931–

The looking glass war / John Le Carré.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-0-14-312259-3

eBook ISBN: 978-1-101-60303-1

978-1-101-57683-0

1. Smiley, George (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Intelligence officers—Fiction. 3. Cold War. 4. Spy stories. I. Title.

PR6062.E33L6 2013

823'.914—dc23 2012038483

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

Cover illustration by Matthew Taylor

Cover design by Buckley and Kulick

Version_2

To James Kennaway

‘I wouldn’t mind being a Pawn, if only I might join.’

Alice

FOREWORD

None of the characters, clubs, institutions nor intelligence organisations I have described here or elsewhere exists, or has existed to my knowledge in real life. I wish to make that very clear.

My thanks are due to the Radio Society of Great Britain and to Mr R. E. Molland, to the editors and staff of Aviation Week & Space Technology and Mr Ronald Coles, all of whom provided me with valuable technical advice; and to Miss Elizabeth Tollinton for her secretarial help.

I must thank above all my wife for her untiring cooperation.

JOHN LE CARRÉ,

Agios Nikolaos,

Crete

May, 1964

CONTENTS

Praise for John le Carré

About the Author

Also by John le Carré

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Foreword

Introduction

PART I

Taylor’s Run

PART II

Avery’s Run

Prelude

Take-off

Homecoming

PART III

Leiser’s Run

Prelude

Take-off

Homecoming

INTRODUCTION

JOHN LE CARRÉ

July 1991

Any writer who imagines he has a career is the fool of fashion and circumstance. He has his books, and he has his artistic conscience, which, if he is any good, is a great deal more rigorous than anybody else’s judgment.

I learned this the hard way with The Looking Glass War, which I wrote in the aftermath of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, and which was received, in Britain, with such wholesale derision from the critical community that, had I taken it to heart, would have persuaded me to follow a different profession, such as window-cleaning, or literary journalism.

After the success of The Spy I felt I had earned the right to experiment with the more fragile possibilities of the spy story than those I had explored till now. For the truth was, that the realities of spying as I had known them on the ground had been far removed from the fiendishly clever conspiracy that had entrapped my hero and heroine in The Spy. I was eager to find a way of illustrating the muddle and futility that were so much closer to life. Indeed, I felt I had to: for while The Spy had been heralded as the book that ripped the mask off the spy business, my private view was that it had glamorised the spy business to Kingdom Come. The brilliance of my British Intelligence mastermind, Control, was like a fan letter to the British secret establishment; the shared death of my doomed lovers at the Berlin Wall was a device of intense romantic satisfaction.

So this time, I thought, I’ll tell it the hard way. This time, cost what it will, I’ll describe a Secret Service that is really not very good at all; that is eking out its wartime glory; that is feeding itself on Little England fantasies; is isolated, directionless, overprotected and destined ultimately to destroy itself.

Such an outfit, if I got it right, would speak not only for the British Intelligence community of the ’sixties, with its internecine feuds and betrayals, its class distinctions and its obsessive vision of the American oaf, trespassing on our precious colonial turf. It would presume to speak also for Little England itself, the England of the Suez campaign, the same England that in those days was being hilariously torn to shreds by the Beyond the Fringe team, and by the revolutionary ‘getting-out-from- under’ music of the Beatles. In a word, I would use the spy story to tell a roman noir in which the British Intelligence Service would be portrayed as a political somnambulant, tapping about in the after-lunch haze of victory, uncertain any more whether it is fighting the Russians or the Germans, but fighting anyway, because not to fight is to wake up. In that sense, The Looking Glass War would be a deliberate reversal, if not an actual parody, of The Spy.

My error, I now believe, was not to have gone far enough down this dangerous path. I should not, as I see it now, have bothered with the Circus or George Smiley at all. I should not have taken counsel from my American editor, the gifted Jack Geoghegan. I should not have pulled my punches. I should have let the Department exist where I was convinced that Britain herself existed, and in some eerie way contrives to exist until this very day: in a vapour of self-delusion and class arrogance, in a gung-ho world of ‘we’ve-never-had-it-so-good’ bordered on one side by our supposed external enemies—the Europeans, the Russians, you name it—and on the other by an illusory conviction that our island can live off its colonial heritage and the favour of its American Cousins for all time.

But my British critics absolutely didn’t see the joke. Or if they did see it, they didn’t find it faintly funny. They wanted A Spy at Easter, A Spy at Christmas, Alec Leamas Rides Again. They wanted anything but the bad, sad news. Thus the book at first found favour only among people who knew us from outside: in Europe, and to my relief in America, where John Kenneth Galbraith wrote that it evoked for him memories of the abortive Bay of Pigs invasion, which was also based on self-delusion; and Allen Dulles, who had recently retired from his post of Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, that this was how the spy world really was. But here in Britain, at least to begin with, I had to live with the pained disappointment of many readers and the outright abuse of the critics. I was duly hurt, and I duly survived. And so, to my surprise, did the book, which little by little clambered its way back into favour with my public.

It is certainly a sad book, but as I flip through it now I find it a rather beautiful one. I wrote it on the island of Crete, whither I had fled after the clamour of The Spy, in the hope of repairing a marriage that had suffered too much from the blows of success. Stuck on a solitary Cretan peninsula, and feeling somewhat directionless myself, I suppose I naturally identified with the forlorn loves of my two male protagonists: Avery’s, for his estranged wife, and Leiser’s for a world that no longer existed.

I cannot tell, even now, how well or badly the novel works. Perhaps, as Joseph Conrad remarked of one of his characters, it stands for so much that it doesn’t stand up. What I do know is that it was an honest book, and perhaps a brave one. Above all, it was the best I could do at the time.

‘The carrying of a very heavy weight such as a large suitcase or trunk, immediately before sending practice, renders the muscles of the forearm, wrist and fingers too insensitive to produce good Morse.’

F. Tait’s The Complete Morse Instructor, Pitman.

PART I

Taylor’s Run

‘A fool lies here who tried to hustle the East.’

KIPLING

1

Snow covered the airfield.

It had come from the north, in the mist, driven by the night wind, smelling of the sea. There it would stay all Winter, threadbare on the grey earth, an icy, sharp dust; not thawing and freezing, but static like a year without seasons. The changing mist, like the smoke of war, would hang over it, swallow up now a hangar, now the radar hut, now the machines; release them piece by piece, drained of colour, black carrion on a white desert.

It was a scene of no depth, no recession and no shadows. The land was one with the sky; figures and buildings locked in the cold like bodies in an icefloe.

Beyond the airfield there was nothing; no house, no hill, no road; not even a fence, a tree; only the sky pressing on the dunes, the running fog that lifted on the muddy Baltic shore. Somewhere inland were the mountains.

A group of children in school caps had gathered at the long observation window, chatting in German. Some wore ski clothes. Taylor gazed dully past them, holding a glass in his gloved hand. A boy turned round and stared at him, blushed and whispered to the other children. They fell silent.

He looked at his watch, making a wide arc with his arm, partly to free the sleeve of his overcoat and partly because it was his style; a military man, he wished you to say, decent regiment, decent club, knocked around in the war.

Ten to four. The plane was an hour late. They would have to announce the reason soon over the loudspeaker. He wondered what they would say: delayed by fog, perhaps; delayed take-off. They probably didn’t even know – and they certainly would not admit – that she was two hundred miles off course, and south of Rostock. He finished his drink, turned to get rid of the empty glass. He had to admit that some of these foreign hooches, drunk in their own country, weren’t at all bad. On the spot, with a couple of hours to kill and ten degrees of frost the other side of the window, you could do a lot worse than Steinhäger. He’d make them order it at the Alias Club when he got back. Cause quite a stir.

The loudspeaker was humming; it blared suddenly, faded out and began again, properly tuned. The children stared expectantly at it. First, the announcement in Finnish, then in Swedish, now in English. Northern Air Services regretted the delay to their charter flight two-nine-zero from Düsseldorf. No hint of how long, no hint of why. They probably didn’t know themselves.

But Taylor knew. He wondered what would happen if he sauntered over to that pert little hostess in the glass box and told her: two-nine-zero will be a bit of time yet, my dear, she’s been blown off course by heavy northerly gales over the Baltic, bearings all to Hades. The girl wouldn’t believe him, of course, she’d think he was a crank. Later she’d know better. She’d realise he was something rather unusual, something rather special.

Outside it was already growing dark. Now the ground was lighter than the sky; the swept runways stood out against the snow like dykes, stained with the amber glow of marking lights. In the nearest hangars neon tubes shed a weary pallor over men and aeroplanes; the foreground beneath him sprang briefly to life as a beam from the control tower flicked across it. A fire engine had pulled away from the workshops on the left and joined the three ambulances already parked short of the centre runway. Simultaneously they switched on their blue rotating lights, and stood in line patiently flashing out their warning. The children pointed at them, chattering excitedly.

The girl’s voice began again on the loudspeaker, it could only have been a few minutes since the last announcement. Once more the children stopped talking and listened. The arrival of flight two-nine-zero would be delayed at least another hour. Further information would be given as soon as it became available. There was something in the girl’s voice, midway between surprise and anxiety, which seemed to communicate itself to the half-dozen people sitting at the other end of the waiting-room. An old woman said something to her husband, stood up, took her handbag and joined the group of children. For a time she peered stupidly into the twilight. Finding no comfort there, she turned to Taylor and said in English, ‘What is become of the Düsseldorf plane?’ Her voice had the throaty, indignant lilt of a Dutchwoman. Taylor shook his head. ‘Probably the snow,’ he replied. He was a brisk man; it went with his military way.

Pushing open the swing door, Taylor made his way downstairs to the reception hall. Near to the main entrance he recognised the yellow pennant of the Northern Air Services. The girl at the desk was very pretty.

‘What’s happened to the Düsseldorf flight?’ His style was confiding; they said he had a knack with little girls. She smiled and shrugged her shoulders.

‘I expect it is the snow. We are often having delays in Autumn.’

‘Why don’t you ask the boss?’ he suggested, indicating with a nod the telephone in front of her.

‘They will tell it on the loudspeaker,’ she said, ‘as soon as they know.’

‘Who’s the skipper, dear?’

‘Please?’

‘Who’s the skipper, the captain?’

‘Captain Lansen.’

‘Is he any good?’

The girl was shocked. ‘Captain Lansen is a very experienced pilot.’

Taylor looked her over, grinned and said, ‘He’s a very lucky pilot anyway, my dear.’ They said he knew a thing or two, old Taylor did. They said it at the Alias on Friday nights.

Lansen. It was odd to hear a name spoken out like that. In the outfit they simply never did it. They favoured circumlocution, cover names, anything but the original: Archie boy, our flying friend, our friend up north, the chappie who takes the snapshots; they would even use the tortuous collection of figures and letters by which he was known on paper; but never in any circumstances the name.

Lansen. Leclerc had shown him a photograph in London: a boyish thirty-five, fair and good-looking. He’d bet those hostesses went mad about him; that’s all they were, anyway, cannon-fodder for the pilots. No one else got a look in. Taylor ran his right hand quickly over the outside of his overcoat pocket just to make sure the envelope was still there. He’d never carried this sort of money before. Five thousand dollars for one flight; seventeen hundred pounds, tax free, to lose your way over the Baltic. Mind you, Lansen didn’t do that every day. This was special, Leclerc had said so. He wondered what she would do if he leant across the counter and told her who he was; showed her the money in that envelope. He’d never had a girl like that, a real girl, tall and young.

He went upstairs again to the bar. The barman was getting to know him. Taylor pointed to the bottle of Steinhäger on the centre shelf and said, ‘Give me another of those, d’you mind? That’s it, the fellow just behind you; some of your local poison.’

‘It’s German,’ the barman said.

He opened his wallet and took out a banknote. In the Cellophane compartment there was a photograph of a girl, perhaps nine years old, wearing glasses and holding a doll. ‘My daughter,’ he explained to the barman, and the barman gave a watery smile.

His voice varied a lot, like the voice of a commercial traveller. His phoney drawl was more extravagant when he addressed his own class, when it was a matter of emphasising a distinction which did not exist; or as now, when he was nervous.

He had to admit: he was windy. It was an eerie situation for a man of his experience and age, going over from routine courier work to operational stuff. This was a job for those swine in the Circus, not for his outfit at all. A different kettle of fish altogether, this was, from the ordinary run-of-the-mill stuff he was used to; stuck out on a limb, miles from nowhere. It beat him how they ever came to put an airport in a place like this. He quite liked the foreign trips as a rule: a visit to old Jimmy Gorton in Hamburg, for instance, or a night on the tiles in Madrid. It did him good to get away from Joanie. He’d done the Turkish run a couple of times, though he didn’t care for wogs. But even that was a piece of cake compared to this: first-class travel and the bags on the seat beside him, a Nato pass in his pocket; a man had status, doing a job like that; good as the diplomatic boys, or nearly. But this was different, and he didn’t like it.

Leclerc had said it was big, and Taylor believed him. They had got him a passport with another name. Malherbe. Pronounced Mallaby, they said. Christ alone knew who’d chosen it. Taylor couldn’t even spell it; made a botch of the hotel register when he signed in that morning. The subsistence was fantastic, of course: fifteen quid a day operational expenses, no vouchers asked for. He’d heard the Circus gave seventeen. He could make a good bit on that, buy something for Joanie. She’d probably rather have the money.

He’d told her, of course: he wasn’t supposed to, but Leclerc didn’t know Joanie. He lit a cigarette, drew from it and held it in the palm of his hand like a sentry smoking on duty. How the hell was he supposed to push off to Scandinavia without telling his wife?

He wondered what those kids were doing, glued to the window all this time. Amazing the way they managed the foreign language. He looked at his watch again, scarcely noticing the time, touched the envelope in his pocket. Better not have another drink; he must keep a clear head. He tried to guess what Joanie was doing now. Probably having a sit-down with a gin and something. A pity she had to work all day.

He suddenly realised that everything had gone silent. The barman was standing still, listening. The old people at the table were listening too, their silly faces turned towards the observation window. Then he heard it quite distinctly, the sound of an aircraft, still far away, but approaching the airfield. He made quickly for the window, was halfway there when the loudspeaker began; after the first few words of German the children, like a flock of pigeons, fluttered away to the reception lounge. The party at the table had stood up; the women were reaching for their gloves, the men for their coats and briefcases. At last the announcer gave the English. Lansen was coming in to land.

Taylor stared into the night. There was no sign of the plane. He waited, his anxiety mounting. It’s like the end of the world, he thought, the end of the bloody world out there. Supposing Lansen crashed; supposing they found the cameras. He wished someone else were handling it. Woodford, why hadn’t Woodford taken it over, or sent that clever college boy Avery? The wind was stronger; he could swear it was far stronger; he could tell from the way it stirred the snow, flinging it over the runway; the way it tore at the flares; the way it made white columns on the horizon, dashing them vehemently away like a hated creation. A gust struck suddenly at the windows in front of him, making him recoil, and there followed the rattle of ice grains and the short grunt of the wooden frame. Again he looked at his watch; it had become a habit with Taylor. It seemed to help, knowing the time.

Lansen will never make it in this, never.

His heart stood still. Softly at first, then rising swiftly to a wail, he heard the klaxons, all four together, moaning out over that godforsaken airfield like the howl of starving animals. Fire . . . the plane must be on fire. He’s on fire and he’s going to try and land . . . he turned frantically, looking for someone who could tell him.

The barman was standing beside him, polishing a glass, looking through the window.

‘What’s going on?’ Taylor shouted. ‘Why are the sirens going?’

‘They always make the sirens in bad weather,’ he replied. ‘It is the law.’

‘Why are they letting him land?’ Taylor insisted. ‘Why don’t they route him farther south? It’s too small, this place; why don’t they send him somewhere bigger?’

The barman shook his head indifferently. ‘It’s not so bad,’ he said indicating the airfield. ‘Besides, he is very late. Maybe he has no petrol.’

They saw the plane low over the airfield, her lights alternating above the flares; her spotlights scanned the runway. She was down, safely down, and they heard the roar of her throttle as she began the long taxi to the reception point.

* * *

The bar had emptied. He was alone. Taylor ordered a drink. He knew his drill: stay put in the bar, Leclerc had said, Lansen will meet you in the bar. He’ll take a bit of time; got to cope with his flight documents, clear his cameras. Taylor heard the children singing downstairs, and a woman leading them. Why the hell did he have to be surrounded by kids and women? He was doing a man’s job, wasn’t he, with five thousand dollars in his pocket and a phoney passport?

‘There are no more flights today,’ the barman said. ‘They have forbidden all flying now.’

Taylor nodded. ‘I know. It’s bloody shocking out there, shocking.’

The barman was putting away bottles. ‘There was no danger,’ he added soothingly. ‘Captain Lansen is a very good pilot.’ He hesitated, not knowing whether to put away the Steinhäger.

‘Of course there wasn’t any danger,’ Taylor snapped. ‘Who said anything about danger?’

‘Another drink?’ the barman said.

‘No, but you have one. Go on, have one yourself.’

The barman reluctantly gave himself a drink, locked the bottle away.

‘All the same, how do they do it?’ Taylor asked. His voice was conciliatory, putting it right with the barman. ‘They can’t see a thing in weather like this, not a damn thing.’ He smiled knowingly. ‘You sit there in the nose and you might just as well have your eyes shut for all the good they do. I’ve seen it,’ Taylor added, his hands loosely cupped in front of him as though he were at the controls. ‘I know what I’m talking about . . . and they’re the first to catch it, those boys, if something does go wrong.’ He shook his head. ‘They can keep it,’ he declared. ‘They’re entitled to every penny they earn. Specially in a kite that size. They’re held together with string, those things; string.’

The barman nodded distantly, finished his drink, washed up the empty glass, dried it and put it on the shelf under the counter. He unbuttoned his white jacket.

Taylor made no move.

‘Well,’ said the barman with a mirthless smile, ‘we have to go home now.’

‘What do you mean we?’ Taylor asked, opening his eyes wide and tilting back his head. ‘What do you mean?’ He’d take on anyone now; Lansen had landed.

‘I have to close the bar.’

‘Go home indeed. Give us another drink, come on. You can go home if you like. I happen to live in London.’ His tone was challenging, half playful, half resentful, gathering volume. ‘And since your aircraft companies are unable to get me to London, or any other damn place until tomorrow morning, it’s a bit silly of you to tell me to go there, isn’t it, old boy?’ He was still smiling, but it was the short, angry smile of a nervous man losing his temper. ‘And next time you accept a drink from me, chum, I’ll trouble you to have the courtesy . . .’

The door opened and Lansen came in.

* * *

This wasn’t the way it was supposed to happen; this wasn’t the way they’d described it at all. Stay in the bar, Leclerc had said, sit at the corner table, have a drink, put your hat and coat on the other chair as if you’re waiting for someone. Lansen always has a beer when he clocks in. He likes the public lounge, it’s Lansen’s style. There’ll be people milling about, Leclerc said. It’s a small place but there’s always something going on at these airports. He’ll look around for somewhere to sit – quite open and above board – then he’ll come over and ask you if anyone’s using the chair. You’ll say you kept it free for a friend but the friend hadn’t turned up: Lansen will ask if he can sit there. He’ll order a beer, then say, ‘Boy friend or girl friend?’ You’ll tell him not to be indelicate, and you’ll both laugh a bit and get talking. Ask the two questions: height and airspeed. Research Section must know the height and airspeed. Leave the money in your overcoat pocket. He’ll pick up your coat, hang his own beside it and help himself quietly, without any fuss, taking the envelope and dropping the film into your coat pocket. You finish your drinks, shake hands, and Bob’s your uncle. In the morning you fly home. Leclerc had made it sound so simple.

Lansen strode across the empty room towards them, a tall, strong figure in a blue mackintosh and cap. He looked briefly at Taylor and spoke past him to the barman: ‘Jens, give me a beer.’ Turning to Taylor he said, ‘What’s yours?’

Taylor smiled thinly. ‘Some of your local stuff.’

‘Give him whatever he wants. A double.’

The barman briskly buttoned up his jacket, unlocked the cupboard and poured out a large Steinhäger. He gave Lansen a beer from the cooler.

‘Are you from Leclerc?’ Lansen inquired shortly. Anyone could have heard.

‘Yes.’ He added tamely, far too late, ‘Leclerc and Company, London.’

Lansen picked up his beer and took it to the nearest table. His hand was shaking. They sat down.

‘Then you tell me,’ he said fiercely, ‘which damn fool gave me those instructions?’

‘I don’t know.’ Taylor was taken aback. ‘I don’t even know what your instructions were. It’s not my fault. I was sent to collect the film, that’s all. It’s not even my job, this kind of thing. I’m on the overt side – courier.’

Lansen leant forward, his hand on Taylor’s arm. Taylor could feel him trembling. ‘I was on the overt side too. Until today. There were kids on that plane. Twenty-five German schoolchildren on Winter holidays. A whole load of kids.’

‘Yes.’ Taylor forced a smile. ‘Yes, we had the reception committee in the waiting-room.’

Lansen burst out, ‘What were we looking for, that’s what I don’t understand. What’s so exciting about Rostock?’

‘I tell you I’m nothing to do with it.’ He added inconsistently: ‘Leclerc said it wasn’t Rostock but the area south.’

‘The triangle south: Kalkstadt, Langdorn, Wolken. You don’t have to tell me the area.’

Taylor looked anxiously towards the barman.

‘I don’t think we should talk so loud,’ he said. ‘That fellow’s a bit anti.’ He drank some Steinhäger.

Lansen made a gesture with his hand as if he were brushing something from in front of his face. ‘It’s finished,’ he said. ‘I don’t want any more. It’s finished. It was OK when we just stayed on course photographing whatever there was; but this is too damn much, see? Just too damn, damn much altogether.’ His accent was thick and clumsy, like an impediment.

‘Did you get any pictures?’ Taylor asked. He must get the film and go.

Lansen shrugged, put his hand in his raincoat pocket and, to Taylor’s horror, extracted a zinc container for thirty-five-millimetre film, handing it to him across the table.

‘What was it?’ Lansen asked again. ‘What were they after in such a place? I went under the cloud, circled the whole area. I didn’t see any atom bombs.’

‘Something important, that’s all they told me. Something big. It’s got to be done, don’t you see? You can’t make illegal flights over an area like that.’ Taylor was repeating what someone had said. ‘It has to be an airline, a registered airline, or nothing. There’s no other way.’

‘Listen. They picked us up as soon as we got into the place. Two MIGs. Where did they come from, that’s what I want to know? As soon as I saw them I turned into cloud; they followed me. I put out a signal, asking for bearings. When we came out of the cloud, there they were again. I thought they’d force me down, order me to land. I tried to jettison the camera but it was stuck. The kids were all crowding the windows, waving at the MIGs. They flew alongside for a time, then peeled off. They came close, very close. It was bloody dangerous for the kids.’ He hadn’t touched his beer. ‘What the hell did they want?’ he asked. ‘Why didn’t they order me down?’

‘I told you: it’s not my fault. This isn’t my kind of work. But whatever London are looking for, they know what they’re doing.’ He seemed to be convincing himself; he needed to believe in London. ‘They don’t waste their time. Or yours, old boy. They know what they’re up to.’ He frowned, to indicate conviction, but Lansen might not have heard.

‘They don’t believe in unnecessary risks either,’ Taylor said. ‘You’ve done a good job, Lansen. We all have to do our bit . . . take risks. We all do. I did in the war, you know. You’re too young to remember the war. This is the same job; we’re fighting for the same thing.’ He suddenly remembered the two questions. ‘What height were you doing when you took the pictures?’

‘It varied. We were down to six thousand feet over Kalkstadt.’

‘It was Kalkstadt they wanted most,’ Taylor said with appreciation. ‘That’s first-class, Lansen, first-class. What was your airspeed?’

‘Two hundred . . . two forty. Something like this. There was nothing there, I’m telling you, nothing.’ He lit a cigarette.

‘It’s the end now,’ Lansen repeated. ‘However big the target is.’ He stood up. Taylor got up too; he put his right hand in his overcoat pocket. Suddenly his throat went dry: the money, where was the money?

‘Try the other pocket,’ Lansen suggested.

Taylor handed him the envelope. ‘Will there be trouble about this? About the MIGs, I mean?’

Lansen shrugged. ‘I doubt it, it hasn’t happened to me before. They’ll believe me once; they’ll believe it was the weather. I went off course about halfway. There could have been a fault in the ground control. In the hand-over.’

‘What about the navigator? What about the rest of the crew? What do they think?’

‘That’s my business,’ said Lansen sourly. ‘You can tell London it’s the end.’

Taylor looked at him anxiously. ‘You’re just upset,’ he said, ‘after the tension.’

‘Go to hell,’ said Lansen softly. ‘Go to bloody hell.’ He turned away, put a coin on the counter and strode out of the bar, stuffing carelessly into his raincoat pocket the long buff envelope which contained the money.

After a moment Taylor followed him. The barman watched him push his way through the door and disappear down the stairs. A very distasteful man, he reflected; but then he never had liked the English.

* * *

Taylor thought at first that he would not take a taxi to the hotel. He could walk it in ten minutes and save a bit on subsistence. The airline girl nodded to him as he passed her on his way to the main entrance. The reception hall was done in teak; blasts of warm air rose from the floor. Taylor stepped outside. Like the thrust of a sword the cold cut through his clothes; like the numbness of an encroaching poison it spread swiftly over his naked face, feeling its way into his neck and shoulders. Changing his mind, he looked round hastily for a taxi. He was drunk. He suddenly realised: the fresh air had made him drunk. The rank was empty. An old Citroën was parked fifty yards up the road, its engine running. He’s got the heater on, lucky devil, thought Taylor and hurried back through the swing doors.

‘I want a cab,’ he said to the girl. ‘Where can I get one, d’you know?’ He hoped to God he looked all right. He was mad to have drunk so much. He shouldn’t have accepted that drink from Lansen.

She shook her head. ‘They have taken the children,’ she said. ‘Six in each car. That was the last flight today. We don’t have many taxis in Winter.’ She smiled. ‘It’s a very little airport.’

‘What’s that up the road, that old car? Not a cab, is it?’ His voice was indistinct.

She went to the doorway and looked out. She had a careful balancing walk, artless and provocative.

‘I don’t see any car,’ she said.

Taylor looked past her. ‘There was an old Citroën. Lights on. Must have gone. I just wondered.’ Christ, it went past and he’d never heard it.

‘The taxis are all Volvos,’ the girl remarked. ‘Perhaps one will come back after he has dropped the children. Why don’t you go and have a drink?’

‘Bar’s closed,’ Taylor snapped. ‘Barman’s gone home.’

‘Are you staying at the airport hotel?’

‘The Regina, yes. I’m in a hurry, as a matter of fact.’ It was easier now. ‘I’m expecting a phone call from London.’

She looked doubtfully at his coat; it was of rainproof material in a pebble weave. ‘You could walk,’ she suggested. ‘It is ten minutes, straight down the road. They can send your luggage later.’

Taylor looked at his watch, the same wide gesture. ‘Luggage is already at the hotel. I arrived this morning.’

He had that kind of crumpled, worried face which is only a hair’s breadth from the music halls and yet is infinitely sad; a face in which the eyes are paler than their environment, and the contours converge upon the nostrils. Aware of this, perhaps, Taylor had grown a trivial moustache, like a scrawl on a photograph, which made a muddle of his face without concealing its shortcomings. The effect was to inspire disbelief, not because he was a rogue but because he had no talent for deception. Similarly he had tricks of movement crudely copied from some lost original, such as an irritating habit which soldiers have of arching his back suddenly, as if he had discovered himself in an unseemly posture, or he would affect an agitation about the knees and elbows which feebly caricatured an association with horses. Yet the whole was dignified by pain, as if he were holding his little body stiff against a cruel wind.

‘If you walk quickly,’ she said, ‘it takes less than ten minutes.’

Taylor hated waiting. He had a notion that people who waited were people of no substance: it was an affront to be seen waiting. He pursed his lips, shook his head, and with an ill-tempered ‘Goodnight, lady,’ stepped abruptly into the freezing air.

* * *

Taylor had never seen such a sky. Limitless, it curved downward to the snowbound fields, its destiny broken here and there by films of mist which frosted the clustered stars and drew a line round the yellow half-moon. Taylor was frightened, like a landsman frightened by the sea. He hastened his uncertain step, swaying as he went.

He had been walking about five minutes when the car caught him up. There was no footpath. He became aware of its headlights first, because the sound of its engine was deadened by the snow, and he only noticed a light ahead of him, not realizing where it came from. It traced its way languidly over the snowfields and for a time he thought it was the beacon from the airport. Then he saw his own shadow shortening on the road, the light became suddenly brighter, and he knew it must be a car. He was walking on the right, stepping briskly along the edge of the icy rubble that lined the road. He observed that the light was unusually yellow and he guessed the headlamps were masked according to the French rule. He was rather pleased with this little piece of deduction; the old brain was pretty clear after all.

He didn’t look over his shoulder because he was a shy man in his way and did not want to give the impression of asking for a lift. But it did occur to him, a little late perhaps, that on the continent they actually drove on the right, and that therefore strictly speaking he was walking on the wrong side of the road, and ought to do something about it.

The car hit him from behind, breaking his spine. For one dreadful moment Taylor described a classic posture of anguish, his head and shoulders flung violently backwards, fingers extended. He made no cry. It was as if his entire body and soul were concentrated in this final attitude of pain, more articulate in death than any sound the living man had made. It is quite possible that the driver was unaware of what he had done; that the impact of the body on the car was not to be distinguished from a thud of loose snow against the axle.

The car carried him for a yard or two then threw him aside, dead on the empty road, a stiff, wrecked figure at the fringe of the wilderness. His trilby hat lay beside him. A sudden blast seized it, carrying it across the snow. The shreds of his pebble-weave coat fluttered in the wind, reaching vainly for the zinc capsule as it rolled gently with the camber to lodge for a moment against the frozen bank, then to continue wearily down the slope.

PART II

Avery’s Run

‘There are some things that no one has a right to ask of any white man.’

JOHN BUCHAN, MR STANDFAST

2

Prelude

It was three in the morning.

Avery put down the telephone, woke Sarah and said, ‘Taylor’s dead.’ He shouldn’t have told her, of course.

‘Who’s Taylor?’

A bore, he thought; he only remembered him vaguely. A dreary English bore, straight off Brighton pier.

‘A man in courier section,’ he said. ‘He was with them in the war. He was rather good.’

‘That’s what you always say. They’re all good. How did he die, then? How did he die?’ She had sat up in bed.

‘Leclerc’s waiting to hear.’ He wished she wouldn’t watch him while he dressed.

‘And he wants you to help him wait?’

‘He wants me to go to the office. He wants me. You don’t expect me to turn over and go back to sleep, do you?’

‘I was only asking,’ Sarah said. ‘You’re always so considerate to Leclerc.’

‘Taylor was an old hand. Leclerc’s very worried.’ He could still hear the triumph in Leclerc’s voice: ‘Come at once, get a taxi; we’ll go through the files again.’

‘Does this often happen? Do people often die?’ There was indignation in her voice, as if no one ever told her anything; as if she alone thought it dreadful that Taylor had died.

‘You’re not to tell anyone,’ said Avery. It was a way of keeping her from him. ‘You’re not even to say I’ve gone out in the middle of the night. Taylor was travelling under another name.’ He added, ‘Someone will have to tell his wife.’ He was looking for his glasses.

She got out of bed and put on a dressing-gown. ‘For God’s sake stop talking like a cowboy. The secretaries know; why can’t the wives? Or are they only told when their husbands die?’ She went to the door.

She was of medium height and wore her hair long, a style at odds with the discipline of her face. There was a tension in her expression, an anxiety, an incipient discontent, as if tomorrow would only be worse. They had met at Oxford; she had taken a better degree than Avery. But somehow marriage had made her childish; dependence had become an attitude, as if she had given him something irredeemable, and were always asking for it back. Her son was less her projection than her excuse; a wall against the world and not a channel to it.

‘Where are you going?’ Avery asked. She sometimes did things to spite him, like tearing up a ticket for a concert. She said, ‘We’ve got a child, remember?’ He noticed Anthony crying. They must have woken him.

‘I’ll ring from the office.’

He went to the front door. As she reached the nursery she looked back and Avery knew she was thinking they hadn’t kissed.

‘You should have stuck to publishing,’ she said.

‘You didn’t like that any better.’

‘Why don’t they send a car?’ she asked. ‘You said they had masses of cars.’

‘It’s waiting at the corner.’

‘Why, for God’s sake?’

‘More secure,’ he replied.

‘Secure against what?’

‘Have you got any money? I seem to have run out.’

‘What for?’

‘Just money, that’s all! I can’t run around without a penny in my pocket.’ She gave him ten shillings from her bag. Closing the door quickly behind him he went down the stairs into Prince of Wales Drive.

He passed the ground-floor window and knew without looking that Mrs Yates was watching him from behind her curtain, as she watched everybody night and day, holding her cat for comfort.

It was terribly cold. The wind seemed to come from the river, across the park. He looked up and down the road. It was empty. He should have telephoned the rank at Clapham but he wanted to get out of the flat. Besides, he had told Sarah the car was coming. He walked a hundred yards or so towards the Power Station, changed his mind and turned back. He was sleepy. It was a curious illusion that even in the street he still heard the telephone ringing. There was a cab that hung round Albert Bridge at all hours; that was the best bet. So he passed the entrance to his part of the Mansions, glanced up at the nursery window, and there was Sarah looking out. She must have been wondering where the car was. She had Anthony in her arms and he knew she was crying because he hadn’t kissed her. He took half an hour to find a taxi to Blackfriars Road.

* * *

Avery watched the lamps come up the street. He was quite young, belonging to that intermediate class of contemporary Englishman which must reconcile an Arts degree with an uncertain provenance. He was tall and bookish in appearance, slow-eyed behind his spectacles, with a gently self-effacing manner which endeared him to his elders. The motion of the taxi comforted him, as rocking consoles a child.

He reached St George’s Circus, passed the Eye Hospital and entered Blackfriars Road. Suddenly he was upon the house, but told the driver to drop him at the next corner because Leclerc had said to be careful.

‘Just here,’ he called. ‘This will do fine.’

The Department was housed in a crabbed, sooty villa of a place with a fire extinguisher on the balcony. It was like a house eternally for sale. No one knew why the Ministry put a wall round it; perhaps to protect it from the gaze of the people, like the wall round a cemetery; or the people from the gaze of the dead. Certainly not for the garden’s sake, because nothing grew in it but grass which had worn away in patches like the coat of an old mongrel. The front door was painted dark green; it was never opened. By day anonymous vans of the same colour occasionally passed down the shabby drive, but they transacted their business in the back yard. The neighbours, if they referred to the place at all, spoke of the Ministry House, which was not accurate, for the Department was a separate entity, and the Ministry its master. The building had that unmistakable air of controlled dilapidation which characterises government hirings all over the world. For those who worked in it, its mystery was like the mystery of motherhood, its survival like the mystery of England. It shrouded and contained them, cradled them and, with sweet anachronism, gave them the illusion of nourishment.

Avery could remember it when the fog lingered contentedly against its stucco walls, or in the Summer, when the sunlight would briefly peer through the mesh curtains of his room, leaving no warmth, revealing no secrets. And he would remember it on that Winter dawn, its façade stained black, the street lights catching the raindrops on the grimy windows. But however he remembered it, it was not as a place where he worked, but where he lived.

Following the path to the back, he rang the bell and waited for Pine to open the door. A light shone in Leclerc’s window.

He showed Pine his pass. Perhaps both were reminded of the war: for Avery a vicarious pleasure, while Pine could look back on experience.

‘A lovely moon, sir,’ said Pine.

‘Yes.’ Avery stepped inside. Pine followed him in, locking up behind him.

‘Time was, the boys would curse a moon like this.’

‘Yes, indeed,’ Avery laughed.

‘Heard about the Melbourne test, sir? Bradley’s out for three.’

‘Oh dear,’ said Avery pleasantly. He disliked cricket.

A blue lamp glowed from the hall ceiling like the night light in a Victorian hospital. Avery climbed the staircase; he felt cold and uneasy. Somewhere a bell rang. It was odd how Sarah had not heard the telephone.

Leclerc was waiting for him: ‘We need a man,’ he said. He spoke involuntarily, like someone waking. A light shone on the file before him.

He was sleek, small and very bland; a precise cat of a man, clean-shaven and groomed. His stiff collars were cut away; he favoured ties of one colour, knowing perhaps that a weak claim was worse than none. His eyes were dark and quick; he smiled as he spoke, yet conveyed no pleasure. His jackets had twin vents, he kept his handkerchief in his sleeve. On Fridays he wore suede shoes, and they said he was going to the country. No one seemed to know where he lived. The room was in half-darkness.

‘We can’t do another overflight. This was the last; they warned me at the Ministry. We’ll have to put a man in. I’ve been going through the old cards, John. There’s one called Leiser, a Pole. He would do.’

‘What happened to Taylor? Who killed him?’

Avery went to the door and switched on the main light. They looked at one another awkwardly. ‘Sorry. I’m still half asleep,’ Avery said. They began again, finding the thread.

Leclerc spoke up. ‘You took a time, John. Something go wrong at home?’ He was not born to authority.

‘I couldn’t get a cab. I phoned the rank at Clapham but they didn’t reply. Nor Albert Bridge; nothing there either.’ He hated to disappoint Leclerc.

‘You can charge for it,’ Leclerc said distantly, ‘and the phone calls, you realise. Your wife all right?’

‘I told you: there was no reply. She’s fine.’

‘She didn’t mind?’

‘Of course not.’

They never talked about Sarah. It was as if they shared a single relationship to Avery’s wife, like children who are able to share a toy they no longer care for. Leclerc said, ‘Well, she’s got that son of yours to keep her company.’

‘Yes, rather.’

Leclerc was proud of knowing it was a son and not a daughter.

He took a cigarette from the silver box on his desk. He had told Avery once: the box was a gift, a gift from the war. The man who gave it to him was dead, the occasion for giving it was past; there was no inscription on the lid. Even now, he would say, he was not entirely certain whose side the man had been on, and Avery would laugh to make him happy.

Taking the file from his desk, Leclerc now held it directly under the light as if there was something in it which he must study very closely.

‘John.’

Avery went to him, trying not to touch his shoulder.

‘What do you make of a face like that?’

‘I don’t know. It’s hard to tell from photographs.’

It was the head of a boy, round and blank, with long, fair hair swept back.

‘Leiser. He looks all right, doesn’t he? That was twenty years ago, of course,’ Leclerc said. ‘We gave him a very high rating.’ Reluctantly he put it down, struck his lighter and held it to the cigarette. ‘Well,’ he said briskly, ‘we seem to be up against something. I’ve no idea what happened to Taylor. We have a routine consular report, that’s all. A car accident apparently. A few details, nothing informative. The sort of thing that goes out to next of kin. The Foreign Office sent us the teleprint as it came over the wire. They knew it was one of our passports.’ He pushed a sheet of flimsy paper across the desk. He loved to make you read things while he waited. Avery glanced at it: ‘Malherbe? Was that Taylor’s cover name?’

‘Yes. I’ll have to get a couple of cars from the Ministry pool,’ Leclerc said. ‘Quite absurd not having our own cars. The Circus has a whole fleet.’ And then, ‘Perhaps the Ministry will believe me now. Perhaps they’ll finally accept we’re still an operational department.’

‘Did Taylor collect the film?’ Avery asked. ‘Do we know whether he got it?’

‘I’ve no inventory of his possessions,’ Leclerc replied indignantly. ‘At the moment, all his effects are impounded by the Finnish police. Perhaps the film is among them. It’s a small place and I imagine they like to stick to the letter of the law.’ And casually, so that Avery knew it mattered, ‘The Foreign Office is afraid there may be a muddle.’

‘Oh dear,’ said Avery automatically. It was their practice in the Department: antique and understated.

Leclerc looked directly at him now, taking interest. ‘The Resident Clerk at the Foreign Office spoke to the Assistant half an hour ago. They refuse to involve themselves. They say we’re a clandestine service and must do it our own way. Somebody’s got to go out there as next of kin; that is the course they favour. To claim the body and effects and get them back here. I want you to go.’

Avery was suddenly aware of the pictures round the room, of the boys who had fought in the war. They hung in two rows of six, either side of the model of a Wellington bomber, rather a dusty one, painted black with no insignia. Most of the photographs had been taken out of doors. Avery could see the hangars behind, and between the young, smiling faces the half-hidden fuselages of parked aircraft.

Beneath each photograph were signatures, already brown and faded, some fluent and racy, others – they must have been the other-ranks – self-conscious and elaborate, as if the writers had come unnaturally to fame. There were no surnames, but sobriquets from children’s magazines: Jacko, Shorty, Pip and Lucky Joe. Only the Mae West was uniform, the long hair and the sunny, boyish smile. They seemed to like having their photographs taken, as if being together were an occasion for laughter which might not be repeated. The men in front were crouching comfortably, like men used to crouching in gun turrets, and those behind had put their arms carelessly over one another’s shoulders. There was no affectation but a spontaneous goodwill which does not seem to survive war or photographs.

One face was common to every picture, right to the end; the face of a slim, bright-eyed man in a duffel coat and corduroy trousers. He wore no life jacket and stood a little apart from the men as if he were somehow extra. He was smaller than the rest, older. His features were formed; he had a purpose about him which the others lacked. He might have been their schoolmaster. Avery had once looked for his signature to see if it had altered in the nineteen years, but Leclerc had not signed his name. He was still very like his photographs: a shade more set around the jaw perhaps, a shade less hair.

‘But that would be an operational job,’ said Avery uncertainly.

‘Of course. We’re an operational department, you know.’ A little buck of the head. ‘You are entitled to operational subsistence. All you have to do is collect Taylor’s stuff. You’re to bring back everything except the film, which you deliver to an address in Helsinki. You’ll be instructed about that separately. You come back and you can help me with Leiser—’

‘Couldn’t the Circus take it on? I mean, couldn’t they do it more simply?’

This smile came slowly. ‘I’m afraid that wouldn’t answer at all. It’s our show, John: the commitment is within our competence. A military target. I would be shirking our responsibility if I gave it to the Circus. Their charter is political, exclusively political.’

His small hand ran over his hair, a short, concise movement, tense and controlled. ‘So it’s our problem. Thus far, the Ministry approves my reading’ – a favourite expression – ‘I can send someone else if you prefer – Woodford or one of the older men. I thought you’d enjoy it. It’s an important job, you know; something new for you to tackle.’

‘Of course. I’d like to go . . . if you trust me.’

Leclerc enjoyed that. Now he pushed a piece of blue draft paper into Avery’s hand. It was covered with Leclerc’s own writing, boyish and rounded. He had written ‘Ephemeral’ at the top and underlined it. In the left-hand margin were his initials, all four, and beneath them the word Unclassified. Once more Avery began reading.

‘If you follow it carefully,’ he said, ‘you’ll see that we don’t specifically state that you are next of kin; we just quote from Taylor’s application form. That’s as far as the Foreign Office people are prepared to go. They’ve agreed to send this to the local consulate via Helsinki.’

Avery read: ‘Following from Consular Department. Your Teleprint re Malherbe. John Somerton Avery, holder of British passport no—, half-brother of deceased, is named in Malherbe’s passport application as next of kin. Avery informed and proposes to fly out today take over body and effects. NAS flight 201 via Hamburg, ETA 1820 local time. Please provide usual facilities and assistance.’

‘I didn’t know your passport number,’ Leclerc said. ‘The plane leaves at three this afternoon. It’s only a small place; I imagine the Consul will meet you at the airport. There’s a flight from Hamburg every other day. If you don’t have to go to Helsinki you can take the same plane back.’

‘Couldn’t I be his brother?’ Avery asked lamely. ‘Half-brother looks fishy.’

‘There’s no time to rig the passport. The Foreign Office are being very sticky about passports. We had a lot of trouble about Taylor’s.’ He had returned to the file. ‘A lot of trouble. It would mean calling you Malherbe as well, you see. I don’t think they’d like that.’ He spoke without attention, paying out rope.

The room was very cold.

Avery said, ‘What about our Scandinavian friend . . . ?’ Leclerc looked uncomprehending. ‘Lansen. Shouldn’t someone contact him?’

‘I’m attending to that.’ Leclerc, hating questions, replied cautiously as if he might be quoted.

‘And Taylor’s wife?’ It seemed pedantic to say widow. ‘Are you attending to her?’

‘I thought we’d go round first thing in the morning. She’s not on the telephone. Telegrams are so cryptic.’

‘We?’ said Avery. ‘Do we both need to go?’

‘You’re my aide, aren’t you?’

It was too quiet. Avery longed for the sound of traffic and the buzz of telephones. By day they had people about them, the tramp of messengers, the drone of Registry trolleys. He had the feeling, when alone with Leclerc, that the third person was missing. No one else made him so conscious of behaviour, no one else had such a disintegrating effect on conversation. He wished Leclerc would give him something else to read.

‘Have you heard anything about Taylor’s wife?’ Leclerc asked. ‘Is she a secure sort of person?’

Seeing that Avery did not understand, he continued:

‘She could make it awkward for us, you know. If she decided to. We shall have to tread carefully.’

‘What will you say to her?’

‘We shall play it by ear. The way we did in the war. She won’t know, you see. She won’t even know he was abroad.’

‘He might have told her.’

‘Not Taylor. Taylor’s an old hand. He had his instructions and knew the rules. She must have a pension, that’s most important. Active service.’ He made another brisk, finite gesture with his hand.

‘And the staff; what will you tell them?’

‘I shall hold a meeting this morning for Heads of Sections. As for the rest of the Department, we shall say it was an accident.’

‘Perhaps it was,’ Avery suggested.

Leclerc was smiling again; an iron bar of a smile, like an affliction.

‘In which case we shall have told the truth; and have more chance of getting that film.’

There was still no traffic in the street outside. Avery felt hungry. Leclerc glanced at his watch.

‘You were looking at Gorton’s report,’ Avery said.

He shook his head, wistfully touched a file, revisiting a favourite album. ‘There’s nothing there. I’ve read it over and over again. I’ve had the other photographs blown up to every conceivable size. Haldane’s people have been on them night and day. We just can’t get any farther.’

Sarah was right: to help him wait.

Leclerc said – it seemed suddenly the point of their meeting– ‘I’ve arranged for you to have a short talk with George Smiley at the Circus after this morning’s conference. You’ve heard of him?’

‘No,’ Avery lied. This was delicate ground.

‘He used to be one of their best men. Typical of the Circus in some ways, of the better kind. He resigns, you know, and he comes back. His conscience. One never knows whether he’s there or not. He’s a bit past it now. They say he drinks a good deal. Smiley has the North European desk. He can brief you about dropping the film. Our own courier service is disbanded, so there’s no other way: the FO don’t want to know us; after Taylor’s death I can’t allow you to run around with the thing in your pocket. How much do you know about the Circus?’ He might have been asking about women, wary, an older man without experience.

‘A bit,’ said Avery. ‘The usual gossip.’

Leclerc stood up and went to the window. ‘They’re a curious crowd. Some good, of course. Smiley was good. But they’re cheats,’ he broke out suddenly. ‘That’s an odd word, I know, to use about a sister service, John. Lying’s second nature to them. Half of them don’t know any longer when they’re telling the truth.’ He was inclining his head studiously this way and that to catch sight of whatever moved in the waking street below. ‘What wretched weather. There was a lot of rivalry during the war, you know.’

‘I heard.’

‘That’s all over now. I don’t grudge them their work. They’ve more money and more staff than we have. They do a bigger job. However, I doubt whether they do a better one. Nothing can touch our Research Section, for example. Nothing.’ Avery suddenly had the feeling that Leclerc had revealed something intimate, a failed marriage or a discreditable act, and that now it was all right.

‘When you see Smiley, he may ask you about the operation. I don’t want you to tell him anything, do you see, except that you are going to Finland and you may be handling a film for urgent dispatch to London. If he presses you, suggest it is a training matter. That’s all you’re authorised to say. The background, Gorton’s report, future operations; none of that concerns them in the least. A training matter.’

‘I realise that. But he’ll know about Taylor, won’t he, if the FO knows?’

‘Leave that to me. And don’t be misled into believing the Circus has a monopoly of agent running. We have the same right. We just don’t use it unnecessarily.’ He had restated his text.

Avery watched Leclerc’s slim back against the lightening sky outside; a man excluded, a man without a card, he thought.

‘Could we light a fire?’ he asked, and went into the corridor where Pine had a cupboard for mops and brushes. There was kindling wood and some old newspaper. He came back and knelt in front of the fireplace, keeping the best pieces of cinder and coaxing the ash through the grate, just as he would in the flat at Christmas. ‘I wonder if it was really wise to let them meet at the airport,’ he asked.

‘It was urgent. After Jimmy Gorton’s report, it was very urgent. It still is. We haven’t a moment to lose.’

Avery held a match to the newspaper and watched it burn. As the wood caught, the smoke began to roll gently into his face, causing his eyes to water behind his glasses. ‘How could they know Lansen’s destination?’

‘It was a scheduled flight. He had to get clearance in advance.’

Tossing more coal on to the fire, Avery got up and rinsed his hands at the basin in the corner, drying them on his handkerchief.

‘I keep asking Pine to put me out a towel,’ said Leclerc. ‘They haven’t enough to do, that’s half the trouble.’

‘Never mind.’ Avery put the wet handkerchief in his pocket. It felt cold against his thigh. ‘Perhaps they will have now,’ he added without irony.

‘I thought I’d get Pine to make me up a bed here. A sort of ops room.’ Leclerc spoke cautiously, as if Avery might deprive him of the pleasure. ‘You can ring me here tonight from Finland. If you’ve got the film, just say the deal’s come off.’

‘And if not?’

‘Say the deal’s off.’

‘It sounds rather alike,’ Avery objected. ‘If the line’s bad, I mean. “Off” and “Come off”.’

‘Then say they’re not interested. Say something negative. You know what I mean.’

Avery picked up the empty scuttle. ‘I’ll give this to Pine.’

He passed the duty-room. An Air Force clerk was half asleep beside the telephones. He made his way down the wooden staircase to the front door.

‘The Boss wants some coal, Pine.’ The porter stood up, as he always did when anyone spoke to him, at attention by his bed in a barrack-room.

‘I’m sorry, sir. Can’t leave the door.’

‘For God’s sake, I’ll look after the door. We’re freezing up there.’

Pine took the scuttle, buttoned his tunic and disappeared down the passage. He didn’t whistle these days.

‘And a bed made up in his room,’ he continued when Pine returned. ‘Perhaps you’d tell the duty clerk when he wakes up. Oh, and a towel. He must have a towel by his basin.’

‘Yes, sir. Wonderful to see the old Department on the march again.’

‘Where can we get breakfast round here? Is there anywhere near by?’

‘There’s the Cadena,’ Pine replied doubtfully, ‘but I don’t know whether it would do for the Boss, sir.’ A grin. ‘We had the canteen in the old days. Slinger and wadge.’

It was quarter to seven. ‘When does the Cadena open?’

‘Couldn’t say, sir.’

‘Tell me, do you know Mr Taylor at all?’ He nearly said ‘did’.

‘Oh yes, sir.’

‘Have you met his wife?’

‘No, sir.’

‘What’s she like? Have you any idea? Heard anything?’

‘Couldn’t say, I’m sure, sir. Very sad business indeed, sir.’

Avery looked at him in astonishment. Leclerc must have told him, he thought, and went upstairs. Sooner or later he would have to telephone Sarah.

3

They breakfasted somewhere. Leclerc refused to go into the Cadena and they walked interminably until they found another café, worse than the Cadena and more expensive.

‘I can’t remember him,’ Leclerc said. ‘That’s the absurd thing. He’s a trained radio operator apparently. Or was in those days.’

Avery thought he was talking about Taylor. ‘How old did you say he was?’

‘Forty, something over. That’s a good age. A Danzig Pole. They speak German, you know. Not as mad as the pure Slav. After the war he drifted for a couple of years, pulled himself together and bought a garage. He must have made a nice bit.’

‘Then I don’t suppose he’ll . . .’

‘Nonsense. He’ll be grateful, or should be.’

Leclerc paid the bill and kept it. As they left the restaurant he said something about subsistence, and putting in a bill to Accounts. ‘You can claim for night duty as well, you know. Or time in lieu.’ They walked down the road. ‘Your air ticket is booked. Carol did it from her flat. We’d better make you an advance for expenses. There’ll be the business of having his body sent and that kind of thing. I understand it can be very costly. You’d better have him flown. We’ll do a post-mortem privately over here.’

‘I’ve never seen a dead man before,’ Avery said.

They were standing on a street corner in Kennington, looking for a taxi; a gas works on one side of the road, nothing on the other: the sort of place they could wait all day.

‘John, you’ve got to keep very quiet about that side of it; about putting a man in. No one’s to know, not even in the Department, no one at all. I though we’d call him Mayfly. Leiser, I mean. We’ll call him Mayfly.’

‘All right.’

‘It’s very delicate; a question of timing. I’ve no doubt there’ll be opposition, within the Department as well as outside.’

‘What about my cover and that kind of thing?’ Avery asked. ‘I’m not quite—’ A taxi with its flag up passed them without stopping.

‘Bloody man,’ Leclerc snapped. ‘Why didn’t he pick us up?’

‘He lives out here, I expect. He’s making for the West End. About cover,’ he prompted.

‘You’re travelling under your own name. I don’t see that there’s any problem. You can use your own address. Call yourself a publisher. After all you were one. The Consul will show you the ropes. What are you worried about?’

‘Well – just the details.’

Leclerc, coming out of his reverie, smiled. ‘I’ll tell you something about cover; something you’ll learn for yourself. Never volunteer information. People don’t expect you to explain yourself. After all, what is there to explain? The ground’s prepared; the Consul will have our teleprint. Show your passport and play the rest by ear.’

‘I’ll try,’ said Avery.

‘You’ll succeed,’ Leclerc rejoined with feeling, and they both grinned shyly.

‘How far is it to the town?’ Avery asked. ‘From the airport?’

‘About three miles. It feeds the main ski resorts. Heaven knows what the Consul does all day.’

‘And to Helsinki?’

‘I told you. A hundred miles. Perhaps more.’

Avery proposed they took a bus but Leclerc wouldn’t queue, so they remained standing at the corner. He began talking about official cars again. ‘It’s utterly absurd,’ he said. ‘In the old days we had a pool of our own, now we have two vans and the Treasury won’t let us pay the driver overtime. How can I run a Department under those conditions?’

In the end they walked. Leclerc had the address in his head; he made a point of remembering such things. It was awkward for Avery to walk beside him for long, because Leclerc adjusted his pace to that of the taller man. Avery tried to keep himself in check, but sometimes he forgot and Leclerc would stretch uncomfortably beside him thrusting upwards with each stride. A fine rain was falling. It was still very cold.

There were times when Avery felt for Leclerc a deep, protective love. Leclerc had that indefinable quality of arousing guilt, as if his companion but poorly replaced a departed friend. Somebody had been there, and gone; perhaps a whole world, a generation; somebody had made him and disowned him, so that while at one moment Avery could hate him for his transparent manipulation, detest his prinking gestures as a child detests the affectations of a parent, at the next he ran to protect him, responsible and deeply caring. Beyond all the vicissitudes of their relationship, he was somehow grateful that Leclerc had engendered him; and thus they created that strong love which exists between the weak; each became the stage to which the other related his actions.

‘It would be a good thing,’ Leclerc said suddenly, ‘if you shared the handling of Mayfly.’

‘I’d like to.’

‘When you get back.’

They had found the address on the map. Thirty-four Roxburgh Gardens; it was off Kennington High Street. The road soon became dingier, the houses more crowded. Gas lights burnt yellow and flat like paper moons.

‘In the war they gave us a hostel for the staff.’

‘Perhaps they will again,’ Avery suggested.

‘It’s twenty years since I did an errand like this.’

‘Did you go alone then?’ Avery asked, and wished at once that he had not. It was so easy to inflict pain on Leclerc.

‘It was simpler in those days. We could say they’d died for their country. We didn’t have to tell them the details; they didn’t expect that.’ So it was we, thought Avery. Some other boy, one of those laughing faces on the wall.

‘They died every day then, the pilots. We did reconnaissance, you know, as well as special operations . . . I’m ashamed sometimes: I can’t even remember their names. They were so young, some of them.’

There passed across Avery’s mind a tragic procession of horror-struck faces; mothers and fathers, girl friends and wives, and he tried to visualize Leclerc standing among them, naïve yet footsure, like a politician at the scene of a disaster.

They stood at the top of a rise. It was a wretched place. The road led downward into a line of dingy, eyeless houses; above them rose a single block of flats: Roxburgh Gardens. A string of lights shone on to the glazed tiles, dividing and redividing the whole structure into cells. It was a large building, very ugly in its way, the beginning of a new world, and at its feet lay the black rubble of the old: crumbling, oily houses, haunted by sad faces which moved through the rain like driftwood in a forgotten harbour.

Leclerc’s frail fists were clenched; he stood very still.

‘There?’ he said. ‘Taylor lived there?’

‘What’s wrong? It’s part of a scheme, redevelopment . . .’ Then Avery understood. Leclerc was ashamed. Taylor had disgracefully deceived him. This was not the society they protected, these slums with their Babel’s Tower: they had no place in Leclerc’s scheme of things. To think that a member of Leclerc’s staff should daily trudge from the breath and stink of such a place to the sanctuary of the Department: had he no money, no pension? Had he not a little bit beside, as we all have, just a hundred or two, to buy himself out of this squalor?

‘It’s no worse than Blackfriars Road,’ Avery said involuntarily; it was meant to comfort him.

‘Everyone knows we used to be in Baker Street,’ Leclerc retorted.

They made their way quickly to the base of the block, past shop windows filled with old clothes and rusted electric fires, all the sad muddle of useless things which only the poor will buy. There was a chandler; his candles were yellow and dusty like fragments of a tomb.

‘What number?’ Leclerc asked.

‘You said thirty-four.’

They passed between heavy pillars crudely ornamented with mosaics, followed plastic arrows marked with pink numbers; they squeezed between lines of aged, empty cars, until finally they came to a concrete entrance with cartons of milk on the step. There was no door, but a flight of rubberized steps which squeaked as they trod. The air smelt of food and that liquid soap they give in railway lavatories. On the heavy stucco wall a hand-painted notice discouraged noise. Somewhere a wireless played. They continued up two flights, and stopped before a green door, half glazed. Mounted on it in letters of white Bakelite was the number thirty-four. Leclerc took off his hat and wiped the sweat from his temples. He might have been entering church. It had been raining more than they realised; their coats were quite wet. He pressed the bell. Avery was suddenly very frightened; he glanced at Leclerc and thought: this is your show; you tell her.

The music seemed louder. They strained their ears to catch some other sound, but there was none.

‘Why did you call him Malherbe?’ Avery asked suddenly.

Leclerc pressed the bell again; and then they heard it, both of them, a whimper midway between the sob of a child and the whine of a cat, a throttled, metallic sigh. While Leclerc stepped back, Avery seized the bronze knocker on the letter box and banged it violently. The echo died away and they heard from inside the flat a light, reluctant tread; a bolt was slid from its housing, a spring lock disengaged. Then they heard again, much louder and more distinctly, the same plaintive monotone. The door opened a few inches and Avery saw a child, a frail, pallid rag of a girl not above ten years old. She wore steel-rimmed spectacles, the kind Anthony wore. In her arms, its pink limbs splayed stupidly about it, its painted eyes staring from between fringes of ragged cotton, was a doll. Its daubed mouth was lolling open, its head hung sideways as if it were broken or dead. It is called a talking doll, but no living thing uttered such a sound.

‘Where is your mother?’ asked Leclerc. His voice was aggressive, frightened.

The child shook her head. ‘Gone to work.’

‘Who looks after you, then?’

She spoke slowly as if she were thinking of something else. ‘Mum comes back tea-times. I’m not to open the door.’

‘Where is she? Where does she go?’

‘Work.’

‘Who gives you lunch?’ Leclerc insisted.

‘What?’

‘Who gives you dinner?’ Avery said quickly.

‘Mrs Bradley. After school.’

Then Avery asked, ‘Where’s your father?’ and she smiled and put a finger to her lips.

‘He’s gone on an aeroplane,’ she said. ‘To get money. But I’m not to say. It’s a secret.’

Neither of them spoke. ‘He’s bringing me a present,’ she added.

‘Where from?’ said Avery.

‘From the North Pole, but it’s a secret.’ She still had her hand on the doorknob. ‘Where Father Christmas comes from.’

‘Tell your Mother some men were here,’ Avery said. ‘From your Dad’s office. We’ll come again tea-time.’

‘It’s important,’ said Leclerc.

She seemed to relax when she heard they knew her father.

‘He’s on an aeroplane,’ she repeated. Avery felt in his pocket and gave her two half-crowns, the change from Sarah’s ten shillings. She closed the door, leaving them on that damned staircase with the wireless playing dreamy music.

4

They stood in the street not looking at one another. Leclerc said, ‘Why did you ask that question, the question about her father?’

When Avery did not reply he added incongruously, ‘It isn’t a matter of liking people.’

Sometimes Leclerc seemed neither to hear nor to feel; he drifted away, listening for a sound, like a man who having learnt the steps had been deprived of the music; this mood read like a deep sadness, like the bewilderment of a man betrayed.

‘I’m afraid I shan’t be able to come back here with you this afternoon,’ Avery said gently. ‘Perhaps Bruce Woodford would be prepared—’

‘Bruce is no good.’ He added: ‘You’ll be at the meeting; at ten forty-five?’

‘I may have to leave before the end to get to the Circus and collect my things. Sarah hasn’t been well. I’ll stay at the office as long as I can. I’m sorry I asked that question, I really am.’

‘I don’t want anyone to know. I must speak to her mother first. There may be some explanation. Taylor’s an old hand. He knew the rules.’

‘I shan’t mention it, I promise I shan’t. Nor Mayfly.’

‘I must tell Haldane about Mayfly. He’ll object, of course. Yes, that’s what we’ll call it . . . the whole operation. We’ll call it Mayfly.’ The thought consoled him.

They hurried to the office, not to work but for refuge; for anonymity, a quality they had come to need.

His room was one along from Leclerc’s. It had a label on the door saying, ‘Director’s Aide’. Two years ago Leclerc had been invited to America, and the expression dated from his return. Within the Department, staff were referred to by the function they fulfilled. Hence Avery was known simply as Private Office; though Leclerc might alter the title every week, he could not alter the vernacular.

At a quarter to eleven Woodford came into his room. Avery guessed he would: a little chat before the meeting began, a quiet word about some matter not strictly on the agenda.

‘What’s it all about, John?’ He lit his pipe, tilted back his large head and extinguished the match with long, swinging movements of his hand. He had once been a schoolmaster; an athletic man.

‘You tell me.’

‘Poor Taylor.’

‘Precisely.’

‘I don’t want to jump the gun,’ he said, and settled himself on the edge of the desk, still absorbed in his pipe.

‘I don’t want to jump the gun, John,’ he repeated. ‘But there’s another matter we ought to look at, tragic as Taylor’s death is.’ He stowed the tobacco tin in the pocket of his green suit and said, ‘Registry.’

‘That’s Haldane’s parish. Research.’

‘I’ve got nothing against old Adrian. He’s a good scout. We’ve been working together for over twenty years.’ And therefore you’re a good scout too, thought Avery.

Woodford had a way of coming close when he spoke; riding his heavy shoulder against you like a horse rubbing itself against a gate. He leant forward and looked at Avery earnestly: a plain man perplexed, he was saying, a decent man choosing between friendship and duty. His suit was hairy, too thick to crease, forming rolls like a blanket; rough-cut buttons of brown bone.

‘John, Registry’s all to the devil; we both know that. Papers aren’t being entered, files aren’t brought up on the right dates.’ He shook his head in despair. ‘We’ve been missing a policy file on marine freight since mid-October. Just vanished into thin air.’

‘Adrian Haldane put out a search notice,’ Avery said. ‘We were all involved, not just Adrian. Files do get lost – this is the first since April, Bruce. I don’t think that’s bad, considering the amount we handle. I thought Registry was one of our best things. The files are immaculate. I understand our Research index is unique. That’s all Adrian’s doing, isn’t it? Still, if you’re worried why not speak to Adrian about it?’

‘No, no. It’s not that important.’

Carol came in with the tea. Woodford had his in a pottery jumbo-cup, with his initials drawn large, embossed like icing. As Carol put it down, she remarked, ‘Wilf Taylor’s dead.’

‘I’ve been here since one,’ Avery lied, ‘coping with it. We’ve been working all night.’

‘The Director’s very upset,’ she said.

‘What was his wife like, Carol?’ She was a well-dressed girl, a little taller than Sarah.

‘Nobody’s met her.’

She left the room, Woodford watching her. He took his pipe from his mouth and grinned. Avery knew he was going to say something about sleeping with Carol and suddenly he’d had enough.

‘Did your wife make that cup, Bruce?’ he asked quickly. ‘I hear she’s quite a potter.’

‘Made the saucer as well,’ he said. He began talking about the classes she went to, the amusing way it had caught on in Wimbledon, how his wife was tickled to death.

It was nearly eleven; they could hear the others gathering in the corridor.

‘I’d better go next door,’ Avery said, ‘and see if he’s ready. He’s taken quite a beating in the last eight hours.’

Woodford picked up his mug and took a sip of tea. ‘If you get a chance, mention that Registry business to the Boss, John. I don’t want to drag it up in front of everyone else. Adrian’s getting a bit past it.’

‘The Director’s very tied up at the moment, Bruce.’

‘Oh, quite.’

‘He hates to interfere with Haldane, you know that.’ As they reached the door of his room he turned to Woodford and asked, ‘Do you remember a man called Malherbe in the Department?’

Woodford stopped dead. ‘God, yes. A young chap, like you. In the war. Good Lord.’ And earnestly, but quite unlike his usual manner: ‘Don’t mention that name to the Boss. He was very cut up about young Malherbe. One of the special fliers. The two of them were quite close in a way.’

Leclerc’s room by daylight was not so much drab as of an impermanent appearance. You would think its occupant had requisitioned it hastily, under conditions of emergency, and had not known how long he would be staying. Maps lay sprawled over the trestle table, not in threes or fours but dozens, some of a scale large enough to show streets and buildings. Teletape, pasted in strips on pink paper, hung in batches on the notice board, fastened with a heavy bulldog clip like galley proofs awaiting correction. A bed had been put in one corner with a counterpane over it. A clean towel hung beside the basin. The desk was new, of grey steel, Government issue. The walls were filthy. Here and there the cream paint had peeled, showing dark green beneath. It was a small, square room with Ministry of Works curtains. There had been a row about the curtains, a question of equating Leclerc’s rank to the Civil Service scale. It was the one occasion, so far as Avery knew, when Leclerc had made any effort to improve the disorder of the room. The fire was nearly out. Sometimes when it was very windy the fire would not burn at all, and all through the day Avery could hear from next door the soot falling in the chimney.

Avery watched them come in; Woodford first, then Sandford, Dennison and McCulloch. They had all heard about Taylor. It was easy to imagine the news going round the Department, not as headlines, but as a small and gratifying sensation, passed from room to room, lending a briskness to the day’s activity, as it had to these men; giving them a moment’s optimism, like a rise in pay. They would watch Leclerc, watch him as prisoners watch a warder. They knew his routine by instinct, and they waited for him to break it. There would not be a man or woman in the Department but knew they had been called in the middle of the night, and that Leclerc was sleeping in the office.

They settled themselves at the table, putting their cups in front of them noisily like children at a meal, Leclerc at the head, the others on either side, an empty chair at the farther end. Haldane came in, and Avery knew as soon as he saw him that it would be Leclerc versus Haldane.

Looking at the empty chair, he said, ‘I see I’m to take the draughtiest place.’

Avery rose, but Haldane had sat down. ‘Don’t bother, Avery. I’m a sick man already.’ He coughed, just as he coughed all year. Not even the Summer could help him, apparently; he coughed in all seasons.

The others fidgeted uncomfortably; Woodford helped himself to a biscuit. Haldane glanced at the fire. ‘Is that the best the Ministry of Works can manage?’ he asked.

‘It’s the rain,’ Avery said. ‘The rain disagrees with it. Pine’s had a go but he made no difference.’

‘Ah.’

Haldane was a lean man with long, restless fingers; a man locked in himself, slow in his movements, agile in his features, balding, spare, querulous and dry; a man seemingly contemptuous of everything, keeping his own hours and his own counsel; addicted to crossword puzzles and nineteenth-century water colours.

Carol came in with files and maps, putting them on Leclerc’s desk, which in contrast to the remainder of his room was very tidy. They waited awkwardly until she had gone. The door securely closed, Leclerc passed his hand cautiously over his dark hair as if he were not quite familiar with it.

‘Taylor’s been killed. You’ve all heard it by now. He was killed last night in Finland, travelling under another name.’ Avery noticed he never mentioned Malherbe. ‘We don’t know the details. He appears to have been run over. I’ve told Carol to put it about that it was an accident. Is that clear?’

Yes, they said, it was quite clear.

‘He went to collect a film from . . . a contact, a Scandinavian contact. You know whom I mean. We don’t normally use the routine couriers for operational work, but this was different; something very special indeed. I think Adrian will back me up there.’ He made a little upward gesture with his open hands, freeing the wrists from his white cuffs, laying the palms and fingers vertically together; praying for Haldane’s support.

‘Special?’ Haldane repeated slowly. His voice was thin and sharp like the man himself, cultivated, without emphasis and without affectation; an enviable voice. ‘It was different, yes. Not least because Taylor died. We should never have used him, never,’ he observed flatly. ‘We broke a first principle of intelligence. We used a man on the overt side for a clandestine job. Not that we have a clandestine side any more.’

‘Shall we let our masters be the judges of that?’ Leclerc suggested demurely. ‘At least you’ll agree the Ministry is pressing us daily for results.’ He turned to those on either side of him, now to the left, now to the right, bringing them in like shareholders. ‘It is time you all knew the details. We are dealing with something of exceptional security classification, you understand. I propose to limit to Heads of Sections. So far, only Adrian Haldane and one or two of his staff in Research have been initiated. And John Avery as my aide. I wish to emphasize that our sister service knows nothing whatever about it. Now about our own arrangements. The operation has the codeword Mayfly.’ He was speaking in his clipped, effective voice. ‘There is one action file, which will be returned to me personally, or to Carol if I am out, at the end of each day; and there is a library copy. That is the system we used in the war for operational files and I think you are all familiar with it. It’s the system we shall use henceforth. I shall add Carol’s name to the subscription list.’

Woodford pointed at Avery with his pipe, shaking his head. Not young John there; John was not familiar with the system. Sandford, sitting beside Avery, explained. The library copy was kept in the cypher-room. It was against regulations to take it away. All new serials were to be entered on it as soon as they were made; the subscription list was the list of persons authorised to read it. No pins were allowed; all the papers had to be fast. The others looked on complacently.

Sandford was Administration; he was a fatherly man in gold-rimmed spectacles and came to the office on a motorbike. Leclerc had objected once, on no particular grounds, and now he parked it down the road opposite the hospital.

‘Now, about the operation,’ Leclerc said. The thin line of his joined hands bisected his bright face. Only Haldane was not watching him; his eyes were turned away towards the window. Outside, the rain was falling gently against the buildings like Spring rain in a dark valley.

Abruptly Leclerc rose and went to a map of Europe on the wall. There were small flags pinned to it. Stretching upwards with his arm, riding on his toes to reach the northern hemisphere, he said, ‘We’re having a spot of trouble with the Germans.’ A little laugh went up. ‘In the area south of Rostock; a place called Kalkstadt, just here.’ His finger traced the Baltic coastline of Schleswig-Holstein, moved east and stopped an inch or two south of Rostock.

‘To put it in a nutshell, we have three indicators which suggest – I cannot say prove – that something big is going on there in the way of military installations.’

He swung round to face them. He would remain at the map and say it all from there, to show he had the facts in his memory and didn’t need the papers on the table.

‘The first indicator came exactly a month ago when we received a report from our representative in Hamburg, Jimmy Gorton.’

Woodford smiled: good God, was old Jimmy still going?

‘An East German refugee crossed the border near Lübeck, swam the river; a railwayman from Kalkstadt. He went to our Consulate and offered to sell them information about a new rocket site near Rostock. I need hardly tell you the Consulate threw him out. Since the Foreign Office will not even give us the facilities of its bag service it is unlikely’ – a thin smile – ‘that they will assist us by buying military information.’ A nice murmur greeted this joke. ‘However, by a stroke of luck Gorton got to hear of the man and went to Flensburg to see him.’

Woodford would not let this pass. Flensburg? Was not that the place where they had located German submarines in ’forty-one? Flensburg had been a hell of a show.

Leclerc nodded at Woodford indulgently, as if he too had been amused by the recollection. ‘The wretched man had been to every Allied office in North Germany, but no one would look at him. Jimmy Gorton had a chat with him.’ Implicit in Leclerc’s way of describing things was an assumption that Gorton was the only intelligent man among a lot of fools. He crossed to his desk, took a cigarette from the silver box, lit it, picked up a file with a heavy red cross on the cover and laid it noiselessly on the table in front of them. ‘This is Jimmy’s report,’ he said. ‘It’s a first-class bit of work by any standard.’ The cigarette looked very long between his fingers. ‘The defector’s name,’ he added inconsequentially, ‘was Fritsche.’

‘Defector?’ Haldane put in quickly. ‘The man’s a low-grade refugee, a railwayman. We don’t usually talk about men like that defecting.’

Leclerc replied defensively, ‘The man’s not only a railwayman. He’s a bit of a mechanic and a bit of a photographer.’

McCulloch opened the file and began methodically turning over the serials. Sandford watched him through his gold-rimmed spectacles.

‘On the first or second of September – we don’t know which because he can’t remember – he happened to be doing a double shift in the dumping sheds at Kalkstadt. One of his comrades was sick. He was to work from six till twelve in the morning, and four till ten at night. When he arrived to report for work there were a dozen Vopos, East German people’s police, at the station entrance. All passenger traffic was forbidden. They checked his identity papers against a list and told him to keep away from the sheds on the eastern side of the station. They said,’ Leclerc added deliberately, ‘that if he approached the eastern sheds he was liable to be shot.’

This impressed them. Woodford said it was typical of the Germans.

‘It’s the Russians we’re fighting,’ Haldane put in.

‘He’s an odd fish, our man. He seems to have argued with them. He told them he was as reliable as they were, a good German and a Party member. He showed them his union card, photographs of his wife and Heaven knows what. It didn’t do any good, of course, because they just told him to obey orders and keep away from the sheds. But he must have caught their fancy because when they brewed up some soup at ten o’clock they called him over and offered him a cup. Over the soup he asked them what was going on. They were cagey, but he could see they were excited. Then something happened. Something very important,’ he continued. ‘One of the younger ones blurted out that whatever they had in the sheds could blow the Americans out of West Germany in a couple of hours. At this point an officer came along and told them to get back to work.’

Haldane coughed a deep, hopeless cough, like an echo in an old vault.

What sort of officer, someone asked, was he German or Russian?

‘German. That is most relevant. There were no Russians in evidence at all.’

Haldane interrupted sharply. ‘The refugee saw none. That’s all we know. Let us be accurate.’ He coughed again. It was very irritating.

‘As you wish. He went home and had lunch. He was disgruntled at being ordered around in his own station by a lot of young fellows playing soldiers. He had a couple of glasses of schnapps and sat there brooding about the dumping shed. Adrian, if your cough is troubling you . . . ?’ Haldane shook his head. ‘He remembered that on the northern side it abutted with an old storage hut, and that there was a shutter-type ventilator let into the party wall. He formed the notion of looking through the ventilator to see what was in the shed. As a way of getting his own back on the soldiers.’

Woodford laughed.

‘Then he decided to go one further and photograph whatever was there.’

‘He must have been mad,’ Haldane commented. ‘I find this part impossible to accept.’

‘Mad or not, that’s what he decided to do. He was cross because they wouldn’t trust him. He felt he had a right to know what was in the shed.’ Leclerc missed a beat then took refuge in technique. ‘He had an Exa-two camera, single lens reflex. East German manufacture. It’s cheap housing but takes all the Exakta-range lenses; far fewer speeds than the Exakta, of course.’ He looked inquiringly at the technicians, Dennison and McCulloch. ‘Am I right, gentlemen?’ he asked. ‘You must correct me.’ They smiled sheepishly because there was nothing to correct. ‘He had a good wide-angle lens. The difficulty was the light. His next shift didn’t begin till four, by which time dusk would be falling and there would be even less light inside the shed. He had one fast Agfa film which he’d been keeping for a special occasion; it had a DIN speed of twenty-seven. He decided to use that.’ He paused, more for effect than for questions.

‘Why didn’t he wait till next morning?’ Haldane asked.

‘In the report,’ Leclerc continued blandly, ‘you’ll find a very full account by Gorton of how the man got into the hut, stood on an oil drum and took his photographs through the ventilator. I’m not going to repeat all that now. He used the maximum aperture of two point eight, speeds ranging from a quarter of a second to two seconds. A fortunate piece of German thoroughness.’ No one laughed. ‘The speeds were guesswork, of course. He was bracketing an estimated exposure time of one second. Only the last three frames show anything. Here they are.’

Leclerc unlocked the steel drawer of his desk and extracted a set of high-gloss photographs twelve inches by nine. He was smiling a little, like a man looking at his own reflection. They gathered round, all but Haldane and Avery, who had seen them before.

Something was there.

You could see it if you looked quickly; something hidden in the disintegrating shadows; but keep looking and the dark closed in and the shape was gone. Yet something was there; the muffled form of a gun barrel, but pointed and too long for its carriage, the suspicion of a transporter, a vague glint of what might have been a platform.

‘They would put protective covers over them, of course,’ Leclerc commented, studying their faces hopefully, waiting for their optimism.

Avery looked at his watch. It was twenty past eleven. ‘I shall have to go soon, Director,’ he said. He still hadn’t rung Sarah. ‘I have to see the accountant about my air ticket.’

‘Stay another ten minutes,’ Leclerc pleaded, and Haldane asked, ‘Where’s he going?’

Leclerc replied, ‘To take care of Taylor. He has a date at the Circus first.’

‘What do you mean, take care of him? Taylor’s dead.’

There was an uncomfortable silence.

‘You know very well that Taylor was travelling under an alias. Somebody has to collect his effects; recover the film. Avery is going out as next of kin. The Ministry has already given its approval; I wasn’t aware that I needed yours.’

‘To claim the body?’

‘To get the film,’ Leclerc repeated hotly.

‘That’s an operational job; Avery’s not trained.’

‘They were younger than he in the war. He can look after himself.’

‘Taylor couldn’t. What will he do when he’s got it; bring it back in his sponge bag?’

‘Shall we discuss that afterwards?’ Leclerc suggested, and addressed himself once more to the others, smiling patiently as if to say old Adrian must be humoured.

‘That was all we had to go on till ten days ago. Then came the second indicator. The area round Kalkstadt had been declared a prohibited area.’ There was an excited murmur of interest. ‘For a radius of – as far as we can establish – thirty kilometres. Sealed off; closed to all traffic. They brought in frontier guards.’ He glanced round the table. ‘I then informed the Minister. I cannot tell even you all the implications. But let me name one.’ He said the last sentence quickly, at the same time flicking upwards the little horns of greying hair that grew above his ears.

Haldane was forgotten.

‘What puzzled us in the beginning’ – he nodded at Haldane, a conciliatory gesture at a moment of victory, but Haldane ignored it – ‘was the absence of Soviet troops. They have units in Rostock, Witmar, Schwerin.’ His finger darted among the flags. ‘But none – this is confirmed by other agencies – none in the immediate area of Kalkstadt. If there are weapons there, weapons of high destructive capacity, why are there no Soviet troops?’

McCulloch made a suggestion: might there not be technicians, Soviet technicians in civilian dress?

‘I regard that as unlikely.’ A demure smile. ‘In comparable cases where tactical weapons were being transported we have always identified at least one Soviet unit. On the other hand, five weeks ago a few Russian troops were seen at Gustweiler, farther south.’ He was back to the map. ‘They billeted for one night at a pub. Some wore artillery flashes; others had no shoulder-boards at all. One might conclude they had brought something, left it and gone away again.’

Woodford was becoming restless. What did it all add up to, he wanted to know, what did they make of it over at the Ministry? Woodford had no patience with riddles.

Leclerc adopted his academic tone. It had a bullying quality as if facts were facts and could not be disputed. ‘Research Section have done a magnificent job. The overall length of the object in these photographs – they can compute it pretty exactly – is equal to the length of a Soviet middle-range rocket. On present information’ – he lightly tapped the map with his knuckles so that it swung sideways on its hook – ‘the Ministry believes it is conceivable we are dealing with Soviet missiles under East German control. Research,’ he added quickly, ‘are not prepared to go so far. Now if the Ministry view prevails, if they are right, that is, we would have on our hands’ – this was his moment – ‘a sort of Cuba situation all over again, only’ – he tried to sound apologetic, to make it a throw-away line – ‘more dangerous.’

He had them.

‘It was at this point,’ Leclerc explained, ‘that the Ministry felt entitled to authorize an overflight. As you know, for the last four years the Department has been limited to aerial photographs along orthodox civilian or military air routes. Even these required Foreign Office approval.’ He drifted away. ‘It really was too bad.’ His eyes seemed to be searching for something not in the room. The others watched him anxiously, waiting for him to continue.

‘For once the Ministry agreed to waive the ruling, and I am pleased to say the task of mounting the operation was given to this Department. We selected the best pilot we could find on our books: Lansen.’ Someone looked up in surprise; agents’ names were never used that way. ‘Lansen undertook, for a price, to go off course on a charter flight from Düsseldorf to Finland. Taylor was dispatched to collect the film; he died at the landing field. A road accident, apparently.’

Outside they could hear the sound of cars moving through the rain like the rustling of paper in the wind. The fire had gone out; only the smoke remained, hanging like a shroud over the table.

Sandford had raised his hand. What kind of missile was this supposed to be?

‘A Sandal, Medium Range. I am told by Research that it was first shown in Red Square in November ’sixty-two. It has achieved a certain notoriety since then. It was the Sandal which the Russians installed in Cuba. The Sandal is also’ – a glance at Woodford – ‘the linear descendant of the wartime German V2.’

He fetched other photographs from the desk and laid them on the table.

‘Here is a Research Section photograph of the Sandal missile. They tell me it is distinguished by what is called a flared skirt’ – he pointed to the formation at the base – ‘and by small fins. It is about forty foot long from base to cone. If you look carefully you will see tucks near the clamp – just here – which hold the protective cloth cover in position. There is, ironically, no extant picture of the Sandal in protective covers. Possibly the Americans have one, but I don’t feel able to approach them at this stage.’

Woodford reacted quickly. ‘Of course not,’ he said.

‘The Minister was anxious that we shouldn’t alarm them prematurely. One only has to suggest rockets to the Americans to get the most drastic reaction. Before we know where we are they’ll be flying U2s over Rostock.’ Encouraged by their laughter, Leclerc continued: ‘The Minister made another point which I think I might pass on to you. The country which comes under maximum threat from these rockets – they have a range of around eight hundred miles – might well be our own. It is certainly not the United States. Politically, this would be a bad moment to go hiding our faces in the Americans’ skirts. After all, as the Minister put it, we still have one or two teeth of our own.’

Haldane said sarcastically, ‘That is a charming notion,’ and Avery turned on him with all the anger he had fought away.

‘I think you might do better than that,’ he said. He nearly added: have a little mercy.

Haldane’s cold gaze held Avery for a moment, then released him, his case not forgiven but suspended.

* * *

Someone asked what they would do next: suppose Avery did not find Taylor’s film? Suppose it just wasn’t there? Could they mount another overflight?

‘No,’ Leclerc replied. ‘Another overflight is out of the question. Far too dangerous. We shall have to try something else.’ He seemed disinclined to go further, but Haldane said, ‘What, for instance?’

‘We may have to put a man in. It seems to be the only way.’

‘This Department?’ Haldane asked incredulously. ‘Put a man in? The Ministry would never tolerate such a thing. You mean, surely, you’ll ask the Circus to do it?’

‘I have already told you the position. Heaven knows, Adrian, you’re not going to tell me we can’t do it?’ He looked appealingly round the table. ‘Every one of us here except young Avery has been in the business twenty years or more. You yourself have forgotten more about agents than half those people in the Circus ever knew.’

‘Hear, hear!’ Woodford cried.

‘Look at your own section, Adrian; look at Research. There must have been half a dozen occasions in the last five years when the Circus actually came to you, asked you for advice, used your facilities and skills. The time may come when they do the same with agents! The Ministry granted us an overflight. Why not an agent too?’

‘You mentioned a third indicator. I don’t follow you. What was that?’

‘Taylor’s death,’ said Leclerc.

Avery got up, nodded goodbye and tiptoed to the door. Haldane watched him go.

5

There was a note on his desk from Carol: ‘Your wife rang.’

He walked into her office and found her sitting at her typewriter but not typing. ‘You wouldn’t talk about poor Wilf Taylor like that,’ she said, ‘if you’d known him better.’

‘Like what? I haven’t talked about him at all.’

He thought he should comfort her, because sometimes they touched one another; he thought she might expect that now.

He bent forward, advancing until the sharp ends of her hair touched his cheek. Inclining his head inwards so that their temples met, he felt her skin travel slightly across the flat bone of her skull. For a moment they remained thus, Carol sitting upright, looking straight ahead of her, her hands either side of the typewriter, Avery awkwardly stooping. He thought of putting his hand beneath her arm and touching her breast, but did not; both gently recoiling, they separated and were alone again. Avery stood up.

‘Your wife telephoned,’ she said. ‘I told her you were at the meeting. She wants to talk to you urgently.’

‘Thanks. I’m on my way.’

‘John, what is going on? What’s all this about the Circus? What’s Leclerc up to?’

‘I thought you knew. He said he’d put you on the list.’

‘I don’t mean that. Why’s he lying to them again? He’s dictated a memorandum to Control about some training scheme and you going abroad. Pine took it round by hand. He’s gone mad about her pension; Mrs Taylor’s; looking up precedents and Heaven knows what. Even the application is Top Secret. He’s building one of his card houses, John, I know he is. Who’s Leiser, for instance?’

‘You’re not supposed to know. He’s an agent; a Pole.’

‘Does he work for the Circus?’ She changed her tack. ‘Well, why are you going? That’s another thing I don’t understand. For that matter, why did Taylor have to go? If the Circus has couriers in Finland, why couldn’t we have used them in the first place? Why send poor Taylor? Even now the FO could iron it out. I’m sure they could. He just won’t give them a chance: he wants to send you.’

‘You don’t understand,’ Avery said shortly.

‘Another thing,’ she demanded as he was going, ‘why does Adrian Haldane hate you so?’

He visited the accountant then took a taxi to the Circus. Leclerc had said he could claim for it. He was cross that Sarah had tried to reach him at such a moment. He had told her never to ring him at the Department. Leclerc said it was insecure.

* * *

‘What did you read at Oxford? It was Oxford, wasn’t it?’ Smiley asked, and gave him a cigarette, rather a muddled one from a packet of ten.

‘Languages.’ Avery patted his pockets for a match. ‘German and Italian.’ When Smiley said nothing he added, ‘German principally.’

Smiley was a small, distracted man with plump fingers and a shadowy, blinking way with him which suggested discomfort. Whatever Avery had expected, it was not this.

‘Well, well.’ Smiley nodded to himself, a very private comment. ‘It’s a question of a courier, I believe, in Helsinki. You want to give him a film. A training scheme.’

‘Yes.’

‘It’s a most unusual request. You’re sure . . . do you know the size of the film?’

‘No.’

A long pause.

‘You should try to find out that kind of thing,’ Smiley said kindly. ‘I mean, the courier may want to conceal it, you see.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Oh, it doesn’t matter.’

Avery was reminded of Oxford, and reading essays to his tutor.

‘Perhaps,’ said Smiley thoughtfully, ‘I might say one thing. I’m sure Leclerc has already had it from Control. We want to give you all the help we can – all the help. There used to be a time,’ he mused, with that curious air of indirection which seemed to characterise all his utterances, ‘when our departments competed. I always found that very painful. But I wondered whether you could tell me a little, just a little . . . Control was so anxious to help. We should hate to do the wrong thing out of ignorance.’

‘It’s a training exercise. Full dress. I don’t know much about it myself.’

‘We want to help,’ Smiley repeated simply. ‘What is your target country, your putative target?’

‘I don’t know. I’m only playing a small part. It’s training.’

‘But if it’s training, why so much secrecy?’

‘Well, Germany,’ Avery said.

‘Thank you.’

Smiley seemed embarrassed. He looked at his hands folded lightly on the desk before him. He asked Avery whether it was still raining. Avery said he was afraid so.

‘I’m sorry to hear about Taylor,’ he said. Avery said yes he was a good man.

‘Do you know what time you’ll have your film? Tonight? Tomorrow? Leclerc rather thought tonight, I gather.’

‘I don’t know. It depends how it goes. I just can’t tell at the moment.’

‘No.’ There followed a long, unexplained silence. He’s like an old man, thought Avery, he forgets he’s not alone. ‘No, there are so many imponderables. Have you done this kind of thing before?’

‘Once or twice.’ Again Smiley said nothing and did not seem to notice the gap.

‘How is everyone in Blackfriars Road? Do you know Haldane at all?’ Smiley asked. He didn’t care about the reply.

‘He’s Research now.’

‘Of course. A good brain. Your Research people enjoy quite a reputation, you know. We have consulted them ourselves more than once. Haldane and I were contemporaries at Oxford. Then in the war we worked together for a while. A Greats man. We’d have taken him here after the war; I think the medical people were worried about his chest.’

‘I hadn’t heard.’

‘Hadn’t you?’ The eyebrows rose comically. ‘There’s a hotel in Helsinki called the Prince of Denmark. Opposite the main station. Do you know it by any chance?’

‘No. I’ve never been to Helsinki.’

‘Haven’t you, now?’ Smiley peered at him anxiously. ‘It’s a very strange story. This Taylor: was he training too?’

‘I don’t know. But I’ll find the hotel,’ Avery said with a touch of impatience.

‘They sell magazines and postcards just inside the door. There’s only the one entrance.’ He might have been talking about the house next door. ‘And flowers. I think the best arrangement would be for you to go there once you have the film. Ask the people at the flower stall to send a dozen red roses to Mrs Avery at the Imperial Hotel at Torquay. Or half a dozen would be enough, we don’t want to waste money, do we? Flowers are so expensive up there. Are you travelling under your own name?’

‘Yes.’

‘Any particular reason? I don’t mean to be curious,’ he added hastily, ‘but one has such a short life anyway . . . I mean before one’s blown.’

‘I gather it takes a bit of time to get a fake passport. The Foreign Office . . .’ He shouldn’t have answered. He should have told him to mind his own business.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Smiley, and frowned as if he had made an error of tact. ‘You can always come to us, you know. For passports, I mean.’ It was meant as a kindness. ‘Just send the flowers. As you leave the hotel, check your watch by the hall clock. Half an hour later return to the main entrance. A taxi driver will recognize you and open the door of his car. Get in, drive around, give him the film. Oh, and pay him, please. Just the ordinary fare. It’s so easy to forget the little things. What kind of training precisely?’

‘What if I don’t get the film?’

‘In that case do nothing. Don’t go near the hotel. Don’t go to Helsinki. Forget about it.’ It occurred to Avery that his instructions had been remarkably clear.

‘When you were reading German, did you touch on the seventeenth century by any chance?’ Smiley inquired hopefully as Avery rose to go. ‘Gryphius, Lohenstein; those people?’

‘It was a special subject. I’m afraid I didn’t.’

‘Special,’ muttered Smiley. ‘What a silly word. I suppose they mean extrinsic; it’s a very impertinent notion.’

As they reached the door he said, ‘Have you a briefcase or anything?’

‘Yes.’

‘When you have that film, put it in your pocket,’ he suggested, ‘and carry the briefcase in your hand. If you are followed, they tend to watch the briefcase. It’s natural, really. If you just drop the briefcase somewhere, they may go looking for that instead. I don’t think the Finns are very sophisticated people. It’s only a training hint, of course. But don’t worry. It’s such a mistake, I always feel, to put one’s trust in technique.’ He saw Avery to the door, then made his way ponderously along the corridor to Control’s room.

* * *

Avery walked upstairs to the flat, guessing how Sarah would react. He wished he had telephoned after all because he hated to find her in the kitchen, and Anthony’s toys all over the drawing-room carpet. It never worked, turning up without warning. She took fright as if she expected him to have done something dreadful.

He did not carry a key; Sarah was always in. She had no friends of her own as far as he knew; she never went to coffee parties or took herself shopping. She seemed to have no talent for independent pleasure.

He pressed the bell, heard Anthony calling Mummy, Mummy, and waited to hear her step. The kitchen was at the end of the passage, but this time she came from the bedroom, softly as though she were barefooted.

She opened the door without looking at him. She was wearing a cotton nightdress and a cardigan.

‘God, you took your time,’ she said, turned and walked uncertainly back to the bedroom. ‘Something wrong?’ she asked over her shoulder. ‘Someone else been murdered?’

‘What’s the matter, Sarah? Aren’t you well?’

Anthony was running about shouting because his father had come home. Sarah climbed back into bed. ‘I rang the doctor. I don’t know what it is,’ she said, as if illness were not her subject.

‘Have you a temperature?’

She had put a bowl of cold water and the bathroom flannel beside her. He wrung out the flannel and laid it on her head. ‘You’ll have to cope,’ she said. ‘I’m afraid it’s not as exciting as spies. Aren’t you going to ask me what’s wrong?’

‘When’s the doctor arriving?’

‘He has surgery till twelve. He’ll turn up after that, I suppose.’

He went to the kitchen, Anthony following. The breakfast things were still on the table. He telephoned her mother in Reigate and asked her to come straight away.

It was just before one when the doctor arrived. A fever, he said; some germ that was going the rounds.

He thought she would weep when he told her he was going abroad; she took it in, reflected for a while and then suggested he went and packed.

‘Is it important?’ she said suddenly.

‘Of course. Terribly.’

‘Who for?’

‘You, me. All of us, I suppose.’

‘And for Leclerc?’

‘I told you. For all of us.’

He promised Anthony he would bring him something.

‘Where are you going?’ Anthony asked.

‘In an aeroplane.’

‘Where?’

He was going to tell him it was a great secret when he remembered Taylor’s little girl.

He kissed her goodbye, took his suitcase to the hall and put it on the mat. There were two locks on the door for Sarah’s sake and they had to be turned simultaneously. He heard her say:

‘Is it dangerous too?’

‘I don’t know. I only know it’s very big.’

‘You’re really sure of that, are you?’

He called almost in despair, ‘Look, how far am I supposed to think? It isn’t a question of politics, don’t you see? It’s a question of fact. Can’t you believe? Can’t you tell me for once in my life that I’m doing something good?’ He went into the bedroom, reasoning. She held a paperback in front of her and was pretending to read. ‘We all have to, you know, we all have to draw a line round our lives. It’s no good asking me the whole time, “Are you sure?” It’s like asking whether we should have children, whether we should have married. There’s just no point.’

‘Poor John,’ she observed, putting down the book and analysing him. ‘Loyalty without faith. It’s very hard for you.’ She said this with total dispassion as if she had identified a social evil. The kiss was like a betrayal of her standards.

* * *

Haldane watched the last of them leave the room: he had arrived late, he would leave late, never with the crowd.

Leclerc said, ‘Why do you do that to me?’ He spoke like an actor tired from the play. The maps and photographs were strewn on the table with the empty cups and ashtrays.

Haldane didn’t answer.

‘What are you trying to prove, Adrian?’

‘What was that you said about putting a man in?’

Leclerc went to the basin and poured himself a glass of water from the tap. ‘You don’t care for Avery, do you?’ he asked.

‘He’s young. I’m tired of that cult.’

‘I get a sore throat, talking all the time. Have some yourself. Do your cough good.’

‘How old is Gorton?’ Haldane accepted the glass, drank, and handed it back.

‘Fifty.’

‘He’s more. He’s our age. He was our age in the war.’

‘One forgets. Yes, he must be fifty-five or six.’

‘Established?’ Haldane persisted.

Leclerc shook his head. ‘He’s not qualified. Broken service. He went to the Control Commission after the war. When that packed up he wanted to stay in Germany. German wife, I think. He came to us and we gave him a contract. We could never afford to keep him there if he were established.’ He took a sip of water, delicately, like a girl. ‘Ten years ago we’d thirty men in the field. Now we’ve nine. We haven’t even got our own couriers, not clandestine ones. They all knew it this morning; why didn’t they say so?’

‘How often does he put in a refugee report?’

Leclerc shrugged. ‘I don’t see all his stuff,’ he said. ‘Your people should know. The market’s dwindling, I suppose, now they’ve closed the Berlin border.’

‘They only put the better reports up to me. This must be the first I’ve seen from Hamburg for a year. I always imagined he had some other function.’

Leclerc shook his head. Haldane asked, ‘When does his contract come up for renewal?’

‘I don’t know. I just don’t know.’

‘I suppose he must be fairly worried. Does he get a gratuity on retirement?’

‘It’s just a three-year contract. There’s no gratuity. No frills. He has the chance of going on after sixty, of course, if we want him. That’s the advantage of being a temporary.’

‘When was his contract last renewed?’

‘You’d better ask Carol. It must be two years ago. Maybe longer.’

Haldane said again, ‘You talked about putting a man in.’

‘I’m seeing the Minister again this afternoon.’

‘You’ve sent Avery already. You shouldn’t have done that, you know.’

‘Somebody had to go. Did you want me to ask the Circus?’

‘Avery was very impertinent,’ Haldane observed.

The rain was running in the gutters, tracing grey tracks on the dingy panes. Leclerc seemed to want Haldane to speak, but Haldane had nothing to say. ‘I don’t know yet what the Minister thinks about Taylor’s death. He’ll ask me this afternoon and I shall give him my opinion. We’re all in the dark, of course.’ His voice recovered its strength. ‘But he may instruct me – it’s on the cards, Adrian – he may instruct me to get a man in.’

‘Well?’

‘Suppose I asked you to form an operations section, make the research, prepare papers and equipment; suppose I asked you to find, train and field the agent. Would you do it?’

‘Without telling the Circus?’

‘Not in detail. We may need their facilities from time to time. That doesn’t mean we need tell them the whole story. There’s the question of security: need to know.’

‘Then without the Circus?’

‘Why not?’

Haldane shook his head. ‘Because it isn’t our work. We’re just not equipped. Give it to the Circus and help them out with the military stuff. Give it to an old hand, someone like Smiley or Leamas . . .’

‘Leamas is dead.’

‘All right then, Smiley.’

‘Smiley is blown.’

Haldane coloured. ‘Then Guillam or one of the others. One of the pros. They’ve got a big enough stable these days. Go and see Control, let him have the case.’

‘No,’ Leclerc said firmly, putting the glass on the table. ‘No, Adrian. You’ve been in the Department as long as I have, you know our brief. Take all necessary steps – that’s what it says – all necessary steps for the procurement, analysis and verification of military intelligence in those areas where the requirement cannot be met from conventional military resources.’ He beat out the words with his little fist as he spoke. ‘How else do you think I got authority for the overflight?’

‘All right,’ Haldane conceded. ‘We have our brief. But things have changed. It’s a different game now. In those days we were top of the tree – rubber boats on a moonless night; a captured enemy plane; wireless and all that. You and I know; we did it together. But it’s changed. It’s a different war; a different kind of fighting. They know that at the Ministry perfectly well.’ He added, ‘And don’t place too much trust in the Circus; you’ll get no charity from those people.’

They looked at one another in surprise, a moment of recognition. Leclerc said, his voice scarcely above a whisper: ‘It began with the networks, didn’t it? Do you remember how the Circus swallowed them up one by one? The Ministry would say: “We’re in danger of duplication on the Polish desks, Leclerc. I’ve decided Control should look after Poland.” When was that? July ’forty-eight. Year after year it’s gone on. Why do you think they patronize your Research Section? Not just for your beautiful files; they’ve got us where they want us, don’t you see? Satellites! Non-operational! It’s a way of putting us to sleep! You know what they call us in Whitehall these days? The Grace and Favour boys.’

There was a long silence.

Haldane said, ‘I’m a collator, not an operational man.’

‘You used to be operational, Adrian.’

‘So did we all.’

‘You know the target. You know the whole background. There’s no one else. Take whom you want – Avery, Woodford, whoever you want.’

‘We’re not used to people any more. Handling them, I mean.’ Haldane had become unusually diffident. ‘I’m a Research man. I work with files.’

‘We’ve had nothing else to give you until now. How long is it? Twenty years.’

‘Do you know what it means, a rocket site?’ Haldane demanded. ‘Do you know how much mess it makes? They need launch pads, blast shields, cable troughs, control buildings; they need bunkers for storing the warheads, trailers for fuel and oxidizers. All those things come first. Rockets don’t creep about in the night; they move like a travelling fair; we’d have other indicators before now; or the Circus would. As for Taylor’s death—’

‘For Heaven’s sake, Adrian, do you think Intelligence consists of unassailable philosophical truths? Does every priest have to prove that Christ was born on Christmas Day?’

His little face was thrust forward as he tried to draw from Haldane something he seemed to know was there. ‘You can’t do it all by sums, Adrian. We’re not academics, we’re Civil Servants. We have to deal with things as they are. We have to deal with people, with events!’

‘Very well, events then: if he swam the river, how did he preserve the film? How did he really take the pictures? Why isn’t there any trace of camera shake? He’d been drinking, he was balancing on tiptoe; they’re long enough exposures, you know, time exposures, he said.’ Haldane seemed afraid, not of Leclerc, not of the operation, but of himself. ‘Why did he give Gorton for nothing what he’d offered elsewhere for money? Why did he risk his life at all, taking those photographs? I sent Gorton a list of supplementaries. He’s still trying to find the man, he says.’

His eyes drifted to the model aeroplane and the files on Leclerc’s desk. ‘You’re thinking of Peenemünde, aren’t you?’ he continued. ‘You want it to be like Peenemünde.’

‘You haven’t told me what you’ll do if I get those instructions.’

‘You never will. You never, never will.’ He spoke with great finality, almost triumph. ‘We’re dead, don’t you see? You said it yourself. They want us to go to sleep, not go to war.’ He stood up. ‘So it doesn’t matter. It’s all academic, after all. Can you really imagine Control would help us?’

‘They’ve agreed to help us with a courier.’

‘Yes. I find that most odd.’

Haldane stopped before a photograph by the door. ‘That’s Malherbe, isn’t it? The boy who died. Why did you choose that name?’

‘I don’t know. It just came into my head. One’s memory plays odd tricks.’

‘You shouldn’t have sent Avery. We’ve no business to use him for a job like that.’

‘I went through the cards last night. We’ve got a man who’d do. A man we could send, I mean.’ Daring, he added, ‘An agent. Trained wireless operator, German speaker, unmarried.’ Haldane stood quite still.

‘Age?’ he asked at last.

‘Forty. A bit over.’

‘He must have been very young.’

‘He put up a good show. They caught him in Holland and he got away.’

‘How did he get caught?’

The slightest pause. ‘It isn’t recorded.’

‘Intelligent?’

‘He seems quite well qualified.’

The same long silence.

‘So am I. Let’s see what Avery brings back.’

‘Let’s see what the Ministry says.’

Leclerc waited till the sound of coughing had faded down the corridor before he put on his coat. He would go for a walk, take some fresh air and have lunch at his club; the best they had. He wondered what it would be; the place had gone off badly in the last few years. After lunch he would go round to Taylor’s widow. Then to the Ministry.

* * *

Woodford, lunching with his wife at Gorringe’s, said, ‘Young Avery’s on his first run. Clarkie sent him. He should make a good job of it.’

‘Perhaps he’ll get himself killed, too,’ she said nastily. She was off the drink, doctor’s orders. ‘Then you can have a real ball. Christ, that would be a party and a half! Come to the Black Friars’ Ball!’ Her lower lip was quivering. ‘Why are the young ones always so bloody marvellous? We were young, weren’t we? . . . Christ, we still are! What’s wrong with us? We can’t wait to grow old, can we? We can’t—’

‘All right, Babs,’ he said. He was afraid she might cry.

6

Take-off

Avery sat in the aeroplane remembering the day when Haldane failed to appear. It was, by coincidence, the first of the month, July it must have been, and Haldane did not come to the office. Avery knew nothing of it until Woodford rang him on the internal telephone to tell him. Haldane was probably ill, Avery had said; some personal matter had cropped up. But Woodford was adamant. He had been to Leclerc’s room, he said, and had looked at the leave roster: Haldane was not due for leave till August.

‘Telephone his flat, John, telephone his flat,’ he had urged. ‘Speak to his wife. Find out what’s become of him.’ Avery was so astonished that he did not know what to say: those two had worked together for twenty years, and even he knew Haldane was a bachelor.

‘Find out where he is,’ Woodford had persisted. ‘Go on, I order you: ring his flat.’

So he did. He might have told Woodford to do it himself, but he hadn’t the heart. Haldane’s sister answered. Haldane was in bed, his chest was playing him up; he had refused to tell her the Department’s telephone number. As Avery’s eye caught the calendar, he realised why Woodford had been so agitated: it was the beginning of a quarter. Haldane might have got a new job and left the Department without telling Woodford. A day or two later, when Haldane returned, Woodford was uncommonly warm towards him, bravely ignoring his sarcasm; he was grateful to him for coming back. For some time after that, Avery had been frightened. His faith shaken, he examined more closely its object.

He noticed that they ascribed – it was a plot in which all but Haldane compounded – legendary qualities to one another. Leclerc, for instance, would seldom introduce Avery to a member of his parent Ministry without some catchword. ‘Avery is the brightest of our new stars’ – or, to more senior men, ‘John is my memory. You must ask John.’ For the same reason they lightly forgave one another their trespasses, because they dared not think, for their own sakes, that the Department had room for fools. He recognised that it provided shelter from the complexities of modern life, a place where frontiers still existed. For its servants, the Department had a religious quality. Like monks, they endowed it with a mystical identity far away from the hesitant, sinful band which made up its ranks. While they might be cynical of the qualities of one another, contemptuous of their own hierarchical preoccupations, their faith in the Department burnt in some separate chapel and they called it patriotism.

For all that, as he glanced at the darkening sea beneath him, at the cold sunlight slanting on the waves, he felt his heart thrilling with love. Woodford with his pipe and his plain way became part of that secret élite to which Avery now belonged; Haldane, Haldane above all, with his crosswords and his eccentricities, fitted into place as the uncompromising intellectual, irritable and aloof. He was sorry he had been rude to Haldane. He saw Dennison and McCulloch as the matchless technicians, quiet men, not articulate at meetings, but tireless and, in the end, right. He thanked Leclerc, thanked him warmly, for the privilege of knowing these men, for the excitement of this mission; for the opportunity to advance from the uncertainty of the past towards experience and maturity, to become a man, shoulder to shoulder with the others, tempered in the fire of war; he thanked him for the precision of command, which made order out of the anarchy of his heart. He imagined that when Anthony grew up, he too might be led into those dowdy corridors, and be presented to old Pine, who with tears in his eyes would stand up in his box and warmly grasp the child’s tender hand.

It was a scene in which Sarah played no part.

Avery lightly touched a corner of the long envelope in his inside pocket. It contained his money: two hundred pounds in a blue envelope with the Government crest. He had heard of people in the war sewing such things into the lining of their clothes, and he rather wished they had done that for him. It was a childish conceit, he knew; he even smiled to discover himself given to such fancies.

He remembered Smiley that morning; in retrospect he was just a little frightened of Smiley. And he remembered the child at the door. A man must steel himself against sentiment.

* * *

‘Your husband did a very good job,’ Leclerc was saying, ‘I cannot tell you the details. I am sure that he died very gallantly.’

Her mouth was stained and ugly. Leclerc had never seen anyone cry so much; it was like a wound that would not close.

‘What do you mean, gallantly?’ She blinked. ‘We’re not fighting a war. That’s finished, all that fancy talk. He’s dead,’ she said stupidly, and buried her face in her crooked arm, slouching across the dining-room table like a puppet abandoned. The child was staring from a corner.

‘I trust,’ Leclerc said, ‘that I have your permission to apply for a pension? You must leave all that to us. The sooner we take care of it the better. A pension,’ he declared, as if it were the maxim of his house, ‘can make a lot of difference.’

* * *

The Consul was waiting beside the Immigration Officer; he came forward without a smile, doing his duty. ‘Are you Avery?’ he asked. Avery had the impression of a tall man in a trilby and a dark overcoat; red-faced and severe. They shook hands.

‘You’re the British Consul, Mr Sutherland.’

‘H. M. Consul, actually,’ he replied, a little tartly. ‘There’s a difference, you know.’ He spoke with a Scottish accent. ‘How did you know my name?’

They walked together towards the main entrance. It was all very simple. Avery noticed the girl at the desk; fair and rather pretty.

‘It’s kind of you to come all this way,’ Avery said.

‘It’s only three miles from the town.’ They got into the car.

‘He was killed just up the road,’ said Sutherland. ‘Do you want to see the spot?’

‘I might as well. To tell my mother.’ He was wearing a black tie.

‘Your name is Avery, isn’t it?’

‘Of course it is; you saw my passport at the desk.’ Sutherland didn’t like that, and Avery rather wished he hadn’t said it. He started the engine. They were about to pull into the centre of the road when a Citroën swung out and overtook them.

‘Damn fool,’ Sutherland snapped. ‘Roads are like ice. One of these pilots, I suppose. No idea of speed.’ They could see a peaked cap silhouetted against the windscreen as the car hurried down the long road across the dunes, throwing up a small cloud of snow behind it.

‘Where do you come from?’ he asked.

‘London.’

Sutherland pointed straight ahead: ‘That’s where your brother died. Up there on the brow. The police reckon the driver must have been tight. They’re very hot on drunken driving here, you know.’ It sounded like a warning. Avery stared at the flat reaches of snowbound country on either side and thought of lonely, English Taylor struggling along the road, his weak eyes streaming from the cold.

‘We’ll go to the police afterwards,’ said Sutherland. ‘They’re expecting us. They’ll tell you all the details. Have you booked yourself a room here?’

‘No.’

As they reached the top of the rise Sutherland said with grudging deference, ‘It was just here, if you want to get out.’

‘It’s all right.’

Sutherland accelerated a little as if he wanted to get away from the place.

‘Your brother was walking to the hotel. The Regina, just here. There was no taxi.’ They descended the slope on the other side; Avery caught sight of the long lights of a hotel across the valley.

‘No distance at all, really,’ Sutherland commented. ‘He’d have done it in fifteen minutes. Less. Where does your mother live?’

The question took Avery by surprise.

‘Woodbridge, in Suffolk.’ There was a by-election going on there; it was the first town that came into his head, though he had no interest in politics.

‘Why didn’t he put her down?’

‘I’m sorry, I don’t understand.’

‘As next of kin. Why didn’t Malherbe put his mother down instead of you?’

Perhaps it was not meant as a serious question; perhaps he just wanted to keep Avery talking because he was upset; nevertheless, it was unnerving. He was still strung up from the journey, he wanted to be taken for granted, not subjected to this interrogation. He realised, too, that he had not sufficiently worked out the supposed relationship between Taylor and himself. What had Leclerc written in the teleprint; half-brother or step-brother? Hastily he tried to visualise a train of family events, death, remarriage or estrangement, which would lead him to the answer to Sutherland’s question.

‘There’s the hotel,’ the Consul said suddenly, and then, ‘It’s nothing to do with me, of course. He can put down whoever he wants.’ Resentment had become a habit of speech with Sutherland, a philosophy. He spoke as if everything he said were the contradiction of a popular view.

‘She’s old,’ Avery replied at last. ‘It’s a question of protecting her from shock. I expect that’s what he had in mind when he filled in his passport application. She’s been ill; a bad heart. She’s had an operation.’ It sounded very childish.

‘Ah.’

They had reached the outskirts of the town.

‘There has to be a post-mortem,’ Sutherland said. ‘It’s the law here, I’m afraid, in the case of violent death.’

Leclerc was going to be angry about that. Sutherland continued, ‘For us, it makes the formalities more complicated. The Criminal Police take over the body until the post-mortem is complete. I asked them to be quick, but one can’t insist.’

‘Thanks. I thought I’d have the body flown back.’ As they turned off the main road into the market square, Avery asked casually, as if he had no personal interest in the outcome, ‘What about his effects? I’d better take them with me, hadn’t I?’

‘I doubt whether the police will hand them over until they’ve had the go-ahead from the public prosecutor. The post-mortem report goes to him; he gives clearance. Did your brother leave a will?’

‘I’ve no idea.’

‘You’d not happen to know whether you’re an executor?’

‘No.’

Sutherland gave a dry, patient laugh. ‘I can’t help feeling you’re a little premature. Next of kin is not quite the same as executor,’ he said. ‘It gives you no legal rights, I’m afraid, apart from the disposal of the body.’ He paused, looking back over his seat while he reversed the car into a parking space. ‘Even if the police hand your brother’s effects over to me, I’m not allowed to release them until I’ve had instructions from the Office, and they,’ he continued quickly, for Avery was about to interrupt him, ‘won’t issue such instructions to me until a grant of probate has been made or a Letter of Administration issued. But I can give you a death certificate,’ he added consolingly, opening his door, ‘if the insurance companies require it.’ He looked at Avery sideways, as if wondering whether he stood to inherit anything. ‘It’ll cost you five shillings for the Consular registration and five shillings per certified copy. What was that you said?’

‘Nothing.’ Together they climbed the steps to the police station.

‘We’ll be seeing Inspector Peersen,’ Sutherland explained. ‘He’s quite well disposed. You’ll kindly let me handle him.’

‘Of course.’

‘He’s been a lot of help with my DBS problems.’

‘Your what?’

‘Distressed British Subjects. We get one a day in Summer. They’re a disgrace. Did your brother drink a lot, incidentally? There’s some suggestion he was—’

‘It’s possible,’ Avery said. ‘I hardly knew him in the last few years.’ They entered the building.

* * *

Leclerc himself was walking carefully up the broad steps of the Ministry. It lay between Whitehall Gardens and the river; the doorway was large and new, surrounded with that kind of Fascist statuary which is admired by local authorities. Partly modernised, the building was guarded by sergeants in red sashes and contained two escalators; the one which descended was full, for it was half past five.

‘Under Secretary,’ Leclerc began diffidently. ‘I shall have to ask the Minister for another overflight.’

‘You’ll be wasting your time,’ he replied with satisfaction. ‘He was most apprehensive about the last one. He’s made a policy decision; there’ll be no more.’

‘Even with a target like this?’

‘Particularly with a target like this.’

The Under Secretary lightly touched the corners of his in-tray as a bank manager might touch a statement. ‘You’ll have to think of something else,’ he said. ‘Some other way. Is there no painless method?’

‘None. I suppose we could try to stimulate a defection from the area. That’s a lengthy business. Leaflets, propaganda broadcasts, financial inducements. It worked well in the war. We would have to approach a lot of people.’

‘It sounds a most improbable notion.’

‘Yes. Things are different now.’

‘What other ways are there, then?’ he insisted.

Leclerc smiled again, as if he would like to help a friend, but could not work miracles. ‘An agent. A short-term operation. In and out: a week altogether perhaps.’

The Under Secretary said, ‘But who could you find for a job like that? These days?’

‘Who indeed? It’s a very long shot.’

The Under Secretary’s room was large but dark, with rows of bound books. Modernisation had encroached as far as his Private Office, which was done in the contemporary style, but there the process had stopped. They could wait till he retired to do his room. A gas fire burnt in the marble fireplace. On the wall hung an oil painting of a battle at sea. They could hear the sound of barges in the fog. It was an oddly maritime atmosphere.

‘Kalkstadt’s pretty close to the border,’ Leclerc suggested. ‘We wouldn’t have to use a scheduled airline. We could do a training flight, lose our way. It’s been done before.’

‘Precisely,’ said the Under Secretary, then: ‘This man of yours who died.’

‘Taylor?’

‘I’m not concerned with names. He was murdered, was he?’

‘There’s no proof,’ Leclerc said.

‘But you assume it?’

Leclerc smiled patiently. ‘I think we both know, Under Secretary, that it is very dangerous to make broad assumptions when decisions of policy are involved. I’m still asking for another overflight.’

The Under Secretary coloured.

‘I told you it’s out of the question. No! Does that make it clear? We were talking of alternatives.’

‘There’s one alternative, I suppose, which would scarcely touch on my Department. It’s more a matter for yourselves and the Foreign Office.’

‘Oh?’

‘Drop a hint to the London newspapers. Stimulate publicity. Print the photographs.’

‘And?’

‘Watch them. Watch the East German and Soviet diplomacy, watch their communications. Throw a stone into the nest and see what comes out.’

‘I can tell you exactly what would come out. A protest from the Americans that would ring through these corridors for another twenty years.’

‘Of course. I was forgetting that.’

‘Then you’re very lucky. You suggested putting an agent in.’

‘Only tentatively. We’ve no one in mind.’

‘Look,’ said the Under Secretary, with the finality of a man much tried. ‘The Minister’s position is very simple. You have produced a report. If it is true, it alters our entire defence position. In fact it alters everything. I detest sensation, so does the Minister. Having put up the hare, the least you can do is have a shot at it.’

Leclerc said, ‘If I found a man there’s the problem of resources. Money, training and equipment. Extra staff perhaps. Transport. Whereas an overflight . . .’

‘Why do you raise so many difficulties? I understood you people existed for this kind of thing.’

‘We have the expertise, Under Secretary. But I cut down, you know. I have cut down a lot. Some of our functions have lapsed: one must be honest. I have never tried to put the clock back. This is, after all’ – a delicate smile – ‘a slightly anachronistic situation.’

The Under Secretary glanced out of the window at the lights along the river.

‘It seems pretty contemporary to me. Rockets and that kind of thing. I don’t think the Minister considers it anachronistic.’

‘I’m not referring to the target but the method of attack: it would have to be a crash operation at the border. That has scarcely been done since the war. Although it is a form of clandestine warfare with which my Department is traditionally at home. Or used to be.’

‘What are you getting at?’

‘I’m only thinking aloud, Under Secretary. I wonder whether the Circus might not be better equipped to deal with this. Perhaps you should approach Control. I can promise him the support of my armaments people.’

‘You mean you don’t think you can handle it?’

‘Not with my existing organisation. Control can. As long, that is, as the Minister doesn’t mind bringing in another Department. Two, really. I didn’t realise you were so worried about publicity.’

‘Two?’

‘Control will feel bound to inform the Foreign Office. It’s his duty. Just as I inform you. And from then on, we must accept that it will be their headache.’

‘If those people know,’ the Under Secretary said with contempt, ‘it’ll be round every damned club by tomorrow.’

‘There is that danger,’ Leclerc conceded. ‘More particularly, I wonder whether the Circus has the military skills. A rocket site is a complicated affair: launch pads, blast shields, cable troughs; all these things require proper processing and evaluation. Control and I could combine forces, I suppose—’

‘That’s out of the question. You people make poor bedfellows. Even if you succeeded in cooperating, it would be against policy: no monolith.’

‘Ah yes. Of course.’

‘Assume you do it yourself, then; assume you find a man, what would that involve?’

‘A supplementary estimate. Immediate resources. Extra staff. A training establishment. Ministerial protection; special passes and authority.’ The knife again: ‘And some help from Control . . . we could obtain that under a pretext.’

A foghorn echoed mournfully across the water.

‘If it’s the only way . . .’

‘Perhaps you’d put it to the Minister,’ Leclerc suggested.

Silence. Leclerc continued, ‘In practical terms we need the best part of thirty thousand pounds.’

‘Accountable?’

‘Partially. I understood you wanted to be spared details.’

‘Except where the Treasury’s concerned. I suggest that you make a minute about costs.’

‘Very well. Just an outline.’

The silence returned.

‘That is hardly a large sum when set against the risk,’ the Under Secretary said, consoling himself.

‘The potential risk. We want to clarify. I don’t pretend to be convinced. Merely suspicious, heavily suspicious.’ He couldn’t resist adding, ‘The Circus would ask twice as much. They’re very free with money.’

‘Thirty thousand pounds, then, and our protection?’

‘And a man. But I must find him for myself.’ A small laugh.

The Under Secretary said abruptly: ‘There are certain details the Minister will not want to know. You realise that?’

‘Of course. I imagine you will do most of the talking.’

‘I imagine the Minister will. You’ve succeeded in worrying him a good deal.’

Leclerc remarked with impish piety, ‘We should never do that to our master; our common master.’

The Under Secretary did not seem to feel they had one. They stood up.

‘Incidentally,’ Leclerc said, ‘Mrs Taylor’s pension. I’m making an application to the Treasury. They feel the Minister should sign it.’

‘Why, for God’s sake?’

‘It’s a question of whether he was killed in action.’

The Under Secretary froze. ‘That is most presumptuous. You’re asking for Ministerial confirmation that Taylor was murdered.’

‘I’m asking for a widow’s pension,’ Leclerc protested gravely. ‘He was one of my best men.’

‘Of course. They always are.’

The Minister did not look up as they came in.

* * *

But the Police Inspector rose from his chair, a short, plump man with a shaven neck. He wore plain clothes. Avery supposed him to be a detective. He shook their hands with an air of professional bereavement, sat them in modern chairs with teak arms and offered cigars out of a tin. They declined, so he lit one himself, and used it thereafter both as a prolongation of his short fingers when making gestures of emphasis, and as a drawing instrument to describe in the smoke-filled air objects of which he was speaking. He deferred frequently to Avery’s grief by thrusting his chin downwards into his collar and casting from the shadow of his lowered eyebrows confiding looks of sympathy. First he related the circumstances of the accident, praised in tiresome detail the efforts of the police to track down the car, referred frequently to the personal concern of the President of Police, whose anglophilia was a byword, and stated his own conviction that the guilty man would be found out, and punished with the full severity of Finnish law. He dwelt for some time on his own admiration of the British, his affection for the Queen and Sir Winston Churchill, the charms of Finnish neutrality and finally he came to the body.

The post-mortem, he was proud to say, was complete, and Mr Public Prosecutor (his own words) had declared that the circumstances of Mr Malherbe’s death gave no grounds for suspicion despite the presence of a considerable amount of alcohol in the blood. The barman at the airport accounted for five glasses of Steinhäger. He returned to Sutherland.

‘Does he want to see his brother?’ he inquired, thinking it apparently a delicacy to refer the question to a third party.

Sutherland was embarrassed. ‘That’s up to Mr Avery,’ he said, as if the matter were outside his competence. They both looked at Avery.

‘I don’t think so,’ Avery said.

‘There is one difficulty. About the identification,’ Peersen said.

‘Identification?’ Avery repeated. ‘Of my brother?’

‘You saw his passport,’ Sutherland put in, ‘before you sent it up to me. What’s the difficulty?’

The policeman nodded. ‘Yes, yes.’ Opening a drawer he took out a handful of letters, a wallet and some photographs.

‘His name was Malherbe,’ he said. He spoke fluent English with a heavy American accent which somehow suited the cigar. ‘His passport was Malherbe. It was a good passport, wasn’t it?’ Peersen glanced at Sutherland. For a second Avery thought he detected in Sutherland’s clouded face a certain honest hesitation.

‘Of course.’

Peersen began to sort through the letters, putting some in a file before him and returning others to the drawer. Every now and then, as he added to the pile, he muttered: ‘Ah, so,’ or ‘Yes, yes.’ Avery could feel the sweat running down his body; it drenched his clasped hands.

‘And your brother’s name was Malherbe?’ he asked again, when he had finished his sorting.

Avery nodded. ‘Of course.’

Peersen smiled. ‘Not of course,’ he said, pointing his cigar and nodding in a friendly way as if he were making a debating point. ‘All his possessions, his letters, his clothes, driving licence, all belong to a Mr Taylor. You know anything of Taylor?’

A dreadful block was forming in Avery’s mind. The envelope, what should he do with the envelope? Go to the lavatory, destroy it now before it was too late? He doubted whether it would work: the envelope was stiff and shiny. Even if he tore it, the pieces would float. He was aware of Peersen and Sutherland looking at him, waiting for him to speak and all he could think of was the envelope weighing so heavily in his inside pocket.

He managed to say, ‘No, I don’t. My brother and I . . .’ Step-brother or half-brother? ‘. . . my brother and I did not have much to do with one another. He was older. We didn’t really grow up together. He had a lot of different jobs, he could never quite settle down to anything. Perhaps this Taylor was a friend of his . . . who . . .’ Avery shrugged, bravely trying to imply that Malherbe had been something of a mystery to him also.

‘How old are you?’ Peersen asked. His respect for the bereaved seemed to be dwindling.

‘Thirty-two.’

‘And Malherbe?’ he threw out conversationally. ‘He was how many years older, please?’

Sutherland and Peersen had seen his passport and knew his age. One remembers the age of people who die. Only Avery, his brother, had no idea how old the dead man was.

‘Twelve,’ he hazarded. ‘My brother was forty-four.’ Why did he have to say so much?

Peersen raised his eyebrows. ‘Only forty-four? Then the passport is wrong as well.’

Peersen turned to Sutherland, poked his cigar towards the door at the far end of the room and said happily, as if he had ended an old argument between friends, ‘Now you are seeing why I have a problem about identification.’

Sutherland was looking very angry.

‘It would be nice if Mr Avery looked at the body,’ Peersen suggested, ‘then we can be sure.’

Sutherland said, ‘Inspector Peersen. The identity of Mr Malherbe has been established from his passport. The Foreign Office in London has ascertained that Mr Avery’s name was quoted by Mr Malherbe as his next of kin. You tell me there is nothing suspicious about the circumstances of his death. The customary procedure is now for you to release his effects to me for custody pending the completion of formalities in the United Kingdom. Mr Avery may presumably take charge of his brother’s body.’

Peersen seemed to deliberate. He extracted the remainder of Taylor’s papers from the steel drawer of his desk, added them to the pile already in front of him. He telephoned somebody and spoke in Finnish. After some minutes an orderly brought in an old leather suitcase with an inventory which Sutherland signed. Throughout all this, neither Avery nor Sutherland exchanged a word with the Inspector.

Peersen accompanied them all the way to the front door. Sutherland insisted on carrying the suitcase and papers himself. They went to the car. Avery waited for Sutherland to speak, but he said nothing. They drove for about ten minutes. The town was poorly lit. Avery noticed there was a chemical on the road, in two lanes. The crown and gutters were still covered with snow. He was reminded of riding in the Mall, a thing he had never done. The street lamps were neon, shedding a sickly light which seemed to shrink before the gathering darkness. Now and then Avery was aware of steep timbered roofs, the clanging of a tram or the tall white hat of a policeman.

Occasionally he stole a glance through the rear window.

7

Woodford stood in the corridor smoking his pipe, grinning at the staff as they left. It was his hour of magic. The mornings were different. Tradition demanded that the junior staff arrived at half past nine; officer grades at ten or quarter past. Theoretically, senior members of the Department stayed late in the evening, clearing their papers. A gentleman, Leclerc would say, never watched the clock. The custom dated from the war, when officers spent the early hours of the morning debriefing reconnaissance pilots back from a run, or the late hours of the night dispatching an agent. The junior staff had worked shift in those days, but not the officers, who came and went as their work allowed. Now tradition fulfilled a different purpose. Now there were days, often weeks, when Woodford and his colleagues scarcely knew how to fill the time until five thirty; all but Haldane, who supported on his stooping shoulders the Department’s reputation for research. The rest would draft projects which were never submitted, bicker gently among themselves about leave, duty rosters and the quality of their official furniture, give excessive attention to the problems of their section staff.

Berry, the cypher clerk, came into the corridor, stooped and put on his bicycle clips.

‘How’s the missus, Berry?’ Woodford asked. A man must keep his finger on the pulse.

‘Doing very nicely, thank you, sir.’ He stood up, ran a comb through his hair. ‘Shocking about Wilf Taylor, sir.’

‘Shocking. He was a good scout.’

‘Mr Haldane’s locking up Registry, sir. He’s working late.’

‘Is he? Well, we all have our hands full now.’

Berry lowered his voice. ‘And the Boss is sleeping in, sir. Quite a crisis, really. I hear he’s gone to see the Minister. They sent a car for him.’

‘Goodnight, Berry.’ They hear too much, Woodford reflected with satisfaction, and began sauntering along the passage.

The illumination in Haldane’s room came from an adjustable reading-lamp. It threw a brief, intense beam on to the file in front of him, touching the contours of his face and hands.

‘Working late?’ Woodford inquired.

Haldane pushed one file into his out-tray and picked up another.

‘Wonder how young Avery’s faring; he’ll do well, that boy. I hear the Boss isn’t back yet. Must be a long session.’ As he spoke Woodford settled himself in the leather armchair. It was Haldane’s own, he had brought it from his flat and sat in it to do his crossword after luncheon.

‘Why should he do well? There is no particular precedent,’ Haldane said, without looking up.

‘How did Clarkie get on with Taylor’s wife?’ Woodford now asked. ‘How’d she take it?’

Haldane sighed and put his file aside.

‘He broke it to her. That’s all I know.’

‘You didn’t hear how she took it? He didn’t tell you?’

Woodford always spoke a little louder than necessary, for he was used to competing with his wife.

‘I’ve really no idea. He went alone, I understand. Leclerc prefers to keep these things to himself.’

‘I thought perhaps with you . . .’

Haldane shook his head. ‘Only Avery.’

‘It’s a big thing, this, isn’t it, Adrian . . . could be?’

‘It could be. We shall see,’ Haldane said gently. He was not always unkind towards Woodford.

‘Anything new on the Taylor front?’

‘The Air Attaché at Helsinki has located Lansen. He confirms that he handed Taylor the film. Apparently the Russians intercepted him over Kalkstadt; two MIGs. They buzzed him, then let him go.’

‘God,’ said Woodford stupidly. ‘That clinches it.’

‘It does nothing of the kind; it’s consistent with what we know. If they declare the area closed why shouldn’t they patrol it? They probably closed it for manoeuvres, ground-air exercises. Why didn’t they force Lansen down? The whole thing is entirely inconclusive.’

Leclerc was standing in the doorway. He had put on a clean collar for the Minister and a black tie for Taylor.

‘I came by car,’ he said. ‘They’ve given us one from the Ministry pool on indefinite loan. The Minister was quite distressed to hear we hadn’t one. It’s a Humber, chauffeur-driven like Control’s. They tell me the chauffeur is a secure sort of person.’ He looked at Haldane. ‘I’ve decided to form Special Section, Adrian. I want you to take it over. I’m giving Research to Sandford for the time being. The change will do him good.’ His face broke into a smile as if he could contain himself no longer. He was very excited. ‘We’re putting a man in. The Minister’s given his consent. We go to work at once. I want to see Heads of Sections first thing tomorrow. Adrian, I’ll give you Woodford and Avery. Bruce, you keep in touch with the boys; get on to the old training people. The Minister will support three-month contracts for temporary staff. No peripheral liabilities, of course. The usual programme: wireless, weapon training, cyphers, observation, unarmed combat and cover. Adrian, we’ll need a house. Perhaps Avery could go into that when he comes back. I’ll approach Control about documentation; the forgers all went over to him. We’ll want frontier records for the Lübeck area, refugee reports, details of minefields and obstructions.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘Adrian, shall we have a word?’

‘Tell me one thing,’ Haldane said. ‘How much does the Circus know about this?’

‘Whatever we choose to tell them. Why?’

‘They know Taylor is dead. It’s all over Whitehall.’

‘Possibly.’

‘They know Avery’s picking up a film in Finland. They may very well have noticed the Air Safety Centre report on Lansen’s plane. They have a way of noticing things . . .’

‘Well?’

‘So it isn’t only a question of what we tell them, is it?’

‘You’ll come to tomorrow’s meeting?’ Leclerc asked a little pathetically.

‘I think I have the meat of my instructions. If you have no objection I would like to make one or two inquiries. This evening and tomorrow perhaps.’

Leclerc, bewildered, said, ‘Excellent. Can we help you?’

‘Perhaps I might have the use of your car for an hour?’

‘Of course. I want us all to use it – to our common benefit. Adrian – this is for you.’

He handed him a green card in a Cellophane folder.

‘The Minister signed it, personally.’ He implied that, like a Papal blessing, there were degrees of authenticity in a Ministerial signature. ‘Then you’ll do it, Adrian? You’ll take the job?’

Haldane might not have heard. He had reopened the file and was looking curiously at the photograph of a Polish boy who had fought the Germans twenty years ago. It was a young, strict face; humourless. It seemed to be concerned not with living but with survival.

‘Why, Adrian,’ Leclerc cried with sudden relief, ‘you’ve taken the second vow!’

Reluctantly Haldane smiled, as if the phrase had called to mind something he thought he had forgotten. ‘He seems to have a talent for survival,’ he observed, finally indicating the file. ‘Not an easy man to kill.’

* * *

‘As next of kin,’ Sutherland began, ‘you have the right to state your wishes concerning the disposal of your brother’s body.’

‘Yes.’

Sutherland’s house was a small building with a picture window full of potted plants. Only these distinguished it, either externally or internally, from its model in the dormitory areas of Aberdeen. As they walked down the drive, Avery caught sight of a middle-aged woman in the window. She wore an apron and was dusting something. She reminded him of Mrs Yates and her cat.

‘I have an office at the back,’ said Sutherland, as if to emphasise that the place was not wholly given over to luxury. ‘I suggest we tie up the rest of the details now. I shan’t keep you long.’ He was telling Avery he needn’t expect to stay to supper. ‘How do you propose to get him back to England?’

They sat down either side of the desk. Behind Sutherland’s head hung a watercolour of mauve hills reflected in a Scottish loch.

‘I should like it flown home.’

‘You know that is an expensive business?’

‘I should like him flown all the same.’

‘For burial?’

‘Of course.’

‘It isn’t “of course” at all,’ Sutherland countered with distaste. ‘If your brother’ – he said it in inverted commas now, but he would play the game to the end – ‘were to be cremated, the flight regulations would be totally different.’

‘I see. I’m sorry.’

‘There is a firm of undertakers in the town, Barford and Company. One of the partners is English, married to a Swedish girl. There is a substantial Swedish minority here. We do our best to support the British community. In the circumstances I would prefer you to return to London as soon as you can. I suggest you empower me to use Barford.’

‘All right.’

‘As soon as he has taken over the body, I will provide him with your brother’s passport. He will have to obtain a medical certificate regarding the cause of death. I’ll put him in touch with Peersen.’

‘Yes.’

‘He will also require a death certificate issued by a local registrar. It is cheaper if one attends to that side of things oneself. If money matters to your people.’

Avery said nothing.

‘When he has found out a suitable flight he will look after the freight warrant and bill of lading. I understand these things are usually moved at night. The freight rate is cheaper and . . .’

‘That’s all right.’

‘I’m glad. Barford will make sure the coffin is airtight. It may be of metal or wood. He will also append his own certificate that the coffin contains nothing but the body – and the same body as that to which the passport and the death certificate refer. I mention this for when you take delivery in London. Barford will do all this very quickly. I shall see to that. He has some pull with the charter companies here. The sooner he—’

‘I understand.’

‘I’m not sure you do.’ Sutherland raised his eyebrows, as if Avery had been impertinent. ‘Peersen has been very reasonable. I don’t wish to test his patience. Barford will have a correspondent firm in London – it is London, isn’t it?’

‘London, yes.’

‘I imagine he will expect some payment in advance. I suggest you leave the money with me against a receipt. As regards your brother’s effects, I take it that whoever sent you wished you to recover these letters?’ He pushed them across the table.

Avery muttered, ‘There was a film, an undeveloped film.’ He put the letters in his pocket.

Deliberately Sutherland extracted a copy of the inventory which he had signed at the police station, spread it out before him and ran his finger down the left-hand column, suspiciously, as if he were checking someone else’s figures.

‘There is no film entered here. Was there a camera too?’

‘No.’

‘Ah.’

He saw Avery to the door. ‘You’d better tell whoever sent you that Malherbe’s passport was not valid. The Foreign Office sent out a circular about a group of numbers, twenty-odd. Your brother’s was one of them. There must have been a slip-up. I was about to report it when a Foreign Office teleprint arrived empowering you to take over Malherbe’s effects.’ He gave a short laugh. He was very angry. ‘That was nonsense, of course. The Office would never have sent that on their own. They’ve no authority, not unless you’d Letters of Administration, and you couldn’t have got those in the middle of the night. Have you somewhere to stay? The Regina’s quite good, near the airport. Out of town, too. I assume you can find your own way. I gather you people get excellent subsistence.’

Avery made his way quickly down the drive, carrying in his memory the indelible image of Sutherland’s thin, bitter face set angrily against the Scottish hills. The wooden houses beside the road shone half white in the darkness like shadows round an operating table.

* * *

Somewhere not far from Charing Cross, in the basement of one of those surprising eighteenth-century houses between Villiers Street and the river, is a club with no name on the door. You reach it by descending a curving stone staircase. The railing, like the woodwork of the house in Blackfriars Road, is painted dark green and needs replacing.

Its members are an odd selection. Some of a military kind, some in the teaching profession, others clerical; others again from that no-man’s-land of London society which lies between the bookmaker and the gentleman, presenting to those around them, and perhaps even to themselves, an image of vacuous courage; conversing in codes and phrases which a man with a sense of language can only listen to at a distance. It is a place of old faces and young bodies; of young faces and old bodies; where the tensions of war have become the tensions of peace, and voices are raised to drown the silence, and glasses to drown the loneliness; it is the place where the searchers meet, finding no one but each other and the comfort of a shared pain; where the tired watchful eyes have no horizon to observe. It is their battlefield still; if there is love, they find it here in one another, shyly like adolescents, thinking all the time of other people.

From the war, none but the dons were missing.

It is a small place, run by a thin, dry man called Major Dell; he has a moustache and a tie with blue angels on a black background. He stands the first drink, and they buy him the others. It is called the Alias Club, and Woodford was a member.

It is open in the evenings. They come at about six, detaching themselves with pleasure from the moving crowd, furtive but determined, like men from out of town visiting a disreputable theatre. You notice first the things that are not there: no silver cups behind the bar, no visitors’ book nor list of membership; no insignia, crest or title. Only on the whitewashed brick walls a few photographs hang, framed in passe-partout, like the photographs in Leclerc’s room. The faces are indistinct, some enlarged, apparently from a passport, taken from the front with both ears showing according to the regulation; some are of women, a few of them attractive, with high square shoulders and long hair after the fashion of the war years. The men are wearing a variety of uniforms; Free French and Poles mingle with their British comrades. Some are fliers. Of the English faces one or two, grown old, still haunt the club.

When Woodford came in everyone looked round and Major Dell, much pleased, ordered his pint of beer. A florid, middle-aged man was talking about a sortie he once made over Belgium but he stopped when he lost the attention of his audience.

‘Hello, Woodie,’ somebody said in surprise. ‘How’s the lady?’

‘Fit,’ Woodford smiled genially. ‘Fit.’ He drank some beer. Cigarettes were passed round. Major Dell said, ‘Woodie’s jolly shifty tonight.’

‘I’m looking for someone. It’s all a bit top secret.’

‘We know the form,’ the florid man replied. Woodford glanced round the bar and asked quietly, a note of mystery in his voice, ‘What did Dad do in the war?’

A bewildered silence. They had been drinking for some time.

‘Kept Mum, of course,’ said Major Dell uncertainly and they all laughed.

Woodford laughed with them, savouring the conspiracy, reliving the half-forgotten ritual of secret mess nights somewhere in England.

‘And where did he keep her?’ he demanded, still in the same confiding tone: this time two or three voices called in unison, ‘Under his blooming hat!’

They were louder, happier.

‘There was a man called Johnson,’ Woodford continued quickly, ‘Jack Johnson. I’m trying to find out what became of him. He was a trainer in wireless transmission; one of the best. He was at Bovingdon first with Haldane until they moved him up to Oxford.’

‘Jack Johnson!’ the florid man cried excitedly. ‘The WT man? I bought a car radio from Jack two weeks ago! Johnson’s Fair Deal in the Clapham Broadway, that’s the fellow. Drops in here from time to time. Amateur wireless enthusiast. Little bloke, speaks out of the side of his face?’

‘That’s him,’ someone else said. ‘He knocks off twenty per cent for the old gang.’

‘He didn’t for me,’ the florid man said.

‘That’s Jack; he lives at Clapham.’

The others took it up; that was the fellow and he ran this shop, at Clapham; king of ham radio, been a ham before the war even when he was a kid; yes, on the Broadway, hung out there for years; must be worth a ransom. Liked to come into the club round Christmas time. Woodford, flushed with pleasure, ordered drinks.

In the bustle that followed, Major Dell took Woodford gently by the arm and guided him to the other end of the bar.

‘Woodie, is it true about Wilf Taylor? Has he really bought it?’

Woodford nodded, his face grave. ‘He was on a job. We think someone’s been a little bit naughty.’

Major Dell was all solicitude. ‘I haven’t told the boys. It would only worry them. Who’s caring for the Missus?’

‘The Boss is taking that up now. It looks pretty hopeful.’

‘Good,’ said the Major. ‘Good.’ He nodded, patting Woodford’s arm in a gesture of consolation. ‘We’ll keep it from the boys, shall we?’

‘Of course.’

‘He had one or two bills. Nothing very big. He liked to drop in Friday nights.’ The Major’s accent slipped from time to time like a made-up tie.

‘Send them along. We’ll take care of those.’

‘There was a kid, wasn’t there? A little girl?’ They were moving back to the bar. ‘How old was she?’

‘Eightish. Maybe more.’

‘He talked about her a lot,’ said the Major.

Somebody called, ‘Hey, Bruce, when are you chaps going to take another crack at the Jerries? They’re all over the bloody place. Took the wife to Italy in the Summer – full of arrogant Germans.’

Woodford smiled. ‘Sooner than you think. Now let’s try this one.’ The conversation died. Woodford was real. He still did the job.

‘There was an unarmed-combat man, a staff sergeant; a Welshman. He was short too.’

‘Sounds like Sandy Lowe,’ the florid man suggested.

‘Sandy, that’s him!’ They all turned to the florid man in admiration. ‘He was a Taffy. Randy Sandy we called him.’

‘Of course,’ said Woodford contentedly. ‘Now didn’t he go off to some public school as a boxing instructor?’ He was looking at them narrowly, holding a good deal back, playing it long because it was so secret.

‘That’s him, that’s Sandy!’

Woodford wrote it down, taking care because he had learnt from experience that he tended to forget things which he entrusted to memory.

As he was going, the Major asked, ‘How’s Clarkie?’

‘Busy,’ Woodford said. ‘Working himself to death, as always.’

‘The boys talk about him a lot, you know. I wish he’d come here now and then; give them a hell of a boost, you know. Perk them up.’

‘Tell me,’ said Woodford. They were by the door. ‘Do you remember a fellow called Leiser? Fred Leiser, a Pole? Used to be with our lot. He was in the Holland show.’

‘Still alive?’

‘Yes.’

‘Sorry,’ said the Major vaguely. ‘The foreigners have stopped coming; I don’t know why. I don’t discuss it with the boys.’

Closing the door behind him, Woodford stepped into the London night. He looked about him, loving all he saw – the mother city in his rugged care. He walked slowly, an old athlete on an old track.

8

Avery, on the other hand, walked fast. He was afraid. There is no terror so consistent, so elusive to describe, as that which haunts a spy in a strange country. The glance of a taxi driver, the density of people in the street, the variety of official uniform – was he a policeman or a postman? – the obscurity of custom and language, and the very noises which comprised the world into which Avery had moved contributed to a state of constant anxiety, which, like a nervous pain, became virulent now that he was alone. In the shortest time his spirit ranged between panic and cringing love, responding with unnatural gratitude to a kind glance or word. It was part of an effeminate dependence upon those whom he deceived. Avery needed desperately to win from the uncaring faces around him the absolution of a trusting smile. It was no help that he told himself: you do them no harm, you are their protector. He moved among them like a hunted man in search of rest and food.

He took a cab to the hotel and asked for a room with a bath. They gave him the register to sign. He had actually put his pen to the page when he saw, not ten lines above, done in a laborious hand, the name Malherbe, broken in the middle as if the writer could not spell it. His eye followed the entry along the line: Address, London; Profession, Major (retired); Destination, London. His last vanity, Avery thought, a false profession, a false rank, but little English Taylor had stolen a moment’s glory. Why not Colonel? Or Admiral? Why not give himself a peerage and an address in Park Lane? Even when he dreamt, Taylor had known his limits.

The concierge said, ‘The valet will take your luggage.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Avery, a meaningless apology, and signed his name, while the man watched him curiously.

He gave the valet a coin and it occurred to him as he did so that he had given him eight and six. He closed the bedroom door. For a while he sat on his bed. It was a carefully planned room but bleak and without sympathy. On the door was a notice in several languages warning against the perils of theft, and by the bed another which explained the financial disadvantages of failing to breakfast in the hotel. There was a magazine about travel on the writing-desk, and a Bible bound in black. There was a small bathroom, very clean, and a built-in wardrobe with one coat-hanger. He had forgotten to bring a book. He had not anticipated having to endure leisure.

He was cold and hungry. He thought he would have a bath. He ran it and undressed. He was about to get into the water when he remembered Taylor’s letters in his pocket. He put on a dressing-gown, sat on the bed and looked through them. One from his bank about an overdraft, one from his mother, one from a friend which began Dear Old Wilf, the rest from a woman. He was suddenly frightened of the letters: they were evidence. They could compromise him. He determined to burn them all. There was a second basin in the bedroom. He put all the papers into it and held a match to them. He had read somewhere that was the thing to do. There was a membership card for the Alias Club made out in Taylor’s name so he burnt that too, then broke up the ash with his fingers and turned on the water; it rose swiftly. The plug was a built-in metal affair operated by a lever between the taps. The sodden ash was packed beneath it. The basin was blocked.

He looked for some instrument to probe under the lip of the plug. He tried his fountain pen but it was too fat, so he fetched the nail file. After repeated attempts he persuaded the ash into the outlet. The water ran away, revealing a heavy brown stain on the enamel. He rubbed it, first with his hand then with the scrubbing brush, but it wouldn’t go. Enamel didn’t stain like that, there must have been some quality in the paper, tar or something. He went into the bathroom, looking vainly for a detergent.

As he re-entered his bedroom he became aware that it was filled with the smell of charred paper. He went quickly to the window and opened it. A blast of freezing wind swept over his naked limbs. He was gathering the dressing-gown more closely about him when there was a knock on the door. Paralysed with fear, he stared at the door handle, heard another knock, called, watched the handle turn. It was the man from Reception.

‘Mr Avery?’

‘Yes?’

‘I’m sorry. We need your passport. For the police.’

‘Police?’

‘It’s the customary procedure.’

Avery had backed against the basin. The curtains were flapping wildly beside the open window.

‘May I close the window?’ the man asked.

‘I wasn’t well. I wanted some fresh air.’

He found his passport and handed it over. As he did so, he saw the man’s gaze fixed upon the basin, on the brown mark and the small flakes which still clung to the sides.

He wished as never before that he was back in England.

* * *

The row of villas which lines Western Avenue is like a row of pink graves in a field of grey; an architectural image of middle age. Their uniformity is the discipline of growing old, of dying without violence and living without success. They are houses which have got the better of their occupants, whom they change at will, and do not change themselves. Furniture vans glide respectfully among them like hearses, discreetly removing the dead and introducing the living. Now and then some tenant will raise his hand, expending pots of paint on the woodwork or labour on the garden, but his efforts no more alter the house than flowers a hospital ward, and the grass will grow its own way, like grass on a grave.

Haldane dismissed the car and turned off the road towards South Park Gardens, a crescent five minutes from the Avenue. A school, a post office, four shops and a bank. He stooped a little as he walked; a black briefcase hung from his thin hand. He made his way quietly along the pavement; the tower of a modern church rose above the houses; a clock struck seven. A grocer’s on the corner, new façade, self-service. He looked at the name: Smethwick. Inside, a youngish man in a brown overall was completing a pyramid of cereal foods. Haldane rapped on the glass. The man shook his head and added a packet to the pyramid. He knocked again, sharply. The grocer came to the door.

‘I’m not allowed to sell you anything,’ he shouted, ‘so it’s no good knocking, is it?’ He noticed the briefcase and asked, ‘Are you a rep, then?’

Haldane put his hand in his inside pocket and held something to the window – a card in a Cellophane wrapper like a season ticket. The grocer stared at it. Slowly he turned the key.

‘I want a word with you in private,’ Haldane said, stepping inside.

‘I’ve never seen one of those,’ the grocer observed uneasily. ‘I suppose it’s all right.’

‘It’s quite all right. A security inquiry. Someone called Leiser, a Pole. I understand he worked here long ago.’

‘I’ll have to call my Dad,’ the grocer said. ‘I was only a kid then.’

‘I see,’ said Haldane, as if he disliked youth.

* * *

It was nearly midnight when Avery rang Leclerc. He answered straight away. Avery could imagine him sitting up in the steel bed, the Air Force blankets thrown back, his small, alert face anxious for the news.

‘It’s John,’ he said cautiously.

‘Yes, yes, I know who you are.’ He sounded cross that Avery had mentioned his name.

‘The deal’s off I’m afraid. They’re not interested . . . negative. You’d better tell the man I saw; the little, fat man . . . tell him we shan’t need the services of his friend here.’

‘I see. Never mind.’ He sounded utterly uninterested.

Avery didn’t know what to say; he just didn’t know. He needed desperately to go on talking to Leclerc. He wanted to tell him about Sutherland’s contempt and the passport that wasn’t right. ‘The people here, the people I’m negotiating with, are rather worried about the whole deal.’

He waited.

He wanted to call him by his name but he had no name for him. They did not use ‘Mister’ in the Department; the elder men addressed one another by their surnames and called the juniors by their Christian names. There was no established style of addressing one’s superior. So he said, ‘Are you still there?’ and Leclerc replied, ‘Of course. Who’s worried? What’s gone wrong?’ Avery thought: I could have called him ‘Director’, but that would have been insecure.

‘The representative here, the man who looks after our interests . . . he’s found out about the deal,’ he said. ‘He seems to have guessed.’

‘You stressed it was highly confidential?’

‘Yes, of course.’ How could he ever explain about Sutherland?

‘Good. We don’t want any trouble with the Foreign Office just now.’ In an altered tone Leclerc continued, ‘Things are going very well over here, John, very well. When do you get back?’

‘I’ve got to cope with the . . . with bringing our friend home. There are a lot of formalities. It’s not as easy as you’d think.’

‘When will you be finished?’

‘Tomorrow.’

‘I’ll send a car to meet you at Heathrow. A lot’s happened in the last few hours; a lot of improvements. We need you badly.’ Leclerc added, throwing him a coin, ‘And well done, John, well done indeed.’

‘All right.’

He expected to sleep heavily that night, but after what might have been an hour he woke, alert and watchful. He looked at his watch; it was ten past one. Getting out of bed he went to the window and looked on to the snow-covered landscape, marked by the darker lines of the road which led to the airport; he thought he could discern the little rise where Taylor had died.

He was desolate and afraid. His mind was obsessed by confused visions: Taylor’s dreadful face, the face he so nearly saw, drained of blood, wide-eyed as if communicating a crucial discovery; Leclerc’s voice, filled with vulnerable optimism; the fat policeman, staring at him in envy, as if he were something he could not afford to buy. He realised he was a person who did not take easily to solitude. Solitude saddened him, made him sentimental. He found himself thinking, for the first time since he had left the flat that morning, of Sarah and Anthony. Tears came suddenly to his tired eyes when he recalled his boy, the steel-rimmed spectacles like tiny irons; he wanted to hear his voice, he wanted Sarah, and the familiarity of his home. Perhaps he could telephone the flat, speak to her mother, ask after her. But what if she were ill? He had suffered enough pain that day, he had given enough of his energy, fear and invention. He had lived a nightmare: he could not be expected to ring her now. He went back to bed.

Try as he might, he could not sleep. His eyelids were hot and heavy, his body deeply tired, but still he could not sleep. A wind rose, rattling the double windows; now he was too hot, now too cold. Once he dozed, only to be woken violently from his uneasy rest by the sound of crying, it might have been in the next room, it might have been Anthony, or it might have been – since he did not hear it properly, but only half knew in waking what kind of a sound it had been – the metallic sobbing of a child’s doll.

And once, it was shortly before dawn, he heard a footfall outside his room, a single tread in the corridor, not imagined but real, and he lay in chill terror waiting for the handle of his door to turn or the peremptory knocking of Inspector Peersen’s men. As he strained his ears he swore he detected the faintest rustle of clothing, the subdued intake of human breath, like a tiny sigh; then silence. Though he listened for minutes on end, he heard nothing more.

Putting on the light, he went to the chair, felt in his jacket for his fountain pen. It was by the basin. From his briefcase he took a leather holdall which Sarah had given him.

Settling himself at the flimsy table in front of the window, he began writing a love letter to a girl, it might have been to Carol. When at last morning came, he destroyed it, tearing it into small pieces and flushing them down the lavatory. As he did so he caught sight of something white on the floor. It was a photograph of Taylor’s child carrying a doll; she was wearing glasses, the kind Anthony wore. It must have been among his papers. He thought of destroying it but somehow he couldn’t. He slipped it into his pocket.

9

Homecoming

Leclerc was waiting at Heathrow as Avery knew he would be, standing on tiptoe, peering anxiously between the heads of the waiting crowd. He had squared the customs somehow, he must have got the Ministry to do it, and when he saw Avery he came forward into the hall and guided him in a managing way as if he were used to being spared formalities. This is the life we lead, Avery thought; the same airport with different names; the same hurried, guilty meetings; we live outside the walls of the town, black friars from a dark house in Lambeth. He was desperately tired. He wanted Sarah. He wanted to say sorry, make it up with her, get a new job, try again, play with Anthony more. He felt ashamed.

‘I’ll just make a telephone call. Sarah wasn’t too well when I left.’

‘Do it from the office,’ Leclerc said. ‘Do you mind? I have a meeting with Haldane in an hour.’ Thinking he detected a false note in Leclerc’s voice, Avery looked at him suspiciously, but the other’s eyes were turned away towards the black Humber standing in the privilege car park. Leclerc let the driver open the door for him; a silly muddle took place until Avery sat on his left as protocol apparently demanded. The driver seemed tired of waiting. There was no partition between him and themselves.

‘This is a change,’ Avery said, indicating the car.

Leclerc nodded in a familiar way as if the acquisition were no longer new. ‘How are things?’ he asked, his mind elsewhere.

‘All right. There’s nothing the matter, is there? With Sarah, I mean.’

‘Why should there be?’

‘Blackfriars Road?’ the driver inquired, without turning his head, as a sense of respect might have indicated.

‘Headquarters, yes, please.’

‘There was a hell of a mess in Finland,’ Avery observed brutally. ‘Our friend’s papers . . . Malherbe’s . . . weren’t in order. The Foreign Office had cancelled his passport.’

‘Malherbe? Ah yes. You mean Taylor. We know all about that. It’s all right now. Just the usual jealousy. Control is rather upset about it, as a matter of fact. He sent round to apologise. We’ve a lot of people on our side now, John, you’ve no idea. You’re going to be very useful, John; you’re the only one who’s seen it on the ground.’ Seen what? Avery wondered. They were together again. The same intensity, the same physical unease, the same absences. As Leclerc turned to him Avery thought for one sickening moment he was going to put a hand on his knee. ‘You’re tired, John, I can tell. I know how it feels. Never mind – you’re back with us now. Listen, I’ve good news for you. The Ministry’s woken up to us in a big way. We’re to form a special operational unit to mount the next phase.’

‘Next phase?’

‘Of course. The man I mentioned to you. We can’t leave things as they are. We’re clarifiers, John, not simply collators. I’ve revived Special Section; do you know what that is?’

‘Haldane ran it during the war; training . . .’

Leclerc interrupted quickly for the driver’s sake: ‘. . . training the travelling salesmen. And he’s going to run it again now. I’ve decided you’re to work with him. You’re the two best brains I’ve got.’ A sideways glance.

Leclerc had altered. There was a new quality to his bearing, something more than optimism or hope. When Avery had seen him last he had seemed to be living against adversity; now he had a freshness about him, a purpose, which was either new or very old.

‘And Haldane accepted?’

‘I told you. He’s working night and day. You forget, Adrian’s a professional. A real technician. Old heads are the best for a job like this. With one or two young heads among them.’

Avery said, ‘I want to talk to you about the whole operation . . . about Finland. I’ll come to your office after I’ve rung Sarah.’

‘Come straight away, then I can put you in the picture.’

‘I’ll phone Sarah first.’

Again Avery had the unreasonable feeling that Leclerc was trying to keep him from communicating with Sarah.

‘She is all right, isn’t she?’

‘So far as I know. Why do you ask?’ Leclerc went on, charming him: ‘Glad to be back, John?’

‘Yes, of course.’

He sank back into the cushions of the car. Leclerc, noticing his hostility, abandoned him for a time; Avery turned his attention to the road and the pink, healthy villas drifting past in the light rain.

Leclerc was talking again, his committee voice. ‘I want you to start straight away. Tomorrow if you can. We’ve got your room ready. There’s a lot to be done. This man: Haldane has him in play. We should hear something when we get home. From now on you’re Adrian’s creature. I trust that pleases you. Our masters have agreed to provide you with a special Ministry pass. The same kind of thing that they have in the Circus.’

Avery was familiar with Leclerc’s habit of speech; there were times when he resorted entirely to oblique allusion, offering a raw material which the consumer, not the purveyor, must refine.

‘I want to talk to you about the whole thing. When I’ve rung Sarah.’

‘That’s right,’ Leclerc replied nicely. ‘Come and talk to me about it. Why not come now?’ He looked at Avery, offering his whole face; a thing without depth, a moon with one side. ‘You’ve done well,’ he said generously, ‘I hope you’ll keep it up.’ They entered London. ‘We’re getting some help from the Circus,’ he added. ‘They seem to be quite willing. They don’t know the whole picture of course. The Minister was very firm on that point.’

* * *

They passed down Lambeth Road, where the God of Battles presides; the Imperial War Museum one end, schools the other, hospitals in between; a cemetery wired off like a tennis court. You cannot tell who lives there. The houses are too many for the people, the schools too large for the children. The hospitals may be full, but the blinds are drawn. Dust hangs everywhere, like the dust of war. It hangs over the hollow façades, chokes the grass in the graveyard: it has driven away the people, save those who loiter in the dark places like the ghosts of soldiers, or wait sleepless behind their yellow-lighted windows. It is a road which people seem to have left often. The few who returned brought something of the living world, according to their voyages. One a piece of field, another a broken Regency terrace, a warehouse or dumping yard; or a pub called the Flowers of the Forest.

It is a road filled with faithful institutions. Over one presides our Lady of Consolation, over another, Archbishop Amigo. Whatever is not hospital, school, pub or seminary is dead, and the dust has got its body. There is a toyshop with a padlocked door. Avery looked into it every day on the way to the office; the toys were rusting on the shelves. The window looked dirtier than ever; the lower part was striped with children’s fingermarks. There is a place that mends your teeth while you wait. He glimpsed them now from the car, counting them off as they drove past, wondering whether he would ever see them again as a member of the Department. There are warehouses with barbed wire across their gates, and factories which produce nothing. In one of them a bell rang but no one heard. There is a broken wall with posters on it. You are somebody today in the Regular Army. They rounded St George’s Circus and entered Blackfriars Road for the home run.

As they approached the building, Avery sensed that things had changed. For a moment he imagined that the very grass on the wretched bit of lawn had thickened and revived during his brief absence; that the concrete steps leading to the front door, which even in Midsummer managed to appear moist and dirty, were now clean and inviting. Somehow he knew, before he entered the building at all, that a new spirit had infected the Department.

It had reached the most humble members of the staff. Pine, impressed no doubt by the black staff car and the sudden passage of busy people, looked spruce and alert. For once he said nothing about cricket scores. The staircase was daubed with wax polish.

In the corridor they met Woodford. He was in a hurry. He was carrying a couple of files with red caution notices on the cover.

‘Hullo, John! You’ve landed safely, then? Good party?’ He really did seem pleased to see him. ‘Sarah all right now?’

‘He’s done well,’ said Leclerc quickly. ‘He had a very difficult run.’

‘Ah yes; poor Taylor. We shall need you in the new section. Your wife will have to spare you for a week or two.’

‘What was that about Sarah?’ Avery asked. Suddenly he was frightened. He hastened down the corridor. Leclerc was calling but he took no notice. He entered his room and stopped dead. There was a second telephone on his desk, and a steel bed like Leclerc’s along the side wall. Beside the new telephone was a piece of military board with a list of emergency telephone numbers pinned to it. The numbers for use during the night were printed in red. On the back of the door hung a two-colour poster depicting in profile the head of a man. Across his skull was written, ‘Keep it here’, and across his mouth, ‘Don’t let it out here’. It took him a moment or two to realise that the poster was an exhortation to security, and not some dreadful joke about Taylor. He lifted the receiver and waited. Carol came in with a tray of papers for signature.

‘How did it go?’ she asked. ‘The Boss seems pleased.’ She was standing quite close to him.

‘Go? There’s no film. It wasn’t among his things. I’m going to resign; I’ve decided. What the hell’s wrong with this phone?’

‘They probably don’t know you’re back. There’s a thing from Accounts about your claim for a taxi. They’ve queried it.’

‘Taxi?’

‘From your flat to the office. The night Taylor died. They say it’s too much.’

‘Look, go and stir up the exchange, will you, they must be fast asleep.’

Sarah answered the telephone herself.

‘Oh, thank God it’s you.’

Avery said yes, he had got in an hour ago. ‘Sarah, look, I’ve had enough, I’m going to tell Leclerc—’ But before he could finish she burst out, ‘John, for God’s sake, what have you been doing? We had the police here, detectives; they want to talk to you about a body that’s arrived at London Airport; somebody called Malherbe. They say it was sent from Finland on a false passport.’

He closed his eyes. He wanted to put down the receiver, he held it away from his ear but he still heard her voice, saying John, John. ‘They say he’s your brother; it’s addressed to you, John; some London undertaker was supposed to be doing it all for you . . . John, John, are you still there?’

‘Listen,’ he said, ‘it’s all right. I’ll take care of it now.’

‘I told them about Taylor: I had to.’

‘Sarah!’

‘What else could I do? They thought I was a criminal or something; they didn’t believe me, John! They asked how they could get hold of you; I had to say I didn’t know; I didn’t even know which country or which plane; I was ill, John, I felt awful, I’ve got this damn ’flu and I’d forgotten to take my pills. They came in the middle of the night, two of them. John, why did they come in the night?’

‘What did you tell them? For Christ’s sake, Sarah, what else did you say to them?’

‘Don’t swear at me! I should be swearing at you and your beastly Department! I said you were doing something secret; you’d had to go abroad for the Department – John, I don’t even know its name! – that you’d been rung in the night and you’d gone away. I said it was about a courier called Taylor.’

‘You’re mad,’ Avery shouted, ‘you’re absolutely mad. I told you never to say!’

‘But, John, they were policemen! There can’t be any harm in telling them.’ She was crying, he could hear the tears in her voice. ‘John, please come back. I’m so frightened. You’ve got to get out of this, go back to publishing; I don’t care what you do but . . .’

‘I can’t. It’s terribly big. More important than you can possibly understand. I’m sorry, Sarah. I just can’t leave the office.’ He added savagely, a useful lie, ‘You may have wrecked the whole thing.’

There was a very long silence.

‘Sarah, I’ll have to sort this out. I’ll ring you later.’

When at last she answered he detected in her voice the same flat resignation with which she had sent him to pack his things. ‘You took the cheque book. I’ve no money.’

He told her he would send it round. ‘We’ve got a car,’ he added, ‘specially for this thing, chauffeur-driven.’ As he rang off he heard her say, ‘I thought you’d got lots of cars.’

He ran into Leclerc’s room. Haldane was standing behind the desk; his coat still wet from the rain. They were bent over a file. The pages were faded and torn.

‘Taylor’s body!’ he blurted out. ‘It’s at London Airport. You’ve messed the whole thing up. They’ve been on to Sarah! In the middle of the night!’

‘Wait!’ It was Haldane who spoke. ‘You have no business to come running in here,’ he declared furiously. ‘Just wait.’ He did not care for Avery.

He returned to the file, ignoring him. ‘None at all,’ he muttered, adding to Leclerc: ‘Woodford has already had some success, I gather. Unarmed combat’s all right; he’s heard of a wireless operator, one of the best. I remember him. The garage is called the King of Hearts; it is clearly prosperous. We inquired at the bank; they were quite helpful if not specific. He’s unmarried. He has a reputation for women; the usual Polish style. No political interests, no known hobbies, no debts, no complaints. He seems to be something of a nonentity. They say he’s a good mechanic. As for character—’ he shrugged. ‘What do we know about anybody?’

‘But what did they say? Good Heavens, you can’t be fifteen years in a community without leaving some impression. There was a grocer wasn’t there – Smethwick? – he lived with them after the war.’

Haldane allowed himself a smile. ‘They said he was a good worker and very polite. Everyone says he’s polite. They remember one thing only: he had a passion for hitting a tennis ball round their back yard.’

‘Did you take a look at the garage?’

‘Certainly not. I didn’t go near it. I propose to call there this evening. I don’t see that we have any other choice. After all, the man’s been on our cards for twenty years.’

‘Is there nothing more you can find out?’

‘We would have to do the rest through the Circus.’

‘Then let John Avery clear up the details.’ Leclerc seemed to have forgotten Avery was in the room. ‘As for the Circus, I’ll deal with them myself.’ His interest had been arrested by a new map on the wall, a town plan of Kalkstadt showing the church and railway station. Beside it hung an older map of Eastern Europe. Rocket bases whose existence had already been confirmed were here related to the putative site south of Rostock. Supply routes and chains of command, the order of battle of supporting arms, were indicated with lines of thin wool stretched between pins. A number of these led to Kalkstadt.

‘It’s good, isn’t it? Sandford put it together last night,’ Leclerc said. ‘He does that kind of thing rather well.’

On his desk lay a new whitewood pointer like a giant bodkin threaded with a loop of barrister’s ribbon. He had a new telephone, green, smarter than Avery’s, with a notice on it saying ‘Speech on this telephone is NOT secure.’ For a time Haldane and Leclerc studied the map, referring now and then to a file of telegrams which Leclerc held open in both hands as a choirboy holds a psalter.

Finally Leclerc turned to Avery and said, ‘Now, John.’ They were waiting for him to speak.

He could feel his anger dying. He wanted to hold on to it but it was slipping away. He wanted to cry out in indignation: how dare you involve my wife? He wanted to lose control, but he could not. His eyes were on the map.

‘Well?’

‘The police have been round to Sarah. They woke her in the middle of the night. Two men. Her mother was there. They came about the body at the airport: Taylor’s body. They knew the passport was phoney and thought she was involved. They woke her up,’ he repeated lamely.

‘We know all about that. It’s straightened out. I wanted to tell you but you wouldn’t let me. The body’s been released.’

‘It was wrong to drag Sarah in.’

Haldane lifted his head quickly: ‘What do you mean by that?’

‘We’re not competent to handle this kind of thing.’ It sounded very impertinent. ‘We shouldn’t be doing it. We ought to give it to the Circus. Smiley or someone – they’re the people, not us.’ He struggled on: ‘I don’t even believe that report. I don’t believe it’s true! I wouldn’t be surprised if that refugee never existed; if Gorton made the whole thing up! I don’t believe Taylor was murdered.’

‘Is that all?’ Haldane demanded. He was very angry.

‘It’s not something I want to go on with. The operation, I mean. It isn’t right.’

He looked at the map and at Haldane, then laughed a little stupidly. ‘All the time I’ve been chasing a dead man you’ve been after a live one! It’s easy here, in the dream factory . . . but they’re people out there, real people!’

Leclerc touched Haldane lightly on the arm as if to say he would handle this himself. He seemed undisturbed. He might almost have been gratified to recognise symptoms which he had previously diagnosed. ‘Go to your room, John, you’re suffering from strain.’

‘But what do I tell Sarah?’ He spoke with despair.

‘Tell her she won’t be troubled any more. Tell her it was a mistake . . . tell her whatever you like. Get some hot food and come back in an hour. These airline meals are useless. Then we’ll hear the rest of your news.’ Leclerc was smiling, the same neat, bland smile with which he had stood among the dead fliers. As Avery reached the door he heard his name called softly, with affection: he stopped and looked back.

Leclerc raised one hand from the desk and with a semicircular movement indicated the room in which they were standing.

‘I’ll tell you something, John. During the war we were in Baker Street. We had a cellar and the Ministry fixed it up as an emergency operations room. Adrian and I spent a lot of time down there. A lot of time.’ A glance at Haldane. ‘Remember how the oil lamp used to swing when the bombs fell? We had to face situations where we had one rumour, John, no more. One indicator and we’d take the risk. Send a man in, two if necessary, and maybe they wouldn’t come back. Maybe there wouldn’t be anything there. Rumours, a guess, a hunch one follows up; it’s easy to forget what intelligence consists of: luck, and speculation. Here and there a windfall, here and there a scoop. Sometimes you stumbled on a thing like this: it could be very big, it could be a shadow. It may have been from a peasant in Flensburg, or it may come from the Provost of King’s, but you’re left with a possibility you dare not discount. You get instructions: find a man, put him in. So we did. And many didn’t come back. They were sent to resolve doubt, don’t you see? We sent them because we didn’t know. All of us have moments like this, John. Don’t think it’s always easy.’ A reminiscent smile. ‘Often we had scruples like you. We had to overcome them. We used to call that the second vow.’ He leant against the desk, informally. ‘The second vow,’ he repeated.

‘Now, John, if you want to wait until the bombs are falling, till people are dying in the street . . .’ He was suddenly serious, as if revealing his faith. ‘It’s a great deal harder, I know, in peacetime. It requires courage. Courage of a different kind.’

Avery nodded. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

Haldane was watching him with distaste.

‘What the Director means,’ he said acidly, ‘is that if you wish to stay in the Department and do the job, do it. If you wish to cultivate your emotions, go elsewhere and do so in peace. We are too old for your kind here.’

Avery could still hear Sarah’s voice, see the rows of little houses hanging in the rain; he tried to imagine his life without the Department. He realised that it was too late, as it always had been, because he had gone to them for the little they could give him, and they had taken the little he had. Like a doubting cleric, he had felt that whatever his small heart contained was safely locked in the place of his retreat: now it was gone. He looked at Leclerc, then at Haldane. They were his colleagues. Prisoners of silence, the three of them would work side by side, breaking the arid land all four seasons of the year, strangers to each other, needing each other, in a wilderness of abandoned faith.

‘Did you hear what I said?’ Haldane demanded.

Avery muttered: ‘Sorry.’

‘You didn’t fight in the war, John,’ Leclerc said kindly. ‘You don’t understand how these things take people. You don’t understand what real duty is.’

‘I know,’ said Avery. ‘I’m sorry. I’d like to borrow the car for an hour . . . send something round to Sarah, if that’s all right.’

‘Of course.’

He realised he had forgotten Anthony’s present. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said again.

‘Incidentally—’ Leclerc opened a drawer of the desk and took out an envelope. Indulgently he handed it to Avery. ‘That’s your pass, a special one from the Ministry. To identify yourself. It’s in your own name. You may need it in the weeks to come.’

‘Thanks.’

‘Open it.’

It was a piece of thick pasteboard bound in Cellophane, green, the colour washed downwards, darker at the bottom. His name was printed across it in capitals with an electric typewriter: Mr John Avery. The legend entitled the bearer to make inquiries on behalf of the Ministry. There was a signature in red ink.

‘Thanks.’

‘You’re safe with that,’ Leclerc said. ‘The Minister signed it. He uses red ink, you know. It’s tradition.’

He went back to his room. There were times when he confronted his own image as a man confronts an empty valley, and the vision propelled him forward again to experience, as despair compels us to extinction. Sometimes he was like a man in flight, but running towards the enemy, desperate to feel upon his vanishing body the blows that would prove his being; desperate to imprint upon his sad conformity the mark of real purpose, desperate perhaps, as Leclerc had hinted, to abdicate his conscience in order to discover God.

PART III

Leiser’s Run

‘To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping, Glad from a world grown old and cold and weary’

RUPERT BROOKE, ‘1914’

10

Prelude

The Humber dropped Haldane at the garage.

‘You needn’t wait. You have to take Mr Leclerc to the Ministry.’

He picked his way reluctantly over the tarmac, past the yellow petrol pumps and the advertisement shields rattling in the wind. It was evening; there was rain about. The garage was small but very smart; showrooms one end, workshops the other, in the middle a tower where somebody lived. Swedish timber and open plan; lights on the tower in the shape of a heart, changing colour continuously. From somewhere came the whine of a metal lathe. Haldane went into the office. It was empty. There was a smell of rubber. He rang the bell and began coughing wretchedly. Sometimes when he coughed he held his chest, and his face betrayed the submissiveness of a man familiar with pain. Calendars with showgirls hung on the wall beside a small handwritten notice, like an amateur advertisement, which read, ‘St Christopher and all his angels, please protect us from road accidents. F.L.’ At the window a budgerigar fluttered nervously in its cage. The first drops of rain thumped lazily against the panes. A boy came in, about eighteen, his fingers black with engine oil. He wore an overall with a red heart sewn on to the breast pocket with a crown above it.

‘Good evening,’ said Haldane. ‘Forgive me. I’m looking for an old acquaintance; a friend. We knew one another long ago. A Mr Leiser. Fred Leiser. I wondered if you had any idea . . .’

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

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

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

‘Hullo, I wonder if you remember me?’

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

‘Sure it was me?’

‘Yes.’

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

‘Twenty years.’ Haldane coughed apologetically.

‘In the war then, was it?’

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

‘Surely you remember me?’ Haldane pleaded.

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

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

‘That’s right.’

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

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

‘What do you want him for, sir?’

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

‘To do a job, one job.’

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

‘Yes.’

‘What about getting back?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Leiser lifted a clean hand and let it fall.

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘How about you, Captain?’

Haldane shook his head.

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

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

‘No, of course,’ Leiser said politely.

The bar was filling up.

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

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

* * *

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

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

‘What do you mean, sticky?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘It’s a precaution, no more.’

‘You must do as you think fit.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Intelligent. Self-educated. Polish extraction.’

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

They went in.

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

‘What happened exactly?’

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

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

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

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

‘Only from the war,’ Leiser said.

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

‘Oh . . . he’s well, thank you.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

He kissed her.

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

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

‘Liar.’

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

‘What man?’

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

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

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

‘What man?’ she repeated.

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

‘Christ, you’re really gay tonight.’

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

‘Come on, Fred, dance.’

‘Just a minute, Bett.’

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

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

‘Dance, for Christ’s sake.’

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

She stopped the record, careless as she pulled the arm. The needle scratched in the loudspeaker.

‘Look, what the hell goes on?’

‘Nothing, I tell you. I’ve just had a hard day, that’s all. Then this man called, somebody I used to know.’

‘I keep asking you: who? Some woman, wasn’t it? Some tart.’

‘No, Betty, it was a man.’

She came to the window, nudging him indifferently. ‘What’s so bloody marvellous about the view, anyway? Just a lot of rotten little houses. You always said you hated them. Well, who was it?’

‘He’s from one of the big companies.’

‘And they want you?’

‘Yes . . . they want to make me an offer.’

‘Christ, who’d want a bloody Pole?’

He hardly stirred. ‘They do.’

‘Someone came to the bank, you know, asking about you. They all sat together in Mr Dawnay’s office. You’re in trouble, aren’t you?’

He took her coat and helped her into it, very correct, elbows wide.

She said: ‘Not that new place with waiters, for Christ’s sake.’

‘It’s nice there, isn’t it? I thought you fancied it there. You can dance too; you like that. Where do you want to go then?’

‘With you? For Christ’s sake! Somewhere where there’s a bit of life, that’s all.’

He stared at her. He was holding the door open. Suddenly he smiled.

‘OK, Bett. It’s your night. Slip down and start the car, I’ll book a table.’ He gave her the key. ‘I know a place, a real place.’

‘What the hell’s come over you now?’

‘You can drive. We’ll have a night out.’ He went to the telephone.

* * *

It was shortly before eleven when Haldane returned to the Department. Leclerc and Avery were waiting for him. Carol was typing in the Private Office.

‘I thought you’d be here earlier,’ Leclerc said.

‘It’s no good. He said he wouldn’t play. I think you’d better try the next one yourself. It’s not my style any more.’ He seemed undisturbed. He sat down. They stared at him incredulously.

‘Did you offer money?’ Leclerc asked finally. ‘We have clearance for five thousand pounds.’

‘Of course I offered money. I tell you he’s just not interested. He was a singularly unpleasant person.’

‘I’m sorry.’ He didn’t say why.

They could hear the tapping of Carol’s typewriter. Leclerc said, ‘Where do we go from here?’

‘I have no idea.’ He glanced restlessly at his watch.

‘There must be others, there must be.’

‘Not on our cards. Not with his qualifications. There are Belgians, Swedes, Frenchmen. But Leiser was the only German-speaker with technical experience. On paper, he’s the only one.’

‘Still young enough. Is that what you mean?’

‘I suppose so. It would have to be an old hand. We haven’t the time to train a new man, nor the facilities. We’d better ask the Circus. They’ll have someone.’

‘We can’t do that,’ Avery said.

‘What kind of man was he?’ Leclerc persisted, reluctant to abandon hope.

‘Common, in a Slav way. Small. He plays the Rittmeister. It’s most unattractive.’ He was looking in his pockets for the bill. ‘He dresses like a bookie, but I suppose they all do that. Do I give this to you or Accounts?’

‘Secure?’

‘I don’t see why not.’

‘And you spoke about the urgency? New loyalties and that kind of thing?’

‘He found the old loyalties more attractive.’ He put the bill on the table.

‘And politics . . . some of these exiles are very . . .’

‘We spoke about politics. He’s not that sort of exile. He considers himself integrated, naturalised British. What do you expect him to do? Swear allegiance to the Polish royal house?’ Again he looked at his watch.

‘You never wanted to recruit him!’ Leclerc cried, angered by Haldane’s indifference. ‘You’re pleased, Adrian, I can see it in your face! Good God, what about the Department! Didn’t that mean anything to him? You don’t believe in it any more, you don’t care! You’re sneering at me!’

‘Who of us does believe?’ asked Haldane with contempt. ‘You said yourself: we do the job.’

‘I believe,’ Avery declared.

Haldane was about to speak when the green telephone rang.

‘That will be the Ministry,’ Leclerc said. ‘Now what do I tell them?’ Haldane was watching him.

He picked up the receiver, put it to his ear then handed it across the table. ‘It’s the exchange. Why on earth did they come through on green? Somebody asking for Captain Hawkins. That’s you, isn’t it?’

Haldane listened, his thin face expressionless. Finally he said, ‘I imagine so. We’ll find someone. There should be no difficulty. Tomorrow at eleven. Kindly be punctual,’ and rang off. The light in Leclerc’s room seemed to ebb towards the thinly curtained window. The rain fell ceaselessly outside.

‘That was Leiser. He’s decided he’ll do the job. He wants to know whether we can find someone to take care of his garage while he’s away.’

Leclerc looked at him in astonishment. Pleasure spread comically over his face. ‘You expected it!’ he cried. He stretched out his small hand. ‘I’m sorry, Adrian. I misjudged you. I congratulate you warmly.’

‘Why did he accept?’ Avery asked excitedly. ‘What made him change his mind?’

‘Why do agents ever do anything? Why do any of us?’ Haldane sat down. He looked old but inviolate, like a man whose friends had already died. ‘Why do they consent or refuse, why do they lie or tell the truth? Why do any of us?’ He began coughing again. ‘Perhaps he’s under-employed. It’s the Germans: he hates them. That’s what he says. I place no value on that. Then he said he couldn’t let us down. I assume he means himself.’

To Leclerc he added, ‘The war rules: that was right, wasn’t it?’

But Leclerc was dialling the Ministry.

Avery went into the Private Office. Carol was standing up.

‘What’s going on?’ she said quickly. ‘What’s the excitement?’

‘It’s Leiser.’ Avery closed the door behind him. ‘He’s agreed to go.’ He stretched out his arms to embrace her. It would be the first time.

‘Why?’

‘Hatred of the Germans, he says. My guess is money.’

‘Is that a good thing?’

Avery grinned knowingly. ‘As long as we pay him more than the other side.’

‘Shouldn’t you go back to your wife?’ she said sharply. ‘I can’t believe you need to sleep here.’

‘It’s operational.’ Avery went to his room. She did not say goodnight.

* * *

Leiser put down the telephone. It was suddenly very quiet. The lights on the roof went out, leaving the room in darkness. He went quickly downstairs. He was frowning, as if his entire mental force were concentrated on the prospect of eating a second dinner.

11

They chose Oxford as they had done in the war. The variety of nationalities and occupations, the constant coming and going of visiting academics and the resultant anonymity, the proximity of open country, all perfectly suited their needs. Besides, it was a place they could understand. The morning after Leiser had rung, Avery went ahead to find a house. The following day he telephoned Haldane to say he had taken one for a month in the north of the town, a large Victorian affair with four bedrooms and a garden. It was very expensive. It was known in the Department as the Mayfly house and carded under Live Amenities.

As soon as Haldane heard, he told Leiser. At Leiser’s suggestion it was agreed that he should put it about that he was attending a course in the Midlands.

‘Don’t give any details,’ Haldane had said. ‘Have your mail sent poste restante to Coventry. We’ll get it picked up from there.’ Leiser was pleased when he heard it was Oxford.

Leclerc and Woodford had searched desperately for someone to run the garage in Leiser’s absence; suddenly they thought of McCulloch. Leiser gave him power of attorney and spent a hasty morning showing him the ropes. ‘We’ll offer you some kind of guarantee in return,’ Haldane said.

‘I don’t need it,’ Leiser replied, explaining quite seriously, ‘I’m working for English gentlemen.’

On the Friday night Leiser had telephoned his consent; by the Wednesday preparations were sufficiently advanced for Leclerc to convene a meeting of Special Section and outline his plans. Avery and Haldane were to be with Leiser in Oxford; the two of them would leave the following evening, by which time he understood that Haldane would be ready with his syllabus. Leiser would arrive in Oxford a day or two later, as soon as his own arrangements were complete. Haldane was to supervise his training, Avery to act as Haldane’s assistant. Woodford would remain in London. Among his tasks was that of consulting with the Ministry (and Sandford of Research) in order to assemble instructional material on the external specifications of short- and medium-range rockets, and thus provided come himself to Oxford.

Leclerc had been tireless, now at the Ministry to report on progress, now at the Treasury to argue the case for Taylor’s widow, now, with Woodford’s aid, engaging former instructors in wireless transmission, photography and unarmed combat.

Such time as remained to Leclerc he devoted to Mayfly Zero: the moment at which Leiser was to be infiltrated into Eastern Germany. At first he seemed to have no firm idea of how this was to be done. He talked vaguely of a sea operation from Denmark; small fishing craft and a rubber dinghy to evade radar detection; he discussed illegal frontier crossing with Sandford and telegraphed Gorton for information on the border area round Lübeck. In veiled terms he even consulted the Circus. Control was remarkably helpful.

All this took place in that atmosphere of heightened activity and optimism which Avery had observed on his return. Even those who were kept, supposedly, in ignorance of the operation were infected by the air of crisis. The little lunch group that gathered daily at a corner table of the Cadena café was alive with rumours and speculation. It was said, for instance, that a man named Johnson, known in the war as Jack Johnson, a wireless instructor, had been taken on to boost the strength of the Department. Accounts had paid him subsistence and – most intriguing of all – they had been asked to draft a three-month contract for submission to the Treasury. Who ever heard, they asked, of a three-month contract? Johnson had been concerned with the French drops during the war; a senior girl remembered him. Berry, the cypher clerk, had asked Mr Woodford what Johnson was up to (Berry was always the cheeky one) and Mr Woodford had grinned and told him to mind his own business, but it was for an operation, he’d said, a very secret one they were running in Europe . . . northern Europe, as a matter of fact, and it might interest Berry to know that poor Taylor had not died in vain.

There was now a ceaseless traffic of cars and Ministry messengers in the front drive; Pine requested and received from another Government establishment a junior whom he treated with sovereign brutality. In some oblique way he had learnt that Germany was the target, and the knowledge made him diligent.

It was even rumoured among the local tradesmen that the Ministry House was changing hands; private buyers were named and great hopes placed upon their custom. Meals were sent for at all hours, lights burnt day and night; the front door, hitherto permanently sealed for reasons of security, was opened, and the sight of Leclerc with bowler hat and briefcase entering his black Humber became a familiar one in Blackfriars Road.

And Avery, like an injured man who would not look at his own wound, slept within the walls of his little office, so that they became the boundary of his life. Once he sent out Carol to buy Anthony a present. She came back with a toy milk lorry with plastic bottles. You could lift the caps off and fill the bottles with water. They tried it out one evening, then sent it round to Battersea in the Humber.

* * *

When all was ready Haldane and Avery travelled to Oxford first class on a Ministry Warrant. At dinner on the train they had a table to themselves. Haldane ordered half a bottle of wine and drank it while he completed The Times crossword. They sat in silence, Haldane occupied, Avery too diffident to interrupt him.

Suddenly Avery noticed Haldane’s tie; before he had time to think, he said, ‘Good Lord, I never knew you were a cricketer.’

‘Did you expect me to tell you?’ Haldane snapped. ‘I could hardly wear it in the office.’

‘I’m sorry.’

Haldane looked at him closely. ‘You shouldn’t apologise so much,’ he observed. ‘You both do it.’ He helped himself to some coffee and ordered a brandy. Waiters noticed Haldane.

‘Both?’

‘You and Leiser. He does it by implication.’

‘It’s going to be different with Leiser, isn’t it?’ Avery said quickly. ‘Leiser’s a professional.’

‘Leiser is not one of us. Never make that mistake. We touched him long ago, that’s all.’

‘What’s he like? What sort of man is he?’

‘He’s an agent. He’s a man to be handled, not known.’

He returned to his crossword.

‘He must be loyal,’ Avery said. ‘Why else would he accept?’

‘You heard what the Director said: the two vows. The first is often quite frivolously taken.’

‘And the second?’

‘Ah, that is different. We shall be there to help him take it.’

‘But why did he accept the first time?’

‘I mistrust reasons. I mistrust words like loyalty. And above all,’ Haldane declared, ‘I mistrust motive. We’re running an agent; the arithmetic is over. You read German, didn’t you? In the beginning was the deed.’

Shortly before they arrived Avery ventured one more question.

‘Why was that passport out of date?’

Haldane had a way of inclining his head when addressed.

‘The Foreign Office used to allocate a series of passport numbers to the Department for operational purposes. The arrangement ran from year to year. Six months ago the Office said they wouldn’t issue any more without reference to the Circus. It seems Leclerc had been making insufficient claims on the facility and Control cut him out of the market. Taylor’s passport was one of the old series. They revoked the whole lot three days before he left. There was no time to do anything about it. It might never have been noticed. The Circus has been very devious.’ A pause. ‘Indeed I find it hard to understand what Control is up to.’

They took a taxi to North Oxford and got out at the corner of their road. As they walked along the pavement Avery looked at the houses in the half-darkness, glimpsed grey-haired figures moving across the lighted windows, velvet-covered chairs trimmed with lace, Chinese screens, music stands and a bridge four sitting like bewitched courtiers in a castle. It was a world he had known about once; for a time he had almost fancied he was part of it; but that was long ago.

They spent the evening preparing the house. Haldane said Leiser should have the rear bedroom overlooking the garden, they themselves would take the rooms on the street side. He had sent some academic books in advance, a typewriter and some imposing files. These he unpacked and arranged on the dining-room table for the benefit of the landlord’s housekeeper who would come each day. ‘We shall call this room the study,’ he said. In the drawing-room he installed a tape recorder.

He had some tapes which he locked in a cupboard, meticulously adding the key to his key ring. Other luggage was still waiting in the hall: a projector, Air Force issue, a screen, and a suitcase of green canvas, securely fastened, with leather corners.

The house was spacious and well kept; the furniture was of mahogany, with brass inlay. The walls were filled with pictures of some unknown family: sketches in sepia, miniatures, photographs faded with age. There was a bowl of potpourri on the sideboard and a palm cross pinned to the mirror; chandeliers hung from the ceiling, clumsy, but inoffensive; in one corner, a bible table; in another a small cupid, very ugly, its face turned to the dark. The whole house gently asserted an air of old age; it had a quality, like incense, of courteous but inconsolable sadness.

By midnight they had finished unpacking. They sat down in the drawing-room. The marble fireplace was supported by blackamoors of ebony; the light of the gas fire played over the gilded rose-chains which linked their thick ankles. The fireplace came from an age, it might have been the seventeenth century, it might have been the nineteenth, when blackamoors had briefly replaced borzois as the decorative beasts of society; they were quite naked, as a dog might be, and chained with golden roses. Avery gave himself a whisky, then went to bed, leaving Haldane sunk in his own thoughts.

His room was large and dark; above the bed hung a light shade of blue china; there were embroidered covers on the tables and a small enamelled notice saying, ‘God’s blessing on this house’; beside the window was a picture of a child saying its prayers while his sister ate breakfast in bed.

He lay awake, wondering about Leiser; it was like waiting for a girl. From across the passage he could hear Haldane’s solitary cough, on and on. It had not ended when he fell asleep.

* * *

Leclerc thought Smiley’s club a very strange place; not at all the kind of thing he had expected. Two half-basement rooms and a dozen people dining at separate tables before a large fire. Some of them were vaguely familiar. He suspected they were connected with the Circus.

‘This is rather a good spot. How do you join?’

‘Oh, you don’t,’ said Smiley apologetically, then blushed and continued, ‘I mean, they don’t have new members. Just one generation . . . several went in the war, you know, some have died or gone abroad. What was it you had in mind, I wonder?’

‘You were good enough to help young Avery out.’

‘Yes . . . yes of course. How did that go, by the way? I never heard.’

‘It was just a training run. There was no film in the end.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Smiley spoke hastily, covering up, as if someone were dead and he had not known.

‘We didn’t really expect there would be. It was just a precaution. How much did Avery tell you, I wonder? We’re training up one or two of the old hands . . . and some of the new boys too. It’s something to do,’ Leclerc explained, ‘during the slack season . . . Christmas, you know. People on leave.’

‘I know.’

Leclerc noticed that the claret was very good. He wished he had joined a smaller club; his own had gone off terribly. They had such difficulty with staff.

‘You have probably heard,’ Leclerc added, officially, as it were, ‘that Control has offered me full assistance for training purposes.’

‘Yes, yes, of course.’

‘My Minister was the moving spirit. He likes the idea of a pool of trained agents. When the plan was first mooted I went and spoke to Control myself. Later, Control called on me. You knew that, perhaps?’

‘Yes. Control wondered . . .’

‘He has been most helpful. Don’t think I am unappreciative. It has been agreed – I think I should give you the background, your own office will confirm it – that if the training is to be effective, we must create as nearly as possible an operational atmosphere. What we used to call battle conditions.’ An indulgent smile. ‘We’ve chosen an area in Western Germany. It’s bleak and unfamiliar ground, ideal for frontier-crossing exercises and that kind of thing. We can ask for the Army’s cooperation if we need it.’

‘Yes, indeed. What a good idea.’

‘For elementary reasons of security, we all accept that your office should only be briefed in the aspects of this exercise in which you are good enough to help.’

‘Control told me,’ said Smiley. ‘He wants to do whatever he can. He didn’t know you touched this kind of thing any more. He was pleased.’

‘Good,’ Leclerc said shortly. He moved his elbows forward a little across the polished table. ‘I thought I might pick your brains . . . quite informally. Rather as you people from time to time have made use of Adrian Haldane.’

‘Of course.’

‘The first thing is false documents. I looked up our old forgers in the index. I see Hyde and Fellowby went over to the Circus some years ago.’

‘Yes. It was the change in emphasis.’

‘I’ve written down a personal description of a man in our employment; he is supposedly resident at Magdeburg for the purposes of the scheme. One of the men under training. Do you think they could prepare documents, Identity Card, Party Membership and that kind of thing? Whatever is necessary.’

‘The man would have to sign them,’ Smiley said. ‘We would then stamp on top of his signature. We’d need photographs too. He’d have to be briefed on how the documents worked; perhaps Hyde could do that on the spot with your agent?’

A slight hesitation. ‘No doubt. I have selected a cover name. It closely approximates his own; we find that a useful technique.’

‘I might just make the point,’ Smiley said, with a rather comic frown, ‘since this is such an elaborate exercise, that forged papers are of very limited value. I mean, one telephone call to the Magdeburg Town Administration and the best forgery in the world is blown sky high . . .’

‘I think we know about that. We want to teach them cover, submit them to interrogation . . . you know the kind of thing.’

Smiley sipped his claret. ‘I just thought I’d make the point. It’s so easy to get hypnotised by technique. I didn’t mean to imply . . . How is Haldane, by the way? He read Greats, you know. We were up together.’

‘Adrian is well.’

‘I liked your Avery,’ Smiley said politely. His heavy small face contracted in pain. ‘Do you realise,’ he asked impressively, ‘they still don’t include the Baroque period in the German syllabus? They call it a special subject.’

‘Then there is the question of clandestine wireless. We haven’t used that kind of thing much since the war. I understand it has all become a great deal more sophisticated. High-speed transmission and so on. We want to keep up with the times.’

‘Yes. Yes, I believe the message is taped on a miniature recorder and sent over the air in a matter of seconds.’ He sighed. ‘But no one really tells us much. The technical people hold their cards very close to their chests.’

‘Is that a method in which our people could profitably be trained . . . in a month, say?’

‘And use under operational conditions?’ Smiley asked in astonishment. ‘Straight away, after a month’s training?’

‘Some are technically minded, you understand. People with wireless experience.’

Smiley was watching Leclerc incredulously. ‘Forgive me. Would he, would they,’ he inquired, ‘have other things to learn in that month as well?’

‘For some it’s more a refresher course.’

‘Ah.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Nothing, nothing,’ Smiley said vaguely and added, ‘I don’t think our technical people would be very keen to part with this kind of equipment unless . . .’

‘Unless it were their own training operation?’

‘Yes,’ Smiley blushed. ‘Yes, that’s what I mean. They’re very particular, you know; jealous.’

Leclerc lapsed into silence, lightly tapping the base of his wine glass on the polished surface of the table. Suddenly he smiled and said, as if he had shaken off depression, ‘Oh well. We shall just have to use a conventional set. Have direction-finding methods also improved since the war? Interception, location of an illegal transmitter?’

‘Oh yes. Yes, indeed.’

‘We would have to incorporate that. How long can a man remain on the air before they spot him?’

‘Two or three minutes, perhaps. It depends. Often it’s a matter of luck how soon they hear him. They can only pin him down while he’s transmitting. Much depends on the frequency. Or so they tell me.’

‘In the war,’ said Leclerc reflectively, ‘we gave an agent several crystals. Each vibrated at a fixed frequency. Every so often he changed the crystal; that was usually a safe enough method. We could do that again.’

‘Yes. Yes, I remember that. But there was the headache of retuning the transmitter . . . possibly changing the coil . . . matching the aerial.’

‘Suppose a man is used to a conventional set. You tell me the chances of interception are greater now than they were in the war? You say allow two or three minutes?’

‘Or less,’ said Smiley, watching him. ‘It depends on a lot of things . . . luck, reception, amount of signal traffic, density of population . . .’

‘Supposing he changed his frequency after every two and a half minutes on the air. Surely that would meet the case?’

‘It could be a slow business.’ His sad, unhealthy face was wrinkled in concern. ‘You’re quite sure this is only training?’

‘As far as I remember,’ Leclerc persisted, courting his own idea, ‘these crystals are the size of a small matchbox. We could give them several. We’re only aiming at a few transmissions; perhaps only three or four. Would you consider my suggestion impractical?’

‘It’s hardly my province.’

‘What is the alternative? I asked Control; he said speak to you. He said you’d help, find me the equipment. What else can I do? Can I talk to your technical people?’

‘I’m sorry. Control rather agreed with the technical side, that we should give all the help we can, but not compromise new equipment. Risk compromising it, I mean. After all, it is only training. I think he felt that if you hadn’t full technical resources you should . . .’

‘Hand over the commitment?’

‘No, no,’ Smiley protested, but Leclerc interrupted him. ‘These people would eventually be used against military targets,’ he said angrily. ‘Purely military. Control accepts that.’

‘Oh quite.’ He seemed to have given up. ‘And if you want a conventional set, no doubt we can dig one up.’

The waiter brought a decanter of port. Leclerc watched Smiley pour a little into his glass, then slide the decanter carefully across the polished table.

‘It’s quite good, but I’m afraid it’s nearly finished. When this is gone we shall have to break into the younger ones. I’m seeing Control first thing tomorrow. I’m sure he’ll have no objection. About the documents, I mean. And crystals. We could advise you on frequencies, I’m sure. Control made a point of that.’

‘Control’s been very good,’ Leclerc confessed. He was slightly drunk. ‘It puzzles me sometimes.’

12

Two days later, Leiser arrived at Oxford. They waited anxiously for him on the platform, Haldane peering among the hurrying faces in the crowd. It was Avery, curiously, who saw him first: a motionless figure in a camel-hair coat at the window of an empty compartment.

‘Is that him?’ Avery asked.

‘He’s travelling first class. He must have paid the difference.’ Haldane spoke as if it were an affront.

Leiser lowered the window and handed out two pigskin cases shaped for the boot of a car, a little too orange for nature. They greeted one another briskly, shaking hands for everyone to see. Avery wanted to carry the luggage to the taxi, but Leiser preferred to take it himself, a piece in each hand, as if it were his duty. He walked a little away from them, shoulders back, staring at the people as they went by, startled by the crowd. His long hair bounced with each step.

Avery, watching him, felt suddenly disturbed.

He was a man; not a shadow. A man with force to his body and purpose to his movement, but somehow theirs to direct. There seemed to be nowhere he would not walk. He was recruited; and had assumed already the anxious, brisk manner of an enlisted man. Yet, Avery accepted, no single factor wholly accounted for Leiser’s recruitment. Avery was already familiar, during his short association with the Department, with the phenomenon of organic motivation; with operations which had no discernible genesis and no conclusion, which formed part of an unending pattern of activity until they ceased to have any further identity; with that progress of fruitless courtships which, in the aggregate, passed for an active love life. But as he observed this man bobbing beside him, animate and quick, he recognised that hitherto they had courted ideas, incestuously among themselves; now they had a human being upon their hands, and this was he.

They climbed into the taxi, Leiser last because he insisted. It was mid-afternoon, a slate sky behind the plane trees. The smoke rose from the North Oxford chimneys in ponderous columns like proof of a virtuous sacrifice. The houses were of a modest stateliness; romantic hulls redecked, each according to a different legend. Here the turrets of Avalon, there the carved trellis of a pagoda; between them the monkey-puzzle trees, and the half-hidden washing like butterflies in the wrong season. The houses sat decently in their own gardens, the curtains drawn, first lace and then brocade, petticoats and skirts. It was like a bad water-colour, the dark things drawn too heavy, the sky grey and soiled in the dusk, the paint too worked.

They dismissed the taxi at the corner of the street. A smell of leaf mould lingered in the air. If there were children they made no noise. The three men walked to the gate. Leiser, his eyes on the house, put down his suitcases.

‘Nice place,’ he said with appreciation. He turned to Avery: ‘Who chose it?’

‘I did.’

‘That’s nice.’ He patted his shoulder. ‘You did a good job.’ Avery, pleased, smiled and opened the gate; Leiser was determined that the others should pass through first. They took him upstairs and showed him his room. He still carried his own luggage.

‘I’ll unpack later,’ he said. ‘I like to make a proper job of it.’

He walked through the house in a critical way, picking things up and looking at them; he might have come to bid for the place.

‘It’s a nice spot,’ he repeated finally; ‘I like it.’

‘Good,’ said Haldane, as if he didn’t give a damn.

Avery went with him to his room to see if he could help.

‘What’s your name?’ Leiser asked. He was more at ease with Avery; more vulgar.

‘John.’

They shook hands again.

‘Well, hullo, John; glad to meet you. How old are you?’

‘Thirty-four,’ he lied.

A wink. ‘Christ, I wish I was thirty-four. Done this kind of thing before, have you?’

‘I finished my own run last week.’

‘How did it go?’

‘Fine.’

‘That’s the boy. Where’s your room?’

Avery showed him.

‘Tell me, what’s the set-up here?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Who’s in charge?’

‘Captain Hawkins.’

‘Anyone else?’

‘Not really. I shall be around.’

‘All the time?’

‘Yes.’

He began unpacking. Avery watched. He had brushes backed with leather, hair lotion, a whole range of little bottles of things for men, an electric shaver of the newest kind and ties, some in tartan, others in silk, to match his costly shirts. Avery went downstairs. Haldane was waiting. He smiled as Avery came in. ‘Well?’

Avery shrugged, too big a gesture. He felt elated, ill at ease. ‘What do you make of him?’ he asked.

‘I hardly know him,’ Haldane said drily. He had a way of terminating conversations. ‘I want you to be always in his company. Walk with him, shoot with him, drink with him if you must. He’s not to be alone.’

‘What about his leave in between?’

‘We’ll see about that. Meanwhile, do as I say. You will find he enjoys your company. He’s a very lonely man. And remember he’s British: British to the core. One more thing – this is most important – do not let him think we have changed since the war. The Department has remained exactly as it was: that is an illusion you must foster even’ – he did not smile – ‘even though you are too young to make the comparison.’

* * *

They began next morning. Breakfast over, they assembled in the drawing-room and Haldane addressed them.

The training would be divided into two periods of a fortnight each, with a short rest in between. The first was to be a refresher course; in the second, old skills, now revived, would be related to the task which lay ahead. Not until the second period would Leiser be told his operational name, his cover and the nature of his mission; even then, the information would reveal neither the target area nor the means by which he was to be infiltrated.

In communications as in all other aspects of his training he would graduate from the general to the particular. In the first period he would familiarise himself once more with the technique of cyphers, signal plans and schedules. In the second he would spend much time actually transmitting under semi-operational conditions. The instructor would arrive during that week.

Haldane explained all this with pedagogic acrimony while Leiser listened carefully, now and then briskly nodding his assent. Avery found it strange that Haldane took so little care to conceal his distaste.

‘In the first period we shall see what you remember. We shall give you a lot of running about, I’m afraid. We want to get you fit. There’ll be small-arms training, unarmed combat, mental exercises, tradecraft. We shall try to take you walking in the afternoons.’

‘Who with? Will John come?’

‘Yes. John will take you. You should regard John as your adviser on all minor matters. If there is anything you wish to discuss, any complaint or anxiety, I trust you will not hesitate to mention it to either one of us.’

‘All right.’

‘On the whole, I must ask you not to venture out alone. I should prefer John to accompany you if you wish to go to the cinema, do some shopping or whatever else the time allows. But I fear you may not have much chance of recreation.’

‘I don’t expect it,’ Leiser said; ‘I don’t need it.’ He seemed to mean he didn’t want it.

‘The wireless instructor, when he comes, will not know your name. That is a customary precaution: please observe it. The daily woman believes we are participating in an academic conference. I cannot imagine you will have occasion to talk to her, but if you do, remember that. If you wish to make inquiries about your business, kindly consult me first. You should not telephone without my consent. Then there will be other visitors: photographers, medical people, technicians. They are what we call ancillaries and are not in the picture. Most of them believe you’re here as part of a wider training scheme. Please remember this.’

‘OK,’ said Leiser. Haldane looked at his watch.

‘Our first appointment is at ten o’clock. A car will collect us from the corner of the road. The driver is not one of us: no conversation on the journey, please. Have you no other clothes?’ he asked. ‘Those are scarcely suitable for the range.’

‘I’ve got a sports coat and a pair of flannels.’

‘I could wish you less conspicuous.’

As they went upstairs to change, Leiser smiled wryly at Avery. ‘He’s a real boy, isn’t he? The old school.’

‘But good,’ Avery said.

Leiser stopped. ‘Of course. Here, tell me something. Was this place always here? Have you used it for many people?’

‘You’re not the first,’ Avery said.

‘Look, I know you can’t tell me much. Is the outfit still like it was . . . people everywhere . . . the same set-up?’

‘I don’t think you’d find much difference. I suppose we’ve expanded a bit.’

‘Are there many young ones like you?’

‘Sorry, Fred.’

Leiser put his open hand on Avery’s back. He used his hands a lot.

‘You’re good, too,’ he said. ‘Don’t bother about me. Not to worry, eh, John?’

* * *

They went to Abingdon: the Ministry had made arrangements with the parachute base. The instructor was expecting them.

‘Used to any particular gun, are you?’

‘Browning three-eight automatic, please,’ Leiser said, like a child ordering groceries.

‘We call it the nine-millimetre now. You’ll have had the Mark One.’

Haldane stood in the gallery at the back while Avery helped wind in the man-sized target to a distance of ten yards and paste squares of gum-strip over the old holes.

‘You call me “Staff”,’ the instructor said and turned to Avery. ‘Like to have a go as well, sir?’

Haldane put in quickly, ‘Yes, they are both shooting, please, Staff.’

Leiser took first turn. Avery stood beside Haldane while Leiser, his long back towards them, waited in the empty range, facing the plywood figure of a German soldier. The target was black, framed against the crumbling whitewash of the walls; over its belly and groin a heart had been crudely described in chalk, its interior extensively repaired with fragments of paper. As they watched, he began testing the weight of the gun, raising it quickly to the level of his eye, then lowering it slowly; pushing home the empty magazine, taking it out and thrusting it in again. He glanced over his shoulder at Avery, with his left hand brushing from his forehead a strand of brown hair which threatened to impede his view. Avery smiled encouragement, then said quickly to Haldane, talking business, ‘I still can’t make him out.’

‘Why not? He’s a perfectly ordinary Pole.’

‘Where does he come from? What part of Poland?’

‘You’ve read the file. Danzig.’

‘Of course.’

The instructor began. ‘We’ll just try it with the empty gun first, both eyes open, and look along the line of sight, feet nicely apart now, thank you, that’s lovely. Relax now, be nice and comfy, it’s not a drill movement, it’s a firing position, oh yes, we’ve done this before! Now traverse the gun, point it but never aim. Right!’ The instructor drew breath, opened a wooden box and took out four magazines. ‘One in the gun and one in the left hand,’ he said and handed the other two up to Avery, who watched with fascination as Leiser deftly slipped a full magazine into the butt of the automatic and advanced the safety catch with his thumb.

‘Now cock the gun, pointing it at the ground three yards ahead of you. Now take up a firing position, keeping the arm straight. Pointing the gun but not aiming it, fire off one magazine, two shots at a time, remembering that we don’t regard the automatic as a weapon of science but more in the order of a stopping weapon for close combat. Now slowly, very slowly . . .’

Before he could finish the range was vibrating with the sound of Leiser’s shooting – he shot fast, standing very stiff, his left hand holding the spare magazine precisely at his side like a grenade. He shot angrily, a mute man finding expression. Avery could feel with rising excitement the fury and purpose of his shooting; now two shots, and another two, then three, then a long volley, while the haze gathered round him and the plywood soldier shook and Avery’s nostrils filled with the sweet smell of cordite.

‘Eleven out of thirteen on the target,’ the instructor declared. ‘Very nice, very nice indeed. Next time, stick to two shots at a time, please, and wait till I give the fire order.’ To Avery, the subaltern, he said, ‘Care to have a go, sir?’

Leiser had walked up to the target and was lightly tracing the bullet holes with his slim hands. The silence was suddenly oppressive. He seemed lost in meditation, feeling the plywood here and there, running a finger thoughtfully along the outline of the German helmet, until the instructor called:

‘Come on. We haven’t got all day.’

Avery stood on the gym mat, measuring the weight of the gun. With the instructor’s help he inserted one magazine, clutching the other nervously in his left hand. Haldane and Leiser looked on.

Avery fired, the heavy gun thudding in his ears, and he felt his young heart stir as the silhouette flicked passively to his shooting.

‘Good shot, John, good shot!’

‘Very good,’ said the instructor automatically. ‘A very good first effort, sir.’ He turned to Leiser: ‘Do you mind not shouting like that?’ He knew a foreigner when he saw one.

‘How many?’ Avery asked eagerly, as he and the sergeant gathered round the target, touching the blackened perforations scattered thinly over the chest and belly. ‘How many, Staff?’

‘You’d better come with me, John,’ Leiser whispered, throwing his arm over Avery’s shoulder. ‘I could do with you over there.’ For a moment Avery recoiled. Then, with a laugh, he put his own arm round Leiser, feeling the warm, crisp cloth of his sports jacket in the palm of his hand.

The instructor led them across the parade ground to a brick barrack like a theatre with no windows, tall at one end. There were walls half crossing one another like the entrance to a public lavatory.

‘Moving targets,’ Haldane said, ‘and shooting in the dark.’

At lunch they played the tapes.

The tapes were to run like a theme through the first two weeks of his training. They were made from old gramophone records; there was a crack in one which recurred like a metronome. Together, they comprised a massive parlour game in which things to be remembered were not listed but mentioned, casually, obliquely, often against a distracting background of other noises, now contradicted in conversation, now corrected or contested. There were three principal voices, one female and two male. Others would interfere. It was the woman who got on their nerves.

She had that antiseptic voice which air hostesses seem to acquire. In the first tape she read from lists, quickly; first it was a shopping-list, two pounds of this, one kilo of that; without warning she was talking about coloured skittles – so many green so many ochre; then it was weapons, guns, torpedoes, ammunition of this and that calibre; then a factory with capacity, waste and production figures, annual targets and monthly achievements. In the second tape she had not abandoned these topics, but unfamiliar voices distracted her and led the dialogue into unexpected paths.

While shopping she entered into an argument with the grocer’s wife about certain merchandise which did not meet with her approval; eggs that were not sound, the outrageous cost of butter. When the grocer himself attempted to mediate he was accused of favouritism; there was talk of points and ration cards, the extra allowance of sugar for jam-making; a hint of undisclosed treasures under the counter. The grocer’s voice was raised in anger but he stopped when the child intervened, talking about skittles. ‘Mummy, Mummy, I’ve knocked over the three green ones, but when I tried to put them up, seven black ones fell down; Mummy, why are there only eight black ones left?’

The scene shifted to a public house. It was the woman again. She was reciting armaments statistics; other voices joined in. Figures were disputed, new targets stated, old ones recalled; the performance of a weapon – a weapon unnamed, undescribed – was cynically questioned and heatedly defended.

Every few minutes a voice shouted ‘break!’ – it might have been a referee – and Haldane stopped the tape and made Leiser talk about football or the weather, or read aloud from a newspaper for five minutes by his watch (the clock on the mantelpiece was broken). The tape recorder was switched on again, and they heard a voice, vaguely familiar, trailing a little like a parson’s; a young voice, deprecating and unsure, like Avery’s: ‘Now here are the four questions. Discounting those eggs which were not sound, how many has she bought in the last three weeks? How many skittles are there altogether? What was the annual overall output of proved and calibrated gun barrels for the years 1937 and 1938? Finally, put in telegraph form any information from which the length of the barrels might be computed.’

Leiser rushed into the study – he seemed to know the game – to write down his answers. As soon as he had left the room Avery said accusingly, ‘That was you. That was your voice speaking at the end.’

‘Was it?’ Haldane replied. He might not have known.

There were other tapes too, and they had the smell of death; the running of feet on a wooden staircase, the slamming of a door, a click, and a girl’s voice asking – she might have been offering lemon or cream – ‘Catch of a door, cocking of a gun?’

Leiser hesitated. ‘A door,’ he said. ‘It was just the door.’

‘It was a gun,’ Haldane retorted. ‘A Browning nine-millimetre automatic. The magazine was being slid into the butt.’

In the afternoon they went for their first walk, the two of them, Leiser and Avery, through Port Meadow and into the country beyond. Haldane had sent them. They walked fast, striding over the whip grass, the wind catching at Leiser’s hair and throwing it wildly about his head. It was cold but there was no rain; a clear, sunless day when the sky above the flat fields was darker than the earth.

‘You know your way round here, don’t you?’ Leiser asked. ‘Were you at school here?’

‘I was an undergraduate here, yes.’

‘What did you study?’

‘I read languages. German principally.’

They climbed a stile and emerged in a narrow lane.

‘You married?’ he asked.

‘Yes.’

‘Kids?’

‘One.’

‘Tell me something, John. When the Captain turned up my card . . . what happened?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘What does it look like, an index for so many? It must be a big thing in an outfit like ours.’

‘It’s in alphabetical order,’ Avery said helplessly. ‘Just cards. Why?’

‘He said they remembered me: the old hands. I was the best, he said. Well, who remembered?’

‘They all did. There’s a special index for the best people. Practically everyone in the Department knows Fred Leiser. Even the new ones. You can’t have a record like yours and get forgotten, you know.’ He smiled. ‘You’re part of the furniture, Fred.’

‘Tell me something else, John. I don’t want to rock the boat, see, but tell me this . . . Would I be any good on the inside?’

‘The inside?’

‘In the office, with you people. I suppose you’ve got to be born to it really, like the Captain.’

‘I’m afraid so, Fred.’

‘What cars do you use up there, John?’

‘Humbers.’

‘Hawk or Snipe?’

‘Hawk.’

‘Only four-cylinder? The Snipe’s a better job, you know.’

‘I’m talking about non-operational transport,’ Avery said. ‘We’ve a whole range of stuff for the special work.’

‘Like the van?’

‘That’s it.’

‘How long before . . . how long does it take to train you? You, for instance; you just did a run. How long before they let you go?’

‘Sorry, Fred. I’m not allowed . . . not even you.’

‘Not to worry.’

They passed a church set back on a rise above the road, skirted a field of plough and returned, tired and radiant, to the cheerful embrace of the Mayfly house and the gas fire playing on the golden roses.

In the evening, they had the projector for visual memory: they would be in a car, passing a marshalling yard; or in a train beside an airfield; they would be taken on a walk through a town, and suddenly they would become aware that a vehicle or a face had reappeared, and they had not remembered its features. Sometimes a series of disconnected objects were flashed in rapid succession on to the screen, and there would be voices in the background, like the voices on the tape, but the conversation was not related to the film, so that the student must consult both his senses and retain what was valuable from each.

Thus the first day ended, setting the pattern for those that followed: carefree, exciting days for them both, days of honest labour and cautious but deepening attachment as the skills of boyhood became once more the weapons of war.

* * *

For the unarmed combat they had rented a small gymnasium near Headington which they had used in the war. An instructor had come by train. They called him Sergeant.

‘Will he be carrying a knife at all? Not wanting to be curious,’ he asked respectfully. He had a Welsh accent.

Haldane shrugged. ‘It depends what he likes. We don’t want to clutter him up.’

‘There’s a lot to be said for a knife, sir.’ Leiser was still in the changing-room. ‘If he knows how to use it. And the Jerries don’t like them, not one bit.’ He had brought some knives in a handcase, and he unpacked them in a private way, like a traveller unpacking his samples. ‘They never could take cold steel,’ he explained. ‘Nothing too long, that’s the trick of it, sir. Something flat with the two cutting edges.’ He selected one and held it up. ‘You can’t do much better than this, as a matter of fact.’ It was wide and flat like a laurel leaf, the blade unpolished, the handle waisted like an hourglass, cross-hatched to prevent slip. Leiser was walking towards them, smoothing a comb through his hair.

‘Used one of these, have you?’

Leiser examined the knife and nodded. The sergeant looked at him carefully. ‘I know you, don’t I? My name’s Sandy Lowe. I’m a bloody Welshman.’

‘You taught me in the war.’

‘Christ,’ said Lowe softly, ‘so I did. You haven’t changed much, have you?’ They grinned shyly at one another, not knowing whether to shake hands. ‘Come on, then, see what you remember.’ They walked to the coconut matting in the centre of the floor. Lowe threw the knife at Leiser’s feet and he snatched it up, grunting as he bent.

Lowe wore a jacket of torn tweed, very old. He stepped quickly back, took it off and with a single movement wrapped it round his left forearm, like a man preparing to fight a dog. Drawing his own knife he moved slowly round Leiser, keeping his weight steady but riding a little from one foot to the other. He was stooping, his bound arm held loosely in front of his stomach, fingers outstretched, palm facing the ground. He had gathered his body behind the guard, letting the blade play restlessly in front of it while Leiser kept steady, his eyes fixed upon the sergeant. For a time they feinted back and forth; once Leiser lunged and Lowe sprang back, allowing the knife to cut the cloth of the jacket on his arm. Once Lowe dropped to his knees, as if to drive the knife upwards beneath Leiser’s guard, and it was Leiser’s turn to spring back, but too slowly, it seemed, for Lowe shook his head, shouted ‘Halt!’ and stood upright.

‘Remember that?’ He indicated his own belly and groin, pressing his arms and elbows in as if to reduce the width of his body. ‘Keep the target small.’ He made Leiser put his knife away and showed him holds, crooking his left arm round Leiser’s neck and pretending to stab him in the kidneys or the stomach. Then he asked Avery to stand as a dummy, and the two of them moved round him with detachment, Lowe indicating the places with his knife and Leiser nodding, smiling occasionally when a particular trick came back to him.

‘You didn’t weave with the blade enough. Remember thumb on top, blade parallel to the ground, forearm stiff, wrist loose. Don’t let his eye settle on it, not for a moment. And left hand in over your own target, whether you’ve got the knife or not. Never be generous about offering the body, that’s what I say to my daughter.’ They laughed dutifully, all but Haldane.

After that, Avery had a turn. Leiser seemed to want it. Removing his glasses, he held the knife as Lowe showed him, hesitant, alert, while Leiser trod crabwise, feinted and darted lightly back, the sweat running off his face, his small eyes alight with concentration. All the time Avery was conscious of the sharp grooves of the haft against the flesh of his palm, the aching in his calves and buttocks as he kept his weight forward on his toes, and Leiser’s angry eyes searching his own. Then Leiser’s foot had hooked round his ankle; as he lost his balance he felt the knife being wrenched from his hand; he fell back, Leiser’s full weight upon him, Leiser’s hand clawing at the collar of his shirt.

They helped him up, all laughing, while Leiser brushed the dust from Avery’s clothes. The knives were put away while they did physical training; Avery took part.

When it was over Lowe said: ‘We’ll just have a spot of unarmed combat and that will do nicely.’

Haldane glanced at Leiser. ‘Have you had enough?’

‘I’m all right.’

Lowe took Avery by an arm and stood him in the centre of the gym mat. ‘You sit on the bench,’ he called to Leiser, ‘while I show you a couple of things.’

He put a hand on Avery’s shoulder. ‘We’re only concerned with five marks, whether we got a knife or not. What are they?’

‘Groin, kidneys, belly, heart and throat,’ Leiser replied wearily.

‘How do you break a man’s neck?’

‘You don’t. You smash his windpipe at the front.’

‘What about a blow on the back of the neck?’

‘Not with the bare hand. Not without a weapon.’ He had put his face in his hands.

‘Correct.’ Lowe moved his open palm in slow motion towards Avery’s throat. ‘Hand open, fingers straight, right?’

‘Right,’ Leiser said.

‘What else do you remember?’

A pause. ‘Tiger’s Claw. An attack on the eyes.’

‘Never use it,’ the sergeant replied shortly. ‘Not as an attacking blow. You leave yourself wide open. Now for the strangle holds. All from behind, remember? Bend the head back, so, hand on the throat, so, and squeeze.’ Lowe looked over his shoulder: ‘Look this way, please. I’m not doing this for my own benefit . . . come on, then, if you know it all, show us some throws!’

Leiser stood up, locking arms with Lowe, and for a while they struggled back and forth, each waiting for the other to offer an opening. Then Lowe gave way, Leiser toppled and Lowe’s hand slapped the back of his head, thrusting it down so that Leiser fell face forward heavily on to the mat.

‘You fall a treat,’ said Lowe with a grin, and then Leiser was upon him, twisting Lowe’s arm savagely back and throwing him very hard so that his little body hit the carpets like a bird hitting the windscreen of a car.

‘You play fair!’ Leiser demanded. ‘Or I’ll damn well hurt you.’

‘Never lean on your opponent,’ Lowe said shortly. ‘And don’t lose your temper in the gym.’

He called across to Avery. ‘You have a turn now, sir; give him some exercise.’

Avery stood up, took off his jacket and waited for Leiser to approach him. He felt the strong grasp upon his arms and was suddenly conscious of the frailty of his body when matched against this adult force. He tried to seize the forearms of the older man, but his hands could not encompass them; he tried to break free, but Leiser held him; Leiser’s head was against his own, filling his nostrils with the smell of hair oil. He felt the damp stubble of his cheek and the close, rank heat of his thin, straining body. Putting his hands on Leiser’s chest he forced himself back, throwing all his energy into one frantic effort to escape the suffocating constriction of the man’s embrace. As he drew away they caught sight of one another, it might have been for the first time, across the heaving cradle of their entangled arms; Leiser’s face, contorted with exertion, softened into a smile; the grip relaxed.

Lowe walked over to Haldane. ‘He’s foreign, isn’t he?’

‘A Pole. What’s he like?’

‘I’d say he was quite a fighter in his day. Nasty. He’s a good build. Fit too, considering.’

‘I see.’

‘How are you these days, sir, in yourself? All right, then?’

‘Yes, thank you.’

‘That’s right. Twenty years. Amazing really. Kiddies all grown up.’

‘I’m afraid I have none.’

‘Mine, I mean.’

‘Ah.’

‘See any of the old crowd, then, sir? How about Mr Smiley?’

‘I’m afraid I have not kept in touch. I am not a gregarious kind of person. Shall we settle up?’

Lowe stood lightly to attention while Haldane prepared to pay him; travelling money, salary and thirty-seven and six for the knife, plus twenty-two shillings for the sheath, a flat metal one with a spring to facilitate extraction. Lowe wrote him a receipt, signing it S.L. for reasons of security. ‘I got the knife at cost,’ he explained. ‘It’s a fiddle we work through the sports club.’ He seemed proud of that.

* * *

Haldane gave Leiser a trenchcoat and wellingtons and Avery took him for a walk. They went by bus as far as Headington, sitting on the top deck.

‘What happened this morning?’ Avery asked.

‘I thought we were fooling about, that’s all. Then he threw me.’

‘He remembered you, didn’t he?’

‘Of course he did: then why did he hurt me?’

‘He didn’t mean to.’

‘Look, it’s all right, see.’ He was still upset.

They got out at the terminus and began trudging through the rain. Avery said, ‘It’s because he wasn’t one of us; that’s why you didn’t like him.’

Leiser laughed, slipped his arm through Avery’s. The rain, drifting in slow waves across the empty street, ran down their faces and trickled into the collars of their mackintoshes. Avery pressed his arm to his side, holding Leiser’s hand captive, and they continued their walk in shared contentment, forgetting the rain or playing with it, treading in the deepest parts and not caring about their clothes.

‘Is the Captain pleased, John?’

‘Very. He says it’s going fine. We begin the wireless soon, just the elementary stuff. Jack Johnson’s expected tomorrow.’

‘It’s coming back to me, John, the shooting and that. I hadn’t forgotten.’ He smiled. ‘The old three-eight.’

‘Nine-millimetre. You’re doing fine, Fred. Just fine. The Captain said so.’

‘Is that what he said, John, the Captain?’

‘Of course. And he’s told London. London’s pleased too. We’re only afraid you’re a bit too . . .’

‘Too what?’

‘Well – too English.’

Leiser laughed. ‘Not to worry, John.’

The inside of Avery’s arm, where he held Leiser’s hand, felt dry and warm.

* * *

They spent a morning on cyphers. Haldane acted as instructor. He had brought pieces of silk cloth imprinted with a cypher of the type Leiser would use, and a chart backed with cardboard for converting letters into numerals. He put the chart on the chimney-piece, wedging it behind the marble clock, and lectured them, rather as Leclerc would have done, but without affectation. Avery and Leiser sat at the table, pencils in hand, and under Haldane’s tuition converted one passage after another into numbers according to the chart, deducted the result from figures on the silk cloth, finally re-translating into letters. It was a process which demanded application rather than concentration, and perhaps because Leiser was trying too hard he became bothered and erratic.

‘We’ll have a timed run over twenty groups,’ Haldane said, and dictated from the sheet of paper in his hand a message of eleven words with the signature Mayfly. ‘From next week you will have to manage without the chart. I shall put it in your room and you must commit it to memory. Go!’

He pressed the stopwatch and walked to the window while the two men worked feverishly at the table, muttering almost in unison while they jotted elementary calculations on the scrap paper in front of them. Avery could detect the increasing flurry of Leiser’s movements, the suppressed sighs and imprecations, the angry erasures; deliberately slowing down, he glanced over the other’s arm to ascertain his progress and noticed that the stub of pencil buried in his little hand was smeared with sweat. Without a word, he silently changed his paper for Leiser’s. Haldane, turning round, might not have seen.

* * *

Even in these first few days, it had become apparent that Leiser looked to Haldane as an ailing man looks to his doctor; a sinner to his priest. There was something terrible about a man who derived his strength from such a sickly body.

Haldane affected to ignore him. He adhered stubbornly to the habits of his private life. He never failed to complete his crossword. A case of burgundy was delivered from the town, half-bottles, and he drank one alone at each meal while they listened to the tapes. So complete, indeed, was his withdrawal that one might have thought him revolted by the man’s proximity. Yet the more elusive, the more aloof Haldane became, the more surely he drew Leiser after him. Leiser, by some obscure standards of his own, had cast him as the English gentleman, and whatever Haldane did or said only served, in the eyes of the other, to fortify him in the part.

Haldane grew in stature. In London he was a slow-walking man; he picked his way pedantically along the corridors as if he were looking for footholds; clerks and secretaries would hover impatiently behind him, lacking the courage to pass. In Oxford he betrayed an agility which would have astonished his London colleagues. His parched frame had revived, he held himself erect. Even his hostility acquired the mark of command. Only the cough remained, that racked, abandoned sob too heavy for such a narrow chest, bringing dabs of red to his thin cheeks and causing Leiser the mute concern of a pupil for his admired master.

‘Is the Captain sick?’ he once asked Avery, picking up an old copy of Haldane’s Times.

‘He never speaks of it.’

‘I suppose that would be bad form.’ His attention was suddenly arrested by the newspaper. It was unopened. Only the crossword had been done, the margins round it sparsely annotated with permutations of a nine-letter anagram. He showed it to Avery in bewilderment.

‘He doesn’t read it,’ he said. ‘He’s only done the competition.’

That night, when they went to bed, Leiser took it with him, furtively as if it contained some secret which study could reveal.

So far as Avery could judge, Haldane was content with Leiser’s progress. In the great variety of activities to which Leiser was now subjected, they had been able to observe him more closely; with the corrosive perception of the weak they discovered his failings and tested his power. He acquired, as they gained his trust, a disarming frankness; he loved to confide. He was their creature; he gave them everything, and they stored it away as the poor do. They saw that the Department had provided direction for his energy: like a man of uncommon sexual appetite, Leiser had found in his new employment a love which he could illustrate with his gifts. They saw that he took pleasure in their command, giving in return his strength as homage for fulfilment. They even knew perhaps that between them they constituted for Leiser the poles of absolute authority: the one by his bitter adherence to standards which Leiser could never achieve, the other by his youthful accessibility, the apparent sweetness and dependence of his nature.

He liked to talk to Avery. He talked about his women or the war. He assumed – it was irritating for Avery, but nothing more – that a man in his middle thirties, whether married or not, led an intense and varied love life. Later in the evening when the two of them had put on their coats and hurried to the pub at the end of the road, he would lean his elbows on the small table, thrust his bright face forward and relate the smallest detail of his exploits, his hand beside his chin, his slim fingertips rapidly parting and closing in unconscious imitation of his mouth. It was not vanity which made him thus but friendship. These betrayals and confessions, whether truth or fantasy, were the simple coinage of their intimacy. He never mentioned Betty.

Avery came to know Leiser’s face with an accuracy no longer related to memory. He noticed how its features seemed structurally to alter shape according to his mood, how when he was tired or depressed at the end of a long day the skin on his cheekbones was drawn upwards rather than down, and the corners of his eyes and mouth rose tautly so that his expression was at once more Slav and less familiar.

He had acquired from his neighbourhood or his clients certain turns of phrase which, though wholly without meaning, impressed his foreign ear. He would speak, for instance, of ‘some measure of satisfaction’, using an impersonal construction for the sake of dignity. He had assimilated also a variety of clichés. Expressions like ‘not to worry’, ‘don’t rock the boat’, ‘let the dog see the rabbit’, came to him continually, as if he were aspiring after a way of life which he only imperfectly understood, and these were the offerings that would buy him in. Some expressions, Avery remarked, were out of date.

Once or twice Avery suspected that Haldane resented his intimacy with Leiser. At other times it seemed that Haldane was deploying emotions in Avery over which he himself no longer disposed. One evening at the beginning of the second week, while Leiser was engaged in that lengthy toilet which preceded almost any recreational engagement, Avery asked Haldane whether he did not wish to go out himself.

‘What do you expect me to do? Make a pilgrimage to the shrine of my youth?’

‘I thought you might have friends there; people you still know.’

‘If I do, it would be insecure to visit them. I am here under another name.’

‘I’m sorry. Of course.’

‘Besides’ – a dour smile – ‘we are not all so prolific in our friendships.’

‘You told me to stay with him!’ Avery said hotly.

‘Precisely; and you have. It would be churlish of me to complain. You do it admirably.’

‘Do what?’

‘Obey instructions.’

At that moment the door bell rang and Avery went downstairs to answer it. By the light of the streetlamp he could see the familiar shape of a Department van in the road. A small, homely figure stood on the doorstep. He was wearing a brown suit and overcoat. There was a high shine on the toes of his brown shoes. He might have come to read the meter.

‘Jack Johnson’s my name,’ he said uncertainly. ‘Johnson’s Fair Deal, that’s me.’

‘Come in,’ Avery said.

‘This is the right place, isn’t it? Captain Hawkins . . . and all that?’

He carried a soft leather bag which he laid carefully on the floor as if it contained all he possessed. Half closing his umbrella he shook it expertly to rid it of the rain, then placed it on the stand beneath his overcoat.

‘I’m John.’

Johnson took his hand and squeezed it warmly.

‘Very pleased to meet you. The Boss has talked a lot about you. You’re quite the blue-eyed boy, I hear.’

They laughed.

He took Avery by the arm in a quick confiding gesture. ‘Using your own name, are you?’

‘Yes. Christian name.’

‘And the Captain?’

‘Hawkins.’

‘What’s he like, Mayfly? How’s he bearing up?’

‘Fine. Just fine.’

‘I hear he’s quite a one for the girls.’

While Johnson and Haldane talked in the drawing-room Avery slipped upstairs to Leiser.

‘It’s no go, Fred. Jack’s come.’

‘Who’s Jack?’

‘Jack Johnson, the wireless chap.’

‘I thought we didn’t start that till next week.’

‘Just the elementary this week, to get your hand in. Come down and say hullo.’

He was wearing a dark suit and held a nail file in one hand.

‘What about going out, then?’

‘I told you; we can’t tonight, Fred; Jack’s here.’

Leiser went downstairs and shook Johnson briefly by the hand, without formality, as if he did not care for latecomers. They talked awkwardly for a quarter of an hour until Leiser, protesting tiredness, went sullenly to bed.

* * *

Johnson made his first report. ‘He’s slow,’ he said. ‘He hasn’t worked a key for a long time, mind. But I daren’t try him on a set till he’s quicker on the key. I know it’s all of twenty years, sir; you can’t blame him. But he is slow, sir, very.’ He had an attentive, nursery-rhyme way of talking as if he spent much time in the company of children. ‘The Boss says I’m to play him all the time – when he starts the job, too. I understand we’re all going over to Germany, sir.’

‘Yes.’

‘Then we shall have to get to know each other,’ he insisted, ‘Mayfly and me. We ought to be together a lot, sir, the moment I begin working him on the set. It’s like handwriting, this game, we’ve got to get used to one another’s handwriting. Then there’s schedules, times for coming up and that; signal plans for his frequencies. Safety devices. That’s a lot to learn in a fortnight.’

‘Safety devices?’ Avery asked.

‘Deliberate mistakes, sir; like a misspelling in a particular group, an E for an A or something of that kind. If he wants to tell us he’s been caught and is transmitting under control, he’ll miss the safety device.’ He turned to Haldane. ‘You know the kind of thing, Captain.’

‘There was talk in London of teaching him high-speed transmission on tape. Do you know what became of that idea?’

‘The Boss did mention it to me, sir. I understand the equipment wasn’t available. I can’t say I know much about it, really; since my time, the transistorised stuff. The Boss said we were to stick to the old methods but change the frequency every two and a half minutes, sir; I understand the Jerries are very hot on the direction-finding these days.’

‘What set did they send down? It seemed very heavy for him to carry about.’

‘It’s the kind Mayfly used in the war, sir, that’s the beauty of it. The old B2 in the waterproof casing. If we’ve only got a couple of weeks there doesn’t hardly seem time to go over anything else. Not that he’s ready to work it yet—’

‘What does it weigh?’

‘About fifty pound, sir, all in. The ordinary suitcase set. It’s the waterproofing that adds the weight, but he’s got to have it if he’s going over rough country. Specially at this time of year.’ He hesitated. ‘But he’s slow on his Morse, sir.’

‘Quite. Do you think you can bring him up to scratch in the time?’

‘Can’t tell yet, sir. Not till we really get cracking on the set. Not till the second period, when he’s had his little bit of leave. I’m just letting him handle the buzzer at present.’

‘Thank you,’ said Haldane.

13

At the end of the first two weeks they gave him forty-eight hours’ leave of absence. He had not asked for it and when they offered it to him he seemed puzzled. In no circumstances was he to visit his own neighbourhood. He could depart for London on the Friday but he said he preferred to go on Saturday. He could return on Monday morning but he said it depended and he might come back late on Sunday. They stressed that he was to keep clear of anyone who might know him, and in some curious fashion this seemed to console him.

Avery, worried, went to Haldane.

‘I don’t think we should send him off into the blue. You’ve told him he can’t go back to South Park; or visit his friends, even if he’s got any; I don’t see quite where he can go.’

‘You think he’ll be lonely?’

Avery blushed. ‘I think he’ll just want to come back all the time.’

‘We can hardly object to that.’

They gave him subsistence money in old notes, fives and ones. He wanted to refuse it, but Haldane pressed it on him as if a principle were involved. They offered to book him a room but he declined. Haldane assumed he was going to London, so in the end he went, as if he owed it to them.

‘He’s got some woman,’ said Johnson with satisfaction.

He left on the midday train, carrying one pigskin suitcase and wearing his camel-hair coat; it had a slightly military cut, and leather buttons, but no person of breeding could ever have mistaken it for a British warm.

* * *

He handed in his suitcase to the depository at Paddington Station and wandered out into Praed Street because he had nowhere to go. He walked about for half an hour, looking at the shop windows and reading the tarts’ advertisements on the glazed notice boards. It was Saturday afternoon: a handful of old men in trilby hats and raincoats hovered between the pornography shops and the pimps on the corner. There was very little traffic: an atmosphere of hopeless recreation filled the street.

The cinema club charged a pound and gave him a predated membership card because of the law. He sat among ghost figures on a kitchen chair. The film was very old; it might have come over from Vienna when the persecutions began. Two girls, quite naked, took tea. There was no sound track and they just went on drinking tea, changing position a little as they passed their cups. They would be sixty now, if they had survived the war. He got up to go because it was after half past five and the pubs were open. As he passed the kiosk at the doorway, the manager said: ‘I know a girl who likes a gay time. Very young.’

‘No, thanks.’

‘Two and a half quid; she likes foreigners. She gives it foreign if you like. French.’

‘Run away.’

‘Don’t you tell me to run away.’

‘Run away.’ Leiser returned to the kiosk, his small eyes suddenly alight. ‘Next time you offer me a girl, make it something English, see.’

The air was warmer, the wind had dropped, the street emptied; pleasures were indoors now. The woman behind the bar said, ‘Can’t mix it for you now, dear, not till the rush dies down. You can see for yourself.’

‘It’s the only thing I drink.’

‘Sorry, dear.’

He ordered gin and Italian instead and got it warm with no cherry. Walking had made him tired. He sat on the bench which ran along the wall, watching the darts four. They did not speak, but pursued their game with quiet devotion, as if they were deeply conscious of tradition. It was like the film club. One of them had a date, and they called to Leiser, ‘Make a four, then?’

‘I don’t mind,’ he said, pleased to be addressed, and stood up; but a friend came in, a man called Henry, and Henry was preferred. Leiser was going to argue but there seemed no point.

Avery too had gone out alone. To Haldane he had said he was taking a walk, to Johnson that he was going to the cinema. Avery had a way of lying which defied rational explanation. He found himself drawn to the old places he had known; his college in the Turl; the bookshops, pubs and libraries. The term was just ending. Oxford had a smell of Christmas about it, and acknowledged it with prudish ill will, dressing the shop windows with last year’s tinsel.

He took the Banbury Road until he reached the street where he and Sarah had lived for the first year of marriage. The flat was in darkness. Standing before it, he tried to detect in the house, in himself, some trace of the sentiment, or affection, or love, or whatever it was that explained their marriage, but it was not to be found and he supposed it had never been. He sought desperately, wanting to find the motive of youth; but there was none. He was staring into an empty house. He hastened home to the place where Leiser lived.

‘Good film?’ Johnson asked.

‘Fine.’

‘I thought you were going for a walk,’ Haldane complained, looking up from his crossword.

‘I changed my mind.’

‘Incidentally,’ Haldane said, ‘Leiser’s gun. I understand he prefers the three-eight.’

‘Yes. They call it the nine-millimetre now.’

‘When he returns he should start to carry it with him; take it everywhere, unloaded of course.’ A glance at Johnson. ‘Particularly when he begins transmission exercises on any scale. He must have it on him all the time; we want him to feel lost without it. I have arranged for one to be issued; you’ll find it in your room, Avery, with various holsters. Perhaps you’d explain it to him, would you?’

‘Won’t you tell him yourself?’

‘You do it. You get on with him so nicely.’

He went upstairs to telephone Sarah. She had gone to stay with her mother. Conversation was very formal.

* * *

Leiser dialled Betty’s number, but there was no reply.

Relieved, he went to a cheap jeweller’s, near the station, which was open on Saturday afternoon and bought a gold coach and horses for a charm bracelet. It cost eleven pounds, which was what they had given him for subsistence. He asked them to send it by registered mail to her address in South Park. He put a note in saying ‘Back in two weeks. Be good’, signing it, in a moment of aberration, F. Leiser, so he crossed it out and wrote ‘Fred’.

He walked for a bit, thought of picking up a girl, and finally booked in at the hotel near the station. He slept badly because of the noise of traffic. In the morning he rang her number again; there was no reply. He replaced the receiver quickly; he might have waited a little longer. He had breakfast, went out and bought the Sunday papers, took them to his room and read the football reports till lunch time. In the afternoon he went for a walk, it had become a habit, right through London, he hardly knew where. He followed the river as far as Charing Cross and found himself in an empty garden filled with drifting rain. The tarmac paths were strewn with yellow leaves. An old man sat on the bandstand, quite alone. He wore a black overcoat and a rucksack of green webbing like the case of a gas mask. He was asleep, or listening to music.

He waited till evening in order not to disappoint Avery, then caught the last train home to Oxford.

* * *

Avery knew a pub behind Balliol where they let you play bar billiards on Sundays. Johnson liked a game of bar billiards. Johnson was on Guinness, Avery was on whisky. They were laughing a good deal; it had been a tough week. Johnson was winning; he went for the lower numbers, methodically, while Avery tried cushion shots at the hundred pocket.

‘I wouldn’t mind a bit of what Fred’s having,’ Johnson said with a snigger. He played a shot; a white ball dropped dutifully into its hole. ‘Poles are dead randy. Go up anything, a Pole will. Specially Fred, he’s a real terror. He’s got the walk.’

‘Are you that way, Jack?’

‘When I’m in the mood. I wouldn’t mind a little bit now, as a matter of fact.’

They played a couple of shots, each lost in an alcoholic euphoria of erotic fancy.

‘Still,’ said Johnson gratefully, ‘I’d rather be in our shoes, wouldn’t you?’

‘Any day.’

‘You know,’ Johnson said, chalking his cue, ‘I shouldn’t be speaking to you like this, should I? You’ve had college and that. You’re different class, John.’

They drank to each other, both thinking of Leiser.

‘For Christ’s sake,’ Avery said. ‘We’re fighting the same war, aren’t we?’

‘Quite right.’

Johnson poured the rest of the Guinness out of the bottle. He took great care, but a little ran over the side on to the table.

‘Here’s to Fred,’ Avery said.

‘To Fred. On the nest. And bloody good luck to him.’

‘Good luck, Fred.’

‘I don’t know how he’ll manage the B2,’ Johnson murmured. ‘He’s got a long way to go.’

‘Here’s to Fred.’

‘Fred. He’s a lovely boy. Here: do you know this bloke Woodford, the one who picked me up?’

‘Of course. He’ll be coming down next week.’

‘Met his wife at all; Babs? She was a girl, she was; give it to anyone . . . Christ! Past it now, I suppose. Still, many a good tune, eh?’

‘That’s right.’

‘To him that hath shalt be given,’ Johnson declared.

They drank; that joke went astray.

‘She used to go with the admin bloke, Jimmy Gorton. What happened to him then?’

‘He’s in Hamburg. Doing very well.’

They got home before Leiser. Haldane was in bed.

It was after midnight when Leiser hung his wet camel-hair coat in the hall, on a hanger because he was a precise man: tiptoed to the drawing-room and put on the light. His eye ran fondly over the heavy furniture, the tallboy elaborately decorated with fretwork and heavy brass handles; the escritoire and the bible table. Lovingly he revisited the handsome women at croquet, handsome men at war, disdainful boys in boaters, girls at Cheltenham; a whole long history of discomfort and not a breath of passion. The clock on the chimney-piece was like a pavilion in blue marble. The hands were of gold, so ornate, so fashioned, so flowered and spreading that you had to look twice to see where the points of them lay. They had not moved since he went away, perhaps not since he was born, and somehow that was a great achievement for an old clock.

He picked up his suitcase and went upstairs. Haldane was coughing but no light came from his room. He tapped on Avery’s door.

‘You there, John?’

After a moment he heard him sit up. ‘Nice time, Fred?’

‘You bet.’

‘Woman all right?’

‘Just the job. See you tomorrow, John.’

‘See you in the morning. Night, Fred. Fred . . .’

‘Yes, John?’

‘Jack and I had a bit of a session. You should have been there.’

‘That’s right, John.’

Slowly he made his way along the corridor, content in his weariness, entered his room, took off his jacket, lit a cigarette and threw himself gratefully into the armchair. It was tall and very comfortable, with wings on the side. As he did so he caught sight of something. A chart hung on the wall for turning letters into figures, and beneath it, on the bed, lying in the middle of the eiderdown, was an old suitcase of continental pattern, dark green canvas with leather on the corners. It was open; inside were two boxes of grey steel. He got up, staring at them in mute recognition; reached out and touched them, wary as if they might be hot; turned the dials, stooped and read the legend by the switches. It could have been the set he had in Holland: transmitter and receiver in one box; power unit, key and earphones in the other. Crystals, a dozen of them, in a bag of parachute silk with a green drawstring threaded through the top. He tested the key with his finger; it seemed much smaller than he remembered.

He returned to the armchair, his eyes still fixed upon the suitcase; sat there, stiff and sleepless, like a man conducting a wake.

He was late for breakfast. Haldane said, ‘You spend all day with Johnson. Morning and afternoon.’

‘No walk?’ Avery was busy with his egg.

‘Tomorrow perhaps. From now on we’re concerned with technique. I’m afraid walks take second place.’

* * *

Control quite often stayed in London on Monday nights, which he said was the only time he could get a chair at his club; Smiley suspected he wanted to get away from his wife.

‘I hear the flowers are coming out in Blackfriars Road,’ he said. ‘Leclerc’s driving around in a Rolls-Royce.’

‘It’s a perfectly ordinary Humber,’ Smiley retorted. ‘From the Ministry pool.’

‘Is that where it comes from?’ Control asked, his eyebrows very high. ‘Isn’t it fun? So the black friars have won the pool.’

14

‘You know the set, then?’ Johnson asked.

‘The B2.’

‘OK. Official title, Type three, Mark two; runs on AC or a six-volt car battery, but you’ll be using the mains, right? They’ve queried the current where you’re going and it’s AC. Your mains consumption with this set is fifty-seven watts on transmit and twenty-five on receive. So if you do end up somewhere and they’ve only got DC, you’re going to have to borrow a battery, right?’

Leiser did not laugh.

‘Your mains lead is provided with adaptors for all continental sockets.’

‘I know.’

Leiser watched Johnson prepare the set for operation. First he linked the transmitter and receiver to the power pack by means of six-pin plugs, adjusting the twin claws to the terminals; having plugged in the set and turned it on, he joined the miniature Morse key to the transmitter and the earphones to the receiver.

‘That’s a smaller key than we had in the war,’ Leiser objected. ‘I tried it last night. My fingers kept slipping.’

Johnson shook his head.

‘Sorry, Fred; same size.’ He winked. ‘Perhaps your finger’s grown.’

‘All right, come on.’

Now he extracted from the spares box a coil of multistranded wire, plastic covered, attaching one end to the aerial terminals. ‘Most of your crystals will be around the three megacycle mark, so you may not have to change your coil – get a nice stretch on your aerial and you’ll be a hundred per cent, Fred; specially at night. Now watch the tuning. You’ve connected up your aerial, earth, key, headphones and power pack. Look at your signal plan and see what frequency you’re on; fish out the corresponding crystal, right?’ He held up a small capsule of black bakelite, guided the pins into the double socket – ‘Shoving the male ends into the doodahs, like so. All right so far, Fred? Not hurrying you, am I?’

‘I’m watching. Don’t keep asking.’

‘Now turn the crystal selector dial to “fundamental all crystals”, and adjust your wave band to match your frequency. If you’re on three and a half megs you want the wave-band knob on three to four, like so. Now insert your plug-in coil either way round, Fred; you’ve got a nice overlap there.’

Leiser’s head was supported in his hand as he tried desperately to remember the sequence of movements which once had come so naturally to him. Johnson proceeded with the method of a man born to his trade. His voice was soft and easy, very patient, his hands moving instinctively from one dial to another with perfect familiarity. All the time the monologue continued:

‘TRS switch on T for tune; put your anode tuning and aerial matching on ten; now you can switch on your power pack, right?’ He pointed to the meter window. ‘You should get the three hundred reading, near enough, Fred. Now I’m ready to have a go: I shove my meter selector on three and twiddle the PA tuning till I get maximum meter reading; now I put her on six—’

‘What’s PA?’

‘Power Amplifier, Fred: didn’t you know that?’

‘Go on.’

‘Now I move the anode tuning knob till I get my minimum value – here you are! She’s a hundred with the knob on two, right? Now push your TRS over to S – S for send, Fred – and you’re ready to tune the aerial. Here – press the key. That’s right, see? You get a bigger reading because you’re putting power into the aerial, follow it?’

Silently he performed the brief ritual of tuning the aerial until the meter obediently dipped to the final reading.

‘And Bob’s your uncle!’ he declared triumphantly. ‘Now it’s Fred’s turn. Here, your hand’s sweating. You must have had a week-end, you must. Wait a minute, Fred!’ He left the room, returning with an oversized white pepperpot, from which he carefully sprinkled French chalk over the black lozenge on the key lever.

‘Take my advice,’ Johnson said, ‘just leave the girls in peace, see, Fred? Let it grow.’

Leiser was looking at his open hand. Particles of sweat had gathered in the grooves. ‘I couldn’t sleep.’

‘I’ll bet you couldn’t.’ He slapped the case affectionately. ‘From now on you sleep with her. She’s Mrs Fred, see, and no one else!’ He dismantled the set and waited for Leiser to begin. With childish slowness Leiser painfully reassembled the equipment. It was all so long ago.

Day after day Leiser and Johnson sat at the small table in the bedroom tapping out their messages. Sometimes Johnson would drive away in the van leaving Leiser alone, and they would work back and forth till early morning. Or Leiser and Avery would go – Leiser was not allowed out alone – and from a borrowed house in Fairford they would pass their signals, encoding, sending and receiving en clair trivialities disguised as amateur transmissions. Leiser discernibly changed. He became nervy and irritable; he complained to Haldane about the complications of transmitting on a series of frequencies, the difficulty of constant retuning, the shortage of time. His relationship to Johnson was always uneasy. Johnson had arrived late, and for some reason Leiser insisted on treating him as an outsider, not admitting him properly to the companionship which he fancied to exist between Avery, Haldane and himself.

There was a particularly absurd scene one breakfast. Leiser raised the lid of a jam-pot, peered inside and, turning to Avery, asked, ‘Is this bee-honey?’

Johnson leant across the table, knife in one hand, bread and butter in the other.

‘We don’t say that, Fred. We just call it honey.’

‘That’s right, honey. Bee-honey.’

‘Just honey,’ Johnson repeated. ‘In England we just call it honey.’

Leiser carefully replaced the lid, pale with anger. ‘Don’t you tell me what to say.’

Haldane looked up sharply from his paper. ‘Be quiet, Johnson. Bee-honey is perfectly accurate.’

Leiser’s courtesy had something of the servant, his quarrels with Johnson something of the backstairs.

Despite such incidents as this, like any two men engaged daily upon a single project, they came gradually to share their hopes, moods and depressions. If a lesson had gone well, the meal that followed it would be a happy affair. The two of them would exchange esoteric remarks about the state of the ionosphere, the skip distance on a given frequency, or an unnatural meter reading which had occurred during tuning. If badly, they would speak little or not at all, and everyone but Haldane would hasten through his food for want of anything to say. Occasionally Leiser would ask whether he might not take a walk with Avery, but Haldane shook his head and said there was no time. Avery, a guilty lover, made no move to help.

As the two weeks neared their end, the Mayfly house was several times visited by specialists of one kind or another from London. A photographic instructor came, a tall, hollow-eyed man, who demonstrated a sub-miniature camera with interchangeable lenses; there was a doctor, benign and wholly incurious, who listened to Leiser’s heart for minutes on end. The Treasury had insisted upon it; there was the question of compensation. Leiser declared he had no dependants, but he was examined all the same to satisfy the Treasury.

With the increase in these activities Leiser came to derive great comfort from his gun. Avery had given it to him after his week-end’s leave. He favoured a shoulder holster (the drape of his jackets nicely concealed the bulge) and sometimes at the end of a long day he would draw the gun and finger it, looking down the barrel, raising it and lowering it as he had done on the range. ‘There isn’t a gun to beat it,’ he would say. ‘Not for the size. You can have your continental types any time. Women’s guns, they are, like their cars. Take my advice, John, a three-eight’s best.’

‘Nine-millimetre they call it now.’

His resentment of strangers reached its unexpected climax in the visit of Hyde, a man from the Circus. The morning had gone badly. Leiser had been making a timed run, encoding and transmitting forty groups; his bedroom and Johnson’s were now linked on an internal circuit; they played back and forth behind closed doors. Johnson had taught him a number of international code signs: QRJ, your signals are too weak to read; QRW, send faster; QSD, your keying is bad; QSM, repeat the last message; QSZ, send each word twice; QRU, I have nothing for you. As Leiser’s transmission became increasingly uneven, Johnson’s comments, thus cryptically expressed, added to his confusion, until with a shout of irritation he switched off his set and stalked downstairs to Avery. Johnson followed him.

‘It’s no good giving up, Fred.’

‘Leave me alone.’

‘Look, Fred, you did it all wrong. I told you to send the number of groups before you send the message. You can’t remember a thing, can you—’

‘Look, leave me alone, I said!’ He was about to add something when the door bell rang. It was Hyde. He had brought an assistant, a plump man who was sucking something against the weather.

They did not play the tapes at lunch. Their guests sat side by side, eating glumly as if they had the same food every day because of the calories. Hyde was a meagre, dark-faced man without a trace of humour who reminded Avery of Sutherland. He had come to give Leiser a new identity. He had papers for him to sign, identity documents, a form of ration card, a driving licence, a permit to enter the border zone along a specified area, and an old shirt in a briefcase. After lunch he laid them all out on the drawing-room table while the photographer put up his camera.

They dressed Leiser in the shirt and took him full face with both ears showing according to the German regulations, then led him to sign the papers. He seemed nervous.

‘We’re going to call you Freiser,’ Hyde said, as if that were an end to the matter.

‘Freiser? That’s like my own name.’

‘That’s the idea. That’s what your people wanted. For signatures and things, so that there’s no slip-up. You’d better practise it a bit before you sign.’

‘I’d rather have it different. Quite different.’

‘We’ll stick to Freiser, I think,’ said Hyde. ‘It’s been decided at high level.’ Hyde was a man who leant heavily upon the Passive Voice.

There was an uncomfortable silence.

‘I want it different. I don’t like Freiser and I want it different.’ He didn’t like Hyde either, and in half a minute he was going to say so.

Haldane intervened. ‘You’re under instructions. The Department has taken the decision. There is no question of altering it now.’

Leiser was very pale.

‘Then they can bloody well change the instructions. I want a different name, that’s all. Christ, it’s only a little thing, isn’t it? That’s all I’m asking for: another name, a proper one, not a half-cock imitation of my own.’

‘I don’t understand,’ Hyde said. ‘It’s only training, isn’t it?’

‘You don’t have to understand! Just change it, that’s all. Who the hell d’you think you are, coming in here and ordering me about?’

‘I’ll telephone London,’ Haldane said, and went upstairs. They waited awkwardly until he came down.

‘Will you accept Hartbeck?’ Haldane inquired. There was a note of sarcasm in his voice.

Leiser smiled. ‘Hartbeck. That’s fine.’ He spread out his hands in a gesture of apology. ‘Hartbeck’s fine.’

Leiser spent ten minutes practising a signature then signed the papers, with a little flourish each time as if there were dust on them. Hyde gave them a lecture on the documents. It took a very long time. There were no actual ration cards in East Germany, Hyde said, but there existed a system of registration with food shops, who provided a certificate. He explained the principle of travel permits and the circumstances under which they were granted, he talked at length about the obligation on Leiser to show his identity card, unasked, when he bought a railway ticket or put up at an hotel. Leiser argued with him and Haldane attempted to terminate the meeting. Hyde paid no attention. When he had finished he nodded and went away with his photographer, folding the old shirt into his briefcase as if it were part of his equipment.

This outburst of Leiser’s appeared to cause Haldane some concern. He telephoned to London and ordered his assistant, Gladstone, to go over Leiser’s file for any trace of the name Freiser; he had a search made in all the indices, but without success. When Avery suggested Haldane was making too much of the incident the other shook his head. ‘We’re waiting for the second vow,’ he said.

Following upon Hyde’s visit, Leiser now received daily briefings about his cover. Stage by stage he, Avery and Haldane constructed in tireless detail the background of the man Hartbeck, establishing him in his work, his tastes and recreations, in his love life and choice of friends. Together, they entered the most obscure corners of the man’s conjectured existence, gave him skills and attributes which Leiser himself barely possessed.

Woodford came with news of the Department.

‘The Director’s putting up a marvellous show.’ From the way he spoke, Leclerc might have been fighting an illness. ‘We leave for Lübeck a week today. Jimmy Gorton’s been on to the German frontier people – he says they’re pretty reliable. We’ve got a crossing point lined up and we’ve taken a farmhouse on the outskirts of the town. He’s let it be known that we’re a team of academics wanting a quiet time and a bit of fresh air.’ Woodford looked confidingly at Haldane. ‘The Department is working wonderfully. As one man. And what a spirit, Adrian! No watching the clock these days. And no rank. Dennison, Sandford . . . we’re just a single team. You should see the way Clarkie’s going for the Ministry about poor Taylor’s pension. How’s Mayfly bearing up?’ he added in a low voice.

‘All right. He’s doing wireless upstairs.’

‘Any more signs of nerves? Outbreaks or anything?’

‘None so far as I know,’ Haldane replied, as if he were unlikely to know anyway.

‘Is he getting frisky? Sometimes they want a girl about now.’

Woodford had brought drawings of Soviet rockets. They had been made by Ministry draughtsmen from photographs held in Research Section, enlarged to about two foot by three, neatly mounted on showcards. Some were stamped with a security classification. Prominent features were marked with arrows; the nomenclature was curiously childish: fin, cone, fuel compartment, payload. Beside each rocket stood a gay little figure like a penguin in a flying helmet, and printed beneath him: ‘size of average man’. Woodford arranged them round the room as if they were his own work; Avery and Haldane watched in silence.

‘He can look at them after lunch,’ Haldane said. ‘Put them together till then.’

‘I’ve brought along a film to give him some background. Launchings, transportation, a bit about destructive capacity. The Director said he should have an idea what these things can do. Give him a shot in the arm.’

‘He doesn’t need a shot in the arm,’ Avery said.

Woodford remembered something. ‘Oh – and your little Gladstone wants to talk to you. He said it was urgent – didn’t know how to get hold of you. I told him you’d give him a ring when you had time. Apparently you asked him to do a job on the Mayfly area. Industry, was it, or manoeuvres? He says he’s got the answer ready for you in London. He’s the best type of NCO, that fellow.’ He glanced at the ceiling. ‘When’s Fred coming down?’

Haldane said abruptly, ‘I don’t want you to meet him, Bruce.’ It was unusual in Haldane to use a Christian name. ‘I’m afraid you must take luncheon in the town. Charge it to Accounts.’

‘Why on earth not?’

‘Security. I see no point in his knowing more of us than is strictly necessary. The charts speak for themselves; so, presumably, does the film.’

Woodford, profoundly insulted, left. Avery knew then that Haldane was determined to preserve Leiser in the delusion that the Department housed no fools.

For the last day of the course, Haldane had planned a full-scale exercise to last from ten in the morning until eight in the evening, a combined affair including visual observation in the town, clandestine photography and listening to tapes. The information which Leiser assembled during the day was to be made into a report, encoded and communicated by wireless to Johnson in the evening. A certain hilarity infected the briefing that morning. Johnson made a joke about not photographing the Oxford Constabulary by mistake; Leiser laughed richly and even Haldane allowed himself a wan smile. It was the end of term; the boys were going home.

The exercise was a success. Johnson was pleased; Avery enthusiastic; Leiser manifestly delighted. They had made two faultless transmissions, Johnson said, Fred was steady as a rock. At eight o’clock they assembled for dinner wearing their best suits. A special menu had been arranged. Haldane had presented the rest of his burgundy; toasts were made; there was talk of an annual reunion in years to come. Leiser looked very smart in a dark blue suit and a pale tie of watered silk.

Johnson got rather drunk and insisted on bringing down Leiser’s wireless set, raising his glass to it repeatedly and calling it Mrs Hartbeck. Avery and Leiser sat together: the estrangement of the last week over.

The next day, a Saturday, Avery and Haldane returned to London. Leiser was to remain in Oxford with Johnson until the whole party left for Germany on Monday. On the Sunday, an Air Force van would call at the house to collect the suitcase. This would be independently conveyed to Gorton in Hamburg together with Johnson’s own base equipment, and thence to the farmhouse near Lübeck from which Operation Mayfly would be launched. Before he left the house Avery took a last look round, partly for reasons of sentiment, and partly because he had signed the lease and was concerned about the inventory.

Haldane was ill at ease on the journey to London. He was still waiting, apparently, for some unknown crisis in Leiser.

15

It was the same evening. Sarah was in bed. Her mother had brought her to London.

‘If you ever want me,’ he said, ‘I’ll come to you, wherever you are.’

‘You mean when I’m dying.’ Analysing, she added, ‘I’ll do the same for you, John. Now can I repeat my question?’

‘Monday. There’s a group of us going.’ It was like children: parallel playing.

‘Which part of Germany?’

‘Just Germany, West Germany. For a conference.’

‘More bodies?’

‘Oh, for God’s sake, Sarah, do you think I want to keep it from you?’

‘Yes, John, I do,’ she said simply. ‘I think if you were allowed to tell me you wouldn’t care about the job. You’ve got a kind of licence I can’t share.’

‘I can only tell you it’s a big thing . . . a big operation. With agents. I’ve been training them.’

‘Who’s in charge?’

‘Haldane.’

‘Is that the one who confides in you about his wife? I think he’s utterly disgusting.’

‘No, that’s Woodford. This man’s quite different. Haldane’s odd. Donnish. Very good.’

‘But they’re all good, aren’t they? Woodford’s good too.’

Her mother came in with tea.

‘When are you getting up?’ he asked.

‘Monday, probably. It depends on the doctor.’

‘She’ll need quiet,’ her mother said, and went out.

‘If you believe in it, do it,’ Sarah said. ‘But don’t . . .’ she broke off, shook her head, little girl now.

‘You’re jealous. You’re jealous of my job and the secrecy. You don’t want me to believe in my work!’

‘Go on. Believe in it if you can.’

For a while they did not look at one another. ‘If it weren’t for Anthony I really would leave you,’ Sarah declared at last.

‘What for?’ Avery asked hopelessly, and then, seeing the opening, ‘Don’t let Anthony stop you.’

‘You never talk to me: any more than you talk to Anthony. He hardly knows you.’

‘What is there to talk about?’

‘Oh, God.’

‘I can’t talk about my work, you know that. I tell you more than I should as it is. That’s why you’re always sneering at the Department, isn’t it? You can’t understand it, you don’t want to; you don’t like it being secret but you despise me when I break the rules.’

‘Don’t go over that again.’

‘I’m not coming back,’ Avery said. ‘I’ve decided.’

‘This time, perhaps you’ll remember Anthony’s present.’

‘I bought him that milk lorry.’

They sat in silence again.

‘You ought to meet Leclerc,’ said Avery; ‘I think you ought to talk to him. He keeps suggesting it. Dinner . . . he might convince you.’

‘What of?’

She found a piece of cotton hanging from the seam of her bed-jacket. Sighing, she took a pair of nail scissors from the drawer in the bedside table and cut it off.

‘You should have drawn it through at the back,’ Avery said. ‘You ruin your clothes that way.’

‘What are they like?’ she asked. ‘The agents? Why do they do it?’

‘For loyalty, partly. Partly money, I suppose.’

‘You mean you bribe them?’

‘Oh shut up!’

‘Are they English?’

‘One of them is. Don’t ask me any more, Sarah; I can’t tell you.’ He advanced his head towards her. ‘Don’t ask me, Sweet.’ He took her hand; she let him.

‘And they’re all men?’

‘Yes.’

Suddenly she said, it was a complete break, no tears, no precision, but quickly, with compassion, as if the speeches were over and this were the choice: ‘John, I want to know, I’ve got to know, now, before you go. It’s an awful, unEnglish question, but all the time you’ve been telling me something, ever since you took this job. You’ve been telling me people don’t matter, that I don’t, Anthony doesn’t; that the agents don’t. You’ve been telling me you’ve found a vocation. Well, who calls you, that’s what I mean: what sort of vocation? That’s the question you never answer: that’s why you hide from me. Are you a martyr, John? Should I admire you for what you’re doing? Are you making sacrifices?’

Flatly, avoiding her, Avery replied, ‘It’s nothing like that. I’m doing a job. I’m a technician; part of the machine. You want me to say double-think, don’t you? You want to demonstrate the paradox.’

‘No. You’ve said what I want you to say. You’ve got to draw a circle and not go outside it. That’s not double-think, it’s unthink. It’s very humble of you. Do you really believe you’re that small?’

‘You’ve made me small. Don’t sneer. You’re making me small now.’

‘John, I swear it, I don’t mean to. When you came back earlier in the evening you looked as though you’d fallen in love. The kind of love that gives you comfort. You looked free and at peace. I thought for a moment you’d found a woman. That’s why I asked, really it is, whether they were all men . . . I thought you were in love. Now you tell me you’re nothing, and you seem proud of that too.’

He waited, then smiling, the smile he gave Leiser, he said, ‘Sarah, I missed you terribly. When I was in Oxford I went to the house, the house in Chandos Road, remember? It was fun there, wasn’t it?’ He gave her hand a squeeze. ‘Real fun. I thought about it, our marriage and you. And Anthony. I love you, Sarah; I love you. For everything . . . the way you bring up our baby.’ A laugh. ‘You’re both so vulnerable, sometimes I can hardly tell you apart.’

She remained silent, so he continued, ‘I thought perhaps if we lived in the country, bought a house . . . I’m established now: Leclerc would arrange a loan. Then Anthony could run about more. It’s only a matter of increasing our range. Going to the theatre, like we used to at Oxford.’

She said absently, ‘Did we? We can’t go to the theatre in the country, can we?’

‘The Department gives me something, don’t you understand? It’s a real job. It’s important, Sarah.’

She pushed him gently away. ‘My mother’s asked us to Reigate for Christmas.’

‘That’ll be fine. Look . . . about the office. They owe me something now, after all I’ve done. They accept me on equal terms. As a colleague. I’m one of them.’

‘Then you’re not responsible, are you? Just one of the team. So there’s no sacrifice.’ They were back to the beginning. Avery, not realising this, continued softly, ‘I can tell him, can’t I? I can tell him you’ll come to dinner?’

‘For pity’s sake, John,’ she snapped, ‘don’t try to run me like one of your wretched agents.’

* * *

Haldane, meanwhile, sat at his desk, going through Gladstone’s report.

There had twice been manoeuvres in the Kalkstadt area; in 1952 and 1960. On the second occasion the Russians had staged an infantry attack on Rostock with heavy armoured support but no air cover. Little was known of the 1952 exercise, except that a large detachment of troops had occupied the town of Wolken. They were believed to be wearing magenta shoulder-boards. The report was unreliable. On both occasions the area had been declared closed; the restriction had been enforced as far as the northern coast. There followed a long recitation of the principal industries. There was some evidence – it came from the Circus, who refused to release the source – that a new refinery was being constructed on a plateau to the east of Wolken, and that the machinery for it had been transported from Leipzig. It was conceivable (but unlikely) that it had come by rail and been sent by way of Kalkstadt. There was no evidence of civil or industrial unrest, nor of any incident which could account for a temporary closure of the town.

A note from Registry lay in his in-tray. They had put up the files he had asked for, but some were Subscription Only; he would have to read them in the library.

He went downstairs, opened the combination lock on the steel door of General Registry, groped vainly for the light switch. Finally he made his way in the dark between the shelves to the small, windowless room at the back of the building where documents of special interest or secrecy were kept. It was pitch dark. He struck a match, put on the light. On the table were two sets of files: Mayfly, heavily restricted, now in its third volume, with a subscription list pasted on the cover, and Deception (Soviet and East Germany), an immaculately kept collection of papers and photographs in hard folders.

After glancing briefly at the Mayfly files he turned his attention to the folders, thumbing his way through the depressing miscellany of rogues, double agents and lunatics who in every conceivable corner of the earth, under every conceivable pretext, had attempted, sometimes successfully, to delude the Western intelligence agencies. There was the boring similarity of technique; the grain of truth carefully reconstructed, culled from newspaper reports and bazaar gossip; the follow-up, less carefully done, betraying the deceiver’s contempt for the deceived; and finally the flight of fancy, the stroke of artistic impertinence which wantonly terminated a relationship already under sentence.

On one report he found a flag with Gladstone’s initials; written above them in his cautious, rounded hand were the words: ‘Could be of interest to you.’

It was a refugee report of Soviet tank trials near Gustweiler. It was marked: ‘Should not issue. Fabrication.’ There followed a long justification citing passages in the report which had been abstracted almost verbatim from a 1949 Soviet military manual. The originator appeared to have enlarged every dimension by a third, and added some ingenious flavouring of his own. Attached were six photographs, very blurred, purporting to have been taken from a train with a telephoto lens. On the back of the photographs was written in McCulloch’s careful hand: ‘Claims to have used Exa-two camera, East German manufacture. Cheap housing. Exakta-range lens. Low shutter speed. Negatives very blurred owing to camera shake from train. Fishy.’ It was all very inconclusive. The same make of camera, that was all. He locked up the Registry and went home. Not his duty, Leclerc had said, to prove that Christ was born on Christmas Day; any more, Haldane reflected, than it was his business to prove that Taylor had been murdered.

* * *

Woodford’s wife added a little soda to her Scotch, a splash: it was habit rather than taste.

‘Sleep in the office, my foot,’ she said. ‘Do you get operational subsistence?’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘Well, it isn’t a conference then, is it? A conference isn’t operational. Not unless,’ she added with a giggle, ‘you’re having it in the Kremlin.’

‘All right, it’s not a conference. It’s an operation. That’s why I’m getting subsistence.’

She looked at him cruelly. She was a thin, childless woman, her eyes half shut from the smoke of the cigarette in her mouth.

‘There’s nothing going on at all. You’re making it up.’ She began laughing, a hard false laugh. ‘You poor sod,’ she said and laughed again, derisively. ‘How’s little Clarkie? You’re all scared of him, aren’t you? Why don’t you ever say anything against him? Jimmy Gorton used to: he saw through him.’

‘Don’t mention Jimmy Gorton to me!’

‘Jimmy’s lovely.’

‘Babs, I warn you!’

‘Poor Clarkie. Do you remember,’ his wife asked reflectively, ‘that nice little dinner he gave us in his club? The time he remembered it was our turn for welfare? Steak and kidney and frozen peas.’ She sipped her whisky. ‘And warm gin.’ Something struck her. ‘I wonder if he’s ever had a woman,’ she said. ‘Christ, I wonder why I never thought of that before?’

Woodford returned to safer ground.

‘All right, so nothing’s going on.’ He got up, a silly grin on his face, collected some matches from the desk.

‘You’re not smoking that damn pipe in here,’ she said automatically.

‘So nothing’s going on,’ he repeated smugly, and lit his pipe, sucking noisily.

‘God, I hate you.’

Woodford shook his head, still grinning. ‘Never mind,’ he urged, ‘just never mind. You said it, my dear, I didn’t. I’m not sleeping in the office so everything’s fine, isn’t it? So I didn’t go to Oxford either; I didn’t even go to the Ministry; I haven’t got a car to bring me home at night.’

She leant forward, her voice suddenly urgent, dangerous. ‘What’s happening?’ she hissed. ‘I’ve got a right to know, haven’t I? I’m your wife, aren’t I? You tell those little tarts in the office, don’t you? Well, tell me!’

‘We’re putting a man over the border,’ Woodford said. It was his moment of victory. ‘I’m in charge of the London end. There’s a crisis. There could even be a war. It’s a damn ticklish thing.’ The match had gone out, but he was still swinging it up and down with long movements of his arm, watching her with triumph in his eyes.

‘You bloody liar,’ she said. ‘Don’t give me that.’

* * *

Back in Oxford, the pub at the corner was three-quarters empty. They had the saloon bar to themselves. Leiser sipped a White Lady while the wireless operator drank best bitter at the Department’s expense.

‘Just take it gently, that’s all you got to do, Fred,’ he urged kindly. ‘You came up lovely on the last run through. We’ll hear you, don’t worry about that – you’re only eighty miles from the border. It’s a piece of cake as long as you remember your procedure. Take it gently on the tuning or we’re all done for.’

‘I’ll remember. Not to worry.’

‘Don’t get all bothered about the Jerries picking it up; you’re not sending love letters, just a handful of groups. Then a new call sign and a different frequency. They’ll never home in on that, not for the time you’re there.’

‘Perhaps they can, these days,’ Leiser said. ‘Maybe they got better since the war.’

‘There’ll be all sorts of other traffic getting in their hair; shipping, military, air control, Christ knows what. They’re not supermen, Fred; they’re like us. A dozy lot. Don’t worry.’

‘I’m not worried. They didn’t get me in the war; not for long.’

‘Now listen, Fred, how about this? One more drink and we’ll slip home and just have a nice run through with Mrs Hartbeck. No lights, mind. In the dark: she’s shy, see? Get it a hundred per cent before we turn in. Then tomorrow we’ll take it easy. After all, it’s Sunday tomorrow, isn’t it?’ he added solicitously.

‘I want to sleep. Can’t I sleep a little, Jack?’

‘Tomorrow, Fred. Then you can have a nice rest.’ He nudged Leiser’s elbow. ‘You’re married now, Fred. Can’t always go to sleep, you know. You’ve taken the vow, that’s what we used to say.’

‘All right, forget about it, will you?’ Leiser sounded on edge. ‘Just leave it alone, see?’

‘Sorry, Fred.’

‘When do we go to London?’

‘Monday, Fred.’

‘Will John be there?’

‘We meet him at the airport. And the Captain. They wanted us to have a bit more practice . . . on the routine and that.’

Leiser nodded, drumming his second and third fingers lightly on the table as if he were tapping the key.

‘Here – why don’t you tell us about one of those girls you had on your weekend in London?’ Johnson suggested.

Leiser shook his head.

‘Come on, then, let’s have the other half and you give us a nice game of billiards.’

Leiser smiled shyly, his irritation forgotten. ‘I got a lot more money than you, Jack. White Lady’s an expensive drink. Not to worry.’

He chalked his cue and put in the sixpence. ‘I’ll play you double or quits; for last night.’

‘Look, Fred,’ Johnson pleaded gently. ‘Don’t always go for the big money, see, trying to put the red into the hundred slot. Just take the twenties and fifties – they mount up, you know. Then you’ll be home and dry.’

Leiser was suddenly angry. He put his cue back in the cradle and took down his camel-hair coat from its peg.

‘What’s the matter, Fred, what the hell’s the matter now?’

‘For Christ’s sake let me loose! Stop behaving like a bloody gaoler. I’m going on a job, like we all did in the war. I’m not sitting in the hanging cell.’

‘Don’t you be daft,’ Johnson said gently, taking his coat and putting it back on the peg. ‘Anyway we don’t say hanging, we say condemned.’

* * *

Carol put the coffee on the desk in front of Leclerc. He looked up brightly and said thank you, tired but well drilled, like a child at the end of a party.

‘Adrian Haldane’s gone home,’ Carol observed. Leclerc went back to the map.

‘I looked in his room. He might have said goodnight.’

‘He never does,’ Leclerc said proudly.

‘Is there anything I can do?’

‘I never remember how you turn yards into metres.’

‘Neither do I.’

‘The Circus say this gully is two hundred metres long. That’s about two hundred and fifty yards, isn’t it?’

‘I think so. I’ll get the book.’

She went to her room and took a ready-reckoner from the bookcase.

‘One metre is thirty-nine point three seven inches,’ she read. ‘A hundred metres is a hundred and nine yards and thirteen inches.’

Leclerc wrote it down.

‘I think we should make a confirmatory telegram to Gorton. Have your coffee first, then come in with your pad.’

‘I don’t want any coffee.’

‘Routine Priority will do, we don’t want to haul old Jimmy out of bed.’ He ran his small hand briskly over his hair. ‘One. Advance party, Haldane, Avery, Johnson and Mayfly arrive BEA flight so and so, such and such a time December nine.’ He glanced up. ‘Get the details from Administration. Two. All will travel under their own names and proceed by train to Lübeck. For security reasons you will not repeat not meet party at airport but you may discreetly contact Avery by telephone at Lübeck base. We can’t put him on to old Adrian,’ he observed with a short laugh. ‘The two of them don’t hit it off at all . . .’ He raised his voice: ‘Three. Party number two consisting of Director only arriving morning flight December ten. You will meet him at airport for short conference before he proceeds to Lübeck. Four. Your role is discreetly to provide advice and assistance at all stages in order to bring operation Mayfly to successful conclusion.’

She stood up.

‘Does John Avery have to go? His poor wife hasn’t seen him for weeks.’

‘Fortunes of war,’ Leclerc replied without looking at her. ‘How long does a man take to crawl two hundred and twenty yards?’ he muttered. ‘Oh, Carol – put another sentence on to that telegram: Five. Good Hunting. Old Jimmy likes a bit of encouragement, stuck out there all on his own.’

He picked a file from the in-tray and looked critically at the cover, aware perhaps of Carol’s eyes upon him.

‘Ah.’ A controlled smile. ‘This must be the Hungarian report. Did you ever meet Arthur Fielden in Vienna?’

‘No.’

‘A nice fellow. Rather your type. One of our best chaps . . . knows his way around. Bruce tells me he’s done a very good report on unit changes in Budapest. I must get Adrian to look at it. Such a lot going on just now.’ He opened the file and began reading.

* * *

Control said: ‘Did you speak to Hyde?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, what did he say? What have they got down there?’

Smiley handed him a whisky and soda. They were sitting in Smiley’s house in Bywater Street. Control was in the chair he preferred, nearest the fire.

‘He said they’d got first-night nerves.’

‘Hyde said that? Hyde used an expression like that? How extraordinary.’

‘They’ve taken over a house in North Oxford. There was just this one agent, a Pole of about forty, and they wanted him documented as a mechanic from Magdeburg, a name like Freiser. They wanted travel papers to Rostock.’

‘Who else was there?’

‘Haldane and that new man, Avery. The one who came to me about the Finnish courier. And a wireless operator, Jack Johnson. We had him in the war. No one else at all. So much for their big team of agents.’

‘What are they up to? And whoever gave them all that money just for training? We lent them some equipment, didn’t we?’

‘Yes, a B2.’

‘What on earth’s that?’

‘A wartime set,’ Smiley replied with irritation. ‘You said it was all they could have. That and the crystals. Why on earth did you bother with the crystals?’

‘Just charity. A B2 was it? Oh well,’ Control observed with apparent relief. ‘They wouldn’t get far with that, would they?’

‘Are you going home tonight?’ Smiley asked impatiently.

‘I thought you might give me a bed here,’ Control suggested. ‘Such a fag always traipsing home. It’s the people . . . They seem to get worse every time.’

* * *

Leiser sat at the table, the taste of the White Ladies still in his mouth. He stared at the luminous dial of his watch, the suitcase open in front of him. It was eleven eighteen; the second hand struggled jerkily towards twelve. He began tapping, JAJ, JAJ, – you can remember that, Fred, my name’s Jack Johnson, see? – he switched over to receive, and there was Johnson’s reply, steady as a rock.

Take your time, Johnson had said, don’t rush your fences. We’ll be listening all night, there are plenty more schedules. By the beam of a small torch he counted the encoded groups. There were thirty-eight. Putting out the torch he tapped a three and an eight; numerals were easy but long. His mind was very clear. He could hear Jack’s gentle repetitions all the time: You’re too quick on your shorts, Fred, a dot is one third of a dash, see? That’s longer than you think. Don’t rush the gaps, Fred; five dots between each word, three dots between each letter. Forearm horizontal, in a straight line with the key lever; elbow just clear of the body. It’s like knife-fighting, he thought with a little smile, and began keying. Fingers loose, Fred, relax, wrist clear of the table. He tapped out the first two groups, slurring a little on the gaps, but not as much as he usually did. Now came the third group: put in the safety signal. He tapped an S, cancelled it and tapped the next ten groups, glancing now and then at the dial of his watch. After two and a half minutes he went off the air, groped for the small capsule which contained the crystal, discovered with the tips of his fingers the twin sockets of the housing, inserted it, then stage by stage followed the tuning procedure, moving the dials, flashing his torch on the crescent window to watch the black tongue tremble across it.

He tapped out the second call sign, PRE, PRE, switched quickly to receive and there was Johnson again, QRK4, your signal readable. For the second time he began transmitting, his hand moving slowly but methodically as his eye followed the meaningless letters, until with a nod of satisfaction he heard Johnson’s reply: Signal received. QRU: I have nothing for you.

When they had finished Leiser insisted on a short walk. It was bitterly cold. They followed Walton Street as far as the main gates of Worcester, thence by way of Banbury Road once more to the respectable sanctuary of their dark North Oxford house.

16

Take-off

It was the same wind. The wind that had tugged at Taylor’s frozen body and drove the rain against the blackened walls of Blackfriars Road, the wind that flailed the grass of Port Meadow now ran headlong against the shutters of the farmhouse.

The farmhouse smelt of cats. There were no carpets. The floors were of stone: nothing would dry them. Johnson lit the tiled oven in the hall as soon as they arrived but the damp still lay on the flagstones, collecting in the dips like a tired army. They never saw a cat all the time they were there, but they smelt them in every room. Johnson left corned beef on the doorstep: it was gone in ten minutes.

It was built on one floor with a high granary roof, of brick, and lay against a small coppice beneath a vast Flemish sky, a long, rectangular building with cattle sheds on the sheltered side. It was two miles north of Lübeck. Leclerc had said they were not to enter the town.

A ladder led to the loft, and there Johnson installed his wireless, stretching the aerial between the beams, thence through a skylight to an elm tree beside the road. He wore plimsolls in the house, brown ones of military issue, and a blazer with a squadron crest. Gorton had had food delivered from the Naafi in Celle. It covered the kitchen floor in old cardboard boxes, with an invoice marked ‘Mr Gorton’s party’. There were two bottles of gin and three of whisky. They had two bedrooms; Gorton had sent Army beds, two to each room, and reading lights with standard green shades. Haldane was very angry about the beds. ‘He must have told every damned department in the area,’ he complained. ‘Cheap whisky, Naafi food, army beds. I suppose we shall find he requisitioned the house next. God, what a way to mount an operation.’

It was late afternoon when they arrived. Johnson, having put up his set, busied himself in the kitchen. He was a domesticated man; he cooked and washed up without complaint, treading lightly over the flagstones in his neat plimsolls. He assembled a hash of bully beef and egg, and gave them cocoa with a great deal of sugar. They ate in the hall in front of the stove. Johnson did most of the talking; Leiser, very quiet, scarcely touched his food.

‘What’s the matter, Fred? Not hungry, then?’

‘Sorry, Jack.’

‘Too many sweets on the plane, that’s your trouble.’ Johnson winked at Avery. ‘I saw you giving that air hostess a look. You shouldn’t do it, Fred, you know, you’ll break her heart.’ He frowned round the table in mock disapproval. ‘He really looked her over, you know. A proper tip-to-toe job.’

Avery grinned dutifully. Haldane ignored him.

Leiser was concerned about the moon, so after supper they stood at the back door in a small shivering group, staring at the sky. It was strangely light; the clouds drifted like black smoke, so low that they seemed to mingle with the swaying branches of the coppice and half obscure the grey fields beyond.

‘It will be darker at the border, Fred,’ said Avery. ‘It’s higher ground; more hills.’

Haldane said they should have an early night; they drank another whisky and at quarter past ten they went to bed, Johnson and Leiser to one room, Avery and Haldane to the other. No one dictated the arrangement. Each knew, apparently, where he belonged.

* * *

It was after midnight when Johnson came into their room. Avery was woken by the squeak of his rubber shoes.

‘John, are you awake?’

Haldane sat up.

‘It’s about Fred. He’s sitting alone in the hall. I told him to try and sleep, sir; gave him a couple of tablets, the kind my mother takes; he wouldn’t even get into bed at first, now he’s gone along to the hall.’

Haldane said, ‘Leave him alone. He’s all right. None of us can sleep with this damned wind.’

Johnson went back to his room. An hour must have passed; there was still no sound from the hall. Haldane said, ‘You’d better go and see what he’s up to.’

Avery put on his overcoat and went along the corridor, past tapestries of biblical quotations and an old print of Lübeck harbour. Leiser was sitting on a chair beside the tiled oven.

‘Hullo, Fred.’

He looked old and tired.

‘It’s near here, isn’t it, where I cross?’

‘About five kilometres. The Director will brief us in the morning. They say it’s quite an easy run. He’ll give you all your papers and that kind of thing. In the afternoon we’ll show you the place. They’ve done a lot of work on it in London.’

‘In London,’ Leiser repeated, and suddenly: ‘I did a job in Holland in the war. The Dutch were good people. We sent a lot of agents to Holland. Women. They were all picked up. You were too young.’

‘I read about it.’

‘The Germans caught a radio operator. Our people didn’t know. They just went on sending more agents. They said there was nothing else to do.’ He was talking faster. ‘I was only a kid then; just a quick job they wanted, in and out. They were short of operators. They said it didn’t matter me not speaking Dutch, the reception party would meet me at the drop. All I had to do was work the set. There’d be a safe house ready.’ He was far away. ‘We fly in and nothing moves, not a shot or a searchlight, and I’m jumping. And when I land, there they are: two men and a woman. We say the words and they take me to the road to get the bikes. There’s no time to bury the parachute – we aren’t bothering by then. We find the house and they give me food. After supper we go upstairs where the set is – no schedules, London listened all the time in those days. They give the message: I’m sending a call sign – “Come in TYR, come in TYR” – then the message in front of me, twenty-one groups, four-letter.’

He stopped.

‘Well?’

‘They were following the message, you see; they wanted to know where the safety signal came. It was in the ninth letter; a back shift of one. They let me finish the message and then they were on me, one hitting me, men all over the house.’

‘But who, Fred? Who’s they?’

‘You can’t talk about it like that: you never know. It’s never that easy.’

‘But for God’s sake, whose fault was it? Who did it? Fred!’

‘Anyone’s. You can never tell. You’ll learn that.’ He seemed to have given up.

‘You’re alone this time. Nobody has been told. Nobody’s expecting you.’

‘No. That’s right.’ His hands were clasped on his lap. He made a hunched figure, small and cold. ‘In the war it was easier because, however bad it got, you thought one day we’d win. Even if you were picked up, you thought, “They’ll come and get me, they’ll drop some men or make a raid.” You knew they never would, see, but you could think it. You just wanted to be left alone to think it. But nobody wins this one, do they?’

‘It’s not the same. But more important.’

‘What do you do if I’m caught?’

‘We’ll get you back. Not to worry, eh, Fred?’

‘Yes, but how?’

‘We’re a big outfit, Fred. A lot goes on you don’t know about. Contacts here and there. You can’t see the whole picture.’

‘Can you?’

‘Not all of it, Fred. Only the Director sees it all. Not even the Captain.’

‘What’s he like, the Director?’

‘He’s been in it a long time. You’ll see him tomorrow. He’s a very remarkable man.’

‘Does the Captain fancy him?’

‘Of course.’

‘He never talks about him,’ Leiser said.

‘None of us talk about him.’

‘There was this girl I had. She worked in the bank. I told her I was going away. If anything goes wrong I don’t want anything said, see. She’s just a kid.’

‘What was her name?’

A moment of mistrust. ‘Never mind. But if she turns up just keep it all right with her.’

‘What do you mean, Fred?’

‘Never mind.’

Leiser didn’t talk after that. When the morning came Avery returned to his room.

‘What’s it all about?’ Haldane asked.

‘He was in some mess in the war, in Holland. He was betrayed.’

‘But he’s giving us a second chance. How nice. Just what they always said.’ And then: ‘Leclerc arrives this morning.’

His taxi came at eleven. Leclerc was getting out almost before it had pulled up. He was wearing a duffel coat, heavy brown shoes for rough country and a soft cap. He looked very well.

‘Where’s Mayfly?’

‘With Johnson,’ Haldane said.

‘Got a bed for me?’

‘You can have Mayfly’s when he’s gone.’

At eleven thirty Leclerc held a briefing; in the afternoon they were to make a tour of the border.

The briefing took place in the hall. Leiser came in last. He stood in the doorway, looking at Leclerc, who smiled at him winningly, as if he liked what he saw. They were about the same height.

Avery said, ‘Director, this is Mayfly.’

His eyes still on Leiser, Leclerc replied, ‘I think I’m allowed to call him Fred. Hullo.’ He advanced and shook him by the hand, both formal, two weather men coming out of a box.

‘Hullo,’ said Leiser.

‘I hope they haven’t been working you too hard?’

‘I’m all right, sir.’

‘We’re all very impressed,’ Leclerc said. ‘You’ve done a grand job.’ He might have been talking to his constituents.

‘I haven’t started yet.’

‘I always feel the training is three-quarters of the battle. Don’t you, Adrian?’

‘Yes.’

They sat down. Leclerc stood a little away from them. He had hung a map on the wall. By some indefinable means – it may have been his maps, it may have been the precision of his language, or it may have been his strict deportment, which so elusively combined purpose with restraint – Leclerc evoked in that hour that same nostalgic, campaigning atmosphere which had informed the briefing in Blackfriars Road a month before. He had the illusionist’s gift, whether he spoke of rockets or wireless transmission, of cover or the point at which the border was to be crossed, of implying great familiarity with his subject.

‘Your target is Kalkstadt’ – a little grin – ‘hitherto famous only for a remarkably fine fourteenth-century church.’ They laughed, Leiser too. It was so good, Leclerc knowing about old churches.

He had brought a diagram of the crossing point, done in different inks, with the border drawn in red. It was all very simple. On the western side, he said, there was a low, wooded hill overgrown with gorse and bracken. This ran parallel to the border until the southern end curved eastwards in a narrow arm stopping about two hundred and twenty yards short of the border, directly opposite an observation tower. The tower was set well back from the demarcation line: at its foot ran a fence of barbed wire. It had been observed that this wire was laid out in a single apron and only loosely fixed to its staves. East German guards had been seen to detach it in order to pass through and patrol the undefended strip of territory which lay between the demarcation line and the physical border. That afternoon Leclerc would indicate the precise staves. Mayfly, he said, should not be alarmed at having to pass so close to the tower; experience had shown that the attention of the guards was concentrated on the more distant parts of their area; the night was ideal; a high wind was forecast; there would be no moon. Leclerc had set the crossing time for 0235 hours; the guard changed at midnight, each watch lasted three hours. It was reasonable to suppose that the sentries would not be as alert after two and a half hours on duty as they would be at the start of their watches. The relief guard, which had to approach from a barrack some distance to the north, would not yet be under way.

Much attention had been given, Leclerc continued, to the possibility of mines. They would see from the map – the little forefinger traced the green dotted line from the end of the rise across the border – that there was an old footpath which did indeed follow the very route which Leiser would be taking. The frontier guards had been seen to avoid this path, striking a track of their own some ten yards to the south of it. The assumption was, Leclerc said, that the path was mined, while the area to the side of it had been left clear for the benefit of patrols. Leclerc proposed that Leiser should use the track made by the frontier guards.

Wherever possible over the two hundred-odd yards between the foot of the hill and the tower, Leiser should crawl, keeping his head below the level of the bracken. This eliminated the small danger that he would be sighted from the tower. He would be comforted to hear, Leclerc added with a smile, that there was no record of any patrol operating on the western side of the wire during the hours of darkness. The East German guards seemed to fear that one of their own number might slip away unseen.

Once across the border Leiser should keep clear of any path. The country was rough, partly wooded. The going would be hard but all the safer for that; he was to head south. The reason for this was simple. To the south, the border turned westward for some ten kilometres. Thus Leiser, by moving southwards, would put himself not two but fifteen kilometres from the border, and more quickly escape the zonal patrols which guarded the eastern approaches. Leclerc would advise him thus – he withdrew one hand casually from the pocket of his duffel coat and lit a cigarette, conscious all the time of their eyes upon him – march east for half an hour, then turn due south, making for the Marienhorst lake. At the eastern end of the lake was a disused boathouse. There he could lie up for an hour and give himself some food. By that time Leiser might care for a drink – relieved laughter – and he would find a little brandy in his rucksack.

Leclerc had a habit, when making a joke, of holding himself at attention and lifting his heels from the ground as if to launch his wit upon the higher air.

‘I couldn’t have something with gin, could I?’ Leiser asked. ‘White Lady’s my drink.’

There was a moment’s bewildered silence.

‘That wouldn’t do at all,’ Leclerc said shortly, Leiser’s master.

Having rested, he should walk to the village of Marienhorst and look around for transport to Schwerin. From then on, Leclerc added lightly, he was on his own.

‘You have all the papers necessary for a journey from Magdeburg to Rostock. When you reach Schwerin, you are on the legitimate route. I don’t want to say too much about cover because you have been through that with the Captain. Your name is Fred Hartbeck, you are an unmarried mechanic from Magdeburg with an offer of employment at the State Co-operative ship-building works at Rostock.’ He smiled, undeterred. ‘I am sure you have all been through every detail of this already. Your love life, your pay, medical history, war service and the rest. There is just one thing that I might add about cover. Never volunteer information. People don’t expect you to explain yourself. If you are cornered, play it by ear. Stick as closely to the truth as you can. Cover,’ he declared, stating a favourite maxim, ‘should never be fabricated but only an extension of the truth.’ Leiser laughed in a reserved way. It was as if he could have wished Leclerc a taller man.

Johnson brought coffee from the kitchen, and Leclerc said briskly, ‘Thank you, Jack,’ as if everything were quite as it should be.

Leclerc now addressed himself to the question of Leiser’s target; he gave a résumé of the indicators, implying somehow that they only confirmed suspicions which he himself had long harboured. He employed a tone which Avery had not heard in him before. He sought to imply, as much by omission and inference as by direct allusion, that theirs was a Department of enormous skill and knowledge, enjoying in its access to money, its intercourse with other services and in the unchallenged authority of its judgements an unearthly, oracular immunity, so that Leiser might well have wondered why, if all this were so, he need bother to risk his life at all.

‘The rockets are in the area now,’ Leclerc said. ‘The Captain has told you what signs to look for. We want to know what they look like, where they are and above all who mans them.’

‘I know.’

‘You must try the usual tricks. Pub gossip, tracing an old soldier friend, you know the kind of thing. When you find them, come back.’

Leiser nodded.

‘At Kalkstadt there’s a workers’ hostel.’ He unfolded a chart of the town. ‘Here. Next to the church. Stay there if you can. You may run into people who have actually been engaged . . .’

‘I know,’ Leiser repeated. Haldane stirred, glanced at him anxiously.

‘You might even hear something of a man who used to be employed at the station, Fritsche. He gave us some interesting details about the rockets, then disappeared. If you get the chance, that is. You could ask at the station, say you’re a friend of his . . .’

There was a very slight pause.

‘Just disappeared,’ Leclerc repeated, for them, not for himself. His mind was elsewhere. Avery watched him anxiously, waiting for him to go on. At last he said, rapidly, ‘I have deliberately avoided the question of communication,’ indicating by his tone that they were nearly done. ‘I imagine you have gone over that enough times already.’

‘No worries there,’ Johnson said. ‘All the schedules are at night. That leaves the frequency range pretty simple. He’ll have a clear hand during the day, sir. We’ve had some very nice dummy runs, haven’t we, Fred?’

‘Oh yes. Very nice.’

‘As regards getting back,’ Leclerc said, ‘we play the war rules. There are no submarines any more, Fred; not for this kind of thing. When you return, you should report at once to the nearest British Consulate or Embassy, give your proper name and ask to be repatriated. You should represent yourself as a distressed British subject. My instinct would be to advise you to come out the way you went in. If you’re in trouble, don’t necessarily move west straight away. Lie up for a bit. You’re taking plenty of money.’

Avery knew he would never forget that morning, how they had sat at the farmhouse table like sprawling boys at the Nissen-hut desks, their strained faces fixed upon Leclerc as in the stillness of a church he read the liturgy of their devotion, moving his little hand across the map like a priest with the taper. All of them in that room – but Avery perhaps best of all – knew the fatal disproportion between the dream and reality, between motive and action. Avery had talked to Taylor’s child, stammered out his half-formed lies to Peersen and the Consul: he had heard that dreadful footfall in the hotel, and returned from a nightmare journey to see his own experiences remade into the images of Leclerc’s world. Yet Avery, like Haldane and Leiser, listened to Leclerc with the piety of an agnostic, feeling perhaps that this was how, in some clean and magic place, it really ought to be.

‘Excuse me,’ said Leiser. He was looking at the plan of Kalkstadt. He was very much the small man just then. He might have been pointing to a fault in an engine. The station, hostel and church were marked in green; an inset at the bottom left-hand corner depicted the railway warehouses and dumping sheds. At each side, the point of the compass was given adjectivally: Western Prospect, Northern Prospect.

‘What’s a prospect, sir?’ Leiser inquired.

‘A view, an outlook.’

‘What’s it for? What’s it for on the map, please?’

Leclerc smiled patiently. ‘For purposes of orientation, Fred.’

Leiser got up and examined the chart closely. ‘And this is the church?’

‘That’s right, Fred.’

‘Why does it face north? Churches go from east to west. You’ve got the entrance on the eastern side where the altar should be.’

Haldane leant forward, the index finger of his right hand resting on his lip.

‘It’s only a sketch map,’ Leclerc said. Leiser returned to his place and sat to attention, straighter than ever. ‘I see. Sorry.’

When the meeting was over Leclerc took Avery on one side. ‘Just one point, John, he’s not to take a gun. It’s quite out of the question. The Minister was adamant. Perhaps you’ll mention it to him.’

‘No gun?’

‘I think we can allow the knife. That could be a general-purpose thing; I mean if anything went wrong we could say it was general purpose.’

* * *

After lunch they made a tour of the border – Gorton had provided a car. Leclerc brought with him a handful of notes he had made from the Circus frontier report, and these he kept on his knee, together with a folded map.

The extreme northern part of the frontier which divides the two halves of Germany is largely a thing of depressing inconsequence. Those who look eagerly for dragon’s teeth and substantial fortifications will be disappointed. It crosses land of considerable variety; gullies and small hills overgrown with bracken and patches of untended forest. Often the Eastern defences are set so far behind the demarcation line as to be hidden from Western eyes – only a forward pillbox, crumbling roads, a vacated farmhouse or an occasional observation tower excite the imagination.

By way of emphasis the Western side is adorned with the grotesque statuary of political impotence: a plywood model of the Brandenburg Gate, the screws rusting in their sockets, rises absurdly from an untended field; notice boards, broken by wind and rain, display fifteen-year-old slogans across an empty valley. Only at night, when the beam of a searchlight springs from the darkness and draws its wavering finger across the cold earth, does the heart chill for the captive crouching like a hare in the plough, waiting to break cover and run in terror till he fall.

They followed an unmade road along the top of a hill, and wherever it ran close to the frontier they stopped the car and got out. Leiser was shrouded in a mackintosh and hat. The day was very cold. Leclerc wore his duffel coat and carried a shooting stick – Heaven knows where he had found it. The first time they stopped, and the second, and again at the next, Leclerc said quietly, ‘Not this one.’ As they got into the car for the fourth time he declared, ‘The next stop is ours.’ It was the kind of brave joke favoured in battle.

Avery would not have recognised the place from Leclerc’s sketch map. The hill was there, certainly, turning inwards towards the frontier, then descending sharply to the plain below. But the land beyond it was hilly and partly wooded, its horizon fringed with trees against which, with the aid of glasses, they could discern the brown shape of a wooden tower. ‘It’s the three staves to the left,’ Leclerc said. As they scanned the ground, Avery could make out here and there the worn mark of the old path.

‘It’s mined. The path is mined the whole way. Their territory begins at the foot of the hill.’ Leclerc turned to Leiser. ‘You start from here.’ He pointed with his shooting stick. ‘You proceed to the brow of the hill and lie up till take-off time. We’ll have you here early so that your eyes grow used to the light. I think we should go now. We mustn’t attract attention, you know.’

As they drove back to the farmhouse the rain came bursting against the windscreen, thundering on the roof of the car. Avery, sitting next to Leiser, was sunk in his own thoughts. He realised with what he took to be utter detachment that, whilst his own mission had unfolded as comedy, Leiser was to play the same part as tragedy; that he was witnessing an insane relay race in which each contestant ran faster and longer than the last, arriving nowhere but at his own destruction.

‘Incidentally,’ he said suddenly, addressing himself to Leiser, ‘hadn’t you better do something about your hair? I don’t imagine they have much in the way of lotions over there. A thing like that could be insecure.’

‘He needn’t cut it,’ Haldane observed. ‘The Germans go in for long hair. Just wash it, that’s all that’s needed. Get the oil out. A nice point, John, I congratulate you.’

17

The rain had stopped. The night came slowly, struggling with the wind. They sat at the table in the farmhouse, waiting; Leiser was in his bedroom. Johnson made tea and attended to his equipment. No one talked. The pretending was over. Not even Leclerc, master of the public-school catchword, bothered any more. He seemed to resent being made to wait, that was all, at the tardy wedding of an unloved friend. They had relapsed into a state of somnolent fear, like men in a submarine, while the lamp over their heads rocked gently. Now and then Johnson would be sent to the door to look for the moon, and each time he announced that there was none.

‘The met reports were pretty good,’ Leclerc observed, and drifted away to the attic to watch Johnson check his equipment.

Avery, alone with Haldane, said quickly, ‘He says the Ministry’s ruled against the gun. He’s not to take it.’

‘And what bloody fool told him to consult the Ministry in the first place?’ Haldane demanded, beside himself with anger. Then: ‘You’ll have to tell him. It depends on you.’

‘Tell Leclerc?’

‘No, you idiot; Leiser.’

They had some food and afterwards Avery and Haldane took Leiser to his bedroom.

‘We must dress you up,’ they said.

They made him strip, taking from him piece by piece his warm, expensive clothes: jacket and trousers of matching grey, cream silk shirt, black shoes without toecaps, socks of dark blue nylon. As he loosened the knot of his tartan tie his fingers discovered the gold pin with the horse’s head. He unclipped it carefully and held it out to Haldane.

‘What about this?’

Haldane had provided envelopes for valuables. Into one of these he slipped the tie-pin, sealed it, wrote on the back, tossed it on the bed.

‘You washed your hair?’

‘Yes.’

‘We had difficulty in obtaining East German soap. I’m afraid you’ll have to try and get some when you’re over there. I understand it’s in short supply.’

‘All right.’

He sat on the bed naked except for his watch, crouched forward, his broad arms folded across his hairless thighs, his white skin mottled from the cold. Haldane opened a trunk and extracted a bundle of clothes and half a dozen pairs of shoes.

As Leiser put on each unfamiliar thing, the cheap, baggy trousers of coarse serge, broad at the foot and gathered at the waist, the grey, threadbare jacket with arched pleats, the shoes, brown with a bright unhealthy finish, he seemed to shrink before their eyes, returning to some former estate which they had only guessed at. His brown hair, free from oil, was streaked with grey and fell undisciplined upon his head. He glanced shyly at them, as if he had revealed a secret; a peasant in the company of his masters.

‘How do I look?’

‘Fine,’ Avery said. ‘You look marvellous, Fred.’

‘What about a tie?’

‘A tie would spoil it.’

He tried the shoes one after another, pulling them with difficulty over the coarse woollen socks.

‘They’re Polish,’ Haldane said, giving him a second pair. ‘The Poles export them to East Germany. You’d better take these as well – you don’t know how much walking you’ll have to do.’

Haldane fetched from his own bedroom a heavy cashbox and unlocked it.

First he took a wallet, a shabby brown one with a centre compartment of Cellophane which held Leiser’s identity card, fingered and stamped it; it lay open behind its flat frame, so that the photograph of Leiser looked outwards, a little prison picture. Beside it was an authority to travel and a written offer of employment from the State Co-operative for ship-building in Rostock. Haldane emptied one pocket of the wallet and then replaced the contents paper for paper, describing each in turn.

‘Food registration card – driving licence . . . Party card. How long have you been a Party member?’

‘Since ’forty-nine.’

He put in a photograph of a woman and three or four grimy letters, some still in their envelopes.

‘Love letters,’ he explained shortly.

Next came a Union card and a cutting from a Magdeburg newspaper about production figures at a local engineering works; a photograph of the Brandenburg Gate before the war, a tattered testimonial from a former employer.

‘That’s the wallet, then,’ Haldane said. ‘Except for the money. The rest of your equipment is in the rucksack. Provisions and that kind of thing.’

He handed Leiser a bundle of banknotes from the box. Leiser stood in the compliant attitude of a man being searched, his arms raised a little from his sides and his feet slightly apart. He would accept whatever Haldane gave him, put it carefully away, then resume the same position. He signed a receipt for the money. Haldane glanced at the signature and put the paper in a black briefcase which he had put separately on a side table.

Next came the odds and ends which Hartbeck would plausibly have about him: a bunch of keys on a chain – the key to the suitcase was among them – a comb, a khaki handkerchief stained with oil and a couple of ounces of substitute coffee in a twist of newspaper; a screwdriver, a length of fine wire and fragments of metal ends newly turned – the meaningless rubble of a working man’s pockets.

‘I’m afraid you can’t take that watch,’ Haldane said.

Leiser unbuckled the gold armband and dropped the watch into Haldane’s open palm. They gave him a steel one of Eastern manufacture and set it with great precision by Avery’s bedside clock.

Haldane stood back. ‘That will do. Now remain there and go through your pockets. Make sure things are where you would naturally keep them. Don’t touch anything else in the room, do you understand?’

‘I know the form,’ said Leiser, glancing at his gold watch on the table. He accepted the knife and hooked the black scabbard into the waistband of his trousers.

‘What about my gun?’

Haldane guided the steel clip of the briefcase into its housing and it snapped like the latch of a door.

‘You don’t take one,’ Avery said.

‘No gun?’

‘It’s not on, Fred. They reckon it’s too dangerous.’

‘Who for?’

‘It could lead to a dangerous situation. Politically, I mean. Sending an armed man into East Germany. They’re afraid of an incident.’

‘Afraid.’

For a long time he stared at Avery, his eyes searching the young, unfurrowed face for something that was not there. He turned to Haldane.

‘Is that true?’

Haldane nodded.

Suddenly he thrust out his empty hands in front of him, cupped in a terrible gesture of poverty, the fingers crooked and pressed together as if to catch the last water, his shoulders trembling in the cheap jacket, his face drawn, half in supplication, half in panic.

‘The gun, John! You can’t send a man without a gun! For mercy’s sake, let me have the gun!’

‘Sorry, Fred.’

His hands still extended, he swung round to Haldane. ‘You don’t know what you’re doing!’

Leclerc had heard the noise and came to the doorway. Haldane’s face was arid as rock; Leiser could have beaten his empty fists upon it for all the charity it held. His voice fell to a whisper. ‘What are you doing? God Christ, what are you trying to do?’ To both of them he cried in revelation, ‘You hate me, don’t you! What have I done to you? John, what have I done? We were pals, weren’t we?’

Leclerc’s voice, when at last he spoke, sounded very pure, as if he were deliberately emphasising the gulf between them.

‘What’s the trouble?’

‘He’s worried about the gun,’ Haldane explained.

‘I’m afraid there’s nothing we can do. It’s out of our hands. You know how we feel about it, Fred. Surely you know that. It’s an order, that’s all. Have you forgotten how it used to be?’ He added stiffly, a man of duty and decision, ‘I can’t question my orders: what do you want me to say?’

Leiser shook his head. His hands fell to his sides. The discipline had gone out of his body.

‘Never mind.’ He was looking at Avery.

‘A knife’s better in some ways, Fred,’ Leclerc added consolingly, ‘quieter.’

‘Yes.’

Haldane picked up Leiser’s spare clothes. ‘I must put these into the rucksack,’ he said, and with a sideways glance at Avery, walked quickly from the room, taking Leclerc with him. Leiser and Avery looked at one another in silence. Avery was embarrassed to see him so ugly. At last Leiser spoke.

‘It was us three. The Captain, you and me. It was all right, then. Don’t worry about the others, John. They don’t matter.’

‘That’s right, Fred.’

Leiser smiled. ‘It was the best ever, that week, John. It’s funny, isn’t it: we spend all our time chasing girls, and it’s the men that matter; just the men.’

‘You’re one of us, Fred. You always were; all the time your card was there, you were one of us. We don’t forget.’

‘What does it look like?’

‘It’s two pinned together. One for then, one for now. It’s in the index . . . live agents, we call it. Yours is the first name. You’re the best man we’ve got.’ He could imagine it now; the index was something they had built together. He could believe in it, like love.

‘You said it was alphabetical order,’ Leiser said sharply. ‘You said it was a special index for the best.’

‘Big cases go to the front.’

‘And men all over the world?’

‘Everywhere.’

Leiser frowned as if it were a private matter, a decision to be privately taken. He stared slowly round the bare room, then at the cuffs on his coarse jacket, then at Avery, interminably at Avery, until, taking him by the wrist, but lightly, more to touch than to lead, he said under his breath, ‘Give us something. Give me something to take. From you. Anything.’

Avery felt in his pockets, pulling out a handkerchief, some loose change and a twist of thin cardboard, which he opened. It was the photograph of Taylor’s little girl.

‘Is that your kid?’ Leiser looked over the other’s shoulder at the small, bespectacled face; his hand closed on Avery’s. ‘I’d like that.’ Avery nodded. Leiser put it in his wallet, then picked up his watch from the bed. It was gold with a black dial for the phases of the moon. ‘You have it,’ he said. ‘Keep it. I’ve been trying to remember,’ he continued, ‘at home. There was this school. A big courtyard like a barracks with nothing but windows and drainpipes. We used to bang a ball round after lunch. Then a gate, and a path to the church, and the river on the other side . . .’ He was laying out the town with his hands, placing bricks. ‘We went on Sunday, through the side door, the kids last, see?’ A smile of success. ‘That church was facing north,’ he declared, ‘not east at all.’ Suddenly he asked: ‘How long; how long have you been in, John?’

‘In the outfit?’

‘Yes.’

‘Four years.’

‘How old were you then?’

‘Twenty-eight. It’s the youngest they take you.’

‘You told me you were thirty-four.’

‘They’re waiting for us,’ Avery said.

In the hall they had the rucksack and the suitcase, green canvas with leather corners. He tried the rucksack on, adjusting the straps until it sat high on his back, like a German schoolboy’s satchel. He lifted the suitcase and felt the weight of the two things together.

‘Not too bad,’ he muttered.

‘It’s the minimum,’ Leclerc said. They had begun to whisper, though no one could hear. One by one they got into the car.

* * *

A hurried handshake and he walked away towards the hill. There were no fine words; not even from Leclerc. It was as if they had all taken leave of Leiser long ago. The last they saw of him was the rucksack gently bobbing as he disappeared into the darkness. There had always been a rhythm about the way he walked.

18

Leiser lay in the bracken on the spur of the hill, stared at the luminous dial of his watch. Ten minutes to wait. The key chain was swinging from his belt. He put the keys back in his pocket, and as he drew his hand away he felt the links slip between his thumb and finger like the beads of a rosary. For a moment he let them linger there; there was comfort in their touch; they were where his childhood was. St Christopher and all his angels, please preserve us from road accidents.

Ahead of him the ground descended sharply, then evened out. He had seen it; he knew. But now, as he looked down, he could make out nothing in the darkness below him. Suppose it were marshland down there? There had been rain; the water had drained into the valley. He saw himself struggling through mud to his waist, carrying the suitcase above his head, the bullets splashing round him.

He tried to discern the tower on the opposite hill, but if it was there it was lost against the blackness of the trees.

Seven minutes. Don’t worry about the noise, they said, the wind will carry it south. They’ll hear nothing in a wind like this. Run beside the path, on the south side, that means to the right, keep on the new trail through the bracken, it’s narrow but clear. If you meet anyone, use your knife, but for the love of Heaven don’t go near the path.

His rucksack was heavy. Too heavy. So was the case. He’d quarrelled about it with Jack. He didn’t care for Jack. ‘Better be on the safe side, Fred,’ Jack had explained. ‘These little sets are sensitive as virgins: all right for fifty miles, dead as mutton on sixty. Better to have the margin, Fred, then we know where we are. They’re experts, real experts where this one comes from.’

One minute to go. They’d set his watch by Avery’s clock.

He was frightened. Suddenly he couldn’t keep his mind from it any more. Perhaps he was too old, too tired, perhaps he’d done enough. Perhaps the training had worn him out. He felt his heart pounding in his chest. His body wouldn’t stand any more; he hadn’t the strength. He lay there, talking to Haldane: Christ, Captain, can’t you see I’m past it? The old body’s cracking up. That’s what he’d tell them; he would stay there when the minute hand came up, he would stay there too heavy to move. ‘It’s my heart, it’s packed in,’ he’d tell them. ‘I’ve had a heart attack, skipper, didn’t tell you about my dickie heart, did I? It just came over me as I lay here in the bracken.’

He stood up. Let the dog see the rabbit.

Run down the hill, they’d said; in this wind they won’t hear a thing; run down the hill, because that’s where they may spot you, they’ll be looking at that hillside hoping for a silhouette. Run fast through the moving bracken, keep low and you’ll be safe. When you reach level ground, lie up and get your breath back, then begin the crawl.

He was running like a madman. He tripped and the rucksack brought him down, he felt his knee against his chin and the pain as he bit his tongue, then he was up again and the suitcase swung him round. He half fell into the path and waited for the flash of a bursting mine. He was running down the slope, the ground gave way beneath his heels, the suitcase rattling like an old car. Why wouldn’t they let him take the gun? The pain rose in his chest like fire, spreading under the bone, burning the lungs: he counted each step, he could feel the thump of each footfall and the slowing drag of the case and rucksack. Avery had lied. Lied all the way. Better watch that cough, Captain; better see a doctor, it’s like barbed wire in your guts. The ground levelled out; he fell again and lay still, panting like an animal, feeling nothing but fear and the sweat that drenched his woollen shirt.

He pressed his face to the ground. Arching his body, he slid his hand beneath his belly and tightened the belt of his rucksack.

He began crawling up the hill, dragging himself forward with his elbows and his hands, pushing the suitcase in front of him, conscious all the time of the hump on his back rising above the undergrowth. The water was seeping through his clothes; soon it ran freely over his thighs and knees. The stink of leaf mould filled his nostrils; twigs tugged at his hair. It was as if all nature conspired to hold him back. He looked up the slope and caught sight of the observation tower against the line of black trees on the horizon. There was no light on the tower.

He lay still. It was too far: he could never crawl so far. It was quarter to three by his watch. The relief guard would be coming from the north. He unbuckled his rucksack, stood up, holding it under his arm like a child. Taking the suitcase in his other hand he began walking cautiously up the rise, keeping the trodden path to his left, his eyes fixed upon the skeleton outline of the tower. Suddenly it rose before him like the dark bones of a monster.

The wind clattered over the brow of the hill. From directly above him he could hear the slats of old timber banging, and the long creak of a casement. It was not a single apron but double; when he pulled, it came away from the staves. He stepped across, reattached the wire and stared into the forest ahead. He felt even in that moment of unspeakable terror while the sweat blinded him and the throbbing of his temples drowned the rustling of the wind, a full, confiding gratitude towards Avery and Haldane, as if he knew they had deceived him for his own good.

Then he saw the sentry, like the silhouette in the range, not ten yards from him, back turned, standing on the old path, his rifle slung over his shoulder, his bulky body swaying from left to right as he stamped his feet on the sodden ground to keep them from freezing. Leiser could smell tobacco – it was past him in a second – and coffee warm like a blanket. He put down the rucksack and suitcase and moved instinctively towards him; he might have been in the gymnasium at Headington. He felt the haft sharp in his hand, cross-hatched to prevent slip. The sentry was quite a young boy under his greatcoat; Leiser was surprised how young. He killed him hurriedly, one blow, as a fleeing man might shoot into a crowd; shortly; not to destroy but to preserve; impatiently, for he had to get along; indifferently because it was a fixture.

* * *

‘Can you see anything?’ Haldane repeated.

‘No.’ Avery handed him the glasses. ‘He just went into the dark.’

‘Can you see a light from the watch-tower? They’d shine a light if they heard him.’

‘No, I was looking for Leiser,’ Avery answered.

‘You should have called him Mayfly,’ Leclerc objected from behind. ‘Johnson knows his name now.’

‘I’ll forget it, sir.’

‘He’s over, anyway,’ Leclerc said and walked back to the car.

They drove home in silence.

As they entered the house Avery felt a friendly touch upon his shoulder and turned, expecting to see Johnson; instead he found himself looking into the hollow face of Haldane, but so altered, so manifestly at peace, that it seemed to possess the youthful calm of a man who has survived a long illness; the last pain had gone out of him.

‘I am not given to eulogies,’ Haldane said.

‘Do you think he’s safely over?’

‘You did well.’ He was smiling.

‘We’d have heard, wouldn’t we? Heard the shots or seen the lights?’

‘He’s out of our care. Well done.’ He yawned. ‘I propose we go early to bed. There is nothing more for us to do. Until tomorrow night, of course.’ At the door he stopped, and without turning his head he remarked, ‘You know, it doesn’t seem real. In the war, there was no question. They went or they refused. Why did he go, Avery? Jane Austen said money or love, those were the only two things in the world. Leiser didn’t go for money.’

‘You said one could never know. You said so the night he telephoned.’

‘He told me it was hate. Hatred for the Germans; and I didn’t believe him.’

‘He went anyway. I thought that was all that mattered to you, you said you didn’t trust motive.’

‘He wouldn’t do it for hatred, we know that. What is he, then? We never knew him, did we? He’s near the mark, you know; he’s on his deathbed. What does he think of? If he dies now, tonight, what will be in his mind?’

‘You shouldn’t speak like that.’

‘Ah.’ At last he turned and looked at Avery and the peace had not left his face. ‘When we met him he was a man without love. Do you know what love is? I’ll tell you: it is whatever you can still betray. We ourselves live without it in our profession. We don’t force people to do things for us. We let them discover love. And, of course, Leiser did, didn’t he? He married us for money, so to speak, and left us for love. He took his second vow. I wonder when.’

Avery said quickly, ‘What do you mean, for money?’

‘I mean whatever we gave to him. Love is what he gave to us. I see you have his watch, incidentally.’

‘I’m keeping it for him.’

‘Ah. Goodnight. Or good morning, I suppose.’ A little laugh. ‘How quickly one loses one’s sense of time.’ Then he commented, as if to himself: ‘And the Circus helped us all the way. It’s most strange. I wonder why.’

* * *

Very carefully Leiser rinsed the knife. The knife was dirty and must be washed. In the boathouse, he ate the food and drank the brandy in the flask. ‘After that,’ Haldane had said, ‘you live off the land; you can’t run around with tinned meat and French brandy.’ He opened the door and stepped outside to wash his hands and face in the lake.

The water was quite still in the darkness. Its unruffled surface was like a perfect skin shrouded with floating veils of grey mist. He could see the reeds along the bank; the wind, subdued by the approach of dawn, touched them as it moved across the water. Beyond the lake hung the shadow of low hills. He felt rested and at peace. Until the memory of the boy passed over him like a shudder.

He threw the empty meat can and the brandy bottle far out, and as they hit the water a heron rose languidly from the reeds. Stooping, he picked up a stone and sent it skimming across the lake. He heard it bounce three times before it sank. He threw another but he couldn’t beat three. Returning to the hut he fetched his rucksack and suitcase. His right arm was aching painfully, it must have been from the weight of the case. From somewhere came the bellow of cattle.

He began walking east, along the track which skirted the lake. He wanted to get as far as he could before morning came.

He must have walked through half a dozen villages. Each was empty of life, quieter than the open road because they gave a moment’s shelter from the rising wind. There were no signposts and no new buildings, it suddenly occurred to him. That was where the peace came from, it was the peace of no innovation – it might have been fifty years ago, a hundred. There were no street lights, no gaudy signs on the pubs or shops. It was the darkness of indifference, and it comforted him. He walked into it like a tired man breasting the sea; it cooled and revived him like the wind; until he remembered the boy. He passed a farmhouse. A long drive led to it from the road. He stopped. Half-way up the drive stood a motorbike, an old mackintosh thrown over the saddle. There was no one in sight.

* * *

The oven smoked gently.

‘When did you say his first schedule was?’ Avery asked. He had asked already.

‘Johnson said twenty-two twenty. We start scanning an hour before.’

‘I thought he was on a fixed frequency,’ Leclerc muttered, but without much interest.

‘He may start with the wrong crystal. It’s the kind of thing that happens under strain. It’s safest for base to scan with so many crystals.’

‘He must be on the road by now.’

‘Where’s Haldane?’

‘Asleep.’

‘How can anyone sleep at a time like this?’

‘It’ll be daylight soon.’

‘Can’t you do something about that fire?’ Leclerc asked. ‘It shouldn’t smoke like that, I’m sure.’ He shook his head, suddenly, as if shaking off water and said, ‘John, there’s a most interesting report from Fielden. Troop movements in Budapest. Perhaps when you get back to London . . .’ He lost the thread of his sentence and frowned.

‘You mentioned it,’ Avery said softly.

‘Yes, well, you must take a look at it.’

‘I’d like to. It sounds very interesting.’

‘It does, doesn’t it?’

‘Very.’

‘You know,’ he said – he seemed to be reminiscing – ‘they still won’t give that wretched woman her pension.’

* * *

He sat very straight on the motorbike, elbows in as if he were at table. It made a terrible noise; it seemed to fill the dawn with sound, echoing across the frosted fields and stirring the roosting poultry. The mackintosh had leather pieces on the shoulders; as he bounced along the unmade road its skirts fluttered behind, rattling against the spokes of the rear wheel. Daylight came.

Soon he would have to eat. He couldn’t understand why he was so hungry. Perhaps it was the exercise. Yes, it must be the exercise. He would eat, but not in a town, not yet. Not in a café where strangers came. Not in a café where the boy had been.

He drove on. His hunger taunted him. He could think of nothing else. His hand held down the throttle and drove his ravening body forward. He turned on to a farm track and stopped.

The house was old, falling with neglect; the drive overgrown with grass, pitted with cart tracks. The fences were broken. There was a terraced garden once partly under plough, now left as if it were beyond all use.

A light burnt in the kitchen window. Leiser knocked at the door. His hand was trembling from the motorbike. No one came; he knocked again, and the sound of his knocking frightened him. He thought he saw a face, it might have been the shadow of the boy sinking across the window as he fell, or the reflection of a swaying branch.

He returned quickly to his motorbike, realizing with terror that his hunger was not hunger at all but loneliness. He must lie up somewhere and rest. He thought: I’ve forgotten how it takes you. He drove on until he came to the wood, where he lay down. His face was hot against the bracken.

It was evening; the fields were still light but the wood in which he lay gave itself swiftly to the darkness, so that in a moment the red pines had turned to columns of black.

He picked the leaves from his jacket and laced up his shoes. They pinched badly at the instep. He never had a chance to wear them in. He caught himself thinking, it’s all right for them, and he remembered that nothing ever bridged the gulf between the man who went and the man who stayed behind, between the living and the dying.

He struggled into the harness of his rucksack and once again felt gratefully the hot, raw pain in his shoulders as the straps found the old bruises. Picking up the suitcase he walked across the field to the road where the motorbike was waiting; five kilometres to Langdorn. He guessed it lay beyond the hill: the first of the three towns. Soon he would meet the road block; soon he would have to eat.

He drove slowly, the case across his knees, peering ahead all the time along the wet road, straining his eyes for a line of red lights or a cluster of men and vehicles. He rounded a bend and saw to his left a house with a beer sign propped in the window. He entered the forecourt; the noise of the engine brought an old man to the door. Leiser lifted the bike on to its stand.

‘I want a beer,’ he said, ‘and some sausage. Have you got that here?’

The old man showed him inside, sat him at a table in the front room from which Leiser could see his motorbike parked in the yard. He brought him a bottle of beer, some sliced sausage and a piece of black bread; then stood at the table watching him eat.

‘Where are you making for?’ His thin face was shaded with beard.

‘North.’ Leiser knew this game.

‘Where are you from?’

‘What’s the next town?’

‘Langdorn.’

‘Far?’

‘Five kilometres.’

‘Somewhere to stay?’

The old man shrugged. It was a gesture not of indifference nor of refusal, but of negation, as if he rejected everything and everything rejected him.

‘What’s the road like?’ Leiser asked.

‘It’s all right.’

‘I heard there was a diversion.’

‘No diversion,’ the old man said, as if a diversion were hope, or comfort, or companionship; anything that might warm the damp air or lighten the corners of the room.

‘You’re from the east,’ the man declared. ‘One hears it in the voice.’

‘My parents,’ he said. ‘Any coffee?’

The old man brought him coffee, very black and sour, tasting of nothing.

‘You’re from Wilmsdorf,’ the old man said. ‘You’ve got a Wilmsdorf registration.’

‘Much custom?’ Leiser asked, glancing at the door.

The old man shook his head.

‘Not a busy road, eh?’ Still the old man said nothing. ‘I’ve got a friend near Kalkstadt. Is that far?’

‘Not far. Forty kilometres. They killed a boy near Wilmsdorf.’

‘He runs a café. On the northern side. The Tom Cat. Know it at all?’

‘No.’

Leiser lowered his voice. ‘They had trouble there. A fight. Some soldiers from the town. Russians.’

‘Go away,’ the old man said.

He tried to pay him but he only had a fifty-mark note.

‘Go away,’ the old man repeated.

Leiser picked up the suitcase and rucksack. ‘You old fool,’ he said roughly. ‘What do you think I am?’

‘You are either good or bad, and both are dangerous. Go away.’

There was no road block. Without warning he was in the centre of Langdorn; it was already dark; the only lights in the main street stole from the shuttered windows, barely reaching the wet cobbles. There was no traffic. He was alarmed by the din of his motorbike; it sounded like a trumpet blast across the market square. In the war, Leiser thought, they went to bed early to keep warm; perhaps they still did.

It was time to get rid of the motorbike. He drove through the town, found a disused church and left it by the vestry door. Walking back into the town he made for the railway station. The official wore uniform.

‘Kalkstadt. Single.’

The official held out his hand. Leiser took a banknote from his wallet and gave it to him. The official shook it impatiently. For a moment Leiser’s mind went blank while he looked stupidly at the flicking fingers in front of him and the suspicious, angry face behind the grille.

Suddenly the official shouted: ‘Identity card!’

Leiser smiled apologetically. ‘One forgets,’ he said, and opened his wallet to show the card in the Cellophane window.

‘Take it out of the wallet,’ the official said. Leiser watched him examine it under the light on his desk.

‘Travel authority?’

‘Yes, of course.’ Leiser handed him the paper.

‘Why do you want to go to Kalkstadt if you are travelling to Rostock?’

‘Our co-operative in Magdeburg sent some machinery by rail to Kalkstadt. Heavy turbines and some tooling equipment. It has to be installed.’

‘How did you come this far?’

‘I got a lift.’

‘The granting of lifts is forbidden.’

‘One must do what one can these days.’

‘These days?’

The man pressed his face against the glass, looking down at Leiser’s hands.

‘What’s that you’re fiddling with down there?’ he demanded roughly.

‘A chain; a key chain.’

‘So the equipment has to be installed. Well? Go on!’

‘I can do the job on the way. The people in Kalkstadt have been waiting six weeks already. The consignment was delayed.’

‘So?’

‘We made inquiries . . . of the railway people.’

‘And?’

‘They didn’t reply.’

‘You’ve got an hour’s wait. It leaves at six thirty.’ A pause. ‘You heard the news? They’ve killed a boy at Wilmsdorf,’ he said. ‘Swine.’ He handed him his change.

He had nowhere to go; he dared not deposit his luggage. There was nothing else to do. He walked for half an hour, then returned to the station. The train was late.

* * *

‘You both deserve great credit,’ Leclerc said, nodding gratefully at Haldane and Avery. ‘You too, Johnson. From now on there’s nothing any of us can do: it’s up to Mayfly.’ A special smile for Avery: ‘How about you, John; you’ve been keeping very quiet? Do you think you’ve profited from the experience?’ He added with a laugh, appealing to the other two, ‘I do hope we shan’t have a divorce on our hands; we must get you home to your wife.’

He was sitting at the edge of the table, his small hands folded tidily on his knee. When Avery said nothing he declared brightly, ‘I had a ticking-off from Carol, you know, Adrian; breaking up the young home.’

Haldane smiled as if it were an amusing notion. ‘I’m sure there’s no danger of that,’ he said.

‘He made a great hit with Smiley, too; we must see they don’t poach him away!’

19

When the train reached Kalkstadt, Leiser waited until the other passengers had left the platform. An elderly guard collected the tickets. He looked a kindly man.

‘I’m looking for a friend,’ Leiser said. ‘A man called Fritsche. He used to work here.’

The guard frowned.

‘Fritsche?’

‘Yes.’

‘What was his first name?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘How old, then; how old about?’

He guessed: ‘Forty.’

‘Fritsche, here, at this station?’

‘Yes. He had a small house down by the river; a single man.’

‘A whole house? And worked at this station?’

‘Yes.’

The guard shook his head. ‘Never heard of him.’ He peered at Leiser. ‘Are you sure?’ he said.

‘That’s what he told me.’ Something seemed to come back to him. ‘He wrote to me in November . . . he complained that Vopos had closed the station.’

‘You’re mad,’ the guard said. ‘Goodnight.’

‘Goodnight,’ Leiser replied; as he walked away he was conscious all the time of the man’s gaze upon his back.

There was an inn in the main street called the Old Bell. He waited at the desk in the hall and nobody came. He opened a door and found himself in a big room, dark at the farther end. A girl sat at a table in front of an old gramophone. She was slumped forward, her head buried in her arms, listening to the music. A single light burnt above her. When the record stopped she played it again, moving the arm of the record player without lifting her head.

‘I’m looking for a room,’ Leiser said. ‘I’ve just arrived from Langdorn.’

There were stuffed birds round the room: herons, pheasants and a kingfisher. ‘I’m looking for a room,’ he repeated. It was dance music, very old.

‘Ask at the desk.’

‘There’s no one there.’

‘They have nothing, anyway. They’re not allowed to take you. There’s a hostel near the church. You have to stay there.’

‘Where’s the church?’

With an exaggerated sigh she stopped the record, and Leiser knew she was glad to have someone to talk to.

‘It was bombed,’ she declared. ‘We just talk about it still. There’s only the tower left.’

Finally he said, ‘Surely they’ve got a bed here? It’s a big place.’ He put his rucksack in a corner and sat at the table next to her. He ran a hand through his thick dry hair.

‘You look all in,’ the girl said.

His blue trousers were still caked with mud from the border. ‘I’ve been on the road all day. Takes a lot out of you.’

She stood up self-consciously and went to the end of the room where a wooden staircase led upwards towards a glimmer of light. She called out but no one came.

‘Steinhäger?’ she asked him from the dark.

‘Yes.’

She returned with a bottle and a glass. She was wearing a mackintosh, an old brown one of military cut with epaulettes and square shoulders.

‘Where are you from?’ she asked.

‘Magdeburg. I’m making north. Got a job in Rostock.’ How many more times would he say it? ‘This hostel; do I get a room to myself?’

‘If you want one.’

The light was so poor that at first he could scarcely make her out. Gradually she came alive. She was about eighteen, and heavily built; quite a pretty face but bad skin. The same age as the boy; older perhaps.

‘Who are you?’ he asked. She said nothing. ‘What do you do?’

She took his glass and drank from it, looking at him precociously over the brim as if she were a great beauty. She put it down slowly, still watching him, touched the side of her hair. She seemed to think her gestures mattered. Leiser began again:

‘Been here long?’

‘Two years.’

‘What do you do?’

‘Whatever you want.’ Her voice was quite earnest.

‘Much going on here?’

‘It’s dead. Nothing.’

‘No boys?’

‘Sometimes.’

‘Troops?’ A pause.

‘Now and then. Don’t you know it’s forbidden to ask that?’

Leiser helped himself to more Steinhäger from the bottle.

She took his glass, fumbling with his fingers.

‘What’s wrong with this town?’ he asked. ‘I tried to come here six weeks ago. They wouldn’t let me in. Kalkstadt, Langdorn, Wolken, all closed, they said. What was going on?’

Her fingertips played over his hand.

‘What was up?’ he repeated.

‘Nothing was closed.’

‘Come off it,’ Leiser laughed. ‘They wouldn’t let me near the place, I tell you. Road blocks here and on the Wolken road.’ He thought: it’s eight twenty; only two hours till the first schedule.

‘Nothing was closed.’ Suddenly she added, ‘So you came from the west: you came by road. They’re looking for someone like you.’

He stood up to go. ‘I’d better find the hostel.’ He put some money on the table. The girl whispered, ‘I’ve got my own room. In a new flat behind the Friedensplatz. A workers’ block. They don’t mind. I’ll do whatever you want.’

Leiser shook his head. He picked up his luggage and went to the door. She was still looking at him and he knew she suspected him.

‘Goodbye,’ he said.

‘I won’t say anything. Take me with you.’

‘I had a Steinhäger,’ Leiser muttered. ‘We didn’t even talk. You played your record all the time.’ They were both frightened.

The girl said, ‘Yes. Records all the time.’

‘It was never closed, you are sure of that? Langdorn, Wolken, Kalkstadt, six weeks ago?’

‘What would anyone close this place for?’

‘Not even the station?’

She said quickly, ‘I don’t know about the station. The area was closed for three days in November. No one knows why. Russian troops stayed, about fifty. They were billeted in the town. Mid November.’

‘Fifty? Any equipment?’

‘Lorries. There were manoeuvres farther north, that’s the rumour. Stay with me tonight. Stay with me! Let me come with you. I’ll go anywhere.’

‘What colour shoulder-boards?’

‘I don’t remember.’

‘Where did they come from?’

‘They were new. Some came from Leningrad, two brothers.’

‘Which way did they go?’

‘North. Listen, no one will ever know. I don’t talk, I’m not the kind. I’ll give it to you, anything you want.’

‘Towards Rostock?’

‘They said they were going to Rostock. They said not to tell. The Party came round all the houses.’

Leiser nodded. He was sweating. ‘Goodbye,’ he said.

‘What about tomorrow, tomorrow night? I’ll do whatever you want.’

‘Perhaps. Don’t tell anyone, do you understand?’

She shook her head. ‘I won’t tell them,’ she said, ‘because I don’t care. Ask for the Hochhaus behind the Friedensplatz. Apartment nineteen. Come any time. I’ll open the door. You give two rings and they know it’s for me. You needn’t pay. Take care,’ she said. ‘There are people everywhere. They’ve killed a boy in Wilmsdorf.’

He walked to the market square, correct again because everything was closing in, looking for the church tower and the hostel. Huddled figures passed him in the darkness; some wore pieces of uniform; forage caps and the long coats they had in the war. Now and then he would glimpse their faces, catching them in the pale glow of a street light and he would seek in their locked, unseeing features the qualities he hated. He would say to himself, ‘Hate him – he is old enough,’ but it did not stir him. They were nothing. Perhaps in some other town, some other place, he would find them and hate them; but not here. These were old and nothing; poor, like him, and alone. The tower was black and empty. It reminded him suddenly of the turret on the border, and the garage after eleven, of the moment when he killed the sentry: just a kid, like himself in the war; even younger than Avery.

* * *

‘He should be there by now,’ Avery said.

‘That’s right, John. He should be there, shouldn’t he? One hour to go. One more river to cross.’ He began singing. No one took him up.

They looked at each other in silence.

‘Know the Alias Club at all?’ Johnson asked suddenly. ‘Off Villiers Street? A lot of the old gang meet up there. You ought to come along one evening, when we get home.’

‘Thanks,’ Avery replied. ‘I’d like to.’

‘It gets nice Christmas time,’ he said. ‘That’s when I go. A good crowd. There’s even one or two come in uniform.’

‘It sounds fine.’

‘They have a mixed do at New Year. You could take your wife.’

‘Grand.’

Johnson winked. ‘Or your fancy-girl.’

‘Sarah’s the only girl for me,’ Avery said.

The telephone was ringing. Leclerc rose to answer it.

20

Homecoming

He put down the rucksack and the suitcase and looked round the walls. There was an electric point beside the window. The door had no lock so he pushed the armchair against it. He took off his shoes and lay on the bed. He thought of the girl’s fingers on his hands and the nervous movement of her lips; he remembered her deceitful eyes watching him from the shadows and he wondered how long it would be before she betrayed him.

He remembered Avery: the warmth and English decency of their early companionship; he remembered his young face glistening in the rain, and his shy, dazzled glance as he dried his spectacles, and he thought: he must have said thirty-two all the time. I misheard.

He looked at the ceiling. In an hour he would put up the aerial.

The room was large and bare with a round marble basin in one corner. A single pipe ran from it to the floor and he hoped to God it would do for the earth. He ran some water and to his relief it was cold, because Jack had said a hot pipe was dicey. He drew his knife and carefully scraped the pipe clean on one side. The earth was important; Jack had said so. If you can’t do anything else, he’d said, lay your earth wire zig-zag fashion under the carpet, the same length as the aerial. But there was no carpet; the pipe would have to do. No carpet, no curtains.

Opposite him stood a heavy wardrobe with bow doors. The place must once have been the main hotel. There was a smell of Turkish tobacco and rank, unscented disinfectant. The walls were of grey plaster; the damp had spread over them in dark shadows, arrested here and there by some mysterious inner property of the house which had dried a path across the ceiling. In some places the plaster had crumbled with the damp, leaving a ragged island of white mildew; in others it had contracted and the plasterer had returned to fill the cavities with paste which described white rivers along the corners of the room. Leiser’s eye followed them carefully while he listened for the smallest sound outside.

There was a picture on the wall of workers in a field, leading a horse plough. On the horizon was a tractor. He heard Johnson’s benign voice running on about the aerial: ‘If it’s indoors it’s a headache, and indoors it’ll be. Now listen: zig-zag fashion across the room, quarter the length of your wave and one foot below the ceiling. Space them wide as possible, Fred, and not parallel to metal girders, electric wires and that. And don’t double her back on herself, Fred, or you’ll muck her up properly, see?’ Always the joke, the copulative innuendo to aid the memory of simple men.

Leiser thought: I’ll take it to the picture frame, then back and forth to the far corner. I can put a nail into that soft plaster; he looked around for a nail or pin, and noticed a bronze hanger on one of the pelmets. He got up, unscrewed the handle of his razor. The thread began to the right, it was considered an ingenious detail, so that a suspicious man who gave the handle a casual twist to the left would be going against the thread. From the recess he extracted the knot of silk cloth which he smoothed carefully over his knee with his thick fingers. He found a pencil in his pocket and sharpened it, not moving from the edge of his bed because he did not want to disturb the silk cloth. Twice the point broke; the shavings collected on the floor at his feet. He began writing in the notebook, capital letters, like a prisoner writing to his wife, and every time he made a full stop he drew a ring round it the way he was taught long ago.

The message composed, he drew a line after every two letters, and beneath each compartment he entered the numerical equivalent according to the chart he had memorised: sometimes he had to resort to a mnemonic rhyme in order to recall the numbers; sometimes he remembered wrong and had to rub out and begin again. When he had finished he divided the line of numbers into groups of four and deducted each in turn from the groups on the silk cloth; finally he converted the figures into letters again and wrote out the result, redividing them into groups of four.

Fear like an old pain had again taken hold of his belly so that with every imagined sound he looked sharply towards the door, his hand arrested in the middle of writing. But he heard nothing; just the creaking of an ageing house, like the noise of wind in the rigging of a ship.

He looked at the finished message, conscious that it was too long, and that if he were better at that kind of thing, if his mind were quicker, he could reduce it, but just now he couldn’t think of a way, and he knew, he had been taught, better put in a word or two too many than make it ambiguous the other end. There were forty-two groups.

He pushed the table away from the window and lifted the suitcase; with the key from his chain he unlocked it, praying all the time that nothing was broken from the journey. He opened the spares box, discovering with his trembling fingers the silk bag of crystals bound with green ribbon at the mouth. Loosening the ribbon, he shook the crystals on to the coarse blanket which covered the bed. Each was labelled in Johnson’s handwriting, first the frequency and below it a single figure denoting the place where it came in the signal plan. He arranged them in line, pressing them on to the blanket so that they lay flat. The crystals were the easiest part. He tested the door against the armchair. The handle slipped in his palm. The chair provided no protection. In the war, he remembered, they had given him steel wedges. Returning to the suitcase he connected the transmitter and receiver to the power pack, plugged in the earphones and unscrewed the Morse key from the lid of the spares box. Then he saw it.

Mounted inside the suitcase lid was a piece of adhesive paper with half a dozen groups of letters and beside each its Morse equivalent; they were the international code for standard phrases, the one he could never remember.

When he saw those letters, drawn out in Jack’s neat, post-office hand, tears of gratitude started to his eyes. He never told me, he thought, he never told me he’d done it. Jack was all right, after all. Jack, the Captain and young John; what a team to work for, he thought; a man could go through life and never meet a set of blokes like that. He steadied himself, pressing his hands sharply on the table. He was trembling a little, perhaps from the cold; his damp shirt clung to his shoulder-blades; but he was happy. He glanced at the chair in front of the door and thought: when I’ve got the headphones on I shan’t hear them coming, the way the boy didn’t hear me because of the wind.

Next he attached aerial and earth to their terminals, led the earth wire to the water pipe and fastened the two strands to the cleaned surface with tabs of adhesive plaster. Standing on the bed, he stretched the aerial across the ceiling in eight lengths, zig-zag as Johnson had instructed, fixing it as best he could to the curtain rail or plaster on either side. This done, he returned to the set and adjusted the waveband switch to the fourth position, because he knew that all the frequencies were in the three-megacycle range. He took from the bed the first crystal in the line, plugged it into the far left-hand corner of the set, and settled down to tune the transmitter, muttering gently as he performed each movement. Adjust crystal selector to ‘fundamental all crystals’, plug in the coil; anode-tuning and aerial-matching controls to ten.

He hesitated, trying to remember what happened next. A block was forming in his mind. ‘PA – don’t you know what PA stands for?’ He set the meter switch to three to read the Power Amplifier grid current . . . TSR switch to T for tuning. It was coming back to him. Meter switch to six to ascertain total current . . . anode tuning for minimum reading.

Now he turned the TSR switch to S for send, pressed the key briefly, took a reading, manipulated the aerial-matching control so that the meter reading rose slightly; hastily readjusted the anode tuning. He repeated the procedure until to his profound relief he saw the finger dip against the white background of the kidney-shaped dial and knew that the transmitter and aerial were correctly tuned, and that he could talk to John and Jack.

He sat back with a grunt of satisfaction, lit a cigarette, wished it were an English one because if they came in now they wouldn’t have to bother about the brand of cigarette he was smoking. He looked at his watch, turning the winder until it was stiff, terrified lest it run down; it was matched with Avery’s and in a simple way this gave him comfort. Like divided lovers, they were looking at the same star.

He had killed that boy.

Three minutes to schedule. He unscrewed the Morse key from the spares box because he couldn’t manage it properly while it was on that lid. Jack had said it was all right; he said it didn’t matter. He had to hold the key base with his left hand so that it didn’t slide about, but Jack said every operator had his quirks. He was sure it was smaller than the one they gave him in the war; he was sure of it. Traces of French chalk clung to the lever. He drew in his elbows and straightened his back. The third finger of his right hand crooked over the key. JAJ’s my first call sign, he thought, Johnson’s my name, they call me Jack, that’s easy enough to remember. JA, John Avery; JJ, Jack Johnson. Then he was tapping it out. A dot and three dashes, dot dash, a dot and three dashes, and he kept thinking: it’s like the house in Holland, but there’s no one with me.

Say it twice, Fred, then get off the air. He switched over to receive, pushed the sheet of paper farther towards the middle of the table and suddenly realised he had nothing to write with when Jack came through.

He stood up and looked around for his notebook and pencil, the sweat breaking out on his back. They were nowhere to be seen. Dropping hastily to his hands and knees he felt in the thick dust under the bed, found the pencil, groped vainly for his notebook. As he was getting up he heard a crackle from the earphones. He ran to the table, pressed one phone to his ear, at the same time trying to hold still the sheet of paper so that he could write in a corner of it beside his own message.

‘QSA3: hearing you well enough,’ that’s all they were saying. ‘Steady, boy, steady,’ he muttered. He settled into the chair, switched to transmit, looked at his own encoded message and tapped out four-two because there were forty-two groups. His hand was coated with dust and sweat, his right arm ached, perhaps from carrying the suitcase. Or struggling with the boy.

You’ve got all the time in the world, Johnson had said. We’ll be listening: you’re not passing an exam. He took his handkerchief from his pocket and wiped away the grime from his hands. He was terribly tired; the tiredness was like a physical despair, like the moment of guilt before making love. Groups of four letters, Johnson had said, think of four-letter words, eh, Fred. You don’t need to do it all at once, Fred, have a little stop in the middle if you like; two and a half minutes on the first frequency, two and a half on the second, that’s the way we go; Mrs Hartbeck will wait, I’m sure. With his pencil he drew a heavy line under the ninth letter because that was where the safety device came. That was something he dared think of only in passing.

He put his face in his hands, summoning the last of his concentration, then reached for the key and began tapping. Keep the hand loose, first and second fingers on top of the key, thumb beneath the edge, no putting the wrist on the table, Fred, breathe regular, Fred, you’ll find it helps you to relax.

God, why were his hands so slow? Once he took his fingers from the key and stared impotently at his open palm; once he ran his left hand across his forehead to keep the sweat from his eyes, and he felt the key drifting across the table. His wrist was too stiff: the hand he killed the boy with. All the time he was saying it over to himself – dot, dot, dash, then a K, he always knew that one, a dot between two dashes – his lips were spelling out the letters, but his hand wouldn’t follow, it was a kind of stammer that got worse the more he spoke, and always the boy in his mind, only the boy. Perhaps he was quicker than he thought. He lost all notion of time; the sweat was running into his eyes, he couldn’t stop it any more. He kept mouthing the dots and dashes, and he knew that Johnson would be angry because he shouldn’t be thinking in dots and dashes at all but musically, de-dah, dah, the way the professionals did, but Johnson had not killed the boy. The pounding of his heart outran the weary tapping of the key; his hand seemed to grow heavier and still he went on signalling because it was the only thing left to do, the only thing to hold on to while his body gave way. He was waiting for them now, wishing they’d come – take me, take it all – longing for the footsteps. Give us your hand, John; give us a hand.

When at last he had finished, he went back to the bed. Almost with detachment he caught sight of the line of crystals on the blanket, untouched, still and ready, dressed by the left and numbered; flat on their backs, like dead sentries.

* * *

Avery looked at his watch. It was quarter past ten. ‘He should come on in five minutes,’ he said.

Leclerc announced suddenly: ‘That was Gorton on the telephone. He’s received a telegram from the Ministry. They have some news for us apparently. They’re sending out a courier.’

‘What could that be?’ Avery asked.

‘I expect it’s the Hungarian thing. Fielden’s report. I may have to go back to London.’ A satisfied smile. ‘But I think you people can get along without me.’

Johnson was wearing earphones, sitting forward on a high-backed wooden chair carried up from the kitchen. The dark green receiver hummed gently from the mains transformer; the tuning dial, illuminated from within, glowed palely in the half-light of the attic.

Haldane and Avery sat uncomfortably on a bench. Johnson had a pad and pencil in front of him. He lifted the phones above his ears and said to Leclerc who stood beside him, ‘I shall take him straight through the routine, sir; I’ll do my best to tell you what’s going on. I’m recording, too, mind, for safety’s sake.’

‘I understand.’

They waited in silence. Suddenly – it was their moment of utter magic – Johnson had sat bolt upright, nodded sharply to them, switched on the tape recorder. He smiled, quickly turned to transmission and was tapping. ‘Come in, Fred,’ he said out loud. ‘Hearing you nicely.’

‘He’s made it!’ Leclerc hissed. ‘He’s on target now!’ His eyes were bright with excitement. ‘Do you hear that, John? Do you hear?’

‘Shall we be quiet?’ Haldane suggested.

‘Here he comes,’ Johnson said. His voice was level, controlled. ‘Forty-two groups.’

‘Forty-two!’ Leclerc repeated.

Johnson’s body was motionless, his head inclined a little to one side, his whole concentration given to the earphones, his face impassive in the pale light.

‘I’d like silence now, please.’

For perhaps two minutes his careful hand moved briskly across the pad. Now and then he muttered inaudibly, whispered a letter or shook his head, until the message seemed to come more slowly, his pencil pausing while he listened, until it was tracing out each letter singly with agonising care. He glanced at the clock.

‘Come on, Fred,’ he urged. ‘Come on, change over, that’s nearly three minutes.’ But still the message was coming through, letter by letter, and Johnson’s simple face assumed an expression of alarm.

‘What’s going on?’ Leclerc demanded. ‘Why hasn’t he changed his frequency?’

But Johnson only said, ‘Get off the air, for Christ’s sake, Fred, get off the air.’

Leclerc touched him impatiently on the arm. Johnson raised one earphone.

‘Why’s he not changed frequency? Why’s he still talking?’

‘He must have forgotten! He never forgot on training. I know he’s slow, but Christ!’ He was still writing automatically. ‘Five minutes,’ he muttered. ‘Five bloody minutes. Change the bloody crystal!’

‘Can’t you tell him?’ Leclerc cried.

‘Of course I can’t. How can I? He can’t receive and send at the same time!’

They sat or stood in dreadful fascination. Johnson had turned to them, his voice beseeching. ‘I told him; if I told him once I told him a dozen times. It’s bloody suicide, what he’s doing!’ He looked at his watch. ‘He’s been on damn near six minutes. Bloody, bloody, bloody fool.’

‘What will they do?’ said Haldane.

‘If they pick up a signal? Call in another station. Take a fix, then it’s simple trigonometry when he’s on this long.’ He banged his open hands helplessly on the table, indicated the set as if it were an affront. ‘A kid could do it. Do it with a pair of compasses. Christ Almighty! Come on, Fred, for Jesus’ sake, come on!’ He wrote down a handful of letters then threw his pencil aside. ‘It’s on tape, anyway,’ he said.

Leclerc turned to Haldane. ‘Surely there’s something we can do!’

‘Be quiet,’ Haldane said.

The message stopped. Johnson tapped an acknowledgement, fast, a stab of hatred. He wound back the tape recorder and began transcribing. Putting the coding sheet in front of him he worked without interruption for perhaps a quarter of an hour, occasionally making simple sums on the rough paper at his elbow. No one spoke. When he had finished he stood up, a half-forgotten gesture of respect. ‘Message reads: Area Kalkstadt closed three days mid November when fifty unidentified Soviet troops seen in town. No special equipment. Rumours of Soviet manoeuvres farther north. Troops believed moved to Rostock. Fritsche not repeat not known Kalkstadt railway station. No road check on Kalkstadt road.’ He tossed the paper on to the desk. ‘There are fifteen groups after that which I can’t unbutton. I think he’s muddled his coding.’

* * *

The Vopo sergeant in Rostock picked up the telephone; he was an elderly man, greying and thoughtful. He listened for a moment then began dialling on another line. ‘It must be a child,’ he said, still dialling. ‘What frequency did you say?’ He put the other telephone to his ear and spoke into it fast, repeating the frequency three times. He walked into the adjoining hut. ‘Witmar will be through in a minute,’ he said. ‘They’re taking a fix. Are you still hearing him?’ The corporal nodded. The sergeant held a spare headphone to his ear.

‘It couldn’t be an amateur,’ he muttered. ‘Breaking the regulations. But what is it? No agent in his right mind would put out a signal like that. What are the neighbouring frequencies? Military or civilian?’

‘It’s near the military. Very near.’

‘That’s odd,’ the sergeant said. ‘That would fit, wouldn’t it? That’s what they did in the war.’

The corporal was staring at the tapes slowly revolving on their spindles. ‘He’s still transmitting. Groups of four.’

‘Four?’ The sergeant was searching in his memory for something that had happened long ago. ‘Let me hear again. Listen, listen to the fool! He’s as slow as a child.’

The sound struck some chord in his memory – the slurred gaps, the dots so short as to be little more than clicks. He could swear he knew that hand . . . from the war, in Norway . . . but not so slow: nothing had ever been as slow as this. Not Norway . . . France. Perhaps it was only imagination. Yes, it was imagination.

‘Or an old man,’ the corporal said.

The telephone rang. The sergeant listened for a moment, then ran, ran as fast as he could, through the hut to the officers’ mess across the tarmac path.

The Russian captain was drinking beer; his jacket was slung over the back of his chair and he looked very bored.

‘You wanted something, Sergeant?’ He affected the languid style.

‘He’s come. The man they told us about. The one who killed the boy.’

The captain put down his beer quickly.

‘You heard him?’

‘We’ve taken a fix. With Witmar. Groups of four. A slow hand. Area Kalkstadt. Close to one of our own frequencies. Sommer recorded the transmission.’

‘Christ,’ he said quietly. The sergeant frowned.

‘What’s he looking for? Why should they send him here?’ the sergeant asked.

The captain was buttoning his jacket. ‘Ask them in Leipzig. Perhaps they know that too.’

21

It was very late.

The fire in Control’s grate was burning nicely, but he poked at it with effeminate discontent. He hated working at night.

‘They want you at the Ministry,’ he said irritably. ‘Now, of all hours. It really is too bad. Why does everyone get so agitato on a Thursday? It will ruin the weekend.’ He put down the poker and returned to his desk. ‘They’re in a dreadful state. Some idiot talking about ripples in a pond. It’s extraordinary what the night does to people. I do detest the telephone.’ There were several in front of him.

Smiley offered him a cigarette and he took one without looking at it, as if he could not be held responsible for the actions of his limbs.

‘What Ministry?’ Smiley asked.

‘Leclerc’s. Have you any idea what’s going on?’

Smiley said, ‘Yes. Haven’t you?’

‘Leclerc’s so vulgar. I admit, I find him vulgar. He thinks we compete. What on earth would I do with his dreadful militia? Scouring Europe for mobile laundries. He thinks I want to gobble him up.’

‘Well, don’t you? Why did we cancel that passport?’

‘What a silly man. A silly, vulgar man. However did Haldane fall for it?’

‘He had a conscience once. He’s like all of us. He’s learnt to live with it.’

‘Oh dear. Is that a dig at me?’

‘What does the Ministry want?’ Smiley asked sharply.

Control held up some papers, flapping them. ‘You’ve seen these from Berlin?’

‘They came in an hour ago. The Americans have taken a fix. Groups of four; a primitive letter code. They say it comes from the Kalkstadt area.’

‘Where on earth’s that?’

‘South of Rostock. The message ran six minutes on the same frequency. They said it sounded like an amateur on a first run-through. One of the old wartime sets: they wanted to know if it was ours.’

‘And you replied?’ Control asked quickly.

‘I said no.’

‘So I should hope. Good Lord.’

‘You don’t seem very concerned,’ Smiley said.

Control seemed to remember something from long ago. ‘I hear Leclerc’s in Lübeck. Now there’s a pretty town. I adore Lübeck. The Ministry wants you immediately. I said you’d go. Some meeting.’ He added in apparent earnest, ‘You must, George. We’ve been the most awful fools. It’s in every East German newspaper; they’re screaming about peace conferences and sabotage.’ He prodded at a telephone. ‘So is the Ministry. God, how I loathe Civil Servants.’

Smiley watched him with scepticism. ‘We could have stopped them,’ he said. ‘We knew enough.’

‘Of course we could,’ Control said blandly. ‘D’you know why we didn’t? Plain, idiot Christian charity. We let them have their war game. You’d better go now. And Smiley . . .’

‘Yes?’

‘Be gentle.’ And in his silly voice: ‘I do envy them Lübeck, all the same. There’s that restaurant, isn’t there; what do they call it? Where Thomas Mann used to eat. So interesting.’

‘He never did,’ Smiley said. ‘The place you’re thinking of was bombed.’

Smiley still did not go. ‘I wonder,’ he said. ‘You’ll never tell me, will you? I just wonder.’ He was not looking at Control.

‘My dear George, what has come over you?’

‘We handed it to them. The passport that was cancelled . . . a courier service they never needed . . . a clapped-out wireless set . . . papers, frontier reports . . . who told Berlin to listen for him? Who told them what frequencies? We even gave Leclerc the crystals, didn’t we? Was that just Christian charity too? Plain, idiot Christian charity?’

Control was shocked.

‘What are you suggesting? How very distasteful. Who ever would do a thing like that?’

Smiley was putting on his coat.

‘Goodnight, George,’ Control said; and fiercely, as if he were tired of sensibility: ‘Run along. And preserve the difference between us: your country needs you. It’s not my fault they’ve taken so long to die.’

* * *

The dawn came and Leiser had not slept. He wanted to wash but dared not go into the corridor. He dared not move. If they were looking for him, he knew he must leave normally, not bolt from the hostel before the morning came. Never run, they used to say: walk like the crowd. He could go at six: that was late enough. He rubbed his chin against the back of his hand: it was sharp and rough, marking the brown skin.

He was hungry and no longer knew what to do, but he would not run.

He half turned on the bed, pulled the knife from inside the waistband of his trousers and held it before his eyes. He was shivering. He could feel across his brow the unnatural heat of incipient fever. He looked at the knife, and remembered the clean, friendly way they had talked: thumb on top, blade parallel to the ground, forearm stiff. ‘Go away,’ the old man had said. ‘You are either good or bad, and both are dangerous.’ How should he hold the knife when people spoke to him like that? The way he held it for the boy?

It was six o’clock. He stood up. His legs were heavy and stiff. His shoulders still ached from carrying the rucksack. His clothes, he noticed, smelt of pine and leaf mould. He picked the half-dried mud from his trousers and put on his second pair of shoes.

He went downstairs, looking for someone to pay, the new shoes squeaking on the wooden steps. There was an old woman in a white overall sorting lentils into a bowl, talking to a cat.

‘What do I owe?’

‘You fill in the form,’ she said sourly. ‘That’s the first thing you owe. You should have done it when you came.’

‘I’m sorry.’

She rounded on him, muttering but not daring to raise her voice. ‘Don’t you know it’s forbidden, staying in a town and not reporting your presence to the police?’ She looked at his new shoes. ‘Or are you so rich that you think you need not trouble?’

‘I’m sorry,’ Leiser said again. ‘Give me the form and I’ll sign it now. I’m not rich.’

The woman fell silent, picking studiously among the lentils.

‘Where do you come from?’ she asked.

‘East,’ said Leiser. He meant south, from Magdeburg, or west from Wilmsdorf.

‘You should have reported last night. It’s too late now.’

‘What do I pay?’

‘You can’t,’ the woman replied. ‘Never mind. You haven’t filled in the form. What will you say if they catch you?’

‘I’ll say I slept with a girl.’

‘It’s snowing outside,’ the woman said. ‘Mind your nice shoes.’

Grains of hard snow drifted forlornly in the wind, collecting in the cracks between the black cobbles, lingering on the stucco of the houses. A drab, useless snow, dwindling where it fell.

He crossed the Friedensplatz and saw a new, yellow building, six or seven storeys high, standing on a patch of waste land beside a new estate. There was washing hanging on the balconies, touched with snow. The staircase smelt of food and Russian petrol. The flat was on the third floor. He could hear a child crying and a wireless playing. For a moment he thought he should turn and go away, because he was dangerous for them. He pressed the bell twice, as the girl had told him. She opened the door; she was half asleep. She had put on her mackintosh over the cotton nightdress and she held it at the neck because of the freezing cold. When she saw him she hesitated, not knowing what to do, as if he had brought bad news. He said nothing, just stood there with the suitcase swinging gently at his side. She beckoned with her head; he followed her across the corridor to her room, put the suitcase and rucksack in the corner. There were travel posters on the walls, pictures of desert, palm trees and the moon over a tropical sea. They got into bed and she covered him with her heavy body, trembling a little because she was afraid.

‘I want to sleep,’ he said. ‘Let me sleep first.’

* * *

The Russian captain said, ‘He stole a motorbike at Wilmsdorf and asked for Fritsche at the station. What will he do now?’

‘He’ll have another schedule. Tonight,’ the sergeant replied. ‘If he’s got anything to say.’

‘At the same time?’

‘Of course not. Nor the same frequency. Nor from the same place. He may go to Witmar or Langdorn or Wolken; he may even go to Rostock. Or he may stay in town but go to another house. Or he may not send at all.’

‘House? Who would harbour a spy?’

The sergeant shrugged as if to say he might himself. Stung, the captain asked, ‘How do you know he’s sending from a house? Why not a wood or a field? How can you be so sure?’

‘It’s a very strong signal. A powerful set. He couldn’t get a signal like that from a battery, not a battery you could carry around alone. He’s using the mains.’

‘Put a cordon round the town,’ the captain said. ‘Search every house.’

‘We want him alive.’ The sergeant was looking at his hands. ‘You want him alive.’

‘Then tell me what we should do?’ the captain insisted.

‘Make sure he transmits. That’s the first thing. And make him stay in town. That is the second.’

‘Well?’

‘We would have to act quickly,’ the sergeant observed.

‘Well?’

‘Bring some troops into town. Anything you can find. As soon as possible. Armour, infantry, it doesn’t matter. Create some movement. Make him pay attention. But be quick!’

* * *

‘I’ll go soon,’ Leiser said. ‘Don’t let me stay. Give me coffee and I’ll go.’

‘Coffee?’

‘I’ve got money,’ Leiser said, as if it were the only thing he had. ‘Here.’ He climbed out of bed, fetched the wallet from his jacket and drew a hundred-mark note from the wad.

‘Keep it.’

She took the wallet and with a little laugh emptied it out on the bed. She had a ponderous, kittenish way which was not quite sane; and the quick instinct of an illiterate. He watched her indifferently, running his fingers along the line of her naked shoulder. She held up a photograph of a woman; a blonde, round head.

‘Who is she? What is her name?’

‘She doesn’t exist,’ he said.

She found the letters and read one aloud, laughing at the affectionate passages. ‘Who is she?’ she kept taunting him. ‘Who is she?’

‘I tell you, she doesn’t exist.’

‘Then I can tear them up?’ She held a letter before him with both hands, teasing him, waiting for him to protest. Leiser said nothing. She made a little tear, still watching him, then tore it completely, and a second and a third.

She found a picture of a child, a girl in spectacles, eight or nine years old perhaps, and again she asked, ‘Who is it? Is it your child? Does she exist?’

‘Nobody. Nobody’s kid. Just a photograph.’ She tore that too, scattering the pieces dramatically over the bed, then fell on him, kissing him on the face and neck. ‘Who are you? What is your name?’

He wanted to tell her when she pushed him away.

‘No!’ she cried. ‘No!’ She lowered her voice. ‘I want you with nothing. Alone from it all. You and me alone. We’ll make our own names, our own rules. Nobody, no one at all, no father, no mother. We’ll print our own newspapers, passes, ration cards; make our own people.’ She was whispering, her eyes shining.

‘You’re a spy,’ she said, her lips in his ear. ‘A secret agent. You’ve got a gun.’

‘A knife is quieter,’ he said. She laughed, on and on, until she noticed the bruises on his shoulders. She touched them curiously, with respect, as a child might touch a dead thing.

She went out carrying a shopping basket, still clutching the mackintosh at her neck. Leiser dressed, shaving in cold water, staring at his lined face in the distorted mirror above the basin. When she returned it was nearly midday and she looked worried.

‘The town’s full of soldiers. And Army trucks. What do they want here?’

‘Perhaps they are looking for someone.’

‘They are just sitting about, drinking.’

‘What kind of soldiers?’

‘I don’t know what kind. Russian. How can I tell?’

He went to the door. ‘I’ll come back in an hour.’

She said, ‘You’re trying to get away from me.’ She held his arm, looking up at him, wanting to make a scene.

‘I’ll come back. Maybe not till later. Maybe this evening. But if I do . . .’

‘Yes?’

‘It will be dangerous. I shall have to . . . do something here. Something dangerous.’

She kissed him, a light, silly kiss. ‘I like danger,’ she said.

* * *

‘Four hours,’ Johnson said. ‘If he’s still alive.’

‘Of course he’s alive,’ Avery said angrily. ‘Why do you talk like that?’

Haldane interrupted. ‘Don’t be an ass, Avery. It’s a technical term. Dead or live agents. It has nothing to do with his physical condition.’

Leclerc was drumming his fingers lightly on the table.

‘He’ll be all right,’ he said. ‘Fred’s a hard man to kill. He’s an old hand.’ The daylight had revived him apparently. He glanced at his watch. ‘What the devil’s happened to that courier, I wonder.’

* * *

Leiser blinked at the soldiers like a man emerging from the dark. They filled the cafés, gazed into shop windows, looked at the girls. Trucks were parked in the square, their wheels thick with red mud, a thin surface of snow on their bonnets. He counted them and there were nine. Some had heavy couplings at the rear for pulling trailers; some a line of Cyrillic script on their battered doors, or the imprint of unit insignia and a number. He noted the emblems of the drivers’ uniforms, the colour of their shoulder-boards; they came, he realised, from a variety of units.

Walking back to the main street he pushed his way into a café and ordered a drink. Half a dozen soldiers sat disconsolately at a table sharing three bottles of beer. Leiser grinned at them; it was like the encouragement of a tired whore. He lifted his fist in a Soviet salute and they watched him as if he were mad. He left his drink and made his way back to the square; a group of children had gathered round the trucks and the drivers kept telling them to go away.

He made a tour of the town, went into a dozen cafés, but no one would talk to him because he was a stranger. Everywhere the soldiers sat or stood in groups, aggrieved and bewildered, as if they had been roused to no purpose.

He ate some sausage and drank a Steinhäger, walked to the station to see if anything was going on. The same man was there, watching him, this time without suspicion, from behind his little window; and somehow Leiser knew, though it made no difference, that the man had told the police.

Returning from the station, he passed a cinema. A group of girls had gathered round the photographs and he stood with them pretending to look. Then the noise came, a metallic, irregular drone, filling the street with the piping, rattling of engines, metal and war. He drew back into the cover of the foyer, saw the girls turn and the ticket-seller stand up in her box. An old man crossed himself; he had lost one eye, and wore his hat at an angle. The tanks rolled through the town; they carried troops with rifles. The gun barrels were too long, marked white with snow. He watched them pass, then made his way across the square, quickly.

She smiled as he came in; he was out of breath.

‘What are they doing?’ she asked. She caught sight of his face. ‘You’re afraid,’ she whispered, but he shook his head. ‘You’re afraid,’ she repeated.

‘I killed the boy,’ he said.

He went to the basin, examined his face with the great care of a man under sentence. She followed him, clasped him round the chest, pressing herself against his back. He turned and seized her, wild, held her without skill, forced her across the room. She fought him with the rage of a daughter, calling some name, hating someone, cursing him, taking him, the world burning and only they alive; they were weeping, laughing together, falling, clumsy lovers clumsily triumphant, recognising nothing but each himself, each for that moment completing lives half lived, and for that moment the whole damned dark forgotten.

* * *

Johnson leant out of the window and gently drew on the aerial to make sure it was still fast, then began looking over his receiver like a racing driver before the start, needlessly touching terminals and adjusting dials. Leclerc watched him admiringly.

‘Johnson, that was nobly done last time. Nobly done. We owe you a vote of thanks.’ Leclerc’s face was shiny, as if he had only recently shaved. He looked oddly fragile in the pale light. ‘I propose to hear one more schedule and get back to London.’ He laughed. ‘We’ve work to do, you know. This isn’t the season for continental holidays.’

Johnson might not have heard. He held up his hand. ‘Thirty minutes,’ he said. ‘I shall be asking you for a little hush soon, gentlemen.’ He was like a conjurer at a children’s party. ‘Fred’s a devil for punctuality,’ he observed loudly.

Leclerc addressed himself to Avery. ‘You’re one of those lucky people, John, who have seen action in peacetime.’ He seemed anxious to talk.

‘Yes. I’m very grateful.’

‘You don’t have to be. You’ve done a good job, and we recognise that. There’s no question of gratitude. You’ve achieved something very rare in our work; I wonder if you know what it is?’

Avery said he did not.

‘You’ve induced an agent to like you. In the ordinary way – Adrian will bear me out – the relationship between an agent and his controllers is clouded with suspicion. He resents them, that’s the first thing, for not doing the job themselves. He suspects them of ulterior motives, ineptitude, duplicity. But we’re not the Circus, John: that’s not the way we do things.’

Avery nodded. ‘No, quite.’

‘You’ve done something else, you and Adrian. I would like to feel that if a similar need arose in the future we could use the same technique, the same facilities, the same expertise – that means the Avery–Haldane combination. What I’m trying to say is’ – Leclerc raised one hand and with his forefinger and thumb lightly touched the bridge of his nose in an unusual gesture of English diffidence – ‘the experience you’ve made is to our mutual advantage. Thank you.’

Haldane moved to the stove and began warming his hands, rubbing them gently as if he were separating wheat.

‘That Budapest thing,’ Leclerc continued, raising his voice, partly in enthusiasm and partly perhaps to dispel the atmosphere of intimacy which suddenly threatened them, ‘it’s a complete reorganisation. Nothing less. They’re moving their armour to the border, d’you see. The Ministry is talking about forward strategy. They’re really most interested.’

Avery said, ‘More interested than in the Mayfly area?’

‘No, no,’ Leclerc protested lightly. ‘It’s all part of the same complex – they think very big over there, you know – a move here and a move there – it all has to be pieced together.’

‘Of course,’ Avery said gently. ‘We can’t see it ourselves, can we? We can’t see the whole picture.’ He was trying to make it better for Leclerc. ‘We haven’t the perspective.’

‘When we get back to London,’ Leclerc proposed, ‘you must come and dine with me, John: you and your wife; both come. I’ve been meaning to suggest it for some time. We’ll go to my club. They do a rather good dinner in the Ladies’ Room; your wife would enjoy it.’

‘You mentioned it. I asked Sarah. We’d love to. My mother-in-law’s with us just now. She could baby-sit.’

‘How nice. Don’t forget.’

‘We’re looking forward to it.’

‘Am I not invited?’ Haldane asked coyly.

‘Why, of course, Adrian. Then we shall be four. Excellent.’ His voice changed. ‘Incidentally, the landlords have complained about the house in Oxford. They say we left it in a poor state.’

‘Poor state?’ Haldane echoed angrily.

‘It appears we have been overloading the electrical circuit. Parts of it are quite burnt out. I told Woodford to cope with it.’

‘We should have our own place,’ said Avery. ‘Then we wouldn’t have to worry.’

‘I agree. I spoke to the Minister about it. A training centre is what we need. He was enthusiastic. He’s keen on this kind of thing, now, you know. They have a new phrase for it over there. They are speaking of ICOs. Immediate Clarification Operations. He suggests we find a place and take it for six months. He proposes to speak to the Treasury about a lease.’

‘That’s terrific,’ Avery said.

‘It could be very useful. We must be sure not to abuse our trust.’

‘Of course.’

There was a draught, followed by the sound of someone cautiously ascending the stairs. A figure appeared in the attic doorway. He wore an expensive overcoat of brown tweed, a little too long in the sleeve. It was Smiley.

22

Smiley peered round the room, at Johnson, now in earphones, busy with the controls of his set, at Avery staring over Haldane’s shoulder at the signal plan, at Leclerc, who stood like a soldier, who alone had noticed him, whose face, though turned to him, was empty and far away.

‘What do you want here?’ Leclerc said at last. ‘What do you want with me?’

‘I’m sorry. I was sent.’

‘So were we all,’ Haldane said, not moving.

A note of warning entered Leclerc’s voice. ‘This is my operation, Smiley. We’ve no room for your people here.’

There was nothing in Smiley’s face but compassion, nothing in his voice but that dreadful patience with which we speak to the insane.

‘It wasn’t Control who sent me,’ he said. ‘It was the Ministry. They asked for me, you see, and Control let me go. The Ministry laid on a plane.’

‘Why?’ Haldane inquired. He seemed almost amused.

One by one they stirred, waking from a single dream. Johnson laid his earphones carefully on the table.

‘Well?’ Leclerc asked. ‘Why did they send you?’

‘They called me round last night.’ He managed to indicate that he was as bewildered as they. ‘I had to admire the operation, the way you’d conducted it; you and Haldane. All done from nothing. They showed me the files. Scrupulously kept . . . Library Copy, Operational Copy, sealed minutes: just like in the war. I congratulate you . . . I really do.’

‘They showed you the files? Our files?’ Leclerc repeated. ‘That’s a breach of security: interconsciousness between Departments. You’ve committed an offence, Smiley. They must be mad! Adrian, do you hear what Smiley has told me?’

Smiley said, ‘Is there a schedule tonight, Johnson?’

‘Yes, sir. Twenty-one hundred.’

‘I was surprised, Adrian, that you felt the indicators were strong enough for such a big operation.’

‘Haldane was not responsible,’ Leclerc said crisply. ‘The decision was a collective one; ourselves on the one side, the Ministry on the other.’ His voice changed key. ‘When the schedule is finished I shall want to know, Smiley, I have a right to know, how you came to see those files.’ It was his committee voice, powerful and fluent; for the first time it had the ring of dignity.

Smiley moved towards the centre of the room. ‘Something’s happened; something you couldn’t know about. Leiser killed a man on the border. Killed him with a knife as he went over, two miles from here, at the crossing point.’

Haldane said, ‘That’s absurd. It needn’t be Leiser. It could have been a refugee coming west. It could have been anyone.’

‘They found tracks leading east. Traces of blood in the hut by the lake. It’s in all the East German papers. They’ve been putting it over the wireless since midday yesterday . . .’

Leclerc cried, ‘I don’t believe it. I don’t believe he did it. It’s some trick of Control’s.’

‘No,’ Smiley replied gently. ‘You’ve got to believe me. It’s true.’

‘They killed Taylor,’ Leclerc said. ‘Have you forgotten that?’

‘No, of course not. But we shall never know, shall we? How he died, I mean . . . whether he was murdered . . .’ Hurriedly he continued, ‘Your Ministry informed the Foreign Office yesterday afternoon. The Germans are bound to catch him, you see; we have to assume that. His transmissions are slow . . . very slow. Every policeman, every soldier is after him. They want him alive. We think they’re going to stage a show trial, extract a public confession, display the equipment. It could be very embarrassing. You don’t have to be a politician to sympathise with the Minister. So there’s the question of what to do.’

Leclerc said, ‘Johnson, keep an eye on the clock.’ Johnson put his earphones on again, but without conviction.

Smiley appeared to want someone else to speak, but no one did, so he repeated ponderously, ‘It’s a question of what to do. As I say, we’re not politicians, but one can see the dangers. A party of Englishmen in a farmhouse two miles from where the body was found, posing as academics, stores from the Naafi and a house full of radio equipment. You see what I mean? Making your transmissions,’ he went on, ‘on a single frequency . . . the frequency Leiser receives on . . . There could be a very big scandal indeed. One can imagine even the West Germans getting awfully angry.’

Haldane spoke first again: ‘What are you trying to say?’

‘There’s a military plane waiting at Hamburg. You fly in two hours; all of you. A truck will collect the equipment. You’re to leave nothing behind, not even a pin. Those are my instructions.’

Leclerc said, ‘What about the target? Have they forgotten why we’re here? They’re asking a lot, you know, Smiley: a great lot.’

‘Yes, the target,’ Smiley conceded. ‘We’ll have a conference in London. Perhaps we could do a joint operation.’

‘It’s a military target. I shall want my Ministry represented. No monolith; it’s a policy decision, you know.’

‘Of course. And it’ll be your show.’

‘I suggest the product go out under our joint title: my Ministry could retain autonomy in the matter of distribution. I imagine that would meet their more obvious objections. How about your people?’

‘Yes, I think Control would accept that.’

Leclerc said casually, everyone watching, ‘And the schedule? Who takes care of that? We’ve an agent in the field, you know.’ It was only a small point.

‘He’ll have to manage by himself.’

‘The war rules.’ Leclerc spoke proudly. ‘We play the war rules. He knew that. He was well trained.’ He seemed reconciled; the thing was dismissed.

Avery spoke for the first time. ‘You can’t leave him out there alone.’ His voice was flat.

Leclerc intervened: ‘You know Avery, my aide?’ This time no one came to his rescue. Smiley, ignoring him, observed, ‘The man’s probably been caught already. It’s only a matter of hours.’

‘You’re leaving him there to die!’ Avery was gathering courage.

‘We’re disowning him. It’s never a pretty process. He’s as good as caught already, don’t you see?’

‘You can’t do it,’ he shouted. ‘You can’t just leave him there for some squalid diplomatic reason!’

Now Haldane swung round on Avery, furious. ‘You of all people should not complain! You wanted a faith, didn’t you? You wanted an eleventh Commandment that would match your rare soul!’ He indicated Smiley and Leclerc. ‘Well, here you have it: here is the law you were looking for. Congratulate yourself; you found it. We sent him because we needed to; we abandon him because we must. That is the discipline you admired.’ He turned to Smiley. ‘You too: I find you contemptible. You shoot us, then preach to the dying. Go away. We’re technicians, not poets. Go away!’

Smiley said, ‘Yes. You’re a very good technician, Adrian. There’s no pain in you any more. You’ve made technique a way of life . . . like a whore . . . technique replacing love.’ He hesitated. ‘Little flags . . . the old war piping in the new. There was all that, wasn’t there? And then the man . . . he must have been heady wine. Comfort yourself, Adrian, you weren’t fit.’

He straightened his back, making a statement. ‘A British-naturalised Pole with a criminal record escapes across the border to East Germany. There is no extradition treaty. The Germans will say he is a spy and produce the equipment; we shall say they planted it and point out that it’s twenty-five years old. I understand he put out a cover story that he was attending a course in Coventry. That is easily disproved: there is no such course. The conclusion is that he proposed to flee the country; and we shall imply that he owed money. He was keeping some young girl, you know; she worked in a bank. That ties in quite nicely. I mean with the criminal record, since we have to make one up . . .’ He nodded to himself. ‘As I say, it’s not an attractive process. By then we shall all be in London.’

‘And he’ll be transmitting,’ Avery said, ‘and no one will listen.’

‘To the contrary,’ Smiley retorted bitterly. ‘They’ll be listening.’

Haldane asked: ‘Control too, no doubt. Isn’t that right?’

‘Stop!’ Avery shouted suddenly. ‘Stop, for God’s sake! If anything matters, if anything is real, we’ve got to hear him now! For the sake of . . .’

‘Well?’ Haldane inquired with a sneer.

‘Love. Yes, love! Not yours, Haldane, mine. Smiley’s right! You made me do it for you, made me love him! It wasn’t in you any more! I brought him to you, I kept him in your house, made him dance to the music of your bloody war! I piped for him, but there’s no breath in me now. He’s Peter Pan’s last victim, Haldane, the last one, the last love; the last music gone.’

Haldane was looking at Smiley: ‘My congratulations to Control,’ he said. ‘Thank him, will you? Thank him for the help, the technical help, Smiley; for the encouragement, thank him for the rope. For the kind words too: for lending you to bring the flowers. So nicely done.’

But Leclerc seemed impressed by the neatness of it.

‘Let’s not be hard on Smiley, Adrian. He’s only doing his job. We must all get back to London. There’s the Fielden report . . . I’d like to show you that, Smiley. Troop dispositions in Hungary: something new.’

‘And I’d like to see it,’ Smiley replied politely.

‘He’s right, you know, Avery,’ Leclerc repeated. His voice was quite eager. ‘Be a soldier. Fortunes of war; keep to the rules! We play the war rules in this game. Smiley, I owe you an apology. And Control too, I fear. I had thought the old rivalry was awake. I’m wrong.’ He inclined his head. ‘You must dine with me in London. My club is not your mark, I know, but it’s quiet there; a good set. Very good. Haldane must come. Adrian, I invite you!’

Avery had buried his face in his hands.

‘There’s something else I want to discuss with you, Adrian – Smiley, you won’t mind this I’m sure, you’re practically one of the family – the question of Registry. The system of library files is really out of date. Bruce was on to me about it just before I left. Poor Miss Courtney can hardly keep pace. I fear the answer is more copies . . . top copy to the case officer, carbons for information. There’s a new machine on the market, cheap photostats, threepence halfpenny a copy, that seems quite reasonable in these dog days . . . I must speak to the people about it . . . the Ministry . . . they know a good thing when they see one. Perhaps—’ he broke off. ‘Johnson, I could wish you made less noise, we’re still operational, you know.’ He spoke like a man intent upon appearances, conscious of tradition.

Johnson had gone to the window. Leaning on the sill he reached outside and with his customary precision began winding in the aerial. He held a spool in his left hand like a bobbin. As he gathered in the wire he gently turned it as an old woman spins her thread. Avery was sobbing like a child. No one heeded him.

23

The green van moved slowly down the road, crossed the Station Square where the empty fountain stood. On its roof the small loop aerial turned this way and that like a hand feeling for the wind. Behind it, well back, were two trucks. The snow was settling at last. They drove on sidelights, twenty yards apart, following each other’s tyre marks.

The captain sat in the back of the van with a microphone for speaking to the driver, and beside him the sergeant, lost in private memories. The corporal crouched at his receiver, his hand constantly turning the dial as he watched the line tremble in the small screen.

‘The transmission’s stopped,’ he said suddenly.

‘How many groups have you recorded?’ the sergeant asked.

‘A dozen. The call sign over and over again, then part of a message. I don’t think he’s getting any reply.’

‘Five letters or four?’

‘Still four.’

‘Did he sign off?’

‘No.’

‘What frequency was he using?’

‘Three six five zero.’

‘Keep scanning across it. Two hundred either side.’

‘There’s nothing there.’

‘Keep searching,’ he said sharply. ‘Right across the band. He’s changed the crystal. He’ll take a few minutes to tune up.’

The operator began spinning the large dial, slowly, watching the eye of green light in the centre of the set which opened and closed as he crossed one station after another. ‘Here he is. Three eight seven zero. Different call sign but the same handwriting. Quicker than yesterday; better.’

The tape recorder wound monotonously at his elbow. ‘He’s working on alternating crystals,’ the sergeant said. ‘Like they did in the war. It’s the same trick.’ He was embarrassed, an elderly man confronted with his past.

The corporal slowly raised his head. ‘This is it,’ he said. ‘Zero. We’re right on top of him.’

Quietly the two men dismounted from the van. ‘Wait here,’ the sergeant told the corporal. ‘Keep listening. If the signal breaks, even for a moment, tell the driver to flash the headlights, do you understand?’

‘I’ll tell him.’ The corporal looked frightened.

‘If it stops altogether, keep searching and let me know.’

‘Pay attention,’ the captain warned as he dismounted. The sergeant was waiting impatiently; behind him, a tall building standing on waste land.

In the distance, half hidden in the falling snow, lay row after row of small houses. No sound came.

‘What do they call this place?’ the captain asked.

‘A block of flats; workers’ flats. They haven’t named it yet.’

‘No, beyond.’

‘Nothing. Follow me,’ the sergeant said.

Pale lights shone in almost every window; six floors. Stone steps, thick with leaves, led to the cellar. The sergeant went first, shining his torch ahead of them on to the shoddy walls. The captain nearly fell. The first room was large and airless, half of brick and half unrendered plaster. At the far end were two steel doors. On the ceiling a single bulb burnt behind a wire cage. The sergeant’s torch was still on; he shone it needlessly into the corners.

‘What are you looking for?’ the captain asked.

The steel doors were locked.

‘Find the janitor,’ the sergeant ordered. ‘Quickly.’

The captain ran up the stairs and returned with an old man, unshaven, gently grumbling; he held a bunch of long keys on a chain. Some were rusty.

‘The switches,’ said the sergeant. ‘For the building. Where are they?’

The old man sorted through the keys. He pushed one into the lock and it would not fit, he tried another and a third.

‘Quick, you fool,’ the captain shouted.

‘Don’t fuss him,’ said the sergeant.

The door opened. They pushed into the corridor, their torches playing over the whitewash. The janitor was holding up a key, grinning. ‘Always the last one,’ he said. The sergeant found what he was looking for, hidden on the wall behind the door: a box with a glass front. The captain put his hand to the main lever, had half pulled it when the other struck him roughly away.

‘No! Go to the top of the stairs; tell me when the driver flashes his headlights.’

‘Who’s in charge here?’ the captain complained.

‘Do as I ask.’ He had opened the box and was tugging gently at the first fuse, blinking through his gold-rimmed spectacles; a benign man.

With diligent, surgical fingers the sergeant drew out the fuse, cautiously, as if he were expecting an electric shock, then immediately replaced it, his eyes turning towards the figure at the top of the steps; then a second and still the captain said nothing. Outside the motionless soldiers watched the windows of the block, saw how floor by floor the lights went out, then quickly on again. The sergeant tried another and a fourth and this time he heard an excited cry from above him: ‘The headlights! The headlights have gone out.’

‘Quite! Go and ask the driver which floor. But quietly.’

‘They’ll never hear us in this wind,’ the captain said irritably, and a moment later: ‘The driver says third floor. The third-floor light went out and the transmission stopped at the same time. It’s started again now.’

‘Put the men round the building,’ the sergeant said. ‘And pick five men to come with us. He’s on the third floor.’

Softly, like animals, the Vopos dismounted from the two trucks, their carbines held loosely in their hands, advancing in a ragged line, ploughing the thin snow, turning it to nothing; some to the foot of the building, some standing off, staring at the windows. A few wore helmets, and their square silhouette was redolent of the war. From here and there came a click as the first bullet was sprung gently into the breech; the sound rose to a faint hail and died away.

* * *

Leiser unhooked the aerial and wound it back on the reel, screwed the Morse key into the lid, replaced the earphones in the spares box and folded the silk cloth into the handle of the razor.

‘Twenty years,’ he protested, holding up the razor, ‘and they still haven’t found a better place.’

‘Why do you do it?’

She was sitting contentedly on the bed in her nightdress, wrapped in the mackintosh as if it gave her company.

‘Who do you talk to?’ she asked again.

‘No one. No one heard.’

‘Why do you do it, then?’

He had to say something, so he said, ‘For peace.’

He put on his jacket, went to the window and peered outside. Snow lay on the houses. The wind blew angrily across them. He glanced into the courtyard below, where the silhouettes were waiting.

‘Whose peace?’ she asked.

‘The light went out, didn’t it, while I was working the set?’

‘Did it?’

‘A short break, a second or two, like a power cut?’

‘Yes.’

‘Put it out again now.’ He was very still. ‘Put the light out.’

‘Why?’

‘I like to look at the snow.’

She put the light out and he drew the threadbare curtains. Outside the snow reflected a pale glow into the sky. They were in half-darkness.

‘You said we’d love now,’ she complained.

‘Listen; what’s your name?’

He heard the rustle of raincoat.

‘What is it?’ His voice was rough.

‘Anna.’

‘Listen, Anna.’ He went to the bed. ‘I want to marry you,’ he said. ‘When I met you, in that inn, when I saw you sitting there, listening to the records, I fell in love with you, do you understand? I’m an engineer from Magdeburg, that’s what I said. Are you listening?’

He seized her arms and shook her. His voice was urgent.

‘Take me away,’ she said.

‘That’s right! I said I’d make love to you, take you away to all the places you dreamt of, do you understand?’ He pointed to the posters on the wall. ‘To islands, sunny places—’

‘Why?’ she whispered.

‘I brought you back here. You thought it was to make love, but I drew this knife and threatened you. I said if you made a sound, I’d kill you with the knife, like I – I told you I’d killed the boy and I’d kill you.’

‘Why?’

‘I had to use the wireless. I needed a house, see? Somewhere to work the wireless. I’d nowhere to go. So I picked you up and used you. Listen: if they ask you, that’s what you must say.’

She laughed. She was afraid. She lay back uncertainly on her bed, inviting him to take her, as if that were what he wanted.

‘If they ask, remember what I said.’

‘Make me happy. I love you.’

She put out her arms and pulled his head towards her. Her lips were cold and damp, too thin against her sharp teeth. He drew away but she still held him. He strained his ears for any sound above the wind, but there was none.

‘Let’s talk a bit,’ he said. ‘Are you lonely, Anna? Who’ve you got?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Parents, boy friend. Anyone.’

She shook her head in the darkness. ‘Just you.’

‘Listen; here, let’s button your coat up. I like to talk first. I’ll tell you about London. You want to hear about London, I’ll bet. I went for a walk, once, it was raining and there was this man by the river, drawing on the pavement in the rain. Fancy that! Drawing with chalk in the rain, and the rain just washing it away.’

‘Come now. Come.’

‘Do you know what he was drawing? Just dogs, cottages and that. And the people, Anna – listen to this! – standing in the rain, watching him.’

‘I want you. Hold me. I’m frightened.’

‘Listen! D’you know why I went for a walk: they wanted me to make love to a girl. They sent me to London and I went for this walk instead.’

He could make her out as she watched him, judging him according to some instinct he did not understand.

‘Are you alone too?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why did you come?’

‘They’re crazy people, the English! That old fellow by the river: they think the Thames is the biggest river in the world, you know that? And it’s nothing! Just a little brown stream, you could nearly jump across it some places!’

‘What’s that noise?’ she said suddenly. ‘I know that noise! It was a gun; the cocking of a gun!’

He held her tightly to stop her trembling.

‘It was just a door,’ he said, ‘the latch of a door. This place is made of paper. How could you hear anything in such a wind?’

There was a footfall in the corridor. She struck at him in terror, the raincoat swinging round her. As they came in he was standing away from her, the knife at her throat, his thumb uppermost, the blade parallel to the ground. His back was very straight and his small face was turned to her, empty, held by some private discipline, a man once more intent upon appearances, conscious of tradition.

* * *

The farmhouse lay in darkness, blind and not hearing, motionless against the swaying larches and the running sky.

They had left a shutter open and it banged slowly without rhythm, according to the strength of the storm. Snow gathered like ash and was dispersed. They had gone, leaving nothing behind but tyre tracks in the hardening mud, a twist of wire, and the sleepless tapping of the north wind.

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Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Introduction

PART I

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

PART II

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

PART III

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

PENGUIN BOOKS

TINKER, TAILOR, SOLDIER, SPY

JOHN LE CARRÉ, the pseudonym for David Cornwell, was a member of the British Foreign Service from 1959 to 1964. His third novel, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, became a worldwide bestseller. He has written twenty-one novels, which have been published in thirty-six languages. Many of his books have been made into films, including The Constant Gardener; The Russia House; The Little Drummer Girl; and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.

PENGUIN BOOKS

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

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Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices:

80 Strand, London WC2 R 0RL, England

First published in the United States of America by Alfred A. Knopf 1974

Published in Penguin Books 2011

Copyright © le Carré Productions, 1974

Introduction copyright © David Cornwell, 1991

All rights reserved

Grateful acknowledgment is made to The Clarendon Press for permission to reprint the
eight-line rhyme and descriptive paragraph from page 404 of the Oxford Dictionary of Nursery
Rhymes, edited by Iona and Peter Opie (1951).

PUBLISHER’S NOTE

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the
author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or
dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

eISBN : 978-1-101-52878-5

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http://us.penguingroup.com

For James Bennett and Dusty Rhodes, in memory

TINKER,
TAILOR,
SOLDIER,
SAILOR,
RICH MAN,
POOR MAN,
BEGGARMAN,
THIEF.

Small children’s fortune-telling rhyme used when counting cherry stones, waistcoat buttons, daisy petals, or the seeds of the Timothy grass.

—from the Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes

INTRODUCTION

I have always wanted to set a novel in Cornwall, and to this day Tinker Tailor is as near as I ever came to doing so. The unfinished version that had lain in my desk drawer for years before I started writing the story in earnest did not contain George Smiley at all, but opened instead with a solitary and embittered man living alone on a Cornish cliff, staring up at a single black car as it wove down the hillside towards him. I had chosen in my imagination a spot not unlike the little harbour of Porthgwarra in West Cornwall, where the cottages lie low on the sea’s edge, and the hills behind seem to be pressing them into the sea. My man was holding a bucket in his hand, on his way to feeding his chickens. He had a limp, as Jim Prideaux has a limp in the version you are about to read, and like Jim he was a former British agent who had walked into a trap set for him by a traitor inside his own service, called “The Circus.”

My original plan was for the Circus investigators to put this figure back into harness, in a way that would provoke the unknown traitor to try his hand again, and thus reveal himself. I wanted the entire story to play in contemporary time and not in the flashbacks I later resorted to. But when I got down to writing the book for real, I discovered that I was painting myself into a corner. I could think of no plausible way to pursue a linear path forward while at the same time peering back down the path that had brought my man to the point where the story began. So one day, after months of frustration, I took the whole manuscript into the garden and burned it, and began again.

I had also saddled myself with another headache. I was determined to describe something that in those days was still new to my readers and perhaps, despite all the press revelations about the penetration of our secret services, still is even now: namely, the inside-out logic of a double-agent operation, and the sheer scale of the mayhem that can be visited on an enemy service when its intelligence-gathering efforts fall under the control of its opponent.

Oh, we knew vaguely that Kim Philby had once been head of the counter-intelligence section of the British secret service and privy to American efforts to penetrate the KGB. We knew that at one time he was in line to become chief of the entire British service. Perhaps we even knew that he had personally advised the CIA’s foremost Moscow Centre watcher, James Jesus Angleton, on double-agent cases, in which Philby was held to possess exceptional expertise. We had read perhaps that George Blake, another KGB traitor inside SIS, had betrayed a number of British agents to his Soviet masters—he now claims hundreds, and who is to deny the wretched man his boast? His cause, like his victims, is dead. But what very few people managed to understand was the pushme-pullyou nature of the double-agent’s trade.

For while on one side the secret traitor will be doing his damnedest to frustrate the efforts of his own service, on the other he will be building himself a successful career in it, providing it with the coups and grace-notes that it needs to justify its existence, and generally passing himself off as a capable and trustworthy fellow, a good man on a dark night. The art of the game—best described in J. C. Masterman’s account of the British double-cross system operated against Germany in wartime—is therefore a balancing act between what is good for the double agent in his role as loyal member of his service, and what is good for your own side in its unrelenting efforts to pervert that service to the point where it is doing more harm to the country that employs it than good; or, as Smiley has it, where it has been pulled inside out.

Such an abject state of affairs was certainly reached by SIS in the high days of Blake and Philby, just as it was self-inflicted on the CIA by the paranoid influence of Angleton himself, who, in the aftermath of discovering that he had been eating out of the hand of the KGB’s most successful double agent, spent the rest of his life trying to prove that the Agency, like SIS, was being controlled by Moscow; and that its occasional successes were consequently no more than sweeteners tossed to it by the fiendish manipulators of the KGB. Angleton was wrong, but his effect on the CIA was as disastrous as if he had been right. Both services would have done much less damage to their countries, moral and financial, if they had simply been disbanded.

I never knew either Blake or Philby, but I always had a quite particular dislike for Philby, and an unnatural sympathy for Blake. The reasons, I fear, have much to do with the inverted snobbery of my class and generation. I disliked Philby because he had so many of my attributes. He was public-school educated, the son of a wayward and dictatorial father—the explorer and adventurer, St. John Philby—he drew people easily to him and he was adept at hiding his feelings, in particular, his seething distaste for the bigotries and prejudices of the English ruling classes. I’m afraid that all of these characteristics have at one time or another been mine. I felt I understood him too well, and in some odd way he seems to have sensed this, for in his last interview before he died he told his interviewer, Phil Knightley, that he had the feeling I knew something discreditable about him. And in a way, he was right: I knew what it was like, as he did, to be brought up by a man so oversized that your only resort as his child was to subterfuge and deceit. And I knew, or thought I knew, how easily the anger and inwardness thus born could turn themselves into a love-hate relationship with the father images of society, and finally with society itself, so that the childish avenger becomes the adult predator, a thing I touched upon in my most autobiographical novel, A Perfect Spy. I knew, if you like, that Philby had taken a road that was dangerously open to myself, though I had resisted it. I knew that he represented one of the—thank God, unrealised—possibilities of my nature.

I warmed to Blake, on the other hand, because he was half a Dutchman and half a Jew, and in both capacities a most unlikely recruit to the secret ranks of the British Establishment. Where Philby had been born inside the fortress and spent his life borrowing beneath its ramparts, Blake had been born in the wastes of foreign and ethnic disadvantage, and had gone to great lengths to gain acceptance by those who secretly despised him: his employers. So that when I started putting together my little bestiary of suspects, I made sure that there were at least two of them—Bland and Esterhase and perhaps Jim Prideaux also—who were alienated by birth from the class structure that they served.

So much for the documentary background. The rest is an informed fantasy. The origin of my use of the word “mole” to describe a long-term penetration agent is a small mystery to me, as it was to the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary, who wrote to me asking whether I had invented it. I could not say for certain. I had a memory that it was current KGB jargon in the days when I was briefly an intelligence officer. I even thought I had seen it written down, in an annexe to the Royal Commission report on the Petrovs, who defected to the Australians in Canberra some time in the Fifties. But the OED couldn’t find the trace and neither could I, so for a long time, I thought perhaps I had. Then one day, I received a letter from a reader, referring me to page 240 of Francis Bacon’s Historie of the Reigne of King Henry the Seventh, published in 1641:

As for his secret Spialls, which he did imploy both at home and abroad, by them to discover what Practices and Conspiracies were against him, surely his Case required it: Hee had such Moles perpectually working and casting to undermine him.

Well, I certainly hadn’t read Francis Bacon on moles. Where did he have them from? Or was he just having fun with an apt metaphor?

The other bits of jargon—lamplighter, scalp-hunter, baby-sitter, honey trap and the rest—were all invented, but they too, I am told, have at least in part since been adopted by the professionals. I made no particular cult of them as I wrote: I wished merely to underline the fact that spying for those who do it is a trade like any other, and that, like other trades, it has its little bits of language. The Russians were always more imaginative in this respect, living in daily contact with shoemakers (forgers), neighbours (members of a sister service), pianists (radio operators) and the like. My clandestine vocabulary was therefore a small conceit, but when the BBC’s television version reached the screen, it became for a while a national amusement, for which I was duly grateful.

How do I remember the book now, sixteen years on? Partly, I suppose, for the luck that followed it—the exposure of Blunt, the TV series, Alec Guinness triumphant as George Smiley, not to mention the marvellous direction and casting. And partly, because it restored my spirits after the miserable critical reception given to its predecessor, The Naive and Sentimental Lover. But mostly I remember it for the little boy Bill Roach, who had his counterpart in my own days as a schoolmaster, and later in A Perfect Spy as poor Pym’s son. Roach was not his name, of course, and he did not, so far as I know, spy on members of the staff. But I remember his watchfulness as if it had been my own, and I remember how deeply he got under my skin, perhaps because I could not help thinking of him as myself, when I was fifteen years younger.

And I remember Connie Sachs, too, my Circus researcher, an archetype for the last generation of secret service vestals—clever, unhappy ladies of the English upper classes, who, having joined the service in the war, stayed on to fight the peace, making a kind of granary of their extraordinary memories for us young turks to plunder.

It is odd, in these altered days, to discover that Tinker Tailor is already an historical novel, but I don’t think that makes it irrelevant, and I hope you have as much pleasure with it as I do myself, when I dip into it.

JOHN LE CARRÉ

July 1991

PART I

1

The truth is, if old Major Dover hadn’t dropped dead at Taunton races Jim would never have come to Thursgood’s at all. He came in mid-term without an interview—late May, it was, though no one would have thought it from the weather—employed through one of the shiftier agencies specialising in supply teachers for prep schools, to hold down old Dover’s teaching till someone suitable could be found. “A linguist,” Thursgood told the common-room, “a temporary measure,” and brushed away his forelock in self-defence. “Priddo.” He gave the spelling, “P-r-i-d”—French was not Thursgood’s subject so he consulted the slip of paper—“e-a-u-x, first name James. I think he’ll do us very well till July.” The staff had no difficulty in reading the signals. Jim Prideaux was a poor white of the teaching community. He belonged to the same sad bunch as the late Mrs. Loveday, who had a Persian-lamb coat and stood in for junior divinity until her cheques bounced, or the late Mr. Maltby, the pianist who had been called from choir practice to help the police with their enquiries, and as far as anyone knew was helping them to this day, for Maltby’s trunk still lay in the cellar awaiting instructions. Several of the staff, but chiefly Marjoribanks, were in favour of opening that trunk. They said it contained notorious missing treasures: Aprahamian’s silver-framed picture of his Lebanese mother, for instance; Best-Ingram’s Swiss army penknife and Matron’s watch. But Thursgood set his creaseless face resolutely against their entreaties. Only five years had passed since he had inherited the school from his father, but they had taught him already that some things are best locked away.

Jim Prideaux arrived on a Friday in a rainstorm. The rain rolled like gun-smoke down the brown combes of the Quantocks, then raced across the empty cricket fields into the sandstone of the crumbling façades. He arrived just after lunch, driving an old red Alvis and towing a second-hand trailer that had once been blue. Early afternoons at Thursgood’s are tranquil, a brief truce in the running fight of each school day. The boys are sent to rest in their dormitories, the staff sit in the common-room over coffee reading newspapers or correcting boys’ work. Thursgood reads a novel to his mother. Of the whole school, therefore, only little Bill Roach actually saw Jim arrive, saw the steam belching from the Alvis’s bonnet as it wheezed its way down the pitted drive, windscreen wipers going full pelt and the trailer shuddering through the puddles in pursuit.

Roach was a new boy in those days and graded dull, if not actually deficient. Thursgood’s was his second prep school in two terms. He was a fat round child with asthma, and he spent large parts of his rest kneeling on the end of his bed, gazing through the window. His mother lived grandly in Bath; his father was agreed to be the richest in the school, a distinction which cost the son dear. Coming from a broken home, Roach was also a natural watcher. In Roach’s observation Jim did not stop at the school buildings but continued across the sweep to the stable yard. He knew the layout of the place already. Roach decided later that he must have made a reconnaissance or studied maps. Even when he reached the yard, he didn’t stop but drove straight onto the wet grass, travelling at speed to keep the momentum. Then over the hummock into the Dip, head-first and out of sight. Roach half expected the trailer to jackknife on the brink, Jim took it over so fast, but instead it just lifted its tail and disappeared like a giant rabbit into its hole.

The Dip is a piece of Thursgood folklore. It lies in a patch of wasteland between the orchard, the fruit house, and the stable yard. To look at, it is no more than a depression in the ground, grass covered, with hummocks on the northern side, each about boy height and covered in tufted thickets which in summer grow spongy. It is these hummocks that give the Dip its special virtue as a playground and also its reputation, which varies with the fantasy of each new generation of boys. They are the traces of an open-cast silver mine, says one year, and digs enthusiastically for wealth. They are a Romano-British fort, says another, and stages battles with sticks and clay missiles. To others the Dip is a bomb-crater from the war and the hummocks are seated bodies buried in the blast. The truth is more prosaic. Six years ago, and not long before his abrupt elopement with a receptionist from the Castle Hotel, Thursgood’s father had launched an appeal for a swimming pool and persuaded the boys to dig a large hole with a deep and a shallow end. But the money that came in was never quite enough to finance the ambition, so it was frittered away on other schemes, such as a new projector for the art school, and a plan to grow mushrooms in the school cellars. And even, said the cruel ones, to feather a nest for certain illicit lovers when they eventually took flight to Germany, the lady’s native home.

Jim was unaware of these associations. The fact remains that by sheer luck he had chosen the one corner of Thursgood’s academy which, as far as Roach was concerned, was endowed with supernatural properties.

Roach waited at the window but saw nothing more. Both the Alvis and the trailer were in dead ground, and if it hadn’t been for the wet red tracks across the grass he might have wondered whether he had dreamed the whole thing. But the tracks were real, so when the bell went for the end of rest he put on his rubber boots and trudged through the rain to the top of the Dip and peered down, and there was Jim dressed in an army raincoat and a quite extraordinary hat, broadbrimmed like a safari hat but hairy, with one side pinned up in a rakish piratical curl and the water running off it like a gutter.

The Alvis was in the stable yard; Roach never knew how Jim spirited it out of the Dip, but the trailer was right down there, at what should have been the deep end, bedded on platforms of weathered brick, and Jim was sitting on the step drinking from a green plastic beaker, and rubbing his right shoulder as if he had banged it on something, while the rain poured off his hat. Then the hat lifted and Roach found himself staring at an extremely fierce red face, made still fiercer by the shadow of the brim and by a brown moustache washed into fangs by the rain. The rest of the face was criss-crossed with jagged cracks, so deep and crooked that Roach concluded in another of his flashes of imaginative genius that Jim had once been very hungry in a tropical place and filled up again since. The left arm still lay across his chest, the right shoulder was still drawn high against his neck. But the whole tangled shape of him was stock-still, he was like an animal frozen against its background: a stag, thought Roach, on a hopeful impulse; something noble.

“Who the hell are you?” asked a very military voice.

“Sir, Roach, sir. I’m a new boy.”

For a moment longer, the brick face surveyed Roach from the shadow of the hat. Then, to his intense relief, its features relaxed into a wolfish grin, the left hand, still clapped over the right shoulder, resumed its slow massage while at the same time he managed a long pull from the plastic beaker.

“New boy, eh?” Jim repeated into the beaker, still grinning. “Well, that’s a lucky break, I will say.”

Rising now, and turning his crooked back on Roach, Jim set to work on what appeared to be a detailed study of the trailer’s four legs, a very critical study that involved much rocking of the suspension, and much tilting of the strangely garbed head, and the emplacement of several bricks at different angles and points. Meanwhile the spring rain was clattering down on everything: his coat, his hat, and the roof of the old trailer. And Roach noticed that throughout these manoeuvres Jim’s right shoulder had not budged at all but stayed wedged high against his neck like a rock under the mackintosh. Therefore he wondered whether Jim was a sort of giant hunchback and whether all hunch backs hurt as Jim’s did. And he noticed as a generality, a thing to store away, that people with bad backs take long strides; it was something to do with balance.

“New boy, eh? Well, I’m not a new boy,” Jim went on, in altogether a much more friendly tone, as he pulled at a leg of the trailer. “I’m an old boy. Old as Rip van Winkle, if you want to know. Older. Got any friends?”

“No, sir,” said Roach simply, in the listless tone that schoolboys always use for saying “no,” leaving all positive response to their interrogators. Jim, however, made no response at all, so that Roach felt an odd stirring of kinship suddenly, and of hope.

“My other name’s Bill,” he said. “I was christened Bill but Mr. Thursgood calls me William.”

“Bill, eh. The unpaid Bill. Anyone ever call you that?”

“No, sir.”

“Good name, anyway.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Known a lot of Bills. They’ve all been good’uns.”

With that, in a manner of speaking, the introduction was made. Jim did not tell Roach to go away, so Roach stayed on the brow peering downward through his rain-smeared spectacles. The bricks, he noticed with awe, were pinched from the cucumber frame. Several had been loose already and Jim must have loosened them a bit more. It seemed a wonderful thing to Roach that anyone just arrived at Thursgood’s should be so self-possessed as to pinch the actual fabric of the school for his own purposes, and doubly wonderful that Jim had run a lead off the hydrant for his water, for that hydrant was the subject of a special school rule: to touch it at all was a beatable offence.

“Hey, you, Bill. You wouldn’t have such a thing as a marble on you, by any chance?”

“A, sir, what, sir?” Roach asked, patting his pockets in a dazed way.

“Marble, old boy. Round glass marble, little ball. Don’t boys play marbles any more? We did when I was at school.”

Roach had no marble, but Aprahamian had had a whole collection flown in from Beirut. It took Roach about fifty seconds to race back to the school, secure one against the wildest undertakings, and return panting to the Dip. There he hesitated, for in his mind the Dip was already Jim’s and Roach required leave to descend it. But Jim had disappeared into the trailer, so, having waited a moment, Roach stepped gingerly down the bank and offered the marble through the doorway. Jim didn’t spot him at once. He was sipping from the beaker and staring out the window at the black clouds as they tore this way and that over the Quantocks. This sipping movement, Roach noticed, was actually quite difficult, for Jim could not easily swallow standing up straight; he had to tilt his whole twisted trunk backward to achieve the angle. Meanwhile the rain came on really hard again, rattling against the trailer like gravel.

“Sir,” said Roach, but Jim made no move.

“Trouble with an Alvis is, no damn springs,” said Jim at last, more to the window than to his visitor. “You drive along with your rump on the white line, eh? Cripple anybody.” And, tilting his trunk again, he drank.

“Yes, sir,” said Roach, much surprised that Jim should assume he was a driver.

Jim had taken off his hat. His sandy hair was close-cropped; there were patches where someone had gone too low with the scissors. These patches were mainly on one side, so that Roach guessed that Jim had cut the hair himself with his good arm, which made him even more lopsided.

“I brought you a marble,” said Roach.

“Very good of you. Thanks, old boy.” Taking the marble, he slowly rolled it round his hard, powdery palm, and Roach knew at once that he was very skillful at all sorts of things; that he was the kind of man who lived on terms with tools and objects generally. “Not level, you see, Bill,” he confided, still intent upon the marble. “Skewy. Like me. Watch,” and turned purposefully to the larger window. A strip of aluminium beading ran along the bottom, put there to catch the condensation. Laying the marble in it, Jim watched it roll to the end and fall on the floor.

“Skewy,” he repeated. “Listing in the stern. Can’t have that, can we? Hey, hey, where d’you get to, you little brute?”

The trailer was not a homey place, Roach noticed, stooping to retrieve the marble. It might have belonged to anyone, though it was scrupulously clean. A bunk, a kitchen chair, a ship’s stove, a calor gas cylinder. Not even a picture of his wife, thought Roach, who had not yet met a bachelor, with the exception of Mr. Thursgood. The only personal things he could find were a webbing kit-bag hanging from the door, a set of sewing things stored beside the bunk, and a homemade shower made from a perforated biscuit tin and neatly welded to the roof. And on the table one bottle of colourless drink, gin or vodka, because that was what his father drank when Roach went to his flat for weekends in the holidays.

“East-west looks okay, but north-south is undoubtedly skewy,” Jim declared, testing the other window ledge. “What are you good at, Bill?”

“I don’t know, sir,” said Roach woodenly.

“Got to be good at something, surely; everyone is. How about football? Are you good at football, Bill?”

“No, sir,” said Roach.

“Are you a grind, then?” Jim asked carelessly, as he lowered himself with a short grunt onto the bed and took a pull from the beaker. “You don’t look a grind, I must say,” he added politely. “Although you’re a loner.”

“I don’t know,” Roach repeated, and moved half a pace towards the open door.

“What’s your best thing, then?” He took another long sip. “Must be good at something, Bill; everyone is. My best thing was ducks and drakes. Cheers.”

Now this was an unfortunate question to ask of Roach just then, for it occupied most of his waking hours. Indeed he had recently come to doubt whether he had any purpose on earth at all. In work and play he considered himself seriously inadequate; even the daily routine of the school, such as making his bed and tidying his clothes, seemed to be beyond his reach. Also he lacked piety: old Mrs. Thursgood had told him so; he screwed up his face too much at chapel. He blamed himself very much for these shortcomings, but most of all he blamed himself for the break-up of his parents’ marriage, which he should have seen coming and taken steps to prevent. He even wondered whether he was more directly responsible; whether, for instance, he was abnormally wicked or divisive or slothful, and that his bad character had wrought the rift. At his last school he had tried to explain this by screaming, and feigning fits of cerebral palsy, which his aunt had. His parents conferred, as they frequently did in their reasonable way, and changed his school. Therefore this chance question, levelled at him in the cramped trailer by a creature at least halfway to divinity—a fellow solitary, at that—brought him suddenly very near disaster. He felt the heat charging to his face; he watched his spectacles mist over and the trailer begin to dissolve into a sea of grief. Whether Jim noticed this, Roach never knew, for suddenly he had turned his crooked back on him, moved away to the table, and was helping himself from the plastic beaker while he threw out saving phrases.

“You’re a good watcher, anyway, I’ll tell you that for nothing, old boy. Us singles always are—no one to rely on, what? Nobody else spotted me. Gave me a real turn up there, parked on the horizon. Thought you were a juju man. Best watcher in the unit, Bill Roach is, I’ll bet. Long as he’s got his specs on. What?”

“Yes,” Roach agreed gratefully, “I am.”

“Well, you stay here and watch, then,” Jim commanded, clapping the safari hat back on his head, “and I’ll slip outside and trim the legs. Do that?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Where’s damn marble?”

“Here, sir.”

“Call out when she moves, right? North, south, whichever way she rolls. Understand?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Know which way’s north?”

“That way,” said Roach promptly, and struck out his arm at random.

“Right. Well, you call when she rolls,” Jim repeated, and disappeared into the rain. A moment later, Roach felt the ground swaying under his feet and heard another roar either of pain or anger, as Jim wrestled with a recalcitrant leg.

In the course of that same summer term, the boys paid Jim the compliment of a nickname. They had several shots before they were happy. They tried “Trooper,” which caught the bit of military in him, his occasional, quite harmless cursing, and his solitary rambles in the Quantocks. All the same, “Trooper” didn’t stick, so they tried “Pirate” and for a while “Goulash.” “Goulash” because of his taste for hot food, the smell of curries and onions and paprika that greeted them in warm puffs as they filed past the Dip on their way to evensong. “Goulash” for his perfect French, which was held to have a slushy quality. Spikely, of Five B, could imitate it to a hair: “You heard the question, Berger. What is Emile looking at?”—a convulsive jerk of the right hand—“Don’t gawp at me, old boy, I’m not a juju man. Qu’est-ce qu’il regarde, Emile dans le tableau que tu as sous le nez? Mon cher Berger, if you do not very soon summon one lucid sentence of French, je te mettrai tout de suite à la porte, tu comprends, you beastly toad?”

But these terrible threats were never carried out, either in French or in English. In a quaint way, they actually added to the aura of gentleness which quickly surrounded him, a gentleness only possible in big men seen through the eyes of boys.

Yet “Goulash” did not satisfy them, either. It lacked the hint of strength contained. It took no account of Jim’s passionate Englishness, which was the only subject where he could be relied on to waste time. Toad Spikely had only to venture one disparaging comment on the monarchy, extol the joys of some foreign country, preferably a hot one, for Jim to colour sharply and snap out a good three minutes’ worth on the privilege of being born an Englishman. He knew they were teasing him but he was unable not to rise. Often he ended his homily with a rueful grin, and muttered references to red herrings, and red faces too, when certain people would have to come in for extra work and miss their football. But England was his love; when it came down to it, no one suffered for her.

“Best place in the whole damn world!” he bellowed once. “Know why? Know why, toad?”

Spikely did not, so Jim seized a crayon and drew a globe. To the west, America, he said, full of greedy fools fouling up their inheritance. To the east, China-Russia; he drew no distinction: boiler suits, prison camps, and a damn long march to nowhere. In the middle . . .

Finally they hit on “Rhino.”

Partly this was a play on “Prideaux,” partly a reference to his taste for living off the land and his appetite for physical exercise, which they noted constantly. Shivering in the shower queue first thing in the morning, they would see the Rhino pounding down Combe Lane with a rucksack on his crooked back as he returned from his morning march. Going to bed, they could glimpse his lonely shadow through the plastic roof of the fives court as the Rhino tirelessly attacked the concrete wall. And sometimes, on warm evenings, from their dormitory windows they would covertly watch him at golf, which he played with a dreadful old iron, zigzagging across the playing fields, often after reading to them from an extremely English adventure book: Biggles, Percy Westerman, or Jeffrey Farnol, grabbed haphazard from the dingy library. At each stroke they waited for the grunt as he started his backswing, and they were seldom disappointed. They kept a meticulous score. At the staff cricket match he made twenty-five before dismissing himself with a ball deliberately lofted to Spikely at square leg. “Catch, toad, catch it—go on. Well done, Spikely, good lad—that’s what you’re there for.”

He was also credited, despite his taste for tolerance, with a sound understanding of the criminal mind. There were several examples of this, but the most telling occurred a few days before the end of term, when Spikely discovered in Jim’s waste-basket a draft of the next day’s examination paper, and rented it to candidates at five new pence a time. Several boys paid their shilling and spent an agonised night memorising answers by torchlight in their dormitories. But when the exam came round Jim presented a quite different paper.

“You can look at this one for nothing,” he bellowed as he sat down. And, having hauled open his Daily Telegraph, he calmly gave himself over to the latest counsels of the juju men, which they understood to mean almost anyone with intellectual pretension, even if he wrote in the Queen’s cause.

There was lastly the incident of the owl, which had a separate place in their opinion of him, since it involved death, a phenomenon to which children react variously. The weather continuing cold, Jim brought a bucket of coal to his classroom and one Wednesday lit it in the grate, and sat there with his back to the warmth, reading a dictée. First some soot fell, which he ignored; then the owl came down, a full-sized barn owl which had nested up there, no doubt, through many unswept winters and summers of Dover’s rule, and was now smoked out, dazed and black from beating itself to exhaustion in the flue. It fell over the coals and collapsed in a heap on the wooden floorboard with a clatter and a scuffle, then lay like an emissary of the devil, hunched but breathing, wings stretched, staring straight out at the boys through the soot that caked its eyes. There was no one who was not frightened; even Spikely, a hero, was frightened. Except for Jim, who had in a second folded the beast together and taken it out the door without a word. They heard nothing, though they listened like stowaways, till the sound of running water from down the corridor as Jim evidently washed his hands. “He’s having a pee,” said Spikely, which earned a nervous laugh. But as they filed out of the classroom they discovered the owl still folded, neatly dead and awaiting burial, on top of the compost heap beside the Dip. Its neck, as the braver ones established, was snapped. Only a gamekeeper, declared Sudeley, who had one, would know how to kill an owl so well.

Among the rest of the Thursgood community, opinion regarding Jim was less unanimous. The ghost of Mr. Maltby, the pianist, died hard. Matron, siding with Bill Roach, pronounced him heroic and in need of care: it was a miracle he managed with that back. Marjoribanks said he had been run over by a bus when he was drunk. It was Marjoribanks also, at the staff match where Jim so excelled, who pointed out the sweater. Marjoribanks was not a cricketer but he had strolled down to watch with Thursgood.

“Do you think that sweater’s kosher,” he asked in a high, jokey voice, “or do you think he pinched it?”

“Leonard, that’s very unfair,” Thursgood scolded, hammering at the flanks of his Labrador. “Bite him, Ginny, bite the bad man.”

By the time he reached his study, however, Thursgood’s laughter had quite worn off and he became extremely nervous. Bogus Oxford men he could deal with, just as in his time he had known classics masters who had no Greek and parsons who had no divinity. Such men, confronted with proof of their deception, broke down and wept and left, or stayed on half-pay. But men who withheld genuine accomplishment—these were a breed he had not met but he knew already that he did not like them. Having consulted the university calendar, he telephoned the agency—a Mr. Stroll, of the house of Stroll & Medley.

“What precisely do you want to know?” Mr. Stroll asked with a dreadful sigh.

“Well, nothing precisely.” Thursgood’s mother was sewing at a sampler and seemed not to hear. “Merely that if one asks for a written curriculum vitae one likes it to be complete. One doesn’t like gaps. Not if one pays one’s fee.”

At this point Thursgood found himself wondering rather wildly whether he had woken Mr. Stroll from a deep sleep to which he had now returned.

“Very patriotic bloke,” Mr. Stroll observed finally.

“I did not employ him for his patriotism.”

“He’s been in dock,” Mr. Stroll whispered on, as if through frightful draughts of cigarette smoke. “Laid up. Spinal.”

“Quite so. But I assume he has not been in hospital for the whole of the last twenty-five years. Touché,” he murmured to his mother, his hand over the mouthpiece, and once more it crossed his mind that Mr. Stroll had dropped off to sleep.

“You’ve only got him till the end of term,” Mr. Stroll breathed. “If you don’t fancy him, chuck him out. You asked for temporary, temporary’s what you’ve got. You said cheap, you’ve got cheap.”

“That’s as may be,” Thursgood retorted gamely. “But I’ve paid you a twenty-guinea fee; my father dealt with you for many years and I’m entitled to certain assurances. You’ve put here—may I read it to you?—you’ve put here: ‘Before his injury, various overseas appointments of a commercial and prospecting nature.’ Now that is hardly an enlightening description of a lifetime’s employment, is it?”

At her sewing his mother nodded her agreement. “It is not,” she echoed aloud.

“That’s my first point. Let me go on a little.”

“Not too much, darling,” warned his mother.

“I happen to know he was up at Oxford in 1938. Why didn’t he finish? What went wrong?”

“I seem to recall there was an interlude round about then,” said Mr. Stroll after another age. “But I expect you’re too young to remember it.”

“He can’t have been in prison all the time,” said his mother after a very long silence, still without looking up from her sewing.

“He’s been somewhere,” said Thursgood morosely, staring across the windswept gardens towards the Dip.

All through the summer holidays, as he moved uncomfortably between one household and another, embracing and rejecting, Bill Roach fretted about Jim: whether his back was hurting; what he was doing for money now that he had no one to teach and only half a term’s pay to live on; worst of all, whether he would be there when the new term began, for Bill had a feeling he could not describe that Jim lived so precariously on the world’s surface that he might at any time fall off it into a void; he feared that Jim was like himself, without a natural gravity to hold him on. He rehearsed the circumstances of their first meeting, and in particular Jim’s enquiry regarding friendship, and he had a holy terror that just as he had failed his parents in love, so he had failed Jim, largely owing to the disparity in their ages. And that therefore Jim had moved on and was already looking somewhere else for a companion, scanning other schools with his pale eyes. He imagined also that, like himself, Jim had had a great attachment that had failed him and that he longed to replace. But here Bill Roach’s speculation met a dead end: he had no idea how adults loved each other.

There was so little he could do that was practical. He consulted a medical book and interrogated his mother about hunchbacks and he longed but did not dare to steal a bottle of his father’s vodka and take it back to Thursgood’s as a lure. And when at last his mother’s chauffeur dropped him at the hated steps, he did not pause to say goodbye but ran for all he was worth to the top of the Dip, and there to his immeasurable joy was Jim’s trailer in its same spot at the bottom, a shade dirtier than before, and a fresh patch of earth beside it, he supposed for winter vegetables. And Jim sitting on the step, grinning up at him as if he had heard Bill coming and got the grin of welcome ready before he appeared at the brink.

That same term, Jim invented a nickname for Roach. He dropped “Bill” and called him “Jumbo” instead. He gave no reason for this and Roach, as is common in the case of christenings, was in no position to object. In return, Roach appointed himself Jim’s guardian; a regent-guardian was how he thought of the appointment; a stand-in replacing Jim’s departed friend, whoever that friend might be.

2

Unlike Jim Prideaux, Mr. George Smiley was not naturally equipped for hurrying in the rain, least of all at dead of night. Indeed, he might have been the final form for which Bill Roach was the prototype. Small, podgy, and at best middle-aged, he was by appearance one of London’s meek who do not inherit the earth. His legs were short, his gait anything but agile, his dress costly, ill-fitting, and extremely wet. His overcoat, which had a hint of widowhood about it, was of that black loose weave which is designed to retain moisture. Either the sleeves were too long or his arms were too short, for, as with Roach, when he wore his mackintosh, the cuffs all but concealed the fingers. For reasons of vanity he wore no hat, believing rightly that hats made him ridiculous. “Like an egg-cosy,” his beautiful wife had remarked not long before the last occasion on which she left him, and her criticism, as so often, had endured. Therefore the rain had formed in fat, unbanishable drops on the thick lenses of his spectacles, forcing him alternately to lower or throw back his head as he scuttled along the pavement that skirted the blackened arcades of Victoria Station. He was proceeding west, to the sanctuary of Chelsea, where he lived. His step, for whatever reason, was a fraction uncertain, and if Jim Prideaux had risen out of the shadows demanding to know whether he had any friends, he would probably have answered that he preferred to settle for a taxi.

“Roddy’s such a windbag,” he muttered to himself as a fresh deluge dashed itself against his ample cheeks, then trickled downward to his sodden shirt. “Why didn’t I just get up and leave?”

Ruefully, Smiley once more rehearsed the reasons for his present misery, and concluded with a dispassion inseparable from the humble part of his nature that they were of his own making.

It had been from the start a day of travail. He had risen too late after working too late the night before, a practice that had crept up on him since retirement last year. Discovering he had run out of coffee, he queued at the grocer’s till he ran out of patience also, then haughtily decided to attend to his personal administration. His bank statement, which had arrived with the morning’s post, revealed that his wife had drawn the lion’s share of his monthly pension: very well, he decreed, he would sell something. The response was irrational, for he was quite decently off and the obscure City bank responsible for his pension paid it with regularity. Wrapping up an early edition of Grimmelshausen, nevertheless, a modest treasure from his Oxford days, he solemnly set off for Heywood Hill’s bookshop in Curzon Street, where he occasionally contracted friendly bargains with the proprietor. On the way he became even more irritable, and from a call-box sought an appointment with his solicitor for that afternoon.

“George, how can you be so vulgar? Nobody divorces Ann. Send her flowers and come to lunch.”

This advice bucked him up and he approached Heywood Hill with a merry heart only to walk slap into the arms of Roddy Martindale emerging from Trumper’s after his weekly haircut.

Martindale had no valid claim on Smiley either professionally or socially. He worked on the fleshy side of the Foreign Office and his job consisted of lunching visiting dignitaries whom no one else would have entertained in his woodshed. He was a floating bachelor with a grey mane and that nimbleness which only fat men have. He affected buttonholes and pale suits, and he pretended on the flimsiest grounds to an intimate familiarity with the large back rooms of Whitehall. Some years ago, before it was disbanded, he had adorned a Whitehall working party to co-ordinate intelligence. In the war, having a certain mathematical facility, he had also haunted the fringes of the secret world; and once, as he never tired of telling, he had worked with John Landsbury on a Circus coding operation of transient delicacy. But the war, as Smiley sometimes had to remind himself, was thirty years ago.

“Hullo, Roddy,” said Smiley. “Nice to see you.”

Martindale spoke in a confiding upper-class bellow of the sort that, on foreign holidays, had more than once caused Smiley to sign out of his hotel and run for cover.

“My dear boy, if it isn’t the maestro himself! They told me you were locked up with the monks in Saint Gallen or somewhere, poring over manuscripts! Confess to me at once. I want to know all you’ve been doing, every little bit. Are you well? Do you love England still? How’s the delicious Ann?” His restless gaze flicked up and down the street before lighting on the wrapped volume of Grimmelshausen under Smiley’s arm. “Pound to a penny that’s a present for her. They tell me you spoil her outrageously.” His voice dropped to a mountainous murmur: “I say, you’re not back on the beat, are you? Don’t tell me it’s all cover, George, cover?” His sharp tongue explored the moist edges of his little mouth, then, like a snake, vanished between its folds.

So, fool that he was, Smiley bought his escape by agreeing to dine that same evening at a club in Manchester Square to which they both belonged but which Smiley avoided like the pest, not least because Roddy Martindale was a member. When evening came, he was still full of luncheon at the White Tower, where his solicitor, a very self-indulgent man, had decided that only a great meal would recover George from his doldrums. Martindale, by a different route, had reached the same conclusion, and for four long hours over food Smiley did not want they had bandied names as if they were forgotten footballers. Jebedee, who was Smiley’s old tutor: “Such a loss to us, bless him,” murmured Martindale, who so far as Smiley knew had never clapped eyes on Jebedee. “And what a talent for the game, eh? One of the real greats, I always say.” Then Fielding, the French mediaevalist from Cambridge: “Oh, but what a lovely sense of humour. Sharp mind, sharp!” Then Sparke from the School of Oriental Languages, and lastly Steed-Asprey, who had founded that very club in order to escape from bores like Roddy Martindale.

“I knew his poor brother, you know. Half the mind and twice the brawn, bless him. Brain went all the other way.”

And Smiley through a fog of drink had listened to this nonsense, saying “yes” and “no” and “what a pity” and “no, they never found him,” and once, to his abiding shame, “oh, come, you flatter me,” till with lugubrious inevitability Martindale came to more recent things—the change of power and Smiley’s withdrawal from the service.

Predictably, he started with the last days of Control: “Your old boss, George, bless him, the only one who ever kept his name a secret. Not from you, of course, he never had any secrets from you, George, did he? Close as thieves, Smiley and Control were, so they say, right to the end.”

“They’re very complimentary.”

“Don’t flirt, George; I’m an old trooper, you forget. You and Control were just like that.” Briefly the plump hands made a token marriage. “That’s why you were thrown out—don’t deceive me, that’s why Bill Haydon got your job. That’s why he’s Percy Alleline’s cup-bearer and you’re not.”

“If you say so, Roddy.”

“I do. I say more than that. Far more.”

As Martindale drew closer, Smiley caught the odour of one of Trumper’s most sensitive creations.

“I say something else: Control never died at all. He’s been seen.” With a fluttering gesture he silenced Smiley’s protests. “Let me finish. Willy Andrewartha walked straight into him in Jo’burg airport, in the waiting-room. Not a ghost. Flesh. Willy was at the bar buying a soda for the heat; you haven’t seen Willy recently but he’s a balloon. He turned round, and there was Control beside him dressed up like a ghastly Boer. The moment he saw Willy he bolted. How’s that? So now we know. Control never died at all. He was driven out by Percy Alleline and his three-piece band, so he went to ground in South Africa, bless him. Well, you can’t blame him, can you? You can’t blame a man for wanting a drop of peace in the evening of his life. I can’t.”

The monstrosity of this, reaching Smiley through a thickening wall of spiritual exhaustion, left him momentarily speechless.

“That’s ridiculous! That’s the most idiotic story I ever heard! Control is dead. He died of a heart attack after a long illness. Besides, he hated South Africa. He hated everywhere except Surrey, the Circus, and Lords Cricket Ground. Really, Roddy, you mustn’t tell stories like that.” He might have added: I buried him myself at a hateful crematorium in the East End, last Christmas Eve, alone. The parson had a speech impediment.

“Willy Andrewartha was always the most God-awful liar,” Martindale reflected, quite unruffled. “I said the same to him myself: ‘The sheerest nonsense, Willy; you should be ashamed of yourself.’ ” And straight on, as if never by thought or word had he subscribed to that silly view: “It was the Czech scandal that put the final nail into Control’s coffin, I suppose. That poor fellow who was shot in the back and got himself into the newspapers, the one who was so thick with Bill Haydon always, so we hear. Ellis, we’re to call him, and we still do, don’t we, even if we know his real name as well as we know our own.”

Shrewdly Martindale waited for Smiley to cap this, but Smiley had no intention of capping anything, so Martindale tried a third tack.

“Somehow I can never quite believe in Percy Alleline as Chief, can you? Is it age, George, or is it just my natural cynicism? Do tell me, you’re so good at people. I suppose power sits poorly on those we’ve grown up with. Is that a clue? There are so few who can carry it off for me these days and poor Percy’s such an obvious person, I always think, specially after that little serpent, Control. That heavy good fellowship—how can one take him seriously? One has only to think of him in the old days lolling in the bar of the Travellers’, sucking away on that log pipe of his and buying drinks for the moguls; well, really, one does like one’s perfidy to be subtle, don’t you agree? Or don’t you care as long as it’s successful? What’s his knack, George, what’s his secret recipe?” He was speaking most intently, leaning forward, his eyes greedy and excited. Only food could otherwise move him so deeply. “Living off the wits of his subordinates—well, maybe that’s leadership these days.”

“Really, Roddy, I can’t help you,” said Smiley weakly. “I never knew Percy as a force, you see. Only as a—” He lost the word.

“A striver,” Martindale suggested, eyes glistening. “With his sights on Control’s purple, day and night. Now he’s wearing it and the mob loves him. So who’s his strong left arm, George? Who’s earning him his reputation? Wonderfully well he’s doing, we hear it from all sides. Little reading rooms at the Admiralty, little committees popping up with funny names, red carpet for Percy wherever he goes in the Whitehall corridors, junior ministers receiving special words of congratulation from on high, people one’s never heard of getting grand medals for nothing. I’ve seen it all before, you know.”

“Roddy, I can’t help you,” Smiley insisted, making to get up. “You’re out of my depth, truly.” But Martindale was physically restraining him, holding him at the table with one damp hand while he talked still faster.

“So who’s the cleverboots? Not Percy, that’s for sure. And don’t tell me the Americans have started trusting us again, either.” The grip tightened. “Dashing Bill Haydon, our latter-day Lawrence of Arabia, bless him; there you are—it’s Bill, your old rival.” Martindale’s tongue poked out its head again, reconnoitred and withdrew, leaving a thin smile like a trail. “I’m told that you and Bill shared everything once upon a time,” he said. “Still, he never was orthodox, was he? Genius never is.”

“Anything further you require, Mr. Smiley?” the waiter asked.

“Then it’s Bland: the shop-soiled white hope, the redbrick don.” Still he would not release him. “And if those two aren’t providing the speed, it’s someone in retirement, isn’t it? I mean someone pretending to be in retirement, don’t I? And if Control’s dead, who is there left? Apart from you.”

They were putting on their coats. The porters had gone home; they had to fetch them for themselves from the empty brown racks.

“Roy Bland’s not redbrick,” Smiley said loudly. “He was at Saint Antony’s College, Oxford, if you want to know.”

Heaven help me, it was the best I could do, thought Smiley.

“Don’t be silly, dear,” Martindale snapped. Smiley had bored him: he looked sulky and cheated; distressing downward folds had formed on the lower contours of his cheeks. “Of course Saint Antony’s is redbrick; it makes no difference there’s a little bit of sandstone in the same street, even if he was your protégé. I expect he’s Bill Haydon’s now—don’t tip him, it’s my party, not yours. Father to them all, Bill is—always was. Draws them like bees. Well, he has the glamour, hasn’t he; not like some of us. Star quality I call it, one of the few. I’m told the women literally bow down before him, if that’s what women do.”

“Good night, Roddy.”

“Love to Ann, mind.”

“I won’t forget.”

“Well, don’t.”

And now it was pouring with rain, Smiley was soaked to the skin, and God as a punishment had removed all taxis from the face of London.

3

“Sheer lack of will-power,” he told himself as he courteously declined the suggestions of a lady in a doorway. “One calls it politeness, whereas in fact it is nothing but weakness. You featherhead, Martindale. You pompous, bogus, effeminate, nonproductive—” He stepped widely to avoid an unseen obstacle. “Weakness,” he resumed, “and an inability to live a self-sufficient life independent of institutions”—a puddle emptied itself neatly into his shoe—“and emotional attachments that have long outlived their purpose. Viz., my wife; viz., the Circus; viz., living in London. Taxi!”

Smiley lurched forward but was already too late. Two girls, giggling under one umbrella, clambered aboard in a flurry of arms and legs. Uselessly pulling up the collar of his black overcoat, he continued his solitary march. “Shop-soiled white hope,” he muttered furiously. “Little bit of sandstone in the street. You bombastic, inquisitive, impertinent—”

And then, of course, he remembered far too late that he had left the Grimmelshausen at his club.

“Oh, damn!” he cried sopra voce, halting in his tracks for greater emphasis. “Oh, damn—oh, damn—oh, damn.”

He would sell his London house: he had decided. Back there under the awning, crouching beside the cigarette machine, waiting for the cloudburst to end, he had taken this grave decision. Property values in London had risen out of proportion; he had heard it from every side. Good. He would sell and with a part of the proceeds buy a cottage in the Cotswolds. Burford? Too much traffic. Steeple Aston—that was a place. He would set up as a mild eccentric, discursive, withdrawn, but possessing one or two lovable habits such as muttering to himself as he bumbled along pavements. Out of date, perhaps, but who wasn’t these days? Out of date, but loyal to his own time. At a certain moment, after all, every man chooses: will he go forward, will he go back? There was nothing dishonourable in not being blown about by every little modern wind. Better to have worth, to entrench, to be an oak of one’s own generation. And if Ann wanted to return—well, he would show her the door.

Or not show her the door, according to—well, how much she wanted to return.

Consoled by these visions, Smiley arrived at the King’s Road, where he paused on the pavement as if waiting to cross. To either side, festive boutiques. Before him, his own Bywater Street, a cul-de-sac exactly 117 of his own paces long. When he had first come to live here, these Georgian cottages had a modest, down-at-heel charm, with young couples making do on fifteen pounds a week and a tax-free lodger hidden in the basement. Now steel screens protected their lower windows, and for each house three cars jammed the curb. From long habit, Smiley passed these in review, checking which were familiar, which were not; of the unfamiliar, which had aerials and extra mirrors, which were the closed vans that watchers like. Partly he did this as a test of memory to preserve his mind from the atrophy of retirement, just as on other days he learnt the names of the shops along his bus route to the British Museum; just as he knew how many stairs there were to each flight of his own house and which way each of the twelve doors opened.

But Smiley had a second reason, which was fear, the secret fear that follows every professional to his grave. Namely, that one day, out of a past so complex that he himself could not remember all the enemies he might have made, one of them would find him and demand the reckoning.

At the bottom of the street, a neighbour was exercising her dog; seeing him, she lifted her head to say something, but he ignored her, knowing it would be about Ann. He crossed the road. His house was in darkness; the curtains were as he had left them. He climbed the six steps to the front door. Since Ann’s departure, his cleaning woman had also left: no one but Ann had a key. There were two locks, a Banham deadlock and a Chubb Pipekey, and two splinters of his own manufacture, splits of oak each the size of a thumbnail, wedged into the lintel above and below the Banham. They were a hangover from his days in the field. Recently, without quite knowing why, he had started using them again; perhaps he didn’t want her to take him by surprise. With the tips of his fingers he discovered each in turn. The routine over, he unlocked the door, pushed it open, and felt the midday mail slithering over the carpet.

What was due? he wondered. German Life and Letters? Philology? Philology, he decided; it was already overdue. Putting on the hall light, he stooped and peered through his post. One “account rendered” from his tailor for a suit he had not ordered but that he suspected was one of those presently adorning Ann’s lover; one bill from a garage in Henley for her petrol (what, pray, were they doing in Henley, broke, on the ninth of October?); one letter from the bank regarding a local cashing facility in favour of the Lady Ann Smiley at a branch of the Midland Bank in Immingham.

And what the devil, he demanded of this document, are they doing in Immingham? Who ever had a love affair in Immingham, for goodness’ sake? Where was Immingham?

He was still pondering the question when his gaze fell upon an unfamiliar umbrella in the stand, a silk one with a stitched leather handle and a gold ring with no initial. And it passed through his mind with a speed which has no place in time that since the umbrella was dry it must have arrived there before six-fifteen when the rain began, for there was no moisture in the stand either. Also that it was an elegant umbrella and the ferrule was barely scratched, though it was not new. And that therefore the umbrella belonged to someone agile—even young, like Ann’s latest swain. But that since its owner had known about the wedges and known how to put them back once he was inside the house, and had the wit to lay the mail against the door after disturbing and no doubt reading it, then most likely he knew Smiley, too; and was not a lover but a professional like himself, who had at some time worked closely with him and knew his handwriting, as it is called in the jargon.

The drawing-room door was ajar. Softly he pushed it further open.

“Peter?” he said.

Through the gap he saw by the light of the street two suède shoes, lazily folded, protruding from one end of the sofa.

“I’d leave that coat on if I were you, George, old boy,” said an amiable voice. “We’ve got a long way to go.”

Five minutes later, dressed in a vast brown travelling coat, a gift from Ann and the only one he had that was dry, George Smiley was sitting crossly in the passenger seat of Peter Guillam’s extremely draughty sports car, which he had parked in an adjoining square. Their destination was Ascot, a place famous for women and horses. And less famous, perhaps, as the residence of Mr. Oliver Lacon, of the Cabinet Office, a senior adviser to various mixed committees and a watchdog of intelligence affairs. Or, as Guillam had it less reverentially, Whitehall’s head prefect.

While, at Thursgood’s school, wakefully in bed, Bill Roach was contemplating the latest wonders that had befallen him in the course of his daily vigil over Jim’s welfare. Yesterday Jim had amazed Latzy. Thursday he had stolen Miss Aaronson’s mail. Miss Aaronson taught violin and scripture; Roach courted her for her tenderness. Latzy, the assistant gardener, was a D.P., said Matron, and D.P.s spoke no English, or very little. D.P. meant Different Person, said Matron, or anyway, foreign from the war. But yesterday Jim had spoken to Latzy, seeking his assistance with the car club, and he had spoken to him in D.P., or whatever D.P.s speak, and Latzy had grown a foot taller on the spot.

The matter of Miss Aaronson’s mail was more complex. There were two envelopes on the staffroom sideboard Thursday morning after chapel when Roach called for his form’s exercise books, one addressed to Jim and one to Miss Aaronson. Jim’s was typewritten. Miss Aaronson’s was handwritten, in a hand not unlike Jim’s own. The staffroom, while Roach made these observations, was empty. He helped himself to the exercise books and was quietly taking his leave when Jim walked in by the other door, red and blowing from his early walk.

“On your way, Jumbo, bell’s gone,” stooping over the sideboard.

“Yes, sir.”

“Foxy weather, eh, Jumbo?”

“Yes, sir.”

“On your way, then.”

At the door, Roach looked round. Jim was standing again, leaning back to open the morning’s Daily Telegraph. The sideboard was empty. Both envelopes had gone.

Had Jim written to Miss Aaronson and changed his mind? Proposing marriage, perhaps? Another thought came to Bill Roach. Recently, Jim had acquired an old typewriter, a wrecked Remington that he had put right with his own hands. Had he typed his own letter on it? Was he so lonely that he wrote himself letters, and stole other people’s as well? Roach fell asleep.

4

Guillam drove languidly but fast. Smells of autumn filled the car, a full moon was shining, strands of mist hung over open fields, and the cold was irresistible. Smiley wondered how old Guillam was and guessed forty, but in that light he could have been an undergraduate sculling on the river; he moved the gear lever with a long flowing movement as if he were passing it through water. In any case, Smiley reflected irritably, the car was far too young, for Guillam. They had raced through Runnymede and begun the run up Egham Hill. They had been driving for twenty minutes and Smiley had asked a dozen questions and received no answer worth a penny, and now a nagging fear was waking in him that he refused to name.

“I’m surprised they didn’t throw you out with the rest of us,” he said, not very pleasantly, as he hauled the skirts of his coat more tightly round him. “You had all the qualifications: good at your work, loyal, discreet.”

“They put me in charge of scalp-hunters.”

“Oh, my Lord,” said Smiley with a shudder, and, pulling up his collar round his ample chins, he abandoned himself to that memory in place of others more disturbing: Brixton, and the grim flint schoolhouse that served the scalp-hunters as their headquarters. The scalp-hunters’ official name was Travel. They had been formed by Control on Bill Haydon’s suggestion in the pioneer days of the cold war, when murder and kidnapping and crash blackmail were common currency, and their first commandant was Haydon’s nominee. They were a small outfit, about a dozen men, and they were there to handle the hit-and-run jobs that were too dirty or too risky for the residents abroad. Good intelligence work, Control had always preached, was gradual and rested on a kind of gentleness. The scalp-hunters were the exception to his own rule. They weren’t gradual and they weren’t gentle either, thus reflecting Haydon’s temperament rather than Control’s. And they worked solo, which was why they were stabled out of sight behind a flint wall with broken glass and barbed wire on the top.

“I asked whether ‘lateralism’ was a word to you.”

“It most certainly is not.”

“It’s the ‘in’ doctrine. We used to go up and down. Now we go along.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“In your day, the Circus ran itself by regions. Africa, satellites, Russia, China, South East Asia, you name it: each region was commanded by its own juju man; Control sat in heaven and held the strings. Remember?”

“It strikes a distant chord.”

“Well, today everything operational is under one hat. It’s called London Station. Regions are out, lateralism is in. Bill Haydon’s Commander London Station, Roy Bland’s his number two, Toby Esterhase runs between them like a poodle. They’re a service within a service. They share their own secrets and don’t mix with the proles. It makes us more secure.”

“It sounds a very good idea,” said Smiley, studiously ignoring the innuendo.

As the memories once more began seething upward into his conscious mind, an extraordinary feeling passed over him: that he was living the day twice, first with Martindale in the club, now again with Guillam in a dream. They passed a plantation of young pine trees. The moonlight lay in strips between them.

Smiley began, “Is there any word of—” Then he asked, in a more tentative tone, “What’s the news of Ellis?”

“In quarantine,” said Guillam tersely.

“Oh, I’m sure. Of course. I don’t mean to pry. Merely, can he get around and so on? He did recover; he can walk? Backs can be terribly tricky, I understand.”

“The word says he manages pretty well. How’s Ann, I didn’t ask.”

“Fine. Just fine.”

It was pitch dark inside the car. They had turned off the road and were passing over gravel. Black walls of foliage rose to either side, lights appeared, then a high porch, and the steepled outline of a rambling house lifted above the treetops. The rain had stopped, but as Smiley stepped into the fresh air he heard all round him the restless ticking of wet leaves.

Yes, he thought, it was raining when I came here before, when the name Jim Ellis was headline news.

They had washed and, in the lofty cloakroom, inspected Lacon’s climbing kit mawkishly dumped on the Sheraton chest of drawers. Now they sat in a half-circle facing one empty chair. It was the ugliest house for miles around and Lacon had picked it up for a song. “A Berkshire Camelot,” he had once called it, explaining it away to Smiley, “built by a teetotal millionaire.” The drawing-room was a great hall with stained-glass windows twenty feet high and a pine gallery over the entrance. Smiley counted off the familiar things: an upright piano littered with musical scores, old portraits of clerics in gowns, a wad of printed invitations. He looked for the Cambridge University oar and found it slung over the fireplace. The same fire was burning, too mean for the enormous grate. An air of need prevailing over wealth.

“Are you enjoying retirement, George?” Lacon asked, as if blurting into the ear trumpet of a deaf aunt. “You don’t miss the warmth of human contact? I rather would, I think. One’s work, one’s old buddies.”

He was a string bean of a man, graceless and boyish: church and spy establishment, said Haydon, the Circus wit. His father was a dignitary of the Scottish church and his mother something noble. Occasionally the smarter Sundays wrote about him, calling him “new-style” because he was young. The skin of his face was clawed from hasty shaving.

“Oh, I think I manage very well, really, thank you,” said Smiley politely. And to draw it out: “Yes. Yes, I’m sure I do. And you? All goes well with you?”

“No big changes, no. All very smooth. Charlotte got her scholarship to Roedean, which was nice.”

“Oh, good.”

“And your wife, she’s in the pink and so on?”

His expressions were also boyish.

“Very bonny, thank you,” said Smiley, trying gallantly to respond in kind.

They were watching the double doors. From far off they heard the jangle of footsteps on a ceramic floor. Smiley guessed two people, both men. The doors opened and a tall figure appeared half in silhouette. For the fraction of a moment, Smiley glimpsed a second man behind him, dark, small, and attentive; but only the one man stepped into the room before the doors were closed by unseen hands.

“Lock us in, please,” Lacon called, and they heard the snap of the key. “You know Smiley, don’t you?”

“Yes, I think I do,” said the figure as he began the long walk towards them out of the far gloom. “I think he once gave me a job, didn’t you, Mr. Smiley?”

His voice was as soft as a southerner’s drawl, but there was no mistaking the colonial accent. “Tarr, sir. Ricki Tarr from Penang.”

A fragment of firelight illuminated one side of the stark smile and made a hollow of one eye. “The lawyer’s boy, remember? Come on, Mr. Smiley, you changed my first nappies.”

And then, absurdly, they were all four standing, and Guillam and Lacon looked on like godparents while Tarr shook Smiley’s hand once, then again, then once more for the photographs.

“How are you, Mr. Smiley? It’s real nice to see you, sir.”

Relinquishing Smiley’s hand at last, he swung away in the direction of his appointed chair, while Smiley thought, Yes, with Ricki Tarr it could have happened. With Tarr, anything could have happened. My God, he thought; two hours ago I was telling myself I would take refuge in the past. He felt thirsty, and supposed it was fear.

Ten? Twelve years ago? It was not his night for understanding time. Among Smiley’s jobs in those days was the vetting of recruits: no one taken on without his nod, no one trained without his signature on the schedule. The cold war was running high, scalp-hunters were in demand, the Circus’s residencies abroad had been ordered by Haydon to look out for likely material. Steve Mackelvore from Djakarta came up with Tarr. Mackelvore was an old pro with cover as a shipping agent, and he had found Tarr angry drunk, kicking round the docks looking for a girl called Rose, who had walked out on him.

According to Tarr’s story, he was mixed up with a bunch of Belgians running guns between the islands and up-coast. He disliked Belgians and he was bored with gunrunning and he was angry because they’d stolen Rose. Mackelvore reckoned he would respond to discipline and was young enough to train for the type of mailfist operation that the scalp-hunters undertook from behind the walls of their glum Brixton schoolhouse. After the usual searches, Tarr was forwarded to Singapore for a second look, then to the Nursery at Sarratt for a third. At that point Smiley came into the act as moderator at a succession of interviews, some hostile. Sarratt Nursery was the training compound, but it had space for other uses.

Tarr’s father was an Australian solicitor living in Penang, it seemed. The mother was a small-time actress from Bradford who came East with a British drama group before the war. The father, Smiley recalled, had an evangelical streak and preached in local gospel halls. The mother had a small criminal record in England, but Tarr’s father either didn’t know or didn’t care. When the war came, the couple evacuated to Singapore for the sake of their young son. A few months later, Singapore fell and Ricki Tarr began his education in Changi jail under Japanese supervision. In Changi the father preached God’s charity to everyone in sight, and if the Japs hadn’t persecuted him his fellow prisoners would have done the job for them. With Liberation, the three of them went back to Penang. Ricki tried to read for the law but more often broke it, and the father turned some rough preachers loose on him to beat the sin out of his soul. Tarr flew the coop to Borneo. At eighteen he was a fully paid-up gunrunner playing all seven ends against the middle around the Indonesian islands, and that was how Mackelvore stumbled on him.

By the time he had graduated from the Nursery, the Malayan emergency had broken. Tarr was played back into gunrunning. Almost the first people he bumped into were his old Belgian friends. They were too busy supplying guns to the Communists to bother where he had been, and they were shorthanded. Tarr ran a few shipments for them in order to blow their contacts, then one night got them drunk, shot four of them, including Rose, and set fire to their boat. He hung around Malaya and did a couple more jobs before being called back to Brixton and refitted for special operations in Kenya—or, in less sophisticated language, hunting Mau Mau for bounty.

After Kenya, Smiley pretty much lost sight of him, but a couple of incidents stuck in his memory because they might have become scandals and Control had to be informed. In 1964, Tarr was sent to Brazil to make a crash offer of a bribe to an armaments minister known to be in deep water. Tarr was too rough; the minister panicked and told the press. Tarr had Dutch cover and no one was wiser except Netherlands intelligence, who were furious. In Spain a year later, acting on a tip-off supplied by Bill Haydon, Tarr blackmailed—or burned, as the scalp-hunters would say—a Polish diplomat who had lost his heart to a dancer. The first yield was good; Tarr won a commendation and a bonus. But when he went back for a second helping the Pole wrote a confession to his ambassador and threw himself, with or without encouragement, from a high window.

In Brixton, they used to call him accident-prone. Guillam, by the expression on his immature but aging face, as they sat in their half-circle round the meagre fire, called him a lot worse than that.

“Well, I guess I’d better make my pitch,” Tarr said pleasantly as he settled his easy body into the chair.

5

“It happened around six months ago,” Tarr began.

“April,” Guillam snapped. “Just keep it precise, shall we, all the way along?”

“April, then,” Tarr said equably. “Things were pretty quiet in Brixton. I guess there must have been half a dozen of us on standby. Pete Sembrini, he was in from Rome; Cy Vanhofer had just made a hit in Budapest”—he gave a mischievous smile—“Ping-Pong and snooker in the Brixton waiting room. Right, Mr. Guillam?”

“It was the silly season.”

When out of the blue, said Tarr, came a flash requisition from Hong Kong residency.

“They had a low-grade Soviet trade delegation in town, chasing up electrical goods for the Moscow market. One of the delegates was stepping wide in the nightclubs. Name of Boris; Mr. Guillam has the details. No previous record. They’d had the tabs on him for five days, and the delegation was booked in for fourteen more. Politically it was too hot for the local boys to handle but they reckoned a crash approach might do the trick. The yield didn’t look that special, but so what? Maybe we’d just buy him for stock—right, Mr. Guillam?”

Stock meant sale or exchange with another intelligence service: a commerce in small-time defectors handled by the scalp-hunters.

Ignoring Tarr, Guillam said, “South East Asia was Tarr’s parish. He was sitting around with nothing to do, so I ordered him to make a site inspection and report back by cable.”

Each time someone else spoke, Tarr sank into a dream. His gaze settled upon the speaker, a mistiness entered his eyes, and there was a pause like a coming back before he began again.

“So I did what Mr. Guillam ordered,” he said. “I always do, don’t I, Mr. Guillam? I’m a good boy really, even if I am impulsive.”

He flew the next night—Saturday, March 31st—with an Australian passport describing him as a car salesman and with two virgin Swiss escape passports hidden in the lining of his suitcase. These were contingency documents to be filled in as circumstances demanded: one for Boris, one for himself. He made a car rendezvous with the Hong Kong resident not far from his hotel, the Golden Gate on Kowloon.

Here Guillam leaned over to Smiley and murmured, “Tufty Thesinger, buffoon. Ex-major, King’s African Rifles. Percy Alleline’s appointment.”

Thesinger produced a report on Boris’s movements based on one week’s surveillance.

“Boris was a real oddball,” Tarr said. “I couldn’t make him out. He’d been boozing every night without a break. He hadn’t slept for a week and Thesinger’s watchers were folding at the knees. All day he trailed round after the delegation, inspecting factories, chiming in at discussions, and being the bright young Soviet official.”

“How young?” Smiley asked.

Guillam threw in: “His visa application gave him born Minsk 1946.”

“Evening time, he’d go back to the Alexandra Lodge, an old shanty house out on North Point where the delegation had holed out. He’d eat with the crew; then around nine he’d ease out the side entrance, grab a taxi, and belt down to the mainline night spots around Pedder Street. His favourite haunt was the Cat’s Cradle in Queen’s Road, where he bought drinks for local businessmen and acted like Mr. Personality. He might stay there till midnight. From the Cradle he cut right down to Aberdeen Harbour, a place called Angelika’s, where the drink was cheaper. Alone. It’s mainly floating restaurants and the big spenders down there, but Angelika’s is a landbound café with a hellhole in the basement. He’d have three or four drinks and keep the receipts. Mainly he drank brandy but now and then he’d have a vodka to vary his diet. He’d had one tangle with a Eurasian girl along the way, and Thesinger’s watchers got after her and bought the story. She said he was lonely and sat on the bed moaning about his wife for not appreciating his genius. That was a real breakthrough,” he added sarcastically as Lacon noisily swooped on the little fire and stirred it, one coal against the other, into life. “That night I went down to the Cradle and took a look at him. Thesinger’s watchers had been sent to bed with a glass of milk. They didn’t want to know.”

Sometimes as Tarr spoke, an extraordinary stillness came over his body, as if he were hearing his own voice played back to him.

“He arrived ten minutes after me and he brought his own company, a big blond Swede with a Chinese broad in tow. It was dark, so I moved into a table nearby. They ordered Scotch, Boris paid, and I sat six feet away watching the lousy band and listening to their conversation. The Chinese kid kept her mouth shut and the Swede was doing most of the running. They talked English. The Swede asked Boris where he was staying, and Boris said the Excelsior, which was a damn lie because he was staying at the Alexandra Lodge with the rest of the church outing. All right, the Alexandra is down the list; the Excelsior sounds better. About midnight the party breaks up. Boris says he’s got to go home and tomorrow’s a busy day. That was the second lie, because he was no more going home than—what’s the one, Jekyll and Hyde, right!—the regular doctor who dressed up and went on the razzle. So Boris was who?”

For a moment no one helped him.

“Hyde,” said Lacon to his scrubbed red hands. Sitting again, he had clasped them on his lap.

“Hyde,” Tarr repeated. “Thank you, Mr. Lacon; I always saw you as a literary man. So they settle the bill and I traipse down to Aberdeen to be there ahead of him when he hits Angelika’s. By this time I’m pretty sure I’m in the wrong ball game.”

On dry long fingers, Tarr studiously counted off the reasons: first, he never knew a Soviet delegation that didn’t carry a couple of security gorillas whose job was to keep the boys out of the fleshpots. So how did Boris slip the leash night after night? Second, he didn’t like the way Boris pushed his foreign currency around. For a Soviet official, that was against nature, he insisted: “He just doesn’t have any damn currency. If he does, he buys beads for his squaw. And three, I didn’t like the way he lied. He was a sight too glib for decency.”

So Tarr waited at the Angelika, and sure enough half an hour later his Mr. Hyde turned up all on his own. “He sits down and calls for a drink. That’s all he does. Sits and drinks like a damn wallflower!”

Once more it was Smiley’s turn to receive the heat of Tarr’s charm: “So what’s it all about, Mr. Smiley? See what I mean? It’s little things I’m noticing,” he confided, still to Smiley. “Just take the way he sat. Believe me, sir, if we’d been in that place ourselves we couldn’t have sat better than Boris. He had the pick of the exits and the stairway; he had a fine view of the main entrance and the action; he was right-handed and he was covered by a left-hand wall. Boris was a professional, Mr. Smiley; there was no doubt of it whatsoever. He was waiting for a connect, working a letter-box, maybe, or trailing his coat and looking for a pass from a mug like me. Well, now listen: it’s one thing to burn a small-time trade delegate. It’s quite a different ball game to swing your legs at a Centre-trained hood—right, Mr. Guillam?”

Guillam said, “Since the reorganisation, scalp-hunters have no brief to trawl for double agents. They must be turned over to London Station on sight. The boys have a standing order, over Bill Haydon’s own signature. If there’s even a smell of the opposition, abandon.” He added, for Smiley’s special ear, “Under lateralism our autonomy is cut to the bone.”

“And I’ve been in double-double games before,” Tarr confessed in a tone of injured virtue. “Believe me, Mr. Smiley, they are a can of worms.”

“I’m sure they are,” said Smiley, and gave a prim tug at his spectacles.

Tarr cabled Guillam “no sale,” booked a flight home, and went shopping. However, since his flight didn’t leave till Thursday, he thought that before he left, just to pay his fare, he might as well burgle Boris’s room.

“The Alexandra’s a real ramshackle old place, Mr. Smiley, off Marble Road, with a stack of wooden balconies. As for the locks—why, sir, they give up when they see you coming.”

In a very short time, therefore, Tarr was standing inside Boris’s room with his back against the door, waiting for his eyes to grow accustomed to the dark. He was still standing there when a woman spoke to him in Russian drowsily from the bed.

“It was Boris’s wife,” Tarr explained. “She was crying. Look, I’ll call her Irina, right? Mr. Guillam has the details.”

Smiley was already objecting: wife was impossible, he said. Centre would never let them both out of Russia at the same time; they’d keep one and send the other—

“Common-law marriage,” Guillam said dryly. “Unofficial but permanent.”

“There’s a lot that are the other way round these days,” said Tarr with a sharp grin at no one, least of all Smiley, and Guillam shot him another foul look.

6

From the outset of this meeting, Smiley had assumed for the main a Buddha-like inscrutability from which neither Tarr’s story nor the rare interjections of Lacon and Guillam could rouse him. He sat leaning back with his short legs bent, head forward, and plump hands linked across his generous stomach. His hooded eyes had closed behind the thick lenses. His only fidget was to polish his glasses on the silk lining of his tie, and when he did this his eyes had a soaked, naked look that was embarrassing to those who caught him at it. His interjection, however, and the donnish, inane sound that followed Guillam’s explanation, now acted like a signal upon the rest of the gathering, bringing a shuffling of chairs and a clearing of throats.

Lacon was foremost: “George, what are your drinking habits? Can I get you a Scotch or anything?” He offered drink solicitously, like aspirin for a headache. “I forgot to say it earlier,” he explained. “George, a bracer: come. It’s winter, after all. A nip of something?”

“I’m fine, thank you,” Smiley said.

He would have liked a little coffee from the percolator but somehow he didn’t feel able to ask. Also he remembered it was terrible.

“Guillam?” Lacon proceeded. No; Guillam also found it impossible to accept alcohol from Lacon.

He didn’t offer anything to Tarr, who went straight on with his narrative.

Tarr took Irina’s presence calmly, he said. He had worked up his fallback before he entered the building, and now he went straight into his act. He didn’t pull a gun or slap his hand over her mouth or any of that tripe, as he put it, but he said he had come to speak to Boris on a private matter; he was sorry and he was damn well going to sit there till Boris showed up. In good Australian, as became an outraged car salesman from down under, he explained that while he didn’t want to barge into anyone’s business he was damned if he was going to have his girl and his money stolen in a single night by a lousy Russian who couldn’t pay for his pleasures. He worked up a lot of outrage but managed to keep his voice down, and then he waited to see what she did.

And that, said Tarr, was how it all began.

It was eleven-thirty when he made Boris’s room. He left at one-thirty with a promise of a meeting next night. By then the situation was all the other way: “We weren’t doing anything improper, mind. Just pen friends—right, Mr. Smiley?”

For a moment, that bland sneer seemed to lay claim to Smiley’s most precious secrets.

“Right,” he assented vapidly.

There was nothing exotic about Irina’s presence in Hong Kong and no reason why Thesinger should have known of it, Tarr explained. Irina was a member of the delegation in her own right. She was a trained textile buyer: “Come to think of it, she was a sight better qualified than her old man, if I can call him that. She was a plain kid, a bit blue-stocking for my taste, but she was young and she had one hell of a pretty smile when she stopped crying.” Tarr coloured quaintly. “She was good company,” he insisted, as if arguing against a trend. “When Mr. Thomas from Adelaide came into her life, she was at the end of the line from worrying what to do about the demon Boris. She thought I was the Angel Gabriel. Who could she talk to about her husband who wouldn’t turn the dogs on him? She’d no chums on the delegation; she’d no one she trusted even back in Moscow, she said. Nobody who hadn’t been through it would ever know what it was like trying to keep a ruined relationship going while all the time you’re on the move.” Smiley was once more in a deep trance. “Hotel after hotel, city after city, not even allowed to speak to the natives in a natural way or get a smile from a stranger—that’s how she described her life. She reckoned it was a pretty miserable state of affairs, Mr. Smiley, and there was a lot of God-thumping and an empty vodka bottle beside the bed to show for it. Why couldn’t she be like normal people? she kept saying. Why couldn’t she enjoy the Lord’s sunshine like the rest of us? She loved sightseeing, she loved foreign kids; why couldn’t she have a kid of her own? A kid born free, not in captivity. She kept saying that: born in captivity, born free. ‘I’m a jolly person, Thomas. I’m a normal, sociable girl. I like people: why should I deceive them when I like them?’ And then she said, the trouble was that long ago she had been chosen for work that made her frozen like an old woman and cut her off from God. So that’s why she’d had a drink and why she was having a cry. She’d kind of forgotten her husband by then; she was apologising for having a fling, more.” Again he faltered. “I could scent it, Mr. Smiley. There was gold in her. I could scent it from the start. Knowledge is power, they say, sir, and Irina had the power, same as she had the quality. She was hellbent maybe, but she could still give her all. I can sense generosity in a woman where I meet it, Mr. Smiley. I have a talent for it. And this lady was generous. Jesus, how do you describe a hunch? Some people can smell water under the ground . . .”

He seemed to expect some show of sympathy, so Smiley said, “I understand,” and plucked at the lobe of his ear.

Watching him with a strange dependence in his expression, Tarr kept silent a stretch longer. “First thing next morning, I cancelled my flight and changed my hotel,” he said finally.

Abruptly Smiley opened his eyes wide. “What did you tell London?”

“Nothing.”

“Why not?”

“Because he’s a devious fool,” said Guillam.

“Maybe I thought Mr. Guillam would say, ‘Come home, Tarr,’” he replied, with a knowing glance at Guillam that was not returned. “You see, long ago when I was a little boy I made a mistake and walked into a honey trap.”

“He made an ass of himself with a Polish girl,” said Guillam.

“He sensed her generosity, too.”

“I knew Irina was no honey trap, but how could I expect Mr. Guillam to believe me? No way.”

“Did you tell Thesinger?”

“Hell, no.”

“What reason did you give London for postponing your flight?”

“I was due to fly Thursday. I reckoned no one back home would miss me till Tuesday. Specially with Boris being a dead duck.”

“He didn’t give a reason and the housekeepers posted him absent without leave on the Monday,” said Guillam. “He broke every rule in the book. And some that aren’t. By the middle of that week, even Bill Haydon was beating his war drums. And I was having to listen,” he added tartly.

However that was, Tarr and Irina met next evening. They met again the evening after that. The first meeting was in a café and it limped. They took a lot of care not to be seen, because Irina was frightened stiff not just of her husband but of the security guards attached to the delegation—the gorillas, as Tarr called them. She refused a drink and she was shaking. The second evening Tarr was still waiting on her generosity. They took the tram up to Victoria Peak, jammed between American matrons in white socks and eyeshades. The third he hired a car and drove her round the New Territories till she suddenly got the heebies about being so close to the Chinese border, so they had to run for harbour. Nevertheless she loved that trip, and often spoke of the tidy beauty of it, the fish ponds and the paddy fields. Tarr also liked the trip because it proved to both of them that they weren’t being watched. But Irina had still not unpacked, as he put it.

“Now I’ll tell you a damn odd thing about this stage of the game. At the start, I worked Thomas the Aussie to death. I fed her a lot of smoke about a sheep station outside Adelaide and a big property in the high street with a glass front and ‘Thomas’ in lights. She didn’t believe me. She nodded and fooled around and waited till I’d said my piece; then she said, ‘Yes, Thomas,’ ‘No, Thomas,’ and changed the subject.”

On the fourth evening, he drove her into the hills overlooking North Shore, and Irina told Tarr that she had fallen in love with him and that she was employed by Moscow Centre, she and her husband both, and that she knew Tarr was in the trade, too; she could tell by his alertness and the way he listened with his eyes.

“She’d decided I was an English colonel of intelligence,” said Tarr with no smile at all. “She was crying one minute and laughing the next, and in my opinion she was three-quarters of the way to being a basket case. Half, she talked like a pocket-book loony heroine, half like a nice up-and-down suburban kid. The English were her favourite people. Gentlemen, she kept saying. I’d brought her a bottle of vodka and she drank half of it in about fifteen seconds flat. Hooray for English gentlemen. Boris was the lead and Irina was the backup girl. It was a his-and-hers act, and one day she’d talk to Percy Alleline and tell him a great secret all for himself. Boris was on a trawl for Hong Kong businessmen and had a post-box job on the side for the local Soviet residency. Irina ran courier, boiled down the microdots, and played radio for him on a high-speed squirt to beat the listeners. That was how it read on paper, see? The two nightclubs were rendezvous and fallback for his local connect, in that order. But all Boris really wanted to do was drink and chase the dancing girls and have depressions. Or else go for five-hour walks because he couldn’t stand being in the same room with his wife. All Irina did was wait around crying and getting plastered, and fancy herself sitting alone at Percy’s fireside, telling him all she knew. I kept her there talking, up on the hill, sitting in the car. I didn’t move because I didn’t want to break the spell. We watched the dusk fall on the harbour and the lovely moon come up there, and the peasants slipping by with their long poles and kerosene lamps. All we needed was Humphrey Bogart in a tuxedo. I kept my foot on the vodka bottle and let her talk. I didn’t move a muscle. Fact, Mr. Smiley. Fact,” he declared, with the defence-lessness of a man longing to be believed, but Smiley’s eyes were closed and he was deaf to all appeal.

“She just completely let go,” Tarr explained, as if it were suddenly an accident, a thing he had had no part in. “She told me her whole life story, from birth to Colonel Thomas; that’s me. Mummy, Daddy, early loves, recruitment, training, her lousy half-marriage, the lot. How her and Boris were teamed at training and had been together ever since: one of the great unbreakable relationships. She told me her real name, her work-name, and the cover names she’d travelled and transmitted by; then she hauled out her handbag and started showing me her conjuring set: recessed fountain pen, signal plan folded up inside; concealed camera—the works. ‘Wait till Percy sees that,’ I tell her—playing her along, like. It was production-line stuff, mind, nothing coach-built, but grade-one material all the same. To round it off, she starts barking the dirt about the Soviet Hong Kong set-up: legmen, safe houses, letter-boxes, the lot. I was going crazy trying to remember it all.”

“But you did,” said Guillam shortly.

Yes, Tarr agreed; near on, he did. He knew she hadn’t told him the whole truth, but he knew truth came hard to a girl who’d been a hood since puberty, and he reckoned that for a beginner she was doing pretty nice.

“I kind of felt for her,” he said with another flash of that false confessiveness. “I felt we were on the same wave-length, no messing.”

“Quite so,” said Lacon in a rare interjection. He was very pale, but whether that was anger or the effect of the grey light of early morning creeping through the shutters, there was no way to tell.

7

“Now I was in a queer situation. I saw her next day and the day after, and I reckoned that if she wasn’t already schizoid she was going to be that way damn soon. One minute talking about Percy giving her a top job in the Circus working for Colonel Thomas, and arguing the hell with me about whether she should be a lieutenant or a major. Next minute saying she wouldn’t spy for anybody ever again and she was going to grow flowers and rut in the hay with Thomas. Then she had a convent kick: Baptist nuns were going to wash her soul. I nearly died. Who the hell ever heard of Baptist nuns, I ask her. Never mind, she says, Baptists are the greatest; her mother was a peasant and knew. That was the second biggest secret she would ever tell me. ‘What’s the biggest, then?’ I ask. No dice. All she’s saying is, we’re in mortal danger, bigger than I could possibly know: there’s no hope for either of us unless she has that special chat with Brother Percy. ‘What danger, for Christ’s sake? What do you know that I don’t?’ She was vain as a cat but when I pressed her she clammed up, and I was frightened to death she’d belt home and sing the lot to Boris. I was running out of time, too. Then it was Wednesday already and the delegation was due to fly home to Moscow Friday. Her tradecraft wasn’t all lousy but how could I trust a nut like her? You know how women are when they fall in love, Mr. Smiley. They can’t hardly—”

Guillam had already cut him off. “You just keep your head down, right?” he ordered, and Tarr sulked for a space.

“All I knew was Irina wanted to defect—talk to Percy, as she called it. She had three days left, and the sooner she jumped the better for everybody. If I waited much longer, she was going to talk herself out of it. So I took the plunge and walked in on Thesinger, first thing while he was opening up the shop.”

“Wednesday, the eleventh,” Smiley murmured. “In London the early hours of the morning.”

“I guess Thesinger thought I was a ghost,” Tarr said. “ ‘I’m talking to London, personal for Head of London Station,’ I said. He argued like hell but he let me do it. I sat at his desk and coded up the message myself from a one-time pad while Thesinger watched me like a sick dog. We had to top and tail it like trade code because Thesinger has export cover. That took me an extra half hour. I was nervy, I really was. Then I burnt the whole damn pad and typed out the message on the ticker machine. At that point, there wasn’t a soul on earth but me who knew what the numbers meant on that sheet of paper—not Thesinger, nobody but me. I applied for full defector treatment for Irina on emergency procedure. I held out for all the goodies she’d never even talked about: cash, nationality, a new identity, no limelight, and a place to live. After all, I was her business representative in a manner of speaking, wasn’t I, Mr. Smiley?”

Smiley glanced up as if surprised to be addressed. “Yes,” he said quite kindly. “Yes, I suppose in a manner of speaking that’s what you were.”

“He also had a piece of the action, if I know him,” said Guillam under his breath.

Catching this or guessing the meaning of it, Tarr was furious.

“That’s a damn lie!” he shouted, colouring deeply. “That’s a—” After glaring at Guillam a moment longer, he went back to his story.

“I outlined her career to date and her access, including jobs she’d had at Centre. I asked for inquisitors and an Air Force plane. She thought I was asking for a personal meeting with Percy Alleline on neutral ground, but I reckoned we’d cross that bridge when we were past it. I suggested they should send out a couple of Esterhase’s lamplighters to take charge of her, maybe a tame doctor as well.”

“Why lamplighters?” Smiley asked sharply. “They’re not allowed to handle defectors.”

The lamplighters were Toby Esterhase’s pack, based not in Brixton but in Acton. Their job was to provide the support services for mainline operations: watching, listening, transport, and safe houses.

“Ah, well, Toby’s come up in the world since your day, Mr. Smiley,” Tarr explained. “They tell me even his pavement artists ride around in Cadillacs. Steal the scalp-hunters’ bread out of their mouths, too, if they get the chance—right, Mr. Guillam?”

“They’ve become the general footpads for London Station,” Guillam said shortly. “Part of lateralism.”

“I reckoned it would take half a year for the inquisitors to clean her out, and for some reason she was crazy about Scotland. She had a great wish to spend the rest of her life there, in fact. With Thomas. Raising our babies in the heather. I gave it the London Station address group; I graded it flash and by hand of officer only.”

Guillam put in: “That’s the new formula for maximum limit. It’s supposed to cut out handling in the coding rooms.”

“But not in London Station?” said Smiley.

“That’s their affair.”

“You heard Bill Haydon got that job, I suppose?” said Lacon, jerking round on Smiley. “Head of London Station? He’s effectively their chief of operations, just as Percy used to be when Control was there. They’ve changed all the names, that’s the thing. You know how your old buddies are about names. You ought to fill him in, Guillam, bring him up to date.”

“Oh, I think I have the picture, thank you,” Smiley said politely. Of Tarr, with a deceptive dreaminess, he asked, “She spoke of a great secret, you said?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Did you give any hint of this in your cable to London?”

He had touched something, there was no doubt of it; he had found a spot where touching hurt, for Tarr winced, and darted a suspicious glance at Lacon, then at Guillam.

Guessing his meaning, Lacon at once sang out a disclaimer: “Smiley knows nothing beyond what you have so far told him in this room,” he said. “Correct, Guillam?” Guillam nodded yes, watching Smiley.

“I told London the same as she’d told me,” Tarr conceded grumpily, like someone who has been robbed of a good story.

“What form of words, precisely?” Smiley asked. “I wonder whether you remember that.”

“ ‘Claims to have further information crucial to the well-being of the Circus, but not yet disclosed.’ Near enough, anyhow.”

“Thank you. Thank you very much.”

They waited for Tarr to continue.

“I also requested Head of London Station to inform Mr. Guillam here that I’d landed on my feet and wasn’t playing hookey for the hell of it.”

“Did that happen?” Smiley asked.

“Nobody said anything to me,” said Guillam dryly.

“I hung around all day for an answer, but by evening it still hadn’t come. Irina was doing a normal day’s work. I insisted on that, you see. She wanted to stage a light dose of fever to keep her in bed but I wouldn’t hear of it. The delegation had factories to visit on Kowloon and I told her to tag along and look intelligent. I made her swear to keep off the bottle. I didn’t want her involved in amateur dramatics at the last moment. I wanted it normal right up to when she jumped. I waited till evening, then cabled a flash follow-up.”

Smiley’s shrouded gaze fixed upon the pale face before him. “You had an acknowledgement, of course?” he asked.

“ ‘We read you.’ That’s all. I sweated out the whole damn night. By dawn I still didn’t have an answer. I thought, Maybe that R.A.F. plane is already on its way. London’s playing it long, I thought, tying all the knots before they bring me in. I mean when you’re that far away from them you have to believe they’re good. Whatever you think of them, you have to believe that. And I mean now and then they are—right, Mr. Guillam?”

No one helped him.

“I was worried about Irina, see? I was damn certain that if she had to wait another day she would crack. Finally the answer did come. It wasn’t an answer at all. It was a stall: ‘Tell us what sections she worked in, names of former contacts and acquaintances inside Moscow Centre, name of her present boss, date of intake into Centre.’ Jesus, I don’t know what else. I drafted a reply fast because I had a three o’clock date with her down by the church—”

“What church?” Smiley again.

“English Baptist.” To everyone’s astonishment, Tarr was once again blushing. “She liked to visit there. Not for services, just to sniff around. I hung around the entrance looking natural but she didn’t show. It was the first time she’d broken a date. Our fallback was for three hours later on the hilltop, then a one-minute-fifty descending scale back at the church till we met up. If she was in trouble, she was going to leave her bathing suit on her window-sill. She was a swimming nut, swam every day. I shot round to the Alexandra: no bathing suit. I had two and a half hours to kill. There was nothing I could do any more except wait.”

Smiley said, “What was the priority of London Station’s telegram to you?”

“Immediate.”

“But yours was flash?”

“Both of mine were flash.”

“Was London’s telegram signed?”

Guillam put in: “They’re not any more. Outsiders deal with London Station as a unit.”

“Was it decypher yourself?”

“No,” said Guillam.

They waited for Tarr to go on.

“I kicked around Thesinger’s office but I wasn’t too popular there; he doesn’t approve of scalp-hunters and he has a big thing going on the Chinese mainland that he seemed to think I was going to blow for him. So I sat in a café and I had this idea I just might go down to the airport. It was an idea: like you might say, “Maybe I’ll go to a movie.” I took the Star Ferry, hired a cab, and told the driver to go like hell. It got like a panic. I barged the Information queue and asked for all departures to Russia, or connections in. I nearly went mad going through the flight lists, yelling at the Chinese clerks, but there wasn’t a plane since yesterday and none till six tonight. But now I had this hunch. I had to know. What about charters, what about the unscheduled flights, freight, casual transit? Had nothing, but really nothing, been routed for Moscow since yesterday morning? Then this little girl comes through with the answer, one of the Chinese hostesses. She fancies me, see. She’s doing me a favour. An unscheduled Soviet plane had taken off two hours ago. Only four passengers boarded. The centre of attraction was a woman invalid. A lady. In a coma. They had to cart her to the plane on a stretcher, and her face was wrapped in bandages. Two male nurses went with her and one doctor—that was the party. I called the Alexandra as a last hope. Neither Irina nor her so-called husband had checked out of their room, but there was no reply. The lousy hotel didn’t even know they’d left.”

Perhaps the music had been going on a long time and Smiley only noticed it now. He heard it in imperfect fragments from different parts of the house: a scale on a flute, a child’s tune on a recorder, a violin piece more confidently played. The many Lacon daughters were waking up.

8

“Perhaps she was ill,” said Smiley stolidly, speaking more to Guillam than anyone else. “Perhaps she was in a coma. Perhaps they were real nurses who took her away. By the sound of her, she was a pretty good mess, at best.” He added, with half a glance at Tarr: “After all, only twenty-four hours had elapsed between your first telegram and Irina’s departure. You can hardly lay it at London’s door on that timing.”

“You can just,” said Guillam, looking at the floor. “It’s extremely fast, but it does just work, if somebody in London—” They were all waiting. “If somebody in London had very good footwork. And in Moscow, too, of course.”

“Now, that’s exactly what I told myself, sir,” said Tarr proudly, taking up Smiley’s point and ignoring Guillam’s. “My very words, Mr. Smiley. ‘Relax, Ricki,’ I said; ‘you’ll be shooting at shadows if you’re not damn careful.’ ”

“Or the Russians tumbled to her,” Smiley said. “The security guards found out about your affair and removed her. It would be a wonder if they hadn’t found out, the way you two carried on.”

“Or she told her husband,” Tarr suggested. “I understand psychology as well as the next man, sir. I know what can happen between a husband and wife when they have fallen out. She wishes to annoy him. To goad him, to obtain a reaction, I thought. ‘Want to hear what I’ve been doing while you’ve been out boozing and cutting the rug?’—like that. Boris peels off and tells the gorillas; they sandbag her and take her home. I went through all those possibilities, Mr. Smiley, believe me. I really worked on them, truth. Same as any man does whose woman walks out on him.”

“Let’s just have the story, shall we?” Guillam whispered, furious.

Well, now, said Tarr, he would agree that for twenty-four hours he went a bit berserk: “Now, I don’t often get that way—right, Mr. Guillam?”

“Often enough.”

“I was feeling pretty physical. Frustrated, you could almost say.”

His conviction that a considerable prize had been brutally snatched away from him drove him to a distracted fury that found expression in a rampage through old haunts. He went to the Cat’s Cradle, then to Angelika’s, and by dawn he had taken in half a dozen other places besides, not to mention a few girls along the way. At some point he crossed town and raised a spot of dust around the Alexandra. He was hoping to have a couple of words with those security gorillas. When he sobered down, he got thinking about Irina and their time together, and he decided before he flew back to London to go round their dead letter-boxes to check whether by any chance she had written to him before she left.

Partly it was something to do. “Partly, I guess, I couldn’t bear to think of a letter of hers kicking around in a hole in a wall while she sweated it out in the hot seat,” he added, the ever-redeemable boy.

They had two places where they dropped mail for one another. The first was not far from the hotel on a building site.

“Ever seen that bamboo scaffolding they use? Fantastic. I’ve seen it twenty storeys high and the coolies swarming over it with slabs of precast concrete.” A bit of discarded piping, he said, handy at shoulder height. It seemed most likely, if Irina was in a hurry, that the piping was the letter-box she would use, but when Tarr went there it was empty. The second was back by the church, “in under where they stow the pamphlets,” as he put it. “This stand was part of an old wardrobe, see. If you kneel in the back pew and grope around, there’s a loose board. Behind the board there’s a recess full of rubbish and rat’s mess. I tell you, it made a real lovely drop, the best ever.”

There was a short pause, illuminated by the vision of Ricki Tarr and his Moscow Centre mistress kneeling side by side in the rear pew of a Baptist church in Hong Kong.

In this dead letter-box, Tarr said, he found not a letter but a whole damn diary. The writing was fine and done on both sides of the paper, so that quite often the black ink came through. It was fast urgent writing with no erasures. He knew at a glance that she had maintained it in her lucid periods.

“This isn’t it, mind. This is only my copy.”

Slipping a long hand inside his shirt, he had drawn out a leather purse attached to a broad thong of hide. From it he took a grimy wad of paper.

“I guess she dropped the diary just before they hit her,” he said. “Maybe she was having a last pray at the same time. I made the translation myself.”

“I didn’t know you spoke Russian,” said Smiley—a comment lost to everyone but Tarr, who at once grinned.

“Ah, now, a man needs a qualification in this profession, Mr. Smiley,” he explained as he separated the pages. “I may not have been too great at law but a further language can be decisive. You know what the poets say, I expect?” He looked up from his labours and his grin widened. “ ‘To possess another language is to possess another soul.’ A great king wrote that, sir, Charles the Fifth. My father never forgot a quotation, I’ll say that for him, though the funny thing is he couldn’t speak a damn thing but English. I’ll read the diary aloud to you, if you don’t mind.”

“He hasn’t a word of Russian to his name,” said Guillam.

“They spoke English all the time. Irina had done a three-year English course.”

Guillam had chosen the ceiling to look at, Lacon his hands. Only Smiley was watching Tarr, who was laughing quietly at his own little joke.

“All set?” he enquired. “Right, then, I’ll begin. ‘Thomas, listen, I am talking to you.’ She called me by my surname,” he explained. “I told her I was Tony, but it was always Thomas, right? ‘This diary is my gift for you in case they take me away before I speak to Alleline. I would prefer to give you my life, Thomas, and naturally my body, but I think it more likely that this wretched secret will be all I have to make you happy. Use it well!’ ” Tarr glanced up. “It’s marked Monday. She wrote the diary over the four days.” His voice had become flat, almost bored. “ ‘In Moscow Centre there is more gossip than our superiors would wish. Especially the little fellows like to make themselves grand by appearing to be in the know. For two years before I was attached to the Trade Ministry, I worked as a supervisor in the filing department of our headquarters in Dzerzhinsky Square. The work was so dull, Thomas, the atmosphere was not happy, and I was unmarried. We were encouraged to be suspicious of one another; it is such a strain never to give your heart, not once. Under me was a clerk named Ivlov. Though Ivlov was not socially or in rank my equal, the oppressive atmosphere brought out a mutuality in our temperaments. Forgive me, sometimes only the body can speak for us—you should have appeared earlier, Thomas! Several times Ivlov and I worked night shifts together, and eventually we agreed to defy regulations and meet outside the building. He was blond, Thomas, like you, and I wanted him. We met in a café in a poor district of Moscow. In Russia we are taught that Moscow has no poor districts, but this is a lie. Ivlov told me that his real name was Brod but he was not a Jew. He brought me some coffee sent to him illicitly by a comrade in Teheran—he was very sweet—also some stockings. Ivlov told me that he admired me greatly and that he had once worked in a section responsible for recording the particulars of all the foreign agents employed by Centre. I laughed and told him that no such record existed; it was an idea of dreamers to suppose so many secrets would be in one place. Well, we were both dreamers I suppose.’ ”

Again Tarr broke off. “We get a new day,” he announced. “She kicks off with a lot of ‘good morning Thomas’s,’ prayers, and a bit of love-talk. A woman can’t write to the air, she says, so she’s writing to Thomas. Her old man’s gone out early; she’s got an hour to herself. Okay?”

Smiley grunted.

“ ‘On the second occasion with Ivlov, I met him in the room of a cousin of Ivlov’s wife, a teacher at Moscow State University. No one else was present. The meeting, which was extremely secret, involved what in a report we would call an incriminating act. I think, Thomas, you yourself once or twice committed such an act! Also at this meeting Ivlov told me the following story to bind us in even closer friendship. Thomas, you must take care. Have you heard of Karla? He is an old fox, the most cunning in the Centre, the most secret; even his name is not a name that Russians understand. Ivlov was extremely frightened to tell me this story, which according to Ivlov concerned a great conspiracy, perhaps the greatest we have. The story of Ivlov is as follows. You should tell it only to most trustworthy people, Thomas, because of its extremely conspiratorial nature. You must tell no one in the Circus, for no one can be trusted until the riddle is solved. Ivlov said it was not true that he once worked on agent records. He had invented this story only to show me the great depth of his knowledge concerning the Centre’s affairs and to assure me that I was not in love with a nobody. The truth was he had worked for Karla as a helper in one of Karla’s great conspiracies and he had actually been stationed in England in a conspiratorial capacity, under the cover of being a driver and assistant coding clerk at the Embassy. For this task he was provided with the workname Lapin. Thus Brod became Ivlov and Ivlov became Lapin: of this poor Ivlov was extremely proud. (I did not tell him what Lapin means in French.) That a man’s wealth should be counted by the number of his names! Ivlov’s task was to service a mole. A mole is a deep-penetration agent so called because he burrows deep into the fabric of Western imperialism, in this case an Englishman. Moles are very precious to the Centre because of the many years it takes to place them, often fifteen or twenty. Most of the English moles were recruited by Karla before the war and came from the higher bourgeoisie, even aristocrats and nobles who were disgusted with their origins, and became secretly fanatic, much more fanatic than their working-class English comrades, who are slothful. Several were applying to join the Party when Karla stopped them in time and directed them to special work. Some fought in Spain against Franco Fascism, and Karla’s talent-spotters found them there and turned them over to Karla for recruitment. Others were recruited in the war during the alliance of expediency between Soviet Russia and Britain. Others afterwards, disappointed that the war did not bring Socialism to the West. . .’ It kind of dries up here,” Tarr announced without looking anywhere but at his own manuscript. “I wrote down, ‘dries up.’ I guess her old man came back earlier than she expected. The ink’s all blotted. God knows where she stowed the damn thing. Under the mattress maybe.”

If this was meant as a joke, it failed.

“‘The mole whom Lapin serviced in London was known by the code name Gerald. He had been recruited by Karla and was the object of extreme conspiracy. The servicing of moles is performed only by comrades with a very high standard of ability, said Ivlov. Thus while in appearance Ivlov-Lapin was at the Embassy a mere nobody, subjected to many humiliations on account of his apparent insignificance, such as standing with women behind the bar at functions, by right he was a great man, the secret assistant to Colonel Gregor Viktorov, whose workname at the Embassy is Polyakov.’ ”

Here Smiley made his one interjection, asking for the spelling. Like an actor disturbed in midflow, Tarr answered rudely, “P-o-l-y-a-k-o-v, got it?”

“Thank you,” said Smiley with unshakeable courtesy, in a manner which conveyed conclusively that the name had no significance for him whatever. Tarr resumed.

“ ‘ Viktorov is himself an old professional of great cunning, said Ivlov. His cover job is cultural attaché and that is how he speaks to Karla. As Cultural Attaché Polyakov, he organises lectures to British universities and societies concerning cultural matters in the Soviet Union, but his nightwork as Colonel Gregor Viktorov is briefing and debriefing the mole Gerald on instruction from Karla at Centre. For this purpose, Colonel Viktorov-Polyakov uses legmen and poor Ivlov was for a while one. Nevertheless it is Karla in Moscow who is the real controller of the mole Gerald.’ ”

“Now it really changes,” said Tarr. “She’s writing at night and she’s either plastered or scared out of her pants, because she’s going all over the damn page. There’s talk about footsteps in the corridor and the dirty looks she’s getting from the gorillas. Not transcribed—right, Mr. Smiley?” And, receiving a small nod, he went on: “ ‘The measures for the mole’s security were remarkable. Written reports from London to Karla at Moscow Centre even after coding were cut in two and sent by separate couriers, others in secret inks underneath orthodox Embassy correspondence. Ivlov told me that the mole Gerald produced at times more conspiratorial material than Viktorov-Polyakov could conveniently handle. Much was on undeveloped film, often thirty reels in a week. Anyone opening the container in the wrong fashion at once exposed the film. Other material was given by the mole in speeches, at extremely conspiratorial meetings, and recorded on special tape that could only be played through complicated machines. This tape was also wiped clean by exposure to light or to the wrong machine. The meetings were of the crash type, always different, always sudden, that is all I know except that it was the time when the Fascist aggression in Vietnam was at its worst; in England the extreme reactionaries had again taken the power. Also that according to Ivlov-Lapin, the mole Gerald was a high functionary in the Circus. Thomas, I tell you this because, since I love you, I have decided to admire all English, you most of all. I do not wish to think of an English gentleman behaving as a traitor, though naturally I believe he was right to join the workers’ cause. Also I fear for the safety of anyone employed by the Circus in a conspiracy. Thomas, I love you; take care with this knowledge—it could hurt you also. Ivlov was a man like you, even if they called him Lapin . . .’ ” Tarr paused diffidently. “There’s a bit at the end which . . .”

“Read it,” Guillam murmured.

Lifting the wad of paper slightly sideways, Tarr read in the same flat drawl: “ ‘Thomas, I am telling you this also because I am afraid. This morning when I woke, he was sitting on the bed, staring at me like a madman. When I went downstairs for coffee, the guards Trepov and Novikov watched me like animals, eating very carelessly. I am sure they had been there hours; also from the Residency, Avilov sat with them, a boy. Have you been indiscreet, Thomas? Did you tell more than you let me think? Now you see why only Alleline would do. You need not blame yourself; I can guess what you have told them. In my heart I am free. You have seen only the bad things in me—the drink, the fear, the lies we live. But deep inside me burns a new and blessed light. I used to think that the secret world was a separate place and that I was banished for ever to an island of half-people. But, Thomas, it is not separate. God has shown me that it is here, right in the middle of the real world, all round us, and we have only to open the door and step outside to be free. Thomas, you must always long for the light which I have found. It is called love. Now I shall take this to our secret place and leave it there while there is still time.

Dear God, I hope there is. God give me sanctuary in His Church. Remember it: I loved you there also.’ ” Tarr was extremely pale, and his hands, as he pulled open his shirt to return the diary to its purse, were trembling and moist. “There’s a last bit,” he said. “It goes: ‘Thomas, why could you remember so few prayers from your boyhood? Your father was a great and good man.’ Like I told you,” he explained, “she was crazy.”

Lacon had opened the blinds and now the full white light of day was pouring into the room. The windows looked onto a small paddock where Jackie Lacon, a fat little girl in plaits and a riding hat, was cautiously cantering her pony.

9

Before Tarr left, Smiley asked a number of questions of him. He was gazing not at Tarr but myopically into the middle distance, his pouchy face despondent from the tragedy.

“Where is the original of that diary?”

“I put it straight back in the dead letter-box. Figure it this way, Mr. Smiley: by the time I found the diary, Irina had been in Moscow twenty-four hours. I guessed she wouldn’t have a lot of breath when it came to the interrogation. Most likely they’d sweated her on the plane, then a second going over when she touched down, then question one as soon as the big boys had finished their breakfast. That’s the way they do it to the timid ones: the arm first and the questions after, right? So it might be only a matter of a day or two before Centre sent along a footpad to take a peek round the back of the church, okay?” Primly again: “Also I had my own welfare to consider.”

“He means that Moscow Centre would be less interested in cutting his throat if they thought he hadn’t read the diary,” said Guillam.

“Did you photograph it?”

“I don’t carry a camera. I bought a dollar notebook. I copied the diary into the notebook. The original I put back. The whole job took me four hours flat.” He glanced at Guillam, then away from him. In the fresh daylight, a deep inner fear was suddenly apparent in Tarr’s face. “When I got back to the hotel, my room was a wreck; they’d even stripped the paper off the walls. The manager told me, ‘Get the hell out.’ He didn’t want to know.”

“He’s carrying a gun,” said Guillam. “He won’t part with it.”

“You’re damn right I won’t.”

Smiley offered a dyspeptic grunt of sympathy. “These meetings you had with Irina: the dead letter-boxes, the safety signals, and fallbacks. Who proposed the tradecraft, you or she?”

“She did.”

“What were the safety signals?”

“Body-talk. If I wore my collar open, she knew I’d had a look around and I reckoned the coast was clear. If I wore it closed, scrub the meeting till the fallback.”

“And Irina?”

“Handbag. Left hand, right hand. I got there first and waited up somewhere she could see me. That gave her the choice: whether to go ahead or split.”

“All this happened more than six months ago. What have you been doing since?”

“Resting,” said Tarr rudely.

Guillam said, “He panicked and went native. He bolted to Kuala Lumpur, then lay up in one of the hill villages. That’s his story. He has a daughter called Danny.”

“Danny’s my little kid.”

“He shacked up with Danny and her mother,” said Guillam, talking, as was his habit, clean across anything Tarr said. “He’s got wives scattered across the globe, but she seems to lead the pack just now.”

“Why did you choose this particular moment to come to us?”

Tarr said nothing.

“Don’t you want to spend Christmas with Danny?”

“Sure.”

“So what happened? Did something scare you?”

“There was rumours,” said Tarr sullenly.

“What sort of rumours?”

“Some Frenchman turned up in K.L. telling them all I owed him money. Wanted to get some lawyer hounding me. I don’t owe anybody money.”

Smiley returned to Guillam. “At the Circus he’s still posted as a defector?”

“Presumed.”

“What have they done about it so far?”

“It’s out of my hands. I heard on the grapevine that London Station held a couple of war parties over him a while back, but they didn’t invite me and I don’t know what came of them. Nothing, I should think, as usual.”

“What passport’s he been using?”

Tarr had his answer ready: “I threw away Thomas the day I hit Malaya. I reckoned Thomas wasn’t exactly the flavour of the month in Moscow and I’d do better to kill him off right there. In K.L. I had them run me up a British.” He handed it to Smiley. “Name of Poole. It’s not bad for the money.”

“Why didn’t you use one of your Swiss escapes?”

Another wary pause.

“Or did you lose them when your hotel room was searched?”

Guillam said, “He cached them as soon as he arrived in Hong Kong. Standard practice.”

“So why didn’t you use them?”

“They were numbered, Mr. Smiley. They may have been blank but they were numbered. I was feeling a mite windy, frankly. If London had the numbers, maybe Moscow did, too, if you take my meaning.”

“So what did you do with your Swiss escapes?” Smiley repeated pleasantly.

“He says he threw them away,” said Guillam. “He sold them, more likely. Or swapped them for that one.”

“How? Threw them away how? Did you burn them?”

“That’s right, I burned them,” said Tarr with a nervy ring to his voice, half a threat, half fear.

“So when you say this Frenchman was enquiring for you—”

“He was looking for Poole.”

“But who else ever heard of Poole, except the man who faked this passport?” Smiley asked, turning the pages. Tarr said nothing. “Tell me how you travelled to England,” Smiley suggested.

“Soft route from Dublin. No problem.” Tarr lied badly under pressure. Perhaps his parents were to blame. He was too fast when he had no answer ready, too aggressive when he had one up his sleeve.

“How did you get to Dublin?” Smiley asked, checking the border stamps on the middle page.

“Roses.” He had recovered his confidence. “Roses all the way. I’ve got a girl who’s an air hostess with South African. A pal of mine flew me cargo to the Cape; at the Cape my girl took care of me, then hitched me a free ride to Dublin with one of the pilots. As far as anyone back East knows, I never left the peninsula.”

“I’m doing what I can to check,” said Guillam to the ceiling.

“Well, you be damn careful, baby,” Tarr snapped down the line to Guillam. “Because I don’t want the wrong people on my back.”

“Why did you come to Mr. Guillam?” Smiley enquired, still deep in Poole’s passport. It had a used, well-thumbed look, neither too full nor too empty. “Apart from the fact that you were frightened, of course.”

“Mr. Guillam’s my boss,” said Tarr virtuously.

“Did it cross your mind he might just turn you straight over to Alleline? After all, you’re something of a wanted man as far as the Circus top brass is concerned, aren’t you?”

“Sure. But I don’t figure Mr. Guillam’s any fonder of the new arrangement than you are, Mr. Smiley.”

“He also loves England,” Guillam explained with mordant sarcasm.

“Sure. I got homesick.”

“Did you ever consider going to anyone else but Mr. Guillam? Why not one of the overseas residencies, for instance, where you were in less danger? Is Mackelvore still headman in Paris?” Guillam nodded. “There you are, then: you could have gone to Mr. Mackelvore. He recruited you, you can trust him: he’s old Circus. You could have sat safely in Paris instead of risking your neck over here. Oh, dear God. Lacon, quick!”

Smiley had risen to his feet, the back of one hand pressed to his mouth as he stared out the window. In the paddock Jackie Lacon was lying on her stomach screaming while a riderless pony careered between the trees. They were still watching as Lacon’s wife, a pretty woman with long hair and thick winter stockings, bounded over the fence and gathered the child up.

“They’re often taking tumbles,” Lacon remarked, quite cross. “They don’t hurt themselves at that age.” And scarcely more graciously: “You’re not responsible for everyone, you know, George.”

Slowly they settled again.

“And if you had been making for Paris,” Smiley resumed, “which route would you have taken?”

“The same till Ireland, then Dublin-Orly, I guess. What do you expect me to do—walk on the damn water?”

At this Lacon coloured and Guillam with an angry exclamation rose to his feet. But Smiley seemed quite unbothered. Taking up the passport again, he turned slowly back to the beginning.

“And how did you get in touch with Mr. Guillam?”

Guillam answered for him, speaking fast: “He knew where I garage my car. He left a note on it saying he wanted to buy it and signed it with his workname Trench. He suggested a place to meet and put in a veiled plea for privacy before I took my trade elsewhere. I brought Fawn along to baby-sit—”

Smiley interrupted: “That was Fawn at the door just now?”

“He watched my back while we talked,” Guillam said. “I’ve kept him with us ever since. As soon as I’d heard Tarr’s story, I rang Lacon from a call-box and asked for an interview . . . George, why don’t we talk this over among ourselves?”

“Rang Lacon down here or in London?”

“Down here,” said Lacon.

There was a pause till Guillam explained. “I happened to remember the name of a girl in Lacon’s office. I mentioned her name and said she had asked me to speak to him urgently on an intimate matter. It wasn’t perfect but it was the best I could think of on the spur of the moment.” He added, filling the silence, “Well, damn it, there was no reason to suppose the phone was tapped.”

“There was every reason.”

Smiley had closed the passport and was examining the binding by the light of a tattered reading lamp at his side. “This is rather good, isn’t it?” he remarked lightly. “Really very good indeed. I’d say that was a professional product. I can’t find a blemish.”

“Don’t worry, Mr. Smiley,” Tarr retorted, taking it back; “it’s not made in Russia.” By the time he reached the door, his smile had returned. “You know something?” he said, addressing all three of them down the aisle of the long room. “If Irina is right, you boys are going to need a whole new Circus. So if we all stick together I guess we could be in on the ground floor.” He gave the door a playful tap. “Come on, darling, it’s me. Ricki.”

“Thank you! It’s all right now! Open up, please,” Lacon shouted, and a moment later the key was turned, the dark figure of Fawn the baby-sitter flitted into view, and then the footsteps faded into the big hollows of the house, to the distant accompaniment of Jackie Lacon’s crying.

10

On another side of the house, away from the pony paddock, a grass tennis court was hidden among the trees. It was not a good tennis court; it was mown seldom. In spring the grass was sodden from the winter and no sun got in to dry it, in summer the balls disappeared into the foliage, and this morning it was ankle deep in frosted leaves that had collected from all over the garden. But round the outside, roughly following the wire rectangle, a footpath wandered between some beech trees and here Smiley and Lacon wandered also. Smiley had fetched his travelling coat but Lacon wore only his threadbare suit. For this reason, perhaps, he chose a brisk, if unco-ordinated, pace which with each stride took him well ahead of Smiley, so that he had constantly to hover, shoulders and elbows lifted, waiting till the shorter man caught up. Then he promptly bounded off again, gaining ground. They completed two laps in this way before Lacon broke the silence.

“When you came to me a year ago with a similar suggestion, I’m afraid I threw you out. I suppose I should apologise. I was remiss.” There was a suitable silence while he pondered his dereliction. “I instructed you to abandon your enquiries.”

“You told me they were unconstitutional,” Smiley said mournfully, as if he were recalling the same sad error.

“Was that the word I used? Good Lord, how very pompous of me!”

From the direction of the house came the sound of Jackie’s continued crying.

“You never had any, did you?” Lacon piped at once, his head lifted to the sound.

“I’m sorry?”

“Children. You and Ann.”

“ No.”

“Nephews, nieces?”

“One nephew.”

“On your side?”

“Hers.”

Perhaps I never left the place, Smiley thought, peering around him at the tangled roses, the broken swings and sodden sandpits, the raw red house so shrill in the morning light. Perhaps we’re still here from last time.

Lacon was apologising again: “Dare I say I didn’t absolutely trust your motives? It rather crossed my mind that Control had put you up to it, you see. As a way of hanging on to power and keeping Alleline out”—swirling away again, long strides, wrists outward.

“Oh, no, I assure you Control knew nothing about it at all.”

“I realise that now. I didn’t at the time. It’s a little difficult to know when to trust you people and when not. You do live by rather different standards, don’t you? I mean you have to. I accept that. I’m not being judgemental. Our aims are the same, after all, even if our methods are different”—bounding over a cattle ditch. “I once heard someone say morality was method. Do you hold with that? I suppose you wouldn’t. You would say that morality was vested in the aim, I expect. Difficult to know what one’s aims are, that’s the trouble, specially if you’re British. We can’t expect you people to determine our policy for us, can we? We can only ask you to further it. Correct? Tricky one, that.”

Rather than chase after him, Smiley sat on a rusted swing seat and huddled himself more tightly in his coat, till finally Lacon stalked back and perched beside him. For a while they rocked together to the rhythm of the groaning springs.

“Why the devil did she choose Tarr?” Lacon muttered at last, fiddling his long fingers. “Of all the people in the world to choose for a confessor, I can imagine none more miserably unsuitable.”

“I’m afraid you’ll have to ask a woman that question, not us,” said Smiley, wondering again where Immingham was.

“Oh, indeed,” Lacon agreed lavishly. “All that’s a complete mystery. I’m seeing the Minister at eleven,” he confided, in a lower tone. “I have to put him in the picture. Your parliamentary cousin,” he added, forcing an intimate joke.

“Ann’s cousin, actually,” Smiley corrected him, in the same absent tone. “Far removed I may add, but cousin for all that.”

“And Bill Haydon is also Ann’s cousin? Our distinguished Head of London Station.” They had played this game before as well.

“By a different route, yes, Bill is also her cousin.” He added quite uselessly: “She comes from an old family with a strong political tradition. With time it’s rather spread.”

“The tradition?”—Lacon loved to nail an ambiguity.

“The family.”

Beyond the trees, Smiley thought, cars are passing. Beyond the trees lies a whole world, but Lacon has this red castle and a sense of Christian ethic that promises him no reward except a knighthood, the respect of his peers, a fat pension, and a couple of charitable directorships in the City.

“Anyway I’m seeing him at eleven.” Lacon had jerked to his feet and they were walking again. Smiley caught the name “Ellis” floating backward to him on the leafy morning air. For a moment, as in the car with Guillam, an odd nervousness overcame him.

“After all,” Lacon was saying, “we both held perfectly honourable positions. You felt that Ellis had been betrayed and you wanted a witch-hunt. My Minister and I felt there had been gross incompetence on the part of Control—a view which to put it mildly the Foreign Office shared—and we wanted a new broom.”

“Oh, I quite understood your dilemma,” said Smiley, more to himself than to Lacon.

“I’m glad. And don’t forget, George: you were Control’s man. Control preferred you to Haydon, and when he lost his grip towards the end—and launched that whole extraordinary adventure—it was you who fronted for him. No one but you, George. It’s not every day that the head of one’s secret service embarks on a private war against the Czechs.” It was clear that the memory still smarted. “In other circumstances, I suppose, Haydon might have gone to the wall, but you were in the hot seat and—”

“And Percy Alleline was the Minister’s man,” said Smiley, mildly enough for Lacon to slow himself and listen.

“It wasn’t as if you had a suspect, you know! You didn’t point the finger at anyone! A directionless enquiry can be extraordinarily destructive!”

“Whereas a new broom sweeps cleaner.”

“Percy Alleline has produced intelligence instead of scandals, he has stuck to the letter of his charter and won the trust of the customers. And he has not, to my knowledge, invaded Czechoslovak territory. All in all he has done extremely well.”

“With Bill Haydon to field for him, who wouldn’t?”

“Control, for one,” said Lacon, with punch.

They had drawn up at an empty swimming pool and now stood staring into the deep end. From its grimy depths Smiley fancied he heard again the insinuating tones of Roddy Martindale: “Little reading rooms at the Admiralty, little committees popping up with funny names . . .”

“Is that special source of Percy’s still running?” Smiley enquired. “The Witchcraft material, or whatever it’s called these days?”

“I didn’t know you were on the list,” Lacon said, not at all pleased. “Since you ask, yes. Source Merlin’s our mainstay and Witchcraft is still the name of his product. The Circus hasn’t turned in such good material for years. Since I can remember, in fact.”

“And still subject to all that special handling?”

“Certainly, and now that this has happened I’ve no doubt that we shall take even more rigorous precautions.”

“I wouldn’t do that if I were you. Gerald might smell a rat.”

“That’s the point, isn’t it?” Lacon observed quickly. His strength was improbable, Smiley reflected. One minute he was like a thin, drooping boxer whose gloves were too big for his wrists; the next he had reached out and rocked you against the ropes, and was surveying you with Christian compassion. “We can’t move. We can’t investigate because all the instruments of enquiry are in the Circus’s hands, perhaps in the mole Gerald’s. We can’t watch, or listen, or open mail. To do any one of those things would require the resources of Esterhase’s lamplighters, and Esterhase like anyone else must be suspect. We can’t interrogate; we can’t take steps to limit a particular person’s access to delicate secrets. To do any of these things would be to run the risk of alarming the mole. It’s the oldest question of all, George. Who can spy on the spies? Who can smell out the fox without running with him?” He made an awful stab at humour: “Mole, rather,” he said, in a confiding aside.

In a fit of energy Smiley had broken away and was pounding ahead of Lacon down the path that led towards the paddock.

“Then go to the competition,” he called. “Go to the security people. They’re the experts; they’ll do you a job.”

“The Minister won’t have that. You know perfectly well how he and Alleline feel about the competition. Rightly, too, if I may say so. A lot of ex-colonial administrators ploughing through Circus papers: you might as well bring in the army to investigate the navy!”

“That’s no comparison at all,” Smiley objected.

But Lacon as a good civil servant had his second metaphor ready: “Very well, the Minister would rather live with a damp roof than see his castle pulled down by outsiders. Does that satisfy you? He has a perfectly good point, George. We do have agents in the field, and I wouldn’t give much for their chances once the security gentlemen barge in.”

Now it was Smiley’s turn to slow down. “How many?”

“Six hundred, give or take a few.”

“And behind the Curtain?”

“We budget for a hundred and twenty.” With numbers, with facts of all sorts, Lacon never faltered. They were the gold he worked with, wrested from the grey bureaucratic earth. “So far as I can make out from the financial returns, almost all of them are presently active.” He took a long bound. “So I can tell him you’ll do it, can I?” he sang quite casually, as if the question were mere formality, check the appropriate box. “You’ll take the job, clean the stables? Go backwards, go forwards, do whatever is necessary? It’s your generation, after all. Your legacy.”

Smiley had pushed open the paddock gate and slammed it behind him. They were facing each other over its rickety frame. Lacon, slightly pink, wore a dependent smile.

“Why do I say Ellis?” he asked conversationally. “Why do I talk about the Ellis affair when the poor man’s name was Prideaux?”

“Ellis was his workname.”

“Of course. So many scandals in those days, one forgets the details.” Hiatus. Swinging of the right forearm. Lunge. “And he was Haydon’s friend, not yours?” Lacon enquired.

“They were at Oxford together before the war.”

“And stablemates in the Circus during and after. The famous Haydon-Prideaux partnership. My predecessor spoke of it interminably.” He repeated, “But you were never close to him?”

“To Prideaux? No.”

“Not a cousin, I mean?”

“For heaven’s sake,” Smiley breathed.

Lacon grew suddenly awkward again, but a dogged purpose kept his gaze on Smiley. “And there’s no emotional or other reason which you feel might debar you from the assignment? You must speak up, George,” he insisted anxiously, as if speaking up were the last thing he wanted. He waited a fraction, then threw it all away: “Though I see no real case. There’s always a part of us that belongs to the public domain, isn’t there? The social contract cuts both ways; you always knew that, I’m sure. So did Prideaux.”

“What does that mean?”

“Well, good Lord, he was shot, George. A bullet in the back is held to be quite a sacrifice, isn’t it, even in your world?”

Alone, Smiley stood at the further end of the paddock, under the dripping trees, trying to make sense of his emotions while he reached for breath. Like an old illness, his anger had taken him by surprise. Ever since his retirement, he had been denying its existence, steering clear of anything that could touch it off: newspapers, former colleagues, gossip of the Martindale sort. After a lifetime of living by his wits and his considerable memory, he had given himself full time to the profession of forgetting. He had forced himself to pursue scholarly interests which had served him well enough as a distraction while he was at the Circus, but which now that he was unemployed were nothing, absolutely nothing. He could have shouted: Nothing!

“Burn the lot,” Ann had suggested helpfully, referring to his books. “Set fire to the house. But don’t rot.”

If by rot, she meant conform, she was right to read that as his aim. He had tried, really tried, as he approached what the insurance advertisements were pleased to call the evening of his life, to be all that a model rentier should be; though no one, least of all Ann, thanked him for the effort. Each morning as he got out of bed, each evening as he went back to it, usually alone, he had reminded himself that he never was and never had been indispensable. He had schooled himself to admit that in those last wretched months of Control’s career, when disasters followed one another with heady speed, he had been guilty of seeing things out of proportion. And if the old professional Adam rebelled in him now and then and said: You know the place went bad, you know Jim Prideaux was betrayed—and what more eloquent testimony is there than a bullet, two bullets, in the back? Well, he had replied, suppose he did? And suppose he was right? “It is sheer vanity to believe that one fat middle-aged spy is the only person capable of holding the world together,” he would tell himself. And other times: “I never heard of anyone yet who left the Circus without some unfinished business.”

Only Ann, though she could not read his workings, refused to accept his findings. She was quite passionate, in fact, as only women can be on matters of business, really driving him to go back, take up where he had left off, never to veer aside in favour of the easy arguments. Not of course that she knew anything, but what woman was ever stopped by a want of information? She felt. And despised him for not acting in accordance with her feelings.

And now, at the very moment when he was near enough beginning to believe his own dogma, a feat made no easier by Ann’s infatuation for an out-of-work actor, what happens but that the assembled ghosts of his past—Lacon, Control, Karla, Alleline, Esterhase, Bland, and finally Bill Haydon himself—barge into his cell and cheerfully inform him, as they drag him back to this same garden, that everything he had been calling vanity is truth?

“Haydon,” he repeated to himself, no longer able to stem the tides of memory. Even the name was like a jolt. “I’m told that you and Bill shared everything once upon a time,” said Martindale. He stared at his chubby hands, watching them shake. Too old? Impotent? Afraid of the chase? Or afraid of what he might unearth at the end of it? “There are always a dozen reasons for doing nothing,” Ann liked to say—it was a favourite apologia, indeed, for many of her misdemeanours—“There is only one reason for doing something. And that’s because you want to.” Or have to? Ann would furiously deny it: coercion, she would say, is just another word for doing what you want; or for not doing what you are afraid of.

Middle children weep longer than their brothers and sisters. Over her mother’s shoulder, stilling her pains and her injured pride, Jackie Lacon watched the party leave. First, two men she had not seen before: one tall, one short and dark. They drove off in a small green van. No one waved to them, she noticed, or even said goodbye. Next, her father left in his own car; lastly a blond, good-looking man and a short fat one in an enormous overcoat like a pony blanket made their way to a sports car parked under the beech trees. For a moment she really thought there must be something wrong with the fat one, he followed so slowly and so painfully. Then, seeing the handsome man hold the car door for him, he seemed to wake, and hurried forward with a lumpy skip. Unaccountably, this gesture upset her afresh. A storm of sorrow seized her and her mother could not console her.

11

Peter Guillam was a chivalrous fellow whose conscious loyalties were determined by his affections. The others had been made over long ago to the Circus. His father, a French businessman, had spied for a Circus réseau in the war while his mother, an Englishwoman, did mysterious things with codes. Until eight years ago, under the cover of a shipping clerk, Guillam himself had run his own agents in French North Africa, which was considered a murderous assignment. He was blown, his agents were hanged, and he entered the long middle age of the grounded pro. He did hackwork in London, sometimes for Smiley, ran a few home-based operations, including a network of girlfriends who were not, as the jargon has it, inter-conscious, and when Alleline’s crowd took over he was shoved out to grass in Brixton—he supposed because he had the wrong connections, among them Smiley. That, resolutely, was how until last Friday he would have told the story of his life. Of his relationship with Smiley he would have dwelt principally upon the end.

Guillam was living mainly in London docks in those days, where he was putting together low-grade Marine networks from whatever odd Polish, Russian, and Chinese seamen he and a bunch of talent-spotters occasionally managed to get their hands on. Betweenwhiles he sat in a small room on the first floor of the Circus and consoled a pretty secretary called Mary, and he was quite happy except that no one in authority would answer his minutes. When he used the phone, he got “engaged” or no answer. He had heard vaguely there was trouble, but there was always trouble. It was common knowledge, for instance, that Alleline and Control had locked horns, but they had been doing little else for years. He also knew, like everyone else, that a big operation had aborted in Czechoslovakia, that the Foreign Office and the Defence Ministry had jointly blown a gasket, and that Jim Prideaux—head of scalp-hunters, the oldest Czecho hand, and Bill Haydon’s lifelong stringer—had been shot up and put in the bag. Hence, he assumed, the loud silence and the glum faces. Hence also Bill Haydon’s manic anger, of which the news spread like a nervous thrill through all the building: like God’s wrath, said Mary, who loved a full-scale passion. Later he heard the catastrophe called Testify. Testify, Haydon told him much later, was the most incompetent bloody operation ever launched by an old man for his dying glory, and Jim Prideaux was the price of it. Bits made the newspapers, there were parliamentary questions, and even rumours, never officially confirmed, that British troops in Germany had been put on full alert.

Eventually, by sauntering in and out of other people’s offices, he began to realise what everyone else had realised some weeks before. The Circus wasn’t just silent, it was frozen. Nothing was coming in, nothing was going out; not at the level on which Guillam moved, anyhow. Inside the building, people in authority had gone to earth, and when pay day came round there were no buff envelopes in the pigeon-holes because, according to Mary, the housekeepers had not received the usual monthly authority to issue them. Now and then somebody would say they had seen Alleline leaving his club and he looked furious. Or Control getting into his car and he looked sunny. Or that Bill Haydon had resigned, on the grounds that he had been overruled or undercut, but Bill was always resigning. This time, said the rumour, the grounds were somewhat different, however: Haydon was furious that the Circus would not pay the Czech price for Jim Prideaux’s repatriation; it was said to be too high in agents, or prestige. And that Bill had broken out in one of his fits of chauvinism and declared that any price was fair to get one loyal Englishman home: give them everything, only get Jim back.

Then, one evening, Smiley peered round Guillam’s door and suggested a drink. Mary didn’t realise who he was and just said “Hullo” in her stylish classless drawl. As they walked out of the Circus side by side, Smiley wished the janitors good night with unusual terseness, and in the pub in Wardour Street he said, “I’ve been sacked,” and that was all.

From the pub they went to a wine bar off Charing Cross, a cellar with music playing and no one there. “Did they give any reason?” Guillam enquired. “Or is it just because you’ve lost your figure?”

It was the word “reason” that Smiley fixed on. He was by then politely but thoroughly drunk, but reason, as they walked unsteadily along the Thames embankment, reason got through to him.

“Reason as logic, or reason as motive?” he demanded, sounding less like himself than Bill Haydon, whose pre-war, Oxford Union style of polemic seemed in those days to be in everybody’s ears. “Or reason as a way of life?” They sat on a bench. “They don’t have to give me reasons. I can write my own damn reasons. And that is not the same,” he insisted as Guillam guided him carefully into a cab, gave the driver the money and the address, “that is not the same as the half-baked tolerance that comes from no longer caring.”

“Amen,” said Guillam, fully realising as he watched the cab pull into the distance that by the rules of the Circus their friendship, such as it was, had that minute ended. Next day Guillam learned that more heads had rolled and that Percy Alleline was to stand in as night watchman with the title of acting chief, and that Bill Haydon, to everyone’s astonishment, but most likely out of persisting anger with Control, would serve under him; or, as the wise ones said, over him.

By Christmas, Control was dead. “They’ll get you next,” said Mary, who saw these events as a second storming of the Winter Palace, and she wept when Guillam departed for the siberias of Brixton, ironically to fill Jim Prideaux’s slot.

Climbing the four steps to the Circus that wet Monday afternoon, his mind bright with the prospect of felony, Guillam passed these events in review and decided that today was the beginning of the road back.

He had spent the previous night at his spacious flat in Eaton Place in the company of Camilla, a music student with a long body and a sad, beautiful face. Though she was not more than twenty, her black hair was streaked with grey, as if from a shock she never talked about. As another effect, perhaps, of the same undescribed trauma, she ate no meat, wore no leather, and drank nothing alcoholic; only in love, it seemed to Guillam, was she free of these mysterious restraints.

He had spent the morning alone in his extremely dingy room in Brixton photographing Circus documents, having first drawn a subminiature camera from his own operational stores, a thing he did quite often to keep his hand in. “Daylight or electric?” the storeman asked, and they had a friendly discussion about film grain. He told his secretary he didn’t want to be disturbed, closed his door, and set to work according to Smiley’s precise instructions. The windows were high in the wall. Even sitting, he could see only the sky and the tip of the new school up the road.

He began with works of reference from his personal safe. Smiley had given him priorities. First the staff directory, on issue to senior officers only, which supplied the home addresses, telephone numbers, names, and worknames of all home-based Circus personnel. Second, the handbook on staff duties, including the fold-in diagram of the Circus’s reorganisation under Alleline. At its centre lay Bill Haydon’s London Station, like a giant spider in its own web. “After the Prideaux fiasco,” Bill had reputedly fumed, “we’ll have no more damned private armies, no more left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing.” Alleline, he noticed, was billed twice: once as Chief, once as Director Special Sources. According to rumour, it was those sources that kept the Circus in business. Nothing else, in Guillam’s view, could account for the Circus’s inertia at working level and the esteem it enjoyed in Whitehall. To these documents, at Smiley’s insistence, he added the scalp-hunters’ revised charter, in the form of an Alleline letter beginning “Dear Guillam,” and setting out in detail the diminution of his powers. In several cases, the winner was Toby Esterhase, head of Acton lamplighters, the one outstation that had actually grown fatter under lateralism.

Next he moved to his desk and photographed, also on Smiley’s instruction, a handful of routine circulars that might be useful as background reading. These included a belly-ache from Admin., on the state of safe houses in the London area (“Kindly treat them as if they were your own”), and another about the misuse of unlisted Circus telephones for private calls. Lastly a very rude personal letter from documents warning him “for the last time of asking” that his workname driving licence was out of date, and that unless he took the trouble to renew it “his name would be forwarded to the housekeepers for appropriate disciplinary action.”

He put away the camera and returned to his safe. On the bottom shelf lay a stack of lamplighter reports issued over Toby Esterhase’s signature and stamped with the code word “Hatchet.” These supplied the names and cover jobs of the two or three hundred identified Soviet intelligence officers operating in London under legal or semi-legal cover: trade, Tass, Aeroflot, Radio Moscow, consular, and diplomatic. Where appropriate, they also gave the dates of lamplighter investigations and names of branch lines, which is jargon for contacts thrown up in the course of surveillance and not necessarily run to earth. The reports came in a main annual volume and monthly supplements. He consulted the main volume first, then the supplements. At eleven-twenty he locked his safe, rang London Station on the direct line, and asked for Lauder Strickland, of Banking Section.

“Lauder, this is Peter from Brixton; how’s trade?”

“Yes, Peter, what can we do for you?”

Brisk and blank. We of London Station have more important friends, said the tone.

It was a question of washing some dirty money, Guillam explained, to finance a ploy against a French diplomatic courier who seemed to be for sale. In his meekest voice, he wondered whether Lauder could possibly find the time for them to meet and discuss it. Was the project cleared with London Station, Lauder demanded. No, but Guillam had already sent the papers to Bill by shuttle. Lauder Strickland came down a peg. Guillam pressed his cause: “There are one or two tricky aspects, Lauder; I think we need your sort of brain.”

Lauder said he could spare him half an hour.

On his way to the West End, he dropped his films at the meagre premises of a chemist called Lark, in the Charing Cross Road. Lark, if it was he, was a very fat man with tremendous fists. The shop was empty.

“Mr. Lampton’s films, to be developed,” said Guillam. Lark took the package to the back room, and when he returned he said “All done” in a gravel voice, then blew out a lot of air at once, as if he were smoking, which he wasn’t. He saw Guillam to the door and closed it behind him with a clatter. Where on God’s earth does George find them, Guillam wondered. He had bought some throat pastilles. Every move must be accountable, Smiley had warned him: assume that the Circus has the dogs on you twenty-four hours a day. So what’s new about that, Guillam thought; Toby Esterhase would put the dogs on his own mother if it bought him a pat on the back from Alleline.

From Charing Cross he walked up to Chez Victor for lunch with his head man, Cy Vanhofer, and a thug calling himself Lorimer, who claimed to be sharing his mistress with the East German ambassador in Stockholm. Lorimer said the girl was ready to play ball but she needed British citizenship and a lot of money on delivery of the first take. She would do anything, he said: spike the ambassador’s mail, bug his rooms, or “put broken glass in his bath,” which was supposed to be a joke. Guillam reckoned Lorimer was lying, and he was inclined to wonder whether Vanhofer was too, but he was wise enough to realise that he was in no state to say which way anyone was leaning just then. He liked Chez Victor but had no recollection of what he ate, and now as he entered the lobby of the Circus he knew the reason was excitement.

“Hullo, Bryant.”

“Nice to see you, sir. Take a seat, sir, please, just for a moment, sir, thank you,” said Bryant, all in one breath, and Guillam perched on the wooden settle thinking of dentists and Camilla. She was a recent and somewhat mercurial acquisition; it was a while since things had moved quite so fast for him. They met at a party and she talked about truth, alone in a corner over a carrot juice. Guillam, taking a long chance, said he wasn’t too good at ethics, so why didn’t they just go to bed together? She considered for a while, gravely; then fetched her coat. She’d been hanging around ever since, cooking nut rissoles and playing the flute.

The lobby looked dingier than ever. Three old lifts, a wooden barrier, a poster for Mazawattee tea, Bryant’s glass-fronted sentry box with a “Scenes of England” calendar, and a line of mossy telephones.

“Mr. Strickland is expecting you, sir,” said Bryant as he emerged, and in slow motion stamped a pink chit with the time of day: “14:55, P. Bryant, Janitor.” The grille of the centre lift rattled like a bunch of dry sticks.

“Time you oiled this thing, isn’t it?” Guillam called as he waited for the mechanism to mesh.

“We keep asking,” said Bryant, embarking on a favourite lament. “They never do a thing about it. You can ask till you’re blue in the face. How’s the family, sir?”

“Fine,” said Guillam, who had none.

“That’s right,” said Bryant. Looking down, Guillam saw the creamy head vanish between his feet. Mary called him strawberry and vanilla, he remembered: red face, white hair, and mushy.

In the lift he examined his pass. “Permit to enter L.S.,” ran the headline. “Purpose of visit: Banking Section. This document to be handed back on leaving.” And a space, marked “host’s signature,” blank.

“Well met, Peter. Greetings. You’re a trifle late, I think, but never mind.”

Lauder was waiting at the barrier—all five foot nothing of him, white collared and secretly on tiptoe—to be visited. In Control’s day this floor had been a thoroughfare of busy people. Today a barrier closed the entrance and a rat-faced janitor scrutinised his pass.

“Good God, how long have you had that monster?” Guillam asked, slowing down before a shiny new coffee machine. A couple of girls, filling beakers, glanced round and said “Hullo, Lauder,” looking at Guillam. The tall one reminded him of Camilla: the same slow-burning eyes, censuring male insufficiency.

“Ah, but you’ve no notion how many man-hours it saves!” Lauder cried at once. “Fantastic. Quite fantastic,” and all but knocked over Bill Haydon in his enthusiasm.

He was emerging from his room, an hexagonal pepper pot overlooking New Compton Street and the Charing Cross Road. He was moving in the same direction as they were but at about half a mile an hour, which for Bill indoors was full throttle. Outdoors was a different matter; Guillam had seen that, too—on training games at Sarratt, and once on a night drop in Greece. Outdoors he was swift and eager; his keen face, in this clammy corridor shadowed and withdrawn, seemed in the free air to be fashioned by the outlandish places where he had served. There was no end to them: no operational theatre, in Guillam’s admiring eyes, that did not bear the Haydon imprint somewhere. Over and again in his own career, he had made the same eerie encounter with Bill’s exotic progress. A year or two back, still working on Marine intelligence and having as one of his targets the assembly of a team of coast-watchers for the Chinese ports of Wenchow and Amoy, Guillam discovered to his amazement that there were actually Chinese stay-behind agents living in those very towns, recruited by Bill Haydon in the course of some forgotten wartime exploit, rigged out with cached radios and equipment, with whom contact might be made. Another time, raking through war records of Circus strong-arm men, more out of nostalgia for the period than present professional optimism, Guillam stumbled twice on Haydon’s workname in as many minutes: in 1941 he was running French fishing smacks out of the Helford Estuary; in the same year, with Jim Prideaux as his stringer, he was laying down courier lines across southern Europe from the Balkans to Madrid. To Guillam, Haydon was of that unrepeatable, fading Circus generation, to which his parents and George Smiley also belonged—exclusive and, in Haydon’s case, blue-blooded—which had lived a dozen leisured lives to his own hasty one, and still, thirty years later, gave the Circus its dying flavour of adventure.

Seeing them both, Haydon stood rock-still. It was a month since Guillam had spoken to him; he had probably been away on unexplained business. Now, against the light of his own open doorway, he looked strangely black and tall. He was carrying something—Guillam could not make out what it was—a magazine, a file, or a report; his room, split by his own shadow, was an undergraduate mayhem, monkish and chaotic. Reports, flimsies, and dossiers lay heaped everywhere; on the wall a baize noticeboard jammed with postcards and press cuttings; beside it, askew and unframed, one of Bill’s old paintings, a rounded abstract in the hard flat colours of the desert.

“Hullo, Bill,” said Guillam.

Leaving his door open—a breach of housekeeper regulations—Haydon fell in ahead of them, still without a word. He was dressed with his customary dottiness. The leather patches of his jacket were stitched on like diamonds, not squares, which from behind gave him a harlequin look. His spectacles were jammed up into his hair like goggles. For a moment they followed him uncertainly, till, without warning, he suddenly turned himself round, all of him at once like a statue being slowly swivelled on its plinth, and fixed his gaze on Guillam. Then he grinned, so that his crescent eyebrows went straight up like a clown’s, and his face became handsome and absurdly young.

“What the hell are you doing here, you pariah?” he enquired pleasantly.

Taking the question seriously, Lauder started to explain about the Frenchman and the dirty money.

“Well, mind you lock up the spoons,” said Bill, talking straight through him. “Those bloody scalp-hunters will steal the gold out of your teeth. Lock up the girls, too,” he added as an afterthought, his eyes still on Guillam, “if they’ll let you. Since when did scalp-hunters wash their own money? That’s our job.”

“Lauder’s doing the washing. We’re just spending the stuff.”

“Papers to me,” Haydon said to Strickland, with sudden curtness. “I’m not crossing any more bloody wires.”

“They’re already routed to you,” said Guillam. “They’re probably in your in-tray now.”

A last nod sent them on ahead, so that Guillam felt Haydon’s pale blue gaze boring into his back all the way to the next dark turning.

“Fantastic fellow,” Lauder declared, as if Guillam had never met him. “London Station could not be in better hands. Incredible ability. Incredible record. Brilliant.”

Whereas you, thought Guillam savagely, are brilliant by association. With Bill, with the coffee machine, with banks. His meditations were interrupted by Roy Bland’s caustic cockney voice, issuing from a doorway ahead of them.

“Hey, Lauder, hold on a minute: have you seen Bloody Bill anywhere? He’s wanted urgently.”

Followed at once by Toby Esterhase’s faithful mid-European echo from the same direction: “Immediately, Lauder; actually, we have put out an alert for him.”

They had entered the last cramped corridor. Lauder was perhaps three paces on and was already composing his answer to this question as Guillam arrived at the open doorway and looked in. Bland was sprawled massively at his desk. He had thrown off his jacket and was clutching a paper. Arcs of sweat ringed his armpits. Tiny Toby Esterhase was stooped over him like a headwaiter, a stiff-backed miniature ambassador with silvery hair and a crisp unfriendly jaw, and he had stretched out one hand towards the paper as if to recommend a speciality. They had evidently been reading the same document when Bland caught sight of Lauder Strickland passing.

“Indeed I have seen Bill Haydon,” said Lauder, who had a trick of rephrasing questions to make them sound more seemly. “I suspect Bill is on his way to you this moment. He’s a way back there down the corridor; we were having a brief word about a couple of things.”

Bland’s gaze moved slowly to Guillam and settled there; its chilly appraisal was uncomfortably reminiscent of Haydon’s. “Hullo, Pete,” he said. At this, Tiny Toby straightened up and turned his eyes also directly towards Guillam; brown and quiet like a pointer’s.

“Hi,” said Guillam, “what’s the joke?”

Their greeting was not merely frosty; it was downright hostile. Guillam had lived cheek by jowl with Toby Esterhase for three months on a very dodgy operation in Switzerland and Toby had never smiled once, so his stare came as no surprise. But Roy Bland was one of Smiley’s discoveries, a warmhearted and impulsive fellow for that world, red-haired and burly, an intellectual primitive whose idea of a good evening was talking Wittgenstein in the pubs round Kentish Town. He’d spent ten years as a Party hack, plodding the academic circuit in Eastern Europe, and now, like Guillam, he was grounded, which was even something of a bond. His usual style was a big grin, a slap on the shoulder, and a blast of last night’s beer; but not today.

“No joke, Peter, old boy,” said Roy, mustering a belated smile. “Just surprised to see you, that’s all. We’re used to having this floor to ourselves.”

“Here’s Bill,” said Lauder, very pleased to have his prognostication so promptly confirmed. In a strip of light, as he entered it, Guillam noticed the queer colour of Haydon’s cheeks. A blushing red, daubed high on the bones, but deep, made up of tiny broken veins. It gave him, thought Guillam in his heightened state of nervousness, a slightly Dorian Gray look.

His meeting with Lauder Strickland lasted an hour and twenty minutes; Guillam spun it out that long, and throughout it his mind went back to Bland and Esterhase and he wondered what the hell was eating them.

“Well, I suppose I’d better go and clear all this with the Dolphin,” he said at last. “We all know how she is about Swiss banks.” The housekeepers lived two doors down from Banking. “I’ll leave this here,” he added and tossed the pass on to Lauder’s desk.

Diana Dolphin’s room smelt of fresh deodorant; her chain-mail handbag lay on the safe beside a copy of the Financial Times. She was one of those groomed Circus brides whom no one ever marries. Yes, he said wearily, the operational papers were already on submission to London Station. Yes, he understood that freewheeling with dirty money was a thing of the past.

“Then we shall look into it and let you know,” she announced, which meant she would go and ask Phil Porteous, who sat next door.

“I’ll tell Lauder, then,” said Guillam, and left.

Move, he thought.

In the men’s room he waited thirty seconds at the basins, watching the door in the mirror and listening. A curious quiet had descended over the whole floor. Come on, he thought, you’re getting old; move. He crossed the corridor, stepped boldly into the duty officers’ room, closed the door with a slam, and looked round. He reckoned he had ten minutes, and he reckoned that a slammed door made less noise in that silence than a door surreptitiously closed. Move.

He had brought the camera but the light was awful. The net-curtained window looked onto a courtyard full of blackened pipes. He couldn’t have risked a brighter bulb even if he’d had one with him, so he used his memory. Nothing much seemed to have changed since the takeover. In the daytime the place was used as a restroom for girls with the vapours, and to judge by the smell of cheap scent it still was. Along one wall lay the imitation-leather divan, which at night made into a rotten bed; beside it the first-aid chest with the red cross peeling off the front, and a clapped-out television. The steel cupboard stood in its same place between the switchboard and the locked telephones, and he made a beeline for it. It was an old cupboard and he could have opened it with a tin opener. He had brought his picks and a couple of light alloy tools. Then he remembered that the combination used to be 31-22-11 and he tried it, four anti, three clock, two anti, clockwise till she springs. The dial was so jaded it knew the way. When he opened the door, dust rolled out of the bottom in a cloud, crawled a distance, then slowly lifted towards the dark window. At the same moment, he heard what sounded like a single note played on a flute: it came from a car, most likely, braking in the street outside; or the wheel of a file trolley squeaking on linoleum. But for that moment it was one of those long, mournful notes which made up Camilla’s practice scales. She played exactly when she felt like it. At midnight, in the early morning, or whenever. She didn’t give a damn about the neighbours; she seemed quite nerveless altogether. He remembered her that first evening: “Which is your side of the bed? Where shall I put my clothes?” He prided himself on his delicate touch in such things, but Camilla had no use for it; technique was already a compromise, a compromise with reality—she would say an escape from it. All right, so get me out of this lot.

The duty logbooks were on the top shelf, in bound volumes with the dates pasted on the spines. They looked like family account books. He took down the volume for April and studied the list of names on the inside cover, wondering whether anyone could see him from the dupe-room across the courtyard, and if they could, would they care? He began working through the entries, searching for the night of the tenth and eleventh, when the signals traffic between London Station and Tarr was supposed to have taken place. Hong Kong was eight hours ahead, Smiley had pointed out: Tarr’s telegram and London’s first answer had both happened out of hours.

From the corridor came a sudden swell of voices, and for a second he even fancied he could pick out Alleline’s growling border brogue lifted in humourless banter, but fancies were two a penny just now. He had a cover story and a part of him believed it already. If he was caught, the whole of him would believe it; and if the Sarratt inquisitors sweated him, he had a fallback—he never travelled without one. All the same, he was terrified. The voices died, and the ghost of Percy Alleline with them. Sweat was running over his ribs. A girl tripped past humming a tune from Hair. If Bill hears you, he’ll murder you, he thought; if there’s one thing that sends Bill spare it’s humming. “What are you doing here, you pariah?”

Then, to his fleeting amusement, he actually heard Bill’s infuriated roar, echoing from God knows what distance: “Stop that moaning. Who is the fool?”

Move. Once you stop, you never start again: there is a special stage-fright that can make you dry up and walk away, that burns your fingers when you touch the goods and turns your stomach to water. Move. He put back the April volume and drew four others at random: February, June, September, and October. He flicked through them fast, looking for comparisons, returned them to the shelf, and dropped into a crouch. He wished to God the dust would settle; there seemed to be no end to it. Why didn’t someone complain? Always the same when a lot of people use one place: no one’s responsible, no one gives a hoot. He was looking for the night janitors’ attendance lists. He found them on the bottom shelf, jammed in with the tea-bags and the condensed milk: sheafs of them in envelope-type folders. The janitors filled them in and brought them to you twice in your twelve-hour tour of duty: at midnight and again at 6 A.M. You vouched for their correctness—God knows how, since the night staff were scattered all over the building—signed them off, kept the third copy, and chucked it in the cupboard, no one knew why. That was the procedure before the Flood, and it seemed to be the procedure now.

Dust and tea-bags on one shelf, he thought. How long since anyone made tea?

Once again he fixed his sights on April 10th–11th. His shirt was clinging to his ribs. What’s happened to me? Christ, I’m over the hill. He turned forward and back, forward again, twice, three times, then closed the cupboard on the lot. He waited, listened, took a last worried look at the dust, then stepped boldly across the corridor, back to the safety of the men’s room. On the way the clatter hit him: coding machines, the ringing of the telephones, a girl’s voice calling “Where’s that damn float—I had it in my hand,” and that mysterious piping again, but no longer like Camilla’s in the small hours. Next time I’ll get her to do the job, he thought savagely; without compromise, face to face, the way life should be.

In the men’s room he found Spike Kaspar and Nick de Silsky standing at the hand basins and murmuring at each other into the mirror: legmen for Haydon’s Soviet networks, they’d been around for years, known simply as “the Russians.” Seeing Guillam, they at once stopped talking.

“Hullo, you two. Christ, you really are inseparable.”

They were blond and squat and they looked more like Russians than the real ones. He waited till they’d gone, rinsed the dust off his fingers, then drifted back to Lauder Strickland’s room.

“Lord save us, that Dolphin does talk,” he said carelessly.

“Very able officer. Nearest thing to indispensable we have around here. Extremely competent, you can take my word for it,” said Lauder. He looked closely at his watch before he signed the chit, then led Guillam back to the lifts. Toby Esterhase was at the barrier, talking to an unfriendly young janitor.

“You are going back to Brixton, Peter?” His tone was casual, his expression as usual impenetrable.

“Why?”

“I have a car outside, actually. I thought maybe I could run you. We have some business out that way.”

Run you: Tiny Toby spoke no known language perfectly, but he spoke them all. In Switzerland, Guillam had heard his French and it had a German accent; his German had a Slav accent and his English was full of stray flaws and stops and false vowel sounds.

“It’s all right, Tobe, I think I’ll just go home. Night.”

“Straight home? I would run you, that’s all.”

“Thanks, I’ve got shopping to do. All those bloody godchildren.”

“Sure,” said Toby as if he hadn’t any, and stuck in his little granite jaw in disappointment.

What the hell does he want, Guillam thought. Tiny Toby and Big Roy, both: why were they giving me the eye? Was it something they were reading or something they ate?

Out in the street he sauntered down the Charing Cross Road peering at the windows of the bookshops while his other mind checked both sides of the pavement. It had turned much colder, a wind was getting up, and there was a promise to people’s faces as they bustled by. He felt elated. Till now he had been living too much in the past, he decided. Time to get my eye in again. In Zwemmer’s he examined a coffee-table book called Musical Instruments Down the Ages and remembered that Camilla had a late lesson with Dr. Sand, her flute-teacher. He walked back as far as Foyle’s, glancing down bus queues as he went. Think of it as abroad, Smiley had said. Remembering the duty room and Roy Bland’s fishy stare, Guillam had no difficulty. And Bill, too: was Haydon party to their same suspicion? No. Bill was his own category, Guillam decided, unable to resist a surge of loyalty to Haydon. Bill would share nothing that was not his own in the first place. Set beside Bill, those other two were pygmies.

In Soho he hailed a cab and asked for Waterloo Station. At Waterloo, from a reeking phone box, he telephoned a number in Mitcham, Surrey, and spoke to an Inspector Mendel, formerly of Special Branch, known to both Guillam and Smiley from other lives. When Mendel came on the line, Guillam asked for Jenny and heard Mendel tell him tersely that no Jenny lived there. He apologised and rang off. He dialed the time and feigned a pleasant conversation with the automatic announcer because there was an old lady outside waiting for him to finish. By now he should be there, he thought. He rang off and dialed a second number in Mitcham, this time a call-box at the end of Mendel’s avenue.

“This is Will,” said Guillam.

“And this is Arthur,” said Mendel cheerfully. “How’s Will?” He was a quirkish, loping tracker of a man, sharp-faced and sharp-eyed, and Guillam had a very precise picture of him just then, leaning over his policeman’s notebook with his pencil poised.

“I want to give you the headlines now in case I go under a bus.”

“That’s right, Will,” said Mendel consolingly. “Can’t be too careful.”

He gave his message slowly, using the scholastic cover they had agreed on as a last protection against random interception: exams, students, stolen papers. Each time he paused, he heard nothing but a faint scratching. He imagined Mendel writing slowly and legibly and not speaking till he had it all down.

“I got those happy snaps from the chemist, by the by,” said Mendel finally, when he had checked it all back. “Come out a treat. Not a miss among them.”

“Thanks. I’m glad.”

But Mendel had already rung off.

I’ll say one thing for moles, thought Guillam: it’s a long dark tunnel all the way. As he held open the door for the old lady, he noticed the telephone receiver lying on its cradle, how the sweat crawled over it in drips. He considered his message to Mendel; he thought again of Roy Bland and Toby Esterhase staring at him through the doorway; he wondered quite urgently where Smiley was, and whether he was taking care. He returned to Eaton Place needing Camilla badly, and a little afraid of his reasons. Was it really age that was against him suddenly? Somehow, for the first time in his life, he had sinned against his own notions of nobility. He had a sense of dirtiness, even of self-disgust.

12

There are old men who go back to Oxford and find their youth beckoning to them from the stones. Smiley was not one of them. Ten years ago he might have felt a pull. Not now. Passing the Bodleian, he vaguely thought, I worked there. Seeing the house of his old tutor in Parks Road, he remembered that before the war in its long garden Jebedee had first suggested he might care to talk to “one or two people I know in London.” And hearing Tom Tower strike the evening six, he found himself thinking of Bill Haydon and Jim Prideaux, who must have arrived here the year that he went down, and were then gathered up by the war; and he wondered idly how they must have looked together then; Bill, the painter, polemicist, and socialite; Jim, the athlete, hanging on his words. In their heyday together in the Circus, he reflected, that distinction had all but evened out: Jim grew nimble at the brainwork and Bill in the field was no man’s fool. Only at the end, the old polarity asserted itself: the workhorse went back to his stable, the thinker to his desk.

Spots of rain were falling but he couldn’t see them. He had travelled by rail and walked from the station, making detours all the way: Blackwell’s, his old college, anywhere, then north. Dusk had come here early because of the trees.

Reaching a cul-de-sac, he once more dawdled, once more took stock. A woman in a shawl rode past him on a push-bike, gliding through the beams of the streetlamps where they pierced the swathes of mist. Dismounting, she pulled open a gate and vanished. Across the road a muffled figure was walking a dog—man or woman, he couldn’t tell. Otherwise the road was empty, so was the phone box. Then abruptly two men passed him, talking loudly about God and war. The younger one did most of the talking. Hearing the older one agree, Smiley supposed he was the don.

He was following a high paling that bulged with shrubs. The gate of number 15 was soft on its hinges, a double gate but only one side used. When he pushed it, the latch was broken. The house stood a long way back; most of the windows were lit. In one, high up, a young man stooped over a desk. At another, two girls seemed to be arguing; at a third, a very pale woman was playing the viola but he couldn’t hear the sound. The ground-floor windows were also lit but the curtains were drawn. The porch was tiled, the front door panelled with stained glass; on the jamb was pinned an old notice: “After 11 P.M. use side door only.” Over the bells, more notices: “Prince, three rings,” “Lumby, two rings,” “Buzz: out all evening, see you, Janet.” The bottom bell said “Sachs” and he pressed it. At once dogs barked and a woman started yelling.

“Flush, you stupid boy, it’s only a dunderhead. Flush, shut up, you fool. Flush!”

The door opened part way, held on a chain; a body swelled into the opening. While Smiley in the same instant gave his whole effort to seeing who else was inside the house, two shrewd eyes, wet like a baby’s, appraised him, noted his briefcase and his spattered shoes, flickered upward to peer past his shoulder down the drive, then once more looked him over. Finally the white face broke into a charming smile, and Miss Connie Sachs, formerly queen of research at the Circus, registered her spontaneous joy.

“George Smiley,” she cried, with a shy trailing laugh as she drew him into the house. “Why, you lovely darling man, I thought you were selling me a Hoover, bless you, and all the time it’s George!”

She closed the door after him, fast.

She was a big woman, bigger than Smiley by a head. A tangle of white hair framed her sprawling face. She wore a brown jacket like a blazer and trousers with elastic at the waist and she had a low belly like an old man’s. A coke fire smouldered in the grate. Cats lay before it and a mangy grey spaniel, too fat to move, lounged on the divan. On a trolley were the tins she ate from and the bottles she drank from. From the same adapter she drew power for her radio, her electric ring, and her curling tongs. A boy with shoulder-length hair lay on the floor, making toast. Seeing Smiley, he put down his brass trident.

“Oh, Jingle, darling, could it be tomorrow?” Connie implored. “It’s not often my oldest, oldest lover comes to see me.” He had forgotten her voice. She played with it constantly, pitching it at all odd levels. “I’ll give you a whole free hour, dear, all to himself: will you? One of my dunderheads,” she explained to Smiley, long before the boy was out of earshot. “I still teach, I don’t know why. George,” she murmured, watching him proudly across the room as he took the sherry bottle from his briefcase and filled two glasses. “Of all the lovely darling men I ever knew. He walked,” she explained to the spaniel. “Look at his boots. Walked all the way from London, didn’t you, George? Oh, bless, God bless.”

It was hard for her to drink. Her arthritic fingers were turned downward, as if they had all been broken in the same accident, and her arm was stiff. “Did you walk alone, George?” she asked, fishing a loose cigarette from her blazer pocket. “Not accompanied, were we?”

He lit the cigarette for her and she held it like a peashooter, fingers along the top, then watched him down the line of it with her shrewd, pinkish eyes. “So what does he want from Connie, you bad boy?”

“Her memory.”

“What part?”

“We’re going back over some old ground.”

“Hear that, Flush?” she yelled to the spaniel. “First they chuck us out with an old bone, then they come begging to us. Which ground, George?”

“I’ve brought a letter for you from Lacon. He’ll be at his club this evening at seven. If you’re worried, you’re to call him from the phone box down the road. I’d prefer you not to do that, but if you must he’ll make the necessary impressive noises.”

She had been holding him, but now her hands flopped to her sides and for a good while she floated round the room, knowing the places to rest and the holds to steady her, and cursing, “Oh, damn George Smiley and all who sail in him.” At the window, perhaps out of habit, she parted the edge of the curtain but there seemed to be nothing to distract her.

“Oh, George, damn you so,” she muttered. “How could you let a Lacon in? Might as well let in the competition, while you’re about it.”

On the table lay a copy of the day’s Times, crossword uppermost. Each square was inked in laboured letters. There were no blanks.

“Went to the soccer today,” she sang from the dark under the stairs as she cheered herself up from the trolley. “Lovely Will took me. My favourite dunderhead, wasn’t that super of him?” Her little-girl voice; it went with an outrageous pout: “Connie got cold, George. Froze solid, Connie did, toes an’ all.”

He guessed she was crying, so he fetched her from the dark and led her to the sofa. Her glass was empty and he filled it half. Side by side on the sofa, they drank while Connie’s tears ran down her blazer onto his hands.

“Oh, George,” she said. “Do you know what she told me when they threw me out? That personnel cow?” She was holding one point of Smiley’s collar, working it between her finger and thumb while she cheered up. “You know what the cow said?” Her sergeant-major voice: “ ‘You’re losing your sense of proportion, Connie. It’s time you got out into the real world.’ I hate the real world, George. I like the Circus and all my lovely boys.” She took his hands, trying to interlace her fingers with his.

“Polyakov,” he said quietly, pronouncing it in accordance with Tarr’s instruction. “Aleksey Aleksandrovich Polyakov, cultural attaché, Soviet Embassy, London. He’s come alive again, just as you predicted.”

A car was drawing up in the road; he heard only the sound of the wheels, the engine was already switched off. Then footsteps, very lightly.

“Janet, smuggling in her boyfriend,” Connie whispered, her pink-rimmed eyes fixed on his while she shared his distraction. “She thinks I don’t know. Hear that? Metal quarters on his heels. Now, wait.” The footsteps stopped, there was a small scuffle. “She’s giving him the key. He thinks he works it more quietly than she can. He can’t.” The lock turned with a heavy snap. “Oh, you men,” Connie breathed with a hopeless smile. “Oh, George. Why do you have to drag up Aleks?” And for a while she wept for Aleks Polyakov.

Her brothers were dons, Smiley remembered; her father was a professor of something. Control had met her at bridge and invented a job for her.

She began her story like a fairy-tale: “Once upon a time, there was a defector called Stanley, way back in 1963,” and she applied to it the same spurious logic—part inspiration, part intellectual opportunism—born of a wonderful mind that had never grown up. Her formless white face took on the grandmother’s glow of enchanted reminiscence. Her memory was as compendious as her body and surely she loved it more, for she had put everything aside to listen to it: her drink, her cigarette, even for a while Smiley’s passive hand. She sat no longer slouched but strictly, her big head to one side as she dreamily plucked the white wool of her hair. He had assumed she would begin at once with Polyakov, but she began with Stanley; he had forgotten her passion for family trees. Stanley, she said; the inquisitors’ cover name for a fifth-rate defector from Moscow Centre. March, 1963. The scalp-hunters bought him second-hand from the Dutch and shipped him to Sarratt, and probably if it hadn’t been the silly season and if the inquisitors hadn’t happened to have time on their hands—well, who knows whether any of it would ever have come to light? As it was, Brother Stanley had a speck of gold on him, one teeny speck, and they found it. The Dutch missed it but the inquisitors found it, and a copy of their report came to Connie, “which was a whole other miracle in itself,” Connie bellowed huffily, “considering that everyone, and specially Sarratt, made an absolute principle of leaving research off their distribution lists.”

Patiently Smiley waited for the speck of gold, for Connie was of an age where the only thing a man could give her was time.

Now, Stanley had defected while he was on a mailfist job in The Hague, she explained. He was by profession an assassin of some sort and had been sent to Holland to murder a Russian émigré who was getting on Centre’s nerves. Instead, he decided to give himself up. “Some girl had made a fool of him,” said Connie with great contempt. “The Dutch set him a honey trap, my dear, and he barged in with his eyes wide shut.”

To prepare him for the mission, Centre had posted him to one of their training camps outside Moscow for a brush-up in the black arts: sabotage and silent killing. The Dutch, when they had him, were shocked by this and made it the focal point of their interrogation. They put his picture in the newspapers and had him drawing pictures of cyanide bullets and all the other dreary weaponry Centre so adored. But at the Nursery the inquisitors knew that stuff by heart, so they concentrated on the camp itself, which was a new one, not much known: “Sort of a millionaires’ Sarratt,” she explained. They made a sketch-plan of the compound, which covered several hundred acres of forest and lakeland, and put in all the buildings Stanley could remember: laundries, canteens, lecture huts, ranges, all the dross. Stanley had been there several times and remembered a lot. They thought they were about finished when Stanley went very quiet. He took a pencil and in the north west corner he drew five more huts and a double fence round them for the guard dogs, bless him. These huts were new, said Stanley, built in the last few months. You reached them by a private road; he had seen them from a hilltop when he was out walking with his instructor, Milos. According to Milos (who was Stanley’s friend, said Connie with much innuendo), they housed a special school recently founded by Karla for training military officers in conspiracy.

“So, my dear, there we were,” Connie cried. “For years we’d been hearing rumours that Karla was trying to build a private army of his own inside Moscow Centre but, poor lamb, he hadn’t the power. We knew he had agents scattered round the globe, and naturally he was worried that as he grew older and more senior he wouldn’t be able to manage them alone. We knew that, like everyone else, he was dreadfully jealous of them and couldn’t bear the idea of handing them over to the legal residencies in the target countries. Well, naturally he wouldn’t: you know how he hated residencies—overstaffed, insecure. Same as he hated the old guard. ‘Flat- earthers,’ he called them. Quite right. Well, now he had the power and he was doing something about it, as any real man would. March, 1963,” she repeated, in case Smiley had missed the date.

Then nothing, of course. “The usual game: sit on your thumbs, get on with other work, whistle for a wind.” She sat on them for three years, until Major Mikhail Fedorovich Komarov, assistant military attaché in the Soviet Embassy in Tokyo, was caught in flagrante taking delivery of six reels of top-secret intelligence procured by a senior official in the Japanese Defence Ministry. Komarov was the hero of her second fairy-tale: not a defector but a soldier with the shoulder boards of the artillery.

“And medals, my dear! Medals galore!”

Komarov himself had to leave Tokyo so fast that his dog got locked in his flat and was later found starved to death, which was something Connie could not forgive him for. Whereas Komarov’s Japanese agent was, of course, duly interrogated and by a happy chance the Circus was able to buy the report from the Toka.

“Why, George, come to think of it, it was you who arranged the deal!”

With a quaint pout of professional vanity, Smiley conceded that it might well have been.

The essence of the report was simple. The Japanese defence official was a mole. He had been recruited before the war in the shadow of the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, by one Martin Brandt, a German journalist who seemed to be connected with the Comintern. Brandt, said Connie, was one of Karla’s names in the nineteen-thirties. Komarov himself had never been a member of the official Tokyo residency inside the Embassy; he’d worked solo, with one legman and a direct line to Karla, whose brother officer he had been in the war. Better still, before he arrived in Tokyo he had attended a special training course at a new school outside Moscow set up specially for Karla’s handpicked pupils. “Conclusion,” Connie sang. “Brother Komarov was our first and, alas, not very distinguished graduate of the Karla training school. He was shot, poor lamb,” she added, with a dramatic fall of her voice. “They never hang, do they: too impatient, the little horrors.”

Now Connie had felt able to go to town, she said. Knowing what signs to look for, she tracked back through Karla’s file. She spent three weeks in Whitehall with the army’s Moscow-gazers combing Soviet Army posting bulletins for disguised entries until, from a host of suspects, she reckoned she had three new, identifiable Karla trainees. All were military men, all were personally acquainted with Karla, all were ten to fifteen years his junior. She gave their names as Bardin, Stokovsky, and Viktorov—all colonels.

At the mention of this third name, Smiley’s eyes turned very tired, as if he were staving off boredom.

“So what became of them all,” he asked.

“Bardin changed to Sokolov, then Rusakov. Joined the Soviet Delegation to the United Nations in New York. No overt connection with the local residency, no involvement in bread-and-butter operations, no coat-trailing, no talent-spotting—a good solid cover job. Still there, for all I know.”

“Stokovsky?”

“Went illegal, set up a photographic business in Paris as Grodescu, French Rumanian. Formed an affiliate in Bonn, believed to be running one of Karla’s West German sources from across the border.”

“And the third? Viktorov?”

“Sunk without trace.”

“Oh, dear,” said Smiley, and his boredom seemed to deepen.

“Trained and disappeared off the face of the earth. May have died, of course. One does tend to forget the natural causes.”

“Oh, indeed,” Smiley agreed; “oh, quite.”

He had that art, from miles and miles of secret life, of listening at the front of his mind; of letting the primary incidents unroll directly before him while another, quite separate faculty wrestled with their historical connection. The connection ran through Tarr to Irina, through Irina to her poor lover who was so proud of being called Lapin, and of serving one Colonel Gregor Viktorov “whose workname at the Embassy is Polyakov.” In his memory, these things were like part of a childhood: he would never forget them.

“Were there photographs, Connie?” he asked glumly. “Did you land physical descriptions at all?”

“Of Bardin at the United Nations, naturally. Of Stokovsky, perhaps. We had an old press picture from his soldiering days, but we could never quite nail the verification.”

“And of Viktorov, who sank without trace?” Still, it might have been any name. “No pretty picture of him, either?” Smiley asked, going down the room to fetch more drink.

“Viktorov, Colonel Gregor,” Connie repeated with a fond distracted smile. “Fought like a terrier at Stalingrad. No, we never had a photograph. Pity. They said he was yards the best.” She perked up: “Though, of course, we don’t know about the others. Five huts and a two-year course: well, my dear, that adds up to a sight more than three graduates after all these years!”

With a tiny sigh of disappointment, as if to say there was nothing so far in that whole narrative, let alone in the person of Colonel Gregor Viktorov, to advance him in his laborious quest, Smiley suggested they should pass to the wholly unrelated phenomenon of Polyakov, Aleksey Aleksandrovich, of the Soviet Embassy in London, better known to Connie as dear Aleks Polyakov, and establish just where he fitted into Karla’s scheme of things and why it was that she had been forbidden to investigate him further.

13

She was much more animated now. Polyakov was not a fairy-tale hero; he was her lover Aleks, though she had never spoken to him, probably never seen him in the flesh. She had moved to another seat closer to the reading lamp, a rocking-chair that relieved certain pains: she could sit nowhere for long. She had tilted her head back so that Smiley was looking at the white billows of her neck and she dangled one stiff hand coquettishly, recalling indiscretions she did not regret; while to Smiley’s tidy mind her speculations, in terms of the acceptable arithmetic of intelligence, seemed even wilder than before.

“Oh, he was so good,” she said. “Seven long years Aleks had been here before we even had an inkling. Seven years, my dear, and not so much as a tickle! Imagine!”

She quoted his original visa application, those nine years ago: Polyakov, Aleksey Aleksandrovich, graduate of Leningrad State University, cultural attaché with second-secretary rank, married but not accompanied by wife, born March 3, 1922, in the Ukraine, son of a transporter, early education not supplied. She ran straight on, a smile in her voice as she gave the lamplighters’ first routine description: “Height, five foot eleven; heavy build; colour of eyes, green; colour of hair, black; no other visible distinguishing marks. Jolly giant of a bloke,” she declared with a laugh. “Tremendous joker. Black tuft of hair, here, over the right eye. I’m sure he was a bottom pincher, though we never caught him at it. I’d have offered him one or two bottoms of our own if Toby had played ball, which he wouldn’t. Not that Aleksey Aleksandrovich would have fallen for that, mind. Aleks was far too artful,” she said proudly. “Lovely voice. Mellow like yours. I often used to play the tapes twice, just to listen to him speaking. Is he really still around, George? I don’t even like to ask, you see. I’m afraid they’ll all change and I won’t know them any more.”

He was still there, Smiley assured her. The same cover, the same rank.

“And still occupying that dreadful little suburban house in Highgate that Toby’s watchers hated so? Forty Meadow Close, top floor. Oh, it was a pest of a place. I love a man who really lives his cover, and Aleks did. He was the busiest culture vulture that Embassy ever had. If you wanted something done fast—lecturer, musician, you name it—Aleks cut through the red tape faster than any man.”

“How did he manage that, Connie?”

“Not how you think, George Smiley,” she sang as the blood shot to her face. “Oh, no. Aleksey Aleksandrovich was nothing but what he said he was—so there; you ask Toby Esterhase or Percy Alleline. Pure as the driven snow, he was. Unbesmirched in any shape or form—Toby will put you right on that!”

“Hey,” Smiley murmured, filling her glass. “Hey, steady, Connie. Come down.”

“Fooey,” she shouted, quite unmollified. “Sheer unadulterated fooey. Aleksey Aleksandrovich Polyakov was a six-cylinder Karla-trained hood if ever I saw one, and they wouldn’t even listen to me! ‘You’re seeing spies under the bed,’ says Toby. ‘Lamplighters are fully extended,’ says Percy”—her Scottish brogue—“‘We’ve no place for luxuries here.’ Luxuries my foot!” She was crying again. “Poor George,” she kept saying. “Poor George. You tried to help but what could you do? You were on the down staircase yourself. Oh, George, don’t go hunting with the Lacons. Please don’t.”

Gently he guided her back to Polyakov, and why she was so sure he was Karla’s hood, a graduate of Karla’s special school.

“It was Remembrance Day,” she sobbed. “We photographed his medals—’course we did.”

Year one again, year one of her seven-year love affair with Aleks Polyakov. The curious thing was, she said, that she had her eye on him from the moment he arrived:

“Hullo, I thought. I’m going to have a bit of fun with you.”

Quite why she thought that she didn’t know. Perhaps it was his self-sufficiency, perhaps it was his poker walk, straight off the parade-ground: “Tough as a button. Army written all over him.” Or perhaps it was the way he lived: “He chose the one house in London those lamplighters couldn’t get within fifty yards of.” Or perhaps it was his work: “There were three cultural attachés already: two of them were hoods and the only thing the third did was cart the flowers up to Highgate Cemetery for poor Karl Marx.”

She was a little dazed, so he walked her again, taking the whole weight of her when she stumbled. Well, she said, at first Toby Esterhase agreed to put Aleks on the A list and have his Acton lamplighters cover him for random days, twelve out of every thirty, and each time they followed him he was as pure as the driven snow.

“My dear, you’d have thought I’d rung him up and told him, ‘Aleks Aleksandrovich, mind your “p”s and “q”s because I’m putting Tiny Toby’s dogs on you. So just you live your cover and no monkey business.’ ”

He went to functions, lectures, strolled in the park, played a little tennis, and short of giving sweets to the kids he couldn’t have been more respectable. Connie fought for continued coverage but it was a losing battle. The machinery ground on and Polyakov was transferred to the B list: to be topped up every six months or as resources allowed. The six-monthly top-ups produced nothing at all, and after three years he was graded Persil: investigated in depth and found to be of no intelligence interest. There was nothing Connie could do, and really she had almost begun to live with the assessment when one gorgeous November day lovely Teddy Hankie telephoned her rather breathlessly from the Laundry at Acton to say Aleks Polyakov had blown his cover and run up his true colours at last. They were splashed all over the masthead.

“Teddy was an old old chum. Old Circus and a perfect pet; I don’t care if he’s ninety. He’d finished for the day and was on his way home when the Soviet Ambassador’s Volga drove past going to the wreath-laying ceremony, carrying the three service attachés. Three others were following in a second car. One was Polyakov and he was wearing more medals than a Christmas tree. Teddy shot down to Whitehall with his camera and photographed them across the street. My dear, everything was on our side: the weather was perfect, a bit of rain and then some lovely afternoon sunshine; he could have got the smile on a fly’s backside at three hundred yards. We blew up the photographs and there they were: two gallantry and four campaign. Aleks Polyakov was a war veteran and he’d never told a soul in seven years. Oh, I was excited! I didn’t even need to plot the campaigns. ‘Toby,’ I said—I rang him straight away—‘You just listen to me for a moment, you Hungarian poison dwarf. This is one of the occasions when ego has finally got the better of cover. I want you to turn Aleks Aleksandrovich inside out for me, no “if”s or “but”s. Connie’s little hunch has come home trumps.’ ”

“And what did Toby say?”

The grey spaniel let out a dismal sigh, and dropped off to sleep again.

“Toby?” Connie was suddenly very lonely. “Oh, Tiny Toby gave me his dead-fish voice and said Percy Alleline was now head of operations, didn’t he? It was Percy’s job, not his, to allocate resources. I knew straight away something was wrong but I thought it was Toby.” She fell silent. “Damn fire,” she muttered morosely. “You only have to turn your back and it goes out.” She had lost interest. “You know the rest. Report went to Percy. ‘So what?’ Percy says. ‘Polyakov used to be in the Russian Army. It was a biggish army and not everybody who fought in it was Karla’s agent.’ Very funny. Accused me of unscientific deduction. ‘Whose expression is that?’ I said to him. ‘It’s not deduction at all,’ he says, ‘it’s induction.’ ‘My dear Percy, wherever have you been learning words like that; you sound just like a beastly doctor or someone.’ My dear, he was cross! As a sop, Toby puts the dogs on Aleks and nothing happens. ‘Spike his house,’ I said. ‘His car, everything! Rig a mugging, turn him inside out, put the listeners on him! Fake a mistaken identity, search him. Anything, but for God’s sake do something, because it’s a pound to a rouble Aleks Polyakov is running an English mole!’ So Percy sends for me, all lofty,”—the brogue again: “ ‘You’re to leave Polyakov alone. You’re to put him out of your silly woman’s mind, do you understand? You and your blasted Polly what’s-’is-name are becoming a damned nuisance, so lay off him.’ Follows it up with a rude letter. ‘We spoke and you agreed,’ copy to head cow. I wrote, ‘yes repeat no’ on the bottom and sent it back to him.” She switched to her sergeant-major voice: “ ‘You’re losing your sense of proportion, Connie. Time you got out into the real world.’ ”

Connie was having a hangover. She was sitting again, slumped over her glass. Her eyes had closed and her head kept falling to one side.

“Oh, God,” she whispered, waking up again. “Oh, my Lordy be.”

“Did Polyakov have a legman?” Smiley asked.

“Why should he? He’s a culture vulture. Culture vultures don’t need legmen.”

“Komarov had one in Tokyo. You said so.”

“Komarov was military,” she said sullenly.

“So was Polyakov. You saw his medals.”

He held her hand, waiting. Lapin the rabbit, she said, clerk driver at the Embassy, twerp. At first she couldn’t work him out. She suspected him of being one Ivlov, but she couldn’t prove it and no one would help her anyway. Lapin the rabbit spent most of his day padding round London looking at girls and not daring to talk to them. But gradually she began to pick up the connection. Polyakov gave a reception, Lapin helped pour the drinks. Polyakov was called in late at night, and half an hour later Lapin turned up presumably to unbutton a telegram. And when Polyakov flew to Moscow, Lapin the rabbit actually moved into the Embassy and slept there till he came back. “He was doubling up,” said Connie firmly. “Stuck out a mile.”

“So you reported that, too?”

“ ’Course I did.”

“And what happened?”

“Connie was sacked and Lapin went home,” Connie said with a giggle. “Couple of weeks later, Jimmy Prideaux got shot in the bot, George Smiley was pensioned off, and Control . . .” She yawned. “Hey, ho,” she said. “Halcyon days. Landslide. Did I start it, George?”

The fire was quite dead. From somewhere above them came a thud; perhaps it was Janet and her lover. Gradually, Connie began humming, then swaying to her own music.

He stayed, trying to cheer her up. He gave her more drink and finally it brightened her.

“Come on,” she said, “I’ll show you my bloody medals.”

Dormitory feasts again. She had them in a scuffed attaché case, which Smiley had to pull out from under the bed. First a real medal in a box and a typed citation calling her by her workname Constance Salinger and putting her on the Prime Minister’s list.

“’Cause Connie was a good girl,” she explained, her cheek against his. “And loved all her gorgeous boys.”

Then photographs of past members of the Circus: Connie in Wren’s uniform in the war, standing between Jebedee and old Bill Magnus, the wrangler, taken somewhere in England; Connie with Bill Haydon one side and Jim Prideaux the other, the men in cricket gear and all three looking very-nicely-thank-you, as Connie put it, on a summer course at Sarratt, the grounds stretching out behind them, mown and sunlit, and the sight screens glistening. Next an enormous magnifying glass with signatures engraved on the lens: from Roy, from Percy, from Toby and lots of others, “To Connie with love and never say goodbye!”

Lastly, Bill’s own special contribution: a caricature of Connie lying across the whole expanse of Kensington Palace Gardens while she peered at the Soviet Embassy through a telescope: “With love and fond memories, dear, dear Connie.”

“They still remember him here, you know,” she said. “The golden boy. Christ Church common-room has a couple of his paintings. They take them out quite often. Giles Langley stopped me in the High only the other day: did I ever hear from Haydon? Don’t know what I said: Yes. No. Does Giles’s sister still do safe houses, do you know?” Smiley did not. “ ‘We miss his flair,’ says Giles, ‘they don’t breed them like him any more.’ Giles must be a hundred and eight in the shade. Says he taught Bill modern history, in the days before ‘Empire’ became a dirty word. Asked after Jim, too. ‘His alter ego, we might say, hem hem, hem hem.’ You never liked Bill, did you?” Connie ran on vaguely, as she packed it all away again in plastic bags and bits of cloth. “I never knew whether you were jealous of him or he was jealous of you. Too glamorous, I suppose. You always distrusted looks. Only in men, mind.”

“My dear Connie, don’t be absurd,” Smiley retorted, off guard for once. “Bill and I were perfectly good friends. What on earth makes you say that?”

“Nothing.” She had almost forgotten it. “I heard once he had a run round the park with Ann, that’s all. Isn’t he a cousin of hers, or something? I always thought you’d have been so good together, you and Bill, if it could have worked. You’d have brought back the old spirit. Instead of that Scottish twerp. Bill rebuilding Camelot”—her fairy-tale smile again—“and George—”

“George picking up the bits,” said Smiley, vamping for her, and they laughed, Smiley falsely.

“Give me a kiss, George. Give Connie a kiss.”

She showed him through the kitchen garden, the route her lodgers used; she said he would prefer it to the view of the filthy new bungalows the Harrison pigs had flung up in the next door garden. A thin rain was falling, a few stars glowed big and pale in the mist; on the road lorries rumbled northward through the night. Clasping him, Connie grew suddenly frightened.

“You’re very naughty, George. Do you hear? Look at me. Don’t look that way, it’s all neon lights and Sodom. Kiss me. All over the world, beastly people are making our time into nothing; why do you help them? Why?”

“I’m not helping them, Connie.”

“’Course you are. Look at me. It was a good time, do you hear? A real time. Englishmen could be proud then. Let them be proud now.”

“That’s not quite up to me, Connie.”

She was pulling his face onto her own, so he kissed her full on the lips.

“Poor loves.” She was breathing heavily, not perhaps from any one emotion but from a whole mess of them, washed around in her like mixed drinks. “Poor loves. Trained to Empire, trained to rule the waves. All gone. All taken away. Bye-bye, world. You’re the last, George, you and Bill. And filthy Percy a bit.” He had known it would end like this; but not quite so awfully. He had had the same story from her every Christmas at the little drinking parties that went on in corners round the Circus. “You don’t know Millponds, do you?” she was asking.

“What’s Millponds?”

“My brother’s place. Beautiful Palladian house, lovely grounds, near Newbury. One day a road came. Crash. Bang. Motorway. Took all the grounds away. I grew up there, you see. They haven’t sold Sarratt, have they? I was afraid they might.”

“I’m sure they haven’t.”

He longed to be free of her but she was clutching him more fiercely; he could feel her heart thumping against him.

“If it’s bad, don’t come back. Promise? I’m an old leopard and I’m too old to change my spots. I want to remember you all as you were. Lovely, lovely boys.”

He did not like to leave her there in the dark, swaying under the trees, so he walked her halfway back to the house, neither of them talking. As he went down the road, he heard her humming again, so loud it was like a scream. But it was nothing to the mayhem inside him just then, the currents of alarm and anger and disgust at this blind night walk, with God knew what bodies at the end.

He caught a stopping train to Slough, where Mendel was waiting for him with a hired car. As they drove slowly towards the orange glow of the city, he listened to the sum of Peter Guillam’s researches. The duty officers’ ledger contained no record of the night of April 10th–11th, said Mendel. The pages had been excised with a razor blade. The janitors’ returns for the same night were also missing, as were the signals’ returns.

“Peter thinks it was done recently. There’s a note scribbled on the next page, saying, ‘All enquiries to Head of London Station.’ It’s in Esterhase’s handwriting and dated Friday.”

“Last Friday?” said Smiley, turning so fast that his seat belt let out a whine of complaint. “That’s the day Tarr arrived in England.”

“It’s all according to Peter,” Mendel replied stolidly.

And finally, concerning Lapin alias Ivlov, and Cultural Attaché Aleksey Aleksandrovich Polyakov, both of the Soviet Embassy in London, Toby Esterhase’s lamplighter reports carried no adverse trace whatever. Both had been investigated, both were graded Persil: the cleanest category available. Lapin had been posted back to Moscow a year ago.

In a briefcase, Mendel had also brought Guillam’s photographs, the result of his foray at Brixton, developed and blown up to full-plate size. Close to Paddington Station, Smiley got out and Mendel held the case out to him through the doorway.

“Sure you don’t want me to come with you?” Mendel asked.

“Thank you. It’s only a hundred yards.”

“Lucky for you there’s twenty-four hours in the day, then.”

“Yes, it is.”

“Some people sleep.”

“Good night.”

Mendel was still holding onto the briefcase. “I may have found the school,” he said. “Place called Thursgood’s, near Taunton. He did half a term’s supply work in Berkshire first, then seems to have hoofed it to Somerset. Got a trailer, I hear. Want me to check?”

“How will you do that?”

“Bang on his door. Sell him a magazine, get to know him socially.”

“I’m sorry,” said Smiley, suddenly worried. “I’m afraid I’m jumping at shadows. I’m sorry, that was rude of me.”

“Young Guillam’s jumping at shadows, too,” said Mendel firmly. “Says he’s getting funny looks around the place. Says there’s something up and they’re all in it. I told him to have a stiff drink.”

“Yes,” said Smiley after further thought. “Yes, that’s the thing to do. Jim’s a pro,” he explained. “A fieldman of the old school. He’s good, whatever they did to him.”

Camilla had come back late. Guillam had understood her flute lesson with Sand ended at nine, yet it was eleven by the time she let herself in, and he was accordingly short with her; he couldn’t help it. Now she lay in bed, with her grey-black hair spread over the pillow, watching him as he stood at the unlit window staring into the square.

“Have you eaten?” he said.

“Dr. Sand fed me.”

“What on?”

Sand was a Persian, she had told him.

No answer. Dreams, perhaps? Nut steak? Love? In bed she never stirred except to embrace him. When she slept, she barely breathed; sometimes he would wake and watch her, wondering how he would feel if she were dead.

“Are you fond of Sand?” he asked.

“Sometimes.”

“Is he your lover?”

“Sometimes.”

“Maybe you should move in with him instead of me.”

“It’s not like that,” said Camilla. “You don’t understand.”

No. He didn’t. First there had been a loving couple necking in the back of a Rover, then a lonely queer in a trilby exercising his Sealyham; then a girl made an hour-long call from the phone box outside his front door. There need be nothing to any of it, except that the events were consecutive, like a changing of the guard. Now a van had parked and no one got out. More lovers, or a lamplighters’ night team? The van had been there ten minutes when the Rover drove away.

Camilla was asleep. He lay awake beside her, waiting for tomorrow when, at Smiley’s request, he intended to steal the file on the Prideaux affair, otherwise known as the Ellis scandal or—more locally—Operation Testify.

14

It had been, till that moment, the second happiest day of Bill Roach’s short life. The happiest was shortly before the dissolution of his household, when his father discovered a wasps’ nest in the roof and recruited Bill to help him smoke them out. His father was not an outdoor man—not even handy—but after Bill had looked up wasps in his encyclopaedia they drove to the chemist together and bought sulphur, which they burned on a charger under the eave, and did the wasps to death.

Whereas today had seen the formal opening of Jim Prideaux’s car-club rally. Till now they had only stripped the Alvis down, refurbished her, and put her together again, but today, as the reward, they had laid out—with the help of Latzy, the D.P.—a slalom of straw bales on the stony side of the drive. Then each in turn had taken the wheel and, with Jim as timekeeper, puffed and shunted through the gates to the tumult of their supporters. “Best car England ever made” was how Jim had introduced his car. “Out of production, thanks to Socialism.” She was now repainted, she had a racing Union Jack on the bonnet, and she was undoubtedly the finest, fastest car on earth. In the first round, Roach had come third out of fourteen, and now in the second he had reached the chestnut trees without once stalling, and was all set for the home lap and a record time. He had never imagined that anything could give him so much pleasure. He loved the car, he loved Jim, and he even loved the school, and for the first time in his life he loved trying to win. He could hear Jim yelling, “Easy, Jumbo,” and he could see Latzy leaping up and down with the improvised chequered flag; but as he clattered past the post he already knew that Jim wasn’t watching him any more but glaring down the course towards the beech trees.

“Sir, how long, sir?” he asked breathlessly, and there was a small hush.

“Timekeeper!” sang Spikely, chancing his luck. “Time, please, Rhino.”

“Was very good, Jumbo,” Latzy said, also looking at Jim.

For once, Spikely’s impertinence, like Roach’s entreaty, found no response. Jim was staring across the field, towards the lane that formed the eastern border. Beside him stood a boy named Coleshaw, whose nickname was Cole Slaw. He was a lag from Three B, and famous for sucking up to staff. The ground lay very flat just there before lifting to the hills; often after a few days’ rain it flooded. For this reason there was no good hedge beside the lane but a post-and-wire fence; and no trees, either—just the fence, the flats, and sometimes the Quantocks behind, which today had vanished in the general whiteness. The flats could have been a marsh leading to a lake, or simply to the white infinity. Against this washed-out background strolled a single figure, a trim, inconspicuous pedestrian, male and thin-faced, in a trilby hat and grey raincoat, carrying a walking stick that he barely used. Watching him also, Roach decided that the man wanted to walk faster but was going slowly for a purpose.

“Got your specs on, Jumbo?” asked Jim, staring after the man, who was about to draw level with the next post.

“Yes, sir.”

“Who is he, then? Looks like Solomon Grundy.”

“Don’t know, sir.”

“Never seen him before?”

“No, sir.”

“Not staff, not village. So who is he? Beggarman? Thief? Why doesn’t he look this way, Jumbo? What’s wrong with us? Wouldn’t you, if you saw a bunch of boys flogging a car round a field? Doesn’t he like cars? Doesn’t he like boys?”

Roach was still thinking up an answer to all these questions when Jim started speaking to Latzy in D.P., using a murmured, level sort of tone, which at once suggested to Roach that there was a complicity between them, a special foreign bond. The impression was strengthened by Latzy’s reply, plainly negative, which had the same unstartled quietness.

“Sir, please, sir, I think he’s to do with the church, sir,” said Cole Slaw. “I saw him talking to Wells Fargo, sir, after chapel.”

The vicar’s name was Spargo and he was very old. It was Thursgood legend that he was in fact the great Wells Fargo in retirement. At this intelligence, Jim thought awhile and Roach, furious, told himself that Coleshaw was making the story up.

“Hear what they talked about, Cole Slaw?”

“Sir, no, sir. They were looking at pew lists, sir. But I could ask Wells Fargo, sir.”

“Our pew lists? Thursgood pew lists?”

“Yes, sir. School pew lists. Thursgood’s. With all the names, sir, where we sit.”

And where the staff sit, too, thought Roach sickly.

“Anybody sees him again, let me know. Or any other sinister bodies, understand?” Jim was addressing them all, making light of it now. “Don’t hold with odd bods hanging about the school. Last place I was at, we had a whole damn gang. Cleared the place out. Silver, money, boys’ watches, radios—God knows what they didn’t pinch. He’ll pinch the Alvis next. Best car England ever made, and out of production. Colour of hair, Jumbo?”

“Black, sir.”

“Height, Cole Slaw?”

“Sir, six foot, sir.”

“Everybody looks six foot to Cole Slaw, sir,” said a wit, for Coleshaw was a midget, reputedly fed on gin as a baby.

“Age, Spikely, you toad?”

“Ninety-one, sir.”

The moment dissolved in laughter; Roach was awarded a re-drive and did badly, and the same night lay in an anguish of jealousy that the entire car club, not to mention Latzy, had been recruited wholesale to the select rank of watcher. It was poor consolation to assure himself that their vigilance would never match his own; that Jim’s order would not outlive the day; or that from now on he must increase his efforts to meet what was clearly an advancing threat.

The thin-faced stranger disappeared, but next day Jim paid a rare visit to the churchyard; Roach saw him talking to Wells Fargo before an open grave. Thereafter Bill Roach noticed a steady darkening of Jim’s face, and an alertness which at times was like an anger in him, as he stalked through the twilight every evening, or sat on the hummocks outside his trailer, indifferent to the cold or wet, smoking his tiny cigar and sipping his vodka as the dusk closed on him.

PART II

15

The Hotel Islay in Sussex Gardens—where, on the day after his visit to Ascot, George Smiley under the name of Barraclough had set up his operational headquarters—was a very quiet place, considering its position, and perfectly suited to his needs. It lay a hundred yards south of Paddington Station, one of a terrace of elderly mansions cut off from the main avenue by a line of plane trees and a parking patch. The traffic roared past it all night. But the inside, though it was a fire-bowl of clashing wallpapers and copper lampshades, was a place of extraordinary calm. Not only was there nothing going on in the hotel, there was nothing going on in the world, either, and this impression was strengthened by Mrs. Pope Graham, the proprietor, a major’s widow with a terribly langorous voice that imparted a sense of deep fatigue to Mr. Barraclough or anyone else who sought her hospitality. Inspector Mendel, whose informant she had been for many years, insisted that her name was plain Graham. The Pope had been added for grandeur or out of deference to Rome.

“Your father wasn’t a Green Jacket, was he, dear?” she enquired, with a yawn, as she read Barraclough in the register. Smiley paid her fifty pounds’ advance for a two-week stay, and she gave him Room 8 because he wanted to work. He asked for a desk and she gave him a rickety card table; Norman, the boy, brought it. “It’s Georgian,” she said with a sigh, supervising its delivery. “So you will love it for me, won’t you, dear? I shouldn’t lend it to you, really; it was the Major’s.”

To the fifty, Mendel privately had added a further twenty on account, from his own wallet—“dirty oncers,” as he called them—which he later recovered from Smiley. “No smell to nothing, is there?” he said.

“You could say so,” Mrs. Pope Graham agreed, demurely stowing the notes among her nether garments.

“I’ll want every scrap,” Mendel warned, seated in her basement apartment over a bottle of the one she liked. “Times of entry and exit, contacts, life-style, and most of all,” he said, lifting an emphatic finger, “most of all—and more important than you can possibly know, this is—I’ll want suspicious persons taking an interest or putting questions to your staff under a pretext.” He gave her his state-of-the-nation look. “Even if they say they’re the Guards Armoured and Sherlock Holmes rolled into one.”

“There’s only me and Norman,” said Mrs. Pope Graham, indicating a shivery boy in a black overcoat to which had been stitched a velvet collar of beige. “And they’ll not get far with Norman—will they, dear; you’re too sensitive.”

“Same with his incoming letters,” said the Inspector. “I’ll want postmarks and times posted where legible, but no tampering or holding back. Same with his objects.” He allowed a hush to fall as he eyed the substantial safe that formed such a feature of the furnishings. “Now and then, he’s going to ask for objects to be lodged. Mainly they’ll be papers, sometimes books. There’s only one person allowed to look at those objects apart from him.” He pulled a sudden piratical grin: “Me. Understand? No one else can even know you’ve got them. And don’t fiddle with them, or he’ll know because he’s sharp. It’s got to be expert fiddling. I’m not saying any more,” Mendel concluded. Though he did remark to Smiley, soon after returning from Somerset, that if twenty quid was all it cost them, Norman and his protectress were the cheapest baby-sitting service in the business.

In which boast he was pardonably mistaken, for he could hardly be expected to know of Jim’s recruitment of the entire car club; or the means by which Jim was able subsequently to trace the path of Mendel’s wary investigations. Nor could Mendel, or anyone else, have guessed the state of electric alertness to which anger, and the strain of waiting, and perhaps a little madness, had seemingly brought Jim.

Room 8 was on the top floor. Its window looked onto the parapet. Beyond the parapet lay a side street with a shady bookshop and a travel agency called Wide World. The hand towel was embroidered “Swan Hotel Marlow.” Lacon stalked in that evening carrying a fat briefcase containing the first consignment of papers from his office. To talk, the two men sat side by side on the bed while Smiley played a transistor wireless to drown the sound of their voices. Lacon took this mawkishly; he seemed somehow too old for the picnic. Next morning on his way to work, Lacon reclaimed the papers and returned the books that Smiley had given him to pad out his briefcase. In this role Lacon was at his worst. His manner was offended and off-hand; he made it clear he detested the irregularity. In the cold weather, he seemed to have developed a permanent blush. But Smiley could not have read the files by day, because they were on call to Lacon’s staff and their absence would have caused an uproar. Nor did he want to. He knew better than anyone that he was desperately short of time. Over the next three days this procedure varied very little. Each evening on his way to take the train from Paddington, Lacon dropped in his papers, and each night Mrs. Pope Graham furtively reported to Mendel that the sour gangly one had called again—the one who looked down his nose at Norman. Each morning, after three hours’ sleep and a disgusting breakfast of undercooked sausage and overcooked tomato—there was no other menu—Smiley waited for Lacon to arrive, then slipped gratefully into the cold winter’s day to take his place among his fellow men.

They were extraordinary nights for Smiley, alone up there on the top floor. Thinking of them afterwards—though his days between were just as fraught, and on the surface more eventful—he recalled them as a single journey, almost a single night. “And you’ll do it,” Lacon had piped shamelessly in the garden. “Go forwards, go backwards?” As Smiley retraced path after path into his own past, there was no longer any difference between the two: forwards or backwards, it was the same journey and its destination lay ahead of him. There was nothing in that room, no object among that whole magpie collection of tattered hotel junk, that separated him from the rooms of his recollection. He was back on the top floor of the Circus, in his own plain office with the Oxford prints, just as he had left it a year ago. Beyond his door lay the low-ceilinged anteroom where Control’s grey-haired ladies, the mothers, softly typed and answered telephones; while here in the hotel an undiscovered genius along the corridor night and day tapped patiently at an old machine. At the anteroom’s far end—in Mrs. Pope Graham’s world there was a bathroom there, and a warning not to use it—stood the blank door that led to Control’s sanctuary: an alley of a place, with old steel cupboards and old red books, a smell of sweet dust and jasmine tea. Behind the desk Control himself, a carcass of a man by then, with his lank grey forelock and his smile as warm as a skull.

This mental transposition was so complete in Smiley that when his phone rang—the extension was an extra, payable in cash—he had to give himself time to remember where he was. Other sounds had an equally confusing effect on him, such as the rustle of pigeons on the parapet, the scraping of the television mast in the wind, and—in rain—the sudden river gurgling in the roof valley. For these sounds also belonged to his past, and in Cambridge Circus were heard by the fifth floor only. His ear selected them, no doubt, for that very reason: they were the background jingle of his past. Once in the early morning, hearing a footfall in the corridor outside his room, Smiley actually went to the bedroom door expecting to let in the Circus night coding clerk. He was immersed in Guillam’s photographs at the time, puzzling out, from far too little information, the likely Circus procedure under lateralism for handling an incoming telegram from Hong Kong. But instead of the clerk he found Norman, barefooted in pyjamas. Confetti was strewn over the carpet and two pairs of shoes stood outside the opposite door, a man’s and a girl’s, though no one at the Islay—least of all Norman—would ever clean them.

“Stop prying and go to bed,” said Smiley. And when Norman only stared: “Oh, do go away, will you? ”—And nearly, but he stopped himself in time, “You grubby little man.”

“Operation Witchcraft,” read the title on the first volume Lacon had brought to him that first night. “Policy regarding distribution of Special Product.” The rest of the cover was obliterated by warning labels and handling instructions, including one that quaintly advised the accidental finder to “return the file UNREAD” to the Chief Registrar at the Cabinet Office. “Operation Witchcraft,” read the second. “Supplementary estimates to the Treasury, special accommodation in London, special financing arrangements, bounty, etc.” “Source Merlin,” read the third, bound to the first with pink ribbon. “Customer Evaluations, cost effectiveness, wider exploitation; see also Secret Annexe.” But the secret annexe was not attached, and when Smiley asked for it there was a coldness.

“The Minister keeps it in his personal safe,” Lacon snapped.

“Do you know the combination?”

“Certainly not,” he retorted, now furious.

“What is the title of it?”

“It can be of no possible concern to you. I entirely fail to see why you should waste your time chasing after this material in the first place. It’s highly secret and we have done everything humanly possible to keep the readership to the minimum.”

“Even a secret annexe has to have a title,” said Smiley mildly.

“This has none.”

“Does it give the identity of Merlin?”

“Don’t be ridiculous. The Minister would not want to know, and Alleline would not want to tell him.”

“What does ‘wider exploitation’ mean?”

“I refuse to be interrogated, George. You’re not family any more, you know. By rights, I should have you specially cleared, as it is.”

“Witchcraft-cleared?”

“Yes.”

“Do we have a list of people who have been cleared in that way?”

It was in the policy file, Lacon retorted, and all but slammed the door on him before coming back, to the slow chant of “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” introduced by an Australian disc-jockey. “The Minister—” He stopped, and began again. “He doesn’t like devious explanations. He has a saying: he’ll only believe what can be written on a postcard. He’s very impatient to be given something he can get his hands on.”

Smiley said, “You won’t forget Prideaux, will you? Just anything you have on him at all; even scraps are better than nothing.”

With that, Smiley left Lacon to glare awhile, then make a second exit: “You’re not going fey, are you, George? You realise that Prideaux had most likely never even heard of Witchcraft before he was shot? I really do fail to see why you can’t stick with the primary problem instead of rootling around in . . .” But by this time he had talked himself out of the room.

Smiley turned to the last of the batch: “Operation Witchcraft, correspondence with Department.” “Department” being one of Whitehall’s many euphemisms for the Circus. This volume was conducted in the form of official minutes between the Minister on the one side, and on the other—recognisable at once by his laborious schoolboy hand—Percy Alleline, at that time still consigned to the bottom rungs of Control’s ladder of beings.

A very dull monument, Smiley reflected, surveying these much-handled files, to such a long and cruel war.

16

I t was this long and cruel war that in its main battles Smiley now relived as he embarked upon his reading. The files contained only the thinnest record of it; his memory contained far more. Its protagonists were Alleline and Control, its origins misty. Bill Haydon—a keen, if saddened, follower of those events—maintained that the two men learned to hate each other at Cambridge during Control’s brief spell as a don and Alleline’s as an undergraduate. According to Bill, Alleline was Control’s pupil and a bad one, and Control taunted him, which he certainly might have.

The story was grotesque enough for Control to play it up: “Percy and I are blood brothers, I hear. We romped together in punts, imagine!” He never said whether it was true.

To half-legend of that sort, Smiley could add a few hard facts from his knowledge of the two men’s early lives. While Control was no man’s child, Percy Alleline was a lowland Scot and a son of the Manse; his father was a Presbyterian hammer, and if Percy did not have his faith, he had surely inherited the faculty of bullish persuasion. He missed the war by a year or two and joined the Circus from a City company. At Cambridge he had been a bit of a politician (somewhat to the right of Genghis Khan, said Haydon who was himself, Lord knows, no milk-and-water liberal) and a bit of an athlete. He was recruited by a figure of no account called Maston, who for a short time contrived to build himself a corner in counter-intelligence. Maston saw a great future in Alleline and, having peddled his name furiously, fell from grace. Finding Alleline an embarrassment, Circus personnel packed him off to South America, where he did two full tours under consular cover without returning to England.

Even Control later admitted that Percy did extremely well there, Smiley recalled. The Argentinians, liking his tennis and the way he rode, took him for a gentleman—Control speaking—and assumed he was stupid, which Percy never quite was. By the time he handed over to his successor, he had put together a string of agents along both seaboards and was spreading his wings northward as well. After home leave and a couple of weeks’ briefing, he was moved to India, where his agents seemed to regard him as the reincarnation of the British Raj. He preached loyalty to them, paid them next to nothing, and—when it suited him—sold them down the river. From India he went to Cairo. That posting should have been difficult for Alleline, if not impossible, for the Middle East till then had been Haydon’s favourite stamping-ground. The Cairo networks looked on Bill quite literally in the terms which Martindale had used of him that fateful night in his anonymous dining-club: as a latter-day Lawrence of Arabia. They were all set to make life hell for his successor. Yet somehow Percy bulldozed his way through and, if he had only steered clear of the Americans, might have gone down in memory as a better man than Haydon. Instead there was a scandal and an open row between Percy and Control.

The circumstances were still obscure: the incident occurred long before Smiley’s elevation as Control’s high chamberlain. With no authority from London, it appeared, Alleline had involved himself in a silly American plot to replace a local potentate with one of their own. Alleline had always had a fatal reverence for the Americans. From Argentina he had observed with admiration their rout of left-wing politicians around the hemisphere; in India he had delighted in their skill at dividing the forces of centralisation. Whereas Control, like most of the Circus, despised them and all their works, which he frequently sought to undermine.

The plot aborted, the British oil companies were furious, and Alleline, as the jargon happily puts it, had to leave in his socks. Later, Alleline claimed that Control had urged him on, then pulled the rug out from under; even that he had deliberately blown the plot to Moscow. However it was, Alleline reached London to find a posting order directing him to the Nursery, where he was to take over the training of greenhorn probationers. It was a slot normally reserved for rundown contract men with a couple of years to go before their pension. There were just so few jobs left in London those days for a man of Percy’s seniority and talents, explained Bill Haydon, then head of personnel.

“Then you’ll damn well have to invent me one,” said Percy. He was right. As Bill frankly confessed to Smiley some while later, he had reckoned without the power of the Alleline lobby.

“But who are these people?” Smiley used to ask. “How can they force a man on you when you don’t want him?”

“Golfers,” Control snapped. Golfers and conservatives, for Alleline in those days was flirting with the opposition and was received with open arms, not least by Miles Sercombe, Ann’s lamentably unremoved cousin and now Lacon’s Minister. Yet Control had little power to resist. The Circus was in the doldrums and there was loose talk of scrapping the existing outfit entirely and starting elsewhere with a new one. Failures in that world occur traditionally in series, but this had been an exceptionally long run. Product had slumped; more and more of it had turned out to be suspect. In the places where it mattered, Control’s hand was none too strong.

This temporary incapacity did not mar Control’s joy in the drafting of Percy Alleline’s personal charter as Operational Director. He called it Percy’s Fool’s Cap.

There was nothing Smiley could do. Bill Haydon was in Washington by then, trying to renegotiate an intelligence treaty with what he called the Fascist puritans of the American agency. But Smiley had risen to the fifth floor, and one of his tasks was to keep petitioners off Control’s back. So it was to Smiley that Alleline came to ask “Why?” Would call on him in his office when Control was out, invite him to that dismal flat of his, having first sent his paramour to the cinema, and interrogate him in his plaintive brogue. “Why?” He even invested in a bottle of a malt whisky, which he forced on Smiley liberally while sticking to the cheaper brand himself.

“What have I done to him, George, that’s so damn special? We’d a brush or two—what’s so unusual to that, if you’ll tell me? Why does he pick on me? All I want is a place at the top table. God knows my record entitles me to that!”

By top table, he meant the fifth floor.

The charter which Control had drafted for him, and which at a glance had a most impressive shape, gave Alleline the right to examine all operations before they were launched. The small print made this right conditional upon the consent of the operational sections, and Control made sure that this was not forthcoming. The charter invited him to “co-ordinate resources and break down regional jealousies,” a concept Alleline had since achieved with the establishment of London Station. But the resources sections, such as the lamplighters, the forgers, the listeners, and the wranglers, declined to open their books to him and he lacked the powers to force them. So Alleline starved; his trays were empty from lunchtime onwards.

“I’m mediocre, is that it? We’ve all to be geniuses these days, prima donnas and no damn chorus; old men, at that.” For Alleline, though it was easily forgettable in him, was still a young man to be at the top table, with eight or ten years to brandish over Haydon and Smiley, and more over Control.

Control was immovable: “Percy Alleline would sell his mother for a knighthood and this service for a seat in the House of Lords.” And later, as his hateful illness began creeping over him: “I refuse to bequeath my life’s work to a parade horse. I’m too vain to be flattered, too old to be ambitious, and I’m ugly as a crab. Percy’s quite the other way and there are enough witty men in Whitehall to prefer his sort to mine.”

Which was how, indirectly, Control might be said to have brought Witchcraft upon his own head.

“George, come in here,” Control snapped one day over the buzzer. “Brother Percy’s trying to twist my tail. Come in here or there’ll be bloodshed.”

It was a time, Smiley remembered, when unsuccessful warriors were returning from foreign parts. Roy Bland had just flown in from Belgrade, where with Toby Esterhase’s help he had been trying to save the wreck of a dying network; Paul Skordeno, at that time head German, had just buried his best Soviet agent in East Berlin; and as to Bill, after another fruitless trip he was back in his pepper pot room fuming about Pentagon arrogance, Pentagon idiocy, Pentagon duplicity, and claiming that “the time had come to do a deal with the bloody Russians instead.”

And in the Islay it was after midnight; a late guest was ringing the bell. Which will cost him ten bob to Norman, thought Smiley, for whom the revised British coinage was still something of a puzzle. With a sigh, he drew towards him the first of the Witchcraft files, and, having vouchsafed a gingerly lick to his right finger and thumb, set to work matching the official memory with his own.

“We spoke,” wrote Alleline, only a couple of months after that interview, in a slightly hysterical personal letter addressed to Ann’s distinguished cousin the Minister and entered on Lacon’s file. “Witchcraft reports derive from a source of extreme sensitivity. To my mind, no existing method of Whitehall distribution meets the case. The dispatch-box system which we used for GADFLY fell down when keys were lost by Whitehall customers, or in one disgraceful case when an overworked Under-Secretary gave his key to his personal assistant. I have already spoken to Lilley, of naval intelligence, who is prepared to put at our disposal a special reading-room in the Admiralty main building where the material is made available to customers and watched over by a senior janitor of this service. The reading-room will be known, for cover purposes, as the conference room of the Adriatic Working Party, or the A.W.P. room for short. Customers with reading rights will not have passes, since these also are open to abuse. Instead they will identify themselves personally to my janitor”—Smiley noted the pronoun—“who will be equipped with an indoctrination list illustrated with customers’ photographs.”

Lacon, not yet convinced, to the Treasury through his odious master, the Minister, on whose behalf his submissions were invariably made:

Even allowing that this is necessary, the reading-room will have to be extensively rebuilt.

1. Will you authorise cost?

2. If so, the cost should seem to be borne by the Admiralty. Department will covertly reimburse.

3. There is also the question of extra janitors, a further expense . . .

And there is the question of Alleline’s greater glory, Smiley commented as he slowly turned the pages. It shone already like a beacon everywhere: Percy is heading for the top table and Control might already be dead.

From the stairwell came the sound of rather beautiful singing. A Welsh guest, very drunk, was wishing everyone good night.

Witchcraft, Smiley recalled—his memory again, the files knew nothing so plainly human—Witchcraft was by no means Percy Alleline’s first attempt, in his new post, at launching his own operation; but since his charter bound him to obtain Control’s approval, its predecessors had been stillborn. For a while, for instance, he had concentrated on tunnelling. The Americans had built audio tunnels in Berlin and Belgrade; the French had managed something similar against the Americans. Very well, under Percy’s banner the Circus would get in on the market. Control looked on benignly, an inter-services committee was formed (known as the Alleline Committee), and a team of boffins from nuts and bolts made a survey of the foundations of the Soviet Embassy in Athens, where Alleline counted on the unstinted support of the latest military régime which, like its predecessors, he greatly admired. Then, very gently, Control knocked over Percy’s bricks and waited for him to come up with something new. Which, after several shots between, was exactly what Percy was doing that grey morning when Control peremptorily summoned Smiley to the feast.

Control was sitting at his desk, Alleline was standing at the window; between them lay a plain folder, bright yellow and closed.

“Sit over there and take a look at this nonsense.”

Smiley sat in the easy chair and Alleline stayed at the window resting his big elbows on the sill, staring over the rooftops to Nelson’s Column and the spires of Whitehall beyond.

Inside the folder was a photograph of what purported to be a high-level Soviet naval dispatch fifteen pages long.

“Who made the translation?” Smiley asked, thinking that it looked good enough to be Roy Bland’s work.

“God,” Control replied. “God made it, didn’t he, Percy? Don’t ask him anything, George, he won’t tell you.”

It was Control’s time for looking exceptionally youthful. Smiley remembered how Control had lost weight, how his cheeks were pink, and how those who knew him little tended to congratulate him on his good appearance. Only Smiley, perhaps, ever noticed the tiny beads of sweat that in those days habitually followed his hairline.

Precisely, the document was an appreciation, allegedly prepared for the Soviet High Command, of a recent Soviet naval exercise in the Mediterranean and Black Sea. In Lacon’s file it was entered simply as Report No. 1, under the title “Naval.” For months the Admiralty had been screaming at the Circus for anything relating to this exercise. It therefore had an impressive topicality, which at once, in Smiley’s eyes, made it suspect. It was detailed but it dealt with matters that Smiley did not understand even at a distance: shore-to-sea strike power, radio activation of enemy alert procedures, the higher mathematics of the balance of terror. If it was genuine it was gold-dust, but there was no earthly reason to suppose it was genuine. Every week the Circus processed dozens of unsolicited so-called Soviet documents. Most were straight pedlar material. A few were deliberate plants by allies with an axe to grind; a few more were Russian chicken-feed. Very rarely, one turned out to be sound, but usually after it had been rejected.

“Whose initials are these?” Smiley asked, referring to some annotations pencilled in Russian in the margin. “Does anyone know?”

Control tilted his head at Alleline. “Ask the authority. Don’t ask me.”

“Zharov,” said Alleline. “Admiral, Black Sea Fleet.”

“It’s not dated,” Smiley objected.

“It’s a draft,” Alleline replied complacently, his brogue richer than usual. “Zharov signed it Thursday. The finished dispatch with those amendments went out on circulation Monday, dated accordingly.”

Today was Tuesday.

“Where does it come from?” Smiley asked, still lost.

“Percy doesn’t feel able to tell,” said Control.

“What do our own evaluators say?”

“They’ve not seen it,” said Alleline, “and what’s more they’re not going to.”

Control said icily, “My brother in Christ, Lilley, of naval intelligence, has passed a preliminary opinion, however, has he not, Percy? Percy showed it to him last night—over a pink gin, was it, Percy, at the Travellers’?”

“At the Admiralty.”

“Brother Lilley, being a fellow Caledonian of Percy’s, is as a rule sparing in his praise. However, when he telephoned me half an hour ago he was positively fulsome. He even congratulated me. He regards the document as genuine and is seeking our permission—Percy’s, I suppose I should say—to apprise his fellow sea-lords of its conclusions.”

“Quite impossible,” said Alleline. “It’s for his eyes only, at least for a couple more weeks.”

“The stuff is so hot,” Control explained, “that it has to be cooled off before it can be distributed.”

“But where does it come from?” Smiley insisted.

“Oh, Percy’s dreamed up a cover name, don’t you worry. Never been slow on cover names, have we, Percy?”

“But what’s the access? Who’s the case officer?”

“You’ll enjoy this,” Control promised, aside. He was extraordinarily angry. In their long association Smiley could not remember him so angry. His slim, freckled hands were shaking and his normally lifeless eyes were sparkling with fury.

“Source Merlin,” Alleline said, prefacing the announcement with a slight but very Scottish sucking of the teeth, “is a highly placed source with access to the most sensitive levels of Soviet policy-making.” And, as if he were royalty: “We have dubbed his product ‘Witchcraft.’ ”

He had used the identical form of words, Smiley noticed, in a top-secret and personal letter to a fan at the Treasury, requesting for himself greater discretion in ad hoc payments to agents.

“He’ll be saying he won him at the football pool next,” Control warned, who despite his second youth had an old man’s inaccuracy when it came to popular idiom. “Now get him to tell you why he won’t tell you.”

Alleline was undeterred. He, too, was flushed, but with triumph, not disease. He filled his big chest for a long speech, which he delivered entirely to Smiley, tonelessly, rather as a Scottish police sergeant might give evidence before the courts.

“The identity of Source Merlin is a secret which is not mine to divulge. He’s the fruit of a long cultivation by certain people in this service. People who are bound to me, as I am to them. People who are not at all entertained, either, by the failure rate around this place. There’s been too much blown. Too much lost, wasted, too many scandals. I’ve said so many times, but I might as well have spoken to the wind for all the damn care he paid me.”

“He’s referring to me,” Control explained from the sidelines. “I am he in this speech—you follow, George?”

“The ordinary principles of tradecraft and security have gone to the wall in this service. Need to know: where is it? Compartmentation at all levels: where is it, George? There’s too much regional backbiting, stimulated from the top.”

“Another reference to myself,” Control put in.

“Divide and rule, that’s the principle at work these days. Personalities who should be helping to fight Communism are all at one another’s throats. We’re losing our top partners.”

“He means the Americans,” Control explained.

“We’re losing our livelihood. Our self-respect. We’ve had enough.” He took back the report and jammed it under his arm. “We’ve had a bellyful, in fact.”

“And like everyone who’s had enough,” said Control as Alleline noisily left the room, “he wants more.”

Now for a while Lacon’s files, instead of Smiley’s memory, once more took up the story. It was typical of the atmosphere of those last months that, having been brought in on the affair at the beginning, Smiley should have received no subsequent word of how it had developed. Control detested failure as he detested illness, and his own failures most. He knew that to recognise failure was to live with it; that a service that did not struggle did not survive. He detested the silk-shirt agents, who hogged large chunks of the budget to the detriment of the bread-and-butter networks in which he put his faith. He loved success, but he detested miracles if they put the rest of his endeavour out of focus. He detested weakness as he detested sentiment and religion, and he detested Percy Alleline, who had a dash of most of them. His way of dealing with them was literally to close the door: to withdraw into the dingy solitude of his upper rooms, receive no visitors, and have all his phone calls fed to him by the mothers. The same quiet ladies fed him jasmine tea and the countless office files that he sent for and returned in heaps. Smiley would see them piled before the door as he went about his own business of trying to keep the rest of the Circus afloat. Many were old, from the days before Control led the pack. Some were personal, the biographies of past and present members of the service.

Control never said what he was doing. If Smiley asked the mothers, or if Bill Haydon sauntered in, favourite boy, and made the same enquiry, they only shook their heads or silently raised their eyebrows towards paradise: “A terminal case,” said these gentle glances. “We are humouring a great man at the end of his career.” But Smiley—as he now patiently leafed through file after file, and in a corner of his complex mind rehearsed Irina’s diary to Ricki Tarr—Smiley knew, and in a quite real way took comfort from the knowledge, that he was not after all the first to make this journey of exploration; that Control’s ghost was his companion into all but the furthest reaches; and might even have stayed the whole distance if Operation Testify, at the eleventh hour, had not stopped him dead.

Breakfast again, and a much-subdued Welshman not drawn by undercooked sausage and overcooked tomato.

“Do you want these back,” Lacon demanded, “or have you done with them? They can’t be very enlightening, since they don’t even contain the reports.”

“Tonight, please, if you don’t mind.”

“I suppose you realise you look a wreck.”

He didn’t realise, but at Bywater Street, when he returned there, Ann’s pretty gilt mirror showed his eyes red-rimmed and his plump cheeks clawed with fatigue. He slept a little, then went his mysterious ways. When evening came, Lacon was actually waiting for him. Smiley went straight on with his reading.

For six weeks, according to the files, the naval dispatch had no successor. Other sections of the Ministry of Defence echoed the Admiralty’s enthusiasm for the original dispatch; the Foreign Office remarked that “this document sheds an extraordinary sidelight on Soviet aggressive thinking,” whatever that meant; Alleline persisted in his demands for special handling of the material, but he was like a general with no army. Lacon referred frostily to “the somewhat delayed follow-up,” and suggested to his Minister that he should “defuse the situation with the Admiralty.” From Control, according to the file, nothing. Perhaps he was lying low and praying it would blow over. In the lull, a Treasury Moscow-gazer sourly pointed out that Whitehall had seen plenty of this in recent years: an encouraging first report, then silence or, worse, a scandal.

He was wrong. In the seventh week, Alleline announced publication of three new Witchcraft reports all on the same day. All took the form of secret Soviet interdepartmental correspondence, though the topics differed widely.

Witchcraft No. 2, according to Lacon’s summary, described tensions inside Comecon and spoke of the degenerative effect of Western trade deals on its weaker members. In Circus terms, this was a classic report from Roy Bland territory, covering the very target that the Hungarian-based Aggravate network had been attacking in vain for years. “Excellent tour d’horizon,” wrote a Foreign Office customer, “and backed by good collateral.”

Witchcraft No. 3 discussed revisionism in Hungary and Kadar’s renewed purges in political and academic life: the best way to end loose talk in Hungary, said the author of the paper, borrowing a phrase coined by Khrushchev long before, would be to shoot some more intellectuals. Once again this was Roy Bland territory. “A salutary warning,” wrote the same Foreign Office commentator, “to all those who like to think the Soviet Union is going soft on satellites.”

These two reports were both in essence background, but Witchcraft No. 4 was sixty pages long and held by the customers to be unique. It was an immensely technical Soviet Foreign Service appreciation of the advantages and disadvantages of negotiating with a weakened American President. The conclusion, on balance, was that by throwing the President a bone for his own electorate, the Soviet Union could buy useful concessions in forthcoming discussions on multiple nuclear warheads. But it seriously questioned the desirability of allowing the United States to feel too much the loser, since this could tempt the Pentagon into a retributive or preemptive strike. The report was from the very heart of Bill Haydon territory. But, as Haydon himself wrote in a touching minute to Alleline (promptly copied, without Haydon’s knowledge, to the Minister and entered on the Cabinet Office file), in twenty-five years of attacking the Soviet nuclear target he had not laid his hands on anything of this quality.

“Nor,” he concluded, “unless I am extremely mistaken, have our American brothers-in-arms. I know that these are early days, but it does occur to me that anyone taking this material to Washington could drive a very hard bargain in return. Indeed, if Merlin maintains the standard, I would venture to predict that we could buy anything there is to have in the American agency’s shop.”

Percy Alleline had his reading-room; and George Smiley made himself a coffee on the derelict burner beside the washstand. Midway the meter ran out, and in a temper he called for Norman and ordered five pounds’ worth of shillings.

17

With mounting interest, Smiley continued his journey through Lacon’s meagre records from that first meeting of protagonists until the present day. At the time, such a mood of suspicion had gripped the Circus that even between Smiley and Control the subject of Source Merlin became taboo. Alleline brought up the Witchcraft reports and waited in the anteroom while the mothers took them to Control, who signed them at once in order to demonstrate that he had not read them. Alleline took back the file, poked his head round Smiley’s door, grunted a greeting, and clumped down the staircase. Bland kept his distance, and even Bill Haydon’s breezy visits—traditionally a part of the life up there, of the “talking shop” that Control in the old days had liked to foster among his senior lieutenants—became fewer and shorter, then ceased entirely.

“Control’s going potty,” Haydon told Smiley with contempt. “And if I’m not mistaken he’s also dying. It’s just a question of which gets him first.”

The customary Tuesday meetings were discontinued, and Smiley found himself constantly harassed by Control either to go abroad on some blurred errand or to visit the domestic outstations—Sarratt, Brixton, Acton, and the rest—as his personal envoy. He had a growing feeling that Control wanted him out of the way. When they talked, he felt the heavy strain of suspicion between them, so that even Smiley seriously wondered whether Bill was right and Control was unfit for his job.

The Cabinet Office files made it clear that those next three months saw a steady flowering of the Witchcraft operation, without any help from Control. Reports came in at the rate of two or even three a month, and the standard, according to the customers, continued excellent, but Control’s name was seldom mentioned and he was never invited to comment. Occasionally the evaluators produced quibbles. More often they complained that corroboration was not possible, since Merlin took them into uncharted areas: could we not ask the Americans to check? We could not, said the Minister. Not yet, said Alleline; who in a confidential minute seen by no one, added, “When the time is ripe we shall do more than barter our material for theirs. We are not interested in a one-time deal. Our task is to establish Merlin’s track record beyond all doubt. When that is done, Haydon can go to market . . .”

There was no longer any question of it. Among the chosen few who were admitted to the chambers of the Adriatic Working Party, Merlin was already a winner. His material was accurate; often other sources confirmed it retrospectively. A Witchcraft committee formed, with the Minister in the chair. Alleline was vice-chairman. Merlin had become an industry, and Control was not even employed. Which was why in desperation he had sent out Smiley with his beggar’s bowl: “There are three of them and Alleline,” he said. “Sweat them, George. Tempt them, bully them, give them whatever they eat.”

Of those meetings also, the files were blessedly ignorant, for they belonged in the worst rooms of Smiley’s memory. He had known already that there was nothing left in Control’s larder that would satisfy their hunger.

It was April. Smiley had come back from Portugal, where he had been burying a scandal, to find Control living under siege. Files lay strewn over the floor; new locks had been fitted to the windows. He had put the tea-cosy over his one telephone and from the ceiling hung a baffler against electronic eavesdropping—a thing like an electric fan, which constantly varied its pitch. In the three weeks Smiley had been away, Control had become an old man.

“Tell them they’re buying their way in with counterfeit money,” he ordered, barely looking up from his files. “Tell them any damn thing. I need time.”

“There are three of them and Alleline,” Smiley now repeated to himself, seated at the Major’s card table and studying Lacon’s list of those who had been Witchcraft-cleared. Today there were sixty-eight licensed visitors to the Adriatic Working Party’s reading-room. Each, like a member of the Communist Party, was numbered according to the date of his admission. The list had been retyped since Control’s death; Smiley was not included. But the same four founding fathers still headed the list: Alleline, Bland, Esterhase, and Bill Haydon. Three of them and Alleline, Control had said.

Suddenly Smiley’s mind, open as he read to every inference, every oblique connection, was assailed by a quite extraneous vision: of himself and Ann walking the Cornish cliffs. It was the time immediately after Control’s death, the worst time Smiley could remember in their long, puzzled marriage. They were high on the coast, somewhere between Lamorna and Porthcurno; they had gone there out of season ostensibly for Ann to take the sea air for her cough. They had been following the coast path, each lost in his thoughts: she to Haydon, he supposed; he to Control, to Jim Prideaux and Testify, and the whole mess he had left behind him on retirement. They shared no harmony. They had lost all calmness in one another’s company; they were a mystery to each other, and the most banal conversation could take strange, uncontrollable directions. In London, Ann had been living quite wildly, taking anyone who would have her. He knew she was trying to bury something that hurt or worried her very much; but he knew no way to reach her.

“If I had died,” she demanded suddenly, “rather than Control, say, how would you feel towards Bill?”

Smiley was still pondering his answer when she threw in: “I sometimes think I safeguard your opinion of him. Is that possible? That I somehow keep the two of you together. Is that possible?”

“It’s possible.” He added, “Yes, I suppose I’m dependent on him, too, in a way.”

“Is Bill still important in the Circus?”

“More than he was, probably.”

“And he still goes to Washington, wheels and deals with them, turns them upside down?”

“I expect so. I hear so.”

“Is he as important as you were?”

“I suppose.”

“I suppose,” she repeated. “I expect. I hear. Is he better, then? A better performer than you, better at the arithmetic? Tell me. Please tell me. You must.”

She was strangely excited. Her eyes, tearful from the wind, shone desperately upon him; she had both hands on his arm and, like a child, was dragging on him for an answer.

“You’ve always told me that men aren’t to be compared,” he replied awkwardly. “You’ve always said you didn’t think in that category of comparison.”

“Tell me!”

“All right: no, he’s not better.”

“As good?”

“ No.”

“And if I wasn’t there, what would you think of him then? If Bill were not my cousin, not my anything? Tell me, would you think more of him, or less?”

“Less, I suppose.”

“Then think less now. I divorce him from the family, from our lives, from everything. Here and now. I throw him into the sea. There. Do you understand?”

He understood only: go back to the Circus, finish your business. It was one of a dozen ways she had of saying the same thing.

Still disturbed by this intrusion on his memory, Smiley stood up in rather a flurry and went to the window, his habitual lookout when he was distracted. A line of sea-gulls, a half dozen of them, had settled on the parapet. He must have heard them calling, and remembered that walk to Lamorna.

“I cough when there are things I can’t say,” Ann had told him once. What couldn’t she say then, he asked glumly of the chimney-pots across the street. Connie could say it, Martindale could say it; so why couldn’t Ann?

“Three of them and Alleline,” Smiley muttered aloud. The sea-gulls had gone, all at once, as if they had spotted a better place. “Tell them they’re buying their way in with counterfeit money.” And if the banks accept the money? If the experts pronounce it genuine, and Bill Haydon praises it to the skies? And the Cabinet Office files are full of plaudits for the brave new men of Cambridge Circus, who have finally broken the jinx?

He had chosen Esterhase first because Toby owed Smiley his career. Smiley had recruited him in Vienna, a starving student living in the ruins of a museum of which his dead uncle had been curator. He drove down to Acton and bearded him at the Laundry across his walnut desk with its row of ivory telephones. On the wall, kneeling Magi, questionable Italian seventeenth century. Through the window, a closed courtyard crammed with cars and vans and motorbikes, and rest-huts where the teams of lamplighters killed time between shifts. First Smiley asked Toby about his family: there was a son who went to Westminster and a daughter at medical school, first year. Then he put it to Toby that the lamplighters were two months behind on their worksheets, and when Toby hedged he asked him outright whether his boys had been doing any special jobs recently, either at home or abroad, which for good reasons of security Toby didn’t feel able to mention in his returns.

“Who would I do that for, George?” Toby had asked, dead-eyed. “You know in my book that’s completely illegal.” And idiom, in Toby’s book, had a way of being ludicrous.

“Well, I can see you doing it for Percy Alleline, for one,” Smiley suggested, feeding him the excuse: “After all, if Percy ordered you to do something and not to record it, you’d be in a very difficult position.”

“What sort of something, though, George, I wonder?”

“Clear a foreign letter-box, prime a safe house, watch someone’s back, spike an embassy. Percy’s Director of Operations, after all. You might think he was acting on instructions from the fifth floor. I can see that happening quite reasonably.”

Toby looked carefully at Smiley. He was holding a cigarette, but apart from lighting it he hadn’t smoked it at all. It was a hand-rolled affair, taken from a silver box, but once lit, it never went into his mouth. It swung around, along the line or away to the side; sometimes it was poised to take the plunge, but it never did. Meanwhile Toby made his speech: one of Toby’s personal statements, supposedly definitive about where he stood at this point in his life.

Toby liked the service, he said. He would prefer to remain in it. He felt sentimental about it. He had other interests and at any time they could claim him altogether, but he liked the service best. His trouble was, he said, promotion. Not that he wanted it for any greedy reason. He would say his reasons were social.

“You know, George, I have so many years’ seniority I feel actually quite embarrassed when these young fellows ask me to take orders from them. You know what I mean? Acton, even—just the name of Acton for them is ridiculous.”

“Oh,” said Smiley mildly. “Which young fellows are these?”

But Esterhase had lost interest. His statement completed, his face settled again into its familiar blank expression, his doll’s eyes fixed on a point in the middle distance.

“Do you mean Roy Bland?” Smiley asked. “Or Percy? Is Percy young? Who, Toby?”

It was no good, Toby regretted: “George, when you are overdue for promotion and working your fingers to the bones, anyone looks young who’s above you on the ladder.”

“Perhaps Control could move you up a few rungs,” Smiley suggested, not much caring for himself in this role.

Esterhase’s reply struck a chill. “Well, actually, you know, George, I am not too sure he is able these days. Look here”—opening a drawer—“I give Ann something. When I heard you were coming, I phone a couple of friends of mine; something beautiful, I say, something for a faultless woman; you know I never forget her since we met once at Bill Haydon’s cocktail?”

So Smiley carried off the consolation prize—a costly scent, smuggled, he assumed, by one of Toby’s homing lamplighters—and took his beggar bowl to Bland, knowing as he did so that he was coming one step nearer to Haydon.

Returning to the Major’s table, Smiley searched through Lacon’s files till he came to a slim volume marked “Operation Witchcraft, direct subsidies,” which recorded the earliest expenses incurred through the running of Source Merlin. “For reasons of security it is proposed,” wrote Alleline in yet another personal memo to the Minister, this one dated almost two years ago, “to keep the Witchcraft financing absolutely separate from all other Circus imprests. Until some proper cover can be found, I am asking you for direct subventions from Treasury funds rather than mere supplementaries to the Secret Vote, which in due course are certain to find their way into the mainstream of Circus accounting. I shall then account to you personally.”

“Approved,” wrote the Minister a week later, “provided always . . .”

There were no provisions. A glance at the first row of figures showed Smiley all he needed to know: already by May of that year, when that interview at Acton took place, Toby Esterhase had personally made no fewer than eight trips on the Witchcraft budget, two to Paris, two to The Hague, one to Helsinki, and three to Berlin. In each case the purpose of the journey was curtly described as “Collecting product.” Between May and November, when Control faded from the scene, he made a further nineteen. One of these took him to Sofia, another to Istanbul. None required him to be absent for more than three full days. Most took place at weekends. On several such journeys, he was accompanied by Bland.

Not to put too fine an edge on it, Toby Esterhase, as Smiley had never seriously doubted, had lied in his teeth. It was nice to find the record confirming his impression.

Smiley’s feelings towards Roy Bland had at that time been ambivalent. Recalling them now, he decided they still were. A don had spotted him, Smiley had recruited him; the combination was oddly akin to the one that had brought Smiley himself into the Circus net. But this time there was no German monster to fan the patriotic flame, and Smiley had always been a little embarrassed by protestations of anti-Communism. Like Smiley, Bland had no real childhood. His father was a docker, a passionate trade-unionist, and a Party member. His mother died when Bland was a boy. His father hated education as he hated authority, and when Bland grew clever the father took it into his head that he had lost his son to the ruling class and beat the life out of him. Bland fought his way to grammar school and in the holidays worked his fingers, as Toby would say, to the bones, in order to raise the extra fee. When Smiley met him in his tutor’s rooms at Oxford, he had the battered look of someone just arrived from a bad journey.

Smiley took him up, and over several months edged closer to a proposition, which Bland accepted—largely, Smiley assumed, out of animosity towards his father. After that he passed out of Smiley’s care. Subsisting on odd grants undescribed, Bland toiled in the Marx Memorial Library and wrote leftish papers for tiny magazines that would have died long ago had the Circus not subsidized them. In the evenings he disputed loud and long at smoky meetings in pubs and school halls. In the vacations he went to the Nursery, where a fanatic called Thatch ran a charm school for outward-bound penetration agents, one pupil at a time. Thatch trained Bland in tradecraft and carefully nudged his progressive opinions nearer to his father’s Marxist camp. Three years to the day after his recruitment, partly thanks to his proletarian pedigree, and his father’s influence at King Street, Bland won a year’s appointment as assistant lector in economics at the University of Poznan. He was launched.

From Poland he applied successfully for a post at the Budapest Academy of Sciences, and for the next eight years he lived the nomadic life of a minor left-wing intellectual in search of light, often liked but never trusted. He staged in Prague, returned to Poland, did a hellish two semesters in Sofia and six in Kiev, where he had a nervous breakdown, his second in as many months. Once more the Nursery took charge of him, this time to dry him out. He was passed as clean, his networks were given to other fieldmen, and Roy himself was brought into the Circus to manage, mainly from a desk, the networks he had recruited in the field. Recently, it had seemed to Smiley, Bland had become very much Haydon’s colleague. If Smiley chanced to call on Roy for a chat, like as not Bill was lounging in his armchair surrounded by papers, charts, and cigarette smoke; if he dropped in on Bill, it was no surprise to find Bland, in a sweat-soaked shirt, padding heavily back and forth across the carpet. Bill had Russia, Bland the satellites; but already in those early days of Witchcraft, the distinction had all but vanished.

They met at a pub in St. John’s Wood—still May—half past five on a dull day and the garden empty. Roy brought a child, a boy of five or so, a tiny Bland, fair, burly, and pink-faced. He didn’t explain the boy, but sometimes as they talked he shut off and watched him where he sat on a bench away from them, eating nuts. Nervous breakdowns or not, Bland still bore the imprimatur of the Thatch philosophy for agents in the enemy camp: self-faith, positive participation, Pied Piper appeal, and all those other uncomfortable phrases which in the high day of the cold-war culture had turned the Nursery into something close to a moral-rearmament centre.

“So what’s the deal?” Bland asked affably.

“There isn’t one really, Roy. Control feels that the present situation is unhealthy. He doesn’t like to see you getting mixed up in a cabal. Nor do I.”

“Great. So what’s the deal?”

“What do you want?”

On the table, soaked from the earlier rain fall, was a cruet set left over from lunchtime, with a bunch of paper-wrapped cellulose toothpicks in the centre compartment. Taking one, Bland spat the paper onto the grass and began working his back teeth with the fat end.

“Well, how about a five-thousand-quid backhander out the reptile fund?”

“And a house and a car?” said Smiley, making a joke of it.

“And the kid to Eton,” Bland added, and winked across the concrete paving to the boy while he went on working with the toothpick. “I’ve paid, see, George. You know that. I don’t know what I’ve bought with it but I’ve paid a hell of a lot. I want some back. Ten years’ solitary for the fifth floor; that’s big money at any age. Even yours. There must have been a reason why I fell for all that spiel, but I can’t quite remember what it was. Must be your magnetic personality.”

Smiley’s glass was still going, so Bland fetched himself another from the bar, and something for the boy as well.

“You’re an educated sort of swine,” he announced easily as he sat down again. “An artist is a bloke who can hold two fundamentally opposing views and still function: who dreamed that one up?”

“Scott Fitzgerald,” Smiley replied, thinking for a moment that Bland was proposing to say something about Bill Haydon.

“Well, Fitzgerald knew a thing or two,” Bland affirmed. As he drank, his bulging eyes slid sideways toward the fence, as if in search of someone. “And I’m definitely functioning, George. As a good Socialist, I’m going for the money. As a good capitalist, I’m sticking with the revolution, because if you can’t beat it spy on it. Don’t look like that, George. It’s the name of the game these days: you scratch my conscience, I’ll drive your Jag, right?” He was already lifting an arm as he said this. “With you in a minute!” he called across the lawn. “Set one up for me!”

Two girls were hovering on the other side of the wire fence.

“Is that Bill’s joke?” Smiley asked, suddenly quite angry.

“Is what?”

“Is that one of Bill’s jokes about materialist England, the pigs-in-clover society?”

“Could be,” said Bland, and finished his drink. “Don’t you like it?”

“Not too much, no. I never knew Bill before as a radical reformer. What’s come over him all of a sudden?”

“That’s not radical,” Bland retorted, resenting any devaluation of his Socialism, or of Haydon. “That’s just looking out the bloody window. That’s just England now, man. Nobody wants that, do they?”

“So how do you propose,” Smiley demanded, hearing himself at his pompous worst, “to destroy the acquisitive and competitive instincts in Western society without also destroying . . .”

Bland had finished his drink; and the meeting, too. “Why should you be bothered? You’ve got Bill’s job. What more do you want? Long as it lasts.”

And Bill’s got my wife, Smiley thought as Bland rose to go; and, damn him, he’s told you.

The boy had invented a game. He had laid a table on its side and was rolling an empty bottle onto the gravel. Each time, he started the bottle higher up the table-top. Smiley left before it smashed.

Unlike Esterhase, Bland had not even bothered to lie. Lacon’s files made no pretence of his involvement with the Witchcraft operation:

“Source Merlin,” wrote Alleline, in a minute dated soon after Control’s departure, “is in every sense a committee operation . . . I cannot honestly say which of my three assistants deserves most praise. The energy of Bland has been an inspiration to us all . . .” He was replying to the Minister’s suggestion that those responsible for Witchcraft should be honoured in the New Year’s list. “While Haydon’s operational ingenuity is at times little short of Merlin’s own,” he added. The medals went to all three; Alleline’s appointment as Chief was confirmed, and with it his beloved knighthood.

18

Which left me Bill, thought Smiley. In the course of most London nights, there is one respite from alarm. Ten, twenty minutes, thirty, even an hour, and not a drunk groans or a child cries or a car’s tyres whine into a collision. In Sussex Gardens it happens around three. That night it came early, at one, as Smiley stood once more at his dormer window peering down like a prisoner at Mrs. Pope Graham’s sand patch, where a Bedford van had recently parked. Its roof was daubed with slogans: “Sydney 90 Days,” “Athens Non-Stop,” “Mary Lou Here We Come.” A light glowed inside, and he presumed some children were sleeping there in unmarried bliss. “Kids,” he was supposed to call them. Curtains covered the windows.

Which left me Bill, he thought, still staring at the closed curtains of the van and its flamboyant globe-trotting proclamations; which left me Bill, and our friendly little chat in Bywater Street—just the two of us, old friends, old comrades-at-arms, “sharing everything,” as Martindale had it so elegantly, but Ann sent out for the evening so that the men could be alone. “Which left me Bill,” he repeated hopelessly, and felt the blood rise, and the colours of his vision heighten, and his sense of moderation begin its dangerous slide.

Who was he? Smiley had no focus on him any more. Each time he thought of him, he drew him too large, and different. Until Ann’s affair with him, he thought he knew Bill pretty well, his brilliance and its limitations. He was of that pre-war set that seemed to have vanished for good, which managed to be disreputable and high-minded at the same time. His father was a high court judge, two of his several beautiful sisters had married into the aristocracy; at Oxford he favoured the unfashionable right rather than the fashionable left, but never to the point of strain. From his late teens he had been a keen explorer and amateur painter of brave, if over-ambitious, stamp; several of his paintings now hung in Miles Sercombe’s fatuous palace in Carlton Gardens. He had connections in every embassy and consulate across the Middle East and he used them ruthlessly. He took up remote languages with ease, and when 1939 came, the Circus snapped him up; they had had their eye on him for years. He had a dazzling war. He was ubiquitous and charming; he was unorthodox and occasionally outrageous. He was probably heroic. The comparison with Lawrence was inevitable.

And it was true, Smiley conceded, that Bill in his time had fiddled with substantial pieces of history; had proposed all sorts of grand designs for restoring England to influence and greatness—like Rupert Brooke, he seldom spoke of Britain. But Smiley, in his rare moments of objectivity, could remember few that ever got off the ground.

It was the other side of Haydon’s nature, by contrast, that as a colleague he had found easier to respect: the slow-burning skills of the natural agent runner; his rare sense of balance in the playing back of double agents and the mounting of deception operations; his art of fostering affection, even love, though it ran against the grain of other loyalties.

As witness, thank you, my wife.

Perhaps Bill really is out of scale, Smiley thought hopelessly, still grappling for a sense of proportion. Picturing him now, and putting him beside Bland, Esterhase, even Alleline, it did truthfully seem to Smiley that all of them were, to a great or small extent, imperfect imitations of that one original, Haydon. That their affectations were like steps towards the same unobtainable ideal of the rounded man, even if the ideal was itself misconceived, or misplaced; even if Bill was utterly unworthy of it. Bland in his blunt impertinence, Esterhase in his lofty artificial Englishness, Alleline with his shallow gift of leadership—without Bill they were a disarray. Smiley also knew, or thought he knew—the idea came to him now as a mild enlightenment—that Bill in turn was also very little by himself: that while his admirers (Bland, Prideaux, Alleline, Esterhase, and all the rest of the supporters’ club) might find in him completeness, Bill’s real trick was to use them, to live through them to complete himself, here a piece, there a piece, from their passive identities, thus disguising the fact that he was less, far less, than the sum of his apparent qualities . . . and finally submerging this dependence beneath an artist’s arrogance, calling them the creatures of his mind . . .

“That’s quite enough,” said Smiley aloud.

Withdrawing abruptly from this insight, dismissing it irritably as yet another theory about Bill, he cooled his overheated mind with the recollection of their last meeting.

“I suppose you want to grill me about bloody Merlin,” Bill began. He looked tired and nervy; it was his time for commuting to Washington. In the old days he would have brought an unsuitable girl and sent her to sit with Ann upstairs while they talked their business; expecting Ann to bolster his genius to her, thought Smiley cruelly. They were all of the same sort: half his age, bedraggled art school, clinging, surly; Ann used to say he had a supplier. And once, to shock, he brought a ghastly youth called Steggie, an assistant barman from one of the Chelsea pubs, with an open shirt and a gold chain round his midriff.

“Well, they do say you write the reports,” Smiley explained.

“I thought that was Bland’s job,” said Bill with his foxy grin.

“Roy makes the translations,” said Smiley. “You draft the covering reports; they’re typed on your machine. The material’s not cleared for typists at all.”

Bill listened carefully, brows lifted, as if at any moment he might interrupt with an objection or a more congenial topic, then hoisted himself from the deep armchair and ambled to the bookcase, where he stood a full shelf higher than Smiley. Fishing out a volume with his long fingers, he peered into it, grinning.

“Percy Alleline won’t do,” he announced, turning a page. “Is that the premise?”

“Pretty well.”

“Which means that Merlin won’t do, either. Merlin would do if he were my source, wouldn’t he? What would happen if Bloody Bill here pottered along to Control and said he’d hooked a big fish and wanted to play him alone? ‘That’s very nifty of you, Bill, boy,’ Control would say. ‘You do it just the way you want, Bill, boy—’course you do. Have some filthy tea.’ He’d be giving me a medal by now, instead of sending you snooping round the corridors. We used to be rather a classy bunch. Why are we so vulgar these days?”

“He thinks Percy’s on the make,” Smiley said.

“So he is. So am I. I want to be head boy. Did you know that? Time I made something of myself, George. Half a painter, half a spy—time I was all something. Since when was ambition a sin in our beastly outfit?”

“Who runs him, Bill?”

“Percy? Karla does—who else? Lower-class bloke with upper-class sources, must be a bounder. Percy’s sold out to Karla; it’s the only explanation.” He had developed the art, long ago, of deliberately misunderstanding. “Percy’s our house mole,” he said.

“I meant who runs Merlin? Who is Merlin? What’s going on?”

Leaving the bookcase, Haydon took himself on a tour of Smiley’s drawings. “This is a Callot, isn’t it,” unhooking a small gilt frame and holding it to the light. “It’s nice.” He tilted his spectacles to make them magnify. Smiley was certain he had looked at it a dozen times before. “It’s very nice. Doesn’t anyone think my nose should be out of joint? I am supposed to be in charge of the Russian target, you know. Given it my best years, set up networks, talent-spotters, all mod cons. You chaps on the fifth floor have forgotten what it’s like to run an operation where it takes you three days to post a letter and you don’t even get an answer for your trouble.”

Smiley, dutifully: Yes, I have forgotten. Yes, I sympathise. No, Ann is nowhere in my thoughts. We are colleagues, after all, and men of the world; we are here to talk about Merlin and Control.

“Along comes this upstart Percy, damn Caledonian street-merchant, no shadow of class, shoving a whole wagonload of Russian goodies. Bloody annoying, don’t you think?”

“Very.”

“Trouble is, my networks aren’t very good. Much easier to spy on Percy than—” He broke off, tired of his own thesis. His attention had settled on a tiny van Mieris head in chalk. “And I fancy this very much,” he said.

“Ann gave it me.”

“Amends?”

“Probably.”

“Must have been quite a sin. How long have you had it?”

Even now, Smiley remembered noticing how silent it was in the street. Tuesday? Wednesday? And he remembered thinking: No, Bill. For you I have so far received no consolation prize at all. As of this evening, you don’t even rate a pair of bedroom slippers . . . Thinking but not saying.

“Is Control dead yet?” Haydon asked.

“Just busy.”

“What does he do all day? He’s like a hermit with the clap, scratching around all on his own in that cave up there. All those bloody files he reads—what’s he about, for God’s sake? Sentimental tour of his unlovely past, I’ll bet. He looks sick as a cat. I suppose that’s Merlin’s fault, too, is it?”

Again Smiley said nothing.

“Why doesn’t he eat with the cooks? Why doesn’t he join us instead of grubbing around for truffles up there? What’s he after?”

“I didn’t know he was after anything,” said Smiley.

“Ah, stop flirting around. Of course he is. I’ve got a source up there—one of the mothers, didn’t you know? Tells me indiscretions for chocolate. Control’s been toiling through personal dossiers of old Circus folk heroes, sniffing out the dirt, who was pink, who was a queen. Half of them are under the earth already. Making a study of all our failures. Can you imagine? And for why? Because we’ve got a success on our hands. He’s mad, George. He’s got the big itch: senile paranoia, take my word for it. Ann ever tell you about wicked Uncle Fry? Thought the servants were bugging the roses to find out where he’d hidden his money. Get away from him, George. Death’s a bore. Cut the cord, move down a few floors. Join the proles.”

Ann had still not returned, so they sauntered side by side down the King’s Road looking for a cab while Bill enunciated his latest vision of politics, and Smiley said “Yes, Bill,” “No, Bill,” and wondered how he was going to break it to Control. He forgot now which particular vision it was. The year before, Bill had been a great hawk. He had wanted to run down conventional forces in Europe and replace them outright with nuclear weapons. He was about the only person left in Whitehall who believed in Britain’s independent deterrent. This year, if Smiley remembered rightly, Bill was an aggressive English pacifist and wanted the Sweden solution but without the Swedes.

No cab came; it was a beautiful night, and like old friends they went on walking, side by side.

“By the by, if you ever want to sell that Mieris, let me know, will you? I’ll give you a bloody decent price for it.”

Thinking Bill was making another bad joke, Smiley rounded on him, at last prepared to be angry. Haydon was not even conscious of his interest. He was gazing down the street, his long arm raised at an approaching cab.

“Oh, Christ, look at them,” he shouted irritably. “Full of bloody Jews going to Quag’s.”

“Bill’s backside must look like a damn gridiron,” Control muttered next day, barely looking up from his reading. “The years he’s spent sitting on the fence.”

For a moment he stared at Smiley in an unfocused way, as if looking through him to some different, less fleshy prospect; then ducked his eyes and seemed to resume his reading. “I’m glad he’s not my cousin,” he said.

The following Monday, the mothers had surprising news for Smiley. Control had flown to Belfast for discussions with the army. Later, checking the travel imprests, Smiley nailed the lie. No one in the Circus had flown to Belfast that month, but there was a charge for a first-class return to Vienna and the issuing authority was given as G. Smiley.

Haydon, also looking for Control, was cross: “So now what’s the pitch? Dragging Ireland into the net, creating an organisational diversion, I suppose. Jesus, your man’s a bore!”

The light in the van went out, but Smiley continued to gaze at its garish roof. How do they live? he wondered. What do they do for water, money? He tried to fathom the logistics of a troglodyte life in Sussex Gardens: water, drains, light. Ann would work them out all right; so would Bill.

Facts. What were the facts?

Facts were that one balmy pre-Witchcraft summer evening, I returned unexpectedly from Berlin to find Bill Haydon stretched on the drawing-room floor and Ann playing Liszt on the gramophone. Ann was sitting across the room from him in her dressing gown, wearing no make-up. There was no scene; everyone behaved with painful naturalness. According to Bill, he had dropped by on his way from the airport, having just flown in from Washington; Ann had been in bed but insisted on getting up to receive him. We agreed it was a pity we hadn’t shared a car from Heathrow. Bill left; I asked “What did he want?” And Ann said: “A shoulder to cry on.” Bill was having girl trouble, wanted to pour out his heart, she said.

“There’s Felicity in Washington, who wants a baby, and Jan in London, who’s having one.”

“Bill’s?”

“God knows. I’m sure Bill doesn’t.”

Next morning, without even wishing to, Smiley established that Bill had been back in London two days, not one. Following the episode, Bill showed an uncharacteristic deference towards Smiley, and Smiley reciprocated with acts of courtesy which normally belong to a newer friendship. In due course Smiley noticed that the secret was out, and he was still mystified by the speed with which that had happened. He supposed Bill had boasted to someone, perhaps Bland. If the word was correct, Ann had broken three of her own rules. Bill was Circus and he was Set—her word for family and ramifications. On either count he would be out of bounds. Thirdly, she had received him at Bywater Street, an agreed violation of territorial decencies.

Withdrawing once more into his own lonely life, Smiley waited for Ann to say something. He moved into the spare room and arranged for himself plenty of evening engagements in order that he would not be too aware of her comings and goings. Gradually it dawned on him that she was deeply unhappy. She lost weight, she lost her sense of play, and if he didn’t know her better he would have sworn she was having a bad bout of the guilts, even of self-disgust. When he was gentle with her, she fended him off; she showed no interest in Christmas shopping and developed a wasting cough, which he knew was her signal of distress. If it had not been for Operation Testify, they would have left for Cornwall earlier. As it was, they had to postpone the trip till January, by which time Control was dead, Smiley was unemployed, the scale had tipped; and Ann, to his mortification, was covering the Haydon card with as many others as she could pull from the pack.

So what happened? Did she break off the affair? Did Haydon? Why did she never speak of it? Did it matter, anyway—one among so many? He gave up. Like the Cheshire cat, the face of Bill Haydon seemed to recede as soon as he advanced upon it, leaving only the smile behind. But he knew that somehow Bill had hurt her deeply, which was the sin of sins.

19

Returning with a grunt of distaste to the unlovable table, Smiley resumed his reading of Merlin’s progress since his own enforced retirement from the Circus. The new régime of Percy Alleline, he at once noticed, had immediately produced several favourable changes in Merlin’s life-style. It was like a maturing, a settling down. The night dashes to European capitals ceased; the flow of intelligence became more regular and less nervy. There were headaches, certainly. Merlin’s demands for money—requirements, never threats—continued, and with the steady decline in the value of the pound these large payments in foreign currency caused the Treasury much agony. There was even a suggestion at one point, never pursued, that “since we are the country of Merlin’s choice, he should be ready to shoulder his portion of our financial vicissitudes.” Haydon and Bland exploded, apparently: “I have not the face,” wrote Alleline with rare frankness to the Minister, “to mention this subject to my staff again.”

There was also a row about a new camera, which at great expense was broken into tubular components by nuts and bolts section and fitted into a standard lamp of Soviet manufacture. The lamp, after screams of pain—this time from the Foreign Office—was spirited to Moscow by diplomatic bag. The problem was then the drop. The residency could not be informed of Merlin’s identity, nor did it know the contents of the lamp. The lamp was unwieldy, and would not fit the boot of the resident’s car. After several shots, an untidy handover was achieved, but the camera never worked and there was bad blood between the Circus and its Moscow residency as a result. A less ambitious model was taken by Esterhase to Helsinki, where it was handed—thus Alleline’s memo to the Minister—to “a trusted intermediary whose frontier crossings would go unchallenged.”

Suddenly, Smiley sat up with a jolt.

“We spoke,” wrote Alleline to the Minister, in a minute dated February 27th this year. “You agreed to submit a supplementary estimate to the Treasury for a London house to be carried on the Witchcraft budget.”

He read it once, then again more slowly. The Treasury had sanctioned sixty thousand pounds for the freehold and another ten for furniture and fittings. To cut costs, it wanted its own lawyers to handle the conveyance. Alleline refused to reveal the address. For the same reason there was an argument about who should keep the deeds. This time the Treasury put its foot down and its lawyers drew up instruments to get the house back from Alleline should he die or go bankrupt. But he still kept the address to himself, as also the justification for this remarkable, and costly, adjunct to an operation that was supposedly taking place abroad.

Smiley searched eagerly for an explanation. The financial files, he quickly confirmed, were scrupulous to offer none. They contained only one veiled reference to the London house, and that was when the rates were doubled: Minister to Alleline: “I assume the London end is still necessary?” Alleline to Minister: “Eminently. I would say more than ever. I would add that the circle of knowledge has not widened since our conversation.” What knowledge?

It was not till he went back to the files which appraised the Witchcraft product that he came on the solution. The house was paid for in late March. Occupancy followed immediately. From the same date exactly, Merlin began to acquire a personality, and it was shaped here in the customers’ comments. Till now, to Smiley’s suspicious eye, Merlin had been a machine: faultless in tradecraft, eerie in access, free of the strains that make most agents such hard going. Now, suddenly, he was having a tantrum.

“We put to Merlin your follow-up question about the prevailing Kremlin view on the sale of Russian oil surpluses to the United States. We suggested to him, at your request, that this was at odds with his report last month that the Kremlin is presently flirting with the Tanaka government for a contract to sell Siberian oil on the Japanese market. Merlin saw no contradiction in the two reports and declined to forecast which market might ultimately be favoured.”

Whitehall regretted its temerity.

“Merlin will not, repeat not, add to his report on the repression of Georgian nationalism and the rioting in Tbilisi. Not being himself a Georgian, he takes the traditional Russian view that all Georgians are thieves and vagabonds, and better behind bars . . .”

Whitehall agreed not to press.

Merlin had suddenly drawn nearer. Was it only the acquisition of a London house that gave Smiley this new sense of Merlin’s physical proximity? From the remote stillness of a Moscow winter, Merlin seemed suddenly to be sitting here before him in the tattered room; in the street outside his window, waiting in the rain, where now and then, he knew, Mendel kept his solitary guard. Here out of the blue was a Merlin who talked and answered back and gratuitously offered his opinions, a Merlin who had time to be met. Met here in London? Fed, entertained, debriefed in a sixty-thousand-pound house while he threw his weight about and made jokes about Georgians? What was this circle of knowledge that had now formed itself even within the wider circle of those initiated into the secrets of the Witchcraft operation?

At this point, an improbable figure flitted across the stage: one J.P.R., a new recruit to Whitehall’s growing band of Witchcraft evaluators. Consulting the indoctrination list, Smiley established that his full name was Ribble, and that he was a member of Foreign Office Research Department. J. P. Ribble was puzzled.

J.P.R. to the Adriatic Working Party (A.W.P.): “May I respectfully draw your attention to an apparent discrepancy concerning dates? Witchcraft No. 104 (Soviet-French discussions on joint aircraft production) is dated April 21st. According to your covering minute, Merlin had this information directly from General Markov on the day after the negotiating parties agreed to a secret exchange of notes. But on that day, April 21st, according to our Paris Embassy, Markov was still in Paris, and Merlin, as witness your Report No. 109, was himself visiting a missile research establishment outside Leningrad . . .”

The minute cited no fewer than four similar “discrepancies,” which, put together, suggested a degree of mobility in Merlin that would have done credit to his miraculous namesake.

J. P. Ribble was told in as many words to mind his own business. But in a separate minute to the Minister, Alleline made an extraordinary admission that shed an entirely new light on the nature of the Witchcraft operation.

“Extremely secret and personal. We spoke. Merlin, as you have known for some time, is not one source but several. While we have done our best for security reasons to disguise this fact from your readers, the sheer volume of material makes it increasingly difficult to continue with this fiction. Might it not be time to come clean, at least on a limited basis? By the same token it would do the Treasury no harm to learn that Merlin’s ten thousand Swiss francs a month in salary, and a similar figure for expenses and running costs, are scarcely excessive when the cloth has to be cut so many ways.”

But the minute ended on a harsher note: “Nevertheless, even if we agree to open the door this far, I regard it as paramount that knowledge of the existence of the London house, and the purpose for which it is used, remain absolutely at a minimum. Indeed, once Merlin’s plurality is published among our readers, the delicacy of the London operation is increased.”

Totally mystified, Smiley read this correspondence several times. Then, as if struck by a sudden thought, he looked up, his face a picture of confusion. So far away were his thoughts, indeed, so intense and complex, that the telephone rang several times inside the room before he responded to the summons. Lifting the receiver, he glanced at his watch; it was six in the evening; he had been reading barely an hour.

“Mr. Barraclough? This is Lofthouse from finance, sir.”

Peter Guillam, using the emergency procedure, was asking by means of the agreed phrases for a crash meeting, and he sounded shaken.

20

The Circus Archives were not accessible from the main entrance. They rambled through a warren of dingy rooms and half-landings at the back of the building, more like one of the second-hand bookshops that proliferate round there than the organised memory of a large department. They were reached by a dull doorway in the Charing Cross Road, jammed between a picture-framer and an all-day café that was out of bounds to staff. A plate on the door read, “Town and Country Language School, Staff Only,” and another, “C & L Distribution, Ltd.” To enter, you pressed one or other bell and waited for Alwyn, an effeminate Marine who spoke only of weekends. Till Wednesday or so, he spoke of the weekend past; after that he spoke of the weekend to come. This morning, a Tuesday, he was in a mood of indignant unrest.

“Here, what about that storm, then?” he demanded as he pushed the book across the counter for Guillam to sign. “Might as well live in a lighthouse. All Saturday, all Sunday. I said to my friend: ‘Here we are in the middle of London and listen to it.’ Want me to look after that for you?”

“You should have been where I was,” said Guillam, consigning the brown canvas grip into Alwyn’s waiting hands. “Talk about listen to it, you could hardly stand upright.”

Don’t be over-friendly, he thought, talking to himself.

“Still, I do like the country,” Alwyn confided, stowing the grip in one of the open lockers behind the counter. “Want a number, then? I’m supposed to give you one—the Dolphin would kill me if she knew.”

“I’ll trust you,” said Guillam. Climbing the four steps, he pushed open the swing doors to the reading-room. The place was like a makeshift lecture hall: a dozen desks all facing the same way, a raised area where the archivist sat. Guillam took a desk near the back. It was still early—ten-ten by his watch—and the only other reader was Ben Thruxton, of research, who spent most of his time here. Long ago, masquerading as a Latvian dissident, Ben had run with revolutionaries through the streets of Moscow calling death to the oppressors. Now he crouched over his papers like an old priest, white-haired and perfectly still.

Seeing Guillam standing at her desk, the archivist smiled. Quite often, when Brixton was dead, Guillam would spend a day here searching through old cases for one that could stand refiring. She was Sal, a plump, sporting girl who ran a youth club in Chiswick and was a judo black-belt.

“Break any good necks this weekend?” he asked, helping himself to a bunch of green requisition slips.

Sal handed him the notes she kept for him in her steel cupboard.

“Couple. How about you?”

“Visiting aunts in Shropshire, thank you.”

“Some aunts,” said Sal.

Still at her desk, he filled in slips for the next two references on his list. He watched her stamp them, tear off the flimsies, and post them through a slot on her desk.

“D corridor,” she murmured, handing back the top copies. “The two-eights are halfway on your right, the three-ones are next alcove down.”

Pushing open the far door, he entered the main hall. At the centre an old lift like a miner’s cage carried files into the body of the Circus. Two bleary juniors were feeding it; a third stood by to operate the winch. Guillam moved slowly along the shelves reading the fluorescent number cards.

“Lacon swears he holds no file on Testify at all,” Smiley had explained in his usual worried way. “He has a few resettlement papers on Prideaux and nothing else.” And, in the same lugubrious tone: “So I’m afraid we’ll have to find a way of getting hold of whatever there is in Circus Registry.”

For “getting hold,” in Smiley’s dictionary, read “steal.”

One girl stood on a ladder. Oscar Allitson, the collator, was filling a laundry basket with wrangler files; Astrid, the maintenance man, was mending a radiator. The shelves were wooden, deep as bunks, and divided into pigeon-holes by panels of ply. He knew already that the Testify reference was 4482E which meant alcove 44, where he now stood. “E” stood for “extinct” and was used for dead operations only. Guillam counted to the eighth pigeon-hole from the left. Testify should be second from the left, but there was no way of making certain because the spines were unmarked. His reconnaissance complete, he drew the two files he had requested, leaving the green slips in the steel brackets provided for them.

“There won’t be much, I’m sure,” Smiley had said, as if thinner files were easier. “But there ought to be something, if only for appearances.” That was another thing about him that Guillam didn’t like just then: he spoke as if you followed his reasoning, as if you were inside his mind all the time.

Sitting down, he pretended to read but passed the time thinking of Camilla. What was he supposed to make of her? Early this morning as she lay in his arms, she told him she had once been married. Sometimes she spoke like that, as if she’d lived about twenty lives. It was a mistake, so they packed it in.

“What went wrong?”

“Nothing. We weren’t right for each other.”

Guillam didn’t believe her.

“Did you get a divorce?”

“I expect so.”

“Don’t be damn silly; you must know whether you’re divorced or not!”

His parents handled it, she said; he was foreign.

“Does he send you money?”

“Why should he? He doesn’t owe me anything.”

Then the flute again, in the spare room, long questioning notes in the half-light while Guillam made coffee. Is she a fake or an angel? He’d half a mind to pass her name across the records. She had a lesson with Sand in an hour.

Armed with a green slip with a 43 reference, he returned the two files to their places and positioned himself at the alcove next to Testify.

Dry run uneventful, he thought.

The girl was still up her ladder. Allitson had vanished but the laundry basket was still there. The radiator had already exhausted Astrid and he was sitting beside it reading the Sun. The green slip read “4343,” and he found the file at once because he had already marked it down. It had a pink jacket like Testify. Like Testify, it was reasonably thumbed. He fitted the green slip into the bracket. He moved back across the aisle, again checked Allitson and the girls, then reached for the Testify file and replaced it very fast with the file he had in his hand.

“I think the vital thing, Peter”—Smiley speaking—“is not to leave a gap. So what I suggest is, you requisition a comparable file—physically comparable, I mean—and pop it into the gap which is left by—”

“I get you,” Guillam said.

Holding the Testify file casually in his right hand, title inward to his body, Guillam returned to the reading-room and again sat at his desk. Sal raised her eyebrows and mouthed something. Guillam nodded that all was well, thinking that was what she was asking, but she beckoned him over. Momentary panic. Take the file with me or leave it? What do I usually do? He left it on the desk.

“Juliet’s going for coffee,” Sal whispered. “Want some?”

Guillam laid a shilling on the counter.

He glanced at the clock, then at his watch. Christ, stop looking at your damn watch! Think of Camilla, think of her starting her lesson, think of those aunts you didn’t spend the weekend with, think of Alwyn not looking in your bag. Think of anything but the time. Eighteen minutes to wait. “Peter, if you have the smallest reservation, you really mustn’t go ahead with it. Nothing is as important as that.” Great, so how do you spot a reservation when thirty teenage butterflies are mating in your stomach and the sweat is like a secret rain inside your shirt? Never, he swore, never had he had it this bad.

Opening the Testify file, he tried to read it.

It wasn’t all that thin, but it wasn’t fat, either. It looked pretty much like a token volume, as Smiley had said: the first serial was taken up with a description of what wasn’t there. “Annexes 1 to 8 held London Station, cross-refer to P.F.s ELLIS Jim, PRIDEAUX Jim, HAJEK Vladimir, COLLINS Sam, HABOLT Max . . .” and a whole football team besides. “For these files, consult H/London Station or C.C.,” standing for Chief of Circus and his appointed mothers. Don’t look at your watch; look at the clock and do the arithmetic, you idiot. Eight minutes. Odd to be pinching files about one’s predecessor. Odd to have Jim as a predecessor, come to think of it, and a secretary who held a wake over him without ever mentioning his name. The only living trace Guillam had ever found of him, apart from his workname on the files, was his squash racket jammed behind the safe in his room, with “J.P.” hand-done in poker-work on the handle. He showed it to Ellen, a tough old biddy who could make Cy Vanhofer quail like a schoolboy, and she broke into floods of tears, wrapped it, and sent it to the housekeepers by the next shuttle, with a personal note to the Dolphin insisting that it be returned to him “if humanly possible.” How’s your game these days, Jim, with a couple of Czech bullets in your shoulder-bone?

Still eight minutes.

“Now, if you could contrive,” said Smiley, “I mean if it wouldn’t be too much bother, to take your car in for a service at your local garage. Using your home phone to make the appointment, of course, in the hope that Toby is listening . . .”

In the hope. Mother of Pearl. And all his cosy chats with Camilla? Still eight minutes.

The rest of the file seemed to be Foreign Office telegrams, Czech press cuttings, monitoring reports on Prague radio, extracts from a policy file on the resettlement and rehabilitation of blown agents, draft submissions to the Treasury, and a postmortem by Alleline that blamed Control for the fiasco. Sooner you than me, George.

In his mind, Guillam began measuring the distance from his desk to the rear door, where Alwyn dozed at the reception counter. He reckoned it was five paces and he decided to make a tactical staging post. Two paces from the door stood a chart chest like a big yellow piano. It was filled with oddments of reference: large-scale maps, back copies of Who’s Who, old Baedekers. Putting a pencil between his teeth, he picked up the Testify file, wandered to the chest, selected a telephone directory of Warsaw, and began writing names on a sheet of paper. My hand! a voice screamed inside him: my hand is shaking all over the page; look at those figures—I might be drunk! Why has no one noticed? . . . The girl Juliet came in with a tray and put a cup on his desk. He blew her a distracted kiss. He selected another directory—he thought for Poznan—and laid it beside the first. When Alwyn came through the door, he didn’t even look up.

“Telephone, sir,” he murmured.

“Oh, to hell,” said Guillam, deep in the directory. “Who is it?”

“Outside line, sir. Someone rough. The garage, I think, regarding your car. Said he’d got some bad news for you,” said Alwyn, very pleased.

Guillam was holding the Testify file in both hands, apparently cross-referring with the directory. He had his back to Sal and he could feel his knees shaking against his trouser legs. The pencil was still jammed in his mouth. Alwyn went ahead and held the swing door for him, and he passed through it reading the file. Like a damned choirboy, he thought. He waited for lightning to strike him, Sal to call murder, old Ben the superspy to leap suddenly to life, but it didn’t happen. He felt much better: Alwyn is my ally, I trust him, we are united against the Dolphin, I can move. The swing doors closed; he went down the four steps and there was Alwyn again, holding open the door to the telephone cubicle. The lower part was panelled, the upper part glass. Lifting the receiver, he laid the file at his feet and heard Mendel tell him he needed a new gear-box; the job could cost anything up to a hundred quid. They’d worked this up for the benefit of the housekeepers or whoever read the transcripts, and Guillam kept it going nicely to and fro till Alwyn was safely behind his counter, listening like an eagle. It’s working, he thought; I’m flying, it’s working after all. He heard himself say, “Well, at least get on to the main agents first and find out how long they’ll take to supply the damn thing. Have you got their number?” And irritably: “Hang on.”

He half-opened the door and he kept the mouthpiece jammed against his backside because he was very concerned that this part should not go on tape. “Alwyn, chuck me that bag a minute, will you?”

Alwyn brought it over keenly, like the first-aid man at a football match. “All right, Mr. Guillam, sir? Open it for you, sir?”

“Just dump it there, thanks.”

The bag was on the floor outside the cubicle. Now he stooped, dragged it inside, and unzipped it. At the middle, among his shirts and a lot of newspaper, were three dummy files, one buff, one green, one pink. He took out the pink dummy and his address book and replaced them with the Testify file. He closed the zip, and stood up and read Mendel a telephone number—actually the right one. He rang off, handed Alwyn the bag, and returned to the reading-room with the dummy file. He dawdled at the chart chest, fiddled with a couple more directories, then sauntered to the archive carrying the dummy file. Allitson was going through a comedy routine, first pulling then pushing the laundry basket.

“Peter, give us a hand, will you—I’m stuck.”

“Half a sec.”

Recovering the 43 file from the Testify pigeon-hole, he replaced it with the dummy, restored it to its rightful place in the 43 alcove, and removed the green slip from the bracket. God is in His heaven and the first night was a wow. He could have sung out loud: God is in His heaven and I can still fly.

He took the slip to Sal, who signed it and put it on a spike as she always did. Later today she would check. If the file was in its place, she would destroy both the green slip and the flimsy from the box, and not even clever Sal would remember that he had been alongside the 44 alcove. He was about to return to the archive to give old Allitson a hand when he found himself looking straight into the brown, unfriendly eyes of Toby Esterhase.

“Peter,” said Toby, in his not quite perfect English. “I am so sorry to disturb you but we have a tiny crisis and Percy Alleline would like quite an urgent word with you. Can you come now? That would be very kind.” And at the door, as Alwyn let them out: “Your opinion he wants, actually,” he remarked with the officiousness of a small but rising man. “He wishes to consult you for an opinion.”

In a desperately inspired moment, Guillam turned to Alwyn and said, “There’s a midday shuttle to Brixton. You might just give transport a buzz and ask them to take that thing over for me, will you?”

“Will do, sir,” said Alwyn. “Will do. Mind the step, sir.”

And you pray for me, thought Guillam.

21

“Our Shadow Foreign Secretary,” Haydon called him. The janitors called him “Snow White” because of his hair. Toby Esterhase dressed like a male model, but the moment he dropped his shoulders or closed his tiny fists he was unmistakably a fighter. Following him down the fourth-floor corridor—noting the coffee machine again, and Lauder Strickland’s voice explaining that he was unobtainable—Guillam thought, Christ, we’re back in Berne and on the run.

He’d half a mind to call this out to Toby, but decided the comparison was unwise.

Whenever he thought of Toby, that was what he thought of: Switzerland eight years ago, when Toby was just a humdrum watcher with a growing reputation for informal listening on the side. Guillam was kicking his heels after North Africa, so the Circus packed them both off to Berne on a one-time operation to spike a pair of Belgian arms dealers who were using the Swiss to spread their wares in unpopular directions. They rented a villa next door to the target house, and the following night Toby opened up a junction box and rearranged things so that they overheard the Belgians’ conversations on their own phone. Guillam was boss and legman, and twice a day he dropped the tapes on the Berne residency, using a parked car as a letter-box. With the same ease, Toby bribed the local postman to give him a first sight of the Belgians’ mail before he delivered it, and the cleaning lady to plant a radio mike in the drawing room where they held most of their discussions. For diversion, they went to the Chikito and Toby danced with the youngest girls. Now and then he brought one home, but by morning she was always gone and Toby had the windows open to get rid of the smell.

They lived this way for three months and Guillam knew him no better at the end than he had on the first day. He didn’t even know his country of origin. Toby was a snob, and knew the places to eat and be seen. He washed his own clothes and at night he wore a net over his snow white hair, and on the day the police hit the villa and Guillam had to hop over the back wall, he found Toby at the Bellevue Hotel munching pâtisseries and watching the thé dansant. He listened to what Guillam had to say, paid his bill, tipped first the bandleader, then Franz, the head porter, and then led the way along a succession of corridors and staircases to the underground garage where he had cached the escape car and passports. There also, punctiliously, he asked for his bill. Guillam thought, If you ever want to get out of Switzerland in a hurry, you pay your bills first. The corridors were endless, with mirror walls and Versailles chandeliers, so that Guillam was following not just one Esterhase but a whole delegation of them.

It was this vision that came back to him now, though the narrow wooden staircase to Alleline’s rooms was painted mud-green and only a battered parchment lampshade recalled the chandeliers.

“To see the Chief,” Toby announced portentously to the young janitor who beckoned them through with an insolent nod. In the anteroom at four grey typewriters sat the four grey mothers, in pearls and twin-sets. They nodded to Guillam and ignored Toby. A sign over Alleline’s door said “Engaged.” Beside it, a six-foot wardrobe safe, new. Guillam wondered how on earth the floor took the strain. On its top, bottles of South African sherry; glasses, plates. Tuesday, he remembered: London Station’s informal lunch meeting.

“I’ll have no phone calls, tell them,” Alleline shouted as Toby opened the door.

“The Chief will take no calls, please, ladies,” said Toby elaborately, holding back the door for Guillam. “We are having a conference.”

One of the mothers said, “We heard.”

It was a war party.

Alleline sat at the head of the table in the megalomaniac’s throne, reading a two-page document, and he didn’t stir when Guillam came in. He just growled, “Down there with you. By Paul. Below the salt,” and went on reading with heavy concentration.

The chair to Alleline’s right was empty, and Guillam knew it was Haydon’s by the posture-curve cushion tied to it with string. To Alleline’s left sat Roy Bland, also reading, but he looked up as Guillam passed, and said “Wotcher, Peter,” then followed him all the way down the table with his bulging eyes. Next to Bill’s empty chair sat Mo Delaware, London Station’s token woman, in bobbed hair and a brown tweed suit. Across from her, Phil Porteous, the head housekeeper, a rich servile man with a big house in suburbia. When he saw Guillam, he stopped his reading altogether, ostentatiously closed the folder, laid his sleek hands over it, and smirked.

“ ‘Below the salt’ means next to Paul Skordeno,” said Phil, still smirking.

“Thanks. I can see it.”

Across from Porteous came Bill’s Russians, last seen in the fourth-floor men’s room, Nick de Silsky and his boyfriend Kaspar. They couldn’t smile, and for all Guillam knew they couldn’t read, either, because they had no papers in front of them; they were the only ones who hadn’t. They sat with their four thick hands on the table as if somebody were holding a gun behind them, and they just watched him with their four brown eyes.

Downhill from Porteous sat Paul Skordeno, now reputedly Roy Bland’s fieldman on the satellite networks, though others said he ran between wickets for Bill. Paul was thin and mean and forty, with a pitted brown face and long arms. Guillam had once paired with him on a tough-guy course at the Nursery and they all but killed each other.

Guillam moved the chair away from him and sat down, so Toby sat next along like the other half of a bodyguard. Guillam thought, What the hell do they expect me to do—make a mad dash for freedom? Everyone was watching Alleline fill his pipe when Bill Haydon upstaged him. The door opened and at first no one came in. Then a slow shuffle and Bill appeared, clutching a cup of coffee in both hands, the saucer on top. He had a striped folder jammed under his arm and his glasses were over his nose, for a change, so he must have done his reading elsewhere. They’ve all been reading it except me, thought Guillam, and I don’t know what it is. He wondered whether it was the same document that Esterhase and Roy were reading yesterday, and decided on no evidence at all that it was; that yesterday it had just come in, that Toby had brought it to Roy, and that he had disturbed them in their first excitement—if excitement was the word.

Alleline had still not looked up. Down the table Guillam had only his rich black hair to look at, and a pair of broad tweedy shoulders. Mo Delaware was pulling at her fringe while she read. Percy had two wives, Guillam remembered, as Camilla once more flitted through his teeming mind, and both were alcoholics, which must mean something. He had met only the London edition. Percy was forming his supporters’ club and gave a drinks party at his sprawling panelled flat in Buckingham Palace Mansions. Guillam arrived late and he was taking off his coat in the lobby when a pale blond woman loomed timidly towards him holding out her hands. He took her for the maid wanting his coat.

“I’m Joy,” she said, in a theatrical voice, like “I’m Virtue” or “I’m Continence.” It wasn’t his coat she wanted but a kiss. Yielding to it, Guillam inhaled the joint pleasures of Je Reviens and a high concentration of inexpensive sherry.

“Well, now, young Peter Guillam”—Alleline speaking—“are you ready for me finally or have you other calls to make about my house?” He half looked up and Guillam noticed two tiny triangles of fur on each weathered cheek. “What are you getting up to out there in the sticks these days”—turning a page—“apart from chasing the local virgins, if there are any in Brixton, which I severely doubt—if you’ll pardon my freedom, Mo—and wasting public money on expensive lunches?”

This banter was Alleline’s one instrument of communication; it could be friendly or hostile, reproachful or congratulatory, but in the end it was like a constant tapping on the same spot.

“Couple of Arab ploys look quite promising. Cy Vanhofer’s got a lead to a German diplomat. That’s about it.”

“Arabs,” Alleline repeated, pushing aside the folder and dragging a rough pipe from his pocket. “Any bloody fool can burn an Arab—can’t he, Bill? Buy a whole damn Arab Cabinet for half a crown, if you’ve a mind to.” From another pocket Alleline took a tobacco pouch, which he tossed easily onto the table. “I hear you’ve been hobnobbing with our late-lamented Brother Tarr. How is he these days?”

A lot of things went through Guillam’s mind as he heard himself answer. That the surveillance on his flat did not begin till last night—he was sure of it. That over the weekend he was in the clear unless Fawn, the captive baby-sitter, had doubled, which would have been hard for him. That Roy Bland bore a close resemblance to the late Dylan Thomas: Roy had always reminded him of someone and till this moment he’d never been able to pin down the connection; and that Mo Delaware had only passed muster as a woman because of her brownie mannishness. He wondered whether Dylan Thomas had had Roy’s extraordinary blue eyes. That Toby Esterhase was helping himself to a cigarette from his gold case, and that Alleline didn’t as a rule allow cigarettes but only pipes, so Toby must stand pretty well with Alleline just now. That Bill Haydon was looking strangely young and that Circus rumours about his love-life were not after all so laughable: they said he went both ways. That Paul Skordeno had one brown palm flat on the table and the thumb slightly lifted in a way that hardened the hitting surface on the outside of the hand. He thought also of his canvas case: had Alwyn put it on the shuttle? Or had he gone off for his lunch leaving it in Registry, waiting to be inspected by one of the new young janitors busting for promotion? And Guillam wondered—not for the first time—just how long Toby had been hanging around Registry before Guillam noticed him.

He selected a facetious tone: “That’s right, Chief. Tarr and I have tea at Fortnum’s every afternoon.”

Alleline was sucking at his empty pipe, testing the packing of the tobacco.

“Peter Guillam,” he said deliberately, in his pert brogue. “You may not be aware of this, but I am of an extremely forgiving nature. I am positively seething with goodwill, in fact. All I require is the matter of your discussion with Tarr. I do not ask for his head, nor any other part of his damned anatomy, and I will restrain my impulse personally to strangle him. Or you.” He struck a match and lit his pipe, making a monstrous flame. “I would even go so far as to consider hanging a gold chain about your neck and bringing you into the palace from hateful Brixton.”

“In that case, I can’t wait for him to turn up,” said Guillam.

“And there’s a free pardon for Tarr till I get my hands on him.”

“I’ll tell him. He’ll be thrilled.”

A great cloud of smoke rolled out over the table.

“I’m very disappointed with you, young Peter. Giving ear to gross slanders of a divisive and insidious nature. I pay you honest money and you stab me in the back. I consider that extremely poor reward for keeping you alive. Against the entreaties of my advisers, I may tell you.”

Alleline had a new mannerism, one that Guillam had noticed often in vain men of middle age: it involved taking hold of a tuck of flesh under the chin and massaging it between finger and thumb in the hope of reducing it.

“Tell us some more about Tarr’s circumstances just now,” said Alleline. “Tell us about his emotional state. He has a daughter, has he not? A wee daughter name of Danny. Does he talk of her at all?”

“He used to.”

“Regale us with some anecdotes about her.”

“I don’t know any. He was very fond of her, that’s all I know.”

“Obsessively fond?” His voice rose suddenly in anger. “What’s that shrug for? What the hell are you shrugging at me like that for? I’m talking to you about a defector from your own damn section; I’m accusing you of playing hookey with him behind my back, of taking part in damn-fool parlour games when you don’t know the stakes involved, and all you do is shrug at me down the table. There’s a law, Peter Guillam, against consorting with enemy agents. Maybe you didn’t know that. I’ve a good mind to throw the book at you!”

“But I haven’t been seeing him,” said Guillam as anger came also to his rescue. “It’s not me who’s playing parlour games. It’s you. So get off my back.”

In the same moment he sensed the relaxation round the table, like a tiny descent into boredom, like a general recognition that Alleline had shot off all his ammunition and the target was unmarked. Skordeno was fidgeting with a bit of ivory, some lucky charm he carried round with him. Bland was reading again and Bill Haydon was drinking his coffee and finding it terrible, for he made a sour face at Mo Delaware and put down the cup. Toby Esterhase, chin in hand, had raised his eyebrows and was gazing at the red cellophane that filled the Victorian grate. Only the Russians continued to watch him unblinkingly, like a pair of terriers not wanting to believe that the hunt was over.

“So he used to chat to you about Danny, eh? And he told you he loved her,” said Alleline, back at the document before him. “Who’s Danny’s mother?”

“A Eurasian girl.”

Now Haydon spoke for the first time. “Unmistakably Eurasian, or could she pass for something nearer home?”

“Tarr seems to think she looks full European. He thinks the kid does, too.”

Alleline read aloud: “Twelve years old, long blond hair, brown eyes, slim. Is that Danny?”

“I should think it could be. It sounds like her.”

There was a long silence and not even Haydon seemed inclined to break it.

“So if I told you,” Alleline resumed, choosing his words extremely carefully: “if I told you that Danny and her mother were due to arrive three days ago at London Airport on the direct flight from Singapore, I may take it you would share our perplexity.”

“Yes, I would.”

“You would also keep your mouth shut when you got out of here. You’d tell no one but your twelve best friends?”

From not far away came Phil Porteous’s purr: “The source is extremely secret, Peter. It may sound to you like ordinary flight information but it isn’t that at all. It’s ultra, ultra sensitive.”

“Ah, well, in that case I’ll try to keep my mouth ultra shut,” said Guillam to Porteous, and while Porteous coloured Bill Haydon gave another schoolboy grin.

Alleline came back. “So what would you make of this information? Come on, Peter—” the banter again—“Come on, you were his boss, his guide, philosopher, and his friend. Where’s your psychology, for God’s sake? Why is Tarr coming to England?”

“That’s not what you said at all. You said Tarr’s girl and her daughter Danny were expected in London three days ago. Perhaps she’s visiting relations. Perhaps she’s got a new boyfriend. How should I know?”

“Don’t be obtuse, man. Doesn’t it occur to you that where little Danny is, Tarr himself is unlikely to be far behind? If he’s not here already, which I’m inclined to believe he is, that being the manner of men to come first and bring their impedimenta later. Pardon me, Mo Delaware, a lapse.”

For the second time, Guillam allowed himself a little temperament. “Till now it had not occurred to me, no. Till now Tarr was a defector. Housekeepers’ ruling as of seven months ago. Right or wrong, Phil? Tarr was sitting in Moscow and everything he knew should be regarded as blown. Right, Phil? That was also held to be a good enough reason for turning the lights out in Brixton and giving one chunk of our workload to London Station and another to Toby’s lamplighters. What’s Tarr supposed to be doing now, redefecting to us?”

“Redefecting would be a damned charitable way of putting it, I’ll tell you that for nothing,” Alleline retorted, back at the paper before him. “Listen to me. Listen exactly, and remember. Because I’ve no doubt that, like the rest of my staff, you’ve a memory like a sieve—all you prima donnas are the same. Danny and her mother are travelling on fake British passports in the name of Poole, like the harbour. The passports are Russian fakes. A third went to Tarr himself, the well-known Mr. Poole. Tarr is already in England but we don’t know where. He left ahead of Danny and her mother and came here by a different route; our investigations suggest a black one. He instructed his wife or mistress or whatever”—he said this as if he had neither—“pardon again, Mo, to follow him in one week, which they have not yet done, apparently. This information only reached us yesterday, so we’ve a lot of footwork to do yet. Tarr instructed them, Danny and her mother, that if by any chance he failed to make contact with them, they should throw themselves on the mercy of one Peter Guillam. That’s you, I believe.”

“If they were due three days ago, what’s happened to them?”

“Delayed. Missed their plane. Changed their plans. Lost their tickets. How the hell do I know?”

“Or else the information’s wrong,” Guillam suggested.

“It isn’t,” Alleline snapped.

Resentment, mystification: Guillam clung to them both. “All right. The Russians have turned Tarr round. They’ve sent his family over—God knows why; I’d have thought they’d put them in the bank—and they’ve sent him, too. Why’s it all so hot? What sort of plant can he be when we don’t believe a word he says?”

This time, he noticed with exhilaration, his audience was watching Alleline, who seemed to Guillam to be torn between giving a satisfactory but indiscreet answer or making a fool of himself.

“Never mind what sort of plant! Muddying pools. Poisoning wells, maybe. That damn sort. Pulling the rug out when we’re all but home and dry.” His circulars read that way, too, thought Guillam. Metaphors chasing each other off the page. “But just you remember this. At the first peep, before the first peep, at the first whisper of him or his lady or his wee daughter, young Peter Guillam, you come to one of us grown-ups. Anyone you see at this table. But not another damn soul. Do you follow that injunction perfectly? Because there are more damn wheels within wheels here than you can possibly guess or have any right to know . . .”

It became suddenly a conversation in movement. Bland had plugged his hands into his pockets and slouched across the room to lean against the far door. Alleline had relit his pipe and was putting out the match with a long movement of his arm while he glowered at Guillam through the smoke. “Who are you courting these days, Peter—who’s the lucky wee lady?” Porteous was sliding a sheet of paper down the table for Guillam’s signature. “For you, Peter, if you please.” Paul Skordeno was whispering something into the ear of one of the Russians, and Esterhase was at the door giving unpopular orders to the mothers. Only Mo Delaware’s brown, unassuming eyes still held Guillam in their gaze.

“Read it first, won’t you,” Porteous advised silkily.

Guillam was halfway through the form already: “I certify that I have today been advised of the contents of Witchcraft Report No. 308, Source Merlin,” ran the first paragraph. “I undertake not to divulge any part of this report to other members of the service, nor will I divulge the existence of Source Merlin. I also undertake to report at once any matter which comes to my notice which appears to bear on this material.”

The door had stayed open and, as Guillam signed, the second echelon of London Station filed in, led by the mothers with trays of sandwiches. Diana Dolphin, Lauder Strickland looking taut enough to blow up, the girls from distribution, and a sour-faced old war-horse called Haggard, who was Ben Thruxton’s overlord. Guillam left slowly, counting heads because he knew Smiley would want to know who was there. At the door, to his surprise, he found himself joined by Haydon, who seemed to have decided that the remaining festivities were not for him.

“Stupid bloody cabaret,” Bill remarked, waving vaguely at the mothers. “Percy’s getting more insufferable every day.”

“He does seem to,” said Guillam heartily.

“How’s Smiley these days? Seen much of him? You used to be quite a chum of his, didn’t you?”

Guillam’s world, which was showing signs till then of steadying to a sensible pace, plunged violently. “Afraid not,” he said; “he’s out of bounds.”

“Don’t tell me you take any notice of that nonsense,” Bill said, snorting. They had reached the stairs. Haydon went ahead.

“How about you?” Guillam called. “Have you seen much of him?”

“And Ann’s flown the coop,” said Bill, ignoring the question. “Pushed off with a sailor-boy or a waiter or something.” The door to his room was wide open, the desk heaped with secret files. “Is that right?”

“I didn’t know,” said Guillam. “Poor old George.”

“Coffee?”

“I think I’ll get back, thanks.”

“For tea with Brother Tarr?”

“That’s right. At Fortnum’s. So long.”

In Archives Section, Alwyn was back from lunch. “Bag’s all gone, sir,” he said gaily. “Should be over in Brixton by now.”

“Oh, damn,” said Guillam, firing his last shot. “There was something in it I needed.”

A sickening notion had struck him: it seemed so neat and so horribly obvious that he could only wonder why it had come to him so late. Sand was Camilla’s husband. She was living a double life. Now whole new vistas of deceit opened before him. His friends, his loves, even the Circus itself; joined and re-formed in endless patterns of intrigue. A line of Mendel’s came back to him, dropped two nights ago as they drank beer in some glum suburban pub: “Cheer up, Peter, old son. Jesus Christ only had twelve, you know, and one of them was a double.”

Tarr, he thought. That bastard Ricki Tarr.

22

The bedroom was long and low, once a maid’s room, built into the attic. Guillam was standing at the door; Tarr sat on the bed motionless, his head tilted back against the sloped ceiling, hands to either side of him, fingers wide. There was a dormer window above him, and from where Guillam stood he could see long reaches of black Suffolk countryside and a line of black trees traced against the sky. The wallpaper was brown with large red flowers. The one light hung from a black oak truss, lighting their two faces in strange geometric patterns, and when either one of them moved, Tarr on the bed or Smiley on the wooden kitchen chair, they seemed by their movement to take the light with them a distance before it resettled.

Left to himself, Guillam would have been very rough with Tarr, he had no doubt of it. His nerves were all over the place, and on the drive down he had touched ninety before Smiley sharply told him to go steady. Left to himself, he would have been tempted to beat the daylights out of Tarr, and if necessary he would have brought Fawn in to lend a hand; driving, he had a very clear picture of opening the front door of wherever Tarr lived and hitting him in the face several times, with love from Camilla and her ex-husband, the distinguished doctor of the flute. And perhaps in the shared tension of the journey Smiley had received the same picture telepathically, for the little he said was clearly directed to talking Guillam down. “Tarr has not lied to us, Peter. Not in any material way. He has simply done what agents do the world over: he has failed to tell us the whole story. On the other hand, he has been rather clever.” Far from sharing Guillam’s bewilderment, he seemed curiously confident—even complacent—to the extent of allowing himself a sententious aphorism from Steed-Asprey on the arts of double-cross; something about not looking for perfection, but for advantage, which again had Guillam thinking about Camilla. “Karla has admitted us to the inner circle,” Smiley announced, and Guillam made a bad joke about changing at Charing Cross. After that Smiley contented himself with giving directions and watching the wing mirror.

They had met at Crystal Palace, a van pick-up with Mendel driving. They drove to Barnsbury, straight into a car-body repair shop at the end of a cobbled alley full of children. There they were received with discreet rapture by an old German and his son, who had stripped the plates off the van almost before they got out of it and led them to a souped-up Vauxhall ready to drive out of the far end of the workshop. Mendel stayed behind with the Testify file, which Guillam had brought from Brixton in his night-bag; Smiley said, “Find the A12.” There was very little traffic but short of Colchester they hit a cluster of lorries and Guillam suddenly lost patience. Smiley had to order him to pull in. Once they met an old man driving at twenty in the fast lane. As they overtook him on the inside, he veered wildly towards them, drunk or ill, or just terrified. And once, with no warning, they hit a fog wall; it seemed to fall on them from above. Guillam drove clean through it, afraid to brake because of black ice. Past Colchester they took small lanes. On the signposts were names like Little Horkesley, Wormingford, and Bures Green; then the signposts stopped and Guillam had a feeling of being nowhere at all.

“Left here and left again at the dower house. Go as far as you can but park short of the gates.”

They reached what seemed to be a hamlet but there were no lights, no people, and no moon. As they got out, the cold hit them and Guillam smelt a cricket field and wood-smoke and Christmas all at once; he thought he had never been anywhere so quiet or so cold or so remote. A church tower rose ahead of them, a white fence ran to one side, and up on the slope stood what he took to be the rectory, a low rambling house, part thatched; he could make out the fringe of gable against the sky. Fawn was waiting for them; he came to the car as they parked, and climbed silently into the back.

“Ricki’s been that much better today, sir,” he reported. He had evidently done a lot of reporting to Smiley in the last few days. He was a steady, soft-spoken boy with a great will to please, but the rest of the Brixton pack seemed to be afraid of him, Guillam didn’t know why. “Not so nervy—more relaxed, I’d say. Did his pools this morning—loves the pools, Ricki does—this afternoon we dug up fir trees for Miss Ailsa, so’s she could drive them into market. This evening we had a nice game of cards and early bed.”

“Has he been out alone?” asked Smiley.

“No, sir.”

“Has he used the telephone?”

“Gracious, no, sir, not while I’m around, and I’m sure not while Miss Ailsa was, either.”

Their breath had misted the windows of the car, but Smiley would not have the engine on, so there was no heater and no de-mister.

“Has he mentioned his daughter Danny?”

“Over the weekend he did a lot. Now he’s sort of cooled off about them. I think he’s shut them out of his mind, in view of the emotional side.”

“He hasn’t talked about seeing them again?”

“No, sir.”

“Nothing about arrangements for meeting when all this is over?”

“No, sir.”

“Or bringing them to England?”

“No, sir.”

“Nor about providing them with documents?”

“No, sir.”

Guillam chimed in irritably: “So what has he talked about, for heaven’s sake?”

“The Russian lady, sir. Irina. He likes to read her diary. He says when the mole’s caught, he’s going to make Centre swap him for Irina. Then we’ll get her a nice place, sir—like Miss Ailsa’s but up in Scotland where it’s nicer. He says he’ll see me right, too. Give me a big job in the Circus. He’s been encouraging me to learn another language to increase my scope.”

There was no telling, from the flat voice behind them in the dark, what Fawn made of this advice.

“Where is he now?”

“In bed, sir.”

“Close the doors quietly.”

Ailsa Brimley was waiting in the front porch for them: a grey-haired lady of sixty with a firm, intelligent face. She was old Circus, Smiley said, one of Lord Landsbury’s coding ladies from the war, now in retirement but still formidable. She wore a trim brown suit. She shook Guillam by the hand and said “How do you do,” bolted the door, and when he looked again she had gone. Smiley led the way upstairs. Fawn should wait on the lower landing in case he was needed.

“It’s Smiley,” he said knocking on Tarr’s door. “I want a chat with you.”

Tarr opened the door fast. He must have heard them coming, and been waiting just the other side. He opened it with his left hand, holding the gun in his right, and he was looking past Smiley down the corridor.

“It’s only Guillam,” said Smiley.

“That’s what I mean,” said Tarr. “Babies can bite.”

They stepped inside. He wore slacks and some sort of cheap Malay wrap. Spelling cards lay spread over the floor and in the air hung a smell of curry that he had cooked for himself on a ring.

“I’m sorry to be pestering you,” said Smiley with an air of sincere commiseration. “But I must ask you again what you did with those two Swiss escape passports you took with you to Hong Kong.”

“Why?” said Tarr at last.

The jauntiness was all gone. He had a prison pallor; he had lost weight and as he sat on the bed with the gun on the pillow beside him, his eyes sought them out nervously, each in turn, trusting nothing.

Smiley said, “Listen. I want to believe your story. Nothing is altered. Once we know, we’ll respect your privacy. But we have to know. It’s terribly important. Your whole future stands by it.”

And a lot more besides, thought Guillam, watching; a whole chunk of devious arithmetic was hanging by a thread, if Guillam knew Smiley at all.

“I told you I burned them. I didn’t fancy the numbers. I reckoned they were blown. Might as well put a label round your neck ‘Tarr, Ricki Tarr, Wanted’ soon as use those passports.”

Smiley’s questions were terribly slow in coming. Even to Guillam it was painful waiting for them in the deep silence of the night.

“What did you burn them with?”

“What the hell does that matter?”

But Smiley apparently did not feel like giving reasons for his enquiries; he preferred to let the silence do its work, and he seemed confident that it would. Guillam had seen whole interrogations conducted that way: a laboured catechism swathed in deep coverings of routine; wearying pauses as each answer was written down in longhand and the suspect’s brain besieged itself with a thousand questions to the interrogator’s one; and his hold on his story weakened from day to day.

“When you bought your British passport in the name of Poole,” Smiley asked, after another age, “did you buy any other passports from the same source?”

“Why should I?”

But Smiley did not feel like giving reasons.

“Why should I?” Tarr repeated. “I’m not a damn collector, for Christ’s sake; all I wanted was to get out from under.”

“And protect your child,” Smiley suggested, with an understanding smile. “And protect her mother, too, if you could. I’m sure you gave a lot of thought to that,” he said in a flattering tone. “After all, you could hardly leave them behind to the mercy of that inquisitive Frenchman, could you?”

Waiting, Smiley appeared to examine the lexicon cards, reading off the words longways and sideways. There was nothing to them: they were random words. One was misspelt; Guillam noticed “epistle” with the last two letters back to front. What’s he been doing up there, Guillam wondered, in that stinking flea-pit of a hotel? What furtive little tracks has his mind been following, locked away with the sauce bottles and the commercial travellers?

“All right,” said Tarr sullenly, “so I got passports for Danny and her mother. Mrs. Poole, Miss Danny Poole. What do we do now, cry out in ecstasy?”

Again it was the silence that accused.

“Now why didn’t you tell us that before?” Smiley asked in the tone of a disappointed father. “We’re not monsters. We don’t wish them harm. Why didn’t you tell us? Perhaps we could even have helped you,” and went back to his examination of the cards. Tarr must have used two or three packs; they lay in rivers over the coconut carpet. “Why didn’t you tell us?” he repeated. “There’s no crime in looking after the people one loves.”

If they’ll let you, thought Guillam, with Camilla in mind. To help Tarr answer, Smiley was making helpful suggestions: “Was it because you dipped into your operational expenses to buy these British passports? Was that the reason you didn’t tell us? Good heavens, no one here is worried about money. You’ve brought us a vital piece of information. Why should we quarrel about a couple of thousand dollars?” And the time ticked away again without anyone using it.

“Or was it,” Smiley suggested, “that you were ashamed?”

Guillam stiffened, his own problems forgotten.

“Rightly ashamed in a way, I suppose. It wasn’t a very gallant act, after all, to leave Danny and her mother with blown passports, at the mercy of that so-called Frenchman who was looking so hard for Mr. Poole? While you yourself escaped to all this V.I.P. treatment? It is horrible to think of,” Smiley agreed, as if Tarr, not he, had made the point. “It is horrible to contemplate the lengths Karla would go to in order to obtain your silence. Or your services.”

The sweat on Tarr’s face was suddenly unbearable. There was too much of it; it was like tears all over. The cards no longer interested Smiley; his eye had settled on a different game. It was a toy, made of two steel rods like the shafts of a pair of tongs. The trick was to roll a steel ball along them. The further you rolled it, the more points you won when it fell into one of the holes underneath.

“The other reason you might not have told us, I suppose, is that you burnt them. You burnt the British passports, I mean, not the Swiss ones.”

Go easy, George, thought Guillam, and softly moved a pace nearer to cover the gap between them. Just go easy.

“You knew that Poole was blown, so you burnt the Poole passports you had bought for Danny and her mother, but you kept your own because there was no alternative. Then you made travel bookings for the two of them in the name of Poole in order to convince everybody that you still believed in the Poole passports. By everybody, I think I mean Karla’s footpads, don’t I? You doctored the Swiss escapes, one for Danny, one for her mother, took a chance that the numbers wouldn’t be noticed, and you made a different set of arrangements which you didn’t advertise. Arrangements which matured earlier than those you made for the Pooles. How would that be? Such as staying out East, but somewhere else, like Djakarta: somewhere you have friends.”

Even from where he stood, Guillam was too slow. Tarr’s hands were at Smiley’s throat; the chair toppled and Tarr fell with him. From the heap, Guillam selected Tarr’s right arm and flung it into a lock against his back, bringing it very near to breaking as he did so. From nowhere Fawn appeared, took the gun from the pillow, and walked back to Tarr as if to give him a hand. Then Smiley was straightening his suit and Tarr was back on the bed, dabbing the corner of his mouth with a handkerchief.

Smiley said, “I don’t know where they are. As far as I know, no harm has come to them. You believe that, do you?”

Tarr was staring at him, waiting. His eyes were furious, but over Smiley a kind of calm had settled, and Guillam guessed it was the reassurance he had been hoping for.

“Maybe you should keep a better eye on your own damn woman and leave mine alone,” Tarr whispered, his hand across his mouth. With an exclamation, Guillam sprang forward but Smiley restrained him.

“As long as you don’t try to communicate with them,” Smiley continued, “it’s probably better that I shouldn’t know. Unless you want me to do something about them. Money or protection or comfort of some sort?”

Tarr shook his head. There was blood in his mouth, a lot of it, and Guillam realised Fawn must have hit him but he couldn’t work out when.

“It won’t be long now,” Smiley said. “Perhaps a week. Less, if I can manage it. Try not to think too much.”

By the time they left, Tarr was grinning again, so Guillam guessed that the visit, or the insult to Smiley or the smash in the face, had done him good.

“Those football-pool coupons,” Smiley said quietly to Fawn as they climbed into the car: “You don’t post them anywhere, do you?”

“No, sir.”

“Well, let’s hope to God he doesn’t have a win,” Smiley remarked in a most unusual fit of jocularity, and there was laughter all round.

The memory plays strange tricks on an exhausted, overladen brain. As Guillam drove, one part of his conscious mind upon the road and another still wretchedly grappling with even more gothic suspicions of Camilla, odd images of this and other long days drifted freely through his memory. Days of plain terror in Morocco as one by one his agent lines went dead on him, and every footfall on the stair had him scurrying to the window to check the street; days of idleness in Brixton when he watched that poor world slip by and wondered how long before he joined it. And suddenly the written report was there before him on his desk: duplicated on blue flimsy because it was traded, source unknown, and probably unreliable, and every word of it came back to him in letters a foot high:

According to a recently released prisoner from Lubianka, Moscow Centre held a secret execution in the punishment block in July. The victims were three of its own functionaries. One was a woman. All three were shot in the back of the neck.

“It was stamped ‘internal,’ ” Guillam said dully. They had parked in a layby beside a roadhouse hung with fairy lights. “Somebody from London Station had scribbled on it: ‘Can anyone identify the bodies?’ ”

By the coloured glow of the lights, Guillam watched Smiley’s face pucker in disgust.

“Yes,” he agreed at last. “Yes, well now, the woman was Irina, wasn’t she? Then there was Ivlov and then there was Boris, her husband, I suppose.” His voice remained extremely matter-of-fact. “Tarr mustn’t know,” he continued, as if shaking off lassitude. “It is vital that he should have no wind of this. God knows what he would do, or not do, if he knew that Irina was dead.” For some moments neither moved; perhaps for their different reasons neither had the strength just then, or the heart.

“I ought to telephone,” said Smiley, but he made no attempt to leave the car.

“George?”

“I have a phone call to make,” Smiley muttered. “Lacon.”

“Then make it.”

Reaching across him, Guillam pushed open the door. Smiley clambered, walked a distance over the tarmac, then seemed to change his mind and came back.

“Come and eat something,” he said through the window, in the same preoccupied tone. “I don’t think even Toby’s people would follow us in here.”

It was once a restaurant, now a transport café with trappings of old grandeur. The menu was bound in red leather and stained with grease. The boy who brought it was half asleep.

“I hear the coq au vin is always reliable,” said Smiley, with a poor effort at humour as he returned from the telephone booth in the corner. And in a quieter voice, that fell short and echoed nowhere: “Tell me, how much do you know about Karla?”

“About as much as I know about Witchcraft and Source Merlin, and whatever else it said on the paper I signed for Porteous.”

“Ah, well, now, that’s a very good answer, as it happens. You meant it as a rebuke, I expect, but as it happens, the analogy was most apt.” The boy reappeared, swinging a bottle of Burgundy like an Indian club. “Would you please let it breathe a little?”

The boy stared at Smiley as if he were mad.

“Open it and leave it on the table,” said Guillam curtly.

It was not the whole story Smiley told. Afterwards Guillam did notice several gaps. But it was enough to lift his spirits from the doldrums where they had strayed.

23

“It is the business of agent runners to turn themselves into I legends,” Smiley began, rather as if he were delivering a trainee lecture at the Nursery. “They do this first to impress their agents. Later they try it out on their colleagues and, in my personal experience, make rare asses of themselves in consequence. A few go so far as to try it on themselves. Those are the charlatans and they must be got rid of quickly, there’s no other way.”

Yet legends were made and Karla was one of them. Even his age was a mystery. Most likely Karla was not his real name. Decades of his life were not accounted for, and probably never would be, since the people he worked with had a way of dying off or keeping their mouths shut.

“There’s a story that his father was in the Okhrana and later reappeared in the Cheka. I don’t think it’s true but it may be. There’s another that he worked as a kitchen boy on an armoured train against Japanese Occupation troops in the East. He is said to have learnt his tradecraft from Berg—to have been his ewe lamb, in fact—which is a bit like being taught music by . . . oh, name a great composer. So far as I am concerned, his career began in Spain in 1936, because that at least is documented. He posed as a White Russian journalist in the Franco cause and recruited a stable of German agents. It was a most intricate operation, and for a young man remarkable. He popped up next in the Soviet counter-offensive against Smolensk in the autumn of 1941 as an intelligence officer under Konev. He had the job of running networks of partisans behind the German lines. Along the way he discovered that his radio operator had been turned round and was transmitting radio messages to the enemy. He turned him back and from then on played a radio game which had them going in all directions.”

That was another part of the legend, said Smiley: at Yelnya, thanks to Karla, the Germans shelled their own forward line.

“And between these two sightings,” he continued, “in 1936 and 1941, Karla visited Britain; we think he was here six months. But even today we don’t know—that’s to say, I don’t know—under what name or cover. Which isn’t to say Gerald doesn’t. But Gerald isn’t likely to tell us, at least not on purpose.”

Smiley had never talked to Guillam this way. He was not given to confidences or long lectures; Guillam knew him as a shy man, for all his vanities, and one who expected very little of communication.

“In ’48-odd, having served his country loyally, Karla did a spell in prison and later in Siberia. There was nothing personal about it. He simply happened to be in one of those sections of Red army intelligence which, in some purge or other, ceased to exist.”

And certainly, Smiley went on, after his post-Stalin reinstatement, he went to America; because when the Indian authorities in the summer of ’55 arrested him in Delhi on vague immigration charges, he had just flown in from California. Circus gossip later linked him with the big treason scandals in Britain and the States.

Smiley knew better: “Karla was in disgrace again. Moscow was out for his blood, and we thought we might persuade him to defect. That was why I flew to Delhi. To have a chat with him.”

There was a pause while the weary boy slouched over and enquired whether everything was to their satisfaction. Smiley, with great solicitude, assured him that it was.

“The story of my meeting with Karla,” he resumed, “belonged very much to the mood of the period. In the mid-fifties, Moscow Centre was in pieces on the floor. Senior officers were being shot or purged wholesale and its lower ranks were seized with a collective paranoia. As a first result, there was a crop of defections among Centre officers stationed overseas. All over the place—Singapore, Nairobi, Stockholm, Canberra, Washington, I don’t know where—we got this same steady trickle from the residencies: not just the big fish, but the legmen, drivers, cypher clerks, typists. Somehow we had to respond—I don’t think it’s ever realised how much the industry stimulates its own inflation—and in no time I became a kind of commercial traveller, flying off one day to a capital city, the next to a dingy border outpost—once even to a ship at sea—to sign up defecting Russians. To seed, to stream, to fix the terms, to attend to debriefing and eventual disposal.”

Guillam was watching him all the while, but even in that cruel neon glow Smiley’s expression revealed nothing but a slightly anxious concentration.

“We evolved, you might say, three kinds of contract for those whose stories held together. If the client’s access wasn’t interesting, we might trade him to another country and forget him. Buy him for stock, as you would say, much as the scalp-hunters do today. Or we might play him back into Russia—that’s assuming his defection had not already been noticed there. Or, if he was lucky, we took him; cleaned him of whatever he knew and resettled him in the West. London decided, usually. Not me. But remember this. At that time Karla—or Gerstmann, as he called himself—was just another client. I’ve told his story back to front; I didn’t want to be coy with you, but you have to bear in mind now, through anything that happened between us—or didn’t happen, which is more to the point—that all I or anyone in the Circus knew when I flew to Delhi was that a man calling himself Gerstmann had been setting up a radio link between Rudnev, head of illegal networks at Moscow Centre, and a Centre-run apparatus in California that was lying fallow for want of a means of communication. That’s all. Gerstmann had smuggled a transmitter across the Canadian border and lain up for three weeks in San Francisco breaking in the new operator. That was the assumption, and there was a batch of test transmissions to back it up.”

For these test transmissions between Moscow and California, Smiley explained, a book code was used: “Then, one day, Moscow signalled a straight order—”

“Still on the book code?”

“Precisely. That is the point. Owing to a temporary inattention on the part of Rudnev’s cryptographers, we were ahead of the game. The wranglers broke the code and that’s how we got our information. Gerstmann was to leave San Francisco at once and head for Delhi for a rendezvous with the Tass correspondent, a talent-spotter who had stumbled on a hot Chinese lead and needed immediate direction. Why they dragged him all the way from San Francisco to Delhi, why it had to be Karla and no one else—well, that’s a story for another day. The only material point is that when Gerstmann kept the rendezvous in Delhi, the Tass man handed him an aeroplane ticket and told him to go straight home to Moscow. No questions. The order came from Rudnev personally. It was signed with Rudnev’s workname and it was brusque even by Russian standards.”

Whereupon the Tass man fled, leaving Gerstmann standing on the pavement with a lot of questions and twenty-eight hours until take-off.

“He hadn’t been standing there long when the Indian authorities arrested him at our request and carted him off to Delhi jail. As far as I remember, we had promised the Indians a piece of the product. I think that was the deal,” he remarked and, like someone suddenly shocked by the faultiness of his own memory, fell silent and looked distractedly down the steamy room. “Or perhaps we said they could have him when we’d done with him. Dear, oh dear.”

“It doesn’t really matter,” Guillam said.

“For once in Karla’s life, as I say, the Circus was ahead of him,” Smiley resumed, having taken a sip of wine and made a face. “He couldn’t know it but the San Francisco network which he had just serviced had been rolled up hide and hair the day he left for Delhi. As soon as Control had the story from the wranglers, he traded it to the Americans on the understanding that they missed Gerstmann but hit the rest of the Rudnev network in California. Gerstmann flew on to Delhi unaware, and he was still unaware when I arrived at Delhi jail to sell him a piece of insurance, as Control called it. His choice was very simple. There could not be the slightest doubt, on present form, that Gerstmann’s head was on the block in Moscow, where to save his own neck Rudnev was busy denouncing him for blowing the San Francisco network. The affair had made a great splash in the States, and Moscow was very angry at the publicity. I had with me the American press photographs of the arrest, even of the radio set Karla had imported and the signal plans he had cached before he left. You know how prickly we all become when things get into the papers.”

Guillam did; and with a jolt remembered the Testify file, which he had left with Mendel earlier that evening.

“To sum it up, Karla was the proverbial cold-war orphan. He had left home to do a job abroad. The job had blown up in his face, but he couldn’t go back: home was more hostile than abroad. We had no powers of permanent arrest, so it was up to Karla to ask us for protection. I don’t think I had ever come across a clearer case for defection. I had only to convince him of the arrest of the San Francisco network—wave the press photographs and cuttings from my briefcase at him—talk to him a little about the unfriendly conspiracies of Brother Rudnev in Moscow, and cable the somewhat overworked inquisitors in Sarratt, and with any luck I’d make London by the weekend. I rather think I had tickets for Sadler’s Wells. It was Ann’s great year for ballet.”

Yes, Guillam had heard about that, too: a twenty-year-old Welsh Apollo, the season’s wonder boy. They had been burning up London for months.

The heat in the jail was appalling, Smiley continued. The cell had an iron table at the centre and iron cattle rings let into the wall. “They brought him manacled, which seemed silly because he was so slight. I asked them to free his hands and when they did, he put them on the table in front of him and watched the blood come back. It must have been painful but he didn’t comment on it. He’d been there a week and he was wearing a calico tunic. Red. I forget what red meant. Some piece of prison ethic.” Taking a sip of wine, he again pulled a face, then slowly corrected the gesture as the memories once more bore in upon him.

“Well, at first sight, he made little impression on me. I would have been hard put to it to recognise in the little fellow before me the master of cunning we have heard about in Irina’s diary, poor woman. I suppose it’s also true that my nerve-ends had been a good deal blunted by so many similar encounters in the last few months, by travel, and well by—well, by things at home.”

In all the time Guillam had known him, it was the nearest Smiley had ever come to acknowledging Ann’s infidelities.

“For some reason, it hurt an awful lot.” His eyes were still open but his gaze had fixed upon an inner world. The skin of his brow and cheeks was drawn smooth as if by the exertion of his memory; but nothing could conceal from Guillam the loneliness evoked by this one admission. “I have a theory which I suspect is rather immoral,” Smiley went on, more lightly. “Each of us has only a quantum of compassion. That if we lavish our concern on every stray cat, we never get to the centre of things. What do you think of it?”

“What did Karla look like?” Guillam asked, treating the question as rhetorical.

“Avuncular. Modest, and avuncular. He would have looked very well as a priest: the shabby, gnomic variety one sees in small Italian towns. Little wiry chap, with silvery hair and bright brown eyes and plenty of wrinkles. Or a schoolmaster, he could have been a schoolmaster: tough—whatever that means—and sagacious within the limits of his experience; but the small canvas, all the same. He made no other initial impression, except that his gaze was straight and it fixed on me from early in our talk. If you can call it a talk, seeing that he never uttered a word. Not one, the whole time we were together; not a syllable. Also it was stinking hot and I was travelled to death.”

Out of a sense of manners rather than appetite, Smiley set to work on his food, eating several mouthfuls joylessly before resuming his narrative. “There,” he muttered, “that shouldn’t offend the cook. The truth is, I was slightly predisposed against Mr. Gerstmann. We all have our prejudices and radio men are mine. They’re a thoroughly tiresome lot, in my experience, bad fieldmen and overstrung, and disgracefully unreliable when it comes down to doing the job. Gerstmann, it seemed to me, was just another of the clan. Perhaps I’m looking for excuses for going to work on him with less”—he hesitated—“less care, less caution, than in retrospect would seem appropriate.” He grew suddenly stronger. “Though I’m not at all sure I need make any excuses,” he said.

Here Guillam sensed a wave of unusual anger, imparted by a ghostly smile that crossed Smiley’s pale lips. “To hell with it,” Smiley muttered.

Guillam waited, mystified.

“I also remember thinking that prison seemed to have taken him over very fast in seven days. He had that white dust in the skin and he wasn’t sweating. I was, profusely. I trotted out my piece, as I had a dozen times that year already, except that there was obviously no question of his being played back into Russia as our agent. ‘You have the alternative. It’s no one else’s business but your own. Come to the West and we can give you, within reason, a decent life. After questioning, at which you are expected to cooperate, we can help you to a new start, a new name, seclusion, a certain amount of money. On the other hand, you can go home and I suppose they’ll shoot you or send you to a camp. Last month they sent Bykov, Shur, and Muranov. Now why don’t you tell me your real name?’ Something like that. Then I sat back and wiped away the sweat and waited for him to say, ‘Yes, thank you.’ He did nothing. He didn’t speak. He simply sat there stiff and tiny under the big fan that didn’t work, looking at me with his brown, rather jolly eyes. Hands out in front of him. They were very calloused. I remember thinking I must ask him where he had been doing so much manual labour. He held them—like this—resting on the table, palms upward and fingers a little bent, as if he were still manacled.”

The boy, thinking that by this gesture Smiley was indicating some want, came lumbering over, and Smiley again assured him that all was doubly well, and the wine in particular was exquisite—he really wondered where they had it from; till the boy left grinning with secret amusement and flapped his cloth at an adjoining table.

“It was then, I think, that an extraordinary feeling of unease began to creep over me. The heat was really getting to me. The stench was terrible and I remember listening to the pat-pat of my own sweat falling onto the iron table. It wasn’t just his silence; his physical stillness began to get under my skin. Oh, I had known defectors who took time to speak. It can be a great wrench for somebody trained to secrecy even towards his closest friends suddenly to open his mouth and spill secrets to his enemies. It also crossed my mind that the prison authorities might have thought it a courtesy to soften him up before they brought him to me. They assured me they hadn’t, but of course one can never tell. So at first, I put his silence down to shock. But this stillness—this intense, watchful stillness—was a different matter. Specially when everything inside me was so much in motion: Ann, my own heartbeats, the effects of heat and travel . . .”

“I can understand,” said Guillam quietly.

“Can you? Sitting is an eloquent business; any actor will tell you that. We sit according to our natures. We sprawl and straddle, we rest like boxers between rounds, we fidget, perch, cross and uncross our legs, lose patience, lose endurance. Gerstmann did none of those things. His posture was finite and irreducible, his little jagged body was like a promontory of rock; he could have sat that way all day, without stirring a muscle. Whereas I—” Breaking out in an awkward, embarrassed laugh, Smiley tasted the wine again, but it was no better than before. “Whereas I longed to have something before me—papers, a book, a report. I think I am a restless person, fussy, variable. I thought so then, anyway. I felt I lacked philosophic repose. Lacked philosophy, if you like. My work had been oppressing me much more than I realised; till now. But in that foul cell I really felt aggrieved. I felt that the entire responsibility for fighting the cold war had landed on my shoulders. Which was tripe, of course; I was just exhausted and a little bit ill.” He drank again.

“I tell you,” he insisted, once more quite angry with himself. “No one has any business to apologise for what I did.”

“What did you do?” Guillam asked, with a laugh.

“So anyway there came this gap,” Smiley resumed, disregarding the question. “Hardly of Gerstmann’s making, since he was all gap; so of mine, then. I had said my piece; I had flourished the photographs, which he ignored—I may say, he appeared quite ready to take my word for it that the San Francisco network was blown. I restated this part, that part, talked a few variations, and finally I dried up. Or, rather, sat there sweating like a pig. Well, any fool knows that if ever that happens, you get up and walk out. ‘Take it or leave it,’ you say. ‘See you in the morning’; anything. ‘Go away and think for an hour.’

“As it was, the next thing I knew, I was talking about Ann.” He left no time for Guillam’s muffled exclamation. “Oh, not about my Ann, not in as many words. About his Ann. I assumed he had one. I had asked myself—lazily, no doubt—what would a man think of in such a situation, what would I? And my mind came up with a subjective answer: his woman. Is it called ‘projection’ or ‘substitution’? I detest those terms but I’m sure one of them applies. I exchanged my predicament for his, that is the point, and as I now realise I began to conduct an interrogation with myself—he didn’t speak, can you imagine? There were certain externals, it is true, to which I pinned the approach. He looked connubial; he looked like half a union; he looked too complete to be alone in all his life. Then there was his passport, describing Gerstmann as married; and it is a habit in all of us to make our cover stories, our assumed personae, at least parallel with the reality.” He lapsed again into a moment of reflection. “I often thought that. I even put it to Control: we should take the opposition’s cover stories more seriously, I said. The more identities a man has, the more they express the person they conceal. The fifty-year-old who knocks five years off his age. The married man who calls himself a bachelor; the fatherless man who gives himself two children . . . Or the interrogator who projects himself into the life of a man who does not speak. Few men can resist expressing their appetites when they are making a fantasy about themselves.”

He was lost again, and Guillam waited patiently for him to come back. For while Smiley might have fixed his concentration upon Karla, Guillam had fixed his on Smiley; and just then would have gone anywhere with him, turned any corner, in order to remain beside him and hear the story out.

“I also knew from the American observation reports that Gerstmann was a chain-smoker: Camels. I sent out for several packs of them—‘packs’ is the American word?—and I remember feeling very strange as I handed money to a guard. I had the impression, you see, that Gerstmann saw something symbolic in the transaction of money between myself and the Indian. I wore a money belt in those days. I had to grope and peel off a note from a bundle. Gerstmann’s gaze made me feel like a fifth-rate imperialist oppressor.” He smiled. “And that I assuredly am not. Bill, if you like. Percy. But not I.” He called to the boy, in order to send him away: “May we have some water, please? A jug and two glasses? Thank you.” Again he picked up the story: “So I asked him about Mrs. Gerstmann. I asked him: where was she? It was a question I would dearly have wished answered about Ann. No reply but the eyes unwavering. To either side of him, the two guards, and their eyes seemed so light by comparison. She must make a new life, I said; there was no other way. Had he no friend he could count on to look after her? Perhaps we could find methods of getting in touch with her secretly? I put it to him that his going back to Moscow would do nothing for her at all. I was listening to myself, I ran on, I couldn’t stop. Perhaps I didn’t want to. I was really thinking of leaving Ann, you see; I thought the time had come. To go back would be a quixotic act, I told him, of no material value to his wife or anyone—quite the reverse. She would be ostracised; at best, she would be allowed to see him briefly before he was shot. On the other hand, if he threw in his lot with us, we might be able to trade her; we had a lot of stock in those days, remember, and some of it was going back to Russia as barter; though why in God’s name we should have used it up for that purpose is beyond me. Surely, I said, she would prefer to know him safe and well in the West, with a fair chance that she herself would join him, than shot or starving to death in Siberia? I really harped upon her: his expression encouraged me. I could have sworn I was getting through to him, that I had found the chink in his armour; when of course all I was doing—all I was doing was showing him the chink in mine. And when I mentioned Siberia, I touched something. I could feel it, like a lump in my own throat; I could feel in Gerstmann a shiver of revulsion. Well, naturally I did,” Smiley commented sourly; “since it was only recently that he had been made an inmate. Finally, back came the guard with the cigarettes, armfuls of them, and dumped them with a clatter on the iron table. I counted the change, tipped him, and in doing so again caught the expression in Gerstmann’s eyes; I fancied I read amusement there, but really I was no longer in a state to tell. I noticed that the boy refused my tip; I suppose he disliked the English. I tore open a packet and offered Gerstmann a cigarette. ‘Come,’ I said, ‘you’re a chain-smoker, everyone knows that. And this is your favourite brand.’ My voice sounded strained and silly, and there was nothing I could do about it. Gerstmann stood up and politely indicated to the warders that he would like to return to his cell.”

Taking his time, Smiley pushed aside his half-eaten food, over which white flakes of fat had formed like seasonable frost.

“As he left the cell, he changed his mind and helped himself to a packet of cigarettes and the lighter from the table—my lighter, a gift from Ann. ‘To George from Ann with all my love.’ I would never have dreamed of letting him take it in the ordinary way; but this was not the ordinary way. Indeed I thought it thoroughly appropriate that he should take her lighter; I thought it—Lord help me—expressive of the bond between us. He dropped the lighter and the cigarettes into the pouch of his red tunic, then put out his hand for handcuffs. I said, ‘Light one now, if you want.’ I told the guards, ‘Let him light a cigarette, please.’ But he didn’t make a movement. ‘The intention is to put you on tomorrow’s plane to Moscow unless we come to terms,’ I added. He might not have heard me. I watched the guards lead him out, then returned to my hotel; someone drove me—to this day I couldn’t tell you who. I no longer knew what I felt. I was more confused and more ill than I would admit, even to myself. I ate a poor dinner, drank too much, and ran a soaring temperature. I lay on my bed sweating, dreaming about Gerstmann. I wanted him terribly to stay. Lightheaded as I was, I had really set myself to keep him, to remake his life—if possible to set him up again with his wife in idyllic circumstances. To make him free; to get him out of the war for good. I wanted him desperately not to go back.” He glanced up with an expression of self-irony. “What I am saying, Peter, is it was Smiley, not Gerstmann, who was stepping out of the conflict that night.”

“You were ill,” Guillam insisted.

“Let us say tired. Ill or tired; all night, between aspirin and quinine and treacly visions of the Gerstmann marriage resurrected, I had a recurring image. It was of Gerstmann, poised on the sill, staring down into the street with those fixed brown eyes, and myself talking to him, on and on, ‘Stay, don’t jump, stay.’ Not realising, of course, that I was dreaming of my own insecurity, not his. In the early morning a doctor gave me injections to bring down the fever. I should have dropped the case, cabled for a replacement. I should have waited before going to the prison, but I had nothing but Gerstmann in mind; I needed to hear his decision. By eight o’clock I was already having myself escorted to the accommodation cells. He was sitting stiff as a ramrod on a trestle bench; for the first time, I guessed the soldier in him, and I knew that, like me, he hadn’t slept all night. He hadn’t shaved and there was a silver down on his jaw which gave him an old man’s face. On other benches Indians were sleeping, and with his red tunic and this silvery colouring he looked very white among them. He was holding Ann’s lighter in his hands; the packet of cigarettes lay beside him on the bench, untouched. I concluded that he had been using the night, and the forsworn cigarettes, to decide whether he could face prison and interrogation, and death. One look at his expression told me that he had decided he could. I didn’t beseech him,” Smiley said, going straight on. “He would never have been swayed by histrionics. His plane left in the mid-morning; I still had two hours. I am the worst advocate in the world, but in those two hours I tried to summon all the reasons I knew for his not flying to Moscow. I believed, you see, that I had seen something in his face that was superior to mere dogma, not realising that it was my own reflection. I had convinced myself that Gerstmann ultimately was accessible to ordinary human arguments coming from a man of his own age and profession and—well, durability. I didn’t promise him wealth and women and Cadillacs and cheap butter; I accepted that he had no use for those things. I had the wit by then, at least, to steer clear of the topic of his wife. I didn’t make speeches to him about freedom—whatever that means—or the essential goodwill of the West; besides, they were not favourable days for selling that story, and I was in no clear ideological state myself. I took the line of kinship. ‘Look,’ I said, ‘we’re getting to be old men, and we’ve spent our lives looking for the weaknesses in one another’s systems. I can see through Eastern values just as you can see through our Western ones. Both of us, I am sure, have experienced ad nauseam the technical satisfactions of this wretched war. But now your own side is going to shoot you. Don’t you think it’s time to recognise that there is as little worth on your side as there is on mine? Look,’ I said, ‘in our trade we have only negative vision. In that sense, neither of us has anywhere to go. Both of us when we were young subscribed to great visions—’ Again I felt an impulse in him—Siberia—I had touched a nerve. ‘But not any more. Surely?’ I urged him just to answer me this: did it not occur to him that he and I by different routes might well have reached the same conclusions about life? Even if my conclusions were what he would call unliberated, surely our workings were identical? Did he not believe, for example, that the political generality was meaningless? That only the particular in life had value for him now? That in the hands of politicians grand designs achieve nothing but new forms of the old misery? And that therefore his life, the saving of it from yet another meaningless firing squad, was more important—morally, ethically more important—than the sense of duty, or obligation, or commitment, or whatever it was that kept him on this present path of self-destruction? Did it not occur to him to question—after all the travels of his life—to question the integrity of a system that proposed cold-bloodedly to shoot him down for misdemeanours he had never committed? I begged him—yes, I did beseech him, I’m afraid; we were on the way to the airport and he still had not addressed a word to me—I begged him to consider whether he really believed; whether faith in the system he had served was honestly possible to him at this moment.”

For a while now, Smiley sat silent.

“I had thrown psychology to the winds, such as I possess; tradecraft, too. You can imagine what Control said. My story amused him, all the same; he loved to hear of people’s weakness. Mine especially, for some reason.” He had resumed his factual manner. “So there we are. When the plane arrived, I climbed aboard with him and flew part of the distance: in those days it wasn’t all jet. He was slipping away from me and I couldn’t do anything to stop him. I’d given up talking but I was there if he wanted to change his mind. He didn’t. He would rather die than give me what I wanted; he would rather die than disown the political system to which he was committed. The last I saw of him, so far as I know, was his expressionless face framed in the cabin window of the aeroplane, watching me walk down the gangway. A couple of very Russian-looking thugs had joined us and were sitting in the seats behind him, and there was really no point in my staying. I flew home, and Control said: ‘Well, I hope to God they do shoot him,’ and restored me with a cup of tea. That filthy China stuff he drinks, lemon jasmine or whatever; he sends out for it to that grocer’s round the corner. I mean he used to. Then he sent me on three months’ leave without the option. I like you to have doubts,’ he said. ‘It tells me where you stand. But don’t make a cult of them or you’ll be a bore.’ It was a warning. I heeded it. And he told me to stop thinking about the Americans so much; he assured me that he barely gave them a thought.”

Guillam gazed at him, waiting for the resolution. “But what do you make of it?” he demanded, in a tone that suggested he had been cheated of the end. “Did Karla ever really think of staying?”

“I’m sure it never crossed his mind,” said Smiley with disgust. “I behaved like a soft fool. The very archetype of a flabby Western liberal. But I would rather be my kind of fool than his, for all that. I am sure,” he repeated vigorously, “that neither my arguments nor his own predicament at Moscow Centre would ultimately have swayed him in the least. I expect he spent the night working out how he would outgun Rudnev when he got home. Rudnev was shot a month later, incidentally. Karla got Rudnev’s job and set to work reactivating his old agents. Among them Gerald, no doubt. It’s odd to reflect that all the time he was looking at me, he could have been thinking of Gerald. I expect they’ve had a good laugh about it since.”

The episode had one other result, said Smiley. Since his San Francisco experience, Karla had never once touched illegal radio. He cut it right out of his handwriting. “Embassy links are a different matter. But in the field his agents aren’t allowed to go near it. And he still has Ann’s cigarette lighter.”

“Yours,” Guillam corrected him.

“Yes. Yes, mine. Of course. Tell me,” he continued, as the waiter took away his money, “was Tarr referring to anyone in particular when he made that unpleasant reference to Ann?”

“I’m afraid he was. Yes.”

“The rumour is as precise as that?” Smiley enquired. “And it goes that far down the line? Even to Tarr?”

“Yes.”

“And what does it say, precisely?”

“That Bill Haydon was Ann Smiley’s lover,” said Guillam, feeling that coldness coming over him which was his protection when he broke bad news such as: you’re blown; you’re sacked; you’re dying.

“Ah. I see. Yes. Thank you.”

There was a very awkward silence.

“And was there—is there a Mrs. Gerstmann?” Guillam asked.

“Karla once made a marriage with a girl in Leningrad, a student. She killed herself when he was sent to Siberia.”

“So Karla is fireproof,” Guillam asked finally. “He can’t be bought and he can’t be beaten?”

They returned to the car.

“I must say that was rather expensive for what we had,” Smiley confessed. “Do you think the waiter robbed me?”

But Guillam was not disposed to chat about the cost of bad meals in England. Driving again, the day once more became a nightmare to him, a milling confusion of half-perceived dangers, and suspicions.

“So who’s Source Merlin?” he demanded. “Where could Alleline have had that information from, if not from the Russians themselves?”

“Oh, he had it from the Russians all right.”

“But for God’s sake, if the Russians sent Tarr—”

“They didn’t. Nor did Tarr use the British passports, did he? The Russians got it wrong. What Alleline had was the proof that Tarr had fooled them. That is the vital message we have learned from that whole storm in a teacup.”

“So what the hell did Percy mean about ‘muddying pools’? He must have been talking about Irina, for heaven’s sake.”

“And Gerald,” Smiley agreed.

Again they drove in silence, and the gap between them seemed suddenly unbridgeable.

“Look, I’m not quite there myself, Peter,” Smiley said quietly. “But nearly I am. Karla’s pulled the Circus inside out; that much I understand, so do you. But there’s a last clever knot, and I can’t undo it. Though I mean to. And if you want a sermon, Karla is not fireproof, because he’s a fanatic. And one day, if I have anything to do with it, that lack of moderation will be his downfall.”

It was raining as they reached Stratford tube station; a bunch of pedestrians was huddled under the canopy.

“Peter, I want you to take it easy from now on.”

“Three months without the option?”

“Rest on your oars a bit.”

Closing the passenger door after him, Guillam had a sudden urge to wish Smiley good night or even good luck, so he leaned across the seat and lowered the window and drew in his breath to call. But Smiley was gone. He had never known anyone who could disappear so quickly in a crowd.

Through the remainder of that same night, the light in the dormer window of Mr. Barraclough’s attic room at the Islay Hotel burned uninterrupted. Unchanged, unshaven, George Smiley remained bowed at the Major’s card table, reading, comparing, annotating, cross-referring—all with an intensity that, had he been his own observer, would surely have recalled for him the last days of Control on the fifth floor at Cambridge Circus. Shaking the pieces, he consulted Guillam’s leave rosters and sick-lists going back over the last year, and set these beside the overt travel pattern of Cultural Attaché Aleksey Aleksandrovich Polyakov, his trips to Moscow, his trips out of London, as reported to the Foreign Office by Special Branch and the immigration authorities. He compared these again with the dates when Merlin apparently supplied his information and, without quite knowing why he was doing it, broke down the Witchcraft reports into those which were demonstrably topical at the time they were received and those which could have been banked a month, two months before, either by Merlin or his controllers, in order to bridge empty periods: such as think pieces, character studies of prominent members of the administration, and scraps of Kremlin tittle-tattle which could have been picked up any time and saved for a rainless day. Having listed the topical reports, he set down their dates in a single column and threw out the rest. At this point, his mood could be best compared with that of a scientist who senses by instinct that he is on the brink of a discovery and is awaiting any minute the logical connection. Later, in conversation with Mendel, he called it “shoving everything into a test-tube and seeing if it exploded.” What fascinated him most, he said, was the very point that Guillam had made regarding Alleline’s grim warnings about muddied pools: he was looking, in other terms, for the “last clever knot” that Karla had tied in order to explain away the precise suspicions to which Irina’s diary had given shape.

He came up with some curious preliminary findings. First, that on the nine occasions when Merlin had produced a topical report, either Polyakov had been in London or Toby Esterhase had taken a quick trip abroad. Second, that over the crucial period following Tarr’s adventure in Hong Kong this year, Polyakov was in Moscow for urgent cultural consultations; and that soon afterwards Merlin came through with some of his most spectacular and topical material on the “ideological penetration” of the United States, including an appreciation of Centre’s coverage of the major American intelligence targets.

Backtracking again, he established that the converse was also true: that the reports he had discarded on the grounds that they had no close attachment to recent events were those which most generally went into distribution while Polyakov was in Moscow or on leave.

And then he had it.

No explosive revelation, no flash of light, no cry of “Eureka,” phone calls to Guillam, Lacon, “Smiley is a world champion.” Merely that here before him, in the records he had examined and the notes he had compiled, was the corroboration of a theory which Smiley and Guillam and Ricki Tarr had that day from their separate points of view seen demonstrated: that between the mole Gerald and the Source Merlin there was an interplay which could no longer be denied; that Merlin’s proverbial versatility allowed him to function as Karla’s instrument as well as Alleline’s. Or should he rather say, Smiley reflected—tossing a towel over his shoulder and hopping blithely into the corridor for a celebratory bath—as Karla’s agent? And that at the heart of this plot lay a device so simple that it left him genuinely elated by its symmetry. It had even a physical presence: here in London, a house, paid for by the Treasury, all sixty thousand pounds of it; and often coveted, no doubt, by the many luckless tax-payers who daily passed it by, confident they could never afford it and not knowing that they had already paid for it.

It was with a lighter heart than he had known for many months that he took up the stolen file on Operation Testify.

24

To her credit, Matron had been worried about Roach all week, ever since she had spotted him alone in the washroom, ten minutes after the rest of his dormitory had gone down to breakfast, still in his pyjama trousers, hunched over a basin while he doggedly scrubbed his teeth. When she questioned him, he avoided her eye. “It’s that wretched father of his,” she told Thursgood. “He’s getting him down again.” And by the Friday: “You must write to the mother and tell her he’s having a spell.”

But not even Matron, for all her motherly perception, would have hit on plain terror as the diagnosis.

Whatever could he do—he, a child? That was his guilt. That was the threat that led directly back to the misfortune of his parents. That was the predicament that threw upon his hunched shoulders the responsibility night and day for preserving the world’s peace. Roach, the watcher—“best watcher in the whole damn unit,” to use Jim Prideaux’s treasured words—had finally watched too well. He would have sacrificed everything he possessed—his money, his leather photograph case of his parents, whatever gave him value in the world—if it would buy him release from the knowledge that had consumed him since Sunday evening.

He had put out signals. On Sunday night, an hour after lights out, he had gone noisily to the lavatory, probed his throat, gagged, and finally vomited. But the dormitory monitor, who was supposed to wake and raise the alarm—“Matron, Roach’s been sick”—slept stubbornly through the whole charade. Roach clambered miserably back to bed. From the call-box outside the staffroom next afternoon, he had dialled the menu for the day and whispered strangely into the mouthpiece, hoping to be overheard by a master and taken for mad. No one paid him any attention. He had tried mixing up reality with dreams, in the hope that the event would be converted into something he had imagined; but each morning as he passed the Dip he saw again Jim’s crooked figure stooping over the spade in the moonlight; he saw the black shadow of his face under the brim of his old hat, and heard the grunt of effort as he dug.

Roach should never have been there. That also was his guilt: that the knowledge was acquired by sin. After a cello lesson on the far side of the village, he had returned to school with deliberate slowness in order to be too late for evensong, and Mrs. Thursgood’s disapproving eye. The whole school was worshipping, all but himself and Jim: he heard them sing the Te Deum as he passed the church, taking the long route so that he could skirt the Dip, where Jim’s light was glowing. Standing in his usual place, Roach watched Jim’s shadow move slowly across the curtained window. He’s turning in early, he decided with approval as the light suddenly went out; for Jim had recently been too absent for his taste, driving off in the Alvis after rugger and not returning till Roach was asleep. Then the trailer door opened and closed, and Jim was standing at the vegetable patch with a spade in his hand and Roach in great perplexity was wondering what on earth he should be wanting to dig for in the dark. Vegetables for his supper? For a moment Jim stood very still, listening to the Te Deum; then glared slowly round and straight at Roach, though he was out of sight against the blackness of the hummocks. Roach even thought of calling to him, but felt too sinful on account of missing chapel.

Finally Jim began measuring. That, at least, was how it seemed to Roach. Instead of digging, he had knelt at one corner of the patch and laid the spade on the earth, as if aligning it with something that was out of sight to Roach: for instance, the church spire. This done, Jim strode quickly to where the blade lay, marked the spot with a thud of his heel, took up the spade, and dug fast—Roach counted twelve times—then stood back, taking stock again. From the church, silence; then prayers. Quickly stooping, Jim drew a package from the ground, which he at once smothered in the folds of his duffel coat. Seconds later, and much faster than seemed possible, the trailer door slammed, the light went on again, and in the boldest moment of his life Bill Roach tiptoed down the Dip to within three feet of the poorly curtained window, using the slope to give himself the height he needed to look in.

Jim stood at the table. On the bunk behind him lay a heap of exercise books, a vodka bottle, and an empty glass. He must have dumped them there to make space. He had a penknife ready but he wasn’t using it. Jim would never have cut string if he could avoid it. The package was a foot long and made of yellowy stuff like a tobacco pouch. Pulling it open, he drew out what seemed to be a monkey wrench wrapped in sacking. But who would bury a monkey wrench, even for the best car England ever made? The screws or bolts were in a separate yellow envelope; he spilled them on to the table and examined each in turn. Not screws: pen-tops. Not pen-tops, either; but they had sunk out of sight.

And not a monkey wrench, not a spanner—nothing, but absolutely nothing, for the car.

Roach had blundered wildly to the brow. He was running between the hummocks, making for the drive, but running slower than he had ever run before; running through sand and deep water and dragging grass, gulping the night air, sobbing it out again, running lopsidedly like Jim, pushing now with this leg, now with the other, flailing with his head for extra speed. He had no thought for where he was heading. All his awareness was behind him, fixed on the black revolver and the bands of chamois leather; on the pen-tops that turned to bullets as Jim threaded them methodically into the chamber, his lined face tipped towards the lamplight, pale and slightly squinting in the dazzle.

25

“I won’t be quoted, George,” the Minister warned, in his lounging drawl. “No minutes, no pack-drill. I got voters to deal with. You don’t. Nor does Oliver Lacon, do you, Oliver?”

He had also, thought Smiley, the American violence with auxiliary verbs. “Yes, I’m sorry about that,” he said.

“You’d be sorrier still if you had my constituency,” the Minister retorted.

Predictably, the mere question of where they should meet had sparked a silly quarrel. Smiley had pointed out to Lacon that it would be unwise to meet at his room in Whitehall, since it was under constant attack by Circus personnel, whether janitors delivering dispatch boxes or Percy Alleline dropping in to discuss Ireland. Whereas the Minister declined both the Islay Hotel and Bywater Street, on the arbitrary grounds that they were insecure. He had recently appeared on television and was proud of being recognised. After several more calls back and forth, they settled for Mendel’s semi-detached Tudor residence in Mitcham, where the Minister and his shiny car stuck out like a sore thumb. There they now sat, Lacon, Smiley, and the Minister, in the trim front room with net curtains and fresh salmon sandwiches, while their host stood upstairs watching the approaches. In the lane, children tried to make the chauffeur tell them whom he worked for.

Behind the Minister’s head ran a row of books on bees. They were Mendel’s passion, Smiley remembered: he used the word “exotic” for bees that did not come from Surrey. The Minister was a young man still, with a dark jowl that looked as though it had been knocked off-true in some unseemly fracas. His head was bald on top, which gave him an unwarranted air of maturity, and a terrible Eton drawl. “All right, so what are the decisions?” He also had the bully’s art of dialogue.

“Well first, I suppose, you should damp down whatever recent negotiations you’ve been having with the Americans. I was thinking of the untitled secret annexe which you keep in your safe,” said Smiley, “the one that discusses the further exploitation of Witchcraft material.”

“Never heard of it,” said the Minister.

“I quite understand the incentives, of course; it’s always tempting to get one’s hands on the cream of that enormous American service, and I can see the argument for trading them Witchcraft in return.”

“So what are the arguments against?” the Minister enquired as if he were talking to his stockbroker.

“If the mole Gerald exists,” Smiley began. Of all her cousins, Ann had once said proudly, only Miles Sercombe was without a single redeeming feature. For the first time, Smiley really believed she was right. He felt not only idiotic but incoherent. “If the mole exists, which I assume is common ground among us . . .” He waited, but no one said it wasn’t. “If the mole exists,” he repeated, “it’s not only the Circus that will double its profits by the American deal. Moscow Centre will, too, because they’ll get from the mole whatever you buy from the Americans.”

In a gesture of frustration, the Minister slapped his hand on Mendel’s table, leaving a moist imprint on the polish.

“God damn it, I do not understand,” he declared. “That Witchcraft stuff is bloody marvellous! A month ago it was buying us the moon. Now we’re disappearing up our orifices and saying the Russians are cooking it for us. What the hell’s happening?”

“Well, I don’t think that’s quite as illogical as it sounds, as a matter of fact. After all, we’ve run the odd Russian network from time to time, and though I say it myself we ran them rather well. We gave them the best material we could afford. Rocketry, war planning. You were in on that yourself”—this to Lacon, who threw a jerky nod of agreement. “We tossed them agents we could do without; we gave them good communications, safed their courier links, cleared the air for their signals so that we could listen to them. That was the price we paid for running the opposition—what was your expression?—‘for knowing how they briefed their commissars.’ I’m sure Karla would do as much for us if he was running our networks. He’d do more, wouldn’t he, if he had his eye on the American market, too?” He broke off and glanced at Lacon. “Much, much more. An American connection—a big American dividend, I mean—would put the mole Gerald right at the top table. The Circus, too, by proxy of course. As a Russian, one would give almost anything to the English if . . . well, if one could buy the Americans in return.”

“Thank you,” said Lacon quickly.

The Minister left, taking a couple of sandwiches with him to eat in the car and failing to say goodbye to Mendel, presumably because he was not a constituent.

Lacon stayed behind.

“You asked me to look out for anything on Prideaux,” he announced at last. “Well, I find that we do have a few papers on him, after all.”

He had happened to be going through some files on the internal security of the Circus, he explained, “Simply to clear my decks.” Doing so, he had stumbled on some old positive vetting reports. One of them related to Prideaux.

“He was cleared absolutely, you understand. Not a shadow. However”—an odd inflexion of his voice caused Smiley to glance at him—“I think it might interest you, all the same. Some tiny murmur about his time at Oxford. We’re all entitled to be a bit pink at that age.”

“Indeed, yes.”

The silence returned, broken only by the soft tread of Mendel upstairs.

“Prideaux and Haydon were really very close indeed, you know,” Lacon confessed. “I hadn’t realised.”

He was suddenly in a great hurry to leave. Delving in his briefcase, he hauled out a large plain envelope, thrust it into Smiley’s hand, and went off to the prouder world of Whitehall; and Mr. Barraclough to the Islay Hotel, where he returned to his reading of Operation Testify.

26

It was lunchtime next day. Smiley had read and slept a little, read again and bathed, and as he climbed the steps to that pretty London house he felt pleased, because he liked Sam.

The house was brown brick and Georgian, just off Grosvenor Square. There were five steps and a brass doorbell in a scalloped recess. The door was black, with pillars either side. He pushed the bell and he might as well have pushed the door; it opened at once. He entered a circular hallway with another door the other end, and two large men in black suits who might have been ushers at Westminster Abbey. Over a marble chimney-piece, horses pranced and they might have been Stubbs. One man stood close while he took off his coat; the second led him to a Bible desk to sign the book.

“Hebden,” Smiley murmured as he wrote, giving a workname Sam could remember.

“Adrian Hebden.”

The man who had his coat repeated the name into a house telephone:

“Mr. Hebden—Mr. Adrian Hebden.”

“If you wouldn’t mind waiting one second, sir,” said the man by the Bible desk. There was no music, and Smiley had the feeling there should have been; also a fountain.

“I’m a friend of Mr. Collins’s, as a matter of fact,” said Smiley. “If Mr. Collins is available. I think he may even be expecting me.”

The man at the telephone murmured, “Thank you,” and hung it on the hook. He led Smiley to the inner door and pushed it open. It made no sound at all, not even a rustle on the silk carpet.

“Mr. Collins is over there, sir,” he murmured respectfully. “Drinks are with the courtesy of the house.”

The three reception rooms had been run together, with pillars and arches to divide them optically, and mahogany panelling. In each room was one table, the third was sixty feet away. The lights shone on meaningless pictures of fruit in colossal gold frames, and on the green baize tablecloths. The curtains were drawn, the tables about one third occupied, four or five players to each, all men, but the only sounds were the click of the ball in the wheel, the click of the chips as they were redistributed, and the very low murmur of the croupiers.

“Adrian Hebden,” said Sam Collins, with a twinkle in his voice. “Long time no see.”

“Hullo, Sam,” said Smiley, and they shook hands.

“Come down to my lair,” said Sam, and nodded to the only other man in the room who was standing, a very big man with blood pressure and a chipped face. The big man nodded, too.

“Care for it?” Sam enquired as they crossed a corridor draped in red silk.

“It’s very impressive,” said Smiley politely.

“That’s the word,” said Sam. “Impressive. That’s what it is.” He was wearing a dinner jacket. His office was done in Edwardian plush, his desk had a marble top and ball-and-claw feet, but the room itself was very small and not at all well ventilated—more like the back room of a theatre, Smiley thought, furnished with leftover props.

“They might even let me put in a few pennies of my own later, give it another year. They’re toughish boys, but very go-ahead, you know.”

“I’m sure,” said Smiley.

“Like we were in the old days.”

“That’s right.”

He was trim and lighthearted in his manner and he had a trim black moustache. Smiley couldn’t imagine him without it. He was probably fifty. He had spent a lot of time out East, where they had once worked together on a catch-and-carry job against a Chinese radio operator. His complexion and hair were greying but he still looked thirty-five. His smile was warm and he had a confiding, messroom friendliness. He kept both hands on the table as if he were at cards, and he looked at Smiley with a possessive fondness that was paternal or filial or both.

“If chummy goes over five,” he said, still smiling, “give me a buzz, Harry, will you? Otherwise keep your big mouth shut; I’m chatting up an oil king.” He was talking into a box on his desk. “Where is he now?”

“Three up,” said a gravel voice. Smiley guessed it belonged to the chipped man with blood pressure.

“Then he’s got eight to lose,” said Sam blandly. “Keep him at the table, that’s all. Make a hero of him.” He switched off and grinned. Smiley grinned back.

“Really, it’s a great life,” Sam assured him. “Better than selling washing machines, anyway. Bit odd, of course, putting on the dinner jacket at ten in the morning. Reminds one of diplomatic cover.” Smiley laughed. “Straight, too, believe it or not,” Sam added with no change to his expression. “We get all the help we need from the arithmetic.”

“I’m sure you do,” said Smiley, once more with great politeness.

“Care for some music?”

It was canned and came out of the ceiling. Sam turned it up as loud as they could bear.

“So what can I do you for?” Sam asked, the smile broadening.

“I want to talk to you about the night Jim Prideaux was shot. You were duty officer.”

Sam smoked brown cigarettes that smelt of cigar. Lighting one, he let the end catch fire, then watched it die to an ember. “Writing your memoirs, old boy?” he enquired.

“We’re reopening the case.”

“What’s this we, old boy?”

“I, myself, and me, with Lacon pushing and the Minister pulling.”

“All power corrupts but some must govern, and in that case Brother Lacon will reluctantly scramble to the top of the heap.”

“It hasn’t changed,” said Smiley.

Sam drew ruminatively on his cigarette. The music switched to phrases of Noël Coward.

“It’s a dream of mine, actually,” said Sam Collins through the smoke. “One of these days Percy Alleline walks through that door with a shabby brown suitcase and asks for a flutter. He puts the whole of the secret vote on red and loses.”

“The record’s been filleted,” said Smiley. “It’s a matter of going to people and asking what they remember. There’s almost nothing on file at all.”

“I’m not surprised,” said Sam. Over the phone he ordered sandwiches. “Live on them,” he explained. “Sandwiches and canapés. One of the perks.”

He was pouring coffee when the red pinlight glowed between them on the desk.

“Chummy’s even,” said the gravel voice.

“Then start counting,” said Sam, and closed the switch.

He told it plainly but precisely, the way a good soldier recalls a battle, not to win or lose any more, but simply to remember. He had just come back from abroad, he said; a three-year stint in Vientiane. He’d checked in with personnel and cleared himself with the Dolphin; no one seemed to have any plans for him, so he was thinking of taking off for the South of France for a month’s leave when MacFadean, that old janitor who was practically Control’s valet, scooped him up in the corridor and marched him to Control’s room.

“This was which day, exactly?” said Smiley.

“October 19th.”

“The Thursday.”

“The Thursday. I was thinking of flying to Nice on Monday. You were in Berlin. I wanted to buy you a drink but the mothers said you were occupé, and when I checked with Movements they told me you’d gone to Berlin.”

“Yes, that’s true,” Smiley said simply. “Control sent me there.”

To get me out of the way, he might have added; it was a feeling he had had even at the time.

“I hunted round for Bill but Bill was also in baulk. Control had packed him up-country somewhere,” said Sam, avoiding Smiley’s eye.

“On a wild goose chase,” Smiley murmured. “But he came back.”

Here Sam tipped a sharp, quizzical glance in Smiley’s direction, but he added nothing on the subject of Bill Haydon’s journey.

“The whole place seemed dead. Damn nearly caught the first plane back to Vientiane.”

“It pretty much was dead,” Smiley confessed, and thought, Except for Witchcraft.

And Control, said Sam, looked as though he’d had a five-day fever. He was surrounded by a sea of files, his skin was yellow, and as he talked he kept breaking off to wipe his forehead with a handkerchief. He scarcely bothered with the usual fan-dance at all, said Sam. He didn’t congratulate him on three good years in the field, or make some snide reference to his private life, which was at that time messy; he simply said he wanted Sam to do weekend duty instead of Mary Masterman; could Sam swing it?

“ ‘Sure I can swing it,’ I said. ‘If you want me to do duty officer, I’ll do it.’ He said he’d give me the rest of the story on Saturday. Meanwhile I must tell no one. I mustn’t give a hint anywhere in the building, even that he’d asked me this one thing. He needed someone good to man the switchboard in case there was a crisis, but it had to be someone from an outstation or someone like me who’d been away from head office for a long time. And it had to be an old hand.”

So Sam went to Mary Masterman and sold her a hard-luck story about not being able to get the tenant out of his flat before he went on leave on Monday; how would it be if he did her duty for her and saved himself the hotel? He took over at nine on Saturday morning with his toothbrush and six cans of beer in a briefcase, which still had palm-tree stickers on the side. Geoff Agate was slated to relieve him on Sunday evening.

Once again Sam dwelt on how dead the place was. Back in the old days, Saturdays were much like any other day, he said. Most regional sections had a deskman working weekends, some even had night staff, and when you took a tour of the building you had the feeling that, warts and all, this was an outfit that had a lot going. But that Saturday morning the building might have been evacuated, said Sam; which in a way, from what he heard later, it had been—on orders from Control. A couple of wranglers toiled on the second floor; the radio and code rooms were going strong, but those boys worked all the hours anyway. Otherwise, said Sam, it was the big silence. He sat around waiting for Control to ring but nothing happened. He fleshed out another hour teasing the janitors, whom he reckoned the idlest lot of so-and-so’s in the Circus. He checked their attendance lists and found two typists and one desk officer marked in but absent, so he put the head janitor, a new boy called Mellows, on report. Finally he went upstairs to see if Control was in.

“He was sitting all alone, except for MacFadean. No mothers, no you—just old Mac peeking around with jasmine tea and sympathy. Too much?”

“No, just go on, please. As much detail as you can remember.”

“So then Control peeled off another veil. Half a veil. Someone was doing a special job for him, he said. It was of great importance to the service. He kept saying that: to the service. Not Whitehall or sterling or the price of fish, but us. Even when it was all over, I must never breathe a word about it. Not even to you. Or Bill or Bland or anyone.”

“Nor Alleline?”

“He never mentioned Percy once.”

“No,” Smiley agreed. “He scarcely could at the end.”

“I should regard him, for the night, as Director of Operations. I should see myself as cut-out between Control and whatever was going on in the rest of the building. If anything came in—a signal, a phone call, however trivial it seemed—I should wait till the coast was clear, then whip upstairs and hand it to Control. No one was to know, now or later, that Control was the man behind the gun. In no case should I phone him or minute him; even the internal lines were taboo. Truth, George,” said Sam, helping himself to a sandwich.

“Oh, I do believe you,” said Smiley with feeling.

If outgoing telegrams had to be sent, Sam should once more act as Control’s cut-out. He need not expect much to happen till this evening; even then it was most unlikely anything would happen. As to the janitors and people like that, as Control put it, Sam should do his damnedest to act natural and look busy.

The séance over, Sam returned to the duty room, sent out for an evening paper, opened a can of beer, selected an outside telephone line, and set about losing his shirt. There was steeplechasing at Kempton, which he hadn’t watched for years. Early evening, he took another walk around the lines and tested the alarm pads on the floor of the general registry. Three out of fifteen didn’t work, and by this time the janitors were really loving him. He cooked himself an egg, and when he’d eaten it he trotted upstairs to take a pound off old Mac and give him a beer.

“He’d asked me to put him a quid on some nag with three left feet. I chatted with him for ten minutes, went back to my post, wrote some letters, watched a rotten movie on the telly, then turned in. The first call came just as I was getting to sleep. Eleven-twenty, exactly. The phones didn’t stop ringing for the next ten hours. I thought the switchboard was going to blow up in my face.”

“Arcadi’s five down,” said a voice over the box.

“Excuse me,” said Sam, with his habitual grin and, leaving Smiley to the music, slipped upstairs to cope.

Sitting alone, Smiley watched Sam’s brown cigarette slowly burning away in the ashtray. He waited, Sam didn’t return, and he wondered whether he should stub it out. Not allowed to smoke on duty, he thought; house rules.

“All done,” said Sam.

The first call came from the Foreign Office resident clerk on the direct line, said Sam. In the Whitehall stakes, you might say, the Foreign Office won by a curled lip.

“The Reuters headman in London had just called him with a story of a shooting in Prague. A British spy had been shot dead by Russian security forces, there was a hunt out for his accomplices, and was the F.O. interested? The duty clerk was passing it to us for information. I said it sounded bunkum, and rang off just as Mike Meakin, of wranglers, came through to say that all hell had broken out on the Czech air: half of it was coded, but the other half was en clair. He kept getting garbled accounts of a shooting near Brno. Prague or Brno? I asked. Or both? Just Brno. I said keep listening, and by then all five buzzers were going. Just as I was leaving the room, the resident clerk came back on the direct. The Reuters man had corrected his story, he said: for Prague read Brno. I closed the door and it was like leaving a wasps’ nest in your drawing-room. Control was standing at his desk as I came in. He’d heard me coming up the stairs. Has Alleline put a carpet on those stairs, by the way?”

“No,” said Smiley. He was quite impassive. “George is like a swift,” Ann had once told Haydon in his hearing. “He cuts down his body temperature till it’s the same as the environment. Then he doesn’t lose energy adjusting.”

“You know how quick he was when he looked at you. He checked my hands to see whether I had a telegram for him, and I wished I’d been carrying something but they were empty. ‘I’m afraid there’s a bit of a panic,’ I said. I gave him the gist, he looked at his watch; I suppose he was trying to work out what should have been happening if everything had been plain sailing. I said, ‘Can I have a brief, please?’ He sat down; I couldn’t see him too well—he had that low green light on his desk. I said again, ‘I’ll need a brief. Do you want me to deny it? Why don’t I get someone in?’ No answer. Mind you, there wasn’t anyone to get, but I didn’t know that yet. ‘I must have a brief.’ We could hear footsteps downstairs and I knew the radio boys were trying to find me. ‘Do you want to come down and handle it yourself?’ I said. I went round to the other side of the desk, stepping over these files, all open at different places; you’d think he was compiling an encyclopaedia. Some of them must have been pre-war. He was sitting like this.”

Sam bunched the fingers of one hand, put the tips to his forehead, and stared at the desk. His other hand was laid flat, holding Control’s imaginary fob watch. “‘Tell MacFadean to get me a cab, then find Smiley.’ ‘What about the operation?’ I asked. I had to wait all night for an answer. ‘It’s deniable,’ he says. ‘Both men had foreign documents. No one could know they were British at this stage.’ ‘They’re only talking about one man,’ I said. Then I said, ‘Smiley’s in Berlin.’ That’s what I think I said, anyway. So we have another two-minute silence. ‘Anyone will do. It makes no difference.’ I should have been sorry for him, I suppose, but just then I couldn’t raise much sympathy. I was having to hold the baby and I didn’t know a damn thing. MacFadean wasn’t around so I reckoned Control could find his own cab, and by the time I got to the bottom of the steps I must have looked like Gordon at Khartoum. The duty harridan from monitoring was waving bulletins at me like flags, a couple of janitors were yelling at me, the radio boy was clutching a bunch of signals, the phones were going—not just my own, but half a dozen of the direct lines on the fourth floor. I went straight to the duty room and switched off all the lines while I tried to get my bearings. The monitor—what’s that woman’s name, for God’s sake, used to play bridge with the Dolphin?”

“Purcell. Molly Purcell.”

“That’s the one. Her story was at least straightforward. Prague radio was promising an emergency bulletin in half an hour’s time. That was quarter of an hour ago. The bulletin would concern an act of gross provocation by a Western power, an infringement of Czechoslovakia’s sovereignty, and an outrage against freedom-loving people of all nations. Apart from that,” said Sam dryly, “it was going to be laughs all the way. I rang Bywater Street, of course; then I made a signal to Berlin telling them to find you and fly you back by yesterday. I gave Mellows the main phone numbers and sent him off to find an outside line and get hold of whoever was around of the top brass. Percy was in Scotland for the weekend and out to dinner. His cook gave Mellows a number; he rang it, spoke to his host. Percy had just left.”

“I’m sorry,” Smiley interrupted. “Rang Bywater Street, what for?” He was holding his upper lip between his finger and thumb, pulling it out like a deformity, while he stared into the middle distance.

“In case you’d come back early from Berlin,” said Sam.

“And had I?”

“ No.”

“So who did you speak to?”

“Ann.”

Smiley said, “Ann’s away just now. Could you remind me how it went, that conversation?”

“I asked for you and she said you were in Berlin.”

“And that was all?”

“It was a crisis, George,” Sam said, in a warning tone.

“So?”

“I asked her whether by any chance she knew where Bill Haydon was. It was urgent. I gathered he was on leave but might be around. Somebody once told me they were cousins.” He added: “Besides, he’s a friend of the family, I understood.”

“Yes. He is. What did she say?”

“Gave me a shirty ‘no’ and rang off. Sorry about that, George. War’s war.”

“How did she sound?” Smiley asked, after letting the aphorism lie between them for some while.

“I told you: shirty.”

Roy Bland was at Leeds University talent-spotting, said Sam, and not available.

Between calls, Sam was getting the whole book thrown at him. He might as well have invaded Cuba. The military were yelling about Czech tank movements along the Austrian border; the wranglers couldn’t hear themselves think for the radio traffic round Brno; and as for the Foreign Office, the resident clerk was having the vapours and yellow fever all in one. “First Lacon, then the Minister were baying at the doors, and at half past twelve we had the promised Czech news bulletin, twenty minutes late but none the worse for that. A British spy named Jim Ellis, travelling on false Czech papers and assisted by Czech counter-revolutionaries, had attempted to kidnap an unnamed Czech general in the forests near Brno and smuggle him over the Austrian border. Ellis had been shot but they didn’t say killed; other arrests were imminent. I looked Ellis up in the workname index and found Jim Prideaux. And I thought, just as Control must have thought, If Jim is shot and has Czech papers, how the hell do they know his workname, and how do they know he’s British? Then Bill Haydon arrived, white as a sheet. Picked up the story on the ticker-tape at his club. He turned straight round and came to the Circus.”

“At what time was that, exactly?” Smiley asked, with a vague frown. “It must have been rather late.”

Sam looked as if he wished he could make it easier. “One-fifteen,” he said.

“Which is late, isn’t it, for reading club ticker-tapes.”

“Not my world, old boy.”

“Bill’s the Savile, isn’t he?”

“Don’t know,” said Sam doggedly. He drank some coffee. “He was a treat to watch, that’s all I can tell you. I used to think of him as an erratic sort of devil. Not that night, believe me. All right, he was shaken. Who wouldn’t be? He arrived knowing there’d been a God-awful shooting party and that was about all. But when I told him that it was Jim who’d been shot, he looked at me like a madman. Thought he was going to go for me. ‘Shot. Shot how? Shot dead?’ I shoved the bulletins into his hand and he tore through them one by one—”

“Wouldn’t he have known already from the ticker-tape?” Smiley asked, in a small voice. “I thought the news was everywhere by then: Ellis shot. That was the lead story, wasn’t it?”

“Depends which news bulletin he saw, I suppose,” Sam shrugged it off. “Anyway, he took over the switchboard and by morning he’d picked up what few pieces there were and introduced something pretty close to calm. He told the Foreign Office to sit tight and hold its water; he got hold of Toby Esterhase and sent him off to pull in a brace of Czech agents, students at the London School of Economics. Bill had been letting them hatch till then; he was planning to turn them round and play them back into Czecho. Toby’s lamplighters sandbagged the pair of them and locked them up in Sarratt. Then Bill rang the Czech head resident in London and spoke to him like a sergeant major: threatened to strip him so bare he’d be the laughing-stock of the profession if a hair of Jim Prideaux’s head was hurt. He invited him to pass that on to his masters. I felt I was watching a street accident and Bill was the only doctor. He rang a press contact and told him in strict confidence that Ellis was a Czech mercenary with an American contract; he could use the story unattributably. It actually made the late editions. Soon as he could, he slid off to Jim’s rooms to make sure he’d left nothing around that a journalist might pick on if a journalist were clever enough to make the connection, Ellis to Prideaux. I guess he did a thorough cleaning-up job. Dependents, everything.”

“There weren’t any dependents,” Smiley said. “Apart from Bill, I suppose,” he added, half under his breath.

Sam wound it up: “At eight o’clock Percy Alleline arrived; he’d cadged a special plane off the Air Force. He was grinning all over. I didn’t think that was very clever of him, considering Bill’s feelings, but there you are. He wanted to know why I was doing duty, so I gave him the same story I’d given to Mary Masterman: no flat. He used my phone to make a date with the Minister, and was still talking when Roy Bland came in, hopping mad and half plastered, wanting to know who the hell had been messing on his patch and practically accusing me. I said, ‘Christ, man, what about old Jim? You could pity him while you were about it,’ but Roy’s a hungry boy and likes the living better than the dead. I gave him the switchboard with my love, went down to the Savoy for breakfast, and read the Sundays. The most any of them did was run the Prague radio reports and a pooh-pooh denial from the Foreign Office.”

Finally Smiley said, “After that you went to the South of France?”

“For two lovely months.”

“Did anyone question you again—about Control, for instance?”

“Not till I got back. You were out on your ear by then; Control was ill in hospital.” Sam’s voice deepened a little. “He didn’t do anything silly, did he?”

“He just died. What happened?”

“Percy was acting head boy. He called for me and wanted to know why I’d done duty for Masterman and what communication I’d had with Control. I stuck to my story and Percy called me a liar.”

“So that’s what they sacked you for: lying?”

“Alcoholism. The janitors got a bit of their own back. They’d counted five beer cans in the waste-basket in the duty officer’s lair and reported it to the housekeepers. There’s a standing order: no booze on the premises. In the due process of time, a disciplinary body found me guilty of setting fire to the Queen’s dockyards so I joined the bookies. What happened to you?”

“Oh, much the same. I didn’t seem to be able to convince them I wasn’t involved.”

“Well, if you want anyone’s throat cut,” said Sam as he saw him quietly out through a side door into a pretty mews, “give me a buzz.” Smiley was sunk in thought. “And if you ever want a flutter,” Sam went on, “bring along some of Ann’s smart friends.”

“Sam, listen. Bill was making love to Ann that night. No, listen. You phoned her, she told you Bill wasn’t there. As soon as she’d rung off, she pushed Bill out of bed and he turned up at the Circus an hour later knowing that there had been a shooting in Czecho. If you were giving me the story from the shoulder—on a postcard—that’s what you’d say?”

“Broadly.”

“But you didn’t tell Ann about Czecho when you phoned her—”

“He stopped at his club on the way to the Circus.”

“If it was open. Very well: then why didn’t he know that Jim Prideaux had been shot?”

In the daylight, Sam looked briefly old, though the grin had not left his face. He seemed about to say something, then changed his mind. He seemed angry, then thwarted, then blank again. “Cheeribye,” he said. “Mind how you go,” and withdrew to the permanent night-time of his elected trade.

27

When Smiley had left the Islay for Grosvenor Square that morning, the streets had been bathed in harsh sunshine and the sky was blue. Now as he drove the hired Rover past the unlovable façades of the Edgware Road, the wind had dropped, the sky was black with waiting rain, and all that remained of the sun was a lingering redness on the tarmac. He parked in St. John’s Wood Road, in the forecourt of a new tower block with a glass porch, but he did not enter by the porch. Passing a large sculpture describing, as it seemed to him, nothing but a sort of cosmic muddle, he made his way through icy drizzle to a descending outside staircase marked “Exit Only.” The first flight was of terrazzo tile and had a bannister of African teak. Below that, the contractor’s generosity ceased. Rough-rendered plaster replaced the earlier luxury and a stench of uncollected refuse crammed the air. His manner was cautious rather than furtive, but when he reached the iron door he paused before putting both hands to the long handle and drew himself together as if for an ordeal. The door opened a foot and stopped with a thud, to be answered by a shout of fury, which echoed many times like a shout in a swimming pool.

“Hey, why you don’t look out once?”

Smiley edged through the gap. The door had stopped against the bumper of a very shiny car, but Smiley wasn’t looking at the car. Across the garage two men in overalls were hosing down a Rolls-Royce in a cage. Both were looking in his direction.

“Why you don’t come other way?” the same angry voice demanded. “You tenant here? Why you don’t use tenant lift? This stair for fire.”

It was not possible to tell which of them was speaking, but whichever it was, he spoke in a heavy Slav accent. The light in the cage was behind them. The shorter man held the hose.

Smiley walked forward, taking care to keep his hands clear of his pockets. The man with the hose went back to work, but the taller stayed watching him through the gloom. He wore white overalls and he had turned the collar-points upwards, which gave him a rakish air. His black hair was swept back and full.

“I’m not a tenant, I’m afraid,” Smiley conceded. “But I wonder if I might just speak to someone about renting a space. My name’s Carmichael,” he explained, in a louder voice. “I’ve bought a flat up the road.”

He made a gesture as if to produce a card, as if his documents would speak better for him than his insignificant appearance. “I’ll pay in advance,” he promised. “I could sign a contract or whatever is necessary, I’m sure. I’d want it to be above-board, naturally. I can give references, pay a deposit, anything within reason. As long as it’s above-board. It’s a Rover. A new one. I won’t go behind the company’s back, because I don’t believe in it. But I’ll do anything else within reason. I’d have brought it down, but I didn’t want to presume. And—well, I know it sounds silly but I didn’t like the look of the ramp. It’s so new, you see.”

Throughout this protracted statement of intent, which he delivered with an air of fussy concern, Smiley had remained in the downbeam of a bright light strung from the rafter: a supplicant, rather abject figure, one might have thought, and easily visible across the open space. The attitude had its effect. Leaving the cage, the white figure strode towards a glazed kiosk, built between two iron pillars, and with his fine head beckoned Smiley to follow. As he went, he pulled the gloves off his hands. They were leather gloves, hand-stitched and quite expensive.

“Well, you want mind out how you open door,” he warned in the same loud voice. “You want use lift, see, or maybe you pay couple pounds. Use lift you don’t make no trouble.”

“Max, I want to talk to you,” said Smiley once they were inside the kiosk. “Alone. Away from here.”

Max was broad and powerful with a pale boy’s face, but the skin of it was lined like an old man’s. He was handsome and his brown eyes were very still. He had altogether a rather deadly stillness.

“Now? You want talk now?”

“In the car. I’ve got one outside. If you walk to the top of the ramp, you can get straight into it.”

Putting his hand to his mouth, Max yelled across the garage. He was half a head taller than Smiley and had a roar like a drum major’s. Smiley couldn’t catch the words. Possibly they were Czech. There was no answer, but Max was already unbuttoning his overall.

“It’s about Jim Prideaux,” Smiley said.

“Sure,” said Max.

They drove up to Hampstead and sat in the shiny Rover, watching the kids breaking the ice on the pond. Real rain had held off, after all; perhaps because it was so cold.

Above ground Max wore a blue suit and a blue shirt. His tie was blue but carefully differentiated from the other blues: he had taken a lot of trouble to get the shade. He wore several rings and flying boots with zips at the side.

“I’m not in it any more. Did they tell you?” Smiley asked. Max shrugged. “I thought they would have told you,” Smiley said.

Max was sitting straight; he didn’t use the seat to lean on; he was too proud. He did not look at Smiley. His eyes were turned fixedly to the pool and the kids fooling and skidding in the reeds.

“They don’t tell me nothing,” he said.

“I was sacked,” said Smiley. “I guess at about the same time as you.”

Max seemed to stretch slightly, then settle again. “Too bad, George. What you do, steal money?”

“I don’t want them to know, Max.”

“You private—I private, too,” said Max, and from a gold case offered Smiley a cigarette, which he declined.

“I want to hear what happened,” Smiley went on. “I wanted to find out before they sacked me but there wasn’t time.”

“That why they sack you?”

“Maybe.”

“You don’t know so much, huh?” said Max, his gaze nonchalantly on the kids.

Smiley spoke very simply, watching all the while in case Max didn’t understand. They could have spoken German but Max wouldn’t have that, he knew. So he spoke English and watched Max’s face.

“I don’t know anything, Max. I had no part in it at all. I was in Berlin when it happened; I knew nothing of the planning or the background. They cabled me, but when I arrived in London it was too late.”

“Planning,” Max repeated. “That was some planning.” His jaw and cheeks became suddenly a mass of lines and his eyes turned narrow, making a grimace or a smile. “So now you got plenty time, eh, George? Jesus, that was some planning.”

“Jim had a special job to do. He asked for you.”

“Sure. Jim ask for Max to baby-sit.”

“How did he get you? Did he turn up in Acton and speak to Toby Esterhase, and say, ‘Toby, I want Max’? How did he get you?”

Max’s hands were resting on his knees. They were groomed and slender—all but the knuckles, which were very broad. Now, at the mention of Esterhase, he turned the palms slightly inwards and made a light cage of them as if he had caught a butterfly.

“What the hell?” Max asked.

“So what did happen?”

“Was private,” said Max. “Jim private, I private. Like now.”

“Come,” said Smiley. “Please.”

Max spoke as if it were any mess: family or business or love. It was a Monday evening in mid-October—yes, the sixteenth. It was a slack time, he hadn’t been abroad for weeks, and he was fed up. He had spent all day making a reconnaissance of a house in Bloomsbury where a pair of Chinese students was supposed to live; the lamplighters were thinking of mounting a burglary against their rooms. He was on the point of returning to the Laundry in Acton to write his report when Jim picked him up in the street with a chance-encounter routine and drove him up to Crystal Palace, where they sat in the car and talked, like now, except they spoke Czech. Jim said there was a special job going, something so big, so secret that no one else in the Circus, not even Toby Esterhase, was allowed to know that it was taking place. It came from the very top of the tree and it was hairy. Was Max interested?

“I say, ‘Sure, Jim. Max interested.’ Then he ask me: ‘Take leave. You go to Toby, you say, Toby, my mother sick, I got to take some leave.’ I don’t got no mother. ‘Sure,’ I say, ‘I take leave. How long for, please, Jim?’”

The whole job shouldn’t last more than the weekend, said Jim. They should be in on Saturday and out on Sunday. Then he asked Max whether he had any current identities running for him: best would be Austrian, small trade, with driving licence to match. If Max had none handy at Acton, Jim would get something put together in Brixton.

“ ‘Sure,’ I say. ‘I have Hartmann, Rudi, from Linz, Sudeten émigré.’ ”

So Max gave Toby a story about girl trouble up in Bradford and Toby gave Max a ten-minute lecture on the sexual mores of the English; and on the Thursday, Jim and Max met in a safe house that the scalp-hunters ran in those days, a rackety old place in Lambeth. Jim had brought the keys. A three-day hit, Jim repeated; a clandestine conference outside Brno. Jim had a big map and they studied it. Jim would travel Czech, Max would go Austrian. They would make their separate ways as far as Brno. Jim would fly from Paris to Prague, then train from Prague. He didn’t say what papers he would be carrying himself, but Max presumed Czech because Czech was Jim’s other side; Max had seen him use it before. Max was Hartmann Rudi, trading in glass and ovenware. He was to cross the Austrian border by van near Mikulov, then head north to Brno, giving himself plenty of time to make a six-thirty rendezvous on Saturday evening in a side street near the football ground. There was a big match that evening starting at seven. Jim would walk with the crowd as far as the side street, then climb into the van. They agreed times, fallbacks, and the usual contingencies; and besides, said Max, they knew each other’s handwriting by heart.

Once out of Brno, they were to drive together along the Bilovice road as far as Krtiny, then turn east towards Racice. Somewhere along the Racice road they would pass on the left side a parked black car, most likely a Fiat. The first two figures of the registration would be 99. The driver would be reading a newspaper. They would pull up; Max would go over and ask whether he was all right. The man would reply that his doctor had forbidden him to drive more than three hours at a stretch. Max would say it was true that long journeys were a strain on the heart. The driver would then show them where to park the van and take them to the rendezvous in his own car.

“Who were you meeting, Max? Did Jim tell you that as well?”

No, that was all Jim told him.

As far as Brno, said Max, things went pretty much as planned. Driving from Mikulov, he was followed for a while by a couple of civilian motorcyclists who interchanged every ten minutes, but he put that down to his Austrian number plates and it didn’t bother him. He made Brno comfortably by mid-afternoon, and to keep things shipshape he booked into the hotel and drank a couple of coffees in the restaurant. Some stooge picked him up and Max talked to him about the vicissitudes of the glass trade and about his girl in Linz who’d gone off with an American. Jim missed the first rendezvous but he made the fallback an hour later. Max supposed at first the train was late, but Jim just said, “Drive slowly,” and he knew then that there was trouble.

This was how it was going to work, said Jim. There’d been a change of plan. Max was to stay right out of it. He should drop Jim short of the rendezvous, then lie up in Brno till Monday morning. He was not to make contact with any of the Circus’s trade routes: no one from Aggravate, no one from Plato, least of all with the Prague residency. If Jim didn’t surface at the hotel by eight on Monday morning, Max should get out any way he could. If Jim did surface, Max’s job would be to carry Jim’s message to Control: the message could be very simple; it might be no more than one word. When he got to London, he should go to Control personally, make an appointment through old MacFadean, and give him the message—was that clear? If Jim didn’t show up, Max should take up life where he left off and deny everything, inside the Circus as well as out.

“Did Jim say why the plan had changed?”

“Jim worried.”

“So something had happened to him on his way to meet you?”

“Maybe. I say Jim: ‘Listen, Jim, I come with. You worried, I be baby-sitter. I drive for you, shoot for you, what the hell?’ Jim get damn angry, okay?”

“Okay,” said Smiley.

They drove to the Racice road and found the car parked without lights facing a track over a field, a Fiat, 99 on the number plates, black. Max stopped the van and let Jim out. As Jim walked towards the Fiat, the driver opened the door an inch in order to work the courtesy light. He had a newspaper opened over the steering wheel.

“Could you see his face?”

“Was in shadow.”

Max waited; presumably they exchanged word codes, Jim got in, and the car drove away over the track, still without lights. Max returned to Brno. He was sitting over a schnapps in the restaurant when the whole town started rumbling. He thought at first the sound came from the football stadium; then he realised it was lorries, a convoy racing down the road. He asked the waitress what was going on, and she said there had been a shooting in the woods—counter-revolutionaries were responsible. He went out to the van, turned on the radio, and caught the bulletin from Prague. That was the first he had heard of a general. He guessed there were cordons everywhere, and anyway he had Jim’s instructions to lie up in the hotel till Monday morning.

“Maybe Jim send me message. Maybe some guy from resistance come to me.”

“With this one word,” said Smiley quietly.

“Sure.”

“He didn’t say what sort of word it was?”

“You crazy,” said Max. It was either a statement or a question.

“A Czech word or an English word or a German word?”

No one came, said Max, not bothering to answer craziness.

On Monday he burned his entry passport, changed the plates on his van, and used his West German escape. Rather than head south he drove south west, ditched the van, and crossed the border by bus to Freistadt, which was the softest route he knew. In Freistadt he had a drink and spent the night with a girl because he felt puzzled and angry and he needed to catch his breath. He got to London on Tuesday night, and despite Jim’s orders he thought he’d better try and contact Control. “That was quite damn difficult,” he commented.

He tried to telephone but only got as far as the mothers. MacFadean wasn’t around. He thought of writing but he remembered Jim, and how no one else in the Circus was allowed to know. He decided that writing was too dangerous. The rumour at the Acton Laundry said that Control was ill. He tried to find out what hospital, but couldn’t.

“Did people at the Laundry seem to know where you’d been?”

“I wonder.”

He was still wondering when the housekeepers sent for him and asked to look at his Rudi Hartmann passport. Max said he had lost it, which was after all pretty near true. Why hadn’t he reported the loss? He didn’t know. When had the loss occurred? He didn’t know. When did he last see Jim Prideaux? He couldn’t remember. He was sent down to the Nursery at Sarratt but Max felt fit and angry, and after two or three days the inquisitors got tired of him or somebody called them off.

“I go back Acton Laundry; Toby Esterhase give me hundred pound, tell me go to hell.”

A scream of applause went up round the pond. Two boys had sunk a great slab of ice and now the water was bubbling through the hole.

“Max, what happened to Jim?”

“What the hell?”

“You hear these things. It gets around among the émigrés. What happened to him? Who mended him, how did Bill Haydon buy him back?”

“Emigrés don’t speak Max no more.”

“But you have heard, haven’t you?”

This time it was the white hands that told him. Smiley saw the spread of fingers, five on one hand, four on the other and already he felt the sickness before Max spoke.

“So they shoot Jim from behind. Maybe Jim was running away, what the hell? They put Jim in prison. That’s not so good for Jim. For my friends also. Not good.” He started counting: “Pribyl,” he began, touching his thumb. “Bukova Mirek, from Pribyl’s wife the brother,” he took a finger. “Also Pribyl’s wife,” a second finger. A third: “Kolin Jiri. Also his sister, mainly dead. This was network Aggravate.” He changed hands. “After network Aggravate come network Plato. Come lawyer Rapotin, come Colonel Landkron, and typists Eva Krieglova and Hanka Bilova. Also mainly dead. That’s damn big price, George”—holding the clean fingers close to Smiley’s face—“that’s damn big price for one Englishman with bullet-hole.” He was losing his temper. “Why you bother, George? Circus don’t be no good for Czecho. Allies don’t be no good for Czecho. No rich guy don’t get no poor guy out of prison! You want know some history? How you say ‘Märchen,’ please, George?”

“Fairy tale,” said Smiley.

“Okay, so don’t tell me no more damn fairy tale how English got to save Czecho no more!”

“Perhaps it wasn’t Jim,” said Smiley after a long silence. “Perhaps it was someone else who blew the networks. Not Jim.”

Max was already opening the door. “What the hell?” he asked.

“Max,” said Smiley.

“Don’t worry, George. I don’t got no one to sell you to. Okay?”

“Okay.”

Sitting in the car still, Smiley watched him hail a taxi. He did it with a flick of the hand, as if he were summoning a waiter. He gave the address without bothering to look at the driver. Then rode off sitting very upright again, staring straight ahead of him, like royalty ignoring the crowd.

As the taxi disappeared, Inspector Mendel rose slowly from a bench, folded together his newspaper, walked over to the Rover.

“You’re clean,” he said. “Nothing on your back, nothing on your conscience.”

Not so sure of that, Smiley handed him the keys to the car, then walked to the bus stop, first crossing the road in order to head west.

28

His destination was in Fleet Street, a ground-floor cellar full of wine barrels. In other areas, three-thirty might be considered a little late for a pre-luncheon apéritif, but as Smiley gently pushed open the door a dozen shadowy figures turned to eye him from the bar. And at a corner table, as unremarked as the plastic prison arches or the fake muskets on the wall, sat Jerry Westerby with a very large pink gin.

“Old boy,” said Jerry Westerby shyly, in a voice that seemed to come out of the ground. “Well, I’ll be damned. Hey, Jimmy!” His hand, which he laid on Smiley’s arm while he signalled for refreshment with the other, was enormous and cushioned with muscle, for Jerry had once been wicketkeeper for a county cricket team. In contrast to other wicketkeepers he was a big man, but his shoulders were still hunched from keeping his hands low. He had a mop of sandy grey hair and a red face and he wore a famous sporting tie over a cream silk shirt. The sight of Smiley clearly gave him great joy, for he was beaming with pleasure.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” he repeated. “Of all the amazing things. Hey, what are you doing these days,” dragging him forcibly into the seat beside him. “Sunning your fanny, spitting at the ceiling? Hey”—a most urgent question—“what’ll it be?”

Smiley ordered a Bloody Mary.

“It isn’t complete coincidence, Jerry,” Smiley confessed. There was a slight pause between them, which Jerry was suddenly concerned to fill.

“Listen, how’s the demon wife? All well? That’s the stuff.One of the great marriages, that one—always said so.”

Jerry Westerby himself had made several marriages but few that had given him pleasure.

“Do a deal with you, George,” he proposed, rolling one great shoulder towards him. “I’ll shack up with Ann and spit at the ceiling, you take my job and write up the women’s Ping-Pong. How’s that? God bless.”

“Cheers,” said Smiley good-humouredly.

“Haven’t seen many of the boys and girls for a while, matter of fact,” Jerry confessed awkwardly with an unaccountable blush. “Christmas card from old Toby last year, that’s about my lot. Guess they’ve put me on the shelf as well. Can’t blame them.” He flicked the rim of his glass. “Too much of this stuff, that’s what it is. They think I’ll blab. Crack up.”

“I’m sure they don’t,” said Smiley, and the silence reclaimed them both.

“Too much firewater not good for braves,” Jerry intoned solemnly. For years they had had this Red Indian joke running, Smiley remembered with a sinking heart.

“How,” said Smiley.

“How,” said Jerry, and they drank.

“I burnt your letter as soon as I’d read it,” Smiley went on in a quiet, unbothered voice. “In case you wondered. I didn’t tell anyone about it at all. It came too late, anyway. It was all over.”

At this, Jerry’s lively complexion turned a deep scarlet.

“So it wasn’t the letter you wrote me that put them off you,” Smiley continued in the same very gentle voice, “if that’s what you were thinking. And, after all, you did drop it in to me by hand.”

“Very decent of you,” Jerry muttered. “Thanks. Shouldn’t have written it. Talking out of school.”

“Nonsense,” said Smiley as he ordered two more. “You did it for the good of the service.”

To himself, saying this, Smiley sounded like Lacon. But the only way to talk to Jerry was to talk like Jerry’s newspaper: short sentences; facile opinions.

Jerry expelled some breath and a lot of cigarette smoke. “Last job—oh, year ago,” he recalled with a new airiness. “More. Dumping some little packet in Budapest. Nothing to it, really. Phone box. Ledge at the top. Put my hand up. Left it there. Kid’s play. Don’t think I muffed it or anything. Did my sums first—all that. Safety signals. ‘Box ready for emptying. Help yourself.’ The way they taught us, you know. Still, you lads know best, don’t you? You’re the owls. Do one’s bit, that’s the thing. Can’t do more. All part of a pattern. Design.”

“They’ll be beating the doors down for you soon,” said Smiley consolingly. “I expect they’re resting you up for a season. They do that, you know.”

“Hope so,” said Jerry with a loyal, very diffident smile. His glass shook slightly as he drank.

“Was that the trip you made just before you wrote to me?” Smiley asked.

“Sure. Same trip, actually; Budapest, then Prague.”

“And it was in Prague that you heard this story? The story you referred to in your letter to me?”

At the bar a florid man in a black suit was predicting the imminent collapse of the nation. He gave it three months, he said, then curtains.

“Rum chap, Toby Esterhase,” said Jerry.

“But good,” said Smiley.

“Oh, my God, old boy, first rate. Brilliant, my view. But rum, you know. How.” They drank again, and Jerry Westerby loosely poked a finger behind his head, in imitation of an Apache feather.

“Trouble is,” the florid man at the bar was saying over the top of his drink, “we won’t even know it’s happened.”

They decided to lunch straight away, because Jerry had a story to file for tomorrow’s edition about some top footballer who’d been caught shoplifting. They went to a curry house where the management was content to serve beer at teatime, and they agreed that if anyone bumped into them Jerry would introduce George as his bank manager, a notion that tickled him repeatedly throughout his hearty meal. There was background music, which Jerry called the connubial flight of the mosquito, and at times it threatened to drown the fainter notes of his husky voice. Which was probably just as well, for while Smiley made a brave show of enthusiasm for the curry, Jerry was launched, after his initial reluctance, upon quite a different story, concerning one Jim Ellis: the story that dear old Toby Esterhase had refused to let him print.

Jerry Westerby was that extremely rare person, the perfect witness. He had no fantasy, no malice, no personal opinion. Merely, the thing was rum. He couldn’t get it off his mind and, come to think of it, he hadn’t spoken to Toby since.

“Just this card, you see, ‘Happy Christmas, Toby’—picture of Leadenhall Street in the snow.” He gazed in great perplexity at the electric fan. “Nothing special about Leadenhall Street, is there, old boy? Not a spy-house or a meeting place or something, is it?”

“Not that I know of,” said Smiley, with a laugh.

“Couldn’t think why he chose Leadenhall Street for a Christmas card. Damned odd, don’t you think?”

Perhaps he just wanted a snowy picture of London, Smiley suggested; Toby, after all, was quite foreign in lots of ways.

“Rum way to keep in touch, I must say. Used to send me a crate of Scotch regular as clockwork.” Jerry frowned and drank from his krug. “It’s not the Scotch I mind,” he explained with that puzzlement that often clouded the greater visions of his life; “buy my own Scotch any time. It’s just that when you’re on the outside, you think everything has a meaning, so presents are important—see what I’m getting at?”

It was a year ago—well, December. The Restaurant Sport in Prague, said Jerry Westerby, was a bit off the track of your average Western journalist. Most of them hung around the Cosmo or the International, talking in low murmurs and keeping together because they were jumpy. But Jerry’s local was the Sport, and ever since he had taken Holotek, the goalie, along after the winning match against the Tartars, Jerry had had the big hand from the barman, whose name was Stanislaus or Stan.

“Stan’s a perfect prince. Does just what he damn well pleases. Makes you suddenly think Czecho’s a free country.”

Restaurant, he explained, meant bar. Whereas bar in Czecho meant nightclub, which was rum. Smiley agreed that it must be confusing.

All the same, Jerry always kept an ear to the ground when he went there; after all, it was Czecho, and once or twice he’d been able to bring back the odd snippet for Toby or put him onto the track of someone.

“Even if it was just currency-dealing, black-market stuff. All grist to the mill, according to Tobe. These little scraps add up—that’s what Tobe said, anyway.”

Quite right, Smiley agreed. That was the way it worked.

“Tobe was the owl, what?”

“Sure.”

“I used to work straight to Roy Bland, you see. Then Roy got kicked upstairs, so Tobe took me over. Bit unsettling, actually, changes. Cheers.”

“How long had you been working to Toby when this trip took place?”

“Couple of years, not more.”

There was a pause while food came and krugs were refilled and Jerry Westerby with his enormous hands shattered a popadam onto the hottest curry on the menu, then spread a crimson sauce over the top. The sauce, he said, was to give it bite. “Old Khan runs it up for me specially,” he explained, aside. “Keeps it in a deep shelter.”

So anyway, he resumed, that night in Stan’s bar there was this young boy with the pudding-bowl haircut and the pretty girl on his arm.

“And I thought, Watch out, Jerry, boy; that’s an army haircut. Right?”

“Right,” Smiley echoed, thinking that in some ways Jerry was a bit of an owl himself.

It turned out the boy was Stan’s nephew, and very proud of his English. “Amazing what people will tell you if it gives them a chance of showing off their languages.” He was on leave from the army and he’d fallen in love with this girl; he’d eight days to go and the whole world was his friend, Jerry included. Jerry particularly, in fact, because Jerry was paying for the booze.

“So we’re all sitting hugger-mugger at the big table in the corner—students, pretty girls, all sorts. Old Stan had come round from behind the bar and some laddie was doing a fair job with a squeeze-box. Bags of Gemütlichkeit, bags of booze, bags of noise.”

The noise was specially important, Jerry explained, because it let him chat to the boy without anyone else paying attention. The boy was sitting next to Jerry; he’d taken a shine to him from the start. He had one arm slung round the girl and one arm round Jerry.

“One of those kids who can touch you without giving you the creeps. Don’t like being touched, as a rule. Greeks do it. Hate it, personally.”

Smiley said he hated it, too.

“Come to think of it, the girl looked a bit like Ann,” Jerry reflected. “Foxy—know what I mean? Garbo eyes, lots of oomph.”

So while everyone was carrying on, singing and drinking and playing kiss-in-the-ring, this lad asked Jerry whether he would like to know the truth about Jim Ellis.

“Pretended I’d never heard of him,” Jerry explained to Smiley. “ ‘Love to,’ I said. ‘Who’s Jim Ellis when he’s at home?’ And the boy looks at me as if I’m daft and says, ‘A British spy.’ Only no one else heard, you see; they were all yelling and singing saucy songs. He had the girl’s head on his shoulder, but she was half cut and in her seventh heaven, so he just went on talking to me, proud of his English, you see.”

“I get it,” said Smiley.

“ ‘British spy.’ Yells straight into my ear-hole. ‘Fought with Czech partisans in the war. Came here calling himself Hajek and was shot by the Russian secret police.’ So I just shrugged and said, ‘News to me, old boy.’ Not pushing, you see. Mustn’t be pushy, ever. Scares them off.”

“You’re absolutely right,” said Smiley wholeheartedly, and for an interlude patiently parried further questions about Ann, and what it was like to love—really to love—the other person all your life.

“I am a conscript,” the boy began, according to Jerry Westerby. “I have to serve in the army or I can’t go to university.” In October he had been on basic-training manoeuvres in the forests near Brno. There was always a lot of military in the woods there; in summer the whole area was closed to the public for a month at a time. He was on a boring infantry exercise that was supposed to last two weeks, but on the third day it was called off for no reason and the troops were ordered back to town. That was the order: pack now and get back to barracks. The whole forest was to be cleared by dusk.

“Within hours, every sort of daft rumour was flying around,” Jerry went on. “Some fellow said the ballistics research station at Tisnov had blown up. Somebody else said the training battalions had mutinied and were shooting up the Russian soldiers. Fresh uprising in Prague, Russians taken over the government, the Germans had attacked—God knows what hadn’t happened. You know what soldiers are. Same everywhere, soldiers. Gossip till the cows come home.”

The reference to the army moved Jerry Westerby to ask after certain acquaintances from his military days, people Smiley had dimly known, and forgotten. Finally they resumed.

“They broke camp, packed the lorries, and sat about waiting for the convoy to get moving. They’d gone half a mile when everything stopped again and the convoy was ordered off the road. Lorries had to duckshuffle into the trees. Got stuck in the mud, ditches, every damn thing. Chaos, apparently.”

It was the Russians, said Westerby. They were coming from the direction of Brno, and they were in a very big hurry and everything that was Czech had to get out of the light or take the consequences.

“First came a bunch of motorcycles tearing down the track with lights flashing and the drivers screaming at them. Then a staff car and civilians—the boy reckoned six civilians altogether. Then two lorryloads of special troops armed to the eyebrows and wearing combat paint. Finally a truck full of tracker dogs. All making a most God-awful row. Not boring you am I, old boy?”

Westerby dabbed the sweat from his face with a handkerchief and blinked like someone coming round. The sweat had come through his silk shirt as well; he looked as if he had been under a shower. Curry not being a food he cared for, Smiley ordered two more krugs to wash away the taste.

“So that was the first part of the story. Czech troops out, Russian troops in. Got it?”

Smiley said yes, he thought he had his mind round it so far.

Back in Brno, however, the boy quickly learned that his unit’s part in the proceedings was nowhere near done. Their convoy was joined up with another, and the next night for eight or ten hours they tore round the countryside with no apparent destination. They drove west to Trebic, stopped and waited while the signals section made a long transmission; then they cut back south east nearly as far as Znojmo on the Austrian border, signalling like mad as they went. No one knew who had ordered the route; no one would explain a thing. At one point they were ordered to fix bayonets; at another they pitched camp, then packed up all their kit again and pushed off. Here and there they met up with other units: near Breclav marshalling-yards, tanks going round in circles, once a pair of self-propelled guns on pre-laid track. Everywhere the story was the same: chaotic, pointless activity. The older hands said it was a Russian punishment for being Czech. Back in Brno again, the boy heard a different explanation. The Russians were after a British spy called Hajek. He’d been spying on the research station and tried to kidnap a general and the Russians had shot him.

“So the boy asked, you see,” said Jerry. “Sassy little devil asked his sergeant, ‘If Hajek is already shot, why do we have to tear round the countryside creating an uproar?’ And the sergeant told him, ‘Because it’s the army.’ Sergeants all over the world, what?”

Very quietly Smiley asked, “We’re talking about two nights, Jerry. Which night did the Russians move into the forest?”

Jerry Westerby screwed up his face in perplexity. “That’s what the boy wanted to tell me, you see, George. That’s what he was trying to put over in Stan’s bar. What all the rumours were about. The Russians moved in on Friday. They didn’t shoot Hajek till Saturday. So the wise lads were saying: there you are, Russians were waiting for Hajek to turn up. Knew he was coming. Knew the lot. Lay in wait. Bad story, you see. Bad for our reputation—see what I mean? Bad for big chief. Bad for tribe. How.”

“How,” said Smiley, into his beer.

“That’s what Toby felt, too, mind. We saw it the same way; we just reacted differently.”

“So you told all to Toby,” said Smiley lightly, as he passed Jerry a large dish of dal. “You had to see him anyway to tell him you’d dropped the package for him in Budapest, so you told him the Hajek story, too.”

Well, that was just it, said Jerry. That was the thing that had bothered him, the thing that was rum, the thing that made him write to George, actually. “Old Tobe said it was tripe. Got all regimental and nasty. First he was keen as mustard, clapping me on the back, and Westerby for mayor. He went back to the shop, and next morning he threw the book at me. Emergency meeting, drove me round and round the park in a car, yelling blue murder. Said I was so plastered these days I didn’t know fact from fiction. All that stuff. Made me a bit shirty, actually.”

“I expect you wondered who he’d been talking to in between,” said Smiley sympathetically. “What did he say exactly,” he asked, not in any intense way but as if he just wanted to get it all crystal clear in his mind.

“Told me it was most likely a put-up ploy. Boy was a provocateur. Disruption job to make the Circus chase its own tail. Tore my ears off for disseminating half-baked rumours. I said to him, George: ‘Old boy,’ I said. ‘Tobe, I was only reporting, old boy. No need to get hot under the collar. Yesterday you thought I was the cat’s whiskers. No point in turning round and shooting the messenger. If you’ve decided you don’t like the story, that’s your business.’ Wouldn’t sort of listen any more—know what I mean? Illogical, I thought it was. Bloke like that. Hot one minute and cold the next. Not his best performance—know what I mean?”

With his left hand Jerry rubbed the side of his head, like a schoolboy pretending to think. “ ‘Okie-dokie,’ I said, ‘forget it. I’ll write it up for the rag. Not the part about the Russians getting there first. The other part. “Dirty work in the forest,” that sort of tripe.’ I said to him, ‘If it isn’t good enough for the Circus, it’ll do for the rag.’ Then he went up the wall again. Next day some owl rings the old man. Keep that baboon Westerby off the Ellis story. Rub his nose in the D notice: formal warning. ‘All further references to Jim Ellis alias Hajek against the national interest, so put ’em on the spike.’ Back to women’s Ping-Pong. Cheers.”

“But by then you’d written to me,” Smiley reminded him.

Jerry Westerby blushed terribly. “Sorry about that,” he said. “Got all xenophobe and suspicious. Comes from being on the outside: you don’t trust your best friends. Trust them—well, less than strangers.” He tried again: “Just that I thought old Tobe was going a bit haywire. Shouldn’t have done it, should I? Against the rules.” Through his embarrassment he managed a painful grin. “Then I heard on the grapevine that the firm had given you the heave-ho, so I felt an even bigger damn fool. Not hunting alone, are you, old boy? Not . . .” He left the question unasked; but not, perhaps, unanswered.

As they parted, Smiley took him gently by the arm.

“If Toby should get in touch with you, I think it better if you don’t tell him we met today. He’s a good fellow but he does tend to think people are ganging up on him.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it, old boy.”

“And if he does get in touch in the next few days,” Smiley went on—in that remote contingency, his tone suggested—“you could even warn me, actually. Then I can back you up. Don’t ring me, come to think of it, ring this number.”

Suddenly Jerry Westerby was in a hurry; that story about the shoplifting footballer couldn’t wait. But as he accepted Smiley’s card he did ask with a queer, embarrassed glance away from him, “Nothing untoward going on is there, old boy? No dirty work at the crossroads?” The grin was quite terrible. “Tribe hasn’t gone on the rampage or anything?”

Smiley laughed and lightly laid a hand on Jerry’s enormous, slightly hunched shoulder.

“Any time,” said Westerby.

“I’ll remember.”

“I thought it was you, you see: you who telephoned the old man.”

“It wasn’t.”

“Maybe it was Alleline.”

“I expect so.”

“Any time,” said Westerby again. “Sorry, you know. Love to Ann.” He hesitated.

“Come on, Jerry, out with it,” said Smiley.

“Toby had some bad story about her and Bill the Brain. I told him to stuff it up his shirt-front. Nothing to it, is there?”

“Thanks, Jerry. So long. How.”

“I knew there wasn’t,” said Jerry, very pleased, and lifting his finger to denote the feather, padded off into his own reserves.

29

Waiting that night, alone in bed at the Islay but not yet able to sleep, Smiley once more took up the file that Lacon had given him in Mendel’s house. It dated from the late fifties, when the Circus, like other Whitehall departments, was being pressed by the competition to take a hard look at the loyalty of its staff. Most of the entries were routine: telephone intercepts, surveillance reports, endless interviews with dons, friends, and nominated referees. But one document held Smiley like a magnet; he could not get enough of it. It was a letter, entered baldly on the index as “Haydon to Fanshawe, February 3, 1937.” More precisely it was a handwritten letter, from the undergraduate Bill Haydon to his tutor Fanshawe, a Circus talent-spotter, introducing the young Jim Prideaux as a suitable candidate for recruitment to British intelligence. It was prefaced by a wry explication de texte. The Optimates were “an upper-class Christ Church Club, mainly old Etonian,” wrote the unknown author. Fanshawe (P.R. de T. Fanshawe, Légion d’Honneur, O.B.E., Personal File so-and-so) was its founder; Haydon (countless cross-references) was in that year its leading light. The political complexion of the Optimates, to whom Haydon’s father had also in his day belonged, was unashamedly conservative. Fanshawe, now long dead, was a passionate Empire man and “the Optimates were his private selection tank for The Great Game,” ran the preface. Curiously enough, Smiley dimly remembered Fanshawe from his own day: a thin eager man with rimless spectacles, a Neville Chamberlain umbrella, and an unnatural flush to his cheeks as if he were still teething. Steed-Asprey called him the fairy godfather.

“My dear Fan, I suggest you stir yourself to make a few enquiries about the young gentleman whose name is appended on the attached fragment of human skin.” [Inquisitors’ superfluous note: Prideaux] “You probably know Jim—if you know him at all—as an athleticus of some accomplishment. What you do not know but ought to is that he is no mean linguist nor yet a total idiot either . . .” [Here followed a biographical summary of surprising accuracy: . . . Lycée Lakanal in Paris, put down for Eton, never went there, Jesuit day-school Prague, two semesters Strasbourg, parents in European banking, small aristo, live apart . . . ]

“Hence our Jim’s wide familiarity with parts foreign, and his rather parentless look, which I find irresistible. By the way: though he is made up of all different bits of Europe, make no mistake: the completed version is devoutly our own. At present, he is a bit of a striver and a puzzler, for he has just noticed that there is a World Beyond the Touchline and that world is me.

“But you must first hear how I met him.

“As you know, it is my habit (and your command) now and then to put on Arab costume and go down to the bazaars, there to sit among the great unwashed and give ear to the word of their prophets, that I may in due course better confound them. The juju man en vogue that evening came from the bosom of Mother Russia herself: one Academician Khlebnikov, presently attached to the Soviet Embassy in London, a jolly, rather infectious little fellow, who managed some quite witty things among the usual nonsense. The bazaar in question was a debating club called the Populars—our rival, dear Fan, and well known to you from other forays I have occasionally made. After the sermon a wildly proletarian coffee was served, to the accompaniment of a dreadfully democratic bun, and I noticed this large fellow sitting alone at the back of the room, apparently too shy to mingle. His face was familiar from the cricket field; it turns out we both played in some silly scratch team without exchanging a word. I don’t quite know how to describe him. He has it, Fan. I am serious now.”

Here the handwriting, till now ill-at-ease, spread out as the writer got into his stride:

“He has that heavy quiet that commands. Hard-headed, quite literally. One of those shrewd quiet ones that lead the team without anyone noticing. Fan, you know how hard it is for me to act. You have to remind me all the time, intellectually remind me, that unless I sample life’s dangers I shall never know its mysteries. But Jim acts from instinct . . . he is functional . . . He’s my other half; between us we’d make one marvellous man, except that neither of us can sing. And, Fan, you know that feeling when you just have to go out and find someone new or the world will die on you?”

The writing steadied again.

“ ‘Yavas Lagloo,’ says I, which I understand is Russian for meet me in the woodshed or something similar, and he says ‘Oh, hullo,’ which I think he would have said to the Archangel Gabriel if he’d happened to be passing.

“ ‘What is your dilemma?’ says I.

“ ‘I haven’t got one,’ says he, after about an hour’s thought.

“ ‘Then what are you doing here? If you haven’t a dilemma, how did you get in?’

“So he gives a big placid grin and we saunter over to the great Khlebnikov, shake his tiny paw for a while, then toddle back to my rooms. Where we drink. And drink. And, Fan, he drank everything in sight. Or perhaps I did, I forget. And come the dawn, do you know what we did? I will tell you, Fan. We walked solemnly down to the Parks, I sit on a bench with a stop-watch, and big Jim gets into his running kit and lopes twenty circuits. Twenty. I was quite exhausted.

“We can come to you any time; he asks nothing better than to be in my company or that of my wicked, divine friends. In short, he has appointed me his Mephistopheles and I am vastly tickled by the compliment. By the by, he is virgin, about eight feet tall, and built by the same firm that did Stonehenge. Do not be alarmed.”

The file died again. Sitting up, Smiley turned the yellowed pages impatiently, looking for stronger meat. The tutors of both men aver (twenty years later) that it is inconceivable that the relationship between the two was “more than purely friendly” . . . Haydon’s evidence was never called . . . Jim’s tutor speaks of him as “intellectually omnivorous after long starvation”—dismisses any suggestion that he was “pink.” The confrontation, which takes place at Sarratt, begins with long apologies, particularly in view of Jim’s superb war record. Jim’s answers breathe a pleasing straightforwardness after the extravagance of Haydon’s letter. One representative of the competition present, but his voice is seldom heard. No, Jim never again met Khlebnikov or anyone representing himself as his emissary . . . No, he never spoke to him but on that one occasion. No, he had no other contact with Communists or Russians at that time; he could not remember the name of a single member of the Populars . . .

Q: (Alleline) Shouldn’t think that keeps you awake, does it?

A: As a matter of fact, no. (Laughter)

Yes, he had been a member of the Populars just as he had been a member of his college drama club, the philatelic society, the modern language society, the Union and the historical society, the ethical society and the Rudolf Steiner study group . . . It was a way of getting to hear interesting lectures, and of meeting people, particularly the second. No, he had never distributed left-wing literature, though he did for a while take Soviet Weekly . . . No, he had never paid dues to any political party, at Oxford or later; as a matter of fact, he had never even used his vote . . . One reason why he joined so many clubs at Oxford was that after a messy education abroad he had no natural English contemporaries from school . . .

By now the inquisitors are one and all on Jim’s side; everyone is on the same side against the competition and its bureaucratic meddling.

Q: (Alleline) As a matter of interest, since you were overseas so much, do you mind telling us where you learned your off-drive? (Laughter)

A: Oh, I had an uncle, actually, with a place outside Paris. He was cricket mad. Had a net and all the equipment. When I went there for holidays, he bowled at me non-stop.

[Inquisitors’ note: Comte Henri de Sainte-Yvonne, dec. 1942, P.F. AF64-7.] End of interview. Competition representative would like to call Haydon as a witness but Haydon is abroad and not available. Fixture postponed sine die . . .

Smiley was nearly asleep as he read the last entry on the file, tossed in haphazard long after Jim’s formal clearance had come through from the competition. It was a cutting from an Oxford newspaper of the day giving a review of Haydon’s one-man exhibition in June, 1938, headed “Real or Surreal? An Oxford Eye.”

Having torn the exhibition to shreds, the critic ended on this gleeful note: “We understand that the distinguished Mr. James Prideaux took time off from his cricket in order to help hang the canvases. He would have done better, in our opinion, to remain in the Banbury Road. However, since his role of Dobbin to the arts was the only heartfelt thing about the whole occasion, perhaps we had better not sneer too loud . . .”

He dozed, his mind a controlled clutter of doubts, suspicions, and certainties. He thought of Ann, and in his tiredness cherished her profoundly, longing to protect her frailty with his own. Like a young man, he whispered her name aloud and imagined her beautiful face bowing over him in the half-light, while Mrs. Pope Graham yelled prohibition through the keyhole. He thought of Tarr and Irina, and pondered uselessly on love and loyalty; he thought of Jim Prideaux and what tomorrow held. He was aware of a modest sense of approaching conquest. He had been driven a long way; he had sailed backwards and forwards. Tomorrow, if he was lucky, he might spot land: a peaceful little desert island, for instance. Somewhere Karla had never heard of. Just for himself and Ann. He fell asleep.

PART III

30

In Jim Prideaux’s world, Thursday had gone along like any other, except that some time in the small hours of the morning the wounds in his shoulder-bone started leaking, he supposed because of the inter-house run on Wednesday afternoon. He was woken by the pain, and by the draught on the wet of his back where the discharge flowed. The other time this happened he had driven himself to Taunton General, but the nurses took one look at him and slapped him into emergency to wait for doctor somebody and an X-ray, so he filched his clothes and left. He’d done with hospitals and he’d done with medicos. English hospitals, other hospitals—Jim had done with them. They called the discharge a “track.”

He couldn’t reach the wound to treat it, but after last time he had hacked himself triangles of lint and stitched strings to the corners. Having put these handy on the draining board and prepared the hibitane, he heated hot water, added half a packet of salt, and gave himself an improvised shower, crouching to get his back under the jet. He soaked the lint in the hibitane, flung it across his back, strapped it from the front, and lay face down on the bunk with a vodka handy. The pain eased and a drowsiness came over him, but he knew if he gave way to it he would sleep all day, so he took the vodka bottle to the window and sat at the table correcting Five B French while Thursday’s dawn slipped into the Dip and the rooks started their clatter in the elms.

Sometimes he thought of the wound as a memory he couldn’t keep down. He tried his damnedest to patch it over and forget, but even his damnedest wasn’t always enough.

He took the correcting slowly because he liked it, and because correcting kept his mind in the right places. At six-thirty, seven, he was done so he put on some old flannel bags and a sports coat and walked quietly down to the church, which was never locked. There he knelt a moment in the centre aisle of the Curtois antechapel, which was a family monument to the dead from two wars, and seldom visited by anyone. The cross on the little altar had been carved by sappers at Verdun. Still kneeling, Jim groped cautiously under the pew until his fingertips discovered the line of several pieces of adhesive tape, and following these, a casing of cold metal. His devotions over, he bashed up Combe Lane to the hilltop, jogging a bit to get a sweat running, because the warm did him wonders while it lasted, and rhythm soothed his vigilance.

After his sleepless night and the early-morning vodka, he was feeling a bit light-headed, so when he saw the ponies down the combe, gawping at him with their fool faces, he yelled at them in bad Somerset—“Git ’an there! Damned old fools, take your silly eyes off me! ”—before pounding down the lane again for coffee, and a change of bandage.

First lesson after prayers was Five B French, and there Jim all but lost his temper: doled out a silly punishment to damn-fool Clements, draper’s son; had to take it back at the end of class. In the common-room he went through another routine, of the sort he had followed in the church: quickly, mindlessly, no fumble and out. It was a simple enough notion, the mail check, but it worked. He’d never heard of anyone else who used it, among the pros, but then pros don’t talk about their game. “See it this way,” he would have said. “If the opposition is watching you, it’s certain to be watching your mail, because mail’s the easiest watch in the game—easier still if the opposition is the home side and has the co-operation of the postal service. So what do you do? Every week, from the same post-box, at the same time, at the same rate, you post one envelope to yourself and a second to an innocent party at the same address. Shove in a bit of trash—charity Christmas-card literature, come-on from local supermarket—be sure to seal envelope, stand back and compare times of arrival. If your letter turns up later than the other feller’s, you’ve just felt someone’s hot breath on you—in this case, Toby’s.”

Jim called it, in his odd, chipped vocabulary, water-testing, and once again the temperature was unobjectionable. The two letters clocked in together, but Jim arrived too late to pinch back the one addressed to Marjoribanks, whose turn it was to act as unwitting running mate. So, having pocketed his own, Jim snorted at the Daily Telegraph while Marjoribanks, with an irritable “Oh, to hell,” tore up a printed invitation to join the Bible Reading Fellowship. From there, school routine carried him again till junior rugger versus St. Ermin’s, which he was billed to referee. It was a fast game and when it was over his back acted up again, so he drank vodka till first bell, which he’d promised to take for young Elwes. He couldn’t remember why he’d promised, but the younger staff and specially the married ones relied on him a lot for odd jobs and he let it happen. The bell was an old ship’s tocsin, something Thursgood’s father had dug up and now part of the tradition. As Jim rang it, he was aware of little Bill Roach standing right beside him, peering up at him with a white smile, wanting his attention, as he wanted it half a dozen times each day.

“Hullo, there, Jumbo, what’s your headache this time?”

“Sir, please, sir.”

“Come on, Jumbo, out with it.”

“Sir, there’s someone asking where you live, sir,” said Roach.

Jim put down the bell.

“What sort of someone, Jumbo? Come on, I won’t bite you, come on, hey . . . hey! What sort of someone? Man someone? Woman? Juju man? Hey! Come on, old feller,” he said softly, crouching to Roach’s height. “No need to cry. What’s the matter, then? Got a temperature?” He pulled a handkerchief from his sleeve. “What sort of someone?” he repeated in the same low voice.

“He asked at Mrs. McCullum’s. He said he was a friend. Then he got back into his car; it’s parked in the churchyard, sir.” A fresh gust of tears. “He’s just sitting in it.”

“Get the hell away, damn you!” Jim called to a bunch of seniors grinning in a doorway. “Get the hell!” He went back to Roach. “Tall friend?” he asked softly. “Sloppy tall kind of fellow, Jumbo? Eyebrows and a stoop? Thin feller? Bradbury, come here and stop gawping! Stand by to take Jumbo up to Matron! Thin feller?” he asked again, very steady.

But Roach had run out of words. He had no memory any more, no sense of size or perspective; his faculty of selection in the adult world had gone. Big men, small men, old, young, crooked, straight—they were a single army of indistinguishable dangers. To say no to Jim was more than he could bear; to say yes was to shoulder the whole awful responsibility of disappointing him. He saw Jim’s eyes on him; he saw the smile go out and he felt the merciful touch of a big hand upon his arm.

“Attaboy, Jumbo. Nobody ever watched like you, did they?”

Laying his head hopelessly against Bradbury’s shoulder, Bill Roach closed his eyes. When he opened them, he saw through his tears that Jim was already halfway up the staircase.

Jim felt calm; almost easy. For days he had known there was someone. That also was part of his routine: to watch the places where the watchers asked. The church, where the ebb and flow of the local population is a ready topic; county hall, register of electors; tradesmen, if they kept customer accounts; pubs, if the quarry didn’t use them. In England, he knew these were the natural traps that watchers automatically patrolled before they closed on you. And, sure enough, in Taunton two days ago, chatting pleasantly with the assistant librarian, Jim had come across the footprint he was looking for. A stranger, apparently down from London, had been interested in village wards; yes, a political gentleman—well, more in the line of political research, he was—professional, you could tell—and one of the things he had wanted—fancy that, now—was the up-to-date record of Jim’s very village—yes, the voters’ list—as they were thinking of making a door-to-door survey of a really out-of-the-way community, specially new immigrants . . . Yes, fancy that, Jim agreed, and, from then on, made his dispositions. He bought railway tickets to places—Taunton to Exeter, Taunton to London, Taunton to Swindon, valid one month—because he knew that if he were on the run again, tickets would be hard to come by. He had uncached his old identities and his gun, and hid them handily above ground; he dumped a suitcase full of clothes in the boot of the Alvis, and kept the tank full. These precautions eased his fears a little, made sleep a possibility; or would have done, before his back.

“Sir, who won, sir?”

Prebble, a new boy, in dressing gown and toothpaste, on his way to surgery. Sometimes boys spoke to Jim for no reason; his size and crookedness were a challenge.

“Sir, the match, sir, versus Saint Ermin’s.”

“Saint Vermin’s,” another boy piped. “Yes, sir, who won, actually?”

“Sir, they did, sir,” Jim barked. “As you’d have known, sir, if you’d been watching, sir,” and swinging an enormous fist at them in a slow feinted punch, he propelled both boys across the corridor to Matron’s dispensary.

“Night, sir.”

“Night, you toads,” Jim sang, and stepped the other way into the sick-bay for a view of the church and the cemetery. The sick-bay was unlit; it had a look and a stink he hated. Twelve boys lay in the gloom, dozing between supper and temperatures.

“Who’s that?” asked a hoarse voice.

“Rhino,” said another. “Hey, Rhino, who won against Saint Vermin’s?”

To call Jim by his nickname was insubordinate, but boys in sick-bay feel free from discipline.

“Rhino? Who the hell’s Rhino? Don’t know him. Not a name to me,” Jim snorted, squeezing between two beds. “Put that torch away—not allowed. Damn walk-over, that’s who won. Eighteen to nothing for Vermin’s.” That window went down almost to the floor. An old fireguard protected it from boys. “Too much damn fumble in the three-quarter line,” he muttered, peering down.

“I hate rugger,” said a boy called Stephen.

The blue Ford was parked in the shadow of the church, close in under the elms. From the ground floor it would have been out of sight but it didn’t look hidden. Jim stood very still, a little back from the window, studying it for telltale signs. The light was fading fast, but his eyesight was good and he knew what to look for: discreet aerial, second inside mirror for the legman, burn marks under the exhaust. Sensing the tension in him, the boys became facetious.

“Sir, is it a bird, sir? Is she any good, sir?”

“Sir, are we on fire?”

“Sir, what are her legs like?”

“Gosh, sir, don’t say it’s Miss Aaronson?” At this everyone started giggling, because Miss Aaronson was old and ugly.

“Shut up,” Jim snapped, quite angry. “Rude pigs, shut up.” Downstairs in assembly, Thursgood was calling senior roll before prep.

Abercrombie? Sir. Astor? Sir. Blakeney? Sick, sir.

Still watching, Jim saw the car door open and George Smiley climb cautiously out, wearing a heavy overcoat.

Matron’s footsteps sounded in the corridor. He heard the squeak of her rubber heels and the rattle of thermometers in a paste pot.

“My good Rhino, whatever are you doing in my sick-bay? And close that curtain, you bad boy—you’ll have the whole lot of them dying of pneumonia. William Merridew, sit up at once.”

Smiley was locking the car door. He was alone and he carried nothing, not even a briefcase.

“They’re screaming for you in Grenville, Rhino.”

“Going, gone,” Jim retorted briskly and with a jerky “Night, all,” he humped his way to Grenville dormitory, where he was pledged to finish a story by John Buchan. Reading aloud, he noticed that there were certain sounds he had trouble pronouncing; they caught somewhere in his throat. He knew he was sweating, he guessed his back was seeping, and by the time he had finished there was a stiffness round his jaw that was not just from reading aloud. But all these things were small symptoms beside the rage that was mounting in him as he plunged into the freezing night air. For a moment, on the overgrown terrace, he hesitated, staring at the church. It would take him three minutes, less, to untape the gun from underneath the pew, shove it into the waistband of his trousers, left side, butt inward to the groin . . .

But instinct advised him “no,” so he set course directly for the trailer, singing “Hey, diddle-diddle” as loud as his tuneless voice would carry.

31

Inside the motel room, the state of restlessness was constant. Even when the traffic outside went through one of its rare lulls, the windows continued vibrating. In the bathroom the tooth glasses also vibrated, while from either wall and above them they could hear music, thumps, and bits of conversation or laughter. When a car arrived in the forecourt, the slam of the door seemed to happen inside the room, and the footsteps too. Of the furnishings, everything matched. The yellow chairs matched the yellow pictures and the yellow carpet. The candlewick bedspreads matched the orange paintwork on the doors, and by coincidence the label on the vodka bottle. Smiley had arranged things properly. He had spaced the chairs and put the vodka on the low table, and now as Jim sat glaring at him he extracted a plate of smoked salmon from the tiny refrigerator, and brown bread already buttered. His mood in contrast to Jim’s was noticeably bright, his movements swift and purposeful.

“I thought we should at least be comfortable,” he said, with a short smile, setting things busily on the table. “When do you have to be at school again? Is there a particular time?” Receiving no answer, he sat down. “How do you like teaching? I seem to remember you had a spell of it after the war—is that right? Before they hauled you back? Was that also a prep school? I don’t think I knew.”

“Look at the file,” Jim barked. “Don’t you come here playing cat-and-mouse with me, George Smiley. If you want to know things, read my file.”

Reaching across the table, Smiley poured two drinks and handed one to Jim.

“Your personal file at the Circus?”

“Get it from housekeepers. Get it from Control.”

“I suppose I should,” said Smiley doubtfully. “The trouble is Control’s dead and I was thrown out long before you came back. Didn’t anyone bother to tell you that when they got you home?”

A softening came over Jim’s face at this, and he made in slow motion one of those gestures which so amused the boys at Thursgood’s. “Dear God,” he muttered, “so Control’s gone,” and passed his left hand over the fangs of his moustache, then upward to his moth-eaten hair. “Poor old devil,” he muttered. “What did he die of, George? Heart? Heart kill him?”

“They didn’t even tell you this at the debriefing?” Smiley asked.

At the mention of a debriefing, Jim stiffened and his glare returned.

“Yes,” said Smiley. “It was his heart.”

“Who got the job?”

Smiley laughed. “My goodness, Jim, what did you all talk about at Sarratt, if they didn’t even tell you that?”

“God damn it, who got the job? Wasn’t you, was it—threw you out! Who got the job, George?”

“Alleline got it,” said Smiley, watching Jim very carefully, noting how the right forearm rested motionless across the knees. “Who did you want to get it? Have a candidate, did you, Jim?” And after a long pause: “And they didn’t tell you what happened to the Aggravate network, by any chance? To Pribyl, to his wife, and brother-in-law? Or the Plato network? Landkron, Eva Krieglova, Hanka Bilova? You recruited some of those, didn’t you, in the old days before Roy Bland? Old Landkron even worked for you in the war.”

There was something terrible just then about the way Jim would not move forward and could not move back. His red face was twisted with the strain of indecision and the sweat had gathered in studs over his shaggy ginger eyebrows.

“God damn you, George, what the devil do you want? I’ve drawn a line. That’s what they told me to do. Draw a line, make a new life, forget the whole thing.”

“Which they is this, Jim? Roy? Bill, Percy?” He waited. “Did they tell you what happened to Max, whoever they were? Max is all right, by the way.” Rising, he briskly refreshed Jim’s drink, then sat again.

“All right, come on, so what’s happened to the networks?”

“They’re blown. The story is you blew them to save your own skin. I don’t believe it. But I have to know what happened.” He went on, “I know Control made you promise by all that’s holy, but that’s finished. I know you’ve been questioned to death and I know you’ve pushed some things so far down you can hardly find them any more or tell the difference between truth and cover. I know you’ve tried to draw a line under it and say it didn’t happen. I’ve tried that, too. Well, after tonight you can draw your line. I’ve brought a letter from Lacon and if you want to ring him he’s standing by. I don’t want to silence you. I’d rather you talked. Why didn’t you come and see me at home when you got back? You could have done. You tried to see me before you left, so why not when you got back? Wasn’t just the rules that kept you away.”

“Didn’t anyone get out?” Jim said.

“No. They seem to have been shot.”

They had telephoned Lacon and now Smiley sat alone sipping his drink. From the bathroom he could hear the sound of running taps and grunts as Jim sluiced water in his face.

“For God’s sake, let’s get somewhere we can breathe,” Jim whispered when he came back, as if it were a condition of his talking. Smiley picked up the bottle and walked beside him as they crossed the tarmac to the car.

They drove for twenty minutes, Jim at the wheel. When they parked, they were on the plateau, this morning’s hilltop free of fog, and a long view down the valley. Scattered lights reached into the distance. Jim sat as still as iron, right shoulder high and hands hung down, gazing through the misted windscreen at the shadow of the hills. The sky was light and Jim’s face was cut sharp against it. Smiley kept his first questions short. The anger had left Jim’s voice and little by little he spoke with greater ease. Once, discussing Control’s tradecraft, he even laughed, but Smiley never relaxed; he was as cautious as if he were leading a child across the street. When Jim ran on, or bridled, or showed a flash of temper, Smiley gently drew him back until they were level again, moving at the same pace and in the same direction. When Jim hesitated, Smiley coaxed him forward over the obstacle. At first, by a mixture of instinct and deduction, Smiley actually fed Jim his own story.

For Jim’s first briefing by Control, Smiley suggested, they had made a rendezvous outside the Circus? They had. Where? At a service flat in St. James’s, a place proposed by Control. Was anyone else present? No one. And to get in touch with Jim in the first place, Control had used MacFadean, his personal janitor? Yes, old Mac came over on the Brixton shuttle with a note asking Jim for a meeting that night. Jim was to tell Mac yes or no and give him back the note. He was on no account to use the telephone, even the internal line, to discuss the arrangement. Jim had told Mac yes and arrived at seven.

“First, I suppose, Control cautioned you?”

“Told me not to trust anyone.”

“Did he name particular people?”

“Later,” said Jim. “Not at first. At first, he just said trust nobody. Specially nobody in the mainstream. George?”

“Yes.”

“They were shot all right, were they? Landkron, Krieglova, Bilova, the Pribyls? Straight shooting?”

“The secret police rolled up both networks the same night. After that no one knows, but next of kin were told they were dead. That usually means they are.”

To their left, a line of pine trees like a motionless army climbed out of the valley.

“And then, I suppose, Control asked you what Czech identities you had running for you,” Smiley resumed. “Is that right?”

He had to repeat the question.

“I told him Hajek,” said Jim finally. “Vladimir Hajek, Czech journalist based on Paris. Control asked me how much longer the papers were good for. ‘You never know,’ I said. ‘Sometimes they’re blown after one trip.’ ” His voice went suddenly louder, as if he had lost his hold on it. “Deaf as an adder, Control was, when he wanted to be.”

“So then he told you what he wanted you to do,” Smiley suggested.

“First, we discussed deniability. He said if I was caught, I should keep Control out of it. A scalp-hunter ploy, bit of private enterprise. Even at the time I thought, Who the hell will ever believe that? Every word he spoke was letting blood,” said Jim. “All through the briefing, I could feel his resistance to telling me anything. He didn’t want me to know but he wanted me well briefed. ‘I’ve had an offer of service,’ Control says. ‘Highly placed official, cover name Testify.’ ‘Czech official?’ I ask. ‘On the military side,’ he says. ‘You’re a military minded man, Jim, you two should hit it off pretty well.’ That’s how it went, the whole damn way. I thought, If you don’t want to tell me, don’t, but stop dithering.”

After more circling, said Jim, Control announced that Testify was a Czech general of artillery. His name was Stevcek; he was known as a pro-Soviet hawk in the Prague defence hierarchy, whatever that was worth; he had worked in Moscow on liaison and was one of the very few Czechs the Russians trusted. Stevcek had conveyed to Control, through an intermediary whom Control had personally interviewed in Austria, his desire to talk to a ranking officer of the Circus on matters of mutual interest. The emissary must be a Czech speaker, somebody able to take decisions. On Friday, October 20th, Stevcek would be inspecting the weapon research station at Tisnov, near Brno, about a hundred miles north of the Austrian border. From there he would be visiting a hunting-lodge for the weekend, alone. It was a place high up in the forests not far from Racice. He would be willing to receive an emissary there on the evening of Saturday, the twenty-first. He would also supply an escort to and from Brno.

Smiley asked, “Did Control have any suggestions about Stevcek’s motive?”

“A girlfriend,” Jim said. “Student he was going with, having a last spring, Control said; twenty years’ age difference between them. She was shot during the uprising of summer ’68. Till then, Stevcek had managed to bury his anti-Russian feelings in favour of his career. The girl’s death put an end to all that: he was out for their blood. For four years he’d lain low acting friendly and salting away information that would really hurt them. Soon as we gave him assurances and fixed the trade routes, he was ready to sell.”

“Had Control checked any of this?”

“What he could. Stevcek was well enough documented. Hungry desk general with a long list of staff appointments. Technocrat. When he wasn’t on courses, he was sharpening his teeth abroad: Warsaw, Moscow, Peking for a year, spell of military attaché in Africa, Moscow again. Young for his rank.”

“Did Control tell you what you were to expect in the way of information?”

“Defence material. Rocketry. Ballistics.”

“Anything else?” said Smiley, passing the bottle.

“Bit of politics.”

“Anything else?”

Not for the first time, Smiley had the distinct sense of stumbling not on Jim’s ignorance but on the relic of a willed determination not to remember. In the dark, Jim Prideaux’s breathing became suddenly deep and greedy. He had lifted his hands to the top of the wheel and was resting his chin on them, peering blankly at the frosted windscreen.

“How long were they in the bag before being shot?” Jim demanded to know.

“I’m afraid, a lot longer than you were,” Smiley confessed.

“Holy God,” said Jim. With a handkerchief taken from his sleeve, he wiped away the perspiration and whatever else was glistening on his face.

“The intelligence Control was hoping to get out of Stevcek,” Smiley prompted, ever so softly.

“That’s what they asked me at the interrogation.”

“At Sarratt?”

Jim shook his head. “Over there.” He nodded his untidy head towards the hills. “They knew it was Control’s operation from the start. There was nothing I could say to persuade them it was mine. They laughed.”

Once again Smiley waited patiently till Jim was ready to go on.

“Stevcek,” said Jim. “Control had this bee in his bonnet: Stevcek would provide the answer, Stevcek would provide the key. ‘What key?’ I asked. ‘What key?’ Had his bag, that old brown music case. Pulled out charts, annoted all in his own handwriting. Charts in coloured inks, crayons. ‘Your visual aid,’ he says. ‘This is the fellow you’ll be meeting.’ Stevcek’s career plotted year by year: took me right through it. Military academies, medals, wives. ‘He’s fond of horses,’ he says. ‘You used to ride yourself, Jim. Something else in common—remember it.’ I thought, That’ll be fun, sitting in Czecho with the dogs after me, talking about breaking thoroughbred mares.” He laughed a little strangely, so Smiley laughed, too.

“The appointments in red were for Stevcek’s Soviet liaison work. Green were his intelligence work. Stevcek had had a finger in everything. Fourth man in Czech army intelligence, chief boffin on weaponry, secretary to the national internal security committee, military counsellor of some sort to the Praesidium, Anglo-American desk in the Czech military intelligence set-up. Then Control comes to this patch in the mid-sixties, Stevcek’s second spell in Moscow, and it’s marked green and red fifty-fifty. Ostensibly, Stevcek was attached to the Warsaw Pact Liaison staff as a colonel general, says Control, but that was just cover. ‘He’d nothing to do with the Warsaw Pact Liaison staff. His real job was in Moscow Centre’s England section. He operated under the workname of Minin,’ he says. ‘His job was dovetailing Czech efforts with Centre’s. This is the treasure,’ Control says. ‘What Stevcek really wants to sell us is the name of Moscow Centre’s mole inside the Circus.’ ”

It might be only one word, Smiley thought, remembering Max, and felt again that sudden wave of apprehension. In the end, he knew, that was all it would be: a name for the mole Gerald, a scream in the dark.

“ ‘There’s a rotten apple, Jim,’ Control said, ‘and he’s infecting all the others.’ ” Jim was going straight on. His voice had stiffened, his manner also. “Kept talking about elimination, how he’d backtracked and researched and was nearly there. There were five possibilities, he said. Don’t ask me how he dug them up. ‘It’s one of the top five,’ he says. ‘Five fingers to a hand.’ He gave me a drink and we sat there like a pair of schoolboys making up a code, me and Control. We used Tinker, Tailor. We sat there in the flat putting it together, drinking that cheap Cyprus sherry he always gave. If I couldn’t get out, if there was any fumble after I’d met Stevcek, if I had to go underground, I must get the one word to him, even if I had to go to Prague and chalk it on the Embassy door or ring the Prague resident and yell it at him down the phone. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Sailor. Alleline was Tinker, Haydon was Tailor, Bland was Soldier, and Toby Esterhase was Poorman. We dropped Sailor because it rhymed with Tailor. You were Beggarman,” Jim said.

“Was I, now? And how did you take to it, Jim, to Control’s theory? How did the idea strike you, over-all?”

“Damn silly. Poppycock.”

“Why?”

“Just damn silly,” he repeated in a tone of military stubbornness. “Think of any one of you—mole—mad!”

“But did you believe it?”

“No! Lord alive, man, why do you—”

“Why not? Rationally we always accepted that sooner or later it would happen. We always warned one another: be on your guard. We’ve turned up enough members of other outfits: Russians, Poles, Czechs, French. Even the odd American. What’s so special about the British, all of a sudden?”

Sensing Jim’s antagonism, Smiley opened his door and let the cold air pour in.

“How about a stroll?” he said. “No point in being cooped up when we can walk around.”

With movement, as Smiley had anticipated, Jim found a new fluency of speech.

They were on the western rim of the plateau, with only a few trees standing and several lying felled. A frosted bench was offered, but they ignored it. There was no wind, the stars were very clear, and as Jim took up his story they went on walking side by side, Jim adjusting always to Smiley’s pace, now away from the car, now back again. Occasionally they drew up, shoulder to shoulder, facing down the valley.

First Jim described his recruitment of Max and the manoeuvres he went through in order to disguise his mission from the rest of the Circus. He let it leak that he had a tentative lead to a high-stepping Soviet cypher clerk in Stockholm, and booked himself to Copenhagen in his old workname Ellis. Instead, he flew to Paris, switched to his Hajek papers, and landed by scheduled flight at Prague airport at ten on Saturday morning. He went through the barriers like a song, confirmed the time of his train at the terminus, then took a walk because he had a couple of hours to kill and thought he might watch his back a little before he left for Brno. That autumn there had been freak bad weather. There was snow on the ground and more falling.

In Czecho, said Jim, surveillance was not usually a problem. The security services knew next to nothing about street-watching, probably because no administration in living memory had ever had to feel shy about it. The tendency, said Jim, was still to throw cars and pavement artists around like Al Capone, and that was what Jim was looking for: black Skodas and trios of squat men in trilbies. In the cold, spotting these things is marginally harder because the traffic is slow, the people walk faster, and everyone is muffled to the nose. All the same, till he reached Masaryk Station—or Central, as they’re pleased to call it these days—he had no worries. But at Masaryk, said Jim, he got a whisper, more instinct than fact, about two women who’d bought tickets ahead of him.

Here, with the dispassionate ease of a professional, Jim went back over the ground. In a covered shopping arcade beside Wenceslaus Square he had been overtaken by three women, of whom the one in the middle was pushing a pram. The woman nearest the curb carried a red plastic handbag and the woman on the inside was walking a dog on a lead. Ten minutes later two other women came towards him, arm in arm, both in a hurry, and it crossed his mind that if Toby Esterhase had had the running of the job, an arrangement like this would be his handwriting; quick profile changes from the pram, backup cars standing off with short-wave radio or bleep, with a second team lying back in case the forward party overran. At Masaryk, looking at the two women ahead of him in the ticket queue, Jim was faced with the knowledge that it was happening now. There is one garment that a watcher has neither time nor inclination to change, least of all in sub-Arctic weather, and that is his shoes. Of the two pairs offered for his inspection in the ticket queue, Jim recognised one: furlined plastic, black, with zips on the outside and soles of a thick brown composition that sang slightly in the snow. He had seen them once already that morning, in the Sterba passage, worn with different top clothes by the woman who had pushed past him with the pram. From then on, Jim didn’t suspect. He knew, just as Smiley would have known.

At the station bookstall, Jim bought himself a Rude Pravo and boarded the Brno train. If they had wanted to arrest him, they would have done so by now. They must be after the branch lines: they were following Jim in order to house his contacts. There was no point in looking for reasons, but Jim guessed that the Hajek identity was blown and they’d primed the trap the moment he booked himself on the plane. As long as they didn’t know he had flushed them, he still had the edge, said Jim; and for a moment Smiley was back in occupied Germany, in his own time as a field agent, living with terror in his mouth, naked to every stranger’s glance.

He was supposed to catch the thirteen-eight arriving Brno sixteen-twenty-seven. It was cancelled, so he took some wonderful stopping train, a special for the football match, which called at every other lamp-post, and each time Jim reckoned he could pick out the hoods. The quality was variable. At Chocen, a one-horse place if ever he saw one, he got out and bought himself a sausage, and there were no fewer than five, all men, spread down the tiny platform with their hands in their pockets, pretending to chat to one another and making damn fools of themselves.

“If there’s one thing that distinguishes a good watcher from a bad one,” said Jim, “it’s the gentle art of doing damn all convincingly.”

At Svitavy two men and a woman entered his carriage and talked about the big match. After a while Jim joined the conversation; he had been reading up the form in his newspaper. It was a club replay, and everyone was going crazy about it. By Brno, nothing more had happened, so he got out and sauntered through shops and crowded areas where they had to stay close for fear of losing him.

He wanted to lull them, demonstrate to them that he suspected nothing. He knew now that he was the target of what Toby would call a grand-slam operation. On foot they were working teams of seven. The cars changed so often he couldn’t count them. The over-all direction came from a scruffy green van driven by a thug. The van had a loop aerial and a chalk star scrawled high on the back where no child could reach. The cars, where he picked them out, were declared to one another by a woman’s handbag on the gloveboard and a passenger sun visor turned down. He guessed there were other signs but those two were good enough for him. He knew from what Toby had told him that jobs like this could cost a hundred people and were unwieldy if the quarry bolted. Toby hated them for that reason.

There is one store in Brno main square that sells everything, said Jim. Shopping in Czecho is usually a bore because there are so few retail outlets for each state industry, but this place was new and quite impressive. He bought children’s toys, a scarf, some cigarettes, and tried on shoes. He guessed his watchers were still waiting for his clandestine contact. He stole a fur hat and a white plastic raincoat and a carrier bag to put them in. He loitered at the men’s department long enough to confirm that two women who formed the forward pair were still behind him but reluctant to come too close. He guessed they had signalled for men to take over, and were waiting. In the men’s lavatory he moved very fast. He pulled the white raincoat over his overcoat, stuffed the carrier bag into the pocket, and put on the fur hat. He abandoned his remaining parcels, then ran like a madman down the emergency staircase, smashed open a fire door, pelted down an alley, strolled up another, which was one-way, stuffed the white raincoat into the carrier bag, sauntered into another store, which was just closing, and there bought a black raincoat to replace the white one. Using the departing shoppers for cover, he squeezed into a crowded tram, stayed aboard till the last stop but one, walked for an hour, and made the fallback with Max to the minute.

Here he described his dialogue with Max and said they nearly had a standing fight.

Smiley asked, “It never crossed your mind to drop the job?”

“No. It did not,” Jim snapped, his voice rising in a threat.

“Although, right from the start, you thought the idea was poppycock?” There was nothing but deference in Smiley’s tone. No edge, no wish to score: only a wish to have the truth, clear under the night sky. “You just kept marching. You’d seen what was on your back, you thought the mission absurd, but you still went on, deeper and deeper into the jungle.”

“I did.”

“Had you perhaps changed your mind about the mission? Did curiosity draw you, after all—was that it? You wanted passionately to know who the mole was, for instance? I’m only speculating, Jim.”

“What’s the difference? What the hell does my motive matter in a damn mess like this?”

The half-moon was free of cloud and seemed very close. Jim sat on the bench. It was bedded in loose gravel, and while he spoke he occasionally picked up a pebble and flicked it backhand into the bracken. Smiley sat beside him, looking nowhere but at Jim. Once, to keep him company, he took a pull of vodka and thought of Tarr and Irina drinking on their hilltop in Hong Kong. It must be a habit of the trade, he decided: we talk better when there’s a view.

Through the window of the parked Fiat, said Jim, the word code passed off without a hitch. The driver was one of those stiff, muscle-bound Czech Magyars with an Edwardian moustache and a mouthful of garlic. Jim didn’t like him but he hadn’t expected to. The two back doors were locked and there was a row about where he should sit. The Magyar said it was insecure for Jim to be in the back. It was also undemocratic. Jim told him to go to hell. He asked Jim whether he had a gun, and Jim said no, which was not true, but if the Magyar didn’t believe him he didn’t dare say so. He asked whether Jim had brought instructions for the General. Jim said he had brought nothing. He had come to listen.

Jim felt a bit nervy, he said. They drove and the Magyar said his piece. When they reached the lodge, there would be no lights and no sign of life. The General would be inside. If there was any sign of life—a bicycle, a car, a light, a dog—if there was any sign that the hut was occupied, then the Magyar would go in first and Jim would wait in the car. Otherwise Jim should go in alone and the Slav would do the waiting. Was that clear?

Why didn’t they just go in together? Jim asked. Because the General didn’t want them to, said the Slav.

They drove for half an hour by Jim’s watch, heading north east at an average of thirty kilometres an hour. The track was winding and steep and tree-lined. There was no moon and he could see very little except occasionally against the skyline more forest, more hilltops. The snow had come from the north, he noticed; it was a point that was useful later. The track was clear but rutted by heavy lorries. They drove without lights. The Magyar had begun telling a dirty story and Jim guessed it was his way of being nervous. The smell of garlic was awful. He seemed to chew it all the time. Without warning, he cut the engine. They were running downhill, but more slowly. They had not quite stopped when the Magyar reached for the handbrake and Jim smashed his head against the window-post and took his gun. They were at the opening to a side-path. Thirty yards down this path lay a low wooden hut. There was no sign of life.

Jim told the Magyar what he would like him to do. He would like him to wear Jim’s fur hat and Jim’s coat and take the walk for him. He should take it slowly, keeping his hands linked behind his back, and walking at the centre of the path. If he failed to do either of those things, Jim would shoot him. When he reached the hut, he should go inside and explain to the General that Jim was indulging in an elementary precaution. Then he should walk back slowly, report to Jim that all was well, and that the General was ready to receive him. Or not, as the case might be.

The Magyar didn’t seem very happy about this but he didn’t have much choice. Before he got out, Jim made him turn the car round and face it down the path. If there was any monkey business, Jim explained, he would put on the headlights and shoot him along the beam, not once but several times, and not in the legs. The Magyar began his walk. He had nearly reached the hut when the whole area was floodlit: the hut, the path, and a large space around. Then a number of things happened at once. Jim didn’t see everything, because he was busy turning the car. He saw four men fall out of the trees, and so far as he could work out, one of them had sandbagged the Magyar. Shooting started but none of the four paid it any attention; they were standing back while somebody took photographs. The shooting seemed to be directed at the clear sky behind the floodlights. It was very theatrical. Flares exploded, Very lights went up, even tracers, and as Jim raced the Fiat down the track, he had the impression of leaving a military tattoo at its climax. He was almost clear—he really felt he was clear—when from the woods to his right someone opened up with a machine-gun at close quarters. The first burst shot off a back wheel and turned the car over. He saw the wheel fly over the bonnet as the car took to the ditch on the left. The ditch might have been ten feet deep but the snow let him down kindly. The car didn’t burn so he lay behind it and waited, facing across the track hoping to get a shot at the machine-gunner. The next burst came from behind him and threw him up against the car. The woods must have been crawling with troops. He knew that he had been hit twice. Both shots caught him in the right shoulder and it seemed amazing to him, as he lay there watching the tattoo, that they hadn’t taken off the arm. A klaxon sounded, maybe two or three. An ambulance rolled down the track and there was still enough shooting to frighten the game for years. The ambulance reminded him of those old Hollywood fire engines, it was so upright. A whole mock battle was taking place, yet the ambulance boys stood gazing at him without a care in the world. He was losing consciousness as he heard a second car arrive, and men’s voices, and more photographs were taken, this time of the right man. Someone gave orders, but he couldn’t tell what they were because they were given in Russian. His one thought, as they dumped him on the stretcher and the lights went out, concerned going back to London. He imagined himself in the St. James’s flat, with the coloured charts and the sheaf of notes, sitting in the armchair and explaining to Control how in their old age the two of them had walked into the biggest sucker’s punch in the history of the trade. His only consolation was that they had sandbagged the Magyar, but looking back Jim wished very much he’d broken his neck for him: it was a thing he could have managed very easily, and without compunction.

32

The describing of pain was to Jim an indulgence to be dispensed with. To Smiley, his stoicism had something awesome about it, the more so because he seemed unaware of it. The gaps in his story came mainly where he passed out, he explained. The ambulance drove him, so far as he could fathom, further north. He guessed this from the trees when they opened the door to let the doctor in: the snow was heaviest when he looked back. The surface was good and he guessed they were on the road to Hradec. The doctor gave him an injection; he came round in a prison hospital with barred windows high up, and three men watching him. He came round again after the operation, in a different cell with no windows at all, and he thought probably the first questioning took place there, about seventy-two hours after they’d patched him up, but time was already a problem and of course they’d taken away his watch.

They moved him a lot. Either to different rooms, depending on what they were going to do with him, or to other prisons, depending on who was questioning him. Sometimes they just moved to keep him awake, walking him down cell corridors at night. He was also moved in lorries, and once by a Czech transport plane, but he was trussed for the flight and hooded, and passed out soon after they took off. The interrogation which followed this flight was very long. Otherwise he had little sense of progression from one questioning to another and thinking didn’t get it any straighter for him—rather the reverse. The thing that was still strongest in his memory was the plan of campaign he formed while he waited for the first interrogation to begin. He knew silence would be impossible and that for his own sanity, or survival, there had to be a dialogue, and at the end of it they had to think he had told them what he knew, all he knew. Lying in hospital, he prepared his mind into lines of defence behind which, if he was lucky, he could fall back stage by stage until he had given the impression of total defeat. His forward line, he reckoned, and his most expendable, was the bare bones of Operation Testify. It was anyone’s guess whether Stevcek was a plant, or had been betrayed. But whichever was the case, one thing was certain: the Czechs knew more about Stevcek than Jim did. His first concession, therefore, would be the Stevcek story, since they had it already; but he would make them work for it. First he would deny everything and stick to his cover. After a fight, he would admit to being a British spy and give his workname Ellis, so that if they published it, the Circus would at least know he was alive and trying. He had little doubt that the elaborate trap and the photographs augured a lot of ballyhoo. After that, in accordance with his understanding with Control, he would describe the operation as his own show, mounted without the consent of his superiors, and calculated to win him favour. And he would bury, as deep as they could go and deeper, all thoughts of a spy inside the Circus.

“No mole,” said Jim, to the black outlines of the Quantocks. “No meeting with Control, no service flat in St. James’s.”

“No Tinker, Tailor.”

His second line of defence would be Max. He proposed at first to deny that he had brought a legman at all. Then he might say he had brought one but didn’t know his name. Then, because everyone likes a name, he would give them one: the wrong one first, then the right one. By that time Max must be clear, or underground, or caught.

Now came in Jim’s imagination a succession of less strongly held positions: recent scalp-hunter operations, Circus tittle-tattle—anything to make his interrogators think he was broken and talking free and that this was all he had, they had passed the last trench. He would rack his memory for back scalp-hunter cases, and if necessary he would give them the names of one or two Soviet and satellite officials who had recently been turned or burned; of others who in the past had made a one-time sale of assets and, since they had not defected, might now be considered to be in line for burning or a second bite. He would throw them any bone he could think of—sell them, if necessary, the entire Brixton stable. And all of this would be the smokescreen to disguise what seemed to Jim to be his most vulnerable intelligence, since they would certainly expect him to possess it: the identity of members of the Czech end of the Aggravate and Plato networks.

“Landkron, Krieglova, Bilova, the Pribyls,” said Jim.

Why did he choose the same order for their names? Smiley wondered.

For a long time Jim had had no responsibility for these networks. Years earlier, before he took over Brixton, he had helped establish them, recruited some of the founder members; since then, a lot had happened to them in the hands of Bland and Haydon of which he knew nothing. But he was certain that he still knew enough to blow them both sky high. And what worried him most was the fear that Control, or Bill, or Percy Alleline, or whoever had the final say these days, would be too greedy, or too slow, to evacuate the networks by the time Jim, under forms of duress he could only guess at, had no alternative but to break completely.

“So that’s the joke,” said Jim, with no humour whatever. “They couldn’t have cared less about the networks. They asked me half a dozen questions about Aggravate, then lost interest. They knew damn well that Testify wasn’t my private brain-child and they knew all about Control buying the Stevcek pass in Vienna. They began exactly where I wanted to end: with the briefing in St. James’s. They didn’t ask me about a legman; they weren’t interested in who had driven me to the rendezvous with the Magyar. All they wanted to talk about was Control’s rotten-apple theory.”

One word, thought Smiley again, it might be just one word. He said, “Did they actually know the St. James’s address?”

“They knew the brand of the bloody sherry, man.”

“And the charts?” asked Smiley quickly. “The music case?”

“No.” He added, “Not at first. No.”

Thinking inside out, Steed-Asprey used to call it. They knew because the mole Gerald had told them, thought Smiley. The mole knew what the housekeepers had succeeded in getting out of old MacFadean. The Circus conducts its postmortem: Karla has the benefit of its findings in time to use them on Jim.

“So I suppose by now you were beginning to think Control was right: there was a mole,” said Smiley.

Jim and Smiley were leaning on a wooden gate. The ground sloped sharply away from them in a long sweep of bracken and fields. Below them lay another village, a bay, and a thin ribbon of moonlit sea.

“They went straight to the heart of it. ‘Why did Control go it alone? What did he hope to achieve?’ ‘His come-back,’ I said. So they laugh: ‘With tinpot information about military emplacements in the area of Brno? That wouldn’t even buy him a square meal in his club.’ ‘Maybe he was losing his grip,’ I said. If Control was losing his grip, they said, who was stamping on his fingers? Alleline, I said, that was the buzz; Alleline and Control were in competition to provide intelligence. But in Brixton we only got the rumours, I said. ‘And what is Alleline producing that Control is not producing?’ ‘I don’t know.’ ‘But you just said that Alleline and Control are in competition to provide intelligence.’ ‘It’s rumour. I don’t know.’ Back to the cooler.”

Time, said Jim, at this stage lost him completely. He lived either in the darkness of the hood, or in the white light of the cells. There was no night or day, and to make it even more weird they kept the noises going most of the time.

They were working him on the production-line principle, he explained: no sleep, relays of questions, a lot of disorientation, a lot of muscle, till the interrogation became to him a slow race between going a bit dotty, as he called it, and breaking completely. Naturally, he hoped he’d go dotty but that wasn’t something you could decide for yourself, because they had a way of bringing you back. A lot of the muscle was done electrically.

“So we start again. New tack. ‘Stevcek was an important general. If he asked for a senior British officer, he could expect him to be properly informed about all aspects of his career. Are you telling us you did not inform yourself?’ ‘I’m saying I got my information from Control.’ ‘Did you read Stevcek’s dossier at the Circus?’ ‘No.’ ‘Did Control?’ ‘I don’t know.’ ‘What conclusions did Control draw from Stevcek’s second appointment in Moscow? Did Control speak to you about Stevcek’s role in the Warsaw Pact Liaison Committee?’ ‘No.’ They stuck to that question and I suppose I stuck to my answer, because after a few more ‘no’s they got a bit crazy. They seemed to lose patience. When I passed out, they hosed me down and had another crack.”

Movement, said Jim. His narrative had become oddly jerky. Cells, corridors, car . . . at the airport V.I.P. treatment and a mauling before the aeroplane . . . on the flight, dropped off to sleep and was punished for it. “Came round in a cell again, smaller, no paint on the walls. Sometimes I thought I was in Russia. I worked out by the stars that we had flown east. Sometimes I was in Sarratt, back on the interrogation resistance course.”

For a couple of days they let him alone. Head was muzzy. He kept hearing the shooting in the forest and he saw the tattoo again, and when finally the big session started—the one he remembered as the marathon—he had the disadvantage of feeling half defeated when he went in.

“Matter of health, much as anything,” he explained, very tense now.

“We could take a break if you want,” Smiley said, but where Jim was, there were no breaks, and what he wanted was irrelevant.

That was the long one, Jim said. Sometime in the course of it, he told them about Control’s notes and his charts and the coloured inks and crayons. They were going at him like the devil and he remembered an all-male audience, at one end of the room, peering like a lot of damn medicos and muttering to one another, and he told them about the crayons just to keep the talk alive, to make them stop and listen. They listened but they didn’t stop.

“Once they had the colours, they wanted to know what the colours meant. ‘What did blue mean?’ ‘Control didn’t have blue.’ ‘What did red mean? What did red stand for? Give us an example of red on the chart. What did red mean? What did red mean? What did red mean?’ Then everybody clears out except a couple of guards and one cold little fellow, stiff back, seemed to be head boy. The guards take me over to a table, and this little fellow sits beside me like a bloody gnome with his hands folded. He’s got two crayons in front of him, red and green, and a chart of Stevcek’s career.”

It wasn’t that Jim broke exactly; he just ran out of invention. He couldn’t think up any more stories. The truths that he had locked away so deeply were the only things that suggested themselves.

“So you told him about the rotten apple,” Smiley suggested. “And you told him about Tinker, Tailor.”

Yes, Jim agreed, he did. He told him that Control believed Stevcek could identify a mole inside the Circus. He told him about the Tinker, Tailor code and who each of them was, name by name.

“What was his reaction?”

“Thought for a bit, then offered me a cigarette. Hated the damn thing.”

“Why?”

“Tasted American. Camel, one of those.”

“Did he smoke one himself?”

Jim gave a short nod. “Bloody chimney,” he said.

Time, after that, began once more to flow, said Jim. He was taken to a camp, he guessed outside a town, and lived in a compound of huts with a double perimeter of wire. With the help of a guard, he was soon able to walk; one day they even went for a stroll in the forest. The camp was very big; his own compound was only a part of it. At night he could see the glow of a city to the east. The guards wore denims and didn’t speak, so he still had no way of telling whether he was in Czecho or in Russia, but his money was heavily on Russia, and when the surgeon came to take a look at his back he used a Russian-English interpreter to express his contempt for his predecessor’s handiwork. The interrogation continued sporadically, but without hostility. They put a fresh team on him but it was a leisurely crowd by comparison with the first eleven. One night he was taken to a military airport and flown by R.A.F. fighter to Inverness. From there he went by small plane to Elstree, then by van to Sarratt; both were night journeys.

Jim was winding up fast. He was already launched on his experiences at the Nursery, in fact, when Smiley asked, “And the headman, the little cold one: you never saw him again?”

Once, Jim conceded; just before he left.

“What for?”

“Gossip.” Much louder. “Lot of damned tripe about Circus personalities, matter of fact.”

“Which personalities?”

Jim ducked that question. Tripe about who was on the up staircase, he said, who was on the down. Who was next in line for Chief: “ ‘How should I know,’ I said. ‘Bloody janitors hear it before Brixton does.’ ”

“So who came in for the tripe, precisely?”

Mainly Roy Bland, said Jim sullenly. How did Bland reconcile his left-wing leanings with his work at the Circus? He hasn’t got any left-wing leanings, said Jim, that’s how. What was Bland’s standing with Esterhase and Alleline? What did Bland think of Bill’s paintings? Then how much Roy drank and what would become of him if Bill ever withdrew his support for him? Jim gave meagre answers to these questions.

“Was anyone else mentioned?”

“Esterhase,” Jim snapped, in the same taut tone. “Bloody man wanted to know how anyone could trust a Hungarian.”

Smiley’s next question seemed, even to himself, to cast an absolute silence over the whole black valley.

“And what did he say about me?” He repeated: “What did he say about me?”

“Showed me a cigarette lighter. Said it was yours. Present from Ann. ‘With all my love.’ Her signature. Engraved.”

“Did he mention how he came by it? What did he say, Jim? Come on, I’m not going to weaken at the knees just because some Russian hood made a bad joke about me.”

Jim’s answer came out like an army order. “He reckoned that after Bill Haydon’s fling with her, she might care to redraft the inscription.” He swung away towards the car. “I told him,” he shouted furiously. “Told him to his wrinkled little face. You can’t judge Bill by things like that. Artists have totally different standards. See things we can’t see. Feel things that are beyond us. Bloody little man just laughed. ‘Didn’t know his pictures were that good,’ he said. I told him, George. ‘Go to hell. Go to bloody hell. If you had one Bill Haydon in your damned outfit, you could call it set and match.’ I said to him: ‘Christ Almighty,’ I said, ‘what are you running over here? A service or the bloody Salvation Army?’ ”

“That was well said,” Smiley remarked at last, as if commenting on some distant debate. “And you’d never seen him before?”

“Who?”

“The little frosty chap. He wasn’t familiar to you—from long ago, for instance? Well, you know how we are. We’re trained, we see a lot of faces, photographs of Centre personalities, and sometimes they stick. Even if we can’t put a name to them any more. This one didn’t, anyway. I just wondered. It occurred to me you had a lot of time to think,” he went on, conversationally. “You lay there recovering, waiting to come home, and what else had you to do, but think?” He waited. “So what did you think of, I wonder? The mission. Your mission, I suppose.”

“Off and on.”

“With what conclusions? Anything useful? Any suspicions, insights, any hints for me to take away?”

“Damn all, thank you,” Jim snapped, very hard. “You know me, George Smiley. I’m not a juju man, I’m a—”

“You’re a plain fieldman who lets the other chaps do his thinking. Nevertheless, when you know you have been led into a king-sized trap, betrayed, shot in the back, and have nothing to do for months but lie or sit on a bunk, or pace a Russian cell, I would guess that even the most dedicated man of action”—his voice had lost none of its friendliness—“might put his mind to wondering how he landed in such a scrape. Let’s take Operation Testify a minute,” Smiley suggested to the motionless figure before him. “Testify ended Control’s career. He was disgraced and he couldn’t pursue his mole, assuming there was one. The Circus passed into other hands. With a sense of timeliness, Control died. Testify did something else, too. It revealed to the Russians—through you, actually—the exact reach of Control’s suspicions. That he’d narrowed the field to five, but apparently no further. I’m not suggesting you should have fathomed all that for yourself in your cell, waiting. After all, you had no idea, sitting in the pen, that Control had been thrown out—though it might have occurred to you that the Russians laid on that mock battle in the forest in order to raise a wind. Did it?”

“You’ve forgotten the networks,” said Jim dully.

“Oh, the Czechs had the networks marked down long before you came on the scene. They only rolled them up in order to compound Control’s failure.”

The discursive, almost chatty tone with which Smiley threw out these theories found no resonance in Jim. Having waited in vain for him to volunteer some word, Smiley let the matter drop. “Well, let’s just go over your reception at Sarratt, shall we? To wrap it up?”

In a rare moment of forgetfulness, he helped himself to the vodka bottle before passing it to Jim.

To judge by his voice, Jim had had enough. He spoke fast and angrily, with that same military shortness which was his refuge from intellectual incursions.

For four days Sarratt was limbo, he said: “Ate a lot, drank a lot, slept a lot. Walked round the cricket ground.” He’d have swum, but the pool was under repair, as it had been six months before: damned inefficient. He had a medical, watched television in his hut, and played a bit of chess with Cranko, who was running reception.

Meanwhile he waited for Control to show up, but he didn’t. The first person from the Circus to visit him was the resettlement officer, talking about a friendly teaching agency; next came some pay wallah to discuss his pension entitlement; then the doctor again to assess him for a gratuity. He waited for the inquisitors to appear but they never did, which was a relief because he didn’t know what he would have told them until he had the green light from Control and he’d had enough of questions. He guessed Control was holding them off. It seemed mad that he should keep from the inquisitors what he had already told the Russians and the Czechs, but until he heard from Control, what else could he do? When Control still sent no word, he formed notions of presenting himself to Lacon and telling his story. Then he decided that Control was waiting for him to get clear of the Nursery before he contacted him. He had a relapse for a few days, and when it was over Toby Esterhase turned up in a new suit, apparently to shake him by the hand and wish him luck. But in fact to tell him how things stood.

“Bloody odd fellow to send, but he seemed to have come up in the world. Then I remembered what Control said about only using chaps from outstations.”

Esterhase told him that the Circus had very nearly gone under as a result of Testify and that Jim was currently the Circus’s Number One leper. Control was out of the game and a reorganisation was going on in order to appease Whitehall.

“Then he told me not to worry,” said Jim.

“In what way not worry?”

“About my special brief. He said a few people knew the real story, and I needn’t worry because it was being taken care of. All the facts were known. Then he gave me a thousand quid in cash to add to my gratuity.”

“Who from?”

“He didn’t say.”

“Did he mention Control’s theory about Stevcek? Centre’s spy inside the Circus?”

“The facts were known,” Jim repeated, glaring. “He ordered me not to approach anyone or try to get my story heard, because it was all being taken care of at the highest level and anything I did might spoil the kill. The Circus was back on the road. I could forget Tinker, Tailor and the whole damn game—moles, everything. ‘Drop out,’ he said. ‘You’re a lucky man, Jim,’ he kept saying. ‘You’ve been ordered to become a lotus-eater.’ I could forget it. Right? Forget it. Just behave as if it had never happened.” He was shouting. “And that’s what I’ve been doing: obeying orders and forgetting!”

The night landscape seemed to Smiley suddenly innocent; it was like a great canvas on which nothing bad or cruel had ever been painted. Side by side, they stared down the valley over the clusters of lights to a tor raised against the horizon. A single tower stood at its top and for a moment it marked for Smiley the end of the journey.

“Yes,” he said. “I did a bit of forgetting, too. So Toby actually mentioned Tinker, Tailor to you. However did he get hold of that story, unless . . . And no word from Bill?” he went on. “Not even a postcard.”

“Bill was abroad,” said Jim shortly.

“Who told you that?”

“Toby.”

“So you never saw Bill; since Testify, your oldest, closest friend, he disappeared.”

“You heard what Toby said. I was out of bounds. Quarantine.”

“Bill was never much of a one for regulations, though, was he?” said Smiley, in a reminiscent tone.

“And you were never one to see him straight,” Jim barked.

“Sorry I wasn’t there when you called on me, before you left for Czecho,” Smiley remarked after a small pause. “Control had pushed me over to Germany to get me out of the light and when I came back—what was it that you wanted, exactly?”

“Nothing. Thought Czecho might be a bit hairy. Thought I’d give you the nod, say goodbye.”

“Before a mission?” cried Smiley in mild surprise. “Before such a special mission?” Jim showed no sign that he had heard. “Did you give anyone else the nod? I suppose we were all away. Toby, Roy—Bill; did he get one?”

“No one.”

“Bill was on leave, wasn’t he? But I gather he was around, all the same.”

“No one,” Jim insisted, as a spasm of pain caused him to lift his right shoulder and rotate his head. “All out,” he said.

“That’s very unlike you, Jim,” said Smiley in the same mild tone, “to go round shaking hands with people before you go on vital missions. You must have been getting sentimental in your old age. It wasn’t . . .” he hesitated. “It wasn’t advice or anything that you wanted, was it? After all, you did think the mission was poppycock, didn’t you? And that Control was losing his grip. Perhaps you felt you should take your problem to a third party? It all had rather a mad air, I agree.”

Learn the facts, Steed-Asprey used to say, then try on the stories like clothes.

With Jim still locked in a furious silence, they returned to the car.

At the motel Smiley drew twenty postcard-sized photographs from the recesses of his coat and laid them out in two lines across the ceramic table. Some were snaps, some portraits; all were of men and none of them looked English. With a grimace Jim picked out two and handed them to Smiley. He was sure of the first, he muttered, less sure of the second. The first was the headman, the cool little man. The second was one of the swine who watched from the shadows while the thugs took Jim to pieces. Smiley returned the photographs to his pocket. As he topped up their glasses for a nightcap, a less tortured observer than Jim might have noticed a sense not of triumph but of ceremony about him; as though the drink were putting a seal on something.

“So when was the last time you saw Bill, actually? To talk to,” Smiley asked, just as one might about any old friend. He had evidently disturbed Jim in other thoughts, for he took a moment to lift his head and catch the question.

“Oh, round about,” he said carelessly. “Bumped into him in the corridors, I suppose.”

“And to talk to? Never mind.” For Jim had returned to his other thoughts.

Jim would not be driven all the way to school. Smiley had to drop him short, at the top of the tarmac path that led through the graveyard to the church. He had left some workbooks in the antechapel, he said. Momentarily, Smiley felt disposed to disbelieve him, but could not understand why. Perhaps because he had come to the opinion that after thirty years in the trade, Jim was still a rather poor liar. The last Smiley saw of him was that lopsided shadow striding towards the Norman porch as his heels cracked like gunshot between the tombs.

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

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

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

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

“We’ve been through all that.”

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

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

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

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

33

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

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

Smiley did not quite understand.

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

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

Or his constituents, Smiley thought.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Roach?”

“Sick, sir.”

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

34

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

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

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

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

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

“Due here any minute.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Looked all clear to me,” said Fawn.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Maybe.”

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

Esterhase gave a neat nod.

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

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

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

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

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

“Sure,” said Esterhase, with absolute confidence.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Toby?”

“Yes, George?”

“Did you bring a baby-sitter?”

“No.”

“No one?”

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

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

“I sold a couple once,” said Toby with a flashy, nervous smile, but no one laughed.

“The more you pay for it, the less inclined you are to doubt it. Silly, but there we are. It’s also comforting for everyone to know that Merlin is venal. That’s a motive we all understand—right, Toby? Specially in the Treasury. Twenty thousand francs a month into a Swiss bank: well, there’s no knowing who wouldn’t bend a few egalitarian principles for money like that. So Whitehall pays him a fortune, and calls his intelligence priceless. And some of it is good,” Smiley conceded. “Very good, I do think, and so it should be. Then, one day, Gerald admits Percy to the greatest secret of all. The Merlin caucus has a London end. It’s the start, I should tell you now, of a very, very clever knot.”

Toby put down his cup and with his handkerchief primly dabbed the corners of his mouth.

“According to Gerald, a member of the Soviet Embassy here in London is actually ready and able to act as Merlin’s London representative. He is even in the extraordinary position of being able to use, on rare occasions, the Embassy facilities to talk to Merlin in Moscow, to send and receive messages. And if every imaginable precaution is taken, it is even possible now and then for Gerald to arrange clandestine meetings with this wonder-man, to brief and debrief him, to put follow-up questions and receive answers from Merlin almost by return of post. We’ll call this Soviet official Aleksey Aleksandrovich Polyakov, and we’ll pretend he’s a member of the cultural section of the Soviet Embassy. Are you with me?”

“I didn’t hear anything,” said Esterhase. “I gone deaf.”

“The story is, he’s been a member of the London Embassy quite a while—nine years, to be precise—but Merlin’s only recently added him to the flock. While Polyakov was on leave in Moscow, perhaps?”

“I’m not hearing nothing.”

“Very quickly Polyakov becomes important, because before long Gerald appoints him linchpin of the Witchcraft operation and a lot more besides. The dead drops in Amsterdam and Paris, the secret inks, the microdots—they all go on, all right, but at less of a pitch. The convenience of having Polyakov right on the doorstep is too good to miss. Some of Merlin’s best material is smuggled to London by diplomatic bag; all Polyakov has to do is slit open the envelopes and pass them to his counterpart in the Circus—Gerald or whomever Gerald nominates. But we must never forget that this part of the Merlin operation is deathly, deathly secret. The Witchcraft committee itself is, of course, secret, too, but large. That’s inevitable. The operation is large, the take is large; processing and distribution alone require a mass of clerical supervision—transcribers, translators, codists, typists, evaluators, and God knows what. None of that worries Gerald at all, of course: he likes it, in fact, because the art of being Gerald is to be one of a crowd. Is the Witchcraft committee led from below? From the middle or from the top? I rather like Karla’s description of committees, don’t you? Is it Chinese? A committee is an animal with four back legs.

“But the London end—Polyakov’s leg—that part is confined to the original magic circle. Skordeno, de Silsky, all the pack: they can tear off abroad and devil like mad for Merlin away from home. But here in London, the operation involving Brother Polyakov, the way that knot is tied—that’s a very special secret, for very special reasons. You, Percy, Bill Haydon, and Roy Bland. You four are the magic circle. Right? Now let’s just speculate about how it works, in detail. There’s a house, we know that. All the same, meetings there are very elaborately arranged; we can be sure of that, can’t we? Who meets him, Toby? Who has the handling of Polyakov? You? Roy? Bill?”

Taking the fat end of his tie, Smiley turned the silk lining outwards and polished his glasses. “Everyone does,” he said, answering his own question. “How’s that? Sometimes Percy meets him. I would guess Percy represents the authoritarian side with him: ‘Isn’t it time you took a holiday? Have you heard from your wife this week?’ Percy would be good at that. But the Witchcraft committee uses Percy sparingly. Percy’s the big gun and he must have rarity value. Then there’s Bill Haydon; Bill meets him. That would happen more often, I think. Bill’s impressive on Russia and he has entertainment value. I have a feeling that he and Polyakov would hit it off pretty well. I would think Bill shone when it came to the briefing and the follow-up questions, wouldn’t you? Making certain that the right messages went to Moscow? Sometimes he takes Roy Bland with him, sometimes he sends Roy on his own. I expect that’s something they work out between themselves. And Roy, of course, is an economic expert, as well as top man on satellites, so there’ll be lots to talk about in that department also. And sometimes—I imagine birthdays, Toby, or a Christmas, or special presentations of thanks and money—there’s a small fortune written down to entertainment, I notice, let alone bounties. Sometimes, to make the party go, you all four trot along, and raise your glasses to the king across the water: to Merlin, through his envoy, Polyakov. Finally, I suppose, Toby himself has things to talk to friend Polyakov about. There’s tradecraft to discuss; there are the useful snippets about goings on inside the Embassy, which are so handy to the lamplighters in their bread-and-butter surveillance operations against the residency. So Toby also has his solo sessions. After all, we shouldn’t overlook Polyakov’s local potential, quite apart from his role as Merlin’s London representative. It’s not every day we have a tame Soviet diplomat in London eating out of our hands. A little training with a camera and Polyakov could be very useful just at the straight domestic level. Provided we all remember our priorities.”

His gaze had not left Toby’s face. “I can imagine that Polyakov might run to quite a few reels of film, can’t you? And that one of the jobs of whoever was seeing him might be to replenish his stock: take him little sealed packets. Packets of film. Unexposed film, of course, since it came from the Circus. Tell me, Toby—could you, please—is the name Lapin familiar to you?”

A lick, a frown, a smile, a forward movement of the head: “Sure, George, I know Lapin.”

“Who ordered the lamplighter reports on Lapin destroyed?”

“I did, George.”

“On your own initiative?”

The smile broadened a fraction. “Listen, George, I made some rungs up the ladder these days.”

“Who said Connie Sachs had to be pushed downhill?”

“Look, I think it was Percy—okay? Say it was Percy, maybe Bill. You know how it is in a big operation. Shoes to mend, pots to clean, always a thing going.” He shrugged. “Maybe it was Roy, huh?”

“So you take orders from all of them,” said Smiley lightly. “That’s very indiscriminate of you, Toby. You should know better.”

Esterhase didn’t like that at all.

“Who told you to cool off Max, Toby? Was it the same three people? Only I have to report all this to Lacon, you see. He’s being awfully pressing just at the moment. He seems to have the Minister on his back. Who was it?”

“George, you been talking to the wrong guys.”

“One of us has,” Smiley agreed pleasantly. “That’s for sure. They also want to know about Westerby: just who put the muzzle on him. Was it the same person who sent you down to Sarratt with a thousand quid in cash and a brief to put Jim Prideaux’s mind at rest? It’s only facts I’m after, Toby, not scalps. You know me—I’m not the vindictive sort. Anyway, what’s to say you’re not a very loyal fellow? It’s just a question of who to.” He added, “Only they do badly want to know, you see. There’s even some ugly talk of calling in the competition. Nobody wants that, do they? It’s like going to solicitors when you’ve had a row with your wife: an irrevocable step. Who gave you the message for Jim about Tinker, Tailor? Did you know what it meant? Did you have it straight from Polyakov, was that it?”

“For God’s sake,” Guillam whispered, “let me sweat the bastard.”

Smiley ignored him. “Let’s keep talking about Lapin. What was his job over here?”

“He worked for Polyakov.”

“His secretary in the cultural department?”

“His legman.”

“But, my dear Toby, what on earth is a cultural attaché doing with his own legman?”

Esterhase’s eyes were on Smiley all the time. He’s like a dog, thought Guillam; he doesn’t know whether to expect a kick or a bone. They flickered from Smiley’s face to his hands, then back to his face, constantly checking the telltale places.

“Don’t be damn silly, George,” Toby said carelessly. “Polyakov is working for Moscow Centre. You know that as well as I do.” He crossed his little legs and, with a resurgence of all his former insolence, sat back in his chair and took a sip of cold tea.

Whereas Smiley, to Guillam’s eye, appeared momentarily set back; from which Guillam in his confusion dryly inferred that he was doubtless very pleased with himself. Perhaps because Toby was at last doing the talking.

“Come on, George,” Toby said. “You’re not a child. Think how many operations we ran this way. We buy Polyakov, okay? Polyakov’s a Moscow hood but he’s our Joe. But he’s got to pretend to his own people that he’s spying on us. How else does he get away with it? How does he walk in and out of that house all day, no gorillas, no baby-sitters, everything so easy? He comes down to our shop, so he got to take home the goodies. So we give him goodies. Chicken-feed, so he can pass it home and everyone in Moscow claps him on the back and tells him he’s a big guy—happens every day.”

If Guillam’s head by now was reeling with a kind of furious awe, Smiley’s seemed remarkably clear.

“And that’s pretty much the standard story, is it, among the four initiated?”

“Well, standard I wouldn’t know,” said Esterhase, with a very Hungarian movement of the hand, a spreading of the palm and a tilting either way.

“So who is Polyakov’s agent?”

The question, Guillam saw, mattered very much to Smiley: he had played the whole long hand in order to arrive at it. As Guillam waited, his eyes now on Esterhase, who was by no means so confident any more, now on Smiley’s mandarin face, he realised that he, too, was beginning to understand the shape of Karla’s last clever knot, as Smiley had called it—and of his own gruelling interview with Alleline.

“What I’m asking you is very simple,” Smiley insisted. “Notionally, who is Polyakov’s agent inside the Circus? Good heavens, Toby, don’t be obtuse. If Polyakov’s cover for meeting you people is that he is spying on the Circus, then he must have a Circus spy, mustn’t he? So who is he? He can’t come back to the Embassy after a meeting with you people, loaded with reels of Circus chicken-feed, and say, ‘I got this from the boys.’ There has to be a story—and a good one, at that: a whole history of courtship, recruitment, clandestine meetings, money, and motive. Doesn’t there? Heavens, this isn’t just Polyakov’s cover story: it’s his life-line. It’s got to be thorough. It’s got to be convincing; I’d say it was a very big issue in the game. So who is he?” Smiley enquired pleasantly. “You? Toby Esterhase masquerades as a Circus traitor in order to keep Polyakov in business? My hat, Toby, that’s worth a whole handful of medals.”

They waited while Toby thought.

“You’re on a damn long road, George,” Toby said at last. “What happens you don’t reach the other end?”

“Even with Lacon behind me?”

“You bring Lacon here. Percy, too; Bill. Why you come to the little guy? Go to the big ones, pick on them.”

“I thought you were a big guy these days. You’d be a good choice for the part, Toby. Hungarian ancestry, resentment about promotion, reasonable access but not too much . . . quick-witted, likes money . . . With you as his agent, Polyakov would have a cover story that really sits up and works. The big three give you the chicken-feed, you hand it to Polyakov, Centre thinks Toby is all theirs, everyone’s served, everyone’s content. The only problem arises when it transpires that you’ve been handing Polyakov the crown jewels and getting Russian chicken-feed in return. If that should turn out to be the case, you’re going to need pretty good friends. Like us. That’s how my thesis runs—just to complete it. That Gerald is a Russian mole, run by Karla. And he’s pulled the Circus inside out.”

Esterhase looked slightly ill. “George, listen. If you’re wrong, I don’t want to be wrong too, get me?”

“But if he’s right, you want to be right,” Guillam suggested, in a rare interruption. “And the sooner you’re right, the happier you’ll be.”

“Sure,” said Toby, quite unaware of any irony. “Sure. I mean George got a nice idea, but Jesus, there’s two sides to everyone, George, agents specially, and maybe it’s you who got the wrong one. Listen: who ever called Witchcraft chicken-feed? No one. Never. It’s the best. You get one guy with a big mouth starts shouting the dirt, and you dug up half London already. Get me? Look, I do what they tell me. Okay? They say act the stooge for Polyakov, I act him. Pass him this film, I pass it. I’m in a very dangerous situation,” he explained. “For me, very dangerous indeed.”

“I’m sorry about that,” said Smiley at the window, where through a chink in the curtain he was once more studying the square. “Must be worrying for you.”

“Extremely,” Toby agreed. “I get ulcers, can’t eat. Very bad predicament.”

For a moment, to Guillam’s fury, they were all three joined in a sympathetic silence over Toby Esterhase’s bad predicament.

“Toby, you wouldn’t be lying about those baby-sitters, would you?” Smiley enquired, still from the window.

“George, I cross my heart, I swear you.”

“What would you use for a job like this? Cars?”

“Pavement artists. Put a bus back by the air terminal, walk them through, turn ’em over.”

“How many?”

“Eight, ten. This time of year—six, maybe. We get a lot ill. Christmas,” he said morosely.

“And one man alone?”

“Never. You crazy. One man! You think I run a toffee shop these days?”

Leaving the window, Smiley sat down again.

“Listen, George, that’s a terrible idea you got there, you know that? I’m a patriotic fellow. Jesus,” Toby repeated.

“What is Polyakov’s job in the London residency?” Smiley asked.

“Polly works solo.”

“Running his master spy inside the Circus?”

“Sure. They take him off regular work, give him a free hand so’s he can handle Toby, master spy. We work it all out; hours on end I sit with him. ‘Listen,’ I say. ‘Bill is suspecting me, my wife is suspecting me, my kid got measles, and I can’t pay the doctor.’ All the crap that agents give you, I give it to Polly so’s he can pass it home for real.”

“And who’s Merlin?”

Esterhase shook his head.

“But at least you’ve heard he’s based in Moscow,” Smiley said. “And a member of the Soviet intelligence establishment, whatever else he isn’t?”

“That much they tell me,” Esterhase agreed.

“Which is how Polyakov can communicate with him. In the Circus’s interest, of course. Secretly, without his own people becoming suspicious?”

“Sure.” Toby resumed his lament, but Smiley seemed to be listening to sounds that were not in the room.

“And Tinker, Tailor?”

“I don’t know what the hell it is. I do what Percy tells me.”

“And Percy told you to square Jim Prideaux?”

“Sure. Maybe it was Bill. Or Roy, maybe. Listen, it was Roy. I got to eat, George, understand? I don’t cut my throat two ways, follow me?”

“It is the perfect fix; you see that, don’t you, Toby, really?” Smiley remarked in a quiet, rather distant way. “Assuming it is a fix. It makes everyone wrong who’s right: Connie Sachs, Jerry Westerby . . . Jim Prideaux . . . even Control. Silences the doubters before they’ve even spoken out . . . The permutations are infinite, once you’ve brought off the basic lie. Moscow Centre must be allowed to think she has an important Circus source; Whitehall on no account must get wind of the same notion. Take it to its logical conclusion and Gerald would have us strangling our own children in their beds. It would be beautiful in another context,” he remarked almost dreamily. “Poor Toby; yes, I do see. What a time you must have been having, running between them all.”

Toby had his next speech ready: “Naturally, if there is anything I can do of a practical nature, you know me, George, I am always pleased to help—no trouble. My boys are pretty well trained; you want to borrow them, maybe we can work a deal. Naturally, I have to speak to Lacon first. All I want, I want to get this thing cleared up. For the sake of the Circus, you know. That’s all I want. The good of the firm. I’m a modest man; I don’t want anything for myself—okay?”

“Where’s this safe house you keep exclusively for Polyakov?”

“Five Lock Gardens, Camden Town.”

“With a caretaker?”

“Mrs. McCraig.”

“Lately a listener?”

“Sure.”

“Is there built-in audio?”

“What do you think?”

“So Millie McCraig keeps house and mans the recording instruments.”

She did, said Toby, ducking his head with great alertness.

“In a minute, I want you to telephone her and tell her I’m staying the night and I’ll want to use the equipment. Tell her I’ve been called in on a special job and she’s to do whatever I ask. I’ll be round about nine. What’s the procedure for contacting Polyakov if you want a crash meeting?”

“My boys have a room on Haverstock Hill. Polly drives past the window each morning on the way to the Embassy, each night going home. If they put up a yellow poster protesting against traffic, that’s the signal.”

“And at night? At weekends?”

“Wrong-number phone call. But nobody likes that.”

“Has it ever been used?”

“I don’t know.”

“You mean you don’t listen to his phone?”

No answer.

“I want you to take the weekend off. Would that raise eyebrows at the Circus?” Enthusiastically, Esterhase shook his head. “I’m sure you’d prefer to be out of it, anyway, wouldn’t you?” Esterhase nodded. “Say you’re having girl trouble or whatever sort of trouble you’re in these days. You’ll be spending the night here, possibly two. Fawn will look after you; there’s food in the kitchen. What about your wife?”

While Guillam and Smiley looked on, Esterhase dialled the Circus and asked for Phil Porteous. He said his lines perfectly: a little self-pity, a little conspiracy, a little joke. Some girl who was passionate about him up north, Phil, and threatening wild things if he didn’t go and hold her hand.

“Don’t tell me, I know it happens to you every day, Phil. Hey, how’s that gorgeous new secretary of yours? And listen, Phil, if Mara phones from home, tell her Toby’s on a big job, okay? Blowing up the Kremlin, back on Monday. Make it nice and heavy, huh? Cheers, Phil.”

He rang off and dialled a number in north London. “Mrs. M., hullo, this is your favourite boyfriend—recognise the voice? Good. Listen, I’m sending you a visitor tonight—an old, old friend, you’ll be surprised. She hates me,” he explained to them, his hand over the mouthpiece. “He wants to check the wiring,” he went on. “Look it all over, make sure it’s working okay, no bad leaks—all right?”

“If he’s any trouble,” Guillam said to Fawn with real venom as they left, “bind him hand and foot.”

In the stairwell, Smiley lightly touched his arm. “Peter, I want you to watch my back. Will you do that for me? Give me a couple of minutes, then pick me up on the corner of Marloes Road, heading north. Stick to the west pavement.”

Guillam waited, then stepped into the street. A thin drizzle lay on the air, which had an eerie warmness like a thaw. Where lights shone, the moisture shifted in fine clouds, but in shadow he neither saw nor felt it: simply, a mist blurred his vision, making him half close his eyes. He completed one round of the gardens, then entered a pretty mews well south of the pick-up point. Reaching Marloes Road, he crossed to the west pavement, bought an evening paper, and began walking at a leisurely rate past villas set in deep gardens. He was counting off pedestrians, cyclists, cars, while out ahead of him, steadily plodding the far pavement, he picked out George Smiley, the very prototype of the homegoing Londoner. “Is it a team?” Guillam had asked. Smiley could not be specific. “Short of Abingdon Villas, I’ll cross over,” he said. “Look for a solo. But look!”

As Guillam watched Smiley pulled up abruptly, as if he had just remembered something, stepped perilously into the road, and scuttled between the angry traffic to disappear at once through the doors of a liquor store. As he did so, Guillam saw, or thought he saw, a tall crooked figure in a dark coat step out after him, but at that moment a bus drew up, screening both Smiley and his pursuer; and when it pulled away, it must have taken his pursuer with it, for the only survivor on that strip of pavement was an older man in a black plastic raincoat and cloth cap lolling at the bus stop while he read his evening paper; and when Smiley emerged from the store with his brown bag, the man did not so much as lift his head from the sporting pages. For a short while longer, Guillam trailed Smiley through the smarter reaches of Victorian Kensington as he slipped from one quiet square to another, sauntered into a mews and out again by the same route. Only once, when Guillam forgot Smiley and out of instinct turned upon his own tracks, did he have a suspicion of a third figure walking with them: a fanged shadow thrown against the broadloom brickwork of an empty street, but when he started forward, it was gone.

The night had its own madness after that; events ran too quickly for him to fasten on them singly. Not till days afterwards did he realise that the figure, or the shadow of it, had struck a chord of familiarity in his memory. Even then, for some time, he could not place it. Then one early morning, waking abruptly, he had it clear in his mind: a barking, military voice, a gentleness of manner heavily concealed, a squash racket jammed behind the safe of his room in Brixton, which brought tears to the eyes of his unemotional secretary.

35

Probably the only thing which Steve Mackelvore did wrong that same evening, in terms of classic tradecraft, was blame himself for leaving the passenger door of his car unlocked. Climbing in from the driver’s side, he put it down to his own negligence that the other lock was up. Survival, as Jim Prideaux liked to recall, is an infinite capacity for suspicion. By that purist standard, Mackelvore should have suspected that in the middle of a particularly vile rush-hour, on a particularly vile evening, in one of those blaring side streets that feed into the lower end of the Elysées, Ricki Tarr would unlock the passenger door and hold him up at gunpoint. But life in the Paris residency these days did little to keep a man’s wits sharp, and most of Mackelvore’s working day had been taken up with filing his weekly expenses and completing his weekly returns of staff for the housekeepers. Only lunch, a longish affair with an insincere anglophile in the French security labyrinth, had broken the monotony of that Friday.

His car, parked under a lime tree that was dying of exhaust fumes, had an extraterritorial registration and “C.C.” plastered on the back, for the residency cover was consular, though no one took it seriously. Mackelvore was a Circus elder, a squat, white-haired Yorkshireman with a long record of consular appointments which in the eyes of the world had brought him no advancement. Paris was the last of them. He did not care particularly for Paris, and he knew from an operational lifetime in the Far East that the French were not for him. But as a prelude to retirement it could not be bettered. The allowances were good, the billet was comfortable, and the most that had been asked of him in the ten months he had been here was to welfare the occasional agent in transit, put up a chalk-mark here and there, play postman to some ploy by London Station, and show a time to the visiting firemen.

Until now, that was, as he sat in his own car with Tarr’s gun jammed against his rib-cage, and Tarr’s hand resting affectionately on his right shoulder, ready to wrench his head off if he tried any monkey business. A couple of feet away, girls hurried past on their way to the Metro, and six feet beyond that the traffic had come to a standstill; it could stay that way for an hour. None was faintly stirred by the sight of two men having a cosy chat in a parked car.

Tarr had been talking ever since Mackelvore sat down. He needed to send a message to Alleline, he said. It would be personal and decypher yourself, and Tarr would like Steve to work the machine for him while Tarr stood off with the gun.

“What the hell have you been up to, Ricki?” Mackelvore complained, as they walked arm in arm back to the residency. “The whole service is looking for you—you know that, don’t you? They’ll skin you alive if they find you. We’re supposed to do blood-curdling things to you on sight.”

He thought of turning into the hold and smacking Tarr’s neck, but he knew he hadn’t the speed and Tarr would kill him.

The message would run to about two hundred groups, said Tarr, as Mackelvore unlocked the front door and put on the lights. When Steve had transmitted them, they would sit on the machine and wait for Percy’s answer. By tomorrow, if Tarr’s instinct was correct, Percy would be coming over to Paris hotfoot to have a conference with Ricki. This conference would also take place in the residency, because Tarr reckoned it was marginally less likely that the Russians would try to kill him on British consular premises.

“You’re berserk, Ricki. It’s not the Russians who want to kill you. It’s us.”

The front room was called Reception; it was what remained of the cover. It had an old wooden counter and out-of-date “Notices to British Subjects” hanging on the grimy wall. Here, with his left hand, Tarr searched Mackelvore for a weapon but found none. It was a courtyard house and most of the sensitive stuff was across the yard: the cypher-room, the strong-room, and the machines.

“You’re out of your mind, Ricki,” Mackelvore warned monotonously, as he led the way through a couple of empty offices and pressed the bell to the cypher-room. “You always thought you were Napoleon Bonaparte and now it’s got you completely. You’d too much religion from your dad.”

The steel message hatch slid back and a mystified, slightly silly face appeared in the opening. “You can go home, Ben, boy. Go home to your missus but stay close to your phone in case I need you, there’s a lad. Leave the books where they are and put the keys in the machines. I’ll be talking to London presently, under my own steam.”

The face withdrew and they waited while the boy unlocked the door from inside: one key, two keys, a spring lock.

“This gentleman’s from out East, Ben,” Mackelvore explained as the door opened. “He’s one of my most distinguished connections.”

“Hullo, sir,” said Ben. He was a tall, mathematical-looking boy with spectacles and an unblinking gaze.

“Get along with you, Ben. I’ll not dock it against your duty pay. You’ve the weekend free on full rates, and you’ll not owe me time, either. Off you go, then.”

“Ben stays here,” said Tarr.

In Cambridge Circus the lighting was quite yellow and from where Mendel stood, on the third floor of the clothes shop, the wet tarmac glistened like cheap gold. It was nearly midnight and he had been standing three hours. He stood between a net curtain and a clothes-horse. He stood the way coppers stand the world over: weight on both feet equally, legs straight, leaning slightly backward over the line of balance. He had pulled his hat low and turned up his collar to keep the white of his face from the street, but his eyes as they watched the front entrance below him glittered like a cat’s eyes in a coal-hole. He would wait another three hours or another six: Mendel was back on the beat; the scent of the hunt was in his nostrils. Better still, he was a night bird; the darkness of that fitting room woke him wonderfully. Such light as reached him from the street lay upside down in pale pieces on the ceiling. All the rest—the cutting-benches, the bolts of cloth, the draped machines, the steam iron, the signed photographs of princes of the blood—these were there because he had seen them on his reconnaissance that afternoon; the light did not reach them and even now he could barely make them out.

From his window he covered most of the approaches: eight or nine unequal roads and alleys that for no good reason had chosen Cambridge Circus as their meeting point. Between them, the buildings were gimcrack, cheaply fitted out with bits of Empire: a Roman bank, a theatre like a vast desecrated mosque. Behind them, high-rise blocks advanced like an army of robots. Above, a pink sky was slowly filling with fog.

Why was it so quiet? he wondered. The theatre had long emptied but why didn’t the pleasure trade of Soho, only a stone’s throw from his window, fill the place with taxis, groups of loiterers? Not a single fruit lorry had rumbled down Shaftesbury Avenue on its way to Covent Garden.

Through his binoculars Mendel once more studied the building straight across the road from him. It seemed to sleep even more soundly than its neighbours. The twin doors of the portico were closed and no light was visible in the ground-floor windows. Only on the fourth floor, out of the second window from the left, a pale glow issued, and Mendel knew it was the duty officer’s room; Smiley had told him. Briefly he raised the glasses to the roof, where a plantation of aerials made wild patterns against the sky, then down a floor to the four blackened windows of the radio section.

“At night everyone uses the front door,” Guillam had said. “It’s an economy measure to cut down on janitors.”

In those three hours, only three events had rewarded Mendel’s vigil; one an hour is not much. At half past nine a blue Ford Transit delivered two men carrying what looked like an ammunition box. They unlocked the door for themselves and closed it as soon as they were inside, while Mendel murmured his commentary into the telephone. At ten o’clock the shuttle arrived; Guillam had warned him of this, too. The shuttle collected hot documents from the outstations and stored them for safekeeping at the Circus over the weekend. It called at Brixton, Acton, and Sarratt, in that order, said Guillam, lastly at the Admiralty, and it made the Circus by about ten. In the event, it arrived on the dot of ten, and this time two men from inside the building came out to help unload; Mendel reported that, too, and Smiley acknowledged with a patient “Thank you.”

Was Smiley sitting down? Was he in the darkness like Mendel? Mendel had a notion he was. Of all the odd coves he had known, Smiley was the oddest. You thought, to look at him, that he couldn’t cross the road alone, but you might as well have offered protection to a hedgehog. Funnies, Mendel mused. A lifetime of chasing villains and how do I end up? Breaking and entering, standing in the dark and spying on the Funnies. He’d never held with Funnies till he met Smiley. Thought they were an interfering lot of amateurs and college boys; thought they were unconstitutional; thought the best thing the Special Branch could do, for its own sake and the public’s, was say “Yes, sir,” “No, sir” and lose the correspondence. Come to think of it, with the notable exception of Smiley and Guillam, that’s exactly what he thought tonight.

Shortly before eleven, just an hour ago, a cab arrived. A plain licensed London hackney cab, and it drew up at the theatre. Even that was something Smiley had warned him about: it was the habit within the service not to take taxis to the door. Some stopped at Foyle’s, some in Old Compton Street or at one of the shops; most people had a favourite cover destination and Alleline’s was the theatre. Mendel had never seen Alleline, but he had their description of him and as he watched him through the glasses he recognised him without a doubt, a big lumbering fellow in a dark coat; he even noticed how the cabby pulled a bad face at his tip and called something after him as Alleline delved for his keys.

The front door is not secured, Guillam had explained; it is only locked. The security begins inside, once you have turned left at the end of the corridor. Alleline lives on the fifth floor. You won’t see his windows light up but there’s a skylight and the glow should catch the chimney-stack. Sure enough, as he watched, a patch of yellow appeared on the grimy bricks of the chimney: Alleline had entered his room.

And young Guillam needs a holiday, thought Mendel. He’d seen that happen before, too: the tough ones who crack at forty. They lock it away, pretend it isn’t there, lean on grown-ups who turn out not to be so grown up after all; then one day it’s all over them, and their heroes come tumbling down and they’re sitting at their desks with the tears pouring onto the blotter.

He had laid the receiver on the floor. Picking it up, he said, “Looks like Tinker’s clocked in.”

He gave the number of the cab, then went back to waiting.

“How did he look?” Smiley murmured.

“Busy,” said Mendel.

“So he should be.”

That one won’t crack, though, Mendel decided with approval; one of your flabby oak trees, Smiley was. Think you could blow him over with one puff, but when it comes to the storm he’s the only one left standing at the end of it. At this point in his reflections a second cab drew up, squarely at the front entrance, and a tall slow figure cautiously climbed the steps one at a time, like a man who takes care of his heart.

“Here’s your Tailor,” Mendel murmured into the telephone. “Hold on, here’s Soldier-boy, too. Proper gathering of the clans, by the look of it. I say, take it easy.”

An old Mercedes 190 shot out of Earlham Street, swung directly beneath his window, and held the curve with difficulty as far as the northern outlet of the Charing Cross Road, where it parked. A young heavy fellow with ginger hair clambered out, slammed the door, and clumped across the street to the entrance without even taking the key out of the dash. A moment later another light went up on the fourth floor as Roy Bland joined the party.

All we need to know now is who comes out, thought Mendel.

36

Lock Gardens, which presumably drew its name from the Camden and Hampstead Road Locks nearby, was a terrace of four flat-fronted nineteenth-century houses built at the centre of a crescent, each with three floors and a basement and a strip of walled back garden running down to the Regent’s Canal. The numbers ran 2 to 5: number 1 had either fallen down or never been built. Number 5 made up the north end, and as a safe house it could not have been improved, for there were three approaches in thirty yards and the canal towpath offered two more. To the north lay Camden High Street for joining traffic; south and west lay the parks and Primrose Hill. Better still, the neighbourhood possessed no social identity and demanded none. Some of the houses had been turned into one-room flats, and had ten doorbells laid out like a typewriter. Some were got up grandly and had only one. Number 5 had two: one for Millie McCraig and one for her lodger, Mr. Jefferson.

Mrs. McCraig was churchy and collected for everything, which was incidentally an excellent way of keeping an eye on the locals, though that was scarcely how they viewed her zeal. Jefferson, her lodger, was known vaguely to be foreign and in oil and away a lot. Lock Gardens was his pied-à-terre. The neighbours, when they bothered to notice him, found him shy and respectable. They would have formed the same impression of George Smiley if they had happened to spot him in the dim light of the porch at nine that evening, as Millie McCraig admitted him to her front room and drew the pious curtains. She was a wiry Scottish widow with brown stockings and bobbed hair and the polished, wrinkled skin of an old man. In the interest of God and the Circus, she had run Bible schools in Mozambique and a seaman’s mission in Hamburg, and though she had been a professional eavesdropper for twenty years since then, she was still inclined to treat all menfolk as transgressors. Smiley had no way of telling what she thought. Her manner, from the moment he arrived, had a deep and lonely stillness; she showed him round the house like a chatelaine whose guests had long since died.

First the semi-basement, where she lived herself, full of plants and that medley of old postcards, brass table-tops, and carved black furniture which seems to attach itself to travelled British ladies of a certain age and class. Yes, if the Circus wanted her at night they rang her on the basement phone. Yes, there was a separate line upstairs, but it was only for outgoing calls. The basement phone had an extension in the upstairs dining-room. Then up to the ground floor, a veritable shrine to the costly bad taste of the housekeepers: loud Regency stripes, gilded reproduction chairs, plush sofas with roped corners. The kitchen was untouched and squalid. Beyond it lay a glass outhouse, half conservatory, half scullery, which looked down to the rough garden and the canal. Strewn over the tiled floor: an old mangle, a copper tub, and crates of tonic water.

“Where are the mikes, Millie?” Smiley had returned to the drawing-room.

They were in pairs, Millie murmured, bedded behind the wallpaper: two pairs to each room on the ground floor, one to each room upstairs. Each pair was connected with a separate recorder. He followed her up the steep stairs. The top floor was unfurnished save for an attic bedroom that contained a grey steel frame with eight tape machines, four up, four down.

“And Jefferson knows all about this?”

“Mr. Jefferson,” said Millie primly, “is run on a basis of trust.” That was the nearest she came to expressing her disapproval of Smiley, or her devotion to Christian ethics.

Downstairs again, she showed him the switches that controlled the system. An extra switch was fitted in each finger panel. Any time Jefferson or one of the boys, as she put it, wanted to go over to record, he had only to get up and turn down the left-hand light switch. From then on, the system was voice-activated; that is to say, the tape deck did not turn unless somebody was speaking.

“And where are you while all this goes on, Millie?”

She remained downstairs, she said, as if that were a woman’s place.

Smiley was pulling open cupboards, lockers, walking from room to room. Then back to the scullery again, with its view to the canal. Taking out a pocket torch, he signalled one flash into the darkness of the garden.

“What are the safety procedures?” Smiley asked as he thoughtfully fingered the end light switch by the drawing-room door.

Her reply came in a liturgical monotone. “Two full milk bottles on the doorstep, you may come in and all’s well. No milk bottles and you’re not to enter.”

From the direction of the sunroom came a faint tapping. Returning to the scullery, Smiley opened the glazed door and after a hastily murmured conversation reappeared with Guillam.

“You know Peter, don’t you, Millie?”

Millie might, she might not; her little hard eyes had fixed on him with scorn. He was studying the switch panel, feeling in his pocket as he did so.

“What’s he doing? He’s not to do that. Stop him.”

If she was worried, said Smiley, she should ring Lacon on the basement phone. Millie McCraig didn’t stir, but two red bruises had appeared on her leathery cheeks and she was snapping her fingers in anger. With a small screwdriver Guillam had cautiously removed the screws from either side of the plastic panel, and was peering at the wiring behind. Now, very carefully, he turned the end switch upside down, twisting it on its wires, then screwed the plate back in position, leaving the remaining switches undisturbed.

“We’ll just try it,” said Guillam, and while Smiley went upstairs to check the tape deck, Guillam sang “Old Man River,” in a low Paul Robeson growl.

“Thank you,” said Smiley with a shudder, coming down again. “That’s more than enough.”

Millie had gone to the basement to ring Lacon. Quietly, Smiley set the stage. He put the telephone beside an armchair in the drawing-room, then cleared his line of retreat to the scullery. He fetched two full bottles of milk from the icebox and placed them on the doorstep to signify, in the eclectic language of Millie McCraig, that you may come in and all’s well. He removed his shoes and took them to the scullery, and having put out all the lights, took up his post in the armchair just as Mendel made his connecting call.

On the canal towpath, meanwhile, Guillam had resumed his vigil of the house. The footpath is closed to the public one hour before dark: after that it can be anything from a trysting place for lovers to a haven for down-and-outs; both, for different reasons, are attracted by the darkness of the bridges. That cold night Guillam saw neither. Occasionally an empty train raced past, leaving a still greater emptiness behind. His nerves were so taut, his expectations so varied, that for a moment he saw the whole architecture of that night in apocalyptic terms: the signals on the railway bridge turned to gallows; the Victorian warehouses to gigantic prisons, their windows barred and arched against the misty sky. Closer at hand, the ripple of rats and the stink of still water. Then the drawing-room lights went out; the house stood in darkness except for the chinks of yellow to either side of Millie’s basement window. From the scullery a pin of light winked at him down the unkempt garden. Taking a pen torch from his pocket, he slipped out the silver hood, sighted it with shaking fingers at the point from which the light had come, and signalled back. From now on, they could only wait.

Tarr tossed the incoming telegram back to Ben, together with the one-time pad from the safe.

“Come on,” he said, “earn your pay. Unbutton it.”

“It’s personal for you,” Ben objected. “Look. ‘Personal from Alleline decypher yourself.’ I’m not allowed to touch it. It’s the tops.”

“Do as he asks, Ben,” said Mackelvore, watching Tarr.

For ten minutes, no word passed between the three men. Tarr was standing across the room from them, very nervous from the waiting. He had jammed the gun in his waistband. His jacket lay over a chair. The sweat had stuck his shirt to his back all the way down. Ben was using a ruler to read off the number groups, then carefully writing his findings on the block of graph paper before him. To concentrate, he put his tongue against his teeth, and now he made a small click as he withdrew it. Putting aside his pencil, he offered Tarr the tearsheet.

“Read it aloud,” Tarr said.

Ben’s voice was kindly, and a little fervent. “ ‘Personal for Tarr from Alleline decypher yourself. I positively require clarification and/or trade samples before meeting your request. Quote information vital to safeguarding of the service unquote does not qualify. Let me remind you of your bad position here following your disgraceful disappearance stop urge you confide Mackelvore immediately repeat immediately stop Chief.’ ”

Ben had not quite finished before Tarr began laughing in a strange, excited way.

“That’s the way, Percy boy!” he cried. “Yes repeat no! Know why he’s stalling, Ben, darling? He’s sizing up to shoot me in the bloody back! That’s how he got my Russki girl. He’s playing the same tune, the bastard.” He was ruffling Ben’s hair, shouting at him, laughing. “I warn you, Ben: there’s some damn lousy people in this outfit, so don’t you trust the one of them, I’m telling you, or you’ll never grow up strong!”

Alone in the darkness of the drawing-room, Smiley also waited, sitting in the housekeeper’s uncomfortable chair, his head propped awkwardly against the earpiece of the telephone. Occasionally he would mutter something and Mendel would mutter back; most of the time they shared the silence. His mood was subdued, even a little glum. Like an actor, he had a sense of approaching anti-climax before the curtain went up, a sense of great things dwindling to a small, mean end; as death itself seemed small and mean to him after the struggles of his life. He had no sense of conquest that he knew of. His thoughts, as often when he was afraid, concerned people. He had no theories or judgements in particular. He simply wondered how everyone would be affected; and he felt responsible. He thought of Jim and Sam and Max and Connie and Jerry Westerby, and personal loyalties all broken; in a separate category he thought of Ann and the hopeless dislocation of their talk on the Cornish cliffs; he wondered whether there was any love between human beings that did not rest upon some sort of self-delusion; he wished he could just get up and walk out before it happened, but he couldn’t. He worried, in a quite paternal way, about Guillam, and wondered how he would take the late strains of growing up. He thought again of the day he buried Control. He thought about treason and wondered whether there was mindless treason in the same way, supposedly, as there was mindless violence. It worried him that he felt so bankrupt; that whatever intellectual or philosophical precepts he clung to broke down entirely now that he was faced with the human situation.

“Anything?” he asked Mendel, into the telephone.

“A couple of drunks,” said Mendel, “singing ‘See the jungle when it’s wet with rain.’ ”

“Never heard of it.”

Changing the telephone to his left side, he drew the gun from the wallet pocket of his jacket, where it had already ruined the excellent silk lining. He discovered the safety catch, and for a moment played with the idea that he didn’t know which way was on and which way off. He snapped out the magazine and put it back, and remembered doing this hundreds of times on the trot, in the night range at Sarratt before the war; he remembered how you always shot with two hands, sir, one to hold the gun and one the magazine, sir; and how there was a piece of Circus folklore which demanded that he should lay his index finger along the barrel and pull the trigger with his second. But when he tried it the sensation was ridiculous and he forgot about it.

“Just taking a walk,” he murmured, and Mendel said “Righty-ho.”

The gun still in his hand, he returned to the scullery, listening for a creak in the floorboards that might give him away, but the floor must have been concrete under the tatty carpet; he could have jumped and caused not even a vibration. With his torch he signalled two short flashes, a long delay, then two more. At once Guillam replied with three short.

“Back again.”

“Got you,” said Mendel.

He settled, thinking glumly of Ann: to dream the impossible dream. He put the gun in his pocket. From the canal side, the moan of a hooter. At night? Boats moving at night? Must be a car. What if Gerald has a whole emergency procedure that we know nothing about? A call-box to call-box, a car pick-up? What if Polyakov has after all a legman, a helper whom Connie never identified? He’d been through that already. This system was built to be watertight, to accommodate meetings in all contingencies. When it comes to tradecraft, Karla is a pedant.

And his fancy that he was being followed? What of that? What of the shadow he never saw, only felt, till his back seemed to tingle with the intensity of his watcher’s gaze; he saw nothing, heard nothing, only felt. He was too old not to heed the warning. The creak of a stair that had not creaked before; the rustle of a shutter when no wind was blowing; the car with a different number plate but the same scratch on the offside wing; the face on the Metro that you know you have seen somewhere before: for years at a time these were signs he had lived by; any one of them was reason enough to move, change towns, identities. For in that profession there is no such thing as coincidence.

“One gone,” said Mendel suddenly. “Hullo?”

“I’m here.”

Somebody had just come out of the Circus, said Mendel. Front door, but he couldn’t be certain of the identification. Mackintosh and hat. Bulky and moving fast. He must have ordered a cab to the door and stepped straight into it.

“Heading north, your way.”

Smiley looked at his watch. Give him ten minutes, he thought. Give him twelve; he’ll have to stop and phone Polyakov on the way. Then he thought, Don’t be silly, he’s done that already from the Circus.

“I’m ringing off,” said Smiley.

“Cheers,” said Mendel.

On the footpath, Guillam read three long flashes. The mole is on his way.

In the scullery Smiley had once more checked his thoroughfare, shoved some deck-chairs aside, and pinned a string to the mangle to guide him because he saw badly in the dark. The string led to the open kitchen door, and the kitchen led to the drawing-room and dining-room both; it had the two doors side by side. The kitchen was a long room, actually an annexe to the house before the glass scullery was added. He had thought of using the dining-room but it was too risky, and besides from the dining-room he couldn’t signal to Guillam. So he waited in the scullery, feeling absurd in his stockinged feet, polishing his spectacles because the heat of his face kept misting them. It was much colder in the scullery. The drawing-room was close and overheated but the scullery had these outside walls, and this glass and this concrete floor beneath the matting, which made his feet feel wet. The mole arrives first, he thought; the mole plays host: that is protocol, part of the pretence that Polyakov is Gerald’s agent.

A London taxi is a flying bomb.

The comparison rose in him slowly, from deep in his unconscious memory. The clatter as it barges into the crescent, the metric tick-tick as the bass notes die. The cut-off: where has it stopped, which house—when all of us on the street are waiting in the dark, crouching under tables or clutching at pieces of string—which house? Then the slam of the door, the explosive anti-climax: if you can hear it, it’s not for you.

But Smiley heard it, and it was for him.

He heard the tread of one pair of feet on the gravel, brisk and vigorous. They stopped. It’s the wrong door, Smiley thought absurdly; go away. He had the gun in his hand; he had dropped the catch. Still he listened, heard nothing. You’re suspicious, Gerald, he thought. You’re an old mole, you can sniff there’s something wrong. Millie, he thought; Millie has taken away the milk bottles, put up a warning, headed him off. Millie’s spoilt the kill. Then he heard the latch turn, one turn, two; it’s a Banham lock, he remembered—my God, we must keep Banham’s in business. Of course: the mole had been patting his pockets, looking for his key. A nervous man would have it in his hand already, would have been clutching it, cosseting it in his pocket all the way in the taxi; but not the mole. The mole might be worried but he was not nervous. At the same moment the latch turned, the bell chimed—housekeepers’ taste again: high tone, low tone, high tone. That will mean it’s one of us, Millie had said; one of the boys, her boys, Connie’s boys, Karla’s boys. The front door opened, someone stepped into the house, he heard the shuffle of the mat, he heard the door close, he heard the light switches snap and saw a pale line appear under the kitchen door. He put the gun in his pocket and wiped the palm of his hand on his jacket, then took it out again and in the same moment he heard a second flying bomb, a second taxi pulling up, and footsteps fast. Polyakov didn’t just have the key ready, he had his taxi money ready, too: do Russians tip, he wondered, or is tipping undemocratic? Again the bell rang, the front door opened and closed, and Smiley heard the double chink as two milk bottles were put on the hall table in the interest of good order and sound tradecraft.

Lord save me, thought Smiley in horror as he stared at the old icebox beside him; it never crossed my mind: suppose he had wanted to put them back in the fridge?

The strip of light under the kitchen door grew suddenly brighter as the drawing-room lights were switched on. An extraordinary silence descended over the house. Holding the string, Smiley edged forward over the icy floor. Then he heard voices. At first they were indistinct. They must still be at the far end of the room, he thought. Or perhaps they always begin in a low tone. Now Polyakov came nearer: he was at the trolley, pouring drinks.

“What is our cover story in case we are disturbed?” he asked in good English.

“Lovely voice,” Smiley remembered; “mellow like yours. I often used to play the tapes twice, just to listen to him speaking.” Connie, you should hear him now.

From the further end of the room still, a muffled murmur answered each question. Smiley could make nothing of it. “Where shall we regroup?” “What is our fallback?” “Have you anything on you that you would prefer me to be carrying during our talk, bearing in mind I have diplomatic immunity?”

It must be a catechism, Smiley thought; part of Karla’s school routine.

“Is the switch down? Will you please check? Thank you. What will you drink?”

“Scotch,” said Haydon, “a bloody great big one.”

With a feeling of utter disbelief, Smiley listened to the familiar voice reading aloud the very telegram that Smiley himself had drafted for Tarr’s use only forty-eight hours ago.

Then, for a moment, one part of Smiley broke into open revolt against the other. The wave of angry doubt that had swept over him in Lacon’s garden, and that ever since had pulled against his progress like a worrying tide, drove him now on to the rocks of despair, and then to mutiny: I refuse. Nothing is worth the destruction of another human being. Somewhere the path of pain and betrayal must end. Until that happened, there was no future; there was only a continued slide into still more terrifying versions of the present. This man was my friend and Ann’s lover, Jim’s friend and—for all I know—Jim’s lover, too; it was the treason, not the man, that belonged to the public domain.

Haydon had betrayed. As a lover, a colleague, a friend; as a patriot; as a member of that inestimable body that Ann loosely called the Set: in every capacity, Haydon had overtly pursued one aim and secretly achieved its opposite. Smiley knew very well that even now he did not grasp the scope of that appalling duplicity; yet there was a part of him that rose already in Haydon’s defence. Was not Bill also betrayed? Connie’s lament rang in his ears: “Poor loves. Trained to Empire, trained to rule the waves . . . You’re the last, George, you and Bill.” He saw with painful clarity an ambitious man born to the big canvas, brought up to rule, divide and conquer, whose visions and vanities all were fixed, like Percy’s, upon the world’s game; for whom the reality was a poor island with scarcely a voice that would carry across the water. Thus Smiley felt not only disgust, but, despite all that the moment meant to him, a surge of resentment against the institutions he was supposed to be protecting: “The social contract cuts both ways, you know,” said Lacon. The Minister’s lolling mendacity, Lacon’s tight-lipped moral complacency, the bludgeoning greed of Percy Alleline: such men invalidated any contract—why should anyone be loyal to them?

He knew, of course. He had always known it was Bill. Just as Control had known, and Lacon in Mendel’s house. Just as Connie and Jim had known, and Alleline and Esterhase; all of them had tacitly shared that unexpressed half-knowledge which was like an illness they hoped would go away if it was never owned to, never diagnosed.

And Ann? Did Ann know? Was that the shadow that fell over them that day on the Cornish cliffs?

For a space, that was how Smiley stood: a fat, barefooted spy, as Ann would say, deceived in love and impotent in hate, clutching a gun in one hand, a bit of string in the other, as he waited in the darkness. Then, gun still in hand, he tiptoed backward as far as the window, from which he signalled five short flashes in quick succession. Having waited long enough to read the acknowledgement, he returned to his listening post.

Guillam raced down the canal towpath, the torch jolting wildly in his hand, till he reached a low arched bridge and a steel stairway that led upward in zigzags to Gloucester Avenue. The gate was closed and he had to climb it, ripping one sleeve to the elbow. Lacon was standing at the corner of Princess Road, wearing an old country coat and carrying a briefcase.

“He’s there. He’s arrived,” Guillam whispered. “He’s got Gerald.” “I won’t have bloodshed,” Lacon warned. “I want absolute calm.”

Guillam didn’t bother to reply. Thirty yards down the road Mendel was waiting in a tame cab. They drove for two minutes, not so much, and stopped the cab short of the crescent. Guillam was holding Esterhase’s door key. Reaching number 5, Mendel and Guillam stepped over the gate, rather than risk the noise of it, and kept to the grass verge. As they went, Guillam glanced back and thought for a moment he saw a figure watching them—man or woman, he couldn’t tell—from the shadow of a doorway across the road; but when he drew Mendel’s attention to the spot there was nothing there, and Mendel ordered him quite roughly to calm down. The porch light was out. Guillam went ahead; Mendel waited under an apple tree. Guillam inserted the key, felt the lock ease as he turned it. Damn fool, he thought triumphantly, why didn’t you drop the latch? He pushed open the door an inch and hesitated. He was breathing slowly, filling his lungs for action. Mendel moved forward another bound. In the street two young boys went by, laughing loudly because they were nervous of the night. Once more Guillam looked back but the crescent was clear. He stepped into the hall. He was wearing suede shoes and they squeaked on the parquet; there was no carpet. At the drawing-room door he listened long enough for the fury to break in him at last.

His butchered agents in Morocco, his exile to Brixton, the daily frustration of his efforts as daily he grew older and youth slipped through his fingers; the drabness that was closing round him; the truncation of his power to love, enjoy, and laugh; the constant erosion of the standards he wished to live by; the checks and stops he had imposed on himself in the name of tacit dedication—he could fling them all in Haydon’s sneering face. Haydon, once his confessor; Haydon, always good for a laugh, a chat, and a cup of burnt coffee; Haydon, a model on which he built his life.

And more. Now that he saw, he knew. Haydon was more than his model, he was his inspiration, the torch-bearer of a certain kind of antiquated romanticism, a notion of English calling which—for the very reason that it was vague and understated and elusive—had made sense of Guillam’s life till now. In that moment, Guillam felt not merely betrayed but orphaned. His suspicions, his resentments for so long turned outward on the real world—on his women, his attempted loves—now swung upon the Circus and the failed magic that had formed his faith. With all his force he shoved open the door and sprang inside, gun in hand. Haydon and a heavy man with black hair were seated either side of a small table. Polyakov—Guillam recognised him from the photographs—was smoking a very English pipe. He wore a grey cardigan with a zip down the front, like the top half of a track suit. He had not even taken the pipe from his mouth before Guillam had Haydon by the collar. With a single heave he lifted him straight out of his chair. He had thrown away his gun and was hurling Haydon from side to side, shaking him, and shouting. Then suddenly there seemed no point. After all, it was only Bill and they had done a lot together. Guillam had drawn back long before Mendel took his arm, and he heard Smiley, politely as ever, inviting “Bill and Colonel Viktorov,” as he called them, to raise their hands and place them on their heads till Percy Alleline arrived.

“There was no one out there, was there, that you noticed?” Smiley asked of Guillam, while they waited.

“Quiet as the grave,” said Mendel, answering for both of them.

37

There are moments that are made up of too much stuff for them to be lived at the time they occur. For Guillam and all those present, this was one. Smiley’s continued distraction and Haydon’s indifference; his frequent cautious glances from the window; Polyakov’s predictable fit of indignation, his demands to be treated as became a member of the Diplomatic Corps—demands that Guillam from his place on the sofa tersely threatened to meet; the flustered arrival of Alleline and Bland; more protestations and the pilgrimage upstairs, where Smiley played the tapes; the long glum silence that followed their return to the drawing-room; the arrival of Lacon and finally of Esterhase and Fawn; Millie McCraig’s silent ministrations with the teapot: all these events and cameos unrolled with a theatrical unreality that, much like the trip to Ascot an age before, was intensified by the unreality of the hour of day. It was also true that these incidents, which included at an early point the physical constraint of Polyakov—and a stream of Russian abuse directed at Fawn for hitting him, heaven knows where, despite Mendel’s vigilance—were like a silly subplot against Smiley’s only purpose in convening the assembly: to persuade Alleline that Haydon offered Smiley’s one chance to treat with Karla, and to save, in humanitarian if not professional terms, whatever was left of the networks that Haydon had betrayed. Smiley was not empowered to conduct these transactions, nor did he seem to want to; perhaps he reckoned that between them Esterhase and Bland and Alleline were better placed to know what agents were still theoretically in being. In any event he soon took himself upstairs, where Guillam heard him once more restlessly padding from one room to the other as he continued his vigil from the windows.

So while Alleline and his lieutenants withdrew with Polyakov to the dining-room to conduct their business alone, the rest of them sat in silence in the drawing-room, either looking at Haydon or deliberately away from him. He seemed unaware that they were there. Chin in hand, he sat apart from them in a corner, watched over by Fawn, and he looked rather bored. The conference ended, they all trooped out of the dining-room and Alleline announced to Lacon, who insisted on not being present at the discussions, that an appointment had been made three days hence at this address, by which time “the Colonel will have had a chance to consult his superiors.” Lacon nodded. It might have been a board meeting.

The departures were even stranger than the arrivals. Between Esterhase and Polyakov in particular, there was a curiously poignant farewell. Esterhase, who would always rather have been a gentleman than a spy, seemed determined to make a gallant occasion of it, and offered his hand, which Polyakov struck petulantly aside. Esterhase looked round forlornly for Smiley, perhaps in the hope of ingratiating himself further with him, then shrugged and flung an arm across Bland’s broad shoulder. Soon afterwards they left together. They didn’t say goodbye to anybody, but Bland looked dreadfully shaken and Esterhase seemed to be consoling him, though his own future at that moment could hardly have struck him as rosy. Soon afterwards a radio cab arrived for Polyakov and he, too, left without a nod to anyone. By now, the conversation had died entirely; without the Russian present, the show became wretchedly parochial. Haydon remained in his familiar bored pose, still watched by Fawn and Mendel, and stared at in mute embarrassment by Lacon and Alleline. More telephone calls were made, mainly for cars. At some point Smiley reappeared from upstairs and mentioned Tarr. Alleline phoned the Circus and dictated one telegram to Paris saying that he could return to England with honour, whatever that meant; and a second to Mackelvore saying that Tarr was an acceptable person, which again seemed to Guillam a matter of opinion.

Finally, to the general relief, a windowless van arrived from the Nursery, and two men got out whom Guillam had never seen before, one tall and limping, the other doughy and fair-haired. With a shudder Guillam realised they were inquisitors. Fawn fetched Haydon’s coat from the hall, went through the pockets, and respectfully helped him into it. At this point, Smiley gently interposed himself and insisted that Haydon’s walk from the front door to the van should take place without the hall light on, and that the escort should be large. Guillam, Fawn, even Alleline, were pressed into service, and finally, with Haydon at its centre, the whole motley group shuffled through the garden to the van.

“It’s simply a precaution,” Smiley insisted. No one was disposed to argue with him. Haydon climbed in, and the inquisitors followed, locking the grille from inside. As the doors closed, Haydon lifted one hand in an amiable, if dismissive, gesture directed at Alleline.

So it was only afterwards that separate things came back to Guillam and single people came forward for his recollection: the unqualified hatred, for instance, which Polyakov directed against everyone present, from poor little Millie McCraig upwards, and which actually distorted him; his mouth curved in a savage, uncontrollable sneer, he turned white and trembled, but not from fear and not from anger. It was just plain hatred, of the sort that Guillam could not visit on Haydon, but then Haydon was of his own kind.

For Alleline, in the moment of his defeat, Guillam discovered a sneaking admiration: Alleline at least had shown a certain bearing. But later Guillam was not so sure whether Percy realised, on that first presentation of the facts, quite what the facts were: after all, he was still Chief, and Haydon was still his Iago.

But the strangest thing to Guillam, the insight that he took away with him and thought over much more deeply than was commonly his policy, was that despite his banked-up anger at the moment of breaking into the room, it required an act of will on his own part—and quite a violent one, at that—to regard Bill Haydon with much other than affection. Perhaps, as Bill would say, he had finally grown up. Best of all, on the same evening he climbed the steps to his flat and heard the familiar notes of Camilla’s flute echoing in the well. And if Camilla that night lost something of her mystery, at least by morning he had succeeded in freeing her from the toils of double-cross to which he had latterly consigned her.

In other ways also, over the next few days, his life took on a brighter look. Percy Alleline had been dispatched on indefinite leave; Smiley had been asked to come back for a while and help sweep up what was left. For Guillam himself there was talk of being rescued from Brixton. It was not till much, much later that he learned that there had been a final act; and he put a name and a purpose to that familiar shadow which had followed Smiley through the night streets of Kensington.

38

For the next two days George Smiley lived in limbo. To his neighbours, when they noticed him, he seemed to have lapsed into a wasting grief. He rose late and pottered round the house in his dressing gown, cleaning things, dusting, cooking himself meals and not eating them. In the afternoon, quite against the local by-laws, he lit a coal fire and sat before it reading among his German poets or writing letters to Ann, which he seldom completed and never posted. When the telephone rang, he went to it quickly, only to be disappointed. Outside the window the weather continued foul, and the few passers-by—Smiley studied them continuously—were huddled in Balkan misery. Once Lacon called with a request from the Minister that Smiley should “stand by to help clear up the mess at Cambridge Circus, were he called upon to do so”—in effect, to act as night watchman till a replacement for Percy Alleline could be found. Replying vaguely, Smiley prevailed on Lacon to take extreme care of Haydon’s physical safety while he was at Sarratt.

“Aren’t you being a little dramatic?” Lacon retorted. “The only place he can go is Russia, and we’re sending him there any way.”

“When? How soon?”

The details would take several more days to arrange. Smiley disdained, in his state of anti-climactic reaction, to ask how the interrogation was progressing meanwhile, but Lacon’s manner suggested that the answer would have been “badly.” Mendel brought him more solid fare.

“Immingham railway station’s shut,” he said. “You’ll have to get out at Grimsby and hoof it or take a bus.”

More often, Mendel simply sat and watched him, as one might an invalid. “Waiting won’t make her come, you know,” he said once. “Time the mountain went to Mohammed. Faint heart never won fair lady, if I may say so.”

On the morning of the third day, the doorbell rang and Smiley answered it so fast that it might have been Ann, having mislaid her key as usual. It was Lacon. Smiley was required at Sarratt, he said; Haydon insisted on seeing him. The inquisitors had got nowhere and time was running out. The understanding was that if Smiley would act as confessor, Haydon would give a limited account of himself.

“I’m assured there has been no coercion,” Lacon said.

Sarratt was a sorry place after the grandeur that Smiley remembered. Most of the elms had gone with the disease; pylons burgeoned over the old cricket field. The house itself, a sprawling brick mansion, had also come down a lot since the heyday of the cold war in Europe, and most of the better furniture seemed to have disappeared, he supposed into one of Alleline’s houses. He found Haydon in a Nissen hut hidden among the trees.

Inside, it had the stink of an army guardhouse, black-painted walls and high-barred windows. Guards manned the rooms to either side and they received Smiley respectfully, calling him “sir.” The word, it seemed, had got around. Haydon was dressed in denims, he was trembling, and he complained of dizziness. Several times he had to lie on his bed to stop the nosebleeds he was having. He had grown a half-hearted beard: apparently there was a dispute about whether he was allowed a razor.

“Cheer up,” said Smiley. “You’ll be out of here soon.”

He had tried, on the journey down, to remember Prideaux, and Irina, and the Czech networks, and he even entered Haydon’s room with a vague notion of public duty: somehow, he thought, he ought to censure him on behalf of right-thinking men. He felt instead rather shy; he felt he had never known Haydon at all, and now it was too late. He was also angry at Haydon’s physical condition, but when he taxed the guards they professed mystification. He was angrier still to learn that the additional security precautions he had insisted on had been relaxed after the first day. When he demanded to see Craddox, head of Nursery, Craddox was unavailable and his assistant acted dumb.

Their first conversation was halting and banal.

Would Smiley please forward the mail from his club, and tell Alleline to get a move on with the horse-trading with Karla? And he needed tissues, paper tissues for his nose. His habit of weeping, Haydon explained, had nothing to do with remorse or pain; it was a physical reaction to what he called the pettiness of the inquisitors, who had made up their minds that Haydon knew the names of other Karla recruits, and were determined to have them before he left. There was also a school of thought which held that Fanshawe, of the Christ Church Optimates, had been acting as a talent-spotter for Moscow Centre as well as for the Circus, Haydon explained. “Really, what can one do with asses like that?” He managed, despite his weakness, to convey that his was the only level head around. They walked in the grounds, and Smiley established with something close to despair that the perimeter was not even patrolled any more, either by night or by day. After one circuit, Haydon asked to go back to the hut, where he dug up a piece of floorboard and extracted some sheets of paper covered in hieroglyphics. They reminded Smiley forcibly of Irina’s diary. Squatting on the bed, he sorted through them, and in that pose, in that dull light, with his long forelock dangling almost to the paper, he might have been lounging in Control’s room, back in the sixties, propounding some wonderfully plausible and quite inoperable piece of skulduggery for England’s greater glory. Smiley did not bother to write anything down, since it was common ground between them that their conversation was being recorded anyway. The statement began with a long apologia, of which he afterwards recalled only a few sentences.

“We live in an age where only fundamental issues matter . . .

“The United States is no longer capable of undertaking its own revolution . . .

“The political posture of the United Kingdom is without relevance or moral viability in world affairs . . .”

With much of it, Smiley might, in other circumstances, have agreed; it was the tone, rather than the music, that alienated him.

“In capitalist America economic repression of the masses is institutionalised to a point which not even Lenin could have foreseen . . .

“The cold war began in 1917 but the bitterest struggles lie ahead of us, as America’s death-bed paranoia drives her to greater excesses abroad . . .”

He spoke not of the decline of the West, but of its death by greed and constipation. He hated America very deeply, he said, and Smiley supposed he did. Haydon also took it for granted that secret services were the only real measure of a nation’s political health, the only real expression of its subconscious.

Finally he came to his own case. At Oxford, he said, he was genuinely of the right, and in the war it scarcely mattered where one stood as long as one was fighting the Germans. For a while, after ’45, he said, he had remained content with Britain’s part in the world, till gradually it dawned on him just how trivial this was. How and when was a mystery. In the historical mayhem of his own lifetime he could point to no one occasion; simply he knew that if England were out of the game, the price of fish would not be altered by a farthing. He had often wondered which side he would be on if the test ever came; after prolonged reflection he had finally to admit that if either monolith had to win the day, he would prefer it to be the East.

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

“Of course,” said Smiley politely.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I’m sure.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Naturally.”

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

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

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

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

“Yes, he did, as a matter of fact.”

“To say what?”

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

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

Smiley appeared not quite to be listening.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Thank you.”

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

“Point,” said Smiley.

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

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

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

“Tailor. I was Beggarman.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Then who the hell did?”

Everyone waited on Smiley’s answer, but none came. The torches went out and the group moved uncertainly towards the car.

“Can we lose him just the same?” the Minister asked on the way back.

“He was a Soviet citizen. Let them have him,” said Lacon.

They agreed it was a pity about the networks. Better see whether Karla would do the deal anyhow.

“He won’t,” said Smiley.

39

Recalling all this in the seclusion of his first-class compartment, Smiley had the curious sensation of watching Haydon through the wrong end of a telescope. He had eaten very little since last night, but the bar had been open for most of the journey.

Leaving King’s Cross, he had had a wistful notion of liking Haydon and respecting him: Bill was a man, after all, who had had something to say and had said it. But his mental system rejected this convenient simplification. The more he puzzled over Haydon’s rambling account of himself, the more conscious he was of the contradictions. He tried at first to see Haydon in the romantic newspaper terms of a thirties intellectual, for whom Moscow was the natural Mecca. “Moscow was Bill’s discipline,” he told himself. “He needed the symmetry of an historical and economic solution.” This struck him as too sparse, so he added more of the man whom he was trying to like: “Bill was a romantic and a snob. He wanted to join an elitist vanguard and lead the masses out of darkness.” Then he remembered the half-finished canvases in the girl’s drawing-room in Kentish Town: cramped, over-worked, and condemned. He remembered also the ghost of Bill’s authoritarian father—Ann had called him simply the Monster—and he imagined Bill’s Marxism making up for his inadequacy as an artist and for his loveless childhood. Later, of course, it hardly mattered if the doctrine wore thin. Bill was set on the road and Karla would know how to keep him there. Treason is very much a matter of habit, Smiley decided, seeing Bill again stretched out on the floor in Bywater Street, while Ann played him music on the gramophone.

Bill had loved it, too. Smiley didn’t doubt that for a moment. Standing at the middle of a secret stage, playing world against world, hero and playwright in one: oh, Bill had loved that, all right.

Smiley shrugged it all aside, distrustful as ever of the standard shapes of human motive. He settled instead for a picture of one of those wooden Russian dolls that open up, revealing one person inside the other, and another inside him. Of all men living, only Karla had seen the last little doll inside Bill Haydon. When was Bill recruited, and how? Was his right-wing stand at Oxford a pose, or was it paradoxically the state of sin from which Karla summoned him to grace?

Ask Karla: pity I didn’t.

Ask Jim: I never shall.

Over the flat East Anglian landscape as it slid slowly by, the unyielding face of Karla replaced Bill Haydon’s crooked death mask. “But you had this one price: Ann. The last illusion of the illusionless man. He reckoned that if I were known to be Ann’s lover around the place you wouldn’t see me very straight when it came to other things.”

Illusion? Was that really Karla’s name for love? And Bill’s?

“Here,” said the guard very loudly, and perhaps for the second time. “Come on with it, you’re for Grimsby, aren’t you?”

“No, no—Immingham.” Then he remembered Mendel’s instructions and clambered onto the platform.

There was no cab in sight, so, having enquired at the ticket office, he made his way across the empty forecourt and stood beside a green sign marked “Queue.” He had hoped she might collect him, but perhaps she hadn’t received his wire. Ah well: the post office at Christmas: who could blame them? He wondered how she would take the news about Bill; till, remembering her frightened face on the cliffs in Cornwall, he realised that by then Bill was already dead for her. She had sensed the coldness of his touch, and somehow guessed what lay behind it.

Illusion? He repeated to himself. Illusionless?

It was bitterly cold. He hoped very much that her wretched lover had found her somewhere warm to live.

He wished he had brought her fur boots from the cupboard under the stairs.

He remembered the copy of Grimmelshausen, still uncollected at Martindale’s club.

Then he saw her: her disreputable car shunting towards him down the lane marked “Buses Only” and Ann at the wheel staring the wrong way. Saw her get out, leaving the indicator winking, and walk into the station to enquire: tall and puckish, extraordinarily beautiful, essentially another man’s woman.

For the rest of that term, Jim Prideaux behaved in the eyes of Roach much as his mother had behaved when his father went away. He spent a lot of time on little things, like fixing up the lighting for the school play and mending the soccer nets with string, and in French he took enormous pains over small inaccuracies. But big things, like his walks and solitary golf, he gave up altogether, and in the evenings stayed in and kept clear of the village. Worst of all was his staring empty look when Roach caught him unaware, and the way he forgot things in class, even red marks for merit. Roach had to remind him to hand them in each week.

To support him, Roach took the job of dimmer man on the lighting. Thus at rehearsals Jim had to give him a special signal—to Bill and no one else. He was to raise his arm and drop it to his side when he wanted the footlights to fade.

With time, Jim seemed to respond to treatment, however. His eye grew clearer and he became alert again, as the shadow of his mother’s death withdrew. By the night of the play, he was more light-hearted than Roach had ever known him. “Hey, Jumbo, you silly toad, where’s your mac—can’t you see it’s raining?” he called out as, tired but triumphant, they trailed back to the main building after the performance. “His real name is Bill,” he heard him explain to a visiting parent. “We were new boys together.”

The gun, Bill Roach had finally convinced himself, was, after all, a dream.

PRAISE FOR JOHN LE CARRÉ

“Le Carré is more than just a great storyteller—he captures the Zeitgeist itself.”

—Tom Wolfe

“He is one of the half-dozen best novelists now working in English.”

—Chicago Sun-Times

“A brilliant linguistic artist with a keen eye for the exotic and not-so-exotic locale, a crafty moralizer with an occasional bent for sentiment.”

—The Wall Street Journal

“No other contemporary novelist has more durably enjoyed the twin badges of being both well-read and well-regarded.”

—Scott Turow

“Le Carré has a great talent for entangling his audience in the sticky tape of complexity, paradox, and irony, and much of the pleasure in his stories is following the same dense, dark path as his characters.”

—New York Daily News

“For my money, le Carré is the equal of any novelist now writing in English.”

—Guardian (U.K.)

“Le Carré is one of the best novelists—of any kind—we have.”

—Vanity Fair

AND PRAISE FOR HIS BESTSELLING THRILLERS

THE CONSTANT GARDENER

“His best book since The Spy Who Came In from the Cold. . . . Amazingly seductive, pulling you in deeper all the time.”

—David Halberstam

“Brilliant. . . . No serious novelist can do more.”

—The Washington Post Book World

“Le Carré has never been angrier or more satisfyingly entertaining.”

—New York Daily News

“A novelist of conscience, pure and simple. . . . A masterpiece.”

—Seattle Union Record

SINGLE & SINGLE

“Any reader who feared that the end of the Cold War would deprive Mr. le Carré of his subject can now feel a measure of relief. If anything, his subject of East-West misunderstanding has grown richer, and he now possesses vast new territories to mine.”

—The New York Times

THE RUSSIA HOUSE

“An exciting spy story. . . . A well-informed political parable, incisive and instructive . . . rich . . . poignant . . . fascinating.”

—The New York Times Book Review

A PERFECT SPY

“Le Carré is a perfect spy novelist. A first-rate espionage novel, perhaps his best.”

—The New York Times

THE LITTLE DRUMMER GIRL

“It becomes instantly apparent that we are in the hands of a writer of great powers. . . . It transcends the genre. . . . His entertainment is of a high order.”

—The New York Times Book Review

SMILEY’S PEOPLE

“Riveting. Le Carré at the top of his powers.”

—Newsday

THE HONOURABLE SCHOOLBOY

“One of the most effective thrillers we have had in years.”

—The Sunday Times (U.K.)

THE NAÏVE AND SENTIMENTAL LOVER

“Splendid, original . . . le Carré shows how endowed he is with the gift of storytelling.”

—The Times (U.K.)

A SMALL TOWN IN GERMANY

“Exciting, compulsively readable, and brilliantly plotted.”

—The New York Times

THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD

“The best spy story I have ever read.”

—Graham Greene

PENGUIN CANADA

THE HONOURABLE SCHOOLBOY

JOHN LE CARRÉ is the author of many bestselling novels, several of which have achieved the status of modern classic. His works include The Spy Who Came in from the Cold; Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; Smiley’s People; The Russia House; The Constant Gardener; Absolute Friends; and The Mission Song.

ALSO BY JOHN LE CARRÉ

Call for the Dead

A Murder of Quality

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold

The Looking Glass War

A Small Town in Germany

The Naïve and Sentimental Lover

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

Smiley’s People

The Little Drummer Girl

A Perfect Spy

The Russia House

The Secret Pilgrim

The Night Manager

Our Game

The Tailor of Panama

Single & Single

The Constant Gardener

Absolute Friends

The Mission Song

JOHN
LE CARRÉ

THE HONOURABLE
SCHOOLBOY

PENGUIN CANADA

Published by the Penguin Group

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(a division of Pearson Canada Inc.)

Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

First published in Great Britain by Hodder and Stoughton Ltd, 1977
Published in Penguin Canada paperback by Penguin Group (Canada),

a division of Pearson Canada Inc., 1989, 2001

Published in this edition, 2006

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 (WEB)

Copyright © David Cornwell, 1977

Introduction copyright © David Cornwell, 1989

Grateful acknowledgment is made to Random House, Inc., and to Faber & Faber Ltd. for permission to reprint four lines of “September 1, 1939” from The Collected Poetry of W. H. Auden by W. H. Auden. Copyright 1940 by W. H. Auden.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Publisher’s note: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Manufactured in Canada.

LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

Le Carré, John, 1931–

The honourable schoolboy / John le Carré.

ISBN-13: 978-0-14-305673-7

ISBN-10: 0-14-305673-5

I. Title.

PR6062.E42H65  2006   823’.914   C2006-902557-6

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For Jane, who bore the brunt,
put up with my presence and
absence alike, and made it all possible

I and the public know

What all schoolchildren learn,

Those to whom evil is done

Do evil in return.

—W. H. Auden

FOREWORD

I offer my warm thanks to the many generous and hospitable people who found time to help me with my research for this novel.

In Singapore, Alwyne (Bob) Taylor, the Daily Mail correspondent; Max Vanzi, of U.P.I.; Peter Simms, then of Time; and Bruce Wilson, of the Melbourne Herald.

In Hong Kong, Sydney Liu, of Newsweek; Bing Wong, of Time; H. D. S. Greenway, of the Washington Post; Anthony Lawrence, of the B.B.C.; Richard Hughes, then of the Sunday Times; Donald A. Davis and Vic Vanzi, of U.P.I.; and Derek Davies and his staff at the Far Eastern Economic Review, notably Leo Goodstadt. I must also acknowledge with gratitude the exceptional co-operation of Major General Penfold and his team at the Royal Hong Kong Jockey Club, who gave me the run of Happy Valley Racecourse and showed me much kindness without once seeking to know my purpose. I wish I could also name the several officials of the Hong Kong government, and members of the Royal Hong Kong Police, who opened doors for me at some risk of embarrassment to themselves.

In Phnom Penh, my genial host Baron Walther von Marschall took marvellous care of me, and I could never have managed without the wisdom of Kurt Furrer and Madame Yvette Pierpaoli, both of Suisindo Shipping & Trading Co., and currently in Bangkok.

But my special thanks must be reserved for those who put up with me the longest: for my friend David Greenway, of the Washington Post, who allowed me to follow in his distinguished shadow through Laos, North East Thailand, and Phnom Penh; and for Peter Simms, who, before settling in Hong Kong, guided my eye through unfamiliar territory and helped me with much of the legwork. To them, to Bing Wong, and to certain Hong Kong Chinese friends who, I believe, will prefer to remain anonymous, I owe a great debt.

Last there is the great Dick Hughes, whose outward character and mannerisms I have shamelessly exaggerated for the part of old Craw. Some people, once met, simply elbow their way into a novel and sit there till the writer finds them a place. Dick is one. I am sorry I could not obey his urgent exhortation to libel him to the hilt. My cruellest efforts could not prevail against the affectionate nature of the original.

And since none of these good people had any more notion than I did, in those days, of how the book would turn out, I must be quick to absolve them from my misdemeanours.

Terry Mayers, a veteran of the British Karate Team, advised me on certain alarming skills. And for Miss Nellie Adams, for her stupendous bouts of typing, no praise is enough.

JOHN LE CARRÉ

Cornwall, 1977

INTRODUCTION

A clever English writer once remarked that he wrote in order to have something to read in his old age. At fifty-seven I have yet to count myself old, but there is no doubt that in the thirteen years since I began this book, history has aged perceptibly. Thirteen years ago the Soviet Union was still locked in the ice of a slothful and corrupt oligarchy, and the puritanically minded leaders of the new China had turned their backs on their old ally and mentor in contempt. Today it is the Soviet Union which is in the throes of redefining the great Proletarian Revolution, if there ever really was one, while the blood of heroic young Chinese men and women who asked peaceably for similar redefinition of their political identity lies thick on Tiananmen Square, however many times the Army’s watercannons try to wash it away.

So if you read this book, be warned. You are reading an historical novel, written on the hoof, in a climate so altered that I for one would not know how to recapture any part of it if I were to try to tell you the same story in recollection today.

There is another reason why I might be tempted back to this book in my old age, and that is its fragile recognition of the man I was at the time. The Honourable Schoolboy was the first book I wrote on location, and the first, but not the last, for which I put on the non-uniform of a field reporter in order to obtain my experiences and my information. It commemorates the first time I saw shots exchanged in the heat of battle, or succoured a wounded soldier, or smelt the stench of old blood in the fields. It tells therefore of a certain growing up, but also of a certain growing down, for war is nothing if not a return to childhood.

Thus when Jerry Westerby, my hero, takes his taxi-ride to the battle front a few kilometres outside Phnom Penh, and involuntarily finds himself behind Khmer Rouge lines, I was sitting much where he sat, in the same taxi, with my heart in my mouth, drumming my fingers on the same dashboard and offering the same prayers to my Maker. When Jerry visits an opium den or entrusts himself to the flying skills of an intoxicated Chinese opium pilot in an aeroplane that would not have passed muster in a scrap - auction, he is the beneficiary of my own timid adventurings. Which means only that, in the space of a few months, I shared the perils that any good reporter will take in his stride in a single afternoon.

I remember only one occasion when I chickened, but it does duty for those other occasions I have conveniently forgotten. With H. D. S. Greenway, then of the Washignton Post, I was proposing to take a train from Nakhomphenom, in North-East Thailand, back to Bangkok. We had come from Laos and had been roughing it for a week. We had shared some rich but unnerving encounters in the insurgency area, not least with an American-trained Thai colonel of Special Forces whom you will meet in the later chapters of the book and who carried more armament on his person than anybody I have ever seen before or since. As we approached the ticket office, Greenway asked me wearily whether my quest for material required us to travel in the poorest part of the train. I was still hesitating when he came up with the solution: “Tell you what. We’ll travel First and leave Smiley to sweat it out in Third.” And so we did, and consequently arrived in Bangkok in good enough shape to celebrate the publication of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.

Why else might I pick up this book ten years from now? The answer is like a sad smile in my memory. For the vanished Cambodia. For the vanished Phnom Penh, the last of Joseph Conrad’s river ports to go to the devil. For the scent of cooking oil and night flowers and the clamour of the bullfrogs as we ate our ridiculously wonderful French-Khmer meals just a few miles from the predatory armies that were about to devastate the city. For the insinuating murmur of the street girls perched up in the backs of their cyclos, as they ticked past us in the hot dark. For the memory, in short, of the dying days of French colonialism, before the vengeance of the terrible Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge swept it all away for good or bad.

As to Hong Kong—is that all history too? Even as I write, Mrs. Thatcher’s Foreign Secretary is in the Colony, bravely explaining why Britain can do nothing for a people she has dined off for a hundred and fifty years. Only betrayal, it seems, is timeless.

JOHN LE CARRÉ
July 1989

PART I

Winding the Clock

1

HOW THE CIRCUS LEFT TOWN

Afterwards, in the dusty little corners where London’s secret servants drink together, there was argument about where the Dolphin case history should really begin. One crowd, led by a blimpish fellow in charge of microphone transcription, went so far as to claim that the fitting date was some sixty years ago, when “that arch-cad Bill Haydon” was born into the world under a treacherous star. Haydon’s very name struck a chill into them. It does so even today. For it was this same Haydon who, while still at Oxford, was recruited by Karla the Russian as a “mole” or “sleeper”—or, in English, agent of penetration—to work against them. And who with Karla’s guidance entered their ranks and spied on them for thirty years or more. And whose eventual discovery—thus the line of reasoning—brought the British so low that they were forced into a fatal dependence upon their American sister service, whom they called in their own strange jargon “the Cousins.” The Cousins changed the game entirely, said the blimpish fellow, much as he might have deplored power tennis or bodyline bowling. And ruined it too, said his seconds.

To less-flowery minds, the true genesis was Haydon’s unmasking by George Smiley and Smiley’s consequent appointment as caretaker chief of the betrayed service, which occurred in the late November of 1973. Once George had got Karla under his skin, they said, there was no stopping him; the rest was inevitable. Poor old George: but what a mind under all that burden!

One scholarly soul, a researcher of some sort—in the jargon, a “burrower”—even insisted, in his cups, upon January 26, 1841, as the natural date, when a certain Captain Elliot of the Royal Navy took a landing party to a fog-laden rock called Hong Kong at the mouth of the Pearl River and a few days later proclaimed it a British colony. With Elliot’s arrival, said the scholar, Hong Kong became the headquarters of Britain’s opium trade to China, and in consequence one of the pillars of the Imperial economy. If the British had not invented the opium market—he said, not entirely serious—then there would have been no case, no ploy, no dividend; and therefore no renaissance of the Circus following Bill Haydon’s traitorous depredations.

Whereas the hard men—the grounded fieldmen, the trainers, and the case officers who made their own murmured caucus always—they saw the question solely in operational terms. They pointed to Smiley’s deft footwork in tracking down Karla’s paymaster in Vientiane; to Smiley’s handling of the girl’s parents; and to his wheeling and dealing with the reluctant barons of Whitehall, who held the operational purse strings and dealt out rights and permissions in the secret world. Above all, to the wonderful moment where he turned the operation round on its own axis. For these pros, the case was a victory of technique. Nothing more. They saw the shot-gun marriage with the Cousins as just another skilful bit of tradecraft in a long and delicate poker game. As to the final outcome: to hell. The king is dead, so long live the next one.

The debate continues wherever old comrades meet, though the name of Jerry Westerby, understandably, is seldom mentioned. Occasionally, it is true, somebody does, out of foolhardiness or sentiment or plain forgetfulness, dredge it up, and there is atmosphere for a moment; but it passes. Only the other day a young probationer just out of the Circus’s refurbished training school at Sarratt—in the jargon again, “the Nursery”—piped it out in the under-thirties bar, for instance. A watered-down version of the Dolphin case had recently been introduced at Sarratt as material for syndicate discussion—even playlets—and the poor boy, still very green, was brimming with excitement to discover he was in the know. “But my God,” he protested, enjoying the kind of fool’s freedom sometimes granted to naval midshipmen in the wardroom, “my God, why does nobody seem to recognise Westerby’s part in the affair? If anybody carried the load, it was Jerry Westerby. He was the spearhead. Well, wasn’t he? Frankly?” Except, of course, he did not utter the name “Westerby,” or “Jerry” either, not least because he did not know them; but used instead the cryptonym allocated to Jerry for the duration of the case.

Peter Guillam fielded this loose ball. Guillam is tall and tough and graceful, and probationers awaiting first posting tend to look up to him as some sort of Greek god.

“Westerby was the stick that poked the fire,” he declared curtly, ending the silence. “Any fieldman would have done as well, some a damn sight better.”

When the boy still did not take the hint, Guillam rose and went over to him and, very pale, snapped into his ear that he should fetch himself another drink, if he could hold it, and thereafter guard his tongue for several days or weeks. Whereupon the conversation returned once more to the topic of dear old George Smiley, surely the last of the true greats, and what was he doing with himself these days, back in retirement? So many lives he had led; so much to recollect in tranquillity, they agreed.

“George went five times round the moon to our one,” someone declared loyally, a woman.

Ten times, they agreed. Twenty! Fifty! With hyperbole, Westerby’s shadow mercifully receded. As in a sense, so did George Smiley’s. Well, George had a marvellous innings, they would say. At his age what could you expect?

Perhaps a more realistic point of departure is a certain typhoon Saturday in mid-1974, three o’clock in the afternoon, when Hong Kong lay battened down waiting for the next onslaught. In the bar of the Foreign Correspondents’ Club, a score of journalists, mainly from former British colonies—Australian, Canadian, American—fooled and drank in a mood of violent idleness, a chorus without a hero. Thirteen floors below them, the old trams and double-deckers were caked in the mud-brown sweat of building dust and smuts from the chimney stacks in Kowloon. The tiny ponds outside the high-rise hotels prickled with slow, subversive rain. And in the men’s room, which provided the Club’s best view of the harbour, young Luke, the Californian, was ducking his face into the hand-basin, washing the blood from his mouth.

Luke was a wayward, gangling tennis player, an old man of twenty-seven who, until the American pull-out, had been the star turn in his magazine’s Saigon stable of war reporters. When you knew he played tennis, it was hard to think of him doing anything else, even drinking. You imagined him at the net, uncoiling and smashing everything to kingdom come; or serving aces between double faults. His mind, as he sucked and spat, was fragmented by drink and mild concussion—Luke would probably have used the war word “fragged”—into several lucid parts. One part was occupied with a Wanchai bar-girl called Ella, for whose sake he had punched the pig policeman on the jaw and suffered the inevitable consequences. With the minimum necessary force, Superintendent Rockhurst, known otherwise as “the Rocker,” who was this minute relaxing in a corner of the bar after his exertions, had knocked Luke cold and kicked him smartly in the ribs. Another part of Luke’s mind was on something his Chinese landlord had said to him this morning when he called to complain of the noise of Luke’s gramophone, and had stayed to drink a beer.

A scoop of some sort, definitely. But what sort?

He retched again, then peered out of the window. The junks were lashed behind the barriers and the Star Ferry had stopped running. A veteran British frigate lay at anchor, and Club rumours said Whitehall was selling it.

“Should be putting to sea,” he muttered confusedly, recalling some bit of naval lore he had picked up in his travels. “Frigates put to sea in typhoons. Yes, sir.”

The hills were slate under the stacks of black cloud-bank. Six months ago, the sight would have had him cooing with pleasure. The harbour, the din, even the skyscraper shanties that clambered from the sea’s edge upwards to the Peak: after Saigon, Luke had ravenously embraced the whole scene. But all he saw today was a smug, rich British rock run by a bunch of plum-throated traders whose horizons went no farther than their belly-lines. The colony had therefore become for him exactly what it was already for the rest of the journalists: an airfield, a telephone, a laundry, a bed. Occasionally—but never for long—a woman. Where even experience had to be imported. As to the wars which for so long had been his addiction, they were as remote from Hong Kong as they were from London or New York. Only the Stock Exchange showed a token sensibility, and on Saturdays it was closed anyway.

“Think you’re going to live, ace?” asked the shaggy Canadian cowboy, coming to the stall beside him. The two men had shared the pleasures of the Tet offensive.

“Thank you, dear, I feel perfectly topping,” Luke replied, in his most exalted English accent.

Luke decided it really was important for him to remember what Jake Chiu had said to him over the beer this morning, and suddenly, like a gift from heaven, it came to him.

“I remember!” he shouted. “Jesus, cowboy, I remember! Luke, you remember! My brain! It works! Folks, give ear to Luke!”

“Forget it,” the cowboy advised. “That’s badland out there today, ace. Whatever it is, forget it.”

But Luke kicked open the door and charged into the bar, arms flung wide.

“Hey! Hey! Folks!”

Not a head turned. Luke cupped his hands to his mouth.

“Listen, you drunken bums, I got news. This is fantastic. Two bottles of Scotch a day and a brain like a razor. Someone give me a bell.”

Finding none, he grabbed a tankard and hammered it on the bar rail, spilling the beer. Even then, only the dwarf paid him the slightest notice.

“So what’s happened, Lukie?” whined the dwarf, in his queeny Greenwich Village drawl. “Has Big Moo gotten hiccups again? I can’t bear it.”

Big Moo was Club jargon for the Governor, and the dwarf was Luke’s chief of bureau. He was a pouchy, sullen creature, with disordered hair that wept in black strands over his face, and a silent way of popping up beside you. A year back, two Frenchmen, otherwise rarely seen there, had nearly killed him for a chance remark he had made on the origins of the mess in Vietnam. They took him to the lift, broke his jaw and several of his ribs, then dumped him in a heap on the ground floor and came back to finish their drinks. Soon afterwards the Australians did a similar job on him when he made a silly accusation about their token military involvement in the war. He suggested that Canberra had done a deal with President Johnson to keep the Australian boys in Vung Tau, which was a picnic, while the Americans did the real fighting elsewhere. Unlike the French, the Australians didn’t even bother to use the lift. They just beat the hell out of the dwarf where he stood, and when he fell they added a little more of the same. After that, he learned when to keep clear of certain people in Hong Kong. In times of persistent fog, for instance. Or when the water was cut to four hours a day. Or on a typhoon Saturday.

Otherwise the Club was pretty much empty. For reasons of prestige, the top correspondents steered clear of the place anyway. A few businessmen, who came for the flavour pressmen give; a few girls, who came for the men. A couple of war tourists in fake battle-drill. And in his customary corner, the awesome Rocker, Superintendent of Police, ex-Palestine, ex-Kenya, ex-Malaya, ex-Fiji, an implacable war-horse, with a beer, one set of slightly reddened knuckles, and a weekend copy of the South China Morning Post. The Rocker, people said, came for the class.

At the big table at the centre, which on weekdays was the preserve of United Press International, lounged the Shanghai Junior Baptist Conservative Bowling Club, presided over by mottled old Craw, the Australian, enjoying its usual Saturday tournament. The aim of the contest was to pitch a screwed-up napkin across the room and lodge it in the wine rack. Every time you succeeded, your competitors bought you the bottle and helped you drink it. Old Craw growled the orders to fire, and an elderly Shanghainese waiter, Craw’s favourite, wearily manned the butts and served the prizes. The game was not a zestful one that day, and some members were not bothering to throw. Nevertheless this was the group Luke selected for his audience.

“Big Moo’s wife’s got hiccups!” the dwarf insisted. “Big Moo’s wife’s horse has got hiccups! Big Moo’s wife’s horse’s groom’s got hiccups! Big Moo’s wife’s horse’s—”

Striding to the table, Luke leapt straight onto it with a crash, breaking several glasses and cracking his head on the ceiling in the process. Framed up there against the south window in a halfcrouch, he was out of scale to everyone: the dark mist, the dark shadow of the Peak behind it, and this giant filling the whole foreground. But they went on pitching and drinking as if they hadn’t seen him. Only the Rocker glanced in Luke’s direction, once, before licking a huge thumb and turning to the cartoon page.

“Round three,” Craw ordered, in his rich Australian accent. “Brother Canada, prepare to fire. Wait, you slob. Fire.”

A screwed-up napkin floated toward the rack, taking a high trajectory. Finding a cranny, it hung a moment, then flopped to the ground. Egged on by the dwarf, Luke began stamping on the table and more glasses fell. Finally he wore his audience down.

“Your Graces,” said old Craw, with a sigh. “Pray silence for my son. I fear he would have parley with us. Brother Luke, you have committed several acts of war today and one more will meet with our severe disfavour. Speak clearly and concisely omitting no detail, however slight, and thereafter hold your water, sir.”

In their tireless pursuit of legends about one another, old Craw was their Ancient Mariner. Craw had shaken more sand out of his shorts, they told each other, than most of them would walk over; and they were right. In Shanghai, where his career had started, he had been teaboy and city editor to the only English-speaking journal in the port. Since then, he had covered the Communists against Chiang Kai-shek and Chiang against the Japanese and the Americans against practically everyone. Craw gave them a sense of history in this rootless place. His style of speech, which at typhoon times even the hardiest might pardonably find irksome, was a genuine hangover from the thirties, when Australia provided the bulk of journalists in the Orient, and the Vatican, for some reason, the jargon of their companionship.

So Luke, thanks to old Craw, finally got it out.

“Gentlemen! Dwarf, you damn Polack, let go of my foot! Gentlemen.” He paused to dab his mouth with a handkerchief. “The house known as High Haven is for sale and His Grace Tufty Thesinger has flown the coop.”

Nothing happened, but he didn’t expect much anyway. Journalists are not given to cries of amazement or even incredulity.

“High Haven,” Luke repeated sonorously, “is up for grabs. Mr. Jake Chiu, the well-known and popular real-estate entrepreneur, more familiar to you as my personal irate landlord, has been charged by Her Majesty’s majestic government to dispose of High Haven. To wit, peddle. Let me go, you Polish bastard, I’ll kill you!”

The dwarf had toppled him. Only a flailing, agile leap saved him from injury. From the floor, Luke hurled more abuse at his assailant. Meanwhile, Craw’s large head had turned to Luke, and his moist eyes fixed on him a baleful stare that seemed to go on forever. Luke began to wonder which of Craw’s many laws he might have sinned against. Beneath his various disguises, Craw was a complex and solitary figure, as everyone round the table knew. Under the willed roughness of his manner lay a love of the East which seemed sometimes to string him tighter than he could stand, so that there were months when he would disappear from sight altogether and, like a sulky elephant, go off on his private paths until he was once more fit to live with.

“Don’t burble, Your Grace, do you mind?” said Craw at last, and tilted back his big head imperiously. “Refrain from spewing low-grade bilge into highly salubrious water, will you, Squire? High Haven’s the spookhouse. Been the spookhouse for years. Lair of the lynx-eyed Major Tufty Thesinger, formerly of Her Majesty’s Rifles, presently Hong Kong’s Lestrade of the Yard. Tufty wouldn’t fly the coop. He’s a hood, not a tit. Give my son a drink, Monsignor”—this to the Shanghainese barman—“he’s wandering.”

Craw intoned another fire order and the Club returned to its intellectual pursuits. The truth was, there was little new to these great spy scoops by Luke. He had a long reputation as a failed spook-watcher, and his leads were invariably disproved. Since Vietnam, the stupid lad saw spies under every carpet. He believed the world was run by them, and much of his spare time, when he was sober, was spent hanging round the Colony’s numberless battalions of thinly disguised China-watchers, and worse, who infested the enormous American Consulate up the hill. So if it hadn’t been such a listless day, the matter would probably have rested there. As it was, the dwarf saw an opening to amuse, and seized it.

“Tell us, Lukie,” he suggested, with a queer upward twisting of the hands, “are they selling High Haven with contents or as found?”

The question won him a round of applause. Was High Haven worth more with its secrets or without?

“Do they sell it with Major Thesinger?” the South African photographer pursued, in his humourless singsong, and there was more laughter still, though it was no more affectionate. The photographer was a disturbing figure, crew cut and starved, and his complexion was pitted like the battlefields he loved to haunt. He came from Cape Town, but they called him Deathwish the Hun. The saying was, he would bury all of them, for he stalked them like a mute.

For several diverting minutes now, Luke’s point was lost entirely under a spate of Major Thesinger stories and Major Thesinger imitations, in which all but Craw joined. It was recalled that the Major had made his first appearance in the Colony as an importer, with some fatuous cover down among the docks; only to transfer, six months later, quite improbably, to the services’ list and, complete with his staff of pallid clerks and doughy, well-bred secretaries, decamp to the said spookhouse as somebody’s replacement.

In particular, the Major’s tête-à-tête luncheons were described, to which, as it now turned out, practically every journalist listening had at one time or another been invited. And which ended with laborious proposals over brandy, including such wonderful phrases as: “Now, look here, old man, if you should ever bump into an interesting Chow from over the river, you know—one with access, follow me?—just you remember High Haven!” Then the magic telephone number—the one that “rings spot on my desk, no middle men, tape-recorders, nothing, right?”—which a good half-dozen of them seemed to have in their diaries: “Here, pencil this one on your cuff; pretend it’s a date or a girl-friend or something. Ready for it? Hong Kong-side five zero two four . . .”

Having chanted the digits in unison, they fell quiet. Somewhere a clock chimed for three-fifteen. Luke slowly stood up and brushed the dust from his jeans. The old Shanghainese waiter gave up his post by the racks and reached for the menu, in the hope that someone might eat. For a moment, uncertainty overcame them. The day was forfeit. It had been so since the first gin.

In the background, a low growl sounded as the Rocker ordered himself a generous luncheon: “And bring me a cold beer, cold, you hear, boy? Muchee coldee. Chop chop.” The Superintendent had his way with natives and said this every time. The quiet returned.

“Well, there you are, Lukie,” the dwarf called, moving away. “That’s how you win your Pulitzer, I guess. Congratulations, darling. Scoop of the year.”

“Ah, go impale yourselves, the bunch of you,” said Luke carelessly and started to make his way down the bar to where two sallow blond girls sat, army daughters on the prowl. “Jake Chiu showed me the damn letter of instruction, didn’t he? On Her Majesty’s damn Service, wasn’t it? Damn crest on the top, lion screwing a goat. Hi, sweethearts, remember me? I’m the kind man who bought you the lollipops at the fair.”

“Thesinger don’t answer,” Deathwish the Hun sang mournfully from the telephone. “Nobody don’t answer. Not Thesinger, not his duty man. They disconnected the line.” In the excitement, or the monotony, no one had noticed Deathwish slip away.

Till now, old Craw the Australian had lain dead as a dodo. Now he looked up sharply.

“Dial it again, you fool,” he ordered, tart as a drill sergeant.

With a shrug, Deathwish dialled Thesinger’s number a second time, and a couple of them went to watch him do it. Craw stayed put, watching from where he sat. There were two instruments. Deathwish tried the second, but with no better result.

“Ring the operator,” Craw ordered across the room to them. “Don’t stand there like a pregnant banshee. Ring the operator, you African ape!”

Number disconnected, said the operator.

“Since when, man?” Deathwish demanded, into the mouthpiece.

No information available, said the operator.

“Maybe they got a new number then, right, man?” Deathwish howled, still at the luckless operator. No one had ever seen him so involved. Life for Deathwish was what happened at the end of a viewfinder: such passion was only attributable to the typhoon.

No information available, said the operator.

“Ring Shallow Throat,” Craw ordered, now quite furious. “Ring every damned striped-pants in the Colony!”

Deathwish shook his long head uncertainly. Shallow Throat was the official government spokesman, a hate-object to them all. To approach him for anything was bad face.

“Here, give him to me,” said Craw and, rising to his feet, shoved them aside to get to the phone and embark on the lugubrious courtship of Shallow Throat. “Your devoted Craw, sir, at your service. How’s Your Eminence in mind and health? Charmed, sir, charmed. And the wife and veg, sir? All eating well, I trust? No scurvy or typhus? Good. Well now, perhaps you’ll have the benison to advise me why the hell Tufty Thesinger’s flown the coop?”

They watched him, but his face had set like rock, and there was nothing more to read there.

“And the same to you, sir!” he snorted finally, and slammed the phone back on its cradle so hard the whole table bounced. Then he turned to the old Shanghainese waiter. “Monsignor Goh, sir, order me a petrol donkey and oblige! Your Graces, get off your arses, the pack of you!”

“What the hell for?” said the dwarf, hoping to be included in the command.

“For a story, you snotty little Cardinal, for a story, Your lecherous, alcoholic Eminences. For wealth, fame, women, and longevity!”

His black mood was indecipherable to any of them.

“But what did Shallow Throat say that was so damn bad?” the shaggy Canadian cowboy asked, mystified.

The dwarf echoed him. “Yeah, so what did he say, Brother Craw?”

“He said, ‘No comment,’ ” Craw replied with fine dignity, as if the words were the vilest slur upon his professional honour.

So up the Peak they went, leaving only the silent majority of drinkers to their peace: restive Deathwish the Hun went, long Luke, then the shaggy Canadian cowboy, very striking in his Mexican revolutionary moustache, the dwarf, attaching as ever, and finally old Craw and the two army girls—a plenary session of the Shanghai Junior Baptist Conservative Bowling Club, therefore, with ladies added, though the Club was sworn to celibacy. Amazingly, the jolly Cantonese driver took them all, a triumph of exuberance over physics. He even consented to give three receipts for the full fare, one for each of the journals represented, a thing no Hong Kong taxi-driver had been known to do before or since. It was a day to break all precedents. Old Craw sat in the front wearing his famous soft straw hat with Eton colours on the ribbon, bequeathed to him by an old comrade in his will. The dwarf was squeezed over the gear lever, the other three men sat in the back, and the two girls sat on Luke’s lap, which made it hard for him to dab his mouth.

The Rocker did not see fit to join them. He had tucked his napkin into his collar in preparation for the Club’s roast lamb and mint sauce and a lot of potatoes: “And another beer! But cold this time—hear that, boy? Muchee coldee, and bring it chop chop.”

But once the coast was clear, the Rocker also made use of the telephone, and spoke to Someone in Authority, just to be on the safe side, though they agreed there was nothing to be done.

The taxi was a red Mercedes, quite new, but nowhere kills a car faster than the Peak, climbing at no speed forever, airconditioners at full blast. The weather continued awful. As the car sobbed slowly up the concrete cliffs, they were engulfed by a fog thick enough to choke on. When they got out, it was even worse. A hot, unbudgeable curtain had spread itself across the summit, reeking of petrol and crammed with the din of the valley. The moisture floated in hot fine swarms. On a clear day they would have had a view both ways, one of the loveliest on earth: northward to Kowloon and the blue mountains of the New Territories, which hid from sight the eight hundred million Chinese who lacked the privilege of British rule; southward to Repulse and Deep Water Bays and the open China Sea. High Haven, after all, had been built by the Royal Navy in the twenties in all the grand innocence of that service, to receive and impart a sense of power.

But that afternoon, if the house had not been set among the trees, and in a hollow where the trees grew tall in their effort to reach the sky, and if the trees had not kept the fog out, they would have had nothing to look at but the two white concrete pillars—one bearing bell buttons marked “DAY” and “NIGHT”— and the chained gates they supported. Thanks to the trees, however, they saw the house clearly, though it was set back fifty yards. They could pick out the drain-pipes, fire-escapes, and washing lines and they could admire the green dome which the Japanese army had added during their four years’ tenancy.

Hurrying to the front in his desire to be accepted, the dwarf pressed the bell marked “DAY.” A speaker was let into the pillar and they all stared at it, waiting for it to say something or, as Luke would have it, puff out pot-smoke. At the roadside, the Cantonese driver had switched on his radio full, and it was playing a whining Chinese love song, on and on. The second pillar was blank except for a brass plate announcing the Inter Services Liaison Staff, Thesinger’s threadbare cover. Deathwish the Hun had produced a camera and was photographing as methodically as if he were on one of his native battlefields.

“Maybe they don’t work Saturdays,” Luke suggested while they continued to wait, at which Craw told him not to be bloody silly; spooks worked seven days a week and round the clock, he said. Also they never ate, apart from Tufty.

“Good afternoon to you,” said the dwarf.

Pressing the night bell, he had put his twisted red lips to the vents of the speaker and affected an upper-class English accent, which, to give him credit, he managed surprisingly well.

“My name is Michael Hanbury-Steadly-Heamoor, and I’m personal bumboy to Big Moo. I should like, pliss, to speak to Major Thesinger on a matter of some urgency, pliss. There is a mushroom-shaped cloud the Major may not have noticed; it appearce to be forming over the Pearl River and it’s spoiling Big Moo’s golf. Thenk you. Will you kindly open the gate?”

One of the blond girls gave a titter.

“I didn’t know he was a Steadly-Heamoor,” she said. Abandoning Luke, they had tethered themselves to the shaggy Canadian’s arm, and spent a lot of time whispering in his ear.

“He’s Rasputin,” said one of the girls admiringly, stroking the back of his thigh. “I’ve seen the film. He’s the spitten image, aren’t you, Canada?”

Now everybody had a drink from Luke’s flask while they regrouped and wondered what to do. From the direction of the parked cab, the driver’s Chinese love song continued dauntlessly, but the speakers on the pillars said nothing at all. The dwarf pressed both bells at once, and tried an Al Capone threat.

“Now see here, Thesinger, we know you’re in there. You come out with your hands raised, uncloaked, throw down your daggers—Hey, watch it, you stupid cow!”

The imprecation was addressed neither to the Canadian nor to old Craw—who was sidling toward the trees, apparently to meet a call of nature—but to Luke, who had decided to beat his way into the house. The gateway stood in a muddy service bay sheltered by dripping trees. On the far side was a pile of refuse, some new. Sauntering over to this in search of an illuminating clue, Luke had unearthed a piece of pig-iron made in the shape of an “S.” Having carted it to the gate, though it must have weighed thirty pounds or more, he was holding it two-handed above his head and driving it against the staves, at which the gate tolled like a cracked bell.

Deathwish had sunk to one knee, his hollowed face clawed into a martyr’s smile as he shot.

“Counting five, Tufty!” Luke yelled, with another shattering heave. “One . . .” He struck again. “Two . . .”

Overhead an assorted flock of birds, some very large, lifted out of the trees and flew in slow spirals, but the thunder of the valley and the boom of the gate drowned their screams. The taxi-driver was dancing about, clapping and laughing, his love song forgotten. Stranger still, in view of the menacing weather, an entire Chinese family appeared, pushing not one pram but two, and they began laughing, also—even the smallest child—holding their hands across their mouths to conceal their teeth. Till suddenly the Canadian cowboy let out a cry, shook off the girls, and pointed through the gates.

“For Lord’s sakes, what the heck’s Craw doing? Old buzzard’s jumped the wire.”

By now, whatever sense of normal scale there might have been had vanished. A collective madness had seized everyone. The drink, the black day, the claustrophobia had gone to their heads entirely. The girls fondled the Canadian with abandon, Luke continued his hammering, the Chinese were hooting with laughter, until with divine timeliness the fog lifted, temples of blue-black cloud soared directly above them, and a torrent of rain crashed into the trees. A second longer and it hit them, drenching them in the first swoop. The girls, suddenly half naked, flew laughing and shrieking for the Mercedes, but the male ranks held firm— even the dwarf held firm—staring through the films of water at the unmistakeable figure of the old Australian in his Etonian hat, standing in the shelter of the house under a rough porch that looked as if it were made for bicycles, though no one but a lunatic would bicycle up the Peak.

“Craw!” they screamed. “Monsignor! The bastard’s scooped us!”

The din of the rain was deafening; the branches seemed to be cracking under its force. Luke had thrown aside his mad hammer. The shaggy cowboy went first, Luke and the dwarf followed, Deathwish with his smile and his camera brought up the tail, crouching and hobbling as he continued photographing blindly. The rain poured off them as it wanted, sloshing in red rivulets round their ankles as they pursued Craw’s trail up a slope where the screech of bullfrogs added to the row. They scaled a bracken ridge, slithered to a halt before a barbed-wire fence, clambered through the parted strands, and crossed a low ditch. By the time they reached him, Craw was gazing at the green cupola, while the rain—despite the straw hat—ran busily off his jaw, turning his trim fawn suit into a blackened, shapeless tunic. He stood as if mesmerised, staring upward.

Luke, who loved him best, spoke first. “Your Grace? Hey, wake up! It’s me—Romeo. Jesus Christ, what the hell’s eating him?”

Suddenly concerned, Luke gently touched his arm. But still Craw didn’t speak.

“Maybe he died standing up,” the dwarf suggested, while grinning Deathwish photographed him on this happy off chance.

Like an old prize-fighter, Craw slowly rallied. “Brother Luke, we owe you a handsome apology, sir,” he muttered.

“Get him back to the cab,” said Luke, and began clearing a way for him, but the old boy refused to move.

“Tufty Thesinger. A good scout. Not a flyer—not sly enough for flight—but a good scout.”

“Tufty Thesinger rest in peace,” said Luke impatiently. “Let’s go. Dwarf, move your ass.”

“He’s stoned,” said the cowboy.

“Consider the clues, Watson,” Craw resumed, after another pause for meditation, while Luke tugged at his arm and the rain came on still faster. “Remark first the empty cages over the window, whence air-conditioners have been untimely ripped. Parsimony, my son, a commendable virtue—especially, if I may say so, in a spook. Notice the dome there? Study it carefully, sir. Scratch marks. Not, alas, the footprints of a gigantic hound, but the scratch marks of wireless aerials removed by the frantic hand of round-eyes. Ever heard of a spookhouse without a wireless aerial? Might as well have a cathouse without a piano.”

The rainfall had reached a crescendo. Huge drops thumped around them like shot. Craw’s face was a mix of things Luke could only guess at. Deep in his heart it occurred to him that Craw really might be dying. Luke had seen little of natural death, and was very much on the alert for it.

“Maybe they just got rock-fever and split,” he said, trying again to coax him to the car.

“Very possibly, Your Grace, very possibly indeed. It is certainly the season for rash, ungovernable acts.”

“Home,” said Luke, and pulled firmly at his arm. “Make a path there, will you? Stretcher party.”

But the old man still lingered stubbornly for a last look at the English spookhouse flinching in the storm.

The Canadian cowboy filed first, and his piece deserved a better fate. He wrote it that night, while the girls slept in his bed. He guessed the story would go best as a magazine piece rather than straight news, so he built it round the Peak in general and only used Thesinger as a peg. He explained how the Peak was traditionally Hong Kong’s Olympus—“the higher you lived on it, the higher you stood in society”—and how the rich British opium traders, Hong Kong’s founding fathers, fled there to avoid the cholera and fever of the town; how even a couple of decades ago a person of Chinese race required a pass before he could set foot there. He described the history of High Haven, and lastly its reputation, fostered by the Chinese-language press, as a witches’ kitchen of British Imperialist plots against Mao. Overnight the kitchen had closed and the cooks had vanished.

“Another conciliatory gesture?” he asked. “Appeasement? All part of Britain’s low-profile policy toward the mainland? Or simply one more sign that in South East Asia, as everywhere else in the world, the British were having to come down from their mountaintop?”

His mistake was to select a heavy English Sunday paper, which occasionally ran his pieces. The D notice forbidding all reference to these events was there ahead of him. “REGRET YOUR NICE HAVENSTORY UNPLACED,” the editor cabled, and shoved it straight on the spike. A few days later, returning to his room, the cowboy found it ransacked. Also, for several weeks his telephone developed a sort of laryngitis, so that he never used it without including an obscene reference to Big Moo and his retinue.

* * *

Luke went home full of ideas, bathed, drank a lot of black coffee, and set to work. He telephoned airlines, government contacts, and a whole host of pale, over-brushed acquaintances in the U.S. Consulate, who infuriated him with arch and Delphic answers. He pestered furniture-removal firms which specialised in handling government contracts. By ten that night, he had, in his own words to the dwarf, whom he also telephoned several times, “proof-cooked five different ways” that Thesinger, his wife, and all the staff of High Haven had left Hong Kong by charter in the early hours of Thursday morning, bound for London. Thesinger’s boxer dog, he learned by a happy chance, would follow by air cargo later in the week. Having made a few notes, Luke crossed the room, settled to his typewriter, bashed out a few lines, and dried up, as he knew he would.

He began in a rush, fluently: “Today a fresh cloud of scandal hangs over the embattled and non-elected government of Britain’s one remaining Asian colony. Hot on the latest revelations of graft in the police and civil service comes word that the Island’s most hush-hush establishment, High Haven, base for Britain’s cloak-and-dagger ploys against Red China, has been summarily shut down.”

There, with a blasphemous sob of impotence, he stopped and pressed his face into his open hands. Nightmares: those he could stand. To wake, after so much war, shaking and sweating from unspeakable visions, with his nostrils filled with the stink of napalm on human flesh: in a way, it was a consolation to him to know that after all that pressing down, the floodgates of his feeling had burst. There had been times, experiencing those things, when he longed for the leisure to recover his powers of disgust. If nightmares were necessary in order to restore him to the ranks of normal men and women, then he could embrace them with gratitude. But not in the worst of his nightmares had it occurred to him that having written the war, he might not be able to write the peace. For six night hours, Luke fought with this awful deadness. Sometimes he thought of old Craw, standing there with the rain running off him, delivering his funeral oration: maybe that was the story? But whoever hung a story on the strange humour of a fellow hack?

Nor did the dwarf’s own hashed-out version meet with much success, which made him very scratchy. On the face of it, the story had everything they asked for. It spoofed the British, it had spy written large, and for once it got away from the notion of America as the hangman of South East Asia. But all he had for a reply, after a five-day wait, was a terse instruction to stay on his rostrum and leave off trying to play the trumpet.

Which left old Craw. Though a mere side-show by comparison with the thrust of the main action, the timing of what Craw did, and did not do, remains to this day impressive. He filed nothing for three weeks. There was small stuff he should have handled but he didn’t bother. To Luke, who was seriously concerned for him, he seemed at first to continue his mysterious decline. He lost his bounce and his love of fellowship entirely. He became snappish and at times downright unkind, and he barked bad Cantonese at the waiters—even at his favourite, Goh. He treated the Shanghai Bowlers as if they were his worst enemies, and recalled alleged slights they had long forgotten. Sitting alone at his window-seat, he was like an old boulevardier fallen on hard times, waspish, inward, slothful.

Then one day he disappeared, and when Luke called apprehensively at his apartment the old amah told him that “Whisky Papa runrun London fastee.” She was a strange little creature and Luke was inclined to doubt her. A dull North German stringer for Der Spiegel reported sighting Craw in Vientiane, carousing at the Constellation bar, but again Luke wondered. Craw-watching had always been something of an insider sport, and there was prestige in adding to the general fund.

Till a Monday came, and around midday the old boy strolled into the Club wearing a new beige suit and a very fine buttonhole, all smiles and anecdotes once more, and went to work on the High Haven story. He spent money, more than his paper would normally have allowed him. He ate several jovial lunches with well-dressed Americans from vaguely titled United States agencies, some of them known to Luke. Wearing his famous straw hat, he took each separately to quiet, well-chosen restaurants. In the Club, he was reviled for diplomat-crawling, a grave crime, and this pleased him.

Next, a China-watchers’ conference summoned him to Tokyo, and with hindsight it is fair to assume he used that visit to check out other parts of the story that was shaping for him. Certainly he asked old friends at the conference to unearth bits of fact for him when they got home to Bangkok, or Singapore, or Taipei, or wherever they came from, and they obliged because they knew he would have done the same for them. In an eerie way, he seemed to know what he was looking for before they found it.

The result appeared in its fullest version in a Sydney morning newspaper, which was beyond the long arm of Anglo-American censorship. By common consent, it recalled the master’s vintage years. It ran to two thousand words. Typically, he did not lead with the High Haven story at all, but with the “mysteriously empty wing” of the British Embassy in Bangkok, which till a month ago had housed a strange body called the Seato Coordination Unit, as well as a Visa Section boasting six second secretaries. Was it the pleasures of the Soho massage parlours, the old Australian enquired sweetly, which lured the Thais to Britain in such numbers that six second secretaries were needed to handle their visa applications? Strange too, he mused, that since their departure and the closure of that wing, long queues of aspirant travellers had not formed outside the Embassy.

Gradually—he wrote at ease, but never carelessly—a surprising picture unfolded before his readers. He called British intelligence “the Circus.” He said the name derived from the address of that organisation’s secret headquarters, which overlooked a famous intersection of London streets. The Circus had not merely pulled out of High Haven, he said, but out of Bangkok, Singapore, Saigon, Tokyo, Manila, and Djakarta as well. And Seoul. Even solitary Taiwan was not immune, where an unsung British Resident was discovered to have shed three clerk-drivers and two secretarial assistants only a week before the article went to press.

“A hoods’ Dunkirk,” Craw called it, “in which charter DC-3s replaced the Kentish fishing fleets.”

What had prompted such an exodus? Craw offered several nimble theories. Were we witnessing yet one more cut in British government spending? The writer was sceptical. In times of travail, Britain’s tendency was to rely more, not less, on spies. Her entire Empire history urged her to do so. The thinner her trade routes, the more elaborate her clandestine efforts to protect them. The more feeble her colonial grip, the more desperate her subversion of those who sought to loosen it. No: Britain might be on the breadline, but the spies would be the last of her luxuries to go. Craw set up other possibilities and knocked them down. A gesture of détente toward mainland China? he suggested, echoing the cowboy’s point. Certainly Britain would do anything under the sun to keep Hong Kong clear of Mao’s anti-colonial zeal—short of giving up her spies.

Thus old Craw arrived at the theory he liked best: “Right across the Far Eastern chequerboard,” he wrote, “the Circus is performing what is known in the spy-trade as a duck-dive.”

But why?

The writer now quoted his “senior American prebends of the intelligence church militant in Asia.” American intelligence agents generally, he said, and not just in Asia, were “hopping mad about lax security in the British organisations.” They were hopping highest about the recent discovery of a top Russian spy—he threw in the correct trade name of “mole”—inside the Circus’s London headquarters: a British traitor, whom they declined to name, but who, in the words of the senior prebends, had “compromised every Anglo-American clandestine operation worth a dime for the last twenty years.” Where was the mole now? the writer had asked his sources. To which, with undiminished spleen, they had replied: “Dead. In Russia. And hopefully both.”

Craw had never wanted for a wrap-up, but this one, to Luke’s fond eye, had a real sense of ceremony about it. It was almost an assertion of life itself, if only of the secret life:

“Is Kim, the boy spy, vanished for good, then, from the legends of the East?” he asked. “Shall the English pundit never again stain his skin, slip into native costume, and silently take his place beside the village fires? Do not fear,” he insisted, “the British will be back! The time-honoured sport of spot-the-spook will be with us once again! The spy is not dead: he sleepeth.”

The piece appeared. In the Club, it was fleetingly admired, envied, forgotten. A local English-language paper with strong American connections reprinted it in full, with the result that the mayfly, after all, enjoyed another day of life. The old boy’s charity benefit, they said: a doffing of the cap before he passes from the stage. Then the overseas network of the B.B.C. ran it, and finally the Colony’s own torpid radio network ran a version of the B.B.C.’s version, and for a full day there was debate about whether Big Moo had decided to take the muzzle off the local news services. Yet even with this protracted billing, nobody—not Luke, not even the dwarf—saw fit to wonder how the devil the old man had known the back way into High Haven.

Which merely proved, if proof were ever needed, that journalists are no quicker than anybody else at spotting what goes on under their noses. It was a typhoon Saturday, after all.

Within the Circus itself, as Craw had correctly called the seat of British intelligence, reactions to Craw’s piece varied according to how much was known by those who were doing the reacting. In Housekeeping Section, for instance, which was responsible for such tatters of cover as the Circus could gather to itself these days, the old boy released a wave of pent-up fury that can only be understood by those who have tasted the atmosphere of a secret department under heavy siege. Even otherwise tolerant spirits became savagely retributive. Treachery! Breach of contract! Block his pension! Put him on the watch list! Prosecution the moment he returns to England!

Down the market a little, those less rabid about their security took a kindlier view, though it was still uninformed. Well, well, they said a little ruefully, that was the way of it; name us a joe who didn’t blow his top now and then, and specially one who’d been left in ignorance for as long as poor old Craw had. And after all, he’d disclosed nothing that wasn’t generally available, now had he? Really, those housekeeper people should show a little moderation. Look how they went for poor Molly Meakin the other night, sister to Mike and hardly out of ribbons, just because she left a bit of blank stationery in her waste basket!

Only those at the inmost point saw things differently. To them, old Craw’s article was a discreet masterpiece of disinforma-tion; George Smiley at his best, they said. Clearly, the story had to come out, and all were agreed that censorship at any time was objectionable. Much better therefore to let it come out in the manner of our choosing. The right timing, the right amount, the right tone: a lifetime’s experience, they agreed, in every brushstroke. But that was not a view which passed outside their set.

Back in Hong Kong—clearly, said the Shanghai Bowlers, the old boy, like the dying, had had a prophetic instinct of this—Craw’s High Haven story turned out to be his swan-song. A month after it appeared, he had retired, not from the Colony but from his trade as a scribbler and from the Island too. Renting a cottage in the New Territories, he announced that he proposed to expire under a slant-eye heaven. For the Bowlers, he might as well have chosen Alaska. It was just too damn far, they said, to drive back when you were drunk. There was a rumour—untrue, since Craw’s appetites did not run in that direction—that he had got himself a pretty Chinese boy as a companion. That was the dwarf’s work: he did not like to be scooped by old men.

Only Luke refused to put him out of mind. Luke drove out to see him one mid-morning after night-shift. For the hell of it, and because the old buzzard meant a lot to him. Craw was happy as the day is long, he reported; quite his former vile self, but a bit dazed to be bearded by Luke without warning. He had a friend with him, not a Chinese boy, but a visiting fireman whom he introduced as George: a podgy, ill-sighted little body in very round spectacles who had apparently dropped in unexpectedly. Aside, Craw explained to Luke that this George was a back-room boy on a British newspaper syndicate he used to work for in the dark ages.

“Handles the geriatric side, Your Grace. Taking a swing through Asia.”

Whoever he was, it was clear that Craw stood in awe of the podgy man, for he even called him “Your Holiness.” Luke had felt he was intruding and left without getting drunk.

So there it was: Thesinger’s moonlight flit; old Craw’s near death and resurrection; his swan-song in defiance of so much hidden censorship; Luke’s restless preoccupation with the secret world; the Circus’s inspired exploitation of a necessary evil. Nothing planned but, as life would have it, a curtain-raiser to much that happened later. A typhoon Saturday; a ripple on the plunging, fetid, sterile, swarming pool that is Hong Kong; a bored chorus, still without a hero. And curiously, a few months afterwards, it fell once more to Luke, in his role of Shakespearean messenger, to announce the hero’s coming. The news came over the house wire while he was on stand-by, and he published it to a bored audience with his customary fervour.

“Folks! Give ear! I have news! Jerry Westerby’s back on the beat, men! Heading out East again, hear me, stringing for that same damn comic!”

“His Lordship,” the dwarf cried at once, in mock ecstasy. “A desh of blue blood, I say, to raise the vulgar tone! ’Oorah for quality, I say.” With a profane oath, he threw a napkin at the wine rack. “Jesus,” he said, and emptied Luke’s glass.

2

THE GREAT CALL

On the afternoon the telegram arrived, Jerry Westerby was hacking at his typewriter on the shaded side of the balcony of his rundown farmhouse, a sack of old books dumped at his feet. The envelope was brought by the black-clad person of the postmistress, a craggy and ferocious peasant who, with the ebbing of traditional forces, had become the headman of the ragtag Tuscan hamlet. She was a wily creature, but today the drama of the occasion had the better of her, and despite the heat she fairly scampered up the arid track. In her ledger the historic moment of delivery was later put at six past five, which was a lie but gave it force. The real time was five exactly. Indoors, Westerby’s scrawny girl, whom the village called “the orphan,” was hammering at a stubborn piece of goat’s meat, vehemently, the way she attacked everything. The greedy eye of the postmistress spotted her at the open window and from a good way off: elbows stuck out all ways and her top teeth jammed onto her lower lip—scowling, no doubt, as usual.

Whore, thought the postmistress passionately; now you have what you have been waiting for!

The radio was blaring Verdi; the orphan would hear only classical music, as the whole village had learned from the scene she had made at the tavern the evening when the blacksmith tried to choose rock music on the juke-box. She had thrown a pitcher at him. So what with the Verdi, and the typewriter, and the goat, said the postmistress, the row was so deafening that even an Italian would have heard it.

Jerry sat like a locust on the wood floor, she recalled—maybe he had one cushion—and he was using the book-sack as a footstool. He sat splay-footed, typing between his knees. He had bits of fly-blown manuscript spread round him, which were weighted with stones against the red-hot breezes that plagued his scalded hilltop, and a wicker flask of the local red at his elbow, no doubt for the moments, known even to the greatest artists, when natural inspiration failed him. He typed the eagle’s way, she told them later amid admiring laughter: much circling before he swooped.

He wore what he always wore, whether he was loafing fruitlessly around his bit of paddock tilling the dozen useless olive trees which the rogue Marcello had palmed off on him, or paddling down to the village with the orphan to shop, or sitting in the tavern over a sharp one before embarking on the long climb home: buckskin boots, which the orphan never brushed and were consequently worn shiny at the toe; ankle socks, which she never washed; a filthy shirt, once white; and grey shorts, which looked as though they had been frayed by hostile dogs and which an honest woman would long ago have mended. And he greeted the postmistress with that familiar burry rush of words, at once bashful and enthusiastic, which she did not understand in detail, but only generally, like a news broadcast, and could copy, through the black gaps of her decrepit teeth, with surprising flashes of fidelity.

“Mama Stefano, gosh, super, must be boiling. Here, sport, wet your whistle,” he exclaimed, while he slopped down the brick steps with a glass of wine for her, grinning like a schoolboy, which was his nickname in the village: the schoolboy—a telegram for the schoolboy, urgent from London! In nine months, no more than a wad of paperback books and the weekly scrawl from his child, and now out of a blue sky this monument of a telegram, short like a demand, but fifty words prepaid for the reply! Imagine, fifty, the cost alone! Only natural that as many as possible should have tried their hand at reading it.

They had choked at first over “Honourable.” “The Honourable Gerald Westerby.” Why? The baker, who had been a prisoner of war in Birmingham, produced a battered dictionary: “having honour, title of courtesy given to the son of a nobleman.” Of course. Signora Sanders, who lived across the valley, had already declared the schoolboy to be of noble blood. The second son of a press baron, she had said: Lord Westerby, a newspaper proprietor, dead. First the paper had died, then its owner—thus Signora Sanders, a wit; they had passed the joke round. Next “regret,” which was easy. So was “advise.” The postmistress was gratified to discover, against all expectation, how much good Latin the English had assimilated despite their decadence. The word “guardian” came harder, for it led to “protector,” thence inevitably to unsavoury jokes among the menfolk, which the postmistress angrily quelled.

Till at last, step by step, the code was broken and the story out. The schoolboy had a guardian, meaning a substitute father. This guardian lay dangerously ill in hospital, demanding to see the schoolboy before he died. He wanted nobody else. Only Honourable Westerby would do. Quickly they filled in the rest of the picture for themselves: the sobbing family gathered at the bedside, the wife prominent and inconsolable, refined priests administering the last sacraments, valuables being locked away, and all over the house—in corridors, back kitchens—the same whispered words, “Westerby—where is Honourable Westerby?”

Lastly the telegram’s signatories remained to be interpreted. There were three and they called themselves “solicitors,” a word which triggered one more burst of dirty innuendo before “notary” was arrived at, and faces abruptly hardened. Holy Maria. If three notaries were involved, then so were large sums of money. And if all three had insisted upon signing, and prepaid that fifty-word reply to boot, then not just large but mountainous sums! Acres! Wagonloads! No wonder the orphan had clung to him so—the whore! Suddenly everyone was clamouring to make the hill-climb. Guido’s Lambretta would take him as far as the water tank; Mario could run like a fox; Manuela, the chandler’s girl, had a tender eye—the shadow of bereavement sat well on her. Repulsing all volunteers, and handing Mario a sharp cuff for his presumption, the postmistress locked the till and left her idiot son to mind the shop, though it meant twenty sweltering minutes and—if that cursed furnace of a wind was blowing up there—a mouthful of red dust for her toil.

They had not made enough of Jerry at first. She regretted this now as she laboured through the olive groves, but the error had its reasons. First, he had arrived in winter when the cheap buyers come. He arrived alone, but wearing the furtive look of someone who has recently dumped a lot of human cargo, such as children, wives, mothers; the postmistress had known men in her time, and she had seen that wounded smile too often not to recognise it in Jerry. “I am married but free,” it said, and neither claim was true.

Second, the scented English major had brought him, a known pig who ran a property agency for exploiting peasants—yet another reason to spurn the schoolboy. The scented major showed him several desirable farmhouses, including one in which the postmistress herself had an interest—also, by coincidence, the finest—but the schoolboy settled instead for the pederast Franco’s hovel stuck on this forsaken hilltop she was now ascending. The devil’s hill, they called it; the devil came up here when hell became too cool for him. Slick Franco, of all people, who watered his milk and his wine and spent his Sundays simpering with popinjays in the town square! The inflated price was half a million lire, of which the scented major tried to steal a third, merely because there was a contract.

“And everyone knows why the major favoured slick Franco,” she hissed through her frothing teeth, and her pack of supporters made knowing “tch-tch” noises at each other, till she again ordered them to shut up.

Also, as a shrewd woman, she distrusted something in Jerry’s make-up. A hardness buried in the lavishness. She had seen it with Englishmen before, but the schoolboy was in a class by himself, and she distrusted him; she held him dangerous through his restless charm. Today, of course, one could put down those early failings to the eccentricity of a noble English writer, but at the time the postmistress had shown him no such indulgence.

“Wait till the summer,” she had warned her customers in a snarl, soon after his first shambling visit to her shop—pasta, bread, flykiller. “In the summer he’ll find out what he’s bought, the cretin.” In the summer, slick Franco’s mice would storm the bedroom, Franco’s fleas would devour him alive, and Franco’s pederastic hornets would chase him round the garden and the devil’s red-hot wind would burn his parts to a frazzle. The water would run out, he would be forced to defecate in the fields like an animal. And when winter came round again the scented pig major could sell the house to another fool, at a loss to everyone but himself.

As to celebrity, in those first weeks the schoolboy showed not a shred of it. He never bargained, he had never heard of discounts, there was not even pleasure in robbing him. And when, in the shop, she drove him beyond his few miserable phrases of kitchen Italian, he did not raise his voice and bawl at her like the real English but shrugged happily and helped himself to whatever he wanted. A writer, they said; well, who was not? Very well, he bought quires of foolscap from her. She ordered more, he bought them. Bravo. He possessed books: a mildewed lot, by the look of them, which he carried in a grey jute sack like a poacher’s, and before the orphan came they would see him striding off into the middle of nowhere, the book-sack slung over his shoulder, for a reading session. Guido had happened on him in the Contessa’s forest, perched on a log like a toad and leafing through them one after another, as if they were all one book and he had lost his place. He also possessed a typewriter of which the filthy cover was a patchwork of worn-out luggage labels: bravo again. Just as any long-hair who buys a paint pot calls himself an artist: that sort of writer. In the spring, the orphan came and the postmistress hated her too.

A redhead, which was half-way to whoredom for a start. Not enough breast to nurse a rabbit, and worst of all a fierce eye for arithmetic. They said he found her in the town: whore again. From the first day, she had not let him out of her sight. Clung to him like a child. Ate with him, and sulked; drank with him, and sulked; shopped with him, picking up the language like a thief, till they became a minor local sight together, the English giant and his sulking wraith whore, trailing down the hill with their rush basket—the schoolboy, in his tattered shorts, grinning at everyone, and the scowling orphan, in her whore’s sackcloth with nothing underneath, so that though she was plain as a scorpion the men stared after her to see her hard haunches rock through the fabric. She walked with all her fingers locked round his arm and her cheek against his shoulder, and she only let go of him to pay out meanly from the purse she now controlled. When they met a familiar face, he greeted it for both of them, flapping his vast free arm like a Fascist. And God help the man who, on the rare occasion when she went alone, ventured a fresh word or a wolf call: she would turn and spit like a gutter-cat, and her eyes burned like the devil’s.

“And now we know why!” cried the postmistress very loud as, still climbing, she mounted a false crest. “The orphan is after his inheritance. Why else would a whore be loyal?”

It was the visit of Signora Sanders to her shop which had caused Mama Stefano’s dramatic reappraisal of the schoolboy’s worth, and of the orphan’s motive. The Sanders was rich and bred horses farther up the valley, where she lived with a lady friend, known as the man-child, who wore close-cut hair and chain belts. Their horses won prizes everywhere. The Sanders was sharp and intelligent, and frugal in a way Italians liked, and she knew whoever was worth knowing of the few moth-eaten English scattered over the hills. She called ostensibly to buy a ham—a month ago, it must have been—but her real quest was for the schoolboy. Was it true? she asked. Signor Gerald Westerby, and living here in the village? A large man, pepper and salt hair, athletic, full of energy, an aristocrat, shy? Her father, the General, had known the family in England, she said; they had been neighbours in the country for a spell, the schoolboy’s father and her own. The Sanders was considering paying him a visit. What were the schoolboy’s circumstances? The postmistress muttered something about the orphan, but the Sanders was unperturbed.

“Oh, the Westerbys are always changing their women,” she said with a laugh, and turned toward the door.

Dumfounded, the postmistress detained her, then showered her with questions.

But who was he? What had he done with his youth? A journalist, said the Sanders, and gave what she knew of the family background. The father, a flamboyant figure, fair-haired like the son, kept racehorses; she had met him again not long before his death and he was still a man. Like the son, he was never at peace: women and houses, changing them all the time; always roaring at someone, if not at his son then at someone across the street. The postmistress pressed harder. But in his own right—was the schoolboy distinguished in his own right? Well, he had certainly worked for some distinguished newspapers, put it that way, said the Sanders, her smile mysteriously broadening.

“It is not the English habit, as a rule, to accord distinction to journalists,” she explained, in her classic Roman way of talking.

But the postmistress needed more, far more. His writing, his book, what was all that about? So long! So much thrown away! Basketsful, the rubbish carter had told her—for no one in his right mind would light a fire up there in summertime. Beth Sanders understood the intensity of isolated people, and knew that in barren places their intelligence must fix on tiny matters. So she tried, she really tried to oblige. Well, he certainly had travelled incessantly, she said, coming back to the counter and putting down her parcel. Today all journalists were travellers, of course—breakfast in London, lunch in Rome, dinner in Delhi— but Signor Westerby had been exceptional even by that standard. So perhaps it was a travel book, she ventured.

But why had he travelled, the postmistress insisted, for whom no journey was without a goal; why?

For the wars, the Sanders replied patiently; for wars, pestilence, and famine. “What else has a journalist to do these days, after all, but report life’s miseries?” she asked.

The postmistress shook her head wisely, all her senses fixed upon the revelation: the son of a blond equestrian lord who bellowed, a mad traveller, a writer in distinguished newspapers! And was there a particular theatre? she asked—a corner of God’s earth—in which he was a specialist? He was mostly in the East, the Sanders said after a moment’s reflection. He had been everywhere, but there is a kind of Englishman for whom only the East is home. No doubt that was why he had come to Italy; some men go dull without the sun.

And some women too, the postmistress shrieked, and they had a good laugh.

Ah, the East, said the postmistress, with a tragic rolling of the head—war upon war, why didn’t the Pope stop it? As Mama Stefano ran on this way, the Sanders seemed to remember something. She smiled slightly at first, and her smile grew. An exile’s smile, the postmistress reflected, watching her; she is like a sailor remembering the sea.

“He used to drag a sackful of books around,” she said. “We used to say he stole them from the big houses.”

“He carries it now!” the postmistress cried, and told how Guido had stumbled on him in the Contessa’s forest, the schoolboy, reading on the log.

“He had notions of becoming a novelist, I believe,” the Sanders continued, in the same vein of private reminiscence. “I remember his father telling us. He was frightfully angry. Roared all over the house.”

“The schoolboy? The schoolboy was angry?” Mama Stefano exclaimed, now quite incredulous.

“No, no. The father.” The Sanders laughed aloud; in the English social scale, she explained, novelists rated even worse than journalists. “Does he also paint still?”

“Paint? He is a painter?”

He tried, said the Sanders, but the father forbade that also. Painters were the lowest of all creatures, she said, amid fresh laughter; only the successful ones were remotely tolerable.

Soon after this multiple bombshell, the blacksmith—the same blacksmith who had been the target of the orphan’s pitcher— reported having seen Jerry and the girl at the Sanders’s stud, twice in one week, then three times, also eating there. And that the schoolboy had shown a great talent for horses, lunging and walking them with natural understanding—even the wildest. The orphan took no part, said the blacksmith. She sat in the shade with the man-child, either reading from the book-sack or watching him with her jealous, unblinking eyes; waiting, as they all now knew, for the guardian to die. And today the telegram!

Jerry had seen Mama Stefano from a long way off. He had that instinct; there was a part of him that never ceased to watch. A black figure hobbling inexorably up the dust path like a lame beetle in and out of the ruled shadows of the cedars, up the dry watercourse of slick Franco’s olive groves, into their own bit of Italy, as he called it, all two hundred square metres of it, but big enough to hit a tethered tennis-ball round a pole on cool evenings when they felt athletic. He had seen very early the blue envelope she was waving, and he had even heard the sound of her mewing carrying crookedly over the other sounds of the valley: the Lambrettas and the band-saws. And his first gesture, without stopping his typing, was to steal a glance at the house to make sure the girl had closed the kitchen window to keep out the heat and the insects. Then, just as the postmistress later described, he went quickly down the steps to her, wineglass in hand, in order to head her off before she came too near.

He read the telegram slowly, once, bending over it to get the writing into shadow, and his face as Mama Stefano watched it became gaunt, and private, and an extra huskiness entered his voice as he laid one huge, cushioned hand on her arm.

“La sera,” he managed, as he guided her back along the path. He would send his reply this evening, he meant. “Molto grazie, Mama. Super. Thanks very much. Terrific.”

The other English managed grazie tanto, but not the schoolboy. As they parted, she was still chattering wildly, offering him every service under the sun—taxis, porters, phone calls to the airport—and Jerry was vaguely patting the pockets of his shorts for small or large change; he had momentarily forgotten, apparently, that the girl looked after the money.

The schoolboy had received the news with bearing, the postmistress reported to the village. Graciously, to the point of escorting her part of the way back; bravely, so that only a woman of the world—and one who knew the English—would have read the aching grief beneath; distractedly, so that he had neglected to tip her. Or was he already acquiring the extreme parsimony of the very rich?

But how did the orphan behave, they asked. Did she not sob and cry to the Virgin, pretending to share his distress?

“He has yet to tell her,” the postmistress whispered, recalling wistfully her one short glimpse of her, side-view, hammering at the meat. “He has yet to consider her position.”

The village settled, waiting for the evening, and Jerry sat in the hornet field, gazing at the sea and winding the book-bag round and round, till it reached its limit and unwound itself.

First there was the valley, and above it stood the five hills in a half-ring, and above the hills ran the sea, which at that time of day was no more than a flat brown stain in the sky. The hornet field where he sat was a long terrace shored by stones, with a ruined barn at one corner which had given them shelter to picnic and sunbathe unobserved until the hornets nested in the wall. She had seen them when she was hanging out washing, and had run in to Jerry to tell him, and Jerry had unthinkingly grabbed a bucket of mortar from slick Franco’s place and filled in all their entrances. Then called her down so that she could admire his handiwork: my man, how he protects me. In his memory he saw her exactly: shivering at his side, arms huddled across her body, staring at the new cement and listening to the crazed hornets inside and whispering, “Jesus, Jesus,” too frightened to budge.

Maybe she’ll wait for me, he thought.

He remembered the day he met her. He told himself that story often, because good luck was rare in Jerry’s life where women were concerned, and when it happened he liked to roll it around the tongue, as he would say. A Thursday. He’d taken his usual lift to town in order to do a spot of shopping, or maybe to see a fresh set of faces and get away from the novel for a while; or maybe just to bolt from the screaming monotony of that empty landscape, which more often was like a prison to him, and a solitary one at that. Or conceivably he might just hook himself a woman, which occasionally he brought off by hanging round the bar of the tourist hotel. So he was sitting reading in the trattoria in the town square—a carafe, plate of ham, olives—and suddenly he became aware of this skinny, rangy kid, redhead, sullen face, and a brown dress like a monk’s habit and a shoulder-bag made out of carpet stuff.

Looks naked without a guitar, he’d thought.

Vaguely, she reminded him of his daughter Cat, short for Catherine, but only vaguely, because he hadn’t seen Cat for ten years, which was when his first marriage fell in. Quite why he hadn’t seen her, he could even now not say. In the first shock of separation a confused sense of chivalry told him Cat would do better to forget him. Best if she writes me off. Put her heart where her home is. When her mother remarried, the case for selfdenial seemed all the stronger. But sometimes he missed her very badly, and most likely that was why, having caught his interest, the girl held it. Did Cat go round like that, alone and spiked with tiredness? Had Cat got her freckles still, and a jaw like a pebble?

Later, the girl told him she’d jumped the wall. She’d got herself a governess job with some rich family in Florence. Mother was too busy with the lovers to worry about the kids, but the husband had lots of time for the governess. She’d grabbed what cash she could find and bolted, and here she was: no luggage, the police alerted, and using her last chewed banknote to buy herself one square meal before perdition.

There was not a lot of talent in the square that day—there never was, really—and by the time she sat down, that kid had got just about every able-bodied fellow in town giving her the treatment, from the waiters upwards, purring “beautiful missus” and much rougher stuff besides, of which Jerry missed the precise drift, but it had them all laughing at her expense. Then one of them tried to tweak her breast, at which Jerry got up and went over to her table. He was no great hero—quite the reverse, in his secret view—but a lot of things were going around in his mind, and it might just as well have been Cat who was getting shoved into a corner. So, yes: anger. He therefore clapped one hand on the shoulder of the small waiter who had made the dive for her, and one hand on the shoulder of the big one who had applauded such bravado, and he explained to them, in bad Italian, but in a fairly reasonable way, that they really must stop being pests and let the beautiful missus eat her meal in peace. Otherwise he would break their greasy little necks.

The atmosphere wasn’t too good after that, and the little one seemed actually to be squaring for a fight, for his hand kept travelling toward a back pocket, and hitching at his jacket, till a final look at Jerry changed his mind for him. Jerry dumped some money on the table, picked up her bag for her, went back to collect his book-sack, and led her by the arm, all but lifting her off the ground, across the square to the Apollo.

“Are you English?” she asked on the way.

“Pips, core, the lot,” Jerry snorted furiously, which was the first time he saw her smile. It was a smile definitely worth working for; her bony little face lit up like an urchin’s through the grime.

So, simmered down, Jerry fed her, and with the advent of calm he began spinning the tale a bit, because after all those weeks without a focus it was natural he should make an effort to amuse. He explained that he was a newshound out to grass and now writing a novel, that it was his first shot, that he was scratching a long-standing itch, and that he had a dwindling pile of cash from a comic that had paid him redundancy—which was a giggle, he said, because he had been redundant all his life.

“Kind of golden handshake,” he said. He had put a bit down for the house, loafed a bit, and now there was precious little gold left over. That was the second time she smiled. Encouraged, he touched on the solitary nature of the creative life: “But, Christ, you wouldn’t believe the sweat of really—well, really getting it all to come out, sort of thing—”

“Wives?” she asked, interrupting him. For a moment, he had assumed she was tuning to the novel. Then he saw her waiting, suspicious eyes, so he replied cautiously, “None active,” as if wives were volcanoes, which in Jerry’s world they had been.

After lunch as they drifted, somewhat plastered, across the empty square, with the sun pelting straight down on them, she made her one declaration of intent: “Everything I own is in this bag, got it?” she asked. It was the shoulder-bag made out of carpet stuff. “That’s the way I’m going to keep it. So just don’t anybody give me anything I can’t carry. Got it?”

When they reached his bus-stop she hung around, and when the bus came she climbed aboard after him and let him buy her a ticket, and when she got out at the village she climbed the hill with him, Jerry with his book-sack, the girl with her shoulderbag, and that’s how it was. Three nights and most of the days she slept, and on the fourth night she came to him. He was so unprepared for her that he had actually left his bedroom door locked; he had a bit of a thing about doors and windows, specially at night. So that she had to hammer on the door and shout, “I want to come into your bloody cot, for Christ’s sake!” before he opened up.

“Just never lie to me,” she warned, scrambling into his bed as if they were sharing a dormitory feast. “No words, no lies. Got it?”

As a lover, she was like a butterfly, he remembered—could have been Chinese. Weightless, never still, so unprotected he despaired of her. When the fireflies came out, the two of them knelt on the window-seat and watched them, and Jerry thought about the East. The cicadas shrieked and the frogs burped, and the lights of the fireflies ducked and parried round a central pool of blackness, and they would kneel there naked for an hour or more, watching and listening, while the hot moon drooped into the hill-crests. They never spoke on those occasions, or reached any conclusions that he was aware of. But he gave up locking his door.

The music and the hammering had stopped, but a din of church bells had started—he supposed for evensong. The valley was never quiet, but the bells sounded heavier because of the dew. He sauntered over to the swing-ball, teasing the rope away from the metal pillar, then with his old buckskin boot kicked at the grass around the base, remembering her lithe little body flying from shot to shot and the monk’s habit billowing.

“Guardian is the big one,” they had said to him. “Guardian means the road back.” For a moment longer Jerry hesitated, gazing downward again into the blue plain where the very road, not figurative at all, led shimmering and straight as a canal toward the city and the airport.

Jerry was not what he would have called a thinking man. A childhood spent listening to his father’s bellowing had taught him early the value of big ideas, and big words as well. Perhaps that was what had joined him to the girl in the first place, he thought. That’s what she was on about: “Don’t give me anything I can’t carry.”

Maybe. Maybe not. She’ll find someone else. They always do. It’s time, he thought. Money gone, novel stillborn, girl too young. Come on. It’s time.

Time for what?

Time! Time she found herself a young bull instead of wearing out an old one. Time to let the wanderlust stir. Strike camp. Wake the camels. On your way. Lord knows, he had done it before once or twice. Pitch the old tent, stay a little, move on; sorry, sport.

It’s an order, he told himself. Ours not to reason. Whistle goes, the lads rally. End of argument. Guardian.

Rum how he’d had a feeling it was coming, all the same, he thought, still staring into the blurred plain. No great presentiment, any of that tripe; simply, yes, a sense of time. It was due. A sense of season. But in place of a gay upsurge of activity, a deep sluggishness seized hold of his body. He suddenly felt too tired, too fat, too sleepy ever to move again. He could have lain down just here, where he stood. He could have slept on the harsh grass till she woke him or the darkness came.

Tripe, he told himself. Sheer tripe. Taking the telegram from his pocket, he strode vigorously into the house, calling her name.

“Hey, sport! Old thing! Where are you hiding? Spot of bad news.” He handed it to her. “Doomsville,” he said, and went to the window rather than watch her read it.

He waited till he heard the flutter of the paper landing on the table. Then he turned round because there was nothing else for it. She hadn’t said anything, but she had wedged her hands under her armpits and sometimes her body-talk was deafening. He saw how the fingers waved blindly about, trying to lock on to something.

“Why not shove off to Beth’s place for a bit?” he suggested. “She’ll have you like a shot, old Beth. Thinks the world of you. Have you long as you like, Beth would.”

She kept her arms folded till he went down the hill to send his telegram. By the time he came back she had got his suit out, the blue one they had always laughed about—his prison gear, she called it—but she was trembling and her face had turned white and ill, the way it went when he dealt with the hornets. When he tried to kiss her, she was cold as marble, so he let her be. At night they slept together and it was worse than being alone.

* * *

Mama Stefano announced the news at lunch-time, breathlessly. The honourable schoolboy had left, she said. He wore his suit. He carried a grip, his typewriter, and the book-sack. Franco had taken him to the airport in the van. The orphan had gone with them, but only as far as the slip-road to the autostrada. When she got out, she didn’t even say goodbye—just sat beside the road like the trash she was. For a while, after they dumped her, the schoolboy had remained very quiet and private. He scarcely noticed Franco’s ingenious and pointed questions, and he pulled at his tawny forelock a lot—the Sanders had called it pepper and salt. At the airport, with an hour to kill before the plane left, they had a flask together, also a game of dominoes, but when Franco tried to rob him for the fare, the schoolboy showed an unusual harshness, haggling at last like the true rich.

Franco had told her, she said; her bosom friend. Franco, maligned as a pederast. Had she not always defended him, Franco the elegant? Franco, the father of her idiot son? They had had their differences—who had not?—but let them only name for her, if they could, in the whole valley, a more upright, diligent, graceful, better-dressed man than Franco, her friend and lover!

The schoolboy had gone back for his inheritance, she said.

3

MR. GEORGE SMILEY’S HORSE

Only George Smiley, said Roddy Martindale, a fleshy Foreign Office wit, could have got himself appointed captain of a wrecked ship. Only Smiley, he added, could have compounded the pains of that appointment by choosing the same moment to abandon his beautiful, if occasionally errant wife.

At first or even second glance, George Smiley was ill-suited to either part, as Martindale was quick to note. He was tubby, and in small ways hopelessly unassertive. A natural shyness made him from time to time pompous, and to men of Martindale’s flamboyance his unobtrusiveness acted as a standing reproach. He was also myopic, and to see him in those first days after the holocaust—in his round spectacles and his civil-servant weeds, attended by his slender, tight-mouthed cupbearer Peter Guillam, discreetly padding the marshier bypaths of the Whitehall jungle; or stooped over a heap of papers at any hour of day or night in his scruffy throne-room on the fifth floor of the Edwardian mausoleum in Cambridge Circus, which he now commanded—you would think it was he, and not the dead Haydon, the Russian spy, who deserved the trade name “mole.” After such long hours of work in that cavernous and half-deserted building, the bags beneath his eyes turned to bruises, he smiled seldom, though he was by no means humourless, and there were times when the mere exertion of rising from his chair seemed to leave him winded. Reaching the upright position, he would pause, mouth slightly open, and give a little, fricative “uh” before moving off. Another mannerism had him polishing his spectacles distractedly on the fat end of his tie, which left his face so disconcertingly naked that one very senior secretary—in the jargon, these ladies were known as “mothers”—was on more than one occasion assailed by a barely containable urge, of which psychiatrists would have made all sorts of heavy weather, to start forward and shelter him from the impossible task he seemed determined to perform.

“George Smiley isn’t just cleaning the stable,” the same Roddy Martindale remarked, from his luncheon table at the Garrick. “He’s carrying his horse up the hill as well. Haw haw.”

Other rumours, favoured mainly by departments which had entered bids for the charter of the foundered service, were less respectful of his travail.

“George is living on his reputation,” they said, after a few months of this. “Catching Bill Haydon was a fluke.”

Anyway, they said, it had been an American tip-off, not George’s coup at all; the Cousins should have had the credit, but they had waived it diplomatically. No, no, said others, it was the Dutch. The Dutch had broken Moscow Centre’s code and passed the take through liaison; ask Roddy Martindale—Martindale, of course, being a professional trafficker in Circus misinformation. And so, back and forth, while Smiley, seemingly oblivious, kept his counsel and dismissed his wife.

They could hardly believe it.

They were stunned.

Martindale, who had never loved a woman in his life, was particularly affronted. He made a positive thing of it at the Garrick.

“The gall! Him a complete nobody and her half a Sawley! Pavlovian, that’s what I call it. Sheer Pavlovian cruelty. After years of putting up with her perfectly healthy peccadilloes—driving her to them, you mark my words—what does the little man do? Turns round and with quite Napoleonic brutality kicks her in the teeth! It’s a scandal. I shall tell everyone it’s a scandal. I’m a tolerant man in my way—not unworldly, I think—but Smiley has gone too far. Oh, yes.”

For once, as occasionally occurred, Martindale had the picture straight. The evidence was there for all to read. With Haydon dead and the past buried, the Smileys had made up their differences, and together, with some small ceremony, the reunited couple had moved back into their little Chelsea house in Bywater Street. They had even made a stab at being in society. They had gone out, they had entertained in the style befitting George’s new appointment; the Cousins, the odd parliamentary Minister, a variety of Whitehall barons all dined and went home full. They had even for a few weeks made a modestly exotic couple around the higher bureaucratic circuit. Till overnight, to his wife’s unmistakeable discomfort, George Smiley had removed himself from her sight and set up camp in the meagre attics behind his throne-room in the Circus. Soon the gloom of the place seemed to work itself into the fabric of his face, like dust into the complexion of a prisoner. While, in Chelsea, Ann Smiley pined, taking very hardly to her unaccustomed rôle of wife abandoned.

Dedication, said the knowing. Monkish abstinence. George is a saint. And at his age.

Balls, the Martindale faction retorted. Dedication to what? What was there left, in that dreary red-brick monster, that could possibly command such an act of self-immolation? What was there anywhere in beastly Whitehall—or, Lord help us, in beastly England—that could command it any more?

Work, said the knowing.

But what work? came the falsetto protests of these selfappointed Circus-watchers, handing round, like Gorgons, their little scraps of sight and hearing. What did he do up there, shorn of three-quarters of his staff, all but a few old biddies to brew his tea, his networks blown to smithereens? His foreign residencies, his reptile fund frozen solid by the Treasury (they meant his operational accounts), and not a friend in Whitehall or Washington to call his own? Unless you counted that loping prig Lacon at the Cabinet Office to be his friend, always so determined to go down the line for him at every conceivable opportunity. And naturally Lacon would put up a fight for him; what else had he? The Circus was Lacon’s power base. Without it, he was—well, what he was already, a capon. Naturally, Lacon would sound the battle cry.

“It’s a scandal,” Martindale announced huffily as he cropped his smoked eel and steak-and-kidney and the club’s own claret, up another twenty pence a crack. “I shall tell everybody.”

Between the villagers of Whitehall and the villagers of Tuscany, there was sometimes surprisingly little to choose.

Time did not kill the rumours. To the contrary, they multiplied, taking colour from his isolation, and calling it obsession.

It was remembered that Bill Haydon had not merely been George Smiley’s colleague, but Ann’s cousin and something more besides. Smiley’s fury against him, they said, had not stopped at Haydon’s death; he was positively dancing on Bill’s grave. For example, George had personally supervised the clearing of Haydon’s fabled pepper-pot room overlooking the Charing Cross Road, and the destruction of every last sign of him, from the indifferent oil-paintings by his own hand to the left-over oddments in the drawers of his desk; even the desk itself, which he had ordered sawn up and burned. And when that was done, they maintained, he had called in Circus workmen to tear down the partition walls. Oh, yes.

Or, for another example, and frankly a most unnerving one, take the photograph which hung on the wall of Smiley’s dingy throne-room—a passport photograph by the look of it, but blown up far beyond its natural size, so that it had a grainy and, some said, spectral look. One of the Treasury boys spotted it during an ad hoc conference about scrapping the operational bank accounts.

“Is that Control’s portrait, by the by?” he had asked of Peter Guillam, purely as a bit of social chit-chat. No sinister intent behind the question. Well, surely one was allowed to ask? Control, other names still unknown, was the legend of the place. He had been Smiley’s guide and mentor for all of thirty years. Smiley had actually buried him, they said; for the very secret, like the very rich, have a tendency to die unmourned.

“No, it bloody well isn’t Control,” Guillam, the cupbearer, had retorted, in that offhand, supercilious way of his. “It’s Karla.”

And who was Karla when he was at home?

Karla, my dear, was the work name of the Soviet case officer who had recruited Bill Haydon in the first place, and had the running of him thereafter. “A different sort of legend entirely, to say the least,” said Martindale, all a-quiver. “It seems we’ve a real vendetta on our hands. How puerile can you get, I wonder?”

Even Lacon was a mite bothered by that picture: “Now, seriously, why do you hang him there, George?” he demanded, in his bold, head prefect’s voice, dropping in on Smiley one evening on his way home from the Cabinet Office. “What does he mean to you, I wonder? Have you thought about that one? It isn’t a little macabre, you don’t think? The victorious enemy? I’d have thought he would get you down, gloating over you all up there?”

“Well, Bill’s dead,” said Smiley, who had a habit sometimes of giving a clue to an argument, rather than the argument itself.

“And Karla’s alive, you mean?” Lacon prompted. “And you’d rather have a live enemy than a dead one? Is that what you mean?”

But questions of George Smiley at a certain point had a habit of passing him by—even, said his colleagues, of appearing to be in bad taste.

An incident which provided more substantial fare around the Whitehall bazaars concerned the “ferrets,” or electronic sweepers. A worse case of favouritism could not be remembered anywhere. My God, those hoods had a nerve sometimes! Martindale, who had been waiting a year to have his room done, sent a complaint to his Under-Secretary. By hand. To be opened personally by. So did his Brother-in-Christ at Defence and so, nearly, did Hammer of Treasury, but Hammer either forgot to post his or thought better of it at the last moment. It wasn’t just a question of priorities—not at all. Not even of principle. Money was involved. Public money. Treasury had already had half the Circus rewired on George’s insistence. His paranoia about eavesdropping knew no limits, apparently. Add to that, the ferrets were short-staffed, there had been industrial disputes about unsocial hours—oh, any number of angles! Dynamite, the whole subject.

Yet what had happened in the event? Martindale had the details at his manicured fingertips. George went to Lacon on a Thursday—the day of the freak heat wave, you remember, when everyone practically expired, even at the Garrick—and by the Saturday—a Saturday, imagine the overtime!—the brutes were swarming over the Circus, enraging the neighbours with their din, and tearing the place apart. A more gross case of blind preference had not been met with since—well, since they allowed Smiley to have back that mangy old Russian researcher of his— Sachs, Connie Sachs—the don woman from Oxford, against all reason, calling her a mother when she wasn’t.

Discreetly, or as discreetly as he could manage, Martindale went to quite some lengths to find out whether the ferrets had actually discovered anything, but met a blank wall. In the secret world, information is money, and by that standard at least, though he might not know it, Roddy Martindale was a pauper, for the inside to this inside story was known only to the smallest few. It was true that Smiley called on Lacon in his panelled room overlooking St. James’s Park on the Thursday, and that the day was uncommonly hot for autumn. Rich shafts of sunlight poured on to the representational carpet, and the dust specks played in them like tiny tropical fish. Lacon had even removed his jacket, though of course not his tie.

“Connie Sachs has been doing some arithmetic on Karla’s handwriting in analogous cases,” Smiley announced.

“Handwriting?” Lacon echoed, as if handwriting were a vice.

“Tradecraft. Karla’s habits of technique. It seems that where it was operable, he ran moles and sound-thieves in tandem.”

“Once more now, in English, George—do you mind?”

Where circumstance allowed, said Smiley, Karla had backed up his agent operations with microphones. Though Smiley was satisfied that nothing had been said within the building which could compromise any “present plans,” as he called them, the implications were unsettling.

Lacon was getting to know Smiley’s handwriting too: “Any collateral for that rather academic theory?” he enquired, examining Smiley’s expressionless features over the top of his pencil, which he held between his two index fingers, like a rule.

“We’ve been making an inventory of our own audio stores,” Smiley confessed with a puckering of his brow. “There’s a quantity of house equipment missing. A lot seems to have disappeared during the alterations of ’sixty-six.” Lacon waited, dragging it out of him. “Haydon was on the building committee responsible for having the work carried out,” Smiley ended, as a final sop. “He was the driving force, in fact. It’s just—well, if the Cousins ever got to hear of it, I fear it would be the last straw.”

Lacon was no fool, and the Cousins’ wrath just when everyone was trying to smooth their feathers was a thing to be avoided at any cost. If he had had his way, he would have ordered the ferrets out the same day. Saturday was a compromise, and without consulting anybody he dispatched the entire team, all twelve of them, in two grey vans painted “PEST CONTROL.”

It was true that they tore the place apart; hence the silly rumours about the destruction of the pepper-pot room. They were angry because it was the weekend, and perhaps therefore needlessly violent; the tax they paid on overtime was frightful. But their mood changed fast enough when they bagged eight radio microphones in the first sweep, every one of them Circus standard-issue from audio stores. Haydon’s distribution of them was classic, as Lacon agreed when he called to make his own inspection. One in a drawer of a disused desk, as if innocently left there and forgotten about, except that the desk happened to be in the coding room. One collecting dust on top of an old steel cupboard in the fifth-floor conference room—or, in the jargon, rumpus room. And one, with typical Haydon flair, wedged behind the cistern in the senior officers’ lavatory next door. A second sweep, to include load-bearing walls, threw up three more embedded in the fabric during the building work. Probes, with plastic snorkel-straws to pipe the sound back to them. The ferrets laid them out like a game-line. Extinct, of course, as all the devices were, but put there by Haydon nevertheless, and tuned to frequencies the Circus did not use.

“Maintained at Treasury cost, too, I declare,” said Lacon, with the driest of smiles, fondling the leads which had once connected the probe microphones with the mains power supply. “Or used to be, till George rewired the place. I must be sure to tell Brother Hammer. He’ll be thrilled.” Hammer, a Welshman, being Lacon’s most persistent enemy.

On Lacon’s advice, Smiley now staged a modest piece of theatre. He ordered the ferrets to reactivate the radio microphones in the conference room and to modify the receiver on one of the Circus’s few remaining surveillance cars. Then he invited three of the least bending Whitehall desk jockeys, including the Welsh Hammer, to drive in a half-mile radius round the building, while they listened to a pre-scripted discussion between two of Smiley’s shadowy helpers sitting in the rumpus room. Word for word. Not a syllable out of place.

After which, Smiley himself swore them to absolute secrecy, and for good measure made them sign a declaration, drafted by the housekeepers expressly to inspire awe.

Peter Guillam reckoned it would keep them quiet for about a month. “Or less if it rains,” he added, sourly.

Yet if Martindale and his colleagues in the Whitehall outfield lived in a state of primeval innocence about the reality of Smiley’s world, those closer to the throne felt equally removed from him. The circles around him grew smaller as they grew nearer, and precious few in the early days reached the centre. Entering the brown and dismal doorway of the Circus, with its temporary barriers manned by watchful janitors, Smiley shed none of his habitual privacy. For nights and days at a time, the door to his tiny office suite stayed closed and his only company was Peter Guillam, and a hovering dark-eyed factotum named Fawn, a sleek, diminutive creature who had shared with Guillam the job of baby-sitting for Smiley during the smoking-out of Haydon.

Sometimes Smiley disappeared by the back door with no more than a nod, taking Fawn with him and leaving Guillam to field the phone calls and get hold of him in emergency. The mothers likened his behaviour to the last days of Control, who had died in harness, thanks to Haydon, of a broken heart. By the organic processes of a closed society, a new word was added to the jargon. The unmasking of Haydon now became the “fall,” and Circus history was divided into before the fall and after it. To Smiley’s comings and goings, the physical fall of the building itself— three-quarters empty and, since the visit of the ferrets, in a wrecked condition—lent a sombre sense of ruin which at low moments became symbolic to those who had to live with it. What the ferrets destroy they do not put together; and the same, they felt perhaps, was true of Karla, whose dusty features, nailed there by their elusive chief, continued to watch over them from the shadows of his Spartan throne-room.

The little they did know was appalling. Such humdrum matters as personnel, for example, took on a horrific dimension. Smiley had blown staff to dismiss, and blown residencies to dismantle; poor Tufty Thesinger’s in Hong Kong, for one—though, being pretty far removed from the anti-Soviet scene, Hong Kong was among the last to go.

Round Whitehall—a terrain which, like Smiley, they deeply distrusted—they heard of him engaged in bizarre and rather terrible arguments over terms of severance and resettlement. There were cases, it seemed—poor Tufty Thesinger in Hong Kong once more supplied the readiest example—where Bill Haydon had deliberately encouraged the over-promotion of burnt-out officers who could be counted on not to mount private initiatives. Should they be paid off at their natural value, or at the inflated one Haydon had mischievously set on them? There were others where Haydon, for his own preservation, had confected reasons for dismissal. Should they receive full pension? Had they a claim to reinstatement? Perplexed young Ministers, new to power since the elections, made brave and contradictory rulings. In consequence, a sad stream of deluded Circus field officers, both men and women, passed through Smiley’s hands, and the housekeepers were ordered to make sure that for reasons of security and perhaps aesthetics, none of these returnees from foreign residencies should set foot inside the main building.

Nor would Smiley tolerate any contact between the damned and the reprieved. Accordingly, with grudging Treasury support from the Welsh Hammer, the housekeepers opened a temporary reception point in a rented house in Bloomsbury, under cover of a language school (“Regret No Callers Without Appointment”), and manned it with a quartet of pay-and-personnel officers. This body became inevitably the Bloomsbury Group, and it was known that sometimes for a spare hour or so Smiley made a point of slipping down there and, rather in the manner of a hospital visitor, offering his condolences to faces frequently unknown to him. At other times, depending on his mood, he would remain entirely silent, preferring to perch unexplained and Buddha-like in a corner of the dusty interviewing room.

What drove him? What was he looking for? If anger was the root, then it was an anger common to them all in those days. They could be sitting together in the rumpus room after a long day’s work, joking and gossiping; but if someone should let slip the names of Karla or his mole Haydon, a silence of angels would descend on them, and not even cunning old Connie Sachs, the Moscow-gazer, could break the spell.

Even more affecting in the eyes of his subordinates were Smiley’s efforts to save something of the agent networks from the wreck. Within a day of Haydon’s arrest, all nine of the Circus’s Soviet and East European networks had gone cold. Radio links stopped dead, courier lines dried up, and there was every reason to say that if there had been any genuinely Circus-owned agents left among them, they had been rolled up overnight. But Smiley fiercely opposed that easy view, just as he refused to accept that Karla and Moscow Centre between them were invincibly efficient, or tidy, or logical.

He pestered Lacon, he pestered the Cousins in their vast annexes in Grosvenor Square, he insisted that agent radio frequencies continue to be monitored, and, despite bitter protest by the Foreign Office (Roddy Martindale, as ever, to the fore), he had open-language messages put out by the overseas services of the B.B.C. ordering any live agent who should happen to hear them and know the code word to abandon ship immediately. And, little by little, to their amazement, came tiny flutterings of life, like garbled messages from another planet.

First, the Cousins, in the person of their suspiciously bluff local station chief Martello, reported from Grosvenor Square that an American escape line was passing two British agents, a man and a woman, to the old holiday resort of Sochi on the Black Sea, where a small boat was being fitted in readiness for what Martello’s quiet men insisted on calling an “exfiltration assignment.” By his description, he was referring to the Churayevs, linchpins of the Contemplate network, which had covered Georgia and the Ukraine. Without waiting for Treasury sanction, Smiley resurrected from retirement one Roy Bland, a burly ex-Marxist dialectician and sometime field agent, who had been the network’s case officer. To Bland, who had come down heavily in the fall, he entrusted the two Russian leash-dogs, de Silsky and Kaspar, also in moth-balls, also former Haydon protégés, to make up a stand-by reception party. They were still sitting in their R.A.F. transport plane when word came through that the couple had been shot dead as they were leaving harbour. The exfiltration assignment had fallen through, said the Cousins. In sympathy, Martello personally telephoned Smiley with the news. He was a kindly man by his own lights and, like Smiley, old school. It was night-time, and raining furiously.

“Now, don’t go taking this too hard, George,” he warned in his avuncular way. “Hear me? There’s fieldmen and there’s deskmen and it’s up to you and me to see that the distinction is preserved. Otherwise we all go crazy. Can’t go down the line for every one of them. That’s generalship. So you just remember that.”

Peter Guillam, who was at Smiley’s shoulder when he took the call, swore later that Smiley showed no particular reaction; and Guillam knew him well. Nevertheless, ten minutes later, unobserved by anybody, he was gone, and his voluminous mackintosh was missing from its peg. He returned after dawn, drenched to the skin, still carrying the mackintosh over his arm. Having changed, he returned to his desk, but when Guillam, unbidden, tiptoed in to him with tea, he found his master, to his embarrassment, sitting rigidly before an old volume of German poetry, fists clenched either side of it, while he silently wept.

Bland, Kaspar, and de Silsky begged for reinstatement. They pointed to little Toby Esterhase the Hungarian, who had somehow gained readmittance, and demanded the same treatment. In vain. They were stood down and not spoken of again. To injustice belongs injustice. Though tarnished, they might have been useful, but Smiley would not hear their names; not then; not later; not ever. Of the immediate post-fall period, that was the lowest point. There were those who seriously believed—inside the Circus, as well as out—that they had heard the last beat of the secret English heart.

A few days after this catastrophe, as it happened, luck handed Smiley a small consolation. In Warsaw, in broad daylight, a Circus head agent on the run picked up the B.B.C. signal and walked straight into the British Embassy. Thanks to ferocious lobbying by Lacon and Smiley between them, he was flown home to London the same night disguised as a diplomatic courier, Martindale notwithstanding. Mistrusting his cover story, Smiley turned the man over to the Circus inquisitors, who, deprived of other meat, nearly killed him but afterwards declared him clean. He was resettled in Australia.

Next, still at the very genesis of his rule, Smiley was compelled to pass judgment on the Circus’s blown domestic outstations. His instinct was to shed everything: the safe houses, now totally unsafe; the Sarratt Nursery, where traditionally the briefing and training of agents and new entrants was conducted; the experimental audio laboratories in Harlow; the stinks-and-bangs school in Argyll; the water school in the Helford Estuary, where passé sailors practised the black arts of small-boat seacraft like the ritual of some lost religion; and the long-arm radio-transmission base at Canterbury. He would even have done away with the wranglers’ headquarters in Bath, where the code-breaking went on.

“Scrap the lot,” he told Lacon, calling on him in his rooms. “And then what?” Lacon enquired, puzzled by his vehemence, which since the Sochi failure was more marked in him.

“Start again.”

“I see,” said Lacon, which meant, of course, that he didn’t. Lacon had sheets of Treasury figures before him and was studying them while he spoke.

“The Sarratt Nursery, for some reason which I fail to understand, is carried on the military budget,” he observed reflectively. “Not on your reptile fund at all. The Foreign Office pays for Harlow—and I’m sure has long forgotten the fact. Argyll is under the wing of the Ministry of Defence, who most certainly won’t know of its existence. The Post Office has Canterbury and the Navy has Helford. Bath, I’m pleased to say, is also supported from Foreign Office funds, over the particular signature of Martindale, appended six years ago and similarly faded from official memory. So they don’t eat a thing. Do they?”

“They’re dead wood,” Smiley insisted. “And while they exist we shall never replace them. Sarratt went to the devil long ago, Helford is moribund, Argyll is farcical. As to the wranglers, for the last five years they’ve been working practically full time for Karla.”

“By Karla you mean Moscow Centre?”

“I mean the department responsible for Haydon and half a dozen—”

“I know what you mean. But I think it safer to stay with institutions, if you don’t mind. In that way we are spared the embarrassment of personalities. After all, that’s what institutions are for, isn’t it?” Lacon tapped the back of his pencil rhythmically on his desk. Finally he looked up, and considered Smiley quizzically. “Well, well, you are the root-and-bough man these days, George. I dread to think what would happen if you were ever to wield your axe round my side of the garden. Those outstations are gilt-edged stock. Do away with them now and you’ll never get them back. Later, if you like, when you’re on the road again, you can cash them in and buy yourself something better. You mustn’t sell when the market’s low, you know. You must wait till you can take a profit.”

Reluctantly, Smiley bowed to his advice.

As if all these headaches were not enough, there came one bleak Monday morning when a Treasury audit pointed up serious discrepancies in the conduct of the Circus reptile fund over the period of five years before it was frozen by the fall. Smiley was forced to hold a kangaroo court, at which an elderly clerk in Finance Section, hauled from retirement, broke down and confessed to a shameful passion for a girl in Registry who had led him by the nose. In a ghastly fit of remorse, the old man went home and hanged himself. Against all Guillam’s advice, Smiley insisted on attending the funeral.

Yet it is a matter of record that from these quite dismal beginnings, and indeed from his very first weeks in office, George Smiley went over to the attack.

The base from which this attack was launched was in the first instance philosophical, in the second theoretical, and only in the last instance, thanks to the dramatic appearance of the egregious gambler Sam Collins, human.

The philosophy was simple. The task of an intelligence service, Smiley announced firmly, was not to play chase games but to deliver intelligence to its customers. If it failed to do this, those customers would resort to other, less scrupulous sellers or, worse, indulge in amateurish self-help. And the service itself would wither. Not to be seen in the Whitehall markets was not to be desired, he went on. Unless the Circus produced, it would also have no wares to barter with the Cousins, or with other sister services with whom reciprocal deals were traditional. Not to produce was not to trade, and not to trade was to die.

Amen, they said.

His theory—he called it his “premise”—on how intelligence could be produced with no resources was the subject of an informal meeting held in the rumpus room, not two months after his accession, between himself and the tiny inner circle which made up, to a point, his team of confidants. They were, in all, five: Smiley himself; Peter Guillam his cupbearer; big, flowing Connie Sachs the Moscow-gazer; Fawn the dark-eyed factotum, who wore black gym shoes and manned the Russian-style copper samovar and gave out biscuits; and lastly Doc di Salis, known as “the Mad Jesuit,” the Circus’s head China-watcher. When God had finished making Connie Sachs, said the wags, He needed a rest, so He ran up Doc di Salis from the remnants.

The Doc was a patchy, grubby little creature, more like Connie’s monkey than her counterpart, and his features, it was true, from the spiky silver hair that strayed over his grimy collar to the moist misshapen fingertips, which picked like chicken beaks at everything around them, had an unquestionably illbegotten look. If Beardsley had drawn him, he would have had him chained and hirsute, peeping round the corner of her enormous caftan. Yet di Salis was a notable Orientalist, a scholar, and something of a hero too, for he had spent a part of the war in China, recruiting for God and the Circus, and another part in Changi jail, for the pleasure of the Japanese.

That was the team: the group of five. In time it expanded, but to start with, these five alone made up the famous cadre, and to have been one of them, said di Salis afterwards, was “like holding a Communist Party card with a single-figure membership number.”

First, Smiley reviewed the wreck, and that took some while, in the way that sacking a city takes some while, or liquidating great numbers of people. He simply drove through every back alley the Circus possessed, demonstrating quite ruthlessly how, by what method, and often exactly when Haydon had laid bare its secrets to his Soviet masters. He had, of course, the advantage of his own interrogation of Haydon, and of the original researches which had led him to Haydon’s discovery. He knew the track. Nevertheless, his peroration was a minor tour de force of destructive analysis.

“So no illusions,” he ended tersely. “This service will never be the same again. It may be better, but it will be different.”

Amen again, they said, and took a doleful break to stretch their legs.

It was odd, Guillam recalled later, how the important scenes of those early months seemed all to play at night. The rumpus room was long and raftered, with high dormer windows which gave on to nothing but orange night sky and a coppice of rusted radio aerials, war relics no one had seen fit to remove.

The premise, said Smiley when they had resettled, was that Haydon had done nothing against the Circus that was not directed, and that the direction came from one man personally: Karla.

The premise was that in briefing Haydon, Karla was exposing the gaps in Moscow Centre’s knowledge; that in ordering Haydon to suppress certain intelligence which came the Circus’s way, in ordering him to downgrade or distort it, to deride it, or even to deny it circulation altogether, Karla was indicating which secrets he did not want revealed.

“So we can take the back-bearings, can’t we, darling?” murmured Connie Sachs, whose speed of uptake put her, as usual, a good length ahead of the rest of the field.

“That’s right, Con. That’s exactly what we can do,” said Smiley gravely. “We can take the back-bearings.” He resumed his lecture, leaving Guillam, for one, more mystified than before.

By minutely charting Haydon’s path of destruction (his pug marks, as Smiley called them); by exhaustively recording his selection of files; by reassembling—after aching weeks of research, if necessary—the intelligence culled in good faith by Circus outstations, and balancing it, in every detail, against the intelligence distributed by Haydon to the Circus’s customers in the Whitehall market-place, it would be possible to take backbearings (as Connie so rightly called them) and establish Haydon’s, and therefore Karla’s, point of departure. Said Smiley.

Once a correct back-bearing had been taken, surprising doors of opportunity would open, and the Circus, against all outward likelihood, would be in a position to go over to the initiative—or, as Smiley put it, “to act, and not merely to react.”

The premise, to use Connie Sachs’s joyous description later, meant “Looking for another bloody Tutankhamun, with George Smiley holding the light and us poor Charlies doing the digging.”

At that time, of course, Jerry Westerby was not even a twinkle in their operational eye.

They went into battle next day, huge Connie to one corner, the crabbed little di Salis to his. As di Salis said, in a nasal, deprecating tone that had a savage force, “At least we do finally know why we’re here.” Their families of pasty burrowers carved the archive in two. To Connie and “my Bolshies,” as she called them, went Russia and the Satellites. To di Salis and his “yellow perils” China and the Third World. What fell between—source reports on the nation’s theoretical Allies, for instance—was consigned to a special wait-bin for later evaluation.

They worked, like Smiley himself, impossible hours. The canteen complained, the janitors threatened to walk out, but gradually the sheer energy of the burrowers infected even the ancillary staff, and they shut up. A bantering rivalry developed. Under Connie’s influence, back-room boys and girls who till now had scarcely been seen to smile learned suddenly to chaff each other in the language of their great familiars in the world outside the Circus. Czarist imperialist running dogs drank tasteless coffee with divisive, deviationist, chauvinist Stalinists and were proud of it.

But the most impressive blossoming was unquestionably in di Salis, who interrupted his nocturnal labours with short but vigorous spells at the Ping-Pong table, where he would challenge all comers, leaping about like a lepidopterist after rare specimens. Soon the first fruits appeared, and gave them fresh impetus. Within a month, three reports had been nervously distributed, under extreme limitation, and even found favour with the sceptical Cousins. A month later, a hard-bound summary wordily entitled “Interim Report on Lacunae in Soviet Intelligence Regarding Nato Sea-to-Air Strike Capacity” earned grudging applause from Martello’s parent factory in Langley, Virginia, and an exuberant phone call from Martello himself.

“George, I told them!” he yelled, so loud that the telephone line seemed an unnecessary extravagance. “I told them, ‘The Circus will deliver.’ Did they believe me? Did they hell!”

Meanwhile, sometimes with Guillam for company, sometimes with silent Fawn to baby-sit, Smiley conducted his own dark peregrinations and marched till he was half dead with tiredness. And, still without reward, kept marching. By day and often by night as well, he trailed the home counties and points beyond, questioning past officers of the Circus and former agents out to grass.

In Chiswick, perched meekly in the office of a cut-price travel agent and talking in murmurs to a former Polish colonel of cavalry resettled as a clerk there, he thought he had glimpsed it; but like a mirage, the promise dissolved as he advanced on it. In a second-hand radio shop in Sevenoaks, a Sudeten Czech held out the same hope to him, but when he and Guillam hurried back to confirm the story from Circus records, they found the actors dead and no one left to lead him further. At a private stud in Newmarket, to Fawn’s near-violent fury, he suffered insult at the hand of a tweedy and opinionated Scot, a protégé of Smiley’s predecessor Alleline, all in the same elusive cause. Back home, he called for the papers, only once more to see the light go out.

For this was the last and unspoken conviction of the premise Smiley had outlined in the rumpus room: that the snare with which Haydon had trapped himself was not unique. That in the end analysis, it was not Haydon’s paperwork which had caused his downfall, not his meddling with reports, or his “losing” of inconvenient records. It was Haydon’s panic. It was Haydon’s spontaneous intervention in a field operation, where the threat to himself, or perhaps to another Karla agent, was suddenly so grave that his one hope was to suppress it despite the risk.

This was the trick which Smiley longed to find repeated. And this was the question which never directly, but by inference, Smiley and his helpers in the Bloomsbury reception centre canvassed: “Can you remember any incident during your service in the field when in your opinion you were unreasonably restrained from following an operational lead?”

And it was dapper Sam Collins, in his dinner-jacket, with his brown cigarette and his trim moustache and his Mississippi dandy’s smile, summoned for a quiet chat one day, who breezed in to say, “Come to think of it, yes, old boy, I can.”

But behind this question again, and Sam’s crucial answer, stalked the formidable person of Miss Connie Sachs and her pursuit of Russian gold.

And behind Connie again, as ever, the permanently misted photograph of Karla.

“Connie’s got one, Peter,” she whispered to Guillam over the internal telephone late one night. “She’s got one, sure as boots.”

It was not her first find, by any means, not her tenth, but her devious instinct told her straight away it was “the genuine article, darling, mark old Connie’s words.” So Guillam told Smiley and Smiley locked up his files and cleared his desk and said, “All right, send her in.”

She was a huge, crippled, cunning woman, a don’s daughter, a don’s sister, herself some sort of academic, and known to the older hands as Mother Russia. The folklore said Control had recruited her over a rubber of bridge while she was still a débutante, on the night Neville Chamberlain promised “peace in our time.” When Haydon came to power in the slip-stream of his protector Alleline, one of his first and most prudent moves was to have Connie put out to grass.

For Connie knew more about the byways of Moscow Centre than most of the wretched brutes, as she called them, who toiled there, and Karla’s private army of moles and recruiters had always been her very special joy. Not a Soviet defector, in the old days, but his debriefing report had passed through Mother Russia’s arthritic fingers; not a coat-trailer who had manoeuvred himself alongside an identified Karla talent-spotter, but Connie greedily rehearsed him in every detail of the quarry’s choreography; not a scrap of hearsay over nearly forty years on the beat that had not been assumed into her pain-wracked body, and lodged there among the junk of her compendious memory, to be turned up the moment she rummaged for it. Connie’s mind, said Control once, in a kind of despair, was like the back of one enormous envelope.

Dismissed, she went back to Oxford and the devil. At the time Smiley reclaimed her, her only recreation was the Times crossword and she was running at a comfortable bottle of gin a day.

But that night, that modestly historic night, as Connie hauled her great frame along the fifth-floor corridor toward George Smiley’s inner room, she sported a clean grey caftan, she had daubed a pair of rosy lips not far from her own, and she had taken nothing stronger than a vile peppermint cordial all day long—of which the reek lingered in her wake. A sense of occasion, they all decided afterwards, was stamped on her from the first. She carried a heavy plastic shopping bag, for she would countenance no leather. In her lair on a lower floor, her mongrel dog, christened Trot and recruited on a wave of remorse for its late predecessor, whimpered disconsolately from beneath her desk, to the lively fury of her roommate di Salis, who would often privily lash at the beast with his foot; or in more jovial moments content himself with reciting to Connie the many tasty ways in which the Chinese prepared their dogs for the pot. Outside the Edwardian dormers, as she passed them one by one, a racing late-summer rain was falling, ending a long drought, and she saw it—she told them all later—as symbolic, if not Biblical. The drops rattled like pellets on the slate roof, flattening the dead leaves which had settled there. In that ante-room, the mothers continued stonily with their business, accustomed to Connie’s pilgrimages, and not liking them the better for it.

“Darlings,” Connie murmured, waving her hand to them like royalty. “So loyal. So very loyal.”

There was one step down into the throne-room—the uninitiated tended to stumble on it despite the faded warning notice— and Connie, with her arthritis, negotiated it as if it were a ladder while Guillam held her arm.

Smiley watched her, plump hands linked on his desk, as she began solemnly unpacking her offerings from the carrier: not eye of newt, or the finger of a birth-strangled babe—Guillam speaking once more—but files, a string of them, flagged and annotated, the booty of yet another of her impassioned skirmishes through the Moscow Centre archive, which until her return from the dead a few months before had, thanks to Haydon, lain gathering dust for all of three long years. As she pulled them out, and smoothed the notes that she had pinned on them like markers in her paper-chase, she smiled that brimming smile of hers—Guillam again, for curiosity had obliged him to down tools and come and watch— and she was muttering, “There, you little devil,” and, “Now where did you get to, you wretch?” not to Smiley or Guillam, of course, but to the documents themselves, for Connie had the affectation of assuming everything was alive and potentially recalcitrant, whether it was Trot her dog or a chair that obstructed her passage, or Moscow Centre, or finally Karla himself.

“A guided tour, darlings,” she announced; “that’s what Connie’s been having. Super fun. Reminded me of Easter, when Mother hid painted eggs round the house and sent us gals off hunting for them.”

For perhaps three hours after that, interspersed with coffee and sandwiches and other unwanted treats, which dark Fawn insisted on bringing to them, Guillam struggled to follow the twists and impulsions of Connie’s extraordinary journey, to which her subsequent research had by now supplied the solid basis. She dealt Smiley papers as if they were playing cards, shoving them down and snatching them back with her crumpled hands almost before he had had a chance to read them. Over it all she was keeping up what Guillam called “her fifth-rate conjurer’s patter,” the abracadabra of the obsessive burrower’s trade.

At the heart of her discovery, so far as Guillam could make out, lay what Connie called a Moscow Centre “gold seam”; a Soviet laundering operation to move clandestine funds into open-air channels. The charting of it was not complete. Israeli liaison had supplied one section, the Cousins another, Steve Mackelvore, head resident in Paris, now dead, a third. From Paris the trail turned East, by way of the Banque de l’Indochine. At this point also, the papers had been put up to Haydon’s London Station, as the operational directorate was called, together with a recommendation from the Circus’s depleted Soviet research section that the case be thrown open to full-scale enquiry in the field.

London Station killed the suggestion stone dead: “Potentially prejudicial to a highly delicate source,” wrote one of Haydon’s minions, and that was that.

“File and forget,” Smiley muttered, distractedly turning pages. “File and forget. We always have good reasons for doing nothing.”

Outside, the world was fast asleep.

“Exactly, dear,” said Connie very softly, as if she were afraid to wake him.

Files and folders were by then strewn all over the throne-room. The scene looked a lot more like a disaster than a triumph. For an hour longer, Guillam and Connie gazed silently into space or at Karla’s photograph while Smiley conscientiously retraced her steps, his anxious face stooped to the reading-lamp, its pudgy lines accentuated by the beam, his hands skipping over the papers and occasionally lifting to his mouth so that he could lick his thumb. Once or twice, he started to glance at her or open his mouth to speak, but Connie had the answer ready before he put his question. In her mind, she was walking beside him along the path.

When he had finished he sat back, and took off his spectacles and polished them—not on the fat end of his tie, for once, but on a new silk handkerchief in the top pocket of his black jacket, for he had spent most of the day cloistered with the Cousins on another fence-mending mission. While he did this, Connie beamed at Guillam and mouthed “Isn’t he a love?”—a favourite dictum when she was talking of her Chief, which drove Guillam nearly mad with rage.

Smiley’s next utterance had the ring of mild objection: “All the same, Con, a formal search request did go out from London Station to our residency in Vientiane.”

“Happened before Bill had time to get his hoof on it,” she replied.

Not seeming to hear, Smiley picked up an open file and held it to her across the desk. “And Vientiane did send a lengthy reply. It’s all marked up in the index. We don’t seem to have that. Where is it?”

Connie had not bothered to receive the offered file. “In the shredder, darling,” she said, and beamed contentedly at Guillam.

The morning had come. Guillam strolled round switching out the lights.

The same afternoon, he dropped in at the quiet West End gaming club where, in the permanent night-time of his elected trade, Sam Collins endured the rigours of retirement. Expecting to find him overseeing his usual afternoon game of chemin de fer, Guillam was surprised at being shown to a sumptuous room marked “Management.” Sam was roosting behind a fine desk, smiling prosperously through the smoke of his habitual brown cigarette.

“What the hell have you done, Sam?” Guillam demanded in a stage whisper, affecting to look round nervously. “Taken over the Mafia? Jesus!”

“Oh, that wasn’t necessary,” said Sam, with the same raffish smile. Slipping a mackintosh over his dinner-jacket, he led Guillam down a passage and through a fire door into the street, where the two men hopped into the back of Guillam’s waiting cab, while Guillam still secretly marvelled at Sam’s new-found eminence.

Fieldmen have different ways of showing no emotion, and Sam’s was to smile, smoke slower, and fill his eyes with a dark glow of particular indulgence, fixing them intently on his partner in discussion. Sam was an Asian hand, old Circus, with a lot of time behind him in the field: five years in Borneo, six in Burma, five more in Northern Thailand and latterly three in the Laotian capital of Vientiane, all under natural cover as a general trader. The Thais had sweated him twice but let him go. He’d had to leave Sarawak in his socks. When he was in the mood, he had stories to tell about his journeying among the northern hill tribes of Burma and the Shans, but he was seldom in the mood. Sam was a Haydon casualty. There had been a moment, five years back, when Sam’s lazy brilliance had made him a serious contender for promotion to the fifth floor—even, said some, to the post of Chief itself, had not Haydon put his weight behind the preposterous Percy Alleline. So in place of power, Sam was left to moulder in the field until Haydon contrived to recall him, and have him sacked for a trumped-up misdemeanour.

“Sam! How good of you! Take a pew,” said Smiley, all conviviality for once. “Will you drink? Where are you in your day? Perhaps we should be offering you breakfast?”

At Cambridge, Sam had taken a dazzling first, thus confounding his tutors, who till then had dismissed him as a near idiot. He had done it, the dons afterwards told each other consolingly, entirely on memory. The more worldly tongues told a different tale, however. According to them, Sam had trailed a love affair with a plain girl at the Examination Schools, and obtained from her a preview of the papers.

4

THE CASTLE WAKES

Now at first Smiley tested the water with Sam—and Sam, who liked a poker hand himself, tested the water with Smiley. Some fieldmen, and particularly the clever ones, take a perverse pride in not knowing the whole picture. Their art consists in the deft handling of loose ends, and stops there stubbornly. Sam was inclined that way. Having raked a little in his dossier, Smiley tried him out on several old cases, which had no sinister look at all but which gave a clue to Sam’s present disposition and confirmed his ability to remember accurately. He received Sam alone because with other people present it would have been a different game—either more or less intense, but different.

Later, when the story was out in the open and only follow-up questions remained, he did summon Connie and Doc di Salis from the nether regions, and let Guillam sit in too. But that was later, and for the time being Smiley plumbed Sam’s mind alone, concealing from him entirely the fact that all case papers had been destroyed, and that since Mackelvore was dead, Sam was at present the only witness to certain key events.

“Now, Sam, do you remember at all,” Smiley asked, when he finally judged the moment right, “a request that came in to you in Vientiane once, from here in London, concerning certain money drafts from Paris? Just a standard request it would have been, asking for ‘unattributable field enquiries please, to confirm or deny’—that sort of thing? Ring a bell, by any chance?”

He had a sheet of notes before him, so that this was just one more question in a slow stream. As he spoke, he was actually marking something with his pencil, not looking at Sam at all. But in the same way that we hear better with our eyes closed, Smiley did sense Sam’s attention harden; which is to say, Sam stretched out his legs a little, and crossed them, and slowed his gestures almost to a halt.

“Monthly transfers to the Banque de l’Indochine,” said Sam after a suitable pause. “Hefty ones. Paid out of a Canadian overseas account with their Paris affiliate.” He gave the number of the account. “Payments made on the last Friday of every month. Start date January ’seventy-three or thereabouts. It rings a bell, sure.”

Smiley detected immediately that Sam was settling to a long game. His memory was clear but his information meagre: more like an opening bid than a frank reply.

Still stooped over the papers, Smiley said, “Now can we just wander over the course here a little, Sam? There’s some discrepancy on the filing side, and I’d like to get your part of the record straight.”

“Sure,” said Sam again, and drew comfortably on his brown cigarette. He was watching Smiley’s hands, and occasionally, with studied idleness, his eyes—though never for too long. Whereas Smiley, for his part, fought only to keep his mind open to the devious options of a fieldman’s life. Sam might easily be defending something quite irrelevant. He had fiddled a little bit on his expenses, for example, and was afraid he’d been caught out. He had fabricated his report rather than go out and risk his neck; Sam was of an age, after all, where a fieldman looks first to his own skin.

Or it was the opposite situation. Sam had ranged a little wider in his enquiries than Head Office had sanctioned. Hard pressed, he had gone to the pedlars rather than file a nil return. He had fixed himself a side-deal with the local Cousins. Or the local security services had blackmailed him—in Sarratt jargon the angels had put a burn on him—and he had played the case both ways in order to survive and smile and keep his Circus pension. To read Sam’s moves, Smiley knew that he must stay alert to these and countless other options. A desk is a dangerous place from which to watch the world.

So, as Smiley proposed, they wandered. London’s request for field enquiries, said Sam, reached him in standard form, much as Smiley had described. It was shown to him by old Mac who, until his Paris posting, was the Circus’s linkman in the Vientiane Embassy. An evening session at their safe house. Routine, though the Russian aspect stuck out from the start, and Sam actually remembered saying to Mac that early, “London must think it’s Moscow Centre reptile money,” because he had spotted the cryptonym of the Circus’s Soviet research section mixed in with the prelims on the signal. (Smiley noted that Steve Mackelvore had no business showing Sam the signal.) Sam also remembered Mac’s reply to his observation. “They should never have given old Connie Sachs the shove,” he had said. Sam had agreed whole-heartedly.

As it happened, said Sam, the request was pretty easy to meet; Sam already had a contact at the Indochine, a good one—call him Johnny.

“Filed here, Sam?” Smiley enquired politely.

Sam avoided answering that question directly and Smiley respected his reluctance. The fieldman who files all his contacts with Head Office, or even clears them, was not yet born. As illusionists cling to their mystique, so fieldmen for different reasons are congenitally secretive about their sources.

Johnny was reliable, said Sam emphatically. He had an excellent track record on several arms-dealing and narcotics cases, and Sam would swear by him anywhere.

“Oh, you handled those things, too, did you, Sam?” Smiley asked respectfully.

So Sam had moonlighted for the local narcotics bureau on the side, Smiley noted. A lot of fieldmen did that, some even with Head Office consent; in their world, they likened it to selling off industrial waste. It was a perk. Nothing dramatic therefore, but Smiley stored away the information all the same.

“Johnny was okay,” Sam repeated, with a warning in his voice.

“I’m sure he was,” said Smiley with the same courtesy.

Sam continued with his story. He had called on Johnny at the Indochine and sold him a cock-and-bull cover to keep him quiet, and a few days later, Johnny, who was just a humble counter clerk, had checked the ledgers and unearthed the dockets and Sam had the first leg of the connection cut and dried.

The routine went this way, said Sam: “On the last Friday of each month, a telexed money order arrived from Paris to the credit of a Monsieur Delassus presently staying at the Hotel Condor, Vientiane, payable on production of passport, number quoted.” Once again, Sam effortlessly recited the figures. “The bank sent out the advice, Delassus called first thing on the Monday, drew the money in cash, stuffed it in a brief-case, and walked out with it. End of connection,” said Sam.

“How much?”

“Started small and grew fast. Then went on growing, then grew a little more.”

“Ending where?”

“Twenty-five thousand U.S., in big ones,” said Sam without a flicker.

Smiley’s eyebrows lifted slightly. “A month?” he said, in humorous surprise.

“The big table,” Sam agreed, and lapsed into a leisurely silence. There is a particular intensity about clever men whose brains are under-used, and sometimes there is no way they can control their emanations. In that sense, they are a great deal more at risk under the bright lights than their more stupid colleagues. “You checking me against the record, old boy?” Sam asked.

“I’m not checking you against anything, Sam. You know how it is at times like this. Clutching at straws, listening to the wind.”

“Sure,” said Sam sympathetically and, when they had exchanged further glances of mutual confidence, once more resumed his narrative.

So Sam enquired at the Hotel Condor, he said. The porter there was a stock sub-source to the trade; everybody owned him. No Delassus staying there, but the front desk cheerfully admitted to receiving a little something for providing him with an accommodation address. The very next Monday—which happened to follow the last Friday of the month, said Sam—with the help of his contact Johnny, Sam duly hung around the bank “cashing traveller’s cheques and whatnot,” and had a grandstand view of the said Monsieur Delassus marching in, handing over his French passport, counting the money into a brief-case, and retreating with it to a waiting taxi.

Taxis, Sam explained, were rare beasts in Vientiane. Anyone who was anyone had a car and a driver, so the presumption was that Delassus didn’t want to be anyone.

“So far, so good,” Sam concluded, watching with interest while Smiley wrote.

“So far, so very good,” Smiley corrected him. Like his predecessor Control, Smiley never used pads—just single sheets of paper, one at a time, and a glass top to press on, which Fawn polished twice a day.

“Do I fit the record or do I deviate?” asked Sam.

“I’d say you were right on course, Sam,” Smiley said. “It’s the detail I’m enjoying. You know how it is with records.”

The same evening, Sam said, hugger-mugger with his linkman Mac once more, he took a long cool look at the rogues’ gallery of local Russians, and was able to identify the unlovely features of a Second Secretary (Commercial) at the Soviet Embassy, Vientiane, mid-fifties, military bearing, no previous convictions, full names given but unpronounceable, and known therefore around the diplomatic bazaars as “Commercial Boris.”

But Sam, of course, had the unpronounceable names ready in his head and spelt them out for Smiley slowly enough for him to write them down in block capitals.

“Got it?” he enquired helpfully.

“Thank you, yes.”

“Somebody left the card index on a bus, have they, old boy?” Sam asked.

“That’s right,” Smiley said, with a laugh.

When the crucial Monday came round again a month later, Sam went on, he decided he would tread wary. So instead of gumshoeing after Commercial Boris himself, he stayed home and briefed a couple of locally based leash-dogs who specialised in pavement work.

“A lace-curtain job,” said Sam. “No shaking the tree, no branch lines, no nothing. Laotian boys.”

“Our own?”

“Three years at the mast,” said Sam. “And good,” added the fieldman in him, for whom all his geese are swans.

The said leash-dogs watched the brief-case on its next journey. The taxi, a different one from the month before, took Boris on a tour of the town and after half an hour dropped him back near the main square, not far from the Indochine. Commercial Boris walked a short distance, ducked into a second bank, a local one, and paid the entire sum straight across the counter to the credit of another account.

“So tra-la,” said Sam, and lit a fresh cigarette, not bothering to conceal his amused bewilderment that Smiley was rehearsing orally a case so fully documented.

“Tra-la indeed,” Smiley murmured, writing hard.

After that, said Sam, they were home and dry. Sam lay low for a couple of weeks to let the dust settle, then put in his girl assistant to deliver the final blow. “Name?”

Sam gave it. A home-based senior girl, Sarratt trained, sharing his commercial cover. This senior girl waited ahead of Boris in the local bank, let him complete his paying-in forms, then raised a small scene.

“How did she do that, Sam?”

“Demanded to be served first,” said Sam, with a grin. “Brother Boris, being a male chauvinist pig, thought he had equal rights and objected. Words passed.”

The paying-in slip lay on the counter, said Sam, and while the senior girl did her number she read it upside down. Twenty-five thousand American dollars to the credit of the overseas account of a mickey-mouse aviation company called Indocharter Vientiane S.A.: “Assets, a handful of clapped-out DC-3s, a tin hut, a stack of fancy letter-paper, one dumb blonde for the front office, and a wildcat Mexican pilot known round town as Tiny Ricardo on account of his considerable height,” said Sam. He added, “And the usual anonymous bunch of diligent Chinese in the back room, of course.”

Smiley’s ears were so sharp at that moment that he could have heard a leaf fall; but what he heard, metaphorically, was the sound of barriers being erected, and he knew at once, from the cadence, from the tightening of the voice, from the tiny facial and physical things which make up an exaggerated show of throwaway, that he was closing on the heart of Sam’s defences.

So in his mind he put in a marker, deciding to remain with the mickey-mouse aviation company for a while.

“Ah,” he said lightly, “you mean you knew the firm already?”

Sam tossed out a small card. “Vientiane’s not exactly your giant metropolis, old boy.”

“But you knew of it? That’s the point.”

“Everybody in town knew Tiny Ricardo,” said Sam, grinning more broadly than ever, and Smiley knew at once that Sam was throwing sand in his eyes. But he played Sam along all the same.

“Tell me about Ricardo,” he suggested.

“One of the ex-Air America clowns. Vientiane was stiff with them. Fought the secret war in Laos.”

“And lost it,” Smiley said, writing again.

“Single-handed,” Sam agreed, watching Smiley put aside one sheet and take another from his drawer. “Ricardo was local legend. Flew with Captain Rocky and that crowd. Credited with a couple of joy-rides into Yunnan Province for the Cousins. When the war ended, he kicked around a bit, then took up with the Chinese. We used to call those outfits Air Opium. By the time Bill hauled me home, they were a flourishing industry.”

Still Smiley let Sam run. As long as Sam thought he was leading Smiley from the scent, he would talk the hind legs off a donkey; whereas if Sam thought Smiley was getting too close, he would put up the shutters at once.

“Fine,” he said amiably, therefore, after yet more careful writing. “Now let’s go back to what Sam did next, may we? We have the money, we know whom it’s paid to, we know who handles it. What’s your next move, Sam?”

Well, if Sam remembered rightly, he took stock for a day or two. There were angles, Sam explained, gathering confidence; there were little things that caught the eye. First, you might say, there was the strange case of Commercial Boris. Boris, as Sam had indicated, was held to be a bona-fide diplomat, if such a thing existed: no known connection with any other firm. Yet he rode around alone, had sole signing rights over a pot of money, and in Sam’s limited experience, either one of these things spelt hood on one hand.

“Not just hood, a blasted supremo. A red-toothed four-square paymaster—colonel or upwards, right?”

“What other angles, Sam?” Smiley asked, keeping Sam on the same long rein; still making no effort to go for what Sam regarded as the centre of things.

“The money wasn’t mainstream,” said Sam. “It was oddball. Mac said so. I said so. We all said so.”

Smiley’s head lifted even more slowly than before.

“Why?” he asked, looking very straight at Sam.

“The above-the-line Soviet residency in Vientiane ran three bank accounts round town. The Cousins had all three wired. They’ve had them wired for years. They knew every cent the residency drew, and even, from the account number, whether it was for intelligence-gathering or subversion. The residency had its own money-carriers, and a triple-signature system for any drawing over a thousand bucks. Christ, George, I mean it’s all in the record, you know!”

“Sam, I want you to pretend that record doesn’t exist,” said Smiley gravely, still writing. “All will be revealed to you in due season. Till then, bear with us.”

“Whatever you say,” said Sam, breathing much more easily, Smiley noticed; he seemed to feel he was on firmer ground.

It was at this point that Smiley proposed they get old Connie to come and lend an ear, and perhaps Doc di Salis, too, since South East Asia was, after all, Doc’s patch. Tactically, he was content to bide his time with Sam’s little secret; and strategically, the force of Sam’s story was already of burning interest. So Guillam was sent to whip them in while Smiley called a break and the two men stretched their legs.

“How’s trade?” Sam asked politely.

“Well, a little depressed,” Smiley admitted. “Miss it?”

“That’s Karla, is it?” said Sam, studying the photograph. Smiley’s tone became at once donnish and vague.

“Who? Ah, yes, yes it is. Not much of a likeness, I’m afraid, but the best we can do as yet.”

They might have been admiring an early water-colour.

“You’ve got some personal thing about him, haven’t you?” said Sam ruminatively.

At this point, Connie, di Salis, and Guillam filed in, led by Guillam, with little Fawn needlessly holding open the door.

With the enigma temporarily set aside therefore, the meeting became something of a war party: the hunt was up. First Smiley recapitulated for Sam, incidentally making it clear in the process that they were pretending there were no records—which was a veiled warning to the new-comers. Then Sam took up the tale where he had left off: about the angles, the little things that caught the eye; though really, he insisted, there was not a lot more to say. Once the trail led to Indocharter Vientiane S.A., it stopped dead.

“Indocharter was an overseas Chinese company,” said Sam, with a glance at Doc di Salis. “Mainly Swatownese.”

At the name “Swatownese” di Salis gave a cry, part laughter, part lament. “Oh, they’re the very worst,” he declared, meaning the most difficult to crack.

“It was an overseas Chinese outfit,” Sam repeated for the rest of them, “and the loony-bins of South East Asia are jam-packed with honest fieldmen who have tried to unravel the life-style of hot money once it entered the maw of the overseas Chinese.” Particularly, he added, of the Swatownese or Chiu Chow, who were a people apart, and controlled the rice monopolies in Thailand, Laos, and several other spots as well. Of which league, said Sam, Indocharter Vientiane S.A. was classic. His trade cover had evidently allowed him to investigate it in some depth.

“First, the société anonyme was registered in Paris,” he said. “Second, the société, on reliable information, was the property of a discreetly diversified overseas Shanghainese trading company based in Manila, which was itself owned by a Chiu Chow company registered in Bangkok, which in turn paid its dues to a totally amorphous outfit in Hong Kong called China Airsea, quoted on the local Stock Exchange, which owned everything from junk-fleets to cement factories to racehorses to restaurants. China Airsea was, by Hong Kong standards, a blue-chip trading house, long-established and in good standing,” said Sam, “and probably the only connection between Indocharter and China Airsea was that somebody’s fifth elder brother had an aunt who was at school with one of the shareholders and owed him a favour.”

Di Salis gave another swift, approving nod and, linking his awkward hands, thrust them over one crooked knee and drew it to his chin.

Smiley had closed his eyes and seemed to have dozed off. But in reality he was hearing precisely what he had expected to hear: when it came to the full staffing of the firm of Indocharter Vientiane S.A., Sam Collins trod very lightly round a certain personality.

“But I think you mentioned there were also two non-Chinese in the firm, Sam,” Smiley reminded him. “A dumb blonde, you said, and a pilot: Ricardo.”

Sam lightly brushed the objection aside. “Ricardo was a madcap March Hare,” he said. “The Chinese wouldn’t have trusted him with the stamp money. The real work was all done in the back room. If cash came in, that’s where it was handled, that’s where it was lost. Whether it was Russian cash, opium cash, or whatever.”

Di Salis, pulling frantically at one ear-lobe, was prompt to agree. “Reappearing at will in Vancouver, Amsterdam, or Hong Kong, or wherever it suited somebody’s very Chinese purpose,” he declared, and writhed in pleasure at his own perception.

Once again, thought Smiley, Sam had got himself off the hook. “Well, well,” he said. “And how did it go from there, Sam, in your authorised version?”

“London scrubbed the case.”

From the dead silence, Sam must have realised in a second that he had touched a considerable nerve. His sign language indicated as much, for he did not peer round at their faces, or register any curiosity at all. Instead, out of a sort of theatrical modesty, he studied his shiny evening shoes and his elegant dress socks, and drew thoughtfully on his brown cigarette.

“When did they do that then, Sam?” asked Smiley.

Sam gave the date.

“Go back a little. Still forgetting the record, right? How much did London know of your enquiries as you went along? Tell us that. Did you send progress reports from day to day? Did Mac?”

If the mothers next door had set a bomb off, said Guillam afterwards, nobody would have taken his eyes off Sam.

Well, said Sam easily, as if humouring Smiley’s whim, he was an old dog. His principle in the field had always been to do it first and apologise afterwards. Mac’s, too. Operate the other way round and soon you have London refusing to let you cross the street without changing your nappies first, said Sam.

“So?” said Smiley patiently.

So the first word they sent London on the case was, you might say, their last. Mac acknowledged the enquiry, reported the sum of Sam’s findings, and asked for instructions.

“And London? What did London do, Sam?”

“Sent Mac a top-priority shriek pulling us both off the case and ordering him to cable back immediately confirming I had understood and obeyed the order. For good measure, they threw in a rocket telling us not to fly solo again.”

Guillam was doodling on the sheet of paper before him: a flower, then petals, then rain falling on the flower. Connie was beaming at Sam as if it were his wedding day, and her baby eyes were brimming tears of excitement. Di Salis, as usual, was jiggling and fiddling like an old engine, but his gaze also, as much as he could fix it anywhere, was upon Sam.

“You must have been rather cross,” said Smiley.

“Not really.”

“Didn’t you have any wish to see the case through? You’d made a considerable strike.”

“I was irked, sure.”

“But you went along with London’s instruction?”

“I’m a soldier, George. We all are in the field.”

“Very laudable,” said Smiley, considering Sam once more, how he lounged smooth and charming in his dinner-jacket.

“Orders is orders,” said Sam, with a smile.

“Indeed. And when you eventually got back to London, I wonder,” Smiley went on, in a controlled, speculative way, “and you had your ‘welcome-home-well-done’ session with Bill, did you happen to mention the matter casually at all, to Bill?”

“Asked him what the hell he thought he was up to,” Sam agreed, just as leisurely.

“And what did Bill have to answer there, Sam?”

“Blamed the Cousins. Said they had got in on the act ahead of us. Said it was their case and their parish.”

“Had you any reason to believe that?”

“Sure. Ricardo.”

“You guessed he was the Cousins’ man?”

“He’d flown for them. He was on their books already. He was a natural. All they had to do was keep him in play.”

“I thought we were agreed that a man like Ricardo would have no access to the real operations of the company?”

“Wouldn’t stop them using him. Not the Cousins. Still be their case, even if Ricardo was a bummer. The hands-off pact would apply either way.”

“Let’s go back to the moment when London pulled you off the case. You received the order ‘Drop everything.’ You obeyed. But it was some while yet before you returned to London, wasn’t it? Was there an aftermath of any kind?”

“Don’t quite follow you, old boy.”

Once again, at the back of his mind, Smiley made a scrupulous record of Sam’s evasion.

“For example your friendly contact at the Banque de l’Indochine. Johnny. You kept up with him, of course?”

“Sure,” said Sam.

“And did Johnny happen to mention to you, as a matter of history, what happened to the gold seam after you’d received your hands-off telegram? Did it continue to come in month by month, just as it had before?”

“Stopped dead. Paris turned the tap off. No Indocharter, no nothing.”

“And Commercial Boris, of no previous convictions? Does he live happily ever after?”

“Went home.”

“Was he due to?”

“Done three years.”

“They usually do more.”

“Specially the hoods,” Sam agreed, smiling.

“And Ricardo, the madcap Mexican flyer whom you suspect of being the Cousins’ agent—what became of him?”

“Died,” said Sam, eyes on Smiley all the while. “Crashed up on the Thai border. The boys put it down to an overload of heroin.”

Pressed, Sam had that date too.

“Was there moaning at the bar about that, so to speak?”

“Not much. General feeling seemed to be that Vientiane would be a safer place without Ricardo emptying his pistol through the ceiling of the White Rose or Madame Lulu’s.”

“Where was that feeling expressed, Sam?”

“Oh, at Maurice’s place.”

“Maurice?”

“Constellation Hotel. Maurice is the proprietor.”

“I see. Thank you.”

Here there was a definite gap, but Smiley seemed disinclined to fill it. Watched by Sam and his three assistants and Fawn the factotum, Smiley plucked at his spectacles, tilted them, straightened them, and returned his hands to the glass-top desk. Then he took Sam all the way through the story again, rechecked dates and names and places, very laboriously in the way of trained interrogators the world over, listening by long habit for the tiny flaws and the chance discrepancies and the omissions and the changes of emphasis, and apparently not finding any. And Sam, in his sense of false security, let it all happen, watching with the same blank smile with which he watched cards slip across the baize, or the roulette wheel tease the white ball from one bay to another.

“Sam, I wonder whether you could possibly manage to stay the night with us?” Smiley said when they were once more just the two of them. “Fawn will do you a bed and so on. Do you think you could swing that with your club?”

“My dear fellow,” said Sam generously.

Then Smiley did a rather unnerving thing. Having handed Sam a bunch of magazines, he phoned for Sam’s personal dossier, all volumes, and with Sam sitting there before him he read them in silence from cover to cover.

“I see you’re a ladies’ man,” he remarked at last, as the dusk gathered at the window.

“Here and there,” Sam agreed, still smiling. “Here and there.” But the nervousness was quite apparent in his voice.

When night came, Smiley sent the mothers home and issued orders through Housekeeping Section to have archives cleared of all burrowers by eight at the latest. He gave no reason. He let them think what they wanted. Sam should lie up in the rumpus room to be on call, and Fawn should keep him company and not let him stray. Fawn took this instruction literally. Even when the hours dragged out and Sam appeared to doze, Fawn stayed folded like a cat across the threshold, but with his eyes always open.

Then the four of them cloistered themselves in Registry— Connie, di Salis, Smiley, and Guillam—and began the long, cautious paper-chase. They looked first for the operational case papers which properly should have been housed in the South East Asian cut, under the dates Sam had given them. There was no card in the index and there were no case papers either, but this was not yet significant. Haydon’s London Station had been in the habit of waylaying operational files and confining them to its own restricted archive. So they plodded across the basement, feet clapping on the brown linoleum tiles, till they came to a barred alcove like an antechapel where the remains of what was formerly London Station’s archive were laid to rest. Once again, they found no card and no papers.

“Look for the telegrams,” Smiley ordered, so they checked the signals ledgers, both incoming and outgoing, and for a moment Guillam at least was ready to suspect Sam of lying, till Connie pointed out that the relevant traffic sheets had been typed with a different typewriter: a machine, as it later turned out, that had not been acquired by housekeepers till six months after the date on the paper.

“Look for floats,” Smiley ordered.

Circus floats were duplicated copies of main serials, which

Registry ran off when case papers threatened to be in constant action. They were banked in loose-leaf folders like back numbers of magazines and indexed every six weeks. After much delving, Connie Sachs unearthed the South East Asian folder covering the six-week period immediately following Collins’s trace request. It contained no reference to a suspected Soviet gold seam and none to Indocharter Vientiane S.A.

“Try the P.F.s,” said Smiley, with a rare use of initials, which he otherwise detested. So they trailed to another corner of Registry and sorted through drawers of cards, looking first for personal files on Commercial Boris, then for Ricardo, then under aliases for Tiny, believed dead, whom Sam had apparently mentioned in his original ill-fated report to London Station. Now and then, Guillam was sent upstairs to ask Sam some small point, and found him reading Field and sipping a large Scotch, watched unflinchingly by Fawn, who occasionally varied his routine— Guillam learned later—with press-ups, first on two knuckles of each hand, then on his fingertips. In the case of Ricardo, they mapped out phonetic variations and ran them across the index also.

“Where are the organisations filed?” Smiley asked.

But of the société anonyme known as Indocharter Vientiane, the organisations index contained no card either.

“Look up the liaison material.”

Dealings with the Cousins in Haydon’s day were handled entirely through the London Station Liaison Secretariat, of which he himself for obvious reasons had personal command and which held its own file copies of all inter-service correspondence. Returning to the antechapel, they once more drew a blank. To Peter Guillam the night was taking on surreal dimensions. Smiley had become all but wordless. His plump face turned to rock. Connie in her excitement had forgotten her arthritic aches and pains and was hopping around the shelves like a teenager at the ball. Not by any means a born paper man, Guillam scrambled after her pretending to keep up with the pack, and secretly grateful for his trips up to Sam.

“We’ve got him, George, darling,” Connie kept saying under her breath. “Sure as boots we’ve got the beastly toad.”

Doc di Salis had danced away in search of Indocharter’s Chinese directors—Sam, astonishingly, had the names of two still in his head—and was wrestling with their names first in Chinese, then in Roman script, and finally in Chinese commercial code. Smiley sat in a chair reading the files on his knee like a man in a train, doughtily ignoring the passengers. Sometimes he lifted his head, but the sounds he heard were not from inside the room.

Connie, on her own initiative, had launched a search for crossreferences to files with which the case papers should theoretically have been linked. There were subject files on mercenaries, and on free-lance aviators. There were method files on Centre’s techniques for laundering agent payments, and even a treatise, which she herself had written long ago, on the subject of below-the-line paymasters responsible for Karla’s illegal networks run unbeknown to the mainstream residencies. Commercial Boris’s unpronounceable last names had not been added to the appendix. There were background files on the Banque de l’Indochine and its links with the Moscow Narodny Bank, and statistical files on the growing scale of Centre’s activities in South East Asia, and study files on the Vientiane residency itself. But the negatives only multiplied, and as they multiplied they proved the affirmative: nowhere in their whole pursuit of Haydon had they come upon such a systematic and wholesale brushing-over of the traces. It was the back-bearing of all time.

And it led inexorably East.

Only one clue that night pointed to the culprit. They came on it somewhere between dawn and morning while Guillam was dozing on his feet. Connie sniffed it out, Smiley laid it silently on the table, and three of them peered at it together under the reading-light as if it were the clue to buried treasure: a clip of destruction certificates, a dozen in all, with the authorising cryptonym scribbled in black felt-tip along the middle line, giving a pleasing effect of charcoal. The condemned files related to “top-secret correspondence with H/Annexe”; that is to say, with the Cousins’ Head of Station—then, as now, Smiley’s Brother-in-Christ Martello. The reason for destruction was the same as that which Haydon had given to Sam Collins for abandoning the field enquiries in Vientiane: “Risk of compromising delicate American operation.” The signature consigning the files to the incinerator was in Haydon’s work name.

Returning upstairs, Smiley invited Sam once more to his room. Sam had removed his bow-tie, and the stubble of his jaw against his open-necked white shirt made him a lot less smooth.

First, Smiley sent Fawn out for coffee. He let it arrive and he waited till Fawn had flitted away again before pouring two cups, black for both of them, sugar for Sam, a saccharin for Smiley on account of his weight problem. Then he settled in a soft chair at Sam’s side rather than have a desk between them, in order to affiliate himself to Sam.

“Sam, I think I ought to hear a little about the girl,” he said very softly, as if he were breaking sad news. “Was it chivalry that made you miss her out?”

Sam seemed rather amused. “Lost the files, have you, old boy?” he enquired, with the same men’s-room intimacy.

Sometimes, in order to obtain a confidence, it is necessary to impart one.

“Bill lost them,” Smiley replied gently.

Elaborately, Sam lapsed into deep thought. Curling one cardplayer’s hand, he surveyed his fingertips, lamenting their grimy state.

“That club of mine practically runs itself these days,” he reflected. “I’m getting bored with it, to be frank. Money, money. Time I had a change, made something of myself.”

Smiley understood, but he had to be firm: “I’ve no resources, Sam. I can hardly feed the mouths I’ve hired already.”

Sam sipped his black coffee ruminatively, smiling through the steam.

“Who is she, Sam? What’s it all about? No one minds how bad it is. It’s water under the bridge, I promise you.”

Standing, Sam sank his hands in his pockets, shook his head, and, rather as Jerry Westerby might have done, began meandering round the room, peering at the odd gloomy things that hung on the wall: group war photographs of dons in uniform; a framed and handwritten letter from a dead Prime Minister; Karla’s portrait again, which this time he studied from very close, on and on.

“ ‘Never throw your chips away,’ ” he remarked, so close to Karla that his breath dulled the glass. “That’s what my old mother used to tell me. ‘Never make a present of your assets. We get very few in life. Got to dole them out sparingly.’ Not as if there isn’t a game going, is it?” he enquired. With his sleeve he wiped the glass clean. “Very hungry mood prevails in this house of yours. Felt it the moment I walked in. The big table, I said to myself. Baby will eat tonight.”

Arriving at Smiley’s desk, he sat himself in the chair as if testing it for comfort. The chair swivelled as well as rocked. Sam tried both movements. “I need a search request,” he said.

“Top right,” said Smiley, and watched while Sam opened the drawer, pulled out a yellow flimsy, and laid it on the glass to write.

For a couple of minutes Sam composed in silence, pausing occasionally for artistic consideration, then writing again.

“Call me if she shows up,” he said and, with a facetious wave to Karla, took his leave.

When he had gone, Smiley took the form from the desk, sent for Guillam, and handed it to him without a word.

On the staircase Guillam paused to read the text: “Worthington Elizabeth, alias Lizzie, alias Ricardo Lizzie.” That was the top line. Then the details: “Age about twenty-seven. Nationality British. Status: married, details of husband unknown, maiden name also unknown. 1972/3 common-law wife of Ricardo Tiny, now dead. Last known place of residence: Vientiane, Laos. Last known occupation: typist-receptionist with Indocharter Vientiane S.A. Previous occupations: night-club hostess, whisky saleswoman, high-class tart.”

Performing its usual dismal rôle these days, Registry took about three minutes to regret “no trace repeat no trace of subject.” Beyond this, the Queen Bee took issue with the term “high class.” She insisted that “superior” was the proper way to describe that kind of tart.

Curiously enough, Smiley was not deterred by Sam’s reticence. He seemed happy to accept it as part and parcel of the trade. Instead, he requested copies of all source reports which Sam had originated from Vientiane or elsewhere over the last ten years odd, and which had escaped Haydon’s clever knife. And thereafter, in leisure hours, such as they were, he browsed through these and allowed his questing imagination to form pictures of Sam’s murky world.

At this hanging moment in the affair Smiley showed a quite lovely sense of tact, as all later agreed. A lesser man might have stormed round to the Cousins and asked, as a matter of the highest urgency, that Martello look out the American end of the destroyed correspondence and grant him a sight of it, but Smiley wanted nothing stirred, nothing signalled. So instead he chose his humblest emissary.

Molly Meakin was a prim, pretty graduate, a little bluestocking, perhaps, a little inward, but already with a modest name as a capable desk officer, and Old Circus by virtue of both her brother and her father. At the time of the fall, she was still a probationer, cutting her milk-teeth in Registry. After it, she was kept on as skeleton staff and promoted, if that is the word, to Vetting Section, whence no man, let alone woman, says the folklore, returns alive. But Molly possessed, perhaps by heredity, what the trade calls a natural eye. While those around her were still exchanging anecdotes about exactly where they were and what they were wearing when the news of Haydon’s arrest was broken to them, Molly was setting up an unsung channel to her opposite number at the Annexe in Grosvenor Square, one which bypassed the laborious procedures laid down by the Cousins since the fall.

Molly’s greatest ally was routine. Her visiting day was a Friday. Every Friday she drank coffee with Ed, who manned the computer; and talked classical music with Marge, who doubled for Ed; and sometimes she stayed for Old Tyme dancing or a game of shuffleboard or tenpin bowling at the Twilight Club in the basement. Friday was also the day, quite incidentally, when she took along her little shopping list of trace requests. Even if she had none outstanding, Molly was careful to invent some in order to keep the channel open, and on this particular Friday, at Smiley’s behest, Molly Meakin included the name of Tiny Ricardo in her selection. “But I don’t want him sticking out in any way, Molly,” said Smiley anxiously.

“Of course not,” said Molly.

For smoke, as she called it, Molly chose a dozen other “R”s, and when she came to Ricardo she wrote down “Richards query Rickard query Ricardo, profession teacher query aviation instructor,” so that the real Ricardo would only be thrown up as a possible identification. “Nationality Mexican query Arab,” she added; and she threw in the extra information that he might anyway be dead.

It was once more late in the evening before Molly returned to the Circus. Guillam was exhausted. Forty is a difficult age at which to stay awake, he decided. At twenty or at sixty the body knows what it’s about, but forty is an adolescence where one sleeps to grow up or to stay young. Molly was twenty-three. She came straight to Smiley’s room, sat down primly with her knees pressed tight together, and began unpacking her handbag, watched intently by Connie Sachs, and even more intently by Peter Guillam, though for different reasons.

She was sorry she’d been so long, she said severely, but Ed had insisted on taking her to a rerun of True Grit, a great favourite in the Twilight Club, and afterwards she had had to fight him off, but hadn’t wished to give offence, least of all tonight. She handed Smiley an envelope and he opened it and drew out a long buff computer card. So did she fight him off or not? Guillam wanted to ask.

“How did it play?” was Smiley’s first question.

“Quite straightforward,” she replied.

“What an extraordinary-looking script,” Smiley exclaimed next. But as he went on reading, his expression changed slowly to a rare and wolfish grin.

Connie was less restrained. By the time she had passed the card to Guillam, she was laughing outright.

“Oh, Bill!” she cried. “Oh, you wicked lovely man! Talk about pointing everybody in the wrong direction! Oh, the devil!”

In order to silence the Cousins, Haydon had reversed his original lie. Deciphered, the lengthy computer print-out told the following enchanting story.

Anxious lest the Cousins might have been duplicating the Circus’s enquiries into Indocharter Vientiane S.A., Bill Haydon, in his capacity as Head of London Station, had sent to the Annexe a pro-forma hands-off notice, under the standing bilateral agreement between the services. This advised the Americans that Indocharter Vientiane S.A. was presently under scrutiny by London and that the Circus had an agent in place. Accordingly, the Americans consented to drop any interest they might have in the case in exchange for a share of the eventual take. As an aid to the British operation, the Cousins did however mention that their link with the pilot Tiny Ricardo was extinct.

In short, as neat an example of playing both ends against the middle as anybody had met with.

“Thank you, Molly,” said Smiley politely, when everyone had had a chance to marvel. “Thank you very much indeed.”

“Not at all,” said Molly, prim as a nursemaid. “And Ricardo is definitely dead, Mr. Smiley,” she ended, and she quoted the same date of death which Sam Collins had already supplied. With that, she snapped together the clasp of her handbag, pulled her skirt over her admirable knees, and walked delicately from the room, well observed once more by Peter Guillam.

A different pace, a different mood entirely, now overtook the Circus. The frantic search for a trail, any trail, was over. They could march to a purpose, rather than gallop in all directions. The amiable distinctions between the two families largely fell away: the Bolshies and the yellow perils became a single unit under the joint direction of Connie and the Doc, even if they kept their separate skills. Joy after that, for the burrowers, came in bits, like water-holes on a long and dusty trek, and sometimes they all but fell at the wayside.

Connie took no more than a week to identify the Soviet paymaster in Vientiane who had supervised the transfer of funds to Indocharter Vientiane S.A.—the Commercial Boris. He was the former soldier Zimin, a long-standing graduate of Karla’s private training school outside Moscow. Under the previous alias of Smirnov, this Zimin was on record as having played paymaster to an East German apparat in Switzerland six years ago. Using the name Kursky, he had surfaced before that in Vienna. As a secondary skill, he offered sound-stealing and entrapment, and some said he was the same Zimin who had sprung the successful honey-trap in West Berlin against a certain French senator who later sold half his country’s secrets down the river. He had left Vientiane exactly a month after Sam’s report had hit London.

After that small triumph, Connie set herself the apparently impossible task of defining what arrangements Karla, or his paymaster Zimin, might have made to replace the interrupted gold seam. Her touchstones were several. First, the known conservatism of enormous intelligence establishments, and their attachment to proven trade routes. Second, Centre’s presumed need, since large payments were involved, to replace the old system with a new one fast. Third, Karla’s complacency, both before the fall, when he had the Circus tethered, and since the fall, when it lay gasping and toothless at his feet. Lastly, quite simply, she relied upon her own encyclopaedic grasp of the subject. Gathering together the heaps of unprocessed raw material which had lain deliberately neglected during the years of her exile, Connie’s team made huge arcs through the files, revised, conferred, drew charts and diagrams, pursued the individual handwriting of known operators, had migraines, argued, played Ping-Pong, and occasionally, with agonising caution and Smiley’s express consent, undertook timid investigations in the field. A friendly contact in the City was persuaded to visit an old acquaintance who specialised in offshore Hong Kong companies. A Cheapside currency broker opened his books to Toby Esterhase, the sharp-eyed Hungarian survivor who was all that remained of the Circus’s once glorious travelling army of couriers and pavement artists.

So it went on, at a snail’s pace; but at least the snail knew where it wanted to go. Doc di Salis, in his distant way, took the overseas Chinese path, working his passage through the arcane connections of Indocharter Vientiane S.A. and its elusive echelons of parent companies. His helpers were as uncommon as himself, either language students or elderly recycled China hands. With time they acquired a collective pallor, like inmates of the same dank seminary.

Meanwhile, Smiley himself advanced no less cautiously, if anything down yet more devious avenues, and through a greater number of doors.

Once more he sank from view. It was a time of waiting and he spent it in attending to the hundred other things that needed his urgent attention. His brief burst of team-work over, he withdrew to the inner regions of his solitary world. Whitehall saw him; so did Bloomsbury still; so did the Cousins. At other times the throne-room door stayed closed for days at a time, and only dark Fawn the factotum was permitted to flit in and out in his gym shoes, bearing steaming cups and plates of biscuits and occasional written memoranda, to or from his master.

Smiley had always loathed the telephone, and now he would take no calls whatever, unless in Guillam’s view they concerned matters of great urgency, and none did. The only instrument Smiley could not switch off controlled the direct line from Guillam’s desk, but when he was in one of his moods he went so far as to put a tea-cosy over it in an effort to quell the ring. The invariable procedure was for Guillam to say that Smiley was out, or in conference, and would return the call in an hour’s time. He then wrote out a message, handed it to Fawn, and eventually, with the initiative on his side, Smiley would ring back.

He conferred with Connie, sometimes with di Salis, sometimes with both, but Guillam was not required. The Karla file was transferred from Connie’s research section to Smiley’s personal safe for good—all seven volumes. Guillam signed for them and took them in to him, and when Smiley looked up from the desk and saw them, the quiet of recognition came over him, and he reached forward as if to receive an old friend. The door closed again, and more days passed.

“Any word?” Smiley would ask occasionally of Guillam. He meant “Has Connie rung?”

The Hong Kong residency was evacuated around this time, and, too late, Smiley was advised of the housekeepers’ elephantine efforts at repressing the High Haven story. He at once drew Craw’s dossier, and again called Connie in for consultation. A few days later, Craw himself appeared in London for a forty-eighthour visit. Guillam had heard him lecture at Sarratt and detested him.

A couple of weeks afterwards, the old man’s celebrated article finally saw the light of day. Smiley read it intently, then passed it to Guillam, and for once he actually offered an explanation for his action: Karla would know very well what the Circus was up to, he said. Back-bearings were a time-honoured pastime. However, Karla would not be human if he didn’t sleep after such a big kill.

“I want him to hear from everyone just how dead we are,” Smiley explained.

Soon this broken-wing technique was extended to other spheres, and one of Guillam’s more entertaining tasks was to make sure that Roddy Martindale was well supplied with woeful stories about the Circus’s disarray.

And still the burrowers toiled. They called it afterwards “the phoney peace.” They had the map, Connie said later, and they had the directions, but there were still mountains to be moved in spoonfuls. Waiting, Guillam took Molly Meakin to long and costly dinners, but they ended inconclusively. He played squash with her and admired her eye, he swam with her and admired her body, but she warded off closer contact with a mysterious and private smile, turning her head away and downward while she went on holding him.

Under the continued pressure of idleness, Fawn the factotum took to acting strangely. When Smiley disappeared and left him behind, he literally pined for his master’s return. Catching him by surprise in his little den one evening, Guillam was shocked to find him in a near-foetal crouch, winding a handkerchief round and round his thumb like a ligature, in order to hurt himself.

“For God’s sake, it’s nothing personal, man!” Guillam cried. “George doesn’t need you for once, that’s all. Take a few days’ leave or something. Unwind.”

But Fawn referred to Smiley as the Chief, and looked askance at those who called him George.

It was toward the end of this barren phase that a new and wonderful gadget appeared on the fifth floor. It was brought in suitcases by two crew-cut technicians and installed over three days: a green telephone destined, despite his prejudices, for Smiley’s desk and connecting him directly with the Annexe. It was routed by way of Guillam’s room, and linked to all manner of anonymous grey boxes, which hummed without warning. Its presence only deepened the general mood of nervousness. What use was a machine, they asked each other, if they had nothing to put into it?

But they had something.

Suddenly the word was out. What Connie had found she wasn’t saying, but news of the discovery ran like wildfire through the building: “Connie’s home! The burrowers are home! They’ve found the new gold seam! They’ve traced it all the way through!”

Through what? To whom? Where did it end? Connie and di Salis still kept mum. For a day and a night, they trailed in and out of the throne-room laden with files, no doubt once more in order to show Smiley their workings.

Then Smiley disappeared for three days, and Guillam only learned much later that “in order to screw down every bolt,” as he called it, he had visited both Hamburg and Amsterdam for discussions with certain eminent bankers of his acquaintance. These gentlemen spent a great while explaining to him that the war was over and they could not possibly offend against their code of ethics; and then they gave him the information he so badly needed, though it was only the final confirmation of all that the burrowers had deduced. Smiley returned, but Peter Guillam still remained shut out, and he might well have continued in this private limbo indefinitely had it not been for dinner at the Lacons’.

Guillam’s inclusion was pure chance. So was the dinner. Smiley had asked Lacon for an afternoon appointment at the Cabinet Office, and spent several hours in cahoots with Connie and di Salis preparing for it. At the last moment, Lacon was summoned by his parliamentary masters, and proposed potluck at his ugly mansion at Ascot instead. Smiley detested driving and there was no duty car. In the end, Guillam offered to chauffeur him in his draughty old Porsche, having first put a rug over him, which he was keeping in case Molly Meakin consented to a picnic.

On the drive Smiley attempted small talk, which came hard to him, but he was nervous. They arrived in rain and there was muddle on the doorstep about what to do with the unexpected underling. Smiley insisted that Guillam would make his own way and return at ten-thirty; the Lacons that he must stay, there was simply masses of food.

“It’s up to you,” said Guillam to Smiley.

“Oh, of course. No, I mean really, if it’s all right with the Lacons, naturally,” said Smiley huffily, and in they went.

So a fourth place was laid, and the over-cooked steak was cut into bits till it looked like dry stew, and a daughter was dispatched on her bicycle with a pound to fetch a second bottle of wine from the pub up the road. Mrs. Lacon was doe-like and fair and blushing, a child bride who had become a child mother. The table was too long for four. She sat Smiley and her husband one end and Guillam next to her. Having asked him whether he liked madrigals, she embarked on an endless account of a concert at her daughters’ private school. She said it was absolutely ruined by the rich foreigners they were taking in to balance the books. Half of them couldn’t sing in a Western way at all.

“I mean who wants one’s child brought up with a lot of Persians when they all have six wives apiece?” she said.

Stringing her along, Guillam strove to catch the dialogue at the other end of the table. Lacon seemed to be bowling and batting at once.

“First, you petition me,” he boomed. “You are doing that now, very properly. At this stage, you should give no more than a preliminary outline. Traditionally, Ministers like nothing that cannot be written on a postcard. Preferably a picture postcard,” he said, and took a prim sip at the vile red wine.

Mrs. Lacon, whose intolerance had a beatific innocence about it, began complaining about Jews.

“I mean they don’t even eat the same food as we do,” she said. “Penny says they get special herring things for lunch.”

Guillam again lost the thread till Lacon raised his voice in warning.

“Try to keep ‘Karla’ out of this, George. I’ve asked you before. Learn to say ‘Moscow’ instead, will you? They don’t like personalities—however dispassionate your hatred of him. Nor do I.”

“Moscow, then,” Smiley said.

“It’s not that one dislikes them,” Mrs. Lacon said. “They’re just different.”

Lacon picked up some earlier point: “When you say a large sum, how large is large?”

“We are not yet in a position to say,” Smiley replied.

“Good. More enticing. Have you no panic factor?”

Smiley didn’t follow that question any better than Guillam did.

“What alarms you most about your discovery, George? What do you fear for here, in your rôle of watch-dog?”

“The security of a British Crown Colony?” Smiley suggested after some thought.

“They’re talking about Hong Kong,” Mrs. Lacon explained to Guillam. “My uncle was Political Secretary. On Daddy’s side,” she added. “Mummy’s brothers never did anything brainy at all.”

She said Hong Kong was nice but smelly.

Lacon had become a little pink and erratic. “Colony—my

God, hear that, Val?” he called down the table, taking time off to educate her. “Richer than we are by half, I should think, and from where I sit, enviably more secure as well. A full twenty years their treaty has to run, even if the Chinese enforce it. More. At this rate, they should see us out in comfort!”

“Oliver thinks we’re doomed,” Mrs. Lacon explained to Guillam excitedly, as if she were admitting him to a family secret, and shot her husband an angelic smile.

Lacon resumed his former confiding tone, but he continued to blurt, and Guillam guessed he was showing off to his squaw. “You would also make the point to me, wouldn’t you—as background to the postcard, as it were—that a major Soviet intelligence presence in Hong Kong would be an appalling embarrassment to the Colonial government in her relations with Peking?”

“Before I went as far as that—”

“On whose magnanimity,” Lacon pursued, “she depends from hour to hour for her survival—correct?”

“It’s because of these very implications—” Smiley said.

“Oh, Penny, you’re naked!” Mrs. Lacon cried indulgently.

Providing Guillam with a glorious respite, she bounded off to calm an unruly small daughter who had appeared at the doorway. Lacon meanwhile had filled his lungs for an aria.

“We are therefore not only protecting Hong Kong from the Russians—which is bad enough, I grant you, but perhaps not quite bad enough for some of our higher-minded Ministers—we are protecting her from the wrath of Peking, which is universally held to be awful. Right, Guillam? However,” said Lacon, and to emphasise the volte-face went so far as to arrest Smiley’s arm with his long hand so that he had to put down his glass. “However,” he warned, as his erratic voice swooped and rose again, “whether our masters will swallow all that is quite another matter altogether.”

“I would not consider asking them to until I had obtained corroboration of our data,” Smiley said sharply.

“Ah, but you can’t, can you?” Lacon warned, changing hats. “You can’t go beyond domestic research. You haven’t the charter.”

“Without a reconnaissance of the information—”

“Ah, but what does that mean, George?”

“Putting in an agent.”

Lacon lifted his eyebrows and turned away his head, reminding Guillam irresistibly of Molly Meakin.

“Method is not my affair, nor are the details. Clearly you can do nothing to embarrass, since you have no money and no resources.” He poured more wine, spilling some. “Val!” he yelled. “Cloth!”

“I do have some money.”

“But not for that purpose.” The wine had stained the tablecloth. Guillam poured salt on it while Lacon lifted the cloth and shoved his napkin-ring under it to spare the polish.

A long silence followed, broken by the slow pat of wine falling on the parquet floor.

Finally Lacon said, “It is entirely up to you to define what is chargeable under your mandate.”

“May I have that in writing?”

“No, sir.”

“May I have your authority to take what steps are needed to corroborate the information?”

“No, sir.”

“But you won’t block me?”

“Since I know nothing of method, and am not required to, it is hardly my province to dictate to you.”

“But since I make a formal approach—” Smiley began.

“Val, do bring a cloth! Once you make a formal approach, I shall wash my hands of you entirely. It is the Intelligence Steering Group, not myself, who determine your scope of action. You will make your pitch. They will hear you out. From then on, it’s between you and them. I am just the midwife. Val, bring a cloth—it’s everywhere!”

“Oh, it’s my head on the block, not yours,” said Smiley, almost to himself. “You’re impartial. I know all about that.”

“Oliver’s not impartial,” said Mrs. Lacon gaily as she returned with the girl over her shoulder, brushed and wearing a nightdress. “He’s terrifically in favour of you, aren’t you, Olly?” She handed Lacon a cloth and he began mopping. “He’s become a real hawk these days. Better than the Americans. Now say good night to everyone, Penny, come on.” She was offering the child to each of them in turn. “Mr. Smiley first . . . Mr. Guillam . . . now Daddy. . . . How’s Ann, George; not off to the country again, I hope?”

“Oh, very bonny, thank you.”

“Well, make Oliver give you what you want. He’s getting terribly pompous, aren’t you, Olly?”

She danced off, chanting her own rituals to the child: “Hitty pitty without the wall . . . hitty pitty within the wall . . . and bumps goes Pottifer!”

Lacon proudly watched her go.

“Now, will you bring the Americans into it, George?” he demanded airily. “That’s a great catchpenny, you know. Wheel in the Cousins and you’d carry the committee without a shot fired. Foreign Office would eat out of your hand.”

“I would prefer to stay my decision on that, if you don’t mind.”

The green telephone, thought Guillam, might never have existed.

Lacon ruminated, twiddling his glass.

“Pity,” he pronounced finally. “Pity. No Cousins, no panic factor—” He gazed at the dumpy, unimpressive figure before him. Smiley sat, eyes closed, seemingly half asleep. “And no credibility, either,” Lacon went on, apparently as a direct comment upon Smiley’s appearance. “Defence won’t lift a finger for you, I’ll tell you that for a start. Nor will the Home Office. The Treasury’s a toss-up, and the Foreign Office—depends who they send to the meeting and what they had for breakfast.” Again he reflected. “George.”

“Yes?”

“Let me send you an advocate. Somebody who can ride point for you, draft your submission, carry it to the barricades.”

“Oh, I think I can manage, thank you!”

“Make him rest more,” Lacon advised Guillam, in a deafening whisper as they walked to the car. “And try and get him to drop those black jackets and stuff. They went out with bustles. Goodbye, George! Ring me tomorrow if you change your mind and want help. Now drive carefully, Guillam. Remember you’ve been drinking.”

As they passed through the gates, Guillam said something very rude indeed, but Smiley was too deep inside the rug to hear.

“So it’s Hong Kong, then?” Guillam said.

No answer; but no denial, either.

“And who’s the lucky fieldman?” Guillam asked a little later, with no real hope of getting an answer. “Or is that all part of foxing around with the Cousins?”

“We’re not foxing around with them at all,” Smiley retorted, stung for once. “If we cut them in, they’ll swamp us. If we don’t, we’ve no resources. It’s simply a matter of balance.”

Smiley dived back into the rug.

But the very next day, lo and behold, they were ready.

At ten, Smiley convened an operational directorate. Smiley talked, Connie talked, and di Salis fidgeted and scratched himself like a verminous court tutor in a Restoration comedy till it was his turn to speak out, in his cracked, clever voice.

The same evening still, Smiley sent his telegram to Italy: a real one, not just a signal, code word “Guardian,” copy to the fast-growing file. Smiley wrote it out, Guillam gave it to Fawn, who whisked it off triumphantly to the all-night post office at Charing Cross. From the air of ceremony with which he departed, one might have supposed that the little buff form was the highest point so far of his sheltered life. This was not so. Before the fall, Fawn had worked under Guillam as a scalp-hunter based in Brixton. By actual trade though, he was a silent killer.

5

A WALK IN THE PARK

Throughout that whole sunny week, Jerry Westerby’s leavetaking had a bustling, festive air which never once let up. If London was holding its summer late, then so, one might have thought, was Jerry. Stepmothers, vaccinations, travel touts, literary agents, and Fleet Street editors—Jerry, though he loathed London like the pest, took them all in his cheery pounding stride.

He even had a London persona to go with the buckskin boots: a suit, not Savile Row exactly, but undeniably a suit. His prison gear, as the orphan called it, was a washable, blue-faded affair, the creation of a twenty-four-hour tailor named Pontschak Happy House of Bangkok, who guaranteed it “unwrinkable” in radiant silk letters on the tag. In the mild midday breezes, it billowed as weightlessly as a frock on Brighton pier. His silk shirt from the same source had a yellowed, locker-room look recalling Wimbledon or Henley. His tan, though Tuscan, was as English as the famous cricketing tie which flew from him like a patriotic flag. Only his expression, to the very discerning, had that certain watchfulness, which also Mama Stefano, the postmistress, had noticed and which the instinct describes as “professional” and leaves at that. Sometimes, if he anticipated waiting, he carted the book-sack with him, which gave him a bumpkin air: Dick Whittington had come to town.

He was based, if anywhere, in Thurloe Square where he lodged with his stepmother, the third Lady Westerby, in a tiny frilly flat crammed with huge antiques salvaged from abandoned houses. She was a painted, hen-like woman—snappish, as old beauties sometimes are—and she would often curse him for real or imagined crimes, such as smoking her last cigarette or bringing in mud from his caged rambles in the park. Jerry took it all in good part. Sometimes, returning as late as three or four in the morning but still not sleepy, he would hammer on her door to wake her, though often she was awake already; and when she had put on her make-up, he set her on his bed in her frou-frou dressing-gown with a king-sized crème de menthe frappée in her little claw, while Jerry himself sprawled over the whole floor space, among a magic mountain of junk, getting on with what he called his packing.

The mountain was made of everything that was useless: old press cuttings, heaps of yellowed newspapers, legal deeds tied in green ribbon, and even a pair of custom-made riding boots, treed but green with mildew. In theory, Jerry was deciding what he would need of all this for his journey, but he seldom got much further than a keepsake of some kind, which set the two of them off on a chain of memories. One night, for example, he unearthed an album of his earliest stories.

“Hey, Pet, here’s a good one! Westerby really rips the mask off this one! Make your heart beat faster, does it, sport? Get the old blood stirring?”

“You should have gone into your uncle’s business,” she retorted, turning the pages with great satisfaction. The uncle in question was a gravel king, whom Pet used freely to emphasise old Sambo’s improvidence.

Another time, they found a copy of the old man’s will from years back—“I, Samuel, also known as Sambo, Westerby”— jammed in with a bunch of bills and solicitors’ correspondence addressed to Jerry, in his function as executor, all stained with whisky, or quinine, and beginning “We regret.”

“Bit of a turn-up, that one,” Jerry muttered uncomfortably when it was too late to re-bury the envelope in the mountain. “Reckon we could bung it down the old whatnot, don’t you, sport?”

Her boot-button eyes glowed furiously.

“Aloud,” she ordered, in a booming theatrical voice, and in no time they were wandering together through the insoluble complexities of trusts that endowed grandchildren, educated nephews and nieces, the income to this wife for her lifetime, the capital to so-and-so on death or marriage; codicils to reward favours, others to punish slights.

“Hey, know who that was? Dread cousin Aldred, the one who went to jug! Jesus, why’d he want to leave him money? Blow it in one night!”

And codicils to take care of the racehorses, who might otherwise come under the axe: “My horse Rosalie in Maison Laffitte, together with two thousand pounds a year for stabling . . . my horse Intruder, presently under training in Dublin, to my son Gerald for their respective lifetimes, on the understanding he will support them to their natural deaths. . . .”

Old Sambo, like Jerry, dearly loved a horse.

Also for Jerry: stock. Only for Jerry: the company’s stock in millions. A mantle, power, responsibility; a whole grand world to inherit and romp around in—a world offered, promised even, then withheld: “my son to manage all the newspapers of the group according to the style and codes of practice established in my lifetime.” Even a bastard was owned to: a sum of twenty thousands, free of duty, payable to Miss Mary Something of The Green, Chobham, the mother of my acknowledged son Adam. The only trouble was: the cupboard was bare. The figures on the account sheet wasted steadily away from the day the great man’s empire tottered into liquidation. Then changed to red and grew again into long bloodsucking insects, swelling by a nought a year.

“Ah well, Pet,” said Jerry, in the unearthly silence of early dawn, as he tossed the envelope back on the magic mountain. “Shot of him now, aren’t you, sport?” Rolling onto his side, he grabbed the pile of faded newspapers—last editions of his father’s brainchildren—and, as only old pressmen can, fumbled his way through all of them at once. “Can’t go chasing the dollybirds where he is, can he, Pet?”—a huge rustle of paper— “Wouldn’t put it past him, mind. Wouldn’t be for want of trying, I daresay.” And in a quieter voice, as he turned back to glance at the little still doll on the edge of his bed, her feet barely reaching the carpet: “You were always his tai-tai, sport, his number one. Always stuck up for you. Told me. ‘Most beautiful girl in the world, Pet is.’ Told me. Very words. Bellowed it at me across Fleet Street once. ‘Best wife I ever had.’ ”

“Damn devil,” said his stepmother, in a soft, sudden rush of pure North Country dialect, as the creases collected like a surgeon’s pins round the red scar of her lips. “Rotten devil, I hate every inch of him.” And for a while they stayed that way, neither of them speaking, Jerry lying pottering with his junk and yanking up his forelock, she sitting, joined in some kind of love for Jerry’s father.

“You should have sold ballast for your Uncle Paul,” she sighed, with the insight of a much-deceived woman.

On their last night, Jerry took her out to dinner, and afterwards, back in Thurloe Square, she served him coffee in what was left of her Sèvres service. The gesture led to disaster. Wedging his broad forefinger unthinkingly into the handle of his cup, Jerry broke it off with a faint putt which mercifully escaped her notice. By dexterous palming, he contrived to conceal the damage from her until he was able to gain the kitchen and make a swap. God’s wrath is inescapable, alas. When Jerry’s plane staged in Tashkent (he had wangled himself a concession on the trans-Siberian route), he found to his surprise that the Russian authorities had opened a bar at one end of the waiting-room—in Jerry’s view, amazing evidence of the country’s liberalization. Groping in his jacket pocket for hard currency to pay for a large vodka, he came instead on the pretty little porcelain question mark with its snapped-off edges. He forswore the vodka.

* * *

In business matters he was equally amenable, equally compliant. His literary agent was an old cricketing acquaintance, a snob of uncertain origins called Mencken, known as Ming, one of those natural fools for whom English society, and the publishing world in particular, is ever ready to make a comfortable space. Mencken—his famous name could have been his one invention—was bluff and gusty and sported a grizzled beard, perhaps in order to suggest he wrote the books he trafficked in. They lunched in Jerry’s club, a grand, grubby place which owed its survival to amalgamation with humbler clubs, and repeated appeals through the post. Huddled in the half-empty diningroom, under the marble eyes of Empire builders, they lamented Lancashire’s lack of fast bowlers. Jerry wished Kent would “hit the damn ball, Ming, not peck at it.” Middlesex, they agreed, had some good young ones coming on. But “Lord help us, look at the way they pick ’em,” said Ming, shaking his head and cutting his food all at once.

“Pity you ran out of steam,” Ming bawled to Jerry and anyone else who cared to listen. “Nobody’s brought off the Eastern novel recently, my view. Greene managed it, if you can take Greene, which I can’t—too much popery. Malraux, if you like philosophy, which I don’t. Maugham you can have, and before that it’s back to Conrad. Cheers. Mind my saying something?” Jerry filled Ming’s glass. “Go easy on the Hemingway stuff. All that grace under pressure, love with your balls shot off. They don’t like it, my view. It’s been said.”

Jerry saw Ming to his cab.

“Mind my saying something?” Mencken repeated. “Longer sentences. Moment you journalist chappies turn your hand to novels, you write too short. Short paragraphs, short sentences, short chapters. You see the stuff in column inches, ’stead of across the page. Hemingway was just the same. Always trying to write novels on the back of a matchbox. Spread yourself, my view.”

“Cheero, Ming. Thanks.”

“Cheero, Westerby. Remember me to your old father, mind. Must be getting on now, I suppose. Still, it comes to us all.”

Even with Stubbs, Jerry near enough preserved the same sunny temper; though Stubbs, as Connie Sachs would have said, was a known pig.

Pressmen, like other travelling people, make the same mess everywhere, and Stubbs, as the group’s managing editor, was no exception. His desk was littered with tea-stained proofs and inkstained cups and the remains of a ham sandwich that had died of old age. Stubbs himself sat scowling at Jerry from the middle of it all as if Jerry had come to take it away from him.

“Stubbsie. Pride of the profession,” Jerry murmured, shoving open the door, and leaned against the wall with his hands behind him as if to keep them in check.

Stubbs bit something hard and nasty on the tip of his tongue before returning to the file he was studying at the top of the muck on his desk. Stubbs made all the weary jokes about editors come true. He was a resentful man with heavy grey jowls and heavy eyelids that looked as though they had been rubbed with soot. He would stay with the daily until the ulcers got him, and then they would send him to the Sunday. Another year, he would be farmed out to the women’s magazines to take orders from children till he had served his time. Meanwhile he was devious, and listened to incoming phone calls from correspondents without telling them he was on the line.

“Saigon,” Stubbs growled, and with a chewed ballpoint marked something in a margin. His London accent was complicated by a half-hearted twang left over from the days when Canadian was the Fleet Street sound. “Christmas, three years back. Ring a bell?”

“What bell’s that, old boy?” Jerry asked, still pressed against the wall.

“A festive bell,” said Stubbs, with a hangman’s smile. “Fellow-ship and good cheer in the bureau, when the group was fool enough to maintain one out there. A Christmas party. You gave it.” He read from a file. “ ‘To Christmas luncheon, Hotel Conti-nental, Saigon.’ Then you list the guests, just the way we ask you to. Stringers, photographers, drivers, secretaries, messenger boys— what the hell do I know? Cool seventy pounds changed hands in the interest of public relations and festive cheer. Recall that?” He went straight on. “Among the guests, you have Smoothie Stallwood entered. He was there, was he? Stallwood? His usual act? Oiling up to the ugliest girls, saying the right things?”

Waiting, Stubbs nibbled again at whatever it was he had on the tip of his tongue. But Jerry propped up the wall, ready to wait all day.

“We’re a left-wing group,” said Stubbs, launching on a favourite dictum. “That means we disapprove of fox-hunting and rely for our survival on the generosity of one illiterate millionaire. Records say Stallwood ate his Christmas lunch in Phnom Penh, lashing out hospitality on dignitaries of the Cambodian government, God help him. I’ve spoken to Stallwood, and he seems to think that’s where he was. Phnom Penh.”

Jerry slouched over to the window and settled his rump against an old black radiator. Outside, not six feet from him, a grimy clock hung over the busy pavement, a present to Fleet Street from the founder. It was mid-morning, but the hands were stuck at five to six. In a doorway across the street, two men stood reading a newspaper. They wore hats, and the newspaper obscured their faces, and Jerry reflected how lovely life would be if watchers only looked like that in reality.

“Everybody screws this comic, Stubbsie,” he said thoughtfully after another longish silence. “You included. You’re talking about three bloody years ago. Stuff it, sport. That’s my advice. Pop it up the old back passage. Best place for that one.”

“It’s not a comic, it’s a rag. Comic’s a colour supplement.”

“Comic to me, sport. Always was, always will be.”

“Welcome,” Stubbs intoned, with a sigh. “Welcome to the Chairman’s choice.” He took up a printed form of contract. “Name: Westerby, Clive Gerald,” he declaimed, pretending to read from it. “Profession: aristocrat. Welcome to the son of old Sambo.” He tossed the contract on the desk. “You take the both. The Sunday and the daily. Seven-day coverage, wars to tit-shows. No tenure or pension, expenses at the meanest possible level. Laundry in the field only, and that doesn’t mean the whole week’s wash. You get a cable card but don’t use it. Just air-freight your story and wire the number of the way-bill and we’ll put it on the spike for you when it arrives. Further payment by results. The B.B.C. is also graciously pleased to take voice interviews from you at the usual derisory rates. Chairman says it’s good for prestige, whatever the hell that means. For syndication—”

“Alleluia,” said Jerry in a long outward breath.

Ambling to the desk, he took up the chewed ballpoint, still wet from Stubbs’s lick, and without a glance at its owner, or the wording of the contract, scrawled his signature in a slow zigzag along the bottom of the last page, grinning lavishly. At the same moment, as if summoned to interrupt this hallowed event, a girl in jeans unceremoniously kicked open the door and dumped a fresh sheaf of galleys on the desk. The phones rang—perhaps they had been ringing for some while—the girl departed, balancing absurdly on her enormous platform heels, an unfamiliar head poked round the door and yelled “Old man’s prayer-meeting, Stubbsie,” an underling appeared, and moments later Jerry was being marched down the chicken run: administration, foreign desk, editorial, pay, diary, sports, travel, the ghastly women’s magazines. His guide was a twenty-year-old bearded graduate, and Jerry called him “Cedric” all the way through the ritual. On the pavement Jerry paused, rocking slightly, heel to toe and back, as if he were drunk, or punch-drunk.

“Super,” he muttered, loud enough for a couple of girls to turn and stare at him as they passed. “Excellent. Marvellous. Splendid. Perfect.” With that, he dived into the nearest watering-hole, where a bunch of old hands were propping up the bar, mainly the industrial and political caucus, boasting about how they nearly had a page 5 lead.

“Westerby! It’s the Earl himself! It’s the suit! The same suit! And Early-bird’s inside it, for Christ’s sake!”

Jerry stayed till “time” was called. He drank frugally, nevertheless, for he liked to keep a clear head for his walks in the park with George Smiley.

To every closed society there is an inside and an outside, and Jerry was on the outside. To walk in the park with George Smiley, in those days; or—free of the professional jargon—to make a clandestine rendezvous with him; or, as Jerry himself might have expressed it (if he ever, which God forbid, put a name to the larger issues of his destiny), “to take a dive into his other, better life,” required him to saunter from a given point of departure, usually some rather under-populated area like the recently extinguished Covent Garden, and arrive still on foot at a given destination at a little before six. By which time, he assumed, the Circus’s depleted team of pavement artists had taken a look at his back and declared it clean. On the first evening, his destination was the embankment side of Charing Cross underground station, as it was still called that year, a busy, scrappy spot where something awkward always seems to be happening to the traffic. On the last evening, it was a multiple bus-stop on the southern pavement of Piccadilly where it borders Green Park.

There were, in all, four occasions: two in London and two at the Nursery. The Sarratt stuff was operational—the obligatory rebore in tradecraft to which fieldmen must periodically submit—and included much to be memorised, such as phone numbers, word codes, and contact procedures; such as open-code phrases for insertion into plain-language telex messages to the comic; such as fall-backs and emergency action in certain, it was hoped, remote contingencies. Like many sportsmen, Jerry had a clear, easy memory for facts, and when the inquisitors tested him they were pleased. Also they rehearsed him in the strong-arm stuff, with the result that his back bled from hitting the worn matting once too often.

The sessions in London consisted of one very simple briefing and one very short farewell.

The pick-ups were variously contrived. At Green Park, by way of a recognition signal, he carried a Fortnum & Mason carrier-bag and managed, however long the bus queue became, by a series of grins and shuffles, to remain neatly at the back of it. Hovering at the embankment, on the other hand, he clutched an out-of-date copy of Time magazine, bearing by coincidence the nourished features of Chairman Mao on the cover, of which the red lettering and border on a white field stood out strongly in the slanting sunlight. Big Ben struck six and Jerry counted the chimes, but the ethic of such meetings requires they do not happen on the hour or on the quarter, but in the vaguer spaces in between, which are held to be less conspicuous. Six o’clock was the witching hour, when the smells of every wet and leaf-blown country cricket field in England were wafted up-river with the damp shreds of dusk, and Jerry passed the time in a pleasurable halftrance, scenting them thoughtlessly and keeping his left eye, for some reason, wedged tight shut.

The van, when it lumbered up to him, was a battered green Bedford, with a ladder on the roof and “HARRIS BUILDER” painted out but still legible on the side: an old surveillance horse put out to grass, with steel flaps over the windows. Seeing it pull up, Jerry started forward at the same moment that the driver, a sour boy with a harelip, shoved his spiky head through the open window.

“Where’s Wilf, then?” the boy demanded rudely. “They said you got Wilf with you.”

“You’ll have to make do with me,” Jerry retorted with spirit. “Wilf’s on a job.” And, opening the back door, he clambered straight in and slammed it, for the passenger seat in the front cab was deliberately crammed with lengths of plywood, so that there was no room for him to sit there.

That was the only conversation they had, ever.

In the old days, when the Circus had a natural noncommissioned class, Jerry would have counted on some amiable small talk. No longer. When he went to Sarratt, the procedure was little different except that they bounced along for fifteen miles or so, and if he was lucky, the boy remembered to throw in a cushion to prevent the total rupture of Jerry’s backside. The driver’s cab was blocked off from the belly of the van where Jerry crouched, and all he had to look through, as he slid up and down the wooden bench and clutched the grab handles, were the cracks at the edges of the steel window screens, which gave at best a perforated view of the world outside, though Jerry was quick enough to read the landmarks.

On the Sarratt run, he passed depressing segments of out-ofdate factories resembling poorly whitewashed cinemas in the twenties, and a brick road-house with “WEDDING RECEPTIONS CATERED FOR” in red neon. But his feelings were at their most intense on the first evening, and on the last, when he visited the Circus. On the first evening, as he approached the fabled turrets—the moment never failed him—a sort of muddled saintliness came over him: “This is what service is all about.” A smear of red brick was followed by the blackened stems of plane trees, a salad of coloured lights came up, a gateway flung past him, and the van thudded to a stop. The van doors were slammed open from outside at the same time that he heard the gates close and a male, sergeant-major voice shout, “Come on, man, move it, for Christ’s sake,” and that was Guillam, having a bit of fun.

“Hullo, Peter boy, how’s trade? Jesus, it’s cold!”

Not bothering to reply, Peter Guillam slapped Jerry on the shoulder briskly, as if starting him on a race, closed the door fast, locked it top and bottom, pocketed the keys, and led him off at a trot down a corridor which the ferrets must have ripped apart in fury. Plaster was hacked away in clumps, exposing the lath beneath; doors had been torn from their hinges; joists and lintels were dangling; dust-sheets, ladders, rubble lay everywhere.

“Had the Irish in, have you?” Jerry yelled. “Or just an allranks dance?”

His questions were lost in the clatter. The two men climbed fast and competitively, Guillam bounding ahead and Jerry on his heels, laughing breathlessly, their feet thundering and scraping like lively animals on the bare wood steps. A door delayed them, and Jerry waited while Guillam fiddled with the locks. Then waited again the other side while he reset them.

“Welcome aboard,” said Guillam more quietly.

They had reached the fifth floor. They trod quietly now, no more romping, English subalterns called to order. The corridor turned left, then right again, then rose by a few narrow steps. A cracked fish-eye mirror, steps again, two up, three down, till they came to a janitor’s desk, unmanned. To their left lay the rumpus room, empty, with the chairs pulled into a rough ring and a good fire burning in the grate. Thus to a long, brown-carpeted room marked “Secretariat” but in fact the ante-room, where three mothers, in pearls and twin sets, quietly typed by the glow of reading-lamps. At the far end of this room, one more door, shut, unpainted, and very grubby round the handle. No finger-plate, no escutcheon for the lock. Just the screw holes, he noticed, and the halo where one had been. Pushing it open without knocking, Guillam shoved his head through the gap and announced something quietly into the room. Then he backed away and quickly ushered Jerry past him: Jerry Westerby, into the presence.

“Gosh, super, George, hullo.”

“And don’t ask him about his wife,” Guillam warned, in a fast, soft murmur that hummed in Jerry’s ear for a good spell afterwards.

Father and son? That kind of relationship? Brawn to brain? More exact, perhaps, would be a son to his adopted father, which in the trade is held to be the strongest tie of all.

“Sport,” Jerry muttered, and gave a husky laugh.

English friends have no real way of greeting each other, least of all across a glum civil-service office with nothing more lovely to inspire them than a deal desk. For a fraction of a second, Jerry laid his cricketer’s fist alongside Smiley’s soft, hesitant palm, then lumbered after him at a distance to the fireside, where two armchairs awaited them: old leather, cracked, and much sat in. Once again, in this erratic season, a fire burned in the Victorian grate, but very small by comparison with the fire in the rumpus room.

“And how was Lucca?” Smiley enquired, filling two glasses from a decanter.

“Lucca was great.”

“Oh, dear. Then I expect it was a wrench to leave.”

“Gosh, no. Super. Cheers.”

“Cheers.”

They sat down.

“Now, why super, Jerry?” Smiley enquired, as if “super” were not a word he was familiar with. There were no papers on the desk and the room was bare, more like a spare room than his own.

“I thought I was done for,” Jerry explained. “Out to grass for good. Telegram took the wind right out of my sails. I thought, Well, Bill’s blown me sky high. Blew everyone else, so why not me?”

“Yes,” Smiley said, as if sharing Jerry’s doubts, and peered at him a moment in frank speculation. “Yes, yes, quite. However, on balance it seems he never got around to blowing the Occasionals. We’ve traced him to pretty well every other corner of the archive, but the Occasionals were filed under ‘friendly contacts’ in the Territorials’ cut, in a separate archive altogether, one to which he had no natural access. It’s not that he didn’t think you important enough,” he added hastily, “it’s simply that other claims on him took priority.”

“I can live with it,” said Jerry, with a grin.

“I’m glad,” said Smiley, missing the joke. Rising, he refilled their glasses, then went to the fire and, taking up a brass poker, began stabbing thoughtfully at the coals. “Lucca. Yes. Ann and I went there. Oh, eleven, twelve years ago, it must have been. It rained.” He gave a little laugh. In a cramped bay at the farther end of the room, Jerry glimpsed a narrow, bony-looking campbed with a row of telephones at the head.

“We visited the bagno, I remember,” Smiley went on. “It was the fashionable cure. Lord alone knows what we were curing.” He attacked the fire again, and this time the flames flew alive, daubing the rounded contours of his face with strokes of orange and making gold pools of his thick spectacles. “Did you know the poet Heine had a great adventure there? A romance? I rather think it must be why we went, come to think of it. We thought some of it would rub off.”

Jerry grunted something, not too certain, at that moment, who Heine was.

“He went to the bagno, he took the waters, and while doing so he met a lady whose name alone so impressed him that he made his wife use it from then on.” The flames held him for a moment longer. “And you had an adventure there, too, didn’t you?”

“Just a flutter. Nothing to write home about.”

Beth Sanders, Jerry thought automatically as his world rocked, then righted itself. A natural, Beth was. Father a retired general, High Sheriff of the County. Old Beth must have an aunt in every secret office in Whitehall.

Stooping again, Smiley propped the poker in a corner, laboriously, as if he were laying a wreath. “We’re not necessarily in competition with affection. We simply like to know where it lies.” Jerry said nothing. Over his shoulder Smiley glanced at Jerry, and Jerry pulled a grin to please him.

“The name of Heine’s lady-love, I may tell you, was Irwin Mathilde,” Smiley resumed, and Jerry’s grin became an awkward laugh. “Yes, well, it does sound better in German, I confess. And the novel—how will that fare? I’d hate to think we’d scared away your muse. I don’t think I’d forgive myself, I’m sure.”

“No problem,” said Jerry.

“Finished?”

“Well, you know.”

For a moment there was no sound but the mothers’ typing and the rumble of traffic from the street below.

“Then we shall make it up to you when this is over,” Smiley said. “I insist. How did the Stubbs scene play?”

“No problem,” said Jerry again.

“Nothing more we need do for you to smooth your path?” “Don’t think so.”

From beyond the ante-room they heard the shuffle of footsteps all in one direction. It’s a war party, Jerry thought, a gathering of the clans.

“And you’re game, and so on?” Smiley asked. “You’re—well, prepared? You have the will?”

“No problem.” Why can’t I say something different? he asked himself. Bloody needle’s stuck.

“A lot of people haven’t these days. The will. Specially in England. A lot of people see doubt as a legitimate philosophical posture. They think of themselves in the middle, whereas, of course, really they’re nowhere. No battle was ever won by spectators, was it? We understand that in this service. We’re lucky. Our war began in nineteen seventeen, with the Bolshevik Revolution. It hasn’t changed yet.”

Smiley had taken up a new position, across the room from him, not far from the bed. Behind him an old and grainy photograph glittered in the new firelight. Jerry had noticed it as he came in. Now, in the strain of the moment, he felt himself to be the object of a double scrutiny: by Smiley, and by the blurred eyes of the portrait dancing in the firelight behind the glass. The sounds of preparation multiplied. They heard voices and snatches of laughter, the squeak of chairs.

“I read somewhere,” Smiley said, “an historian, I suppose he was—an American, anyway—he wrote of generations that are born into debtors’ prisons and spend their lives buying their way to freedom. I think ours is such a generation. Don’t you? I still feel strongly that I owe. Don’t you? I’ve always been grateful to this service, that it gave me a chance to pay. Is that how you feel? I don’t think we should be afraid of . . . devoting ourselves. Is that old-fashioned of me?”

Jerry’s face clamped tight shut. He always forgot this part of Smiley when he was away from him, and remembered it too late when he was with him. There was a bit of the failed priest in old George, and the older he grew, the more prominent it became. He seemed to assume that the whole blasted Western world shared his worries and had to be talked round to a proper way of thinking.

“In that sense, I think we may legitimately congratulate ourselves on being a trifle old-fashioned—”

Jerry had had enough. “Sport,” he expostulated, with a clumsy laugh, as the colour rose to his face. “For heaven’s sake. You point me and I’ll march. Okay? You’re the owl, not me. Tell me the shots, I’ll play them. World’s chock-a-block with milk-and-water intellectuals armed with fifteen conflicting arguments against blowing their blasted noses. We don’t need another. Okay? I mean, Christ.”

A sharp knock at the door announced the reappearance of Guillam.

“Peace pipes all lit, Chief.”

To his surprise, over the clatter of this interruption, Jerry thought he caught the term “ladies’ man,” but whether it was a reference to himself or the poet Heine, he could not say, nor did he particularly care. Smiley hesitated, frowned, then seemed to wake again to his surroundings. He glanced at Guillam, then once more at Jerry; then his eyes settled on that middle distance which is the special preserve of English academics.

“Well then, yes, let’s start winding the clock,” he said in a withdrawn voice.

As they trooped out, Jerry paused to admire the photograph on the wall, hands in pockets, grinning at it, hoping Guillam would hang back, too, which he did.

“Looks as though he’s swallowed his last sixpence,” said Jerry. “Who is he?”

“Karla,” said Guillam. “Recruited Bill Haydon. Russian hood.”

“Sounds more like a girl’s name. How you keeping?”

“It’s the code-name of his first network. There’s a school of thought that says it’s also the name of his one love.”

“Bully for him,” said Jerry carelessly and, still grinning, padded beside him toward the rumpus room. Perhaps deliberately, Smiley had gone ahead, out of earshot of their conversation. “Still with that loony girl, the flute-player, are you?” Jerry asked.

“She got less loony,” said Guillam. They took a few more paces.

“Bolted?” Jerry enquired sympathetically.

“Something like that.”

“And he’s all right, is he?” Jerry asked dead casually, nodding at the solitary figure ahead of them. “Eating well, good coat, all that stuff?”

“Never been better. Why?”

“Just asked,” said Jerry, very pleased.

From the airport, Jerry rang his daughter Cat, a thing he rarely did, but this time he had to. He knew it was a mistake before he put the money in, but he still persisted, and not even the terribly familiar voice of the early wife could put him off.

“Gosh, hullo! It’s me, actually. Super. Listen: how’s Phillie?”

Phillie was her husband, a civil servant nearly eligible for a pension, though younger than Jerry by about thirty muddled lives.

“Perfectly well, thank you,” she retorted, in the frosty tone with which old wives defend new mates. “Is that why you rang?”

“Well, I did just think I might chat up old Cat, actually. Going out East for a bit, back in harness,” he said. He felt he should apologise. “It’s just the comic needs a hack out there,” he said, and heard a clatter as the receiver hit the hall chest. Oak, he remembered. Barley-twist legs. Another of old Sambo’s left-overs.

“Daddy?”

“Hi!” he yelled, as if the line were bad, as if she had taken him by surprise. “Cat? Hullo, hey, listen, sport, did you get my postcards and stuff?” He knew she had. She had thanked him regularly in her weekly letters.

Hearing nothing but “Daddy” repeated in a questioning voice, Jerry asked jovially, “You do still collect stamps, don’t you? Only I’m going that way, you see. East.”

Planes were called, others landed, whole worlds were changing places, but Jerry Westerby, speaking to his daughter, was motionless in the procession.

“You used to be a demon for stamps,” he reminded her.

“I’m seventeen.”

“Sure, sure, what do you collect now? Don’t tell me. Boys!” With the brightest humour, he kept it going while he danced from one buckskin boot to the other, making his own jokes and supplying his own laughter. “Listen, I’m sending you some money—Blatt & Rodney are fixing it, sort of birthday and Christmas put together—better talk to Mummy before spending it. Or maybe Phillie, what? He’s a sound sort of bloke, isn’t he? Turn Phillie loose on it, kind of thing he likes to get his teeth into.” He opened the kiosk door to raise an artificial flurry. “’Fraid they’re calling my flight there, Cat,” he bellowed over the clatter. “Look, mind how you go, d’you hear? Watch yourself. Don’t give yourself too easy. Know what I mean?”

He queued for the bar awhile, but at the last moment the old Eastern hand in him woke up and he moved across to the cafeteria. It might be some time before he got his next glass of fresh cow’s milk. Standing in the queue, Jerry had a sensation of being watched. No trick to that; at an airport everyone watches everyone, so what the hell? He thought of the orphan and wished he’d had time to get himself a girl before he left, if only to take the bad taste out of his mouth.

Smiley walked, one round little man in a raincoat. Social journalists with more class than Jerry, shrewdly observing his progress through the purlieus of the Charing Cross Road, would have recognised the type at once: the mackintosh brigade personified, cannon-fodder of the mixed-sauna parlours and the naughty bookshops. These long tramps had become a habit for him; with his new-found energy he could cover half the length of London and not notice it. From Cambridge Circus, now that he knew the byways, he could take any of twenty routes and never cross the same path twice. Having selected a beginning, he would let luck and instinct guide him while his other mind plundered the remoter regions of his soul.

But this evening his journey had a pull to it, drawing him south and westward, and Smiley yielded. The air was damp and cold, hung with a harsh fog that had never seen the sun. Walking, he took his own island with him, and it was crammed with images, not people. Like an extra mantle, the white walls encased him in his thoughts. In a doorway, two murderers in leather coats were whispering; under a streetlamp, a dark-haired boy angrily clutched a violin case. Outside a theatre, a waiting crowd burned in the blaze of lights from the awning overhead, and the fog curled round them like fire smoke.

Never had Smiley gone into battle knowing so little and expecting so much. He felt lured, and he felt pursued. Yet when he tired, and drew back for a moment, and considered the logic of what he was about, it almost eluded him. He glanced back and saw the jaws of failure waiting for him. He peered forward and through his moist spectacles saw the phantoms of great hopes dancing in the mist. He blinked around him and knew there was nothing for him where he stood. Yet he advanced without the ultimate conviction.

It was no answer to rehearse the steps that had brought him to this point—the Russian gold seam, the imprint of Karla’s private army, the thoroughness of Haydon’s efforts to extinguish knowledge of them. Beyond the limits of these external reasons, Smiley perceived in himself the existence of a darker motive, infinitely more obscure, one which his rational mind continued to reject. He called it Karla, and it was true that somewhere in him, like a leftover legend, there burned the embers of hatred toward the man who had set out to destroy the temples of his private faith, whatever remained of them: the service that he loved, his friends, his country, his concept of a reasonable balance in human affairs. It was true also that a lifetime or two ago, in a sweltering Indian jail, the two men had actually faced each other, Smiley and Karla, across an iron table, though Smiley had no reason at the time to know he was in the presence of his destiny. Karla’s head was on the block in Moscow; Smiley had tried to woo him to the West, and Karla had kept silent, preferring death or worse to an easy defection. And it was true that now and then the memory of that encounter, of Karla’s unshaven face and watchful, inward eyes, came at him like a spectre out of the murk of his little room while he slept fitfully on his bunk.

But hatred was really not an emotion he could sustain for any length of time, unless it was the obverse side of love.

He was approaching the King’s Road in Chelsea. The fog was heavier because of the closeness of the river. Above him, the globes of streetlamps hung like Chinese lanterns in the bare branches of the trees. The traffic was sparse and cautious. Crossing the road, he followed the pavement till he came to Bywater Street and turned in to it: a cul-de-sac of neat flatfronted terrace cottages. He trod discreetly now, keeping to the west side, and the shadow of the parked cars. It was the cocktail hour, and in other windows he saw talking heads and shrieking, silent mouths. Some he recognised, some she even had names for: “Felix the cat,” “Lady Macbeth,” “the Puffer.”

He drew level with his own house. For their reunion, she had had the shutters painted blue and they were blue still. The curtains were open because she hated to be enclosed. She sat alone at her escritoire, and she might have composed the scene for him deliberately: the beautiful and conscientious wife, ending her day, attends to matters of administration. She was listening to music, and he caught the echo of it carried on the fog: Sibelius. Smiley wasn’t good at music, but he knew all her records and he had several times praised the Sibelius out of politeness. He couldn’t see the gramophone but he knew it lay on the floor, where it had lain for Bill Haydon when she was trailing her affair with him. He wondered whether the German dictionary lay beside it, and her anthology of German poetry. Several times, over the last decade or two, usually during reconciliations, she had made a show of learning German so that Smiley would be able to read aloud to her.

As he watched, she got up, crossed the room, paused in front of the pretty gilt mirror to adjust her hair. The notes she wrote to herself were jammed into the frame. What was it this time, he wondered. “Blast garage.” “Cancel lunch Madeleine.” “Destroy butcher.” Sometimes, when things were tense, she had sent him messages that way: “Force George to smile, apologise insincerely for lapse.” In very bad times, she wrote whole letters to him, and posted them there for his collection.

To his surprise, she had put out the light. He heard the bolts slide on the front door. Drop the chain, he thought automatically. Double-lock the Banhams. How many times do I have to tell you bolts are as weak as the screws that hold them in place? Odd, all the same; he had somehow supposed she would leave the bolts open in case he might return. Then the bedroom light went on, and he saw her body framed in silhouette in the window as, angel-like, she stretched her arms to the curtains. She drew them almost to her, stopped, and momentarily he feared she had seen him, till he remembered her short-sightedness and her refusal to wear glasses. She’s going out, he thought; she’s going to doll herself up. He saw her head half turn as if she had been addressed. He saw her lips move, and break into a puckish smile as her arms lifted again, this time to the back of her neck, and she began to unfasten the top button of her housecoat. In the same moment, the gap between the curtains was abruptly closed by other, impatient hands.

Oh, no, thought Smiley hopelessly. Please! Wait till I’ve gone!

For a minute, perhaps longer, standing on the pavement, he stared in disbelief at the blacked-out window, till anger, shame, and finally self-disgust broke in him together like a physical anguish and he turned and hurried blindly back toward the King’s Road. Who was it this time? Another beardless ballet dancer, performing some narcissistic ritual? Her vile cousin Miles, the career politician? Or a one-night Adonis spirited from the nearby pub?

* * *

When the outside telephone rang, Peter Guillam was sitting alone in the rumpus room a little drunk, languishing equally for Molly Meakin’s body and George Smiley’s return. He lifted the receiver at once and heard Fawn, out of breath and furious.

“I’ve lost him!” he shouted. “He’s bilked me!”

“Then you’re a bloody idiot,” Guillam retorted with satisfaction.

“Idiot nothing! He heads for home, right? Our usual ritual. I’m waiting for him, I stand off, he’s coming back to the main road, looks at me. Like I’m dirt. Just dirt. Next thing I know, I’m on my own. How does he do it? Where does he go? I’m his friend, aren’t I? Who the hell does he think he is? Fat little runt, I’ll kill him!”

Guillam was still laughing as he rang off.

6

THE BURNING OF FROST

In Hong Kong it was Saturday again, but the typhoons were forgotten and the day burned hot and clear and breathless. In the Hong Kong Club a serenely Christian clock struck eleven and the chimes tinkled in the panelled quiet like spoons dropped on a distant kitchen floor. The better chairs were already taken by readers of last Thursday’s Telegraph, which gave a quite dismal picture of the moral and economic miseries of their homeland.

“Pound’s in the soup again,” a crusted voice growled through a pipe. “Electricians out. Railways out. Pilots out.”

“Who’s in? More the question,” said another, just as crusted.

“If I was the Kremlin, I’d say we were doing a first-class job,” said the first speaker, barking out the final word to give it a military indignation, and with a sigh ordered up a couple of dry martinis. Neither man was above twenty-five years old, but being an exiled patriot in search of a quick fortune can age you pretty fast.

The Foreign Correspondents’ Club, by contrast, was having one of its churchy days when burghers far outnumbered newsmen. Without old Craw to hold them together, the Shanghai Bowlers had dispersed and several had left the Colony altogether. The photographers had been lured to Phnom Penh by the promise of some great new fighting now the wet season was ended. The cowboy was in Bangkok for an expected revival of student riots, Luke was at the bureau, and his boss the dwarf was slouched grumpily at the bar surrounded by sonorous British suburbanites in dark trousers and white shirts discussing the 1100 gearbox.

“But cold this time. Hear that? Muchee coldee and bring it chop chop!”

Even the Rocker was muted. He was attended this morning by his wife, a former Bible School teacher from Borneo, a driedout shrew in bobbed hair and ankle socks who could spot a sin before it was committed.

And a couple of miles eastward on Cloudview Road, a thirtycent ride on the one-price city bus—in what is said to be the most populated corner of our planet, on North Point, just where the city swells toward the Peak—on the sixteenth floor of a highrise block called 7A, Jerry Westerby was lying on a mattress after a short but dreamless sleep, singing his own words to the tune of “Miami Sunrise” and watching a beautiful girl undress.

The mattress was seven feet long, intended to be used the other way on by an entire Chinese family, and for about the first time in his life his feet didn’t hang over the end. It was longer than Pet’s cot by a mile, longer even than the bed in Tuscany, though in Tuscany it hadn’t mattered, because he had a real girl to curl round and with a girl you don’t lie so straight. Whereas the girl he was watching was framed in a window opposite his own, ten yards or miles out of reach, and on every one of the nine mornings he had woken here, she had stripped and washed herself this way, to his considerable enthusiasm, even applause. When he was lucky, he followed the whole ceremony, from the moment when she tipped her head sideways to let her black hair fall to her waist, until she chastely wound a sheet about her and rejoined her ten-strong family in the next room where they all lived. He knew the family intimately. Their washing habits. Their tastes in music, cooking, and love-making, their celebrations, their flaring, dangerous rows. The only thing he wasn’t sure of was whether she was two girls or one.

She vanished, but he went on singing. He felt eager, which was how it took him every time, whether he was about to gumshoe down a back alley in Prague to swap little packages with a terror-stricken joe in a doorway or—his finest hour, and for an Occasional unprecedented—row three miles in a blackened dinghy to scrape a radio operator off a Caspian beach. As the clamps tightened, Jerry discovered the same surprising mastery of himself, the same jollity, and the same alertness. And the same barking funk, not necessarily a contradiction. It’s today, he thought. The kissing’s over.

There were three tiny rooms and they were parquet-floored all through. That was the first thing he noted every morning, because there was no furniture anywhere, except the mattress and the kitchen chair and the table where his typewriter sat, the one dinner plate, which did duty as an ashtray, and the girlie calendar, vintage 1960, of a redhead whose charms had long since lost their bloom. He knew the type exactly: green eyes, a temper, and a skin so sensitive it looked like a battlefield every time you laid a finger on it. Add one telephone, one ancient record-player for 78s only, and two very real opium pipes suspended from business-like nails on the wall, and he had a complete inventory of the wealth and interests of Deathwish the Hun, now in Cambodia, from whom Jerry had rented the apartment. And one book-sack, his own, beside the mattress.

The gramophone had run down. He climbed happily to his feet, tightening the makeshift sarong around his stomach. As he did so, the telephone began ringing, so he sat again and, grabbing the wire, dragged the instrument toward him across the floor. It was Luke, as usual wanting to play.

“Sorry, sport. Doing a story. Try solo whist.”

Dialling the speaking clock, Jerry heard a Chinese squawk, then an English squawk, and set his watch by the second. Then he went to the gramophone and put on “Miami Sunrise” again, loud as it would go. It was the only record, but it drowned the gurgle of the useless air-conditioner. Still humming, he pulled open the one wardrobe, and from an old leather grip on the floor picked out his father’s yellowed tennis racquet, vintage 1930-odd, with “S.W.” in marking ink on the pommel. Unscrewing the handle, he fished from the recess four lozenges of subminiature film, a worm of grey wadding, and a battered subminiature camera with measuring chain, which the conservative in him preferred to the flashier models that the Sarratt smudgers had tried to press on him. He loaded a cassette into the camera, set the film speed, and took three sample light-readings of the redhead’s bosom before slopping to the kitchen in his sandals, where he lowered himself devoutly to his knees before the fridge and loosened the Free Foresters tie that held the door in place. With a wild tearing noise he passed his right thumb-nail down the rotted rubber strips, took out three eggs, and re-tied the tie. Waiting for them to boil, he lounged at the window, elbows on the sill, peering fondly through the burglar wire at his beloved roof-tops, which descended like giant stepping-stones to the sea’s edge.

The roof-tops were a civilisation for themselves, a breathtaking theatre of survival against the raging of the city. Within their barbed-wire compounds, sweat-shops turned out anoraks, religious services were held, mah-jong was played, and fortunetellers burned joss and consulted huge brown volumes. Ahead of him lay a formal garden made of smuggled earth. Below, three old women fattened chow puppies for the pot. There were schools for dancing, reading, ballet, recreation, and combat; there were schools in culture and the wonders of Mao, and this morning, while Jerry’s eggs boiled, an old man completed his long rigmarole of calisthenics before opening the tiny folding chair where he performed his daily reading of the great man’s Thoughts.

The wealthier poor, if they had no roof, built themselves giddy crow’s-nests, two feet by eight, on home-made cantilevers driven into their drawing-room floors. Deathwish maintained there were suicides all the time. That was what grabbed him about the place, he said. When he wasn’t fornicating, he liked to hang out of the window with his Nikon, hoping to catch one, but he never did. Down to the right lay the graveyard, which Deathwish said was bad luck and knocked a few dollars off the rent.

While he was eating, the phone rang again.

“What story?” said Luke.

“Wanchai whores have hijacked Big Moo,” Jerry said. “Taken him to Stonecutters Island and are holding him to ransom.”

Other than Luke, it tended to be Deathwish’s women who called, but they didn’t want Jerry instead. The shower had no curtain, so Jerry had to squat in a tiled corner, like a boxer, in order not to flood the bathroom. Returning to the bedroom, he put on his suit, grabbed a bread knife, and counted twelve wood blocks from the corner of the room. With the knife blade he dug up the thirteenth. In a hollowed recess cut into the tar-like under-surface lay one plastic bag containing a roll of American bills of large and small denominations; one escape passport, driving licence, and air-travel card in the name of Worrell, contractor; and one small-arm, which, in defiance of every Circus regulation under the sun, Jerry had procured from Deathwish, who did not care to take it on his travels. From this treasure chest he extracted five one-hundred-dollar bills and, leaving the rest untouched, replaced the wood block.

He dropped the camera and two spare cassettes into his pockets, then, whistling, stepped onto the tiny landing. His front door was guarded by a white-painted grille which would have delayed a decent burglar for ninety seconds. Jerry had picked the lock when he had nothing better to do, and that was how long it took him. He pressed the button for the lift, and it arrived full of Chinese, who all got out. It happened every time; Jerry was just too big for them, too ugly, and too foreign.

From scenes like these, thought Jerry, with willed cheerfulness as he plunged into the pitch darkness of the city-bound bus, St. George’s children go forth to save the Empire.

Time spent in preparation is never time wasted runs the Nursery’s laborious maxim on counter-surveillance.

Sometimes Jerry became Sarratt man and nothing else. By the ordinary logic of things he could have gone to his destination directly; he had every right. By the ordinary logic of things there was no reason on earth, particularly after their revelries of last night, why Jerry should not have taken a cab to the front door, barged gaily in, bearded his new-found bosom friend, and be done with it. But this was not the ordinary logic of things, and in the Sarratt folklore Jerry was approaching the operational moment of truth: the moment when the back door closed on him with a bang, after which there was no way out but forward. The moment when every one of his twenty years of tradecraft rose in him and shouted “caution.” If he was walking into a trap, this was where the trap was sprung. Even if they knew his route in advance, still the static posts would be staked out ahead of him, in cars and behind windows, and the surveillance teams locked on to him in case of fumble or branch lines. If there was ever a last opportunity to test the water before he jumped, it was now. Last night, around the haunts, he could have been watched by a hundred local angels and still not have known for certain he was their quarry. But here he could weave and count the shadows; here, in theory at least, he had a chance to know.

He glanced at his watch. Exactly twenty minutes to go, and even at Chinese rather than European pace he needed seven. So he sauntered, but never idly. In other countries, in almost any place in the world outside Hong Kong, he would have given himself far longer. Behind the Curtain, Sarratt lore said, half a day, preferably more. He’d have posted himself a letter, just so that he could walk half-way down the street, stop dead at the post-box, and double back, checking the feet that faltered and the faces that ducked away; looking for the classic formations, a two this side, a three across the road, a front tail who floats ahead of you.

But paradoxically, though this morning he zealously went through the steps, another side of him knew he was wasting his time; knew that in the East a round-eye could live all his life in the same block and never have the smallest notion of the secret tic-tac on his doorstep. At every corner of each teeming street he entered, men waited, lounged, and watched, strenuously employed in doing nothing. The beggar who suddenly stretched his arms and yawned; the crippled shoeshine boy who dived for his escaping feet and, having missed them, drove the backs of his brushes together in a crack; the old hag selling bi-racial pornography who cupped her hand and shrieked one word into the bamboo scaffolding above her: though in his mind Jerry recorded them, they were as obscure to him today as they had been when he first came East—twenty?—Lord help us, twenty-five years ago. Pimps? Numbers boys? Dope pedlars pushing the coloured twists of candy paper—“Yellow two dollar, blue five dollar? You chase dragon, like quick-shot?” Or were they ordering up a bowl of rice from the food stalls across the way? In the East, sport, survival is knowing you don’t know.

He was using the reflections in the marble facing of the shops: shelves of amber, shelves of jade, credit-card signs, electrical gadgets, and pyramids of black luggage nobody ever seemed to carry. At Cartier’s, a beautiful girl was laying pearls on a velvet tray, putting them to bed for the day. Sensing his presence, she lifted her eyes to him; and in Jerry, despite his preoccupation, the old Adam briefly stirred. But one glance at his shambler’s grin and his shabby suit and his buckskin boots told her all she needed to know: Jerry Westerby was not a potential customer. There was news of fresh battles, Jerry noticed, passing a news-stand. The Chinese-language press carried front-page photographs of decimated children, screaming mothers, and troops in American-style helmets. Whether Vietnam, or Cambodia, or Korea, or the Philippines, Jerry couldn’t tell. The red characters of the headline had the effect of splashed blood. Maybe Deathwish was in luck.

Thirsty from last night’s booze, Jerry cut through the Mandarin and plunged into the twilight of the Captain’s Bar, but he only drank water in the Gents. Back in the lobby, he bought a copy of Time but didn’t like the way the plain-clothes crushers looked at him, and left. Joining the crowds again, he sauntered toward the post office, built 1911 and since pulled down, but in those days a rare and hideous antique made beautiful by the clumsy concrete of the buildings round it; then he doubled through the arches into Pedder Street, passing under a green corrugated bridge where mailbags trailed like turkeys on the gibbet. Doubling yet again, he crossed to the Connaught Centre, using the foot-bridge to thin out the field.

In the glittering steel lobby, a peasant woman was scrubbing out the teeth of a stationary escalator with a wire brush, and on the promenade a group of Chinese students gazed in respectful silence at Henry Moore’s “Oval with Points.” Looking back, Jerry glimpsed the brown dome of the old law courts dwarfed by the Hilton’s beehive walls: Regina versus Westerby, he thought, “and the prisoner is charged with blackmail, corruption, pretended affection, and a few others we shall dream up before the day is out, my Lord.” The harbour was alive with shipping, most of it small. Beyond it, the New Territories, pocked with excavation, shoved vainly against muddy clouds of smog. At their feet, new godowns, and factory chimneys belching brown smoke.

Retracing his steps, he passed the big Scottish business houses: Jardines, Swire, old opium money washed moderately clean. Must be a holiday, he thought. Ours or theirs? In Statue Square a leisurely carnival was taking place, with fountains, beach umbrellas, Coca-Cola sellers, and about half a million Chinese who stood in groups or shuffled past him like a barefoot army, darting glances at his size. Loudspeakers, building drills, wailing music. He crossed Jackson Road and the noise level fell a little.

Ahead of him, on a patch of perfect English lawn, fifteen white-clad figures lounged. The all-day cricket match had just begun. At the receiving end, a lank, disdainful figure in an outdated cap was fiddling with his batting gloves. Pausing, Jerry watched, grinning in fond familiarity. The bowler bowled. Medium pace, bit of inswing, dead wicket. The batsman played a gracious stroke, missed, and took a leg-bye in slow motion. Jerry foresaw a long dull innings to no applause. He wondered who was playing whom, and decided it was the usual Peak mafia playing itself. On the leg boundary, across the road, rose the Bank of China, a vast and fluted cenotaph festooned with crimson slogans loving Mao. At its base, granite lions looked on sightlessly while flocks of white-shirted Chinese photographed each other against their flanks.

But the bank which Jerry had his eye on stood directly behind the bowler’s arm. A Union Jack was posted at its pinnacle, an armoured van more confidently at its base. The doors stood open and their burnished surfaces glittered like fool’s gold. While Jerry continued his shambling arc toward it, a gang of helmeted guards, escorted by tall Indians with elephant guns, emerged suddenly from the interior blackness and nursed three black money boxes down the wide steps as if they held the Host itself. The armoured van drove away, and for a sickening moment Jerry had visions of the bank’s doors closing after it.

Not logical visions. Not nervous visions, either. Merely that for a moment Jerry expected fumble with the same trained pessimism with which a gardener foresees drought or an athlete a foolish sprain on the eve of a great match; or a fieldman with twenty years on the clock foresees just one more unpredictable frustration. But the doors stayed open, and Jerry veered away to the left. Give the guards time to relax, he thought. Shepherding the money will have made them jumpy. They’ll see too sharply, they’ll remember things.

Turning, he began a slow, dreamy stroll toward the Hong Kong Club: Wedgwood porticoes, striped blinds, and a smell of stale English food at the doorway. Cover is not a lie, they tell you. Cover is what you believe. Cover is who you are. On Saturday morning Mr. Gerald Westerby, the not very distinguished journalist, heads for a favourite watering-hole. . . . On the Club steps, Jerry paused, patted his pockets, then turned full circle and struck out purposefully for his destination, making two long sides of the square as he watched for the last time for the slurring feet and turned-down glances. Mr. Gerald Westerby, discovering he is short of weekend cash, decides on a quick visit to the bank. Elephant guns slung carelessly at their shoulders, the Indian guards studied him without interest.

Except, Mr. Gerald Westerby doesn’t!

Cursing himself for being a damned fool, Jerry remembered that the time was after twelve o’clock, and that at twelve sharp the banking halls were closed. After twelve it was upstairs only, and that was the way he had planned it.

Relax, he thought. You’re thinking too much. Don’t think: do. In the beginning was the deed. Who had said that to him once? Old George, for God’s sake, quoting Goethe. Coming from him, of all people!

As he began the run-in, a wave of dismay hit him, and he knew it was fear. He was hungry. He was tired. Why had George left him alone like this? Why did he have to do everything for himself? Before the fall they’d have posted baby-sitters ahead of him—even someone inside the bank—just to watch for rain. They’d have had a reception team to skim the take almost before he left the building, and an escape car in case he had to slip away in his socks. And in London, he thought sweetly, talking himself down, they’d have had dear old Bill Haydon—wouldn’t they?— passing it all to the Russians, bless him.

Thinking this, Jerry willed upon himself an extraordinary hallucination, quick as the flash of camera, and as slow to fade. God had answered his prayers, he thought. The old days were here again, after all, and the street was alive with a grand-slam supporting cast. Behind him a blue Peugeot had pulled up and two bullish round-eyes sat in it studying a Happy Valley racecard. Radio aerial, the works. From his left, American matrons sauntered by, laden with guidebooks and a positive obligation to observe. And from the bank itself, as he advanced swiftly on its portals, a couple of solemn money-men emerged, wearing just that grim stare watchers sometimes use in order to discourage an enquiring eye.

Senility, Jerry told himself. You’re over the hill, sport, no question. Dotage and funk have brought you to your knees. He bounded up the steps, jaunty as a cock robin on a hot spring day.

The lobby was big as a railway station, the canned music as martial. The banking area was barred and he saw no one lurking, not even a phantom stand-off man. The lift was a gold cage with a spittoon filled with sand for cigarettes, but by the ninth floor the largeness of downstairs had all gone. Space was money. A narrow cream corridor led to an empty reception desk. Jerry strolled easily, marking the emergency exit and the service lift, which the bearleaders had already charted for him in case he had to do a duck-dive. Queer how they knew so much, he thought, with so few resources; must have dug out an architect’s drawing from somewhere.

On the counter, one teak sign reading “Trustee Department Enquiries.” Beside it, one grimy paperback on fortune-telling by the stars, open and much annotated. But no receptionist, because Saturdays are different. On Saturdays you get the best ride, they had said. He looked cheerfully round, nothing on his conscience. A second corridor ran the width of the building, office doors to the left, soggy vinyl-covered partitions to the right. From behind the partitions came the slow pat of an electric typewriter as someone typed a legal document, and the slow Saturday singsong of Chinese secretaries without a lot to do except wait for lunch and the free afternoon.

There were four glazed doors with penny-sized eyeholes for looking in or out. Jerry ambled down the corridor, glancing through each as if glancing were his recreation, hands in pockets, a slightly daft smile aloft. The fourth on the left, they had said, one door, one window. A clerk walked past him, then a secretary on dinky, clicking heels, but Jerry, though scruffy, was European and wore a suit, and neither challenged him.

“Morning, gang,” he muttered, and they wished him “Good day, sir,” in return.

There were iron bars at the end of the corridor and iron bars over the windows. A blue night-light was fixed to the ceiling, he supposed for security but he didn’t know: fire, space protection—he didn’t know, the bearleaders hadn’t mentioned it, and stinks and bangs were not his thing. The first room was an office, unoccupied except for a few dusty sports trophies on the window-sill and an embroidered coat of arms of the bank athletics club on the pegboard wall. He passed a pile of apple boxes marked “Trustee.” They seemed to be full of deeds and wills. The cheese-paring tradition of the old China trading houses died hard, apparently. A notice on the wall read “Private” and another “By Appointment Only.”

The second door gave on to a corridor and a small archive, which was likewise empty. The third was a “Directors Only” lavatory; the fourth had a staff notice-board mounted directly beside it and a red light bulb on the jamb and an important name-plate in Letraset saying “J. Frost, Deputy Chief Trustee, Appointments Only, Do Not Enter When Light Is On.” But the light was not on, and the penny-sized eyehole showed one man at his desk alone, and the only company he had was a heap of files, and scrolls of costly paper bound in green silk on the English legal pattern, and two closed-circuit television sets for the Stock Exchange prices, dead, and the harbour view, mandatory to the higher-executive image, sliced into pencil-grey lines by mandatory Venetian blinds. One shiny, podgy, prosperous little man in a sporty linen suit of Robin Hood green, working far too conscientiously for a Saturday. Moisture on his brow, black crescents beneath his arms, and—to Jerry’s informed eye—the leaden immobility of a man recovering very slowly from debauch.

A corner room, thought Jerry. One door only, this one. One shove and you’re away. He took a last glance up and down the empty corridor. Jerry Westerby on stage, he thought. If you can’t talk, dance. The door gave immediately. He stepped gaily inside wearing his best shy smile.

“Gosh, Frostie, hullo, super. Am I early or late? Sport—I say— most extraordinary thing back there. In the corridor—nearly fell over them—lot of apple boxes full of legal bumf. ‘Who’s Frostie’s client?’ I asked myself. ‘Cox’s Orange Pippins? Or Beauty of Bath?’ Beauty of Bath, knowing you. Thought it was rather a giggle, after last night’s high jinks round the parlours.”

All of which, feeble though it might have sounded to the astonished Frost, got him into the room with the door closed, fast, while his broad back masked the only eyehole and his soul sent prayers of gratitude to Sarratt for a soft landing, and prayers of preservation to his Maker.

A moment of theatricality followed Jerry’s entry. Frost lifted his head slowly, keeping his eyes half shut, as if the light were hurting them, which it probably was. Spotting Jerry, he winced and looked away, then looked at him again to confirm that he was flesh. Then he wiped his brow with his handkerchief.

“Christ,” he said. “It’s his nibs. What the hell are you doing here, you disgusting aristocrat?”

To which Jerry, still at the door, responded with another large grin, and a lifting of one hand in a Red Indian salute, while he marked down the worry points precisely: the two telephones, the grey box for inter-office speaking, and the wardrobe safe with a keyhole but no combination lock.

“How did they let you in? I suppose you flashed your Honourable at them. What do you mean by it, barging in here?” Not half as displeased as his words suggested, Frost had left his desk and was waddling down the room. “This isn’t a cathouse, you know. This is a respectable bank. More or less.”

Arriving at Jerry’s considerable bulk, he stuck his hands on his hips and gazed at him, shaking his head in wonder. Then patted Jerry’s arm, then prodded him in the stomach, amid more shaking of the head.

“You alcoholic, dissolute, lecherous, libidinous . . .”

“Newshound,” Jerry prompted.

Frost was not above forty, but nature had already printed on him the crueller marks of littleness, such as a floor-walker’s fussiness about the cuffs and fingers, and a moistening of his lips and pursing of them all at once. What redeemed him was a transparent sense of fun, which leapt to his damp cheeks like sunlight.

“Here,” said Jerry. “Poison yourself,” and offered him a cigarette.

“Christ,” said Frost again, and with a key from his chain opened an old-fashioned walnut cupboard, full of mirror and rows of cocktail sticks with artificial cherries, and trick tankards with pin-ups and pink elephants.

“Bloody Mary do you?”

“Bloody Mary would slip down grateful, sport,” Jerry assured him.

On the key chain, one brass Chubb key. The safe was also Chubb, a fine one, with a battered gold medallion fading into the old green paint.

“I’ll say one thing for you blue-blooded rakes,” Frost called while he poured and shook the ingredients like a chemist. “You do know the haunts. Drop you blindfold in the middle of Salisbury Plain, I reckon you’d find a cathouse in thirty seconds flat. My virgin sensitive nature took yet another grave jolt last night. Rocked to its frail little bearings, it was—say when!—I’ll take a few addresses off you sometime, when I’m healed. If I ever am, which I doubt.”

Sauntering over to Frost’s desk, Jerry riffled idly through his correspondence, then began playing with the switches of the speaking-box, patting them up and down one by one with his enormous index finger, but getting no answers. A separate button was marked “ENGAGED.” Pressing it, Jerry saw a rose gleam in the eyehole as the caution-light went on in the corridor.

“As to those girls,” Frost was saying, his back still turned to Jerry while he rattled the sauce bottle. “Wicked they were. Shocking.” Laughing delightedly, Frost advanced across the room, holding the glasses wide. “What were their names? Oh, dear, oh, dear!”

“Seven and twenty-four,” said Jerry distractedly.

He was stooping as he spoke, looking for the alarm button he knew would be somewhere on the desk.

“Seven and twenty-four!” Frost repeated rapturously. “What poetry! What a memory!”

At knee level Jerry had found a grey box screwed to the drawer pillar. The key was vertical, at the off position. He pulled it out and dropped it into his pocket.

“I said what a wonderful memory,” Frost repeated, rather puzzled.

“You know newshounds, sport,” said Jerry, straightening. “Worse than wives, us newshounds are, when it comes to memories.”

“Here. Come off there. That’s holy ground.”

Picking up Frost’s large desk diary, Jerry was studying it for the day’s engagements.

“Jesus,” he said. “It’s all go, isn’t it? Who’s N, sport? N, eight to twelve? Not your mother-in-law, is she?”

Ducking his mouth to the glass, Frost drank greedily, swallowed, then made a farce of choking, writhing, and recovering. “Keep her out of this, do you mind? You nearly gave me a heart attack. Bung-ho.”

“N for nuts? N for Napoleon? Who’s N?”

“Natalie. My secretary. Very nice. Legs go right up to its bottom, so they tell me. Never been there myself, so I don’t know. My one rule. Remind me to break it sometime. Bung-ho,” he said again.

“She in?”

“I think I heard her dulcet tread, yes. Want me to give her a buzz? I’m told she puts on a very nice turn for the upper classes.”

“No, thanks,” said Jerry and, setting down the diary, looked at Frost four square, man to man, though the fight was uneven, for Jerry was a whole head taller than Frost, and a lot broader.

“Incredible,” Frost declared reverently, still beaming at Jerry. “Incredible, that’s what it was.” His manner was devoted, even possessive. “Incredible girls, incredible company. I mean why should a bloke like me bother with a bloke like you? A mere Honourable, at that? Dukes are my level. Dukes and tarts. Let’s do it again tonight. Come on.”

Jerry laughed.

“I mean it. Scout’s honour. Let’s die of it before we’re too old. On me this time, the whole treat.” In the corridor heavy footsteps sounded, coming nearer. “Know what I’m going to do? Try me. I’m going to go back to the Meteor with you, and I’m going to call Madame Whoosit, and I’m going to insist on a— What’s eating you?” he said, catching Jerry’s expression.

The footsteps slowed, then stopped. A black shadow filled the eyehole and stayed.

“Who is he?” said Jerry quietly.

“Milky.”

“Who’s Milky?”

“Milky Way, my boss,” said Frost as the footsteps moved away.

Closing his eyes, he crossed himself devoutly. “Going home to his very lovely lady wife, the distinguished Mrs. Way, alias Moby Dick. Six foot eight and a cavalry moustache. Not him. Her.” Frost giggled.

“Why didn’t he come in?”

“Thought I had a client, I suppose,” said Frost carelessly, again puzzled by Jerry’s watchfulness, and by his quiet. “Apart from the fact that Moby Dick would kick him to death if she caught him with the smell of alcohol on his evil lips at this hour of the day. Cheer up, you’ve got me to look after you. Have the other half. You look a bit pious today. Gives me the creeps.”

When you get in there, go, the bearleaders had said. Don’t feel his bones too long; don’t let him get comfy with you.

“Hey, Frostie,” Jerry said when the footsteps had quite faded. “How’s the missis?” Frost had his hand out for Jerry’s glass. “Your missis. How’s she doing?”

“Still ailing nicely, thank you,” said Frost uncomfortably.

“Ring the hospital, did you?”

“This morning? You’re crazy. I wasn’t coherent till eleven o’clock. If then. She’d have smelt my breath.”

“When are you next visiting?”

“Look. Shut up. Shut up about her. Do you mind?”

With Frost watching him, Jerry drifted to the safe. He tried the big handle but it was locked. On the top, covered in dust, lay a heavy riot stick. Taking it in both hands, he played a couple of distracted cricket shots and put it back, while Frost’s puzzled stare followed him alertly.

“I want to open an account, Frostie,” said Jerry, still at the safe.

“You?”

“Me.”

“From all you told me last night, you haven’t the resources to open a bloody piggy bank. Not unless your distinguished dad kept a bit in the mattress, which I somehow doubt.” Frost’s world was slipping fast but he tried desperately to hold on to it. “Look, get yourself a bloody drink and stop playing Boris Karloff on a wet Wednesday, will you? Let’s go to the gee-gees. Happy Valley, here we come. I’ll buy you lunch.”

“I didn’t mean we’d open my account exactly, sport. I meant someone else’s,” Jerry explained.

In a slow, sad comedy, the fun drained out of Frost’s little face, and he muttered, “Oh, no. Oh, Jerry,” under his breath, as if he were witnessing an accident in which Jerry, not Frost, were the victim. For the second time, footsteps approached down the corridor. A girl’s, short and quick. Then a sharp knock. Then silence.

“Natalie?” said Jerry quietly. Frost nodded. “If I was a client, would you introduce me?” Frost shook his head. “Let her in.”

Frost’s tongue, like a scared pink snake, peeked out from between his lips, looked quickly round, then vanished.

“Come!” he called in a hoarse voice, and a tall Chinese girl with thick glasses collected some letters from his out-tray.

“Enjoy your weekend, Mr. Frost,” she said.

“See you Monday,” said Frost.

The door closed again.

Coming across the room, Jerry put an arm round Frost’s shoulders and guided him, unresisting, quickly to the window.

“A trust account, Frostie. Lodged in your incorruptible hands. Sharpish.”

In the square, the carnival continued. On the cricket field, somebody was out. The lank batsman in the outmoded cap had dropped into a crouch and was patiently repairing the pitch. The fieldsmen lay about and chatted.

“You set me up,” said Frost simply, trying to get used to the notion. “I thought I had a friend at last, and now you want to screw me. And you a lord.”

“Shouldn’t mingle with newshounds, Frostie. Rough bunch. No sporting instinct. Shouldn’t have shot your mouth off. Where do you keep the records?”

“Friends do shoot their mouths off,” Frost protested. “That’s what friends are for! To tell each other!”

“Then tell me.”

Frost shook his head. “I’m a Christian,” he said stupidly. “I go every Sunday, I never miss. I’m afraid it’s quite out of the question. I’d rather lose my place in society than commit a breach of confidence. It’s known of me, right? No go. Sorry about that.”

Jerry edged closer along the sill, till their arms were all but touching. The big window-pane was trembling from the traffic. The Venetian blinds were red with building smuts. Frost’s face worked pitifully as he wrestled with the news of his bereavement.

“Here’s the deal, sport,” said Jerry, very quietly. “Listen carefully. Right? It’s a stick-and-carrot job. If you don’t play, the comic will blow the whistle on you. Front-page mug shot, banner headlines, continued back page, col six, the works. ‘Would you buy a second-hand trust account from this man?’ Hong Kong the cesspit of corruption and Frostie the slavering monster: that line. We’d tell them how you play round-eye musical beds at the young bankers’ club, just the way you told it to me, and how till recently you maintained a wicked love-nest over on Kowloonside, only it went sour on you because she wanted more bread. Before they did all that, of course, they’d check the story out with your Chairman and maybe with your missis, too, if she’s well enough.”

A rainstorm of sweat had broken on Frost’s face without warning. One moment his sallow features had shown an oily moistness and that was all. The next they were drenched and the sweat was running unchecked off his plump chin and falling on his Robin Hood suit.

“It’s the booze,” he said stupidly, trying to staunch it with his handkerchief. “I always get this when I drink. Bloody climate—I shouldn’t be exposed to it. No one should. Rotting out here. I hate it.”

“That’s the bad news,” Jerry continued. They were still at the window, side by side, like two men loving the view. “The good news is five hundred U.S. into your hot little hand, compliments of Grub Street, no one any the wiser, and Frostie for Chairman. So why not sit back and enjoy it? See what I mean?”

“And may I enquire,” Frost said at last, with a disastrous shot at sarcasm, “to what end or purpose you wish to peruse this file in the first place?”

“Crime and corruption, sport. The Hong Kong connection. Grub Street names the guilty men. Account number four four two. Do you keep it here?” Jerry asked, indicating the safe.

Frost made a “No” with his lips, but no sound came out. “Both the fours, then the two. Where is it?”

“Look,” Frost muttered. His face was a hopeless mess of fear and disappointment. “Do me a favour, will you? Keep me out of it. Bribe one of my Chinese clerks, okay? That’s the proper way. I mean I’ve got a position here.”

“You know the saying, Frostie. In Hong Kong even the daisies talk. I want you. You’re here, and you’re better qualified. Is it in the strong-room?”

You have to keep it moving, they said. You have to raise the threshold all the time. Lose the initiative once and you lose it forever.

As Frost dithered, Jerry affected to lose patience. With one very large hand, he seized hold of Frost’s shoulder and spun him round, and backed him till his little shoulders were flat against the safe.

“Is it in the strong-room?”

“How should I know?”

“I’ll tell you how,” Jerry promised, and nodded hard at Frost so that his forelock flopped up and down. “I’ll tell you, sport,” he repeated, tapping Frost’s shoulder lightly with his free hand. “Because otherwise you’re forty and on the road, with a sick wife, and bambinos to feed, and school fees, and the whole catastrophe. It’s one thing or t’other, and the moment’s now. Not five minutes on, but now. I don’t care how you do it, but make it sound normal and keep Natalie out of it.”

Jerry guided him back into the middle of the room, where his desk stood, and the telephone. There are parts in life which are impossible to play with dignity. Frost’s that day was one. Lifting the receiver, he dialled a single digit.

“Natalie? Oh, you haven’t gone. Listen, I’ll be staying on for an hour yet; I’ve just had a client on the phone. Tell Syd to leave the strong-room on the key. I’ll close up when I go, right?”

He slumped into his chair.

“Straighten your hair,” said Jerry, and returned to the window while they waited.

“Crime and corruption, my arse,” Frost muttered. “All right, suppose he cuts a few corners. Name me a Chinese who doesn’t. Name me a Brit who doesn’t. Do you think that brings the Island to its feet?”

“Chinese, is he?” said Jerry very sharply.

Coming back to the desk, Jerry himself dialled Natalie’s number. No answer. Lifting Frost gently to his feet, Jerry led him to the door.

“Now, don’t go locking up,” he warned. “We’ll need to put it back before you leave.”

Frost had returned. He sat glumly at the desk, three folders before him on the blotter. Jerry poured him a vodka.

Standing at his shoulder while Frost drank it, Jerry explained how a collaboration of this sort worked. Frostie wouldn’t feel a thing, he said. All he had to do was leave everything where it lay, then step into the corridor, closing the door carefully after him. Beside the door was a staff notice-board; Frostie had no doubt observed it often. Frostie should place himself before this noticeboard and read the notices diligently, all of them, until he heard Jerry give two knocks from within, when he could return. While reading, he should take care to keep his body at such an angle as to obscure the peep-hole, so that Jerry would know he was still there, and passersby would not be able to see in. Frost could also console himself with the thought that he had betrayed no confidences, Jerry explained. The worst that Higher Authority could ever say—or the client, for that matter—was that by abandoning his room when Jerry was inside it, he had committed a technical breach of the bank’s security regulations.

“How many papers are there in the folders?”

“How should I know?” asked Frost, slightly emboldened by his unexpected innocence.

“Count ’em, will you, sport? Attaboy.”

There were fifty exactly, which was a great deal more than Jerry had bargained for. There remained the fall-back against the eventuality that Jerry, despite these precautions, might be disturbed.

“I’ll need application forms,” he said.

“What bloody application forms? I don’t keep forms,” Frost retorted. “I’ve got girls who bring me forms. No, I haven’t. They’ve gone home.”

“To open my trust account with your distinguished house, Frostie. Spread here on the table, with your hospitality goldplated fountain-pen—will you? You’re taking a break while I fill them in. And that’s the first installment,” he said. Drawing a little wad of American money from his hip pocket, he tossed it on the table with a pleasing slap. Frost eyed the money but did not pick it up.

Alone, Jerry worked fast. He disentangled the papers from the clasp and laid them out in pairs, photographing them two pages to a shot, keeping his big arms close to his body for stillness and his big feet slightly apart for balance, like a slip-catch at cricket, and the measuring chain just brushing the papers for distance. When he was not satisfied he repeated a shot. Sometimes he bracketed the exposure. Often he turned his head and glanced at the circle of Robin Hood green in the eyehole to make sure Frost was at his post and not, even now, calling in the guards armoured.

Once, Frost grew impatient and tapped on the glass, and Jerry growled at him to shut up. Occasionally he heard footsteps approach, and when that happened he left everything on the table with the money and the application forms, put the camera in his pocket, and ambled to the window to gaze at the harbour and yank at his hair, like a man contemplating the great decisions of his life. And once, which is a fiddly game when you have big fingers and you’re under stress, he changed the cassette, wishing the old camera’s action a shade more quiet.

By the time he called Frost back, the folders were once more on his desk, the money was beside the folders, and Jerry was feeling cold and just a little murderous.

“You’re a bloody fool,” Frost announced, feeding the five hundred dollars into the button-down pocket of his tunic.

“Sure,” he said. He was looking round, brushing over his traces.

“You’re out of your dirty little mind,” Frost told him. His expression was oddly resolute. “You think you can bust a man like him? You might as well try and take Fort Knox with a jemmy and a box of firecrackers as take the lid off that crowd.”

“Mr. Big himself. I like that.”

“No, you won’t, you’ll hate it.”

“Know him, do you?”

“We’re like ham and eggs,” said Frost sourly. “I’m in and out of his place every day. You know my passion for the high and mighty.”

“Who opened his account for him?” “My predecessor.”

“Been here, has he?”

“Not in my day.”

“Ever seen him?”

“Canidrome in Macao.”

“The where?”

“Macao dog races. Losing his shirt. Mixing with the common crowd. I was with my little Chinese bird—the one before last. She pointed him out to me. ‘Him?’ I said. ‘Him? Oh, yes—well, he’s a client of mine.’ Very impressed she was.” A flicker of his former self appeared in Frost’s subdued features. “I’ll tell you one thing; hewasn’t doing badly for himself. Very nice blond party he had with him. Round-eye. Film star, by the look of her. Swedish. Lot of conscientious work on the casting couch. Here—” Frost managed a ghostly smile.

“Hurry, sport. What is it?”

“Let’s make it up. Come on. We’ll go on the town. Blow my five hundred bucks. You’re not really like that, are you? It’s just something you do for your living.”

Groping in his pocket, Jerry dug out the alarm key and dropped it into Frost’s passive hand.

“You’ll need this,” he said.

On the great steps as he left stood a slender, well-dressed young man in low-cut American slacks. He was reading a seriouslooking book in the hardback edition; Jerry couldn’t see what. He had not got very far into it, but he was reading it intently, like somebody determined upon improving his mind.

Sarratt man, once more; the rest blanked out.

Heeltap, said the bearleaders. Never go there straight. If you can’t cache the take, at least queer the scent. He took taxis, but always to somewhere specific. To the Queen’s Pier, where he watched the out-island ferries loading and the brown junks skimming between the liners. To Aberdeen, where he meandered with the sightseers gawping at the boat people and the floating restaurants. To Stanley village, and along the public beach, where pale-bodied Chinese bathers, a little stooped as if the city were still weighing on their shoulders, chastely paddled with their children. Chinese never swim after the moon festival, he reminded himself automatically, but he couldn’t remember offhand when the moon festival was.

He had thought of dropping the camera at the hat-check room at the Hilton Hotel. He had thought of night safes, and posting a parcel to himself; of special messengers under journalistic cover. None worked for him—more particularly, none worked for the bearleaders. It’s a solo, they had said; it’s a do-it-yourself or nothing. So he bought something to carry: a plastic shopping bag and a couple of cotton shirts to flesh it out. When you’re hot, said the doctrine, make sure you have a distraction. Even the oldest watchers fall for it. And if they flush you and you drop it, who knows? You may even hold off the dogs long enough to get out in your socks.

He kept clear of people, all the same. He had a living terror of the chance pickpocket. In the hire garage on Kowloon-side, they had the car ready for him. He felt calm—he was coming down— but his vigilance never relaxed. He felt victorious and the rest of what he felt was of no account. Some jobs are grubby.

Driving, he watched particularly for Hondas, which in Hong Kong are the poor bloody infantry of the watching trade. Before leaving Kowloon, he made a couple of passes through sidestreets. Nothing. At Junction Road he joined the picnic convoy and continued toward Clear Water Bay for another hour, grateful for the really bad traffic; there is nothing harder than unobtrusively ringing the changes between a trio of Hondas caught in a fifteen-mile snarl-up. The rest was watching mirrors, driving, getting there—flying solo. The afternoon heat stayed fierce. He had the air-conditioning full on but couldn’t feel it. He passed acres of potted plants, Seiko signs, then quilts of paddies and plots of young peach trees growing for the new-year market.

He came to a narrow sand lane to his left and turned sharply in to it, watching his mirror. He pulled up, parked for a while with the rear lid up, pretending to let the engine cool. A pea-green Mercedes slid past him, smoked windows, one driver, one passenger in front. It had been behind him for some time. But it stuck to the main road. He crossed the road to the café, dialled a number, let the phone ring four times, and rang off. He dialled the number again; it rang six times and as the receiver was lifted he rang off again.

He drove on, lumbering through remnants of fishing villages to a lake-side where the rushes were threaded far out into the water, and doubled by their own straight reflection. Bullfrogs bellowed and light pleasure yachts switched in and out of the heat haze. The sky was dead white and reached right into the water. He got out. As he did so, an old Citroën van hobbled down the road, several Chinese aboard: Coca-Cola hats, fishing tackle, kids; but two men, no women, and the men ignored him. He made for a row of clapboard balcony houses, very run-down and fronted with concrete lattice walls like houses on an English sea front, but the paint on them paler because of the sun. Their names were done in heavy poker-work on bits of ship’s timber: “Driftwood,” “Susy May,” “Dun-romin.” There was a marina at the end of the track, but it was closed down and the yachts now harboured somewhere else.

Approaching the houses, Jerry glanced casually at the upper windows. In the second from the left stood a lurid vase of dried flowers, their stems wrapped in silver paper. All clear, it said. Pushing open the little gate, he pressed the bell. The Citroën had stopped at the lake-side. He heard the doors slam at the same time that he heard the misused electronics over the entry-phone loudspeaker.

“What bastard’s that?” a gravel voice demanded, its rich Australian tones thundering through the atmospherics, but the catch on the door was already buzzing, and when Jerry shoved it he saw the gross figure of old Craw in his kimono planted at the top of the staircase, hugely pleased, calling him “Monsignor” and “you thieving pommy dog,” and exhorting him to haul his ugly, upper-class backside up here and put a bloody drink under his belt.

* * *

The house reeked of burning joss. From the shadows of a ground-floor doorway a toothless amah grinned at him, the same strange little creature whom Luke had questioned while Craw was absent in London. The drawing-room was on the first floor, the grimy panelling strewn with curling photographs of Craw’s old pals, journalists he’d worked with for all of fifty years of crazy Oriental history. At the centre stood a table with a battered Remington where Craw was supposed to be composing his life’s memoirs. The rest of the room was sparse. Craw, like Jerry, had kids and wives left over from half a dozen existences, and after meeting the immediate needs there wasn’t much money for furniture.

The bathroom had no window.

Beside the hand-basin, a developing tank and brown bottles of fixer and developer. Also a small editor with a ground-glass screen for reading negatives. Craw switched off the light, and for numberless years in space laboured in the total darkness, grunting and cursing and appealing to the Pope. Beside him, Jerry sweated and tried to chart the old man’s actions by his swearing. Now, he guessed, Craw was feeding the narrow ribbon from the cassette onto the spool. Jerry imagined him holding it too lightly for fear of marking the emulsion. In a moment he’ll be doubting whether he’s holding it at all, thought Jerry. He’ll be having to will his fingertips into continuing the movement. He felt sick. In the darkness old Craw’s cursing grew much louder, but not loud enough to drown the scream of water birds from the lake. He’s deft, thought Jerry, reassured. He can do it in his sleep. He heard the grinding of bakelite as Craw screwed down the lid, and a muttered “Go to bed, you little heathen bastard,” then the strangely dry rattle as he cautiously shook the air bubbles out of the developer. Then the safety light went on with a snap as loud as a pistol-shot, and there was old Craw himself once more, red as a parrot from the glow, stooped over the sealed tank, quickly pouring in the hypo, then confidently overturning the tank and setting it right again while he watched the old kitchen timer stammer through the seconds.

Half stifled with nerves and heat, Jerry returned alone to the drawing-room, poured himself a beer, and slumped into a cane chair, looking nowhere while he listened to the steady running of the tap. From the window came the bubbling of Chinese voices. At the lake’s edge the two fishermen had set up their tackle. The children were watching them, sitting in the dust. From the bathroom came the scratching of the lid again, and Jerry leapt to his feet, but Craw must have heard him, for he growled “Wait” and closed the door.

Airline pilots, journalists, spies, the Sarratt doctrine warned, it’s the same drag. Bloody inertia interspersed with bouts of bloody frenzy.

He’s taking first look, thought Jerry; in case it’s fumble. In the pecking order, it was Craw, not Jerry, who had to make his peace with London. Craw who, in the worst contingency, would order him to take a second bite of Frost.

“What are you doing in there, for Christ’s sake?” Jerry yelled. “What goes on?”

Perhaps he’s having a pee, he thought absurdly.

Slowly the door opened. Craw’s gravity was awesome.

“They haven’t come out,” said Jerry.

He had the feeling of not reaching Craw at all. He was going to repeat himself, in fact, loudly. He was going to dance about and make a damn scene. So that Craw’s answer, when it finally came, came just in time.

“To the contrary, my son.” The old boy took a step forward, and Jerry could see the films now, hanging behind him like black wet worms from Craw’s little clothes-line, pink pegs holding them in place. “To the contrary, sir,” he said, “every frame is a bold and disturbing masterpiece.”

7

MORE ABOUT HORSES

In the Circus, the first scraps of news on Jerry’s progress arrived in the early morning, in a deadly quiet, and thereafter set the weekend upside down. Knowing what to expect, Guillam had taken himself to bed at ten and slumbered fitfully between bouts of anxiety for Jerry, and frankly lustful visions of Molly Meakin with and without her sedate swimming-suit. Jerry was due to present himself to Frost just after 4 a.m. London time, and by three-thirty Guillam was clattering in his old Porsche through the foggy streets toward Cambridge Circus. It could have been dawn or dusk. He arrived at the rumpus room to find Connie completing the Times crossword and Doc di Salis reading the meditations of Thomas Traherne, plucking his ear, and jiggling his foot all at the same time, like a one-man percussion band. Restless as ever, Fawn flitted between them, dusting and tidying, a headwaiter impatient for the next sitting. Now and then he sucked his teeth and let out a breathy “tah,” in barely controlled frustration. A pall of tobacco smoke hung like a rain cloud across the room and there was the usual stink of rank tea from the samovar.

Smiley’s door was closed and Guillam saw no cause to disturb him. He opened a copy of Country Life. Like waiting at the bloody dentist, he thought, and sat staring mindlessly at photographs of great houses till Connie softly put down her crossword, sat bolt upright, and said “Listen.” Then he heard a quick snarl from the Cousins’ green telephone before Smiley picked it up. Through the open doorway to his own room Guillam glanced at the row of electronic boxes. On one, a green caution-light burned for as long as the conversation lasted. Then the pax rang in the rumpus room—“pax” being jargon for internal phone—and this time Guillam reached it before Fawn.

“He’s entered the bank,” Smiley announced cryptically. Guillam relayed the message to the gathering. “He’s gone into the bank,” he said, but he might have been talking to the dead: nobody gave the slightest sign of hearing.

By five, Jerry had come out of the bank. Nervously contemplating the options, Guillam felt physically sick. Burning was a dangerous game, and like most pros Guillam hated it, though not for reasons of scruple. First there was the quarry or, worse, the local security angels. Second there was the burn itself, and not everybody responded logically to blackmail. You got heroes, you got liars, you got hysterical virgins who put their heads back and screamed blue murder even if they were enjoying it. But the real danger came now, when the burn was over and Jerry had to turn his back on the smoking bomb and run. Which way would Frost jump? Would he telephone the police? His mother? His boss? His wife? “Darling, I’ll confess all. Save me and we’ll turn over a new leaf.” Guillam did not even rule out the ghastly possibility that Frost might go directly to his client. “Sir, I have come to purge myself of a gross breach of bank confidence.”

In the fusty eeriness of early morning Guillam shuddered, and fixed his mind resolutely on Molly.

On the next occasion the green phone sounded, Guillam didn’t hear it. George must have been sitting right over the thing; suddenly the pin-light in Guillam’s room was glowing, and it continued glowing for fifteen minutes. It went out and they waited, all eyes fixed on Smiley’s door, willing him from his seclusion. Fawn was frozen in mid-movement, holding a plate of brown marmalade sandwiches, which nobody would ever eat.

Then the handle tipped and Smiley appeared with a common-or-garden search-request form in his hand, already completed in his own neat script and flagged “Stripe,” which meant “Urgent for Chief ” and was the top priority. He gave it to Guillam and asked him to take it straight to the Queen Bee in Registry and stand over her while she looked up the name. Receiving it, Guillam recalled an earlier moment when he had been presented with a similar form, made out in the name of Worthington Elizabeth, alias Lizzie, and ending “high-class tart.” And as he departed, he heard Smiley quietly inviting Connie and di Salis to accompany him to the throne-room, while Fawn was packed off to the unclassified library in search of the current edition of Who’s Who in Hong Kong.

The Queen Bee had been specially summoned for the dawn shift, and when Guillam walked in on her, her lair looked like a tableau of “The Night London Burned,” complete with an iron bunk and a small primus stove, though there was a coffee machine in the corridor. All she needs is a boiler suit and a portrait of Winston Churchill, he thought. The details on the trace read “Ko forename Drake other names unknown, date of birth 1925 Shanghai, present address Seven Gates, Headland Road, Hong Kong, occupation Chairman and Managing Director of China Airsea Ltd., Hong Kong.” The Queen Bee launched herself on an impressive paper-chase, but all she finally came up with was the information that Ko had been appointed to the Order of the British Empire under the Hong Kong list in 1966 for “social and charitable services to the Colony,” and that the Circus had responded “Nothing recorded against” to a vetting enquiry from the Governor’s office before the award was passed up for approval.

Hurrying upstairs with this glad intelligence, Guillam was awake enough to remember that China Airsea Ltd., Hong Kong, had been described by Sam Collins as the ultimate owner of that mickey-mouse airline in Vientiane, which had been the beneficiary of Commercial Boris’s bounty. This struck Guillam as a most orderly connection. Pleased with himself, he returned to the throne-room to be greeted by funereal silence. Strewn over the floor lay not just the current edition of Who’s Who but several back numbers as well; Fawn, as usual, had overreached himself. Smiley sat at his desk and he was staring at a sheet of notes in his own handwriting, Connie and di Salis were staring at Smiley, but Fawn was absent again, presumably on another errand. Guillam handed Smiley the trace form with the Queen Bee’s findings written along the middle in her best Kensington copperplate. At the same moment, the green phone crackled again. Lifting the receiver, Smiley began jotting on the sheet before him.

“Yes. Thanks, I have that. Go on, please. Yes, I have that also.” And so on for ten minutes, till he said, “Good. Till this evening, then,” and rang off.

Outside in the street, an Irish milkman was enthusiastically proclaiming that he never would be the wild rover no more.

“Westerby’s landed the complete file,” Smiley said finally— though, like everyone else, he referred to him by his cryptonym. “All the figures.” He nodded as if agreeing with himself, still studying the paper. “The film won’t be here till tonight but the shape is already clear. Everything that was originally paid through Vientiane has found its way to the account in Hong Kong. Right from the very beginning. Hong Kong was the final destination of the gold seam. All of it. Down to the last cent. No deductions, not even for bank commission. It was at first a humble figure, then rose steeply—why, we may only guess. All as Collins described. Till it stopped at twenty-five thousand a month and stayed there. When the Vientiane arrangement ended, Centre didn’t miss a single month. They switched to the alternative route immediately. You’re right, Con. Karla never does anything without a fall-back.”

“He’s a professional, darling,” Connie Sachs murmured. “Like you.”

“Not like me.” He continued studying his jottings. “It’s a lockaway account,” he declared, in the same matter-of-fact tone. “Only one name is given and that’s the founder of the trust. Ko. ‘Beneficiary unknown,’ they say. Perhaps we shall see why tonight. Not a penny has been drawn,” he said, singling out Connie Sachs. He repeated that: “Since the payments started over two years ago, not a single penny has been drawn from the account. The balance stands in the order of half a million American dollars. With compound interest, it’s naturally rising fast.”

To Guillam, this last piece of intelligence was daylight madness. What the hell was the point to a million-dollar gold seam if the money was not even used when it reached the other end? To Connie Sachs and di Salis, on the other hand, it was patently of enormous significance. A crocodile smile spread slowly across Connie’s face and her baby eyes fixed on Smiley in silent ecstasy.

“Oh, George,” she breathed at last, as the revelation gathered in her. “Darling. Lock-away! Well, that’s quite a different kettle of fish. Well, of course it had to be, didn’t it! It had all the signs. From the very first day. And if fat, stupid Connie hadn’t been so blinkered and old and doddery and idle, she’d have read them off long ago! You leave me alone, Peter Guillam, you lecherous young toad.” She was pulling herself to her feet, her crippled hands clamped over the chair arms. “But who can be worth so much? Would it be a network? No, no, they’d never do it for a network. No precedent. Not a wholesale thing, that’s unheard of. So who can it be? Whatever can he deliver that would be worth so much?” She was hobbling toward the door, tugging the shawl over her shoulders, slipping already from their world to her own. “Karladoesn’t pay out money like that.” They heard her mutterings follow her. She passed the mothers’ lane of covered typewriters, muffled sentinels in the gloom. “Karla’s such a mean prig he thinks his agents should work for him for nothing! ’Course he does. Pennies, that’s what he pays them. Pocket-money. Inflation is all very well, but half a million dollars for one little mole—I never heard such a thing!”

In his quirkish way, di Salis was no less impressed than Connie. He sat with the top part of his crabbed, uneven body tilted forward, and he was stirring feverishly in the bowl of his pipe with a silver knife as if it were a cook pot which had caught on the flame. His silver hair stood wry as a cockscomb over the dandruffed collar of his crumpled black jacket.

“Well, well, no wonder Karla wanted the bodies buried,” he blurted suddenly, as if the words had been jerked out of him. “No wonder. Karla’s a China hand, too, you know. It’s attested. I have it from Connie.” He clambered to his feet, holding too many things in his hands: pipe, tobacco tin, his penknife, and his Thomas Traherne. “Not sophisticated, naturally. Well, one doesn’t expect that. Karla’s no scholar, he’s a soldier. But not blind, either—not by a long chalk, she tells me. Ko.” He repeated the name at several different levels: “Ko. Ko. I must see the character. It depends entirely on the character. Height . . . Tree even, yes I can see tree . . . or can I? . . . oh, and several other concepts. ‘Drake’ is mission school, of course. Shanghainese mission boy. Well, well. Shanghai was where it all started, you know. First party cell ever was in Shanghai. Why did I say that? Drake Ko. Wonder what his real names are. We shall find that all out very shortly, no doubt. Yes, good. Well, I think I might go back to my reading, too. Smiley, do you think I might have a coal-scuttle in my room? Without the heating on, one simply freezes up. I’ve asked the housekeepers a dozen times and had nothing but impertinence for my pains. Anno Domini, I’m afraid, but the winter is almost upon us, I suppose. You’ll show us the raw material as soon as it arrives, I trust? One doesn’t like to work too long on potted versions. I shall make a curriculum vitae. That will be my first thing. Ko. Ah, thank you, Guillam.”

He had dropped his Thomas Traherne. Accepting it, he dropped his tobacco tin, so Guillam picked that up as well. “Drake Ko. Shanghainese doesn’t mean a thing, of course. Shanghai was the real melting-pot. Chiu Chow’s the answer, judging by what we know. Still, mustn’t jump the gun. Baptist. Well, the Chiu Chow Christians mostly are, aren’t they? Swatownese: where did we have that? Yes, the intermediate company in Bangkok. Well, that figures well enough. Or Hakka. They’re not mutually exclusive, not by any means.” He stalked after Connie into the corridor, leaving Guillam alone with Smiley, who rose and, going to an armchair, slumped into it staring sightlessly at the fire.

“Odd,” he remarked finally. “One has no sense of shock. Why is that, Peter? You know me. Why is it?”

Guillam had the wisdom to keep quiet.

“A big fish. In Karla’s pay. Lock-away accounts, the threat of

Russian spies at the very centre of the Colony’s life. So why no sense of shock?”

The green telephone was barking again; this time Guillam took the call. As he did so, he was surprised to see a fresh folder of Sam Collins’s Far Eastern reports lying open on the desk.

That was the weekend. Connie and di Salis sank without trace; Smiley set to work preparing his submission; Guillam smoothed feathers, called in the mothers, and arranged for typing in shifts. On the Monday, carefully briefed by Smiley, he telephoned Lacon’s private secretary. He did it very well. “No drum-beats,” Smiley had warned. “Keep it very idle.” And Guillam did just that. There had been talk over dinner the other evening—he said—of a prima-facie case for convening the Intelligence Steering Group.

“The case has firmed up a little, so perhaps it would be sensible to fix a date. Give us the batting order and we’ll circulate the document in advance.”

“A batting order? Firmed up? Where ever do you people learn your English?”

Lacon’s private secretary was a fat voice called Pym. Guillam had never met him, but he loathed him quite unreasonably.

“I can only tell him,” Pym warned. “I can tell him and I can see what he says and I can ring you back. His card is very heavily marked this month.”

“It’s just one little waltz, if he can manage it,” said Guillam, and rang off in a fury.

You bloody well wait and see what hits you, he thought.

* * *

When London is having its baby, the folklore says, the fieldman can only pace the waiting-room. Airline pilots, newshounds, spies—Jerry was back with the bloody inertia.

“We’re in moth-balls,” Craw announced. “The word is well done and hold your water.”

They talked every two days at least, limbo calls between two third-party telephones, usually one hotel lobby to another. They disguised their language with a mix of Sarratt word code and journalistic mumbo-jumbo.

“Your story is being checked out on high,” Craw said. “When our editors have wisdom, they will impart it in due season. Meanwhile, slap your hand over it and keep it there. That’s an order.”

Jerry had no idea how Craw talked to London and he didn’t care as long as it was safe. He assumed some co-opted official from the huge, untouchable above-the-line intelligence fraternity was playing linkman; but he didn’t care.

“Your job is to put in mileage for the comic and tuck some spare copy under your belt, which you can wave at Brother Stubbs when the next crisis comes,” Craw said to him. “Nothing else, hear me?”

Drawing on his jaunts with Frost, Jerry bashed out a piece on the effect of the American military pull-out upon the night-life of Wanchai: “What’s happened to Susie Wong since war-weary G.I.s with bulging wallets have ceased to flock in for rest and recreation?” He fabricated a “dawn interview” with a disconsolate and fictitious bar-girl who was reduced to accepting Japanese customers, air-freighted his piece, and got Luke’s bureau to wire through the number of the way-bill, all as Stubbs had ordered.

Jerry was by no means a bad reporter, but just as pressure brought out the best in him, sloth brought out the worst. Astonished by Stubb’s prompt and even gracious acceptance (a “herogram,” Luke called it, phoning through the text from the bureau), he cast around for other heights to scale. A couple of sensational corruption trials were attracting good houses, starring the usual crop of misunderstood policemen, but after taking a look at them, Jerry concluded they hadn’t the scale to travel. England had her own these days. A “please-matcher” ordered him to chase a story floated by a rival comic about the alleged pregnancy of Miss Hong Kong, but a libel suit got there ahead of him.

He attended an arid government press briefing by Shallow Throat, himself a humourless reject from a Northern Irish daily; idled away a morning researching successful stories from the past that might stand re-heating; and, on the strength of a rumour about army economy cuts, spent an afternoon being trailed round the Gurkha garrison by a public-relations major who looked about eighteen. And no, the major didn’t know, thank you, in reply to Jerry’s cheerful enquiry, what his men would do for sex when their families were sent home to Nepal. They would be visiting their villages about once every three years, he thought; and he seemed to think that was quite enough for anyone. Stretching the facts till they read as if the Gurkhas were already a community of military grass widowers (“COLD SHOWERS IN A HOT CLIMATE FOR BRITAIN’S MERCENARIES”), Jerry triumphantly landed himself an inside lead. He banked a couple more stories for a rainy day, lounged away the evenings at the Club, and inwardly gnawed his head off while he waited for the Circus to produce its baby.

“For Christ’s sake,” he protested to Craw. “The bloody man’s practically public property.”

“All the same,” said Craw firmly.

So Jerry said “Yes, sir,” and a few days later, out of sheer boredom, began his own entirely informal investigation into the life and loves of Mr. Drake Ko, O.B.E., Steward of the Royal Hong Kong Jockey Club, millionaire, and citizen above suspicion. Nothing dramatic; nothing, in Jerry’s book, disobedient; for there is not a fieldman born who does not at one time or another stray across the borders of his brief. He began tentatively, like journeys to a forbidden biscuit box. As it happened, he had been considering proposing to Stubbs a three-part series on the Hong Kong super-rich. Browsing in the reference shelves of the Foreign Correspondents’ Club before lunch one day, he unconsciously took a leaf from Smiley’s book and turned up “Ko, Drake” in the current edition of Who’s Who in Hong Kong: married; one son, died 1968; sometime law student of Gray’s Inn, London, but not a successful one, apparently, for there was no record of his having been called to the bar. Then a run-down of his twenty-odd directorships. Hobbies: horseracing, cruising, and jade. Well, whose aren’t? Then the charities he supported, including a Baptist church, a Chiu Chow Spirit Temple, and the Drake Ko Free Hospital for Children. Backed all the possibilities, Jerry reflected with amusement. The photograph showed the usual soft-eyed, twenty-year-old beautiful soul, rich in merit as well as goods, and was otherwise unrecognisable.

The dead son’s name was Nelson, Jerry noticed: Drake and Nelson, British admirals. He couldn’t get it out of his mind that the father should be named after the first British sailor to enter the China Seas, and the son after the hero of Trafalgar.

Jerry had a lot less difficulty than Peter Guillam in making the connection between China Airsea in Hong Kong and Indocharter S.A. in Vientiane, and he was amused to read in the China Airsea company prospectus that its business was described as a “wide spread of trading and transportation activities in the South East Asian theatre”—including rice, fish, electrical goods, teak, real estate, and shipping.

Devilling at Luke’s bureau, he took a bolder step; the sheerest accident shoved the name of Drake Ko under his nose. True, he had looked up Ko in the card index. Just as he had looked up a dozen or twenty other wealthy Chinese in the Colony; just as he had asked the Chinese clerk, in perfectly good faith, who she thought were the most exotic Chinese millionaires for his purpose. And while Drake might not have been one of the absolute front runners, it took very little to draw the name from her, and consequently the papers. Indeed, as he had already protested to Craw, there was something flattening, not to say dream-like, about pursuing by hole-and-corner methods a man so publicly evident. Soviet intelligence agents, in Jerry’s limited experience of the breed, normally came in more modest versions. Ko seemed king-sized by comparison.

Reminds me of old Sambo, Jerry thought. It was the first time this intimation struck him.

The most detailed offering appeared in a glossy periodical called Golden Orient, now out of print. In one of its last editions, an eight-page illustrated feature titled “The Red Knights of Nanyang” concerned itself with the growing number of overseas Chinese with profitable trade relations with Red China, commonly known as “fat cats.” Nanyang, as Jerry knew, meant the realms south of China, and implied to the Chinese a kind of eldorado of peace and wealth. To each chosen personality the feature devoted a page and a photograph, generally shot against a background of personal possessions. The hero of the Hong Kong interview—there were pieces from Bangkok, Manila, and Singapore as well—was that “much-loved sporting personality and Jockey Club Steward,” Mr. Drake Ko, President, Chairman, Managing Director, and chief shareholder of China Airsea Ltd., and he was shown with his horse Lucky Nelson at the end of a successful season in Happy Valley. The horse’s name momentarily arrested Jerry’s Western eye. He found it macabre that a father should christen a horse after his dead son.

The accompanying photograph revealed much more than the spineless mug shot in Who’s Who. Ko looked jolly, even exuberant, and he appeared, despite his hat, to be hairless. The hat was at this stage the most interesting thing about Ko, for it was one which no Chinese, in Jerry’s firm opinion, had ever been seen to wear before. It was a beret, worn sloping, putting Ko somewhere between a British soldier and a French onion seller; but above all, it had, for a Chinese, the rarest quality of all—self-mockery. He was apparently tall, he was wearing a Burberry, and his long hands stuck out of the sleeves like twigs. He seemed genuinely to like the horse, and one arm rested easily on its back.

Asked why he still ran a junk-fleet when these were commonly held to be unprofitable, he replied: “My people are Hakka from Chiu Chow. We breathed the water, farmed the water, slept on the water. Boats are my element.” He was fond also of describing his journey from Shanghai to Hong Kong in 1951. At that time, the border was still open and there were no effective restrictions on immigration. Nevertheless, Ko chose to make the trip by fishing junk—pirates, blockades, and bad weather notwithstanding—which was held at the very least to be eccentric.

“I’m a very lazy fellow,” he was reported as saying. “If the wind will blow me for nothing, why should I walk? Now I’ve got a sixty-foot cruiser but I still love the sea.”

Famous for his sense of humour, said the article.

A good agent must have entertainment value, say the Sarratt bearleaders; that was something Moscow Centre also understood.

There being no one watching, Jerry ambled over to the card index and a few minutes later had taken possession of a thick folder of press cuttings, the bulk of which concerned a share scandal in 1965, in which Ko and a group of Swatownese had played a shady part. The Stock Exchange enquiry, not surprisingly, proved inconclusive and was shelved. The following year Ko got his O.B.E. “If you buy people,” old Sambo used to say, “buy them thoroughly.”

In Luke’s bureau they kept a bunch of Chinese researchers, among them a convivial Cantonese named Jimmy who often appeared at the Club and was paid at Chinese rates to be the oracle on Chinese matters. Jimmy said the Swatownese were a people apart, “like Scots or Jews,” hardy, clannish, and notoriously thrifty, who lived near the sea so that they could run for it when they were persecuted or starving or in debt. He said their women were sought-after, being beautiful, diligent, frugal, and lecherous.

“Writing yourself another novel, your Lordship?” the dwarf asked endearingly, coming out of his office to find out what Jerry was up to. Jerry had wanted to ask why a Swatownese should have been brought up in Shanghai, but he thought it wiser to bend course toward a less delicate topic.

Next day Jerry borrowed Luke’s battered car. Armed with a standard-size 35-millimetre camera, he drove to Headland Road, a millionaire’s ghetto between Repulse Bay and Stanley, where he made a show of rubbernecking at the outside of the villas there, as many idle tourists do. His cover story was still that feature for Stubbs on the Hong Kong super-rich; even now, even to himself, he would scarcely have admitted going there on account of Drake Ko.

“He’s raising Cain in Taipei,” Craw had told him casually in one of their limbo calls. “Won’t be back till Thursday.” Once again, Jerry accepted without question Craw’s lines of communication.

He did not photograph the house called Seven Gates, but he took several long, stupid gazes at it. He saw a low, pantiled villa set well back from the road, with a big verandah on the seaward side and a pergola of white-painted pillars cut against the blue horizon. Craw had told him that Drake must have chosen the name because of Shanghai, whose old city walls were pierced with seven gates. “Sentiment, my son. Never underrate the power of sentiment upon a slant-eye, and never count on it either. Amen.” He saw lawns—including, to his amusement, a croquet lawn. He saw a fine collection of azaleas and hibiscus. He saw a model junk about ten feet long set on a concrete sea, and he saw a garden bar, round like a bandstand, with a blue-andwhite striped awning over it, and a ring of empty white chairs presided over by a boy in a white coat and trousers and white shoes. The Kos were evidently expecting company. He saw other houseboys washing a tobacco-coloured Rolls-Royce Phantom saloon. The long garage was open, and he recorded a Chrysler station-wagon of some kind, and a Mercedes, black, with the licence plates removed, presumably as part of some repair. But he was meticulous about giving equal attention to the other houses in Headland Road, and photographed three of them.

Continuing to Deep Water Bay, he stood on the shore gazing at the small armada of stockbroker junks and launches which bobbed at anchor on the choppy sea, but was not able to pick out Admiral Nelson, Ko’s celebrated ocean-going cruiser—the ubiquity of the name Nelson was becoming positively oppressive. About to give up, he heard a cry from below him, and walking down a rickety wooden causeway, he found an old woman in a sampan grinning up at him and pointing to herself with a yellow chicken leg she had been sucking with her toothless gums.

Clambering aboard, he indicated the boats and she took him on a tour of them, laughing and chanting while she skulled, and keeping the chicken leg in her mouth. Admiral Nelson was sleek and low-lined. Three more boys in white ducks were diligently scouring the decks. Jerry tried to calculate Ko’s monthly housekeeping bill, just for staff alone.

On the drive back he paused to examine the Drake Ko Free Hospital for Children and established, for what it was worth, that that too was in excellent repair.

Next morning early, Jerry placed himself in the lobby of a chintzy high-rise office building in Central, and read the brass plates of the business companies housed there. China Airsea Ltd. and its affiliates occupied the top three floors, but somewhat predictably there was no mention of Indocharter Vientiane S.A., the former recipient of twenty-five thousand U.S. dollars on the last Friday of every month.

The cuttings folder in Luke’s bureau had contained a crossreference to U.S. Consulate archives. Jerry called there next day, ostensibly to check out his story on the American troops in Wanchai. Under the eyes of an unreasonably pretty girl, Jerry drifted, picked at a few things, then settled on some of the oldest stuff they had, which dated from the very early fifties when Truman had put a trade embargo on China and North Korea. The Hong Kong Consulate had been ordered to report infringements, and this was the record of what they had unearthed. The favourite commodity, next to medicines and electrical goods, was oil, and “the United States Agencies,” as they were styled, had gone for it in a big way, setting traps, putting out gunboats, interrogating defectors and prisoners, and finally placing huge dossiers before Congressional and Senate sub-committees.

The year in question was 1951, two years after the Communist take-over in China and the year Ko sailed to Hong Kong from Shanghai without a cent to his name. The operation to which the bureau’s reference directed him was Shanghainese, and to begin with, that was the only connection it had with Ko. Many Shanghainese immigrants in those days lived in a crowded, insanitary hotel on the Des Voeux Road. The introduction said that they were like one enormous family, welded together by shared suffering and squalor. Some had escaped together from the Japanese before escaping from the Communists.

“After enduring so much at Communist hands,” one culprit told his interrogators, “the least we could do was make a little money out of them.”

Another was more aggressive: “The Hong Kong fat cats are making millions out of this war. Who sells the Reds their electronic equipment, their penicillin, their rice?”

In ’51 there were two methods open to them, said the report. One was to bribe the frontier guards and truck the oil across the New Territories and over the border. The other was taking it by ship, which meant bribing the harbour authorities.

An informant again: “Us Hakka know the sea. We find boat, three hundred tons, we rent. We fill with drums of oil, make false manifest and false destination. We reach international waters, run like hell for Amoy. Reds call us brother, profit one hundred percent. After a few runs we buy boat.”

“Where did the original money come from?” the interrogator demanded.

“Ritz Ballroom” was the disconcerting answer. The Ritz was a high-class pick-up spot right down the King’s Road on the waterfront, said a footnote. Most of the girls were Shanghainese. The same footnote named members of the gang. Drake Ko was one.

“Drake Ko was very tough boy,” said a witness’s statement given in fine print in the appendix. “You don’t tell no fairy story to Drake Ko. He don’t like politician people one piece. Chiang Kai-shek. Mao. He say they all one person. He say he keen supporter of Chiang Mao-shek. One day Mr. Ko lead our gang.”

As to gangs, the investigation turned up nothing. It was a matter of history that Shanghai, by the time it fell to Mao in ’49, had emptied three-quarters of its underworld into Hong Kong; that the Red Gang and the Green Gang had fought enough battles over the Hong Kong protection rackets to make Chicago in the twenties look like child’s play. But not a witness could be found who admitted to knowing anything about gangs, triads, or any other criminal organisation.

Not surprisingly, by the time Saturday came round and Jerry was on his way to Happy Valley races, he possessed quite a detailed portrait of his quarry.

The taxi charged double because it was the races, and Jerry paid because he knew it was the form. He had told Craw he was going and Craw had not objected. He had brought Luke along for the ride, knowing that sometimes two are less conspicuous than one. He was nervous of bumping into Frost, because round-eye Hong Kong is a very small city indeed. At the main entrance, he telephoned the management to raise some influence, and in due course a Captain Grant appeared, a young official to whom Jerry explained that this was work: he was writing the place up for the comic.

Grant was a witty, elegant man who smoked Turkish cigarettes through a holder, and everything Jerry said seemed to amuse him in a fond, if rather remote way.

“You’re the son, then,” he said finally.

“Did you know him?” said Jerry, grinning.

“Only of him,” Captain Grant replied; but he seemed to like what he had heard.

He gave them badges and offered them drinks later. The second race was just over. While they talked, they heard the roar of the crowd set to and rise and die like an avalanche. Waiting for the lift, Jerry checked the notice-board to see who had taken the private boxes. The hardy annuals were the Peak mafia: The Bank—as the Hong Kong & Shanghai Bank liked to call itself— Jardine Matheson, the Governor, the Commander British Forces. Mr. Drake Ko, O.B.E., though a Steward of the Club, was not among them.

“Westerby! Good God, man, who the hell ever let you in here? Listen, is it true your dad went bust before he died?”

Jerry hesitated, grinning, then belatedly drew the card from his memory: Clive Somebody, pigs-in-clover solicitor, house in Repulse Bay, overpowering Scot, all false affability and an open reputation for crookedness. Jerry had used him for background in a Macao-based gold swindle and concluded that Clive had had a slice of the cake.

“Gosh, Clive, super, marvellous.”

They exchanged banalities, still waiting for the lift.

“Here. Give us your card. Come on! I’ll make your fortune yet.” Porton, thought Jerry; Clive Porton. Tearing the racecard from Jerry’s hand, Porton licked his big thumb, turned to a centre page, and ringed a horse’s name in ballpoint. “Number seven in the third—you can’t go wrong,” he breathed. “Put your shirt on it, okay? Not every day I give away money, I’ll tell you.”

“What did the slob sell you?” Luke enquired when they were clear of him.

“Thing called Open Space.”

Their ways divided. Luke went off to place bets and wangle his way into the American Club upstairs. Jerry, on an impulse, took a hundred dollars’ worth of Lucky Nelson and set a hasty course for the Hong Kong Club’s luncheon room. If I lose, he thought drily, I’ll chalk it up to George.

The double doors were open and he walked straight in. The atmosphere was of dowdy wealth: a Surrey golf-club on a wet weekend, except that those brave enough to risk the pickpockets wore real jewels. A group of wives sat apart, like expensive unused equipment, scowling at the closed-circuit television and moaning about servants and muggings. There was a smell of cigar smoke and sweat and departed food. Seeing him shamble in—the awful suit, the buckskin boots, “press” written all over him—their scowls darkened. The trouble with being exclusive in Hong Kong, their faces said, was that not enough people are thrown out.

A school of serious drinkers had gathered at the bar, mainly carpet-baggers from the London merchant banks, with curdled accents, beer bellies, and fat necks before their time. With them, the Jardine Matheson second eleven, not yet grand enough for the firm’s private box: groomed, unloveable innocents for whom heaven was money and promotion. Apprehensively, he glanced round for Frostie, but either the gee-gees hadn’t drawn him today or he was with some other crowd.

With one grin and a vague flap of the hand for all of them, Jerry winkled out the under-manager, saluted him like a lost friend, talked airily of Captain Grant, slipped him twenty bucks for himself, signed up for the day in defiance of every regulation, and stepped gratefully onto the balcony with eighteen minutes still before the “off ”: sun, the stink of dung, the feral rumble of a Chinese crowd, and Jerry’s own quickening heartbeat that whispered “horses.”

For a moment Jerry hung there, grinning, taking in the view, because every time he saw it was the first time.

The grass at Happy Valley Racecourse must be the most valuable crop on earth. There was very little of it. A narrow ring ran round the edge of what looked like a London borough recreation ground which sun and feet have beaten into dirt. Eight scuffed football pitches, one rugger pitch, one hockey gave an air of municipal neglect. But the thin green ribbon which surrounded this dingy package in that year alone was likely to attract a cool hundred million sterling through legal betting, and the same amount again in the shade. The place was less a valley than a fire-bowl—glistening white stadium one side, brown hills the other—while ahead of Jerry and to his left lurked the other Hong Kong: a card-house Manhattan of grey skyscraper slums crammed so tight they seemed to lean on one another in the heat. From each tiny balcony, a bamboo pole stuck out like a pin put in to brace the structure; from each pole hung innumerable flags of black laundry, as if something huge had brushed against the building leaving these tatters in its wake. It was from places like these, for all but the tiniest few that day, that Happy Valley offered the gambler’s dream of instantaneous salvation.

Away to the right of Jerry shone newer, grander buildings. There, he remembered, the illegal bookies pitched their offices and by a dozen obscure methods—tic-tac, walkie-talkie, flashing lights; Sarratt would have been entranced by them—kept up their dialogue with legmen round the course. Higher again ran the spines of shaven hilltop slashed by quarries and littered with the ironmongery of electronic eavesdropping. Jerry had heard somewhere that the saucers had been put there for the Cousins, so that they could track the sponsored over-flights of Taiwanese U-2s. Above the hills, dumplings of white cloud which no weather ever seemed to clear away. And above the cloud, that day, the bleached China sky aching in the sun, and one hawk slowly wheeling. All this Jerry took in at a single, grateful draught.

For the crowd it was the aimless time. The focus of attention, if anywhere, was on the four fat Chinese women in fringed Hakka hats and black pyjama suits who were marching down the track with rakes, prinking the precious grass where the galloping hoofs had mussed it. They moved with the dignity of total indif-ference; it was as if the whole of Chinese peasantry were depicted in their gestures. For a second, in the way crowds have, a tremor of collective affinity reached out to them, and was forgotten.

The betting put Clive Porton’s Open Space third favourite. Drake Ko’s Lucky Nelson was in with the field at forty to one, which meant nowhere. Edging his way past a bunch of festive Australians, Jerry reached the corner of the balcony and, craning, peered steeply downward over the tiers of heads to the owners’ box, cut off from the common people by a green iron gate and a security guard. Shading his eyes and wishing he had brought binoculars, he made out one fat, hard-looking man in a suit and dark glasses, accompanied by a young and very pretty girl. He looked half Chinese, half Latin, and Jerry put him down as Filipino. The girl was the best that money could buy.

Must be with his horse, thought Jerry, recalling old Sambo. Most likely in the paddock, briefing his trainer and the jockey.

Striding back through the luncheon room to the main lobby, he dropped into a wide back-stairway for two floors and crossed a hall to the viewing gallery, which was filled with a vast and thoughtful Chinese crowd, all men, staring downward in devotional silence into a covered sand-pit filled with noisy sparrows and three horses, each led by his permanent male groom, the mafoo. The mafoos held their charges miserably, as if sick with nerves. The elegant Captain Grant was looking on; so was an old White Russian trainer called Sacha, whom Jerry loved. Sacha sat on a tiny folding chair, leaning slightly forward as if he were fishing. Sacha had trained Mongolian ponies in the treaty days of Shanghai, and Jerry could listen to him all night: how Shanghai had had three racecourses, British, International, and Chinese; how the British merchant princes kept sixty—even a hundred— horses apiece and sailed them up and down the coast, competing like madmen with each other from port to port. Sacha was a gentle, philosophical fellow with far-away blue eyes and an all-in wrestler’s jaw. He was also the trainer of Lucky Nelson. He sat alone, watching what Jerry took to be a doorway out of his own line of sight.

A sudden hubbub from the stands caused Jerry to turn sharply toward the sunlight. A roar sounded, then one high, strangled shriek as the crowd on one tier swayed and an axe-head of greyand-black uniforms tore into it. An instant later and a swarm of police was dragging some wretched pickpocket, bleeding and coughing, into the tunnel stairway for a voluntary statement. Dazzled, Jerry returned his gaze to the interior darkness of the sand-paddock, and took a moment to focus on the fogged outline of Mr. Drake Ko.

The identification was nowhere near immediate. The first person Jerry noticed was not Ko at all, but the young Chinese jockey standing at old Sacha’s side: tall boy, thin as wire where his silks were nipped into his breeches. He was slapping his whip against his boot as if he had seen the gesture in an English sporting print; he was wearing Ko’s colours—“sky blue and sea grey, quartered,” said the article in Golden Orient—and, like Sacha, he was staring at something out of Jerry’s sight.

Next, from under the platform where Jerry stood, came a bay griffin, led by a giggly fat mafoo in filthy grey overalls. His number was hidden by a rug, but Jerry knew the horse already from its photograph, and he knew it even better now; he knew it really well, in fact. There are some horses that are simply superior to their class, and Lucky Nelson, to Jerry’s eye, was one. Bit of quality, he thought, nice long rein, a bold eye. None of your jail-bait chestnut with a light mane and tail that take the women’s vote in every race. Given the local form, which is heavily restricted by the climate, Lucky Nelson was as sound as anything he’d seen here. Jerry was sure of it. For one bad moment he was anxious about the horse’s condition: sweating, too much gloss on the flanks and quarters. Then he looked again at the bold eye, and the slightly unnatural sweat lines, and his heart revived. Cunning devil’s had him hosed down to make him look poorly, he thought, in joyous memory of old Sambo.

It was only at that late point, therefore, that Jerry moved his eye from the horse to its owner.

Mr. Drake Ko, O.B.E., the recipient to date of a cool half million of Moscow Centre’s American dollars, the avowed supporter of Chiang Mao-shek, stood apart from everyone, in the shadow of a white concrete pillar ten feet in diameter: an ugly but inoffen-sive figure at first glance, tall, with a stoop that should have been occupational—a dentist, or a cobbler. He was dressed in an English way, in baggy grey flannels and a black double-breasted blazer too long in the waist, so that it emphasised the disjointedness of his legs and gave a crumpled look to his spare body. His face and neck were as polished as old leather and as hairless, and the many creases looked sharp as ironed pleats. His complexion was darker than Jerry had expected; he would almost have suspected Arab or Indian blood. He wore the same unsuitable hat of the photograph, a dark blue beret, and his ears stuck out from under it like pastry roses. His very narrow eyes were stretched still finer by its pressure. Brown Italian shoes, white shirt, open neck. No props, not even binoculars: but a marvellous halfmillion-dollar smile, ear to ear, partly gold, that seemed to relish everyone’s good fortune as well as his own.

Except there was a hint—some men have it, it is like a ten-sion; headwaiters, doormen, journalists can spot it at a glance; old Sambo almost had it—there was a hint of resources instantly available. If things were needed, hidden people would bring them at the double.

The picture sprang to life. Over the loudspeaker the clerk of the course ordered the jockeys to mount. The giggly mafoo pulled off the rug, and Jerry, to his pleasure, noticed that Ko had had the bay’s coat back-brushed to emphasise his supposedly poor condition. The thin jockey made the long awkward journey to the saddle and, with nervous friendliness, called down to Ko on the other side of him.

Ko, already moving away, swung round and snapped something back, one inaudible syllable, without looking where he spoke or who picked it up. A rebuke? An encouragement? An order to a servant? The smile had lost none of its exuberance, but the voice was hard as a whipcrack. Horse and rider took their leave. Ko took his. Jerry raced back up the stairs, through the lunch-room to the balcony, waded to the corner, and looked down.

By then Ko was no longer alone, but married.

Whether they arrived together on the stand, whether she followed him at a moment’s distance, Jerry was never sure. She was so small. He spotted a glitter of black silk and a movement round it as men deferred—the stand was filling up—but at first he looked too high and missed her. Her head was at the level of their chests. He picked her up again at Ko’s side, a tiny, immaculate Chinese wife, sovereign, elderly, pale, so groomed you could never imagine she had been any other age or worn any clothes but these Paris-tailored black silks, frogged and brocaded like a hussar’s. Wife’s a handful, Craw had said, extemporising as they sat bemused in front of the tiny projector. Pinches from the big stores. Ko’s people have to get in ahead of her and promise to pay for whatever she nicks.

The article in Golden Orient referred to her as “an early business partner.” Reading between the lines, Jerry guessed she’d been one of the girls at the Ritz Ballroom.

The crowd’s roar had gathered throat.

“Did you do him, Westerby? Did you do him, man?”

Scottish Clive Porton was bearing down on him, sweating heavily from drink. “Open Space, for God’s sake! Even at those odds you’ll make a dollar or two! Go on, man, it’s a cert!”

The “off ” spared him a reply. The roar choked, lifted, and swelled. All round him a pitter-patter of names and numbers fluttered in the stands; the horses sprang from their traps, drawn forward by the din. The lazy first furlong had begun. Wait: frenzy will follow the inertia. In the dawn light when they train, Jerry remembered, their hoofs are muffled in order to spare the residents their slumbers. Sometimes in the old days, drying out between war stories, Jerry would get up early and come down here just to watch them and, if he was lucky and found an influential friend, go back with them to the air-conditioned, multi-storey stables where they lived, to watch the grooming and the cosseting. Whereas, by day the howl of traffic drowned their thunder entirely and the glittering cluster that advanced so slowly made no sound at all, but floated on the thin emerald river.

“Open Space all the way,” Clive Porton announced uncertainly as he watched through his glasses. “The favourite’s done it. Well done, Open Space, well done, lad.” They began the long turn before the final straight. “Come on, Open Space, stretch for it man, ride! Use your whip, you cretin!” Porton screamed, for by now it was clear even to the naked eye that the sky-blue and seagrey colours of Lucky Nelson were heading for the front, and that his competitors were courteously making way for him. A second horse put up a show of challenging, then flagged, but Open Space was already three lengths behind while his jockey worked furiously with his whip on the air around his mount’s quarters.

“Objection!” Porton was shouting. “Where’s the stewards, for God’s sake? That horse was pulled! I never saw a horse so pulled in my life!”

As Lucky Nelson loped gracefully past the post, Jerry quickly turned his gaze to the right again, and down. Ko appeared unmoved. It was not Oriental inscrutability; Jerry had never subscribed to that myth. Certainly it was not indifference. It was merely that he was observing the satisfactory unfolding of a ceremony: Mr. Drake Ko watches a march-past of his troops. His little mad wife stood poker-backed beside him as if, after all the struggles of her life, they were finally playing her anthem. For a second Jerry was reminded of old Pet in her prime. Just the way Pet looked, thought Jerry, when Sambo’s pride came in a good eighteenth. Just the way she stood, and coped with failure.

The presentation was a moment for dreams.

While the scene lacked a cake stall, the sunshine was certainly far beyond the expectation of the most sanguine organiser of an English village fête, and the silver cups were a great deal more lavish than the scratched little beaker presented by the squire for excellence in the three-legged race. The sixty uniformed policemen were also perhaps a trifle ostentatious. But the gracious lady in a 1930s turban who presided over the long white table was as mawkish and arrogant as the most exacting patriot would have wished. She knew the form exactly. The Chairman of the Stewards handed her the cup, and she quickly held it away from her as if it were too hot for her hands. Drake Ko and his wife—both grinning hugely, Ko still in his beret—emerged from a cluster of delighted supporters and grabbed the cup, but they tripped so fast and merrily back and forth across the roped-off patch of grass that the photographer was caught unprepared and had to ask the actors to re-stage the moment of consummation. This annoyed the gracious lady quite a lot, and Jerry caught the words “bloody bore” drawled out over the chatter of the onlookers. The cup was finally Ko’s, the gracious lady took sullen delivery of six hundred dollars’ worth of gardenias, and East and West returned gratefully to their separate cantonments.

“Do him?” Captain Grant enquired amiably. They were sauntering back toward the stands.

“Well, yes, actually,” Jerry confessed with a grin. “Bit of a turn-up, wasn’t it?”

“Oh, it was Drake’s race, all right,” said Grant drily. They walked a little. “Clever of you to spot it. More than we did. Do you want to talk to him?”

“Talk to who?”

“Ko. While he’s flushed with victory. Perhaps you’ll get something out of him, for once,” said Grant, with that fond smile. “Come, I’ll introduce you.”

Jerry did not falter. As a reporter, he had every reason to say yes. As a spy—well, sometimes they say at Sarratt that nothing is insecure but thinking makes it so. They sauntered back to the group. The Ko party had formed a rough circle round the cup and the laughter was very loud. At the centre, closest to Ko, stood the fat Filipino with his beautiful girl, and Ko was clowning with the girl, kissing her on both cheeks, then kissing her again, while everyone laughed except Ko’s wife, who withdrew deliberately to the edge and began talking to a Chinese woman her own age.

“That’s Arpego,” said Grant, in Jerry’s ear and indicating the fat Filipino. “He owns Manila and most of the out-islands.”

Arpego’s paunch sat forward over his belt like a rock stuffed inside his shirt.

Grant did not make straight for Ko, but singled out a burly, bland-faced Chinese in an electric-blue suit, who seemed to be some kind of aide. Jerry stood off, waiting. The plump Chinese came over to him, Grant at his side.

“This is Mr. Tiu,” said Grant quietly. “Mr. Tiu, meet Mr. Westerby, son of the famous one.”

“You wanna talk to Mr. Ko, Mr. Wessby?”

“If it’s convenient.”

“Sure it’s convenient,” said Tiu euphorically. His chubby hands floated restlessly in front of his stomach. He wore a gold watch on his right wrist. His fingers were curled, as if to scoop water. He was sleek and shiny, and he could have been thirty or sixty. “Mr. Ko win a horse-race, everything’s convenient. I bring him over. Stay here. What your father’s name?”

“Samuel,” said Jerry.

“Lord Samuel,” said Grant firmly, and inaccurately.

“Who is he?” Jerry asked aside, as plump Tiu returned to the noisy Chinese group.

“Ko’s major-domo. Manager, chief bag-carrier, bottle-washer, fixer. Been with him since the start. They ran away from the Japanese together in the war.”

And his chief crusher, too, Jerry thought, watching Tiu waddle back with his master.

Grant began again with the introductions. “Sir,” he said, “this is Westerby, whose famous father had a lot of very slow horses. He also bought several racecourses for the bookmakers.”

“What paper?” asked Ko. His voice was harsh and powerful and deep, yet to Jerry’s surprise he could have sworn he caught a trace of an English North Country accent, reminiscent of old Pet’s.

Jerry told him.

“That the paper with the girls!” Ko cried gaily. “I used to read that paper when I was in London, during my residence there for the purpose of legal study at the famous Gray’s Inn of Court. Do you know why I read your paper, Mr. Westerby? It is my sound opinion that the more papers which are printing pretty girls in preference to politics today, the more chance we get of a damn sight better world, Mr. Westerby,” Ko declared, in a vigorous mixture of misused idiom and boardroom English. “Kindly tell that to your paper from me, Mr. Westerby. I give it to you as free advice.”

With a laugh, Jerry opened his notebook. “I backed your horse, Mr. Ko. How does it feel to win?”

“Better than losing, I think.”

“Doesn’t wear off?”

“I like it better every time.”

“Does the same go for business?”

“Naturally.”

“Can I speak to Mrs. Ko?”

“She’s busy.”

Jotting, Jerry was disconcerted by a familiar smell. It was of a musky, very pungent French soap, a blend of almonds and rosewater favoured by an early wife; and also, apparently, by the shiny Tiu for his greater allure.

“What’s your formula for winning, Mr. Ko?”

“Hard work. No politics. Plenty sleep.”

“Are you a lot richer than you were ten minutes ago?”

“I was pretty rich ten minutes ago. You may tell your paper also I am a great admirer of the British way of life.”

“Even though we don’t work hard? And make a lot of politics?”

“Just tell them,” Ko said straight at him, and that was an order.

“What makes you so lucky, Mr. Ko?”

Ko appeared not to hear this question, except that his smile slowly vanished. He was staring at Jerry, measuring him through his very narrow eyes, and his face had hardened remarkably.

“What makes you so lucky, sir?” Jerry repeated.

There was a long silence.

“No comment,” Ko said, still into Jerry’s face.

The temptation to press the question had become irresistible. “Play fair, Mr. Ko,” Jerry urged, grinning largely. “The world’s full of people who dream of being as rich as you are. Give them a clue, won’t you? What makes you so lucky?”

“Mind your own damn business,” Ko told him, and without the smallest ceremony turned his back on him and walked away. At the same moment, Tiu took a leisurely half-pace forward, arresting Jerry’s line of advance with one soft hand on his upper arm.

“You going to win next time round, Mr. Ko?” Jerry called over Tiu’s shoulder at his departing back.

“You betta ask the horse, Mr. Wessby,” Tiu suggested with a chubby smile, his hand still on Jerry’s arm.

He might as well have done so, for Ko had already rejoined his friend Mr. Arpego, the Filipino, and they were laughing and talking just as before. Drake Ko was very tough boy, Jerry remembered the witness saying. You don’t tell no fairy story to Drake Ko. Tiu doesn’t do so badly either, he thought.

As they walked back toward the grandstand, Grant was laughing quietly to himself.

“Last time Ko won, he wouldn’t even lead the horse into the paddock after the race,” he recalled. “Waved it away. Didn’t want it.”

“Why the hell not?”

“Hadn’t expected it to win, that’s why. Hadn’t told his Chiu Chow friends. Bad face. Maybe he felt the same when you asked him about his luck.”

“How did he get to be a Steward?”

“Oh, had Tiu buy the votes for him, no doubt. The usual thing. Cheers. Don’t forget your winnings.”

Then it happened: Ace Westerby’s unforeseen scoop.

The last race was over, Jerry was four thousand dollars to the good, and Luke had disappeared. Jerry tried the American Club, the Club Lusitano, and a couple of others, but either they hadn’t seen him or they’d thrown him out. From the enclosure there was only one gate, so Jerry joined the march. The traffic was chaotic. Rolls-Royces and Mercedes vied for curb space and the crowds were shoving from behind.

Deciding not to join the fight for taxis, Jerry started along the narrow pavement and saw, to his surprise, Drake Ko alone, emerging from a gateway across the road. Reaching the roadside, he seemed undecided whether to cross, then settled for where he was, gazing at the on-coming traffic. He’s waiting for the Rolls-Royce Phantom, thought Jerry, remembering the fleet in the garage at Headland Road. Or the Merc, or the Chrysler.

Suddenly Jerry saw him whip off the beret and, clowning, hold it into the road as if to draw rifle fire. The wrinkles flew up around his eyes and jaw, his gold teeth glittered in welcome; but instead of a Rolls-Royce, or a Merc, or a Chrysler, a long red Jaguar E-type with a soft top folded back screeched to a stop beside him, oblivious of the other cars. Jerry couldn’t have missed it if he’d wanted to; the noise of the tyres alone turned every head along the pavement. His eye read the number, his mind recorded it. Ko climbed aboard with all the excitement of someone who might never have ridden in an open car before, and he was already talking and laughing before they pulled away.

But not before Jerry had seen the driver: her fluttering blue headscarf, dark glasses, long blond hair, and enough of her body, as she leaned across Drake to lock his door, to know that she was a hell of a lot of woman. Drake’s hand was resting on her bare back, fingers splayed; his spare hand was waving about while he no doubt gave her a blow-by-blow account of his victory, and as they set off together he planted a very un-Chinese kiss on her cheek, and then for good measure two more: but all somehow with a great deal more sincerity than he had brought to the business of kissing Mr. Arpego’s escort.

On the other side of the road stood the gateway Ko had just come out of, and the iron gate was still open. His mind spinning, Jerry dodged the traffic and walked through. He was in the old Colonial Cemetery, a lush place scented with flowers and shaded by heavy overhanging trees. Jerry had never been here and he was shocked to enter such seclusion. It was built up an opposing slope round an old chapel that was gently falling into disuse. Its cracking walls glinted in the speckled evening light. Beside it, from a chicken-wire kennel, an emaciated Alsatian dog howled at him in fury.

Jerry peered round, not knowing why he was here or what he was looking for. The graves were of all ages and races and sects. There were White Russian graves, and their orthodox headstones were dark and scrolled with Czarist grandeur. Jerry imagined heavy snow on them and their shape still coming through. Another stone described a restless sojourn of a Russian princess and Jerry paused to read it: Tallin to Peking, with dates; Peking to Shanghai, dates again; to Hong Kong in ’49, to die. “And estates in Sverdlovsk,” the inscription ended defiantly. Was Shanghai the connection? Was Drake here on some pilgrimage to old friends?

He rejoined the living: three old men in blue pyjama suits sat on a shaded bench, not talking. They had hung their cage-birds in the branches overhead, close enough to hear one another’s song above the noise of traffic and cicadas. Two grave-diggers in steel helmets were filling a new grave. No mourners watched. Still not knowing what he wanted, Jerry reached the chapel steps. He peered through the door. Inside was pitch dark after the sunlight. An old woman glared at him. He drew back. The Alsatian dog howled at him still louder. A sign said “Verger” and he followed it. The shriek of the cicadas was deafening, even drowning the dog’s barking. The scent of flowers was steamy and a little rotten. An idea had struck him, almost an intimation. He was determined to pursue it.

The verger was a kindly distant man and spoke no English. The ledgers were very old; the entries resembled old bank accounts. Jerry sat at a desk slowly turning the heavy pages, reading the names, the dates of birth, death, and burial; lastly the map reference—the zone and the number. Having found what he was looking for, he stepped into the air again and made his way along a different path, through a cloud of butterflies, up the hill toward the cliff-side. A bunch of schoolgirls watched him from a foot-bridge, giggling. He took off his jacket and trailed it over his shoulder.

He passed between high shrubs and entered a slanted coppice of yellow grass where the headstones were very small, the mounds only a foot or two long. Jerry sidled past them, reading the numbers, till he found himself in front of a low iron gate marked 728. The gate was part of a rectangular perimeter, and as Jerry lifted his eyes he found himself looking at the statue of a small boy in Victorian knickerbockers and an Eton jacket, life size, with tousled stone curls and rosebud stone lips, reading or singing from an open stone book while real butterflies dived giddily round his head. He was an entirely English child, and the inscription read “Nelson Ko in loving memory.” A lot of dates followed, and it took Jerry a second to understand their meaning: ten successive years with none left out, and the last 1968. Then he realised they were the ten years the boy had lived, each one to be relished. On the bottom step of the plinth lay a large bunch of orchids, still in their paper.

Ko was thanking Nelson for his win. Now, at least, Jerry understood why he did not care to be invaded with questions about his luck.

There is a kind of fatigue, sometimes, which only fieldmen know: a temptation to gentleness that can be the kiss of death. Jerry lingered a moment longer, staring at the orchids and the stone boy, and setting them in his mind beside everything he had seen and learned of Ko till now. And he had an overwhelming feeling—only for a moment, but dangerous at any time—of completeness, as if he had met a family, only to discover it was his own. He had a feeling of arrival. Here was a man, housed this way, married that way, striving and playing in ways Jerry effortlessly understood. A man of no particular persuasion, yet Jerry saw him in that moment more clearly than he had ever seen himself. A Chiu Chow poor-boy who becomes a Jockey Club Steward with an O.B.E., and hoses down his horse before a race. A Hakka water-gypsy who gives his child a Baptist burial and an English effigy. A capitalist who hates politics. An incomplete lawyer, a gang boss, a builder of hospitals who runs an opium airline. A supporter of spirit temples who plays croquet and rides about in a Rolls-Royce. An American bar in his Chinese garden, and Russian gold in his trust account.

Such complex and conflicting insights did not at that moment alarm Jerry in the least; they presaged no foreboding or paradox. Rather he saw them welded by Ko’s own harsh endeavour into a single but many-sided man not too unlike old Sambo. Stronger still—for the few seconds that it lasted—he had an irresistible feeling of being in good company, a thing he had always liked. He returned to the gate in a mood of calm munificence, as if he, not Ko, had won the race.

The traffic had cleared and he found a taxi straight away. They had driven a hundred yards when he saw Luke performing lonely pirouettes along the curb. Jerry coaxed him aboard and dumped him outside the Foreign Correspondents’ Club. From the Furama Hotel he rang Craw’s home number, let it ring twice, rang it again, and heard Craw’s voice demanding “Who the bloody hell is that?” He asked for a Mr. Savage, received a foul rebuke and the information that he was ringing the wrong number, allowed Craw half an hour to get to another phone, then walked over to the Hilton to field the return call.

Our friend had surfaced in person, Jerry told him. Been put on public view on account of a big win. When it was over, a very nice blond party gave him a lift in her sports car. Jerry gave the licence number. They were definitely friends, he said. Very demonstrative and un-Chinese. At least friends, he would say.

“Round-eye?”

“Of course she was bloody well round-eye! Who the hell ever heard of a—”

“Jesus,” said Craw softly, and rang off before Jerry even had a chance to tell him about little Nelson’s shrine.

8

THE BARONS CONFER

The waiting-room of the pretty Foreign Office conference house in Carlton Gardens was slowly filling up. People in twos and threes, ignoring each other, like mourners for a funeral. A printed notice hung on the wall saying “Warning, no confidential matter to be discussed.” Smiley and Guillam perched disconsolately beneath it, on a bench of salmon velvet. The room was oval, the style Ministry of Works Rococo. Across the painted ceiling Bacchus pursued nymphs who were a lot more willing to be caught than Molly Meakin. Empty fire-buckets stood against the wall, and two government messengers guarded the door to the interior. Outside the curved sash windows, autumn sunlight filled the park, making each leaf crisp against the next.

Saul Enderby strode in, leading the Foreign Office contingent. Guillam knew him only by name. He was a former Ambassador to Indonesia, now chief pundit on South East Asia and said to be a great supporter of the American hard line. In tow, one obedient Parliamentary Under-Secretary, a trade-union appointment, and one flowery, overdressed figure who advanced on Smiley on tiptoe, hands held horizontal, as if he had caught him napping.

“Can it be?” he whispered exuberantly. “Is it? It is! George Smiley, all in your feathers. My dear, you’ve lost simply pounds. Who’s your nice boy? Don’t tell me. Peter Guillam. I’ve heard all about him. Quite unspoilt by failure, I’m told.”

“Oh, no!” Smiley cried involuntarily. “Oh, Lord. Roddy.”

“What do you mean ‘Oh, no. Oh, Lord. Roddy,’ ” Martindale demanded, wholly undeterred, in the same vibrant murmur. “ ‘Oh, yes’ is what you mean! ‘Yes, Roddy. Divine to see you, Roddy!’ Listen. Before the riff-raff come. How is the exquisite Ann? For my very own ears. Can I make a dinner for the two of you? You shall choose the guests. How’s that? And yes, I am on the list, if that’s what’s going through your rat-like little mind, young Peter Guillam. I’ve been translated, I’m a goodie, our new masters adore me. So they should, the fuss I’ve made of them.”

The interior doors opened with a bang. One of the messengers shouted “Gentlemen!” and those who knew the form stood back to let the women file ahead. There were two. The men followed and Guillam brought up the tail. For a few yards it might have been the Circus: a makeshift bottle-neck at which each face was checked by janitors, then a makeshift corridor leading to what resembled a builders’ cabin parked at the centre of a gutted stair-well—except that it had no windows and was suspended from wires and held tight by guy-ropes. Guillam had lost sight of Smiley entirely, and as he climbed the hardboard steps and entered the safe room he saw only shadows hovering under a blue night-light.

“Do do something, somebody,” Enderby growled, in the tones of a bored diner complaining about the service. “Lights, for God’s sake. Bloody little men.”

The door slammed behind Guillam’s back, a key turned in the lock, an electronic hum did the scale and whined out of earshot, and three strip-lights stammered to life, drenching everyone in their sickly pallor.

“Hoorah,” said Enderby, and sat down. Later Guillam wondered how he had been so sure it was Enderby calling in the darkness, but there are voices you can hear before they speak.

The conference table was covered in a ripped green baize like a billiards table in a youth club. The Foreign Office sat one end, the Colonial Office at the other. The separation was visceral rather than legal. For six years, the two departments had been formally married under the grandiose awnings of the Diplomatic Service, but no one in his right mind took the union seriously.

Guillam and Smiley sat at the centre, shoulder to shoulder, each with empty chairs to the other side of him. Examining the cast, Guillam was absurdly aware of costume. The Foreign Office had come sharply dressed in charcoal suits and the secret plumage of privilege: both Enderby and Martindale wore Old Etonian ties. The Colonialists had the home-weave look of country people come to town, and the best they could offer in the way of ties was one Royal Artilleryman: honest Wilbraham, their leader, a fit lean schoolmasterly figure with crimson veins on his weather-beaten cheeks. A tranquil woman in church-organ brown supported him, and to the other side a freshly minted boy with freckles and a shock of ginger hair.

The rest of the committee sat across from Smiley and Guillam and had the air of seconds in a duel they disapproved of. They had come in twos for protection: dark Pretorius of the Security Service with one nameless woman bag-carrier; two grim warriors from Defence; two Treasury bankers, one of them Welsh Hammer. Oliver Lacon was alone and had set himself apart from everyone, for all the world the person least engaged.

Before each pair of hands lay Smiley’s submission in a pinkand-red folder marked “Top Secret Withhold,” like a souvenir programme. The “Withhold” meant keep it away from the Cousins. Smiley had drafted it, the mothers had typed it, Guillam himself had watched the eighteen pages come off the duplicators and supervised the hand-stitching of the twenty-four copies. Now their handiwork lay tossed around the torn baize, among the water-glasses and the ashtrays. Lifting a copy six inches above the table, Enderby let it fall with a slap.

“All read it?” he asked. All had.

“Then let’s go,” said Enderby, and peered round the table with bloodshot, arrogant eyes. “Who’ll start the bowling? Oliver? You got us here. You shoot first.”

It crossed Guillam’s mind that Martindale, the great scourge of the Circus and its works, was curiously subdued. His eyes were turned dutifully to Enderby, and his mouth sagged unhappily.

Lacon meanwhile was setting out his defences: “Let me say first that I’m as much taken by surprise in this as anyone else,” he said. “This is a real body-blow, George. It would have been helpful to have had a little preparation. It’s a little uncomfortable for me, I have to tell you, to be the link to a service which has rather cut its links of late.”

Wilbraham said, “Hear, hear.” Smiley preserved a mandarin silence. Pretorius of the competition frowned in agreement.

“It also comes at an awkward time,” Lacon added portentously. “I mean the thesis, your thesis alone, is—well, momentous. A lot to swallow. A lot to face up to, George.”

Having thus secured his back way out, Lacon made a show of pretending there might not be a bomb under the bed at all.

“Let me try to summarise the summary. May I do that? In bald terms, George. A prominent Hong Kong Chinese citizen is under suspicion of being a Russian spy. That’s the nub?”

“He is known to receive very large Russian subventions,” Smiley corrected him, but talking to his hands.

“From a secret fund devoted to financing penetration agents?”

“Yes.”

“Solely for financing them? Or does this fund have other uses?”

“To the best of our knowledge, it has no other use at all,” said Smiley in the same lapidary tone as before.

“Such as—propaganda—the informal promotion of trade— kickbacks, that kind of thing? No?”

“To the best of our knowledge: no,” Smiley repeated.

“Ah, but how good’s their knowledge?” Wilbraham called from below the salt. “Hasn’t been too good in the past, has it?”

“You see what I’m getting at?” Lacon asked.

“We would want far more corroboration,” the Colonial lady in church brown said, with a heartening smile.

“So would we,” Smiley agreed mildly. One or two heads lifted in surprise. “It is in order to obtain corroboration that we are asking for rights and permissions.”

Lacon resumed the initiative. “Accept your thesis for a moment. A secret intelligence fund, all much as you say.”

Smiley gave a remote nod.

“Is there any suggestion that he subverts the Colony?”

“No.”

Lacon glanced at his notes. It occurred to Guillam that he had done a lot of homework.

“He is not, for example, preaching the withdrawal of their sterling reserves from London? Which would put us a further nine hundred million pounds in the red?”

“To my knowledge, no.”

“He is not telling us to get off the Island. He is not whipping up riots or urging amalgamation with the mainland, or waving the wretched treaty in our faces?”

“Not that we know.”

“He’s not a leveller. He’s not demanding effective trade unions, or a free vote, or a minimum wage, or compulsory education, or racial equality, or a separate parliament for the Chinese instead of their tame assemblies, whatever they’re called?”

“Legco and Exco,” Wilbraham snapped. “And they’re not tame.”

“No, he isn’t,” said Smiley.

“Then what is he doing?” Wilbraham interrupted excitedly. “Nothing. That’s the answer. They’ve got it all wrong. It’s a goose-chase.”

“For what it’s worth,” Lacon proceeded, as if he hadn’t heard, “he probably does as much to enrich the Colony as any other wealthy and respected Chinese businessman. Or as little. He dines with the Governor, but he is not known to rifle the contents of his safe, I assume. In fact, to all outward purposes, he is something of a Hong Kong prototype: Steward of the Jockey Club, supports the charities, pillar of the integrated society, successful, benevolent, has the wealth of Croesus and the commercial morality of the whorehouse.”

“I say, that’s a bit hard!” Wilbraham objected. “Steady on, Oliver. Remember the new housing estates.”

Again Lacon ignored him: “Short of the Victoria Cross, a wardisability pension, and a baronetcy, therefore, it is hard to see how he could be a less suitable subject for harassment by a British service, or recruitment by a Russian one.”

“In my world, we call that good cover,” said Smiley.

“Touché, Oliver,” said Enderby with satisfaction.

“Oh, everything’s cover these days,” said Wilbraham mournfully, but it didn’t get Lacon off the hook.

Round 1 to Smiley, thought Guillam in delight, recalling the dreadful Ascot dinner. “Hitty-pitty within the wall, and bumps goes Pottifer,” he chanted inwardly, with due acknowledgment to his hostess.

“Hammer?” said Enderby, and the Treasury had a brief fling in which Smiley was hauled over the coals for his financial accounts, but no one except the Treasury seemed to find Smiley’s transgressions relevant.

“This is not the purpose for which you were granted a secret float,” Hammer kept insisting, in Welsh outrage. “That was postmortem funds only—”

“Fine, fine, so Georgie’s been a naughty boy,” Enderby interrupted in the end, closing him down. “Has he thrown his money down the drain or has he made a cheap killing? That’s the question. Chris, time the Empire had its shout.”

Thus bidden, Colonial Wilbraham formally took the floor, backed by his lady in church brown and his red-haired assistant, whose young face was already set bravely in protection of his headmaster.

Wilbraham was one of those men who are unconscious of how much time they take to think. “Yes,” he began after an age. “Yes. Yes—well, I’d like to stay with the money, if I may, much as Lacon did, to begin with.” It was already clear that he regarded the submission as an assault upon his territory. “Since the money is all we’ve got to go on,” he remarked pointedly, turning back a page in his folder. “Yes.” And there followed another interminable hiatus. “You say here the money first of all came from Paris through Vientiane.” Pause. “Then the Russians switched systems, so to speak, and it was paid through a different channel altogether. A Hamburg-Vienna-Hong Kong tie-up. Endless complexities, subterfuges, all that—we’ll take your word for it— right. Same amount, different hat, so to speak. Right. Now, why d’you think they did that, so to speak?”

“So to speak,” Guillam recorded, who was very susceptible to verbal ticks.

“It is sensible practice to vary the routine from time to time,” Smiley replied, repeating the explanation he had already offered in the submission.

“Tradecraft, Chris,” Enderby put in, who liked his bit of jargon, and Martindale, still piano, shot him a glance of admiration.

Again Wilbraham slowly wound himself up.

“We’ve got to be guided by what Ko does,” he declared with puzzled fervour, and rattled his knuckles on the baize table. “Not by what he gets. That’s my argument. After all, I mean—dash it—it’s not Ko’s own money, is it? Legally it’s nothing to do with him.” The point caused a moment’s puzzled silence. “Page two, top. Money’s all in trust.” A general shuffle as everyone but Smiley and Guillam reached for their folders. “I mean, not only is none of it being spent, which in itself is jolly odd—I’ll come to that in a bit—it’s not Ko’s money. It’s in trust, and when the claimant comes along, whoever he or she is, it will be the claimant’s money. Till then, it’s the trust’s money. So to speak. So, I mean, what’s Ko done wrong? Opened a trust? No law against that. Done every day. Specially in Hong Kong. The beneficiary of the trust—oh, well, he could be anywhere! In Moscow or Timbuctoo or—” He didn’t seem to be able to think of a third place, so he dried up, to the discomfort of his ginger-headed assistant, who scowled straight at Guillam as if to challenge him. “Point is: what’s against Ko?”

Enderby was holding a matchstick to his mouth, and rolling it between his front teeth. Conscious perhaps that his adversary had made a good point badly—whereas his own speciality tended to be the reverse—he took the matchstick out and contemplated the wet end.

“Hell’s all this balls about thumb-prints, George?” he asked, perhaps in an effort to deflate Wilbraham’s success. “Like something out of Phillips Oppenheim.”

Belgravia cockney, thought Guillam: the last stage of linguistic collapse.

Smiley’s answers contained about as much emotion as a speaking clock: “The use of thumb-prints is old banking practice along the China coast. It dates from the days of widespread illiteracy. Many overseas Chinese prefer to use British banks rather than their own, and the structure of this account is by no means extraordinary. The beneficiary is not named, but identifies himself by a visual means, such as the torn half of a banknote—or in this case his left thumb-print, on the assumption that it is less worn by labour than the right. The bank is unlikely to raise an eyebrow provided that whoever founded the trust has indemnified the bank against charges of accidental or wrongful payment.”

“Thank you,” said Enderby, and did more delving with the matchstick. “Could be Ko’s own thumb-print, I suppose,” he suggested. “Nothing to stop him doing that, is there? Then it would be his money all right. If he’s trustee and beneficiary all at once, of course it’s his own damn money.”

To Guillam, the issue had already taken a quite ludicrous wrong turning.

“That’s pure supposition,” Wilbraham said after the usual two-minute silence. “Suppose Ko’s doing a favour for a chum. Just suppose that for a moment. And this chum’s on a fiddle, so to speak, or doing business with the Russians at several removes. Your Chinese loves a conspiracy. Get up to all the tricks, even the nicest of ’em. Ko’s no different, I’ll be bound.”

Speaking for the first time, the red-haired boy ventured direct support.

“The submission rests on a fallacy,” he declared bluntly, speaking at this stage more to Guillam than to Smiley. Sixth-form puritan, thought Guillam; thinks sex weakens you and spying is immoral. “You say Ko is on the Russian payroll. We say that’s not demonstrated. We say the trust may contain Russian money, but that Ko and the trust are separate entities.” In his indignation he went on too long: “You’re talking about guilt. Whereas we say Ko’s done nothing wrong under Hong Kong law and should enjoy the due rights of a Colonial subject.”

Several voices pounced at once. Lacon’s won. “No one is talking about guilt,” he retorted. “Guilt doesn’t enter into it in the least degree. We’re talking about security. Solely. Security, and the desirability or otherwise of investigating an apparent threat.”

Welsh Hammer’s Treasury colleague was a bleak Scot, as it turned out, with a style as bald as the sixth-former’s.

“Nobody’s sizing up to infringe Ko’s Colonial rights, either,” he snapped. “He hasn’t any. There’s nothing in Hong Kong law whatever which says the Governor cannot steam open Mr. Ko’s mail, tap Mr. Ko’s telephone, suborn his maid, or bug his house to kingdom come. Nothing whatever. There are a few other things the Governor can do too, if he feels like it.”

“Also speculative,” said Enderby, with a glance to Smiley. “Circus has no local facilities for those high jinks, and anyway in the circumstances they’d be insecure.”

“They would be scandalous,” said the red-haired boy unwisely, and Enderby’s gourmet eye, yellowed by a lifetime’s luncheons, lifted to him, and marked him down for future treatment.

So that was the second, inconclusive skirmish. They hacked about in this way till coffee break, no victor and no corpses. Round 2 a draw, Guillam decided. He wondered despondently how many rounds there would be.

“What’s it all about?” he asked Smiley under the buzz. “They won’t make it go away by talking. It’s a monstrous notion. What’s wrong with them?”

“They have to reduce it to their own size,” Smiley explained uncritically. Beyond that, he seemed bent on Oriental self-effacement, and no prodding from Guillam was going to shake him out of it. Enderby demanded fresh ashtrays.

The parliamentary Under-Secretary said they should try to make progress. “Think what it’s costing the taxpayer, just having us sit here,” he urged proudly. Lunch was still two hours away.

Opening round 3, Enderby moved the ticklish issue of whether to advise the Hong Kong government of the intelligence regarding Ko. This was impish of him, in Guillam’s view, since the position of the shadow Colonial Office (as Enderby referred to his homespun confrères) was still that there was no crisis, and consequently nothing for anyone to be advised of.

But honest Wilbraham, failing to see the trap, walked into it and said, “Of course we should advise Hong Kong! They’re selfadministering. We’ve no alternative.”

“Oliver?” said Enderby with the calm of a man who holds good cards. Lacon glanced up, clearly irritated at being drawn into the open. “Oliver?” Enderby repeated.

“I’m tempted to reply that it’s Smiley’s case and Wilbraham’s Colony and we should let them fight it out,” he said, remaining firmly on the fence.

Which left Smiley: “Oh, well, if it were the Governor and nobody else I could hardly object,” he said. “That is, if you feel it’s not too much for him,” he added dubiously, and Guillam saw the redhead stoke himself up again.

“Why the dickens should it be too much for the Governor?” Colonial Wilbraham demanded, genuinely perplexed. “Experi-enced administrator, shrewd negotiator. Find his way through anything. Why’s it too much?”

This time, it was Smiley who made the pause. “He would have to encode and decode his own telegrams, of course,” he mused, as if he were even now working his way obliviously through all the implications. “We couldn’t have him cutting his staff in on the secret, naturally. That’s asking too much of anyone. Personal code-books—well, we can fix him up with those, no doubt. Brush up his coding, if he needs it. There is also the problem, I suppose, of the Governor being forced into the position of agent provocateur if he continues to receive Ko socially—which he obviously must. We can’t frighten the game at this stage. Would he mind that? Perhaps not. Some people take to it quite naturally.” He glanced at Enderby.

Wilbraham was already expostulating: “But good heavens, man—if Ko’s a Russian spy, which we say he isn’t anyway—if the Governor has him to dinner, and perfectly naturally, in confidence, commits some minor indiscretion— Well, it’s damned unfair. It could ruin the man’s career. Let alone what it could do to the Colony! He must be told!”

Smiley looked sleepier than ever. “Well, of course, if he’s given to being indiscreet,” he murmured meekly, “I suppose one might argue that he’s not a suitable person to be informed anyway.”

In the icy silence, Enderby once more languidly took the matchstick from his mouth. “Bloody odd it would be, wouldn’t it, Chris,” he called cheerfully down the table to Wilbraham, “if Peking woke up one morning to the glad news that the Governor of Hong Kong, Queen’s representative and what have you, head of the troops and so forth, made a point of entertaining Moscow’s ace spy at his dinner table once a month. And gave him a medal for his trouble. What’s he got so far? Not a K, is it?”

“An O.B.E.,” said somebody sotto voce.

“Poor chap. Still, he’s on his way, I suppose. He’ll work his way up, same as we all do.”

Enderby, as it happened, had his knighthood already, whereas Wilbraham was stuck in the bulge, owing to the growing shortage of colonies.

“There is no case,” said Wilbraham stoutly, and laid a hairy hand flat over the lurid folder before him.

A free-for-all followed, to Guillam’s ear an intermezzo, in which by tacit understanding the minor parts were allowed to chime in with irrelevant questions in order to get themselves a mention in the minutes. The Welsh Hammer wished to establish here and now what would happen to Moscow Centre’s half million dollars of reptile money if by any chance they fell into British hands. There could be no question of their simply being recycled through the Circus, he warned. Treasury would have sole rights. Was that clear?

It was clear, Smiley said.

Guillam began to discern a gulf. There were those who assumed, even if reluctantly, that the investigation was a fait accompli; and those who continued to fight a rear-guard action against its taking place. Hammer, he noticed to his surprise, seemed reconciled to an investigation.

A string of questions on “legal” and “illegal” residencies, though wearisome, served to entrench the fear of a Red peril. Luff, the parliamentarian, wanted the difference spelt out to him. Smiley patiently obliged. A “legal” or “above-the-line” resident, he said, was an intelligence officer living under official or semi-official protection. Since the Hong Kong government, out of deference to Peking’s sensitivities about Russia, had seen fit to banish all forms of Soviet representation from the Colony—embassy, consular, Tass, Radio Moscow, Novosti, Aeroflot, Intourist, and the other flags of convenience which legals traditionally sailed under—then by definition it followed that any Soviet activity on the Colony had to be carried out by an illegal or below-the-line apparatus.

It was this presumption which had directed the efforts of the Circus’s researches toward discovering the replacement money route, he said, avoiding the jargon “gold seam.”

“Ah, well, then, we’ve forced the Russians into it,” said Luff with satisfaction. “We’ve only ourselves to thank. We victimise the Russians, they bite back. Well, who’s surprised by that? It’s the last government’s hash we’re settling. Not ours at all. Go in for Russian-baiting, you get what you deserve. Natural. We’re just reaping the whirlwind, as usual.”

“What have the Russians got up to in Hong Kong before this?” asked a clever back-room boy from the Home Office.

The Colonialists at once sprang to life. Wilbraham began feverishly leafing through a folder, but seeing his red-headed assistant straining at the leash, he muttered, “You’ll do that one, then, John, will you? Good,” and sat back looking ferocious. The brown-clad lady smiled wistfully at the baize cloth. So the sixthformer made his second disastrous sally.

“We consider the precedents here very enlightening indeed,” he began aggressively. “Moscow Centre’s previous attempts to gain a toe-hold on the Colony have been one and all, without exception, abortive and completely low grade.” He reeled off a bunch of boring instances.

Five years ago, he said, a bogus Russian Orthodox archimandrite flew in from Paris in an effort to make links with remnants of the White Russian community.

“This gentleman tried to press-gang an elderly restaurateur into Moscow Centre’s service and was promptly arrested. More recently, we have had cases of ship’s crew coming ashore from Russian freighters which have put in to Hong Kong for repair. They have made ham-fisted attempts to suborn longshoremen and dock workers whom they consider to be leftist oriented. They have been arrested, questioned, made complete fools of by the press, and duly confined to their ship for the rest of its stay.” He gave other equally milk-and-water examples and everyone grew sleepy, waiting for the last lap. “Our policy has been exactly the same each time. As soon as they’re caught, right away, culprits are put on public show. Press photographs? As many as you like, gentlemen. Television? Set up your cameras. Result? Peking hands us a nice pat on the back for containing Soviet imperialist expansionism.”

Thoroughly over-excited, he found the nerve to address himself directly to Smiley. “So you see, as to your networks of illegals, to be frank, we discount them. Legal, illegal, above-the-line, below it—our view is, the Circus is doing a bit of special pleading in order to get its nose back under the wire!”

Opening his mouth to deliver a suitable rebuke, Guillam felt a restraining touch on his elbow and closed it again.

There was a long silence, in which Wilbraham looked more embarrassed than anybody.

“Sounds more like smoke to me, Chris,” said Enderby drily.

“What’s he driving at?” Wilbraham demanded nervously.

“Just answering the point your bully-boy made for you, Chris. Smoke. Deception. Russians are waving their sabres where you can watch ’em, and while your heads are all turned the wrong way, they get on with the dirty work t’other side of the Island. To wit, Brother Ko. Right, George?”

“Well, that is our view, yes,” Smiley conceded. “And I suppose I should remind you—it’s in the submission, actually—that Haydon himself was always very keen to argue that the Russians had nothing going in Hong Kong.”

“Lunch,” Martindale announced without much optimism. They ate it upstairs, glumly, off plastic catering trays delivered by van. The partitions were too low, and Guillam’s custard flowed into his meat.

Thus refreshed, Smiley availed himself of the after-luncheon torpor to raise what Lacon had called the panic factor. More accurately, he sought to entrench in the meeting a sense of logic behind a Soviet presence in Hong Kong, even if, as he put it, Ko did not supply the example.

How Hong Kong, as mainland China’s largest port, handled 40 percent of her foreign trade.

How an estimated one out of every five Hong Kong residents travelled legally in and out of China every year, though manytime travellers doubtless raised the average.

How Red China maintained in Hong Kong, sub rosa but with the full connivance of the authorities, teams of first-class negotiators, economists, and technicians to watch over Peking’s interest in trade, shipping, and development; and how every man jack of them constituted a natural intelligence target for “enticement, or other forms of secret persuasion,” as he put it.

How Hong Kong’s fishing fleets and junk-fleets enjoyed dual registration in Hong Kong and along the China coast, and passed freely in and out of China waters—

Interrupting, Enderby drawled a supporting question: “And Ko owns a junk-fleet. Didn’t you say he’s one of the last of the brave?”

“Yes, yes, he does.”

“But he doesn’t visit the mainland himself?”

“No, never. His assistant goes, but not Ko, we gather.”

“Assistant?”

“He has a manager body named Tiu. They’ve been together for twenty years. Longer. They share the same background—Hakka, Shanghai, and so forth. Tiu’s his front man on several companies.”

“And Tiu goes to the mainland regularly?”

“Once a year, at least.”

“All over?”

“Canton, Peking, Shanghai are on record. But the record is not necessarily complete.”

“But Ko stays home. Queer.”

There being no further questions or comments on that score, Smiley resumed his Cook’s tour of the charms of Hong Kong as a spy base. Hong Kong was unique, he stated simply. Nowhere on earth offered a tenth of the facilities for getting a toe-hold on China.

“Facilities!” Wilbraham echoed. “Temptations, more like.”

Smiley shrugged. “If you like, temptations,” he agreed. “The Soviet service is not famous for resisting them.” And amid some knowing laughter, he went on to recount what was known of Centre’s attempts till now against the China target as a whole: a joint précis by Connie and di Salis. He described Centre’s efforts to attack from the north, by means of the wholesale recruitment and infiltration of her own ethnic Chinese. Abortive, he said. He described a huge network of listening-posts all along the 4,500-mile Sino-Soviet land border: unproductive, he said, since the yield was military, whereas the threat was political. He recounted the rumours of Soviet approaches to Taiwan, proposing common cause against the China threat through joint operations and profit-sharing: rejected, he said, and probably designed for mischief to annoy Peking, rather than to be taken at face value. He gave instances of the Russian use of talent-spotters among overseas Chinese communities in London, Amsterdam, Vancouver, and San Francisco; and touched on Centre’s veiled proposals to the Cousins some years ago for the establishment of an “intelligence pool” available to China’s common enemies. Fruitless, he said. The Cousins wouldn’t play. Lastly he referred to Centre’s long history of savage burning and bribery operations against Peking officials in overseas posts: product indeterminate, he said.

When he had done all this, he sat back and restated the thesis that was causing all the trouble:

“Sooner or later,” he repeated, “Moscow Centre has to come to Hong Kong.”

Which brought them to Ko once more, and to Roddy Martindale, who, under Enderby’s eagle eye, made the next real passage of arms.

“Well, what do you think the money’s for, George? I mean we’ve heard all the things it isn’t for, and we’ve heard it’s not being spent. But we’re no forrarder, are we, bless us? We don’t seem to know anything. It’s the same old question: how’s the money being earned, how’s it being spent, what should we do?”

“That’s three questions,” said Enderby cruelly under his breath.

“It is because we don’t know,” said Smiley woodenly, “that we are asking permission to find out.”

Someone from the Treasury benches said, “Is half a million a lot?”

“In my experience, unprecedented,” said Smiley. “Moscow Centre”—dutifully he avoided “Karla”—“detests having to buy loyalty at any time. For them to buy it on this scale is unheard of.”

“But whose loyalty are they buying?” someone complained.

Martindale, the gladiator, back to the charge: “You’re selling us short, George. I know you are. You have an inkling—of course you have. Now cut us in on it. Don’t be so coy.”

“Yes, can’t you kick a few ideas around for us?” said Lacon, equally plaintively.

“Surely you can go down the line a little,” Hammer pleaded.

Even under this three-pronged attack Smiley still did not waver. The panic factor was finally paying off; Smiley himself had triggered it. Like scared patients they were appealing to him for a diagnosis. And Smiley was declining to provide one, on the grounds that he lacked the data.

“Really, I cannot do more than give you the facts as they stand. For me to speculate aloud at this stage would not be useful.”

For the first time since the meeting had begun, the Colonial lady in brown opened her mouth and asked a question. Her voice was melodious and intelligent.

“On the matter of precedents then, Mr. Smiley—?” Smiley ducked his head in a quaint little bow. “Are there, for instance, precedents for secret Russian moneys being paid to a stakeholder? In other theatres, for instance?”

Smiley did not immediately answer. Seated only a few inches from him, Guillam swore he sensed a sudden tension, like a surge of energy, passing through his neighbour. But when he glanced at the impassive profile, he saw only a deepening somnolence in his master, and a slight lowering of the weary eyelids.

“There have been a few cases of what we call alimony,” he conceded finally.

“Alimony, Mr. Smiley?” the Colonial lady echoed, while her red-haired companion scowled more terribly, as if divorce were something else he disapproved of.

Smiley picked his way with extreme care. “Clearly there are agents, working in hostile countries—hostile from the Soviet point of view—who for reasons of cover cannot enjoy their pay while they are in the field.” The brown-clad lady delicately nodded her understanding. “The normal practice in such cases is to bank the money in Moscow and make it available to the agent when he is free to spend it. Or to his dependents if—”

“If he gets the chop,” said Martindale with relish.

“But Hong Kong is not Moscow,” the Colonial lady reminded him with a smile.

Smiley had all but come to a halt. “In rare cases where the in-centive is money, and the agent perhaps has no stomach for eventual resettlement in Russia, Moscow Centre has been known, under duress, to make a comparable arrangement in, say, Switzerland.”

“But not in Hong Kong?” she persisted.

“No. Not. And it is unimaginable, on past showing, that Moscow would contemplate parting with alimony on such a scale. For one thing, it would be an inducement to the agent to retire from the field.”

There was laughter, but when it died, the brown-clad lady had her next question ready.

“But the payments began modestly,” she persisted pleasantly. “The inducement is only of relatively recent date?” “Correct,” said Smiley.

Too damn correct, thought Guillam, starting to get alarmed.

“Mr. Smiley, if the dividend were of sufficient value to them, do you think the Russians would be prepared to swallow their objections and pay such a price? After all, in absolute terms the money is entirely trivial beside the value of a great intelligence advantage.”

Smiley had simply stopped. He made no particular gesture. He remained courteous, he even managed a small smile, but he was plainly finished with conjecture. It took Enderby, with his blasé drawl, to blow the question away.

“Look, children, we’ll be doing the theoreticals all day if we’re not careful,” he said, looking at his watch. “Chris, do we wheel the Americans in here? If we’re not telling the Governor, where do we stand on telling the gallant Allies?”

George saved by the bell, thought Guillam.

At the mention of the Americans, Colonial Wilbraham came in like an angry bull. Guillam guessed he had sensed the issue looming, and determined to kill it immediately it showed its head.

“Vetoed, I’m afraid,” he snapped. “Absolutely. Whole host of grounds. Demarcation for one. Hong Kong’s our patch. Americans have no fishing rights there. None. Ko’s a British subject, for another, and entitled to some protection from us. I suppose that’s old-fashioned. Don’t care too much, to be frank. Americans would go clean overboard. Seen it before. God knows where it would end. Three: small point of protocol.” He meant this ironically. He was appealing to the instincts of an ex-Ambassador, trying to rouse his sympathy. “Just a small point, Enderby. Telling the Americans and not telling the Governor—if I was the Governor, put in that position, I’d turn in my badge. That’s all I can say. You would, too. Know you would. You do. I do.”

“Assuming you found out,” Enderby corrected him.

“Don’t worry. I’d find out. I’d have ’em ten deep crawling over his house with microphones, for a start. One or two places in Africa where we let them in. Disaster. Total.” Plonking his forearms on the table, one over the other, he stared at them furiously.

A vehement chugging, as if from an outboard motor, announced a fault in one of the electronic bafflers. It choked, recovered, and zoomed out of hearing again.

“Be a brave man who diddled you on that one, Chris,” Enderby murmured, with a long admiring smile, into the strained silence.

“Endorsed,” Lacon blurted out of the blue.

They know, thought Guillam simply. George has squared them. They know he’s done a deal with Martello, and they know he won’t say so because he’s determined to lie dead. But Guillam saw nothing clearly that day. While the Treasury and Defence factions cautiously concurred on what seemed to be a straight issue—“keep the Americans out of it”—Smiley himself appeared mysteriously unwilling to toe the line.

“But there does remain the headache of what to do with the raw intelligence,” he said. “Should you decide that my service may not proceed, I mean,” he added doubtfully, to the general confusion.

Guillam was relieved to find Enderby equally bewildered: “Hell’s that mean?” he demanded, running with the hounds for a moment.

“Ko has financial interests all over South East Asia,” Smiley reminded them. “Page one of my submission.” Business; clatter of papers. “We have information, for example, that he controls through intermediaries and straw men such oddities as a string of Saigon night-clubs, a Vientiane-based aviation company, a piece of a tanker fleet in Thailand. . . . Several of these enterprises could well be seen to have political overtones which are far within the American sphere of influence. I would have to have your written instruction, naturally, if I were to ignore our side of the existing bilateral agreements.”

“Keep talking,” Enderby ordered, and pulled a fresh match from the box in front of him.

“Oh, I think my point is made, thank you,” said Smiley politely. “Really, it’s a very simple one. Assuming we don’t proceed, which Lacon tells me is the balance of probability today, what am I to do? Throw the intelligence on the scrap-heap? Or pass it to our Allies under the existing barter arrangements?”

“Allies,” Wilbraham exclaimed bitterly. “Allies? You’re putting a pistol at our heads, man!”

Smiley’s iron reply was all the more startling for the passivity which had preceded it: “I have a standing instruction from this committee to repair our American liaison. It is written into my charter, by yourselves, that I am to do everything possible to nurture the special relationship and revive the spirit of mutual confidence which existed before—Haydon. ‘To get us back to the top table,’ you said. . . .” He was looking directly at Enderby.

“Top table,” someone echoed—a quite new voice. “Sacrificial altar, if you ask me. We’ve already burned the Middle East and half Africa on it. All for the special relationship.”

But Smiley seemed not to hear. He had relapsed once more into his posture of mournful reluctance. Sometimes, his sad face said, the burdens of his office were simply too much for him to bear.

A fresh bout of post-luncheon sulkiness set in. Someone complained of the tobacco smoke. A messenger was summoned.

“Devil’s happened to the extractors?” Enderby demanded crossly. “We’re stifling.”

“It’s the parts,” the messenger said. “We put in for them months ago, sir. Before Christmas it was, sir—nearly a year, come to think of it. Still, you can’t blame delay, can you, sir?”

“Christ,” said Enderby.

Tea was sent for. It came in paper cups which leaked onto the baize. Guillam gave his thoughts to Molly Meakin’s peerless figure.

It was almost four o’clock when Lacon rode disdainfully in front of the armies and invited Smiley to state “just exactly what it is you’re asking for in practical terms, George. Let’s have it all on the table and try to hack out an answer.”

Enthusiasm would have been fatal. Smiley seemed to understand that.

“One, we need rights and permissions to operate in the South East Asian theatre—deniably. So that the Governor can wash his hands of us”—a glance at the Parliamentary Under-Secretary— “and so can our masters here. Two, to conduct certain domestic enquiries.”

Heads shot up. The Home Office at once grew fidgety. Why? Who? How? What enquiries? If it’s domestic, it should go to the competition. Pretorius, of the Security Service, was already in a ferment.

“Ko read law in London,” Smiley insisted. “He has connections here, social and business. We should naturally have to investigate them.” He glanced at Pretorius. “We would show the competition all our findings,” he promised.

He resumed his bid. “As regards money, my submission contains a full breakdown of what we need at once, as well as supplementary estimates for various contingencies. Finally we are asking permission, at local as well as Whitehall level, to reopen our Hong Kong residency as a forward base for the operation.”

A stunned silence greeted this last item, to which Guillam’s own amazement contributed. Nowhere, in any of the preparatory discussions at the Circus, or with Lacon, had anybody—not even Smiley himself, to Guillam’s knowledge—raised the slightest question of reopening High Haven or establishing its successor. A fresh clamour started.

“Failing that,” he ended, overriding the protests, “if we cannot have our residency, we request at the very least blind-eye approval to run our own below-the-line agents on the Colony. No local awareness, but approval and protection by London. Any existing sources to be retrospectively legitimised. In writing,” he ended, with a hard glance at Lacon, and stood up.

Glumly, Guillam and Smiley sat themselves once more in the waiting-room on the same salmon bench where they had begun, side by side, like passengers travelling in the same direction.

“Why?” Guillam muttered once, but asking questions of George Smiley was not merely in bad taste that day; it was a pastime expressly forbidden by the cautionary notice that hung above them on the wall.

Of all the damn-fool ways of overplaying one’s hand, thought Guillam dismally. You’ve thrown it, he thought. Poor old sod: finally past it. The one operation which could put us back in the game. Greed, that’s what it was. The greed of an old spy in a hurry. I’ll stick with him, thought Guillam. I’ll go down with the ship. We’ll open a chicken farm together. Molly can keep the accounts, and Ann can have bucolic tangles with the labourers.

“How do you feel?” he asked.

“It’s not a matter of feeling,” Smiley replied.

Thanks very much, thought Guillam.

The minutes turned to twenty. Smiley had not stirred. His chin had fallen on to his chest, his eyes had closed; he might have been at prayer.

“Perhaps you should take an evening off,” said Guillam.

Smiley only frowned.

A messenger appeared, inviting them to return. Lacon was now at the head of the table, and his manner was prefectorial. Enderby sat two away from him, conversing in murmurs with the Welsh Hammer. Pretorius glowered like a storm cloud, and his nameless lady pursed her lips in an unconscious kiss of disapproval.

Lacon rustled his notes for silence and, like a teasing judge, began reading off the committee’s detailed findings before he delivered the verdict. The Treasury had entered a serious protest, on the record, regarding the misuse of Smiley’s management account. Smiley should also bear in mind that any requirement for domestic rights and permissions should be cleared with the Security Service in advance and not “sprung on them like a rabbit out of a hat in the middle of a full-dress meeting of the committee.” There could be no earthly question of reopening the Hong Kong residency. Simply on the issue of time alone, such a step was impossible. It was really a quite shameful proposal, he implied. Principle was involved, consultation would have to be at the highest level, and since Smiley had already moved specifically against advising the Governor of his findings—Lacon’s doff of the cap to Wilbraham here—it was going to be very hard to make a case for re-establishing a residency in the foreseeable future, particularly bearing in mind the unhappy publicity attaching to the evacuation of High Haven.

“I must accept that view with great reluctance,” said Smiley gravely.

Oh, for God’s sake, thought Guillam; let’s at least go down fighting!

“Accept it how you like,” said Enderby—and Guillam could have sworn he saw in the eyes of both Enderby and the Welsh Hammer a gleam of victory.

Bastards, he thought simply. No free chickens for you. In his mind he was taking leave of the whole pack of them.

“Everything else,” said Lacon, putting down a sheet of paper and taking up another, “with certain limiting conditions and safeguards regarding desirability, money, and the duration of the licence, is granted.”

The park was empty. The lesser commuters had left the field to the professionals. A few lovers lay on the damp grass like soldiers after the battle. A few flamingoes dozed. At Guillam’s side, as he sauntered euphorically in Smiley’s wake, Roddy Martindale was singing Smiley’s praises. “I think George is simply marvellous. Indestructible. And grip. I adore grip. Grip is my favourite human quality. George has it in spades. One takes quite a different view of these things when one’s translated. One grows to the scale of them, I admit. Your father was an Arabist, I recall?”

“Yes,” said Guillam, his mind yet again on Molly, wondering whether dinner was still possible.

“And frightfully Almanach de Gotha. Now was he an A.D. man or a B.C. man?”

About to give a thoroughly obscene reply, Guillam realised just in time that Martindale was enquiring after nothing more harmful than his father’s scholarly preferences.

“Oh, B.C. B.C. all the way,” he said. “He’d have gone back to Eden if he could have done.”

“Come to dinner.”

“Thanks.”

“We’ll fix a date. Now, who’s fun for a change? Who do you like?”

Ahead of them, floating on the dewy air, they heard the drawling voice of Enderby applauding Smiley’s victory.

“Nice little meeting. Lot achieved. Nothing given away. Nicely played hand. Land this one and you can just about build an extension, I should think. And the Cousins will play ball, will they?” He was bellowing as if they were still inside the safe room. “You’ve tested the water there? They’ll carry your bags for you and not hog the match? Bit of a cliff-hanger that one, I’d have thought, but I suppose you’re up to it. You tell Martello to wear his crêpe soles, if he’s got any, or we’ll be in deep trouble with the Colonials in no time. Pity about old Wilbraham. He’d have run India rather well.”

Beyond them again, almost out of sight among the trees, the little Welsh Hammer was making energetic gestures to Lacon, who was stooping to catch his words.

Nice little conspiracy too, thought Guillam. He glanced back and was surprised to see Fawn, the baby-sitter, hurrying after them. He seemed at first a long way off. Shreds of fog obscured his legs entirely. Only the top of him reached above the sea. Then suddenly he was much closer, and Guillam heard his familiar plaintive bray calling “Sir, sir,” trying to catch Smiley’s attention. Quickly placing Martindale out of earshot, Guillam strode up to him.

“What the devil’s the matter? Why are you bleating like that?”

“They’ve found a girl! Miss Sachs, sir, she sent me to tell him specially.” His eyes shone bright and slightly crazy. “ ‘Tell the Chief they’ve found the girl.’ Her very words, personal for Chief.”

“Do you mean she sent you here?”

“Personal for Chief, immediate,” Fawn replied evasively.

“I said, ‘Did she send you here?’ ” Guillam was seething. “Answer, ‘No, sir, she did not.’ You bloody little drama queen, racing round London in your gym shoes! You’re out of your mind.” Snatching the crumpled note from Fawn’s hand, he read it cursorily. “It’s not even the same name. Hysterical bloody nonsense. You go straight back to your hutch, do you hear? The Chief will give the matter his attention when he returns. Don’t you dare stir things up like that again.”

“Whoever was he?” Martindale enquired, quite breathless with excitement, as Guillam returned. “What a darling little creature! Are all spies as pretty as that? How positively Venetian. I shall volunteer at once.”

The same night, a ragged conference was held in the rumpus room, and the quality was not improved by the euphoria—in Connie’s case, alcoholic—brought on by Smiley’s triumph at the steering conference. After the constraints and tensions of the last months, Connie charged in all directions. The girl! The girl was the clue! Connie had shed all her intellectual bonds. Send Toby Esterhase to Hong Kong, house her, photograph her, trace her, search her room! Get Sam Collins in, now!

Di Salis fidgeted, simpered, puffed at his pipe, and jiggled his feet, but for that evening he was entirely under Connie’s spell. He even spoke once of “a natural line to the heart of things”— meaning, yet again, the mystery girl. No wonder little Fawn had been infected by their zeal. Guillam felt almost apologetic for his outburst in the park. Indeed, without Smiley and Guillam to put the dampers on, an act of collective folly could very easily have taken place that night, and God knows where it might not have led. The secret world has plenty of precedents of sane people breaking out that way, but this was the first time Guillam had seen the disease in action.

So it was ten o’clock or more before a brief could be drafted for old Craw, and half past before Guillam blearily bumped into Molly Meakin on his way to the lift. In consequence of this happy coincidence—or had Molly planned it? He never knew—a beacon was lit in Peter Guillam’s life that burned fiercely from then on. With her customary acquiescence, Molly consented to be driven home, though she lived in Highgate, miles out of his way, and when they reached her doorstep she as usual invited him in for a quick coffee. Anticipating the familiar frustrations (“no-Peter-please-Peter-dear-I’m sorry”), Guillam was on the brink of declining, when something in her eye—a certain calm resolution, as it seemed to him—caused him to change his mind. Once inside her flat, she closed the door and put it on the chain. Then she led him demurely to her bedroom, where she astonished him with a joyous and refined carnality.

9

CRAW’S LITTLE SHIP

In Hong Kong it was forty-eight hours later, and a Sunday evening. In the alley Craw walked carefully. Dusk had come early with the fog, but the houses were jammed too close to let it in, so it hung a few floors higher, with the washing and the cables, spitting hot polluted raindrops which raised smells of orange in the food stalls and ticked on the brim of Craw’s straw hat. He was in China here, at sea-level, the China he loved most, and China was waking for the festival of night: singing, honking, wailing, beating gongs, bargaining, cooking, playing tinny tunes through twenty different instruments; or watching motionless from doorways how delicately the fancy-looking foreign devil picked his way among them. Craw loved it all; but most tenderly he loved his “little ships,” as the Chinese called their secret whisperers, and of these Miss Phoebe Wayfarer, whom he was on his way to visit, was a classic, if modest example.

He breathed in, savouring the familiar pleasures. The East had never failed him: “We colonise them, Your Graces, we corrupt them, we exploit them, we bomb them, sack their cities, ignore their culture, and confound them with the infinite variety of our religious sects. We are hideous not only in their sight, Monsignors, but in their nostrils as well—the stink of the roundeye is abhorrent to them and we’re too thick even to know it. Yet when we have done our worst, and more than our worst, my sons, we have barely scratched the surface of the Asian smile.”

Other round-eyes might not have come here so willingly alone. The Peak mafia would not have known this place existed; the embattled British wives in their government housing ghettoes in Happy Valley would have found here everything they hated most about their billet. It was not a bad part of town, but it was not Europe either: the Europe of Central and Pedder Street half a mile away, of electric doors that sighed for you as they admitted you to the air-conditioning. Other round-eyes, in their apprehension, might have cast inadvertent glares, and that was dangerous. In Shanghai, Craw had known more than one man die of an accidental bad look. Whereas Craw’s look was at all times kindly; he deferred, he was modest in his manner, and when he stopped to make a purchase, he offered respectful greetings to the stall-holder in bad but robust Cantonese. And he paid without carping at the surcharge befitting his inferior race.

He bought orchids and lamb’s liver. He bought them every Sunday, distributing his custom fairly between rival stalls and— when his Cantonese ran out—lapsing into his own ornate version of English.

He pressed the bell. Phoebe, like old Craw himself, had an entry phone. Head Office had decreed they should be standard issue. She had twisted a piece of heather into her mail-box for good joss, and this was the safety signal.

“Hi,” a girl’s voice said, over the speaker. It could have been American or it could have been Cantonese, offering an interrogative “Yes?”

“Larry calls me Pete,” Craw said.

“Come on up, I have Larry with me at this moment.”

The staircase was pitch dark and stank of vomit, and Craw’s heels clanked like tin on the stone treads. He pressed the timeswitch but no light went on, so he had to grope his way for three floors. There had been a move to find her somewhere better, but it had died with Thesinger’s departure and now there was no hope and, in a way, no Phoebe either.

“Bill,” she murmured, closing the door after him, and kissed him on both mottled cheeks, the way pretty girls may kiss kind uncles, though she was not pretty. Craw gave her the orchids. His manner was gentle and solicitous.

“My dear,” he said. “My dear.”

She was trembling. There was a bed-sitting-room with a cooker and a hand-basin; there was a separate lavatory with a shower. That was all. He walked past her to the basin, unwrapped the liver, and gave it to the cat.

“Oh, you spoil her, Bill,” said Phoebe, smiling at the flowers. He had laid a brown envelope on the bed, but neither of them mentioned it.

“How’s William?” she said, playing with the sound of his name.

Craw had hung his hat and stick on the door and was pouring Scotch: neat for Phoebe, soda for himself.

“How’s Pheeb? That’s more to the point. How’s it been out there, the cold long week? Eh, Pheeb?”

She had ruffled the bed and laid a frilly night dress on the floor, because so far as the block was concerned, Phoebe was the half-kwailo bastard who whored with the fat foreign devil. Over the crushed pillows hung her picture of Swiss Alps, the picture every Chinese girl seemed to have, and on the bedside locker the photograph of her English father, the only picture she had ever seen of him: a clerk from Dorking in Surrey, just after his arrival on the Island—rounded collars, moustache, and staring, slightly crazy eyes. Craw sometimes wondered whether it was taken after he was shot.

“It’s all right now,” said Phoebe. “It’s fine now, Bill.”

She stood at his shoulder, filling the vase, and her hands were shaking badly, which they usually did on Sundays. She wore a grey tunic dress in honour of Peking, and the gold necklace given to her to commemorate her first decade of service to the Circus. In a ridiculous spurt of gallantry, Head Office had decided to have it made at Asprey’s, then sent out by bag, with a personal letter to her signed by Percy Alleline, George Smiley’s luckless predecessor, which she had been allowed to look at but not keep. Having filled the vase, she tried to carry it to the table but it slopped, so Craw took it.

“Hey, now, take it easy, won’t you?”

She stood for a moment, still smiling at him, then breathed out, a long slow sob of reaction, and slumped into a chair. Sometimes she wept, sometimes she sneezed, or was very loud and laughed too much, but always she saved the moment for his arrival, however it took her.

“Bill, I get so frightened sometimes.”

“I know, dear, I know.” He sat at her side, holding her hand.

“That new boy in Features. He stares at me, Bill, he watches everything I do. I’m sure he works for someone. Bill, who does he work for?”

“Maybe he’s a little amorous,” said Craw, in his softest tone, as he rhythmically patted her shoulder. “You’re an attractive woman, Phoebe. Don’t you forget that, my dear. You can exert an influence without knowing it.” He affected a paternal sternness. “Now, have you been flirting with him? There’s another thing. A woman like you can flirt without being conscious of the fact. A man of the world can spot these things, Phoebe. He can tell.”

Last week, it was the janitor downstairs; she said he was writing down the hours she came and went. The week before, it was a car she kept seeing, an Opel, always the same one, green. The trick was to calm her fears without discouraging her vigilance; because one day—as Craw never allowed himself to forget—one day, she was going to be right.

Producing a bunch of handwritten notes from the bedside, she began her own debriefing, but so suddenly that Craw was overrun. She had a pale large face that missed being beautiful in either race. Her trunk was long, her legs were short, and her hands Saxon, ugly, and strong. Sitting on the edge of the bed, she looked suddenly matronly. She had put on thick spectacles to read. Canton was sending a student commissar to address Tuesday’s cadre, she said, so the Thursday meeting was closed and Ellen Tuo had once more lost her chance to be secretary for an evening—

“Hey steady down, now,” Craw cried, laughing. “Where’s the fire, for God’s sake!”

Opening a notebook on his knee, he tried to catch up with her. But Phoebe would not be checked, not even by Bill Craw, though she had been told he was, in fact, a colonel—even higher. She wanted it behind her, the whole confession. One of her routine targets was a leftist intellectual group of university students and Communist journalists, which had somewhat superficially accepted her. She had reported on it weekly without much progress. Now, for some reason, the group had flared into activity. Billy Chan had been called to Kuala Lumpur for a special conference, she said, and Johnny and Belinda Fong were being asked to find a safe store for a printing press. The evening was approaching fast. While she ran on, Craw discreetly rose and put on the lamp so that the electric light would not shock her once the day faded altogether.

There was talk of joining up with the Fukienese in North Point, she said, but the academic comrades were opposed as usual. “They’re opposed to everything,” said Phoebe savagely, “the snobs. And anyway that stupid bitch Belinda is months behind on her dues, and we may quite well chuck her out of the Party unless she stops gambling.”

“And quite right too, my dear,” said Craw sedately.

“Johnny Fong says Belinda’s pregnant and it isn’t his. Well, I hope she is; it will shut her up,” said Phoebe, and Craw thought, We had that trouble a couple of times with you if I remember rightly, and it didn’t shut you up, did it?

Craw wrote obediently, knowing that neither London nor anyone else would ever read a word of it. In the days of its wealth, the Circus had penetrated dozens of such groups, hoping in time to break into what was idiotically referred to as “the Peking-Hong Kong shuttle” and so get a foot in the mainland. The ploy had withered and the Circus had no brief to act as watch-dog for the Colony’s security, a rôle Special Branch jealously guarded for itself. But little ships, as Craw knew very well, cannot change course as easily as the winds that drive them.

Craw played her along, pitching in with the follow-up questions, checking sources and sub-sources. Was it hearsay, Pheeb? Well, where did Billy Lee get that one from, Pheeb? Was it possible Billy Lee was needling the story a bit—for face, Pheeb, giving it the old needle? He used the journalistic term because, like Jerry and Craw himself, Phoebe was in her other profession a journalist, a free-lance gossip writer feeding the local Englishlanguage press with tid-bits about life-styles of the local Chinese aristocracy.

Listening, waiting—vamping, as the actors call it—Craw told himself her story, just as he had told it on the refresher course at Sarratt five years ago, when he was back there getting a rebore in the black arts. The triumph of the fortnight, they had told him afterwards. They had made it a plenary session in anticipation. Even the directing staff had come to hear him. Those who were off duty had asked for a special van to bring them in early from their Watford housing estate. Just to hear old Craw, the Eastern hand, sitting under the antlers in the converted library, sum up a lifetime in the game. “Agents Who Recruit Themselves” ran the title. There was a lectern on the podium but he didn’t use it. Instead, he sat on a plain chair, with his jacket off and his belly hanging out and his knees apart and shadows of sweat darkening his shirt, and he told it to them the way he would have told it to the Shanghai Bowlers, on a typhoon Saturday in Hong Kong, if only circumstance had allowed.

“ ‘Agents Who Recruit Themselves,’ Your Graces.”

No one knew the job better, they told him—and he believed them. If the East was Craw’s home, the little ships were his family, and he lavished on them all the fondness for which the overt world had somehow never given him an outlet. He raised and trained them with a love that would have done credit to a father; and it was the hardest moment in an old man’s life when Tufty Thesinger did his moonlight flit and left Craw unwarned, temporarily without a purpose or a lifeline.

Some people are agents from birth, Monsignors—he told them—appointed to the work by the period of history, the place, and their own natural dispositions. In their cases, it was simply a question of who got to them first, Your Eminences: “Whether it’s us, whether it’s the opposition, or whether it’s the bloody missionaries.”

Laughter.

Then the case histories with names and places changed, and among them none other than code-name Susan, a little ship of the female gender, Monsignors, South East Asian theatre, born in the year of turmoil 1941, of mixed blood. He was referring to Phoebe Wayfarer.

“Father a penniless clerk from Dorking, Your Graces. Came East to join one of the Scottish houses that plundered the coast six days a week and prayed to Calvin on the seventh. Too broke to get himself a European wife, lads, so he takes a forbidden Chinese girl and sets her up for a few pence, and code-name Susan is the result. Same year the Japanese appear on the scene. Call it Singapore, Hong Kong, Malaya—the story’s the same, Monsignors. They appear overnight. To stay. In the chaos, codename Susan’s father does a very noble thing: ‘To hell with caution, Your Eminences,’ he says. ‘This is the time for good men and true to stand up and be counted.’ So he marries the lady, Your Graces, a course of action I would not normally counsel, but he does, and when he’s married her he christens his daughter code-name Susan and joins the Volunteers, which was a fine body of heroic fools who formed a local Home Guard against the Nipponese hordes. The very next day, not being a natural manat-arms, Your Graces, he gets his arse shot off by the Japanese invader and promptly expires. Amen. May the clerk from Dorking rest in peace, Your Graces.”

As old Craw crosses himself, gusts of laughter sweep the room. Craw does not laugh with them, but plays the straight man. There are fresh faces in the front two rows, uncut, unlined, television faces; Craw guesses they are new entrants whipped in to hear the Great One. Their presence sharpens his performance. Henceforth he has a special eye for the front rows.

“Code-name Susan is still in rompers when her good father meets his quietus, lads, but all her life she’s going to remember: when the chips are down, the British stand by their commitments. Every year that passes, she’s going to love that dead hero a little more. After the war, her father’s old trading house remembers her for a year or two, then conveniently forgets her. Never mind. At fifteen, she’s ill from having to keep her sick mother and work the ballrooms to finance her own schooling. Never mind. A welfare worker takes up with her—fortunately, a member of our distinguished brethren, Your Reverends—and he guides her in our direction.” Craw mops his brow. “Code-name Susan’s rise to wealth and godliness has begun, Your Graces,” he declares. “Under journalist cover we bring her into play, give her Chinese newspapers to translate, send her on little errands, involve her, complete her education, and train her in nightwork. A little money, a little patronage, a little love, a little patience, and it’s not too long before our Susan has seven legal trips to mainland China to her credit, including some very windy tradecraft. Skilfully performed, Your Graces. She has played courier, and made one crash approach to an uncle in Peking, which paid off. All this, lads, despite the fact she’s half a kwailo and not naturally trusted by the Chinese.

“And who did she think the Circus was, all that time?” Craw bellowed at his enthralled audience. “Who did she think we were, lads?” The old magician drops his voice, and lifts a fat forefinger. “Her father,” he says, in the silence. “We’re that dead clerk from Dorking. Saint George, that’s who we are. Cleansing the overseas Chinese communities of ‘harmful elements,’ whatever the hell they are. Breaking the triads and the rice cartels and the opium gangs and the child prostitution. She even saw us, when she had to, as the secret ally of Peking, because we, the Circus, had the interest of all good Chinese at heart.” Craw ran a ferocious eye over the rows of child faces longing to be stern.

“Do I see someone smiling, Your Graces?” he demanded, in a voice of thunder. He didn’t.

“Mind you, Squires,” Craw ended, “there’s a part of her knew damn well it was all baloney. That’s where you come in. That’s where your fieldman is ever at the ready. Oh, yes! We’re keepers of the faith, lads. When it shakes, we stiffen it. When it falls, we’ve got our arms out to catch it.” He had reached his zenith. In counterpoint, he let his voice fall to a mellow murmur. “Be the faith ever so crackpot, Your Graces, never despise it. We’ve precious little else to offer them these days. Amen.”

All his life, in his unashamedly emotional way, old Craw would remember the applause.

Her debriefing finished, Phoebe was hunched forward, her forearms on her knees, the knuckles of her big hands backed loosely against each other like tired lovers. Craw rose solemnly, took her notes from the table, and burnt them at the gas ring.

“Bravo, my dear,” he said quietly. “A sterling week, if I may say so. Anything else?”

She shook her head.

“I mean to burn,” he said.

She shook her head again.

Craw studied her. “Pheeb, my dear,” he declared at last, as if he had reached a momentous decision. “Get off your hunkers. It’s time I took you out to dinner.” She looked around at him, confused. The drink had raced to her head, as it always did. “An amiable dinner between fellow scribblers, once in a while, is not inconsistent with cover, I venture to suggest. How about it?”

She made him look at the wall while she put on a pretty frock. She used to have a humming-bird but it died. He bought her another but it died too, so they agreed the flat was bad luck for humming-birds and gave up on them.

“One day I’ll take you skiing,” he said as she locked the front door behind them. It was a joke between them, to do with her snow scene over the bed.

“Only for one day?” she replied. Which was also a joke, part of the same habitual repartee.

In that year of turmoil, as Craw would say, it was still clever to eat in a sampan on Causeway Bay. The smart set had not discovered it; the food was cheap and unlike food elsewhere. Craw took a gamble and by the time they reached the waterfront the fog had lifted and the night sky was clear. He chose the sampan farthest out to sea, deep in among a cluster of small junks. The cook squatted at the charcoal brazier and his wife served; the hulls of the junks loomed over them, blotting out the stars, and the boat children scampered like crabs from one deck to another while their parents chanted slow funny catechisms across the black water. Craw and Phoebe crouched on wood stools under the furled canopy, two feet above the sea, eating mullet by lamplight. Beyond the typhoon shelters, ships slid past them, lighted buildings on the march, and the junks hobbled in their wakes. Inland, the Island whined and clanged and throbbed, and the huge slums twinkled like jewel boxes opened by the deceptive beauty of the night. Presiding over them, glimpsed between the dipping finger of the masts, sat the black Peak, Victoria, her sodden face shrouded with moonlit skeins; the goddess, the freedom, the lure of all that wild striving in the valley.

They talked the arts. Phoebe was doing what Craw thought of as her cultural number. It was very boring. One day, she said drowsily, she would direct a film, perhaps two, on the true, the real China. Recently she had seen an historical romance made by Run Run Shaw, all about the palace intrigues. She considered it excellent but a little too—well—heroic. Theatre, now. Had Craw heard the good news that the Cambridge Players might be bringing a new revue to the Colony in December? At present it was only a rumour, but she hoped it would be confirmed next week.

“That should be fun, Pheeb,” said Craw heartily.

“It will not be fun at all,” Phoebe retorted sternly. “The Players specialise in biting social satire.”

In the darkness Craw smiled and poured Phoebe more beer. You can always learn, he told himself; Monsignors, you can always learn.

Till with no prompting that she could have been aware of, Phoebe began talking about her Chinese millionaires, which was what Craw had been waiting for all evening. In Phoebe’s world, the Hong Kong rich were royalty. Their foibles and excesses were handed round as freely as in other places the lives of actresses or footballers. Phoebe knew them by heart.

“So who’s pig of the week this time, Pheeb?” Craw asked genially.

Phoebe was unsure. “Whom shall we elect?” she said, affecting coquettish indecision. There was the pig P.K. of course: his sixtyeighth birthday on Tuesday, a third wife half his age, and how does P.K. celebrate? Out on the town with a twenty-year-old slut.

Disgusting, Craw agreed. “P.K.” he repeated. “P.K. was the fellow with the gateposts, wasn’t he?”

One hundred thousand Hong Kong, said Phoebe. Dragons nine feet high, cast in fibreglass and perspex so that they lit up from inside.

Or it might be the pig Y.Y., she reflected judiciously, changing her mind. Y.Y. was certainly a candidate. Y.Y. had married one month ago exactly, that nice daughter of J. J. Haw, of Haw & Chan, the tanker kings, a thousand lobsters at the wedding. Night before last, he turned up at a reception with a brand-new mistress, bought with his wife’s money, a nobody except that he had dressed her at Saint Laurent and decked her out in a fourstring choker of Mikimoto pearls—hired, of course, not given.

Despite herself, Phoebe’s voice faltered and softened. “Bill,” she breathed, “that kid looked completely fantastic beside the old frog. You should have seen.”

Or maybe Harold Tan, she pondered dreamily. Harold had been specially nasty. Harold Tan had flown his kids home from their Swiss finishing schools for the festival, first class return from Geneva. At four in the morning, they were all cavorting naked round the pool, the kids and their friends, drunk, pouring champagne into the water, while Harold Tan tried to photograph the action.

Craw waited, in his mind holding the door wide open for her, but still she wouldn’t pass through, and Craw was far too old a dog to push her. Chiu Chow were best, he said archly. “Chiu Chow wouldn’t get up to all that nonsense. Eh, Pheeb? Very long pockets, the Chiu Chow have, and very short arms,” he advised her. “Make a Scotsman blush, your Chiu Chow would—eh, Pheeb?”

Phoebe had no place for irony. “Do not believe it,” she retorted demurely. “Many Chiu Chow are both generous and highminded.”

He was willing the man on her, like a conjurer willing a card, but still she hesitated, walked around it, reached for the alternatives.

She mentioned this one, that one, lost the thread, wanted more beer, and when he had all but given up she remarked, quite dreamily, “And as for Drake Ko, he is a complete lamb. Against Drake Ko, no bad words at all, please.”

Now it was Craw’s turn to walk away. What did Phoebe think of old Andrew Kwok’s divorce, he asked; Christ, that must have been a costly one! They say she would have given him the push long ago, but she wanted to wait till he’d made his pile and was really worth divorcing. Any truth in that one, Pheeb? And so on, three, five names, before he allowed himself to take the bait.

“Have you ever heard of old Drake Ko keeping a round-eye mistress at any time? They were talking about it in the Hong Kong Club, only the other day. Blond party, said to be quite a dish.”

Phoebe liked to think of Craw in the Hong Kong Club. It satisfied her colonial yearnings.

“Oh, everyone has heard,” she said wearily, as if Craw, as usual, was light-years behind the hunt. “There was a time when all the boys had them—didn’t you know? P.K. had two, of course. Harold Tan had one, till Eustace Chow stole her, and Charlie Wu tried to take his to dinner at the Governor’s, but his tai-tai wouldn’t let the chauffeur pick her up.”

“Where’d they get them from, for Christ’s sakes?” Craw asked with a laugh. “Lane Crawford?”

“From the airlines, where do you think,” Phoebe retorted with heavy disapproval. “Air hostesses moonlighting on their stop-overs, five hundred U.S. a night for a white-woman whore. And including the English lines—don’t deceive yourself, the English were the worst by far. Then Harold Tan liked his so much he made an arrangement with her, and the next thing they were all moving into flats and walking round the stores like duchesses any time they came to Hong Kong for four days—enough to make you sick.

“Mind you, Liese is a different class entirely. Liese has class. She is extremely aristocratic, her parents own fabulous estates in the South of France and also an out-island in the Bahamas, and it is purely for reasons of moral independence that she refuses to accept their wealth. You only have to look at her bone structure.”

“Liese,” Craw repeated. “Liese? Kraut, eh? Don’t hold with Krauts. No racial prejudices but don’t care for Krauts, I’m afraid. Now, what’s a nice Chiu Chow boy like Drake doing with a hateful Hun for a concubine, I ask myself. Still, you should know, Pheeb, you’re the expert, it’s your bailiwick, my dear—who am I to criticise?”

They had moved to the back of the sampan and were lying in the cushions side by side.

“Don’t be utterly ridiculous. Liese is an aristocratic English girl.”

“Tra-la-la,” said Craw, and for a while gazed at the stars.

“She has a most positive and refining influence on him.”

“Who does?” said Craw, as if he had lost the thread.

Phoebe spoke through gritted teeth. “Liese has a refining influence on Drake Ko. Bill, listen! Are you asleep? Bill, I think you should take me home. Take me home, please.”

Craw gave a low sigh. These lovers’ tiffs between them were six-monthly events, at least, and had a cleansing effect on their relationship.

“My dear. Phoebe. Give ear to me, will you? For one moment, right? No English girl, high-born, fine-boned, or knock-kneed, can possibly be named Liese unless there is a Kraut at work somewhere. That’s for openers. What’s her other name?”

“Worth.”

“Worth what? All right, that was a joke. Forget it. Elizabeth, that’s what she is. Contracted to Lizzie. Or Liza. Liza of Lambeth. You misheard. There’s blood for you, if you like: Miss Elizabeth Worth. I could see the bone structure there all right. Not Liese, dear. Lizzie.”

Phoebe became openly furious: “Don’t you tell me how to pronounce anything!” she flung at him. “Her name is Liese, pronounced ‘Leesa’ and written ‘L-i-e-s-e,’ because I asked her and I wrote it down and I have printed that name in—Oh, Bill.” Her forehead fell on his shoulder. “Oh, Bill. Take me home.”

She began weeping. Craw cuddled her against him, gently patting her shoulder.

“Ah, now, cheer up, my dear. The fault was mine, not yours. I should have known that she was a friend of yours. A fine society woman like Liese, a woman of beauty and fortune, locked in romantic attachment to one of the Island’s new nobility—how could a diligent newshound like Phoebe fail to befriend her? I was blind. Forgive me.” He allowed a decent interval. “What happened?” he asked indulgently. “You interviewed her, did you?”

For the second time that night, Phoebe dried her eyes with Craw’s handkerchief.

“She begged me. She’s not my friend. She is far too grand to be my friend. How could she be? She begged me not to print her name. She is here incognito. Her life depends upon it. If her parents know she is here, they will send for her at once. They are fantastically influential. They have private planes, everything. The minute they know she is living with a Chinese man, they would bring fantastic pressure to bear just to get her back. ‘Phoebe,’ she said. ‘Of all people in Hong Kong, you will understand best what it means to live under the shadow of intolerance.’ She appealed to me. I promised.”

“Quite right,” said Craw stoutly. “Don’t you ever break that promise, Pheeb. A promise is a bond.” He gave an admiring sigh. “Life’s byways, I always maintain, are ever stranger than life’s highways. If you put that in your paper, your editor would say you were soft in the head, I daresay. And yet it’s true. A shining wonderful example of human integrity for its own sake.” Her eyes had closed, so he gave her a jolt in order to keep them open. “Now, where does a match like that have its genesis, I ask myself. What star, what happy chance could bring together two such needful souls? In Hong Kong too, for God’s sake.”

“It was fate. She was not even living here. She had withdrawn from the world altogether after an unhappy love affair, and she had decided to spend the rest of her life making exquisite jewellery in order to give the world something beautiful among all its suffering. She flew in for a day or two just to buy some gold, and quite by chance, at one of Sally Cale’s fabulous receptions, she met Drake Ko and that was that.”

“And thereafter the course of true love ran sweet, eh?”

“Certainly not. She met him. She loved him. But she was determined not to get embroiled, and returned home.”

“Home?” Craw echoed, mystified. “Where’s home for a woman of her integrity?”

Phoebe laughed. “Not to the South of France, silly. To Vientiane. To a city no one ever visits. A city without high life, or any of the luxuries to which she was accustomed from birth. That was her chosen place. Her island. She had friends there, she was interested in Buddhism and art and antiquity.”

“And where does she hang out now? Still in some humble croft, is she, clinging to her notions of abstinence? Or has Brother Ko converted her to less frugal paths?”

“Don’t be sarcastic. Drake has given her a most beautiful apartment, naturally.”

That was Craw’s limit; he knew it at once. He covered the card with others, he told her stories about old Shanghai. But he didn’t take another step toward the elusive Liese Worth, though Phoebe might have saved him a lot of legwork.

“Behind every painter,” he liked to say, “and behind every fieldman, lads, there should be a colleague standing with a mallet, ready to hit him over the head when he has gone far enough.”

In the taxi home, she was calm again but shivering. He saw her right to the door in style. He had forgiven her entirely. On the doorstep he made to kiss her, but she held him back from her.

“Bill. Am I really any use? Tell me. When I’m no use, you must throw me out, I insist. Tonight was nothing. You are sweet, you pretend, I try. But it was still nothing. If there is other work for me, I will take it. Otherwise you must throw me aside. Ruthlessly.”

“There’ll be other nights,” he assured her, and only then did she let him kiss her.

“Thank you, Bill,” she said.

“So there you are, Your Graces,” Craw reflected happily, as he took the taxi on to the Hilton. “Code-name Susan toiled and span and she was worth a little less each day, because agents are only ever as good as the target they’re pointed at, and that’s the truth of them. And the one time she gave us gold, pure gold, Monsignors”—in his mind’s eye, he held up that same fat forefinger, one message for the uncut boys spellbound in the forward rows—“the one time—she didn’t even know she’d done it, and she never could!”

* * *

The best jokes in Hong Kong, Craw had once written, are seldom laughed at because they are too serious. That year there was the Tudor pub in the unfinished high-rise building, for instance, where genuine, sour-faced English wenches in period décolleté served genuine English beer at twenty degrees below its English temperature, while outside in the lobby sweating coolies in yellow helmets toiled round the clock to finish off the elevators. Or you could visit the Italian taverna where a cast-iron spiral staircase pointed to Juliet’s balcony but ended instead in a blank plaster ceiling; or the Scottish inn with kilted Chinese Scots who occasionally rioted in the heat or when the fares rose on the Star Ferry. Craw had even attended an opium divan with air-conditioning and Muzak churning out “Greensleeves.” But the most bizarre, the most contrary, for Craw’s money, was this roof-top bar overlooking the harbour, with its four-piece Chinese band playing Noël Coward, and its straight-faced Chinese barmen in periwigs and frock-coats looming out of the darkness and enquiring, in good Americanese, what was his “drinking pleasure?”

“A beer,” Craw’s guest growled, helping himself to a handful of salted almonds. “But cold. Hear that? Muchee coldee. And bring it chop chop.”

“Life smiles upon Your Eminence?” Craw enquired.

“Drop all that, d’you mind? Gets on my wick.”

The Superintendent’s embattled face had one expression only, and that was of a bottomless cynicism. If man had a choice between good and evil, his baleful scowl said, he chose evil any time; and the world was cut down the middle, between those who knew this, and accepted it, and those long-haired pansies in Whitehall who believed in Father Christmas.

“Found her file yet?” Craw enquired.

“No.”

“She calls herself Worth. She’s had her syllables removed.”

“I know what she bloody calls herself. She can call herself bloody Mata Hari, for all I care. There’s still no file on her.”

“But there was?”

“Right, cobber, there was,” the Rocker simpered furiously, mimicking Craw’s accent. “There was, and now there isn’t. Do I make myself clear or shall I write it in invisible ink on a carrier pigeon’s arse for you, you heathen bloody Aussie?”

Craw sat quiet awhile, sipping his drink in steady, repetitive movements.

“Would Ko have done that?”

“Done what?” The Rocker was being wilfully obtuse.

“Had her file nicked?”

“Could have done.”

“The missing-record malady appears to be spreading,” Craw commented after further pause for refreshment. “London sneezes and Hong Kong catches the cold. My professional sympathies, Monsignor. My fraternal commiserations.” He lowered his voice to a toneless murmur. “Tell me: is the name Sally Cale music to Your Grace’s ear?”

“Never heard of her.”

“What’s her racket?”

“Chichi antiquities limited, Kowloon-side. Pillaged art trea-sures, quality fakes, images of the Lord Buddha.”

“Where from?”

“Real stuff comes from Burma, way of Vientiane. Fakes are home produce. Sixty-year-old dyke,” he added sourly, addressing himself cautiously to another beer. “Keeps Alsatians and chimpanzees. Just up your street.”

“Any form?”

“You’re joking.”

“I am advised that it was Cale who introduced the girl to Ko.” “So what? Cale pimps the round-eye lay. The Chows like her for it, and so do I. I asked her to fix me up once. Said she hadn’t got anything small enough, cheeky sow.”

“Our frail beauty was here allegedly on a gold-buying kick. Does that figure?”

The Rocker looked at Craw with fresh loathing and Craw looked at the Rocker, and it was a collision of two immovable objects.

“’Course it bloody figures,” said the Rocker contemptuously. “Cale had the corner in bent gold from Macao, didn’t she?”

“So where did Ko fit in the bed?”

“Ah, come off it, don’t pussyfoot around. Cale was the front man. It was Ko’s racket all along. That fat bulldog of his went in as partner with her.”

“Tiu?”

The Rocker had lapsed once more into beery melancholy, but Craw would not be deflected, and put his mottled head very close to the Rocker’s battered ear: “My Uncle George will be highly appreciative of all available intelligence on the said Cale. Right? He will reward merit richly. He is particularly interested in her as of the fateful moment when she introduced my little lady to her Chow protector, and up to the present day. Names, dates, track record, whatever you’ve got in the fridge. Hear me?”

“Well, you tell your Uncle George he’ll get me five bloody years in Stanley jail.”

“And you won’t want for company there, either, will you, Squire?” said Craw pointedly.

This was an unkind reference to recent sad events in the Rocker’s world. Two of his senior colleagues had been sent down for several years apiece, and there were others dolefully waiting to join them.

“Corruption,” the Rocker muttered in disgust. “They’ll be discovering bloody steam next.”

Craw had heard it all before, but he heard it again now, for he had the golden gift of listening, which at Sarratt they prize far higher than communication.

“Thirty thousand bloody Europeans and four million bloody slant-eyes, a different bloody morality, some of the bestorganised bloody crime syndicates in the bloody world. What do they expect me to do? We can’t stop crime, so how do we control it? We dig out the big boys and we do a deal with them, of course we do. ‘Right, boys. No casual crime, no territorial infringements, everything clean and decent, and my daughter can walk down the street any time of day or night. I want plenty of arrests to keep the judges happy and earn me my pathetic pension, and God help anybody who breaks the rules or is disrespectful to authority.’ All right, they pay a little squeeze. Name me one person on this whole benighted Island who doesn’t pay a little squeeze along the line. If there’s people paying it, there’s people getting it. Stands to reason. And if there’s people getting it . . . Besides,” said the Rocker, suddenly bored by his own theme, “George knows it all already.”

Craw’s lion’s head lifted slowly, until his dreadful eye was fixed squarely on the Rocker’s averted face.

“George knows what, may I enquire?”

“Sally bloody Cale. We turned her inside out for you people years ago. Planning to subvert the bloody pound sterling or some damn thing. Bullion-dumping on the Zurich gold markets, I ask you. Load of old cobblers as usual, if you want my view.”

It was another half-hour before the Australian climbed wearily to his feet, wishing the Rocker long life and felicity.

“And you keep your arse to the sunset,” the Rocker growled.

Craw did not go home that night. He had friends, an American lawyer and his wife, who owned one of Hong Kong’s two hundred-odd private houses, an elderly rambling place on Pollock’s Path high up on the Peak, and they had given him a key. A consular car was parked in the driveway, but Craw’s friends were known for their addiction to the diplomatic whirl. Entering his room, Craw seemed not at all surprised to find a respectful young American seated in the wicker armchair reading a heavy novel: a blond, trim boy in a neat diplomatic-looking suit. Craw did not greet this person, or remark his presence in any way, but instead placed himself at the glass-topped writingdesk and, on a single sheet of paper, in the best tradition of his papal mentor, began blocking out a message in capital letters, personal for His Holiness, heretical hands keep off. Afterwards, on another sheet, he set out the key to match it. When he had finished, he handed both to the boy, who with great deference put them in his pocket and departed swiftly without a word. Left alone, Craw waited till he heard the growl of the limousine before opening and reading the signal the boy had left for him. Then he burned it and washed the ash down the sink before stretching himself gratefully on the bed.

A Gideon’s day, but I can surprise them yet, he thought. He was tired. Christ, he was tired. He saw the serried faces of the Sarratt children. But we progress, Your Graces. Inexorably we progress. Albeit at the blind man’s speed, as we tap-tap along in the dark. Time I smoked a little opium, he thought. Time I had a nice little girl to cheer me up. Christ, he was tired.

Smiley was equally tired, perhaps, but the text of Craw’s message, when he received it an hour later, quickened him remarkably: the more so since the file on Miss Cale, Sally—last known address Hong Kong, art faker, illicit bullion dealer, and occasional heroin trafficker—was, for once, alive and well and intact in the Circus archives. Not only that. The cryptonym of Sam Collins, in his capacity as the Circus’s below-the-line resident in Vientiane, was blazoned all over it like the bunting of a longawaited victory.

10

TEA AND SYMPATHY

It has been laid at Smiley’s door more than once since the curtain was rung down on the Dolphin case that now was the moment when George should have gone back to Sam Collins and hit him hard and straight just where it hurt. George could have cut a lot of corners that way, say the knowing; he could have saved vital time.

They are talking simplistic nonsense.

In the first place, time was of no account. The Russian gold seam, and the operation it financed, whatever that was, had been running for years, and undisturbed would presumably run for many more. The only people who were demanding action were the Whitehall barons, the Circus itself, and indirectly Jerry Westerby, who had to eat his head off with boredom for a couple more weeks while Smiley meticulously prepared his next move. Also, Christmas was approaching, which makes everyone impatient. Ko, and whatever show he was controlling, showed no sign of development.

“Ko and his Russian money stood like a mountain before us,” Smiley wrote later, in his departing paper on Dolphin: “We could visit the case whenever we wished, but we could not move it. The problem was going to be not how to stir ourselves but how to stir Ko to the point where we could read him.”

The lesson is clear: long before anyone else, except perhaps Connie Sachs, Smiley already saw the girl as a potential lever and, as such, the most important single character in the cast—far more important, for instance, than Jerry Westerby, who was at any time replaceable. This was just one of many good reasons why Smiley made it his business to get as close to her as security considerations allowed.

Another was that the whole nature of the link between Sam Collins and the girl still floated in uncertainty. It’s so easy now to turn round and say “obvious,” but at that time the issue was anything but cut and dried. The Cale file gave an indication. Smiley’s intuitive feeling for Sam’s footwork helped fill in some blanks; hasty back-bearings by Registry produced clues and the usual batch of analogous cases; the anthology of Sam’s field reports was illuminating. The fact still remains that the longer Smiley held Sam off, the closer he came to an independent understanding of the relationship between the girl and Ko, and between the girl and Sam; and the stronger his bargaining power when he and Sam next sat down together.

And who on earth could honestly say how Sam would have reacted under pressure, had Smiley allowed it to be applied? The Sarratt inquisitors have had their successes, true, but also their failures. And Sam was a very hard nut.

One more consideration also weighed with Smiley, though in his farewell paper he is too gentlemanly to mention it. A lot of ghosts walked in those post-fall days, and one of them was a fear that, buried somewhere in the Circus, lay Bill Haydon’s chosen successor: that Bill had brought him on, recruited and educated him against the very day when he himself, one way or another, would fade from the scene. Sam was originally a Haydon nominee. His later victimisation by Haydon could easily have been a put-up job. Who was to say, in that very jumpy atmosphere, that Sam Collins, manoeuvring for readmission, was not the heir elect to Haydon’s treachery?

For all these reasons, George Smiley put on his raincoat and got himself out on the street. Besides, at heart, he was still a case man. Even his detractors give him that.

* * *

In the district of old Barnsbury, in the London borough of Islington, on the day that Smiley finally made his discreet appearance there, the rain was taking a mid-morning pause. On the slate roof-tops of Victorian cottages, the dripping chimneypots huddled like bedraggled birds among the television aerials. Behind them, held up by scaffolding, rose the outline of a public housing estate abandoned for want of funds.

“Mr.—?”

“Standfast,” Smiley replied politely, from beneath his umbrella. Honourable men recognise each other instinctively. Mr. Peter Worthington had only to open his front door and run his eye over the plump, rain-soaked figure on the step—the black official brief-case, with “E II R” embossed on the bulging plastic flap, the diffident and slightly shabby air—for an expression of friendly welcome to brighten his kindly face.

“That’s it. Jolly decent of you to come. Foreign Office is in Downing Street these days, isn’t it? What did you do? Tube from Charing Cross, I suppose? Come on in, have a cuppa.”

He was a public-school man who had gone into state education because it was more rewarding. His voice was moderate and consoling and loyal. Even his clothes, Smiley noticed, following him down the slim corridor, had a sort of faithfulness. Peter Worthington might be only thirty-four years old, but his heavy tweed suit would stay in fashion—or out of it—for as long as its owner needed.

There was no garden. The study backed straight on to a concrete playground. A stout grille protected the window, and the playground was divided in two by a high wire fence. Beyond it stood the school itself, a scrolled Edwardian building not unlike the Circus, except that it was possible to see in. On the ground floor, Smiley noticed children’s paintings hanging on the walls. Higher up, test-tubes in wooden racks.

It was playtime, and in their own half girls in gym-slips were racing after a handball. But on the other side of the wire the boys stood in silent groups, like pickets at a factory gate, blacks and whites separate. The study was knee deep in exercise books. A pictorial guide to the kings and queens of England hung on the chimney-breast. Dark clouds filled the sky and made the school look rusty.

“Hope you don’t mind the noise,” Peter Worthington called from the kitchen. “I don’t hear it any more, I’m afraid. Sugar?”

“No, no. No sugar, thank you,” said Smiley, with a confessive grin.

“Watching the calories?”

“Well, a little, a little.”

Smiley was acting himself, but more so, as they say at Sarratt. A mite homelier, a mite more care-worn: the gentle, decent civil servant who had reached his ceiling by the age of forty, and stayed there ever since.

“There’s lemon if you want it!” Peter Worthington called from the kitchen, clattering dishes inexpertly.

“Oh, no, thank you! Just the milk.”

On the threadbare study floor lay evidence of yet another, smaller child: bricks, and a scribbling book with “D”s and “A”s scrawled endlessly. From the lamp hung a Christmas star in cardboard. On the drab walls Magi and sleds and cotton wool. Peter Worthington returned carrying a tea-tray. He was big and rugged, with wiry brown hair going early to grey. After all the clattering, the cups were still not very clean.

“Clever of you to choose my free period,” he said, with a nod at the exercise books. “If you can call it free, with that lot to correct.”

“I do think you people are very underrated,” Smiley said, mildly shaking his head. “I have friends in the profession myself. They sit up half the night just correcting the work, so they assure me, and I’ve no reason to doubt them.”

“They’re the conscientious ones.”

“I trust I may include you in that category.”

Peter Worthington grinned, suddenly very pleased. “Afraid so. If a thing’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well,” he said, helping Smiley out of his raincoat.

“I could wish that view were a little more widely held, to be frank.”

“You should have been a teacher yourself,” said Peter Worthington, and they both laughed.

“What do you do with your little boy?” said Smiley, sitting down.

“Ian? Oh, he goes to his gran’s. My side, not hers,” he added as he poured. He handed Smiley a cup. “You married?” he asked.

“Yes, yes, I am, and very happily so, too, if I may say so.”

“Kids?”

Smiley shook his head, allowing himself a small frown of disappointment. “Alas,” he said.

“That’s where it hurts,” said Peter Worthington, entirely reasonably.

“I’m sure it does,” said Smiley. “Still, we’d have liked the experience. You feel it more, at our age.”

“You said on the phone there was some news of Elizabeth,” said Peter Worthington. “I’d be awfully grateful to hear it, I must say.”

“Well, nothing to be excited about,” said Smiley cautiously.

“But hopeful. One must have hope.”

Smiley stooped to the official black plastic brief-case and unlocked the cheap clasp.

“Well, now, I wonder whether you’ll oblige me,” he said. “It’s not that I’m holding back on you, but we do like to be sure. I’m a belt-and-braces man myself, and I don’t mind admitting it. We do exactly the same with our foreign deceases. We never commit ourselves until we’re absolutely sure. Forenames, surname, full address, date of birth, if we can get it. We go to no end of trouble. Just to be safe. Not cause, of course, we don’t do cause—that’s up to the local authorities.”

“Shoot ahead,” said Peter Worthington heartily. Noticing the exaggeration in his tone, Smiley glanced up, but Peter Worthington’s honest face was turned away and he seemed to be studying a pile of old music stands heaped in a corner.

Licking his thumb, Smiley laboriously opened a file on his lap and turned some pages. It was the Foreign Office file, marked “Missing Person,” and obtained by Lacon on a pretext to Enderby.

“Would it be asking too much if I went through the details with you from the beginning? Only the salient ones, naturally, and only what you wish to tell me—I don’t have to say that, do I? My headache is, you see, I’m actually not the normal person for this work. My colleague Wendover, whom you met, is sick, I’m afraid—and well, we don’t always like to put everything on paper, do we? He’s an admirable fellow, but when it comes to report writing I do find him a little terse. Not sloppy, far from it, but sometimes a little wanting on the human-picture side.”

“I’ve always been absolutely frank. Always,” said Peter Worthington rather impatiently to the music stands. “I believe in that.”

“And for our part, I can assure you we at the Office do respect a confidence.”

A sudden lull descended. It had not occurred to Smiley, till this moment, that the scream of children could be soothing; yet as it stopped, and the playground emptied, he had a sense of dislocation which took him a moment to get over.

“Break’s finished,” said Peter Worthington, with a smile.

“I’m sorry?”

“Break. Milk and buns. What you pay your taxes for.”

“Now first of all, there is no question here, according to my colleague Wendover’s notes—nothing against him, I hasten to say—that Mrs. Worthington left under any kind of con-straint. . . . Just a minute. Let me explain what I mean by that. Please. She left voluntarily. She left alone. She was not unduly prevailed upon, lured, or in any wise the victim of unnatural pressure. Pressure, for instance, which, let us say, might in due course be the subject of a legal court action by yourself or others against a third party not so far named?”

Long-windedness, as Smiley knew, creates in those who must put up with it an almost unbearable urge to speak. If they do not interrupt directly, they at least counter with pent-up energy; and as a schoolmaster, Peter Worthington was not by any means a natural listener.

“She left alone, absolutely alone, and my entire position is, was, and always has been that she was free to do so. If she had not left alone, if there had been others involved—men, God knows we’re all human—it would have made no difference. Does that satisfy your question? Children have a right to both parents,” he ended, stating a maxim.

Smiley was writing diligently but very slowly. Peter Worthington drummed his fingers on his knee, then cracked them, one after another, in a quick impatient salvo.

“Now in the interim, Mr. Worthington, can you please tell me whether a custody order has been applied for in respect of—”

“We always knew she’d wander. That was understood. I was her anchor. She called me ‘my anchor.’ Either that or ‘schoolmaster.’ I didn’t mind. It wasn’t badly meant. It was just she couldn’t bear to say Peter. She loved me as a concept. Not as a figure, perhaps, a body, a mind, a person, not even as a partner. As a concept, a necessary adjunct to her personal, human completeness. She had an urge to please; I understand that. It was part of her insecurity, she longed to be admired. If she paid a compliment, it was because she wished for one in return.”

“I see,” said Smiley, and wrote again, as if physically subscribing to this view.

“I mean nobody could have a girl like Elizabeth as a wife and expect to have her all to himself. It wasn’t natural. I’ve come to terms with that now. Even little Ian had to call her Elizabeth. Again I understand. She couldn’t bear the chains of ‘Mummy.’ Child running after her calling ‘Mummy.’ Too much for her. That’s all right. I understand that too. I can imagine it might be hard for you, as a childless man, to understand how a woman of any stamp, a mother—well cared for and loved and looked after, not even having to earn—can literally walk out on her own son and not even send him a postcard from that day to this. Probably that worries, even disgusts you. Well, I take a different view, I’m afraid. At the time, I grant you—yes, it was hard.”

He glanced toward the wired playground. He spoke quietly with no hint at all of self-pity. He might have been talking to a pupil. “We try to teach people freedom here. Freedom within citizenship. Let them develop their individuality. How could I tell her who she was? I wanted to be there, that’s all. To be Elizabeth’s friend. Her longstop—that was another of her words for me. ‘My longstop.’ The point is she didn’t need to go. She could have done it all here. At my side. Women need a prop, you know. Without one—”

“And you still have not received any direct word of her?” Smiley enquired meekly. “Not a letter, not even that postcard to Ian, nothing?”

“Not a sausage.”

“Mr. Worthington, to your knowledge, has your wife ever used another name?” For some reason, the question threatened to annoy Peter Worthington quite considerably; he flared, as if he were responding to impertinence in class, and his finger shot up to command silence. But Smiley hurried on. “Her maiden name, for instance? Perhaps an abbreviation of her married one, which in a non-English-speaking country could create difficulties with the natives—”

“Never. Never, never. You have to understand basic human behavioural psychology. She was a textbook case. She couldn’t wait to get rid of her father’s name. One very good reason why she married me was to have a new father and a new name. Once she’d got it, why should she give it up? It was the same with her romancing, her wild, wild story-telling. She was trying to escape from her environment. Having done so, having succeeded, having found me, and the stability which I represent, she naturally no longer needed to be someone else. She was someone else. She was fulfilled. So why go?”

Again Smiley took his time. He looked at Peter Worthington as if in uncertainty; he looked at his file; he turned to the last entry, tipped his spectacles and read it, obviously not by any means for the first time.

“Mr. Worthington, if our information is correct, and we have good reason to believe it is—I’d say our estimate was a conservative eighty percent sure, I’d go that far—your wife is at present using the surname Worth. And she is using a forename with a German spelling, curiously enough ‘L-i-e-s-e.’ Pronounced not ‘Liza,’ I am told, but ‘Leesa.’ I wondered whether you were in a position to confirm or deny this suggestion, also the suggestion that she is actively connected with a Far Eastern jewellery business with ramifications extending to Hong Kong and other major centres. She appears to be living in a style of affluence and good social appearance, moving in quite high circles.”

Peter Worthington seemed to absorb very little of this. He had taken a position on the floor but seemed unable to lower his knees. Cracking his fingers once more, he glared impatiently at the music stands crowded like skeletons into the corner of the room, and was already trying to speak before Smiley had ended.

“Look. This is what I want. That whoever approaches her should make the right kind of point. I don’t want any passionate appeals, no appeals to conscience. All that’s out. Just a straight statement of what’s offered, and she’s welcome. That’s all.”

Smiley took refuge in the file: “Well, before we come to that, if we could just continue going through the facts, Mr. Worthington—”

“There aren’t facts,” said Peter Worthington, thoroughly irritated again. “There are just two people. Well, three, with Ian. There aren’t facts in a thing like this. Not in any marriage. That’s what life teaches us. Relationships are entirely subjective. I’m sitting on the floor. That’s a fact. You’re writing. That’s a fact. Her mother was behind it. That’s a fact. Follow me? Her father is a raving criminal lunatic. That’s a fact. Elizabeth is not the daughter of the Queen of Sheba or the natural grandchild of Lloyd George. Whatever she may say. She has not got a degree in Sanskrit, which she chose to tell the headmistress, who still believes it to this day. ‘When are we going to see your charming Oriental wife again?’ She knows no more about jewellery than I do. That’s a fact.”

“Dates and places,” Smiley murmured to the file. “If I could just check those for a start.”

“Absolutely,” said Peter Worthington handsomely, and from a green tin teapot refilled Smiley’s cup. Blackboard chalk was worked into his large fingertips. It was like the grey in his hair.

“It really was the mother that messed her up, I’m afraid, though,” he went on, in the same entirely reasonable tone. “All that urgency about putting her on the stage, then ballet, then trying to get her into television. Her mother just wanted Elizabeth to be admired. As a substitute for herself, of course. It’s perfectly natural, psychologically. Read Berne. Read anyone. That’s just her way of defining her individuality. Through her daughter. One must respect that those things happen. I understand all that now. She’s okay, I’m okay, the world’s okay, Ian’s okay, then suddenly she’s off.”

“Do you happen to know whether she communicates with her mother, incidentally?”

Peter Worthington shook his head.

“Absolutely not, I’m afraid. She’d seen through her entirely by the time she left. Broken with her completely. The one hurdle I can safely say I helped her over. My one contribution to her happiness—”

“I don’t think we have her mother’s address here,” said Smiley, leafing doggedly through the pages of the file. “You don’t—”

Peter Worthington gave it to him rather loud, at dictation speed.

“And now the dates and places,” Smiley repeated. “Please.”

She had left him two years ago. Peter Worthington recited not just the date but the hour. There had been no scene—Peter Worthington didn’t hold with scenes; Elizabeth had had too many with her mother—they’d had a happy evening, as a matter of fact, particularly happy. For a diversion, he’d taken her to the kebab house.

“Perhaps you spotted it as you came down the road? The Knossos, it’s called, next door to the Express Dairy?”

They’d had wine and a real blow-out, and Andrew Wiltshire, the new English master, had come along to make a three. Elizabeth had introduced this Andrew to yoga only a few weeks before; they had gone to classes together at the Sobell Centre and become great buddies.

“She was really into yoga,” he said, with an approving nod of the grizzled head. “It was a real interest for her. Andrew was just the sort of chap to bring her out. Extrovert, unreflective, physical . . . perfect for her,” he said determinedly.

The three of them had returned to the house at ten, because of the baby-sitter, he said: himself, Andrew, and Elizabeth. He’d made coffee, they’d listened to music, and around eleven Elizabeth gave them both a kiss and said she was going over to her mother’s to see how she was.

“I had understood she had broken with her mother,” Smiley objected mildly, but Peter Worthington chose not to hear.

“Of course, kisses mean nothing with her,” Peter Worthington explained, as a matter of information. “She kisses everybody, the pupils, her girl-friends—she’d kiss the dustman, anyone. She’s very outgoing. Once again, she can’t leave anyone alone. I mean every relationship has to be a conquest. With her child, the waiter at the restaurant . . . Then when she’s won them, they bore her. Naturally. She went upstairs, looked at Ian, and—I’ve no doubt—used the moment to collect her passport and the housekeeping money from the bedroom. She left a note saying ‘sorry’ and I haven’t seen her since. Nor’s Ian,” said Peter Worthington.

“Er, has Andrew heard from her?” Smiley enquired, with another tilt of his spectacles.

“Why should he have done?”

“You said they were friends, Mr. Worthington. Sometimes third parties become intermediaries in these affairs.”

On the word “affair,” he looked up and found himself staring directly into Peter Worthington’s honest, abject eyes; and for a moment the two masks slipped simultaneously. Was Smiley observing? Or was he being observed? Perhaps it was only his embattled imagination—or did he sense, in himself and in this weak boy across the room, the stirring of an embarrassed kinship? There should be a league for deceived husbands who feel sorry for themselves. You’ve all got the same boring, awful charity! Ann had once flung at him. You never knew your Elizabeth, Smiley thought, still staring at Peter Worthington; and I never knew my Ann.

“That’s all I can remember, really,” said Peter Worthington. “After that, it’s a blank.”

“Yes,” said Smiley, inadvertently taking refuge in Worthington’s own repeated assertion: “Yes, I understand.”

He rose to leave. A little boy was standing in the doorway. He had a shrouded, hostile stare. A placid, heavy woman stood behind him, holding him by both wrists above his head, so that he seemed to swing from her, though really he was standing by himself.

“Look, there’s Daddy,” said the woman, gazing at Worthington with brown, attaching eyes.

“Jenny, hi. This is Mr. Standfast from the Foreign Office.”

“How do you do?” said Smiley politely, and after a few minutes’ meaningless chatter, and a promise of further information in due course should any become available, he quietly took his leave.

“Oh, and Happy Christmas,” Peter Worthington called from the steps.

“Ah, yes. And to you, too. To all of you. Happy indeed and many more of them.”

In the transport café they put in sugar unless you asked them not to, and each time the Indian woman made a cup, the tiny kitchen filled with steam. In twos and threes, not talking, men ate breakfast, lunch, or supper, depending on the point they had reached in their separate days. Here also Christmas was approaching. Six greasy coloured glass balls dangled over the counter for festive cheer; and a net stocking appealed for help for spastic kids.

Smiley stared at an evening paper, not reading it. In a corner, not twelve feet from him, little Fawn had taken up the babysitter’s classic position. His dark eyes smiled agreeably on the diners and on the doorway. He lifted his cup with his left hand, while his right idled close to his chest. Did Karla sit like this, Smiley wondered. Did Karla take refuge among the unsuspecting?

Control had. Control had made a whole second, third, or fourth life for himself in a two-room upstairs flat, beside the Western bypass, under the plain name of Matthews, not filed with housekeepers as an alias. Well, “whole” life was an exaggeration. But he had kept clothes there, and a woman—Mrs. Matthews herself—even a cat. And taken golf lessons at an artisans’ club on Thursday mornings early, while from his desk in the Circus he poured scorn on the great unwashed, and on golf, and on love, and on any other piffling human pursuit which secretly might tempt him. He had even rented a garden allotment, Smiley remembered, down by a railway siding. Mrs. Matthews had insisted on driving Smiley to see it in her groomed Morris car on the day he broke the sad news to her. It was as big a mess as anyone else’s allotment: standard roses, winter vegetables they hadn’t used, a tool-shed crammed with hose-pipe and seed boxes.

Mrs. Matthews was a widow, pliant but capable. “All I want to know,” she had said, having read the figure on the cheque. “All I want to be sure of, Mr. Standfast, is he really dead, or has he gone back to his wife?”

“He is really dead,” Smiley assured her, and she believed him gratefully. He forbore from adding that Control’s wife had gone to her grave eleven years ago, still believing her husband was something in the Coal Board.

Did Karla have to scheme in committees? Fight cabals, deceive the stupid, flatter the clever, look in distorting mirrors of the Peter Worthington variety, all in order to do the job?

He glanced at his watch, then at Fawn. The coin-box stood next to the lavatory. But when Smiley asked the proprietor for change, he refused it on the grounds that he was too busy.

“Hand it over, you awkward bastard,” shouted a long-distance driver all in leather. The proprietor briskly obliged.

“How did it go?” Guillam asked, taking the call on the direct line.

“Good background,” Smiley replied.

“Hooray,” said Guillam coolly.

Another of the charges later levelled against Smiley was that he wasted time on menial matters, instead of delegating them to his subordinates.

There are blocks of flats near the Town and Country Golf Course on the northern fringes of London that are like the superstructure of permanently sinking ships. They lie at the end of long lawns where the flowers are never quite in flower; the husbands man the lifeboats all in a flurry at about eightthirty in the morning, and the women and children spend the day keeping afloat until their men-folk return too tired to sail anywhere. These buildings were built in the thirties and have stayed a grubby white ever since. Their oblong, steel-framed windows look on to the lush billows of the links, where women in eye-shades wander like lost souls.

One such block is called Arcady Mansions, and the Pellings lived in number 7, with a cramped view of the ninth green which vanished when the beeches were in leaf. When Smiley rang the bell, he heard nothing except the thin electric tinkle: no footsteps, no dog, no music. The door opened and a man’s cracked voice said “Yes?” from the darkness, but it belonged to a woman. She was tall and stooping. A cigarette hung from her hand.

“My name is Oates,” Smiley said, offering a big green card encased in cellophane. To a different cover belongs a different name.

“Oh, it’s you, is it? Come in. Dine, see the show. You sounded younger on the telephone,” she boomed, in a curdled voice striving for refinement. “He’s in here. He thinks you’re a spy,” she said, squinting at the green card. “You’re not, are you?”

“No,” said Smiley. “I’m afraid not. Just a snooper.”

The flat was all corridors. She led the way, leaving a vapour trail of gin. One leg slurred as she walked, and her right arm was stiff. Smiley guessed she had had a stroke. She dressed as if nobody had ever admired her height or sex. And as if she didn’t care. She wore flat shoes and a mannish pullover with a belt that made her shoulders broad.

“He says he’s never heard of you. He says he’s looked you up in the telephone directory and you don’t exist.”

“We like to be discreet,” Smiley said.

She pushed open a door. “He exists,” she reported loudly, ahead of her into the room. “And he’s not a spy, he’s a snooper.”

In a far chair a man was reading the Daily Telegraph, holding it in front of his face so that Smiley only saw the bald head, and the dressing-gown, and the short crossed legs ending in leather bedroom slippers; but somehow he knew at once that Mr. Pelling was the kind of small man who would only ever marry tall women. The room carried everything he could need in order to survive alone: his television, his bed, his gas fire, a table to eat at, and an easel for painting by numbers. On the wall hung an overcoloured portrait photograph of a very beautiful girl, with an inscription scribbled diagonally across one corner in the way that film stars wish love to the unglamorous. Smiley recognised it as Elizabeth Worthington; he had seen a lot of photographs already.

“Mr. Oates, meet Nunc,” she said, and all but curtsied.

The Daily Telegraph came down with the slowness of a garrison flag, revealing an aggressive, glittering little face with thick brows and managerial spectacles.

“Yes. Well, just who are you precisely?” said Mr. Pelling. “Are you Secret Service or aren’t you? Don’t shilly-shally, out with it and be done. I don’t hold with snooping, you see. What’s that?” he demanded.

“His card,” said Mrs. Pelling, offering it. “Green in hue.”

“Oh, we’re exchanging notes, are we? I need a card too then, Cess, don’t I? Better get some printed, my dear. Slip down to Smith’s, will you?”

“Do you like tea?” Mrs. Pelling asked, peering down at Smiley with her head on one side.

“What are you giving him tea for?” Mr. Pelling demanded, watching her plug in the kettle. “He doesn’t need tea. He’s not a guest. He’s not even intelligence. I didn’t ask him. Stay the week,” he said to Smiley. “Move in if you like. Have her bed. ‘Bullion Universal Security Advisors,’ my Aunt Fanny.”

“He wants to talk about Lizzie, darling,” said Mrs. Pelling, setting a tray for her husband. “Now be a father for a change.”

“Fat lot of good her bed would do you, mind,” said Mr. Pelling, taking up his Telegraph again.

“For those kind words,” said Mrs. Pelling, and gave a laugh. It consisted of two notes like a bird-call, and was not meant to be funny. A disjointed silence followed.

Mrs. Pelling handed Smiley a cup of tea. Accepting it, he addressed himself to the back of Mr. Pelling’s newspaper. “Sir, your daughter Elizabeth is being considered for an important appointment with a major overseas corporation. My organisation has been asked in confidence—as a normal but very necessary formality these days—to approach friends and relations in this country and obtain character references.”

“That’s us, dear,” Mrs. Pelling explained, in case her husband hadn’t understood.

The newspaper came down with a snap.

“Are you suggesting my daughter is of bad character? Is that what you’re sitting here, drinking my tea, suggesting?”

“No, sir,” said Smiley.

“No, sir,” said Mrs. Pelling unhelpfully.

A long silence followed, which Smiley was at no great pains to end.

“Mr. Pelling,” he said finally, in a firm and patient voice. “I understand that you spent many years in the Post Office and rose to a high position.”

“Many many years,” Mrs. Pelling agreed.

“I worked,” said Mr. Pelling from behind his newspaper once more. “There’s too much talk in the world. Not enough work done.”

“Did you employ criminals in your department?”

The newspaper rattled, then held still.

“Or Communists?” said Smiley, equally gently.

“If we did, we damn soon got rid of them,” said Mr. Pelling, and this time the newspaper stayed down.

Mrs. Pelling snapped her fingers. “Like that,” she said.

“Mr. Pelling,” Smiley continued, in the same bedside manner, “the position for which your daughter is being considered is with one of the major Eastern companies. She will be specialising in air transport, and her work will give her advance knowledge of large gold shipments to and from this country, as well as the movement of diplomatic couriers and classified mails. It carries an extremely high remuneration. I don’t think it unreasonable—and I don’t think you do—that your daughter should be subject to the same procedures as any other candidate for such a responsible—and desirable—post.”

“Who employs you,” said Mr. Pelling. “That’s what I’m getting at. Who says you’re responsible?”

“Nunc,” Mrs. Pelling pleaded. “Who says anyone is?”

“Don’t Nunc me! Give him some more tea. You’re hostess, aren’t you? Well, act like one. It’s high time Lizzie was rewarded and I’m frankly displeased that it hasn’t occurred before now, seeing what they owe her.”

Mr. Pelling resumed his reading of Smiley’s impressive green card: “ ‘Correspondents in Asia, U.S.A., and the Middle East.’ Pen-friends, I suppose they are. Head Office in South Molton Street. Any enquiries, telephone blah-blah-blah. Who do I get then? Your partner in crime, I suppose.”

“If it’s South Molton Street, he must be all right,” said Mrs. Pelling.

“Authority without responsibility,” Mr. Pelling said, dialling the number. He spoke as if someone were holding his nostrils. “I don’t hold with it, I’m afraid.”

“With responsibility,” Smiley corrected him. “We as a company are pledged to indemnify our customers against any dishonesty on the part of staff we recommend. We are insured accordingly.”

The number rang five times before the Circus switchboard answered it, and Smiley hoped to God there wasn’t going to be a muddle.

“Give me the Managing Director,” Mr. Pelling ordered. “I don’t care if he’s in conference! Has he got a name? Well, what is it? Well, you tell Mr. Andrew Forbes-Lisle that Mr. Humphrey Pelling desires a personal word with him. Now.” Long wait. Well done, thought Smiley; nice touch. “Pelling here. I’ve a man calling himself Oates sitting in front of me. Short, fat, and worried. What do you want me to do with him?”

In the background, Smiley heard Peter Guillam’s resonant, officer-like tones all but ordering Pelling to stand up when he addressed him. Mollified, Mr. Pelling rang off.

“Does Lizzie know you’re talking to us?” he asked.

“She’d laugh her head off if she did,” said his wife.

“She may not even know she is being considered for the post,” said Smiley. “More and more, the tendency these days is to make the approach after clearance has been obtained.”

“It’s for Lizzie, Nunc,” Mrs. Pelling reminded him. “You know you love her, although we haven’t heard of her for a year.”

“You don’t write to her at all?” Smiley asked sympathetically.

“She doesn’t want it,” said Mrs. Pelling, with a glance at her husband.

The tiniest grunt escaped Smiley’s lips. It could have been regret, but it was actually relief.

“Give him more tea,” her husband ordered. “He’s wolfed that lot already.” He stared quizzically at Smiley yet again. “I’m still not sure he’s not Secret Service, even now,” he said. “He may not be glamour, but that could be deliberate.”

Smiley had brought forms. The Circus printer had run them up last night, on buff paper—which was fortunate, for in Mr. Pelling’s world, it turned out, forms were the legitimisation of everything, and buff was the respectable colour. So the men worked together, like two friends solving a crossword, Smiley perched at his side, and Mr. Pelling doing the pencil work while his wife sat smoking and staring through the grey net curtains, turning her wedding ring round and round. They did date and place of birth: “Up the road at the Alexandra Nursing Home. Pulled it down now, haven’t they, Cess? Turned it into one of those ice-cream blocks.” They did education, and Mr. Pelling gave his views on that subject.

“I never let one school have her too long, did I, Cess? Keep her mind alert. Don’t let it get into a rut. A change is worth a holiday, I said. Didn’t I, Cess?”

“He’s read books on education,” said Mrs. Pelling.

“We married late,” he said, as if explaining her presence.

“We wanted her on the stage,” she said. “He wanted to be her manager, among other things.”

He gave other dates. There was a drama school and there was a secretarial course.

“Grooming,” Mr. Pelling said. “Preparation, not education, that’s what I believe in. Throw a bit of everything at her. Make her worldly. Give her deportment.”

“Oh, she’s got the deportment,” Mrs. Pelling agreed, and with a click of her throat blew out a lot of cigarette smoke. “And the worldliness.”

“But she never finished secretarial college?” Smiley asked, pointing to the panel. “Or the drama.”

“Didn’t need to,” said Mr. Pelling.

They came to previous employers. Mr. Pelling listed half a dozen in the London area, all within eighteen months of one another.

“All bores,” said Mrs. Pelling pleasantly.

“She was looking around,” said her husband airily. “She was taking the pulse before committing herself. I made her, didn’t I, Cess? They all wanted her but I wouldn’t fall for it.” He flung out an arm at her. “And don’t say it didn’t pay off in the end!” he yelled. “Even if we aren’t allowed to talk about it!”

“She liked the ballet best,” said Mrs. Pelling. “Teaching the children. She adores children. Adores them.”

This annoyed Mr. Pelling very much. “She’s making a career, Cess!” he shouted, slamming the form on his knee. “God Almighty, you cretinous woman, do you want her to go back to him?”

“Now, what was she doing in the Middle East exactly?” Smiley asked.

“Taking courses. Business schools. Learning Arabic,” said Mr. Pelling, acquiring a sudden largeness of view. To Smiley’s surprise, he even stood and, gesticulating imperiously, roamed the room. “What got her there in the first place, I don’t mind telling you, was an unfortunate marriage.”

“Jesus,” said Mrs. Pelling.

Upright, he had a prehensile sturdiness which made him formidable. “But we got her back. Oh, yes. Her room’s always ready when she wants it. Next door to mine. She can find me any time. Oh, yes. We helped her over that hurdle, didn’t we, Cess? Then one day I said to her—”

“She came with a darling English teacher with curly hair,” his wife interrupted. “Andrew.”

“Scottish,” Mr. Pelling corrected her automatically.

“Andrew was a nice boy but no match for Nunc, was he, darling?”

“He wasn’t enough for her. All that Yogi Bear stuff. Swinging by your tail is what I call it. Then one day I said to her, ‘Lizzie: Arabs. That’s where your future is.’ ” He snapped his fingers, pointing at an imaginary daughter. “ ‘Oil. Money. Power. Away you go. Pack. Get your ticket. Off.’ ”

“A night-club paid her fare,” said Mrs. Pelling. “It took her for one hell of a ride too.”

“It did no such thing!” Mr. Pelling retorted, hunching his broad shoulders to yell at her, but Mrs. Pelling continued as if he weren’t there.

“She answered this advertisement, you see. Some woman in Bradford with a soft line of talk. A bawd. ‘Hostesses needed, but not what you’d think,’ she said. They paid her air fare and the moment she landed in Bahrein they made her sign a contract giving over all her salary for the rent of her flat. From then on they’d got her, hadn’t they? There was nowhere she could go, was there? The Embassy couldn’t help her, no one could. She’s beautiful, you see.”

“You stupid bloody hag! We’re talking about a career! Don’t you love her? Your own daughter? You unnatural mother! My God!”

“She’s got her career,” said Mrs. Pelling complacently. “The best in the world.”

In desperation Mr. Pelling turned to Smiley. “Put down ‘reception work and picking up the language,’ and put down—”

“Perhaps you could tell me,” Smiley interjected mildly as he licked his thumb and turned the page. “This might be the way to do it—of any experience she has had in the transportation industry.”

“And put down”—Mr. Pelling clenched his fists and stared first at his wife, then at Smiley, and he seemed in two minds as to whether to go on or not—“put down ‘working for the British Secret Service in a high capacity.’ Undercover. Go on, put it down! There. It’s out now.” He swung back at his wife. “He’s in security, he said so. He’s got a right to know and she’s got a right to have it known of her. No daughter of mine’s going to be an unsung heroine! Or unpaid! She’ll get the George Medal before she’s done, you mark my words!”

“Oh, balls,” said Mrs. Pelling wearily. “That was just one of her stories. You know that.”

“Could we possibly take things one by one?” Smiley asked in a tone of gentle forbearance. “We were talking, I think, of experience in the transportation industry.”

Sage-like, Mr. Pelling put his thumb and forefinger to his chin.

“Her first commercial experience,” he began ruminatively, “running her own show entirely, you understand—when everything came together, and jelled, and really began to pay off—apart from the intelligence side I’m referring to—employing staff and handling large quantities of cash and exercising the responsibility she’s capable of—came in—how do you pronounce it?”

“Vi-ent-iane,” his wife droned, with perfect Anglicisation.

“Capital of La-os,” said Mr. Pelling, pronouncing the word to rhyme with “chaos.”

“And what was the name of the firm, please?” Smiley enquired, pencil poised over the appropriate panel.

“A distilling company,” said Mr. Pelling grandly. “My daughter Elizabeth owned and managed one of the major distilling concessions in that war-torn country.”

“And the name?”

“She was selling kegs of unbranded whisky to American lay-abouts,” said Mrs. Pelling, to the window. “On commission, twenty percent. They bought their kegs and left them to mature in Scotland as an investment to be sold off later.”

“They, in this case, being—?” Smiley asked.

“Then her lover went and filched the money,” Mrs. Pelling said. “It was a racket. Rather a good one.”

“Sheer unadulterated balderdash!” Mr. Pelling shouted. “The woman’s insane. Disregard her.”

“And what was her address at that time, please?” Smiley asked.

“Put down ‘representative,’ ” said Mr. Pelling, shaking his head as if things were quite out of hand. “ ‘Distiller’s representative and secret agent.’ ”

“She was living with a pilot,” said Mrs. Pelling. “Tiny, she called him. If it hadn’t been for Tiny, she’d have starved. He was gorgeous but the war had turned him inside out. Well, of course it would! Same with our boys, wasn’t it? Missions night after night, day after day.” Putting back her head, she screamed very loud, “ ‘Scramble!’ ”

“She’s mad,” Mr. Pelling explained.

“Nervous wrecks at eighteen, half of them. But they stuck it. They loved Churchill, you see. They loved his guts.”

“Blind mad,” Mr. Pelling repeated. “Barking.”

“I’m sorry,” said Smiley, writing busily. “Tiny who? The pilot? What was his name?”

“Ricardo. Tiny Ricardo. A lamb. He died, you know,” she said, straight at her husband. “Lizzie was heart-broken, wasn’t she, Nunc? Still, it was probably the best way.”

“She wasn’t living with anyone, you anthropoid ape! It was a put-up, the whole thing. She was working for the British Secret Service!”

“Oh, my Christ,” said Mrs. Pelling hopelessly.

“Not your Christ. My Mellon. Take that down, Oates. Let me see you write it down. Mellon. The name of her commanding officer in the British Secret Service was M-e-l-l-o-n. Like the fruit but twice the l’s. Mellon. Pretending to be a plain simple trader. And making quite a decent thing of it. Naturally, an intelligent man, he would. But underneath”—Mr. Pelling drove a fist into his open palm, making an astonishingly loud noise—“but underneath the bland and affable exterior of a British businessman, this same Mellon, two l’s, was fighting a secret and lonely war against Her Majesty’s enemies, and my Lizzie was helping him do it. Drug dealers, Chinese, homosexuals, every single foreign element sworn to the subversion of our island nation, my gallant daughter Lizzie and her friend Colonel Mellon between them fought to check their insidious progress! And that’s the honest truth.”

“Now ask me where she gets it from,” said Mrs. Pelling and, leaving the door open, trailed away down the corridor grumbling to herself. Glancing after her, Smiley saw her pause and seem to tilt her head, beckoning to him from the gloom. They heard a distant door slam shut.

“It’s true,” said Pelling stoutly, but more quietly. “She did, she did, she did. My daughter was a senior and respected operative of our British intelligence.”

Smiley did not reply at first, he was too intent on writing; so for a while there was no sound but the slow scratch of his pen on paper, and the rustle as he turned the page.

“Good. Well, then, I’ll just take those details, too, if I may. In confidence, naturally. We come across quite a lot of it in our work, I don’t mind telling you.”

“Right,” said Mr. Pelling and, sitting himself vigorously on a plastic-covered stool, he pulled a single sheet of paper from his wallet and thrust it into Smiley’s hand. It was a letter, handwritten, one and a half sides long, and very badly spelt; the script was at once grandiose and childish, with high, curled “I”s for the first person, while the other characters appeared more cautiously.

It began “My dearest darling Pops,” and it ended “Your One True Daughter Elizabeth,” and the message between, the bulk of which Smiley committed to his memory, ran like this: “I have arrived in Vientiane which is a flat town, a bit French and wild but don’t wory, I have important news for you which I have to impart immediately. It is possible you may not hear from me for a bit but don’t worry even if you hear bad things. I’m all right and cared for and doing it for a Good Cause you would be proud of. As soon as I arrived I contacted the British Trade Counsul Mister Mackervoor (British) and he sent me for a job to Mellon. I’m not aloud to tell you so you’ll have to trust me but Mellon is his name and he’s a well-off English trader here but that’s only half the story. Mellon is Dispatching me on a mision to Hong Kong and I’m to investgate Bullion and Drugs, pretending otherwise, and he’s got men everywhere to look after me and his real name isn’t Mellon. Mackervoor is in on it only secretly. If anything happens to me it will be worth it anyway because you and I know the Country matters and what’s one life among so many in Asia where life counts for nought anyway? This is good Work, Dad, the kind we dreamed of you and me and specially you when you were in the war fighting for your family and loved ones. Pray for me and look after Mum. I will always love even in prison.”

Smiley handed back the letter.

“There’s no date,” he objected flatly. “Can you give me the date, Mr. Pelling? Even approximately?”

Pelling gave it not approximately but exactly; not for nothing had he spent his working life handling the Royal Mails.

“She’s never written to me since,” said Mr. Pelling proudly, folding the letter back into his wallet. “Not a word, not a peep have I had out of her from that day to this. Totally unnecessary. We’re one. It was said, I never alluded to it, neither did she. She’d tipped me the wink. I knew. She knew I knew. You’ll never get finer understanding between daughter and father than that. Everything that followed: Ricardo, whatever his name was— alive, dead, who cares? Some Chinaman she’s on about—forget him. Men friends, girl-friends, business—disregard everything you hear. It’s cover, the lot. They own her, they control her completely. She works for Mellon and she loves her father. Finish.”

“You’ve been very kind,” said Smiley, packing together his papers. “Please don’t worry, I’ll see myself out.”

“See yourself how you like,” Mr. Pelling said with a flash of his old wit.

As Smiley closed the door, he had resumed his armchair, and was ostentatiously looking for his place in the Daily Telegraph.

In the dark corridor the smell of drink was stronger. Smiley had counted nine paces before the door slammed, so it must have been the last door on the left, and the farthest from Mr. Pelling. It might have been the lavatory, except the lavatory was marked with a sign saying “Buckingham Palace Rear Entrance,” so he called her name very softly and heard her yell, “Get out!”

He stepped inside and found himself in her bedroom, and Mrs. Pelling sprawled on the bed with a glass in her hand, riffling through a heap of picture postcards. The room itself, like her husband’s, was fitted up for a separate existence, with a cooker and a sink and a pile of unwashed plates. Round the walls were snapshots of a tall and very pretty girl, some with boy-friends, some alone, mainly against Oriental backgrounds. The smell was of gin and cat.

“He won’t leave her alone,” Mrs. Pelling said. “Nunc won’t. Never could. He tried but he never could. She’s beautiful, you see,” she explained for the second time, and rolled on to her back while she held a postcard above her head to read it.

“Will he come in here?”

“Not if you dragged him, darling.”

Smiley closed the door, sat in a chair, and once more took out his notebook.

“She’s got a dear sweet Chinaman,” she said still gazing at the postcard upside down. “She went to him to save Ricardo and then she fell in love with him. He’s a real father to her, the first she ever had. It’s all come out all right after all. All the bad things. They’re over. He calls her ‘Liese,’ ” she said. “He thinks it’s prettier for her. Funny, really. We don’t like Germans. We’re patriotic. And now he’s fiddling her a lovely job, isn’t he?”

“I understand she prefers the name Worth, rather than Worthington. Is there a reason for that, that you know of?”

“Cutting that boring schoolmaster down to size, I should think.”

“When you say she did it to save Ricardo, you mean of course that—”

Mrs. Pelling let out a stage groan of pain.

“Oh, you men. When? Who? Why? How? In the bushes, dear. In a telephone box, dear. She bought Ricardo his life, darling, with the only currency she has. She did him proud, then left him. What the hell, he was a slug.” She took up another postcard and studied the picture of palm trees and an empty beach. “My little Lizzie went behind the hedge with half of Asia before she found her Drake. But she found him.”

As if hearing a noise, she sat up sharply and stared at Smiley most intently while she straightened her hair. “I think you’d better go, dear,” she said, in the same low voice, while she turned herself toward the mirror. “You give me the galloping creeps, to be honest. I can’t do with trustworthy faces round me. Sorry, darling, know what I mean?”

At the Circus, Smiley took no more than a couple of minutes to confirm what he already knew: that Mellon was the work name of Sam Collins.

11

SHANGHAI EXPRESS

In the scheme of things as they are now conveniently remembered, there is at this point a deceptive condensation of events. Somewhere around here in Jerry’s life, Christmas came and went in a succession of aimless drinking sessions at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club, and a series of last-minute parcels to Cat clumsily wrapped in holly paper at all hours of the night. A revised trace request on Ricardo was submitted formally to the Cousins, and Smiley took it to the Annexe in person in order to explain himself more fully to Martello. But the request got snarled up in the Christmas rush—not to mention the impending collapse of Vietnam and Cambodia—and didn’t complete its round of the American departments till well into the New Year, as the dates in the Dolphin file show. Indeed, the crucial meeting with Martello and his friends on the Drug Enforcement side did not take place till early February.

The wear of this prolonged delay on Jerry’s nerves was appreciated intellectually within the Circus, but not, in the continued mood of crisis, felt or acted on. For that, one may again blame Smiley, depending where one stands, but it is very hard to see what more he could have done short of calling Jerry home, particularly since Craw continued to report favourably on his general disposition. The fifth floor was working flat out all the time, and Christmas was hardly noticed apart from a rather battered sherry party at midday on the twenty-fifth, and a break later while Connie and the mothers played the Queen’s speech very loud in order to shame heretics like Guillam and Molly Meakin, who found it hilarious and did bad imitations of it in the corridors.

The formal induction of Sam Collins to the Circus’s meagre ranks took place on a really freezing day in mid-January, and it had a light side and a dark side. The light side was his arrest. He arrived at ten exactly, on a Monday morning, not in a dinnerjacket but in a dapper grey overcoat with a rose in the buttonhole, looking miraculously youthful in the cold. But Smiley and Guillam were out, cloistered with the Cousins, and neither the janitors nor the housekeepers had any brief to admit him, so they locked him in a basement for three hours where he shivered and fumed till Smiley returned to verify the appointment. There was more comedy about his room. Smiley had put him on the fourth floor next to Connie and di Salis, but Sam wouldn’t wear that and wanted the fifth. He considered it more suitable to his acting rank of co-ordinator. The poor janitors humped furniture up and down stairs like coolies.

The dark side was harder to describe, though several tried. Connie said Sam was “frigid,” a disturbing choice of adjective. To Guillam he was “hungry,” to the mothers “shifty,” and to the burrowers “too smooth by half.” The strangest thing, to those who did not know the background, was his self-sufficiency. He drew no files, he made no bids for this or that responsibility, and he scarcely used the telephone, except to place gambling bets or oversee the running of his club. But his smile went with him everywhere. The typists declared that he slept in it, and handwashed it at weekends. Smiley’s interviews with him took place behind closed doors, and bit by bit the product of them was communicated to the team.

Yes, the girl had fetched up in Vientiane with a couple of hippies who had overrun the Katmandu trail. Yes, when they dumped her she had asked Mackelvore to find her a job. And yes, Mackelvore had passed her on to Sam, thinking that on looks alone she must be exploitable: all, reading between the lines, much as the girl had described in her letter home. Sam had a couple of low-grade drug ploys mouldering on his books and was otherwise, thanks to Haydon, becalmed, so he thought he might as well put her alongside the flying boys and see what came up. He didn’t tell London, because London at that point was killing everything. He just went ahead with her on trial and paid her out of his management fund. What came up was Ricardo. He also let her follow an old lead to the bullion racket in Hong Kong; but that was all before he realised she was a total disaster. It was a positive relief to Sam, he said, when Ricardo took her off his hands and got her a job with Indocharter.

“So what else does he know?” Guillam demanded indignantly. “That’s not much of a ticket, is it, for screwing up the pecking order, horning in on our meetings.”

“He knows her,” said Smiley patiently, and resumed his study of Jerry Westerby’s file, which of late had become his principal reading. “We are not above a little blackmail ourselves from time to time,” he added with maddening tolerance, “and it is perfectly reasonable that we should have to submit to it occasionally.” Whereas Connie, with unwonted coarseness, startled everyone by paraphrasing—apparently—President Johnson on the subject of J. Edgar Hoover. “George would rather have Sam Collins inside the tent pissing out than outside the tent pissing in,” she declared, and gave a schoolgirl giggle at her own audacity.

And most particularly, it was not till mid-January, in the course of his continued excursions into the minutiae of the Ko background, that Doc di Salis unveiled his amazing discovery of the survival of a certain Mr. Hibbert, a China missionary in the Baptist interest, whom Ko had mentioned as a referee when he applied to read law in London.

All much more spread out, therefore, than the contemporary memory conveniently allows—and the strain on Jerry accordingly all the greater.

* * *

“There’s the possibility of a knighthood,” Connie Sachs said. They had said it already on the telephone.

It was a very sober scene. Connie had bobbed her hair. She wore a dark brown hat and a dark brown suit, and she carried a dark brown handbag to contain the radio microphone. Outside in the little drive, in a blue cab with the engine and the heater on, Toby Esterhase, the Hungarian pavement artist, wearing a peak cap, pretended to doze while he received and recorded the conversation on the instruments beneath his seat. Connie’s extravagant shape had acquired a prim discipline. She held a Stationery Office notebook handy, and a Stationery Office ballpoint pen between her arthritic fingers. As to the remote di Salis, the art had been to modernise him a little. Under protest, he wore one of Guillam’s striped shirts, with a dark tie to match. The result, somewhat surprisingly, was quite convincing.

“It’s extremely confidential,” Connie said to Mr. Hibbert, speaking loud and clear. She had said that on the telephone as well.

“Enormously,” di Salis muttered in confirmation, and flung his arms about till one elbow settled awkwardly on his knobbly knee, and a crabbed hand enclosed his chin, then scratched it.

The Governor had recommended one, she said, and now it was up to the Board to decide whether or not they would pass the recommendation on to the Palace. And on the word “Palace” she cast a restrained glance at di Salis, who at once smiled brightly but modestly, like a celebrity at a chat show. His strands of grey hair were slicked down with cream, and looked (said Connie later) as though they had been basted for the oven.

“So you will understand,” said Connie, in the precise accents of a female news-reader, “that in order to protect our noblest institutions against embarrassment, a very thorough enquiry has to be made.”

“The Palace,” Mr. Hibbert echoed, with a wink in di Salis’s direction. “Well, I’m blowed. The Palace—hear that, Doris?” He was very old. The record said eighty-one, but his features had reached the age where they were once more unweathered. He wore a clerical dog-collar, a tan cardigan with worn leather patches on the elbows, and a shawl around his shoulders. The background of the grey sea made a halo round his white hair. “Sir Drake Ko,” he said. “That’s one thing I’d not thought of, I will say.” His North Country accent was so pure that, like his snowy hair, it could have been put on. “Sir Drake,” he repeated. “Well, I’m blowed. Eh, Doris?”

A daughter sat with them, thirty to forty-odd, blond, and she wore a yellow frock and powder but no lipstick. Since girlhood, nothing seemed to have happened to her face beyond a steady fading of its hopes. When she spoke, she blushed, but she rarely spoke. She had made pastries, and sandwiches as thin as handkerchiefs, and seed-cake on a doily; to strain the tea she used a piece of muslin with beads to weight it stitched around the border.

From the ceiling hung a pronged parchment lampshade made in the shape of a star. An upright piano stood along one wall with the score of “Lead, Kindly Light” open on its stand. A sampler of Kipling’s “If ” hung over the empty fire grate, and the velvet curtains on either side of the sea window were so heavy they might have been there to screen off an unused part of life. There were no books; there was not even a Bible. There was a very big colour television set and there was a long line of Christmas cards hung laterally over string, wings downward, like shot birds half-way to hitting the ground. There was nothing to recall the China coast, unless it was the shadow of the winter sea. It was a day of no weather and no wind. In the garden, cacti and shrubs waited dully in the cold. Walkers went quickly on the promenade.

They would like to take notes, Connie added. For it is Circus folklore that when the sound is being stolen, notes should be taken, both as fall-back and for cover.

“Oh, you write away,” Mr. Hibbert said encouragingly. “We’re not all elephants, are we, Doris? Doris is, mind—wonderful her memory is, good as her mother’s.”

“So what we’d like to do first,” said Connie—careful all the same to match the old man’s pace—“if we may, is what we do with all character witnesses, as we call them. We’d like to establish exactly how long you’ve known Mr. Ko, and the circumstances of your relationship with him.”

Describe your access to Dolphin, she was saying, in a somewhat different language.

Talking of others, old men talk about themselves, studying their image in vanished mirrors.

“I was born to the calling,” Mr. Hibbert said. “My grandfather, he was called. My father, he had—oh, a big parish in Macclesfield. My uncle died when he was twelve, but he still took the Pledge, didn’t he, Doris? I was in missionary training school at twenty. By twenty-four, I’d set sail for Shanghai to join the Lord’s Life Mission. The Empire Queen, she was called. We’d more waiters than passengers, the way I remember it. Oh, dear.”

He aimed to spend a few years in Shanghai teaching and learning the language, he said, and then with luck transfer to the China Inland Mission and move to the interior.

“I’d have liked that. I’d have liked the challenge. I’ve always liked the Chinese. The Lord’s Life wasn’t posh, but it did a job. Now, those Roman schools—well, they were more like your monasteries, and with all that that entails,” said Mr. Hibbert.

Di Salis, the sometime Jesuit, gave a dim smile.

“Now, we’d got our kids in from the streets,” he said. “Shanghai was a rare old hotchpotch, I can tell you. We’d everything and everyone. Gangs, corruption, prostitution galore, we’d politics, money and greed and misery. All human life was there, wasn’t it, Doris? She wouldn’t remember, really. We went back after the war, didn’t we, but they soon chucked us out again. She wasn’t above eleven, even then, were you? There weren’t the places left after that—well, not like Shanghai—so we came back here. But we like it, don’t we, Doris?” said Mr. Hibbert, very conscious of speaking for both of them. “We like the air. That’s what we like.”

“Very much,” said Doris, and cleared her throat with a cough into her large fist.

“So we’d fill up with whatever we could get, that’s what it came to,” he resumed. “We had old Miss Fong. Remember Daisy Fong, Doris? ’Course you do—Daisy and her bell? Well, she wouldn’t really. My, how the time goes, though. A Pied Piper, that’s what Daisy was, except it was a bell, and her not a man, and she was doing God’s work even if she did fall later. Best convert I ever had, till the Japs came. She’d go down the streets, Daisy would, ringing the daylights out of that bell. Sometimes old Charlie Wan would go along with her, sometimes I’d go. We’d choose the docks or the night-club areas—behind the Bund maybe—Blood Alley we called that street, remember, Doris?— she wouldn’t really—and old Daisy would ring her bell, ring, ring!”

He burst out laughing at the memory; he saw her before him quite clearly, for his hand was unconsciously making the vigorous movements of the bell. Di Salis and Connie politely joined in his laughter, but Doris only frowned.

“Rue de Jaffe, that was the worst spot. In the French concession, not surprisingly, where the houses of sin were. Well, they were everywhere, really. Shanghai was jam-packed with them. Sin City they called it. And they were right. Then a few kids gathered and she’d ask them, ‘Any of you lost your mothers?’ And you’d get a couple. Not all at once, here one, there one. Some would try it on, like for the rice supper, then get sent home with a cuff. But we’d always a few real ones, hadn’t we, Doris? And bit by bit we got a school going, forty-four we had by the end, hadn’t we? Some boarders, not all. Bible Class, the three Rs, a bit of geography and history. That’s all we could do, really. No, we weren’t a posh place.”

Restraining his impatience, di Salis had fixed his gaze on the grey sea and kept it there. But Connie had arranged her expression in a steady smile of admiration, and her eyes never left the old man’s face.

“That’s how Daisy found the Kos,” he went on, oblivious of his erratic sequence. “Down in the docks, didn’t she, Doris, looking for their mother.

“They’d come up from Swatow, the two of them. When was that? Nineteen thirty-six, I suppose. Young Drake was ten or eleven, and his brother Nelson was eight—thin as wire, they were, hadn’t had a square meal for weeks. They became rice Christians overnight, I can tell you! Mind you, they hadn’t names in those days—not English, naturally. They were boat people, Chiu Chow. We never really found out about the mother, did we, Doris? ‘Killed by the guns,’ they said. ‘Killed by the guns.’ Could have been Japanese guns, could have been Kuomintang. We never got to the bottom of it; why should we? The Lord had her and that was that. Might as well stop all the questions and get on with it.

“Little Nelson had his arm all messed. Shocking, really. Broken bone sticking through his sleeve—I suppose the guns did that as well. Drake, he was holding Nelson’s good hand, and he wouldn’t let it go for love nor money at first, not even for the lad to eat. We used to say they’d one good hand between them— remember, Doris? Drake would sit there at table clutching on to him, shovelling rice into him for all he was worth. We had the doctor in: hecouldn’t separate them. We just had to put up with it. ‘You’ll be Drake,’ I said, ‘and you’ll be Nelson, because you’re both brave sailors, how’s that?’ It was your mother’s idea, wasn’t it, Doris? She’d always wanted boys.”

Doris looked at her father, started to say something, and changed her mind.

“They used to stroke her hair,” the old man said, in a slightly mystified voice. “Stroke your mother’s hair and ring old Daisy’s bell, that’s what they liked. They’d never seen blond hair before.

“Here, Doris, how about a drop more saw? Mine’s run cold, so I’m sure theirs has. Saw is Shanghainese for tea,” he explained. “In Canton they call it cha. We’ve kept some of the old words, I don’t know why.”

With an exasperated hiss, Doris bounded from the room, and Connie seized the opportunity to speak.

“Now, Mr. Hibbert, we have no note of a brother till now,” she said, in a slightly reproachful tone. “He was younger, you say. Two years younger? Three?”

“No note of Nelson?” The old man was amazed. “Why, he loved him! Drake’s whole life, Nelson was. Do anything for him. No note of Nelson, Doris?”

But Doris was in the kitchen, fetching saw.

Referring to her notes, Connie gave a strict smile.

“I’m afraid it’s we who are to blame, Mr. Hibbert. I see here that Government House has left a blank against ‘Brothers and sisters.’ There’ll be one or two red faces in Hong Kong quite shortly, I can tell you. You don’t happen to remember Nelson’s date of birth, I suppose? Just to short-cut things?”

“No, my goodness! Daisy Fong would remember, of course, but she’s long gone. Gave them all birthdays, Daisy did, even when they didn’t know them theirselves.”

Di Salis hauled on his ear-lobe, pulling his head down. “Or his Chinese forenames?” he blurted in his high voice. “They might be useful, if one’s checking.”

Mr. Hibbert was shaking his head. “No note of Nelson! Bless my soul! You can’t really think of Drake, not without little Nelson at his side. Went together like bread and cheese, we used to say. Being orphans, naturally.”

From the hall they heard a telephone ringing, and to the secret surprise of both Connie and di Salis a distinct “Oh, hell” from Doris in the kitchen as she dashed to answer it. They heard clippings of angry conversation against the mounting whimper of a tea-kettle: “Well, why isn’t it? Well, if it’s the bloody brakes, why say it’s the clutch? No, we don’t want a new car. We want the old one repaired, for God’s sake.” With a loud “Christ” she rang off and returned to the kitchen and the screaming kettle.

“Nelson’s Chinese forenames,” Connie prompted gently, through her smile, but the old man shook his head.

“You’d have to ask old Daisy that,” he said. “And she’s long in heaven, bless her.” Di Salis seemed about to contest the old man’s claim to ignorance, but Connie shut him up with a look: Let him run, she was urging. Force him and we’ll lose the whole match.

The old man’s chair was on a swivel. Unconsciously, he had worked his way clockwise, and now he was talking to the sea.

“They were like chalk and cheese,” Mr. Hibbert said. “I never saw two brothers so different, nor so faithful, and that’s a fact.”

“Different in what way?” Connie asked invitingly.

“Little Nelson, now, he was frightened of the cockroaches. That was the first thing. We didn’t have your modern sanitation, naturally. We had to send them down to the hut, and—oh, dear, those cockroaches, they flew about that hut like bullets! Nelson wouldn’t go near the place. His arm was mending well enough, he was eating like a fighting cock, but that lad would hold himself in for days on end rather than go inside the hut. Your mother promised him the moon if he’d go. Daisy Fong took a stick to him, and I can see his eyes still. He’d look at you sometimes and clench his one good fist, and you’d think he’d turn you to stone. That Nelson was a rebel from the day he was born.

“Then one day we looked out of the window and there they were. Drake with his arm round little Nelson’s shoulder, leading him down the path to keep him company while he did his business. Notice how they walk different, the boat children?” he asked brightly, as if he saw them now. “Bow-legged from the cramp, they both were.”

The door was barged open and Doris came in with a tray of fresh tea, making a clatter as she set it down.

“Singing was just the same,” he said, and fell silent again, gazing at the sea.

“Singing hymns?” Connie prompted brightly, glancing at the polished piano with its empty candle-holders.

“Drake, he’d belt anything out as long as your mother was at the piano. Carols. ‘There Is a Green Hill.’ Cut his own throat for your mother, Drake would. But young Nelson, I never heard him sing one note.”

“You heard him later all right,” Doris reminded him harshly, but he preferred not to notice her.

“You’d take his lunch away, his supper, but he’d not even say his Amens. He’d a real quarrel with God from the start.” He laughed with sudden freshness. “Well, those are your real believers, I always say. The others are just polite. There’s no true conversion, not without a quarrel.”

“Damn garage,” Doris muttered, still fuming after her telephone call, as she hacked at the seed-cake.

“Here! Is your driver all right?” Mr. Hibbert cried. “Shall Doris take out to him? He must be freezing to death out there! Bring him in, go on!” But before either of them could answer, Mr. Hibbert had started talking about his war. Not Drake’s war, or Nelson’s, but his own, in unjoined scraps of graphic memory.

“Funny thing, there was a lot who thought the Japs were just the ticket. Teach those upstart Chinese Nationalists where to get off. Let alone the Communists, of course. Oh, it took quite a while for the scales to fall, I can tell you. Even after the bombardments started. European shops closed. Taipans evacuated their families, Country Club became a hospital. But there were still the ones who said ‘Don’t worry.’ Then one day, bang, they’d locked us up, hadn’t they, Doris? And killed your mother into the bargain. She’d not the stamina, had she, not after her tuberculosis. Still, those Ko brothers were better off than most, for all that.”

“Oh. Why was that?” Connie enquired, all interest.

“They’d the knowledge of Jesus to guide and comfort them, hadn’t they?”

“Of course,” said Connie.

“Naturally,” di Salis chimed, linking his fingers and hauling at them. “Indeed they had,” he said unctuously.

So with the Japs, as he called them, the mission closed and Daisy Fong with her handbell led the children to join the stream of refugees, who by cart, bus, or train, but mostly on foot, were taking the trail to Shangjao and finally to Chungking, where Chiang’s Nationalists had set up their temporary capital.

“He can’t go on too long,” Doris warned at one point, in an aside to Connie. “He gets gaga.”

“Oh, yes, I can, dear,” Mr. Hibbert corrected her, with a fond smile. “I’ve had my share of life now. I can do what I like.”

With his wife’s death, he somehow said, his own life had ended too; he was marking time until he joined her. He had had a living in the North of England for a while. After that he’d done a bit of work in London, propagating the Bible.

“Then we came south, didn’t we, Doris? I don’t know why.”

“For the air,” she said.

“There’ll be a party, will there, at the Palace?” Mr. Hibbert asked. “I suppose Drake might even put us down for invites. Think of that, Doris. You’d like that: a Royal Garden Party. Hats.”

“But you did return to Shanghai,” Connie reminded him eventually, shuffling her notes to call him back. “The Japanese were defeated, Shanghai was reopened, and back you went. Without your wife, of course, but you returned all the same.”

“Oh, ay, we went.”

“So you saw the Kos again. You all met up and you had a marvellous old natter, I’m sure. Is that what happened, Mr. Hibbert?”

For a moment it seemed he hadn’t taken in the question, but suddenly with a delayed action he laughed. “By Jove and weren’t they real little men by then, too! Fly as fly they were! And after the girls, saving your presence, Doris. I always say Drake would have married you, dear, if you’d given him any hope.”

“Oh, honestly, Dad,” Doris muttered, and scowled at the floor.

“And Nelson—on, my, he was the firebrand!” He drank his tea with the spoon, carefully, as if he were feeding a bird. “ ‘Where Missie?’ His first question that was, Drake’s. He wanted your mother. ‘Where Missie?’ He’d forgotten all his English, so’d Nelson. I’d to give them lessons later. So I told him. He’d seen enough of death by then, that was for sure. Wasn’t as if he didn’t believe in it.

“ ‘Missie dead,’ I said. Nothing else to say. ‘She’s dead, Drake, and she’s with God.’ I never saw him weep before or since, but he wept then and I loved him for it. ‘I lose two mothers,’ he says to me. ‘Mother dead, now Missie dead.’ We prayed for her, what else can you do? Little Nelson, now he didn’t cry or pray. Not him. He never took to her the way Drake did. Nothing personal. She was enemy. We all were.”

“We being who precisely, Mr. Hibbert?” di Salis asked coaxingly.

“Europeans, capitalists, missionaries: all of us exploiters who were there for their souls, or their labour, or their silver. All of us,” Mr. Hibbert repeated, without the least hint of rancour. “Exploiters. That’s how he saw us. Right, in a way too.” The conversation hung awkwardly for a moment till Connie carefully retrieved it.

“So, anyway,” she said, “you reopened the mission, and you stayed till the Communist take-over of ’forty-nine, I assume, and for those four years at least you were able to keep a fatherly eye on Drake and Nelson. Is that how it went, Mr. Hibbert?” she asked, pen poised.

“Oh, we hung the lamp on the door again, yes. In ’forty-five, we were jubilant, same as anyone else. The fighting had stopped, the Japs were beaten, the refugees could come home. Hugging in the street, there was, the usual. We’d money—reparation, I suppose, a grant. Daisy Fong came back, but not for long. For the first year or two the surface held, but not really, even then. We were there as long as Chiang Kai-shek could govern—well, he was never much of a one for that, was he? By ’forty-seven we’d the Communism out on the streets—and by ’forty-nine it was there to stay. International Settlement long gone, of course— concessions, too, and a good thing. The rest went slowly.

“You got the blind ones, as usual, who said the old Shanghai would go on forever, same as you did with the Japs. Shanghai had corrupted the Manchus, they said; the war-lords, the Kuomintang, the Japanese, the British. Now she’d corrupt the Communists. They were wrong, of course. Doris and me—well, we didn’t believe in corruption, did we, not as a solution to China’s problems—nor did your mother. So we came home.”

“And the Kos?” Connie reminded him, while Doris noisily hauled some knitting out of a brown-paper bag.

The old man hesitated, and this time it was not senility, perhaps, which slowed his narrative, but doubt. “Well, yes,” he conceded, after an awkward gap. “Yes, rare adventures those two had, I can tell you.”

“Adventures,” Doris echoed angrily as she clicked her knitting needles. “Rampages, more like.”

The light was clinging to the sea, but inside the room it was dying and the gas fire puttered like a distant motor.

Several times, escaping from Shanghai, Drake and Nelson were separated, the old man said. When they couldn’t find each other, they ate their hearts out till they did. Nelson, the young one, got all the way to Chungking without a scratch, surviving starvation, exhaustion, and hellish air bombardments which killed thousands of civilians. But Drake, being older, was drafted into Chiang’s army, though Chiang did nothing but run away, hoping that the Communists and the Japanese would kill each other.

“Charged all over the shop, Drake did, trying to find the front and worrying himself to death about Nelson. And, of course, Nelson—well, he was twiddling his thumbs in Chungking, wasn’t he, boning up on his ideological reading. They’d even the New China Daily there, he told me afterwards, and published with Chiang’s agreement. Fancy that! There was a few others of his mind around, and in Chungking they got their heads together rebuilding the world for when the war ended, and one day, thank God, it did.”

In 1945, said Mr. Hibbert simply, their separation was ended by a miracle. “One chance in thousands, it was—millions. That road back littered with streams of lorries, carts, troops, guns all pouring toward the coast, and there was Drake running up and down like a madman: ‘Have you seen my brother?’ ”

The drama of the instant touched the preacher in him, and his voice lifted: “And one little dirty fellow put his arm on Drake’s elbow. ‘Here. You. Ko.’ Like he’s asking for a light. ‘Your brother’s two trucks back, talking the hind legs off a bunch of Hakka Communists.’ Next thing, they’re in each other’s arms and Drake won’t let Nelson out of his sight till they’re back in Shanghai and then not!”

“So they came to see you,” Connie suggested cosily.

“When Drake got back to Shanghai, he’d one thing in his mind and one only. Brother Nelson should have a formal education. Nothing else on God’s good earth mattered to Drake except Nelson’s schooling. Nothing. Nelson must go to school.” The old man’s hand thudded on the chair arm. “One of the brothers at least would make the grade. Oh, he was adamant, Drake was! And he did it,” said the old man. “Drake swung it. He would. He was a real fixer by then. Drake was nineteen years of age, odd, when he came back from the war. Nelson, he was going on seventeen, and worked night and day, too—on his studies, of course. Same as Drake did, but Drake worked with his body.”

“He was bent,” Doris said under her breath. “He joined a gang and stole. When he wasn’t pawing me.”

Whether Mr. Hibbert heard her or whether he was simply answering a standard objection in her was not clear. “Now, Doris, you must see those triads in perspective,” he corrected her. “Shanghai was a city-state. It was run by a bunch of merchant princes, robber barons, and worse. There were no unions, no law and order, life was cheap and hard, and I doubt Hong Kong’s that different today once you scratch the surface. Some of those so-called English gentlemen would have made your Lancashire mill-owner into a shining example of Christian charity by comparison.”

The mild rebuke administered, he returned to Connie and his narrative. Connie was familiar to him: the archetypal lady in the front pew, big, attentive, in a hat, listening indulgently to the old man’s every word.

“They’d come round to tea, see, five o’clock, the brothers. I’d to have everything ready, the food on the table—lemonade they liked, called it soda. Drake came in from the docks, Nelson from his books, and they’d eat not hardly talking; then back to work, wouldn’t they, Doris? They’d dug out some legendary hero, the scholar Che Yin. Che Yin was so poor he’d had to teach himself to read and write by the light of the fireflies. They’d go on about how Nelson was to emulate him. ‘Come on, Che Yin,’ I’d say. ‘Have another bun to keep your strength up.’ They’d laugh a bit and away they’d go again. ‘Bye-bye, Che Yin, off you go.’

“Now and then, when his mouth wasn’t too full, Nelson would have a go at me on the politics. My, he’d some ideas! Nothing we could have taught him, I can tell you—we didn’t know enough. Money the root of all evil—well, I’d never deny that! I’d been preaching it myself for years! Brotherly love, comradeship, religion the opiate of the masses—well, I couldn’t go along with that, but clericalism, High Church baloney, popery, idolatry—well, he wasn’t too far wrong there either, the way I saw it. He’d a few bad words against us British too, not but what we deserved them, I daresay.”

“Didn’t stop him eating your food, did it?” Doris said, in another low-toned aside. “Or renouncing his religious background. Or smashing the mission to pieces.”

But the old man only smiled patiently. “Doris, my dear, I have told you before and I’ll tell you again. The Lord reveals himself in many ways. So long as good men are prepared to go out and seek for truth and justice and brotherly love, He’ll not be kept waiting too long outside the door.”

Colouring, Doris dug away at her knitting.

“She’s right, of course. Nelson did smash up the mission. Renounced his religion too.” A cloud of grief threatened his old face for a moment, till laughter suddenly triumphed. “And my billy-oh, didn’t Drake make him smart for it! Didn’t he give him a dressing down, though! Oh dear, oh dear! ‘Politics,’ says Drake. ‘You can’t eat them, you can’t sell them, and’—saving Doris’s presence—‘you can’t sleep with them! All you can do with them is smash temples and kill the innocent!’ I’ve never seen him so angry. And gave Nelson a hiding, he did! Drake had learned a thing or two down in the docks, I can tell you!”

“And you must,” di Salis hissed, snakelike in the gloom. “You must tell us everything. It’s your duty.”

“A student procession,” Mr. Hibbert resumed. “Torchlight, after the curfew, group of Communists out on the streets for a shindy. Early ’forty-nine—spring it would have been, I suppose—things were just beginning to hot up.” In contrast to his earlier ramblings, Mr. Hibbert’s narrative style had become unexpectedly concise.

“We were sitting by the fire, weren’t we, Doris? Fourteen, Doris was, or was it fifteen? We used to love a fire, even when there wasn’t the need—took us home to Macclesfield. And we hear this clattering and chanting outside: cymbals, whistles, gongs, bells, drums—oh, a shocking din. I’d a notion something like this might have been happening. Little Nelson, he was forever warning me in his English lessons. “You go home, Mr. Hibbert. You’re a good man,’ he used to say, bless him. ‘You’re a good man, but when the floodgates burst the water will cover the good and the bad alike.’ He’d a lovely turn of phrase, Nelson, when he wanted. It went with his faith. Not invented. Felt.

“ ‘Daisy,’ I said—Daisy Fong, that was; she was sitting with us—‘Daisy, you and Doris go to the back courtyard, I think we’re about to have company.’ Next thing I knew, smash, someone had tossed a stone through the window. We heard voices, of course, shouting, and I picked out young Nelson even then, just from his voice. He’d the Chiu Chow and the Shanghainese, of course, but he was using Shanghainese to the lads, naturally. ‘Condemn the imperialist running dogs!’ he’s yelling. ‘Down with the religious hyenas!’ Oh, the slogans they dream up! They sound all right in the Chinese but shove ’em into English and they’re rubbish. Then the door goes and in they come.”

“They smashed the cross,” said Doris, pausing to glare at her pattern.

It was Hibbert this time, not his daughter, who startled his audience with his earthiness: “They smashed a damn sight more than that, Doris! They smashed the lot. Pews, the Table, the piano, chairs, lamps, hymn-books, Bibles. Oh, they’d a real old go, I can tell you. Proper little pigs, they were. ‘Go on,’ I says. ‘Help yourselves. What man hath put together will perish, but you’ll not destroy God’s word, not if you chop the whole place up for matchwood.’ Nelson, he wouldn’t look at me, poor lad. I could have wept for him.

“When they’d gone, I looked round and I saw old Daisy Fong standing there in the doorway and Doris behind her. She’d been watching, had Daisy. Enjoying it. I could see it in her eyes. She was one of them, at heart. Happy. ‘Daisy,’ I said. ‘Pack your things and go. In this life you can give yourself or withhold yourself as you please, my dear. But never lend yourself. That way you’re worse than a spy.’ ”

While Connie beamed her agreement, di Salis gave a squeaky, offended wheeze.

But the old man was really enjoying himself. “Well, so we sat down, me and Doris here, and we’d a bit of a cry together, I don’t mind admitting, hadn’t we, Doris? I’m not ashamed of tears, never have been. We missed your mother sorely. Knelt down, had a pray. Then we started clearing up. Difficult to know where to begin, really.

“Then in comes Drake!” He shook his head in wonder. “ ‘Good evening Mr. Hibbert,’ he says, in that deep voice of his, plus a bit of my North Country that always made us laugh. And behind him, there’s little Nelson standing with a brush and pan in his hand. He’d still his crooked arm—I suppose he has now— smashed in the bombs when he was little, but it didn’t stop him brushing, I can tell you. That’s when Drake went for him—oh, cursing him like a navvy! I’d never heard him like it. Well, he was a navvy, wasn’t he, in a manner of speaking?” He smiled serenely at his daughter. “Lucky he spoke the Chiu Chow, eh, Doris? I only understand the half of it myself, not that, but my hat! Effing and blinding like I don’t know what.”

He paused and closed his eyes a moment, either in prayer or tiredness. “It wasn’t Nelson’s fault, of course. Well, we knew that already. He was a leader. Face was involved. They’d started marching, nowhere much in mind, then somebody calls to him, ‘Hey! Mission boy! Show us where your loyalties are now!’ So he did. He had to. Didn’t stop Drake lamming into him, all the same. They cleaned up, we went to bed, and the two lads slept on the chapel floor in case the mob came back. Came down in the morning, there were the hymn-books all piled up neatly, those that had survived, same with the Bibles. They’d fixed a cross up, fashioned it theirselves. Even patched up the piano, though not to tune it, naturally.”

Winding himself into a fresh knot, di Salis put a question. Like Connie, he had a notebook open, but he had not yet written anything in it.

“What was Nelson’s discipline at this time?” he demanded, in his nasal, indignant way, and held his pen ready to write.

Mr. Hibbert gave a puzzled frown: “Why, the Communist Party, naturally.”

As Doris whispered “Oh, Daddy” into her knitting, Connie hastily translated: “What was Nelson studying, Mr. Hibbert, and where?”

“Ah, discipline. That kind of discipline!” Mr. Hibbert resumed his plainer style.

* * *

He knew the answer exactly. What else, he asked, had he and Nelson to talk about in their English lessons—apart from the Communist gospel—but Nelson’s own ambitions? Nelson’s passion was engineering. Nelson believed that technology, not Bibles, would lead China out of feudalism.

“Shipbuilding, roads, railways, factories: that was Nelson. The Angel Gabriel with a slide-rule and a white collar, and a degree. That’s who he was, in his mind.”

Mr. Hibbert did not stay in Shanghai long enough to see Nelson achieve this happy state, he said, because Nelson did not graduate till ’51.

Di Salis’s pen scratched wildly on the notebook.

“But Drake, who’d scraped and scrounged for him those six years,” said Mr. Hibbert—over Doris’s renewed references to the triads—“Drake stuck it out, and he had his reward, same as Nelson did. He saw that vital piece of paper go into Nelson’s hand, and he knew his job was done and he could get out, just like he’d always planned.”

Di Salis in his excitement was growing positively avid. His ugly face had sprung fresh patches of colour and he was fidgeting desperately on his chair.

“And after graduating—what then?” he said urgently. “What did he do? What became of him? Go on, please. Please go on.”

Amused by such enthusiasm, Mr. Hibbert smiled. Well, according to Drake, he said, Nelson had first joined the shipyards as a draughtsman, working on blueprints and buildingprojects, and learning like mad whatever he could from the Russian technicians who’d poured in since Mao’s victory. Then in ’53, if Mr. Hibbert’s memory served him correctly, Nelson was privileged to be chosen for further training at the Leningrad University in Russia, and he stayed on there till— well, late fifties anyway.

“Oh, he was like a dog with two tails, Drake was, by the sound of him.” Mr. Hibbert could not have looked more proud if it had been his own son he was talking of.

Di Salis suddenly leaned forward, even presuming, despite cautionary glances from Connie, to jab his pen in the old man’s direction. “So after Leningrad: what did they do with him then?”

“Why, he came back to Shanghai, naturally,” said Mr. Hibbert with a laugh. “And promoted, he was, after the learning he’d acquired, and the standing: a shipbuilder, Russian taught, a technologist, an administrator! Oh, he loved those Russians! Specially after Korea. They’d machines, power, ideas, philosophy. His promised land, Russia was. He looked up to them like—”

His voice and his zeal both died. “Oh, dear,” he muttered, and stopped, unsure of himself for the second time since they had listened to him. “But that couldn’t last forever, could it? Admiring Russia—how long was that fashionable in Mao’s new wonderland? Doris dear, get me a shawl.”

“You’re wearing it,” Doris said.

Yet still, tactlessly, stridently, di Salis bore in on him. He cared for nothing now except the answers—not even for the notebook open on his lap.

“He returned,” he piped. “Very well. He rose in the hierarchy. He was Russia trained, Russia oriented. Very well. What comes next?”

Mr. Hibbert looked at di Salis for a long time. There was no guile in his face, and none in his gaze. He looked at him as a clever child might, without the hindrance of sophistication; and it was suddenly clear that Mr. Hibbert didn’t trust di Salis any more, and indeed that he didn’t like him.

“He’s dead, young man,” Mr. Hibbert said finally, and, swivelling his chair, stared at the sea view. In the room it was already half dark, and most of the light came from the gas fire. The grey beach was empty. On the wicket gate a single sea-gull perched black and vast against the last strands of the evening sky.

“You said he still had his crooked arm,” di Salis snapped straight back. “You said you supposed he had. You said it about now; I heard it in your voice.”

* * *

“Well, now, I think we have taxed Mr. Hibbert quite enough,” said Connie brightly and, with a sharp glance at di Salis, stooped for her bag. But di Salis would have none of it.

“I don’t believe him!” he cried in his shrill voice. “When did Nelson die? Give us the dates!”

But the old man only drew his shawl more closely round him, and kept his eyes to the sea.

“We were in Durham,” Doris said, still looking at her knitting, though there was not the light to knit by. “Drake drove up and saw us in his big chauffeur-driven car. He took his henchman with him, the one he calls Tiu. They were fellow crooks together in Shanghai. Wanted to show off. Brought me a platinum cigarette-lighter, and a thousand pounds in cash for Dad’s church and flashed his O.B.E. at us in its case; took me into a corner and asked me to come to Hong Kong and be his mistress, right under Dad’s nose. Bloody sauce!

“He wanted Dad’s signature on something. A guarantee. Said he was going to read law at Gray’s Inn. At his age, I ask you! Forty-two! Talk about mature student! He wasn’t, of course. It was all just face and talk, as usual. Dad said to him, ‘How’s Nelson?’ and—”

“Just one minute, please.” Di Salis had made yet another illjudged interruption. “The date? When did all this happen, please? I must have dates!”

“’Sixty-seven. Dad was almost retired, weren’t you, Dad?”

The old man did not stir.

“All right, ’sixty-seven. What month? Be precise, please!”

He all but said “Be precise, woman,” and he was making Connie seriously anxious. But when she tried to restrain him, he again ignored her.

“April,” Doris said, after some thought. “We’d just had Dad’s birthday. That’s why he brought the thousand quid for the church. He knew Dad wouldn’t take it for himself, because Dad didn’t like the way Drake made his money.”

“All right. Good. Well done. April. So Nelson died pre-April, ’sixty-seven. What details did Drake supply of the circumstances? Do you remember that?”

“None. No details. I told you. Dad asked, and he just said ‘dead,’ as if Nelson was a dog. So much for brotherly love. Dad didn’t know where to look. It nearly broke his heart and there was Drake not giving a hoot. ‘I have no brother. Nelson is dead.’ And Dad still praying for Nelson, weren’t you, Dad?”

“I prayed for Nelson and I pray for him still,” he said bluntly. “When he was alive, I prayed that one way or another he would do God’s work in the world. I believed he had it in him to do great things. Drake—he’d manage anywhere. He’s tough. But the light on the door at the Lord’s Life Mission would not have burned in vain, I used to think, if Nelson Ko succeeded in helping to lay the foundation of a just society in China. Nelson might call it Communism. Call it what he likes. But for three long years your mother and I gave him our Christian love, and I won’t have it said, Doris, not by you or anyone, that the light of God’s love can be put out forever—not by politics, not by the sword.”

He drew a long breath. “And now he’s dead I pray for his soul, same as I do for your mother’s,” he said, sounding strangely less convinced. “If that’s popery, I don’t care.”

Connie had actually risen to go. She knew the limits, she had the eye, and she was scared of the way di Salis was hammering on. But di Salis on the scent knew no limits at all.

“So it was a violent death, was it? Politics and the sword, you said. Which politics? Did Drake tell you that? Actual killings were relatively rare, you know. I think you’re holding out on us!”

Di Salis also was standing, but at Mr. Hibbert’s side, and he was yapping these questions down at the old man’s white head as if he were acting in a Sarratt playlet on interrogation.

“You’ve been so very kind,” said Connie gushingly to Doris. “Really, we’ve all we could possibly need and more. I’m sure it will all go through with the knighthood,” she said, in a voice pregnant with message for di Salis. “Now, away we go and thank you both enormously.”

But this time it was the old man himself who frustrated her. “And the year after, he lost his other Nelson, too, God help him, his little boy,” he said. “He’ll be a lonely man, will Drake. That was his last letter to us, wasn’t it, Doris? ‘Pray for my little Nelson, Mr. Hibbert,’ he wrote. And we did.

“Wanted me to fly over and conduct the funeral. I couldn’t do it, I don’t know why. I never much held with money spent on funerals, to be honest.”

At this di Salis literally pounced, and with a truly terrible glee. He stooped right over the old man, and he was so animated that he grabbed a fistful of shawl in his feverish little hand.

“Ah! Ah, now! But did he ever ask you to pray for Nelson senior? Answer me that.”

“No,” the old man said simply. “No, he didn’t.”

“Why not? Unless he wasn’t really dead, of course! There are more ways than one of dying in China, aren’t there, and not all of them fatal! ‘Disgraced’—is that a better expression?”

His squeaky words flew about the firelit room like ugly spirits.

“They’re to go, Doris,” the old man said calmly to the sea.

“See that driver right, won’t you, dear? I’m sure we should have taken out to him, but never mind.”

They stood in the hall, making their goodbyes. The old man had stayed in his chair, and Doris had closed the door on him.

Sometimes Connie’s sixth sense was frightening. “The name Liesedoesn’t mean anything to you, does it, Miss Hibbert?” she asked, buckling her enormous plastic coat. “We have a reference to a Liese in Mr. Ko’s life.”

Doris’s powdered face made an angry scowl.

“That’s Mum’s name,” she said. “She was German Lutheran. The swine stole that too, did he?”

With Toby Esterhase at the wheel, Connie Sachs and Doc di Salis hurried home to George with their amazing news. At first, on the way, they squabbled about di Salis’s lack of restraint. Toby Esterhase particularly was shocked, and Connie seriously feared the old man might write to Ko. But soon the import of their discovery overwhelmed their apprehensions, and they arrived triumphant at the gates of their secret city.

Safely inside the walls, it was now di Salis’s hour of glory. Summoning his family of yellow perils once more, he set in motion a whole variety of enquiries, which sent them scurrying all over London on one false pretext or another, and to Cambridge too. At heart di Salis was a loner: no one knew him, except Connie perhaps; and if Connie didn’t care for him, then no one liked him either. Socially, he was discordant and frequently absurd. But neither did anyone doubt his hunter’s will.

He scoured old records of the Shanghai University of Communications—in Chinese the Chiao Tung—which had a reputation for student Communist militancy after the 1939–45 war, and concentrated his interest upon the Department of Marine Studies, which included both administration and shipbuilding in its curriculum. He drew lists of Party cadre members of both before and after ’49, and pored over the scant details of those entrusted with the take-over of big enterprises where technological know-how was required—in particular the Kiangnan shipyard, a massive affair from which the Kuomintang elements had repeatedly to be purged.

Having drawn up lists of several thousand names, he opened files on all those who were known to have continued their studies at Leningrad University and afterwards reappeared at the shipyard in improved positions. A course of shipbuilding at Leningrad took three years. By di Salis’s computation, Nelson should have been there from ’53 to ’56, and afterwards formally assigned to the Shanghai municipal department in charge of marine engineering, which would then have returned him to the Kiangnan.

Accepting that Nelson not only possessed Chinese forenames which were still unknown, but quite possibly had chosen a new surname for himself into the bargain, di Salis warned his helpers that Nelson’s biography might be split into two parts, each under a different name. They should watch for dovetailing. He cadged lists of graduates and lists of enrolled students both at Chiao Tung and at Leningrad and set them side by side.

China-watchers are a fraternity apart, and their common interests transcend protocol and national differences. Di Salis had connections not only in Cambridge, and in every Oriental archive, but in Rome, Tokyo, and Munich as well. He wrote to all of them, concealing his goal in a welter of other questions. Even the Cousins, it turned out later, had unwittingly opened their files to him. He made other enquiries even more devious. He dispatched burrowers to the Baptists, to delve among records of old pupils at the mission schools, on the off chance that Nelson’s Chinese names had, after all, been taken down and filed. He tracked down any chance records of the deaths of middle-ranking Shanghai officials in the shipping industry.

That was the first leg of his labours. The second began with what Connie called the Great Beastly Cultural Revolution of the mid-sixties and the names of such Shanghainese officials who, in consequence of criminal pro-Russian leanings, had been officially purged, humiliated, or sent to a May 7th school to rediscover the virtues of peasant labour. He also consulted lists of those sent to labour reform camps, but with no great success. He looked for any references among the Red Guards’ harangues to the wicked influence of a Baptist upbringing upon this or that disgraced official, and he played complicated games with the name of Ko, for it was at the back of his mind that, in changing his name, Nelson might have hit upon a different character which retained an internal kinship with the original—either homophonic or symphonetic. But when he tried to explain this to Connie, he lost her.

For Connie Sachs was pursuing a different line entirely. Her interest centred on the activities of known Karla-trained talentspotters working among overseas students at the University of Leningrad in the fifties; and on rumours, never proven, that Karla, as a young Comintern agent, had been lent to the Shanghai Communist underground after the war to help them rebuild their secret apparatus.

It was in the middle of all this fresh burrowing that a small bombshell was delivered from Grosvenor Square. Mr. Hibbert’s intelligence was still fresh from the presses, in fact, and the researchers of both families were still frantically at work when Peter Guillam walked in on Smiley with an urgent message. He was, as usual, deep in his own reading, and as Guillam entered he slipped a file into a drawer and closed it.

“It’s the Cousins,” Guillam said gently. “About Brother Ricardo, your favourite pilot. They want to meet with you at the Annexe as soon as possible. I’m to ring back by yesterday.”

“They want what?”

“To meet you. But they use the preposition.”

“Do they? Do they really? Good Lord. I suppose it’s the German influence. Or is it Old English? Meet with. Well, I must say.” And he lumbered off to his bathroom to shave.

Returning to his own room, Guillam found Sam Collins sitting in the soft chair, smoking one of his beastly brown cigarettes, and smiling his washable smile.

“Something up?” Sam asked, very leisurely.

“Get the hell out of here,” Guillam snapped. Sam was nosing around a lot too much for Guillam’s liking, but that day he had a firm reason for distrusting him. Calling on Lacon at the Cabinet Office to deliver the Circus’s monthly imprest account for his inspection, he had been astonished to see Sam emerging from his private office, joking easily with Lacon and Saul Enderby of the Foreign Office.

12

THE RESURRECTION OF RICARDO

Before the fall, studiously informal meetings of intelligence partners to the special relationship were held as often as monthly and followed by what Smiley’s predecessor Alleline had liked to call “a jar.” If it was the American turn to play host, then Alleline and his cohorts—among them the popular Bill Haydon—would be shepherded to a vast roof-top bar, known within the Circus as “the planetarium,” to be regaled with dry martinis and a view of West London they could not otherwise have afforded. If it was the British turn, then a trestle-table was set up in the rumpus room, and a darned damask table-cloth spread over it, and the American delegates were invited to pay homage to the last bastion of clubland spying, and incidentally the birthplace of their own service, while they sipped South African sherry disguised by cut-glass decanters on the grounds that they wouldn’t know the difference. For the discussions there was no agenda and by tradition no notes were taken. Old friends had no need of such devices, particularly since hidden microphones stayed sober and did the job better.

Since the fall, these niceties had for a while stopped dead. Under orders from Martello’s headquarters at Langley, Virginia, the “British liaison,” as they knew the Circus, was placed on the arm’s-length list, equating it with Yugoslavia and Lebanon, and for a while the two services in effect passed each other on opposite sidewalks, scarcely lifting their eyes. They were like an estranged couple in the middle of divorce proceedings. But by the time that grey winter’s morning had come along when Smiley and Guillam, in some haste, presented themselves at the front doors of the Legal Advisor’s Annexe in Grosvenor Square, a marked thaw was already discernible everywhere, even in the rigid faces of the two Marines who frisked them.

The doors, incidentally, were double, with black grilles over black iron, and gilded feathers on the grilles. The cost of them alone would have kept the entire Circus ticking over for a couple of days at least. Once inside them, Smiley and Guillam had the sensation of coming from a hamlet to a metropolis.

Martello’s room was very large. There were no windows and it could have been midnight. Above an empty desk, an American flag, unfurled as if by a breeze, occupied half the end wall. At the centre of the floor, a ring of airport chairs was clustered round a fake rosewood table, and in one of these sat Martello himself, a burly, cheerful-looking Yale man in a country suit which seemed always out of season. Two quiet men flanked him, each as sallow and sincere as the other.

“George, this is good of you,” said Martello heartily, in his warm, confiding voice, as he came quickly forward to receive them. “I don’t need to tell you. I know how busy you are. I know.

“Sol,” he said, turning to two strangers sitting across the room so far unnoticed: the one young like Martello’s quiet men, if less smooth; the other squat and tough and much older, with a slashed complexion and a crew cut, a veteran of something. “Sol,” Martello repeated in a voice of hushed ceremony, “I want you to meet one of the true legends of our profession. Sol: Mr. George Smiley. George, this is Sol Eckland, who’s high in our fine Drug Enforcement Administration, formerly the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, now rechristened—right, Sol? Sol, say hello to Pete Guillam.”

The elder of the two men put out a hand, and Smiley and Guillam each shook it, and it felt like dried bark.

“Sure,” said Martello, looking on with the satisfaction of a matchmaker. “George, ah, remember Ed Ristow, also in narcotics, George? Paid a courtesy call on you over there a few months back? Well, Sol has taken over from Ristow. He has the South East Asian sphere. Cy here is with him.”

Nobody remembers names like the Americans, thought Guillam.

Cy was the young one of the two. He had sideburns and a gold watch and he looked like a Mormon missionary: devout, but defensive. He smiled as if smiling had been part of his course, and Guillam smiled in return.

“What happened to Ristow?” Smiley asked as they sat down.

“Coronary,” growled Sol in a voice as dry as his hand. His hair was like wire wool crimped into small trenches. When he scratched it, which he did a lot, it rasped.

“I’m sorry,” said Smiley.

“Could be permanent,” said Sol, not looking at him, and drew on his cigarette.

Here, for the first time, it passed through Guillam’s mind that something fairly momentous was in the air. He caught a hint of real tension between the two American camps. Unheralded replacements, in Guillam’s experience of the American scene, were seldom caused by anything as banal as illness. He went so far as to wonder in what way Sol’s predecessor might have blotted his copy-book.

“Enforcement, ah, naturally has a strong interest in our little joint venture, ah, George,” Martello said, and with this unpromising fanfare the Ricardo connection was indirectly announced, though Guillam detected there was still a mysterious urge, on the American side, to pretend their meeting was about something different—as witness Martello’s vacuous opening comments.

“George, our people in Langley like to work very closely indeed with their good friends in narcotics,” he declared, with all the warmth of a diplomatic note verbale.

“Cuts both ways,” Sol, the veteran, said in confirmation and expelled more cigarette smoke while he scratched his iron-grey hair. He seemed to Guillam at root a shy man, not comfortable here at all. Cy, his young sidekick, was a lot smoother.

“It’s parameters, Mr. Smiley, sir. On a deal like this, you get some areas, they overlap entirely.” Cy’s voice was a little too high for his size.

“Cy and Sol have hunted with us before, George,” Martello said, offering yet further reassurance. “Cy and Sol are family— take my word for it. Langley cuts Enforcement in, Enforcement cuts Langley in. That’s the way it goes. Right, Sol?”

“Right,” said Sol.

If they don’t go to bed together soon, thought Guillam, they just may claw each other’s eyes out instead. He glanced at Smiley and saw that he too was conscious of the strained atmosphere. He sat like his own effigy, a hand on each knee, eyes almost closed as usual, and he seemed to be willing himself into invisibility while the explanation was acted out for him.

“Maybe we should all just get ourselves up to date on the latest details first,” Martello now suggested, as if he were inviting everyone to wash. First before what? Guillam wondered.

One of the quiet men used the work name Murphy. Murphy was so fair he was nearly albino. Taking a folder from the rosewood table, Murphy began reading from it aloud with great respect in his voice. He held each page singly between his clean fingers.

“Sir, Monday subject flew to Bangkok with Cathay Pacific Airlines, flight details given, and was picked up at the airport by Tan Lee, our reference given, in his personal limousine. They proceeded directly to the Airsea permanent suite at the Hotel Erawan.” He glanced at Sol. “Tan is managing director of Asian Rice & General, sir, that’s Airsea’s Bangkok subsidiary, file references appended. They spent three hours in the suite and—”

“Ah, Murphy,” said Martello, interrupting.

“Sir?”

“All that ‘reference given,’ ‘reference appended.’ Leave that out, will you? We all know we have files on these guys. Right?”

“Right, sir.”

“Ko alone?” Sol demanded.

“Sir, Ko took his manager Tiu along with him. Tiu goes with him most everywhere.”

Here, chancing to look at Smiley again, Guillam intercepted an enquiring glance from him directed at Martello. Guillam had a notion he was thinking of the girl—had she gone, too?—but Martello’s indulgent smile didn’t waver, and after a moment Smiley seemed to accept this, and resumed his attentive pose.

Sol meanwhile had turned to his assistant and the two of them had a brief private exchange.

“Why the hell doesn’t somebody bug the damn hotel suite, Cy? What’s holding everyone up?”

“We already suggested that to Bangkok, Sol, but they’ve got problems with the party walls—they’ve got no proper cavities or something.”

“Those Bangkok clowns are drowsy with too much ass. That the same Tan we tried to nail last year for heroin?”

“No, that was Tan Ha, Sol. This one’s Tan Lee. They have a lot of Tans out there. Tan Lee’s just a front man. He plays link to Fatty Hong in Chiang Mai. It’s Hong who has the connections to the growers and the big brokers.”

“Somebody ought to go out and shoot that bastard,” Sol said. Which bastard wasn’t quite clear.

Martello nodded at pale Murphy to go on.

“Sir, the three men then drove down to Bangkok port—that’s Ko and Tan Lee and Tiu, sir—and they looked at twenty or thirty small coasters tied up along the bank. Then they drove back to Bangkok airport and subject flew to Manila, Philippines, for a cement conference at the Hotel Eden and Bali.”

“Tiu didn’t go to Manila?” Martello asked, buying time.

“No, sir. Flew home,” Murphy replied, and once more Smiley glanced at Martello.

“Cement, my ass,” Sol exclaimed. “Those the boats that do the run up to Hong Kong, Murphy?”

“Yes, sir.”

“We know those boats,” expostulated Sol. “We’ve been going for those boats for years. Right, Cy?”

“Right.”

Sol had rounded on Martello as if he were personally to blame:

“They leave harbour clean. They don’t take the stuff aboard till they’re at sea. Nobody knows which boat will carry, not even the captain of the selected vessel, until the launch pulls alongside, gives them the dope. When they hit Hong Kong waters, they drop the dope overboard with markers and the junks scoop it in.” He spoke slowly, as if speaking hurt him, forcing each word out hoarsely. “We’ve been screaming at the Brits for years to shake those junks out, but the bastards are all on the take.”

“That’s all we have, sir,” said Murphy, and put down his report.

They were back to the awkward pauses. A pretty girl, armed with a tray of coffee and biscuits, provided a temporary reprieve, but when she left the silence was worse.

“Why don’t you just tell him?” Sol snapped finally. “Otherwise maybe I will.”

Which was when, as Martello would have said, they finally got down to the nitty-gritty.

Martello’s manner became both grave and confiding, a family solicitor reading a will to the heirs. “George, ah, at our request Enforcement here took a kind of a second look at the background and the record of the missing pilot Ricardo, and as we half surmised, they’ve dug up a fair quantity of material which till now has not come to light as it should have done, owing to various factors. There’s no profit, in my view, to pointing the finger at anyone, and besides Ed Ristow is a sick man. Let’s just agree that, however it happened, the Ricardo thing fell into a small gap between Enforcement and ourselves. That gap has since closed and we’d like to rectify the information for you.”

“Thank you, Marty,” said Smiley patiently.

“Seems Ricardo’s alive, after all,” Sol declared. “Seems like it’s a prime snafu.”

“A what?” Smiley asked sharply, perhaps before the full significance of Sol’s statement had sunk in.

Martello was quick to translate: “Error, George. Human error. Happens to all of us. Snafu. Even you, okay?”

Guillam was studying Cy’s shoes, which had a rubbery gloss and thick welts. Smiley’s eyes had lifted to the side wall, where the benevolent features of President Nixon gazed down encouragingly on the triangular union. Nixon had resigned a good six months ago, but Martello seemed touchingly determined to tend his lamp. Murphy and his mute companion sat as still as confirmands in the presence of the bishop. Only Sol was forever on the move, alternately scratching at his crimped scalp or sucking on his cigarette, like an athletic version of di Salis. He never smiles, thought Guillam extraneously; he’s forgotten how.

Martello continued: “Ricardo’s death is formally recorded in our files as on or around August twenty-first, nineteen seventythree, George, correct?”

“Correct,” said Smiley.

Martello drew a breath and tilted his head the other way as he read his notes. “However, on September second—couple of weeks after his death, right?—it, ah, seems Ricardo made personal contact with one of the narcotics bureaus in the Asian theatre, then known as B.N.D.D. but primarily the same house, okay? Sol would, ah, prefer not to mention which bureau, and I respect that.”

The mannerism “ah,” Guillam decided, was Martello’s way of continuing to talk while he thought.

Martello went on: “Ricardo offered the bureau his services on a sell-and-tell basis regarding an, ah, opium mission he claimed to have received to fly right over the border into, ah, Red China.”

A cold hand seemed to seize hold of Guillam’s stomach at this moment and stay there. His sense of occasion was all the greater following the slow lead-in through so much unrelated detail. He told Molly afterwards that it was as if “all the threads of the case had suddenly wound themselves together in a single skein” for him; but that was hindsight and he was boasting a little. Nevertheless the shock—after all the tiptoeing and the speculation, and the paper-chases—the plain shock of being almost physically projected into the Chinese mainland: that certainly was real, and required no exaggeration.

Martello was doing his worthy-solicitor act again.

“George, I have to fill you in on, ah, a little of the family background here. During the Laos thing the Company used a few of the northern hill tribes for combat purposes—maybe you knew that. Right up there in Burma—know those parts, the Shans? Volunteers, follow me? Lot of those tribes were one-crop communities, ah, opium communities, and in the interests of the war there, the Company had to, ah—well, turn a blind eye to what we couldn’t change, follow me? These good people have to live and many knew no better and saw nothing wrong in, ah, growing that crop. Follow me?”

“Jesus Christ,” said Sol under his breath. “Hear that, Cy?”

“I heard, Sol.”

Smiley said he followed.

“This policy, conducted, ah, by the Company, caused a very brief and very temporary rift between the Company on the one side and the, ah, Enforcement people here, formerly the Bureau of Narcotics. Because—well, while Sol’s boys were out to, well, ah, suppress the abuse of drugs, and quite rightly and, ah, ride down the shipments, which is their job, George, and their duty, it was in the Company’s best interest—in the best interest of the war, that is—at this point in time, you follow, George—to, well, ah, turn a blind eye.”

“Company played godfather to the hill tribes,” Sol growled. “Menfolk were all out fighting the war, Company people flew up to the villages, pushed their poppy crops, screwed their women, and flew their dope.”

Martello was not so easily thrown. “Well, we think that’s overstating things a little, Sol, but the, ah, rift was there and that’s the point as far as our friend George is concerned. Ricardo—well, he’s a tough cookie. He flew a lot of missions for the Company in Laos, and when the war ended, the Company resettled him and kissed him off and pulled up the ladder. Nobody messes around with those boys when there’s no war for them any more. So, ah, maybe at that time, the, ah, gamekeeper Ricardo turned into the, ah, poacher Ricardo, if you follow me—”

“Well, not absolutely,” Smiley confessed mildly.

Sol had no such scruples about unpalatable truths. “Long as the war was on,” he said, “Ricardo carried dope for the Company to keep the home fires burning up in the hill villages. War ended, he carried it for himself. He had the connects and he knew where the bodies were buried. He went independent, that’s all.”

“Thank you,” said Smiley, and Sol went back to scratching his crew cut.

For the second time, Martello backed toward the story of Ricardo’s embarrassing resurrection.

They must have done a deal between them, thought Guillam: Martello does the talking. “Smiley’s our contact,” Martello would have said. “We play him our way.”

On the second of September, 1973, said Martello, an “unnamed narcotics agent in the South East Asian theatre,” as he insisted on describing him, “a young man quite new to the field, George,” received a nocturnal telephone call at his home from a self-styled Captain Tiny Ricardo, hitherto believed dead, formerly a Laos mercenary with Captain Rocky. Ricardo offered a sizeable quantity of raw opium at standard buy-in rates. In addition to the opium, however, he was offering hot information at what he called a bargain-basement price for a quick sale. That is to say, fifty thousand U.S. dollars in small notes and a West German passport for a one-time journey out. “The unnamed narcotics agent met Ricardo later that night at a parking lot, and they quickly agreed on the sale of the opium.”

“You mean he bought it?” Smiley asked, most surprised.

“Sol tells me there is a, ah, fixed tariff for such deals—right Sol?—known to everyone in the game, George, and, ah, based upon a percentage of the street value of the haul, right?” Sol growled an affirmative. “The, ah, unnamed agent had a standing authority to buy in at that tariff, and he exercised it. No problem. The agent also, ah, expressed himself willing, subject to higher consent, to supply Ricardo with quick-expiry documentation, George” (he meant, it turned out later, a West German passport with only a few days to run) “in the event, George—an event not yet realized, you follow me—that Ricardo’s information prove to be of value, since policy is to encourage informants at all costs. But he made it clear, the agent, that the whole deal—the passport and the payment for the information—was subject to the ratification, and authority, of Sol’s people back at headquarters. So he bought the opium, but he held on the information. Right Sol?”

“On the button,” Sol growled.

“Sol, ah, maybe you should handle this part,” Martello said.

When Sol spoke, he kept the rest of himself still for once. Just his mouth moved. “Our agent asked Ricardo for a teaser so’s the information could be evaluated back home. What we call taking it to first base. Ricardo comes up with the story he’s been ordered to fly the dope over the border into Red China and bring back an unspecified load in payment. That’s what he said. His teaser. He said he knew who was behind the deal; he said he knew the Mr. Big of all time, but that’s what every informant says, and very few do. He said he embarked on his journey for the China mainland, chickened out, and hedge-hopped home over Laos, ducking the radar screens. That’s what he said, no more, no less.

“He didn’t say where he set out from. He said he owed a favour to the people who sent him, and if they ever found him they’d kick his teeth right up his throat. That’s what’s in the protocol, word for word. His teeth up his throat. So he was in a hurry, hence the favourable price of fifty grand. He didn’t say who the people were, he did not produce one scrap of positive collateral apart from the opium, but he said he had the plane still hidden, a Beechcraft, and he offered to show this plane to our agent at the next occasion of their meeting, subject to there being serious interest back at headquarters,” said Sol, and devoted himself to his cigarette. “Opium was a couple of hundred kilos. Good stuff.”

Martello deftly took back the ball: “So the unnamed narcotics agent filed his story, George. He took down the teaser and he sent it back to headquarters and he told Ricardo to lie low till he heard back from his people. See you in ten days, maybe fourteen. Here’s your opium-money, but for information-money you have to wait a little. There’s regulations. Follow me?”

Smiley nodded sympathetically, and Martello nodded back at him while he went on talking: “So here it is. Here’s where you get your human error, right? It could be worse, but not much. In our game there’s two views of history: conspiracy and fuck-up. Here’s where we get the fuck-up, no question at all. Sol’s predecessor Ed, now ill, evaluated the material and on the evidence—now, you met him George, Ed Ristow, a good sound guy—and on the evidence available to him, Ed decided, understandably but wrongly, not to proceed. Ricardo wanted fifty grand. Well, for a major haul I understand that’s chickenfeed. But Ricardo, he wanted payment on the nail. A one-time, and out. And Ed—well Ed had responsibilities, and a lot of family trouble, and Ed just didn’t see his way to investing that sum of public American money in a character like Ricardo, when no haul is guaranteed, who has all the passes, knows all the fast steps, and is maybe squaring up to take that field agent of Ed’s, who is only a young guy, for one hell of a journey. So Ed killed it. No further action. File and forget. All squared away. Buy the opium, but not the story.”

Maybe it was a real coronary after all, Guillam reflected, marvelling. But with another part of him he knew it could have happened to himself, and even had: the pedlar who has the big one, and you let it through your fingers.

Rather than waste time in recrimination, Smiley had quietly moved ahead to the remaining possibilities.

“Where is Ricardo now, Marty?” he asked.

“Not known.”

His next question was much longer in coming, and was scarcely a question so much as a piece of thinking aloud. “To bring back an ‘unspecified load in payment,’ ” he repeated. “Are there any theories as to what type of load that might have been?”

“We guessed gold. We don’t have second vision, any more than you do,” Sol said harshly.

Here Smiley simply ceased to take part in the proceedings for a time. His face set, his expression became anxious and, to anyone who knew him, inward, and suddenly it was up to Guillam to keep the ball rolling. To do this, like Smiley, he addressed Martello.

“Ricardo did not give any hint of where he was to deliver his return load?”

“I told you, Pete; that’s all we have.”

Smiley was still non-combatant. He sat staring mournfully at his folded hands.

Guillam hunted for another question. “And no hint of the anticipated weight of the return load, either?” he asked.

“Jesus Christ,” said Sol and, misreading Smiley’s attitude, slowly shook his head in wonder at the kind of dead-beat company he was obliged to keep.

“But you are satisfied it was Ricardo who approached your agent?” Guillam asked, still in there throwing punches.

“One hundred percent,” said Sol.

“Sol,” Martello suggested, leaning across to him. “Sol, why don’t you just give George a blind copy of that original field report? That way he has everything we have.”

Sol hesitated, glanced at his sidekick, shrugged, and finally with some reluctance drew a flimsy sheet of India paper from a folder on the table beside him, from which he solemnly tore off the signature.

“Off the record,” he growled.

At this point Smiley abruptly revived, and, receiving the report from Sol’s hand, studied both sides intently for a while in silence.

“And where, please, is the unnamed narcotics agent who wrote this document?” he enquired finally, looking first at Martello, then at Sol.

Sol scraped his scalp. Cy began shaking his head in disapproval. Whereas Martello’s two quiet men showed no curiosity whatever. Pale Murphy continued reading among his notes, and his colleague gazed blankly at the former President.

“Shacked up in a hippie commune north of Katmandu,” Sol growled through a gush of cigarette smoke. “Bastard joined the opposition.”

Martello’s bright end-piece was wonderfully irrelevant: “So, ah, that’s the reason, George, why our computer has Ricardo dead and buried, George, when the over-all record—on reconsideration by our Enforcement friends—gives no grounds for that, ah, assumption.”

So far, it had seemed to Guillam that the boot was all on Martello’s foot. Sol’s boys had made fools of themselves, he was saying, but the Cousins were nothing if not magnanimous and they were willing to kiss and make up. In the post-coital calm which followed Martello’s revelations, this false impression prevailed a little longer.

“So, ah, George, I would say that henceforward, we may count—you, we, Sol here—on the fullest co-operation of all our agencies. I would say there was a very positive side to this. Right, George? Constructive?”

But Smiley in his renewed distraction only lifted his eyebrows and pursed his lips.

“Something on your mind, George?” Martello asked. “I said is there something on your mind?”

“Oh. Thank you. Beechcraft,” Smiley said. “Is that a singleengined plane?”

“Jesus,” said Sol under his breath.

“Twin, George, twin,” said Martello. “Kind of executive runabout kind of thing.”

“And the weight of the opium load was four hundred kilos, the report says.”

“Just short of half of one ton, George,” said Martello at his most solicitous. “A metric ton,” he added doubtfully, to Smiley’s shadowed face. “Not your English ton, George, naturally. Metric.”

“And it would be carried where—the opium, I mean?”

“Cabin,” said Sol. “Most likely unscrewed the spare seats. Beechcrafts come different shapes. We don’t know which this was, because we never got to see it.”

Smiley peered once more at the flimsy which he still clutched in his pudgy hand. “Yes,” he muttered. “Yes, I suppose they would have done.” And with a gold lead-pencil he wrote a small hieroglyphic in the margin before relapsing into his private reverie.

“Well,” said Martello brightly. “Guess us worker bees had better get back to our hives and see where that gets us—right, Pete?”

Guillam was half-way to his feet as Sol spoke. Sol had the rare and rather terrible gift of natural rudeness. Nothing had changed in him. He was in no way out of control. This was the way he talked, this was the way he did business, and other ways patently bored him.

“Jesus Christ, Martello,” he said. “What kind of a game are we playing round here? This is the big one, right? We have put our finger on maybe the most important single narcotics target in the entire South East Asian scene. Okay, so there’s liaison. Okay, so we have a hands-off deal with the Brits on Hong Kong. But Thailand’s ours, so’s the Philippines, so’s Taiwan, so’s the whole damn theatre, so’s the war, and the Brits are on their ass. Four months ago the Brits came in and made their pitch. Great, so we roll it to the Brits. What they been doing all that time? Rubbing soap into their pretty faces. So when do they get to shave, for God’s sakes?

“We got money riding on this. We got a whole apparatus standing by, ready to shake out Ko’s connections across the hemisphere. We been looking years for a guy like this. And we can nail him. We have enough legislation—boy, do we have legislation!—to pin a ten-to-thirty on him and then some! We got drugs on him, we got arms, we got embargoed goods, we got the biggest damn load of Red gold we ever saw Moscow hand to one man in our lives, and we got the first proof ever, if this guy Ricardo is telling a correct story, of a Moscow-subsidised drug-subversion programme which is ready and willing to carry the battle into Red China in the hopes of doing the same for them as they’re already doing for us.”

The outburst had woken Smiley like a douche of water. He was sitting forward on the edge of his chair, the narcotics agent’s report crumpled in his hand, and he was staring appalled, first at Sol, finally at Martello.

“Marty,” he muttered, “oh, my Lord. No.”

Guillam showed greater presence of mind. At least he threw in an objection: “You’d have to spread half a ton awfully thin, wouldn’t you, Sol, to hook eight hundred million Chinese?”

But Sol had no use for humour, or objections either, least of all from some pretty-faced Brit. “And do we go for his jugular?” he demanded, keeping straight on course. “Do we, hell. We pussyfoot. We stand on the sidelines. ‘Play it delicate. It’s a British ball game. Their territory, their joe, their party.’ So we weave, we dance around. We float like a butterfly and sting like one. Jesus, if we’d been handling this thing, we’d have had that bastard trussed over a barrel months ago.”

Slapping the table with his palm, he used the rhetorical trick of repeating his point in different language. “For the first time ever, we have gotten ourselves a sabre-toothed Soviet Communist corrupter in our sights, pushing dope and screwing up the area and taking Russian money and we can prove it!” It was all addressed to Martello; Smiley and Guillam might not have been there at all.

“And you just remember another thing,” he advised Martello in conclusion. “We got big people wanting mileage out of this. Impatient people. Influential. People very angry with the dubious part your Company has indirectly played in the supply and merchandising of narcotics to our boys in Vietnam, which is why you cut us in on this in the first place. So maybe you better tell some of those limousine liberals back in Langley, Virginia, it’s time for them to shit or get off the pot. Pot in both senses,” he ended, in a humourless—and to Guillam, pointless—pun.

Smiley had turned so pale that Guillam was genuinely afraid for him; he wondered whether he had had a heart attack, or was going to faint. From where Guillam sat, his cheeks and complexion were suddenly an old man’s, and his eyes, as he too addressed Martello only, had an old man’s fire.

“However, there is an agreement,” Smiley said. “And so long as it stands, I trust that you will stick to it. We have your general declaration that you will abstain from operations in British areas unless our permission has been granted. We have your particular promise that you will leave to us the entire development of this case, outside surveillance and communication, regardless of where the development leads. That was the contract: a complete hands-off in exchange for a complete sight of the product. I take that to mean this: no action by Langley and no action by any other American agency. I take that to be your absolute word. And I take your word to be still good, and I regard that understanding as irreducible.”

“Tell him,” said Sol, and walked out, followed by Cy, his sallow Mormon sidekick. At the door Sol turned and jabbed a finger in Smiley’s direction.

“You ride our wagon, we tell you where to get off and where to stay topsides,” he said.

The Mormon nodded. “Sure do,” he said, and smiled at Guillam as if in invitation. On Martello’s nod, Murphy and his fellow quiet man followed them out of the room.

Martello was pouring drinks. In his office, the walls were also rosewood—a fake laminate, Guillam noticed, not the real thing— and when Martello pulled a handle he revealed an ice machine that vomited a steady flow of pellets in the shape of rugby balls. He poured three whiskies without asking the others what they wanted. Smiley looked all in. His plump hands were still cupped over the ends of his airport chair, but he was leaning back like a spent boxer between rounds, staring at the ceiling, which was perforated by twinkling lights. Martello set the glasses on the table.

“Thank you, sir,” Guillam said. Martello liked a “sir.”

“You bet,” said Martello.

“Whom else have your headquarters told?” Smiley said, to the stars. “The Revenue Service? The Customs Service? The Mayor of Chicago? Their twelve best friends? Do you realise that not even my masters know we are in collaboration with you? God in heaven.”

“Ah, come on now, George. We have politics, same as you. We have promises to keep. Mouths to buy. Enforcement’s out for our blood. That dope story’s gotten a lot of air time on the Hill. Senators, the House sub-committees, the whole garbage. Kid comes back from the war a screaming junkie, first thing his pa does is write to his congressman. Company doesn’t care for all those bad rumours. It likes to have its friends on its own side. That’s showbiz, George.”

“Could I please just know what the deal is?” Smiley asked. “Could I have it in plain words, at least?”

“Oh, now, there’s no deal, George. Langley can’t deal with what she doesn’t own, and this is your case, your property, your . . . We fish for him—you do, with a little help from us, maybe—we do our best and then if, ah, we don’t come up with anything—why, Enforcement will get in on the act a little and, on a very friendly and controllable basis, try their hand.”

“At which point it’s open season,” Smiley said. “My goodness, what a way to run a case.”

When it came to pacification, Martello was a very old hand indeed.

“George. George. Suppose they nail Ko. Suppose they fall on him out of the trees next time he leaves the Colony. If Ko’s going to languish in Sing Sing on a ten-to-thirty rap—why, we can pick him clean at will. Is that so very terrible, suddenly?”

Yes it bloody well is, thought Guillam, till it suddenly dawned on him, with a quite malignant glee, that Martello himself was not

“witting” on the subject of brother Nelson, and that George had kept his best card to his chest.

Smiley was still sitting forward. The ice in his whisky had put a damp frost round the outside of the glass, and for a time he stared at it, watching the tears slide onto the rosewood table.

“So how long have we got on our own?” Smiley asked. “What’s our head start before the narcotics people come barging in?”

“It’s not rigid, George. It’s not like that! It’s parameters, like Cy said.”

“Three months?”

“That’s generous, a little generous.”

“Less than three months?”

“Three months, inside of three months, ten to twelve weeks— in that area, George. It’s fluid. It’s between friends. Three months outside, I would say.”

Smiley breathed out in a long slow sigh: “Yesterday we had all the time in the world.”

Martello dropped the veil an inch or two. “Sol is not that conscious, George,” he said, careful to use Circus jargon rather than his own. “Ah, Sol has blank areas,” he said, half by way of admission. “We don’t just throw him the whole carcass, know what I mean?”

Martello paused, then said, “Sol goes to first echelon. No further. Believe me.”

“And what does first echelon mean?”

“He knows Ko is in funds from Moscow. Knows he pushes opium. That’s all.”

“Does he know of the girl?”

“Now, she’s a case in point, George. The girl. That girl went with him on the trip to Bangkok. Remember Murphy describing the Bangkok trip? She stayed in the hotel suite with him. She flew on with him to Manila. I saw you read me there. I caught your eye. But we had Murphy delete that section of the report. Just for Sol’s benefit.”

Very slightly, Smiley seemed to revive. “Deal stands, George,” Martello assured him munificently. “Nothing’s added, nothing’s subtracted. You play the fish, we’ll help you eat it. Any help along the way, you just have to pick up that green line and holler.”

He went so far as to lay a consoling hand on Smiley’s shoulder, but sensing that Smiley disliked the gesture, abandoned it rather quickly. “However, if you ever do want to pass us the oars—why, we would merely reverse that arrangement and—”

“Steal our thunder and get yourselves thrown off the Colony into the bargain,” said Smiley, completing the sentence for him. “I want one more thing made clear. I want it written down. I want it to be the subject of an exchange of letters between us.”

“Your party, you choose the games,” said Martello expansively.

“My service will play the fish,” Smiley insisted, in the same direct tone. “We will also land it, if that is the angling expression. I’m not a sportsman, I’m afraid.”

“Land it, beach it, hook it, sure.”

Martello’s good will, to Guillam’s suspicious eye, was tiring a little at the edges.

“I insist on it being our operation. Our man. I insist on first rights. To have and to hold, until we see fit to pass him on.”

“No problem, George, no problem at all. You take him aboard, he’s yours. Soon as you want to share him, call us. It’s simple as that.”

“I’ll send round a written confirmation in the morning.”

“Oh, don’t bother to do that, George. We have people. We’ll have them collect it for you.”

“I’ll send it round,” said Smiley.

Martello stood up. “George, you just got yourself a deal.”

“I had a deal already,” Smiley said. “Langley broke it.”

They shook hands.

The case history has no other moment like this. In the trade it goes under various smart phrases. “The day George reversed the controls,” is one—though it took him a good week, and brought Martello’s deadline that much nearer. But to Guillam the process had something far more stately about it, far more beautiful than a mere technical retooling. As his understanding of Smiley’s intention slowly grew, as he looked on fascinated while Smiley laid down each meticulous line, summoned this or that collaborator, put out a hook here, and took in a cleat there, Guillam had the sensation of watching the turn-round of some large oceangoing vessel as it is coaxed and nosed and gentled into facing back along its own course.

They returned to the Circus without a word spoken. Smiley took the last flight of stairs slowly enough to revive Guillam’s fears for his health, so that as soon as he was able he rang the Circus doctor and gave him a run-down of the symptoms as he saw them—only to be told that Smiley had been round to see him a couple of days ago on an unrelated matter and showed every sign of being indestructible.

The throne-room door closed and Fawn, the baby-sitter, once more had his beloved Chief to himself. Smiley’s needs, where they filtered through, had the smack of alchemy. Beechcraft aeroplanes: he wished for plans and catalogues, and also—provided they could be obtained unattributably—any details of owners, sales, and purchases in the South East Asian region. Toby Esterhase duly disappeared into the murky thickets of the aircraft sales industry, and soon afterwards Fawn handed to Molly Meakin a daunting heap of back numbers of a journal called Transport World with handwritten instructions from Smiley in the traditional green ink of his office to mark down any advertisements for Beechcraft planes which might have caught the eye of a potential buyer during the six-month period before the pilot Ricardo’s abortive opium mission into Red China.

Again on Smiley’s written orders, Guillam discreetly visited several of di Salis’s burrowers and, without the knowledge of their temperamental superior, established that they were still far from putting the finger on Nelson Ko. One old fellow went so far as to suggest that Drake Ko had spoken no less than the truth in his last meeting with old Hibbert, and that brother Nelson was dead indeed. But when Guillam took this news to Smiley he shook his head impatiently and handed him a signal for transmission to Craw, telling him to obtain from his local police source, preferably on a pretext, all recorded details of the travel movements of Ko’s manager, Tiu, in and out of mainland China.

Craw’s long answer was on Smiley’s desk forty-eight hours later, and it appeared to give him a rare moment of pleasure, for he ordered out the duty driver and had himself taken to Hampstead, where he walked alone over the Heath for an hour, through sunlit frost and, according to Fawn, stood gawping at the ruddy squirrels before returning to the throne-room.

“But don’t you see?” Smiley protested to Guillam, in an equally rare fit of excitement that evening. “Don’t you understand, Peter?” He shoved Craw’s dates under Guillam’s nose, actually stubbing his finger on one entry. “Tiu went to Shanghai six weeks before Ricardo’s mission. How long did he stay there? Forty-eight hours. Oh, you are a dunce!”

“I’m nothing of the kind,” Guillam retorted. “I just don’t happen to have a direct line to God, that’s all.”

In the cellars, cloistered with Millie McCraig, the head listener, Smiley replayed old Hibbert’s monologues, scowling occasionally—said Millie—at di Salis’s clumsy bullying. Otherwise he read and prowled, and talked to Sam Collins in short, intensive bursts. These encounters, Guillam noticed, cost Smiley a lot of spirit, and his bouts of ill temper—which Lord knows were few enough for a man with Smiley’s burdens—always occurred after Sam’s departure. And even when they had blown over, he looked more strained and lonely than ever, till he had taken one of his long night walks.

Then on about the fourth day, which in Guillam’s life was a crisis day for some reason—probably the argument with Treasury, who resented paying Craw a bonus—Toby Esterhase somehow slipped through the net of both Fawn and Guillam, and gained the throne-room undetected, where he presented Smiley with a bunch of Xeroxed contracts of sale for one brand-new four-seater Beechcraft to the Bangkok firm of Aerosuis & Co., registered in Zurich, details pending. Smiley was particularly jubilant about the fact that there were four seats. The two at the rear were removable, but the pilot’s and co-pilot’s were fixed. As to the actual sale of the plane, it had been completed on the twentieth of July: a scant month, therefore, before the crazy Ricardo set off to infringe Red China’s airspace and then changed his mind.

“Even Peter can make that connection,” Smiley declared, with heavy skittishness. “Sequence, Peter, sequence, come on!”

“The plane was sold two weeks after Tiu returned from Shanghai,” Guillam replied reluctantly.

“And so?” Smiley demanded. “And so? What do we look at next?”

“We ask ourselves who owns the firm of Aerosuis,” Guillam snapped, really quite irritated.

“Precisely. Thank you,” said Smiley in mock relief. “You restore my faith in you, Peter. Now, then: whom do we discover at the helm of Aerosuis, do you think? The Bangkok representative, no less?”

Guillam glanced at the notes on Smiley’s desk, but Smiley was too quick and clapped his hands over them.

“Tiu,” Guillam said, actually blushing.

“Hoorah. Yes. Tiu. Well done.”

But by the time Smiley sent again for Sam Collins that evening, the shadows had returned to his pendulous face.

Still the lines were thrown out. After his success in the aircraft industry, Toby Esterhase, the pavement artist, was reassigned to the liquor trade and flew to the Western Isles of Scotland, under the guise of a value-added-tax inspector, where he spent three days making a spot check of the books of a house of whisky distillers who specialised in the forward selling of unmatured kegs. He returned—to quote Connie—leering like a successful bigamist.

The multiple climax of all this activity was an extremely long signal to Craw, drafted after a full-dress meeting of the operational directorate—the Golden Oldies, to quote Connie yet again—with Sam Collins added. The meeting followed an extended ways-and-means session with the Cousins, at which Smiley refrained from all mention of the elusive Nelson Ko, but requested certain additional facilities of surveillance and communication in the field.

To his collaborators Smiley explained his plans this way: Till now the operation had been limited to obtaining intelligence about Ko and the ramifications of the Soviet gold seam. Much care had been taken to prevent Ko from becoming aware of the Circus’s interest in him.

He then summarised the intelligence they had so far collected: Nelson, Ricardo, Tiu, the Beechcraft, the dates, the inferences, the Swiss-registered aviation company—which, as it now turned out, possessed no premises and no other aircraft. He would prefer, he said, to wait for the positive identification of Nelson, but every operation was a compromise and time, partly thanks to the Cousins, was running out.

He made no mention at all of the girl, and he never once looked at Sam Collins while he delivered his address.

Then he came to what he modestly called “the next phase.”

“Our problem is to break the stalemate. There are operations which run better for not being resolved. There are others which are worthless until they are resolved, and the Dolphin case is one of these.”

He gave a studious frown, and blinked, then whipped off his spectacles and, to the secret delight of everyone, unconsciously subscribed to his own legend by polishing them on the fat end of his tie. “I propose to do this by turning our tactic inside out. In other words, by declaring to Ko our interest in his affairs.”

It was Connie, as ever, who put an end to the suitably stunned silence. Her smile was also the fastest—and the most knowing. “He’s smoking him out,” she whispered to them all in ecstasy. “Same as he did with Bill, the clever hound! Lighting a fire on his doorstep, aren’t you, darling, and seeing which way he runs. Oh, George, you lovely, lovely man—the best of all my boys, I do declare!”

Smiley’s signal to Craw used a different metaphor to describe the plan: one which fieldmen favour. He referred to “shaking Ko’s tree,” and it was clear from the remainder of the text that, despite the considerable dangers, he proposed to use the broad back of Jerry Westerby to do it.

As a footnote to all this: a couple of days later, Sam Collins vanished. Everyone was very pleased. He ceased to come in and Smiley did not refer to him. His room, when Guillam sneaked in covertly to look it over, contained nothing personal to Sam at all except a couple of unbroken packs of playing-cards and some garish book matches advertising a West End night-club. When he sounded out the housekeepers, they were for once unusually forthcoming: his price was a kiss-off gratuity, they said, and a promise to have his pension rights reconsidered. He had not really had much to sell at all. A flash in the pan, they said, never to reappear. Good riddance.

All the same, Guillam could not rid himself of a certain unease about Sam, which he often conveyed to Molly Meakin over the next few weeks. It was not just about bumping into him at Lacon’s office. He was bothered about the business of Smiley’s exchange of letters with Martello confirming their oral understanding. Rather than have the Cousins collect it, with the consequent parade of a limousine and even a motorcycle outrider in Cambridge Circus, Smiley had ordered Guillam to run it round to Grosvenor Square himself, with Fawn baby-sitting. But Guillam was snowed under with work, as it happened, and Sam as usual was spare. So when Sam volunteered to take it for him, Guillam let him, and wished to God he never had. He wished it still, devoutly. Because instead of handing George’s letter to Murphy or his faceless running mate, said Fawn, Sam had insisted on going in to Martello personally, and spent more than an hour with him alone.

PART II

Shaking the Tree

13

LIESE

Star Heights was the newest and tallest apartment block in the Midlevels, built on the round, and by night jammed like a huge lighted pencil into the soft darkness of the Peak. A winding causeway led to it, but the only pavement was a line of curbstone six inches wide between the causeway and the cliff. At Star Heights, pedestrians were in bad taste. It was early evening and the social rush hour was nearing its height.

As Jerry edged his way along the curb, the Mercedes and Rolls-Royces brushed against him in their haste to deliver and collect. He carried a bunch of orchids wrapped in tissue: larger than the bunch Craw had presented to Phoebe Wayfarer, smaller than the one Drake Ko had given the dead boy Nelson. These orchids were for nobody. “When you’re my size, sport, you have to have a hell of a good reason for whatever you do.”

He felt tense but also relieved that the long, long wait was over.

A straight foot-in-the-door operation, Your Grace, Craw had advised him at yesterday’s protracted briefing. Shove your way in there and start pitching and don’t stop till you’re out the other side.

A striped awning led to the entrance hall and a perfume of women hung in the air, like a foretaste of his errand. And just remember Ko owns the building, Craw had added sourly, as a parting gift. The interior decoration was not quite finished. Plates of marble were missing round the mail-boxes. A fibreglass fish should have been spewing water into a terrazzo fountain, but the pipes had not yet been connected and bags of cement were heaped in the basin.

He headed for the lifts. A glass booth was marked “Reception” and the Chinese porter was watching him from inside it. Jerry only saw the blur of him. He had been reading when Jerry arrived, but now he was staring at Jerry, undecided whether to challenge him, but half reassured by the orchids. A couple of American matrons in full war-paint arrived and took up a position near him.

“Great flowers,” they said, poking in the tissue.

“Super, aren’t they? Here, have them. Present! Come on! Beautiful woman. Naked without them!”

Laughter. The English are a race apart. The porter returned to his reading and Jerry was authenticated. A lift arrived. A herd of diplomats, businessmen, and their squaws shuffled into the lobby, sullen and bejewelled. Jerry ushered the American matrons ahead of him. Cigar smoke mingled with the scent. Slovenly canned music hummed forgotten melodies. The matrons pressed the button for twelve.

“You visiting with the Hammersteins too?” they asked, still looking at the orchids.

At the fifteenth, Jerry made for the fire stairs. They stank of cat, and rubbish from the chute. Descending, he met an amah carrying a nappy bucket. She scowled at him till he greeted her, then laughed uproariously. He kept going till he reached the eighth floor where he stepped back into the plush of the residents’ landing. He was at the end of a corridor. A small rotunda gave on to two gold lift doors. There were four flats, each a quadrant of the circular building, and each with its own corridor. He took up a position in the B corridor with only the flowers to protect him. He was watching the rotunda, his attention on the mouth of the corridor marked C. The tissue round the orchids was damp where he’d been clutching it too tight.

“It’s a firm weekly date,” Craw had assured him. “Every Monday, flower arrangement at the American Club. Regular as clockwork. She meets a girl-friend there, Nellie Tan, works for Airsea. They take in the flower arrangement and stay for dinner afterwards.”

“So where’s Ko meanwhile?”

“In Bangkok. Trading.”

“Well, let’s bloody well hope he stays there.”

“Amen, sir. Amen.”

With a shriek of new hinges unoiled, the door at his ear was yanked open and a slim young American in a dinner-jacket stepped into the corridor, stopped dead, and stared at Jerry and the orchids. He had blue, steady eyes and he carried a brief-case.

“You looking for me with those things?” he enquired, with a Boston society drawl. He looked rich and assured. Jerry guessed diplomacy or Ivy League banking.

“Well, I don’t think so, actually,” Jerry confessed, playing the English bloody fool. “Cavendish,” he said. Over the American’s shoulder Jerry saw the door quietly close on a packed book shelf. “Friend of mine asked me to give these to a Miss Cavendish at 9D. Waltzed off to Manila, left me holding the orchids, sort of thing.”

“Wrong floor,” said the American, strolling toward the lift. “You want one up. Wrong corridor, too. D’s over on the other side. Thattaway.”

Jerry stood beside him, pretending to wait for an up lift. The down lift came first, the young American stepped easily into it, and Jerry resumed his post. The door marked C opened; he saw her come out, and turn to double-lock it. Her clothes were everyday. Her hair was long and ash blond but she had tied it in a pony-tail at the nape. She wore a plain halter-neck dress and sandals, and though he couldn’t see her face he knew already she was beautiful. She walked to the lift, still not seeing him, and Jerry had the illusion of looking in on her through a window from the street.

There were women in Jerry’s world who carried their bodies as if they were citadels to be stormed only by the bravest, and Jerry had married several; or perhaps they grew that way under his influence. There were women who seemed determined to hate themselves, hunching their backs and locking up their hips. And there were women who had only to walk toward him to bring him a gift. They were the rare ones, and for Jerry at that moment she led the pack.

She had stopped at the gold doors and was watching the lighted numbers. He reached her side as the lift arrived and she still hadn’t noticed him. It was packed, as he had hoped it would be. He entered crabwise, intent on the orchids, apologising, grinning, and making a show of holding them high. She had her back to him, and he was standing at her shoulder. It was a strong shoulder, and bare either side of the halter, and Jerry could see small freckles and a down of tiny gold hairs disappearing down her spine. Her face was in profile below him. He peered down at it.

“Lizzie?” he said uncertainly. “Hey, Lizzie. It’s me, Jerry.”

She turned sharply and stared up at him. He wished he could have backed away from her, because he knew her first response would be physical fear of his size, and he was right. He saw it momentarily in her grey eyes, which flickered before holding him in their stare.

“Lizzie Worthington!” he declared more confidently. “How’s the whisky, remember me? One of your proud investors. Jerry. Chum of Tiny Ricardo’s. One fifty-gallon keg with my name on the label. All paid and above-board.”

He had kept it quiet on the assumption that he might be raking up a past she was keen to disown. He had kept it so quiet that their fellow passengers heard either “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head” over the Muzak or the grumbling of an elderly Greek who thought he was boxed in.

“Why, of course,” she said, and gave a bright, air-hostess smile. “Jerry!” Her voice faded as she pretended to have it on the tip of her tongue: “Jerry—er—” She frowned and looked upward like a repertory actress doing forgetfulness. The lift stopped at the sixth floor.

“Westerby,” he said promptly, getting her off the hook. “Newshound. You put the bite on me in the Constellation bar. I wanted a spot of loving comfort and all I got was a keg of whisky.”

Somebody next to him laughed.

“Of course! Jerry darling! How could I possibly . . . So, I mean, what are you doing in Hong Kong? My God!”

“Usual beat. Fire and pestilence, famine. How about you? Retired, I should think, with your sales methods. Never had my arm twisted so thoroughly in my life.”

She laughed delightedly. The doors had opened at the third floor. An old woman shuffled in on two walking-sticks.

Lizzie Worthington sold in all a cool fifty-five kegs of the blushful Hippocrene, Your Grace, old Craw had said. Every one of them to a male buyer and a fair number of them, according to my advisers, with service thrown in. Gives a new meaning to the term “good measure,” I venture to suggest.

They had reached the ground floor. She got out first and he walked beside her. Through the main doors he saw her red sports car, with its roof up, waiting in the bay, jammed among the glistening limousines. She must have phoned down and ordered them to have it ready, he thought; if Ko owns the building, he’ll make damn sure she gets the treatment. She was heading for the porter’s window. As they crossed the hall, she went on chattering, pivoting to talk to him, one arm held wide of her body, palm upward, like a fashion model. He must have asked her how she liked Hong Kong, though he couldn’t remember doing so.

“I adore it, Jerry, I simply adore it. Vientiane seems—oh, centuries away. You know Ric died?” She threw this in heroically, as if she and death weren’t strangers to each other. “After Ric, I thought I’d never care for anywhere again. I was completely wrong, Jerry. Hong Kong has to be the most fun city in the world. Lawrence, darling, I’m sailing my red submarine. It’s hen night at the club.”

Lawrence was the porter, and the key to her car dangled from a large silver horseshoe which reminded Jerry of Happy Valley races.

“Thank you, Lawrence,” she said sweetly, and gave him a smile that would last him all night. “The people here are so marvellous, Jerry,” she confided to him in a stage whisper as they moved toward the main entrance. “To think what we used to say about the Chinese in Laos! Yet here they’re just the most marvellous and outgoing and inventive people ever.” She had slipped into a stateless foreign accent, he noticed. Must have picked it up from Ricardo and stuck to it for chic. “People think to themselves: Hong Kong—fabulous shopping—tax-free cameras—restaurants. But honestly, Jerry, when you get under the surface, and meet the true Hong Kong, and the people—it’s got everything you could possibly want from life. Don’t you adore my new car?”

“So that’s how you spend the whisky profits.”

He held out his open palm, and she dropped the keys into it so that he could unlock the door for her. Still in dumb show, he gave her the orchids to hold. Behind the black Peak a full moon, not yet risen, glowed like a forest fire. She climbed in, he handed her the keys, and this time he felt the contact of her hand and remembered Happy Valley again, and Ko’s kiss as they drove away.

“Mind if I ride on the back?” he asked.

She laughed and pushed open the passenger door for him. “Where are you going with those gorgeous orchids, anyway?”

She started the engine, but Jerry gently switched it off again, so that she stared at him in surprise.

“Sport,” he said quietly. “I cannot tell a lie. I’m a viper in your nest, and before you drive me anywhere, you’d better fasten your seat-belt and hear the grisly truth.”

He had chosen this moment carefully, because he didn’t want her to feel threatened. She was in the driving seat of her own car, under the lighted awning of her own apartment block, within sixty feet of Lawrence, the porter, and he was playing the humble sinner in order to increase her sense of security.

“Our chance reunion was not entire chance. That’s point one. Point two, not to put too fine an edge on it, my paper told me to run you to earth and besiege you with many searching questions regarding your late chum Ricardo.”

She was still watching him, still waiting. On the point of her chin she had two small parallel scars like claw marks, quite deep. He wondered who had made them, and what with.

“But Ricardo’s dead,” she said, much too early.

“Sure,” said Jerry consolingly. “No question. However, the comic is in possession of what they’re pleased to call a hot tip that he’s alive after all, and it’s my job to humour them.”

“But that’s absolutely absurd!”

“Agreed. Totally. They’re out of their minds. The consolation prize is two dozen well-thumbed orchids and the best dinner in town.”

Turning away from him, she gazed through the windscreen, her face in the full glare of the overhead lamp, and Jerry wondered what it must be like to inhabit such a beautiful body, living up to it twenty-four hours a day. Her grey eyes opened a little wider, and he had a shrewd suspicion that he was supposed to notice the tears brimming and the way her hands grasped the steering-wheel for support.

“Forgive me,” she murmured. “It’s just—when you love a man—give everything up for him—and he dies—then one evening, out of the blue—”

“Sure,” said Jerry. “I’m sorry.”

She started the engine. “Why should you be sorry? If he’s alive, that’s bonus. If he’s dead, nothing’s changed. We’re on a pound to nothing.” She laughed. “Ric always said he was indestructible.”

It’s like stealing from a blind beggar, he thought. She shouldn’t be let loose.

She drove well but stiffly, and he guessed—because she inspired guesswork—that she had only recently passed her test and that the car was her prize for doing so. It was the calmest night in the world. As they sank into the city, the harbour lay like a perfect mirror at the centre of the jewel box. They talked places. Jerry suggested the Peninsula, but she shook her head.

“Okay. Let’s go get a drink first,” he said. “Come on, let’s blow the walls out!”

To his surprise, she reached across and gave his hand a squeeze. Then he remembered Craw: she did that to everyone, he’d said.

She was off the leash for a night: he had that overwhelming sensation. He remembered taking his daughter out from school when she was young, and how they had to do lots of different things in order to make the afternoon longer.

At a dark disco on Kowloon-side, they drank Rémy Martin with ice and soda. He guessed it was Ko’s drink and she had picked up the habit to keep him company. It was early and there were maybe a dozen people, no more. The music was loud and they had to yell to hear each other, but she didn’t mention Ricardo. She preferred the music, and listening with her head back. Sometimes she held his hand, and once put her head on his shoulder, and once she blew him a distracted kiss and drifted onto the floor to perform a slow, solitary dance, eyes closed, slightly smiling. The men ignored their own girls and undressed her with their eyes, and the Chinese waiters brought fresh ashtrays every three minutes so that they could look down her dress.

After two drinks and half an hour, she announced a passion for the Duke and the big-band sound, so they raced back to the Island to a place Jerry knew where a live Filipino band gave a fair rendering of Ellington. Cat Anderson was the best thing since sliced bread, she said. Had he heard Armstrong and Ellington together? Weren’t they just the greatest? More Rémy Martin while she sang “Mood Indigo” to him.

“Did Ricardo dance?” Jerry asked.

“Did he dance?” she replied softly as she tapped her foot and lightly clicked her fingers to the rhythm.

“Thought Ricardo had a limp,” Jerry objected.

“That never stopped him,” she said, still absorbed by the music. “I’ll never go back to him, you understand. Never. That chapter’s closed. And how.”

“How’d he pick it up?”

“Dancing?”

“The limp.”

With her finger curled round an imaginary trigger, she fired a shot into the air.

“It was either the war or an angry husband,” she said. He made her repeat it, her lips close to his ear.

She knew a new Japanese restaurant where they served fabulous Kobe beef.

“Tell me how you got those scars,” he asked as they were driving there. He touched his own chin. “The left and the right. What did it?”

“Oh, hunting poor innocent foxes,” she said with a light smile. “My dear papa was horse mad. He still is, I’m afraid.”

“Where does he live?”

“Daddy? Oh, the usual tumbledown schloss in Shropshire. Miles too big but they won’t move. No staff, no money, ice cold three-quarters of the year. Mummy can’t even boil an egg.”

He was still reeling when she remembered a bar where they gave heavenly curry canapés, so they drove around until they found it and she kissed the barman. There was no music, but for some reason he heard himself telling her all about the orphan, till he came to the reasons for their breakup, which he deliberately fogged over.

“Ah, but Jerry, darling,” she said sagely. “With twenty-five years between you and her, what else can you expect?”

And with nineteen years and a Chinese wife between you and Drake Ko, what can you expect? he thought.

They left—more kisses for the barman—and Jerry was not so intoxicated by her company, or by the brandy-sodas, to miss the point that she made a phone call, allegedly to cancel her date, that the call took a long time, and that when she returned from it she looked rather solemn. In the car again, he caught her eye and thought he read a shadow of mistrust.

“Jerry?”

“Yes?”

She shook her head, laughed, ran her palm along his face, then kissed him. “It’s fun,” she said.

He guessed she was wondering whether, if she had really sold him that keg of unbranded whisky, she would so thoroughly have forgotten him. He guessed she was also wondering whether, in order to sell him the keg, she had thrown in any fringe benefits of the sort Craw had so coarsely referred to. But that was her problem, he reckoned. Had been from the start.

In the Japanese restaurant they were given the corner table, thanks to Lizzie’s smile and other attributes. She sat looking into the room, and he sat looking at Lizzie, which was fine with Jerry but would have given Sarratt the bends. By the candle-light he saw her face very clearly and was conscious for the first time of the signs of wear: not just the claw marks on her chin, but her lines of travel, and of strain, which to Jerry had a determined quality about them, like honourable scars from all the battles against her bad luck and her bad judgment. She wore a gold bracelet, new, and a bashed tin watch with a Walt Disney dial on it and scratched gloved hands pointing to the numerals. Her loyalty to the old watch impressed him and he wanted to know who gave it to her.

“Daddy,” she said distractedly.

A mirror was let into the ceiling above them, and he could see her gold hair and the swell of her breasts among the scalps of other diners, and the gold-dust of the hairs on her back. When he tried to hit her with Ricardo, she turned guarded. It should have occurred to Jerry, but it didn’t, that her attitude had changed since she made the phone call.

“What guarantee do I have that you will keep my name out of your paper?” she asked.

“Just my promise.”

“But if your editor knows I was Ricardo’s girl, what’s to stop him putting it in for himself?”

“Ricardo had lots of girls. You know that. They came in all shapes and sizes and ran concurrently.”

“There was only one of me,” she said firmly, and he saw her glance toward the door; but then she had that habit anyway, wherever she was, of looking round the room all the time for someone who wasn’t there. He let her keep the initiative.

“You said your paper had a hot tip,” she said. “What do they mean by that?”

He had boned up his answer to this with Craw. It was one they had actually rehearsed. He delivered it therefore with force if not conviction.

“Ric’s crash was eighteen months ago in the hills near Pailin on the Thai-Cambodian border. That’s the official line. No one found a body, no one found wreckage, and there’s talk he was doing an opium run. The insurance company never paid up and Indocharter never sued them. Why not? Ricardo had an exclusive contract to fly for them. For that matter, why doesn’t someone sue Indocharter? You, for instance. You were his woman. Why not go for damages?”

“That is a very vulgar suggestion,” she said, in her duchess voice.

“Beyond that, there’s rumours he’s been seen recently around the haunts a little. He’s grown a beard but he can’t cure the limp, they say, nor his habit of sinking a bottle of Scotch a day, nor—saving your presence—chasing after everything that wears a skirt within a five-mile radius of wherever he happens to be standing.”

She was forming up to argue, but he gave her the rest while he was about it. “Head porter at the Rincome Hotel, Chiang Mai, confirmed the identification from a photograph, beard notwithstanding. All right, us round-eyes all look the same to them. Nevertheless he was pretty sure. Then only last month a fifteenyear-old girl in Bangkok, particulars to hand, took her little bundle to the Mexican Consulate and named Ricardo as the lucky father. I don’t believe in eighteen-month pregnancies and I assume you don’t. And don’t look at me like that, sport. It’s not my idea, is it?”

It’s London’s, he might have added: as neat a blend of fact and fiction as ever shook a tree. But she was actually looking past him, at the door again.

“Another thing I’m to ask you about is the whisky racket,” he said.

“It was not a racket, Jerry. It was a perfectly valid business enterprise!”

“Sport. You were straight as a die. No breath of scandal attaches. Etcetera. But if Ric cut a few too many corners, now, that would be a reason for doing the old disappearing act, wouldn’t it?”

He seriously regretted her discomfort. It ran quite contrary to the feelings he would have wished for her in other circumstances. He watched her and he knew that argument was something she always lost; it planted a hopelessness in her, a resignation to defeat.

“That wasn’t Ric’s way,” she said finally, without any conviction at all. “He liked to be the big man around town. It wasn’t his way to run.”

“For example,” Jerry continued—as her head fell forward in submission—“were we to prove that your Ric, in flogging his kegs, had stuck to the cash and instead of passing it back to the distillery—pure hypothesis, no shred of evidence—then in that case—”

“By the time our partnership was wound up, every investor had a certificated contract with interest from the date of purchase. Every penny we borrowed was duly accounted for.”

Till now, it all had been footwork. Now he saw his goal looming, and he made for it fast.

“Not duly, sport,” he corrected her, while she continued to stare down at her uneaten food. “Not duly at all. Those settlements were made six months after the due date. Unduly. That’s a very eloquent point, in my view. Question: who bailed Rick out? According to our information, the whole world was going for him. The distillers, the creditors, the law, the local community— every one of them had the knife sharpened for him. Till one day—bingo! Writs withdrawn, shades of the prison bars recede. How? Ric was on his knees. Who’s the mystery angel? Who bought his debts?”

She had lifted her head while he was speaking and now to his astonishment a radiant smile suddenly lit her face, and the next thing he knew, she was waving over his shoulder at someone he couldn’t see till he looked into the ceiling mirror and caught the glitter of an electric-blue suit and a full head of black hair well greased; and between the two, a foreshortened chubby Chinese face set on a pair of powerful shoulders, and two curled hands held out in a fighter’s greeting while Lizzie piped him aboard.

“Mr. Tiu! What a marvellous coincidence. Come on over! Try the beef. It’s gorgeous. Mr. Tiu, this is Jerry, from Fleet Street. Jerry, this is a very good friend of mine who helps look after me. He’s interviewing me, Mr. Tiu! Me! It’s most exciting. All about Vientiane and a poor pilot I tried to help a hundred years ago. Jerry knows everything about me. He’s a miracle!”

“We met,” said Jerry, with a broad grin.

“Sure,” said Tiu, equally happy, and as he spoke, Jerry once more caught the familiar smell of almonds and rose-water mixed, the one his early wife had so much liked. “Sure,” Tiu repeated. “You the horse-writer, okay?”

“Okay,” Jerry agreed, stretching his smile to breaking-point.

Then of course Jerry’s vision of the world turned several somersaults, and he had a whole lot of business to worry about: such as appearing to be as tickled as everybody else by the amazing good luck of Tiu’s appearance; such as shaking hands, which was like a mutual promise of future settlement; such as drawing up a chair and calling for drinks, beef and chopsticks, and all the rest. But the thing that stuck in his mind even while he did all this—the memory that lodged there as permanently as later events allowed—had little to do with Tiu or his hasty arrival; or not directly. It was the expression on Lizzie’s face as she first caught sight of him, for the fraction of a second before the lines of courage drew the gay smile out of her. It explained to him as nothing else could have done the paradoxes that comprised her: her prisoner’s dreams, her borrowed personalities which were like disguises in which she could momentarily escape her destiny. Of course she had summoned Tiu: she had no choice. It amazed him that neither the Circus nor he himself had predicted it. The Ricardo story, whatever the truth of it, was far too hot for her to handle by herself. But the expression in her grey eyes as Tiu entered the restaurant was not relief, but resignation: the doors had slammed on her again; the fun was over. “We’re like those bloody glow-worms,” the orphan had whispered to him once, raging about her childhood, “carting the bloody fire round on our backs.”

Operationally of course, as Jerry recognised immediately, Tiu’s appearance was a gift from the gods. If information was to be fed back to Ko, then Tiu was an infinitely more impressive channel for it than Lizzie Worthington could ever hope to be.

She had finished kissing Tiu, so she handed him to Jerry.

“Mr. Tiu, you’re my witness,” she declared, making a great conspiracy of it. “You must remember every word I say. Jerry, go straight on just as if he wasn’t here. I mean Mr. Tiu’s as silent as the grave, aren’t you. Darling,” she said, and kissed him again. “It’s so exciting,” she repeated, and they all settled down for a friendly chat.

“So what you looking for, Mr. Wessby?” Tiu enquired, perfectly affably, while he tucked into his beef. “You a horse-writer, why you bother pretty girls, okay?”

“Good point, sport! Good point! Horses much safer, right?”

They all laughed richly, avoiding one another’s eyes.

The waiter put a half-bottle of Black Label Scotch in front of Tiu. He unscrewed it and sniffed at it critically before pouring.

“He’s looking for Ricardo, Mr. Tiu. Don’t you understand? He thinks Ricardo is alive. Isn’t that wonderful? I mean I have no vestige of feeling for him now, naturally, but it would be lovely to have him back with us. Think of the party we could give!”

“Liese tell you that?” Tiu asked, pouring himself two inches of Scotch. “She tell you Ricardo still around?”

“Who, old boy? Didn’t get you. Didn’t get the first name.”

Tiu jabbed a chopstick at Lizzie. “She tell you he’s alive? This pilot guy? This Ricardo? Liese tell you that?”

“I never reveal my sources, Mr. Tiu,” said Jerry, just as archly. “That’s a journalist’s way of saying he’s made something up,” he explained.

“A horse-writer’s way, okay?”

“That’s it, that’s it!”

Again Tiu laughed, and this time Lizzie laughed even louder. She was slipping out of control again. Maybe it’s the drink, thought Jerry, or maybe she goes for the stronger stuff and the drink has stoked the fire. And if he calls me horse-writer again, maybe I’ll take defensive action.

Lizzie again, a party-piece: “Oh, Mr. Tiu, Ricardo was so lucky! Think who he had. Indocharter—me—everyone. There I was, working for this little airline—some dear Chinese people Daddy knew—and Ricardo, like all the pilots, was a shocking businessman—got into the most frightful debt.” With a wave of her hand, she brought Jerry into the act. “My God, he even tried to involve me in one of his schemes, can you imagine!— selling whisky, if you please—and suddenly my lovely, dotty Chinese friends decided they needed another charter pilot. They settled his debts, put him on a salary, they gave him an old banger to fly—”

Jerry now took the first of several irrevocable steps. “When Ricardo went missing, he wasn’t flying an old banger, sport. He was flying a brand-new Beechcraft,” he corrected her deliberately. “Indocharter never had a Beechcraft to their name. They haven’t now. My editor’s checked it right through—don’t ask me how. Indocharter never hired one, never leased one, never crashed one.”

Tiu gave another jolly whoop of laughter.

Tiu is a very cool bishop, Your Eminence, Craw had warned. Ran Monsignor Ko’s San Francisco diocese with exemplary efficiency for five years, and the worst the narcotics artists could hang on him was washing his Rolls-Royce on a saint’s day.

“Hey, Mr. Wessby, maybe Liese stole them one!” Tiu cried in his half-American accent. “Maybe she go out nights steal aircraft from other airlines!”

“Mr. Tiu, that’s very naughty of you!” Lizzie declared.

“How you like that, horse-writer? How you like?”

The merriment at their table was by now so loud for three people that several heads turned to peer at them. Jerry saw them in the mirrors, where he half expected to spot Ko himself, with his crooked boat people’s walk, swaying toward them through the wicker doorway. Lizzie plunged wildly on.

“Oh, it was a complete fairy tale! One moment Ric can scarcely eat, and owed all of us money—Charlie’s savings, my allowance from Daddy—Ric practically ruined us all. Of course everyone’s money just naturally belonged to him—and the next thing we knew, Ric had work, he was in the clear, life was a ball again. All those other poor pilots grounded, and Ric and Charlie flying all over the place like—”

“Like blue-arsed flies,” Jerry suggested, at which Tiu was so doubled with hilarity that he was obliged to hold on to Jerry’s shoulder to keep himself afloat—while Jerry had the uncomfortable feeling of being physically measured for the knife.

“Hey listen, that pretty good! Blue-arse fly! I like that! You pretty funny fellow, horse-writer!”

It was at this point, under the pressure of Tiu’s cheerful insults, that Jerry used very good footwork indeed. Afterwards, Craw said the best. He ignored Tiu entirely and picked up that other name which Lizzie had let slip:

“Yeah, whatever happened to old Charlie, by the way?” he asked, not having the least idea who Charlie was. “What became of him after Ric did his disappearing number? Don’t tell me he went down with his ship as well?”

Once more she floated away on a fresh wave of narrative, and Tiu patently enjoyed everything he heard, chuckling and nodding while he ate.

He’s here to find out the score, Jerry thought. He’s much too sharp to put the brakes on Lizzie. It’s me he’s worried about, not her.

“Oh, Charlie’s indestructible, completely immortal,” Lizzie declared, and once more selected Tiu as her foil: “Charlie Marshall, Mr. Tiu,” she explained. “Oh, you should meet him, a fantastic half-Chinese, all skin and bones and opium and a completely brilliant pilot. His father’s old Kuomintang, a terrific brigand, and lives up in the Shans. His mother was some poor Corsican girl—you know how the Corsicans flocked into Indo-China—but really he is an utterly fantastic character. Do you know why he calls himself Marshall? His father wouldn’t give him his own name. So what does Charlie do? Gives himself the highest rank in the army instead. ‘My dad’s a general but I’m a marshal,’ he’d say. Isn’t that cute? And far better than admiral, I mean.”

“Super,” Jerry agreed. “Marvellous. Charlie’s a prince.”

“Liese some pretty utterly fantastic character herself, Mr. Wessby,” Tiu remarked handsomely, so on Jerry’s insistence they drank to that—to her fantastic character.

“Hey, what’s all this ‘Liese’ thing, actually?” Jerry asked as he put down his glass. “You’re Lizzie. Who’s this Liese? Mr. Tiu, I don’t know the lady. Why am I left out of the joke?”

Here Lizzie did definitely turn to Tiu for guidance, but Tiu had ordered himself some raw fish and was eating it rapidly and with total devotion.

“Some horse-writer ask pretty damn questions,” he remarked, through a full mouth.

“New town, new leaf, new name,” Lizzie said finally, with an unconvincing smile. “I wanted a change, so I chose a new name. Some girls get a new hair-do, I get a new name.”

“Got a new fellow to go with it?” Jerry asked.

She shook her head, eyes down, while Tiu let out a whoop of laughter.

“What’s happened to this town, Mr. Tiu?” Jerry demanded, instinctively covering for her. “Chaps all gone blind or something? Crikey, I’d cross continents for her, wouldn’t you? Whatever she calls herself, right?”

“Me, I go from Kowloon-side to Hong Kong-side, no further!” said Tiu, hugely entertained by his own wit. “Or maybe I stay Kowloon-side and call her up, tell her come over see me one hour!” At which Lizzie’s eyes stayed down and Jerry thought it would be quite fun, on another occasion when they all had more time, to break Tiu’s fat neck in several places.

Unfortunately, however, breaking Tiu’s neck was not at present on Craw’s shopping list.

The money, Craw had said. When the moment’s right, open up one end of the gold seam and that’s your grand finale.

So he started her off about Indocharter. Who were they, what was it like to work for them? She rose to it so fast he began to wonder whether she enjoyed this knife-edge existence more than he had realised.

“Oh, it was a fabulous adventure, Jerry! You can’t begin to imagine it, I assure you.” Ric’s multinational accent again. “ ‘Airline’—just the word is so absurd. I mean don’t for a minute think of your bright new planes and your glamorous hostesses and champagne and caviar or anything like that at all. This was work. This was pioneering, which is what drew me in the first place. I could perfectly well have simply lived off Daddy, or my aunts. I mean mercifully I’m totally independent, but who can resist challenge? All we started out with was a couple of dreadful old DC-3s literally stuck together with string and chewing-gum. We even had to buy the safety certificates. Nobody would issue them. After that we flew literally anything. Hondas, vegetables, pigs—oh, the boys had such a story about those poor pigs. They broke loose, Jerry. They came into the first class, even into the cabin, imagine!”

“Like passengers,” Tiu explained, with his mouth full. “She fly first-class pigs, okay, Mr. Wessby?”

“What routes?” Jerry asked when they had recovered from their laughter.

“You can see how he interrogates me, Mr. Tiu? I never knew I was so glamorous! So mysterious! We flew everywhere, Jerry. Bangkok, Cambodia sometimes. Battambang, Phnom Penh, Kampong Cham when it was open. Everywhere. Awful places.”

“And who were your customers? Traders, taxi jobs—who were the regulars?”

“Absolutely anyone we could get. Anyone who could pay. Preferably in advance, naturally.”

Pausing from his Kobe beef, Tiu felt inspired to offer social chit-chat.

“Your father some big lord, okay, Mr. Wessby?”

“More or less,” said Jerry.

“Lords some pretty rich fellows. Why you gotta be a horsewriter, okay?”

Ignoring Tiu entirely, Jerry played his trump card and waited for the ceiling mirror to crash on to their table.

“There’s a story that you people had some local Russian Embassy link,” he said easily, straight at Lizzie. “That ring a bell at all, sport? Any Reds under your bed at all, if I may ask?”

Having resumed his eating, Tiu was taking care of his rice, holding the bowl under his chin and shovelling it non-stop; but this time, significantly, Lizzie didn’t give him half a glance.

“Russians?” she repeated, puzzled. “Why on earth should Russians come to us? They had regular Aeroflot flights in and out of Vientiane every week.”

Though he would have sworn, then or later, that she was telling the truth, Jerry acted not quite satisfied. “Not even local runs?” he insisted. “Fetching and carrying, courier service, or whatever?”

“Never. How could we? Besides, the Chinese simply loathe the Russians, don’t they, Mr. Tiu?”

“Russians pretty bad people, Mr. Wessby,” Tiu agreed. “They stink pretty bad.”

So do you, thought Jerry, catching a fresh waft of that early wife’s body-water.

Jerry laughed at his own absurdity. “I’ve got editors like other people have stomach-ache,” he protested. “He’s convinced we can do a Red-under-the-bed job. ‘Ricardo’s Soviet paymasters’ . . . ‘Did Ricardo take a dive for the Kremlin?’ ”

“Paymaster?” Lizzie repeated, utterly mystified. “Ric never received a penny from the Russians. What are they talking about?”

Jerry again: “But Indocharter did, didn’t they? Unless my lords and masters have been sold a total pup, which I suspect they have been, as usual. They drew money from the local Russian Embassy and piped it down to Hong Kong in U.S. dollars. That’s London’s story and they’re sticking to it.”

“They’re mad,” she said confidently. “I’ve never heard such nonsense.”

To Jerry she seemed even relieved that the conversation had taken this improbable course. Ricardo alive—there she was drifting through a minefield. Ko as her lover—that secret was Ko’s or Tiu’s to dispense, not hers. But Russian money—Jerry was as certain as he dared be that she knew nothing and feared nothing about it.

He offered to ride back with her to Star Heights, but Mr. Tiu lived that way, she said.

“See you again pretty soon, Mr. Wessby,” Tiu promised.

“Look forward to it, sport,” said Jerry.

“You wanna stick to horse-writing, hear that? In my opinion, you get more money that way, Mr. Wessby, okay?” There was no menace in his voice or in the friendly way he patted Jerry’s upper arm. Tiu did not even speak as if he expected his advice to be taken as any more than a confidence between friends.

Then suddenly it was over. Lizzie kissed the headwaiter, but not Jerry. She sent Jerry, not Tiu, for her coat, so that she wouldn’t be alone with him. She scarcely looked at him as she said goodbye.

Dealing with beautiful women, Your Grace, Craw had warned, is like dealing with known criminals, and the lady you are about to solicit undoubtedly falls within that category.

Wandering home through the moonlit streets—the long trek, beggars, eyes in doorways notwithstanding—Jerry subjected Craw’s dictum to closer scrutiny. On “criminal” he really couldn’t rule at all: “criminal” seemed a pretty variable sort of standard at the best of times, and neither the Circus nor its agents existed to uphold some parochial concept of the law. Craw had told him that in slump periods Ricardo had made her carry little parcels for him over frontiers. Big deal. Leave it to the owls. “Known” criminal, however, was quite a different matter. “Known” he would go along with absolutely. Remembering Elizabeth Worthington’s caged stare at Tiu, he reckoned he had known that face, that look, and that dependence in one guise or another for the bulk of his waking life.

It has been whispered once or twice by certain trivial critics of George Smiley that at this juncture he should somehow have seen which way the wind was blowing with Jerry, and hauled him out of the field. Effectively, Smiley was Jerry’s case officer, after all. Smiley alone kept Jerry’s file, welfared and briefed him. Had George been at his peak, they say, instead of half-way down the other side, he would have read the warning signals between the lines of Craw’s reports and headed Jerry off in time. They might just as well have complained that he was a second-rate fortune-teller. The facts, as they came to Smiley, are these.

On the morning following his “pass” at Lizzie Worth or Worthington—the jargon has no sexual connotation—Craw debriefed Jerry for more than three hours on a car pick-up, and his report describes Jerry as being, quite reasonably, in a state of “anti-climactic gloom.” He appeared, said Craw, to be afraid that Tiu, or even Ko, might blame the girl for her “guilty knowledge” and even lay hands on her. Jerry referred more than once to Tiu’s patent contempt for the girl—and for himself, and, he suspected, for all Europeans—and repeated his comment about travelling from Kowloon-side to Hong Kong-side for her and no further. Craw countered by pointing out that Tiu could at any time have shut her up; and that her knowledge, on Jerry’s own testimony, did not extend even as far as the Russian gold seam, let alone to brother Nelson.

Jerry, in short, was producing the standard post-operational manifestations of a fieldman. A sense of guilt, coupled with foreboding, an involuntary movement of affiliation toward the target person—these are as predictable as a burst of tears in an athlete after the big race.

At their next contact—an extended limbo call on the second day, at which, to buoy him up, Craw passed on Smiley’s warm personal congratulations somewhat ahead of receiving them from the Circus—Jerry sounded in altogether better case, but he was worried about his daughter Cat. He had forgotten her birthday—he said it was tomorrow—and wished the Circus to send her at once a Japanese cassette player with a bunch of cassettes to start off her collection. Craw’s telegram to Smiley named the cassettes, asked for immediate action by housekeepers, and requested that Shoemaker Section—the Circus forgers, in other words—run up an accompanying card in Jerry’s handwriting, text given: “Darling Cat. Asked a friend of mine to post this in London. Look after yourself, my dearest, love to you now and ever, Pa.”

Smiley authorised the purchase, instructing housekeepers to dock the cost from Jerry’s pay at source. He personally checked the parcel before it was sent, and approved the forged card. He also verified what he and Craw already suspected: that it was not Cat’s birthday, or anywhere near. Jerry simply had a strong urge to make a gesture of affection: once more, a normal symptom of temporary field fatigue. Smiley cabled Craw to stay close to him but the initiative was with Jerry, and Jerry made no further contact till the night of the fifth day, when he demanded— and got—a crash meeting within the hour. This took place at their standing after-dark emergency rendezvous, an all-night roadside café in the New Territories, under the guise of a casual encounter between old colleagues. Craw’s letter, marked “Personal to Smiley only,” was a follow-up to his telegram. It arrived at the Circus by hand of the Cousins’ courier two days after the episode it describes: on day seven therefore. Writing on the assumption that the Cousins would contrive to read the text despite the seal and other devices, Craw crammed it with evasions, work names, and cryptograph, which are here restored to their real meaning:

Westerby was very angry. He demanded to know what the hell Sam Collins was doing in Hong Kong and in what way Collins was involved in the Ko case. I have not seen him so disturbed before. I asked him what made him think Collins was around. He replied that he had seen him that very night—eleven-fifteen exactly—sitting in a parked car in the Midlevels, on a terrace just below Star Heights, under a streetlamp, reading a newspaper. The position Collins had taken up, said Westerby, gave him a clear view to Lizzie Worthington’s windows on the eighth floor, and it was Westerby’s assumption that he was engaged in some sort of surveillance. Westerby, who was on foot at the time, insists that he “damn nearly went up to Sam and asked him outright.” But Sarratt discipline held firm, and he kept going down the hill on his own side of the road. But he does claim that as soon as Collins saw him, he started the car and drove up the hill at speed. Westerby has the licence number, and of course it is the correct one. Collins confirms the rest.

In accordance with our agreed position in this contingency (your signal of Feb. 15th), I gave Westerby the following answers:

1. Even if it was Collins, the Circus had no control over his movements. Collins had left the Circus under a cloud, before the fall, he was a known gambler, drifter, wheelerdealer, etc., and the East was his natural stomping-ground. I told Westerby he was being a fat-headed idiot to assume that Collins was still on the payroll, or, worse, had any part in the Ko case.

2. Collins is facially a type, I said: regular-featured, moustached, etc., looked like half the pimps in London. I doubted whether, from across a road at eleven-fifteen at night, Westerby could be certain of his identification. Westerby retorted that he had A-1 vision and that Sam had his newspaper open at the racing page.

3. Anyway, what was Westerby himself doing, I enquired, round Star Heights at eleven-fifteen at night? Answer, returning from drinking with the U.P.I. mob and hoping for a cab. At this I pretended to explode, and said that nobody who had been on a U.P.I. thrash could see an elephant at five yards, let alone Sam Collins at twenty-five, in a car, at dead of night. Over and out—I hope.

That Smiley was seriously concerned about this incident goes without saying. Only four people knew of the Collins ploy: Smiley, Connie Sachs, Craw, and Sam himself. That Jerry should have stumbled on him provided an added anxiety in an operation already loaded with imponderables.

But Craw was deft, and Craw believed he had talked Jerry down, and Craw was the man on the spot. Just possibly in a perfect world, Craw might have made it his business to find out whether there had really been a U.P.I. party in the Midlevels that night—and on learning that there had not, he might have challenged Jerry again to explain his presence in the region of Star Heights, and in that case Jerry would probably have thrown a tantrum and produced some other story that was not checkable: that he had been with a woman, for instance, and Craw could mind his bloody business. Of which the net result would have been needless bad blood and the same take-it-or-leave-it situation as before.

It is also tempting, but unreasonable, to expect of Smiley that with so many other pressures upon him—the continued and unabating quest for Nelson, daily sessions with the Cousins, rear-guard actions round the Whitehall corridors—he should have drawn the inference closest to his own lonely experience: namely, that Jerry, having no taste for sleep or company that evening, had wandered the night pavements till he found himself standing outside the building where Lizzie lived, and hung about, as Smiley did, without exactly knowing what he wanted, beyond the off chance of a sight of her. The rush of events which carried Smiley along was far too powerful to permit of such fanciful abstractions. Not only did the eighth day, when it came, put the Circus effectively on a war footing; it is also the pardonable vanity of lonely people everywhere to assume that they have no counterparts.

14

THE EIGHTH DAY

The jolly mood of the fifth floor was a great relief after the depression of the previous gathering. “A burrowers’ honeymoon,” Guillam called it, and tonight was its highest point, its attenuated star-burst of a consummation, and it came exactly eight days, in the chronology which historians afterwards impose on things, after Jerry and Lizzie and Tiu had had their full and frank exchange of views on the subject of Tiny Ricardo and the Russian gold seam—to the great delight of the Circus planners. Guillam had wangled Molly along specially.

They had run in all directions, these shady night animals, down old paths and new paths and old paths grown over till they were rediscovered; and now at last, behind their twin leaders— Connie Sachs alias Mother Russia, and di Salis alias the Doc— they crammed themselves, all twelve of them, into the very throne-room itself, under Karla’s portrait, in an obedient halfcircle round their chief, Bolshies and yellow perils together. A plenary session, then: for people unused to such drama, a monument of history indeed. And Molly primly at Guillam’s side, her hair brushed long to hide the bite marks on her neck.

Di Salis does most of the talking. The other ranks feel this to be appropriate. After all, Nelson Ko is the Doc’s patch entirely: Chinese to the sleeve-ends of his tunic. Reining himself right in—his spiky wet hair, his knees and feet and fussing fingers all but still for once—he keeps things in a low and almost deprecating key of which the inexorable climax is accordingly more thrilling. The climax even has a name. It is Ko Sheng-hsiu—alias Ko, Nelson—later known also as Yao Kai-sheng, under which name he was still later disgraced in the Cultural Revolution.

“But within these walls, gentlemen,” pipes the Doc, whose awareness of the female sex is inconsistent, “we shall continue to call him Nelson.” Born 1928 of humble proletarian stock, in Swatow—to quote the official sources, says the Doc—and soon afterwards removed to Shanghai. No mention, in either official or unofficial handouts, of Mr. Hibbert’s Lord’s Life Mission school, but a sad reference to “exploitation at the hands of Western Imperialists in childhood,” who poisoned him with religion. When the Japanese reached Shanghai, Nelson joined the refugee trail to Chungking, all as Mr. Hibbert has described.

From an early age, the Doc continues, once more according to official records, Nelson secretly devoted himself to seminal revolutionary reading and took an active part in clandestine Communist groups, despite the oppression of the loathsome Chiang Kai-shek rabble. On the refugee trail he also attempted “on many occasions” to escape to Mao, but his extreme youth held him back. Returning to Shanghai, he became, already as a student, a leading cadre member of the outlawed Communist movement and undertook special assignments in and around the Kiangnan shipyards to subvert the pernicious influence of K.M.T. Fascist elements. At the University of Communications he appealed publicly for a united front of students and peasants. Graduated with conspicuous excellence in 1951. . . .

Di Salis interrupts himself, and in a sharp release of tension throws up one arm and clenches the hair at the back of his head.

“The usual unctuous portrait, Chief, of a student hero who sees the light before his time,” he sings.

“What about Leningrad?” Smiley asks, from his desk, while he jots the occasional note.

“Nineteen fifty-three to six.”

“Yes, Connie?”

Connie is in her wheelchair again. She blames the freezing month and that toad Karla, jointly.

“We have a Brother Bretlev, darling. Bretlev, Ivan Ivanovitch, Academician, Leningrad faculty of shipbuilding, old-time China hand, devilled in Shanghai for Centre’s China hounds. Revolu-tionary war-horse, latter-day Karla-trained university talentspotter trawling the overseas students for likely lads and lasses.”

For the burrowers on the Chinese side—the yellow perils— this intelligence is new and thrilling, and produces an excited crackle of chairs and papers till at a sign from Smiley, di Salis lets go his head and takes up his narrative once more.

“Nineteen fifty-seven returned to Shanghai and was put in charge of a railway workshop—”

Smiley again: “But his dates at Leningrad were ’fifty-three to ’fifty-six?”

“Correct,” says di Salis.

“Then there seems to be a missing year.”

Now no papers crackle and no chairs, either.

“A tour of Soviet shipyards is the official explanation,” says di Salis, with a smirk at Connie and a mysterious, knowing writhe of the neck.

“Thank you,” says Smiley and makes another note. “’Fiftyseven,” he repeats. “Was that before or after the Sino-Soviet split, Doc?”

“Before. The split started in earnest in ’fifty-nine.”

Smiley asks here whether Nelson’s brother receives a mention anywhere; or is Drake as much disowned in Nelson’s China as Nelson is in Drake’s?

“In one of the earliest biographies, Drake is referred to, but not by name. In the later ones, a brother is said to have died during the Communist take-over of ’forty-nine.”

Smiley makes a rare joke, which is followed by dense, relieved laughter. “This case is littered with people pretending to be dead,” he complains. “It will be a positive relief to me to find a real corpse somewhere.”

Only hours later, this mot was remembered with a shudder.

“We also have a note that Nelson was a model student at Leningrad,” di Salis goes on. “At least in Russian eyes. They sent him back with the highest references.”

Connie from her iron chair allows herself another interjection. She has brought Trot, her mangy mongrel, with her. He lies misshapenly across her vast lap, stinking and occasionally sighing, but not even Guillam, who is a dog-hater, has the nerve to banish him.

“Oh, and so they would, dear, wouldn’t they?” she cries. “The Russians would praise Nelson’s talents to the skies, ’course they would, specially if Brother Ivan Ivanovitch Bretlev has snapped him up at university, and Karla’s lovelies have spirited him off to training school and all! Bright little mole like Nelson, give him a decent start in life for when he gets home to China! Didn’t do him much good later though, did it, Doc? Not when the Great Beastly Cultural Revolution got him in the neck! The generous admiration of Soviet imperialist running dogs wasn’t at all the thing to be wearing in your cap then, was it?”

Of Nelson’s fall, few details are available, the Doc proclaims, speaking louder in response to Connie’s outburst. “One must assume that it was violent, and as Connie has pointed out, those who were highest in Russian favour fell the hardest.”

He glances at the sheet of paper which he holds crookedly before his blotched face. “I won’t give you all his appointments at the time of his disgrace, Chief, because he lost them anyway. But there is no doubt that he did indeed have effective management of most of the shipbuilding in Kiangnan, and consequently of a large part of China’s naval tonnage.”

“I see,” says Smiley quietly. Jotting, he purses his lips as if in disapproval, while his eyebrows lift very high.

“His post at Kiangnan also procured him a string of seats on the naval planning committees and in the field of communications and strategic policy. By ’sixty-three his name is beginning to pop up regularly in the Cousins’ Peking watch reports.”

“Well done, Karla,” Guillam says quietly from his place at Smiley’s side, and Smiley, still writing, actually echoes this sentiment with a “Yes.”

“The only one, Peter dear!” Connie yells, suddenly unable to contain herself. “The only one of all those toads to see it coming! A voice in the wilderness, wasn’t he, Trot? ‘Look out for the yellow peril,’ he told ’em. ‘One day they’re going to turn round and bite the hand that’s feeding ’em, sure as eggs. And when that happens you’ll have eight hundred million new enemies banging on your own back door. And your guns will all be pointing the wrong way. Mark my words.’

“Told ’em,” she repeats, hauling at the mongrel’s ear in her emotion. “Put it all in a paper, ‘Threat of Deviation by Emerging Socialist Partner.’ Circulated every little brute in Moscow Centre’s Collegium. Drafted it word for word in his clever little mind while he was doing a spot of time in Siberia for Uncle Joe Stalin, bless him. ‘Spy on your friends today, they’re certain to be your enemies tomorrow,’ he told them. Oldest maxim of the trade, Karla’s favourite. When he was given his job back, he practically nailed it on the door in Dzerzhinski Square. No one paid a blind bit of notice. Not a scrap. Fell on barren ground, my dear. Five years later, he was proved right, and the Collegium didn’t thank him for that, either, I can tell you! He’s been right a sight too often for their liking, the boobies—hasn’t he, Trot! You know, don’t you, darling, you know what the old fool-woman’s on about!” At which she lifts the puling dog a few inches in the air by its forepaws and lets it flop back onto her lap again.

Connie can’t bear old Doc hogging the limelight, they secretly agree. She sees the logic of it, but the woman in her can’t abide the reality.

“Very well, he was purged, Doc,” Smiley says quietly, restoring calm. “Let’s go back to ’sixty-seven, shall we?” And puts his chin back in his hand.

In the gloom, Karla’s portrait peers stodgily down as di Salis resumes. “Well, the usual grim story, one supposes, Chief,” he chants. “The dunce’s cap, no doubt. Spat on in the street. Wife and children kicked and beaten up. Indoctrination camps, labour education ‘on a scale commensurate with the crime.’ Urged to reconsider the peasant virtues. One report has him sent to a rural commune to test himself. And when he came crawling back to Shanghai they’d have made him start at the bottom again, driving bolts into a railway line or whatever. As far as the Russians were concerned—if that’s what we’re talking about”—he hurries on before Connie can interrupt again—“he was a wash-out. No access, no influence, no friends.”

“How long did it take him to climb back?” Smiley enquires, with a characteristic lowering of the eyelids.

“About three years ago he started to be functional again. In the long run he has what they need most: brains, technical know-how, experience. But his formal rehabilitation didn’t really occur till the beginning of ’seventy-three.”

While di Salis goes on to describe the stages of Nelson’s ritual reinstatement, Smiley quietly draws a folder to him and refers to certain other dates which, for reasons as yet unexplained, are suddenly acutely relevant to him.

“The payments to Drake have their beginnings in January ’seventy-three,” he murmurs. “They rise steeply in mid-’seventythree.”

“With Nelson’s access, darling,” Connie whispers after him, like a prompter from the wings. “The more he knows, the more he tells, and the more he tells, the more he gets. Karla only pays for goodies, and even then it hurts like blazes.”

“By ’seventy-three,” says di Salis, “Nelson, having made all the proper confessions, has been embraced into the Shanghai municipal revolutionary committee, and appointed responsible person in a naval unit of the People’s Liberation Army. Six months later—”

“Date?” Smiley interrupts.

“July.”

Six months later, di Salis continues, Nelson is seen to be acting in an unknown capacity with the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party.

“Holy smoke,” says Guillam softly, and Molly Meakin gives his hand a hidden squeeze.

“And a report from the Cousins,” says di Salis, “undated as usual but well attested, has Nelson down as an informal adviser to the Munitions and Ordnance Committee of the Ministry of Defence.”

Rather than orchestrate this revelation with his customary range of mannerisms, di Salis again contrives to keep rock-still to great effect.

“In terms of eligibility, Chief,” he goes on quietly, “from an operational standpoint, we on the China side of your house would regard this as one of the key positions in the whole of the Chinese administration. If we could pick ourselves one slot for an agent inside the mainland, Nelson’s might well be the one.”

“Reasons?” Smiley enquires, still alternating between his jottings and the open folder before him.

“The Chinese navy is still in the Stone Age. We do have a formal interest in Chinese technical intelligence, naturally, but our real priorities—like those of Moscow, no doubt—are strategic and political. Beyond that, Nelson could supply us with the total capacity of all Chinese shipyards. Beyond that again, he could tell us the Chinese submarine potential, which has been frightening the daylights out of the Cousins for years. And of ourselves too, I may add, off and on.”

“So think what it’s doing for Moscow,” an old burrower murmurs out of turn.

“The Chinese are supposedly developing their own version of the Russian G-2 class submarine,” di Salis explains. “No one knows a lot about it. Have they their own design? Have they two or four tubes? Are they armed with sea-to-air missiles or sea-tosea? What is the financial appropriation for them? There’s talk of a Han class. We had word they laid one down in ’seventy-one. We’ve never had confirmation. In Dairen in ’sixty-four, they allegedly built a G class armed with ballistic missiles but it still hasn’t been officially sighted. And so forth and so on,” he says deprecatingly, for, like most of the Circus, he has a rooted dislike of military matters and would prefer the more artistic targets.

“For hard and fast detail on those subjects the Cousins would pay a fortune,” di Salis says. “In a couple of years, Langley could spend hundreds of millions in research, over-flights, satellites, listening devices, and God knows what—and still not come up with an answer half as good as one photograph. So if Nelson—” He lets the sentence hang, which is somehow a lot more effective than making it finite.

Connie whispers, “Well done, Doc,” but still for a while nobody else speaks; they are held back by Smiley’s jotting, and his continued examination of the folder.

“Good as Haydon,” Guillam mutters. “Better. China’s the last frontier. Toughest nut in the trade.”

Smiley sits back, his calculations apparently finished.

“Ricardo made his trip a few months after Nelson’s formal rehabilitation,” he says.

Nobody sees fit to question this.

“Tiu travels to Shanghai, and six weeks later Ricardo—”

In the far background, Guillam hears the bark of the Cousins’ telephone switched through to his room, and it is a thing he afterwards avers most strongly—whether in truth or with hindsight—that the unloveable image of Sam Collins was at this point conjured out of his subconscious memory like a djinni out of a lamp, and that he wondered yet again how he could ever have been so unthinking as to let Sam Collins deliver that vital letter to Martello.

“Nelson has one more string to his bow, Chief,” di Salis continues, just as everyone is assuming he is done. “I hesitate to offer it with any confidence, but in the circumstances I dare not omit it altogether. A barter report from the West Germans, dated a few weeks ago. According to their sources, Nelson is lately a member of what we have for want of information dubbed the Peking Tea Club, an embryonic body which we believe has been set up to coordinate the Chinese intelligence effort. He came in first as an adviser on electronic surveillance, and was then co-opted as a full member. It functions, so far as we can fathom, somewhat as our own Intelligence Steering Group. But I must emphasize that this is a shot in the dark. We know absolutely nothing about the Chinese services, and nor do the Cousins.”

For once at a loss for words, Smiley stares at di Salis, opens his mouth, closes it, then pulls off his glasses and polishes them.

“And Nelson’s motive?” he asks, still oblivious to the steady bark of the Cousins’ bell. “A shot in the dark, Doc? How would you see that?”

Di Salis gives an enormous shrug, so that his tallow hair bucks like a floor-mop. “Oh, anybody’s guess,” he says waspishly. “Who believes in motive these days? It would have been perfectly natural for him to respond to Centre’s recruitment overtures while a student in Leningrad, of course, provided they were made in the right way. Not a disloyal thing at all. Not doctrinally, anyway. Russia was China’s big elder brother. Nelson needed merely to be told he had been chosen as one of a special vanguard of vigilantes. I see no great art to that.”

Outside the room, the green phone just goes on ringing, which is remarkable. Martello is not usually so persistent. Only Guillam and Smiley are allowed to pick it up. But Smiley has not heard it, and Guillam is damned if he will budge while di Salis is extemporising on Nelson’s possible reasons for becoming Karla’s mole.

“When the Cultural Revolution came, many people in Nelson’s position believed that Mao had gone mad,” di Salis explains, still reluctant to theorise. “Even some of his own generals thought so. The humiliations Nelson suffered made him conform outwardly—while inwardly, perhaps, he remained bitter— who knows?—and vengeful.”

“The alimony payments to Drake started at a time when Nelson’s rehabilitation was barely complete,” Smiley objects mildly. “What is the presumption there, Doc?”

All this is just too much for Connie, and once again she brims over. “Oh, George, how can you be so naïve? You can find the line, dear, ’course you can! Those poor Chinese can’t afford to hang a top technician in the cupboard half his life and not use him! Karla saw the drift, didn’t he, Doc? He read the wind and went with it. He kept his poor little Nelson on a string and as soon as he started to come out of the wilderness again he had his legmen get alongside him: ‘It’s us, remember? Your friends! We don’t let you down! We don’t spit on you in the street! Let’s get back to business!’ You’d play it just the same way yourself, you know you would!”

“And the money?” Smiley asks. “The half million?”

“Stick and carrot! Blackmail implicit, rewards enormous. Nelson’s hooked both ways.”

But it is di Salis, Connie’s outburst notwithstanding, who has the last word: “He’s Chinese. He’s pragmatic. He’s Drake’s brother. He can’t get out of China—”

“Not yet,” says Smiley softly, glancing at the folder again.

“—and he knows very well his market value to the Russian service. ‘You can’t eat politics, you can’t sell them, and you can’t sleep with them,’ Drake liked to say. So you might as well make money out of them.”

“Against the day when you can leave China and spend it,” Smiley concludes and, as Guillam tiptoes from the room, silently closes the folder and takes up his sheet of jottings. “Drake tried to get him out and failed, so he took the Russians’ money till . . . till what? Till Drake has better luck, perhaps.”

In the background, the insistent snarling of the green telephone has finally ceased.

“Nelson is Karla’s mole,” Smiley remarks at last, once more almost himself. “He’s sitting on a priceless crock of Chinese intelligence. That alone we could do with. He’s acting on Karla’s orders. The orders themselves are of inestimable value to us. They would show us precisely how much the Russians know about their Chinese enemy, and even what they intend toward him. We could take backbearings galore. Yes, Peter?”

In the breaking of tragic news there is no transition. One minute a concept stands, the next it lies smashed, and for those affected the world has altered irrevocably. As a cushion, however, Guillam had used official Circus stationery and the written word. By writing his message to Smiley in signal form, he hoped that the sight of it would prepare him in advance. Walking quietly to the desk, the form in his hand, he laid it on the glass sheet and waited.

“About Charlie Marshall, the other pilot, by the way,” Smiley asked of the gathering, still oblivious. “Have the Cousins run him to earth yet, Molly?”

“His record is much the same as Ricardo’s,” Molly Meakin replied, glancing queerly at Guillam. Still at Smiley’s side, he looked suddenly grey and middle-aged and ill. “Like Ricardo, he flew for the Cousins in the Laos war, Mr. Smiley. They were contemporaries at Langley’s secret aviation school in Oklahoma. They dumped him when Laos ended and have no further word on him. Enforcement say he has ferried opium, but they say that of all of the Cousins’ pilots.”

“I think you should read that,” Guillam said, pointing firmly at the message.

“Marshall must be our next step,” Smiley said. “We have to maintain the pressure.”

Picking up the signal form at last, he held it critically to his left side, where the reading-light was brightest. He read with his eyebrows raised and his lids lowered. As always, he read twice. His expression did not change, but those nearest him said the movement went out of his face.

“Thank you, Peter,” he said quietly, laying the paper down again. “And thank you everyone else. Connie and the Doc, perhaps you’d stay behind. I trust the rest of you will get a good night’s sleep.”

Among the younger sparks this hope was greeted with cheerful laughter, for it was well past midnight already.

The girl from upstairs slept, a neat brown doll along the length of one of Jerry’s legs, plump and immaculate by the orange night-light of the rain-soaked Hong Kong sky. She was snoring her head off, and Jerry was staring through the window thinking of Lizzie Worthington. He thought of the twin claw marks on her chin and wondered again who had put them there. He thought of Tiu, imagining him as her jailer, and he rehearsed the name horse-writer until it really annoyed him. He wondered how much more waiting there was, and whether at the end of it he might have a chance with her, which was all he asked: a chance. The girl stirred, but only to scratch her rump. From next door, Jerry heard a ritual clicking as the habitual mah-jong party washed the pieces before distributing them.

The girl had not been unduly responsive to Jerry’s courtship at first—a gush of impassioned notes jammed through her letterbox at all hours of the previous few days—but she did need to pay her gas bill. Officially, she was the property of a businessman, but recently his visits had become fewer and most recently had ceased altogether, with the result that she could afford neither the fortune-teller nor mah-jong, nor the stylish clothes she had set her heart on for the day she broke into Kung Fu films. So she succumbed, but on a clear financial understanding.

Her main fear was of being known to consort with the hideous kwailo, and for this reason she had put on her entire outdoor equipment to descend the one floor: a brown raincoat with transatlantic brass buckles on the epaulettes, plastic yellow boots, and a plastic umbrella with red roses. Now this equipment lay around the parquet floor like armour after the battle, and she slept with the same noble exhaustion. So that when the phone rang her only response was a drowsy Cantonese oath.

Lifting the receiver, Jerry nursed the idiotic hope it might be Lizzie, but it wasn’t.

“Get your ass down here fast,” Luke said. “And Stubbsie will love you. Move it. I’m doing you the favour of our career.”

“Where’s here?” Jerry asked.

“Downstairs, you ape.”

He rolled the girl off him but she still didn’t wake.

The roads glittered with unexpected rain and a thick halo ringed the moon. Luke drove as if they were in a jeep: in high gear with hammer changes on the corners. Fumes of whisky filled the car.

“What have you got, for Christ’s sake?” Jerry demanded. “What’s going on?”

“Great meat. Now shut up.”

“I don’t want meat. I’m suited.”

“You’ll want this one. Man, you’ll want this one.”

They were heading for the harbour tunnel. A flock of cyclists without lights lurched out of a side turning, and Luke had to mount the central reservation to avoid them.

“Look for a damn great building site,” Luke said. A patrol car overtook them, all lights flashing. Thinking he was going to be stopped, Luke lowered his window.

“We’re press, you idiots!” he screamed. “We’re stars, hear me?”

Inside the patrol car as it passed they had a glimpse of a Chinese sergeant and his driver, and an august-looking European perched in the back like a judge. Ahead of them, to the right of the carriage-way, the promised building site sprang into view: a cage of yellow girders and bamboo scaffolding alive with sweating coolies. Cranes, glistening in the wet, dangled over them like whips. The floodlighting came from the ground and poured wastefully into the mist.

“Look for a low place just near,” Luke ordered, slowing down to sixty. “White. Look for a white place.”

Jerry pointed to it: a two-storey complex of weeping stucco, neither new nor old, with a twenty-foot stand of bamboos by the entrance, and an ambulance. The ambulance stood open and the three attendants lounged in it, smoking, watching the police who milled around the forecourt as if it were a riot they were handling.

“He’s giving us an hour’s start over the field.”

“Who?”

“Rocker. Rocker is. Who do you think?”

“Why?”

“Because he hit me, I guess. He loves me. He loves you, too. He said to bring you specially.”

“Why?”

The rain fell steadily.

“Why? Why? Why?” Luke echoed, furious. “Just hurry!”

The bamboos were out of scale, higher than the wall. A couple of orange-clad priests were sheltering against them, clapping cymbals. A third held an umbrella. There were flower stalls and hearses and from somewhere out of sight the sounds of leisurely incantation. The entrance lobby was a jungle swamp reeking of formaldehyde.

“Big Moo’s special envoy,” said Luke.

“Press,” said Jerry.

The police nodded them through, not looking at their cards.

“Where’s the Superintendent?” said Luke.

The smell of formaldehyde was awful. A young sergeant led them. They pushed through a glass door to a room where old men and women, maybe thirty of them, mostly in pyjama suits, waited phlegmatically as if for a late train, under shadowless neon lights and an electric fan. One old man was clearing out his throat, snorting onto the green tiled floor. Seeing the giant kwailos, they stared in polite amazement. The pathologist’s office was yellow. Yellow walls; yellow blinds, closed; an airconditioner that wasn’t working. The same green tiles, easily washed down.

“Great smell,” said Luke.

“Like home,” Jerry agreed.

Jerry wished it was battle. Battle was easier. The sergeant told them to wait while he went ahead. They heard the squeak of trolleys, low voices, the clamp of a freezer door, the low hiss of rubber soles. A volume of Gray’s Anatomy lay next to the telephone. Jerry turned the pages, staring at the illustrations. Luke perched on a chair. An assistant in short rubber boots and overalls brought tea. White cups, green rims, and the Hong Kong monogram with a crown.

“Can you tell the sergeant to hurry, please?” said Luke. “You’ll have the whole damn town here in a minute.”

“Why us?” said Jerry again.

Luke poured some tea onto the tiled floor, and while it ran into the gutter he topped up the cup from his whisky flask. The sergeant returned, beckoning quickly with his slender hand. They followed him back through the waiting-room. This way there was no door, just a corridor, and a turn like a public lavatory, and they were there.

The first thing Jerry saw was the trolley chipped to hell; there’s nothing older or more derelict than worn-out hospital equipment, he thought. The walls were covered in green mould, green stalactites hung from the ceiling, a battered spittoon was filled with used tissues. They clean out the noses, he remembered, before they pull down the sheet to show you. It’s a courtesy, so that you aren’t shocked. The fumes of formaldehyde made his eyes run. A Chinese pathologist was sitting at the window, making notes on a pad. A couple of attendants were hovering, and more police. There seemed to be a general sense of apology around; Jerry couldn’t make it out.

The Rocker was ignoring them. He was in a corner, murmuring to the august-looking gentleman from the back of the patrol car, but the corner wasn’t far away and Jerry heard “slur on our reputation” spoken twice, in an indignant, nervous tone. Over the body lay a white sheet with a blue cross on it, made in two equal lengths. So that they can use it either way round, Jerry thought. It was the only trolley in the room. The only sheet. The rest of the exhibition was inside the two big freezers with the wooden doors, walk-in size, big as a butcher’s shop. Luke was going out of his mind with impatience.

“Jesus, Rocker!” he called across the room. “How much longer you going to keep the lid on this? We got work to do.”

No one bothered with him. Tired of waiting, Luke yanked back the sheet. Jerry looked, and looked away. The autopsy room was next door, and he could hear the sound of sawing, like the snarling of a dog.

No wonder they’re all so apologetic, Jerry thought stupidly. Bringing a round-eye corpse to a place like this.

“Jesus Christ,” Luke was saying. “Holy Christ. Who did it to him? How do you make those marks? That’s a triad thing. Jesus.”

The dampened window gave on to the courtyard. Jerry could see the bamboos rocking in the rain and the liquid shadows of an ambulance delivering another customer, but he doubted whether any of them looked like this. A police photographer had appeared and there were flashes. A telephone extension hung on the wall. The Rocker was talking into it. He still hadn’t looked at Luke, or at Jerry.

“I want him out of here,” the august gentleman said.

“Soon as you like,” said the Rocker. He returned to the telephone. “In the Walled City, sir. . . . Yes, sir. . . . In an alley, sir. Stripped. Lot of alcohol. . . . The forensic pathologist recognised him immediately, sir. . . . Yes, sir, the bank’s here already, sir.” He rang off. “Yes, sir, no, sir, three bags full, sir.” He dialled a number.

Luke was making notes. “Jesus,” he kept saying in awe. “Jesus. They must have taken weeks to kill him. Months.”

He had died twice, Jerry decided. Once to make him talk and once to shut him up. The things they had done to him first were all over his body, in big and small patches, the way fire hits a carpet, eats holes, then suddenly gives up. Then there was the thing round his neck, a different, faster death altogether. They had done that last, when they didn’t want him any more.

Luke called to the pathologist. “Turn him over, will you? Would you mind please turning him over, sir?”

The Superintendent had put down the phone.

“What’s the story?” said Jerry, straight at him. “Who is he?”

“Name of Frost,” the Rocker said, staring back with one eyelid drooping. “Senior official of the South Asian & China. Trustee Department.”

“Who killed him?” Jerry asked.

“Yeah, who did it? That’s the point,” said Luke, writing hard.

“Mice,” said the Rocker.

“Hong Kong has no triads, no Communists, and no Kuomintang. Right, Rocker?”

“And no whores,” the Rocker said.

The august gentleman spared the Rocker further reply. “A vicious case of mugging,” he declared over the policeman’s shoulder. “A filthy, vicious mugging, exemplifying the need for public vigilance at all times. He was a loyal servant of the bank.”

“That’s not a mugging,” said Luke, looking at Frost again. “That’s a party.”

“He certainly had some damned odd friends,” the Rocker said, still staring at Jerry.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” said Jerry.

“What’s the story so far?” said Luke.

“He was on the town till midnight. In the company of a couple of Chinese males. One cathouse after another. Then we lose him. Till tonight.”

“The bank’s offering a reward of fifty thousand dollars,” said the august man.

“Hong Kong or U.S.?” said Luke, writing.

The august man said, “Hong Kong,” very tartly.

“Now, you boys go easy,” the Rocker warned. “There’s a sick wife in Stanley Hospital, and there’s kids—”

“And there’s the reputation of the bank,” said the august man.

“That will be our first concern,” said Luke.

They left half an hour later, still ahead of the field.

“Thanks,” said Luke to the Superintendent.

“For nothing,” said the Rocker. His drooping eyelid, Jerry noticed, leaked when he was tired.

We’ve shaken the tree, thought Jerry as they drove away. Boy, oh, boy, have we shaken the tree!

They sat in the same attitudes, Smiley at his desk, Connie in her wheelchair, di Salis gazing into the languid smoke-coil of his pipe. Guillam stood at Smiley’s side, the grate of Martello’s voice still in his ears. Smiley, with a slight circular movement of his thumb, was polishing his spectacles with the fat end of his tie.

Di Salis, the Jesuit, spoke first. Perhaps he had the most to disown. “There is nothing in logic to link us with this incident. Frost was a libertine. He kept Chinese women, he was manifestly corrupt. He took our bribe without demur. Heaven knows what bribes he has not taken in the past. I will not have it laid at my door.”

“Oh, stuff,” Connie muttered. She sat expressionless and the dog lay sleeping on her lap. Her crippled hands lay over his brown back for warmth. In the background Fawn was pouring tea. Smiley took neither milk nor sugar.

Smiley spoke to the signal form. Nobody had seen his face since he had first looked down to read it.

“Connie, I want the arithmetic,” he said.

“Yes, dear.”

“Outside these four walls, who is conscious that we leaned on Frost?”

“Craw. Westerby. Craw’s policeman. And if they’ve any mind, the Cousins will have guessed.”

“Not Lacon, not Whitehall.”

“And not Karla, dear,” Connie declared, with a sharp look at the murky portrait.

“No. Not Karla. I believe that.” From his voice, they could feel the intensity of the conflict as his intellect forced its will upon his emotions. “For Karla, it would be a most exaggerated response. If a bank account is blown, all he need do is open another elsewhere. He doesn’t need this.” With the tips of his fingers, he precisely moved the signal form an inch up the glass. “The ploy went as planned. The response was simply—” He began again. “The response was more than we expected. Operationally nothing is amiss. Operationally we have advanced the case.”

“We’ve drawn them, dear,” Connie said firmly.

Di Salis blew up completely. “I insist you do not speak as if we were all of us accomplices here. There is no proven link and I consider it invidious that you should suggest there is.”

Smiley remained remote in his response: “I would consider it invidious if I suggested anything else. I ordered this initiative. I refuse not to look at the consequences merely because they are ugly. Put it on my head. But don’t let’s deceive ourselves.”

“Poor devil didn’t know enough, did he?” Connie mused, seemingly to herself. At first nobody took her up. Then Guillam did: what did she mean by that?

“Frost had nothing to betray, darling,” she explained. “That’s the worst that can happen to anyone. What could he give them? One zealous journalist, name of Westerby. They had that already, little dears. So of course, they went on. And on.” She turned to Smiley’s direction. He was the only one who shared so much history with her. “We used to make it a rule—remember, George— when the boys went in? We always gave them something they could confess.”

With loving care, Fawn set down a paper cup on Smiley’s desk, a slice of lemon floating on the tea. His skull-like grin moved Guillam to repressed fury.

“When you’ve handed that round, get out,” he snapped in his ear. Still smirking, Fawn left.

“Where is Ko, in his mind, at this moment?” Smiley asked, still talking to the signal form. He had locked his fingers under his chin and might have been praying.

“Funk and fuzzy-headedness,” Connie declared with confidence. “Fleet Street on the prowl, Frost dead and he’s still no further forward.”

“Yes. Yes, he’ll dither. ‘Can he hold the dam? Can he plug the leaks? Where are the leaks, anyway?’ . . . That’s what we wanted. We’ve got it.” He made the smallest movement of his bowed head, and it pointed toward Guillam. “Peter, you will please ask the Cousins to step up their surveillance on Tiu. Static posts only, tell them. No street-work, no frightening the game, no nonsense of that kind. Telephone, mail, the easy things only. Doc, when did Tiu last visit the mainland?”

Di Salis grudgingly gave a date.

“Find out the route he travelled and where he bought his ticket. In case he does it again.”

“It’s on record already,” di Salis retorted sulkily and made a most unpleasing sneer, looking to heaven and writhing with his lips and shoulders.

“Then kindly be so good as to make me a separate note of it,” Smiley replied with unshakeable forbearance. “Westerby,” he went on in the same flat voice, and for a second Guillam had the sickening feeling that Smiley was suffering from some kind of hallucination, and thought that Jerry was in the room with him, to receive his orders like the rest of them. “I pull him out—I can do that. His paper recalls him, why shouldn’t it? Then what? Ko waits. He listens. He hears nothing. And he relaxes.”

“And enter the narcotics heroes,” Guillam said, glancing at the calendar.

“Or I pull him out and I replace him, and another fieldman takes up the trail. Is he any less at risk than Westerby is now?”

“It never works,” Connie muttered. “Changing horses. Never. You know that. Briefing, training, re-gearing, new relationships. Never.”

“I don’t see that he is at risk!” di Salis asserted shrilly.

Swinging angrily round, Guillam started to slap him down, but Smiley spoke ahead of him: “Why not, Doc?”

“Accepting your hypothesis—which I don’t—Ko is not a man of violence. He’s a successful businessman and his maxims are face, and expediency, and merit, and hard work. I won’t have him spoken of as if he were some kind of thug. I grant you he has people, and perhaps his people are less nice than he when it comes to method. Much as we are Whitehall’s people. That doesn’t make blackguards of Whitehall, I trust.”

For Christ’s sake, out with it! thought Guillam.

“Westerby is not a Frost,” di Salis persisted, in the same didactic, nasal whine. “Westerby is not a dishonest servant. Westerby has not betrayed Ko’s confidence, or Ko’s money, or Ko’s brother. In Ko’s eyes, Westerby represents a large newspaper. And Westerby has let it be known—both to Frost and to Tiu, I understand—that his paper possesses a greater degree of knowledge in the matter than he himself. Ko understands the world. By removing one journalist, he will not remove the risk. To the contrary, he will bring out the whole pack.”

“Then what is in his mind?” said Smiley.

“Uncertainty. Much as Connie said. He cannot gauge the threat. The Chinese have little place for abstracts, less still for abstract situations. He would like the threat to blow over, and if nothing concrete occurs, he will assume it has done so. That is not a habit confined to the Occident. I am extending your hypothesis.” He stood up. “I am not endorsing it. I refuse to. I dissociate myself from it absolutely.”

He stalked out. On Smiley’s nod, Guillam followed him. Only Connie stayed behind.

Smiley had closed his eyes and his brow was drawn into a rigid knot above the bridge of his nose. For a long while Connie said nothing at all. Trot lay as dead across her lap, and she gazed down at him, fondling his belly.

“Karla wouldn’t give two pins, would he, dearie?” she murmured. “Not for one dead Frost, nor for ten. That’s the difference, really. We can’t write it much larger than that, can we, not these days? Who was it who used to say, ‘We’re fighting for the survival of Reasonable Man’? Steed-Asprey? Or was it Control? I loved that. It covered it all. Hitler. The new thing. That’s who we are: reasonable. Aren’t we, Trot? We’re not just English. We’re reasonable.”

Her voice fell a little. “Darling, what about Sam? Have you had thoughts?”

It was still a long while before Smiley spoke, and when he did so, his voice was harsh, like a voice to keep her at a distance.

“He’s to stand by. Do nothing till he has the green light. He knows that. He’s to wait till the green light.” He drew in a deep breath and let it out again. “He may not even be needed. We may quite well manage without him. It all depends how Ko jumps.”

“George, darling, dear George.”

In silent ritual, she pushed herself to the grate, took up the poker, and with a huge effort stirred the coals, clinging to the dog with her free hand.

Jerry stood at the kitchen window, watching the yellow dawn cut up the harbour mist. Last night there had been a storm, he remembered. Must have hit an hour before Luke telephoned. He had watched it from the mattress while the girl lay snoring along his leg. First the smell of vegetation, then the wind rustling guiltily in the palm trees, dry hands rubbed together. Then the hiss of rain like tons of molten shot being shaken into the sea. Finally the sheet lightning rocking the harbour in long slow breaths while salvos of thunder cracked over the dancing rooftops. I killed him, he thought. Give or take a little, it was me who gave him the shove. “It’s not just the generals, it’s every man who carries a gun.” Quote source and context.

The phone was ringing. Let it ring, he thought. Probably Craw, wetting his pants. He picked up the receiver. Luke, sounding even more than usually American.

“Hey, man! Big drama! Stubbsie just came through on the wire. Personal for Westerby. Eat before reading. Want to hear it?”

“No.”

“A swing through the war zones. Cambodia’s airlines and the siege economy. Our man amid shot and shell! You’re in luck, sailor! They want you to get your ass shot off!”

And leave Lizzie to Tiu, he thought, ringing off.

And for all I know, to that bastard Collins too, lurking in her shadow like a white slaver. Jerry had worked to Sam a couple of times while Sam was plain Mr. Mellon of Vientiane, an uncannily successful trader, headman of the local round-eye crooks. He reckoned him one of the most unappetising operators in the game.

He returned to his place at the window thinking of Lizzie again, up there on her own giddy roof-top. Thinking of little Frost, and of his fondness for being alive. Thinking of the smell that had greeted him when he returned here, to his flat. It was everywhere. It overrode the reek of the girl’s deodorant, the stale cigarette smoke, the smell of gas, and the smell of cooking oil from the mah-jong players next door. It even overrode the memory of Frost’s formaldehyde. Catching it, Jerry had actually charted in his imagination the route Tiu had taken as he foraged: where he had lingered, and where he had skimped on his journey through Jerry’s clothes, Jerry’s pantry, and Jerry’s few possessions. A smell of rose-water and almonds mixed, favoured by an early wife.

15

SIEGE TOWN

When you leave Hong Kong, it ceases to exist. When you have passed the last Chinese policeman in British ammunition boots and puttees, and held your breath as you race sixty feet above the roofs of the grey slums, when the out-islands have dwindled into the blue mist, you know that the curtain has been rung down, the props cleared away, and the life you lived there was all illusion. But this time for once, Jerry couldn’t rise to that feeling: he carried the memory of the dead Frost and the live girl with him, and they were still beside him as he reached Bangkok.

As usual it took him all day to find what he was looking for; as usual he was about to give up. In Bangkok, in Jerry’s view, that happened to everyone: a tourist looking for a wat, a journalist for a story—or Jerry for Ricardo’s friend and partner Charlie Marshall—your prize sits down the far end of some damned alley, jammed between a silted klong and a pile of concrete trash, and it costs you five dollars U.S. more than you expected. Also, though this was theoretically Bangkok’s dry season, Jerry could not remember ever being here except in rain, which cascaded in unheralded bursts from the polluted, burning sky. Afterwards people always told him he got the one wet day. He started at the airport, because he was already there and because he reasoned that in the South East no one can fly for long without flying through Bangkok. Charlie wasn’t around any more, they said; someone even assured him Charlie had stopped being a pilot after Ric died. Someone else said he was in jail, someone else again that he was most likely in “one of the dens.” A ravishing Air Vietnam hostess said with a giggle that he was making freight hops to Saigon; she only ever saw him in Saigon.

“Out of where?” Jerry asked.

“Maybe Phnom Penh, maybe Vientiane,” she said—but Charlie’s destination, she insisted, was always Saigon and he never hit Bangkok. Jerry checked the telephone directory and there was no Indocharter listed. On an off chance he looked up Marshall too, discovered one—even a Marshall, C.—called him, but found himself talking not to the son of a Kuomintang war-lord who had christened himself with high military rank but to a puzzled Scottish trader who kept saying, “Listen, but do come round.”

He went to the jail where the farangs are locked up when they can’t pay or have been rude to a general, and checked the record. He walked along the balconies and peered through the cage doors and spoke to a couple of crazed hippies. But while they had a good deal to say about being locked up, they hadn’t seen Charlie Marshall and they hadn’t heard of him, and to put it delicately they didn’t care about him either. In a black mood he drove to the so-called sanatorium where addicts enjoy their cold turkey, and there was great excitement because a man in a straitjacket had succeeded in putting his own eyes out with his fingers, but it wasn’t Charlie Marshall, and no, they had no pilots, no Corsicans, no Corsican Chinese, and certainly no son of a Kuomintang general.

So Jerry started on the hotels where pilots might hang out in transit. He didn’t like the work, because it was deadening and, more particularly, he knew that Ko had a big outfit here. He had no serious doubt that Frost had blown him; he knew that most rich overseas Chinese legitimately run several passports and the Swatownese more than several; he knew that Ko had a Thai passport in his pocket and probably a couple of Thai generals as well. And he knew that when they were cross the Thais killed a great deal sooner and more thoroughly than almost everyone else, even though when they condemned a man to the firingsquad, they shot him through a stretched bed sheet in order not to offend the laws of the Lord Buddha. For that reason among a good few others, Jerry felt less than comfortable shouting Charlie Marshall’s name all over the big hotels.

He tried the Erawan, the Hyatt, the Miramar, and the Oriental and about thirty others, and at the Erawan he trod specially lightly, remembering that China Airsea had a suite there and Craw said Ko used it often. He formed a picture of Lizzie with her blond hair, playing hostess for him or stretched out at the poolside sunning her long body while the tycoons sipped their Scotches and wondered how much would buy an hour of her time.

While he rode round, a sudden rainstorm pelted fat drops so foul with soot that they blackened the gold of the street temples. The taxi-driver aquaplaned on the flooded roads, missing the water-buffaloes by inches, the garish buses jingled and charged at them, blood-stained Kung Fu posters screamed at them; but Marshall—Charlie Marshall—Captain Marshall—was not a name to anyone, though Jerry dispensed coffee money liberally. Charlie’s got a girl, thought Jerry. He’s got a girl and uses her place, just as I would.

At the Oriental he tipped the porter and arranged to collect messages and use the telephone, and best of all he obtained a receipt for two nights’ lodging with which to taunt Stubbs. But his trail round the hotels had scared him, he felt exposed and at risk, so to sleep, for a dollar a night, he took a prepaid room in a nameless backstreet doss-house where the formalities of registration were dispensed with: a place like a row of beach huts, with all the room doors opening straight on to the pavement in order to make fornication easier, and open garages with plastic curtains that screened the number of your car.

By the evening he was reduced to stomping the air-freight agencies, asking about a firm called Indocharter, though he wasn’t too keen to do that either, and he was seriously wondering whether to believe the Air Vietnam hostess and take up the trail in Saigon, when a Chinese girl in one of the agencies said, “Indocharter? That’s Captain Marshall’s line.”

She directed him to a bookshop where Charlie Marshall bought his literature and collected his mail whenever he was in town. The shop was also run by Chinese, and when Jerry mentioned Marshall the old proprietor burst out laughing and said Charlie hadn’t been in for months. The old man was very small, with false teeth that grimaced.

“He owe you money? Charlie Marshall owe you money, clash a plane for you?” He once more hooted with laughter and Jerry joined in.

“Super. Great. Listen, what do you do with all the mail when he doesn’t come here? Do you send it on?”

Charlie Marshall, he didn’t get no mail, the old man said.

“Ah, but, sport, if a letter comes tomorrow, where will you send it?”

To Phnom Penh, the old man said, pocketing his five dollars, and fished a scrap of paper from his desk so that Jerry could copy down the address.

“Maybe I should buy him a book,” said Jerry, looking round. “What does he like?”

“Flench,” the old man said automatically and, taking Jerry upstairs, showed him his sanctum for round-eye culture: for the English, pornography printed in Brussels; for the French, row after row of tattered classics—Voltaire, Montesquieu, Hugo. Jerry bought a copy of Candide and slipped it into his pocket. Visitors to this room were ex officio celebrities apparently, for the old man produced a visitor’s book and Jerry signed it: “J. Westerby, newshound.” The comments column was played for laughs, so he wrote, “A most distinguished emporium.”

Then he looked back through the pages and asked, “Charlie Marshall sign here too, sport?”

The old man showed him Charlie Marshall’s signature a couple of times—“Address: here,” he had written.

“How about his friend?”

“Flend?”

“Captain Ricardo.”

At this the old man grew very solemn and gently took away the book.

He went round to the Foreign Correspondents’ Club at the Oriental, and it was empty except for a troop of Japanese who had just returned from Cambodia. They told him the state of play there as of yesterday, and he got a little drunk. And as he was leaving, to his momentary horror, the dwarf appeared, in town for consultation with the local bureau. He had a Thai boy in tow, which made him particularly pert. “Why, Westerby! But how’s the Secret Service today?” He played this joke on pretty well everyone, but it didn’t improve Jerry’s peace of mind.

At the doss-house he drank a lot more Scotch but the exertions of his fellow guests kept him awake. Finally, in self-defence he went out and found himself a girl, a soft little creature from a bar up the road, but when he lay alone his thoughts once more homed on Lizzie: like it or not, she was his bed companion.

How much was she consciously involved with them? he wondered. Did she know what she was playing with when she set Jerry up for Tiu? Did she know what Drake’s boys had done to Frost? Did she know they might do it to Jerry? It even entered his mind that she had been there while they did it, and that thought appalled him. No question: Frost’s body was still very fresh in his memory. It was one of the worst.

By two in the morning he decided he was going to have a bout of fever, he was sweating and turning so much. Once, he heard sounds of soft footsteps inside the room and flung himself into a corner, clutching a teak table-lamp ripped from its socket. At four he was woken by that amazing Asian hubbub: pig-like hawking sounds, bells, cries of old men in extremis, the crowing of a thousand roosters echoing in the tile and concrete corridors. He fought with the broken plumbing and began the laborious business of getting clean from a thin trickle of cold water. At five the radio was turned on full blast to get him out of bed, and a whine of Asian music announced that the day had begun in earnest. By then he had shaved as if it were his wedding day, and at eight he cabled his plans to the comic for the Circus to intercept.

At eleven he caught the plane to Phnom Penh. As he climbed aboard the Air Cambodge Caravelle, the ground hostess turned her lovely face to him and, in her best lilting English, melodiously wished him a “nice fright.”

“Thanks. Yes. Super,” he said, and chose the seat over the wing where you stood the best chance. As they slowly took off, he saw a group of fat Thais playing lousy golf on perfect links just beside the runway.

There were eight names on the flight manifest when Jerry read it at the check-in, but only one other passenger boarded the plane, a black-clad American boy with a brief-case. The rest was cargo, stacked aft in brown gunny bags and rush boxes. A siege plane, Jerry thought automatically. You fly in with the goods, you fly out with the lucky. The stewardess offered him an old Jours de France and a barley sugar. He read the Jours de France to put some French back into his mind, then remembered Candide and read that. He had brought the book-bag, and in the book-bag he had Conrad. In Phnom Penh he always read Conrad; it tickled him to remind himself he was sitting in the last of the true Conrad river ports.

To land, they flew in high, then pancaked in a tight uneasy spiral to avoid random small-arms fire from the jungle. There was no ground control, but Jerry hadn’t expected any. The stewardess didn’t know how close the Khmer Rouge were to the town, but the Japanese had said fifteen kilometres on all fronts and less where there were no roads. The Japanese had said the airport was under fire but only from rockets and sporadically. No 105s. Not yet, but there’s always a beginning, thought Jerry.

Then olive earth leapt at them and Jerry saw bomb craters spattered like egg-spots, and the yellow lines from the tyre tracks of the convoys. As they landed feather-light on the pitted runway, the inevitable naked brown children splashed contentedly in a mud-filled crater.

He stepped on to the tarmac and as the heat hit him with a slap, so did the roar of transport planes taking off and landing. Yet for all that, he had the illusion of arriving on a calm summer’s day: for in Phnom Penh, like nowhere else Jerry had ever been, war took place in an atmosphere of peace. He remembered the last time he was here, before the bombing halt. A group of Air France passengers bound for Tokyo had been dawdling curiously on the apron, not realising they had landed in a battle. No one told them to take cover, no one was with them. F-4s and 111s were screaming over the airfield, there was shooting from the perimeter, Air America choppers were landing the dead in nets like frightful catches from some red sea, and a Boeing 707, in order to take off, had to crawl across the entire airfield, running the gauntlet in slow motion. Spellbound, Jerry had watched her lollop out of range of the ground fire, and all the way he had waited for the thump that would tell him she had been hit in the tail. But she had kept going as if the innocent were immune, and disappeared into the untroubled horizon.

Now ironically, with the end so close, he noticed that the accent was on the cargo of survival. On the farther side of the airfield huge chartered all-silver American transport planes, 707s and four-engined turbo-prop C-130s marked “Trans World,” “Bird Airways,” or not marked at all, were landing and taking off in a clumsy, dangerous shuttle as they brought the ammunition and rice in from Thailand and Saigon. On his hasty walk to the terminal Jerry saw two landings, and each time held his breath waiting for the late back-charge of the jets as they fought and shivered to a halt inside the revêtement of earth-filled ammunition boxes at the soft end of the landing-strip. Even before they stopped, flight handlers in flack-jackets and helmets had converged like unarmed platoons to wrest their precious sacks from the holds.

Yet even these bad omens could not destroy his pleasure at being back.

“Vous restez combien de temps, Monsieur?” the immigration officer enquired.

“Toujours, sport,” said Jerry. “Long as you’ll have me. Longer.” He thought of asking after Charlie Marshall then and there, but the airport was stiff with police and spooks of every sort, and as long as he didn’t know what he was up against it seemed wise not to advertise his interest. There was a colourful array of old aircraft with new insignia, but he couldn’t see any belonging to Indocharter, whose registered markings, Craw had told him at the valedictory briefing just before he left Hong Kong, were believed to be Ko’s racing colours: sea grey and sky blue.

He took a taxi and rode in front, gently declining the driver’s courteous offers of girls, shows, clubs, boys. The flamboyants made a luscious arcade of orange against the slate monsoon sky. He stopped at a haberdasher to change money au cours flexible, a term he loved. The money-changers used to be Chinese, Jerry remembered. This one was Indian: the Chinese get out early, but the Indians stay to pick the carcass. Shanty towns lay left and right of the road. Refugees crouched everywhere, cooking, dozing in silent groups. A ring of small children sat passing round a cigarette.

“Nous sommes un village avec une population des millions,” said the driver in his schoolroom French.

An army convoy drove at them, headlights on, sticking to the centre of the road. The taxi-driver obediently pulled into the dirt. An ambulance brought up the rear, both doors open. The bodies were stacked feet outward, legs like pigs’ trotters, marbled and bruised. Dead or alive, it scarcely mattered. They passed a cluster of stilt houses smashed by rockets, and entered a provincial French square: a restaurant, an épicerie, a charcuterie, advertisements for Byrrh and Coca-Cola. On the curb, children squatted, watching over litre winebottles filled with stolen petrol. Jerry remembered that too: that was what had happened in the shellings. The shells touched off the petrol and the result was a blood-bath. It would happen again this time. Nobody learned anything, nothing changed, the offal was cleared away by morning.

“Stop!” said Jerry and on the spur of the moment handed the driver the piece of paper on which he had written down the Bangkok bookshop’s address for Charlie Marshall. He had imagined he should creep up on the place at dead of night, but in the sunlight there seemed no point any more.

“Y aller?” the driver asked, turning to look at him in surprise.

“That’s it, sport.”

“Vous connaissez cette maison?”

“Chum of mine.”

“A vous? Un ami à vous?”

“Press,” said Jerry, which explains any lunacy.

The driver shrugged and pointed the car down a long boulevard, past the French cathedral, into a mud road lined with courtyard villas which became quickly dingier as they approached the edge of town. Twice Jerry asked the driver what was special about the address, but the driver had lost his charm and shrugged away the questions. When they stopped, he insisted on being paid off, and drove away racing the gear changes in rebuke.

It was just another villa, the lower half hidden behind a wall pierced with a wrought-iron gate. Jerry pushed the bell and heard nothing. When he tried to force the gate, it wouldn’t move. He heard a window slam and thought, as he looked quickly up, that he saw a brown face slip away behind the mosquito wire. Then the gate buzzed and yielded, and he walked up a few steps to a tiled verandah and another door, this one of solid teak with a tiny shaded grille for looking out but not in. He waited, then hammered heavily on the knocker, and heard the echoes bounding all over the house. The door was double, with a join at the centre. Pressing his face to the gap, he saw a strip of tiled floor and two steps, presumably the last two steps of a staircase. On the lower of these stood two smooth brown feet, naked, and two bare shins, but he saw no farther than the knees.

“Hullo!” he yelled, still at the gap. “Bonjour! Hullo!” And when the legs still did not move: “Je suis un ami de Charlie Marshall! Madame, Monsieur, je suis un ami anglais de Charlie Marshall! Je veux lui parler.”

He took out a five-dollar bill and shoved it through the gap but nothing happened, so he took it back and instead tore a piece of paper from his notebook. He headed his message “To Captain C. Marshall” and introduced himself by name as “a British journalist with a proposal to our mutual interest,” and gave the address of his hotel. Threading this note also through the gap, he looked for the brown legs again but they had vanished, so he walked till he found a cyclo, then rode in the cyclo till he found a cab: and no, thank you, no, thank you, he didn’t want a girl— except that, as usual, he did.

The hotel used to be the Royal. Now it was Le Phnom. A flag was flying from the mast-head, but its grandeur already looked desperate. Signing himself in, he saw living flesh basking round the courtyard pool and once more thought of Lizzie. For the girls, this was the hard school, and if she’d carried little packets for Ricardo, then ten to one she’d been through it. The prettiest belonged to the richest, and the richest were Phnom Penh’s Rotarian crooks: the gold and rubber smugglers, the police chiefs, the big-fisted Corsicans who made neat deals with the Khmer Rouge in mid-battle.

There was a letter waiting for him, the flap not sealed. The receptionist, having read it himself, politely watched Jerry do the same. A gilt-edged invitation card with an Embassy crest invited him to dinner. His host was someone he had never heard of. Mystified, he turned the card over. A scrawl on the back read “Knew your friend George of the Guardian,” and “guardian” was the word that introduced. Dinner and dead-letter boxes, he thought: what Sarratt scathingly called the great Foreign Office disconnection.

“Téléphone?” Jerry enquired.

“Il est foutu, Monsieur.”

“Electricité?”

“Aussi foutue, Monsieur, mais nous avons beaucoup de l’eau.”

“Keller!” said Jerry with a grin.

“Dans la cour, Monsieur.”

He walked into the gardens. Among the flesh sat a bunch of warries from the Fleet Street Heavies, drinking Scotch and exchanging hard stories. They looked like boy pilots in the Battle of Britain fighting a borrowed war, and they watched him in collective contempt for his upper-class origins. One wore a white kerchief, and lank hair bravely tossed back.

“Christ, it’s the Duke,” he said. “How’d you get here? Walk on the Mekong?”

But Jerry didn’t want them, he wanted Keller. Keller was permanent. He was a wireman and he was American and Jerry knew him from other wars. More particularly, no uitlander newsman came to town without putting his cause at Keller’s feet, and if Jerry was to have credibility, then Keller’s chop would supply it, and credibility was increasingly dear to him. He found Keller in the car-park. Broad shoulders, grey-headed, one sleeve rolled down. He was standing with his sleeved arm stuffed into his pocket, watching a driver hose out the inside of a Mercedes.

“Max. Super.”

“Ripping,” said Keller after glancing at him, then went back to his watching. Beside him stood a pair of slim Khmer boys looking like fashion photographers, in high-heeled boots and bell-bottoms and cameras dangling over their glittering, unbuttoned shirts. As Jerry looked on, the driver stopped hosing and began scrubbing the upholstery with an army pack of lint which turned brown the more he rubbed. Another American joined the group and Jerry guessed he was Keller’s newest stringer. Keller went through stringers fairly fast.

“What happened?” said Jerry as the driver began hosing again.

“Two-dollar hero caught very expensive bullet,” said the stringer. “That’s what happened.” He was a pale Southerner with an air of being amused, and Jerry was prepared to dislike him.

“Right, Keller?” Jerry asked.

“Photographer,” Keller said.

“One of Keller’s native picture-warriors,” said the Southerner, still grinning.

Keller’s wire service ran a stable of them. All the big services did: Cambodian boys, like the couple standing here. They paid them two U.S. to go to the front and twenty for every photo printed. Jerry had heard that Keller was losing them at the rate of one a week.

“Took it clean through the shoulder while he was running and stooping,” said the stringer. “Lost it through the lower back. Went through him like grass through a goose.” He seemed impressed.

“Where is he?” said Jerry for something to say, while the driver continued to mop and hose and scrub.

“Dying right up the road there. What happened, see, couple of weeks back those bastards in the New York bureau dug their toes in about medication. We used to ship them to Bangkok. Not now. Man, not now. Know something? Up the road they lie on the floor and have to bribe the nurses to take them water. Right, boys?”

The two Cambodians smiled politely.

“Want something, Westerby?” Keller asked.

Keller’s face was grey and pitted. Jerry knew him best from the sixties in the Congo, where Keller had burned his hand pulling a kid out of a lorry. Now the fingers were welded like a webbed claw, but otherwise he looked the same. Jerry remembered that incident best because he had been holding the other end of the kid.

“Comic wants me to take a look round,” Jerry said.

“Can you still do that?”

Jerry laughed and Keller laughed, and they drank Scotch in the bar till the car was ready, chatting about old times. At the main entrance, they picked up a girl who had been waiting all day, just for Keller, a tall Californian with too much camera and long, restless legs. As the phones weren’t working, Jerry insisted on stopping off at the British Embassy so that he could reply to his invitation.

Keller wasn’t very polite: “You some kinda spook or something these days, Westerby, slanting your stories, arse-licking for deep background and a pension on the side or something?” There were people who said that was roughly Keller’s position, but there are always people.

“Sure,” said Jerry amiably. “Been at it for years.”

The sandbags at the entrance were new and new anti-grenade wires glistened in the teeming sunlight. In the lobby, with the spine-breaking irrelevance which only diplomats can quite achieve, a big partitioned poster recommended “British High Performance Cars” to a city parched of fuel, and supplied cheerful photographs of several unavailable models.

“I will tell the Counsellor you have accepted,” said the receptionist solemnly.

The Mercedes still smelt a little warm from the blood, but the driver had turned up the air-conditioning.

“What do they do in there, Westerby?” Keller asked. “Knit or something?”

“Or something.” Jerry smiled, mainly to the Californian girl.

Jerry sat in front, Keller and the girl in the back.

“Okay. So hear this,” said Keller.

“Sure,” said Jerry.

Jerry had his notebook open and scribbled while Keller talked. The girl wore a short skirt and Jerry and the driver could see her thighs in the mirror. Keller had his good hand on her knee. Her name of all things was Lorraine and, like Jerry, she was formally taking a swing through the war zones for her group of Midwest dailies. Soon they were the only car. Soon even the cyclos stopped, leaving them peasants, and bicycles, and buffaloes, and the flowered bushes of the approaching countryside.

“Heavy fighting on all the main highways,” Keller intoned at near dictation speed. “Rocket attacks at night, plastics during the day, Lon Nol still thinks he’s God, and the U.S. Embassy has hot flushes supporting him then trying to throw him out.” He gave statistics, ordnance, casualties, the scale of U.S. aid. He named generals known to be selling American arms to the Khmer Rouge, and generals who ran phantom armies in order to claim the troops’ pay, and generals who did both.

“The usual snafu,” he went on. “Bad guys are too weak to take the towns, good guys are too crapped out to take the countryside, and nobody wants to fight except the Coms. Students ready to set fire to the place soon as they’re no longer exempt from the war, food riots any day now, corruption like there was no tomorrow, no one can live on his salary, fortunes being made, and the place bleeding to death. Palace is unreal and the Embassy is a nut-house, more spooks than straight guys and all pretending they’ve got a secret. Want more?”

“How long do you give it?”

“A week. Ten years.”

“How about the airlines?”

“Airlines is all we have. Mekong’s good as dead, so’s the roads. Airlines have the whole ballpark. We did a story on that. You see it? They ripped it to pieces. Jesus,” he said to the girl. “Why do I have to give a rerun for the poms?”

“More,” said Jerry, writing.

“Six months ago this town had five registered airlines. Last three months we got thirty-four new licences issued and there’s like another dozen in the pipeline. Going rate is three million riels to the Minister personally and two million spread around his people. Less if you pay gold, less still if you pay abroad. We’re working route thirteen,” he said to the girl. “Thought you’d like to take a look.”

“Great,” said the girl and pressed her knees together, entrapping Keller’s good hand.

They passed a statue with its arm shot off and after that the road followed the river bend.

“That’s if Westerby here can handle it,” Keller added as an afterthought.

“Oh, I think I’m in pretty good shape,” said Jerry, and the girl laughed, changing sides a moment.

“K.R. got themselves a new position out on the far bank there, hon,” Keller explained, talking to the girl in preference. Across the brown, fast water, Jerry saw a couple of T-28s, poking around looking for something to bomb. There was a fire, quite a big one, and the smoke column rose straight into the sky like a virtuous offering.

“Where do the overseas Chinese come in?” Jerry asked. “In Hong Kong no one’s heard of this place.”

“Chinese control eighty percent of our commerce and that includes airlines. Old or new. Cambodian’s lazy, see, hon? Your Cambodian’s content to take his profit out of American aid. Your Chinese aren’t like that. Oh, no, siree. Chinese like to work, Chinese like to turn their cash over. They fixed our money market, our transport monopoly, our rate of inflation, our siege economy. War’s getting to be a wholly owned Hong Kong subsidiary. Hey, Westerby, you still got that wife you told me about, the cute one with the eyes?”

“Took the other road,” Jerry said.

“Too bad. She sounded real great. He had this great wife,” said Keller to the girl.

“How about you?” asked Jerry.

Keller shook his head and smiled at the girl. “Care if I smoke, hon?” he asked confidingly.

There was a gap in Keller’s welded claw which could have been drilled specially to hold a cigarette, and the rim of it was brown with nicotine. Keller put his good hand back on her thigh. The road turned to track, and deep ruts appeared where the convoys had passed. They entered a short tunnel of trees, and as they did so a thunder of shell-fire opened to their right and the trees arched like trees in a typhoon.

“Wow!” the girl yelled. “Can we slow down a little?” And she began hauling at the straps of her camera.

“Be my guest. Medium artillery,” said Keller. “Ours,” he added as a joke. The girl lowered the window and shot off some film. The barrage continued, the trees danced, but the peasants in the paddy didn’t even lift their heads. When it died, the bells of the water-buffaloes went on ringing like an echo. They drove on. On the near river-bank, two kids had an old bike and were swapping rides. In the water, a shoal of them were diving in and out of an inner tube, brown bodies glistening. The girl photographed them too.

“You still speak French, Westerby? Me and Westerby did a thing together in the Congo awhile back,” he explained to the girl.

“I heard,” she said knowingly.

“Poms get education,” Keller explained. Jerry hadn’t remembered him so talkative. “They get raised. That right, Westerby? Specially lords, right? Westerby’s some kind of lord.”

“That’s us, sport. Scholars to a man. Not like you hayseeds.”

“Well, you speak to the driver, right? We got instructions for him, you do the saying. He hasn’t had time to learn English yet. Go left.”

“A gauche,” said Jerry.

The driver was a boy, but he already had the guide’s boredom.

In the mirror Jerry noticed that Keller’s white claw was shaking as he drew on the cigarette. He wondered if it always did. They passed through a couple of villages. It was very quiet. He thought of Lizzie and the claw marks on her chin. He longed to do something plain with her, like taking a walk over English fields. Craw said she was a suburban drag-up. It touched him that she had a fantasy about horses.

“Westerby.”

“Yes, sport?”

“That thing you have with your fingers. Drumming them. Mind not doing that? Bugs me. It’s repressive, somehow.” He turned to the girl. “They been pounding this place for years, hon,” he said expansively. “Years.” He blew out a gust of cigarette smoke.

“About the airline thing,” Jerry suggested, pencil ready to write again. “What’s the arithmetic?”

“Most of the companies take dry-wing leases out of Vientiane. That includes maintenance, pilot, depreciation, but not fuel. Maybe you knew that. Best is own your own plane. That way you have the two things. You milk the siege and you get your ass out when the end comes. Watch for the kids, hon,” he told the girl as he drew again on his cigarette. “While there’s kids around there won’t be trouble. When the kids disappear it’s bad news. Means they’ve hidden them. Always watch for kids.”

The girl Lorraine was fiddling with her camera again. They had reached a rudimentary check-point. A couple of sentries peered in as they passed, but the driver didn’t even slow down. They approached a fork and the driver stopped.

“The river,” Keller ordered. “Tell him to stay on the riverbank.”

Jerry told him. The boy seemed surprised; seemed even about to object, then changed his mind.

“Kids in the villages,” Keller was saying, “kids at the front. No difference. Either way, kids are a weather-vane. Khmer soldiers take their families with them to war as a matter of course. If the father dies, there’ll be nothing for the family anyway, so they might as well come along with the military where there’s food. Another thing, hon, another thing is, the widows must be right on hand to claim evidence of the father’s death, right? That’s a human-interest thing for you—right, Westerby? If they don’t claim, the commanding officer will deny it and steal the man’s pay for himself. Be my guest,” he said as she wrote. “But don’t think anyone will print it. This war’s over. Right, Westerby?”

“Finito,” Jerry agreed.

She would be funny, he decided. If Lizzie were here, she would definitely see a funny side and laugh at it. Somewhere among all her imitations, he reckoned, there was a lost original, and he definitely intended to find it. The driver drew up beside an old woman and asked her something in Khmer, but she put her face in her hands and turned her head away.

“Why’d she do that, for God’s sakes?” the girl cried angrily. “We didn’t want anything bad. Jesus!”

“Shy,” said Keller in a flattening voice.

Behind them the artillery barrage fired another salvo and it was like a door slamming, barring the way back. They passed a wat and entered a market square made of wooden houses. Saffron-clad monks stared at them, but the girls tending the stalls ignored them and the babies went on playing with the bantams.

“So what was the check-point for?” the girl asked as she photographed. “Are we somewhere dangerous now?”

“Getting there, hon, getting there. Now shut up.”

Ahead of them Jerry could hear the sound of automatic fire, M-16s and AK-47s mixed. A jeep raced at them out of the trees and at the last second veered, banging and tripping over the ruts. At the same moment the sunshine went out. Till now they had accepted it as their right, a liquid, vivid light washed clean by the rainstorms. This was March and the dry season; this was Cambodia, where war, like cricket, was played in decent weather. But now black clouds collected, the trees closed round them like winter, and the wooden houses pulled into the dark.

“What do the Khmer Rouge dress like?” the girl asked in a quieter voice. “Do they have uniforms?”

“Feathers and a G-string,” Keller roared. “Some are even bottomless.” As he laughed, Jerry heard the taut strain in his voice, and glimpsed the trembling claw as he drew on his cigarette. “Hell, hon, they dress like farmers, for Christ’s sake. They just have these black pyjamas.”

“Is it always so empty?”

“Varies,” said Keller.

“And Ho Chi Minh sandals,” Jerry put in distractedly.

A pair of green water birds lifted across the track. The sound of firing was no louder.

“Didn’t you have a daughter or something? What happened there?” Keller said.

“She’s fine. Great.”

“Called what?”

“Catherine,” said Jerry.

“Sounds like we’re going away from it,” Lorraine said, disappointed. They passed an old corpse with no arms. The flies had settled on the face wounds in a black lava.

“Do they always do that?” the girl asked, curious.

“Do what, hon?”

“Take off the boots?”

“Sometimes they take the boots off, sometimes they’re the wrong damn size,” said Keller in another queer snap of anger. “Some cows got horns, some cows don’t, and some cows is horses. Now shut up, will you? Where you from?”

“Santa Barbara,” said the girl.

Abruptly the trees ended. They turned a bend and were in the open again, with the brown river right beside them. Unbidden, the driver stopped, then gently backed into the trees.

“Where’s he going?” the girl asked. “Who told him to do that?” “I think he’s worried about his tyres, sport,” said Jerry, making a joke of it.

“At thirty bucks a day?” said Keller, also as a joke.

They had found a little battle. Ahead of them, dominating the river bend, stood a smashed village on high waste ground without a living tree near it. The ruined walls were white and the torn edges yellow. With so little vegetation the place looked like the remnants of a Foreign Legion fort, and perhaps it was just that. Inside the walls brown lorries clustered, like lorries at a building site. They heard a few shots, a light rattle. It could have been huntsmen shooting at the evening flight. Tracer flashed, a trio of mortar bombs struck, the ground shook, the car vibrated, and the driver quietly unwound his window while Jerry did the same. But the girl had opened her door and was getting out, one classic leg after the other. Rummaging in a black air-bag, she produced a telefoto lens, screwed it into her camera, and studied the enlarged image.

“That’s all there is?” she asked doubtfully. “Shouldn’t we see the enemy as well? I don’t see anything but our guys and a lot of dirty smoke.”

“Oh, they’re out on the other side there, hon,” Keller said.

“Can’t we see?” There was a small silence while the two men conferred without speaking.

“Look,” said Keller. “This was just a tour, okay, hon? The detail of the thing gets very varied. Okay?”

“I just think it would be great to see the enemy. I want confrontation, Max. I really do. I like it.”

They started walking.

Sometimes you do it to save face, thought Jerry, other times you just do it because you haven’t done your job unless you’ve scared yourself to death. Other times again, you go in order to remind yourself that survival is a fluke. But mostly you go because the others go—for machismo—and because in order to belong you must share.

In the old days perhaps, Jerry had gone for more select reasons. In order to know himself: the Hemingway game. In order to raise his threshold of fear. Because in battle, as in love, desire escalates. When you have been machine-gunned, single rounds seem trivial. When you’ve been shelled to pieces, the machinegunning’s child’s play, if only because the impact of plain shot leaves your brain in place, where the clump of a shell blows it through your ears. And there is a peace: he remembered that too. At bad times in his life—money, children, women all adrift— there had been a sense of peace that came from realising that staying alive was his only responsibility. But this time, he thought, this time it’s the most damn-fool reason of all, and that’s because I’m looking for a drugged-out pilot who knows a man who used to have Lizzie Worthington for his mistress.

They were walking slowly because the girl in her short skirt had difficulty picking her way over the slippery ruts.

“Great chick,” Keller murmured.

“Made for it,” Jerry agreed dutifully.

With embarrassment Jerry remembered how in the Congo they used to be confidants, confessing their loves and weaknesses. To steady herself on the rutted ground, the girl was swinging her arms about.

Don’t point, thought Jerry; for Christ’s sake, don’t point. That’s how photographers get theirs.

“Keep walking, hon,” Keller said shrilly. “Don’t think of anything. Walk. Want to go back, Westerby?”

They stepped round a little boy playing privately with stones in the dust. Jerry wondered whether he was gun-deaf. He glanced back. The Mercedes was still parked in the trees. Ahead he could pick out men in low firing positions among the rubble, more men than he had realised.

The noise rose suddenly. On the far bank a couple of bombs exploded in the middle of the fire: the T-28s were trying to spread the flames. A ricochet tore into the bank below them, flinging up wet mud and dust. A peasant rode past them on his bicycle, serenely. He rode into the village, through it, and out again, slowly past the ruins and into the trees beyond. No one shot at him, no one challenged him. He could be theirs or ours, thought Jerry. He came into town last night, tossed a plastic into a cinema, and now he’s returning to his kind.

“Jesus,” cried the girl, with a laugh, “why didn’t we think of bicycles?”

With a clatter of bricks falling, a volley of machine-gun bullets slapped all round them. Below them in the river-bank, by the grace of God, ran a line of empty leopard spots, shallow firing positions dug into the mud. Jerry had picked them out already. Grabbing the girl, he threw her down. Keller was already flat. Lying beside her, Jerry discerned a deep lack of interest. Better a bullet or two here than getting what Frostie got.

The bullets threw up screens of mud and whined off the road. They lay low, waiting for the firing to tire. The girl was looking excitedly across the river, smiling. She was blue-eyed and flaxen and Aryan. A mortar bomb landed behind them on the verge, and for the second time Jerry shoved her flat. The blast swept over them, and when it was past feathers of earth drifted down like a propitiation. But she came up smiling. When the Pentagon thinks of civilization, thought Jerry, it thinks of you.

In the fort the battle had suddenly thickened. The lorries had disappeared, a dense pall had gathered, the flash and din of mortar was incessant, light machine-gun fire challenged and answered itself with increasing swiftness. Keller’s pocked face appeared white as death over the edge of his leopard spot.

“K.R.’s got them by the balls!” he yelled. “Across the river, ahead, and now from the other flank. We should have taken the other lane!”

Christ, Jerry thought, as the rest of the memories came back to him, Keller and I once fought over a girl too. He tried to remember who she was and who had won.

They waited, the firing died. They walked back to the car and gained the fork in time to meet the retreating convoy. Dead and wounded were littered along the roadside, and women crouched among them, fanning the stunned faces with palm leaves.

They got out of the car again. Refugees trundled buffaloes and handcarts and one another, while they screamed at their pigs and children. One old woman screamed at the girl’s camera, thinking the lens was a gun barrel. There were sounds Jerry couldn’t place, like the ringing of bicycle bells and wailing, and sounds he could, like the drenched sobs of the dying and the clump of approaching mortar fire. Keller was running beside a lorry, trying to find an English-speaking officer; Jerry loped beside him yelling the same questions in French.

“Ah, to hell,” said Keller, suddenly bored. “Let’s go home.” His English lordling’s voice: “The people and the noise,” he explained. They returned to the Mercedes.

For a while they were stuck in the column, with the lorries cutting them to the side and the refugees politely tapping at the window asking for a ride. Once Jerry thought he saw Deathwish the Hun riding pillion on an army motor-bike. At the next fork Keller ordered the driver to turn left.

“More private,” he said, and put his good hand back on the girl’s knee. But Jerry was thinking of Frost in the mortuary, and the whiteness of his screaming jaw.

“My old mother always told me,” Keller declared in a folksy drawl, “Son, don’t never go back through the jungle the same way as you came. Hon?”

“Yes?”

“Hon, you just lost your cherry. My humble congratulations.” The hand slipped a little higher.

From all round them came the sound of pouring water like so many burst pipes as a sudden torrent of rain fell. They passed a settlement full of chickens running in a flurry. A barber’s chair stood empty in the rain. Jerry turned to Keller.

“This siege economy thing,” he resumed as they settled to one another again. “Market forces and so forth. You reckon that story will go?”

“Could do,” said Keller airily. “It’s been done a few times. But it travels.”

“Who are the main operators?”

Keller named a few.

“Indocharter?”

“Indocharter’s one,” said Keller.

Jerry took a long shot: “There’s a clown called Charlie Marshall flies for them, half Chinese. Somebody said he’d talk. Met him?”

“Nope.”

He reckoned that was far enough: “What do most of them use for machines?”

“Whatever they can get. DC-4s, you name it. One’s not enough. You need two at least—fly one, cannibalise the second for parts. Cheaper to ground a plane and strip it than bribe the customs to release the spares.”

“What’s the profit?”

“Unprintable.”

“Much opium around?”

“There’s a whole damn refinery out on the Bassac, for Christ’s sakes. Looks like something out of Prohibition times. I can arrange a tour if that’s what you’re after.”

The girl Lorraine was at the window, staring at the rain. “I don’t see any kids, Max,” she announced. “You said to look out for no kids, that’s all. Well, I’ve been watching and they’ve disappeared.” The driver stopped the car. “It’s raining, and I read somewhere that when it rains Asian kids like to come out and play. So, you know, where’s the kids?” she said, but Jerry wasn’t listening to what she’d read. Ducking and peering through the windscreen all at once, he saw what the driver saw, and it made his throat dry.

“You’re the boss, sport,” he said to Keller quietly. “Your car, your war, and your girl.”

In the mirror, to his pain, Jerry watched Keller’s pumice-stone face torn between experience and incapacity.

“Drive at them slowly,” Jerry said, when he could wait no longer. “Lentement.”

“That’s right,” Keller said. “Do that.”

Fifty yards ahead of them, shrouded by the teeming rain, a grey lorry had pulled broadside across the track, blocking it. In the mirror, a second had pulled out behind them, blocking their retreat.

“Better show our hands,” said Keller in a hoarse rush. With his good one he wound down his window. The girl and Jerry did the same. Jerry wiped the windscreen clear of mist and put his hands on the console. The driver held the wheel at the top.

“Don’t smile at them, don’t speak to them,” Jerry ordered.

“Jesus Christ,” said Keller. “Holy God.”

All over Asia, thought Jerry, pressmen had their favourite stories of what the Khmer Rouge did to you, and most of them were true. Even Frost at this moment would have been grateful for his relatively peaceful end. He knew newsmen who carried poison, or a concealed gun, to save themselves from just this moment. If you’re caught, the first night is the only night to get out, he remembered: before they take your shoes, and your health, and God knows what other parts of you. The first night is your only chance, said the folklore. He wondered whether he should repeat it for the girl, but he didn’t want to hurt Keller’s feelings.

The Mercedes was ploughing forward in first gear, engine whining. The rain was flying all over the car, thundering on the roof, smacking the bonnet, and darting through the open windows. If we bog down, we’re finished, Jerry thought. Still the lorry ahead had not moved and it was no more than fifteen yards away, a glistening monster in the downpour. In the dark of the lorry’s cab they saw thin faces watching them. At the last minute it lurched backward into the foliage, leaving just enough room to pass. The Mercedes tilted. Jerry had to hold the door pillar to stop himself rolling onto the driver. The two offside wheels skidded and whined, the bonnet swung and all but lurched onto the fender of the lorry.

“No licence plates,” Keller breathed. “Holy Christ.”

“Don’t hurry,” Jerry warned the driver. “Toujours lentement. Don’t put on your lights.” He was watching in the mirror.

“And those were the black pyjamas?” the girl said excitedly. “And you wouldn’t even let me take a picture?”

No one spoke.

“What did they want? Who are they trying to ambush?” she insisted.

“Somebody else,” said Jerry. “Not us.”

“Some bum following us,” said Keller. “Who cares?”

“Shouldn’t we warn someone?”

“There isn’t the apparatus,” said Keller.

They heard shooting behind them but they kept going.

“Fucking rain,” Keller breathed, half to himself. “Why the hell do we get rain suddenly?”

It had all but stopped.

“But Christ, Max,” the girl protested, “if they’ve got us pinned out on the floor like this, why don’t they just finish us off?”

Before Keller could reply, the driver did it for him in French, softly and politely, though only Jerry understood.

“When they want to come, they will come,” he said, smiling at her in the mirror. “In the bad weather. While the Americans are adding another five metres of concrete to the Embassy roof, and the soldiers are crouching in capes under their trees, and the journalists are drinking whisky, and the generals are at the opium houses, the Khmer Rouge will come out of the jungle and cut our throats.”

“What did he say?” Keller demanded. “Translate that, Westerby.”

“Yeah, what was all that?” said the girl. “It sounded really great. Like a proposition or something.”

“Didn’t quite get it actually, sport. Sort of outgunned me.”

They all broke out laughing, too loud, the driver as well.

And all through it, Jerry realised, he had thought of nobody but Lizzie. Not to the exclusion of danger—quite the contrary. Like the new, glorious sunshine which suddenly engulfed them, she was the prize of his survival.

At Le Phnom, the same sun was beating gaily on the poolside. There had been no rain in the town, but a bad rocket near the girls’ school had killed eight or nine children. The Southern stringer had that moment returned from counting them.

“So how did Maxie make out at the bang-bangs?” he asked Jerry as they met in the hall. “Seems to me like his nerve is creaking at the joints a little these days.”

“Take your grinning little face out of my sight,” Jerry advised. “Otherwise actually I’ll smack it.” Still grinning, the Southerner departed.

“We could meet tomorrow,” the girl said to Jerry. “Tomorrow’s free all day.”

Behind her, Keller was making his way slowly up the stairs, a hunched figure in a one-sleeved shirt, pulling himself by the bannister rail.

“We could even meet tonight, if you wanted,” Lorraine said.

For a while, Jerry sat alone in his room writing postcards for Cat. Then he set course for Max’s bureau. He had a few more questions about Charlie Marshall; and besides, he had a notion old Max would appreciate his company.

His duty done, he took a cyclo and rode up to Charlie Marshall’s house again, and though he pummelled on the door and yelled, all he could see was the same bare brown legs motionless at the bottom of the stairs, this time by candle-light. But the page torn from his notebook had disappeared.

He returned to the town and, still with an hour to kill, settled at a pavement café in one of a hundred empty chairs and drank a long Pernod, remembering how once the girls of the town had ticked past him here on their little wicker carriages, whispering clichés of love in singsong French. Tonight the darkness trembled to nothing more lovely than the thud of occasional gun-fire, while the town huddled, waiting for the blow.

Yet it was not the shelling but the silence that held the greatest fear. Like the jungle itself, silence, not gun-fire, was the natural element of the approaching enemy.

When a diplomat wants to talk, the first thing he thinks of is food, and in diplomatic circles one dined early because of the curfew. Not that diplomats were subject to such rigours, but it is a charming arrogance of diplomats the world over to suppose they set an example—to whom, or of what, the devil himself will never know. The Counsellor’s house was in a flat, leafy enclave bordering Lon Nol’s palace. In the driveway as Jerry arrived, an official limousine was emptying its occupants, watched over by a jeep stiff with militia. It’s either royalty or religion, Jerry thought as he got out; but it was no more than a senior American diplomat and his wife arriving for a meal.

“Ah. You must be Mr. Westerby,” said his hostess.

She was tall and Harrods and amused by the idea of a journalist, as she was amused by anyone who was not a diplomat, and of counsellor rank at that. “John has been dying to meet you,” she declared brightly, and Jerry supposed she was putting him at his ease. He followed the trail upstairs. His host stood at the top, a wiry man with a moustache and a stoop and a boyishness which Jerry more usually associated with the clergy.

“Oh, well done! Smashing. You’re the cricketer. Well done. Mutual friends, right? We’re not allowed to use the balcony tonight, I’m afraid,” he said, with a naughty glance toward the American corner. “Good men are too scarce, apparently. Got to stay under cover. Seen where you are?” He stabbed a commanding finger at a leather-framed placement chart showing the seating arrangement. “Come and meet some people. Just a minute.” He drew him slightly aside, but only slightly. “It all goes through me, right? I’ve made that absolutely clear. Don’t let them get you into a corner, right? Quite a little squall running, if you follow me. Local thing. Not your problem.”

The senior American appeared at first sight small, being dark and tidy, but when he stood to shake Jerry’s hand, he was nearly Jerry’s height. He wore a tartan jacket of raw silk and he held a walkie-talkie radio in a black plastic case. His brown eyes were intelligent but over-respectful, and as they shook hands, a voice inside Jerry said “Cousin.”

“Glad to know you, Mr. Westerby. I understand you’re from Hong Kong. Your Governor there is a very good friend of mine. Beckie, this is Mr. Westerby, a friend of the Governor of Hong Kong and a good friend of John, our host.”

He indicated a large woman bridled in dull hand-beaten silver from the market. Her bright clothes flowed in an Asian medley.

“Oh, Mr. Westerby,” she said. “From Hong Kong. Hello.”

The remaining guests were a mixed bag of local traders. Their womenfolk were Eurasian, French, and Corsican. A houseboy hit a silver gong. The dining-room ceiling was concrete, but as they trooped in Jerry saw several eyes lift to make sure. A silver card holder told him he was “The Honourable G. Westerby,” a silver menu holder promised him le roast beef à l’anglaise, silver candle-sticks held long candles of a devotional kind, Cambodian boys flitted and backed at the half-crouch with trays of food cooked this morning while the electricity was on. A much travelled French beauty sat to Jerry’s right with a lace handkerchief between her breasts. She held another in her hand, and each time she ate or drank she dusted her little mouth. Her name card called her Countess Sylvia.

“Je suis très, très diplomée,” she whispered to Jerry as she pecked and dabbed. “J’ai fait la science politique, mécanique, et l’électricité générale. In January I have a bad heart. Now I recover.”

“Ah, well now, me, I’m not qualified at anything,” Jerry insisted, making far too much of a joke of it. “Jack of all trades, master of none, that’s us.” To put this into French took him quite some while, and he was still labouring at it when from somewhere fairly close a burst of machine-gun fire sounded, far too long for the health of the gun. There were no answering shots. The conversation hung.

“Some bloody idiot shooting at the geckos, I should think,” said the Counsellor, and his wife laughed at him fondly down the table, as if the war were a little side-show they had laid on between them for their guests. The silence returned, more pregnant than before. The little Countess put her fork on her plate and it clanged like a tram in the night.

“Dieu,” she said.

At once, everyone started talking. The American wife asked Jerry where he was raised, and when they had been through that she asked him where his home was, so Jerry gave Thurloe Square, old Pet’s place, because he didn’t feel like talking about Tuscany.

“We own land in Vermont,” she said firmly. “But we haven’t built on it yet.”

Two rockets fell at the same time. Jerry reckoned they were east about half a mile. Glancing round to see whether the windows were closed, Jerry caught the brown gaze of the American husband fixed on him with mysterious urgency.

“You have plans for tomorrow, Mr. Westerby?” he asked.

“Not particularly.”

“If there’s anything we can do, let me know.”

“Thanks,” said Jerry, but he had the feeling that wasn’t the point of the question.

A Swiss trader with a wise face had a funny story. He used Jerry’s presence to repeat it.

“Some time back, the whole town was alight with shooting, Mr. Westerby,” he said. “We were all going to die. Oh, definitely. Tonight we die! Everything—shells, tracer—poured into the sky, one million dollars’ worth of ammunition, we heard afterwards. Hours on end. Some of my friends went round shaking hands with one another.” An army of black ants emerged from under the table and began marching in single column across the perfectly laundered damask cloth, making a careful detour round the silver candle-sticks and the silver flower bowl brimming with hibiscus. “The Americans radioed around, hopped up and down, we all considered very carefully our position on the evacuation list, but a funny thing, you know: the telephones were working and we even had electricity. What did the target turn out to be?” The others were already laughing hysterically. “Frogs! Some very greedy frogs!”

“Toads,” somebody corrected him, but it didn’t stop the laughter.

The American diplomat, a model of courteous self-criticism, supplied the amusing epilogue.

“The Cambodians have an old superstition, Mr. Westerby,” he said. “When there’s an eclipse of the moon, you must make a lot of noise. You must shoot off fireworks, you must bang tin cans, or, best still, fire off a million dollars’ worth of ordnance. Because if you don’t—why, the frogs will gobble up the moon. We should have known, but we didn’t know, and in consequence we were made to look very, very silly indeed,” he said proudly.

“Yes, I’m afraid you boobed there, old boy,” the Counsellor said with satisfaction.

But though the American’s smile remained frank and open his eyes continued to impart something far more pressing—such as a message between professionals.

Someone talked about servants and their amazing fatalism. An isolated detonation, loud and seemingly quite near, ended the performance. As the Countess Sylvia reached for Jerry’s hand, their hostess smiled interrogatively at her husband down the table.

“John, darling,” she asked in her most hospitable voice, “was that incoming or outgoing?”

“Outgoing,” he replied, with a laugh. “Oh, outgoing definitely. Ask our journalist friend if you don’t believe me. He’s been through a few wars, haven’t you, Westerby?”

At which the silence, yet again, joined them like a forbidden topic. The American lady clung to that piece of land in Vermont: perhaps, after all, they should build on it. Perhaps, after all, it was time.

“Maybe we should just write to that architect,” she said. “Maybe we should,” her husband agreed, and at that moment they were flung into a pitched battle. From very close a prolonged burst of pom-poms lit the washing in the courtyard and a cluster of machine-guns—as many as twenty—crackled in a sustained and desperate fire. By the flashes they saw the servants scurry into the house, and over the firing they heard orders given and replied to, scream for scream, and the crazy ringing of handgongs.

Inside the room, nobody moved except the American diplomat, who lifted his walkie-talkie to his lips, drew out the aerial, and murmured something before putting it to his ear. Jerry glanced downward and saw the Countess’s hand battened trustingly to his own. Her cheek brushed his shoulder. The firing faltered. He heard the clump of a small bomb close. No vibration, but the flames of the candles tilted in salute and on the mantelshelf a couple of heavy invitation cards flopped over with a slap and lay still, the only recognisable casualties. Then as a last and separate sound, they heard the grizzle of a departing single-engined plane like the distant grousing of a child.

It was capped by the Counsellor’s easy laughter as he addressed his wife. “Ah, well now, that wasn’t the eclipse, I’m afraid, was it, Hills? That was the advantage of having Lon Nol as our neighbour. One of his pilots gets fed up with not being paid now and then, so he takes up a plane and has a pot-shot at the palace. Darling, are you going to take the gels off to powder their noses and do whatever you all do?”

It’s anger, Jerry decided, catching the senior American’s eye again. He’s like a man with a mission to the poor who has to waste his time with the rich.

Downstairs Jerry, the Counsellor, and the American stood alone in the ground-floor study. The Counsellor had acquired a wolfish shyness.

“Yes, well,” he said. “Now I’ve put you both on the map, perhaps I should leave you to it. Whisky in the decanter, right, Westerby?”

“Right, John,” said the American, but the Counsellor didn’t seem to hear.

“Just remember, Westerby: the mandate’s ours, right? We’re keeping the bed warm. Right?” With a knowing wag of the finger, he disappeared.

The study was candle-lit, a small masculine room with no mirrors or pictures, just a ribbed teak ceiling and a green metal desk. The geckos and the bullfrogs would have baffled the most sophisticated microphone.

“Hey, let me get that,” said the American, arresting Jerry’s progress to the sideboard, and made a show of getting the mix just right for him: water or soda, don’t let me drown it.

“Seems kind of a long way round to bring two friends together,” the American said, in a taut, chatty tone, from the sideboard as he poured.

“Does rather.”

“John’s a great guy, but he’s kind of a stickler for protocol.

Your people have no resources here right now but they have certain rights, so John likes to make sure that the ball doesn’t slip out of his court for good. I can understand his point of view. Just that things take a little longer sometimes.”

He handed Jerry a long brown envelope from inside the tartan jacket, and with the same pregnant intensity as before watched while he broke the seal. The paper had a smeared and photographic quality.

Somewhere a child moaned, and was silenced. The garage, Jerry thought: the servants have filled the garage with refugees and the Counsellor is not to know.

ENFORCEMENT SAIGON reports Charlie MARSHALL rpt MARSHALL scheduled hit Battambang ETA 1930 tomorrow via Pailin . . . converted DC-4 Carvair, Indocharter markings manifest quotes miscellaneous cargo . . . scheduled continue Phnom Penh.

Then he read the time and date of transmission and anger hit him like a wind storm. He remembered yesterday’s foot-slogging in Bangkok and today’s hairbrained taxi ride with Keller and the girl, and with a “Jesus Christ” he slammed the message back on the table between them: “How long have you been sitting on this? That’s not tomorrow. That’s tonight!”

“Unfortunately our host could not arrange the wedding any earlier. He has an extremely crowded social programme. Good luck.”

Just as angry as Jerry, he quietly took back the signal, slipped it into the pocket of his jacket, and disappeared upstairs to his wife, who was busy admiring her hostess’s indifferent collection of pilfered Buddhas.

He stood alone. A rocket fell and this time it was close. The candles went out and the night sky seemed finally to be splitting with the strain of this illusory, Gilbertian war. Mindlessly the machine-guns joined the clatter. The little bare room with its tiled floor rattled and sang like a sound machine.

Only as suddenly to stop again, leaving the town to the silence.

“Something wrong, old boy?” the Counsellor enquired genially from the doorway. “Yank rub you up the wrong way, did he? They seem to want to run the world single-handed these days.”

“I’ll need six-hour options,” Jerry said. The Counsellor didn’t quite follow. Having explained to him how they worked, Jerry stepped quickly into the night.

“Got transport, have you, old boy? That’s the way. They’ll shoot you, otherwise. Mind how you go.”

He strode quickly, driven by his irritation and disgust. It was long after curfew. There were no streetlamps, no stars. The moon had vanished, and the squeak of his crêpe soles ran with him like an unwanted companion. The only light came from the perimeter of the palace across the road, but none spilled onto Jerry’s side of the street. High walls blocked off the inner building, high wires crowned the walls, and barrels of the light anti-aircraft guns gleamed bronze against the black and soundless sky. Young soldiers dozed in groups and as Jerry strode past them a fresh roll of gong-beats sounded: the master of the guard was keeping the sentries awake. There was no traffic, but between the sentry posts the refugees had made up their own night villages in a long column down the pavement. Some had draped themselves with strips of brown tarpaulin, some had plank bunks, and some were cooking by tiny flames, though God alone knew what they had found to eat. Some sat in neat social groups, facing in upon each other. On an ox-cart a girl lay with a boy, children Cat’s age when he last had seen her in the flesh. But from the hundreds of them not one sound came, and after he had gone a distance he actually turned and peered to make sure they were there. If they were, the darkness and the silence hid them. He thought of the dinner party. It had taken place in another land, another universe entirely. He was irrelevant here, yet somehow he had contributed to the disaster.

For no reason that he knew of, the sweat began running off him and the night air made no cooling impact. The dark was as hot as the day. Ahead of him in the town a stray rocket struck carelessly. They creep into the paddies until they’re within range, he thought. They lie up, hugging their bits of drain-pipe and their little bomb, then fire and run like hell for the jungle. The palace was behind him. A battery fired a salvo and for a few seconds he was able to see his way by the flashes. The road was broad, a boulevard, and as best he could he kept to the crown. Occasionally he made out the gaps of the side-streets passing him in geometric regularity. If he stooped, he could even see the tree-tops retreating into the paler sky. Once a cyclo pattered by, toppling nervously out of the turning, hitting the curb, then steadying. He thought of shouting to it but he preferred to keep on striding.

A male voice greeted him doubtfully out of the darkness—a whisper, nothing indiscreet: “Bon soir? Monsieur? Bon soir?”

The sentries stood every hundred metres in ones or twos, holding their carbines in both hands. Their murmurs came to him like invitations, but Jerry was always careful and kept his hands wide of his pockets where they could watch them. Some, seeing the enormous sweating round-eye, laughed and waved him on. Others stopped him at pistol point and gazed up at him earnestly by the light of bicycle lamps while they asked him questions in order to practise their French. Some requested cigarettes and these he gave. He tugged off his drenched jacket and opened his shirt to the waist, but still the air wouldn’t cool him and he wondered again whether he had a fever and whether, like last night in Bangkok, he would wake up in his bedroom crouching in the darkness waiting to brain someone with a table-lamp.

The moon appeared, lapped by the foam of the rain clouds. By its light his hotel resembled a locked fortress. He reached the garden wall and followed it leftwards along the trees until it turned again. He threw his jacket over the wall and with difficulty climbed after it. He crossed the lawn to the steps, pushed open the door to the lobby, and stepped back with a surge of disgust. The lobby was in pitch blackness except for a single moonbeam, which shone like a spotlight on a huge luminous chrysalis spun around the naked brown larva of a human body.

It was the night watchman in his hammock, asleep under a mosquito net.

“Vous désirez, Monsieur?” a voice asked softly.

The boy handed him a key and a note, and silently accepted his tip. Jerry struck his lighter and read the note: “Darling, I’m in room 28 and lonely. Come and see me. L.”

What the hell? he thought; maybe it’ll put the bits back together again. He climbed the stairs to the second floor, forgetting her terrible banality, thinking only of her long legs and her tilting rump as she negotiated the ruts along the river-bank; her cornflower eyes and her regular all-American gravity as she lay in the leopard spot; thinking only of his own yearning for human touch. Who gives a damn about Keller? he thought. To hold someone is to exist. Perhaps she’s frightened too. He knocked on the door, waited, gave it a shove.

“Lorraine? It’s me. Westerby.”

Nothing happened. He lurched toward the bed, conscious of the absence of any female smell, even face powder or deodorant. On his way there he saw by the same moonlight the dreadfully familiar sight of blue jeans, heavy bean-boots, and a tattered Olivetti portable not unlike his own.

“Come one step nearer and it’s statutory rape,” said Luke, uncapping the whisky bottle on his bedside table.

16

FRIENDS OF CHARLIE MARSHALL

He crept out before light, having slept on Luke’s floor. He took his typewriter and shoulder-bag, though he expected to use neither. He left a note for Keller asking him to wire Stubbs that he was following the siege story out to the provinces. His back ached from the floor and his head from the bottle.

Luke had come for the bang-bangs, he said; bureau was giving him a rest from Big Moo. Also Jake Chiu, his irate landlord, had finally thrown him out of his apartment.

“I’m destitute, Westerby!” he had cried, and began wailing round the room, “Destitute,” till Jerry, to buy himself some sleep and stop the neighbour’s banging, slipped his spare flat-key off its ring and flung it at him.

“Until I get back,” he warned. “Then out. Understood?”

Jerry asked about the Frost thing. Luke had forgotten all about it and had to be reminded. Ah, him, he said. Him. Yeah, well there were stories he’d been cheeky to the triads and maybe in a hundred years they would all come true, but meanwhile who gave a damn?

But sleep hadn’t come so easy even then. They discussed today’s arrangements. Luke had proposed to do whatever Jerry was doing. Dying alone was a bore, he had insisted. Better they got drunk and found some whores. Jerry had replied that Luke would have to wait awhile before the two of them went into the sunset together, because he was going fishing for the day and he was going alone.

“Fishing for what, for hell’s sakes? If there’s a story, share it. Where can you go that is not more beautiful for Brother Lukie’s presence?”

Pretty well anywhere, Jerry had said unkindly, and managed to leave without waking him.

He made first for the market and sipped a soupe chinoise, studying the stalls and shop fronts. He selected a young Indian who was offering nothing but plastic buckets, water-bottles, and brooms, yet looking very prosperous on the profits.

“What else do you sell, sport?”

“Sir, I sell all things to all gentlemen.”

They foxed around. No, said Jerry, it was nothing to smoke that he wanted, and nothing to swallow, nothing to sniff and nothing for the wrists, either. And no, thank you, with all respect to the many beautiful sisters, cousins, and young men of his circle, Jerry’s other needs were also taken care of.

“Then, oh, gladness, sir, you are a most happy man.”

“I was really looking for something for a friend,” said Jerry.

The Indian boy looked sharply up and down the street and he wasn’t foxing any more. “A friendly friend, sir?”

“Not very.”

They shared a cyclo. The Indian had an uncle who sold Buddhas in the silver market, and the uncle had a back room with locks and bolts on the door. For thirty American dollars Jerry bought a neat brown Walther automatic with twenty rounds of ammunition. The Sarratt bearleaders, he reckoned as he climbed back into the cyclo, would have fallen into a deep swoon. First for what they called improper dressing, a crime of crimes. Second because they preached the hardy nonsense that small guns gave more trouble than use. But they’d have had a bigger fit still if he’d carted his Hong Kong Webley through customs to Bangkok and thence to Phnom Penh, so in Jerry’s view they could count themselves lucky, because he wasn’t walking into this one naked whatever their doctrine of the week.

At the airport there was no plane to Battambang, but there was never a plane to anywhere. There were the silver rice jets howling on and off the landing-strip, and there were new revêtements being built after a fresh fall of rockets in the night. Jerry watched the earth arriving in lorry-loads, and the coolies filling ammunition boxes frantically. In another life, he decided, I’ll go into the sand business and flog it to besieged cities.

In the waiting-room Jerry found a group of stewardesses drinking coffee and laughing, and in his breezy way he joined them. A tall girl who spoke English made a doubtful face and disappeared with his passport and five dollars.

“C’est impossible,” they all assured him while they waited for her. “C’est tout occupé.”

The girl returned smiling. “The pilot is very susceptible,” she said. “If he don’t like you, he don’t take you. But I show him your photograph and he has agreed to surcharger. He is allowed to take only thirty-one personnes but he take you, he don’t care, he do it for friendship if you give him one thousand five hundred riels.”

The plane was two-thirds empty, and the bullet-holes in the wings wept dew like undressed wounds.

At that time, Battambang was the safest town left in Lon Nol’s dwindling archipelago, and Phnom Penh’s last farm. For an hour they lumbered over supposedly Khmer Rouge-infested territory without a soul in sight. As they circled, someone shot lazily from the paddies and the pilot pulled a couple of token turns to avoid being hit, but Jerry was more concerned to mark the ground layout before they landed: the park-bays; which runways were civil and which were military; the wired-off enclave which contained the freight huts. They landed in an air of pastoral affluence. Flowers grew round the gun emplacements, fat brown chickens scurried in the shell-holes, water and electricity abounded, though a telegram to Phnom Penh already took a week.

Jerry trod very carefully now. His instinct for cover was stronger than ever. The Honourable Gerald Westerby, the distinguished hack, reports on the siege economy. When you’re my size, sport, you have to have a hell of a good reason for whatever you’re doing. So he put out smoke, as the jargon goes.

At the enquiry desk, watched by several quiet men, he asked for the names of the best hotels in town and wrote down a couple while he continued to study the groupings of planes and buildings. Meandering from one office to another, he asked what facilities existed to air-freight news copy to Phnom Penh and no one had the least idea. Continuing his discreet reconnaissance, he waved his cable card around and enquired how to get to the governor’s palace, implying that he might have business with the great man personally. By now he was the most distinguished reporter who had ever been to Battambang. Meanwhile he noted the doors marked “Crew” and the doors marked “Private,” and the position of the men’s rooms, so that later, when he was clear, he could make himself a sketch plan of the entire concourse, with emphasis on the exits to the wired-off part of the airfield.

Finally he asked who was in town just now among the pilots. He was friendly with several, he said, so his simplest plan— should it become necessary—was probably to ask one of them to take his copy in his flight-bag. A stewardess gave names from a list, and while she did this Jerry gently turned the list round and read off the rest. The Indocharter flight was listed but no pilot was mentioned.

“Captain Andreas still flying for Indocharter?” he enquired.

“Le capitaine qui, Monsieur?”

“Andreas. We used to call him André. Little fellow, always wore dark glasses. Did the Kampong Cham run.”

She shook her head. Only Captain Marshall and Captain Ricardo, she said, flew for Indocharter, but Captain Ric had immolated himself in an accident. Jerry affected no interest but established in passing that Captain Marshall’s Carvair was due to take off in the afternoon, as forecast in last night’s signal, but there was no freight space available; everything was taken, Indocharter was always fully contracted.

“Know where I can reach him?”

“Captain Marshall never flies in the mornings, Monsieur.”

He took a cab into town. The best hotel was a flea-bitten dug-out in the main street. The street itself was narrow, stinking, and deafening: an Asian boom town in the making, pounded by the din of Hondas and crammed with the frustrated Mercedes of the quick rich. Keeping his cover going, he took a room and paid for it in advance, to include service spécial, which meant nothing more exotic than clean sheets as opposed to those which still bore the marks of other bodies. He told his driver to return in an hour. By force of habit he secured an inflated receipt. He showered, changed, and listened courteously while the houseboy showed him where to climb in after curfew; then he went out to find breakfast because it was still only nine in the morning.

He carried his typewriter and shoulder-bag with him. He saw no other round-eyes. He saw basket-makers, skin-sellers, and fruit-sellers, and once again the inevitable bottles of stolen petrol laid along the pavement waiting for an attack to touch them off. In a mirror hung in a tree he watched a dentist extract teeth from a patient tied in a high chair, and he watched the redtipped tooth being solemnly added to the thread that displayed the day’s catch.

All of these things Jerry recorded in his notebook, as became a zealous reporter of the social scene. And from a pavement café, as he consumed cold beer and fresh fish, he watched the dingy halfglazed offices marked “Indocharter” across the road and waited for someone to come and unlock the door. No one did. Captain Marshall never flies in the mornings, Monsieur.

At a chemist’s shop that specialised in children’s bicycles, he bought a roll of sticking-plaster and back in his room taped the Walther to his ribs rather than have it waving around in his waistband. Thus equipped, the intrepid journalist set forth to live some more cover, which sometimes, in the psychology of a fieldman, is no more than a gratuitous act of self-legitimisation as the heat begins to gather.

The governor lived on the edge of town, behind a verandah and French colonial portals, and a secretariat seventy strong. The vast concrete hall led to a waiting-room never finished, and to much smaller offices behind, and in one of these, after a fiftyminute wait, Jerry was admitted to the presence of a tiny, very senior black-suited Cambodian sent by Phnom Penh to handle noisome correspondents. Word said he was the son of a general and managed the Battambang end of the family opium business. His desk was much too big for him. Several attendants lounged about and they all looked very severe. One wore a uniform with a lot of medal ribbons.

Jerry asked for deep background and made a list of several charming dreams: that the Communist enemy was all but beaten; that there was serious discussion about reopening the entire national road system; that tourism was the growth industry of the province. The general’s son spoke slow and beautiful French, and it clearly gave him great pleasure to hear himself, for he kept his eyes half closed and smiled as he spoke, as if listening to beloved music.

“I may conclude, Monsieur, with a word of warning to your country. You are American?”

“English.”

“It is the same. Tell your government, sir. If you do not help us to continue the fight against the Communists, we shall go to the Russians and ask them to replace you in our struggle.”

Oh, Mother, thought Jerry. Oh, boy. Oh, God.

“I will give them that message,” he promised, and made to go.

“Un instant, Monsieur,” said the senior official sharply, and there was a stirring among his dozing courtiers. He opened a drawer and pulled out an imposing folder. Frost’s will, Jerry thought. My death warrant. Stamps for Cat.

“You are a writer?”

“Yes.”

Ko’s putting the arm on me. Prison tonight, and wake up with my throat cut tomorrow.

“You were at the Sorbonne, Monsieur?” the official enquired.

“Oxford.”

“Oxford in London?”

“Yes.”

“Then you have read the great French poets, Monsieur?” “With intense pleasure,” Jerry replied fervently. The courtiers were looking extremely grave.

“Then perhaps Monsieur will favour me with his opinion of the following few verses.” In his dignified French, the little official began to read aloud, slowly conducting with his palm.

“Deux amants assis sur la terre

Regardaient la mer,”

he began, and continued for perhaps twenty excruciating lines while Jerry listened in mystification.

“Voilà,” said the official finally and put the file aside. “Vous l’aimez?” he enquired, severely fixing his eye upon a neutral part of the room.

“Superbe,” said Jerry with a gush of enthusiasm. “Merveilleux. The sensitivity.”

“They are by whom, would you think?”

Jerry grabbed a name at random: “By Lamartine?”

The senior official shook his head. The courtiers were observing Jerry even more closely.

“Victor Hugo?” Jerry ventured.

“They are by me,” said the official, and with a sigh returned his poems to the drawer. The courtiers relaxed. “See that this literary person has every facility,” he ordered.

Jerry returned to the airport to find it a milling, dangerous chaos. Mercedes raced up and down the approach as if someone had invaded their nest, the forecourt was a turmoil of beacons, motorcycles, and sirens; and the hall, when he argued his way through the cordon, was jammed with scared people fighting to read notice-boards, yell at each other, and hear the blaring loudspeakers all at the same time.

Forcing a path to the information desk, Jerry found it closed. He leapt on the counter and saw the airfield through a hole in the anti-blast board. A squad of armed soldiers was jog-trotting down the empty runway toward a group of white poles where the national flags drooped in the windless air. They lowered two of the flags to half-mast, and inside the hall the loudspeakers interrupted themselves to blare a few bars of the national anthem. Over the seething heads Jerry searched for someone he might talk to. He selected a lank missionary with cropped yellow hair and glasses and a six-inch silver cross pinned to the pocket of his brown shirt. A pair of Cambodians in dog-collars stood miserably beside him.

“Vous parlez français?”

“Yes, but I also speak English!”

A lilting, corrective tone. Jerry guessed he was a Dane.

“I’m press. What’s the fuss?” He was shouting at the top of his voice.

“Phnom Penh is closed,” the missionary bellowed in reply. “No planes may leave or land.”

“Why?”

“Khmer Rouge have hit the ammunition dump in the airport. The town is closed till morning at the least!”

The loudspeaker began chattering again. The two priests listened. The missionary stooped nearly double to catch their murmured translation.

“They have made a great damage and devastated half a dozen planes already. They have laid them waste entirely. The authority is also suspecting sabotage. Maybe she also takes some prisoners. Why are they putting an ammunition house inside the airport in the first case? That was most dangerous. What is the reason here?”

“Good question,” Jerry agreed.

He ploughed across the hall. His master plan was already dead, as his master plans usually were. The “Crew Only” door was guarded by a pair of very serious crushers, and in the tension he saw no chance of brazening his way through. The thrust of the crowd was toward the passenger exit, where harassed ground staff were refusing to accept boarding tickets, and harassed police were being besieged with letters of laissez-passer designed to put the prominent outside their reach. He let it carry him. At the edges, a team of French traders was screaming for a refund, and the elderly were preparing to settle for the night. But the centre pushed and peered and exchanged fresh rumours, and the momentum carried him steadily to the front. Reaching it, Jerry discreetly took out his cable card and climbed over the improvised barrier. The senior policeman was sleek and well covered and he watched Jerry disdainfully while his subordinates toiled. Jerry strode straight up to him, his shoulder-bag dangling from his hand, and pressed the cable card under his nose.

“Sécurité américaine,” he roared in awful French and, with a snarl at the two men on the swing-doors, barged his way onto the tarmac and kept going, while his back waited all the time for a challenge or a warning shot or, in the trigger-happy atmosphere, a shot that was not even a warning. He walked angrily, with rough authority, swinging his shoulder-bag Sarratt-style to distract. Ahead of him—sixty yards, soon fifty—stood a row of single-engined military trainers without insignia. Beyond lay the caged enclosure and the freight huts, numbered nine to eighteen, and beyond the freight huts Jerry saw a cluster of hangars and park-bays marked “Prohibited” in just about every language except Chinese.

Reaching the trainers, Jerry strode imperiously along the line of them as if he were carrying out an inspection. They were anchored with bricks on wires. Pausing but not stopping, he stabbed irritably at a brick with his buckskin boot, yanked at an aileron, and shook his head. From their sandbagged emplacement, to his left, an anti-aircraft gun crew watched him indolently.

“Qu’est-ce que vous faites?”

Half turning, Jerry cupped his hands to his mouth. “Watch the damn sky, for Christ’s sakes,” he yelled in good American, pointing angrily to heaven, and kept going till he reached the high cage. It was open and the huts lay ahead of him. Once past them he would be out of sight of both the terminal and the control tower. He was walking on smashed concrete with couchgrass in the cracks. There was nobody in sight. The huts were weather-board, thirty feet long, ten high, with palm roofs. He reached the first. The boarding on the windows read “Bomb Cluster Fragmentation Without Fuses.” A trodden dust path led to the hangars on the other side. Through the gap Jerry glimpsed the parrot colours of parked cargo planes.

“Got you,” Jerry muttered aloud as he emerged on the safe side of the huts, because there ahead of him, clear as day, like a first sight of the enemy after months of lonely marching, a battered blue-grey DC-4 Carvair, fat as a frog, squatted on the crumbling tarmac with her nose-cone open. Diesel oil was dripping in a fast black rain from both her starboard engines, and a spindly Chinese in a sailing cap laden with military insignia stood smoking under the loading bay while he marked an inventory. Two coolies scurried back and forth with sacks, and a third worked the ancient loading lift. At his feet, chickens scrabbled petulantly. And on the fuselage, in flaming crimson against Drake Ko’s faded racing colours, ran the letters “OCHART.” The others had been lost in a repair job.

Oh, Charlie’s indestructible, completely immortal! Charlie Marshall, Mr. Tiu, a fantastic half-Chinese, all skin and bones and opium and a completely brilliant pilot. . . .

He’d bloody well better be, sport, thought Jerry with a shudder, as the coolies loaded sack after sack through the open nose and into the battered belly of the plane.

The Reverend Ricardo’s lifelong Sancho Panza, Your Grace, Craw had said, in extension of Lizzie’s description. Half Chow, as the good lady advised us, and the proud veteran of many futile wars.

Jerry remained standing, making no attempt to conceal himself, dangling the bag from his fist, and wearing the apologetic grin of an English stray. Coolies now seemed to be converging on the plane from several points at once: there were many more than two. Turning his back on them, Jerry repeated his routine of strolling along the line of huts, much as he had walked along the line of trainers, or along the corridor toward Frost’s room, peering through cracks in the weather-board and seeing nothing but the occasional broken packing-case. The concession to operate out of Battambang costs half a million U.S. renewable, Keller had said. At that price, who pays for redecoration?

The line of huts broke and he came on four army lorries loaded high with fruit, vegetables, and unmarked gunny bags. Their tailboards faced the plane and they sported artillery insignia. Two soldiers stood in each lorry, handing the gunny bags down to the coolies. The sensible thing would have been to drive the lorries onto the tarmac, but a mood of discretion prevailed. The army likes to be in on things, Keller had said. The navy can make millions out of one convoy down the Mekong, the air force is sitting pretty. Bombers fly fruit and the choppers can airlift the rich Chinese instead of the wounded out of the siege towns. Only the fighter boys go hungry, because they have to land where they take off. But the army really has to scratch around to make a living.

Jerry was closer to the plane now and could hear the squawking as Charlie Marshall fired commands at the coolies.

The huts began again. Number 18 had double doors and the name “Indocharter” daubed in green down the woodwork so that from any distance the letters looked like Chinese characters. In the gloomy interior a Chinese peasant couple squatted on the dust floor. A tethered pig lay with its head on the old man’s slippered foot. Their other possession was a long rush parcel meticulously bound with string. It could have been a corpse. A water jar stood in one corner with two rice-bowls at its base. There was nothing else in the hut. Welcome to the Indocharter transit lounge, Jerry thought. With the sweat running down his ribs he tagged himself to the line of coolies till he drew alongside Charlie Marshall, who went on squawking in Khmer at the top of his voice while his shaking pen checked each load on the inventory.

He wore an oily white short-sleeved shirt with enough gold stripes on the epaulettes to make a full general in anybody’s air force. Two American combat patches were stitched to his shirt front, amid an amazing collection of medal ribbons and Communist red stars. One patch read “Kill a Commie for Christ,” and the other “Christ Was a Capitalist at Heart.” His head was turned down and his face was in the shadow of his huge sailing cap, which slopped freely over his ears.

Jerry waited for him to look up. The coolies were already yelling for Jerry to move on, but Charlie Marshall kept his head turned stubbornly down while he added and wrote on the inventory and squawked furiously back at them.

“Captain Marshall, I’m doing a story on Ricardo for a London newspaper,” said Jerry quietly. “I want to ride with you as far as Phnom Penh and ask you some questions.”

As he spoke, he gently laid the volume of Candide on top of the inventory, with three one-hundred-dollar bills poking outward in a discreet fan. When you want a man to look one way, says the Sarratt school of illusionists, always point him in the other.

“They tell me you like Voltaire,” he said.

“I don’t like anybody,” Charlie Marshall retorted in a scratchy falsetto at the inventory, while the cap slipped still lower over his face. “I hate the whole human race, hear me?” His vituperation, despite its Chinese cadence, was unmistakeably French-American. “Jesus Christ, I hate mankind so damn much that if it don’t hurry and blow itself to pieces, I’m personally going to buy some bombs and go out there myself!”

He had lost his audience. Jerry was half-way up the steel ladder before Charlie Marshall had completed his thesis.

“Voltaire didn’t know a damn bloody thing!” he screamed at the next coolie. “He fought the wrong damn war, hear me? Put it over there, you lazy coon, and grab another handful! Dépêche-toi, crétin, oui?”

But all the same he jammed Voltaire into the back pocket of his baggy trousers.

The inside of the plane was dark and roomy and as cool as a cathedral. The seats had been removed, and perforated green shelves like meccano had been fitted to the walls. Carcasses of pig and guinea-fowl hung from the roof. The rest of the cargo was stowed in the gangway, starting from the tail-end, which gave Jerry no good feeling about taking off, and consisted of fruit and vegetables and the gunny bags Jerry had spotted in the army trucks, marked “GRAIN,” “RICE,” “FLOUR,” in letters large enough for the most illiterate narcotics agent to read. But the sticky smell of yeast and molasses that already filled the hold required no labels at all.

Some of the bags had been arranged in a ring, to make a sitting area for Jerry’s fellow passengers. Chief of these were two austere Chinese men, dressed very poorly in grey, and from their sameness and their demure superiority Jerry at once inferred an expertise of some kind; he remembered explosives-wallahs and pianists he had occasionally ferried thanklessly in and out of badland. Next to them, but respectfully apart, four hillsmen armed to the teeth sat smoking and cropping from their rice-bowls. Jerry guessed Meo or one of the Shan tribes from the northern borders where Charlie Marshall’s father had his army, and he guessed from their ease that they were part of the permanent help.

In a separate class altogether sat the quality: the colonel of artillery himself, who had thoughtfully supplied the transport and the troop escort, and his companion, a senior officer of customs, without whom nothing could have been achieved. They reclined regally in the gangway on chairs specially provided, watching proudly while the loading continued, and they wore their best uniforms, as the ceremony demanded.

There was one other member of the party and he lurked alone on top of the cases in the tail, head almost against the roof, and it was not possible to make him out in any detail. He sat with a bottle of whisky to himself, and even a glass to himself. He wore a Fidel Castro hat and a full beard. Gold links glittered on his dark arms, known in those days (to all but those who wore them) as C.I.A. bracelets, on the happy assumption that a man ditched in hostile country could buy his way to safety by doling out a link at a time. But his eyes, as they watched Jerry along the welloiled barrel of an AK-47 automatic rifle, had a fixed brightness.

He was covering me through the nose-cone, Jerry thought. He had a bead on me from the moment I left the hut.

The two Chinese were cooks, he decided in a moment of inspiration—“cooks” being the underworld nickname for chemists. Keller had said that the Air Opium lines had taken to bringing in the raw base and refining it in Phnom Penh, but were having hell’s own job persuading the cooks to come and work in siege conditions.

“Hey, you! Voltaire!”

Jerry hurried forward to the edge of the hold. Looking down, he saw the old peasant couple standing at the bottom of the ladder and Charlie Marshall trying to wrench the pig from them while he shoved the old woman up the steel ladder.

“When she come up, you gotta reach out and grab her, hear me?” he called, holding the pig in his arms. “She fall down and break her arse, we gotta whole lot more trouble with the coons. You some crazy narcotics hero, Voltaire?”

“No.”

“Well, you grab hold of her completely, hear me?”

She started up the ladder. When she had gone a few rungs, she began croaking and Charlie Marshall contrived to get the pig under his arm while he gave her a sharp crack on the rump and screamed at her in Chinese. The husband scurried up after her, and Jerry hauled them both to safety.

Finally Charlie Marshall’s own clown’s head appeared through the cone, and though it was swamped by the hat, Jerry had his first glimpse of the face beneath: skeletal and brown, with sleepy Chinese eyes and a big French mouth which twisted all ways when he squawked. He shoved the pig through, Jerry grabbed it and carted it, screaming and wriggling, to the old peasants. Then Charlie hauled his own fleshless frame aboard, like a spider climbing out of a drain. At once the officer of customs and the colonel of artillery stood up, brushed the seats of their uniforms, and progressed swiftly along the gangway to the shadowed man in the Castro hat squatting on the packing-cases. Reaching him, they waited respectfully, like sidesmen taking the offertory to the altar.

The link bracelets flashed, an arm reached down, once, twice, and a devout silence descended while the two men carefully counted a lot of banknotes and everybody watched. In rough unison, they returned to the top of the ladder where Charlie Marshall waited with the manifest. The officer of customs signed it, the colonel of artillery looked on approvingly; then they both saluted and disappeared down the ladder. The nose-cone juddered to an almost closed position, Charlie Marshall gave it a kick, flung some matting across the gap, and clambered quickly over the packing-cases to an inside stairway leading to the cabin.

Jerry clambered after him and, having settled himself into the copilot’s seat, silently totted up his blessings: We’re about five hundred tons overweight. We’re leaking oil. We’re carrying an armed bodyguard. We’re forbidden to take off. We’re forbidden to land, and Phnom Penh airport’s probably got a hole in it the size of Buckinghamshire. We have an hour and a half of Khmer Rouge between us and salvation, and if anybody turns sour on us at the other end, ace operator Westerby is caught with his knickers round his ankles and about two hundred gunny bags of opium base in his arms.

“You know how to fly this thing?” Charlie Marshall yelled as he struck at a row of mildewed switches. “You some kinda great flying hero, Voltaire?”

“I hate it all.”

“Me too.”

Seizing a swatter, Charlie Marshall flung himself upon a huge bottle-fly that was buzzing round the windscreen, then started the engines one by one, until the whole dreadful plane was heaving and rattling like a London bus on its last journey home up Clapham Hill. The radio crackled and Charlie Marshall took time off to give an obscene instruction to the control tower, first in Khmer and afterwards, in the best aviation tradition, in English. Heading for the far end of the runway, they passed a couple of gun emplacements and for a moment Jerry expected an overzealous crew to loose off at the fuselage, till in gratitude he remembered the army colonel and his lorries and his pay-off.

Another bottle-fly appeared and this time Jerry took possession of the fly-swatter. The plane seemed to be gathering no speed at all, but half the instruments read zero, so he couldn’t be sure. The din of the wheels on the runway seemed louder than the engines. Jerry remembered old Sambo’s chauffeur driving him back to school: the slow, inevitable progress down the Western bypass toward Slough and finally Eton.

A couple of the hillsmen had come forward to see the fun and were laughing their heads off. A clump of palm trees came hopping toward them, but the plane kept its feet firmly on the ground. Charlie Marshall absently pulled back the stick and retracted the landing-gear. Uncertain whether the nose had really lifted, Jerry thought of school again, and competing in the long jump, and recalled the same sensation of not rising, yet ceasing to be on the earth.

He felt the jolt and heard the swish of leaves as the under-belly cropped the trees. Charlie Marshall was screaming at the plane to pull itself into the damn air, and for an age they made no height at all but hung and wheezed a few feet above a winding road which climbed inexorably toward a ridge of hills. Charlie Marshall was lighting a cigarette, so Jerry held the wheel in front of him and felt the live kick of the rudder. Taking back the controls, Charlie Marshall put the plane into a slow bank toward the lowest point of the range. He held the turn, crested the range, and went on to make a complete circle. As they looked down on the brown roof-tops and the river and the airport, Jerry reckoned they had an altitude of a thousand feet. As far as Charlie Marshall was concerned, that was a comfortable cruising height, for now at last he took his hat off and, with the air of a man who had done a good job well, treated himself to a large glass of Scotch from the bottle at his feet. Below them dusk was gathering, and the brown earth was fading softly into mauve.

“Thanks,” said Jerry, accepting the bottle. “Yes, I think I might.”

Jerry kicked off with a little small talk—if it is possible to talk small while you are shouting at the top of your voice.

“Khmer Rouge just blew up the airport ammunition dump!” he bellowed. “It’s closed for landing and take-off.”

“They did?” For the first time since Jerry had met him, Charlie Marshall seemed both pleased and impressed.

“They say you and Ricardo were great buddies.”

“We bomb everything. We killed half the human race already. We see more dead people than alive people. Plain of Jars, Danang—we’re such big damn heroes that when we die Jesus Christ going to come down personally with a chopper and fish us out the jungle.”

“They tell me Ric was a great guy for business!”

“Sure! He the greatest! Know how many offshore companies we got, me and Ricardo? Six. We got foundations in Liechtenstein, corporations in Geneva, we got a bank manager in the Dutch Antilles, lawyers, Jesus. Know how much money I got?” He slapped his back pocket. “Three hundred U.S. exactly. Charlie Marshall and Ricardo killed half the whole damn human race together. Nobody give us no money. My father killed the other half and he got plenty plenty money. Ricardo, he always got these crazy schemes always. Shell cases. Jesus. We’re going to pay the coons to collect up all the shell cases in Asia, sell ’em for the next war!”

The nose dropped and he hauled it up again with a foul French oath. “Latex! We gotta steal all the latex out of Kampong Cham! We fly to Kampong Cham, we got big choppers, red crosses. So what do we do? We bring out the damn wounded. Hold still, you crazy bastard, hear me?” He was talking to the plane again. In the nose-cone, Jerry noticed a long line of bullet-holes which had not been very well patched. Tear here, he thought absurdly.

“Human hair. We were gonna be millionaires out of hair. All the coon girls in the villages got to grow long hair and we’re going to cut it off and fly it to Bangkok for wigs.”

“Who was it paid Ricardo’s debts so that he could fly for Indocharter?”

“Nobody!”

“Somebody told me it was Drake Ko.”

“I never heard of Drake Ko. On my deathbed, I tell my mother, my father: bastard Charlie, the General’s boy, he never heard of Drake Ko in his life.”

“What did Ricardo do for Ko that was so special that Ko paid all his debts?”

Charlie Marshall drank some whisky straight from the bottle, then handed it to Jerry. His fleshless hands shook wildly whenever he took them off the stick, and his nose ran all the while. Jerry wondered how many pipes a day he was up to. He had once known a pied-noir hotelier in Luang Prabang who needed sixty to do a good day’s work. Captain Marshall never flies in the mornings, he thought.

“Americans always in a hurry,” Charlie Marshall complained, shaking his head. “Know why we gotta take this stuff to Phnom Penh now? Everybody impatient. Everybody want quick-shot these days. Nobody got time to smoke. Everybody got to turn on quick. You wanta kill the human race, you gotta take time, hear me?”

Jerry tried again. One of the four engines had given up, but another had developed a howl as if from a broken silencer, so that he had to yell even louder than before.

“What did Ricardo do for all that money?” he repeated.

“Listen, Voltaire, okay? I don’t like politics, I’m just a simple opium smuggler, okay? You like politics you go back below and talk to those crazy Shans. ‘You can’t eat politics. You can’t screw politics. You can’t smoke politics.’ He tell my father.”

“Who did?”

“Drake Ko tell my father, my father tell me, and me—I tell the whole damn human race! Drake Ko some philosopher, hear me?”

For its own reasons, the plane had begun falling steadily till it was a couple of hundred feet above the paddies. They saw a village, and cooking fires burning, and figures running wildly toward the trees, and Jerry wondered seriously whether Charlie Marshall had noticed. But at the last minute, like a patient jockey, he hauled and leaned and finally got the horse’s head up, and they both had some more Scotch.

“You know him well?”

“Who?”

“Ko.”

“I never met him in my life, Voltaire. You wanna talk about Drake Ko, you go ask my father. He cut your throat.”

“How about Tiu? Tell me, who’s the couple with the pig?” Jerry yelled, to keep the conversation going while Charlie took back the bottle for another pull.

“Haw people, down from Chiang Mai. They worried about their lousy son in Phnom Penh. They think he too damn hungry, so they take him a pig.”

“So how about Tiu?”

“I never heard of Mr. Tiu, hear me?”

“Ricardo was seen up in Chiang Mai three months ago,” Jerry yelled.

“Yeah—well, Ric’s a damn fool,” said Charlie Marshall with feeling. “Ric’s gotta keep his ass out of Chiang Mai or somebody shoot it right off. Anybody lying dead they gotta keep their damn mouth shut, hear me? I say to him, ‘Ric, you my partner. Keep your damn mouth shut and your ass out of sight or certain people get personally pretty mad with you.’ ”

The plane entered a rain cloud and at once began losing height fast. Rain raced over the iron deck and down the insides of the windows. Charlie Marshall flicked some switches up and down; there was a bleeping from the controls panel and a couple of pin-lights came on, which no amount of swearing could put out. To Jerry’s amazement they began climbing again, though in the racing cloud he doubted his judgment of the angle. Glancing behind him in order to check, he was in time to glimpse the bearded figure of the dark-skinned paymaster in the Fidel Castro cap retreating down the cabin ladder, holding his AK-47 by the barrel.

They continued climbing, the rain ended, and the night surrounded them like another country. The stars broke suddenly above them, they jolted over the moonlit crevasses of the cloudtops, they lifted again, the cloud vanished for good, and Charlie Marshall put on his hat and announced that both starboard engines had now ceased to play any part in the festivities. In this moment of respite, Jerry asked his maddest question.

“So where’s Ricardo now, sport? Got to find him, see. Promised my paper I’d have a word with him. Can’t disappoint them, can we?”

Charlie Marshall’s sleepy eyes had all but closed. He was sitting in a half-trance with his head against the seat and the brim of his hat over his nose.

“What’s that, Voltaire? You speak at all?”

“Where is Ricardo now?”

“Ric?” Charlie Marshall repeated, glancing at Jerry in a sort of wonder. “Where Ricardo is, Voltaire?”

“That’s it, sport. Where is he? I’d like to have an exchange of views with him. That’s what the three hundred bucks were about. There’s another five hundred if you could find the time to arrange an introduction.”

Springing suddenly to life, Charlie Marshall delved for the Candide and slammed it into Jerry’s lap while he delivered himself of a furious outburst.

“I don’t know where Ricardo is ever, hear me? I never don’t want a friend in my life. If I see that crazy Ricardo, I shoot his balls right off in the street, hear me? He dead. So he can stay dead till he dies. He tell everyone he got killed. So maybe for once in my life I’m going to believe that bastard!”

Pointing the plane angrily into the cloud, he let it fall toward the slow flashes of Phnom Penh’s artillery batteries to make a perfect three-point landing in what to Jerry was pitch darkness. He waited for the burst of machine-gun fire from the ground defences, he waited for the sickening free fall as they nosedived into a mammoth crater, but all he saw, quite suddenly, was a newly assembled revêtement of the familiar mud-filled ammunition boxes, arms open and palely lit, waiting to receive them. As they taxied toward it, a brown jeep pulled in front of them with a green light winking on the back, like a flashlight being turned on and off by hand. The plane was humping over grass. Hard beside the revêtement Jerry could see a pair of green lorries and a tight knot of waiting figures looking anxiously toward them, and behind them the dark shadow of a twin-engined sports plane. They parked, and Jerry heard at once from the hold beneath their penthouse the creak of the nose-cone opening, followed by the clatter of feet on the iron ladder and the quick call and answer of voices. The speed of their departure took him by surprise. But he heard something else that turned his blood cold and made him charge down the steps to the belly of the plane.

“Ricardo!” he yelled. “Stop! Ricardo!”

But the only passengers left were the old couple clutching their pig and their parcel. Seizing the steel ladder, he let himself fall, jolting his spine as he hit the tarmac with his heels. The jeep had already left with the Chinese cooks and their Shan bodyguard. As he ran forward, Jerry could see the jeep racing for an open gateway at the perimeter of the airfield. It passed through, and two sentries slammed the gates and took up their position as before. Behind him the helmeted flight-handlers were swarming toward the Carvair. A couple of lorry-loads of police looked on, and for a moment the Western fool in Jerry was seduced into thinking they might be playing some restraining rôle, till he realised they were Phnom Penh’s guard of honour for a three-ton load of opium. But his eye was for one figure only, and that was the tall bearded man with the Fidel Castro hat and the AK-47 and the heavy limp that sounded like a hard-soft drum-beat as the rubber-soled flying boots hobbled down the steel ladder.

Jerry saw him just. The door of the little Beechcraft waited open for him, and there were two ground crew poised to help him in. As he reached them, they held out their hands for the rifle but Ricardo waved them aside. He had turned and was looking for Jerry. For a second they saw each other. Jerry was falling and Ricardo was lifting the gun, and for twenty seconds Jerry reviewed his life from birth till now while a few more bullets ripped and whined round the battle-torn airfield. By the time Jerry looked up again, the firing had stopped, Ricardo was inside the plane, and his helpers were pulling away the chocks. As the little plane lifted into the flashes, Jerry ran like the devil for the darkest part of the perimeter before anybody else decided that his presence was obstructive to good trading.

Just a lovers’ tiff, he told himself, sitting in a taxi-cab, and he held his hands over his head and tried to damp down the wild shaking of his chest. That’s what you get for trying to play footsie-footsie with an old flame of Lizzie Worthington’s. Somewhere a rocket fell and he didn’t give a damn.

* * *

He allowed Charlie Marshall two hours, though he reckoned one was generous. It was past curfew but the day’s crisis had not ended with the dark; there were traffic checks all the way to Le Phnom, and the sentries held their machine-pistols at the ready. In the square two men were screaming at each other by torchlight before a gathering crowd. Farther down the boulevard, troops had surrounded a floodlit house and were leaning against the wall of it, fingering their guns. The driver said the secret police had made an arrest there. A colonel and his people were still inside with a suspected agitator. In the hotel forecourt tanks were parked, and in his bedroom Jerry found Luke lying on the bed drinking contentedly.

“Any water?” Jerry asked.

“Yip.”

He turned on the bath and started to undress until he remembered the Walther.

“Filed?” he asked.

“Yip,” said Luke again. “And so have you.”

“Ha ha.”

“I had Keller cable Stubbsie under your byline.”

“The airport story?”

Luke handed him a tear-sheet. “Added some true Westerby colour. How the buds are bursting in the cemeteries. Stubbsie loves you.”

“Well, thanks.”

In the bathroom, Jerry unstuck the Walther from the plaster and slipped it in the pocket of his jacket where he would be able to get at it.

“Where we going tonight?” Luke called through the closed door.

“Nowhere.”

“What the hell’s that mean?” “I’ve got a date.”

“A woman?”

“Yes.”

“Take Lukie. Three in a bed.”

Jerry sank gratefully into the tepid water. “No.”

“Call her. Tell her to whip in a whore for Lukie. Listen, there’s that hooker from Santa Barbara downstairs. I’m not proud. I’ll bring her.”

“No.”

“For Christ’s sakes!” Luke shouted, now serious. “Why the hell not?” He had come right to the locked door to make his protest.

“Sport, you’ve got to get off my back,” Jerry advised. “Honest. I love you, but you’re not everything to me, right? So stay off.”

“Thorn in your breeches, huh?” Long silence. “Well don’t get your ass shot off, pardner, it’s a stormy night out there.”

When Jerry returned to the bedroom, Luke was back on the bed staring at the wall and drinking methodically.

“You know, you’re worse than a bloody woman,” Jerry told him, pausing at the door to look back at him.

The whole childish exchange would not have caused him another moment’s thought had it not been for the way things turned out afterwards.

This time Jerry didn’t bother with the bell on the gate, but climbed the wall and grazed his hands on the broken glass that ran along the top of it. He didn’t make for the front door either, or go through the formality of watching the brown legs waiting on the bottom stair. Instead he stood in the garden waiting for the thump of his heavy landing to fade and for his eyes and ears to catch a sign of habitation from the big villa which loomed darkly above him with the moon behind it.

A car drew up without lights and two figures got out, by their size and quietness Cambodian. They pressed the gate bell and at the front door murmured the magic password through the crack, and were instantly, silently admitted. Jerry tried to fathom the layout. It puzzled him that no telltale smell escaped either from the front of the house or into the garden where he stood. There was no wind. He knew that for a large divan secrecy was vital, not because the law was punitive, but because the bribes were. The villa possessed a chimney and a courtyard and two floors: a place to live comfortably as a French colon, with a little family of concubines and half-caste children. The kitchen, he guessed, would be given over to preparation. The safest place to smoke would undoubtedly be upstairs in rooms which faced the courtyard. And since there was no smell from the front door, Jerry reckoned that they were using the rear of the courtyard rather than the wings or the front.

He trod soundlessly till he came to the paling that marked the rear boundary. It was lush with flowers and creeper. A barred window gave a first foothold to his buckskin boot, an overflow pipe a second, a high extractor fan a third, and as he climbed past it to the upper balcony he caught the smell he expected: warm and sweet and beckoning. On the balcony there was still no light, though the two Cambodian girls who squatted there were easily visible in the moonlight and he could see their scared eyes fixing him as he appeared out of the sky. Beckoning them to their feet, he walked them ahead of him, led by the smell.

The shelling had stopped, leaving the night to the geckos. Jerry remembered that Cambodians liked to gamble on the number of times they cheeped: tomorrow will be a lucky day; tomorrow won’t; tomorrow I will take a bride; no, the day after. The girls were very young and they must have been waiting for the customers to send for them. At the rush door they hesitated and stared unhappily back at him. Jerry signalled and they began pulling aside layers of matting until a pale light gleamed onto the balcony, no stronger than a candle. He stepped inside, keeping the girls ahead of him.

The room must once have been the master bedroom, with a second, smaller room connecting. He had his hand on the shoulder of one girl. The other followed submissively. Twelve customers lay in the first room, all men. A few girls lay between them, whispering. Barefooted coolies ministered, moving with great deliberation from one recumbent body to the next, threading a pellet onto the needle, lighting it and holding it across the bowl of the pipe while the customer took a long steady draught and the pellet burned itself out. The conversation was slow and murmured and intimate, broken by soft ripples of grateful laughter. Jerry recognised the wise Swiss from the Counsellor’s dinner party. He was chatting to a fat Cambodian. No one was interested in Jerry; like the orchids he carried at Lizzie Worthington’s apartment block, the girls authenticated him.

“Charlie Marshall,” Jerry said quietly. A coolie pointed to the next room. Jerry dismissed the two girls and they slipped away. The second room was smaller and Charlie Marshall lay in the corner, while a Chinese girl in an elaborate cheongsam crouched over him preparing his pipe. Jerry supposed she was the daughter of the house and that Charlie Marshall was getting the grand treatment because he was both an habitué and a supplier. He knelt the other side of him. An old man was watching from the doorway. The girl watched also, the pipe still in her hands.

“What you want, Voltaire? Why don’t you leave me be?”

“Just a little stroll, sport. Then you can come back.”

Taking his arm, Jerry lifted him gently to his feet, while the girl helped.

“How much has he had?” he asked the girl. She held up three fingers.

“And how much does he like?” he asked.

She lowered her head, smiling. A whole lot more, she was saying.

Charlie Marshall walked shakily at first, but by the time they reached the balcony he was prepared to argue, so Jerry lifted him up and carried him across his body like a fire victim, down the wooden steps and across the courtyard. The old man bowed them obligingly through the front door, a grinning coolie held the gate onto the street, and both were clearly very thankful to Jerry for showing so much tact. They had gone perhaps fifty yards when a pair of Chinese boys came rushing down the road at them, yelling and waving sticks like small paddles. Setting Charlie Marshall upright but holding him firmly with his left hand, Jerry let the first boy strike, deflected the paddle, then hit him at half strength with a two-knuckle punch just below the eye. The boy ran away, his friend after him. Still clutching Charlie Marshall, Jerry walked him till they came to the river and a heavy patch of darkness. Then he sat him down on the bank like a puppet in the sloped, dry grass.

“You gonna blow my brains out, Voltaire?”

“We’re going to have to leave that to the opium, sport,” said Jerry.

Jerry liked Charlie Marshall, and in a perfect world he would have been glad to spend an evening with him at the fumerie and hear the story of his wretched but extraordinary life. But now his fist grasped Charlie Marshall’s tiny arm remorselessly lest he took it into his hollow head to bolt; for he had a feeling Charlie could run very fast when he became desperate. He half lay therefore, much as he had lounged among the magic mountain of possessions in old Pet’s place, on his left haunch and his left elbow, holding Charlie Marshall’s wrist into the mud, while Charlie Marshall lay flat on his back. From the river thirty feet below them came the murmured chant of the sampans as they drifted like long leaves across the golden moon path. From the sky—now in front of them, now behind—came the occasional ragged flashes of outgoing gun-fire as some bored battery commander decided to justify his existence. And sometimes from much nearer came the lighter, sharper snap as the Khmer Rouge replied, but only as tiny interludes between the racket of the geckos and the greater silence just beyond. By the moonlight Jerry looked at his watch, then at the crazed face, trying to calculate the strength of Charlie Marshall’s cravings. If Charlie was a night smoker and slept in the mornings, then his needs must come on fast. The wet on his face was already unearthly. It flowed from the heavy pores and from the stretched eyes, and from the sniffing, weeping nose. It channelled itself meticulously along the engraved creases, making neat reservoirs in the caverns.

“Jesus, Voltaire. Ricardo’s my friend. He got a lot of philosophy, that guy. You want to hear him talk, Voltaire. You wanna hear his ideas.”

“Yes,” Jerry agreed. “I do.”

Charlie Marshall grabbed hold of Jerry’s hand.

“Voltaire, these are good guys, hear me? Mr. Tiu . . . Drake Ko. They don’t want to hurt nobody. They wanna do business. They got something to sell, they got people buying it! It’s a service! Nobody gets his rice-bowl broken. Why you want to screw that up? You’re a nice guy yourself. I saw. You carry the old boy’s pig, okay? Whoever saw a round-eye carry a slant-eye pig before? But Jesus, Voltaire, you screw it out of me, they will kill you very completely, because that Mr. Tiu, he’s a business-like and very philosophical gentleman, hear me? They kill me, they kill Ricardo, they kill you, they kill the whole damn human race!”

The artillery fired a barrage, and this time the jungle replied with a small salvo of missiles, perhaps six, which hissed over their heads like whirring boulders from a catapult. Moments later they heard the detonations somewhere in the centre of the town. After them, nothing. Not the wail of a fire engine, not the siren of an ambulance.

“Why would they kill Ricardo?” Jerry asked. “What’s Ricardo done wrong?”

“Voltaire! Ricardo’s my friend! Drake Ko my father’s friend! Those old men big brothers. They fight some lousy war together in Shanghai about two hundred and fifty years ago, okay? I go see my father. I tell him, ‘Father you gotta love me once. You gotta quit calling me your spider bastard, and you gotta tell your good friend Drake Ko to take the heat off Ricardo. You gotta say, “Drake Ko, that Ricardo and my Charlie, they are like you and me. They brothers, same as us. They learn fly together in Oklahoma, they kill the human race together. And they some pretty good friends. And that’s a fact.” ’ My father hate me very bad, okay?”

“Okay.”

“But he send Drake Ko a damn long personal message all the same.”

Charlie Marshall breathed in, on and on, as if his little breast could scarcely hold enough air to feed him. “That Lizzie. She some woman. Lizzie, she go personally to Drake Ko herself. Also on a very private basis. And she say to him, ‘Mr. Ko, you gotta take the heat off Ric.’ That’s a very delicate situation there, Voltaire. We all got to hold on to each other tight or we fall off the crazy mountaintop, hear me? Voltaire, let me go. I beg! I completely beg, for Christ’s sake, je m’abîme, hear me? That’s all I know!”

Watching him, listening to his wracked outbursts, how he collapsed and rallied and broke again and rallied less, Jerry felt he was witnessing the last martyred writhing of a friend. His instinct was to lead Charlie slowly and let him ramble. His dilemma was that he didn’t know how much time he had before whatever happens to an addict happened. He asked questions, but often Charlie didn’t seem to hear them. At other times he appeared to answer questions Jerry hadn’t put. And sometimes a delayed-action mechanism threw out an answer to a question which Jerry had long abandoned. At Sarratt the inquisitors said a broken man was dangerous because he paid you money he didn’t have in order to buy your love. But for whole precious minutes Charlie could pay nothing at all.

“Drake Ko never went to Vientiane in his life!” Charlie yelled suddenly. “You crazy, Voltaire! A big guy like Ko bothering with a dirty little Asian town? Drake Ko some philosopher, Voltaire! You wanna watch that guy pretty careful!” Everyone, it seemed, was some philosopher—or everyone but Charlie Marshall. “In Vientiane nobody even heard Ko’s name! Hear me, Voltaire?”

At another point, Charlie Marshall wept and seized Jerry’s hands and enquired between sobs whether Jerry also had a father.

“Yes, sport, I did,” said Jerry patiently. “And in his way he was a general too.”

Over the river two white flares shed an amazing daylight, inspiring Charlie to reminisce on the hardships of their early days together in Vientiane. Sitting bolt upright, he drew a house in diagram in the mud. That’s where Lizzie and Ric and Charlie Marshall lived, he said proudly: in a stinking flea-hut on the edge of town, a place so lousy even the geckos got sick from it. Ric and Lizzie had the royal suite, which was the only room this fleahut contained, and Charlie’s job was to keep out of the way and pay the rent and fetch the booze. But the memory of their dreadful economic plight moved Charlie to a fresh storm of tears.

“So what did you live on, sport?” Jerry asked, expecting nothing from the question. “Come on. It’s over now. What did you live on?”

More tears while Charlie confessed to a monthly allowance from his father, whom he loved and revered.

“That crazy Lizzie,” said Charlie through his grief, “that crazy Lizzie, she make trips to Hong Kong for Mellon.”

Somehow Jerry contrived to keep himself steady in order not to shake Charlie from his course: “Mellon? Who’s this Mellon?” he asked. But the soft tone made Charlie sleepy, and he started playing with the mud house, adding a chimney and smoke.

“Come on, damn you! Mellon! Mellon!” Jerry shouted straight into Charlie’s face, trying to shock him into replying. “Mellon, you hashed-out wreck! Trips to Hong Kong!” Lifting Charlie to his feet, he shook him like a rag doll, but it took a lot more shaking to produce the answer, and in the course of it Charlie Marshall implored Jerry to understand what it was like to love, really to love, a crazy round-eye hooker and know you could never have her, even for a night.

Mellon was a creepy English trader, nobody knew what he did. A little of this, a little of that, Charlie said. People were scared of him. Mellon said he could get Lizzie into the big-time heroin trail. “With your passport and your body,” Mellon had told her, “you can go in and out of Hong Kong like a princess.”

Exhausted, Charlie sank to the ground and crouched before his mud house. Squatting beside him, Jerry fastened his fist to the back of Charlie’s collar, careful not to hurt him.

“So she did that for him, did she, Charlie? Lizzie carried for Mellon.” With his palm, he gently tipped Charlie’s head round till his lost eyes were staring straight at him.

“Lizzie don’t carry for Mellon, Voltaire,” Charlie corrected him. “Lizzie carry for Ricardo. Lizzie don’t love Mellon. She love Ric and me.”

Staring glumly at the mud house, Charlie burst suddenly into raucous dirty laughter, which then petered out with no explanation.

“You louse it up, Lizzie!” Charlie called teasingly, poking a finger into the mud door. “You louse it up as usual, honey! You talk too much. Why you tell everyone you Queen of England? Why you tell everyone you some great spook-lady? Mellon get very very mad with you, Lizzie. Mellon throw you out, right out on your ass. Ric got pretty mad too, remember? Ric smash you up real bad and Charlie have to take you to the doctor in the middle of the damn night, remember? You got one hell of a big mouth, Lizzie, hear me? You my sister, but you got the biggest damn mouth ever!”

Till Ricardo closed it for her, Jerry thought, remembering the grooves on her chin. Because she spoiled the deal with Mellon.

Still crouching at Charlie’s side and clutching him by the scruff, Jerry watched the world around him vanish, and in place of it he saw Sam Collins sitting in his car below Star Heights, with a clear view of the eighth floor, while he studied the racing page of the newspaper at eleven o’clock at night. Not even the clump of a rocket falling quite close could distract him from that freezing vision. And he heard Craw’s voice above the mortar fire, intoning on the subject of Lizzie’s criminality. When funds were low, Craw had said, Ricardo had made her carry little parcels across frontiers for him.

And how did London town learn that, Your Grace—Jerry would have liked to ask old Craw—if not from Sam Collins alias Mellon himself?

A three-second rainstorm had washed away Charlie’s mud house and he was furious about it. He was splashing around on all fours looking for it, weeping and cursing frantically. The fit passed and he started talking about his father again, and how the old man had found employment for his natural son with a certain distinguished Vientiane airline—though Charlie till then had been quite keen to get out of flying for good on account of losing his nerve.

One day, it seemed, the General just lost patience with Charlie. He called together his bodyguard and came down from his hilltop in the Shans to a little opium town called Fang, not far inside the Thai border. There, after the fashion of patriarchs the world over, the General rebuked Charlie for his spendthrift ways.

Charlie had a special squawk for his father and a special way of puffing out his wasted cheeks in military disapproval.

“ ‘So you better do some proper damn work, for a change—hear me, you kwailo spider bastard? You better stay away from horse gambling, hear me, and strong liquor, and opium. And you better take those Commie stars off your tits and sack that stink friend Ricardo of yours. And you better cease financing his woman, hear me? Because I don’t gonna keep you one day more, not one hour, you spider bastard, and I hate you so much one day I kill you because you remind me of that Corsican whore your mother!’ ”

Then to the job itself—Charlie’s father, the General, still speaking: “ ‘Certain very fine Chiu Chow gentlemen who are pretty good friends of pretty good friends of mine, hear me, happen to have a controlling interest in a certain aviation company. Also I got certain shares in that company. Also this company happens to bear the distinguished title of Indocharter Aviation. So these good friends, they do me a favour to assist me in my disgrace for my three-legged spider-bastard son and I pray sincerely you may fall out of the sky and break your kwailo neck.’ ”

So Charlie flew his father’s opium for Indocharter—one, two flights a week at first, but regular, honest work and he liked it. His nerve came back, he steadied down, and he felt real gratitude toward his old man. He tried, of course, to get the Chiu Chow boys to take Ricardo too, but they wouldn’t. After a few months they did agree to pay Lizzie twenty bucks a week to sit in the front office and sweet-mouth the clients. These were the golden days, Charlie implied. Charlie and Lizzie earned the money, Ricardo wasted it on ever crazier enterprises, everybody was happy, everybody was employed.

Till one evening, like a nemesis, Tiu appeared and screwed the whole thing up. He appeared just as they were locking up the company’s offices, straight off the pavement without an appointment, asking for Charlie Marshall by name and describing himself as part of the company’s Bangkok management. The Chiu Chow boys came out of the back office, took one look at Tiu, vouched for his good faith, and made themselves scarce.

Charlie broke off in order to weep on Jerry’s shoulder.

“Now listen to me carefully, sport,” Jerry urged. “Listen. This is the bit I like, okay? You tell me this bit carefully and I’ll take you home. Promise. Please.”

But Jerry had it wrong. It was no longer a matter of making Charlie talk. Jerry was now the drug on which Charlie Marshall depended. It was no longer a matter of holding him down, either. Charlie Marshall clutched Jerry’s breast as if it were the last raft on his lonely sea, and their conversation had become a desperate monologue from which Jerry stole his facts while Charlie Marshall cringed and begged and howled for his tormentor’s attention, making jokes and laughing at them through his tears. Downriver one of Lon Nol’s machine-guns which had not yet been sold to the Khmer Rouge was firing tracer into the jungle by the light of another flare. Long golden bolts flowed in streams above and below the water, and lit a small cave where they disappeared into the trees.

Charlie’s sweat-soaked hair was pricking Jerry’s chin and Charlie was gabbling and dribbling all at the same time.

“Mr. Tiu don’t wanna talk in no office, Voltaire. Oh, no! Mr. Tiu don’t dress too good, either. Tiu very Chiu Chow person, he use Thai passport like Drake Ko, he use crazy name and keep very very low appearance when he come to Vientiane. ‘Captain Marshall,’ he say to me, ‘how you like earn a lot of extra cash by performing certain interesting and varied work outside the company’s hours, tell me? How you like fly a certain unconventional journey for me once? They tell me you some pretty damn fine pilot these days, very steady. How you like earn yourself not less than maybe four to five thousand U.S. for one day’s work, not even a whole day? How would that personally attract you, Captain Marshall?’ ‘Mr. Tiu,’ I tell him”—Charlie is shouting hysterically now—“ ‘without in any way prejudicing my negotiating position, Mr. Tiu, for five thousand bucks U.S. in my present serene mood I go down to hell for you and I bring you the devil’s balls back!’ Tiu say he come back one day and I gotta keep my damn mouth shut.”

Suddenly Charlie had changed to his father’s voice, and he was calling himself a spider bastard and the son of a Corsican whore— till gradually it dawned on Jerry that Charlie was describing the next episode in the story.

Amazingly, it turned out, Charlie had kept to himself the secret of Tiu’s offer until he next saw his father, this time in Chiang Mai for a celebration of the Chinese New Year. He had not told Ric and he had not even told Lizzie—maybe because at this point they weren’t getting on too well any more, and Ric was having himself a lot of women on the side.

The General’s counsel was not encouraging: “ ‘Don’t you touch that horse! That Tiu, he got some pretty highly big connections, and they all a bit too special for a crazy little spider bastard like you, hear me! Jesus Christ, who ever heard of a Swatownese give five thousand dollar to a lousy half-kwailo to improve his mind with travel!’ ”

“So you passed the deal to Ric, right?” said Jerry quickly. “Right, Charlie? You told Tiu, ‘Sorry, but try Ricardo.’ Is that how it went?”

But Charlie Marshall was missing—believed dead. He had fallen straight off Jerry’s chest and lay flat in the mud with his eyes closed, and only his occasional gulps for breath—greedy, rasping draughts of it—and the crazy beating of his pulse where Jerry held his wrist testified to the life inside the frame.

“Voltaire,” Charlie whispered. “On the Bible, Voltaire. You’re a good man. Take me home. Jesus, take me home, Voltaire.”

Stunned, Jerry stared at the prone and broken figure and knew that he had to ask one more question, even if it was the last in both their lives. Reaching down, he dragged Charlie to his feet for the last time. And there for an hour in the black road, struggling on his arm, while more aimless barrages stabbed the darkness, Charlie Marshall screamed, and begged, and swore he would love Jerry always if only he didn’t have to reveal what arrangements his friend Ricardo had made for his survival. But Jerry explained that without that, the mystery was not even half revealed. And perhaps Charlie Marshall, in his ruin and despair, as he sobbed out the forbidden secrets, understood Jerry’s reasoning: that in a city about to be given back to the jungle, there was no destruction unless it was complete.

As gently as he could, Jerry carried Charlie Marshall down the road, back to the villa and up the steps, where the same silent faces gratefully received him. I should have got more, he thought. I should have told him more as well; I didn’t tend the two-way traffic in the way they ordered. I stayed too long with the business of Lizzie and Sam Collins. I did it upside down, I foozled my shopping list, I loused it up like Lizzie. He tried to feel sorry about that but he couldn’t, and the things he remembered best were the things that weren’t on the list at all, and they were the same things that stood up in his mind like monuments while he typed his message to dear old George.

He typed with the door locked and the gun in his belt. There was no sign of Luke, so Jerry assumed he had gone off to a whore-house, still in his drunken sulk. It was a long signal, the longest of his career: “Know this much in case you don’t hear from me again.” He reported his contact with the Counsellor, he gave his next port of call and gave Ricardo’s address, and a portrait of Charlie Marshall and of the three-sided household in the flea-hut, but only in the most formal terms, and he left out entirely his new-found knowledge regarding the rôle played by the unsavoury Sam Collins. After all, if they knew it already what was the point of telling it to them again? He left out the placenames and the proper names and made a separate key of them, then spent another hour putting the two messages into a firstbase code that wouldn’t fool a cryptographer for five minutes, but was beyond the ken of ordinary mortals, and of mortals like his host the British Counsellor. He ended with a reminder to housekeepers to check whether Blatt & Rodney had made that latest money draft to Cat. He burned the en clair texts, rolled the encoded versions into a newspaper, then lay on the newspaper and dozed, the gun awkwardly at his side.

At six he shaved, transferred his signals to a paperback novel which he felt able to part with, and took himself for a walk in the morning quiet. In the place, the Counsellor’s car was parked conspicuously. The Counsellor himself was parked equally conspicuously on the terrace of a pretty bistro, wearing a Riviera straw hat reminiscent of Craw’s, and treating himself to hot croissants and café au lait. Seeing Jerry, he gave an elaborate wave.

Jerry wandered over to him: “Morning,” he said.

“Ah, you’ve got it! Good man!” the Counsellor cried, bounding to his feet. “Been longing to read it ever since it came out!”

Parting with the signal, conscious only of its omissions, Jerry had a feeling of end-of-term. He might come back, he might not, but things would never be quite the same again.

The exact circumstances of Jerry’s departure from Phnom Penh are relevant because of Luke, later.

For the first part of the morning that remained, Jerry pursued his obsessional search for cover, which was the natural antidote, perhaps, to his increasing sense of nakedness. Diligently he went on the stomp for refugee and orphan stories, which he filed through Keller at midday, together with a quite decent atmosphere piece on his visit to Battambang, which, though never used, has at least a place in his dossier. There were two refugee camps at that time, both blossoming, one in an enormous hotel on the Bassac, Sihanouk’s personal and unfinished dream of para-dise; one in the railway-yards near the airport, two or three families packed into each carriage. He visited both and they were the same: young Australian heroes struggling with the impossible, the only water filthy, a rice hand-out twice a week, and the children chirruping “Hi” and “Bye-bye” after him while he trailed his Cambodian interpreter up and down their lines, besieging everyone with questions, acting large, and looking for that extra something that would melt Stubbsie’s heart.

At a travel office he noisily booked a passage to Bangkok. Making for the airport, he had a sudden sense of déjà vu. Last time I was here, I went water-skiing, he thought. The round-eye traders kept houseboats moored along the Mekong. And for a moment he saw himself—and the city—in the days when the Cambodian war still had a certain ghastly innocence: ace operator Westerby, risking mono, bouncing boyishly over the brown water of the Mekong, towed by a jolly Dutchman in a speed launch that burned enough petrol to feed a family for a week. The greatest hazard was the two-foot wave, he remembered, which rolled down the river every time the guards on the bridge let off a depth-charge to prevent the Khmer Rouge divers from blowing it up. But now the river was theirs, so was the jungle. And so, tomorrow or the next day, was the town.

At the airport, he ditched the Walther in a rubbish bin and at the last minute bribed his way aboard a plane to Saigon, which was his destination. Taking off, he wondered who had the longer expectation of survival, himself or the city.

* * *

Luke, on the other hand, with the key to Deathwish the Hun’s flat nestling in his pocket, flew to Bangkok, and as luck had it he flew under Jerry’s name, since Jerry was on the flight list and Luke was not, and the remaining places were all taken. In Bangkok he attended a hasty bureau conference at which the magazine’s local manpower was carved up between various bits of the crumbling Vietnam front. Luke got Hué and Danang and accordingly left for Saigon next day, thence north by connecting midday plane.

Contrary to later rumour, the two men did not meet in Saigon.

Nor did they meet in the course of the northern roll-back. The last they saw of each other, in any mutual sense, was on that final evening in Phnom Penh, when Jerry had bawled Luke out and Luke had sulked: and that’s fact—a commodity which was afterwards notoriously hard to come by.

17

RICARDO

At no time in the entire case did George Smiley hold the ring with such tenacity as now. In the Circus, nerves were stretched to snapping-point. The bloody inertia and the bouts of frenzy which Sarratt habitually warned against became one and the same. Each day that brought no hard news from Hong Kong was another day of disaster. Jerry’s long signal was put under the microscope and held to be ambiguous, then neurotic.

Why had he not pressed Marshall harder? Why had he not raised the Russian spectre again? He should have grilled Charlie about the gold seam; he should have carried on where he left off with Tiu. Had he forgotten that his main job was to sow alarm and only afterwards to obtain information? As to his obsession with that wretched daughter of his—God Almighty, doesn’t the fellow know what signals cost? (They seemed to forget it was the Cousins who were footing the bill.) And what was all this about having no more to do with British Embassy officials standing proxy for the absent Circus resident? All right, there had been a delay in the pipeline in getting the signal across from the Cousins’ side of the house. Jerry had still run Charlie Marshall to earth, hadn’t he? It was absolutely no part of a fieldman’s job to dictate the “do”s and “don’t”s to London. Housekeeping Section, who had arranged the contact, wanted him rebuked by return.

Pressure from outside the Circus was even fiercer. Colonial Wilbraham’s faction had not been idle, and the Steering Group, in a startling about-turn, decided that the Governor of Hong Kong should after all be informed of the case, and soon. There was high talk of calling him back to London on a pretext. The panic had arisen because Ko had once more been received at Government House, this time at one of the Governor’s talk-in suppers, at which influential Chinese were invited to air their opinions off the record.

By contrast Saul Enderby and his fellow hard-liners pulled the opposite way: “To hell with the Governor. What we want is full partnership with the Cousins immediately!” George should go to Martello today, said Enderby, and make a clean breast of the whole case and invite them to take over the last stage of development. He should stop playing hide-and-seek about Nelson, he should admit that he had no resources, he should let the Cousins compute the possible intelligence dividend for themselves, and if they brought the job off, so much the better: let them claim the credit on Capitol Hill, to the confusion of their enemies. The result of this generous and timely gesture, Enderby argued— coming bang in the middle of the Vietnam fiasco—would be an indissoluble intelligence partnership for years to come, a view which in his shifty way Lacon seemed to support. Caught in the cross-fire, Smiley suddenly found himself saddled with a double reputation. The Wilbraham set branded him as anti-Colonial and pro-American, while Enderby’s men accused him of ultraconservatism in the handling of the special relationship.

Much more serious however was Smiley’s impression that some hint of the row had reached Martello by other routes, and that he would be able to exploit it. For example, Molly Meakin’s sources spoke of a burgeoning relationship between Enderby and Martello at the personal level, and not just because their children were all being educated at the Lycée in South Kensington. It seemed that the two men had taken to fishing together at weekends in Scotland, where Enderby had a bit of water. Martello supplied the plane, said the joke later, and Enderby supplied the fish. Smiley also learned around this time, in his unworldly way, what everyone else had known from the beginning and assumed he knew too. Enderby’s third and newest wife was American and rich. Before their marriage she had been a considerable hostess of the Washington establishment, a rôle she was now repeating with some success in London.

But the underlying cause of everybody’s agitation was finally the same. On the Ko front, nothing ultimately was happening. Worse still, there was an agonising shortage of operational intelligence. Every day now, at ten o’clock, Smiley and Guillam presented themselves at the Annexe and every day came away less satisfied. Tiu’s domestic telephone line was tapped, so was Lizzie Worthington’s. The tapes were locally monitored, then flown back to London for detailed processing. Jerry had sweated Charlie Marshall on a Wednesday. On the Friday, Charlie was sufficiently recovered from his ordeal to ring Tiu from Bangkok and pour out his heart to him. But after listening for less than thirty seconds, Tiu cut him short with an instruction to “get in touch with Harry right away,” which left everybody mystified: nobody had a Harry anywhere.

On the Saturday there was drama because the watch on Ko’s home number had him cancelling his regular Sunday-morning golf date with Mr. Arpego. Ko pleaded a pressing business engagement. This was it! This was the breakthrough! Next day, with Smiley’s consent, the Hong Kong Cousins locked a surveillance van, two cars, and a Honda on to Ko’s Rolls-Royce as it entered town. What secret mission at five-thirty on a Sunday morning was so important to Ko that he would abandon his weekly golf? The answer turned out to be his fortune-teller, a venerable old Swatownese who operated from a seedy spirit temple in a side-street off the Hollywood Road. Ko spent more than an hour with him before returning home, and though some zealous child inside the Cousins’ van trained a concealed directional microphone on the temple window for the entire session, the only sounds he recorded apart from the traffic turned out to be cluckings from the old man’s hen-house. Back at the Circus, di Salis was called in. What on earth would anyone be going to the fortune-teller at six in the morning for, least of all a millionaire?

Greatly amused by their perplexity, di Salis twirled his hair in delight. A man of Ko’s standing would insist on being the first client in a fortune-teller’s day, he said, while the great man’s mind was still clear to receive the intimations of the spirits.

Then nothing happened for five weeks. Nothing. The mail and phone checks spewed out wads of indigestible raw material which, when refined, produced not a single intelligence lead. Meanwhile the artificial deadline imposed by the Enforcement Agency drew steadily nearer, on which day Ko should become open game for whoever could pin something on him soonest.

Yet Smiley kept his head. He resisted all recriminations, both of his own handling of the case and of Jerry’s. The tree had been shaken, he maintained, Drake Ko was running scared, and time would show they were right. He refused to be hustled into some dramatic gesture to Martello, and he held resolutely to the terms of the deal that he had outlined in his letter, and of which a copy now lodged with Lacon. He also refused, as his charter allowed him, to enter into any discussion of operational detail, either with the Steering Group or with Enderby personally, except where issues of protocol or local mandate were concerned. To give way on this, he knew very well, would only have meant providing the doubters with fresh ammunition with which to shoot him down.

He held this line for five weeks, and on the thirty-sixth day, either God or the forces of logic—or better, the forces of Ko’s human chemistry—delivered to Smiley a substantial if mysterious consolation. Ko took to the water. Accompanied by Tiu and an unknown Chinese later identified as the lead captain of Ko’s junk-fleet, he spent the better part of three days touring the Hong Kong out-islands, returning each evening at dusk. Where they went, there was as yet no telling. Martello proposed a series of helicopter overflights to observe their course, but Smiley turned down the suggestion flat. Static surveillance from the quayside confirmed that they apparently left and returned by a different route each day, and that was all. And on the last day, the fourth, the boat did not return at all.

Panic. Where had it gone? Martello’s masters in Langley, Virginia, flew into a complete spin and decided that Ko and the Admiral Nelson had deliberately strayed into China waters. Even that they had been abducted. Ko would never be seen again, and Enderby, going downhill fast, actually telephoned Smiley and told him it would be “your damn fault if Ko pops up in Peking yelling the odds about Secret Service persecution.” Even Smiley, for one agonising day, secretly wondered whether, against all reason, Ko had indeed gone to join his brother.

Then of course, next morning early, the launch sailed back into the main harbour looking as if it had just returned from a regatta, and Ko gaily disembarked, following his beautiful Liese down the gangway.

It was this intelligence which, after very long thought and a renewed and detailed reading of Ko’s file—not to mention much tense debate with Connie and di Salis—determined Smiley to take two decisions at once or, in gambler’s terms, to play the only two cards that were left to him.

One: Jerry should advance to the “last stage,” by which Smiley meant Ricardo. He hoped by this step to maintain the pressure on Ko, and provide Ko, if he needed it, with the final proof that he must act.

Two: Sam Collins should “go in.”

This second decision was reached in consultation with Connie Sachs alone. It finds no mention in Jerry’s main dossier, but only in a secret appendix later released, with deletions, for wider scrutiny.

The fragmenting effect upon Jerry of these delays and hesitations was something not the greatest intelligence chief on earth could have included in his calculations. To be aware of it was one thing—and Smiley undoubtedly was, and even took one or two steps to forestall it. To be guided by it, to set it on the same plane as the factors of high policy which he was having daily fired at him, would have been downright irresponsible. A general is nothing without priorities.

The fact remains that Saigon was the worst place on earth for Jerry to be kicking his heels. Periodically, as the delays dragged on, there was talk at the Circus of sending him somewhere more salubrious—for instance, to Singapore or Kuala Lumpur—but the arguments of expediency and cover always kept him where he was; besides, tomorrow everything might change. There was also the matter of his personal safety. Hong Kong was not to be considered, and in both Singapore and Bangkok, Ko’s influence was sure to be strong. Then, cover again: with the collapse approaching, where more natural than Saigon?

Yet it was a half-life Jerry lived, and in a half-town. For forty years, give or take, war had been Saigon’s staple industry, but the American pull-out of ’73 had produced a slump from which, to the end, the city never properly recovered, so that even this longawaited final act, with its cast of millions, was playing to quite poor audiences. Even when he took his obligatory rides to the sharp end of the fighting, Jerry had a sense of watching a rainedoff cricket match where the contestants wanted only to go back to the pavilion. The Circus forbade him to leave Saigon on the grounds that he might be needed elsewhere at any moment, but the injunction, literally observed, would have made him look ridiculous, and he ignored it. Xuan Loc was a boring French rubber town fifty miles out, on what was now the city’s tactical perimeter. For this was a different war entirely from Phnom Penh’s, more technical and more European in inspiration. Where the Khmer Rouge had no armour, the North Vietnamese had Russian tanks and 130 millimetre artillery, which they drew up on the classic Russian pattern, wheel to wheel, as if they were about to storm Berlin under Marshal Zhukov, and nothing would move till the last gun was laid and primed. He found the town half deserted, and the Catholic church empty except for one French priest.

“C’est terminé,” the priest explained to him simply. The South Vietnamese would do what they always did, he said. They would stop the advance, then turn and run.

They drank wine together staring at the empty square.

Jerry filed a story saying the rot this time was irreversible, and Stubbsie shoved it on the spike with a laconic “PREFER PEOPLE TO PROPHECIES STUBBS.”

Back in Saigon, on the steps of the Hotel Caravelle, begging children peddled useless garlands of flowers. Jerry gave them money and to save them face took their flowers, then dumped them in the waste-paper basket in his room. When he sat downstairs, they tapped on the window and sold him Stars & Stripes. In the almost empty bars where he drank, the girls collected to him desperately as if he were their last chance before the end. Only the police were in their element. They stood at every corner in white helmets and fresh white gloves, as if already waiting to direct the victorious enemy traffic when it arrived. They rode like monarchs past the refugees in their bird-coops on the pavement.

Jerry returned to his hotel room and Hercule rang, his favourite Vietnamese, whom he had been avoiding for all he was worth. Hercule, as he called himself, was anti-establishment and anti-Thieu and had made a quiet living supplying British journalists with information on the Vietcong, on the questionable grounds that the British were not involved in the war. “The British are my friends!” he begged into the phone. “Get me out! I need papers, I need money!”

Jerry said, “Try the Americans,” and rang off hopelessly.

The Reuters office, when Jerry filed his stillborn copy, was a monument to forgotten heroes and the romance of failure. Under the glass desk-tops lay the photographed heads of tousled boys, on the walls famous rejection slips and samples of editorial fury; in the air a stink of old newsprint, and the Somewhere-in-England sense of makeshift habitation which enshrines the secret nostalgia of every exiled correspondent. There was a travel agent just round the corner, and later it turned out that Jerry had twice in that period booked himself passages to Hong Kong, then not appeared at the airport. He was serviced by an earnest young Cousin named Pike, who had Information cover and occasionally came to the hotel with signals in yellow envelopes marked “RUSH PRESS” for authenticity. But the message inside was the same: no decision, stand by, no decision. He read Ford Madox Ford and a truly terrible novel about old Hong Kong. He read Greene and Conrad and T. E. Lawrence, and still no word came. The shellings sounded worst at night, and the panic was everywhere, like a spreading plague. In search of Stubbsie’s people not prophecies, he went down to the American Embassy where ten thousand-odd Vietnamese were beating at the doors in an effort to prove their American citizenship. As he watched, a South Vietnamese officer rode up in a jeep, leapt out, and began yelling at the women, calling them whores and traitors—picking, as it happened, a group of bona-fide U.S. wives to bear the brunt.

Again Jerry filed and again Stubbs threw his story out, which no doubt added to his depression. A few days later the Circus planners lost their nerve. As the rout continued, and worsened, they signalled Jerry to fly at once to Vientiane and keep his head down till ordered otherwise by a Cousins’ postman. So he took a room at the Constellation, where Lizzie had liked to hang out, and he drank at the bar where Lizzie had liked to drink, and he occasionally chatted to Maurice the proprietor, and he waited. The bar was of concrete, two feet deep, so that if the need arose it could do duty as a bomb shelter or firing position. Each night in the gloomy dining room attached to it, one old colon ate and drank fastidiously, a napkin tucked into his collar. Jerry sat reading at another table. They were the only diners ever, and they never spoke. In the streets, the Pathet Lao—not long down from the hills—walked righteously in pairs and in great number, wearing Maoist caps and tunics and avoiding the glances of the girls. They had commandeered the corner villas and the villas along the road to the airport. They had camped in immaculate tents which peeked over the walls of overgrown gardens.

“Will the coalition hold?” Jerry asked Maurice once.

Maurice was not a political man. He gave a huge shrug. “It’s the way it is,” he replied in a stage French accent, and in silence handed Jerry a ballpoint pen as a consolation. It had “Löwenbräu” written on it: Maurice owned the concession for the whole of Laos, selling—it was said—several bottles a year. Jerry avoided absolutely the street that housed the Indocharter offices, just as he restrained himself from taking a look, out of curiosity, at the fleahut on the edge of town which, on Charlie Marshall’s testimony, had housed their ménage à trois. When asked, Maurice said there were very few Chinese left in town these days: “Chinese do not like,” he said with another smile, tilting his head at the Pathet Lao on the pavement outside.

There remains the mystery of the telephone transcripts. Did Jerry ring Lizzie from the Constellation, or not? And if he did ring her, did he mean to talk to her, or only to listen to her voice? And if he intended to talk to her, then what did he propose to say? Or was the very act of making the phone call—like the act of booking airline passages in Saigon—in itself sufficient catharsis to hold him back from the reality?

What is certain is that nobody—neither Smiley nor Connie nor anyone else who read the crucial transcripts—can be seriously accused of failing in their duty, for the entry was at best ambivalent:

0055 hrs HK time. Incoming overseas call, personal for subject. Operator on the line. Subject accepts call, says “hullo” several times.

Operator: “Speak up, please, caller!”

(repeated in French and ? Lao)

Subject: “Hullo? Hullo?”

Operator: “Can you hear me, caller? Speak up, please!”

(repeated in French and ? Lao)

Subject: “Hullo? Liese Worth here. Who’s calling, please?”

Call disconnected from caller’s end.

The transcript nowhere mentions Vientiane as the place of origin and it is even doubtful whether Smiley saw it, since his cryptonym does not appear in the signing panel.

Anyway, whether it was Jerry who made that call or someone else, the next day a pair of Cousins, not one, brought him his marching orders and at long long last the welcome relief of action. The bloody inertia, however many interminable weeks of it, had ended—as it happened for good.

Jerry spent the afternoon fixing himself visas and transport, and next morning at dawn he crossed the Mekong into North East Thailand, carrying his shoulder-bag and his typewriter. The long wooden ferry boat was crammed with peasants and shrieking pigs. At the shack that controlled the crossing point, he pledged himself to return to Laos by the same route. Documentation would otherwise be impossible, the officials warned him severely. If I return at all, he thought. Looking back to the receding shores of Laos, he saw an American car parked on the tow-path, and beside it two slender, stationary figures watching. The Cousins we have always with us.

On the Thai bank everything was immediately impossible. Jerry’s visa was not enough, his photographs bore no likeness, the whole area was forbidden to farangs. Ten dollars secured a revised opinion. After the visa, the car. Jerry had insisted on an English-speaking driver and the rate had been fixed accordingly, but the old man who waited for him spoke nothing but Thai, and little of that. By bawling English phrases into the nearby rice shop, Jerry finally hooked a fat supine boy who had some English and said he could drive.

A laborious contract was drawn up. The old man’s insurance did not cover another driver, and anyway it was out of date. An exhausted travel clerk issued a new policy while the boy went home to make his arrangements. The car was a clapped-out red Ford with bald tyres. Of all the ways Jerry didn’t intend to die in the next day or two, this was one of them. They haggled, Jerry put up another twenty dollars. At a garage full of chickens he watched every move of the mechanics till the new tyres were in place.

Having thus wasted an hour, they set out at a breakneck speed south-eastwards over flat farm country. The boy played “The lights are always out in Massachusetts” five times before Jerry asked for silence.

The road was tarmac but deserted. Occasionally a yellow bus came side-winding down the hill toward them, and at once the driver accelerated and stayed on the crown till the bus had yielded a foot and thundered past. Once while he was dozing, Jerry was startled by the crunch of bamboo fencing and woke in time to see a fountain of splinters lift into the sunlight just ahead of him, and a pick-up truck rolling into the ditch in slow motion. He saw the door float upward like a leaf and the flailing driver follow it through the fence and into the high grass. The boy hadn’t even slowed down, though his laughter made them swerve all over the road. Jerry shouted “Stop!” but the boy would have none of it.

“You want to get blood on your suit? You leave that to the doctors,” he advised sternly. “I look after you, okay? This very bad country here. Lot of Commies.”

“What’s your name?” said Jerry resignedly.

It was unpronounceable, so they settled on Mickey.

It was two more hours before they hit the first barrier. Jerry dozed again, rehearsing his lines. There’s always one more door you have to put your foot in, he thought. He wondered whether a day would come—for the Circus—for the comic—when the old entertainer would not be able to pull the gags any more; when just the sheer energy of bare-arsing his way over the threshold would defeat him, and he would stand there flaccid, sporting his friendly salesman’s grin while the words died in his throat. Not this time, he thought hastily. Dear God, not this time please.

They stopped, and a young monk scurried out of the trees with a wat bowl and Jerry dropped a few baht into it. Mickey opened the boot. A police sentry peered inside, then ordered Jerry out and led him and Mickey over to a captain, who sat in a shaded hut all his own. The captain took a long while to notice Jerry at all.

“He ask you American?” said Mickey.

Jerry produced his papers.

On the other side of the barrier the perfect tarmac road ran straight as a pencil over the flat scrub land.

“He says what you want here?” Mickey said.

“Business with the colonel.”

Driving on, they passed a village and a cinema. Even the latest films up here are silents, Jerry recalled. He had once done a story about them. Local actors made the voices and invented whatever plots came into their heads. He remembered John Wayne with a squeaky Thai voice, and the audience ecstatic, and the interpreter explaining to him that they were hearing an imitation of the local mayor, who was a famous queen.

They were passing forest, but the shoulders of the road had been cleared fifty yards on either side to cut the risk of ambush. Occasionally they came on sharp white lines which had nothing to do with earth-bound traffic. The road had been laid by the Americans with an eye to auxiliary landing-strips.

“You know this colonel guy?” Mickey asked.

“No,” said Jerry.

Mickey laughed in delight. “Why you want?”

Jerry didn’t bother to answer.

The second road-block came twenty miles later, in the centre of a small village given over to police. A cluster of grey trucks stood in the courtyard of the wat; four jeeps were parked beside the road-block. The village lay at a junction. At right angles to their road a yellow dust path crossed the plain and snaked into the hills on either side.

This time Jerry took the initiative, leaping from the car immediately with a merry cry of “Take me to your leader!” Their leader turned out to be a nervous young captain with the anxious frown of a man trying to keep abreast of matters beyond his learning. He sat in the police station with his pistol on the desk. The police station was temporary, Jerry noticed. Out of the window he saw the bombed ruins of what he took to be the last one.

“My colonel is a busy man,” the captain said, through Mickey the driver.

“He is also a very brave man,” Jerry said.

There was dumb show till they had established “brave.”

“He has shot many Communists,” Jerry said. “My paper wishes to write about this brave Thai colonel.”

The captain spoke for quite a while, and suddenly Mickey began hooting with laughter: “The captain say we don’t got no Commies. We only got Bangkok! Poor people up here don’t know nothing, because Bangkok don’t give them no schools, so the Commies come talk to them in the night and the Commies tell them all their sons go Moscow, learn be big doctors, so they blow up the police station.”

“Where can I find the colonel?”

“Captain say we stay here.”

“Will he ask the colonel to come to us?”

“Colonel very busy man.”

“Where is the colonel?”

“He next village.”

“What is the name of the next village?”

The driver once more collapsed with laughter. “It don’t got no name. That village all dead.”

“What was the village called before it died?”

Mickey said a name.

“Is the road open as far as this dead village?”

“Captain say military secret. That mean he don’t know.”

“Will the captain let us through to take a look?”

A long exchange followed. “Sure,” said Mickey finally. “He say we go. Okay.”

“Will the captain radio the colonel and tell him we are coming?”

“Colonel very busy man.”

“Will he radio him?”

“Sure,” said the driver, as if only a hideous farang could have made a meal of such a patently obvious detail.

They climbed back into the car. The boom lifted and they continued along the perfect tarmac road with its cleared shoulders and occasional landing marks. For twenty minutes they drove without seeing another living thing, but Jerry wasn’t consoled by the emptiness. He had heard that for every Communist guerrilla fighting with a gun in the hills, it took five in the plains to produce the rice, the ammunition, and the infrastructure, and these were the plains. They came to a dust path on their right, and the dust of it was smeared across the tarmac from recent use. Mickey swung down it, following the heavy tyre tracks, playing “The lights are always out in Massachusetts” again, and singing the words very loud, Jerry notwithstanding.

“This way the Commies think we plenty people,” he explained amid more laughter, thus making it impossible for him to object. To Jerry’s surprise he also produced a huge, long-barrelled .45 target pistol from the bag beneath his seat. Jerry ordered him sharply to shove it back where it came from. Minutes later they smelt burning, then they drove through wood-smoke, then they reached what was left of the village: clusters of cowed people, a couple of acres of burnt teak trees like a petrified forest, three jeeps, twenty-odd police, and a stocky lieutenant-colonel at their centre. Villagers and police alike were gazing at a patch of smouldering ash sixty yards across, in which a few charred beams sketched the outline of the burned houses.

The colonel watched them park and he watched them walk over. He was a fighting man. Jerry saw it immediately. He was squat and strong, and he neither smiled nor scowled. He was swarthy and greying, and he could have been Malay, except that he was thicker in the trunk. He wore parachute wings and flying wings and a couple of rows of medal ribbons. He wore battledrill and a regulation automatic in a leather holster on his right thigh, and the restraining straps hung open.

“You the newsman?” he asked Jerry in flat, military American.

“That’s right.”

The colonel turned to the driver. He said something, and Mickey walked hastily back to the car, got into it, and stayed there.

“What do you want?”

“Anybody die here?”

“Three people. I just shot them. We got thirty-eight million.” His functional American-English, all but perfect, came as a growing surprise.

“Why did you shoot them?”

“At night the C.T.s held classes here. People come from all around to hear the C.T.s.”

Communist terrorists, thought Jerry. He had an inkling it was originally a British phrase. A string of lorries was nosing down the dust path. Seeing them, the villagers began picking up their bedrolls and children. The colonel gave an order, and his men formed them into a rough file while the lorries turned round.

“We find them a better place,” the colonel said. “They start again.”

“Who did you shoot?”

“Last week two of my men got bombed. The C.T.s operated from this village.” He picked out a sullen woman at that moment clambering on the lorry and called her back so that Jerry could take a look at her. She stood with her head bowed.

“They stay in her house,” he said. “This time I shoot her husband. Next time I shoot her.”

“And the other two?” Jerry asked.

He asked because to keep asking is to stay punching, but it was Jerry, not the colonel, who was under interrogation. The colonel’s eyes were hard and appraising and held a lot in reserve. They looked at Jerry enquiringly but without anxiety.

“One of the C.T.s sleep with a girl here,” he said simply. “We’re not only the police. We’re the judge and courts as well. There’s no one else. Bangkok don’t care for a lot of public trials up here. That’s the way it is.”

The villagers had boarded the lorries. They drove away without looking back. Only the children waved over the tailboards. The jeeps followed, leaving the three of them, and the two cars, and a boy, perhaps fifteen.

“Who’s he?” said Jerry.

“He comes with us. Next year—year after, maybe—I shoot him too.”

Jerry rode in the jeep beside the colonel, who drove. The boy sat impassively in the back, murmuring yes and no while the colonel lectured him in a firm, mechanical tone. Mickey followed in the car. On the floor of the jeep, between the seat and the pedals, the colonel kept four grenades in a cardboard carton. A small machine-gun lay along the rear seat, and the colonel didn’t bother to move it for the boy. Above the driving mirror beside the votive pictures hung a postcard portrait of John Kennedy, with the legend “Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask rather what you can do for your country.” Jerry had taken his notebook out. The lecture to the boy continued.

“What are you saying to him?”

“I am explaining the principles of democracy.”

“What are they?”

“No Communism and no generals,” he replied, and laughed. At the main road they turned right, farther into the interior, Mickey following in the red Ford.

“Dealing with Bangkok is like climbing that big tree,” the colonel said to Jerry, pointing at the forest. “You climb one branch, go up a bit, change branches, the branch breaks, you go up again. Maybe one day you get to the top general. Maybe never.”

Two small kids flagged them down, and the colonel stopped to let them squeeze in beside the boy.

“I don’t do that too often,” he said with a smile. “I do that to show you I’m a nice guy. The C.T.s get to know you stop for kids, they put out kids to stop you. You got to vary yourself. That way you stay alive.”

He had turned in to forest again. They drove a few miles and let the small children out, but not the sullen boy. The trees stopped and gave way to desolate scrub land. The sky grew white, with the shadows of the hills just breaking through the mist.

“What’s he done?” Jerry asked.

“Him? He’s a C.T.,” the colonel said. “We catch him.” In the forest Jerry saw a flash of gold, but it was only a wat. “Last week one of my police turns informer to C.T. I send him on patrol, shoot him, make him a big hero. I fix the wife a pension, I buy a big flag for the body, I make a great funeral, and the village gets a bit richer. That guy’s not an informer any more. He’s a folk hero. You got to win the hearts and minds of the people.”

“No question,” Jerry agreed.

They had reached a wide dry paddy-field with two women hoeing at the centre and otherwise nothing in sight but a far hedge and rocky dune land fading into the white sky. Leaving Mickey in the Ford, Jerry and the colonel began walking across the field, the sullen boy trailing behind him.

“You British?”

“Yes.”

“I was at Washington International Police Academy,” said the colonel. “Very nice place. I studied law enforcement at Michigan State. They showed us a good time. You want to keep clear of me a little?” he asked politely as they trod meticulously over the plough. “They shoot me, not you. They shoot a farang, they get too much trouble here. They don’t want that. Nobody shoots a farang in my territory.”

They had reached the women. The colonel spoke to them, walked a distance, stopped, looked back at the sullen boy, and returned to the women and spoke to them a second time.

“What’s that about?” said Jerry.

“I ask them if there’s any C.T.s around. They tell me no. Then I think, Maybe the C.T.s want this boy back. So I go back and tell them, ‘If anything goes wrong, we shoot you women first.’ ” They had reached the hedge. The dunes lay ahead of them, overgrown with high bushes and palms like sword blades. The colonel cupped his hands and yelled until an answering call came.

“I learned that in the jungle,” he explained with another smile. “When you’re in the jungle, always call first.”

“What jungle was that?” said Jerry.

“Stand near to me now please. Smile when you speak to me. They like to see you very clear.”

They had reached a small river. Around it, a hundred or more males, some even younger than the boy, picked indifferently at the rocks with axes and spades, or humped bags of cement from one vast pile to another. A handful of armed police looked negligently on. The colonel called up the boy and spoke to him, and the boy bowed his head and the colonel boxed him sharply on the ears. The boy muttered something and the colonel hit him again, then patted him on the shoulder, whereupon like a freed but crippled bird the boy scuffled away to join the labour force.

“You write about C.T.s, you write about my dam, too,” the colonel ordered as they started their return talk. “We’re going to make this fine pasture here. They will name it after me.”

“What jungle did you fight in?” Jerry repeated.

“Laos. Very hard fighting.”

“You volunteered?”

“Sure. I got kids, need the money. I joined PARU. Heard of PARU? Police Aerial Reinforcement Unit. The Americans ran it. They got it made. I write a letter resigning from the Thai police. They put it in a drawer. If I get killed, they pull out the letter to prove I resigned before I joined PARU.”

“That where you met Ricardo?”

“Sure. Ricardo’s my friend. We fought together, shoot a lot of bad guys.”

“I want to see him,” said Jerry. “I met a girl of his in Saigon. She told me he had a place up here. I want to make him a business proposition.”

They passed the women again. The colonel waved at them but they ignored him. Jerry was watching his face but he could as soon have watched a boulder back on the dunes. The colonel climbed into the jeep. Jerry got in after him.

“I thought maybe you could take me to him. I could even make him rich for a few days.”

“This for your paper?”

“It’s private.”

“A private business proposition?” the colonel asked.

“That’s right.”

As they drove back to the road, two cement-mixer lorries came toward them and the colonel had to back to let them pass. Automatically Jerry noticed the name painted on the yellow sides. As he did so, he caught the colonel’s eye watching him. They continued toward the interior, driving as fast as the jeep would go, in order to beat anybody’s bad intentions along the way. Faithfully Mickey followed behind.

“Ricardo is my friend and this is my territory,” the colonel repeated. The statement, though familiar, was this time an entirely explicit warning. “He lives here under my protection, according to an arrangement we have made. Everybody around here knows that. The villagers know it, C.T. knows it. Nobody hurts Ricardo or I’ll shoot every C.T. on the dam.”

As they turned off the main road into the dust path again, Jerry saw the light skid marks of a small plane written on the tarmac.

“This where he lands?”

“Only in the rainy season.” The colonel continued outlining his ethical position in the matter: “If Ricardo kills you, that’s his business. One farang shoots another on my territory, that’s natural.” He could have been explaining basic arithmetic to a child. “Ricardo is my friend,” he repeated without embarrassment. “My comrade.”

“He expecting me?”

“Please pay attention to him. Captain Ricardo is sometimes a sick man.”

Tiu make a special place for him, Charlie Marshall had said, a place where only crazy people go. Tiu say to him, “You stay alive, you keep the plane, you ride shot-gun for Charlie Marshall any time you like, carry money for him, if that’s the way Charlie wants it. That’s the deal and Drake Ko don’t never break a deal,” he say. But if Ric make trouble, or if Ric louses up, or if Ric shoot his big mouth off about certain matters, Tiu and his people kill that crazy bastard so completely he don’t never know who he is.

“Why doesn’t Ric just take the plane and run for it?” Jerry had asked.

Tiu got Ric’s passport, Voltaire. Tiu buy Ric’s debts and his business enterprises and his police record. Tiu pinned about fifty tons of opium on him and Tiu got the proof all ready for the narcs for if ever he need it. Ric, he’s free to walk out any damn time he wants. They got prisons waiting for him everywhere.

The house stood on stilts at the centre of a wide dust path, with a balcony all round it and a small stream beside it and a couple of Thai girls under it, and one of them was feeding her baby while the other stirred a cook pot. Behind the house lay a flat brown field with a shed at one end big enough to house a small plane—say, a Beechcraft—and there was a silvered track of pressed grass down the field where one might recently have landed. There were no trees near the house and it stood on a small rise. It had all-round vision and broad windows not very high, which Jerry guessed had been altered to provide a wide angle of fire from inside.

Short of the house the colonel told Jerry to get out, and walked back with him to Mickey’s car. He spoke to Mickey and Mickey leapt out and unlocked the boot. The colonel reached under the car seat and pulled out the target pistol and tossed it contemptuously into the jeep. He frisked Jerry, then he frisked Mickey; then he searched the car for himself. Then he told them both to wait and climbed the steps to the first floor. The girls ignored him.

“He fine colonel,” said Mickey.

They waited.

“England rich country,” said Mickey.

“England a very poor country,” Jerry retorted as they continued to watch the house.

“Poor country, rich people,” said Mickey. He was still shaking with laughter at his own good joke as the colonel came out of the house, climbed into the jeep, and drove away.

“Wait here,” said Jerry. He walked slowly to the foot of the steps, cupped his hands to his mouth, and called upwards.

“My name’s Westerby. You may remember shooting at me in Phnom Penh a few weeks ago. I’m a poor journalist with expensive ideas.”

“What do you want, Voltaire? Somebody told me you were dead already.”

A Latin-American voice, deep and feathered, from the darkness above.

“I want to blackmail Drake Ko. I reckon that between us we could sting him for a couple of million bucks and you could buy your freedom.”

In the darkness of the trap above him Jerry saw a single gun barrel, like a Cyclopean eye, wink, then settle its gaze on him again.

“Each,” Jerry called. “Two for you, two for me. I’ve got it all worked out. With my brains and your information and Lizzie Worthington’s figure, I reckon it’s a dead cert.”

He started walking slowly up the steps. Voltaire, he thought; when it came to spreading the word, Charlie Marshall didn’t hang around. As to being dead already—give it a little time, he thought.

As Jerry climbed through the trap he moved from the dark into the light, and the Latin-American voice said, “Stay right there.” Doing as he was told, Jerry was able to look round the room, which was a mix between a small armaments museum and an American P.X. On the centre table on a tripod stood an AK-47 similar to the one Ricardo had already fired at him, and as Jerry had suspected, it covered all four approaches through the windows. But in case it didn’t, there were a couple of spares and beside each gun a decent pile of ammunition clips. Grenades lay about like fruit, in clusters of three and four, and on the hideous walnut cocktail cabinet under a plastic effigy of the Madonna lay a selection of pistols and automatics for all occasions.

There was only one room but it was large, with a low bed with japanned and lacquered ends, and Jerry had a silly moment wondering how the devil Ricardo had ever got it into his Beechcraft. There were two refrigerators and an ice-maker, and there were painfully worked oil paintings of nude Thai girls, drawn with the sort of erotic inaccuracy that usually comes with too little access to the subject. There was a filing cabinet with a Luger on it and there was a book shelf with works on company law, international taxation, and sexual technique. On the walls hung several locally carved icons of saints, the Virgin, and the Christ-child. On the floor lay a steel scaffold of a rowing-boat, with a sliding seat for improving the figure.

At the centre of all this, in much the same pose in which Jerry had first set eyes on him, sat Ricardo in a senior executive’s swivel chair, wearing his C.I.A. bracelets and a sarong and a gold cross on his handsome bare chest. His beard was a lot less full than when Jerry had seen it last, and he guessed the girls had clipped it for him. He wore no cap, and his crinkly black hair was threaded into a small gold ring at the back of his neck. He was broad-shouldered and muscular and his skin was tanned and oily and his chest was matted with hair.

He also had a bottle of Scotch at his elbow, and a jug of water, but no ice because there was no electricity for the refrigerators.

“Take off your jacket please, Voltaire,” Ricardo ordered, so Jerry did, and with a sigh Ricardo stood up, and picked an automatic from the table, and walked slowly round Jerry, studying his body while he gently probed it for weapons.

“You play tennis?” he enquired from behind him, running one hand very lightly down Jerry’s back. “Charlie said you got muscles like a gorilla.” But Ricardo did not really ask questions of anyone but himself. “I like very much tennis. I am an extremely good player. I win always. Here unfortunately I have little opportunity.”

He sat down again. “Sometimes you got to hide with the enemy to get away from your friends. I ride horses, box, shoot, I got degrees, I fly an aeroplane, I know a lot of things about life, I’m very intelligent, but, owing to unforeseen circumstances, I live in the jungle like a monkey.” The automatic lay casually in his left hand. “That what you call a paranoid, Voltaire? Somebody who think everybody his enemy?”

“I rather think it is.”

To produce the well-trodden witticism, Ricardo laid a finger to his bronzed and oiled breast: “Well, this paranoid got real enemies,” he said.

“With two million bucks,” said Jerry, still standing where Ricardo had left him, “I’m sure most of them could be eliminated.”

“Voltaire, I must tell you honestly that I regard your business proposition as crap.”

Ricardo laughed. That was to say he made a fine display of his white teeth against his newly clipped beard, and flexed his stomach muscles a little, and kept his eyes fixed dead level on Jerry’s face while he sipped his glass of whisky. He’s got a brief, thought Jerry, same as I have. If he shows up, you hear him out, Tiu had no doubt said to him. And when Ricardo had heard him out—then what?

“I definitely understood you had had an accident, Voltaire,” said Ricardo sadly and shook his head as if complaining about the poor quality of his information. “You want a drink?”

“Thanks, I’ll pour it for myself,” said Jerry. The glasses were in a cabinet, all different colours and sizes. Deliberately Jerry walked over to it and helped himself to a long pink tumbler with a dressed girl outside and a naked girl inside. He poured a couple of fingers of Scotch into it, added a little water, and sat down opposite Ricardo at the table, while Ricardo studied him with interest.

“You do exercises, weight-lifting, something?” Ricardo enquired confidingly.

“Just the odd bottle,” said Jerry.

Ricardo laughed inordinately, still examining him very closely with his flickering bedroom eyes.

“That was a very bad thing you did to little Charlie, you know that? I don’t like you to sit on my friend’s head in the darkness while he catch cold turkey. Charlie going to take a long while to recover. That’s no way to make friends with Charlie’s friends, Voltaire. They say you even been rude to Mr. Ko. Took my little Lizzie out to dinner. That true?”

“I took her out to dinner.”

“You screw her?”

Jerry didn’t answer. Ricardo gave another burst of laughter, which stopped as suddenly as it had started. He took a long draught of whisky and sighed.

“Well, I hope she’s grateful, that’s all.” Ricardo was at once a much misunderstood man. “I forgive her. Okay? You see Lizzie again, tell her I, Ricardo, forgive her. I train her. I put her on the right road. I tell her a lot of things—art, culture, politics, business, religion—I teach her how to make love, and I send her into the world. Where would she be without my connections? Where? Living in the jungle with Ricardo like a monkey. She owes me everything.

“Pygmalion—know that movie? Well, I’m the professor. I tell her some things—know what I mean?—I tell her things no man can tell her but Ricardo. Seven years in Vietnam. Two years in Laos. Four thousand dollars a month from C.I.A., and me a Catholic. You think I can’t tell her some things, a girl like that from nowhere, an English scrubber? She got a kid, you know that? Little boy in London. She walk out on him, imagine. Such a mother, huh? Worse than a whore.”

Jerry found nothing useful to say. He was looking at the two large rings side by side on the middle fingers of Ricardo’s heavy right hand, and in his memory measuring them against the twin scars on Lizzie’s chin. It was a downward blow, he decided, a right cross while she was below him. It seemed strange he hadn’t broken her jaw. Perhaps he had, and she’d had a lucky mend.

“You gone deaf, Voltaire? I said outline to me your business proposition. Without prejudice, you understand. Except I don’t believe a word of it.”

Jerry helped himself to some more whisky: “I thought maybe if you told me what it was Drake Ko wanted you to do that time you flew for him, and if Lizzie could get me alongside Ko, and we all kept our hands on the table, we’d have a good chance of taking him to the cleaners.”

Now he said it, it sounded even lamer than when he had rehearsed it, but he didn’t particularly care.

“You crazy, Voltaire. Crazy. You’re making pictures in the air.”

“Not if Ko was asking you to fly into the China mainland for him, I’m not. Ko can own the whole of Hong Kong for all I care, but if the Governor ever got to hear of that little adventure, I reckon he and Ko would stop kissing overnight. That’s for openers. There’s more.”

“What are you talking about, Voltaire? China? What nonsense is this you are telling me about the China mainland?” He shrugged his glistening shoulders and drank, smirking into his glass. “I do not read you, Voltaire. You talk through your ass. What makes you think I fly to China for Ko? Ridiculous. Laughable.”

As a liar, Jerry reckoned, Ricardo was about three leagues lower down the chart than Lizzie, which was saying quite a lot.

“My editor makes me think it, sport. My editor is a very sharp fellow. Lot of influential and knowledgeable friends. They tell him things. Now, for instance, my editor has a very good hunch that not long after you died so tragically in that air crash of yours you sold a damn great load of raw opium to a friendly American purchaser engaged in the suppression of dangerous drugs. Another hunch of his tells him it was Ko’s opium, not yours to sell at all, and that it was addressed to the China mainland. Only you decided to play the angles instead.”

He went straight on, while Ricardo’s eyes watched him over the top of his whisky glass. “Now, if that were so, and Ko’s ambition were, let us say, to reintroduce the opium habit to the mainland—slowly, but gradually creating new markets, you follow me—well, I reckon he would go a very long distance to prevent that information making the front pages of the world’s press. That’s not all either. There are other aspects altogether, for us even more lucrative.”

“What’s that, Voltaire?” Ricardo asked and continued watching him as fixedly as if he had him in the sights of his rifle. “What are these other aspects you refer to? Kindly tell me, please.”

“Well, I think I’ll hold back on that,” said Jerry with a frank smile. “I think I’ll keep it warm while you give me a little something in return.”

A girl came silently up the stairs carrying bowls of rice and lemon grass and boiled chicken. She was trim and entirely beautiful. They could hear voices from underneath the house, including Mickey’s, and the sound of the baby laughing.

“Who you got down there, Voltaire?” Ricardo asked vaguely, half waking from his reverie. “You got some damn bodyguard or something?”

“Just the driver.”

“He got guns?”

Receiving no reply, Ricardo shook his head in wonder. “You’re some crazy fellow,” he remarked, as he waved at the girl to get out. “You’re some really crazy fellow.” He handed Jerry a bowl and chopsticks. “Holy Maria. That Tiu, he’s a pretty rough guy. I’m a pretty rough guy myself. But those Chinese can be very hard people, Voltaire. You mess with a guy like Tiu, you get pretty big trouble.”

“We’ll beat them at their own game,” said Jerry. “We’ll use English lawyers. We’ll stack it so high a board of bishops couldn’t knock it down. We’ll collect witnesses. You, Charlie Marshall, whoever else knows. Give dates and times of what he said and did. We’ll show him a copy and we’ll bank the others and we’ll make a contract with him. Signed, sealed, and delivered. Legal as hell. That’s what he likes. Ko’s a very legal-minded man. I’ve been into his business affairs. I’ve seen his bank statements, his assets. The story’s pretty good as it stands. But with the other aspects I’m talking about, I reckon it’s cheap at five million. Two for you. Two for me. One for Lizzie.”

“For her, nothing.”

Ricardo was stooping over the filing cabinet. Pulling open a drawer, he began picking through the contents, studying brochures and correspondence.

“You ever been to Bali, Voltaire?”

Solemnly pulling on a pair of reading glasses, Ricardo sat at the table again and began studying the file. “I bought some land there a few years back. A deal I made. I make many deals. Walk, ride, I got a Honda seven fifty there, a girl. In Laos we kill everybody, in Vietnam we burn the whole damn countryside, so I buy this land in Bali, bit of land we don’t burn for once and a girl we don’t kill, know what I mean? Fifty acres of scrub. Here, come here.”

Peering over his shoulder, Jerry saw a planner’s mimeographed diagram of an isthmus broken into numbered building plots, and in the bottom left corner the words “Ricardo & Worthington Ltd., Dutch Antilles.”

“You come into business with me, Voltaire. We develop this thing together, okay? Build fifty houses, have one each, nice people, put Charlie Marshall out there as manager, get some girls, make a colony maybe—artists, concerts sometimes—you like music, Voltaire?”

“I need hard facts,” Jerry insisted firmly. “Dates, times, places, witnesses’ statements. When you’ve told me, I’ll trade you. I’ll explain those other aspects to you—the lucrative ones. I’ll explain the whole deal.”

“Sure,” said Ricardo distractedly, still studying the map. “We screw him. Sure we do.”

This is how they lived together, Jerry thought: with one foot in fairyland and the other in jail, bolstering each other’s fantasies, a beggars’ opera with a cast of three.

For a while now Ricardo fell in love with his sins and there was nothing Jerry could do to stop him. In Ricardo’s simple world, to talk about himself was to get to know the other person better.

So he talked about his big soul, about his great sexual potency and his concern for its continuation, but most of all he talked about the horrors of war, a subject on which he considered himself uniquely well informed.

“In Vietnam I fall in love with a girl, Voltaire. I, Ricardo, I fall in love. This is very rare and holy to me. Black hair, straight back, face like a Madonna, little tits. Each morning I stop the jeep as she walks to school, each morning she says ‘No.’ ‘Listen,’ I tell her. ‘Ricardo is not American. He is Mexican.’ She never even heard of Mexico. I go crazy, Voltaire. For weeks I, Ricardo, live like a monk. The other girls, I don’t touch them any more. Every morning. Then one day I’m in first gear already and she throws up her hand—stop! She gets in beside me. She leaves school, goes out to live in a kampong, I tell you one day the name.

“The B-52s go in and flatten the village. Some hero doesn’t read the map. Little villages, they’re like stones on the beach, each one the same. I’m in the chopper behind. Nothing’s stopping me. Charlie Marshall’s beside me and he’s screaming me I’m crazy. I don’t care. I go down, land, I find her. The whole village dead. I find her. She’s dead too, but I find her. I get back to base, the military police beat me up, I get seven weeks in solitary, lose my service stripes. Me. Ricardo.”

“You poor thing,” said Jerry, who had played these games before and hated them—disbelieved or believed them, but always hated them.

“You are right,” said Ricardo, acknowledging Jerry’s homage with a bow. “ ‘Poor’ is the correct word. They treat us like peasants. Me and Charlie, we fly everything. We were never properly rewarded. Wounded, dead, bits of bodies, dope. For nothing. Jesus, that was shooting, that war. Twice I fly into Yunnan Province. I am fearless. Totally. Even my good looks do not make me afraid for myself.”

“Counting Drake Ko’s trip,” Jerry reminded him, “you would have been there three times, wouldn’t you?”

“I train pilots for the Cambodian air force. For nothing. The Cambodian air force, Voltaire! Eighteen generals, fifty-four planes— and Ricardo. End of your time, you get the life insurance—that’s the deal. A hundred thousand U.S. Only you. Ricardo die, his next of kin get nothing—that’s the deal. Ricardo make it, he get it all. I talk to some friends from the French Foreign Legion once. They know the racket, they warn me. ‘Take care, Ricardo. Soon they send you to bad spots you can’t get out of. That way they don’t have to pay you.’ Cambodians want me to fly on half fuel. I got wing tanks and refuse. Another time they fix my hydraulics. I engineer the plane myself. That way they don’t kill me. Listen, I snap my fingers, Lizzie come back to me. Okay?”

Lunch was over.

“So how did it go with Tiu and Drake?” said Jerry. With confession, they say at Sarratt, all you have to do is tilt the stream a little.

For the first time, it seemed to Jerry, Ricardo stared at him with the full intensity of his animal stupidity.

“You confuse me, Voltaire. If I tell you too much, I have to shoot you. I’m a very talkative person, you follow me? I get lonely up here, it is my disposition always to be lonely. I like a guy, I talk to him, then I regret myself. I remember my business commitments, follow me?”

An inner stillness came over Jerry now, as Sarratt man became Sarratt recording angel with no part to play but to receive and to remember. Operationally, he knew, he stood close to journey’s end: even if the journey back was, at best, imponderable. Operationally, by any precedents he understood, muted bells of triumph should have been sounding in his awe-struck ear. But that didn’t happen. And the fact that it didn’t was an early warning to him even then, that his quest was no longer, in every respect, on all fours with that of the Sarratt bearleaders.

At first—with allowances for Ricardo’s vaunting ego—the story went much as Charlie Marshall had said it went. Tiu came to Vientiane dressed like a coolie and smelling of cat scent and asked around for the finest pilot in town, and naturally he was at once referred to Ricardo, who as it happened was resting between business commitments and available for certain specialised and highly rewarded work in the aviation field.

Unlike Charlie Marshall, Ricardo told his story with a studious directness, as if he expected to be dealing with intellects inferior to his own. Tiu introduced himself as a person with wide contacts in the aviation industry, mentioned his undefined link with Indocharter, and went over the ground he had already covered with Charlie Marshall. Finally he came to the project in hand— which is to say that, in fine Sarratt style, Tiu fed Ricardo the cover story. A certain major Bangkok trading company, with which Tiu was proud to be associated, was in the throes of an extremely legitimate deal with certain officials in a neighbouring friendly foreign country.

“I ask him, Voltaire, very seriously, ‘Mr. Tiu, maybe you just discovered the moon. I never heard yet an Asian country with a friendly foreign neighbour.’ Tiu laughed at my joke. He naturally considered it a witty contribution,” said Ricardo very seriously, in one of his strange outbreaks of business-school English.

Before consummating their profitable and legitimate deal, however, Tiu explained, in Ricardo’s language, his business associates were faced with the problem of paying off certain officials and other parties inside that friendly foreign country who had cleared away tiresome bureaucratic obstacles.

“Why was this a problem?” Ricardo had asked, not unnaturally.

Suppose, said Tiu, the country was Burma. Just suppose. In modern Burma officials were not allowed to enrich themselves, nor could they easily bank money. In such a case some other means of payment would have to be found.

Ricardo suggested gold. Tiu, said Ricardo, regretted himself: in the country he had in mind, even gold was difficult to negotiate. The currency selected in this case was therefore to be opium, he said: four hundred kilos of it. The distance was not great, the inside of a day would see Ricardo there and back; the fee was five thousand dollars, and the remaining details would be vouchsafed to him just before departure in order to avoid “a needless erosion of the memory,” as Ricardo put it, in another of those bizarre linguistic flourishes which must have formed a major part of Lizzie’s education at his hands. Upon Ricardo’s return from what Tiu was certain would be a painless and instructive flight, five thousand U.S. dollars in convenient denominations would at once be his— subject, of course, to Ricardo producing, in whatever form should prove convenient, confirmation that the consignment had reached its destination.

A receipt, for example.

Ricardo, as he described his own footwork, now showed a crude cunning in his dealings with Tiu. He told him he would think about this offer. He spoke of other pressing commitments and his ambitions to open his own airline. Then he set to work to find out who the hell Tiu was. He discovered at once that, following their interview, Tiu had returned not to Bangkok but to Hong Kong on the direct flight. He made Lizzie pump the Chiu Chow boys at Indocharter, and one of them let slip that Tiu was a big cat in China Airsea, because when he was in Bangkok he stayed in the China Airsea suite at the Erawan Hotel. By the time Tiu returned to Vientiane to hear Ricardo’s answer, Ricardo therefore knew a lot more about him—even, though he made little of it, that Tiu was right-hand man to Drake Ko.

Five thousand U.S. dollars for a one-day trip, he now told Tiu at this second interview, was either too little or too much. If the job was as soft as Tiu insisted, it was too much. If it was as totally crazy as Ricardo suspected, it was too little. Ricardo suggested a different arrangement: a “business compromise,” he said. He was suffering, he explained—in a phrase he had no doubt used often—from “a temporary problem of liquidity.” In other words (Jerry interpreting) he was broke as usual, and the creditors were at his throat. What he required immediately was a regular income, and this was best obtained by Tiu arranging for him to be taken on by Indocharter as a pilot-consultant for a year at an agreed salary of twenty-five thousand U.S. dollars.

Tiu did not seem too shocked by the idea, said Ricardo. Upstairs in the stilt-house, the room grew very quiet.

Secondly, instead of being paid five thousand dollars on delivery of the consignment, Ricardo wanted an advance of twenty thousand U.S. dollars now, with which to settle his outstanding commitments. Ten thousand would be considered earned as soon as he had delivered the opium, and the other ten thousand would be deductible “at source”—another Ricardo nom de guerre—from his Indocharter salary over the remaining months of his employment. If Tiu and his associates couldn’t manage this, Ricardo explained, then unfortunately he would have to leave town before he could make the opium delivery.

Next day, with variations, Tiu agreed to the terms. Rather than advance Ricardo twenty thousand dollars, Tiu and his associates proposed to buy Ricardo’s debts directly from his creditors. That way, he explained, they would feel more comfortable. The same day, the arrangement was sanctified—Ricardo’s religious convictions were never far away—by a formidable contract, drawn in English and signed by both parties. Ricardo—Jerry silently recorded—had just sold his soul.

“What did Lizzie think of the deal?” Jerry asked.

He shrugged his smooth shoulders. “Women,” Ricardo said. “Sure,” said Jerry, returning his knowing smile.

Ricardo’s future thus secured, he resumed a “suitable professional life-style,” as he called it. A scheme to float an all-Asian football pool claimed his attention, so did a fourteen-year-old girl in Bangkok named Rosie, whom on the strength of his Indocharter salary he periodically visited for the purpose of training her for life’s great stage.

Occasionally but not often, he flew the odd run for Indocharter, but nothing demanding: “Chiang Mai couple of times. Saigon. Couple of times into the Shans, visit Charlie Marshall’s old man, collect a little mud maybe, take him a few guns, rice, gold. Battambang maybe.”

“Where’s Lizzie meanwhile?” Jerry asked in the same easy, man-to-man tone as before.

The same contemptuous shrug: “Sitting in Vientiane. Does her knitting. Scrubs a little at the Constellation. That’s an old woman already, Voltaire. I need youth. Optimism. Energy. People who respect me. It is my nature to give. How can I give to an old woman?”

“Until?” Jerry repeated.

“Huh?”

“So when did the kissing stop?”

Misunderstanding the phrase, Ricardo looked suddenly very dangerous, and his voice dropped to a low warning: “What the hell you mean?”

Jerry soothed him with the friendliest of smiles. “How long did you draw your pay and kick around before Tiu collected on the contract?”

Six weeks, said Ricardo, recovering his composure. Maybe eight. Twice the trip was on, then cancelled. Once, it seemed, he was ordered to Chiang Mai and loafed for a couple of days till Tiu called to say the people at the other end weren’t ready. Increasingly Ricardo had the feeling he was mixed up in something deep, he said, but history, he implied, had always cast him for the great rôles of life and at least the creditors were off his back.

Ricardo broke off and once more studied Jerry closely, scratching his beard in contemplation. Finally he sighed and, pouring them both a whisky, pushed a glass across the table. Below them the perfect day was preparing its own slow death. The green trees had grown heavy; the wood-smoke from the girls’ cook pot smelt damp.

“Where you go from here, Voltaire?”

“Home,” said Jerry.

Ricardo let out a fresh burst of laughter. “You stay the night, I send you one of my girls.”

“I’ll make my own damn way, actually, sport,” Jerry said. Like fighting animals, the two men surveyed each other, and for a moment the spark of battle was very close indeed.

“You some crazy fellow, Voltaire,” Ricardo muttered.

But Sarratt man prevailed. “Then one day the trip was on, right?” Jerry said. “And nobody cancelled. Then what? Come on sport, let’s have the story.”

“Sure,” said Ricardo. “Sure, Voltaire,” and drank, still watching him. “How it happened,” he said. “Listen, I tell you how it happened, Voltaire.”

And then I’ll kill you, said his eyes.

Ricardo was in Bangkok. Rosie was being demanding. Tiu had insisted Ricardo should always be within reach, and one morning early, maybe five o’clock, a messenger arrived at their love-nest summoning him to the Erawan immediately. Ricardo was impressed by the suite. He would have wished it for himself.

“Ever seen Versailles, Voltaire? A desk so big as a B-52. This Tiu is a very different human individual to the cat-scent coolie who came to Vientiane, okay? This is a very influential person. ‘Ricardo,’ he tell me. ‘This time is for certain. This time we deliver.’ ”

Tiu’s orders were simple. In a few hours there was a commercial flight to Chiang Mai. Ricardo should take it. Rooms had been booked for him at the Hotel Rincome. He should stay the night there. Alone. No drink, no women, no society.

“ ‘You better take plenty to read, Mr. Ricardo,’ he tell me. ‘Mr. Tiu,’ I tell him. ‘You tell me where to fly. You don’t tell me where to read. Okay?’ This guy is very arrogant behind his big desk—understand me, Voltaire? I am obliged to teach him manners.”

Next morning, someone would call for Ricardo at six o’clock at his hotel announcing himself as a friend of Mr. Johnny. Ricardo should go with him.

Things went as planned. Ricardo flew to Chiang Mai, spent an abstemious night at the Rincome, and at six o’clock two Chinese, not one, called for him and drove him north for some hours till they came to a Hakka village. Leaving the car, they walked for half an hour till they reached an empty field with a hut at one end of it. Inside the hut stood “a dandy little Beechcraft,” brand new, and inside the Beechcraft sat Tiu, with a lot of maps and documents on his lap, in the seat beside the pilot’s. The rear seats had been removed to make space for the gunny bags. A couple of Chinese crushers stood off watching, and the over-all mood, Ricardo implied, was not all he would have liked.

“First I got to empty my pockets. My pockets are very personal to me, Voltaire. They are like a lady’s handbag. Mementoes. Letters. Photographs. My Madonna. They retain everything. My passport, my pilot’s licence, my money . . . even my bracelets,” he said and lifted his brown arms so that the gold links jingled.

After that, he said with a frown of disapproval, there were yet more documents to sign. Such as a power of attorney, signing over whatever bits of Ricardo’s life were left to him after his Indocharter contract. Such as various confessions to “previous technically illegal undertakings,” several of them—Ricardo asserted in considerable outrage—performed on behalf of Indocharter. One of the Chinese crushers even turned out to be a lawyer. Ricardo considered this particularly unsporting.

Only then did Tiu unveil the maps, and the instructions, which Ricardo now reproduced in a blend of his own style and Tiu’s: “ ‘You head north, Mr. Ricardo, and you keep heading north. Maybe you clip the edge off Laos, maybe you stay over the Shans, I don’t give a damn. Flying is your business, not mine. Fifty miles inside the China border you pick up the Mekong and follow it. Then you keep going north till you find a little hill town called Tienpao stuck on a tributary of that very famous river. Head due east twenty miles, you find a landing-strip—one white flare, one green—you do me a favour please. You land there. A man will be waiting for you. He speaks very lousy English, but he speaks it. Here is half one-dollar bill. This man will have the other half. Unload the opium. This man will give you a package, and certain particular instructions. The package is your receipt, Mr. Ricardo. When you return, bring it with you and obey all instructions most absolutely, including especially your place of landing. Do you understand me entirely, Mr. Ricardo?’ ”

“What kind of package?” Jerry asked.

“He don’t say and I don’t care. ‘You do that,’ he tell me, ‘and keep your big mouth shut, Mr. Ricardo, and my associates will look after you all your life like you are their son. Your children, they look after—your girls. Your girl in Bali. All your life they will be grateful men. But you screw them, or you go bigmouthing round town, they definitely kill you, Mr. Ricardo, believe me. Not tomorrow maybe, not the next day, but they definitely kill you. We got a contract, Mr. Ricardo. My associates don’t never break a contract. They are very legal men.’ I got sweat on me, Voltaire. I am in perfect condition, a fine athlete, but I sweat. ‘Don’t you worry, Mr. Tiu,’ I tell him. ‘Mr. Tiu, sir. Any time you want to fly opium into Red China, Ricardo’s your man.’ Voltaire, believe me, I was very concerned.”

Ricardo squeezed his nose as if it were smarting with sea water.

“Hear this, Voltaire. Listen most attentively. When I was young and crazy, I flew twice into Yunnan Province for the Americans. To be a hero, one must do certain crazy things, and if you crash, maybe one day they get you out. But each time I flew, I look down at the lousy brown earth and I see Ricardo in a wood cage. No women, extremely lousy food, no place to sit, no place to stand or sleep, chains on my arms, no status or position assured to me. ‘See the imperialist spy and running dog.’ Voltaire, I do not like this vision. To be locked all my life in China for running opium? I am not enthusiastic. ‘Sure, Mr. Tiu! Bye-bye! See you this afternoon!’ I have to consider most seriously.”

The brown haze of the sinking sun suddenly filled the room. On Ricardo’s chest, despite the perfection of his condition, the same sweat had gathered. It lay in beads over the matted black hair and on his oiled shoulders.

“Where was Lizzie in all this?” Jerry asked again.

Ricardo’s answer was nervous and already angry. “In Vientiane! On the moon! In bed with Charlie! What the hell do I care?”

“Did she know of the deal with Tiu?”

Ricardo gave only a scowl of contempt.

Time to go, Jerry thought. Time to light the last fuse and run. Below, Mickey was making a great hit with Ricardo’s women. Jerry could hear his singsong chattering, broken by their highpitched laughter, like the laughter of a whole class at girls’ school.

“So away you flew,” he said. He waited, but Ricardo remained lost in thought.

“You took off and headed north,” Jerry said.

Lifting his eyes a little, Ricardo held Jerry in a bullish, furious stare, till the invitation to describe his own heroic feat finally got the better of him.

“I never flew so good in my life. Never. I was magnificent. That little black Beechcraft. North a hundred miles because I don’t trust nobody. Maybe those clowns have got me locked on a radar screen somewhere? I don’t take no chances. Then east, but very slowly, very low over the mountains, Voltaire. I fly between the cow’s legs, okay? In the war we have little landingstrips up there, crazy listening places in the middle of badland. I flew those places, Voltaire. I know them. I find one right at the top of a mountain, you can reach it only from the air. I take a look, I see the fuel dump, I land, I refuel, I take a sleep, it’s crazy. But Jesus, Voltaire, it’s not Yunnan Province, okay? It’s not China—and Ricardo, the American war criminal and opium smuggler, is not going to spend the rest of his life hanging from a hen-hook in Peking, okay? Listen, I brought that plane back south again. I know places, I know places I could lose a whole air force, believe me.”

Ricardo became suddenly very vague about the next few months of his life. He had heard of the Flying Dutchman, and he said that was what he became; he flew, hid again, flew, resprayed the Beechcraft, changed the registration once a month, sold the opium in small lots in order not to be conspicuous, a kilo here, fifty there, bought a Spanish passport from an Indian but had no faith in it, kept away from everyone he knew, including Rosie in Bangkok, and even Charlie Marshall. It was also the time, Jerry remembered from his briefing by old Craw, when Ricardo sold Ko’s opium to the Enforcement heroes but got the cold shoulder on his story. On Tiu’s orders, said Ricardo, the Indocharter boys had been quick to post him dead, and changed his flight route southwards to distract attention. Ricardo heard of this and did not object to being dead.

“What did you do about Lizzie?” Jerry asked.

Again Ricardo flared. “Lizzie, Lizzie! You got some fixation about that scrubber, Voltaire, that you throw Lizzie in my face all the time? I never knew a woman so irrelevant. Listen, I give her to Drake Ko, okay? I make her fortune.”

Seizing his whisky glass, he drank from it, still glowering.

She was lobbying for him, Jerry thought. She and Charlie Marshall. Plodding the pavements trying to buy Ricardo’s neck for him.

“You referred boastingly to other lucrative aspects of the case,” Ricardo said in a peremptory resumption of his business-school English. “Kindly advise me what they are, Voltaire.”

Sarratt man had this part off pat. “Number one: Ko was being paid large sums by the Russian Embassy in Vientiane. The money was syphoned through Indocharter and ended up in a slush account in Hong Kong. We’ve got the proof. We’ve got photostats of the bank statements.”

Ricardo pulled a face as if his whisky didn’t taste right, then went on drinking.

“Whether the money was for reviving the opium habit in Red China or for some other service, we don’t yet know,” said Jerry. “But we will. Point two. Do you want to hear it or am I keeping you awake?”

Ricardo had yawned.

“Point two,” Jerry continued. “Ko has a younger brother in Red China. Used to be called Nelson. Ko pretends he’s dead but he’s a big beef with the Peking administration. Ko’s been trying to get him out for years. Your job was to take in opium and bring out a package. The package was brother Nelson. That’s why Ko was going to love you like his own son if you brought him back. And that’s why he was going to kill you if you didn’t. If that’s not a five-million-dollar touch, what is?”

Nothing much happened to Ricardo as Jerry watched him in the failing light, except that the slumbering animal in him visibly woke. To set down his glass, he leaned forward slowly, but he couldn’t conceal the tautness of his shoulders or the knotting of the muscles of his stomach. To flash a smile of exceptional good will at Jerry, he turned quite languidly, but his eyes had a brightness that was like a signal to attack. So that when he reached out and patted Jerry’s cheek affectionately with his right hand, Jerry was quite ready to fall straight back with it if necessary, on the off chance he would manage to throw Ricardo across the room.

“Five million bucks, Voltaire!” Ricardo exclaimed with steelybright excitement. “Five million! Listen—we got to do something for poor old Charlie Marshall, okay? For love. Charlie’s always broke. Maybe we put him in charge of the football pool once. Wait a minute. I get some more Scotch, we celebrate.” He stood up, his head tilted to one side; he held out his naked arms. “Voltaire,” he said softly. “Voltaire!” Affectionately, he took Jerry by the cheeks and kissed him. “Listen, that’s some research you guys did! That’s some pretty smart editor you work for. You be my business partner. Like you say. Okay? I need an Englishman in my life. I got to be like Lizzie once, marry a schoolmaster. You do that for Ricardo, Voltaire? You hold me down a little?”

“No problem,” said Jerry, smiling back.

“You play with the guns a minute, okay?”

“Sure.”

“I got to tell those girls some little thing.”

“Sure.”

“Personal family thing.”

“I’ll be here.”

From the top of the trap Jerry looked urgently down after him. Mickey, the driver, was dandling the baby on his arm, chucking it under the ear. In a mad world you keep the fiction going, he thought; stick to it till the bitter end and leave the first bite to him. Returning to the table, Jerry took Ricardo’s pencil and his pad of paper and wrote out a non-existent address in Hong Kong where he could be reached at any time. Ricardo had still not returned, but when Jerry stood he saw him coming out of the trees behind the car. He likes contracts, he thought; give him something to sign. He took a fresh sheet of paper. “I, Jerry Westerby, do solemnly swear to share with my friend Captain Tiny Ricardo all proceeds relating to our joint exploitation of his life story,” he wrote, and signed his name.

Ricardo was coming up the steps. Jerry thought of helping himself from the private armoury, but he guessed Ricardo was waiting for him to do just that. While Ricardo poured more whisky, Jerry handed him the two sheets of paper.

“I’ll draft a legal deposition,” he said, looking straight into Ricardo’s burning eyes. “I have an English lawyer in Bangkok whom I trust entirely. I’ll have him check it over and bring it back to you to sign. After that we’ll plan the march route and I’ll talk to Lizzie. Okay?”

“Sure. Listen, it’s dark out there. They got a lot of bad guys in that forest. You stay the night. I talk to the girls. They like you. They say you very strong man. Not so strong as me, but strong.”

Jerry said something about not wasting time. He’d like to make Bangkok by tomorrow, he said. To himself he sounded as lame as a three-legged mule—good enough to get in maybe, but never to get out. But Ricardo seemed content to the point of serenity. Maybe it’s the ambush deal, thought Jerry, something the colonel is arranging.

“Go well, horse-writer. Go well, my friend.”

Ricardo put both hands on the back of Jerry’s neck and let his thumb-prints settle into Jerry’s jaw, then drew Jerry’s head forward for another kiss, and Jerry let it happen. Though his heart thumped and his wet spine felt sore against his shirt, Jerry let it happen.

Outside it was half dark. Ricardo did not see them to the car but watched them indulgently from under the stilts, the girls sitting at his feet, while he waved with both naked arms.

From the car Jerry turned and waved back. The last sun lay dying in the teak trees. My last ever, he thought.

“Don’t start the engine,” he told Mickey quietly. “I want to check the oil.”

Perhaps it’s just me who’s mad. Perhaps I really got myself a deal, he thought.

Sitting in the driver’s seat, Mickey released the catch and Jerry pulled up the bonnet but there was no little plastic, no leavingpresent from his new friend and partner. He pulled up the dipstick and pretended to read it.

“You want oil, horse-writer?” Ricardo yelled down the dust path.

“No, we’re all right. So long!”

“So long.”

He had no torch, but when he crouched and groped under the chassis in the gloom, he again found nothing.

“You lost something, horse-writer?” Ricardo called again, cupping his hands to his mouth.

“Start the engine,” Jerry said and got into the car.

“Lights on, Mister?”

“Yes, Mickey. Lights on.”

“Why he call you horse-writer?”

“Mutual friends.”

If Ricardo has tipped off the C.T.s, thought Jerry, it won’t make any damn difference either way. Mickey put on the lights, and inside the car the American dashboard lit up like a small city.

“Let’s go,” said Jerry.

“Quick-quick?”

“Yes, quick-quick.”

They drove five miles, seven, nine. Jerry was watching them on the indicator, reckoning twenty to the first check-point and forty-five to the second. Mickey had hit seventy and Jerry was in no mood to complain. They were on the crown of the road and the road was straight, and beyond the ambush strips the tall teaks slid past them like orange ghosts.

“Fine man,” Mickey said. “He plenty fine lover. Those girls say he some pretty fine lover.”

“Watch for wires,” Jerry said.

On the right the trees broke and a red dust track disappeared into the cleft.

“He get pretty good time in there,” said Mickey. “Girls, he get kids, he get whisky. He get real good time.”

“Pull in, Mickey. Stop the car. Here in the middle of the road where it’s level. Just do it, Mickey.”

Mickey began laughing.

“Girls get good time, too,” Mickey said. “Girls get candy, little baby get candy, everybody get candy!”

“Stop the damn car!”

At his own leisurely pace, Mickey brought the car to a halt, still giggling about the girls.

“Is that thing accurate?” Jerry asked, his finger pressed to the petrol gauge.

“Accurate?” Mickey echoed, puzzled by the English.

“Petrol. Gas. Full? Or half full? Or three-quarters? Has it been reading right on the journey?”

“Sure. He right.”

“When we arrived at the burnt village, Mickey, you had halffull gas. You still have halffull gas.”

“Sure.”

“You put any in? From a can? You fill car?”

“No.”

“Get out.”

Mickey began protesting, but Jerry leaned across him, opened his door, shoved Mickey straight through it onto the tarmac, and followed him. Seizing Mickey’s arm, he jammed it into his back and frog-marched him at a gallop across the road to the edge of the wide soft shoulder and twenty yards into it, then threw him into the scrub and fell half beside him, half onto him, so that the wind went out of Mickey’s stomach in a single astonished hiccup, and it took him all of half a minute before he was able to give vent to an indignant “Why for?”

But Jerry by that time was pushing his face into the earth to keep it out of the blast.

The old Ford seemed to burn first and explode afterwards, finally lifting into the air in one last assertion of life, before collapsing dead and flaming on its side. While Mickey gasped in admiration, Jerry looked at his watch. Eighteen minutes since they had left the stilt house. Maybe twenty. Should have happened sooner, he thought. Not surprising Ricardo was keen for us to go. At Sarratt they wouldn’t even have seen it coming; this was an Eastern treat, and Sarratt’s natural soul was with Europe and the good old days of the cold war—Czecho, Berlin, and the old fronts. Jerry wondered which brand of grenade it was. The Vietcong preferred the American type; they loved its double action. All you needed, they said, was a wide throat to the petrol tank. You took out the pin, you put an elastic band over the spring, you slipped the grenade into the petrol tank, and you waited patiently for the petrol to eat its way through the rubber. The result was one of those Western inventions it took the Vietcong to discover. Ricardo must have used fat elastic bands, he decided.

They made the first check-point in four hours, walking on the road. Mickey was extremely happy about the insurance situation, assuming that since Jerry had paid the premium, the money was automatically theirs to squander. Jerry could not deter him from this view. But Mickey was also scared: first of C.T.s, then of ghosts, then of the colonel. So Jerry explained to him that neither the ghosts nor the C.T.s would venture near the road after that little episode. As for the colonel—though Jerry didn’t mention this to Mickey—well, he was a father and a soldier and he had a dam to build. Not for nothing was he building it with Drake Ko’s cement and China Airsea’s transport.

At the check-point they eventually found a truck to take Mickey home. Riding with him a distance, Jerry promised the comic’s support in any insurance haggle, but Mickey in his euphoria was deaf to doubts. Amid much laughter they exchanged addresses and many hearty handshakes; then Jerry dropped off at a roadside café to wait half a day for the bus that would carry him eastwards toward a fresh field of war.

Need Jerry have ever gone to Ricardo in the first place? Would the outcome, for himself, have been different if he had not? Or did Jerry, as Smiley’s defenders to this day insist, by his pass at Ricardo, supply the last crucial heave which shook the tree and caused the coveted fruit to fall?

For the George Smiley Supporters’ Club there is no question: the visit to Ricardo was the final straw, and Ko’s back broke under it. Without it he might have gone on dithering until the open season started, by which time Ko himself, and the intelligence on him, would be up for grabs. End of argument. And on the face of it, the facts demonstrate a wonderful causality. For this is what happened.

A mere six hours after Jerry and his driver Mickey had picked themselves out of the dust of that roadside in North East Thailand, the whole of the Circus fifth floor exploded into a blaze of ecstatic jubilation which would have outshone the pyre of Mickey’s borrowed Ford car any night. In the rumpus room, where Smiley announced the news, Doc di Salis actually danced a stiff little jig, and Connie would unquestionably have joined him if her arthritis had not held her to that wretched chair. Trot howled, Guillam and Molly embraced, and only Smiley amid so much revelry preserved his usual slightly startled air, though Molly swore she saw him redden as he blinked around the company.

He had just had word, he said. A flash communication from the Cousins. At seven this morning, Hong Kong time, Tiu had telephoned Ko at Star Heights, where he had been spending the night relaxing with Lizzie Worth. Lizzie herself took the call in the first instance, but Ko came in on the extension and sharply ordered Lizzie to ring off, which she did. Tiu had proposed breakfast in town at once: “At George’s place,” said Tiu, to the great entertainment of the transcribers. Three hours later Tiu was on the phone to his travel agent making hasty plans for a business trip to mainland China. His first stop would be Canton, where China Airsea kept a representative, but his ultimate destination was Shanghai.

So how did Ricardo get through to Tiu so fast without the telephone? The most likely theory is the colonel’s police link to Bangkok. And from Bangkok? Heaven knows. Trade telex, the exchange-rate network—anything is possible. The Chinese have their own ways of doing these things.

On the other hand, it may just be that Ko’s patience chose this moment to snap of its own accord, and that the breakfast at George’s place was about something entirely different. Either way, it was the breakthrough they had all been dreaming of, the triumphant vindication of Smiley’s footwork. By lunch-time Lacon had called in person to offer his congratulations, and by early evening Saul Enderby had made a gesture nobody from the wrong side of Trafalgar Square had ever made before. He had sent round a crate of champagne from Berry Brothers & Rudd, a vintage Krug, a real beauty. Attached to it was a note to George saying “To the first day of summer.” And indeed, though late April, it seemed to be just that. Through the thick net curtains of the lower floors, the plane trees were already in leaf. Higher up a cluster of hyacinths had bloomed in Connie’s window-box. “Red,” she said as she drank Saul Enderby’s health. “Karla’s favourite colour, bless him.”

18

THE RIVER BEND

The air base was neither beautiful nor victorious. Technically— since it was in North East Thailand—it was under Thai command, and in practice the Thais were allowed to collect the garbage and occupy the stockade close to the perimeter. The check-point was a separate town. Amid smells of charcoal, urine, pickled fish, and Calor gas, chains of collapsing tin hovels plied the historic trades of military occupation. The brothels were manned by crippled pimps, the tailor shops offered wedding tuxedos, the bookshops offered pornography and travel, the bars were called Sunset Strip, Hawaii, and Lucky Time. At the M.P. hut, Jerry asked for Captain Urquhart of public relations, and the black sergeant squared to throw him out when he said he was press. On the base telephone Jerry heard a lot of clicking and popping before a slow Southern voice said, “Urquhart isn’t around just now. My name is Masters. Who’s this again?”

“We met last summer at General Crosse’s briefing,” Jerry said.

A long silence followed, presumably while the code words “Urquhart” and “Crosse” were hunted down in the contingency book.

“Well now, so we did, man,” said the same amazingly slow voice, reminding him of Deathwish. “Pay off your cab. Be right down. Blue jeep. Wait for the whites of its eyes.”

A flow of air-force personnel was drifting in and out of the camp, blacks and whites, in scowling segregated groups. A white officer passed. The blacks gave him the black-power salute. The officer warily returned it. The enlisted men wore Charlie Marshall-style patches on their uniforms, mostly in praise of drugs. The mood was sullen, defeated, and innately violent. The Thai troops greeted nobody. Nobody greeted the Thais.

A blue jeep with lights flashing and siren wailing pulled up with a ferocious skid on the other side of the boom. The sergeant waved Jerry through. A moment later he was careering over the runway at breakneck speed toward a long string of low white huts at the centre of the airfield. His driver was a lanky boy with all the signs of a probationer.

“You Masters?” Jerry asked.

“No, sir. Sir, I just carry the Major’s bags,” he said.

They passed a ragged baseball game, siren wailing all the time, lights still flashing.

“Great cover,” said Jerry.

“What’s that, sir?” the boy yelled above the din.

“Forget it.”

It was not the biggest base. Jerry had seen larger. They passed lines of Phantoms and helicopters, and as they approached the white huts he realised that they comprised a separate spook encampment, with their own compound and aerial masts and their own cluster of little black-painted small planes—“weirdos,” they used to be called—which before the pull-out had dropped and collected God knew whom in God knew where.

They entered by a side door which the boy unlocked. The short corridor was empty and soundless. A door stood ajar at the end of it, made of traditional fake rosewood. Masters wore a short-sleeved air-force uniform with few insignia. He had medals and the rank of major and Jerry guessed he was the paramilitary type of Cousin, maybe not even career. He was sallow and wiry, with resentful tight lips and hollow cheeks. He stood before a fake fireplace, under an Andrew Wyeth reproduction, and there was something strangely still about him, and disconnected. He was like a man being deliberately slow when everyone else was in a hurry. The boy made the introductions and hesitated. Masters stared at him until he left, then turned his colourless gaze to the table where the coffee was.

“Look like you need breakfast,” Masters said. He poured coffee and proffered a plate of doughnuts, all in slow motion.

“Facilities,” he said.

“Facilities,” Jerry agreed.

An electric typewriter lay on the desk, and plain paper beside it. Masters walked stiffly to a chair and perched on the arm. Taking up a copy of Stars & Stripes, he held it in front of him while Jerry settled at the desk.

“Hear you’re going to win it all back for us single-handed,” said Masters to his Stars & Stripes. “Well now.”

Jerry set up his portable in preference to the electric, and stabbed out his report in a series of quick smacks, which to his own ear grew louder as he laboured. Perhaps to Masters’s ear also, for he looked up frequently, though only as far as Jerry’s hands and the toy-town portable.

Jerry handed him his copy.

“Your orders are to remain here,” Masters said, articulating each word with great deliberation. “Your orders are to remain here while we dispatch your signal. Man, will we dispatch that signal. Your orders are to stand by for confirmation and further instructions. That figure? Does that figure, sir?”

“Sure,” said Jerry.

“Heard the glad news by any chance?” Masters enquired. They were facing each other. Not three feet lay between them. Masters was staring at Jerry’s signal, but his eyes did not appear to be scanning the lines.

“What news is that, sport?”

“We just lost the war, Mr. Westerby. Yes, sir. Last of the brave just had themselves scraped off the roof of the Saigon Embassy by chopper, like a bunch of rookies caught with their pants down in a whore-house. Maybe that doesn’t affect you. Ambassador’s dog survived, you’ll be relieved to hear. Newsman took it out on his damn lap. Maybe that doesn’t affect you either. Maybe you’re not a dog-lover. Maybe you feel about dogs the same way I personally feel about newsmen, Mr. Westerby, sir.”

Jerry had caught the smell of brandy on Masters’s breath, which no amount of coffee could conceal, and he guessed he had been drinking for a long time without succeeding in getting drunk.

“Mr. Westerby, sir?”

“Yes, old boy.”

Masters held out his hand. “Old boy, I want you to shake me by the hand.”

The hand stuck between them, thumb upward.

“What for?” said Jerry.

“I want you to extend to me the hand of welcome, sir. The United States of America has just applied to join the club of second-class powers, of which I understand your own fine nation to be chairman, president, and oldest member. Shake it!”

“Proud to have you aboard,” said Jerry and obligingly shook the Major’s hand.

He was at once rewarded by a brilliant smile of false gratitude.

“Why, sir, I call that real handsome of you, Mr. Westerby. Anything we can do to make your stay with us more comfortable, I invite you to let me know. If you want to rent the place, no reasonable offer refused, we say.”

“You could shove a little Scotch through the bars,” Jerry said, pulling a dead grin.

“Mah pleasure,” said Masters, in a drawl so long it was like a slow punch. “Man after my own heart. Yes, sir.”

Masters left him with a half-bottle of J & B from the cupboard, and some back numbers of Playboy.

“We keep these handy for English gentlemen who didn’t see fit to lift a damn finger to help us,” he explained confidingly.

“Very thoughtful of you,” said Jerry.

“I’ll go send your letter home to Mummy. How is the Queen, by the way?”

Masters didn’t turn a key, but when Jerry tested the door handle it was locked. The windows overlooking the airfield were smoked and double glazed. On the runway aircraft landed and took off without making a sound. This is how they tried to win, Jerry thought: from inside sound-proof rooms, through smoked glass, using machines at arm’s length. This is how they lost. He drank, feeling nothing. . . . Waiting. So it’s over, he thought, and that was all. So what was his next stop? Charlie Marshall’s old man? Little swing through the Shans, heart-to-heart chat with the General’s bodyguard? He waited, his thoughts crowding formlessly. He sat down, then lay on the sofa and for a while slept. He woke abruptly to the sound of canned music occasionally interrupted by an announcement of homely-wise assurance. Would Captain somebody do so and so? Once the speaker offered higher education. Once cut-price washing-machines. Once prayer. Jerry prowled the room, made nervous by the crematorium quiet and the music.

He crossed to the other window, and in his mind Lizzie’s face bobbed along at his shoulder, the way the orphan’s once had, but no longer. He drank more whisky. I should have slept in the truck, he thought. Altogether I should sleep more. So they’ve lost the war at last. It seemed a long time since he’d slept the way he’d like to. Old Frostie had rather put an end to that. His hand was shaking: Christ, look at that. He thought of Luke. Time we went on a bender together. He must be back by now, if he hasn’t had his arse shot off. Got to stop the old brain a bit, he thought. But sometimes the old brain hunted on its own these days. Bit too much, actually. Got to tie it down, he told himself sternly. Man.

He thought of Ricardo’s grenades. Hurry up, he thought. Come on, let’s have a decision. Where next? Who now? No whys. His face was dry and hot, and his hands moist. He had a headache just above the eyes. Bloody music, he thought. Bloody, bloody end-of-world music. He was casting round urgently for somewhere to switch it off when he saw Masters standing in the doorway, an envelope in his hand and nothing in his eyes. Jerry read the signal. Masters settled on the chair arm again.

“ ‘Son, come home,’ ” Masters intoned, mocking his own Southern drawl. “ ‘Come directly home. Do not pass go. Do not collect two hundred dollars.’ The Cousins will fly you to Bangkok. From Bangkok you will proceed immediately to London, England, not repeat not London, Ontario, by a flight of your own choosing. You will on no account return to Hong Kong. You will not! No sir! Mission accomplished, son. Thank you and well done. Her Majesty is so thrilled. So hurry home to dinner, we got hominy grits and turkey, and blueberry pie. Sounds like a bunch of fairies you’re working for, man.”

Jerry read the signal a second time.

“Plane leaves for Bangkok one one hundred,” Masters said. He wore his watch on the inside of his wrist, so that its information was private to himself. “Hear me?”

Jerry grinned. “Sorry, sport. Slow reader. Thanks. Too many big words. Lot to get the old mind round. Look, left my things at the hotel.”

“My houseboys are at your royal command.”

“Thanks, but if you don’t mind, I’d prefer to avoid the official connection.”

“Please yourself, sir, please yourself.”

“I’ll find a cab at the gates. There and back in an hour. Thanks,” he repeated.

“Thank you.”

Sarratt man provided a smart piece of tradecraft for the kissoff. “Mind if I leave that there?” he asked, nodding to his scruffy portable where it lay beside Masters’s golf-ball I.B.M.

“Sir, it shall be our most treasured possession.”

If Masters had bothered to look at him at that moment, he might have hesitated when he saw the purposeful brightness in Jerry’s eye. If he had known Jerry’s voice better perhaps, or noticed its particularly friendly huskiness, he might also have hesitated. If he had seen the way Jerry clawed at his forelock, arm across his body in an attitude of instinctive self-concealment, or responded to Jerry’s sheepish grin of thanks as the probationer returned to drive him to the gates in the blue jeep—well, again he might have had his doubts. But Major Masters was not only an embittered professional with a lot of disillusionment to his credit. He was a Southern gentleman suffering the stab of defeat at the hands of unintelligible savages; and he hadn’t too much time just then for the contortions of a bone-weary overdue Brit using his expiring spookhouse as a post office.

A mood of festivity attended the leavetaking of the Circus’s Hong Kong operations party, and it was only enriched by the secrecy of the arrangements. The news of Jerry’s reappearance triggered it. The content of his signal intensified it and coincided with word from the Cousins that Drake Ko had cancelled all his social and business engagements and withdrawn to the seclusion of his house, Seven Gates, in Headland Road. A photograph of Ko, taken in long shot from the Cousins’ surveillance van, showed him in quarter-profile, standing in his own large garden, at the end of an arbour of rose-trees, staring out to sea. The concrete junk was not visible, but he was wearing his floppy beret.

“Like a latter-day Jay Gatsby, my dear!” Connie Sachs cried in delight as they all pored over it. “Mooning at the blasted light at the end of the pier, or whatever the ninny did!”

When the van returned that way two hours later, Ko was in the identical pose, so they didn’t bother to re-shoot. More significant was the fact that Ko had ceased to use the telephone altogether—or at least those lines on which the Cousins ran a tap.

Sam Collins also sent a report, the third in a stream, but by far his longest to date. As usual it arrived in a special cover addressed to Smiley personally, and as usual he discussed its contents with nobody but Connie Sachs. And at the very moment when the party was leaving for London Airport, a last-minute message from Martello advised them that Tiu had returned from China and was at present closeted with Ko in Headland Road.

But the most important ceremony, then and later in Guillam’s recollection, and the most disturbing, was a small war party held in Martello’s rooms in the Annexe, which, exceptionally, was attended not only by the usual quintet of Martello, his two quiet men, Smiley, and Guillam, but also by Lacon and Saul Enderby as well, who significantly arrived in the same official car. The purpose of the ceremony—called by Smiley—was the formal handing over of the keys. Martello was now to receive a complete portrait of the Dolphin case, including the all-important link with Nelson. He was to be indoctrinated, with certain minor omissions which only showed up later, as a full partner in the enterprise.

How Lacon and Enderby muscled in on the occasion, Guillam never quite knew and Smiley was afterwards understandably reticent about it. Enderby declared in a fat voice that he had come along in the “interest of good order and military discipline.” Lacon looked more than usually wan and disdainful. Guillam had the strongest impression they were up to something, and this was further strengthened by his observation of the interplay between Enderby and Martello: in short, these buddies cut each other so dead they put Guillam in mind of two secret lovers meeting at communal breakfast in a country house, a situation in which he often found himself.

It was the scale of the thing, Enderby explained at one point. Case was blowing up so big he really thought there ought to be a few official flies on the wall. It was the Colonial lobby, he explained at another. Wilbraham was raising a stink with Treasury.

“All right, so we’ve heard the dirt,” said Enderby, when Smiley had finished his lengthy summary and Martello’s praises had all but brought the roof down. “Now whose finger’s on the trigger, George, point one?” he demanded to know, and after that the meeting became very much Enderby’s show, as meetings with Enderby usually did. “Who calls the shots when it gets hot? You, George? Still? I mean you’ve done a good planning job, I grant you, but it’s old Marty here who’s providing the artillery, isn’t it?”

At which Martello had another bout of deafness, while he beamed upon all the great and lovely British people he was privileged to be associated with, and let Enderby go on doing his hatchet-work for him.

“Marty, how do you see this one?” Enderby pressed, as if he really had no idea; as if he never went fishing with Martello, or gave lavish dinners for him, or discussed top-secret matters out of school.

A strange insight came to Guillam at this moment, though he kicked himself afterwards for making too little of it. Martello knew. The revelations about Nelson, which Martello had affected to be dazzled by, were not revelations at all, but restatements of information that he and his quiet men already possessed. Guillam read it in their pale, wooden faces and their watchful eyes. He read it in Martello’s fulsomeness. Martello knew.

“Ah, technically this is George’s show, Saul,” Martello reminded Enderby loyally, in answer to his question, but with just enough spin on the “technically” to put the rest in doubt. “George is on the bridge, Saul. We’re just there to stoke the engines.”

Enderby staged an unhappy frown and shoved a matchstick between his teeth. “George, how does that grab you? You content to let that happen, are you? Let Marty chuck in the cover, the accommodation out there, communications, all the cloak-anddagger stuff, surveillance, charging round Hong Kong and whatnot? While you call the shots? Bit like wearing someone else’s dinner-jacket, I’d have thought.”

Smiley was firm enough but, to Guillam’s eye, a deal too concerned with the question and not nearly concerned enough with the thinly veiled collusion.

“Not at all,” said Smiley. “Martello and I have a clear understanding. The spearhead of the operation will be shared by ourselves. If supportive action is required, Martello will supply it. The product is then halved. If one is thinking in terms of a dividend for the American investment, it comes with the partition of the product. The responsibility for obtaining it remains ours.” He ended strongly: “The letter of agreement setting all this out has of course long been on file.”

Enderby glanced at Lacon. “Oliver, you said you’d send me that. Where is it?”

Lacon put his long head on one side and pulled a dreary smile at nothing in particular. “Kicking around your Third Room, I should think, Saul.”

Enderby tried another tack: “And you two guys can see the deal holding up in all contingencies, can you? I mean, who’s handling the safe houses, all that? Burying the body sort of thing?”

Smiley again: “Housekeeping Section has already rented a cottage in the country, and is preparing it for occupation,” he said stolidly.

Enderby took the wet matchstick from his mouth and broke it into the ashtray. “Could have had my place if you’d asked,” he muttered absently. “Bags of room. Nobody ever there. Staff. Everything.” But he went on worrying at his theme. “Look here. Answer me this one. Your man panics. He cuts and runs through the back streets of Hong Kong. Who plays cops-and-robbers to get him back?”

Don’t answer it. Guillam prayed. He has absolutely no business to plumb around like this! Tell him to get lost!

Smiley’s answer, though effective, lacked the fire Guillam longed for. “Oh, I suppose one can always invent a hypothesis,” he objected mildly. “I think the best one can say is that Martello and I would at that stage pool our thoughts and act for the best.”

“George and I have a fine working relationship, Saul,” Martello declared handsomely. “Just fine.”

“Much tidier, you see, George,” Enderby resumed, through a fresh matchstick. “Much safer if it’s an all-Yank do. Marty’s people make a hash and all they do is apologise to the Governor, post a couple of blokes to Walla Walla, and promise not to do it again. That’s it. What everyone expects of ’em anyway. Advantage of a disgraceful reputation—right, Marty? Nobody’s surprised if you screw the housemaid.”

“Why, Saul,” said Martello, and laughed richly at the great British sense of humour.

“Much more tricky if we’re the naughty boys, George,” Enderby went on. “Or you are, rather. Governor could blow you down with one puff, the way it’s set up at the moment. Wilbraham’s crying all over his desk already.”

Against Smiley’s distracted obduracy, there was however no progress to be made, so for the while Enderby bowed out and they resumed their discussion of the “meat and potatoes,” which was Martello’s amusing phrase for modalities. But before they finished, Enderby had one last shot at dislodging Smiley from his primacy, choosing again the issue of the efficient handling and after-care of the catch.

“George, who’s going to manage all the grilling and stuff? You using that funny little Jesuit of yours, the one with the smart name?”

“Di Salis will be responsible for the Chinese aspects of the debriefing and our Soviet research section the Russian.”

“That the crippled don woman, is it, George? The one Bill shoved out to grass for drinking?”

“It is they, between them, who have brought the case this far,” said Smiley.

Inevitably Martello sprang into the breach: “Ah, now, George, I won’t have that! Sir, I will not! Saul, Oliver, I wish you to know that I regard the Dolphin case, in all its aspects, Saul, as a personal triumph for George here and for George alone!”

With a big hand all round for dear old George, they made their way back to Cambridge Circus.

“Gunpowder, treason, and plot!” Guillam expostulated. “Why’s Enderby selling you down the river? What’s all that tripe about losing the letter?”

“Yes,” said Smiley at last, but from far away. “Yes, that’s very careless of them. I thought I’d send them a copy, actually. Blind, by hand, for information only. Enderby seemed so woolly, didn’t he? Will you attend to that, Peter, ask the mothers?”

The mention of the letter of agreement—heads of agreement, as Lacon called it—revived Guillam’s worst misgivings. He remembered how he had foolishly allowed Sam Collins to be the bearer of it, and how, according to Fawn, he had spent more than an hour cloistered with Martello under the pretext of delivering it. He remembered Sam Collins also as he had glimpsed him in Lacon’s anteroom, the mysterious confidant of Lacon and Enderby, lazing around Whitehall like a blasted Cheshire cat. He remembered Enderby’s taste for backgammon, which he played for very high stakes, and it even passed through his head, as he tried to sniff out the conspiracy, that Enderby might be a client of Sam Collins’s club. From that notion he soon pulled back, discounting it as too absurd. But ironically it later turned out to be true. And he remembered his fleeting conviction—based on little but the physiognomy of the three Americans, and therefore soon also to be dismissed—that they knew already what Smiley had come to tell them.

But Guillam did not pull back from the notion of Sam Collins as the ghost at that morning’s feast, and as he boarded the plane at London Airport, exhausted by his long and energetic farewell from Molly, the same ghost grinned at him through the smoke of his infernal brown cigarette.

The flight was uneventful except in one respect. They were three strong, and in the seating arrangements Guillam had won a small battle in his running war with Fawn. Over Housekeeping Section’s dead body, Guillam and Smiley flew first class, while Fawn, the baby-sitter, took an aisle seat at the front of the tourist compartment, cheek by jowl with the airline security guards, who slept innocently for most of the journey while Fawn sulked. There had never been any suggestion, fortunately, that Martello and his quiet men would fly with them, for Smiley was determined that that should not happen on any account. As it was, Martello flew west, staging in Langley for instructions and continuing through Honolulu and Tokyo in order to be on hand in Hong Kong for their arrival.

As an unconsciously ironic footnote to their departure, Smiley left a long handwritten note to Jerry, to be presented to him on his arrival at the Circus, congratulating him on his first-rate performance. The carbon copy is still in Jerry’s dossier. Nobody has thought to remove it. Smiley speaks of Jerry’s “unswerving loyalty” and of “setting the crown on more than twenty years of service.” He includes an apocryphal message from Ann, “who joins me in wishing you an equally distinguished career in letters.” And he winds up rather awkwardly with the sentiment that “one of the privileges of our work is that it provides us with such wonderful colleagues. I must tell you that we all think of you in those terms.”

Certain people do still ask why no anxious word about Jerry’s whereabouts had reached the Circus before take-off. He was, after all, several days overdue. Once more they look for ways of blaming Smiley, but there is no evidence of a lapse on the Circus’s side. For the transmission of Jerry’s report from the air base in North East Thailand—his last—the Cousins had cleared a line through Bangkok direct to the Annexe in London. But the arrangement was valid for one signal and one answer-back only, and a follow-up was not envisaged.

Accordingly, the grizzle, when it came, was routed first to Bangkok on the military network, thence to the Cousins in Hong Kong on their network—since Hong Kong was held to have a total lien on all Dolphin-starred material—and only then, marked “Routine,” repeated by Hong Kong to London, where it kicked around in several rosewood in-trays before anybody noted its significance. And it must be admitted that the languid Major Masters had attached very little significance to the no-show, as he later called it, of some travelling English fairy. “ASSUME EXPLANATION YOUR END,” his message ends. Major Masters now lives in Norman, Oklahoma, where he runs a small automobile repair business.

Nor did Housekeeping Section have any reason to panic—or so they still plead. Jerry’s instructions on reaching Bangkok were to find himself a plane, any plane, using his air-travel card, and get himself to London. No date was mentioned and no airline. The whole purpose was to leave things fluid. Most likely he had stopped over somewhere for a bit of relaxation. Many homing fieldmen do, and Jerry was on record as sexually oriented. So they kept their usual watch on flight lists and made a provisional booking at Sarratt for the two weeks’ drying-out and recycling ceremony, then returned their attention to the far more urgent business of setting up the Dolphin safe house.

This was a charming mill-house, quite remote, though situated in the commuter town of Maresfield, Sussex, and on most days they found a reason for going down there. As well as di Salis and a sizeable part of his Chinese archive, a small army of interpreters and transcribers had to be accommodated, not to mention technicians, baby-sitters, and a Chinese-speaking doctor. In no time at all the residents were complaining noisily to the police about the influx of Japanese. The local paper carried a story that they were a visiting dance troupe. Housekeeping Section had inspired the leak.

Jerry had nothing to collect at the hotel—and, as it happened, no hotel—but he reckoned he had an hour to get clear, perhaps two. He had no doubt the Americans had the whole town wired, and he knew there would be nothing easier, if London asked for it, than for Major Masters to have Jerry’s name and description broadcast as an American deserter travelling on a false-flag passport. Once his taxi was clear of the gates, therefore, he took it to the southern edge of town, waited, then took a second taxi and pointed it due north.

A wet haze lay over the paddies and the straight road ran into it endlessly. The radio pumped out female Thai voices like a slow-motion nursery rhyme. They passed an American electronics base, a circular grid a quarter of a mile wide floating in the haze and known locally as the Elephant Cage. Giant bodkins marked the perimeter, and at the middle, surrounded by webs of strung wire, burned a single infernal light like the promise of a future war. He had heard there were twelve hundred language students inside the place, but not one soul was to be seen.

He needed time, and in the event he helped himself to more than a week. Even now, he needed that long to bring himself to the point, because Jerry at heart was a soldier and voted with his feet. In the beginning was the deed, Smiley liked to say to him, in his failed-priest mood, quoting from Goethe. For Jerry that simple statement had become a pillar of his uncomplicated philosophy. What a man thinks is his own business. What matters is what he does.

Reaching the Mekong by early evening, he selected a village and for a couple of days strolled idly up and down the river-bank, trailing his shoulder-bag and kicking at an empty Coca-Cola tin with the toe of his buckskin boot. Across the river, behind the brown anthill mountains, lay the Ho Chi Minh trail. He had once watched a B-52 strike from this very point, three miles away in central Laos. He remembered how the ground shook under his feet and the sky emptied and burned, and he had known—he had really for a moment known—what it was like to be in the middle of it.

In this same spot, to use Frost’s jolly phrase, Jerry Westerby blew the walls out, much along the lines the housekeepers expected of him, if not in quite the circumstances. In a river-side bar where they played old tunes on a nickelodeon, he drank black-market P.X. Scotch and night after night drove himself into oblivion, leading one laughing girl after another up the unlit staircase to a tattered bedroom, till finally he stayed there sleeping and didn’t come down.

Waking with a jolt, clear-headed at dawn, to the screaming of roosters and the clatter of the river traffic, Jerry would force himself to think long and generously of his chum and mentor, George Smiley. It was an act of will that made him do this, almost an act of obedience. He wished, quite simply, to rehearse the articles of his creed, and his creed till now had been old George. At Sarratt they have a very worldly and relaxed attitude to the motives of a fieldman, and no patience at all for the fieryeyed zealot who grinds his teeth and says, “I hate Communism.” If he hates it that much, they argue, he’s most likely half-way in love with it already. What they really like—and what Jerry possessed, what he was, in effect—was the fellow who hadn’t a lot of time for flannel but loved the service and knew—though God forbid he should make a fuss of it—that we were right. We being a necessarily flexible notion, but to Jerry it meant George and that was that.

Old George. Super. Good morning.

He saw him as he liked to remember him best, the first time they met, at Sarratt soon after the war. Jerry was still an army subaltern, his time nearly up and Oxford looming, and he was bored stiff. The course was for London Occasionals: people who, having done the odd bit of skulduggery without going formally onto the Circus payroll, were being groomed as an auxiliary reserve. Jerry had already volunteered for full-time employment, but Circus personnel had turned him down, which scarcely helped his mood.

So when Smiley waddled into the paraffin-heated lecture hut in his heavy overcoat and spectacles, Jerry inwardly groaned and prepared himself for another creaking fifty minutes of boredom—on good places to look for dead-letter boxes, most likely, followed by a sort of clandestine nature ramble through Rickmansworth, trying to spot hollow trees in graveyards. There was comedy while the Directing Staff cranked the lectern lower so that George could see over the top. In the end he stood himself a little fussily at the side of it and declared that his subject this afternoon was “Problems of Maintaining Courier Lines Inside Enemy Territory.” Slowly it dawned on Jerry that he was talking not from the textbook but from experience: that this little pedant with the diffident voice and the blinking, apologetic manner had sweated out three years in some benighted German town, holding the threads of a very respectable network, while he waited for the boot through the door panel or the pistol butt across the face that would introduce him to the pleasures of interrogation.

When the meeting was over, Smiley asked to see him. They met in a corner of an empty bar, under the antlers where the darts board hung.

“I’m so sorry we couldn’t have you,” Smiley said. “I think our feeling was you needed a little more time outside first.” Which was their way of saying he was immature. Too late, Jerry remembered Smiley as one of the non-speaking members of the Selection Board that had failed him. “Perhaps if you could get your degree and make your way a little in a different walk of life, they would change their way of thinking. Don’t lose touch, will you?”

After which, somehow, old George had always been there. Never surprised, never out of patience, old George had gently but firmly rejigged Jerry’s life till it was Circus property. His father’s empire collapsed: George was waiting with his hands out to catch him. His marriages collapsed: George would sit all night for him, hold his head.

“I’ve always been grateful to this service that it gave me a chance to pay,” Smiley had said. “I’m sure one should feel that. I don’t think we should be afraid of . . . devoting ourselves. Is that old-fashioned of me?”

“You point me, I’ll march,” Jerry had replied. “Tell me the shots and I’ll play them.”

There was still time. He knew that. Train to Bangkok, hop on a plane home, and the worst he would get was a flea in his ear for jumping ship for a few days. “Home,” he repeated to himself. Bit of a problem. Home to Tuscany and the yawning emptiness of the hilltop without the orphan? Home to old Pet, sorry about the teacup? Home to dear old Stubbsie, key appointment as desk jockey with special responsibility for the spike? Or home to the Circus: “We think you’d be happiest in Banking Section.” Even—great thought—home to Sarratt, training job, winning the hearts and minds of new entrants while he commuted dangerously from a maisonette in Watford.

On the third or fourth morning he woke very early. Dawn was just rising over the river, turning it first red, then orange, now brown. A family of water-buffaloes wallowed in the mud, their bells jingling. In mid-stream three sampans were linked in a long and complicated trawl. He heard a hiss and saw a net curl, then fall like hail on the water.

Yet it’s not for want of a future that I’m here, he thought. It’s for want of a present.

Home’s where you go when you run out of homes, he thought. Which brings me to Lizzie. Vexed issue. Shove it on the back burner. Spot of breakfast.

Sitting on the teak balcony munching eggs and rice, Jerry remembered George breaking the news to him about Haydon: El Vino’s bar, Fleet Street, a rainy midday. Jerry had never found it possible to hate anyone for very long, and after the initial shock there had really not been much more to say.

“Well, no point in crying in the old booze, is there, sport? Can’t leave the ship to the rats. Soldier on, that’s the thing.”

To which Smiley agreed; yes, that was the thing, to soldier on, grateful for the chance to pay. Jerry had even found a sort of rum comfort in the fact that Bill was one of the clan. He had never seriously doubted, in his vague way, that his country was in a state of irreversible decline, or that his own class was to blame for the mess. “We made Bill,” ran his argument, “so it’s right we should carry the brunt of his betrayal.” Pay, in fact. Pay. What old George was on about.

Pottering beside the river again, breathing the free warm air, Jerry chucked flat stones to make them bounce.

Lizzie, he thought. Lizzie Worthington, suburban bolter. Ricardo’s pupil and punch-ball. Charlie Marshall’s big sister and earth mother and unattainable whore. Drake Ko’s cage-bird. My dinner companion for all of four hours. And to Sam Collins—to repeat the question—what had she been to him? For Mr. Mellon, Charlie’s “creepy English trader” of eighteen months ago, she was a courier working the Hong Kong heroin trail. But she was more than that. Somewhere along the line, Sam had shown her a bit of ankle and told her she was working for Queen and country. Which glad news Lizzie had promptly shared with her admiring circle of friends. To Sam’s fury, and he dropped her like a hot brick. So Sam had set her up as a patsy of some kind. A coattrailer on probation. In one way this thought amused Jerry very much, for Sam had a reputation as an ace operator, whereas Lizzie Worthington might well star at Sarratt as the archetypal Woman Never to Be Recruited as Long as She Can Speak or Breathe.

Less funny was the question of what she meant to Sam now. What kept him skulking in her shadow like a patient murderer, smiling his grim iron smile? That question worried Jerry very much. Not to put too fine a point on it, he was obsessed by it. He definitely did not wish to see Lizzie taking another of her dives. If she went anywhere from Ko’s bed, it was going to be into Jerry’s. For some while, off and on—ever since he had met her, in fact—he had been thinking how much Lizzie would benefit from the bracing Tuscan air. And while he didn’t know how or why Sam Collins came to be in Hong Kong, or even what the Circus at large intended for Drake Ko, he had the strongest possible impression—and here was the nub of the thing—that by pushing off to London at this moment, far from carting Lizzie away on his white charger, Jerry was leaving her sitting on a very large bomb.

Which struck him as unacceptable. In other times, he might have been prepared to leave that problem to the owls, as he had left so many other problems in his day. But these were not other times. This time, as he now realised, it was the Cousins who were paying the piper, and while Jerry had no particular quarrel with the Cousins, their presence made it a much rougher ball game. So that whatever vague notions he had about George’s humanity did not apply.

Also he cared about Lizzie. Urgently. There was nothing imprecise in his feelings at all. He ached for her, warts and all. She was his kind of loser, and he loved her. He had worked it out and drawn the line, and that, after several days of counting on beads, was his net unalterable solution. He was a little awed, but very pleased by it.

Gerald Westerby, he told himself. You were present at your birth. You were present at your several marriages and at some of your divorces, and you will certainly be present at your funeral. High time, in our considered view, that you were present at certain other crucial moments in your history.

Taking a bus up-river a few miles, he walked again, rode on cyclos, sat in bars, made love to the girls, thinking only of Lizzie. The inn where he stayed was full of children and one morning he woke to find two of them sitting on his bed, marvelling at the enormous length of the farang’s legs and giggling at the way his bare feet hung over the end. Maybe I’ll just stay here, he thought. But by then he was fooling, because he knew that he had to go back and ask her, even if the answer was a custard pie. From the balcony he launched paper aeroplanes for the children, and they clapped and danced, watching them float away.

He found a boatman and, when evening came, crossed the river to Vientiane, avoiding the formalities of immigration. Next morning, also without formality, he wangled himself aboard an unscheduled Royal Air Lao DC-8, and by afternoon he was airborne and in possession of a delicious warm whisky and chatting merrily to a couple of friendly opium dealers. As they landed, black rain was falling and the windows of the airport bus were foul with dust. Jerry didn’t mind at all. For the first time in his life, returning to Hong Kong was quite like coming home after all.

Inside the reception area nevertheless, Jerry played a cautious hand. No trumpets, he told himself: definitely. The few days’ rest had done wonders for his presence of mind. Having taken a good look round, he made for the men’s room instead of the immigration desks and lay up there till a big load of Japanese tourists arrived, then barged over to them and asked who spoke English. Having cut out four of them, he showed them his Hong Kong press card, and while they stood in line waiting for their passport check he besieged them with questions about why they were here and what they proposed to do, and with whom, and wrote wildly on his pad before choosing four more and repeating the process. Meanwhile he waited for the police on duty to change watch. At four o’clock they did, and he at once made for a door marked “No Entry,” which he had noted earlier. He banged on it till it was opened, and started to walk through to the other side.

“Where the hell are you going?” asked an outraged Scottish police inspector.

“Home to the comic, sport. Got to file the dirt on our friendly Japanese visitors.”

He showed his press card.

“Well go through the damn gates, like everyone else.”

“Don’t be bloody silly. I haven’t got my passport. That’s why your distinguished colleague brought me through this way in the first place.”

Bulk, a ranking voice, a patently British appearance, an affecting grin, won him a space in a city-bound bus five minutes later. Outside his apartment block he dawdled but saw no one suspicious, but this was China and who could tell?

The lift as usual emptied for him. Riding in it, he hummed Deathwish the Hun’s one record in anticipation of a hot bath and change of clothes. At his front door he had a moment’s anxiety when he noticed the tiny wedges he had left in place lying on the floor, till he belatedly remembered Luke and smiled at the prospect of their reunion. He unlocked the burglar door, and as he did so he heard the sound of humming from inside, a droning monotone, which could have been an air-conditioner but not Deathwish’s. Bloody idiot Luke has left the gramophone on, he thought, and it’s about to brew up. Then he thought, I’m doing him an injustice; it’s that fridge.

Then he opened the door and saw Luke’s dead body strewn across the floor with half his head shot to pieces, and half the flies in Hong Kong swarming over it and round it; and all he could think of to do, as he quickly closed the door behind him and jammed his handkerchief over his mouth, was run into the kitchen in case there was still someone there. Returning to the living-room, he pushed Luke’s feet aside and dug up the parquet brick where he had cached his forbidden side-arm and his escape kit, and put them in his pocket before he vomited.

Of course, he thought. That’s why Ricardo was so certain the horse-writer was dead.

Join the club, he thought, as he stood out in the street again, with rage and grief pounding in his ears and eyes: Nelson Ko’s dead, but he’s running China. Ricardo’s dead, but Drake Ko says he can stay alive as long as he sticks to the shady side of the street. Jerry Westerby the horse-writer is also completely dead, except that Ko’s stupid pagan vicious bastard of a henchman, Mr. Tiu, was so thick he shot the wrong round-eye.

19

GOLDEN THREAD

The inside of the American Consulate in Hong Kong could have been the inside of the Annexe, right down to the ever-present fake rosewood and the bland courtesy and the airport chairs and the heartening portrait of the President, even if this time it was Ford. Welcome to your Howard Johnson spookhouse, Guillam thought. The section they worked in was called the isolation ward and had its own doorway to the street, guarded by two Marines. They had passes in false names—Guillam’s was Gordon—and for the duration of their stay there, except on the telephone, they never spoke to a soul inside the building except one another. “We’re not just deniable, gentlemen,” Martello had told them proudly in the briefing, “we’re also invisible.” That was how it was going to be played, he said. The U.S. Consul General could put his hand on the Bible and swear to the Governor they weren’t there and his staff were not involved, said Martello; “Blind eye right down the line.” After that, he handed over to George, because “George, this is your show from soup to nuts.”

Downhill they had five minutes’ walk to the Hilton, where Martello had booked them rooms. Uphill, though it would have been hard going, they had ten minutes’ walk to Lizzie Worth’s apartment block. They had been here five days and now it was evening, but they had no way of telling because there were no windows in the operations room; there were maps and sea charts instead, and a couple of telephones manned by Martello’s quiet men, Murphy and his friend. Martello and Smiley had a big desk each; Guillam, Murphy, and his friend shared the table with the telephones, and Fawn sat moodily at the centre of an empty row of cinema chairs along the back wall, like a bored critic at a preview, sometimes picking his teeth and sometimes yawning but refusing to take himself off as Guillam repeatedly advised him. Craw had been spoken to but ordered to keep clear of everything—a total duck-dive. Smiley was frightened for him since Frost’s death and would have preferred him evacuated, but the old boy wouldn’t leave.

It was also for once the hour of the quiet men: “Our final detailed briefing,” Martello had called it. “Ah, that’s if it’s okay by you, George.” Pale Murphy, wearing a white shirt and blue trousers, was standing on the raised podium before a wall chart, soliloquising from pages of detailed notes. The rest of them sat at his feet and listened mainly in silence, including Smiley and Martello. Murphy could have been describing a vacuum cleaner, and to Guillam that made his monologue the more hypnotic.

The chart showed largely sea, but at the top and to the left hung a lace-fringe of the South China coast. Behind Hong Kong the spattered outskirts of Canton were just visible below the batten which held the chart in place, and due south of Hong Kong at the very mid-point of the chart stretched the green outline of what looked to be a cloud divided into four sections, marked A, B, C, and D. These, said Murphy reverently, were the fishing beds and the cross at the centre was Centre Point, sir. Murphy spoke only to Martello, whether it was George’s show from soup to nuts or not.

“Sir, basing on the last occasion Drake exited Red China, sir, and updating our assessment to the situation as of now, we and navy int. between us, sir—”

“Murphy, Murphy,” put in Martello quite kindly, “ease off a little, will you, friend? This isn’t training school any more, okay? Loosen your girdle, will you, son?”

“Sir. One. Weather,” Murphy said, quite untouched by this appeal. “April and May are the transitional months, sir, between the north-east monsoons and the beginning of the south-west monsoons. Forecasts day-to-day are unpredictable, sir, but no extreme conditions are foreseen for the trip.” He was using the pointer to show the line from Swatow southward to the fishing beds, then from the fishing beds north-west past Hong Kong up the Pearl River to Canton.

“Fog?” Martello said.

“Fog is traditional for the season, and cloud is anticipated at six to seven oktas, sir.”

“What the hell’s an okta, Murphy?”

“One okta is one eighth of sky area covered, sir. Oktas have replaced the former tenths. No typhoons have been recorded in April for over fifty years and navy int. calls typhoons unlikely. Wind is easterly, nine to ten knots, but any fleet that runs with it must count on periods of calm—also contrary winds too, sir. Humidity around eighty percent, temperature fifteen to twentyfour centigrade. Sea conditions calm with a small swell. Currents around Swatow tend to run north-east through the Taiwan Strait, at around three sea miles per day. But farther westward—on this side, sir—”

“That’s one thing I do know, Murphy,” Martello put in sharply. “I know where west is, dammit.” Then he grinned at Smiley as if to say “these young whipper-snappers.”

Murphy was again unmoved. “We have to be prepared to calculate the speed factor and consequently the progress of the fleet at any one point in its journey, sir.”

“Sure, sure.”

“Moon, sir,” Murphy continued. “Assuming the fleet to have exited Swatow on the night of Friday, April twenty-fifth, the moon would be three days off of full—”

“Why do we assume that, Murphy?”

“Because that’s when the fleet exited Swatow, sir. We had confirmation from navy int. one hour ago. Column of junks sighted at the eastern end of fishing bed C and easing westward with the wind, sir. Positive identification of the lead junk confirmed.”

There was a prickly pause. Martello coloured.

“You’re a clever boy, Murphy,” Martello said in a warning tone. “But you should have given me that information a little earlier.”

“Yes, sir. Assuming also that the intention of the junk containing Nelson Ko is to hit Hong Kong waters on the night of May fourth, the moon will be in its last quarter, sir. If we follow precedents right down the line—”

“We do,” said Smiley firmly. “The escape is to be an exact repetition of Drake’s own journey in ’fifty-one.”

Once more, no one doubted him, Guillam noticed. Why not? It was utterly bewildering.

“—then our junk should hit the southernmost out-island of Po Toi at twenty hundred hours tomorrow, and rejoin the fleet up along the Pearl River in time to make Canton harbour between zero ten-thirty and twelve hundred hours the following day, May fifth, sir.”

While Murphy droned on, Guillam covertly kept his eye on Smiley, thinking, as he often did, that he knew him no better today than when he first met him back in the dark days of the cold war in Europe. Where did he slip away to at all odd hours? Mooning about Ann? About Karla? What company did he keep that brought him back to the hotel at four in the morning? Don’t tell me George is having a second spring, he thought.

Last night at eleven there had been a scream from London, so Guillam had trailed up here to unbutton it. Westerby adrift, they said. They were terrified Ko had had him murdered—or, worse, abducted and tortured—and that the operation would abort in consequence. Guillam thought it more likely Jerry was holed up with a couple of air hostesses somewhere en route to London, but with that priority on the signal he had no option but to wake Smiley and tell him. He rang his room and got no answer, so he dressed and banged on Smiley’s door, and finally he was reduced to picking the lock, for now it was Guillam’s turn to panic: he thought Smiley might be ill.

But Smiley’s room was empty and his bed unslept in, and when Guillam went through his things he was fascinated to see that the old fieldman had gone to the length of sewing false name-tapes in his shirts. That was all he discovered, however. So he settled in Smiley’s chair and dozed and didn’t wake till four, when he heard a tiny flutter and opened his eyes to see Smiley stooped and peering at him from about six inches away; how he got into the room so silently, God alone knew.

“Gordon?” he asked softly. “What can I do for you?”—for they were on an operational footing of course, and lived with the assumption the rooms were bugged. For the same reason Guillam did not speak but handed Smiley the envelope containing Connie’s message, which he read and reread, then burned. Guillam was impressed how seriously he took the news. Even at that hour he insisted on going straight up to the Consulate to attend to it, so Guillam went along to carry his bags.

“Instructive evening?” he asked lightly as they plodded the short way up the hill.

“I? Oh, to a point, thank you, to a point,” Smiley replied, doing his disappearing act, and that was all Guillam or anyone could get out of him about his nocturnal or other ambles. Meanwhile, without the smallest explanation of his source, George was bringing in hard operational data in a manner that brooked no enquiry from anyone.

“Ah, George, we can count on that, can we?” Martello asked in bewilderment, on the first occasion that this happened.

“What? Oh yes, yes, indeed you may.”

“Great. Great footwork, George. I admire you,” said Martello heartily after a further puzzled silence, and from then on they had gone along with it. They had no choice. For nobody, not even Martello, quite dared to challenge Smiley’s authority.

* * *

“How many days’ fishing is that, Murphy?” Martello was asking.

“Fleet will have had seven days’ fishing and hopefully make Canton with full holds, sir.”

“That figure, George?”

“Yes, oh yes—nothing to add, thank you.”

Martello asked what time the fleet would have to leave the fishing beds in order for Nelson’s junk to make tomorrow evening’s rendezvous on time.

“I have put it at eleven tomorrow morning,” Smiley said without looking up from his notes.

“Me too,” said Murphy.

“This rogue junk, Murphy,” Martello said, with another deferential glance at Smiley.

“Yes, sir,” said Murphy.

“Can it break away from the pack that easy? What would be its cover for entering Hong Kong waters, Murphy?”

“Happens all the time, sir. Red Chinese junk-fleets operate a collective catch system without profit motivation, sir. Con-sequence of that, you get the single junks that break away at night-time and come in without lights and sell their fish to the out-islanders for money.”

“Literally moonlighting!” Martello exclaimed, much amused by the felicity of the expression.

Smiley had turned to the map of Po Toi island on the other wall and was tilting his head in order to intensify the magnification of his spectacles.

“What size of junk are we talking about here?” Martello asked.

“Twenty-eight-man long-liners, sir, baited for shark, golden thread, and conger.”

“Did Drake use that type also?”

“Yes,” said Smiley, still watching the map. “Yes, he did.”

“And she can come that close in, can she? Provided the weather allows?”

Again it was Smiley who answered. Till today, Guillam had not heard him so much as speak of a boat in his life.

“The draw of a long-liner is very modest,” he remarked. “She can come in pretty well as close as she wishes, provided always that the sea is not too rough.”

From the back bench Fawn gave an immoderate laugh. Wheeling round in his chair, Guillam shot him a foul look. Fawn leered and shook his head, marvelling at his master’s omniscience.

“How many junks make up a fleet?” Martello asked.

“Twenty to thirty,” said Smiley.

“Check,” said Murphy meekly.

“So what does Nelson do, George? Kind of get out to the edge of the pack there and stray a little?”

“He’ll hang back,” said Smiley. “The fleets like to move in column astern. Nelson will tell his skipper to take the rear position.”

“Will he, by God,” Martello muttered under his breath. “Murphy, what identifications are traditional?”

“Very little known in that area, sir. Boat people are notoriously evasive. They have no respect for marine regulations. Out to sea, they show no lights at all, mostly for fear of pirates.”

Smiley was lost to them again. He had sunk into a wooden immobility, and though his eyes stayed fixed on the big sea chart, his mind, Guillam knew, was anywhere but with Murphy’s dreary recitation of statistics. Not so Martello.

“How much coastal trade do we have over all, Murphy?”

“Sir, there are no controls and no data.”

“Any quarantine checks as the junks enter Hong Kong waters, Murphy?” Martello asked.

“Theoretically all vessels should stop and have themselves checked, sir.”

“And in practice, Murphy?”

“Junks are a law to themselves, sir. Technically, Chinese junks are forbidden to sail between Victoria Island and Kowloon point, sir, but the last thing the Brits want is a hassle with the mainland over rights of way. Sorry, sir.”

“Not at all,” said Smiley politely, still gazing at the chart. “Brits we are and Brits we shall remain.”

It’s his Karla expression, Guillam decided; the one that comes over him when he looks at the photograph. He catches sight of it, it surprises him, and for a while he seems to study its contours, its blurred and sightless gaze. Then the light slowly goes out of his eyes, and somehow the hope as well, and you feel he’s looking inward, in alarm.

“Murphy, did I hear you mention navigation lights?” Smiley enquired, turning his head slightly but still staring toward the chart.

“Yes, sir.”

“I expect Nelson’s junk to carry three,” said Smiley. “Two green lights vertically on the stern mast and one red light to starboard.”

“Yes, sir.”

Martello tried to catch Guillam’s eye but Guillam wouldn’t play.

“But it may not,” Smiley warned as an afterthought. “It may carry none at all, and simply signal from close in.”

Murphy resumed. A new heading: Communications.

“Sir, in the communications area, sir, few junks have their own transmitters but most all have receivers. Once in a while you get a skipper who buys a cheap walkie-talkie with range about one mile to facilitate the trawl, but they’ve been doing it so long they don’t have much call to speak to each other, I guess. Then as to finding their way—well, navy int. says that’s near enough a mystery. We have reliable information that many long-liners operate on a primitive compass, a hand lead and line, or even just a rusty alarm clock for finding true north.”

“Murphy, how the hell do they work that, for God’s sakes?” Martello cried.

“Line with a lead plumb and wax stuck to it, sir. They sound the bed and know where they are from what sticks to the wax.”

“Well, they really do it the hard way,” Martello declared.

A phone rang. Martello’s other quiet man took the call, listened, then put his hand over the mouthpiece.

“Quarry Worth’s just gotten back, sir,” he said to Smiley. “Party drove around for an hour, now she’s checked in her car back at the block. Mac says sounds like she’s running a bath, so maybe she plans going out again later.”

“And she’s alone,” Smiley said impassively. It was a question.

“She alone there, Mac?” He gave a hard laugh. “I’ll bet you would, you dirty bastard. Yes, sir, lady’s all alone taking a bath, and Mac there says when will we ever get to use video as well. Is the lady singing in the bath, Mac?” He rang off. “She’s not singing.”

“Murphy, get on with the war,” Martello snapped.

Smiley would like the interception plans rehearsed once more, he said.

“Why, George! Please! It’s your show, remember?”

“Perhaps we could look again at the big map of Po Toi island, could we? And then Murphy could break it down for us, would you mind?”

“Mind, George, mind?” Martello cried, so Murphy began again, this time using a pointer. “Navy int. observation posts here, sir . . . constant two-way communication with base, sir . . . no presence at all within two sea miles of the landing zone. . . . Navy int. to advise base the moment the Ko launch starts back for Hong Kong, sir. . . . Interception will take place by regular British police vessel as the Ko launch enters harbour. . . . U.S. to supply op. int. and stand off only, for unforeseen supportive situation. . . .”

Smiley monitored every detail with a prim nod of his head.

“After all, Marty,” he put in at one point, “once Ko has Nelson aboard, there’s nowhere else he can go, is there? Po Toi is right at the edge of China waters. It’s us or nothing.”

One day, thought Guillam, as he continued listening, one of two things will happen to George. He’ll cease to care or the paradox will kill him. If he ceases to care, he’ll be half the operator he is. If he doesn’t, that little chest will blow up from the struggle of trying to find the explanation for what we do. Smiley himself, in a disastrous off-the-record chat to senior officers, had put the names to his dilemma, and Guillam with some embarrassment recalled them to this day. To be inhuman in defence of our humanity, he had said, harsh in defence of compassion. To be single-minded in defence of our disparity. They had filed out in a veritable ferment of protest; why didn’t George just do the job and shut up instead of taking his faith out and polishing it in public till the flaws showed? Connie had even murmured a Russian aphorism in Guillam’s ear, which she insisted on attributing to Karla. “There’ll be no war, will there, Peter darling?” she had said reassuringly, squeezing his hand as he led her along the corridor. “But in the struggle for peace not a single stone will be left standing, bless the old fox. I’ll bet they didn’t thank him for that one in the Collegium, either.”

A thud made Guillam swing round. Fawn was changing cinema seats again. Seeing Guillam, he flared his nostrils in an insolent sneer.

He’s off his head, thought Guillam with a shiver.

Fawn too, for different reasons, was now causing Guillam serious anxiety. Two days ago, in Guillam’s company, he had been the author of a disgusting incident. Smiley as usual had gone out alone. To kill time Guillam had hired a car and driven Fawn up to the China border. Returning, they were waiting at some country traffic-lights when a Chinese boy drew alongside on a Honda. Guillam was driving. Fawn had the passenger seat. Fawn’s window was lowered; he had taken his jacket off and was resting his left arm on the door where he could admire a new gilt watch he had bought himself in the Hilton shopping concourse.

As they pulled away, the Chinese boy ill-advisedly made a dive for the watch, but Fawn was much too quick for him. Catching hold of the boy’s wrist instead, he held on to it, towing him beside the car while the boy struggled vainly to break free. Guillam had driven fifty yards or so before he realised what had happened, and he at once stopped the car, which was what Fawn was waiting for. He hopped out before Guillam could stop him, lifted the boy straight off his Honda, led him to the side of the road, and broke both his arms for him, then returned smiling to the car. Terrified of a scandal, Guillam drove rapidly from the scene, leaving the boy screaming and staring at his dangling arms. He reached Hong Kong determined to report Fawn to George immediately, but luckily for Fawn it was eight hours before Smiley surfaced, and by then Guillam reckoned George had enough on his plate already.

Another phone was ringing, the red. Martello took the call himself. He listened a moment, then burst into a loud laugh.

“They found him,” he told Smiley, holding the phone to him.

“Found whom?”

The phone hovered between them.

“Your man, George. Your Weatherby—”

“Westerby,” Murphy corrected him, and Martello shot him a venomous look.

“They got him,” said Martello.

“Where is he?”

“Where was he, you mean! George, he just had himself the time of his life in two cathouses up along the Mekong. If our people are not exaggerating, he’s the hottest thing since Barnum’s baby elephant left town in ’forty-nine!”

“And where is he now, please?”

Martello handed him the phone. “Why don’t you just have ’em read you the signal, okay? They have some story that he crossed the river.” He turned to Guillam and winked. “They tell me there’s a couple of places in Vientiane where he might find himself a little action too,” he said, and went on laughing richly while Smiley sat patiently with the telephone to his ear.

Jerry chose a cab with two wing mirrors and sat in the front. In Kowloon he hired a car from the biggest outfit he could find, using the escape passport and driving licence because marginally he thought the false name was safer if only by an hour. As he headed up the Midlevels, it was dusk and still raining and huge haloes hung from the neon lights that lit the hillside. He passed the American Consulate and drove past Star Heights twice, half expecting to see Sam Collins, and on the second occasion he knew for sure he had found her flat and that her light was burning: an arty Italian affair by the look of it, that hung across the picture window in a gracious droop, three hundred dollars’ worth of pretension. Also the frosted glass of a bathroom window was lit. The third time he passed, he saw her pulling a wrap over her shoulders, and instinct or something about the formality of her gesture told him she was once more preparing to go out for the evening but that this time she was dressed to kill.

Every time he allowed himself to remember Luke, a darkness covered his eyes and he imagined himself doing the noble useless things like telephoning Luke’s family in California, or the dwarf at the bureau, or even for whatever purpose the Rocker. Later, he thought. Later, he promised himself, he would mourn Luke in fitting style.

He coasted slowly into the driveway that led to the entrance till he came to the slip-road to the car-park. The park was three tiers deep and he idled round it till he found her red Jaguar stowed in a safe corner behind a chain to discourage careless neighbours from approaching its peerless paint-work. She had put a mock leopard-skin cover on the steering-wheel. She just couldn’t do enough for the damn car. Get pregnant, he thought, in a burst of fury; buy a dog. Keep mice. For two pins he’d have smashed the front in, but those two pins had held Jerry back more times than he liked to count. If she’s not using it, then he’s sending a limousine for her, he thought. Maybe with Tiu riding shot-gun, even. Or maybe he’ll come himself. Or maybe she’s just getting herself dolled up for the evening sacrifice and not going out at all. He wished it was Sunday. He remembered Craw saying that Drake Ko spent Sundays with his family, and that on Sundays Lizzie had to make her own running. But it wasn’t Sunday, and neither did he have dear old Craw at his elbow telling him—on what evidence Jerry could only guess—that Ko was away in Bangkok or Timbuctoo conducting his business.

Grateful that the rain was turning to fog, he headed back up the slipway to the drive and at the junction found a narrow piece of shoulder where, if he parked hard against the barrier, the other traffic could complain but squeeze past. He grazed the barrier and didn’t care. From where he now sat, he could watch the pedestrians coming in and out under the striped awning of the block, and the cars joining or leaving the main road. He felt no sense of caution at all. He lit a cigarette and the limousines crackled past him both ways, but none belonged to Ko. Occasionally as a car edged by him, the driver paused to hoot or shout a complaint and Jerry ignored him. Every few seconds his eyes took in the mirrors, and once when a plump figure not unlike Tiu padded guiltily up behind him, he actually dropped the safety catch of the pistol in his jacket pocket before admitting to himself that the man lacked Tiu’s brawn. Probably been collecting gambling debts from the pak-pai drivers, he thought, as the figure went by him.

He remembered being with Luke at Happy Valley. He remembered being with Luke.

He was still looking in the mirror when the red Jaguar hissed up the slipway behind him, just the driver, and the roof closed, no passenger. The one thing he hadn’t thought of was that she might take the lift right down to the car-park and collect the car herself rather than have the porter bring it to the door for her as he did before. Pulling out after her, he glanced up and saw the lights still burning in her window. Had she left somebody behind? Or did she propose to come back shortly? Then he thought, Don’t be so damn clever. She’s just careless about lights.

The last time I spoke to Luke, it was to tell him to get out of my hair, he thought, and the last time he spoke to me was to tell me he’d covered my back with Stubbsie.

She had turned down the hill toward the town. He headed down after her, and for a space nothing followed him, which seemed unnatural, but these were unnatural hours and Sarratt man was dying in him faster than he could handle. She was heading for the brightest part of town. He supposed he still loved her, though just now he was prepared to suspect anybody of anything. He kept close behind her, remembering that she used her mirror seldom. In this dusky fog she would only see his headlights anyway. The fog hung in patches and the harbour looked as if it were on fire, with the shafts of crane-light playing like water hoses on the crawling smoke. In Central she ducked into another basement garage, and he drove straight in after her and parked six bays away, but she didn’t notice him. Remaining in the car, she paused to repair her make-up and he actually saw her working on her chin, powdering the scars. Then she got out and went through the ritual of locking, though a kid with a razorblade could have cut through the soft top in one easy movement. She was dressed in a silk cape of some kind and a long silk dress, and as she walked toward the stone spiral stair she raised both her hands and carefully lifted her hair, which was gathered at the neck, and laid the pony-tail down the outside of the cape. Getting out after her, he followed her as far as the hotel lobby and turned aside in time to avoid being photographed by a bisexual drove of chattering fashion journalists in satins and bows.

Hanging back in the comparative safety of the corridor, Jerry pieced the scene together. It was a large private party, and Lizzie had joined it from the blind side. The other guests were arriving at the front entrance, where the Rolls-Royces were so thick on the ground that nobody was special. A woman with blue-grey hair presided, doing absolutely nothing but swaying about and speaking gin-sodden French. A prim Chinese public-relations girl with a couple of assistants made up the receiving line, and as the guests filed in, the girl and her cohorts came forward frightfully cordially and asked for names and sometimes invitation cards before consulting a list and saying “Oh, yes, of course.” The blue-grey woman smiled and growled. The cohorts handed out lapel pins for the men and orchids for the women, then lighted on the next arrivals.

Lizzie Worthington went through this screening woodenly. Jerry gave her a minute to clear, watched her through the double doors marked “Soirée” with a Cupid’s arrow, then attached himself to the queue. The public-relations girl was bothered by his buckskin boots. His suit was disgusting enough, but it was the boots that bothered her. On her course of training, he decided while she stared at them, she had been taught to place a lot of value on shoes. Millionaires may be tramps from the socks up but a pair of two-hundred-dollar Guccis is a passport not to be missed. She frowned at his press card, then at her guest list, then at his press card again, and once more at his boots, and she threw a lost glance at the blue-grey lush, who kept on smiling and growling. Jerry guessed she was drugged clean out of her mind. Finally the girl put up her own special smile for the marginal consumer and handed him a disc the size of a coffee saucer painted fluorescent pink with “PRESSE” an inch high in white.

“Tonight we are making everybody beautiful, Mr. Westerby,” she said.

“Have a job with me, sport.”

“You like my parfum, Mr. Westerby?”

“Sensational,” said Jerry.

“It is called Juice of the Vine, Mr. Westerby, one hundred Hong Kong for a little bottle, but tonight Maison Flaubert gives free samples to all our guests. Madame Montifiori . . . oh . . . of course, welcome to House of Flaubert. You like my parfum, Madame Montifiori?”

A Eurasian girl in a cheongsam held out a tray and whispered, “Flaubert wishes you an exotic night.”

“For Christ’s sake,” Jerry said.

Inside the double doors a second receiving line was manned by three pretty boys flown in from Paris for their charm, and a posse of security men that would have done credit to a President. For a moment he thought they might frisk him, and he knew that if they tried he was going to pull down the temple with him. They eyed Jerry without friendliness, counting him part of the help, but he was light-haired and they let him go.

“The press is in the third row back from the catwalk,” said a hermaphrodite blond in a cowboy leather suit, handing him a press kit. “You have no camera, Monsieur?”

“I just do the captions,” Jerry said, jamming a thumb over his shoulder. “Spike here does the pictures.” He walked into the reception room peering round him, grinning extravagantly, waving at whoever caught his eye.

The pyramid of champagne glasses was six feet tall, with black satin steps so that the waiters could take them from the top. In sunken ice coffins lay magnums awaiting burial. There was a wheelbarrow full of cooked lobsters and a wedding cake of pâté de foie gras, with “Maison Flaubert” done in aspic on the top. Space music was playing and there was even conversation under it, if only the bored drone of the extremely rich. The catwalk stretched from the foot of the long window to the centre of the room. The window faced the harbour but the fog broke the view into patches. The air-conditioning was turned up so that the women could wear their mink without sweating. Most of the men wore dinner-jackets but the young Chinese playboys sported New York-style slacks and black shirts and gold chains. The British taipans stood in one sodden circle with their womenfolk, like bored officers at a garrison get-together.

Feeling a hand on his shoulder, Jerry swung fast, but all he found in front of him was a little Chinese queer called Graham who worked for one of the local gossip rags. Jerry had once helped him out with a story he was trying to sell to the comic. Rows of armchairs faced the catwalk in a rough horseshoe, and Lizzie was sitting in the front between Mr. Arpego and his wife or paramour. Jerry recognised them from Happy Valley. They looked as though they were chaperoning Lizzie for the evening. The Arpegos talked to her, but she seemed barely to hear them. She sat straight and beautiful and she had taken off her cape, and from where Jerry sat she could have been stark naked except for her pearl collar and her pearl earrings. At least she’s still intact, he thought. She hasn’t rotted or got cholera or had her head shot off. He remembered the line of gold hairs running down her spine as he stood over her that first evening in the lift. Queer Graham sat next to Jerry, and Phoebe Wayfarer sat two along. He knew her only vaguely but gave her a fat wave.

“Gosh. Super. Pheeb. You look terrific. Should be up there on the catwalk, sport, showing a bit of leg.”

He thought she was a bit tight, and perhaps she thought he was, though he’d drunk nothing since the plane. He took out a pad and wrote on it, playing the professional, trying to rein himself in. Easy as you go. Don’t frighten the game. When he read what he had written, he saw the words “Lizzie Worthington” and nothing else. Chinese Graham read it too, and laughed.

“My new byline,” said Jerry, and they laughed together, too loud, so that people in front turned their heads as the lights began to dim. But not Lizzie, though he thought she might have recognised his voice.

Behind them the doors were being closed, and as the lights went lower Jerry had a mind to fall asleep in this soft and kindly chair. The space music gave way to a jungle beat brushed out on a cymbal, till only a single chandelier flickered over the black catwalk, answering the churned and patchy lights of the harbour in the window behind. The drum-beat rose in a slow crescendo from amplifiers everywhere. It went on a long time, just drums very well played, very insistent, till gradually grotesque human shadows became visible against the harbour window. The drumbeats stopped. In a wracked silence two black girls strode flank against flank down the catwalk, wearing nothing but jewels. Their skulls were shaven and they wore round ivory earrings and diamond collars like the iron rings of slave girls. Their oiled limbs shone with clustered diamonds, pearls, and rubies. They were tall, and beautiful, and lithe, and utterly unexpected, and for a moment they cast over the whole audience the spell of absolute sexuality. The drums recovered and soared, spotlights raced over jewels and limbs. They writhed out of the steaming harbour and advanced on the spectators with the anger of sensuous enslavement. They turned and walked slowly away, challenging and disdaining with their haunches.

Lights came on, there was a crash of nervous applause followed by laughter and drinks. Everyone was talking at once and Jerry was talking loudest: to Miss Lizzie Worthington, the well-known aristocratic society beauty whose mother couldn’t even boil an egg, and to the Arpegos who owned Manila and one or two of the out-islands, as Captain Grant of the Jockey Club had once assured him. Jerry was holding his notebook like a headwaiter.

“Lizzie Worthington, gosh, all Hong Kong at your feet, Madame, if I may say so. My paper is doing an exclusive on this event, Miss Worth or Worthington, and we’re hoping to feature you, your dresses, your fascinating life-style, and your even more fascinating friends. My photographers are bringing up the rear.” He bowed to the Arpegos. “Good evening, Madame. Sir. Proud to have you with us, I’m sure. This your first visit to Hong Kong?”

He was doing his big-puppy number, the boyish soul of the party. A waiter brought champagne and he insisted on transferring the glasses to their hands rather than let them help themselves. The Arpegos were much amused by this performance. Craw said they were crooks. Lizzie was staring at him and there was something in her eyes he couldn’t make out, something real and appalled, as if she, not Jerry, had just opened the door on Luke.

“Mr. Westerby has already done one story on me, I understand,” she said. “I don’t think it was ever printed, was it, Mr. Westerby?”

“Who you write for?” Mr. Arpego demanded suddenly. He wasn’t smiling any more. He looked dangerous and ugly, and she had clearly reminded him of something he had heard about and didn’t like. Something Tiu had warned him of, for instance.

Jerry told him.

“Then go write for them. Leave this lady alone. She don’t give interviews. You got work to do, you work somewhere else. You didn’t come here to play. Earn your money.”

“Couple of questions for you then, Mr. Arpego. Just before I go. How can I write you down, sir? As a rude Filipino millionaire? Or only half a millionaire?”

“For God’s sake,” Lizzie breathed, and by a mercy the lights went out again, the drum-beat began, everyone went back to his corner, and a woman’s voice with a French accent began a soft commentary on the loudspeaker. At the back of the catwalk the two black girls were performing long insinuating shadow dances. As the first model appeared, Jerry saw Lizzie stand up ahead of him in the darkness, pull her cape over her shoulders, and walk fast and softly up the aisle past him and toward the doors, head bowed. Jerry went after her. In the lobby she half turned as if to look at him, and it crossed his mind she was expecting him. Her expression was the same and it reflected his own mood. She looked haunted and tired and utterly confused.

“Lizzie!” he called as if he had just sighted an old friend, and ran quickly to her side before she could reach the powder-room door. “Lizzie! My God! It’s been years! A lifetime! Super!”

A couple of security guards looked on meekly as he flung his arms round her for the kiss of long friendship. He had slipped his left hand under her cape, and as he bent his laughing face to hers he laid the small revolver against the bare flesh of her back, the barrel just below her nape, and in that way, linked to her with bonds of old affection, led her straight into the street, chatting gaily all the way, and hailed a cab. He hadn’t wanted to produce the gun but he couldn’t risk having to manhandle her. That’s the way it goes, he thought: you come back to tell her you love her and end up by marching her at gunpoint.

She was shivering and furious but he didn’t think she was afraid, and he didn’t even think she was sorry to be leaving that awful gathering.

“That’s all I need,” she said as they wound up the hill again, through the fog. “Perfect. Bloody perfect.”

She wore a scent that was strange to him, but it smelt a deal better than Juice of the Vine.

Guillam was not bored exactly, but neither was his capacity for concentration infinite, as George’s appeared to be. When he wasn’t wondering what the devil Jerry Westerby was up to, he found himself basking in the erotic deprival of Molly Meakin or else remembering the Chinese boy with his arms inside out, whining like a half-shot hare after the disappearing car. Murphy’s theme was now the island of Po Toi and he was dilating on it remorselessly.

Volcanic, sir, he said.

Hardest rock substance of the whole Hong Kong group, sir, he said.

And the most southerly of the islands, he said.

Seven hundred and ninety feet high, sir; fishermen use it as a navigation point from far out to sea, sir, he said.

Technically not one island but a group of six islands, the other five being barren and treeless and uninhabited.

Fine temple, sir. Great antiquity. Fine wood carvings but little natural water.

“Jesus Christ, Murphy, we’re not buying the damn place, are we?” Martello expostulated. With action close and London far away, Martello had lost a lot of his gloss, Guillam noticed, and all his Englishness. His tropical suits were honest-to-cornball American, and he needed to talk to people, preferably his own. Guillam suspected that even London was an adventure for him, and Hong Kong was already enemy territory. Whereas under stress Smiley went quite the other way; he became private and rigidly polite.

Po Toi itself has a shrinking population of one hundred and eighty farmers and fishermen, mostly Communist, three living villages and three dead ones, sir, said Murphy. He droned on. Smiley continued to listen intently but Martello impatiently doodled on his pad.

“And tomorrow, sir,” said Murphy, “tomorrow is the night of Po Toi’s annual festival intended to pay homage to Tin Hau, the goddess of the sea, sir.”

Martello stopped doodling: “These people really believe that crap?”

“Everybody has a right to his religion, sir.”

“They teach you that at training college too, Murphy?” Martello returned to his doodling.

There was an uncomfortable silence before Murphy valiantly took up his pointer and laid the tip on the southern edge of the island’s coastline.

“This festival of Tin Hau, sir, is concentrated in the one main harbour, sir, right here on the south-west point where the ancient temple is situated. Mr. Smiley’s informed prediction, sir, has the Ko landing operation taking place here, away from the main bay, in a small cove on the east side of the island. By landing on that side of the island, which has no habitation, no natural access to the sea, at a point in time when the diversion of the island festival in the main bay—”

Guillam never heard the ring. He just heard the voice of Martello’s other quiet man answering the call: “Yes, Mac,” then the squeak of his airport chair as he sat bolt upright, staring at Smiley. “Right, Mac. Sure, Mac. Right now. Yes. Hold it. Right beside me. Hold everything.”

Smiley was already standing over him, his hand held out for the phone. Martello was watching Smiley. On the podium Murphy had his back turned while he pointed out further intriguing features of Po Toi, not quite registering the interruption.

“This island is also known to seamen as Ghost Rock, sir,” he explained, in the same dreary voice. “But nobody seems to know why.”

Smiley listened briefly then put down the telephone. “Thank you, Murphy,” he said courteously. “That was very interesting.”

He stood dead still a moment, his fingers to his upper lip in a Pickwickian posture of deliberation. “Yes,” he repeated. “Yes, very.”

He walked as far as the door then paused again.

“Marty, forgive me, I shall have to leave you for a while. Not above an hour or two, I trust. I shall telephone you in any event.” He reached for the door handle, then turned to Guillam. “Peter, I think you had better come along too—would you mind? We may need a car and you seem admirably unmoved by the Hong Kong traffic. Did I see Fawn somewhere? Ah, there you are.”

On Headland Road the flowers had a hairy brilliance, like ferns sprayed for Christmas. The pavement was narrow and seldom used, except by amahs to exercise the children, which they did without talking to them, as if they were walking dogs. The Cousins’ surveillance van was a deliberately forgettable brown Mercedes lorry, battered-looking, with clay dust on the wings and “H. K. DEVP. & BLDG. SURVEY LTD.” sprayed on one side. An old aerial with Chinese streamers trailing from it drooped over the cab, and as the lorry nosed its lugubrious way past the Ko residence—for the second, or was it the fourth time that morning?—nobody gave it a thought. In Headland Road, as everywhere in Hong Kong, somebody is always building.

Stretched inside the lorry on leather bunks fitted for the purpose, the two men watched intently from among a forest of lenses, cameras, and radio-telephone appliances. For them also, their progress past Seven Gates was becoming something of a routine.

“No change?” said the first.

“No change,” the second confirmed.

“No change,” the first repeated into the radio-telephone, and heard the assuring voice of Murphy at the other end, acknowledging the message.

“Maybe they’re waxworks,” said the first, still watching. “Maybe we should go give them a prod and see if they holler.”

“Maybe we should, at that,” said the second.

In all their professional lives, they were agreed, they had never followed anything that kept so still. Ko stood where he always stood, at the end of the rose-arbour, his back to them as he stared out to sea. His little wife sat apart from him, dressed as usual in black, on a white garden chair, and she seemed to be staring at her husband. Only Tiu made any movement. He also was sitting, but to Ko’s other side, and he was munching what looked like a doughnut.

Reaching the main road, the lorry lumbered toward Stanley, pursuing for cover reasons its fictional reconnaissance of the region.

20

LIESE’S LOVER

Her apartment was big and unreconciled: a mix of hotel lounge, executive suite, and tart’s boudoir. The drawing-room ceiling was raked to a lopsided point like the nave of a subsiding church. The floor changed levels restlessly; the carpet was as thick as grass, and Lizzie and Jerry left shiny footprints where they walked. The enormous windows gave limitless but lonely views, and when she closed the blinds and drew the curtains, the two of them were suddenly in a suburban bungalow with no garden. The amah had gone to her room behind the kitchen, and when she appeared Lizzie sent her back there. She crept out scowling and hissing. “Wait till I tell the master,” she was saying.

He put the chains across the front door, and after that he took her with him, steering her from room to room, making her walk a little ahead of him on his left side, open the doors for him and even the cupboards. The bedroom was a television stage-set for a femme fatale, with a round, quilted bed and a sunken round bath behind Spanish screens. He looked through the bedside lockers for a small-arm because, though Hong Kong is not particularly gun-ridden, people who have lived in Indo-China usually have something. Her dressing-room looked as though she’d emptied one of the smart Scandinavian décor shops in Central by telephone. The dining-room was done in smoked glass, polished chrome and leather, with fake Gainsborough ancestors staring at the empty chairs—all the mummies who couldn’t boil eggs, he thought. Black tiger-skin steps led to Ko’s den, and here Jerry lingered, staring round, fascinated despite himself, seeing the man in everything, and—for all his rather awful crimes at first remove—his kinship with old Sambo. The king-sized desk with the bombé legs and ball-and-claw feet, the Presidential cutlery. The ink-wells, the sheathed paper-knife and scissors, the untouched works of legal reference, the very ones old Sambo trailed around with him: Simons on tax, Charlesworth on company law. The framed testimonials on the wall. The citation for his Order of the British Empire, beginning “Elizabeth the Second by the Grace of God . . .” The medal itself, embalmed in satin like the arms of a dead knight. Group photographs of Chinese elders on the steps of a spirit temple. Victorious racehorses. Lizzie laughing to him. Lizzie in a swim-suit, looking stunning. Lizzie in Paris.

Gently he pulled open the desk drawers and discovered the embossed stationery of a dozen different companies. In the cupboards, empty files, an I.B.M. electric typewriter with no plug on it, an address book with no addresses entered. Lizzie naked from the waist up, glancing round at him over her long back. Lizzie, God help her, in a wedding dress, clutching a posy of gardenias. Ko must have sent her to a bridal parlour for the photograph.

There were no photographs of gunny bags of opium.

The executive sanctuary, thought Jerry, still standing there. Old Sambo had several, he remembered: girls who had flats from him—one even a house—yet saw him only a few times a year. But always this one secret special room, with the desk and the unused telephones and the instant mementoes, a physical corner carved off someone else’s life, a shelter from his other shelters.

“Where is he?” Jerry asked, remembering Luke again.

“Drake?”

“No, Father Christmas.”

“You tell me.”

He followed her to the bedroom. “Do you often not know?” he asked.

She was pulling off her earrings, dropping them in a jewellery box. Then her clasp, her necklace and bracelets.

“He rings me wherever he is, night or day, we never care. This is the first time he’s cut himself off.”

“Can you ring him?”

“Any bloody time,” she said with savage sarcasm. “’Course I can. Number One Wife and me get on just great.”

“What about at the office?”

“He’s not going to the office.”

“What about Tiu?”

“Sod Tiu.”

“Why?”

“Because he’s a pig,” she snapped, pulling open a cupboard.

“He could pass on messages for you.”

“If he felt like it, which he doesn’t.”

“Why not?”

“How the hell should I know?” She hauled out a pullover and some jeans and chucked them on the bed. “Because he resents me. Because he doesn’t trust me. Because he doesn’t like roundeyes horning in on Big Sir. Get out while I change.”

So he wandered into the dressing-room again, keeping his back to her, hearing the rustle of silk and skin.

“I saw Ricardo,” he said. “We had a full and frank exchange of views.”

He needed very much to hear whether they had told her. He needed to absolve her from Luke. He listened, then went on:

“Charlie Marshall gave me his address, so I popped up and had a chat with him.”

“Great. So now you’re family.”

“They told me about Mellon. Said you carried dope for him.” She didn’t speak so he turned to look at her, and she was sitting on the bed with her head in her hands. In the jeans and pullover she looked about fifteen years old, and half a foot shorter.

“What the hell do you want?” she whispered at last, so quietly she might have been putting the question to herself.

“You,” he said. “For keeps.”

He didn’t know whether she heard because all she did was let out a long breath and whisper “Oh, Jesus” at the end of it.

“Mellon a friend of yours?” she asked finally.

“No.”

“Pity. He needs a friend like you.”

“Does Arpego know where Ko is?”

She shrugged.

“When did you last hear from him?”

“A week.”

“What did he say?”

“He had things to arrange.”

“What things?”

“For Christ’s sake, stop asking questions! The whole sodding world is asking questions, so just don’t join the queue, right?”

He stared at her and her eyes were alight with anger and despair. He opened the balcony door and stepped outside.

I need a brief, he thought bitterly. Sarratt bearleaders, where are you now I need you? It hadn’t dawned on him till now that when he cut the cable, he was also dropping the pilot.

The balcony ran along three sides. The fog had temporarily cleared. Behind him hung the Peak, its shoulders festooned in gold lights. Banks of running cloud made changing caverns round the moon. The harbour had dug out all its finery. At its centre an American aircraft carrier, floodlit and dressed overall, basked like a pampered woman amid a cluster of attendant launches. On her deck, a line of helicopters and small fighters reminded him of the air base in Northern Thailand. A column of ocean-going junks drifted past her, headed for Canton.

“Jerry,” she called.

She was standing in the open doorway, watching him down a line of tub trees.

“Come on in. I’m hungry,” she said.

It was a kitchen where nobody cooked or ate, but it had a Bavarian corner, with pine settles, Chinese-style alpine pictures, and ashtrays saying “Carlsberg.” She gave him coffee from an ever-ready percolator, and he noticed how when she was on guard she kept her shoulders forward and her forearms across her body, the way the orphan used to. She was shivering. He thought she had been shivering ever since he laid the gun on her and he wished he hadn’t done that, because it was beginning to dawn on him that she was in as bad a state as he was, and perhaps a damn sight worse, and that the mood between them was like two people after a disaster, each in a separate hell. He made her a brandy and soda and the same for himself and sat her in the drawingroom where it was warmer, and he watched her while she hugged herself and drank the brandy, staring at the carpet.

“Music?” he asked.

She shook her head.

“I represent myself,” he said. “No connection with any other firm.”

She might not have heard.

“I’m free and willing,” he said. “It’s just that a friend of mine died.”

He saw her nod, but only in sympathy; he was sure it rang no bell with her at all.

“The Ko thing is getting very grubby,” he said. “It’s not going to work out well. They’re very rough boys you’re mixed up with. I thought maybe you’d like a leg out of it all. That’s why I came back. My Galahad act. It’s just I don’t quite know what’s gathering round you. Mellon—all that. Maybe we should unbutton it together and see what’s there.”

After which not very articulate explanation, the telephone rang. It had one of those throttled croaks designed to spare the nerves.

The telephone was across the room on a gilded trolley. A pinlight winked on it with each dull note, and the rippled glass shelves picked up the reflection. She glanced at it, then at Jerry, and her face was at once alert with hope. Jumping to his feet, he pushed the trolley over to her and its wheels stammered in the deep pile. The wire uncoiled behind him as he walked, till it was like a child’s scribble across the room. She lifted the receiver quickly and said “Worth” in the slightly rude tone women learn when they live alone. He thought of telling her the line was bugged but he didn’t know what he was warning her against; he had no position any more, this side or that side. He didn’t know what the sides were, but his head was suddenly full of Luke again and the hunter in him was wide awake.

She had the telephone to her ear but she hadn’t spoken. Once she said “Yes,” as if she were acknowledging instructions, and once she said “No” strongly. Her expression had turned blank, her voice told him nothing. But he sensed obedience and he sensed concealment, and as he did so, the anger lit in him completely and nothing else mattered.

“No,” she said to the phone. “I left the party early.”

He knelt beside her, trying to listen, but she kept the receiver pressed hard against her.

Why didn’t she ask him where he was? Why didn’t she ask when she would see him? Whether he was all right? Why he hadn’t phoned? Why did she look at Jerry like this, show no relief?

His hand on her cheek, he forced her head round and whispered to the other ear.

“Tell him you must see him! You’ll come to him. Anywhere.”

“Yes,” she said again into the phone. “All right. Yes.”

“Tell him! Tell him you must see him!”

“I must see you,” she said finally. “I’ll come to you wherever you are.”

The receiver was still in her hand. She made a shrug, asking for instruction, and her eyes were still turned to Jerry—not as her Sir Galahad but as just another part of a hostile world that encircled her.

“I love you!” he whispered. “Say what you say!”

“I love you,” she said shortly, with her eyes closed, and rang off before he could stop her.

“He’s coming here,” she said. “And damn you.”

Jerry was still kneeling beside her. She stood up in order to get clear of him.

“Does he know?” Jerry asked.

“Know what?”

“That I’m here?”

“Perhaps.” She lit a cigarette.

“Where is he now?”

“I don’t know.”

“When will he be here?”

“He said soon.”

“Is he alone?”

“He didn’t say.”

“Does he carry a gun?”

She was across the room from him. Her strained grey eyes still held him in their furious, frightened glare. But Jerry was indifferent to her mood. A feverish urge for action had overcome all other feelings.

“Drake Ko. The nice man who set you up here. Does he carry a gun? Is he going to shoot me? Is Tiu with him? Just questions, that’s all.”

“He doesn’t wear it in bed, if that’s what you mean.”

“Where are you going?”

“I thought you two men would prefer to be left alone.”

Leading her back to the sofa, he sat her facing the double doors at the far end of the room. They were panelled with frosted glass, and on the other side of them lay the hall and the front entrance. He opened them, clearing her line of view to anybody coming in.

“Do you have rules about letting people in, you two?” She didn’t follow his question. “There’s a peep-hole here. Does he insist you check every time before you open?”

“He’ll ring on the house phone from downstairs. Then he’ll use his door key.”

The front door was laminated hardboard, not solid, but solid enough. Sarratt folklore said, “If you are taking a lone intruder unawares, don’t get behind the door or you’ll never get out again.” For once Jerry was inclined to agree. Yet to keep to the open side was to be a sitting duck for anyone aggressively inclined, and Jerry was by no means sure that Ko was either unaware or alone. He considered going behind the sofa, but if there was to be shooting he didn’t want the girl to be in the line of it; he definitely didn’t. Her passivity, her lethargic stare did nothing to reassure him. His brandy glass was beside hers on the table, and he put it quietly out of sight behind a vase of plastic orchids. He emptied the ashtray and set an open copy of Vogue in front of her on the table.

“You play music when you’re alone?”

“Sometimes.”

He chose Ellington.

“Too loud?”

“Louder,” she said. Suspicious, he turned down the sound, watching her. As he did so, the house phone whistled twice from the hall.

“Take care,” he warned and, gun in hand, moved to the open side of the front door, the sitting-duck position, three feet from the arc, close enough to spring forward, far enough to shoot and throw himself, which was what he had in mind as he dropped into a halfcrouch. He held the gun in his left hand and nothing in his right, because at that distance he couldn’t miss with either hand, whereas if he had to strike he wanted his right hand free. He remembered the way Tiu carried his hands curled, and he warned himself not to get in close. Whatever he did, to do it from a distance. A groin kick but don’t follow it in; stay outside those hands.

“You say ‘Come on up,’ ” he told her.

“Come on up,” Lizzie repeated into the phone. She rang off and unhooked the chain.

“When he comes in, smile for the camera. Don’t shout.”

“Go to hell,” she said.

From the lift-well, to his sharpened ear, came the clump of a lift arriving and the monotonous “ping” of the bell. He heard footsteps approaching the door, one pair only, steady, and remembered Drake Ko’s comic, slightly ape-like gait at Happy Valley, how the knees tipped through the grey flannels. A key slid into the lock, one hand came round the door, and the rest with no apparent forethought followed. By then Jerry had sprung with all his weight, flattening the unresisting body against the wall. A picture of Venice fell, the glass smashed, he slammed the door, all in the same moment that he found a throat and jammed the barrel of the pistol straight into the deep flesh. Then the door was unlocked a second time from outside, very fast, the wind went out of his body, his feet flew upward, a crippling shock of pain spread from his kidneys and felled him on the thick carpet, a second blow caught him in the groin and made him gasp as he jerked his knees to his chin. Through his streaming eyes he saw the little, furious figure of Fawn the baby-sitter standing over him, shaping for a third strike, and the rigid grin of Sam Collins as he peered calmly over Fawn’s shoulder to see what the damage was. And still in the doorway, wearing an expression of grave apprehension as he straightened his collar after Jerry’s unprovoked assault on him, the flustered figure of his one-time guide and mentor, Mr. George Smiley, breathlessly calling his leash-dogs to order.

Jerry was able to sit, but only if he leaned forward. He held both hands in front of him, his forearms jammed into his lap. The pain was all over his body, like poison spreading from a central source. The girl watched from the hall doorway. Fawn was lurking, hoping for another excuse to hit him. Sam Collins was at the other end of the room, sitting in a winged armchair with his legs crossed as if he were at home here and the chair his favourite. Smiley had poured Jerry a neat brandy and was stooping over him, poking the glass into his hand.

“What are you doing here, Jerry?” Smiley said. “I don’t understand.”

“Courting,” said Jerry and closed his eyes as a wave of black pain swept over him. “Developed an unscheduled affection for our hostess, here. Sorry about that.”

“That was a very dangerous thing to do, Jerry,” Smiley objected. “You could have wrecked the entire operation. Suppose I had been Ko. The consequences would have been disastrous.”

“I’ll say they would.” He drank some brandy. “Luke’s dead. Lying in my flat with his head shot off.”

“Who’s Luke?” Smiley asked, forgetting their meeting at Craw’s house.

“No one. Just a friend.” He drank again. “American journalist. A drunk. No loss to anyone.”

Smiley glanced at Sam Collins, but Sam shrugged. “Nobody we know,” he said.

“Ring them, all the same,” said Smiley.

Sam picked up the mobile telephone and walked out of the room with it because he knew the layout.

“Put the burn on her, have you?” Jerry said, with a nod of his head toward Lizzie. “About the only thing left in the book that hasn’t been done to her, I should think.” He called over to her. “How are you doing there, sport? Sorry about the tussle. Didn’t break anything, did we?”

“No,” she said.

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

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

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

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

“Jerry,” said Smiley.

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

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

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

Sam Collins returned. Smiley glanced at him in question.

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

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

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

“Been there some while.”

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

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

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

Collins nodded.

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

She shook her head.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Sometimes.”

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

She nodded.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Love to Ann, then,” Jerry said.

“Thank you.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Drunk,” said Fawn in disgust.

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

“Get in,” he snapped.

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

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

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

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

“Cousins bringing up the tail,” he announced.

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

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

Guillam made an obscene answer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Send Fawn!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Like Lizzie, for instance.

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

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

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

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

And what will Drake do with Lizzie, he wondered, while that little drama unfolds? Which particular scrap-heap is she headed for this time?

They were at the mouth of the tunnel and they had slowed almost to a halt. The Mercedes lay right behind them. Jerry let his head fall forward. He put both hands over his groin while he rocked himself and grunted in pain. From an improvised police box, like a sentry post, a Chinese constable watched curiously.

“If he comes over to us, tell him we’ve got a drunk on our hands,” Guillam snapped. “Show him the sick on the floor.”

They crawled into the tunnel. Two lanes of north-bound traffic were bunched nose to bumper by the bad weather. Guillam had taken the right-hand stream. The Mercedes drew up beside them on their left. In the mirror, through half-closed eyes, Jerry saw a brown lorry grind down the hill after them.

“Give me some change,” Guillam said. “I’ll need change as I come out.”

Fawn delved in his pockets, but using one hand only.

The tunnel pounded to the roar of engines. A hooting match started. Others began joining in. To the encroaching fog was added the stench of exhaust fumes. Fawn closed his window. The din rose and echoed till the car trembled to it.

Jerry put his hands to his ears. “Sorry, sport. Going to bring up again, I’m afraid.”

But this time he leaned toward Fawn, who, with a muttered “Filthy bastard,” started hastily to wind his window down again, until Jerry’s head crashed into the lower part of his face and Jerry’s elbow hacked down in his groin. For Guillam, caught between driving and defending himself, Jerry had one pounding chop on the point where the shoulder socket meets the collarbone. He started the strike with the arm quite relaxed, converting the speed into power at the last possible moment. The impact made Guillam scream “Christ!” and lifted him straight out of his seat as the car veered to the right.

Fawn had an arm round Jerry’s neck and with his other hand he was trying to press Jerry’s head over it, which would definitely have killed him. But there is a blow they teach at Sarratt for cramped spaces that is called “the tiger’s claw” and is delivered by driving the heel of the hand upwards into the opponent’s windpipe, keeping the arm crooked and the fingers pressed back for tension. Jerry did that now, and Fawn’s head hit the back window so hard that the safety glass starred. In the Mercedes the two Americans went on looking ahead of them, as if they were driving to a state funeral. He thought of squeezing Fawn’s windpipe with his finger and thumb but it didn’t seem necessary. Recovering his gun from Fawn’s waistband, Jerry opened the right-hand door. Guillam made one desperate dive for him, ripping the sleeve of his faithful but very old suit to the elbow. Jerry swung the gun onto his arm and saw his face contort with pain. Fawn got a leg out, but Jerry slammed the door on it and heard him shout “Bastard!” again, and after that he just kept running back toward town, against the stream.

Bounding and weaving between the land-locked cars, he pelted out of the tunnel and up the hill until he reached the little sentry hut. He thought he heard Guillam yelling. He thought he heard a shot, but it could have been a car backfiring. His groin was hurting amazingly, but he seemed to run faster under the impetus of the pain. A policeman on the curb shouted at him, another held out his arms, but Jerry brushed them aside, and they gave him the final indulgence of the round-eye. He ran until he found a cab. The driver spoke no English so he had to point the way. “That’s it, sport. Up there. Left, you bloody idiot. That’s it—” until they reached her block.

He didn’t know whether Smiley and Collins were still there, or whether Ko had turned up, perhaps with Tiu, but there was very little time to play games finding out. He didn’t ring the bell because he knew the mikes would pick it up. Instead he fished a card from his wallet, scribbled on it, shoved it through the letterbox, and waited in a crouch, shivering and sweating and panting like a dray-horse while he listened for her tread and nursed his groin. He waited an age, and finally the door opened and she stood there staring at him while he tried to get upright.

“Christ, it’s Galahad,” she muttered. She wore no make-up and Ricardo’s claw marks were deep and red. She wasn’t crying; he didn’t think she did that, but her face looked older than the rest of her. To talk, he drew her into the corridor and she didn’t resist. He showed her the door leading to the fire steps.

“Meet me the other side of it in five seconds flat, hear me? Don’t telephone anybody, don’t make a clatter leaving, and don’t ask any bloody silly questions. Bring some warm clothes. Now do it, sport. Don’t dither. Please.”

She looked at him, at his torn sleeve, and sweat-stained jacket; at his mop of forelock hanging over one eye.

“It’s me or nothing,” he said. “And believe me, it’s a big nothing.”

She walked back to her flat alone, leaving the door ajar. But she came out much faster, and for safety’s sake she didn’t even close the door. On the fire stairs he led the way. She carried a shoulder-bag and wore a leather coat. She had brought a cardigan for him to replace the torn jacket—he supposed Drake’s, because it was miles too small, but he managed to squeeze into it. He emptied his jacket pockets into her bag and chucked the jacket down the rubbish chute.

She was so quiet following him that he twice looked back to make sure she was still there. Reaching the ground floor, he peered through the window and drew back in time to see the Rocker in person, accompanied by a heavy subordinate, approach the porter in his kiosk and show him his police pass. They followed the stair as far as the car-park, and she said, “Let’s take the red canoe.”

“Don’t be bloody stupid, we left it in town.”

Shaking his head, he led her past the cars into a squalid open-air compound full of refuse and building junk, like the backyard at the Circus. From here, between walls of weeping concrete, a giddy stairway fell toward the town, overhung by black branches and cut into sections by the winding road. The jarring of the downward steps hurt his groin a lot. The first time they reached the road, Jerry took her straight across it. The second time, alerted by the blood-red flash of an alarm light in the distance, he hauled her into the trees to avoid the beam of a police car whining down the hill at speed. At the underpass they found a pak-pai and Jerry gave the address.

“Where the hell’s that?” she asked.

“Somewhere you don’t have to register,” said Jerry. “Just shut up and let me be masterful, will you? How much money have you got with you?”

She opened her bag and counted from a fat wallet. “I won it off Tiu at mah-jong,” she said, and for some reason he sensed she was romancing.

The driver dropped them at the end of the alley and they walked the short distance to the low gateway. The house had no lights, but as they approached the front door it opened and another couple flitted past them out of the darkness. They entered the hall and the door closed behind them, and they followed a hand-borne pin-light through a short maze of brick walls until they reached a smart interior lobby in which piped music played. On the serpentine sofa in the centre sat a trim Chinese lady with a pencil and a notebook on her lap, to all the world a model chatelaine. She saw Jerry and smiled; she saw Lizzie and her smile broadened.

“For the whole night,” said Jerry.

“Of course,” she replied.

They followed her upstairs to a small corridor. The open doors gave glimpses of silk counterpanes, low lights, mirrors. The woman was murmuring prices in Jerry’s ear. Jerry chose the least suggestive, declined the offer of a second girl to make up the numbers, gave her money, and ordered a bottle of Rémy Martin. Lizzie followed him in, chucked her shoulder-bag on the bed, and, while the door was still open, broke into a taut laugh of relief.

“Lizzie Worthington,” she announced, “this is where they said you’d end up, you brazen bitch, and blow me if they weren’t right!”

There was a chaise longue and Jerry lay on it, staring at the ceiling, feet crossed, the brandy glass in his hand. Lizzie took the bed and for a time neither spoke. The place was very still. Occasionally, from the floor above, they heard a cry of pleasure or muffled laughter, once of protest. She went to the window and peered out.

“What’s out there?” he asked.

“Bloody brick wall, about thirty cats, stacks of empties.”

“Foggy?”

“Vile.”

She sauntered to the bathroom, poked around, came out again.

“Sport,” said Jerry quietly.

She paused, suddenly wary.

“Are you sober and of sound judgment?”

“Why?”

“I want you to tell me everything you told them. When you’ve done that, I want you to tell me everything they asked you, whether you could answer it or not. And when you’ve done that, we’ll try to take a little thing called a back-bearing and work out where those bastards all are in the scheme of the universe.”

“It’s a replay,” she said finally.

“What of?”

“I don’t know: it’s all to be exactly the way it happened before.”

“So what happened before?”

“Whatever it was,” she said wearily, “it’s going to happen again.”

21

NELSON

It was one in the morning. She had bathed. She came out of the bathroom wearing a white wrap and no shoes and her hair in a towel.

“They’ve even got those bits of paper stretched across the loo,” she said. “And tooth-mugs in cellophane bags.”

She dozed on the bed and he on the sofa, and once she said, “I’d like to, but it doesn’t work,” and he replied that after being kicked where Fawn had kicked him the libido tended to be a bit quiescent anyway. She told him about her schoolmaster—Mr. Bloody Worthington, she called him—and “her one shot at going straight,” and about the child she had borne him out of politeness. She talked about her terrible parents, and about Ricardo and what a sod he was, and how she had loved him, and how a girl in the Constellation bar had advised her to poison him with laburnum, so one day after he had beaten her half to death she put a “damn great dose in his coffee.” But perhaps she hadn’t got the right stuff, she said, because all that happened was that he was sick for days and “the one thing worse than Ricardo healthy was Ricardo at death’s door.” How another time she actually got a knife into him while he was in the bath, but all he did was stick a bit of plaster over it and swipe her again.

How when Ricardo did his disappearing act she and Charlie Marshall refused to accept that he was dead, and mounted a “Ricardo Lives!” campaign as they called it, and how Charlie went and badgered his old man, all just as he had described to Jerry. And how Lizzie packed up her rucksack and went down to Bangkok, where she barged straight into the China Airsea suite at the Erawan, intending to beard Tiu, and found herself face to face with Ko instead, having met him only once before, very briefly—at a bun-fight in Hong Kong given by one Sally Cale, an old bull-dyke in the antique trade who pushed heroin on the side. And how that was quite a scene she played, beginning with Ko’s sharp instruction to get out, and ending with “nature taking her course,” as she put it cheerfully: “Another step on Lizzie Worthington’s unswerving road to perdition.” So that slowly and deviously, with Charlie Marshall’s old man pulling, “and Lizzie pushing, as you might say,” they put together a very Chinese contract, to which the main signatories were Ko and Charlie’s old man, and the commodities to be transacted were, one, Ricardo and, two, his recently retired life partner, Lizzie.

In which said contract, Jerry learned with no particular surprise, both she and Ricardo gratefully acquiesced.

“You should have let him rot,” said Jerry, remembering the twin rings on his right hand, and the Ford car blown to bits.

But Lizzie hadn’t seen it that way at all, and she didn’t now. “He was one of us,” she said. “Although he was a sod.”

But having bought his life, she felt free of him.

“Chinese arrange marriages every day. So why shouldn’t Drake and Liese?”

What was all the “Liese” stuff? Jerry asked. Why Liese instead of Lizzie?

She didn’t know. Something Drake didn’t talk about, she said. There had once been a Liese in his life, he told her, and his fortune-teller had promised him that one day he would get another, and he reckoned Lizzie was near enough, so they gave it a shove and called it Liese and while she was about it she pared her surname to plain Worth.

“Blond bird,” she said absently.

The name-change had a practical purpose, too, she said. Having chosen a new name for her, Ko took the trouble to have the local police record of her old one destroyed. “Till that sod Mellon marches in and says he’ll get them to rewrite it, with a special mention about me carrying his bloody heroin,” she said.

Which brought them back to where they were now. And why.

To Jerry, their sleepy wanderings occasionally had the calm of after-love. He lay on the divan, wide awake, but Lizzie talked between dozes, taking up her story dreamily where she had left it when she fell asleep, and he knew that near enough she was telling him the truth, because it made nothing of her that he did not already know, and understand. He realised also that with time Ko had become another anchor for her, somewhat as the schoolmaster had. He gave her the authority from which to survey her odyssey.

“Drake never broke a promise in his life,” she said once, as she rolled over and sank back into a fitful sleep. Jerry remembered the orphan: just never lie to me.

Hours, lifetimes later, she was woken by a squawk of ecstasy next door.

“Christ,” she declared appreciatively, “she really hit the moon.” The squawk repeated itself. She changed her mind. “No go,” she said disapprovingly. “She’s faking it.” Silence. “You awake?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Tomorrow?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t know,” he said.

“Join the club,” she whispered, and seemed to fall asleep again.

I need that Sarratt brief again, he thought. Very badly I need it. Put in a limbo call to Craw, he thought. Ask dear old George for a spot of that philosophical advice he’s taken to doling out these days. He must be around. Somewhere.

* * *

Smiley was around, but at that moment he could not have given Jerry any help at all. He would have traded all his knowledge for a little understanding. The isolation ward had no night-time, so they lay or lounged under the punctured daylight of the ceiling, the three Cousins and Sam on one side of the room, Smiley and Guillam on the other, and Fawn striding up and down the line of the cinema seats, looking caged and furious and squeezing what appeared to be a squash-ball in each fist. His lips were black and swollen and one eye was shut. A clot of blood under his nose refused to go away. Guillam had his right arm strapped to his shoulder and his eyes were on Smiley all the while. But so were the eyes of everyone—or everyone but Fawn. A phone rang, but it was the communications room upstairs saying Bangkok had reported Jerry traced for certain as far as Vientiane.

“Tell them the trail’s cold, Murphy,” Martello ordered, his eyes still on Smiley. “Tell them any damn thing. Just get them off our backs. Right, George?”

Smiley nodded.

“Right,” said Guillam firmly, speaking for him.

“The trail’s cold, honey,” Murphy echoed into the phone. The “honey” came as a surprise. Murphy had not till now shown such signs of human tenderness. “You want to make a signal or do I have to do it for you? We’re not interested, right? Kill it.”

He rang off.

“Rockhurst has found her car,” Guillam said for the second time, while Smiley still stared ahead of him. “In an underground car-park in Central. There is a hire-car down there too. Westerby rented it. Today. In his work name. George?”

Smiley gave a nod so slight it might have been no more than an attack of sleepiness he had staved away.

“At least he’s doing something, George,” said Martello pointedly down the room from his own small caucus of Collins and the quiet men. “Some people would say, when you have a rogue elephant, best thing to do is go out there and shoot him.”

“You have to find him first,” snapped Guillam, whose nerves were at breaking-point.

“I’m not even sure George wants to do that, Peter,” Martello said, in a reprise of his avuncular style. “I think George may be lifting his eye from the ball a little on this, to the grave peril of our common enterprise.”

“What do you want George to do?” Guillam rejoined tartly. “Walk the streets till he finds him? Have Rockhurst circulate his name and description, so that every journalist in town knows there’s a man-hunt for him?”

At Guillam’s side Smiley remained hunched and inert like an old man.

“Westerby’s a professional,” Guillam insisted. “He’s not a natural, but he’s good. He can lie up for months in a town like this and Rockhurst wouldn’t get a scent of him.”

“Not even with the girl in tow?” said Murphy.

His strapped arm notwithstanding, Guillam stooped to Smiley: “It’s your operation,” he whispered urgently. “If you say we’ve got to wait, we’ll wait. Just give the order. All these people want is an excuse to take over. Anything but a vacuum. Anything.”

Prowling the line of the cinema chairs, Fawn gave vent to a sarcastic murmur: “Talk, talk, talk. That’s all they can do.”

Martello tried again: “George. Is this island British or is it not? You guys can shake this town out any time.” He pointed to a windowless wall. “We have a man out there—your man—who seems bent on running amok. Nelson Ko is the biggest catch you or I are ever likely to land. The biggest of my career, and—I will stake my wife, my grandmother, and the deeds of my plantation—the biggest even of yours.”

“No takers,” said Sam Collins, the gambler, through his grin.

Martello stuck to his guns: “Are we going to let him rob us of the prize, George, sit here passively asking one another how it came about that Jesus Christ was born on Christmas Day and not on December twenty-sixth or twenty-seventh?”

Smiley peered at Martello at last, then up at Guillam, who stood stiffly at his side, tipping back his shoulders to support the sling, and finally he looked downward at his own, locked, conflicting hands, and for a period quite meaningless in time he studied himself in his mind, and reviewed his quest for Karla, whom Ann called his “black Grail.” He thought of Ann and her repeated betrayals of him in the name of her own Grail, which she called love. He recalled how against his better judgment he had tried to share her faith and, like a true believer, renew it each day, despite her anarchic interpretations of its meaning. He thought of Haydon, steered at Ann by Karla. He thought of Jerry and the girl, and he thought of Peter Worthington, her husband, and the dog-like look of kinship which Worthington had bestowed on him when he called to interview him in the terrace house in Islington: “You and I are the ones they leave behind,” ran the message.

He thought of Jerry’s other tentative loves along his untidy trail, the half-paid bills the Circus had picked up for him, and it would have been handy to lump Lizzie in with them as just one more, but he couldn’t do that. He was not Sam Collins, and he had not the smallest doubt that at this moment Jerry’s feeling for the girl was a cause Ann would warmly have espoused. But he was not Ann either. For a cruel moment nevertheless, as he sat still locked in indecision, he did honestly wonder whether Ann was right and his striving had become nothing other than a private journey among the beasts and villains of his own insufficiency, in which he ruthlessly involved simplistic minds like Jerry’s.

You’re wrong, sport. Don’t know how, don’t know why, but you’re wrong.

The fact that I am wrong, Smiley had once replied to Ann, in the mid-stream of one of their endless arguments, does not make you right.

He heard Martello again, speaking in present time: “George, we have people waiting with open arms for what we can give them. What Nelson can.”

A phone was ringing. Murphy took the call and relayed the message to the silent room: “Land-line from the aircraft carrier, sir. Navy int. has the junks dead on schedule, sir. South wind favourable and good fishing along the way. Sir, I don’t even think Nelson’s riding with them. I don’t see why he should.”

The focus shifted abruptly to Murphy, who had never before been heard to express an opinion.

“What the hell’s that, Murphy?” Martello demanded quite astonished. “You been to the fortune-teller too, son?”

“Sir, I was down on the carrier this morning and those people have a lot of data. They can’t figure why anybody who lives in Shanghai would ever want to exit out of Swatow. They would do it all different, sir. They would fly or train to Canton, then take the bus maybe to Waichow. They say that’s a lot safer, sir.”

“These are Nelson’s people,” Smiley said as the heads swung sharply back on him. “They’re his clan. He would rather be at sea with them, even if he’s at risk. He trusts them.” He turned to Guillam. “We’ll do this,” he said. “Tell Rockhurst to distribute a description of Westerby and the girl together. You say he hired the car under his work name? Used his escape papers?”

“Yes.”

“Worrell?”

“Yes.”

“The police are looking for a Mr. and Mrs. Worrell then, British. No photographs, and make sure the descriptions are vague enough not to arouse suspicion. Marty.”

Martello was all attentiveness.

“Is Ko still on his boat?” Smiley asked.

“Nestled right in there with Tiu, George.”

“It’s just possible Westerby may try to reach him. You have a static post at the quayside. Put more men down there.”

“What are they looking for?”

“Trouble. The same goes for surveillance on his house. Tell me—” He sank into his thoughts a moment, but Guillam need not have worried. “Tell me, can you simulate a fault on Ko’s home telephone line?”

Martello glanced at Murphy.

“Sir, we don’t have the apparatus handy,” Murphy said, “but I guess we could. . . .”

“Then cut it,” Smiley said simply. “Cut the whole cable if necessary. Try and do it near some road-works.”

Having dispensed his orders, Martello came lightly across the room and sat himself at Smiley’s side.

“Ah, George, about tomorrow, now. Do you think we might, ah, put a little hardware on stand-by as well?” From the desk where he was telephoning Rockhurst, Guillam watched the dialogue most intently. From across the room so did Sam Collins. “Just seems there’s no telling what your man Westerby might do, George. We have to be prepared for all emergencies, right?”

“By all means stand anything by. But for the time being, if you don’t mind, we’ll leave the interception plans as they are. And the competence with me.”

“Sure, George. Sure,” said Martello fulsomely, and with the same church-like reverence tiptoed back to his own camp.

“What did he want?” Guillam demanded in a low voice, crouching at Smiley’s side. “What’s he trying to get you to agree to?”

“I will not have it, Peter,” Smiley warned, also under his breath. He was suddenly very angry. “I shall not hear you again. I shall not tolerate your Byzantine notions of a palace plot. These people are our hosts and our Allies. We have a written agreement with them. We have quite enough to worry about already without grotesque and—I may tell you honestly—paranoid fancies. Now please—”

“I tell you!” Guillam began, but Smiley closed him down.

“I want you to get hold of Craw. Call on him, if necessary. Perhaps the journey would do you good. Tell him Westerby’s on the rampage. He’s to let us know at once if he has word of him. He’ll know what to do.”

Still walking the line of seats, Fawn watched Guillam leave, while his fists continued restlessly kneading whatever was inside them.

* * *

In Jerry’s world it was also three in the morning, and the madame had found him a razor, but no fresh shirt. He had shaved and cleaned himself up as best he could, but his body still ached from head to toe. He stood over Lizzie where she lay on the bed and promised to be back in a couple of hours, but he doubted whether she even heard him. The more papers which are printing pretty girls in preference to politics today, he remembered Ko saying, the more chance we get of a damn sight better world.

He took pak-pais, knowing they were less under the thumb of the police. Otherwise he walked, and the walking helped his body and his mystical process of decision-taking, because back there on the divan it had suddenly become impossible. He needed to move in order to find direction. He was heading for Deep Water Bay, and he knew he was entering badland. Now that he was on the loose, they would be on to that launch like leeches. He wondered who they had, what they were using. If it was the Cousins, he would look for too much hardware, and overmanning.

Rain was coming on and he feared it would clear the fog. Above him the moon was already partly free, and as he padded silently down the hill he could make out by its pale light the nearest stock-broker junks groaning and tugging at their moorings. A south-east wind, he noticed, and rising. If it’s a static observation post, they’ll go for height, he thought, and sure enough there on the promontory to his right he saw a batteredlooking Mercedes van tucked between the trees, and the aerial with its Chinese streamers.

He waited, watching the fog roll, till a car came down the hill with its lights full on, and as soon as it was past him he darted across the road, knowing that not all the hardware in the world would enable them to see him behind the advancing headlights. At the water’s level the visibility was down to zero, and he had to grope in order to pick out the rickety wooden causeway he remembered from his previous reconnaissance. Then he found what he was looking for. The same toothless old woman sat in her sampan, grinning up at him through the fog.

“Ko,” he whispered. “Admiral Nelson. Ko?”

The echo of her cackle bounded away across the water. “Po Toi!” she shouted. “Tin Hau! Po Toi!”

“Today?”

“Today!”

“Tomorrow?”

“Tomollow!”

He tossed her a couple of dollars and her laughter followed him as he crept away.

I’m right, Lizzie’s right, we’re right, he thought. He’s going to the festival. He hoped to God Lizzie was staying put. If she woke up, he wouldn’t put it past her to wander.

He walked, trying to stamp away the aching in his groin and back. Take it stage by stage, he thought. Nothing big. Just play it as it comes. The fog was like a corridor leading to different rooms. Once he met an invalid car crawling along the curb as its owner exercised his dog. Once he saw two old men in undervests performing their morning exercises. In a public garden small children stared at him from a rhododendron bush they seemed to have made their home, for their clothes were draped over the branches and they were as naked as the refugee kids in Phnom Penh.

She was sitting up waiting for him when he returned, and she looked terrible.

“Don’t do that again,” she warned, and shoved her arm through his as they set out to find some breakfast and a boat. “Don’t ever bloody walk out on me without waving.”

Hong Kong at first possessed no boats at all that day. Jerry would not contemplate the big out-island ferries which took the trippers. He knew the Rocker would have them sewn up. He refused to go down to the bays and make conspicuous enquiries. When he telephoned the listed water-taxi firms, whatever they had was either rented or too small for the voyage. Then he remembered Luigi Tan, the fixer, who was a myth at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club; Luigi could get you anything from a Korean dance troupe to a cut-price air ticket faster than any fixer in town. They took a taxi to the other side of Wanchai, where Luigi had his lair, then walked. It was eight in the morning but the hot fog had not lifted. The unlit signs sprawled over the narrow lanes like spent fireworks: “Happy Boy,” “Lucky Place,” “Americana.” The crowded food-stalls added their warm smells to the reek of petrol fumes and soot. Through splits in the wall they sometimes glimpsed a canal. “Anyone tell you where to find me,” Luigi Tan liked to say. “Ask for the big guy with one leg.”

They found him behind the counter of his shop, just tall enough to look over it, a tiny, darting half-Portuguese who had once earned a living Chinese-boxing in the grimy booths of Macao. The front of the shop was six feet wide. His wares were new motor-bikes and relics of the old China service, which he called antiques: daguerreo-types of hatted ladies in tortoise-shell frames, a battered travelling box, an opium clipper’s log.

Luigi knew Jerry already but he liked Lizzie much better, and insisted that she go ahead so that he could study her hind quarters while he ushered them under a washing line to an outhouse marked “Private,” with three chairs and a telephone on the floor. Crouching till he was rolled into a neat ball, Luigi talked Chinese to the telephone and English to Lizzie. He was a grandfather, he said, but virile, and had four sons, all good. Even Number Four son was off his hands. All good drivers, good workers, and good husbands. Also, he said to Lizzie, he had a Mercedes complete with stereo.

“Maybe I take you ride in it one day,” he said.

Jerry wondered whether she realised that he was proposing marriage, or perhaps something slightly less.

And yes, Luigi thought he had a boat as well.

After two phone calls he knew he had a boat, which he only ever lent to friends, at a nominal cost. He gave Lizzie his creditcard case to count the number of cards, then his wallet to admire the family snaps, one of which showed a lobster caught by Number Four son on the day of his recent wedding, though the son was not visible.

“Po Toi bad place,” said Luigi Tan to Lizzie, still on the telephone. “Very dirty place. Rough sea, lousy festival, bad food. Why you want to go there?”

For Tin Hau of course, Jerry said patiently, answering for her. For the famous temple and the festival.

Luigi Tan preferred to speak to Lizzie.

“You go Lantau,” he advised. “Lantau good island. Nice food, good fish, nice people. I tell them you go Lantau, eat at Charlie’s. Charlie my friend.”

“Po Toi,” said Jerry firmly.

“Po Toi hell of a lot of cash.”

“We’ve got a hell of a lot of cash,” said Lizzie with a lovely smile, and Luigi looked at her again, contemplatively, the long up-and-down look.

“Maybe I come with you,” he said to her.

“No,” said Jerry.

Luigi drove them to Causeway Bay and rode with them on the sampan. The boat was a fourteen-foot power boat, common as driftwood, but Jerry reckoned she was sound and Luigi said she had a deep keel. A boy lounged on the stern, trailing one foot in the water.

“My nephew,” said Luigi, ruffling the boy’s hair proudly. “He got mother in Lantau. He take you Lantau, eat Charlie’s place, give you good time. You pay me later.”

“Old boy,” said Jerry patiently. “Sport. We don’t want Lantau. We want Po Toi. Only Po Toi. Po Toi or nothing. Drop us there and go.”

“Po Toi bad weather, bad festival. Bad place. Too near China. Lot of Commies.”

“Po Toi or nothing,” Jerry said.

“Boat too small,” said Luigi with a frightful loss of face, and it took all Lizzie’s charm to build him up again.

For another hour the boys primed the boat, and all Jerry and Lizzie could do was sit in the half-cabin keeping out of sight and sip judicious shots of Rémy Martin. Periodically one or the other of them sank into a private reverie. When Lizzie did this, she hugged herself and rocked slowly on her haunches, head down. Whereas Jerry yanked at his forelock, and once he yanked so hard she touched his arm to stop him, and he laughed.

Almost carelessly they pulled away from the harbour.

“Stay out of sight,” Jerry ordered and for safety’s sake put his arm round her to keep her in the meagre shelter of the open cabin.

The American aircraft carrier had stripped off her ornamental garb and lay grey and menacing, like an unsheathed knife, above the water. At first they had nothing but the same sticky calm. On the shore, shelves of fog pressed on the grey high-rises, and brown smoke columns slid into a white expressionless sky. On the flat water their boat felt high as a balloon. But as they slipped the shelter and headed east, the waves slapped her sides hard enough to wind her, the bow pitched and cracked, and they had to brace themselves to keep upright. With the little bow lifting and tugging like a bad horse, they tumbled past cranes and godowns and factories and the stumps of quarried hillsides.

They were running straight into the wind and spray was flying on all sides. The coxswain at the wheel was laughing and crowing to his mate, and Jerry supposed it was the mad round-eyes they were laughing at, who chose to do their courting in a pitching tub. A giant tanker passed them, not seeming to move, brown junks running in her wake. From the dockyards, where a freighter was laid to, the white flashes of the welders’ lamps signalled to them across the water.

The boys’ laughter eased and they began to talk sensibly because they were at sea. Looking back between the swaying walls of transport ships, Jerry saw the Island drawing slowly away from him, cut like a table mountain by the cloud. Once more Hong Kong was ceasing to exist.

They passed another headland. As the sea roughened, the pitching steadied and the cloud above them dropped until its base was only a few feet above their mast, and for a while they stayed in this lower, unreal world, advancing under cover of its protective blanket. The fog ended suddenly and left them in dancing sunlight. Southward, on hills of violent lushness, an orange navigation lamp winked at them through the clear air.

“What do we do now?” she asked softly, looking through the porthole.

“Smile and pray,” said Jerry.

A pilot’s launch was pulling alongside and for a moment he definitely expected to see the hideous face of the Rocker glowering down on him, but the crew ignored them entirely.

“Who are they?” she whispered. “What do you think?”

“It’s routine,” said Jerry. “It’s meaningless.”

The launch veered away. That’s it, thought Jerry, with no particular feeling; they’ve spotted us.

“You sure it was just routine?” she asked.

“Hundreds of boats go to the festival,” he said.

The boat bucked violently and kept bucking. Great seaworthiness, he thought, hanging on to Lizzie. Great keel. If this goes on, we won’t have anything to decide. The sea will do it for us. It was one of those trips where if you made it, nobody noticed, and if you didn’t, they’d say you threw your life away. The east wind could swirl right round on itself at any moment, he thought. In the season between monsoons, nothing was ever sure. He listened anxiously to the erratic galloping of the engine. If it gives up, we’ll finish on the rocks.

Suddenly his nightmares multiplied unreasonably. The butane, he thought; Christ, the butane! While the boys were preparing the boat, he had glimpsed two cylinders stowed in the front hold beside the water tanks, presumably for cooking Luigi’s lobsters. Fool that he was, he had made nothing of them till now. He worked it out. Butane is heavier than air. All cylinders leak. It’s just a question of degree. With this sea pounding the bows, they leak faster, and the escaped gas will now be lying in the bilge about two feet from the spark of the engine, with a nice blend of oxygen to assist combustion.

Lizzie had slipped from his grasp and stood astern. The sea was suddenly crowded. Out of nowhere, a fleet of fishing junks had gathered, and she was gazing at them earnestly. Grabbing her arm, he hauled her back to the cover of the cabin.

“Where do you think you are?” he shouted. “Bloody Cowes?”

She studied him a moment, then gently kissed him, then kissed him again.

“You calm down,” she warned. She kissed him a third time, muttered “Yes,” as if her expectations had been fulfilled, then sat quiet for a while, looking at the deck but keeping hold of his hand.

Jerry reckoned they were making five knots into the wind. A small plane zoomed overhead. Holding her out of sight, he looked up sharply, but was too late to read the markings.

And good morning to you, he thought.

They were rounding the last point, tossing and groaning in the spray. Once, the propellers lifted clean out of the water with a roar. As they hit the sea again, the engine faltered, choked, but decided to stay alive. Touching Lizzie’s shoulder, Jerry pointed ahead of them to where the bare, steep island of Po Toi loomed like a cut-out against the cloud-torn sky: two peaks, sheer from the water, the larger to the south, and a saddle between.

The sea had turned iron blue and the wind ripped over it, slapping the breath from their mouths and hurling spray at them like hail. On the port bow lay Beaufort Island: a lighthouse, a jetty, no inhabitants. The wind dropped as though it had never been. Not a breeze greeted them as they entered the unruffled water of the island’s lee. The sun’s heat was direct and harsh. Ahead of them, perhaps a mile, lay the mouth of Po Toi’s main bay, and behind it the low brown ghosts of China’s islands.

Soon they could make out a whole untidy fleet of junks and cruise boats jamming the bay. The first jingle of drums and cymbals and unco-ordinated chanting floated to them across the water. On the hill behind lay the shanty village, its tin roofs twinkling, and on its own small headland stood one solid building, the temple of Tin Hau, with a bamboo scaffold lashed round it in a rudimentary grandstand, and a large crowd with a pall of smoke hanging over it and dabs of gold between.

“Which side was it?” he asked her.

“I don’t know. We climbed to a house and walked from there.”

Each time he spoke to her, he looked at her, but now she avoided his gaze. Tapping the coxswain on the shoulder, he pointed the course he wanted him to take. The boy at once began protesting. Squaring to him, Jerry showed him a bunch of money, pretty well all he had left. With an ill grace the boy swung across the mouth of the harbour, weaving between the boats toward a small granite headland where a tumbledown jetty offered a risky landing. The din of the festival was much louder. They could smell charcoal and suckling pig, and hear concerted bursts of laughter, but for the time being the crowd was out of sight to them, as they were to the crowd.

“Here!” Jerry yelled. “Put in here. Now! Now!”

The jetty leaned drunkenly as they clambered onto it. They had not even reached land before their boat had turned for home. Nobody said goodbye. They climbed up the rock hand in hand and walked straight into a money game that was being watched by a large and laughing crowd. At the centre stood a clownish old man with a bag of coins, and he was throwing them down the rock one by one while barefooted boys hurled themselves after them, pushing each other almost to the cliff-edge in their zeal.

“They took a boat,” Guillam said. “Rockhurst has interviewed the proprietor. The proprietor is a friend of Westerby’s, and yes it was Westerby and a beautiful girl, and they wanted to go to Po Toi for Tin Hau.”

“And how did Rockhurst play that?” Smiley asked.

“Said in that case it wasn’t the couple he was looking for.

Bowed out. Disappointed. The harbour police have also belatedly reported sighting it on course for the festival.”

“Want us to put up a spotter plane, George?” Martello asked nervously. “Navy int. have all sorts standing by.”

Murphy had a bright suggestion: “Why don’t we just go right in with choppers and scoop Nelson off that end junk?” he demanded.

“Murphy, shut up,” Martello said.

“They’re making for the island,” Smiley said firmly. “We know they are. I don’t think we need air cover to prove it.”

Martello was not satisfied. “Then maybe we should send a couple of people out to that island, George. Maybe we ought to do a little interfering, finally.”

Fawn was standing stock-still. Even his fists had stopped working.

“No,” said Smiley.

At Martello’s side Sam Collins grinned a little thinly.

“Any reason?” Martello asked.

“Right up to the last minute, Ko has one sanction. He can signal his brother not to come ashore,” Smiley said. “The merest hint of a disturbance on the island could persuade him to do that.”

Martello gave a nervous, angry sigh. He had put aside the pipe he sometimes smoked and was drawing heavily on Sam’s supply of brown cigarettes, which seemed to be endless.

“George, what does this man want?” he demanded in exasperation. “Is this a blackmail thing now, a disruption? I don’t see a category here.” A dreadful thought struck him. His voice dropped and he pointed with the full length of his arm across the room. “Now just don’t tell me we got one of these new ones on our hands, for Christ’s sakes! Don’t tell me he’s one of those cold-war converts with a middle-aged mission to wash his soul in public. Because if he is, and if we are going to read this guy’s frank life story in the Washington Post next week, George, I personally am going to put the whole Fifth Fleet on that island, if that’s what it takes to hold him down.” He turned to Murphy. “I have contingencies, right?”

“Right.”

“George, I want a landing party on stand-by. You guys can come aboard or stay home. Please yourselves.”

Smiley stared at Martello, then at Guillam, with his strapped and useless arm, then at Fawn, who was poised like a diver at the end of a spring-board, eyes half closed and heels together, while he lifted himself slowly up and down on his toes.

“Fawn and Collins,” Smiley said at last.

“You two boys take them to the aircraft carrier and hand them right over to the people there. Murphy comes back.”

A smoke cloud marked the place where Collins had been sitting. Where Fawn had stood, two squash-balls slowly rolled a distance before coming to a halt.

“God help us all,” somebody murmured fervently. It was Guillam, but Smiley ignored him.

The lion was three men long and the crowd was laughing because it nipped at them and because self-appointed picadors were prodding it with sticks while it lolloped in dance steps down the narrow path, to the clatter of the drums and cymbals. Reaching the headland, the procession slowly turned itself and started to retrace its steps, and at this point Jerry drew Lizzie quickly into the middle of it, bending low in order to make less of his height. At first the track was mud and full of puddles, but soon the dance was leading them past the temple and down concrete steps toward a sand beach where the suckling pigs were being roasted.

“Which way?” he asked her.

She led him quickly left, out of the dance, along the back of a shanty village and over a wooden bridge across an inlet. They climbed along a fringe of cypress trees, Lizzie leading, until they were alone again, standing over the perfect horseshoe bay, looking down on Ko’s Admiral Nelson where she lay at the very centre point, like a grand lady among the hundreds of pleasure boats and junks around her. There was nobody visible on deck, not even crew. A clutch of grey police boats, five or six of them, was anchored farther out to sea.

And why not, thought Jerry, since this was a festival?

She had let go his hand, and when he turned to her, she was still staring at Ko’s launch and he saw the shadow of confusion in her face.

“Is this really the way he brought you?” he asked.

It was the way, she said; and turned to him, to look; to confirm or weigh things in her mind. Then with her forefinger she gravely traced his lips as if examining the point where she had kissed them. “Jesus,” she said, and as gravely shook her head.

They started climbing again. Glancing up, Jerry saw the brown island peak deceptively near, and on the hillside groups of rice terraces gone to ruin. They entered a small village populated by nothing but surly dogs, and the bay vanished from sight. The schoolhouse was open and empty. Through the doorway they saw charts of fighting aircraft. Washing jars stood on the step. Cupping her hands, Lizzie rinsed her face. The huts were slung with wire and brick to anchor them against typhoons. The path turned to sand and the going grew harder.

“Still right?” he asked.

“It’s just up,” she said, as if she were sick of telling him. “It’s just up, and then the house, and bingo. I mean Christ, what do you think I am, a bloody nitwit?”

“I didn’t say a thing,” said Jerry. He put his arm round her and she pressed in to him, giving herself exactly as she had done on the dance floor.

They heard a blare of music from the temple as somebody tested the loudspeakers, and after it the wail of a slow tune. The bay was in view again. A crowd had gathered on the shore. Jerry saw more puffs of smoke and, in the windless heat of this side of the island, caught a whiff of joss. The water was blue and clear and calm. Round it, white lights burned on poles. The Ko launch had not stirred, nor had the police.

“See him?” he asked.

She stood apart from him. She was studying the crowd. She shook her head. “Probably having a kip after lunch,” she said.

The beating of the sun was ferocious. When they entered the shadow of the hillside it was like a sudden dusk, and when they reached the sunlight it stung their faces like the heat of a close fire. The air was alive with dragonflies, the hillside strewn with big boulders, but where bushes grew they wound and straggled, producing rich trumpets, red and white and yellow. Old picnic cans lay in profusion.

“And that’s the house?”

“I told you,” she said.

It was a ruin: a broken villa with gaping walls and a view. It had been built with some grandeur above a dried-up stream and was reached by a concrete foot-bridge. The mud stank and hummed with insects. Between palms and bracken the remains of a verandah gave a vast prospect of the sea and of the bay. As they crossed the foot-bridge, he took her arm.

“So let’s play it from here,” he said. “No interrogations. Just tell.”

“We walked up here. Like I said. Me, Drake, and bloody Tiu. The boys brought a basket and the booze. I said ‘Where are we going?’ and he said ‘Picnic.’ Tiu didn’t want me but Drake said I could come. ‘You hate walking,’ I said. ‘I’ve never even seen you even cross a road before!’ ‘Today we walk,’ he says, doing his Captain of Industry act. So I tag along and shut up.”

A thick cloud was already obscuring the peak above them and rolling slowly down the hill. The sun had vanished. In moments the cloud reached them and they were alone at the world’s end, unable to see even their feet. They groped their way into the house. She sat apart from him on a roof beam. Chinese slogans were daubed in red paint down the door pillars. The floor was littered with picnic refuse and long twists of lining paper.

“He tells the boys to hop it, so they hop it,” she went on. “Him and Tiu have a long earnest natter in whatever they’re speaking this week, and half-way through lunch he breaks into English and tells me Po Toi’s his island. It’s where he first landed when he left China. The boat people dumped him here. ‘My people,’ he calls them. That’s why he comes to the festival every year and that’s why he gives money to the temple, and that’s why we’ve sweated up the bloody hill for a picnic. Then they go back into Chinese and I get the feeling Tiu is tearing him off a strip for talking too much, but Drake’s all excited and little-boy and he won’t listen. Then they go on up.”

“Up?”

“Up to the top. ‘Old ways are the best,’ he says to me. ‘We shall stick to what is proven.’ Then his Baptist bit—‘Hold fast to that which is good, Liese. That is what God likes.’ ”

Jerry glanced into the fog-bank above him, and he could have sworn he heard the crackle of a small plane, but at that moment he didn’t mind too much whether it was there or not, because he had the two things he most badly needed. He had the girl with him, and he had the information: for now he finally understood exactly what she had been worth to Smiley and Sam Collins, and how she had unconsciously betrayed to them the vital clue to Ko’s intentions.

“So they went on to the top. Did you go with them?”

“No.”

“Did you see where they went?”

“To the top. I told you.”

“Then what?”

“They looked down the other side. Talked. Pointed. More talk, more pointing. Then down they come again and Drake’s even more excited, the way he gets when he’s brought off a big deal and Number One’s not there to disapprove. Tiu looks dead solemn, and that’s the way he gets when Drake acts fond of me. Drake wants to stay and have a couple of brandies, so Tiu goes back to Hong Kong in a huff. Drake gets amorous and decides we’ll spend the night on the boat and go home in the morning, so that’s what we do.”

“Where does he moor the boat? Here? In the bay?”

“No.”

“Where?”

“Off Lantau.”

“You went straight there, did you?”

She shook her head. “We did a round of the island.”

“This island?”

“There was a place he wanted to look at in the dark. A bit of coast round the other side. The boys had to shine the lamps on it. ‘That’s where I land in ’fifty-one,’ he says. ‘The boat people were frightened to put in to the main harbour. They were frightened of police and ghosts and pirates and customs men. They say the islanders will cut their throats.’ ”

“And in the night?” said Jerry. “While you were moored off Lantau?”

“He told me he had a brother and loved him.”

“That was the first time he told you?”

She nodded.

“He tell you where the brother was?”

“No.”

“But you knew?”

This time she didn’t even nod.

From below, the clatter of the festival rose through the cloud. He lifted her gently to her feet.

“Bloody questions,” she muttered.

“They’re nearly over,” he promised. He kissed her and she let him, but did not otherwise take part.

“Let’s go up there and take a look,” he said.

Ten minutes more and the sunlight returned and blue sky opened above them. With Lizzie leading, they scrambled quickly over several false peaks toward the saddle. The sounds from the bay stopped and the colder air filled with screaming, wheeling gulls. They approached the crest, the path widened, they walked side by side. A few steps more and the wind hit them with a force that made them gasp and reel back. They were at the knife-edge, looking down into an abyss. At their very feet the cliff fell vertical to a boiling sea, and the foam smothered the headlands. Dumpling clouds were blowing from the east and behind them the sky was black. Two hundred metres down lay an inlet which the breakers did not cover. Fifty yards out from it, a shoal of rock checked the sea’s force, and the spume washed it in white rings.

“That it?” he yelled above the wind. “He landed there? That bit of coast?”

“Yes.”

“Shone the lights on it?”

“Yes.”

Leaving her where she stood, he moved slowly up the knifeedge, crouching almost double while the wind rushed over his ears and covered his face in a sticky salt sweat and his stomach screamed in pain from what he supposed was a punctured gut or internal bleeding or both. At the inmost point before the cliff cut back into the sea, he looked down once more, and now he thought he could just make out a skimpy path, sometimes no more than a seam of rock or a ridge of rough grass, ekeing its way cautiously toward the inlet. There was no sand in the inlet but some of the rocks looked dry. Returning to her, he led her away from the knife-edge. The wind dropped and they heard the din of the festival again, much louder than before. The snap of firecrackers made a toy war.

“It’s his brother Nelson,” he explained. “In case you hadn’t gathered. Ko’s bringing him out of China. Tonight’s the night. Trouble is, he’s a much sought-after character. Lot of people would like a chat with him. That’s where Mellon came in.” He took a breath. “My view is that you should get the hell out of here. How do you see that? Drake’s not going to want you around, that’s for sure.”

“Is he going to want you?” she asked.

“I think what you should do, you should go back to the harbour. Are you listening?”

She managed “Of course I am.”

“You look for a nice friendly-looking round-eye family. Choose the woman, for once, not the bloke. Tell her you’ve had a row with your boy-friend and can they take you home in their boat? If they’ll have you, stay the night with them; otherwise go to a hotel. Spin them one of your stories. Christ, that’s no problem, is it?”

A police helicopter pattered overhead in a long curve, presumably to observe the festival. Instinctively he grabbed her shoulders and drew her back to the rock.

“Remember the second place we went—the big-band sound— the bar?” He was still holding her.

She said, “Yes.”

“I’ll pick you up there tomorrow night.”

“I don’t know,” she said.

“Be there at seven. At seven, got it?”

She pushed him gently away from her, as if she were determined to stand alone.

“Tell him I kept faith,” she said. “It’s what he cares about most. I stuck to the deal. If you see him, tell him, ‘Liese stuck to the deal.’ ”

“Sure.”

“Not sure. Yes. Tell him. He did everything he promised. He said he’d look after me. He did. He said he’d let Ric go. He did that, too. He always stuck to a deal.”

She was looking down. He raised her head, holding it with both his hands, but she insisted on going on.

“And tell him—and tell him—tell him they made it impossible. They fenced me in.”

“Be there from seven on,” he said. “Even if I’m a bit late. Now come on, that’s not too difficult, is it? You don’t need a university degree to hoist that aboard.” He was gentling her, battling for a smile, striving for a last complicity before they separated.

She wanted to say something but it didn’t work. She took a few steps, turned and looked back at him, and he waved—one big flap of the arm. She took a few more and kept going till she was below the line of the hill, but he did hear her shout “Seven, then,” or thought he did. Having watched her out of sight, Jerry returned to the knife-edge, where he sat down for a bit of a breather before the Tarzan stuff. A snatch of John Donne came back to him, one of the few things he had picked up at school, though somehow he never got quotations completely right:

On a huge hill

Cragged and steep, Truth stands, and he that will

Reach her, about must, and about must go.

Or something.

For an hour, deep in thought—two hours—he lay in the lee of the rock and watched the daylight turn to dusk over the Chinese islands a few miles into the sea. Then he pulled off his buckskin boots and re-threaded the laces in a herring-bone, the way he used to thread them for his cricket boots. Then he put them on again and tied them as tight as they would go. It could be Tuscany again, he thought, and the five hills which he used to look at from the hornet field. Except that this time he wasn’t proposing to walk out on anyone. Not the girl. Not Luke. Not himself. Even if it took a lot of footwork.

“Navy int. has the junk-fleet making around six knots and dead on course,” Murphy announced. “Quit the beds right on one one hundred, just like they were following our projection.”

From somewhere he had scrounged a set of bakelite toy boats which he could fix to the chart. Standing, he pointed them proudly in a single column at Po Toi island.

Murphy had returned but his colleague had stayed with Sam Collins and Fawn, so they were four.

“And Rockhurst has found the girl,” said Guillam quietly, putting down the other phone. His shoulder was acting up and he was extremely pale.

“Where?” said Smiley.

Still at the chart, Murphy turned.

At his desk, where he was keeping a log of events, Martello put down his pen.

“Picked her up at Aberdeen harbour as she landed,” Guillam went on. “She’d cadged a lift back from Po Toi with a clerk and his wife from the Hong Kong & Shanghai Bank.”

“So what’s the story?” Martello demanded before Smiley could speak. “Where’s Westerby?”

“She doesn’t know,” said Guillam.

“Ah, come on!” Martello protested.

“She says they had a row and left in different boats. Rockhurst says give him another hour with her.”

Smiley spoke. “And Ko?” he asked. “Where’s he?”

“His launch is still in Po Toi harbour,” Guillam replied. “Most of the other boats have already left. But Ko’s is where it was this morning. Sitting pretty, Rockhurst says, and everyone below.”

Smiley peered at the sea chart, then at Guillam, then at the map of Po Toi.

“If she told Westerby what she told Collins,” he said, “then he’s stayed on the island.”

“With what in mind?” Martello demanded very loud. “George, for what purpose is that man remaining on that island?”

An age went by for all of them.

“He’s waiting,” Smiley said.

“For what, may I enquire?” Martello persisted in the same determined tone.

Nobody saw Smiley’s face. It had found its own bit of shadow. They saw his shoulders hunch, they saw his hand rise to his spectacles as if to remove them, they saw it fall back empty in defeat onto the rosewood table.

“Whatever we do, we must let Nelson land,” he said firmly.

“And whatever do we do?” Martello demanded, getting up and coming round the table. “Westerby’s not here, George. He never entered the Colony. He can leave by the same damn route!”

“Please don’t shout at me,” Smiley said.

Martello ignored him. “Which is it going to be, that’s all? The conspiracy or the fuck-up?”

Guillam was standing his height, barring the way, and for an extraordinary moment it seemed possible that, broken shoulder notwithstanding, he proposed physically to restrain Martello from coming any closer to where Smiley sat.

“Peter,” Smiley said quietly. “I see there’s a telephone behind you. Perhaps you’d be good enough to pass it to me.”

With the full moon, the wind had dropped and the sea settled. Jerry had not descended all the way to the inlet but made a last camp thirty feet above it, in the cover of a shrub, where he had protection. His hands and knees were cut, and a branch had grazed his cheek, but he felt good: hungry and alert. In the sweat and danger of the scramble he had forgotten his pain. The inlet was larger than he had imagined when he looked down on it from higher up, and the granite cliffs at sea-level were pierced with caves. He was trying to guess Ko’s plan. He had been trying all day. What Ko had to do he would do from the sea, because he was not capable of the nightmarish climb down the cliff. Jerry had wondered at first whether Ko might try to intercept Nelson before he landed, but could see no safe way for Nelson to slip the fleet and make a sea-meeting with his brother.

The sky darkened, the stars came, and the path of the moon grew brighter. And Westerby? he thought. What does A do now? A was one hell of a long way from the syndicate solutions of Sarratt, that was for sure.

Ko would also be a fool to attempt to bring his launch to this side of the island, he decided. She was unwieldy and drew too much water to come inshore on a windward coast. A small boat was better, and a sampan or a rubber dinghy best. Clambering down the cliff till his boots hit pebbles, Jerry huddled against the rock, watching the breakers thump and the sparks of phosphorus riding with the spume.

She’ll be back by now, he thought. With any luck, she’s talked her way into someone’s house and is charming the kids and wrapping herself round a cup of Bovril. “Tell him I kept faith,” she said.

The moon lifted and still Jerry waited, training his eyes on the darkest spots in an effort to improve his vision. Then, over the clatter of the sea, he could have sworn he heard the awkward slap of water on a wooden hull and the short grumble of an engine switched on and off again. He saw no light. Edging his way along the shadowed rock, he crept as close to the water’s edge as he dared and once more crouched, waiting. As a wave of surf soaked him to the thighs, he saw what he was waiting for: against the moon path, not twenty yards from him, the arched cabin and curled prow of a single sampan rocking on its anchor. He heard a splash and a muffled order, and as he sank as low as the slope allowed, he picked out the unmistakeable shape of Drake Ko, in his Anglo-French beret, wading cautiously ashore, followed by Tiu carrying an M-16 across both arms. So there you are, thought Jerry. End of the long trail. Luke’s killer, Frostie’s killer—whether by proxy or in the flesh is immaterial—Lizzie’s lover, Nelson’s father, Nelson’s brother. Welcome to the man who never broke a deal in his life.

Ko also had a burden but it was less ferocious, and Jerry knew long before he made it out that it was a lamp and a power pack, pretty much like those he had used in the Circus water games on the Helford Estuary, except that the Circus favoured ultraviolet, and shoddy wire-framed spectacles which were useless in rain or spray.

Reaching the beach, the two men made their way over the shingle until they reached the highest point; then, like Jerry, they merged against the black rock. He reckoned they were sixty feet from him. He heard a grunt and saw the flame of a cigarette lighter, then the red glow of two cigarettes followed by the murmur of Chinese voices. Wouldn’t mind one myself, thought Jerry. Stooping, he spread out one large hand and began loading it with pebbles until it was full, then padded as stealthily as he could manage along the base of the rock toward the two red embers. By his calculation he was eight paces from them. He had the pistol in his left hand and the pebbles in his right, and he was listening to the clump of the waves, how they gathered, tottered, and fell, and he was thinking that it was going to be a lot easier to have a chat with Drake once Tiu was out of the way.

Very slowly, in the classic posture of the outfielder, he leaned back, raised his left elbow in front of him, and crooked his right arm behind him, prepared for a throw at full stretch. A wave fell, he heard the shuffle of the undertow, the grumble as another gathered. Still he waited, right arm back, palm sweating as he clasped the pebbles. Then as the wave reached its height he hurled the pebbles high up the cliff, using all his strength, before ducking to a crouch, gaze fixed upon the embers of the two cigarettes. He waited, then heard the pebbles patter against the rock above him and the hailstorm gather as they tumbled down. In the next instant he heard Tiu’s short curse and saw one red ember fly into the air as he leapt to his feet, M-16 in hand, barrel lifted to the cliff and his back to Jerry. Ko was scrambling for cover.

First Jerry hit Tiu very hard with the pistol, taking care to keep his fingers inside the guard. Then he hit him again with his closed right hand, a two-knuckle strike at full force, “with the fist turned down and turning,” as they say at Sarratt, and a lot of follow-through at the end. As Tiu went down, Jerry caught his cheek-bone with the whole weight of his swinging right boot and heard the snap of his closing jaw. And as he stooped to pick up the M-16 he smashed the butt of it into Tiu’s kidneys, thinking angrily of both Luke and Frost, but also of the cheap crack Tiu had made about Lizzie not rating more than the journey from Kowloon-side to Hong Kong-side. Greetings from the horsewriter, he thought. Then he looked toward Ko, who, having stepped forward, was still no more than a black shape against the sea: a crooked silhouette with piecrust ears sticking out below the line of his odd beret. A strong wind had risen again, or perhaps Jerry was only now aware of it. It rattled in the rocks behind them and made Ko’s broad trousers billow.

“That Mr. Westerby, the English newsman?” he enquired, in precisely the deep, harsh tones he had used at Happy Valley.

“The same,” said Jerry.

“You’re a very political man, Mr. Westerby. What the hell do you want here?”

Jerry was recovering his breath, and for a moment he didn’t feel quite ready to answer.

“Mr. Ricardo tells my people it is your aim to blackmail me. Is money your aim, Mr. Westerby?”

“Message from your girl,” Jerry said, feeling he should discharge that promise first. “She says she keeps faith. She’s on your side.”

“I don’t have a side, Mr. Westerby. I’m an army of one. What do you want? Mr. Marshall tells my people you are some kind of hero. Heroes are very political persons, Mr. Westerby. I don’t care for heroes.”

“I came to warn you. They want Nelson. You mustn’t take him back to Hong Kong. They’ve got him all sewn up. They’ve got plans that will last him the rest of his life. And you as well. They’re queueing up for both of you.”

“What do you want, Mr. Westerby?”

“A deal.”

“Nobody wants a deal. They want a commodity. The deal obtains for them the commodity. What do you want?” Ko repeated, raising his voice in command. “Tell me, please.”

“You bought yourself the girl with Ricardo’s life,” said Jerry. “I thought I might buy her back with Nelson’s. I’ll speak to them for you. I know what they want. They’ll settle.”

That’s the last foot in the last door for me, he thought, forever and a day.

“A political settlement, Mr. Westerby? With your people? I made many political settlements with them. They told me God loved children. Did you ever notice God love an Asian child, Mr. Westerby? They told me God was a kwailo and his mother had yellow hair. They told me God was a peaceful man, but I read once that there have never been so many civil wars as in the kingdom of Christ. They told me—”

“Your brother’s right behind you, Mr. Ko.”

Ko swung round. On their left, heading from the east, a dozen or more junks in full sail trembled southward across the moon path in ragged column, lights prickling in the water. Dropping to his knees, Ko began frantically groping for the lamp. Jerry found the tripod, wrenched it open; Ko stood the lamp on it, but his hands were shaking wildly and Jerry had to help him. Jerry seized the wires, struck a match, and clipped the cables to the terminals. They were staring out to sea, side by side. Ko flashed the lamp once, then again, first red then green.

“Wait,” Jerry said softly. “You’re too soon. Go easy or you’ll muck it all up.”

Moving him gently aside, Jerry bent to the eyepiece and scanned the line of boats: “Which one?”

“The last,” said Ko.

Holding the last junk in view, though it was still only a shadow, Jerry signalled again, one red, one green, and a moment later heard Ko let out a cry of joy as an answering flicker darted back across the water.

“Can he fix on that?” said Jerry.

“Sure,” said Ko, still looking out to sea. “Sure. He will fix on that.”

“Then leave it alone. Don’t do any more.”

Ko turned to him, and Jerry saw the excitement in his face, and felt his dependence.

“Mr. Westerby, I am advising you sincerely: if you have played a trick on me for my brother Nelson, your Christian Baptist hell will be a very comfortable place by comparison with what my people do to you. But if you help me I give you everything. That is my contract and I never broke a contract in my life. My brother also made certain contracts.” He looked out to sea. “I am pleased to advise you that he has seen the error of his ways.”

The forward junks were out of sight. Only the tail-enders remained. From far away Jerry fancied he heard the uneven rumble of an engine, but he knew his mind was all over the place and it could have been the tumble of the waves. The moon passed behind the peak and the shadow of the mountain fell like a black knife-point onto the sea, leaving the far fields silver. Stooped to the lamp, Ko gave another cry of pleasure.

“Here! Here! Take a look, Mr. Westerby.”

Through the eyepiece Jerry made out a single phantom junk, unlit except for three pale lamps, two green ones on the mast and a red one to starboard, making its way toward them. It passed from the silver into the blackness and he lost it. From behind him, he heard a groan from Tiu. Ignoring it, Ko remained stooped to the eyepiece, one arm held wide like a Victorian photographer while he began calling softly in Chinese. Running up the shingle, Jerry pulled the pistol from Tiu’s belt, picked up the M-16 again, and, taking both to the sea’s edge, chucked them in. Ko was preparing to repeat the signal but mercifully he couldn’t find the button and Jerry was in time to stop him.

Once more Jerry thought he heard the rumble, not of one engine but two. Running out onto the headland, he peered anxiously north and south in search of a patrol boat, but again he saw nothing and again he blamed the surf and his strained imagination. The junk was nearer, beating in toward the island, her brown batwing sail suddenly tall and terribly conspicuous against the sky. Ko had run to the water’s edge and was waving and yelling across the sea.

“Keep your voice down!” Jerry whispered from beside him.

But Jerry had become an irrelevance: Drake Ko’s whole life was for Nelson. From the shelter of the near headland, the sampan tottered alongside the rocking junk. The moon came out of hiding, and for a moment Jerry forgot his anxiety as a little greyclad figure, small and sturdy, in stature Drake’s antithesis, in a kapok coat and bulging proletarian cap, lowered himself over the side and leapt for the waiting arms of the sampan’s crew. Drake Ko gave another cry; the junk filled its sails and slid behind the headland till only the green lights on its masthead remained visible above the rocks, and then they too vanished. The sampan was making for the beach, and Jerry could see Nelson’s stocky frame as he stood on the bow waving with both hands and Drake Ko in his beret wild on the beach, dancing like a madman, waving back.

The throb of engines grew steadily louder, but still Jerry couldn’t place them. The sea was empty, and when he looked upwards he saw only the hammer-head cliff and its peak black against the stars. The brothers met and embraced and stayed locked in each other’s arms, not moving.

In a burst of realisation Jerry seized hold of both of them, began pummelling them, and cried out for all his life, “Get back in the boat! Hurry!”

They saw no one but each other. Running back to the water’s edge, Jerry grabbed the sampan’s prow and held it, still calling to them as he saw the sky behind the peak turn yellow, then quickly brighten as the throb of the engines swelled to a roar and three blinding searchlights burst on them from blackened helicopters. The rocks danced to the whirl of landing lights, the sea furrowed, pebbles bounced and flew around in storms. For a fraction of a second Jerry saw Drake Ko’s face turn to him beseeching help, as if too late he had recognised where help lay. He mouthed something but the din drowned it.

Jerry hurled himself forward, not for Nelson’s sake, still less for Drake’s; but for what linked them, and for what linked him to Lizzie. But long before he reached them a dark swarm closed on the two men, tore them apart, and bundled the baggy shape of Nelson into the hold of one of the helicopters. In the mayhem Jerry had drawn his gun and held it in his hand. He was screaming, though he could not hear himself above the hurricanes of war. The helicopter was lifting. A single figure remained in the open doorway, looking down, and perhaps it was Fawn, for he looked dark and mad. Then an orange flash broke from in front of him, then a second and a third, and after that Jerry wasn’t calling any more. In fury he threw up his hands, his mouth still open, his face still silently imploring. Then he fell and lay there. Soon there was once more no sound but the surf flopping on the beach and Drake Ko’s hopeless, choking grief against the victorious armadas of the West, which had stolen his brother and left their hard-pressed soldier dead at his feet.

22

BORN AGAIN

In the Circus a mood of wild triumph broke out when the grand news came through from the Cousins. Nelson landed, Nelson bagged! Not a hair of his head injured! For two days there was speculation about medals, knighthoods, and promotions. They must do something for George at last, they must! Not so, said Connie shrewdly from the touch-line. They would never forgive him for raking up Bill Haydon.

The euphoria was followed by certain perplexing rumours. Connie and Doc di Salis, for instance, who were eagerly ensconced in the Maresfield safe house, now dubbed the Dolphinarium, waited a full week for their body to arrive, and waited in vain. So did the interpreters, transcribers, inquisitors, baby-sitters, and allied trades who made up the rest of the reception and interrogation unit there.

The match was rained off, said the housekeepers. Another date would be fixed. Stand by, they said. But quite soon a source at the local estate agent in the neighbouring town of Uckfield revealed that the housekeepers were trying to renege on the lease. Sure enough, after another week the team was stood down “pending policy decisions.” It was never reassembled.

Next, word filtered out that Enderby and Martello jointly— the combination even then seemed odd—were chairing an Anglo-American processing committee. It would meet alternately in Washington and London and have responsibility for simultaneous distribution of the Dolphin product, code-name Whitebait, on either side of the Atlantic.

Quite incidentally it emerged that Nelson was somewhere in the United States, in an armed compound already prepared for him in Philadelphia. The explanation was even slower in coming. It was felt—presumably by somebody, but feelings are hard to trace among so many corridors—that Nelson would be safer there. Physically safer. Think of the Russians. Think of the Chinese. Also, the housekeepers insisted, the Cousins’ processing and evaluation units were more of a scale to handle the unprecedented take that was expected. Also, they said, the Cousins could afford the cost. Also—

“Also gammon and spinach!” Connie stormed when she heard the news.

She and di Salis waited moodily to be invited to join the Cousins’ team. Connie even got herself the injections to be ready, but no call came.

More explanations. The Cousins had a new man at Harvard, the housekeepers said, when Connie sailed in on them in her wheelchair.

“Who?” she demanded in a fury.

A professor somebody, young, a Moscow-gazer. He had made a life specialty of the dark side of Moscow Centre, they said, and had recently published a paper for private distribution only, but based on Company archives, in which he had referred to the “mole principle” and even in veiled terms to Karla’s private army.

“Of course he did, the maggot!” she blurted at them, through her bitter tears of frustration. “And he hogged it all from Connie’s blasted reports, didn’t he? Culpepper, that’s his name, and he knows as much about Karla as my left toe!”

The housekeepers were unmoved however by thoughts of Connie’s toe. It was Culpepper, not Sachs, who had the new committee’s vote.

“Wait till George gets back!” Connie warned them. The threat left them strangely unaffected.

Di Salis fared no better. China-watchers were two a penny in Langley, he was told. A glut on the market, old boy. Sorry, but Enderby’s orders, said the housekeepers.

“Enderby’s?” di Salis echoed.

The committee’s, they said vaguely. It was a joint decision.

So di Salis took his cause to Lacon, who liked to think of himself as a poor man’s ombudsman in such matters, and Lacon in turn took di Salis to luncheon, at which they split the bill down the middle because Lacon did not hold with civil servants treating one another at the taxpayers’ expense.

“How do you all feel about Enderby, by the by?” he asked at some point in the meal, interrupting di Salis’s plaintive monologue about his familiarity with the Chiu Chow and Hakka dialects. Feeling was playing a large part just at the moment. “Does he go down well over there? I’d have thought you liked his way of seeing things. Isn’t he rather sound, wouldn’t you say?”

“Sound” in the Whitehall vocabulary in those days meant hawkish.

Rushing back to the Circus, di Salis duly reported this amazing question to Connie Sachs—as Lacon of course wished him to—and Connie was thereafter seen little. She spent her time quietly “packing her trunk,” as she called it: that is to say, preparing her Moscow Centre archive for posterity. There was a new young burrower she favoured, a goatish but obliging youth called Doolittle. She made this Doolittle sit at her feet while she gave him of her wisdom.

“The old order’s hoofing it,” she warned whoever would listen. “That twerp Enderby is oiling through the back door. It’s a pogrom.”

They treated her at first with much the same derision that Noah had to put up with when he started building his ark. No slouch at tradecraft still, Connie meanwhile secretly took Molly Meakin aside and persuaded her to put in a letter of resignation. “Tell the housekeepers you’re looking for something more fulfill-ing, dear,” she advised, with much winking and pinching. “They’ll give you a rise at the very least.”

Molly had fears of being taken at her word, but Connie knew the game too well. So she wrote her letter and was at once ordered to stay behind after hours. Certain changes were in the air, the housekeepers told her in great confidence. There was a move to create a younger and more vigorous service, with closer links to Whitehall. Molly solemnly promised to reconsider her decision, and Connie Sachs resumed her packing with fresh determination.

Then where was George Smiley all this while? In the Far East? No, in Washington! Nonsense! He was back home and skulking down in the country somewhere—Cornwall was his favourite— taking a well-earned rest and mending his fences with Ann!

Then one of the housekeepers let slip that George might be “suffering from a spot of strain,” and his phrase struck a chill everywhere, for even the dimmest little gnome in Banking Section knew that strain, like old age, was a disease for which there was only one known remedy, and it did not entail recovery.

Guillam came back eventually, but only to sweep Molly off on leave, and he refused to say anything at all. Those who saw him on his swift passage through the fifth floor said he looked shot-about, and obviously in need of a break. Also he seemed to have had an accident to his collar-bone; his right shoulder was all strapped up. From the housekeepers it became known that he had spent a couple of days in the care of the Circus leech at his private clinic in Manchester Square. But still there was no Smiley, and the housekeepers showed only a steely bonhomie when asked when he would return. The housekeepers in these cases become the Star Chamber, feared but needed. Unobtrusively Karla’s portrait disappeared, the wits said for cleaning.

What was odd, and in a way rather terrible, was that none of them thought to drop in on the little house in Bywater Street and simply ring the doorbell. If they had done so they would have found Smiley there, most likely in his dressing-gown, either clearing up plates or preparing food he didn’t eat. Sometimes, usually at dusk, he took himself for a solitary walk in the park and peered at people as if he half recognised them, so that they peered in return, and then looked down. Or he would go and sit himself in one of the cheaper cafés in the King’s Road, taking a book for company and sweet tea for refreshment—for he had abandoned his good intentions about saccharin for his waistline. They would have noticed that he spent a deal of time looking at his hands, and polishing his spectacles on his tie, or re-reading the letter Ann had left for him, which was very long, but only because of repetitions.

Lacon called on him and so did Enderby, and once Martello came along with them, dressed in his London character again; for everyone agreed, and none with greater sincerity than Smiley, that in the interest of the service the hand-over should be as smooth and painless as possible. Smiley made certain requests regarding staff and these were carefully noted by Lacon, who let him understand that toward the Circus—if toward no one else—Treasury was at present in a spending mood. In the secret world at least, sterling was on the up. It was not merely the success of the Dolphin affair which accounted for this change of heart, Lacon said. The American enthusiasm for Enderby’s appointment had been overwhelming. It had been felt even at the highest diplomatic levels. “Spontaneous applause” was how Lacon described it.

“Saul really knows how to talk to them,” he said.

“Oh, does he. Ah, good. Well, good,” Smiley said and bucked his head in approval, as the deaf do.

Even when Enderby confided to Smiley that he proposed to appoint Sam Collins as his head of operations, Smiley showed nothing but courtesy toward the suggestion. Sam was a hustler, Enderby explained, and hustlers were what Langley liked these days.

“Ah, yes. No doubt,” said Smiley.

The two men agreed that Roddy Martindale, though he had bags of entertainment value, was not cut out for the game. Old Roddy really was too queer, said Enderby, and the Minister was scared stiff of him. Nor did he exactly go down swimmingly with the Americans, even the ones that happened to be that way themselves. Also, Enderby was a bit chary of taking in any more Etonians. Gave the wrong impression.

A week later the housekeepers reopened Sam’s old room on the fifth floor and removed the furniture. Collins’s ghost laid for good, said certain unwise voices with relish. Then on the Monday an ornate desk arrived, with a red leather top, and several fake hunting prints from the walls of Sam’s club, which was in the process of being taken over by one of the larger gambling syndicates, to the satisfaction of all parties.

Little Fawn was not seen again. Not even when several of the more muscular London outstations were revived, including the Brixton scalp-hunters, to whom he had formerly belonged, and the Acton lamplighters under Toby Esterhase. But he was not missed either. Like Sam Collins somehow, he had stalked the story without ever quite belonging to it; but unlike Sam, he stayed in the thickets when it ended, and never reappeared.

To Sam Collins, on his first day back in harness, fell the task of breaking the sad news of Jerry’s death. He did it in the rumpus room, just a small, unaffected speech, and everyone agreed he did it well. They had not thought he had it in him.

“For fifth-floor ears only,” he told them. His audience was stunned, then proud. Connie wept and tried to claim Jerry as another of Karla’s victims, but she was held back in this for want of information about who or what had killed him. It was operational, went the word, and it was noble.

Back in Hong Kong, the Foreign Correspondents’ Club showed much initial concern for its missing children Luke and Westerby. Thanks to heavy lobbying by its members, a full-scale confidential enquiry was set up, under the chairmanship of the vigilant Superintendent Rockhurst, to solve the double riddle of their disappearance. The authorities promised full publication of all findings, and the United States Consul General offered five thousand dollars of his own money to anyone coming forward with helpful information. As a gesture to local feeling he included Jerry Westerby’s name in the offer.

The two became known as “the missing newsmen,” and suggestions of a disgraceful attachment between them were rampant. Luke’s bureau matched the five-thousand-dollar figure, and the dwarf, though he was inconsolable, entered a strong bid to have the moneys paid to him. It was he, after all, working on both fronts at once, who had learned from Deathwish that the Cloudview Road apartment, which Luke had last used, had been redecorated from floor to ceiling before the Rocker’s sharp-eyed investigators got round to visiting it. Who ordered this? Who paid? Nobody knew. It was the dwarf also who collected firsthand reports that Jerry had been seen at Kai Tak airport interviewing Japanese package tourists. But the Rocker’s committee of enquiry was obliged to reject these reports. The Japanese concerned were “willing but unreliable witnesses,” they said, when it came to identifying a round-eye who sprang at them after a long journey.

As to Luke—well, the way he had been going, they said, he was heading for some kind of breakdown anyway. The knowing spoke of amnesia brought on by alcohol and fast living. After a while even the best stories grow cold. Rumours went out that the two men had been seen hunting together during the Hué collapse—or was it Danang?—and drinking together in Saigon. Another had them sitting side by side on the waterfront at Manila.

“Holding hands?” the dwarf asked.

“Worse” was the reply.

The Rocker’s name was also in wide circulation, thanks to his success in a recent spectacular narcotics trial mounted with the help of the American Drug Enforcement Administration. Several Chinese and a glamorous English adventuress, a heroin carrier, were featured, and though as usual the Mr. Big was never brought to justice, it was said the Rocker came within an ace of nailing him. “Our tough but honest trouble-shooter,” wrote the South China Morning Post in an editorial praising his astuteness. “Hong Kong could do with more like him.”

For other distractions the Club could turn to the dramatic reopening of High Haven behind a twenty-foot floodlit wire perimeter patrolled by guard dogs. But there were no free lunches any more and the joke soon faded.

As to old Craw, for months he was not seen and not spoken of. Till one night he appeared, looking much aged and soberly dressed, and sat in his former corner gazing into space. A few were still left who recognised him. The Canadian cowboy suggested a rubber of Shanghai bowling, but he declined. Then a strange thing happened. An argument broke out concerning a silly point of Club protocol. Nothing serious at all: whether some item of tradition about signing chits was still useful to the Club’s running. As trifling as that. But for some reason it made the old fellow absolutely furious. Rising to his feet, he stomped toward the lifts, tears pouring down his face, while he hurled one insult after another at them.

“Don’t change anything,” he advised them, shaking his stick in fury. “The old order changeth not, let it all run on. You won’t stop the wheel—not together, not divided—you snivelling, arselicking novices! You’re a bunch of suicidal tits to try!”

Past it, they agreed, as the doors closed on him. Poor fellow. Embarrassing.

Was there really a conspiracy against Smiley, of the scale that Guillam supposed? If so, how was it affected by Westerby’s own maverick intervention? No information is available and even those who trust each other well are not disposed to discuss the question. Certainly there was a secret understanding between Enderby and Martello, that the Cousins should have first bite of Nelson—as well as joint credit for procuring him—against their championship of Enderby for chief. Certainly Lacon and Collins, in their vastly different spheres, were party to it. But at what point they proposed to seize Nelson for themselves and by what means—for instance, the more conventional recourse of a concerted démarche at ministerial level in London—will probably never be known. But there can be no doubt, as it turned out, that Westerby was a blessing in disguise. He gave them the excuse they were looking for.

And did Smiley know of the conspiracy, deep down? Was he aware of it, and did he secretly even welcome the solution? Peter Guillam, who has since had two good years in exile in Brixton to consider his opinion, insists that the answer to both questions is a firm yes. There is a letter George wrote to Ann Smiley—he says—in the heat of the crisis, presumably in one of the long waiting periods in the isolation ward. Guillam leans heavily on it for his theory. Ann showed it to him when he called on her in Wiltshire, in the hope of bringing about a reconciliation, and though the mission failed, she produced it from her handbag in the course of their talk. Guillam memorised a part, he claims, and wrote it down as soon as he got back to the car. Certainly the style flies a lot higher than anything Guillam would aspire to for himself:

I honestly do wonder, without wishing to be morbid, how I reached this present pass. So far as I can ever remember of my youth, I chose the secret road because it seemed to lead straightest and furthest toward my country’s goal. The enemy in those days was someone we could point at and read about in the papers. Today, all I know is that I have learned to interpret the whole of life in terms of conspiracy. That is the sword I have lived by, and as I look round me now I see it is the sword I shall die by as well. These people terrify me, but I am one of them. If they stab me in the back, then at least that is the judgment of my peers.

As Guillam points out, the letter was essentially from Smiley’s blue period.

These days, he says, the old boy is much more himself. Occasionally he and Ann have lunches, and Guillam personally is convinced that they will simply get together one day and that will be that. But George never mentions Westerby. And nor does Guillam, for George’s sake.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Introduction

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

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JOHN LE CARRÉ, the pseudonym for David Cornwell, was a member of the British Foreign Service from 1959 to 1964. His third novel, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, became a worldwide bestseller. He has written twenty-one novels, which have been published in thirty-six languages. Many of his books have been made into films, including The Constant Gardener; The Russia House; The Little Drummer Girl; and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.

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First published in the United States of America by Franklin Library 1979
Published in the United States of America by Alfred A. Knopf 1980
Published in Penguin Books 2011

Copyright © David Cornwell, 1979

Introduction copyright © David Cornwell, 2000
All rights reserved.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to Random House, Inc., and to Faber & Faber Ltd. for permission to reprint a verse by W. H. Auden.

PUBLISHER’S NOTE

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

ISBN : 978-1-101-53529-5

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For my sons,
Simon, Stephen,
Timothy, and
Nicholas, with love

INTRODUCTION

JOHN LE CARRÉ

Cornwall, October 2000

Smiley’s People is the third and final novel in what became a trilogy recounting the duel of wits between George Smiley of the British Secret Service, which I called the Circus, and his rival and alter ego, code name Karla of the KGB, which I called Moscow Centre. The first novel of the trilogy was Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; the second, The Honourable Schoolboy. My grand ambition was to write not just three but a whole scad of them—ten or fifteen—describing an epic stand-off between my two protagonists that would cover every corner of the globe and collectively constitute a kind of Comédie Humaine of the cold war, told in terms of mutual espionage.

Spying, in all its different forms, was after all what the cold war had for a battlefield, and the spies were its ground troops. Hot wars like Korea and Vietnam might come and go, but spying was a continuum. The obsession of the two great economic systems with each other’s identity, intentions, strengths, and weaknesses had produced by the 1970s a state of mutual watchfulness and paranoia that seemed to know no bounds. Each side was ready to pay any sum, take any risk, tell any lie, to gain a seeming intelligence advantage over the other. Neither seemed able to grasp the utter sterility of this situation. It is no wonder that, when the players were finally able to look at one another’s cards, it tuned out that each had vastly exaggerated the other’s strategic capability. In that sense, the quest for intelligence took on at its worst an almost mythic form, with the spies not so much required to report the truth about the enemy as paint him in a form monstrous enough to keep the alarm bells ringing for all eternity.

And at the heart of this war of fantasies lay the war between intelligence services of the opposing Blocs themselves—surely the most sterile, the least productive, and the most addictive of all the games spies play, since it neither enlightens nor benefits the real world which gives them their daily bread, and turns the basically very simple trade of espionage into a never-ending maze of mirrors to which only professionals are admitted, and nobody looks the wiser. Along the way, I had preachier notions I wanted to slip into my great oeuvre, provided I could find a way to dramatise them, even seditious ones—the moral corruption that the cold war was leaving in its wake in the Western as well as the Communist world, for instance; and how the cold war’s cult of lying was permeating every area of Western public life so that in this country alone there was scarcely an organ of government, from the parish pump upwards, that couldn’t invoke the spectre of national security to disguise its bias, incompetence, and corruption. And Smiley would be my champion, my mouthpiece, my knight errant. And my readers would listen to him where they wouldn’t listen to me. Because he was a better man than I was, and part of a grand story. And if Smiley on the insistence of some secret loyalty board of American-inspired witch-hunters was one day hauled before a kangaroo court of his peers—such things happened in those days—and charged with harbouring sympathies incompatible with his secret work, then my readers would rush to his protection and send his accusers packing. In my head I had a lot of this stuff planned, and more of it in notebooks.

So what stopped me from fulfilling this grand design?

In part, Smiley did. The older I became, the more I wanted to write about younger passions and a changing society. There had been a time when Smiley had been my proxy father, almost my father confessor. But as my knight errant he cast too old an eye on the world. Where he saw change, it pained him. And where his corrosive eye and brave past had once provided me with a voice and a disguise, I was beginning to find these very assets a liability. Smiley was still my hero, but he had got above his station. He was too patient for me. His radicalism was the thinker’s, not the doer’s. Ultimately, whatever his misgivings, he always knuckled down and did the job, even if he had to leave his conscience outside the door. Which meant he and the reader had the best of both worlds. Alec Guinness’s superb portrayal of him only added to my problems. When Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy was first shown on the BBC, the only independent channel in those days obligingly staged a strike and for six precious weeks the entire British viewing public had to choose between BBC1 and BBC2. In consequence, we were pulling in audiences of up to eleven million for each episode, and the series became a kind of public institution, with endless chat on the radio about who understood how much or how little of the plot, and George Smiley briefly became a kind of myopic national hero, solving crossword puzzles that defeated the rest of us.

The problem went further than that. George Smiley, whether I liked it or not, was from then on Alec Guinness—voice, mannerisms, the whole package. And I did like it. I liked it enormously. Once in a writer’s life, if he’s lucky, an actor plays one of his characters to perfection. And Alec did that. He was as good at being Smiley as Cyril Cusack was at being Control in The Spy Who Came In from the Cold. Better. On the other hand, I didn’t at all enjoy the fact that Smiley had somehow been taken over by my public. It was a thoroughly odd sensation, and not at all a pleasant one, when I went to get my character back after Alec had finished with him, to discover that I had been given used goods. I think I even felt a little bit betrayed.

Another thing that held me back from my great design was a drastic change in my writing methods for which to this day I can’t quite account. Writing Tinker, Tailor had been a static exercise. I sat in Cornwall and scribbled. Though the story had scenes in Hong Kong, Delhi, and Prague, I had visited none of those places in order to write the novel. I had fed off my memory and imagination, and got away with it. Perhaps for this reason, when I came to write The Honourable Schoolboy, I took to the road in a very big way indeed. Basing myself in Hong Kong, I shot off to north-east Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, and Taiwan in quick order, and wrote, as it were, from the stirrup. Along the way, I tasted hot warfare for the first time, though mercifully very little of it, and by the time I’d seen what I set out to see, I was beginning to regard Smiley and Karla as superfluous baggage. The Honourable Schoolboy was kindly received, but I still believe it might have been a better novel without their presence.

For all these reasons then, Smiley’s People was intended to be a requiem for the old spy, and to me that is what it remains. Smiley popped up again in The Secret Pilgrim, but only in a retrospective rôle. To provide him with a good send-off, I assembled all the usual suspects: Peter Guillam, Toby Esterhase, Connie Sachs, and, of course, the old fox himself, code name Karla. The grand finale takes place in divided Berlin. Where else could I choose? In The Spy Who Came In from the Cold it was at the Berlin Wall that Smiley was heard shouting at Alec Leamas not to go back for the girl Liz. For his last act, Smiley would return there, and in his heart beg Karla not to leave the East. Smiley wins, Karla loses. But at what cost to both of them? Facing each other, they are the two no-men of no-man’s-land. Karla has sacrificed his political faith, Smiley his humanity.

I always remember the words of a Berlin comedian when, against all prediction, the Berlin Wall did finally come down. “The right side lost but the wrong side won.” He meant, I suppose, that having defeated Communism, we are left with the problem of how to tackle our own greed, and our indifference to human suffering in the world outside our own. I’ll bet you that George Smiley, if he is still with us, is still agonising over the answer.

1

Two seemingly unconnected events heralded the summons of Mr. George Smiley from his dubious retirement. The first had for its background Paris, and for a season the boiling month of August, when Parisians by tradition abandon their city to the scalding sunshine and the bus-loads of packaged tourists.

On one of these August days—the fourth, and at twelve o’clock exactly, for a church clock was chiming and a factory bell had just preceded it—in a quartier once celebrated for its large population of the poorer Russian émigrés, a stocky woman of about fifty, carrying a shopping bag, emerged from the darkness of an old warehouse and set off, full of her usual energy and purpose, along the pavement to the bus-stop. The street was grey and narrow, and shuttered, with a couple of small hôtels de passe and a lot of cats. It was a place, for some reason, of peculiar quiet. The warehouse, since it handled perishable goods, had remained open during the holidays. The heat, fouled by exhaust fumes and unwashed by the slightest breeze, rose at her like the heat from a lift-shaft, but her Slavic features registered no complaint. She was neither dressed nor built for exertion on a hot day, being in stature very short indeed, and fat, so that she had to roll a little in order to get along. Her black dress, of ecclesiastical severity, possessed neither a waist nor any other relief except for a dash of white lace at the neck and a large metal cross, well fingered but of no intrinsic value, at the bosom. Her cracked shoes, which in walking tended outwards at the points, set a stern tattoo rattling between the shuttered houses. Her shabby bag, full since early morning, gave her a slight starboard list and told clearly that she was used to burdens. There was also fun in her, however. Her grey hair was gathered in a bun behind her, but there remained one sprightly forelock that flopped over her brow to the rhythm of her waddle. A hardy humour lit her brown eyes. Her mouth, set above a fighter’s chin, seemed ready, given half a reason, to smile at any time.

Reaching her usual bus-stop, she put down her shopping bag and with her right hand massaged her rump just where it met the spine, a gesture she made often these days though it gave her little relief. The high stool in the warehouse where she worked every morning as a checker possessed no back, and increasingly she was resenting the deficiency. “Devil,” she muttered to the offending part. Having rubbed it, she began plying her black elbows behind her like an old town raven preparing to fly. “Devil,” she repeated. Then, suddenly aware of being watched, she wheeled round and peered upward at the heavily built man towering behind her.

He was the only other person waiting, and indeed, at that moment, the only other person in the street. She had never spoken to him, yet his face was already familiar to her: so big, so uncertain, so sweaty. She had seen it yesterday, she had seen it the day before, and for all she knew, the day before that as well—my Lord, she was not a walking diary! For the last three or four days, this weak, itchy giant, waiting for a bus or hovering on the pavement outside the warehouse, had become a figure of the street for her; and what was more, a figure of a recognisable type, though she had yet to put her finger on which. She thought he looked traqué—hunted—as so many Parisians did these days. She saw so much fear in their faces; in the way they walked yet dared not greet each other. Perhaps it was the same everywhere, she wouldn’t know. Also, more than once, she had felt his interest in her. She had wondered whether he was a policeman. She had even considered asking him, for she had this urban cockiness. His lugubrious build suggested the police, so did the sweaty suit and the needless raincoat that hung like a bit of old uniform from his forearm. If she was right, and he was police, then—high time too, the idiots were finally doing something about the spate of pilfering that had made a beargarden of her stock-checking for months.

By now the stranger had been staring down at her for some time, however. And he was staring at her still.

“I have the misfortune to suffer in my back, monsieur,” she confided to him finally, in her slow and classically enunciated French. “It is not a large back but the pain is disproportionate. You are a doctor, perhaps? An osteopath?”

Then she wondered, looking up at him, whether he was ill, and her joke out of place. An oily gloss glistened on his jaw and neck, and there was an unseeing self-obsession about his pallid eyes. He seemed to see beyond her to some private trouble of his own. She was going to ask him this—You are perhaps in love, monsieur? Your wife is deceiving you?—and she was actually considering steering him into a café for a glass of water or a tisane when he abruptly swung away from her and looked behind him, then over her head up the street the other way. And it occurred to her that he really was afraid, not just traqué but frightened stiff; so perhaps he was not a policeman at all, but a thief—though the difference, she knew well, was often slight.

“Your name is Maria Andreyevna Ostrakova?” he asked her abruptly, as if the question scared him.

He was speaking French but she knew that it was not his mother tongue any more than it was her own, and his correct pronunciation of her name, complete with patronymic, already alerted her to his origin. She recognised the slur at once and the shapes of the tongue that made it, and she identified too late, and with a considerable inward start, the type she had not been able to put her finger on.

“If it is, who on earth are you?” she asked him in reply, sticking out her jaw and scowling.

He had drawn a pace closer. The difference in their heights was immediately absurd. So was the degree to which the man’s features betrayed his unpleasing character. From her low position Ostrakova could read his weakness as clearly as his fear. His damp chin had set in a grimace, his mouth had twisted to make him look strong, but she knew he was only banishing an incurable cowardice. He is like a man steeling himself for a heroic act, she thought. Or a criminal one. He is a man cut off from all spontaneous acts, she thought.

“You were born in Leningrad on May 8, 1927?” the stranger asked.

Probably she said yes. Afterwards she was not sure. She saw his scared gaze lift and stare at the approaching bus. She saw an indecision near to panic seize him, and it occurred to her—which in the long run was an act of near clairvoyance—that he proposed to push her under it. He didn’t, but he did put his next question in Russian—and in the brutal accents of Moscow officialdom.

“In 1956, were you granted permission to leave the Soviet Union for the purpose of nursing your sick husband, the traitor Ostrakov? Also for certain other purposes?”

“Ostrakov was not a traitor,” she replied, cutting him off. “He was a patriot.” And by instinct she took up her shopping bag and clutched the handle very tight.

The stranger spoke straight over this contradiction, and very loudly, in order to defeat the clatter of the bus: “Ostrakova, I bring you greetings from your daughter Alexandra in Moscow, also from certain official quarters! I wish to speak to you concerning her! Do not board this car!”

The bus had pulled up. The conductor knew her and was holding his hand out for her bag. Lowering his voice, the stranger added one more terrible statement: “Alexandra has serious problems which require the assistance of a mother.”

The conductor was calling to her to get a move on. He spoke with pretended roughness, which was the way they joked. “Come on, mother! It’s too hot for love! Pass us your bag and let’s go!” cried the conductor.

Inside the bus there was laughter; then someone shouted an insult—old woman, keeps the world waiting! She felt the stranger’s hand scrabbling inexpertly at her arm, like a clumsy suitor groping for the buttons. She pulled herself free. She tried to tell the conductor something but she couldn’t; she opened her mouth but she had forgotten how to speak. The best she could manage was to shake her head. The conductor yelled at her again, then waved his hands and shrugged. The insults multiplied—old woman, drunk as a whore at midday! Remaining where she was, Ostrakova watched the bus out of sight, waiting for her vision to clear and her heart to stop its crazy cavorting. Now it is I who need a glass of water, she thought. From the strong I can protect myself. God preserve me from the weak.

She followed him to the café, limping heavily. In a forced-labour camp, exactly twenty-five years before, she had broken her leg in three places in a coal slip. On this August 4th—the date had not escaped her—under the extreme duress of the stranger’s message, the old sensation of being crippled came back to her.

The café was the last in the street, if not in all Paris, to lack both a juke-box and neon lighting—and to remain open in August—though there were bagatelle tables that bumped and flashed from dawn till night. For the rest, there was the usual mid-morning hubbub, of grand politics, and horses, and whatever else Parisians talked; there was the usual trio of prostitutes murmuring among themselves, and a sullen young waiter in a soiled shirt who led them to a table in a corner that was reserved with a grimy Campari sign. A moment of ludicrous banality followed. The stranger ordered two coffees, but the waiter protested that at midday one does not reserve the best table in the house merely in order to drink coffee; the patron had to pay the rent, monsieur! Since the stranger did not follow this flow of patois, Ostrakova had to translate it for him. The stranger blushed and ordered two ham omelettes with frites, and two Alsatian beers, all without consulting Ostrakova. Then he took himself to the men’s room to repair his courage—confident, presumably, she would not run away—and when he returned his face was dry and his ginger hair combed, but the stink of him, now they were indoors, reminded Ostrakova of Moscow subways, and Moscow trams, and Moscow interrogation rooms. More eloquently than anything he could ever have said to her, that short walk back from the men’s room to their table had convinced her of what she already feared. He was one of them. The suppressed swagger, the deliberate brutalisation of the features, the ponderous style in which he now squared his forearms on the table and with feigned reluctance helped himself to a piece of bread from the basket as if he were dipping a pen in ink—they revived her worst memories of living as a disgraced woman under the weight of Moscow’s malevolent bureaucracy.

“So,” he said, and started eating the bread at the same time. He selected a crusty end. With hands like that he could have crushed it in a second, but instead he chose to prise ladylike flakes from it with his fat finger-ends, as if that were the official way of eating. While he nibbled, his eyebrows went up and he looked sorry for himself, me a stranger in this foreign land. “Do they know here that you have lived an immoral life in Russia?” he asked finally. “Maybe in a town full of whores they don’t care.”

Her answer lay ready on the tip of her tongue: My life in Russia was not immoral. It was your system which was immoral.

But she did not say it, she kept rigidly silent. Ostrakova had already sworn to herself that she would restrain both her quick temper and her quick tongue, and she now physically enjoined herself to this vow by grabbing a piece of skin on the soft inside of her wrist and pinching it through her sleeve with a fierce, sustained pressure under the table, exactly as she had done a hundred times before, in the old days, when such questionings were part of her daily life—When did you last hear from your husband, Ostrakov, the traitor? Name all persons with whom you have associated in the last three months! With bitter experience she had learned the other lessons of interrogation too. A part of her was rehearsing them at this minute, and though they belonged, in terms of history, to a full generation earlier, they appeared to her now as bright as yesterday and as vital: never to match rudeness with rudeness, never to be provoked, never to score, never to be witty or superior or intellectual, never to be deflected by fury, or despair, or the surge of sudden hope that an occasional question might arouse. To match dullness with dullness and routine with routine. And only deep, deep down to preserve the two secrets that made all these humiliations bearable: her hatred of them; and her hope that one day, after endless drips of water on the stone, she would wear them down, and by a reluctant miracle of their own elephantine processes, obtain from them the freedom they were denying her.

He had produced a notebook. In Moscow it would have been her file but here in a Paris café it was a sleek black leatherbound notebook, something that in Moscow even an official would count himself lucky to possess.

File or notebook, the preamble was the same: “You were born Maria Andreyevna Rogova in Leningrad on May 8, 1927,” he repeated. “On September 1, 1948, aged twenty-one, you married the traitor Ostrakov Igor, a captain of infantry in the Red Army, born of an Estonian mother. In 1950, the said Ostrakov, being at the time stationed in East Berlin, traitorously defected to Fascist Germany through the assistance of reactionary Estonian émigrés, leaving you in Moscow. He took up residence, and later French citizenship, in Paris, where he continued his contact with anti-Soviet elements. At the time of his defection you had no children by this man. Also you were not pregnant. Correct?”

“Correct,” she said.

In Moscow it would have been “Correct, Comrade Captain,” or “Correct, Comrade Inspector,” but in this clamorous French café such formality was out of place. The fold of skin on her wrist had gone numb. Releasing it, she allowed the blood to return, then took hold of another.

“As an accomplice to Ostrakov’s defection you were sentenced to five years’ detention in a labour camp, but were released under an amnesty following the death of Stalin in March, 1953. Correct?”

“Correct.”

“On your return to Moscow, despite the improbability that your request would be granted, you applied for a foreign travel passport to join your husband in France. Correct?”

“He had cancer,” she said. “If I had not applied, I would have been failing in my duty as his wife.”

The waiter brought the plates of omelette and frites and the two Alsatian beers, and Ostrakova asked him to bring a thé citron: she was thirsty, but did not care for beer. Addressing the boy, she tried vainly to make a bridge to him, with smiles and with her eyes. But his stoniness repulsed her; she realised she was the only woman in the place apart from the three prostitutes. Holding his notebook to one side like a hymnal, the stranger helped himself to a forkful, then another, while Ostrakova tightened her grasp on her wrist, and Alexandra’s name pulsed in her mind like an unstaunched wound, and she contemplated a thousand different serious problems that required the assistance of a mother.

The stranger continued his crude history of her while he ate. Did he eat for pleasure or did he eat in order not to be conspicuous again? She decided he was a compulsive eater.

“Meanwhile,” he announced, eating.

“Meanwhile,” she whispered involuntarily.

“Meanwhile, despite your pretended concern for your husband, the traitor Ostrakov,” he continued through his mouthful, “you nevertheless formed an adulterous relationship with the so-called music student Glikman Joseph, a Jew with four convictions for anti-social behaviour whom you had met during your detention. You cohabited with this Jew in his apartment. Correct or false?”

“I was lonely.”

“In consequence of this union with Glikman you bore a daughter, Alexandra, at The Lying-in Hospital of the October Revolution in Moscow. The certificate of parentage was signed by Glikman Joseph and Ostrakova Maria. The girl was registered in the name of the Jew Glikman. Correct or false?”

“Correct.”

“Meanwhile, you persisted in your application for a foreign travel passport. Why?”

“I told you. My husband was ill. It was my duty to persist.”

He ate again, so grossly that she had a sight of his many bad teeth. “In January, 1956, as an act of clemency you were granted a passport on condition the child Alexandra was left behind in Moscow. You exceeded the permitted time limit and remained in France, abandoning your child. Correct or false?”

The doors to the street were glass, the walls too. A big lorry parked outside them and the café darkened. The young waiter slammed down her tea without looking at her.

“Correct,” she said again, and managed this time to look at her interrogator, knowing what would follow, forcing herself to show him that on this score at least she had no doubts, and no regrets.

“Correct,” she repeated defiantly.

“As a condition of your application being favourably considered by the authorities, you signed an undertaking to the organs of State Security to perform certain tasks for them during your residence in Paris. One, to persuade your husband, the traitor Ostrakov, to return to the Soviet Union—”

“To attempt to persuade him,” she corrected him, with a faint smile. “He was not amenable to this suggestion.”

“Two, you undertook also to provide information concerning the activities and personalities of revanchist anti-Soviet émigré groups. You submitted two reports of no value and afterwards nothing. Why?”

“My husband despised such groups and had given up his contact with them.”

“You could have participated in the groups without him. You signed the document and neglected its undertaking. Yes or no?”

“Yes.”

“For this you abandon your child in Russia? To a Jew? In order to give your attention to an enemy of the people, a traitor of the State? For this you neglect your duty? Outstay the permitted period, remain in France?”

“My husband was dying. He needed me.”

“And the child Alexandra? She did not need you? A dying husband is more important than a living child? A traitor? A conspirator against the people?”

Releasing her wrist, Ostrakova deliberately took hold of her tea and watched the glass rise to her face, the lemon floating on the surface. Beyond it, she saw a grimy mosaic floor and beyond the floor the loved, ferocious, and kindly face of Glikman pressing down on her, exhorting her to sign, to go, to swear to anything they asked. The freedom of one is more than the slavery of three, he had whispered; a child of such parents as ourselves cannot prosper in Russia whether you stay or go; leave and we shall do our best to follow; sign anything, leave, and live for all of us; if you love me, go. . . .

“They were the hard days, still,” she said to the stranger finally, almost in a tone of reminiscence. “You are too young. They were the hard days, even after Stalin’s death: still hard.”

“Does the criminal Glikman continue to write to you?” the stranger asked in a superior, knowing way.

“He never wrote,” she lied. “How could he write, a dissident, living under restriction? The decision to stay in France was mine alone.”

Paint yourself black, she thought; do everything possible to spare those within their power.

“I have heard nothing from Glikman since I came to France more than twenty years ago,” she added, gathering courage. “Indirectly, I learned that he was angered by my anti-Soviet behaviour. He did not wish to know me any more. Inwardly he was already wishing to reform by the time I left him.”

“He did not write concerning your common child?”

“He did not write, he did not send messages. I told you this already.”

“Where is your daughter now?”

“I don’t know.”

“You have received communications from her?”

“Of course not. I heard only that she had entered a State orphanage and acquired another name. I assume she does not know I exist.”

The stranger ate again with one hand, while the other held the notebook. He filled his mouth, munched a little, then swilled his food down with the beer. But the superior smile remained.

“And now it is the criminal Glikman who is dead,” the stranger announced, revealing his little secret. He continued eating.

Suddenly Ostrakova wished the twenty years were two hundred. She wished that Glikman’s face had never, after all, looked down on her, that she had never loved him, never cared for him, never cooked for him, or got drunk with him day after day in his one-roomed exile where they lived on the charity of their friends, deprived of the right to work, to do anything but make music and love, get drunk, walk in the woods, and be cut dead by their neighbours.

“Next time I go to prison or you do, they will take her anyway. Alexandra is forfeit in any case,” Glikman had said. “But you can save yourself.”

“I will decide when I am there,” she had replied.

“Decide now.”

“When I am there.”

The stranger pushed aside his empty plate and once more took the sleek French notebook in both hands. He turned a page, as if approaching a new chapter.

“Concerning now your criminal daughter Alexandra,” he announced, through his food.

“Criminal?” she whispered.

To her astonishment the stranger was reciting a fresh catalogue of crimes. As he did so, Ostrakova lost her final hold upon the present. Her eyes were on the mosaic floor and she noticed the husks of langoustine and crumbs of bread. But her mind was in the Moscow law court again, where her own trial was being repeated. If not hers, then Glikman’s—yet not Glikman’s either. Then whose? She remembered trials that the two of them had attended as unwelcome spectators. Trials of friends, if only friends by accident: such as people who had questioned the absolute right of the authorities; or had worshipped some unacceptable god; or had painted criminally abstract pictures; or had published politically endangering love-poems. The chattering customers in the café became the jeering claque of the State police; the slamming of the bagatelle tables, the crash of iron doors. On this date, for escaping from the State orphanage on something street, so many months’ corrective detention. On that date, for insulting organs of State Security, so many more months, extended for bad behaviour, followed by so many years’ internal exile. Ostrakova felt her stomach turn and thought she might be sick. She put her hands to her glass of tea and saw the red pinch marks on her wrist. The stranger continued his recitation and she heard her daughter awarded another two years for refusing to accept employment at the something factory, God help her, and why shouldn’t she? Where had she learnt it? Ostrakova asked herself, incredulous. What had Glikman taught the child, in the short time before they took her away from him, that had stamped her in his mould and defeated all the system’s efforts? Fear, exultation, amazement jangled in Ostrakova’s mind, till something that the stranger was saying to her blocked them out.

“I did not hear,” she whispered after an age. “I am a little distressed. Kindly repeat what you just said.”

He said it again, and she looked up and stared at him, trying to think of all the tricks she had been warned against, but they were too many and she was no longer clever. She no longer had Glikman’s cleverness—if she had ever had it—about reading their lies and playing their games ahead of them. She knew only that to save herself and be reunited with her beloved Ostrakov, she had committed a great sin, the greatest a mother can commit. The stranger had begun threatening her, but for once the threat seemed meaningless. In the event of her non-collaboration—he was saying—a copy of her signed undertaking to the Soviet authorities would find its way to the French police. Copies of her useless two reports (done, as he well knew, solely in order to keep the brigands quiet) would be circulated among the surviving Paris émigrés—though, God knows, there were few enough of them about these days! Yet why should she have to submit to pressure in order to accept a gift of such immeasurable value—when, by some inexplicable act of clemency, this man, this system, was holding out to her the chance to redeem herself, and her child? She knew that her nightly and daily prayers for forgiveness had been answered, the thousands of candles, the thousands of tears. She made him say it a third time. She made him pull his notebook away from his gingery face, and she saw that his weak mouth had lifted into a half smile and that, idiotically, he seemed to require her absolution, even while he repeated his insane, God-given question.

“Assuming it has been decided to rid the Soviet Union of this disruptive and unsocial element, how would you like your daughter Alexandra to follow your footsteps here to France?”

For weeks after that encounter, and through all the hushed activities that accompanied it—furtive visits to the Soviet Embassy, form-filling, signed affidavits, certificats d’hébergement, the laborious trail through successive French ministries—Ostrakova followed her own actions as if they were someone else’s. She prayed often, but even with her prayers she adopted a conspiratorial attitude, dividing them among several Russian Orthodox churches so that in none would she be observed suffering an undue assault of piety. Some of the churches were no more than little private houses scattered round the 15th and 16th districts, with distinctive twice-struck crosses in plywood, and old, rain-sodden Russian notices on the doors, requesting cheap accommodation and offering instruction in the piano. She went to the Church of the Russian Abroad, and the Church of the Apparition of the Holy Virgin, and the Church of St. Seraphin of Sarov. She went everywhere. She rang the bells till someone came, a verger or a frail-faced woman in black; she gave them money, and they let her crouch in the damp cold before candle-lit icons, and breathe the thick incense till it made her half drunk. She made promises to the Almighty, she thanked Him, she asked Him for advice, she practically asked Him what He would have done if the stranger had approached Him in similar circumstances, she reminded Him that anyway she was under pressure, and they would destroy her if she did not obey. Yet at the same time, her indomitable common sense asserted itself, and she asked herself over and again why she of all people, wife of the traitor Ostrakov, lover of the dissident Glikman, mother—so she was given to believe—of a turbulent and anti-social daughter, should be singled out for such untypical indulgence?

In the Soviet Embassy, when she made her first formal application, she was treated with a regard she would never have dreamed possible, which was suited neither to a defector and renegade spy nor to the mother of an untamable hell-raiser. She was not ordered brusquely to a waiting-room, but escorted to an interviewing-room, where a young and personable official showed her a positively Western courtesy, even helping her, where her pen or courage faltered, to a proper formulation of her case.

And she told nobody, not even her nearest—though her nearest was not very near. The gingery man’s warning rang in her ears day and night: any indiscretion and your daughter will not be released.

And who was there, after all, apart from God, to turn to? To her half-sister Valentina, who lived in Lyons and was married to a car salesman? The very thought that Ostrakova had been consorting with a secret official from Moscow would send her rushing for her smelling-salts. In a café, Maria? In broad daylight, Maria? Yes, Valentina, and what he said is true. I had a bastard daughter by a Jew.

It was the nothingness that scared her most. The weeks passed; at the Embassy they told her that her application was receiving “favoured attention”; the French authorities had assured her that Alexandra would quickly qualify for French citizenship. The gingery stranger had persuaded her to backdate Alexandra’s birth so that she could be represented as an Ostrakova, not a Glikman; he said the French authorities would find this more acceptable; and it seemed that they had done so, even though she had never so much as mentioned the child’s existence at her naturalisation interviews. Now, suddenly, there were no more forms to fill in, no more hurdles to be cleared, and Ostrakova waited without knowing what she was waiting for. For the gingery stranger to reappear? He no longer existed. One ham omelette and frites, some Alsatian beer, two pieces of crusty bread had satisfied all his needs, apparently. What he was in relation to the Embassy she could not imagine: he had told her to present herself there, and that they would be expecting her; he was right. But when she referred to “your gentleman,” even “your blond, large gentleman who first approached me,” she met with smiling incomprehension.

Thus gradually whatever she was waiting for ceased to exist. First it was ahead of her, then it was behind her, and she had had no knowledge of its passing, no moment of fulfilment. Had Alexandra already arrived in France? Obtained her papers, moved on or gone to ground? Ostrakova began to think she might have done. Abandoned to a new and inconsolable sense of disappointment, she peered at the faces of young girls in the street, wondering what Alexandra looked like. Returning home, her eyes would fall automatically to the doormat in the hope of seeing a handwritten note or a pneumatique: “Mama, it is I. I am staying at the so-and-so hotel. . . .”A cable giving a flight number, arriving Orly tomorrow, tonight; or was it not Orly Airport but Charles de Gaulle? She had no familiarity with airlines, so she visited a travel agent, just to ask. It was both. She considered going to the expense of having a telephone installed so that Alexandra could ring her up. Yet what on earth was she expecting after all these years? Tearful reunions with a grown child to whom she had never been united? The wishful remaking, more than twenty years too late, of a relationship she had deliberately turned her back on? I have no right to her, Ostrakova told herself severely; I have only my debts and my obligations. She asked at the Embassy but they knew nothing more. The formalities were complete, they said. That was all they knew. And if Ostrakova wished to send her daughter money? she asked cunningly—for her fares, for instance, for her visa?—could they give her an address perhaps, an office that would find her?

We are not a postal service, they told her. Their new chilliness scared her. She did not go any more.

After that, she fell once more to worrying about the several muddy photographs, each the same, which they had given her to pin to her application forms. The photographs were all she had ever seen. She wished now that she had made copies, but she had never thought of it; stupidly, she had assumed she would soon be meeting the original. She had not had them in her hand above an hour! She had hurried straight from the Embassy to the Ministry with them, and by the time she left the Ministry the photographs were already working their way through another bureaucracy. But she had studied them! My Lord, how she had studied those photographs, whether they were each the same or not! On the Métro, in the Ministry waiting-room, even on the pavement before she went in, she had stared at the lifeless depiction of her child, trying with all her might to see in the expressionless grey shadows some hint of the man she had adored. And failing. Always, till then, whenever she had dared to wonder, she had imagined Glikman’s features as clearly written on the growing child as they had been on the new-born baby. It had seemed impossible that a man so vigorous would not plant his imprint deeply and for good. Yet Ostrakova saw nothing of Glikman in that photograph. He had worn his Jewishness like a flag. It was part of his solitary revolution. He was not Orthodox, he was not even religious, he disliked Ostrakova’s secret piety nearly as much as he disliked the Soviet bureaucracy—yet he had borrowed her tongs to curl his sideburns like the Hasidim, just to give focus, as he put it, to the anti-Semitism of the authorities. But in the face in the photograph she recognised not a drop of his blood, not the least spark of his fire—though his fire, according to the stranger, burned in her amazingly.

“If they had photographed a corpse to get that picture,” thought Ostrakova aloud in her apartment, “I would not be surprised.” And with this downright observation, she gave her first outward expression of the growing doubt inside her.

Toiling in her warehouse, sitting alone in her tiny apartment in the long evenings, Ostrakova racked her brains for someone she could trust; who would not condone and not condemn; who would see round the corners of the route she had embarked on; above all, who would not talk and thus wreck—she had been assured of it—wreck her chances of being reunited with Alexandra. Then one night, either God or her own striving memory supplied her with an answer: The General! she thought, sitting up in bed and putting on the light. Ostrakov himself had told her of him! Those émigré groups are a catastrophe, he used to say, and you must avoid them like the pest. The only one you can trust is Vladimir the General; he is an old devil, and a womaniser, but he is a man, he has connections and knows how to keep his mouth shut.

But Ostrakov had said this some twenty years ago, and not even old generals are immortal. And besides—Vladimir who? She did not even know his other name. Even the name Vladimir—Ostrakov had told her—was something he had put on for his military service; since his real name was Estonian, and not suitable for Red Army usage. Nevertheless, next day she went down to the bookshop beside the Cathedral of St. Alexander Nevsky, where information about the dwindling Russian population was often to be had, and made her first enquiries. She got a name and even a phone number, but no address. The phone was disconnected. She went to the Post Office, cajoled the assistants, and finally came up with a 1966 telephone directory listing the Movement for Baltic Freedom, followed by an address in Montparnasse. She was not stupid. She looked up the address and found no less than four other organisations listed there also: the Riga Group, the Association of Victims of Soviet Imperialism, the Forty-Eight Committee for a Free Latvia, the Tallinn Committee of Freedom. She remembered vividly Ostrakov’s scathing opinions of such bodies, even though he had paid his dues to them. All the same, she went to the address and rang the bell, and the house was like one of her little churches: quaint, and very nearly closed for ever. Eventually an old White Russian opened the door wearing a cardigan crookedly buttoned, and leaning on a walking-stick, and looking superior.

They’ve gone, he said, pointing his stick down the cobbled road. Moved out. Finished. Bigger outfits put them out of business, he added with a laugh. Too few of them, too many groups, and they squabbled like children. No wonder the Czar was defeated! The old White Russian had false teeth that didn’t fit, and thin hair plastered all over his scalp to hide his baldness.

But the General? she asked. Where was the General? Was he still alive, or had he—?

The old Russian smirked and asked whether it was business.

It was not, said Ostrakova craftily, remembering the General’s reputation for philandering, and contrived a shy woman’s smile. The old Russian laughed, and his teeth rattled. He laughed again and said, “Oh, the General!” Then he came back with an address in London, stamped in mauve on a bit of card, and gave it to her. The General would never change, he said; when he got to Heaven, he’d be chasing after the angels and trying to up-end them, no question. And that night while the whole neighbourhood slept, Ostrakova sat at her dead husband’s desk and wrote to the General with the frankness which lonely people reserve for strangers, using French rather than Russian as an aid to greater detachment. She told him about her love for Glikman and took comfort from the knowledge that the General himself loved women just as Glikman had. She admitted immediately that she had come to France as a spy, and she explained how she had assembled the two trivial reports that were the squalid price of her freedom. It was à contre-cœur, she said; invention and evasion, she said; a nothing. But the reports existed, so did her signed undertaking, and they placed grave limits on her freedom. Then she told him of her soul, and of her prayers to God all round the Russian churches. Since the gingery stranger’s approach to her, she said, her days had become unreal; she had a feeling of being denied a natural explanation of her life, even if it had to be a painful one. She kept nothing back from him, for whatever guilty feelings she had, they did not relate to her efforts to bring Alexandra to the West, but rather to her decision to stay in Paris and take care of Ostrakov until he died—after which event, she said, the Soviets would not let her come back anyway; she had become a defector herself.

“But, General,” she wrote, “if tonight I had to face my Maker in person, and tell Him what is deepest in my heart, I would tell Him what I now tell you. My child Alexandra was born in pain. Days and nights she fought me and I fought her back. Even in the womb she was her father’s child. I had no time to love her; I only ever knew her as the little Jewish warrior her father made. But, General, this I do know: the child in the photograph is neither Glikman’s, nor is she mine. They are putting the wrong egg into the nest, and though there is a part of this old woman that would like to be deluded, there is a stronger part that hates them for their tricks.”

When she had finished the letter, she sealed it immediately in its envelope so that she would not read it and change her mind. Then she stuck too many stamps on it deliberately, much as she might have lit a candle to a lover.

For the next two weeks exactly, following the posting of this document, nothing happened, and in the strange ways of women the silence was a relief to her. After the storm had come the calm, she had done the little she could do—she had confessed her weaknesses and her betrayals and her one great sin—the rest was in the hands of God, and of the General. A disruption of the French postal services did not dismay her. She saw it rather as another obstacle that those who were shaping her destiny would have to overcome if their will was strong enough. She went to work contentedly and her back ceased to trouble her, which she took as an omen. She even managed to become philosophical again. It is this way or that way, she told herself; either Alexandra was in the West and better off—if indeed it was Alexandra—or Alexandra was where she had been before, and no worse off. But gradually, with another part of her, she saw through this false optimism. There was a third possibility, and that was the worst and by degrees the one she considered most likely: namely, that Alexandra was being used for a sinister and perhaps wicked purpose; that they were forcing her somehow, exactly as they had forced Ostrakova, misusing the humanity and courage that her father, Glikman, had given her. So that on the fourteenth night, Ostrakova broke into a profound fit of weeping, and with the tears streaming down her face walked half-way across Paris looking for a church, any church that was open, until she came to the Cathedral of St. Alexander Nevsky itself. It was open. Kneeling, she prayed for long hours to St. Joseph, who was after all a father and protector, and the giver of Glikman’s first name, even if Glikman would have scoffed at the association. And on the day following these spiritual exertions, her prayer was answered. A letter came. It had no stamp or postmark. She had added her address at work as a precaution, and the letter was there waiting for her when she arrived, delivered by hand, presumably, some time in the night. It was a very short letter and carried neither the name of the sender nor his address. It was unsigned. Like her own, it was in a stilted French and handwritten, in the sprawl of an old and dictatorial hand, which she knew at once was the General’s.

Madame!—it began, like a command—Your letter has reached the writer safely. A friend of our cause will call upon you very soon. He is a man of honour and he will identify himself by handing to you the other half of the enclosed postcard. I urge you to speak to nobody concerning this matter until he arrives. He will come to your apartment between eight and ten o’clock in the evening. He will ring your doorbell three times. He has my absolute confidence. Trust him entirely, Madame, and we shall do everything to assist you.

Even in her relief, she was secretly entertained by the writer’s melodramatic tone. Why not deliver the letter directly to her flat? she wondered; and why should I feel safer because he gives me half an English picture? For the piece of postcard showed a part of Piccadilly Circus and was torn, not cut, with a deliberate roughness, diagonally. The side to be written on was blank.

To her astonishment the General’s envoy came that night.

He rang the bell three times, as the letter promised, but he must have known she was in her apartment—must have watched her enter, and the lights go on—for all she heard was a snap of the letter-box, a snap much louder than it normally made, and when she went to the door she saw the piece of torn postcard lying on the mat, the same mat she had looked at so often when she was longing for word of her daughter Alexandra. Picking it up, she ran to the bedroom for her Bible, where her own half already lay, and yes, the pieces matched, God was on her side, St. Joseph had interceded for her. (But what a needless piece of nonsense, all the same!) And when she opened the door to him, he slipped past her like a shadow: a little hobgoblin of a fellow, in a black overcoat with velvet tabs on the collar, giving him an air of operatic conspiracy. They have sent me a midget to catch a giant, was her first thought. He had arched eyebrows and a grooved face and flicked-up horns of black hair above his pointed ears, which he prinked with his little palms before the hall mirror as he took off his hat—so bright and comic that on a different occasion Ostrakova would have laughed out loud at all the life and humour and irreverence in him.

But not tonight.

Tonight he had a gravity that she sensed immediately was not his normal way. Tonight, like a busy salesman who had just stepped off an aeroplane—she had the feeling also about him that he was brand new in town: his cleanliness, his air of travelling light—tonight he wished only to do business.

“You received my letter safely, madame?” He spoke Russian swiftly, with an Estonian accent.

“I had thought it was the General’s letter,” she replied, affecting—she could not save herself—a certain sternness with him.

“It is I who brought it for him,” he said gravely. He was delving in an inside pocket and she had a dreadful feeling that, like the big Russian, he was going to produce a sleek black notebook. But he drew out instead a photograph, and one look was quite enough: the pallid, glossy features, the expression that despised all womanhood, not just her own; the suggestion of longing, but not daring to take.

“Yes,” she said. “That is the stranger.”

Seeing his happiness increase, she knew immediately that he was what Glikman and his friends called “one of us”—not a Jew necessarily, but a man with heart and meat to him. From that moment on she called him in her mind “the magician.” She thought of his pockets as being full of clever tricks, and of his merry eyes as containing a dash of magic.

For half the night, with an intensity she hadn’t experienced since Glikman, she and the magician talked. First, she told it all again, reliving it exactly, secretly surprised to discover how much she had left out of her letter, which the magician seemed to know by heart. She explained her feelings to him, and her tears, her terrible inner turmoil; she described the crudeness of her perspiring tormentor. He was so inept—she kept repeating, in wonder—as if it were his first time, she said—he had no finesse, no assurance. So odd to think of the Devil as a fumbler! She told about the ham omelette and the frites and the Alsatian beer, and he laughed; about her feeling that he was a man of dangerous timidity and inhibition—not a woman’s man at all—to most of which the little magician agreed with her cordially, as if he and the gingery man were already well acquainted. She trusted the magician entirely, as the General had told her to; she was sick and tired of suspicion. She talked, she thought afterwards, as frankly as she once had talked to Ostrakov when they were young lovers in her own home town, on the nights they thought they might never meet again, clutching each other under siege, whispering to the sound of approaching guns; or to Glikman, while they waited for the hammering on the door that would take him back to prison yet again. She talked to his alert and understanding gaze, to the laughter in him, to the suffering that she sensed immediately was the better side of his unorthodox and perhaps anti-social nature. And gradually, as she went on talking, her woman’s instinct told her that she was feeding a passion in him—not a love this time, but a sharp and particular hatred that gave thrust and sensibility to every little question he asked. What or whom it was that he hated, exactly, she could not say, but she feared for any man, whether the gingery stranger or anybody else, who had attracted this tiny magician’s fire. Glikman’s passion, she recalled, had been a universal, sleepless passion against injustice, fixing itself almost at random upon a range of symptoms, small or large. But the magician’s was a single beam, fixed upon a spot she could not see.

It is in any case a fact that by the time the magician left—my Lord, she thought, it was nearly time for her to go to work again!—Ostrakova had told him everything she had to tell, and the magician in return had woken feelings in her that for years, until this night, had belonged only to her past. Tidying away the plates and bottles in a daze, she managed, despite the complexity of her feelings regarding Alexandra, and herself, and her two dead men, to burst out laughing at her woman’s folly.

“And I do not even know his name!” she said aloud, and shook her head in mockery. “How shall I reach you?” she had asked. “How can I warn you if he returns?”

She could not, the magician had replied. But if there was a crisis she should write to the General again, under his English name and at a different address. “Mr. Miller,” he said gravely, pronouncing it as French, and gave her a card with a London address printed by hand in capitals. “But be discreet,” he warned. “You must be indirect in your language.”

All that day, and for many days afterwards, Ostrakova kept her last departing image of the magician at the forefront of her memory as he slipped away from her and down the ill-lit staircase. His last fervid stare, taut with purpose and excitement: “I promise to release you. Thank you for calling me to arms.” His little white hand, running down the broad banister of the stairwell, like a handkerchief waved from a train window, round and round in a dwindling circle of farewell, till it disappeared into the darkness of the tunnel.

2

The second of the two events that brought George Smiley from his retirement occurred a few weeks after the first, in early autumn of the same year: not in Paris at all, but in the once ancient, free, and Hanseatic city of Hamburg, now almost pounded to death by the thunder of its own prosperity; yet it remains true that nowhere does the summer fade more splendidly than along the gold and orange banks of the Alster, which nobody as yet has drained or filled with concrete. George Smiley, needless to say, had seen nothing of its languorous autumn splendour. Smiley, on the day in question, was toiling obliviously, with whatever conviction he could muster, at his habitual desk in the London Library in St. James’s Square, with two spindly trees to look at through the sash-window of the reading-room. The only link to Hamburg he might have pleaded—if he had afterwards attempted the connection, which he did not—was in the Parnassian field of German baroque poetry, for at the time he was composing a monograph on the bard Opitz, and trying loyally to distinguish true passion from the tiresome literary convention of the period.

The time in Hamburg was a few moments after eleven in the morning, and the footpath leading to the jetty was speckled with sunlight and dead leaves. A candescent haze hung over the flat water of the Aussenalster and through it the spires of the eastern bank were like green stains dabbed on the wet horizon. Along the shore, red squirrels scurried, foraging for the winter. But the slight and somewhat anarchistic-looking young man standing on the jetty wearing a track suit and running shoes had neither eyes nor mind for them. His red-rimmed gaze was locked tensely upon the approaching steamer, his hollow face darkened by a two-day stubble. He carried a Hamburg newspaper under his left arm, and an eye as perceptive as George Smiley’s would have noticed at once that it was yesterday’s edition, not today’s. In his right hand he clutched a rush shopping basket better suited to the dumpy Madame Ostrakova than to this lithe, bedraggled athlete who seemed any minute about to leap into the lake. Oranges peeked out of the top of the basket, a yellow Kodak envelope with English printing lay on top of the oranges. The jetty was otherwise empty, and the haze over the water added to his solitude. His only companions were the steamer timetable and an archaic notice, which must have survived the war, telling him how to revive the half-drowned; his only thoughts concerned the General’s instructions, which he was continuously reciting to himself like a prayer.

The steamer glided alongside and the boy skipped aboard like a child in a dance game—a flurry of steps, then motionless until the music starts again. For forty-eight hours, night and day, he had had nothing to think of but this moment: now. Driving, he had stared wakefully at the road, imagining, between glimpses of his wife and little girl, the many disastrous things that could go wrong. He knew he had a talent for disaster. During his rare breaks for coffee, he had packed and repacked the oranges a dozen times, laying the envelope lengthways, sideways—no, this angle is better, it is more appropriate, easier to get hold of. At the edge of town he had collected small change so that he would have the fare exactly—what if the conductor held him up, engaged him in casual conversation? There was so little time to do what he had to do! He would speak no German, he had worked it out. He would mumble, smile, be reticent, apologise, but stay mute. Or he would say some of his few words of Estonian—some phrase from the Bible he could still remember from his Lutheran childhood, before his father insisted he learn Russian. But now, with the moment so close upon him, the boy suddenly saw a snag in this plan. What if his fellow passengers then came to his aid? In polyglot Hamburg, with the East only a few miles away, any six people could muster as many languages between them! Better to keep silent, be blank.

He wished he had shaved. He wished he was less conspicuous.

Inside the main cabin of the steamer, the boy looked at nobody. He kept his eyes lowered; avoid eye contact, the General had ordered. The conductor was chatting to an old lady and ignored him. He waited awkwardly, trying to look calm. There were about thirty passengers. He had an impression of men and women dressed alike in green overcoats and green felt hats, all disapproving of him. It was his turn. He held out a damp palm. One mark, a fifty-pfennig piece, a bunch of little brass tens. The conductor helped himself, not speaking. Clumsily, the boy groped his way between the seats, making for the stern. The jetty was moving away. They suspect me of being a terrorist, thought the boy. There was engine oil on his hands and he wished he’d washed it off. Perhaps it’s on my face as well. Be blank, the General had said. Efface yourself. Neither smile nor frown. Be normal. He glanced at his watch, trying to keep the action slow. He had rolled back his left cuff in advance, specially to leave the watch free. Ducking, though he was not tall, the boy arrived suddenly in the stern section, which was open to the weather, protected only by a canopy. It was a case of seconds. Not of days or kilometres any more; not hours. Seconds. The timing hand of his watch flickered past the six. The next time it reaches six, you move. A breeze was blowing but he barely noticed it. The time was an awful worry to him. When he got excited—he knew—he lost all sense of time completely. He was afraid the seconds hand would race through a double circuit before he had realised, turning one minute into two. In the stern section all seats were vacant. He made jerkily for the last bench of all, holding the basket of oranges over his stomach in both hands, clamping the newspaper to his armpit at the same time: it is I, read my signals. He felt a fool. The oranges were too conspicuous by far. Why on earth should an unshaven young man in a track suit be carrying a basket of oranges and yesterday’s newspaper? The whole boat must have noticed him! “Captain—that young man—there—he is a bomber! He has a bomb in his basket, he intends to hijack us or sink the ship!” A couple stood arm in arm at the railing with their backs to him, staring into the mist. The man was very small, shorter than the woman. He wore a black overcoat with a velvet collar. They ignored him. Sit as far back as you can; be sure you sit next to the aisle, the General had said. He sat down, praying it would work the first time, that none of the fall-backs would be needed. “Beckie, I do this for you,” he whispered secretly, thinking of his daughter, and remembering the General’s words. His Lutheran origins notwithstanding, he wore a wooden cross round his neck, a present to him from his mother, but the zip of his tunic covered it. Why had he hidden the cross? So that God would not witness his deceit? He didn’t know. He wanted only to be driving again, to drive and drive till he dropped or was safely home.

Look nowhere, he remembered the General saying. He was to look nowhere but ahead of him: You are the passive partner. You have nothing to do but supply the opportunity. No code word, nothing; just the basket and the oranges and the yellow envelope and the newspaper under your arm. I should never have agreed to it, he thought. I have endangered my daughter Beckie. Stella will never forgive me. I shall lose my citizenship, I have put everything at risk. Do it for our cause, the General had said. General, I haven’t got one: it was not my cause, it was your cause, it was my father’s; that is why I threw the oranges overboard.

But he didn’t. Laying the newspaper beside him on the slatted bench, he saw that it was drenched in sweat—that patches of print had worn off where he clutched it. He looked at his watch. The seconds hand was standing at ten. It’s stopped! Fifteen seconds since I last looked—that simply is not possible! A frantic glance at the shore convinced him they were already in mid-lake. He looked at the watch again and saw the seconds hand jerking past eleven. Fool, he thought, calm yourself. Leaning to his right, he affected to read the newspaper while he kept the dial of his watch constantly in view. Terrorists. Nothing but terrorists, he thought, reading the headlines for the twentieth time. No wonder the passengers think I’m one of them. Grossfahndung. That was their word for massive search. It amazed him that he remembered so much German. Do it for our cause.

At his feet the basket of oranges was leaning precariously. When you get up, put the basket on the bench to reserve your seat, the General had said. What if it falls over? In his imagination he saw the oranges rolling all over the deck, the yellow envelope upside down among them, photographs everywhere, all of Beckie. The seconds hand was passing six. He stood up. Now. His midriff was cold. He tugged his tunic down to cover it and inadvertently exposed his mother’s wooden cross. He closed the zip. Saunter. Look nowhere. Pretend you are the dreamy sort, the General had said. Your father would not have hesitated a moment, the General had said. Nor will you. Cautiously lifting the basket onto the bench, he steadied it with both hands, then leaned it towards the back to give it extra stability. Then tested it. He wondered about the Abendblatt. To take it, to leave it where it was? Perhaps his contact had still not seen the signal? He picked it up and put it under his arm.

He returned to the main cabin. A second couple moved into the stern section, presumably to take the air, older, very sedate. The first couple were a sexy pair, even from behind—the little man, the shapely girl, the trimness of them both. You knew they had a good time in bed, just to look at them. But this second couple were like a pair of policemen to him; the boy was certain they got no pleasure from their love-making at all. Where is my mind going? he thought crazily. To my wife, Stella, was the answer. To the long exquisite embraces we may never have again. Sauntering as he had been ordered to, he advanced down the aisle towards the closed-off area where the pilot sat. Looking at nobody was easy; the passengers sat with their backs to him. He had reached as far forward as passengers were allowed. The pilot sat to his left, on his raised platform. Go to the pilot’s window and admire the view. Remain there one minute exactly. The cabin roof was lower here; he had to stoop. Through the big windscreen, trees and buildings on the move. He saw a rowing eight switch by, followed by a lone blonde goddess in a skiff. Breasts like a statue’s, he thought. For greater casualness, he propped one running shoe on the pilot’s platform. Give me a woman, he thought desperately as the moment of crisis came; give me my Stella, drowsy and desiring, in the half-light of early morning. He had his left wrist forward on the railing, his watch constantly in view.

“We don’t clean boots here,” the pilot growled.

Hastily the boy replaced his foot on the deck. Now he knows I speak German, he thought, and felt his face prickle in embarrassment. But they know anyway, he thought stupidly, for why else would I carry a German newspaper?

It was time. Swiftly standing to his full height again, he swung round too fast and began the return journey to his seat, and it was no use any more remembering not to stare at faces, because the faces stared at him, disapproving of his two days’ growth of beard, his track suit, and his wild look. His eyes left one face, only to find another. He thought he had never seen such a chorus of mute ill-will. His track suit had parted at the midriff again and showed a line of black hair. Stella washes them too hot, he thought. He tugged the tunic down again and stepped into the air, wearing his wooden cross like a medal. As he did so, two things happened almost at the same time. On the bench, next to the basket, he saw the yellow chalk mark he was looking for, running over two slats, bright as a canary, telling him that the hand-over had taken place successfully. At the sight of it, a sense of glory filled him; he had known nothing like it in his life, a release more perfect than any woman could provide.

Why must we do it this way? he had asked the General; why does it have to be so elaborate?

Because the object is unique in the whole world, the General had replied. It is a treasure without a counterpart. Its loss would be a tragedy to the free world.

And he chose me to be his courier, thought the boy proudly: though he still, at the back of his mind, thought the old man was overdoing it. Serenely picking up the yellow envelope, he dropped it into his tunic pocket, drew the zip, and ran his finger down the join to make sure it had meshed.

At the same instant exactly, he realised he was being watched. The woman at the railing still had her back to him and he noticed again that she had very pretty hips and legs. But her sexy little companion in the black overcoat had turned all the way round to face him, and his expression put an end to all the good feelings the boy had just experienced. Only once had he seen a face like that, and that was when his father lay dying in their first English home, a room in Ruislip, a few months after they had reached England. The boy had seen nothing so desperate, so profoundly serious, so bare of all protection, in anyone else, ever. More alarming still, he knew—precisely as Ostrakova had known—that it was a desperation in contrast with the natural disposition of the features, which were those of a comedian—or as Ostrakova had it, a magician. So that the impassioned stare of this little, sharp-faced stranger, with its message of furious entreaty—“Boy, you have no idea what you are carrying! Guard it with your life!”—was a revelation of that same comedian’s soul.

The steamer had stopped. They were on the other bank. Seizing his basket, the boy leapt ashore and, almost running, ducked between the bustling shoppers from one side-street to another without knowing where they led.

All through the drive back, while the steering-wheel hammered his arms and the engine played its pounding scale in his ears, the boy saw that face before him in the wet road, wondering as the hours passed whether it was something he had merely imagined in the emotion of the hand-over. Most likely the real contact was someone completely different, he thought, trying to soothe himself. One of those fat ladies in the green felt hats—even the conductor. I was overstrung, he told himself. At a crucial moment, an unknown man turned round and looked at me and I hung an entire history on him, even imagining he was my dying father.

By the time he reached Dover, he almost believed he had put the man out of his mind. He had dumped the cursed oranges in a litter-bin; the yellow envelope lay snug in the pouch of his tunic, one sharp corner pricking his skin, and that was all that mattered. So he had formed theories about his secret accomplice? Forget them. And even if, by sheer coincidence, he was right and it was that hollowed, glaring face—then what? All the less reason to go blabbing about it to the General, whose concern with security the boy likened to the unchallengeable passion of a seer. The thought of Stella became an aching need to him. His desire sharpened with every noisy mile. It was early morning still. He imagined waking her with his caresses; he saw her sleepy smile slowly turn to passion.

The summons came to Smiley that same night, and it is a curious fact, since he had an overall impression of not sleeping at all well during this late period of his life, that the phone had to ring a long time beside the bed before he answered it. He had come home straight from the library, then dined poorly at an Italian restaurant in Kings Road, taking the Voyages of Olearius with him for protection. He had returned to his house in Bywater Street and resumed work on his monograph with the devotion of a man who had nothing else to do. After a couple of hours he had opened a bottle of red Burgundy and drunk half of it, listening to a poor play on the radio. Then dozed, wrestling with troubled dreams. Yet the moment he heard Lacon’s voice, he had the feeling of being hauled from a warm and treasured place, where he wished to remain undisturbed for ever. Also, though in fact he was moving swiftly, he had the sensation of taking a long time to dress; and he wondered whether that was what old men did when they heard about a death.

3

“Knew him personally at all, did you, sir?” the Detective Chief Superintendent of Police asked respectfully in a voice kept deliberately low. “Or perhaps I shouldn’t enquire.”

The two men had been together for fifteen minutes but this was the Superintendent’s first question. For a while Smiley did not seem to hear it, but his silence was not offensive, he had the gift of quiet. Besides, there is a companionship about two men contemplating a corpse. It was an hour before dawn on Hampstead Heath, a dripping, misty, no-man’s hour, neither warm nor cold, with a heaven tinted orange by the London glow, and the trees glistening like oilskins. They stood side by side in an avenue of beeches and the Superintendent was taller by a head: a young giant of a man, prematurely grizzled, a little pompous perhaps, but with a giant’s gentleness that made him naturally befriending. Smiley was clasping his pudgy hands over his belly like a mayor at a cenotaph, and had eyes for nothing but the plastic-covered body lying at his feet in the beam of the Superintendent’s torch. The walk this far had evidently winded him, for he puffed a little as he stared. From the darkness round them, police receivers crackled in the night air. There were no other lights at all; the Superintendent had ordered them extinguished.

“He was just somebody I worked with,” Smiley explained after a long delay.

“So I was given to understand, sir,” the Superintendent said.

He waited hopefully but nothing more came. “Don’t even speak to him,” the Deputy Assistant Commissioner (Crime and Ops) had said to him. “You never saw him and it was two other blokes. Just show him what he wants and drop him down a hole. Fast.” Till now, the Detective Chief Superintendent had done exactly that. He had moved, in his own estimation, with the speed of light. The photographer had photographed, the doctor had certified life extinct, the pathologist had inspected the body in situ as a prelude to conducting his autopsy—all with an expedition quite contrary to the proper pace of things, merely in order to clear the way for the visiting irregular, as the Deputy Assistant Commissioner (Crime and Ops) had liked to call him. The irregular had arrived—with about as much ceremony as a meter-reader, the Superintendent noted—and the Superintendent had led him over the course at a canter. They had looked at footprints, they had tracked the old man’s route till here. The Superintendent had made a reconstruction of the crime, as well as he was able in the circumstances, and the Superintendent was an able man. Now they were in the dip, at the point where the avenue turned, where the rolling mist was thickest. In the torchbeam the dead body was the centre-piece of everything. It lay face downward and spread-eagled, as if it had been crucified to the gravel, and the plastic sheet emphasized its lifelessness. It was the body of an old man, but broad-shouldered still, a body that had battled and endured. The white hair was cut to stubble. One strong, veined hand still grasped a sturdy walking-stick. He wore a black overcoat and rubber overshoes. A black beret lay on the ground beside him, and the gravel at his head was black with blood. Some loose change lay about, and a pocket handkerchief, and a small penknife that looked more like a keepsake than a tool. Most likely they had started to search him and given up, sir, the Superintendent had said. Most likely they were disturbed, Mr. Smiley, sir; and Smiley had wondered what it must be like to touch a warm body you had just shot.

“If I might possibly take a look at his face, Superintendent,” Smiley said.

This time it was the Superintendent who caused the delay. “Ah, now are you sure about that, sir?” He sounded slightly embarrassed. “There’ll be better ways of identifying him than that, you know.”

“Yes. Yes, I am sure,” said Smiley earnestly, as if he really had given the matter great thought.

The Superintendent called softly to the trees, where his men stood among their blacked-out cars like a next generation waiting for its turn.

“You there. Hall. Sergeant Pike. Come here at the double and turn him over.”

Fast, the Deputy Assistant Commissioner (Crime and Ops) had said.

Two men slipped forward from the shadows. The elder wore a black beard. Their surgical gloves of elbow length shone ghostly grey. They wore blue overalls and thigh-length rubber boots. Squatting, the bearded man cautiously untucked the plastic sheet while the younger constable laid a hand on the dead man’s shoulder as if to wake him up.

“You’ll have to try harder than that, lad,” the Superintendent warned in an altogether crisper tone.

The boy pulled, the bearded sergeant helped him, and the body reluctantly rolled over, one arm stiffly waving, the other still clutching the stick.

“Oh, Christ,” said the constable. “Oh, bloody hell!”—and clapped a hand over his mouth. The sergeant grabbed his elbow and shoved him away. They heard the sound of retching.

“I don’t hold with politics,” the Superintendent confided to Smiley inconsequentially, staring downward still. “I don’t hold with politics and I don’t hold with politicians either. Licensed lunatics most of them, in my view. That’s why I joined the Force, to be honest.” The sinewy mist curled strangely in the steady beam of his torch. “You don’t happen to know what did it, do you, sir? I haven’t seen a wound like that in fifteen years.”

“I’m afraid ballistics is not my province,” Smiley replied after another pause for thought.

“No, I don’t expect it would be, would it? Seen enough, sir?”

Smiley apparently had not.

“Most people expect to be shot in the chest really, don’t they, sir?” the Superintendent remarked brightly. He had learned that small talk sometimes eased the atmosphere on such occasions. “Your neat round bullet that drills a tasteful hole. That’s what most people expect. Victim falls gently to his knees to the tune of celestial choirs. It’s the telly that does it, I suppose. Whereas your real bullet these days can take off an arm or a leg, so my friends in brown tell me.” His voice took on a more practical tone. “Did he have a moustache at all, sir? My sergeant fancied a trace of white whisker on the upper jaw.”

“A military one,” said Smiley after a long gap, and with his thumb and forefinger absently described the shape upon his own lip while his gaze remained locked upon the old man’s body. “I wonder, Superintendent, whether I might just examine the contents of his pockets, possibly?”

“Sergeant Pike.”

“Sir!”

“Put that sheet back and tell Mr. Murgotroyd to have his pockets ready for me in the van, will you, what they’ve left of them. At the double,” the Superintendent added, as a matter of routine.

“Sir!”

“And come here.” The Superintendent had taken the sergeant softly by the upper arm. “You tell that young Constable Hall that I can’t stop him sicking up but I won’t have his irreverent language.” For the Superintendent on his home territory was a devoutly Christian man and did not care who knew it. “This way, Mr. Smiley, sir,” he added, recovering his gentler tone.

As they moved higher up the avenue, the chatter of the radios faded, and they heard instead the angry wheeling of rooks and the growl of the city. The Superintendent marched briskly, keeping to the left of the roped-off area. Smiley hurried after him. A windowless van was parked between the trees, its back doors open, and a dim light burning inside. Entering, they sat on hard benches. Mr. Murgotroyd had grey hair and wore a grey suit. He crouched before them with a plastic sack like a transparent pillowcase. The sack had a knot at the throat, which he untied. Inside, smaller packages floated. As Mr. Murgotroyd lifted them out, the Superintendent read the labels by his torch before handing them to Smiley to consider.

“One scuffed leather coin purse Continental appearance. Half inside his pocket, half out, left-side jacket. You saw the coins by his body—seventy-two pence. That’s all the money on him. Carry a wallet at all, did he, sir?”

“I don’t know.”

“Our guess is they helped themselves to the wallet, started on the purse, then ran. One bunch keys domestic and various, right-hand trousers. . . .”He ran on but Smiley’s scrutiny did not relax. Some people act a memory, the Superintendent thought, noticing his concentration, others have one. In the Superintendent’s book, memory was the better half of intelligence, he prized it highest of all mental accomplishments; and Smiley, he knew, possessed it. “One Paddington Borough Library Card in the name of V. Miller, one box Swan Vesta matches partly used, overcoat left. One Aliens’ Registration Card, number as reported, also in the name of Vladimir Miller. One bottle tablets, overcoat left. What would the tablets be for, sir, any views on that at all? Name of Sustac, whatever that is, to be taken two or three times a day?”

“Heart,” said Smiley.

“And one receipt for the sum of thirteen pounds from the Straight and Steady Minicab Service of Islington, North.”

“May I look?” said Smiley, and the Superintendent held it out so that Smiley could read the date and the driver’s signature, J. Lamb, in a copy-book hand wildly underlined.

The next bag contained a stick of school chalk, yellow and miraculously unbroken. The narrow end was smeared brown as if by a single stroke, but the thick end was unused.

“There’s yellow chalk powder on his left hand too,” Mr. Murgotroyd said, speaking for the first time. His complexion was like grey stone. His voice too was grey, and mournful as an undertaker’s. “We did wonder whether he might be in the teaching line, actually,” Mr. Murgotroyd added, but Smiley, either by design or oversight, did not answer Mr. Murgotroyd’s implicit question, and the Superintendent did not pursue it.

And a second cotton handkerchief, proffered this time by Mr. Murgotroyd, part blooded, part clean, and carefully ironed into a sharp triangle for the top pocket.

“On his way to a party, we wondered,” Mr. Murgotroyd said, this time with no hope at all.

“Crime and Ops on the air, sir,” a voice called from the front of the van.

Without a word the Superintendent vanished into the darkness, leaving Smiley to the depressed gaze of Mr. Murgotroyd.

“You a specialist of some sort, sir?” Mr. Murgotroyd asked after a long sad scrutiny of his guest.

“No. No, I’m afraid not,” said Smiley.

“Home Office, sir?”

“Alas, not Home Office either,” said Smiley with a benign shake of his head, which somehow made him party to Mr. Murgotroyd’s bewilderment.

“My superiors are a little worried about the press, Mr. Smiley,” the Superintendent said, poking his head into the van again. “Seems they’re heading this way, sir.”

Smiley clambered quickly out. The two men stood face to face in the avenue.

“You’ve been very kind,” Smiley said. “Thank you.”

“Privilege,” said the Superintendent.

“You don’t happen to remember which pocket the chalk was in, do you?” Smiley asked.

“Overcoat left,” the Superintendent replied in some surprise.

“And the searching of him—could you tell me again how you see that exactly?”

“They hadn’t time or didn’t care to turn him over. Knelt by him, fished for his wallet, pulled at his purse. Scattered a few objects as they did so. By then they’d had enough.”

“Thank you,” said Smiley again.

And a moment later, with more ease than his portly figure might have suggested him capable of, he had vanished among the trees. But not before the Superintendent had shone the torch full upon his face, a thing he hadn’t done till now for reasons of discretion. And taken an intense professional look at the legendary features, if only to tell his grandchildren in his old age: how George Smiley, sometime Chief of the Secret Service, by then retired, had one night come out of the woodwork to peer at some dead foreigner of his who had died in highly nasty circumstances.

Not one face at all actually, the Superintendent reflected. Not when it was lit by the torch like that indirectly from below. More your whole range of faces. More your patchwork of different ages, people, and endeavours. Even—thought the Super-intendent—of different faiths.

“The best I ever met,” old Mendel, the Superintendent’s onetime superior, had told him over a friendly pint not long ago. Mendel was retired now, like Smiley. But Mendel knew what he was talking about and didn’t like Funnies any better than the Superintendent did—interfering la-di-da amateurs most of them, and devious with it. But not Smiley. Smiley was different, Mendel had said. Smiley was the best—simply the best case man Mendel had ever met—and old Mendel knew what he was talking about.

An abbey, the Superintendent decided. That’s what he was, an abbey. He would work that into his sermon the next time his turn came around. An abbey, made up of all sorts of conflicting ages and styles and convictions. The Superintendent liked that metaphor the more he dwelt on it. He would try it out on his wife when he got home: man as God’s architecture, my dear, moulded by the hand of ages, infinite in his striving and diversity. . . . But at this point the Superintendent laid a restraining hand upon his own rhetorical imagination. Maybe not, after all, he thought. Maybe we’re flying a mite too high for the course, my friend.

There was another thing about that face the Superintendent wouldn’t easily forget either. Later, he talked to old Mendel about it, as he talked to him later about lots of things. The moisture. He’d taken it for dew at first—yet if it was dew why was the Superintendent’s own face bone dry? It wasn’t dew and it wasn’t grief either, if his hunch was right. It was a thing that happened to the Superintendent himself occasionally and happened to the lads too, even the hardest; it crept up on them and the Superintendent watched for it like a hawk. Usually in kids’ cases, where the pointlessness suddenly got through to you—your child batterings, your criminal assaults, your infant rapes. You didn’t break down or beat your chest or any of those histrionics. No. You just happened to put your hand to your face and find it damp and you wondered what the hell Christ bothered to die for, if He ever died at all.

And when you had that mood on you, the Superintendent told himself with a slight shiver, the best thing you could do was give yourself a couple of days off and take the wife to Margate, or before you knew where you were you found yourself getting a little too rough with people for your own good health.

“Sergeant!” the Superintendent yelled.

The bearded figure loomed before him.

“Switch the lights on and get it back to normal,” the Superintendent ordered. “And ask Inspector Hallowes to slip up here and oblige. At the double.”

4

They had unchained the door to him, they had questioned him even before they took his coat: tersely and intently. Were there any compromising materials on the body, George? Any that would link him with us? My God, you’ve been a time! They had shown him where to wash, forgetting that he knew already. They had sat him in an armchair and there Smiley remained, humble and discarded, while Oliver Lacon, Whitehall’s Head Prefect to the intelligence services, prowled the threadbare carpet like a man made restless by his conscience, and Lauder Strickland said it all again in fifteen different ways to fifteen different people, over the old upright telephone in the far corner of the room—“Then get me back to police liaison, woman, at once”—either bullying or fawning, depending on rank and clout. The Superintendent was a life ago, but in time ten minutes. The flat smelt of old nappies and stale cigarettes and was on the top floor of a scrolled Edwardian apartment house not two hundred yards from Hampstead Heath. In Smiley’s mind, visions of Vladimir’s burst face mingled with these pale faces of the living, yet death was not a shock to him just now, but merely an affirmation that his own existence too was dwindling; that he was living against the odds. He sat without expectation. He sat like an old man at a country railway station, watching the express go by. But watching all the same. And remembering old journeys.

This is how crises always were, he thought; ragtag conversations with no centre. One man on the telephone, another dead, a third prowling. The nervous idleness of slow motion.

He peered around, trying to fix his mind on the decaying things outside himself. Chipped fire extinguishers, Ministry of Works issue. Prickly brown sofas—the stains a little worse. But safe flats, unlike old generals, never die, he thought. They don’t even fade away.

On the table before him lay the cumbersome apparatus of agent hospitality, there to revive the unrevivable guest. Smiley took the inventory. In a bucket of melted ice, one bottle of Stolichnaya vodka, Vladimir’s recorded favourite brand. Salted herrings, still in their tin. Pickled cucumber, bought loose and already drying. One mandatory loaf of black bread. Like every Russian Smiley had known, the old boy could scarcely drink his vodka without it. Two Marks & Spencer vodka glasses, could be cleaner. One packet of Russian cigarettes, unopened: if he had come, he would have smoked the lot; he had none with him when he died.

Vladimir had none with him when he died, he repeated to himself, and made a little mental stammer of it, a knot in his handkerchief.

A clatter interrupted Smiley’s reverie. In the kitchen, Mostyn the boy had dropped a plate. At the telephone Lauder Strickland wheeled round, demanding quiet. But he already had it again. What was Mostyn preparing anyway? Dinner? Breakfast? Seedcake for the funeral? And what was Mostyn? Who was Mostyn? Smiley had shaken his damp and trembling hand, then promptly forgotten what he looked like, except that he was so young. And yet for some reason Mostyn was known to him, if only as a type. Mostyn is our grief, Smiley decided arbitrarily.

Lacon, in the middle of his prowling, came to a sudden halt.

“George! You look worried. Don’t be. We’re all in the clear on this. All of us!”

“I’m not worried, Oliver.”

“You look as though you’re reproaching yourself. I can tell!”

“When agents die—” said Smiley, but left the sentence incomplete, and anyway Lacon couldn’t wait for him. He strode off again, a hiker with miles to go. Lacon, Strickland, Mostyn, thought Smiley as Strickland’s Aberdonian brogue hammered on. One Cabinet Office factotum, one Circus fixer, one scared boy. Why not real people? Why not Vladimir’s case officer, whoever he is? Why not Saul Enderby, their Chief?

A verse of Auden’s rang in his mind from the days when he was Mostyn’s age: Let us honour if we can/The vertical man/ Though we value none/But the horizontal one. Or something.

And why Smiley? he thought. Above all, why me? Of all people, when as far as they’re concerned I’m deader than old Vladimir.

“Will you have tea, Mr. Smiley, or something stronger?” called Mostyn through the open kitchen doorway. Smiley wondered whether he was naturally so pale.

“He’ll have tea only, thank you, Mostyn!” Lacon blurted, making a sharp about-turn. “After shock, tea is a deal safer. With sugar, right, George? Sugar replaces lost energy. Was it gruesome, George? How perfectly awful for you.”

No, it wasn’t awful, it was the truth, thought Smiley. He was shot and I saw him dead. Perhaps you should do that too.

Apparently unable to leave Smiley alone, Lacon had come back down the room and was peering at him with clever, uncomprehending eyes. He was a mawkish creature, sudden but without spring, with youthful features cruelly aged and a raw unhealthy rash around his neck where his shirt had scuffed the skin. In the religious light between dawn and morning his black waistcoat and white collar had the glint of the soutane.

“I’ve hardly said hullo,” Lacon complained, as if it were Smiley’s fault. “George. Old friend. My goodness.”

“Hullo, Oliver,” said Smiley.

Still Lacon remained there, gazing down at him, his long head to one side, like a child studying an insect. In his memory Smiley replayed Lacon’s fervid phone call of two hours before.

It’s an emergency, George. You remember Vladimir? George, are you awake? You remember the old General, George? Used to live in Paris?

Yes, I remember the General, he had replied. Yes, Oliver, I remember Vladimir.

We need someone from his past, George. Someone who knew his little ways, can identify him, damp down potential scandal. We need you, George. Now. George, wake up.

He had been trying to. Just as he had been trying to transfer the receiver to his better ear, and sit upright in a bed too large for him. He was sprawling in the cold space deserted by his wife, because that was the side where the telephone was.

You mean he’s been shot? Smiley had repeated.

George, why can’t you listen? Shot dead. This evening. George, for Heaven’s sake wake up, we need you!

Lacon loped off again, plucking at his signet ring as if it were too tight. I need you, thought Smiley, watching him gyrate. I love you, I hate you, I need you. Such apocalyptic statements reminded him of Ann when she had run out of money or love. The heart of the sentence is the subject, he thought. It is not the verb, least of all the object. It is the ego, demanding its feed.

Need me what for? he thought again. To console them? Give them absolution? What have they done that they need my past to redress their future?

Down the room, Lauder Strickland was holding up an arm in Fascist salute while he addressed Authority.

“Yes, Chief, he’s with us at this moment, sir. . . . I shall tell him that, sir. . . . Indeed, sir. . . . I shall convey to him that message. . . . Yes, sir. . . .”

Why are Scots so attracted to the secret world? Smiley wondered, not for the first time in his career. Ships’ engineers, Colonial administrators, spies. . . . Their heretical Scottish history drew them to distant churches, he decided.

“George!” Strickland, suddenly much louder, calling Smiley’s name like an order. “Sir Saul sends you his warmest personal salutations, George!” He had swung round, still with his arm up. “At a quieter moment he will express his gratitude to you more fittingly.” Back to the phone: “Yes, Chief, Oliver Lacon is also with me and his opposite number at the Home Office is at this instant in parley with the Commissioner of Police regarding our former interest in the dead man and the preparation of the D-notice for the press.”

Former interest, Smiley recorded. A former interest with his face shot off and no cigarettes in his pocket. Yellow chalk. Smiley studied Strickland frankly: the awful green suit, the shoes of brushed pigskin got up as suède leather. The only change he could observe in him was a russet moustache not half as military as Vladimir’s when he had still had one.

“Yes, sir, ‘an extinct case of purely historic concern,’ sir,” Strickland went on, into the telephone. Extinct is right, thought Smiley. Extinct, extinguished, put out. “That is precisely the terminology,” Strickland continued. “And Oliver Lacon proposes to have it included word for word in the D-notice. Am I on target there, Oliver?”

“Historical,”Lacon corrected him irritably. “Not historic concern. That’s the last thing we want! Historical.” He stalked across the room, ostensibly to peer through the window at the coming day.

“It is still Enderby in charge, is it, Oliver?” Smiley asked, of Lacon’s back.

“Yes, yes, it is still Saul Enderby, your old adversary, and he is doing marvels,” Lacon retorted impatiently. Pulling at the curtain, he unseated it from its runners. “Not your style, I grant you—why should he be? He’s an Atlantic man.” He was trying to force the casement. “Not an easy thing to be under a government like this one, I can tell you.” He gave the handle another savage shove. A freezing draught raced round Smiley’s knees. “Takes a lot of footwork. Mostyn, where’s tea? We seem to have been waiting for ever.”

All our lives, thought Smiley.

Over the sound of a lorry grinding up the hill, he heard Strickland again, interminably talking to Saul Enderby. “I think the point with the press is not to play him down too far, Chief. Dullness is all, in a case like this. Even the private-life angle is a dangerous one, here. What we want is absolute lack of contemporary relevance of any sort. Oh, true, true, indeed, Chief, right—” On he droned, sycophantic but alert.

“Oliver—” Smiley began, losing patience. “Oliver, do you mind, just—”

But Lacon was talking, not listening. “How’s Ann?” he asked vaguely, at the window, stretching his forearms on the sill. “With you and so forth, I trust? Not roaming, is she? God, I hate autumn.”

“Fine, thank you. How’s—” He struggled without success to remember the name of Lacon’s wife.

“Abandoned me, dammit. Ran off with her pesky riding instructor, blast her. Left me with the children. The girls are farmed out to boarding-schools, thank God.” Leaning over his hands, Lacon was staring up at the lightening sky. “Is that Orion up there, stuck like a golf ball between the chimney-pots?” he asked.

Which is another death, thought Smiley sadly, his mind staying briefly with Lacon’s broken marriage. He remembered a pretty, unworldly woman and a string of daughters jumping ponies in the garden of their rambling house in Ascot.

“I’m sorry, Oliver,” he said.

“Why should you be? Not your wife. She’s mine. It’s every man for himself in love.”

“Could you close that window, please!” Strickland called, dialling again. “It’s bloody arctic down this end.”

Irritably slamming the window, Lacon strode back into the room.

Smiley tried a second time: “Oliver, what’s going on?” he asked. “Why did you need me?”

“Only one who knew him, for a start. Strickland, are you nearly done? He’s like one of those airport announcers,” he told Smiley with a stupid grin. “Never done.”

You could break, Oliver, thought Smiley, noticing the estrangement of Lacon’s eyes as he came under the light. You’ve had too much, he thought in unexpected sympathy. We both have.

From the kitchen the mysterious Mostyn appeared with tea: an earnest, contemporary-looking child with flared trousers and a mane of brown hair. Seeing him set down the tray, Smiley finally placed him in the terms of his own past. Ann had had a lover like him once, an ordinand from Wells Theological College. She gave him a lift down the M-4 and later claimed to have saved him from going queer.

“What section are you in, Mostyn?” Smiley asked him.

“Oddbins, sir.” He crouched, level to the table, displaying an Asian suppleness. “Since your day, actually, sir. It’s a sort of operational pool. Mainly probationers waiting for overseas postings.”

“I see.”

“I heard you lecture at the Nursery at Sarratt, sir. On the new entrants’ course. ‘Agent Handling in the Field.’ It was the best thing of the whole two years.”

“Thank you.”

But Mostyn’s calf eyes stayed on him intently.

“Thank you,” said Smiley again, more puzzled than before.

“Milk, sir, or lemon, sir? The lemon was for him,” Mostyn added in a low aside, as if that were a recommendation for the lemon.

Strickland had rung off and was fiddling with the waistband of his trousers, making it looser or tighter.

“Yes, well, we have to temper truth, George!” Lacon bellowed suddenly, in what seemed to be a declaration of personal faith. “Sometimes people are innocent but the circumstances can make them appear quite otherwise. There was never a golden age. There’s only a golden mean. We have to remember that. Chalk it on our shaving mirrors.”

In yellow, Smiley thought.

Strickland was waddling down the room: “You. Mostyn. Young Nigel. You, sir!”

Mostyn lifted his grave brown eyes in reply.

“Commit nothing to paper whatever,” Strickland warned him, wiping the back of his hand on his moustache as if one or the other were wet. “Hear me? That’s an order from on high. There was no encounter, so you’ve no call to fill in the usual encounter sheet or any of that stuff. You’ve nothing to do but keep your mouth shut. Understand? You’ll account for your expenses as general petty-cash disbursements. To me, direct. No file reference. Understand?”

“I understand,” said Mostyn.

“And no whispered confidences to those little tarts in Registry, or I’ll know. Hear me? Give us some tea.”

Something happened inside George Smiley when he heard this conversation. Out of the formless indirection of these dialogues, out of the horror of the scene upon the Heath, a single shocking truth struck him. He felt a pull in his chest somewhere and he had the sensation of momentary disconnection from the room and the three haunted people he had found in it. Encounter sheet? No encounter? Encounter between Mostyn and Vladimir? God in Heaven, he thought, squaring the mad circle. The Lord preserve, cosset, and protect us. Mostyn was Vladimir’s case officer! That old man, a General, once our glory, and they farmed him out to this uncut boy! Then another lurch, more violent still, as his surprise was swept aside in an explosion of internal fury. He felt his lips tremble, he felt his throat seize up in indignation, blocking his words, and when he turned to Lacon his spectacles seemed to be misting over from the heat.

“Oliver, I wonder if you’d mind finally telling me what I’m doing here,” he heard himself suggesting for the third time, hardly above a murmur.

Reaching out an arm, he removed the vodka bottle from its bucket. Still unbidden, he broke the cap and poured himself a rather large tot.

Even then, Lacon dithered, pondered, hunted with his eyes, delayed. In Lacon’s world, direct questions were the height of bad taste but direct answers were worse. For a moment, caught in mid-gesture at the centre of the room, he stood staring at Smiley in disbelief. A car stumbled up the hill, bringing news of the real world outside the window. Lauder Strickland slurped his tea. Mostyn was seating himself primly on a piano-stool to which there was no piano. But Lacon with his jerky gestures could only scratch about for words sufficiently elliptical to disguise his meaning.

“George,” he said. A shower of rain crashed against the window, but he ignored it. “Where’s Mostyn?” he asked.

Mostyn, no sooner settled, had flitted from the room to cope with a nervous need. They heard the thunder of the flush, loud as a brass band, and the gurgle of pipes all down the building.

Lacon raised a hand to his neck, tracing the raw patches. Reluctantly, he began: “Three years ago, George—let us start there—soon after you left the Circus—your successor Saul Enderby—your worthy successor—under pressure from a concerned Cabinet—by concerned I mean newly formed—decided on certain far-reaching changes of intelligence practice. I’m giving you the background, George,” he explained, interrupting himself. “I’m doing this because you’re who you are, because of old times, and because”—he jabbed a finger at the window—“because of out there.”

Strickland had unbuttoned his waistcoat and lay dozing and replete like a first-class passenger on a night plane. But his small watchful eyes followed every pass that Lacon made. The door opened and closed, admitting Mostyn, who resumed his perch on the piano-stool.

“Mostyn, I expect you to close your ears to this. I am talking high, high policy. One of these far-reaching changes, George, was the decision to form an inter-ministerial Steering Committee. A mixed committee”—he composed one in the air with his hands—“part Westminster, part Whitehall, representing Cabinet as well as the major Whitehall customers. Known as the Wise Men. But placed—George—placed between the intelligence fraternity and Cabinet. As a channel, as a filter, as a brake.” One hand had remained outstretched, dealing these metaphors like cards. “To look over the Circus’s shoulder. To exercise control, George. Vigilance and accountability in the interest of a more open government. You don’t like it. I can tell by your face.”

“I’m out of it,” Smiley said. “I’m not qualified to judge.”

Suddenly Lacon’s own face took on an appalled expression and his tone dropped to one of near despair.

“You should hear them, George, our new masters! You should hear the way they talk about the Circus! I’m their dog’s-body, damn it; I know, get it every day! Gibes. Suspicion. Mistrust at every turn, even from Ministers who should know better. As if the Circus were some rogue animal outside their comprehension. As if British Intelligence were a sort of wholly owned subsidiary of the Conservative Party. Not their ally at all but some autonomous viper in their socialist nest. The thirties all over again. Do you know, they’re even reviving all that talk about a British Freedom of Information Act on the American pattern? From within the Cabinet? Of open hearings, revelations, all for the public sport? You’d be shocked, George. Pained. Think of the effect such a thing would have on morale alone. Would Mostyn here have ever joined the Circus after that kind of notoriety in the press and wherever? Would you. Mostyn?”

The question seemed to strike Mostyn very deep, for his grave eyes, made yet darker by his sickly colour, became graver, and he lifted a thumb and finger to his lip. But he did not speak.

“Where was I, George?” Lacon asked, suddenly lost.

“The Wise Men,” said Smiley sympathetically.

From the sofa, Lauder Strickland threw in his own pronouncement on that body: “Wise, my Aunt Fanny. Bunch of left-wing flannel merchants. Rule our lives for us. Tell us how to run the shop. Smack our wrists when we don’t do our sums right.”

Lacon shot Strickland a glance of rebuke but did not contradict him.

“One of the less controversial exercises of the Wise Men, George—one of their first duties—conferred upon them specifically by our masters—enshrined in a jointly drafted charter—was stock-taking. To review the Circus’s resources worldwide and set them beside legitimate present-day targets. Don’t ask me what constitutes a legitimate present-day target in their sight. That is a very moot point. However, I must not be disloyal.” He returned to his text. “Suffice it to say that over a period of six months a review was conducted, and an axe duly laid.” He broke off, staring at Smiley. “Are you with me, George?” he asked in a puzzled voice.

But it was hardly possible at that moment to tell whether Smiley was with anybody at all. His heavy lids had almost closed, and what remained visible of his eyes was clouded by the thick lenses of his spectacles. He was sitting upright but his head had fallen forward till his plump chins rested on his chest.

Lacon hesitated a moment longer, then continued: “Now as a result of this axe-laying—this stock-taking, if you prefer—on the part of the Wise Men, certain categories of clandestine operation have been ruled ipso facto out of bounds. Verboten. Right?”

Prone on his sofa, Strickland incanted the unsayable: “No coat-trailing. No honey-traps. No doubles. No stimulated defections. No émigrés. No bugger all.”

“What’s that?” said Smiley, as if sharply waking from a deep sleep. But such straight talk was not to Lacon’s liking and he overrode it.

“Let us not be simplistic, please, Lauder. Let us reach things organically. Conceptual thinking is essential here. So the Wise Men composed a codex, George,” he resumed to Smiley. “A catalogue of proscribed practices. Right?” But Smiley was waiting rather than listening. “Ranged the whole field—on the uses and abuses of agents, on our fishing rights in the Commonwealth countries—or lack of them—all sorts. Listeners, surveillance overseas, false-flag operations—a mammoth task, bravely tackled.” To the astonishment of everyone but himself, Lacon locked his fingers together, turned down the palms, and cracked the joints in a defiant staccato.

He continued: “Also included in their forbidden list—and it is a crude instrument, George, no respecter of tradition—are such matters as the classic use of double agents. Obsession, our new masters were pleased to call it in their finding. The old games of coat-trailing—turning and playing back our enemies’ spies—in your day the very meat and drink of counter-intelligence—today, George, in the collective opinion of the Wise Men—today they are ruled obsolete. Uneconomic. Throw them out.”

Another lorry thundered giddily down the hill, or up it. They heard the bump of its wheels on the kerb.

“Christ,” Strickland muttered.

“Or—for example—I strike another blow at random—the over-emphasis on exile groups.”

This time there was no lorry at all: only the deep, accusing silence that had followed in its wake. Smiley sat as before, receiving not judging, his concentration only on Lacon, hearing him with the sharpness of the blind.

“Exile groups, you will want to know,” Lacon went on, “or more properly the Circus’s time-honoured connections with them—the Wise Men prefer to call it dependence, but I think that a trifle strong—I took issue with them, but was overruled—are today ruled provocative, anti-détente, inflammatory. An expensive indulgence. Those who tamper with them do so on pain of excommunication. I mean it, George. We have got thus far. This is the extent of their mastery. Imagine.”

With a gesture of baring his breast for Smiley’s onslaught, Lacon opened his arms and remained standing, peering down at him as he had done before, while in the background Strickland’s Scottish echo once again told the same truth more brutally.

“The groups have been dustbinned, George,” Strickland said. “The lot of them. Orders from on high. No contact, not even arm’s length. The late Vladimir’s death-and-glory artists included. Special two-key archive for ’em on the fifth floor. No officer access without consent in writing from the Chief. Copy to the weekly float for the Wise Men’s inspection. Troubled times, George, I tell you true, troubled times.”

“George, now steady,” Lacon warned uneasily, catching something the others had not heard.

“What utter nonsense,” Smiley repeated deliberately.

His head had lifted and his eyes had turned full on Lacon, as if emphasising the bluntness of his contradiction. “Vladimir wasn’t expensive. He wasn’t an indulgence either. Least of all was he uneconomic. You know perfectly well he loathed taking our money. We had to force it on him or he’d have starved. As to inflammatory—anti-détente, whatever those words mean—well, we had to hold him in check once in a while as one does with most good agents, but when it came down to it he took our orders like a lamb. You were a fan of his, Oliver. You know as well as I do what he was worth.”

The quietness of Smiley’s voice did not conceal its tautness. Nor had Lacon failed to notice the dangerous points of colour in his cheeks.

Sharply, Lacon turned upon the weakest member present: “Mostyn, I expect you to forget all this. Do you hear? Strickland, tell him.”

Strickland obliged with alacrity: “Mostyn, you will present yourself to Housekeepers this morning at ten-thirty precisely and sign an indoctrination certificate which I personally shall compose and witness!”

“Yes, sir,” Mostyn said, after a slightly eerie delay.

Only now did Lacon respond to Smiley’s point: “George, I admired the man. Never his Group. There is an absolute distinction here. The man, yes. In many ways, a heroic figure, if you will. But not the company he kept: the fantasists, the down-at-heel princelings. Nor the Moscow Centre infiltrators they enfolded so warmly to their breasts. Never. The Wise Men have a point and you can’t deny it.”

Smiley had taken off his spectacles and was polishing them with the thick end of his tie. By the pale light now breaking through the curtains, his plump face looked moist and undefended.

“Vladimir was one of the best agents we ever had,” Smiley said baldly.

“Because he was yours, you mean?” Strickland sneered, behind Smiley’s back.

“Because he was good!” Smiley snapped, and there was a startled silence everywhere while he recovered himself. “Vladimir’s father was an Estonian and a passionate Bolshevik, Oliver,” he resumed in a calmer voice. “A professional man, a lawyer. Stalin rewarded his loyalty by murdering him in the purges. Vladimir was born Voldemar but he even changed his name to Vladimir out of allegiance to Moscow and the Revolution. He still wanted to believe, despite what they had done to his father. He joined the Red Army and by God’s grace missed being purged as well. The war prompted him, he fought like a lion, and when it was over, he waited for the great Russian liberalisation that he had been dreaming of, and the freeing of his own people. It never came. Instead, he witnessed the ruthless repression of his homeland by the government he had served. Scores of thousands of his fellow Estonians went to the camps, several of his own relatives among them.” Lacon opened his mouth to interrupt, but wisely closed it. “The lucky ones escaped to Sweden and Germany. We’re talking of a population of a million sober, hard-working people, cut to bits. One night, in despair, he offered us his services. Us, the British. In Moscow. For three years after that he spied for us from the very heart of the capital. Risked everything for us, every day.”

“And needless to say, our George here ran him,” Strickland growled, still somehow trying to suggest that this very fact put Smiley out of court. But Smiley would not be stopped. At his feet, young Mostyn was listening in a kind of trance.

“We even gave him a medal, if you remember, Oliver. Not to wear or possess, of course. But somewhere, on a bit of parchment that he was occasionally allowed to look at, there was a signature very much like the Monarch’s.”

“George, this is history,” Lacon protested weakly. “This is not today.”

“For three long years, Vladimir was the best source we ever had on Soviet capabilities and intentions—and at the height of the cold war. He was close to their intelligence community and reported on that too. Then one day on a service visit to Paris, he took his chance and jumped, and thank God he did, because otherwise he’d have been shot a great deal sooner.”

Lacon was suddenly quite lost. “What do you mean?” he asked. “How sooner? What are you saying now?”

“I mean that in those days the Circus was largely run by a Moscow Centre agent,” Smiley replied with deadly patience. “It was the sheerest luck that Bill Haydon happened to be stationed abroad while Vladimir was working for us. Another three months and Bill would have been blown sky high.”

Lacon found nothing to say at all, so Strickland filled in for him.

“Bill Haydon this, Bill Haydon that,” he sneered. “Just because you had that extra involvement with him—” He was going to continue but thought better of it. “Haydon’s dead, dammit,” he ended sullenly, “so’s that whole era.”

“And so is Vladimir,” said Smiley quietly, and once again there was a halt in the proceedings.

“George,” Lacon intoned gravely, as if he had belatedly found his place in the prayer book. “We are pragmatists, George. We adapt. We are not keepers of some sacred flame. I ask you, I commend you, to remember this!”

Quiet but resolute, Smiley had not quite finished the old man’s obituary, and perhaps he sensed already that it was the only one he was ever going to get.

“And when he did come out, all right, he was a declining asset, as all ex-agents are,” he continued.

“I’ll say,” said Strickland sotto voce.

“He stayed on in Paris and threw himself whole-heartedly into the Baltic independence movement. All right, it was a lost cause. It so happens that to this very day, the British have refused de jure recognition to the Soviet annexation of the three Baltic States—but never mind that either. Estonia, you may not know, Oliver, maintains a perfectly respectable Legation and Consulate General in Queen’s Gate. We don’t mind supporting lost causes once they’re fully lost, apparently. Not before.” He drew a sharp breath. “And all right, in Paris he formed a Baltic Group, and the Group went downhill, as émigré groups and lost causes always will—let me go on Oliver, I’m not often long!”

“My dear fellow,” said Lacon, and blushed. “Be as long as you like,” he said, quelling another groan from Strickland.

“His Group split up, there were quarrels. Vladimir was in a hurry and wanted to bring all the factions under one hat. The factions had their vested interests and didn’t agree. There was a pitched battle, some heads got broken, and the French threw him out. We moved him to London with a couple of his lieutenants. Vladimir in his old age returned to the Lutheran religion of his forefathers, exchanging the Marxist Saviour for the Christian Messiah. We’re supposed to encourage that too, I believe. Or perhaps that is not policy any more. He has now been murdered. Since we are talking background, that is Vladimir’s. Now why am I here?”

The ringing of the bell could not have been more timely. Lacon was still quite pink, and Smiley, breathing heavily, was once more polishing his spectacles. Reverently Mostyn the acolyte unchained the door and admitted a tall motor-cycle messenger dangling a bunch of keys in his gloved hand. Reverently, Mostyn bore the keys to Strickland, who signed for them and made an entry in his log. The messenger, after a long and even doting glance at Smiley, departed, leaving Smiley with the guilty feeling that he should have recognised him, even under all his paraphernalia. But Smiley had more pressing insights to concern him. With no reverence at all, Stickland dumped the keys into Lacon’s open palm.

“All right, Mostyn, tell him!” Lacon boomed suddenly. “Tell him in your own words.”

5

Mostyn sat with a quite particular stillness. He spoke softly. To hear him, Lacon had withdrawn to a corner and bunched his hands judicially under his nose. But Strickland had sat himself bolt upright and seemed, like Mostyn himself, to be patrolling the boy’s words for lapses.

“Vladimir telephoned the Circus at lunch-time today, sir,” Mostyn began, leaving some unclarity as to which “sir” he was addressing. “I happened to be Oddbins duty officer and took the call.”

Strickland corrected him with unpleasant haste: “You mean yesterday. Be precise, can’t you?”

“I’m sorry, sir. Yesterday,” said Mostyn.

“Well, get it right,” Strickland warned.

To be Oddbins duty officer, Mostyn explained, meant little more than covering the lunch-hour gap and checking desks and wastebins at closing time. Oddbins personnel were too junior for night duty, so there was just this roster for lunch-times and evenings.

And Vladimir, he repeated, came through in the lunch-hour, using the lifeline.

“Lifeline?” Smiley repeated in bewilderment. “I don’t think I quite know what you mean.”

“It’s the system we have for keeping in touch with dead agents, sir,” said Mostyn, then put his fingers to his temple and muttered, “Oh, my Lord.” He started again: “I mean agents who have run their course but are still on the welfare roll, sir,” said Mostyn unhappily.

“So he rang and you took the call,” said Smiley kindly. “What time was that?”

“One-fifteen exactly, sir. Oddbins is like a sort of Fleet Street news-room, you see. There are these twelve desks and there’s the section head’s hen-coop at the end, with a glass partition between us and him. The lifeline’s in a locked box and normally it’s the section head who keeps the key. But in the lunch-hour he gives it to the duty dog. I unlocked the box and heard this foreign voice saying ‘Hullo.’ ”

“Get on with it, Mostyn,” Strickland growled.

“I said ‘Hullo’ back, Mr. Smiley. That’s all we do. We don’t give the number. He said, ‘This is Gregory calling for Max. I have something very urgent for him. Please get me Max immediately.’ I asked him where he was calling from, which is routine, but he just said he had plenty of change. We have no brief to trace incoming calls and anyway it takes too long. There’s an electric card selector by the lifeline, it’s got all the worknames on it. I told him to hold on and typed out ‘Gregory.’ That’s the next thing we do after asking where they’re calling from. Up it came on the selector. ‘Gregory equals Vladimir, ex-agent, ex–Soviet General, ex-leader of the Riga Group.’ Then the file reference. I typed out ‘Max’ and found you, sir.” Smiley gave a small nod. “ ‘Max equals Smiley.’ Then I typed out ‘Riga Group’ and realised you were their last vicar, sir.”

“Their vicar?” said Lacon, as if he had detected heresy. “Smiley their last vicar, Mostyn? What on earth—”

“I thought you had heard all this, Oliver,” Smiley said, to cut him off.

“Only the essence,” Lacon retorted. “In a crisis one deals only with essentials.”

In his pressed-down Scottish, without letting Mostyn from his sight, Strickland provided Lacon with the required explanation: “Organisations such as the Group had by tradition two case officers. The postman, who did the nuts and bolts for them, and the vicar, who stood above the fight. Their father figure,” he said, and nodded perfunctorily towards Smiley.

“And who was carded as his most recent postman, Mostyn?” Smiley asked, ignoring Strickland entirely.

“Esterhase, sir. Workname Hector.”

“And he didn’t ask for him?” said Smiley to Mostyn, speaking straight past Strickland yet again.

“I’m sorry, sir?”

“Vladimir didn’t ask for Hector? His postman? He asked for me. Max. Only Max. You’re sure of that?”

“He wanted you and nobody else, sir,” said Mostyn earnestly.

“Did you make notes?”

“The lifeline is taped automatically, sir. It’s also linked to a speaking clock, so that we get the exact timing as well.”

“Damn you, Mostyn, that’s a confidential matter,” Strickland snapped. “Mr. Smiley may be a distinguished ex-member, but he’s no longer family.”

“So what did you do next, Mostyn?” Smiley asked.

“Standing instructions gave me very little latitude, sir,” Mostyn replied, showing once again, like Smiley, a studied disregard for Strickland. “Both ‘Smiley’ and ‘Esterhase’ were wait-listed, which meant that they could be contacted only through the fifth floor. My section head was out to lunch and not due back till two-fifteen.” He gave a light shrug. “I stalled. I told him to try again at two-thirty.”

Smiley turned to Strickland. “I thought you said that all the émigré files had been consigned to special keeping?”

“Correct.”

“Shouldn’t there have been something on the selector card to that effect?”

“There should and there wasn’t,” Strickland said.

“That is just the point, sir,” Mostyn agreed, talking only to Smiley. “At that stage there was no suggestion that Vladimir or his Group was out of bounds. From the card, he looked just like any other pensioned-off agent raising a wind. I assumed he wanted a bit of money, or company, or something. We get quite a few of those. Leave him to the section head, I thought.”

“Who shall remain nameless, Mostyn,” Strickland said. “Remember that.”

It crossed Smiley’s mind at this point that the reticence in Mostyn—his air of distastefully stepping round some dangerous secret all the time he spoke—might have something to do with protecting a negligent superior. But Mostyn’s next words dispelled this notion, for he went out of his way to imply that his superior was at fault.

“The trouble was, my section head didn’t get back from lunch till three-fifteen, so that when Vladimir rang in at two-thirty, I had to put him off again. He was furious,” said Mostyn. “Vladimir was, I mean. I asked whether there was anything I could do in the meantime and he said, ‘Find Max. Just find me Max. Tell Max I have been in touch with certain friends, also through friends with neighbours.’ There were a couple of notes on the card about his word code and I saw that ‘neighbour’ meant Soviet Intelligence.”

A mandarin impassivity had descended over Smiley’s face. The earlier emotion was quite gone.

“All of which you duly reported to your section head at three-fifteen?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Did you play him the tape?”

“He hadn’t time to hear it,” said Mostyn mercilessly. “He had to leave straight away for a long week-end.”

The stubborn brevity of Mostyn’s speech was now so evident that Strickland felt obliged to fill the gaps.

“Yes, well, there’s no question but that if we’re looking for scapegoats, George, that section head of Mostyn’s made a monumental fool of himself, no question at all,” Strickland declared brightly. “He omitted to send for Vladimir’s papers—which would not, of course, have been forthcoming. He omitted to acquaint himself with standing orders on the handling of émigrés. He also appears to have succumbed to a severe dose of week-end fever, leaving no word of his whereabouts should he be required. God help him on Monday morning, says I. Oh, yes. Come, Mostyn, we’re waiting, boy.”

Mostyn obediently took back the story. Vladimir rang for the third and last time at three-forty-three, sir, he said, speaking even more slowly than before. It should have been quarter to four, but he jumped the gun by two minutes. Mostyn by then had a rudimentary brief from his section head, which he now repeated to Smiley: “He called it a bromide job. I was to find out what, if anything, the old boy really wanted and, if all else failed, make a rendezvous with him to cool him down. I was to give him a drink, sir, pat him on the back, and promise nothing except to pass on whatever message he brought me.”

“And the ‘neighbours’?” Smiley asked. “They were not an issue to your section head?”

“He rather thought that was just a bit of agent’s histrionics, sir.”

“I see. Yes, I see.” Yet his eyes, in contradiction, closed completely for a moment. “So how did the dialogue with Vladimir go this third time?”

“According to Vladimir, it was to be an immediate meeting or nothing, sir. I tried out the alternatives on him as instructed—‘Write us a letter—is it money you want? Surely it can wait till Monday’—but by then he was shouting at me down the phone. ‘A meeting or nothing. Tonight or nothing. Moscow Rules. I insist Moscow Rules. Tell this to Max—’”

Interrupting himself, Mostyn lifted his head and with unblinking eyes returned Lauder Strickland’s hostile stare.

“Tell what to Max?” said Smiley, his gaze moving swiftly from one to the other of them.

“We were speaking French, sir. The card said French was his preferred second language and I’m only Grade B in Russian.”

“Irrelevant,” Strickland snapped.

“Tell what to Max?” Smiley persisted.

Mostyn’s eyes searched out a spot on the floor a yard or two beyond his own feet. “He meant: Tell Max I insist it’s Moscow Rules.”

Lacon, who had stayed uncharacteristically quiet these last minutes, now chimed in: “There’s an important point here, George. The Circus were not the suitors here. He was. The ex-agent. He was doing all the pressing, making all the running. If he’d accepted our suggestion, written out his information, none of this need ever have happened. He brought it on himself entirely. George, I insist you take the point!”

Strickland was lighting himself a fresh cigarette.

“Whoever heard of Moscow Rules in the middle of bloody Hampstead anyway?” Strickland asked, waving out the match.

“Bloody Hampstead is right,” Smiley said quietly.

“Mostyn, wrap the story up,” Lacon commanded, blushing scarlet.

They had agreed a time, Mostyn resumed woodenly, now staring at his left palm as if he were reading his own fortune in it: “Ten-twenty, sir.”

They had agreed Moscow Rules, he said, and the usual contact procedures, which Mostyn had established earlier in the afternoon by consulting the Oddbins encounter index.

“And what were the contact procedures exactly?” Smiley asked.

“A copy-book rendezvous, sir,” Mostyn replied. “The Sarratt training course all over again, sir.”

Smiley felt suddenly crowded by the intimacy of Mostyn’s respectfulness. He did not wish to be this boy’s hero, or to be caressed by his voice, his gaze, his “sir”s. He was not prepared for the claustrophobic admiration of this stranger.

“There’s a tin pavilion on Hampstead Heath, ten minutes’ walk from East Heath Road, overlooking a games field on the south side of the avenue, sir. The safety signal was one new drawing-pin shoved high in the first wood support on the left as you entered.”

“And the counter-signal?” Smiley asked.

But he knew the answer already.

“A yellow chalk line,” said Mostyn. “I gather yellow was the sort of Group trade mark from the old days.” He had adopted a tone of ending. “I put up the pin and came back here and waited. When he didn’t show up, I thought, ‘Well, if he’s secrecy-mad I’ll have to go up to the hut again and check out his counter-signal, then I’ll know whether he’s around and proposes to try the fallback.’ ”

“Which was what?”

“A car pick-up near Swiss Cottage underground at eleven-forty, sir. I was about to go out and take a look when Mr. Strickland rang through and ordered me to sit tight until further orders.” Smiley assumed he had finished but this was not quite true. Seeming to forget everyone but himself, Mostyn slowly shook his handsome head. “I never met him,” he said, in amazement. “He was my first agent, I never met him, I’ll never know what he was trying to tell me,” he said. “My first agent, and he’s dead. It’s incredible. I feel like a complete Jonah.” His head continued shaking long after he had finished speaking.

Lacon added a brisk postscript: “Yes, well, Scotland Yard has a computer these days, George. The Heath Patrol found the body and cordoned off the area and the moment the name was fed into the computer a light came up or a lot of digits or something, and immediately they knew he was on our special watch list. From then on it went like clockwork. The Commissioner phoned the Home Office, the Home Office phoned the Circus—”

“And you phoned me,” said Smiley. “Why, Oliver? Who suggested you bring me in on this?”

“George, does it matter?”

“Enderby?”

“If you insist, yes, it was Saul Enderby. George, listen to me.”

It was Lacon’s moment at last. The issue, whatever it might be, was before them, circumscribed if not yet actually defined. Mostyn was forgotten. Lacon was standing confidently over Smiley’s seated figure and had assumed the rights of an old friend.

“George, as things now stand, I can go to the Wise Men and say: ‘I have investigated and the Circus’s hands are clean.’ I can say that. ‘The Circus gave no encouragement to these people, nor to their leader. For a whole year they have neither paid nor welfared him!’ Perfectly honestly. They don’t own his flat, his car, they don’t pay his rent, educate his bastards, send flowers to his mistress, or have any other of the old—and lamentable—connections with him or his kind. His only link was with the past. His case officers have left the stage for good—yourself and Esterhase, both old ’uns, both off the books. I can say that with my hand on my breast. To the Wise Men, and if necessary to my Minister personally.”

“I don’t follow you,” Smiley said with deliberate obtuseness. “Vladimir was our agent. He was trying to tell us something.”

“Our ex-agent, George. How do we know he was trying to tell us something? We gave him no brief. He spoke of urgency—even of Soviet Intelligence—so do a lot of ex-agents when they’re holding out their caps for a subsidy!”

“Not Vladimir,” Smiley said.

But sophistry was Lacon’s element. He was born to it, he breathed it, he could fly and swim in it, nobody in Whitehall was better at it.

“George, we cannot be held responsible for every ex-agent who takes an injudicious nocturnal walk in one of London’s increasingly dangerous open spaces!” He held out his hands in appeal. “George. What is it to be? Choose. You choose. On the one hand, Vladimir asked for a chat with you. Retired buddies—a chin-wag about old times—why not? And in order to raise a bit of wind, as any of us might, he pretended he had something for you. Some nugget of information. Why not? They all do it. On that basis my Minister will back us. No heads need roll, no tantrums, Cabinet hysteria. He will help us bury the case. Not a cover-up, naturally. But he will use his judgment. If I catch him in the right mood, he may even decide that there is no point in troubling the Wise Men with it at all.”

“Amen,” Strickland echoed.

“On the other hand,” Lacon insisted, mustering all his persuasiveness for the kill, “if things were to come unstuck, George, and the Minister got it into his head that we were engaging his good offices in order to clean up the traces of some unlicensed adventure which has aborted”—he was striding again, skirting an imaginary quagmire—“and there was a scandal, George, and the Circus were proved to be currently involved—your old service, George, one you still love, I am sure—with a notoriously revanchist émigré outfit—volatile, talkative, violently anti-détente—with all manner of anachronistic fixations—a total hangover from the worst days of the cold war—the very archetype of everything our masters have told us to avoid”—he had reached his corner again, a little outside the circle of light—“and there had been a death, George—and an attempted cover-up, as they would no doubt call it—with all the attendant publicity—well, it could be just one scandal too many. The service is a weak child still, George, a sickly one, and in the hands of these new people desperately delicate. At this stage in its rebirth, it could die of the common cold. If it does, your generation will not be least to blame. You have a duty, as we all do. A loyalty.”

Duty to what? Smiley wondered, with that part of himself which sometimes seemed to be a spectator to the rest. Loyalty to whom? “There is no loyalty without betrayal,” Ann liked to tell him in their youth when he had ventured to protest at her infidelities.

For a time nobody spoke.

“And the weapon?” Smiley asked finally, in the tone of someone testing a theory. “How do you account for that, Oliver?”

“What weapon? There was no weapon. He was shot. By his own buddies most likely, knowing their cabals. Not to mention his appetite for other people’s wives.”

“Yes, he was shot,” Smiley agreed. “In the face. At extremely close range. With a soft-nosed bullet. And cursorily searched. Had his wallet taken. That is the police diagnosis. But our diagnosis would be different, wouldn’t it, Lauder?”

“No way,” said Strickland, glowering at him through a cloud of cigarette smoke.

“Well, mine would.”

“Then let’s hear it, George,” said Lacon handsomely.

“The weapon used to kill Vladimir was a standard Moscow Centre assassination device,” Smiley said. “Concealed in a camera, a brief-case, or whatever. A soft-nosed bullet is fired at point-blank range. To obliterate, to punish, and to discourage others. If I remember rightly, they even had one on display at Sarratt in the black museum next to the bar.”

“They still have. It’s horrific,” said Mostyn.

Strickland vouchsafed Mostyn a foul glance.

“But, George!” Lacon cried.

Smiley waited, knowing that in this mood Lacon could swear away Big Ben.

“These people—these émigrés—of whom this poor chap was one—don’t they come from Russia? Haven’t half of them been in touch with Moscow Centre—with or without our knowledge? A weapon like that—I’m not saying you’re right, of course—a weapon like that, in their world, could be as common as cheese!”

Against stupidity, the gods themselves fight in vain, thought Smiley; but Schiller had forgotten the bureaucrats. Lacon was addressing Strickland.

“Lauder. There is the question of the D-notice to the Press outstanding.” It was an order. “Perhaps you should have another shot at them, see how far it’s got.”

In his stockinged feet, Strickland obediently padded down the room and dialled a number.

“Mostyn, perhaps you should take these things out to the kitchen. We don’t want to leave needless traces, do we?”

With Mostyn also dismissed, Smiley and Lacon were suddenly alone.

“It’s a yes or no, George,” Lacon said. “There’s cleaning up to be done. Explanations to be given to tradesmen, what do I know? Mail. Milk. Friends. Whatever such people have. No one knows the course as you do. No one. The police have promised you a head start. They will not be dilatory but they will observe a certain measured order about things and let routine play its part.” With a nervous bound Lacon approached Smiley’s chair and sat awkwardly on the arm. “George. You were their vicar. Very well, I’m asking you to go and read the Offices. He wanted you, George. Not us. You.”

From his old place at the telephone, Strickland interrupted: “They’re asking for a signature for that D-notice, Oliver. They’d like it to be yours, if it’s all the same to you.”

“Why not the chief’s?” Lacon demanded warily.

“Seem to think yours will carry a spot more weight, I fancy.”

“Ask him to hold a moment,” Lacon said, and with a wind-mill gesture drove a fist into his pocket. “I may give you the keys, George?” He dangled them in front of Smiley’s face. “On terms. Right?” The keys still dangled. Smiley stared at them and perhaps he asked “What terms?” or perhaps he just stared; he wasn’t really in a mood for conversation. His mind was on Mostyn, and missing cigarettes; on phone calls about neighbours; on agents with no faces; on sleep. Lacon was counting. He attached great merit to numbering his paragraphs. “One, that you are a private citizen, Vladimir’s executor, not ours. Two, that you are of the past, not the present, and conduct yourself accordingly. The sanitised past. That you will pour oil on the waters, not muddy them. That you will suppress your old professional interest in him, naturally, for that means ours. On those terms may I give you the keys? Yes? No?”

Mostyn was standing in the kitchen doorway. He was addressing Lacon, but his earnest eyes veered constantly towards Smiley.

“What is it, Mostyn?” Lacon demanded. “Be quick!”

“I just remembered a note on Vladimir’s card, sir. He had a wife in Tallinn. I wondered whether she should be informed. I just thought I’d better mention it.”

“The card is once more not accurate,” said Smiley, returning Mostyn’s gaze. “She was with him in Moscow when he defected, she was arrested and taken to a forced-labour camp. She died there.”

“Mr. Smiley must do whatever he thinks fit about such things,” Lacon said swiftly, anxious to avoid a fresh outbreak, and dropped the keys into Smiley’s passive palm. Suddenly everything was in movement. Smiley was on his feet, Lacon was already half-way down the room, and Strickland was holding out the phone to him. Mostyn had slipped to the darkened hallway and was deftly unhooking Smiley’s raincoat from the stand.

“What else did Vladimir say to you on the telephone, Mostyn?” Smiley asked quietly, dropping one arm into the sleeve.

“He said, ‘Tell Max that it concerns the Sandman. Tell him I have two proofs and can bring them with me. Then perhaps he will see me.’ He said it twice. It was on the tape but Strickland erased it.”

“Do you know what Vladimir meant by that? Keep your voice down.”

“No, sir.”

“Nothing on the card?”

“No, sir.”

“Do they know what he meant?” Smiley asked, tilting his hand swiftly towards Strickland and Lacon.

“I think Strickland may. I’m not sure.”

“Did Vladimir really not ask for Esterhase?”

“No, sir.”

Lacon was finishing on the phone. Strickland took back the receiver from him and spoke into it himself. Seeing Smiley at the door, Lacon bounded down the room to him.

“George! Good man! Fare you well! Listen. I want to talk to you about marriage some time. A seminar with no holds barred. I’m counting on you to tell me the art of it, George!”

“Yes. We must get together,” Smiley said.

Looking down, he saw that Lacon was shaking his hand.

A bizarre postscript to this meeting confounds its conspiratorial purpose. Standard Circus tradecraft requires that hidden microphones be installed in safe houses. Agents in their strange way accept this, even though they are not informed of it, even though their case officers go through motions of taking notes. For his rendezvous with Vladimir, Mostyn had quite properly switched on the system in anticipation of the old man’s arrival, and nobody, in the subsequent panic, thought to turn it off. Routine procedures brought the tapes to transcriber section, who in good faith put out several texts for the general Circus reader. The luckless head of Oddbins got a copy, so did the Secretariat, so did the heads of Personnel, Operations, and Finance. It was not till a copy landed in Lauder Strickland’s in-tray that the explosion occurred and the innocent recipients were sworn to secrecy under all manner of dreadful threats. The tape is perfect. Lacon’s restless pacing is there; so are Strickland’s sotto voce asides, some of them obscene. Only Mostyn’s flustered confessions in the hall escaped.

As to Mostyn himself, he played no further part in the affair. He resigned of his own accord a few months later, part of the wastage rate that gets everyone so worried these days.

6

The same uncertain light that greeted Smiley as he stepped gratefully out of the safe flat into the fresh air of that Hampstead morning greeted Ostrakova also, though the Paris autumn was further on, and only a last few leaves clung to the plane trees. Like Smiley’s too, her night had not been restful. She had risen in the dark and dressed with care, and she had deliberated, since the morning looked colder, whether this was the day on which to get out her winter boots, because the draught in the warehouse could be cruel and affected her legs the most. Still undecided, she had fished them out of the cupboard and wiped them down, and even polished them, but she still had not been able to make up her mind whether to wear them or not. Which was how it always went with her when she had one big problem to grapple with: the small ones became impossible. She knew all the signs, she could feel them coming on, but there was nothing she could do. She would mislay her purse, botch her bookkeeping at the warehouse, lock herself out of the flat and have to fetch the old fool of a concierge, Madame la Pierre, who pecked and snuffled like a goat in a nettle patch. She could quite easily, when the mood was on her, after fifteen years of taking the same route, catch the wrong bus and finish up, furious, in a strange neighbourhood. She pulled on the boots finally—muttering to herself “old fool, cretin,” and the like—and, carrying the heavy shopping bag that she had prepared the previous night, she set off along her usual route, passing her three usual shops and neglecting to enter any of them, while she tried to work out whether or not she was going off her head.

I am mad. I am not mad. Somebody is trying to kill me, somebody is trying to protect me. I am safe. I am in mortal danger. Back and forth.

In the four weeks since she had received her little Estonian confessor, Ostrakova had been aware of many changes in herself and for most of them she was not at all ungrateful. Whether she had fallen in love with him was neither here nor there: his appearance was timely, and the piracy in him had revived her sense of opposition at a moment when it was in danger of going out. He had rekindled her, and there was enough of the alley cat in him to remind her of Glikman and other men as well; she had never been particularly continent. And since, on top of this, she thought, the magician is a man of looks, and knows women, and steps into my life armed with a picture of my oppressor and the determination, apparently, to eliminate him—why then, it would be positively indecent, lonely old fool that I am, if I did not fall in love with him on the spot!

But it was his gravity that had impressed her even more than his magic. “You must not decorate,” he had told her, with uncharacteristic sharpness, when for the sake of entertainment or variety she had allowed herself to deviate just a little from the version she had written to the General. “Merely because you yourself feel more at ease, do not make the mistake of supposing that the danger is over.”

She had promised to improve herself.

“The danger is absolute,” he had told her as he left. “It is not yours to make greater or make less.”

People had talked to her about danger before, but when the magician talked about it, she believed him.

“Danger to my daughter?” she had asked. “Danger to Alexandra?”

“Your daughter plays no part in this. You may be sure she knows nothing of what is going on.”

“Then danger to whom?”

“Danger to all of us who have knowledge of this matter,” he had replied as she happily conceded, in the doorway, to their one embrace. “Danger most of all to you.”

And now, for the last three days—or was it two? or was it ten?—Ostrakova swore she had seen the danger gather round her like an army of shadows at her own deathbed. The danger that was absolute; that was not hers to make greater or less. And she saw it again this Saturday morning as she clumped along in her polished winter boots, swinging the heavy shopping bag at her side: the same two men, pursuing her, the week-end notwithstanding. Hard men. Harder than the gingery man. Men who sit about at headquarters listening to the interrogations. And never speak a word. The one was walking five metres behind her, the other was keeping abreast of her across the street, at this moment passing the doorway of that vagabond Mercier the chandler, whose red-and-green awning hung so low it was a danger even to someone of Ostrakova’s humble height.

She had decided, when she had first allowed herself to notice them, that they were the General’s men. That was Monday, or was it Friday? General Vladimir has turned out his bodyguard for me, she thought with much amusement, and for a dangerous morning she plotted the friendly gestures she would make to them in order to express her gratitude: the smiles of complicity she would vouchsafe to them when there was nobody else looking; even the soupe she would prepare and take to them, to help them while away their vigil in the doorways. Two hulking great bodyguards, she had thought, just for one old lady! Ostrakov had been right: that General was a man! On the second day she decided they were not there at all, and that her desire to appoint such men was merely an extension of her desire to be reunited with the magician. I am looking for links to him, she thought; just as I have not yet brought myself to wash up the glass from which he drank his vodka, or to puff up the cushions where he sat and lectured me on danger.

But on the third—or was it the fifth?—day she took a different and harsher view of her supposed protectors. She stopped playing the little girl. On whichever day it was, leaving her apartment early in order to check a particular consignment to the warehouse, she had stepped out of the sanctuary of her abstractions straight into the streets of Moscow, as she had too often known them in her years with Glikman. The ill-lit, cobbled street was empty but for one black car parked twenty metres from her doorway. Most likely it had arrived that minute. She had a notion, afterwards, of having seen it pull up, presumably in order to deliver the sentries to their beat. Pull up sharply, just as she came out. And douse its headlights. Resolutely she had begun walking down the pavement. “Danger most of all to you,” she kept remembering; “danger to all of us who know.”

The car was following her.

They think I am a whore, she thought vainly, one of those old ones who work the early-morning market.

Suddenly her one aim had been to get inside a church. Any church. The nearest Russian Orthodox church was twenty minutes away, and so small that to pray in it at all was like a séance; the very proximity of the Holy Family offered a forgiveness by itself. But twenty minutes was a lifetime. Non-Orthodox churches she eschewed, as a rule, entirely—they were a betrayal of her nationhood. That morning, however, with the car crawling along behind her, she had suspended her prejudice and ducked into the very first church she came to, which turned out to be not merely Catholic, but modern Catholic as well, so that she heard the whole Mass twice through in bad French, read by a worker-priest who smelt of garlic and worse. But by the time she left, the men were nowhere to be seen and that was all that mattered—even though when she arrived at the warehouse she had to promise two extra hours to make up for the inconvenience she had caused by her lateness.

Then for three days nothing, or was it five? Ostrakova had become as incapable of hoarding time as money. Three or five, they had gone, they had never existed. It was all her “decoration,” as the magician had called it, her stupid habit of seeing too much, looking too many people in the eye, inventing too much incident. Till today again, when they were back. Except that today was about fifty thousand times worse, because today was now, and the street today was as empty as on the last day or the first, and the man who was five metres behind her was drawing closer, and the man who had been under Mercier’s outrageously dangerous awning was crossing the street to join him.

What happened next, in such descriptions or imaginings as had come Ostrakova’s way, was supposed to happen in a flash. One minute you were upright, walking down the pavement, the next, with a flurry of lights and a wailing of horns, you were wafted to the operating table surrounded by surgeons in various coloured masks. Or you were in Heaven, before the Almighty, mumbling excuses about certain lapses that you did not really regret; and neither—if you understood Him at all—did He. Or worst of all, you came round, and were returned, as walking wounded, to your apartment, and your boring half-sister Valentina dropped everything, with an extremely ill grace, in order to come up from Lyons and be a non-stop scold at your bedside.

Not one of these expectations was fulfilled.

What happened took place with the slowness of an underwater ballet. The man who was gaining on her drew alongside her, taking the right, or inside, position. At the same moment, the man who had crossed the road from Mercier’s came up on her left, walking not on the pavement but in the gutter, incidentally splashing her with yesterday’s rain-water as he strode along. With her fatal habit of looking into people’s eyes Ostrakova stared at her two unwished-for companions and saw faces she had already recognised and knew by heart. They had hunted Ostrakov, they had murdered Glikman, and in her personal view they had been murdering the entire Russian people for centuries, whether in the name of the Czar, or God, or Lenin. Looking away from them, she saw the black car that had followed her on her way to church heading slowly down the empty road towards her. Therefore she did exactly what she had planned to do all night through, what she had lain awake picturing. In her shopping bag she had put an old flat-iron, a bit of junk that Ostrakov had acquired in the days when the poor dying man had fancied he might make a few extra francs by dealing in antiques. Her shopping bag was of leather—green and brown in a patchwork—and stout. Drawing it back, she swung it round her with all her strength at the man in the gutter—at his groin, the hated centre of him. He swore—she could not hear in which language—and crumpled to his knees. Here her plan went adrift. She had not expected a villain on either side of her, and she needed time to recover her own balance and get the iron swinging at the second man. He did not allow her to do this. Throwing his arms round both of hers, he gathered her together like the fat sack she was, and lifted her clean off her feet. She saw the bag fall and heard the chime as the flat-iron slipped from it onto a drain cover. Still looking down, she saw her boots dangling ten centimetres from the ground, as if she had hanged herself like her brother Niki—his feet, exactly, turned into each other like a simpleton’s. She noticed that one of her toe-caps, the left, was already scratched in the scuffle. Her assailant’s arms now locked themselves even harder across her breast and she wondered whether her ribs would crack before she suffocated. She felt him draw her back, and she presumed that he was shaping to swing her into the car, which was now approaching at a good speed down the road: that she was being kidnapped. This notion terrified her. Nothing, least of all death, was as appalling to her at that moment as the thought that these pigs would take her back to Russia and subject her to the kind of slow, doctrinal prison death she was certain had killed Glikman. She struggled with all her force, she managed to bite his hand. She saw a couple of bystanders who seemed as scared as she was. Then she realised that the car was not slowing down, and that the men had something quite different in mind: not to kidnap her at all, but to kill her.

He threw her.

She reeled but did not fall, and as the car swerved to knock her down, she thanked God and all His angels that she had, after all, decided on the winter boots, because the front bumper hit her at the back of the shins, and when she saw her feet again, they were straight up in front of her face, and her bare thighs were parted as for childbirth. She flew for a while, then hit the road with everything at once—with her head, her spine, and her heels—then rolled like a sausage over the cobbles. The car had passed her but she heard it screech to a stop and wondered whether they were going to reverse and drive over her again. She tried to move but felt too sleepy. She heard voices and car doors slamming, she heard the engine roaring, and fading, so that either it was going away or she was losing her hearing.

“Don’t touch her,” someone said.

No, don’t, she thought.

“It’s a lack of oxygen,” she heard herself say. “Lift me to my feet and I’ll be all right.”

Why on earth did she say that? Or did she only think it?

“Aubergines,” she said. “Get the aubergines.” She didn’t know whether she was talking about her shopping, or the female traffic wardens for whom aubergine was the Paris slang.

Then a pair of woman’s hands put a blanket over her, and a furious Gallic argument started about what one did next. Did anyone get the number? she wanted to ask. But she was really too sleepy to bother, and besides she had no oxygen—the fall had taken it out of her body for good. She had a vision of half-shot birds she had seen in the Russian countryside, flapping helplessly on the ground, waiting for the dogs to reach them. General, she thought, did you get my second letter? Drifting off, she willed him, begged him to read it, and to respond to its entreaty. General, read my second letter.

She had written it a week before in a moment of despair. She had posted it yesterday in another.

7

There are Victorian terraces in the region of Paddington Station that are painted as white as luxury liners on the outside, and inside are dark as tombs. Westbourne Terrace that Saturday morning gleamed as brightly as any of them, but the service road that led to Vladimir’s part of it was blocked at one end by a heap of rotting mattresses, and by a smashed boom, like a frontier post, at the other.

“Thank you, I’ll get out here,” said Smiley politely, and paid the cab off at the mattresses.

He had come straight from Hampstead and his knees ached. The Greek driver had spent the journey lecturing him on Cyprus, and out of courtesy he had crouched on the jump seat in order to hear him over the din of the engine. Vladimir, we should have done better by you, he thought, surveying the filth on the pavements, the poor washing trailing from the balconies. The Circus should have shown more honour to its vertical man.

It concerns the Sandman, he thought. Tell him I have two proofs and can bring them with me.

He walked slowly, knowing that early morning is a better time of day to come out of a building than go into it. A small queue had gathered at the bus-stop. A milkman was going his rounds, so was a newspaper boy. A squadron of grounded sea-gulls scavenged gracefully at the spilling dustbins. If sea-gulls are taking to the cities, he thought, will pigeons take to the sea? Crossing the service road, he saw a motor-cyclist with a black official-looking side-car parking his steed a hundred yards down the kerb. Something in the man’s posture reminded him of the tall messenger who had brought the keys to the safe flat—a similar fixity, even at that distance; a respectful attentiveness, of an almost military kind.

Shedding chestnut trees darkened the pillared doorway, a scarred cat eyed him warily. The doorbell was the topmost of thirty, but Smiley didn’t press it and when he shoved the double doors they swung open too freely, revealing the same gloomy corridors painted very shiny to defeat graffiti writers, and the same linoleum staircase that squeaked like a hospital trolley. He remembered it all. Nothing had changed, and now nothing ever would. There was no light switch and the stairs grew darker the higher he climbed. Why didn’t Vladimir’s murderers steal his keys? he wondered, feeling them nudging against his hip with every step. Perhaps they didn’t need them. Perhaps they had their own set already. He reached a landing and squeezed past a luxurious perambulator. He heard a dog howling and the morning news in German and the flushing of a communal lavatory. He heard a child screaming at its mother, then a slap and the father screaming at the child. Tell Max it concerns the Sandman. There was a smell of curry and cheap fat frying, and disinfectant. There was a smell of too many people with not much money jammed into too little air. He remembered that too. Nothing had changed.

If we’d treated him better, it would never have happened, Smiley thought. The neglected are too easily killed, he thought, in unconscious affinity with Ostrakova. He remembered the day they had brought him here, Smiley the vicar, Toby Esterhase the postman. They had driven to Heathrow to fetch him: Toby the fixer, dyed in all the oceans, as he would say of himself. Toby drove like the wind but they were almost late, even then. The plane had landed. They hurried to the barrier and there he was: silvered and majestic, towering stock-still in the temporary corridor from the arrivals bay, while the common peasants swept past him. He remembered their solemn embrace—“Max, my old friend, it is really you?” “It’s me, Vladimir, they’ve put us together again.” He remembered Toby spiriting them through the large back alleys of the immigration service, because the enraged French police had confiscated the old boy’s papers before throwing him out. He remembered how they had lunched at Scott’s, all three of them, the old boy too animated even to drink but talking grandly of the future they all knew he didn’t have: “It will be Moscow all over again, Max. Maybe we even get a chance at the Sandman.” Next day they went flat-hunting, “just to show you a few possibilities, General,” as Toby Esterhase had explained. It was Christmas time and the resettlement budget for the year was used up. Smiley appealed to Circus Finance. He lobbied Lacon and the Treasury for a supplementary estimate, but in vain. “A dose of reality will bring him down to earth,” Lacon had pronounced. “Use your influence with him, George. That’s what you’re there for.” Their first dose of reality was a tart’s parlour in Kensington, their second overlooked a shunting-yard near Waterloo. Westbourne Terrace was their third, and as they squeaked up these same stairs, Toby leading, the old man had suddenly halted, and put back his great mottled head, and wrinkled his nose theatrically.

Ah! So if I get hungry I have only to stand in the corridor and sniff and my hunger is gone! he had announced in his thick French. That way I don’t have to eat for a week!

By then even Vladimir had guessed they were putting him away for good.

Smiley returned to the present. The next landing was musical, he noticed, as he continued his solitary ascent. Through one door came rock music played at full blast, through another Sibelius and the smell of bacon. Peering out of the window, he saw two men loitering between the chestnut trees who were not there when he had arrived. A team would do that, he thought. A team would post look-outs while the others went inside. Whose team was another question. Moscow’s? The Superintendent’s? Saul Enderby’s? Farther down the road, the tall motor-cyclist had acquired a tabloid newspaper and was sitting on his bike reading it.

At Smiley’s side a door opened and an old woman in a dressing-gown came out holding a cat against her shoulder. He could smell last night’s drink on her breath even before she spoke to him.

“Are you a burglar, dearie?” she asked.

“I’m afraid not,” Smiley replied with a laugh. “Just a visitor.”

“Still, it’s nice to be fancied, isn’t it, dearie?” she said.

“It is indeed,” said Smiley politely.

The last flight was steep and very narrow and lit by real daylight from a wired skylight on the slant. There were two doors on the top landing, both closed, both very cramped. On one, a typed notice faced him: “MR. V. MILLER, TRANSLATIONS.” Smiley remembered the argument about Vladimir’s alias now he was to become a Londoner and keep his head down. “Miller” was no problem. For some reason, the old boy found Miller rather grand. “Miller, c’est bien,” he had declared. “Miller I like, Max.” But “Mr.” was anything but good. He pressed for General, then offered to settle for Colonel. But Smiley in his rôle as vicar was on this point unbudgeable: Mr. was a lot less trouble than a bogus rank in the wrong army, he had ruled.

He knocked boldly, knowing that a soft knock is more conspicuous than a loud one. He heard the echo, and nothing else. He heard no footfall, no sudden freezing of a sound. He called “Vladimir” through the letter-box as though he were an old friend visiting. He tried one Yale from the bunch and it stuck, he tried another and it turned. He stepped inside and closed the door, waiting for something to hit him on the back of the head but preferring the thought of a broken skull to having his face shot off. He felt dizzy and realised he was holding his breath. The same white paint, he noticed; the same prison emptiness exactly. The same queer hush, like a phone-box; the same mix of public smells.

This is where we stood, Smiley remembered—the three of us, that afternoon. Toby and myself like tugs, nudging at the old battleship between us. The estate agent’s particulars had said “penthouse.”

“Hopeless,” Toby Esterhase had announced in his Hungarian French, always the first to speak, as he turned to open the door and leave. “I mean completely awful. I mean, I should have come and taken a look first, I was an idiot,” said Toby when Vladimir still didn’t budge. “General, please accept my apologies. This is a complete insult.”

Smiley added his own assurances. We can do better for you than this, Vladi; much. We just have to persist.

But the old man’s eyes were on the window, as Smiley’s were now, on this dotty forest of chimney-pots and gables and slate roofs that flourished beyond the parapet. And suddenly he had thumped a gloved paw on Smiley’s shoulder.

“Better you keep your money to shoot those swine in Moscow, Max,” he had advised.

With the tears running down his cheeks, and the same determined smile, Vladimir had continued to stare at the Moscow chimneys; and at his fading dreams of ever again living under a Russian sky.

“On reste ici,” he had commanded finally as if he were drawing up a last-ditch defence.

A tiny divan bed ran along one wall, a cooking ring stood on the sill. From the smell of putty Smiley guessed that the old man had kept whiting the place himself, painting out the damp and filling the cracks. On the table he used for typing and eating lay an old Remington upright and a pair of worn dictionaries. His translating work, he thought; the few extra pennies that fleshed out his allowance. Pressing back his elbows as if he were having trouble with his spine, Smiley drew himself to his full if diminutive height and launched himself upon the familiar death rites for a departed spy. An Estonian Bible lay on the pine bedside locker. He probed it delicately for cut cavities, then dangled it upside down for scraps of paper or photographs. Pulling open the locker drawer, he found a bottle of patent pills for rejuvenating the sexually jaded and three Red Army gallantry medals mounted on a chrome bar. So much for cover, thought Smiley, wondering how on earth Vladimir and his many paramours had managed on such a tiny bed. A print of Martin Luther hung at the bedhead. Next to it, a coloured picture called “The Red Roofs of Old Tallinn,” which Vladimir must have torn from something and backed on cardboard. A second picture showed “The Kazari Coast,” a third “Windmills and a Ruined Castle.” He delved behind each. The bedside light caught his eye. He tried the switch and when it didn’t work he unplugged it, took out the bulb, and fished in the wood base, but without result. Just a dead bulb, he thought. A sudden shriek from outside sent him pulling back against the wall but when he had collected himself he realised it was more of those land-borne sea-gulls: a whole colony had settled round the chimney-pots. He glanced over the parapet into the street again. The two loiterers had gone. They’re on their way up, he thought; my head start is over. They’re not police at all, he thought; they’re assassins. The motor bike with its black side-car stood unattended. He closed the window, wondering whether there was a special Valhalla for dead spies where he and Vladimir would meet and he could put things right; telling himself he had lived a long life and that this moment was as good as any other for it to end. And not believing it for one second.

The table drawer contained sheets of plain paper, a stapler, a chewed pencil, some elastic bands, and a recent quarterly telephone bill, unpaid, for the sum of seventy-eight pounds, which struck him as uncharacteristically high for Vladimir’s frugal lifestyle. He opened the stapler and found nothing. He put the phone bill in his pocket to study later and kept searching, knowing it was not a real search at all, that a real search would take three men several days before they could say with certainty they had found whatever was to be found. If he was looking for anything in particular, then it was probably an address book or a diary or something that did duty for one, even if it was only a scrap of paper. He knew that sometimes old spies, even the best of them, were a little like old lovers; as age crept up on them, they began to cheat, out of fear that their powers were deserting them. They pretended they had it all in the memory, but in secret they were hanging on to their virility, in secret they wrote things down, often in some home-made code, which, if they only knew it, could be unbuttoned in hours or minutes by anyone who knew the game. Names and addresses of contacts, sub-agents. Nothing was holy. Routines, times and places of meetings, worknames, phone numbers, even safe combinations written out as social-security numbers and birthdays. In his time Smiley had seen entire networks put at risk that way because one agent no longer dared to trust his head. He didn’t believe Vladimir would have done that, but there was always a first time.

Tell him I have two proofs and can bring them with me. . . .

He was standing in what the old man would have called his kitchen: the window-sill with the gas ring on it, the tiny home-made food-store with holes drilled for ventilation. We men who cook for ourselves are half-creatures, he thought as he scanned the two shelves, tugged out the saucepan and the frying-pan, poked among the cayenne and paprika. Anywhere else in the house—even in bed—you can cut yourself off, read your books, deceive yourself that solitude is best. But in the kitchen the signs of incompleteness are too strident. Half of one black loaf. Half of one coarse sausage. Half an onion. Half a pint of milk. Half a lemon. Half a packet of black tea. Half a life. He opened anything that would open, he probed with his finger in the paprika. He found a loose tile and prised it free, he unscrewed the wooden handle of the frying-pan. About to pull open the clothes cupboard, he stopped as if listening again, but this time it was something he had seen that held him, not something he had heard.

On top of the food-store lay a parcel of Gauloises Caporal cigarettes, Vladimir’s favourites when he couldn’t get his Russians. Tipped, he noticed, reading the different legends. “Duty Free.” “Filtre.” Marked “Exportation” and “Made in France.” Cellophane-wrapped. He took them down. Of the ten original packets, one already missing. In the ashtray, three stubbed-out cigarettes of the same brand. In the air, now that he sniffed for it over the smell of food and putty, a faint aroma of French cigarettes.

And no cigarettes in his pocket, he remembered.

Holding the blue parcel in both hands, slowly turning it, Smiley tried to understand what it meant to him. Instinct—or better, a submerged perception yet to rise to the surface—signalled to him urgently that something about these cigarettes was wrong. Not their appearance. Not that they were stuffed with microfilm or high explosive or soft-nosed bullets or any other of those weary games.

Merely the fact of their presence, here and nowhere else, was wrong.

So new, so free of dust, one packet missing, three smoked.

And no cigarettes in his pocket.

He worked faster now, wanting very much to leave. The flat was too high up. It was too empty and too full. He had a growing sense of something being out of joint. Why didn’t they take his keys? He pulled open the cupboard. It held clothes as well as papers but Vladimir possessed few of either. The papers were mostly cyclostyled pamphlets in Russian and English and in what Smiley took to be one of the Baltic languages. There was a folder of letters from the Group’s old headquarters in Paris, and posters reading “REMEMBER LATVIA,”“REMEMBER ESTONIA,”“REMEMBER LITHUANIA,”presumably for display at public demonstrations. There was a box of school chalk, yellow, a couple of pieces missing. And Vladimir’s treasured Norfolk jacket, lying off its hook on the floor. Fallen there, perhaps, as Vladimir closed the cupboard door too fast.

And Vladimir so vain? thought Smiley. So military in his appearance? Yet dumps his best jacket in a heap on the cupboard floor? Or was it that a more careless hand than Vladimir’s had not replaced it on the hanger?

Picking the jacket up, Smiley searched the pockets, then hung it back in the cupboard and slammed the door to see if it fell off its hook.

It did.

They didn’t take the keys, and they didn’t search his flat, he thought. They searched Vladimir, but in the Superintendent’s opinion they had been disturbed.

Tell him I have two proofs and can bring them with me.

Returning to the kitchen area, he stood before the food-store and took another studied look at the blue parcel lying on top of it. Then peered in the waste-paper basket. At the ashtray again, memorising. Then in the garbage bucket, just in case the missing packet, crumpled up, was there. It wasn’t, which for some reason pleased him.

Time to go.

But he didn’t, not quite. For another quarter of an hour, with his ear cocked for interruptions, Smiley delved and probed, lifting and replacing, still on the look-out for the loose floor-board, or the favoured recess behind the shelves. But this time he wanted not to find. This time, he wanted to confirm an absence. Only when he was as satisfied as circumstance allowed did he step quietly onto the landing and lock the door behind him. At the bottom of the first flight he met a temporary postman wearing a GPO armband emerging from another corridor. Smiley touched his elbow.

“If you’ve anything at all for flat 6B, I can save you the climb,” he said humbly.

The postman rummaged and produced a brown envelope. Postmark Paris, dated five days ago, the 15th district. Smiley slipped it into his pocket. At the bottom of the second flight stood a fire-door with a push-bar to open it from the inside only. He had made a mental note of it on his way up. He pushed, the door yielded, he descended a vile concrete staircase and crossed an interior courtyard to a deserted mews, still pondering the omission. Why didn’t they search his flat? he wondered. Moscow Centre, like any other large bureaucracy, had its fixed procedures. You decide to kill a man. So you station pickets outside his house, you stake out his route with static posts, you put in your assassination team, and you kill him. In the classic method. Then why not search his flat as well?—Vladimir, a bachelor, living in a building constantly overrun with strangers?—why not send in the pickets the moment he is on his way? Because they knew he had it with him, thought Smiley. And the body search, which the Superintendent regarded as so cursory? Suppose they were not disturbed, but had found what they were looking for?

He hailed a taxi, telling the driver, “Bywater Street in Chelsea, please, off Kings Road.”

Go home, he thought. Have a bath, think it through. Shave. Tell him I have two proofs and can bring them with me.

Suddenly, leaning forward, he tapped on the glass partition and changed his destination. As they made the U-turn, the tall motor-cyclist screeched to a stop behind them, dismounted, and solemnly shunted his large black bike and side-car into the opposite lane. A footman, thought Smiley, watching him. A footman, wheeling in the trolley for tea. Like an official escort, arch-backed and elbows spread, the motor-cyclist followed them through the outer reaches of Camden, then, still at a regulation distance, slowly up the hill. The cab drew up, Smiley leaned forward to pay his fare. As he did so, the dark figure proceeded solemnly past them, one arm lifted from the elbow in a mail-fist salute.

8

He stood at the mouth of the avenue, gazing into the ranks of beech trees as they sank away from him like a retreating army into the mist. The darkness had departed reluctantly, leaving an indoor gloom. It could have been dusk already: tea-time in an old country house. The street lights either side of him were poor candles, illuminating nothing. The air felt warm and heavy. He had expected police still, and a roped-off area. He had expected journalists or curious bystanders. It never happened, he told himself, as he started slowly down the slope. No sooner had I left the scene than Vladimir clambered merrily to his feet, stick in hand, wiped off the gruesome make-up, and skipped away with his fellow actors for a pot of beer at the police station.

Stick in hand, he repeated to himself, remembering something the Superintendent had said to him. Left hand or right hand? “There’s yellow chalk powder on his left hand too,” Mr. Murgotroyd had said inside the van. “Thumb and first two fingers.”

He advanced and the avenue darkened round him, the mist thickened. His footsteps echoed tinnily ahead of him. Twenty yards higher, brown sunlight burned like a slow bonfire in its own smoke. But down here in the dip the mist had collected in a cold fog, and Vladimir was very dead after all. He saw tyre marks where the police cars had parked. He noticed the absence of leaves and the unnatural cleanness of the gravel. What do they do? he wondered. Hose the gravel down? Sweep the leaves into more plastic pillowcases?

His tiredness had given way to a new and mysterious clarity. He continued up the avenue wishing Vladimir good morning and good night and not feeling a fool for doing so, thinking intently about drawing-pins and chalk and French cigarettes and Moscow Rules, looking for a tin pavilion by a playing field. Take it in sequence, he told himself. Take it from the beginning. Leave the Caporals on their shelf. He reached an intersection of paths and crossed it, still climbing. To his right, goal-posts appeared, and beyond them a green pavilion of corrugated iron, apparently empty. He started across the field, rain-water seeping into his shoes. Behind the hut ran a steep mud bank scoured with children’s slides. He climbed the bank, entered a coppice, and kept climbing. The fog had not penetrated the trees and by the time he reached the brow it had cleared. There was still no one in sight. Returning, he approached the pavilion through the trees. It was a tin box, no more, with one side open to the field. The only furniture was a rough wood bench slashed and written on with knives, the only occupant a prone figure stretched on it, with a blanket pulled over his head and brown boots protruding. For an undisciplined moment Smiley wondered whether he too had had his face blown off. Girders held up the roof; earnest moral statements enlivened the flaking green paint. “Punk is destructive. Society does not need it.” The assertion caused him a moment’s indecision. “Oh, but society does,” he wanted to reply; “society is an association of minorities.” The drawing-pin was where Mostyn had said it was, at head height exactly, in the best Sarratt tradition of regularity, its Circus-issue brass head as new and as unmarked as the boy who had put it there.

Proceed to the rendezvous, it said; no danger sighted.

Moscow Rules, thought Smiley yet again. Moscow, where it could take a fieldman three days to post a letter to a safe address. Moscow, where all minorities are punk.

Tell him I have two proofs and can bring them with me. . . .

Vladimir’s chalked acknowledgment ran close beside the pin, a wavering yellow worm of a message scrawled all down the post. Perhaps the old man was worried about rain, thought Smiley. Perhaps he was afraid it could wash his mark away. Or perhaps in his emotional state he leaned too heavily on the chalk, just as he had left his Norfolk jacket lying on the floor. A meeting or nothing, he had told Mostyn . . . Tonight or nothing . . . Tell him I have two proofs and can bring them with me. . . . Nevertheless only the vigilant would ever have noticed that mark, heavy though it was, or the shiny drawing-pin either, and not even the vigilant would have found them odd, for on Hampstead Heath people post bills and messages to each other ceaselessly, and not all of them are spies. Some are children, some are tramps, some are believers in God, some have lost pets, and some are looking for variations of love and having to proclaim their needs from a hilltop. And not all of them, by any means, get their faces blown off at point-blank range by a Moscow Centre assassination weapon.

And the purpose of this acknowledgment? In Moscow, when Smiley from his desk in London had had the ultimate responsibility for Vladimir’s case—in Moscow these signs were devised for agents who might disappear from hour to hour; they were the broken twigs along a path that could always be their last. I see no danger and am proceeding as instructed to the agreed rendezvous, read Vladimir’s last—and fatally mistaken—message to the living world.

Leaving the hut, Smiley moved a short distance back along the route he had just come. And as he walked, he meticulously called to mind the Superintendent’s reconstruction of Vladimir’s last journey, drawing upon his memory as if it were an archive.

Those rubber overshoes are a Godsend, Mr. Smiley, the Superintendent had declared piously: North British Century, diamond-pattern soles, sir, and barely walked on—why, you could follow him through a football crowd if you had to!

“I’ll give you the authorised version,” the Superintendent had said, speaking fast because they were short of time. “Ready, Mr. Smiley?”

Ready, Smiley had said.

The Superintendent changed his tone of voice. Conversation was one thing, evidence another. As he spoke, he shone his torch in phases onto the wet gravel of the roped-off area. A lecture with magic lantern, Smiley had thought; at Sarratt I’d have taken notes. “Here he is, coming down the hill now, sir. See him there? Normal pace, nice heel and toe movement, normal progress, everything above-board. See, Mr. Smiley?”

Mr. Smiley had seen.

“And the stick mark there, do you, in his right hand, sir?”

Smiley had seen that too, how the rubber-ferruled walking-stick had left a deep round rip with every second footprint.

“Whereas of course he had the stick in his left when he was shot, correct? You saw that, too, sir, I noticed. Happen to know which side his bad leg was at all, sir, if he had one?”

“The right,” Smiley had said.

“Ah. Then most likely the right was the side he normally held the stick, as well. Down here, please, sir, that’s the way! Walking normal still, please note,” the Superintendent had added, making a rare slip of grammar in his distraction.

For five more paces the regular diamond imprint, heel and toe, had continued undisturbed in the beam of the Superintendent’s torch. Now, by daylight, Smiley saw only the ghost of them. The rain, other feet, and the tyre tracks of illicit cyclists had caused large parts to disappear. But by night, at the Superintendent’s lantern show, he had seen them vividly, as vividly as he saw the plastic-covered corpse in the dip below them, where the trail had ended.

“Now,”the Superintendent had declared with satisfaction, and halted, the cone of his torchbeam resting on a single scuffed area of ground.

“How old did you say he was, sir?” the Superintendent asked.

“I didn’t, but he owned to sixty-nine.”

“Plus your recent heart attack, I gather. Now, sir. First he stops. In sharp order. Don’t ask me why, perhaps he was spoken to. My guess is he heard something. Behind him. Notice the way the pace shortens, notice the position of the feet as he makes the half-turn, looks over his shoulder, or whatever? Anyway he turns and that’s why I say ‘behind him.’ And whatever he saw or didn’t see—or heard or didn’t hear—he decides to run. Off he goes, look!” the Superintendent urged, with the sudden enthusiasm of the sportsman. “Wider stride, heels not hardly on the ground at all. A new print entirely, and going for all he’s worth. You can even see where he shoved himself off with his stick for the extra purchase.”

Peering now by daylight, Smiley no longer with any certainty could see, but he had seen last night—and in his memory saw again this morning—the sudden desperate gashes of the ferrule thrust downward, then thrust at an angle.

“Trouble was,” the Superintendent commented quietly, resuming his courtroom style, “whatever killed him was out in front, wasn’t it? Not behind him at all.”

It was both, thought Smiley now, with the advantage of the intervening hours. They drove him, he thought, trying without success to recall the Sarratt jargon for this particular technique. They knew his route, and they drove him. The frightener behind the target drives him forward, the finger man loiters ahead undetected till the target blunders into him. For it was a truth known also to Moscow Centre murder teams that even the oldest hands will spend hours worrying about their backs, their flanks, the cars that pass and the cars that don’t, the streets they cross, and the houses that they enter. Yet still fail, when the moment is upon them, to recognise the danger that greets them face to face.

“Still running,” the Superintendent said, moving steadily nearer the body down the hill. “Notice how his pace gets a little longer because of the steeper gradient now? Erratic too, see that? Feet flying all over the shop. Running for dear life. Literally. And the walking-stick still in his right hand. See him veering now, moving towards the verge? Lost his bearings, I wouldn’t wonder. Here we go. Explain that if you can!”

The torchbeam rested on a patch of footprints close together, five or six of them, all in a very small space at the edge of the grass between two high trees.

“Stopped again,” the Superintendent announced. “Not so much a total stop perhaps, more your stutter. Don’t ask me why. Maybe he just wrong-footed himself. Maybe he was worried to find himself so close to the trees. Maybe his heart got him if you tell me it was dicky. Then off he goes again same as before.”

“With the stick in his left hand,” Smiley had said quietly.

“Why? That’s what I ask myself, sir, but perhaps you people know the answer. Why? Did he hear something again? Remember something? Why—when you’re running for your life—why pause, do a duck-shuffle, change hands, and then run on again? Straight into the arms of whoever shot him? Unless of course whatever was behind him overtook him there, came round through the trees perhaps, made an arc as it were? Any explanation from your side of the street, Mr. Smiley?”

And with that question still ringing in Smiley’s ears they had arrived at last at the body, floating like an embryo under its plastic film.

But Smiley, on this morning after, stopped short of the dip. Instead, by placing his sodden shoes as best he could upon each spot exactly, he set about trying to imitate the movements the old man might have made. And since Smiley did all this in slow motion, and with every appearance of concentration, under the eye of two trousered ladies walking their Alsatians, he was taken for an adherent of the new fad in Chinese martial exercises, and accounted mad accordingly.

First he put his feet side by side and pointed them down the hill. Then he put his left foot forward, and moved his right foot round until the toe pointed directly towards a spinney of young saplings. As he did so, his right shoulder followed naturally, and his instinct told him that this would be the likely moment for Vladimir to transfer the stick to his left hand. But why? As the Superintendent had also asked, why transfer the stick at all? Why, in this most extreme moment of his life, why solemnly move a walking-stick from the right hand to the left? Certainly not to defend himself—since, as Smiley remembered, he was right-handed. To defend himself, he would only have seized the stick more firmly. Or clasped it with both his hands, like a club.

Was it in order to leave his right hand free? But free for what?

Aware this time of being observed, Smiley peered sharply behind him and saw two small boys in blazers who had paused to watch this round little man in spectacles performing strange antics with his feet. He glowered at them in his most school-masterly manner, and they moved hastily on.

To leave his right hand free for what? Smiley repeated to himself. And why start running again a moment later?

Vladimir turned to the right, thought Smiley, once again matching his action to the thought. Vladimir turned to the right. He faced the spinney, he put his stick in his left hand. For a moment, according to the Superintendent, he stood still. Then he ran on.

Moscow Rules, Smiley thought, staring at his own right hand. Slowly he lowered it into his raincoat pocket. Which was empty, as Vladimir’s right-hand coat pocket was also empty.

Had he meant to write a message perhaps? Smiley was teasing himself with the theory he was determined to hold at bay. To write a message with the chalk, for instance? Had he recognised his pursuer, and wished to chalk a name somewhere, or a sign? But what on? Not on these wet tree trunks for sure. Not on the clay, the dead leaves, the gravel! Looking round him, Smiley became aware of a peculiar feature of his location. Here, almost between two trees, at the very edge of the avenue, at the point where the fog was approaching its thickest, he was as good as out of sight. The avenue descended, yes, and lifted ahead of him. But it also curved, and from where he stood the upward line of sight in both directions was masked by tree trunks and a dense thicket of saplings. Along the whole path of Vladimir’s last frantic journey—a path he knew well, remember, had used for similar meetings—this was the one point, Smiley realised with increasing satisfaction, where the fleeing man was out of sight from both ahead of him and behind him.

And had stopped.

Had freed his right hand.

Had put it—let us say—in his pocket.

For his heart tablets? No. Like the yellow chalk and the matches, they were in his left pocket, not his right.

For something—let us say—that was no longer in the pocket when he was found dead.

For what then?

Tell him I have two proofs and can bring them with me. . . . Then perhaps he will see me. . . . This is Gregory asking for Max. I have something for him, please. . . .

Proofs. Proofs too precious to post. He was bringing something. Two somethings. Not just in his head—in his pocket. And was playing Moscow Rules. Rules that had been drummed into the General from the very day of his recruitment as a defector in place. By Smiley himself, no less, as well as his case officer on the spot. Rules that had been invented for his survival; and the survival of his network. Smiley felt the excitement seize his stomach like a nausea. Moscow Rules decree that if you physically carry a message, you must also carry the means to discard it! That, however it is disguised or concealed—microdot, secret writing, undeveloped film, any one of the hundred risky, finicky ways—still as an object it must be the first and lightest thing that comes to hand, the least conspicuous when jettisoned!

Such as a medicine bottle full of tablets, he thought, calming a little. Such as a box of matches.

One box Swan Vesta matches partly used, overcoat left, he remembered. A smoker’s match, note well.overcoat he remembered. A smoker’s match, note well.

And in the safe flat, he thought relentlessly—tantalising himself, staving off the final insight—there on the table waiting for him, one packet of cigarettes, Vladimir’s favourite brand. And in Westbourne Terrace on the food-store, nine packets of Gauloises Caporal. Out of ten.

But no cigarettes in his pockets. None, as the good Superintendent would have said, on his person. Or not when they found him, that is to say.

So the premise, George? Smiley asked himself, mimicking Lacon—brandishing Lacon’s prefectorial finger accusingly in his own intact face—the premise? The premise is thus far, Oliver, that a smoker, a habitual smoker, in a state of high nervousness, sets off on a crucial clandestine meeting equipped with matches but not even so much as an empty packet of cigarettes, though he possesses quite demonstrably a whole stock of them. So that either the assassins found it, and removed it—the proof, or proofs, that Vladimir was speaking of, or—or what? Or Vladimir changed his stick from his right hand to his left in time. And put his right hand in his pocket in time. And took it out again, also in time, at the very spot where he could not be seen. And got rid of it, or them, according to Moscow Rules.

Having satisfied his own insistence upon a logical succession, George Smiley stepped cautiously into the long grass that led to the spinney, soaking his trousers from the knees down. For half an hour or more he searched, groping in the grass and among the foliage, retreading his tracks, cursing his own blundering, giving up, beginning again, answering the fatuous enquiries of passersby, which ranged from the obscene to the excessively attentive. There were even two Buddhist monks from a local seminary, complete with saffron robes and lace-up boots and knitted woollen caps, who offered their assistance. Smiley courteously declined it. He found two broken kites, a quantity of Coca-Cola tins. He found scraps of the female body, some in colour, some in black-and-white, ripped from magazines. He found an old running shoe, black, and shreds of an old burnt blanket. He found four beer bottles, empty, and four empty cigarette packets so sodden and old that after one glance he discounted them. And in a branch, slipped into the fork just where it joined its parent trunk, the fifth packet—or better perhaps, the tenth—that was not even empty: a relatively dry packet of Gauloises Caporal, Filtre and Duty Free, high up. Smiley reached for it as if it were forbidden fruit, but like forbidden fruit it stayed outside his grasp. He jumped for it and felt his back rip: a distinct and unnerving parting of tissue that smarted and dug at him for days afterwards. He said “damn” out loud and rubbed the spot, much as Ostrakova might have done. Two typists, on their way to work, consoled him with their giggles. He found a stick, poked the packet free, opened it. Four cigarettes remained.

And behind those four cigarettes, half concealed, and protected by its own skin of cellophane, something he recognised but dared not even disturb with his wet and trembling fingers. Something he dared not even contemplate until he was free of this appalling place, where giggling typists and Buddhist monks innocently trampled the spot where Vladimir had died.

They have one, I have the other, he thought. I have shared the old man’s legacy with his murderers.

Braving the traffic, he followed the narrow pavement down the hill till he came to South End Green, where he hoped for a café that would give him tea. Finding none open so early, he sat on a bench across from a cinema instead, contemplating an old marble fountain and a pair of red telephone-boxes, one filthier than the other. A warm drizzle was falling; a few shopkeepers had started lowering their awnings; a delicatessen store was taking delivery of bread. He sat with hunched shoulders, and the damp points of his mackintosh collar stabbed his unshaven cheeks whenever he turned his head. “For God’s sake, mourn!” Ann had flung at Smiley once, infuriated by his apparent composure after yet another friend had died. “If you won’t grieve for the dead, how can you love the living?” Sitting on his bench, pondering his next step, Smiley now transmitted to her the answer he had failed to find at the time. “You are wrong,” he told her distractedly. “I mourn the dead sincerely, and Vladimir, at this moment, deeply. It’s loving the living which is sometimes a bit of a problem.”

He tried the two telephone-boxes and the second worked. By a miracle, even the S–Z directory was intact, and more amazing still, the Straight and Steady Minicab Service of Islington North had paid for the privilege of heavy type. He dialled the number and while it rang out he had a panic that he had forgotten the name of the signatory on the receipt in Vladimir’s pocket. He rang off, recovering his twopence. Lane? Lang? He dialled again.

A female voice answered him in a bored singsong: “Straight-and-Stead-ee! Name-when-and-where-to-please?”

“I’d like to speak to Mr. J. Lamb, please, one of your drivers,” Smiley said politely.

“Sorr-ee, no personal calls on this line,” she sang and rang off.

He dialled a third time. It wasn’t personal at all, he said huffily, now surer of his ground. He wanted Mr. Lamb to drive for him, and nobody but Mr. Lamb would do. “Tell him it’s a long journey. Stratford-on-Avon”—choosing a city at random—“tell him I want to go to Stratford.” Sampson, he replied, when she insisted on a name. Sampson with a “p.”

He returned to his bench to wait again.

To ring Lacon? For what purpose? Rush home, open the cigarette packet, find out its precious contents? It was the first thing Vladimir threw away, he thought: in the spy trade we abandon first what we love the most. I got the better end of the bargain after all. An elderly couple had settled opposite him. The man wore a stiff Homburg hat and was playing war tunes on a tin whistle. His wife grinned inanely at the passers-by. To avoid her gaze, Smiley remembered the brown envelope from Paris, and tore it open, expecting what? A bill probably, some hangover from the old boy’s life there. Or one of those cyclo-styled battle-cries that émigrés send each other like Christmas cards. But this was neither a bill nor a circular but a personal letter: an appeal, but of a very special sort. Unsigned, no address for the sender. In French, handwritten very fast. Smiley read it once and he was reading it a second time when an overpainted Ford Cortina, driven by a boy in a polo-neck pullover, skidded to a giddy halt outside the cinema. Returning the letter to his pocket, he crossed the road to the car.

“Sampson with a ‘p’?” the boy yelled impertinently through the window, then shoved open the back door from inside. Smiley climbed in. A smell of aftershave mingled with stale cigarette smoke. He held a ten-pound note in his hand and he let it show.

“Will you please switch off the engine?” Smiley asked.

The boy obeyed, watching him all the time in the mirror. He had brown Afro hair. White hands, carefully manicured.

“I’m a private detective,” Smiley explained. “I’m sure you get a lot of us and we’re a nuisance but I would be happy to pay for a little bit of information. You signed a receipt yesterday for thirteen pounds. Do you remember who your fare was?”

“Tall party. Foreign. White moustache and a limp.”

“Old?”

“Very. Walking-stick and all.”

“Where did you pick him up?” Smiley asked.

“Cosmo Restaurant, Praed Street, ten-thirty, morning,” the boy said, gabbling deliberately.

Praed Street was five minutes’ walk from Westbourne Terrace.

“And where did you take him, please?”

“Charlton.”

“Charlton in South-East London?”

“Saint Somebody’s Church off of Battle-of-the-Nile Street. Ask for a pub called The Defeated Frog.”

“Frog?”

“Frenchman.”

“Did you leave him there?”

“One hour wait, then back to Praed Street.”

“Did you make any other stops?”

“Once at a toy-shop going, once at a phone-box coming back. Party bought a wooden duck on wheels.” He turned and, resting his chin on the back of the seat, insolently held his hands apart, indicating size. “Yellow job,” he said. “The phone call was local.”

“How do you know?”

“I lent him twopence, didn’t I? Then he come back and borrows himself two ten p’s, for in-case.”

I asked him where he was calling from but he just said he had plenty of change, Mostyn had said.

Passing the boy the ten-pound note, Smiley reached for the door handle.

“You can tell your firm I didn’t turn up,” he said.

“Tell ’em what I bloody like, can’t I?”

Smiley climbed quickly out, just managing to close the door before the boy drove away at the same frightful speed. Standing on the pavement, he completed his second reading of the letter, and by then he had it in his memory for good. A woman, he thought, trusting his first instinct. And she thinks she’s going to die. Well, so do we all, and we’re right. He was feigning lightheadedness to himself, indifference. Each man has only a quantum of compassion, he argued, and mine is used up for the day. But the letter scared him all the same, and recharged his sense of urgency.

General, I do not wish to be dramatic but some men are watching my house and I do not think they are your friends or mine. This morning I had an impression that they were trying to kill me. Will you not send me your magic friend once more?

He had things to hide. To cache, as they insisted on saying at Sarratt. He took busses, changing several times, watching his back, dozing. The black motor cycle with its side-car had not reappeared; he could discern no other surveillance. At a stationer’s shop in Baker Street he bought a large cardboard box, some daily newspapers, some wrapping paper, and a reel of Scotch tape. He hailed a taxi, then crouched in the back making up his parcel. He put Vladimir’s packet of cigarettes into the box, together with Ostrakova’s letter, and he padded out the rest of the space with newspaper. He wrapped the box and got his fingers tangled in the Scotch tape. Scotch tape had always defeated him. He wrote his own name on the lid, “To be called for.” He paid off the cab at the Savoy Hotel, where he consigned the box to the men’s-cloakroom attendant, together with a pound note.

“Not heavy enough for a bomb, is it, sir?” the attendant asked, and facetiously held the parcel to his ear.

“I wouldn’t be so sure,” said Smiley, and they shared a good laugh together.

Tell Max that it concerns the Sandman, he thought. Vladimir, he wondered wistfully, what was your other proof?

9

The low skyline was filled with cranes and gasometers; lazy chimneys spouted ochre smoke into the rainclouds. If it had not been Saturday, Smiley would have used public transport but on Saturdays he was prepared to drive, though he lived on terms of mutual hatred with the combustion engine. He had crossed the river at Vauxhall Bridge. Greenwich lay behind him. He had entered the flat dismembered hinterland of the docks. While the wiper blades shuddered, large raindrops crept through the bodywork of his unhappy little English car. Glum children, sheltering in a bus-stop, said “Keep straight on, guv.” He had shaved and bathed, but he had not slept. He had sent Vladimir’s telephone bill to Lacon, requesting a breakdown of all traceable calls as a matter of urgency. His mind, as he drove, was clear, but prey to anarchic changes of mood. He was wearing a brown tweed overcoat, the one he used for travelling. He navigated a roundabout, mounted a rise, and suddenly a fine Edwardian pub stood before him, under the sign of a red-faced warrior. Battle-of-the-Nile Street rose away from it towards an island of worn grass, and on the island stood St. Saviour’s Church, built of stone and flint, proclaiming God’s message to the crumbling Victorian warehouses. Next Sunday’s preacher, said the poster, was a female major in the Salvation Army, and in front of the poster stood the lorry: a sixty-foot giant trailer, crimson, its side windows fringed with football pennants and a motley of foreign registration stickers covering one door. It was the biggest thing in sight, bigger even than the church. Somewhere in the background he heard a motor-bike engine slow down and then start up again, but he didn’t even bother to look back. The familiar escort had followed him since Chelsea; but fear, as he used to preach at Sarratt, is always a matter of selection.

Following the footpath, Smiley entered a graveyard with no graves. Lines of headstones made up the perimeter, a climbing frame and three standard-pattern new houses occupied the central ground. The first house was called Zion, the second had no name at all, the third was called Number Three. Each had wide windows but Number Three had lace curtains, and when he pushed the gate all he saw was one shadow upstairs. He saw it stationary, then he saw it sink and vanish as if it had been sucked into the floor, and for a second he wondered, in a quite dreadful way, whether he had just witnessed another murder. He rang the bell and angel chimes exploded inside the house. The door was made of rippled glass. Pressing his eye to it, he made out brown stair carpet and what looked like a perambulator. He rang the bell again and heard a scream. It started low and grew louder and at first he thought it was a child, then a cat, then a whistling kettle. It reached its zenith, held it, then suddenly stopped, either because someone had taken the kettle off the boil or because it had blown its nozzle off. He walked round to the back of the house. It was the same as the front, except for the drain-pipes and a vegetable patch, and a tiny goldfish pond made of pre-cast slab. There was no water in the pond, and consequently no goldfish either; but in the concrete bowl lay a yellow wooden duck on its side. It lay with its beak open and its staring eye turned to Heaven and two of its wheels were still going round.

“Party bought a wooden duck on wheels,” the minicab driver had said, turning to illustrate with his white hands. “Yellow job.”

The back door had a knocker. He gave a light tap with it and tried the door handle, which yielded. He stepped inside and closed the door carefully behind him. He was standing in a scullery that led to a kitchen and the first thing he noticed in the kitchen was the kettle off the gas with a thin line of steam curling from its silent whistle. And two cups and a milk jug and a teapot on a tray.

“Mrs. Craven?” he called softly. “Stella?”

He crossed the dining-room and stood in the hall, on the brown carpet beside the perambulator, and in his mind he was making pacts with God: just no more deaths, no more Vladimirs, and I will worship You for the rest of our respective lives.

“Stella? It’s me. Max,” he said.

He pushed open the drawing-room door and she was sitting in the corner on an easy chair between the piano and window, watching him with cold determination. She was not scared, but she looked as if she hated him. She was wearing a long Asian dress and no make-up. She was holding the child to her, boy or girl he couldn’t tell and couldn’t remember. She had its tousled head pressed against her shoulder and her hand over its mouth to stop it making a noise, and she was watching him over the top of its head, challenging and defying him.

“Where’s Villem?” he asked.

Slowly she took her hand away and Smiley expected the child to scream but instead it stared at him in salute.

“His name’s William,” she said quietly. “Get that straight, Max. That’s his choice. William Craven. British to the core. Not Estonian, not Russian. British.” She was a beautiful woman, black-haired and still. Seated in the corner holding her child, she seemed permanently painted against the dark background.

“I want to talk to him, Stella. I’m not asking him to do anything. I may even be able to help him.”

“I’ve heard that before, haven’t I? He’s out. Gone to work where he belongs.”

Smiley digested this.

“Then what’s his lorry doing outside?” he objected gently.

“He’s gone to the depot. They sent a car for him.”

Smiley digested this also.

“Then who’s the second cup for in the kitchen?”

“He’s got nothing to do with it,” she said.

He went upstairs and she let him. There was a door straight ahead of him and there were doors to his left and right, both open, one to the child’s room, one to the main bedroom. The door ahead of him was closed and when he knocked there was no answer.

“Villem, it’s Max,” he said. “I have to talk to you, please. Then I’ll go and leave you in peace, I promise.”

He repeated this word for word, then went down the steep stairs again to the drawing-room. The child had begun crying loudly.

“Perhaps if you made that tea,” he suggested between the child’s sobs.

“You’re not talking to him alone, Max. I’m not having you charm him off the tree again.”

“I never did that. That was not my job.”

“He still thinks the world of you. That’s enough for me.”

“It’s about Vladimir,” Smiley said.

“I know what it’s about. They’ve been ringing half the night, haven’t they?”

“Who have?”

“‘Where’s Vladimir? Where’s Vladi?’ What do they think William is? Jack the Ripper? He hasn’t had sound nor sight of Vladi for God knows how long. Oh, Beckie, darling, do be quiet!” Striding across the room, she found a tin of biscuits under a heap of washing and shoved one forcibly into the child’s mouth. “I’m not usually like this,” she said.

“Who’s been asking for him?” Smiley insisted gently.

“Mikhel, who else? Remember Mikhel, our Freedom Radio ace, Prime Minister designate of Estonia, betting tout? Three o’clock this morning while Beckie’s cutting a tooth, the bloody phone goes. It’s Mikhel doing his heavy-breathing act. ‘Where’s Vladi, Stella? Where’s our leader?’ I said to him: ‘You’re daft, aren’t you? You think it’s harder to tap the phone when people only whisper? You’re barking mad,’ I said to him. ‘Stick to racehorses and get out of politics,’ I told him.”

“Why was he so worried?” Smiley asked.

“Vladi owed him money, that’s why. Fifty quid. Probably lost it on a horse together, one of their many losers. He’d promised to bring it round to Mikhel’s place and have a game of chess with him. In the middle of the night, mark you. They’re insomniacs, apparently, as well as patriots. Our leader hadn’t shown up. Drama. ‘Why the hell should William know where he is?’ I ask him. ‘Go to sleep.’ An hour later who’s back on the line? Breathing as before? Our Major Mikhel once more, hero of the Royal Estonian Cavalry, clicking our heels and apologising. He’s been round to Vladi’s pad, banged on the door, rung the bell. There’s nobody at home. ‘Look, Mikhel,’ I said. ‘He’s not here, we’re not hiding him in the attic, we haven’t seen him since Beckie’s christening, we haven’t heard from him. Right? William’s just in from Hamburg, he needs sleep, and I’m not waking him.’”

“So he rang off again,” Smiley suggested.

“Did he, hell! He’s a leech. ‘Villem is Vladi’s favourite,’ he says. ‘What for?’ I say. ‘The three-thirty at Ascot? Look, go to bloody sleep!’ ‘Vladimir always said to me, if ever anything went wrong, I should go to Villem,’ he said. ‘So what do you want him to do?’ I said. ‘Drive up to town in the trailer and bang on Vladi’s door as well?’ Jesus!”

She sat the child on a chair. Where she stayed, contentedly cropping her biscuit.

There was the sound of a door slammed violently, followed by fast footsteps coming down the stairs.

“William’s right out of it, Max,” Stella warned, staring straight at Smiley. “He’s not political and he’s not slimy, and he’s got over his dad being a martyr. He’s a big boy now and he’s going to stand on his own feet. Right? I said ‘Right?’”

Smiley had moved to the far end of the room to give himself distance from the door. Villem strode in purposefully, still wearing his track suit and running shoes, about ten years Stella’s junior and somehow too slight for his own safety. He perched himself on the sofa, at the edge, his intense gaze switching between his wife and Smiley as if wondering which of them would spring first. His high forehead looked strangely white under his dark, swept-back hair. He had shaved, and shaving had filled out his face, making him even younger. His eyes, red-rimmed from driving, were brown and passionate.

“Hullo, Villem,” Smiley said.

“William,” Stella corrected him.

Villem nodded tautly, acknowledging both forms.

“Hullo, Max,” said Villem. On his lap, his hands found and held each other. “How you doing, Max? That’s the way, huh?”

“I gather you’ve already heard the news about Vladimir,” Smiley said.

“News? What news, please?”

Smiley took his time. Watching him, sensing his stress.

“That he’s disappeared,” Smiley replied quite lightly, at last. “I gather his friends have been ringing you up at unsocial hours.”

“Friends?” Villem shot a dependent glance at Stella. “Old émigrés, drink tea, play chess all day, politics? Talk crazy dreams? Mikhel is not my friend, Max.”

He spoke swiftly, with impatience for this foreign language, which was such a poor substitute for his own. Whereas Smiley spoke as if he had all day.

“But Vladi is your friend,” he objected. “Vladi was your father’s friend before you. They were in Paris together. Brothers-in-arms. They came to England together.”

Countering the weight of this suggestion, Villem’s small body became a storm of gestures. His hands parted and made furious arcs, his brown hair lifted and fell flat again.

“Sure! Vladimir, he was my father’s friend. His good friend. Also of Beckie the godfather, okay? But not for politics. Not any more.” He glanced at Stella, seeking her approval. “Me, I am William Craven. I got English home, English wife, English kid, English name. Okay?”

“And an English job,” Stella put in quietly, watching him.

“A good job! Know how much I earn, Max? We buy house. Maybe a car, okay?”

Something in Villem’s manner—his glibness perhaps, or the energy of his protest—had caught the attention of his wife, for now Stella was studying him as intently as Smiley was, and she began to hold the baby distractedly, almost without interest.

“When did you last see him, William?” Smiley asked.

“Who, Max? See who? I don’t understand you, please.”

“Tell him, Bill,” Stella ordered her husband, not moving her eyes from him for a moment.

“When did you last see Vladimir?” Smiley repeated patiently.

“Long time, Max.”

“Weeks?”

“Sure. Weeks.”

“Months?”

“Months. Six months! Seven! At christening. He was godfather, we make a party. But no politics.”

Smiley’s silences had begun to produce an awkward tension.

“And not since?” he asked at last.

“No.”

Smiley turned to Stella, whose gaze had still not flinched.

“What time did William get back yesterday?”

“Early,” she said.

“As early as ten o’clock in the morning?”

“Could have been. I wasn’t here. I was visiting Mother.”

“Vladimir drove down here yesterday by taxi,” he explained, still to Stella. “I think he saw William.”

Nobody helped him, not Smiley, not his wife. Even the child kept still.

“On his way here Vladimir bought a toy. The taxi waited an hour down the lane and took him away again, back to Paddington where he lives,” Smiley said, still being very careful to keep the present tense.

Villem had found his voice at last. “Vladi is of Beckie the godfather!” he protested with another flourish, as his English threatened to desert him entirely. “Stella don’t like him, so he must come here like a thief, okay? He bring my Beckie toy, okay? Is a crime already, Max? Is a law, an old man cannot bring to his godchild toys?”

Once again neither Smiley nor Stella spoke. They were both waiting for the same inevitable collapse.

“Vladi is old man, Max! Who knows when he sees his Beckie again? He is friend of family!”

“Not of this family,” said Stella. “Not any more.”

“He was friend of my father! Comrade! In Paris they fight together Bolshevism. So he brings to Beckie a toy. Why not, please? Why not, Max?”

“You said you bought the bloody thing yourself,” said Stella. Putting a hand to her breast, she closed a button as if to cut him off.

Villem swung to Smiley, appealing to him: “Stella don’t like the old man, okay? Is afraid I make more politics with him, okay? So I don’t tell Stella. She goes to see her mother in Staines hospital and while she is away Vladi makes a small visit to see Beckie, say hullo, why not?” In desperation he actually leapt to his feet, flinging up his arms in too much protest. “Stella!” he cried. “Listen to me! So Vladi don’t get home last night? Please, I am so sorry! But it is not my fault, okay? Max! That Vladi is an old man! Lonely. So maybe he finds a woman once. Okay? So he can’t do much with her, but he still likes her company. For this he was pretty famous, I think! Okay? Why not?”

“And before yesterday?” Smiley asked, after an age. Villem seemed not to understand, so Smiley paced out the question again: “You saw Vladimir yesterday. He came by taxi and brought a yellow wooden duck for Beckie. On wheels.”

“Sure.”

“Very well. But before yesterday—not counting yesterday—when did you last see him?”

Some questions are hazard, some are instinct, some—like this one—are based on a premature understanding that is more than instinct, but less than knowledge.

Villem wiped his lips on the back of his hand. “Monday,” he said miserably. “I see him Monday. He ring me, we meet. Sure.”

Then Stella whispered, “Oh, William,” and held the child upright against her, a little soldier, while she peered downward at the haircord carpet waiting for her feelings to right themselves.

The phone began ringing. Like an infuriated infant, Villem sprang at it, lifted the receiver, slammed it back on the cradle, then threw the whole telephone onto the floor and kicked the receiver clear. He sat down.

Stella turned to Smiley. “I want you to go,” she said. “I want you to walk out of here and never come back. Please, Max. Now.”

For a time Smiley seemed to consider this request quite seriously. He looked at Villem with avuncular affection; he looked at Stella. Then he delved in his inside pocket and pulled out a folded copy of the day’s first edition of the Evening Standard and handed it to Stella rather than to Villem, partly because of the language barrier and partly because he guessed that Villem would break down.

“I’m afraid Vladi’s disappeared for good, William,” he said in a tone of simple regret. “It’s in the papers. He’s been shot dead. The police will want to ask you questions. I have to hear what happened and tell you how to answer them.”

Then Villem said something hopeless in Russian, and Stella, moved by his tone if not his words, put down one child and went to comfort the other, and Smiley might not have been in the room at all. So he sat for a while quite alone, thinking of Vladimir’s piece of negative film—indecipherable until he turned it to positive—nestling in its box in the Savoy Hotel with the anonymous letter from Paris that he could do nothing about. And of the second proof, wondering what it was, and how the old man had carried it, and supposing it was in his wallet; but believing also that he would never know.

Villem sat bravely as if he were already attending Vladimir’s funeral. Stella sat at his side with her hand on his, Beckie the child lay on the floor and slept. Occasionally as Villem talked, tears rolled unashamedly down his pale cheeks.

“For the others I give nothing,” said Villem. “For Vladi everything. I love this man.” He began again: “After the death of my father, Vladi become father to me. Sometimes I even say him: ‘my father.’ Not uncle. Father.”

“Perhaps we could start with Monday,” Smiley suggested. “With the first meeting.”

Vladi had telephoned, said Villem. It was the first time Villem had heard from him or from anybody in the Group for months. Vladi telephoned Villem at the depot, out of the blue, while Villem was consolidating his load and checking his transshipment papers with the office before leaving for Dover. That was the arrangement, Villem said, that was how it had been left with the Group. He was out of it, as they all were, more or less, but if he was ever urgently needed he could be reached at the depot on a Monday morning, not at home because of Stella. Vladi was Beckie’s godfather and as godfather could ring the house any time. But not on business. Never.

“I ask him: ‘Vladi! What you want? Listen, how are you?’”

Vladimir was in a call-box down the road. He wanted a personal conversation immediately. Against all the employers’ regulations, Villem picked him up at the roundabout and Vladimir rode half the way to Dover with him: “black,” said Villem—meaning “illegally.” The old boy was carrying a rush basket full of oranges, but Villem had not been of a mood to ask him why he should saddle himself with pounds of oranges. At first Vladimir had talked about Paris and Villem’s father, and the great struggles they had shared; then he talked about a small favour Villem could do for him. For the sake of old times a small favour. For the sake of Villem’s dead father, whom Vladimir had loved. For the sake of the Group, of which Villem’s father had once been such a hero.

“I tell him: ‘Vladi, this small favour is impossible for me. I promise Stella: is impossible!’”

Stella’s hand left her husband’s side and she sat alone, torn between wishing to console him for the old man’s death and her hurt at his broken promise.

Just a small favour, Vladimir had insisted. Small, no trouble, no risk, but very helpful to our cause: also Villem’s duty. Then Vladi produced snaps he had taken of Beckie at the christening. They were in a yellow Kodak envelope, the prints on one side and the negatives in protective cellophane on the other and the chemist’s blue docket still stapled to the outside, all as innocent as the day.

For a while they admired them till Vladimir said suddenly: “It is for Beckie, Villem. What we do, we do for Beckie’s future.”

Hearing Villem repeat this, Stella clenched her fists, and when she looked up again she was resolute and somehow much older, with islands of tiny wrinkles at the corner of each eye.

Villem went on with his story: “Then Vladimir tell to me, ‘Villem. Every Monday you are driving to Hanover and Hamburg, returning Friday. How long you stay in Hamburg, please?’”

To which Villem had replied as short a time as possible, depending on how long it took him to unload, depending on whether he delivered to the agent or to the addressee, depending on what time of day he arrived and how many hours he already had on his sheet. Depending on his return load, if he had one. There were more questions of this sort, which Villem now related, many trivial—where Villem slept on the journey, where he ate—and Smiley knew that the old man in a rather monstrous way was doing what he would have done himself; he was talking Villem into a corner, making him answer as a prelude to making him obey. And only after this did Vladimir explain to Villem, using all his military and family authority, just what he wished Villem to do.

“He say to me: ‘Villem, take these oranges to Hamburg for me. Take this basket.’ ‘What for?’ I ask him. ‘General, why do I take this basket?’ Then he give me fifty pounds. ‘For emergencies,’ he tell to me. ‘In emergency, here is fifty pounds.’ ‘But why do I take this basket?’ I ask him. ‘What emergency is considered here, General?’”

Then Vladimir recited to Villem his instructions, and they included fall-backs and contingencies—even, if necessary, staying an extra night on the strength of the fifty pounds—and Smiley noticed how the old man had insisted upon Moscow Rules, exactly as he had with Mostyn, and how there was too much, as there always had been—the older he got, the more the old boy had tied himself up in the skeins of his own conspiracies. Villem should lay the yellow Kodak envelope containing Beckie’s photographs on the top of the oranges, he should take his stroll down to the front of the cabin—all as Villem in the event had done, he said—and the envelope was the letter-box, and the sign that it had been filled would be a chalk mark, “also yellow like the envelope, which is the tradition of our Group,” said Villem.

“And the safety signal?” Smiley asked. “The signal that says ‘I am not being followed’?”

“Was Hamburg newspaper from yesterday,” Villem replied swiftly—but on this subject, he confessed, he had had a small difference with Vladimir, despite all the respect he owed to him as a leader, as a General, and as his father’s friend.

“He tell to me, ‘Villem, you carry that newspaper in your pocket.’ But I tell to him: ‘Vladi, please, look at me, I have only track suit, no pockets.’ So he say, ‘Villem, then carry the newspaper under your arm.’”

“Bill,” Stella breathed, with a sort of awe. “Oh, Bill, you stupid bloody fool.” She turned to Smiley. “I mean, why didn’t they just put it in the bloody post, whatever it is, and be done with it?”

Because it was a negative, and only negatives are acceptable under Moscow Rules. Because the General had a terror of betrayal, Smiley thought. The old boy saw it everywhere, in everyone around him. And if death is the ultimate judge, he was right.

“And it worked?” Smiley said finally to Villem with great gentleness. “The hand-over worked?”

“Sure! It work fine,” Villem agreed heartily, and darted Stella a defiant glance.

“And did you have any idea, for instance, who might have been your contact at this meeting?”

Then with much hesitation, and after much prompting, some of it from Stella, Villem told that also: about the hollowed face that had looked so desperate and had reminded him of his father; about the warning stare, which was either real or he had imagined it because he was so excited. How sometimes, when he watched football on the television, which he liked to do very much, the camera caught someone’s face or expression, and it stuck in your memory for the rest of the match, even if you never saw it again—and how the face on the steamer was of this sort exactly. He described the flicked horns of hair, and with his fingertips he lightly drew deep grooves in his own unmarked cheeks. He described the man’s smallness, and even his sexiness—Villem said he could tell. He described his own feelings of being warned by the man, warned to take care of a precious thing. Villem would look the same way himself—he told Stella with a sudden flourish of imagined tragedy—if there was another war, and fighting, and he had to give away Beckie to a stranger to look after! And this was the cue for more tears, and more reconciliation, and more lamentations about the old man’s death, to which Smiley’s next question inevitably contributed.

“So you brought the yellow envelope back, and yesterday when the General came down with Beckie’s duck, you handed him the envelope,” he suggested, as mildly as he knew how, but it was still some while before a plain narrative emerged.

It was Villem’s habit, he said, before driving home on Fridays, to sleep at the depot for a few hours in the cab, then shave and drink a cup of tea with the boys so that he arrived home feeling steady, rather than nervous and bad-tempered. It was a trick he had learned from the older hands, he said: not to rush home, you only regret it. But yesterday was different, he said, and besides—lapsing suddenly into monosyllabic names—Stell had taken Beck to Staines to see her mum. So he for once came straight home, rang Vladimir, and gave him the code word they had agreed on in advance.

“Rang him where?” Smiley asked, softly interrupting.

“At flat. He told me: ‘Phone me only at flat. Never at library. Mikhel is good man, but he is not informed.’”

And, Villem continued, within a short time—he forgot how long—Vladimir had arrived at the house by minicab, a thing he had never done before, bringing the duck for Beck. Villem handed him the yellow envelope of snapshots and Vladimir took them to the window and very slowly, “like they were sacred from a church, Max,” with his back to Villem, Vladimir held the negatives one after the other to the light till he apparently found the one he was looking for, and after that he went on gazing at it for a long time.

“Just one?” Smiley asked swiftly, his mind upon the two proofs again. “One negative?”

“Sure.”

“One frame, or one strip?”

Frame: Villem was certain. One small frame. Yes, thirty-five millimetre, like his own Agfa automatic. No, Villem had not been able to see what it contained, whether writing or what. He had seen Vladimir, that was all.

“Vladi was red, Max. Wild in the face, Max, bright with his eyes. He was old man.”

“And on your journey,” Smiley said, interrupting Villem’s story to ask this crucial question. “All the way home from Hamburg, you never once thought to look?”

“Was secret, Max. Was military secret.”

Smiley glanced at Stella.

“He wouldn’t,” she said in answer to his unspoken question. “He’s too straight.”

Smiley believed her.

Villem took up his story again. Having put the yellow envelope in his pocket, Vladimir took Villem into the garden and thanked him, holding Villem’s hand in both of his, telling him that it was a great thing he had done, the best; that Villem was his father’s son, a finer soldier even than his father—the best Estonian stock, steady, conscientious, and reliable; that with this photograph they could repay many debts and do great damage to the Bolsheviks; that the photograph was a proof, a proof impossible to ignore. But of what, he did not say—only that Max would see it, and believe, and remember. Villem didn’t quite know why they had to go into the garden but he supposed that the old man in his excitement had become scared of microphones, for he was already talking a lot about security.

“I take him to gate but not to taxi. He tell me I must not come to taxi. ‘Villem. I am old man,’ he say to me. We speak Russian. ‘Next week maybe I fall dead. Who cares? Today we have won great battle. Max will be greatly proud of us.’”

Struck by the aptness of the General’s last words to him, Villem again bounded to his feet in fury, his brown eyes smouldering. “Was Soviets!” he shouted. “Was Soviet spies, Max, they kill Vladimir! He know too much!”

“So do you,” said Stella, and there was a long and awkward silence. “So do we all,” she added, with a glance at Smiley.

“That’s all he said?” Smiley asked. “Nothing else, about the value of what you have done, for instance. Just that Max would believe?”

Villem shook his head.

“About there being other proofs, for instance?”

Nothing, said Villem; no more.

“Nothing to explain how he had communicated with Hamburg in the first place, set up the arrangements? Whether others of the Group were involved? Please think.”

Villem thought, but without result.

“So whom have you told this to, William, apart from me?” Smiley asked.

“Nobody! Max, nobody!”

“He hasn’t had time,” said Stella.

“Nobody! On journey I sleep in cab, save ten pounds a night subsistence. We buy house with this money! In Hamburg I tell nobody! At depot nobody!”

“Had Vladimir told anyone—anyone that you know of, that is?”

“From the Group nobody only Mikhel, which was necessary, but not all, even to Mikhel. I ask to him: ‘Vladimir, who knows I do this for you?’ ‘Only Mikhel a very little,’ he say. ‘Mikhel lends me money, lends me photocopier, he is my friend. But even to friends we cannot trust. Enemies I do not fear, Villem. But friends I fear greatly.’”

Smiley spoke to Stella: “If the police do come here,” he said. “If they do, they will only know that Vladimir drove down here yesterday. They’ll have got on to the cab driver, as I did.”

She was watching him with her large shrewd eyes.

“So?” she asked.

“So don’t tell them the rest. They know all they need. Any more could be an embarrassment to them.”

“To them or to you?” Stella asked.

“Vladimir came here yesterday to see Beckie and bring her a present. That’s the cover story, just as William first told it. He didn’t know you’d taken her to see your mother. He found William here, they talked old times and strolled in the garden. He couldn’t wait too long because of the taxi, so he left without seeing either you or his goddaughter. That’s all there was.”

“Were you here?” Stella was still watching him.

“If they ask about me, yes. I came here today and gave you the bad news. The police don’t mind that Villem belonged to the Group. It’s only the present that matters to them.”

Smiley returned his attention to Villem. “Tell me, did you bring anything else for Vladimir?” he asked. “Apart from what was in the envelope? A present perhaps? Something he liked and couldn’t buy himself?”

Villem concentrated energetically upon the question before replying. “Cigarettes!” he cried suddenly. “On boat, I buy him French cigarettes as gift. Gauloises, Max. He like very much! ‘Gauloises Caporal, with filter, Villem.’ Sure!”

“And the fifty pounds he had borrowed from Mikhel?” Smiley asked.

“I give back. Sure.”

“All?” said Smiley.

“All. Cigarettes was gift. Max, I love this man.”

Stella saw him to the door and at the door he gently took her arm and led her a few steps into the garden out of earshot of her husband.

“You’re out of date,” she told him. “Whatever it is you’re doing, sooner or later one side or the other will have to stop. You’re like the Group.”

“Be quiet and listen,” said Smiley. “Are you listening?”

“Yes.”

“William’s to speak to no one about this. Whom does he like to talk to at the depot?”

“The whole world.”

“Well, do what you can. Did anybody else ring apart from Mikhel? A wrong-number call even? Ring—then ring off?”

She thought, then shook her head.

“Did anyone come to the door? Salesman, market researcher, religious evangelist. Canvasser. Anyone? You’re sure?”

As she continued staring at him, her eyes seemed to acquire real knowledge of him, and appreciation. Then again she shook her head, denying him the complicity he was asking for.

“Stay away, Max. All of you. Whatever happens, however bad it is. He’s grown up. He doesn’t need a vicar any more.”

She watched him leave, perhaps to make sure he really went. For a while as he drove, the notion of Vladimir’s piece of negative film nestling in its box consumed him like hidden money—whether it was still safe, whether he should inspect it or convert it, since it had been brought through the lines at the cost of life. But by the time he approached the river he had other thoughts and purposes. Eschewing Chelsea, he joined the northbound Saturday traffic, which consisted mainly of young families with old cars. And one motor bike with a black side-car, clinging faithfully to his tail all the way to Bloomsbury.

10

The Free Baltic Library was on the third floor over a dusty antiquarian bookshop that specialised in the Spirit. Its little windows squinted down into a forecourt of the British Museum. Smiley reached the place by way of a winding wooden staircase, passing on his ponderous climb several aged handdrawn signs pulling at their drawing-pins and a stack of brown toiletry boxes belonging to a chemist’s shop next door. Gaining the top, he discovered himself thoroughly out of breath, and wisely paused before pressing the bell. Waiting, he was assailed in his momentary exhaustion by a hallucination. He had the delusion that he kept visiting the same high place over and over again: the safe flat in Hampstead, Vladimir’s garret in Westbourne Terrace, and now this haunted backwater from the fifties, once a rallying point of the so-called Bloomsbury Irregulars. He fancied they were all a single place, a single proving ground for virtues not yet stated. The illusion passed, and he gave three short rings, one long, wondering whether they had changed the signal, doubting it; still worrying about Villem or perhaps Stella, or perhaps just the child. He heard a close creak of floorboards and guessed he was being examined through the spyhole by someone a foot away from him. The door swiftly opened, he stepped into a gloomy hall as two wiry arms hugged him in their grip. He smelt body-heat and sweat and cigarette smoke and an unshaven face pressed against his own—left cheek, right cheek, as if to bestow a medal—once more to the left for particular affection.

“Max,” Mikhel murmured in a voice that was itself a requiem. “You came. I am glad. I had hoped but I did not dare expect. I was waiting for you nevertheless. I waited all day till now. He loved you, Max. You were the best. He said so always. You were his inspiration. He told me. His example.”

“I’m sorry, Mikhel,” Smiley said. “I’m really sorry.”

“As we all are, Max. As we all are. Inconsolable. But we are soldiers.”

He was dapper, and hollow-backed, and trim as the ex-major of horse he professed to be. His brown eyes, reddened by the night watch, had a becoming droopiness. He wore a black blazer over his shoulders like a cloak and black boots much polished, which could indeed have been for riding. His grey hair was groomed with military correctness, his moustache thick but carefully clipped. His face was at first glance youthful and only a close look at the crumbling of its pale surface into countless tiny deltas revealed his years. Smiley followed him to the library. It ran the width of the house and was divided by alcoves into vanished countries: Latvia, Lithuania, and—not least—Estonia, and in each alcove were a table and a flag and at several tables there were chess sets laid out for play, but nobody was playing, nobody was reading either; nobody was there, except for one blonde, broad woman in her forties wearing a short skirt and ankle socks. Her yellow hair, dark at the roots, was knotted in a severe bun, and she lounged beside a samovar, reading a travel magazine showing birch forests in the autumn. Drawing level with her, Mikhel paused and seemed about to make an introduction, but at the sight of Smiley she betrayed an intense and unmistakable anger. She looked at him, her mouth curled in contempt, she looked away through the rain-smeared window. Her cheeks were shiny from weeping and there were olive bruises under her heavy-lidded eyes.

“Elvira loved him also very much,” Mikhel observed by way of explanation when they were out of her hearing. “He was a brother to her. He instructed her.”

“Elvira?”

“My wife, Max. After many years we are married. I resisted. It is not always good for our work. But I owe her this security.”

They sat down. Around them and along the walls hung martyrs of forgotten movements. This one already in prison, photographed through wire. That one dead and—like Vladimir—they had pulled back the sheet to expose his bloodied face. A third, laughing, wore the baggy cap of a partisan and carried a longbarrelled rifle. From down the room they heard a small explosion followed by a rich Russian oath. Elvira, bride of Mikhel, was lighting the samovar.

“I’m sorry,” Smiley repeated.

Enemies I do not fear, Villem, thought Smiley. But friends I fear greatly.

They were in Mikhel’s private alcove that he called his office. An old-fashioned telephone lay on the table beside a Remington upright typewriter like the one in Vladimir’s flat. Somebody must once have bought lots of them, thought Smiley. But the focus was a high hand-carved chair with barley-twist legs and a monarchic crest embroidered on the back. Mikhel sat on it primly, knees and boots together, a proxy king too small for his throne. He had lit a cigarette, which he held vertically from below. Above him a pall of tobacco smoke hung exactly where Smiley remembered it. In the waste-paper basket, Smiley noticed several discarded copies of Sporting Life.

“He was a leader, Max, he was a hero,” Mikhel declared. “We must try to profit from his courage and example.” He paused as if expecting Smiley to write this down for publication. “In such cases it is natural to ask oneself how one can possibly carry on. Who is worthy to follow him? Who has his stature, his honour, his sense of destiny? Fortunately our movement is a continuing process. It is greater than any one individual, even than any one group.”

Listening to Mikhel’s polished phrases, staring at his polished boots, Smiley found himself marvelling at the man’s age. The Russians occupied Estonia in 1940, he recalled. To have been a cavalry officer then, Mikhel would now have to be sixty if a day. He tried to assemble the rest of Mikhel’s turbulent biography—the long road through foreign wars and untrusted ethnic brigades, all the chapters of history contained in this one little body. He wondered how old the boots were.

“Tell me about his last days, Mikhel,” Smiley suggested. “Was he active to the very end?”

“Completely active, Max, active in all respects. As a patriot. As a man. As a leader.”

Her expression as contemptuous as before, Elvira put the tea before them, two cups with lemon, and small marzipan cakes. In motion she was insinuating, with fluid haunches and a sullen hint of challenge. Smiley tried to remember her background also, but it eluded him or perhaps he had never known it. He was a brother to her, he thought. He instructed her. But something from his own life had long ago warned him to mistrust explanations, particularly of love.

“As a member of the Group?” Smiley asked when she had left them. “Also active?”

“Always,” said Mikhel gravely.

There was a small pause while each man politely waited for the other to continue.

“Who do you think did it, Mikhel? Was he betrayed?”

“Max, you know as well as I do who did it. We are all of us at risk. All of us. The call can come any time. Important is, we must be ready for it. Myself I am a soldier, I am prepared, I am ready. If I go, Elvira has her security. That is all. For the Bolshevites we exiles remain enemy number one. Anathema. Where they can, they destroy us. Still. As once they destroyed our churches and our villages and our schools and our culture. And they are right, Max. They are right to be afraid of us. Because one day we shall defeat them.”

“But why did they choose this particular moment?” Smiley objected gently after this somewhat ritualistic pronouncement. “They could have killed Vladimir years ago.”

Mikhel had produced a flat tin box with two tiny rollers on it like a mangle, and a packet of coarse yellow cigarette-papers. Having licked a paper, he laid it on the rollers and poured in black tobacco. A snap, the mangle turned, and there on the silvered surface lay one fat, loosely packed cigarette. He was about to help himself to it when Elvira came over and took it. He rolled another and returned the box to his pocket.

“Unless Vladi was up to something, I suppose,” Smiley continued after these staged manoeuvres. “Unless he provoked them in some way—which he might have done, knowing him.”

“Who can tell?” Mikhel said, and blew some more smoke carefully into the air above them.

“Well, you can, Mikhel, if anyone can. Surely he confided in you. You were his right-hand man for twenty years or more. First Paris, then here. Don’t tell me he didn’t trust you,” said Smiley ingenuously.

“Our leader was a secretive man, Max. This was his strength. He had to be. It was a military necessity.”

“But not towards you, surely?” Smiley insisted, in his most flattering tone. “His Paris adjutant. His aide-de-camp. His confidential secretary? Come, you do yourself an injustice!”

Leaning forward in his throne, Mikhel placed a small hand strictly across his heart. His brown voice took on an even deeper tone.

“Max. Even towards me. At the end, even towards Mikhel. It was to shield me. To spare me dangerous knowledge. He said to me even: ‘Mikhel, it is better that you—even you—do not know what the past has thrown up.’ I implored him. In vain. He came to me one evening. Here. I was asleep upstairs. He gave the special ring on the bell: ‘Mikhel, I need fifty pounds.’”

Elvira returned, this time with an empty ashtray, and as she put it on the table Smiley felt a surge of tension like the sudden working of a drug. He experienced it driving sometimes, waiting for a crash that didn’t happen. And he experienced it with Ann, watching her return from some supposedly innocuous engagement and knowing—simply knowing—it was not.

“When was this?” he asked when she had left again.

“Twelve days ago. One week last Monday. From his manner I am able to discern immediately that this is an official affair. He has never before asked me for money. ‘General,’ I say to him. ‘You are making a conspiracy. Tell me what it is.’ But he shakes his head. ‘Listen,’ I tell him, ‘if this is a conspiracy, take my advice, go to Max.’ He refused. ‘Mikhel,’ he tells me, ‘Max is a good man, but he does not have confidence any more in our Group. He wishes, even, that we end our struggle. But when I have landed the big fish I am hoping for, then I shall go to Max and claim our expenses and perhaps many things besides. But this I do afterwards, not before. Meanwhile I cannot conduct my business in a dirty shirt. Please, Mikhel. Lend me fifty pounds. In all my life this is my most important mission. It reaches far into our past.’ His words exactly. In my wallet I had fifty pounds—fortunately I had that day made a successful investment—I give them to him. ‘General,’ I said. ‘Take all I have. My possessions are yours. Please,’” said Mikhel and to punctuate this gesture—or to authenticate it—drew heavily at his yellow cigarette.

In the grimy window above them Smiley had glimpsed the reflection of Elvira standing half-way down the room, listening to their conversation. Mikhel had also seen her and had even shot her an evil frown, but he seemed unwilling, and perhaps unable, to order her away.

“That was very good of you,” Smiley said after a suitable pause.

“Max, it was my duty. From the heart. I know no other law.”

She despises me for not helping the old man, thought Smiley. She was in on it, she knew, and now she despises me for not helping him in his hour of need. He was a brother to her, he remembered. He instructed her.

“And this approach to you—this request for operational funds,” said Smiley. “It came out of the blue? There’d been nothing before, to tell you he was up to something big?”

Again Mikhel frowned, taking his time, and it was clear that Mikhel did not care too much for questions.

“Some months ago, perhaps two, he received a letter,” he said cautiously. “Here, to this address.”

“Did he receive so few?”

“This letter was special,” said Mikhel, with the same air of caution, and suddenly Smiley realised that Mikhel was in what the Sarratt inquisitors called the loser’s corner, because he did not know—he could only guess—how much or how little Smiley knew already. Therefore Mikhel would give up his information jealously, hoping to read the strength of Smiley’s hand while he did so.

“Who was it from?”

Mikhel, as so often, answered a slightly different question.

“It was from Paris, Max, a long letter, many pages, hand-written. Addressed to the General personally, not Miller. To General Vladimir, most personal. On the envelope was written ‘Most Personal,’ in French. The letter arrived, I lock it in my desk; at eleven o’clock he walks in as usual. ‘Mikhel, I salute you.’ Sometimes, believe me, we even saluted each other. I hand him the letter, he sat”—he pointed towards Elvira’s end of the room—“he sat down, opened it quite carelessly, as if he had no expectation from it, and I saw him gradually become preoccupied. Absorbed. I would say fascinated. Impassioned even. I spoke to him. He didn’t answer. I spoke again—you know his ways—he ignored me totally. He went for a walk. ‘I shall return,’ he said.”

“Taking the letter?”

“Of course. It was his fashion, when he had a great matter to consider, to go for a walk. When he returned, I noticed a deep excitement in him. A tension. ‘Mikhel.’ You know how he spoke. All must obey. ‘Mikhel. Get out the photocopier. Put some paper in it for me. I have a document to copy.’ I asked him how many copies. One. I asked him how many sheets. ‘Seven. Please stand at five paces’ distance while I operate the machine,’ he tells me. ‘I cannot involve you in this matter.’”

Once again, Mikhel indicated the spot as if it proved the absolute veracity of his story. The black copier stood on its own table, like an old steam-engine, with rollers, and holes for pouring in the different chemicals. “The General was not mechanical, Max. I setup the machine for him—then I stood—here—so—calling out instructions to him across the room. When he had finished, he stood over the copies while they dried, then folded them into his pocket.”

“And the original?”

“This also he put in his pocket.”

“So you never read the letter?” Smiley said, in a tone of light commiseration.

“No, Max. I am sad to tell you I did not.”

“But you saw the envelope. You had it here to give to him when he arrived.”

“I told you, Max. It was from Paris.”

“Which district?”

The hesitation again: “The fifteenth,” said Mikhel. “I believe it was the fifteenth. Where many of our people used to be.”

“And the date? Can you be more precise about it? You said about two months.”

“Early September. I would say early September. Late August is possible. Say six weeks ago, around.”

“The address on the envelope was also handwritten?”

“It was, Max. It was.”

“What colour was the envelope?”

“Brown.”

“And the ink?”

“I suppose blue.”

“Was it sealed?”

“Please?”

“Was the envelope sealed with sealing-wax or adhesive tape? Or was it just gummed in the ordinary way?”

Mikhel shrugged, as if such details were beneath him.

“But the sender had put his name on the outside, presumably?” Smiley persisted lightly.

If he had, Mikhel was not admitting it.

For a moment Smiley allowed his mind to dwell upon the brown envelope cached in the Savoy cloakroom, and the passionate plea for help it had contained. This morning I had an impression that they were trying to kill me. Will you not send me your magic friend once more? Postmark Paris, he thought. The 15th district. After the first letter, Vladimir gave the writer his home address, he thought. Just as he gave his home telephone number to Villem. After the first letter, Vladimir made sure he bypassed Mikhel.

A phone rang and Mikhel answered it at once, with a brief “Yes,” then listened.

“Then put me five each way,” he muttered, and rang off with magisterial dignity.

Approaching the main purpose of his visit to Mikhel, Smiley took care to proceed with great respect. He remembered that Mikhel—who by the time he joined the Group in Paris had seen the inside of half the interrogation centres of Eastern Europe—had a way of slowing down when he was prodded, and by this means in his day had driven the Sarratt inquisitors half mad.

“May I ask you something, Mikhel?” Smiley said, instructively selecting a line that was oblique to the main thrust of his enquiry.

“Please.”

“That evening when he called here to borrow money from you, did he stay? Did you make him tea? Play a game of chess perhaps? Could you paint it for me a little, please, that evening?”

“We played chess, but not with concentration. He was preoccupied, Max.”

“Did he say any more about the big fish?”

The drooped eyes considered Smiley soulfully.

“Please, Max?”

“The big fish. The operation he said he was planning. I wondered whether he enlarged upon it in any way.”

“Nothing. Nothing at all, Max. He was entirely secretive.”

“Did you have the impression it involved another country?”

“He spoke only of having no passport. He was wounded—Max, I tell you this frankly—he was hurt that the Circus would not trust him with a passport. After such service, such devotion—he was hurt.”

“It was for his own good, Mikhel.”

“Max, I understand entirely. I am a younger man, a man of the world, flexible. The General was at times impulsive, Max. Steps had to be taken—even by those who admired him—to contain his energies. Please. But for the man himself, it was incomprehensible. An insult.”

From behind him Smiley heard the thud of feet as Elvira stomped contemptuously back to her corner.

“So who did he think should do his travelling for him?” Smiley asked, again ignoring her.

“Villem,” said Mikhel with obvious disapproval. “He does not tell me in many words but I believe he sends Villem. That was my impression. Villem would go. General Vladimir spoke with much pride of Villem’s youth and honour. Also of his father. He even made an historical reference. He spoke of bringing in the new generation to avenge the injustices of the old. He was very moved.”

“Where did he send him? Did Vladi give any hint of that?”

“He does not tell me. He tells me only, ‘Villem has a passport, he is a brave boy, a good Balt, steady, he can travel, but it is also necessary to protect him.’ I do not probe, Max. I do not pry. That is not my way. You know that.”

“Still you did form an impression, I suppose,” Smiley said. “The way one does. There are not so many places Villem would be free to go to, after all. Least of all on fifty pounds. There was Villem’s job too, wasn’t there? Not to mention his wife. He couldn’t just step into the blue when he felt like it.”

Mikhel made a very military gesture. Pushing out his lips till his moustache was almost on its back, he tugged shrewdly at his nose with his thumb and forefinger. “The General also asked me for maps,” he said finally. “I was in two minds whether to tell you this. You are his vicar, Max, but you are not of our cause. But as I trust you, I shall.”

“Maps of where?”

“Street maps.” He flicked a hand towards the shelves as if ordering them closer. “City plans. Of Danzig. Hamburg. Lübeck. Helsinki. The northern seaboard. I asked him, ‘General, sir. Let me help you,’ I said to him. ‘Please. I am your assistant for everything. I have a right. Vladimir. Let me help you.’ He refused me. He wished to be entirely private.”

Moscow Rules, Smiley thought yet again. Many maps and only one of them is relevant. And once again, he noted, towards his trusted Paris adjutant Vladimir was taking measures to obscure his purpose.

“After which he left?” he suggested.

“Correct.”

“At what time?”

“It was late.”

“Can you say how late?”

“Two. Three. Even four maybe. I am not sure.”

Then Smiley felt Mikhel’s gaze lift fractionally over his shoulder and beyond it and stay there, and an instinct that he had lived by for as long as he could remember made him ask: “Did Vladimir come here alone?”

“Of course, Max. Who would he bring?”

They were interrupted by a clank of crockery as Elvira at the other end of the room went clumsily back to her chores. Daring to glance at Mikhel just then, Smiley saw him staring after her with an expression he recognised but for a split second could not place: hopeless and affectionate at once, torn between dependence and disgust. Till, with sickening empathy, Smiley found himself looking into his own face as he had glimpsed it too often, red-eyed like Mikhel’s, in Ann’s pretty gilt mirrors in their house in Bywater Street.

“So if he wouldn’t let you help him, what did you do?” Smiley asked with the same studied casualness. “Sit up and read—play chess with Elvira?”

Mikhel’s brown eyes held him a moment, slipped away, and came back to him.

“No, Max,” he replied with great courtesy. “I gave him the maps. He desired to be left alone with them. I wished him good night. I was asleep by the time he left.”

But not Elvira, apparently, Smiley thought. Elvira stayed behind for instruction from her proxy brother. Active as a patriot, as a man, as a leader, Smiley rehearsed. Active in all respects.

“So what contact have you had with him since?” Smiley asked, and Mikhel came suddenly to yesterday. Nothing till yesterday, Mikhel said.

“Yesterday afternoon he called me on the telephone. Max, I swear to you I had not heard him so excited for many years. Happy, I would say ecstatic. ‘Mikhel! Mikhel!’ Max, that was a delighted man. He would come to me that night. Last night. Late maybe, but he will have my fifty pounds. ‘General,’ I tell him. ‘What is fifty pounds? Are you well? Are you safe? Tell me.’ ‘Mikhel, I have been fishing and I am happy. Stay awake,’ he says to me. ‘I shall be with you at eleven o’clock, soon after. I shall have the money. Also it is necessary I beat you at chess to calm my nerves.’ I stay awake, make tea, wait for him. And wait. Max, I am a soldier, for myself I am not afraid. But for the General—for that old man, Max—I was afraid. I phone the Circus, an emergency. They hang up on me. Why? Max, why did you do that, please?”

“I was not on duty,” Smiley said, now watching Mikhel as intently as he dared. “Tell me, Mikhel,” he began deliberately.

“Max.”

“What did you think Vladimir was going to be doing after he rang you with the good news—and before he came to repay you fifty pounds?”

Mikhel did not hesitate. “Naturally I assumed he would be going to Max,” he said. “He had landed his big fish. Now he would go to Max, claim his expenses, present him with his great news. Naturally,” he repeated, looking a little too straight into Smiley’s eyes.

Naturally, thought Smiley; and you knew to the minute when he would leave his apartment, and to the metre the route he would take to reach the Hampstead flat.

“So he failed to appear, you rang the Circus, and we were unhelpful,” Smiley resumed. “I’m sorry. So what did you do next?”

“I phone Villem. First to make sure the boy is all right, also to ask him where is our leader? That English wife of his bawled me out. Finally I went to his flat. I did not like to—it was an intrusion—his private life is his own—but I went. I rang the bell. He did not answer. I came home. This morning at eleven o’clock Jüri rings. I had not read the early edition of the evening papers, I am not fond of English newspapers. Jüri had read them. Vladimir our leader was dead,” he ended.

Elvira was at his elbow. She had two glasses of vodka on a tray.

“Please,” said Mikhel. Smiley took a glass, Mikhel the other.

“To life!” said Mikhel, very loud, and drank as the tears started to his eyes.

“To life,” Smiley repeated while Elvira watched them.

She went with him, Smiley thought. She forced Mikhel to the old man’s flat, she dragged him to the door.

“Have you told anyone else of this, Mikhel?” Smiley asked when she had once more left.

“Jüri I don’t trust,” said Mikhel, blowing his nose.

“Did you tell Jüri about Villem?”

“Please?”

“Did you mention Villem to him? Did you suggest to Jüri in any way that Villem might have been involved with Vladimir?”

Mikhel had committed no such sin, apparently.

“In this situation you should trust no one,” Smiley said, in a more formal tone, as he prepared to take his leave. “Not even the police. Those are the orders. The police must not know that Vladimir was doing anything operational when he died. It is important for security. Yours as well as ours. He gave you no message otherwise? No word for Max, for instance?”

Tell Max that it concerns the Sandman, he thought.

Mikhel smiled his regrets.

“Did Vladimir mention Hector recently, Mikhel?”

“Hector was no good for him.”

“Did Vladimir say that?”

“Please, Max. I have nothing against Hector personally. Hector is Hector, he is not a gentleman, but in our work we must use many varieties of mankind. This was the General speaking. Our leader was an old man. ‘Hector,’ Vladimir says to me. ‘Hector is no good. Our good postman Hector is like the City banks. When it rains, they say, the banks take away your umbrella. Our postman Hector is the same.’ Please. This is Vladimir speaking. Not Mikhel. ‘Hector is no good.’”

“When did he say this?”

“He said it several times.”

“Recently?”

“Yes.”

“How recently?”

“Maybe two months. Maybe less.”

“After he received the Paris letter, or before?”

“After. No question.”

Mikhel escorted him to the door, a gentleman even if Toby Esterhase was not. At her place again beside the samovar, Elvira sat smoking before the same photograph of birch trees. And as he passed her, Smiley heard a sort of hiss, made through the nose or mouth, or both at once, as a last statement of her contempt.

“What will you do now?” he asked of Mikhel in the way one asks such things of the bereaved. Out of the corner of his eye he saw her head lift at his question and her fingers spread across the page.

A last thought struck him. “And you didn’t recognise the handwriting?” Smiley asked.

“What handwriting is this, Max?”

“On the envelope from Paris?”

Suddenly he had no time to wait for an answer; suddenly he was sick of evasion.

“Goodbye, Mikhel.”

“Go well, Max.”

Elvira’s head sank again to the birch trees.

I’ll never know, Smiley thought, as he made his way quickly down the wooden staircase. None of us will. Was he Mikhel the traitor who resented the old man sharing his woman, and thirsted for the crown that had been denied him for too long? Or was he Mikhel the selfless officer and gentleman, Mikhel the ever-loyal servant? Or was he perhaps, like many loyal servants, both?

He thought of Mikhel’s cavalry pride, as terribly tender as any other hero’s manhood. His pride in being the General’s keeper, his pride in being his satrap. His sense of injury at being excluded. His pride again—how it split so many ways! But how far did it extend? To a pride in giving nobly to each master, for instance? Gentlemen, I have served you both well, says the perfect double agent in the twilight of his life. And says it with pride, too, thought Smiley, who had known a number of them.

He thought of the seven-page letter from Paris. He thought of second proofs. He wondered who the photocopy had gone to—maybe Esterhase? He wondered where the original was. So who went to Paris? he wondered. If Villem went to Hamburg, who was the little magician? He was bone tired. His tiredness hit him like a sudden virus. He felt it in the knees, the hips, his whole subsiding body. But he kept walking, for his mind refused to rest.

11

To walk was just possible for Ostrakova, and to walk was all she asked. To walk and wait for the magician. Nothing was broken. Though her dumpy little body, when they had given her a bath, was shaping up to become as blackened and patchy as a map of the Siberian coalfields, nothing was broken. And her poor rump, which had given her that bit of trouble at the warehouse, looked already as though the assembled secret armies of Soviet Russia had booted her from one end of Paris to the other; still, nothing was broken. They had X-rayed every part of her, they had prodded her like questionable meat for signs of internal bleeding. But in the end, they had gloomily declared her to be the victim of a miracle.

They had wanted to keep her, for all that. They had wanted to treat her for shock, sedate her—at least for one night! The police, who had found six witnesses with seven conflicting accounts of what had happened (The car was grey, or was it blue? The registration number was from Marseilles, or was it foreign?), the police had taken one long statement from her, and threatened to come back and take another.

Ostrakova had nevertheless discharged herself.

Then had she at least children to look after her? they had asked. Oh, but she had a mass of them! she said. Daughters who would pander to her smallest whim, sons to assist her up and down the stairs! Any number—as many as they wished! To please the sisters, she even made up lives for them, though her head was beating like a war-drum. She had sent out for clothes. Her own were in shreds and God Himself must have blushed to see the state she was in when they found her. She gave a false address to go with her false name; she wanted no follow-up, no visitors. And somehow, by sheer will-power, at the stroke of six that evening, Ostrakova became just another ex-patient, stepping cautiously and extremely painfully down the ramp of the great black hospital, to rejoin the very world which that same day had done its best to be rid of her for good. Wearing her boots, which like herself were battered but mysteriously unbroken; and she was quaintly proud of the way they had supported her.

She wore them still. Restored to the twilight of her own apartment, seated in Ostrakov’s tattered armchair while she patiently wrestled with his old army revolver, trying to fathom how the devil it loaded, cocked, and fired itself, she wore them like a uniform. “I am an army of one.” To stay alive: that was her one aim, and the longer she did it, the greater would be her victory. To stay alive until the General came, or sent her the magician.

To escape from them, like Ostrakov? Well, she had done that. To mock them, like Glikman, to force them into corners where they had no option but to contemplate their own obscenity? In her time, she liked to think, she had done a little of that as well. But to survive, as neither of her men had done; to cling to life, against all the efforts of that soulless, numberless universe of brutalised functionaries; to be a thorn to them every hour of the day, merely by staying alive, by breathing, eating, moving, and having her wits about her—that, Ostrakova had decided, was an occupation worthy of her mettle, and her faith, and of her two loves. She had set about it immediately, with appropriate devotion. Already she had sent the fool concierge to shop for her: disability had its uses.

“I have had a small attack, Madame la Pierre”—whether of the heart, the stomach, or the Russian secret police she did not divulge to the old goat. “I am advised to leave off work for several weeks and rest completely. I am exhausted, madame—there are times when one wishes only to be alone. And here, take this, madame—not like the others, so grasping and over-vigilant.” Madame la Pierre took the note in her fist, and looked at just one corner of it before tucking it away at her waist somewhere. “And listen, madame, if anyone asks for me, do me a favour and say I am away. I shall burn no lights on the street side. We women of sensitivity are entitled to a little peace, you agree? But, madame, please, remember who they are, these visitors, and tell me—the gasman, people from the charities—tell me everything. I like to hear that life is going on around me.”

The concierge concluded she was mad, no doubt, but there was no madness to her money, and money was what the concierge liked best, and besides, she was mad herself. In a few hours, Ostrakova had become more cunning even than in Moscow. The concierge’s husband came up—a brigand himself, worse than the old goat—and, encouraged by further payments, fixed chains to her front door. Tomorrow he would fit a peep-hole, also for money. The concierge promised to receive her mail for her, and deliver it only at certain agreed times—exactly eleven in the morning, six in the evening, two short rings—for money. By forcing open the tiny ventilator in the back lavatory and standing on a chair, Ostrakova could look down into the courtyard whenever she wanted, at whoever came and went. She had sent a note to the warehouse saying she was indisposed. She could not move her double bed, but with pillows and her feather coverlet she made up the divan and positioned it so that it pointed like a torpedo through the open door of the drawing-room at the front door beyond it, and all she had to do was lie on it with her boots aimed at the intruder and shoot down the line of them, and if she didn’t blow her own foot off, she would catch him in the first moment of surprise as he attempted to burst in on her: she had worked it out. Her head throbbed and caterwauled, her eyes had a way of darkening over when she moved her head too fast, she had a raging temperature and sometimes she half fainted. But she had worked it out, she had made her dispositions, and till the General or the magician came, it was Moscow all over again. “You’re on your own, you old fool,” she told herself aloud. “You’ve nobody to rely on but yourself, so get on with it.”

With one photograph of Glikman and one of Ostrakov on the floor beside her, and an icon of the Virgin under the coverlet, Ostrakova embarked upon her first night’s vigil, praying steadily to a host of saints, not least of them St. Joseph, that they would send her her redeemer, the magician.

Not a single message tapped to me over the water-pipes, she thought. Not even a guard’s insult to wake me up.

12

And still it was the same day; there was no end to it, no bed. For a while after leaving Mikhel, George Smiley let his legs lead him, not knowing where, too tired, too stirred to trust himself to drive, yet bright enough to watch his back, to make the vague yet sudden turnings that catch would-be followers off guard. Bedraggled, heavy-eyed, he waited for his mind to come down, trying to unwind, to step clear of the restless thrust of his twenty-hour marathon. The Embankment had him, so did a pub off Northumberland Avenue, probably The Sherlock Holmes, where he gave himself a large whisky and dithered over telephoning Stella—was she all right? Deciding there was no point—he could hardly phone her every night asking whether she and Villem were alive—he walked again until he found himself in Soho, which on Saturday nights was even nastier than usual. Beard Lacon, he thought. Demand protection for the family. But he had only to imagine the scene to know the idea was stillborn. If Vladimir was not the Circus’s responsibility, then still less could Villem be. And how, pray, do you attach a team of baby-sitters to a long-distance Continental lorry driver? His one consolation was that Vladimir’s assassins had apparently found what they were looking for: that they had no other needs. Yet what about the woman in Paris? What about the writer of the two letters?

Go home, he thought. Twice, from phone-boxes, he made dummy calls, checking the pavement. Once he entered a cul-de-sac and doubled back, watching for the slurred step, the eye that ducked his glance. He considered taking a hotel room. Sometimes he did that, just for a night’s peace. Sometimes his house was too much of a dangerous place for him. He thought of the piece of negative film: time to open the box. Finding himself gravitating by instinct towards his old headquarters at Cambridge Circus, he cut hastily away eastward, finishing by his car again. Confident that he was not observed, he drove to Bayswater, well off his beaten track, but he still watched his mirror intently. From a Pakistani ironmonger who sold everything, he bought two plastic washing-up bowls and a rectangle of commercial glass three and a half inches by five; and from a cash-and-carry chemist not three doors down, ten sheets of Grade 2 resin-coated paper of the same size, and a children’s pocket torch with a spaceman on the handle and a red filter that slid over the lens when you pushed a nickel button. From Bayswater, by a painstaking route, he drove to the Savoy, entering from the Embankment side. He was still alone. In the men’s cloakroom, the same attendant was on duty, and he even remembered their joke.

“I’m still waiting for it to explode,” he said with a smile, handing back the box. “I thought I heard it ticking once or twice, and all.”

At his front door the tiny wedges he had put up before his drive to Charlton were still in place. In his neighbours’ windows he saw Saturday-evening candle-light and talking heads; but in his own, the curtains were still drawn as he had left them, and in the hall, Ann’s pretty little grandmother clock received him in deep darkness, which he hastily corrected.

Dead weary, he nevertheless proceeded methodically.

First he tossed three fire-lighters into the drawing-room grate, lit them, shovelled smokeless coal over them, and hung Ann’s indoor clothes-line across the hearth. For an overall he donned an old kitchen apron, tying the cord firmly round his ample midriff for additional protection. From under the stairs he exhumed a pile of green black-out material and a pair of kitchen steps, which he took to the basement. Having blacked out the window, he went upstairs again, unwrapped the box, opened it, and no, it was not a bomb, it was a letter and a packet of battered cigarettes with Vladimir’s piece of negative film fed into it. Taking it out, he returned to the basement, put on the red torch, and went to work, though Heaven knows he possessed no photographic flair whatever, and could perfectly well—in theory—have had the job done for him in a fraction of the time, through Lauder Strickland, by the Circus’s own photographic section. Or for that matter he could have taken it to any one of half a dozen “tradesmen,” as they are known in the jargon: marked collaborators in certain fields who are pledged, if called upon at any time, to drop everything and, asking no questions, put their skills at the service’s disposal. One such tradesman actually lived not a stone’s throw from Sloane Square, a gentle soul who specialised in wedding photographs. Smiley had only to walk ten minutes and press the man’s doorbell and he could have had his prints in half an hour. But he didn’t. He preferred instead the inconvenience, as well as imperfection, of taking a contact print in the privacy of his home, while upstairs the telephone rang and he ignored it.

He preferred the trial and error of exposing the negative for too long, then for too little, under the main room light. Of using as a measure the cumbersome kitchen timer, which ticked and grumbled like something from Coppélia. He preferred grunting and cursing in irritation and sweating in the dark and wasting at least six sheets of resin-coated paper before the developer in the washing-up bowl yielded an image even half-way passable, which he laid in the rapid fixer for three minutes. And washed it. And dabbed it with a clean teacloth, probably ruining the cloth for good, he wouldn’t know. And took it upstairs and pegged it to the clothesline. And for those who like a heavy symbol, it is a matter of history that the fire, despite the fire-lighters, was all but out, since the coal consisted in great measure of damp slag, and that George Smiley had to puff at the flames to prevent it from dying, crouching on all fours for the task. Thus it might have occurred to him—though it didn’t, for with his curiosity once more aroused he had put aside his introspective mood—that the action was exactly contrary to Lacon’s jangling order to douse the flames and not to fan them.

Next, with the point safely suspended over the carpet, Smiley addressed himself to a pretty marquetry writing-desk in which Ann kept her “things” with embarrassing openness. Such as a sheet of writing-paper on which she had written the one word “Darling” and not continued, perhaps uncertain which darling to write to. Such as book-matches from restaurants he had never been to and letters in handwriting he did not know. From among such painful bric-à-brac he extracted a large Victorian magnifying glass with a mother-of-pearl handle, which she employed for reading clues to crosswords never completed. Thus armed—the sequence of these actions, because of his fatigue, lacked the final edge of logic—he put on a record of Mahler, which Ann had given him, and sat himself in the leather reading chair that was equipped with a mahogany book-rest designed to swivel like a bed tray across the occupant’s stomach. Tired to death again, he unwisely allowed his eyes to close while he listened, part to the music, part to the occasional pat-pat of the dripping photograph, and part to the grudging crackle of the fire. Waking with a start thirty minutes later, he found the print dry and the Mahler revolving mutely on its turntable.

He stared, one hand to his spectacles, the other slowly rotating the magnifying glass over the print.

The photograph showed a group, but it was not political, nor was it a bathing party, since nobody was wearing a swimming-suit. The group consisted of a quartet, two men and two women, and they were lounging on quilted sofas round a low table laden with bottles and cigarettes. The women were naked and young and pretty. The men, scarcely better covered, were sprawled side by side, and the girls had twined themselves dutifully around their elected mates. The lighting of the photograph was sallow and unearthly, and from the little Smiley knew of such matters he concluded that the negative was made on fast film, for the print was also grainy. Its texture, when he pondered it, reminded him of the photographs one saw too often of terrorists’ hostages, except that the four in the photograph were concerned with each other, whereas hostages have a way of staring down the lens as if it were a gun barrel. Still in quest of what he would have called operational intelligence, he passed to the probable position of the camera and decided it must have been high above the subjects. The four appeared to be lying at the centre of a pit with the camera looking down on them. A shadow, very black—a balustrade, or perhaps it was a window-sill, or merely the shoulder of somebody in front—obtruded across the lower foreground. It was as if, despite the vantage point, only half the lens had dared to lift its head above the eye-line.

Here Smiley drew his first tentative conclusion. A step—not a large one, but he had enough large steps on his mind already. A technical step, call it: a modest technical step. The photograph had every mark of being what the trade called stolen. And stolen moreover with a view to burning, meaning “blackmail.” But the blackmail of whom? To what end?

Weighing the problem, Smiley probably fell asleep. The telephone was on Ann’s little desk, and it must have rung three or four times before he was aware of it.

“Yes, Oliver?” said Smiley cautiously.

“Ah. George. I tried you earlier. You got back all right, I trust?”

“Where from?” asked Smiley.

Lacon preferred not to answer this question. “I felt I owed you a call, George. We parted on a sour note. I was brusque. Too much on my plate. I apologise. How are things? You are done? Finished?”

In the background Smiley heard Lacon’s daughters squabbling about how much rent was payable on a hotel in Park Place. He’s got them for the week-end, thought Smiley.

“I’ve had the Home Office on the line again, George,” Lacon went on in a lower voice, not bothering to wait for his reply. “They’ve had the pathologist’s report and the body may be released. An early cremation is recommended. I thought perhaps if I gave you the name of the firm that is handling things, you might care to pass it on to those concerned. Unattributably, of course. You saw the press release? What did you think of it? I thought it was apt. I thought it caught the tone exactly.”

“I’ll get a pencil,” Smiley said and fumbled in the drawer once more until he found a pear-shaped plastic object with a leather thong, which Ann sometimes wore around her neck. With difficulty he prised it open, and wrote to Lacon’s dictation: the firm, the address, the firm again, followed yet again by the address.

“Got it? Want me to repeat it? Or should you read it back to me, make assurance double sure?”

“I think I have it, thank you,” Smiley said. Somewhat belatedly, it dawned on him that Lacon was drunk.

“Now, George, we have a date, don’t forget. A seminar on marriage with no holds barred. I have cast you as my elder statesman here. There’s a very decent steak-house downstairs and I shall treat you to a slap-up dinner while you give me of your wisdom. Have you a diary there? Let’s pencil something in.”

With dismal foreboding Smiley agreed on a date. After a lifetime of inventing cover stories for every occasion, he still found it impossible to talk his way out of a dinner invitation.

“And you found nothing?” Lacon asked, on a more cautious note. “No snags, hitches, loose ends. It was a storm in a teacup, was it, as we suspected?”

A lot of answers crossed Smiley’s mind, but he saw no use to any of them.

“What about the phone bill?” Smiley asked.

“Phone bill? What phone bill? Ah, you mean his. Pay it and send me the receipt. No problem. Better still, slip it in the post to Strickland.”

“I already sent it to you,” said Smiley patiently. “I asked you for a breakdown of traceable calls.”

“I’ll get on to them at once,” Lacon replied blandly. “Nothing else?”

“No. No, I don’t think so. Nothing.”

“Get some sleep. You sound all in.”

“Good night,” said Smiley.

With Ann’s magnifying glass in his plump fist once more, Smiley went back to his examination. The floor of the pit was carpeted, apparently in white; the quilted sofas were formed in a horseshoe following the line of the drapes that comprised the rear perimeter. There was an upholstered door in the background and the clothes the two men had discarded—jackets, neckties, trousers—were hanging from it with hospital neatness. There was an ashtray on the table and Smiley set to work trying to read the writing round the edge. After much manipulation of the glass he came up with what the lapsed philologist in him described as the asterisk (or putative) form of the letters “A-C-H-T,” but whether as a word in their own right—meaning “eight” or “attention,” as well as certain other more remote concepts—or as four letters from a larger word, he could not tell. Nor did he at this stage exert himself to find out, preferring simply to store the intelligence in the back of his mind until some other part of the puzzle forced it into play.

Ann rang. Once again, perhaps, he had dozed off, for his recollection ever afterwards was that he did not hear the ring of the phone at all, but simply her voice as he slowly lifted the receiver to his ear: “George, George,” as if she had been crying for him a long time, and he had only now summoned the energy or the caring to answer her.

They began their conversation as strangers, much as they began their love-making.

“How are you?” she asked.

“Very well, thank you. How are you? What can I do for you?”

“I meant it,” Ann insisted. “How are you? I want to know.”

“And I told you I was well.”

“I rang you this morning. Why didn’t you answer?”

“I was out.”

Long silence while she appeared to consider this feeble excuse. The telephone had never been a bother to her. It gave her no sense of urgency.

“Out working?” she asked.

“An administrative thing for Lacon.”

“He begins his administration early these days.”

“His wife’s left him,” Smiley said by way of explanation.

No answer.

“You used to say she would be wise to,” he went on. “She should get out fast, you used to say, before she became another Civil Service geisha.”

“I’ve changed my mind. He needs her.”

“But she, I gather, does not need him,” Smiley pointed out, taking refuge in an academic tone.

“Silly woman,” said Ann, and another longer silence followed, this time of Smiley’s making while he contemplated the sudden unwished-for mountain of choice she had revealed to him.

To be together again, as she sometimes called it.

To forget the hurts, the list of lovers; to forget Bill Haydon, the Circus traitor, whose shadow still fell across her face each time he reached for her, whose memory he carried in him like a constant pain. Bill his friend, Bill the flower of their generation, the jester, the enchanter, the iconoclastic conformer; Bill the born deceiver, whose quest for the ultimate betrayal led him into the Russians’ bed, and Ann’s. To stage yet another honeymoon, fly away to the South of France, eat the meals, buy the clothes, all the let’s pretend that lovers play. And for how long? How long before her smile faded and her eyes grew dull and those mythical relations started needing her to cure their mythical ailments in far-off places?

“Where are you?” he asked.

“Hilda’s.”

“I thought you were in Cornwall.”

Hilda was a divorced woman of some speed. She lived in Kensington, not twenty minutes’ walk away.

“So where’s Hilda?” he asked when he had come to terms with this intelligence.

“Out.”

“All night?”

“I expect so, knowing Hilda. Unless she brings him back.”

“Well then, I suppose you must entertain yourself as well as you can without her,” he said, but as he spoke he heard her whisper “George.”

A profound and vehement fear seized hold of Smiley’s heart. He glared across the room at the reading chair and saw the contact photograph still on the book-rest beside her magnifying glass; in a single surge of memory, he reconstructed all the things that had hinted and whispered to him throughout the endless day; he heard the drum-beats of his own past, summoning him to one last effort to externalise and resolve the conflict he had lived by; and he wanted her nowhere near him. Tell Max that it concerns the Sandman. Gifted with the clarity that hunger, tiredness, and confusion can supply, Smiley knew for certain she must have no part in what he had to do. He knew—he was barely at the threshold—yet he still knew that it was just possible, against all the odds, that he had been given, in late age, a chance to return to the rained-out contests of his life and play them after all. If that was so, then no Ann, no false peace, no tainted witness to his actions should disturb his lonely quest. He had not known his mind till then. But now he knew it.

“You mustn’t,” he said. “Ann? Listen. You mustn’t come here. It has nothing to do with choice. It’s to do with practicalities. You mustn’t come here.” His own words rang strangely to him.

“Then come here,” she said.

He rang off. He imagined her crying, then getting out her address book to see who from her First Eleven, as she called them, might console her in his place. He poured himself a neat whisky, the Lacon solution. He went to the kitchen, forgot why, and wandered into his study. Soda, he thought. Too late. Do without. I must have been mad, he thought. I’m chasing phantoms, there is nothing there. A senile General had a dream and died for it. He remembered Wilde: the fact that a man dies for a cause does not make that cause right. A picture was crooked. He straightened it, too much, too little, stepping back each time. Tell him it concerns the Sandman. He returned to the reading chair and his two prostitutes, fixing on them through Ann’s magnifying glass with a ferocity that would have sent them scurrying to their pimps.

Clearly they were from the upper end of their profession, being fresh-bodied and young and well-groomed. They seemed also—but perhaps it was coincidence—to be deliberately distinguished from each other by whoever had selected them. The girl at the left was blonde and fine and even classical in build, with long thighs and small high breasts. Whereas her companion was dark-haired and stubby, with spreading hips and flared features, perhaps Eurasian. The blonde, he recorded, wore earrings in the shape of anchors, which struck him as odd because, in his limited experience of women, earrings were what they took off first. Ann had only to go out of the house without wearing them for his heart to sink. Beyond that he could think of nothing very clever to say about either girl and so, having swallowed another large gulp of raw Scotch, he transferred his attention to the men, once more—which was where it had been, if he would admit it, ever since he had started looking at the photograph in the first place. Like the girls, they were sharply differentiated from each other, though in the men—since they were a deal older—the differences had the appearance of greater depth and legibility of character. The man supporting the blonde girl was fair and at first sight dull, while the man supporting the dark girl was not merely dark-complexioned but had a Latin, even Levantine, alertness in his features, and an infectious smile that was the one engaging feature of the photograph. The fair man was large and sprawling, the dark man was small and bright enough to be his jester: a little imp of a fellow, with a kind face and flicked-up horns of hair above his ears.

A sudden nervousness—in retrospect perhaps foreboding—made Smiley take the fair man first. It was a time to feel safer with strangers.

The man’s torso was burly but not athletic, his limbs ponderous without suggesting strength. The fairness of his skin and hair emphasised his obesity. His hands, one splayed on the girl’s flank, the other round her waist, were fatty and artless. Lifting the magnifying glass slowly over the naked chest, Smiley reached the head. By the age of forty, someone clever had written ominously, a man gets the face he deserves. Smiley doubted it. He had known poetic souls condemned to life imprisonment behind harsh faces, and delinquents with the appearance of angels. Nevertheless, it was not an asset as a face, nor had the camera caught it at its most appealing. In terms of character, it appeared to be divided into two parts: the lower, which was pulled into a grin of crude high spirits as, open-mouthed, he addressed something to his male companion; the upper, which was ruled by two small and pallid eyes round which no mirth had gathered at all and no high spirits either, but which seemed to look out of their doughy surroundings with the cold, unblinking blandness of a child. The nose was flat, the hair-style full and mid-European.

Greedy, Ann would have said, who was given to passing absolute judgment on people merely by studying their portraits in the press. Greedy, weak, vicious. Avoid. A pity she had not reached the same conclusion about Haydon, he thought; or not in time.

Smiley returned to the kitchen and rinsed his face, then remembered that he had come to fetch water for his whisky. Settling again in the reading chair, he trained the magnifying glass on the second of the men, the jester. The whisky was keeping him awake, but it was also putting him to sleep. Why doesn’t she ring again? he thought. If she rings again, I’ll go to her. But in reality his mind was on this second face, because its familiarity disturbed him in much the way that its urgent complicity had disturbed Villem and Ostrakova before him. He gazed at it and his tiredness left him, he seemed to draw energy from it. Some faces, as Villem had suggested this morning, are known to us before we see them; others we see once and remember all our lives; others we see every day and never remember at all. But which was this?

A Toulouse-Lautrec face, Smiley thought, peering in wonder—caught as the eyes slid away to some intense and perhaps erotic distraction. Ann would have taken to him immediately; he had the dangerous edge she liked. A Toulouse-Lautrec face, caught as a stray shard of fair-ground light fired one gaunt and travelled cheek. A hewn face, peaked and jagged, of which the brow and nose and jaw seemed all to have succumbed to the same eroding gales. A Toulouse-Lautrec face, swift and attaching. A waiter’s face, never a diner’s. With a waiter’s anger burning brightest behind a subservient smile. Ann would like that side less well. Leaving the print where it lay, Smiley clambered slowly to his feet in order to keep himself awake, and lumbered round the room, trying to place it, failing, wondering whether it was all imagining. Some people transmit, he thought. Some people—you meet them, and they bring you their whole past as a natural gift. Some people are intimacy itself.

At Ann’s writing-table he paused to stare at the telephone again. Hers. Hers and Haydon’s. Hers and everybody’s. Trimline, he thought. Or was it Slimline? Five pounds extra to the Post Office for the questionable pleasure of its outmoded, futuristic lines. My tart’s phone, she used to call it. The little warble for my little loves, the loud woo-hoo for my big ones. He realised it was ringing. Had been ringing a long while, the little warble for the little loves. He put down his glass, still staring at the telephone while it trilled. She used to leave it on the floor among her records when she was playing music, he remembered. She used to lie with it—there, by the fire, over there—one haunch carelessly lifted in case it needed her. When she went to bed, she unplugged it and took it with her, to comfort her in the night. When they made love, he knew he was the surrogate for all the men who hadn’t rung. For the First Eleven. For Bill Haydon, even though he was dead.

It had stopped ringing.

What does she do now? Try the Second Eleven? To be beautiful and Ann is one thing, she had said to him not long ago; to be beautiful and Ann’s age will soon be another. And to be ugly and mine is another again, he thought furiously. Taking up the contact print, he resumed, with fresh intensity, his contemplations.

Shadows, he thought. Smudges of light and dark, ahead of us, behind us, as we lurch along our ways. Imp’s horns, devil’s horns, our shadows so much larger than ourselves. Who is he? Who was he? I met him. I refused to. And if I refused to, how do I know him? He was a supplicant of some kind, a man with something to sell—intelligence, then? Dreams? Wakefully now, he stretched out on the sofa—anything rather than go upstairs to bed—and with the print before him, began plodding through the long galleries of his professional memory, holding the lamp to the half-forgotten portraits of charlatans, gold-markers, fabricators, pedlars, middlemen, hoods, rogues, and occasionally heroes who made up the supporting cast of his multitudinous acquaintance; looking for the one hollowed face that, like a secret sharer, seemed to have swum out of the little contact photograph to board his faltering consciousness. The lamp’s beam flitted, hesitated, returned. I was deceived by the darkness, he thought. I met him in the light. He saw a ghastly, neon-lit hotel bedroom—Muzak and tartan wallpaper, and the little stranger perched smiling in a corner, calling him Max. A little ambassador—but representing what cause, what country? He recalled an overcoat with velvet tabs, and hard little hands jerking out their own dance. He recalled the passionate, laughing eyes, the crisp mouth opening and closing swiftly, but he heard no words. He felt a sense of loss—of missing the target—of some other, looming shadow being present while they spoke.

Maybe, he thought. Everything is maybe. Maybe Vladimir was shot by a jealous husband after all, he thought, as the front doorbell screamed at him like a vulture, two rings.

She’s forgotten her key as usual, he thought. He was in the hall before he knew it, fumbling with the lock. Her key would do no good, he realised; like Ostrakova, he had chained the door. He fished at the chain, calling “Ann. Hang on!” and feeling nothing in his fingers. He slammed a bolt along its runner and heard the whole house tingle to the echo. “Just coming!” he shouted. “Wait! Don’t go!”

He heaved the door wide open, swaying on the threshold, offering his plump face as a sacrifice to the midnight air, to the shimmering black leather figure, crash helmet under his arm, standing before him like death’s sentinel.

“I didn’t mean to alarm, sir, I’m sure,” the stranger said. Clutching the doorway, Smiley could only stare at his intruder. He was tall and close cropped, and his eyes reflected unrequited loyalty.

“Ferguson, sir. You remember me, sir, Ferguson? I used to manage the transport pool for Mr. Esterhase’s lamplighters.”

His black motor cycle with its side-car was parked on the kerb behind him, its lovingly polished surfaces glinting under the street lamp.

“I thought lamplighter section had been disbanded,” Smiley said, still staring at him.

“So they have, sir. Scattered to the four winds, I regret to say. The camaraderie, the spirit, gone for ever.”

“So who employs you?”

“Well no one, sir. Not officially, as you might say. But still on the side of the angels, all the same.”

“I didn’t know we had any angels.”

“No, well that’s true, sir. All men are fallible, I do say. Specially these days.” He was holding a brown envelope for Smiley to take. “From certain friends of yours, sir, put it that way. I understand it relates to a telephone account you were enquiring about. We get a good response from the Post Office generally, I will say. Good night, sir. Sorry to bother you. Time you had some shut-eye, isn’t it? Good men are scarce, I always say.”

“Good night,” said Smiley.

But still his visitor lingered, like someone asking for a tip. “You did remember me really, didn’t you, sir? It was just a lapse, wasn’t it?”

“Of course.”

There were stars, he noticed as he closed the door. Clear stars swollen by the dew. Shivering, he took out one of Ann’s many photograph albums and opened it at the centre. It was her habit, when she liked a snap, to wedge the negative behind it. Selecting a picture of the two of them in Cap Ferrat—Ann in a bathing-dress, Smiley prudently covered—he removed the negative and put Vladimir’s behind it. He tidied up his chemicals and equipment and slipped the print into the twelfth volume of his 1961 Oxford English Dictionary, under Y for Yesterday. He opened Ferguson’s envelope, glanced wearily at the contents, registered a couple of entries and the word “Hamburg,” and tossed the whole lot into a drawer of the desk. Tomorrow, he thought; tomorrow is another riddle. He climbed into bed, never sure, as usual, which side to sleep on. He closed his eyes and at once the questions bombarded him, as he knew they would, in crazy uncoordinated salvoes.

Why didn’t Vladimir ask for Hector? he wondered for the hundredth time. Why did the old man liken Esterhase, alias Hector, to the City banks who took your umbrella away when it rained?

Tell Max it concerns the Sandman.

To ring her? To throw on his clothes and hurry round there, to be received as her secret lover, creeping away with the dawn?

Too late. She was already suited.

Suddenly, he wanted her dreadfully. He could not bear the spaces round him that did not contain her, he longed for her laughing trembling body as she cried to him, calling him her only true, her best lover, she wanted none other, ever. “Women are lawless, George,” she had told him once, when they lay in rare peace. “So what am I?” he had asked, and she said, “My law.” “So what was Haydon?” he had asked. And she laughed and said, “My anarchy.”

He saw the little photograph again, printed, like the little stranger himself, in his sinking memory. A small man, with a big shadow. He remembered Villem’s description of the little figure on the Hamburg ferry, the horns of flicked-up hair, the grooved face, the warning eyes. General, he thought chaotically, will you not send me your magic friend once more?

Maybe. Everything is maybe.

Hamburg, he thought, and got quickly out of bed and put on his dressing-gown. Back at Ann’s desk, he set to work seriously to study the breakdown of Vladimir’s telephone account, rendered in the copperplate script of a post-office clerk. Taking a sheet of paper, he began jotting down dates and notes.

Fact: in early September, Vladimir receives the Paris letter, and removes it from Mikhel’s grasp.

Fact: at about the same date, Vladimir makes a rare and costly trunk-call to Hamburg, operator-dialled, presumably so that he can later claim the cost.

Fact: three days after that again, the eighth, Vladimir accepts a reverse-charge call from Hamburg at a cost of two pounds eighty, origin, duration, and time all given, and the origin is the same number that Vladimir had called three days before.

Hamburg, Smiley thought again, his mind flitting once more to the imp in the photograph. The reversed telephone traffic had continued intermittently till three days ago; nine calls, totalling twenty-one pounds, and all of them from Hamburg to Vladimir. But who was calling him? From Hamburg? Who?

Then suddenly he remembered.

The looming figure in the hotel room, the imp’s vast shadow, was Vladimir himself. He saw them standing side by side, both in black coats, the giant and the midget. The vile hotel with Muzak and tartan wallpaper was near Heathrow Airport, where the two men, so ill-matched, had flown in for a conference at the very moment of Smiley’s life when his professional identity was crashing round his ears. Max, we need you. Max, give us the chance.

Picking up the telephone, Smiley dialled the number in Hamburg, and heard a man’s voice at the other end: the one word “Yes,” spoken softly in German, followed by a silence.

“I should like to speak to Herr Dieter Fassbender,” Smiley said, selecting a name at random. German was Smiley’s second language, and sometimes his first.

“We have no Fassbender,” said the same voice coolly after a moment’s pause, as if the speaker had consulted something in the meantime. Smiley could hear faint music in the background.

“This is Leber,” Smiley persisted. “I want to speak to Herr Fassbender urgently. I’m his partner.”

There was yet another delay.

“Not possible,” said the man’s voice flatly after another pause—and rang off.

Not a private house, thought Smiley, hastily jotting down his impressions—the speaker had too many choices. Not an office, for what kind of office plays soft background music and is open at midnight on a Saturday? A hotel? Possibly, but a hotel, if it was of any size, would have put him through to reception, and displayed a modicum of civility. A restaurant? Too furtive, too guarded—and surely they would have announced themselves as they picked up the phone?

Don’t force the pieces, he warned himself. Store them away. Patience. But how to be patient when he had so little time?

Returning to bed, he opened a copy of Cobbett’s Rural Rides and tried to read it while he loosely pondered, among other weighty matters, his sense of civitas and how much, or how little, he owed to Oliver Lacon: “Your duty, George.” Yet who could seriously be Lacon’s man? he asked himself. Who could regard Lacon’s fragile arguments as Caesar’s due?

“Émigrés in, émigrés out. Two legs good, two legs bad,” he muttered aloud.

All his professional life, it seemed to Smiley, he had listened to similar verbal antics signalling supposedly great changes in Whitehall doctrine; signalling restraint, self-denial, always another reason for doing nothing. He had watched Whitehall’s skirts go up, and come down again, her belts being tightened, loosened, tightened. He had been the witness, or victim—or even reluctant prophet—of such spurious cults as lateralism, parallelism, separatism, operational devolution, and now, if he remembered Lacon’s most recent meanderings correctly, of integration. Each new fashion had been hailed as a panacea: “Now we shall vanquish, now the machine will work!” Each had gone out with a whimper, leaving behind it the familiar English muddle, of which, more and more, in retrospect, he saw himself as a lifelong moderator. He had forborne, hoping others would forbear, and they had not. He had toiled in back rooms while shallower men held the stage. They held it still. Even five years ago he would never have admitted to such sentiments. But today, peering calmly into his own heart, Smiley knew that he was unled, and perhaps unleadable; that the only restraints upon him were those of his own reason, and his own humanity. As with his marriage, so with his sense of public service. I invested my life in institutions—he thought without rancour—and all I am left with is myself.

And with Karla, he thought; with my black Grail.

He could not help himself: his restless mind would not leave him alone. Staring ahead of him into the gloom, he imagined he saw Karla standing before him, breaking and reforming in the shifting specks of dark. He saw the brown, attendant eyes appraising him, as once they had appraised him from the darkness of the interrogation cell in Delhi jail a hundred years before: eyes that at first glance were sensitive and seemed to signal companionship; then like molten glass slowly hardened till they were brittle and unyielding. He saw himself stepping onto the dust-driven runway of Delhi airport, and wincing as the Indian heat leapt up at him from the tarmac: Smiley alias Barraclough, or Standfast, or whatever name he had fished from the bag that week—he forgot. A Smiley of the Sixties, anyway, Smiley the commercial traveller, they called him, charged by the Circus to quarter the globe, offering resettlement terms to Moscow Centre officers who were thinking of jumping ship. Centre was holding one of its periodical purges at the time, and the woods were thick with Russian field officers scared of going home. A Smiley who was Ann’s husband and Bill Haydon’s colleague, whose last illusions were still intact. A Smiley close to inner crisis all the same, for it was the year Ann lost her heart to a ballet dancer: Haydon’s turn was yet to come.

Still in the darkness of Ann’s bedroom, he relived the rattling, honking jeep-ride to the jail, the laughing children hanging to the tailboard; he saw the ox-carts and the eternal Indian crowds, the shanties on the brown river bank. He caught the smells of dung and ever-smouldering fires—fires to cook and fires to cleanse; fires to remove the dead. He saw the iron gateway of the old prison engulf him, and the perfectly pressed British uniforms of the warders as they waded kneedeep through the prisoners:

“This way, your honour, sir! Please be good enough to follow us, your excellency!”

One European prisoner, calling himself Gerstmann.

One grey-haired little man with brown eyes and a red calico tunic, resembling the sole survivor of an extinguished priesthood.

With his wrists manacled: “Please undo them, officer, and bring him some cigarettes,” Smiley had said.

One prisoner, identified by London as a Moscow Centre agent, and now awaiting deportation to Russia. One little cold war infantryman, as he appeared, who knew—knew for certain—that to be repatriated to Moscow was to face the camps or the firing squad or both; that to have been in enemy hands was in Centre’s eyes to have become the enemy himself: to have talked or kept his secrets was immaterial.

Join us, Smiley had said to him across the iron table.

Join us and we will give you life.

Go home and they will give you death.

His hands were sweating—Smiley’s, in the prison. The heat was dreadful. Have a cigarette, Smiley had said—here, use my lighter. It was a gold one, smeared by his own damp hands. Engraved. A gift from Ann to compensate some misdemeanour.

To George from Ann with all my love. There are little loves and big loves, Ann liked to say, but when she had composed the inscription she awarded him both kinds. It was probably the only occasion when she did.

Join us, Smiley had said. Save yourself. You have no right to deny yourself survival. First mechanically, then with passion, Smiley had repeated the familiar arguments while his own sweat fell like raindrops onto the table. Join us. You have nothing to lose. Those in Russia who love you are already lost. Your return will make things worse for them, not better. Join us. I beg. Listen to me, listen to the arguments, the philosophy.

And waited, on and on, vainly, for the slightest response to his increasingly desperate entreaty. For the brown eyes to flicker, for the rigid lips to utter a single word through the billows of cigarette smoke—yes, I will join you. Yes, I will agree to be debriefed. Yes, I will accept your money, your promises of resettlement, and the leftover life of a defector. He waited for the freed hands to cease their restless fondling of Ann’s lighter, to George from Ann with all my love.

Yet the more Smiley implored him, the more dogmatic Gerstmann’s silence became. Smiley pressed answers on him, but Gerstmann had no questions to support them. Gradually Gerstmann’s completeness was awesome. He was a man who had prepared himself for the gallows; who would rather die at the hands of his friends than live at the hands of his enemies. Next morning they parted, each to his appointed fate: Gerstmann, against all odds, flew back to Moscow to survive the purge and prosper. Smiley, with a high fever, returned to his Ann and not quite all her love; and to the later knowledge that Gerstmann was none other than Karla himself, Bill Haydon’s recruiter, case officer, mentor; and the man who had spirited Bill into Ann’s bed—this very bed where he now lay—in order to cloud Smiley’s hardening vision of Bill’s greater treason, against the service and its agents.

Karla, he thought, as his eyes bored into the darkness, what do you want with me now? Tell Max it concerns the Sandman.

Sandman, he thought: why do you wake me up when you are supposed to put me back to sleep?

Still incarcerated in her little Paris apartment, tormented equally in spirit and body, Ostrakova could not have slept even if she had wanted. Not all the Sandman’s magic would have helped her. She turned on her side and her squeezed ribs screamed as if the assassin’s arms were still flung round them while he prepared to sling her under the car. She tried her back and the pain in her rump was enough to make her vomit. And when she lay on her belly, her breasts became as sore as when she had tried to feed Alexandra in the months before she abandoned her, and she hated them.

It is God’s punishment, she told herself, without too much conviction. Not till morning came and she was back in Ostrakov’s armchair with his pistol across her knees did the waking world, for an hour or two, release her from her thoughts.

13

The gallery was situated in what the art trade calls the naughty end of Bond Street, and Smiley arrived on its doorstep that Monday morning long before any respectable art dealer was out of bed.

His Sunday had passed in mysterious tranquillity. Bywater Street had woken late, and so had Smiley. His memory had served him while he slept, and it continued to serve him in modest spasms of enlightenment throughout the day. In terms of memory at least, his black Grail had drawn a little nearer. His telephone had not rung once; a slight but persistent hangover had kept him in the contemplative mood. There was a club he belonged to, against his better judgment, near Pall Mall, and he lunched there in imperial solitude on warmed-up steak-and-kidney pie. Afterwards, from the head porter, he had requested his box from the club safe and discreetly abstracted a few illicit possessions, including a British passport in his former workname of Standfast, which he had never quite managed to return to Circus Housekeepers; an international driving licence to match; a sizeable sum of Swiss francs, his own certainly, but equally certainly retained in defiance of the Exchange Control Act. He had them in his pocket now.

The gallery had a dazzling whiteness and the canvases in its armoured glass window were much the same: white upon white, with just the faintest outline of a mosque or St. Paul’s Cathedral—or was it Washington?—drawn with a finger in the thick pigment. Six months ago the sign hanging over the pavement had proclaimed The Wandering Snail Coffee Shop. Today it read “ATELIER BENATI, GOÛT ARABE, PARIS, NEW YORK, MONACO,” and a discreet menu on the door proclaimed the new chef’s specialties: “Islam classique-moderne. Conceptual Interior Design. Contracts catered. Sonnez.”

Smiley did as he was bidden, a buzzer screamed, the glass door yielded. A shop-worn girl, ash blonde and half awake, eyed him warily over a white desk.

“If I could just look round,” said Smiley.

Her eyes lifted slightly towards an Islamic heaven. “The little red spots mean sold,” she drawled, and, having handed him a typed price-list, sighed and went back to her cigarette and her horoscope.

For a few moments Smiley shuffled unhappily from one canvas to another till he stood in front of the girl again.

“If I could have a word with Mr. Benati,” he said.

“Oh, I’m afraid Signor Benati is fully involved right now. That’s the trouble with being international.”

“If you could tell him it’s Mr. Angel,” Smiley proposed in the same diffident style. “If you could just tell him that. Angel, Alan Angel, he does know me.”

He sat himself on the S-shaped sofa. It was priced at two thousand pounds and covered in protective cellophane, which squeaked when he moved. He heard her lift the phone and sigh into it.

“Got an angel for you,” she drawled, in her pillow-talk voice. “As in Paradise, got it, angel?”

A moment later he was descending a spiral staircase into darkness. He reached the bottom and waited. There was a click and half a dozen picture lights sprang on to empty spaces where no pictures hung. A door opened revealing a small and dapper figure, quite motionless. His full white hair was swept back with bravado. He wore a black suit with a broad stripe and shoes with pantomime buckles. The stripe was definitely too big for him. His right fist was in his jacket pocket, but when he saw Smiley he drew it slowly out and held it at him like a dangerous blade.

“Why, Mr. Angel,” he declared in a distinctly mid-European accent, with a sharp glance up the staircase as if to see who was listening. “What pure pleasure, sir. It has been far too long. Come in, please.”

They shook hands, each keeping his distance.

“Hullo, Mr. Benati,” Smiley said, and followed him to an inner room and through it to a second, where Mr. Benati closed the door and gently leaned his back against it, perhaps as a bulwark against intrusion. For a while after that, neither man spoke at all, each preferring to study the other in a silence bred of mutual respect. Mr. Benati’s eyes were brown and they looked nowhere long and nowhere without a purpose. The room had the atmosphere of a sleazy boudoir, with a chaise longue and a pink hand-basin in one corner.

“So how’s trade, Toby?” Smiley asked.

Toby Esterhase had a special smile for that question and a special way of tilting his little palm.

“We have been lucky, George. We had a good opening, we had a fantastic summer. Autumn, George”—the gesture again—“autumn I would say is on the slow side. One must live off one’s hump actually. Some coffee, George? My girl can make some.”

“Vladimir’s dead,” said Smiley after another longish gap. “Shot dead on Hampstead Heath.”

“Too bad. That old man, huh? Too bad.”

“Oliver Lacon has asked me to sweep up the bits. As you were the Group’s postman, I thought I’d have a word with you.”

“Sure,” said Toby agreeably.

“You knew, then? About his death?”

“Read it in the papers.”

Smiley let his eye wander round the room. There were no newspapers anywhere.

“Any theories about who did it?” Smiley asked.

“At his age, George? After a lifetime of disappointments, you might say? No family, no prospects, the Group all washed up—I assumed he had done it himself. Naturally.”

Cautiously, Smiley sat himself on the chaise longue and, watched by Toby, picked up a bronze maquette of a dancer that stood on the table.

“Shouldn’t this be numbered if it’s a Degas, Toby?” Smiley asked.

“Degas, that’s a very grey area, George. You got to know exactly what you are dealing with.”

“But this one is genuine?” Smiley asked, with an air of really wishing to know.

“Totally.”

“Would you sell it to me?”

“What’s that?”

“Just out of academic interest. Is it for sale? If I offered to buy it, would I be out of court?”

Toby shrugged, slightly embarrassed.

“George, listen, we’re talking thousands, know what I mean? Like a year’s pension or something.”

“When was the last time you had anything to do with Vladi’s network, actually, Toby?” Smiley asked, returning the dancer to its table.

Toby digested this question at his leisure.

“Network?” he echoed incredulously at last. “Did I hear network, George?” Laughter in the normal run played little part in Toby’s repertoire but now he did manage a small if tense outburst. “You call that crazy Group a network? Twenty cuckoo Balts, leaky like a barn, and they make a network already?”

“Well, we have to call them something,” Smiley objected equably.

“Something, sure. Just not network, okay?”

“So what’s the answer?”

“What answer?”

“When did you last have dealings with the Group?”

“Years ago. Before they sacked me. Years ago.”

“How many years?”

“I don’t know.”

“Three?”

“May be.”

“Two?”

“You trying to pin me down, George?”

“I suppose I am. Yes.”

Toby nodded gravely as if he had suspected as much all along: “And have you forgotten, George, how it was with us in lamplighters? How overworked we were? How my boys and I played postman to half the networks in the Circus? Remember? In one week how many meetings, pick-ups? Twenty, thirty? In the high season once—forty? Go to Registry, George. If you’ve got Lacon behind you, go to Registry, draw the file, check the encounter sheets. That way you see exactly. Don’t come here trying to trip me up, know what I mean? Degas, Vladimir—I don’t like these questions. A friend, an old boss, my own house—it upsets me, okay?”

His speech having run for a deal longer than either of them apparently expected, Toby paused, as if waiting for Smiley to provide the explanation for his loquacity. Then he took a step forward, and turned up his palms in appeal.

“George,” he said reproachfully. “George, my name is Benati, okay?”

Smiley seemed to have lapsed into dejection. He was peering gloomily at the stacks of grimy art catalogues strewn over the carpet.

“I’m not called Hector, definitely not Esterhase,” Toby insisted. “I got an alibi for every day of the year—hiding from my bank manager. You think I want trouble round my neck? Émigrés, police even? This an interrogation, George?”

“You know me, Toby.”

“Sure. I know you, George. You want matches so you can burn my feet?”

Smiley’s gaze remained fixed upon the catalogues. “Before Vladimir died—hours before—he rang the Circus,” he said. “He said he wanted to give us information.”

“But this Vladimir was an old man, George!” Toby insisted—protesting, at least to Smiley’s ear, altogether too much. “Listen, there’s a lot of guys like him. Big background, been on the payroll too long; they get old, soft in the head, start writing crazy memoirs, seeing world plots everywhere, know what I mean?”

On and on, Smiley contemplated the catalogues, his round head supported on his clenched fists.

“Now why do you say that exactly, Toby?” he asked critically. “I don’t follow your reasoning.”

“What do you mean, why I say it? Old defectors, old spies, they get a bit cuckoo. They hear voices, talk to the dicky-birds. It’s normal.”

“Did Vladimir hear voices?”

“How should I know?”

“That’s what I was asking you, Toby,” Smiley explained reasonably, to the catalogues. “I told you Vladimir claimed to have news for us, and you replied to me that he was going soft in the head. I wondered how you knew. About the softness of Vladimir’s head. I wondered how recent was your information about his state of mind. And why you pooh-poohed whatever he might have had to say. That’s all.”

“George, these are very old games you are playing. Don’t twist my words. Okay? You want to ask me, ask me. Please. But don’t twist my words.”

“It wasn’t suicide, Toby,” Smiley said, still without a glance at him. “It definitely wasn’t suicide. I saw the body, believe me. It wasn’t a jealous husband either—not unless he was equipped with a Moscow Centre murder weapon. What we used to call them, those gun things? ‘Inhumane killers,’ wasn’t it? Well, that’s what Moscow used. An inhumane killer.”

Smiley once more pondered, but this time—even if it was too late—Toby had the wit to wait in silence.

“You see, Toby, when Vladimir made that phone call to the Circus he demanded Max. Myself, in other words. Not his postman, which would have been you. Not Hector. He demanded his vicar, which for better or worse was me. Against all protocol, against all training, and against all precedent. Never done it before. I wasn’t there of course, so they offered him a substitute, a silly little boy called Mostyn. It didn’t matter because in the event they never met anyway. But can you tell me why he didn’t ask for Hector?”

“George, I mean really! These are shadows you are chasing! Should I know why he doesn’t ask for me? We are responsible for the omissions of others, suddenly? What is this?”

“Did you quarrel with him? Would that be a reason?”

“Why should I quarrel with Vladimir? He was being dramatic, George. That’s how they are, these old guys when they retire.” Toby paused as if to imply that Smiley himself was not above these foibles. “They get bored, they miss the action, they want stroking, so they make up some piece of mickeymouse.”

“But not all of them get shot, do they, Toby? That’s the worry, you see: the cause and effect. Toby quarrels with Vladimir one day, Vladimir gets shot with a Russian gun the next. In police terms that’s what one calls an embarrassing chain of events. In our terms too, actually.”

“George, are you crazy? What the hell is quarrel? I told you: I never quarrel with the old man in my life!”

“Mikhel said you did.”

“Mikhel? You go talking to Mikhel?”

“According to Mikhel, the old man was very bitter about you. ‘Hector is no good,’ Vladimir kept telling him. He quoted Vladimir’s words exactly. ‘Hector is no good.’ Mikhel was very surprised. Vladimir used to think highly of you. Mikhel couldn’t think what had been going on between the two of you that could produce such a severe change of heart. ‘Hector is no good.’ Why weren’t you any good, Toby? What happened that made Vladimir so passionate about you? I’d like to keep it away from the police if I could, you see. For all our sakes.”

But the fieldman in Toby Esterhase was by now fully awake, and he knew that interrogations, like battles, are never won but only lost.

“George, this is absurd,” he declared with pity rather than hurt. “I mean it’s so obvious you are fooling me. Know that? Some old man builds castles in the air, so you want to go to the police already? Is that what Lacon is hiring you for? Are these the bits you are sweeping up? George?”

This time, the long silence seemed to create some resolution in Smiley, and when he spoke again it was as if he had not much time left. His tone was brisk, even impatient.

“Vladimir came to see you. I don’t know when but within the last few weeks. You met him or you talked to him over the phone—call-box to call-box, whatever the technique was. He asked you to do something for him. You refused. That’s why he demanded Max when he rang the Circus on Friday night. He’d had Hector’s answer already and it was no. That’s also why Hector was ‘no good.’ You turned him down.”

This time Toby made no attempt to interrupt.

“And if I may say so, you’re scared,” Smiley resumed, studiously not looking at the lump in Toby’s jacket pocket. “You know enough about who killed Vladimir to think they might kill you too. You even thought it possible I wasn’t the right Angel.” He waited, but Toby didn’t rise. His tone softened. “You remember what we used to say at Sarratt, Toby—about fear being information without the cure? How we should respect it? Well, I respect yours, Toby. I want to know more about it. Where it came from. Whether I should share it. That’s all.”

Still at the door, his little palms pressed flat against the panels, Toby Esterhase studied Smiley most attentively and without the smallest decline in his composure. He even contrived to suggest by the depth and question of his glance that his concern was now for Smiley rather than himself. Next, in line with this solicitous approach, he took a pace, then another, into the room—but tentatively, and somewhat as if he were visiting an ailing friend in hospital. Only then, with a passable imitation of a bedside manner, did he respond to Smiley’s accusations with a most perceptive question, one that Smiley himself, as it happened, had been deliberating in some depth over the last two days.

“George. Kindly answer me something. Who is speaking here actually? Is it George Smiley? Is it Oliver Lacon? Mikhel? Who is speaking, please?” Receiving no immediate answer, he continued his advance as far as a grimy satin-covered stool where he perched himself with a catlike trimness, one hand over each knee. “Because for an official fellow, George, you are asking some pretty damn unofficial questions, it strikes me. You are taking rather an unofficial attitude, I think.”

“You saw Vladimir and you spoke to him. What happened?” Smiley asked, quite undeflected by this challenge. “You tell me that, and I’ll tell you who is speaking here.”

In the farthest corner of the ceiling there was a yellowed patch of glass about a metre square and the shadows that played over it were the feet of passers-by in the street. For some reason Toby’s eyes had fixed on this strange spot and he seemed to read his decision there, like an instruction flashed on a screen.

“Vladimir put up a distress rocket,” Toby said in exactly the same tone as before, of neither conceding nor confiding. Indeed, by some trick of tone or inflection, he even managed to bring a note of warning to his voice.

“Through the Circus?”

“Through friends of mine,” said Toby.

“When?”

Toby gave a date. Two weeks ago. A crash meeting. Smiley asked where it took place.

“In the Science Museum,” Toby replied with new-found confidence. “The café on the top floor, George. We drank coffee, admired the old aeroplanes hanging from the roof. You going to report all this to Lacon, George? Feel free, okay? Be my guest. I got nothing to hide.”

“And he put the proposition?”

“Sure. He put me a proposition. He wanted me to do a lamplighter job. To be his camel. That was our joke, back in the old Moscow days, remember? To collect, carry across the desert, to deliver. ‘Toby, I got no passport. Aidez-moi. Mon ami, aidez-moi.’ You know how he talked. Like de Gaulle. We used to call him that—‘the other General.’ Remember?”

“Carry what?”

“He was not precise. It was documentary, it was small, no concealment was needed. This much he tells me.”

“For somebody putting out feelers, he seems to have told you a lot.”

“He was asking a hell of a lot too,” said Toby calmly, and waited for Smiley’s next question.

“And the where?” Smiley asked. “Did Vladimir tell you that too?”

“Germany.”

“Which one?”

“Ours. The north of it.”

“Casual encounter? Dead-letter boxes? Live? What sort of meeting?”

“On the fly. I should take a train ride. From Hamburg north. The hand-over to be made on the train, details on acceptance.”

“And it was to be a private arrangement. No Circus, no Max?”

“For the time being, very private, George.”

Smiley picked his words with tact. “And the compensation for your labours?”

A distinct scepticism marked Toby’s answer: “If we get the document—that’s what he called it, okay? Document. If we get the document, and the document is genuine, which he swore it was, we win immediately a place in Heaven. We take first the document to Max, tell Max the story. Max would know its meaning, Max would know the crucial importance—of the document. Max would reward us. Gifts, promotion, medals, Max will put us in the House of Lords. Sure. Only problem was, Vladimir didn’t know Max was on the shelf and the Circus has joined the Boy Scouts.”

“Did he know that Hector was on the shelf?”

“Fifty-fifty, George.”

“What does that mean?” Then, with a “never mind,” Smiley cancelled his own question again and lapsed into prolonged thought.

“George, you want to drop this line of enquiry,” Toby said earnestly. “That is my strong advice to you, abandon it,” he said, and waited.

Smiley might not have heard. Momentarily shocked, he seemed to be pondering the scale of Toby’s error.

“The point is, you sent him packing,” he muttered, and remained staring into space. “He appealed to you and you slammed the door in his face. How could you do that, Toby? You of all people?”

The reproach brought Toby furiously to his feet, which was perhaps what it was meant to do. His eyes lit up, his cheeks coloured, the sleeping Hungarian in him was wide awake.

“And you want to hear why, maybe? You want to know why I told him, ‘Go to hell, Vladimir. Leave my sight, please, you make me sick’? You want to know who his connect is out there—this magic guy in North Germany with the crock of gold that’s going to make millionaires of us overnight, George—you want to know his full identity? Remember the name Otto Leipzig, by any chance? Holder many times of our Creep of the Year award? Fabricator, intelligence pedlar, confidence man, sex maniac, pimp, also various sorts of criminal? Remember that great hero?”

Smiley saw the tartan walls of the hotel again, and the dreadful hunting prints of Jorrocks in full cry; he saw the two black-coated figures, the giant and the midget, and the General’s huge mottled hand resting on the tiny shoulder of his protégé. “Max, here is my good friend Otto. I have brought him to tell his own story.” He heard the steady thunder of the planes landing and taking off at Heathrow Airport.

“Vaguely,” Smiley replied equably. “Yes, vaguely I do remember an Otto Leipzig. Tell me about him. I seem to remember he had rather a lot of names. But then so do we all, don’t we?”

“About two hundred, but Leipzig he ended up with. Know why? Leipzig in East Germany; he liked the jail there. He was that kind of crazy joker. Remember the stuff he peddled, by any chance?” Believing he had the initiative, Toby stepped boldly forward and stood over the passive Smiley while he talked down at him: “George, do you not even remember the incredible and total bilge which year for year that creep would push out under fifteen different source names to our West European stations, mainly German? Our expert on the new Estonian order? Our top source on Soviet arms shipments out of Leningrad? Our inside ear at Moscow Centre, our principal Karla-watcher, even?” Smiley did not stir. “How he took our Berlin resident alone for two thousand Deutschmarks for a rewrite from Stern magazine? How he foxed that old General, worked on him like a sucking-leech, time and again—‘us fellow Balts’—that line? ‘General, I just got the Crown jewels for you—only trouble, I don’t have the air fare’? Jesus!”

“It wasn’t all fabrication, though, was it, Toby?” Smiley objected mildly. “Some of it, I seem to remember—in certain areas, at least—turned out to be rather good stuff.”

“Count it on one finger.”

“His Moscow Centre material, for instance. I don’t remember that we faulted him on that, ever?”

“Okay! So Centre gave him some decent chicken-feed occasionally, so he could pass us the other crap! How else does anyone play a double, for God’s sake?”

Smiley seemed about to argue this point, then changed his mind.

“I see,” he said finally, as if overruled. “Yes, I see what you mean. A plant.”

“Not a plant, a creep. A little of this, a little of that. A dealer. No principles. No standards. Work for anyone who sweetens his pie.”

“I take the point,” said Smiley gravely, in the same diminished tone. “And of course he settled in North Germany, too, didn’t he? Up towards Travemünde somewhere.”

“Otto Leipzig never settled anywhere in his life,” said Toby with contempt. “George, that guy’s a drifter, a total bum. Dresses like he was a Rothschild, owns a cat and a bicycle. Know what his last job was, this great spy? Night-watchman in some lousy Hamburg cargo house somewhere! Forget him.”

“And he had a partner,” Smiley said, in the same tone of innocent reminiscence. “Yes, that comes back to me too. An immigrant, an East German.”

“Worse than East German: Saxon. Name of Kretzschmar, first name was Claus. Claus with a ‘C,’ don’t ask me why. I mean these guys have got no logic at all. Claus was also a creep. They stole together, pimped together, faked reports together.”

“But that was long ago, Toby,” Smiley put in gently.

“Who cares? It was a perfect marriage.”

“Then I expect it didn’t last,” said Smiley, in an aside to himself.

But perhaps Smiley had for once overdone his meekness; or perhaps Toby simply knew him too well. For a warning light had come up in his swift, Hungarian eye, and a tuck of suspicion formed on his bland brow. He stood back and, contemplating Smiley, passed one hand thoughtfully over his immaculate white hair.

“George,” he said. “Listen, who are you fooling, okay?”

Smiley did not speak, but lifted the Degas, and turned it round, then put it down.

“George, listen to me once. Please! Okay, George? Maybe I give you once a lecture.”

Smiley glanced at him, then looked away.

“George, I owe you. You got to hear me. So you pulled me from out the gutter once in Vienna when I was a stinking kid. I was a Leipzig. A bum. So you got me my job with the Circus. So we had a lot of times together, stole some horses. You remember the first rule of retirement, George? ‘No moonlighting. No fooling with loose ends. No private enterprise ever’? You remember who preached this rule? At Sarratt? In the corridors? George Smiley did. ‘When it’s over, it’s over. Pull down the shutters, go home!’ So now what do you want to do, suddenly? Play kiss-kiss with an old crazy General who’s dead but won’t lie down and a five-sided comedian like Otto Leipzig! What is this? The last cavalry charge on the Kremlin suddenly? We’re over, George. We got no licence. They don’t want us any more. Forget it.” He hesitated, suddenly embarrassed. “So okay, Ann gave you a bad time with Bill Haydon. So there’s Karla, and Karla was Bill’s big daddy in Moscow. George, I mean this gets very crude, know what I mean?”

His hands fell to his sides. He stared at the still figure before him. Smiley’s eyelids were nearly closed. His head had dropped forward. With the shifting of his cheeks deep crevices had appeared round his mouth and eyes.

“We never faulted Leipzig’s reports on Moscow Centre,” Smiley said, as if he hadn’t heard the last part. “I remember distinctly that we never faulted them. Nor on Karla. Vladimir trusted him implicitly. On the Moscow stuff, so did we.”

“George, who ever faulted a report on Moscow Centre? Please? So okay, once in a while we got a defector, he tells you: ‘This thing is crap and that thing is maybe true.’ So where’s the collateral? Where’s the hard base, you used to say? Some guy feeds you a story: ‘Karla just built a new spy nursery in Siberia.’ So who’s to say he didn’t? Keep it vague enough, you can’t lose.”

“That was why we put up with him,” Smiley went on, as if he hadn’t heard. “Where the Soviet service was involved, he played a straight game.”

“George,” said Toby softly, shaking his head. “You got to wake up. The crowds have all gone home.”

“Will you tell me the rest of it now, Toby? Will you tell me exactly what Vladimir said to you? Please?”

So in the end, as a reluctant gift of friendship, Toby told it as Smiley asked, straight out, with a frankness that was like defeat.

The maquette that might have been by Degas portrayed a ballerina with her arms above her head. Her body was curved backward and her lips were parted in what might have been ecstasy and there was no question but that, fake or genuine, she bore an uncomfortable if superficial resemblance to Ann. Smiley had taken her in his hands again and was slowly turning her, gazing at her this way and that with no clear appreciation. Toby was back on his satin stool. In the ceiling window, the shadowed feet walked jauntily.

Toby and Vladimir had met in the café of the Science Museum on the aeronautical floor, Toby repeated. Vladimir was in a state of high excitement and kept clutching Toby’s arm, which Toby didn’t like; it made him conspicuous. Otto Leipzig had managed the impossible, Vladimir kept saying. It was the big one, the chance in a million, Toby; Otto Leipzig had landed the one Max had always dreamed of, “the full settlement of all our claims,” as Vladimir had put it. When Toby asked him somewhat acidly what claims he had in mind, Vladimir either wouldn’t or couldn’t say: “Ask Max,” he insisted. “If you do not believe me, ask Max, tell Max it is the big one.”

“So what’s the deal?” Toby had asked—knowing, he said, that where Otto Leipzig was concerned the bill came first and the goods a long, long way behind. “How much does he want, the great hero?”

Toby confessed to Smiley that he had found it hard to conceal his scepticism—“which put a bad mood on the meeting from the start.” Vladimir outlined the terms. Leipzig had the story, said Vladimir, but he also had certain material proofs that the story was true. There was first a document, and the document was what Leipzig called a Vorspeise, or appetizer. There was also a second proof, a letter, held by Vladimir. There was then the story itself, which would be given by other materials, which Leipzig had entrusted to safe keeping. The document showed how the story was obtained, the materials themselves were incontrovertible.

“And the subject?” Smiley asked.

“Not revealed,” Toby replied shortly. “To Hector, not revealed. Get Max, and okay—then Vladimir reveals the subject. But Hector for the time being got to shut up and run the errands.”

For a moment Toby appeared about to launch upon a second speech of discouragement. “George, I mean look here, the old boy was just totally cuckoo,” he began. “Otto Leipzig was taking him a complete ride.” Then he saw Smiley’s expression, so inward and inaccessible, and contented himself instead with a repetition of Otto Leipzig’s totally outrageous demands.

“The document to be taken personally to Max by Vladimir, Moscow Rules at all points, no middle men, no correspondence. The preparations they made already on the telephone—”

“Telephone between London and Hamburg?” Smiley interrupted, suggesting by his tone that this was new and unwelcome information.

“They used word code, he tells me. Old pals, they know how to fox around. But not with the proof, says Vladi; with the proof there’s no foxing at all. No phones, no mails, no trucks, they got to have a camel, period. Vladi’s security-crazy, okay, this we know already. From now on, only Moscow Rules apply.”

Smiley remembered his own phone call to Hamburg of Saturday night, and wondered again what kind of establishment Otto Leipzig had been using as his telephone exchange.

“Once the Circus had declared its interest,” Toby continued, “they pay a down payment to Otto Leipzig of five thousand Swiss for an audition fee. George! Five thousand Swiss! For openers! Just to be in the game! Next—George, you got to hear this—next, Otto Leipzig to be flown to a safe house in England for the audition. George, I mean I never heard such craziness. You want the rest? If, following the audition, the Circus wants to buy the material itself—you want to hear how much?”

Smiley did.

“Fifty grand Swiss. Maybe you want to sign me a cheque?”

Toby waited for a cry of outrage but none came.

“All for Leipzig?”

“Sure. They were Leipzig’s terms. Who else would be so cuckoo?”

“What did Vladimir ask for himself?”

A small hesitation. “Nothing,” said Toby reluctantly. Then, as if to leave that point behind, set off on a fresh wave of indignation.

“Basta. So now all Hector got to do is fly to Hamburg at his own expense, take a train north and play rabbit for some crazy entrapment game that Otto Leipzig has lined up for himself with the East Germans, the Russians, the Poles, the Bulgarians, the Cubans, and also no doubt, being modern, the Chinese. I said to him—George, listen to me—I said to him: ‘Vladimir, old friend, excuse me, pay attention to me once. Tell me what in life is so important that the Circus pays five thousand Swiss from its precious reptile fund for one lousy audition with Otto Leipzig? Maria Callas never got so much and believe me she sang a damn lot better than Otto does.’ He’s holding my arm. Here.” Demonstrating, Toby grasped his own biceps. “Squeezing me like I am an orange. That old boy had some strength still, believe me. ‘Fetch the document for me, Hector.’ He is speaking Russian. That’s a very quiet place, that museum. Everyone has stopped to listen to him. I had a bad feeling. He is weeping. ‘For the sake of God, Hector, I am an old man. I got no legs, no passport, no one I can trust but Otto Leipzig. Go to Hamburg and fetch the document. When he sees the proof, Max will believe me, Max has faith.’ I try to console him, make some hints. I tell him émigrés are bad news these days, change of policy, new government. I advise him, ‘Vladimir, go home, play some chess. Listen, I come round to the library one day, have a game maybe.’ Then he says to me: ‘Hector, I began this. It was me sent the order to Otto Leipzig telling him to explore the position. Me who sent the money to him for the groundwork, all I had.’ Listen, that was an old, sad man. Past it.”

Toby made a pause but Smiley did not stir. Toby stood up, went to a cupboard, poured two glasses of an extremely indifferent sherry, and put one on the table beside the Degas maquette. He said “Cheers” and drank back his glass, but still Smiley did not budge. His inertia rekindled Toby’s anger.

“So I killed him, George, okay? It’s Hector’s fault, okay? Hector is personally and totally responsible for the old man’s death. That’s all I need.” He flung out both hands, palms upward. “George! Advise me! George, for this story I should go to Hamburg, unofficial, no cover, no baby-sitter? Know where the East German border is up there? From Lübeck two kilometres? Less? Remember? In Travemünde you got to stay on the left of the street or you’ve defected by mistake.” Smiley did not laugh. “And in the unlikely event I come back, I should call up George Smiley, go round to Saul Enderby with him, knock on the back door like a bum—‘Let us in, Saul, please, we got hot information totally reliable from Otto Leipzig, only five grand Swiss for an audition concerning matters totally forbidden under the Boy Scout laws’? I should do this, George?”

From an inside pocket, Smiley drew a battered packet of English cigarettes. From the packet he drew the home-made contact print, which he passed silently across the table for Toby to look at.

“Who’s the second man?” Smiley asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Not his partner, the Saxon, the man he stole with in the old days? Kretzschmar?”

Shaking his head, Toby Esterhase went on looking at the picture.

“So who’s the second man?” Smiley asked again.

Toby handed back the photograph. “George, pay attention to me, please,” he said quietly. “You listening?”

Smiley might have been and might not. He was threading the print back into the cigarette packet.

“People forge things like that these days, you know that? That’s very easy done, George. I want to put a head on another guy’s shoulders, I got the equipment, it takes me maybe two minutes. You’re not a technical guy, George, you don’t understand these matters. You don’t buy photographs from Otto Leipzig, you don’t buy Degas from Signor Benati, follow me?”

“Do they forge negatives?”

“Sure. You forge the print, then you photograph it, make a new negative—why not?”

“Is this a forgery?” Smiley asked.

Toby hesitated a long time. “I don’t think so.”

“Leipzig travelled a lot. How did we raise him if we needed him?” Smiley asked.

“He was strictly arm’s length. Totally.”

“So how did we raise him?”

“For a routine rendezvous the Hamburger Abendblatt marriage ads. Petra, aged twenty-two, blonde, petite, former singer—that crap. George, listen to me. Leipzig is a dangerous bum with very many lousy connections, mostly still in Moscow.”

“What about emergencies? Did he have a house, a girl?”

“He never had a house in his life. For crash meetings, Claus Kretzschmar played key-holder. George, for God’s sake, hear me once—”

“So how did we reach Kretzschmar?”

“He’s got a couple of night-clubs. Cat houses. We left a message there.”

A warning buzzer rang and from upstairs they heard the sound of voices raised in argument.

“I’m afraid Signor Benati has a conference in Florence today,” the blonde girl was saying. “That’s the trouble with being international.”

But the caller refused to believe her; Smiley could hear the rising tide of his protest. For a fraction of a second Toby’s brown eyes lifted sharply to the sound; then with a sigh he pulled open a wardrobe and drew out a grimy raincoat and a brown hat, despite the sunlight in the ceiling window.

“What’s it called?” Smiley asked. “Kretzschmar’s night-club—what’s it called?”

“The Blue Diamond. George, don’t do it, okay? Whatever it is, drop it. So the photo is genuine, then what? The Circus has a picture of some guy rolling in the snow courtesy of Otto Leipzig. You think that’s a gold-mine suddenly? You think that makes Saul Enderby horny?”

Smiley looked at Toby, and remembered him, and remembered also that in all the years they had known each other and worked together, Toby had never once volunteered the truth, that information was money to him; even when he counted it valueless, he never threw it away.

“What else did Vladimir tell you about Leipzig’s information?” Smiley asked.

“He said it was some old case come alive. Years of investment. Some crap about the Sandman. He was a child again, remembering fairy tales, for God’s sake. See what I mean?”

“What about the Sandman?”

“To tell you it concerned the Sandman. That’s all. The Sandman is making a legend for a girl. Max will understand. George, he was weeping, for Christ’s sake. He’d have said anything that came into his head. He wanted the action. He was an old spy in a hurry. You used to say they were the worst.”

Toby was at the far door, already half-way gone. But he turned and came back despite the approaching clamour from upstairs, because something in Smiley’s manner seemed to trouble him—“a definitely harder stare,” he called it afterward, “like I’d completely insulted him somehow.”

“George? George, this is Toby, remember? If you don’t get the hell out of here, that guy upstairs will sequester you in part-payment, hear me?”

Smiley hardly did. “Years of investment and the Sandman was making a legend for a girl?” he repeated. “What else? Toby, what else!”

“He was behaving like a crazy man again.”

“The General was? Vladi was?”

“No, the Sandman. George, listen. ‘The Sandman is behaving like a crazy man again, the Sandman is making a legend for a girl, Max will understand.’ Finito. The total garbage. I’ve told you every word. Go easy now, hear me?”

From upstairs, the sounds of argument grew still louder. A door slammed, they heard footsteps stamping towards the staircase. Toby gave Smiley’s arm a last, swift pat.

“Goodbye, George. You want a Hungarian baby-sitter some day, call me. Hear that? You’re messing around with a creep like Otto Leipzig, then you better have a creep like Toby look after you. Don’t go out alone nights, you’re too young.”

Climbing the steel ladder back to the gallery, Smiley all but knocked over an irate creditor on his way down. But this was not important to Smiley; neither was the insolent sigh of the ash-blonde girl as he stepped into the street. What mattered was that he had put a name to the second face in the photograph; and to the name, the story, which like an undiagnosed pain had been nagging at his memory for the last thirty-six hours—as Toby might have said, the story of a legend.

And that, indeed, is the dilemma of those would-be historians who are concerned, only months after the close of the affair, to chart the interplay of Smiley’s knowledge and his actions. Toby told him this much, they say, so he did that much. Or: if so-and-so had not occurred, then there would have been no resolution. Yet the truth is more complex than this, and far less handy. As a patient tests himself on coming out of the anaesthetic—this leg, that leg, do the hands still close and open?—so Smiley by a succession of cautious movements grew into his own strength of body and mind, probing the motives of his adversary as he probed his own.

14

He was driving on a high plateau and the plateau was above the tree-line because the pines had been planted low in the valley’s cleft. It was early evening of the same day and in the plain the first lights were pricking the wet gloom. On the horizon lay the city of Oxford, lifted by ground mist, an academic Jerusalem. The view from that side was new to him and increased his sense of unreality, of being conveyed rather than determining his own journey; of being in the grasp of thoughts that were not his to command. His visit to Toby Esterhase had fallen, arguably, within the crude guide-lines of Lacon’s brief; but this journey, he knew, led for better or for worse to the forbidden province of his secret interest. Yet he was aware of no alternative, and wanted none. Like an archaeologist who has delved all his life in vain, Smiley had begged for one last day, and this was it.

At first he had watched his rear-view mirror constantly, how the familiar motor cycle had hung behind him like a gull at sea. But when he left the last roundabout the man called Ferguson had not followed him, and when he pulled up to read the map nothing passed him either; so either they had guessed his destination or, for some arcane reason of procedure, they had forbidden their man to cross the county border. Sometimes, as he drove, a trepidation gripped him. Let her be, he thought. He had heard things; not much, but enough to guess the rest. Let her be, let her find her own peace where she can. But he knew that peace was not his to give, that the battle he was involved in must be continuous to have any meaning at all.

The kennel sign was like a painted grin: “MERRILEE BOARDING ALL PETS WELCOME EGGS.” A daubed yellow dog wearing a top hat pointed one paw down a cart-track; the track, when he took it, led so steeply downward that it felt like a free fall. He passed a pylon and heard the wind howling in it; he entered the plantation. First came the young trees; then the old ones darkened over him and he was in the Black Forest of his German childhood heading for some unrevealed interior. He switched on his headlights, rounded a steep bend, and another, and a third, and there was the cabin much as he had imagined it—her dacha, as she used to call it. Once she had had the house in Oxford and the dacha as a place away from it. Now there was only the dacha; she had quitted towns for ever. It stood in its own clearing of tree trunks and trodden mud, with a ramshackle veranda and a wood-shingle roof and a tin chimney with smoke coming out of it. The clapboard walls were blackened with creosote, a galvanised iron feed-tub almost blocked the front porch. On a bit of lawn stood a home-made bird-table with enough bread to feed an ark, and dotted round the clearing, like allotment huts, stood the asbestos sheds and wire runs that held the chickens and all the pets welcome without discrimination.

Karla, he thought. What a place to look for you.

He parked, and his arrival set loose a bedlam as dogs sobbed in torment and thin walls thundered to desperate bodies. He walked to the house, carrier-bag in hand, the bottles bumping against his legs. Above the din he heard his own feet rattling up the six steps of the veranda. A notice on the door read: “If OUT do NOT leave pets on spec.” And underneath, seemingly added in a fury, “No bloody monkeys.”

The bell-pull was a donkey’s tail in plastic. He reached for it but the door had already opened and a frail pretty woman peered at him from the interior darkness of the cabin. Her eyes were timid and grey, she had that period English beauty which had once been Ann’s: accepting, and grave. She saw him and stopped dead. “Oh, Lord,” she whispered. “Gosh.” Then looked downward at her brogues, brushing back her forelock with one finger, while the dogs barked themselves hoarse at him from behind their wire.

“I’m sorry, Hilary,” said Smiley, with great gentleness. “It’s only for an hour, I promise. That’s all it is. An hour.”

A deep, masculine voice, very slow, issued out of the darkness behind her. “What is it, Hils?” growled the voice. “Bogweevil, budgie, or giraffe?”

The question was followed by a slow thud like the movement of cloth over something hollow.

“It’s human, Con,” Hilary called over her shoulder, and went back to looking at her brogues.

“She human or the other thing?” the voice demanded.

“It’s George, Con. Don’t be cross, Con.”

“George? Which George? George the Lorry, who waters my coal, or George the Meat, who poisons my dogs?”

“It’s just some questions,” Smiley assured Hilary in the same deeply compassionate tone. “An old case. Nothing momentous, I promise you.”

“It doesn’t matter, George,” Hilary said, still looking downward. “Honestly. It’s fine.”

“Stop all that flirting!” the voice from inside the house commanded. “Unhand her, whoever you are!”

As the thudding drew gradually nearer, Smiley leaned past Hilary and spoke into the doorway. “Connie, it’s me,” he said. And once again, his voice did everything possible to signal his goodwill.

First came the puppies—four of them, probably whippets—in a fast pack. Next came a mangy old mongrel with barely life enough to reach the veranda and collapse. Then the door shuddered open to its fullest extent and revealed a mountainous woman propped crookedly between two thick wooden crutches, which she did not seem to hold. She had white hair clipped short as a man’s, and watery, very shrewd eyes that held him fiercely in their stare. So long was her examination of him, in fact, so leisured and minute—his earnest face, his baggy suit, the plastic carrier-bag dangling from his left hand, his whole posture of waiting meekly to be admitted—that it gave her an almost regal authority over him, to which her stillness, and her troubled breathing, and her crippled state only contributed greater strength.

“Oh, my giddy aunts,” she announced, still studying him, and blew out a stream of air. “Jumping whatevers. Damn you, George Smiley. Damn you and all who sail in you. Welcome to Siberia.”

Then she smiled, and her smile was so sudden, and fresh, and little-girl, that it almost washed away the long questioning that had gone before it.

“Hullo, Con,” said Smiley.

Her eyes, notwithstanding her smile, stayed on him still. They had the pallor of a new-born baby’s.

“Hils,” she said, at last. “I said Hils!”

“Yes, Con?”

“Go feed the doggie-wogs, darling. When you’ve done that, feed the filthy chickadees. Glut the brutes. When you’ve done that, mix tomorrow’s meal, and when you’ve done that, bring me the humane killer so that I can dispatch this interfering whatsit to an early Paradise. George, follow me.”

Hilary smiled but seemed unable to move till Connie softly pushed an elbow into her to get her going.

“Hoof it, darling. There’s nothing he can do to you now. He’s shot his bolt, and so have you, and, God knows, so have I.”

It was a house of day and night at once. At the centre, on a pine table littered with the remains of toast and Marmite, an old oil lamp shed a globe of yellow light, intensifying the darkness round it. The gleam of blue rain clouds, streaked by sunset, filled the far French windows. Gradually, as Smiley followed Connie’s agonisingly slow procession, he realised that this one wooden room was all there was. For an office, they had the roll-top desk laden with bills and flea powder; for a bedroom the brass double bedstead with its heap of stuffed toy animals lying like dead soldiers between the pillows; for a drawing-room Connie’s rocking-chair and a crumbling wicker sofa; for a kitchen a gas ring fired from a cylinder; and for decoration the unclearable litter of old age.

“Connie’s not coming back, George,” she called as she hobbled ahead of him. “Wild horses can puff and blow their snivelling hearts out, the old fool has hung up her boots for good.” Reaching her rocking-chair, she began the ponderous business of turning herself round until she had her back to it. “So if that’s what you’re after, you can tell Saul Enderby to shove it up his smoke and pipe it.” She held out her arms to him and he thought she wanted him to kiss her. “Not that, you sex maniac. Batten on to my hands!”

He did so, and lowered her into the rocking-chair.

“That’s not what I came for, Con,” said Smiley. “I’m not trying to woo you away, I promise.”

“For one good reason, she’s dying,” she announced firmly, not seeming to notice his interjection. “The old fool’s for the shredder, and high time too. The leech tries to fool me, of course. That’s because he’s a funk. Bronchitis. Rheumatism. Touch of the weather. Balls, the lot of it. It’s death, that’s what I’m suffering from. The systematic encroachment of the big D. Is that booze you’re toting in that bag?”

“Yes. Yes, it is,” said Smiley.

“Goody. Let’s have lots. How’s the demon Ann?”

On the draining-board, amid a permanent pile of washing-up, he found two glasses, and half filled them.

“Flourishing, I gather,” he replied.

Reciprocating, by his own kindly smile, her evident pleasure at his visit, he held out a glass to her and she grappled it between her mittened hands.

“You gather,” she echoed. “Wish you would gather. Gather her up for good is what you should do. Or else put powdered glass in her coffee. All right, what are you after?” she demanded, all in the same breath. “I never knew you yet to do anything without a reason. Mud in your eye.”

“And in yours, Con,” said Smiley.

To drink, she had to lean her whole trunk towards the glass. And as her huge head lurched into the glare of the lamplight, he saw—he knew from too much experience—that she was telling no less than the truth, and her flesh had the leprous whiteness of death.

“Come on. Out with it,” she ordered, in her sternest tone. “I’m not sure I’ll help you, mind. I’ve discovered love since we parted. Addles the hormones. Softens the teeth.”

He had wanted time to know her again. He was unsure of her.

“It’s one of our old cases, Con, that’s all,” he began apologetically. “It’s come alive again, the way they do.” He tried to raise the pitch of his voice to make it sound casual. “We need more details. You know how you used to be about keeping records,” he added, teasingly.

Her eyes did not stir from his face.

“Kirov,” he went on, pronouncing the name very slowly. “Kirov, first name Oleg. Ring a bell? Soviet Embassy, Paris, three or four years ago, Second Secretary? We thought he was some sort of Moscow Centre man.”

“He was,” she said, and sat back a little, still watching him.

She motioned for a cigarette. A packet of ten lay on the table. He wedged one between her lips and lit it, but still her eyes would not leave his face.

“Saul Enderby threw that case out of the window,” she said and, forming her lips as if to play a flute, blew a lot of smoke straight downward in order to avoid his face.

“He ruled it should be dropped,” Smiley corrected her.

“What’s the difference?”

Smiley had not expected to find himself defending Saul Enderby.

“It ran awhile, then in the transition time between my tenure and his, he ruled, quite understandably, that it was unproductive,” Smiley said, picking his words with measured care.

“And now he’s changed his mind,” she said.

“I’ve got bits, Con. I want it all.”

“You always did,” she said. “George,” she muttered. “George Smiley. Lord alive. Lord bless us and preserve us. George.” Her gaze was half possessive, half disapproving, as if he were an erring son she loved. It held him awhile longer, then switched to the French windows and the darkening sky outside.

“Kirov,” he said again, reminding her, and waited, wondering seriously whether it was all up with her; whether her mind was dying with her body, and this was all there was.

“Kirov, Oleg,” she repeated, in a musing tone. “Born Leningrad October, 1929, according to his passport, which doesn’t mean a damn thing except that he probably never went near Leningrad in his life.” She smiled, as if that were the way of the wicked world. “Arrived Paris June 1, 1974, in the rank and quality of Second Secretary, Commercial. Three to four years ago, you say? Dear Lord, it could be twenty. That’s right, darling, he was a hood. ’Course he was. Identified by the Paris lodge of the poor old Riga Group, which didn’t help us any, specially not on the fifth floor. What was his real name? Kursky. Of course it was. Yes, I think I remember Oleg Kirov né Kursky all right.” Her smile returned, and was once more very pretty. “Must have been Vladimir’s last case, near enough. How is the old stoat?” she asked, and her moist clever eyes waited for his answer.

“Oh, fighting fit,” said Smiley.

“Still terrifying the virgins of Paddington?”

“I’m sure he is.”

“Bless you, darling,” said Connie, and turned her head till it was in profile to him, very dark except for the one fine line from the oil lamp, while she again stared out of the French windows.

“Go and see how the mad bitch is, will you, heart?” she asked fondly. “Make sure the idiot hasn’t thrown herself into the millrace or drunk the universal weed-killer.”

Stepping outside, Smiley stood on the veranda, and in the thickening gloom made out the figure of Hilary loping awkwardly among the coops. He heard the clanking of her spoon on the bucket, and shreds of her well-bred voice on the night air as she called out childish names: “Come on Whitey, Flopsy, Bo.”

“She’s fine,” said Smiley, coming back. “Feeding the chickens.”

“I should tell her to bugger off, shouldn’t I, George?” she remarked, ignoring his information entirely. “‘Go forth into the world, Hils, my dear.’ That’s what I should say. ‘Don’t tie yourself to a rotting old hulk like Con. Marry a chinless fool, spawn brats, fulfil your foul womanhood.’” She had voices for everybody, he remembered: even for herself. She had them still. “I’ll be damned if I will, George. I want her. Every gorgeous bit of her. I’d take her with me if I’d half a chance. You want to try it some time.” A break. “How are all the boys and girls?”

For a second, he didn’t understand her question; his thoughts were with Hilary still, and Ann.

“His Grace Saul Enderby is still top of the heap, I take it? Eating well, I trust? Not moulting?”

“Oh, Saul goes from strength to strength, thanks.”

“That toad Sam Collins still head of Operations?”

There was an edge to her questions, but he had no choice except to answer.

“Sam’s fine too,” he said.

“Toby Esterhase still oiling round the corridors?”

“It’s all pretty much as usual.”

Her face was now so dark to him that he could not tell whether she was proposing to speak again. He heard her breathing and the rasp of her chest. But he knew he was still the object of her scrutiny.

“You’d never work for that bunch, George,” she remarked at last, as if it were the most self-evident of platitudes. “Not you. Give me another drink.”

Glad of the movement, Smiley went down the room again.

“Kirov, you said?” Connie called to him.

“That’s right,” said Smiley cheerfully, and returned with her glass replenished.

“That little ferret Otto Leipzig was the first hurdle,” she remarked with relish, when she had taken a deep draught. “The fifth floor wouldn’t believe him, would they? Not our little Otto—oh, no! Otto was a fabricator, and that was that!”

“But I don’t think Leipzig ever lied to us about the Moscow target,” Smiley said, taking up her tone of reminiscence.

“No, darling, he did not,” she said with approval. “He had his weaknesses, I’ll grant you. But when it came to the big stuff he always played a straight bat. And you understood that, alone of all your tribe, I’ll say that for you. But you didn’t get much support from the other barons, did you?”

“He never lied to Vladimir, either,” Smiley said. “It was Vladimir’s escape lines that got him out of Russia in the first place.”

“Well, well,” said Connie, after another long silence. “Kirov né Kursky, the Ginger Pig.”

She said it again—“Kirov né Kursky”—a rallying call spoken to her own mountainous memory. As she did so, Smiley saw in his mind’s eye the airport hotel room again, and the two strange conspirators seated before him in their black overcoats: the one so huge, the other tiny; the old General using all his bulk to enforce his passionate imploring; little Leipzig, an angry leash-dog at his side.

She was seduced.

The glow of the oil lamp had grown into a smoky light-ball, and Connie in her rocking-chair sat at the edge of it, Mother Russia herself, as they had called her in the Circus, her wasting face hallowed with reminiscence as she unfolded the story of just one of her unnumbered family of erring children. Whatever suspicions she was harbouring about Smiley’s motive in coming here, she had suspended them: this was what she had lived for; this was her song, even if it was her last; these monumental acts of recollection were her genius. In the old days, Smiley remembered, she would have teased him, flirted with her voice, taken huge arcs through seemingly extraneous chunks of Moscow Centre history, all to lure him nearer. But tonight her narrative had acquired an awesome sobriety, as if she knew she had very little time.

Oleg Kirov arrived in Paris direct from Moscow, she repeated—that June, darling, same as I told you—the one when it poured and poured and the annual Sarratt cricket match had to be scrapped three Sundays in a row. Fat Oleg was listed as single, and he didn’t replace anyone. His desk was on the second floor overlooking the Rue Saint-Simon—trafficky but nice, darling—whereas the Moscow Centre Residency hogged the third and fourth, to the rage of the Ambassador, who felt he was being squeezed into a cupboard by his unloved neighbours. To outward appearances, therefore, Kirov looked at first sight like that rare creature of the Soviet diplomatic community—namely, a straight diplomat. But it was the practice in Paris in those days—and for all Connie knew in these days too, heart—whenever a new face showed up at the Soviet Embassy, to distribute his photograph among the émigré tribal chiefs. Brother Kirov’s photograph duly found its way to the groups, and in no time that old devil Vladimir was banging on his case officer’s door in a state of fine excitement—Steve Mackelvore had Paris in those days, bless him, and dropped dead of a heart attack soon after, but that’s another story—insisting that “his people” had identified Kirov as a former agent provocateur named Kursky, who, while a student at Tallinn Polytechnical Institute, had formed a circle of dissident Estonian dock workers, something called “the unaligned discussion club,” then shopped its members to the secret police. Vladimir’s source, presently visiting Paris, had been one of those unfortunate workers, and for his sins he had personally befriended Kursky right up to the moment of his betrayal.

So far so good, except that Vladi’s source—said Connie—was none other than wicked little Otto, which meant that the fat was in the fire from the start.

As Connie went on speaking, Smiley’s memory once again began to supplement her own. He saw himself in his last months as caretaker Chief of the Circus, wearily descending the rickety wooden staircase from the fifth floor for the Monday meeting, a bunch of dog-eared files jammed under his arm. The Circus in those days was like a bombed-out building, he remembered; its officers scattered, its budget hamstrung, its agents blown or dead or laid off. Bill Haydon’s unmasking was an open wound in everyone’s mind: they called it the Fall and shared the same sense of primeval shame. In their secret hearts, perhaps, they even blamed Smiley for having caused it, because it was Smiley who had nailed Bill’s treachery. He saw himself at the head of the conference, and the ring of hostile faces already set against him as one by one the week’s cases were introduced, and subjected to the customary questions: Do we or do we not develop this? Shall we give it another week? Another month? Another year? Is it a trap, is it deniable, is it within our Charter? What resources will be needed and are they better applied elsewhere? Who will authorise? Who will be informed? How much will it cost? He remembered the intemperate outburst that the mere name, or workname, of Otto Leipzig immediately called forth among such uncertain judges as Lauder Strickland, Sam Collins, and their kind. He tried to recall who else would have been there apart from Connie and her cohorts from Soviet Research. Director of Finance, director Western Europe, director Soviet Attack, most of them already Saul Enderby’s men. And Enderby himself, still nominally a Foreign Servant, put in by his own palace guard in the guise of Whitehall linkman, but whose smile was already their laughter, whose frown their disapproval. Smiley saw himself listening to the submission—Connie’s own—much as she now repeated it, together with the results of her preliminary researches.

Otto’s story figured, she had insisted. This far, it couldn’t be faulted. She had shown her workings:

Her own Soviet Research Section had confirmed from printed sources that one Oleg Kursky, a law student, was at Tallinn Polytechnic during the relevant period, she said.

Foreign Office contemporary archives spoke of unrest in the docks.

A defector report from the American Cousins gave a Kursky query Karsky, lawyer, first name Oleg, as graduating from a Moscow Centre training course at Kiev in 1971.

The same source, though suspect, suggested Kursky had later changed his name on the advice of his superiors, “owing to his previous field experience.”

Routine French liaison reports, though notoriously unreliable, indicated that for a Second Secretary, Commercial, in Paris, Kirov did indeed enjoy unusual freedoms, such as shopping alone and attending Third World receptions without the customary fifteen companions.

All of which, in short—Connie had ended, far too vigorously for the fifth-floor taste—all of which confirmed the Leipzig story, and the suspicion that Kirov had an intelligence rôle. Then she had slapped the file on the table and passed round her photographs—the very stills, picked up as a matter of routine by French surveillance teams, that had caused the original uproar in the Riga Group headquarters in Paris. Kirov enters an Embassy car. Kirov emerges from the Moscow Narodny carrying a brief-case. Kirov pauses at the window of a saucy bookshop in order to scowl at the magazine covers.

But none, Smiley reflected—returning to the present—none showing Oleg Kirov and his erstwhile victim Otto Leipzig disporting themselves with a pair of ladies.

“So that was the case, darling,” Connie announced when she had taken a long pull at her drink. “We had the evidence of little Otto with plenty on his file to prove him right. We had a spot of collateral from other sources—not oodles, I grant you, but a start. Kirov was a hood, he was newly appointed, but what sort of hood was anybody’s guess. And that made him interesting, didn’t it, darling?”

“Yes,” Smiley said distractedly. “Yes, Connie, I remember that it did.”

“He wasn’t residency mainstream, we knew that from day one. He didn’t ride about in residency cars, do night-shifts or twin up with identified fellow hoods, or use their cipher room or attend their weekly prayer-meetings or feed the residency cat or whatever. On the other hand, Kirov wasn’t Karla’s man either, was he, heart? That was the rum thing.”

“Why not?” Smiley asked, without looking at her.

But Connie looked at Smiley all right. Connie made one of her long pauses in order to consider him at her leisure, while outside in the dying elms, the rooks wisely chose the sudden lull to sound a Shakespearean omen of screams. “Because Karla already had his man in Paris, darling,” she explained patiently. “As you are very well aware. That old stickler Pudin, the assistant military attaché. You remember how Karla always loved a soldier. Still does, for all I know.” She broke off, in order once more to study his impassive face. He had put his chin in his hands. His eyes, half closed, were turned towards the floor. “Besides, Kirov was an idiot, and the one thing Karla never did like was idiots, did he? You weren’t too kindly towards them either, come to think of it. Oleg Kirov was foul-mannered, stank, sweated, and stuck out like a fish in a tree wherever he went. Karla would have run a mile before hiring an oaf like that.” Again she paused. “So would you,” she added.

Lifting a palm, Smiley placed it against his brow, fingers upward, like a child at an exam. “Unless,” he said.

“Unless what? Unless he’d gone off his turnip, I suppose! That’ll be the day, I must say.”

“It was the time of the rumours,” Smiley said from far inside his thoughts.

“What rumours? There were always rumours, you dunderhead.”

“Oh, just defector reports,” he said disparagingly. “Stories of strange happenings in Karla’s court. Secondary sources, of course. But didn’t they—”

“Didn’t they what?”

“Well, didn’t they suggest that he was taking rather strange people onto his pay-roll? Holding interviews with them at dead of night? It was all low-grade stuff, I know. I only mention it in passing.”

“And we were ordered to discount them,” Connie said very firmly. “Kirov was the target. Not Karla. That was the fifth-floor ruling, George, and you were party to it. ‘Stop moongazing and get on with earthly matters,’ says you.” Twisting her mouth and putting back her head, she produced an uncomfortably realistic likeness of Saul Enderby: “‘This service is in the business of collectin’ intelligence,’” she drawled. “‘Not conductin’ feuds again the opposition.’ Don’t tell me he’s changed his tune, darling. Has he? George?” she whispered. “Oh, George, you are bad!”

He fetched her another drink and when he came back he saw her eyes glistening with mischievous excitement. She was plucking at the tufts of her white hair the way she used to when she wore it long.

“The point is, we licensed the operation, Con,” said Smiley, in a factual tone intended to rein her in. “We overruled the doubters, and we gave you permission to take Kirov to first base. How did it run after that?”

The drink, the memories, the revived excitement of the chase were driving her at a speed he could not control. Her breathing had quickened. She was rasping like an old engine with the restraints dangerously removed. He realised she was telling Leipzig’s story the way Leipzig had told it to Vladimir. He had thought he was in the Circus with her still, with the operation against Kirov just about to be launched. But in her imagination she had leapt instead to the ancient city of Tallinn more than a quarter of a century earlier. In her extraordinary mind, she had been there; she had known both Leipzig and Kirov in the time of their friendship. A love story, she insisted. Little Otto and fat Oleg. This was the pivot, she said; let the old fool tell it the way it was, she said, and you pursue your wicked purposes as I go along, George.

“The tortoise and the hare, darling, that’s who they were. Kirov the big sad baby, reading away at his law books at the Poly, and using the beastly secret police as Daddy; and little Otto Leipzig the proper devil, a finger in all the rackets, bit of prison behind him, working in the docks all day, at night preaching sedition to the unaligned. They met in a bar and it was love at first sight. Otto pulled the girls, Oleg Kirov slip-streamed along behind him, picking up his leavings. What are you trying to do, George? Joan-of-Arc me?”

He had lighted a fresh cigarette for her and put it into her mouth in the hope of calming her, but her feverish talking had already burned it low enough to scorch her. Taking it quickly from her, he stubbed it on the tin lid she used for an ashtray.

“They even shared a girl-friend for a time,” she said, so loud she was nearly yelling. “And one day, if you can believe it, the poor ninny came to little Otto and warned him outright. ‘Your fat friend is jealous of you and he’s a toady of the secret police,’ says she. ‘The unaligned discussion club is for the high jump. Beware the Ides of March!’”

“Go easy, Con,” Smiley warned her anxiously. “Con, come down!”

Her voice grew still louder: “Otto threw the girl out and a week later the whole bunch were arrested. Including fat Oleg, of course, who’d set them up—but they knew. Oh, they knew!” She faltered as if she had lost her way. “And the fool girl who’d tried to warn him died,” she said. “Missing, believed interrogated. Otto combed the forests for her till he found someone who’d been with her in the cells. Dead as a dodo. Two dodos. Dead as I’ll be, damn soon.”

“Let’s go on later,” Smiley said.

He would have stopped her, too—made tea, talked weather, anything to halt the mounting speed of her. But she had taken a second leap and was already back in Paris, describing how Otto Leipzig, with the fifth floor’s grudging approval and the old General’s passionate help, set about arranging the reunion, after all those lost years, with Second Secretary Kirov, whom she dubbed the Ginger Pig. Smiley supposed it was her name for him at the time. Her face was scarlet and her breath was not enough for her story, so that it kept running out in a wheeze, but she forced herself to continue.

“Connie,” he begged her again, but it was not enough either, and perhaps nothing would have been.

First, she said, in search of the Ginger Pig, little Otto trotted along to the various Franco-Soviet friendship societies that Kirov was known to frequent.

“That poor little Otto must have seen The Battleship Potemkin fifteen times, but the Ginger Pig never showed up once.”

Word came that Kirov was showing a serious interest in émigrés, and even representing himself as their secret sympathiser, enquiring whether, as a junior official, there was anything he could do to help their families in the Soviet Union. With Vladimir’s help Leipzig tried to put himself in Kirov’s path, but once more luck was against him. Then Kirov started travelling—travelling everywhere, my dear, a positive Flying Dutchman—so that Connie and her boys began to wonder whether he was some sort of clerical administrator for Moscow Centre, not on the operational side at all: the accountant-auditor for a group of Western residencies, for instance, with Paris as their centre—Bonn, Madrid, Stockholm, Vienna.

“For Karla or for the mainstream?” Smiley asked quietly.

Whisper who dares, said Connie, but for her money, it was for Karla. Even though Pudin was already there. Even though Kirov was an idiot, and not a soldier; it still had to be for Karla, Connie said, perversely doubling back upon her own assertions to the contrary. If Kirov had been visiting the mainstream residencies, he would have been entertained and put up by identified intelligence officers. But instead, he lived his cover, and stayed only with his national counterparts in the Commercial sections, she said.

Anyway, the flying did it, said Connie. Little Otto waited till Kirov had booked himself on a flight to Vienna, made sure he was travelling alone, then boarded the same flight, and they were in business.

“A straight copybook honey-trap, that’s what we were aiming for,” Connie sang, very loud indeed. “Your real old-fashioned burn. A big operator might laugh it off, but not Brother Kirov, least of all if he was on Karla’s books. Naughty photographs and information with menaces, that was what we were after. And when we’d done with him, and found out what he was up to, and who his nasty friends were, and who was giving him all that heady freedom, we’d either buy him in as a defector or bung him back in the pond, depending on how much was left of him!”

She stopped dead. She opened her mouth, closed it, drew some breath, held out her glass to him.

“Darling, get the old soak another drinkie, double-quick, will you? Connie’s getting her lurgies. No, don’t. Stay where you are.”

For a fatal second, Smiley was lost.

“George?”

“Connie, I’m here! What is it?”

He was fast but not fast enough. He saw the stiffening of her face, saw her distorted hands fly out in front of her, and her eyes screw up in disgust, as if she had seen a horrible accident.

“Hils, quick!” she cried. “Oh, my hat!”

He embraced her and felt her forearms lock over the back of his neck to hold him tighter. Her skin was cold, she was shaking, but from terror not from chill. He stayed against her, smelling Scotch and medicated powder and old lady, trying to comfort her. Her tears were all over his cheeks, he could feel them and taste their salty sting as she pushed him away from her. He found her handbag and opened it for her, then went quickly back to the veranda and called to Hilary. She ran out of the darkness with her fists half clenched, elbows and hips rotating, in a way that makes men laugh. She hurried past him, grinning with shyness, and he stayed on the veranda, feeling the night cold pricking his cheeks while he stared at the gathering rain clouds and the pine trees silvered by the rising moon. The dogs’ screaming had subsided. Only the wheeling rooks sounded their harsh warnings. Go, he told himself. Get out of here. Bolt. The car waited not a hundred feet from him, frost already forming on the roof. He imagined himself leaping into it and driving up the hill, through the plantation, and away, never to return. But he knew he couldn’t.

“She wants you back now, George,” Hilary said sternly from the doorway, with the special authority of those who nurse the dying.

But when he went back, everything was fine.

15

Everything was fine. Connie sat powdered and austere in her rocking-chair, and her eyes, as he entered, were as straight upon him as when he had first come here. Hilary had calmed her, Hilary had sobered her, and now Hilary stood behind her with her hands on Connie’s neck, thumbs inward, while she gently massaged the nape.

“Spot of timor mortis, darling,” Connie explained. “The leech prescribes Valium but the old fool prefers the juice. You won’t mention that bit to Saul Enderby when you report back, will you, heart?”

“No, of course not.”

“When will you be reporting back, by the by, darling?”

“Soon,” said Smiley.

“Tonight, when you get home?”

“It depends what there is to tell.”

“Con did write it all up, you know, George. The old fool’s accounts of the case were very full, I thought. Very detailed. Very circumstantial, for once. But you haven’t consulted them.” Smiley said nothing. “They’re lost. Destroyed. Eaten by mealy-bugs. You haven’t had time. Well, well. And you such a devil for the paperwork. Higher, Hils,” she ordered, without taking her gleaming eyes away from Smiley. “Higher, darling. The bit where the vertebrae get stuck in the tonsils.”

Smiley sat down on the old wicker sofa.

“I used to love those double-double games,” Connie confessed dreamily, rolling her head in order to caress Hilary’s hands with it. “Didn’t I, Hils? All human life was there. You wouldn’t know that any more, would you? Not since you blew your gasket.”

She returned to Smiley. “Want me to go on, dearie?” she asked in her East End tart’s voice.

“If you could just take me through it briefly,” Smiley said. “But not if it’s—”

“Where were we? I know. Up in that aeroplane with the Ginger Pig. He’s on his way to Vienna, he’s got his trotters in a trough of beer. Looks up, and who does he see standing in front of him like his own bad conscience but his dear old buddy of twenty-five years ago, little Otto, grinning like Old Nick. What does Brother Kirov né Kursky feel? we ask ourselves, assuming he’s got any feelings. Does Otto know—he wonders—that it was naughty me who sold him into the Gulag? So what does he do?”

“What does he do?” said Smiley, not responding to her banter.

“He decides to play it hearty, dearie. Doesn’t he, Hils? Whistles up the caviare, and says ‘Thank God.’” She whispered something and Hilary bent her head to catch it, then giggled. “‘Champagne!’ he says. And my God they have it, and the Ginger Pig pays for it, and they drink it, and they share a taxi into town, and they even have a quick snifter in a café before the Ginger Pig goes about his furtive duties. Kirov likes Otto,” Connie insisted. “Loves him, doesn’t he, Hils? They’re a proper pair of raving whatsits, same as us. Otto’s sexy, Otto’s fun, Otto’s dishy, and anti-authoritarian, and light on his feet—and—oh, everything the Ginger Pig could never be, not in a thousand years! Why did the fifth floor always think people had to have one motive only?”

“I’m sure I didn’t,” said Smiley fervently.

But Connie was back talking to Hilary, not to Smiley at all. “Kirov was bored, heart. Otto was life for him. Same as you are for me. You put the spring into my stride, don’t you, lovey? Hadn’t prevented him from shopping Otto, of course, but that’s only nature, isn’t it?”

Still gently swaying at Connie’s back, Hilary nodded in vague assent.

“And what did Kirov mean to Otto Leipzig?” Smiley asked.

“Hate, my darling,” Connie replied, without hesitation. “Pure, undiluted hatred. Plain, honest-to-God black loathing. Hate and money. Those were Otto’s two best things. Otto always felt he was owed for all those years he’d spent in the slammer. He wanted to collect for the girl, too. His great dream was that one day he would sell Kirov né Kursky for lots of money. Lots and lots and lots of money. Then spend it.”

A waiter’s anger, Smiley thought, remembering the contact print. Remembering the tartan room again, at the airport, and Otto’s quiet German voice with its caressing edge; remembering his brown, unblinking eyes that were like windows on his smouldering soul.

After the Vienna meeting, said Connie, the two men had agreed to meet again in Paris, and Otto wisely played a long hand. In Vienna, Otto had not asked a single question to which the Ginger Pig could take exception; Otto was a pro, said Connie. Was Kirov married? he had asked. Kirov had flung up his hands and roared with laughter at the question, indicating that he was prepared not to be at any time. Married but wife in Moscow, Otto had reported—which would make a honey-trap that much more effective. Kirov had asked Leipzig what his job was these days, and Leipzig had replied magnanimously “import-export,” proposing himself as a bit of a wheeler-dealer, Vienna one day, Hamburg the next. In the event, Otto waited a whole month—after twenty-five years, said Connie, he could afford to take his time—and during that one month, Kirov was observed by the French to make three separate passes at elderly Paris-based Russian émigrés: one a taxi-driver, one a shopkeeper, one a restaurateur, all three with dependents in the Soviet Union. He offered to take letters, messages, addresses; he even offered to take money and, if they were not too bulky, gifts. And to operate a two-way service next time he returned. Nobody took him up. In the fifth week Otto rang Kirov at his flat, said he had just flown in from Hamburg, and suggested they have some fun. Over dinner, picking his moment, Otto said the night was on him; he had just made a big killing on a certain shipment to a certain country, and had money to burn.

“This was the bait we had worked out for him, darling,” Connie explained, addressing Smiley directly at last. “And the Ginger Pig rose to it, didn’t he, as they all do, don’t they, bless them, salmon to the fly every time.”

What sort of shipment? Kirov had asked Otto. What sort of country? For reply, Leipzig had drawn in the air a hooked nose on the end of his own, and broken out laughing. Kirov laughed too, but he was clearly very interested. To Israel? he said; then what sort of shipment? Leipzig pointed his same forefinger at Kirov and pretended to pull a trigger. Arms to Israel? Kirov asked in amazement, but Leipzig was a pro and would say no more. They drank, went to a strip club, and talked old times. Kirov even referred to their shared girl-friend, asking whether Leipzig knew what had become of her. Leipzig said he didn’t. In the early morning, Leipzig had proposed they pick up some company and take it to his flat, but Kirov, to his disappointment, refused: not in Paris, too dangerous. In Vienna or Hamburg, sure. But not in Paris. They parted, drunk, at breakfast-time, and the Circus was a hundred pounds poorer.

“Then the bloody infighting started,” said Connie, suddenly changing track completely. “The Great Head Office Debate. Debate, my arse. You were away, Saul Enderby put one manicured hoof in, and the rest of them promptly got the vapours—that’s what happened.” Her baron’s voice again: “‘Otto Leipzig’s taking us for a ride. . . . We haven’t cleared the operation with the Frogs. . . . Foreign Office worried about implications. . . . Kirov is a plant . . . the Riga Group a totally unsound base from which to make a ploy of this scale.’ Where were you, anyway? Beastly Berlin, wasn’t it?”

“Hong Kong.”

“Oh, there,” she said vaguely, and slumped in her chair while her eyelids drooped.

Smiley had sent Hilary to make tea, and she was clanking dishes at the other end of the room. He glanced at her, wondering whether he should call her, and saw her standing exactly as he had last seen her in the Circus the night they sent for him—her knuckles backed against her mouth, suppressing a silent scream. He had been working late—it was about that time; yes, he was preparing his departure to Hong Kong—when suddenly his internal phone rang and he heard a man’s voice, very strained, asking him to come immediately to the cipher room, Mr. Smiley, sir, it’s urgent. Moments later he was hurrying down a bare corridor, flanked by two worried janitors. They pushed open the door for him, he stepped inside, they hung back. He saw the smashed machinery, the files and card indices and telegrams flung around the room like rubbish at a football ground, he saw the filthy graffiti daubed in lipstick on the wall. And at the centre of it all, he saw Hilary herself, the culprit—exactly as she was now—staring through the thick net curtains at the free white sky outside: Hilary our Vestal, so well bred; Hilary our Circus bride.

“Hell are you up to, Hils?” Connie demanded roughly from her rocking-chair.

“Making tea, Con. George wants a cup of tea.”

“To hell with what George wants,” she retorted, flaring.

“George is fifth floor. George put the kibosh on the Kirov case and now he’s trying to get it right, flying solo in his old age. Right, George? Right? Even lied to me about that old devil Vladimir, who walked into a bullet on Hampstead Heath, according to the newspapers, which he apparently doesn’t read, any more than my reports!”

They drank the tea. A rainstorm was getting up. The first hard drops were hammering on the wood roof.

Smiley had charmed her, Smiley had flattered her, Smiley had willed her to go on. She had drawn the thread halfway out for him. He was determined that she should draw it all the way.

“I’ve got to have it all, Con,” he repeated. “I’ve got to hear everything, just as you remember it, even if the end is painful.”

“The end bloody well is painful,” she retorted.

But already her voice, her face, the very lustre of her memory were flagging, and he knew it was a race against time.

Now it was Kirov’s turn to play the classic card, she said wearily. At their next meeting, which was in Brussels a month later, Kirov referred to the Israeli arms shipment thing and said he had happened to mention their conversation to a friend of his in the Commercial Section of the Embassy who was contributing to a special study of the Israeli military economy, and even had funds available for researching it. Would Leipzig consider—no, but seriously, Otto!—talking to the fellow or, better still, giving the story to his old buddy Oleg here and now, who might even get a little credit for it on his own account? Otto said, “Provided it pays and doesn’t hurt anyone.” Then he solemnly fed Kirov a bag of chicken-feed prepared by Connie and the Middle Eastern people—all of it true, of course, and eminently checkable, even if it wasn’t a lot of use to anyone—and Kirov solemnly wrote it all down, though both of them, as Connie put it, knew perfectly well that neither Kirov nor his master, whoever that was, had the smallest interest in Israel, or arms, or shipments, or her military economy—not in this case, anyway. What Kirov was aiming to do was create a conspiratorial relationship, as their next meeting back in Paris showed. Kirov evinced huge enthusiasm for the report, insisted that Otto accept five hundred dollars for it, against the minor formality of signing a receipt. And when Otto had done this, and was squarely hooked, Kirov sailed straight in with all the crudity he could command—which was a lot, said Connie—and asked Otto how well placed he was with the local Russian émigrés.

“Please, Con,” he whispered. “We’re almost there!” She was so near but he could feel her drifting farther and farther away.

Hilary was sitting on the floor with her head against Connie’s knees. Absently, Connie’s mittened hands had taken hold of her hair for comfort, and her eyes had fallen almost shut.

“Connie!” he repeated.

Opening her eyes, Connie gave a tired smile.

“It was only the fan dance, darling,” she said. “The heknows-I-know-you-know. The usual fan dance,” she repeated indulgently, and her eyes closed again.

“So how did Leipzig answer him? Connie!”

“He did what we’d do, darling,” she murmured. “Stalled. Admitted he was well in with the émigré groups, and huggermugger with the General. Then stalled. Said he didn’t visit Paris that much. ‘Why not hire someone local?’ he said. He was teasing, Hils, darling, you see. Asked again: Would it hurt anyone? Asked what the job was, anyway. What did it pay? Get me some booze, Hils.”

“No,” said Hilary.

“Get it.”

Smiley poured her two fingers of whisky and watched her sip.

“What did Kirov want Otto to do with the émigrés?” he said.

“Kirov wanted a legend,” she replied. “He wanted a legend for a girl.”

Nothing in Smiley’s manner suggested he had heard the phrase from Toby Esterhase only a few hours ago. Four years before, Oleg Kirov wanted a legend, Connie repeated. Just as the Sandman, according to Toby and the General—thought Smiley—wanted one today. Kirov wanted a cover story for a female agent who could be infiltrated into France. That was the nub of it, Connie said. Kirov didn’t say this, of course; he put it quite differently, in fact. He told Otto that Moscow had issued a secret instruction to all embassies announcing that split Russian families might in certain circumstances be reunited abroad. If enough families could be found who wished it, said the instruction, then Moscow would go public with the idea and thus enhance the Soviet Union’s image in the field of human rights. Ideally, they wanted cases with a compassionate ring: daughters in Russia, say, cut off from their families in the West, single girls, perhaps of marriageable age. Secrecy was essential, said Kirov, until a list of suitable cases had been assembled—think of the outcry there would be, Kirov said, if the story leaked ahead of time!

The Ginger Pig made his pitch so badly, said Connie, that Otto had at first to deride the proposal simply for the sake of verisimilitude; it was too crazy, too hole-in-corner, he said—secret lists, what nonsense! Why didn’t Kirov approach the émigré organisations themselves and swear them to secrecy? Why employ a total outsider to do his dirty work? As Leipzig teased, Kirov grew more heated. It was not Leipzig’s job to make fun of Moscow’s secret edicts, said Kirov. He began shouting at him, and somehow Connie discovered the energy to shout too, or at least to lift her voice above its weary level, and to give it the guttural Russian ring she thought Kirov ought to have: “‘Where is your compassion?’ he says. ‘Don’t you want to help people? Why do you sneer at a human gesture merely because it comes from Russia!’” Kirov said he had approached some families himself, but found no trust, and made no headway. He began to put pressure on Leipzig, first of a personal kind—“Don’t you want to help me in my career?”—and when this failed, he suggested to Leipzig that since he had already supplied secret information to the Embassy for money, he might consider it prudent to continue, lest the West German authorities somehow get to hear of this connection and throw him out of Hamburg—maybe out of Germany altogether. How would Otto like that? And finally, said Connie, Kirov offered money, and that was where the wonder lay. “For each successful reunion effected, ten thousand U.S. dollars,” she announced. “For each suitable candidate, whether a reunion takes place or not, one thousand U.S. on the nail. Cash-cash.”

At which point, of course, said Connie, the fifth floor decided Kirov was off his head, and ordered the case abandoned immediately.

“And I returned from the Far East,” said Smiley.

“Like poor King Richard from the Crusades, you did, darling!” Connie agreed. “And found the peasants in uproar and your nasty brother on the throne. Serves you right.” She gave a gigantic yawn. “Case dustbinned,” she declared. “The Kraut police wanted Leipzig extradited from France; we could perfectly well have begged them off but we didn’t. No honey-trap, no dividend, no bugger-all. Fixture cancelled.”

“And how did Vladimir take all that?” Smiley asked, as if he really didn’t know.

Connie opened her eyes with difficulty. “Take what?”

“Cancelling the fixture.”

“Oh, roared, what do you expect? Roar, roar. Said we’d spoilt the kill of the century. Swore to continue the war by other means.”

“What kind of kill?”

She missed his question. “It’s not a shooting war any more, George,” she said as her eyes closed again. “That’s the trouble. It’s grey. Half-angels fighting half-devils. No one knows where the lines are. No bang-bangs.”

Once again, Smiley in his memory saw the tartan hotel bedroom and the two black overcoats side by side as Vladimir appealed desperately to have the case reopened: “Max, hear us one more time, hear what has happened since you ordered us to stop!” They had flown from Paris at their own expense to tell him, because Finance Section on Enderby’s orders had closed the case account. “Max, hear us, please,” Vladimir had begged. “Kirov summoned Otto to his apartment late last night. They had another meeting, Otto and Kirov. Kirov got drunk and said amazing things!”

He saw himself back in his old room at the Circus, Enderby already installed at his desk. It was the same day, just a few hours later.

“Sounds like little Otto’s last-ditch effort at keeping out of the hands of the Huns,” Enderby said when he had heard Smiley out. “What do they want him for over there, theft or rape?”

“Fraud,” Smiley had replied hopelessly, which was the wretched truth.

Connie was humming something. She tried to make a song of it, then a limerick. She wanted more drink but Hilary had taken away her glass.

“I want you to go,” Hilary said, straight into Smiley’s face.

Leaning forward on the wicker sofa, Smiley asked his last question. He asked it, one might have thought, reluctantly; almost with distaste. His soft face had hardened with determination, but not enough to conceal the marks of disapproval. “Do you remember a story old Vladimir used to tell, Con? One we never shared with anyone? Stored away, as a piece of private treasure? That Karla had a mistress, someone he loved?”

“His Ann,” she said dully.

“That in all the world, she was his one thing, that she made him act like a crazy man?”

Slowly her head came up, and he saw her face clear, and his voice quickened and gathered strength.

“How that was the rumour they passed around in Moscow Centre—those in the know? Karla’s invention—his creation, Con? How he found her when she was a child, wandering in a burnt-out village in the war? Adopted her, brought her up, fell in love with her?”

He watched her and despite the whisky, despite her deathly weariness, he saw the last excitement, like the last drop in the bottle, slowly rekindle her features.

“He was behind the German lines,” she said. “It was the forties. There was a team of them, raising the Balts. Building networks, stay-behind groups. It was a big operation. Karla was boss. She became their mascot. They carted her from pillar to post. A kid. Oh, George!”

He was holding his breath to catch her words. The din on the roof grew louder, he heard the rising growl of the forest as the rain came down on it. His face was near to hers, very; its animation matched her own.

“And then what?” he said.

“Then he bumped her off, darling. That’s what.”

“Why?” He drew still closer, as if he feared her words might fail her at the crucial moment. “Why, Connie? Why kill her when he loved her?”

“He’d done everything for her. Found foster-parents for her. Educated her. Had her all got up to be his ideal hag. Played Daddy, played lover, played God. She was his toy. Then one day she ups and gets ideas above her station.”

“What sort of ideas?”

“Soft on revolution. Mixing with bloody intellectuals. Wanting the State to wither away. Asking the big ‘Why?’ and the big ‘Why not?’ He told her to shut up. She wouldn’t. She had a devil in her. He had her shoved in the slammer. Made her worse.”

“And there was a child,” Smiley prompted, taking her mittened hand in both of his. “He gave her a child, remember?” Her hand was between them, between their faces. “You researched it, didn’t you, Con. One silly season, I gave you your head. ‘Track it down, Con,’ I said to you. ‘Take it wherever it leads.’ Remember?”

Under Smiley’s intense encouragement, her story had acquired the fervour of a last love. She was speaking fast, eyes streaming. She was backtracking, zigzagging everywhere in her memory. Karla had this hag . . . yes, darling, that was the story, do you hear me?—Yes, Connie, go on, I hear you.—Then listen. He brought her up, made her his mistress, there was a brat, and the quarrels were about the brat. George, darling, do you love me like the old days?—Come on, Con, give me the rest, yes of course I do.—He accused her of warping its precious mind with dangerous ideas, like freedom, for instance. Or love. A girl, her mother’s image, said to be a beauty. In the end the old despot’s love turned to hatred and he had his ideal carted off and spavined: end of story. We had it from Vladimir first, then a few scraps, never the hard base. Name unknown, darling, because he destroyed all records of her, killed whoever might have heard, which is Karla’s way, bless him, isn’t it, darling, always was. Others said she wasn’t dead at all, the story of her murder was disinformation to end the trail. There, she did it, didn’t she? The old fool remembered!

“And the child?” Smiley asked. “The girl in her mother’s image? There was a defector report—what was that about?” She didn’t pause. She had remembered that as well, her mind was galloping ahead of her, just as her voice was outrunning her breath.

A don of some sort from Leningrad University, said Connie. Claimed he’d been ordered to take on a weird girl for special political instruction in the evenings, a sort of private patient who was showing anti-social tendencies, the daughter of a high official. Tatiana, he was only allowed to know her as Tatiana. She’d been raising hell all over town, but her father was a big beef in Moscow and she couldn’t be touched. The girl tried to seduce him, probably did, then told him some story about how Daddy had had Mummy killed for showing insufficient faith in the historical process. Next day his professor called him in and said if he ever repeated a word of what had happened at that interview, he would find himself tripping on a very big banana skin. . . .

Connie ran on wildly, describing clues that led nowhere, the sources that vanished at the moment of discovery. It seemed impossible that her racked and drink-sodden body could have once more summoned so much strength.

“Oh, George, darling, take me with you! That’s what you’re after, I’ve got it! Who killed Vladimir, and why! I saw it in your ugly face the moment you walked in. I couldn’t place it, now I can. You’ve got your Karla look! Vladi had opened up the vein again, so Karla had him killed! That’s your banner, George. I can see you marching. Take me with you, George, for God’s sake! I’ll leave Hils, I’ll leave anything, no more of the juice, I swear. Get me up to London and I’ll find his hag for you, even if she doesn’t exist, if it’s the last thing I do!”

“Why did Vladimir call him the Sandman?” Smiley asked, knowing the answer already.

“It was his joke. A German fairy tale Vladi picked up in Estonia from one of his Kraut forebears. ‘Karla is our Sandman. Anyone who comes too close to him has a way of falling asleep.’ We never knew, darling, how could we? In the Lubianka, someone had met a man who’d met a woman who’d met her. Someone else knew someone who’d helped to bury her. That hag was Karla’s shrine, George. And she betrayed him. Twin cities, we used to say you were, you and Karla, two halves of the same apple. George, darling, don’t! Please!”

She had stopped, and he realised that she was staring up at him in fear, that her face was somehow beneath his own; he was standing, glaring down at her. Hilary was against the wall, calling “Stop, stop!” He was standing over her, incensed by her cheap and unjust comparison, knowing that neither Karla’s methods nor Karla’s absolutism were his own. He heard himself say “No, Connie!” and discovered that he had lifted his hands to the level of his chest, palms downward and rigid, as if he were pressing something into the ground. And he realised that his passion had scared her; that he had never betrayed so much conviction to her—or so much feeling—before.

“I’m getting old,” he muttered, and gave a sheepish smile.

He relaxed, and as he did so, slowly Connie’s own body became limp also, and the dream died in her. The hands that had clutched him seconds earlier lay on her lap like bodies in a trench.

“It was all bilge,” she said sullenly. A deep and terminal listlessness descended over her. “Bored émigrés crying into their vodka. Drop it, George. Karla’s beaten you all ends up. He foxed you, he made a fool of your time. Our time.” She drank, no longer caring what she said. Her head flopped forward again and for a moment he thought she really was asleep. “He foxed you, he foxed me, and when you smelt a rat he got Bloody Bill Haydon to fox Ann and put you off the scent.” With difficulty she lifted her head to stare at him one more time. “Go home, George. Karla won’t give you back your past. Be like the old fool here. Get yourself a bit of love and wait for Armageddon.”

She began coughing, hopelessly, one hacking retch after another.

The rain had stopped. Gazing out of the French windows, Smiley saw again the moonlight on the cages, touching the frost on the wire; he saw the frosted crowns of the fir trees climbing the hill into a black sky; he saw a world reversed, with the light things darkened into shadow, and the dark things picked out like beacons on the white ground. He saw a sudden moon, stepping clear before the clouds, beckoning him into seething crevices. He saw one black figure in Wellington boots and a headscarf running up the lane, and realised it was Hilary; she must have slipped out without his noticing. He remembered he had heard a door slam. He went back to Connie and sat on the sofa beside her. Connie wept and drifted, talking about love. Love was a positive power, she said vaguely—ask Hils. But Hilary was not there to ask. Love was a stone thrown into the water, and if there were enough stones and we all loved together, the ripples would eventually be strong enough to reach across the sea and overwhelm the haters and the cynics—“even beastly Karla, darling,” she assured him. “That’s what Hils says. Bilge, isn’t it? It’s bilge, Hils!” she yelled.

Then Connie closed her eyes again, and after a while, by her breathing, appeared to doze off. Or perhaps she was only pretending in order to avoid the pain of saying goodbye to him. He tiptoed into the cold evening. The car’s engine, by a miracle, started; he began climbing the lane, keeping a look-out for Hilary. He rounded a bend and saw her in the headlights. She was cowering among the trees, waiting for him to leave before she went back to Connie. She had her hands to her face again and he thought he saw blood; perhaps she had scratched herself with her finger-nails. He passed her and saw her in the mirror, staring after him in the glow of his rear lights, and for a moment she resembled for him all those muddy ghosts who are the real victims of conflict: who lurch out of the smoke of war, battered and starved and deprived of all they ever had or loved. He waited until he saw her start down the hill again, towards the lights of the dacha.

At Heathrow Airport he bought his air ticket for the next morning, then lay on his bed in the hotel, for all he knew the same one, though the walls were not tartan. All night long the hotel stayed awake, and Smiley with it. He heard the clank of plumbing and the ringing of phones and the thud of lovers who would not or could not sleep.

Max, hear us one more time, he rehearsed; it was the Sandman himself who sent Kirov to the émigrés to find the legend.

16

Smiley arrived in Hamburg in mid-morning and took the airport bus to the city centre. Fog lingered and the day was very cold. In the Station Square, after repeated rejections, he found an old, thin terminus hotel with a lift licensed for three persons at a time. He signed in as Standfast, then walked as far as a car-rental agency, where he hired a small Opel, which he parked in an underground garage that played softened Beethoven out of loudspeakers. The car was his back door. He didn’t know whether he would need it, but he knew it needed to be there. He walked again, heading for the Alster, sensing everything with a particular sharpness: the manic traffic, the toy-shops for millionaire children. The din of the city hit him like a fire-storm, causing him to forget the cold. Germany was his second nature, even his second soul. In his youth, her literature had been his passion and his discipline. He could put on her language like a uniform and speak with its boldness. Yet he sensed danger in every step he took, for Smiley as a young man had spent half the war here in the lonely terror of the spy, and the awareness of being on enemy territory was lodged in him for good. In boyhood he had known Hamburg as a rich and graceful shipping town, which hid its volatile soul behind a cloak of Englishness; in manhood as a city smashed into medieval darkness by thousand-bomber air raids. He had seen it in the first years of peace, one endless smouldering bombsite and the survivors tilling the rubble like fields. And he saw it today, hurtling into the anonymity of canned music, high-rise concrete, and smoked glass.

Reaching the sanctuary of the Alster, he walked the pleasant footpath to the jetty where Villem had boarded the steamer. On weekdays, he recorded, the first ferry was at 7:10, the last at 20:15, and Villem had been here on a weekday. There was a steamer due in fifteen minutes. Waiting for it, he watched the sculls and the red squirrels much as Villem had done, and when the steamer arrived he sat in the stern where Villem had sat, in the open air under the canopy. His companions consisted of a crowd of schoolchildren and three nuns. He sat with his eyes almost closed by the dazzle, listening to their chatter. Half-way across he stood, walked through the cabins to the forward window, looked out, apparently to confirm something, glanced at his watch, then returned to his seat until the Jungfernstieg, where he landed.

Villem’s story tallied. Smiley had not expected otherwise, but in a world of perpetual doubt, reassurance never came amiss.

He lunched, then went to the main Post Office and studied old telephone directories for an hour, much as Ostrakova had done in Paris, though for different reasons. His researches complete, he settled himself gratefully in the lounge of the Four Seasons Hotel and read newspapers till dusk.

In a Hamburg guide to houses of pleasure, The Blue Diamond was not listed under night-clubs but under “amour” and earned three stars for exclusivity and cost. It was situated in St. Pauli, but discreetly apart from the main beat, in a cobbled alley that was tilted and dark and smelt of fish. Smiley rang the doorbell and it opened on an electric switch. He stepped inside and stood at once in a trim ante-room filled with grey machinery manned by a smart young man in a grey suit. On the wall grey reels of tape turned slowly, though the music they played was mostly somewhere else. On the desk an elaborate telephone system, also grey, flickered and ticked.

“I should like to pass some time here,” Smiley said.

This is where they answered my phone call, he thought, when I telephoned Vladimir’s Hamburg correspondent.

The smart young man drew a printed form from his desk and in a confiding murmur explained the procedure, much as a lawyer would, which possibly was his daytime profession anyway. Membership cost one hundred and seventy-five marks, he said softly. This was a one-time annual subscription entitling Smiley to enter free for a full year, as many times as he wished. The first drink would cost him a further twenty-five marks and thereafter prices were high but not unreasonable. A first drink was obligatory and, like the membership fee, payable before entry. All other forms of entertainment came without charge, though the girls received gifts appreciatively. Smiley should complete the form in whatever name he wished. It would be filed here by the young man personally. All he had to do on his next visit was remember the name under which he had joined and he would be admitted without formalities.

Smiley put down his money and added one more false name to the dozens he had used in his lifetime. He descended a staircase to a second door, which once more opened electronically, revealing a narrow passage giving on to a row of cubicles, still empty because in that world the night was only now beginning. At the end of the passage stood a third door and, once through it, he entered total darkness filled with the full blast of the music from the smart young man’s tape-recorders. A male voice spoke to him, a pin-light led him to a table. He was handed a list of drinks. “Proprietor C. Kretzschmar,” he read at the foot of the page in small print. He ordered whisky.

“I wish to remain alone. No company.”

“I shall advise the house, sir,” the waiter said with confiding dignity, and accepted his tip.

“Concerning Herr Kretzschmar. He is from Saxony, by any chance?”

“Yes, sir.”

Worse than East German, Toby Esterhase had said. Saxon. They stole together, pimped together, faked reports together. It was a perfect marriage.

He sipped his whisky, waiting for his eyes to grow accustomed to the light. From somewhere a blue glow shone, picking out cuffs and collars eerily. He saw white faces and white bodies. There were two levels. The lower, where he sat, was furnished with tables and armchairs. The upper consisted of six chambres séparées, like boxes at the theatre, each with its own blue glow. It was in one of these, he decided, that, knowingly or not, the quartet had posed for its photograph. He recalled the angle from which the picture had been taken. It was from above—from well above. But “well above” meant somewhere in the blackness of the upper walls where no eye could penetrate, not even Smiley’s.

The music died and over the same speakers a cabaret was announced. The title, said the compère, was Old Berlin, and the compère’s voice was also Old Berlin: hectoring, nasal, and suggestive. The smart young man has changed the tape, thought Smiley. A curtain lifted revealing a small stage. By the light it released, he peered quickly upward again and this time saw what he was looking for: a small observation window of smoked glass set very high in the wall. The photographer used special cameras, he thought vaguely; these days, he had been told, darkness was no longer a hindrance. I should have asked Toby, he thought; Toby knows those gadgets by heart. On the stage, a demonstration of love making had begun, mechanical, pointless, dispiriting. Smiley turned his attention to his fellow members scattered round the room. The girls were beautiful and naked and young, in the way the girls in the photograph were young. Those who had partners sat entwined with them, seemingly delighted by their senility and ugliness. Those who had none sat in a silent group like American footballers waiting to be called. The noise from the speakers grew very loud, a mixture of music and hysterical narrative. And in Berlin they are playing Old Hamburg, Smiley thought. On the stage the couple increased their efforts, but to little account. Smiley wondered whether he would recognise the girls in the photograph if they should appear. He decided he would not. The curtain closed. He ordered another whisky in relief.

“Is Herr Kretzschmar in the house tonight?” he asked the waiter.

Herr Kretzschmar was a man of commitments, the waiter explained. Herr Kretzschmar was obliged to divide his time between several establishments.

“If he comes, have the goodness to let me know.”

“He will be here at eleven exactly, sir.”

At the bar, naked couples had begun dancing. He endured another half-hour of this before returning to the front office by way of the cubicles, some of which were now occupied. The smart young man asked whom he might announce.

“Tell him it’s a special request,” Smiley said.

The smart young man pressed a button and spoke extremely quietly, much as he had spoken to Smiley.

The upstairs office was clean as a doctor’s surgery with a polished plastic desk and a lot more machinery. A closed-circuit television supplied a daylight version of the scene downstairs. The same observation window that Smiley had already noticed looked down into the séparées. Herr Kretzschmar was what the Germans call a serious person. He was fiftyish, groomed, and thickset, with a dark suit and a pale tie. His hair was straw blond like a good Saxon’s, his bland face neither welcomed nor rejected. He shook Smiley’s hand briskly and motioned him to a chair. He seemed well accustomed to dealing with special requests.

“Please,” Herr Kretzschmar said, and the preliminaries were over.

There was nowhere to go but forward.

“I understand you were once business partner to an acquaintance of mine named Otto Leipzig,” Smiley said, sounding a little too loud to himself. “I happen to be visiting Hamburg and I wondered whether you could tell me where he is. His address does not appear to be listed anywhere.”

Herr Kretzschmar’s coffee was in a silver pot with a paper napkin round the handle to protect his fingers when he poured. He drank and put his cup down carefully, to avoid collision.

“Who are you, please?” Herr Kretzschmar asked. The Saxon twang made his voice flat. A small frown enhanced his air of respectability.

“Otto called me Max,” Smiley said.

Herr Kretzschmar did not respond to this information but he took his time before putting his next question. His gaze, Smiley noticed again, was strangely innocent. Otto never had a house in his life, Toby had said. For crash meetings, Kretzschmar played key-holder.

“And your business with Herr Leipzig, if I may ask?”

“I represent a large company,” Smiley said. “Among other interests, we own a literary and photographic agency for freelance reporters.”

“So?”

“In the distant past, my parent company has been pleased to accept occasional offerings from Herr Leipzig—through intermediaries—and pass them out to our customers for processing and syndication.”

“So?” Herr Kretzschmar repeated. His head had lifted slightly, but his expression had not altered.

“Recently the business relationship between my parent company and Herr Leipzig was revived.” He paused slightly. “Initially by means of the telephone,” he said, but Herr Kretzschmar might never have heard of the telephone. “Through intermediaries again, he sent us a sample of his work, which we were pleased to place for him. I came here to discuss terms and to commission further work. Assuming, of course, that Herr Leipzig is in a position to provide it.”

“Of what nature was this work, please—that Herr Leipzig sent you—please, Herr Max?”

“It was a negative photograph of erotic content. My firm always insists on negatives. Herr Leipzig knew this, naturally.” Smiley pointed carefully across the room. “I rather think it must have been taken from that window. A peculiarity of the photograph is that Herr Leipzig himself was modelling in it. One therefore assumes that a friend or business partner may have operated the camera.”

Herr Kretzschmar’s blue gaze remained as direct and innocent as before. His face, though strangely unmarked, struck Smiley as courageous, but he didn’t know why.

You’re messing around with a creep like Leipzig, then you better have a creep like me look after you, Toby had said.

“There is another aspect,” Smiley said.

“Yes?”

“Unhappily the gentleman who was acting as intermediary on this occasion met with a serious accident shortly after the negative was put into our care. The usual line of communication with Herr Leipzig was therefore severed.”

Herr Kretzschmar did not conceal his anxiety. A frown of what seemed to be genuine concern clouded his smooth face and he spoke quite sharply.

“How so an accident? What sort of accident?”

“A fatal one. I came to warn Otto and talk to him.”

Herr Kretzschmar owned a fine gold pencil. Taking it deliberately from an inside pocket, he popped out the point and, still frowning, drew a pure circle on the pad before him. Then he set a cross on top, then he drew a line through his creation, then he tutted and said “Pity,” and when he had done all this he straightened up, and spoke tersely into a machine.

“No disturbances,” he said. In a murmur, the voice of the grey receptionist acknowledged the instruction.

“You said Herr Leipzig was an old acquaintance of your parent company?” Herr Kretzschmar resumed.

“As I believe you yourself were, long ago, Herr Kretzschmar.”

“Please explain this more closely,” Herr Kretzschmar said, turning the pencil slowly in both hands as if studying the quality of the gold.

“We are talking old history, of course,” said Smiley deprecatingly.

“This I understand.”

“When Herr Leipzig first escaped from Russia, he came to Schleswig-Holstein,” Smiley said. “The organisation which had arranged his escape was based in Paris, but as a Balt, he preferred to live in northern Germany. Germany was still occupied and it was difficult for him to make a living.”

“For anyone,” Herr Kretzschmar corrected him. “For anyone at all to make a living. Those were fantastically hard times. The young of today have no idea.”

“None,” Smiley agreed. “And they were particularly hard for refugees. Whether they came from Estonia or from Saxony, life was hard for them.”

“This is absolutely correct. The refugees had it worst. Please continue.”

“In those days there was a considerable industry in information. Of all kinds. Military, industrial, political, economic. The victorious powers were prepared to pay large sums of money for enlightening material about each other. My parent company was involved in this commerce, and kept a representative here whose task was to collect such material and pass it back to London. Herr Leipzig and his partner became occasional clients. On a free-lance basis.”

News of the General’s fatal accident notwithstanding, a swift and most unexpected smile passed like a breeze across the surface of Herr Kretzschmar’s features.

“Free lance,” he said, as if he liked the words, and were new to them. “Free lance,” he repeated. “That’s what we were.”

“Such relationships are naturally of a temporary nature,” Smiley continued. “But Herr Leipzig, being a Balt, had other interests and continued over a long period to correspond with my firm through intermediaries in Paris.” He paused. “Notably a certain General. A few years ago, following a dispute, the General was obliged to move to London, but Otto kept in touch with him. And the General on his side remained the intermediary.”

“Until his accident,” Herr Kretzschmar put in.

“Precisely,” Smiley said.

“It was a traffic accident? An old man—a bit careless?”

“He was shot,” said Smiley, and saw Herr Kretzschmar’s face once more wince with displeasure. “But murdered,” Smiley added, as if to reassure him. “It wasn’t suicide or an accident or anything like that.”

“Naturally,” said Herr Kretzschmar, and offered Smiley a cigarette. Smiley declined, so he lit one for himself, took a few puffs, and stubbed it out. His pale complexion was a shade paler.

“You have met Otto? You know him?” Herr Kretzschmar asked in the tone of one making light conversation.

“I have met him once.”

“Where?”

“I am not at liberty to say.”

Herr Kretzschmar frowned, but in perplexity rather than disapproval.

“Tell me, please. If your parent company—okay, London—wanted to reach Herr Leipzig directly, what steps did it take?” Herr Kretzschmar asked.

“There was an arrangement involving the Hamburger Abendblatt.”

“And if they wished to contact him very urgently?”

“There was you.”

“You are police?” Herr Kretzschmar asked quietly. “Scotland Yard?”

“No.” Smiley stared at Herr Kretzschmar and Herr Kretzschmar returned his gaze.

“Have you brought me something?” Herr Kretzschmar asked. At a loss, Smiley did not immediately reply. “Such as a letter of introduction? A card, for instance?”

“No.”

“Nothing to show? That’s a pity.”

“Perhaps when I have seen him, I shall understand your question better.”

“But you have seen it evidently, this photograph? You have it with you, maybe?”

Smiley took out his wallet, and passed the contact print across the desk. Holding it by the edges, Herr Kretzschmar studied it for a moment, but only by way of confirmation, then laid it on the plastic surface before him. As he did so, Smiley’s sixth sense told him that Herr Kretzschmar was about to make a statement, in the way that Germans sometimes do make statements—whether of philosophy, or personal exculpation, or in order to be liked, or pitied. He began to suspect that Herr Kretzschmar, in his own estimation at least, was a companionable if misunderstood man; a man of heart; even a good man; and that his initial taciturnity was something he wore like a professional suit, reluctantly, in a world that he frequently found unsympathetic to his affectionate character.

“I wish to explain to you that I run a decent house here,” Herr Kretzschmar remarked when he had once more, by the clinical modern lamp, glanced at the print on his desk. “I am not in the habit of photographing clients. Other people sell ties, I sell sex. The important thing to me is to conduct my business in an orderly and correct manner. But this was not business. This was friendship.”

Smiley had the wisdom to keep silent.

Herr Kretzschmar frowned. His voice dropped and became confiding: “You knew him, Herr Max? That old General? You were personally connected with him?”

“Yes.”

“He was something, I understand?”

“He was indeed.”

“A lion, huh?”

“A lion.”

“Otto was crazy about him. My name is Claus. ‘Claus,’ he would say to me. ‘That Vladimir, I love that man.’ You follow me? Otto is a very loyal fellow. The General too?”

“He was,” said Smiley.

“A lot of people do not believe in Otto. Your parent company also, they do not always believe in him. This is understandable. I make no reproach. But the General, he believed in Otto. Not in every detail. But in the big things.” Holding up his forearm, Herr Kretzschmar clenched his fist and it was suddenly a very big fist indeed. “When things got hard, the old General believed in Otto absolutely. I too believe in Otto, Herr Max. In the big things. But I am German, I am not political, I am a businessman. These refugee stories are finished for me. You follow me?”

“Of course.”

“But not for Otto. Never. Otto is a fanatic. I can use that word. Fanatic. This is one reason why our lives have diverged. Nevertheless he is my friend. Anyone harms him, they get a bad time from Kretzschmar.” His face clouded in momentary mystification. “You are sure you have nothing for me, Herr Max?”

“Beyond the photograph, I have nothing for you.”

Reluctantly Herr Kretzschmar once more dismissed the matter, but it took him time; he was uneasy.

“The old General was shot in England?” he asked finally.

“Yes.”

“But you consider nevertheless that Otto too is in danger?”

“Yes, but I think he has chosen to be.”

Herr Kretzschmar was pleased with this answer and nodded energetically twice.

“So do I. I also. This is my clear impression of him. I told him many times: ‘Otto, you should have been a high-wire acrobat.’ To Otto, in my opinion, no day is worth living unless it threatens on at least six separate occasions to be his last. You permit me to make certain observations on my relationship with Otto?”

“Please,” said Smiley politely.

Putting his forearms on the plastic surface, Herr Kretzschmar settled himself into a more comfortable posture for confession.

“There was a time when Otto and Claus Kretzschmar did everything together—stole a lot of horses, as we say. I was from Saxony, Otto came from the East. A Balt. Not Russia—he would insist—Estonia. He had had a tough time, studied the interior of a good few prisons, some bad fellow had betrayed him back in Estonia. A girl had died, and he was pretty mad about that. There was an uncle near Kiel but he was a swine. I may say that. A swine. We had no money, we were comrades and fellow thieves. This was normal, Herr Max.”

Smiley acknowledged the instructive point.

“One of our lines of business was to sell information. You have said correctly that information was a valuable commodity in those days. For example, we would hear of a refugee who had just come over and had not yet been interviewed by the Allies. Or maybe a Russian deserted. Or the master of a cargo ship. We hear about him, we question him. If we are ingenious, we contrive to sell the same report in different versions to three or even four different buyers. The Americans, the French, the British, the Germans themselves, already back in the saddle, yes. Sometimes, as long as it was inaccurate, even five buyers.” He gave a rich laugh. “But only if it was inaccurate, okay? On other occasions, when we were out of sources, we invented—no question. We had maps, good imagination, good contacts. Don’t misunderstand me: Kretzschmar is an enemy of Communism. We are talking old history, like you said, Herr Max. It was necessary to survive. Otto had the idea, Kretzschmar did the work. Otto was not the inventor of work, I would say.” Herr Kretzschmar frowned. “But in one respect Otto was a very serious man. He had a debt to settle. Of this he spoke repeatedly. Maybe against the fellow who betrayed him and killed his girl, maybe against the whole human race. What do I know? He had to be active. Politically active. So for this purpose he went to Paris, on many occasions. Many.”

Herr Kretzschmar allowed himself a short period of reflection.

“I shall be frank,” he announced.

“And I shall respect your confidence,” said Smiley.

“I believe you. You are Max. The General was your friend, Otto told me this. Otto met you once, he admired you. Very well. I shall be frank with you. Many years ago Otto Leipzig went to prison for me. In those days I was not respectable. Now that I have money, I can afford to be. We stole something, he was caught, he lied and took the whole rap. I wanted to pay him. He said, ‘What the hell? If you are Otto Leipzig, a year in prison is a holiday.’ I visited him every week, I bribed the guards to take him special food—even once a woman. When he came out, I again tried to pay him. He declined my offers. ‘One day I’ll ask you something,’ he said. ‘Maybe your wife.’ ‘You shall have her,’ I told him. ‘No problem.’ Herr Max, I assume you are an Englishman. You will appreciate my position.”

Smiley said he did.

“Two months ago—what do I know, maybe more, maybe less—the old General comes through on the telephone. He needs Otto urgently. ‘Not tomorrow, but tonight.’ Sometimes he used to call that way from Paris, using code-names, all this nonsense. The old General is a secretive fellow. So is Otto. Like children, know what I mean? Never mind.”

Herr Kretzschmar made an indulgent sweep of his big hand across his face, as if he were wiping away a cobweb. “‘Listen,’ I tell him. ‘I don’t know where Otto is. Last time I heard of him, he was in bad trouble with some business he started. I’ve got to find him, it will take time. Maybe tomorrow, maybe ten days.’ Then the old man tells me, ‘I sent you a letter for him. Guard it with your life.’ Next day a letter comes, express for Kretzschmar, postmark London. Inside, a second envelope. ‘Urgent and top secret for Otto.’ Top secret, okay? So the old guy’s crazy. Never mind. You know that big handwriting of his, strong like an army order?”

Smiley did.

“I find Otto. He’s hiding from trouble again, no money. One suit he’s got, but dresses like a film star. I give him the old man’s letter.”

“Which is a fat one,” Smiley suggested, thinking of the seven pages of photocopy paper. Thinking of Mikhel’s black machine parked like an old tank in the library.

“Sure. A long letter. He opened it while I was there—”

Herr Kretzschmar broke off and stared at Smiley, and from his expression seemed, reluctantly, to recognise a restraint.

“A long letter,” he repeated. “Many pages. He read it, he got pretty excited. ‘Claus,’ he said. ‘Lend me some money. I got to go to Paris.’ I lend him some money, five hundred marks, no problem. After this I don’t see him much for a time. A couple of occasions he comes here, makes a phone call. I don’t listen. Then a month ago he came to see me.” Again he broke off, and again Smiley felt his restraint. “I am being frank,” he said, as if once again enjoining Smiley to secrecy. “He was—well, I would say excited.”

“He wanted to use the night-club,” Smiley suggested helpfully.

“‘Claus,’ he said. ‘Do what I ask and you have paid your debt to me.’ He called it a honey-trap. He would bring a man to the club, an Ivan, someone he knew well, had been cultivating for many years, he said, a very particular swine. This man was the target. He called him ‘the target.’ He said it was the chance of his life, everything he had waited for. The best girls, the best champagne, the best show. For one night, courtesy of Kretzschmar. The climax of his efforts, he said. The chance to pay old debts and make some money as well. He was owed, he said. Now he would collect. He promised there would be no repercussions. I said ‘No problem.’ ‘Also, Claus, I wish you to photograph us,’ he tells me. I said ‘No problem’ again. So he came. And brought his target.”

Herr Kretzschmar’s narrative had suddenly become uncharacteristically sparse. In the hiatus, Smiley slipped in a question, of which the purpose went far beyond the context: “What language did they speak?”

Herr Kretzschmar hesitated, frowned, but finally answered: “At first his target pretended to be French, but the girls did not speak much French so he spoke German to them. But with Otto he spoke Russian. He was disagreeable, this target. Smelt a lot, sweated a lot, and was in certain other ways not a gentleman. The girls did not like to stay with him. They came to me and complained. I sent them back but they still grumbled.”

He seemed embarrassed.

“Another small question,” said Smiley, as the awkwardness returned.

“Please.”

“How could Otto Leipzig promise there would be no repercussions since he was presumably setting out to blackmail this man?”

“The target was not the end,” Herr Kretzschmar said, pursing his lips to assist the intellectual point. “He was the means.”

“The means to someone else?”

“Otto was not precise. ‘A step on the General’s ladder’ was his expression. ‘For me, Claus, the target is enough. The target and afterwards the money. But for the General, he is only a step on the ladder. For Max also.’ For reasons I did not understand, the money was also dependent upon the General’s satisfaction. Or perhaps yours.” He paused, as if hoping Smiley might enlighten him. Smiley did not. “It was not my wish to ask questions or make conditions,” Herr Kretzschmar continued, picking his words with much greater severity. “Otto and his target were admitted by the back entrance, and shown straight to a séparée. We arranged to display nothing that would indicate the name of the establishment. Not long ago, a night-club down the road went bankrupt,” Herr Kretzschmar said, in a tone that suggested he might not be wholly desolated by the event. “Place called the Freudenjacht. I had bought certain equipment at the sale. Matches. Plates, we spread them around the séparée.” Smiley remembered the letters “ACHT” on the ashtray in the photograph.

“Can you tell me what the two men discussed?”

“No.” He changed his answer: “I have no Russian,” he said. He made the same disowning wave of his hand. “In German they talked about God and the world. Everything.”

“I see.”

“That’s all I know.”

“How was Otto in his manner?” Smiley asked. “Was he still excited?”

“I never saw Otto like that before in my life. He was laughing like an executioner, speaking three languages at once, not drunk but extremely animated, singing, telling jokes, I don’t know what. That’s all I know,” Herr Kretzschmar repeated, with embarrassment.

Smiley glanced discreetly at the observation window and at the grey boxes of machinery. He glimpsed once more in Herr Kretzschmar’s little television screen the soundless twining and parting of the white bodies on the other side of the wall. He saw his last question, he recognised its logic, he sensed the wealth it promised. Yet the same lifetime’s instinct that had brought him this far now held him back. Nothing at this moment, no short-term dividend, was worth the risk of alienating Kretzschmar, and closing the road to Otto Leipzig.

“And Otto gave you no other description of his target?” Smiley asked, for the sake of asking something; to help him run their conversation down.

“During the evening, he came to me once. Up here. He excused himself from the company and came up here to make sure the arrangements were in order. He looked at the screen there and laughed. ‘Now I have taken him over the edge and he can’t get back,’ he said. I did not ask any more. That is all that happened.”

Herr Kretzschmar was writing his instructions for Smiley on a leather-backed jotting pad with gold corners.

“Otto lives in bad circumstances,” he said. “One cannot alter that. Giving him money does not improve his social standards. He remains”—Herr Kretzschmar hesitated—“he remains at heart, Herr Max, a gypsy. Do not misunderstand me.”

“Will you warn him that I am coming?”

“We have agreed not to use the telephone. The official link between us is completely closed.” He handed him the sheet of paper. “I strongly advise you to take care,” Herr Kretzschmar said. “Otto will be very angry when he hears the old General has been shot.” He saw Smiley to the door. “What did they charge you down there?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Downstairs. How much did they take from you?”

“A hundred and seventy-five marks for membership.”

“With the drinks inside, at least two hundred. I’ll tell them to give it back to you at the door. You English are poor these days. Too many trade unions. How’d you like the show?”

“It was very artistic,” said Smiley.

Herr Kretzschmar was once again very pleased with Smiley’s answer. He patted Smiley on the shoulder: “Maybe you should have more fun in life.”

“Maybe I should have done,” Smiley agreed.

“Greet Otto for me,” said Herr Kretzschmar.

“I will,” Smiley promised.

Herr Kretzschmar hesitated, and the same momentary bewilderment came over him.

“And you have nothing for me?” he repeated. “No papers, for example?”

“No.”

“Pity.”

As Smiley left, Herr Kretzschmar was already at the telephone, attending to other special requests.

He returned to the hotel. A drunken night porter opened the door to him, full of suggestions about the wonderful girls he could send to Smiley’s room. He woke, if he had ever slept, to the chime of church bells and the honk of shipping in the harbour, carried to him on the wind. But there are nightmares that do not go away with daylight, and as he drove northward over the fens in his hired Opel, the terrors that hovered in the mist were the same as those that had plagued him in the night.

17

The roads were as empty as the landscape. Through breaks in the mist, he glimpsed now a patch of cornfield, now a red farmhouse crouched low against the wind. A blue notice said “KAI.” He swung sharply into a slip-road, dropping two flights, and saw ahead of him the wharf, a complex of low grey barracks dwarfed by the decks of cargo ships. A red-and-white pole guarded the entrance, there was a customs notice in several languages, but not a human soul in sight. Stopping the car, Smiley got out and walked lightly to the barrier. The red push-button was as big as a saucer. He pressed it and the shriek of its bell set a pair of herons flapping into the white mist. A control tower stood to his left on tubular legs. He heard a door slam and a ring of metal and watched a bearded figure in blue uniform stomp down the iron staircase to the bottom step. The man called to him, “What do you want then?” Not waiting for an answer, he released the boom and waved Smiley through. The tarmac was like a vast bombed area cemented in, bordered by cranes and pressed down by the fogged white sky. Beyond it, the low sea looked too frail for the weight of so much shipping. He glanced in the mirror and saw the spires of a sea town etched like an old print half-way up the page. He glanced out to sea and saw through the mist the line of buoys and winking lamps that marked the water border to East Germany and the start of seven and a half thousand miles of Soviet Empire. That’s where the herons went, he thought. He was driving at a crawl between red-and-white traffic cones towards a container-park heaped with car tyres and logs. “Left at the container-park,” Herr Kretzschmar had said. Obediently, Smiley swung slowly left, looking for an old house, though an old house in this Hanseatic dumping ground seemed a physical impossibility. But Herr Kretzschmar had said, “Look for an old house marked ‘Office,’” and Herr Kretzschmar did not make errors.

He bumped over a railway track and headed for the cargo ships. Beams of morning sun had broken through the mist, making their white paintwork dazzle. He entered an alley comprised of control rooms for the cranes, each like a modern signal-box, each with green levers and big windows. And there at the end of the alley, exactly as Herr Kretzschmar had promised, stood the old tin house with a high tin gable cut like fretwork and crowned with a peeling flag-post. The electric wires that led into it seemed to hold it up; there was an old water pump beside it, dripping, with a tin mug chained to its pedestal. On the wooden door, in faded Gothic lettering, stood the one word “BUREAU,” in the French spelling, not the German, above a newer notice saying “P.K. BERGEN, IMPORT-EXPORT.” He works there as the night clerk, Herr Kretzschmar had said. What he does by day only God and the Devil know.

He rang the bell, then stood well back from the door, very visible. He was keeping his hands clear of his pockets and they were very visible too. He had buttoned his overcoat to the neck. He wore no hat. He had parked the car sideways to the house so that anyone indoors could see the car was empty. I am alone and unarmed, he was trying to say. I am not their man, but yours. He rang the bell again and called “Herr Leipzig!” An upper window opened, and a pretty woman looked out blearily, holding a blanket round her shoulders.

“I’m sorry,” Smiley called up to her politely. “I was looking for Herr Leipzig. It’s rather important.”

“Not here,” she replied, and smiled.

A man joined her. He was young and unshaven, with tattoo marks on his arms and chest. They spoke together a moment, Smiley guessed in Polish.

“Nix hier,” the man confirmed guardedly. “Otto nix hier.”

“We’re just the temporary tenants,” the girl called down. “When Otto’s broke, he moves to his country villa and rents us the apartment.”

She repeated this to her man, who this time laughed.

“Nix hier,” he repeated. “No money. Nobody has money.”

They were enjoying the crisp morning, and the company.

“How long since you saw him?” Smiley asked.

More conference. Was it this day or that day? Smiley had the impression they had lost track of time.

“Thursday,” the girl announced, smiling again.

“Thursday,” her man repeated.

“I’ve got good news for him,” Smiley explained cheerfully, catching her mood. He patted his side pocket. “Money. Pinkapinka. All for Otto. He’s earned it in commission. I promised to bring it to him yesterday.”

The girl interpreted all this and the man argued with her, and the girl laughed again.

“My friend says don’t give it to him or Otto will come back and move us out and we’ll have nowhere to make love!”

Try the water camp, she suggested, pointing with her bare arm. Two kilometres along the main road, over the railway and past the windmill, then right—she looked at her hands, then curved one prettily towards her lover—yes, right; right towards the lake, though you don’t see the lake till you get to it.

“What is the place called?” Smiley asked.

“It has no name,” she said. “It’s just a place. Ask for holiday houses to let, then drive on towards the boats. Ask for Walther. If Otto is around, Walther will know where to find him.”

“Thank you.”

“Walther knows everything!” she called. “He is like a professor!”

She translated this also, but this time her man looked angry.

“Bad professor!” he called down. “Walther bad man!”

“Are you a professor too?” the girl asked Smiley.

“No. No, unfortunately not.” He laughed and thanked them, and they watched him get into his car as if they were children at a celebration. The day, the spreading sunshine, his visit—everything was fun for them. He lowered the window to say goodbye and heard her say something he couldn’t catch.

“What was that?” he called up to her, still smiling.

“I said, ‘Then Otto is twice lucky, for a change!’” the girl repeated.

“Why?” asked Smiley, and stopped the engine. “Why is he twice lucky?”

The girl shrugged. The blanket was slipping from her shoulders and the blanket was all she wore. Her man put an arm round her and pulled it up again for decency.

“Last week the unexpected visit from the East,” she said. “And today the money.” She opened her hands. “Otto is Sunday’s child for once. That’s all.”

Then she saw Smiley’s face, and the laughter went clean out of her voice.

“Visitor?” Smiley repeated. “Who was the visitor?”

“From the East,” she said.

Seeing her dismay, terrified she might disappear altogether, Smiley with difficulty resurrected his appearance of good humour.

“Not his brother, was it?” he asked gaily, all enthusiasm. He held out one hand, cupping it over the mythical brother’s head. “A small chap? Spectacles like mine?”

“No, no! A big fellow. With a chauffeur. Rich.”

Smiley shook his head, affecting light-hearted disappointment. “Then I don’t know him,” he said. “Otto’s brother was certainly never rich.” He succeeded in laughing outright. “Unless he was the chauffeur, of course,” he added.

He followed her directions exactly, with the secret calmness of emergency. To be conveyed. To have no will of his own. To be conveyed, to pray, to make deals with your Maker. Oh, God, don’t make it happen, not another Vladimir. In the sunlight the brown fields had turned to gold, but the sweat on Smiley’s back was like a cold hand stinging his skin. He followed her directions seeing everything as if it were his last day, knowing that the big fellow with the chauffeur had gone ahead of him. He saw the farmhouse with the old horse-plough in the barn, the faulty beer sign with its neon blinking, the window-boxes of geraniums like blood. He saw the windmill like a giant pepper-mill and the field full of white geese all running with the gusty wind. He saw the herons skimming like sails over the fens. He was driving too fast. I should drive more often, he thought; I’m out of practice, out of control. The road changed from tarmac to gravel, gravel to dust, and the dust blew up round the car like a sandstorm. He entered some pine trees and on the other side of them saw a sign saying “HOLIDAY HOUSES TO LET,” and a row of shuttered asbestos bungalows waiting for their summer paint. He kept going and in the distance saw a coppice of masts, and brown water low in its basin. He headed for the masts, bumped over a pot-hole, and heard a frightful crack from under the car. He supposed it was the exhaust, because the noise of his engine was suddenly much louder, and half the water birds in Schleswig-Holstein had taken fright at his arrival.

He passed a farm and entered the protective darkness of trees, then emerged in a stark and brilliant frame of whiteness of which a broken jetty and a few faint olive-coloured reeds made up the foreground, and an enormous sky the rest. The boats lay to his right, beside an inlet. Shabby caravans were parked along the track that led to them, grubby washing hung between the television aerials. He passed a tent in its own vegetable patch and a couple of broken huts that had once been military. On one, a psychedelic sunrise had been painted, and it was peeling. Three old cars and some heaped rubbish stood beside it. He parked and followed a mud path through the reeds to the shore. In the grass harbour lay a cluster of improvised houseboats, some of them converted landing-craft from the war. It was colder here, and for some reason darker. The boats he had seen were day boats, moored in a huddle apart, mostly under tarpaulins. A couple of radios played, but at first he saw nobody. Then he noticed a backwater, and a blue dinghy made fast in it. And, in the dinghy, one gnarled old man in a sailcloth jacket and a black peaked cap, massaging his neck as if he had just woken up.

“Are you Walther?” Smiley asked.

Still rubbing his neck, the old man seemed to nod.

“I’m looking for Otto Leipzig. They told me at the wharf I might find him here.”

Walther’s eyes were cut almond-shaped into the crumpled brown paper of his skin.

“Isadora,” he said.

He pointed at a rickety jetty farther down the shore. The Isadora lay at the end of it, a forty-foot motor launch down on her luck, a Grand Hotel awaiting demolition. The portholes were curtained; one of them was smashed, another was repaired with Scotch tape. The planks of the jetty yielded alarmingly to Smiley’s tread. Once he nearly fell, and twice, to bridge the gaps, he had to stride much wider than seemed safe to his short legs. At the end of the jetty, he realised that the Isadora was adrift. She had slipped her moorings at the stern and shifted twelve feet out to sea, which was probably the longest journey she would ever make. The cabin doors were closed, their windows curtained. There was no small boat.

The old man sat sixty yards off, resting on his oars. He had rowed out of the backwater to watch. Smiley cupped his hands and yelled: “How do I get to him?”

“If you want him, call him,” the old man replied, not seeming to lift his voice at all.

Turning to the launch, Smiley called “Otto.” He called softly, then more loudly, but inside the Isadora nothing stirred. He watched the curtains. He watched the oily water tossing against the rotting hull. He listened and thought he heard music like the music in Herr Kretzschmar’s club, but it might have been echo from another boat. From the dinghy, Walther’s brown face still watched him.

“Call again,” he growled. “Keep calling, if you want him.”

But Smiley had an instinct against being commanded by the old man. He could feel his authority and his contempt and he resented both.

“Is he in here or not?” Smiley called. “I said, ‘Is he in here?’”

The old man did not budge.

“Did you see him come aboard?” Smiley insisted.

He saw the brown head turn, and knew the old man was spitting into the water.

“The wild pig comes and goes,” Smiley heard him say. “What the hell do I care?”

“So when did he come last?”

At the sound of their voices a couple of heads had lifted out of other boats. They stared at Smiley without expression: the little fat stranger standing at the end of the broken jetty. On the shore a ragtag group had formed: a girl in shorts, an old woman, two blond teen-aged boys dressed alike. There was something that linked them in their disparity: a prison look; submission to the same bad laws.

“I’m looking for Otto Leipzig,” Smiley called to all of them. “Can anyone tell me, please, whether he’s around?” On a houseboat not too far away, a bearded man was lowering a bucket into the water. Smiley’s eye selected him. “Is there anyone aboard the Isadora?” he asked.

The bucket gurgled and filled. The bearded man pulled it out, but didn’t speak.

“You should see his car,” a woman shouted shrilly from the shore, or perhaps it was a child. “They took it to the wood.”

The wood lay a hundred yards back from the water, mostly saplings and birch trees.

“Who did?” Smiley asked. “Who took it there?”

Whoever had spoken chose not to speak again. The old man was rowing himself towards the jetty. Smiley watched him approach, watched him back the stern towards the jetty steps. Without hesitating, Smiley clambered aboard. The old man pulled him the few strokes to the Isadora’s side. A cigarette was jammed between his cracked old lips and, like his eyes, it shone unnaturally against the evil gloom of his weathered face.

“Come far?” the old man asked.

“I’m a friend of his,” Smiley said.

There was rust and weed on the Isadora’s ladder, and as Smiley reached the deck it was slippery with dew. He looked for signs of life and saw none. He looked for footprints in the dew, in vain. A couple of fixed fishing-lines hung into the water, made fast to the rusted balustrade, but they could have been there for weeks. He listened, and heard again, very faintly, the strains of slow band music. From the shore? Or from farther out? From neither. The sound came from under his feet, and it was as if someone were playing a seventy-eight record on thirty-three.

He looked down and saw the old man in his dinghy, leaning back, and the peak of his cap pulled over his eyes, while he slowly conducted to the beat. He tried the cabin door and it was locked, but the door did not seem strong—nothing did—so he walked around the deck till he found a rusted screwdriver to use as a jemmy. He shoved it into the gap, worked it backwards and forwards, and suddenly to his surprise the whole door went, frame, hinges, lock, and everything else, with a bang like an explosion, followed by a shower of red dust from the rotten timber. A big slow moth thudded against his cheek and left it stinging strangely for a good while afterwards, till he began to wonder whether it was a bee. Inside, the cabin was pitch dark, but the music was a little louder. He was on the top rung of the ladder, and even with the daylight behind him the darkness below remained absolute. He pressed a light switch. It didn’t work, so he stepped back and spoke down to the old man in his dinghy: “Matches.”

For a moment Smiley nearly lost his temper. The peaked cap didn’t stir, nor did the conducting cease. He shouted, and this time a box of matches landed at his feet. He took them into the cabin and lit one, and saw the exhausted transistor radio that was still putting out music with the last of its energy, and it was about the only thing intact, the only thing still functioning, in all the devastation round it.

The match had gone out. He pulled the curtains, but not on the landward side, before he lit another. He didn’t want the old man looking in. In the grey sideways light, Leipzig was ridiculously like his tiny portrait in the photograph taken by Herr Kretzschmar. He was naked, he was lying where they had trussed him, even if there was no girl and no Kirov either. The hewn Toulouse-Lautrec face, blackened with bruising and gagged with several strands of rope, was as jagged and articulate in death as Smiley had remembered it in life. They must have used the music to drown the noise while they tortured him, Smiley thought. But he doubted whether the music would have been enough. He went on staring at the radio as a point of reference, a thing to go back to when the body became too much to look at before the match went out. Japanese, he noticed. Odd, he thought. Fix on the oddness of it. How odd of the technical Germans to buy Japanese radios. He wondered whether the Japanese returned the compliment. Keep wondering, he urged himself ferociously; keep your whole mind on this interesting economic phenomenon of the exchange of goods between highly industrialised nations.

Still staring at the radio, Smiley righted a folding stool and sat on it. Slowly, he returned his gaze to Leipzig’s face. Some dead faces, he reflected, have the dull, even stupid look of a patient under anaesthetic. Others preserve a single mood of the once varied nature—the dead man as lover, as father, as car driver, bridge player, tyrant. And some, like Vladimir’s, have ceased to preserve anything. But Leipzig’s face, even with the ropes across it, had a mood, and it was anger: anger intensified by pain, turned to fury by it; anger that had increased and become the whole man as the body lost its strength.

Hate, Connie had said.

Methodically, Smiley peered about him, thinking as slowly as he could manage, trying, by his examination of the debris, to reconstruct their progress. First the fight before they overpowered him, which he deduced from the smashed table-legs and chairs and lamps and shelves, and anything else that could be ripped from its housing and either wielded or thrown. Then the search, which took place after they had trussed him and in the intervals while they questioned him. Their frustration was written everywhere. They had ripped out wall-boards and floor-boards, and cupboard drawers and clothes and mattresses and by the end anything that came apart, anything that was not a minimal component, as Otto Leipzig still refused to talk. He noticed also that there was blood in surprising places—in the wash-basin, over the stove. He liked to think it was not all Otto Leipzig’s. And finally, in desperation, they had killed him, because those were Karla’s orders, that was Karla’s way. “The killing comes first, the questioning second,” Vladimir used to say.

I too believe in Otto, Smiley thought stupidly, recalling Herr Kretzschmar’s words. Not in every detail but in the big things. So do I, he thought. He believed in him, at that moment, as surely as he believed in death, and in the Sandman. As for Vladimir, so for Otto Leipzig: death had ruled that he was telling the truth.

From the direction of the shore, he heard a woman yelling: “What’s he found? Has he found something? Who is he?”

He returned aloft. The old man had shipped his oars and let the dinghy drift. He sat with his back to the ladder, head hunched into his big shoulders. He had finished his cigarette and lit a cigar as if it were Sunday. And at the same moment as Smiley saw the old man, he also saw the chalk mark. It was in the same line of vision, but very close to him, swimming in the misted lenses of his spectacles. He had to lower his head and look over the top of them to fix on it. A chalk mark, sharp and yellow. One line, carefully drawn over the rust of the balustrade, and a foot away from it a reel of fishing-line, made fast with a sailor’s knot. The old man was watching him; so, for all he knew, was the growing group of watchers on the shore, but he had no option. He pulled at the line and it was heavy. He pulled steadily, hand over hand, till the line changed to gut, and he found himself pulling that instead. The gut grew suddenly tight. Cautiously he kept pulling. The people on the shore had grown expectant; he could feel their interest even across the water. The old man had put back his head and was watching through the black shadow of his cap. Suddenly, with a plop, the catch jumped clear of the water and a peal of ribald laughter rose from the spectators: one old gym-shoe, green, with the lace still in it, and the hook that held it to the line was big enough to beach a shark. The laughter slowly died. Smiley unhooked the shoe. Then, as if he had other business there, he lumbered back into the cabin till he was out of sight, leaving the door ajar for light.

But happening to take the gym-shoe with him.

An oilskin packet was hand-stitched into the toe of the shoe. He pulled it out. It was a tobacco pouch, stitched along the top and folded several times. Moscow Rules, he thought woodenly. Moscow Rules all the way. How many more dead men’s legacies must I inherit? he wondered. Though we value none/But the horizontal one. He had unpicked the stitching. Inside the pouch was another wrapping, this time a latex-rubber sheath knotted at the throat. And secreted inside the sheath, one hard wad of cardboard smaller than a book of matches. Smiley spread it open. It was half a picture postcard. Black-and-white, not even coloured. Half a dull picture of Schleswig-Holstein landscape with half a herd of Friesian cattle grazing in grey sunlight. Ripped with a deliberate jaggedness. No writing on the back, no address, no stamp. Just half a boring, unposted postcard; but they had tortured him, then killed him for it, and still not found it, or any of the treasures it unlocked. Putting it, together with its wrapping, into the inside pocket of his jacket, he returned to the deck. The old man in his dinghy had drawn alongside. Without a word, Smiley climbed slowly down the ladder. The crowd of camp people on the shore had grown still larger.

“Drunk?” the old man asked. “Sleeping it off?”

Smiley stepped into the dinghy and, as the old man pulled away, looked back at the Isadora once more. He saw the broken porthole, he thought of the wreckage in the cabin, the paper-thin sides that allowed him to hear the very shuffle of feet on the shore. He imagined the fight and Leipzig’s screams filling the whole camp with their din. He imagined the silent group standing where they were standing now, without a voice or a helping hand between them.

“It was a party,” the old man said carelessly while he made the dinghy fast against the jetty. “Lots of music, singing. They warned us it would be loud.” He tugged at a knot. “Maybe they quarrelled. So what? Many people quarrel. They made some noise, played some jazz. So what? We are musical people here.”

“They were police,” a woman called from the group on the shore. “When police go about their business, it is the duty of the citizen to keep his trap shut.”

“Show me his car,” Smiley said.

They moved in a rabble, no one leading. The old man strode at Smiley’s side, half custodian, half bodyguard, making a way for him with facetious ceremony. The children ran everywhere but they kept well clear of the old man. The Volkswagen stood in a coppice and it was ripped apart like the cabin of the Isadora. The roof lining hung in shreds, the seats had been pulled out and split open. The wheels were missing but Smiley guessed that had happened since. The camp people stood round it reverently, as if it were their show-piece. Someone had tried to burn it but the fire had not caught.

“He was scum,” the old man explained. “They all are. Look at them. Polacks, criminals, subhumans.”

Smiley’s Opel stood where he had parked it, at the edge of the track, close to the dustbins, and the two blond boys who were dressed alike were standing over the boot beating the lid with hammers. As he walked towards them, he could see their forelocks bouncing with each blow. They wore jeans and black boots studded with love-daisies.

“Tell them to stop hitting my car,” Smiley said to the old man.

The camp people were following at a distance. He could hear again the furtive shuffle of their feet, like a refugee army. He reached his car and had the keys in his hand, and the two boys were still bent over the back hitting with all their might. But when he walked round to take a look, all they had done was beat the lid of the boot right off its hinges, then fold it and beat it flat again till it lay like a crude parcel on the floor. He looked at the wheels but nothing seemed amiss. He didn’t know what else to look for. Then he saw that they had tied a dustbin to the rear bumper with string. Keeping clear, he tugged at the string to break it, but it refused to yield. He tried it with his teeth, without success. The old man lent him a penknife and he cut it, keeping clear of the boys with their hammers. The camp people had made a half ring and they were holding up their children for the farewell. Smiley got into the car and the old man slammed the door after him with a tremendous heave. Smiley had the key in the ignition, but by the time he turned it, one of the boys had draped himself over the bonnet as languidly as a model at a motor show and the other was tapping politely at the window.

Smiley lowered the window. “What do you want?” he asked.

The boy held out his palm. “Repairs,” he explained. “Your boot didn’t shut properly. Time and materials. Overheads. Parking.” He indicated his thumb-nail. “My colleague here hurt his hand. It could have been serious.”

Smiley looked at the boy’s face and saw no human instinct that he understood.

“You have repaired nothing. You have done damage. Ask your friend to get off the car.”

The boys conferred, seeming to disagree. They did this under the full gaze of the crowd, in a reasoned manner, slowly pushing each other’s shoulders and making rhetorical gestures that did not coincide with their words. They talked about nature and about politics, and their Platonic dialogue might have gone on indefinitely if the boy who was on the car had not stood up in order to make the best of a debating point. As he did so, he broke off a windscreen wiper as if it were a flower and handed it to the old man. Driving away, Smiley looked in his mirror and saw a ring of faces staring after him with the old man at their centre. Nobody waved goodbye.

He drove without haste, weighing the chances, while the car clanged like an old fire-engine. He supposed they had done something else to it as well, something he had failed to notice. He had left Germany before, he had come and gone illicitly, he had hunted while on the run, and though he was old now and in a different Germany, he felt as if he had been returned to the wild. He had no way of knowing whether anybody from the water camp had telephoned the police, but he took it for an accomplished fact. The boat was open and its secret out. Those who had looked away would now be the first to come forward as good citizens. He had seen that before as well.

He entered a sea town, the boot—if it was the boot—still clanking behind him. Or perhaps it’s the exhaust, he thought; the pot-hole I crashed into on the way to the camp. A hot, unseasonable sun had replaced the morning mists. There were no trees. An amazing brilliance was opening around him. It was still early, and empty horse carriages stood waiting for the first tourists. The sand was a pattern of craters dug in the summer by sun-worshippers to escape the wind. He could hear the tinny echo of his own progress bouncing between the painted shop-fronts, and the sunlight seemed to make it even louder. Where he passed people, he saw their heads lift to stare after him because of the row the car made.

They’ll know the car, he thought. Even if nobody at the water camp remembered the number, the smashed boot would give him away. He turned off the main street. The sun was really very bright indeed. “A man came, Herr Wachtmeister,” they would be saying to the police patrol. “This morning, Herr Wachtmeister. He said he was a friend. He looked in the boat and then drove away. He asked us nothing, Captain. He was unmoved. He fished a shoe, Herr Wachtmeister. Imagine—a shoe!”

He was heading for the railway station, following the signs, looking for a place where you could park a car all day. The station was red brick and massive, he supposed from before the war. He passed it and found a big car-park to his left. A line of shedding trees ran through it, and there were leaves on some of the cars. A machine took his money and issued him a ticket to stick on his windscreen. He backed into the middle of a line, the boot as far out of sight as possible against a mud bank. He stepped out and the extraordinary sun hit him like a slap. There was not a breath of wind. He locked the car and put the keys in the exhaust-pipe, he didn’t quite know why, except that he felt apologetic towards the hire company. He kicked up the leaves and sand till the front number-plate was almost hidden. In an hour, in this St. Luke’s summer, there would be a hundred and more cars in the park.

He had noticed a men’s clothes shop in the main street. He bought a linen jacket there but nothing more, because people who buy whole outfits are remembered. He did not wear it, but carried it in a plastic bag. In a side-street full of boutiques he bought a gaudy straw hat and, from a stationer’s, a holiday map of the area, and a railway timetable of the region Hamburg, Schleswig-Holstein, and Lower Saxony. He didn’t wear the hat either, but kept it in its bag like the jacket. He was sweating from the unexpected heat. The heat was upsetting him; it was as absurd as snow in summer. He went to a telephone-box and again consulted local directories. Hamburg had no Claus Kretzschmar, but one of the Schleswig-Holstein directories had a Kretzschmar who lived in a place Smiley had never heard of. He studied his map and found a small town by that name on the main railway line to Hamburg. This pleased him very much.

Calmly, all other thoughts bound down with iron bands, Smiley once more did his sums. Within moments of finding the car, the police would be talking to the hire firm in Hamburg. As soon as they had spoken to the hire firm and obtained his name and description, they would put a watch on the airport and other crossing places. Kretzschmar was a night-bird and would sleep late. The town where he lived was an hour away by stopping train.

He returned to the railway station. The main concourse was a Wagnerian fantasy of a Gothic court, with an arched roof and a huge stained-glass window that poured out coloured sunbeams onto the ceramic floor. From a telephone-box, he rang Hamburg Airport, giving his name as “Standfast, initial J,” which was the name on the passport he had collected from his London club. The first available flight to London was this evening at six but only first-class was open. He booked a first-class seat and said he would upgrade his economy ticket on arrival at the airport. The girl said, “Then please come half an hour before check-in.” Smiley promised he would—he wanted to make an impression—but no, alas, Mr. Standfast had no phone number where he could be reached meanwhile. There was nothing in her tone to suggest she had a security officer standing behind her with a Telex in his hand, whispering instructions in her ear, but he guessed that within a couple of hours Mr. Standfast’s seat reservation was going to ring a lot of bells, because it was Mr. Standfast who had hired the Opel car. He stepped back into the concourse, and the shafts of coloured light. There were two ticket counters and two short queues. At the first, an intelligent girl attended him and he bought a second-class single ticket to Hamburg. But it was a deliberately laboured purchase, full of indecision and nervousness, and when he had made it he insisted on writing down times of departure and arrival: also on borrowing her ball-point and a pad of paper.

In the men’s room, having first transferred the contents of his pockets, beginning with the treasured piece of postcard from Leipzig’s boat, he changed into the linen jacket and straw hat, then went to the second ticket counter where, with a minimum of fuss, he bought a ticket on the stopping train to Kretzschmar’s town. To do this, he avoided looking at the attendant at all, concentrating instead on the ticket and his change, from under the brim of his loud straw hat. Before leaving he took one last precaution. He made a wrong-number phone call to Herr Kretzschmar and established from an indignant wife that it was a scandal to telephone anybody so early. As a last measure, he folded the plastic carrier-bags into his pocket.

The town was leafy and secluded, the lawns large, the houses carefully zoned. Whatever there had been of country life had long fallen before the armies of suburbia, but the brilliant sunlight made everything beautiful. Number 8 was on the right-hand side, a substantial two-story residence with steep Scandinavian roofs, a double garage, and a wide selection of young trees planted much too close together. There was a swing chair in the garden with a flowered plastic seat and a new fish-pond in the romantic idiom. But the main attraction, and Herr Kretzschmar’s pride, was an outdoor swimming-pool in its own patio of shrieking red tile, and it was there that Smiley found him, in the bosom of his family, on this unlikely autumn day, entertaining a few neighbours at an impromptu party. Herr Kretzschmar himself, in shorts, was preparing the barbecue and as Smiley dropped the latch on the gate he paused from his labours and looked round to see who had come. But the new straw hat and the linen jacket confused him and he called instead to his wife.

Frau Kretzschmar strode down the path, bearing a champagne glass. She was clad in a pink bathing-dress and a diaphanous pink cape, which she allowed to flow behind her daringly.

“Who is that then? Who is the nice surprise?” she kept asking in a playful voice. She could have been talking to her puppy.

She stopped in front of him. She was tanned and tall and, like her husband, built to last. He could see little of her face, for she wore dark glasses with a white plastic beak to protect her nose from burning.

“Here is family Kretzschmar, going about its pleasures,” she said not very confidently when he had still not introduced himself. “What can we do for you, sir? In what way can we serve?”

“I have to speak to your husband,” Smiley said. It was the first time he had spoken since he bought his ticket, and his voice was thick and unnatural.

“But Cläuschen does no business in the daytime,” she said firmly, still smiling. “In the daytime by family decree the profit motive has its sleep. Shall I put handcuffs on him to prove to you he is our prisoner till sunset?”

Her bathing-dress was in two parts and her smooth, full belly was oily with lotion. She wore a gold chain round her waist, presumably as a further sign of naturalness. And gold sandals with very high heels.

“Kindly tell your husband that this is not business,” Smiley said. “This is friendship.”

Frau Kretzschmar took a sip of her champagne, then removed her dark glasses and beak, as if she were declaring herself at the bal masqué. She had a snub nose. Her face, though kindly, was a good deal older than her body.

“But how can it be friendship when I don’t know your name?” she demanded, no longer certain whether to be winsome or discouraging.

But by then Herr Kretzschmar himself had walked down the path after her, and stopped before them, staring from his wife to Smiley, then at Smiley again. And perhaps the sight of Smiley’s set face and manner, and the fixity of his gaze, warned Herr Kretzschmar of the reason for his coming.

“Go and take care of the cooking,” he said curtly.

Guiding Smiley by the arm, Herr Kretzschmar led him to a drawing-room with brass chandeliers and a picture window full of jungle cacti.

“Otto Leipzig is dead,” Smiley said without preliminary as soon as the door was closed. “Two men killed him at the water camp.”

Herr Kretzschmar’s eyes opened very wide; then unashamedly he swung his back to Smiley and covered his face with his hands.

“You made a tape-recording,” Smiley said, ignoring this display entirely. “There was the photograph which I showed you, and somewhere there is also a tape-recording which you are keeping for him.” Herr Kretzschmar’s back showed no sign that he had heard. “You talked about it to me yourself last night,” Smiley went on, in the same sentinel tone. “You said they discussed God and the world. You said Otto was laughing like an executioner, speaking three languages at once, singing, telling jokes. You took the photographs for Otto, but you also recorded their conversation for him. I suspect you also have the letter which you received on his behalf from London.”

Herr Kretzschmar had swung round and he was staring at Smiley in outrage.

“Who killed him?” he asked. “Herr Max, I ask you as a soldier!”

Smiley had taken the torn piece of picture postcard from his pocket.

“Who killed him?” Herr Kretzschmar repeated. “I insist!”

“This is what you expected me to bring last night,” said Smiley, ignoring the question. “Whoever brings it to you may have the tapes and whatever else you were keeping for him. That was the way he worked it out with you.”

Kretzschmar took the card.

“He called it his Moscow Rules,” Kretzschmar said. “Both Otto and the General insisted on it, though it struck me personally as ridiculous.”

“You have the other half of the card?” Smiley asked.

“Yes,” said Kretzschmar.

“Then make the match and give me the material. I shall use it exactly as Otto would have wished.”

He had to say this twice in different ways before Kretzschmar answered. “You promise this?” Kretzschmar demanded.

“Yes.”

“And the killers? What will you do with them?”

“Most likely they are already safe across the water,” Smiley said. “They have only a few kilometres to drive.”

“Then what good is the material?”

“The material is an embarrassment to the man who sent the killers,” Smiley said, and perhaps at this moment the iron quietness of Smiley’s demeanour advised Herr Kretzschmar that his visitor was as distressed as he was—perhaps, in his own very private fashion, more so.

“Will it kill him also?” Herr Kretzschmar asked.

Smiley took quite a time to answer this question. “It will do worse than kill him,” he said.

For a moment Herr Kretzschmar seemed disposed to ask what was worse than being killed; but he didn’t. Holding the half postcard lifelessly in his hand, he left the room. Smiley waited patiently. A perpetual brass clock laboured on its captive course, red fish gazed at him from an aquarium. Kretzschmar returned. He held a white cardboard box. Inside it, padded in hygienic tissue, lay a folded wad of photocopy paper covered with a now familiar handwriting, and six miniature cassettes, blue plastic, of a type favoured by men of modern habits.

“He entrusted them to me,” Herr Kretzschmar said.

“He was wise,” said Smiley.

Herr Kretzschmar laid a hand on Smiley’s shoulder. “If you need anything, let me know,” he said. “I have my people. These are violent times.”

From a call-box Smiley once more rang Hamburg Airport, this time to re-confirm Standfast’s flight to London Heathrow. This done, he bought stamps and a strong envelope and wrote on it a fictional address in Adelaide, Australia. He put Mr. Standfast’s passport inside it and dropped it in a letter-box. Then, travelling as plain Mr. George Smiley, profession clerk, he returned to the railway station, passing without incident across the border into Denmark. During the journey, he took himself to the lavatory and there read Ostrakova’s letter, all seven pages of it, the copy made by the General himself on Mikhel’s antiquated liquid copier in the little library next door to the British Museum. What he read, added to what he had that day already seen, filled him with a growing and almost uncontainable alarm. By train, ferry, and finally taxi, he hastened to Copenhagen’s Castrup Airport. From Castrup he caught a mid-afternoon plane to Paris and, though the flight lasted only an hour, in Smiley’s world it took a lifetime, conveying him across the entire range of his memories, emotions, and anticipations. His anger and revulsion at Leipzig’s murder, till now suppressed, welled over, only to be set aside by his fears for Ostrakova: if they had done so much to Leipzig and the General, what would they not do to her? The dash through Schleswig-Holstein had given him the swiftness of revived youth, but now, in the anti-climax of escape, he was assailed by the incurable indifference of age. With death so close, he thought, so ever-present, what is the point of struggling any longer? He thought of Karla again, and of his absolutism, which at least gave point to the perpetual chaos that was life’s condition; point to violence, and to death; of Karla for whom killing had never been more than the necessary adjunct of a grand design.

How can I win? he asked himself; alone, restrained by doubt and a sense of decency—how can any of us—against this remorseless fusillade?

The plane’s descent—and the promise of the renewed chase—restored him. There are two Karlas, he reasoned, remembering again the stoic face, the patient eyes, the wiry body waiting philosophically upon its own destruction. There is Karla the professional, so self-possessed that he could allow, if need be, ten years for an operation to bear fruit: in Bill Haydon’s case, twenty; Karla the old spy, the pragmatist, ready to trade a dozen losses for one great win.

And there is this other Karla, Karla of the heart after all, of the one great love, the Karla flawed by humanity. I should not be deterred if, in order to defend his weakness, he resorts to the methods of his trade.

Reaching in the compartment above him for his straw hat, Smiley happened to remember a cavalier promise he had once made concerning Karla’s eventual downfall. “No,” he had replied, in answer to a question much like the one he had just put to himself. “No, Karla is not fireproof. Because he’s a fanatic. And one day, if I have anything to do with it, that lack of moderation will be his downfall.”

Hastening to the cab rank, he recalled that his remark had been made to one Peter Guillam, who at this present moment happened to be much upon his mind.

18

Lying on the divan, Ostrakova glanced at the twilight and seriously wondered whether it signalled the world’s end.

All day long the same grey gloom had hung over the courtyard, consigning her tiny universe to a perpetual evening. At dawn a sepia glow had thickened it; at midday, soon after the men came, it was a celestial power-cut, deepening to a cavernous black in anticipation of her own end. And now, at evening, fog had further strengthened the grip of darkness upon the retreating forces of light. And so it goes with Ostrakova also, she decided without bitterness: with my bruised, black-and-blue body, and my siege, and my hopes for the second coming of the redeemer; so it goes exactly, an ebbing of my own day.

She had woken this morning to find herself seemingly bound hand and foot. She had tried to move one leg and, immediately, burning cords had tightened round her thighs and chest and stomach. She had raised an arm, but only against the tugging of iron ligatures. She had taken a lifetime to crawl to the bathroom and another to get herself undressed and into the warm water. And when she entered it, she was frightened that she had fainted from the pain, her flailed flesh hurt so terribly where the road had grazed it. She heard a hammering and had thought it was inside her head, till she realised it was the work of a furious neighbour. When she counted the church clock’s chimes, they stopped at four; so no wonder the neighbour was protesting at the thunder of running water in the old pipes. The labour of making coffee had exhausted her but sitting down was suddenly unbearable, lying down just as bad. The only way for her to rest was to lean herself forward, elbows on the draining-board. From there she could watch the courtyard, as a pastime and as a precaution, and from there she had seen the men, the two creatures of darkness, as she now thought of them, mouthing to the concierge, and the old goat of a concierge, Madame la Pierre, mouthing back, shaking her fool head—“No, Ostrakova is not here, not here”—not here in ten different ways, that echoed like an aria round the courtyard—is not here—drowning the clipping of carpet-beaters and the clatter of children and the gossip of the two turbaned old wives on the third floor, leaning out of their windows two metres apart—is not here! Till a child would not have believed her.

If she wanted to read, she had to put the book on the draining-board, which after the men came, was where she kept the gun as well, till she noticed the swivel on the butt-end, and with a woman’s practicality improvised a lanyard out of kitchen string. In that way, with the pistol round her neck, she had both her arms free when she needed to hand herself across the room. But when it prodded her breasts she thought she would retch from the agony. After the men left again, she had started reciting aloud while she went about the chores she had promised herself she would observe during her imprisonment. “One tall man, one leather coat, one Homburg hat,” she had murmured, helping herself to a generous ration of vodka to restore her. “One broad man, one balding pate, grey shoes with perforations!” Make songs of my memory, she had thought; sing them to the magician, to the General—oh, why don’t they answer my second letter?

She was a child again, falling off her pony, and the pony came back and trampled her. She was a woman again, trying to be a mother. She remembered the three days of impossible pain in which Alexandra fiercely resisted being born into the grey and dangerous light of an unwashed Moscow nursing home—the same light that was outside her window now, and lay like unnatural dust over the polished floors of her apartment. She heard herself calling for Glikman—“Bring him to me, bring him to me.” She remembered how it had seemed to her that sometimes it was he, Glikman her lover, whom she was bearing, and not their child at all—as if his whole sturdy, hairy body were trying to fight its way out of her—or was it into her?—as if to give birth at all would be to deliver Glikman into the very captivity she dreaded for him.

Why was he not there, why would he not come? she wondered, confusing Glikman with the General and the magician equally. Why don’t they answer my letter?

She knew very well why Glikman had not come to her as she wrestled with Alexandra. She had begged him to keep away. “You have the courage to suffer, and that is enough,” she had told him. “But you have not the courage to witness the suffering of others, and for that I love you also. Christ had it too easy,” she told him. “Christ could cure the lepers, Christ could make the blind see and the dead come alive. He could even die in a sensible cause. But you are not Christ, you are Glikman, and there’s nothing you can do about my pain except watch and suffer too, which does nobody any good whatever.”

But the General and his magician were different, she argued, with some resentment; they have set themselves up as the physicians of my disease, and I have a right to them!

At her appointed time, the cretinous, braying concierge had come up, complete with her troglodyte husband with his screwdriver. They were full of excitement for Ostrakova, and joy at being able to bring such heartening news. Ostrakova had composed herself carefully for the visit, putting on music, making up her face, and heaping books beside the divan, all to create an atmosphere of leisured introspection.

“Visitors, madame, men. . . . No, they would not leave their names . . . here for a short visit from abroad . . . knew your husband, madame. Emigrés, they were like yourself. . . . No, they wished to keep it a surprise, madame. . . . They said they had gifts for you from relations, madame . . . a secret, madame, and one of them so big and strong and good-looking. . . . No, they will come back another time, they are here on business, many appointments, they said. . . . No, by taxi, and they kept it waiting—the expense, imagine!”

Ostrakova had laughed, and put her hand on the concierge’s arm, physically drawing her into a great secret, while the troglodyte stood and puffed cigarette and garlic over both of them.

“Listen,” she said. “Both of you. Attend to me, Monsieur and Madame la Pierre. I know very well who they are, these rich and handsome visitors. They are my husband’s no-good nephews from Marseilles, lazy devils and great vagabonds. If they are bringing a present for me, you may be sure they will also want beds and most likely dinner too. Be so kind and tell them I am away in the country for a few more days. I love them dearly, but I must have my peace.”

Whatever doubts or disappointments remained in their goatish heads, Ostrakova bought them away with money, and now she was alone again—the lanyard round her neck. She was stretched out on the divan, her hips hoisted into a position that was halfway tolerable. The gun was in her hand and pointed at the door, and she could hear the footsteps coming up the stairs, two pairs, the one heavy, the other light.

She rehearsed: “One tall man, one leather coat . . . One broad man, grey shoes with perforations...”

Then the knocking, timid as a childhood proposition of love. And the unfamiliar voice, speaking French with an unfamiliar accent, slow and classical like her husband Ostrakov’s and with the same alluring tenderness.

“Madame Ostrakova. Please admit me. I am here to help you.”

With a sense of everything ending, Ostrakova deliberately cocked her dead husband’s pistol, and advanced with firm if painful steps, upon the door. She advanced crabwise and she wore no shoes and she mistrusted the fish-eye peep-hole. Nothing would convince her it couldn’t peep in both directions. Therefore she made this detour round the room in the hope of escaping its eye-line, and on the way she passed Ostrakov’s blurry portrait and resented very much that he had had the selfishness to die so early instead of staying alive so that he could protect her. Then she thought: No. I have turned the corner. I possess my own courage.

And she did possess it. She was going to war, every minute could be her last, but the pains had vanished, her body felt as ready as it had been for Glikman, always, any time; she could feel his energy running into her limbs like reinforcements. She had Glikman beside her and she remembered his strength without wishing for it. She had a Biblical notion that all his tireless lovemaking had invigorated her for this moment. She had the calm of Ostrakov and the honour of Ostrakov; she had his gun. But her desperate, solitary courage was finally her own, and it was the courage of a mother roused, and deprived, and furious: Alexandra! The men who had come to kill her were the same men who had taunted her with her secret motherhood, who had killed Ostrakov and Glikman, and would kill the whole poor world if she did not stop them.

She wanted only to aim before she fired, and she had realised that as long as the door was closed and chained and the peep-hole was in place, she could aim from very close—and the closer she aimed, the better, for she was sensibly modest about her marksmanship. She put her finger over the peep-hole to stop them looking in, then she put her eye to it to see who they were, and the first thing she saw was her own foolish concierge, very close, round as an onion in the distorted lens, with green hair from the glow of the ceramic tiles in the landing, and a huge rubber smile and a nose that came out like a duck’s bill. And it occurred to Ostrakova that the light footsteps had been hers—lightness, like pain and happiness, being always relative to whatever has come before, or after. And the second thing she saw was a small gentleman in spectacles, who in the fish-eye was as fat as the Michelin tyre man. And while she watched him, he earnestly removed a straw hat that came straight out of a novel by Turgenev, and held it at his side as if he had just heard his national anthem being played. And she inferred from this gesture that the small gentleman was telling her that he knew she was afraid, and knew that a shadowed face was what she was afraid of most, and that by baring his head he was in some way revealing his goodwill to her.

His stillness and his gravity had a sense of dutiful submission about them, which, like his voice, again reminded her of Ostrakov; the lens might make him into a frog, but it could not take away his bearing. His spectacles also reminded her of Ostrakov, being as necessary to vision as a walking-stick to a cripple. All this, with a thumping heart but a very steady eye, Ostrakova took in at her first long inspection, while she kept the gun barrel clamped to the door and her finger on the trigger, and considered whether or not to shoot him then and there, straight through the door—“Take that for Glikman, that for Ostrakov, that for Alexandra!”

For, in her state of suspicion, she was ready to believe that they had selected the man for his very air of humanity; because they knew that Ostrakov himself had had this same capacity to be at once fat and dignified.

“I do not need help,” Ostrakova called back at last, and watched in terror to see what effect her words would have on him. But while she watched, the fool concierge decided to start yelling on her own account.

“Madame, he is a gentleman! He is English! He is concerned for you! You are ill, madame, the whole street is frightened for you! Madame, you cannot lock yourself away like this any more.” A pause. “He is a doctor, madame—aren’t you, monsieur? A distinguished doctor for maladies of the spirit!” Then Ostrakova heard the idiot whisper to him: “Tell her, monsieur. Tell her you’re a doctor!”

But the stranger shook his head in disapproval, and replied: “No. It is not true.”

“Madame, open up or I shall fetch the police!” the concierge cried. “A Russian, making such a scandal!”

“I do not need help,” Ostrakova repeated, much louder.

But she knew already that help, more than anything else, was what she did need; that without it she would never kill, any more than Glikman would have killed. Not even if she had the Devil himself in her sights could she kill another woman’s child.

As she continued her vigil, the little man took a slow step forward till his face, distorted like a face under water, was all she could see in the lens; and she saw for the first time the fatigue in it, the redness of the eyes behind the spectacles, the heavy shadows under them; and she sensed in him a passionate caring for herself that had nothing to do with death, but with survival; she sensed that she was looking at a face that was concerned, rather than one that had banished sympathy for ever. The face came closer still and the snap of the letter-box alone almost made her pull the trigger by mistake and this appalled her. She felt the convulsion in her hand and stayed it only at the very instant of completion; then stopped to pick the envelope from the mat. It was her own letter, addressed to the General—her second, saying “Someone is trying to kill me,” written in French. As a last-ditch gesture of resistance, she pretended to wonder whether the letter was a trick, and they had intercepted it, or bought it, or stolen it, or done whatever deceivers do. But seeing her letter, recognising its opening words and its despairing tone, she became utterly weary of deceit, and weary of mistrust, and weary of trying to read evil where she wished more than anything to read good. She heard the fat man’s voice again, and a French well-taught but a little rusty, and it reminded her of rhymes from school she half remembered. And if it was a lie he was telling, then it was the most cunning lie she had ever heard in her life.

“The magician is dead, madame,” he said, fogging the fish-eye with his breath. “I have come from London to help you in his place.”

For years afterwards, and probably for all his life, Peter Guillam would relate, with varying degrees of frankness, the story of his home-coming that same evening. He would emphasize that the circumstances were particular. He was in a bad temper—one—he had been so all day. Two—his Ambassador had publicly rebuked him at the weekly meeting for a remark of unseemly levity about the British balance of payments. He was newly married—three—and his very young wife was pregnant. Her phone call—four—came moments after he had decoded a long and extremely boring signal from the Circus reminding him for the fifteenth time that no, repeat no operations could be undertaken on French soil without advance permission in writing from Head Office. And—five—le tout Paris was having one of its periodical scares about kidnapping. Last, the post of Circus head resident in Paris was widely known to be a laying-out place for officers shortly to be buried, offering little more than the opportunity to lunch interminably with a variety of very corrupt, very boring chiefs of rival French Intelligence services who spent more time spying on each other than on their supposed enemies. All of these factors, Guillam would afterwards insist, should be taken into account before anyone accused him of impetuosity. Guillam, it may be added, was an athlete, half French, but more English on account of it; he was slender, and near enough handsome—but though he fought it every inch of the way, he was also close on fifty, which is the watershed that few careers of ageing fieldmen survive. He also owned a brand-new German Porsche car, which he had acquired, somewhat shamefacedly, at diplomatic rates, and parked, to the Ambassador’s strident disapproval, in the Embassy car-park.

Marie-Claire Guillam, then, rang her husband at six exactly, just as Guillam was locking away his code-books. Guillam had two telephone lines to his desk, one of them in theory operational and direct. The second went through the Embassy switchboard. Marie-Claire rang on the direct line, a thing they had always agreed she would only ever do in emergency. She spoke French, which, true, was her native language, but they had recently been communicating in English in order to improve her fluency.

“Peter,” she began.

He heard at once the tension in her voice.

“Marie-Claire? What is it?”

“Peter, there’s someone here. He wants you to come at once.”

“Who?”

“I can’t say. It’s important. Please come home at once,” she repeated and rang off.

Guillam’s chief clerk, a Mr. Anstruther, had been standing at the strong-room door when the call came, waiting for him to spin the combination lock before they each put in their keys. Through the open doorway to Guillam’s office he saw him slam down the phone, and the next thing he knew, Guillam had tossed to Anstruther—a long throw, probably fifteen feet—the Head Resident’s sacred personal key, near enough the symbol of his office, and Anstruther by a miracle had caught it: put up his left hand and caught it in his palm, like an American baseball player; he couldn’t have done it again if he’d tried it a hundred times, he told Guillam later.

“Don’t budge from here till I ring you!” Guillam shouted. “You sit at my desk and you man those phones. Hear me?”

Anstruther did, but by then Guillam was half-way down the absurdly elegant spiral staircase of the Embassy, barging between typists and Chancery guards and bright young men setting out on the evening cocktail round. Seconds later, he was at the wheel of his Porsche, revving the engine like a racing driver, which in another life he might well have been. Guillam’s home was in Neuilly, and in the ordinary way these sporting dashes through the rush-hour rather amused him, reminding him twice a day—as he put it—that however mindbendingly boring the Embassy routine, life around him was hairy, quarrelsome, and fun. He was even given to timing himself over the distance. If he took the Avenue Charles de Gaulle and got a fair wind at the traffic-lights, twenty-five minutes through the evening traffic was not unreasonable. Late at night or early in the morning, with empty roads and CD plates, he could cut it to fifteen, but in the rush-hour thirty-five minutes was fast going and forty the norm. That evening, hounded by visions of Marie-Claire held at pistol point by a bunch of crazed nihilists, he made the distance in eighteen minutes cold. Police reports later submitted to the Ambassador had him jumping three sets of lights and touching around a hundred and forty kilometres as he entered the home stretch; but these were of necessity something of a reconstruction, since no one felt inclined to try to keep up with him. Guillam himself remembers little of the drive, beyond a near squeak with a furniture van, and a lunatic cyclist who took it into his head to turn left when Guillam was a mere hundred and fifty metres behind him.

His apartment was in a villa, on the third floor. Braking hard before he reached the entrance, he cut the engine and coasted to a halt in the street outside, then pelted to the front door as quietly as haste allowed. He had expected a car parked somewhere close, probably with a get-away driver waiting at the wheel, but to his momentary relief there was none in sight. A light was burning in their bedroom, however, so that he now imagined Marie-Claire gagged and tied to the bed, and her captors sitting over her, waiting for Guillam to arrive. If it was Guillam they wanted, he did not propose to disappoint them. He had come unarmed; he had no choice. The Circus Housekeepers had a holy terror of weapons, and his illicit revolver was in the bedside locker, where no doubt they had by now found it. He climbed the three flights silently and at the front door threw off his jacket and dropped it on the floor beside him. He had his door key in his hand, and now, as softly as he knew how, he fed it into the lock, then pressed the bell and called “Facteur”—postman—through the letter-box and then “Exprès.” His hand on the key, he waited till he heard approaching footsteps, which he knew at once were not those of Marie-Claire. They were slow, even ponderous, and, to Guillam’s ear, too self-assured by half. And they came from the direction of the bedroom. What he did next, he did all at once. To open the door from inside, he knew, required two distinct movements: first the chain must be shot, then the spring catch must be freed. In a half-crouch, Guillam waited till he heard the chain slip, then used his one weapon of surprise: he turned his own key and threw all his weight against the door and, as he did so, had the intense satisfaction of seeing a plump male figure spin wildly back against the hall mirror, knocking it clean off its moorings, while Guillam seized his arm and swung it into a vicious breaking lock—only to see the startled face of his lifelong friend and mentor, George Smiley, staring helplessly at him.

The aftermath of that encounter is described by Guillam somewhat hazily; he had, of course, no forewarning of Smiley’s coming, and Smiley—perhaps out of fear of microphones—said little inside the flat to enlighten him. Marie-Claire was in the bedroom, but neither bound nor gagged; it was Ostrakova who, at Marie-Claire’s insistence, was lying on the bed, still in her old black dress, and Marie-Claire was ministering to her in any way she could think of—jellied breast of chicken, mint tea, all the invalid foods she had diligently laid in for the wonderful day, alas not yet at hand, when Guillam would fall ill on her. Ostrakova, Guillam noticed (though he had yet to learn her name), seemed to have been beaten up. She had broad grey bruises round the eyes and lips, and her fingers were cut to bits where she had apparently tried to defend herself. Having briefly admitted Guillam to this scene—the battered lady tended by the anxious child bride—Smiley conducted Guillam to his own drawing-room and, with all the authority of Guillam’s old chief, which he indeed had been, rapidly set out his requirements. Only now, it developed, was Guillam’s earlier haste warranted. Ostrakova—Smiley referred to her only as “our guest”—should leave Paris tonight, he said. The station’s safe house outside Orléans—he called it “our country mansion”—was not safe enough; she needed somewhere that provided care and protection. Guillam remembered a French couple in Arras, a retired agent and his wife, who in the past had provided shelter for the Circus’s occasional birds of passage. It was agreed he would telephone them, but not from the apartment: Smiley sent him off to find a public call-box. By the time Guillam had made the necessary arrangements and returned, Smiley had written out a brief signal on a sheet of Marie-Claire’s awful notepaper with its grazing bunnies, which he wished Guillam to have transmitted immediately to the Circus, “Personal for Saul Enderby, decipher yourself.” The text, which Smiley insisted that Guillam should read (but not aloud), politely asked Enderby—“in view of a second death no doubt by now reported to you”—for a meeting at Ben’s Place forty-eight hours hence. Guillam had no idea where Ben’s Place was.

“And, Peter.”

“Yes, George,” said Guillam, still dazed.

“I imagine there exists an official directory of locally accredited diplomats. Do you happen to have such a thing in the house by any chance?”

Guillam did. Indeed, Marie-Claire lived by it. She had no memory for names at all, so it lay beside the bedroom telephone for every time a member of a foreign embassy telephoned her with yet another invitation to drinks, to dinner, or, most ghastly of all, to a National Day festivity. Guillam fetched it, and a moment later was peering over Smiley’s shoulder. “Kirov,” he read—but not, once more, aloud—as he followed the line of Smiley’s thumb-nail—“Kirov, Oleg, Second Secretary (Commercial), Unmarried.” Followed by an address in the Soviet Embassy ghetto in the 7th district.

“Ever bumped into him?” Smiley asked.

Guillam shook his head. “We took a look at him a few years back. He’s marked ‘hands off,’” he replied.

“When was this list compiled?” Smiley asked. The answer was printed on the cover: December of the previous year.

Smiley said, “Well, when you get to the office—”

“I’ll take a look at the file,” Guillam promised.

“There is also this,” said Smiley sharply, and handed Guillam a plain carrier-bag containing, when he looked later, several micro-cassettes and a fat brown envelope.

“By first bag tomorrow, please,” Smiley said. “The same grading and the same addressee as the telegram.”

Leaving Smiley still poring over the list, and the two women cloistered in the bedroom, Guillam hastened back to the Embassy and, having released the bemused Anstruther from his vigil at the telephones, consigned the carrier-bag to him, together with Smiley’s instructions. The tension in Smiley had affected Guillam considerably, and he was sweating. In all the years he had known George, he said later, he had never known him so inward, so intent, so elliptical, so desperate. Re-opening the strong-room, he personally encoded and dispatched the telegram, waiting only as long as it took him to receive the Head Office acknowledgment before drawing the file on Soviet Embassy movements and browsing through back numbers of old watch lists. He had not far to look. The third serial, copied to London, told him all that he needed to know. Kirov Oleg, Second Secretary Commercial, described this time as “married but wife not en poste,” had returned to Moscow two weeks ago. In the panel reserved for miscellaneous comments, the French liaison service had added that, according to informed Soviet sources, Kirov had been “recalled to the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs at short notice in order to take up a senior appointment which had become vacant unexpectedly.” The customary farewell parties had therefore not been feasible.

Back in Neuilly, Smiley received Guillam’s intelligence in utter silence. He did not seem surprised, but he seemed in some way appalled, and when he finally spoke—which did not occur until they were all three in the car and speeding towards Arras—his voice had an almost hopeless ring. “Yes,” he said—as if Guillam knew the whole history inside out. “Yes, that is of course exactly what he would do, isn’t it? He would call Kirov back under the pretext of a promotion, in order to make sure he really came.”

George had not sounded that way, said Guillam—no doubt with the wisdom of hindsight—since the night he unmasked Bill Haydon as Karla’s mole as well as Ann’s lover.

Ostrakova also, in retrospect, had little coherent recollection of that night, neither of the car journey, on which she contrived to sleep, nor of the patient but persistent questioning to which the little plump man subjected her when she woke late the next morning. Perhaps she had temporarily lost her capacity to be impressed—and, accordingly, to remember. She answered his questions, she was grateful to him, she gave him—without the zest or “decoration”—the same information that she had given to the magician, though he seemed to possess most of it already.

“The magician,” she said once. “Dead. My God.”

She asked after the General, but scarcely heeded Smiley’s noncommittal reply. She was thinking of Ostrakov, then Glikman, now the magician—and she never knew his name. Her host and hostess were kind to her also, but as yet made no impression on her. It was raining and she could not see the distant fields.

Little by little, all the same, as the weeks passed, Ostrakova permitted herself an idyllic hibernation. The deep winter came early and she let its snows embrace her; she walked a little, and then a great deal, retired early, spoke seldom, and as her body repaired itself so did her spirit. At first a pardonable confusion reigned in her mind, and she found herself thinking of her daughter in the terms by which the gingery stranger had described her: as the tearaway dissenter and untameable rebel. Then slowly the logic of the matter presented itself to her. Somewhere, she argued, there was the real Alexandra who lived and had her being, as before. Or who, as before, did not. In either case, the gingery man’s lies concerned a different creature altogether, one whom they had invented for their own needs. She even managed to find consolation in the likelihood that her daughter, if she lived at all, lived in complete ignorance of their machinations.

Perhaps the hurts which had been visited on her—of the mind as well as of the body—did what years of prayer and anxiety had failed to do, and purged her of her self-recriminations regarding Alexandra. She mourned Glikman at her leisure, she was conscious of being quite alone in the world, but in the winter landscape her solitude was not disagreeable to her. A retired brigadier proposed marriage to her but she declined. It turned out later that he proposed to everybody. Peter Guillam visited her at least every week and sometimes they walked together for an hour or two. In faultless French he talked to her mainly of landscape gardening, a subject on which he possessed an inexhaustible knowledge. That was Ostrakova’s life, where it touched upon this story. And it was lived out in total ignorance of the events that her own first letter to the General had set in train.

19

“Do you know his name really is Ferguson?” Saul Enderby drawled in that lounging Belgravia cockney which is the final vulgarity of the English upper class.

“I never doubted it,” Smiley said.

“He’s about all we’ve got left of that whole lamplighter stable. Wise Men don’t hold with domestic surveillance these days. Anti-Party or some damn thing.” Enderby continued his study of the bulky document in his hand. “So what’s your name, George? Sherlock Holmes dogging his poor old Moriarty? Captain Ahab chasing his big white whale? Who are you?”

Smiley did not reply.

“Wish I had an enemy, I must say,” Enderby remarked, turning a few pages. “Been looking for one for donkey’s years. Haven’t I, Sam?”

“Night and day, Chief,” Sam Collins agreed heartily, and sent his master a confiding grin.

Ben’s Place was the back room of a dark hotel in Knightsbridge and the three men had met there an hour ago. A notice on the door said “MANAGEMENT STRICTLY PRIVATE” and inside was an ante-room for coats and hats and privacy, and beyond it lay this oak-panelled sanctum full of books and musk, which in turn gave on to its own rectangle of walled garden stolen from the park, with a fish-pond and a marble angel and a path for contemplative walks. Ben’s identity, if he ever had one, was lost in the unwritten archives of Circus mythology. But this place of his remained, as an unrecorded perquisite of Enderby’s appointment, and of George Smiley’s before him—and as a trysting ground for meetings that afterwards have not occurred.

“I’ll read it again, if you don’t mind,” Enderby said. “I’m a bit slow on the uptake this time of day.”

“I think that would be jolly helpful, actually, Chief,” said Collins.

Enderby shifted his half-lens spectacles, but only by way of peering over the top of them, and it was Smiley’s secret theory that they were plain glass anyway.

“Kirov is doing the talking. This is after Leipzig has put the bite on him, right, George?” Smiley gave a distant nod. “They’re still sitting in the cat house with their pants down, but it’s five in the morning and the girls have been sent home. First we get Kirov’s tearful how-could-you-do-this-to-me? ‘I thought you were my friend, Otto!’ he says. Christ, he picked a wrong ’un there! Then comes his statement, put into bad English by the translators. They’ve made a concordance—that the word, George? Um’s and ah’s omitted.”

Whether it was the word or not, Smiley offered no answer. Perhaps he was not expected to. He sat very still in a leather armchair leaning forward over his clasped hands, and he had not taken off his brown tweed overcoat. A set of the Kirov typescripts lay at his elbow. He looked drawn, and Enderby remarked later that he seemed to have been on a diet. Sam Collins, head of Operations, sat literally in Enderby’s shadow, a dapper man with a dark moustache and a flashy, ever-ready smile. There had been a time when Collins was the Circus hard-man, whose years in the field had taught him to despise the cant of the fifth floor. Now he was the poacher turned gamekeeper, nurturing his own pension and security in the way he had once nurtured his networks. A wilful blankness had overcome him; he was smoking brown cigarettes down to the half-way mark, then stubbing them into a cracked sea shell, while his doglike gaze rested faithfully on Enderby, his master. Enderby himself stood propped against the pillar of French windows, silhouetted by the light outside, and he was using a bit of matchstick to pick his teeth. A silk handkerchief peeked from his left sleeve and he stood with one knee forward and slightly bent as if he were in the members’ enclosure at Ascot. In the garden, shreds of mist lay stretched like fine gauze across the lawn. Enderby put back his head and held the document away from him like a menu.

“Here we go. I’m Kirov. ‘As a finance officer working in Moscow Centre from 1970 to 1974, it was my duty to unearth irregularities in the accounts of overseas residencies and bring the culprits to book.’” He broke off and peered over his glasses again. “This is all before Kirov was posted to Paris, right?”

“Dead right,” said Collins keenly and glanced at Smiley for support, but got none.

“Just working it out, you see, George,” Enderby explained. “Just getting my ducks in a row. Haven’t got your little grey cells.”

Sam Collins smiled brightly at his chief’s show of modesty.

Enderby continued: “‘As a result of conducting these extremely delicate and confidential enquiries, which in some cases led to the punishment of senior officers of Moscow Centre, I made the acquaintance of the head of the independent Thirteenth Intelligence Directorate, subordinated to the Party’s Central Committee, who is known throughout Centre only by his workname Karla. This is a woman’s name and is said to belong to the first network he controlled.’ That right, George?”

“It was during the Spanish Civil War,” said Smiley.

“The great playground. Well, well. To continue. ‘The Thirteenth Directorate is a separate service within Moscow Centre, since its principal duty is the recruitment, training, and placing of illegal agents under deep cover in Fascist countries, known also as moles . . . blah . . . blah . . . blah. Often a mole will take many years to find his place inside the target country before he becomes active in secret work.’ Shades of Bloody Bill Haydon. ‘The task of servicing such moles is not entrusted to normal overseas residencies but to a Karla representative, as he is known, usually a military officer, whose daywork is to be an attaché of an embassy. Such representatives are handpicked by Karla personally and constitute an élite... blah... blah... enjoying privileges of trust and freedom not given to other Centre officers, also travel and money. They are accordingly objects of jealousy to the rest of the service.’”

Enderby affected to draw breath: “Christ, these translators!” he exclaimed. “Or maybe it’s just Kirov being a perishing little bore. You’d think a man making his deathbed confession would have the grace to keep it brief, wouldn’t you? But not our Kirov, oh no. How you doing, Sam?”

“Fine, Chief, fine.”

“Here we go again,” said Enderby, and resumed his ritual tone: “‘In the course of my general investigations into financial irregularities, the integrity of a Karla resident came into question, the resident in Lisbon, Colonel Orlov. Karla convened a secret tribunal of his own people to hear the case, and as a result of my evidence Colonel Orlov was liquidated in Moscow on June 10, 1973.’ That checks, you say, Sam?”

“We have an unconfirmed defector report that he was shot by firing-squad,” said Collins breezily.

“Congratulations, Comrade Kirov, the embezzler’s friend. Jesus. What a snake-pit. Worse than us.” Enderby continued: “‘For my part in bringing the criminal Orlov to justice I was personally congratulated by Karla, and also sworn to secrecy, since he considered the irregularity of Colonel Orlov a shame on his Directorate, and damaging to his standing within Moscow Centre. Karla is known as a comrade of high standards of integrity, and for this reason has many enemies among the ranks of the self-indulgent.’”

Enderby deliberately paused, and yet again glanced at Smiley over the top of his half-lenses.

“We all spin the ropes that hang us, right, George?”

“We’re a bunch of suicidal spiders, Chief,” said Collins heartily, and flashed an even broader smile at a place somewhere between the two of them.

But Smiley was lost in his reading of Kirov’s statement and not accessible to pleasantries.

“Skip the next year of Brother Kirov’s life and loves, and let’s come to his next meeting with Karla,” Enderby proposed, undeterred by Smiley’s taciturnity. “The nocturnal summons . . . that’s standard, I gather.” He turned a couple of pages. Smiley, following Enderby, did the same. “Car pulls up outside Kirov’s Moscow apartment—why can’t they say flat for God’s sake, like anyone else?—he’s hauled out of bed and driven to an unknown destination. They lead a rum life, don’t they, those gorillas in Moscow Centre, never knowing whether they’re getting a medal or a bullet.” He referred to the report again. “All that tallies, does it, George? The journey and stuff? Half an hour by car, small plane, and so forth?”

“The Thirteenth Directorate has three or four establishments, including a large training camp near Minsk,” Smiley said.

Enderby turned some more pages.

“So here’s Kirov back in Karla’s presence again: middle of nowhere, the same night. Karla and Kirov totally alone. Small wooden hut, monastic atmosphere, no trimmings, no witnesses—or none visible. Karla goes straight to the nub. How would Kirov like a posting to Paris? Kirov would like one very much, sir—” He turned another page. “Kirov always admired the Thirteenth Directorate, sir, blah, blah—always been a great fan of Karla’s—creep, crawl, creep. Sounds like you, Sam. Interesting that Kirov thought Karla looked tired—notice that point?—twitchy. Karla under stress, smoking like a chimney.”

“He always did that,” said Smiley.

“Did what?”

“He was always an excessive smoker,” Smiley said.

“Was he, by God? Was he?”

Enderby turned another page. “Now Kirov’s brief,” he said. “Karla spells it out for him. ‘For my daywork I should have the post of a Commercial officer of the Embassy, and for my special work I would be responsible for the control and conduct of financial accounts in all outstations of the Thirteenth Directorate in the following countries . . .’ Kirov goes on to list them. They include Bonn, but not Hamburg. With me, Sam?”

“All the way, Chief.”

“Not losing you in the labyrinth?”

“Not a bit, Chief.”

“Clever blokes, these Russkies.”

“Devilish.”

“Kirov again: ‘He impressed upon me the extreme importance of my task—blah, blah—reminded me of my excellent performance in the Orlov case, and advised me that in view of the great delicacy of the matters I was handling, I would be reporting directly to Karla’s private office and would have a separate set of ciphers . . .’ Turn to page fifteen.”

“Page fifteen it is, Chief,” Collins said.

Smiley had already found it.

“‘In addition to my work as West European auditor to the Thirteenth Directorate outstations, however, Karla also warned me that I would be required to perform certain clandestine activities with a view to finding cover backgrounds, or legends for future agents. All members of his Directorate took a hand in this, he said, but legend work was extremely secret nevertheless, and I should not under any circumstances discuss it with anybody at all. Not my Ambassador, nor with Major Pudin, who was Karla’s permanent operational representative inside our Embassy in Paris. I naturally accepted the appointment and, having attended a special course in security and communications, took up my post. I had not been in Paris long when a personal signal from Karla advised me that a legend was required urgently for a female agent, age about twenty-one years.’ Now we’re at the bone,” Enderby commented with satisfaction. “‘Karla’s signal referred me to several émigré families who might be persuaded by pressure to adopt such an agent as their own child, since blackmail is considered by Karla a preferable technique to bribery.’ Damn right it is,” Enderby assented heartily. “At the present rate of inflation, blackmail’s about the only bloody thing that keeps its value.”

Sam Collins obliged with a rich laugh of appreciation.

“Thank you, Sam,” said Enderby pleasantly. “Thanks very much.”

A lesser man than Enderby—or a less thick-skinned one—might have skated over the next few pages, for they consisted mainly of a vindication of Connie Sachs’s and Smiley’s pleas of three years ago that the Leipzig-Kirov relationship should be exploited.

“Kirov dutifully trawls the émigrés, but without result,” Enderby announced, as if he were reading out subtitles at the cinema. “Karla exhorts Kirov to greater efforts, Kirov strives still harder, and goofs again.”

Enderby broke off, and looked at Smiley, this time very straight. “Kirov was no bloody good, was he, George?” he said.

“No,” said Smiley.

“Karla couldn’t trust his own chaps, that’s your point. He had to go out into the sticks and recruit an irregular like Kirov.”

“Yes.”

“A clod. Sort of bloke who’d never make Sarratt.”

“That’s right.”

“Having set up his apparatus, in other words, trained it to accept his iron rules, you might say, he didn’t dare use it for this particular deal. That your point?”

“Yes,” said Smiley. “That is my point.”

Thus, when Kirov bumped into Leipzig on the plane to Vienna—Enderby resumed, paraphrasing Kirov’s own account now—Leipzig appeared to him as the answer to all his prayers. Never mind that he was based in Hamburg, never mind that there’d been a bit of nastiness back in Tallinn: Otto was an émigré, in with the groups, Otto the Golden Boy. Kirov signalled urgently to Karla proposing that Leipzig be recruited as an émigré source and talent-spotter. Karla agreed.

“Which is another rum thing, when you work it out,” Enderby remarked. “Jesus, I mean who’d back a horse with Leipzig’s record when he was sober and of sound mind? Specially for a job like that?”

“Karla was under stress,” Smiley said. “Kirov said so and we have it from elsewhere also. He was in a hurry. He had to take risks.”

“Like bumping chaps off?”

“That was more recent,” Smiley said, in a tone of such casual exoneration that Enderby glanced at him quite sharply.

“You’re bloody forgiving these days, aren’t you, George?” said Enderby suspiciously.

“Am I?” Smiley sounded puzzled by the question. “If you say so, Saul.”

“And bloody meek too.” He returned to the transcript. “Page twenty-one and we’re home free.” He read slowly to give the passage extra point. “Page twenty-one,” he repeated. “‘Following the successful recruitment of Ostrakova, and the formal issuing of a French permit to her daughter Alexandra, I was instructed to set aside immediately ten thousand American dollars a month from the Paris imprest for the purpose of servicing this new mole, who was henceforth awarded the workname KOMET. The agent KOMET also received the highest classification of secrecy within the Directorate, requiring all communications regarding her to be sent to the Director personally, using person-to-person ciphers, and without intermediaries. Preferably, however, such communications should go by courier, since Karla is an opponent of the excessive use of radio.’ Any truth in that one, George?” Enderby asked casually.

“It was how we caught him in India,” said Smiley without lifting his head from the script. “We broke his codes and he later swore that he would never use radio again. Like most promises, it was subject to review.”

Enderby bit off a bit of matchstick, and smeared it onto the back of his hand. “Don’t you want to take your coat off, George?” he asked. “Sam, ask him what he wants to drink.”

Sam asked, but Smiley was too absorbed in the script to answer.

Enderby resumed his reading aloud: “‘I was also instructed to make sure that no reference to KOMET appeared on the annual accounts for Western Europe which, as auditor, I was obliged to sign and present to Karla for submission to the Collegium of Moscow Centre at the close of each financial year. . . . No, I never met the agent KOMET, nor do I know what became of her, or in which country she is operating. I know only that she is living under the name of Alexandra Ostrakova, the daughter of naturalised French parents. . . .’” More turning of pages. “‘The monthly payment of ten thousand dollars was not expended by myself, but transferred to a bank in Thun in the Swiss canton of Berne. The transfer is made by standing orders to the credit of a Dr. Adolf Glaser. Glaser is the nominal account holder, but I believe that Dr. Glaser is only the workname for a Karla operative at the Soviet Embassy in Berne, whose real name is Grigoriev. I believe this because once when I sent money to Thun, the sending bank made an error and it did not arrive; when this became known to Karla, he ordered me to send a second sum immediately to Grigoriev personally while bank enquiries were continuing. I did as I was ordered and later recovered the duplicated amount. This is all I know. Otto, my friend, I beg you to preserve these confidences, they could kill me.’ He’s bloody right. They did.” Enderby chucked the transcript onto a table, and it made a loud slap. “Kirov’s last will and testament, as you might say. That’s it. George?”

“Yes, Saul.”

“Really no drink?”

“Thank you, I’m fine.”

“I’m still going to spell it out because I’m thick. Watch my arithmetic. It’s nowhere near as good as yours. Watch my every move.” Recalling Lacon, he held up a white hand and spread the fingers as a prelude to counting on them.

“One, Ostrakova writes to Vladimir. Her message rings old bells. Probably Mikhel intercepted and read it, but we’ll never know. We could sweat him, but I doubt if it would help, and it would most certainly put the cat among Karla’s pigeons in a big way if we did.” He grabbed a second finger. “Two, Vladimir sends a copy of Ostrakova’s letter to Otto Leipzig, urging him to rewarm the Kirov relationship double-quick. Three, Leipzig roars off to Paris, sees Ostrakova, gets himself alongside his dear old buddy Kirov, tempts him to Hamburg—where Kirov is free to go, after all, since Leipzig is still down in Karla’s books as Kirov’s agent. Now there’s a thing, George.”

Smiley waited.

“In Hamburg, Leipzig burns Kirov rotten. Right? Proof right here in our sweaty hands. But I mean—how?”

Did Smiley really not follow, or was he merely intent upon making Enderby work a little harder? In either case, he preferred to take Enderby’s question as rhetorical.

“How does Leipzig burn him precisely?” Enderby insisted. “What’s the pressure? Dirty pix—well, okay. Karla’s a puritan, so’s Kirov. But I mean, Christ, this isn’t the fifties, is it? Everyone’s allowed a bit of leg-sliding these days, what?”

Smiley offered no comment on Russian mores; but on the subject of pressure he was as precise as Karla might have been: “It’s a different ethic to ours. It suffers no fools. We think of ourselves as more susceptible to pressure than the Russians. It’s not true. It’s simply not true.” He seemed very sure of this. He seemed to have given the matter a lot of recent thought:

“Kirov had been incompetent and indiscreet. For his indiscretion alone, Karla would have destroyed him. Leipzig had the proof of that. You may remember that when we were running the original operation against Kirov, Kirov got drunk and talked out of turn about Karla. He told Leipzig that it was Karla personally who had ordered him to compose the legend for a female agent. You discounted the story at the time, but it was true.”

Enderby was not a man to blush, but he did have the grace to pull a wry grin before fishing in his pocket for another matchstick.

“And he that rolleth a stone, it will return upon him,” he remarked contentedly, though whether he was referring to his own dereliction or to Kirov’s was unclear. “Tell us the rest, buddy, or I’ll tell Karla what you’ve told me already, says little Otto to the fly. Jesus, you’re right, he really did have Kirov by the balls!”

Sam Collins ventured a soothing interjection. “I think George’s point meshes pretty neatly with the reference on page two, Chief,” he said. “There’s a passage where Leipzig actually refers to ‘our discussions in Paris.’ Otto’s twisting the Karla knife there, no question. Right, George?”

But Sam Collins might have been speaking in another room for all the attention either of them paid him.

“Leipzig also had Ostrakova’s letter,” Smiley added. “Its contents did not speak well for Kirov.”

“Another thing,” said Enderby.

“Yes, Saul?”

“Four years, right? It’s fully four years since Kirov made his original pass at Leipzig. Suddenly he’s all over Ostrakova, wanting the same thing. Four years later. You suggesting he’s been swanning around with the same brief from Karla all this time, and got no forrarder?”

Smiley’s answer was curiously bureaucratic. “One can only suppose that Karla’s requirement ceased and was then revived,” he replied primly, and Enderby had the sense not to press him.

“Point is, Leipzig burns Kirov rotten and gets word to Vladimir that he’s done so,” Enderby resumed as the spread fingers came up again for counting. “Vladimir dispatches Villem to play courier. Meanwhile back at the Moscow ranch, Karla is either smelling a rat or Mikhel has peached, probably the latter. In either case, Karla calls Kirov home under the pretext of promotion and swings him by his ears. Kirov sings, as I would, fast. Karla tries to put the toothpaste back in the tube. Kills Vladimir while he’s on the way to our rendezvous armed with Ostrakova’s letter. Kills Leipzig. Takes a pot at the old lady, and fluffs it. What’s his mood now?”

“He’s sitting in Moscow waiting for Holmes or Captain Ahab to catch up with him,” Sam Collins suggested, in his velvet voice, and lit yet another of his brown cigarettes.

Enderby was unamused. “So why doesn’t Karla dig up his treasure, George? Put it somewhere else? If Kirov has confessed to Karla what he’s confessed to Leipzig, Karla’s first move should be to brush over the traces!”

“Perhaps the treasure is not movable,” Smiley replied. “Perhaps Karla’s options have run out.”

“But it would be daylight madness to leave that bank account intact!”

“It was daylight madness to use a fool like Kirov,” Smiley said, with unusual harshness. “It was madness to let him recruit Leipzig and madness to approach Ostrakova, and madness to believe that by killing three people he could stop the leak. Presumptions of sanity are therefore not given. Why should they be?” He paused. “And Karla does believe it, apparently, or Grigoriev would not still be in Berne. Which you say he is, I gather?” The smallest glance at Collins.

“As of today he’s sitting pretty,” Collins said through his all-weather grin.

“Then moving the bank account would hardly be a logical step,” Smiley remarked. And he added: “Even for a madman.”

And it was strange—as Collins and Enderby afterwards privily agreed—how everything that Smiley said seemed to pass through the room like a chill; how in some way that they failed to understand, they had removed themselves to a higher order of human conduct for which they were unfit.

“So who’s his dark lady?” Enderby demanded outright. “Who’s worth ten grand a month and his whole damn career? Forcing him to use boobies instead of his own regular cut-throats? Must be quite a gal.”

Again there is mystery about Smiley’s decision not to reply to this question. Perhaps only his wilful inaccessibility can explain it; or perhaps we are staring at the stubborn refusal of the born case man to reveal anything to his controller that is not essential to their collaboration. Certainly there was philosophy in his decision. In his mind already, Smiley was accountable to nobody but himself: why should he act as if things were otherwise? “The threads lead all of them into my own life,” he may have reasoned. “Why pass the ends to my adversary merely so that he can manipulate me?” Again, he may well have assumed—and probably with justice—that Enderby was as familiar as Smiley was with the complexities of Karla’s background; and that even if he was not, he had had his Soviet Research Section burrowing all night until they found the answers he required.

In any case, the fact is that Smiley kept his counsel.

“George?” said Enderby, finally.

An aeroplane flew over quite low.

“It’s simply a question of whether you want the product,” Smiley said at last. “I can’t see that anything else is ultimately of very much importance.”

“Can’t you, by God!” said Enderby, and pulled his hand from his mouth and the matchstick with it. “Oh, I want him all right,” he went on, as if that were only half the point. “I want the Mona Lisa, and the Chairman of the Chinese People’s Republic, and next year’s winner of the Irish Sweep. I want Karla sitting in the hot seat at Sarratt, coughing out his life story to the inquisitors. I want the American Cousins to eat out of my hand for years to come. I want the whole ball game, of course I do. Still doesn’t get me off the hook.”

But Smiley seemed curiously unconcerned by Enderby’s dilemma.

“Brother Lacon told you the facts of life, I suppose? The stalemate and all?” Enderby asked. “Young, idealistic Cabinet, mustard for détente, preaching open government, all that balls? Ending the conditioned reflexes of the cold war? Sniffing Tory conspiracies under every Whitehall bed, ours specially? Did he? Did he tell you they’re proposing to launch a damn great Anglo-Bolshie peace initiative, yet another, which will duly fall on its arse around Christmas next?”

“No. No, he didn’t tell me that part.”

“Well, they are. And we’re not to jeopardise it, tra-la. Mind you, the very chaps who go hammering the peace-drums are the ones who scream like hell when we don’t deliver the goods. I suppose that stands to reason. They’re already asking what the Soviet posture will be, even now. Was it always like that?”

Smiley took so long to answer that he might have been passing the Judgment of Ages. “Yes. I suppose it was. I suppose that in one form or another it always was like that,” he said at last, as if the answer mattered to him deeply.

“Wish you’d warned me.”

Enderby sauntered back towards the centre of the room and poured himself some plain soda from the sideboard; he stared at Smiley with what seemed to be honest indecision. He stared at him, he shifted his head and stared again, showing all the signs of being faced with an insoluble problem.

“It’s a tough one, Chief, it really is,” said Sam Collins, unremarked by either man.

“And it’s not all a wicked Bolshie plot, George, to lure us to our ultimate destruction—you’re sure of that?”

“I’m afraid we’re no longer worth the candle, Saul,” Smiley said, with an apologetic smile.

Enderby did not care to be reminded of the limitations of British grandeur, and for a moment his mouth set into a sour grimace.

“All right, Maud,” he said finally. “Let’s go into the garden.”

They walked side by side. Collins, on Enderby’s nod, had stayed indoors. Slow rain puckered the surface of the pool and made the marble angel glisten in the dusk. Sometimes a breeze passed and a chain of water slopped from the hanging branches onto the lawn, soaking one or the other of them. But Enderby was an English gentleman, and while God’s rain might be falling on the rest of mankind, he was damned if it was going to fall on him. The light came at them in bits. From Ben’s French windows, yellow rectangles fell across the pond. From over the brick wall, they had the sickly green glow of a modern street lamp. They completed a round in silence before Enderby spoke.

“Led us a proper dance, you did, George, I’ll tell you that for nothing, Villem, Mikhel, Toby, Connie. Poor old Ferguson hardly had time to fill in his expense claims before you were off again. ‘Doesn’t he ever sleep?’ he asked me. ‘Doesn’t he ever drink?’”

“I’m sorry,” said Smiley, for something to say.

“Oh, no, you’re not,” said Enderby, and came to a sudden halt. “Bloody laces,” he muttered, stooping over his boot, “they always do this with suède. Too few eyeholes, that’s the problem. You wouldn’t think even the bloody Brits would manage to be mean with holes, would you?”

Enderby replaced one foot and lifted the other.

“I want his body, George, hear me? Hand me a live, talking Karla and I’ll accept him and make my excuses later. Karla asks for asylum? Well, um, yes, most reluctantly he can have it. By the time the Wise Men are loading their shot-guns for me, I’ll have enough out of him to shut them up for good. His body or nothing, you got me?”

They were strolling again, Smiley trailing behind, but Enderby, though he was speaking, did not turn his head.

“Don’t you ever go thinking they’ll go away, either,” he warned. “When you and Karla are stuck on your ledge on the Reichenbach Falls and you’ve got your hands round Karla’s throat, Brother Lacon will be right there behind you holding your coat-tails and telling you not to be beastly to the Russians. Did you get that?”

Smiley said yes, he had got it.

“What have you got on him so far? Misuse of the facilities of his office, I suppose. Fraud. Peculation of public funds, the very thing he topped that Lisbon fellow for. Unlawful operations abroad, including a couple of assassination jobs. I suppose there’s a whole bloody bookful when you work it out. Plus all those jealous beavers at Centre longing for an excuse to knife him. He’s right: blackmail’s a bloody sight better than bribery.”

Smiley said yes, it seemed so.

“You’ll need people. Baby-sitters, lamplighters, all the forbidden toys. Don’t talk to me about it, find your own. Money’s another matter. I can lose you in the accounts for years the way these clowns in Treasury work. Just tell me when and how much and where, and I’ll do a Karla for you and fiddle the accounts. How about passports and stuff? Need some addresses?”

“I think I can manage, thank you.”

“I’ll watch you day and night. If the ploy aborts and there’s a scandal, I’m not going to have people telling me I should have staked you out. I’ll say I suspected you might be slipping the leash on the Vladimir thing and I decided to have you checked in case. I’ll say the whole catastrophe was a ludicrous piece of private enterprise by a senile spy who’s lost his marbles.”

Smiley said he thought that was a good idea.

“I may not have much to put on the street, but I can still tap your phone, steam open your mail, and if I want to, I’ll bug your bedroom too. We’ve been listening in since Saturday as it is. Nothing, of course, but what do you expect?”

Smiley gave a small nod of sympathy.

“If your departure abroad strikes me as hasty or mysterious I shall report it. I also need a cover story for your visits to the Circus Registry. You’ll go at night but you may be recognised and I’m not having that catch up with me, either.”

“There was a project once to commission an in-house history of the service,” Smiley said helpfully. “Nothing for publication, obviously, but some sort of continuing record which could be available to new entrants and certain liaison services.”

“I’ll send you a formal letter,” Enderby said. “I’ll bloody well backdate it too. If you happen to misuse your licence while you’re inside the building, it’s no fault of mine. That chap in Berne whom Kirov mentioned. Grigoriev, Commercial Counsellor. The chap who’s been getting the cash?”

Smiley seemed lost in thought. “Yes, yes, of course,” he said. “Grigoriev?”

“I suppose he’s your next stop, is he?”

A shooting star ran across the sky and for a second they both watched it.

Enderby pulled a plain piece of folded paper from his inside pocket. “Well, that’s Grigoriev’s pedigree, far as we know it. He’s clean as a whistle. One of the very rare ones. Used to be an economics don at some Bolshie university. Wife’s a harridan.”

“Thank you,” said Smiley politely. “Thank you very much.”

“Meanwhile, you have my totally deniable blessing,” said Enderby as they started back towards the house.

“Thank you,” said Smiley again.

“Sorry you’ve become an instrument of the imperial hypocrisy but there’s rather a lot of it about.”

“Not at all,” said Smiley.

Enderby stopped to let Smiley draw up beside him.

“How’s Ann?”

“Well, thank you.”

“How much—” He was suddenly off his stroke. “Put it this way, George,” he suggested, when he had savoured the night air for a moment. “You travelling on business, or for pleasure in this thing? Which is it?”

Smiley’s reply was also slow in coming, and as indirect: “I was never conscious of pleasure,” he said. “Or perhaps I mean: of the distinction.”

“Karla still got that cigarette-lighter she gave you? It’s true, isn’t it? That time you interviewed him in Delhi—tried to get him to defect—they say he pinched your cigarette-lighter. Still got it, has he? Still using it? Pretty grating, I’d find that, if it was mine.”

“It was just an ordinary Ronson,” Smiley said. “Still, they’re made to last, aren’t they?”

They parted without saying goodbye.

20

In the weeks that followed this encounter with Enderby, George Smiley found himself in a complex and variable mood to accompany his many tasks of preparation. He was not at peace; he was not, in a single phrase, definable as a single person, beyond the one constant thrust of his determination. Hunter, recluse, lover, solitary man in search of completion, shrewd player of the Great Game, avenger, doubter in search of reassurance—Smiley was by turns each one of them, and sometimes more than one. Among those who remembered him later—old Mendel, the retired policeman, one of his few confidants; a Mrs. Gray, the landlady of the humble bed-and-breakfast house for gentlemen only, in Pimlico, which for security reasons he made his temporary headquarters; or Toby Esterhase, alias Benati, the distinguished dealer in Arab art—most, in their various ways, spoke of an ominous going in, a quietness, an economy of word and glance, and they described it according to their knowledge of him, and their station in life.

Mendel, a loping, dourly observant man with a taste for keeping bees, said outright that George was pacing himself before his big fight. Mendel had been in the amateur ring in his time, he had boxed middleweight for the Division, and he claimed to recognise the eve-of-match signs: a sobriety, a clarifying loneliness, and what he called a staring sort of look, which showed that Smiley was “thinking about his hands.” Mendel seems to have taken him in occasionally, and fed him meals. But Mendel was too perceptive not to observe the other sides of him also: the perplexity, often cloaked as social inhibition; his habit of slipping away, on a frail excuse, as if the sitting-still had suddenly become too long for him; as if he needed movement in order to escape himself.

To his landlady, Mrs. Gray, Smiley was, quite simply, bereaved. She knew nothing of him as a man, except that his name was Lorimer and he was a retired librarian by trade. But she told her other gentlemen she could feel he had had a loss, which was why he left his bacon, why he went out a lot but always alone, and why he slept with his light on. He reminded her of her father, she said, “after Mother went.” And this was perceptive of Mrs. Gray, for the aftermath of the two violent deaths hung heavily on Smiley in the lull, though it did the very reverse of slow his hand. She was also right when she called him divided, constantly changing his mind about small things; like Ostrakova, Smiley found life’s lesser decisions increasingly difficult to take.

Toby Esterhase, on the other hand, who dealt with him a great deal, took a more informed view, and one that was naturally brightened by Toby’s own excitement at being back in the field. The prospect of playing Karla “at the big table,” as he insisted on describing it, had made a new man of Toby. Mr. Benati had become international indeed. For two weeks, he toured the byways of Europe’s seedier cities, mustering his bizarre army of discarded specialists—the pavement artists, the sound-thieves, the drivers, the photographers—and every day, from wherever he happened to be, using an agreed word code, he telephoned Smiley at a succession of numbers within walking distance of the boarding-house in order to report his progress. If Toby was passing through London, Smiley would drive to an airport hotel and debrief him in one of its now familiar bedrooms. George—Toby declared—was making a Flucht nach vorn, which nobody has ever quite succeeded in translating. Literally it means “an escape forward,” and it implies a desperation certainly, but also a weakness at one’s back, if not an actual burning of boats. Quite what this weakness was, Toby could not describe. “Listen,” he would say. “George always bruised easy, know what I mean? You see a lot—your eyes get very painful. George saw too much, maybe.” And he added, in a phrase which found a modest place in Circus folklore—“George has got too many heads under his hat.” Of his generalship, on the other hand, Toby had no doubt whatever. “Meticulous to a fault,” he declared respectfully—even if the fault included checking Toby’s imprest down to the last Swiss Rappen, a discipline he accepted with a rueful grace. George was nervous, he said, as they all were; and his nervousness came to a natural head as Toby began concentrating his teams, in twos and threes, on the target city of Berne, and very, very cautiously taking the first steps towards the quarry. “He got too detailed,” Toby complained. “Like he wanted to be on the pavement with us. A case man, he finds it hard to delegate, know what I mean?”

Even when the teams were all assembled, all accounted for and briefed, Smiley from his London base still insisted on three days of virtual inactivity while everybody “took the temperature of the city,” as he called it, acquired local clothes and transport, and rehearsed the systems of communication. “It’s lace curtain all the way, Toby,” he repeated anxiously. “For every week that nothing happens, Karla will feel that much more secure. But frighten the game just once, and Karla will panic and we’re done for.” After the first operational swing Smiley summoned Toby home to report yet again: “Are you sure there was no eye contact? Did you ring the changes enough? Do you need more cars, more people?” Then, said Toby, he had to take him through the whole manoeuvre yet again, using street maps and still photographs of the target house, explaining exactly where the static posts were laid, where the one team had peeled off to make room for the next. “Wait till you’ve got his pattern,” said Smiley as they parted. “When you’ve got his behaviour pattern, I’ll come. Not before.”

Toby says he made damn sure to take his time.

Of Smiley’s visits to the Circus during this trying period there is, naturally, no official memory at all. He entered the place like his own ghost, floating as if invisible down the familiar corridors. At Enderby’s suggestion he arrived at a quarter past six in the evening, just after the day-shift had ended, and before the night staff had got into its stride. He had expected barriers; he had queasy notions of janitors he had known for twenty years telephoning the fifth floor for clearance. But Enderby had arranged things differently, and when Smiley presented himself, passless, at the hardboard chicane, a boy he had never seen before nodded him carelessly to the open lift. From there, he made his way unchallenged to the basement. He got out, and the first thing he saw was the welfare club notice-board and they were the same notices from his own days exactly, word for word: free kittens available to good home; the junior staff drama group would read The Admirable Crichton, misspelt, on Friday in the canteen. The same squash competition, with players enrolled under worknames in the interest of security. The same ventilators emitting their troubled hum. So that, by the time he pushed the wired-glass door of Registry and scented the printing-ink and library dust, he half expected to see his own rotund shape bowed over the corner desk in the glow of the chipped green reading-lamp, as it had been often enough in the days when he was charting Bill Haydon’s rampages of betrayal, and trying, by a reverse process of logic, to point to the weaknesses in Moscow Centre’s armour.

“Ah, now, you’re writing up our glorious past, I hear,” the night registrar sang indulgently. She was a tall girl and county, with Hilary’s walk: she seemed to topple even when she sat. She plonked an old tin deed-box on the table. “Fifth floor sent you this lot with their love,” she said. “Squeal if you need ferrying around, won’t you?”

The label on the handle read “Memorabilia.” Lifting the lid, Smiley saw a heap of old buff files bound together with green string. Gently, he untied and lifted the cover of the first volume, to reveal Karla’s misted photograph staring up at him like a corpse from the darkness of its coffin. He read all night, he hardly stirred. He read as far into his own past as into Karla’s, and sometimes it seemed to him that the one life was merely the complement to the other; that they were causes of the same incurable malady. He wondered, as so often before, how he would have turned out if he had had Karla’s childhood, had been fired in the same kilns of revolutionary upheaval. He tried but, as so often before, failed to resist his own fascination at the sheer scale of the Russian suffering, its careless savagery, its flights of heroism. He felt small in the face of it, and soft by comparison, even though he did not consider his own life wanting in its pains. When the night-shift ended, he was still there, staring into the yellow pages “the way a horse sleeps standing up,” said the same night registrar, who rode in gymkhanas. Even when she took the files from him to return them to the fifth floor, he went on staring till she gently touched his elbow.

He came the next night and the next; he disappeared, and returned a week later without explanation. When he had done with Karla, he drew the files on Kirov, on Mikhel, on Villem, and on the Group at large, if only to give, in retrospect, a solid documentary heart to all he had heard and remembered of the Leipzig-Kirov story. For there was yet another part of Smiley, call it pedant, call it scholar, for which the file was the only truth, and all the rest a mere extravagance until it was matched and fitted to the record. He drew the files on Otto Leipzig and the General, too, and, as a service to their memory, if nothing else, added to each a memorandum that calmly set out the true circumstances of his death. The last file he drew was Bill Haydon’s. There was hesitation at first about releasing it, and the fifth-floor duty officer, whoever he was that night, called Enderby out of a private ministerial dinner party in order to clear it with him. Enderby, to his credit, was furious: “God Almighty, man, he wrote the damn thing in the first place, didn’t he? If George can’t read his own reports, who the hell can?” Smiley didn’t really read it, even then, the registrar reported, who had a secret watching brief on everything he drew. It was more browsing, she said—and described a slow and speculative turning of the pages, “like someone looking for a picture they’d seen and couldn’t find again.” He only kept the file for an hour or so, then gave it back with a polite “Thank you very much.” He did not come again after that, but there is a story the janitors tell that some time after eleven on the same night, when he had tidied away his papers and cleared his desk space and consigned his few scribbled notes to the bin for secret waste, he was observed to stand for a long time in the rear courtyard—a dismal place, all white tiles and black drain-pipes and a stink of cat—staring at the building he was about to take his leave of, and at the light that was burning weakly in his former room, much as old men will look at the houses where they were born, the schools where they were educated, and the churches where they were married. And from Cambridge Circus—it was by then eleven-thirty—he startled everybody, took a cab to Paddington and caught the night sleeper to Penzance, which leaves just after midnight. He had not bought a ticket in advance, or ordered one by telephone; nor did he have any night things with him, not even a razor, though in the morning he did manage to borrow one from the attendant. Sam Collins had put together a ragtag team of watchers by then, an amateurish lot admittedly, and all they could say afterwards was that he made a call from a phone-box, but there was no time for them to do anything about it.

“Bloody queer moment to take a holiday, isn’t it?” Enderby remarked petulantly when this intelligence was brought to him, together with a string of moans from the staff-side about overtime, travelling time, and allowances for unsocial hours. Then he remembered, and said, “Oh, my Christ, he’s visiting his bitch goddess. Hasn’t he got enough problems, taking on Karla single-handed?” The whole episode annoyed Enderby strangely. He fumed all day and insulted Sam Collins in front of everyone. As a former diplomat, he had great contempt for abstracts, even if he took refuge in them constantly.

The house stood on a hill, in a coppice of bare elms still waiting for the blight. It was granite and very big, and crumbling, with a crowd of gables that clustered like torn black tents above the tree-tops. Acres of smashed greenhouses led to it; collapsed stables and an untended kitchen garden lay below it in the valley. The hills were olive and shaven, and had once been hill-forts. “Harry’s Cornish heap,” she called it. Between the hills ran the line of the sea, which that morning was hard as slate under the lowering cloud banks. A taxi took him up the bumpy drive, an old Humber like a wartime staff car. This is where she spent her childhood, thought Smiley; and where she adopted mine. The drive was very pitted; stubs of felled trees lay like yellow tombstones either side. She’ll be in the main house, he thought. The cottage where they had passed their holidays together lay over the brow, but on her own she stayed in the house, in the room she had had as a girl. He told the driver not to wait, and started towards the front porch, picking his way between the puddles with his London shoes, giving the puddles all his attention. It’s not my world any more, he thought. It’s hers, it’s theirs. His watcher’s eyes scanned the many windows of the front façade, trying to catch a glimpse of her shadow. She’d have picked me up at the station, only she muddled the time, he thought, giving her the benefit of the doubt. But her car was parked in the stables with the morning frost still on it; he had spotted it while he was still paying off the taxi. He rang the bell and heard her footsteps on the flagstones, but it was Mrs. Tremedda who opened the door and showed him to one of the drawing-rooms—smoking-room, morning-room, drawing-room, he had never worked them out. A log fire was burning.

“I’ll get her,” Mrs. Tremedda said.

At least I haven’t got to talk about Communists to mad Harry, Smiley thought while he waited. At least I haven’t got to hear how all the Chinese waiters in Penzance are standing by for the order from Peking to poison their customers. Or how the bloody strikers should be put up against a wall and shot—where’s their sense of service, for Christ’s sake? Or how Hitler may have been a blackguard but he had the right idea about the Jews. Or some similar monstrous, but seriously held, conviction.

She’s told the family to keep clear, he thought.

He could smell honey through the wood-smoke and wondered, as he always did, where it came from. The furniture wax? Or was there, somewhere in the catacombs, a honey room, just as there was a gunroom and a fishing-room and a box-room and, for all he knew, a love room? He looked for the Tiepolo drawing that used to hang over the fireplace, a scene of Venice life. They’ve sold it, he thought. Each time he came, the collection had dwindled by one more pretty thing. What Harry spent the money on was anybody’s guess—certainly not the upkeep of the house.

She crossed the room to him and he was glad it was she who was doing the walking, not himself, because he would have stumbled into something. His mouth was dry and he had a lump of cactus in his stomach; he didn’t want her near him, her reality was suddenly too much for him. She was looking beautiful and Celtic, as she always did down here, and as she came towards him her brown eyes scanned him, looking for his mood. She kissed him on the mouth, putting her fingers along the back of his neck to guide him, and Haydon’s shadow fell between them like a sword.

“You didn’t think to pick up a morning paper at the station, did you?” she enquired. “Harry’s stopped them again.”

She asked whether he had breakfasted and he lied and said he had. Perhaps they could go for a walk instead, she suggested, as if he were someone wanting to see round the estate. She took him to the gunroom where they rummaged for boots that would do. There were boots that shone like conkers and boots that looked permanently damp. The coast footpath led in both directions out of the bay. Periodically, Harry threw barbed-wire barricades across it, or put up notices saying “DANGER LAND-MINES.” He was fighting a running battle with the Council for permission to make a camping site, and its refusal sometimes drove him to a fury. They chose the north shoulder and the wind, and she had taken his arm to listen. The north was windier, but on the south you had to go single file through the gorse.

“I’m going away for a bit, Ann,” he said, trying to use her name naturally. “I didn’t want to tell you over the telephone.” It was his wartime voice and he felt an idiot when he heard himself using it. “I’m going off to blackmail a lover,” he should have said.

“Away to somewhere particular, or just away from me?”

“There’s a job I have to do abroad,” he said, still trying to escape his Gallant Pilot rôle, and failing. “I don’t think you should go to Bywater Street while I’m away.”

She had locked her fingers through his own, but then she did those things: she handled people naturally, all people. Below them in the rocks’ cleft, the sea broke and formed itself furiously in patterns of writhing foam.

“And you’ve come all this way just to tell me the house is out of bounds?” she asked.

He didn’t answer.

“Let me try it differently,” she proposed when they had walked a distance. “If Bywater Street had been in bounds, would you have suggested that I did go there? Or are you telling me it’s out of bounds for good?”

She stopped and gazed at him, and held him away from her, trying to read his answer. She whispered, “For goodness’ sake,” and he could see the doubt, the pride, and the hope in her face all at once, and wondered what she saw in his, because he himself had no knowledge of what he felt, except that he belonged nowhere near her, nowhere near this place; she was like a girl on a floating island that was swiftly moving away from him with the shadows of all her lovers gathered round her. He loved her, he was indifferent to her, he observed her with the curse of detachment, but she was leaving him. If I do not know myself, he thought, how can I tell who you are? He saw the lines of age and pain and striving that their life together had put there. She was all he wanted, she was nothing, she reminded him of someone he had once known a long time ago; she was remote to him, he knew her entirely. He saw the gravity in her face and one minute wondered that he could ever have taken it for profundity; the next, he despised her dependence on him, and wanted only to be free of her. He wanted to call out “Come back” but he didn’t do it; he didn’t even put out a hand to stop her from slipping away.

“You used to tell me never to stop looking,” he said. The statement began like the preface to a question, but no question followed.

She waited, then offered a statement of her own. “I’m a comedian, George,” she said. “I need a straight man. I need you.”

But he saw her from a long way off.

“It’s the job,” he said.

“I can’t live with them. I can’t live without them.” He supposed she was talking about her lovers again. “There’s one thing worse than change and that’s the status quo. I hate the choice. I love you. Do you understand?” There was a gap while he must have said something. She was not relying on him, but she was leaning on him while she wept, because the weeping had taken away her strength. “You never knew how free you were, George,” he heard her say. “I had to be free for both of us.”

She seemed to realise her own absurdity and laughed.

She let go his arm and they walked again while she tried to right the ship by asking plain questions. He said weeks, perhaps longer. He said “In a hotel,” but didn’t say which city or country. She faced him again, and the tears were suddenly running anywhere, worse than before, but they still didn’t move him as he wished they would.

“George, this is all there is, I promise you,” she said, halting to make her entreaty. “The whistle’s gone, in your world and in mine. We’re landed with each other. There isn’t any more. According to the averages we’re the most contented people on earth.”

He nodded, seeming to take the point that she had been somewhere he had not, but not regarding it as conclusive. They walked a little more, and he noticed that when she didn’t speak he was able to relate to her, but only in the sense that she was another living creature moving along the same path as himself.

“It’s to do with the people who ruined Bill Haydon,” he said to her, either as a consolation, or an excuse for his retreat. But he thought: “who ruined you.”

He had missed his train and there were two hours to kill. The tide was out so he walked along the shore near Marazion, scared by his own indifference. The day was grey, the seabirds were very white against the slate sea. A couple of brave children were splashing in the surf. I am a thief of the spirit, he thought despondently. Faithless, I am pursuing another man’s convictions; I am trying to warm myself against other people’s fires. He watched the children, and recalled some scrap of poetry from the days when he read it:

To turn as swimmers into cleanness leaping,
Glad from a world grown old and cold and weary.

Yes, he thought glumly. That’s me.

“Now, George,” Lacon demanded. “Do you think we set our women up too high, is that where we English middle-class chaps go wrong? Do you think—I’ll put it this way—that we English, with our traditions and our schools, expect our womenfolk to stand for far too much, then blame them for not standing up at all—if you follow me? We see them as concepts, rather than flesh and blood. Is that our hangup?”

Smiley said it might be.

“Well, if it isn’t, why does Val always fall for shits?” Lacon snapped aggressively, to the surprise of the couple sitting at the next-door table.

Smiley did not know the answer to that either.

They had dined, appallingly, in the steak-house Lacon had suggested. They had drunk Spanish burgundy out of a carafe, and Lacon had raged wildly over the British political dilemma. Now they were drinking coffee and a suspect brandy. The anti-Communist phobia was overdone; Lacon had declared himself sure of it. Communists were only people, after all. They weren’t red-toothed monsters, not any more. Communists wanted what everyone wanted: prosperity and a bit of peace and quiet. A chance to take a breather from all this damned hostility. And if they didn’t—well, what could we do about it anyway? he had asked. Some problems—take Ireland—were insoluble, but you would never get the Americans to admit anything was insoluble. Britain was ungovernable; so would everywhere else be in a couple of years. Our future was with the collective, but our survival was with the individual, and the paradox was killing us every day.

“Now, George, how do you see it? You’re out of harness after all. You have the objective view, the overall perspective.”

Smiley heard himself muttering something inane about a spectrum.

And now the topic that Smiley had dreaded all evening was finally upon them: their seminar on marriage had begun.

“We were always taught that women had to be cherished,” Lacon declared resentfully. “If one didn’t make ’em feel loved every minute of the day, they’d go off the rails. But this chap Val’s with—well, if she annoys him, or speaks out of turn, he’ll like as not give her a black eye. You and I never do that, do we?”

“I’m sure we don’t,” said Smiley.

“Look here. Do you reckon if I went and saw her—bearded her in his house—took a really tough line—threatened legal action and so forth—it might tip the scales? I mean I’m bigger than he is, God knows. I’m not without clout, whichever way you read me!”

They stood on the pavement under the stars, waiting for Smiley’s cab.

“Well, have a good holiday anyway. You’ve deserved it,” Lacon said. “Going somewhere warm?”

“Well, I thought I might just take off and wander.”

“Lucky you. My God, I envy you your freedom! Well, you’ve been jolly useful, anyway. I shall follow your advice to the letter.”

“But, Oliver, I didn’t give you any advice,” Smiley protested, slightly alarmed.

Lacon ignored him. “And that other thing is all squared away, I hear,” he said serenely. “No loose ends, no messiness. Good of you, that, George. Loyal. I’m going to see if we can get you a bit of recognition for it. What have you got already, I forget? Some chap the other day in the Athenaeum was saying you deserve a K.”

The cab came, and to Smiley’s embarrassment Lacon insisted on shaking hands. “George. Bless you. You’ve been a brick. We’re birds of a feather, George. Both patriots, givers, not takers. Trained to our services. Our country. We must pay the price. If Ann had been your agent instead of your wife, you’d probably have run her pretty well.”

The next afternoon, following a telephone call from Toby to say that “the deal was just about ready for completion,” George Smiley quietly left for Switzerland, using the workname Barraclough. From Zurich Airport he took the Swissair bus to Berne and made straight for the Bellevue Palace Hotel, an enormous, sumptuous place of mellowed Edwardian quiet, which on clear days looks across the foothills to the glistening Alps, but that evening was shrouded in a cloying winter fog. He had considered smaller places; he had considered using one of Toby’s safe flats. But Toby had persuaded him that the Bellevue was best. It had several exits, it was central, and it was the first place in Berne where anyone would think to find him, and therefore the last where Karla, if he was looking out for him, would expect him to be. Entering the enormous hall, Smiley had the feeling of stepping onto an empty liner far out at sea.

21

His room was a tiny Swiss Versailles. The bombé writing-desk had brass inlay and a marble top, and a Bartlett print of Lord Byron’s Childe Harold hung above the pristine twin beds. The fog outside the window made a grey wall. He unpacked and went downstairs again to the bar where an elderly pianist was playing a medley of hits from the Fifties, things that had been Ann’s favourites, and, he supposed, his. He ate some cheese and drank a glass of Fendant, thinking: Now. Now is the beginning. From now on there is no shrinking back, no space for hesitation. At ten he made his way to the old city, which he loved. The streets were cobbled; the freezing air smelt of roast chestnuts and cigar. The ancient fountains advanced on him through the fog, the medieval houses were the backdrop to a play he had no part in. He entered the arcades, passing art galleries and antique shops and doorways tall enough to ride a horse through. At the Nydegg Bridge he came to a halt, and stared into the river. So many nights, he thought. So many streets till here. He thought of Hesse: strange to wander in the fog . . . no tree knows another. The frozen mist curled low over the racing water; the weir burned creamy yellow.

An orange Volvo estate car drew up behind him, Berne registration, and briefly doused its lights. As Smiley started towards it, the passenger door was pushed open from inside, and by the interior light he saw Toby Esterhase in the driving seat, and in the back, a stern-looking woman in the uniform of a Bernese housewife, dandling a child on her knee. He’s using them for cover, Smiley thought; for what the watchers called the silhouette. They drove off and the woman began talking to the child. Her Swiss German had a steady note of indignation: “See there the crane, Eduard. . . . Now we are passing the bear pit, Eduard. . . . Look, Eduard, a tram . . .” Watchers are always dissatisfied, he remembered; it’s the fate of every voyeur. She was moving her hands about, directing the child’s eye to anything. A family evening, Officer, said the scenario. We are going visiting in our fine orange Volvo, Officer. We are going home. And the men, naturally, Officer, seated in the front.

They had entered Elfenau, Berne’s diplomatic ghetto. Through the fog, Smiley glimpsed tangled gardens white with frost, and the green porticoes of villas. The headlights picked out a brass plate proclaiming an Arab state, and two bodyguards protecting it. They passed an English church and a row of tennis-courts; they entered an avenue lined with bare beeches. The street lights hung in them like white balloons.

“Number eighteen is five hundred metres on the left,” said Toby softly. “Grigoriev and his wife occupy the ground floor.” He was driving slowly, using the fog as his excuse.

“Very rich people live here, Eduard!” the woman was singing from behind them. “All from foreign places.”

“Most of the Iron Curtain crowd live in Muri, not Elfenau,” Toby went on. “It’s a commune, they do everything in groups. Shop in groups, go for walks in groups, you name it. The Grigorievs are different. Three months ago, they moved out of Muri and rented this apartment on a personal basis. Three thousand five hundred a month, George, he pays it in person to the landlord.”

“Cash?”

“Monthly in one-hundred notes.”

“How are the rest of the Embassy hirings paid for?”

“Through the Mission accounts. Not Grigoriev’s. Grigoriev is the exception.”

A police-patrol car overtook them with the slowness of a river barge; Smiley saw its three heads turned to them.

“Look, Eduard, police!” the woman cried, and tried to make the child wave at them.

Toby too was careful not to stop talking. “The police boys are worried about bombs,” he explained. “They think the Palestinians are going to blow the place sky high. That’s been good and bad for us, George. If we’re clumsy, Grigoriev can tell himself we’re local angels. The same doesn’t go for the police. One hundred metres, George. Look for a black Mercedes in the forecourt. Other staff use the Embassy car pool. Not Grigoriev. Grigoriev drives his own Mercedes.”

“When did he get it?” Smiley asked.

“Three months ago, second-hand. Same time as he moved out of Muri. That was a big leap for him, George. Like a birthday, so many things. The car, the house, promotion from First Secretary to Counsellor.”

It was a stucco villa, set in a large garden that had no back because of the fog. In a bay window at the front Smiley glimpsed a light burning behind curtains. There was a children’s slide in the garden, and what appeared to be an empty swimming-pool. On the gravel sweep stood a black Mercedes with CD plates.

“All Soviet Embassy car numbers end with 73,” said Toby. “The Brits have 72. Grigorieva got herself a driving licence two months ago. There are only two women in the Embassy with licences. She’s one and she’s a terrible driver, George. And I mean terrible.”

“Who occupies the rest of the house?”

“The landlord. A professor at Berne University, a creep. A while ago the Cousins got alongside him and said they’d like to run a couple of probe mikes into the ground floor, offered him money. The professor took the money and reported them to the Bundespolizei like a good citizen. The Bundespolizei got a scare. They’d promised the Cousins to look the other way in exchange for a sight of the product. Operation abandoned. Seems the Cousins had no particular interest in Grigoriev, it was just routine.”

“Where are the Grigoriev children?”

“In Geneva at Soviet Mission School, weekly boarders. They get home Friday nights. Week-ends the family make excursions. Romp in the woods, langlauf, play badminton. Collect mushrooms. Grigorieva’s a fresh-air freak. Also they have taken up bicycling,” he added, with a glance.

“Does Grigoriev go with the family on these excursions?”

“Saturdays he works, George—and, I am certain, only to escape them.” Toby had formed decided views on the Grigoriev marriage, Smiley noticed. He wondered whether it had echoes of one of Toby’s own.

They had left the avenue and entered a side-road. “Listen, George,” Toby was saying, still on the subject of Grigoriev’s week-ends. “Okay? Watchers imagine things. They got to, it’s their job. There’s a girl works in the Visa Section. Brunette and, for a Russian, sexy. The boys call her ‘little Natasha.’ Her real name’s something else but for them she’s Natasha. Saturdays she comes in to the Embassy. To work. Couple of times, Grigoriev drives her home to Muri. We took some pictures, not bad. She got out of the car short of her apartment and walked the last five hundred metres. Why? Another time he took her nowhere—just a drive round the Gurten, but talking very cosy. Maybe the boys just want it to be that way, on account of Grigorieva. They like the guy, George. You know how watchers are. It’s love or hate all the time. They like him.”

He was pulling up. The lights of a small café glowed at them through the fog. In its courtyard stood a green Citroën deuxchevaux, Geneva registration. Cardboard boxes were heaped on the back seat like trade samples. A foxtail dangling from the radio aerial. Springing out, Toby pulled open the flimsy door and hustled Smiley into the passenger seat: then handed him a trilby hat, which he put on. For himself, Toby had a Russian-style fur. They drove off again, and Smiley saw their Bernese matron climbing into the front of the orange Volvo they had just abandoned. Her child waved at them despondently through the back window as they left.

“How is everyone?” Smiley said.

“Great. Pawing the earth, George, everyone of them. One of the Sartor brothers had a sick kid, had to go home to Vienna. It nearly broke his heart. Otherwise great. You’re Number One for all of them. This is Harry Slingo coming up on the right. Remember Harry? Used to be my sidekick back in Acton.”

“I read that his son had won a scholarship to Oxford,” Smiley said.

“Physics. Wadham, Oxford. The boy’s a genius. Keep looking down the road, George, don’t move your head.”

They passed a van with “Auto-Schnelldienst” painted in breezy letters on the side, and a driver dozing at the wheel.

“Who’s in the back?” Smiley asked when they were clear.

“Pete Lusty, used to be a scalp-hunter. Those guys have been having it very bad, George. No work, no action. Pete signed up for the Rhodesian Army. Killed some guys, didn’t care for it, came back. No wonder they love you.”

They were passing Grigoriev’s house again. A light was burning in the other window.

“The Grigorievs go to bed early,” Toby said in a sort of awe.

A parked limousine lay ahead of them with Zurich consular plates. In the driving seat, a chauffeur was reading a paperback book.

“That’s Canada Bill,” Toby explained. “Grigoriev leaves the house, turns right, he passes Pete Lusty. Turns left, he passes Canada Bill. They’re good boys. Very vigilant.”

“Who’s behind us?”

“The Meinertzhagen girls. The big one got married.”

The fog made their progress private, very quiet. They descended a gentle hill, passing the British Ambassador’s residence on their right, and his Rolls-Royce parked in the sweep. The road led left and Toby followed it. As he did so, the car behind overtook them and conveniently put up its headlights. By their beam, Smiley found himself looking into a wooded cul-de-sac ending in a pair of tall closed gates guarded on the inside by a small huddle of men. The trees cut off the rest entirely.

“Welcome to the Soviet Embassy, George,” Toby said, very softly. “Twenty-four diplomats, fifty other ranks—cipher clerks, typists, and some very lousy drivers, all home-based. The trade delegation’s in another building, Schanzeneckstrasse 17. Grigoriev visits there a lot. In Berne we got also Tass and Novosti, mostly mainstream hoods. The parent residency is Geneva, U.N. cover, about two hundred strong. This place is a side-show: twelve, fifteen altogether, growing but only slow. The Consulate is tacked onto the back of the Embassy. You go into it through a door in the fence, like it was an opium den or a cat house. They got a closed-circuit television camera on the path and scanners in the waiting-room. Try applying for a visa once.”

“I think I’ll give it a miss, thanks,” said Smiley, and Toby gave one of his rare laughs.

“Embassy grounds,” Toby said as the headlights flashed over steep woods falling away to the right. “That’s where Grigorieva plays her volley-ball, gives political instruction to the kids. George, believe me, that’s a very distorting woman. Embassy kindergarten, the indoctrination classes, the Ping-Pong club, women’s badminton—that woman runs the whole show. Don’t take my word for it, hear my boys talk about her.” As they turned out of the cul-de-sac, Smiley lifted his glance towards the upper window of the corner house and saw a light go out, and then come on again.

“And that’s Pauli Skordeno saying ‘Welcome to Berne,’” said Toby. “We managed to rent the top floor last week. Pauli’s a Reuters stringer. We even faked a press pass for him. Cable cards, everything.”

Toby had parked near the Thunplatz. A modern clock tower was striking eleven. Fine snow was falling but the fog had not dispersed. For a moment neither man spoke.

“Today was a model of last week, last week was a model of the week before, George,” said Toby. “Every Thursday it’s the same. After work he takes the Mercedes to the garage, fills it with petrol and oil, checks the batteries, asks for a receipt. He goes home. Six o’clock, a little after, an Embassy car arrives at his front door and out gets Krassky, the regular Thursday courier from Moscow. Alone. That’s a very itchy fellow, a professional. In all other situations, Krassky don’t go anywhere without his companion Bogdanov. Fly together, carry together, eat together. But to visit Grigoriev, Krassky breaks ranks and goes alone. Stays half an hour, leaves again. Why? That’s very irregular in a courier, George. Very dangerous, if he hasn’t got the backing, believe me.”

“So what do you make of Grigoriev, Toby?” Smiley asked. “What is he?”

Toby made his tilting gesture with his outstretched palm. “A trained hood Grigoriev isn’t, George. No tradecraft, actually a complete catastrophe. But he’s not straight either. A half-breed, George.”

So was Kirov, Smiley thought.

“Do you think we’ve got enough on him?” Smiley asked.

“Technically no problem. The bank, the false identity, little Natasha even: technically we got a hand of aces.”

“And you think he’ll burn,” said Smiley, more as confirmation than a question.

In the darkness, Toby’s palm once more tilted, this way, that way.

“Burning, George, that’s always a hazard, know what I mean? Some guys get heroic and want to die for their countries suddenly. Other guys roll over and lie still the moment you put the arm on them. Burning, that touches the stubbornness in certain people. Know what I mean?”

“Yes. Yes, I think I do,” said Smiley. And he remembered Delhi again, and the silent face watching him through the haze of cigarette smoke.

“Go easy, George. Okay? You got to put your feet up now and then.”

“Good night,” said Smiley.

He caught the last tram back to the town centre. By the time he had reached the Bellevue, the snow was falling heavily: big flakes, milling in the yellow light, too wet to settle. He set his alarm for seven.

22

The young woman they called Alexandra had been awake one hour exactly when the morning bell sounded for assembly, but when she heard it she immediately drew up her knees inside her calico night-suit, crammed her eyelids together, and swore to herself she was still asleep, a child who needed rest. The assembly bell, like Smiley’s alarm clock, went off at seven, but already at six she had heard the chiming of the valley clocks, first the Catholics, then the Protestants, then the Town Hall, and she didn’t believe in any of them. Not this God, not that God, and least of all the burghers with their butchers’ faces, who at the annual festival had stood to attention with their stomachs stuck out while the fire-brigade choir moaned patriotic songs in dialect.

She knew about the annual festival because it was one of the few Permitted Expeditions, and she had recently been allowed to attend it as a privilege—her first, and to her huge amusement it was devoted to the celebration of the common onion. She had stood between Sister Ursula and Sister Beatitude and she knew they were both alert in case she tried to run away or snap inside and start a fit, and she had watched an hour of the most boring speechifying ever, then an hour’s singing to the accompaniment of boring martial music by the brass band. Then a march past of people dressed in village costume and carrying strings of onions on long sticks, headed by the village flag-swinger, who on other days brought the milk to the lodge and—if he could slip by—right up to the hostel door, in the hope of getting a sight of a girl through the window, or perhaps it was just Alexandra trying to get a sight of him.

After the village clocks had chimed the six, Alexandra from deep, deep in her bed had decided to count the minutes till eternity. In her self-imposed rôle as child, she had done this by counting each second in a whisper: “One thousand and one, one thousand and two.” At twelve minutes past, by her childish reckoning, she heard Mother Felicity on her way back from Mass, her pompous Moped snorting down the drive, telling everyone that Felicity-Felicity—pop-pop—and no one else—pop-pop—was our Superintendent and Official Starter of the Day; nobody else—pop-pop—would do. Which was funny because her real name was not Felicity at all; Felicity was what she had chosen for the other nuns. Her real name, she had told Alexandra as a secret, was Nadezhda, meaning “Hope.” So Alexandra had told Felicity that her real name was Tatiana, not Alexandra at all. Alexandra was a new name, she explained, put on to wear in Switzerland specially. But Felicity-Felicity had told her sharply not to be a silly girl.

After Mother Felicity’s arrival, Alexandra had held the white bed sheet to her eyes and decided that time was not passing at all, that she was in a child’s white limbo where everything was shadowless, even Alexandra, even Tatiana. White light bulbs, white walls, a white iron bed frame. White radiators. Through the high windows, white mountains against a white sky.

Dr. Rüedi, she thought, here is a new dream for you when we have our next little Thursday talk, or is it Tuesday?

Now listen carefully, Doctor. Is your Russian good enough? Sometimes you pretend to understand more than you really do. Very well, I will begin. My name is Tatiana and I am standing in my white night-suit in front of the white Alpine landscape, trying to write on the mountain face with a stick of Felicity-Felicity’s white chalk, whose real name is Nadezhda. I am wearing nothing underneath. You pretend you are indifferent to such things, but when I talk to you about how I love my body you pay close attention, don’t you, Dr. Rüedi? I scribble with the chalk in the mountain face. I stub with it like a cigarette. I think of the filthiest words I know—yes, Dr. Rüedi, this word, that word—but I fear your Russian vocabulary is unlikely to include them. I try to write them also, but white on white, what impact can a little girl make, I ask you, Doctor?

Doctor, it’s terrible, you must never have my dreams. Do you know I was once a whore called Tatiana? That I can do no wrong? That I can set fire to things, even myself, vilify the State, and still the wise ones in authority will not punish me? But instead, let me out of the back door—“Go, Tatiana, go”—did you know this?

Hearing footsteps in the corridor, Alexandra pulled herself deeper under the bedclothes. The French girl is being led to the toilets, she thought. The French girl was the most beautiful in the place. Alexandra loved her, just for her beauty. She beat the whole system with it. Even when they put her in the coat—for clawing or messing herself or smashing something—her angel’s face still gazed at them like one of their own icons. Even when she wore her shapeless night-suit with no buttons, her breasts lifted it up in a crisp bridge and there was nothing anyone could do, not even the most jealous, not even Felicity-Felicity whose secret name was Hope, to prevent her from looking like a film star. When she tore her clothes off, even the nuns stared at her with a kind of covetous terror. Only the American girl had matched her for looks, and the American girl had been taken away, she was too bad. The French girl was bad enough with her naked tantrums and her wrist-cutting and her fits of rage at Felicity-Felicity, but she was nothing beside the American girl by the time she left. The sisters had to fetch Kranko from the lodge to hold her down, just for the sedation. They had to close the entire rest-wing while they did it, but when the van took the American girl off, it was like a death in the family and Sister Beatitude wept all through evening prayers. And afterwards, when Alexandra forced her to tell, she called her by her pet name, Sasha, a sure sign of her distress. “The American girl has gone to Untersee,” she said through her tears when Alexandra forced her to tell. “Oh, Sasha, Sasha, promise me you will never go to Untersee.” Just as in the life she could not mention, they had begged her: “Tatiana, do not do these mad and dangerous things!”

After that, Untersee became Alexandra’s worst terror, a threat that silenced her at any time, even her naughtiest: “If you are bad, you will go to Untersee, Sasha. If you tease Dr. Rüedi, pull up your skirt, and cross your legs at him, Mother Felicity will have to send you to Untersee. Hush, or they’ll send you to Untersee.”

The footsteps returned along the corridor. The French girl was being taken to be dressed. Sometimes she fought them and ended up in the coat instead. Sometimes Alexandra would be sent to calm her, which she did by brushing the French girl’s hair over and over again, not talking, till the French girl relaxed and started to kiss her hands. Then Alexandra would be taken away again, because love was not, was not, was not on the curriculum.

The door flew open and Alexandra heard Felicity-Felicity’s courtly voice, harrying her like an old nurse in a Russian play: “Sasha! You must get up immediately! Sasha, wake up immediately! Sasha, wake up! Sasha!”

She came a step nearer. Alexandra wondered whether she was going to pull back the sheets and yank her to her feet. Mother Felicity could be rough as a soldier, for all her aristocratic blood. She was not a bully, but she was blunt and easily provoked.

“Sasha, you will be late for breakfast. The other girls will look at you and laugh and say that we stupid Russians are always late. Sasha? Sasha, do you want to miss prayers? God will be very angry with you, Sasha. He will be sad and He will cry. He may have to think of ways of punishing you.”

Sasha, do you want to go to Untersee?

Alexandra pressed her eyelids closer together. I am six years old and need my sleep, Mother Felicity. God make me five, God make me four. I am three years old and need my sleep, Mother Felicity.

“Sasha, have you forgotten it is your special day? Sasha, have you forgotten you have your visitor today?”

God make me two, God make me one, God make me nothing and unborn. No, I have not forgotten my visitor, Mother Felicity. I remembered my visitor before I went to sleep, I dreamt of him, I have thought of nothing else since I woke. But, Mother Felicity, I do not want my visitor today, or any other day. I cannot, cannot live the lie, I don’t know how, and that is why I shall not, shall not, shall not let the day begin!

Obediently, Alexandra clambered out of bed.

“There,” said Mother Felicity, and gave her a distracted kiss before bustling off down the corridor, calling “Late again! Late again!” and clapping her hands—“Shoo, shoo!”—just as she would to a flock of silly hens.

23

The train journey to Thun took half an hour and from the station Smiley drifted, window-shopping, making little detours. Some guys get heroic and want to die for their countries, he thought. . . . Burning, that touches the stubbornness in people. . . . He wondered what it would touch in himself.

It was a day of darkening blankness. The few pedestrians were slow shadows against the fog, and lake steamers were frozen in the locks. Occasionally the blankness parted enough to offer him a glimpse of castle, a tree, a piece of city wall. Then swiftly closed over them again. Snow lay in the cobble and in the forks of the knobbly spa trees. The few cars drove with their lights on, their tyres crackling in the slush. The only colours were in shop-windows: gold watches, ski clothes like national flags. “Be there by eleven earliest,” Toby had said; “eleven is already too early, George, they won’t arrive till twelve.” It was only ten-thirty but he wanted the time, he wanted to circle before he settled; time, as Enderby would say, to get his ducks in a row. He entered a narrow street and saw the castle lift directly above him. The arcade became a pavement, then a staircase, then a steep slope, and he kept climbing. He passed an English Tea-Room, an American-Bar, an Oasis Night-Club, each hyphenated, each neon-lit, each a sanitised copy of a lost original. But they could not destroy his love of Switzerland. He entered a square and saw the bank, the very one, and straight across the road the little hotel exactly as Toby had described it, with its café-restaurant on the ground floor and its barracks of rooms above. He saw the yellow mail van parked boldly in the no-parking bay, and he knew it was Toby’s static post. Toby had a lifelong faith in mail vans; he stole them wherever he went, saying nobody noticed or remembered them. He had fitted new number-plates but they looked older than the van. Smiley crossed the square. A notice on the bank door said “OPEN MONDAY TO THURSDAY 07.45–17.00, FRIDAY 07.45–18.15.” “Grigoriev likes the lunch-hour because in Thun nobody wastes his lunch-hour going to the bank,” Toby had explained. “He has completely mistaken quiet for security, George. Empty places, empty times, Grigoriev is so conspicuous he’s embarrassing.” He crossed a foot-bridge. The time was ten to eleven. He crossed the road and headed for the little hotel with its unencumbered view of Grigoriev’s bank. Tension in a vacuum, he thought, listening to the clip of his own feet and the gurgle of water from the gutters; the town was out of season and out of time. Burning, George, that’s always a hazard. How would Karla do it? he wondered. What would the absolutist do which we are not doing ourselves? Smiley could think of nothing, short of straight physical abduction. Karla would collect the operational intelligence, he thought, then he would make his approach—risking the hazard. He pushed the café door and the warm air sighed to him. He made for a window table marked “RESERVED.” “I’m waiting for Mr. Jacobi,” he told the girl. She nodded disapprovingly, missing his eye. The girl had a cloistered pallor, and no expression at all. He ordered café-crême in a glass, but she said that if it came in a glass, he would have to have schnapps with it.

“Then in a cup,” he said, capitulating.

Why had he asked for a glass in the first place?

Tension in a vacuum, he thought again, looking round. Hazard in a blank place.

The café was modern Swiss antique. Crossed plastic lances hung from stucco pillars. Hidden speakers played harmless music; the confiding voice changed language with each announcement. In a corner, four men played a silent game of cards. He looked out of the window, into the empty square. Rain had started again, turning white to grey. A boy cycled past wearing a red woollen cap, and the cap went down the road like a torch until the fog put it out. The bank’s doors were double, he noticed, opened by electronic eye. He looked at his watch. Eleven-ten. A till murmured. A coffee machine hissed. The card-players were dealing a new hand. Wooden plates hung on the wall: dancing couples in national costume. What else was there to look at? The lamps were wrought iron but the illumination came from a ring of strip lighting round the ceiling and it was very harsh. He thought of Hong Kong, with its Bavarian beer cellars on the fifteenth floor, the same sense of waiting for explanations that would never be supplied. And today is only preparation, he thought: today is not even the approach. He looked at the bank again. Nobody entering, nobody leaving. He remembered waiting all his life for something he could no longer define: call it resolution. He remembered Ann, and their last walk. Resolution in a vacuum. He heard a chair squeak and saw Toby’s hand held out for him, Swiss style, to shake, and Toby’s bright face sparkling as if he’d just come in from a run.

“The Grigorievs left the house in Elfenau five minutes ago,” he said quietly. “Grigorieva’s driving. Most likely they die before they get here.”

“And the bicycles?” Smiley said anxiously.

“Like normal,” said Toby, pulling up a chair.

“Did she drive last week?”

“Also the week before. She insists. George, I mean that woman is a monster.” The girl brought him a coffee unbidden. “Last week, she actually hauled Grigoriev out of the driving seat, then drove the car into the gatepost, clipped the wing. Pauli and Canada Bill were laughing so much we thought we’d get static on the whisperers.” He put a friendly hand on Smiley’s shoulder. “Listen, it’s going to be a nice day. Believe me. Nice light, a nice layout, all you got to do is sit back and enjoy the show.”

The phone rang, and the girl called, “Herr Jacobi!” Toby walked easily to the counter. She handed him the receiver and blushed at something he whispered to her. From the kitchen, the chef came in with his small son: “Herr Jacobi!” The chrysanthemums on Smiley’s table were plastic but someone had put water in the vase.

“Ciao,” Toby called cheerfully into the phone, and came back. “Everyone in position, everyone happy,” he announced with satisfaction. “Eat something, okay? Enjoy yourself, George. This is Switzerland.”

Toby stepped gaily into the street. Enjoy the show, thought Smiley. That’s right. I wrote it, Toby produced it, and all I can do now is watch. No, he thought, correcting himself: Karla wrote it, and sometimes that worried him quite a lot.

Two girls in hiking kit were entering the double doors of the bank. A moment later and Toby had followed them in. He’s packing the bank, thought Smiley. He’ll man every counter two-deep. After Toby, a young couple, arm in arm, then a stubby woman with two shopping bags. The yellow mail van had not budged: nobody moves a mail van. He noticed a public phone-box, and two figures huddled into it, perhaps sheltering from the rain. Two people are less conspicuous than one, they liked to say at Sarratt, and three are less conspicuous than a pair. An empty tour coach passed. A clock struck twelve and, right on cue, a black Mercedes lurched out of the fog, its dipped headlights glittering on the cobble. Bumping clumsily onto the kerb, it stopped outside the bank, six feet from Toby’s mail van. Soviet Embassy car numbers end with 73, Toby had said. She drops him and drives round the block a couple of times till he comes out. But today, in the filthy weather, the Grigorievs had apparently decided to flout the parking laws and Karla’s laws too, and rely on their CD plates to keep them out of trouble. The passenger door opened and a stocky figure in a dark suit and spectacles scampered for the bank entrance, carrying a brief-case. Smiley had just time to record the thick grey hair and rimless spectacles of Grigoriev’s photographs before a lorry masked his view. When it moved on, Grigoriev had disappeared, but Smiley had a clear sight of the formidable bulk of Grigorieva herself, with her red hair and learner-driver scowl, seated alone at the steering-wheel. George, believe me, that’s a very distorting woman. Seeing her now, her set jaw, her bullish glare, Smiley was able for the first time, if cautiously, to share Toby’s optimism. If fear was the essential concomitant of a successful burn, Grigorieva was certainly someone to be afraid of.

In his mind’s eye Smiley now imagined the scene that was playing inside the bank, exactly as he and Toby had planned. The bank was a small one, a team of seven could flood it. Toby had opened a private account for himself: Herr Jacobi, a few thousand francs. Toby would take one counter and occupy it with small transactions. The foreign-exchange desk was also no problem. Two of Toby’s people, armed with a spread of currencies, could keep them on the run for minutes. He imagined the hubbub of Toby’s hilarity, causing Grigoriev to raise his voice. He imagined the two girl hikers doing a double act, one rucksack dumped carelessly at Grigoriev’s feet, recording whatever he happened to say to the cashier; and the hidden cameras snapping away from toggle bags, rucksacks, brief-cases, bedrolls, or wherever they were stowed. “It’s the same as the firing-squad, George,” Toby explained when Smiley said he was worried about the shutter noise. “Everybody hears the click except the quarry.”

The bank doors slid open. Two businessmen emerged, adjusting their raincoats as if they had been to the lavatory. The stubby woman with the two shopping bags followed them out, and Toby came after her, chatting volubly to the girl hikers. Next came Grigoriev himself. Oblivious of everything, he hopped into the black Mercedes and planted a kiss on his wife’s cheek before she had time to turn away. He saw her mouth show criticism of him, and Grigoriev’s placatory smile as he replied. Yes, Smiley thought, he certainly has something to be guilty about; yes, he thought, remembering the watchers’ affection for him; yes, I understand that too. But the Grigorievs did not leave; not yet. Grigoriev had hardly closed his door before a tall, vaguely familiar woman in a green Loden coat came striding down the pavement, tapped fiercely on the passenger window, and delivered herself of what seemed to be a homily upon the sins of parking on pavements. Grigoriev was embarrassed, Grigorieva leaned across him and bawled at her—Smiley even heard the word Diplomat in heavy German rise above the sound of the traffic—but the woman remained where she was, her handbag under her arm, still swearing at them as they drove away. She’ll have snapped them in the car with the bank doors in the background, he thought. They photograph through perforations: half a dozen pin-holes and the lens can see perfectly.

Toby had returned and was sitting beside him at the table. He had lit a small cigar. Smiley could feel him trembling like a dog after the chase.

“Grigoriev drew his normal ten thousand,” he said. His English had become a little rash. “Same as last week, same as the week before. We got it, George, the whole scene. The boys are very happy, the girls too. George, I mean they are fantastic. Completely the best. I never had so good. What do you think of him?”

Surprised to be asked, Smiley actually laughed.

“He’s certainly henpecked,” he agreed.

“And a nice fellow, know what I mean? Reasonable. I think he’ll act reasonable too. That’s my view, George. The boys are the same.”

“Where do the Grigorievs go from here?”

A sharp male voice interrupted him. “Herr Jacobi!”

But it was only the chef, holding up a glass of schnapps to drink Toby’s health. Toby returned the toast.

“Lunch at the station buffet, first-class,” he continued. “Grigorieva takes pork chop and chips, Grigoriev steak, a glass of beer. Maybe they take also a couple of vodkas.”

“And after lunch?”

Toby gave a brisk nod, as if the question required no elucidation.

“Sure,” he said. “That’s where they go. George, cheer up. That guy will fold, believe me. You never had a wife like that. And Natasha’s a cute kid.” He lowered his voice. “Karla’s his meal ticket, George. You don’t always understand the simple things. You think she’d let him give up the new apartment? The Mercedes?”

Alexandra’s weekly visitor arrived, always punctual, always at the same time, which was on Fridays after rest. At one o’clock came lunch, which on Fridays consisted of cold meat and Rösti and Kompott of apples or perhaps plums, depending on the season, but she couldn’t eat it and sometimes she made a show of sicking it up or running to the lavatory or calling Felicity-Felicity and complaining, in the basest language, about the quality of the food. This never failed to annoy her. The hostel took great pride in growing its own fruit, and the hostel’s brochures in Felicity-Felicity’s office contained many photographs of fruit and blossom and Alpine streams and mountains indiscriminately, as if God, or the sisters, or Dr. Rüedi, had grown the whole lot specially for the inmates. After lunch came an hour’s rest and on Fridays this daily hour was Alexandra’s worst, her worst of the whole week, when she had to lie on the white iron bedstead and pretend she was relaxing, while she prayed to any God that would have her that Uncle Anton might be run over or have a heart attack, or, best of all, cease to exist—locked away with her own past and her own secrets and her own name of Tatiana. She thought of his rimless spectacles and in her imagination she drove them into his head and out the other side, taking his eyes with them, so that instead of his soggy gaze to stare at, she would see straight through him to the world outside.

And now at last rest had ended, and Alexandra stood in the empty dining hall in her best frock, watching the lodge through the window while two of the Marthas scoured the tiled floor. She felt sick. Crash, she thought. Crash on your silly bicycle. Other girls had visitors, but they came on Saturdays and none had Uncle Anton, few had men of any sort; it was mainly wan aunts and bored sisters who attended. And none got Felicity-Felicity’s study to sit in, either, with the door closed and nobody present but the visitor; that was a privilege which Alexandra and Uncle Anton enjoyed alone, as Sister Beatitude never tired of pointing out. But Alexandra would have traded all of those privileges, and a good few more besides, for the privilege of not having Uncle Anton’s visit at all.

The lodge gates opened and she began trembling on purpose, shaking her hands from the wrists as if she had seen a mouse, or a spider, or a naked man aroused for her. A tubby figure in a brown suit began cycling down the drive. He was not a natural cyclist, she could tell from his self-consciousness. He had not cycled here from any distance, bringing a breath of outside. It could be baking hot, but Uncle Anton neither sweated nor burned. It could be raining heavily, but Uncle Anton’s mackintosh and hat, when he reached the main door, would scarcely be wet, and his shoes were never muddied. Only when the giant snowfall had come, three weeks ago, or call it years, and put a metre’s thickness of extra padding round the dead castle, did Uncle Anton look anything like a real man living in the real elements; in his thick knee boots and anorak and fur hat, skirting the pine trees as he plodded up the track, he stepped straight out of the memories she was never to mention. And when he had embraced her, calling her “my little daughter,” slapping his big gloves down on Felicity-Felicity’s highly polished table, she felt such a surge of kinship and hope that she would catch herself smiling for days afterwards.

“He was so warm,” she confided to Sister Beatitude in her bit of French. “He held me like a friend! Why does the snow make him so fond?”

But today there was only sleet and fog and big floppy flakes that would not settle on the yellow gravel.

He comes in a car, Sasha—Sister Beatitude told her once—with a woman, Sasha. Beatitude had seen them. Twice. Watched them, naturally. They had two bicycles strapped to the roof of the car, upside down, and the woman did the driving, a big strong woman, a bit like Mother Felicity but not so Christian, with hair red enough to scare a bull. When they reached the edge of the village, they parked the car behind Andreas Gertsch’s barn, and Uncle Anton untied his bicycle and rode it to the lodge. But the woman stayed in the car and smoked, and read Schweizer Illustrierte, sometimes scowling at the mirror, and her bicycle never left the roof; it stayed there like an upturned sow while she read her magazine! And guess what! Uncle Anton’s bicycle was illegal! The bicycle—as a good Swiss, Sister Beatitude had checked the point quite naturally—Uncle Anton’s bicycle had no plaque, no licence, he was a criminal at large, and so was the woman, though she was probably too fat to ride it!

But Alexandra cared nothing for illegal bicycles. It was the car she wanted to know about. What type? Rich or poor? What colour, and above all, where did it come from? Was it from Moscow, from Paris, where? But Sister Beatitude was a country girl and simple, and in the world beyond the mountains most foreign places were alike to her. Then what letters were on the number-plate, for goodness’ sake, silly? Alexandra had cried. Sister Beatitude had not noticed such matters. Sister Beatitude shook her head like the dumb dairymaid she was. Bicycles and cows she understood. Cars were beyond her mark.

Alexandra watched Grigoriev arrive, she waited for the moment when he leaned his head forward over the handle-bars and raised his ample bottom in the air and swung one short leg over the crossbars as if he were climbing off a woman. She saw how the short ride had reddened his face, she watched him unfasten the brief-case from the rack over the back wheel. She ran to the door and tried to kiss him, first on the cheek, then on the lips, for she had an idea of putting her tongue into his mouth as an act of welcome, but he scurried past her with his head down as if he were already going back to his wife.

“Greetings, Alexandra Borisovna,” she heard him whisper, all of a flurry, uttering her patronymic as if it were a state secret.

“Greetings, Uncle Anton,” she replied; then Sister Beatitude caught her by the arm, and whispered to her to behave herself or else.

Mother Felicity’s study was at once both sparse and sumptuous. It was small and bare and very hygienic, and the Marthas scrubbed it and polished it every day so that it smelt like a swimming-pool. Yet her little pieces of Russia glistened like caskets. She had icons, and she had richly framed sepia photographs of princesses she had loved, and bishops she had served, and on her saint’s day—or was it her birthday or the bishop’s?—she had taken them all down and made a theatre of them with candles and a Virgin and a Christ-child. Alexandra knew this because Felicity had called her in to sit with her, and had read old Russian prayers to her aloud, and chanted bits of liturgy in a marching rhythm to her, and given her sweet cake and a glass of sweet wine, all to have Russian company on her saint’s day—or was it Easter or Christmas? Russians were the best in the world, she said. Gradually, though she had had a lot of pills, Alexandra had realised that Felicity-Felicity was stone drunk, so she lifted up her old feet and put a pillow for her, and kissed her hair and let her fall asleep on the tweed sofa where parents sat when they came to enrol fresh patients. It was the same sofa where Alexandra sat now, staring at Uncle Anton while he pulled the little notebook from his pocket. He was having one of his brown days, she noticed: brown suit, brown tie, brown shirt.

“You should buy yourself brown cycle clips,” she told him in Russian.

Uncle Anton did not laugh. He kept a piece of black elastic like a garter round his notebook and he was unwinding it with a shrewd, reluctant air while he moistened his official lips. Sometimes Alexandra thought he was a policeman, sometimes a priest disguised, sometimes a lawyer or schoolmaster, sometimes even a special kind of doctor. But whatever he was, he clearly wished her to know, by means of the elastic and the notebook, and by the expressions of nervous benevolence, that there was a Higher Law for which neither he nor she was personally responsible, that he did not mean to be her jailer, that he wished her forgiveness—if not her actual love—for locking her away. She knew also that he wished her to know that he was sad and even lonely, and assuredly that he was fond of her, and that in a better world he would have been the uncle who brought her birthday presents, Christmas presents faithfully, and each year chucked her under the chin, “My-my, Sasha, aren’t you growing up,” followed by a restrained pat on some rounded part of her, meaning “My-my, Sasha, you’ll soon be ready for the pot.”

“How is your reading progressing, Alexandra?” he asked her while he flattened the notebook in front of him and turned the pages looking for his list. This was small talk. This was not the Higher Law. This was like talk about the weather, or what a pretty dress she was wearing, or how happy she appeared today—not at all like last week.

“My name is Tatiana and I come from the moon,” she replied.

Uncle Anton acted as though this statement had not been made, so perhaps she only said it to herself, silently in her mind, where she said a lot of things.

“You have finished the novel by Turgenev I brought you?” he asked. “You were reading Torrents of Spring, I think.”

“Mother Felicity was reading it to me but she has a sore throat,” said Alexandra.

“So.”

This was a lie. Felicity-Felicity had stopped reading to her as a punishment for throwing her food on the floor.

Uncle Anton had found the page of his notebook with the list on it, and he had found his pencil too, a silver one with a top you pressed; he appeared inordinately proud of it.

“So,” he said. “So then, Alexandra!”

Suddenly Alexandra did not want to wait for his questions. Suddenly she could not. She thought of pulling down his trousers and making love to him. She thought of messing in a corner like the French girl. She showed him the blood on her hands where she had chewed them. She needed to explain to him, through her own divine blood, that she did not want to hear his first question. She stood up, holding out one hand for him while she dug her teeth into the other. She wanted to demonstrate to Uncle Anton, for once and for ever, that the question he had in mind was obscene to her, and insulting, and unacceptable, and mad, and to do this she had chosen Christ’s example as the nearest and best: did He not hang on Felicity-Felicity’s wall, straight ahead of her, with blood running down His wrists? I have shed this for you, Uncle Anton, she explained, thinking of Easter now, of Felicity-Felicity going round the castle breaking eggs. Please. This is my blood, Uncle Anton. I have shed it for you. But with her other hand jammed in her mouth, all she could manage in her speaking voice was a sob. So finally she sat down, frowning, with her hands linked on her lap, not actually bleeding, she noticed, but at least wet with her saliva.

Uncle Anton held the notebook open with his right hand and was holding the pop-top pencil in his left. He was the first left-handed man she had known and sometimes, watching him write, she wondered whether he was a mirror image, with the real version of him sitting in the car behind Andreas Gertsch’s barn. She thought what a wonderful way that would be of handling what Dr. Rüedi called the “divided nature”—to send one half away on a bicycle while the other half stayed put in the car with the redheaded woman who drove him. Felicity-Felicity, if you lend me your pop-pop bicycle, I will send the bad part of me away on it.

Suddenly she heard herself talking. It was a wonderful sound. It made her like all the strong healthy voices around her: politicians on the radio, doctors when they looked down on her in bed.

“Uncle Anton, where do you come from, please?” she heard herself enquire, with measured curiosity. “Uncle Anton, pay attention to me, please, while I make a statement. Until you have told me who you are and whether you are my real uncle, and what is the registration number of your big black car, I shall refuse to answer any of your questions. I regret this, but it is necessary. Also, is the redheaded woman your wife or is she Felicity-Felicity with her hair dyed, as Sister Beatitude advises me?”

But too often Alexandra’s mind spoke words which her mouth did not transmit, with the result that the words stayed flying around inside her and she became their unwilling jailer, just as Uncle Anton pretended to be hers.

“Who gives you the money to pay Felicity-Felicity for my detention here? Who pays Dr. Rüedi? Who dictates what questions go into your notebook every week? To whom do you pass my answers which you so meticulously write down?”

But once again, the words flew around inside her skull like the birds in Kranko’s greenhouse in the fruit season, and there was nothing that Alexandra could do to persuade them to come out.

“So, then?” said Uncle Anton a third time, with the watery smile that Dr. Rüedi wore when he was about to give her an injection. “Now first you must please tell me your full name, Alexandra.”

Alexandra held up three fingers and counted on them like a good child. “Alexandra Borisovna Ostrakova,” she said in an infantile voice.

“Good. And how have you been feeling this week, Sasha?”

Alexandra smiled politely in response: “Thank you, Uncle Anton. I have been feeling much better this week. Dr. Rüedi tells me that my crisis is already far behind me.”

“Have you received by any means—post, telephone, or word of mouth—any communication from outside persons?”

Alexandra had decided she was a saint. She folded her hands on her lap, and tilted her head to one side, and imagined she was one of Felicity-Felicity’s Russian Orthodox saints on the wall behind the desk. Vera, who was faith; Liubov, who was love; Sofia, Olga, Irina, or Xenia—all the names that Mother Felicity had taught her during that evening when she had confided that her own real name was Hope—whereas Alexandra’s was Alexandra or Sasha, but never, never Tatiana, and just remember it. Alexandra smiled at Uncle Anton and she knew her smile was sublime, and tolerant, and wise; and that she was hearing God’s voice, not Uncle Anton’s; and Uncle Anton knew it too, for he gave a long sigh and put away his notebook, then reached for the bell button to summon Mother Felicity for the ceremony of the money.

Mother Felicity came hastily and Alexandra guessed she had not been far from the other side of the door. She had the account ready in her hand. Uncle Anton considered it and frowned, as he always did, then counted notes onto the desk, blue ones and orange ones singly, so that each was for a moment transparent under the beam of the reading lamp. Then Uncle Anton patted Alexandra on the shoulder as if she were fifteen instead of twenty-five, or twenty, or however old she was when she had clipped away the forbidden bits of her life. She watched him waddle out of the door again and onto his bike. She watched his rump strive and gather rhythm as he rode away from her, through the lodge, past Kranko, and away down the hill towards the village. And as she watched she saw a strange thing, a thing that had never happened before: not to Uncle Anton, at least. From nowhere, two purposeful figures materialised—a man and a woman, wheeling a motor bike. They must have been sitting on the summer bench the other side of the lodge, keeping out of sight, perhaps in order to make love. They moved into the lane, and stared after him, but they didn’t mount the motor bike, not yet. Instead, they waited till Uncle Anton was almost out of sight before setting off after him down the hill. Then Alexandra decided to scream, and this time she found her talking voice and the scream split the whole house from roof to floor before Sister Beatitude bore down on her to quell her with a heavy smack across the mouth.

“They’re the same people,” Alexandra shrieked.

“Who are?” Sister Beatitude demanded, drawing back her hand in case she needed to use it again. “Who are the same people, you bad girl?”

“They’re the people who followed my mother before they dragged her away to kill her.”

Sister Beatitude gave a snort of disbelief. “On black horses, I suppose!” she sneered. “Dragged her on a sledge, too, didn’t he, all across Siberia!”

Alexandra had spun these tales before. How her father was a secret prince more powerful than the Czar. How he ruled at night, as the owls rule while the hawks are at rest. How his secret eyes followed her wherever she went, how his secret ears heard every word she spoke. And how, one night, hearing her mother praying in her sleep, he sent his men for her and they took her into the snow and she was never seen again: not even by God, He was looking for her still.

24

The burning of Tricky Tony, as it afterwards became known in the Circus mythology—such being Grigoriev’s whimsical code-name among the watchers—was one of those rare operations where luck, timing, and preparation come together in a perfect marriage. They had all known from early on that the problem would be to find Grigoriev alone at a moment that allowed for his speedy reintroduction into normal life a few hours later. Yet by the week-end following the coverage of the Thun bank, intensive researches into Grigoriev’s behaviour pattern had produced no obvious pointers as to when this moment might be. In desperation Skordeno and de Silsky, Toby’s hard men, dreamed up a wildcat scheme to snatch him on his way to work, along the few hundred metres of pavement between his house and the Embassy. Toby killed it at once. One of the girls offered herself as a decoy: perhaps she could hitch a lift from him somehow? Her altruism was applauded, but it did not answer the practicalities.

The main problem was that Grigoriev was under double guard. Not only did the Embassy security staff keep check on him as a matter of routine; so did his wife. The watchers had no doubt that she suspected him of a tenderness for little Natasha. Their fears were confirmed when Toby’s listeners contrived to tamper with the junction box at the corner of the road. In one day’s watch, Grigorieva telephoned her husband no less than three times, to no apparent purpose other than to establish that he was indeed at the Embassy.

“George, I mean that woman is a total monster,” Toby stormed when he heard this. “Love—I mean, all right. But possession, for its own sake, this I absolutely condemn. It’s a matter of principle for me.”

The one chink was Grigoriev’s Thursday-afternoon drives to the garage, when he took the Mercedes to have it checked. If a practised car coper such as Canada Bill could introduce an engine fault during the Wednesday night—one that kept the car mobile, but only just—then might not Grigoriev be snatched from the garage while he was waiting for the mechanic to trace it? The plan bristled with imponderables. Even if everything worked, how long would they have Grigoriev to themselves? Then again, on Thursdays Grigoriev must be back home in time to receive his weekly visit from the courier Krassky. Nevertheless, it remained the only plan they had—their worst except for the others, said Toby—and accordingly they settled to an apprehensive wait of five days while Toby and his team leaders plotted fall-backs for the many unpleasant contingencies should the plot abort: everyone to be signed out of his hotel and packed; escape papers and money to be carried at all times; radio equipment to be boxed and cached under American identity in the vaults of one of the major banks, so that any clues left behind would point to the Cousins rather than themselves; no forms of assembly other than walk-and-talk encounters on the pavement; wavelengths to be changed every four hours. Toby knew his Swiss police, he said. He had hunted here before. If the balloon went up, he said, then the fewer of his boys and girls around to answer questions, the better. “I mean thank God the Swiss are only neutral, know what I mean?”

As a somewhat forlorn consolation, and as a boost to the delicate morale of the watchers, Smiley and Toby decreed that the surveillance of Grigoriev should be kept at full pitch throughout the expected days of waiting. The observation post in the Brunnadernrain would be manned round the clock; car and cycle patrols would be increased; everyone should be on his toes for the remote chance that God, in an uncharacteristic moment, would favour the just.

What God did, in fact, was send idyllic Sunday weather, and it proved decisive. By ten o’clock that Sunday it was as if the Alpine sun had come down from the Oberland to brighten the lives of the fog-ridden lowlanders. In the Bellevue Palace, which on Sundays has a quite overwhelming calm, a waiter had just spread a napkin on Smiley’s lap for him. He was drinking a leisurely coffee, trying to concentrate on the week-end edition of the Herald Tribune, when, looking up, he saw the gentle figure of Franz the head porter standing before him.

“Mr. Barraclough, sir, the telephone, I am sorry. A Mr. Anselm.”

The cabins were in the main hall, the voice was Toby’s, and the name Anselm signified urgency: “The Geneva bureau has just advised us that the managing director is on his way to Berne at this very moment.”

The Geneva bureau was word code for the Brunnadernrain observation post.

“Is he bringing his wife?” said Smiley.

“Unfortunately, Madame is obliged to make an excursion with the children,” Toby replied. “Perhaps if you could come down to the office, Mr. Barraclough?”

Toby’s office was a sun pavilion situated in an ornamental garden next to the Bundeshaus. Smiley was there in five minutes. Below them lay the ravine of the green river. In the distance, under a blue sky, the peaks of the Bernese Oberland lifted splendidly in the sunlight.

“Grigoriev left the Embassy on his own five minutes ago, wearing a hat and coat,” Toby said as soon as Smiley arrived. “He’s heading for the town on foot. It’s like the first Sunday we watched him. He walks to the Embassy, ten minutes later he sets off for the town. He’s going to watch the chess game, George, no question. What do you say?”

“Who’s with him?”

“Skordeno and de Silsky on foot, a back-up car behind, two more ahead. One team’s heading for the Cathedral Close right now. Do we go, George, or don’t we?”

For a moment, Toby was aware of that disconnection which seemed to afflict Smiley whenever the operation gathered speed: less indecision, then a mysterious reluctance to advance.

He pressed him: “The green light, George? Or not? George, please! We are speaking of seconds here!”

“Is the house still covered for when Grigorieva and the children get back?”

“Completely.”

For a moment longer Smiley hesitated. For a moment, he weighed the method against the prize, and the grey and distant figure of Karla seemed actually to admonish him.

“The green light, then,” said Smiley. “Yes. Go.”

He had barely finished speaking before Toby was standing in the telephone kiosk not twenty metres from the pavilion. “With my heart going like a complete steam engine,” as he later claimed. But also with the light of battle in his eyes.

There is even a scale model of the scene at Sarratt, and occasionally the directing staff will dig it out and tell the tale.

The old city of Berne is best described as a mountain, a fortress, and a peninsula all at once, as the model shows. Between the Kirchenfeld and Kornhaus bridges, the Aare runs in a horseshoe cut into a giddy cleft, and the old city roosts prudently inside it, in rising foothills of medieval streets, till it reaches the superb late-Gothic spire of the Cathedral, which is both the mountain’s peak and its glory. Next to the Cathedral, at the same height, stands the Platform, from whose southern perimeter the unwary visitor may find himself staring down a hundred feet of sheer stone face, straight into the swirling river. It is a place to draw suicides and no doubt there have been some. It is a place where, according to popular history, a pious man was thrown from his horse and, though he fell the whole awesome distance, survived by God’s deliverance to serve the church for another thirty years, dying peacefully at a great age. The rest of the Platform makes a tranquil spot, with benches and ornamental trees and a children’s playground—and, in recent years, a place for public chess. The pieces are two feet or more in height, light enough to move, but heavy enough to withstand the occasional thrust of a south wind that whips off the surrounding hills. The scale model even runs to replicas of them.

By the time Toby Esterhase arrived there that Sunday morning, the unexpected sunshine had drawn a small but tidy body of the game’s enthusiasts, who stood or sat around the chequered pavement. And at their centre, a mere six feet from where Toby stood, as oblivious to his surroundings as could be wished, stood Counsellor (Commercial) Anton Grigoriev of the Soviet Embassy in Berne, a truant from both work and family, intently following, through his rimless spectacles, each move the players made. And behind Grigoriev stood Skordeno and his companion de Silsky, watching Grigoriev. The players were young and bearded and volatile—if not art students, then certainly they wished to be taken for them. And they were very conscious of fighting a duel under the public gaze.

Toby had been this close to Grigoriev before, but never when the Russian’s attention was so firmly locked elsewhere. With the calm of impending battle, Toby appraised him and confirmed what he had all along maintained: Anton Grigoriev was not a fieldman. His rapt attention, the unguarded frankness of his expressions as each move was played or contemplated, had an innocence that could never have survived the infighting of Moscow Centre.

Toby’s personal appearance was another of those happy chances of the day. Out of respect for the Bernese Sunday, he had donned a dark overcoat and his black fur hat. He was therefore, at this crucial moment of improvisation, looking exactly as he would have wished had he planned everything to the last detail: a man of position takes his Sunday relaxation.

Toby’s dark eyes lifted to the Cathedral Close. The get-away cars were in position.

A ripple of laughter went out. With a flourish, one of the bearded players lifted his queen and, pretending it was a most appalling weight, reeled with it a couple of steps and dumped it with a groan. Grigoriev’s face darkened into a frown as he considered this unexpected move. On a nod from Toby, Skordeno and de Silsky drew one to either side of him, so close that Skordeno’s shoulder was actually nudging the quarry’s, but Grigoriev paid no heed. Taking this as their signal, Toby’s watchers began sauntering into the crowd, forming a second echelon behind de Silsky and Skordeno. Toby waited no longer. Placing himself directly in front of Grigoriev, he smiled and lifted his hat. Grigoriev returned the smile—uncertainly, as one might to a diplomatic colleague half-remembered—and lifted his hat in return.

“How are you today, Counsellor?” Toby asked in Russian, in a tone of quiet jocularity.

More mystified than ever, Grigoriev said thank you, he was well.

“I hope you enjoyed your little excursion to the country on Friday,” said Toby in the same easy but very quiet voice, as he slipped his arm through Grigoriev’s. “The old city of Thun is not sufficiently appreciated, I believe, by members of our distinguished diplomatic community here. In my view it is to be recommended both for its antiquity, and its banking facilities. Do you not agree?”

This opening sally was long enough, and disturbing enough, to carry Grigoriev unresisting to the crowd’s edge. Skordeno and de Silsky were packing close behind.

“My name is Kurt Siebel, sir,” Toby confided in Grigoriev’s ear, his hand still on his arm. “I am chief investigator to the Bernese Standard Bank of Thun. We have certain questions relating to Dr. Adolf Glaser’s private account with us. You would do well to pretend you know me.” They were still moving. Behind them, the watchers followed in a staggered line, like rugger players poised to block a sudden dash. “Please do not be alarmed,” Toby continued, counting the steps as Grigoriev kept up his progress. “If you could spare us an hour, sir, I am sure we could arrange matters without troubling your domestic or professional position. Please.”

In the world of a secret agent, the wall between safety and extreme hazard is almost nothing, a membrane that can be burst in a second. He may court a man for years, fattening him for the pass. But the pass itself—the “will you, won’t you?”—is a leap from which there is either ruin or victory, and for a moment Toby thought he was looking ruin in the face. Grigoriev had finally stopped dead and turned round to stare at him. He was pale as an invalid. His chin lifted, he opened his mouth to protest a monstrous insult. He tugged at his captive arm in order to free himself, but Toby held it firm. Skordeno and de Silsky were hovering, but the distance to the car was still fifteen metres, which was a long way, in Toby’s book, to drag one stocky Russian. Meanwhile, Toby kept talking; all his instinct urged him to.

“There are irregularities, Counsellor. Grave irregularities. We have a dossier upon your good self which makes lamentable reading. If I placed it before the Swiss police, not all the diplomatic protests in the world would protect you from the most acute public embarrassment. I need hardly mention the consequence to your professional career. Please. I said please.”

Grigoriev had still not budged. He seemed transfixed with indecision. Toby pushed at his arm, but Grigoriev stood rock solid and seemed unaware of the physical pressure on him. Toby shoved harder, Skordeno and de Silsky drew closer, but Grigoriev had the stubborn strength of the demented. His mouth opened, he swallowed, his gaze fixed stupidly on Toby.

“What irregularities?” he said at last. Only the shock and the quietness in his voice gave cause for hope. His thick body remained rigidly set against further movement. “Who is this Glaser you speak of?” he demanded huskily, in the same stunned tone. “I am not Glaser. I am a diplomat, Grigoriev. The account you speak of has been conducted with total propriety. As Commercial Counsellor I have immunity. I also have the right to own foreign bank accounts.”

Toby fired his only other shot. The money and the girl, Smiley had said. The money and the girl are all you have to play with.

“There is also the delicate matter of your marriage, sir,” Toby resumed with a show of reluctance. “I must advise you that your philanderings in the Embassy have put your domestic arrangements in grave danger.” Grigoriev started, and was heard to mutter “banker”—whether in disbelief or derision will never be sure. His eyes closed and he was heard to repeat the word, this time—according to Skordeno—with a particularly vile obscenity. But he started walking again. The rear door of the car stood open. The back-up car waited behind it. Toby was talking some nonsense about the withholding tax payable on the interest accruing from Swiss bank accounts, but he knew that Grigoriev was not really listening. Slipping ahead, de Silsky jumped into the back of the car and Skordeno threw Grigoriev straight in after him, then sat down beside him and slammed the door. Toby took the passenger seat; the driver was one of the Meinertzhagen girls. Speaking German, Toby told her to go easy and for God’s sake remember it was a Bernese Sunday. No English in Grigoriev’s hearing, Smiley had said.

Somewhere near the station Grigoriev must have had second thoughts, because there was a short scuffle and when Toby looked in the mirror Grigoriev’s face was contorted with pain and he had both hands over his groin. They drove to the Länggass-strasse, a long dull road behind the university. The door of the apartment house opened as they pulled up outside it. A thin housekeeper waited on the doorstep. She was Millie McCraig, an old Circus trooper. At the sight of her smile, Grigoriev bridled, and now it was speed, not cover, that mattered. Skordeno jumped onto the pavement, seized one of Grigoriev’s arms, and nearly pulled it out of its socket; de Silsky must have hit him again, though he swore afterwards it was an accident, for Grigoriev came out doubled up, and between them they carried him over the threshold like a bride, and burst into the drawing-room in a bunch. Smiley was seated in a corner waiting for them. It was a room of brown chintzes and lace. The door closed, the abductors allowed themselves a brief show of festivity. Skordeno and de Silsky burst out laughing in relief. Toby took off his fur hat and wiped the sweat away.

“Ruhe,” he said softly, ordering quiet. They obeyed him instantly.

Grigoriev was rubbing his shoulder, seemingly unaware of anything but the pain. Studying him, Smiley took comfort from this gesture of self-concern: subconsciously, Grigoriev was declaring himself to be one of life’s losers. Smiley remembered Kirov, his botched pass at Ostrakova and his laborious recruitment of Otto Leipzig. He looked at Grigoriev and read the same incurable mediocrity in everything he saw: in the new but ill-chosen striped suit that emphasised his portliness; in the treasured grey shoes, punctured for ventilation but too tight for comfort; in the prinked, waved hair. All these tiny, useless acts of vanity communicated to Smiley an aspiration to greatness which he knew—as Grigoriev seemed to know—would never be fulfilled.

A former academic, he remembered, from the document Enderby had handed him at Ben’s Place. Appears to have abandoned university teaching for the larger privileges of officialdom.

A pincher, Ann would have said, weighing his sexuality at a single glance. Dismiss him.

But Smiley could not dismiss him. Grigoriev was a hooked fish: Smiley had only moments in which to decide how best to land him. He wore rimless spectacles and was running to fat round the chin. His hair oil, warmed by the heat of his body, gave out a lemon vapour. Still kneading his shoulder, he started peering round at his captors. Sweat was falling from his face like raindrops.

“Where am I?” he demanded truculently, ignoring Smiley and selecting Toby as the leader. His voice was hoarse and high pitched. He was speaking German, with a Slav sibilance.

Three years as First Secretary, Commercial, Soviet Mission to Potsdam, Smiley remembered. No apparent intelligence connection.

“I demand to know where I am. I am a senior Soviet diplomat. I demand to speak to my Ambassador immediately.”

The continuing action of his hand upon his injured shoulder took the edge off his indignation.

“I have been kidnapped! I am here against my will! If you do not immediately return me to my Ambassador there will be a grave international incident!”

Grigoriev had the stage to himself, and he could not quite fill it. Only George will ask questions, Toby had told his team. Only George will answer them. But Smiley sat still as an undertaker; nothing, it seemed, could rouse him.

“You want ransom?” Grigoriev called, to all of them. An awful thought appeared to strike him. “You are terrorists?” he whispered. “But if you are terrorists, why do you not bind my eyes? Why do you let me see your faces?” He stared round at de Silsky, then at Skordeno. “You must cover your faces. Cover them! I want no knowledge of you!”

Goaded by the continuing silence, Grigoriev drove a plump fist into his open palm and shouted “I demand” twice. At which point Smiley, with an air of official regret, opened a note-book on his lap, much as Kirov might have done, and gave a small, very official sigh: “You are Counsellor Grigoriev of the Soviet Embassy in Berne?” he asked in the dullest possible voice.

“Grigoriev! I am Grigoriev! Yes, well done, I am Grigoriev! Who are you, please? Al Capone? Who are you? Why do you rumble at me like a commissar?”

Commissar could not have described Smiley’s manner better: it was leaden to the point of indifference.

“Then, Counsellor, since we cannot afford to delay, I must ask you to study the incriminating photographs on the table behind you,” Smiley said, with the same studied dullness.

“Photographs? What photographs? How can you incriminate a diplomat? I demand to telephone my Ambassador immediately!”

“I would advise the Counsellor to look at the photographs first,” said Smiley, in a glum, regionless German. “When he has looked at the photographs, he is free to telephone whomever he wants. Kindly start at the left,” he advised. “The photographs are arranged from left to right.”

A blackmailed man has the dignity of all our weaknesses, Smiley thought, covertly watching Grigoriev shuffling along the table as if he were inspecting one more diplomatic buffet. A blackmailed man is any one of us caught in the door as we try to escape the trap. Smiley had arranged the layout of the pictures himself; he had imagined, in Grigoriev’s mind, an orchestrated succession of disasters. The Grigorievs parking their Mercedes outside the bank. Grigorieva, with her perpetual scowl of discontent, waiting alone in the driving seat, clutching the wheel in case anyone tried to take it from her. Grigoriev and little Natasha in long shot, sitting very close to each other on a bench. Grigoriev inside the bank, several pictures, culminating in a superb over-the-shoulder shot of Grigoriev signing a cashier’s receipt, the full name Adolf Glaser clearly typed on the line above his signature. There was Grigoriev, looking uncomfortable on his bicycle, about to enter the sanatorium; there was Grigorieva roosting crossly in the car again, this time beside Gertsch’s barn, her own bicycle still strapped to the roof. But the photograph that held Grigoriev longest, Smiley noticed, was the muddy long shot stolen by the Meinertzhagen girls. The quality was not good but the two heads in the car, though they were locked mouth to mouth, were recognisable enough. One was Grigoriev’s. The other, pressed down on him as if she would eat him alive, was little Natasha’s.

“The telephone is at your disposal, Counsellor,” Smiley called to him quietly, when Grigoriev still did not move.

But Grigoriev remained frozen over this last photograph, and to judge by his expression, his desolation was complete. He was not merely a man found out, thought Smiley; he was a man whose very dream of love, till now vested in secrecy, had suddenly become public and ridiculous.

Still using his glum tone of official necessity, Smiley set about explaining what Karla would have called the pressures. Other inquisitors, says Toby, would have offered Grigoriev a choice, thereby inevitably mustering the Russian obstinacy in him, and the Russian penchant for self-destruction: the very impulses, he says, which could have invited catastrophe. Other inquisitors, he insists, would have menaced, raised their voices, resorted to histrionics, even physical abuse. Not George, he says: never. George acted out the low-key official time-server, and Grigoriev, like Grigorievs the world over, accepted him as his unalterable fate. George bypassed choice entirely, says Toby. George calmly made clear to Grigoriev why it was that he had no choice at all: The important thing, Counsellor—said Smiley, as if he were explaining a tax demand—was to consider what impact these photographs would have in the places where they would very soon be studied if nothing was done to prevent their distribution. There were first the Swiss authorities, who would obviously be incensed by the misuse of a Swiss passport on the part of an accredited diplomat, not to mention the grave breach of banking laws, said Smiley. They would register the strongest official protest, and the Grigorievs would be returned to Moscow overnight, all of them, never again to enjoy the fruits of a foreign posting. Back in Moscow, however, Grigoriev would not be well regarded either, Smiley explained. His superiors in the Foreign Ministry would take a dismal view of his behaviour, “both in the private and professional spheres.” Grigoriev’s prospects for an official career would be ended. He would be an exile in his own land, said Smiley, and his family with him. All his family. “Imagine facing the wrath of Grigorieva twenty-four hours a day in the wastes of outer Siberia,” he was saying in effect.

At which Grigoriev slumped into a chair and clapped his hands on to the top of his head, as if scared it would blow off.

“But finally,” said Smiley, lifting his eyes from his notebook, though only for a moment—and what he read there, said Toby, God knows, the pages were ruled but otherwise blank—“finally, Counsellor, we have also to consider the effect of these photographs upon certain organs of State Security.”

And here Grigoriev released his head and drew the handkerchief from his top pocket and began wiping his brow, but as hard as he wiped, the sweat came back again. It fell as fast as Smiley’s own in the interrogation cell in Delhi, when he had sat face to face with Karla.

Totally committed to his part as bureaucratic messenger of the inevitable, Smiley signed once more and primly turned to another page of his notebook.

“Counsellor, may I ask you what time you expect your wife and family to return from their picnic?”

Still dabbing with the handkerchief, Grigoriev appeared too preoccupied to hear.

“Grigorieva and the children are taking a picnic in the Elfenau woods,” Smiley reminded him. “We have some questions to ask you, but it would be unfortunate if your absence from home were to cause concern.”

Grigoriev put away the handkerchief. “You are spies?” he whispered. “You are Western spies?”

“Counsellor, it is better that you do not know who we are,” said Smiley earnestly. “Such information is a dangerous burden. When you have done as we ask, you will walk out of here a free man. You have our assurance. Neither your wife, nor even Moscow Centre, will ever be the wiser. Please tell me what time your family returns from Elfenau—” Smiley broke off.

Somewhat half-heartedly, Grigoriev was affecting to make a dash for it. He stood up, he took a bound towards the door. Paul Skordeno had a languid air for a hard-man, but he caught the fugitive in an armlock even before he had taken a second step, and returned him gently to his chair, careful not to mark him. With another stage groan, Grigoriev flung up his hands in vast despair. His heavy face coloured and became convulsed, his broad shoulders started heaving as he broke into a mournful torrent of self-recrimination. He spoke half in Russian, half in German. He cursed himself with a slow and holy zeal, and after that, he cursed his mother, his wife and his bad luck and his own dreadful frailty as a father. He should have stayed in Moscow, in the Trade Ministry. He should never have been wooed away from academia merely because his fool wife wanted foreign clothes and music and privileges. He should have divorced her long ago but he could not bear to relinquish the children, he was a fool and a clown. He should be in the asylum instead of the girl. When he was sent for in Moscow, he should have said no, he should have resisted the pressure, he should have reported the matter to his Ambassador when he returned.

“Oh, Grigoriev!” he cried. “Oh, Grigoriev! You are so weak, so weak!”

Next, he delivered himself of a tirade against conspiracy. Conspiracy was anathema to him, several times in the course of his career he had been obliged to collaborate with the hateful “neighbours” in some crackpot enterprise, every time it was a disaster. Intelligence people were criminals, charlatans, and fools, a masonry of monsters. Why were Russians so in love with them? Oh, the fatal flaw of secretiveness in the Russian soul!

“Conspiracy has replaced religion!” Grigoriev moaned to all of them, in German. “It is our mystical substitute! Its agents are our Jesuits, these swine, they ruin everything!”

Bunching his fists now, he pushed them into his cheeks, pummelling himself in his remorse, till with a movement of the notepad on his lap, Smiley brought him dourly back to the matter in hand:

“Concerning Grigorieva and your children, Counsellor,” he said. “It really is essential that we know what time they are due to return home.”

In every successful interrogation—as Toby Esterhase likes to pontificate concerning this moment—there is one slip which cannot be recovered; one gesture, tacit or direct, even if it is only a half smile, or the acceptance of a cigarette, which marks the shift away from resistance, towards collaboration. Grigoriev, in Toby’s account of the scene, now made his crucial slip.

“She will be home at one o’clock,” he muttered, avoiding both Smiley’s eye, and Toby’s.

Smiley looked at his watch. To Toby’s secret ecstasy, Grigoriev did the same.

“But perhaps she will be late?” Smiley objected.

“She is never late,” Grigoriev retorted moodily.

“Then kindly begin by telling me of your relationship with the girl Ostrakova,” said Smiley, stepping right into the blue—says Toby—yet contriving to imply that his question was the most natural sequel to the issue of Madame Grigorieva’s punctuality. Then he held his pen ready, and in such a way, says Toby, that a man like Grigoriev would feel positively obliged to give him something to write down.

For all this, Grigoriev’s resistance was not quite evaporated. His amour propre demanded at least one further outing. Opening his hands, therefore, he appealed to Toby: “Ostrakova!” he repeated with exaggerated scorn. “He asks me about some woman called Ostrakova? I know no such person. Perhaps he does, but I do not. I am a diplomat. Release me immediately. I have important engagements.”

But the steam, as well as the logic, was fast going out of his protests. Grigoriev knew this as well as anyone.

“Alexandra Borisovna Ostrakova,” Smiley intoned, while he polished his spectacles on the fat end of his tie. “A Russian girl, but has a French passport.” He replaced his spectacles. “Just as you are Russian, Counsellor, but have a Swiss passport. Under a false name. Now how did you come to get involved with her, I wonder?”

“Involved? Now he tells me I was involved with her! You think I am so base I sleep with mad girls? I was blackmailed. As you blackmail me now, so I was blackmailed. Pressure! Always pressure, always Grigoriev!”

“Then tell me how they blackmailed you,” Smiley suggested, with barely a glance at him.

Grigoriev peered into his hands, lifted them, but let them drop back onto his knees again, for once unused. He dabbed his lips with his handkerchief. He shook his head at the world’s iniquity.

“I was in Moscow,” he said, and in Toby’s ears, as he afterwards declares, angel choirs sang their hallelujahs. George had turned the trick, and Grigoriev’s confession had begun.

Smiley, on the other hand, betrayed no such jubilation at his achievement. To the contrary, a frown of irritation puckered his plump face.

“The date, please, Counsellor,” he said, as if the place were not the issue. “Give the date when you were in Moscow. Henceforth, please give dates at all points.”

This too is classic, Toby likes to explain: the wise inquisitor will always light a few false fires.

“September,” said Grigoriev, mystified.

“Of which year?” said Smiley, writing.

Grigoriev looked plaintively to Toby again. “Which year! I say September, he asks me which September. He is a historian? I think he is a historian. This September,” he said sulkily to Smiley. “I was recalled to Moscow for an urgent commercial conference. I am an expert in certain highly specialized economic fields. Such a conference would have been meaningless without my presence.”

“Did your wife accompany you on this journey?”

Grigoriev let out a hollow laugh. “Now he thinks we are capitalists!” he commented to Toby. “He thinks we go flying our wives around for two-week conferences, first-class Swissair.”

“‘In September of this year, I was ordered to fly alone to Moscow in order to attend a two-week economic conference,’” Smiley proposed, as if he were reading Grigoriev’s statement aloud. “‘My wife remained in Berne.’ Please describe the purpose of the conference.”

“The subject of our high-level discussions was extremely secret,” Grigoriev replied with resignation. “My Ministry wished to consider ways of giving teeth to the official Soviet attitude towards nations who were selling arms to China. We were to discuss what sanctions could be used against the offenders.”

Smiley’s faceless style, his manner of regretful bureaucratic necessity, were by now not merely established, says Toby, they were perfected: Grigoriev had adopted them wholesale, with philosophic, and very Russian, pessimism. As to the rest of those present, they could hardly believe, afterwards, that he had not been brought to the flat already in a mood to talk.

“Where was the conference held?” Smiley asked, as if secret matters concerned him less than formal details.

“At the Trade Ministry. On the fourth floor . . . in the conference room. Opposite the lavatory,” Grigoriev retorted, with hopeless facetiousness.

“Where did you stay?”

At a hostel for senior officials, Grigoriev replied. He gave the address and even, in sarcasm, his room number. Sometimes, our discussions ended late at night, he said, by now liberally volunteering information; but on the Friday, since it was still summer weather and very hot, they ended early in order to enable those who wished, to leave for the country. But Grigoriev had no such plans. Grigoriev proposed to stay in Moscow for the week-end, and with reason: “I had arranged to pass two days in the apartment of a girl called Evdokia, formerly my secretary. Her husband was away on military service,” he explained, as if this were a perfectly normal transaction among men of the world; one which Toby at least, as a fellow soul, would appreciate, even if soulless commissars would not. Then, to Toby’s astonishment, he went straight on. From his dalliance with Evdokia, he passed without warning or preamble to the very heart of their enquiry:

“Unfortunately, I was prevented from adhering to these arrangements by the intervention of members of the Thirteenth Directorate of Moscow Centre, known also as the Karla Directorate. I was summoned to attend an interview immediately.”

At which moment, the telephone rang. Toby took the call, rang off, and spoke to Smiley.

“She’s arrived back at the house,” he said, still in German.

Without demur, Smiley turned straight to Grigoriev: “Counsellor, we are advised that your wife has returned home. It has now become necessary for you to telephone her.”

“Telephone her?” Horrified, Grigoriev swung round on Toby. “He tells me, telephone her! What do I say? ‘Grigorieva, here is loving husband! I have been kidnapped by Western spies!’ Your commissar is mad! Mad!”

“You will please tell her you are unavoidably delayed,” Smiley said.

His placidity added fuel to Grigoriev’s outrage: “I tell this to my wife? To Grigorieva? You think she will believe me? She will report me to the Ambassador immediately. ‘Ambassador, my husband has run away! Find him!’”

“The courier Krassky brings your weekly orders from Moscow, does he not?” Smiley asked.

“The commissar knows everything,” Grigoriev told Toby, and wiped his hand across his chin. “If he knows everything, why doesn’t he speak to Grigorieva himself?”

“You are to adopt an official tone with her, Counsellor,” Smiley advised. “Do not refer to Krassky by name, but suggest that he has ordered you to meet him for a conspiratorial discussion somewhere in the town. An emergency. Krassky has changed his plans. You have no idea when you will be back, or what he wants. If she protests, rebuke her. Tell her it is a secret of State.”

They watched him worry, they watched him wonder. Finally, they watched a small smile settle over his face.

“A secret,” Grigoriev repeated, to himself. “A secret of State. Yes.”

Stepping boldly to the telephone, he dialled a number. Toby stood over him, one hand discreetly poised to slam the cradle should he try some trick, but Smiley with a small shake of the head signalled him away. They heard Grigorieva’s voice saying “Yes?” in German. They heard Grigoriev’s bold reply, followed by his wife—it is all on tape—demanding sharply to know where he was. They saw him stiffen and lift his chin, and put on an official face; they heard him snap out a few short phrases, and ask a question to which there was apparently no answer. They saw him ring off again, bright-eyed and pink with pleasure, and his short arms fly in the air with delight, like someone who has scored a goal. The next thing they knew, he had burst out laughing, long, rich gusts of Slav laughter, up and down the scale. Uncontrollably, the others began laughing with him—Skordeno, de Silsky, and Toby. Grigoriev was shaking Toby’s hand.

“Today I like very much conspiracy!” Grigoriev cried, between further gusts of cathartic laughter. “Conspiracy is very good today!”

Smiley had not joined in the general festivity, however. Having cast himself deliberately as the killjoy, he sat turning the pages of his notebook, waiting for the fun to end.

“You were describing how you were approached by members of the Thirteenth Directorate,” Smiley said, when all was quiet again. “Known also as the Karla Directorate. Kindly continue with your narrative, Counsellor?”

25

Did Grigoriev sense the new alertness round him—the discreet freezing of gestures? Did he notice how the eyes of Skordeno and de Silsky, both, hunted out Smiley’s impassive face and held it in their gaze? How Millie McCraig slipped silently to the kitchen to check her tape recorders yet again, in case, by an act of a malevolent god, both the main set and the reserve had failed at once? Did he notice Smiley’s now almost Oriental self-effacement—the very opposite of interest—the retreat of his whole body into the copious folds of his brown tweed travelling coat, while he patiently licked his thumb and finger and turned a page?

Toby, at least, noticed these things. Toby in his dark corner by the telephone had a grandstand seat from which he could observe everyone and remain as good as unobserved himself. A fly could not have crossed the floor, but Toby’s watchful eyes would have recorded its entire odyssey. Toby even describes his own symptoms—a hot feeling around the neckband, he says, a knotting of the throat and stomach muscles—Toby not only endured these discomforts, but remembered them faithfully. Whether Grigoriev was responsive to the atmosphere is another matter. Most likely he was too consumed by his central rôle. The triumph of the telephone call had stimulated him, and revived his self-confidence; and it was significant that his first statement, when he once more had the floor, concerned not the Karla Directorate, but his prowess as the lover of little Natasha: “Fellows of our age need a girl like that,” he explained to Toby with a wink. “They make us into young men again, like we used to be!”

“Very well, you flew to Moscow alone,” Smiley said, quite snappishly. “The conference got under way, you were approached for an interview. Please continue from there. We have not got all afternoon, you know.”

The conference started on the Monday, Grigoriev agreed, obediently resuming his official statement. When the Friday afternoon came, I returned to my hostel in order to fetch my belongings and take them to Evdokia’s apartment for our little week-end together. Instead of this, however, I was met by three men who ordered me into their car with even less explanation than you did—a glance at Toby—saying to me only that I was required for a special task. During the journey they advised me that they were members of the Thirteenth Directorate of Moscow Centre, which everybody in official Moscow knows to be the élite. I formed the impression that they were intelligent men, above the common run of their profession, which, saving your presence, sir, is not high. I had the impression they could be officers rather than mere lackeys. Nevertheless I was not unduly worried. I assumed that my professional expertise was being required for some secret matter, that was all. They were courteous and I was even somewhat flattered . . .

“How long was the journey?” Smiley interrupted, as he continued writing.

Across town, Grigoriev replied vaguely. Across town, then into countryside till dark. Till we reached this one little man like a monk, sitting in a small room, who seemed to be their master.

Once again, Toby insists on bearing witness here to Smiley’s unique mastery of the occasion. It was the strongest proof yet of Smiley’s tradecraft, says Toby—as well as of his command of Grigoriev altogether—that throughout Grigoriev’s protracted narrative, he never once, whether by an over-hasty follow-up question or the smallest false inflection of his voice, departed from the faceless rôle he had assumed for the interrogation. By his self-effacement, Toby insists, George held the whole scene “like a thrush’s egg in his hand.” The slightest careless movement on his part could have destroyed everything, but he never made it. And as the crowning example, Toby likes to offer this crucial moment, when the actual figure of Karla was for the first time introduced. Any other inquisitor, he says, at the very mention of a “little man like a monk who seemed to be their master,” would have pressed for a description—his age, rank, what was he wearing, smoking, how did you know he was their master? Not Smiley. Smiley with a suppressed exclamation of annoyance tapped his ballpoint pen on his pad, and in a long-suffering voice invited Grigoriev, then and for the future, kindly not to foreshorten factual detail:

“Let me put the question again. How long was the journey? Please describe it precisely as you remember it and let us proceed from there.”

Crestfallen, Grigoriev actually apologised. He would say they drove for four hours at speed, sir; perhaps more. He remembered now that they twice stopped to relieve themselves. After four hours they entered a guarded area—no, sir, I saw no shoulder-boards, the guards wore plain clothes—and drove for at least another half hour into the heart of it. Like a nightmare, sir.

Yet again, Smiley objected, determined to keep the temperature as low as possible. How could it have been a nightmare, he wanted to know, since Grigoriev had only a moment before claimed that he was not frightened?

Well, not a nightmare exactly, sir, more a dream. At this stage, Grigoriev had had an impression he was being taken to the landlord—he used the Russian word, and Toby translated it—while he himself felt increasingly like a poor peasant. Therefore he was not frightened, sir, because he had no control over events, and accordingly nothing for which to reproach himself. But when the car finally stopped, and one of the men put a hand on his arm, and addressed a warning to him: at this point, his attitude changed entirely, sir: “You are about to meet a great Soviet fighter and a powerful man,” the man told him. “If you are disrespectful to him, or attempt to tell lies, you may never again see your wife and family.”

“What is the name of this man?” Grigoriev had asked.

But the men replied, without smiling, that this great Soviet fighter had no name. Grigoriev asked whether he was Karla himself; knowing that Karla was the code name for the head of the Thirteenth Directorate. The men only repeated that the great fighter had no name.

“So that was when the dream became a nightmare, sir,” said Grigoriev humbly. “They told me also that I could say goodbye to my week-end of love. Little Evdokia would have to get her fun elsewhere, they said. Then one of them laughed.”

Now a great fear had seized Grigoriev, he said, and by the time he had entered the first room and advanced upon the second door, he was so scared his knees were shaking. He even had time to be scared for his beloved Evdokia. Who could this supernatural person be, he wondered in awe, that he could know almost before Grigoriev himself knew, that he was pledged to meet Evdokia for the week-end?

“So you knocked on the door,” said Smiley, as he wrote.

And I was ordered to enter! Grigoriev went on. His enthusiasm for confession was mounting; so was his dependence upon his interrogator. His voice had become louder, his gestures more free. It was as if, says Toby, he was trying physically to coax Smiley out of his posture of reticence; whereas in reality it was Smiley’s feigned indifference which was coaxing Grigoriev into the open. And I found myself not in a large and splendid office at all, sir, as became a senior official and a great Soviet fighter, but in a room so barren it would have done duty for a prison cell, with a bare wood desk at the centre, and a hard chair for a visitor to sit on:

“Imagine, sir, a great Soviet fighter and a powerful man! And all he had was a bare desk, which was illuminated only by a most inferior light! And behind it sat this priest, sir, a man of no affectation or pretence at all—a man of deep experience, I would say—a man from the very roots of his country—with small, straight eyes, and short grey hair, and a habit of holding his hands together while he smoked.”

“Smoked what?” Smiley asked, writing.

“Please?”

“What did he smoke? The question is plain enough. A pipe, cigarettes, cigar?”

“Cigarettes. American, and the room was full of their aroma. It was like Potsdam again, when we were negotiating with the American officers from Berlin. ‘If this man smokes American all the time,’ I thought, ‘then he is certainly a man of influence.’” Rounding on Toby again in his excitement, Grigoriev put the same point to him in Russian. To smoke American, chain smoke them, he said: imagine the cost, the influence necessary to obtain so many packets!

Then Smiley, true to his pedantic manner, asked Grigoriev to demonstrate what he meant by “holding his hands together” while he smoked. And he looked on impassively while Grigoriev took a brown wood pencil from his pocket and linked his chubby hands in front of his face, and held the pencil in both of them, and sucked at it in caricature, like someone drinking two-handed from a mug.

“So!” he explained, and with another volatile switch of mood, shouted something in high laughter to Toby in Russian, which Toby did not see fit, at the time, to translate, and in the transcription is rendered only as “obscene.”

The priest ordered Grigoriev to sit, and for ten minutes described to him the most intimate details of Grigoriev’s love affair with Evdokia, and also of his indiscretions with two other girls, who had both worked for him as secretaries, one in Potsdam and one in Bonn, and had ended up, unknown to Grigorieva, by sharing his bed. At which point, if Grigoriev was to be believed, he made a show of courage, and rose to his feet, demanding to know whether he had been brought half-way across Russia in order to attend a court of morals: “To sleep with one’s secretary was not an unknown phenomenon, I told him, even in the Politburo! I assured him that I had never been indiscreet with foreign girls, only Russians. ‘This too I know,’ he says. ‘But Grigorieva is unlikely to appreciate the distinction.’”

And then, to Toby’s continuing amazement, Grigoriev gave vent to another burst of throaty laughter; and though both de Silsky and Skordeno discreetly joined in, Grigoriev’s mirth outlived everybody’s, so that they had to wait for it to run down.

“Kindly tell us, please, why the man you call the priest summoned you,” Smiley said, from deep in his brown overcoat.

“He advised me that he had special work for me in Berne on behalf of the Thirteenth Directorate. I should reveal it to nobody, not even to my Ambassador, it was too secret for any of them. ‘But,’ says the priest, ‘you shall tell your wife. Your personal circumstances render it impossible for you to make a conspiracy without the knowledge of your wife. This I know, Grigoriev. So tell her.’ And he was right,” Grigoriev commented. “This was wise of him! This was clear evidence that the man was familiar with the human condition.”

Smiley turned a page and continued writing. “Go on, please,” he said.

First, said the priest, Grigoriev was to open a Swiss bank account. The priest handed him a thousand Swiss francs in one hundred notes and told him to use them as the first payment. He should open the account not in Berne, where he was known, nor in Zurich, where there was a Soviet trade bank.

“The Vozhod,” Grigoriev explained gratuitously. “This bank is used for many official and unofficial transactions.”

Not in Zurich, then, but in the small town of Thun, a few kilometres outside Berne. He should open the account under the name of Glaser, a Swiss subject: “But I am a Soviet diplomat!” Grigoriev had objected. “I am not Glaser, I am Grigoriev!”

Undeterred, the priest handed him a Swiss passport in the name of Adolf Glaser. Every month, said the priest, the account would be credited with several thousand Swiss francs, sometimes even ten or fifteen. Grigoriev would now be told what use to make of them. It was very secret, the priest repeated patiently, and to the secrecy belonged both a reward and a threat. Very much as Smiley himself had done an hour before, the priest baldly set out each in turn. “Sir, you should have observed his composure towards me,” Grigoriev told Smiley incredulously. “His calmness, his authority in all circumstances! In a chess game he would win everything, merely by his nerves.”

“But he was not playing chess,” Smiley objected drily.

“Sir, he was not,” Grigoriev agreed, and with a sad shake of his head resumed his story.

A reward, and a threat, he repeated.

The threat was that Grigoriev’s parent Ministry would be advised that he was unreliable on account of his philandering, and that he should therefore be barred from further foreign postings. This would cripple Grigoriev’s career, also his marriage. So much for the threat.

“This would be extremely terrible for me,” Grigoriev added, needlessly.

Next the reward, and the reward was substantial. If Grigoriev acquitted himself well, and with absolute secrecy, his career would be furthered, his indiscretions overlooked. In Berne he would have an opportunity to move to more agreeable quarters, which would please Grigorieva; he would be given funds with which to buy himself an imposing car which would be greatly to Grigorieva’s taste; also he would be independent of Embassy drivers, most of whom were “neighbours,” it was true, but were not admitted to this great secret. Lastly, said the priest, his promotion to Counsellor would be accelerated in order to explain the improvement in his living standards.

Grigoriev looked at the heap of Swiss francs lying on the desk between them, then at the Swiss passport, then at the priest. And he asked what would happen to him if he said he would rather not take part in this conspiracy. The priest nodded his head. He too, he assured Grigoriev, had considered this third possibility, but unfortunately the urgency of the need did not provide for such an option.

“So tell me what I must do with this money,” Grigoriev had said.

It was routine, the priest replied, which was another reason why Grigoriev had been selected: “In matters of routine, I am told you are excellent,” he said. Grigoriev, though he was by now scared half-way out of his skin by the priest’s words, had felt flattered by this commendation.

“He had heard good reports of me,” he explained to Smiley with pleasure.

Then the priest told Grigoriev about the mad girl.

Smiley did not budge. His eyes as he wrote were almost closed, but he wrote all the time—though God knows what he wrote, says Toby, for George would never have dreamed of consigning anything of even passing confidentiality to a notepad. Now and then, says Toby, while Grigoriev continued talking, George’s head lifted far enough out of his coat collar for him to study the speaker’s hands, or even his face. In every other respect he appeared remote from everything and everybody inside the room. Millie McCraig was in the doorway, de Silsky and Skordeno kept still as statues, while Toby prayed only for Grigoriev to “keep talking, I mean talking at any price, who cares? We were hearing of Karla’s tradecraft from the horse’s mouth.”

The priest proposed to conceal nothing, he assured Grigoriev—which, as everyone in the room but Grigoriev at once recognised, was a prelude to concealing something.

In a private psychiatric clinic in Switzerland, said the priest, there was confined a young Russian girl who was suffering from an advanced state of schizophrenia: “In the Soviet Union this form of illness is not sufficiently understood,” said the priest. Grigoriev recalled being strangely touched by the priest’s finality. “Diagnosis and treatment are too often complicated by political considerations,” the priest went on. “In four years of treatment in our hospitals, the child Alexandra has been accused of many things by her doctors. ‘Paranoid reformist and delusional ideas . . . An over-estimation of her own personality . . . Poor adaptation to the social environment . . . Over-inflation of her capabilities . . . A bourgeois decadence in her sexual behaviour.’ Soviet doctors have repeatedly ordered her to renounce her incorrect ideas. This is not medicine,” said the priest unhappily to Grigoriev. “It is politics. In Swiss hospitals, a more advanced attitude is taken to such matters. Grigoriev, it was essential that the child Alexandra should go to Switzerland!”

It was by now clear to Grigoriev that the high official was personally committed to the girl’s problem, and familiar with every aspect of it. Grigoriev himself was already beginning to feel sad for her. She was the daughter of a Soviet hero—said the priest—and a former official of the Red Army who, in the guise of a traitor to Russia, was living in penurious circumstances among counter-revolutionary Czarists in Paris.

“His name,” the priest said now, admitting Grigoriev to the greatest secret of all, “his name,” he said, “is Colonel Ostrakov. He is one of our finest and most active secret agents. We rely on him totally for our information regarding counter-revolutionary conspirators in Paris.”

Nobody in the room, says Toby, showed the least surprise at this sudden deification of a dead Russian deserter.

The priest, said Grigoriev, now proceeded to sketch the manner of the heroic agent Ostrakov’s life, at the same time initiating Grigoriev into the mysteries of secret work. In order to escape the vigilance of imperialist counter-intelligence, the priest explained, it was necessary to invent for an agent a legend or false biography that would make him acceptable to anti-Soviet elements. Ostrakov was therefore in appearance a Red Army defector who had “escaped” into West Berlin, and thence to Paris, abandoning his wife and one daughter in Moscow. But in order to safeguard Ostrakov’s standing among the Paris émigrés, it was logically necessary that the wife should suffer for the traitorous actions of the husband.

“For after all,” said the priest, “if imperialist spies were to report that Ostrakova, the wife of a deserter and renegade, was living in good standing in Moscow—receiving her husband’s salary, for example, or occupying the same apartment—imagine the effect this would have upon the credibility of Ostrakov!”

Grigoriev said he could imagine this well. The priest, he explained in parenthesis, was in no sense authoritarian in his manner, but rather treated Grigoriev as an equal, doubtless out of respect for his academic qualifications.

“Doubtless,” Smiley said, and made a note.

Therefore, said the priest somewhat abruptly, Ostrakova and her daughter Alexandra, with the full agreement of her husband, were transferred to a far province and given a house to live in, and different names, and even—in their modest and selfless way—of necessity, their own legend also. Such, said the priest, was the painful reality of those who devoted themselves to special work. And consider, Grigoriev—he went on intently—consider the effect that such deprivation, and subterfuge, and even duplicity, might have upon a sensitive and perhaps already unbalanced daughter: an absent father whose very name had been eradicated from her life! A mother, who before being removed to safety, was obliged to endure the full brunt of public disgrace! Picture to yourself, the priest insisted—you, a father—the strains upon the young and delicate nature of a maturing girl!

Bowing to such forceful eloquence, Grigoriev was quick to say that as a father he could picture such strains easily; and it occurred to Toby at that moment, and probably to everybody else as well, that Grigoriev was exactly what he claimed to be: a humane and decent man caught in the net of events beyond his understanding or control.

For the last several years, the priest continued in a voice heavy with regret, the girl Alexandra—or, as she used to call herself, Tatiana—had been, in the Soviet province where she lived, a wanton and a social outcast. Under the pressures of her situation she had performed a variety of criminal acts, including arson and theft in public places. She had sided with pseudo-intellectual criminals and the worst imaginable anti-social elements. She had given herself freely to men, often several in a day. At first, when she was arrested, it had been possible for the priest and his assistants to stay the normal processes of law. But gradually, for reasons of security, this protection had to be withdrawn, and Alexandra had more than once been confined to State psychiatric clinics that specialised in the treatment of congenital social malcontents—with the negative results the priest had already described.

“She has also on several occasions been detained in a common prison,” said the priest in a low voice. And, according to Grigoriev, he summed up this sad story as follows: “You will readily appreciate, dear Grigoriev, as an academic, a father, as a man of the world, how tragically the ever-worsening news of his daughter’s misfortunes affected the usefulness of our heroic agent Ostrakov in his lonely exile in Paris.”

Yet again, Grigoriev had been impressed by the remarkable sense of feeling—he would call it even a sense of direct personal responsibility—that the priest, through his story, inspired.

His voice arid as ever, Smiley made another interruption.

“And the mother is by now where, Counsellor, according to your priest?” he asked.

“Dead,” Grigoriev replied. “She died in the province. The province to which she had been sent. She was buried under another name, naturally. According to the story as he told it to me, she died of a broken heart. This also placed a great burden on the priest’s heroic agent in Paris,” he added. “And upon the authorities in Russia.”

“Naturally,” said Smiley, and his solemnity was shared by the four motionless figures stationed round the room.

At last, said Grigoriev, the priest came to the precise reason why Grigoriev had been summoned. Ostrakova’s death, coupled with the dreadful fate of Alexandra, had produced a grave crisis in the life of Moscow’s heroic foreign agent. He was even for a short time tempted to give up his vital work in Paris in order to return to Russia and take care of his deranged and motherless child. Eventually, however, a solution was agreed upon. Since Ostrakov could not come to Russia, his daughter must come to the West, and be cared for in a private clinic where she was accessible to her father whenever he cared to visit her. France was too dangerous for this purpose, but in Switzerland, across the border, treatment could take place far from the suspicious eye of Ostrakov’s counter-revolutionary companions. As a French citizen, the father would claim the girl and obtain the necessary papers. A suitable clinic had already been located and it was a short drive from Berne. What Grigoriev must now do was take over the welfare of this child, from the moment she arrived there. He must visit her, pay the clinic, and report weekly to Moscow on her progress, so that the information could at once be relayed to her father. This was the purpose of the bank account, and of what the priest referred to as Grigoriev’s Swiss identity.

“And you agreed,” said Smiley, as Grigoriev paused, and they heard his pen scratching busily over the paper.

“Not immediately. I asked him first two questions,” said Grigoriev, with a queer flush of vanity. “We academics are not deceived so easily, you understand. First, I naturally asked him why this task could not be undertaken by one of the many Swiss-based representatives of our State Security.”

“An excellent question,” Smiley said, in a rare mood of congratulation. “How did he reply to it?”

“It was too secret. Secrecy, he said, was a matter of compartments. He did not wish the name of Ostrakov to be associated with the people of the Moscow Centre mainstream. As things were now, he said, he would know that if ever there was a leak, Grigoriev alone was personally responsible. I was not grateful for this distinction,” said Grigoriev, and smirked somewhat wanly at Nick de Silsky.

“And what was your second question, Counsellor?”

“Concerning the father in Paris: how often he would visit. If the father was visiting frequently, then surely my own position as a substitute father was redundant. Arrangements could be made to pay the clinic directly, the father could visit from Paris every month and concern himself with his own daughter’s welfare. To this the priest replied that the father could come only very seldom and should never be spoken of in discussions with the girl Alexandra. He added, without consistency, that the topic of the daughter was also acutely painful to the father and that conceivably he would never visit her at all. He told me I should feel honoured to be performing an important service on behalf of a secret hero of the Soviet Union. He grew stern. He told me it was not my place to apply the logic of an amateur to the craft of professionals. I apologised. I told him I indeed felt honoured. I was proud to assist however I could in the anti-imperialist struggle.”

“Yet you spoke without inner conviction?” Smiley suggested, looking up again and pausing in his writing.

“That is so.”

“Why?”

At first, Grigoriev seemed unsure why. Perhaps he had never before been invited to speak the truth about his feelings.

“Did you perhaps not believe the priest?” Smiley suggested.

“The story had many inconsistencies,” Grigoriev repeated with a frown. “No doubt in secret work this was inevitable. Nevertheless I regarded much of it as unlikely or untrue.”

“Can you explain why?”

In the catharsis of confession, Grigoriev once more forgot his own peril, and gave a smile of superiority.

“He was emotional,” he said. “I asked myself. Afterwards, with Evdokia, next day, lying at Evdokia’s side, discussing the matter with her, I asked myself: What was it between the priest and this Ostrakov? Are they brothers? Old comrades? This great man they had brought me to see, so powerful, so secret—all over the world he is making conspiracies, putting pressure, taking special action. He is a ruthless man, in a ruthless profession. Yet when I, Grigoriev, am sitting with him, talking about some fellow’s deranged daughter, I have the feeling I am reading this man’s most intimate love letters. I said to him: ‘Comrade. You are telling me too much. Don’t tell me what I do not need to know. Tell me only what I must do.’ But he says to me: ‘Grigoriev, you must be a friend to this child. Then you will be a friend to me. Her father’s twisted life has had a bad effect on her. She does not know who she is or where she belongs. She speaks of freedom without regard to its meaning. She is the victim of pernicious bourgeois fantasies. She uses foul language not suitable to a young girl. In lying, she has the genius of madness. None of this is her fault.’ Then I ask him: ‘Sir, have you met this girl?’ And he says to me only, ‘Grigoriev, you must be a father to her. Her mother was in many ways not an easy woman either. You have sympathy for such matters. In her later life she became embittered, and even supported her daughter in some of her anti-social fantasies.’”

Grigoriev fell silent a moment and Toby Esterhase, still reeling from the knowledge that Grigoriev had discussed Karla’s proposition with his occasional mistress within hours of its being made, was grateful for the respite.

“I felt he was dependent on me,” Grigoriev resumed. “I felt he was concealing not only facts, but feelings.”

There remained, said Grigoriev, the practical details. The priest supplied them. The overseer of the clinic was a White Russian woman, a nun, formerly of the Russian Orthodox community in Jerusalem, but a good-hearted woman. In these cases, we should not be too scrupulous politically, said the priest. This woman had herself met Alexandra in Paris and escorted her to Switzerland. The clinic also had the services of a Russian-speaking doctor. The girl, thanks to the ethnic connections of her mother, also spoke German, but frequently refused to do so. These factors, together with the remoteness of the place, accounted for its selection. The money paid into the Thun bank would be sufficient for the clinic’s fees, for medical attention up to one thousand francs a month, and as a hidden subsidy for the Grigorievs’ new life-style. More money was available if Grigoriev thought it necessary; he should keep no bills or receipts; the priest would know soon enough if Grigoriev was cheating. He should visit the clinic weekly to pay the bill and inform himself of the girl’s welfare; the Soviet Ambassador in Berne would be informed that the Grigorievs had been entrusted with secret work, and that he should allow them flexibility.

The priest then came to the question of Grigoriev’s communication with Moscow.

“He asked me: ‘Do you know the courier Krassky?’ I reply, naturally I know this courier; Krassky comes once, sometimes twice a week to the Embassy in the company of his escort. If you are friendly with him, he will maybe bring you a loaf of black bread direct from Moscow.”

In future, said the priest, Krassky would make a point of meeting Grigoriev privately each Thursday evening during his regular visit to Berne, either in Grigoriev’s house or in Grigoriev’s room in the Embassy, but preferably his house. No conspiratorial discussions would take place, but Krassky would hand to Grigoriev an envelope containing an apparently personal letter from Grigoriev’s aunt in Moscow. Grigoriev would take the letter to a safe place and treat it at prescribed temperatures with three chemical solutions freely available on the open market—the priest named them and Grigoriev now repeated them. In the writing thus revealed, said the priest, Grigoriev would find a list of questions he should put to Alexandra on his next weekly visit. At the same meeting with Krassky, Grigoriev should hand him a letter to be delivered to the same aunt, in which he would pretend to be writing in detail about his wife Grigorieva’s welfare, whereas in fact he would be reporting to the priest on the welfare of the girl Alexandra. This was called word code. Later, the priest would if necessary supply Grigoriev with materials for a more clandestine communication, but for the time being the word-code letter to Grigoriev’s aunt would do.

The priest then handed Grigoriev a medical certificate, signed by an eminent Moscow doctor.

“While here in Moscow, you have suffered a minor heart attack as a consequence of stress and overwork,” said the priest. “You are advised to take up regular cycling in order to improve your physical condition. Your wife will accompany you.”

By arriving at the clinic by bicycle or on foot, the priest explained, Grigoriev would be able to conceal the diplomatic registration of his car.

The priest then authorised him to purchase two secondhand bicycles. There remained the question of which day of the week would be best suited for Grigoriev’s visits to the clinic. Saturday was the normal visiting day but this was too dangerous; several of the inmates were from Berne and there was always the risk that “Glaser” would be recognised. The overseer had therefore been advised that Saturdays were impracticable, and had consented, exceptionally, to a regular Friday-afternoon visit. The Ambassador would not object, but how would Grigoriev reconcile his Friday absences with Embassy routine?

There was no problem, Grigoriev replied. It was always permissible to trade Fridays for Saturdays, so Grigoriev would merely apply to work on Saturdays instead; then his Fridays would be free.

His confession over, Grigoriev treated his audience to a swift, over-lit smile.

“On Saturdays, a certain young lady also happened to be working in the Visa Section,” he said, with a wink at Toby. “It was therefore possible we could enjoy some privacy together.”

This time the general laughter was not quite as hearty as it might have been. Time, like Grigoriev’s story, was running out.

They were back where they had started, and suddenly there was only Grigoriev himself to worry about, only Grigoriev to administer, only Grigoriev to secure. He sat smirking on the sofa, but the arrogance was ebbing from him. He had linked his hands submissively and he was looking from one to the other of them, as if expecting orders.

“My wife cannot ride a bicycle,” he remarked with a sad little smile. “She tried many times.” Her failure seemed to mean whole volumes to him. “The priest wrote to me from Moscow: ‘Take your wife to her. Maybe Alexandra needs a mother, also.’” He shook his head, bemused. “She cannot ride it,” he said to Smiley. “In such a great conspiracy, how can I tell Moscow that Grigorieva cannot ride a bicycle?” Perhaps there was no greater test of Smiley’s rôle as the responsible functionary in charge, than the way in which he now almost casually transformed Grigoriev the onetime source into Grigoriev the defector-in-place.

“Counsellor, whatever your long-term plans may be, you will please remain at the Embassy for at least another two weeks,” he announced, precisely closing his notepad. “If you do as I propose, you will find a warm welcome should you elect to make a new life somewhere in the West.” He dropped the pad into his pocket. “But next Friday you will on no account visit the girl Alexandra. You will tell your wife that this was the substance of today’s meeting with Krassky. When Krassky the courier brings you Thursday’s letter, you will accept it normally but you will afterwards continue to maintain to your wife that Alexandra is not to be visited. Be mysterious towards her. Blind her with mystery.”

Accepting his instructions, Grigoriev nodded uneasily.

“I must warn you, however, that if you make the smallest error or, on the other hand, try some trick, the priest will find out and destroy you. You will also forfeit your chances of a friendly reception in the West. Is that clear to you?”

There were telephone numbers for Grigoriev to ring, there were call-box to call-box procedures to be explained, and against all the laws of the trade, Smiley allowed Grigoriev to write the whole lot down, for he knew that he would not remember them otherwise. When all this was done, Grigoriev took his leave in a spirit of brooding dejection. Toby drove him to a safe dropping point, then returned to the flat and held a curt meeting of farewell.

Smiley was in his same chair, hands clasped on his lap. The rest of them, under Millie McCraig’s orders, were busily tidying up the traces of their presence, polishing, dusting, emptying ashtrays and waste-paper baskets. Everyone present except himself and Smiley was getting out today, said Toby, the surveillance teams as well. Not tonight, not tomorrow. Now. They were sitting on a king-sized time bomb, he said: Grigoriev might at this very moment, under the continued impulse of confession, be describing the entire episode to his awful wife. If he had told Evdokia about Karla, who was to say he would not tell Grigorieva, or for that matter little Natasha, about his pow-wow with George today? Nobody should feel discarded, nobody should feel left out, said Toby. They had done a great job, and they would be meeting again soon to set the crown on it. There were handshakes, even a tear or two, but the prospect of the final act left everybody cheerful at heart.

And Smiley, sitting so quiet, so immobile, as the party broke up around him, what did he feel? On the face of it, this was a moment of high achievement for him. He had done everything he had set out to do, and more, even if he had resorted to Karla’s techniques for the purpose. He had done it alone; and today, as the record would show, he had broken and turned Karla’s hand-picked agent in the space of a couple of hours. Unaided, even hampered by those who had called him back to service, he had fought his way through to the point where he could honestly say he had burst the last important lock. He was in late age, yet his tradecraft had never been better; for the first time in his career, he held the advantage over his old adversary.

On the other hand, that adversary had acquired a human face of disconcerting clarity. It was no brute whom Smiley was pursuing with such mastery, no unqualified fanatic after all, no automaton. It was a man; and one whose downfall, if Smiley chose to bring it about, would be caused by nothing more sinister than excessive love, a weakness with which Smiley himself, from his own tangled life, was eminently familiar.

26

To every clandestine operation, says the folklore, belong more days of waiting than are numbered in Paradise, and for both George Smiley and Toby Esterhase, in their separate ways, the days and nights between Sunday evening and Friday seemed often numberless, and surely bore no relation to the Hereafter.

They lived not so much by Moscow Rules, says Toby, as by George’s war rules. Both changed hotels and identities that same Sunday night, Smiley decamping to a small hôtel garni in the old town, the Arca, and Toby to a distasteful motel outside the town. Thereafter the two men communicated between call-boxes according to an agreed rota, and if they needed to meet, they selected crowded outdoor places, walking a short distance together before parting. Toby had decided to change his tracks, he said, and was using cars as sparingly as possible. His task was to keep the watch on Grigoriev. All week he clung to his stated conviction that, having so recently enjoyed the luxury of one confession, Grigoriev was sure to treat himself to another. To forestall this, he kept Grigoriev on as short a rein as possible, but to keep up with him at all was a nightmare. For example, Grigoriev left his house at quarter to eight each morning and had a five-minute walk to the Embassy. Very well: Toby would make one car sweep down the road at seven-fifty exactly. If Grigoriev carried his brief-case in his right hand, Toby would know that nothing was happening. But the left hand meant “emergency,” with a crash meeting in the gardens of the Elfenau palace and a fall-back in the town. On the Monday and Tuesday, Grigoriev went the distance using his right hand only. But on the Wednesday it was snowing, he wished to clear his spectacles, and therefore he stopped to locate his handkerchief, with the result that Toby first saw the brief-case in his left hand, but when he raced round the block again to check, Grigoriev was grinning like a madman and waving the brief-case at him with his right. Toby, according to his own account, had “a total heart attack.” The next day, the crucial Thursday, Toby achieved a car meeting with Grigoriev in the little village of Allmendingen, just outside the town, and was able to talk to him face to face. An hour earlier, the courier Krassky had arrived, bringing Karla’s weekly orders: Toby had seen him enter the Grigoriev residence. So where were the instructions from Moscow? Toby asked. Grigoriev was cantankerous and a little drunk. He demanded ten thousand dollars for the letter, which so enraged Toby that he threatened Grigoriev with exposure then and there; he would make a citizen’s arrest and take him straight down to the police station and charge him personally with posing as a Swiss national, abusing his diplomatic status, evading Swiss tax laws, and about fifteen other things, including venery and espionage. The bluff worked, Grigoriev produced the letter, already treated, with the secret writing showing between the hand-written lines. Toby took several photographs of it, then returned it to Grigoriev.

Karla’s questions from Moscow, which Toby showed to Smiley late that night in a rare meeting at a country inn, had a beseeching ring: “. . . report more fully on Alexandra’s appearance and state of mind. . . . Is she lucid? Does she laugh and does her laughter make a happy or a sad impression? Is she clean in her personal habits, clean finger-nails, brushed hair? What is the doctor’s latest diagnosis; does he recommend some other treatment?”

But Grigoriev’s main preoccupations at their rendezvous in Allmendingen turned out not to be with Krassky, or with the letter, or its author. His lady-friend of the Visa Section had been demanding outright to know about his Friday excursions, he said. Hence his depression and drunkenness. Grigoriev had answered her vaguely, but now he suspected her of being a Moscow spy, put there either by the priest or, worse, by some other frightful organ of Soviet Security. Toby, as it happened, shared this belief, but did not feel that much would be served by saying so.

“I have told her I shall not make love to her again until I completely trust her,” Grigoriev said earnestly. “Also I have not yet decided whether she shall be permitted to accompany me in my new life in Australia.”

“George, this is a madhouse!” Toby told Smiley in a furious mixture of images, while Smiley continued to study Karla’s solicitous questions, even though they were written in Russian. “Listen, I mean how long can we hold the dam? This guy is a total crazy!”

“When does Krassky return to Moscow?” Smiley asked.

“Saturday midday.”

“Grigoriev must arrange a meeting with him before he leaves. He’s to tell Krassky he will have a special message for him. An urgent one.”

“Sure,” said Toby. “Sure, George.” And that was that.

Where had George gone in his mind? Toby wondered, watching him vanish into the crowd once more. Karla’s instructions to Grigoriev seemed to have upset Smiley quite absurdly. “I was caught between one total loony and one complete depressive,” Toby claims of this taxing period.

While Toby, however, could at least agonise over the vagaries of his master and his agent, Smiley had less substantial fare with which to occupy his time, which may have been his problem. On the Tuesday, he took a train to Zurich and lunched at the Kronenhalle with Peter Guillam, who had flown in by way of London at Saul Enderby’s behest. Their discussion was restrained, and not merely on the grounds of security. Guillam had taken it upon himself to speak to Ann while he was in London, he said, and was keen to know whether there was any message he might take back to her. Smiley said icily that there was none, and came as near as Guillam could remember to bawling him out. On another occasion—he suggested—perhaps Guillam would be good enough to keep his damned fingers out of Smiley’s private affairs? Guillam switched the topic hastily to business. Concerning Grigoriev, he said, Saul Enderby had a notion to sell him to the Cousins as found rather than process him at Sarratt. How did George feel about that one? Saul had a sort of hunch that the glamour of a senior Russian defector would give the Cousins a much-needed lift in Washington, even if he hadn’t anything to tell, while Grigoriev in London might, so to speak, mar the pure wine to come. How did George feel on that one, actually?

“Quite,” said Smiley.

“Saul also rather wondered whether your plans for next Friday were strictly necessary,” said Guillam, with evident reluctance.

Picking up a table-knife, Smiley stared along the blade.

“She’s worth his career to him,” he said at last, with a most unnerving tautness. “He steals for her, lies for her, risks his neck for her. He has to know whether she cleans her fingernails and brushes her hair. Don’t you think we owe her a look?”

Owe to whom? Guillam wondered nervously as he flew back to London to report. Had Smiley meant that he owed it to himself? Or did he mean to Karla? But he was far too cautious to air these theories to Saul Enderby.

From a distance, it might have been a castle, or one of those small farmsteads that sit on hilltops in the Swiss wine country, with turrets, and moats with covered bridges leading to inner courtyards. Closer to, it took on a more utilitarian appearance, with an incinerator, and an orchard, and modern outbuildings with rows of small windows rather high. A sign at the edge of the village pointed to it, praising its quiet position, its comfort, and the solicitude of its staff. The community was described as “interdenominational Christian theosophist,” and foreign patients were a speciality. Old, heavy snow cluttered fields and roof-tops, but the road that Smiley drove was clear. The day was all white; sky and snow had merged into a single, uncharted void. From the gatehouse a dour porter telephoned ahead of him and, receiving somebody’s permission, waved him through. There was a bay marked “DOCTORS” and a bay marked “VISITORS” and he parked in the second. When he pressed the bell, a dull-looking woman in a grey habit opened the door to him, blushing even before she spoke. He heard crematorium music, and the clanking of crockery from a kitchen, and human voices all at once. It was a house with hard floors and no curtains.

“Mother Felicity is expecting you,” said Sister Beatitude in a shy whisper.

A scream would fill the entire house, thought Smiley. He noticed potted plants out of reach. At a door marked “OFFICE” his escort thumped lustily, then shoved it open. Mother Felicity was a large, inflamed-looking woman with a disconcerting worldliness in her gaze. Smiley sat opposite her. An ornate cross rested on her large bosom, and while she spoke, her heavy hands consoled it with a couple of touches. Her German was slow and regal.

“So,” she said. “So, you are Herr Lachmann, and Herr Lachmann is an acquaintance of Herr Glaser, and Herr Glaser is this week indisposed.” She played on these names as if she knew as well as he did they were lies. “He was not so indisposed that he could not telephone, but he was so indisposed that he could not bicycle. That is correct?”

Smiley said it was.

“Please do not lower your voice merely because I am a nun. We run a noisy house here and nobody is the less pious for it. You look pale. You have a flu?”

“No. No, I am well.”

“Then you are better off than Herr Glaser, who has succumbed to a flu. Last year we had an Egyptian flu, the year before it was an Asian flu, but this year the malheur seems to be our own entirely. Does Herr Lachmann have documents, may I ask, which legitimise him for who he is?”

Smiley handed her a Swiss identity card.

“Come. Your hand is shaking. But you have no flu. By occupation, professor,” she read aloud. “Herr Lachmann hides his light. He is Professor Lachmann. Of which subject is he professor, may one ask?”

“Of philology.”

“So. Philology. And Herr Glaser, what is his profession? He has never revealed it to me.”

“I understand he is in business,” Smiley said.

“A businessman who speaks perfect Russian. You also speak perfect Russian, Professor?”

“Alas, no.”

“But you are friends.” She handed back the identity card. “A Swiss-Russian businessman and a modest professor of philology are friends. So. Let us hope the friendship is a fruitful one.”

“We are also neighbours,” Smiley said.

“We are all neighbours, Herr Lachmann. Have you met Alexandra before?”

“No.”

“Young girls are brought here in many capacities. We have godchildren. We have wards. Nieces. Orphans. Cousins. Aunts, a few. A few sisters. And now a professor. But you would be very surprised how few daughters there are in the world. What is the family relationship between Herr Glaser and Alexandra, for example?”

“I understand he is a friend of Monsieur Ostrakov.”

“Who is in Paris. But is invisible. As also is Madame Ostrakova. Invisible. As also, today, is Herr Glaser. You see how difficult it is for us to come to grips with the world, Herr Lachmann? When we ourselves scarcely know who we are, how can we tell them who they are? You must be very careful with her.” A bell was ringing for the end of rest. “Sometimes she lives in the dark. Sometimes she sees too much. Both are painful. She has grown up in Russia. I don’t know why. It is a complicated story, full of contrasts, full of gaps. If it is not the cause of her malady, it is certainly, let us say, the framework. You do not think Herr Glaser is the father, for instance?”

“No.”

“Nor do I. Have you met the invisible Ostrakov? You have not. Does the invisible Ostrakov exist? Alexandra insists he is a phantom. Alexandra will have a quite different parentage. Well, so would many of us!”

“May I ask what you have told her about me?”

“All I know. Which is nothing. That you are a friend of Uncle Anton, whom she refuses to accept as her uncle. That Uncle Anton is ill, which appears to delight her, but probably it worries her very much. I have told her it is her father’s wish to have someone visit her every week, but she tells me her father is a brigand and pushed her mother off a mountain at dead of night. I have told her to speak German but she may still decide that Russian is best.”

“I understand,” said Smiley.

“You are lucky, then,” Mother Felicity retorted. “For I do not.”

Alexandra entered and at first he saw only her eyes: so clear, so defenceless. In his imagination, he had drawn her, for some reason, larger. Her lips were full at the centre, but at the corners already thin and too agile, and her smile had a dangerous luminosity. Mother Felicity told her to sit, said something in Russian, gave her a kiss on her flaxen head. She left, and they heard her keys jingle as she strode off down the corridor, yelling at one of the sisters in French to have this mess cleared up. Alexandra wore a green tunic with long sleeves gathered at the wrists and a cardigan over her shoulders like a cape. She seemed to carry her clothes rather than wear them, as if someone had dressed her for the meeting.

“Is Anton dead?” she asked, and Smiley noticed that there was no natural link between the expression on her face and the thoughts in her head.

“No, Anton has a bad flu,” he replied.

“Anton says he is my uncle but he is not,” she explained. Her German was good, and he wondered, despite what Karla had said to Grigoriev, whether she had that from her mother too, or whether she had inherited her father’s gift for languages, or both. “He also pretends he has no car.” As her father had once done, she watched him without emotion, and without commitment. “Where is your list?” she asked. “Anton always brings a list.”

“Oh, I have my questions in my head.”

“It is forbidden to ask questions without a list. Questions out of the head are all completely forbidden by my father.”

“Who is your father?” Smiley asked.

For a time he saw only her eyes again, staring at him out of their private lonely place. She picked up a roll of Scotch tape from Mother Felicity’s desk, and lightly traced the shiny surface with her finger.

“I saw your car,” she said. “‘BE’ stands for ‘Berne.’”

“Yes, it does,” said Smiley.

“What kind of car does Anton have?”

“A Mercedes. A black one. Very grand.”

“How much did he pay for it?”

“He bought it second-hand. About five thousand francs, I should imagine.”

“Then why does he come and see me on a bicycle?”

“Perhaps he needs the exercise.”

“No,” she said. “He has a secret.”

“Have you got a secret, Alexandra?” Smiley asked.

She heard his question, and smiled at it, and nodded a couple of times as if to someone a long way off. “My secret is called Tatiana,” she said.

“That’s a good name,” said Smiley. “Tatiana. How did you come by that?”

Raising her head, she smiled radiantly at the icons on the wall. “It is forbidden to talk about it,” she said. “If you talk about it, nobody will believe you, but they put you in a clinic.”

“But you are in a clinic already,” Smiley pointed out.

Her voice did not lift, it only quickened. She remained so absolutely still that she seemed not even to draw breath between her words. Her lucidity and her courtesy were awesome. She respected his kindness, she said, but she knew that he was an extremely dangerous man, more dangerous than teachers or police. Dr. Rüedi had invented property and prisons, and many of the clever arguments by which the world lived out its lies, she said. Mother Felicity was too close to God, she did not understand that God was somebody who had to be ridden and kicked like a horse till he took you in the right direction.

“But you, Herr Lachmann, represent the forgiveness of the authorities. Yes, I am afraid you do.”

She sighed, and gave him a tired smile of indulgence, but when he looked at the table he saw that she had seized hold of her thumb, and was forcing it back upon itself till it looked like snapping.

“Perhaps you are my father, Herr Lachmann,” she suggested with a smile.

“No, alas, I have no children,” Smiley replied.

“Are you God?”

“No, I’m just an ordinary person.”

“Mother Felicity says that in every ordinary person, there is a part that is God.”

This time it was Smiley’s turn to take a long while to reply. His mouth opened, then with uncharacteristic hesitation closed again.

“I have heard it said too,” he replied, and looked away from her a moment.

“You are supposed to ask me whether I have been feeling better.”

“Are you feeling better, Alexandra?”

“My name is Tatiana,” she said.

“Then how does Tatiana feel?”

She laughed. Her eyes were delightfully bright. “Tatiana is the daughter of a man who is too important to exist,” she said. “He controls the whole of Russia, but he does not exist. When people arrest her, her father arranges for her to be freed. He does not exist but everyone is afraid of him. Tatiana does not exist either,” she added. “There is only Alexandra.”

“What about Tatiana’s mother?”

“She was punished,” said Alexandra calmly, confiding this information to the icons rather than to Smiley. “She was not obedient to history. That is to say, she believed that history had taken a wrong course. She was mistaken. The people should not attempt to change history. It is the task of history to change the people. I would like you to take me with you, please. I wish to leave this clinic.”

Her hands were fighting each other furiously while she continued to smile at the icons.

“Did Tatiana ever meet her father?” he asked.

“A small man used to watch the children walk to school,” she replied. He waited but she said no more.

“And then?” he asked.

“From a car. He would lower the window but he looked only at me.”

“Did you look at him?”

“Of course. How else would I know he was looking at me?”

“What was his appearance? His manner? Did he smile?”

“He smoked. Feel free, if you wish. Mother Felicity likes a cigarette occasionally. Well, it’s only natural, isn’t it? Smoking calms the conscience, I am told.”

She had pressed the bell: reached out and pressed it for a long time. He heard the jingle of Mother Felicity’s keys again, coming towards them down the bare corridor, and the shuffle of her feet at the door as she paused to unlock it, just like the sounds of any prison in the world.

“I wish to come with you in your car,” said Alexandra.

Smiley paid her bill and Alexandra watched him count the notes out under the lamp, exactly the way Uncle Anton did it. Mother Felicity intercepted Alexandra’s studious look and perhaps she sensed trouble, for she glanced sharply at Smiley as if she suspected some misconduct in him. Alexandra accompanied him to the door and helped Sister Beatitude open it, then shook Smiley’s hand in a very stylish way, lifting her elbow up and outward, and bending her front knee. She tried to kiss his hand but Sister Beatitude prevented her. She watched him to the car and she began waving, and he was already moving when he heard her screaming from very close, and saw that she was trying to open the car door and travel with him, but Sister Beatitude hauled her off and dragged her, still screaming, back into the house.

Half an hour later in Thun, in the same café from which he had observed Grigoriev’s visit to the bank a week before, Smiley silently handed Toby the letter he had prepared. Grigoriev was to give it to Krassky tonight or whenever they met, he said.

“Grigoriev wants to defect tonight,” Toby objected.

Smiley shouted. For once in his life, shouted. He opened his mouth very wide, he shouted, and the whole café sat up with a jolt—which is to say that the barmaid looked up from her marriage advertisements, and of the four card-players in the corner, one at least turned his head.

“Not yet!”

Then, to show that he had himself completely under control, he repeated the words quietly: “Not yet, Toby. Forgive me. Not yet.”

Of the letter that Smiley sent to Karla by way of Grigoriev, no copy exists, which is perhaps what Smiley intended, but there can be little doubt of the substance, since Karla himself was anyway a self-professed exponent of the arts of what he liked to call pressure. Smiley would have set out the bare facts: that Alexandra was known to be his daughter by a dead mistress of manifest anti-Soviet tendencies, that he had arranged her illegal departure from the Soviet Union by pretending that she was his secret agent; that he had misappropriated public money and resources; that he had organised two murders and perhaps also the conjectured official execution of Kirov, all in order to protect his criminal scheme. Smiley would have pointed out that the accumulated evidence of this was quite sufficient, given Karla’s precarious position within Moscow Centre, to secure his liquidation by his peers in the Collegium; and that if this were to happen, his daughter’s future in the West—where she was residing under false pretences—would be uncertain, to say the least. There would be no money for her, and Alexandra would become a perpetual and ailing exile, ferried from one public hospital to another, without friends, proper papers, or a penny to her name. At worst, she would be brought back to Russia, to have visited upon her the full wrath of her father’s enemies.

After the stick, Smiley offered Karla the same carrot he had offered him more than twenty years before, in Delhi: save your skin, come to us, tell us what you know, and we will make a home for you. A straight replay, said Saul Enderby later, who liked a sporting metaphor. Smiley would have promised Karla immunity from prosecution for complicity in the murder of Vladimir, and there is evidence that Enderby obtained a similar concession through his German liaison regarding the murder of Otto Leipzig. Without question, Smiley also threw in general guarantees about Alexandra’s future in the West—treatment, maintenance, and, if necessary, citizenship. Did he take the line of kinship, as he had done before, in Delhi? Did he appeal to Karla’s humanity, now so demonstrably on show? Did he add some clever seasoning, calculated to spare Karla humiliation and, knowing his pride, head him off perhaps from an act of self-destruction?

Certainly he gave Karla very little time to make up his mind. For that too is an axiom of pressure, as Karla was well aware: time to think is dangerous, except that in this case, there is reason to suppose that it was dangerous to Smiley also, though for vastly different reasons: he might have relented at the eleventh hour. Only the immediate call to action, says the Sarratt folklore, will force the quarry to slip the ropes of his restraint and, against every impulse born or taught to him, sail into the blue. The same, on this occasion, may be said to have applied equally to the hunter.

27

It’s like putting all your money on black, thought Guillam, staring out of the window of the café: everything you’ve got in the world, your wife, your unborn child. Then waiting, hour by hour, for the croupier to spin the wheel.

He had known Berlin when it was the world capital of the cold war, when every crossing point from East to West had the tenseness of a major surgical operation. He remembered how on nights like these, clusters of Berlin policemen and Allied soldiers used to gather under the arc lights, stamping their feet, cursing the cold, fidgeting their rifles from shoulder to shoulder, puffing clouds of frosted breath into each other’s faces. He remembered how the tanks waited, growling to keep their engines warm, their gun barrels picking targets on the other side, feigning strength. He remembered the sudden wail of the alarm klaxons and the dash to the Bernauerstrasse or wherever the latest escape attempt might be. He remembered the fire-brigade ladders going up; the orders to shoot back; the orders not to; the dead, some of them agents. But after tonight, he knew that he would remember it only like this: so dark you wanted to take a torch with you into the street, so still you could have heard the cocking of a rifle from across the river.

“What cover will he use?” he asked.

Smiley sat opposite him across the little plastic table, a cup of cold coffee at his elbow. He looked somehow very small inside his overcoat.

“Something humble,” Smiley said. “Something that fits in. Those who cross here are mostly old-age pensioners, I gather.” He was smoking one of Guillam’s cigarettes and it seemed to take all his attention.

“What on earth do pensioners want here?” Guillam asked.

“Some work. Some visit dependents. I didn’t enquire very closely, I’m afraid.”

Guillam remained dissatisfied.

“We pensioners tend to keep ourselves to ourselves,” Smiley added, in a poor effort at humour.

“You’re telling me,” said Guillam.

The café was in the Turkish quarter because the Turks are now the poor whites of West Berlin, and property is worst and cheapest near the Wall. Smiley and Guillam were the only foreigners. At a long table sat a whole Turkish family, chewing flat bread and drinking coffee and Coca-Cola. The children had shaven heads and the wide, puzzled eyes of refugees. Islamic music was playing from an old tape-recorder. Strips of coloured plastic hung from the hardboard arch of an Islamic doorway.

Guillam returned his gaze to the window, and the bridge. First came the piers of the overhead railway, next the old brick house that Sam Collins and his team had discreetly requisitioned as an observation centre. His men had been moving in surreptitiously these last two days. Then came the halo of sodium arc lights, and behind it lay a barricade, a pillbox, then the bridge. The bridge was for pedestrians only, and the only way over it was a corridor of steel fencing like a bird walk, sometimes one man’s width and sometimes three. Occasionally one crossed, keeping a meek appearance and a steady pace in order not to alarm the sentry tower, then stepping into the sodium halo as he reached the West. By daylight the bird walk was grey; by night for some reason yellow, and strangely bright. The pillbox was a yard or two inside the border, its roof just mastering the barricade, but it was the tower that dominated everything, one iron-black rectangular pillar at the bridge’s centre. Even the snow avoided it. There was snow on the concrete teeth that blocked the bridge to traffic, snow swarmed round the halo and the pillbox and made a show of settling on the wet cobble; but the sentry tower was immune, as if not even the snow would go near it of its own free will. Just short of the halo, the bird walk narrowed to a last gateway and a cattle pen. But the gateway, said Toby, could be closed electrically at a moment’s notice from inside the pillbox.

The time was ten-thirty but it could have been three in the morning, because along its borders, West Berlin goes to bed with the dark. Inland, the island-city may chat and drink and whore and spend its money; the Sony signs and rebuilt churches and conference halls may glitter like a fair-ground; but the dark shores of the border-land are silent from seven in the evening. Close to the halo stood a Christmas tree, but only the upper half of it was lit, only the upper half was visible from across the river. It is a place of no compromise, thought Guillam, a place of no third way. Whatever reservations he might occasionally have about the Western freedom, here, at this border, like most other things, they stopped dead.

“George?” said Guillam softly, and cast Smiley a questioning glance.

A labourer had lurched into the halo. He seemed to rise into it as they all did the moment they stepped out of the bird walk, as if a burden had fallen from their backs. He was carrying a small brief-case and what looked like a rail man’s lamp. He was slight of build. But Smiley, if he had noticed the man at all, had already returned to the collar of his brown overcoat and his lonely, faraway thoughts. “If he comes, he’ll come on time,” Smiley had said. Then why do we get here two hours early? Guillam had wanted to ask. Why do we sit here, like two strangers, drinking sweet coffee out of little cups, soaked in the steam of this wretched Turkish kitchen, talking platitudes? But he knew the answer already. Because we owe, Smiley would have said if he had been in a talking mood. Because we owe the caring and the waiting, we owe this vigil over one man’s effort to escape the system he has helped create. For as long as he is trying to reach us, we are his friends. Nobody else is on his side.

He’ll come, Guillam thought. He won’t. He may. If this isn’t prayer, he thought, what is?

“More coffee, George?”

“No, thank you, Peter. No, I don’t think so. No.”

“They seem to have soup of some sort. Unless that was the coffee.”

“Thank you, I think I’ve consumed about all I can manage,” said Smiley, in quite a general tone, as if anyone who wished to hear was welcome.

“Well, maybe I’ll just order something for rent,” said Guillam.

“Rent? I’m sorry. Of course. God knows what they must live on.”

Guillam ordered two more coffees and paid for them. He was paying as he went, deliberately, in case they had to leave in a hurry.

Come for George’s sake, he thought; come for mine. Come for all our damn sakes, and be the impossible harvest we have dreamed of for so long.

“When did you say the baby was due, Peter?”

“March.”

“Ah. March. What will you call it?”

“We haven’t really thought.”

Across the road, by the glow of a furniture shop that sold reproduction wrought iron and brocade and fake muskets and pewter, Guillam made out the muffled figure of Toby Esterhase in his Balkan fur hat, affecting to study the wares. Toby and his team had the streets, Sam Collins had the observation post: that was the deal. For the escape cars, Toby had insisted on taxis, and there they stood, three of them, suitably shabby, in the darkness of the station arches, with notices in their windscreens saying “OUT OF SERVICE,” and their drivers standing at the Imbiss-stand, eating sausages in sweet sauce out of paper dishes.

The place is a total minefield, Peter, Toby had warned. Turks, Greeks, Yugoslavs, a lot of crooks—even the damn cats are wired, no exaggeration.

Not a whisper anywhere, Smiley had ordered. Not a murmur, Peter. Tell Collins.

Come, thought Guillam urgently. We’re all rooting for you. Come.

From Toby’s back, Guillam lifted his gaze slowly to the top-floor window of the old house where Collins’s observation post was sited. Guillam had done his Berlin stint, he had been part of it a dozen times. The telescopes and cameras, the directional microphones, all the useless hardware that was supposed to make the waiting easier; the crackle of the radios, the stink of coffee and tobacco; the bunk-beds. He imagined the co-opted West German policeman who had no idea why he had been brought here, and would have to stay till the operation was abandoned or successful—the man who knew the bridge by heart and could tell the regulars from the casuals and spot the smallest bad omen the moment it occurred: the silent doubling of the watch, the Vopo sharpshooters easing softly into place.

And if they shoot him? thought Guillam. If they arrest him? If they leave him—which they would surely like to, and had done before to others—bleeding to death, face downward in the bird walk not six feet from the halo?

Come, he thought, less certainly, willing his prayers into the black skyline of the East. Come all the same.

A fine, very bright pin-light flitted across the west-facing upper window of the observation house, bringing Guillam to his feet. He turned round to see Smiley already half-way to the door. Toby Esterhase was waiting for them on the pavement.

“It’s only a possibility, George,” he said softly, in the tone of a man preparing them for disappointment. “Just a thin chance, but he could be our man.”

They followed him without another word. The cold was ferocious. They passed a tailor’s shop with two dark-haired girls stitching in the window. They passed wall posters offering cheap ski holidays, death to Fascists, and to the Shah. The cold made them breathless. Turning his face from the swirling snow, Guillam glimpsed a children’s adventure playground made of old railway sleepers. They passed between black, dead buildings, then right, across the cobbled road, in pitch-frozen darkness to the river bank, where an old timber bullet-shelter with rifle slits offered them the whole span of the bridge. To their left, black against the hostile river, a tall wooden cross, garnished with barbed wire, bore memory to an unknown man who had not quite escaped.

Toby silently extracted a pair of field-glasses from his overcoat and handed them to Smiley.

“George. Listen. Good luck, okay?”

Toby’s hand closed briefly over Guillam’s arm. Then he darted away again, into the darkness.

The shelter stank of leaf-mould and damp. Smiley crouched to the rifle slit, the skirt of his tweed coat trailing in the mud, while he surveyed the scene before him as if it held the very reaches of his own long life. The river was broad and slow, misted with cold. Arc lights played over it, and the snow danced in their beams. The bridge spanned it on fat stone piers, six or eight of them, which swelled into crude shoes as they reached the water. The spaces between them were arched, all but the centre, which was squared off to make room for shipping, but the only ship was a grey patrol boat moored at the eastern bank, and the only commerce it offered was death. Behind the bridge, like its vastly bigger shadow, ran the railway viaduct, but like the river it was derelict, and no trains ever crossed. The warehouses of the far bank stood monstrous as the hulks of an earlier barbaric civilisation, and the bridge with its yellow bird walk seemed to leap from half-way up them, like a fantastic light-path out of darkness. From his vantage point, Smiley could scan the whole length of it with his field-glasses, from the floodlit white barrack house on the eastern bank, up to the black sentry tower at the crest, then slightly downhill again towards the western side: to the cattle pen, the pillbox that controlled the gateway, and finally the halo.

Guillam stood but a few feet behind him, yet Guillam could have been back in Paris for all the awareness Smiley had of him: he had seen the solitary black figure start his journey; he had seen the glimmer of the cigarette-end as he took one last pull, the spark of it comet towards the water as he tossed it over the iron fencing of the bird walk. One small man, in a worker’s half-length coat, with a worker’s satchel slung across his little chest, walking neither fast nor slowly, but walking like a man who walked a lot. One small man, his body a fraction too long for his legs, hatless despite the snow. That is all that happens, Smiley thought; one little man walks across a bridge.

“Is it him?” Guillam whispered. “George, tell me! Is it Karla?”

Don’t come, thought Smiley. Shoot, Smiley thought, talking to Karla’s people, not to his own. There was suddenly something terrible in his foreknowledge that this tiny creature was about to cut himself off from the black castle behind him. Shoot him from the sentry tower, shoot him from the pillbox, from the white barrack hut, from the crow’s-nest on the prison warehouse, slam the gate on him, cut him down, your own traitor, kill him! In his racing imagination, he saw the scene unfold: the last-minute discovery by Moscow Centre of Karla’s infamy; the phone calls to the frontier—“Stop him at any cost!” And the shooting, never too much—enough to hit a man a time or two, and wait.

“It’s him!” Guillam whispered. He had taken the binoculars from Smiley’s unresisting hand. “It’s the same man! The photograph that hung on your wall in the Circus! George, you miracle!”

But Smiley in his imagination saw only the Vopo’s searchlights converging on Karla as if he were a hare in the headlights, so dark against the snow; and Karla’s hopeless old man’s run before the bullets threw him like a rag doll over his own feet. Like Guillam, Smiley had seen it all before. He looked across the river into the darkness again, and an unholy vertigo seized him as the very evil he had fought against seemed to reach out and possess him and claim him despite his striving, calling him a traitor also; mocking him, yet at the same time applauding his betrayal. On Karla has descended the curse of Smiley’s compassion; on Smiley the curse of Karla’s fanaticism. I have destroyed him with the weapons I abhorred, and they are his. We have crossed each other’s frontiers, we are the no-men of this no-man’s-land.

“Just keep moving,” Guillam was murmuring. “Just keep moving, let nothing stop you.”

Approaching the blackness of the sentry tower, Karla took a couple of shorter steps and for a moment Smiley really thought he might change his mind and give himself up to the East Germans. Then he saw a cat’s tongue of flame as Karla lit a fresh cigarette. With a match or a lighter? he wondered. To George from Ann with all my love.

“Christ, he’s cool!” said Guillam.

The little figure set off again, but at a slower pace, as if he had grown weary. He is stoking up his courage for the last step, thought Smiley, or he is trying to damp his courage down. He thought again of Vladimir and Otto Leipzig and the dead Kirov; he thought of Haydon and his own life’s work ruined; he thought of Ann, permanently stained for him by Karla’s cunning and Haydon’s scheming embrace. He recited in his despair a whole list of crimes—the tortures, the killings, the endless ring of corruption—to lay upon the frail shoulders of this one pedestrian on the bridge, but they would not stay there: he did not want these spoils, won by these methods. Like a chasm, the jagged skyline beckoned to him yet again, the swirling snow made it an inferno. For a second longer, Smiley stood on the brink, at the smouldering river’s edge.

They had started walking along the tow-path, Guillam leading, Smiley reluctantly following. The halo burned ahead of them, growing as they approached it. Like two ordinary pedestrians, Toby had said. Just walk to the bridge and wait, it’s normal. From the darkness around them, Smiley heard whispered voices and the swift, damped sounds of hasty movement under tension. “George,” someone whispered. “George.” From a yellow phone-box, an unknown figure lifted a hand in discreet salute, and he heard the word “triumph” smuggled to him on the wet freezing air. The snow was blurring his glasses, he found it hard to see. The observation post stood to their right, not a light burning in the windows. He made out a van parked at the entrance, and realised it was a Berlin mail van, one of Toby’s favourites. Guillam was hanging back. Smiley heard something about “claiming the prize.”

They had reached the edge of the halo. An orange rampart blocked the bridge and the chicane from sight. They were out of the eye-line of the sentry-box. Perched above the Christmas tree, Toby Esterhase was standing on the observation scaffold with a pair of binoculars, calmly playing the cold-war tourist. A plump female watcher stood at his side. An old notice warned them they were there at their own risk. On the smashed brick viaduct behind them Smiley picked out a forgotten armorial crest. Toby made a tiny motion with his hand: thumbs up, it’s our man now. From beyond the rampart, Smiley heard light footsteps and the vibration of an iron fence. He caught the smell of an American cigarette as the icy wind wafted it ahead of the smoker. There’s still the electric gateway, he thought; he waited for the clang as it slammed shut, but none came. He realised he had no real name by which to address his enemy: only a code-name, and a woman’s at that. Even his military rank was a mystery. And still Smiley hung back, like a man refusing to go on stage.

Guillam had drawn alongside him and seemed to be trying to edge him forward. He heard soft footsteps as Toby’s watchers gathered to the edge of the halo, safe from view in the shelter of the rampart, waiting with bated breath for a sight of the catch. And suddenly, there he stood, like a man slipping into a crowded hall unnoticed. His small right hand hung flat and naked at his side, his left held the cigarette timidly across his chest. One little man, hatless, with a satchel. He took a step forward and in the halo Smiley saw his face, aged and weary and travelled, the short hair turned to white by a sprinkling of snow. He wore a grimy shirt and a black tie: he looked like a poor man going to the funeral of a friend. The cold had nipped his cheeks low down, adding to his age.

They faced each other; they were perhaps a yard apart, much as they had been in Delhi jail. Smiley heard more footsteps and this time it was the sound of Toby padding swiftly down the wooden ladder of the scaffold. He heard soft voices and laughter; he thought he even heard the sound of gentle clapping, but he never knew; there were shadows everywhere, and once inside the halo, it was hard for him to see out. Paul Skordeno slipped forward and stood himself one side of Karla; Nick de Silsky stood the other. He heard Guillam telling someone to get that bloody car up here before they come over the bridge and get him back. He heard the ring of something metal falling onto the icy cobble, and knew it was Ann’s cigarette-lighter, but nobody else seemed to notice it. They exchanged one more glance and perhaps each for that second did see in the other something of himself. He heard the crackle of car tyres and the sounds of doors opening, while the engine kept running. De Silsky and Skordeno moved towards it, and Karla went with them though they didn’t touch him; he seemed to have acquired already the submissive manner of a prisoner; he had learned it in a hard school. Smiley stood back and the three of them marched softly past him, all somehow too absorbed by the ceremony to pay attention to him. The halo was empty. He heard the quiet closing of the car’s doors and the sound of it driving away. He heard two other cars leave after it, or with it. He didn’t watch them go. He felt Toby Esterhase fling his arms round his shoulders, and saw that his eyes were filled with tears.

“George,” he began. “All your life. Fantastic!”

Then something in Smiley’s stiffness made Toby pull away, and Smiley himself stepped quickly out of the halo, passing very close to Ann’s lighter on his way. It lay at the halo’s very edge, tilted slightly, glinting like fool’s gold on the cobble. He thought of picking it up, but somehow there seemed no point and no one else appeared to have seen it. Someone was shaking his hand, someone else was clapping him on the shoulder. Toby quietly restrained them.

“Take care, George,” Toby said. “Go well, hear me?”

Smiley heard Toby’s team leave one by one until only Peter Guillam remained. Walking a short way back along the embankment, almost to where the cross stood, Smiley took another look at the bridge, as if to establish whether anything had changed, but clearly it had not, and though the wind appeared a little stronger, the snow was still swirling in all directions.

Peter Guillam touched his arm.

“Come on, old friend,” he said. “It’s bedtime.”

From long habit, Smiley had taken off his spectacles and was absently polishing them on the fat end of his tie, even though he had to delve for it among the folds of his tweed coat.

“George, you won,” said Guillam, as they walked slowly towards the car.

“Did I?” said Smiley. “Yes. Yes, well I suppose I did.”

Praise for The Secret Pilgrim

“Smiley is back! To have a new John le Carré is treat enough. But better still, as The Secret Pilgrim opens, the book seems to center on the formidable, wise and somehow rather cuddly spymaster, George Smiley….Riveting…marvelous.”

—The Philadephia Inquirer

“Illumines the spiritual condition of being a spy.”

—The Washington Post Book World

“Memorable…strongly romantic…One finishes the book confident that le Carré will find new spies and that they will find new arenas in which to practice their deceptions.”

—Newsweek

“No other contemporary novelist has more durably enjoyed [the] twin badges of being both well-read and well-regarded….This book is like an old cop’s fireside reminiscences of famous capers that he handled, with much the same charm. The stories Ned recalls along the way are good ones, suspenseful, telling, each one cleverly recounted.”

—SCOTT TUROW, Chicago Tribune

“John le Carré scales new heights.”

—The Christian Science Monitor

“Wonderful…The Secret Pilgrim [is] laced with lethal irony or occasional hope, with characters ranging from the heroic to the most banal form of evil. If John le Carré had to choose between his own espionage experience and his gifts as a writer, one strongly suspects he would bet on the latter.”

—The Boston Globe

“They keep calling him a spy novelist, but of course he is much more; he is, indeed, one of the half-dozen best novelists now working in English….Here in The Secret Pilgrim are several old friends at twilight, telling tales to tomorrow morning’s fresh class….Anybody can write a novel. Nobody can write a le Carré novel.”

—Chicago Sun-Times

“Powerful…a highly absorbing tale written with le Carré’s customary blend of deft characterization, scene-setting and dialogue, not to mention a new-found affinity for humor.”

—Newsday

“Riveting…It’s not only one of the author’s best books, it’s one of the best books, period.”

—Cosmopolitan

“The Secret Pilgrim bridges a gap between the recent past and the unforeseeable future. No longer able, because of the innate honesty that has characterized his storytelling career, to offer a full-blown cold war drama, le Carré pops out some discrete and satisfactorily chilling ice cubes.”

—Time

“Thrilling…[Le Carré] proves that even in the days of the superpower thaw there is much left to be said about the shadow world of covert intrigue.”

—The Kansas City Star

“John le Carré’s The Secret Pilgrim is much more than a marvelous spy novel. It is something even grander: a marvelous novel about spies.”

—The Buffalo News

“Extraordinary.”

—USA Today

The Secret Pilgrim is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1990 by David Cornwell

Author essay copyright © 2001 by David Cornwell

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

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ALLANTINE and the

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OUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, in 1990.

ISBN 9780345504425

Ebook ISBN 9781524797621

randomhousebooks.com

Book design by Virginia Norey, adapted for ebook

Cover design: Buckley and Kulick

Cover illustration: Matthew Taylor

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Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Dedication

An Essay by the Author

By John Le Carré

About the Author

1

Let me confess to you at once that if I had not, on the spur of the moment, picked up my pen and scribbled a note to George Smiley inviting him to address my passing-out class on the closing evening of their entry course—and had Smiley not, against all my expectations, consented—I would not be making so free to you with my heart.

At the most, I would be offering you the sort of laundered reminiscence with which, if I am honest, I was a bit too inclined to regale my students: feats of secret chivalry, of the dramatic, the resourceful and the brave. And always, of course, the useful. I would be enthralling you with memories of night drops into the Caucasus, hazardous crossings by fast boat, beach landings, winking shore lights, clandestine radio messages that ceased in midtransmission. Of silent heroes of the Cold War who, having made their contribution, modestly went to earth in the society they had protected. Of defectors-in-place snatched in the nick of time from the jaws of the opposition.

And to a point, yes, that is the life we lived. In our day we did those things, and some even ended well. We had good men in bad countries who risked their lives for us. And usually they were believed, and sometimes their intelligence was wisely used. I hope so, for the greatest spy on earth is worth nothing when it isn’t.

And for the lighter note, over a second whisky in the Probationers’ Mess, I would have picked out for them the occasion when a three-man reception team from the Circus, operating inside East Germany, and gallantly led by myself, lay freezing on a ridge in the Harz Mountains, praying for the flutter of an unmarked plane with its engines cut, and the blessed black parachute floating in its wake. And what did we find when our prayer was answered and we had slithered down an icefield to claim our treasure? Stones, I would tell my wide-eyed students. Chunks of honest Argyll granite. The despatchers at our Scottish airbase had sent us the training cannister by mistake.

That tale, at least, found a certain echo, even if some of my other offerings tended to lose their audience halfway through.

—

I suspect that my impulse to write to Smiley had been brewing in me longer than I realised. The idea was conceived during one of my regular visits to Personnel to discuss the progress of my students. Dropping in on the Senior Officers’ Bar for a sandwich and a beer, I had bumped into Peter Guillam. Peter had played Watson to George’s Sherlock Holmes in the long search for the Circus traitor, who turned out to be our Head of Operations, Bill Haydon. Peter had not heard from George for—oh, a year now, more. George had bought this cottage in North Cornwall somewhere, he said, and was indulging his dislike of the telephone. He had some kind of sinecure at Exeter University, and was allowed to use their library. Sadly I pictured the rest: George the lonely hermit on an empty landscape, taking his solitary walks and thinking his thoughts. George slipping up to Exeter for a little human warmth in his old age while he waited to take his place in the spies’ Valhalla.

And Ann, his wife? I asked Peter, lowering my voice as one does when Ann’s name comes up—for it was an open secret, and a painful one, that Bill Haydon had counted among Ann’s many lovers.

Ann was Ann, said Peter, with a Gallic shrug. She had bits of family with grand houses on the Helford Estuary. Sometimes she stayed with them, sometimes she stayed with George.

I asked for Smiley’s address. “Don’t tell him I gave it you,” said Peter as I wrote it down. With George, there had always been that certain kind of guilt about passing on his whereabouts—I still don’t quite know why.

Three weeks later Toby Esterhase came down to Sarratt to give us his celebrated talk on the arts of clandestine surveillance on unfriendly soil. And of course he stayed for lunch, which was greatly enhanced for him by the presence of our first three girls. After a battle lasting as long as I had been at Sarratt, Personnel had finally decided that girls were all right after all.

And I heard myself trailing Smiley’s name.

There have been times when I would not have entertained Toby in the woodshed, and others when I thanked my Maker I had him on my side. But with the years, I am pleased to notice, one settles to people.

“Oh look here, my God, Ned!” Toby cried in his incurably Hungarian English, smoothing back his carefully pomaded mane of silver hair. “You mean you haven’t heard?”

“Heard what?” I asked patiently.

“My dear fellow, George is chairing the Fishing Rights Committee. Don’t they tell you anything down here in the sticks? I think I better take this up with the Chief actually, one to one. A word in his ear at the Club.”

“Perhaps you’d tell me first what the Fishing Rights Committee is,” I suggested.

“Ned, you know what? I think I get nervous. Maybe they took you off the list.”

“Maybe they did at that,” I said.

He told me anyway, as I knew he would, and I duly acted astonished, which gave him an even greater sense of his importance. And there is a part of me that remains astonished to this day. The Fishing Rights Committee, Toby explained for the benefit of the unblessed, was an informal working party made up of officers from Moscow Centre and the Circus. Its job, said Toby—who I really believe had lost any capacity to be surprised—was to identify intelligence targets of interest to both services and thrash out a system of sharing. “The idea actually, Ned, was to target the world’s trouble spots,” he said with an air of maddening superiority.—“I think they fix first the Middle East. Don’t quote me, Ned, okay?”

“And you’re telling me Smiley chairs this committee?” I asked incredulously when I had attempted to digest this.

“Well, maybe not much longer, Ned—Anno Domini and so forth. But the Russians were so frightfully keen to meet him, we brought him in to snip the tape. Give the old fellow a treat, I say. Stroke him a bit. Bunch of fixers in an envelope.”

I didn’t know which to marvel at the more: the notion of Toby Esterhase tripping to the altar with Moscow Centre, or of George Smiley presiding over the marriage. A few days later, with Personnel’s permission, I wrote to the Cornish address Guillam had given me, adding diffidently that if George loathed public speaking half as much as I did, he should on no account accept. I had been a bit in the dumps till then, but when his prim little card arrived by return declaring him delighted, I felt a probationer myself, and just as nervous.

Two weeks after that, wearing a brand-new country suit for the occasion, I was standing at the barrier at Paddington Station, watching the elderly trains disgorge their middle-aged commuters. I don’t think I had ever been quite so aware of Smiley’s anonymity. Wherever I looked, I seemed to see versions of him: tubby, bespectacled gentlemen of a certain seniority, and every one of them with George’s air of being slightly late for something he would rather not be doing. Then suddenly we had shaken hands and he was sitting beside me in the back of a Head Office Rover, stockier than I remembered him, and white-haired, it was true, but of a vigour and good humour I had not seen in him since his wife had her fatal fling with Haydon.

“Well, well, Ned. How do you like being a schoolmaster?”

“How do you like retirement?” I countered, with a laugh. “I’ll be joining you soon!”

Oh, he loved retirement, he assured me. Couldn’t get enough of it, he said wryly; I should have no fears of it at all. A little tutoring here, Ned, the odd paper to deliver there; walks, he’d even acquired a dog.

“I hear they hauled you back to sit on some extraordinary committee,” I said. “Conspiring with the Bear, they say, against the Thief of Baghdad.”

George does not gossip, but I saw his smile broaden. “Do they now? And your source would be Toby, no doubt,” he said, and beamed contentedly upon the dismal subtopian landscape while he launched into a diversionary story about two old ladies in his village who hated each other. One owned an antique shop, the other was very rich. But as the Rover continued its progress through once-rural Hertfordshire, I found myself thinking less about the ladies of George’s village than about George himself. I was thinking that this was a Smiley reborn, who told stories about old ladies, sat on committees with Russian spies and gazed on the overt world with the relish of someone who has just come out of hospital.

That evening, squeezed into an elderly dinner jacket, the same man sat at my side at Sarratt high table, peering benignly round him at the polished plate candlesticks and old group photographs going back to God knows when. And at the fit, expectant faces of his young audience as they waited on the master’s word.

“Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. George Smiley,” I announced severely as I rose to introduce him. “A legend of the Service. Thank you.”

“Oh, I don’t think I’m a legend at all,” Smiley protested as he clambered to his feet. “I think I’m just a rather fat old man wedged between the pudding and the port.”

—

Then the legend began talking, and I realised that I had never heard Smiley address a social gathering before. I had assumed it was a thing he would be congenitally bad at, like forcing his opinions on people, or referring to a joe by his real name. So the sovereign way in which he addressed us surprised me before I had begun to fathom the content. I heard his first few sentences and I watched my students’ faces—not always so obliging—lift and relax and light to him as they gave him first their attention, then their trust and finally their support. And I thought, with an inner smile of belated recognition: yes, yes, of course, this was George’s other nature. This was the actor who had always lain hidden in him, the secret Pied Piper. This was the man Ann Smiley had loved and Bill Haydon had deceived and the rest of us had loyally followed, to the mystification of outsiders.

There is a wise tradition at Sarratt that our dinner speeches are not recorded and no notes are taken, and that no official reference may afterwards be made to what was said. The guest of honour enjoyed what Smiley in his Germanic way called “the fool’s freedom,” though I can think of few people less qualified for the privilege. But I am nothing if not a professional, trained to listen and remember, and you must understand also that Smiley had not spoken many words before I realised—as my students were not slow to notice—that he was speaking straight into my heretical heart. I refer to that other, less obedient person who is also inside me and whom, if I am honest, I had refused to acknowledge since I had embarked on this final lap of my career—to the secret questioner who had been my uncomfortable companion even before a reluctant joe of mine called Barley Blair had stepped across the crumbling Iron Curtain and, for reasons of love, and some sort of honour, had calmly kept on walking, to the incredulity of the Fifth Floor.

The better the restaurant, we say of Personnel, the worse the news. “It’s time you handed on your wisdom to the new boys, Ned,” he had told me over a suspiciously good lunch at the Connaught. “And to the new girls,” he added, with a loathsome smirk. “They’ll be letting them into the Church next, I suppose.” He returned to happier ground. “You know the tricks. You’ve kicked around. You’ve had an impressive last lap running Secretariat. Time to put it all to advantage. We think you should take over the Nursery and pass the torch to tomorrow’s spies.”

He had used a rather similar set of sporting metaphors, if I remembered rightly, when in the wake of Barley Blair’s defection he had removed me from my post as Head of the Russia House and consigned me to that knacker’s yard, the Interrogators’ Pool.

He ordered up two more glasses of Armagnac. “How’s your Mabel, by the way?” he continued, as if he had just remembered her. “Somebody told me she’d got her handicap down to twelve—ten, by God! Well. I trust you’ll keep her away from me! So what do you say? Sarratt in the week, home to Tunbridge Wells at weekends, sounds to me like the triumphant crowning of a career. What do you say?”

So what do you say? You say what others have said before you. Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach. And what they teach is what they can’t do any more, because either the body or the spirit or both have lost their singleness of purpose; because they have seen too much and suppressed too much and compromised too much, and in the end tasted too little. So they take to rekindling their old dreams in new minds, and warming themselves against the fires of the young.

And that brings me back to the opening bars of Smiley’s speech that night, for suddenly his words were reaching out and grasping me. I had invited him because he was a legend of the past. Yet to the delight of all of us, he was turning out to be the iconoclastic prophet of the future.

—

I’ll not bother you with the finer points of Smiley’s introductory tour of the globe. He gave them the Middle East, which was obviously on his mind, and he explored the limits of colonial power in supposedly post-colonialist times. He gave them the Third World and the Fourth World and posited a Fifth World, and pondered aloud whether human despair and poverty were the serious concern of any wealthy nation. He seemed pretty confident they weren’t. He scoffed at the idea that spying was a dying profession now that the Cold War had ended: with each new nation that came out of the ice, he said, with each new alignment, each rediscovery of old identities and passions, with each erosion of the old status quo, the spies would be working round the clock. He spoke, I discovered afterwards, for twice the customary length, but I didn’t hear a chair creak or a glass clink—not even when they dragged him to the library and sat him in the throne of honour before the fire for more of the same, more heresy, more subversion. My children, hardened cases all of them, in love with George! I didn’t hear a sound beyond the confident flow of Smiley’s voice and the eager burst of laughter at some unexpected self-irony or confession of failure. You’re only old once, I thought, as I listened with them, sharing their excitement.

He gave them case histories I had never heard, and which I was certain nobody in Head Office had cleared in advance—certainly not our Legal Adviser Palfrey, who in response to the openness of our former enemies had been battening down and double-locking every useless secret he could lay his obedient hands on.

He dwelt on their future rôle as agent-runners and, applying it to the altered world, vested in it the traditional Service image of mentor, shepherd, parent and befriender, as prop and marriage counsellor, as pardoner, entertainer and protector; as the man or woman who has the gift of treating the outrageous premise as an everyday affair, and so becomes his agent’s partner in illusion. None of that had changed, he said. None of it ever would. He paraphrased Burns: “A spy’s a spy for all that.”

But no sooner had he lulled them with this sweet notion than he warned them of the death of their own natures that could result from the manipulation of their fellow men, and the truncation of their natural feeling.

“By being all things to all spies, one does rather run the risk of becoming nothing to oneself,” he confessed sadly. “Please don’t ever imagine you’ll be unscathed by the methods you use. The end may justify the means—if it wasn’t supposed to, I dare say you wouldn’t be here. But there’s a price to pay, and the price does tend to be oneself. Easy to sell one’s soul at your age. Harder later.”

He mixed the deadly serious with the deadly frivolous and made the difference small. Betweenwhiles he seemed to be asking the questions I had been asking of myself for most of my working life, but had never managed to express, such as: “Did it do any good?” And “What did it do to me?” And “What will become of us now?” Sometimes his questions were answers: George, we used to say, never asked unless he knew.

He made us laugh, he made us feel and, by means of his inordinate deference, he shocked us with his contrasts. Better still, he put our prejudices at risk. He got rid of the acceptance in me and revived the slumbering rebel that my exile to Sarratt had silenced. George Smiley, out of a clear sky, had renewed my search and confused me wonderfully.

Frightened people never learn, I have read. If that is so, they certainly have no right to teach. I’m not a frightened man—or no more frightened than any other man who has looked at death and knows it is for him. All the same, experience and a little pain had made me a mite too wary of the truth, even towards myself. George Smiley put that right. George was more than a mentor to me, more than a friend. Though not always present, he presided over my life. There were times when I thought of him as some kind of father to replace the one I never knew. George’s visit to Sarratt gave back the dangerous edge to my memory. And now that I have the leisure to remember, that’s what I mean to do for you, so that you can share my voyage and ask yourself the same questions.

2

“There are some people,” Smiley declared comfortably, favouring with his merry smile the pretty girl from Trinity Oxford whom I had thoughtfully placed across the table from him, “who, when their past is threatened, get frightened of losing everything they thought they had, and perhaps everything they thought they were as well. Now I don’t feel that one bit. The purpose of my life was to end the time I lived in. So if my past were still around today, you could say I’d faded. But it’s not around. We won. Not that the victory matters a damn. And perhaps we didn’t win anyway. Perhaps they just lost. Or perhaps, without the bonds of ideological conflict to restrain us any more, our troubles are just beginning. Never mind. What matters is that a long war is over. What matters is the hope.”

Removing his spectacles from his ears, he fumbled distractedly with his shirt front, looking for I could not imagine what, until I realised that it was the fat end of the necktie on which he was accustomed to polish his lenses. But an awkwardly assembled black bow tie provides no such conveniences, so he used the silk handkerchief from his pocket instead.

“If I regret anything at all, it’s the way we wasted our time and skills. All the false alleys, and bogus friends, the misapplication of our energies. All the delusions we had about who we were.” He replaced his spectacles and, as I fancied, turned his smile upon myself. And suddenly I felt like one of my own students. It was the sixties again. I was a fledgling spy, and George Smiley—tolerant, patient, clever George—was observing my first attempts at flight.

—

We were fine fellows in those days, and the days seemed longer. Probably no finer than my students today, but our patriotic vision was less clouded. By the end of my new-entry course I was ready to save the world if I had to spy on it from end to end. We were ten in my intake and after a couple of years of training—at the Sarratt Nursery, in the glens of Argyll and battle camps of Wiltshire—we waited for our first operational postings like thoroughbreds pining for the chase.

We too in our way had come to maturity at a great moment in history, even if it was the reverse of this one. Stagnation and hostility stared at us from every corner of the globe. The Red Peril was everywhere, not least on our own sacred hearth. The Berlin Wall had been up two years and by the looks of it would stay up for another two hundred. The Middle East was a volcano, just as it is now, except that in those days Nasser was our chosen British hate object, not least because he was giving Arabs back their dignity and playing hookey with the Russians into the bargain. In Cyprus, Africa and South East Asia the lesser breeds without the law were rising against their old colonial masters. And if we few brave British occasionally felt our power diminished by this—well, there was always Cousin America to cut us back into the world’s game.

As secret heroes in the making, therefore, we had everything we needed: a righteous cause, an evil enemy, an indulgent ally, a seething world, women to cheer us, but only from the touchline, and best of all the Great Tradition to inherit, for the Circus in those days was still basking in its wartime glory. Almost all our leading men had earned their spurs by spying on the Germans. All of them, when questioned at our earnest, off-the-record seminars, agreed that when it came to protecting mankind against its own excesses, World Communism was an even darker menace than the Hun.

“You gentlemen have inherited a dangerous planet,” Jack Arthur Lumley, our fabled Head of Training, liked to tell us. “And if you want my personal opinion, you’re bloody lucky.”

Oh, we wanted his opinion all right! Jack Arthur was a derring-do man. He had spent three years dropping in and out of Nazi-occupied Europe as if he were a regular house-guest. He had blown up bridges single-handed. He had been caught and escaped and caught again, no one knew how many times. He had killed men with his bare fingers, losing a couple in the fray, and when the Cold War came along to replace the hot one, Jack hardly noticed the difference. At the age of fifty-five he could still shoot you a grin on a man-sized target with a 9-millimetre Browning at twenty paces, pick your door lock with a paper clip, booby-trap a lavatory chain in thirty seconds or pin you helpless to the gym-mat in one throw. Jack Arthur had despatched us by parachute from Stirling bombers and landed us in rubber boats on Cornish beaches and drunk us under the table on mess nights. If Jack Arthur said it was a dangerous planet, we believed him to the hilt!

But it made the waiting all the harder. If I hadn’t had Ben Arno Cavendish to share it with, it would have been harder still. There are only so many attachments you can serve around Head Office before your enthusiasm turns to gall.

Ben and I had been born under the same star. We were the same age, the same schooling, the same build, and within an inch of the same height. Trust the Circus to throw us together—we told each other excitedly; they probably knew it all along! We both had foreign mothers, though his was dead—the Arno came from his German side—and were both, perhaps by way of compensation, determinedly of the English extrovert classes—athletic, hedonistic, public-school, male, born to administer if not to rule. Though, as I look at the group photographs of our year, I see that Ben made a rather better job of the part than I did, for he possessed an air of maturity that in those days eluded me—he had the widow’s peak and the confirmed jaw, a man superior to his youthfulness.

Which, for all I knew, was why Ben got the coveted Berlin job instead of me, running flesh-and-blood agents inside East Germany, while I was once more put on standby.

“We’re lending you to the watchers for a couple of weeks, young Ned,” said Personnel, with an avuncular complacency I was beginning to resent. “Be good experience for you, and they can do with a spare pair of hands. Plenty of cloak-and-dagger stuff. You like that.”

Anything for a change, I thought, putting a brave face on it. For the past month I had bent my ingenuity to sabotaging the World Peace Conference in—let’s say—Belgrade, from a dark desk on the Third Floor. Under the instruction of a slow-spoken superior who lunched for hours on end in the Senior Officers’ Bar, I had enthusiastically re-routed delegates’ trains, blocked their hotel plumbing and made anonymous bomb threats to their conference ball. For the month before that, I had crouched bravely in a stinking cellar next to the Egyptian Embassy at six every morning, waiting for a venal charlady to bring me, in exchange for a five-pound note, the contents of the Ambassadorial wastepaper basket from the previous day. By such modest standards, a couple of weeks riding around with the world’s best watchers sounded like a free holiday.

“They’re assigning you to Operation Fat Boy,” Personnel said, and gave me the address of a safe house off Green Street in the West End. I heard the sound of Ping-Pong as I walked in, and a cracked gramophone record playing Gracie Fields. My heart sank, and once again I sent a prayer of envy to Ben Cavendish and his heroic agents in Berlin, the spy’s eternal city. Monty Arbuck, our section leader, briefed us the same evening.

—

Let me apologise for myself in advance. I knew very little of other ranks in those days. I was of the officer caste—literally for I had served with the Royal Navy—and found it perfectly natural that I had been born into the upper end of the social system. The Circus is nothing if not a little mirror of the England it protects, so it seemed equally right to me that our watchers and allied trades, such as burglars and eavesdroppers, should be drawn from the artisan community. You cannot follow a man for long in a bowler hat. A honed BBC voice is no passport to unobtrusiveness once you are outside London’s golden mile, least of all if you are posing as a street hawker or a window cleaner or a post-office engineer. So you should see me, at best, as a callow young midshipman seated among his more experienced and less privileged shipmates. And you should see Monty not as he was, but as I saw him that evening, as a taut-minded gamekeeper with a chip on his shoulder. We were ten, including Monty: three teams of three, therefore, with a woman to each so that we could cover ladies’ lavatories. That was the principle. And Monty our controller.

“Good evening, College,” he said, placing himself before a blackboard and talking straight to me. “Always nice to have a touch of quality to raise the tone, I say.”

Laughter all round, loudest from myself, a good sport to his men.

“Target for tomorrow, College, is His Right Royal Sovereign Highness Fat Boy, otherwise known as—”

Turning to the blackboard, Monty helped himself to a piece of chalk and laboriously scratched up a long Arab name.

“And the nature of our mission, College, is PR,” he resumed. “I trust you know what PR is, do you? I have no doubt they teach you that at the spies’ Eton?”

“Public Relations,” I said, surprised to occasion so much merriment. For alas it turned out that in the watchers’ vernacular the initials stood for Protect and Report, and that our task for tomorrow, and for as long as our royal visitor chose to remain our charge, was to ensure that no harm came to him, and to report to Head Office on his activities, whether social or commercial.

“College, you’re with Paul and Nancy,” Monty told me, when he had provided us with the rest of our operational intelligence. “You’ll be number three in the section, College, and you’ll kindly do exactly as you are told, irregardless.”

But here I prefer to give you the background to Fat Boy’s case not in Monty’s words but in my own, and with the benefit of twenty-five years of hindsight. Even today, I can blush to think who I thought I was, and how I must have appeared to the likes of Monty, Paul and Nancy.

—

Understand first that licensed arms dealers in Britain regard themselves as some kind of rough-edged élite—did then, do now—and that they enjoy quite disproportionate privileges at the hands of the police, the bureaucracy and the intelligence services. For reasons I have never understood, their grisly trade puts them in a relationship of confidence with these bodies. Perhaps it’s the illusion of reality they impart, of guns as the earthy truth of life and death. Perhaps, in the tethered minds of our officials, their wares suggest the same authority that is exerted by those who use them. I don’t know. But I’ve seen enough of the street side of life in the years between to know that more men are in love with war than ever get a chance to fight one, and that more guns are bought to satisfy this love than for a pardonable purpose.

Understand also that Fat Boy was a most valued customer of this industry. And that our task of Protecting and Reporting was only one small part of a far larger undertaking; namely, the care and cultivation of a so-called friendly Arab state. By which was meant, and is meant to this day, currying favour, suborning and flattering its princelings with our English ways, wheedling favourable concessions in order to satisfy our oil addiction—and, along the way, selling enough British weaponry to keep the Satanic mills of Birmingham turning day and night. Which may have accounted for Monty’s rooted distaste for our task. I like to think so anyway. Old watchers are famous for their moralising—and with reason. First they watch, later they think. Monty had reached the thinking stage.

As to Fat Boy, his credentials for this treatment were impeccable. He was the wastrel brother of the ruler of an oil-rich sheikdom. He was capricious, and prone to forget what he had bought before. And he arrived as billed, in the ruler’s Boeing jet, at a military airport near London specially cleared for him, to have himself a little fun and do a little shopping—which we understood would include such fripperies as a couple of armoured Rolls-Royces for himself, half the trinkets at Cartier’s for his women friends around the globe, a hundred or so of our not quite latest ground-to-air missile launchers, and a squadron or two of our not quite latest combat fighters for his royal brother. Not forgetting a succulent British government contract for spares, services and training which would keep the Royal Air Force and the arms manufacturers in clover for years to come. —Oh, and oil. We would have oil to burn. Naturally.

His retinue, apart from private secretaries, astrologers, flatterers, nannies, children and two tutors, comprised a personal doctor and three bodyguards.

Lastly there was Fat Boy’s wife, and her codename is irrelevant because from Day One Monty’s watchers dubbed her “the Panda” on account of the dark circles round her eyes when she was unveiled, and her wistful and solitary deportment, which gave the air of an endangered species. Fat Boy had a string of wives, but the Panda, though the oldest, was the most favoured, and perhaps the most tolerant of her husband’s pleasures around town, for he liked nightclubs and he liked to gamble—tastes for which my fellow watchers cordially loathed him before he arrived, since it was known of him that he seldom went to bed before six in the morning, and never without losing about twenty times their combined annual salaries.

The party had rooms at a grand West End hotel, on two floors linked by a specially installed lift. Fat Boy, like many forty-year-old voluptuaries, was worried about his heart. He was also worried about microphones, and liked to use the lift as his safe room. So the Circus listeners had thoughtfully provided a microphone in the lift for him as well, which was where they reckoned to pick up their tidbits about the latest palace intrigues, or any unforeseen threat to Fat Boy’s military shopping list.

And everything was running smoothly until Day Three, when one small unknown Arab man in a black overcoat with velvet collars appeared silently on our horizon. Or more accurately, in the ladies’ lingerie department of a great Knightsbridge department store, where the Panda and her attendants were picking their way through a stack of frilly white undergarments spread over the glass counter. For the Panda also had her spies. And word had reached her that, on the day before, the Fat Boy himself had brooded fondly over the same articles, and even ordered a few dozen to be sent to an address in Paris where a favoured lady friend constantly awaited him in subsidised luxury.

—

Day Three, I repeat, and the morale of our three-strong unit under strain. Paul was Paul Skordeno, an inward man with a pocked complexion and a talent for ferocious invective. Nancy told me he was under a cloud, but wouldn’t say what for.

“He hit a girl, Ned,” she said, but I think now that she meant more than merely hit.

Nancy herself was all of five feet tall and in appearance a kind of licensed bag-lady. For her standard, as she called it, she wore lisle stockings and sensible rubber-soled walking shoes, which she seldom changed. What more she needed—scarves, raincoats, woollen hats of different colours—she took in a plastic carrier.

On surveillance duty our section worked eight-hour shifts always in the same formation, Nancy and Paul playing forward, young Ned trailing along behind as sweep. When I asked Skordeno whether we could vary the formation, he told me to get used to what I’d got. On our first day we had followed Fat Boy to Sandhurst, where a lunch had been organised in his honour. The three of us ate egg-and-chips in a café close to the main gates while Skordeno railed first against the Arabs, then against the Western exploitation of them, then to my distress against the Fifth Floor, whom he described as Fascist golfers.

“You a Freemason, College?”

I assured him I was not.

“Well, you’d best hurry up and join then, hadn’t you? Haven’t you noticed the saucy way Personnel shakes your hand? You’ll never get to Berlin if you’re not a Mason, College.”

Day Two had been spent hanging around Mount Street while Fat Boy had himself measured for a pair of Purdy shotguns, first precariously brandishing a try-gun round the premises, then throwing a tantrum when he discovered he would have to wait two years before they were ready. Paul ordered me twice into the shop while this scene was unfolding, and seemed pleased when I told him the staff were becoming suspicious of my frivolous enquiries.

“I’d have thought it was your kind of place,” he said, with his skull-like grin. “Huntin’, shootin’ and fishin’—they like that on the Fifth Floor, College.”

The same night had found us sitting three up in a van outside a shuttered whorehouse in South Audley Street, and Head Office in a state of near panic. Fat Boy had only been holed up there two hours when he had telephoned the hotel and ordered his personal doctor to attend immediately. His heart! we thought in alarm. Should we go in? While Head Office dithered, we entertained visions of our quarry dead of a heart attack in the arms of some over-conscientious whore before he had signed the cheque for his obsolete fighter planes. It was not till four o’clock that the listeners laid our fears to rest. Fat Boy had been afflicted by a spell of impotence, they explained, and his doctor had been summoned to inject an aphrodisiac into the royal rump. We returned home at five, Skordeno drunk with anger, but all of us consoled by the knowledge that Fat Boy was due in Luton at midday to attend a grand demonstration of the nearly latest British tank, and we could count on a day’s rest. But our relief was premature.

“The Panda wants to buy herself some pretties,” Monty announced to us benignly on our arrival in Green Street. “Your lot’s on. Sorry about that, College.”

Which brings us to the lingerie department of the great Knightsbridge store, and to my moment of glory. Ben, I was thinking; Ben, I would trade one day of yours for five of mine. Then suddenly I wasn’t thinking of Ben any more and I had ceased to envy him. I had drawn back into the privacy of a doorway and was speaking into the mouthpiece of the cumbersome radio set, which in those days was the best there was. I had selected the channel which gave me a direct line to base. It was the one Skordeno had told me not to use.

“The Panda’s got a monkey on her back,” I informed Monty in my calmest voice, using the approved watchers’ jargon to describe a mysterious follower. “Five five, black curly hair, heavy moustache, aged forty, black overcoat, rubber-soled black shoes, Arab appearance. He was at the airport when Fat Boy’s plane came in. I remember him. It’s the same man.”

“Stay on him” came Monty’s laconic reply. “Paul and Nancy stick with the Panda, you stick with the monkey. Which floor?”

“One.”

“Stay on him wherever he goes, keep talking to me.”

“He could be carrying,” I said as my eyes again fixed surreptitiously on the subject of my call.

“You mean he’s pregnant?”

I didn’t think that very funny.

Let me set the scene precisely, for it was more complicated than you may suppose. Our trio was not alone in following the Panda’s retinue on its snail-paced shopping expedition. Wealthy Arab princesses do not arrive unannounced at great Knightsbridge stores. In addition to a pair of floorwalkers in black jackets and striped trousers, two very obvious house detectives had placed themselves at either archway with their feet apart and their hands curled at their sides, ready at any moment to grapple with whirling dervishes. As if that were not enough, Scotland Yard had that morning taken upon itself to provide its own brand of protection in the form of an iron-faced man in a belted raincoat who insisted on placing himself beside the Panda and glowering at anyone who came near. And finally, you must see Paul and Nancy in their Sunday best, their backs turned to everyone while they affected to study trays of negligés, and watched our quarry in the mirrors.

And all of this again, you understand, set in the hushed and scented privacy of the harem; in a world of flimsy undergarments, deep-pile carpets and languorous half-naked dummies—not to mention those kindly grey-haired lady attendants in black crêpe who, at a certain age, are deemed to have achieved a sufficiently unthreatening demeanour to reside over shrines of female intimacy.

Other men, I noticed, preferred not to enter the lingerie department at all, or hurried through it with averted gaze. My instinct would have been the same, had it not been for my recognition of this melancholy little man with his black moustache and passionate brown eyes, who unswervingly trailed the Panda’s retinue at fifteen paces. If Monty had not appointed me sweep, I might not have seen him at all—or not then. But it was quickly clear that both he and I, by virtue of our different trades, were obliged to keep the same distance from our target—I with nonchalance, he with a kind of intense and mystical dependence. For his gaze never wavered from her. Even when he was unsighted by a pillar or a customer, he still contrived to crane his dark head this way or that until he had locked her once more in his zealous and—I was now convinced—fanatical gaze.

I had first sensed this fervour in him when I had spotted him in the arrivals hall at the airport, pressing himself on tiptoe against the long window as he wriggled to get a better view of the royal couple’s approach. I had made nothing so special of him then. I was subjecting everyone to the same critical examination. He had seemed to be just another of the gaggle of diplomats, retainers and hangers-on who formed the royal welcome party. Nevertheless his intensity had struck a chord in me: So this is the Middle East, I had mused as I watched him squeeze his hollowed face against the glass. These are the heathen passions my Service must contain if we are to drive our cars and heat our houses and sell our weaponry in peace.

The monkey had taken a couple of steps forward and was peering at a cabinet of ribbons. His gait—exactly like that of his namesake—was wide but stealthy; he seemed to move entirely from the knees, in conspiratorial strides. I selected a display of garters next to him and peered into it while I again furtively examined him for tell-tale bulges round the waist and armpits. His black overcoat was of the classic gunman’s cape: voluminous and without a belt, the kind of coat that covers effortlessly a long-barrelled pistol fitted with a suppressor, or a semi-automatic slung beneath the arm.

I studied his hands, my own nervously prickling. His left hung loosely at his side, but his right, which looked the stronger, kept travelling towards his chest and withholding, as if he were preparing himself to pluck up courage for the final act.

A right-handed cross draw, I thought; most likely to the armpit. Our weapons trainers had taught us all the combinations.

And his eyes—those dark, slow-burning, soulful zealot’s eyes—even in profile they seemed fixed upon the afterlife. Had he sworn vengeance on her? On her household? Had fanatical mullahs promised him a place in Heaven if he did the deed? My knowledge of Islam was scant, and what there was of it was drawn from a couple of background lectures and the novels of P. C. Wren. Yet it was enough to warn me that I was in the presence of a desperate fanatic who counted his own life cheap.

As to myself, alas, I was unarmed. It was a sore point with me. Watchers would never dream of carrying weapons on normal duty, but covert protection work is a different type of watching, and Paul Skordeno had been allocated a sidearm from Monty’s safe.

“One’s enough, College,” Monty had told me, with his old man’s smile. “We don’t want you starting World War Three, now do we?”

All that was left to me, therefore, as I rose and softly followed him again, was to select in advance one of the blows we had been taught to master in our silent-killing classes. Should I count on attacking him from behind—with a rabbit punch?—with a double simultaneous blow over the ears? Either method could kill him instantly, whereas a live one can still be questioned. Then would I do better breaking his right arm first, hoping to take him with his own weapon? Yet if I let him draw, might I myself not go down in a hail of bullets from the several bodyguards around the room?

She had seen him!

The Panda had looked straight into the eyes of the monkey, and the monkey had returned her stare!

Had she recognised him? I was certain she had. But had she recognised his purpose? And was she, perhaps, in some strange turn of Oriental fatalism, preparing herself for death? The lurid possibilities went racing through my mind as I continued to observe their mysterious exchange. Their eyes met, the Panda froze in mid-gesture. Her jewelled, crabby little hands, plundering the clothing on the counter, kept still—and then, as if to his command, slipped passively to her sides. After which she stood motionless, without will, without even the strength to detach herself from his penetrating stare.

At last, with a forlorn and strangely humble air, she turned away from him, murmured something to her lady companions and, holding out her hand to the counter, released whatever frilly thing she was still clutching in it. She was wearing brown that day—if she had been a man, I would be tempted to say a Franciscan habit—with wide sleeves longer than her arms, and a brown headband bound tightly across her brow.

I saw her sigh, then slowly and, I was sure, resignedly, she led her entourage towards the archway. After her went her personal bodyguard; after him the Scotland Yard policeman. Then came the ladies of her train, followed by the floorwalkers. And finally came Paul and Nancy, who, with a show of indecision, had torn themselves away from their study of the negligés and were sauntering like any shoppers in the party’s wake. Paul, who had surely overheard my conversations with Monty, vouchsafed me not the smallest glance. Nancy, who prided herself on her amateur dramatics, was pretending to pick a marital dispute with him. I tried to see whether Paul had unbuttoned his jacket, for he too favoured the cross draw. But his broad back was turned away from me.

“All right, College, show me,” said Money brightly into my left ear, appearing beside me as if by magic. How long had he been there? I had no idea. It was past midday and our time for standing down, but this was no moment to change the guard. The monkey was not five yards from us, stepping lightly but determinedly after the Panda.

“We can take him at the stairs,” I murmured.

“Speak louder,” Monty advised me, in the same unabashed voice. “Speak normally, no one listens to you. Mutter, mutter out of the corner of your mouth, they think you’ve come to rob the till.”

Since we were on the first floor, the Panda’s party was sure to take the lift, whether they went up or down. Beside the lift stood a pair of swing doors opening on to what in those days was a stone emergency staircase, rather dank and insanitary, with linoleum treads. My plan, which I outlined to Monty in staccato sentences as we followed the monkey towards the archway, was simplicity itself. As the party approached the lift, Monty and I would close on him from either side, grab an arm each and sweep him into the staircase. We would subdue him with a blow to the groin, remove his weapon, then spirit him to Green Street where we would invite him to make a voluntary statement. In training exercises we had done such things a dozen times—once, to our embarrassment, to an innocent bank clerk who was hurrying home to his wife and family, and whom we had mistaken for a member of the training staff.

But if Monty heard me, to my frustration he gave no sign of having done so. He was watching the floorwalkers clear a path through the crowd to the lift so that the Panda’s party could ride in privacy. And he was smiling like any casual commoner who stumbles on a glimpse of royalty.

“She’s going down,” he declared with satisfaction. “Pound to a penny it’s the costume jewellery she’s after. You’d think the Gulfies wouldn’t bother with the artificial stuff, but they can’t get enough of it; they think it’s got to be a bargain. Come on, son. This is fun. Let’s go and take a look.”

I like to think that even in my perplexity I recognised the excellence of Monty’s tradecraft. The Panda’s exotic entourage, mostly in Arab dress, was arousing lively curiosity among the shoppers. Monty was just another punter, enjoying the spectacle. And yes, he was right again, their destination was the costume jewellery department, as the monkey also had divined, for as we emerged from our lift the monkey scampered ahead of the party to take up a favoured place alongside the glittering displays, his left shoulder nearest to the wall, exactly as required of a right-handed gunman who draws across his chest.

Yet, far from choosing a strategic position from which to return fire, Monty merely wandered after him, and, having placed himself next to him, beckoned me to join them, and in such a way that I had no alternative but to leave Monty, not the monkey, at the centre of our trio.

“This is why I always come to Knightsbridge, son,” Monty was explaining, loudly enough for half the floor to hear. “You never know who you’re going to meet. I brought your mother last time—you remember—we’d gone to the Harrods Food Hall. I thought: ‘Hullo, I know you, you’re Rex Harrison.’ I could have held out my hand and touched him but I didn’t. It’s the crossroads of the world, Knightsbridge is, don’t you agree, sir?”—lifting his hat to the monkey, who smiled wanly in return. “Now I wonder where this lot would be from. Arabs, by the look of them, with the wealth of Solomon at their fingertips. And they don’t even pay taxes, I dare say. Not royalty, well they wouldn’t have to. There isn’t a royal household in the world pays taxes to itself, it wouldn’t be logical. See the big policeman there, son? He’ll be Special Branch, you can tell by his stupid scowl.”

The Panda’s party meanwhile was distributing itself among the illuminated glass counters while the Panda, in barely concealed agitation, was requiring that the trays be taken out for her inspection. And soon, as in the lingerie department, she was picking out one object after another, turning it critically under the inspection light, then setting it down and taking up another. And yet again, as she continued to appraise and relinquish each piece in turn, I saw her worried gaze slip towards us, first to the monkey, then to myself, as if she had seen in me her one hope of protection.

Yet Monty, when I glanced at him for confirmation, was still smiling.

“That’s exactly what happened in the lingerie department,” I whispered, forgetting his instruction to speak normally.

But Monty continued his noisy monologue. “But underneath, son—I always say this—underneath, royals or not, they’re the same as what we are, through and through. We’re all born naked, we’re all on our way to the grave. Your wealth is your health, better to be rich in friends than money, I say. We’ve all got the same appetites, the same little weaknesses and naughty ways.” And on he ran, as if in deliberate contrast to my extreme alertness.

She had ordered up more trays. The counter was covered with sumptuous paste tiaras, bracelets and rings. Selecting a threestring necklace of imitation rubies, she held it to her throat, then took up a hand mirror to admire herself.

And was it my imagination? It was not! She was using the mirror to observe the monkey and ourselves! First one dark eye, then the other fixed upon us; then the two of them together, warning us, imploring us, before she set the mirror down again and turned her back to us, and swept as if in anger along the edge of the glass counter, where a fresh display awaited her.

At the same moment, the monkey took a step forward and I saw his hand rise to the opening of his overcoat. Throwing caution aside, I too stepped forward, my right arm drawn back, the fingers of my right hand flexed, palm parallel to the ground in the approved Sarratt manner. I had decided on an elbow to the heart, followed by a side-of-hand to the upper lip, to the point where the nose cartilage joins the top half of the jaw. A complicated network of nerves has its meeting point here, and a well-aimed blow can immobilise the victim for some while. The monkey was opening his mouth and breathing in. I anticipated a cry to Allah, or perhaps the screamed slogan of some fundamentalist sect—though I am no longer sure how much we knew or cared in those days about fundamentalist Arabs. I at once determined to scream myself, not only in order to confuse him, but because a deep breath would put more oxygen into my bloodstream and so increase my striking power. I was actually drawing this breath when I felt Monty’s hand lock like an iron ring round my wrist and, with unpredicted power, immobilise me as he drew me back to him.

“Now don’t do that, son, this gentleman was before you,” he said in a matter-of-fact voice. “He’s got a little confidential business to transact, haven’t you, sir?”

He had indeed. And Monty’s grasp did not release me until I had observed the nature of it. The monkey was speaking. Not to the Panda, not to her retinue, but to the two floorwalkers in striped trousers who were inclining their heads to listen to him, at first condescendingly, then with startled interest as their gaze switched to the Panda.

“Alas, gentlemen, Her Royal Highness prefers to make her purchases informally, you see,” he was saying. “Without the inconvenience of a wrapping or an invoice, let us put it that way. It is her time of life. Three and four years ago, she was a most expert bargainer, you know. Oh yes. She would negotiate a most competitive discount for everything she wished to buy. But today, at her time of life, she is taking matters most literally into her own hands, you see. Or should I say into her sleeve, oh dear? I am therefore charged by His Royal Highness to make a most bountiful settlement for all such informal purchases, on the very clear understanding that no breath of publicity reaches the public ear, gentlemen, whether in the written or the spoken word, if you understand me.”

Then from his pocket he drew not, alas, a deadly Walther automatic, not a Heckler & Koch sub-machine gun, not even one of our beloved standard Browning 9-millimetres, but a tooled Moroccan leather wallet stuffed with his master’s banknotes in a variety of denominations.

“I counted, I believe, three fine rings, sir, one in artificial emerald, two in paste diamond, also a fine artificial ruby necklace, gentlemen, three strings. It is the wish of His Royal Highness that our settlement should take generous account of any inconvenience suffered by your most excellent staff, you see. Also commission to your good selves, on the understanding already stated regarding publicity.”

Monty’s grip on me had at last relaxed, and as we walked towards the hall I dared to glance at him, and saw to my relief that his expression, though thoughtful, was surprisingly gentle.

“That’s the trouble in our job, Ned,” he explained contentedly, using my Christian name for the first time. “Life’s looking one way, we’re looking the other. I like an honest-to-God enemy myself sometimes, I don’t mind admitting. Take a lot of finding, though, don’t they? Too many nice blokes about.”

3

“Now do please remember,” Smiley piously exhorted his young audience, in much the tone he might have selected if he had been asking them to put their offerings in the collection box as they were leaving, “that the privately educated Englishman—and Englishwoman, if you will allow me—is the greatest dissembler on earth.” He waited for the laughter to subside. “Was, is now and ever shall be for as long as our disgraceful school system remains intact. Nobody will charm you so glibly, disguise his feelings from you better, cover his tracks more skilfully or find it harder to confess to you that he’s been a damned fool. Nobody acts braver when he’s frightened stiff, or happier when he’s miserable; nobody can flatter you better when he hates you than your extrovert Englishman or woman of the supposedly privileged classes. He can have a Force Twelve nervous breakdown while he stands next to you in the bus queue, and you may be his best friend, but you’ll never be the wiser. Which is why some of our best officers turn out to be our worst. And our worst, our best. And why the most difficult agent you will ever have to run is yourself.”

In his own mind, I had no doubt, Smiley was talking about the greatest deceiver of us all, Bill Haydon. But for me, he was talking about Ben—and yes, though it’s harder to admit, about the young Ned, and perhaps the old one too.

—

It was the afternoon of the day I had failed to immolate the Panda’s bodyguard. Tired and dispirited, I arrived at my flat in Battersea to find the door on the latch and two men in grey suits sifting through the papers in my desk.

They barely looked at me as I burst in. The nearer of them was Personnel and the second an owlish, ageless, tubby man in circular spectacles who eyed me with a sort of baleful commiseration.

“When did you last hear from your friend Cavendish?” said Personnel, scarcely glancing at me before returning to my papers.

“He is your friend, isn’t he?” said the owlish man unhappily while I struggled to collect myself. “Ben? Arno? Which do you call him?”

“Yes. He is. Ben is. What is this?”

“So when did you last hear from him?” Personnel repeated, shoving aside a pile of letters from my girlfriend of the time. “Does he ring you? How do you keep in touch?”

“I had a postcard from him a week ago. Why?”

“Where is it?”

“I don’t know. I destroyed it. If it isn’t in the desk. Will you kindly tell me what’s going on?”

“Destroyed it?”

“Threw it away.”

“Destroy sounds deliberate, doesn’t it? What did it look like?” Personnel said, pulling out another drawer. “Stay where you are.”

“It had a picture of a girl on one side and a couple of lines from Ben on the other. What does it matter what it had on it? Please get out of here.”

“Saying?”

“Nothing. It said, this is my latest acquisition. ‘Dear Ned, this is my new catch, so glad you’re not here. Love, Ben.’ Now get out!”

“What did he mean by that?”—pulling out another drawer.

“Glad I wouldn’t cut him out with the girl, I suppose. It was a joke.”

“Do you usually cut him out with his women?”

“We’ve no women in common. We never have had.”

“What do you have in common?”

“Friendship,” I said angrily. “What the hell are you looking for actually? I think you’d better leave at once. Both of you.”

“I can’t find it,” Personnel complained to his fat companion as he tossed aside another wad of my private letters. “No postcard of any kind. You’re not lying, are you, Ned?”

The owlish man had not taken his eyes off me. He continued to regard me with a wretched empathy, as if to say it comes to all of us and there’s nothing we can do. “How was the postcard delivered, Ned?” he asked. His voice, like his demeanour, was tentative and regretful.

“By post, how else?” I replied rudely.

“The open mail, you mean?” the owlish man suggested sadly. “Not by Service bag, for instance?”

“By Forces mail,” I replied. “Field Post Office. Posted Berlin with a British stamp on it. Delivered by the local postman.”

“Do you remember the Field Post Office number, by any chance, Ned?” the owlish man enquired with enormous diffidence. “On the postmark, I mean?”

“It was the ordinary Berlin number, I imagine,” I retorted, struggling to keep up my indignation in the face of someone so exquisitely deferential. “Forty, I think. Why’s it so important? I’ve had enough of this.”

“But you’d say it was definitely posted in Berlin anyway? I mean, that was your impression at the time? So far as you recall it now? The Berlin number—you’re sure?”

“It looked exactly like the others he’d sent me. I didn’t submit it to a minute examination,” I said, my anger rising again as I saw Personnel yank yet another drawer from my desk and tip out its contents.

“A pin-up sort of girl, Ned?” the owlish man enquired, with a hangdog smile, which was evidently intended to apologise for Personnel as well as for himself.

“A nude, yes. A tart, I assume, looking over her bare backside. That’s why I threw it away. Because of my cleaning lady.”

“Oh, so you remember now!” Personnel cried, swinging round to face me. “ ‘I threw it away.’ Pity you didn’t bloody say so at once!”

“Oh, I don’t know, Rex,” said the owlish man placatingly. “Ned was very confused when he came in. Who wouldn’t be?” His worried gaze settled once more upon myself. “You’re doing a stint with the watchers, isn’t that right? Monty says you’re rather good. Was she in colour, by the way? Your nude?”

“Yes.”

“Did he always send postcards, or sometimes letters?”

“Only postcards.”

“How many?”

“Three or four since he’s been there.”

“Always in colour?”

“I don’t remember. Probably. Yes.”

“And always of girls?”

“I think so.”

“Oh, but you remember, really. Of course you do. And always naked too, I expect?”

“Yes.”

“Where are the others?”

“I must have thrown them away too.”

“Because of your cleaning lady?”

“Yes.”

“To protect her sensitivities?”

“Yes!”

The owlish man took his time to consider this. “So the dirty postcards—forgive me, I don’t mean that offensively, really not—they were a sort of running joke between you?”

“On his side, yes.”

“But you didn’t send him any in return? Please say if you did. Don’t be embarrassed. There isn’t time.”

“I’m not embarrassed! I didn’t send him any. Yes, they were a running joke. And they were getting increasingly risqué. If you want to know, I was becoming slightly bored with seeing them laid out on the hall table for my collection. So was Mr. Simpson. He’s the landlord. He suggested I write to Ben and tell him to stop sending them. He said it was getting the house a bad name. Now will you please, one of you, tell me what the hell’s going on?”

This time Personnel replied. “Well, that’s what we thought you might be able to tell us,” he said in a mournful voice. “Ben Cavendish has disappeared. So have his agents, in a manner of speaking. A couple of them are featured in this morning’s Neues Deutschland. British spy ring caught red-handed. The London evening papers are running the story in their late editions. He hasn’t been seen for three days. This is Mr. Smiley. He wants to talk to you. You’re to tell him whatever you know. And that means anything. I’ll see you later.”

I must have lost my bearings for a moment, because when I saw Smiley again he was standing at the centre of my carpet, gloomily peering round him at the havoc he and Personnel had wreaked.

“I’ve a house across the river in Bywater Street,” he confessed, as if it were a great burden to him. “Perhaps we ought to pop round there, if it’s all the same to you. It’s not terribly tidy, but it is better than this.”

—

We drove there in Smiley’s humble little Austin, so slowly you would have supposed he was conveying an invalid, which was perhaps how he regarded me. It was dusk. The white lanterns of Albert Bridge floated at us like waterborne coachlights. Ben, I thought desperately, what have we done? Ben, what have they done to you?

Bywater Street was jammed, so we parked in a mews. Parking for Smiley was as complicated as docking a liner, but he managed it and we walked back. I remember how impossible it was to keep alongside him, how his thrusting roundarm waddle somehow ignored my existence. I remember how he steeled himself to turn the key of his own front door, and his alertness as he stepped into the hall. As if home were a dangerous place for him, as I know now that it was. There was a couple of days’ milk in the hall and a half-eaten plate of chop and peas in the drawing room. The turntable of a gramophone was silently revolving. It didn’t take a genius to surmise that he had been called out in a hurry—presumably by Personnel yesterday evening—while he was tucking into his chop and listening to a spot of music.

He wandered off to the kitchen in search of soda for our whiskies. I followed him. There was something about Smiley that made you responsible for his solitude. Open tins of food lay about and the sink was crammed with dirty plates. While he mixed our whiskies, I started clearing up, so he fished a teacloth from the back of the door and set to work drying and putting away.

“You and Ben were considerable partners, weren’t you?” he asked.

“We shared a cabin at Sarratt, yes.”

“So that’s what—kitchen, couple of bedrooms, bathroom?”

“No kitchen.”

“But you were twinned for your training course as well?”

“For the last year of it. You choose an oppo and learn to work to each other.”

“Choose? Or have chosen for you?”

“Choose first, then they approve or break you up.”

“And after that, you’re landed with each other for better for worse?”

“Pretty much, yes.”

“For the whole of the last year? For half the course, in fact? Day and night, as it were? A total marriage?”

I could not understand why he was pressing me about things he must have known.

“And you do everything together?” he continued. “Forgive me but it’s some time since I was trained. Written, practical, physical, you mess together, share a cabin—a whole life, in fact.”

“We do the syndicate work together, and the strong-arm stuff. That’s automatic. It begins with being roughly the same weight and physical aptitude.” Despite the disturbing tendency of his questions, I was beginning to feel a great need to talk to him. “Then the rest sort of follows naturally.”

“Ah.”

“Sometimes they split us up—say, for a special exercise if they think one person is relying too much on his oppo. But as long as it’s fifty-fifty they’re happy for you to keep together.”

“And you won everything,” Smiley suggested approvingly, helping himself to another wet plate. “You were the best pair. You and Ben.”

“It was just that Ben was the best student,” I said. “Whoever had him would have won.”

“Yes, of course. Well, we all know people like that. Did you know each other before you joined the Service?”

“No. But we’d run parallel. We were at the same school, different houses. We were at Oxford, different colleges. We both read languages but we still never met. He did a short service commission in the army, I did the same in the navy. It took the Circus to bring us together.”

Taking up a delicate bone-china cup, he peered doubtfully into it, as if searching for something I had missed. “Would you have sent Ben to Berlin?”

“Yes, of course I would. Why not?”

“Well, why?”

“He’s got perfect German from his mother. He’s bright. Resourceful. People do what he wants them to do. His father had this terrific war.”

“So did your mother, as I remember.” He was referring to my mother’s work with the Dutch Resistance. “What did he do—Ben’s father, I mean?” he continued, as if he really didn’t know.

“He broke codes,” I said, with Ben’s pride. “He was a wrangler. A mathematician. A genius, apparently. He helped organise the double-cross system against the Germans—recruit their agents and play them back. My mother was very small beer by comparison.”

“And Ben was impressed by that?”

“Who wouldn’t be?”

“He talked of it, I mean,” Smiley insisted. “Often? It was a big matter for him. You had that impression?”

“He just said it was something he had to live up to. He said it was the up-side of having a German mother.”

“Oh dear,” said Smiley unhappily. “Poor man. And those were his words? You’re not embellishing?”

“Of course I’m not! He said that with a background like his, in England you had to run twice as fast as everyone else, just to keep up.”

Smiley seemed genuinely upset. “Oh dear,” he said again. “How unkind. And do you think he has the stamina, would you say?”

He had once more stopped me short. At our age, we really didn’t think of stamina as being limited.

“What for?” I asked.

“Oh, I don’t know. What kind of stamina would one need for running twice as fast as everyone else in Berlin? A double ration of nerves, I suppose—always a strain. A doubly good head for alcohol—and where women are concerned—never easy.”

“I’m sure he’s got whatever it takes,” I said loyally.

Smiley hung his teacloth on a bent nail which looked like his own addition to the kitchen. “Did you ever talk politics, the two of you?” he asked as we took our whiskies to the drawing room.

“Never.”

“Then I’m sure he’s sound,” he said, with a sad little laugh, and I laughed too.

Houses always seem to me, at first acquaintance, to be either masculine or feminine, and Smiley’s was undoubtedly feminine, with pretty curtains and carved mirrors and clever woman’s touches. I wondered who he was living with, or wasn’t. We sat down.

“And is there any reason why you mightn’t have sent Ben to Berlin?” he resumed, smiling kindly over the top of his glass.

“Well, only that I wanted to go myself. Everybody wants a Berlin break. It’s the front line.”

“He simply disappeared,” Smiley explained, settling back and appearing to close his eyes. “We’re not keeping anything from you. I’ll tell you what we know. Last Thursday he crossed into East Berlin to meet his head agent, a gentleman named Hans Seidl—you can see his photograph in Neues Deutschland. It was Ben’s first solo meeting with him. A big event. Ben’s superior in the Berlin Station is Haggarty. Do you know Haggarty?”

“No.”

“Have you heard of him?”

“No.”

“Ben never mentioned him to you?”

“No. I told you. I’ve never heard his name.”

“Forgive me. Sometimes an answer can vary with a context, if you follow me.”

I didn’t.

“Haggarty is second man in the Station under the Station Commander. Did you not know that either?”

“No.”

“Has Ben a regular girlfriend?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Irregular?”

“You only had to go to a dance with him, they were all over him.”

“And after the dance?”

“He didn’t brag. He doesn’t. If he slept with them, he wouldn’t say. He’s not that kind of man.”

“They tell me you and Ben took your bits of leave together. Where did you go?”

“Twickenham. Lord’s. Bit of fishing. Mainly we stayed with one another’s people.”

“Ah.”

I couldn’t understand why Smiley’s words were scaring me. Perhaps I was so scared for Ben that I was scared by everything. Increasingly I had the feeling Smiley assumed I was guilty of something, even if we had still to find out what. His recitation of events was like a summary of the evidence.

“First comes Willis,” he said, as if we were following a difficult trail. “Willis is the Berlin Head of Station, Willis has overall command. Then comes Haggarty, and Haggarty is the senior field officer under Willis and Ben’s direct boss. Haggarty is responsible for the day-to-day servicing of the Seidl network. The network is twelve agents strong, or was—that is to say, nine men and three women, now all under arrest. An illegal network of that size, communicating partly by radio and partly by secret writing, requires a base team of at least the same number to maintain it, and I’m not talking about evaluating or distributing the product.”

“I know.”

“I’m sure you do, but let me tell you all the same,” he continued at the same ponderous pace. “Then you can help me fill in the gaps. Haggarty is a powerful personality. An Ulsterman. Off duty, he drinks, he’s noisy and unpleasant. But when he’s working he’s none of those things. He’s a conscientious officer with a prodigious memory. You’re sure Ben never mentioned him to you?”

“I told you. No.”

I had not intended this to sound so adamant. There’s always a mystery about how often you can deny a thing without beginning to sound like a liar, even to yourself; and of course this was the very mystery Smiley was playing upon in order to bring hidden things to the surface in me.

“Yes, well you did tell me no,” he agreed with his habitual courtesy. “And I did hear you say no. I merely wondered whether I had jogged your memory?”

“No.”

“Haggarty and Seidl were friends,” he continued, speaking, if it were possible, even more slowly. “So far as their business allowed, they were close friends. Seidl had been a prisoner of war in England, Haggarty in Germany. While Seidl was working as a farm labourer near Cirencester in 1944, under the relaxed conditions for German prisoners of war that prevailed by then, he succeeded in courting an English landgirl. His guards at the camp took to leaving a bicycle for him outside the main gates with an army greatcoat tossed over the handlebar to cover Seidl’s prisoner-of-war tunic. As long as he was back in his own bed by reveille, the guards turned a blind eye. Seidl never forgot his gratitude to the English. When the baby came along, Seidl’s guards and fellow prisoners came to the christening. Charming, isn’t it? The English at their best. But the story doesn’t ring a bell?”

“How could it? You’re talking about a joe!”

“A blown joe. One of Ben’s. Haggarty’s experiences of German prison camp were not so uplifting. Never mind. In 1948, while Haggarty was nominally working with the Control Commission, he picked up Seidl in a bar in Hannover, recruited him and ran him back into East Germany, to his home town of Leipzig. He has been running him ever since. The Haggarty-Seidl friendship has been the linchpin of the Berlin Station for the last fifteen years. At the time of his arrest last week, Seidl was fourth man in the East German Foreign Ministry. He had served as their Ambassador in Havana. But you’ve never heard of him. Nobody ever mentioned him to you. Not Ben. Not anyone.”

“No,” I said, as wearily as I could manage.

“Once a month Haggarty was accustomed to going into East Berlin and debriefing Seidl—in a car, in a safe flat, on a park bench, wherever—the usual thing. After the Wall there was a suspension of service for a while, before the meetings were cautiously resumed. The game was to cross in a Four Power vehicle—say, an army jeep—introduce a substitute, hop out at the right moment and rejoin the vehicle at an agreed point. It sounds perilous and it was, but with practice it worked. If Haggarty was on leave or sick, there was no meeting. A couple of months ago Head Office ruled that Haggarty should introduce Seidl to be a successor. Haggarty is past retiring age, Willis has had Berlin so long he’s blown sky high, and besides he knows far too many secrets to go wandering around behind the Curtain. Hence Ben’s posting to Berlin. Ben was untarnished. Clean. Haggarty in person briefed him—I gather exhaustively. I’m sure he was not merciful. Haggarty is not a merciful man, and a twelve-strong network can be a complicated matter: who works to whom and why; who knows whose identity; the cut-outs, codes, couriers, covernames, symbols, radios, dead-letter boxes, inks, cars, salaries, children, birthdays, wives, mistresses. A lot to get into one’s head all at once.”

“I know.”

“Ben told you, did he?”

I did not rise to him this time. I was determined not to. “We learned it on the course. Ad infinitum,” I said.

“Yes. Well, I suppose you did. The trouble is, the theory’s never quite the same as the real thing, is it? Who’s his best friend, apart from you?”

“I don’t know.” I was startled by his sudden change of tack. “Jeremy, I suppose.”

“Jeremy who?”

“Galt. He was on the course.”

“And women?”

“I told you. No one special.”

“Haggarty wanted to take Ben into East Berlin with him, make the introduction himself,” Smiley resumed. “The Fifth Floor wouldn’t wear that. They were trying to wean Haggarty away from his agent, and they don’t hold with sending two men into badland where one will do. So Haggarty took Ben through the rendezvous procedures on a street map, and Ben went into East Berlin alone. On the Wednesday, he did a dry run and reconnoitred the location. On the Thursday he went in again, this time for real. He went in legally, driven in a Control Commission Humber car. He crossed at Checkpoint Charlie at three in the afternoon and slipped out of the car at the agreed spot. His substitute rode in it for three hours, all as planned. Ben rejoined the car successfully at six-ten, and recrossed into West Berlin at six-fifty in the evening. His return was logged by the checkpoint. He had himself dropped at his flat. A faultless run. Willis and Haggarty were waiting for him at Station Headquarters, but he telephoned from his flat instead. He said the rendezvous had gone to plan, but he’d brought nothing back except a high temperature and a ferocious stomach bug. Could they postpone their debriefing till morning? Lamentably they could. They haven’t seen him or heard from him since. He sounded cheerful despite his ailment, which they put down to nerves. Has Ben ever been ill on you?”

“No.”

“He said their mutual friend had been in great form, real character and so forth. Obviously he could say no more on the open telephone. His bed wasn’t slept in, he took no extra clothes with him. There’s no proof that he was in his flat when he rang, there’s no proof he’s been kidnapped, there’s no proof he hasn’t been. If he was going to defect, why didn’t he stay in East Berlin? They can’t have turned him round and played him back at us or they wouldn’t have arrested his network. And if they wanted to kidnap him, why not do it while he was their side of the Wall? There’s no hard evidence that he left West Berlin by any of the approved corridors—train, autobahn, air. The controls are not efficient, and as you say, he was trained. For all we know, he hasn’t left Berlin at all. On the other hand, we thought he might have come to you. Don’t look so appalled. You’re his friend, aren’t you? His best friend? Closer to him than anyone? Young Galt doesn’t compare. He told us so himself. ‘Ben’s great buddy was Ned,’ he said. ‘If Ben was going to turn to any of us, it would have to be Ned.’ The evidence rather bears that out, I’m afraid.”

“What evidence?”

No pregnant pause, no dramatic change of tone, no warning of any kind: just dear old George Smiley being his apologetic self. “There’s a letter in his flat, addressed to you,” he said. “It’s not dated, just thrown in a drawer. A scrawl rather than a letter. He was probably drunk. It’s a love letter, I’m afraid.” And, having handed me a photocopy to read, he fetched us both another whisky.

—

Perhaps I do it to help me look away from the discomfort of the moment. But always when I set that scene in my memory I find myself switching to Smiley’s point of view. I imagine how it must have felt to be in his position.

What he had before him is easy enough to picture. See a striving trainee trying to look older than his years, a pipe-smoker, a sailor, a wise nodder, a boy who could not wait for middle age, and you have the young Ned of the early sixties.

But what he had behind him was not half so easy, and it was capable of altering his reading of me drastically. The Circus, though I couldn’t know it at the time, was in low water, dogged by unaccountable failure. The arrest of Ben’s agents, tragic in itself, was only the latest in a chain of catastrophes reaching across the globe. In northern Japan, an entire Circus listening station and its three-man staff had vanished into thin air. In the Caucasus, our escape lines had been rolled up overnight. We had lost networks in Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria, all in a space of months. And in Washington our American Cousins were voicing ever-louder dissatisfaction with our reliability, and threatening to cut the special cord for good.

In such a climate, monstrous theories became daily fare. A bunker mentality develops. Nothing is allowed to be accidental, nothing random. If the Circus triumphed, it was because we were allowed to do so by our opponents. Guilt by association was rife. In the American perception, the Circus was nurturing not one mole but burrows of them, each cunningly advancing the career of every other. And what joined them was not so much their pernicious faith in Marx—though that was bad enough—it was their dreadful English homosexuality.

I read Ben’s letter. Twenty lines long, unsigned, on white unwatermarked Service stationery, one side. Ben’s handwriting but awry, no crossings out. So yes, probably he was drunk.

It called me “Ned my darling.” It laid Ben’s hands along my face and drew my lips to his. It kissed my eyelids and my neck and, thank God, on the physical front it stopped there.

It was without adjectives, without art, and the more appalling for its lack of them. It was not a period piece, it was not affected. It was not arch, Greek or nineteen-twenties. It was an unobstructed cry of homosexual longing from a man I had known only as my good companion.

But when I read it, I knew it was the real Ben who had written it. Ben in torment confessing feelings I had never been aware of, but which when I read them I accepted as true. Perhaps that already made me guilty—I mean, to be the object of his desire, even if I had never consciously attracted it, and did not desire him in return. His letter said sorry, then it ended. I didn’t think it was unfinished. He had nothing more to say.

“I didn’t know,” I said.

I handed Smiley back the letter. He returned it to his pocket. His eyes didn’t leave my face.

“Or you didn’t know you knew,” he suggested.

“I didn’t know,” I repeated hotly. “What are you trying to make me say?”

You must try to understand Smiley’s eminence, the respect his name awoke in someone of my generation. He waited for me. I shall remember all my life the compelling power of his patience. A sudden shower of rain fell, with the handclap that London showers make in narrow sweets. If Smiley had told me he commanded the elements, I would not have been surprised.

“In England you can’t tell anyway,” I said sulkily, trying to collect myself. God alone knows what point I was trying to make. “Jack Arthur’s not married, is he? Nowhere to go in the evenings. Drinks with the lads till the bar closes. Then drinks a bit more. No one says Jack Arthur’s queer. But if they arrested him tomorrow in bed with two of the cooks, we’d say we’d known it all along. Or I would. It’s imponderable.” I stumbled on, all wrong, groping for a path and finding none. I knew that to protest at all was to protest too much, but I went on protesting all the same.

“Anyway, where was the letter found?” I demanded, trying to recover the initiative.

“In a drawer of his desk. I thought I told you.”

“An empty drawer?”

“Does it matter?”

“Yes, it does! If it was jammed in among old papers, that’s one thing. If it was put there to be found by you people, that’s another. Maybe he was forced to write it.”

“Oh, I’m sure he was forced,” said Smiley. “It’s just a question of what by. Did you know he was so lonely? If there was no one in his life but you, I’d have thought it would have been rather obvious.”

“Then why wasn’t it obvious to Personnel?” I said, bridling again. “My God, they grilled us for long enough before they appointed us. Sniffed round our friends and relations and teachers and dons. They know far more about Ben than I do.”

“Why don’t we just assume that Personnel fell down on the job? He’s human, this is England, we’re the clan. Let’s begin again with the Ben who’s disappeared. The Ben who wrote to you. There was no one close to him but you. Not anyone that you knew of, anyway. There could have been lots of people you didn’t know of, but that’s not your fault. As far as you knew, there was no one. We have that settled. Don’t we?”

“Yes!”

“Very well then, let’s talk about what you did know. How’s that?”

Somehow he brought me down to earth and we talked into the small grey hours. Long after the rain had stopped and the starlings had begun, we were talking. Or I was—and Smiley was listening as only Smiley can, eyes half closed, chins sunk into his neck. I thought I was telling him everything I knew. Perhaps he thought I was too, though I doubt it, for he understood far better than I the levels of self-deception that are the means of our survival. The phone rang. He listened, muttered “Thank you” and rang off. “Ben’s still missing and there are no new pointers,” he said. “You’re still the only clue.” He took no notes that I remember and I don’t know to this day whether he had a recorder running. I doubt it. He hated machines, and besides, his memory was more reliable than theirs.

I talked about Ben but I talked as much about myself, which was what Smiley wanted me to do: myself as the explanation for Ben’s actions. I described again the parallel nature of our lives. How I had envied him his heroic father—I, who had no father to remember. I made no secret of our shared excitement, Ben’s and mine, when we began to discover how much we had in common. No, no, I said again, I knew of no one woman—except his mother, who was dead. And I believed myself. I am sure I did.

In childhood, I told Smiley, I used to wonder whether somewhere in the world there was not another version of myself, some secret twin who had the same toys and clothes and thoughts that I did, even the same parents. Perhaps I’d read a book based on this story. I was an only child. So was Ben. I told Smiley all this because I was determined to talk directly to him from my thoughts and memories as they came to me, even if they incriminated me in his eyes. I only know that, consciously, I held nothing back from him, even if I reckoned it potentially ruinous to myself. Somehow Smiley had convinced me that was the least I owed to Ben. Unconsciously—well, that’s another matter altogether. Who knows what a man hides, even from himself, when he is telling the truth for his survival?

I told him of our first meeting—mine and Ben’s—in the Circus training house in Lambeth where the newly selected entrants were convened. Until then, none of us had met any of his fellow novices. We had hardly met the Circus either, for that matter, beyond the recruiting officer, the selectors and the vetting team. Some of us had only the haziest notion of what we’d joined. Finally we were to be enlightened—about each other, and about our calling—and we gathered in the waiting room like so many characters in a Foreign Legion novel, each with his secret expectations and his secret reasons for being there, each with his overnight bag containing the same quantity of shirts and underpants, marked in Indian ink with his personal number, in obedience to the printed instructions on the unheaded notepaper. My number was nine and Ben’s was ten. There were two people ahead of me when I walked into the waiting room, Ben and a stocky little Scot called Jimmy. I nodded at Jimmy, but Ben and I recognised each other at once—I don’t mean from school or university but as people who bear a physical and temperamental similarity to one another.

“Enter the third murderer,” he said, shaking my hand. It seemed a wonderfully inappropriate moment to be quoting Shakespeare. “I’m Ben, this is Jimmy. Apparently we’ve got no surnames any more. Jimmy left his in Aberdeen.”

So I shook Jimmy’s hand as well, and waited on the bench beside Ben to see who came through the door next.

“Five to one he’s got a moustache, ten to one a beard, thirty to one green socks,” said Ben.

“And evens on a cloak,” I said.

I told Smiley about the training exercises in unfamiliar towns when we had to invent a cover story, meet a contact and withstand arrest and interrogation. I let him sense how such exploits deepened our companionship, just as sharing our first parachute jumps deepened it, or compass-trekking at night across the Scottish Highlands, or looking out dead-letter boxes in godforsaken inner cities, or making a beach landing by submarine.

I described to him how the directing staff would sometimes drop a veiled reference to Ben’s father, just to emphasise their pride in having the son to teach. I told him about our leave weekends, how we would go once to my mother’s house in Gloucestershire and once to his father’s in Shropshire. And how, each parent being widowed, we had amused ourselves with the notion that we might broker a marriage between them. But the chances in reality were small, for my mother was stubbornly Anglo-Dutch, with jolly sisters and nephews and nieces who all looked like Breughel models, whereas Ben’s father had become a scholarly recluse whose only known surviving passion was for Bach.

“And Ben reveres him,” said Smiley, prodding again at the same spot.

“Yes. He adored his mother but she’s dead. His father has become some sort of icon for him.”

And I remember noticing to my shame that I had deliberately avoided using the word “love,” because Ben had used it to describe his feelings for me.

I told him about Ben’s drinking, though again I think he knew. How Ben normally drank little and often nothing at all, until an evening would come along—say, a Thursday and the weekend already looming—when he would drink insatiably, Scotch, vodka, anything, a shot for Ben, a shot for Arno. Then reel off to bed, speechless but inoffensive. And how on the morning after, he looked as if he had undergone a fortnight’s cure at a health farm.

“And there was really nobody but you?” Smiley mused. “Poor you, what a burden, coping with all that charm alone.”

I reminisced, I wandered, I told him everything as it came to me, but I knew he was still waiting for me to tell him something I was keeping back, if we could find out what it was. Was I conscious of withholding? I can only reply to you as I afterwards replied to myself: I did not know I knew. It took me a full twenty-four hours more of self-interrogation to winkle my secret out of its dark corner. At four A.M., he told me to go home and get some sleep. I was not to stray from my telephone without telling Personnel what I was up to.

“They’ll be watching your flat, naturally,” he warned me as we waited for my cab. “You won’t take it personally, will you? If you imagine being on the loose yourself, there are really very few ports you’d feel safe to head for in a storm. Your flat could rank high on Ben’s list. Assuming there isn’t anybody else except his father. But he wouldn’t go to him, would he? He’d be ashamed. He’d want you. So they watch your flat. It’s natural.”

“I understand,” I said as a fresh wave of disgust swept over me.

“After all, there’s no one of his age whom he seems to like better than you.”

“It’s all right. I understand,” I repeated.

“On the other hand of course, he’s not a fool, so he’ll know how we’re reasoning. And he could hardly imagine you would hide him in your priest-hole without telling us. Well, you wouldn’t, would you?”

“No. I couldn’t.”

“Which if he’s halfway rational he would also know, and that would rule you out for him. Still, he might drop by for advice or assistance, I suppose. Or a drink. It’s unlikely, but it’s not an assumption we can ignore. You must be far, far and away his best friend. Nobody to compare with you. Is there?”

I was wishing very much he would stop talking like this. Until now, he had shown the greatest delicacy in avoiding the topic of Ben’s declared love for me. Suddenly he seemed determined to reopen the wound.

“Of course he may have written to other people apart from you,” he remarked speculatively. “Men or women, both. It’s not so unlikely. There are times when one’s so desperate that one declares one’s love to all sorts of people. If one knows one’s dying or contemplating some desperate act. The difference in their case would be, he posted the letters. Still, we can’t go round Ben’s chums asking them whether he’s written them a steamy letter recently—it wouldn’t be secure. Besides, where would one start? That’s the question. You have to put yourself in Ben’s position.”

Did he deliberately plant the germ of self-knowledge in me? Later, I was certain he did. I remember his troubled, perspicacious gaze upon me as he saw me to the cab. I remember looking back as we turned the corner, and seeing his stocky figure standing in the centre of the street as he peered after me, ramming his last words into my departing head. “You have to put yourself in Ben’s position.”

—

I was in vortex. My day had begun in the small hours in South Audley Street and continued with barely pause for sleep through the Panda’s monkey and Ben’s letter until now. Smiley’s coffee and my sense of being the prisoner of outrageous circumstance had done the rest. But the name of Stefanie, I swear it, was still nowhere in my head—not at the front, not at the back. Stefanie still did not exist. I have never, I am sure, forgotten anyone so thoroughly.

Back in my flat, my periodical spurts of revulsion at Ben’s passion gave way to concern for his safety. In the living room I stared theatrically at the sofa where he had so often stretched out after a long day’s street training in Lambeth: “Think I’ll bunk down here if you don’t mind, old boy. Jollier than home tonight. Arno can sleep at home. Ben sleeps here.” In the kitchen I laid the palm of my hand on the old iron oven where I had fried him his midnight eggs: “Christ Almighty, Ned, is that a stove? Looks more like what we lost the Crimean War with!”

I remembered his voice, long after I had switched out my bedside light, rattling one crazy idea after another at me through the thin partition—the shared words we had, our insider language.

“You know what we ought to do with Brother Nasser?”

“No, Ben.”

“Give him Israel. Know what we ought to do with the Jews?”

“No, Ben.”

“Give them Egypt.”

“Why, Ben?”

“People are only satisfied with what doesn’t belong to them. Know the story of the scorpion and the frog crossing the Nile?”

“Yes, I do. Now shut up and go to sleep.”

Then he’d tell me the story, nevertheless, as a Sarratt case history. The scorpion as penetration agent, needing to contact his stay-behind team on the opposite bank. The frog as double agent, pretending to buy the scorpion’s cover story, then blowing it to his paymasters.

And in the morning he was gone, leaving behind him a one-line note saying, “See you at Borstal,” which was his name for Sarratt. “Love, Ben.”

Had we talked about Stefanie on those occasions? We hadn’t. Stefanie was someone we discussed in motion, glancingly, not side by side through a stationary wall. Stefanie was a phantom shared on the run, an enigma too delightful to dissect. So perhaps that’s why I didn’t think of her. Or not yet. Not knowingly. There was no dramatic moment when a great light went up and I sprang from my bath shouting, “Stefanie!” It simply didn’t happen that way, for the reason I’m trying to explain to you; somewhere in the no-man’s-land between confession and self-preservation, Stefanie floated like a mythic creature who only existed when she was owned up to. As best I remember, the notion of her first came back to me as I was tidying up the mess left by Personnel. Stumbling on my last year’s diary, I began flipping through it, thinking how much more of life we live than we remember. And in the month of June, I came on a line drawn diagonally through the two middle weeks, and the numeral “8” written neatly beside it—meaning Camp 8, North Argyll, where we did our paramilitary training. And I began to thank—or perhaps merely to sense—yes, of course, Stefanie.

And from there, still without any sudden Archimedean revelation, I found myself reliving our night drive over the moonlit Highlands. Ben at the wheel of the open Triumph roadster, and myself beside him making chatty conversation in order to keep him awake, because we were both happily exhausted after a week of pretending we were in the Albanian mountains raising a guerrilla army. And the June air rushing over our faces.

The rest of the intake were travelling back to London on the Sarratt bus. But Ben and I had Stefanie’s Triumph roadster because Steff was a sport, Steff was selfless, Steff had driven it all the way from Oban to Glasgow just so that Ben could borrow it for the week and bring it back to her when the course restarted. And that was how Stefanie came back to me—exactly as she had come to me in the car—amorphously, a titillating concept, a shared woman—Ben’s.

“So who or what is Stefanie, or do I get the usual loud silence?” I asked him as I pulled open the glove compartment and looked in vain for traces of her.

For a while I got the loud silence.

“Stefanie is a light to the ungodly and a paragon to the virtuous,” he replied gravely. And then, more deprecatingly: “Steff’s from the Hun side of the family.” He was from it himself, he liked to say in his more acerbic moods. Steff was from the Arno side, he was saying.

“Is she pretty?” I asked.

“Don’t be vulgar.”

“Beautiful?”

“Less vulgar, but still not there.”

“What is she, then?”

“She is perfection. She is luminous. She is peerless.”

“So beautiful, then?”

“No, you lout. Exquisite. Sans pareil. Intelligent beyond the dreams of Personnel.”

“And otherwise—to you—what is she? Apart from being Hun and the owner of this car?”

“She is my mother’s eighteenth cousin dozens of times removed. After the war she came and lived with us in Shropshire and we grew up together.”

“So she’s your age, then?”

“If the eternal is to be measured, yes.”

“Your proxy sister, as it were?”

“She was. For a few years. We ran wild together, picked mushrooms in the dawn, touched wee-wees. Then I went to boarding school and she returned to Munich to resume being a Hun. End of childhood idyll and back to Daddy and England.”

I had never known him so forthcoming about any woman, nor about himself.

“And now?”

I feared he had switched off again, but finally he answered me. “Now is less funny. She went to art school, took up with a mad painter and settled in a dower house in the Western Isles of Scotland.”

“Why’s it less funny? Doesn’t her painter like you?”

“He doesn’t like anyone. He shot himself. Reasons unknown. Left a note to the local council apologising for the mess. No note to Steff. They weren’t married, which made it more of a muddle.”

“And now?” I asked him again.

“She still lives there.”

“On the island?”

“Yes.”

“In the dower house?”

“Yes.”

“Alone?”

“Most of the time.”

“You mean you go and see her?”

“I see her, yes. So I suppose I go too. Yes. I go and see her.”

“Is it serious?”

“Everything to do with Steff is massively serious.”

“What does she do when you’re not there?”

“Same as she does when I’m there, I should think. Paints. Talks to the dickie birds. Reads. Plays music. Reads. Plays music. Paints. Thinks. Reads. Lends me her car. Do you want to know any more of my business?”

For a while we remained strangers, until Ben once more relented. “Tell you what, Ned. Marry her.”

“Stefanie?”

“Who else, you idiot? That’s a bloody good idea, come to think of it. I propose to bring the two of you together to discuss it. You shall marry Steff, Steff shall marry you, and I shall come and live with you both, and fish the loch.”

My question sprang from a monstrous, culpable innocence: “Why don’t you marry her yourself?” I asked.

Was it only now, standing in my flat and watching the slow dawn print itself on the walls, that I had the answer? Staring at the ruled-out pages of last June and remembering with a jolt his dreadful letter?

Or was it given to me already in the car, by Ben’s silence as we sped through the Scottish night? Did I know even then that Ben was telling me he would never marry any woman?

And was this the reason why I had banished Stefanie from my conscious memory, planting her so deep that not even Smiley, for all his clever delving, had been able to exhume her?

Had I looked at Ben as I asked him my fatal question? Had I looked at him as he refused, and went on refusing, to reply? Had I deliberately not looked at him at all? I was used to his silences by then, so perhaps, having waited in vain, I punished him by entering my own thoughts.

All I knew for certain was that Ben never answered my question, and that neither of us ever mentioned Stefanie again.

—

Stefanie his dream woman, I thought as I continued to examine the diary. On her island. Who loved him. But should marry me.

Who had the taint of death about her that Ben’s heroes always seemed to need.

Eternal Stefanie, a light to the ungodly, luminous, peerless, German Stefanie, his paragon and proxy sister—mother too, perhaps—waving to him from her tower, offering him sanctuary from his father.

You have to put yourself in Ben’s position, Smiley had said.

Yet even now, the open diary in my hands, I did not allow myself the elusive moment of revelation. An idea was forming in me. Gradually it became a possibility. And only gradually again, as my state of physical and mental siege bore in on me, did it harden into conviction, and finally purpose.

It was morning at last. I hoovered the flat. I dusted and polished. I considered my anger. Dispassionately, you understand; I reopened the desk, pulled out my desecrated private papers and burned in the grate whatever I felt had been irrevocably sullied by the intrusion of Smiley and Personnel: the letters from Mabel, the exhortations from my former tutor to “do something a bit more fun” than mere research work at the War Office.

I did these things with the outside of myself while the rest of me grappled with the correct, the moral, the decent course of action.

Ben, my friend.

Ben, with the dogs after him.

Ben in anguish, and God knew what more besides.

Stefanie.

I took a long bath, then lay on my bed watching the mirror on the chest of drawers because the mirror gave me a view of the street. I could see a couple of men whom I took to be Monty’s, dressed in overalls and doing something longwinded with a junction box. Smiley had said I shouldn’t take them personally. After all, they only wanted to put Ben in irons.

—

It is ten o’clock of the same long morning as I stand purposefully to one side of my rear window, peering down into the squalid courtyard, with its creosoted shed that used to be the old privy, and its clapboard gate that opens on the dingy street. The street is empty. Monty is not so perfect after all.

The Western Isles, Ben had said. A dower house on the Western Isles.

But which isle? And Stefanie who? The only safe guess was that if she came from the German side of Ben’s family and lived in Munich, and that since Ben’s German relatives were grand, she was likely to be titled.

I rang Personnel. I might have rung Smiley but I felt safer lying to Personnel. He recognised my voice before I had a chance to state my business.

“Have you heard anything?” he demanded.

“Afraid not. I want to go out for an hour. Can I do that?”

“Where to?”

“I need a few things. Provisions. Something to read. Thought I’d just pop round to the library.”

Personnel was famous for his disapproving silences.

“Be back by eleven. Ring me as soon as you get in.”

Pleased by my cool performance, I went out by the front door, bought a newspaper and bread. Using shop windows, I checked my back. Nobody was following me, I was sure. I went to the public library and from the reference section drew an old copy of Who’s Who and a tattered Almanach de Gotha. I did not pause to ask myself who on earth, in Battersea of all places, could have worn out the Almanach de Gotha. I consulted the Who’s Who first and turned up Ben’s father, who had a knighthood and a battery of decorations: “1936, married the Gräfin Ilse Arno zu Lothringen, one son Benjamin Arno.” I switched to the Almanach and turned up the Arno Lothringens. They rated three pages, but it took me no time to identify the distant cousin whose first name was Stefanie. I boldly asked the librarian for a telephone directory for the Western Isles of Scotland. She hadn’t one, but allowed me to call enquiries on her telephone, which was fortunate for I had no doubt my own was being tapped. By ten-forty-five I was back at the telephone in my flat talking to Personnel in the same relaxed tone as before.

“Where did you go?” he asked.

“To the newsagent. And the baker’s.”

“Didn’t you do the library?”

“Library? Oh yes. Yes, I did.”

“And what, pray, did you take out?”

“Nothing, actually. For some reason I find it hard to settle to anything at the moment. What do I do next?”

Waiting for him to reply, I wondered whether I had given too many answers but decided I had not.

“You wait. The same as the rest of us.”

“Can I come in to Head Office?”

“Since you’re waiting, you might as well wait there as here.”

“I could go back to Monty, if you like.”

It was probably my over-acute imagination at work, but I had a mental image of Smiley standing at his elbow, telling him how to answer me.

“Just wait where you are,” he said curtly.

I waited, Lord knows how. I pretended to read. I dramatised myself and wrote a pompous letter of resignation to Personnel. I tore up the letter and burned the pieces. I watched television, and in the evening I lay on the bed observing the changing of Monty’s guard in the mirror and thinking of Stefanie, then Ben, then Stefanie again, who was now firmly lodged in my imagination, always outside my reach, dressed in white, Stefanie the immaculate, Ben’s protector. I was young, let me remind you, and in matters of women less experienced than you would have suspected if you had heard me speak of them. The Adam in me was still pretty much a child, not to be confused with the warrior.

I waited till ten, then slipped downstairs with a bottle of wine for Mr. Simpson and his wife, and sat with them while we drank it, watching more television. Then I took Mr. Simpson aside.

“Chris,” I said. “I know it’s daft but there’s a jealous lady stalking me and I’d like to leave by the back way. Would you mind letting me out through your kitchen?”

An hour later, I was on the night sleeper to Glasgow. I had obeyed my counter-surveillance procedures to the letter and I was certain I was not being followed. At Glasgow Central Station, all the same, I took the precaution of dawdling over a pot of tea in the buffet while I cocked an eye for potential watchers. As a further precaution, I hired a cab to Helensburgh on the other side of the Clyde, before joining the Campbeltown bus to West Loch Tarbert. The ferry to the Western Isles sailed three days a week in those days, except for the short summer season. But my luck held: a boat was waiting, and she sailed as soon as I had boarded her, so that by early afternoon we had passed Jura, docked at Port Askaig and were heading out to the open sea again under a darkening northern sky. We were down to three passengers by then, an old couple and myself, and when I went up on deck to fend off their questions, the first mate cheerfully asked me more of his own: Was I on holiday now? Was I a doctor then? Was I married at all? Nevertheless, I was in my element. From the moment I take to the sea, everyone is clear to me, everything possible. Yes, I thought excitedly, surveying the great crags as they approached, and smiling at the shrieking of the gulls, yes, this is where Ben would hide! This is where his Wagnerian demons would find their ease!

You must understand and try to pardon my callow susceptibility in those days to all forms of Nordic abstraction. What Ben was driven by, I pursued. The mythic island—it should have been Ossian’s!—the swirling clouds and tossing sea, the priestess in her solitary castle—I could not get enough of them. I was in the middle of my Romantic period, and my soul was lost to Stefanie before I met her.

The dower house was on the other side of the island, they told me at the shop, better ask young Fergus to take you in his jeep. Young Fergus turned out to be seventy, if a day. We passed between a pair of crumbling iron gates. I paid off young Fergus and rang the bell. The door opened; a fair woman stared at me.

She was tall and slim. If it was really true that she was my own age—and it was—she had an authority it would take me another lifetime to acquire. She wore, instead of white, a paint-smeared smock of dark blue. She held a palette knife in one hand, and as I spoke she raised it to her forehead and pushed away a stray bit of hair with the back of her wrist. Then lowered it again to her side, and stood listening to me long after I had finished speaking, while she pondered the resonance of my words inside her head and compared them with the man or boy who stood before her. But the strangest part of this moment is also the hardest for me to relate. It is that Stefanie came closer to the figure of my imagination than made sense. Her pallor, her air of uncorrupted truthfulness, of inner strength, coupled with an almost pitiable fragility, corresponded so exactly with my expectation that, had I bumped into her in another place, I would have known that she was Stefanie.

“My name’s Ned,” I said, speaking to her eyes. “I’m a friend of Ben’s. Also a colleague. I’m alone. No one knows I’m here.”

I had meant to go on. I had a pompous speech in my head that said something like “Please tell him that whatever he’s done, it makes no difference to me.” But the steadiness of her gaze prevented me.

“Why should it matter who knows that you are here and who does not?” she asked. She spoke without accent, but with a German cadence, making tiny hesitations before the open vowels. “He is not hiding. Who is looking for him except you? Why should he hide?”

“I understood he might be in some kind of trouble,” I said, following her into the house.

The hall was half studio, half makeshift living room. Dustsheets covered much of the furniture. The remains of a meal lay on the table: two mugs, two plates, both used.

“What kind of trouble?” she demanded.

“It’s to do with his work in Berlin. I thought perhaps he would have told you about it.”

“He has told me nothing. He has never talked to me about his work. Perhaps he knows I am not interested.”

“May I ask what he does talk about?”

She considered this. “No.” And then, as if relenting, “At present he does not talk to me at all. He seems to have become a Trappist. Why not? Sometimes he watches me paint, sometimes he fishes, sometimes we eat something or drink a little wine. Quite often he sleeps.”

“How long’s he been here?”

She shrugged. “Three days?”

“Did he come straight from Berlin?”

“He came on the boat. Since he does not speak, that’s all I know.”

“He disappeared,” I said. “There’s a hue and cry for him. They thought he might come to me. I don’t think they know about you.”

She was listening to me again, listening first to my words and then my silence. She seemed to be without embarrassment, like a listening animal. It’s the authority of suffering, I thought, remembering her lover’s suicide, she cannot be reached by small worries.

“They,” she repeated with puzzlement. “Who are they? What is there to know about me that is so particular?”

“Ben was doing secret work,” I said.

“Ben?”

“Like his father,” I said. “He was tremendously proud of following in his father’s steps.”

She was shocked and agitated. “What? Who for? Secret work? What a fool!”

“For British Intelligence. He was in Berlin, attached to the Military Adviser’s office, but his real work was intelligence.”

“Ben?” she said as the disgust and disbelief gathered in her face. “All those lies he must tell? Ben?”

“Yes, I’m afraid so. But it was duty.”

“How terrible.”

Her easel stood with its back to me. Placing herself the other side of it, she began mixing her paints.

“If I could just talk to him,” I said, but she pretended to be too much lost to her painting to hear me.

The back of the house gave on to parkland, then a line of pines hunchbacked by the wind. Beyond the pines lay a loch surrounded by small mauve hills. On its far bank I made out a fisherman standing on a collapsed jetty. He was fishing but not casting. I don’t know how long I watched him, but long enough to know that it was Ben, and that he had no interest in catching fish. I pushed open the French windows and stepped into the garden. A cold wind was ruffling the surface of the loch as I tiptoed along the jetty. He was wearing a tweed jacket that was too full for him. I guessed it had belonged to her dead lover. And a hat, a green felt hat that, like all hats with Ben, looked as though it had been made for him. He didn’t turn, though he must have felt my footsteps. I placed myself beside him.

“The only thing you’ll catch like that is pneumonia, you German ass,” I said.

His face was turned against me, so I remained standing beside him, watching the water with him and sensing the nudge of his shoulder as the rocking jetty threw us carelessly together. I watched the water thicken and the sky turn grey behind the mountains. A few times I watched the red float of his line vanish below the oily surface. But if a fish had struck, Ben made no effort to play it or reel it in. I saw the lights go on in the house, and the figure of Stefanie standing at her easel, adding a brush stroke, then backing her wrist against her brow. The air turned cold and the night gathered, but Ben didn’t move. We were in competition with each other, as we had been during our strongarm training. I was demanding, Ben was refusing. Only one of us could have his way. If it took me all night and all tomorrow, and if I starved in the process, I wasn’t going to yield till he’d acknowledged me.

A half moon came up, and stars. The wind dropped and silver ground mist formed across the blackened heather. And still we stood there, waiting for one of us to surrender. I was nearly sleeping on my feet when I heard the rattle of his reel and saw the float lift from the water and the bare line after it, flashing in the moonlight. I didn’t move and didn’t speak. I let him reel in and make his hook fast. I let him turn to me, because he had to if he wanted to walk past me down the jetty.

We stood face-to-face in the moonlight. Ben looked downwards, apparently studying my feet to see how he could step round them. His gaze travelled up to my face, but nothing changed in his expression. His locked features stayed locked. If they betrayed anything, it was anger.

“Well,” he said. “Enter the third murderer.”

This time neither of us laughed.

—

She must have sensed our approach and removed herself. I heard music playing in another part of the house. When we reached the hall, Ben headed for the stairs but I grabbed his arm.

“You’ve got to tell me,” I said. “There’s never going to be anyone better to tell. I broke ranks to come here. You’ve got to tell me what happened to the network.”

There was a long drawing room beyond the hall, with shuttered windows and more dustsheets over the sofas. It was cold, but Ben still had his jacket on and I my greatcoat. I opened the shutters and let the moonlight in. I had an instinct that anything brighter would disturb him. The music was not far away from us. I thought it was Grieg. I wasn’t sure. Ben spoke without remorse and without catharsis. He had confessed enough to himself, all day and night, I knew. He talked in the dead tone of somebody describing a disaster he knows that nobody can understand who was not part of it, and the music kept playing below his voice. He had no use for himself. The glamorous hero had given up as one of life’s contenders. Perhaps he was a little tired of his guilt. He spoke tersely. I think he wanted me to go.

“Haggarty’s a shit,” he said. “World class. He’s a thief, he drinks, he rapes a bit. His one justification was the Seidl network. Head Office were trying to wheedle him away from it and give Seidl to new people. I was the first new person. Haggarty decided to punish me for taking away his network.”

He described the studied insults, the successive night duties and weekends, the hostile reports passed back to Haggarty’s supporters’ club in Head Office.

“At first he wouldn’t tell me anything about the network. Then Head Office bawled him out, so he told me everything. Fifteen years of it. Every tiny detail of their lives, even the joes who’d died on the job. He’d send files to me in pyramids, all flagged and cross-referred. Read this, remember that. Who’s she? Who’s he? Note this address, the name, these covernames, those symbols. Escape procedures. Fallbacks. The recognition codes and safety procedures for the radio. Then he’d test me. Take me to the safe room, sit me across the table, grill me. ‘You’re not up to it. We can’t send you in till you know your stuff. You’d better stay in over the weekend and mug it up. I’ll test you again on Monday.’ The network was his life. He wanted me to feel inadequate. I did and I was.”

But Head Office did not give in to Haggarty’s bullying, neither did Ben. “I put myself on an exam footing,” he said.

As the day of his first meeting with Seidl approached, Ben assembled for himself a system of mnemonics and acronyms that would enable him to encompass the network’s fifteen years of history. Seated night and day in his office at Station Headquarters, he drew up consciousness charts and communications charts and devised systems for memorizing the aliases, covernames, home addresses and places of employment of its agents, sub-agents, couriers and collaborators. Then he transferred his data to plain postcards, writing on one side only. On the other, in one line, he wrote the subject “dead-letter boxes,” “salaries,” “safe houses.” Each night, before going back to his flat or stretching out in the Station sickroom, he would play a game of memory with himself, first putting the cards face downward on his desk, then comparing what he had remembered with the data on the reverse side.

“I didn’t sleep a lot but that’s not unusual,” he said. “As the day came up, I didn’t sleep at all. I spent the whole night mugging up my stuff, then I lay on the couch staring at the ceiling. When I got up I couldn’t remember any of it. Sort of paralysis. I went to my room, sat down at the desk, put my head in my hands and started to ask myself questions. ‘If covername Margaret-stroke-two thinks he’s under surveillance, whom does he contact how, and what does the contact then do?’ The answer was a total blank.

“Haggarty wandered in and asked how I was feeling and I said ‘fine.’ To do him justice, he wished me luck and I think he meant it. I thought he’d shoot some trick question at me and I was going to tell him to go to hell. But he just said, ‘Komm gut heim,’ and patted my shoulder. I put the cards in my pocket. Don’t ask me why. I was scared of failure. That’s why we do everything, isn’t it? I was scared of failure and I hated Haggarty and Haggarty had put me to the torture. I’ve got about two hundred other reasons why I took the cards, but none of them help a great deal. Perhaps it was my way of committing suicide. I quite like that idea. I took them and I went across. We used a limousine, specially converted. I sat in the back with my double hidden under the seat. The Vopos weren’t allowed to search us, of course. All the same, switching with a double as you turn a sharp corner is a bloody hairy game. You’ve got to sort of roll out of the car. Seidl had provided a bike for me. He believes in bicycles. His guards used to lend him one when he was a prisoner of war in England.”

Smiley had told me the story already, but I let Ben tell it to me again.

“I had the cards in my jacket pocket,” he went on. “My inside jacket pocket. It was one of those blazing-hot Berlin days. I think I unbuttoned my jacket while I bicycled. I don’t know. When I try to remember, I sometimes unbuttoned it and I sometimes didn’t. That’s what happens to your memory when you work it to death. It does all the versions for you. I got to the rendezvous early, checked the cars, the usual bullshit, went in. It had all come back to me by then. Taking the cards with me had done the trick. I didn’t need them. Seidl was fine. I was fine. We did our business, I briefed him, gave him some money—all just like Sarratt. I rode back to the pickup point, ditched the bike, dived into the car and as we crossed into West Berlin I realised I hadn’t got the cards. I was missing the weight of them, or the pressure or something. I was in a panic but I always am. Deep down, I’m in a panic all the time. That’s who I am. This was just a bigger panic. I made them drop me at my flat, rang Seidl’s emergency number. No one answered. I tried the fallback. No answer. I tried his stand-in, a woman called Lotte. No answer. I took a cab to Tempelhof, made a discreet exit, came here.”

Suddenly there was only Stefanie’s music to listen to. Ben had finished his story. I didn’t realise at first that this was all there was. I waited, staring at him, expecting him to go on. I had been wanting a kidnapping at least—savage East German secret police rising from the back of his car, sandbagging him, forcing a chloroformed mask on him while they rifled his pockets. It was only gradually that the appalling banality of what he had told me got through to me: that you could lose a network as easily as you could lose a bunch of keys or a cheque book or a pocket handkerchief. I was craving for a greater dignity, but he had none to offer me.

“So where did you last have them?” I said stupidly. I could have been talking to a child about his lost schoolbooks, but he didn’t mind, he had no pride any more.

“The cards?” he said. “Maybe on the bicycle. Maybe rolling out of the car. Maybe getting back into it. The bike has a security chain to lock round the wheel. I had to stoop down to put it on and take it off. Maybe then. It’s like losing anything. Till you find it, you never know. Afterwards, it’s obvious. But there hasn’t been an afterwards.”

“Do you think you were followed?”

“I don’t know. I just don’t know.”

I wanted to ask him when he had written his love letter to me, but I couldn’t bring myself to. Besides, I thought I knew it was in one of his drinking sessions when Haggarty was riding him hardest and he was in despair. What I really wanted him to tell me was that he had never written it. I wanted to put the clock back and make things the way they had been until a week ago. But the simple questions had died with the simple answers. Our childhoods were over for good.

—

They must have surrounded the house, and certainly they never rang the bell. Monty was probably standing outside the window when I opened the shutters to let the moonlight in, because when he needed to, he just stepped into the room, looking embarrassed but resolute.

“You did ever so nice, Ned,” he said consolingly. “It was the public library gave you away. Your nice librarian lady took a real shine to you. I think she’d have come with us if we’d let her.”

Skordeno followed him, and then Smiley appeared in the other doorway, wearing the apologetic air that frequently accompanied his most ruthless acts. And I recognised with no particular surprise that I had done everything he had wanted me to do. I had put myself in Ben’s position and led them to my friend. Ben didn’t seem particularly surprised either. Perhaps he was relieved. Monty and Skordeno moved into place either side of him, but Ben remained sitting among the dustsheets, his tweed jacket pulled around him like a rug. Skordeno tapped him on the shoulder; then Monty and Skordeno stooped and, like a pair of furniture removers used to one another’s timing, lifted him gently to his feet. When I protested to Ben that I had not knowingly betrayed him, he shook his head to say it didn’t matter. Smiley stepped aside to let them by. His myopic gaze was fixed on me enquiringly.

“We’ve arranged a special sailing,” he said.

“I’m not coming,” I replied.

I looked away from him and when I looked again he was gone. I heard the jeep disappearing down the track. I followed the music across the empty hall into a study crammed with books and magazines and what appeared to be the manuscript of a novel spread over the floor. She was sitting sideways in a deep chair. She had changed into a housecoat and her pale golden hair hung loose over her shoulders. She was barefoot, and did not lift her head as I entered. She spoke to me as if she had known me all her life, and I suppose in a way she had, in the sense that I was Ben’s familiar. She switched off the music.

“Were you his lover?” she asked.

“No. He wanted me to be. I realise that now.”

She smiled. “And I wanted him to be my lover, but that wasn’t possible either, was it?” she said.

“It seems not.”

“Have you had women, Ned?”

“No.”

“Had Ben?”

“I don’t know. I think he tried. I suppose it didn’t work.”

She was breathing deeply and tears were trickling down her cheeks and neck. She climbed to her feet, eyes pressed shut, and, like a blind woman, stretched out her arms for me to embrace her. Her body squeezed against me as she buried her head in my shoulder and shook and wept. I put my arms round her but she pushed me away and led me to the sofa.

“Who made him become one of you?” she said.

“No one. It was his own choice. He wanted to imitate his father.”

“Is that a choice?”

“Of a sort.”

“And you too, you are a volunteer?”

“Yes.”

“Whom are you imitating?”

“No one.”

“Ben had no capacity for such a life. They had no business to be charmed by him. He was too persuasive.”

“I know.”

“And you? Do you need them to make a man of you?”

“It’s something that has to be done.”

“To make a man of you?”

“The work. It’s like emptying the dustbins or cleaning up in hospitals. Somebody has to do it. We can’t pretend it isn’t there.”

“Oh, I think we can.” She took my hand and wound her fingers stiffly into mine. “We pretend a lot of things aren’t there. Or we pretend that other things are more important. That’s how we survive. We shall not defeat liars by lying to them. Will you stay here tonight?”

“I have to go back. I’m not Ben. I’m me. I’m his friend.”

“Let me tell you something. May I? It is very dangerous to play with reality. Will you remember that?”

—

I have no picture of our leavetaking, so I expect it was too painful and my memory has rejected it. All I know now is, I had to catch the ferry. There was no jeep waiting so I walked. I remember the salt of her tears and the smell of her hair as I hurried through the night wind, and the black clouds writhing round the moon and the thump of the sea as I skirted the rocky bay. I remember the headland and the stubby little lighted steamer starting to cast off. And I know that for the entire journey I stood on the foredeck and that for the last part of it Smiley stood beside me. He must have heard Ben’s story by then, and come up on deck to offer me his silent consolation.

I never saw Ben again—they kept me from him as we disembarked—but when I heard he had been discharged from the Service I wrote to Stefanie and asked her to tell me where he was. My letter was returned marked “Gone Away.”

I would like to be able to tell you that Ben did not cause the destruction of the network, because Bill Haydon had betrayed it long before. Or better, that the network had been set up for us by the East Germans or the Russians in the first place, as a means of keeping us occupied and feeding us disinformation. But I am afraid the truth is otherwise, for in those days Haydon’s access was limited by compartmentation, and his work did not take him to Berlin. Smiley even asked Bill, after his capture, whether he had had a hand in it, and Bill had laughed.

“I’d been wanting to get my hooks on that network for years,” he’d replied. “When I heard what had happened, I’d a bloody good mind to send young Cavendish a bunch of flowers, but I suppose it wouldn’t have been secure.”

The best I could tell Ben, if I saw him today, is that if he hadn’t blown the network when he did, Haydon would have blown it for him a couple of years later. The best I could tell Stefanie is that she was right in her way, but then so was I, and that her words never left my memory, even after I had ceased to regard her as the fountain of all wisdom. If I never understood who she was—if she belonged, as it were, more to Ben’s mystery than my own—she was nevertheless the first of the siren voices that sounded in my ear, warning me that my mission was an ambiguous one. Sometimes I wonder what I was for her, but I’m afraid I know only too well: a callow boy, another Ben, unversed in life, banishing weakness with a show of strength, and taking refuge in a cloistered world.

—

I went back to Berlin not long ago. It was a few weeks after the Wall had been declared obsolete. An old bit of business took me, and Personnel was pleased to pay my fare. I never was formally stationed there, as it worked out, but I had been a frequent visitor, and for us old cold warriors a visa to Berlin is like returning to the source. And on a damp afternoon I found myself standing at the grimy little bit of fencing known grandly as the Wall of the Unknown Ones, which was the memorial to those killed while trying to escape during the sixties, some of whom did not have the foresight to give their names in advance. I stood among a humble group of East Germans, mostly women, and I noticed that they were examining the inscriptions on the crosses: unknown man, shot on such-and-such a date, in 1965. They were looking for clues, fitting the dates to the little that they knew.

And the sickening notion struck me that they could even have been looking for one of Ben’s agents who had made a dash for freedom at the eleventh hour and failed. And the notion was all the more bewildering when I reflected that it was no longer we Western Allies, but East Germany itself, which was struggling to snuff out its existence.

The memorial is gone now. Perhaps it will find a corner in a museum somewhere, but I doubt it. When the Wall came down—hacked to pieces, sold—the memorial came down with it, which strikes me as an appropriate comment on the fickleness of human constancy.

4

Somebody asked Smiley about interrogation, yet again. It was a question that cropped up often as the night progressed—mainly because his audience wanted to squeeze more case histories out of him. Children are merciless.

“Oh, there’s some art to faulting the liar, of course there is,” Smiley conceded doubtfully, and took a sip from his glass. “But the real art lies in recognising the truth, which is a great deal harder. Under interrogation, nobody behaves normally. People who are stupid act intelligent. Intelligent people act stupid. The guilty look innocent as the day, and the innocent look dreadfully guilty. And just occasionally people act as they are and tell the truth as they know it, and of course they’re the poor souls who get caught out every time. There’s nobody less convincing to our wretched trade than the blameless man with nothing to hide.”

“Except possibly the blameless woman,” I suggested under my breath.

George had reminded me of Bella and the ambiguous sea captain Brandt.

—

He was a big, rough flaxen fellow, at first guess Slav or Scandinavian, with the roll of a landed seaman and the far eyes of an adventurer. I first met him in Zurich where he was in hot water with the police. The city superintendent called me in the middle of the night and said, “Herr Konsul, we have somebody who says he has information for the British. We have orders to put him over the border in the morning.”

I didn’t ask which border. The Swiss have four, but when they are throwing somebody out they’re not particular. I drove to the district prison and met him in a barred interviewing room: a caged giant in a roll-neck pullover who called himself Sea Captain Brandt, which seemed to be his personal version of Kapitän zur See.

“You’re a long way from the sea,” I said as I shook his great, padded hand.

As far as the Swiss were concerned, he had everything wrong with him. He had swindled a hotel, which in Switzerland is such a heinous crime it gets its own paragraph in the criminal code. He had caused a disturbance, he was penniless and his West German passport did not bear examination—though the Swiss refused to say this out loud, since a fake passport could prejudice their chances of getting rid of him to another country. He had been picked up drunk and vagrant and he blamed it on a girl. He had broken someone’s jaw. He insisted on speaking to me alone.

“You British?” he asked in English, presumably in order to disguise our conversation from the Swiss, though they spoke better English than he did.

“Yes.”

“Prove, please.”

I showed him my official identity card, describing me as ViceConsul for Economic Affairs.

“You work for British Intelligence?” he asked.

“I work for the British government.”

“Okay, okay,” he said, and in sudden weariness sank his head into his hand so that his long blond hair flopped forward, and he had to toss it back again with a sweep of his arm. His face was chipped and pitted like a boxer’s.

“You ever been in prison?” he asked, staring at the scrubbed white table.

“No, thank God.”

“Jesus,” he said, and in bad English told me his story.

He was a Latvian, born in Riga of Latvian and Polish parents. He spoke Latvian, Russian, Polish and German. He was born to the sea, which I sensed immediately, for I was born to it myself. His father and grandfather had been sailors, he had served six years in the Soviet navy, sailing the Arctic out of Archangel, and the Sea of Japan out of Vladivostok. A year back he had returned to Riga, bought a small boat and taken up smuggling along the Baltic coast, running cheap Russian vodka into Finland with the help of Scandinavian fishermen. He was caught and put in prison near Leningrad, escaped and stowed away to Poland, where he lived illegally with a Polish girl student in Cracow. I tell you this exactly as he told it to me, as if stowing away to Poland from Russia were as self-evident as catching a number 11 bus or popping down the road for a drink. Yet even with my limited familiarity with the obstacles he had overcome, I knew it was an extraordinary feat—and no less so when he performed it a second time. For when the girl left him to marry a Swiss salesman, he headed back to the coast and got himself a ride to Malmö, then down to Hamburg where he had a distant cousin, but the cousin was distant indeed, and told him to go to hell. So he stole the cousin’s passport and headed south to Switzerland, determined to get back his Polish girl. When her new husband wouldn’t let her go, Brandt broke the poor man’s jaw for him, so here he was, a prisoner of the Swiss police.

All this still in English, so I asked him where he’d learned it. From the BBC, when he was out smuggling, he said. From his Polish girl—she was a language student. I had given him a packet of cigarettes and he was devouring them one after another, making a gas chamber of our little room.

“So what’s this information you’ve got for us?” I asked him.

As a Latvian, he said in preamble, he felt no allegiance to Moscow. He had grown up under the lousy Russian tyranny in Latvia, he had served under lousy Russian officers in the navy, he had been sent to prison by lousy Russians and hounded by lousy Russians, and he had no compunction about betraying them. He hated Russians. I asked him the names of the ships he had served on and he told me. I asked him what armament they carried and he described some of the most sophisticated stuff they possessed at that time. I gave him a pencil and paper and he made surprisingly impressive drawings. I asked him what he knew about signals. He knew a lot. He was a qualified signalman and had used their latest toys, even if his memory was a year old. I asked him, “Why the British?” and he replied that he had known “a couple of you guys in Leningrad”—British sailors on a goodwill visit. I wrote down their names and the name of their ship, returned to my office and sent a flash telegram to London because we only had a few hours’ grace before they put him over the border. Next evening Sea Captain Brandt was undergoing rigorous questioning at a safe house in Surrey. He was on the brink of a dangerous career. He knew every nook and bay along the south Baltic coast; he had good friends who were honest Latvian fishermen, others who were black marketeers, thieves and disaffected drop-outs. He was offering exactly what London was looking for after our recent losses—the chance to build a new supply line in and out of northern Russia, across Poland into Germany.

—

I have to set the recent history for you here—of the Circus, and of my own efforts to succeed in it.

After Ben, it had been touch and go for me whether they promoted me or threw me out. I think today that I owed more to Smiley’s backstairs intervention than I gave him credit for at the time. Left to himself, I don’t think Personnel would have kept me five minutes. I had broken bounds while under house arrest, I had withheld my knowledge of Ben’s attachment to Stefanie, and if I was not a willing recipient of Ben’s amorous declarations, I was guilty by association, so to hell with me.

“We rather thought you might like to consider the British Council,” Personnel had suggested nastily, at a meeting adorned not even by a cup of tea.

But Smiley interceded for me. Smiley, it appeared, had seen beyond my youthful impulsiveness, and Smiley commanded what amounted to his own modest private army of secret sources scattered around Europe. A further reason for my reprieve was provided—though not even Smiley could have known it at the time—by the traitor Bill Haydon, whose London Station was rapidly acquiring a monopoly of Circus operations worldwide. And if Smiley’s questing eye had not yet focused on Bill, he was already convinced that the Fifth Floor was nursing a Moscow Centre mole to its bosom, and determined to assemble a team of officers whose age and access placed them beyond suspicion. By a mercy, I was one.

For a few months I was kept in limbo, devilling in large back rooms, evaluating and distributing low-grade reports to Whitehall clients. Friendless and bored, I was seriously beginning to wonder whether Personnel had decided to post me to death, when to my joy I was summoned to his office and in Smiley’s presence offered the post of second man in Zurich, under a capable old trooper named Eddows, whose stated principle was to leave me to sink or swim.

Within a month I was installed in a small flat in the Altstadt, working round the clock eight days a week. I had a Soviet naval attaché in Geneva who loved Lenin but loved a French air hostess more, and a Czech arms dealer in Lausanne who was having a crisis of conscience about supplying the world’s terrorists with weapons and explosives. I had a millionaire Albanian with a chalet in St. Moritz who was risking his neck by returning to his homeland and recruiting members of his former household, and a nervous East German physicist on attachment to the Max Planck Institute in Essen who had secretly converted to Rome. I had a beautiful little microphone operation running against the Polish Embassy in Bern and a telephone tap on a pair of Hungarian spies in Basel. And I was by now beginning to fancy myself seriously in love with Mabel, who had recently been transferred to Vetting Section, and was the toast of the Junior Officers’ Bar.

And Smiley’s faith in me was not misplaced, for by my own exertions in the field, and his insistence upon rigid need-to-know at home, we succeeded in netting valuable intelligence and even getting it into the right hands—and you would be surprised how rarely that combination is achieved.

So that when after two years of this the Hamburg slot came up—a one-man post, and working directly to London Station, now willy-nilly the operational hub of the Service—I had Smiley’s generous blessing to apply for it, whatever his private reservations about Haydon’s widening embrace. I angled, I was not brash, I reminded Personnel of my naval background. I let him infer, if I did not say it in as many words, that I was straining at the bonds of Smiley’s old-world caution. And it worked. He gave me Hamburg Station on the Haydon ticket, and the same night, after a romantic dinner at Bianchi’s, Mabel and I slept together, the first time for each of us.

My sense of the rightness of things was further increased when, on looking over my new stocklist, I saw to my amusement that one Wolf Dittrich, alias Sea Captain Brandt, was a leading player in my new cast of characters. We are talking of the late sixties now. Bill Haydon had three more years to run.

—

Hamburg had always been a good place to be English, now it was an even better place to spy. After the lakeside gentility of Zurich, Hamburg crackled with energy and sparkled with sea air. The old Hanseatic ties to Poland, northern Russia and the Baltic states were still very much alive. We had commerce, we had banking—well, so had Zurich. But we had shipping too, and immigrants and adventurers. We had brashness and vulgarity galore. We were the German capital of whoredom and the press. And on our doorstep we had the secretive lowlands of Schleswig-Holstein, with their horizontal rainstorms, red farms, green fields and cloudstacked skies. Every man has his price. To this day, my soul can be bought for a jar of Lübeck beer, a pickled herring and a glass of schnapps after a trudge along the dykes.

Everything else about the job was equally pleasing. I was Ned the Assistant Shipping Consul; my humble office was a pretty brick cottage with a brass plate, handy enough for the Consulate General, yet prudently apart from it. Two clerks on secondment from the Admiralty performed my cover work for me, and kept their mouths shut. I had a radio and a Circus cypher clerk. And if Mabel and I were not yet engaged to be married, our relationship had reached a stage when she was ready to clear her decks for me whenever I popped back to London for a consultation with Bill or one of his lieutenants.

To meet my joes, I had a safe flat in Wellingsbüttel overlooking the cemetery, on the upper floor of a flower shop managed by a retired German couple who had belonged to us in the war. Their busiest days were Sundays, and on Monday mornings a queue of kids from the housing estate sold them back the flowers they had sold the day before. I never saw a safer spot. Hearses, covered vans and funeral corteges rolled past us all day long. But at night the place was literally as quiet as the grave. Even the exotic figure of my sea captain became unremarkable when he donned his black hat and dark suit and swung into the brick archway of our shop and, with his commercial traveller’s briefcase bouncing at his side, stomped up the stairs to our innocent front door marked “Büro.”

I shall go on calling him Brandt. Some people, however much they change their names, have only one.

—

But the jewel in my crown was the Margerite—or, as we called her in English, the Daisy. She was a fifty-foot clinker-built, double-ended fishing boat converted to a cabin cruiser, with a wheelhouse, a main saloon and four berths in the foc’sle. She had a mizzen mast and sail to steady her from rolling. She had a dark-green hull with light-green gunnels and a white cabin roof. She was built for stealth, not speed. In poor light and choppy water, she was invisible to the naked eye. She had sparse top-hamper, and lay close to the water, which gave her a harmless image on the radar screens, particularly in heavy weather. The Baltic is a vengeful sea, shallow and tideless. Even in a mild wind, the waves come steep and nasty. At ten knots and full throttle, the Daisy pitched and rolled like a pig. The only speedy thing about her was the fourteen-foot Zodiac dinghy hoisted as the ship’s lifeboat and lashed to the cabin roof, with a Johnson 50-horsepower to whisk our agents in and out.

For her berth she had the old fishing village of Blankenese on the river Elbe, just a few short miles out of Hamburg. And there she lay contentedly among her equals, as humble an example of her kind as you could wish. From Blankenese, when she was needed, she could slip upriver to the Kiel Canal, and crawl its sixty miles at five knots before hitting open sea.

She had a Decca navigator that took readings from slave stations on the shore, but so did everyone. She had nothing inside or out that was not consistent with her modesty. Each of her three-man crew could turn his hand to everything. There were no specialists, though each had his particular love. When we needed expert despatchers or fitters, the Royal Navy was on hand to help us.

So you can see that, what with a new dynamic team to back me up at London Station, and a full hand of sources to test my versatility, and the Daisy and her crew to manage, I had everything that a Head of Station with salt water in his blood could decently inherit.

And of course I had Brandt.

Brandt’s two years before the Circus mast had altered him in ways I at first found hard to define. It was not so much an aging or a hardening I observed in him, as that wearying alertness, that overwakefulness, which the secret world with time imprints upon even the most relaxed of its inhabitants. We met at the safe flat. He entered. He stopped dead and stared at me. His jaw fell open and he let out a great shout of recognition. He seized my arms in a sultan’s greeting and nearly broke them. He laughed till the tears came, he held me away to look at, then hauled me back to hug against his black overcoat. But his spontaneity was strained by watchfulness. I knew the signs. I had seen them in other joes.

“God damn, why they don’t tell me nothing, Herr Konsul?” he cried as he embraced me yet again. “What damn game they playing? Listen, we do some good things over there, hear me? We got good people, we beat those damn Russians to death, okay?”

“I know,” I said, laughing back at him. “I heard.”

And when night fell he insisted on seating me among the coils of rope in the back of his van and driving me at breakneck speed to the remote farmhouse that London had acquired for him. He was determined to introduce me to his crew and I looked forward to it. And I looked forward even more to getting a sight of his girlfriend Bella, because London Station was feeling a little queasy about her recent arrival in his life. She was twenty-two years old and had been with him three months. Brandt was looking hard at fifty. It was midsummer, I remember, and the inside of the van smelt of freesias, for he had bought her a bunch at the market.

“She’s a number one girl,” he told me proudly as we entered the house. “Cooks good, makes good love, learns English, everything. Hey, Bella, I brought you new boyfriend!”

—

Painters and sailors make the same kind of houses, and Brandt’s was no exception. It was scant but homely, with brick floors and low, white-raftered ceilings. Even in the darkness it seemed to usher in the outside light. From the front door we stepped straight down into the drawing room. A wood fire smouldered in the hearth and a ship’s lamp shone on the naked flank of a girl as she lay reading on a heap of cushions. Hearing us enter, she sprang excitedly to her feet. Twenty-two and going on eighteen, I thought as she grabbed my hand and gaily pumped it up and down. She was wearing a man’s shirt and very short shorts. A gold amulet glinted at her throat, declaring Brandt’s possession of her: this is my woman, wearing my badge of ownership. Her face was peasant and Slav and naturally happy, with clear, wide eyes, high cheeks and a tipped-up smile even when her lips were in repose. Her bare legs were long and tanned to the same gold colour as her hair. She had a small waist, high breasts and full hips. It was a very beautiful, very young body, and whatever Brandt was thinking, it belonged to no one of his age, or even mine.

She set his freesias in a vase and fetched black bread and pickles and a bottle of schnapps. She was carelessly provocative in her movements. Either she knew exactly, or not at all, the power of each slight gesture she made. She sat beside him at the table, smiled at me and threw her arm around him, letting her shirt gape. She took possession of his hand and showed me by comparison the slenderness of her own, while Brandt talked recklessly about the network, mentioning joes and places by name, and Bella measured me with her frank eyes.

“Listen,” Brandt said, “we got to get Aleks another radio, hear me, Ned? They take it apart, they put new spares, batteries, that radio’s lousy. That’s a bad-luck radio.”

When the phone rang, he answered it imperiously: “Listen, I’m busy, okay?…Leave the package with Stefan, I said. Listen, have you heard from Leonids?”

The room gradually filled up. First to enter was a darting, bandy-legged man with a drooping moustache. He kissed Bella rapturously but chastely on the lips, punched Brandt’s forearm and helped himself to a plateful of food.

“That’s Kazimirs,” Brandt explained, with a jab of his thumb. “He’s a bastard and I love him. Okay?”

“Very okay,” I said heartily.

Kazimirs had escaped three years ago across the Finnish border, I remembered. He had killed two Soviet frontier guards along his way, and he was crazy about engines—never happier than when he was up to his elbows in oil. He was also the respected ship’s cook.

After Kazimirs came the Durba brothers, Antons and Alfreds, stocky and pert like Welshmen, and blue-eyed like Brandt. The Durbas had sworn to their mother that they would never go to sea together, so they took it in turns, for the Daisy handled best with three, and we liked to leave space for cargo and unexpected passengers. Soon everyone was talking at once, shooting questions at me, not waiting for the answers, laughing, proposing toasts, smoking, reminiscing, conspiring. Their last run had been bad, really bad, said Kazimirs. That was three weeks ago. Daisy had hit a freak storm off the Gulf of Danzig and lost her mizzen. At Ujava on the Latvian coast, they had missed the light signal in the fog, said Antons Durba. They had fired a rocket and God help them, there was this whole damned reception party of crazy Latvians standing on the beach like a delegation of city fathers! Wild laughter, toasts, then a deep Nordic silence while everyone but myself was struck by the same solemn memory.

“To Valdemars,” said Kazimirs, and we drank a toast to Valdemars, a member of their group who had died five years ago. Then Bella took Brandt’s glass and drank too, a separate ceremony while she watched me over the brim. “Valdemars,” she repeated softly, and her solemnity was as beguiling as her smile. Had she known Valdemars? Had he been one of her lovers? Or was she simply drinking to a brave fellow countryman who had died for the Cause?

But I have to tell you a little more about Valdemars—not whether he had slept with Bella or even how he had died, for no one knew for sure. All that was known was that he had been put ashore and never heard of again. One story said he had managed to swallow his pill, another that he had given orders to his bodyguard to shoot him if he walked into a trap. But the bodyguard had disappeared too. And Valdemars was not the only one who had disappeared during what was now remembered by the group as “the autumn of betrayal.” In the next few months, as the anniversaries of their deaths came round, we drank to four other Latvian heroes who had perished unaccountably in the same ill-starred period—delivered, it was now believed, not to partisans in the forest, nor loyal reception parties on the beach, but straight into the hands of Moscow Centre’s chief of Latvian operations. And if new networks had been cautiously rebuilt meanwhile, five years later the stigma of these betrayals still clung to the survivors, as Haydon had been at pains to warn me.

“They’re a careless bunch of sods,” he had said with his usual irreverence, “and when they’re not being careless, they’re duplicitous. Don’t be fooled by all that Nordic phlegm and backslapping.”

I was remembering his words as I continued my mental reconnaissance of Bella. Sometimes she listened resting her head on her clenched fist, sometimes she laid her head on Brandt’s forearm, dreaming his thoughts for him while he plotted and drank. But her big, light eyes never ceased visiting me, working me out, this Englishman sent to rule our lives. And occasionally, like a warm cat, she shook herself free of Brandt and took time to groom herself, recrossing her legs and primly correcting the fit of her shorts, or twisting a hank of hair into a plait, or drawing her gold amulet from between her breasts and examining it front and back. I waited for a spark of complicity between herself and other members of the crew, but it was clear to me that Brandt’s girl was holy ground. Even the ebullient Kazimirs deadened his face to talk to her. She fetched another bottle, and when she returned she sat down beside me and took hold of my hand and opened my palm on the table, examining it while she spoke in Latvian to Brandt, who broke into a gust of laughter which the rest of them took up.

“You know what she say?”

“I’m afraid I don’t.”

“She says English make damn good husband. If I die, she going to have you instead!”

She clambered back to him and, laughing, wriggled into his embrace. She didn’t look at me after that. It was as if she didn’t need to. So I avoided her eyes in return, and thought dutifully about her history as told to London Station by Sea Captain Brandt.

She was the daughter of a farmer from a village near Jelgava, who had been shot dead when security police raided a secret meeting of Latvian patriots, Brandt had said. The farmer was a founder member of the group. The police wanted to shoot the girl as well, but she escaped into the forest and joined up with a band of partisans and outlaws who passed her round among them for a summer, which did not seem to have upset her. By stages she had made her way to the coast and, by a route that was still mysterious to us, got word to Brandt, who, without troubling to mention her to London in advance, picked her off a beach while he was landing a new radio operator to replace another who had had a nervous breakdown. Radio operators are the opera star of every network. If they don’t have breakdowns, they have shingles.

“Great guys,” said Brandt enthusiastically as he drove me back to town. “You like them?”

“They’re terrific,” I said, and meant it, for there is no better company anywhere than men who love the sea.

“Bella want to work with us. She want to kill the guys who shoot her father. I say no. She’s too young. I love her.”

A fierce white moon shone on the flat meadows, and by its light I saw his craggy face in profile, as if set against the storm to come.

“And you knew him,” I suggested, affecting to recapitulate something I vaguely remembered. “Her father. Feliks. He was a friend of yours.”

“Sure I knew Feliks! I love him! He was a great guy! The bastards shot him dead.”

“Did he die immediately?”

“They shoot him to pieces. Kalashnikovs. They shoot everybody. Seven guys. All shot.”

“Did anyone see it happen?”

“One guy. He see it, run away.”

“What became of the bodies?”

“Secret police take them. They’re scared, those police guys. Don’t want no trouble from the people. Shoot the partisans, throw them in a truck, drive away to hell.”

“How well did you know him—her father?”

Brandt made his sweeping gesture with his forearm. “Feliks? He was my friend. Fought at Leningrad. Prisoner of war in Germany. Stalin didn’t like those guys. When they came home from Germany, he sent them to Siberia, shot them, gave them a bad time. What the hell?”

But London Station had picked up a different story, even if at this stage it was only a whisper. The father had been the informant, said the whisper. Recruited in Siberian captivity and sent back to Latvia to penetrate the groups. He had called the meeting, tipped off his masters, then climbed out of the back window while the partisans were being slaughtered. As a reward, he was now managing a collective farm near Kiev, living under a different name. Somebody had recognised him and told somebody else who had told somebody else. The source was delicate, checking would be a lengthy process.

So I was warned. Watch out for Bella.

—

I was more than warned. I was disturbed. In the next weeks I saw Bella several times, and each time I was obliged to record my impressions on the encounter sheet which London Station now insisted must be completed each time she was sighted. I made a rendezvous with Brandt at the safe flat, and to my alarm he brought her with him. She had spent the day in town, he said. They were on their way back to the farmhouse, why not?

“Relax. She don’t speak no English,” he reminded me with a laugh, noticing my discomfort.

So I kept our business short, while she lounged on the sofa and smiled and listened to us with her eyes, but mostly she listened to me.

“My girl’s studying,” Brandt told me proudly, patting her on the backside as we prepared to separate. “One day she be a big professor. Nicht wahr, Bella? Du wirst ein ganz grosser Professor, du!”

A week later, when I took a discreet look at the Daisy at her berth in Blankenese, Bella was there again, wearing her shorts and scampering over the deck in her bare feet as if we were planning a Mediterranean cruise.

“For heaven’s sake. We can’t have girls abroad. London will go mad,” I told Brandt that night. “So will the crew. You know how superstitious they are about having women on the ship. You’re the same yourself.”

He brushed me aside. My predecessor had raised no objection, he said. Why should I?

“Bella makes the boys happy,” he insisted. “She’s from home, Ned, she’s a kid. She’s a family for them, come on!”

When I checked the file, I discovered he was half right. My predecessor, a seconded naval officer, had reported that Bella was “conscious to” the Daisy, even adding that she seemed to “exert a benign influence as ship’s mascot.” And when I read between the lines of his report of the Daisy’s most recent operational mission, I realised that Bella had been there on the dockside to wave them off—and no doubt to wave them safely back as well.

Now of course operational security is always relative. I had never imagined that everything in the Brandt organisation was going to be played by Sarratt rules. I was aware that in the cloistered atmosphere of Head Office it was too easy to mistake our tortuous structures of codenames, symbols and cutouts for life on the ground. Cambridge Circus was one thing. A bunch of volatile Baltic patriots risking their necks was another.

Nevertheless the presence of an uncleared, unrecruited campfollower at the heart of our operation, privy to our plans and conversations, went beyond anything I had imagined—and all this in the wake of the betrayals five years earlier. And the more I worried over it, the more proprietorial, it seemed to me, did Brandt’s devotion to the girl become. His endearments grew increasingly lavish in my presence, his caresses more demonstrative. “A typical older man’s infatuation for a young girl,” I told London, as if I had seen dozens of such cases.

Meanwhile a new mission was being planned for the Daisy, the purpose to be revealed to us later. Twice, three times a week, I found myself of necessity driving out to the farmhouse, arriving after dark, then sitting for hours at the table while we studied charts and weather maps and the latest shore observation bulletins. Sometimes the full crew came, sometimes it was just the three of us. To Brandt it made no difference. He clasped Bella to him as if the two of them were in the throes of constant ecstasy, fondling her hair and neck, and once forgetting himself so far as to slip his hand inside her shirt and cup her naked breast while he gave her a prolonged kiss. Yet as I discreetly looked away from these disturbing scenes, what remained longest in my sight was Bella’s gaze on me, as if she were telling me she wished that it was I, not Brandt, who was caressing her.

“Explicit embraces appear to be the norm,” I wrote drily on the encounter sheet, Hamburg to London Station, late that night in my office. And in my nightly log: “Route, weather and sea conditions acceptable. We await firm orders from Head Office. Morale of crew high.”

But my own morale was fighting for survival as one calamity followed upon another.

There was first the unfortunate business of my predecessor, full name Lieutenant Commander Perry de Mornay Lipton, D.S.O., R.N., retd., sometime hero of Jack Arthur Lumley’s wartime irregulars. For ten years until my arrival, Lipton had cultivated the rôle of Hamburg character, by day acting the English bloody fool, sporting a monocle and hanging around the expatriate clubs ostensibly to pick up free advice on his investments. But come nightfall, he put on his secret hat and went to work briefing and debriefing his formidable army of secret agents. Or so the legend, as I had heard it from Head Office.

The only thing that had puzzled me was that there had been no formal handover between us, but Personnel had told me tersely Lipton was on a mission elsewhere. I was now admitted to the truth. Lipton had departed, not on some life-and-death adventure in darkest Russia, but to southern Spain, where he had set up house with a former Corporal of Horse named Kenneth, and two hundred thousand pounds of Circus funds, mainly in gold bars and Swiss francs, which he had paid out over several years to brave agents who did not exist.

The mistrust shed by this sad discovery now spilled into every operation Lipton had touched, including inevitably Brandt’s. Was Brandt too a Lipton fiction, living high on our secret funds in exchange for ingeniously fabricated intelligence? Were his networks, were his vaunted collaborators and friends, many of whom were drawing liberal salaries?

And Bella—was Bella part of the deception? Had Bella softened his head and weakened his will? Was Brandt too feathering his nest before retiring with his loved one to the south of Spain?

A procession of Circus experts passed through the door of my little shipping office. First came an improbable man called Captain Plum. Crouched in the privacy of my safe room, Plum and I pored over the Daisy’s old fuel dockets and mileage records and compared them with the perilous routes that Brandt and the crew claimed to have steered on their missions along the Baltic coast. The ship’s logs were sketchy at best, as most logs are, but we read them all, alongside Plum’s records of signals intercepts, radar stations, navigational buoys and sightings of Soviet patrol boats.

A week later Plum was back, this time accompanied by a foulmouthed Mancunian called Rose, a former Malayan policeman who had made himself a name as a Circus sniffer dog. Rose questioned me as roughly as if I were myself a part of the deception. But when I was about to lose my temper he disarmed me by declaring that, on the evidence available, the Brandt organisation was innocent of misdoing.

Yet in the minds of such people as this, suspicions of one kind only fired suspicions of another, and the question mark hanging over Bella’s father, Feliks, had not gone away. If the father was bad, then the daughter must know it, went the reasoning. And if she knew and had not said it, then she was bad as well. Moscow Centre, like the Circus, was well known for recruiting entire families. A father-and-daughter team was eminently plausible. Soon, without any solid evidence I was aware of, London Station began to peddle the notion that Feliks had been responsible for the betrayals five years ago.

Inevitably, this placed Bella in an even more sinister light. There was talk of ordering her to London and grilling her, but here my authority as Brandt’s case officer held sway. Impossible, I advised London Station. Brandt would never stand for it. Very well, came the answer—typical of Haydon’s cavalier approach—bring them both over and Brandt can sit in while we interrogate the girl. This time I was sufficiently moved to fly back to London myself, where I insisted on stating my case personally to Bill. I entered his room to find him stretched out on a chaise longue, for he affected the eccentricity of never sitting at his desk. A joss stick was burning from an old ginger jar.

“Maybe Brother Brandt isn’t as prickly as you think, Master Ned,” he said accusingly, peering at me over his half-framed spectacles. “Maybe you’re the prickly one?”

“He’s besotted with her,” I said.

“Are you?”

“If we start accusing his girl in front of him, he’ll go crazy. He lives for her. He’d tell us to go to hell and dismantle the network, and I doubt whether anyone else could run it.”

Haydon pondered this: “The Garibaldi of the Baltic. Well, well. Still, Garibaldi wasn’t much bloody good, was he?” He waited for me to answer but I preferred to take his question as rhetorical. “Those jokers she shacked up in the forest with,” he drawled finally. “Does she talk about them?”

“She doesn’t talk about any of it. Brandt does, she doesn’t.”

“So what does she talk about?”

“Nothing much. If she says anything of significance, it’s usually in Latvian and Brandt translates or not as he thinks fit. Otherwise she just smiles and looks.”

“At you?”

“At him.”

“And she’s quite a looker, I gather.”

“She’s attractive, I suppose. Yes.”

Once more he took his time to consider this. “Sounds to me like the ideal woman,” he pronounced. “Smiles and looks, keeps quiet, fucks—what more can you ask?” He again examined me quizzically over his spectacles. “Do you mean she doesn’t even speak German? She must do, coming from up there. Don’t be daft.”

“She speaks German reluctantly when she’s got no choice. Speaking Latvian’s a patriotic act. German isn’t.”

“Good tits?”

“Not bad.”

“Couldn’t you get alongside her a bit more? Without rocking the lovers’ boat, obviously. Just the answers to a few basic questions would be a help. Nothing dramatic. Just whether she’s the real thing, or whether Brother Brandt smuggled her into the nest in a warming pan—or whether Moscow Centre did, of course. See what you can get out of her. He’s not her natural father, you realise that, I suppose. He can’t be.”

“Who isn’t?” For a confused moment I had thought he was still talking about Brandt.

“Her daddy. Feliks. The one who got shot or didn’t. The farmer. According to the record, she was born January ’45, wasn’t she?”

“Yes.”

“Ergo, conceived around April ’44. At which time—if Brother Brandt’s to be believed—her supposed daddy was languishing in a prisoner-of-war camp in Germany. Mind you, we shouldn’t be too straitlaced about it. No great feat of skill, I suppose, to get yourself knocked up while your old man’s in the pen. Still every little detail helps when we’re trying to decide whether to abort a network which may have run its course.”

I was grateful for Mabel’s company that night, even if we had not yet found our form as the great lovers we were so anxious to become. But of course I didn’t tell her anything of my business, least of all about Bella. As a Vetting girl, Mabel was on the routine side of the Circus. It would have been quite improper for me to share my problems with her. If we had already been married—well, that might have been a different thing. Meanwhile, Bella must remain my secret.

—

And she did. Back in my solitary bed in Hamburg I thought of Bella and little else. The double mystery of her—as a woman and as a potential traitor—elevated her to an object of almost unlimited danger to me. I saw her no longer as a fringe figure of our organisation but its destiny. Her virtue as ours. If Bella was pure, so was the network. But if she was the plaything of another service—a deceiver planted on us to tempt and weaken and ultimately betray us—then the integrity of those round her was soiled with her own, and the network would indeed, as Haydon put it, have run its course.

I closed my eyes and saw her gaze upon me, sunny and beckoning. I felt again the softness of her kisses each time we greeted one another—always, as it seemed to me, held for a fraction longer than formality required. I pictured her liquid body in its different poses, and turned it over and over in my imagination in the same way that I contemplated the possibilities of her treason. I remembered Haydon’s suggestion that I could try to “get alongside her,” and discovered I was incapable of separating my sense of duty from my desires.

I retold myself the story of her escape, questioning it at every stage. Had she got away before the shooting or during it? And how? Had some lover among the security troops tipped her off? Had there been a shooting at all? And why did she not grieve more for her dead father, instead of making love to Brandt? Even her happiness seemed to speak against her. I imagined her in the forest, with the cut-throats and outlaws. Did each man take her at his will, or did she live now with this one, now with that? I dreamed of her, naked in the forest and myself naked with her. I awoke ashamed of myself and put through an early-morning call to Mabel.

Did I understand myself? I doubt it. I knew little about women, beautiful women least of all. I am sure it never occurred to me that finding fault with Bella might be my way of weakening her sexual hold on me. Determined on the straight path, I wrote to Mabel daily. Meanwhile I fixed on the Daisy’s forthcoming mission as the perfect opportunity to undertake a hostile questioning of Bella. The weather was turning foul, which was what suited the Daisy best. It was autumn and the nights were lengthening. The Daisy liked the dark too.

“Crew stand by to sail Monday,” said London Station’s first signal. The second, which did not arrive till Friday evening, gave their destination as the Narva Bay in northern Estonia, not a hundred miles west of Leningrad. Never before had the Daisy ventured so far along the Russian seaboard; only rarely had she been used in support of non-Latvian patriots.

“I would give my eyes,” I told Brandt.

“You’re too damn dangerous, Ned,” he replied, clapping me on the shoulder. “Be seasick four days, lie in your bunk, get in the way, what the hell?”

We both knew it was impossible. The most Head Office had ever granted me was a night spin round the island of Bornholm, and even that had been like drawing teeth.

On the Saturday night we gathered in the farmhouse. Kazimirs and Antons Durba arrived together in the van. It was Antons’s turn to go to sea. With such a small operational crew, everyone had to know everything, everyone had to be interchangeable. There was no more drink. From now on, they were a dry ship. Kazimirs had brought lobsters. He cooked them elaborately, with a sauce that he was famous for, while Bella played cabin girl to him, fetching and carrying and being decorative. When we had eaten, Bella cleared the table and I spread the charts under the hanging overhead lamp.

Brandt had said six days. It was an optimistic guess. From the Kieler Förde the Daisy would make for open sea, passing Bornholm on the Swedish side. On reaching the Swedish land of Gotland she would put in at Sundre on the southern tip, refuel and top up her provisions. While refuelling, she would be approached by two men, one of whom would ask if they had any herring. They were to reply: “Only in tins. There have been no herring in these waters for years.” All such exchanges sound fatuous in cold blood, and this one reduced Antons and Kazimirs to fits of nervous laughter. Returning from the kitchen, Bella joined in.

One of the men would then ask to come aboard, I continued. He was an expert—I did not say in sabotage, because the crew had mixed feelings on the matter. His name for the trip would be Volodia. He would be carrying a leather suitcase and, in his coat pocket, a brown button and a white button as proof of his good faith. If he did not know his name, or carried no suitcase, or did not produce the buttons, they were to put him back on shore alive, but return to Kiel at once. There was an agreed radio signal for this eventuality. Otherwise they should make no signals whatever. A moment’s silence gripped us, and I heard the sound of Bella’s bare feet on the brick floor as she fetched more firewood.

From Gotland they should head northeast through international waters, I said, and steer a central course up the Gulf of Finland, until they were lying off the island of Hogland, where they should idle till dusk, then head due south for Narva Bay, reckoning to make landfall by midnight.

I had brought large-scale charts of the Bay and photographs of the sandy coastline. I spread them on the table and the men gathered to my side to look at them. As they did so, something made me glance up and I caught sight of Bella, curled up in her own corner of the room, her excited eye full upon me in the firelight.

I showed them the point on the beach that the Zodiac should make for, and the point on the headland where they should watch for signals. The landing party would be wearing ultra-violet glasses, I said; the Estonian reception party would be using an ultra-violet lamp. Nothing would be visible to the naked eye. After the passenger and his suitcase had been landed, the dinghy should wait no more than two minutes for any possible replacement before heading back for the Daisy at full speed. The dinghy should be crewed by one man only, so that if necessary he could take a second passenger on the return run. I recited the recognition signals to be exchanged with the reception party, and this time nobody laughed. I gave the shelving and gradients of the landing beach. There would be no moon. Bad weather was expected, and surely hoped for. Bella brought us tea, brushing carelessly against us as she set out the mugs. It was as if she were harnessing her sexuality to our cause. Reaching Brandt, who was still stooped over the beach chart, she gravely caressed his broad back with both hands as if filling him with her youthful strength.

I returned to my flat at five in the morning with no thought of sleep. In the afternoon I rode with Brandt and Bella to Blankenese in the van. Antons and Kazimirs had been with the boat all day. They were dressed for the voyage, in bobble hats and oilskin trousers. Orange life jackets were airing on the deck. Shaking hands with each man in turn, I passed round the seaproofed capsules that contained their lethal pills of pure cyanide. A grey drizzle was falling; the little quay was deserted. Brandt walked to the gangway, but when Bella made to follow him, he stopped her.

“No more,” he told her. “You stay with Ned.”

She was wearing his old duffle coat, and a woollen hat with earflaps, which I suspected she had been wearing when he rescued her. He kissed her and she hugged him till he pushed her off and went aboard, leaving her at my side. Antons stepped into the engine house and we heard the engine cough and come to life. Brandt and Kazimirs cast off. Nobody looked at us any more. The Daisy cleared the quay and headed sedately for the centre of the river. The three men’s backs remained turned against us. We heard the hoot of her ship’s horn, and watched her until she had slipped behind the curtain of grey mist.

Like abandoned children, Bella and I walked hand in hand up the ramp to Brandt’s parked van. Neither of us spoke. Neither of us had anything to say. I glanced back for a last sight of the Daisy, but the mist had swallowed her. I looked at Bella and saw that her eyes were unusually bright, and that she was breathing fast.

“He’ll be all right,” I assured her, releasing her hand while I unlocked the door. “They’re very experienced. He’s a great man.” Even in German, it sounded rather silly.

She got into the van beside me and took back my hand. Her fingers were like separate lives inside my palm. Get alongside her, Haydon had kept insisting. In my most recent signal, I had assured him I would try.

—

At first we drove in companionable silence, joined and separated by our shared experience. I was driving cautiously because I was taut, but my hand still held hers to give her comfort, and when I was obliged to take a firmer grasp of the steering wheel, I saw that her hand stayed beside me, fingers upward, waiting for me to come back. Suddenly I was terribly concerned about where to take her. Absurdly so. I thought of an elegant basement restaurant with tiled alcoves where I took my banking joes. The elderly waiters would provide her with the kind of reassurance she needed. Then I remembered she was wearing Brandt’s duffle coat, jeans and rubber boots. I was no better dressed myself. So where? I wondered anxiously. It was getting late. Through the mist, lights were coming on in the cottages.

“Are you hungry?” I asked.

She put her hand back on her lap.

“Should I find us somewhere to eat?” I asked.

She shrugged.

“Shall I take you to the farmhouse?” I suggested.

“What for?”

“Well I mean, how are you going to spend the next few days? What did you do the last time he was away?”

“I rested from him,” she said, with a laugh I had not expected.

“Then tell me how you would like to wait for him,” I suggested magnanimously, with a hint of rank. “Do you prefer to be alone? Meet up with other exiles and have gossips? What’s best?”

“It’s not important,” she said, and moved away from me. “Tell me all the same. Help me.”

“I shall go to cinemas. Look at shops. Read magazines. I shall listen to music. Try to study. Get bored.”

I decided on the safe flat. There would be food in the fridge, I told myself. Give her a meal, a drink, get her talking. Then either drive her to the farmhouse or send her by cab.

We entered the city. I parked two streets away from the safe flat and took her arm as we walked along the tree-lined pavement. I would have done the same for any woman in a dark street, but there was something disturbing about feeling her bare arm inside Brandt’s sleeve. The city was unfamiliar to me. In the lighted windows of the houses, people talked and laughed as if we didn’t exist. She clasped my arm and drew my hand against her breast—to be precise, the underside of it, I could feel its shape precisely through the layers of clothing. I was remembering the Circus bar-room jokes about certain officers who picked up their best intelligence in bed. I was remembering Haydon asking me whether she had good tits. I felt ashamed, and took back my hand.

There was a man-door to one side of the cemetery gates. As I unlocked it and ushered her ahead of me, she turned and kissed me on the eyes, one after the other, while she held my face in both her hands. I gripped her waist and she seemed weightless. She was very happy. I could see her smile by the yellow cemetery lights.

“Everyone is dead,” she whispered excitedly. “But we are alive.”

I went ahead of her up the stairs. Halfway, I looked back to make sure she was following me. I was scared that she might have changed her mind. I was scared altogether—not because I was without experience—thanks to Mabel I was not—but because I knew already that I was encountering a different category of woman from any I had known before. She was standing right behind me, holding her shoes in her hands, still smiling.

I opened the door for her. She stepped through and kissed me again, laughing in merriment, just as if I had lifted her up and carried her across the threshold on our wedding day. I remembered stupidly that Russians never shake hands in doorways, and perhaps Latvians didn’t either, and perhaps her kisses were some kind of ceremony of exorcism. I would have asked her, except that, near enough, I had lost my voice. I closed the door, then crossed the room to turn up the fire, an electric convector affair which, as long as the room was cold, blew out warm air with enormous vigour, but afterwards only fitfully, like an old dog dreaming.

I went to the kitchen to fetch some wine. When I returned she had disappeared and the light was on under the bathroom door. I set the table carefully with knives and forks and spoons and cheese and cold meat and glasses and paper napkins and anything else that I could possibly think of, because I was taking refuge in the distancing formalities of hospitality.

The bathroom door opened and she emerged wearing Brandt’s coat wrapped round her as a dressing-gown and, to judge by her bare legs, little else. Her hair was brushed. In our safe flats, we always keep a brush and comb for hospitality.

And I remember thinking that if she was as bad as Haydon seemed to think she was, it was a pretty terrible thing for her to be wearing Brandt’s coat in order to deceive the man she was already betraying, and a pretty terrible thing for me to be the man she had selected, while my agents were heading for high danger with lethal pills in their coat pockets. But I had no sense of guilt. I mention this in order to try to explain that my mind was zigzagging in any number of directions in its effort to still my desire for her.

I kissed her and took off her coat, and I never saw before or since anyone so beautiful. And the truth is that, at that moment and at that age, I had not yet acquired the power to distinguish between truth and beauty. They were one and the same to me, and I could only feel awe for her. If I had ever suspected her of anything, the sight of her naked body convinced me of her innocence.

After that, the images of my memory must tell you their own tale. Even today I see us as two other people, never as ourselves.

Bella naked by the half light of the fire, lying on her side as I had first seen her by the fire in the farmhouse. I had fetched the duvet from the bedroom.

“You’re so beautiful,” she whispered.

It had not occurred to me that I could fill her with a comparable wonder.

Bella at the window, the light from the cemetery making a perfect statue of her body, gilding her fleece and drawing light patterns on her breasts.

Bella kissing Ned’s face, hundreds of small kisses as she brings him back to life. Bella laughing at the limitless beauty of herself, and of the two of us together. Bella taking laughter into love, a thing that had never happened to me before, until every part of each of us was a matter for celebration, to be kissed and suckled and admired in its own way.

Bella turning away from Ned to offer herself, thrusting back to accept him as she continues whispering to him. Her whispering stops. She begins her ascent, arching backward until she is upright. And suddenly she is crying out, crying to me and the dead, and she is the most living thing on earth.

Ned and Bella calm at last, standing at the window and gazing down into the graveyard.

There is Mabel, I say, but it seems too early to get married.

“It is always too early,” she replies as we start to make love again.

Bella in the bath and myself crammed happily against the taps at the other end while she lazily fondles me under the water and talks about her childhood.

Bella on the duvet, drawing my head between her legs. Bella above me, riding me.

Bella kneeling over me, her secret garden open to my face as she transports me to places I have never imagined, not even lying in my wretched single bed, dreaming over and over of this moment and trying with far too little knowledge to ward off the unknown.

And betweenwhiles you may see Ned dozing on Bella’s breast, our untouched food still on the table that I had set so formally in self-protection. With a mind made lucid by our lovemaking I ask whatever else I can think of that will satisfy Bill Haydon’s curiosity, and my own.

—

I drove her home and reached my flat around seven in the morning. In no mood to sleep for the second night running, I sat down and wrote my encounter report instead, my pen flying because I was still in paradise. There was no message from the Daisy but I expected none. Come evening, I received an interim report on her progress. She had passed Kiel and was heading for the Kieler Förde. She would be hitting open sea in a couple of hours. I had a tame German journalist to see that night and a consular meeting in the morning, but I passed the news in veiled terms to Bella on the telephone and promised to come to her soon, for she was determined I should visit her at the farmhouse. When Brandt returned, she said, she wanted to be able to look at all the places in the house where we had made love, and think of me. I suppose it testifies to the power of love’s illusion that I found nothing underhand in this, or paradoxical. We had created a world together and she wished to have it round her when I was taken away from her. That was all. She was Brandt’s girl. She expected nothing of me but my love.

When I arrived, we made straight for the long drawing room, where this time it was she who had laid the table. We sat at it quite naked, which was what she wanted. She wanted to see me among the familiar furniture. Afterwards we made love in their bed. I suppose I should have been ashamed, but I felt only the excitement of being appointed to the most secret places of their lives. “These are his hairbrushes,” she said. “These are his clothes, you are on his side of the bed.” One day I will understand what this means, I thought. And then, more grimly: or is this the pleasure that she takes in betrayal?

Next evening I had arranged to visit an old Pole in Lübeck who had established a clandestine correspondence with a distant nephew in Warsaw. The boy was being trained for cypher work in the Polish diplomatic service, and wanted to spy for us in exchange for resettlement in Australia. London Station was considering a direct approach to him. I returned to Hamburg and slept like the dead. Next morning, while I was still writing my report, a signal from London announced that the Daisy had successfully refuelled in Sundre and was on course for the Finnish Gulf with passenger Volodia aboard. I phoned Bella and told her all was still well, and she said, “Please come to me.”

I spent the morning in the Reeperbahn police station extricating a pair of drunk British merchant sailors who had broken up a brothel, and the afternoon at a ghastly consular wives’ tea party to rally support for the Week of the Political Prisoner. I wished the merchant sailors had broken up that brothel too. I arrived at the farmhouse at eight in the evening and we went straight to bed. At two in the morning the phone rang and Bella answered it. It was my cypher clerk calling me from the shipping office: a decypher yourself, flash priority; I was required at once. I drove like the wind and made the office in forty minutes. As I sat down to the codebooks, I realised that Bella’s smells were on my face and hands.

The signal had been transmitted over Haydon’s symbol, personal to Head of Station, Hamburg. The Daisy’s landing party had come under heavy fire from prepared positions, it said. The dinghy was unaccounted for, and so was everyone aboard it, which meant Antons Durba and his passenger, and very likely whoever was waiting on the beach. There was no word of the Estonian patriots. The Daisy had sighted ultraviolet-light signals from the shore, but only one completed series of the agreed pattern, and the assumption was that the Estonian team had been taken captive as soon as they had lured the landing party to its fate. It was a familiar story, even if it was five years old. The fallback radio in Tallinn was not replying.

I was to pass this information to nobody and return to London on the first flight of the morning. A seat had been reserved for me. Toby Esterhase would meet me at Heathrow. I drafted an acknowledgement and handed it to my clerk, who accepted it without comment. He knows, I thought. How could he not? He had telephoned me at the farmhouse and spoken to Bella. The rest he could see in my face and, for all I knew, he could smell it too.

—

This time there was no joss burning in Haydon’s room and he was sitting at his desk. Roy Bland, his Head of Eastern Europe, sat one side of him, Toby Esterhase the other. Toby’s jobs were never easily defined, for he liked to keep them vague in the hope that they would multiply. But in practice he was Haydon’s poodle, a rôle which later cost him dear. And I was surprised to see George Smiley sitting unhappily apart from them on the edge of Haydon’s chaise longue, even if the symbolism of his posture did not dawn on me till three years later.

“It’s an inside job,” Haydon said without preliminaries. “The mission was blown sky high in advance. If Durba hasn’t gone down with the ship, he’s already swinging by his thumbs, telling his all. Volodia doesn’t know a lot, but that may be his tough luck, because his interrogators aren’t going to believe him and he’s got a hamper full of explosives to explain. Maybe he took the pill, but I doubt it—he’s a ninny.”

“Where’s Brandt?” I said.

“Sitting under a bright light in the Sarratt interrogation wing and roaring like a bull. Somewhere somebody blundered. We’re asking Brandt whether it might possibly be him. If not, who? It’s a carbon-copy fuck-up from the last time round. Each member of the crew is being grilled separately.”

“Where’s the Daisy?”

“In Helsinki. We’ve put a navy crew aboard and they’re under orders to get her out tonight. The Finns don’t fancy being seen providing safe harbour for people teasing the Bear. If the press don’t get to hear about it, it’ll be a bloody miracle.”

“I see,” I said stupidly.

“Good. I don’t. What do we do? You tell me. You’ve got thirty Baltic agents waiting on your every word. What do you say? Abort? Apologise? Act natural and look busy? All suggestions gratefully acknowledged.”

“The Durbas weren’t conscious to the Estonian network,” I objected. “Antons can’t blow what he doesn’t know.”

“So who blew Antons, pray? Who blew the landing party, the coordinates, the beach, the time? Who set us up? We asked Brandt the same question, funnily enough. We thought he might suggest Bella, the Baltic strumpet. He suggested it was one of us lot instead, the cheeky bastard.”

He was furious and his fury was directed at me. I would never have imagined that lethargy could convert to such violent anger. Yet he still spoke quietly, in the nasal, upper-class drawl he had. He still managed to remain offhand. Even in passion he conveyed a deadly casualness, which made him all the more formidable.

“So what do you say?” he demanded of me.

“What about?”

“About her, sweetheart. Pouting Miss Latvia.” He was holding up the encounter report that I had written after our first night together. “Christ Almighty, I asked for an assessment, not a bloody aria.”

“I think she’s innocent,” I said. “I think she’s a simple peasant kid. That’s my assessment. I expect it’s Brandt’s too. She answered my questions, she gave a plausible account of herself.”

Haydon had found his charm again. He could do that at the drop of a hat. He drew you and he repelled you. I remember that exactly. He danced all ways for you, playing your emotions against each other, because he had none of his own.

“Most spies do give a plausible account of themselves,” he retorted as he turned the pages of my report. “The better ones do, anyway. Don’t they, Tobe?”—favouring Esterhase.

“Absolutely, Bill. All the way, I would say,” said Esterhase the pleaser.

The others had a copy too. Silence settled while they studied it, pausing at the passages Haydon had sidelined. Roy Bland lifted his head and peered at me. Bland had lectured to us at Sarratt. He was a North Countryman and former don who had spent years behind the Curtain under academic cover. His accent was broad and very flat.

“Bella admits her father’s not her father, right, Ned? Her mother was raped by the Germans and got pregnant from it, so she’s half German by origin. Right, Ned?”

“Yes. Right, Roy. That’s what she told me.”

“So when her father, as she calls him, when Feliks comes back from prisoner-of-war camp, and hears what’s happened, he adopts the child. Her. Bella. Nice of him. She volunteered that to you. She made no secret of it. Right, Ned?”

“Yes. Right, Roy.”

“Then why the fuck doesn’t she tell Brandt the same tale as she tells you?”

I had asked her this myself, and so was able to answer him at once. “When he brought her to the West, she was afraid he wouldn’t take her in if he knew she wasn’t his best friend’s natural daughter. They weren’t lovers then. He was offering protection and a life. She was scared. She took it. She’d been living in the forest. It was her first time in the West. Her own father was dead, so she needed another father figure.”

“Brandt, you mean?” said Bland slyly.

“Yes, of course.”

“Well, don’t you think it’s pretty bloody odd then, Ned, that Brandt didn’t know the truth about her anyway?” he demanded triumphantly. “If Brandt was her father’s close buddy like he says he was, wouldn’t he be bound to know all that? Come on, Ned!”

Smiley cut in, I thought in order to help me: “Brandt very probably does know, Roy. Would you tell your best friend’s daughter that she was the illegitimate child of a German soldier if you thought she wasn’t aware of it? I’m sure I wouldn’t. I’d go to quite some lengths to protect her. Specially if the father was dead and I was in love with the daughter.”

“Bugger love,” said Haydon, turning another page of my report. “Brandt’s a randy old goat. Who’s this Tadeo she keeps talking about? ‘Tadeo saw the bodies being loaded into the truck. Tadeo says he saw my father’s body go in last. They’d shot most of the men in the face, but my father was shot in the chest and stomach, a machine gun had nearly cut him in two.’ I mean, Christ, for a wilting violet she’s bloody explicit when it helps her story, I will say.”

“Tadeo was her first lover,” I said.

“Jealous, are we?” Haydon asked me, drawing laughter from the satraps either side of him.

But not from Smiley. And not from me.

“Tadeo was a boy at her school,” I said. “He’d been ordered to keep guard outside the house while the meeting took place, but he was making love with Bella in a field nearby. That’s how she managed to escape. Tadeo told her to run for it, and who to ask for when she reached the partisans. Then he hid in a nearby house and watched what happened before joining her. It’s in my report.”

Toby Esterhase added his own kind of sneer, in his own kind of Austro-Hungarian English. “And Tadeo is most conveniently dead, of course, Ned. Being a witness in Bella’s story is actually quite a risk business, I would say.”

“He was shot by a frontier guard,” I said. “He wasn’t ever trying to cross. He was making a reconnaissance. She has the feeling everyone she touches dies,” I added, thinking involuntarily of Ben.

“She could be right, at that,” said Haydon.

Perversely, it seemed to me, Roy Bland now joined in my defence—for increasingly I had the feeling I was in the dock. “Mind you, Tadeo could be kosher and wrong about Feliks’s death. Maybe the police faked his death. After all, he did go into the truck last. He’d have been covered with blood anyway in that slaughterhouse. They wouldn’t have needed to splash the tomato ketchup on him, would they? It would have been done for them already.”

Smiley took up Bland’s cudgels. I was beginning to regret I had lobbied so hard to be posted out of his care.

“Is the father really so important to us, Bill?” he objected. “Feliks can be the Judas of all time, and still have a perfectly honest daughter, can’t he?”

“I believe that too,” I said. “She admires her father. She has no problem talking about him. She honours him. She’s still in mourning for him.”

I was remembering how she had looked down into the graveyard. I was remembering her determination to celebrate the gift of life. I refused to believe she had been pretending.

“All right,” said Haydon impatiently, shoving a full-plate photograph at me across the desk. “We’ll stretch a point and trust you. What the hell are we supposed to make of this lot?”

It was a much enlarged photograph and out of register. I guessed it was a photograph of a photograph. It was stamped in red along the top left corner with the one word “Witchcraft,” which I had heard on the grapevine was London Station’s most secret source.

Toby Esterhase’s warning to me confirmed this: “You never saw this photograph actually, Ned,” he told me over Haydon’s shoulder, with the kind of smarminess people reserve for the young. “Also you never saw the word ‘Witchcraft.’ When you leave this room, your mind will be a blank, totally.”

It was a group photograph of young men and women arranged against a background of what could have been a barracks, or the campus of a university. They were about sixty strong, and in civilian uniform, the men in suits and ties, the women in high white blouses and long skirts. A group of older men and an evil-looking woman stood to one side of them. The mood, like the clothes and the building and the background, was sullen.

“Second row of the chorus, third from the right,” said Haydon, handing me a magnifying glass. “Good tits, same as the young man said.”

It was Bella, there was no doubt of it. Bella three or four years younger it was true, and Bella with her hair swept back in what I guessed to be a bun. But Bella’s broad, fair eyes and Bella’s irrepressible smile, and the high, firm cheeks I adored.

“Did Bella ever whisper in your tiny shell-like ear that she’d been at language school in Kiev?” Haydon asked me.

“No.”

“Did she give any account of her education at all, apart from how she’d had it off with Tadeo in the hay?”

“No.”

“Of course Kiev is more of a holiday school than a school. Not a place many chaps talk about afterwards much. Unless they’re confessing. Theoretically it’s a school for tomorrow’s interpreters but I’m afraid that in practice it’s more a spawning ground for Moscow Centre hopefuls. Centre owns it, Centre staffs it, Centre skims the cream. The slops go to their Foreign Office, same as here.”

“Has Brandt seen this?” I asked.

His levity fell from him. “You’re joking, aren’t you? Brandt’s a hostile witness, so are they all.”

“Can I see Brandt?”

“I wouldn’t recommend it.”

“Does that mean no?”

“Yes. It means no.”

“Was Witchcraft also the source of the report against Bella’s father?”

“Mind your own bloody business,” he said, but I had caught Toby’s startled eye and sensed that I was right.

“Does Moscow Centre always take class photographs of its white hopes?” I asked, emboldened as Smiley’s head lifted to me in what I again took to be support.

“We take ’em at Sarratt,” Haydon retorted. “Why shouldn’t Moscow Centre?”

I could feel the sweat running down my back, and I knew my voice was slipping. But I floundered on. “Has anyone else in this photograph been identified?”

“As a matter of fact, yes.”

“What as?”

“Never mind.”

“What languages did she learn?”

Haydon had had enough of me. He lifted his eyes to Heaven as if appealing for the gift of patience. “Well, they all learn English, darling, if that’s what you’re asking,” he drawled and, putting his chin in his hand, gave Smiley a long look.

I am not clairvoyant and I had no way of knowing what was passing between the two men, or what had passed already. But even allowing for the advantages of hindsight, I am sure I had the sensation of being caught between hostile camps. Even somebody as remote from Head Office politics as I was could not help hearing the rumble of the battle that was raging: how the great X had walked clean past the great Y in the corridor without so much as a “Good morning”; how A had refused to sit at the same table with B in the canteen. And how Haydon’s London Station was becoming a service within a service, gobbling up the regional directorates, taking over the special sections, the watchers, the listeners, right the way down to such humble beings as our postmen, who sat in dripping sorting offices, loyally steaming open mail with gas kettles permanently on the boil. It was even hinted that the true clash of Titans was between Bill Haydon and the reigning Chief, the last to call himself Control, and that Smiley as Control’s cupbearer was more on his master’s side than Haydon’s.

But then it was also hinted that Smiley himself was under sentence—or, put more tactfully—contemplating an academic appointment so that he could take more care of his marriage.

Haydon looked jauntily at Smiley, but the jaunty look became a chill stare as he waited for Smiley to return it. The rest of us waited too. The embarrassment was that Smiley didn’t return it. He was like a man declining to acknowledge a salute. He sat on the chaise longue with his eyebrows lifted, and his long eyelids turned down, and his round head tilted, seeming to study the Persian prayer mat that was another eccentric feature of Bill’s room. And he simply went on studying it as if he were unaware of Haydon’s interest in him, though we all knew—even I knew—that he wasn’t. Then he puffed out his cheeks and pulled a frown of disapproval. And finally he stood—not dramatically, for George never had that far to go—and gathered up his papers.

“Well, I think we’ve had the meat of this, don’t you, Bill?” he said. “Control will see indoctrinated officers in one hour, please, if that’s convenient, and we’ll try to take a view. Ned, you and I have a small piece of Zurich history to clear up. Perhaps you’d drop by when Bill has done with you.”

Twenty minutes later I was sitting in Smiley’s office.

“Do you believe that photograph?” he asked, with no pretense of talking about Zurich.

“I suppose I have to.”

“Why do you suppose that? Photographs can be faked. There is such a thing as disinformation. Moscow Centre has been known to go in for it now and then. They’ve even stooped to discrediting innocent people, I’m told. They have an entire department, as a matter of fact, devoted to little else. It runs to about five hundred officers.”

“Then why frame Bella? Why not go for Brandt or one of the crew?”

“What’s Bill told you to do?”

“Nothing. He says I’ll get my orders in due course.”

“You never answered his question. Do you think we should abort the network?”

“It’s hard for me to say. I’m just the local link. The network’s run direct from London Station.”

“Nevertheless.”

“We can’t exfiltrate thirty agents. We’d start a war. If the supply lines are blown and the escape routes are closed, I don’t see there’s anything we can do for them at all.”

“So they’re dead anyway,” he suggested, more in confirmation than question. A phone was ringing on his desk but he didn’t pick it up. He continued to look at me with a merciful concern. “Well, if they are dead, will you please remember it’s not your fault, Ned?” he added kindly. “Nobody expects you to take on Moscow Centre single-handed. It may be the Fifth Floor’s fault, it may be mine. It certainly isn’t yours.”

He nodded me to the door. I closed it after me and heard his phone stop ringing.

—

I returned to Hamburg the same night. Bella sounded excited when I rang, and sad that I wasn’t rushing round to her at once.

“Where’s Brandt?” she asked. She had no notion of telephone security. I said Brandt was fine, just fine. I felt guilty talking to her when I knew so much and she so little. I was to be natural towards her, Haydon had said: “Whatever you did before, keep doing it or do it better. I don’t want her guessing anything.” I should tell her that Brandt loved her, which he was apparently insisting on. I guessed that in his travail he was asking to see me. I hoped so, because I trusted him and he was my responsibility.

I tried not to feel upset for myself when there were so many larger tragedies round me, but it was hard. Until a few days ago, Brandt and the crew had been mine to care for. I had been their spokesman and champion. Now one of them was dead or worse, and the rest had been taken out of my hands. The network, though it had worked to London, had been my proxy family. Now it was like the remnants of a ghostly army, out of touch, floating between life and death.

Worst of all was my sense of dislocation, of holding a dozen conflicting theories in my head at once, and favouring each in turn. One minute I was insisting to myself that Bella was innocent, just as I had maintained to Haydon. The next I was asking myself how she could have communicated with her masters. The answer was, only too easily. She shopped, she went to cinemas, she went to school. She could meet couriers, fill and empty dead-letter boxes to her heart’s content.

But no sooner had I gone this far than I ran to her defence. Bella was not bad. The photograph was a plant and the story about her father amounted to nothing. Smiley had said as much. There were a hundred ways in which the mission could have been blown without Bella having the least thing to do with it. Our operational security was tight, but not as tight as I would have wished. My predecessor had turned out to be corrupt. Might he not, in addition to inventing agents, have sold a few as well? And even if he hadn’t, was it really so unreasonable of Brandt to suggest that the leak could have come from our side of the fence, not his?

—

Now I would not have you think that, alone in his cot that night, the young Ned unravelled single-handed the skein of treachery that later took all George Smiley’s powers to expose. A source can be a plant, a plant can be ignored, an experienced intelligence officer can take a wrong decision—all without the assistance of a traitor within the Fifth Floor’s gates. I knew that. I was not a child, and not one of your grey-cheeked Circus conspiracy-theorists either.

Nevertheless I did ponder, as any of us might when he is stretched to the limits of his allegiance to his Service. I pieced together from my worm’s-eye view all the rumours that had reached me on the Circus grapevine. Stories of unaccountable failure and repeated scandal, of the mounting anger of our American Cousins. Of meaningless reorganisations, wasteful rivalries between men who were today immortals and tomorrow had resigned. Horror stories of incompetence being taken as proof of grand betrayal—and unnerving evidence of betrayal dismissed as incompetence.

If there is such a thing as growing up, you may say that sometime that night I made one of those leaps into maturity. I realised that the Circus was much the same as any other British institution, except that it was more so, since it played its games in the safety of sealed rooms, with other people’s lives for counters. Yet I was pleased to have made my recognition. It gave me back the responsibility for my actions, which hitherto I had been a little too willing to lay at other people’s feet. If my career till now had been a constant battle between submission and identity, then you might say that submission had maintained the upper hand. But that night I crossed some sort of border. I decided that from then on, I would pay more heed to my own instincts and desires, and less to the harness that I seemed unable to dispense with.

—

We met at the safe flat. If there was neutral ground to be found anywhere, it was there. She still knew nothing of the catastrophe. I had told her only that Brandt had been summoned to England. We made love at once, blindly and hungrily; then I waited for the clarity of after-love to begin my interrogation.

I began playfully stroking her hair, smoothing it against her head. Then I swept it back with both my hands, and scooped it into a rough bun.

“This way you look very stern,” I said, and kissed her, still holding it in place. “Have you ever worn it like this?” I kissed her again.

“When I was a girl.”

“When was that?” I said, between our joined lips. “You mean before Tadeo? When?”

“Until I went to the forest. Then I cut it off. Another woman did it with a knife.”

“Have you got a photograph of yourself like this?”

“In the forest we did not take photographs.”

“I mean before. When you wore it like a stern lady.”

She sat up. “Why?”

“Just tell me.”

She was watching me with her almost colourless eyes. “At school, they took our photographs. Why?”

“In groups? In classes? What sort of photographs?”

“Why?”

“Just tell me, Bella. I need to know.”

“They took photographs of us in our class, and they took photographs for our documents.”

“What documents?”

“For identity. For our passports.”

She did not mean a passport as we understand it. She meant a passport for moving about inside the Soviet Union. No free citizen could cross the road without one.

“A full-face photograph? Not smiling?”

“Yes.”

“What did you do with your old passport, Bella?”

She didn’t remember.

“What did you wear for it—for the photograph?” I kissed her breasts. “Not these. What did you wear?”

“A blouse and tie. What nonsense are you talking?”

“Bella, listen to me. Is there anyone you can think of, back at home, a schoolfriend, an old boyfriend, a relation, who would have a photograph of you with your hair back? Someone you could write to, perhaps, who could be contacted?”

She considered for a moment, staring at me. “My aunt,” she said grumpily.

“What’s her name?”

She told me.

“Where does she live?”

In Riga, she said. With Uncle Janek. I seized an envelope, sat her still naked at a table and made her write out their full address. Then I put a piece of plain writing paper before her and dictated a letter which she translated as she wrote.

“Bella.” I lifted her to her feet and kissed her tenderly. “Bella, tell me something else. Did you ever go to any school, of any kind, except the schools in your own town?”

She shook her head.

“No holiday schools? Special schools? Language schools?”

“No.”

“Did you learn English at school?”

“Of course not. Otherwise I would speak English. What’s happening to you, Ned? Why are you asking me these stupid questions?”

“The Daisy sailed into trouble,” I said, still face-to-face with her. “There was shooting. Brandt wasn’t hurt but others were. That’s all I’m allowed to tell you. We’re to fly back to London tomorrow, you and I together. They need to ask us some questions and find out what went wrong.”

She closed her eyes and began shaking. She opened her mouth and made a silent scream.

“I believe in you,” I said. “I want to help you. And Brandt. That’s the truth.”

Gradually she came back to me and put her head on my chest while she wept. She was a child again. Perhaps she had always been one. Perhaps, by helping me to grow up, she had increased the distance between us. I had brought a British passport for her. She had no nationality of her own. I made her stay the night with me and she clutched me like a drowning girl. Neither of us slept.

On the plane she held my hand but we were already continents apart. Then she spoke in a voice that I had not heard from her before. A firm, adult voice of sadness and disillusionment that reminded me of Stefanie’s when she had delivered her Sibyl’s warning to me on the island.

“Es ist ein reiner Unsinn,” she said. It is a pure nonsense.

“What is?”

She had taken away her hand. Not in anger, but in a kind of worldly despair. “You tell them to put their feet into the water and you wait to see what happens. If they are not shot, they are heroes. If they are shot, they are martyrs. You gain nothing that is worth having and you encourage my people to kill themselves. What do you want us to do? Rise up and kill the Russian oppressor? Will you come and help us if we try? I don’t think so. I think you are doing something because you cannot do nothing. I think you are not useful to us at all.”

I could never forget what Bella said, for it was also a dismissal of my love. And today I think of her each morning as I listen to the news before walking my dog. I wonder what we thought we were promising to those brave Balts in those days, and whether it was the same promise which we are now so diligently breaking.

This time it was Peter Guillam who was waiting at the airport, which was a relief to me, because his good looks and breezy manners seemed to give her confidence. For a chaperone he had brought Nancy from the watchers, and Nancy had made herself motherly for the occasion. Between them they led Bella through immigration to a grey van which belonged to the Sarratt inquisitors. I wished that someone could have thought to send a less formidable vehicle, because when she saw the van she stopped and looked back to me in accusation before Nancy grabbed her by the arm and shoved her in.

In the turbulent life of a case officer, I was learning, there was not always such a thing as an elegant goodbye.

—

I can only tell you what I next did, and what I later heard. I made for Smiley’s office, and spent most of my day trying to catch him between meetings. Circus protocol required me to go first to Haydon, but I had already exceeded Haydon’s brief by the questions I had put to Bella, and suspected Smiley would give me a more sympathetic hearing. He listened to me; he took charge of Bella’s letter and examined it.

“If we have it posted in Moscow and give a Finnish safe address for them to write back to, it might just work,” I urged him.

But, as so often with Smiley, I had the impression that he was thinking beyond me into realms from which I was excluded. He dropped the letter in a drawer and closed it.

“I rather think it won’t be necessary,” he said. “Let us hope not anyway.”

I asked him what they would do with Bella.

“I suppose much the same as they have done with Brandt,” he replied, waking sufficiently from his absorption to give me a sad smile. “Take her through every detail of her life. Try to trip her up. Wear her down. They won’t hurt her. Not physically. They won’t tell her what they have against her. They’ll just hope to break her cover. It seems that most of the men who looked after her in the forest were rounded up recently. That won’t speak well for her, naturally.”

“What will they do with her afterwards?”

“Well, I think we can still prevent the worst, even if we can’t prevent much else these days,” he replied, returning to his papers. “Time you went on to Bill, isn’t it? He’ll be wondering what you’re up to.”

And I remember the expression on his face as he dismissed me: the pain and frustration in it, and the anger.

—

Did Smiley have the letter posted as I suggested? Did the letter produce a photograph and did the photograph turn out to be the very one that Moscow Centre’s forgers had dropped into their group photograph? I wish it were so neat, but in reality it never is, though I like to believe that my efforts on Bella’s behalf had some influence on her release and resettlement in Canada, which occurred a few months later in circumstances that are a puzzle to me.

For Brandt refused to take her back, let alone go with her. Had Bella told him of our affair? Had someone else? I hardly think it possible, unless Haydon himself did it out of mischief. Bill hated all women and most men too, and liked nothing better than to turn people’s affections inside out.

Brandt too was given a clean ticket and, after some resistance from the Fifth Floor, a gratuity to start him in a respectable walk of life. That is to say, he was able to buy a boat and take himself to the West Indies, where he resumed his old trade of smuggling, except that this time he chose arms to Cuba.

And the betrayal? The Brandt network had simply been too efficient for Haydon’s stomach, Smiley told me later, so Bill had betrayed it as he had betrayed its predecessor, and tried to fix the blame on Bella. He had arranged for Moscow Centre to fake the evidence against her, which he then presented as coming from his spurious source Merlin, the provider of the Witchcraft material. Hard on the mole’s tracks by then, Smiley had voiced his suspicions in high places, only to be sent into exile for being right. It took another two years for him to be brought back to clean the stable.

—

And there the story stood until our own internal perestroika began in earnest—in the winter of ’89—when Toby Esterhase, the ubiquitous survivor, conducted a middle-ranking Circus delegation to Moscow Centre as a first step to what our blessed Foreign Office insisted on calling a “normalisation of the relationship between the two services.”

Toby’s team was welcomed at Dzerzhinsky Square and shown many of the appointments, though not, one gathers, the torture chambers of the old Lubyanka, or the roof on which certain careless prisoners had occasionally lost their footing. Toby and his men were wined and dined. They were shown, as the Americans say, a time. They bought fur hats and pinned facetious badges on them and had themselves photographed in Dzerzhinsky Square.

And on the last day, as a special gesture of goodwill, they were escorted to the gallery of Centre’s huge communications hall, where reports from all sources are received and processed. And it was here, as they were leaving the gallery, says Toby, that he and Peter Guillam in the same moment spotted a tall, flaxen, thickset fellow in half silhouette at the further end of the corridor, emerging from what was apparently the men’s lavatory, for there was only one other door in that part of the corridor, and it was marked for women.

He was a man of some age, yet he strode out of the doorway like a bull. He paused, and for a long beat stared straight at them, as if in two minds whether to come towards them and greet them or retreat. Then he lowered his head and, as it seemed to them, with a smile, swung away from them and disappeared into another corridor. But not before they had ample opportunity to remark his seamanly roll and wrestler’s shoulders.

Nothing goes away in the secret world; nothing goes away in the real one. If Toby and Peter are right—and there are those who still maintain that Russian hospitality had got the better of them—then Haydon had an even stronger reason to point the finger of suspicion at Bella, and away from Sea Captain Brandt.

Was Brandt bad from the beginning? If so, I had unwittingly furthered his recruitment and our agents’ deaths. It is a dreadful thought and sometimes in the cold grey hours as I lie at Mabel’s side, it comes home to haunt me.

And Bella? I think of her as my last love, as the right turning I never took. If Stefanie had unlocked the door of doubt in me, Bella pointed me towards the open world while there was still time. When I think of my women since, they are aftercare. And when I think of Mabel, I can only explain her as the lure of domesticity to a man returned from the front line. But the memory of Bella remains as fresh for me as on our first night in the safe flat overlooking the cemetery—though in my dreams she is always walking away from me, and there is reproach even in her back.

5

“Are you saying we could be housing another Haydon now?” a student named Maggs called out amid the groans of his colleagues. “What’s his motivation, Mr. Smiley? Who’s paying him? What’s his bag?”

I had had my doubts about Maggs ever since he had joined. He was earmarked for a cover career in journalism, and already had the worst characteristics of his future trade. But Smiley was unruffled.

“Oh well, I’m sure that in retrospect we owe Bill a great debt of thanks,” he replied calmly. “He administered the needle to a Service that had been far too long a-dying.” He made a fussy little frown of perplexity. “As to new traitors, I’m sure our present leader will have sown her discontents, won’t she? Perhaps I’m one. I do find I become a great deal more radical in my old age.”

—

But believe me, we didn’t thank Bill at the time.

There was Before the Fall and there was After the Fall and the Fall was Haydon, and suddenly there was not a man or woman in the Circus who could not tell you where he was and what he was doing when he heard the dreadful news. Old hands tell each other to this day of the silence in the corridors, the numbed, averted faces in the canteen, the unanswered telephones.

The greatest casualty was trust. Only gradually, like dazed people after an air attack, did we step shyly, one by one, from our shattered houses, and set to work to reconstruct the citadel. A fundamental reform was deemed necessary, so the Circus abandoned its ancient nickname and the warren of Dickensian corridors and crooked staircases in Cambridge Circus that had housed its shame, and built itself instead a vile steel-and-glass affair not far from Victoria, where the windows still blow out in a gale and the corridors reek of stale cabbage from the canteen, and typewriter-cleaning fluid. Only the English punish themselves with quite such dreadful prisons. Overnight we became, in formal parlance, the Service, though the name “Circus” still occasionally crosses our lips in the same way as we speak of pounds, shillings and pence long after decimalisation.

The trust was broken because Haydon had been part of it. Bill was no upstart with a chip on his shoulder and a pistol in his pocket. He was exactly who he had always sneeringly described himself to be: Church and Spy Establishment, with uncles who sat on Tory Party committees, and a rundown estate in Norfolk with tenant farmers who called him “Mr. William.” He was a strand of the finely spun web of English influence of which we had perceived ourselves the centre. And he had caught us in it.

—

In my own case—I still claim a certain distinction for this—I actually succeeded in hearing the news of Bill’s arrest twenty-four hours after it had reached the rest of the Circus, for I was incarcerated in a windowless mediaeval cell at the back of a run of grand apartments in the Vatican. I was commanding a team of Circus eavesdroppers under the guidance of a hollow-eyed friar supplied to us by the Vatican’s own secret service, who would rather have gone to the Russians themselves than seek the assistance of their secular colleagues a mile up the road in Rome. And our mission was to winkle a probe microphone into the audience room of a corrupt Catholic bishop who had got himself involved in a drugs-for-arms deal with one of our disintegrating colonies—well, why be coy? It was Malta.

With Monty and his boys flown in for the occasion, we had tiptoed through vaulted dungeons, up underground staircases, until we had reached this vantage point, from which we proposed to drill a fine hole through a course of old cement that ran between the blocks of a three-foot party wall. The hole by agreement was to be no more than two centimetres in diameter, wide enough for us to insert the elongated plastic drinking straw that would conduct the sound from the target room to our microphone, small enough to spare the hallowed masonry of the Papal palace. Today we would use more sophisticated equipment, but the seventies were the last of the steam age and probes were still the fashion. Besides, with the best will in the world, you don’t show off your prize gadgets to an official Vatican liaison, let alone to a friar in a black habit who looks as though he has stepped straight out of the Inquisition.

We drilled, Monty drilled, the friar watched. We poured water onto red-hot drill-heads, and onto our sweating hands and faces. We muffled the drone of our drills with liquid foam, and every few minutes we took readings to make sure we hadn’t drilled our way into the holy man’s apartment by mistake. For the aim was to stop the drill-head a centimetre short of entry, and listen from inside the membrane of the wallpaper or surface plaster.

Suddenly we were through, but worse than through. We were in thin air. A hasty sampling by vacuum produced only exotic threads of silk. A bemused silence descended on us. Had we struck furniture? Drapes? A bed? Or the hem of some unsuspecting prelate’s robe? Had the audience room been altered since we had taken the reconnaissance photographs?

At which low point the friar was inspired to remember, in an appalled whisper, that the good bishop was a collector of priceless needlework, and we realised that the shreds of cloth we were staring at were not pieces of sofa or curtain, or even some priest’s finery, but fragments of Gobelin tapestry. Excusing himself, the friar fled.

Now the scene changes to the old Kentish town of Rye, where two sisters named the Misses Quayle ran a tapestry-restoration business, and by a mercy—or, you may say, by the ineluctable laws of English social connection—their brother Henry was a retired member of the Service. Henry was run to earth, the sisters were roused from their beds, an RAF jet plane wafted them to Rome’s military airport, from where a car sped them to our side. Then Monty calmly returned to the front of the building and ignited a smoke bomb which cleared half the Vatican and gave our augmented team four desperate hours in the target room. By midafternoon of the same day, the Gobelin was passably patched and our probe microphone snugly in place.

The scene changes yet again to the grand dinner given by our Vatican hosts. Swiss Guards stand menacingly at the doors. Monty, a white napkin at his throat, is seated between the sedate Misses Quayle and wiping the last of his cannelloni from his plate with a piece of bread while he regales them with accounts of his daughter’s latest accomplishments at her riding school.

“Now you won’t know this, Rosie, and there’s no reason why you should, but my Beckie has the best pair of hands for her age in the whole of South Croydon—”

Then Monty stops dead in his tracks. He is reading the note I have passed him, delivered to me by hand of a messenger from our Rome Station: Bill Haydon, Director of Circus Clandestine Operations, has confessed to being a Moscow Centre spy.

Sometimes I wonder whether that was the greatest of all Bill’s crimes: to steal for good the lightness we had shared.

—

I returned to London to be told that when there was more to tell me I would be told. A few mornings later Personnel informed me that I had been classified “Tailor Halftone,” which was Circus jargon for “unpostable to all but friendly countries.” It was like being told I would spend the rest of my life in a wheelchair. I had done nothing wrong, I was in no disgrace, quite the contrary. But in the trade, cover is virtue, and mine was blown.

I packed up my desk and gave myself the rest of the day off. I drove into the country and I still don’t remember the drive, but there is a walk I do on the Sussex Downs, over whaleback chalk hills with cliffs five hundred feet high.

It took another month before I heard my sentence. “You’ll be back with the émigrés, I’m afraid,” Personnel said, with his customary distaste. “And it’s Germany again. Still, the allowances are quite decent, and the skiing isn’t bad either, if you go high enough.”

6

It was approaching midnight but Smiley’s good spirits had increased with every fresh heresy. He’s like a jolly Father Christmas, I thought, who hands round seditious leaflets with his gifts.

“Sometimes I think the most vulgar thing about the Cold War was the way we learned to gobble up our own propaganda,” he said, with the most benign of smiles. “I don’t mean to sound didactic, and of course in a way we’d done it all through our history. But in the Cold War, when our enemies lied, they lied to conceal the wretchedness of their system. Whereas when we lied, we concealed our virtues. Even from ourselves. We concealed the very things that made us right. Our respect for the individual, our love of variety and argument, our belief that you can only govern fairly with the consent of the governed, our capacity to see the other fellow’s view—most notably in the countries we exploited, almost to death, for our own ends. In our supposed ideological rectitude, we sacrificed our compassion to the great god of indifference. We protected the strong against the weak, and we perfected the art of the public lie. We made enemies of decent reformers and friends of the most disgusting potentates. And we scarcely paused to ask ourselves how much longer we could defend our society by these means and remain a society worth defending.” A glance to me again. “So it wasn’t much wonder, was it, Ned, if we opened our gates to every con-man and charlatan in the anti-Communist racket? We got the villains we deserved. Ned knows. Ask Ned.”

At which Smiley, to the general delight, burst out laughing—and I, after a moment’s hesitation, joined in and assured my students that I would tell them about it some day.

—

Perhaps you caught the show, as they say in the States. Perhaps you were part of the appreciative audience at one of the many rousing performances they gave on their tireless trail through the American Midwest, as they pressed the flesh and worked the rubber-chicken luncheons of the lecture circuit, a hundred dollars a plate and every plate a sell-out. We called it the Teodor-Latzi show. Teodor was the Professor’s first name.

Perhaps you joined in one of the numberless standing ovations as our two heroes humbly took centre stage, the Professor tall and resplendent in one of several costly new suits purchased for his tour, and the diminutive Latzi his chubby mute, his shallow eyes brimming with ideals. There were ovations before they started speaking and ovations when they had finished. No applause was loud enough for “two great American Hungarians who, single-handed, kicked themselves a hole in the Iron Curtain.” I am quoting the Tulsa Herald.

Perhaps your all-American daughter dressed herself in the becoming costume of a Hungarian peasant girl and put flowers in her hair for the occasion—such things happened too. Perhaps you sent a donation to the League for the Liberation, Post Box something or other, Wilmington. Or did you read about our heroes in the Reader’s Digest in your dentist’s waiting room?

Or perhaps, like Peter Guillam, who was based in Washington at the time, you were honoured to be present at the grand world première, jointly stage-managed by our American Cousins, the Washington city police and the FBI, at no less a shrine of rightthinking than the austere and panelled Hay-Adams Hotel, just across the square from the White House. If so, you must have been rated a serious influence-maker. You had to be a front-line journalist or lobbyist at least to be admitted to the hushed conference room where every understated word had the authority of an engraved tablet, and men in bulging blazers watched tautly over your comfort and convenience. For who knew when the Kremlin would strike back? It was still that kind of time.

Or maybe you read their book, slipped by the Cousins to an obedient publisher on Madison Avenue and launched to a fanfare of docile critical acclaim before occupying the lower end of the non-fiction bestseller list for a spectacular two weeks. I hope you did, for though it appeared over their joint names, the fact is I wrote a slice of it myself, even if the Cousins took exception to my original title. The title of record was The Kremlin’s Killer. I’ll tell you what mine was later.

—

As usual, Personnel had got it wrong. For anybody who has lived in Hamburg, Munich is not Germany at all. It is another country. I never felt the remotest connection between the two cities, but when it came to spying, Munich like Hamburg was one of the unsung capitals of Europe. Even Berlin ran a poor second when it came to the size and visibility of Munich’s invisible community. The largest and nastiest of our organisations was a body known best by the place that housed it, Pullach, where much too soon after 1945 the Americans had installed an unlovely assembly of old Nazi officers under a former general of Hitler’s military intelligence. Their brief was to pay court to other old Nazis in East Germany and, by bribery, blackmail or an appeal to comradely sentiment, procure them for the West. It never seemed to occur to the Americans that the East Germans might be doing the same thing in reverse, though they did more of it and better.

So the German Service sat in Pullach, and the Americans sat with them, egging them on, then getting cold feet and egging them off. And where the Americans sat, there sat everybody else. And now and then frightful scandals broke, usually when one or other of this company of clowns literally forgot which side he was working for, or made a tearful confession in his cups, or shot his mistress or his boyfriend or himself, or popped up drunk on the other side of the Curtain to declare his loyalty to whomever he had not been loyal to so far. I never in my life knew such an intelligence bordello.

After Pullach came the codebreakers and security artists, and after these came Radio Liberty, Radio Free Europe and Radio Free Everywhere Else, and inevitably, since they were largely the same people, the émigré conspirators, who by now were feeling a little down on their luck but dared not say it. And much time was spent among these exiled bodies arguing out niceties about who would be Master of the Royal Horse when the monarchy was restored; and who would be awarded the Order of Saint Peter and the Hedgehog; or succeed to the Grand Duke’s summer palace once the Communist chickens had been removed from its drawing rooms; or who would recover the crock of gold that had been sunk to the bottom of the Whatnotsee, always forgetting that the said lake had been drained thirty years ago by the Bolshevik usurpers, who had built a six-acre hydro-electric plant on the site before running out of water.

As if this were not enough, Munich played host to the wildest sort of All German aspiration, whose adherents regarded even the 1939 borders as a mere prelude to Greater German needs. East Prussians, Saxons, Pomeranians, Silesians, Baits and Sudeten Germans all protested the terrible injustice done to them, and drew fat pay-packets from Bonn for their grief. There were nights, as I trudged home to Mabel through the beery streets, when I fancied I could hear them singing their anthems behind Hitler’s marching ghost.

Are they still in business as I write? Oh, I fear they are, and looking a lot less mad than in the days when it was my job to move among them. Smiley once quoted Horace Walpole to me, not a name that would otherwise have sprung naturally to my mind: This world is a comedy to those that think, said Walpole, a tragedy to those that feel. Well, for comedy Munich has her Bavarians. And for tragedy, she has her past.

My memory is patchy nearly twenty years later regarding the Professor’s political antecedents. At the time, I fancied I understood them—indeed, I must have done, for most of my evenings with him were spent listening to his recitations of Hungarian history between the wars. And I am sure we put them into the book too—a chapter’s worth, at least, if I could only lay my hands on a copy.

The problem was, he was so much happier evoking Hungary’s past than her present. Perhaps he had learned, in a life of continual adjustment, that it is wise to limit one’s concerns to issues safely consigned to history. There were the Legitimists, I remember, and they supported King Charles, who made a sudden return to Hungary in 1921, much to the consternation of the Allies, who ordered him smartly from the stage. I don’t think the Professor could have been a day above five years old when this moving event occurred, but he spoke of it with tears in his enlightened eyes, and there was much in his bearing to suggest the transitory touch of monarchy. And when he mentioned the Treaty of Trianon, the refined white hand that held his wine glass trembled in restrained outrage.

“It was a Diktat, Herr Ned,” he protested to me in courtly reproof. “Imposed upon us by you victors. You robbed us of two-thirds of our land under the Crown! You gave it to Czechoslovakia, Romania, Yugoslavia. Such scum you gave it to, Herr Ned! And we Hungarians were cultivated people! Why did you do it to us? For what?”

I could only apologise for my country’s bad behaviour, just as I could only apologise for the League of Nations, which destroyed the Hungarian economy in 1931. Quite how the League achieved this reckless act I never understood, but I remember it had something to do with the wheat market, and the League’s rigid policy of orthodox deflation.

Yet when we approached more contemporary matters, the Professor became strangely reticent in his opinions.

“It is another catastrophe” was all he would say. “It is all a consequence of Trianon and the Jews.”

Shafts of evening sunlight sloped through the garden window on to Teodor’s superb white head. He was a lion of a fellow, believe me, wide-browed and Socratic, like a grand conductor close to genius all the time, with sculpted hands and flowing locks, and a stoop of intellectual profundity. Nobody who looked so venerable could be shallow—not even when the learned eyes appeared a mite too small for their sockets, or slipped furtively to one side in the manner of a diner in a restaurant who catches sight of a better meal passing by.

No, no, he was a great, good man, and fifteen years our joe. If a man is tall, then clearly he has authority. If he has a golden voice, then his words are also golden. If he looks like Schiller, he must feel like Schiller. If the smile is remote and spiritual, then so for sure is the man within. Thus the visual society.

Except that just occasionally, as I think now, God amuses Himself by dealing us an entirely different man inside the shell. Some founder and are rumbled. Others expand until they meet the challenge of their looks. And a few do neither, but wear their splendours like a favour granted from above, blandly accepting the homage that is not their due.

—

The Professor’s operational history is quickly told. Too quickly, for it was a mite banal. He was born in Debrecen, close to the Romanian border, an only son of indulgent parents of the small nobility who trimmed their sails to every wind. Through them, he inherited money and connections, a thing that happened more often in the so-called Socialist countries, even in those days, than you would suppose. He was a man of letters, a writer of articles for learned journals, a bit of a poet and a lover several times married. He wore his jackets like capes, the sleeves loose. All these luxuries he could well afford, on account of his privileges and discreet wealth.

In Budapest, where he taught a languid version of philosophy, he had acquired a modest following among his students, who discerned more fire in Teodor’s words than he intended, for he was never cut out to be an orator, rhetoric being something for the rabble. Nevertheless, he had risen a certain distance to their needs. He had observed their passion, and as a natural conciliator he had responded by giving it a voice—moderate enough in all conscience, but a voice for all that, and one they respected, along with his beautiful manners and air of representing an older, better order. He was of an age, by then, to be warmed by youthful adulation, and he was always vain. And through vanity he allowed himself to be carried on the counter-revolutionary tide. So that when the Soviet tanks turned back from the border and surrounded Budapest on the terrible night of November 3, 1956, he had no choice but to run for his life, which he did, into the arms of British Intelligence.

The Professor’s first act on arriving in Vienna was to telephone a Hungarian friend at Oxford, pressing him in his peremptory way for money, introductions and letters testifying to his excellence. This friend happened also to be a friend of the Circus, and it was the high season for recruitment.

Within months, the Professor was on the payroll. There was little courtship, no arch approach, no customary fan dance. The offer was made, and accepted as a due. Within a year, with generous American assistance, Professor Teodor had been set up in Munich, in a comfortable house beside the river, with a car and his devoted if distraught wife, Helena, who had escaped with him—one suspected, somewhat to his regret. Henceforth, and for an extraordinary length of time, Professor Teodor had been the unlikely spearhead of our Hungarian attack, and not even Haydon had unseated him.

His cover job was Radio Free Europe’s patrician-at-large on the subject of Hungarian history and culture, and it fitted him like a glove. He had never been much else. In addition, he lectured a little and gave private tuition—mainly, I noticed, to girls. His clandestine job, for which, thanks to the Americans, he was remarkably well paid, was to foster his links with the friends and former students he had left behind, to be a focus for them and a rallying point and, under guidance, to shape them into an operational network, though none, to my knowledge, had ever quite emerged. It was a visionary operation, and better on the page perhaps than on the ground. Yet it ran and ran. It ran for five years, and then another five and by the time I took up the great man’s file, it had completed an extraordinary fifteen years. Some operations are like that, and stagnation favours them. They are not expensive, they are not conclusive, they don’t necessarily lead anywhere—but then neither does political stalemate—they are free of scandal. And each year when the annual audit is taken, they are waved through without a vote, until their longevity becomes their justification.

Now I won’t say the Professor had achieved nothing for us in all that time. To say so would not only be unfair, it would be derogatory to Toby Esterhase, himself of Hungarian origin, who on his reinstatement After the Fall had become the desk officer handling the Professor’s case. Toby had paid a heavy price for his blind support of Haydon, and when he was given the Hungary desk—never the most exalted of Iron Curtain slots—the Professor promptly became the most important player in Toby’s personal rehabilitation programme.

“Teodor, I would say, Ned—Teodor is our absolutely total star,” he had assured me before I left London, over a lunch he nearly paid for. “Old school, total discretion, lot of years in the saddle, loyal like a leech. Teodor is our ace, totally.”

And certainly one of the Professor’s more striking accomplishments had been to escape the Haydon axe—either because he had been lucky or, less charitably, because the Professor had never produced enough intelligence to merit the interest of a busy traitor. For I could not help noticing as I prepared myself for the takeover—my predecessor having dropped dead of a stroke while on leave in Ibiza—that whereas Teodor’s personal file ran to several volumes, his product file was unusually slender. Partly this could be explained by the fact that his main function had been to spot talent rather than exploit it, partly that the few sources he had guided into our net over the long period he had been working for us were still relatively unproductive.

“Hungary, Ned, that’s actually a damned hard target, I would say,” Toby assured me when I delicately pointed this out to him. “It’s too open. An open target, you get a lot of crap you know already. If you don’t get the Crown jewels, you get the common knowledge—who needs it? What Teodor produces for the Americans, it’s fantastic.”

This seemed to be the nub. “So what does he produce for them actually?” I asked. “Apart from hearts and minds on the radio, and articles no one reads?”

Toby’s smile became unpleasantly superior. “Sorry, Ned, old boy. ‘Need to know,’ I’m afraid. You’re not on the list for this one.”

A few days later, as protocol required, I called on Russell Sheriton in Grosvenor Square to say my goodbyes. Sheriton was the Cousins’ Head of Station in London, but he was also responsible for their Western European operations. I bided my time, then dropped the name of Teodor.

“Ah now, that’s for Munich to say, Ned,” Sheriton said quickly. “You know me. Never trespass on another man’s preserves.”

“But is he doing you any good? That’s all I want to know. I mean joes do burn out, don’t they? Fifteen years.”

“Well now, we thought he was doing you some good, Ned. To hear Toby speak, you’d think Teodor was propping up the free world single-handed.”

No, I thought. To hear Toby speak, you’d think Teodor was propping up Toby single-handed. But I was not cynical. In spying, as in much of life, it is always easier to say no than yes. I arrived in Munich prepared to believe that Teodor was the star Toby had cracked him up to be. All I wanted was to be assured.

And I was. At first I was. He was magnificent. I thought my marriage to Mabel had ridded me of such swift enthusiasms, and in a way it had, until the evening when he opened the door to me and I decided I had walked in on one of those perfectly preserved relics of mid-European history, and that all I could decently do was sit at his feet like the rest of his disciples and drink in his wisdom. This is what the Service is for! I thought. Such a man is worth saving on his own account! The culture, I thought. The breadth. The years and years of service.

He received me warmly but with a certain distance, as became his age and distinction. He offered me a glass of fine Tokay and treated me to a discourse on its provenance. No, I confessed, I knew little about Hungarian wines, but I was keen to learn. He talked music, of which I am also sadly ignorant, and played a few bars for me on his treasured violin, the very one he had brought with him when he escaped from Hungary, he explained, and made not by Stradivarius but someone infinitely better, whose name has long escaped me. I thought it a wonderful privilege to be running an agent who had fled with his violin. He talked theatre. A Hungarian theatrical company was presently on tour in Munich with an extraordinary Othello, and though Mabel and I had yet to see the production, his opinion of it enchanted me. He was dressed in what Germans call a Hausjacke, black trousers and a pair of splendidly polished boots. We talked of God and the world, we ate the best gulyás of my life, served by the distraught Helena, who whispered her excuses and left us. She was a tall woman and must once have been beautiful, but she preferred to wear the signs of her neglect. We rounded off the meal with an apricot Palinká.

“Herr Ned, if I may call you so,” said the Professor, “there is one matter which weighs heavily on my mind, and which you will permit me to raise with you at the outset of our professional relationship.”

“Please do,” I said generously.

“Unfortunately, your most recent predecessor—a good man, of course”—he broke off, evidently unable to speak ill of the recent dead—“and, like yourself, a man of culture—”

“Please,” I repeated.

“It concerns my British passport.”

“I didn’t know you had one!” I exclaimed in surprise.

“That is the point. I haven’t. One understands there are problems. It is so with all bureaucracies. Bureaucracies are the most evil of man’s institutions, Herr Ned. They enshrine the worst of us and bring low the best of us. An exiled Hungarian living in Munich in the employment of an American organisation is not naturally eligible for British citizenship. I understand that. Nevertheless, after my many years of collaboration with your department; I am owed this passport. A temporary travel document is not a dignified alternative.”

“But I understood the Americans were giving you a passport! Wasn’t that the deal right from the beginning? The Americans to be responsible for your citizenship and resettlement? That includes a passport, surely. It must!”

I was upset that a man who had given us so much of his life should have been denied this simple dignity. But the Professor had learned a more philosophical attitude.

“The Americans, Herr Ned, are a young people and a mercenary people. Having used the best of me, they can scarcely regard me as a man of the future. For the Americans, I belong already to the garbage heap of obsolescence.”

“But didn’t they promise—subject to satisfactory service? I’m sure they did!”

He made a gesture I shall never forget. He lifted his hands from the table as if he were raising a prodigiously heavy rock. He brought them almost to the level of his shoulders, before letting them crash at full force back onto the table, the imaginary rock between them. And I remember his eyes, indignant from the exertion, accusing me in the silence. So much for your promises, he was saying. Yours and the Americans, both.

“Just get me my passport, Herr Ned.”

—

As a loyal case officer, concerned to do the best for my joe, I threw myself upon the problem. Knowing Toby of old, I decided to take an official tone from the beginning: no half promises, no vaporous reassurances for me. I informed Toby of Teodor’s request and asked for guidance. He was my desk officer after all, my London anchor. If it was true that the Americans were sliding out of their undertaking to give the Professor citizenship, the matter would have to be dealt with in London or Washington, I said, not Munich. And if, for reasons outside my knowledge, a British passport was to be granted after all, this too would require the energetic endorsement of the Fifth Floor. The days were gone for good when the Home Office handed out free British citizenship to every ex-Circus Tom, Dick and Teodor. The Fall had seen to that.

I did not signal my request, but sent it by bag, which in Circus lore gives greater formality. I wrote a fighting letter and a couple of weeks later followed it with a reminder. But when the Professor asked for a progress report, I was noncommittal. It’s in the pipeline, I assured him; London does not take kindly to being hustled. But I still wondered why Toby took so long to answer.

Meanwhile, at my meetings with Teodor, I strove to unravel what precisely he was doing for us that made him the star of Toby’s underpopulated firmament. My investigations were not made easier by the Professor’s prickliness, and at first I wondered whether he was withholding his cooperation until the question of his passport was settled. Gradually I realised that where our secret work was concerned, this was his normal demeanour.

One of his more humdrum jobs was maintaining a one-roomed student flat in the Schwabing district, which he used as a safe address for receiving mail from certain of his Hungarian contacts. I persuaded him to take me there. He unlocked the door and there must have been a dozen envelopes lying on the mat, all with Hungarian stamps.

“My goodness, when did you last come here, Professor?” I asked him as I watched him gather them laboriously together.

He shrugged, I thought gracelessly.

“How many letters do you normally reckon to receive in a week, Professor?”

I took the envelopes from him and went through the postmarks. The oldest had been posted three weeks ago, the most recent, one. We moved to the tiny desk, which was covered in dust. With a sigh he settled himself in the chair, opened a drawer and withdrew a couple of bottles of chemicals and a paintbrush from a concealed recess. Taking up the first envelope, he examined it gloomily, then slit it open with a pocket knife.

“Who’s it from?” I asked, with more curiosity than he appeared to consider warranted.

“Pali,” he replied gloomily.

“Pali at the Agriculture Ministry?”

“Pali from Debrecen. He has been visiting Romania.”

“What for? Not the toxic-weapons conference? That could be a scoop!”

“We shall see. An academic conference of some kind. His field is cybernetics. He is undistinguished.”

I watched him dip the brush into the first bottle and paint the back of the handwritten letter with it. He rinsed the brush in water and applied the second chemical. And it seemed to me he was determined to demonstrate his disdain for such menial employment. He repeated the process for every letter, sometimes varying the routine by spreading open the envelope and treating the inside of it, or by painting between the lines of the visible handwriting. In the same slow motion, he sat himself at an upright Remington and wearily tapped out in translation the texts that had emerged: anticipated mineral and power deficiencies in the new industries…bauxite quotas for mines in the Bakony Mountains…low metal content of iron ore recently extracted in the region of Miskolc…projected yield of maize and sugar-beet harvest in the region of somewhere else…rumours of five-year plan to revitalise State railway network…disruptive action against Party officials in Sopron…I could almost hear the yawns of the Third Floor analysts as they waded through such turgid stuff. I remembered Toby’s boast that Teodor was only interested in the highest quality of intelligence. If this was the highest, what in heaven’s name was the lowest? Patience, I told myself. Great agents have to be humoured.

The next day I received a reply to my letter about the passport. The problem, Toby explained, was that there had been a lot of changes among the Cousins’ Hungarian Section in recent years. An effort was now being made, he said—making suspicious use of the passive voice—to establish the terms of any undertakings given by the Americans or ourselves. Meanwhile I should avoid discussing the matter with Teodor, he added—as if it were I, not the Professor, who was making the running.

The matter was still in the air three weeks later when I lunched with Milton Wagner at the Cosmo. Wagner was an old hand and my American opposite number. Now he was winding up his career as the Cousins’ Chief of Eastern Operations, Munich. The Cosmo was the kind of place Americans make anywhere, with crisp potato skins and garlic dip, and club sandwiches impaled on enormous plastic hairpins.

“How are you getting along with our distinguished academic friend?” he asked, in his southern drawl, after we had despatched our other business.

“Splendidly,” I replied.

“Couple of our people seem to think Teodor’s been having himself a free ride these how many years,” said Wagner lazily.

This time I said nothing.

“The boys back home have been holding a retrospective of his work. Not good, Ned. Not good at all. Some of the ‘Hello, Hungary’ stuff he’s been pushing out on the radio. It’s been said before. They’ve found one passage makes a perfect fit with an article published in Der Monat back in ’48. The original writer recognised his own words soon as he heard them on the air and flipped.” He helped himself liberally to ketchup. “Could be any day now we haul him in for a full and frank exchange.”

“Probably going through a bad patch,” I said.

“Fifteen years is a long bad patch, Ned.”

“Is he aware you’re checking on him?”

“In Radio Free Europe, Ned? Among Hungarians? Gossip? You must be joking.”

I could no longer contain my anxiety. “But why has nobody warned London? Why haven’t you?”

“Understand we did, Ned. Understand the message fell on pretty deaf ears. Bad time for you boys. Don’t we know it.”

By now the momentous force of his news had got through to me. If the Professor was cheating with his broadcasts, whom else might he not be cheating?”

“Milt, can I ask you a silly question?”

“Be my guest, Ned.”

“Has Teodor ever done good work for you? In all his time? Secret work? Very secret work, even?”

Wagner pondered this, determined to give the Professor the benefit of the doubt. “Can’t say he has, Ned. We did consider using him as an intermediary for one of our big fish one time, but we kind of didn’t like the old man’s manners.”

“Can I believe that?”

“Would I ever lie to you, Ned?”

So much for the fantastic work he’s doing for the Americans, I thought. So much for the years of loyal service nobody can quite recall.

—

I signalled Toby straight away. I wasted time drafting different texts because my anger kept getting in the way. I understood only too well now why the Americans were refusing to give the Professor his passport, and why he had turned to us for one instead. I understood his air of last things, his listlessness, his lack of urgency: he was waiting to be sacked. I repeated Wagner’s information and asked whether it was known to Head Office. If not, the Cousins were in default of their sharing agreement with us. If, on the other hand, the Cousins had warned us, why hadn’t I been warned too?

Next morning I had Toby’s slippery reply. It took a regal tone. I suspected he had got somebody to write it for him, for it was accent-free. The Cousins had given London a “non-specific warning” he explained, that the Professor might be facing “disciplinary enquiries at some future date on the subject of his broadcasts.” Head Office—by which I suspected he meant himself—had “adopted the view” that the Professor’s relationship with his American employers was not of direct concern to the Circus. Head Office also “took the point”—who but Toby could have made it?—that with so much operational work to occupy him, the Professor could be excused for any “small defects” in his cover work. If another cover job had to be found for the Professor, Head Office would “take steps at the appropriate time.” One solution would be to place him with one of the tame magazines to which he was already an occasional contributor. But that was for the future. The Professor had fallen foul of his employers before, Toby reminded me, and he had ridden out the storm. This was true. A woman secretary had complained of his advances, and elements of the Hungarian community had taken exception to his anti-Semitic views.

For the rest, Toby advised me to cool down, bide my time, and—always a maxim of Toby’s—act as if nothing had happened. Which was how matters stood one week and twelve hours later when the Professor telephoned me at ten at night, using the emergency wordcode and asking me in a strangled but imperious voice to come round to his house immediately, entering by way of the garden door.

My first thought was that he had killed someone, possibly his wife. I could not have been more wrong.

—

The Professor opened the back door, and closed it swiftly after me. The lights inside the house were dimmed. Somewhere in the gloom, a Biedermeier grandfather clock ticked like a big old bomb. At the entrance to the living room stood Helena, her hands to her mouth, smothering a scream. Twenty minutes had passed since Teodor’s call, but the scream still seemed to be on the point of coming out of her.

Two armchairs stood before a dying fire. One was empty. I took it to be the Professor’s. In the other, somewhat obscured from my line of sight, sat a silky, rounded man of forty, with a cap of soft black hair, and twinkling round eyes that said we were all friends, weren’t we? His winged chair was high-backed and he had fitted himself into the angle of it like an aircraft passenger prepared for landing. His rather circular shoes stopped short of the floor, and it occurred to me they were East European shoes: marbled, of an uncertain leather, with moulded, heavy-treaded soles. His hairy brown suit was like a remodelled military uniform. Before him stood a table with a pot of mauve hyacinths on it, and beside the hyacinths lay a display of objects which I recognised as the instruments of silent killing: two garottes made of wooden toggles and lengths of piano wire; a screwdriver so sharpened that it was a stiletto; a Charter Arms .38 Undercover revolver with a five-shot cylinder, together with two kinds of bullet, six soft-nosed, and six rifled, with congealed powder squashed into the grooves.

“It is cyanide,” the Professor explained, in answer to my silent perplexity. “It is an invention of the Devil. The bullet has only to graze the victim to destroy him utterly.”

I found myself wondering how the poisonous powder was supposed to survive the intense heat of a gun barrel.

“This gentleman is named Ladislaus Kaldor,” the Professor continued. “He was sent by the Hungarian secret police to kill us. He is a friend. Kindly sit down, Herr Ned.”

With ceremony, Ladislaus Kaldor rose from his chair and pumped my hand as if we had concluded a profitable deal.

“Sir!” he cried happily, in English. “Latzi. I am sorry, sir. Don’t worry anything. Everybody call me Latzi. Herr Doktor. My friend. Please sit down. Yes.”

I remember how the scent of the hyacinths seemed to go so nicely with his smile. It was only slowly I began to realise I had no sense of danger. Some people convey danger all the time; others put it on when they are angry or threatened. But Latzi, when I was able to consult my instincts, conveyed only an enormous will to please. Which perhaps is all you need if you’re a professional killer.

—

I did not sit down. A chorus of conflicting feelings was yelling in my head, but fatigue was not among them. The empty coffee cups, I was thinking. The empty plates with cake crumbs. Who eats cake and drinks coffee when his life is being threatened? Latzi was sitting again, smiling like a conjuror. The Professor and his wife were studying my face, but from different places in the room. They’ve quarrelled, I thought; crisis has driven them to their separate corners. An American revolver, I thought. But not the spare cylinder that serious players customarily carried. East European shoes, and with soles that leave a perfect print on every carpet or polished floor. Cyanide bullets that would burn off their cyanide in the barrel.

“How long’s he been here?” I asked the Professor. He shrugged. I hated his shrugs. “One hour. Less.”

“More than one hour,” Helena contradicted him. Her indignant gaze was fixed upon me. Until tonight she had made a point of ignoring me, slipping past me like a ghost, smiling or scowling at the ground to show her disapproval. Suddenly she needed my support. “He rang the bell at eight-forty-five exactly. I was listening to the radio. The programme changed.”

I glanced at Latzi. “You speak German?”

“Jawohl, Herr Doktor!”

Back to Helena. “Which programme?”

“The BBC World Service,” she said.

I went to the radio and switched it on. A reedy Oxford academic of unknown gender was bleating about Keats. Thank you, BBC. I switched it off.

“He rang the bell—who answered it?” I said.

“I did,” said the Professor.

“He did,” said Helena.

“Please,” said Latzi.

“And then?”

“He was standing on the doorstep, wearing a coat,” said the Professor.

“A raincoat,” Helena corrected him.

“He asked if I was Professor Teodor, I said yes. He gave his name, he said, ‘Forgive me, Professor, I have come to kill you with a garotte or cyanide bullet but I do not wish to, I am your disciple and admirer. I wish, to surrender to you and remain in the West.’ ”

“He spoke Hungarian?” I asked.

“Naturally.”

“So you invited him in?”

“Naturally.”

Helena did not agree. “No! First Teodor asked for me,” she insisted. I had not heard her correct her husband before tonight. Now she had done so twice in as many minutes. “He calls to me and says, ‘Helena, we have a guest.’ I say, ‘Good.’ Then he asks Latzi into the house. I take his raincoat, I hang it in the hall, I make coffee. That is how it happened exactly.”

“And cake,” I said. “You made cake?”

“The cake was made already.”

“Were you afraid?” I asked—for fear, like danger, was something else that was missing.

“I was disgusted, I was shocked,” she replied. “Now I am afraid—yes, I am very afraid. We are all afraid.”

“And you?” I said to the Professor.

He shrugged again, as if to say I was the last man on earth to whom he would confide his feelings.

“Why don’t you take your wife to the study?” I said.

He was disposed to argue, then changed his mind. Strangers arm in arm, they marched from the room.

I was alone with Latzi. I stood, he sat. Munich can be a very silent city. Even in repose his face smiled at me ingratiatingly. His small eyes still twinkled, but there was nothing I could read in them. He gave me a nod of encouragement, his smile broadened. He said “Please,” and eased himself more comfortably into his chair. I made the gesture every Middle European understands. I held out my hand, palm upward, and passed my thumb across the tip of my forefinger. Still smiling, he rummaged in his inside jacket pocket and handed me his papers. They were in the name of Egon Braubach of Passau, born 1933, occupation artist. I never saw anyone who looked less like a Bavarian artist. They comprised one West German passport, one driver’s licence and one social security document. None of them, it seemed to me, carried the least conviction. Neither did his shoes.

“When did you enter Germany?”

“This afternoon, Herr Doktor, this afternoon at five. Please.”

“Where from?”

“Vienna, please. Vienna,” he repeated, in a breathless rush, as if making me a gift of the entire city, and gave another wriggling motion of his rump, apparently to achieve greater subservience. “I caught the first train to Munich this morning, Herr Doktor.”

“At what time?”

“At eight o’clock, sir. The eight-o’clock train.”

“When did you enter Austria?”

“Yesterday, Herr Doktor. It was raining. Please.”

“Which papers did you present at the Austrian border?”

“My Hungarian passport, Your Excellency. In Vienna I was given German papers.”

Sweat was forming on his upper lip. His German was fluent but unmistakably Balkan. He had travelled by train, he said: Budapest, Györ, Vienna, Herr Doktor. His masters had given him a cold chicken and a bottle of wine for the journey. With best pickles, Your Honour, and paprika. More smiles. Arriving in Vienna, he had checked in at the Altes Kaiserreich Hotel, near the railway station, where a room had been reserved for him. A humble room, a humble hotel, Your Excellency, but I am a humble man. It was at the hotel, late at night, that he was visited by a Hungarian gentleman whom he had not seen before—“But I suspect he was a diplomat, Herr Doktor. He was distinguished like yourself!” This gentleman gave him his money and documents, he explained—and the arsenal that lay before us on the table.

“Where are you staying in Munich?”

“It is a modest guesthouse on the edge of town, Herr Doktor,” he replied, with an apologetic smile. “More a brothel. Yes, a brothel. One sees many men there, coming and going all the time.” He told me its name, and I had half a notion he was going to recommend a girl as well.

“Did they tell you to stay there?”

“For the discretion, Herr Doktor. The anonymity. Please.”

“Do you have luggage there?”

He gave the poor man’s shrug, quite unlike the Professor’s. “A toothbrush,” he said. “Some clothes. A bag, sir. Modest materials.”

In Hungary he was by vocation an agricultural journalist, he said, but he had made himself a second living working for the secret police, first as an informer, and more recently, for the money, as assassin. He had performed certain duties inside Hungary but preferred—forgive him, Excellency—not to say what these were until he was assured he would not be prosecuted in the West. The Professor was his first “foreign duty,” but the thought of killing him had offended his sense of decorum.

“The Professor is a man of format, Herr Doktor! Of reputation! He is not some Jew or priest! Why should I kill this man? I’m a respectable human being, good heavens! I have my honour! Please!”

“Tell me your orders.”

They were not complicated. He was to ring the Herr Professor’s doorbell, they had said—so he had rung it. The Professor was sure to be at home, since on Wednesdays he gave private tuition until nine, they had said.—The Professor was indeed at home.—He should describe himself as a friend of Pali from Debrecen.—He had taken the liberty not to describe himself in these terms.—Once inside the house, he should kill the Herr Professor by whatever means seemed appropriate, but preferably the garotte, since it was sure and silent, though there was always a regrettable danger of decapitation. He should kill Helena also, they said—perhaps kill her first, depending on who opened the door to him, they were not particular. It was for this contingency that he had brought a second garotte. With a garotte, Herr Doktor, he explained helpfully, one could never be sure of being able to disentangle the instrument after use. He should then telephone a number in Bonn, ask for Peter, and report that “Susi will be staying with friends tonight”—Susi being the Professor’s codename for the operation, Excellency. This was the signal for success, though in the present circumstance, Herr Doktor, it must be admitted that he had not been successful. Giggle.

“Telephone from here?” I asked.

“From this house, exactly. To Peter. Please. They are violent men, Herr Doktor. They threaten my family. I have no choice, naturally. I have a daughter. They gave me strict instructions: ‘From the Professor’s house you will telephone Peter.’ ”

This also surprised me. Since the Professor was identified to the Hungarian secret police as a Western asset—and had been for fifteen years—one might suppose they would be suspicious of his telephone.

“What do you do if you’ve failed?” I asked.

“If the duty cannot be fulfilled—if the Herr Professor has guests, or is for some reason not available—I am to ring from a phone box and say that Susi is on her way home.”

“From any particular phone box?”

“All phone boxes are suitable, Herr Doktor, in the event of a non-completion. Peter may then give further instructions, he may not. If not, I return at once to Budapest. Alternatively, Peter may say, ‘Try again tomorrow,’ or he may say, ‘Try in two days.’ It is all in the hands of Peter in this case.”

“What is the Bonn telephone number?”

He recited it.

“Turn out your pockets.”

A khaki handkerchief, some badly printed family snaps, including some of a young girl, presumably his daughter, three East European condoms, an open packet of Russian cigarettes, a wobbly tin penknife of obvious Eastern manufacture, a stub of unpainted pencil, 960 West German marks, some small change. The return half of a second-class rail ticket, Vienna–Munich–Vienna. I never in my life saw such miserably assembled pockets. Did the Hungarian Service have no despatchers? Checkers? What the Devil were they thinking of?

“And your raincoat,” I said, and watched him fetch it from the hall. It was brand-new. The pockets were empty. It was of Austrian manufacture and good quality. It must have cost serious Western money.

“Did you buy this in Vienna?”

“Jawohl, Herr Doktor. It was raining cats and dogs and I had no protection.”

“When?”

“Please?”

“What with?”

“Please?”

I discovered he could anger me quite quickly. “You caught the first train this morning, right? It left Vienna before the shops opened, right? You didn’t get your money till late last night when the Hungarian diplomat visited you. So when did you buy the coat and what did you use for money? Or did you steal it? Is that the answer?”

First he frowned, then he laughed indulgently at my breach of good manners. It was clear that he forgave me. He opened his hands to me in generosity. “But I bought it last night, Herr Doktor! When I arrived at the station! With my personal Valuten that I brought with me from Hungary for shopping, naturally! I am not a liar! Please!”

“Did you keep the receipt?”

He shook his head sagely, advice to a younger man. “To keep receipts, Herr Doktor? I give you this advice. To keep receipts is to invite questions about where you get your money. A receipt—it’s like a spy in the pocket. Please.”

Too many excuses, I thought, releasing myself from the brilliance of his smile. Too many answers in one paragraph. All my instincts told me to trust nobody and nothing about the story that was being told me. It was not so much the sloppiness of the assassination plan that strained my credulity—the implausible documents, the contents of the pockets, the shoes—not even the basic improbability of the mission. I had seen enough of low-level Soviet satellite operations to regard such amateurishness as the norm. What disturbed me about these people was the unreality of their behaviour in my company, the feeling there was one story for me and one for them; that I had been brought here to perform a function, and the collective will required me to shut up and get on with it.

Yet at the same time I was trapped. I had no choice, and no time, but to take everything they had told me at face value. I was in the position of a doctor who, while suspecting a patient of malingering, has no option but to treat his symptoms. By the laws of the game, Latzi was a prize. It was not every day that a Hungarian assassin offered to defect to the West, no matter how incompetent he was. By the same token, the man was in considerable danger, since it was unthinkable that an assassination operation of this consequence could be launched without separate surveillance.

When in doubt, says the handbook, take the operational line. Were they watching the house? It was necessary to assume so, though it was not an easy house to watch, which was what had commended it to Teodor’s handlers fifteen years ago. It stood at the end of a leafy cul-de-sac and backed on to the river. The way into the garden led along a deserted tow-path. But the front porch was visible to anybody passing by, and Latzi could have already been observed entering it.

I went upstairs and from the landing window surveyed the road. The neighbouring houses were in darkness. I saw no sign of stray cars or people. My own car was parked in the next sidestreet, close to the river. I returned to the drawing room. The telephone was on the bookcase. I handed Latzi the receiver and watched him dial the number in Bonn. His hands were girlish and moist. Obligingly, he tilted the earpiece in my direction, and himself with it. He smelt of old blanket and Russian tobacco. The phone rang out, I heard a man’s voice, very grumpy, speaking German. For somebody awaiting news of a killing, I thought, you’re doing a good job of pretending you aren’t.

A thick accent, presumably Hungarian: “Hullo? Yes? Who is it?”

I nodded to Latzi to go ahead.

“Good evening, sir. I wish, please to speak to Mr. Peter.”

“What about?”

“Is this Mr. Peter, please? It is a private matter.”

“What do you want?”

“Is this Peter?”

“My name is Peter!”

“It is regarding Susi, Mr. Peter,” Latzi explained, with a sideways wink at me. “Susi will not be coming home tonight, Mr. Peter. She will be staying with friends, I am afraid. Good friends. She will be looked after. Good night, Mr. Peter.”

He was about to replace the receiver, but I stayed his hand long enough to hear a growl of contempt or incomprehension the other end before he rang off.

Latzi smiled at me, very pleased with himself. “He plays it well, Herr Doktor. A true professional, I would say. A fine actor, you agree?”

“Did you recognise the voice?”

“No, Herr Doktor. Alas, the voice is not familiar to me.”

I shoved open the study door. The Professor sat at his desk, his fists in front of him. Helena sat on the tutorial sofa. I felt a need to acquaint the Professor with my scepticism. I stepped into the room, closing the door behind me.

“The man Latzi, as you call him, is a criminal,” I said. “Either he’s some kind of confidence trickster, or he’s a self-confessed murderer who came to Germany on false papers in order to kill you and your wife. Either way, you’re within your rights to turn him over to the West German police and be done with him. Do you want to do that? Or do you want to leave the decisions to us? Which?”

To my surprise, he appeared for the first time that evening genuinely alarmed. Perhaps he had not expected to be challenged. Perhaps the proximity of his own death had dawned on him. Either way, I had the impression he was attaching more importance to my question than I understood. Helena had turned her eyes away from me and was watching him also. Critically. A woman waiting to be paid.

“Do whatever you must do,” he muttered. “Then you must do as I ask. Both of you.”

“We are cooperative. We shall be—yes, cooperative. We have been—cooperative—for many years. Too many.”

I glanced at Helena.

“It will be my husband’s responsibility,” she said.

I had no time to ponder the mysteries of this ominous statement. “Then please put together some night things and be ready at the garden door in five minutes,” I said, and returned to the drawing room and Latzi.

I think he had been standing at the door for he stepped quickly back as I entered, then clasped his hands to his chin and beamed at me, asking what was gefällig—what was my pleasure?

“Have you ever seen the Professor before tonight?”

“No, sir. Only photographs. One would admire him anywhere. A true aristocrat.”

“And his wife?”

“She is known to me, sir. Naturally.”

“How?”

“She was once an actress, Herr Doktor, one of the best in Budapest.”

“And you saw her on the stage?”

Another pause. “No, sir.”

“Then where did you see her?”

He was trying to read me. I had the impression he was wondering whether she might have told me something, and he was trimming his answers accordingly.

“Theatre bills, Your Excellency. When she was young, her famous face was on every street corner. All young men loved her—I was no exception.”

“Where else?”

He saw that I had nothing. And I saw that he saw. “So sad about a woman’s looks, Herr Doktor. A man, he can remain impressive until he is eighty. A woman—” he sighed.

I let him pack together his weapons, then took possession of them. I loaded the soft-nosed bullets into the revolver. As I did so, a thought occurred to me.

“When I walked in here, the cylinder was empty and the bullets were spread on the table.”

“Correct, Excellency.”

“When did you take the bullets out of the cylinder?” I asked.

“Before entering the house. So that I could demonstrate my peaceful intentions. Naturally.”

“Naturally.”

As we moved to the hall, I shoved the revolver into my waist-band.

“If you take it into your head to run away, I shall shoot you in the back,” I explained to him, and had the satisfaction of seeing his little eyes swivel in alarm. Professional assassins, it seemed, did not take kindly to their own medicine.

I tossed him his raincoat and glanced round the room for other traces of him. There were none. I ordered silence and led the three of them into the garden and along the tow-path to my car. A famous actress, I thought, and not a word about it on the file. I put the Professor and Helena in the back, and Latzi in the front beside me. Then we sat still for five minutes while I waited for the slightest sign that we were being watched. Nothing. It was by now midnight and a new moon had risen among the stars. I circled the town, keeping a watch on my mirror, then took the autobahn south-west to the Starnbergersee, where we kept a safe house for briefing and debriefing joes in passage. It lay close to the lake’s edge and was manned by two murderous long-haired wonders left over from London Station’s Lamplighters Section. They were called Jeffrey and Arnold. Arnold was hovering in the doorway by the time we reached it. One hand was in the pocket of his kaftan. The other hung threateningly to his side.

“It’s me, you buffoon,” I said softly.

Jeffrey showed the Professor and his wife to their bedroom while Arnold sat with Latzi in the drawing room. I went down the garden to the boat-house, where I was at last able to talk to Toby Esterhase on the safe telephone. He was amazingly composed. It was as if he had been expecting my call.

—

Toby arrived in Munich on the first flight from London next morning, wearing a beaver-lamb coat and a leather Trilby hat, and looking more the impresario than the beleaguered spy.

“Nedike, my God!” he cried, embracing me like a prodigal father. “Listen, you look fantastic, I would say. Congratulations, okay? Nothing like a little excitement to bring the blooms to your cheeks. How’s Mabel, actually? A marriage, that’s something you got to water, same as a flower.”

I drove slowly and spoke, as best I could, dispassionately, giving him the fruits of my researches throughout the long night. I wanted him to know everything I knew by the time we reached the lake house.

Neither the Americans nor the West Germans had any trace of Latzi, I said. Neither, I gathered from Toby, had London.

“Latzi, that’s an unwritten page, Ned. Totally,” Toby agreed, surveying the passing landscape with every sign of approval.

There was also no trace of his Bavarian covername, or of any of the covernames that Latzi claimed to have used on his “duties” inside Hungary, I said.

Toby lowered his window to enjoy the fragrance of the fields.

Latzi’s West German passport was a fake, I continued with determination, one of a batch recently run up by a low-grade forger in Vienna and sold on the private market.

Toby was mildly indignant. “I mean who buys that crap, for God’s sake?” he protested, as we passed a pair of palomino horses grazing in a paddock. “With passports, these days, you get what you pay for actually. What you get for crap like that, it’s six months in a stinking gaol.” And he shook his head sadly like a man whose warnings go unheeded until it’s too late.

I blundered on. The phone number in Bonn belonged to the Hungarian military attaché, I said, whose first name was indeed listed as Peter. He was an identified Hungarian Intelligence officer. I allowed myself a restrained irony:

“That’s a new one for us, isn’t it, Toby? A spy using his own name as a covername? I mean why bother any more? You’re Toby, so we’ll keep it a secret and call you Toby instead. Great.”

But Toby was too set on enjoying his day in Bavaria to be disturbed by the implications of my words. “Nedike, believe me, those army guys, they’re total idiots. Hungarian military intelligence, that’s the same as Hungarian military music, know what I mean? They blow it out their arses actually.”

I continued my recitation. West German Security had a permanent tap running on the Hungarian attaché’s telephone, I said. A cassette of Latzi’s conversation with Peter was on its way to my office. From what I understood, it offered no surprises except to underline that Peter appeared genuinely unprepared for the call. Peter had neither made nor received further calls last night, I said, nor had there been any burst of diplomatic signals traffic from the roof of the Hungarian Embassy in Bonn. Peter had, however, complained to the Protocol Department of the West German Foreign Office about telephone harassment on his home line. This was not, I suggested, the act of a conspirator. Toby was less sure.

“Could be one thing, Ned, could be the other,” he said, leaning back in his seat and languidly tilting the flat of his hand both ways. “A man thinks he’s been compromised? So maybe it’s not so stupid he makes a formal complaint once, brushes over his traces—why not?”

I gave him the rest. I was determined to. Latzi’s description of the putative diplomat in Vienna tallied with that of one Leo Bakocs, Commercial Secretary and, like Peter, an identified Hungarian Intelligence officer, I said. Cousin Wagner was getting hold of a photograph for us to show to Latzi later in the day.

The name Bakocs brought a fond smile to Toby’s lips. “They drag Leo in on this? Listen, Leo’s so vain he spies only on duchesses.” He laughed in jolly disbelief. “Leo in some lousy hotel, handing over garottes to a smelly assassin? Tell me another, Ned. I mean.”

“It isn’t me who’s telling you,” I said. “It’s Latzi.”

Lastly, I said, I had despatched Jeffrey to the Munich whorehouse to pay Latzi’s bill and collect his overnight bag. The only article of interest in his luggage was a set of pornographic photographs.

“It’s the tension, Ned,” Toby explained magnanimously. “In a foreign country, killing somebody you don’t know, you need a little private company—know what I mean?”

In return, Toby had brought me nothing whatever, private or otherwise. I had imagined him on the phone all night, and perhaps he had been. But not in support of my enquiries.

“Maybe we have a party tonight,” he proposed. “Harry Palfrey of Legal Department is coming over with a couple of guys from the Foreign Office. That’s a nice fellow, Harry. Very English.”

I was bewildered. “What branch of the Foreign Office?” I said. “Who? Why Palfrey?”

But as Toby would say, questions are never dangerous until you answer them. We arrived at the lake house to find Arnold cooking eggs and bacon. The Professor and Latzi sat at one end of the table. Helena, a vegetarian, sat at the other, eating a nut bar from her handbag.

Arnold was blond and lank. His hair was done in a knot at the back. “They had a bit of a dingdong, Ned,” he confided to me disapprovingly while Toby fell about the Professor’s neck. “The Professor and his missus, a real dogfight. I don’t know who started it or what it was about, I wouldn’t ask.”

“Did Latzi join in?”

“He was going to, Ned, but I told him to keep quiet. I don’t like a man who comes between husband and wife, I never did.”

—

In retrospect, our discussions that day resemble an intricate minuet, beginning in our humble kitchen and ending in the courts of the Almighty Himself—more precisely in the beflagged conference room of the American Consulate General, where the inspiring features of President Nixon and Vice President Agnew smiled favourably on our endeavours.

For Toby, as I soon realised, far from doing nothing, had laid on an entire programme for himself, which he advanced from stage to stage with the dexterity of a ringmaster. In the kitchen, he listened to the whole story over again from Latzi and the Professor, while Helena chewed her nut bar. I had never seen Toby in full Hungarian flight before and found time to marvel at the transformation. With one sentence he had flung aside the unnatural corset of his Anglo-Saxon restraint and was back among his people. His eyes caught fire. He preened, and his back arched as if he were sitting on a parade horse.

“Ned, they say you have been quite fantastic actually,” he called to me down the table in the midst of all this. “A tower of strength, they are saying, completely. I think maybe they will recommend you a Nobel prize!”

“Tell them to make it an Oscar, I’ll accept,” I said sourly, and took myself for a walk down to the lakeside to recover my temper.

I returned to the house to find Toby and the Professor closeted in the drawing room, talking volubly. Toby’s high respect for the Professor seemed, if anything, to have increased. Latzi was helping Arnold with the washing-up and they were both sniggering. Latzi had evidently been telling a dirty joke. Helena was nowhere to be seen. Next, it was Latzi’s turn to sit alone with Toby, while the Professor and his wife walked uneasily at the lakeside, pausing every few steps to remonstrate with each other, until the Professor turned on his heel and strode back to the house.

Seizing the moment, I slipped out and joined Helena. Her lips were pursed and her face was sickly-white—whether from fear, anger or fatigue, I couldn’t tell. When she spoke, she had to stop and begin again before the words would come.

“He is a liar,” she said. “It is all lies! Lie, lie! He is a liar!”

“Who is?”

“They are both liars. From the day of birth, they lie. On their deathbeds, they lie.”

“So what’s the truth?” I said.

“Wait is the truth!”

“Wait for what?”

“I have warned him. ‘If you do this, I shall tell the English.’ So we wait. If he does it, I shall tell you. If he repents, I shall spare him. I am his wife.”

She walked to the house, a stately woman. As she entered it, a black limousine pulled up in the drive and Harry Palfrey, the Circus legal adviser, emerged, accompanied by two other members of the English governing classes. I recognised the taller of them as Alan Barnaby, luminary of the Foreign Office’s misnomered Information and Research Department, which traded in Communist counterpropaganda at its sleaziest. Toby was shaking him warmly by the hand while with his other he beckoned me to join them. We went indoors and sat down.

At first I smouldered in silence. The players had been sent upstairs. Toby was doing the talking, the others listened to him with the special reverence their kind reserves for paupers or black men. I even found myself feeling a little protective of him—of Toby Esterhase, God help me, who protected no one but himself!

“What we are dealing with here, Alan, without talking out of turn actually, is a completely top source who is now expended,” Toby explained. “A great joe, but his day is over.”

“You mean the Prof,” Barnaby said helpfully.

“They are on to him. They know his value too well. From certain clues I have obtained from Latzi, it’s clear the Hungarians have a fat dossier on the Professor’s operations. After all, I mean, why would they try to kill a fellow who is no use to us? A Hungarian assassination attempt—that’s a Good Housekeeping certificate for the target, I would say.”

“We can’t be responsible for the Professor’s safety indefinitely,” Palfrey cautioned us with his loser’s smile. “We can give him protection for a bit, naturally. But we can’t accept a life interest in him. He has to know that. We may have to get him to sign something just to make the point.”

The second Foreign Office man was round and shiny with a chain across his waistcoat. I had a childish urge to pull it and see if he squealed.

“Well, I think we may all be talking too much,” he said silkily. “If the Americans agree to take the pair of ’em off our hands, the Prof and his missus, we shan’t have to worry, shall we? Best keep our heads down and our powder dry, what?”

Palfrey demurred. “He should still sign a release for us, Norman. He has rather been playing us off against the Cousins in the last few years.”

Ever the protector of his own, Toby gave a knowing smile. “All the best joes do this, I would say, Harry. One hand washes the other, even at Teodor’s level. The question is, now that he is no longer usable, what have we got to lose except trouble actually? I mean, I am not the expert here,” he added, with an ingratiating smile at Barnaby.

“What about the assassin fellow?” said the man called Norman. “Will he play ball as well? Bloody dangerous, isn’t it, sitting up there like a duck in a tree?”

“Latzi is flexible,” said Toby. “He is scared, he is also a complete patriot.” I would not have backed him on either of these points, but I was too sickened to interrupt. “These apparatchiks, when they step out of the system, they are in shock. Latzi is coping with it. He agonises over his family, but he is reconciled. If Teodor accepts, Latzi will accept also. With guarantees, naturally.”

“What sort of guarantees?” said the shiny Foreign Office man, so quickly that not even Harry Palfrey got in ahead of him.

Toby did not falter. “Well, naturally the usual. Latzi and Teodor don’t want to be thrown on to the rubbish heap when this one’s over, I would say. Nor does Helena. American passports, a good bit of money at the end of the road, assistance and protection—I mean, that’s basic so to speak.”

“The whole thing’s a con,” I blurted. I had had enough.

—

Everybody was smiling at me. They would have smiled whatever I had said. They were that sort of crowd. If I had said I was a Hungarian double agent, they would have smiled. If I had said I was Adolf Hitler’s reincarnated younger brother, they would have smiled. All but Toby, that is, whose face had acquired the lifelessness of someone who knows that all he can safely be at this moment is nobody at all.

“Now why on earth do you say that, Ned?” Barnaby was asking, awfully interested.

“Latzi’s not a trained killer,” I said. “I don’t know what he is, but he isn’t a killer. He was carrying an unloaded gun. No professional in his right mind does that. He’s posing as a Bavarian artist, but he’s wearing Hungarian clothes and half the junk in his pockets is Hungarian. I was standing over him when he made his phone call to Bonn. Fine, the attaché’s first name is Peter. It’s in the diplomatic list as Peter. Peter wasn’t expecting that call in a month of Sundays. Latzi laid it on him. Listen to the German tape of their conversation.”

“Then what about the chap in Vienna, Ned?” said Barnaby, still determined to patronise me. “The chap who gave him his money and his hardware? Eh? Eh?”

“They never met. We showed Latzi the photograph and he was delighted. ‘That’s the man,’ he said. Oh sure: he’d seen a photograph somewhere else. Ask Helena, she knows. She’s not telling at the moment, but if we put pressure on her, I’m sure she will.”

Toby came briefly alive. “Pressure, Ned? Helena? Pressure, that’s something you use when you know you can squeeze harder than the other fellow. That woman is crazy about her husband. She defends him to the grave actually.”

“The Professor’s fallen foul of the Americans,” I said. “They’re rolling up his red carpet. He’s desperate. If he didn’t set up the assassination himself, Latzi did. The whole ploy is a device for him to cut his losses and make a new life.”

They waited for me to continue, all of them. It was as if they were waiting for the punchline. Finally Toby spoke. He had rediscovered his form.

“Nedike, how long since you slept actually?” he asked with an indulgent smile. “Tell us, please.”

“What’s that got to do with it?”

Toby was ostentatiously studying his watch. “I think you have been now thirty hours without sleep, Ned. You took some pretty damn big decisions in that time—all good ones I would say. I don’t think we can blame you for having a bit of a reaction.”

It was as if I had never spoken. All heads had turned back to Toby.

“Well, I think it’s rather important we take a peek at the cast,” Barnaby was saying as I headed for the door. “Can we whistle them down, Toby? Question of how they’ll shape up under the spotlights.”

“I think there’s news value in doing this thing straightaway, Barnaby,” Palfrey was saying, as I headed for the garden and sanity. “Strike while the iron is hot. With me?”

“With you all the way, Harry. Hundred percent.”

—

I refused to be present for the first audition. I sulked in the kitchen and let Arnold minister to me while I pretended to listen to some story about his mother walking out on the fellow she’d been with for twenty years and shacking up with her childhood sweetheart. I watched Toby skip upstairs to fetch his champions, and scowled when the three men descended some minutes later, Latzi with his black hair slicked into a parting, the Professor with his jacket outside his shoulders, his seer’s head struck forward in contemplation and his white mane flowing becomingly.

Then Helena came into the kitchen with tears streaming down her cheeks, so Arnold gave her a hug and fetched a blanket for her, because the spring morning was crisp and she was shivering. Then Arnold made her a camomile tea, and sat with his arm round her till Toby bustled in to say we were all expected at the American Consulate in two hours.

“Russell Sheriton is flying in from London, Pete de May from Bonn. They are mustard for it, Ned. Totally mustard. Washington throws its cap in the air, completely.” I do not recall whether Pete de May was grander than Sheriton or less grand. But grand enough. “Ned, that Teodor’s fantastic,” Toby assured me privately.

“Really? In what way?”

“You know what they told him? ‘What you are doing is damn risky, Professor. Do you think you can handle it?’ You know what he replied? ‘Mr. Ambassador, risks are what we all take to protect civilised society.’ He’s quiet, he’s dignified. Latzi too. Ned, after this you get some sleep, okay? I phone Mabel.”

We rode in two cars, Toby with the Hungarians, myself with Palfrey and the Foreign Office. Opening the car door for me, Palfrey touched my arm and offered me some steel-edged advice. “I think from now on, it’s all hands pulling together, Ned. Tired is one thing. Talk about con-tricks is something else. Yes? Agreed?”

—

We must have numbered twenty head. The Consul General presided. He was a pallid Midwesterner, an ex-lawyer like Palfrey, and kept talking anxiously about “reprocussions.” Milton Wagner was seated between Sheriton and de May. It was clear to me that, whatever their private thoughts, Sheriton and Wagner had orders to keep their scepticism to themselves. Perhaps they too had recognised that there were worse ways of getting rid of useless agents than off-loading them onto the U.S. Information Services, who were represented by a quartet of troubled believers whose names I never learned.

Pullach was spoken for, naturally. Though not involved, they had sent their own observer, so we could be confident that our determinations would be the gossip of Potsdam by afternoon. They also insisted on making a voluble complaint about Vienna. It seemed that Pullach had a running battle with the Austrian police about forged passports, and suspected them of selling them to the Hungarians. Quite a lot of the meeting was taken up by an Oberst von-und-zu somewhere or other moaning about Austrian duplicity.

The three champions did not, of course, attend our deliberations, but sat in the waiting room. When sandwiches were passed round, a generous plate was sent out to them. And when they were finally called in, several of the lay members of the meeting broke into applause, which must have been the first of many times from then on when they heard the roar of the greasepaint.

But it was Helena’s tears that stole the show. The Professor said his few words, and his halting dignity worked its predictable magic. Latzi followed him, and a cold chill fell over the room as he explained why he had carried the two garottes, which were then passed gingerly round the table with the rest of the exhibits. But when Helena stepped forward on the Professor’s arm, I felt a lump rise to my throat, and knew that everyone in the room was feeling the same.

“I support my husband,” was all the great actress could declaim.

But it was enough to bring the room to its feet.

—

It was late evening before I managed to speak to her alone. We were washed out by then; even the irrepressible Latzi was exhausted. The captains and the kings had departed, Toby had departed. I was sitting with Arnold in the drawing room of the lake house. An American van, with blackened windows and two plainclothes marines aboard, was waiting in the drive, but our stars were learning to keep their public waiting. The day had been spent preparing afternoon press announcements and signing Palfrey’s releases, which he turned out to have brought with him in his briefcase.

She entered hesitantly, as if she expected me to strike her, but the anger had been drained out of me.

“We shall get our passports,” she said, sitting down. “It is the new world.”

Arnold slipped tactfully from the room, closing the door behind him.

“Who’s Latzi?” I said.

“He is a friend of Teodor.”

“What else is he?”

“He is an actor. A bad, oh a bad actor from Debrecen.”

“Did he ever work for the secret police?”

She made a gesture of deprecation. “He had connections. When Teodor needed to arrange himself with the authorities, Latzi was the go-between.”

“You mean, when Teodor needed to inform on his students?”

“Yes.”

“Did Latzi supply Teodor with his information while you were in Munich?”

“At first only a little. But when none came from other sources, more. Then much more. Latzi prepared the material for Teodor. Teodor sold it to the British and Americans. Otherwise we would have had no money.”

“Was Latzi getting help from the secret police to do this?”

“It was private. Things are changing in Hungary. It is no longer prudent to be involved with the authorities.”

I unlocked the door and watched her make her exit, head erect.

A few weeks later, back in London, I faced Toby with her story. He was neither surprised nor contrite.

“Women, Ned, that’s a criminal class actually. Better we eat the soup, not stir it.”

A few weeks more and the Teodor-Latzi show was riding high. So was Toby. How much was he a part of it? How much did he know when? The whole of it? Did he dream up the entire piece of theatre in order to make the best of his imperilled agent and get him off his hands? I have often secretly suspected that the play was a three-hander, at the least, with Helena as the reluctant audience.

“Know what, Nedike?” Toby declared, throwing an affectionate arm around my shoulder. “If you can’t ride two horses at once, you better stay out of the Circus.”

—

You remember the pseudonymous Colonel Weatherby in the book? The master of disguises, at ease in seven European languages? Pimpernel leader of the East European resistance fighters? The man who “flitted back and forth across the Iron Curtain as if it were of frailest gossamer”? That was me. Ned. I didn’t write that part, thank God. It was the work of some venal sports journalist from Baltimore recruited by the Cousins. Mine was the introductory pen portrait of the great man, printed under the caption “The Real Professor Teodor as I Knew Him,” and gouged out of me by Toby and the Fifth Floor. My working title for the book was Tricks of the Trade, but the Fifth Floor said that might be misunderstood. They promoted me instead.

But not before I had taken my indignation to George Smiley, who had just given up his job as acting chief and was on the point of removing himself for the nearly last time to the shadows of academia. I was back in London on a mid-tour break. It was a Friday evening and I ran him to earth in Bywater Street, packing for the weekend. He heard me out, he gave a small chuckle, then a larger chuckle. He muttered, “Oh Toby,” affectionately under his breath.

“But then they do assassinate, don’t they, Ned,” he objected as he laboriously folded a tweed suit. “The Hungarians, I mean. Even by East European standards, they’re one of the foulest mobs there are, surely?”

Yes, I conceded, the Hungarians killed and tortured pretty much at will. But that didn’t alter the fact that Latzi was a fake and Teodor was Latzi’s accomplice, and as to Toby—

Smiley cut me short. “Now, Ned, I think you’re being a little bit prissy. Every church needs its saints. The anti-Communist church is no exception. And saints as a bunch are a pretty bogus lot, when you come down to it. But no one would pretend they don’t have their uses, once they get the job. Do you think this shirt will do, or must I give it another iron?”

We sat in his drawing room sipping our Scotches and listening to the clamour of party-goers in Bywater Street.

“And did the ghost of Stefanie stalk the Munich pavements for you, Ned?” Smiley enquired tenderly, just when I was beginning to wonder whether he had dozed off.

I had long ceased to marvel at his capacity to put himself in my shoes.

“Now and then,” I replied.

“But not in the flesh? How sad.”

“I once rang one of her aunts,” I said. “I’d had some silly row with Mabel and gone to a hotel. It was late. I expect I was a bit drunk.” I found myself wondering whether Smiley already knew, and decided I was being fanciful. “Or I think it was an aunt. It could have been a servant. No, it was an aunt.”

“What did she say?”

“ ‘Fräulein Stefanie is not at home.’ ”

A long silence, but this time I did not make the mistake of thinking he had gone to sleep.

“Young voice?” he enquired thoughtfully.

“Quite.”

“Then perhaps it was Stefanie who answered.”

“Perhaps it was.”

We listened again to the raised voices in the street. A girl was laughing. A man was cross. Somebody hooted a horn and drove away. The sounds died. Stefanie’s my Ann, I thought, as I walked back across the river to Battersea, where I had kept my little flat: the difference is, I never had the courage to let her disappoint me.

7

Smiley had interrupted himself—some tale of a Central American diplomat with a passion for British model railways of a certain generation, and how the Circus had bought the man’s lifelong allegiance with a Hornby Double-O shunting engine stolen from a London toy museum by Monty Arbuck’s team. Everyone was laughing until this sudden reflective silence, while Smiley’s troubled gaze fixed itself upon some point outside the room.

“And just occasionally we meet the reality we’ve been playing with,” he said quietly. “Until it happens, we’re spectators. The joes live out our dreams for us, and we case officers sit safe and snug behind our one-way mirrors, telling ourselves that seeing is feeling. But when the moment of truth strikes—if ever it does for you—well, from then on we become a little more humble about what we ask people to do for us.”

He never once glanced at me as he said this. He gave no hint of who was in his mind. But I knew, and he knew. And each knew the other knew that it was Colonel Jerzy.

—

I saw him and I said nothing to Mabel. Perhaps I was too surprised. Or perhaps the old habits of dissembling die so hard that even today my first response at any unexpected event is to suppress the spontaneous reaction. We were watching the nine-o’clock news on television, which for Mabel and myself has become a kind of Evensong these days, don’t ask me why. And suddenly I saw him. Colonel Jerzy. And instead of leaping from my chair and shouting, “My God! Mabel! Look, that fellow in the back there! That’s Jerzy!”—which would have been the healthy reaction of any ordinary man—I went on watching the screen and sipping my whisky and soda. Then, as soon as I was alone, I slipped a fresh tape into the video machine so that I could be sure of catching the repeat when it came round on “Newsnight.” Since when—the incident is now six weeks old—I must have watched it a dozen more times, for there is always some extra nuance to be relished.

But I shall leave that part of the story to the end where it belongs. Better to give you the events in the order they occurred, for there was more to Munich than Professor Teodor, and there was more to spying in the wake of Bill Haydon’s exposure than waiting for the wounds to heal.

—

Colonel Jerzy was a Pole and I have never understood why so many Poles have a soft spot for us. Our repeated betrayals of their country have always seemed to me so disgraceful that if I were Polish, I would spit on every passing British shadow, whether I had suffered under the Nazis or the Russians—the British in their time having abandoned the poor Poles to both. And I would certainly be tempted to plant a bomb under the so-called “competent department” of the British Foreign Office. Dear heaven, what a phrase! As I write, the Poles are once more squeezed between the unpredictable Russian Bear and the rather more predictable German Ox. But you may be quite sure that if they should ever need a good friend to help them out, the same “competent department” of the British Foreign Office will send its treacly regrets and plead a more enticing function up the road.

Nevertheless, the record of my Service boasts a disproportionate rate of success in Poland, and an almost embarrassing number of Polish men and women who, with reckless Polish courage, have risked their necks and those of their families in order to spy for “England.”

No wonder then if, in the aftermath of Haydon, the casualty rate among our Polish networks was correspondingly high. Thanks to Haydon, the British had added yet another betrayal to their long list. As each new loss followed the previous one with sickening inevitability, the air of mourning in our Munich Station became almost palpable, and our sense of shame was compounded by our helplessness. None of us had any doubt of what had happened. Until the Fall, Polish Security—ably led by their Chief of Operations, Colonel Jerzy—had held Haydon’s treachery close to their chests, contenting themselves with penetrating our existing networks and using them as channels of disinformation—or, where they succeeded in turning them, playing them back at us with skill.

But After the Fall, the Colonel felt no further need of delicacy, and in the course of a few days savagely silenced those of our loyal agents whom till then he had allowed to remain in place. “Jerzy’s hit list,” we called it as the tally rose almost daily, and in our frustration we developed a personal hatred of the man who had murdered our beloved joes, sometimes not bothering with the formalities of a trial, but letting his interrogators have their fun until the end.

It may seem odd to think of Munich as a springboard to Poland. Yet for decades Munich had been the command centre for a range of Polish operations. From the roof of our Consular annexe in a leafy suburb, our antennae had listened night and day for our Polish agents’ signals—often no more than a blip compressed between words spoken on the open radio. And in return, on pre-determined schedules, we had transmitted comfort and fresh orders to them. From Munich we had despatched our Polish letters, impregnated with secret writing. And if our sources managed to travel outside Poland, it was from Munich again that we flew off to debrief and feast them and listen to their worries.

It was from Munich also, when the need was great enough, that our Station officers would cross into Poland, always singly and usually in the guise of a visiting businessman bound for a trade fair or exhibition. And in some roadside picnic spot or backstreet café, our emissaries would come briefly face-to-face with our precious joes, transact their business and depart, knowing they had refilled the lamp. For nobody who has not led a joe’s life can imagine what loneliness of faith it brings. A well-timed cup of bad coffee shared with a good case officer can raise a joe’s morale for months.

Which is how it happened that, one winter’s day soon after the beginning of the second half of my tour in Munich (and the welcome departure of Professor Teodor and his appendages to America), I found myself flying into Gdansk on a LOT Polish Airlines flight from Warsaw, with a Dutch passport in my pocket describing me as Franz Joost of Nijmegen, born forty years before. According to my businessman’s visa application, my mission was to inspect prefabricated agricultural buildings on behalf of a West German farming consortium. For I have some basic grounding as an engineer, and certainly enough to exchange visiting cards with officials from their Ministry of Agriculture.

My other mission was more complicated. I was looking for a joe named Oskar, who had returned to life six months after being given up for dead. Out of the blue, Oskar had sent us a letter to an old cover address, using his secret writing equipment and describing everything he had done and not done from the day he had first heard of the arrests till now. He had kept his nerve. He had remained at his job. He had anonymously denounced some blameless apparatchik in his Archives Section in order to divert suspicion. He had waited, and after a few weeks the apparatchik disappeared. Encouraged, he waited again. Rumour reached him, that the apparatchik had confessed. Given Colonel Jerzy’s tender ministrations, this was not surprising. As the weeks went by, he began to feel safe again. Now he was ready to resume work if someone would tell him what to do. In earnest of this, he had stuck microdots to the third, fifth and seventh full stop of the letter, which were the prearranged positions. Blown up, they amounted to sixteen pages of top-secret orders from the Polish Defence Ministry to Colonel Jerzy’s department. The Circus analysts declared them “likely and presumed reliable,” which, coming from them, was an ecstatic declaration of faith.

You must imagine now the excitement that Oskar’s letter kindled in the Station, and even in myself, though I had never met him. Oskar! the believers cried. The old devil! Alive and kicking under the rubble! Trust Oskar to beat the rap! Oskar, our hardened Polish Admiralty clerk, based at Gdansk’s coastal defence headquarters, one of the best the Station ever had!

Only the hardest-nosed, or those nearest to retirement, dismissed the letter as a lure. Saying “no” in such cases is easy. Saying “yes” takes nerve. Nevertheless, the nay-sayers are always heard the clearest, particularly after Haydon, and for a while there was a stalemate when no one had the nerve to jump either way. Buying time, we wrote to Oskar asking for more collateral. He wrote back angrily demanding to know whether he was trusted, and this time he insisted on a meeting. “A meeting or nothing,” he said. And in Poland. Soon or never.

While Head Office continued to vacillate, I begged to be allowed to go to him. The unbelievers in my Station told me I was mad, the believers said it was the only decent thing to do. I was convinced by neither side, but I wanted clarity. Perhaps I also wanted it for myself, for Mabel had recently shown signs of withdrawing herself from our relationship and I was not disposed to rate myself too highly. Head Office sided with the noes. I reminded them of my naval background. Head Office dithered and said “no, but maybe.” I reminded them of my bilinguality and the tested strength of my Netherlands identity, which our Dutch liaison condoned in exchange for favours in another field. Head Office measured the risks and the alternatives, and finally said, “Yes, but only for two days.” Perhaps they had concluded that, after Haydon, I hadn’t that many secrets to give away anyway. Hastily I put together my cover and set off before they could change their minds again. It was six below as my plane touched down at Gdansk airport; thick snow was lying in the streets, more was falling and the quiet gave me a greater sense of safety than was prudent. But I was taking no risks, believe me. I might be looking for clarity, but I was nobody’s innocent any more.

Gdansk hotels are of a uniform frightfulness and mine was no exception. The lobby stank like a disinfected urinal; checking-in was as complicated as adopting a baby and took longer. My room turned out to be someone else’s and she spoke no known language. By the time I had found another room, and a maid to remove the grosser traces of its previous inhabitant, it was dusk and time for me to make my arrival known to Oskar.

—

Every joe has his handwriting. In summer, said the file, Oskar liked to fish, and my predecessor had held successful conversations with him along the river bank. They had even caught a couple of fish together, though the pollution had made them inedible. But this was deep-frozen winter, when only children and masochists fished. In winter Oskar’s habits changed and he liked to play billiards at a club for small officials near the docks. And this club had a telephone. To initiate a meeting, my predecessor, who spoke Polish, had only to call him there and conduct a cheery conversation built round the fiction that he was an old naval friend named Lech. Then Oskar would say, “All right, I’ll meet you tomorrow at my sister’s for a drink,” which meant “Pick me up in your car on the corner of so-and-so street in one hour’s time.”

But I spoke no Polish. And besides, the rules of post-Haydon tradecraft dictated that no agent should be reactivated by means of past procedures.

In his letter, Oskar had provided the telephone numbers of three cafés, and the times at which he would try to be available in each of them—three because there was always the likelihood that one of the phones would be out of order or occupied. If none of the phone calls worked, then we would resort to a car pick-up, and Oskar had told me which tram stop I should stand at, and at what time. He had provided the registration number of his new blue Trabant.

And if all of this seems to place me in a passive rôle, that is because the iron rule for such meetings is that the agent in the field is king, and it’s the agent who decides what is the safest course for him, and the most natural to his lifestyle. What Oskar was suggesting was not what I would have suggested, nor did I understand why we had to speak on the telephone before we met. But perhaps Oskar understood. Perhaps he was afraid of a trap. Perhaps he wanted to sample the reassurance of my voice before he took the plunge.

Or perhaps there was some sidelight I had yet to learn of: he was bringing a friend with him; he wished to be evacuated at once; he had changed his mind. For there is a second rule of tradecraft as rigid as the first, which says that the outrageous is to be regarded at all times as the norm. The good case officer expects the entire Gdansk telephone system to fail the moment he begins his call. He expects the tram stop to be at the centre of a road works, or that Oskar will that morning have driven his car into a lamp-post or developed a temperature of a hundred and four, or that his wife will have persuaded him to demand a million dollars in gold before resuming contact with us, or that her baby will have decided to be premature. The whole art—as I told my students till they hated me for it—is to rely on Sod’s Law and otherwise nothing.

It was with this maxim in mind that, having spent a fruitless hour telephoning the three cafés, I placed myself at the agreed tram stop at ten past nine that night, and waited for Oskar’s Trabant to grope its way towards me down the street. For though the snow had by now ceased to fall, the street was still no more than a pair of black tracks at one side of the tramlines, and the few cars that passed had the wariness of survivors returning from the front.

There is old Danzig the stately Hanseatic port, and there is Gdansk the Polish industrial slum. The tram stop was in Gdansk. To left and right of me as I waited, dour, low-lit concrete apartment houses hunched under the smouldering orange sky. Looking up and down the street, I saw not the smallest sign of human love or pleasure. Not a café, not a cinema, not a pretty light. Even the pair of drunks slumped in a doorway across the street seemed afraid to speak. One peak of laughter, one shout of good-fellowship or pleasure would have been a crime against the drabness of this outdoor prison. A car slipped by but it was not blue and it was not a Trabant. Its side windows were caked with snow, and ever after it had passed I could not have told you how many people were inside. It stopped. Not at the side of the street, not on the pavement or in a turning or a layby, for mounds of snow blocked them all. It simply stopped in the twin black track of the road, and cut its engine, then its lights.

Lovers, I thought. If so, they were lovers blind to danger, for the road was two-way. A second car appeared, traveling in the same direction as the first. It too pulled up, but short of my tram stop. More lovers? Or merely a sensible drive allowing plenty of skidding distance between himself and the stationary car ahead of him? The effect was the same; there was one car to either side of me, and as I stood waiting, I saw that the two silent drunks were standing clear of their doorway and looking very sober. Then I heard the single footstep behind me, soft as a bedroom slipper in the snow, but close. And I knew that I must not make any sudden movement, certainly not a clever one. There was no springing free, there was no preemptive blow that would save me, because what I was beginning to fear in my imagination was either nothing or it was everything. And if it was everything, there was nothing I could do.

A man was standing to my left, close enough to touch me. He wore a fur coat and a leather hat and carried a collapsed umbrella that could have been a lead pipe shoved into a nylon sheath. Very well, like myself he was waiting for the tram. A second man was standing to my right. He smelt of horse. And very well, like his companion and myself, he too was waiting for the tram, even if he had ridden here on horseback. Then a man’s voice spoke to me in mournful Polish English, and it came neither from my left nor my right, but from directly behind me, where I had heard the slippered footstep.

“Oskar will not be coming tonight, I am afraid, sir. He has been dead for six months.”

But by then he had given me time to think. A whole age, in fact. I knew of no Oskar. Oskar who? Coming where? I was a Dutchman who spoke only a limited amount of English, with a thick Dutch accent like my uncles and aunts in Nijmegen. I paused while I let his words have their effect on me; then I turned—but slowly and incuriously.

“You are confusing me, sir, I think,” I protested, in the slow singsong voice I had learned at my mother’s knee. “My name is Franz Joost, from Holland, and I do not think that I am waiting for anyone except the tram.”

And that was when the men on either side of me grabbed hold of me like good professionals, pinning my arms and knocking me off balance at the same moment, then dragging and toppling me all the way to the second car. But not before I had time to recognise the squat man who had addressed me, his damp grey jowls, and sodden night-clerk’s eyes. It was our very own Colonel Jerzy, the much publicised hero of the Protection of the Polish People’s Republic, whose expressionless photograph had graced the front pages of several illustrious Polish newspapers around the time that he was gallantly arresting and torturing our agents.

—

There are deaths we unconsciously prepare for, depending on our choice of trades. An undertaker contemplates his funerals, the richman his destitution, the gaoler his imprisonment, the debauchee his impotence. An actor’s greatest terror, I am told, is to watch the theatre empty itself while he wrestles in a void for his lines, and what else is that but a premature vision of his dying? For the civil servant, it is the moment when his protective walls of privilege collapse around him and he finds himself no safer than the next man, exposed to the gaze of the overt world, answering like a lying husband for his laxities and evasions. And most of my intelligence colleagues, if I am honest, came into this category: their greatest fear was to wake up one morning to read their real names en clair in the newspapers; to hear themselves spoken of on the radio and television, joked and laughed about and, worse yet, questioned by the public they believed they served. They would have regarded such public scrutiny as a greater disaster than being outwitted by the opposition, or, blown to every kindred service round the globe. It would have been their death.

And for myself, the worst death, and therefore the greatest test, the one for which I had prepared myself ever since I passed through the secret door, was the one that was upon me now: to have my uncertain courage tested on the rack; to be reduced mentally and physically to my last component of endurance, knowing I had within me the power to stop the dying with a word—that what was going on inside me was mortal combat between my spirit and my body, and that those who were applying the pain were merely the hired mercenaries in this secret war within myself.

So that from the first blinding explosion of pain, my response was recognition: Hullo, I thought, you’ve come at last—my name is Joost, what’s yours?

—

There was no ceremony, you see. He didn’t sit me at a desk in the tried tradition of the screen and say, “Either talk to me or you’ll be beaten. Here is your confession. Sign it.” He didn’t have them lock me in a cell and leave me to cook for a few days while I decided that confession was the better part of courage. They simply dragged me out of the car and through the gateway of what could have been a private house, then into a courtyard where the only footprints were our own, so that they had to topple me through the thick snow, slewing me on my heels, all three of them, punching me from one to the other, now in the face, now in the groin and stomach, now back to the face again, this time with an elbow or a knee. Then, while I was still double, kicking me like a half-stunned pig across the slithery cobble as if they couldn’t wait to get indoors before they had me.

Then, once indoors, they became more systematic, as if the elegance of the old bare room had instilled in them a sense of order. They took me in turns, like civilised men, two of them holding me and one hitting me, a proper democratic rota, except that when it was Colonel Jerzy’s fifth or fiftieth turn, he hit me so regretfully and so hard that I actually did die for a while, and when I came round I was alone with him. He was seated at a folding desk, with his elbows on it, holding his unhappy head between his grazed hands as if he had a hangover, and reviewing with disappointment the answers I had given to the questions he had put to me between onslaughts, first lifting his head in order to study with disapproval my altered appearance, then shaking it painfully and sighing as if to say life really was unfair to him, he didn’t know what more he could do to me to help me see the light. It dawned on me that more time had passed than I realised, perhaps several hours.

This was also the moment when the scene began to take on a resemblance to the one I had always imagined, with my tormentor sitting comfortably at a desk, brooding over me with a professional’s concern, and myself spreadeagled against a scalding waterpipe, my arms handcuffed either side of a black concertina-style radiator; with corners that bit into the base of my spine like red-hot teeth. I had been bleeding from the mouth and nose and, I thought, from one ear as well, and my shirt front looked like a slaughterer’s apron. But the blood had dried and I wasn’t bleeding any more, which was another way of calculating the passage of time. How long does blood take to congeal in a big empty house in Gdansk when you are chained to a furnace and looking into the puppyish face of Colonel Jerzy?

It was terribly hard to hate him, and with the burning in my back it was becoming harder by the moment. He was my only saviour. His face stayed on me all the time now. Even when he turned his head downward to the table in private prayer, or got up and lit himself a filthy Polish cigarette and took a stretch around the room, his lugubrious gaze seemed to stay on me without reference to where the rest of him had gone. He turned his squat back to me. He gave me a view of his thick bald head and the pitted nape of his neck. Yet his eyes—treating with me, reasoning with me and sometimes, as it seemed, imploring me to ease his anguish—never left me for a second. And there was a part of me that really wanted to help him and it was becoming more and more strident with the burning. Because the burning was not a burning any more, it was pure pain, a pain indivisible and absolute, mounting like a scale that had no upper limit. So that I would have given almost anything to make him feel better—except myself. Except the part of me that made me separate from him, and was therefore my survival.

“What’s your name?” he asked me, still in his Polish English.

“Joost.” He had to bend over me to hear me. “Franz Joost.”

“From Munich,” he suggested, using my shoulder as a prop while he put his ear closer to my mouth.

“Born Nijmegen. Working for farmers in the Taunus, by Frankfurt.”

“You’ve forgotten your Dutch accent.” He shook me a little to wake me.

“You just don’t hear it. You’re a Pole. I want to see the Dutch Consul.”

“You mean British Consul.”

“Dutch.” And then I think I repeated the same word “Dutch” several times, and went on repeating it till he threw cold water over me, then poured a little of it into my mouth to let me rinse and spit. I realised I was missing a tooth. Lower jaw front left. Two teeth perhaps. It was hard to tell.

“Do you believe in God?” he asked me.

When he stared down at me like this, his cheeks fell forward like a baby’s and his lips formed themselves in a kiss, so that he looked like a puzzled cherub.

“Not at the moment,” I said. “Why not?”

“Get me the Dutch Consul. You’ve got the wrong man.”

I saw that he didn’t like being told this. He wasn’t used to being given orders or contradicted. He passed the back of his right hand across his lips, a thing he sometimes did before he hit me, and I waited for the blow. He began patting his pockets, I assumed for some instrument.

“No,” he remarked, with a sigh. “You are mistaken. I have got the right man.”

He knelt to me and I thought he was preparing to kill me because I had noticed that he was at his most murderous when he appeared most unhappy. But he was unlocking my handcuffs. When he had done so, he shoved his clenched fists under my armpits and hauled me—I almost thought helped me—to a spacious bathroom with an old, freestanding bath filled with warm water.

“Strip,” he said, and watched me dejectedly while I dragged off what remained of my clothes, too exhausted to care about what he would do to me once I was in the water: drown me, or cook me or freeze me, or drop in an electric wire.

He had my suitcase from the hotel. While I lay in the bath, he picked out clean clothes and tossed them on to a chair.

“You leave on tomorrow’s plane for Frankfurt via Warsaw. There has been a mistake,” he said. “We apologise. We shall cancel your business appointments and say you were the victim of a hit-and-run car.”

“I’ll need more than an apology,” I said.

The bath was doing me no good. I was afraid that if I lay flat any longer, I would die again. I hauled myself into a crouch. Jerzy held out his forearm. I clutched it and stood upright, swaying dangerously. Jerzy helped me out of the bath, then handed me a towel and watched me gloomily while I dried myself and pulled on the clean clothes he had laid out for me.

He led me from the house and across the courtyard, carrying my case in one hand and bearing my weight with the other, because the bath had weakened me as well as easing the pain. I peered round for the henchmen but saw none.

“The cold air will be good for you,” he said, with the confidence of an expert.

He led me to a parked car, and it did not resemble either of the cars that had taken part in my arrest. A toy steering wheel lay on the backseat. We drove down empty streets. Sometimes I dozed. We reached a pair of white iron gates guarded by militia.

“Don’t look at them,” he ordered me, and showed them his papers, while I dozed again.

We got out of the car and stood on a grass clifftop. An inshore wind froze our faces. Mine felt big as two footballs. My mouth had moved into my left cheek. One eye had closed. There was no moon and the sea was a growl behind the salt mist. The only light came from the city, behind us. Occasionally phosphorous sparks slipped past us, or puffs of white spume spun away into the blackness. This is where I’m supposed to die, I thought as I stood beside him; first he beats me, then he gives me a warm bath, now he shoots me and shoves me over the cliff. But his hands were hanging glumly at his sides and there was no gun in them, and his eyes—what I could make out of them—were fixed on the starless darkness, not on me; so perhaps someone else was going to shoot me, someone already waiting in the dark. If I had had the energy, I could have killed Jerzy first. But I hadn’t, and didn’t feel the need. I thought of Mabel, but without any sense of loss or gain. I wondered how she’d manage living on a pension, whom she’d find. Fräulein Stefanie is not at home, I remembered….Then perhaps it was Stefanie who answered, Smiley was saying….So many unanswered prayers, I was thinking. But so many never offered, either. I was feeling very drowsy.

At last Jerzy spoke, his voice no less despondent than before. “I have brought you here because there isn’t a microphone on earth can hear us. I wish to spy for your country. I need a good professional to act as intermediary. I have decided to choose you.”

Once more I lost my sense of time and place. But perhaps he had lost his too, for he had turned his back on the sea and with his hand clutched to his leather hat to hold it against the wind, he had undertaken a mournful study of the inland lights, scowling at things that needed no scowling at, sometimes punching the windtears from his cheeks with his big fists.

“Why should anyone spy for Holland?” I asked him.

“Very well, I propose to spy for Holland,” he replied wearily, indulging a pedant. “Therefore I need a good professional Dutchman who can keep his mouth shut. Knowing what fools you Dutchmen have employed against us in the past, I am understandably selective. However, you have passed the test. Congratulations. I select you.”

I thought it best to say nothing. Probably I didn’t believe him.

“In the false compartment of your suitcase you will find a wad of Polish secret documents,” he continued, in a tone of dejection. “At Gdansk airport you will have no Customs problems, naturally. I have given orders for them not to examine your luggage. For all they know, you are by now my agent. In Frankfurt, you are on home ground. I shall work for you and nobody else. Our next meeting will be in Berlin on May 5th. I shall be attending the May Day celebrations to mark the glorious victory of the proletariat.”

He was trying to light a fresh cigarette, but the wind kept putting out his matches. So he took his hat off and lit the cigarette inside the crown, lowering his fat face to it as if he were drinking water from a stream.

“Your people will wish to know my motive,” he continued when he had taken a deep draught of cigarette smoke. “Tell them—” Suddenly at a loss, he sank his head into his shoulders and peered round at me as if pleading for advice on how to deal with idiots. “Tell them I’m bored. Tell them I’m sick of the work. Tell them the Party’s a bunch of crooks. They know that anyway, but tell them. I’m a Catholic. I’m a Jew. I’m a Tartar. Tell them whatever the hell they want to hear.”

“They may want to know why you have chosen to come to the Dutch,” I said. “Rather than to the Americans, or the French or whoever.”

He thought about that too, puffing at his cigarette in the darkness. “You Dutch had some good joes,” he said ruminatively. “I got to know some of them pretty well. They did a good job till that bastard Haydon came along.” An idea occurred to him. “Tell them my father was a Battle of Britain pilot,” he suggested. “Got himself shot down over Kent. That should please them. You know Kent?”

“Why should a Dutchman know Kent?” I said.

If I had weakened, I could have told him that, before our so-called “friendly” separation, Mabel and I had bought a house in Tunbridge Wells. But I didn’t, which was as well, because when Head Office came to check the story out, there was no record of Jerzy’s father having flown anything larger than a paper kite. And when I put this to Jerzy several years later—long after his loyalty to the perfidious British had been demonstrated beyond all doubt—he just laughed, and said his father was an old fool who cared for nothing but vodka and potatoes.

—

So why?

For five years Jerzy was my secret university of espionage, but his contempt for motive—his own particularly—never relaxed. First we idiots do what we want to do, he said; then we look round for justifications for having done it. All men were idiots to him, he told me, and we spies were the biggest idiots of all.

At first I suspected that he was spying for vengeance, and drew him out on the people above him in the hierarchy who might have slighted him. He hated them all, himself the most.

Then I decided he was spying for ideological reasons, and that his cynicism was a disguise for the finer yearnings he had discovered in his middle age. But when I attempted to use my wiles to break his cynicism down—“Your family, Jerzy, your mother, Jerzy. Admit you’re proud to have become a grandfather”—I found only more cynicism beneath. He felt nothing for any of them, he retorted, but so icily that I concluded that he did indeed, as he maintained, hate the entire human race, and that his savagery, and perhaps his betrayal too, were the simple expression of this hatred.

As to the West, it was run by the same idiots who ran everything in the world, so what’s the difference? And when I told him this simply was not so, he became as defensive of his nihilist creed as any other zealot, and I had to rein myself in for fear of angering him seriously.

So why? Why risk his neck, his life, his livelihood and the family he hated, to do something for a world he despised?

The Church? I asked him that too, and significantly, as I think now, he bridled. Christ was a manic depressive, he retorted. Christ needed to commit suicide in public, so he provoked the authorities until they did him the favour. “Those God-thumper guys are all the same,” he said with contempt. “I’ve tortured them. I know.”

Like most cynics, he was a Puritan, and this paradox repeated itself in him in several ways. When we offered to drop money for him, open a Swiss bank account, the usual, he flew into a rage and declared he was not some “cheap informant.” When I picked a moment—on the instruction of Head Office—to assure him that if ever things went wrong, we would spare no effort to get him out and provide him with a new identity in the West, his contempt was absolute: “I’m a Polish creep, but I would rather face a firing squad of my fellow creeps than die a traitor in some capitalist pigsty.”

As to life’s other comforts, we could offer him nothing he had not got. His wife was a scold, he said, and going home after a heavy day at the office bored him. His mistress was a young fool, and after an hour with her he preferred a game of billiards to her conversation.

Then why? I kept asking myself when I had exhausted my checklist of the Service’s standard-issue motives.

Meanwhile, Jerzy continued to fill our coffers. He was turning his Service inside out as neatly as Haydon had ever done with ours. When Moscow Centre gave him orders, we knew of them before he passed them to his underlings. He photographed everything that came within his reach; he took risks I begged him not to take. He was so heedless that sometimes he left me wondering whether, like the Christ he was so determined to deny, he was looking for a public death. It was only the unflagging efficiency of what we were pleased to call his cover work that protected him from suspicion. For that was the dark side of his balancing act: God help the Western agent, real or imagined, who was invited to make his voluntary confession at Jerzy’s hands.

Only once in the five years that I ran him did he seem to let slip the clue I was searching for. He was tired to death. He had been attending a conference of Warsaw Pact Intelligence chiefs in Bucharest, in the midst of fighting off charges of brutality and corruption against his Service at home. We met in West Berlin, in a pension on the Kurfürstendamm which catered to the better type of representative. He was a really tired torturer. He sat on my bed, smoking and answering my follow-up questions about his last batch of material. He was red-eyed. When we had finished, he asked for a whisky, then another.

“No danger is no life,” he said, tossing three more rolls of film on the counterpane. “No danger is dead.” He took out a grimy brown handkerchief and carefully wiped his heavy face with it. “No danger, you do better stay home, look after the baby.”

I preferred not to believe it was danger he was talking about. What he was talking about, I decided, was feeling, and his terror that by ceasing to feel he was ceasing to exist—which perhaps was why he was so devoted to instilling feeling in others. For that moment, I thought I caught a glimpse of why he was sitting with me in the room breaking every rule in his book. He was keeping his spirit alive at a time of his life when it was beginning to look like dying.

—

The same night I dined with Stefanie at an American restaurant ten minutes’ walk from the pension where Jerzy and I had met. I had wangled her telephone number from a sister in Munich. She was as tall and beautiful as I remembered her, and determined to convince me she was happy. Oh, life was perfect, Ned, she declared. She was living with this terribly distinguished academic, not in his first youth any more—but look here, nor are we—and completely adorable and wise. She told me his name. It meant nothing to me. She said she was pregnant by him. It didn’t show.

“And you, Ned, how did it go for you?” she asked, as if we were two generals reporting to each other from successful, but separate, campaigns.

I gave her my most confident smile, the one that had earned me the trust of my joes and colleagues in the years since I had seen her.

“Oh, I think it worked out pretty well actually, thanks, yes,” I said, with seeming British understatement. “After all, you can’t expect one person to be everything you need, can you? It’s a pretty good partnership, I’d say. Good parallel living.”

“And you still do that work?” she said. “Ben’s work?”

“Yes.”

It was the first time either of us had mentioned him. He was living in Ireland, she said. A cousin of his had bought a tumbledown estate in County Cork. Ben sort of caretook for him while he wasn’t there, stocking the river and looking after the farm and so on.

I asked whether she ever saw him.

“No,” she said. “He won’t.”

I would have driven her home, but she preferred a cab. We waited in the street till it came, and it seemed to take a terribly long time. As I closed the door on her, her head tipped forward, as if she had dropped something on the floor. I waved her out of sight but she didn’t wave back.

—

The nine-o’clock news was showing us an outdoor meeting of Solidarity in Gdansk, where a Polish Cardinal was exhorting an enormous crowd to moderation. Losing interest, Mabel settled the Daily Telegraph on her lap and resumed her crossword. At first the crowd heard the Cardinal noisily. Then with the devotion Poles are famous for, they fell silent. After his address, the Cardinal moved among his flock, bestowing blessings and accepting homage. And as one dignitary after another was brought to him, I picked out Jerzy hovering in the background, like the ugly boy excluded from the feast. He had lost a lot of weight since he had retired, and I guessed that the social changes had not been kind to him. His jacket hung on him like someone else’s; his once-formidable fists were hardly visible inside the sleeves.

Suddenly the Cardinal has spotted him, just as I had.

The Cardinal freezes as if in doubt of his own feelings, and for a moment makes himself neater somehow, almost in obedience, pressing in his elbows and drawing back his shoulders to attention. Then slowly his arms lift again and he gives an order to one of his attendants, a young priest who seems reluctant to obey it. The Cardinal repeats the order, the priest clears a path to Jerzy; the two men face each other, the secret policeman and the Cardinal. Jerzy winces, as if he has digestion pains. The Cardinal leans forward and speaks in Jerzy’s ear. Awkwardly, Jerzy kneels to receive the Cardinal’s blessing.

And each time I replay this moment I see Jerzy’s eyes close apparently in pain. But what is he repenting? His brutality? His loyalty to a vanished cause? Or his betrayal of it? Or is squeezing the eyes shut merely the instinctive response of a torturer receiving the forgiveness of a victim?

—

I fish. I drop into my little reveries. My love of English landscape has, if possible, increased. I think of Stefanie and Bella, and my other half-had women. I lobby our Member of Parliament about the filthy river. He’s a Conservative, but what on earth does he imagine he’s conserving? I’ve joined one of the sounder environmentalist groups; I collect signatures on petitions. The petitions are ignored. I won’t play golf, I never would. But I’ll walk round with Mabel on a Wednesday afternoon, provided she’s playing alone. I encourage her. The dog enjoys himself. Retirement is no time to be wandering lost, or puzzling how to reinvent mankind.

8

My students had decided to give Smiley a rough ride, just as they’d done to me from time to time. We’d be running along perfectly smoothly—a double session on natural cover, say, in the late afternoon—when one of them would start hectoring me, usually by adopting an anarchic stance which nobody, in his right mind could sustain. Then a second would chime in, then all of them, so that if I didn’t have any sense of humour shining-ready—and I’m only human—they’d be trampling me till the bell rang for close of play. And next day all would be forgotten: they’d have fed whatever little demon had got hold of them and now they’d like to go back to learning, please, so where were we? At first I used to brood over these occasions, suspect conspiracy, hunt for ringleaders. Then cautiously I came to recognise them as spontaneous expressions of resistance to the unnatural harness that these children had chosen to put on.

But when they started in on Smiley, their guest of honour and mine, even questioning the entire purpose of his life’s work, my tolerance ended with a snap. And this time the offender was not Maggs, either, but the demure Clare, his girlfriend, who had sat so adoringly opposite Smiley throughout dinner.

“No, no, Ned,” Smiley protested, as I leapt angrily to my feet. “Clare has a valid point. Nine times out of ten a good journalist can tell us quite as much about a situation as the spies can. Very often they’re sharing the same sources anyway. So why not scrap the spies and subsidise the newspapers? It’s a point that should be answered in these changeable times. Why not?”

Reluctantly I resumed my seat, while Clare, snuggling close against Maggs, continued to gaze angelically at her victim while her colleagues smothered their grins.

But where I would have taken refuge in humour, Smiley elected to treat her sally seriously:

“It is perfectly true,” he agreed, “that most of our work is either useless, or duplicated by overt sources. The trouble is, the spies aren’t there to enlighten the public, but governments.”

And slowly I felt his spell re-unite them. They had moved their chairs to him in a disordered half-circle. Some of the girls were sprawled becomingly on the floor.

“And governments, like anyone else, trust what they pay for, and are suspicious of what they don’t,” he said. Thus delicately passing beyond Clare’s provocative question, he addressed a larger one: “Spying is eternal,” he announced simply. “If governments could do without it, they never would. They adore it. If the day ever comes when there are no enemies left in the world, governments will invent them for us, so don’t worry. Besides—who says we only spy on enemies? All history teaches us that today’s allies are tomorrow’s rivals. Fashion may dictate priorities, but foresight doesn’t. For as long as rogues become leaders, we shall spy. For as long as there are bullies and liars, and madmen in the world we shall spy. For as long as nations compete, and politicians deceive, and tyrants launch conquests, and consumers need resources, and the homeless look for land, and the hungry for food, and the rich for excess, your chosen profession is perfectly secure, I can assure you.”

And with the topic thus neatly turned back to their own future, he once more warned them of its perils:

“There’s no career on earth more cockeyed than the one you’ve picked,” he assured them, with every sign of satisfaction. “You’ll be at your most postable while you’re least experienced, and by the time you’ve learned the ropes, no one will be able to send you anywhere without a trade description round your necks. Old athletes know they’ve played their best games when they were in their prime. But spies in their prime are on the shelf, which is why they take so ungraciously to middle age, and start counting the cost of living how they’ve lived.”

Though his hooded gaze to all appearance remained fixed upon his brandy, I saw him cast a sideways glance at me. “And then, at a certain age, you want the answer,” he continued. “You want the rolled-up parchment in the inmost room that tells you who runs your lives and why. The trouble is, that by then you’re the very people who know best that the inmost room is bare. Ned, you’re not drinking. You’re a brandy traitor. Fill him up, someone.”

—

It is an uncomfortable truth of the period of my life that follows that I recall it as a single search the object of which was unclear to me. And that the object, when I found him, turned out to be the lapsed spy Hansen.

And that, although in reality I was pursuing quite other goals and people among my eastward journey, all of them in retrospect seem to have been stages on my journey to him. I can put it no other way. Hansen in his Cambodian jungle was my Kurtz at the heart of darkness. And everything that happened to me on the way was a preparation for our meeting. Hansen’s was the voice I was waiting to hear. Hansen held the answer to the questions I did not know I was asking. Outwardly, I was my stolid, moderate, pipesmoking, decent self, a shoulder for weaker souls to rest their heads on. Inside, I felt a rampant incomprehension of my uselessness; a sense that, for all my striving, I had failed to come to grips with life; that in struggling to give freedom to others, I had found none for myself. At my lowest ebb, I saw myself as ridiculous, a hero in the style not of Buchan but of Quixote.

I took to writing down sardonic versions of my life, so that when, for instance, I reviewed the episodes I have described to you this far, I gave them picaresque titles that emphasised their futility: the Panda—I safeguard our Middle Eastern interests! Ben—I run to earth a British defector! Bella—I make the ultimate sacrifice! Teodor—I take part in a grand deception! Jerzy—I play the game to the end! Though with Jerzy, I had to admit, a positive purpose had been served, even if it was as shortlived as most intelligence, and as irrelevant to the human forces that have now engulfed his nation.

Like Quixote, I had set out in life vowing to check the flow of evil. Yet in my lowest moments I was beginning to wonder whether I had become a contributor to it. But I still looked to the world to provide me with the chance to make my contribution—and I blamed it for not knowing how to use me.

To understand this, you should know what has happened to me after Munich. Jerzy, whatever else he did to me, brought me a sort of prestige, and the Fifth Floor decided to invent a job for me as roving operational fixer, sent out on short assignments “to appraise, and where possible exploit opportunities outside the remit of the local Station”—thus my brief, signed and returned to maker.

Looking back, I realise that the constant travel this entailed—Central America one week, Northern Ireland the next, Africa, the Middle East, Africa again—soothed the restlessness that was stalking me, and that Personnel in all likelihood knew this, for I had recently embarked on a senseless love affair with a girl called Monica, who worked in the Service’s Industrial Liaison Section. I had decided I needed an affair; I saw her in the canteen and cast her in the part. It was as banal as that. One night it was raining, and as I started to drive home, I saw her standing at a number 23 bus stop. Banality made flesh. I took her to her flat, I took her to her bed, I took her to dinner and we tried to work out what we had done, and came up with the convenient solution that we had fallen in love. It served us well for several months, until tragedy abruptly called me to my senses. By a mercy, I was back in London briefing myself for my next mission when word came that my mother was failing. By an act of divine ill taste, I was in bed with Monica when I took the call. But at least I was able to be present for the event, which was lengthy, but unexpectedly serene.

Nevertheless, I found myself unprepared for it. Somehow I had taken for granted that, in the same way that I had managed to negotiate myself round awkward hurdles in the past, I would do the same in the case of my mother’s death. I could not have been more mistaken. Very few conspiracies, Smiley once remarked, survive contact with reality. And so it was with the conspiracy that I had made with myself to let my mother’s death slip past me as a timely and necessary release from pain. I had not taken into my calculations that the pain could be my own.

I was orphaned and elated both at once. I can describe it no other way. My father had long been dead. Without my realising it, my mother had done duty for both parents. In her death I saw the loss, not only of my childhood, but of most of my adulthood as well. At last I stood unencumbered before life’s challenges, yet many of them were already behind me—fudged, missed or botched. I was free to love at last, but whom? Not, I am afraid, Monica, however much I might protest the contrary and expect the reality to follow. Neither Monica nor my marriage offered me the magic it was henceforth my duty as a survivor to pursue. And when I looked at myself in the mirror of the undertaker’s rose-tinted lavatory after my night’s vigil, I was horrified by what I saw. It was the face of a spy branded by his own deception.

Have you seen it too, around you? On you? That face? In my case it was so much my everyday companion that I had ceased to notice it until the shock of death brought it home to me. We smile, but our withholding makes our smile false. When we are exhilarated, or drunk—or, even as I am told, make love—the reserve does not dissolve, the gyroscope stays vertical, the monitory voice reminds us of our calling. Until gradually our very withholding becomes so strident it is almost a security risk by itself. So that today—if I go to a reunion, say, or we have a Sarratt old-boys’ night—I can actually look round the room and see how the secret stain has come out in every one of us. I see the overbright face or the underlit one, but inside each I see the remnants of a life withheld. I hear the hoot of supposedly abandoned laughter and I don’t have to mark down the source of it to know that nothing has been abandoned—not its owner, nor its interior restrictions, nothing. In my younger days, I used to think it was just the inhibited British ruling classes who became that person. “They were born into captivity and had no option from then on,” I would tell myself as I listened to their unconvincing courtesies, and returned their good-chap smiles. But, as only half a Briton, I had exempted myself from their misfortune—until that day in the undertaker’s pink-tiled lavatory when I saw that the same shadow that falls across us all had fallen across me.

From that day on, I now believe, I saw only the horizon. I am starting too late! I thought. And from so far back! Life was to be searched, or nothing! But it was the fear that it was nothing that drove me forward. That’s how I see it now. And so, please, must you see it, in the fragmented recollections that belong to this surreal passage of my life. In the eyes of the man I had become, every encounter was an encounter with myself. Every stranger’s confession was my own, and Hansen’s the most accusing—and therefore, ultimately, the most consoling. I buried my mother, I said goodbye to Monica and Mabel. The next day I departed for Beirut. Yet even that simple departure was attended by a disconcerting episode.

—

To brief myself for my mission, I had been sharing a room with a rather clever man called Giles Latimer, who had made a corner for himself in what was known as the “Mad Mullah department,” studying the intricate and seemingly indecypherable web of Muslim fundamentalist groups operating out of Lebanon. The notion so beloved of the amateur terror industry that these bodies are all part of a super plot is nonsense. If only it were so, for then there might be some way to get at them! As it is, they slip about, grouping and regrouping like drops of water on a wet wall, and they are about as easy to pin down.

But Giles, who was an Arabist and a distinguished bridge player, had come as near to achieving the impossible as any one was likely to, and my job was to sit at his feet in order to prepare myself for my mission. He was tall, angular and woolly. He was of my intake. His boyish manner was given extra youthfulness by the redness of his cheeks, though this was actually the consequence of clusters of tiny broken blood vessels. He was indefatigably, painfully gentlemanly, forever opening doors and leaping to his feet for women. In the spring weather I twice saw him get drenched to the skin on account of his habit of lending his umbrella to whoever was proposing to venture out of doors without one. He was rich but frugal, and a thoroughly good man, with a thoroughly good wife, who organised Service bridge drives and remembered the names of the junior staff and their families. Which made it all the more bizarre when his files started disappearing.

It was I, inadvertently, who first noticed the phenomenon. I was tracking a German girl called Britta on her odyssey through the terrorist training camps in the Shuf Mountains, and I requested a contingent file which contained sensitive intercept material about her. The material was American and limited by a subscription list, but when I had gone through the rigmarole of signing myself in, nobody could find it. Nominally it was marked to Giles, but so was almost everything, because Giles was Giles and his name was on every list around.

But Giles knew nothing of it. He remembered reading it, he could quote from it; he thought he had passed it on to me. It must have gone to the Fifth Floor, he said, or back to Registry. Or somewhere.

So the file was posted missing and the Registry bloodhounds were informed, and everything ran along normally for a couple of days until the same thing happened again, though this time it was Giles’s own secretary who started the hunt when Registry called in all three volumes on a misty group called the Brothers of the Prophet, supposedly based in Damour.

Once again, Giles knew nothing: he had neither seen nor touched them. The Registry bloodhounds showed him his signature on the receipt. He flatly disowned it. And when Giles denied something, you didn’t feel like challenging him. As I say, he was a man of transparent rectitude.

By now, the hunt was up in earnest and inventories were being taken left and right. Registry was in its last days before computerisation, and could still find what it was looking for, or know for sure that it was lost. Today somebody would shake his head and phone for an engineer.

What Registry discovered was that thirty-two files marked out to Giles were missing. Twenty-one of them were standard top secret, five had higher gradings and six were of a category called RETAIN, which meant, I am afraid, that nobody of strong pro-Jewish sentiments should be admitted as a signatory. Parse that how you will. It was a squalid limitation and there were few of us who were not embarrassed by it. But this was the Middle East.

My first intimation of the scale of the crisis came from Personnel. It was a Friday morning. Personnel always liked the shelter of the weekend when he was about to wield his axe.

“Has Giles been well lately, Ned?” he asked me, with old-boy intimacy.

“Perfectly,” I said.

“He’s a Christian, isn’t he? Christian sort of chap. Pious.”

“I believe so.”

“Well, I mean we all are in a way, but he is a heavy sort of Christian, would you say, Ned? What’s your opinion?”

“We’ve never discussed it.”

“Are you?”

“No.”

“Would you say, for example, he could be sympathetic to something like—say—the British-Israelite sect, or one of those sort of things, at all? Nothing against them, mind. Every man to his convictions, me.”

“Giles is very orthodox, very down the middle, I am sure. He’s some sort of lay dignitary at his parish church. I believe he gives the odd Lenten Address, and that’s about it.”

“That’s what I’ve got down here,” Personnel complained, tapping his knuckles on a closed file. “That’s the picture I’ve got of him exactly, Ned. So what’s up? Not always easy, my job, you know. Not always pleasant at all.”

“Why don’t you ask him yourself?”

“Oh I know, I know, I must. Unless you would, of course. You could take him out to lunch—my expense, obviously. Feel his bones. Tell me what you think.”

“No,” I said.

His old-boy manner gave way to something a lot harder. “I thought you’d say that. I worry about you sometimes, Ned. You’re putting yourself about with the women and you’re a touch stubborn for your health. It’s the Dutch blood in you. Well, keep your mouth shut. That’s an order.”

In the end it was Giles who took me out to lunch. Probably Personnel had played the game both ways, pitching some tale to Giles in reverse. Whether he had or not, at twelve-thirty Giles sprang suddenly to his feet and said, “To hell with it, Ned. It’s Friday. Come on, I’ll give you lunch. Haven’t had a pissy lunch for years.”

So we went to the Travellers’, and sat at a table by the window and we drank a bottle of Sancerre very fast. And suddenly Giles began talking about a liaison trip he’d made recently to the FBI in New York. He kicked off quite normally. Then his voice seemed to get stuck on one note, and his eyes got fixed on something only he could see. I put it down to the wine at first. Giles didn’t look like a drinker and didn’t drink like one. Yet there was great conviction in the way he spoke and—as he continued—a visionary intensity.

“Peculiar chaps actually, the Americans, Ned, you want to watch out for them. One doesn’t think they’re after one at first. One’s hotel, for instance. You can always read the clues in a hotel. Too much smiling when you sign in. Too much interest in your luggage. They’re watching you. Damned great highrise greenhouse. Swimming pool on the top floor. You can look down on the helicopters going up the river. ‘Welcome, Mr. Lambert, and have a nice day, sir.’ I was using Lambert. I always do for America. The fourteenth floor they’d put me on. I’m a methodical chap. Always have been. Shoe-trees and that kind of thing. Can’t help it. My father was the same. Shoes here, shirts there. Socks there. Suits in a certain order. We never have lightweight suits, do we, the English? You think they’re lightweight. You choose lightweight. Your tailor tells you they’re lightweight. ‘Lightest we’ve got, sir. We don’t go any lighter.’ You’d think they’d have learned by now, the amount of American business they do. But they haven’t. Cheers.”

He drank and I drank with him. I poured him some mineral water. He was sweating.

“Next day I come back to the hotel. Meetings all day long. Lot of trying to like each other. And I do, I mean they’re nice chaps. Just—well, different. Different attitudes. Carry guns. Want results. There can’t be any, though, can there? We all know that. The more fanatics you kill, the more there are of them. I know that, they don’t. My father was an Arabist too, you know.”

I said I didn’t. I said, “Tell me about him.” I wanted to deflect him. I felt I would feel much better if he talked about his father instead of the hotel.

“So I walk in and they hand me the key. ‘Hey, hang on,’ I say. ‘This isn’t floor fourteen. This is floor twenty-one. Mistake.’ I smile, naturally. Anyone can make a mistake. It’s a woman this time. Very strong-looking woman. ‘It is not a mistake, Mr. Lambert. You’re on the twenty-first floor. You room is 2109.’ ‘No, no,’ I say. ‘It’s 1409. Look here.’ I had this identity card they give you somewhere and I looked for it. Turned out my pockets while she watched, but couldn’t find it. ‘Look,’ I said. ‘Believe me. I have that kind of memory. My room is 1409.’ She gets out the guest list, shows it to me. Lambert, 2109. I go up in the lift, unlock the room, it’s all there. Shoes here. Shirts there. Socks there. Suits in the same order. Everything where I’d put it in the other room down on the fourteenth floor. Know what they’d done?”

Again I said I didn’t.

“Photographed it. Polaroid.”

“Why would they do that?”

“They wanted to mike me—2109 was miked, 1409 was clean. No good to them, so they moved me up. They thought I was an Arab spy.”

“Why would they think that?”

“Because of my father. He was a Lawrence man. They knew that. They’d decided. That’s what they do. Photograph your room.”

I scarcely remember the rest of lunch. I don’t remember what we ate or what else we drank or anything at all. I have a recollection of Giles extolling Mabel at great length as the perfect Service wife, but perhaps that was my conscience. All I really remember is the two of us side by side in Giles’s room back at Head Office, and Personnel standing in front of Giles’s steel cupboard with the door removed, and the thirty-two missing files crammed higgledypiggledy into the shelves—all the files Giles hadn’t been able to cope with while he was having what Smiley called his “Force Twelve nervous breakdown” in place.

And the reason for it, as I learned later? Giles too had found his Monica. What had unhinged him, ostensibly, was his passion for a twenty-year-old girl in his village. His love for her, his guilt and despair had dictated that he could no longer function. He had continued going through the day’s motions—naturally, he was a soldier—but his mind wouldn’t play anymore. It had acquired its own preoccupations, even if he wouldn’t own to them.

What else had unhinged him, I leave that to you, and to our in-house shrinks who seem to be daily gaining ground. Something to do, perhaps, with the gap between our dreams and our realities. Something to do, perhaps, with the gap between what Giles longed for when he was young, and what he’d got now that he was nearly old. And the hard truth was, Giles had frightened me. I felt he had gone ahead of me down the road I myself was treading. I felt it as I drove to the airport; I felt it on the plane while I thought about my mother. And downed several in-flight whiskies in order not to feel it more.

I was still feeling it as I set out my own meagre wardrobe in Room 607 at the Commodore Hotel, Beirut, and the telephone began ringing a few inches from my head. As I picked up the receiver, I had a wayward fancy I was going to hear Ahmed at the front desk telling me I had been allocated a new room on floor twenty-one. I was wrong. Surreal episode number two had just announced itself.

—

Shooting had started, semi-automatic on the move. Most likely a bunch of kids in a Japanese pickup hosing down the neighbourhood with AK 47s. It was one of those seasons in Beirut when you could set your watch by the first excitement of the evening. But I had never minded too much about the shooting. Shooting has a logic, if a haphazard one. It’s directed at you, or away from you. My personal phobia was car bombs—never knowing, as you hurried along a pavement or dawdled in the sweating, crawling traffic, whether a parked car was going to take out the entire block with one huge heave, and leave you in such tiny shreds that there was nothing worth a body bag, let alone a burial. The thing you noticed about car bombs—I mean afterwards—was shoes. People blown clean out of them, but the shoes intact. So that even after the bits of body had been picked out and taken away, there was still the odd pair or two of wearable shoes among the broken glass and smashed false teeth and shreds of someone’s suit. A little machine-gun fire, like now, or the odd hand-held rocket, didn’t trouble me as much as it did some people.

I lifted the receiver and when I heard a woman’s voice I quickened, not only because of my domestic ambiguities but because my errand was to trace a German woman—the same Britta who had been taking lessons in terror in the Shuf Mountains.

But it was not Britta. It was not Monica and not Mabel. The voice was middle-American and scared. And I was Peter, remember—Peter Carter, from a great British newspaper, even if its local correspondent had never heard of me. I was reminding myself of this as I listened to her.

“Peter, for Christ’s sake, I need to be with you,” she said in a single rush of breath. “Peter, where the fuck have you been?”

A rattle of heavy machine-gun fire broke out, to be promptly silenced by the smack of a rocket-propelled grenade. The voice on the phone resumed in greater agitation.

“Jesus, Peter, why don’t you call me? Okay, I said some shitty things. I spoiled your copy. I’m sorry. I mean, Jesus, what are we? Children? You know how I hate this stuff.”

A frenzy of rifle fire. Sometimes the kids just shot into the sky for effect.

Her voice rose steeply. “Talk to me, Peter! Tell me something funny, will you, please? Something funny must be happening somewhere in the world! Peter, will you please answer me? You’re not dead, are you? You’re not lying on the floor with your head blown off? Just nod for no. I don’t want to die alone, Peter. I’m sociable. I love sociably, I die sociably. Peter, answer me. Please.”

“What room are you calling?” I said.

Dead silence. The really dead silence that gathers between bursts of gunfire.

“Who is this?” she demanded.

“This is Peter, but I don’t think I’m your Peter. What room are you calling?”

“This room.”

“What number?”

“Room 607.”

“I’m afraid he must have checked out. I arrived in Beirut this afternoon. This is the room they gave me.”

A grenade exploded, answered by another. Out in the street, perhaps three blocks away, somebody screamed seriously. The scream ended.

“Is he dead?” she whispered.

I didn’t answer.

“Could have been a woman,” she said.

“Could have been,” I agreed.

“Who are you? You British?”

“Yes.” Peter is too, I thought, without knowing why.

“What do you do?”

“For a living?”

“Just talk to me. Keep talking.”

“I’m a journalist,” I said.

“Like Peter?”

“I don’t know what kind of journalist he is.”

“He’s tough. The danger school. Are you tough?”

“Some things scare me, some don’t.”

“Mice?”

“Mice scare me stiff.”

“Are you good?”

“As good as the news, I suppose. I don’t write much any more. I’m editorial these days.”

“Married?”

“Are you?”

“Yes.”

“To Peter?”

“No, not Peter.”

“How long have you known him?”

“My husband?”

“No. Peter,” I said. I did not ask myself why I was more interested in her adultery than her marriage.

“You don’t time things like that out here,” she said. “A year, a couple of years—you don’t talk that way. Not in Beirut. You’re married too, aren’t you? You didn’t want to tell me till I told you first.”

“Yes, I am.”

“So tell me about her.”

“My wife?”

“Sure. Do you love her? Is she tall? Great skin? Very British, stiff upper lip?”

I told her some harmless things about Mabel and invented some others, hating myself.

“I mean, who on earth can believe in sex after fifteen years of the same person?” she said.

I laughed but didn’t answer.

“Are you faithful to her, Peter?”

“Infallibly,” I said, after a delay.

“Okay, let’s do work. Go back to work. What are you doing out here? Something special? Tell me what you’re doing.”

The spy in me dodged the question: “I think it’s time you told me what you do,” I said. “Are you a journalist too?”

A stream of tracer tore into the sky. The firing followed.

Her voice turned weary, as if the fear had worn her out. “I file copy, sure.”

“Who for?”

“A lousy wire service, what else? Fifty cents a line, till some big prick steals it and makes two grand in an afternoon. What’s new?”

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“I don’t know. Maybe Annie. Call me Annie. Listen, you’re real nice, know that? What do you do if a Doberman humps your leg?”

“Bark?”

“Fake an orgasm. I’m scared, Peter. Maybe I didn’t make that clear. I need a drink.”

“Where are you?”

“Right here.”

“Where’s here?”

“In the hotel, for Christ’s sake. The Commodore. Standing in the lobby, smelling Ahmed’s garlic and getting eyeballed by the Greek.”

“Who’s the Greek?”

“Stavros. He pushes hard drugs and swears up and down they’re soft. He’s serious sleaze.”

I listened, and for the first time made out the babble of voices in the background. The shooting was over.

“Peter?”

“Yes.”

“Peter, put that light out.”

She must have known there was only one light working in the room, a rickety bedside light with a tilted parchment shade. It lay on a locker between the two divans. I turned it off. There were stars again.

“Unlock your door and leave it ajar. One inch. Got booze?”

“A bottle of Scotch,” I said.

“Vodka?”

“No.”

“Ice?”

“No.”

“I’ll bring some. Peter?”

“Yes.”

“You’re a good man. Anybody ever told you that?”

“Not for a long time.”

“Watch this space,” she said, and rang off.

—

She never came to me.

You may imagine it any way you like, as I did, all ways, while I sat on the divan, watching the door in the darkness and watching my life go by while I waited to hear her tread in the corridor.

After an hour I went downstairs. I sat in the bar and listened to every female American voice I could find. None fitted. I looked for someone who might call herself Annie and proposition a man she had only talked to on the telephone. I bribed Ahmed to tell me who had used the house phone from the lobby at nine o’clock that night, but his memory, for whatever reason, did not stretch to an emotional American woman.

I went so far as to try to establish the identity of the previous occupant of my room, and whether his first name was Peter, but Ahmed became mysteriously vague and said he had been in Tripoli visiting his old mother, and the hotel kept no lists.

Did the real Peter return in the nick of time and sweep her off? Did Stavros the Greek? Was she a whore? Was I? Was Ahmed pimping her? Was the phone call some kind of elaborate trick she played on newcomers to the hotel, to hook them on their first nervous night alone?

Or was she, as I prefer to think, simply a frightened woman missing her boyfriend and craving a body to hold on to when the nightly thunder of the city started driving her mad?

Whatever mystery she presented, I had learned something about myself even if it disconcerted me. I had learned how perilous was my solitude, how available I was, how much I needed to give love and receive it; and how fickle in me was that virtue which the Service called “personal security,” compared with my growing hunger for connection. I thought of Monica and my hollow protestations of love which so failed to move the gods they were addressed to. I thought of Giles Latimer and his hopeless passion. And somehow the woman who called herself Annie seemed to belong to the same line of anguished messengers, all speaking from inside myself.

After the faceless girl came the faceless boy. That happened the next evening.

—

Exhausted, I had settled myself in the hotel lobby and I was drinking my Scotch alone. I had been visiting the camps round Sidon and my hand was still shaking from just another day in southern Lebanon. Now it was the magic hour of dusk when Beirut’s human animal kingdom agreed to put aside its feuds and assemble at the common watering hole. I have seen the same thing happen in the jungle. Perhaps you have too. At a single command, elephants, wart-hogs, gazelles, lions and giraffes tiptoe from the protective darkness of the trees and, mostly in silence, arrange themselves on the muddy flats. You could observe the Commodore lobby at the same hour, when the journalists came back from their day’s excursions. As the electric glass doors, always a little too slow on their feet, sighed and grunted from their exertions, so the dark of the early Beirut night disgorged its motley: a Swedish television unit, fronted by a grey-faced blonde in designer denims; a photographer and correspondent from an American weekly; the wire men always in pairs; an elderly and utterly mysterious East German with his Japanese mistress. All had the same self-consciously undramatic way of entering, and pausing, and setting down the day’s burden.

Not that their day was over. For the real journalists, there were films to be despatched, stories to be written and telexed and telephoned. Someone was missing and must be accounted for. So-and-so had taken a bad bullet, did his wife know? Nevertheless, with the closing of the glass doors behind them, their day was won back from the enemy. The hackpack was battening down the hatches for the night.

And as I watched, I waited—to meet a man who knew a man who knew another man who just might know the woman I had been sent to find. My day till then had yielded nothing, except another tour of the wretched of the earth.

Elsewhere in the lobby, other species were gathering, less glamorous but frequently more interesting to the observer: carpetbaggers and arms dealers and drug dealers and dark-suited minor diplomats, the pedlars in influence and information, switching at their worry-beads as their restless eyes darted from face to face about the room. And the spies—everyone’s spies—trading openly, because in Beirut their trade was everyone’s. There was not a man or woman in the place who had not got his source of inside information, if it was only Ahmed behind the counter, who for a few dollars and a smile would tell you the secrets of the universe.

But the figure who had caught my eye was exotic even by the standards of the Commodore’s menagerie. I did not see him enter. He must have come in behind a group. I saw him inside the lobby, framed against the darkness of the glass doors, dressed in a striped football shirt and a clean white nurse’s scarf tied lightly round his head. If he had not been slender and flat-chested, I would not have been certain, at first sight, whether he was a woman pretending to be a man, or a man pretending to be a woman.

The security man had noticed him too. So had Ahmed the concierge behind his formidable counter. His two Kalashnikovs were propped against the wall behind him, just below the pigeonholes where the room keys hung, and I saw Ahmed ease a half-step backward so that he had one within reach. A small hand-grenade in that lobby at that hour could have wiped out half the better rackets in the city.

But the apparition kept moving forward, either unaware or unheeding of the curiosity he was arousing. He was tall and young and agile, but rigid. He was like a person without will, summoned forward by his controller’s voice. I saw him better now. He had dark glasses, black stubble and moustache. That was why his face had seemed so black. And the white nurse’s scarf over his head. But it was the automaton’s stiffness of his walk that set my skin tingling and made me wonder what kind of believer we might have on our hands.

He had reached the centre of the lobby. A few people made way for him. Some looked at him and looked away, others turned their backs in abstention, as if they knew and did not like him. Suddenly, under the brightness of the centre light, he seemed to be ascending. With his shrouded head forward and his arms barely moving, he was mounting his own scaffold on orders from above. I saw now that he was American. I saw it in the dipping knees and hanging wrists and slightly girlish hips. An all-American boy. His dark glasses were not dark enough, apparently, for a cloth eyeshade dangled from one long hand. It was of the kind that gamblers are supposed to wear, and night editors in forties films. He was six feet tall, at least. He wore sneakers, vestal white like his headscarf, and soundless.

An Arab freak? I wondered.

A crazed Zionist! There had been a few of those.

Stoned?

A high-school war tourist on the hippy trail, searching for kicks in the city of the damned?

Changing direction, he had begun talking to the receptionist, but at an angle facing into the lobby, already searching for the person he was enquiring for. Which was when I saw the red spots spattered over his cheeks and forehead, like hives or chicken pox, but more vivid. The bedbugs had eaten him in some stinking hostel, I decided. He had stuck his head through the windscreen of a clapped-out car. He started walking towards me. Stiffly again, without expression. Purposefully, a man used to being looked at. Angrily, the eyeshade dangling from his hand. Glowering at me blindly through his black glasses as I sat drinking. A woman had taken his arm. She wore a skirt and could have been the nurse who had given him his headscarf. They stood before me. Me and no one else.

“Sir? This is Sol, sir,” she said—or Mort, or Syd, or whatever. “He’s asking whether you’re the journalist, sir.”

I said I was a journalist.

“From London, sir, visiting? Are you the editor, sir? Are you influential, sir?”

Influential, I doubted, I said with a deprecating smile. I was on the managerial side, here on a brief swing. “And going back to London, sir? Soon?”

In Beirut you learn not to talk in advance about your movements. “Pretty soon,” I conceded, though the truth was I was planning to return south again next day.

“Can Sol speak with you a moment, sir, just speak? Sol needs very much to speak with a person who has influence with the major Western newspapers. The journalists here, he feels they’ve seen it all, they’re jaded. Sol needs a voice from outside.”

I made space and she sat beside me while Sol very slowly lowered himself into a chair—this covered, silent, very clean man in his long football sleeves and headscarf. Seated finally, he laid his wrists over his knees, holding the eyeshade in both hands. Then he gave a long sigh and began to murmur to me.

“There’s this thing I’ve written, sir. I’d like, please, to have it printed in your newspaper.”

His voice, though soft, was educated and polite. But it was lifeless and, like his movements, economical, as if each word hurt him to produce. Inside the lenses of his very dark glasses I saw that his left eye was smaller than his right. Narrower. Not swollen, not closed by a punch, just altogether smaller than its partner, taken from a different face. And the spots were not bites, not hives, not cuts. They were craters, like pockmarks of small-arms fire on a Beirut wall, stamped with heat and speed. Like craters also, the skin around them had risen but not closed.

His story followed without my asking for it. He was a relief volunteer, sir, a third-year medical student from Omaha. He believed in peace, sir. And he had been in this bombing, down by the Corniche, in this restaurant that had been one of the worst-hit places, just wiped out, you should go down there and take a look, a place called Akhbar’s, sir, where a lot of Americans went, there was this car bomb and car bombs are the worst. You can’t get worse than car bombs for surprise.

I said I knew that.

Almost everyone in the restaurant had died except himself, sir, the people nearest the wall just blew apart, he continued, unaware that he had painted my own worst nightmare for me. And now he had this thing he had written, he felt he had to say it, sir, a sort of mild statement about peace; which he needed to print in my newspaper, maybe it would do some good, he was thinking of like this weekend or maybe Monday. He’d like to donate the fee to charity. He guessed it could be like a couple of hundred dollars, maybe more. In the Beirut hospitals, that still bought people a piece of hope.

“We need a pause, sir,” he explained, in his dead voice as the woman fished a wad of typescript from his pocket for him. “A pause for moderation. Just a break between wars to find the middle way.”

Only in the Commodore in Beirut could it have seemed natural that a bomb-shocked peace-seeker should be pleading a hopeless cause to a journalist who wasn’t one. Nevertheless I promised to do what I could. When I had done my business with the man I was waiting for—who knew nothing, of course, had heard nothing, but perhaps, sir, if I spoke to Colonel Asme in Tyre?—I settled in my room and with a glass at my elbow began to read his offering, determined that if it had any reasonable chance of publication, I would twist the arm of one of our numberless Fleet Street friendlies when I returned to London, and see it done.

It was a tragic piece, and quickly it became unreadable: a rambling, emotional appeal to Jews, Christians and Muslims alike to remember their own mothers and children, and live together in love. It urged the middle ground of compromise and gave inaccurate examples from history. It proposed a new religion “like Joan of Arc would have given us only the English wouldn’t let her, so they burned her alive, disregarding her screams and the will of the ordinary people.” This great new movement, he said, would “bind the Semitic races in a spiritual brotherhood of love and tolerance.” Then it lost its way completely, and resorted to capital letters, underlining, and rows of exclamation marks. So that by the time I reached the end, it had ceased to be what it set out to be at all, and was talking about “this whole family, kids, and grandparents, that was sitting up beside the wall nearest to the epicentre.” And how they had all been blown to pieces, not once, but over and over again, each time Sol allowed himself to look into his anguished memory.

Suddenly I was writing the piece for him. To her. To Annie. First in my mind, then in the margin of his pages, then on a fresh sheet of A4 paper from my briefcase, which was quickly covered so I took another. I was sweating, the sweat was pouring off me like rain; it was that kind of Beirut night, quiet till now but with a damp, itchy heat rolling off the mountains and an evil grey smog like gunsmoke draping itself across the sea. I was writing, and wondering if she would ring again. I was writing as the bombed boy, to a girl I didn’t know. I was writing—as I saw to my dismay when I awoke next morning—pretentious junk. I was proclaiming maverick affections, mouthing great sentiments, pontificating about the unbreakable cycle of human evil, about man’s endless search for reasons to do the wrong thing.

A pause, the boy had said. A pause for moderation, a break between wars. I put him right on that. I put Annie right on it too. I told them that the only pauses in the history of human conflict had been pauses not for moderation but excess, pauses for the world to redivide itself, for the thugs and the victims to find each other, for greed and deprival to regroup. I wrote like an adolescent bleeding heart, and when the morning came and I saw the pages of my handwriting strewn over the floor around the empty whisky bottle, I could not believe this was the work of anyone I knew.

So I did the only thing I could think of. I put them in the handbasin and cremated them, then broke up the ash and scattered it in the lavatory and flushed it into the body-blocked sewers of Beirut. And when I had done that, I took myself for a punishing pelt along the waterfront, running as hard as I could go from whatever was coming after me.

I was running towards Hansen, away from myself, but I had one more stop to make along the way.

—

My German girl, Britta, turned out to be in Israel, in the middle of the Negev Desert, in a compound of stark grey huts near a village called Revivim. The huts had a ploughed strip round them, and a double perimeter of barbed-wire fencing with a manned watchtower at each corner. If there were other European prisoners in the compound apart from her, I was not introduced to them. Her only companions that I saw were young Arab girls, mainly from poor villages in the West Bank or the Gaza, who had been talked or bullied by their Palestinian comrades into committing acts of savagery against the hated Zionist occupiers, most often planting bombs in marketplaces or tossing them into civilian buses.

I arrived there by jeep from Beersheeba, driven by a hardy young Colonel of Intelligence whose father, while still a boy, had been trained as a Night Raider by the eccentric General Wingate during the British Mandate. The Colonel’s father remembered Wingate squatting naked in his tent by candlelight, drawing out the battle plan in the sand. Every Israeli soldier seems to talk about his father and a good few talk about the British. After the Mandate, they think they know us for what we probably still are: anti-Semitic, ignorant and imperialist, with just enough exceptions to redeem us. Dimona, where the Israelis store their nuclear arsenal, was up the road.

My sense of unreality had not left me. To the contrary, it had intensified. It was as if I had lost the distance from the human condition that is essential to our trade. My feelings and the feelings of others seemed to count more with me than my observations. It is quite easy in the Lebanon, if you drop your guard, to develop an unreasoning hatred of Israel. But I had succumbed to a serious dose of the disease. Trudging through the mud and stench of the shattered camps, crouching in the sandbagged hovels, I convinced myself that the Israeli thirst for vengeance would not be stilled until the accusing eyes of the last Palestinian child had been closed for good.

Perhaps my young Colonel got a hint of this, for though I had flown in from Cyprus it was still only a few hours since I had left Beirut, and something of what I felt may still have been legible in my face.

“You get to see Arafat?” he asked, with a moody smile as we drove along the straight road.

“No, I didn’t.”

“Why not? He’s a nice guy.”

I let that go.

“Why do you want to see Britta?”

I told him. There was no point in not doing so. It had taken all London’s powers of persuasion to get me the interview with her at all, and my hosts were certainly not going to let me speak to her alone.

“We think she may be willing to talk to us about an old boyfriend,” I said.

“Why would she do that?”

“He jilted her. She was angry with him.”

“Who’s the ‘boyfriend’?”—as if he didn’t know.

“He’s Irish. He has the rank of adjutant in the IRA. He briefs bombers, reconnoitres targets, supplies the equipment. She lived underground with him in Amsterdam and Paris.”

“Like George Orwell, huh? Down and Out?”

“Like George Orwell.”

“How long ago he jilted her?”

“Six months.”

“Maybe she’s not angry any more. Maybe she’ll tell you go suck. For a girl like Britta, six months is a hell of a long time.”

I asked whether she had talked much in her captivity. It was a delicate question, since the Israelis were still not saying how long they had been holding her, or how they had obtained her in the first place. The Colonel was broad-faced and brown-skinned. His family came originally from Russia. He wore parachute wings on his short-sleeved khaki shirt. He was twenty-eight, a Sabra, born in Tel Aviv, engaged to a Sephardi from Morocco. His father, the Night Raider, was now a dentist. All this he had told me in the first few minutes of our acquaintance, in a guttural English he had captured single-handed.

“Talked?” he repeated with a grim smile, in answer to my question. “Britta? That lady didn’t stop talking since she became a resident.”

Knowing a little of Israeli methods, I was not surprised, and I shuddered inwardly at the prospect of questioning a woman who had been subjected to them. It had happened to me in Ireland: a man buttoned to the neck who had stared at me like a dead man and confessed to everything.

“Do you interrogate her yourself?” I asked, noticing afresh his thick brown forearms and the uncompromising set of his jaw. And thinking, perhaps, of Colonel Jerzy.

He shook his head. “Impossible.”

“Why?”

He seemed about to tell me something, then changed his mind. “We got experts,” he said. “Shin Bet guys, smart like Britta. Take their time with her. Family.”

I had heard about this loving family too, though I didn’t say so. The Zionists had lured her into a trap, a bloodshot-eyed informant had whispered to me in Tyre. She had left the camps and gone to Athens with her new boyfriend, Said, and three of Said’s friends, he said. Good boys. All able. The plan had been to shoot down an El Al plane as it made its approach to Athens airport. The boys had got themselves a hand-held rocket launcher and a rented house on the flightpath. Britta’s job, as an unsuspicious-looking European, was to stand in a phone box at the airport with a thirty-dollar shortwave receiver and relay the control tower’s instructions to the boys on the roof as the plane came in. Everything had been set fair, said my bone-weary informant. The rehearsals had gone like a dream. But on the day, the operation had fouled up.

Listening to him, I had filled in the rest of the story for myself, imagining how the Service would have done the job if we’d had the foreknowledge: two teams to assault the roof and the phone box simultaneously; the target plane, forewarned and empty, landing safely at Athens airport; the plane’s homeward journey to Tel Aviv with the terrorists chained in their seats. I wondered what they would do with her. Whether they would put her on trial or trade her for favours in return.

“What happened to the boys she was with in Athens?” I asked the Colonel, ignoring London’s injunction to show no curiosity in such matters.

“Boys? She knows nothing from boys. Athens? Where’s Athens already? She’s an innocent German tourist on vacation in Eilat. We kidnapped her, we drugged her, we imprisoned her, now we’re framing her for propaganda. She invites us to prove the contrary because she knows we can’t. You want any more information? Ask Britta, be our guest.”

His mood mystified me, the more so when, as we got out of the jeep, he laid a hand on my shoulder and wished me a sort of luck. “She’s all yours,” he said. “Mazel tov.”

I was beginning to dread what I might find.

A dumpy little woman in army uniform received us in her clean office. Prison staff never go short of cleaners, I thought. She was Captain Levi and she was Britta’s unlikely gaoler. She spoke English the way a small-town American schoolmistress might speak it, but more slowly, with greater care. She had twinkly eyes and short grey hair and a look of kindly resignation. She had the dusty complexion of prison life, but when she put her hands together you felt she ought to be knitting for her grandchildren.

“Britta is very intelligent,” she said apologetically. “For an intelligent man to question an intelligent woman, that’s sometimes difficult. Do you have a daughter, sir?”

I was not about to fill in my character profile for her so I said no, which happened also to be the truth.

“A pity. Never mind. Maybe you still get one. A man like you, you have time. You speak German?”

“Yes.”

“Then you are lucky. You can communicate with her in her language. That way you get to know her better. Britta and I, we can speak only English together. I speak it like my late husband, who was American. Britta speaks it like her late lover, who was Irish. Tel Aviv says we are to allow you two hours. Will you be happy with two hours? If you need more, we shall ask them—maybe they say yes. Maybe two hours will be too much. We shall see.”

“You are very kind,” I said.

“Kind, I don’t know. Maybe we should be less kind. Maybe we are making kind too much. You will see.”

And with this she sent for coffee and for Britta, while the Colonel and myself took up our places along one side of the plain wood table.

But Captain Levi did not sit at the table, I supposed because she was not part of the interview. She sat beside the door on a straight kitchen chair, her eyes lowered as if in preparation for a concert. Even when Britta walked in between two young wardresses, she only lifted her eyes as far as was necessary to watch the three women’s feet pass her to the centre of the room and halt. One wardress pulled back a chair for Britta, the second unlocked her handcuffs. The wardresses left, and we settled to the table.

And I would like to paint for you the scene exactly as I saw it from where I sat: with the Colonel to the right, and Britta opposite us across the table, and the bowed grey head of Captain Levi almost directly behind her, but slightly to the left, wearing a reminiscent expression that was half a smile. Throughout our discussion she stayed like that, still as a waxwork. Her part-smile of familiarity never altered and never went away. There was concentration in her pose, and something of effort, so that I wondered whether she was straining to pick out phrases and words she could identify, perhaps from a combined knowledge of Yiddish and English, for Britta, being a Bremen girl, spoke a clear and authoritarian German, which makes comprehension easier.

And Britta, without a doubt, was a fine sample of her breed. She was “blond as a bread roll,” as they say up there, tall and deep-shouldered and well-grown, with wide rather insolent blue eyes and a strong, attractive jaw. She had Monica’s youth and Monica’s height as well, and, as I could not avoid speculating, Monica’s sensuality. My suspicion that they had been maltreating her vanished as soon as she walked in. She held herself like a ballerina, but with more intelligence and more of life’s reality than is to be found in most dancers. She would have looked well in tennis gear or in a dirndl dress, and I suspected that in her time she had worn both. Even her prison tunic did not diminish her, for she had made herself a cloth belt out of something, and tied it at the waist, and she had brushed her fair hair over her shoulders in a cape. Her first gesture when her hands were freed was to offer me one, at the same time dropping a schoolgirl bob, whether out of irony or respect it was too soon to tell. She wore no makeup but needed none.

“Und mit wem hab’ ich die Ehre?” she enquired, either courteously or impishly. And whom do I have the honour to address?

“I’m a British official,” I said.

“Your name, please?”

“It’s unimportant.”

“But you are very important!”

Prisoners when they are brought up from their cells often say silly things in their first flush, so I answered her with consideration.

“I’m working with the Israelis on aspects of your case. That’s all you need to know.”

“Case? I am a case? How amusing. I thought I was a human being. Please sit down, Mr. Nobody,” she said, doing so herself.

So we sit as I have described, with Captain Levi’s face behind her, a little out of focus like its expression. The Colonel had not stood up to greet Britta, and he barely bothered to look at her now she was sitting before him. He seemed suddenly to be without expectation. He glanced at his watch. It was of dull steel and like a weapon on his brown wrist. Britta’s wrists were white and smooth like Monica’s, but chafed with red rings from the handcuffs.

Suddenly she was lecturing me.

She began at once, as if she were resuming a tutorial, and in a sense she was, for I soon realised she lectured everyone this way, or everyone whom she had dismissed as bourgeois. She said she had a statement to make which she would like me to relay to my “colleagues,” as she called them, since she felt that her position was not being sufficiently appreciated by the authorities. She was a prisoner of war, just as any Israeli soldier in Palestinian hands was a prisoner of war, and entitled to the treatment and privileges set out in the Geneva Convention. She was a tourist here, she had committed no crime against Israel; she had been arrested solely on the strength of her trumped-up record in other countries, as a deliberate act of provocation against the world proletariat.

I gave a quick laugh, and she faltered. She was not expecting laughter.

“But look here,” I objected. “Either you’re a prisoner of war or you’re an innocent tourist. You can’t be both.”

“The struggle is between the innocent and the guilty,” she retorted, without hesitation, and resumed her lecture. Her enemies were not limited to Zionism, she said, but what she called the dynamic of bourgeois domination, the repression of natural instincts, and the maintenance of despotic authority disguised as “democracy.”

Again I tried to interrupt her, but this time she talked straight through me. She quoted Marcuse at me and Freud. She referred to the rebellion of sons in puberty against their fathers, and the disavowal of this rebellion in later years as the sons themselves became the fathers.

I glanced at the Colonel, but he seemed to be dozing.

The purpose of her “actions,” she said, and those of her comrades, was to arrest this instinctual cycle of repression in all its forms—in the enslavement of labour to materialism, in the repressive principle of “progress” itself—and to allow the real forces of society to surge, like erotic energy, into new, unfettered forms of cultural creation.

“None of this is faintly interesting to me,” I protested. “Just stop, please, and listen to my questions.”

Acts of so-called “terrorism” had therefore two clear purposes, she continued, as if I had never spoken, of which the first was to disconcert the armies of the bourgeois-materialist conspiracy, and the second to instruct, by example, the pit-ponies of the earth, who had lost all knowledge of the light. In other words, to introduce ferment and awaken consciousness at the most repressed human levels.

She wished to add that though she was not an adherent of Communism, she preferred its teachings to those of Capitalism, since Communism provided a powerful negation of the ego-ideal which used property to construct the human prison.

She favoured free sexual expression and—for those who needed them—the use of drugs as a means of discovering the free self as contrasted with the unfree self that is castrated by aggressive tolerance.

I turned to the Colonel. There is an etiquette of interrogation as there is about everything else. “Do we have to go on listening to this nonsense? The lady is your prisoner, not mine,” I said. For I could hardly lay the law down to her across his table.

The Colonel lifted his head high enough to glance at her with indifference. “You want to go back down, Britta?” he asked her. “You want bread and water for a couple of weeks?” His German was as bizarre as his English. He seemed suddenly a lot older than his age, and wiser.

“I have more to say, thank you.”

“If you’re going to stay up here, you answer his questions and you shut up,” said the Colonel. “It’s your choice. You want to leave now, it’s fine by us.” He added something in Hebrew to Captain Levi, who nodded distantly. An Arab prisoner entered with a tray of coffee—four cups and a plate of sugar biscuits—and handed them round meekly, a coffee cup for each of us and one for Captain Levi, the biscuits at the centre of the table. An air of lassitude had settled over us. Britta stretched out her long arm for a biscuit, lazily, as if she were in her own home. The Colonel’s hand crashed on the table just ahead of her as he removed the plate from her reach.

“So what do you wish to ask me, please?” Britta enquired of me, as if nothing at all had happened. “Do you wish me to deliver the Irish to you? What other aspects of my case could interest the English, Mr. Nobody?”

“If you deliver us one particular Irishman, that will be fine,” I said. “You lived with a man named Seamus for a year.”

She was amused. I had provided her with an opening. She studied me, and seemed to see something in my face she recognised. “Lived with him? That is an exaggeration. I slept with him. Seamus was only for sex,” she explained, with a mischievous smile. “He was a convenience, an instrument. A good instrument, I would say. I was the same for him. You like sex? Sometimes another boy would join us, maybe sometimes a girl. We make combinations. It was irrelevant but we had fun.”

“Irrelevant to what?” I asked.

“To our work.”

“What work?”

“I have already described our work to you, Mr. Nobody. I have told you of its aims, and of our motivations. Humanitarianism is not to be equated with non-violence. We must fight to be free. Sometimes even the highest causes can only be served by violent methods. Do you know that? Sex also can be violent.”

“What kind of violent methods was Seamus involved in?” I asked.

“We are speaking not of wanton acts but of the people’s right of resistance against acts committed by the forces of repression. Are you a member of those forces or are you in favour of spontaneity, Mr. Nobody? Perhaps you should free yourself and join us.”

“He’s a bomber,” I said. “He blows up innocent people. His most recent target was a public house in southern England. He killed one elderly couple, the barman and the pianist, and I give you my word he didn’t liberate a single deluded worker.”

“Is that a question or a statement, Mr. Nobody?”

“It’s an invitation to you to tell me about his activities.”

“The public house was close to a British military camp,” she replied. “It was providing infrastructure and comfort to Fascistic forces of oppression.”

Again her cool eyes held me in their playful gaze. Did I say she was attractive? What is attraction in such circumstances? She was wearing a calico tunic. She was an enforced penitent of crimes that she did not repent. She was alert in every part of herself, I could feel it, and she knew I felt it, and the divide between us enticed her.

“My department is considering offering you a sum of money on your lease, payable, if you prefer, to somebody you nominate in the meantime,” I said. “They want information that would lead to the arrest and conviction of your friend Seamus. They are interested in his past crimes, others he has yet to commit, safe addresses, contacts, habits and weaknesses.” She waited for me to go on, so, perhaps unwisely, I did. “Seamus is not a hero. He’s a pig. Not what you call a pig. A real pig. Nobody did bad things to him when he was young; his parents are decent people who run a tobacco shop in County Down. His grandfather was a policeman, a good one. Seamus is blowing people up for kicks because he’s inadequate. That’s why he treated you badly. He only exists when he’s inflicting pain. The rest of the time he’s a spoilt little boy.”

I had not scratched the surface of her steady stare.

“Are you inadequate, Mr. Nobody? I think perhaps you are. In your occupation, that is normal. You should join us, Mr. Nobody. You should take lessons with us, and we shall convert you to our cause. Then you will be adequate.”

You must understand that she did not raise her voice while she said this, or indulge in dramatics of any kind. She remained condescending and composed, even hospitable. The mischief in her lay deep and well-disguised. She had a healthy natural smile and it stayed with her all the time she spoke, while Captain Levi behind her continued to gaze into her own memories, perhaps because she did not understand what was being said.

The Colonel glanced at me in question. Not trusting myself to speak, I lifted my hands from the table, asking what’s the point? The Colonel said something to Captain Levi, who in the disappointed manner of someone who has prepared a meal only to see it taken away uneaten, pressed a bell for the escort, Britta rose to her feet, smoothed her prison tunic over her breasts and hips and held out her hands for the handcuffs.

“How much money were they thinking of offering me, Mr. Nobody?” she enquired.

“None,” I said.

She dropped me another bob and walked between her guards towards the door, her hips flowing inside her calico tunic, reminding me of Monica’s inside her dressing-gown. I was afraid she would speak again but she didn’t. Perhaps she knew she had won the day, and anything more would spoil the effect. The Colonel followed her out and I was alone with Captain Levi. The half smile had not left her face.

“There,” she said. “Now you know a little of what it feels like to hear Britta’s music.”

“I suppose I do.”

“Sometimes we communicate too much. Perhaps you should have spoken English to her. So long as she speaks English, I can care for her. She is a human being, she is a woman, she is in prison. And you may be sure she is in agony. She is courageous, and so long as she speaks English to me I can do my duty for her.”

“And when she speaks German to you?”

“What would be the point, since she knows I cannot understand her?”

“But if she did—and if you could understand her? What then?”

Her smile twisted and became slightly shameful. “Then I think I would be frightened,” she replied in her slow American. “I think if she ordered something of me, I would be tempted to obey her. But I do not let her order me. Why should I? I do not give her the power over me. I speak English and I stay the boss. I was for two years in concentration camp in Buchenwald, you see.” Still smiling at me, she delivered the rest in German, in the clenched, hushed whisper of the campnik: “Man hört so scheussliche Echos in ihrer Stimme, wissen Sie.” One hears such dreadful echoes in her voice, you see.

The Colonel was standing in the doorway waiting for me. As we walked downstairs, he put his hand once more on my shoulder. This time I knew why.

“Is she like that with all the boys?” I asked him.

“Captain Levi?”

“Britta.”

“Sure. With you a bit more, that’s all. Maybe that’s because you’re English.”

Maybe it is, I thought, and maybe it’s because she saw more in me than just my Englishness. Maybe she read my unconscious signals of availability. But whatever she saw in me, or didn’t, Britta had provided the summation of my confusion until now. She had articulated my sense of trying to hold on to a world that was slipping away from me, my susceptibility to every stray argument and desire.

The summons to find Hansen arrived the same night, in the middle of a jolly diplomatic party given by my British Embassy host in Herzliyya.

9

Earnest Perigrew was quizzing Smiley about colonialism. Sooner or later, Perigrew quizzed everyone who came to Sarratt about colonialism, and his questions always hovered at the edge of outrage. He was a troubled boy, the son of British missionaries to West Africa, and one of those people the Service is almost bound to employ, on account of their rare knowledge and linguistic qualifications. He was sitting as usual alone, amid the shadows at the back of the library, his gaunt face thrust forward and one long hand held up as if to fend off ridicule. The question had started reasonably, then degenerated into a tirade against Britain’s indifference towards her former enslaved subjects.

“Yes, well I think I rather agree with you,” said Smiley courteously, to the general surprise, when he had heard Perigrew to the end. “The sad answer is, I’m afraid, that the Cold War produced in us a kind of vicarious colonialism. On the one hand we abandoned practically every article of our national identity to American foreign policy. On the other we bought ourselves a stay of execution for our vision of our colonial selves. Worse still, we encouraged the Americans to behave in the same way. Not that they needed our encouragement, but they were pleased to have it, naturally.”

Hansen had said much the same. And in much the same language. But where Smiley had lost little of his urbanity, Hansen had glared into my face with eyes lit by the red hells from which he had returned.

—

I flew from Israel to Bangkok because Smiley said Hansen had gone mad and knew too many secrets; a decypher yourself signal, care of the Head of Station, Tel Aviv. Smiley had charge of Service security at the time, with the courtesy rank of deputy chief. Whenever I heard of him, he seemed to be scuttling round plugging another leak or another scandal. I spent the weekend in a heatwave sweating my way through the stack of hand-delivered files and an hour on the telephone placating Mabel, who had fallen at the last fence of her annual race to become ladies’ captain of our local golf club and was scenting intrigue.

I don’t know why they’re so hard on Mabel. Perhaps it’s her way of plain talking that puts them off. I did what I could. I told her that nothing I had come upon in the Service could compare with the skulduggery of those Kent wives. I promised her a splendid holiday when I returned. I forget where the holiday was going to be because we never took it.

Hansen’s file gave me a portrait of a type I had grown familiar with because we used a good few of them. I was one myself and Ben was another: the crossbred Englishman who adopts the Service as his country and endows it with a bunch of qualities it hasn’t really got.

Like myself, Hansen was half a Dutchman. Perhaps that was why Smiley had chosen me. He was born in the long night of the German Occupation of Holland and raised in the shadow of Delft Cathedral. His mother, a counter clerk at Thomas Cook’s, was of English parents who urged her to go back to London with them when the war broke out. She refused, choosing instead to marry a Delft curate, who a year afterwards got himself shot by a German firing squad, leaving his pregnant wife to fend for herself. Undaunted, she joined a British escape line and, by the time the war ended, had charge of a fully fledged network, with its own communications, informants, safe houses and the usual appointments. My mother’s work with the Service had not been so different.

By what route the infant Hansen found his way to the Jesuits, the file did not relate. Perhaps the mother converted. Those were dark years still, and if expediency required it, she may have swallowed her Protestant convictions to buy the boy a decent education. Give the Jesuits his soul, she may have reasoned, and they will give him a brain. Or perhaps she sensed in her son from early on the mercurial nature that later ruled his life, and she determined to subordinate him to a stronger religious discipline than was offered by the easy-going Protestants. If so, she was wise. Hansen embraced the faith as he embraced everything else, with passion. The nuns had him, the brothers had him, the priests had him, the scholars had him. Till at twenty-one, schooled and devout but still a novice, he was packed off to a seminary in Indonesia to learn the ways of the heathen: Sumatra, Molucca, Java.

The Orient seems to have been an instinctive love of Hansen’s as it is for many Dutchmen. The good Dutch, like Heine’s proverbial pine tree, can stand on the shores of their flat little country and sniff the Asian scents of lemon grass and cooking pots on the chill sea air. Hansen arrived, he saw, he was conquered. Buddhism, Islam, the rites and superstitions of the remotest savages—he flung himself on all of them with a fervour that only intensified the deeper he penetrated into the jungle.

Languages also came naturally to him. To his native Dutch and English, he had effortlessly added French and German. Now he acquired Tamil, Khmer, Thai, Sanskrit and more than a smattering of Cantonese, often hiking hundreds of miles of hill country in his quest for a missing dialect or ritualistic link. He wrote papers on philology, marriage rites, illumination and monkeys. He discovered lost temples in the depths of the jungle, and won prizes the Society forbade him to accept. After six years of fearless exploring and enquiring, he was not only the kind of academic showpiece Jesuits are famous for; he was also a full priest.

But few secrets can survive six years. Gradually the stories about him began to acquire a seamy edge. Hansen the skin artist. Hansen’s appetites. Don’t look now but here comes one of Hansen’s girls.

It was the scale as well as the duration that did for him: the fact that once they started probing, they found no corner to his life that was immune, no journey that did not have its detour. A woman here or there—a boy or two—well, from what I have seen of priesthood round the globe, such peccadilloes are to be found more in the observance than the breach.

But this wholesale indulgence, in every kampong, in every tawdry sidestreet, this indefatigable debauchery, flaunted, as they now discovered, beneath their noses for more than a decade, with girls who by Western standards were barely eligible for their First Communion, let alone the marriage bed—and many of them under the Church’s own protection—made Hansen suddenly and dramatically untenable. Faced with the evidence of such prolonged and dedicated sinning, his Superior responded, more in grief than indignation. He ordered Hansen to return to Rome, and sent a letter ahead of him to the General of the Society. From Rome, he told Hansen sadly, he would most likely go to Loyola in Spain, where qualified Jesuit psychotherapists would help him come to terms with his regrettable weakness. After Loyola—well, a new beginning, perhaps a different hemisphere, a different decade.

But Hansen, like his mother before him, stubbornly declined to leave the place of his adoption.

At a loss, the Father Guardian packed him off to a distant mission in the hills run by a traditionalist of the sterner school. There Hansen suffered the barbarities of house arrest. He was watched over like a madman. He was forbidden to pass beyond the precincts of the house, denied books, paper, company, laughter. Men take to confinement in different ways, as they take differently to heights or cold or dying. Hansen took to it terribly, and after three months could bear no more. As his brother guardians escorted him to Mass, he hurled one of them down a staircase while the other fled. Then he headed back to Djakarta and, with neither money nor passport, went to ground in the brothels he knew well. The girls took him into their care, and in return he worked as pimp and bouncer. He gave out beer, washed glasses, ejected the unruly, heard confessions, gave succour, played with the children in the back room. I see him, as I know him now, doing all those things without fuss or complication. He was barely thirty and his desires burned bright as ever. Until one day, yielding as so often to an impulse, Hansen shaved, put on a clean shirt, and presented himself to the British Consul to claim his British soul.

And the Consul, being neither deaf nor blind, but a long-standing member of the Service, listened to Hansen’s story, asked a humdrum question or two and, from behind a mask of apathy, sprang to action. For years he had been looking for a man of Hansen’s gifts. Hansen’s waywardness did not deter the Consul in the least. He liked it. He signalled London for background; he lent Hansen cautious sums of cash against receipts in triplicate, for he did not wish to show undue enthusiasm. When London came back with a white trace on Hansen’s mother, indicating she was a former agent of the Service, the Consul’s cup brimmed over.

Another month and Hansen was semi-conscious, which means he knew, but only half knew, but then again might not know, that he just could be half in touch with what one might loosely refer to as British Intelligence. Another two months and, restless as ever, he was taking a swing through southern Java ostensibly in search of ancient scrolls, in reality to report back to the Consul the strength of Communist subversion, which was his newly adopted anti-Christ. By the end of the year he was headed for London with the brand-new British passport he had wanted in his pocket, though not in his own name.

—

I turned to his potted training record, all six months of it. Clive Bellamy, a gangly, mischievous Etonian, was in charge of Sarratt. “Excellent at all things practical,” he wrote in Hansen’s end-of-course report. “Has a first-rate memory, fast reactions, is self-sufficient. Needs to be ridden hard. If there’s ever a mutiny on my ship, Hansen will be the first man I’ll flog. Needs a big canvas and a first-rate controller.”

I turned to the operational record. No madness there either. Since Hansen was still Dutch, Head Office decided to keep him that way and play down his Englishness. Hansen bridled but they overruled him. At a time when the British abroad were being seen by everyone except themselves as Americans without the clout, Head Office would kill for a Swede and steal for a West German. Even Canadians, though more easily manufactured, were smiled on. Back in Holland, Hansen formalised his severance from the Jesuits and set about looking for new employment back East. A score of Oriental academic bodies were spread around the capitals of Western Europe in those days. Hansen did his rounds of them, gaining a promise here and a commitment there. A French Oriental news agency took him on as a stringer. A London weekly, nudged by Head Office, made a berth for him on condition they got him free. Till bit by bit his cover was complete—wide enough for him to have a reason to go anywhere and ask what questions he wanted, varied enough to be financially inscrutable, since no one would ever be able to tell which of his several employers were paying him how much for what. He was ready to be launched. British interests in South East Asia might have dwindled with her Empire, but the Americans were in there knee-deep with an official war running in Vietnam, an unofficial one in Cambodia and a secret one in Laos. In our unlovely rôle as camp follower, we were delighted to offer them Hansen’s precious talents.

Espionage technology can do a lot. It can photograph crops and trenches, tanks and rocket sites and tyre-marks and the migration of the reindeer. It can flinch at the sound of a Russian fighter pilot breaking wind at forty thousand feet or a Chinese general belching in his sleep. But it can’t replace human understanding. It can’t tell you what’s in the heart of a Cambodian farmer whose hill crops have been blown to smithereens by Dr. Kissinger’s unmarked bombers, whose daughters have been sold into prostitution in the city, and whose sons have been lured into leaving the fields and fighting for an American puppet army, or urged, by way of family insurance, into the ranks of the Khmer Rouge. It can’t read the lips of jungle fighters in black pyjamas whose most powerful weapon is the perverted Marxism of a blood-hungry Sorbonne-educated Cambodian psychopath. It can’t sniff the exhaust fumes of an army that is unmechanised. Or break the codes of an army without radio. Or calculate the supplies of men who can nourish themselves on ground beetles and wood bark, or the morale of those who, having lost all they possess, have only the future to win.

But Hansen could. Hansen, the adopted Asian, could trek without food for a week, squat in the kampongs and listen to the murmur of the villagers, and Hansen could read the rising wind of their resistance long before it stirred the Stars and Stripes on the Embassy roofs of Phnom Penh and Saigon. And he could tell the bombers—and, to his later remorse, he did—he could tell the American bombers which villages were playing host to the Vietcong. He was a fisher of men, too. He could recruit helpers from every walk of life and instruct them how to see and hear and remember and report. He knew how little to tell them and how much, how to reward them and when not to.

For months, then years, Hansen functioned that way in the so-called “liberated areas” of northern Cambodia where the Khmer Rouge nominally held sway, until the day he vanished from the village he had made his home. Vanished soundlessly, taking the inhabitants with him. Soon to be given up for dead, another jungle disappearance.

And remained dead until a short time ago, when he had come alive in a brothel in Bangkok.

“Take your time, Ned,” Smiley had urged me on the telephone to Tel Aviv. “If you want to add a couple of days for jet-lag, it’s quite all right by me.”

Which was Smiley-speak for “Get to him as fast as you can and tell me I haven’t got another king-sized scandal on my hands.”

—

Our Station Head in Bangkok was a bald, rude, moustachioed little tyrant called Rumbelow, whom I had never warmed to. The Service offers precious few prospects for men of fifty. Most are blown; many are too tired and disenchanted to care whether they are or not. Others head for private banking or big business, but the marriage seldom lasts. Something has happened to their way of thinking that unsuits them to the overt life. But a very few, of whom Toby Esterhase was one and Rumbelow another, pull off the trick of holding the Service hostage to their supposed assets.

Exactly what Rumbelow’s were I never knew. Seedy, I am sure, for if he specialised in anything, it was human baseness. One rumour said he owned a couple of corrupt Thai generals who would work for him and for no one else. Another that he had managed to perform a grimy favour for a member of the royal household that was not transferable. Whatever his hold on them, the barons of the Fifth Floor would hear no ill of him. “And for God’s sake, don’t rub up Rumbelow the wrong way, Ned,” Smiley had begged me. “I’m sure he’s a pain in the neck, but we do need him.”

I met him in my hotel room. To the overt world I was Mark Seymour, occupation accountant, and had no wish to parade myself at the Embassy or his house. I had been flying twenty hours. It was early evening. Rumbelow spoke like an Etonian bookmaker. Come to think of it, he looked like one as well.

“It was sheerest bloody coincidence we bumped into this bastard at all,” he told me huffily. “One puts out one’s feelers, naturally. One keeps one’s ear on the proverbial ground. One knows the score. One’s heard of other cases. One isn’t insensitive. One doesn’t like to think of one’s joe trussed to a stick, being carted through the jungle for weeks on end, while the Khmer Rouge torture the hell out of him, naturally. Not an ostrich. Know the score. Your brown man doesn’t obey the Queensberry Rules, you know,” he assured me, as if I had implied the opposite. And, plucking a handkerchief from the sleeve of his sweat-patched suit, he pummelled his stupid moustache with it. “Your average joe would be yelling for a quick bullet after one night of it.”

“Are you sure that’s what happened to him?”

“Not sure of anything, thank you, old boy. Rumour, that’s all. How can I be sure, if the bastard won’t even talk to us? Threatens violence if we try! For all I know, the KR never had sight nor sound of him. Never did trust a Dutchman, not out here—they think they own the bloody place. Hansen wouldn’t be the first joe to lie doggo when things got too hot for him, then come bouncing back when it’s all over, asking for his gong and his pension, not by any means. Still in possession of all his fingers and thumbs, by all accounts. Not missing any other part of his anatomy either, to judge by where he’s holed out. Duffy Marchbanks spotted him. Remember Duffy? Good chap.”

With a sinking heart, yes, I remembered Duffy. I had remembered him when I saw his name in the file. He was a flamboyant crook based in Hong Kong, with a taste for fast deals in anything from opium to shellcases. For a few misguided years we had financed his office.

“Purest chance, it was, on Duffy’s part. He’d popped up here on a flying visit. One day, that’s all. One day, one night, then back to the missus and a book. Offshore leisure consortium wanted him to buy a hundred acres of prime coastland for them. Did his business, then off they go to this girlie restaurant, Duffy, and a bunch of his traders—Duffy’s not averse to a bit of the other, never has been. Place called The Sea of Happiness, slap in the middle of the red-light quarter. Upmarket sort of establishment, as they go, I’m told. Private rooms, decent food if you like Hunanese, a straight deal and the girls leave you alone unless you tell ’em not to.”

At girlie restaurants, he explained, somehow contriving to suggest he had never personally been to one, young hostesses, dressed or undressed, sat between the guests and fed them food and drink while the men talked high matters of business. In addition, The Sea of Happiness offered a massage parlour, a discothèque and a live theatre on the ground floor.

“Duffy clinches the deal with the consortium, a cheque is passed, he’s feeling his oats. So he decides to do himself a favour with one of the girls. Terms agreed, off they go to a cubicle. Girl says she’s thirsty, how about a bottle of champagne to get her going? She’s on commission, naturally—they all are. Never mind. Duffy’s feeling expansive, so he says why not. Girl presses a bell, squawks into the intercom, next thing Duffy knows, in marches this bloody great European chap with an ice bucket and a tray. Sets it down, Duffy gives him twenty baht for himself, fellow says ‘Thank you’ in English, polite enough but no smiles, clears out. It’s Hansen. Jungle Hansen. Not a portrait…himself!”

“How does Duffy know that?”

“Seen his photograph, hasn’t he?”

“Why?”

“Because we showed Duffy the bloody photograph, for heaven’s sake, when Hansen went missing! We showed it to everyone we knew, all over the bloody hemisphere! We didn’t say why—we just said if you spot this man, holler. Head Office’s orders, thank you, not my idea. I thought it was bloody insecure.”

To calm himself, Rumbelow poured us both another whisky. “Duffy roars back to his hotel, phones me at home straight away. Three in the morning. ‘It’s your fellow,’ he tells me. ‘What fellow?’ I say. ‘Fellow you sent me that pretty picture of, back in Hongkers a year ago or more. He’s potboy at a whorehouse called The Sea of Happiness.’ You know how old Duffy talks. Loose. I sent Henry round next day. Bloody fool made a hash of it. You heard about that, I hope? Typical.”

“Did Duffy speak to Hansen? Ask him who he was. Anything?”

“Not a dickie bird. Looked clean through him. Duffy’s a trouper. Salt of the earth. Always was.”

“Where’s Henry?”

“Sitting downstairs in the lobby.”

“Call him up.”

—

Henry was Chinese, the son of a Kuomintang warlord in the Shan States and our resident chief agent, though I suspect he had long ago taken out reinsurance with the Thai police and was earning a quiet living playing both ends against the middle.

He was a podgy, over-eager, shiny fellow and he smiled too much. He wore a gold chain round his neck and carried a smart leather notebook with a gold pen in it. His cover work was translator. No translator I had ever met sported a Gucci notebook, but Henry was different.

“Tell Mark how you made a bloody fool of yourself at The Sea of Happiness last Thursday evening,” Rumbelow ordered menacingly.

“Sure, Mike.”

“Mark,” I said.

“Sure, Mark.”

“His orders were to take a look. That’s all he was to do,” Rumbelow barged in before Henry could tell anything at all. “Take a look, sniff, get out, call me. Right, Henry? He was to spin the tale, sniff, see if he could spot Hansen anywhere, not approach him, report back to me. A discreet, no-contact reconnaissance. Sniff and tell. Now tell Mark what you did.”

First Henry had had a drink at the bar, he said; then he had watched the show. Then he had sent for the Mama San, who hurried over assuming he had a special wish. The Mama San was a Chinese lady from the same province as Henry’s father, so they had an immediate bond.

He had shown the Mama San his translator’s card and said he was writing an article about her establishment—the superb food, the romantic girls, the high standards of sensitivity and hygiene, particularly the hygiene. He said he had a commission from a German travel magazine that recommended only the best places.

The Mama San took the bait and offered him the run of the house. She showed him the private dining rooms, the kitchens, cubicles, toilets. She introduced him to the girls—and offered him one on the house, which he declined—to the head chef, the doorman and the bouncers, but not, as it happened, to the enormous round-eye whom Henry had by then spotted three times, once as he carried a tray of glasses from the private dining rooms to the kitchens, once crossing a corridor pushing a trolley of bottles and once emerging from an open steel doorway which apparently led to the drinks store.

“But who is your farang who carries the bottles for you?” Henry had cried out with amusement to the Mama San. “Must he stay behind and work because he cannot pay his bill?”

The Mama San laughed also. Against farangs, or Westerners, all Asians feel naturally united. “The farang lives with one of our Cambodian girls,” she replied with contempt, for Cambodians are rated even lower than farangs and Vietnamese in the Thai zoology. “He met her here and fell in love with her, so he tried to buy her and make a lady out of her. But she refused to leave us. So he brings her to work every day and stays until she is free to go home again.”

“What kind of farang is he? German? English? Dutch?”

The Mama San shrugged. What was the difference? Henry pressed her. But a farang who brings his woman to the brothel and pushes drinks about while she goes with other men, he insisted, and then takes her home again to his bed. This must be quite some girl!

“She is number nineteen,” said the Mama San, with a shrug. “Her house name is Amanda. Would you like her?”

But Henry was too excited by his journalistic coup to be sidetracked. “But the farang, what is his name? What is his history?” he cried in great amusement.

“He is called Ham Sin. He speaks Thai with us and Khmer with the girl but you must not put him in your magazine because he is illegal.”

“I can disguise him. I can make it all disguised. Does the girl love him in return?”

“She prefers to be here at The Sea of Happiness with her friends,” the Mama San said primly.

Henry could not resist taking a look. The girls who were not with clients lounged on plush benches behind a glass wall, wearing numbers round their necks and nothing else, while they chatted to each other or tended their fingernails or stared vacuously at an ill-tuned television set. As Henry watched, number 19 stood up in response to a summons, picked up her little handbag and a wrap and walked from the room. She was very young. Many girls lied about their age in order to defeat the regulations—penniless Cambodians particularly. But this girl, said Henry, had looked no more than fifteen.

It was here that Henry’s excess of zeal began to lead him astray. He said his goodbyes to the Mama San and drove his car into an alley opposite the rear entrance, where he settled down to wait. Soon after one o’clock the staff began leaving, among them Hansen, twice the height of anyone else, leading number 19 on his arm. In the square, Hansen and the girl looked round for a cab and Henry had the temerity to pull up his car beside them. Pimps and illegal cab drivers thrive at that hour of night, and Henry in his time had been both, so perhaps the move came naturally to him.

“Where you want to go, sir?” he called to Hansen in English. “You want me to drive you?”

Hansen gave an address in a poor suburb five miles north. A price was agreed, Hansen and his girl got into the back of the car; they set off.

Now Henry began to lose his head in earnest. Flushed by his success, he decided for no reason he could afterwards explain that his best course of action would be to deliver his quarry and the girl to Rumbelow’s house, which lay not north but west. He had not of course prepared Rumbelow for this bold manoeuvre; he had hardly prepared himself for it. He had no assurance that Rumbelow was at home, or in any condition, at one-thirty in the morning, to conduct a conversation with a former spy who had disappeared off the map for eighteen months. But reason, at that moment, did not predominate in Henry’s mind. He was a joe, and there is not a joe in the world who does not, at one time or another in his life, do something totally daft.

“You like Bangkok?” Henry asked Hansen gaily, hoping to distract his passengers from the route he was taking.

No answer.

“You been here long?”

No answer.

“That’s a nice girl. Very young. Very pretty. She your regular girl?”

The girl had her head on Hansen’s shoulder. From what Henry could see in the mirror, she was already asleep. For some reason, this knowledge excited Henry further.

“You want a tailor, sir? All-night tailor, very good? I take you there. Good tailor.”

And he drove wildly into a sidestreet, pretending to look for his wretched tailor while he hurried towards Rumbelow’s house.

“Why are you going west?” said Hansen, speaking for the first time. “I don’t want to go this way. I don’t want a tailor. Get back on the main road.”

The last of Henry’s commonsense deserted him. He was suddenly terrified by Hansen’s size and Hansen’s tactical advantage in sitting behind him. What if Hansen was armed? Henry jammed on the brakes and stopped the car.

“Mr. Hansen, sir, I am your friend!” he cried in Thai, much as he might plead for mercy. “Mr. Rumbelow is your friend too. He’s proud of you! He wants to give you a lot of money. You come with me, please. No problem. Mr. Rumbelow will be very happy to see you!”

That was the last speech Henry made that night, for the next thing he knew, Hansen had pushed the back of Henry’s driving seat so hard that Henry’s head nearly went through the windscreen. Hansen got out of the car and hauled Henry into the street. After that, Hansen lifted Henry to his feet and flung him across the road, to the dismay of a group of sleeping beggars, who began whimpering and clamouring while Hansen strode to where Henry lay and glared down at him.

“You tell Rumbelow, if he comes for me, I’ll kill him,” he said in Thai.

Then he led the girl up the road in search of a better cab, one arm round her waist while she dozed.

By the time I had heard the two men’s story to the end, I was suddenly dreadfully tired.

I sent them away, telling Rumbelow to call me next morning. I said that before I did anything else I was going to sleep off my jet-lag. I lay down and was at once wide awake. An hour later, I was presenting myself at The Sea of Happiness and buying a ticket for fifty dollars. I removed my shoes, as custom required, and moments later I was standing in a neon-lit cubicle in my stockinged feet, staring into the passive, much painted features of girl number 19.

—

She wore a cheap silk wrap with tigers on it, but it was open from the neck down. Underneath it she was naked. A heavy Japanese-style makeup covered her complexion. She smiled at me and thrust her hand swiftly towards my groin, but I replaced it at her side. She was so slight it seemed a mystery that she was equal to the work. She was longer-legged than most Asian girls and her skin was unusually pale. She threw off her wrap and, before I could stop her, sprang on to the frayed chaise longue, where she arranged herself in what she imagined to be an erotic pose, caressing herself and uttering sighs of desire. She rolled on to her side with her rump thrust out, draping her black hair across her shoulder so that her tiny breasts poked through it. When I did not advance on her, she lay on her back and opened her thighs to me and bucked her pelvis, calling me “darling” and saying “please.” She flung herself away from me so that I could admire her back view, keeping her legs apart in invitation.

“Sit up,” I said, so she sat up and again waited for me to come to her.

“Put on your wrap,” I said.

When she appeared not to understand, I helped her into it. Henry had written the message for me in Khmer. “I want to speak to Hansen,” it read. “I am in a position to obtain Thai papers for yourself and your family.” I handed it to her and watched her study it. Could she read? I had no way of telling. I held out a plain white envelope addressed to Hansen. She took it and opened it. The letter was typed and its tone was not gentle. It contained two thousand baht.

“As an old friend of Father Vernon,” I had written, using the wordcode familiar to him, “I must advise you that you are in breach of your contract with our company. You have assaulted a Thai citizen and your girlfriend is an illegal Cambodian immigrant. We may have no alternative but to pass this information to the authorities. My car is parked across the street. Give the enclosed money to the Mama San as payment to release you for the night, and join me in ten minutes.”

She left the cubicle, taking the letter with her. I had not realised till then how much noise there was in the corridor: the jangling music, the tinny laughter, the grumbles of desire, the swish of water down the ramshackle pipes.

—

I had left the car unlocked and he was sitting in the back, the girl beside him. Somehow I had not doubted he would bring the girl. He was big and powerful, which I knew already, and haggard. In the half darkness, with his black beard and hollowed eyes and his flattened hands curled tensely over the back of the passenger seat, he resembled one of the saints he had once worshipped, rather than the photographs on his file. The girl sat slumped and close to him, sheltering against his body. We had not gone a hundred metres before a rainburst crashed on us like a waterfall. I pulled in to the kerb while each of us stared through the drenched windscreen, watching the torrents of water swarm over the gutters and potholes.

“How did you get to Thailand?” I yelled in Dutch. The rain was thundering on the roof.

“I walked,” Hansen replied in English.

“Where did you come over?” I yelled, in English also.

He mentioned a town. It sounded like “Orania Prathet.” The downpour ended and I drove for three hours while the girl dozed and Hansen sat guard over her, alert as a cat, and silent. I had selected a beach hotel advertised in the Bangkok Nation. I wanted to get him out of his own setting, into one that I controlled. I drew the key and paid a night’s lodging in advance. Hansen and the girl followed me down a concrete path to the beach. The bungalows stood in a half ring facing the sea. Mine was at one end. I unlocked the door and went ahead of them. Hansen followed, after him the girl. I switched on the light and the air-conditioning. The girl hovered near the door, but Hansen kicked off his shoes and placed himself at the centre of the room, casting round him with his hollowed eyes.

“Sit down,” I said. I pulled open the refrigerator door. “Does she want a drink?” I asked.

“Give her a Coca-Cola,” said Hansen. “Ice. Got any limes in there?”

“No.”

He watched me on my knees in front of the refrigerator.

“How about you?” I asked.

“Water.”

I searched again: glasses, mineral water, ice. As I did so, I heard Hansen say something tender to the girl in Khmer. She protested and he overrode her. I heard her go into the bedroom and come out again. Climbing to my feet, I saw the girl curled on the daybed that ran along one wall of the room, and Hansen bending over her with a blanket, tucking her up. When he had finished, he switched out the lamp above her and touched her cheek with his fingertips before striding to the French window to stare at the sea. A full red moon hung above the horizon. The rainclouds made black mountains across the sky.

“What’s your name?” he asked me.

“Mark,” I said.

“Is that your real name? Mark?”

The surest knowledge we have of one another comes from instinct. As I watched Hansen’s figure framed in the window and gazing out to sea, and the moonlight picking out the lines and hollows of his ravaged face, I knew that the lapsed priest had appointed me his confessor.

“Call me whatever you like,” I said.

—

You must think of a strong but uneasy English voice, the tone rich, the manner shocked, as if its owner never expected it to say the things he is hearing. The slight accent is East Indian Dutch. The bungalow is unlit, designed for fornication, and gives on to a tiny illuminated swimming pool and concrete rockery. Beyond this nonsense lies a superb and placid Asian sea, with a wide moon-path, and stars sparkling in the water like sunspots. A couple of fishermen stand upright in their sampans, tossing their round nets into the water and drawing them slowly out again.

In the foreground you must set the jagged, towering figure of Hansen as he prowls the room in his bare feet, now pausing at the French window, now perching himself on the arm of a chair before slipping soundlessly away to another corner. And always the voice, now fierce, now ruminative, now shaken, and now, like his body, resting itself for minutes on end while it gathers strength for the next ordeal.

Stretched on her daybed, the Cambodian girl lies wrapped in a blanket, her forearm crooked Asian style beneath her head. Was she awake? Did she understand what he was saying? Did she care? Hansen cared. He could not pass her without stopping to gaze down at her, or fiddle with the blanket at her neck. Once, dropping to the floor beside her, he stared ardently into her closed eyes while he laid his palm on her brow as if to test her temperature.

“She needs limes,” he murmured. “Coca-Cola is nothing for her. Limes.”

I had sent out for them already. They arrived, by hand of a boy from the front desk. There was business while Hansen squeezed them for her, then held her upright while she drank.

His first questions were a vague catechism about my standing in the Service. He wished to know with what authority had I been sent, with what instructions.

“I want no thanks for what I have done,” he warned me. “There are no thanks for bombing villages.”

“But you may need help,” I said.

His response was to tell me formally that he would never again, in any circumstance, work for the Service. I could have told him that too, but I refrained. He had thought he was working for the British, he said, but he had been working for murderers. He had been another man when he did the things he did. He hoped the American pilots had been other men as well.

He asked after his sub-agents—the farmer so-and-so, the rice trader so-and-so. He asked about the staybehind network he had painstakingly built up against the certain day when the Khmer Rouge would break out of the jungle and help themselves to the cities, a thing that neither we nor the Americans, despite all the warnings, had ever quite believed would happen. But Hansen had believed it. Hansen was one of the warners. Hansen had told us time and again that Kissinger’s bombs were dragon’s teeth, even though Hansen had helped direct them to their targets.

“May I believe you?” he asked me when I assured him there had been no pattern of arrests among his sources.

“It’s the truth,” I said, responding to the supplication in his voice.

“Then I didn’t betray them,” he muttered in marvel. For a moment he sat and cupped his head in his hands, as if holding it together.

“If you were captured by the Khmer Rouge, nobody could expect you to stay silent, anyway,” I said.

“Silent! My God.” He almost laughed. “Silent!” And, standing sharply, he swung away to the window again.

By the moonlight I saw tears of sweat clinging to his great bearded face. I started to say something about the Service wishing to acquit itself honourably by him, but halfway through my speech he flung out his arms to their fullest extent, as if testing the limits of his confinement. Finding nothing to obstruct them, they fell back to his sides.

“The Service to hell,” he said softly. “The West to bloody, bloody hell. We have no business making our wars here, peddling our religious recipes. We have sinned against Asia: the French, the British, the Dutch, now the Americans. We have sinned against the children of Eden. God forgive us.”

My tape recorder lay on the table.

—

We are in Asia. Hansen’s Asia. The Asia sinned against. Listen to the frenetic chatter of the insects. Thais and Cambodians alike have been known to bet large sums on the number of times a bullfrog will burp. The room is twilit, the hour forgotten, the room forgotten also; the moon has risen out of sight. The Vietnam War is back with us, and we are in the Cambodian jungle with Hansen, and modern comforts are few, unless we include the American bombers that circle miles above us, like patient hawks, waiting for the computers to tell them what to destroy next: for instance, a team of oxen whose urine has been misread by secret sensors as the exhaust fumes of a military convoy; for instance, children whose chatter has been mistaken for military commands. The sensors have been hidden by American commandos along the supply routes Hansen has indicated to them—but unfortunately the sensors are not as well informed as Hansen is.

We are in what the American pilots call badland, though in the jungle definitions of good and bad are fluid. We are in a Khmer Rouge “liberated area” that provides sanctuary for Vietcong troops who wish to attack the Americans in the flank rather than head-on from the north. Yet despite these appearances of war, we are among people with no collective perception of their enemies, in a region unmapped except by fighters. To hear Hansen speak, the region is as close to paradise as makes no difference, whether he speaks as priest, sinner, scholar or spy.

A few miles up the trail by jeep is an ancient Buddhist temple which, with the help of villagers, Hansen has excavated from the depths of vegetation, and which is the apparent reason for his being there, and for the notes he takes, and the wireless messages he sends, and for the trickle of visitors who arrive usually just before nightfall, and depart at first light. The kampong where he lives is built on stilts in a clearing at the edge of a good river, in a plain of fertile fields that climb in steps to a rain forest. A blue mist is frequent. Hansen’s house is set high up the slope in order to improve his radio reception and give a view of whatever enters and leaves the valley. In the wet season, it is his habit to leave the jeep in the village and trudge up to his house on foot. In the dry season, he drives into his compound, most often taking half the village children with him. As many as a dozen of them will be waiting to clamber over the tailboard for the five-minute ride from the village to his compound.

“Sometimes, my daughter was among them,” Hansen said.

Neither Rumbelow nor the file had mentioned that Hansen had a daughter. If he had hidden her from us, he was gravely in breach of Service rules—though heaven knows, Service rules were about the last thing that mattered to either of us by then. Nevertheless he stopped speaking and glared at me in the darkness as if waiting for my reproof. But I preserved my silence, wishing to be the ear he had been waiting for, perhaps for years.

“While I was still a priest, I visited the temples of Cambodia,” he said. “While I was there, I fell in love with a village woman and made her pregnant. In Cambodia it was the best time still. Sihanouk ruled. I remained with her until the child was born. A girl. I christened her Marie. I gave the mother money and returned to Djakarta, but I missed my child terribly. I sent more money. I sent money to the headman to look after them. I sent letters. I prayed for the child and her mother, and swore that one day I would care for them properly. As soon as I returned to Cambodia, I put the mother in my house, even though in the intervening years she had lost her beauty. My daughter had a Khmer name, but from the day she came to me I called her Marie. She liked that. She was proud to have me as her father.”

He seemed concerned to make clear to me that Marie was at ease with her European name. It was not an American name, he said. It was European.

“I had other women in my household, but Marie was my only child and I loved her. She was more beautiful than I had imagined her. But if she had been ugly and ungracious I would have loved her no less.” His voice acquired sudden strength and, as I heard it, warning. “No woman, no man, no child, ever claimed my love in such a way. You may say that Marie is the only woman I have loved purely except for my mother.” He was staring at me in the darkness, challenging me to doubt his passion. But under Hansen’s spell, I doubted nothing and had forgotten everything about myself, even my own mother’s death. He was assuming me, occupying me.

“Once you have embarked upon the impossible concept of God, you will know that real love permits no rejection. Perhaps that is something only a sinner can properly understand. Only a sinner knows the scale of God’s forgiveness.”

I think I nodded wisely. I thought of Colonel Jerzy. I was wondering why Hansen needed to explain that he could not reject his daughter. Or why his sinfulness was a concern to him when he spoke of her.

“That evening when I drove home from the temple, there were no children waiting for me in the kampong, though it was the dry season. I was disappointed because we had made a good find that day and I wanted to tell Marie about it. They must be having a school festival, I thought, but I could not think which one. I drove up the hill to the compound and called her name. The compound was empty. The gatehouse empty. The women’s cookpots empty under the stilts. I called Marie again, then my wife. Then anybody. No one came. I drove back to the village. I went into the house of one of Marie’s friends, then another and another, calling Marie. Even the pigs and chickens had disappeared. I looked for blood, for traces of fighting. There were none. But I found footprints leading into the jungle. I drove back to the compound. I took a spade and cached my radio in the forest, halfway between two tall trees that made a line due west, close to an old ant-hill shaped like a man. I hated all my work for you, all my lies, for you and for the Americans. I still do. I walked back to the house, uncached my codepads and equipment and destroyed them. I was glad to. I hated them also. I put on boots and filled a rucksack with food for a week. With my revolver I sent three bullets through the jeep’s engine to immobilise it; then I followed the footprints into the jungle. The jeep was an insult to me, because you had bought it.”

Alone, Hansen had set off in pursuit of the Khmer Rouge. Other men—even men who were not Western spies—might have thought twice and a third time, even with their wife and daughter taken hostage. Not Hansen. Hansen had one thought and, absolutist that he was, he acted on it.

“I could not allow myself to be separated from God’s grace,” he said. He was telling me, in case I did not know, that beyond the girl’s survival lay the survival of his immortal soul.

—

I asked him how long he had marched for. He didn’t know. To begin with he had marched only at night and lain up by day. But the daylight gnawed at him and gradually, against all jungle sense, it drew him forward. As he marched, he recalled every event of Marie’s life from the night when he had lifted her from her mother’s womb and, with a ritual bamboo stave, cut the cord and ordered the women in attendance to give him water so that he could wash her; and with the water, by his authority as priest and father, had christened her Marie after his own mother and the mother of Christ.

He remembered the nights when she had lain sleeping in his arms or in the rush crib at his feet. He saw her at her mother’s breast in the firelight. He flailed himself for the dreadful years of separation in Djakarta and on his training course in England. He flailed himself for all the falsity of his work for the Service, and for his weakness, as he described it, his treachery against Asia. He was referring to his work of directing the American bombers.

He relived the hours he had spent telling her stories and singing her to sleep with English and Dutch songs. He cared only for his love for her, and his need of her, and for her need of him.

He was following the tracks because he had nothing else to follow. He knew now what had happened. It had happened to other kampongs, though none in Hansen’s region. The fighters had surrounded the kampong at night and waited till dawn, when the able-bodied left for the fields. They had taken the able-bodied, then crept into the village and taken the elderly and the children, afterwards the livestock. They were provisioning themselves but they were also adding to their ranks. They were in a hurry or they would have ransacked the houses, but they wanted to return to the jungle before they were discovered. Soon, by the light of a full moon, Hansen came upon the first grisly proofs of his theory: the naked bodies of an old storekeeper and his wife, their hands bound behind their backs. Had they been unable to keep up? Were they too ugly? Had they argued?

Hansen marched faster. He was thanking God that Marie looked like a full Asian. In most children of mixed blood, the European strain would have been there for every Asian to see, but Hansen, though a giant, was dark-skinned and slim-bodied, and somehow with his Asian soul he had succeeded in engendering an Asian girl.

Next night another corpse lay beside the trail and Hansen approached it fearfully. It was Ong Sai, the argumentative schoolmistress. Her mouth was wide open. Shot while protesting, Hansen diagnosed, and pressed anxiously forward. In search of Marie, his pure love, the earth mother who was his daughter, the only keeper of his grace.

He wondered which sort of unit he was following. The shy boys who banged on your door at night to ask a little rice for the fighters? The grim-jawed cadres who regarded the Asian smile as an emblem of Western decadence? And there were the zombies, he remembered: freebooting packs of homeless who had clubbed together from necessity, more outlaws than guerrillas. But already in the group ahead of him he had an intimation of discipline. A less organised gang would have stayed to loot the village. They would have made camp to eat a meal and congratulate themselves. On the morning after he found Ong Sai, Hansen took special care to conceal himself while he slept.

“I had a premonition,” he said.

In the jungle you ignored premonition at your peril. He buried himself deep in the undergrowth and smeared himself with mud. He slept with his revolver in his hand. He woke at evening to the smell of woodsmoke and the shrill sound of shouting, and when he opened his eyes he found himself looking straight into the barrels of several automatic rifles.

—

He was talking about the chains. Jungle fighters, trained to travel light, humping a dozen sets of manacles for hundreds of kilometres—how had it happened? He was still mystified. Yet somebody had carried them, somebody had made a clearing and driven a stake into the centre of the clearing, and dropped the iron rings round the stake, and attached the twelve sets of chains to the twelve iron rings in order to tether twelve special prisoners to the rain and heat and cold and dark. Hansen described the pattern of the chains. To do so, he broke into French. I assumed he needed the protection of a different language. “…une tringle collective sur laquelle étaient enfilés des étriers…nous étions fixés par un pied…j’avais été mis au bout de la chaîne parce que ma cheville trop grosse ne passait pas…”

I glanced at the girl. She lay, if it were possible, more inert than before. She could have been dead or in a trance. I realised Hansen was sparing her something he did not want her to hear.

By day, he said, still in French, our ankles were released, enabling us to kneel and even crawl, though never far, because we were tethered to the stake and had each other’s bodies to contend with. Only by night, when our foot irons were fixed to heavy poles that made up the circumference of the enclosure, were we able to stretch full length. The availability of chains determined the number of special prisoners, who were drawn exclusively from the village bourgeoisie, he said. He recognised two village elders, and a stringy forty-year-old widow called Ra who had a reputation for prophecy. And the three rice-dealing brothers Liu, who were famous misers, one of whom looked already dead, for he lay curled round his chains like a hairless hedgehog. Only the sound of his sobbing proved he was alive.

And Hansen, with his horror of captivity? How had he responded to his chains?

“Je les ai portées pour Marie,” he answered in the swift, warning French I was learning to respect.

The prisoners who were not special were confined to a stockade at the clearing’s edge, from which at intervals one of them was led or dragged to headquarters, a place out of sight behind a hillock. Questioning was brief. After a few hours’ screaming, a single pistol shot would ring out and the uneasy quiet of the jungle would return. Nobody came back from questioning. The children, including Marie, were allowed to roam provided they did not approach the prisoners or venture up the hillock which hid the headquarters. The boldest of them had already struck up an acquaintance with the young fighters during the march, and were scurrying around them trying to perform errands or touch their guns.

But Marie had stayed apart from everyone. She sat in the dust of the clearing on the other side of the poles, watching over her father from dawn till night. Even when they hauled her mother from the stockade and her screams for Hansen rang out from behind the hillock, changing to screams for mercy and ending with the usual pistol shot, Marie’s eyes never flinched from Hansen’s face.

“Did she know?” I asked in French.

“The whole camp knew,” he replied.

“Had she been fond of her mother?”

Was it my imagination or had Hansen closed his eyes in the darkness?

“I was the father of Marie,” he replied. “I was not the father of their relationship.”

How had I known that the mother and daughter had hated each other? Was it because I sensed that Hansen’s love for Marie had been a jealous and demanding one—absolute, like all his loves, excluding rivals?

“I was not allowed to speak to her, nor she to me,” he was saying. “Prisoners spoke to nobody on pain of death.”

Even a groan was enough, as one of the luckless Liu brothers learned when the guards reduced him to permanent silence with their rifle butts, and replaced him next morning with a cringing leftover from the stockade. But between Marie and her father no words were necessary. The stoicism Hansen saw in his daughter’s face was the impassioned determination of his own heart as he lay bound and helpless in his chains. With Marie to support him, he could bear anything. Each would be the salvation of the other. Her love for him was as fierce and single-minded as his for her. He did not doubt it. For all his loathing of captivity, he thanked God he had followed her.

A day passed and another, but Hansen remained chained to the stake, burning in the sun, shaking in the evening cold, stinking in his own filth, his gaze and spirit fixed always upon Marie.

In his head, meanwhile, he was wrestling with the tactics of his situation.

From the start it had been clear to him that he was a celebrity. If they had been planning to capture a European, they would have made their attack before Hansen left his house, and searched the house afterwards. He was unexpected treasure, and they were waiting to hear what should be done with him. Others on the stake were fetched and disappeared, all but the one surviving Liu brother and the woman fortune teller, who after days of noisy questioning reappeared as camp trusties, abusing their former companions and trying by every means to ingratiate themselves with the soldiers.

An indoctrination class was formed, and each evening the children and selected survivors sat in a circle in the shade to be harangued by a young commissar with a red headband. While Hansen burned and froze, he could hear the commissar’s shrill squawk, hour by hour as he ranted against the hated imperialists. At first he resented these classes because they took Marie away from him. But when he made the effort, he could still lift his head high enough to see her straight body seated strictly at the far side of the circle, staring at him across the clearing. I will be your mother and your father and your friend, he told her. I will be your life, if I have to give up my own.

At other times he reproached himself with her spectacular beauty, regarding it as a punishment for his random lusts. Marie at twelve was without doubt the most beautiful in the camp, and though sex was forbidden to the cadres on the grounds that it was a bourgeois threat to their revolutionary will, Hansen could not help observe the effect that her thinly clothed figure had on the young fighters as they watched her pass; how their dulled eyes drank in her sprouting breasts and swinging haunches beneath the torn cotton frock, and their scowls darkened when they yelled at her. Worse still, he knew she was aware of their desire, and that her emerging womanhood responded to it.

Then a morning came when the routine of Hansen’s captivity unaccountably improved, and his apprehensions deepened, for his benefactor was the young commissar in the red headband. Escorted by two soldiers, the commissar ordered Hansen to stand. When he was unable, the soldiers lifted him to his feet and, taking an arm each, let him stagger to a point along the river bank where an inlet made a natural pool.

“Wash,” the young commissar ordered.

For days—ever since they had bound him—Hansen had been vainly demanding the right to clean himself. On his first evening he had roared at them, “Take me to the river.” They had beaten him. The next morning he had flung himself about on his chains, risking more beatings, yelling for a responsible comrade, all to assert his right to remain a person whom his captors could respect and consequently preserve.

Under the gaze of the soldiers, Hansen sufficiently rallied his racked limbs to bathe and—though it was a crucifixion—rub himself with the fine river mud before being led back to the stake. On each journey, he passed within a few feet of his beloved Marie in her habitual place beyond the ring of poles. Though his heart leapt at her nearness and the courage in her eyes, he could not suppress the suspicion that it was his own child who had purchased the rare comfort he was now enjoying. And when the commissar grunted a greeting to her and Marie lifted her head and gave half a smile in return, the anguish of jealousy added itself to Hansen’s pains.

After his bath, they brought him rice—more than they had given him in all the time he had been their prisoner. And instead of making him eat it from the bowl like a dog, they untied his hands and let him use his fingers, so that he was able to secrete a small amount in his palm, and drop it down the front of his tunic before they chained him again.

All day long he thought of nothing but the pellet of rice inside his shirt, making sure no movement of his body crushed it. I will win her back, he thought. I will supplant the commissar in her admiration. When evening came and they again led him to the river, he achieved the miracle he had been planning. Staggering more dramatically than was necessary, he succeeded in dropping a pellet of rice at Marie’s feet, unnoticed by his guards. As he passed by her again on his way back, he saw to his secret ecstasy that it had vanished.

Yet her face told him nothing. Only her eyes, straight and sometimes lifeless in their devotion, told him she returned his absolute love. I was deluding myself, he decided, as they refastened his chains. She is learning the prisoner’s tricks. She is chaste and will survive. That evening he listened with a new tolerance to the commissar’s indoctrination class. Lead him on, he urged her in the telepathic dialogue he conducted with her constantly; lull him, bewitch him, gain his trust but give him nothing. And Marie must have heard him, because as the class broke up he saw the commissar beckon her over to him and rebuke her while she remained cowed and silent. He saw her head fall forward. He saw her walk away from him, her head still lowered.

Next day and for a week, Hansen repeated his trick, convinced he was unobserved except by Marie. The pellet of rice, rolling lightly over his stomach each time he shifted his body, became a source of vital comfort to him. I am nourishing her from my own breast. I am her guardian, the protector of her chastity. I am her priest, giving her Christ’s Sacrament.

The rice was all that mattered to him. His concern was to contrive new ways to smuggle it to her, waiting till he was past her and flicking the pellet backward, letting it fall down the inside of his tattered trouser leg.

“I was inordinate,” he said softly, in the tone of a penitent.

And because he had been inordinate, God took Marie from him. Suddenly one morning when they unchained him and led him to the pool, there was no Marie waiting to receive her Sacrament. At the evening indoctrination class, he saw that she had been elevated to the commissar’s side, and he thought he heard her voice above the rest, intoning the liturgical responses with a new self-confidence. When night fell, he picked out her silhouette among the soldiers’ fires—an accepted member of their company, sharing their rice like a comrade. Next day he did not see her at all, nor the day after.

“I wished to die,” he said.

But in the evening as he waited in despair, prone and motionless, for the guards to chain his feet, it was the young commissar who marched towards him, and Marie, dressed in a black tunic, who trotted at his side.

“Is this man your father?” the commissar asked as they reached Hansen.

Marie’s stare did not falter, but she seemed to be searching her memory for her reply. “Angka is my father,” she said finally. “Angka is the father of all oppressed.”

“Angka was the Party,” Hansen explained for me, without my asking. “Angka was the Organisation that the Khmer Rouge prayed to. In the Khmer Rouge’s ladder of beings, Angka was God.”

“So who is your mother?” the commissar asked Marie.

“My mother is Angka. I have no mother but Angka.”

“Who is this man?”

“He is an American agent,” Marie replied. “He drops bombs on our villages. He kills our workers.”

“Why does he pretend he is your father?”

“He wishes to trick us by claiming to be our comrade.”

“Test the spy’s chains. See that they are tight enough,” the commissar commanded.

Marie knelt to Hansen’s feet, exactly as he had taught her to kneel in prayer. For a moment, like the healing touch of Christ, her hand closed over his festering ankles.

“Can you insert your fingers between the chain and ankle?” the commissar asked.

In his panic, Hansen behaved as he always did when his feet were being chained. He flexed his ankle muscles, hoping to give himself more freedom when he relaxed. He felt her finger probe the chain.

“I can insert my little finger,” she replied, holding it up while she kept her body in the line of sight between the commissar and Hansen’s feet.

“Can you insert it with difficulty or easily?”

“I can insert my finger only with difficulty,” she lied.

Watching them march away, Hansen noticed something that alarmed him. With her black tunic, Marie had put on the stealthy waddle of the jungle fighter. All the same, for the first time since his capture, Hansen slept soundly in his chains. She is joining them in order to deceive them, he assured himself. God is protecting us. Soon we shall escape.

—

The official interrogator arrived by boat, a smooth-cheeked student with an earnest, frowning manner. In Hansen’s mind, that was how he named him: the student. A reception committee led by the commissar met him at the river bank and escorted him over the hillock to headquarters. Hansen knew he was the interrogator because he was the only one who did not turn his head to look at the last remaining prisoner rotting in the heat. But he looked at Marie. He stopped in front of her, obliging everybody to stop with him. He stood before her; he held his studious face close to her while he asked her questions. Hansen could not hear. He kept it there while he listened to her parrot answers. My daughter is the camp whore, thought Hansen in despair. But was she? Nothing he had ever heard about the Khmer Rouge suggested they appointed or even tolerated prostitutes in their midst. Everything suggested the contrary. “Angka haït le sexuel,” a French anthropologist had said to him once.

Then they are ravishing her with their puritanism, he decided. They have locked her to them in a passion that is worse than a debauching. He lay with his face in the earth, praying to be allowed to take her sins of innocence upon himself.

—

I have no coherent picture of Hansen’s interrogation for the reason he had little himself. I remembered my own treatment at the hands of Colonel Jerzy, and it was child’s play by comparison. But Hansen’s recollections had the same imprecision. That they tortured him goes without saying. They had built a wooden grid for the purpose. Yet they were also concerned to keep him alive, because between sessions they gave him food and even, if he remembered rightly, allowed him visits to the river bank, though it may have been a single visit broken by spells of unconsciousness.

There were also the sessions of writing, for in the literal mind of the student, no confession was real until it was written down. And the writing grew harder and harder and became a punishment in itself, even though they unstrapped him from the grid to make him do it.

As an interrogator, the student seems to have proceeded simultaneously on two intellectual fronts. When he was checked on the one, he shifted to the other.

You are an American spy, he said, and an agent of the counterrevolutionary puppet Lon Nol, also an enemy of the revolution. Hansen disagreed.

But you’re also a Roman Catholic masquerading as a Buddhist, a prisoner of minds, a promoter of anti-Party superstitions, and a saboteur of the popular enlightenment, the student screamed at him.

In general, the student seems to have preferred making statements to asking questions: “You will now please give all dates and places of your conspiratorial meetings with the counter-revolutionary puppet and American spy Lon Nol, naming all Americans present.”

Hansen insisted that no such meetings had occurred. But this gave the student no satisfaction. As the agony increased, Hansen recalled the names from an English folksong that his mother had used to sing him: Tom Pearse…Bill Brewer…Jan Stewer…Peter Gurney…Peter Davey…Dan Whiddon…Harry Hawk…

“You will now please write down the ringleader of this rabble,” the student said, turning a page of his notebook. The student’s eyes, said Hansen, were often nearly closed. I remembered that about Jerzy too.

“Cobbleigh,” Hansen whispered, lifting his head from the desk where they had sat him. Thomas Cobbleigh, he wrote. Tom for short. Covername Uncle.

The dates were important because Hansen was concerned he would forget them once he had invented them, and be accused of inconsistency. He chose Marie’s birthday and his mother’s birthday and the date of his father’s execution. He altered the year to suit Lon Nol’s accession to power. For a conspiratorial place, he selected the walled gardens of Lon Nol’s palace in Phnom Penh, which he had often admired on his way to a favourite fumerie.

His fear while he was confessing to this rubbish was that he would reveal true information by mistake, for it was by now clear to him that the student knew nothing about his real intelligence-gathering activities, and that the charges against him were based on the fact that he was a Westerner.

“You will please write down the name of each spy paid by you in the last five years, also each act of sabotage committed by you against the people.”

Not in all the days and nights that Hansen had passed anticipating his ordeal had he imagined he might fail on the score of creativity. He recited the names of martyrs whose agonies he had contemplated in order to prepare himself, of Oriental scholars safely dead; of authors of learned works on philology and linguistics. Spies, he said. All spies. And wrote them down, his hand jerking on the paper to the convulsions of the pain that continued to rack him long after they switched off the machine.

Writing desperately, he made a list of T. E. Lawrence’s officers in the desert, which he remembered from his many readings of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom. He described how on Lon Nol’s personal orders he had organised the poisoning of crops and cattle by Buddhist priests. The student put him back on the grid and increased the pain.

He described the clandestine classes he had held in imperialism, and how he had encouraged the spread of bourgeois sentiment and family virtues. The student opened his eyes, offered his commiserations and again increased the pain.

He gave them nearly everything. He described how he had lit beacons to guide American bombers, and distributed rumours that the bombers were Chinese. He was on the brink of telling them who had helped him to lead American commandos to the supply trails, when mercifully he fainted.

—

But throughout his ordeal it was still Marie with whom he lived in his heart, to whom he cried out in his pain, whose hands drew him back to life when his body was begging to relinquish it, whose eyes watched over him in love and pity. It was Marie to whom he sacrificed his suffering and for whom he swore to survive. As he lay between life and death, he had a hallucination in which he saw himself stretched out in the well of the student’s boat and Marie in her black tunic seated over him, paddling them upriver to Heaven. But he still was not dead. They have not killed me. I have confessed to everything and they have not killed me.

But he had not confessed to everything. He had remained true to his helpers and he had not told them about his radio. And when they dragged him back next day and strapped him once more to the grid, he saw Marie sitting at the student’s side, a copy of his confession lying before her on the table. Her hair was cropped, her expression closed.

“Are you familiar with the statements of this spy?” the student asked her.

“I am familiar with his statements,” she replied.

“Do the spy’s statements accurately depict his lifestyle as you were able to observe it in his company?”

“No.”

“Why not?” the student asked, opening his notebook.

“They are not complete.”

“Explain why the spy Hansen’s statements are not complete.”

“The spy Hansen kept a radio in his house which he used for signalling to the imperialist bombers. Also the names he has mentioned in his confession are fictitious. They are taken from a bourgeois English song which he sang to me when he was pretending to be my father. Also he received imperialist soldiers at our house at night and led them into the jungle. Also he has failed to mention that he has an English mother.”

The student appeared disappointed. “What else has he failed to mention?” he asked, flattening a fresh page with the edge of his small hand.

“During his confinement, he has been guilty of many breaches of regulation. He has hoarded food and attempted to buy the collaboration of comrades in his plans to escape.”

The student sighed and made more notes. “What else has he failed to mention?” he asked patiently.

“He has been wearing his foot chains improperly. When the chains were being fastened, he braced his feet illegally, leaving the chains loose for his escape.”

Until that moment Hansen had managed to persuade himself that Marie was playing a cunning game. No longer. The game was the reality.

“He is a whoremonger!” she screamed through her tears. “He debauches our women by bringing them to his house and drugging them. He pretends to make a bourgeois marriage, then forces his wife to tolerate his decadent practices. He sleeps with girls of my own age! He pretends he is the father of our children and that our blood is not Khmer! He reads us bourgeois literature in Western languages in order to deprave us! He seduces us by taking us for rides in his jeep and singing imperialist songs to us!”

He had never heard her scream before. Nor evidently had the student, who appeared embarrassed. But she would not be checked. She persisted in denying him. She told them how he had forbidden her mother to love her. She was expressing a hatred for him that he knew was unfeigned, as absolute and inordinate as his love for her. Her body shook with the pent-up hatred of a misused woman, her features were crumpled with hatred and guilt. Her arm struck out and she pointed at him in the classic posture of accusation. Her voice belonged to someone he had never known.

“Kill him!” she screamed. “Kill the despoiler of our people! Kill the corrupter of our Khmer blood! Kill the Western liar who tells us we are different from one another! Avenge the people!”

The student made a last note and ordered Marie to be led away.

“I prayed for her forgiveness,” Hansen said.

—

In the bungalow, I realised, it was dawn. Hansen was standing at the window, his eyes fixed on the misty plateau of the sea. The girl lay on the daybed where she had lain all night, her eyes closed, the empty Coca-Cola can beside her, her head still supported by her arm. Her hand, hanging down, looked worn and elderly. A terseness had entered Hansen’s voice, and for a moment I feared that with morning he had decided to resent me. Then I realised it was not me he was at odds with but himself. He was remembering his anger as they carried him, bound but not chained, to the stockade to sleep—if sleep is what you do when your body is dying of pain, and the blood is filling your ears and nose. Anger against himself that he had implanted in his child so much loathing.

“I was her father still,” he said in French. “I blamed Marie for nothing, myself for everything. If only I had made my escape earlier, instead of counting on her to help me. If only I had fought my way out when I was strong, instead of placing my reliance in a child. I should never have worked for you. My secret work had endangered her. I cursed you all. I still do.”

Did I speak? My concern was to say nothing that would obstruct his flow.

“She was drawn, to them,” he said, making her excuses for her. “They were her own people, jungle fighters with a faith to die for. Why should she reject them?

“I was the last obstacle to her acceptance by her people,” he said, explaining her. “I was an intruder, a corrupter. Why should she believe I was her father when they were telling her I was not?”

Still lying in the stockade, he remembered her on the day the young commissar dressed her in her bridal black. He remembered her expression of distaste as she stared down at him, fouled and beaten, a beggar at her feet, a cringing Western spy. And beside her, the handsome commissar with his red headband. “I am wedded to the Angka,” she was saying to him. “The Angka answers all my questions.”

“I was alone,” he said.

Darkness fell in the stockade, and he supposed that if they were going to shoot him they would wait for daylight. But the notion that Marie would go through life knowing she had ordered her father’s death appalled him. He imagined her in middle age. Who would help her? Who would confess her? Who would give her release and absolution? The idea of his death became increasingly alarming to him. It will be her death too.

At some point he must have dozed, he said, for when dawn came he found a bowl of rice on the floor of the stockade and he knew it had not been there the night before; even in his agony he would have smelt it. Not rolled into pellets, the rice, not hoarded against the naked skin, but a white mound of it, enough for five days. At first he was too tired to be surprised. Lying on his stomach to eat, he noticed the quiet. By this hour the clearing should have been alive with the sounds of soldiers waking for the day: singsong voices and washing noises from the river bank, the clatter of pans and rifles, the chant of slogans led by the commissar. Yet when he paused to listen, even the birds and monkeys seemed to have stopped their shrieking and he heard no human sounds at all.

“They had gone,” he said, from somewhere behind me. “They had decamped in the night, taking Marie with them.”

He ate more rice and dozed again. Why have they not killed me? Marie has talked them out of it. Marie has bought me my life. Hansen set to work chafing his bonds against the wall of the stockade. By nightfall, covered in sores and flies, he was lying on the river bank, washing his wounds. He crawled back to the stockade to sleep, and next morning, with the remainder of his rice, he set off. This time, having no prisoners or livestock, they had left no tracks.

All the same, he went in search of her.

—

For months, Hansen thinks five or six, he remained in the jungle, moving from village to village, never settling, trusting no one—I suspect a little crazed. Wherever he could, he enquired after Marie’s unit, but there was too little to describe it by and his quest became indiscriminate. He heard of units that had fighting girls. He heard of units that consisted of girls only. He heard of girls being sent into the towns as whores to gather information. He imagined Marie in all these situations. One night he crept back to his old house hoping she had taken refuge there. The village had been burned.

I asked him whether his cached wireless had been disturbed.

“I didn’t look,” he replied. “I didn’t care. I hated you all.”

Another night he called on Marie’s aunt, who lived in a remote village, but she hurled pans at him and he had to flee. Yet his determination to rescue his daughter was stronger than ever, for he knew now that he must rescue her from herself. She is cursed with my absolutism, he thought. She is violent and headstrong; it is I who am to blame. I have locked her in the prison of my own impulses. Only a father’s love could ever have blinded him to this knowledge. Now his eyes were open. He saw her drawn to cruelty and inhumanity as a means of proving her devotion. He saw her reliving his own erratic quest, yet deprived of his intellectual and religious disciplines—vaguely believing, like himself, that her assumption into a great vision would bring her self-fulfillment.

Of his walk to the Thai border he said little. He headed southwest towards Pailin. He had heard there was a camp there for Khmer refugees. He crossed mountains and malarial marshes. Once arrived, he besieged the tracing centres and pinned her description on camp noticeboards. How he achieved this without papers, money or connections, yet kept his presence in Thailand secret, is a mystery to me still. But Hansen was a trained and hardened agent, even if he denied us. He was not disposed to let much stop him. I asked why he did not turn to Rumbelow for help, but he shook off the idea contemptuously.

“I was not an imperialist agent any more. I believed in nothing but my daughter.”

One day in the office of a relief organisation, he met an American woman who thought she remembered Marie.

“She left,” she said cautiously.

Hansen pressed her. Marie was one of a group of half dozen girls, said the woman. They were whores but they had the assurance of fighters. When they were not entertaining men, they kept themselves apart from everyone and were tough to handle. One day they broke bounds. She had heard they were picked up by the Thai police. She never saw them again.

The woman who said this appeared unsure whether to say what else was on her mind, but Hansen gave her no choice.

“We were afraid for her,” she said. “She gave different names for herself. She gave conflicting accounts of how she came to us. The doctors argued over whether she was mad. Somewhere along her journey, she had lost track of who she was.”

Hansen presented himself to the Thai police and, by threats or animal persuasion, traced Marie to a police hostel run for the enjoyment of the officers. They never asked him who he was, it seems, or what he had for papers. He was a round-eye, a farang, who spoke Khmer and Thai. Marie had stayed three months, then vanished, they said. She was strange, said a kindly sergeant.

“What is strange?” Hansen asked.

“She would speak only English,” the sergeant replied.

There was another girl, a friend of Marie’s, who had stayed longer and married one of the corporals. Hansen obtained her name.

—

He had ceased speaking.

“And did you find her?” I asked after a long silence.

I knew the answer already, as I had known it from halfway through his story, without knowing that I knew. He was sitting at the girl’s head, which he was gently stroking. Slowly she sat upright and with her little, old hands rubbed her eyes, pretending she had been asleep. I think she had listened to us all night.

“It was all she understood any more,” Hansen explained in English, while he continued to stroke her head. He was speaking of the brothel where he had found her. “She wanted no big choices, did you, Marie? No big words, no promises.” He pressed her to him. “She wishes only to be admired. By her own people. By us. All of us must love Marie. That is what comforts her.”

I think he mistook my reticence for reproach, for his voice rose. “She wishes to be harmless. Is that so bad? She wishes to be left alone, as all of them wish. It would be a good thing if more of us wished the same. Your bombers and your spies and your big talk are not for her. She is not the child of Dr. Kissinger. She asks only for a small existence where she can give pleasure and hurt no one. Which is worse? Your brothel or hers? Get out of Asia. You should never have come, any of you. I am ashamed I ever helped you. Leave us alone.”

“I shall tell Rumbelow very little of this,” I said as I rose to leave.

“Tell him what you like.”

From the doorway, I took a last look at them. The girl was staring at me as I believe she had stared at Hansen from outside the circle of chains, her eyes unflinching, deep and still. I thought I knew what was in her mind. I had paid her and not had her. She was wondering whether I want my money’s worth.

—

Rumbelow drove me to the airport. Like Hansen, I would have preferred to do without him, but we had matters to discuss.

“You promised him how much?” he cried in horror.

“I told him he was entitled to a resettlement grant and all the protection we can give him. I told him you would be sending him a cashier’s cheque for fifty thousand dollars.”

Rumbelow was furious. “Me give him fifty thousand dollars? My dear man, he’ll be drunk for six months and spill his life story all over Bangkok. What about that Cambodian whore of his? She’s in the know, I’ll bet.”

“Don’t worry,” I said. “He turned me down.”

This news astonished Rumbelow so profoundly that he ran out of indignation altogether, preserving instead a wounding silence that lasted us the rest of the journey.

On the plane I drank too much and slept too little. Once waking from a bad dream, I was guilty of a seditious thought about Rumbelow and the Fifth Floor. I wished I could pack off the whole tribe of them on Hansen’s march into the jungle, Smiley included. I wished I could make them throw everything over for a flawed and impossible passion, only to see the object of it turn against them, proving there is no reward for love except the experience of loving, and nothing to be learned by it except humility.

Yet I was content, as I am content to this day whenever I think of Hansen. I had found what I was looking for—a man like myself, but one who in his search for meaning had discovered a worthwhile object for his life; who had paid every price and not counted it a sacrifice; who was paying it still and would pay it until he died; who cared nothing for compromise, nothing for ourselves or the opinion of others; who had reduced his life to the one thing that mattered to him, and was free. The slumbering subversive in me had met his champion. The would-be lover in me had found a scale by which to measure his own trivial preoccupations.

So that when a few years later I was appointed Head of the Russia House, only to watch my most valuable agent betray his country for his love, I could never quite muster the outrage required of me by my masters. Personnel was not all stupid when he packed me off to the Interrogators’ Pool.

10

Maggs, my unpleasing crypto journalist, was trying to draw Smiley on the amoral nature of our work. He was wanting Smiley to admit that anything went, as long as you got away with it. I suspect he was actually wanting to hear this maxim applied to the whole of life, for he was ruthless as well as mannerless, and wished to see in our work some kind of licence to throw aside his few remaining scruples.

But Smiley would not give him this satisfaction. At first he appeared ready to be angry, which I hoped he would be. If so, he checked himself. He started to speak, but stopped again, and faltered, leaving me wondering whether it was time to call a halt to the proceedings. Until, to my relief, he rallied, and I knew he had merely been distracted by some private memory among the thousands that made up his secret self.

“You see,” he explained—replying, as so often, to the spirit rather than the letter of the question—“it really is essential in a free society that the people who do our work should remain unreconciled. It’s true that we are obliged to sup with the Devil, and not always with a very long spoon. And as everyone knows”—a sly glance at Maggs produced a gust of grateful laughter—“the Devil is often far better company than the Godly, isn’t he? All the same, our obsession with virtue won’t go away. Self-interest is so limiting. So is expediency.” He paused again, still deep inside his own thoughts. “All I’m really saying, I suppose, is that if the temptation to humanity does assail you now and then, I hope you won’t take it as a weakness in yourselves, but give it a fair hearing.”

The cufflinks, I thought, in a flash of inspiration. George is remembering the old man.

—

For a long time I could not fathom why the story had continued to haunt me for so long. Then I realised I had happened upon it at a period when my relationship with my son Adrian had hit a low point. He was talking of not bothering with university, and getting himself a well-paid job instead. I mistook his restlessness for materialism and his dreams of independence for laziness, and one night I lost my temper and insulted him, and was duly ashamed of myself for weeks thereafter. It was during one of those weeks that I unearthed the story.

Then I remembered also that Smiley had had no children and that perhaps his ambiguous part in the affair was to some extent explained by this. I was slightly chilled by the thought that he might have been filling an emptiness in himself by redressing a relationship he had never had.

Finally I remembered that just a few days after coming upon the papers, I had received the letter that anonymously denounced poor Frewin as a Russian spy. And that there were certain mystical affinities between Frewin and the old man, to do with dogged loyalty and lost worlds. All this for context, you understand, for I never knew a case yet that was not made up of a hundred others.

Finally there was the fact that, as so often in my life, Smiley turned out once again to have been my precursor, for I had no sooner settled myself at my unfamiliar desk in the Interrogators’ Pool than I found his traces everywhere: in our dusty archives, in backnumbers of our duty officer’s log and in the reminiscent smiles of our senior secretaries, who spoke of him with the old vestal’s treacly awe, part as God, part as teddy bear and part—though they were always quick to gloss over this aspect of his nature—as killer shark. They would even show you the bone-china cup and saucer by Thomas Goode of South Audley Street—where else?—a present to George from Ann, they explained dotingly, which George had bequeathed to the Pool after his reprieve and rehabilitation to Head Office—and, of course, like the Grail itself, the Smiley cup could never possibly be drunk from by a mere mortal.

The Pool, if you have not already gathered as much, is by way of being the Service’s Siberia, and Smiley, I was comforted to discover, had served out not one exile there but two; the first, for his gall in suggesting to the Fifth Floor that it might be nursing a Moscow Centre mole to its bosom; and the second, a few years later, for being right. And the Pool has not only the monotony of Siberia but its remoteness also, being situated not in the main building but in a run of cavernous offices on the ground floor of a gabled pile in Northumberland Avenue at the northern end of Whitehall.

And, like so much of the architecture around it, the Pool has seen great days. It was set up in the Second World War to receive the offerings of strangers, to listen to their suspicions and calm their fears or—if they had indeed stumbled on a larger truth—misguide or scare them into silence.

If you thought you had glimpsed your neighbour late at night, for instance, crouched over a radio transmitter; if you had seen strange lights winking from a window and were too shy or untrusting to inform your local police station; if the mysterious foreigner on the bus who questioned you about your work had reappeared at your elbow in your local pub; if your secret lover confessed to you—out of loneliness or bravado or a desperate need to make himself more interesting in your eyes—that he was working for the German Secret Service—why then, after a correspondence with some spurious assistant to some unheard-of Whitehall Under-Secretary, you would quite likely, of an early evening, be summoned to brave the blitz, and find yourself being guided heart-in-mouth down the flaking, sandbagged corridor, on your way to Room 909, where a Major Somebody or a Captain Somebody Else, both bogus as three-dollar bills, would courteously invite you to state your matter frankly without fear of repercussion.

And occasionally, as the covert history of the Pool records, great things were born, and are still occasionally born today, of these inauspicious beginnings, though business is not a patch on what it used to be, and much of the Pool’s work is now given over to such chores as unsolicited offers of service, anonymous denunciations like the one levelled at poor Frewin and even—in support of the despised security services—positive vetting enquiries, which are the worst Siberias of all, and about as far as you can get from the high-wire operations of the Russia House without quitting the Service altogether.

All the same, there is more than mere humility to be learned from these chastisements. An intelligence officer is nothing if he has lost the will to listen, and George Smiley, plump, troubled, cuckolded, unassuming, indefatigable George, forever polishing his spectacles on the lining of his tie, puffing to himself and sighing in his perennial distraction, was the best listener of us all.

Smiley could listen with his hooded, sleepy eyes; he could listen by the very inclination of his tubby body, by his stillness and his understanding smile. He could listen because with one exception, which was Ann, his wife, he expected nothing of his fellow souls, criticised nothing, condoned the worst of you long before you had revealed it. He could listen better than a microphone because his mind lit at once upon essentials; he seemed able to spot them before he knew where they were leading.

And that was how George had come to be listening to Mr. Arthur Wilfred Hawthorne of 12, The Dene, Ruislip, half a lifetime before me, in the very same Room 909 where I now sat, curiously turning the yellowed pages of a file marked “Destruction Pending” which I had unearthed from the shelves of the Pool’s strongroom.

I had begun my quest idly—you may even say frivolously—much as one might pick up an old copy of the Tatler in one’s club. And suddenly I realised I had stumbled on page after page of Smiley’s familiar, guarded handwriting, with its sharp little German t’s and twisted Greek e’s, and signed with his legendary symbol. Where he was forced to appear in the drama in person—and you could feel him seeking any means to escape this vulgar ordeal—he referred to himself merely as “D.O.,” short for Duty Officer. And since he was notorious for his hatred of initials, you are made once more aware of his reclusive, if not downright fugitive nature. If I had discovered a missing Shakespeare folio, I could not have been more excited. Everything was there: Hawthorne’s original letter, transcripts of the microphoned interviews, initialled by Smiley himself, even Hawthorne’s signed receipts for his travel money and out-of-pocket expenses.

My dull care was gone. My relegation no longer oppressed me, neither did the silence of the great empty house to which I was condemned. I was sharing them with George, waiting for the clip of Arthur Hawthorne’s loyal boots as he was marched down the corridor and into Smiley’s presence.

“Dear Sir,” he had written to “The Officer in Charge of Intelligence, Ministry of Defence.” And already, because we are British, his class is branded on the page—if only by the strangely imperious use of capitals so dear to uneducated people. I imagined much effort in the penning, and perhaps a dictionary at the elbow. “I wish, Sir, to Request an Interview with your Staff regarding a Person who has done Special Work for British Intelligence at the highest Level, and whose Name is as Important to my Wife and myself as it may be to your good Selves, and which I am accordingly forbidden to Mention in this Letter.”

That was all. Signed “Hawthorne, A. W., Warrant Officer Class II, retired.” Arthur Wilfred Hawthorne, in other words, as Smiley’s researches revealed when he consulted the voters’ list, and followed up his findings with an examination of the War Office files. Born 1915, Smiley painstakingly recorded on Hawthorne’s personal particulars sheet. Enlisted 1939, served with the Eighth Army from Egypt to Italy. Ex–Sergeant Major Arthur Wilfred Hawthorne, twice wounded in battle, three commendations and one gallantry medal for his trouble, demobilised without a stain on his character, “the best example of the best fighting man in the world,” wrote his commandant, in a glowing if hyperbolic commendation.

And I knew that Smiley, as a good professional, would have taken up his post well ahead of his client’s arrival, just as I myself had done these last months: at the same scuffed yellow desk of wartime pine, singed brown along the leading edge—legend has it by the Hun; with the same mossy telephone, letters as well as numbers on the dial; the same hand-tinted photograph of the Queen, sitting on a horse when she was twenty. I see George frowning studiously at his watch, then pulling a sour face as he peered round him at the usual mess, for there had been a running battle for as long as anyone could remember about who was supposed to clean the place, the Ministry or ourselves. I see him tug a handkerchief from his sleeve—laboriously again, for no gesture ever came to George without a struggle—and wipe the grime off the seat of his wooden chair, then do the same in advance for Hawthorne on the other side of the desk. Then, as I had done myself a few times, perform a similar service for the Queen, setting her frame straight and bringing back the sparkle to her young, idealistic eyes.

For I imagined George already studying the feelings of his subject, as any good intelligence officer must. An ex–sergeant major would expect a certain order about him, after all. Then I see Hawthorne himself, punctual to the minute, as the janitor showed him in, his best suit buttoned like a battledress, the polished toecaps of his boots glistening like conkers in the gloom. Smiley’s description of him on the encounter sheet was sparse but trenchant: height five seven, grey hair close cut, cleanshaven, groomed appearance, military bearing. Other characteristics: suppressed limp of the left leg, army boots.

“Hawthorne, sir,” he snapped, and held himself to attention till Smiley with difficulty persuaded him to sit.

Smiley was Major Nottingham that day and had an impressive card with his photograph to prove it. In my pocket as I read his account of the case lay a similar card in the name of Colonel Ned Ascot. Don’t ask me why Ascot except to note that, in choosing a place-name for my alias, I was yet again unconsciously copying one of Smiley’s little habits.

“What regiment are you from, sir, if you don’t mind my asking?” Hawthorne enquired of Smiley as he sat.

“The General List, I’m afraid,” said Smiley, which is the only way we are allowed to answer.

But I am sure it came hard to Smiley, as it would to me, to have to describe himself as some kind of non-combatant.

As evidence of his loyalty, Hawthorne had brought his medals wrapped in a piece of gun cloth. Smiley obligingly went through them for him.

“It’s about our son, sir,” the old man said. “I’ve got to ask you. The wife—well, she won’t hear of it any more, she says it’s a load of his nonsense. But I told her I’ve got to ask you. Even if you refuse to answer, I told her, I won’t have done my duty by my son if I didn’t ask on his account.”

Smiley said nothing but I am sure his silence was sympathetic.

“Ken was our only boy, you see, Major, so it’s natural,” said Hawthorne apologetically.

And still Smiley let him take his time. Did I not say he was a listener? Smiley could draw answers from you to questions he had never put, just by the sincerity of his listening.

“We’re not asking for secrets, Major. We’re not asking to know what can’t be known. But Mrs. Hawthorne is failing, sir, and she needs to know whether it’s true before she goes.” He had prepared the question exactly. Now he put it. “Was our boy, or was he not—was Ken—in the course of what appeared to be a criminal career, operating behind enemy lines in Russia?”

And here you might say that for once I was ahead of Smiley, if only because after five years in the Russia House I had a pretty good idea of the operations we had conducted in the past. I felt a smile come to my face, and my interest in the story, if it was possible, increased.

—

But to Smiley’s face, I am sure, came nothing at all. I imagine features settling into a Mandarin immobility. Perhaps he fiddled with his spectacles, which always gave the impression of belonging to a larger man. Finally he asked Hawthorne—but earnestly, never a hint of scepticism—why he supposed this might be the case.

“Ken told me he was, sir, that’s why.” And still nothing on Smiley’s side, except an ever-open door. “Mrs. Hawthorne wouldn’t visit Ken in prison, you see. I would. Every month. He was doing five years for grievous bodily harm, plus three more for being habitual. We had PD in those days, preventive detention. We’re in the prison canteen there, me and Ken sitting together at a table. And suddenly Ken puts his head close to mine, and he says to me in this low voice he’s got, ‘Don’t come here again, Dad. It’s difficult for me. I’m not really locked up, you see. I’m in Russia. They had to bring me back special, just to show me to you. I’m working behind the lines, but don’t tell Mum. Write to me—that’s not a problem, they’ll send it on. And I’ll write back same as if I was a prisoner here, which is what I pretend to be, because you can’t get better cover than a prison. But the truth is, Dad, I’m serving the old country just like you did when you was with the Desert Rats, which is why the best of us are put on earth.’ I didn’t ask to see Ken after that. I felt I had to obey orders. I wrote to him, of course. In the prison. Hawthorne and then his number. And three months later he’d write back on prison paper like it was a different boy writing to me every time. Sometimes the big heavy writing, like he was angry, sometimes small and quick, like he hadn’t had the time. Once or twice there was even the foreign words in there that I didn’t understand, crossed out mainly, like he was having difficulty with his own language. Sometimes he’d drop me a clue. ‘I’m cold but safe,’ he’d say. ‘Last week I had a bit more exercise than I needed,’ he’d say. I didn’t tell the wife because he said I wasn’t to. Besides, she wouldn’t have believed him. When I offered her his letters, she pushed them away—they hurt too much. But when Ken died we went and saw his body all cut to pieces in the prison morgue. Twenty stab wounds and nobody to blame. She didn’t weep, she doesn’t, but they might as well have stabbed her. And on the way home on the bus I couldn’t help it. ‘Ken’s a hero,’ I said to her. I was trying to wake her up because she’d gone all wooden. I got hold of her by the sleeve and gave her a bit of a shake to make her listen. ‘He’s not a dirty convict,’ I said. ‘Not our Ken. He never was. And it wasn’t convicts who done him in, either. It was the Red Russians.’ I told her about the cufflinks too. ‘Ken’s romancing,’ she said. ‘Same as he always did. He doesn’t know the difference, he never did, which has been his trouble all along.’ ”

Interrogators, like priests and doctors, have a particular advantage when it comes to concealing their feelings. They can ask another question, which is what I would have done myself.

“What cufflinks, Sergeant Major?” Smiley said, and I see him lowering his long eyelids and sinking his head into his neck as he once more prepared himself to listen to the old man’s tale.

“ ‘There’s no medals, Dad,’ Ken says to me. ‘Medals wouldn’t be secure. You have to be gazetted to get a medal, there’d be too many in the know. Otherwise I’d have a medal same as you. Maybe an even better one, if I’m honest, like the Victoria Cross, because they stretch us as far as we can go and sometimes further. But if you do right in the job, you earn your cufflinks and they keep them for you in a special safe. Then once a year there’s this big dinner at a certain place I’m not allowed to mention, with the champagne and butlers you wouldn’t believe, and all us Russia boys go to it. And we put on our tuxedos and we wear the cufflinks, same as a uniform but secret. And we have this party, with the speeches and the handshakes, like a special investiture, same as you had for your medals, I expect, in this place I’m not allowed to mention. And when the party’s over, we hand the cufflinks back. We have to, for the security. So if ever I go missing, or if something happens to me, just you write to them at the Secret Service and ask them for the Russia cufflinks for your Ken. Maybe they’ll say they never heard of me, maybe they’ll say, “What cufflinks?” But maybe they’ll make you a compassionate exception and let you have them, because they sometimes do. And if they do—you’ll know that everything I ever did wrong was more right than you can imagine. Because I’m my dad’s boy, right down the line, and the cufflinks will prove it to you. That’s all I’m saying, and it’s more than I’m allowed.’ ”

Smiley asked first for the boy’s full name. Then for the boy’s date of birth. Then he asked about his schooling and qualifications, which were predictably dismal, both. I see him acting quiet and businesslike as he takes down the details: Kenneth Branham Hawthorne, the old soldier told him—Branham, that was his mother’s maiden name, sir; he sometimes used it for what they called his crimes—born Folkestone, July 14, 1946, sir, twelve months after I came back from the war. I wouldn’t have a child earlier, although the wife wanted it, sir, I didn’t think it right. I wanted our boy brought up in peace, sir, with both his living parents to look after him, Major, which is the right of any child, I say, even if it’s not as usual as it ought to be.

Smiley’s next task was not half as easy as it might seem, whatever the improbabilities of Kenneth Hawthorne’s story. Smiley was never one to deny a good man, or even a bad one, the benefit of the doubt. The Circus of those days possesses no such thing as a reliable central index of its resources, and what passed for one was shamefully and often deliberately incomplete, for rival outfits guarded their sources jealously and poached from their neighbours when they saw the chance.

True, the old man’s story bristled with unlikelihoods. In purist terms it was grotesque, for example, to imagine a group of secret agents meeting once a year to dine, thus breaking the most elementary rule of “need to know.” But worse things could happen in the lawless world of the irregulars, as Smiley was aware. And it took all his powers of ingenuity and persuasion to satisfy himself that Hawthorne was nowhere on their books: not as a runner, not as a lamplighter or a scalphunter, not as a signalman and not as any other of the beloved tradenames with which these seedy operators glamourised their ranks.

And when he had exhausted the irregulars he returned to the armed services, the security services and the Royal Ulster Constabulary, any one of which might conceivably have employed—if on some much more modest basis than the boy described—a violent criminal of Ken Hawthorne’s character.

For one thing at least seemed certain: the boy’s criminal record was a nightmare. It would have been hard to imagine a grimmer record of persistent and often bestial behaviour. As Smiley crossed and recrossed the boy’s history, through childhood to adolescence, reform school to prison, there seemed to be no transgression, from pilfering to sadistic assault, that Kenneth Branham Hawthorne, born Folkestone 1946, had not stooped to.

Till at the end of a full week, Smiley appears reluctantly to have admitted to himself what in another part of his head he must have known all along. Kenneth Hawthorne, for whatever sad reasons, had been an unredeemable and habitual monster. The death he had suffered at the hands of his fellow prisoners was no more than he deserved. His past was written and complete, and his tales of heroism on behalf of some mythical British intelligence service were merely the last chapter in his lifelong effort to steal his father’s glory.

—

It was mid-winter. It was a foul grey, sleet-driven evening on which to drag an old soldier back across London to a barren interviewing room in Whitehall. And Whitehall in the meagre lighting of those days was a citadel still at war, even if its guns were somewhere else. It was a place of military austerity, heartless and imperial, of lowered voices and blacked windows, of rare and hurried footsteps and averted eyes. Smiley was in the War too, remember, even if he was sitting behind German lines. I can hear the puttering of the paraffin Aladdin stove which the Circus had grudgingly approved to supplement the faulty ministerial radiators. It has the sound of a wireless transmitter operated by a freezing hand.

Hawthorne had not come alone to hear Major Nottingham’s reply. The old soldier had brought his wife, and I can even tell you how she looked, for Smiley had written of her in his log and my imagination has long painted in the rest.

She had a buckled sick body wrapped in Sunday best. She wore a brooch in the design of her husband’s regimental badge. Smiley invited her to sit, but she preferred her husband’s arm. Smiley stood across the desk from them, the same burned, yellowed desk where I had sat in exile these last months. I see him standing almost to attention, with his rounded shoulders uncharacteristically straightened. His stubby fingers curled at the seams of his trousers in traditional army manner.

Ignoring Mrs. Hawthorne, he addressed the old soldier man to man. “You understand I have absolutely nothing to say to you at all, Sergeant Major?”

“I do, sir.”

“I never heard of your son, you understand? Kenneth Hawthorne is not a name to me, nor to any of my colleagues.”

“Yes, sir.” The old man’s gaze was fixed parade-ground style above Smiley’s head. But his wife had her eyes fiercely turned on Smiley’s all the time, even if she found it hard to fix on them through the thick lenses of his spectacles.

“He has never in his life worked for any British department of government, whether secret or otherwise. He was a common criminal all his life. Nothing more. Nothing at all.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I deny absolutely that he was ever a secret agent in the service of the Crown.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You understand also that I can answer no questions, give you no explanations, and that you will never see me again or be received at this building?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You understand finally that you may never speak of this moment to a living soul? However proud you may be of your son? That there are others still alive who must be protected?”

“Yes, sir. I understand, sir.”

Opening the drawer of our desk, Smiley took out a small red Cartier box, which he handed to the old man. “I happened to find this in my safe,” he said.

The old man passed the box to his wife without looking at it. With firm fingers, she forced it open. Inside lay a pair of superb gold cufflinks with a tiny English rose set discreetly in a corner, hand-engraved, a marvel of fine work. Her husband still did not look. Perhaps he didn’t have to; perhaps he didn’t trust himself. Closing the box, she parted the clasp of her scuffed purse and popped it inside. Then snapped the purse shut again, so loudly you would think she was slamming down the lid on her son’s tomb. I have listened to the tape; it too is waiting to be destroyed.

The old man still said nothing. They were too proud to bother with Smiley as they left.

—

And the cufflinks? you ask—where did Smiley get the cufflinks from? I had my answer not from the yellowing records of Room 909 but from Ann Smiley herself, quite by chance one evening in a splendid Cornish castle near Saltash where we both happened to be guests. Ann was on her own, and chastened. Mabel had a golf tournament. It was long after the Bill Haydon business, but Smiley still could not bear to have her near him. When dinner was over, the guests dispersed themselves in groups, but Ann stayed close to me, I supposed as a substitute for being close to George. And I asked her, half intuitively, whether she had ever given George a pair of cufflinks. Ann was always at her most beautiful when she was alone.

“Oh those,” she said, as if she scarcely remembered. “You mean the ones he gave to the old man.”

Ann had given them to George on their first anniversary, she said. After her fling with Bill, he had decided they should be put to better use.

—

But why, exactly, did George decide that? I wondered.

At first it seemed perfectly clear to me. This was Smiley’s soft centre. The old cold warrior was revealing his bleeding heart.

Like most things with George—maybe.

Or an act of vengeance against Ann perhaps? Or against his other faithless love, the Circus, at a time when the Fifth Floor was locking him out of the house?

Gradually I arrived at a slightly different theory, which I may as well pass on to you, since one thing is certain, and that is that George himself will not enlighten us.

Listening to the old soldier, Smiley recognised one of those rare moments when the Service could be of real value to real people. For once, the mythology of espionage would be used not to disguise yet another tale of incompetence or betrayal, but to leave an old couple with their dreams. For once, Smiley could look at an intelligence operation and say with absolute confidence that it had worked.

11

“And some interrogations,” said Smiley, gazing into the dancing flames of the log fire, “are not interrogations at all, but communions between damaged souls.”

He had been talking about his debriefing of the Moscow Centre spymaster, codename Karla, whose defection he had secured. But for me, he was talking only of poor Frewin, of whom, so far as I know, he had never heard.

—

The letter denouncing Frewin as a Soviet spy arrived on my desk on a Monday evening, posted first class in the S.W.I area of London on the Friday, opened by Head Office Registry on the Monday morning and marked by the Assistant Registrar on duty “HIP to see,” HIP being the unlikely acronym of the Head of the Interrogators’ Pool; in other words, myself, and in the opinion of some the “H” ought to be an “R”—you Rest in Peace at the Interrogators’ Pool. It was five o’clock by the time the Head Office green van unloaded its humble package at Northumberland Avenue, and in the Pool such late intrusions were customarily ignored until next morning. But I was trying to change all that and, having anyway nothing else to do, I opened the envelope at once.

Two pink trace slips were pinned to the letter, each bearing a pencilled note. Head Office’s notes to the Pool always had the ring of instructions addressed to an idiot. The first read, “FREWIN C presumed identical with FREWIN Cyril Arthur, Foreign Office cypher clerk,” followed by Frewin’s positive vetting reference and white file number, which was a cumbersome way of telling me there was nothing recorded against him. The second said, “MODRIAN S presumed identical with MODRIAN Sergei,” followed by a further string of references, but I didn’t bother with them. After my five years in the Russia House, Sergei Modrian was plain Sergei to me, as he had been to the rest of us: old Sergei, the crafty Armenian, head boy of Moscow Centre’s generously over-staffed residence at the Soviet Embassy in London.

If I had had any lingering wish to postpone my reading of the letter till tomorrow, Sergei’s name dispelled it. The letter might be bunkum, but I was playing on home ground.

To the Director,

The Security Department,

The Foreign Office,

Downing Street, SW.

Dear Sir,

This is to inform you, that C. Frewin, a Foreign Office cypher clerk with constant and regular access to Top Secret and Above, has been keeping surreptitious company with S. Modrian, First Secretary at the Soviet Embassy in London, for the last four years, and has not revealed same in his annual vetting returns. Secret materials have been passed. Mr. Modrian’s whereabouts are no longer known, in view of the fact that he has recently been recalled to the Soviet Union. The said Frewin still resides at the Chestnuts, Beavor Drive, Sutton, and Modrian has been present there at least on one occasion. C. Frewin is now living a highly solitary life.

Yours sincerely,

A. Patriot.

Electronically typed. Plain white A4 paper, no watermark. Dated, overpunctuated, accurately spelt and crisply folded. And no address of sender. There never is.

Having nothing much else to do that evening, I had a couple of Scotches at The Sherlock Holmes, then wandered round to Head Office, where I checked myself into the Registry reading room and drew the files. Next morning at the surgery hour of ten I took my place in Burr’s waiting room, having first spelt my name to his glossy personal assistant, who seemed never to have heard of me. Brock, from Moscow Station, was ahead of me in the queue. We talked intently about cricket till his name was called, and managed not to refer to the fact that he had worked for me in the Russia House, most recently on the Blair case. A couple of minutes later, Peter Guillam drifted in clutching a bunch of files and looking hungover. He had recently become Head of Secretariat for Burr.

“Don’t mind if I squeeze ahead of you, do you, old boy? I’ve been sent for urgently. Bloody man seems to expect me to work in my sleep. What’s your problem?”

“Leprosy,” I said.

There is nowhere quite like the Service—except possibly Moscow—for becoming an unperson overnight. In the upheavals that had followed Barley Blair’s defection, not even Burr’s predecessor, the nimble Clive, had kept his foothold on the slippery Fifth Floor deck. When last heard of, he was on his way to take up the salubrious post of Head of Station, Guyana. Only our craven legal adviser, Harry Palfrey, seemed as usual to have weathered the changes, and as I entered Burr’s shiny executive suite, Palfrey was slipping stealthily out of the other door—but not quite quickly enough, so he treated me to a rhapsodic smile instead. He had recently grown himself a moustache for greater integrity.

“Ned! Marvellous! We must do that lunch,” he breathed in an excited whisper, and disappeared below the waterline.

Like his office, Burr was all modern man. Where he came from was a mystery to me, but then I was no longer in the swim. Someone had told me advertising, someone else the City, someone else the Inns of Court. One wit in the Pool mailroom said he came from nowhere at all: that he had been born as found, smelling of aftershave and power, in his two-piece executive blue suit and his patent black shoes with side buckles. He was big and floating and absurdly young. Grasping his soft hand, you at once relaxed your grip for fear of denting it. He had Frewin’s file in front of him on his executive desk, with my loose minute—written late last night—pinned to the cover.

“Where does the letter come from?” he demanded in his dry North Country cadence, before I had sat down.

“I don’t know. It’s well informed. Whoever wrote it did his homework.”

“Probably Frewin’s best friend,” said Burr, as if that was what best friends were known for.

“He’s got Modrian’s dates right, he’s got Frewin’s access right,” I said. “He knows the positive vetting routine.”

“Not a work of art, though, is it? Not if you’re an insider. Most likely a colleague. Or his girl. What do you want to ask me?”

I had not expected this quickfire interrogation. After six months in the Pool, I wasn’t used to being hurried.

“I suppose I need to know whether you want me to pursue the case,” I said.

“Why shouldn’t I?”

“It’s outside the Pool’s normal league. Frewin’s access is formidable. His section handles some of the most delicate signals traffic in Whitehall. I assumed you’d prefer to pass it to the Security Service.”

“Why?”

“It’s their bailiwick. If it’s anything at all, it’s a straight security enquiry.”

“It’s our information, our shout, our letter,” Burr retorted with a bluntness that secretly warmed my heart. “To hell with them. When we know what we’ve got, we’ll decide where we go with it. All that those churchy buggers across the Park can think of is a judgeproof prosecution and a bunch of medals to hand around. I collect intelligence for the marketplace. If Frewin’s bad, maybe we can keep him going and turn him round. He might even get us alongside Brother Modrian back in Moscow. Who knows? The security artists don’t, that’s for sure.”

“Then presumably you’d prefer to hand the case to the Russia House,” I said doggedly.

“Why should I do that?”

I had assumed I would make an unappetising figure to him, for he was still of an age to find failure immoral. Yet he seemed to be asking me to tell him why he shouldn’t count on me.

“The Pool has no charter to function operationally,” I explained. “We run a front office and listen to the lonely hearts. We’ve no charter to conduct clandestine investigations or run agents, and no mandate to pursue suspects with Frewin’s sort of access.”

“You can run a phone tap, can’t you?”

“If you get me a warrant I can.”

“You can brief watchers, can’t you? You’ve done that a few times, they say.”

“Not unless you authorise it personally.”

“Suppose I do? The Pool’s also empowered to make vetting enquiries. You can play Mr. Plod. You’re good at it by all accounts. This is a vetting matter, right? And Frewin’s due for a vetting top-up, right? So vet him.”

“In positive vetting cases, the Pool is obliged to clear all enquiries with the Security Service in advance.”

“Assume it’s done.”

“I can’t do that unless I have it in writing.”

“Oh yes you can. You’re not a Service hack. You’re the great Ned. You’ve broken as many rules as you’ve stuck to, you have, I’ve read you up. You know Modrian, too.”

“Not well.”

“How well?”

“I had dinner with him once and played squash with him once. That’s hardly knowing him.”

“Squash where?”

“At the Lansdowne.”

“How did that come about?”

“Modrian was formally declared to us as the Embassy’s Moscow Centre link. I was trying to put together a deal with him on Barley Blair. A swap.”

“Why didn’t you succeed?”

“Barley wouldn’t go along with us. He’d done his own deal already. He wanted his girl, not us.”

“What’s his game like?”

“Tricky.”

“Did you beat him?”

“Yes.”

He interrupted his own flow while he looked me over. It was like being studied by a baby. “And you can handle it, can you? You’re not under too much stress? You’ve done some good things in your time. You’ve a heart too, which is more than I can say for some of the capons in this outfit.”

“Why should I be under stress?”

No answer. Or not yet. He seemed to be chewing at something just behind his thick lips.

“Who believes in marriage these days, for Christ’s sake?” he demanded. His regional drawl had thickened. It was as if he had abandoned restraint. “If you want to live with your girl, live with her is my advice. We’ve cleared her, she’s nobody’s worry, she’s not a bomb thrower or a secret sympathiser or a druggie, what’s your bother? She’s a nice girl in a nice way of life, and you’re a lucky fellow. Do you want the case, or do you not?”

For a moment I was robbed of an answer. There was nothing surprising in Burr knowing of my affair with Sally. In our world you put those things on record before the record put them on you, and I had already endured my obligatory confessional with Personnel. No, it was Burr’s capacity for intimacy that had silenced me, the speed with which he had got under my skin.

“If you’ll cover me and give me the resources, of course I’ll take it,” I said.

“So get on with it, then. Keep me informed but not too much—don’t bullshit me, always give me bad news straight. He’s a man without qualities, our Cyril is. You’ve read Robert Musil, I dare say, haven’t you?”

“I’m afraid I haven’t.”

He was pulling open Frewin’s file. I say “pulling” because his doughy hands gave no impression of having done anything before: now we are going to see how this file opens; now we are going to address ourselves to this strange object called a pencil.

“He’s got no hobbies, no stated interests beyond music, no wife, no girl, no parents, no money worries, not even any bizarre sexual appetites, poor devil,” Burr complained, flipping to a different part of the file. When on earth had he found time to read it? I asked myself. I presumed the early hours. “And how the hell a man of your experience, whose job is dealing with modern civilisation and its discontentments, can manage without the wisdom of Robert Musil is a question which at a calmer moment I shall require you to answer.” He licked his thumb and turned another page. “He’s one of five,” he said.

“I thought he was an only child.”

“Not his brothers and sisters, you mug, his work. There’s five clerks in his dreary cyphers office and he’s one of them. They all handle the same stuff; they’re all the same rank, work the same hours, think the same dirty thoughts.” He looked straight at me, a thing he had not done before. “If he did it, what’s his motive? The writer doesn’t say. Funny, that. They usually do. Boredom—how about that? Boredom and greed, they’re the only motives left these days. Plus getting even, which is eternal.” He went back to the file. “Cyril’s the only one not married, notice that? He’s a poofter. So am I. I’m a poofter, you’re a poofter. We’re all poofters. It’s just a question which bit of yourself ends on top. He’s no hair, see that?” I caught a flash of Frewin’s photograph as he waved it past me and talked on. He had a daunting energy. “Still that’s no crime, I dare say, baldness, any more than marriage is. I should know, I’ve had three and I’m still not done. That’s no normal denunciation, is it? That’s why you’re here. That letter knows what it’s talking about. You don’t think Modrian wrote it, do you?”

“Why should he have done?”

“I’m asking, Ned, don’t fox with me. Wicked thoughts are what keep me going. Perhaps Modrian thought he’d leave a little confusion in his wake when he went back to Moscow. He’s a scheming little monkey, Modrian, when he puts his mind to it. I’ve been reading him too.”

When? I thought again. When on earth did you find the time?

For another twenty minutes he zigzagged back and forth tossing possibilities at me, seeing how they came back. And when I finally stepped exhausted into the anteroom, I walked straight into Peter Guillam again.

“Who the hell is Leonard Burr?” I asked him, still dazed.

Peter was astonished that I didn’t know. “Burr? My dear chap. Leonard was Smiley’s Crown Prince for years. George rescued him from a fate worse than death at All Souls.”

Of Sally, my reigning extramarital girlfriend, what should I tell you? She was free, and spoke to the captive in me. Monica had been within my walls. Monica was a woman of the Service, bound and not bound to me by the same set of rules. But to Sally I was just a middle-aged civil servant who had forgotten to have any fun. She was a designer and sometime dancer whose passion was theatre, and she thought the rest of life unreal. She was tall and she was fair and rather wise, and sometimes I think she must have reminded me of Stefanie.

—

“Meet you, skipper?” Gorst cried over the telephone. “Top up our Cyril? It’ll be my pleasure, sir!”

We met the next day in a Foreign Office interviewing room. I was Captain York, another dreary vetting officer doing his rounds. Gorst was head of Frewin’s Cypher Section, which was better known as the Tank: a lecher in a beadle’s suit, waddling, smirking man with prising elbows and a tiny mouth that wriggled like a worm. When he sat, he scooped up the skirts of his jacket as if he were exposing himself from behind. Then he kicked out a plump leg like a chorus girl, before laying it suggestively over the thigh of the other.

“Saint Cyril, that’s what we call Mr. Frewin,” he announced blithely. “Doesn’t drink, doesn’t smoke, doesn’t swear, certified virgin. End of vetting interview.” Extracting a cigarette from a packet of ten, he tapped the tip of it on his thumbnail, then moistened it with his busy tongue. “Music’s his only weakness. Loves the operah. Goes to the operah regular as clockwork. Never cared for it myself. Can’t make out whether it’s actors singing or singers acting.” He lit his cigarette. I could smell the lunchtime beer on his breath. “I’m not too fond of fat women, either, to be frank. Specially when they scream at me.” He tipped his head back and blew out smoke rings, savouring them as if they were emblems of his authority.

“May I ask how Frewin gets on with the rest of the staff these days?” I said, playing the honest journeyman as I turned a page of my notebook.

“Swimmingly, your grace. Par-fectly.”

“The archivists, registrars, secretaries—no trouble on that front?”

“Not a finger. Not a mini-digit.”

“You all sit together?”

“In a big room and I’m the titular head of it. Very tit-ular indeed.”

“And I’ve had it said to me he’s something of a misogynist,” I said, fishing.

Gorst gave a shrill laugh. “Cyril? A misogynist? Bollocks. He just hates the girls. Won’t speak to them, not apart from good morning. Won’t come to the pre-Christmas party if he can help it, in case he has to kiss them under the mistletoe.” He recrossed his legs, indicating that he had decided to make a statement. “Cyril Arthur Frewin—Saint Cyril—is a highly reliable, eminently conscientious, totally bald, incredibly boring clerk of the old school. Saint Cyril, though punctilious to a fault, has in my view reached his natural promotion ceiling in his line of country or profession. Saint Cyril is set in his ways. Saint Cyril does what he does, one hundred percent. Amen.”

“Politics?”

“Not in my house, thank you.”

“And he’s not workshy?”

“Did I say he was, squire?”

“No, to the contrary, I was quoting from the file. If there’s extra work to be done, Cyril will always roll his sleeves up, stay on the lunch hour, the evenings and so forth. That’s still the case, is it? No slackening off of his enthusiasm?”

“Our Cyril is ready to oblige at all hours, to the pleasure of those who have families, wives or a nice piece of Significant Other to return to. He’ll do the early mornings, he’ll do lunch hours, he’ll do evening watch, except for operah nights, of course. Cyril never counts the cost. Latterly, I will admit, he has been slightly less inclined to martyr himself, but that is no doubt a purely temporary suspension of service. Our Cyril does have his little moods. Who does not, your eminence?”

“So recently a slackening off, you would say?”

“Not of his work, never. Cyril is your total workslave, always has been. Merely of his willingness to be put upon by his more human colleagues. Come five-thirty these days, Saint Cyril packs up his desk and goes home with the rest of us. He does not, for instance, offer to replace the late shift and remain solo incommunicado till nine o’clock and lock up, which was what he used to do.”

“You can’t put a date to that change of habit, can you?” I enquired as boringly as I could manage, turning dutifully to a fresh page of my notebook.

Curiously enough, Gorst could. He pursed his lips. He frowned. He raised his girlish eyebrows and pressed his chins into his grimy shirt collar. He made a vast show of ruminating. And he finally remembered. “The last time Cyril Frewin did young Burton’s evening watch was Midsummer’s Day. I keep a log, you see. Security. I also have quite an impressive memory, which I don’t always care to reveal.”

I was secretly impressed, but not by Gorst. Three days after Modrian left London for Moscow, Cyril Frewin had ceased to work late, I was thinking. I had other questions that were clamouring to be asked. Did the Tank boast electronic typewriters? Did the cypher clerks have access to them? Did Gorst? But I was afraid of arousing his suspicions.

“You mentioned his love of the opera,” I said. “Could you tell me a little more about that?”

“No, I could not, since we do not get blow-by-blow accounts, and we do not ask for them. However, he does come in wearing a pressed dark suit on his operah days, if he doesn’t bring his dinner jacket in a suitcase, and he does impart what I would refer to as a state of high if controlled excitement somewhat similar to other forms of anticipation, which I will not mention.”

“But he has a regular seat, for instance? A subscription seat? It’s only for the record. As you say, he’s a bit short of relaxing pastimes otherwise.”

“As I think I told you, squire, alas, me and operah were not made for each other. Put down ‘opera buff’ on his form and you’re covered for your relaxing pastime is my advice.”

“Thank you. I will.” I turned another page. “And really no enemies that you can think of?” I said, my pencil hovering over my notebook.

Gorst became serious. The beer was wearing off. “Cyril is laughed at, Captain, I’ll admit. But he takes it in good part. Cyril is not disliked.”

“No one who would speak ill of him, for instance?”

“I can think of no single reason whatever why anyone should speak ill of Cyril Arthur Frewin. The British civil servant, he may be sullen but he’s not malicious. Cyril does his duty, as we all do. We’re a happy ship. I wouldn’t mind if you put that down, too.”

“I gather he went to Salzburg for Christmas this year. And previous years too, is that right?”

“That is correct. Cyril always takes his leave at Christmas. He goes to Salzburg, he hears the music. It’s the one point on which he will make no concession to the rest of the Tank. There’s some of the young ones try to complain about it, but I won’t let them. ‘Cyril makes it up to you in other ways,’ I tell them. ‘Cyril’s got his seniority, he loves his trip to Salzburg for the music, he has his little ways, and that’s how it’s going to stay.’ ”

“Does he leave a holiday address behind when he goes?”

Gorst didn’t know, but at my request he telephoned his personnel department and obtained it. The same hotel, the last four years running. He’s been keeping company with Modrian for four years too, I thought, remembering the letter. Four years of Salzburg, four years of Modrian, ending in a highly solitary life.

“Does he take a friend, would you know?”

“Cyril never had a friend in his life, skipper.” Gorst yawned. “Not one he’d take on holiday, that’s for sure. Shall we do lunch next time? They tell me you boys have very nifty expense accounts when you care to give them a tickle.”

“Does he talk about his Salzburg trips at all when he comes back? The fun he’s had—the music he’s heard—anything like that?” Thanks to Sally, I suppose, I had learned that people were expected to have fun.

Having made a brief show of thinking, Gorst shook his head. “If Cyril has fun, squire, it’s very, very private,” he said with a last smirk.

That wasn’t Sally’s idea of fun at all.

—

From my office at the Pool I booked a secure line to Vienna and spoke to Toby Esterhase, who with his infinite talent for survival had recently been made Head of Station.

“I want you to shake out the Weisse Rose in Salzburg for me, Toby. Cyril Frewin, British subject. Stayed there every Christmas for the last four years. I want to know when he arrived, how long he stayed, whether he’s stayed there before, who with, how much the bills come to and what he gets up to. Concert tickets, excursions, meals, women, boys, celebrations—anything you can get. But don’t raise local eyebrows, whatever you do. Be a divorce agent or something.”

Toby was predictably appalled. “Ned, listen to me. Ned, this is actually completely impossible. I’m in Vienna, okay? Salzburg, that’s like the other side of the globe. This city is buzzing like a beehouse. I need more staff, Ned. You got to tell Burr. He doesn’t understand the pressures here. Get me two more guys, we do anything you want, no problem. Sorry.”

He asked for a week. I said three days. He said he’d try his best and I believed him. He said he had heard a rumour that Mabel and I had broken up. I denied it.

—

Ever since I can remember, watchers have been most at home in condemned houses handy for bus routes and the airport. Monty’s choice for his own headquarters was an unlikely Edwardian palazzo in Baron’s Court. From the tiled hall, a stone staircase curled grandly through five pokey floors to a stained-glass skylight. As I climbed, doors flew open and shut like a French farce as his strange crew, in varying stages of undress, scurried between changing room, cafeteria and briefing room, their eyes averted from the stranger. I arrived in a garret once a painter’s studio. Somewhere a women’s foursome was playing noisy Ping-Pong. Closer at hand, two male voices were singing Blake’s “Jerusalem” under the shower.

I had not set eyes on Monty for a long time, but neither the years between nor his promotion to Head Watcher had aged him. A few grey hairs, a sharper edge to his hollow cheeks. He was not a natural conversationalist, and for a while we just sat and sipped our tea.

“Frewin, then,” he said finally.

“Frewin,” I said.

Like a marksman, Monty had a way of making his own particular area of quiet. “Frewin’s a funny one, Ned. He’s not being normal. Now of course we don’t know what normal is, do we, not really, not for Cyril, not apart from what you pick up from hearsay and that. Postman, milkman, neighbours, the usual. Everyone talks to a window cleaner, you’d be amazed. Or a Telecom engineer who’s lost his way with a junction box. We’ve only been on him two days, all the same.”

With Monty, when he talked like this, you just pinned your ears back and bided your time.

“And nights, of course,” he added. “If you count nights. Cyril’s not sleeping, that’s for sure. More prowling, judging by his windows and his teacups in the morning. And the music. One of his neighbours is thinking of complaining to him. She never has before, but she might this time. ‘Whatever’s come over him?’ she says. ‘Handel for breakfast is one thing, but Handel at three in the morning’s a bit of another.’ She thinks he’s having his change. She says men get like that at his age, same as women. We wouldn’t know about that, would we?”

I grinned. And again bided my time. “She does, though,” Monty said reflectively. “Her old man’s gone off with a supply teacher from the comprehensive. She’s not at all sure she’ll have him back. Nearly raped our pretty boy who’d come to read the meter. Here—how’s Mabel?” he demanded.

I wondered whether he too had heard the rumour; but I decided that if he had, he would not have asked me. “Fine,” I said.

“Cyril used to take a newspaper on the train. The Telegraph, need you ask. Cyril doesn’t hold with Labour—he says they’re common. But he doesn’t buy a paper any more. He sits. Sits and stares. That’s all he does. Our bloke had to give him a nudge yesterday when they pulled up at Victoria. He’d gone off in a daydream. Going home last night, he tapped out the whole score of an opera on his briefcase. Nancy says it was Vivaldi. I suppose she knows. Remember Pauli Skordeno?”

I said I did. Diversions were part of Monty’s way. Like, “How’s Mabel?” for instance.

“Pauli’s doing seven years in Barbados for bothering a bank. What gets into them, Ned? He never put a foot wrong while he was watching. Never late, never naughty with his expenses, lovely memory, lovely eye, good nose. Burglaries galore we did. London, the Home Counties, the Midlands, the civil-rights boys, the disarmers, the Party, the naughty diplomats—we did the lot. Did Pauli ever get rumbled? Not once. The moment he goes private, he’s all fingers and thumbs and boasting to the bloke next door to him in the bar. I think they want to be caught, that’s my opinion. I think it’s wanting recognition after all the years of being nobody.”

He sipped his tea. “Cyril’s other kick, apart from music, is his radio. He loves his radio. Only receiving, mind, as far as anybody knows. But he’s got one of those fancy German sets with the fine tuning and big speakers for his concerts, and he didn’t buy it locally because when it went on the blink the local shop had to send it off to Wiesbaden. Three months it took, and cost a fortune. He doesn’t run a car, he doesn’t hold with them. He shops by bus Saturday mornings, he’s a stay-at-home except for his Christmases in Austria. No pets, he doesn’t mix. Entertaining, forget it. No house-guests, lodgers, receives no mail except the bills, pays everything regular, doesn’t vote, doesn’t go to church, doesn’t have a television. His cleaning lady says he reads a lot, mainly big books. She only comes once a week, usually when he’s not there, and we didn’t dare get close to her. A big book for her is anything bigger than a Bible-study pamphlet. His phone bills are modest, he’s got six thousand in a building society, owns his house and maintains a well-managed bank account fluctuating between six and fourteen hundred, except Christmas times when it drops to around two hundred because of his holiday.”

Monty’s sense of the proprieties again required us to make a detour, this time to discuss our children. My son Adrian had just won a modern languages scholarship to Cambridge, I said. Monty was hugely impressed. Monty’s only son had just passed his law exam with flying colours. We agreed that kids were what made life worth living.

“Modrian,” I said when the formalities were once more over. “Sergei.”

“I remember the gentleman well, Ned. We all do. We used to follow him round the clock some days. Except at Christmas, of course, when he took his home leave….Hullo! Are you thinking what I’m thinking? We all take leave at Christmas?”

“It had crossed my mind,” I said.

“We didn’t even bother to pretend with Modrian, not after a while, you couldn’t. Oh, he was a slippery eel, though. I could have walloped him sometimes, I really could. Pauli Skordeno got so angry with him once he let his tyres down outside the Victoria and Albert while he was inside sussing out a dead-letter box. I never reported it, I didn’t have the heart.”

“Am I not right in thinking Modrian was also an opera buff, Monty?”

Monty’s eyes became quite round, and I had the rare pleasure of seeing him surprised.

“Oh my Lord, Ned,” he exclaimed. “Oh dear, oh dear. You’re right. Sergei was a Covent Garden subscriber—of course he was, same as Cyril. We must have taken him there and fetched him—oh, a dozen times. He could have used a cab if he’d had any mercy, but he never did. He liked wearing us out in the traffic.”

“If we could know the performances he went to, and where he sat—if you could get them—we could try and match them up with Frewin’s.”

Monty had fallen into a theatrical silence. He frowned, then scratched his head. “You don’t think this is all a touch too easy for us, do you, Ned?” he asked. “I get suspicious when everything fits in a pretty pattern, don’t you?”

“I won’t be part of your pattern,” Sally had said to me the night before. “Patterns are for breaking.”

—

“He sings, Ned,” Mary Lasselles murmured while she arranged my white tulips in a pickle jar. “He sings all the time. Night and day, it doesn’t matter. I think he missed his vocation.”

Mary was as pale as a nightnurse and as dedicated. A luminous virtue lit her unpowdered face and shone from her clear eyes. A shock of white, like the mark of early widowhood, capped her bobbed hair.

Of the many callings that comprise the over-world of intelligence, none requires as much devotion as that of the sisterhood of listeners. Men are no good at it. Only women are capable of such passionate espousal of the destiny of others. Condemned to windowless cellars, engulfed by tracks of grey-clad cable and banks of Russian-style tape recorders, they occupy a nether region populated by absent lives which they know more intimately than those of their closest friends or relations. They never see their quarries, never meet them, never touch them or sleep with them. Yet the whole force of their personalities is beamed upon these secret loves. On microphones and telephones they hear them blandish, weep, smoke, eat, argue and couple. They hear them cook, belch, snore and worry. They endure their children, in-laws and babysitters without complaint, as well as their tastes in television. These days, they even ride with them in cars, take them shopping, sit with them in cafés and bingo halls. They are the secret sharers of the trade.

Passing me a pair of earphones, Mary put on her own and, folding her hands beneath her chin, closed her eyes for better listening. So I heard Cyril Frewin’s voice for the first time, singing himself a passage from Turandot while Mary Lasselles with her eyes shut smiled in her enchantment. His voice was mellow and, to my untutored ear, as pleasing as it clearly was to Mary.

I sat up straight. The singing had stopped. I heard a woman’s voice in the background, then a man’s, and they were speaking Russian.

“Mary, who the hell’s that?”

“His teachers, darling. Radio Moscow’s Olga and Boris, five days a week, six A.M. sharp. This is yesterday morning.”

“You mean he’s teaching himself Russian?”

“Well, he listens to it, darling. How much of it is going into his little head is anybody’s guess. Every morning, sharp at six, Cyril does his Olga and Boris. They’re visiting the Kremlin today. Yesterday they were shopping at Gum.”

I heard Frewin mutter unintelligibly in the bath, I heard him call out “Mother” in the night, while he tossed restlessly in bed: FREWIN Ella, I remembered, deceased, mother to FREWIN Cyril Arthur, q.v. I have never understood why Registry insists on opening personal files for the dead relatives of suspected spies.

I listened to him arguing with the British Telecom engineers’ department after he had waited the statutory twenty minutes to be connected with them. His voice was edgy, full of unexpected emphases.

“Well, next time you elect to identify a fault on my line, I would be highly grateful if you would kindly inform me as the subscriber prior to barging into my house when my cleaning woman happens to be in, and leaving particles of wire on the carpets and bootmarks on the kitchen floor…”

I listened to him phone the Covent Garden opera house to say he would not be taking up his subscription ticket this Friday. This time his tone was self-pitying. He explained that he was ill. The kind lady on the other end said there was a lot of it about.

I listened to him talking to the butcher in anticipation of my visit, which Foreign Office Personnel had set for tomorrow morning at his house.

“Mr. Steele, this is Mr. Cyril Frewin. Good morning. I shall not be able to come in to you on Saturday, owing to the fact that I have a conference at my house. I would therefore be grateful if you would kindly deliver four good lamb chops for me on the Friday evening as you pass by on your way home. Will that be convenient, Mr. Steele? Also a jar of your pre-mixed mint sauce. No, I have red currant jelly already, thank you. Will you attach your bill, please?”

To my over-acute ear, he sounded like a man preparing to abandon ship.

“I’ll take the engineers again, please, Mary,” I said. Having twice more listened to Frewin’s dogmatic tones of complaint to British Telecom, I gave her a distracted kiss and stepped into the evening air. Sally had said, “Come round,” but I was in no mood to spend an evening professing love to her and listening to music I secretly detested.

—

I returned to the Pool. The Service laboratories had completed their examination of the anonymous letter. A Markus electronic, model number so-and-so, probably Belgian manufacture, new or little used, was the best they could suggest. They believed they would be able to identify another document issuing from the same machine. Could I get one? End of report. The laboratories were still wrestling with the characteristics of the new generation of machines.

I rang Monty at his lair in Baron’s Court. Frewin’s complaint to the engineers was still ringing in my memory: his pauses, like unnatural commas, his use of the word highly, his habit of punching the unlikely word to achieve vindictive emphasis.

“Did your fellows notice a typewriter in Cyril’s house, Monty, by any chance, while they were kindly mending his telephone?” I asked.

“No, Ned. There was no typewriter, Ned—not one they saw, put it that way.”

“Could they have missed it?”

“Easily, Ned. It was soft-pedalling only. No opening desks or cupboards, no photographing, not too much familiarity with his cleaning lady either, or she’ll worry afterwards. It was ‘See what you can, get out fast, and be sure you leave a mess or he’ll smell a rat.’ ”

I thought of phoning Burr, but I didn’t. My case officer’s possessiveness was taking over, and I was damned if I was going to share Frewin with anyone, not even the man who had entrusted him to me. A hundred twisted threads were running through my head, from Modrian to Gorst to Boris and Olga to Christmas to Salzburg to Sally. In the end, I wrote Burr a minute setting out most of what I had discovered and confirming that I would “make a first reconnaissance” of Frewin tomorrow morning when I interviewed him for his routine vetting clearance.

To go home? To go to Sally? Home was a hateful little service flat in St. James’s, where I was supposed to be sorting myself out—though that’s the last thing any man does when he sits alone with a bottle of Scotch and a reproduction painting of The Laughing Cavalier, dithering between his dreams of freedom and his addiction to what holds him prisoner. Sally was my Alternative Life, but I knew already I was too set to jump the wall and reach it.

Preferring to remain at my desk, therefore, I fetched myself a whisky from the safe and browsed through Modrian’s file. It told me nothing I didn’t already know, but I wanted him at the front of my head. Sergei Modrian, tried and tested Moscow Centre professional. A charmer, a bit of a dancer, a befriender, a smiling Armenian with a mercury tongue. I had liked him. He had liked me. In our profession, since we may like no one beyond a point, we can forgive a lot for charm.

My direct line was ringing. I thought for a moment it would be Sally, for contrary to regulations I had given her the number. It was Toby and he sounded pleased with himself. He usually did. He didn’t mention Frewin by name. He didn’t mention Salzburg. I guessed he was ringing from his flat, and I’d a shrewd notion he was in bed and not alone.

“Ned? Your man’s a joke. Books himself a single room for two weeks, checks in, pays his two weeks in advance, gives the staff their Christmas box, pats the kids, makes nice to everybody. Next morning he disappears, does it every year. Ned, can you hear me? Listen, the guy’s crazy. No phone calls out, one meal, two Apfelsaft, no explanations, taxi to the station. Keep my room, don’t let it, maybe I’ll be back tomorrow, maybe in a few days, I don’t know. After twelve days, back he comes, no explanations, tips the staff some more, everybody happy like a heathen. They call him ‘the ghost.’ Ned, you got to talk nice to Burr for me. You owe me now. Toby works his fingers to the bone, tell him. Old star like you, a young fellow like Burr, he’ll listen to you, costs you nothing. I need another man out here, maybe two. Tell him, Ned, hear me? Cheers.”

I stared at the wall, the one I couldn’t scale; I stared at Modrian’s file, I remembered Monty’s dictum about too easy. I suddenly wanted Sally terribly, and had some cloudy notion that by solving the mystery of Frewin I would convert my recurring spurts for freedom into one bold leap. But as I reached for the phone to talk to her, it started to ring again.

“They fit,” said Monty in a flat voice. He had managed to check Frewin’s opera attendance. “It’s Sergei and Cyril every time. When he goes, so does he. When he doesn’t, neither does he. Maybe that’s why he doesn’t go any more. Got it?”

“And the seats?” I asked.

“Side by side, darling. What do you expect? Front to back?

“Thanks, Monty,” I said.

—

Do I have to tell you how I spent that interminable night? Have you never telephoned your own son, listened to his unhappy jibes and had to remind yourself that he is yours? Talked frankly to an understanding wife about your inadequacies, not knowing what on earth they were? Have you never reached out for your mistress, cried “I love you” and remained a mystified spectator to her untroubled fulfillment, before leaving her once more, to walk the London streets as if they were a foreign city? Have you never, from all the other sounds of dawn, picked out the wet chuckle of a magpie and fixed on it for your whole life long while you lie wide-eyed on your beastly single bed?

I arrived at Frewin’s house at half past nine, having dressed myself as boringly as I could contrive, and that must have been boringly indeed, for I am not a natty dresser at the best of times, though Sally has appalling ideas about how she might improve my style. Frewin and I had agreed on ten but I told myself I wanted the element of surprise. Perhaps the truth was, I needed his company. A postman’s van was parked up the street. A builder’s truck with an aerial stood beyond it, telling me Monty’s men were at their posts.

I forgot what month it was but I know it was autumn, both in my private life and in the prim cul-de-sac of steep brick houses. For I see a disc of white sun hanging behind the pollarded chestnut trees that had given the place its name, and I smell to this day the scent of bonfires and autumn air in my nostrils urging me to leave London, leave the Service, take to Sally and the world’s real countryside. And I remember the whirr of small birds as they lifted from Frewin’s telephone line on their way to somewhere better. And a cat in the next-door garden rising on its rear paws to box a drowsy butterfly.

I dropped the latch to the garden gate and crunched up the prim gravel path to the Seven Dwarfs semi-detached, with its bottle-glass windows and thatched porch. I reached out my hand for the bell, but the front door flew away from me. It was ribbed, and studded with fake coach bolts, and it shot back as if it had been blasted by a street bomb, almost sucking me after it into the dark tiled hall. Then the door stood still, and Frewin stood beside it, a bald centurion to his own endangered house.

He was taller than I had realised by a wrestler’s head. His thick shoulders were braced to receive my attack, his eyes were fixed on me in scared hostility. Yet even at this first moment of encounter I sensed no contest in him, only a sort of heroic vulnerability made tragic by his bulk. I entered his house, and knew I was entering a madness. I had known it all night long. In desperation we find a natural kinship with the mad. I had known that for much longer.

—

“Captain York? Yes, well, welcome, sir. Welcome indeed. Personnel of their goodness did advise me you were coming. They don’t always. But this time they did. Come in, please. You have your duty to do, Captain, as I have mine.” His vast, soggy hands were lifted for my coat but seemed unable to grapple with it. So they hovered above my neck as if to strangle or embrace me while he went on talking. “We’re all on the same side and no hard feelings, I say. I liken your job to airport security, personally, it’s the same parameters. If they don’t search me, they won’t search the villains either, will they? It’s the logical approach to the matter, in my view.”

Heaven knows what lost original he thought he was copying as he delivered these over-prepared words, but at least they freed him from his frozen state. His hands descended to my coat and helped me out of it, and I can feel now the reverence with which they did so, as if unveiling something exciting to us both.

“You fly a lot then, do you, Mr. Frewin?” I asked.

He hung my coat on a hanger, and the hanger on a vile reproduction coat-tree. I waited for an answer but none came. I was thinking of his air travel to Salzburg, and I wonder whether he was too, and whether his conscience was speaking out of him in the tension of my arrival. He marched ahead of me to the drawing room, where by the light of the leaded bay window I was able to examine him at my ease, for he was already busy with the next article of his urgent hospitality: this time, an electric coffee percolator filled but not switched on—did I want the milk, or the sugar or the both, Captain? And the milk, Captain, was it hot or cold? And how about a home-made biscuit for you, Captain?

“You really made them yourself?” I asked as I fished one from the jar.

“Any fool who can read can cook,” said Frewin, with a chaotic grin of superiority, and I could see at once why Gorst would loathe him.

“Well, I can read, but I certainly can’t cook,” I replied, with a rueful shake of my head.

“What’s your first name, Captain?”

“Ned,” I replied.

“Well, that’s because you’re married, Ned, I expect. Your wife has robbed you of your self-sufficiency. I’ve seen it too often in life. In comes the wife, out goes the independence. I’m Cyril.”

And you’re ducking my question about your air travel, I thought, refusing to allow him this attempted incursion into my private territory.

“If I ran this country,” Frewin announced over his shoulder to me while he poured, “which I am pleased to say l shall never have the opportunity to do”—his voice was acquiring the didactic drumbeat of his conversation with the engineers—“I would make an absolute law that everyone, regardless of colour, sex or creed, would take cooking as an obligatory subject while at school.”

“Good idea,” I said, accepting a mug of coffee, “very sound,” and helped myself to sugar from the yellow beehive pot, which nestled like a missile in his damp paw. He had turned to me all at once, shoulders, waist and head together. His bare eyes, unfringed and unprotected, gazed down on me with a radiant and doting innocence.

“Play any games at all, Ned?” he enquired softly, tipping his head to one side for added confidentiality.

“A spot of golf, Cyril,” I lied. “How about you?”

“Hobbies at all, Ned?”

“Well, I do like to do the odd watercolour when I’m on holiday,” I said, borrowing again from Mabel.

“Drive a car, do you, Ned? I expect you boys have to have all the skills at your fingertips, don’t you?”

“Just an old Rover.”

“What year is it, then? What vintage, Ned? There’s many a good tune played on an old fiddle, they say.”

His energy was not just in his person, I realised as I gave him the first date that occurred to me; it spilled into every object that came within his sphere. Into the reproduction horse-brasses that glistened like military cap-badges from his vigorous polishing. Into the polished fire grate and wood fire and the resplendent surface of his dining table. Into the very chair where I now sat and meekly sipped my coffee, for its arms were concealed in linen covers so pressed and spotless that I was reluctant to put hands on them. And I knew without his telling me that, cleaning woman or none, he tended all these things himself, that he was their servant and dictator, in the kingdom of his boundless wasted energy.

“Where do you live then, Ned?”

“Me? Oh well, London, really.”

“What part then, Ned? What district? Somewhere nice, or do you have to be slightly anonymous for your work?”

“Well, we’re not really allowed to say, I’m afraid.”

“London born, are you? Hastings, me.”

“Sort of suburbs. You know. Pinner, say.”

“You must retain your discretion, Ned. Always. Your discretion is your dignity. Let nobody take it from you. It’s your professional integrity, discretion is. Remember that. It could come in handy.”

“Thanks,” I said, affecting a sheepish laugh. “I will.”

He was feeding on me with his eyes. He reminded me of my dog Lizzie when she watches me for a signal—unblinking body ready to go. “Shall we start, then?” he said. “Want to sound the ‘off’? As soon as it’s official, tell me. ‘Cyril. The red light’s on.’ That’s all you have to say.”

I laughed, shaking my head again, as if to say he was a card.

“It’s only routine, Cyril,” I said. “My goodness, you must know the questions by heart after all these years. Mind if I smoke?” I laboriously lit my pipe and dropped the match into the ashtray he was pressing on me. Then I resumed my study of his room. Along the walls, do-it-yourself shelves filled with do-it-yourself books, every one of them of global resonance: The World’s One Hundred Greatest Men; Gems of All the World’s Literature; Music of the Great Ages in Three Volumes. Next to them, his gramophone records in cases, all classical. And in the corner, the gramophone itself, a splendid teak affair with more control buttons than a simpleton like myself could master.

“Well now, if you like painting watercolours, Ned, why don’t you try the music too?” he suggested, following my eye. “It’s the finest consolation in the world, good music is, properly played, if you choose right. I could put you on the right lines if you wanted.”

I puffed for a while. A pipe is a great weapon for playing slow against someone else’s haste. “I rather think I’m tone deaf, actually, Cyril. I have made the occasional effort, but I don’t know, I sort of lose heart really…”

My heresy—drawn, I am afraid, from inconclusive debates I had had with Sally—was already too much for him. He had sprung to his feet, his face a mask of horror and concern as he seized the biscuit jar and thrust it at me as if only food would save me.

“Now, Ned, that is not right, if I may say so! There is no such thing as a tone-deaf person! Take two, go on, there’s plenty more in the kitchen.”

“I’ll stick to my pipe if you don’t mind.”

“Tone deafness, Ned, is merely a term, an expression, I will go so far as to say an excuse, designed to cover up, to disguise; a purely temporary, self-imposed psychological resistance to a certain world which your conscious mind is refusing you permission to enter! It is merely a fear of the unknown which is holding you back. Let me give you the example of certain acquaintances of mine…”

He ran on and I let him, while he dabbed at me with his forefinger, and with the other hand clutched the biscuit jar against his heart. I listened to him, I watched him, I expressed my admiration at the appropriate moments. I fished for my black notebook and removed the garter of black elastic from it as a signal to him that I was ready to begin, but he ignored me and ranted on. I imagined Mary Lasselles in her lair, smiling dreamily while her loved one lectured me. And Monty’s boys and girls in their surveillance vans outside, cursing him and yawning while they waited to change shifts. For all I knew, Burr too—all of them hostages to Frewin’s endless anecdote about a married couple he had had for neighbours when he lived in Surbiton, whom he had taught to share his musical appreciation.

“Anyway, I can tell my masters at PVHQ that music is still your great love,” I suggested with a smile when he had finished.

“PV” for Positive Vetting, you understand, and “HQ” for Headquarters. My part as the downtrodden security workhorse required a higher authority than my own. Then, opening the notebook on my knee, I spread the pages, and with my unpainted government-issue pencil wrote the name FREWIN at the top of the left-hand page.

“Ah well, if you’re talking about love, Ned—you could say music was my great love, yes. And music, to quote the bard, is the food of love. However, I’d prefer to say, it depends how you define love. What is love? That’s your real question, Ned. Define love.”

God’s coincidences are sometimes too vulgar to be borne. “Well, I suppose I define it rather broadly,” I said doubtfully, my pencil poised. “How do you define it?”

He shook his head and began energetically stirring his coffee, all his thick fingers gathered round the neck of one tiny Apostle spoon.

“Is this on the record?” he asked.

“It could be. Please yourself.”

“Commitment is how I define love. A great number of people speak of love as if it were some kind of nirvana. It isn’t. I happen to know that. Love is not separate from life. It’s not beyond it or superior to it. Love is within life. Love is totally integral to life, and what you get out of it depends on the ways and means whereby you invest your efforts and your loyalty. Our Lord taught us that perfectly clearly, not that I’m a God-man personally, I’m a rationalist. Love is sacrifice and love is hard work. Love is also sweat and tears, exactly as your great music has to be in order to qualify. By that token, yes, I’ll grant you, Ned, music is my first love, if you follow me.”

I was following him only too well. I had made similar halfhearted representations to Sally, only to have them swept aside. I knew also that in his beleaguered state of mind there was no such thing to him as a casual question, let alone a casual answer—any more than there was to me, even if my systems of concealment were more sophisticated than his.

“I don’t think I’ll write that down,” I said. “I think I’ll regard it as what we call deep background.” In earnest of which, I pencilled a couple of words in the notebook, as a memo to myself and a sign to him that we were going on the record. “All right, let’s do the meat-and-potatoes-work first,” I suggested, “or PVHQ will say I’m dragging my feet as usual. Have you joined the Communist Party since you were last spoken to by one of our representatives, Cyril, or have you managed to restrain yourself?”

“I have not,” he said, with a smirk.

“Haven’t joined or haven’t restrained yourself?”

A broader smirk. “The first. I like you, Ned. I cherish wit when I find it, I always have done. Not that we’re overburdened with it at my place of work. Where wit’s concerned, I’d be inclined to refer to the Tank as a total desert.”

“No friendship or peace groups?” I continued, affecting disappointment. “Fellow-travelling organisations? Taken out membership to any homosexual or otherwise deviant-oriented clubs, formed a secret passion for any under-age choirboys lately?”

“No to the lot, thank you,” said Frewin, now smiling broadly.

“Run up vast debts, causing you to live beyond your means? Set up some tasteful redhead in the style to which she is not accustomed? Acquired a Ferrari motorcar on the hire purchase?”

“My needs remain as modest as they have always been, thank you. I am not of a materialist or self-indulgent nature, as you may have gathered. I rather abhor materialism, frankly. There’s too much of it these days. Far.”

“And no to the rest?”

“All no.”

I was jotting all the time, making annotations against an imaginary checklist.

“So you wouldn’t be flogging secrets for money, then,” I commented, turning a page and adding a couple of ticks. “And you have not launched yourself upon a course of foreign language instruction without first obtaining the consent of your employing department in writing, I take it?” My pencil was poised once more. “Sanskrit? Hebrew? Urdu? Serbo-Croat?” I suggested. “Russian?”

He was standing very still and staring at me, but I pretended to be unaware of this.

“Hottentot?” I continued facetiously. “Estonian?”

“Since when’s that been on the list?” Frewin demanded aggressively.

“Hottentot?”

I waited.

“Languages. A language isn’t a defect. It’s an attribute. An accomplishment! You don’t have to list all your accomplishments, just to get cleared!”

I tilted back my head in reminiscence. “Addendum to the Positive Vetting procedure, November, 1967,” I recited. “I always remember that one. Fireworks Day. Special circular to all employing departments, yours included, requiring advance notice in writing of all intended language instruction courses. Recommended by Judicial Steering Committee, approved by Cabinet.”

He had turned his back to me. “I regard this as a totally out-of-court question and I refuse to answer it in any shape or form. Write that down.”

I puffed through my pipe smoke.

“I said write it down!”

“I wouldn’t say that, Cyril, if I were you. They’ll be cross with you.”

“Let them be.”

I drew on my pipe again. “I’ll put it to you the way HQ put it to me, shall I? ‘What’s all this nonsense Cyril’s been getting up to with his chums Boris and Olga?’ they said. ‘Ask him that one—then see what he comes up with.’ ”

Still turned away from me, he was scowling indignantly from place to place around the room, appealing to his polished world to witness my profanity. I waited for the explosion I was sure would come. But instead he peered at me in hurt reproach. Us, he was saying, friends—and you do this to me. And in the way that the brain in stress can handle a multitude of images at once, I saw before me, not Frewin, but a typist I had once interrogated in our Embassy in Ankara: how she had rolled back the sleeve of her cardigan and thrust out her arm at me and showed me the festering cigarette burns she had inflicted on herself the night before our interview. “Don’t you think you have made me suffer enough?” she asked. Yet it was not I who had made her suffer; it was the twenty-five-year-old Polish diplomat for whom she had sacrificed every secret she possessed.

I took my pipe from my mouth and gave him a reassuring laugh. “Come on, Cyril. Aren’t Boris and Olga two of the characters on this Russian course you’re doing on the sly? Papering their house together? Going off to stay at Auntie Tanya’s dacha, all that? You’re doing the standard Radio Moscow language course, five days a week, six A.M. sharp, that’s what they told me. ‘Ask him about Boris and Olga,’ they say. ‘Ask him why he’s learning Russian on the q.t.’ So I’m asking you. That’s all.”

“They’d no business knowing I was doing that course,” he muttered, still grappling with the implications of my question. “Bloody sniffer dogs. It was private. Privately selected, privately pursued. They can get lost. So can you.”

I laughed. But I was also put out. “Now don’t be like that, Cyril. You know the rules as well as I do. It’s not your style to ignore a regulation. It’s not mine either. Russian is Russian, and reporting is reporting. It’s only a matter of getting it down in writing. I didn’t make up the regulations. I get a brief, the same as anyone else.” I was talking to his back again. He had taken refuge at the bay window, and was gazing out at the rectangle that was his garden.

“What’s their names?” he demanded.

“Olga and Boris,” I repeated patiently.

This enraged him. “The people who brief you, idiot! I’m going to enter a complaint about them! Snooping, that’s what it is. It’s bloody brutal in this day and age. I’m holding you to blame too, frankly. What’s their names?”

I still didn’t answer him. I preferred to let the fury bank up in him.

“Number one,” he announced in a louder voice, still staring at his mud patch. “Are you writing this down? Number one, I am not taking a language course within the meaning of the Act. A language course is going to a school or class, it is sitting on a bench with a bunch of snivelling typists with bad breath, it is submitting to the sneers of an uncouth instructor. Number two. I do, however, listen to radio, it being one of my continuing pleasures to scan the wavebands for examples of the quaint or esoteric. Write that down and I’ll sign it. Finish, okay? Then take yourself off. I’m done with you, thank you up to here. Nothing personal. It’s them.”

“Which was how you stumbled on Boris and Olga,” I suggested helpfully, writing again. “Got it. You scanned the wavebands and there they were. Boris and Olga. Nothing wrong in that, Cyril. Stick with it and you might even land yourself a language allowance, if you pass the test. It’s only a few bob, I suppose, but it’s better in your pocket than theirs, I always say.” I continued writing, but slowly, letting him hear the maddening scratch of my government-issue pencil. “It’s always the not reporting that bothers them most,” I confided, apologising for the foibles of my masters. “ ‘If he hasn’t told us about Olga and Boris, what else hasn’t he told us?’ You can’t blame them, I suppose. Their jobs are on the line, same as ours.”

Turn another page. Lick tip of pencil. Make another annotation. I was beginning to feel the excitement of the chase. Love as commitment, he had said, love as part of life, love as effort, love as sacrifice. But love for whom? I drew a heavy pencil line and turned a page.

“Can we pass on to your Iron Curtains, please, Cyril?” I asked in my weariest voice. “HQ are devils for Iron Curtains. I wondered whether you’d any fresh names to add to the list of those you’ve already given us these past years. The last one”—I flipped to the back of the notebook—“my goodness, that was aeons ago. A gentleman from East Germany, a member of a local choral society you joined. Is there no one you can think of since at all? They’re a bit after you now, Cyril, I’ll admit, now that they’ve caught you not reporting the language course.”

His disillusionment in me was again sliding into anger. Once again he began punching the unlikely words. But this time it was as if he were punching me.

“You will find all my Iron Curtain contacts, past and present, such as they are, duly listed and submitted to my superiors, according to regulations. If you had troubled yourself to obtain this data from Foreign Office Personnel Department prior to this interview—and I mean why they send me a hack like you—”

I decided to cut him short. I did not think it useful that he should be allowed to reduce me to nothing. To insignificance, yes. But not to nothing, for I was the servant of a higher authority. I pulled a sheet of paper from the back of my notebook. “Look, now, here you are, I’ve got them. All your Iron Curtains on one page. There’s only been five ever, in your whole twenty years. HQ-cleared, I see, the lot. Well, so they would be, as long as you report them.” I put the sheet back in my notebook. “Anyone to add, then? Who’s to add? Think now, Cyril. Don’t be hasty. They know an awful lot, my people. They shock me sometimes. Take your time.”

He took his time. And more time. And more. Finally he took the line of self-pity.

“I’m not a diplomat, Ned,” he complained in a small voice. “I’m not out doing the gay hurrah every night, Belgravia, Kensington, St. John’s Wood, medals and white tie, rubbing shoulders with the great, am I? I’m a clerk. I’m not that man at all.”

“What man’s that, Cyril?”

“I like a treat, that’s different. I like a friend best.”

“I know you do, Cyril. HQ knows too.”

A fresh resort to anger to mask his rising panic. Deafening body language as he clenches his great fists and lifts his elbows. “There is not a single name on that list that has crossed my path since I reported the persons concerned. The names in that list related entirely to the most completely casual encounters, which had no follow-up whatsoever.”

“But, what about new people since?” I pleaded patiently. “You’ll not get past them, Cyril. I don’t, so why should you?”

“If there was anyone to add, any contact at all, even a Christmas card from someone, you may rest assured I would have been the first to add him. Finish. Done. Over. Next question, thank you.”

Diplomat, I noted. Him, I noted; Christmas. Salzburg. I became if anything more laborious.

“That’s not quite the answer they want, Cyril,” I said as I wrote in my notebook. “That sounds a bit too much like flannel, frankly. They want a ‘yes’ or a ‘no,’ or an ‘if yes, who?’ They want a straight answer and they’re not settling for flannel. ‘He didn’t own up to his language, so why should we think he’s owning up to his Iron Curtains?’ That’s what they’re thinking, Cyril. That’s what they’re going to say to me too. It’ll all come back on me in the end,” I warned him, still writing.

Once again I could feel that my ponderousness was a torture to him. He was pacing, snapping his fingers at his sides. He was muttering, working his jaw menacingly, growling again about getting names. But I was far too busy writing in my notebook to notice any of this. I was old Ned, Burr’s Mr. Plod, doing his duty by HQ.

“How’s about this then, Cyril?” I said at last. And, holding up my notebook, I read aloud to him what I had written: “ ‘I, Cyril Frewin, solemnly declare that I have not made the acquaintance, however briefly, of any Soviet or Eastern Bloc citizen, other than those already listed by me, in the last twelve months. Dated and signed Cyril.’ ”

I relit my pipe and studied the bowl in order to make quite sure it was drawing. I put the burned-out match in the matchbox, and the matchbox in my pocket. My voice, already slowed to a walking pace, now became a crawl.

“Alternatively, Cyril, and I say this advisedly, if there is anyone like that in your life, now’s your chance to tell me. And them. I’ll treat everything you say in confidence, so will they, depending what I tell them of it, which isn’t always everything, not by any means. Nobody’s a saint, after all. And HQ probably wouldn’t clear them if they were.”

Intentionally or otherwise, I had touched the fuse in him. He had been waiting for an excuse and now I had delivered it.

“Saint? Who’s talking saint? Don’t you call me bloody saint, I won’t have it! Saint Cyril, they call me, did you know that? Of course you did, you’re taunting me!”

Taut-faced and rude. Battering me with words. Frewin against the ropes, slugging anything that came at him. “If there were such a person—which there is not—I would not have told you or your snooping PV lot—I would have reported the matter in writing, according to regulations, to personnel department at the—”

For the second time, I allowed myself to cut him short. I didn’t like him conducing the rhythm of our exchanges. “But there really isn’t anyone, is that right?” I said, as pressingly as my passive rôle allowed. “There’s no one? You haven’t been to any functions—parties, get-togethers, meetings—official, unofficial—in London, outside London, abroad even—at which a citizen of an Iron Curtain country was remotely present?”

“Do I have to continue saying no?”

“Not if the answer’s yes,” I replied, with a smile he didn’t like.

“The answer is no. No, no, no. Repeat no. Got it?”

“Thank you. So I can put none, can I? That means no one, not even a Russian. And you can sign it. Yes?”

“Yes.”

“Meaning no?” I suggested, making another weak joke. “I’m sorry, Cyril, but we do have to be crystal clear, otherwise HQ will fall on us from a great height. Look, I’ve written it down for you. Sign it.”

I handed him my pencil and he signed. I wanted to instill the habit in him. He handed back my notebook, smiling tragically at me. He had lied to me and he needed my comfort in his wretchedness. So I granted it to him—if only, I am afraid, because I wanted to take it away again very soon. I stowed the notebook in my inside pocket, stood up, and gave a big stretch as if announcing a break in our discussions, seeing that a tricky point was behind us. I rubbed my back a bit, an old man’s ache.

“What’s all that digging you’ve been doing out there, Cyril?” I said. “Building your own deep shelter, are you? Hardly necessary these days, I’d have thought.”

Looking past him, my eye had fallen on a pile of new bricks stacked in a corner of the mud patch, with a tarpaulin tied over the top of them. An unfinished trench, about two feet deep, cut across the lawn towards them.

“I am building a pond,” Frewin retorted, seizing gratefully on my facetious diversion. “I happen to be very fond of water.”

“A goldfish pond, Cyril?”

“An ornamental pond.” His good humour came sailing back. He relaxed, he smiled, and his smile was so warm and unaffected that I found myself smiling in return. “What I intend to do, Ned,” he explained, drawing near to me in friendship, “is construct three separate levels of water, beginning four feet above the existing ground, descending over eighteen-inch intervals to that trench. I shall then illuminate each pool from beneath with the aid of a concealed lamp. I shall then pump the water with an electric pump. And at night, instead of drawing the curtains, I shall be able to look out on to my own private display of illuminated pools and waterfalls!”

“And play your music!” I cried, responding in full measure to his enthusiasm. “I think that’s splendid, Cyril. Genius. I’m most impressed, I really am. I’d like my wife to see that. How was Salzburg, by the way?”

He actually reels, I thought, watching his head swing away from me. I hit him and he reels, and I wait till he recovers consciousness before I hit him again.

“You go to Salzburg for the music, they tell me. Quite a Mecca for you musicians, they tell me, Salzburg. Do they do opera at Christmas, or is it all carols and anthems you go for?”

They must have closed off the street, I thought, listening to the enormous silence. I wondered whether Frewin was thinking the same as he went on staring into the garden.

“Why should you care?” he answered. “You’re a musical ignoramus. You said so. As well as being a very considerable snooper.”

“Verdi? I’ve heard of Verdi. Mozart? He was Austrian, wasn’t he? I saw the film. I’ll bet they do you Mozart for Christmas. They’d have to. Which ones do they do?”

Silence again. I sat down and once again prepared myself to write to his dictation.

“Do you go alone?” I asked.

“Of course I do.”

“Do you always?”

“Of course I do.”

“Last time too?”

“Yes!”

“Do you stay alone?” I asked.

He laughed loudly. “Me? Not for one minute. Not me. There’s dancing girls waiting for me in my room when I arrive. They’re changed every day.”

“But music night after night after night, the way you like it?”

“Who says what I like?”

“Fourteen nights of it. Twelve, I suppose, if you count the travel.”

“Could be twelve. Could be fourteen. Could be thirteen. What does it matter?” He was still concussed. He was talking from a long way off.

“Which is what you go for. To Salzburg. And what you pay for. Yes? Yes, Cyril? Give me a signal, please, Cyril. I keep thinking I’m losing you. And it was what you went for this Christmas too?”

He nodded.

“Concerts, night after night? Opera? Carols?”

“Yes.”

“Only the trouble is, you see, HQ says you only stayed the one night. You arrived on the first day as booked, they say, and you were off again next morning. You paid the full whack for your room, all two weeks, but the hotel never saw hide nor hair of you from your second day till you came back at the end of your holiday. So quite reasonably, really, HQ are asking where the bloody hell you went.” I took my boldest leap so far. “And who with. They’re asking whether you’ve got someone on the side. Like Boris and Olga, but real.”

I turned a couple more pages of my notebook, and in the deep silence the rustle was like falling bricks. His terror was infecting me. It was like a shared evil. The truth lay a membrane from us, yet the dread of it seemed to be as terrible to the man who was trying to keep it outside the door as to myself, who was trying to let it in.

“All we need to do is get it down on paper, Cyril,” I said. “Then we can forget it. Nothing like writing something down for getting it out of the way, I say. It’s no crime to have a friend. Even a foreign one isn’t a crime, as long as he’s written down. He is foreign, I take it? Only, I notice a certain hesitation in you here. He must be quite some friend, I will say, if you gave up all that music for him.”

“He’s nowhere. He doesn’t exist. He’s gone. I was in his way.”

“Well, he hadn’t gone at Christmas time, had he? Not if you were together with him. Was he Austrian, Cyril?”

Frewin was lifeless. He was dead with his eyes open. I had hit him once too often.

“All right, then, he’s French,” I suggested more loudly, trying to jerk him from his introspection. “Was he a Frenchie, Cyril, your chum?…They wouldn’t mind about a Frenchie, even if they don’t like them. Come on, Cyril, how about a Yank then? They can’t object to a Yank!” No answer. “Not Irish, was he? I hope not, for your sake!”

I did the laughing for him, but nothing stirred him from his melancholy. Still at the window, he had crooked his thumb and was boring the knuckle joint into his forehead, as if trying to make a bullet hole. Had he whispered something?

“I didn’t catch you, Cyril!”

“He’s above all that.”

“Above nationality?”

“He’s above it.”

“You mean he’s a diplomat.”

“He didn’t come to Salzburg, can’t you bloody listen?” He swung round at me and began screaming. “You’re bloody spastic, you know that? Never mind the answers, you can’t even ask right! No wonder the country’s in a mess! Where’s your savvy gone? Where’s your human understanding, for a change?”

I stood up again. Slowly. Keep him watching me. Give my back another rub. I wandered down the room. I shook my head as if to say this simply would not do.

“I’m trying to help you, Cyril. If you went to Salzburg and stayed there, that’s one scenario. If you went on somewhere else—well, that’s quite another. If your chum is Italian, say. And if you pretended to go to Salzburg but went—oh, I don’t know—to Rome, say, or Milan, even Venice—well, that’s another. I can’t do it all for you. It’s not fair and they wouldn’t thank me if I did.”

He was wide-eyed. He was transferring his madness to me, appointing himself the sane one. I refilled my pipe, giving it my entire attention while I went on talking.

“You’re a hard man to please, Cyril”—tamping the tobacco with my forefinger—“you’re a tease, if you want to know. ‘Don’t touch me here, take your hand away from there, you can do this but only once.’ I mean, what am I allowed to talk about?”

I struck the match and held it to the bowl, and as I did so I saw that he had transferred his knuckles to his eyes in order not to be in the room. But I pretended not to notice. “All right, we’ll forget Salzburg. If Salzburg is hurtful, put Salzburg aside and let’s go back to your Iron Curtains. Yes? Agreed?”

His hands slipped slowly from his face. No answer, but no outright rejection either. I went on talking. He wanted me to. I could sense his reliance on my words as a bridge between the real world and the inner hell where he was living. He wanted me to do the talking for both of us. I felt I had to make his confession for him, which was why I decided to play my most perilous card.

“So suppose, for argument’s sake, Cyril, we were to add the name of Sergei Modrian to this list and call it a day,” I suggested carelessly, almost covering over my words in my efforts to sound unthreatening. “Just to be on the safe side,” I added cheerfully. “What do you say?” His head was still hanging downward, his face cut off from me. Chatting cheerfully, I expanded on my latest helpful proposal for HQ. “ ‘All right,’ we say to them, ‘so take your wretched Mr. Modrian. Don’t play around with us any more, we’ll come clean. Have him and go home. Ned and Cyril have got work to do.’ ”

He was dangling, smiling like a hanged man. In the profound silence that had settled over the neighbourhood, I had the sensation of hearing my words resounding from the rooftops. But Frewin seemed barely to have heard them.

“Modrian’s the one they want you to own up to, Cyril,” I continued reasonably. “They told me. If you say yes to Modrian—and if I write him down, which I’m doing, and you allow me to, and I notice you’re not stopping me, are you?—nobody can accuse either one of us of being less than frank with them. ‘Yes, I am a chum of Sergei Modrian and screw the lot of you’—how’s that? ‘And I went with him to wherever we went, and we did this, we did that, we agreed to do certain other things, and we had a lovely time, or we didn’t. And anyway, what’s all the glasnost for, if I’m still being forbidden to associate with an extremely civilised Russian?’…How’s that? Never mind the gaps for the moment, we can fill all those in later. Then, the way I see it, they can pack up the file for another year and we can all get on with our weekend.”

“Why?”

I affected not to understand.

“Why can they pack up the file, then?” he demanded, as suspicions crowded in on him. “When they’ve been who they are? They’re not going to turn round and say ‘What’s the point?’ Nobody does. Not when they’ve been one thing. They stay who they are. They don’t become other people. They can’t.”

“Come off it, Cyril!” He had sunk into his own thoughts and was becoming hard to reach. “Cyril!”

“What then? What’s up? Don’t shout.”

“So what’s wrong with being Russian these days? HQ would be far more worried if Sergei was a Frenchie! I only suggested Frenchie as a trap. I regret that now, I apologise. But a Russian these days—for heaven’s sake, we’re not just talking friendly nations, we’re talking partners! You know HQ. They’re always behind the times. So’s Gorst. Our job’s to set the trend. Are you hearing me, Cyril?”

And that was where, for a moment, I thought I had lost the whole game—lost his complicity, lost his dependence, lost the willing suspension of his disbelief. He wandered past me like a sleepwalker. He stood himself at his bay window again, here he remained contemplating his half-dug pool and all the other halfbuilt dreams of his life, which he must have known by now would never be completed.

Then, to my relief, he started talking. Not about what he had done. Not about who he had done it with. But why.

—

“You don’t know what it means, do you, to be locked up all day with a bunch of morons?”

I thought at first he was complaining of his future, till I realised he was talking about the Tank.

“Listening to their filthy jokes all day, choking on their fags and their BO? Not you, you’re privileged, however humble you make yourself out. Day after day of it, sniggers about tits and knickers and periods and little bits on the side? ‘Come on, Saint, tell us a naughty joke for a change! You’re a deep one, I’ll bet, Saint! What are you into—gym slips? Bit of the rough? What’s the Saint’s little fancy of a Saturday night?’ ” His energy had returned to him in full force, and with it, to my astonishment, an unexpected gift for mimicry. He was mincing at me, playing the music-hall queen, a ghastly soft grin twisting his hairless face. “ ‘Heard the one about the Boy Scouts and the Girl Guides, Saint? The excitement was in tents. Get you!’ You wouldn’t know about that, would you? ‘Do you pull it now and then, Saint? Give it a little jerk occasionally, just to make sure it’s there? You’ll go blind, you know. It’ll drop off. I’ll bet you’ve got a big one, haven’t you? A real donkey knock, all the way down your leg and tucked into your garter’….You’ve never had that, have you, all day long, in the office, in the canteen? You’re a gentleman. Know what they gave me April Fool’s Day? A top secret incoming from Paris, Frewin’s eyes only, decypher yourself, manual, ha ha. Flash priority, get the joke? I didn’t. So I go into the cubicle and get out the books, don’t I? And I decypher it, don’t I? Manual. Everyone’s got his head down. Nobody laughing or spoiling it. I do the first six groups and it’s filth, some filthy joke all about a French letter. Gorst had done it. He’d had the boys at the Paris Embassy send it specially as a joke. ‘Steady on, Saint, keep your hair on, give us a smile. It was only a joke, Saint, can’t you take a joke?’ That’s what Personnel said too, when I complained. Horseplay, they said. Pranks are good for morale. Think of it as a compliment, they said, show a little sporting instinct. If I hadn’t had my music I’d have killed myself long ago. I considered it, I don’t mind telling you. Trouble was, I wouldn’t see their faces when they found out what they’d done.”

A traitor needs two things, Smiley had once remarked bitterly to me at the time of Haydon’s betrayal of the Circus: somebody to hate, and somebody to love. Frewin had told me whom he hated. Now he began to talk about whom he loved.

—

“I’d been all over the world that night—Puerto Rico, Cape Verde, Jo’burg—and there wasn’t anything that took my fancy. I like the amateurs best, as a rule, the hacks. They’ve got more wit, which is what I like, I told you. I didn’t even know it was morning. I’ve got these thick curtains up there, three hundred quids’ worth, interlined. It’s meat and drink to me after the Tank, the quiet is.”

A different smile had come up on him, a small boy’s smile on his birthday.

“ ‘Good morning to you, Boris, my friend,’ says Olga. ‘How are you feeling this morning?’ Then she says it in Russian and Boris replies that he’s feeling a bit low. He’s often low, Boris is. He’s prone to Slav depressions. Olga takes care of him, mind. She’ll have a joke, but it’s never cruelly meant. They have a fight now and then too—well, it’s only natural, seeing they do everything together. But they always make it up in the same programme. They don’t bear a grudge from day to day. Olga couldn’t do that, to be frank. It’s out with it and that’s it, with Olga. Then they’ll have a laugh together. That’s how they are. Constructive. Friendly. Clean spoken. Musical too, naturally—well, they would be, being Russian. I wasn’t that keen on Tchaikovsky till I heard them discussing him. But afterwards I came round to him straight away. Boris has got quite advanced tastes in music actually. Olga—well, she’s a bit easy to please. Still, they’re only actors, I suppose, reading their lines. But you forget that when you’re listening to them, trying to learn the language. You believe in them.”

And you send your written work in, he was saying.

For free correction and advice, he was saying.

You don’t even have to write to Moscow after the first time. They’ve got this box number in Luxembourg.

—

He had fallen quiet but not dangerously so. Nevertheless I was becoming scared that his trance might end too soon. I took myself out of his line of sight, and stood in a corner of the room behind him.

“What address did you give them, Cyril?”

“This one, of course. What else have I got to give them, then? A country house in Shropshire? A villa in Capri?”

“Did you give them your own name, too?”

“Of course I didn’t. Well, Cyril, yes. I mean anyone can be Cyril.”

“Good man,” I said approvingly. “Cyril who?”

“Nemo,” he announced proudly. “Mr. C. Nemo. ‘Nemo’ is Latin for ‘nobody,’ in case you didn’t know.”

Mr. C. Nemo. Like Mr. A. Patriot, perhaps.

“Did you put your occupation?”

“Not my real one. You’re being stupid again.”

“So what did you put?”

“Musician.”

“Did they ask for your age?”

“Of course they did. They had to. They had to know you were eligible, in case you won the prize. They can’t give prizes to minors, can they? No one can.”

“And status—married or single—you told them that too?”

“I had to put my status, didn’t I, with the prize being available to couples! They can’t give a prize to one person and leave his wife out, it wouldn’t be gracious.”

“What work did you send in—the first time round, for instance—do you remember?”

He decided to take further exception to my stupidity.

“Thickhead. What do you think I sent them? Bloody logarithms? You write in, you get the forms, you enrol, you get the Luxembourg box number, you get the book, you’re one of them. After that you do what Boris and Olga tell you to do in the programme, don’t you? ‘Complete the exercise on page 9. Answer the questions on page 12.’ Haven’t you been to school then?”

“And you were good. HQ says you’ve got a mind like an encyclopaedia when you use it. They told me.” I was beginning to learn how much he relished flattery.

“I was more than good, as a matter of fact, thank you, HQ. If you wish to know, I was in the nature of being their top pupil. Certain notes were sent to me by certain tutors, and some of them had a highly congratulatory tone,” he added, with the wild grin that came over him when he was praised. “It gave me quite a filip, if you wish to know, walking into the Tank of a Monday morning with one of their little notes in my pocket and not saying anything. I thought, I could tell some of you a tale if I wanted. I didn’t, though. I preferred my privacy. I preferred my friendships. I wasn’t going to have those animals making filthy comments about Olga and Boris, thank you.”

“And you wrote back to these tutors?”

“Only as Nemo.”

“But you didn’t fool with them otherwise?” I asked, trying to fathom what restraints, if any, were in his mind as he embarked on this first illicit love affair. “I mean, if they asked you a plain question, you’d give them a plain answer. You weren’t coy.”

“I was not coy! I had no cause to be! I took great care to be courteous, the same as my tutors were. They were high professors, some of them, academicians. I was grateful and I was diligent. That was the least they deserved, considering there was no fee and it was voluntary and in the interests of human understanding.”

The hunter in me again. I was calculating the moves they would have made as they played him along. I was working out how I would have played him myself, if the Circus had dreamed up anything so perfect.

“And I suppose, as you improved, they passed you on from plain printed exercises to the more ambitious stuff—composition, essays?”

“When it was deemed by the Board of Tutors in Moscow that I was ripe for it, yes, they moved me up to freestyle.”

“Do you remember the subjects they set you?”

He laughed his superior laugh. “You think I’d forget them? Five nights at each one of them with the dictionary? Two hours’ sleep if I’m lucky? Wake up, will you, Ned!”

I gave a rueful little laugh as I wrote to his dictation.

“ ‘My Life’ was the first one. I told them about the Tank, not mentioning names, of course, or the nature of our work, naturally. Nevertheless, a certain element of social comment was present, I won’t deny it. I thought the Board had a right to know, specially with the glasnost in the pipeline and everything easing up for the benefit of all mankind.”

“What was the next one?”

“ ‘My Home.’ I told them about my plans for the pond. They liked that. And my cooking. One of them was quite a major cook. After that they gave me ‘My Favourite Pastime,’ which could have been redundant but wasn’t.”

“You described your love of music, I suppose?”

“Wrong.”

The rest of his answer rings in my ears today: as an accusation, as a cry of sympathy from a fellow sufferer; as a blind prayer flung into the ether by a man who, like myself, was desperate for love before it was too late.

“I elected ‘Good Company’ as my favourite pastime, if you really wish to know,” he said as the wild smile came racing back to his cheeks. “The fact that I had not had much good company in my life hitherto did not deter me from relishing the few occasions when it had come my way.” He seemed to forget that he had spoken, for he began again, in words I might have used of Sally: “I had a feeling I had renounced something in my life which I now wished to reclaim,” he said.

“And did they admire your advanced work too? Were they impressed by it?” I asked as I diligently wrote this down.

He was smirking again. “Moderately, I assume. Marginally. Here and there. With reservations, naturally.”

“Why do you assume that?”

“Because, unlike some, they had the grace and generosity to show their appreciation. That’s why.”

And they showed it, said Frewin—I scarcely needed to press him further—they showed it in the person of one Sergei Modrian, First Secretary Cultural, of the Soviet Embassy in London, in his capacity as Radio Moscow’s devoted local emissary despatched to answer Frewin’s prayer.

Like all good angels, Modrian arrived without warning, on Frewin’s doorstep one dank November Saturday, bearing with him the gifts of his high office: one bottle of Moskovskaya vodka, one tin of Sevruga caviar, and one foully printed artbook about the Bolshoi Ballet. And one grandly typed letter appointing Mr. C. Nemo to be an Honorary Student of Moscow State University, in recognition of his unique progress in the Russian language.

But the greatest gift of all was Modrian’s own magical person, custom-trained to provide the good company Frewin had so loudly craved in his prize-winning essay for the Board.

—

We had arrived at our destination. Frewin was calm, Frewin was in triumph; Frewin, for however long, was fulfilled. His voice had broken, free of its confinements; his plain face was lit with the smile of a man who had known true love and was longing to impart his luck. If there had been anyone in the world for whom I could ever have smiled in the same way, I would have been a different man.

“Modrian, Ned? Sergei Modrian? Oh, Ned, I mean we’re talking the total top league here. One look at him, I knew. None of your half measures here, I thought. This one’s the whole hog. We had the same sense of humour, of course, straight off. Acid. No wool across the eyes. The same interests too, right down to composers.” He attempted a more detached tone, but in vain. “It is very rare in life, in my experience, for two human beings to be naturally compatible in each and every respect—bar women, where I have to admit that Sergei’s experience far outran my own. Sergei’s attitude to women”—he was trying hard to be disapproving—“I’ll put it this way: if it had been anyone else behaving in that manner, I would have been hard put to it to approve.”

“Did he introduce you to women, Cyril?”

His expression switched to one of adamant rejection. “He assuredly did not, thank you. Nor would I have permitted him to. Nor would he have regarded such introductions as coming within the ambit of our relationship.”

“Not even on your trips to Russia together?” I ventured, taking another leap for him.

“Nowhere, thank you. It would have ruined them, as a matter of fact. Killed them stone dead.”

“So it’s all hearsay, what they say about his women?”

“No, it’s not. It’s what Sergei told me himself. Sergei Modrian had a totally ruthless attitude to women. His colleagues confirmed this to me privately. Ruthless.”

I found time to marvel at Modrian’s psychological dexterity—or was it the dexterity of his masters? Between Modrian the ruthless pursuer of women, and Frewin the ruthless rejecter of them, there was indeed a natural bond.

“So you met his colleagues too,” I said. “In Moscow, presumably. At Christmas.”

“Only the ones he trusted. Their respect for him was incredible. Or Leningrad. I wasn’t fussy, I’d no right to be. I was an honoured guest. I went along with whatever they’d arranged for me.”

I kept my eyes on my notebook. God knows what I was writing by then. Gobbledygook. Afterwards, there were whole tracts I couldn’t read a word of. I selected my absolutely dullest tone.

“And was all this in honour of your remarkable linguistic abilities, Cyril? Or were you already providing informal services for Modrian by then? Like giving him information or whatever. Translating and so on. A lot do it, I’m told. They’re not supposed to, of course. But you can’t blame people—can you?—wanting to help the glasnost along, now it’s come. We’ve waited long enough. Only, I’ve got to put the proper history to this, Cyril. They’ll skin me otherwise.”

I did not dare look up. I simply kept writing. I turned a page and wrote: keep talking, keep talking, keep talking. And still I did not look up.

I heard him whisper something I couldn’t understand. I heard him mutter, “It’s not. I didn’t. I never bloody did.” I heard him complain more loudly: “Don’t say that, do you mind? Don’t you ever say that again, you and your HQ. ‘Giving him information’—what’s all that about? They’re wrong words. I’m talking to you, Ned!”

I looked up, sucking on my pipe and smiling. “Are you, Cyril? Of course you are. I’m sorry. You’re my sixth in a week, to be honest. They’re all doing the glasnost these days. It’s the fashion. I’m beginning to feel my age.”

He decided to comfort me. He sat down. Not in the chair, but on its arm. He put on an avuncular, friend-to-friend manner that reminded me of my preparatory-school headmaster.

“You’re by way of being a liberal yourself, aren’t you, Ned? You’ve got the face for it anyway, even if you are a bit of a toady for HQ.”

“I suppose I’m a sort of free thinker in my way, yes,” I conceded. “Though I do have my pension to consider, naturally.”

“Of course you are! You favour a mixed economy, don’t you? You don’t like public poverty and private wealth any more than I do. Humanity above ideology, you believe in that? Stop the derailed tram of capitalism destroying all before it in its path? Of course you do! You’ve got a sensible concern for the environment, I dare say. Badgers, whales, fur coats, power stations. Even a vision of sharing, where it doesn’t impinge. Brothers and sisters marching together towards common goals, culture and music for all! Freedom of movement and choice of allegiance! Peace! Well, then.”

“Makes good sense to me,” I said.

“You’re not old enough to have done the thirties; neither am I. I wouldn’t have held with them if I had been. We’re good men, that’s all we are. Reasonable men. That’s what Sergei was too. You and Sergei—I can see it in your face, Ned, it’s no good your trying to hide it, you’re birds of a feather. So don’t go painting me black and you white, because we’re like minds, same as me and Sergei were. On the same side against the wickedness, the lack of culture, the filth. ‘We’re “the unrecognised aristocracy” ’—that’s what Sergei called us. He was right. You’re one too, that’s all I’m saying. I mean, who else is there? Who’s the alternative to what we see around us every day, the degradation, the waste, the disrespect? Who are we going to listen to, up there in the attic at night, twiddling the dials? Not the yuppies, that’s for sure. Not the pigs-in-clover lot—what have they got to say? Not the make-more spend-more be-more school, they’re no help. Not the knickers-and-tits brigade, either. And we’re not going to convert to Islam in a hurry, are we, not while they go round pinching countries off each other and doing the poison gas. So I mean what’s the alternative for a feeling man, a man of conscience, now the Russians are abandoning their responsibilities right and left and putting on the hair shirt? Who’s out there for us? Where’s the vision any more? Where’s the relief? The friendship? Someone’s got to fill the gap. I can’t be left in the air. I can’t be without. Not after Sergei, Ned—I’d die. Sergei was the most important man on earth to me. Drink, meat and laughter, Sergei was. He was my total meaning. What’s going to happen? That’s what I want to know. There’s some heads could roll, in my view. Sergei had the ideology. I don’t see it in you—I don’t think I do anyway. I get a glimpse of it, a longing here and there, then I’m not at all sure. I don’t know you’ve got the quality.”

“Try me,” I said.

“I don’t know you’ve got the wit. The dance. I thought that as you came in. I compared you with Sergei in my mind, and I’m afraid I found you seriously wanting. Sergei didn’t shuffle in like a deadbeat; he took me by storm. Rings the bell, marches in as if he’s bought the place, sits down where you’re sitting, but more awake—not that he ever sat anywhere long. Sergei didn’t, he was a shocking fidget, even at the opera. Then he grins like an elf and lifts up a glass of his own vodka. ‘Congratulations, Mr. Nemo,’ he says. ‘Or may I call you C? You’ve won the competition and I’m the first prize.’ ”

He passed the back of his hand across his mouth, and realised that he was wiping away a grin. “He was a real flyer, Sergei was.”

He was laughing, so I laughed with him. Modrian was his false freedom, I was thinking. As Sally is mine.

“He hadn’t even taken his coat off,” he continued. “He went straight into his pitch. ‘Now the first thing we’ve got to talk about is the ceremony,’ he says. ‘Nothing flashy, Mr. Nemo, just a couple of friends of mine, who happen to be Boris and Olga, plus one or two high dignitaries from the Board, and a small reception for a few of your many admirers in Moscow.’

“ ‘At your Embassy?’ I said. ‘I’m not coming there. My office would kill me—you don’t know Gorst.’

“ ‘No, no, Mr. Nemo,’ he says. ‘No, no, Mr. C. I’m not talking about the Embassy—who cares about the Embassy. I’m talking about Moscow State University foreign language school and the official inauguration of your honorary studentship with full civilian honours.’

“I thought I was dead at first. My heart had stopped beating. I could feel it. I’d never been beyond Dover in my life, let alone Russia, although I was Foreign Office. ‘Come to Moscow?’ I said.‘You’re off your head,’ I said. ‘I’m a cypher clerk, not a trade union leader with an ulcer. I can’t come to Moscow at the drop of a hat,’ I said. ‘Even if there is a prize at the end of it, and Olga and Boris waiting to shake my hand, and studentships and I don’t know what. You don’t seem to understand the position at all. I’m in highly sensitive work,’ I said. ‘The people aren’t that sensitive, but the work is. I’ve got constant and regular access to top secret and above. I’m not just anybody off the street, into your plane to Moscow and nobody’s the wiser. I thought I put that in my essays, some of them.’

“ ‘Then come to Salzburg,’ he says. ‘Who’s counting? Take a plane to Salzburg, say you’re doing the music there, slip up to Vienna, I’ll have the air tickets ready—all right, it’s Aeroflot but it’s only two hours—no nonsense with the passports when we arrive, we’ll keep the ceremony family, who’s the wiser?’ Then he hands me this document like a scroll, all with the burned edges and that, the full formal invitation, signed by the whole Board, English one side, Russian the other. I read the English, I don’t mind telling you. I wasn’t going to sit in front of him with a dictionary for an hour, was I? I’d have looked a total idiot, me a top language student.” He paused—a little shamefully, I thought. “Then I told him my name,” he said. “I shouldn’t have done, really, but I’d had enough of being Nemo. I wanted to be me.”

—

Now you must lose me for a minute, as I lost Cyril. Until now, I had managed to stay abreast of his references. Where I had dared, I had even led them. Now suddenly he was running free and I was struggling to keep up with him. He was in Russia, but I wasn’t. He’d given me no warning that he’d gone there. He was talking about Boris and Olga, not how they sounded any more, but how they looked; and how Boris had flung his arms round him, and how Olga had given him a demure but heartfelt Russian kiss—he didn’t hold with kissing as a rule, Ned, but with the Russians it wasn’t Gorst’s kind of kissing at all, so you didn’t mind. You even got to respect it, Ned, it being all part of what Russians regard as comradely. Frewin was looking twenty years younger and talking about being made a fuss of, all the birthdays, that he’d never had. Olga and Boris in the flesh, Ned, no side to them, just natural, same as they were in their lessons.

“ ‘Congratulations, Cyril,’ she says to me, ‘on your completely phenomenal progress in the Russian language.’ Well, through interpreters, naturally, I wasn’t that far on, as I told her. Then Boris puts his arm round me. ‘We’re proud to be of assistance, Cyril,’ he says. ‘There’s a lot of our students fall by the wayside, to be truthful, but those as don’t make up for all the rest.’ ”

And by then at last I had pieced together the scene that he was painting for me in such broad, unpredicated strokes: his first Christmas in Russia, and for Frewin, I had no doubt, his first good Christmas anywhere, and Sergei Modrian playing ringmaster at his side. They are in a great room somewhere in Moscow, with chandeliers and speeches and a presentation and fifty handpicked extras from Moscow Central Casting, and Frewin in paradise, which is exactly where Modrian wishes him to be.

Then, as abruptly as Frewin had treated me to this memory he abandoned it. The light went out of his eyes, his head tipped to one side, and he beetled his eyebrows as if in judgment at his own behaviour.

Prudently, I returned him to time present. “So where is it?” I said. “The scroll he gave you. Here? The scroll, Cyril. Appointing you. Where?”

He stared, at me, slowly waking. “I had to give it back to Sergei. ‘When we’re in Moscow, Cyril,’ he said, ‘you shall have it hanging on your wall and framed in gold. Not here. I wouldn’t put you in the danger.’ He’d thought of everything, Sergei had, and he was quite right, what with you and your HQ snooping on me night and day.”

I allowed no pause, no alteration in my voice, not even in the direction of casualness. I lowered my eyes again and dug once more in my inside pocket. I was his candidate as Sergei’s replacement, and he was courting me. He was showing me his tricks and asking me to take him on. Instinct told me to make him work harder for me. I addressed myself to the notebook again, and I spoke exactly as if I were asking him the name of his maternal grandfather.

“So when did you start giving Sergei all these great British secrets?” I said. “Well, what we call secrets, anyway. Obviously what was secret a few years ago is not going to be the same as what’s secret today, is it? We didn’t win the Cold War by secrecy, did we? We won it with the openness. The glasnost.”

It was the second time I had mentioned passing over secrets, but on this occasion, when I crossed the Rubicon for him, he came with me. Yet he seemed not even to notice he was on the other side.

“Correct. That’s how we won it. And Sergei didn’t even want the secrets at first, either. ‘Secrets, Cyril, they’re unimportant to me,’ he said. ‘Secrets, Cyril, in the changing world in which we live, I’m pleased to say, they’re a drug on the market,’ he said. ‘I’d rather keep our friendship on a non-official basis. However, if I do require something in that line, you may count on me to let you know.’ In the meantime, he said, it would be quite sufficient if I wrote him a few unofficial reports on the quality of Radio Moscow’s programmes just to keep his bosses happy. Whether the reception was good enough, for example. You’d think they’d know that, really, but they don’t. You never know with Russians where you’re going to strike the ignorance in them, to be frank. That’s not a criticism, it’s a fact. He’d like my opinion of the course as well, he said, for standards of instruction generally, any suggestions I might have for Boris and Olga in the future, me being somewhat of an unusual pupil in my own right.”

“So what changed it?”

“Changed what? Be lucid, please, Ned. I’m not nobody, you know. I’m not Mr. Nemo. I’m Cyril.”

“What changed Sergei’s reluctance to take secrets from you?” I said.

“His Embassy did. The diehards. The barbarians. They always do. They prevailed on him. They declined to recognize the course of history; they preferred to remain total troglodytes in their caves and continue with their ridiculous Cold War.”

I said I did not understand him. I said he was a bit above my head.

“Yes, well I’m not surprised. I’ll put it this way. There was lot of them in that Embassy didn’t like the time given over to cultural friendship, for a start. There was this internal rivalry going on between the camps. I was an impotent spectator. The doves, they were in favour of the culture, naturally, and above all they were in favour of the glasnost. They saw culture filling the vacuum left behind by the withdrawal hostilities. Sergei explained that to me. But the hawks—including the Ambassador, I regret to say—wanted Sergei concentrating more on the continuation of old attitudes, what’s left of them, gathering intelligence and generally acting in an aggressive and conspiratorial manner regardless of the changes in the world climate. The Embassy diehards didn’t care about Sergei being an idealist, not at all. Well, they wouldn’t, would they, any more than what Gorst does. Sergei had to tread a highly precarious path, frankly, a bit for one side, then a bit for the other. So did I, it was duty. We’d do our culture together, a bit of language, a bit of art or music then we’d do some secrets to satisfy the hawks. We had to justify ourselves to all parties, same as you with your HQ and me with the Tank.”

He was fading, I was losing him. I had to use the whip. “So when?” I asked impatiently.

“When what?”

“Don’t be clever with me, Cyril, do you mind? I’ve got to get this down. Look at the time. When did you start giving Sergei Modrian information, what did you give him, what for, how much for, when did it stop, and why, when it could perfectly well have continued? I’d like a weekend, Cyril, if you don’t mind. So would my wife. I’d like to put my feet up in front of the telly. I’m not paid overtime, you know. It’s strictly piecework, what they offer. One candidate’s the same as another, when it comes to payday. We’re living in a time of cost effectiveness, in case you haven’t noticed. They tell me we could be privatised if we’re not careful.”

He didn’t hear me. He didn’t want to. He was wandering in his body and in his mind, looking for distraction, for somewhere to hide. My anger was not all simulated. I was beginning to hate Modrian. I was angry about how much we depended on the credulity of the innocent in order to survive. It was sickening me that a trickster like Modrian had contrived to turn Frewin’s loneliness to treachery. I felt threatened by the notion of love as the antithesis of duty.

I stood up smartly, anger still my ally. Frewin was perched listlessly on the edge of a carved Arthurian stool with the Royal Navy’s ensign stitched into the seat.

“Show me your toys,” I ordered him.

“What toys? I’m a man, if you don’t mind, not an infant. It’s my house. Don’t tell me what to do.”

I was remembering Modrian’s tradecraft, the stuff he used, the way he equipped his agents. I was remembering my own tradecraft, from the days when I had run Frewin’s counterparts against the Soviet target, even if they were not quite as bad as Frewin. I was imagining how I would have handled a high-access walk-in like Frewin, living on borrowed sanity.

“I want to see your camera, don’t I?” I said petulantly. “Your high-speed transmitter, right, Cyril? Your signals plan. Your one-time codepads. Your crystals. Your white carbons for your secret writing. Your concealment devices. I want to see them, Cyril, I want to put them in my briefcase for Monday; then I want to go home and watch Arsenal against United. That may not be your taste, but it happens to be mine. So can we move this along a bit and cut out the bullshit, please?”

The madness was running out, I could feel it. He was drained and so was I. He sat head down and knees spread, staring dully at his hands. I could sense the end beginning for him—the moment when the penitent grows tired of his confession and of the emotions that compelled it.

“Cyril, I’m getting a bit edgy,” I said.

And when he still didn’t respond, I strode to his telephone, the same one that Monty’s fake engineer had made permanently live. I dialled Burr’s direct line and heard his fancy secretary on the other end, the same one who hadn’t known my name.

“Darling?” I said. “I’m going to be about another hour if I’m lucky. I’ve got a slow one. Yes, all right, I know, I’m sorry. Well, I said I’m sorry. Yes, of course.”

I rang off and stared at him accusingly. He climbed slowly to his feet and led me upstairs. His attic was a spare bedroom roof high. His radio receiver stood on a table in the corner—German, just as Monty had said. I switched it on while he watched me, and we heard an accented female Russian voice talking indignantly about Moscow’s criminal mafia.

“Why do they do that?” Frewin burst out at me, as if I were responsible. “The Russians. Why do they run down their own country all the time? They never used to. They were proud. I was proud too. All the cornfields, the classlessness, the chess, the cosmonauts, and ballet, the athletes. It was paradise till they started running it down. They’ve forgotten the good in themselves. It’s bloody disgraceful. That’s what I told Sergei.”

“Then why do you still listen to them?” I said.

He was almost weeping, but I pretended not to notice.

“For the message, don’t I?”

“Make it snappy, will you, Cyril!”

“Telling me I’m reactivated. That I’m wanted again. ‘Come back, Cyril. All is forgiven, love, Sergei.’ That’s all I need to hear.”

“How would they say that?”

“White paint.”

“Go on.”

“ ‘There’s white paint on the dog, Olga.’…‘We need a spot of white paint on the bookshelf, Boris.’…‘Oh dear, oh dear, Olga, look at the cat, someone has dipped her tail in white paint. I hate cruelty,’ says Boris. Why don’t they say it when I’m listening?”

“Let’s just stick to the method, can we? All right, you hear the message. On the radio. Olga or Boris says ‘white paint.’ Or they both do. Then what do you do?”

“Look in my signals plan.”

I held out my hand, commanding him with my snapping fingers. “Hurry!” I said.

He hurried. He found a wooden hairbrush. Pulling the bristles from the casing, he shoved his big fingers into the gap and hauled out a piece of soft, flammable paper with times of the day and wavebands printed in parallel. He offered it to me, hoping it would satisfy. I took it from him without pleasure and snapped it into my notebook; glancing at my watch at the same moment.

“Thanks,” I said curtly. “More, please, Cyril I need a codebook and a transmitter. Don’t tell me you haven’t got them, I’m not in the mood.”

He was grappling with a tin of talcum powder, tugging at the base, trying desperately to please me. He talked nervously while he shook the powder into the handbasin.

“I was respected, you see, Ned, you don’t get that a lot. There’s three of these. Olga and Boris tell me which to use, like with the white paint except it was the composers. Tchaikovsky was number three, Beethoven was number two, Bach was one. They did them alphabetical to help me remember. You get the glimpses but you don’t get the friends, not normally, do you? Not unless you meet Sergei or one of his lot.”

The powder was all poured away. Three radio crystals lay in his palm, together with a tiny codepad and an eye-glass to enlarge it.

“He had all I’d got, Sergei did. I gave it to him. He’d tell me a thing, I’d add it to my life. I’d have a mood, he’d get me straight again. He understood. He could see right into me. It gave me a feeling of being known, which I liked. It’s gone now. It’s been posted back to Moscow.”

His rambling was scaring me. So was his feverish desire to pacify me. If I had been his hangman, he would have been gratefully loosening his tie.

“Your transmitter,” I snapped. “What the hell’s the good of crystal and a codepad if you can’t send!”

At the same terrible pace, he bent his swelled body to the floor and rolled back a corner of the tufted Wilton carpet.

“I haven’t got a knife actually, Ned,” he confessed.

Neither had I, but I dared not leave him, I dared not break my command over him. I crouched beside him. He was peering vaguely at a loose floorboard, trying to raise it with his thick fingertips. Clenching my fist, I punched one end of the board, and had the satisfaction of seeing the other end lift.

“Help yourself,” I said.

It was old stuff, I could have guessed, nothing they cared about any more—a rig of grey boxes, a squash transmitter, a lash-up to be fitted to his receiver. Yet he handed it to me proudly, in its tangled mess.

A terrible anxiety had entered his eyes. “All I am now, you see, Ned, I’m a hole,” he explained. “I don’t mean to be morbid, do I, but I don’t exist. This house isn’t anything either. I used to love it. It looked after me, same as I looked after it. We’d have been nothing without each other, the house and me. It’s hard for you to understand that, I dare say, if you have a wife, what a house is. She’d come between you. You and the house, I mean. Your wife. You and him. Modrian. I loved him, Ned. I was infatuated. ‘You’re too much, Cyril,’ he used to say. ‘Cool down. Relax. Take a holiday. You’re hallucinating.’ I couldn’t. Sergei was my holiday.”

“Camera,” I ordered.

He didn’t read me at once. He was obsessed with Modrian. He looked at me, but it was Modrian he saw.

“Don’t be like that,” he said, not understanding.

“Camera!” I yelled. “For Christ’s sake, Cyril, don’t you ever have a weekend?”

He stood at his wardrobe. Camelot sword blades carved on oak doors.

“Camera!” I shouted louder as he still hesitated. “How can you slip film to a good friend at the opera if you haven’t photographed your files in the first place?”

“Take it easy, Ned. Cool down, will you? Please.” Grinning in a superior way, he reached a hand into the wardrobe. But his eyes were ogling me, saying “Now watch this.” He groped in the wardrobe, smiling at me mysteriously. He pulled out a pair of opera glasses and trained them on me, first the right way, then back to front. Then he handed them to me so that I could do the same to him. I took them in my hands and felt their unnatural weight at once. I turned the central dial until it clicked. He was nodding at me, encouraging me, saying “Yes, Ned, that’s the way.” He grabbed a book from the bookshelf and opened it at the centre, All the World’s Dancers, illustrated. A young girl was doing a pas de chat. Sally too had been at ballet school. He unbuckled the neck strap and I saw that the short end did duty as a measuring chain. He took the binoculars from me and trained them on the book, measured the distance and turned the dial till it clicked.

“See?” he said proudly. “Comprenez, do you? They made it specially. For me. For opera nights. Sergei designed it personally.There’s a lot of idleness in Russia, but Sergei had to have the best. I’d stay in late at the Tank. I’d photograph the whole weekly float for him if I felt like it, then give him the film while we were sitting in the stalls. I’d give it to him in one of the arias, usually—it was a sort of joke between us.” He handed the binoculars back to me and drifted down the room, scrabbling his fingertips on his bare scalp as if he had a full head of hair. Then he held out his hands like someone testing the atmosphere for rain.

“Sergei had the best of me, Ned, and he’s gone. C’est la vie, I say. Now it’s up to you. Have you got the courage? Have you got the wit? That’s why I wrote to you. I had to. I was empty. I didn’t know you, but I needed you. I wanted a good man who understood me. A man I could trust again. It’s up to you, Ned. Now’s your chance. Jump out of yourself and live, I say, while there is yet time. That wife of yours is a bit of a bully, by the sound of her. You’d be well advised to tell her to live her own life instead of yours. I should have advertised, shouldn’t I?” A terrible smile, which he turned full upon me. “Single man, non-smoker, fond of music and wit. I peruse those columns sometimes—who doesn’t? I contemplate replying sometimes, except I’d never know how to break it off if I wasn’t suited. So I wrote you a letter, didn’t I? It was like writing to God in a way, till you came along in your shabby coat and asked a lot of spotty questions, no doubt drafted by HQ. It’s time you stood on your own feet, Ned, same as me. You’re cowed, that’s your trouble. Your wife is partly to blame, in my opinion. I listened to your voice while you were apologising and I was not impressed. You won’t reach out to take. Still, I reckon I could make something of you, and you could make something of me, too. You could help me dig my pool. I could show you music. That’s evens, right? Nobody’s impervious to music. I only did it because of Gorst.” His voice leapt in horror. “Ned! Leave that alone, do you mind! Take your thieving hands off my property, Ned. Now!”

I was fingering his Markus typewriter. It was in the wardrobe where he kept his opera glasses, stowed under a few shirts. Signed A. Patriot, I thought. “A” standing for Anyone’s, I thought. Anyone who loved him. I’d guessed already and he’d told me already, but the sight of it had excited both of us with a sense of ending.

“So why did you break it off with Sergei?” I asked him, still fingering the keys.

But this time he didn’t rise to my flattery. “I didn’t break it off. He did. I haven’t ended it now, not if you’re stepping into his shoes. Put that away. Cover it over the way you found it, thank you.”

I did as he asked. I hid the evidence of the typewriter.

“What did he say?” I asked carelessly. “How did he break it to you? Or did he write and run?” I was thinking of Sally again.

“Not a lot. You don’t need a lot of words when someone’s stuck in London and you’re in Moscow. The silence speaks for itself.”

He wandered over to his radio and sat before it. I followed close on his heels, ready to restrain him.

“Let’s plug her in, shall we, have a nice listen. I could still get a ‘Come back, Cyril,’ you never know.”

I watched him set up his transmitter, then fling open the leaded window and toss out the hairline-aerial, which was like a fishing line with a lead sinker but no hook. I watched him peer at his signals plan and type out SOS and his callsign on his squash recorder. Then he linked the recorder to the transmitter and, with a whizz, sent it into the ether. He did this several times before he switched over to receive, but nothing came and he didn’t expect it to; he was showing me that it never would again.

“He did tell me it was over,” he said, staring at the dials. “I’m not accusing him. He did say.”

“What was over? Spying?”

“Oh no, not spying, that’ll go on for ever, won’t it? Communism, really. He said Communism was just another minority religion these days, but we hadn’t woken up to the fact. ‘Time to hang up your boots, Cyril. Better not come to Russia if you’re rumbled, Cyril. You’d be a bit of an embarrassment to the new climate. We might have to give you back as a gesture. We’re out of date, you see, you and me. Moscow Centre’s decided. It’s hard currency that talks to Moscow these days. They need all the pounds and dollars they can get. So I’m afraid we’re on the shelf, you and me, we’re de trop and slightly déjà vu, not to say a rather large embarrassment to all concerned. Moscow can’t afford to be seen running Foreign Office cypher clerks with access to top secret and above, and they rather regard you and me as more of a liability than an asset, which is the reason why they’re calling me home. My advice to you, Cyril, therefore, is to take a nice long holiday, see a doctor and get some sun and rest, because between you and me you’re showing signs of being slightly barking. We’d like to do right by you but we’re a bit strapped for hard currency, to be frank. If you’d like a modest couple of thousand, I’m sure we can do you a small something in a Swiss bank, but the larger sums are unavailable till further notice.’ He was like a different person talking to me, to be honest, Ned,” he continued, in a tone of valiant incomprehension. “We’d been these great friends and he didn’t want me any more. ‘Don’t take life so hard, Cyril,’ he says. He keeps telling me I’m under strain, too many people inside my head. He’s right really, I suppose. I lived the wrong life, that’s all. You don’t know till it’s too late, though, do you, sometimes? You think you’re one person, you turn out to be another, same as opera. Still, not to worry, I say. Fight another day. Say not the struggle naught availeth. All grist to the mill. Yes.”

He had pulled back his soft shoulders and inflated himself somehow, seeing himself as a person superior to events. “Right, then,” he said, and we returned spryly to the drawing room.

We had finished. All that remained was to mop up the missing answers and obtain an inventory of what he had betrayed.

We had finished, but it was I, not Frewin, who was resisting the final step. Sitting on the arm of the sofa, he turned his head away from me, smiling over-brightly and offering me his long neck for the knife. But he was waiting for a strike that I was refusing to deliver. His round bald head was craned tensely upward while he leaned away from me as if saying, “Do it now, hit me here.” But I couldn’t do it. I made no move towards him. I had the notebook in my hand, and enough written down for him to sign and destroy himself. But I didn’t move. I was on his stupid side, not theirs. Yet what side was that? Was love an ideology? Was loyalty a political party? Or had we, in our rush to divide the world, divided it the wrong way, failing to notice that the real battle lay between those who were still searching, and those who, in order to prevail had reduced their vulnerability to the lowest common factor of indifference? I was on the brink of destroying a man for love. I had led him to the steps of his own scaffold, pretending we were taking a Sunday stroll together.

“Cyril?”

I had to repeat his name.

“What is it?”

“I’m supposed to take a signed statement from you.”

“You can tell HQ that I was furthering understanding between great nations,” he said helpfully. I had the feeling that if he had been able, he would have told them for me. “Tell them I was putting an end to the mindless and incredible hostility I had observed for many years in the Tank. That should keep them quiet.”

“Well, they did guess it would be something like that,” I said. “It’s just that there’s a bit more to it than you understand.

“Also, put in that I wish for a posting. I should like to leave the Tank forthwith and earn out my retirement in a non-classified appointment. I’ll accept demotion, I’ve decided. I’m not short of a bob or two. I’m not proud. A change of work is better than a holiday, I say. Where are you going, Ned? The facilities are the other way.”

I was heading for the door. I was heading for sanity and escape. It was as if my world had reduced itself to this dreadful room. “Just back to the office, Cyril. For an hour or so. I can’t produce your statement out of a hat for you, you know. It’s got to be properly drawn up on the right forms and so forth. Never mind about the weekend. I never like weekends anyway, to be truthful. Holes in the universe, if you want my secret opinion, weekends are.” Why was I speaking with his cadences? “Not to worry, Cyril. I’ll see myself out. You get some rest.”

I wanted to escape before they came. Looking past Frewin’s head to the window, I could see Monty and two of his boys climbing out of their van, and a black police car pulling up outside the house—for the Service, thank God, has no powers of arrest.

But Frewin was talking again, the way the dying go on talking after you think they’re dead.

“I can’t be left alone, Ned, you see. Not any more. I can’t explain it to a stranger, Ned, what I’ve done, not all over again, no one can.”

I heard a footfall on the gravel, then the ring of the doorbell. Frewin’s head came up and his eyes found mine and I watched the knowledge dawn in them, and fade in disbelief, and dawn again. I kept my gaze on him while I opened the front door. Palfrey was standing at Monty’s shoulder. Behind them stood two uniformed police officers and a man called Redman, better known as Bedlam, from the Service’s team of shrinks.

“Marvellous, Ned,” Palfrey murmured, in a hasty aside to me as the others brushed past us into the drawing room. “An absolute coup. You’ll get a medal, I’ll see to it.”

They had put handcuffs on him. It had not occurred to me that they would do that. They had handcuffed his hands behind his back, which made him lift his chin. I walked with him to the van and helped him into it, but by then he had found some kind of dignity of his own, and was no longer bothering whose hand was on his elbow.

—

“It’s not everyone can crack a Modrian-trained spook between breakfast and lunchtime,” said Burr with dour satisfaction. We were eating a muted dinner at Cecconi’s, where he had insisted on taking me the same evening. “Our dear brethren across the Park are beside themselves with rage, anger, indignation and envy, which is never bad either.” But he was speaking to me from a world I had temporarily taken leave of.

“He cracked himself,” I said.

Burr looked sharply at me. “I won’t have that, Ned. I’ve not seen a hand played better. You were a whore. You had to be. We’re all whores. Whores who pay. I’ve had enough of your melancholy, come to think of it—sitting over there in Northumberland Avenue, sulking like a stormcloud, caught between your women. If you can’t take a decision, that’s a decision. Leave your little love and go back to Mabel, if you want my advice, which you don’t. I went back to mine last week and it’s bloody murder.”

Despite myself I discovered I was laughing.

“So what I’ve decided is this,” Burr continued when he had generously consented to another enormous plate of pasta. “You’re to abandon sulking as a way of life, and you’re to abandon the Interrogators’ Pool, in which, in my humble opinion, you have been studying your own narcissistic reflection for somewhat too long. And you’re to unroll your mat on the Fifth Floor and replace Peter Guillam as my Head of Secretariat, which will suit your Calvinist disposition and rid me of a thoroughly idle officer.”

I did what he suggested—all of it. Not because he had suggested it, but because he had spoken into my mind. I told Sally of my decision the next night and, if nothing else, the wretchedness of the occasion served to ease my memories of Frewin. For a few months, at her request, I continued writing to her from Tunbridge Wells, but it became as difficult as writing home from school. Sally was the last of what Burr had called my little loves. Perhaps I had had a notion that, added together, they could make up one big one.

12

“So it’s over,” said Smiley. The glow of the dying fire lit the panelled library, gilding its gappy shelves of dusty books on travel and adventure, and the old, cracked leather of its armchairs, and the foxed photographs of its vanished battalions of uniformed officers with walking sticks, and finally our own assorted faces, turned to Smiley on his throne of honour. Four generations of the Service lounged about the room, but Smiley’s quiet voice and the haze of cigar smoke seemed to bind us in a single family.

I did not remember ever quite inviting Toby to join us, but certainly the staff had been expecting him and the mess waiters had scurried out to greet him as he arrived. In his wide, watered-silk lapels and waistcoat with its Balkan frogging, he looked every inch the Rittmeister.

Burr had hastened directly from Heathrow, changing into his dinner jacket in the back of his chauffeur-driven Rover in deference to George. He had entered almost unremarked, with that soundless dancer’s walk of his that big men seem to manage naturally. Then Monty Arbuck spotted him and at once gave up his seat. Burr had recently become the first man to make Coordinator before the age of thirty-five.

And at Smiley’s feet lounged my last intake of students, the girls like cut flowers in their evening dresses, the boys keen and fresh-faced after their end-of-course exertions in Argyll.

“It’s over,” Smiley repeated.

Was it his sudden stillness that alerted us. His altered voice? Or some almost priestly gesture that he made, a stiffening of his tubby body in piety or resolution. I couldn’t have told you then, I can’t tell you now. But I know I caught no one’s eye, yet with his words I felt at once a kind of tensing among us, as if Smiley were calling us to arms—yet what he was talking about had as much to do with laying them down as taking them up.

“It’s over, and so am I. Absolutely over. Time you rang down the curtain on yesterday’s cold warrior. And please don’t ask me back, ever again. The new time needs new people. The worst thing you can do is imitate us.”

I think he had intended to end there, but with George you do better not to guess. For all I know, he had committed his entire closing speech to memory before he came, worked on it, rehearsed it word for word. In either case our silence now commanded him, as did our need of ceremony. Indeed, so thorough was our dependence on him at that moment that if he had turned and walked from the room without offering us another word, our disappointment would have turned our love to gall.

“I only ever cared about the man,” Smiley announced. And it was typical of his artfulness that he should have opened with a riddle, then waited a moment before setting out to explain it. “I never gave a fig for the ideologies, unless they were mad or evil, I never saw institutions as being worthy of their parts, or policies as much other than excuses for not feeling. Man, not the mass, is what our calling is about. It was man who ended the Cold War in case you didn’t notice. It wasn’t weaponry, or technology, or armies or campaigns. It was just man. Not even Western man either, as it happened, but our sworn enemy in the East, who went into the streets, faced the bullets and the batons and said: we’ve had enough. It was their emperor, not ours, who had the nerve to mount the rostrum and declare he had no clothes. And the ideologies trailed after these impossible events like condemned prisoners, as ideologies do when they’ve had their day. Because they have no heart of their own. They’re the whores and angels of our striving selves. One day, history may tell us who really won. If a democratic Russia emerges—why then, Russia will have been the winner. And if the West chokes on its own materialism, then the West may still turn out to have been the loser. History keeps her secrets longer than most of us. But she has one secret that I will reveal to you tonight in the greatest confidence. Sometimes there are no winners at all. And sometimes nobody needs to lose. You asked me how we should think of Russia today.”

Was that really what we had asked him? What else explained his change of direction? We had talked loosely of the crumbling Soviet Empire, it was true; we had pondered the rise and rise of Japan and the historical shifts of economic power. And in the to-and-fro after dinner, yes, there had been a few passing references to my time in the Russia House, and a few questions touching on the Middle East and Smiley’s work with the Fishing Rights Committee, which, thanks to Toby, had become common knowledge. But I don’t think that was the question George was choosing to answer now.

“You ask,” he went on, “can we ever trust the Bear? You seem to be amused, yet a bit unseated, by the notion that we can talk to the Russians like human beings and find common cause with them in many fields. I will give you several answers at once.

“The first is no, we can never trust the Bear. For one reason, the Bear doesn’t trust himself. The Bear is threatened and the Bear is frightened and the Bear is falling apart. The Bear is disgusted with his past, sick of his present and scared stiff of his future. He often was. The bear is broke, lazy, volatile, incompetent, slippery, dangerously proud, dangerously armed, sometimes brilliant, often ignorant. Without his claws, he’d be just another chaotic member of the Third World. But he isn’t without his claws, not by any means. And he can’t pull his soldiers back from foreign parts overnight, for the good reason that he can’t house them or feed them or employ them, and he doesn’t trust them either. And since this Service is the hired keeper of our national mistrust, we’d be neglecting our duty if we relaxed for one second our watch on the Bear, or on any of his unruly cubs. That’s the first answer.

“The second answer is yes, we can trust the Bear completely. The Bear has never been so trustworthy. The Bear is begging to be part of us, to submerge his problems in us, have his own bank account with us, to shop in our High Street and be accepted as a dignified member of our forest as well as his—all the more so because his society and economy are in tatters, his natural resources are pillaged and his managers incompetent beyond belief. The Bear needs us so desperately that we may safely trust him to need us. The Bear longs to wind back his dreadful history and emerge from the dark of the last seventy or seven hundred years. We are his daylight.

“The problem is, we Westerners do not find it in us naturally to trust the Bear, whether he’s a White Bear or a Red Bear, or both kinds of bear at once, which is what he is at the moment. The Bear may be in perdition without us, but there are lots of us who believe that’s exactly where he belongs. Just as there were people in 1945 who argued that a defeated Germany should remain a rubble desert for the rest of human history.”

Smiley paused and seemed to wonder whether he had said enough. He glanced towards me but I refused to catch his eye. The waiting silence must have convinced him to go on.

“The Bear of the future will be whatever we make of him, and the reasons for making something of him are several. The first is common decency. When you’ve helped a man to escape from wrongful imprisonment, the least you can do is provide him with a bowl of soup and the means to take his place in a free world. The second is so obvious it makes me a little intemperate to have to mention it at all. Russia—even Russia alone, shorn of all her conquests and possessions—is a vast country with a vast population in a crucial part of the globe. Do we leave the Bear to rot?—encourage him to become resentful, backward, an over-armed nation outside our camp? Or make a partner of him in a world that’s changing its shape every day?”

He picked up his balloon glass and peered thoughtfully into it while he swirled the last of his brandy. And I sensed that he was finding it harder to take his leave than he had expected.

“Yes. Well,” he muttered, as if somehow defending himself against his own assertions. “It’s not only our minds we’re going to have to reconstruct, either. It’s the over-mighty modern State we’ve built for ourselves as a bastion against something that isn’t there any more. We’ve given up far too many freedoms in order to be free. Now we’ve got to take them back.”

He gave a shy grin, and I knew that he was trying to break his own spell upon us.

“So while you’re out there striving loyally for the State, perhaps you’ll do me a small favour and lean on its pillars from time to time. It’s got a lot too big for its boots of late. It would be nice if you would cut it down to size. Ned, I’m a bore. Time you sent me home.”

He stood up abruptly, as if shaking himself free of something that threatened to hold him too tight. Then, very deliberately, he treated himself to a last slow look round the room—not at the students any more, but at the old photographs and trophies of his time, apparently committing them to memory. He was taking leave of his house after he had bequeathed it to his heirs. Then, with a great flurry, he launched a search for his spectacles, before he discovered he was wearing them. Then he drew back his shoulders and marched purposefully to the door as two students hastened to open it for him.

“Yes. Well. Goodnight. And thanks. Oh, and tell them to spy on the ozone layer, will you, Ned? It’s dreadfully hot in St. Agnes for the time of year.”

He left without looking back.

13

The rituals of retirement from the Service are probably no more harrowing than any other professional leave-taking, but they have their own poignancy. There are the ceremonies of remembering—lunches with old contacts, office parties, brave handshakes with tearful senior secretaries, courtesy visits to friendly services. And there are the ceremonies of forgetting, where snip by snip you sever yourself from the special knowledge not given to other mortals. For someone who has spent a lifetime in the Service, including three years in Burr’s inmost Secretariat, these can be lengthy and repetitive affairs, even if the secrets themselves have retired long before you. Closeted in Palfrey’s musty lawyer’s office, mercifully quite often in the glow of a good lunch, I signed away one piece after another of my past, obediently mumbling after him the same shy little English oath, and listening each time to his insincere warnings of retribution should I be tempted by vanity or money to transgress.

And I would be deceiving us both if I pretended that the cumulative burden of these ceremonies did not slowly weigh me down, and make me wish that my day of execution could be brought forward—or, better still, regarded as accomplished. For day by day I began to feel like the man who is reconciled to death but has to spend the last of his energies consoling those who will survive him.

It was a considerable relief to me, therefore, when seated once more in Palfrey’s wretched lair with three days still to go before my final freedom or imprisonment, I received a peremptory summons to Burr’s presence.

“I’ve got a job for you. You’ll hate it,” he assured me, and slammed down the phone.

He was still fuming when I reached his gaudy modern office. “You’re to read his file, then drive into the country and reason with him. You’re not to offend him, but if you should happen to break his neck by accident you’ll not find me over-critical.”

“Who is he?”

“Some leftover relic of Percy Alleline’s. One of those beer-bellied tycoons from the City that Percy liked to play his golf with.”

I glanced at the cover of the top volume. “BRADSHAW,” I read, “Sir Anthony Joyston.” And in small letters underneath: “asset index,” meaning that the fileholder was perceived as an ally of the Service.

“You’re to crawl to him, that’s an order. Appeal to his better nature,” said Burr in the same acid tone. “Strike the elder statesman’s note. Bring him back into the fold.”

“Who says I am?”

“The sainted Foreign Office. Who do you think?”

“Why don’t they do their own crawling?” I said, peering curiously at the career synopsis on page 1. “I thought that was what they were paid for.”

“They tried. They sent a Junior Minister, cap in hand. Sir Anthony is crawlproof. He also knows too much. He can name names and point fingers. Sir Anthony Bradshaw”—Burr announced, raising his voice in a North Country salvo of indignation—“Sir Anthony Joyston Bradshaw,” he corrected himself, “is one of England’s natural shits, who in the course of affecting to be of service to his country has picked up more knowledge of the disreputable activities of Her Majesty’s Government than HMG ever picked up from Sir Anthony in regard to her adversaries. He accordingly has HMG by the balls. Your brief is to invite him, very courteously, to relax his grip. Your weapons for this task are your grey locks and your palpable good nature, which I have observed that you are not above putting to perfidious use. He’s expecting you at five this evening and he likes punctuality. Kitty’s cleared a desk for you in the anteroom.”

It was not long before Burr’s outrage was explained to me. There are few things more riling in our trade than having to cope with the unappetising leftovers of one’s predecessors, and Sir Anthony Joyston Bradshaw, self-styled merchant venturer and City magnate, was a gruesome example of the type. Alleline had befriended him—at his club, where else? Alleline had recruited him. Alleline had sponsored him through a string of shady transactions of dubious value to anybody but Sir Anthony, and there were uncomfortable suggestions that Alleline might have taken a cut. Where scandal had threatened, Alleline had sheltered Sir Anthony under the Circus’s compendious umbrella. Worse still, many of the doors that Alleline had opened for Bradshaw appeared to have stayed open, for the reason that nobody had thought to close them. And it was through one of these that Bradshaw had now walked, to the shrill outrage of the Foreign Office and half of Whitehall.

I drew an Ordnance Survey map from Library and a Ford Granada from the car pool. At half past two, with the file pretty much in my head, I set off. Sometimes you forget how beautiful England is. I passed through Newbury and climbed a winding hill lined with beech trees whose long shadows were cut like trenches into the golden stubble. A smell of cricket fields filled the car. I mounted a crest, castles of white cloud waited to receive me. I must have been thinking of my childhood, I suppose, for I had a sudden urge to drive straight to them, a thing I had often dreamed of as a boy. The car dipped again and fell free, and suddenly a whole valley opened below me, strewn with hamlets, churches, folding fields and forests.

I passed a pub, and soon a great pair of closed and gilded gates appeared between stone gateposts capped by carved lions. Beside them stood a neat white gatehouse newly thatched. A fit young man lowered his face to my open window and studied me with sniper’s eyes.

“To see Sir Anthony,” I said.

“Name, sir?”

“Carlisle,” I replied, using an alias for the last time.

The boy disappeared into the lodge; the gates opened, then closed as soon as I was through them. The park was bordered by a high brick wall—there must have been a couple of miles of it. Fallow deer lay in the shade of chestnut trees. The drive lifted and the house appeared before me. It was golden and immaculate and very large. The centre section was William and Mary. The wings looked later, but not much. A lake lay before it, vegetable gardens and greenhouses behind. The old stables had been converted to offices, with clever outside staircases and glazed external corridors. A gardener was watering the orangerie.

The drive skirted the lake and brought me to the front sweep. Two Arab mares and a llama eyed me over the fence of a lunging ring. A young butler came down the steps, dressed in black trousers and a linen jacket.

“Shall I park your car round the back, Mr. Carlisle, once you’ve been introduced?” he asked. “Sir Anthony does like a clear façade, when he can get one, sir.”

I gave him the keys and followed him up the wide steps. There were nine, though I can’t imagine why I counted, except that it was something we had taught on the Sarratt awareness course, and in recent weeks my life seemed to have become less a continuation than a mosaic of past ages and experiences. If Ben had come striding up to me and grasped my hand, I don’t think I would have been particularly surprised. If Monica or Sally had appeared to accuse me, I would have had my answers ready.

I entered a huge hall. A splendid double staircase rose to an open landing. Portraits of noble ancestors, all men, stared down at me, but somehow I didn’t believe they were of one family, or could have lived here long without their women. I passed through a billiards room and noticed that the table and cues were new. I suppose I saw everything so clearly because I was treating each experience as my last. I followed the butler through a stately drawing room and traversed a second room that was got up as a hall of mirrors, and a third that was supposed to be informal, with a television set the size of one of those old ice-cream tricycles that used to call at my preparatory school on sunny evenings just like this. I arrived at a pair of majestic doors and waited while the butler knocked. Then waited again for a response. If Bradshaw were an Arab, he would keep me standing here for hours, I thought, remembering Beirut.

Finally I heard a male voice drawl “Come,” and the butler took a pace into the room and announced, “A Mr. Carlisle, Sir Anthony, from London.”

I had not told him I had come from London.

The butler stepped aside and gave me a first view of my host, though it took a little longer before my host had his first view of Mr. Carlisle.

He was sitting at a twelve-foot desk with brass inlay and cabriole legs. Modern oil paintings of spoilt children hung behind him. His correspondence was stacked in trays of thick stitched hide. He was a big, well-nourished man, and clearly a big worker also, for he had stripped to his shirt, which was blue with a midwife’s white collar, and he was working in his braces, which were red. Also he was too busy to acknowledge me. First he read, using a gold pen to guide his eye. Then he signed, using the gold pen to write. Then he meditated, still in a downward direction, using the tip of the gold pen as a focus for his great thoughts. His gold cufflinks were as big as old pennies. Then at last he laid the pen down and, with a wounded—even accusatory—air, he raised his head, first to discover me, then to measure me by standards I had yet to ascertain.

At the same moment, by a happy chance of nature, a shaft of low sunlight from the French windows landed on his face, and I was able to measure him in return: the self-sadness of his pouchy eyes, as if he should be pitied for his wealth, the straight small mouth set tense and crooked in the puckered chins, the air of resolution formed of weakness, of boyhood suspicions in a grown-up world. At forty-five, this fattened child was unappeased, blaming some absent parent for his comforts.

Suddenly, Bradshaw was walking towards me. Stalking? Wading? There is an English walk these days peculiar to men of power, and it is a confection of several things at once. Self-confidence is one, lazy sportiveness another. But there is also menace in it, and impatience, and a leisured arrogance, which comes with the crablike splaying of elbows that give way to nobody, and the boxer’s slouch of the shoulders, and the playful springiness in the knees. You knew long before you shook his hand that he had no truck with a whole category of life that ranged from art to public transport. You were silently forewarned to keep your distance if you were that kind of fool.

“You’re one of Percy’s boys,” he told me, in case I didn’t know, while he sampled my hand, and was duly disappointed. “Well, well. Long time no see. Must be ten years. More. Have a drink. Have champagne. Have what you like.” An order: “Summers. Get us a bottle of shampoo, bucket of ice, two glasses, then bugger off. And nuts!” he shouted after him. “Cashews. Brazils. Masses of fucking nuts—like nuts?” he enquired of me, with a sudden and disarming intimacy.

I said I did.

“Good. Me too. Love ’em. You’ve come to read me the riot act. Right? Go on. Not made of glass.”

He was flinging open the French windows so that I could have a better view of what he owned. He had chosen a different walk for this manoeuvre, more march, more swinging the arms to the rhythm of unheard martial music. When he had opened the doors, he gave me his back to look at, and kept his arms up, palms propped against the door posts, like a martyr waiting for the arrow. And the City haircut, I thought: thick at the collar and little horns above the ears. In golds and browns and greens, the valley faded softly into eternity. A nanny and a small child were walking among the deer. She wore a brown hat with the brim up all the way round and a brown uniform like a Girl Guide’s. The lawn was set for croquet.

“We’re just appealing to you, that’s all, Sir Anthony,” I said. “Asking you another favour, like the ones you did for Percy. After all, it was Percy who got you your knighthood, wasn’t it?”

“Fuck Percy. Dead, isn’t he? Nobody gives me anything, thank you. Help myself to it. What do you want? Spit it out, will you? I’ve had one sermon already. Portly Savoury from the Foreign Office. Used to flog him when he was my fag at school. Wimp then, wimp now.”

The arms stayed up there, the back was braced and aggressive. I might have spoken, but I felt strangely off key. Three days before my retirement, I was beginning to feel I hardly knew the real world at all. Summers brought champagne, uncorked it and filled two glasses, which he handed to us on a silver tray. Bradshaw snatched one and strode into the garden. I trailed after him to the centre of a grass alley. Azaleas and rhododendrons grew high to either side of us. At the farther end, a fountain played in a stone pond.

“Did you get a lordship of the manor when you bought this house?” I asked, thinking a little small talk might give me time to collect myself.

“Suppose I did?” Bradshaw retorted, and I realised he did not wish to be reminded that he had bought his house rather than inherited it.

“Sir Anthony,” I said.

“Well?”

“It’s concerning your relationship with a Belgian company called Astrasteel.”

“Never heard of ’em.”

“But you are associated with them, aren’t you?” I said, with a smile.

“Aren’t now, never was. Told Savoury the same.”

“But you have holdings in Astrasteel, Sir Anthony,” I protested patiently.

“Zilch. Absolutely bugger all. Different bloke, wrong address. Told him.”

“But you do have a one hundred percent holding in a company called Allmetal of Birmingham Limited, Sir Anthony. And Allmetal of Birmingham does own a company called Eurotech Funding & Imports Limited of Bermuda, doesn’t it? And Eurotech of Bermuda does own Astrasteel of Belgium, Sir Anthony. So we may take it that a certain loose association might be said to exist between yourself on the one hand, and this company that is owned by the company you own on the other.” I was still smiling, still reasoning with him, joking him along.

“No holdings, no dividends, no influence over Astrasteel’s affairs. Arm’s length, whole thing. Told Savoury, tell the same to you.”

“Nevertheless, when you were invited by Alleline—back in the old days, I know, but not so long ago, was it?—to make deliveries of certain commodities to certain countries not strictly on the official shopping list for those commodities, Astrasteel was the company you used. And Astrasteel did what you told them to do. Because if they hadn’t done, Percy would not have come to you—would he? You’d have been no use to him.” My smile felt stiff on my face. “We’re not policemen, Sir Anthony, we’re not the taxman. I’m merely indicating to you certain relationships that stand—as you insist—beyond the law’s reach, and were indeed designed—with Percy’s active help—to do just that.”

My speech sounded so ill composed to me, so unpointed that I assumed at first that Bradshaw did not propose to bother with it at all.

And in a way I was right, for he merely shrugged and said, “Fuck’s that got to do with anything?”

“Well quite a lot actually.” I could feel my blood beginning to rise, and there was nothing I could do to check it. “We’re asking you to lay off. Stop. You’ve got your knighthood, you’re worth a fortune, you have a duty to your country today just as you had twelve years ago. So get out of the Balkans and stop stirring it with the Serbs and stop stirring it in Central Africa, stop offering them guns galore on tick, and stop trying to cash in on wars that may never happen if you and other like-minded spirits keep your fingers out of them. You’re British. You’ve more money in your pocket than most of us will touch in a lifetime. Stop. Just stop. That’s all we’re asking. Times have changed. We’re not playing those games any more.”

For a moment I fancied I had impressed him, for he turned his unlit gaze on me, and looked me over as if I were someone who might after all be worth buying. Then his interest flickered out again and he relapsed into despondency.

“It’s your country talking to you, Bradshaw,” I said, now with real anger. “For Christ’s sake, man, what more do you need? Haven’t you got even the vestige of a conscience?”

I will give you Bradshaw’s reply as I transcribed it, for at Burr’s request I had slipped a recorder into my jacket pocket and Bradshaw’s sawing nasal tones ensured a perfect reproduction. I will give you his voice too, as nearly as I can write it down. He spoke English as if it were his second language, but it was the only one he had. He spoke in what my son Adrian tells me is called “slur,” which is a slack-mouthed Belgravia cockney that contrives to make mice out of mouse and dispenses almost entirely with the formality of pronouns. It has a vocabulary, naturally: nothing rises but it escalates, no opportunity is without a window, no minor event occurs that is not sensational. It also has a pedantic inaccuracy which is supposed to distinguish it from the unwashed, and explains gems like “as for you and I.” But even without my tape recorder, I like to think I would have remembered every word, for his speech was like an evening war-cry from a world I was leaving to itself.

“I’m sorry,” he began, which was a lie to start with. “Did I understand you were appealing to my conscience? Good. Right. Make a statement for the record. Mind? Statement begins here. Point One. There is only one point actually. I don’t give a fart. The difference between me and other charlies is, I admit it. If a horde of niggers—yes, I said niggers, I meant niggers—if these niggers shot each other dead with my toys tomorrow and I made a bob out of it, great news by me. Because if I don’t sell ’em the goods, some other charlie will. Government used to understand that. If they’ve gone soft, tough titty on ’em. Point Two. Question: heard what the tobacco boys are up to these days? Flogging off high-toxic tobacco to the fuzzy-wuzzies and telling ’em it makes ’em horny and cures the common cold. Tobacco boys give a fart? Sit at home having nervous breakdowns about spreading lung cancer among the natives? The fuck they do. Doing a little creative selling, period. Take drugs. Don’t use ’em personally. Don’t need ’em. Never mind. If willing seller is doing business with willing buyer, my advice is step aside, let them slug it out, and bloody good luck to ’em. If drugs don’t kill ’em, the atmosphere will or they’ll get barbecued by the global warming. British, you said. Matter of fact, rather proud of it. Also rather proud of one’s school. Empire man. Happens to be the tradition one’s inherited. When people get in one’s way, I break ’em. Or they break me. Discipline is rather up one’s street too, actually. Order. Accepting responsibilities of one’s class and education, and beating the foreigner at his own game. Thought you people were rather committed to that one, too. Error, apparently. Failure of communication. What one cares about is quality of life. This life. Standards actually. Old word. Don’t care. These standards. Pompous, you’re thinking. All right, I’m pompous. Fuck you. I’m Pharaoh, right? If a few thousand slaves have to die so that I can build this pyramid, nature. And if they can make me die for their fucking pyramid, bloody good on ’em. Know what I’ve got in my cellar? Iron rings. Rusty iron rings, built into the wall when this house was built. Know what they were for? Slaves. That’s nature too. Original owner of this house—man who built this house—man who paid for it, man who sent his architect to Italy, learn his trade—that man owned slaves, and had his slave quarters in the cellar of this house. Think there aren’t slaves today? Think capital doesn’t depend on slaves. Jesus Christ, what kind of shop do you run? One doesn’t normally talk philosophy, but I’m afraid one doesn’t like being preached to either. Won’t have it, you see. Not in my house, thank you. Annoys me. Don’t bug easily, rather famous for one’s cool. But one does have a certain view of nature; one gives work to people and one takes one’s share.”

I said nothing, and that is on the tape too.

In the face of an absolute, what can you say? All my life I had battled against an institutionalised evil. It had had a name and most often a country as well. It had had a corporate purpose, and had met a corporate end. But the evil that stood before me now was a wrecking infant in our own midst, and I became an infant in return, disarmed, speechless and betrayed. For a moment, it was as if my whole life had been fought against the wrong enemy. Then it was as if Bradshaw had personally stolen the fruits of my victory. I remembered Smiley’s aphorism about the right people losing the Cold War, and the wrong people winning it, and I thought of repeating it to him as some sort of insult, but I would have been beating the air. I thought of telling him that now we had defeated Communism, we were going to have to set about defeating capitalism, but that wasn’t really my point, the evil was not in the system, but in the man. And besides, by then he was asking me whether I wanted to stay to dinner, at which I politely declined, and left.

In the event, it was Burr who gave me dinner, and I am pleased to say I don’t remember much about it. Two days later, I turned in my Head Office pass.

—

You see your face. It’s no one you remember. You wonder where you put your love, what you found, what you were after. You want to say: “I slew the dragon, I left the world a safer place.” You can’t really, not these days. Perhaps you never could.

We have a good life, Mabel and I. We don’t talk about things we can’t change. We don’t cross each other. We’re civilised. We’ve bought a cottage on the coast. There’s a long garden there I’d like to get my hands on, plant a few trees, make a vista to the sea. There’s a sailing club for poor kids I’m involved in; we bring them down from Hackney, they enjoy it. There’s a move to draft me for the local council. Mabel does the church. I go back to Holland now and then. I still have a few relations there.

Burr drops in from time to time. I like that in him. He gets on well with Mabel, as you’d expect. He doesn’t try to be wise. He chats to her about her watercolours. He’s not judgmental. We open a good bottle, cook a chicken. He brings me up to date, drives back to London. Of Smiley, nothing, but that’s the way he wanted it. He hates nostalgia, even if he’s part of other people’s.

There’s no such thing as retirement, really. Sometimes there’s knowing too much, and not being able to do much about it, but that’s just age, I’m sure. I think a lot. I’m stepping out with my reading. I talk to people, ride on buses. I’m a newcomer to the overt world but I’m learning.

For Alec Guinness, with affection and thanks

An Essay by the Author

In The Secret Pilgrim I determined to make a last farewell of the Cold War, of George Smiley and all his people, and of certain elusive themes that had been nagging at me through two-and-a-half decades of writing. I wanted to consider who we had been and who we had become, and take a look at the future shape of the two superpowers, now that—with some reluctance on both sides—they had suspended, at least for the time being, their games of Russian roulette. I had already taken leave of the Cold War twice before, at least in my own mind: in Smiley’s People, which ended for all time, as far as I was concerned, the standoff between Smiley and Karla; and in A Perfect Spy, in which the despairing protagonist doesn’t know or care anymore whether he belongs to the East or West.

But the elusive themes still constituted unfinished business. Some of them remained unexplored until later books. Now that the West had dealt with rogue forms of communism, I wanted to ask, How was it going to deal with rogue forms of capitalism? In The Secret Pilgrim, Smiley pops the question, but I didn’t really get round to addressing it until Single & Single and The Constant Gardener. A more banal theme that had always bugged me was the element of human incompetence in the world of espionage. Part of the baggage that a spywriter has to address is the conviction of the man on the street that spies are somehow smarter and more adept at life than are ordinary folk. Spies don’t lose their car keys or forget the combinations to their safes or accidentally address their new wives by the names of their last ones. Well, of course they don’t; they’re spies, they’re trained and all that—handpicked, aren’t they? And we tell ourselves that despite the endless news stories of cock-up that reach us by way of disgruntled defectors like Shayler or Tomlinson, or through the daily press: briefcases stuffed with priceless secrets left on the London Underground, computer disks containing the names of informants picked up in secondhand radio stores, and so on.

Even when a Chinook helicopter crashes on its way from Northern Ireland, killing a galaxy of intelligence officers, we seem as a nation reluctant to ask ourselves how anyone could be such a purblind idiot as to put all these important people onto the same flight—even if we discount the fact that the perils of such flights had been abundantly clear to the evasive Ministry of Defence. There must be a reason, we tell ourselves, falling back on our faith in the occult. Spies do things differently. They’re not as daft as we are. Whereas, as Arthur Koestler said famously of his fellow Jews, spies are the same as us, but more so.

But when from time to time I had tried—for instance in 1963 when I was writing The Looking Glass War—to use cock-up rather than conspiracy as the dramatic outline of my story, I failed to take the reader with me. And in a sense I had only myself to blame, for the book before it had been The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, in which conspiracy, and conspiracy only, ruled the plot. First you tell us one thing, now you tell us the opposite was the reader’s justifiable grouse, and I paid a high price for my presumption, even if I never gave up my personal conviction that incompetence, not conspiracy, is what makes the secret world go round.

So in The Secret Pilgrim, you get a hyper-nervous young British intelligence officer who leaves a handwritten breakdown of his East German spy network on the roof of his car, and thereby destroys both himself and his luckless agents, and a pathologically solitary cypher clerk who deludes himself into believing he is a star Russian language student, and thus delivers himself to the KGB. The poor clerk wasn’t the victim of a cock-up, exactly, but rather of the fatal triviality of human motive, of the hairline distinction between the harmlessly eccentric and the dangerously mad. Not nearly enough has been written about the phenomenon of seeming sanity among people who turn out to be barking mad. It will be years before anybody is brave enough to put a name to the motive that drove the recently unmasked senior FBI operative, [Robert] Hanssen, to betray his service for so long and with such extraordinary devotion, but the signs are that he was a seemingly sane man whose interior reality was mayhem.

But the character who haunts me most in these pages is neither the poor cypher clerk nor the Berlin trainee. Nor even the old soldier, Sergeant Major Hawthorne, who believed that his criminal thug of a son was a loyal British secret agent acting a part; and was allowed to persist in this belief by George Smiley, who gave him a pair of precious gold cufflinks as spurious proof of the boy’s service before the secret mast.

It is Hansen. Not the wretched real-life Hanssen of the FBI to whom I have just referred, but Hansen my Dutchman and Asian scholar. Hansen my British agent and lapsed Jesuit priest, whose story you will find in chapter nine. Very few characters in my writing are drawn from actual people, and those that are tend to be a mishmash of several. Very few episodes have a basis in fact either, though I confess that the story of Smiley’s cufflinks is descended from an incident attributed to Sir Maurice Oldfield, once chief of MI6.

But my character Hansen does for once have a real-life model and his name is François Bizot, a French scholar of Buddhism whom I first met in Cambodia and then in Thailand when I was researching The Honourable Schoolboy, and who generously gave me permission to adapt his true-life story to my spurious fictional purposes. And Bizot, I am delighted to say, last year published his own much-praised account of the events in his life that I have traduced. And Bizot’s book, rightly hailed in France as a masterpiece, called Le portail—The Gate—and winner of a string of French literary prizes, will be published in English this year.

And it is a measure of the amoral ways of us fiction writers—of our secret thefts and wanton misrepresentations—that in my fictional story of Bizot’s heroism I make of him precisely the person he empathically never was. He was not a Western lackey, he was not an imperialist spy masquerading as a Buddhist scholar, he was not the fascist running dog that Pol Pot and his henchman would have him be. He was Bizot, nobody’s creature but his own—which was why, against all the probabilities of those dreadful times, his Khmer Rouge inquisitors let him go. By sheer determination and force of character, Bizot had convinced his would-be executioners of his innocence.

At the time of its publication I dedicated The Secret Pilgrim to Alec Guinness, in acknowledgment of his portrayal of George Smiley in the BBC television series, and of a modest friendship that persisted until his recent death. But Guinness was always humbled, as I am, by the gap between the world of the imagination and the world of the real. So he would certainly join me in raising a toast to Bizot, a real man among my cast of imaginary souls.

David Cornwell

By John le Carré

Call for the Dead

A Murder of Quality

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold

The Looking Glass War

A Small Town in Germany

The Naïve and Sentimental Lover

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

The Honorable Schoolboy

Smiley’s People

The Little Drummer Girl

A Perfect Spy

The Russia House

The Secret Pilgrim

The Night Manager

Our Game

The Tailor of Panama

Single & Single

The Constant Gardener

Absolute Friends

The Mission Song

A Most Wanted Man

Our Kind of Traitor

A Delicate Truth

A Legacy of Spies

PHOTO: © MARK MATHER

JOHN LE CARRÉ was born in 1931. After attending the universities of Berne and Oxford, he taught at Eton and spent five years in the British Foreign Service. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, his third book, secured him a worldwide reputation. He divides his time between England and the Continent.

www.johnlecarre.com

Facebook.com/johnlecarreofficial

Twitter:

@lecarre_news

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A LEGACY OF SPIES

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Acknowledgements

Follow Penguin

By the same author

Call for the Dead

A Murder of Quality

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold

The Looking Glass War

A Small Town in Germany

The Naive and Sentimental Lover

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

The Honourable Schoolboy

Smiley’s People

The Little Drummer Girl

A Perfect Spy

The Russia House

The Secret Pilgrim

The Night Manager

Our Game

The Tailor of Panama

Single & Single

The Constant Gardener

Absolute Friends

The Mission Song

A Most Wanted Man

Our Kind of Traitor

A Delicate Truth

The Pigeon Tunnel

Every man is born as many men and dies as a single one.

Heidegger (attrib.)

1

What follows is a truthful account, as best I am able to provide it, of my role in the British deception operation, codenamed Windfall, that was mounted against the East German Intelligence Service (Stasi) in the late nineteen fifties and early sixties, and resulted in the death of the best British secret agent I ever worked with, and of the innocent woman for whom he gave his life.

A professional intelligence officer is no more immune to human feelings than the rest of mankind. What matters to him is the extent to which he is able to suppress them, whether in real time or, in my case, fifty years on. Until a couple of months ago, lying in bed at night in the remote farmstead in Brittany that is my home, listening to the honk of cattle and the bickering of hens, I resolutely fought off the accusing voices that from time to time attempted to disrupt my sleep. I was too young, I protested, I was too innocent, too naive, too junior. If you’re looking for scalps, I told them, go to those grand masters of deception, George Smiley and his master, Control. It was their refined cunning, I insisted, their devious, scholarly intellects, not mine, that delivered the triumph and the anguish that was Windfall. It is only now, having been held to account by the Service to which I devoted the best years of my life, that I am driven in age and bewilderment to set down, at whatever cost, the light and dark sides of my involvement in the affair.

How I came to be recruited to the Secret Intelligence Service in the first place – the ‘Circus’ as we Young Turks called it in those supposedly halcyon days when we were quartered, not in a grotesque fortress beside the River Thames, but in a fustian Victorian pile of red brick, built on the curve of Cambridge Circus – remains as much of a mystery to me as do the circumstances of my birth; and the more so since the two events are inseparable.

My father, whose acquaintance I barely remember, was according to my mother the wastrel son of a wealthy Anglo-French family from the English midlands, a man of rash appetites, fast-diminishing inheritance and a redeeming love of France. In the summer of 1930, he was taking the waters in the spa town of Saint-Malo on Brittany’s north coast, frequenting the casinos and

maisons closes

and generally cutting a dash. My mother, sole offspring of a long line of Breton farmers, at that time aged twenty, also happened to be in town, performing the duties of a bridesmaid at the wedding of the daughter of a wealthy cattle auctioneer. Or so she claimed. However, she is a single source, not above a little decoration when the facts were against her, and it would not at all surprise me if she came into town for less upright purposes.

After the ceremony, so her story goes, she and a fellow bridesmaid, the better for a glass or two of champagne, played truant from the reception and, still in their finery, took an evening stroll along the crowded promenade, where my father was also strolling with intent. My mother was pretty and flighty, her friend less so. A whirlwind romance followed. My mother was understandably coy about the pace of it. A second wedding was hastily arranged. I was the product. My father, it appears, was not naturally connubial, and even in the early years of marriage contrived to be more absent than present.

But now the story takes an heroic turn. War, as we know,

changes everything, and in a trice it had changed my father. Scarcely had it been declared than he was hammering on the doors of the British War Office, volunteering his services to whoever would have him. His mission, according to my mother, was to save France single-handed. If it was also to escape the ties of family, that is a heresy I was never permitted to utter in my mother’s presence. The British had a newly formed Special Operations Executive, famously tasked by Winston Churchill himself with ‘setting Europe ablaze’. The coastal towns of south-west Brittany were a hotbed of German submarine activity and our local town of Lorient, a former French naval base, the hottest bed of all. Five times parachuted into the Breton flatlands, my father allied himself with whatever Resistance groups he could find, caused his share of mayhem and died a gruesome death in Rennes prison at the hands of the Gestapo, leaving behind him an example of selfless dedication impossible for any son to match. His other legacy was a misplaced faith in the British public school system, which notwithstanding his dismal performance at his own British public school condemned me to the same fate.

The earliest years of my life had been passed in paradise. My mother cooked and prattled, my grandfather was severe but kindly, the farm prospered. At home we spoke Breton. At the Catholic primary school in our village, a beautiful young nun who had spent six months in Huddersfield as an au pair taught me the rudiments of the English language and, by national decree, French. In the school holidays I ran barefoot in the fields and cliffs around our farmstead, harvested buckwheat for my mother’s crêpes, tended an old sow called Fadette and played wild games with the children of the village.

The future meant nothing to me until it struck.

At Dover, a plump lady called Murphy, cousin to my late father, detached me from my mother’s hand and took me to her

house in Ealing. I was eight years old. Through the train window I saw my first barrage balloons. Over supper, Mr Murphy said it would all be over in months and Mrs Murphy said it wouldn’t, both of them speaking slowly and repeating themselves for my benefit. The next day Mrs Murphy took me to Selfridges and bought me a school uniform, taking care to keep the receipts. The day after that, she stood on the platform at Paddington station, and wept while I waved goodbye to her with my new school cap.

The Anglicization wished on me by my father needs little elaboration. There was a war on. Schools must put up with what they got. I was no longer Pierre but Peter. My poor English was ridiculed by my comrades, my Breton-accented French by my beleaguered teachers. Our little village of Les Deux Eglises, I was informed almost casually, had been overrun by Germans. My mother’s letters arrived, if at all, in brown envelopes with British stamps and London postmarks. It was only years later that I was able to imagine through whose brave hands they must have passed. Holidays were a blur of boys’ camps and proxy parents. Redbrick preparatory schools turned into granite-grey public schools, but the curriculum stayed the same: the same margarine, the same homilies on patriotism and Empire, the same random violence, careless cruelty and unappeased, unaddressed sexual desire. One spring evening in 1944, shortly before the D-Day landings, the headmaster called me to his study and told me that my father had died a soldier’s death, and that I should be proud of him. For security reasons, no further explanation was available.

I was sixteen when, at the end of a particularly tedious summer term, I returned to peacetime Brittany a half-grown English misfit. My grandfather had died. A new companion named Monsieur Emile was sharing my mother’s bed. I did not care for Monsieur Emile. One half of Fadette had been given to the

Germans, the other to the Resistance. In flight from the contradictions of my childhood and fuelled by a sense of filial obligation, I stowed away on a train to Marseilles and, adding a year to my age, attempted to enlist in the French Foreign Legion. My quixotic venture came to a summary end when the Legion, making a rare concession to my mother’s entreaties on the grounds that I was not foreign but French, released me back into captivity, this time to the London suburb of Shoreditch, where my father’s unlikely stepbrother Markus ran a trading company importing precious furs and carpets from the Soviet Union – except he always called it Russia – and had offered to teach me the trade.

Uncle Markus remains another unsolved mystery in my life. I do not know to this day whether his offer of employment was in some way inspired by my later masters. When I asked him how my father had died, he shook his head in disapproval – not of my father, but of the crassness of my question. Sometimes I wonder whether it is possible to be born secret, in the way people are born rich, or tall, or musical. Markus was not mean, or tight, or unkind. He was just secret. He was middle-European, his name was Collins. I never learned what it was before that. He spoke accented English very fast, but I never learned what his mother tongue was. He called me Pierre. He had a lady friend named Dolly who ran a hat shop in Wapping and collected him from the door of the warehouse on Friday afternoons. But I never knew where they went for their weekends, whether they were married to each other, or to other people. Dolly had a Bernie in her life, but I never knew whether Bernie was her husband, her son or her brother, because Dolly was born secret too.

And I don’t know even in retrospect whether the Collins Trans-Siberian Fur & Fine Carpet Company was a bona fide trading house, or a cover company set up for the purpose of intelligence gathering. Later, when I tried to find out, I met a blank wall.

I knew that every time Uncle Markus was preparing to visit a trade fair, whether in Kiev, Perm or Irkutsk, he trembled a lot; and that when he came back, he drank a lot. And that in the days leading up to a trade fair, a well-spoken Englishman called Jack would swing by, charm the secretaries, pop his head round the door to the sorting room and call ‘hullo, Peter, all well with you?’ – never Pierre – then take Markus out to a good lunch somewhere. And after lunch, Markus would come back to his office and lock the door.

Jack claimed to be a broker in fine sable, but I know now that what he really dealt in was intelligence, because when Markus announced that his doctor wouldn’t allow him to do fairs any more, Jack suggested I come to lunch with him instead, and took me to the Travellers Club in Pall Mall, and asked me whether I would have preferred life in the Legion, and if I was serious about any of my girlfriends, and why I had fled my public school considering I’d been captain of boxing, and whether I had ever thought of doing something useful for my country, by which he meant England, because if I felt I’d missed out on the war on account of my age, this was my chance to catch up. He mentioned my father once only, over lunch, in terms so casual that I might have supposed the topic could equally well have slipped his memory altogether:

‘Oh, and concerning your much revered late papa. Strictly off the record, and I never said this. All right by you?’

‘Yes.’

‘He was a very brave chap indeed, and did a bloody good job for his country. Both his countries. Enough said?’

‘If you say so.’

‘So here’s to him.’

Here’s to him, I agreed, and we drank a silent toast.

At an elegant country house in Hampshire, Jack and his colleague Sandy, and an efficient girl called Emily, whom I

immediately fell in love with, gave me the short course in clearing a dead letter box in mid-town Kiev – actually a chunk of loose masonry in the wall of an old tobacco kiosk – of which they had a replica set up in the orangery. And how to read the safety signal that would tell me it was all right to clear it – in this case a piece of tattered green ribbon tied to a railing. And how afterwards to indicate that I had cleared the letter box, by tossing an empty Russian cigarette packet into a litter bin next to a bus shelter.

‘And maybe, Peter, when you apply for your Russian visa, better to use your French passport rather than your Brit version,’ he suggested breezily, and reminded me that Uncle Markus had an affiliate company in Paris. ‘And Emily’s off-limits, by the way,’ he added, in case I was thinking otherwise, which I was.

*

And that was my first run, my first ever assignment for what I later came to know as the Circus, and my first vision of myself as a secret warrior in my dead father’s image. I can no longer enumerate the other runs I made over the next couple of years, a good half-dozen at least, to Leningrad, Gdansk and Sofia, then to Leipzig and Dresden, and all of them, so far as I ever knew, uneventful, if you took away the business of gearing yourself up, then gearing yourself down again afterwards.

Over long weekends in another country house with another beautiful garden, I added other tricks to my repertoire, such as counter-surveillance and brushing up against strangers in a crowd to make a furtive hand-over. Somewhere in the middle of these antics, in a coy ceremony conducted in a safe flat in South Audley Street, I was allowed to take possession of my father’s gallantry medals, one French, one English, and the citations that explained them. Why the delay? I might have asked. But by then I had learned not to.

It was not until I started visiting East Germany that tubby, bespectacled, permanently worried George Smiley wandered into my life one Sunday afternoon in West Sussex, where I was being debriefed, not by Jack any more but by a rugged fellow called Jim, of Czech extraction and around my age, whose surname, when he was finally allowed to have one, turned out to be Prideaux. I mention him because later he too played a substantial part in my career.

Smiley didn’t say much at my debriefing, just sat and listened and occasionally peered owlishly at me through his thick-rimmed spectacles. But when it was over he suggested we take a turn in the garden, which seemed endless and had a park attached to it. We talked, we sat on a bench, strolled, sat again, kept talking. My dear mother – was she alive and well? She’s fine, thank you, George. A bit dotty, but fine. Then my father – had I kept his medals? I said my mother polished them every Sunday, which was true. I didn’t mention that she sometimes hung them on me and wept. But, unlike Jack, he never asked me about my girls. He must have thought there was safety in numbers.

And when I recall that conversation now, I can’t help thinking that, consciously or not, he was offering himself as the father figure he later became. But perhaps the feeling was in me, and not in him. The fact remains that, when he finally popped the question, I had a feeling of coming home, even though my home was across the Channel in Brittany.

‘We were wondering, you see,’ he said in a faraway voice, ‘whether you’d ever considered signing up with us on a more regular basis? People who have worked on the outside for us don’t always fit well on the inside. But in your case, we think you might. We don’t pay a lot, and careers tend to be interrupted. But we do feel it’s an important job, as long as one cares about the end, and not too much about the means.’

2

My farmstead at Les Deux Eglises consists of one straight-backed nineteenth-century granite

manoir

of no distinction, one tumbledown barn with a stone cross on its gable, remnants of fortifications from forgotten wars, an ancient stone well, now unused but formerly requisitioned by Resistance fighters to hide their weapons from the Nazi occupier, an equally ancient outdoor baking oven, a cider press, obsolete, and fifty hectares of indifferent pasture descending to cliff land and the sea’s edge. The place has been in the family’s possession for four generations. I am the fifth. It is neither a noble nor a profitable acquisition. To my right, as I look out of my living-room window, I have the knobbly spire of a nineteenth-century church; and to my left, a white stand-alone chapel, thatched. Between them, they have endowed the village with its name. In Les Deux Eglises, as in all of Brittany, we are Catholic or we are nothing. I am nothing.

To reach our farmstead from the town of Lorient, you first drive for half an hour or so along the southern coast road, which in winter is lined with skinny poplar trees, passing on your way west chunks of Hitler’s Atlantic Wall which, being unremovable, are fast acquiring the status of a latter-day Stonehenge. After thirty kilometres or so, you start to watch out for a pizza restaurant grandly named Odyssée on your left and soon after it on your right a reeking junkyard where the misnomered Honoré, a

drunken vagabond whom my mother always cautioned me to avoid, and known locally as the poison dwarf, peddles bric-à-brac, old car tyres and manure. On reaching a battered sign saying

Delassus

, this being my mother’s family name, you turn up a pitted track, braking hard as you go over the potholes or, if you are Monsieur Denis the postman, weaving deftly between them at full speed: which was what he was doing this sunny morning in early autumn, to the indignation of the chickens in the courtyard and the sublime indifference of Amoureuse, my beloved Irish setter, who was far too occupied grooming her latest litter to give her attention to mere human affairs.

As for me, from the moment Monsieur Denis – alias le Général, thanks to his great height and supposed resemblance to President de Gaulle – had unwound himself from his yellow van and started towards the front steps, I knew at one glance that the letter he was grasping in his spindly hand was from the Circus.

*

I wasn’t alarmed at first, just quietly amused. Some things about a British secret service never change. One of them is an obsessive anxiety about what sort of stationery to use for its overt correspondence. Not too official or formal looking: that would be bad for cover. The envelope not see-through, so preferably lined. Stark white is too visible: go for a tint, just nothing amorous. A dull blue, a hint of grey, both are acceptable. This one was pale grey.

Next question: do we type the address, do we handwrite it? For answer, consider as always the needs of the man in the field, in this case, me: Peter Guillam, ex-member, out to grass and grateful for it. Long-time resident in rural France. Attends no veterans’ reunions. No listed significant others. Draws full pension and therefore torturable. Conclusion: in a remote Breton hamlet

where foreigners are a rarity, a typed, semi-formal-looking grey envelope with a British stamp could raise local eyebrows, so go for handwritten. Now for the hard bit. The Office, or whatever the Circus calls itself these days, can’t resist a security classification, even if it’s only

Private.

Maybe add a

Personal

for extra force?

Private & Personal, addressee only

? Too heavy. Stick to

Private.

Or better, as in this case,

Personnel.

1 Artillery Buildings

London, SE14          

My dear Guillam,

We haven’t met, but allow me to introduce myself. I am business affairs manager at your old firm, with responsibility for both current and historical cases. A matter in which you appear to have played a significant role some years back has unexpectedly raised its head, and I have no option but to ask you to make yourself available in London as soon as possible to assist us in preparing a response.

I am authorized to offer you reimbursement for your travel arrangements (economy class) and a London-weighted

per diem

of £130 for as long as your presence is required.

Since we appear to have no telephone number for you, kindly feel free to call Tania at the number above and reverse the charges, or if you have email, at the email address below. Without wishing to inconvenience you, I have to stress that the matter is of some urgency. Allow me in closing to draw your attention to Paragraph 14 of your termination agreement.

Yours sincerely,

A. Butterfield

(LA to CS)

P.S. Kindly remember to bring your passport with you when you present yourself at Reception. AB

For ‘LA to CS’ read

Legal Adviser to Chief of Service

. For ‘Paragraph 14’ read

lifelong duty to attend, should Circus needs dictate

. And for ‘allow me to remind you’ read

just remember who pays your pension

. And I don’t have email. And why doesn’t he date his letter: security?

Catherine is down in the orchard with her nine-year-old daughter Isabelle, playing with a pair of vicious young goats we recently had wished on us. She is a slight woman with a broad Breton face and slow brown eyes that measure you without expression. If she stretches out her arms, the goats leap into them and little Isabelle, who pleases herself in her own ways, puts her hands together and spins round on her heel in private delight. But Catherine, muscular though she is, must be careful to catch her goats one at a time, because if they’re allowed to jump at her together they can knock her flat. Isabelle ignores me. Eye contact bothers her.

In the field behind them, deaf Yves the occasional labourer is bent double cutting cabbages. With his right hand he slices the stems, with his left he tosses them into a cart, but the angle of his arched back never changes. He is watched by an old grey horse called Artemis, another of Catherine’s foundlings. A couple of years back we took in a stray ostrich who had broken loose from a neighbouring farm. When Catherine alerted the farmer, he said keep him, he’s too old. The ostrich expired gracefully and we gave him a state funeral.

‘You wish something, Pierre?’ Catherine demands.

‘Got to go away for a few days, I’m afraid,’ I reply.

‘To Paris?’ Catherine does not approve of me going to Paris.

‘To London,’ I reply. And because even in retirement I need a cover story: ‘Someone’s died.’

‘Someone you love?’

‘Not any more,’ I reply, with a firmness that takes me by surprise.

‘Then it is not important. You leave tonight?’

‘Tomorrow. I’ll take the early flight from Rennes.’

Time was, the Circus had only to whistle and I would race to Rennes for a plane. Not today.

*

You have to have grown to spy’s estate in the old Circus to understand the aversion that came over me as, at four o’clock the following afternoon, I paid off my cab and started up the concrete catwalk to the Service’s shockingly ostentatious new headquarters. You had to be me in the prime of my spying life, returning dog-weary from some godforsaken outpost of empire – the Soviet empire most likely, or some member of it. You’ve come straight from London airport by bus, then by tube to Cambridge Circus. The Production team is waiting to debrief you. You climb five scruffy steps to the doorway of the Victorian eyesore that we variously call HO, the Office or just the Circus. And you’re home.

Forget the fights you’ve been having with Production or Requirements or Admin. They’re just family quarrels between field and base. The janitor in his box wishes you good morning with a knowing ‘welcome back, Mr Guillam’ and asks you whether you’d like to check your suitcase. And you say thanks Mac, or Bill, or whoever’s on duty that day, and never mind showing him your pass. You’re smiling and you’re not sure why. In front of you stand the three cranky old lifts that you’ve hated since the day you joined – except that two of them are stuck upstairs, and the third is Control’s own, so don’t even think about it. And anyway you’d rather lose yourself in the labyrinth of corridors and dead ends that is the physical embodiment of

the world you’ve chosen to live in, with its worm-eaten wooden staircases, chipped fire extinguishers, fish-eye mirrors and the stinks of stale fag smoke, Nescafé and deodorant.

And now this monstrosity. This Welcome to Spyland Beside the Thames.

Under the scrutiny of dour men and women in tracksuits, I present myself at the armoured-glass welcome desk and watch my British passport being snapped up by a sliding metal tray. The face behind the glass is a woman’s. The absurd emphases and electronic voice are Essex Man’s:

‘Kindly place

all

keys, mobile phones, cash,

wrist

watches, writing instruments and any

other

metal objects you may have about you

in

the box on the table

to

your left, retain the

white

tag identifying your box, then duly proceed

shoes

in hand

through

the door marked Visitors.’

My passport returns. Duly proceeding, I am frisked with a ping-pong bat by a merry girl of about fourteen, then radiated in an upended glass coffin. Having returned the shoes to my feet and tied the laces – somehow a far more humiliating procedure than taking them off – I am escorted to an unmarked lift by the merry girl, who asks me if I’ve had a nice day. I haven’t. Or a nice night either, if she wants to know, which she doesn’t. Thanks to A. Butterfield’s letter I had slept worse than I have slept in a decade, but I can’t tell her that either. I’m a field animal, or was. My natural habitat was spying’s open spaces. What I’m discovering in my so-called mature years is that a Dear John letter coming out of the blue from the Circus in its new incarnation demanding my immediate presence in London sets me off on a night-time journey of the soul.

We have reached what feels like the top floor, but nothing says so. In the world I once inhabited, its biggest secrets were always on the top floor. My youthful escort has a bunch of ribbons round her neck with electronic tabs on them. She opens

an unmarked door, I enter, she closes it on me. I try the handle. It doesn’t budge. I’ve been locked up a few times in my life, but always by the opposition. There are no windows, just childish paintings of flowers and houses. The work of A. Butterfield’s offspring? Or the graffiti of former inmates?

And where has all the noise gone? The silence gets worse the longer I listen. No jolly chatter of typewriters, no unanswered telephones ringing off the hook, no clapped-out file trolley rattling its way like a milkman’s float over the bare-board corridors, no furious male roar of

stop that bloody whistling!

Somewhere along the road between Cambridge Circus and the Embankment, something has died, and it isn’t just the squeak of trolleys.

I perch my backside on a steel and leather chair. I thumb a grimy copy of

Private Eye

and wonder which of us has lost our sense of humour. I get up, try the door again and sit down on a different chair. By now I have decided that A. Butterfield is making an in-depth study of my body language. Well, if he is, good luck to him, because by the time the door flies open and a short-haired, agile woman of forty-odd wearing a business suit sweeps in and says in a class-free sanitized accent, ‘Oh. Hi, Peter, great. I’m Laura, want to come in now?’ I must have relived in quick order every misfire and disaster I’d been involved in over a lifetime of licensed skulduggery.

We troop across an empty corridor and enter a white, hygienic office with sealed windows. A fresh-faced, bespectacled, English public schoolboy of indefinable age in shirt and braces bounces out from behind a table and seizes my hand.

‘

Peter!

Gosh! You look positively

jaunty

!

And

half your age! You travelled well? Coffee? Tea?

Honestly

not? Really, really good of you to come. A

huge

help. You’ve met Laura? Of course you have.

So

sorry to have kept you waiting in there. A call from on high. All well now. Have a pew.’

All this to confiding squeezes of the eyes for extra intimacy as

he guides me to an upright naughty chair with arms for a long stay. Then sits himself back the other side of the table, which is stacked with old-looking Circus files flagged in the colours of all nations. Then sets his shirt-sleeved elbows between them where I can’t see, and links his hands in a cat’s cradle under his chin.

‘I’m

Bunny

, by the by,’ he announces. ‘Bloody silly name, but it’s followed me around since infancy and I can’t get rid of it. Probably the reason I ended up in

this

place, come to think of it. You can’t very well strut your stuff in the High Court of Justice with everyone running after you yelling “Bunny, Bunny”, can you?’

Is this his usual patter? Is this how your average middle-aged Secret Service lawyer speaks these days? Now racy, now one foot in the past? My ear for contemporary English is shaky, but judging by Laura’s expression as she takes her place next to him, yes, it is. Seated, she is feral, ready to pounce. Signet ring on middle finger of right hand. Her daddy’s? Or a coded signal about sexual preference? I’d been out of England too long.

Meaningless small talk, led by Bunny. His children adore Brittany, both are girls. Laura has been to Normandy, but not Brittany. She doesn’t say who with.

‘But you’re Brittany born, Peter!’ Bunny protests suddenly, out of nowhere. ‘We should be calling you Pierre!’

Peter’s fine, I say.

‘So what we

have

, Peter, bluntly, is a bit of a serious

legal porridge

to sort out,’ Bunny resumes at a slower, louder pace, having spotted my new hearing aids peeking out of my white locks. ‘Not a

crisis

yet, but active, and I’m afraid rather

volatile.

And we very much need your help.’

To which I reply that I’m only too happy to oblige in any way I can, Bunny, and it’s nice to think one can still be of use after all these years.

‘Obviously I’m here to protect the

Service.

That’s my job,’ Bunny goes on, as if I haven’t spoken. ‘And

you’re

here as a private

individual, an ex-member admittedly, long and happily retired, I am sure, but what I

can’t

guarantee is that

your

interests and

our

interests are going to coincide at every turn.’ Eyes to slits. Rictal grin. ‘So what I’m saying to you

is

, Peter: for all that we respect you enormously for all the splendid things you have done for the Office in days of yore, this

is

the

Office.

And you are

you

, and

I

am a lethal lawyer. How’s Catherine?’

‘Fine, thank you. Why do you ask?’

Because I haven’t listed her. To put the wind up me. To tell me the gloves are off. And what big eyes the Service has.

‘We wondered whether she should be added to the rather long list of your significant others,’ Bunny explains. ‘Service regulations and so forth.’

‘Catherine is my tenant. She’s the daughter and granddaughter of previous tenants. I choose to live on the premises, and insofar as it’s your business, I’ve never slept with her and I don’t intend to. Does that cover it?’

‘Admirably, thank you.’

My first lie, ably told. Now go for the swift deflection: ‘Sounds to me as if I need a lawyer of my own,’ I suggest.

‘Premature, and you can’t afford one. Not at today’s prices. We have you down as married, then unmarried. Are both correct?’

‘They are.’

‘All within the one calendar year. I’m impressed.’

‘Thank you.’

Are we joking? Or provoking? I’m suspecting the second.

‘A youthful folly?’ Bunny suggests, in the same courteous tone of enquiry.

‘A misunderstanding,’ I reply. ‘Any more questions?’

But Bunny does not give way easily, and wishes me to know it. ‘I mean, so who by – the child? Whose was it? The father?’ – still in the same glossy voice.

I affect to ponder. ‘Do you know, I don’t think I ever thought to ask her,’ I reply. And while he’s still meditating on this: ‘Since we’re talking about who does what to whom, maybe you’ll tell me what Laura’s doing here,’ I suggest.

‘Laura is

History

,’ Bunny replies sonorously.

History as an expressionless woman with short hair, brown eyes and no make-up. And nobody smiling any more, except me.

‘So what’s on the charge sheet, Bunny?’ I ask cheerfully, now that we’re getting to close quarters. ‘Setting fire to the Queen’s dockyards?’

‘Oh come,

charge sheet

is going it a bit, Peter!’ Bunny protests, just as cheerfully. ‘Things to resolve, that’s all. Let me ask you just

one

question ahead of the rest of the field. May I?’ – squeeze of the eyes. ‘Operation

Windfall.

How was it mounted, who drove it, where did it go so wrong, and what was your part in it?’

Does an easing of the soul take place when you realize your worst expectations have been fulfilled? Not in my case.

‘Windfall, Bunny, did you say?’

‘Windfall’ – louder, in case he hasn’t reached my deaf aids.

Keep it slow. Remember you’re of an age. Memory not your strong point these days. Take your time.

‘Now Windfall was

what

exactly, Bunny? Give me a pointer. What sort of date are we looking at?’

‘Early sixties, broadly. Today.’

‘An operation, you say?’

‘Covert. Called Windfall.’

‘Against what target?’

Laura, coming in from the blind side: ‘Soviet & Satellite. Directed against East German Intelligence. Otherwise known as the

Stasi

’ – bellowing for my benefit.

Stasi? Stasi? Give me a moment. Ah yes, the Stasi.

‘With what aim, Laura?’ I ask, having got it all together.

‘Mount a deception, mislead the enemy, protect a vital source.

Penetrate Moscow Centre with the purpose of identifying the perceived traitor or traitors inside Circus ranks.’ And changing gear to downright plaintive: ‘Only we have absolutely

zilch

files on it any more. Just a bunch of cross-references to files that have vanished into thin air. Like missing, believed stolen.’

‘Windfall, Windfall,’ I repeat, shaking my head and smiling the way old men do, even if they’re not quite as old as other people may think they are. ‘Sorry, Laura. Just doesn’t ring a bell, I’m afraid.’

‘Not even a distant chime?’ – Bunny.

‘Not a one, alas. Total blank’ – fighting off images of my youthful self in the garb of a pizza-delivery boy, bent over the handlebars of my learner’s motorbike as I rush a special order of late-night files from Circus headquarters to Somewhere in London.

‘And just in case I didn’t mention it, or you didn’t hear it,’ Bunny is saying, in his blandest voice. ‘It’s our understanding that Operation Windfall involved your friend and colleague Alec Leamas, who you may

just

remember got himself shot dead at the Berlin Wall while hastening to the assistance of his girlfriend Elizabeth Gold, who’d been shot dead at the Berlin Wall already. But perhaps you’ve forgotten that too?’

‘Of course I bloody haven’t,’ I snap. And only then, by way of explanation: ‘You were asking me about Windfall, not about Alec. And the answer’s no. I don’t remember it. Never heard of it. Sorry.’

*

In any interrogation, denial is the tipping point. Never mind the courtesies that went before. From the moment of denial, things are never going to be the same. At the secret-policeman level, denial is likely to provoke instant reprisal, not least because the

average secret policeman is more stupid than his subject. The sophisticated interrogator, on the other hand, finding the door slammed in his face, does not immediately try to kick it in. He prefers to regroup and advance on his target from a different angle. And to judge by Bunny’s contented smile, that’s what he is sizing up to do now.

‘So, Peter.’ His voice for the hard of hearing, despite my assurances: ‘Setting the issue of Operation Windfall aside for a moment, would you mind awfully if Laura and I asked you a few

background questions

regarding the more general issue?’

‘Which is what?’

‘Individual accountability. The old problem of where

obedience

to superior orders

stops

, and responsibility for one’s individual actions begins. Follow me?’

‘Barely.’

‘You’re in the field. Head Office has given you the green light, but not everything goes to plan. Innocent blood is shed. You, or a colleague close to you, are perceived to have exceeded orders. Have you ever thought of a situation like that?’

‘No.’

Either he’s forgotten I can’t hear, or he’s decided that I can.

‘And you can’t think, you personally, purely in the abstract, of how such a stressful situation might arise? Looking back over the many tight corners you must have found yourself in during a long operational career?’

‘No. I can’t. Sorry about that.’

‘Not one single moment where you felt you’d exceeded Head Office orders, started something you couldn’t stop? Put your own feelings, needs –

appetites

even – above the call of duty, perhaps? With dire consequences that you might not have intended or foreseen?’

‘Well, that would get me a reprimand from Head Office,

wouldn’t it? Or a recall to London. Or in a really severe case, the door,’ I suggest, giving him my disciplinary frown.

‘Try going a bit wider than that, Peter. I’m suggesting there could be aggrieved third parties out there. Ordinary people from the outside world who – in consequence of something you’ve done – in error, in the heat of the moment or when the flesh is a bit weak, let’s say – suffered collateral damage. People who might decide,

years later

, maybe a generation later, that they’ve got a pretty juicy legal case against this Service. Either by way of damages or, if that doesn’t stick, a private prosecution for manslaughter or worse. Against the Service at large, or’ – eyebrows shooting up in fake surprise – ‘a named former member of it. You’ve never considered

that

as a possibility?’ – sounding less like a lawyer than a doctor softening you up for really bad news.

Give it time. Scratch the old head. No good.

‘Too busy making trouble for the opposition, I suppose’ – with a veteran’s weary smile. ‘Enemy out in front of you, Head Office on your tail, not a great deal of time for philosophizing.’

‘Their

easiest

course being to kick off with a

parliamentary procedure

, and pave the way for

legal proceedings

by way of a

letter before action

, but not go the whole hog.’

Still thinking, I’m afraid, Bunny.

‘Then of course once

legal proceedings

are initiated, any

parliamentary inquiry

would step aside. Leaving the courts a free hand.’ He waits, in vain, comes in harder:

‘And Windfall still no bells whatever? A covert operation spread over two years in which you played a considerable – some would say heroic – role? And it doesn’t ring a single bell?’

And Laura asking me the same question with her nun’s unblinking brown eyes, while I affect yet again to delve in my old man’s memory and – drat it – come up with absolutely

nothing, but that’s anno Domini for you, I suppose – ruefully shaking my white head in frustration.

‘Wasn’t some sort of training exercise, was it?’ I ask gamely.

‘Laura just told you what it was,’ Bunny retorts, and I do an ‘ah, yes, of course she did,’ and try to look embarrassed.

*

We have put Windfall aside, and are back instead to considering the spectre of an ordinary person from the outside world, first hounding a named former member of the Service through Parliament, then having a second bite of them in the law courts. But we haven’t yet said

whose

name, or

which

former member, we might be talking about. I say

we

because, if you’ve ever done a stint of interrogating and find yourself in the hot seat, there’s a complicity that puts you and your inquisitors together on one side of the table, and the issues to be thrashed out on the other.

‘I mean, just take your own personal file, what’s left of it, Peter,’ Laura complains. ‘It’s not that it’s just been weeded. It’s been filleted. All right, it contained sensitive annexes deemed too secret for the General Archive. Nobody can complain about that, far as it goes. It’s what secret annexes are for. But when we go to the

Restricted

Archive, what do we find? A great big blank.’

‘Fuck all,’ Bunny puts in by way of clarification. ‘Your entire Service career, according to your file, is a shitload of destruction certificates.’

‘If that,’ Laura comments, evidently quite unbothered by this unlawyerly display of foul language.

‘Ah, but to be

fair

, Laura’ – Bunny now assuming the spurious mantle of prisoner’s friend – ‘what we might be looking at here could very well be the handiwork of Bill Haydon of evil memory, could it not?’ – and then to me: ‘But perhaps you’ve forgotten who Haydon is too.’

Haydon?

Bill

Haydon. Got the fellow: Soviet-owned double agent who, as Head of the Circus’s omnipotent Joint Steering Committee, commonly known as Joint, had for three decades diligently betrayed its secrets to Moscow Centre. He’s also the man whose name goes through my head most hours of the day, but I am not about to leap into the air and cry ‘that bastard, I could break his neck for him’ – which in the event was what somebody else I happen to know did for him anyway, to the general satisfaction of the home side.

Laura, meanwhile, is pursuing her conversation with Bunny:

‘Oh, I’ve no doubt of that at all, Bunny. That entire Restricted Archive has the marks of Bill Haydon all over it. And Peter here was one of the very early ones to sniff him out, right, Pete? In your role as George Smiley’s personal assistant. His gatekeeper and trusted disciple, were you not?’

Bunny shakes his head in awe. ‘George Smiley. The best operator we ever had. The conscience of the Circus. Its Hamlet, as some called him, perhaps not entirely fairly. What a man. All the same, you don’t think that in the case of Operation Windfall,’ he goes on, still addressing Laura as if I’m not in the room, ‘it might not have been

Bill Haydon

who was plundering the Restricted Archive, but George Smiley, for whatever reason? There are some pretty odd signatures on those destruction certificates. Names you and I have never heard of. I’m not saying Smiley

personally

. He’d have used a willing proxy, of course he would. Someone who would blindly obey his orders, whatever their legality. Never one to get his own hands dirty, our George, great man as he was.’

‘Got a view about that, Pete?’ Laura enquires.

I have indeed got a view, and a vigorous one. I hate

Pete

, and this conversation is getting seriously out of hand:

‘Why on earth, Laura, would George Smiley, of all the people in the world, need to go stealing Circus files? Bill Haydon, I grant

you. Bill would have stolen a widow’s mite and had a bloody good laugh about it.’

And a chuckle, and a shake of the old head to indicate that you young people these days can’t possibly know how it really was.

‘Oh, I think George could have a reason for stealing them, all right,’ Bunny replies, on Laura’s behalf. ‘He was Head of Covert for the ten coldest years of the Cold War. Waged a bare-knuckle turf war with Joint. No holds barred, whether it was poaching one another’s agents or busting into one another’s safes. Masterminded the blackest ops this Service put its hand to. Overcame his conscience whenever the greater need dictated. Which it seems to have done pretty often. I think I could see your George sweeping a few files under the carpet quite easily.’ To me now, straight into my face: ‘And I could see you helping him, too, without a qualm. Some of those funny signatures look remarkably like your handwriting. You didn’t even have to steal them. Just sign them out under somebody else’s name and bingo. As to the much lamented Alec Leamas who died so tragically at the Berlin Wall –

his

personal file’s not even filleted. It’s gone AWOL. Not so much as a dog-eared card in the general index. You seem strangely unmoved.’

‘I’m shocked if you want to know. And moved, too. Deeply.’

‘Why? Simply because I’m suggesting you nicked the Leamas file out of the secret archive and hid it in a hollow tree? You’ve nicked a few files in your day for your Uncle George. Why not Leamas’s? Something to remember him by after he got himself mown down alongside – what was his girl’s name again?’

‘Gold. Elizabeth Gold.’

‘Ah. You remember. And Liz, for short.

Her

file’s vanished too. One could wax romantic about the notion of Alec Leamas’s and Liz Gold’s files fading into the far yonder together. How come you and Leamas became quite such firm buddies, by the way? Brothers-in-arms to the end, from all one hears.’

‘We did stuff together.’

‘Stuff?’

‘Alec was older than I was. And wiser. If he had an op running and needed a sidekick, he’d ask for me. If Personnel and George agreed, we’d be paired.’

Laura is back: ‘So give us a couple of examples of this

pairing

’ – in a voice that clearly disapproves of pairing, but I am only too happy to digress.

‘Oh, Alec and I must have kicked off in Afghanistan in the mid-fifties, I suppose. Our first spell together was infiltrating small groups into the Caucasus, up into Russia. Probably sounds a bit

old hat

to you.’ Another chuckle. A shake of the head. ‘Wasn’t a roaring success, I have to admit. Nine months later they moved him to the Baltic, running joes in and out of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. He asked for me again, so up I went as his help.’ And for her enlightenment: ‘The Baltic States being part of the Soviet bloc in those days, Laura, as I’m sure you know.’

‘And

joes

being agents. We say

asset

these days. And Leamas officially based in Travemünde, correct? North Germany?’

‘Correct indeed, Laura. Under cover as a member of the International Maritime Survey Group. Fishery protection by day, fast-boat landings by night.’

Bunny interrupts our tête-à-tête: ‘Did these night landings have a name at all?’

‘Jackknife, if I remember rightly.’

‘So not Windfall?’

Ignore him.

‘Jackknife. Ran for a couple of years, then got packed in.’

‘Ran how?’

‘First, rustle up your volunteers. Get ’em trained in Scotland, the Black Forest or wherever. Estonians, Latvians. Then set about putting ’em back where they came from. Wait for no moon. Rubber boat. Softly-softly outboard. Night vision. Reception

party on the beach signals the all-clear. In you go. Or your joes do.’

‘And when your

joes

have gone in, you and Leamas do what? Apart from open a bottle, obviously, which in Leamas’s case was par for the course, one gathers.’

‘Well, we’re not going to sit around, are we?’ I reply, again refusing to rise. ‘Get the hell out fast is the message. Leave them to it. Why are you asking me all this, actually?’

‘Partly to get the feel of you. Partly because I’m wondering why you remember Jackknife so vividly when you don’t remember a damn thing about Windfall.’

Laura again: ‘By

leaving them to it

, I presume you mean leave the agents to their fate?’

‘If you want to put it that way, Laura.’

‘Which was what? Their fate. Or have you forgotten?’

‘They died on us.’

‘Died literally?’

‘Some were grabbed as soon as they landed. Others a couple of days later. Some got turned and played back at us and were only executed later,’ I retort, hearing the anger rising in my voice and not particularly wanting to stop it.

‘So who do we blame for that, Pete?’ Laura still.

‘For what?’

‘For the deaths.’

A little explosion does no harm. ‘Bloody Bill Haydon, our in-house traitor, who d’you think? The poor devils were blown before we ever left the German coast. By our own dear Head of Joint Steering, the same outfit that had planned the op in the first place!’

Bunny dips his head, consults something below the parapet. Laura looks first at me, then at her hands, which she prefers. Short fingernails like a boy’s, scrubbed clean.

‘Peter’ – Bunny’s turn, firing in groups now, rather than single

shots. ‘I am rather concerned, as the Service’s chief lawyer – not

your

lawyer, I repeat – by certain aspects of your past. That is to say, an impression could be created around you by skilful counsel down the line – if ever Parliament were to step aside and leave the field open to the courts, secret or other, which heaven forfend – that, in the course of your career, you were associated with a quite exorbitant number of deaths, and were callous about them. That you were assigned – let us say by the impeccable George Smiley – to covert operations where the death of innocent people was considered an acceptable, even necessary outcome. Even, who knows, a desired one.’

‘Desired outcome? Death? What are you blabbering about?’

‘Windfall,’ says Bunny patiently.

3

‘Peter?’

‘Bunny.’

Laura has assumed a disapproving silence.

‘Can we just go back for a moment to 1959, when I believe Jackknife was shelved?’

‘Not brilliant on dates, I’m afraid, Bunny.’

‘Shelved by Head Office on the grounds that the operation had proved unproductive, and expensive of treasure and life. You and Alec Leamas, on the other hand, suspected there was dirty work on the home front.’

‘Joint Steering was crying cock-up. Alec was crying conspiracy. Never mind which bit of the coast we landed on, the opposition was there ahead of us every time. Radio links blown. Everything blown. It had to be someone on the inside. That was Alec’s view and from my worm’s-eye view I tended to share it.’

‘So you decided, the two of you, that you would make a

démarche

to Smiley. Presumably you considered Smiley himself out of contention as a potential traitor.’

‘Jackknife was Joint’s operation. Under Bill Haydon’s command. Haydon, then Alleline, Bland, Esterhase. Bill’s Boys, we called ’em. George was nowhere near it.’

‘And Joint and Covert at daggers drawn?’

‘Joint were for ever conspiring to get Covert under their wing. George saw that as a power grab, and resisted. Strenuously.’

‘Where was our gallant Chief of Service in all this?

Control

, as we must call him.’

‘Playing Covert and Joint off against each other. Dividing and ruling, as usual.’

‘Am I right in thinking there were personal issues between Smiley and Haydon?’

‘Could have been. There was talk around the bazaars that Bill had had a fling with Ann, George’s wife. It blurred George’s aim. Sort of move you’d expect from Bill. He was a clever shit.’

‘Smiley discussed his private life with you?’

‘Wouldn’t think of it. Not how you talk to an underling.’

Bunny thinks about this, doesn’t believe it, seems to want to pursue it, changes his mind.

‘So with the demise of Operation Jackknife, you and Leamas took your troubles to Smiley. Face to face. The three of you. You. Despite your junior position.’

‘Alec asked me to come along. Didn’t trust himself.’

‘Why not?’

‘Alec fired up too easily.’

‘Where did this meeting

à trois

take place?’

‘Why the hell should that matter?’

‘Because I’m picturing a safe haven. A place you haven’t told me about, but you will in due course. I thought this might be a moment to ask.’

I had lulled myself into believing that with all this tittle-tattle we might be drifting into less perilous waters.

‘We could have used a Circus safe house, but safe houses were bugged as a matter of course by Joint. We could have used

George’s place in Bywater Street, but Ann was in residence. There was a sort of understanding around that she shouldn’t be put in the way of stuff she couldn’t handle.’

‘She’d go running to Haydon?’

‘That’s not what I said. There was a feeling around. Nothing more. Do you want me to go on or not?’

‘Very much, if you wouldn’t mind.’

‘We picked George up from Bywater Street and walked him along the South Bank for his health. It was a summer’s evening. He was always moaning that he didn’t get enough exercise.’

‘And out of this evening stroll beside the river, Operation Windfall was born?’

‘Oh, for Christ’s sake! Grow up!’

‘Oh, I’m grown up, don’t worry. And you’re getting younger by the minute. How did the conversation go? I’m all ears.’

‘We talked treachery. In the large, not in detail, there was no point. Anyone who was a present or recent member of Joint was suspect by definition. So fifty, sixty people, all potential traitors within. We talked about who had the right sort of access to blow Jackknife, but we knew that with Bill running Joint, and Percy Alleline eating out of his hand, and Bland and Esterhase getting in on the act any way they could, all that any traitor had to do was show up at Joint’s free-for-all planning sessions, or sit around the senior officers’ bar and listen to Percy Alleline sounding off. Bill always said compartmentation was a bore, let’s have everybody knowing everything. That gave him all the cover he needed.’

‘How did Smiley respond to your

démarche

?’

‘He’d do some hard thinking and get back to us. Which was as much as anyone ever got out of George. Look here, I think I’ll take that coffee you offered me, if you don’t mind. Black. No sugar.’

I stretched, shook my head, yawned. I’m of an age, for God’s

sake. But Bunny wasn’t buying, and Laura had given up on me long ago. They were eyeing me like a couple of people who’d had about enough of me, and coffee was off the menu.

*

Bunny had put on his legal face. No more squeezing of the eyes. No more raising the voice for a slow-witted older man who doesn’t hear too well.

‘I want to go back to where we came in – that all right with you? You and the Rule of Law. The Service and the Rule of Law. Do I have your full attention?’

‘I suppose so.’

‘I mentioned to you the British public’s insatiable interest in historic crime. Something by no means lost on our gallant parliamentarians.’

‘Did you? Probably.’

‘

Or

the law courts. The historic blame game that is the current rage. Our new national sport. Today’s blameless generation versus your guilty one. Who will atone for our fathers’ sins, even if they weren’t sins at the time? But you’re not a father, are you? Whereas your file rather suggests you should be overrun by grandchildren.’

‘I thought you said my file had been filleted. Are you now telling me it hasn’t?’

‘I’m trying to read your emotions. I can’t. You either have none, or you have too many. You go lightly over Liz Gold’s death. Why? You go lightly over Alec Leamas’s death. You pretend total amnesia about Windfall, whereas we know perfectly well that you were Windfall cleared. Significantly, your late friend Alec Leamas was

not

so cleared, despite the fact that he died in harness to an operation he wasn’t cleared for. I’m not asking you to interrupt, so kindly don’t. However,’ he went on, forgiving

me my ill manners, ‘I do begin to discern the outlines of a deal between us. You admitted that Operation Windfall might ring a distant bell for you. Possibly a training exercise, you said graciously and idiotically. So how’s this? In exchange for greater transparency on

our

side, might the distant chimes of that bell get a little clearer on

yours

?’

I ponder, shake my head, try to capture those distant chimes. I have a sense of fighting to the last man, and the last man is me.

‘The way I think I

dimly

remember it, Bunny,’ I concede, signalling a slight change of direction in his favour, ‘Windfall, if it comes back to me at all, wasn’t an

operation

, it was a

source.

A dud one. I think that’s where we’ve been misunderstanding each other’ – hoping for some sort of easing from the other side of the table and not getting any – ‘a

potential

source who fell flat on his back at the first fence. And was promptly, and very sensibly, dumped. File and forget.’ I plunge on: ‘Source Windfall was a relic from George’s past. Another

historic

case, if you like’ – deferential nod to Laura – ‘an East German professor of Baroque Literature at Weimar University. A pal of George’s from the war years who’d done a bit of this and that for us. He got in touch with George through some Swedish academic or other, back in ’59 or so’ – keep it flowing, keep it imprecise, a golden rule. ‘The

Prof,

as we called him, claimed to have red-hot news about a super-secret compact being struck between the two halves of Germany and the Kremlin. Said he’d heard all about it from some like-minded pal in the East German administration.’ It’s really tripping off the tongue by now, just like old times. ‘The two halves of Germany were to be reunited on condition they remained neutral and disarmed. In other words, exactly what the West

didn’t

want: a power vacuum bang in the centre of Europe. If the Circus would just spirit the Prof to the West, he would give us chapter and verse.’

Rueful smile, shake of the old white head. And nothing coming back to me across the big divide.

‘Turned out all the Prof wanted for himself was a chair at Oxford, a job for life, a knighthood and tea with the Queen’ – chuckle. ‘And of course he’d made the whole thing up. Pure bollocks. Case closed,’ I ended, feeling it was a job well done nonetheless, and Smiley, wherever he was, would be silently applauding.

But Bunny was not applauding. Neither was Laura. Bunny looked insincerely worried, Laura plain incredulous.

‘You see, the problem

is

, Peter,’ Bunny explained after a while, ‘what you’ve just pitched us is exactly the same tired bullshit that we’re getting from the

dummy

files on Windfall in the old central archive. Am I right, Laura?’

Evidently he was, because she came in bang on cue.

‘Practically word for word, Bunny. Concocted with the sole purpose of leading any nosy enquirer up the garden path. No such professor ever existed, and the story is total fabrication from start to finish. And I mean all fair and good: if Windfall had to be protected from the prying eyes of the Haydons of this world, a dummy file for smoke in the central archive makes good sense.’

‘What

doesn’t

make sense however, Peter, is that you sit here at your great age trying to sell us the same shitload of disinformation that you and George Smiley and the rest of Covert were putting out a generation ago,’ Bunny said, and managed a half-squeeze of the eyes for friendly.

‘We’ve found the reigning Control’s old financial returns, you see, Pete,’ Laura explained helpfully, while I’m still considering my reply. ‘For his reptile fund. That’s the slice of the secret vote that Control gets for his personal pocket money, but it still has to be accounted down to the last penny, right, Peter?’ – as to a child. ‘Hand-submitted by the man himself to his trusted ally

at Treasury. Oliver Lacon his name was, later Sir Oliver, now the late Lord Lacon of Ascot West—’

‘Do you mind telling me what all this has got to do with

me

?’

‘Everything actually,’ Laura said calmly. ‘In his financial returns to Treasury, Lacon’s eyes only, Control gives the names of two Circus officers who, if requested, will provide full and frank disclosure regarding the costs pertaining to a certain Operation Windfall. That’s in case the extra expenditure should ever be challenged by posterity. Control was very high-minded in such regards, whatever else he wasn’t. Name One was George Smiley. Name Two was Peter Guillam. You.’

For a while Bunny seemed not to have heard anything of this exchange. He was head down again, eyes below the parapet, and whatever he was reading required his full attention. Eventually he emerged.

‘Tell him about the Windfall safe flat you’ve unearthed, Laura. Covert’s shady nook where Peter stashed all the files he stole,’ he suggested in a tone to imply he was busy with other matters.

‘Yes, well, there’s this safe flat that’s mentioned in the accounts, like Bunny says,’ Laura explained obligingly. ‘

And

a safe flat housekeeper, what’s more’ – indignantly – ‘

and

a mysterious gentleman called Mendel, who isn’t even on the Service’s books but has been hired by Covert exclusively on an agent basis for Windfall. Two hundred quid a month to his Post Office savings account in Weybridge, plus travel and exes up to another two hundred, accountable, paid out of an unnamed client account run by a chichi City law firm. And one George Smiley with effective power of attorney over the account in its entirety.’

‘Mendel being

who

?’ Bunny enquired.

‘Retired police officer, Special Branch,’ I replied, by now on autopilot. ‘First name Oliver. Not to be confused with Oliver Lacon.’

‘Acquired how and where?’

‘George and Mendel went way back. George had worked with him on an earlier case. Liked the cut of his jib. Liked it that he wasn’t Circus. My breath of clean air, he called him.’

Bunny was suddenly exhausted by the whole discussion. He had flopped back in his chair and was flapping his wrists around, easing his body on a long flight.

‘So let’s just get real, for a change, can we?’ he suggested, with an implicit yawn. ‘Control’s reptile fund is at this exact point or moment in time the sole, exclusive piece of credible evidence that provides us with (a) a path to the conduct and purpose of Operation Windfall, and (b) a means to defend ourselves in any frivolous civil action or private prosecution brought against this Service, and against you Peter Guillam personally, by one

Christoph

Leamas, sole heir of the late Alec, and one

Karen

Gold, spinster, sole daughter of the late Elizabeth or Liz. Did you hear any of that? You did. Don’t say we’ve surprised you at last.’

Still slumped in his chair, he emitted a low ‘

Jesus

’ while he waited for my reaction. And probably it was a long time coming because I also have a memory of him bellowing an imperious ‘

Well?

’ at me.

*

‘Liz Gold had a

child

?’ I hear myself ask.

‘A feisty edition of herself, on present showing. She had just turned fifteen when she was knocked up by some oaf at her local grammar. On her parents’ insistence she gave the baby into adoption. Somebody christened it Karen. Or maybe not christened. She’s Jewish. Having grown to woman’s estate, the said Karen exercised her legal right to know the identity of her natural parent, and became understandably curious about the place and manner of her mother’s death.’

He paused in case I had a question. Belatedly, I had: where the hell did Christoph and Karen get our names from? He ignored it.

‘Karen was much encouraged in her quest for truth and reconciliation by Christoph, son of Alec, who ever since the Wall came down had, unknown to her, been busting a gut to find out how and why his father had died – not, I have to say, with the enthusiastic assistance of this Service, which has gone out of its way to put every fucking obstacle in their path that we could think of, and then some. Unfortunately, our best efforts have proved counter-productive, despite the fact that the said Christoph Leamas has a German police record as long as your arm.’

Another pause. And still no question from me.

‘The two plaintiffs have now bonded. They have convinced themselves, not without reason, that their respective parents died as a consequence of what appears to have been a five-star cock-up by this Service, and by you and George Smiley personally. They are seeking full disclosure, punitive damages and a public apology that will name names. Yours for one. Were you aware that Alec Leamas had engendered a son?’

‘Yes. Where’s Smiley? Why isn’t he here instead of me?’

‘So do you happen to know who was the fortunate mother?’

‘A German woman he met in the war when he was operating behind the lines. She later married a Düsseldorf lawyer called Eberhardt. Eberhardt adopted the boy. His name isn’t Leamas, it’s Eberhardt. I asked you where George is.’

‘Later. And thank you for your excellent powers of recall. Were other people aware of the boy’s existence? Your friend Leamas’s

other

colleagues? We’d know, except his file’s been stolen, you see.’ And already sick of waiting for my answer: ‘Was it, or was it not, generally known in and around this Service that Alec Leamas had sired a German bastard named Christoph, resident in Düsseldorf? Yes or no?’

‘No.’

‘How the fuck not?’

‘Alec didn’t talk a lot about himself.’

‘Except to you apparently. Did you meet him?’

‘Who?’

‘Christoph. Not Alec. Christoph. I think you’re back to being deliberately obtuse.’

‘I’m being nothing of the kind, and the answer’s

no

, I did not meet Christoph Leamas,’ I retorted, because why spoil him with the truth? And while he is still digesting this: ‘I asked you where Smiley is.’

‘And I ignored the question, as you may have noticed.’

A pause while we both waited to collect ourselves and Laura stared moodily out of the window.

‘

Christoph

, as we may call him,’ Bunny resumed in a lethargic tone, ‘is not without his talents, Peter, criminal or semi-criminal though they may be. Perhaps the genes help. Having confirmed that his natural father died at the Berlin Wall on the Eastern side, he wangled his way, by what means we know not but respect, into a stash of supposedly sealed Stasi archives, and came up with three significant names. Yours, the late Elizabeth Gold’s and George Smiley’s. Within weeks he was on the scent of Elizabeth, thence by way of public records to her daughter. A tryst was arranged. The unlikely pair bonded – to what extent, not ours to pry. Together they consulted one of those admirably high-minded civil rights lawyers with open-toed sandals who are the bane of this Service. We in response are considering offering the plaintiffs a fortune of public money in exchange for their silence, but are only too aware that, in doing so, we confirm to them that they have a decent case, and thus encourage them to become even more strident than they are at present. “To hell with your money, you men of evil. History must be allowed to speak. The canker must be cut out. Heads must roll.” Yours for one, I fear.’

‘And George’s too, presumably.’

‘We are therefore faced with the ludicrous Shakespearean premise whereby the ghosts of two victims of a fiendish Circus plot rise up to accuse us in the form of their offspring. Thus far, we have managed to contain the media by implying – not entirely truthfully, but who’s counting? – that, in the event of Parliament stepping aside to make way for the legal process, the case will be heard in the decent seclusion of a

secret

court, and we alone will decide who gets the tickets. The plaintiffs in response, egged on as ever by their thoroughly annoying lawyers, are saying “screw that, we want openness, we want full disclosure.” You asked, somewhat ingenuously, where the Stasi could have got your names from. Why, from Moscow Centre, of course, who duly passed them on to the Stasi. Where did Moscow Centre get your names from? From this Service, of course, thanks yet again to the ever-diligent Bill Haydon, at that time very much at large, and destined to remain so for another six years, until St George rode up on his white horse and smoked him out. Are you still in touch?’

‘With George?’

‘With George.’

‘No. Where is he?’

‘And have not been over recent years?’

‘No.’

‘So your last communication with him was when?’

‘Eight years ago. Ten.’

‘Describe.’

‘I was in London. I looked him up.’

‘Where?’

‘In Bywater Street.’

‘How was he?’

‘Fine, thank you.’

‘We seek him here, we seek him there. The wayward Lady

Ann? You’re not in touch with her either?

Touch

strictly in the metaphorical sense, naturally.’

‘No. And I don’t need the innuendo either.’

‘Well, I need your passport.’

‘What for?’

‘The same one that you presented at reception downstairs, please. Your UK passport’ – hand outstretched above the parapet.

‘Why on earth?’

I gave it to him anyway. What else was I supposed to do? Fight him for it?

‘Is this all of them?’ – mulling thoughtfully through the pages. ‘You’ve had a scad of passports in your time, under various guises. Where are they all now?’

‘Turned in. Shredded.’

‘You have dual nationality. Where’s your French passport?’

‘I was born to a British father, I served as a Brit, Brit’s good enough for me. Now can I have my passport back, please?’

But it had already disappeared beneath the parapet.

‘So, Laura.

You

again,’ said Bunny, rediscovering her. ‘Can we now go a little deeper into that Windfall safe flat, please?’

It’s over. I’ve fought to the last lie. I’m dead and I’m out of ammunition.

*

Laura once more examines papers below my eye-line, and I do my best to ignore the beads of sweat rolling down my ribcage.

‘Yes, well, safe flat

and how

, Bunny,’ she agrees as her head comes up again in relish. ‘A dedicated safe flat for sole use of Windfall, and that’s just about the entire job description. To be situate within the purlieus of Inner London, plus a statement

that the said flat will be known for cover purposes as the Stables, and a permanent housekeeper to be assigned at Smiley’s discretion. And that’s about our lot.’

‘Ring a bell after all?’ Bunny enquires.

They wait. So do I. Laura resumes her private conversation with Bunny.

‘It’s like Control didn’t want even Lacon to know where the place was, or who looked after it, Bunny. Which, given Lacon’s seat of power at the Treasury and his comprehensive knowledge of other areas of Circus business, strikes me as a touch paranoid on Control’s part, but who are we to criticize?’

‘Who indeed? Stables as in sweep them clean?’ Bunny asks, all curiosity.

‘I assume so,’ she says.

‘Smiley’s choice?’

‘Ask Pete,’ she suggests helpfully.

But Pete, which I detest, has gone even more deaf than he pretends to be.

‘And the

good

news is’ – Bunny to Laura again – ‘there still

is

a Windfall safe flat! Because either by design or sheer neglect, I

suspect

the latter, the Stables has remained on the private imprest of no fewer than four

successive

Controls. And it’s there

now.

And our very own top floor doesn’t even know it exists, let alone where it is. Funnier still, in these times of austerity, its existence hasn’t been questioned by the dear old Treasury. They’ve nodded it through, bless them, year after year.’ He affects a homophobe lisp: ‘

Too secret to ask, darlings. Sign along the dotted line, and not a word to Mummy.

It’s leasehold, and we have not the faintest idea when the lease expires, who holds it or what generous arsehole pays the bills.’ And to me on the same savage note: ‘Peter. Pierre. Pete. You’re very quiet. Enlighten us, please. Who

is

that generous arsehole?’

When you’re cornered, when you’ve tried all the tricks in

your locker and they haven’t worked, there aren’t many ways left to wriggle. You can spin the story within the story. I’d done that, and it hadn’t worked. You can try a partial hangout and hope it ends there. I’d done that too, but it hadn’t ended there. So you accept that you’ve reached the end of the road, and the only option left to you is be bold, tell the truth, or as little as you can get away with, and earn a few Brownie points for being a good boy – none of which struck me as a very likely outcome, but it might at least get me my passport back.

*

‘George had a tame lawyer,’ I said, as the sinful relief of confession rose in me despite myself. ‘The one you call chichi. A distant relative of Ann’s. He or she agreed to play cut-out. It’s not a safe flat, it’s a safe house three floors high, and it was leased by an offshore trust registered in the Dutch Antilles.’

‘Spoken like a hero’ – Bunny’s approval – ‘and the safe house keeper?’

‘Millie McCraig. A former agent of George’s. She’d kept for him before. Had all the skills. When Windfall started up, she was keeping a Circus safe house for Joint in the New Forest. Place called Camp 4. George told her to resign, then reapply to Covert. He transferred her to the reptile fund and set her up in the Stables.’

‘Which is situate where, may we now know?’ – still Bunny.

So I told them that too, complete with the Stables phone number, which tripped off my tongue as lightly as if it had been straining to come out all along. Then there was stage business while Bunny and Laura made themselves a gully through the files on the table between us, and Bunny plonked a broad-bottomed telephone of a complexity that was totally beyond me in the gap and, having touched a succession of keys at lightning speed, handed me the receiver.

At a tenth of Bunny’s speed, I touched in the Stables phone number and was startled to hear the dialling tone blaring out all over the room, which wasn’t just grossly insecure to my guilty ear, but an act of outright betrayal, as if I’d been blown, captured and turned in a single move. The phone bawled out its ringing tone. We waited. Still no answer. And I was thinking, either Millie’s at church, because she used to do a lot of that, or she’s out bicycling, or she’s a sight less agile than she used to be, like the rest of us. But more likely she’s dead and buried because, beautiful and unattainable though she was, she had a good five years on me.

The ringing stopped. There was a rustle and I assumed the call was going over to answerphone. Then, to my astonishment and disbelief, I heard Millie’s voice, the same voice, the same saw-edge of puritanical Scottish disapproval that I would mimic to make George laugh when he was feeling low:

‘

Yes? Hullo?

’ – and when I hesitated – ‘Who

is

that, please?’ – indignantly, as if it was midnight rather than seven in the evening.

‘It’s me, Peter Weston, Millie,’ I said. And throwing in Smiley’s cover name for good measure: ‘Friend of Mr Barraclough’s, if you remember.’

I was expecting, even hoping, that for once in her life Millie McCraig would need time to collect herself, but she came back so sharply that it was I, not she, who was disconcerted.

‘Mr

Weston

?’

‘Himself, Millie, not his shadow.’

‘Kindly identify yourself, Mr Weston.’

Identify myself?

Hadn’t I just given her two cover names? Then I realized: she wants my

pinpoint

, which was a form of obscure coded communication more often used over Moscow’s telephone system than London’s, but Smiley in our darkest days had insisted on it. So I grabbed a brown wooden pencil that was lying on the

desk in front of me and, feeling a total idiot, stooped over Bunny’s super-elaborate telephone and tapped my thousand-year-old pinpoint code on to the speaker, hoping it would have the same effect as if I’d tapped it on to the mouthpiece, three taps, pause, one tap, pause, two taps. And evidently it did, because no sooner had I delivered the last tap than Millie was back, all sweet and accommodating, saying it was nice to hear my voice after all these years, Mr Weston, and what could she be doing to help me at all?

To which I might have replied: Well, since you ask, Millie, could you kindly confirm that these events are playing out in the real world and not in some murky corner of the middle world reserved for unsleeping spies of yesterday?

4

On my arrival from Brittany the previous morning, I had booked myself into a dismal hotel near Charing Cross station and forked out ninety pounds in advance for a room the size of a hearse. On my way there, I had also paid a courtesy call on my old friend and former joe Bernie Lavendar, Gentlemen’s Tailor to the Diplomatic Corps, whose cutting rooms were situated in a minuscule semi-basement off Savile Row. But size had never mattered to Bernie. What had mattered to him – and to the Circus – was getting inside the diplomatic parlours of Kensington Palace Gardens and St John’s Wood, and doing his bit for England, with a modest tax-free income on the side.

We embraced, he drew the blind and dropped the latch on the door. For old times’ sake I tried on a couple of his uncollecteds: jackets and suits made for foreign diplomats who for unknown reasons had failed to collect them. And finally, also in the spirit of old times, I entrusted him with a sealed envelope to pop in his safe until my return. It contained my French passport, but if it had contained the plans for the D-Day landings, Bernie couldn’t have treated it with greater reverence.

Now I have come to reclaim it.

‘And how’s Mr Smiley, then?’ he asks, dropping his voice out of reverence, or an exaggerated sense of security. ‘Have we heard of him at all, Mister G?’

We haven’t. Has Bernie? Alas, Bernie hasn’t either, so we make do with a chuckle about George’s habit of disappearing for long periods without explaining himself.

But inside, I wasn’t chuckling. Was it possible George was

dead

? And that Bunny

knew

he was dead and wasn’t telling? But not even George could die in secret. And how about Ann, his ever-faithless wife? Word had reached me a while back that, tiring of her many adventures, she had espoused a fashionable charity. But whether the attachment had endured any longer than its predecessors was anybody’s guess.

With my French passport back in my pocket, I took myself to Tottenham Court Road and invested in a couple of disposable mobile phones with ten pounds’ worth of phone time apiece. And, as an afterthought, the bottle of Scotch I had neglected to buy at Rennes airport, which probably accounts for the merciful fact that I have no memory of the night that somehow passed.

Rising with the dawn, I walked for an hour through drizzle, and ate a bad breakfast in a sandwich bar. Only then, with a sense of resignation tinged with disbelief, did I pluck up the courage to hail a black cab and give the driver the address that for two years had been the scene of more rejoicing, stress and human anguish than any other place in my life.

*

As I remembered it, No. 13 Disraeli Street, alias the Stables, had been a shabby, unrestored Victorian end-of-terrace house in a Bloomsbury side street. And to my astonishment, that is the house that stands before me now: unchanged, unrepentant, a standing reproach to its shiny, prinked-up neighbours. The time is nine a.m., the appointed hour, but the doorstep has been commandeered by a slender woman in jeans, sneakers and leather jacket who is talking vituperatively into her mobile

phone. I’m about to begin another circuit when I realize she is Laura-who-is-History in modern dress.

‘Sleep well, Pete?’

‘Like an angel.’

‘Which bell do I press without catching gangrene?’

‘Try Ethics.’

Ethics being Smiley’s own choice for the least alluring doorbell he could think of. The front door swung open and there in the half-darkness stood the ghost of Millie McCraig, her once jet-black hair as white as mine, her athlete’s body bent with age, but the same zealous light burning in the moist blue eyes as she allowed me one air kiss on each frugal Celtic cheek.

Laura brushed past us into the hall. The two women squared up to each other like boxers before the fight, while I underwent such turbulent feelings of recognition and remorse that my one desire was to steal back into the street, close the door after me and pretend I’d never been here. What I was seeing around me would have surpassed the dreams of the most demanding archaeologist: a scrupulously preserved burial chamber, its seals unbroken, dedicated to Operation Windfall and all who had sailed in her, complete with every original artefact, from my pizza-delivery gear hanging from its hook to Millie McCraig’s upright ladies’ bicycle, a vintage model even in its day, with wicker basket, ting-a-ling bell and Rexine carrier bag, parked on its stand in the hallway.

‘Will you be wishing to look around at all?’ Millie is saying to Laura, as indifferently as if she is talking to a potential purchaser.

‘There’s a back door,’ says Laura to Millie, producing an architect’s plan of the building; and where in God’s name had she got

that

from?

We stand at the glazed kitchen door. Below us, a handkerchief-sized garden, and at its centre, Millie’s vegetable patch. Oliver

Mendel and I gave it its first dig. The washing line bare, but Millie was expecting us. The birdhouse, the same one. Mendel and I had cobbled it together one midnight out of bits of spare timber. Mendel, under my slightly drunken guidance, had embellished it with a pokerwork plaque declaring

No bird turned away

. And there it stood, as proud and upright as on the birthday it had celebrated. A stone path weaves between the vegetable beds to the kissing gate that leads to the private car park that leads to the side street. No safe house George countenanced was complete without a rear entrance.

‘Anybody ever come in that way?’ Laura enquires.

‘Control,’ I reply, sparing Millie the need to answer. ‘Wouldn’t have come in by the front to save his life.’

‘And the rest of you?’

‘Used the front door. Once Control had decided the back way was his, it became his private lift.’

Be generous in small things, I am advising myself. Keep the rest in your memory locked, and throw away the key. Next on her itinerary is the winding wooden staircase, a miniature replica of every dingy staircase at the Circus. We are about to ascend it when, to the tinkle of a small bell, a cat appears: a large, black, long-haired, malign-looking animal with a red collar. It sits, yawns and stares at us. Laura stares back at it, then turns to Millie.

‘Is she on the budget too?’

‘She’s a he, and I pay for him myself, thank you.’

‘Does he have a name?’

‘Yes.’

‘But it’s classified?’

‘Yes.’

With Laura striding ahead and the cat cautiously following, we ascend to the half-landing and come to a halt before the green-baize door with its combination lock. Beyond it lies the

cypher room. When George first took the place, the door was glazed, but Ben the cypher clerk wouldn’t allow his fingers to be watched, hence the baize.

‘

Right.

Who’s got the combination?’ – Laura in scout-mistress mode.

Since Millie again says nothing, I reluctantly recite the combination: 21 10 05, the date of the Battle of Trafalgar.

‘Ben was Royal Navy,’ I explain, but if Laura understands the reference, she gives no sign of it.

Parking herself in the swivel chair, she glowers at the array of dials and switches. Flips a switch. Nothing. Turns a dial. Nothing.

‘Power’s been off ever since,’ Millie murmurs to me, not to Laura.

Swinging round in Ben’s chair, Laura jabs a finger at a green Chubb wall safe.

‘

Right.

Has that thing got a key?’

The

rights

are getting on my nerves. They’re like Pete. From a bunch at her side, Millie selects a key. The lock turns, the safe door swings open, Laura peers in and with a scything movement of her arm sweeps the contents on to the coconut matting: codebooks blazoned Top Secret and Beyond, pencils, reinforced envelopes, faded one-time pads in cellophane packs of twelve.

‘We leave everything as it is, right?’ she announces, swinging back to us. ‘Nobody touches anything anywhere. Got that? Pete? Millie?’

She is midway up the next flight of stairs when Millie with an ‘Excuse

me

!’ stops her in her tracks.

‘Would that be my personal quarters you’re proposing to enter at all?’

‘And if I am?’

‘You are welcome to make an inspection of my apartment

and personal possessions provided I have advance notice in writing and in good time signed by the appropriate authority at Head Office,’ Millie pronounces in a single unmodulated sentence, which I suspect she has been rehearsing. ‘In the meantime, I’ll trouble you to respect my personal privacy as becomes my age and station.’

To which Laura comes back with a heresy that not even Oliver Mendel would have risked on a good day:

‘Why’s that, Mill? You got someone tucked away up there?’

*

The classified cat has removed itself. We stand in the Middle Room, so called from the day Mendel and I cleared away the old hardboard partitions. Look at it from the street, all you got was another dingy net-curtained ground-floor window. But on the inside there was no window, because one snow-swept Saturday afternoon in February we bricked it up, consigning the room to eternal darkness until you switched on the green-shaded gamblers’ lights we bought from a shop in Soho.

Two cumbersome Victorian desks filled the centre, the one Smiley’s, the other – but only occasionally – Control’s. Their origin had remained a mystery until an evening when Smiley revealed to us over a Scotch that a cousin of Ann’s was selling off a country pile in Devon to pay death duties.

‘What in the name of all that’s holy is

that

hideous thing when it’s at home?’

Laura’s eye has lighted, not to my surprise, on the garish three-foot-by-two-foot wall chart hanging behind Control’s desk. Hideous? Not to my eyes. But life-threatening, yes indeed. Before I knew it, I had grabbed the ash walking stick hanging over the back of Control’s chair and embarked on an explanation designed not to enlighten, but divert.

‘This section

here

, Laura’ – waving the stick at a maze of coloured lines and cover names resembling a crazy London Underground map – ‘is a homemade representation of the Circus’s East European network, codenamed Mayflower, as it stood before Operation Windfall was conceived. Here we have the great man himself, source Mayflower, the network’s inspiration, founder, cut-out and hub, here his sub-sources, and here, in descending order,

their

sub-sources, conscious or otherwise, together with a capsule description of their product, its rating in the Whitehall market place, and our own in-house assessment of the sources’ and sub-sources’ reliability on a scale of one to ten.’

With which I hung the stick back on its chair. But Laura didn’t appear quite as diverted or confused as I would have wished. She was examining the chart’s cover names one by one, checking them off. Behind me, Millie is sidling from the room.

‘Well, now we do know a

couple

of things about Operation Mayflower, as it happens,’ Laura remarked in a superior tone. ‘From the odd file you were kind enough to leave behind in the General Archive. Plus a couple of other sources of our own.’ And having let this sink in: ‘What’s with naming everybody after garden plants, anyway?’

‘Ah well, that’s from the days when we used

themes

, Laura,’ I replied, maintaining as best I could the lofty tone. ‘Mayflower, so flowers, not the ship.’

But again I had lost her.

‘What the hell are these

stars

for?’

‘Sparks, Laura. Not stars. Figurative sparks. In cases where field agents have been issued with radio sets. Red for active, yellow for cached.’

‘

Cached?

’

‘Buried. In oilskins usually.’

‘If I

hide

something, I

hide

it, right?’ she informs me, still

hunting among the cover names. ‘I don’t

cache

. I don’t do spy-speak and I’m not a boys’ club. What are these

plus signs

anyway?’ – stabbing her fingertip at the bubble around a sub-source and keeping it there.

‘They’re not

plus signs

, actually, Laura. They’re

crosses.

’

‘You mean they’re doubles? They’ve been

double-crossed

?’

‘I mean they’re extinct.’

‘How?’

‘Blown. Resigned. A raft of reasons.’

‘What happened to this man?’

‘Codename Violet?’

‘Yeah. What happened to Violet?’

Was she closing in on me? I was beginning to suspect she was.

‘Missing, believed interrogated. Based East Berlin 1956 to 1961. Ran a team of train-watchers. It’s all in the bubble’ – meaning, read it for yourself.

‘And this fellow? Tulip?’

‘Tulip’s a woman.’

‘And the hashtag?’

Has she been waiting all this time for her fingertip to land where it is now?

‘The hashtag, as you call it, is a

symbol.

’

‘I think I got that. What of?’

‘Tulip was a Russian Orthodox convert, so they gave her a Russian Orthodox cross.’ My voice steady as she goes.

‘Who did?’

‘The women. The two senior secretaries who worked here.’

‘Did every agent who had religion get a cross?’

‘Tulip’s Orthodoxy was part of her motivation to work for us. The cross marked that.’

‘What happened to her?’

‘Disappeared from our screens, alas.’

‘You didn’t have screens.’

‘Our assumption was that she had decided to call it a day. Some joes do that. Break off contact and disappear.’

‘Her actual name was

Gamp

, right? Like umbrella. Doris Gamp?’

This is absolutely not a wave of nausea I am feeling. That was not any kind of lurch of the stomach.

‘Probably. Gamp. Yes, I think it was. I’m surprised you know.’

‘Maybe you didn’t steal enough files. Was it a big loss?’

‘Was what?’

‘Her decision to call it a day.’

‘I’m not sure she

announced

her decision. Just ceased to operate. Still, yes, over time it

was

a loss. Tulip was a major source. Substantial. Yes.’

Too much? Too little? Too light? She’s thinking about it. For too long.

‘I thought it was Windfall you were interested in,’ I remind her.

‘Oh, we’re interested in all of it. Windfall’s just an excuse. What happened to Millie?’

Millie?

Ah, Millie. Not Tulip. Millie.

‘When?’ I say stupidly.

‘Just now. Where did she go?’

‘Upstairs to her flat, probably.’

‘Would you mind whistling for her, please? She hates me.’

But when I open the door, there’s Millie waiting with her keys. Pushing past her, Laura strides ahead down the corridor, map in hand. I hang back.

‘Where’s George?’ I murmur to Millie.

She shakes her head. Don’t know? Or don’t ask?

‘Keys, Millie?’

Millie dutifully unlocks the double doors to the library. Laura takes a pace forward, then slapstick-style two back as she emits the mandatory cry of

Holy shit!

– so shrill it must have awakened the dead in the British Museum. Incredulously,

she advances on the ranks of tattered tomes that cram the bookshelves from floor to ceiling. Gingerly she makes her first selection, volume 18 of a broken thirty-book set of the

Encyclopaedia Britannica

, published 1878. She opens it, flips a couple of pages in disbelief, dumps it on a side table and treats herself instead to

Treks Through Araby and Beyond

, published 1908, also part of a broken set, and priced, as I unaccountably remember, at five shillings and sixpence a volume, a pound for the lot, after Mendel had beaten down the dealer.

‘Do you mind telling me who reads this crap? Or did?’ – to me again.

‘Anyone who was Windfall cleared and had good reason.’

‘Meaning

what

?’

‘Meaning,’ I reply with as much dignity as I can muster, ‘that George Smiley was of the opinion that, since we were not blessed with an armed fortress beside the Thames, natural concealment was better than physical protection. And that, while barred windows and a steel safe would act as an open invitation to any local footpad to break and enter, the thief had yet to be born whose ideal heist was a skipload of—’

‘Just show me, okay? Whatever you stole. Whatever’s here.’

Placing a set of library steps in front of a fireplace filled with Millie’s dried flowers, I fish from the top shelf a copy of

A Layman’s Guide to the Science of Phrenology

by Henry J. Ramken, MA (Cantab.), and from its gouged cavity a buff folder. Passing the folder down to Laura, I restore Dr Ramken to his shelf and descend to firm ground to find her perched on the arm of a library chair scrutinizing her bounty; and Millie again nowhere to be seen.

‘I have a

Paul

here,’ Laura says accusingly. ‘Who’s Paul when he’s at home?’

This time I am not quite so successful at controlling my tonal responses:

‘He’s not

at home

, Laura. He’s dead.

Paul

, pronounced the German way, was one of several cover names that Alec Leamas used in Berlin for his joes.’ Belatedly, I managed the casual: ‘He alternated. Didn’t trust the world much. Well, didn’t trust Joint Steering, let’s say.’

She’s interested but doesn’t want me to know it. ‘And these are

all

the files, right? The whole caboose. Everything you stole is right here, hidden in these old books? Yes?’

I am only too pleased to enlighten her: ‘Not

all

by any means, Laura, I’m afraid. George’s policy was to keep as little as possible. Whatever could be dispensed with was shredded. We shredded, then we burned the shreds. George’s law.’

‘Where’s the shredder?’

‘Right over there in the corner.’

She’d missed it.

‘Where did you burn them?’

‘In that fireplace.’

‘Did you keep destruction certificates?’

‘Then we’d have had to destroy the destruction certificates, wouldn’t we?’

While I am still relishing my little victory, her gaze shifts to the darkest and most distant corner of the room, where two long photographs of standing men hang side by side. And this time she emits no cry of ‘Holy shit’ or any other exclamation, but advances on them in slow steps, as if afraid they’ll fly away.

‘And these beauties?’

‘Josef Fiedler and Hans-Dieter Mundt. Respectively Head and deputy Head of the Stasi’s operational directorate.’

‘I’ll take the one on the left.’

‘That’s Fiedler.’

‘Description?’

‘German Jewish, sole surviving son of academic parents who

died in the camps. Studied humanities in Moscow and Leipzig. Late entrant to the Stasi. Fast-streamed, smart, hates the guts of the man standing next to him.’

‘Mundt.’

‘By a process of elimination, yes, Mundt,’ I agree. ‘First name Hans-Dieter.’

Hans-Dieter Mundt in a double-breasted suit with all his jacket buttons done up. Hans-Dieter Mundt with his murderer’s arms pressed to his sides, thumbs downward, staring contemptuously into camera. He’s attending an execution. His own. Someone else’s. Either way, his expression will never change, the knife slash down the side of his face will never heal.

‘He was your mark, right? The man your pal Alec Leamas was sent to eliminate, right? Except Mundt eliminated Leamas instead. Right?’ She returns to Fiedler. ‘And Fiedler was your super-source? Right? The ultimate secret volunteer. The walk-in who never walked in. Just dumped a pile of red-hot intelligence on your doorstep, pressed the bell and ran away without leaving his name. Over and over. And you still don’t know for sure he was your joe, as you call him. That right?’

I take a breath: ‘All the unsolicited Windfall material that we received pointed in Fiedler’s direction,’ I reply, picking my words with precision. ‘We even asked ourselves whether Fiedler was positioning himself to defect and, so to speak, casting his bread on the waters in advance.’

‘Because he hated Mundt so much? Mundt the ex-Nazi who never quite reformed?’

‘That would have been a motive. Combined, we assumed, with a disillusionment about the democracy or lack of it as practised by the German Democratic Republic, the GDR. The feeling that his Communist god might have failed him, turning to certainty. There’d been an unsuccessful counter-revolution in Hungary, which the Soviets had repressed rather brutally.’

‘Thank you. I think I knew that.’

Of course she did. She’s History.

Two dishevelled youths were standing in the doorway, one male, one female. My first thought was that they must have come in by the back entrance, which had no bell; and my second – a wild one, I admit – that they were Karen, daughter to Elizabeth, and her fellow plaintiff Christoph, son to Alec, come to make a citizen’s arrest. Laura gives herself a lift-up on the stepladder for extra authority.

‘Nelson. Pepsi. Say hullo to Pete,’ she commands.

Hi, Pete.

Hi, Pete.

Hi.

‘Okay. Listen up, everyone. The premises where you are standing will henceforth be treated as a crime scene. They are also

Circus

premises. That includes the garden. Every bit of paper, file, piece of detritus, whatever’s on the walls by way of charts, pegboards, whatever’s in the drawers and bookshelves, is Circus property and potentially a court exhibit, to be copied, photographed and listed accordingly. Right?’

Nobody says it isn’t right.

‘

Pete

here is our

reader.

For his reading

Pete

will be accommodated here in the library. Pete will read, he will be briefed and debriefed by Head of Legal and myself.

Only.

’ Back to the dishevelled youths: ‘Your conversations with Pete will be social, right? They will be courteous. They will not at any point touch on the material he is reading, or the reasons why he’s reading it. All of which you both know, but I’m repeating it for Pete’s information. Should either one of you have cause to suppose that Pete or Millie, by mistake or deliberately, is attempting to remove documents or exhibits from Circus premises, you will immediately notify Legal. Millie.’

No answer, but she’s still in the doorway.

‘Was your area – your apartment – ever used – is it

now

used – for any kind of Service business?’

‘Not that I’m aware of.’

‘Does your area contain Service equipment? Cameras? Listening devices? Secret writing materials? Files? Papers? Official correspondence?’

‘It does not.’

‘Typewriter?’

‘My own. Purchased by myself, out of my personal money.’

‘Electronic?’

‘Remington manual.’

‘Radio?’

‘A wireless. My own. Purchased by myself.’

‘Tape recorder?’

‘For the wireless. Purchased by myself.’

‘Computer? iPad? Smartphone?’

‘Just a normal telephone, thank you.’

‘Millie, you just had your advance notice. Written confirmation is in the post. Pepsi. You will please accompany Millie to her apartment

now

, right? Millie, please provide whatever assistance Pepsi requires. I want the place picked into small pieces. Pete.’

‘Laura.’

‘How do I identify the active volumes in these shelves?’

‘All quarto books on the top shelf with authors’ surnames beginning A to R should contain papers, if they haven’t been destroyed.’

‘Nelson. You remain here in the library till the team arrives. Millie.’

‘What now?’

‘The bicycle in the hallway. Kindly move it. It’s in the way.’

*

Seated in the Middle Room, Laura and I are alone for the first time. She has offered me Control’s chair. I prefer Smiley’s. She appropriates Control’s for herself, lounging on her flank, either for her relaxation or for my benefit.

‘I’m a lawyer. Right? A pretty fucking good one. First I went private, then I went corporate. Then I got pissed off and applied to join your crowd. I was young and beautiful so they gave me History. I’ve been History ever since. Whenever the past threatens to bite the Service in the arse, it’s

get Laura.

And Windfall, believe me, is looking like quite some bite.’

‘You must be very pleased.’

If she notices the irony in my voice, she ignores it.

‘And what we want from

you

, corny as it may sound, is the whole truth and nothing but, and screw your loyalty to Smiley or anybody else. Right?’

Not right at all, so why bother to say it?

‘Once we have the truth, we’ll know how to doctor it. Maybe in your favour too, where our interests coincide. My job is to head off the shit before it hits the fan. That’s what you want too, right? No scandals, however historic. They’re a distraction, they raise unpleasant comparisons with our own times. A Service marches on its reputation and its good looks. Rendition, torture, playing footsie in the woodshed with murderous psychopaths: it’s bad for the public image, bad for trade. So we’re on the same side, right?’

Again I manage to say nothing.

‘So here’s the bad news. It’s not just the offspring of the Windfall victims who are after our blood. Bunny was soft-pedalling out of kindness. There’s a bunch of attention-hungry MPs who want to use Windfall as an example of what happens when the surveillance society is allowed to run amok. They can’t get their hands on the real stuff, so give them history.’ And growing

impatient at my silence: ‘I’m telling you, Pete. If we don’t have your total cooperation, this thing could—’

She waits for me to complete the sentence. I let her do the waiting instead.

‘And you really haven’t heard from him, right?’ she says finally.

It takes me a moment to realize I am sitting in his chair.

‘No, Laura. Once again, I have not heard from George Smiley.’

She leans back and hauls an envelope from her back pocket. For a mad moment I think it’s going to be from George. Electronically printed. No watermark. No human hand.

Temporary accommodation has been obtained for you effective today’s date at apartment 110B, Hood House, Dolphin Square, London SW. Following conditions apply

.

I am to keep no pets. No unauthorized third party to be admitted to the premises. I am to be present and available in the premises between 2200 and 0700 hours, or supply Legal Department with notification in advance. In view of my position (unstated) a concessionary rental of £50 per night will be set against my pension. There will be no charge for heat, light or electricity, but I will be held accountable for any loss or damage to property.

The dishevelled youth called Nelson is poking his head round the door.

‘Van’s up, Laura.’

The sacking of the Stables is about to begin.

5

Dusk was falling. An autumn evening, but by English standards warm as summer. Somehow my first day in the Stables had ended. I walked for a while, had a Scotch in a pub full of deafening young, took a bus to Pimlico, hopped out a few stops early and walked again. Soon the lighted hulk of Dolphin Square was rising at me out of the haze. Ever since I had rallied to the secret flag, the place had given me the shivers. Dolphin Square in my day had more safe flats to the cubic foot than any building on the planet, and there wasn’t one of them where I hadn’t briefed or debriefed some luckless joe. It was also the place where Alec Leamas had spent his last night in England as a guest of Moscow’s recruiter before setting out on the journey that killed him.

Flat 110B Hood House did nothing to dispel his ghost. Circus safe flats had always been models of planned discomfort. This one was a classic of the breed: one industrial-sized fire extinguisher, red; two lumpy armchairs with springs gone; one reproduction watercolour of Lake Windermere; one minibar, locked; one printed warning not to smoke

EVEN WITH WINDOW OPEN

; one very large television set that I automatically assumed was two-way; and one mossy black telephone with no number on it, to be used, as far as I was concerned, for disinformation purposes only. And in the tiny bedroom, one iron-hard school bed, single, to discourage venery.

Closing the bedroom door on the television set, I unpacked my overnight bag and cast round for somewhere to cache my French passport. A framed

INSTRUCTIONS IN CASE OF FIRE

was badly screwed to the bathroom door. Easing the screws, I slid the passport into the cavity, tightened them again, went downstairs and devoured a hamburger. Back in the flat, I treated myself to a liberal shot of Scotch and tried to recline in an austerity armchair. But barely had I drifted off than I was awake again and cold sober, this time in West Berlin in the year of Our Lord nineteen fifty-seven.

*

It’s a Friday, end of day.

I’ve been in the divided city a week, and I’m looking forward to a couple of carnal days and nights in the company of a Swedish journalist called Dagmar, with whom I have fallen passionately in love in the space of three minutes at a cocktail party given by our British High Commissioner, who doubles as British Ambassador to the eternally provisional West German Government in Bonn. I’m due to meet her in a couple of hours, but before doing so I’ve decided to drop in on our Berlin Station and say my hullos and goodbyes to my old pal Alec.

Down at Berlin’s Olympic Stadium, in an echoing redbrick barracks built for Hitler’s glory and once known as the House of German Sports, the Station is packing up for the weekend. I find Alec standing in the queue at the barred window of the Registry, waiting his turn to hand in a tray full of classified papers. He isn’t expecting me, but nothing much surprises him any more, so I say hullo, Alec, great to see you, and Alec says oh, hullo, Peter, it’s you, what the hell are you doing here? Then, after some uncharacteristic hesitation, he asks me whether I’m tied up for the weekend. And I say, I am actually. To which he says, oh, pity,

I thought you might come with me to Düsseldorf. And I say, why on earth Düsseldorf? And he does some more hesitation.

‘I just need to get out of bloody Berlin for once,’ he says, with an unconvincing shrug of indifference. And because he seems to accept that I could never, in my wildest dreams, imagine him as a casual tourist: ‘Got to see a man about a dog,’ he explains, from which I take it that he wishes me to understand he has a joe he’s got to take care of, and I might in that case be useful to him as a foil or a back-up or whatever. But that’s no reason to stand up Dagmar:

‘Can’t do, I’m afraid, Alec. A Scandinavian lady needs my undivided attention. And I need hers.’

He thinks about this for a while, but not in a way that I associate with Alec. It’s as if he feels hurt, or puzzled. A registry clerk is gesturing impatiently the other side of the grille. Alec hands over his papers. The clerk signs them in.

‘A woman would be good,’ he says, without looking at me.

‘Even a woman who thinks I’m from the Ministry of Labour, scouting for German scientific talent? Come off it!’

‘Bring her. She’ll be fine,’ he says.

And if you knew Alec as well as I did, that was as close to a cry for help as you would ever hear from him. In all the years we had hunted together, amid all the ups and downs, I had never once seen him at a loss, till now. Dagmar is game, so the same evening the three of us fly the corridor to Helmstedt, pick up a car, drive to Düsseldorf and book into a hotel Alec knows. Over dinner he barely speaks, but Dagmar, who is turning out to be a real trouper, more than holds her own, and we slip off to bed early and have our carnal night, both parties thoroughly pleased with themselves. Saturday morning we all meet for late breakfast and Alec says he’s got tickets for a football match. I’d never in my life heard Alec express the smallest interest in football. Then it turns out he’s got

four

tickets.

‘Who’s the fourth?’ I ask him, fantasizing that he’s got a secret love tucked away who’s only available on Saturdays.

‘Kid I know,’ he says.

We get into the car, Dagmar and self in the back, and off we go. Alec pulls up at a street corner. A tall, rigid-faced boy in his teens is standing under a Coca–Cola sign, waiting for him. Alec shoves open the door, the boy jumps into the front seat and Alec says, ‘This is Christoph,’ so we say, ‘Hullo, Christoph,’ and off we drive to the stadium. Alec speaks German as well as he speaks English, probably better, and he speaks it to the boy in undertones. The boy grunts, nods or shakes his head. How old is he? Fourteen? Eighteen? Whatever age he is, he is the eternal German adolescent of the authoritarian class: sullen, spotty and resentfully obedient. He’s blond, pallid and square-shouldered, and for a kid he doesn’t smile a lot. On a rise, set back from the touchline, he and Alec stand side by side and exchange the odd word I can’t hear, but the boy doesn’t cheer, he stares, and at half-time the two of them disappear, I’m assuming for a pee or a hot dog. But only Alec returns.

‘Where’s Christoph?’ I ask.

‘Had to head back home,’ he replies gruffly. ‘Mum’s orders.’

And for the rest of the weekend that was that. Dagmar and I spent more happy times in bed, and what Alec got up to I’ve no idea. I just assumed that Christoph was the son of one of his joes and needed an outing, because with joes it’s welfare first and everything else second. It wasn’t till I was about to return to London and Dagmar was safely back in Stockholm with her husband, and Alec and I were having a farewell drink together in one of his many favourite Berlin watering holes, that I asked him casually ‘How’s Christoph?’ because it had crossed my mind that the boy had seemed a bit astray, a bit hard to please, and probably I even said something to this effect.

At first I thought I was going to get another of those odd silences, because he had turned away from me so that I couldn’t see his face.

‘I’m his bloody

father

, for Christ’s sake,’ he said.

Then in short, reluctant bursts, mostly without verbs, and not even bothering to tell me to keep it to myself because he knew I would, the story, or as much of it as he was willing to tell: German woman courier he’d used when he was based in Bern and she lived in Düsseldorf: good girl, good pals, had a fling with her. Wanted me to marry her. Wouldn’t, so she married a local lawyer. Lawyer adopted the boy, only decent thing he ever did. She lets me see him now and then. Can’t tell her bloody husband or the bastard would beat her up.

And the final image that I’m seeing now, as I rouse myself from my austerity chair: Alec and the boy Christoph, standing shoulder to shoulder, staring rigidly at the match. And the same set expression on their faces, and the same Irish jaw.

*

At some point in the night I must have slept, but had no memory of it. The time in Dolphin Square is six a.m., in Brittany seven. Catherine will be up and about by now. If I was at home, I would be up and about too, because Isabelle starts her singing as soon as Chevalier, our chief cockerel, starts his. Her voice carries straight across the courtyard from Catherine’s cottage because Isabelle needs her bedroom window open at all times, never mind the weather. They will have fed the goats their breakfast, and Catherine will be feeding Isabelle hers, probably in a chase game round the courtyard with Isabelle escaping and Catherine coming after her with a spoonful of yoghurt. And the chickens, under the useless command of Chevalier, generally behaving as if the world is ending.

As I pictured this scene it crossed my mind that if I called the main house and Catherine happened to be passing, and had her keys with her, she might hear the ring and answer it. So I gave

it a shot on the off-chance, using one of my disposable mobile phones because I was damned if I was going to have Bunny listening. There’s no answering system on the farm phone, so I let it ring for a few minutes and was just giving up hope when I heard Catherine’s voice, which is Breton, and sometimes a little more severe than perhaps she intends.

‘You are well, Pierre?’

‘Fine. You too, Catherine?’

‘You have said goodbye to your friend who died?’

‘Still a couple of days to go.’

‘You will make a big speech?’

‘Enormous.’

‘You are nervous?’

‘Terrified. How’s Isabelle?’

‘Isabelle is well. She has not changed in your absence.’ By now I had noticed an undertone of annoyance, or something stronger in her voice. ‘A friend came to visit you yesterday. You were expecting a friend, Pierre?’

‘No. What sort of a friend?’

But, like every tough questioner, Catherine has her own way with answers: ‘I told him: no, Pierre is not here, Pierre is in London, he is being a Good Samaritan, somebody has died, he has gone to comfort those who are grieving.’

‘But who

was

he, Catherine?’

‘He didn’t smile. He was not polite. He was persistent.’

‘You mean he made a pass at you?’

‘He asked who had died. I said I don’t know. He asked why don’t I know? I said, because Pierre does not tell me everything. He laughed. He said, maybe at Pierre’s age, all friends are dying. He asked, was it sudden? Was it a woman, a man? He asked, do you stay in a hotel in London? Which one? What is the address? What is the name? I say I don’t know. I am busy, I have a child and a farm.’

‘Was he French?’

‘Maybe German. Maybe American.’

‘Did he come by car?’

‘Taxi. From the station. With Gascon. First you pay me, Gascon told him. Otherwise, I don’t drive you.’

‘What did he look like?’

‘He was not agreeable, Pierre. Farouche. Big like a boxer. Many rings on his fingers.’

‘Age?’

‘Maybe fifty. Sixty. I did not count his teeth. Maybe more.’

‘Did he tell you his name?’

‘He said it was not necessary. He said you are old friends. He said you watch football together.’

I lie motionless, barely breathing. I think I should get out of bed, but have a

fuite du courage

. How the devil, Christoph, son of Alec, litigant, purloiner of closed Stasi files, criminal with a record as long as your arm, did you find your way to Brittany?

The farmstead at Les Deux Eglises had come down to me on my mother’s side. It still bore her maiden name. There was no Pierre Guillam in the local phone book. Had Bunny for his own arcane reasons slipped Christoph my address? To what conceivable purpose?

Then I remember my motorcycle pilgrimage to a rain-swept cemetery in Berlin on a pitch-dark winter’s day in 1989 and everything makes sense.

*

The Berlin Wall has been down a month. Germany is ecstatic, our village in Brittany a little less so. And I seem to be hovering somewhere between the two, one minute rejoicing that peace

of a sort has broken out, then lapsing into introspection as I think of the stuff we did and the sacrifices we made, not least of other people’s lives, in the long years when we thought the Wall was going to be there for ever.

It was in this uncertain mood that I was wrestling with the farmstead’s annual tax returns in the counting room at Les Deux Eglises when our new young postman Denis, not yet dignified by Monsieur, and certainly not le Général, arrived not by yellow van but by pushbike, and handed a letter, not to me but to old Antoine, a one-legged war veteran, who as usual was hanging around the courtyard with a pitchfork in his hands and nothing in particular to do.

Having examined the envelope front and back, and conceded that I might have it after all, Antoine hobbled to the door, presented me with it, then stood back to scrutinize me while I read the contents.

Mürren,

Switzerland

Dear Peter,

I thought you would wish to know that the ashes of our friend Alec have recently been laid to rest in Berlin, close to the spot where he died. It seems that the bodies of those murdered at the Wall were customarily incinerated in secret, and their ashes dispersed. Thanks to meticulous Stasi records, however, it appears that exceptional steps were taken in Alec’s case. His remains have come to light and he has been given a decent, if belated, funeral.

As ever,

George

And on a separate sheet of paper – old habits die hard – the address of a small cemetery in the Berlin district of Friedrichshain, officially set aside for victims of war and tyranny.

I was with Diane at the time, another passing fancy nearing its end. I think I told her that a friend was ill. Or maybe that the friend had died. I jumped on my motorbike – it was still those days – drove myself non-stop to Berlin through some of the worst weather I’d ever come across, went straight to the cemetery and asked at the entrance where I would find Alec. Dense, non-stop rain. An old man who was some kind of sacristan gave me an umbrella and a map and pointed me down a long grey avenue of trees. After hunting around, I found what I was looking for: one fresh grave, one marble headstone inscribed

ALEC JOHANNES LEAMAS

, washed eerily white by the rain. No dates, no job description, and a full-length mound to indicate a body where only ashes lay. For cover? All those years of knowing you, I thought, and you never told me about the Johannes: typical. I hadn’t brought flowers; I thought he’d laugh at me. So I stood under my umbrella and had a sort of internal dialogue with him.

As I was getting back on my bike, the old man asked me whether I’d like to sign the condolence book.

Condolence book?

It was his personal duty to maintain one, he explained; not so much a duty, more as a service to the departed. So I said why not? The first entry was signed ‘GS’, address ‘London’. In the tributes column, the one word ‘Friend’. So that was George, or as much of him as he was willing to admit to. Below George, a bunch of German names that meant nothing to me, with tributes like ‘Never forgotten’, until we reach the one name ‘Christoph’, on its own, no surname after it. And under tributes, the word ‘Sohn’ – son. And under home address, ‘Düsseldorf’.

Was it a passing fit of euphoria about the Wall coming down

and all the world being free again, which I severely doubt – or a gut feeling that I’d done enough secrecy in my life – or simply an urge to stand up in the pouring rain and be counted as another of Alec’s

friends

? Whatever it was, I did the lot: wrote down my real name, my real address in Brittany, and in the tributes column, because I couldn’t think of anything better, ‘

Pierrot

’, which was what Alec called me on the rare occasions he was feeling affectionate.

And Christoph, my farouche fellow mourner and Alec’s son? What did

you

do? On one of your later visits to your father’s grave – I am assuming on no particular grounds that you made a few more, if only for research purposes – you happened to take another look in the condolence book, and what did you see?

Peter Guillam

and

Les Deux Eglises

written out for you

en clair

, not an alias, not a cover address or a safe house, just the unprotected me and where I live. And that’s what got you all the way to Brittany from Düsseldorf.

So what’s your next move, Christoph, son of Alec? I’m hearing Bunny’s fruity legal voice from yesterday:

Christoph is not without his talents, Peter. Perhaps the genes help

.

6

‘Pete here is our

reader

,’ Laura had declared to her admiring audience. ‘For his reading Pete will be accommodated here in the library.’ I see myself in the days that followed, not so much a reader as some sort of senior student forced to sit an examination he should have taken half a lifetime ago. Intermittently, the late developer is hauled out of the examination room and compelled to undergo a viva voce by examiners whose knowledge of his subject is mysteriously uneven, but that doesn’t stop them from trying to give him a hard time. Intermittently, he is so appalled by the antics of his earlier self that he is on the verge of denying them, until the evidence condemns him out of his own mouth. Each morning on arrival I am served with a wad of folders, some familiar, some not. Just because you’ve stolen a file, doesn’t mean you’ve read it.

On the morning of my second day, the library remained closed to all comers. From the thumps that issued from it, and the scurrying of tracksuited young men and women I wasn’t introduced to, I assumed an all-night fingertip search. Then, by afternoon, an ominous quiet. My desk was not a desk, but a trestle table set gallows-like at the centre of the library floor. The bookshelves were gone, leaving only a ghostly imprint like the shadow of prison bars on the Anaglypta walls.

‘When you hit a rosette, stop,’ Laura commands me, and departs.

Rosette?

She means the pink-headed paperclips wedged at intervals among the folders. Nelson silently assumes the invigilator’s chair and opens a hefty paperback. Henri Troyat’s life of Tolstoy.

‘Give us a shout if you want a pee break, right? My dad pees like every ten minutes.’

‘Poor chap.’

‘Just don’t take anything with you.’

*

A freak evening when Laura without explanation replaces Nelson on the invigilator’s chair and, having surveyed me dourly for half an hour or more, says:

‘Fuck it. Want to take me out for a free meal, Pete?’

‘Now?’ I say.

‘Now. Tonight. When do you think?’

Free to whom? I’m wondering as I shrug my cautious acquiescence. Free to her? Me? Or free to both of us because the Office is setting us up? We adjourn to a Greek restaurant up the road. She’s booked a table. She’s wearing a skirt. It’s a corner table, with an unlit candle in a red cage. I don’t know why the image of the unlit candle lingers, but it does. And the patron leaning over us, lighting it and telling me I have the best view in the room, meaning Laura.

We have an ouzo, then another. Straight, no ice, her idea. So is she a lush, is she on the make – me at my age, for Christ’s sake? – or does she think alcohol is going to loosen the old fart’s tongue? And what should I be making of the very ordinary middle-aged couple sitting at the next table and determinedly not looking at us?

She’s wearing a sleeveless halter top that sparkles in the candlelight and the neckline has slipped southward. We order the

usual starters – tarama, houmous, whitebait – she adores moussaka so we settle for two, and she starts on a different kind of interrogation, the flirtatious kind. So is it really true, Pete, what you told Bunny, that you and Catherine are just good friends?

‘Because

frankly

, Pete’ – voice softening to intimate – ‘what with

your

record, how can you

possibly

be shacked up with a super-attractive French girl you don’t even

shag

? Unless of course you’re secretly gay, which is what Bunny thinks. Mind you, Bunny thinks everyone’s gay. So he’s probably gay himself, and won’t admit it.’

One half of me wants to tell her to go to hell, the other half wants to know what she thinks she’s up to. So I let it go.

‘But I mean honestly, Pete, it’s

crazy

!’ she persists. ‘I mean, don’t tell me you’ve

withdrawn your cavalry from the charge

, as my dad used to say: an old stoat like you, you can’t

possibly

!’

I ask her, against my better instincts, what makes her think Catherine is so attractive? And she says, oh, a little bird has told her. We’re drinking Greek red, black as ink and tastes like it, and she’s leaning forward, giving me the full benefit of her neckline.

‘So, Pete, tell me true. Scout’s honour, okay? Of

all

the women you’ve bonked over the years – who gets the absolute number-one slot?’ – her unfortunate choice of the word

slot

causing her to collapse in a fit of giggles.

‘How about you first?’ I retort, and the joke’s over.

I call for the bill, the couple next door call for theirs. She says she’ll take the tube. I say I’ll walk a bit. And to this day I have no idea whether she was on a mission to draw me out; or was she just another unattached soul, looking for a bit of human warmth?

*

I am the Reader. The buff cover of the folder I am reading is blank except for a handwritten file reference – whose hand escapes me, but probably my own. The leading serial is marked Top Secret and Guard, which means keep it away from the Americans, and it is a report – apologia would be a better word – written by one Stavros de Jong, all six foot three of him, an ungainly Circus trainee of twenty-five. Stas for short is a Cambridge graduate with six months still to go before his confirmation. He’s on attachment to Berlin Station’s Covert section, which is commanded by my comrade-in-arms in a string of abortive operations, the veteran fieldman Alec Leamas.

As a matter of protocol, Leamas as local commander is also de facto deputy Head of Station. Stas’s report is accordingly addressed to Leamas in that capacity, and forwarded to his Head of Covert in London, George Smiley.

Report by S. de Jong to DH/Station Berlin

[Leamas]

, copy to JS

[Joint Steering].

I am instructed to submit the following report.

New Year’s Day being cold but sunny and a public holiday, my wife Pippa and I decided to take our children (Barney, 3 and Lucy, 5) and our Jack Russell (Loftus) to Köpenick, East Berlin, for a lakeside picnic in warm clothes, and a ramble in the adjoining woods.

Our family car is a blue Volvo estate with British military number plates front and rear, entitling us to unrestricted passage between Berlin sectors, Köpenick in East Berlin being one of our regular picnic spots and a favourite with the children.

I parked as per usual beside the perimeter wall of Köpenick’s old brewery, now abandoned. There was no other car in sight, and at the waterside only a few seated fishermen who ignored

us. From the car, we carried our picnic basket through the woods to our usual grass promontory beside the lake, and afterwards played hide-and-seek with Loftus barking loudly, to the irritation of one of the fishermen who shouted abuse at us over his shoulder, insisting Loftus had disturbed the fish.

The man was gaunt and in his fifties with greying hair, and I would recognize him if I saw him again. He wore a black peak cap and an old Wehrmacht topcoat stripped of its markings.

It being by now around 1530 hours and Barney due for his rest, we packed our picnic things together and let the children run ahead to the car carrying the basket between them, with Loftus following and barking.

On reaching the car, however, they dropped the basket and ran back in alarm, followed by Loftus barking, to report that the driver’s door had been forced open by a burglar ‘who has completely stolen Daddy’s camera!’ – Lucy.

The driver’s door had indeed been forced, and the handle broken, but the old Kodak camera, which I had inadvertently left in the glove compartment, had not been stolen, nor had my overcoat or the groceries and other provisions that we had picked up at the Naafi, which to our surprise was open on New Year’s Day, before crossing into East Berlin.

Far from committing a burglary, it transpired, the intruder had left a Memphis tobacco tin next to my camera. Inside it was a small nickel cartridge, which I immediately identified as a standard Minox container for sub-miniature film.

Since today is a public holiday, and I have recently attended an operational photography course, I decided there were insufficient grounds at this stage to call out the Station duty officer. On arriving home, I therefore immediately developed the film in our bathroom, which is windowless, using my Service-issue equipment.

By 2100 hours, having examined some one hundred frames of developed negative under a magnifying glass, I alerted the deputy Head of Station [Leamas], who instructed me to bring the material forthwith to headquarters and prepare a written report, which I duly did.

I fully accept, in hindsight, that I should have taken the undeveloped film directly to Berlin Station for processing by photographic section, and that it was insecure and potentially disastrous for me as a probationer to undertake the development in my own home. In mitigation I would like to repeat that 1 January was a public holiday and that I was reluctant to rouse the Station with what might have been a false alarm, plus I had passed my operational photography course at Sarratt with straight As. Nevertheless I sincerely regret my decision, and would like to state that I have learned my lesson.

S de J

And along the bottom of the letter, Alec’s enraged hand-scrawled note to his Head of Covert, Smiley:

George – the stupid little bugger copied this lot to Joint before anyone had a chance to stop him. That’s education for you. Suggest you smooth-talk P. Alleline, B. Haydon, T. Esterhase and Roy bloody Bland and company into believing it was a bum steer: i.e. no further action required, second-rate pedlar material, etc.

Alec

But Alec was never one to sit on his thumbs, least of all when his future career was in the balance. His contract with the Circus was up for renewal, he was way past the age limit for fieldmen,

with precious little prospect of a cosy desk job in Head Office, which explains Smiley’s somewhat untrusting account of what Alec did next:

H/Covert Marylebone

[Smiley]

to Control. Eyes Only. Personal, hand-delivered.

Subject:

AL,

H/Covert Berlin

.

And handwritten, in George’s own immaculate hand:

C: You will be as surprised as I was that AL appeared unannounced on the doorstep of my Chelsea home at ten o’clock last night. Ann being away on a health cure, I was alone in the house. He smelt of drink, not unusual, but was not drunk. He insisted I unplug the phone in the drawing room before we speak, and that, despite the prevailing very cold weather, we sit at the conservatory end overlooking the garden on the grounds that ‘you can’t bug glass’. He then told me he had flown from Berlin by civilian plane that afternoon in order not to appear on the RAF flight list, which he suspects is routinely monitored by Joint Steering. For the same reason he no longer trusts Circus couriers.

He first needed to know, had I put Joint off the scent, as he had asked, regarding the Köpenick material? I replied that I believed I had been able to achieve this, since it was well known that Berlin Station was besieged with offers of worthless pedlar intelligence.

He then produced the attached folded sheet of paper from his pocket, explaining that it was a summary, prepared by himself alone, of the material contained in the Köpenick cassettes, but without benefit of collateral from any other covert or overt source.

I have two visions simultaneously: the one of George and Alec huddled head to head in the chilly conservatory in Bywater Street; the second of Alec alone the night before, crouched over his ancient Olivetti and a bottle of Scotch in his smoke-filled basement office in the Olympic Stadium in West Berlin. The result of his labours lies before me: one grimy typewritten page, blotched by Tipp-Ex and encased in cellophane, text as follows:

Minutes KGB conference East Bloc intelligence services, Prague, 21 Dec 1957.

Name and rank home-based KGB officers on attachment to Stasi directorates, as of 5 July 1956.

Identity of current Stasi head agents in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Names, rank and worknames of all Stasi officers undergoing KGB training in USSR.

Location of six new covert Soviet signals installations in GDR and Poland, as of 5 July 1956.

Turn a page and I am back to Smiley’s handwritten minute to Control, not a crossing-out:

The rest of Alec’s story runs as follows. Regularly each week, after de Jong’s scoop, if such it was, Alec commandeered the de Jongs’ family Volvo and dog, put $500 in the glove compartment together with a children’s colouring book with the number of his direct line to Berlin Station scrawled in it, threw his fishing gear into the back (I did not till now know that Alec fished and am inclined to doubt it), drove to Köpenick and parked where de Jong had parked at the same hour. With the dog beside him, he went fishing and waited. On the third attempt, he struck lucky.

The $500 had been replaced by two cassettes. The children’s colouring book with the phone number had gone.

Two nights later, back in West Berlin, he received a call on the direct line from a man who refused to give his name, but said he fished in Köpenick. Alec instructed him to present himself outside a given house number on the Kurfürstendamm at seven-twenty the next evening carrying the previous week’s edition of

Der Spiegel

in his left hand.

The resulting treff [i.e. covert meeting, as borrowed by Berlin hands from German espionage vernacular] took place in a Volkswagen people-carrier driven by de Jong, and lasted eighteen minutes. MAYFLOWER, as Alec has arbitrarily christened him, at first refused to reveal his name, insisting the cassettes came not from himself but from a ‘friend inside the Stasi’, whom he must protect. His own role was merely that of voluntary intermediary, he insisted, his motive not mercenary but ideological.

But Alec wasn’t having this. Unsourced material delivered by an anonymous intermediary was a drug on the market, he said. So no deal. Finally – and only in response to Alec’s entreaties, we are asked to believe – Mayflower produced a card from his pocket with the name Dr med. Karl Riemeck and the address of the Charité Hospital in East Berlin on one side, and on the back, an address in Köpenick, handwritten.

It is Alec’s conviction that Riemeck had only been waiting to get the measure of his man before revealing himself, and that after ten minutes he abandoned his reservations. But we should never forget the Irishman in Alec.

So to the obvious questions:

Even if Dr Riemeck is who he says he is, who is his magic sub-source?

Are we dealing with yet another elaborate Stasi set-up?

Or – though it pains me to suggest it – are we dealing with something a little more home-brewed by Alec himself?

In conclusion:

Alec is asking with some passion, I have to say, to be allowed to develop Mayflower to the next stage

without

subjecting him to any of the usual searches and background checks which as things stand could not be conducted without the knowledge and assistance of Joint Steering. His reservations are well known to us both, and I venture to suggest we cautiously share them.

Alec however exhibits no such restraint regarding his suspicions. Last night after the third Scotch it was Connie Sachs he had cast as Moscow Centre’s double agent within the Circus, with Toby Esterhase running a close second. His theory, based on nothing but his own whisky-fuelled intuition, was that the pair of them had got themselves caught up in a sex-driven

folie à deux

, the Russians had found out and were blackmailing them. I finally got him to bed around 2.00 a.m., only to find him in the kitchen at 6.00 a.m., cooking himself bacon and eggs.

The question is what to do. On balance, I am inclined to let him have one more run with his Mayflower (which means, effectively, with his mysterious alleged sub-source in the Stasi) on his own terms. As we both know, his days in the field are numbered, and he has every reason to extend them. But we also know that the hardest part of our work is to invest trust. Based on little more than instinct, Alec declares himself solidly convinced of Mayflower’s bona fides. This can be either the inspired hunch of a veteran, or the special pleading of an ageing field officer facing the natural end of his career.

I respectfully recommend that we allow him to go forward in that knowledge.

GS

But Control is not so easily won over: see following exchange.

Control to GS

: Seriously concerned that Leamas is paddling his own canoe. Where are the other indicators? Surely we may test the intelligence in areas that in Leamas’s vision of things are not contaminated?

GS to Control

: Have separately consulted FO and Defence under a pretext. Both speak well of material, do not believe it is fabrication. Chickenfeed as a prelude to a major deception always a possibility.

Control to GS

: Puzzled why Leamas does not consult his Berlin Head of Station. Backstage manoeuvrings of this sort do Service no good.

GS to Control

: Unfortunately Alec regards his H/Stn as anti-Covert and pro-Joint.

Control to GS

: I cannot divest myself of a

galère

of top-notch officers on the unproven supposition that one of them is a bad apple.

GS to Control

: I’m afraid Alec sees Joint as a bad orchard.

Control to GS

: Then perhaps it’s he who should be pruned.

Alec’s next written offering is of a different order altogether: immaculately typed and in a prose style far superior to his own. My immediate suspect as Alec’s amanuensis is Stas de Jong, first-class honours in modern languages. So this time it’s the six-foot-three Stas I see crouched at the Olivetti in the smoke-filled basement in Berlin Station while Alec prowls the room, puffing at one of his vile Russian cigarettes

and dictating raucous Irish obscenities that de Jong discreetly omits.

Encounter Report, 2 February 1959. Location: Berlin Safe House K2. Present: DH/Station Berlin Alec Leamas (PAUL) and Karl Riemeck (MAYFLOWER).

Source MAYFLOWER. Second Treff. Beyond Secret, Personal & Private from AL to H/Covert Marylebone.

Source Mayflower, known to the GDR’s elite as ‘The Doctor of Köpenick’ after Carl Zuckmayer’s play of similar title, is physician of choice to a select coterie of ranking SED [Socialist Unity (i.e. Communist) Party] and Stasi

prominenz

and their families, several of whom reside in Köpenick’s lakeside villas and apartments. His leftist credentials are impeccable. His father Manfred, a Communist since the early thirties, fought in the Thälmann Battalion in the Spanish Civil War. During 1939–45 war Mayflower smuggled messages for his father, who was shot by the Gestapo at Buchenwald concentration camp in 1944. Manfred did not therefore live to see the coming of the revolution to East Germany, but his son Karl, for love of his father, was determined to be its devoted comrade. After excelling at high school, he studied medicine in Jena and Prague. Qualified

magna cum laude

. Not content with working long hours at East Berlin’s one teaching hospital, he opened up his family house in Köpenick, which he shares with ageing mother Helga, as an informal surgery for selected patients.

As a natural-born member of the GDR’s elite, Mayflower is also tasked with medical missions of a sensitive nature. A ranking SED official contracts VD while on a visit to distant parts and doesn’t wish his superiors to know. Mayflower

obliges with a false diagnosis. A Stasi prisoner has died of heart failure under interrogation, but the death certificate must tell a different story. A high-value Stasi prisoner is about to be subjected to harsh treatment. Mayflower is required to check the prisoner’s psychological and physical condition and assess tolerance.

In view of these responsibilities, Mayflower has been awarded the status of

Geheime Mitarbeiter

(secret collaborator) or GM for short, which requires him to report monthly to his Stasi controller, one Urs ALBRECHT, a ‘functionary of no great imagination’. Mayflower says his reports to Albrecht are ‘selective, mostly invented, of no possible consequence’. Albrecht in return has told him that he is ‘a good doctor but a lousy spy’.

Exceptionally, Mayflower has also been granted a pass to the ‘Little City’, otherwise the Majakowskiring in East Berlin, where many of the GDR’s elite are accommodated, while being rigorously protected from the general public by the Dzerzhinsky Brigade, a specially trained unit. Although the ‘Little City’ boasts its own medical centre – not to mention privilege shop, kindergarten, etc. – Mayflower is permitted to enter the hallowed area for the purpose of attending his illustrious ‘private’ patients. Once inside the cordon, he reports, rules of discretion are relaxed, gossip and intrigue are rife, tongues loosened.

Motivation:

Mayflower’s claimed motivation is disgust with GDR regime, father’s Communist dream seen as betrayed.

Offer of service:

Mayflower claims that sub-source TULIP, a female patient and Stasi employee, not only provided the catalyst for his

self-recruitment, but is the source of the original sub-miniature cassettes that he deposited on her behalf in de Jong’s Volvo. He describes Tulip as neurotic but extremely controlled, and highly vulnerable. He insists that she is his patient, and nothing more. He reiterates that neither he nor Tulip requires financial reward.

Resettlement in the West in the event of compromise not yet discussed. See below.

But we don’t see below. Next day Smiley himself flies to Berlin to take a look at this Riemeck for himself, and orders me to accompany him. Yet source Mayflower is not the primary reason for our journey. Of much greater interest to him is the identity, access and motivation of the neurotic but extremely controlled female sub-source, codename Tulip.

*

Dead of night in an unsleeping West Berlin swept by freezing winds of sleet and snow. Alec Leamas and George Smiley sit cloistered with their new prospect Karl Riemeck aka Mayflower over a bottle of Talisker, Alec’s favourite, and for Riemeck a first. I sit at Smiley’s right shoulder. Berlin safe house K2 lies in the Fasanenstrasse, at No. 28, and is a stately and unlikely survivor of Allied bombing. It is built in the Biedermeier style with a pillared doorway, a bay window and a good back exit leading on to the Uhlandstrasse. Whoever chose it had a taste for imperial nostalgia and an operational eye.

Some faces, try as they may, cannot conceal the good heart of their owners, and Riemeck’s is such a face. He is balding, bespectacled – and sweet. The word is simply not to be denied. Never mind the medic’s studious frown: humanity breathes out of him.

Recalling now that first encounter, I have to remind myself that in 1959 there was no great drama to an East Berlin doctor coming across to West Berlin. Many did, and a lot never went back, which was why the Wall was built.

The file’s opening serial is typed and unsigned. It is not a formal report, and I can only assume that the author is Smiley; and that, since no addressee is indicated, he is writing for the file – in other words, to himself.

Asked to identify the process by which he entered what he describes as the ‘chrysalis’ stage of his opposition to the GDR regime, Mayflower points to the moment when the Stasi’s interrogators ordered him to prepare a woman for ‘investigative confinement’. The woman was a GDR citizen in her fifties allegedly working for the CIA. She suffered from acute claustrophobia. Solitary confinement had already driven her half mad. ‘Her screams as they nailed her into a box are with me still’ – Mayflower.

In the wake of this experience, Mayflower, who claims he is not given to rash decisions, says he ‘reappraised his situation from every angle’. He had heard the Party’s lies at first hand, observed its corruption, hypocrisies and abuse of power. He had ‘diagnosed the symptoms of a totalitarian state posing as its opposite’. Far from the democracy his father had dreamed of, East Germany was ‘a Soviet vassal run as a police state’. With this perception made, he says, only one course was open to the son of Manfred: resistance.

His first thought was to establish an underground cell. He would select one or other elite patient who from time to time had given signs of dissatisfaction with the regime, and proposition him or her. But to do what? And for how long? Mayflower’s father Manfred had been betrayed by his comrades. In that regard at least, the son did not propose to follow

in the father’s footsteps. So whom did he trust enough, in all circumstances and all weathers? Answer, not even his mother Helga, an avowed Communist come what may.

Very well, he reasoned, he would remain what he already was: ‘a terrorist cell of one’. He would emulate, not his father but a boyhood hero, Georg Elser, the man who in 1939, without benefit of accomplice or confidant, had made, planted and detonated a bomb in the Munich beer cellar where minutes before the Führer had been addressing his faithful. ‘Only infernal luck had saved him’ – Mayflower.

But the GDR, he reasoned, was not a regime that could be blown away with a single blast, any more than Hitler’s was. Mayflower was first and last a doctor. A rotten system must be treated from within. How to do that would reveal itself in due course. Meanwhile, he would confide in no one, trust in no one. He would be himself alone, sufficient to himself, answerable to himself. He would be ‘

a secret army of one

’.

The ‘chrysalis’ burst open, he maintains, when at 2200 hours on 18 October 1958, a distraught young woman who was unknown to him rode her bicycle to Köpenick in the eastern suburbs of Berlin and presented herself at Mayflower’s surgery, demanding an abortion.

At which point Smiley’s account breaks off, and it is Dr Riemeck who is speaking to us directly. George must have felt that his account, for all its length, was too precious to compress:

Comrade [deleted] is a highly intelligent woman of undoubted attraction, outwardly abrupt in the approved Party manner, highly resourceful, but in the privacy of a medical consultation intermittently childlike and defenceless. Though I am not given to off-the-cuff diagnoses of a patient’s mental

condition, I would tentatively suggest a form of selective schizophrenia, rigidly controlled. That she is also a woman of personal courage and high principle should not be perceived as a paradox.

I inform Comrade [deleted] that she is not pregnant and therefore requires no abortion. She tells me she is surprised to hear this considering she has slept with two equally repugnant men in the same cycle. She asks if I have any alcohol. She says she is not an alcoholic but both her men drink heavily and she has acquired the habit. I offer her a glass of the French cognac given me by a Congolese minister of agriculture in gratitude for my medical services. Having swallowed it at one gulp, she interrogates me:

‘Friends told me you are a decent man and discreet. Are they right?’ she demands.

‘Which friends?’ I ask.

‘Secret friends.’

‘Why do your friends have to be secret?’

‘Because they are from the Organs.’

‘Which organs?’

I have annoyed her. She snaps at me. ‘The

Stasi

, Comrade Doctor. What do you think?’

I caution her. I may be a doctor but I have my responsibilities to the State. She prefers not to hear me. She has a right to choose, she says. In a democracy where all comrades are equal, she can choose between a sadistic shit of a husband who beats her up and refuses to admit that he’s homosexual, and a fat fifty-year-old swine of a boss who regards it as his good right to screw her in the back of his Volga staff car any time he feels like it.

She has twice in this conversation let fall the name Dr Emmanuel Rapp. She calls him the Rappschwein. I ask her whether this Rapp is any relation of Comrade Brigitte Rapp,

who insists on consulting me for a range of illusory ailments. Yes, she confirms, Brigitte is the name of the swine’s wife. The connection is made. Frau Brigitte Rapp has already confided to me that she is married to a senior Stasi functionary who does as he pleases. I am therefore in the presence of Dr Emmanuel Rapp’s very angry personal assistant and – according to her – secret mistress. She says she has considered putting arsenic into Rapp’s coffee. She says she keeps a knife under the bed for the next time her homosexual husband assaults her. I advise her that these are dangerous fantasies and she should abandon them.

I ask her whether she speaks in these seditious terms to her husband or in the workplace. She laughs and assures me she does not. She has three faces, she says. In this she is lucky because in the GDR most people have five or six: ‘In the workplace, I am a devoted and diligent comrade, I am well dressed and have orderly hair at all times and especially at meetings, and I am also the sex-slave of an illustrious swine. At home, I am the hate-object of a sadistic warm brother (homosexual) more than ten years my senior for whom the sole aim of life is to become a member of the Majakowskiring elite and sleep with pretty young men.’ Her third identity is the one I see before me now: a woman who detests every aspect of life in the GDR except her son, and has found secret solace in God the Father and His saints. I ask her who else she has confided this third identity to apart from myself. Nobody. I ask her whether she hears voices. She is not aware of doing so, but if she heard anyone’s voice it would be God’s. I ask her whether she is indeed tempted to do herself harm, as she suggested to me earlier. She replies that she was recently minded to throw herself off a bridge, but was restrained by love of her son Gustav.

I ask her whether she has been tempted to commit other

demonstrative or vengeful acts, and she replies that on one recent occasion, when Dr Emmanuel Rapp left his pullover on his chair one evening, she took a pair of scissors and hacked it to pieces, then gathered the pieces into a burn-bag for secret waste. When Rapp returned next morning and complained that he had mislaid his pullover, she helped him look for it. When he decided that someone had stolen it, she suggested culprits.

I ask her whether her vengeful feelings towards Comrade Dr Rapp have since abated. She retorts that they are stronger than ever, and the only thing she hates more than Rapp is the system that elevates swine like him to positions of power. Her hidden hatreds are alarming and it is something of a miracle to me that she contrives to conceal them from the ever-vigilant eye of her work comrades.

I ask her where she lives. She replies that she and her husband lived till recently in a Soviet-style apartment in the Stalinallee, where there was no special protection and she had only a ten-minute cycle ride to Stasi headquarters in the Magdalenenstrasse. Recently – whether through homosexual influence or money she doesn’t know, since her husband is secretive about the money that was left him by his father – they moved into a protected area in Berlin Hohenschönhausen set aside for government officials and higher civil servants. There are lakes and forest, which she loves, a playground for her son Gustav, and even a small private garden with a barbecue. In any other circumstances the house would be an idyll, but sharing it with her odious husband makes it a mockery. She is a passionate cyclist, still rides her bicycle to work, and reckons half an hour from door to door.

It is one a.m. I ask her what she will tell her husband Lothar when she gets home. She replies that she will tell him nothing and adds the following words:

‘When my darling Lothar is not raping me or getting drunk, he sits on the edge of the bed with GDR Foreign Office papers on his lap, growling and writing like a man who hates the whole world, not only his wife.’

I ask her whether these are secret papers that her husband brings home. She replies that they are extremely secret, and that he brings them home illegally because in addition to being a sexual pervert he is obsessively ambitious. She asks me whether, on the next occasion that she visits me, I will make love to her on the grounds that she has yet to make love to a man who is not a pig or a rapist. I believe she is joking but I am not certain. In any event I decline, explaining that I have made it a principle not to sleep with my patients. I leave her with the possible consolation of knowing that if I were not her doctor I would sleep with her. As she mounts her bicycle to depart, she informs me that she has placed her life in my hands. I reply that, as a doctor, I shall respect her confidences. She asks me for a second appointment. I offer her next Thursday at six in the evening.

Overcome by a wave of inner revulsion, I rise involuntarily to my feet.

‘Know where it is?’ Nelson enquires, without lifting his eyes from his book.

I lock myself in the toilet, remain there as long as I dare. When I resume my place at the table, Doris Gamp, alias Tulip, has arrived punctually for her second appointment, having cycled all the way to Köpenick with her son Gustav riding in a basket.

Riemeck again:

The mood of mother and son is merry and relaxed. The weather is beautiful, her husband Lothar has been summoned to a conference in Warsaw at short notice, he will not be back

for two days, they are in high spirits. Tomorrow she and Gustav will bicycle to her sister Lotte, ‘the only other person in the world I love’, she informs me gaily. Entrusting the child to my dear mother, who wishes only that he were mine, I escort Comrade [deleted] to my attic surgery and play Bach loudly on the gramophone. Ceremoniously – I would say skittishly – she presents me with a box of chocolates which she says was given her by Emmanuel Rapp, and advises me not to eat them all at once. On opening the box I see that it contains, instead of Belgian chocolates, two cassettes of sub-miniature film. I sit on a stool beside her, her mouth close to my ear. I ask her what is in the sub-miniature film. She replies Stasi secret documents. I ask her how she obtained them and she replies that she photographed them this very afternoon with the aid of Emmanuel Rapp’s own Minox camera in the wake of a particularly degrading sexual encounter. The act was barely consummated than the Rappschwein had scurried away to a meeting in House 2 for which he was already late. She was feeling vengeful and bold. The documents were strewn over his desk. His Minox camera lay in the drawer where he keeps it during the day.

‘Stasi officers are supposed to be secure in their habits at all times,’ she tells me, adopting the tone of a Stasi apparatchik. ‘The Rappschwein is so arrogant that he believes he is superior to Service regulations.’

‘And the cassettes?’ I ask her. How will she account for them?

The Rappschwein is infantile, therefore his whims must be gratified instantly, she says. It is totally forbidden even for officers of rank to keep special equipment such as secret cameras or recording devices in their personal safes, but Rapp ignores this edict, as others. Furthermore, on leaving the room in such haste he actually left the safe door ajar,

another flagrant breach of security, enabling her to bypass the wax-lock.

I ask her: what is a wax-lock? She explains that on Stasi safes there is an elaborate lock which is capped by a coating of soft wax. On closing the safe, the rightful owner makes his own imprint in the wax, using the Stasi-issued key and its attached signet [

Petschaft

] that he keeps on his person at all times. Each

Petschaft

is numbered, individually crafted and unique to itself. As to cassettes, he has cardboard boxes full of them, a dozen at a time. He keeps no count of them, and uses his Minox like a toy for many unofficial and dissolute purposes. For instance he has tried many times to persuade her to pose naked for him, but she has always refused. He also keeps bottles of vodka and slivovitz in his safe, since like many Stasi bigwigs he drinks heavily, and when drunk speaks indiscreetly. I ask her how she succeeded in smuggling the sub-miniature film out of Stasi headquarters and she giggled and replied that a doctor like me should know.

However she insists that, despite the Stasi’s obsession with internal security, those with the correct passes are not subject to physical searches. For instance, Comrade [deleted] has a pass entitling her to move at will between Houses 1 and 3 of the Stasi complex. I ask her what she expects me to do with the cassettes now that she has compromised me with them, and she replies that I should kindly pass them to British Intelligence. I ask why not American, and she is shocked. She is a Communist, she says. Imperialist America is her enemy. We return downstairs. Gustav is playing dominoes with my dear mother. She reports that he is a delightful child, and very good at dominoes, and she would like to steal him.

Covert’s technical arm, always on the lookout for an excuse to join the feast, chimes in:

Berlin Covertech to H/Covert Berlin

[Leamas].

Re your Head Agent MAYFLOWER:

You report his attic surgery in Köpenick contains old-style radio. Tech Ops to adapt as recording device?

You report that Mayflower owns an Exakta single-lens reflex camera that is Stasi-approved for recreational use. He also owns a sunlamp for therapeutic use and, from his student days, a microscope. Since he already has the basic components, should he be instructed in the manufacture of microdots?

Köpenick is a rural, densely wooded area, ideal for cachement of W/T and other operational equipment. Stay-behind team to reconnoitre and report?

Wax-locks. In the course of Tulip’s dalliances with Emmanuel Rapp, might she have occasion to take an impression of his personal safe key and attached signet [

Petschaft

]? Technical stores have a wide variety of CDs [concealment devices] for containing suitable plasticine-type substances.

The inner revulsion returns.

In the course of her dalliances?

They weren’t

Tulip’s

bloody dalliances, they were the Rappschwein’s, damn you! Tulip submitted to them because she knew if she didn’t she’d be out on her ear on trumped-up disciplinary charges, and Gustav would never get to that elite school she dreamed of. And all right, she was a passionate woman and easily aroused. That does

not

mean she enjoyed herself

either

with the Rappschwein

or

with her husband!

But in Berlin, Alec Leamas has no such concerns:

H/Covert Berlin

[Leamas]

to H/Covert Marylebone

[Smiley].

DO letter, copy to file.

Dear George,

A perfect pour!

Happy to report that the impression of Emmanuel Rapp’s

Petschaft

and key, covertly taken by sub-source Tulip, has produced a clean facsimile with sharp lettering and numerals. The cowboys in Tech have advised that, for safety’s sake, she should apply a slight twist as she withdraws the

Petschaft

from the wax. So doubles all round!

Yours in the faith,

Alec

P.S. Attached: Tulip’s PP, as per HO regs, for COVERT’S EYES ONLY!! AL

PP for Personal Particulars. PP for the shorthand of any human life in which the Service has a passing interest. PP for penance. PP for pain.

Full name of sub-agent: Doris Carlotta Gamp.

Date and place of birth: Leipzig 21.

X

.’29.

Education: Graduated Jena and Dresden universities in Political and Social Sciences.

One sister: Lotte, elementary school teacher in Potsdam, unmarried.

CV and other personal particulars: Age 23, recruited as junior filing clerk, Stasi HQ, East Berlin. Access restricted to Confidential and below. After six-month probationary period, access raised to Secret. Assigned section J3, responsible for processing and evaluating reports from overseas stations.

One year into employment, forms relationship with

forty-one-year-old Lothar Quinz, held to be a rising star of GDR Foreign Service. Pregnancy and civil marriage follow.

Six months into marriage, Quinz née Gamp gives birth to a son, names him Gustav after father. Unknown to her husband, she has boy christened by eighty-seven-year-old retired Russian Orthodox priest and

starets

(holy wanderer), a self-styled Rasputin attached to Red Army barracks in Karlshorst. How the supposed conversion to Russian Orthodoxy occurred is not otherwise known. To escape Quinz’s notice, Gamp told him she was visiting her sister in Potsdam, and made the journey to Rasputin by bicycle with Gustav in the basket.

10 June 1957, at end of her fifth year of employment, again promoted, this time to assistant to Emmanuel Rapp, KGB-trained director of overseas operations.

To retain Rapp’s patronage, also obliged to provide him with sexual favours. When she complains of this to her husband, he tells her the wishes of a comrade of Rapp’s importance should not be denied. She believes that this is an attitude shared by her Stasi colleagues. According to Tulip, they are aware of the affair, and aware that it constitutes a gross infringement of Stasi discipline. But they also fear that, given the extent of Rapp’s power, if they report it they will suffer the consequences.

Operational experience to date:

On joining Stasi, attended indoctrination course for all junior staff. Unlike most of her colleagues, has good spoken and written Russian. Selected for additional training in conspiratorial methods, covert meetings, recruitment and deception. Also instructed in secret writing (carbon and fluids), clandestine photography (sub-miniature, microdot), surveillance, counter-surveillance, basic W/T. Aptitude rated ‘good to excellent’.

As Emmanuel Rapp’s PA and ‘golden girl’ (Rapp’s description), regularly accompanies him to Prague, Budapest and Gdansk where he attends KGB-organized intelligence conferences of East Bloc liaison services. Twice employed at such conferences as stenographer of record. Despite her antipathy to him, dreams of accompanying Rapp to Moscow to see Red Square at night.

Concluding Comments by Case Officer:

H/Covert Berlin to H/Covert Marylebone

[no doubt with the assistance of Stas de Jong]

Sub-source Tulip’s relationship with this Service is conducted exclusively through Mayflower. He is her medical doctor, handler, confidant, personal confessor and best pal in that order. So what we’ve got is a one-dog girl in thrall to our head agent, and for my money that’s how things should stay. As you know, we recently supplied her with her own Minox, built into the fastener of her shoulder bag, and cassettes in the base of a talc tin. She is also as of now the proud possessor of a duplicate key and

Petschaft

for the wax-lock on Rapp’s safe.

It is gratifying therefore that Mayflower reports that Tulip shows no disturbing signs of strain. To the contrary, he says her morale has never been higher, she appears to relish danger, and his only concern is that she will become over-confident and take needless risks. For as long as the two of them are able to meet naturally in Berlin under medical cover, he is not greatly concerned.

However, an entirely different operational problem arises when she is escorting Rapp to conferences outside the GDR. Since dead letter boxes are no answer to ad hoc requirements, can Covert consider putting a blind courier on standby to service Tulip at short notice in non-German Bloc cities?

I turn a page. My hand is steady. Under stress it always is. This is normal operational discourse between Covert headquarters and Berlin.

George Smiley to Alec Leamas in Berlin, personal, handwritten note, copy to file:

Alec. In anticipation of Emmanuel Rapp’s forthcoming visit to Budapest, please arrange for the attached photograph of Peter Guillam, who will be acting as her blind courier, to be shown to sub-source Tulip asap.

Best, G

George Smiley to Peter Guillam, handwritten note, copy to file:

Peter. This will be your lady in Budapest. Study her well!

Bon voyage, G

‘Say something?’ Nelson asked sharply, looking up from his book.

‘Nothing. Why?’

‘Must have been out in the street.’

*

When you’re examining the features of an unknown woman for operational purposes, carnal thoughts are on hold. You’re not looking for charm. You’re wondering whether she’ll be wearing her hair short or long, tinted, under a hat or free, and what her face has to offer in the way of distinguishing features: broad brow, high cheekbones, small or large eyes, whether they are round or naturally attenuated. After the face, you’ll be looking at the shape

and size of the body and trying to work out how it would look if it was wearing something more recognizable than the standard Party trouser suit and clunky lace-up shoes. You’re not looking for its sex appeal, except insofar as it may draw the eye of an impressionable watcher. My sole concern at this stage was how the owner of this face and this body was going to perform opposite a blind courier on a hot summer’s day in the closely watched streets of Budapest.

And the short answer turned out to be: immaculately. Skilled, deft, anonymous, purposeful. And I, as her blind courier, no less. A sunny day, a bustling street, two strangers, we advance on each other, are about to collide, I veer left, she right, there is momentary entanglement. I grunt an apology, she ignores it and sweeps on. I am richer by two cassettes of microfilm.

A second brush in Warsaw Old Town four weeks later, although more demanding, also passes off without mishap, as witness my handwritten report to George, copy to Alec:

PG to H/Covert Marylebone, copy to AL, Berlin.

Subject: Sub-source TULIP blind treff.

As on previous occasions we achieved early mutual recognition. Interbody contact was undetectable and swift. I do not believe that even close surveillance could have caught the moment of transfer.

It was clear that Tulip had been excellently briefed by Mayflower. My subsequent offload to H/Stn Warsaw presented no difficulties.

PG

And Smiley’s handwritten response:

Deftly done again, Peter! Bravo!      GS

But maybe not quite as deftly as Smiley thinks, or quite as uneventfully as my handwritten minute was so keen to suggest.

*

I am a French tourist from Brittany travelling with a Swiss tour group. My passport describes me as a company director but questioned by my fellow travellers I reveal myself to be a humble traveller in agricultural fertilizer. Together with my group, I am enjoying the sights of Warsaw’s splendidly restored Old Town. A well-grown young woman in baggy jeans and tartan waistcoat is striding towards us. Her hair, last seen hidden by a beret, is today flowing free and auburn. With each step it bounces in the sunshine. She wears a green neck scarf. No scarf means no handover. I am wearing a Party cloth cap with a red star, bought at a street stall. Shove the cap in my pocket, no handover. The Old Town is milling with other tour groups. Ours is less manageable than our Polish guide would wish. Three or four of us are already lost to her, chatting among ourselves instead of being lectured about the city’s miraculous rebirth after the Nazi bombing. A bronze statue has caught my eye. It has caught Tulip’s too because this is how our encounter has been choreographed. There will be no slowing down as we meet. Nonchalance is all, just not too much of it. No eye contact, but nothing too studied about the way we ignore each other. Warsaw is a very wired town. Tourist attractions head the watch list.

So what’s this jaunty swinging of the hips she’s doing suddenly, what’s with the light of explicit welcome in the big, almond eyes? For a fleeting second – but less fleeting than I am prepared for – our right hands curl into each other. But instead of instantly parting, her fingers, having deposited their tiny contents, nestle in my palm, and would have gone on nestling there for longer if I hadn’t

prised them free. Is she mad? Am I? And what’s with that flash of welcoming smile I caught? – or am I deluding myself?

We go our separate ways: she to her conference of Warsaw Pact espiocrats, I with my group to a cellar bar, where the Cultural Secretary from the British Embassy and his wife happen to be regaling themselves at a corner table. I order a beer and adjourn to the men’s lavatory. The Cultural Secretary, known to me in another life as a fellow trainee at Sarratt, follows me. The offload is swift and wordless. I rejoin my group. But the flutter of Tulip’s fingers hasn’t gone away.

And it hasn’t gone away now, as I read Stas de Jong’s hymn of praise to sub-source Tulip, brightest star of the Mayflower network:

Tulip has been made fully conscious that she is reporting to this Service and that Mayflower is our unofficial assistant as well as her cut-out. She has decided she loves England unconditionally. She is particularly impressed by the high quality of our tradecraft, and singled out her most recent treff in Warsaw as an example of British excellence.

Tulip’s terms of resettlement on termination of work, whenever that should occur, will be £1,000 per month of service completed, plus a one-time ex gratia payment of £10,000, as approved by H/Covert [GS]. But her greatest wish is that, when the time comes, whenever that is, she and her son Gustav will become British citizens.

Her own covert gifts are perhaps even more impressive. Her success in installing a sub-miniature camera in the base of the shower platform in the women’s toilet in her corridor relieves her of the stress of taking it in and out of House 3 in her handbag. Her Office-built

Petschaft

and key enable her to enter and leave Rapp’s safe whenever the coast is clear and she feels

inclined. Last Saturday she confided to Mayflower that her most recurrent dream was of one day marrying a beautiful Englishman!

‘Something wrong then?’ Nelson demands, this time with intent.

‘I’ve hit a rosette,’ I reply, which happens to be true.

*

Bunny has brought a briefcase with him and wears a dark suit. He has come straight from a meeting at the Treasury, who with or why he doesn’t say. Laura lounges in Control’s chair with her legs crossed. Bunny takes a bottle of warm Sancerre from his briefcase and pours us all a glass. Then opens a packet of salted cashews, saying we’re to help ourselves.

‘Heavy going, Peter?’ he enquires genially.

‘What do you expect?’ I reply in the aggrieved tone I have decided to adopt. ‘Not exactly a happy walk down memory lane, is it?’

‘But helpful, I hope. Not too stressful, revisiting old times and faces?’

I let this go. The interrogation begins, at first languidly:

‘Can I ask you first about

Riemeck

, an unusually attractive character for an agent, I would have thought?’

Nod.

‘And a doctor. A pretty good one.’

Nod again.

‘So why do Mayflower reports of the day, as distributed to lucky Whitehall customers, describe the source as – and I quote –

a well-placed official employed in the mid-levels of the East German Socialist Unity Party with regular access to highly classified Stasi material

?’

‘Disinformation,’ I reply.

‘Planted by?’

‘George, Control, Lacon in Treasury. They all knew the Mayflower material was going to cause a stir the moment it hit the stands. The first thing customers would be asking was who’s the source. So they cooked up a fictional source of equal weight.’

‘And your Tulip?’

‘What about Tulip?’

Too fast. I should have waited. Is he goading me? Why else is he giving me that knowing, mirthless smirk that makes me want to hit him? And why is Laura smirking too? Is she getting her own back after our misfired Greek dinner?

Bunny is reading from something on his lap, and his subject is still Tulip: ‘

Sub-source is a senior secretary in the Interior Ministry with access to the highest circles

. Isn’t that going it a bit?’

‘Going it how?’

‘Doesn’t it give her a bit more – well,

respectability

than she deserves? I mean, what about

promiscuous

senior secretary, for starters?

Office nympho

might be a better fit, if we’re looking for some sort of equivalence in the real world. Or

holy whore

, perhaps, in deference to her religious preferences?’

He is watching me, waiting for my outburst of fury, indignation, denial. Somehow I manage to deny him the satisfaction.

‘Still, I suppose you should know your Tulip,’ he goes on. ‘You who serviced her so diligently.’

‘I did

not

service her, and she is not

my

Tulip,’ I reply with measured deliberation. ‘The entire time she was in the field, Tulip and I did not exchange a single word.’

‘Not one?’

‘Not in all our treffs. We brush-passed, we never spoke.’

‘So how come she knew your name?’ he enquires with his most charming, boyish smile.

‘She did

not

know my bloody name! How the hell could she, when we never said so much as

hullo

to each other?’

‘

One

of your names, put it that way,’ he persists, unruffled.

Laura’s cue: ‘Try

Jean-François Gamay

for size, Pete,’ she suggests, in the same jocular vein. ‘Partner in a French electronics company based in Metz, enjoying a package holiday beside the Black Sea with the Bulgarian State travel company. That’s a bit more than

hullo

.’

My outburst of merry laughter is unconfined, and so it should be, since it’s the product of spontaneous and genuine relief.

‘Oh for Christ’s sake!’ I exclaim, joining in the fun. ‘That’s not what I told

Tulip

. That’s what I told

Gustav

!’

*

So here you are, Bunny and Laura, and I hope you’re sitting comfortably for this cautionary tale about how the most secretive and best-laid plans can founder on a child’s innocence.

My workname is indeed Jean-François Gamay, and yes, I’m a member of a large, closely observed travel group enjoying low-cost sea and sun in a not very salubrious Bulgarian beach resort on the Black Sea.

Across the bay from our dismal hotel sits the Party Workers’ Hostel, a brutalist hulk of Soviet-style concrete covered in Communist flags and we can hear its martial music booming at us over the water, punctuated with uplifting messages of peace and goodwill from a battery of loudspeakers. Somewhere within its walls, Tulip and her five-year-old son Gustav are taking a workers’ collective holiday, thanks to the influential connections of the odious Comrade Lothar, Tulip’s husband, who has mysteriously overcome the Stasi’s reluctance to allow its members to romp on foreign sands. She is accompanied by her sister, Lotte, the schoolteacher from Potsdam.

On the beach, between four and four-fifteen, Tulip and I will undertake a brush pass, and this time it will include her son Gustav.

Lotte will be safely confined to the hostel, attending a workers’ council. The initiative lies with the agent in the field, in this case Tulip. My job will be to respond to her creatively. And here she is now, coming towards me through the surf, clad in a Mother Hubbard beach robe with a rope shoulder bag. As she advances she directs Gustav’s eye to a seashell or precious stone for his bucket. She has the same skittish swing of the hips that I had refused to acknowledge in Warsaw Old Town – except that I am careful not to mention her hips to Bunny and Laura, who are following my every light-hearted word with undisguised scepticism.

Drawing closer, she forages in her rope shoulder bag. Other sun-worshippers, other children, are splashing, sunbathing, eating sausage sandwiches and playing chess, and Tulip on stage is not beyond a smile or a word for this or that comrade. I don’t know by what ruse she persuades Gustav to approach me, or what she says to him that makes him laugh out loud and scamper towards me in a dare, and thrust into my hand a chunk of blue, white and pink coconut fudge.

But I know that I must be charming, I must express delight. I must pretend to eat some of the fudge, I must drop the rest in my pocket, sink into a crouch, discover magically in the surf the seashell that was already secreted in my hand and offer it to Gustav as payment in return.

To all of which Tulip laughs gaily – rather too gaily, but I don’t tell Laura and Bunny that bit either – and beckons him, come back now, darling, and leave the nice comrade alone.

But Gustav doesn’t want to leave the nice comrade alone, which is the whole point of my witty story to Bunny and Laura. Gustav, who’s a sassy kid by anybody’s standards, has gone way off script. He reckons he has cut a deal with the nice comrade, fudge for shell, and he needs to get to know his new trading partner socially and commercially.

‘What’s your name?’ he demands.

‘Jean-François. What’s yours?’

‘Gustav. Jean-François who?’

‘Gamay.’

‘And your age?’

‘A hundred-and-twenty-eight. What’s yours?’

‘Five. Where does the comrade come from?’

‘Metz, France. What about you?’

‘Berlin, Democratic Germany. Would you like to hear a song?’

‘Very much.’

So Gustav stands himself to attention in the surf and sticks his chest out and gives me the benefit of a school song thanking our beloved Soviet soldiers for shedding their blood for a Socialist Germany. Meanwhile his mother, who is standing behind him, coolly unfastens the girdle of her beach robe and, with her gaze fixed on me, displays her naked body in its undoubted glory before languidly retying the girdle and joining me in my lavish applause for her son’s performance; then looks on like the proud mother she is as I shake Gustav’s hand, take a smart pace back and, right fist raised, return his Communist salute.

But the glory of Tulip’s naked body is also something I keep to myself, while I ponder a question that has been burning in me before I ever embarked on my amusing story:

how the devil did you know that Tulip knew my name?

7

I don’t know what particular variety of fugue swept over me as, released early from my labours, I stepped out of the gloom of the Stables into the afternoon bustle of Bloomsbury and, on no impulse I was aware of, headed south-west towards Chelsea. Humiliation, certainly. Frustration, bewilderment, no question. Outrage at having my past dug up and thrown in my face. Guilt, shame, apprehension, any amount. And all directed in a single blast of pain and incomprehension at George Smiley for making himself unfindable.

Or was he? Was Bunny lying to me, as I was lying to him, and was George not quite as unfindable as he protested? Had they already found him and wrung him dry, as if that were ever possible? If Millie McCraig knew the answer – and I suspected she did – she was also bound to silence by her own version of the Official Secrets Act which laid down that, alive or dead, George Smiley was undiscussable.

Approaching Bywater Street, once a quiet cul-de-sac for the not-so-well-off and now just another of London’s millionaires’ ghettos, I refuse to acknowledge the wave of nostalgia sweeping over me, or make the obligatory mental note of parked cars, scan them for occupants or run a careless eye over doors and windows of the houses opposite. When was the last occasion I had come here? My memory stops at the night I circumvented

George’s little wiles with wooden wedges in the front door and lay in wait to whisk him off to Oliver Lacon’s sprawling red castle in Ascot on the first leg of his anguished journey to his dear old friend Bill Haydon, arch-traitor and his wife’s lover.

But on this late, idle, autumnal afternoon, No. 9 Bywater Street knows nothing and has seen nothing of these things. Blinds drawn, front garden overgrown with weeds, occupants gone away or dead. I climb the four steps to the front door, press the bell, hear no familiar ring, no footstep light or heavy. No George, blinking his pleasure as he polishes his spectacles on the inside lining of his tie – ‘hullo, Peter, you look as though you need a drink, come on in.’ No Ann in a flurry with only half her make-up on – ‘

just

about to go out, Peter darling – kiss, kiss – but

do

come in and sort the world out with poor George.’

I return at military pace to the King’s Road, hail a cab to Marylebone High Street and have myself dropped opposite Daunt’s bookshop, but in Smiley’s day Messrs Francis Edwards, founded 1910, where he whiled away many a happy lunch hour. I plunge into a maze of cobbled alleys and mews cottages that once comprised the Circus’s outstation for Covert Operations – or in the parlance, simply

Marylebone

.

Unlike the Stables, which was only ever a safe house dedicated to a single operation,

Marylebone

with its three front doors was a Service to itself: its own desk officers, cyphers, cypher clerks, couriers, and its own grey army of Occasionals, never known to one another and drawn from all walks of life, who had only to hear the call to down tools and rally to the cause.

So was it remotely conceivable that Covert still had its being here? In my fugue, I chose to believe it was. And does George Smiley still skulk behind its shuttered windows? In my fugue I must have persuaded myself that he did. Of the nine doorbells only one worked. You had to be one of the faithful to know which. I press it. No response. I press the other two buttons in

the same doorway. I move to the next doorway and press all three. A woman’s voice screeches at me.

‘She’s not bloody

here

, Sammy! She’s buggered off with Wally and the kid. You ring again, I’ll call the Law, I swear I will.’

Her advice sobers me. The next thing I know, I am seated in the quiet of Devonshire Street, drinking elderflower cordial in a café full of medics in suits, murmuring head to head. I wait for my breathing to come down. As my head clears, so also does my sense of purpose. For the last couple of days and nights, despite every distraction, the image of Christoph, delinquent, criminal, clever son of Alec, brutally interrogating my Catherine on the doorstep of my house in Brittany, has remained with me. Never until that morning had I heard the ring of fear in Catherine’s voice. Not fear for herself: fear for me.

He was not agreeable, Pierre … farouche … big like a boxer … he asked, do you stay in a hotel in London … what is the address?

I say

my

Catherine because ever since the death of her father I have regarded her as my ward, and to hell with Bunny’s insinuations to the contrary. I watched her grow from infancy. She watched my women come and go until none remained. When she appointed herself the village bad-girl in defiance of her more beautiful sister, and slept with every man-jack she could lay her hands on, I paid no attention to the pompous representations of the village priest, who probably fancied her for himself. I am uneasy with children, but when Isabelle was born I was as happy for Catherine as she was. I never told her what I did for a living. She never told me who the father was. In all the village, I was the only one who didn’t know or care. If she wishes it, one day the farmstead will be hers, and Isabelle will trot along beside her, and perhaps there will be a younger man for Catherine, and perhaps little Isabelle will be willing to look him in the eye.

Are we also lovers, with all those years between us? Gradually, it seems we are. The arrangement was brokered by Isabelle,

who one summer’s evening padded across the courtyard with her bedding and, never a glance at me, installed herself beneath the landing window on the floor outside my bedroom. My bed is large; the spare room is dark and cold; mother and child could not be separated. It is my memory that Catherine and I slept innocently side by side for weeks on end before turning towards each other. But perhaps we didn’t wait quite as long as I would like to think.

*

Of one thing at least I was sure: I would have no problem recognizing my pursuer. Clearing out Alec’s dismal bachelor pad in Holloway after his death, I had stumbled on a pocket-sized photo album with a pressed edelweiss slipped under the cellophane cover. I was on the point of tossing it away when I realized I was holding in my hand a photographic record of Christoph’s life from cradle to matriculation. The German subtitles in white ink under each snapshot had been added, I assumed, by his mother. What had impressed me was how the same locked expression that I remembered from the football match in Düsseldorf had stuck with him all the way to the thick-set, scowling, Alec-lookalike in a Sunday suit, clutching a scroll of parchment as if he was about to jam it in your face.

And what does Christoph know of

me

, meanwhile? That I am in London, burying a friend. That I am being a Good Samaritan. I have no known address, I am not a club man. Not even a researcher of Christoph’s vaunted quality will find me listed at the Travellers or the National Liberal Club. Not in Stasi records, or anywhere else. My last known abode in the United Kingdom was a two-room flat in Acton that I had inhabited under the name of Peterson. When I gave my landlord notice, I left no forwarding address. So where, after Brittany, might severe,

persistent, impolite, criminal Christoph, son of Alec, strong like a boxer, come looking for me? What would be the one place, the

only

place, where, if he is really lucky, he might, given a fair wind, just possibly run me to earth?

Answer – or the only answer that made any sense to me – my old Service’s Lubyanka by the Thames: not the old, hard-to-find Circus of his father, but its gruesome successor, the bastion I was about to reconnoitre.

*

Vauxhall Bridge teems with homebound commuters. The river beneath it is fast-flowing and jam-packed with traffic. I am not a member of a Bulgarian tour group but an Antipodean tourist who is doing the sights of London: cowboy hat, khaki waistcoat with multiple pockets. For my first pass I wore a flat cap and tartan scarf, for my second an Arsenal supporter’s woolly hat with pom-pom. Net cost for the entire wardrobe at Waterloo station’s flea market, fourteen pounds. At Sarratt we called them silhouette changes.

To every watcher there are distractions to beware of, I used to warn my young trainees: things your eye won’t let go, like the pretty girl bravely sunbathing on the balcony, or the street preacher dressed as Jesus Christ. For me, this evening, it’s a handkerchief-sized rectangle of lush green lawn entirely enclosed by spikes that my eyes refuse to let go. What is it? An outdoor punishment cell for Circus miscreants? A secret pleasure-garden for senior officers only? But how do they get in? Worse still, how do they get out?

On a tiny pebble beach at the foot of the bastion’s outer ramparts, an Asian family in coloured silks picnics amid Canada geese. A yellow amphibious craft lumbers up the ramp beside them and stammers to a halt. Nobody emerges. The time is

coming up to five-thirty. I am remembering Circus working hours: ten-till-whenever for the anointed, nine-thirty to five-thirty for the unwashed. A discreet exodus of junior staff is about to begin. I’m counting up likely exit points, which will be dispersed in order to be inconspicuous. When the bastion was first occupied by its present tenants there were tales of secret tunnels under the river all the way to Whitehall. Well, the Circus has dug a tunnel or two in its time, most of them under other people’s territory, so why not a couple under your own?

When I first presented myself to Bunny, I had been passed through a man-door dwarfed by a pair of crash-proof iron gates with an art deco motif, but my guess was the man-door was visitors only. Of the three other exits I have spotted, the one that best suits my intuition is a pair of grey-painted doors set at the top of an inconspicuous flight of stone steps on the river side, giving access to the flow of pedestrians on the footpath. As I round the corner, the grey doors part and half-a-dozen men and women emerge, average age twenty-five to thirty. An expression of determined anonymity joins them. The doors close, I suspect electronically. They reopen. A second group descends.

I am Christoph’s quarry, and his pursuer. I’m assuming he’s been doing what I’ve been doing this last half-hour: familiarizing himself with the target building, picking likely exits, biding his moment. I’m acting on the assumption that Christoph is driven by the same sound operational instincts as his father, that he has thought his way through the probable actions of his quarry and laid his plans accordingly. If, as Catherine says, I have gone to London to bury a friend – and why should he doubt it? – then it’s a racing certainty that I will also have dropped in on my former employers to chew over the irksome historical lawsuit that Christoph and his newfound friend Karen Gold are bringing against the Service and its named officers, of whom I am one.

Another batch of men and women is descending the steps.

As they reach the footpath, I tag along behind them. A grey-haired woman grants me a polite smile. She thinks she should recognize me. Pedestrians on the public footpath mingle with us. A sign says

To Battersea Park

. We approach an archway. I glance upwards and see the hatted figure of a large man in three-quarter-length dark overcoat, standing on the bridge, scanning passers-by below. The spot he has chosen, by chance or design, gives him a grandstand view of three of the bastion’s exits. Having profited from the same vantage point myself, I can confirm its tactical value. Owing to the downward turn of his head, and of his hat, which is a black Homburg with high crown and shallow brim, his face is in shadow. But his boxer’s bulk is not in doubt: broad shouldered, wide backed and a good three inches taller than I would have expected of Alec’s son; but then I never met his mother.

We’re through the archway. Dark coat and black Homburg has left the bridge and joined the procession. For all his bulk, he’s a quick mover. So was Alec. He’s twenty yards behind me, Homburg bobbing from side to side. He’s trying to keep sight of someone or something ahead of him, and I’m inclined to think it’s me. Does he

want

me to spot him? Or am I being excessively surveillance-conscious, another sin I used to rail against?

Joggers, cyclists and boats whisk past. To my left, apartment blocks. At their base, glitzy pavement restaurants, cafés, fast-food stalls. I am using reflections. I am slowing him down. I am remembering my own pontifications to new entrants: it’s you who sets the pace, not the person following you. Be idle. Be indecisive. Never run when you can saunter. The river hums with pleasure boats, ferry boats, skiffs, rowing boats, barges. On the bank, buskers make human statues, kids wave bubbles, fly toy drones. If you’re not Christoph, you’re a Circus watcher. But the Circus’s watchers, even in our worst days, were never this bad.

At St George’s Wharf I peel away to my right and make a show of examining the timetable. You will identify your pursuer by giving him choices. Will he hop on to the bus after you, or will he say, to hell with the bus and walk on? If he walks on, maybe he’s leaving you to someone else. But the Homburg and black overcoat is not leaving me to someone else. He wants me for himself, and he’s hovering at a sausage stand, scrutinizing me in the fancy mirror behind the mustard and ketchup bottles.

At the ticket machine for ferries heading east, a queue is forming. I join it, wait my turn, buy myself a ticket to Tower Bridge, single. My pursuer has decided not to buy himself a sausage. The ferry pulls alongside, the pier rocks, we let the passengers off first. My pursuer has crossed the path and is bending over the ticket machine. He gesticulates irritably. Help me, someone. A Rasta in baggy cap shows him how it’s done. Cash, not credit card, and the face still in shadow under the Homburg. We are boarding. The top deck is packed with sightseers. The crowd is your friend. Use it well. I use the crowd on the top deck and find myself a space of railing while I wait for my pursuer to do the same. Does he realize I’m conscious to him? Are we into mutual awareness? Has he, as my Sarratt students would have said, clocked me clocking him? If he has, abort.

Except I won’t abort. The boat turns. A shaft of sunlight picks him out, but the face remains in shadow, even if in the left margin of my line of sight I see him casting one stealthy glance after another at me, as if he’s afraid I’ll make a dash for it or chuck myself overboard.

Can you really be Christoph, son of Alec? Or are you some lawyer’s bailiff, sent to slap a writ on me? But if that’s who you are, why stalk me? Why not barge up to me here and now, confront me? The boat swings again, and again the sunlight finds him. His head lifts. For the first time I see his face in profile. I

have a feeling that I ought to be amazed and delighted, but I am neither. I feel no rush of kinship. I am aware only of a sense of impending reckoning: Christoph, son of Alec, with the same unblinking stare that I remember from the football stadium at Düsseldorf, and the same jutting Irish jaw.

*

If Christoph was reading my intentions, I was also reading his. He hadn’t identified himself to me because he was waiting to

house

me, as the watchers have it: to find out where I’m staying and, having done so, choose his time and place. My response must be to deny him the operational intelligence he was after and dictate my own terms, which should be a crowded spot with plenty of innocent bystanders. But Catherine’s warnings, added to my apprehensions, force me to consider the possibility of a violent man seeking redress for my perceived sins against his late father.

It was with this contingency in mind that I recalled how as a small boy I had been marched round the Tower of London by my French mother, to her loud and embarrassing exclamations of horror at everything she saw. And I remembered in particular the great stairway on Tower Bridge. It was this stairway that now spoke to me, not for its iconic attractions, but for my self-preservation. Sarratt nursery did not teach self-defence. It taught a variety of ways of killing, some silently, others less so, but self-defence did not feature large on the menu. What I knew for certain was, if it did come to a fight, I needed my opponent’s weight above me, and all the help that gravity could provide. He was a prison-trained brawler with forty pounds of bone and muscle on me. I needed to use his weight against him, and I could think of no better place than a steep stairway, with my aged self standing a few steps beneath him to speed him on his

way. I had already taken a couple of useless precautions: transferred any small change I had to my right-hand jacket pocket for use as short-range grapeshot, and threaded the middle finger of my left hand round my key-ring as an improvised knuckle-duster. Nobody ever lost a fight by preparing for it, did they, son? No, staff, they never did.

We were queuing to disembark. Christoph was twelve feet behind me, his reflection in the glass door expressionless. Grey hair, Catherine had said. Now I saw why: a mass of it, bulging in all directions from beneath the Homburg, grey, wiry and untamed like Alec’s, the central mass of it plaited into a pigtail that hung down the back of his black overcoat. Why had Catherine not mentioned the pigtail? Maybe he tucked it inside his coat. Maybe pigtails weren’t uppermost in her mind. In laborious crocodile we filed up a ramp. Tower Bridge was down. A green light beckoned pedestrians to cross. Reaching the opening to the great stairway, I turned and looked directly back at him. I was saying to him: if you want to talk, we do it here, with people passing by. He too had stopped, but all I could see in his face and eyes was the football spectator’s relentless stare. I took a dozen quick steps down the stairway, which was empty save for a couple of down-and-outs. I needed a midway point. I needed him to have a long way to fall once he’d gone past me, because I didn’t want him coming back.

The stairway filled up. Two giggling girls scampered past, hand in hand. A couple of monks in saffron were engaged in earnest philosophical discussion with a beggar. Christoph was standing at the top of the staircase, a hatted silhouette in an overcoat. Step by step, with studied care, he began to descend the staircase, arms half raised from his sides, feet wide, the wrestler’s stalk. You’re too slow, I urged him, come on down at me, I need your momentum. But he had drawn to a halt a couple of stairs above me, and for the first time I heard his adult voice,

which was German American, and high-pitched, which somehow shocked me.

‘Hi, Peter. Hi, Pierre. It’s me. Christoph. Alec’s little boy, remember? Aren’t you pleased to see me? Don’t you want to shake my hand?’

Releasing the small change in my pocket, I reached up my right hand to him. He grasped it, and kept it long enough for me to feel his strength, despite the slithery dampness of the palm.

‘What can I do for you, Christoph?’ I said, and for answer got one of Alec’s caustic laughs and that extra bit of Irish he put into his voice when he was camping himself up:

‘Well, boyo, you can buy me a bloody drink for a start!’

*

The restaurant was on the first floor of a self-styled Olde Towne House with fake worm-eaten beams and a slanted view of the Tower through mitred windows. The waitresses wore bonnets and pinafores, and we could have a table if we agreed to eat a full meal. Christoph sat with his huge body slumped in his chair, and his Homburg hat pulled down over his eyes. The waitress brought beer, which was what he’d asked for. He took a sip, pulled a face, set it aside. Fingernails black and chipped. Rings on every finger of his left hand. On his right hand, just the two middle ones that count. The face Alec’s, but with pouchy discontent where pain lines should have been. The same pugnacious jaw. In the brown eyes, when they bothered with you, the same flashes of buccaneering charm.

‘So what are you doing with yourself these days, Christoph?’ I asked him. He thought for a while.

‘These days?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, I guess the short answer is:

this

,’ he replied, giving me the big smile.

‘

This

being what exactly? I don’t think I’ve got the whole story.’

But he shook his head as if to say it didn’t matter, and only sat up straight when the waitress brought our steak and chips.

‘Nice place you’ve got over there in Brittany,’ he remarked, eating. ‘How many hectares?’

‘Fifty odd. Why?’

‘Your own?’

‘What are we talking about, Christoph? Why did you come looking for me?’

He took another mouthful, tipped his head and smiled at me to say I’d made a good point.

‘Why I came looking for you? Thirty years now, I’ve been a fortune hunter. Travelled the whole world. I did diamonds. I did gold. I did dope. I did guns a little. I did jail. Too much. Did I find my fortune? Did I fuck. Then I come home to little old Europe, and I find you. My goldmine. My dad’s best friend. His best comrade. And what did you do to your best comrade? You got him killed. That’s money, man. That’s

real

money.’

‘I didn’t get your father killed.’

‘Read the files, man. Read the Stasi files. They’re dynamite. You and George Smiley killed my father. Smiley was the ringleader. You were like his number-one gofer. You set my dad up, and you killed him. Directly or indirectly, that’s what you did. And you dragged Miss Elizabeth Gold into the game. It’s all in the fucking files, man! This great wicked plot you dreamed up that backfired on you and killed everybody. You

lied

to my dad! You and your big George. You lied to my daddy and you sent him to his death.

Deliberately.

Ask the lawyers. You know what? Patriotism is

dead

, man. Patriotism is for

babies

. If this case goes international, patriotism as a justification will

not

fly. Patriotism in mitigation is officially

fucked

. Same as elites. Same as you

guys,’ he added and, about to take a refreshing pull of beer, changed his mind and rummaged in the pocket of his black coat, which he had continued to wear despite the heat. From a battered tin box he poured a dab of white powder on to his wrist and, closing one nostril with his spare hand, snorted it in full view of any customer who cared to watch, and several did.

‘So what are you doing here?’ I said.

‘Saving your fucking life, man,’ he replied and, reaching out with both hands, grasped my wrist in a gesture of true fealty.

‘So here’s the deal. Your dream ticket. Okay? My personal offer to you. The best offer you’ll ever get in your life. You’re my friend, okay?’

‘If you say so.’

I had prised myself free of him, but he was still gazing dotingly at me.

‘You have no other friend. There is no other deal on the table. This is a one-time offer. Without prejudice. Non-negotiable.’ He picks up his tankard, drains it and signals to the waitress for another. ‘One million euros. To me personally. No third parties involved. One million euros on the day the lawyers drop the lawsuit, and you never hear from me again. No lawyers, no human rights, no bullshit. You just bought the whole package. Why are you looking at me? You got a problem?’

‘No problem. Just that it seems cheap at the price. I had rather understood your lawyers have already refused that amount and more.’

‘You’re not listening. I am offering you cut price. That’s what I’m saying. I am offering you cut price, one payment only, to me, one million euros.’

‘And Liz Gold’s daughter Karen – she’s happy, I take it?’

‘Karen? Listen, I know that girl. All I have to do, I go to her, I sing to her, the way I do, I talk about my soul, weep a bit maybe, I tell her I can’t go through with this thing after all, it’s all too

painful to me, my dad’s memory, let the dead sleep. I got all the words. Karen’s sensitive. Trust me.’

And when I d0n’t exhibit the necessary signs of trust:

‘Listen. I invented that fucking girl. She owes me. I did the work, I paid the people, I got the files. I went to her, I gave her the good news, told her where to find her mother’s grave. We go to the lawyers.

Her

lawyers.

Pro bono

, the worst. Where does she get them from? Like Amnesty. Some civil rights organization. The

pro bono

lawyers go to your Government, preach them a sermon. Your Government denies all responsibility, makes a back-door, your-ears-only, we-never-said-this,

without prejudice

offer of one million pounds

sterling

. One

million

! And that’s a base price, it’s negotiable. Personally I would not touch sterling today, but that’s a side issue. What do Karen’s lawyers do? Preach another sermon. We don’t

want

a million pounds, they say. We’re high-minded people, we want you to eat shit. And if you don’t eat shit, we will take you to court, and if necessary all the way to Strasbourg and the European Court of Fucking Human Rights. Your Government says okay,

two

million, but her

pro bonos

still won’t play. They are like Karen. They are holy. They are pure.’

A metallic crash causes every head in the restaurant to turn. Christoph’s unwashed left hand with all its rings has landed palm down on the table in front of me. He is craning forward. His face raining sweat. A door marked Staff Only opens, a startled head appears and, at the sight of Christoph, vanishes.

‘You gonna want my bank details – okay,

man

? Here they are. And you tell this to your Government,

man:

one million euros on the day we withdraw, or we throw the fucking book at you.’

He lifted his hand to reveal a folded piece of lined paper, and watched me thread it into my wallet.

‘Who’s Tulip?’ he demands in the same threatening tone.

‘I’m sorry?’

‘Codename for Doris Gamp. Stasi woman, had a kid.’

He had not announced his departure. I was still insisting that Gamp–Tulip was not a name to me. A brave waitress was scurrying over with the bill, but he was halfway down the stairs. By the time I reached the street all I saw of him was his huge shadow in the back of a departing cab, and his white hand flapping lazy goodbyes out of the window.

I know I walked back to Dolphin Square. Somewhere along the way I must have remembered the piece of lined paper with his account number and chucked it into a litterbin, but I would be hard pressed to tell you which one.

8

The benign weather of yesterday had been driven off by a lateral rain that raked the streets of Pimlico like gunfire. Arriving late for my tryst at the Stables, I found Bunny standing alone on the doorstep under an umbrella.

‘We rather wondered whether you’d done a runner,’ he said, doing his shy-boy smile.

‘And if I had?’

‘Let’s just say you wouldn’t have got very far.’ Still smiling, he handed me a brown envelope marked On Her Majesty’s Service in red. ‘Congratulations. You are courteously requested to appear before our masters. The All-Party parliamentary committee of inquiry wants a word with you. Date to be announced.’

‘And a word with you too, I imagine.’

‘Marginally. But we’re not the stars, are we?’

A black Peugeot draws up. He climbs into the back. The Peugeot drives away.

‘Got our reading boots on, Pete?’ Pepsi asks. She is already installed on her throne in the library. ‘Looks like we’re in for a heavy day.’

She is referring to the thick buff folder that lies waiting for me on the trestle table: my unpublished masterpiece, forty pages of it.

*

‘I am proposing that you draft an official report on the affair, Peter,’ Smiley is saying to me.

It’s three in the morning. We’re sitting head to head in the front parlour of a council house on an estate in the New Forest.

‘I see you as the ideal person for the job,’ he continues, in the same deliberately impersonal tone. ‘A definitive report, please, overlong, rich in irrelevant detail and sparing us the one piece of information that only you and I and four other people in the world, God willing, may ever know. Something that will satisfy the prurient appetites of Joint Steering, and act as an obfuscation for the Head Office post-mortem – I use the word figuratively – that is sure to be called for. To be drafted for my sole approval in the first instance, please. My eyes only. Will you do that? Are you able? With Ilse sitting at your elbow, naturally.’

Ilse, star linguist of Covert: prim, punctilious Ilse who has German, Czech, Serbo-Croat and Polish at her beautiful fingertips; who lives with her mother in Hampstead and plays the flute on Saturday evenings. Ilse will sit at my elbow, correct my transcriptions of German recordings. We will smile together at my little errors, discuss a choice of word or phrase together, send out for our sandwiches together. We shall lean over the tape recorder together, accidentally butt heads, apologize together. And punctually at half past five, Ilse will go back home to her mother and her flute in Hampstead.

*

DEFECTION AND EXFILTRATION OF SUB

-

SOURCE TULIP

.

Draft report assembled by P. Guillam, Asst to H/Covert Marylebone, to Bill Haydon H/Joint Steering and Oliver Lacon HM Treasury. For approval by H/Covert.

FIRST INDICATIONS that sub-source Tulip might be at risk of exposure occurred in the course of a routine treff between Mayflower and his controller Leamas (PAUL) in West Berlin safe house K2 (Fasanenstrasse) on 16 January at approx 0730 hours.

Using his Friedrich Leibach identity, Mayflower had cycledfn1 across the sector border into West Berlin with the ‘morning cavalry’ of East Berlin workmen. A lavish ‘English breakfast’, including fried egg, bacon and baked beans, cooked by Leamas, has become traditional fare for these treffs, which take place at irregular intervals depending on operational need and Mayflower’s professional commitments. As usual, proceedings opened with a routine debriefing and random items of network news:

Sub-source DAFFODIL

has had a recurrence of illness, but insists on continuing to play his part, receiving and forwarding ‘rare books, brochures and personal mail’.

Sub-source VIOLET

’s report on the Soviet military build-up on the Czech border was well received by Whitehall customers. Violet to be granted the bonus she is demanding.

Sub-source PETAL

has a new boyfriend. He is a twenty-

two-year-old Red Army corporal of signals, a cypher specialist from Minsk, recently attached to her unit. He is an obsessive stamp collector and Petal has told him that her ageing aunt (fictitious) has a collection of pre-Revolutionary Russian stamps that she is tired of, and may be willing to part with at a price. She intends that the price, negotiated in bed, will be a codebook. On advice from Leamas, Mayflower has assured her that London will supply an appropriate stamp collection.

Only now does the conversation turn to sub-source Tulip.

Verbatim:

Leamas:

And on the Doris front? Is she up or down?

Mayflower:

Paul, my friend, I don’t know and I can’t diagnose. With Doris, each day will be different.

Leamas:

You’re her lifeline, Karl.

Mayflower:

She has decided that her husband Mr Quinz is taking too much interest in her.

Leamas:

High bloody time. In what way?

Mayflower:

He suspects her. She doesn’t know what of. Asks her all the time where she’s going, who she meets. Where she’s been. Watches her while she cooks, dresses, goes about her life.

Leamas:

Maybe Doris has got herself a jealous husband finally.

Mayflower:

She refutes it. She says Quinz is jealous only of himself, his shining career and his ego. But with Doris, who knows?

Leamas:

How about life in the office?

Mayflower:

She says Rapp dare not suspect her because his disciplinary transgressions do not allow him to. She says that if she were suspected by I.S., she would already be sitting in a cage in the detention house down the road.

Leamas

: I.S.?

Mayflower:

The Stasi’s internal security section. She walks past their door every morning on her way to Rapp’s suite.

At midday of the same day, as a matter of routine, Leamas instructed de Jong to revisit existing contingency plans for the exfiltration of sub-source Tulip. De Jong confirmed that escape papers and resources for an eastward exfiltration via Prague were current. Having waited for the evening shift of workmen, Mayflower cycled back into East Berlin.

Pepsi is being a fidget, repeatedly coming down from her throne to prowl the room for no reason, or stand behind me to peer over my shoulder. I am imagining Tulip in the same state of restlessness, now at home in Hohenschönhausen, now in her office next to Emmanuel Rapp’s in Stasi House Number 3 in the Magdalenenstrasse.

THE SECOND INTIMATION came in the form of a doctor-to-doctor call. With the assistance of the West Berlin police, an emergency contact system had been put in place. If Mayflower called the Klinikum (West Berlin) from the Charité (East Berlin) and demanded to speak to his notional colleague Dr Fleischmann, the call would be immediately re-routed to Berlin Station. At 0920 hours on 21 Jan., the following re-routed conversation between Mayflower and Leamas took place under medical cover.

Verbatim:

Mayflower

(calling from the Charité, East Berlin)

:

Dr Fleischmann?

Leamas:

Speaking.

Mayflower:

This is Dr Riemeck. You have a patient. Frau Lisa Sommer.fn2

Leamas:

What about her?

Mayflower:

Last night Frau Sommer reported herself to my Casualty unit suffering from delusions. We sedated her but she discharged herself during the night.

Leamas:

Delusions of what?

Mayflower:

She fantasizes that her husband suspects her of betraying State secrets to Fascist anti-Party elements.

Leamas:

Thanks. Noted. Unfortunately I am required in theatre.

Mayflower:

Understood.

Two hours intervene during which Mayflower uncached his

Theatre

fn3 equipment, tuned it to the recommended specifications, and finally obtained a weak signal. Sound quality patchy throughout the ensuing conversation. Substance:

Early that same morning Tulip had made an unprecedented crisis call to Mayflower in his surgery, consisting of an agreed series of pinpoint taps on the mouthpiece of a third-party telephone (in this case a callbox). In return Mayflower had signalled his assent: two taps, pause, three taps.

The emergency rendezvous [rv] was a spinney outside Köpenick: fortuitously the same spinney that he had previously chosen to cache his

Theatre

equipment. Both parties arrived by bicycle within minutes of each other. Tulip’s initial mood, according to Mayflower, was ‘triumphalist’. Quinz was ‘neutralized’, he was ‘good as dead’. Mayflower should rejoice with her. God had been at her side. Then the following narrative:

Returning home from work late last night, Quinz had grabbed the Zenit camera hanging from its strap behind the front door, opened its back, muttered something, snapped it shut and returned it to its hook. He had then demanded to inspect the contents of Tulip’s handbag. When she resisted he threw her across the room and searched it anyway. When Gustav ran to his mother’s defence, Quinz hit him across the face, causing bleeding from the mouth and nose. Evidently not finding what he was looking for, Quinz then ransacked kitchen cupboards and drawers, frenetically patted the soft furniture, and stormed through Tulip’s clothes, and finally Gustav’s toy cupboard, all without success.

In Gustav’s hearing he then in a loud tone challenged Tulip to explain, in questions counted on his spread fingers: number one, why the family Zenit camera contained no film; number two, why there was only one unused film in the pocket of the camera case, although a week ago there had been two; and number three, why a film that only last Sunday had been sitting in the Zenit with two frames exposed was also missing.

And by way of subsidiary questions

what

had she photographed with the remaining eight frames?

Where

had she taken the film to be developed?

Where

were the results? And

what

had happened to the missing unused film? Or

had

she – his personal conviction – been photographing the classified documents he brought home and selling them to Western spies?

The true facts of the situation, as Tulip well knew, were as follows. Since caching a Minox under the shower stand in the women’s toilet of her corridor in House 3, Tulip had on principle kept no Minox either in the fastening of her shoulder bag or at home. If Quinz brought documents of interest home from the GDR Foreign Office, Tulip would wait till he was

asleep or engrossed with his male friends and photograph the documents with the family Zenit. On the previous Sunday, she had taken two snaps of Gustav on a swing in the playground. The same evening, while Quinz sat drinking with friends, she had used the remaining frames of the same film to photograph documents from his briefcase. She had then removed the film from the Zenit, buried it in a flowerpot pending her next treff with Mayflower, but had neglected to put a fresh film into the camera, let alone put her finger over the lens and shoot off a couple of frames to represent two misfires of Gustav. Despite all this, Tulip contrived to mount what she considered to be a devastating counter-attack against her husband. She informed Quinz, in case he didn’t know, that there were many in the Stasi who remained suspicious of him on account of his odious father and reputed homosexuality; that nobody in the Stasi was taken in by his exaggerated professions of Party loyalty; and yes, she had indeed photographed whatever she could get her hands on from his briefcase,

not

in order to sell to the West or anyone else, but to blackmail him in the event of a custody battle over Gustav, which she considered imminent. Because one thing was for sure, she told him: if it were ever to come out that Lothar Quinz took home classified documents to obsess over during off-duty hours, his dreams of becoming a GDR ambassador abroad would be over.

Return to tape:

Leamas to Mayflower:

So how do things stand?

Mayflower to Leamas:

She is convinced she has reduced him to silence. He went to work as normal this morning. He was calm, even affectionate.

Leamas:

Where is she now?

Mayflower:

At home, waiting for Emmanuel Rapp. At midday

precisely he will pick her up in his car and they will drive to Dresden for a full session of the Domestic Security Soviet. He has promised her that this time she will attend the meeting as his assistant. It will be an honour for her.

[Fifteen-second pause.]

Leamas:

All right. So here’s what she does. She phones Rapp’s office now. She’s been sick as a dog all night, she’s got a barking temperature and she’s too ill to travel, she’s heartbroken. Then she aborts. She knows the procedure. She gets to the rendezvous. She waits.

Leamas then informed Head Office by crash telegram that the requirement for an emergency exfiltration of sub-source Tulip had advanced from amber to red, and that since she was fully conscious to source Mayflower, the entire Mayflower network must be considered at risk. Since the escape plan required the collaboration of both Prague and Paris Stations, the resources of Joint Steering were essential. He also requested immediate permission to undertake the exfiltration ‘in person’, in the full knowledge that, under standing Circus orders, a serving officer possessing information of high sensitivity who proposes to enter denied territory without diplomatic protection must obtain the advance consent of Head Office in writing – in this case, Joint Steering. Ten minutes later he had his answer: ‘Your request refused. Confirm. J.S.’ The telegram was otherwise unsigned in accordance with H/JS [Haydon’s] policy of collective decision-making. Simultaneously, Signals Intelligence reported a surge on all Stasi wavelengths, while the British Military Mission in Potsdam noted a tightening of security at all crossing points into West Berlin, all along the GDR–West German border. At 1505 GMT, GDR radio announced a nationwide search for an unnamed female

lackey of Fascist imperialism

answering the following description. The description was of Tulip.

Leamas had in the meantime taken steps of his own, in defiance of Joint Steering’s instruction. He makes no apology for this, claiming only that he wasn’t going to ‘sit on his arse and watch Tulip and the entire Mayflower network going up in smoke’. When Joint Steering urged that at least Mayflower himself should immediately be exfiltrated, Leamas’s retort was uncompromising: ‘He can come out any time he wants, but he won’t. He’d rather stand trial like his father.’ Less clear is the part played by the Station’s recently upgraded Assistant Officer, Stavros de Jong, and Ben Porter, the Station’s security guard and driver.

Testimony of Ben Porter (security guard, Berlin Station) to PG, verbatim:

Alec’s at his desk on the secure blower to Joint Steering. I’m standing at the door. He puts down the phone and he turns to me and he says, ‘Ben,’ he says, ‘we’re on. It’s a rolling job. Get the Land Rover out and tell Stas I want him in full drag in the courtyard in five minutes,’ he says. At no time did Mr Leamas say to me, ‘Ben, I have to inform you we are doing this in direct contravention of Head Office instructions.’

Testimony of Stavros de Jong (probationer attached to H/Covert Berlin) to PG, verbatim:

I asked Head of Covert, ‘Alec, are we sure Head Office is behind us on this one?’ To which he replied, ‘Stas, take my word for it.’ So I did.

Their protestations of innocence were mine, not theirs. Since I had no doubt that Smiley had encouraged Leamas to undertake the exfiltration of Tulip himself, I was careful to supply Porter

and de Jong with get-out-of-jail statements in case they were forced to give an account of themselves by Percy Alleline or one of his henchmen.

*

It is three days later. The story is taken up by Alec himself. It is ten o’clock at night and he is being debriefed across a plywood table in the safe room at the British Embassy in Prague where he holed out an hour earlier. He is talking into a tape recorder and on the other side of it sits the Head of Prague Station, one Jerry Ormond, husband to the redoubtable Sally who is also the Station’s number two in a his-and-hers Circus partnership. Also on the table, if only in my informed imagination, a bottle of the Scotch whisky, and one glass only – Alec’s – which Jerry intermittently replenishes. By the lifeless tone of Alec’s voice it is clear that he is exhausted, which as far as Ormond is concerned is all to the good, since his task as debriefer is to take down his subject’s story before his memory has had a chance to edit it. In my imagination again, Alec is unshaven and wearing a borrowed dressing gown after the hasty shower he has been allowed to take. The Irish comes through his voice in irregular bursts.

And I, Peter Guillam: where am I? Not in Prague with Alec, though I might just as well have been. I am sitting in an upstairs room of Covert’s headquarters in Marylebone, listening to the tape that has been rushed to London by RAF plane, and I am thinking to myself:

it’s my turn next

.

AL:

It’s eight below on the steps of the Olympic Stadium, ball-breaking easterly blowing fine snow, ice on the roads. I reckon the foul weather’s all to the good. Foul weather’s escape weather. Land Rover’s standing by, Ben’s at the

wheel. Stas de Jong comes marching down the steps in full army battledress, squeezes himself into the floor cavity, all six foot three of him, army boots and all. Me and Ben lower the lid on him, I sit up front with Ben. I’m wearing an officer’s cap and greatcoat, three pips, East German working clothes underneath. Scruffy shoulder bag under the seat for documents. Rule of mine. Keep your documents separate for the jump. Nine-twenty a.m., we’re going through the official Friedrichstrasse crossing point for military personnel, showing our passes to the Vopos through the closed windows, not letting the buggers get their hands on them, which the diplomats tell us is the current way of doing it. Soon as we’re through we pick up the usual tail: two Vopos in a Citroën. So it’s a normal day. They need to know we’re just another British military vehicle asserting our rights under the quadripartite agreement, and that’s what we’re keen to tell them. We pass through Friedrichshain and I’m hoping to Christ that Tulip has hit the road by now because if she hasn’t, she’s dead or worse and so’s the network. We head north towards Pankow till we reach the Soviet military perimeter, then turn east. Same Citroën on our tail, which is fine by us. We don’t need a changing of the guard and fresh eyes on us. I’m leading them a bit of a dance, which is what they expect us to do: the odd sudden turning, backtrack, slow to a crawl, put your foot down. We’re turning south into Marzahn. We’re still inside Berlin city limits, but it’s forest, flat roads and flying snow. We pass the old Nazi radio station which is our first marker. The Citroën’s a hundred yards behind us, not enjoying the icy roads. We go into the dip, gathering speed. There’s a sharp left coming up and a white factory chimney poking out of the trees which is our second marker: an old

sawmill. We make the left turn fast, hold it, skid to a near-halt next to the sawmill. I roll out, plus shoulder bag, minus greatcoat, which is Stas’s cue to get out of his box and into the passenger seat and look like me. I’m flat in a ditch with snow all over me so I must have rolled a yard or two. When I take a look, the Land Rover’s climbing up the other side of the dip and the Citroën’s scrambling after it, trying to catch up.

[A pause, punctuated by the chink of glass and sounds of pouring liquid.]

AL

[contd]

:

Back of the old sawmill there’s a disused lorry park and a tin shed full of sawdust. And behind the sawdust there’s a brown-and-blue Trabant with a load of steel tubing strapped to the roof. Ninety thousand on the clock and stinks of rat shit, but the tank’s full, and there’s a couple of spare cans in the back and the tyres have even got a bit of tread to them. Maintained by a trusted patient of Mayflower’s who won’t even give his name. Only problem is, Trabis hate the cold. It takes me an hour to thaw her out and all the time I’m thinking: Tulip, where are you, have they got you, and are you talking? Because if you’re talking, we’re all fucked.

JO

[Jerry Ormond]

:

And your identity?

AL:

Günther Schmaus. Welder from Saxony. I give good Saxon. My mother was Chemnitz. My dad was County Cork.

JO:

And Tulip? When you meet up with her, who will she be?

AL:

My own dear wife. Augustina.

JO:

And she’s where at this minute? All being well?

AL:

Rv, north of Dresden. Deep countryside. She’ll have tried to bike despite the weather, gone a distance, then ditched her bike because they know she bikes. Then taken the local train, then hiked or bummed a ride to the rv with orders to hunker down for as long as it takes.

JO:

And the crossing from East Berlin into the GDR? What are you expecting?

AL:

It’s random. No checkpoints, roving patrols. You’re lucky or you’re not.

JO:

And were you lucky?

AL:

Wasn’t a big deal. Two police cars. They cut you up, frighten the shit out of you, have you out of the car, shake you down. But if your papers hold, on you go.

JO:

And they held. Yes?

AL:

I wouldn’t fucking be here if they hadn’t, would I?

[Change of tape, corrupted passage forty-five seconds. Rejoin. Leamas is describing the drive between East Berlin and Cottbus.]

AL:

Best thing about traffic in the GDR, basically there isn’t any. A few horses and carts. Cyclists, mopeds, sidecars, the odd clapped-out lorry. A bit of autobahn, then small roads. I’m alternating. If a small road is snowed up, cut back to the autobahn. Steer clear of Wünsdorf whatever you do. There’s a bloody great Nazi camp there and the Sovs took it over wholesale: three tank divisions, serious rocketry and a king-sized listening station. We’ve been spying the shit out of it for months. I make a detour north for safety’s sake, not an autobahn, just a straight flat country road. There’s heavy snow coming at me, and lines of bare trees chock-a-block with bunches of mistletoe, and me thinking, one day I’ll come back and cut down that lot and flog it at Covent Garden market. Then – am I dreaming this? – I’m in the middle of a fucking great Soviet military convoy, and I’m going the wrong way. Lorries packed with troops, T-34 tanks on low-loaders, six or eight artillery pieces, and me in my piebald Trabi dodging between them, trying to get off the fucking road, and them just not bloody looking,

rolling straight on. I didn’t even have time to take their fucking numbers!

[Laughter, shared by Ormond. Pause. Resumes at a slower pace.]

AL:

Four in the afternoon, I’m five kilometres west of Cottbus. I’m looking for an abandoned

Karosserie

works at the roadside. That’s the rv. And a baby’s mitten jammed on a bit of fencing, which is the safety signal to tell me Tulip’s inside. And it was there. The mitten was. Pink. Stuck up there like a fucking flag in the middle of nowhere. And it scares me, don’t know why. The mitten does. It’s too fucking conspicuous. Maybe it’s not Tulip inside the shed, it’s the Stasi. Or maybe it’s Tulip

and

the Stasi. So I pull up and think about it. And while I’m thinking, the barn door opens and there she is, standing in the doorway with a grinning six-year-old kid on her hand.

[Twenty-second pause.]

AL:

I’d never even

met

the bloody woman, Christ’s sake! Tulip worked to Mayflower. That was the deal. Knew her from photographs, that’s all. So I say,

how d’you do, Doris, my name’s Günther and I’m your husband for this journey, and who the fuck’s this?

Except that I know too bloody well who

this

is. And she says, it’s Gustav my son, and he’s coming with me. And I say, like fuck he’s coming with you, we are a childless couple, and there’s not going to be any hiding him under a bloody blanket when we reach the Czech frontier. So what are we going to do about it? She says in that case she’s not coming, and the boy chirps up and says he’s not either. So I tell Gustav to get back inside the shed and grab her by the arm and take her round the back and tell her what she knows but doesn’t want to hear: there’s no ID for him, they’ll pull us in and run a check on us, and if we don’t get rid of him, you’re

fucked and so am I, and so is the good Dr Riemeck, because once they’ve got you and Gustav in their hands, they’ll squeeze his name out of you in five minutes. No answer and it’s growing dark and the snow’s coming on again. So we go back inside the shed, which is big as a bloody aircraft hangar and full of busted machinery, and Gustav, the little bugger, has laid for dinner, if you can believe it: dug out whatever she’s got for provisions and set them out on the ground: sausage, bread, a thermos of hot cocoa, boxes to sit on, let’s all have a party. So we sit in a ring and have our family picnic and Gustav sings us a patriotic song, and the two of them bed down together under coats and whatever they’ve got, and I sit smoking in a corner, and as soon as it’s half light I shove them in the Trabi and we drive back to the village I passed through the night before, because I’d seen a bus stop there. And by the grace of God there are these two old nellies standing there in black hoods and white skirts, and baskets of cucumbers on their backs, and God bless them they’re Sorbs.

JO:

Sorbs? What the hell …

AL

[outburst]

: Sorbs

, for Christ’s sake! You’ve heard of fucking

Sorbs

! Sixty-fucking-thousand of them. Protected species, even in the GDR. Slavic minority, scattered up and down the Spree, been there for centuries, growing bloody cucumbers. Try recruiting one.

Jesus!

[Ten-second pause. Cools down.]

AL:

I pull up, tell Tulip and Gustav to stay put in the car. Don’t move. I get out, the first old nellie watches me, the other one doesn’t bother. I pull the charm. Does she speak German: that’s respect. She speaks German but she’d rather speak Sorbian, she says. Joke. I ask where she’s heading. Bus into Lübbenau, then train to the Ostbahnhof

in Berlin to flog the cucumbers. They get a better price in Berlin. I pitch her a cock-and-bull story about Gustav: family upset, mother distraught, boy’s got to get back to his father in Berlin, and can they take him? She puts the proposition to her pal and they have a debate about it in Sorbian. And I’m thinking, any minute the fucking bus is going to come over the hill and they won’t have made up their minds. Then the first one says, we’ll take your boy if you buy our cucumbers, and I say, what all of them? And she says, yes, all of them. And I say, if I buy all your cucumbers you won’t have any fucking cucumbers to sell in Berlin, so why would you want to go there? They have a good laugh about this in Sorbian. I shove a wad of cash into her hand, so much for the cucumbers, but keep them. And so much for the boy’s train fare, and here’s some more for his onward journey to Hohenschönhausen. And here’s the bus coming, and I’ll get the boy. I go back to the car, and tell Gustav to get out, but his mother just sits frozen in the car with her hand across her eyes so he won’t budge either. So I

order

him out, bark at him, and he obeys. And I tell him, you march with me to the bus, and these two kind comrades will escort you to the Ostbahnhof. And from the Ostbahnhof you go home to Hohenschönhausen and wait till your father shows up. And that’s an order, Comrade. Then he asks me where his mother’s going and why he’s not going with her, so I say your mother’s got important secret work to do in Dresden, and it’s your duty as a good soldier for Communism to go back to your father and continue the struggle. And he goes. [Five-second silence.] Well, what the fuck else was he supposed to do? He’s a Party kid with a Party father and he’s six years old, for fuck’s sake!

JO:

And Tulip meanwhile?

AL:

Sitting in the fucking Trabi staring out of the windscreen in a trance. I get in, drive a kilometre, then stop again and haul her out. There’s a helicopter buzzing overhead. Fuck knows what

he

thinks he’s doing. Fuck knows where he got a helicopter from. Borrowed it from the Russians? Listen, I tell her. Just fucking listen because we need each other. Sending your kid back to Berlin is not the end of a problem. It’s the beginning of a new one. Two hours from now, the entire Stasi will know that Doris Quinz née Gamp was last seen in the vicinity of Cottbus, heading east with her male friend. They’ll have a description of the car, the lot. So goodbye to any ideas we had about driving this load of shit into Czecho on false papers, because from now on every Stasi and KGB unit and every frontier post from Kaliningrad to Odessa is going to be on the lookout for a piebald plastic Trabi with a pair of Fascist spies in it. And she takes it on the chin, I’ll give her that. No more dramatics, just asks me straight out what the fallback is and I say: one out-of-date smugglers’ map that I brought along as an afterthought, which with luck and a prayer might just possibly get us over the border on foot. So she thinks hard about this, and then she asks me – it’s like the clincher for her – ‘If I come with you, when will I see my son again?’ Which suggests to me that she is seriously considering turning herself in for the boy’s sake. So I grab her by the shoulders and swear blind into her face that I’ll get her boy traded in an agent-swap if it’s the last thing I do on earth. And I know as well as you do that there’s as much chance of

that

ever happening as … [three-second pause] … fuck it.

*

Was it purely for reasons of economy that in my later transcript, which I am now reading, I departed from Alec’s spoken words at this point, preferring to paraphrase them for greater – shall we say objectivity? From the moment of leaving Gustav in the care of the two Sorbs, Alec clung to minor roads wherever the snow permitted. His problem, he explained, was ‘knowing too bloody much’ about the perils of the terrain they were crossing. The whole area was awash with Military Intelligence and KGB listening stations, and he knew them all by heart. He spoke of traversing empty, dead-straight minor roads with six inches of virgin snow on them, only the tree-lines to guide him; of his relief at entering forest until Tulip gave a yell of horror. She had spotted the former Nazi hunting lodge where the GDR elite brought visiting dignitaries to shoot deer and wild boar and get drunk. They made a hasty detour, lost their bearings and saw a light burning in a remote farmhouse. Leamas thumped on the door. It was opened by a terrified peasant woman clutching a knife. Having obtained directions from her, he persuaded her to sell him bread, sausage and a bottle of slivovitz, and on his way back to the Trabant tripped over a sagging telephone cable, he assumed for sounding a fire alarm. He cut it anyway.

The day was darkening, the snow thickening, the piebald Trabant was on her last legs: ‘clutch shot, heater shot, gearbox shot, smoke belching out of the bonnet’. He reckoned that they were about ten kilometres from Bad Schandau and fifteen from the crossing point on the smugglers’ map. Having confirmed their position as best he could by compass, he selected an eastbound timber track and drove until they hit a snowdrift. Huddled together in the Trabi in freezing cold, they ate the bread and

Wurst

, drank the slivovitz, froze and watched the deer go by while Tulip, half asleep with her head on Alec’s shoulder, languidly described her hopes and dreams for her new life with Gustav in England.

She would not wish Gustav to go to Eton. She had heard that English boarding schools were run by pederasts like his father. She would prefer a proletarian State school with girls, much sport, not too strict. Gustav would start learning English from the day he arrived. She would see to that. For his birthday she would buy him an English bicycle. She had heard Scotland was beautiful. They would bicycle together in Scotland.

She was still talking in this vein, dozing, when Alec became aware of four silent male figures with Kalashnikovs standing like sentinels round the car. Ordering Tulip to remain where she was, he opened the door and slowly got out while they watched him. None was above seventeen, he reckoned, and they seemed as scared as he was. Seizing the initiative, he demanded to know what they thought they were doing, sneaking up on a courting couple. At first nobody answered. Then the boldest explained that they were poachers, looking for meat. To which Alec replied that, if they kept their mouths shut, he would do the same. They sealed the bond by shaking hands all round, after which the four men silently vanished.

The day dawns clear, no snow. Soon a pale sun is shining. Together, they tip the piebald Trabant down a slope, and chuck snow and branches over it. It’s a walk from here on. Tulip has only light leather boots, knee length, no tread. Alec’s workman’s boots are little better. They set out, grabbing each other’s hands as they slide and slip. They are in ‘Saxon Switzerland’, a wonderland of steep, undulating snowfields and forest. On the hillsides, old houses fallen to ruin or turned into summer orphanages. If the map is to be believed, they are walking parallel to the border. Hand in hand they battle their way up a rise and skirt a frozen pond. They are in a mountain village of small wooden houses.

AL:

If the map was right, we were either dead or in Czecho.

[Chink of glass. Sounds of pouring liquid.]

But the story has barely begun: see accompanying Circus telegrams. See also the reason why, having listened to Alec’s tape, I am still sitting tensely on the top floor of Covert’s HQ in Marylebone in the small hours, waiting any minute to be summoned to Head Office.

*

Sally Ormond, deputy Head of Station Prague, wife to Head of Station Jerry, is the type of upper-class female go-getter the Circus blindly adores: Cheltenham Ladies’ College, father in SOE in the war, couple of aunts at Bletchley. Also claims a mysterious kinship-by-marriage with George, which to my mind he bears a little too nobly.

Report by Sally Ormond, DH/Station Prague, to H/Covert

[Smiley]

. Personal and Private. Priority: CRASH

.

Station orders from Covert were to receive, support and securely accommodate one disguised officer, Alec Leamas, and one escaping woman agent travelling on East German papers in an East German registered Trabant, registration supplied, expected to arrive in the early hours of darkness.

The Station was NOT however informed that the operation was being carried out contrary to Joint Steering’s instructions. We could only assume that once it was known that Leamas had taken matters into his own hands, HO decided to afford operational support.

Berlin Station (de Jong) had advised us that on entering Czech territory Leamas would signal safe arrival by means of a no-name call to Embassy Visa Section enquiring whether UK visas were valid in Northern Ireland. Prague Station would respond by activating a recorded

announcement advising him to call again in office hours. This would be an acknowledgement of message received.

Leamas and Tulip would then proceed by whatever means possible to a point on the road between Prague city and Prague airport, and park in a siding, map reference supplied.

Under the plan put forward by this Station and approved by H/Covert, the couple would abandon the car and a symbolized driver from Prague’s GODIVA network would commandeer the Embassy shuttle (CD plates and blackened side windows) which regularly ferries Embassy personnel to and from Prague airport. He would then collect Leamas and Tulip from the agreed rv. The rear of the van would contain formal Western clothing, supplied by this Station. Leamas and Tulip would dress themselves as official dinner guests of HM Ambassador, and on that pretext bluff their way into the Embassy, which is under the permanent watch of Czech security.

At 1040 hours an emergency conference was held in the Embassy safe room, at which Her Excellency the Ambassador [HE] graciously consented to this plan. However, by 1600 hours UK time, having further consulted the Foreign Office, she revised her decision without apology on the grounds that, since the fugitive woman had been in the meantime widely featured on GDR media as a State criminal, the potential for diplomatic repercussions outweighed earlier considerations.

In light of HE’s stated position, no Embassy vehicle and no Embassy staff could be deployed in the escape plan. I therefore disconnected Visa Section’s automatic reply system in the hope that this would indicate to Leamas that no support was available.

I’ve replaced my earphones. I’m back with Alec, not in the imperial comfort of our British Embassy in Prague, but stuck at the freezing roadside with Tulip, and no support, no pick-up car and, as Alec would say, no fuck-all. I’m remembering what he’s preached ever since I’ve known him: when you’re planning an op, think of every way the Service can fuck you up, then wait for the one way you never thought of, but they have. And I reckon that’s exactly what he’s thinking now.

AL

[verbatim resumed]

:

When no shuttle showed up, and no joy out of Visa Section, I just thought fuck it, that’s London for you, so the only thing is, make it up as you go along. We’re a distressed East German couple at the roadside, my wife’s sick as a dog, so help us, somebody. I tell Doris to sit on the pavement and look pathetic which suits her just fine, and in due course a lorry full of bricks pulls up and the driver leans out. By the luck of the gods he’s a German from Leipzig and he wants to know whether I’m pimping the pretty lady sitting on the pavement. So I say no, sorry mate, she’s my wife, and she’s ill, and he says okay, get in, and he drives us as far as the hospital in the city centre. I’ve got a rainy-day UK passport stitched into the lining of my shoulder bag, name of Miller. I unpick it and bung it in my pocket. Then I say to her: you’re really seriously ill, Doris. You’re pregnant and you’re getting more ill by the minute. So do me a favour, bag out your tummy and look as fucking awful as you feel. So they open the doors and in we come. Sorry about that.

JO:

Not quite the whole story though, is it? [Liquid pouring.]

AL:

Jesus. All right then. We come up your cobble lane out there. We approach your noble gates with Her Majesty’s royal crest on them in tasteful gold paint. There’s three Czech goons in grey suits hanging around outside, doing

nothing very deliberately. Maybe you haven’t noticed them. Doris is putting on an act Sarah Bernhardt would have given her eyes for. I wave my UK passport at them: let us in quick. The buggers want to see her passport too. Listen, I tell them in my best English. Just press that fucking button you’ve got on the wall there, and tell them inside that my wife’s having a miscarriage, so get a fucking doctor round. And if she has it here in the street it’ll be on your fucking heads. And haven’t you got mothers of your own, probably you haven’t – or words to that effect, okay? And abracadabra the gates have parted. And we’re standing in the Embassy courtyard. And Tulip is clutching her gut and thanking her patron saint for delivering us from evil. And you and your dear lady wife are apologizing profusely for yet another king-sized Head Office fuck-up. So thank you both for the gracious apology, accepted. And if you don’t mind, I’ll go and get some fucking sleep.

Sally Ormond takes back the story.

Extract from Sally Ormond, DH/Station Prague, personal informal handwritten DO letter to H/Covert

[Smiley]

by Circus bag. Priority: CRASH

.

Well, of course, once we’d got poor Tulip and Alec inside the Embassy compound, that’s when the

real

fun started. I honestly think Ambass

and

the FO would have been

far

happier if she had simply been handed back to the GDR authorities and no more said. For starters, Ambass wouldn’t have Tulip inside ‘her house’

at all

, even if legally it didn’t make a jot of difference. She actually insisted that two janitors be moved

into

the main building, just so that poor Tulip could be shoved in the servants’ area, which

from a strict security point of view works rather better than the main house. But that wasn’t

at all

her reason, as she made

totally

clear the moment we were all four of us squashed into the Embassy safe room: Her Excellency, attended by Arthur Lansdowne, her

very

private secretary, plus my dear husband and self. And Alec absolutely not

bien vu

by HE, of which more later, and anyway mopping Tulip’s brow in the servants’ area.

And P.S. George: a word in your ear if we may.

The Embassy safe room is extremely

stuffy

and a

potential health risk

at all times, as repeatedly reported in vain by self to HO Admin. The Mickey Mouse air-con system is totally kaput. It breathes

in

when it should breathe

out

, but according to Barker (Admin’s pest-in-chief), no spare parts have been available for the last two years. And since nobody in the FO has seen fit to send us a new system, anyone using the place just stews and suffocates. Last week poor Jerry nearly

did

suffocate, but of course he’s too noble to say. I’ve suggested about a million times that the safe room be made a Circus responsibility, but that apparently would be an infringement of

FO territorial rights

!!

If you can possibly agitate with Admin unattributably (

NOT

Barker, I suggest!), hugely grateful. Jerry joins me in sending much love and huge fealty as ever, specially to Ann.

S

Text of Immediate Top Secret Telegram from British Ambassador, Prague, personal to Sir Alwyn Withers, H/East European Department, The Foreign Office, copy to Circus (Joint Steering). Minutes of crisis meeting in Embassy safe room, held at 2100 hours. Present: HE Ambassador (Margaret Renford), Arthur Lansdowne, Private Secretary to HE, Jerry Ormond (H/Stn), Sally Ormond (DH/Stn).

Purpose of meeting: Management and disposal of temporary Embassy resident. Priority: CRASH.

Dear Alwyn,

After our secure telephone call of this morning, the following procedure has been agreed between the two of us regarding the onward journey of

our uninvited guest

(OUG):

OUG will travel to her next destination on what our Friends assure us will be a valid non-British passport. This will forestall later accusations by Czech authorities that this Embassy is dishing out UK passports to any Tom, Dick and Harry of whatever nationality attempting to evade GDR/Czech justice.

OUG will not be assisted, accompanied or transported in any manner by diplomatic or non-diplomatic members of Embassy staff in the course of her departure. No vehicle with British diplomatic number plates will be used for her exfiltration. No false British papers will be issued to her.

If OUG at any point claims she has the protection of the British Embassy, it is understood that this will be immediately and robustly denied, locally and in London.

OUG’s departure from Embassy compound will occur within three working days, or other steps for her removal will be considered, including surrender of OUG to Czech authorities.

My telephone is buzzing and the red light is winking. It’s Toby bloody Esterhase, gofer to Percy Alleline and Bill Haydon, yelling at me in his thick Hungarian accent to get my candy arse over to Head Office double-quick. Advising him to watch his

language, I jump on my motorbike, which is being held ready for me outside the front door.

Minutes of emergency conference held in Joint Steering’s safe room at Cambridge Circus. Presiding: Bill Haydon (H/JS). Present: Colonel Etienne Jabroche (Military Attaché, French Embassy, London, Chief of French Intelligence Liaison), Jules Purdy (JS French desk), Jim Prideaux (JS Balkans desk), George Smiley (H/Covert), Peter Guillam (JACQUES).

Note-taker assigned to meeting: T. Esterhase. Recorded, part transcribed verbatim. Flash copy to H/Stn Prague.

It’s five in the morning. The summons has come. I have arrived from Marylebone by motorbike. George has come straight from Treasury. He is unshaven and looks more than usually worried.

‘You’re entirely free to say

no

at any point, Peter,’ he has twice assured me. He has already described the operation as ‘needlessly elaborate’ but his greater concern, try as he might to conceal it, is that the operational plan is the collective achievement of Joint Steering. We are six at the long plywood table in the Circus safe room.

Jabroche:

Bill. My dear friend. My masters in Paris need to be assured that your Monsieur Jacques can hold his own on matters of small farming in France.

Haydon:

Tell him, Jacques.

Guillam:

I’m not worried about that, Colonel.

Jabroche:

Not even in the company of experts?

Guillam:

I grew up on a French smallholding in Brittany.

Haydon:

Is Brittany French? You amaze me, Jacques.

[Laughter.]

Jabroche:

Bill. With your permission.

Switching to French, Colonel Jabroche engages Guillam in an animated discussion on the French farming industry, with particular reference to north-west France.

Jabroche:

I am satisfied, Bill. He passes. He even speaks like a Breton, poor man.

[More laughter.]

Haydon:

But will it play, Etienne? Can you really get him in?

Jabroche:

In, yes. Out, will be up to Monsieur Jacques and his good lady. You are in the nick of time. The list of French delegates closes imminently. We are already holding it open. I suggest we keep the presence of Monsieur Jacques at the conference as brief as possible. We enrol him, he goes on the collective visa, he is delayed by illness, but he is determined to make the closing session. As one of three hundred international delegates, he will not be unduly conspicuous. Do you speak Finnish, Monsieur Jacques?

Guillam:

Not a lot, Colonel.

Jabroche:

I thought all Bretons did. [Laughter.] And the lady in the case speaks no French?

Guillam:

To our knowledge, German and school Russian, but no French.

Jabroche:

But she has panache, you say? She is personable. She has élan. She can dress.

Smiley:

Jacques, you’ve seen her.

I had seen her dressed and I had seen her undressed. I select the first:

Guillam:

We’ve only brush-passed. But she’s impressive. Good tradecraft, quick thinking. Creative. Spirited.

Haydon:

Jesus.

Creativity

. Who the hell needs creativity? Woman needs to do what she’s bloody told and shut up, doesn’t she? Is it a goer or not? Jacques?

Guillam:

I’m up for it if George is.

Haydon:

Is he?

Smiley:

Given that Joint and the Colonel are providing the necessary field support, we at Covert are prepared to accept the risk.

Haydon:

Well, that sounds a bit bloody mealy-mouthed, I must say. It’s a goer then. Etienne, I’m assuming you’ll supply Monsieur Jacques with his French passport and travel papers. Or do you want us to do that?

Jabroche:

Ours are better. [Laughter.] Kindly also remember, Bill, that if things come unstuck, my government will be very shocked to discover that your perfidious English secret service is encouraging its agents to masquerade as French citizens.

Haydon:

And we shall deny the accusation vigorously and apologize. [To Prideaux] Jim-boy. A comment? You’ve been mysteriously silent. Czecho’s your patch. Are you happy with us trampling all over it?

Prideaux:

Not objecting, if that’s what you mean.

Haydon:

Anything you want to add or subtract?

Prideaux:

Not off-hand.

Haydon:

Okay, gents. Thanks all. It’s a goer, so let’s get down to it. Jacques, our thoughts go with you. Etienne, maybe a private word.

But George doesn’t give up his misgivings easily, witness the next serial. The clock is ticking; I am to leave for Prague in six hours.

PG to H/Covert.

George,

We spoke. You asked me to put down my experience of the Field Dispatch Office at Heathrow, Terminal 3, presently under Joint Steering’s command. In appearance the FDO is just another seedy airport office at the end of an unswept corridor. A glazed door is marked ‘Freight Interlink’, access is by entryphone. Once inside, the atmosphere is depressing: a couple of weary couriers playing cards, a woman barking Spanish into a telephone, one dresser only working a double shift because her colleague is off sick, cigarette smoke, full ashtrays and only one cubicle because they’re waiting for new curtains for the other one.

The big surprise was the reception party that awaited my appearance: Alleline, Bland, Esterhase. If Bill H had been there, I’d have had a full hand. Ostensibly they’d come to see me off and wish me well. Alleline to the fore as ever, produced my French passport and conference ID, courtesy of Jabroche, with great flourish. Esterhase did the same with my travelling case and props: clothing bought in Rennes, agricultural handbooks and a history of how France built the Suez Canal for light reading, etc. Roy Bland played big brother and slyly asked me if there was anyone I’d like informed if I was away a few years longer than expected.

But the real purpose of their attentions could not have been clearer. They wanted to know more about Tulip: where she was coming from, how long she had been working for us, who had the handling of her? And then the strangest moment when, having fended off their questions, I was standing in the cubicle being dressed and Toby E

shoved his head round the curtain saying he had the following personal message for me from Bill: ‘Any time you get tired of your Uncle George, think Head of Station Paris.’ My reply was non-committal.

Peter

Now meet George in his role as the ultimate operational pedant, bent on closing every loophole in Joint Steering’s notoriously slipshod planning:

Signal from H/Covert

[Smiley]

to H/Station Prague

[Ormond]

TOP SECRET MAYFLOWER. Priority: CRASH.

A. Finnish passport for sub-source Tulip will arrive tomorrow by bag in name of Venla Lessif, born Helsinki, nutrition expert, married name of spouse: Adrien Lessif. Passport will contain stamped Czech entry visa, date of entry to coincide with Communist French-sponsored conference for

Fields of Peace

.

B. Peter Guillam will arrive Prague airport on Air France flight 412 tomorrow morning at 1040 hours local time, travelling on French national’s passport in name of Adrien Lessif, visiting lecturer in Agrarian Economics at Rennes University. Czech entry visa also valid to coincide with conference. Lessif’s appearance at conference notionally delayed by illness. Both Lessifs currently appear on Conference List of Participants, one participant (delayed), one spouse.

C. Also by tomorrow’s bag, two Air France tickets Prague–Paris Le Bourget, for Adrien and Venla Lessif, departing 0600 hours 28 January. Air France records will confirm that the couple flew to Prague on separate dates (see entry stamps) but will be returning to Paris with fellow academics in the group.

D. Accommodation for Professor and Mme Lessif has been booked at the Hotel Balkan where the French delegation will be housed overnight prior to early morning departure for Paris Le Bourget.

And Sally Ormond in reply, missing no opportunity to sing her own praises:

Extract from second personal letter Sally Ormond to George Smiley, marked Strictly Personal & Private to you, not for the record.

On receipt of your very lucid signal, herewith gratefully acknowledged, Jerry and I decided that I should go and prepare Tulip for her departure from the Embassy and her coming ordeal. I duly crossed the courtyard to the annexe suite where we had housed Tulip: double curtains on street side, camp bed for self in passage outside bedroom door, extra chancery guard posted in downstairs hall in case of unwelcome visitors.

I found her sitting on the bed, and Alec with his arm round her shoulder, but she seemed not to know he was there, just every now and then sobbing in semi-silent hiccups.

Be that as it may, I took firm charge of the situation and, as planned, sent Alec off for fresh air and a boys’ walk beside the river with Jerry. My German language being pretty much stuck at Level 2, I couldn’t get a lot out of her at first, though I doubt it would have made much difference because she was hardly talking, let alone listening. She whispered ‘Gustav’ at me several times and I gathered, after a bit of sign language, that Gustav was not her

Mann

but her

Sohn

.

But I did manage to get through to her that she would be leaving the Embassy tomorrow, flying to England but not directly, and that she would be attached to a mixed French tour group of academics and agriculturalists. Her first reaction, very naturally, was how could she possibly if she didn’t speak a word of French? And when I said that wasn’t going to matter, because she would be Finnish – and nobody speaks Finnish, do they? – her next reaction was:

in these clothes?

– which was my cue to unpack all the brilliant goodies Paris Station had got together for us at no notice at all: gorgeous barley-coloured twinset from Printemps, lovely shoes just her size, dishy nightdress and underclothes, make-up literally to

die

for – Paris Station must have spent a

fortune

– just everything she must have been dreaming of for the last twenty years, even if she didn’t know it, and nice labels from Tours to complete the illusion. And a

very

pretty engagement ring I wouldn’t have minded myself,

and

a decent gold wedding ring rather than the ersatz bit of tin she was wearing – all to be returned on landing, of course, but I didn’t think that needed saying

quite

yet!

And by then she was

into

it. The pro in her had woken up. She looked very carefully at her nice new passport (not actually new) and declared it pretty good. And when I told her that a gallant Frenchman would accompany her and pretend to be her husband for the journey, she said that sounded a sensible arrangement, and what did he look like?

So as ordered I showed her a photograph of Peter G, and she peered at it rather

expressionlessly

, I have to say, given that, as proxy husbands go, you could do a lot worse than PG. Finally she asked, ‘Is he French or English?’ and I said, ‘Both, and you’re Finnish and French,’ and my dear she

hooted

with laughter!

And quite soon after that Alec and Jerry came back from their walk, and with the ice broken we got down to the serious briefing. She listened carefully and calmly.

By the end of our session, I had the feeling she had really warmed to the whole idea, and in a rather awful way thought it fun. A bit of a danger addict, I thought, and in

that

way only, very like Alec!

Take care, and my love as ever to our gorgeous Ann,

     S

*

Make no hasty or inadvertent body movement. Keep your hands and shoulders exactly where they are now, and breathe. Pepsi is back on her throne, but she can’t take her eyes off you, and it’s not love.

*

Report by Peter Guillam on temporary attachment to Covert Ops, re exfiltration of sub-source TULIP from Prague to Paris Le Bourget, for onward transit by RAF fighter plane to London, Northolt airport, 27 January 1960.

I arrived at Prague airport at 1125 hours local time (flight delayed) in the person of visiting lecturer in Agrarian Economics at the University of Rennes.

I understood that, thanks to French Liaison, my late arrival due to illness had been formally noted at the conference, and my name included on the list of attendees for the benefit of the Czech authorities.

In further verification of my bona fides, I was met by the

Cultural Attaché from the French Embassy, who used his diplomatic credentials to hasten airport processing, which passed off relatively easily with the Attaché acting as my interpreter.

He then drove me in his official car to the French Embassy, where I signed the visitors’ book before being delivered, also by French Embassy car, to the conference, where a seat had been reserved for me in the back row.

The conference hall was a gilded, operatic affair, originally built for the Central Council of Railwaymen, and accommodating up to four hundred delegates. Security was cursory. Halfway up the grand staircase, two overworked women who spoke only Czech sat at a desk ticking off the names of delegates from half-a-dozen countries. The conference itself took the form of a seminar conducted by a panel of experts seated on the stage, with choreographed contributions from the floor. No input from myself was required. I was impressed by the deftness of French Liaison, who at short notice had authenticated my presence in the eyes of Czech security, and of the delegates, two of whom were clearly conscious to my role and found time to seek me out and shake my hand.

At 1700 hours, the conference was declared closed, and the French delegates were bussed to the Hotel Balkan, a small, old-fashioned establishment that had been set aside for our exclusive use. On checking in, I was handed a key to bedroom number eight, designated as a ‘family room’, since I was notionally one half of a married couple. The Balkan has a dining room for residents and, leading from it, a bar with a central table where I placed myself in anticipation of my notional wife’s arrival.

My broad understanding was that she would be exfiltrated from the British Embassy by tame ambulance, transported

to a safe house in the suburbs and thence to the Hotel Balkan by unexplained means.

I was therefore impressed to see her arrive in a French diplomatic car, on the arm of the same Cultural Attaché who had welcomed me to Prague airport. I wish again to acknowledge here the acumen and tradecraft of French Liaison.

Under the name of Venla Lessif, Tulip had been listed as a delegate’s spouse attending the conference

in absentia

. Her good looks and fashionable appearance caused a mild stir among other French delegates in the hotel, and again I was supported by the two male members who, having greeted me with familiarity at the conference, saluted and embraced Tulip as a friend. Tulip in return received their compliments with style, affecting broken German only, which became our lingua franca as a married couple, since my own German is limited.

After dinner taken in the company of the two French delegates, who played their part to perfection, we did not linger in the bar with the rest of the delegates but repaired early to our bedroom, where by tacit agreement our conversation was confined to banalities consistent with our cover, the presence of microphones and even cameras in a hotel for foreigners being virtually certain.

Fortunately, our room was spacious, with several single beds and two hand basins. For much of the night we were obliged to listen to the rowdy chatter of the delegates below and, into the small hours, singing.

It is my impression that neither Tulip nor I slept. At 0400 hours we reassembled and were taken by bus to Prague airport where, miraculously as it now appears to me, we were cleared

en bloc

to the transit lounge and thence by Air France to Le Bourget. I wish once more to offer my unstinted thanks for the support of French Liaison.

How the next entry found its way into my report momentarily confounds me, until I conclude that I must have added it as some kind of distraction.

Personal and confidential handwritten DO letter to George Smiley from Jerry Ormond, H/Station Prague. NOT for file.

Dear George,

Well, the bird has certainly flown, to massive sighs of relief here as you can imagine, and is by now presumably safely if not happily installed at Chateau Tulip, Somewhere in England. Her flight in both senses seems to have gone reasonably smoothly, despite the fact that JONAH at the last minute needed $500 on top of salary before consenting to drive Tulip to the rv in his ambulance, the little sod. But Tulip isn’t who I’m writing to you about, and least of all Jonah. It’s Alec.

As you have often said in the past, as professionals bound in secrecy we have a duty of care, and it’s for one another. And that means being mutually watchful, and if one of us appears to be cracking under the strain and is not aware of it, then it’s our duty to protect him from himself, and by the same token protect the Service too.

Alec is the absolute best fieldman you and I know. He’s savvy as hell, dedicated, streetwise, has all the skills. And he has just pulled off one of the neatest and most dicey operations it’s been my pleasure to witness, albeit over the heads of Joint Steering, our revered Ambassador and the Mandarins of Whitehall. So when he knocks home three-quarters of a bottle of Scotch at a sitting and then picks a fight with a chancery guard he happens to dislike, we make all the allowances, and then some.

But we walked, Alec and I. Along the river for an hour,

then up to the castle, then back to the Embassy. So a two-hour walk while he was still by his own standards dead sober. And his one theme in all that time was: the Circus is penetrated. Not just by some mail clerk with a mortgage, but at the top of the tree in Joint where it really counts. And it’s more than just a bee in his bonnet, it’s a whole hive. It’s disproportionate, it’s not fact based, and frankly it’s paranoid. Coupled with his visceral hatred of all things American, it makes for difficult conversation, to say the least, and becomes even more alarming. And under the laws of our profession as defined by no lesser person than yourself, and with all due affection and respect, I am duly reporting my concerns to you.

As ever,

Jerry

    P.S. And to Ann, as ever, homage and much love, J

And from Laura a rosette, ordering me to stop.

*

‘Nice read?’

‘Tolerable, thank you, Bunny.’

‘Well, Christ, you wrote it, didn’t you? Gave you a bit of a buzz, surely, after all that time?’

He has brought a male friend along with him this late afternoon: a blond, smiling, well-polished youth, not a mark of life on him.

‘Peter, this is

Leonard

,’ says Bunny ceremoniously, as if I ought to know who Leonard is. ‘Leonard will be Counsel for the Service if our little matter ever comes to court, which of course we devoutly hope it won’t. He will also be appearing for us at the

preliminary meeting of the All-Party Group inquiry next week. At which, as you know, you have already been tapped to appear.’ Rictal grin. ‘Leonard. Peter.’

We shake hands. Leonard’s soft as a child’s.

‘If Leonard is representing the Service, what’s he doing here with me?’ I demand.

‘A getting-to-know-each-other’s-faces,’ says Bunny soothingly. ‘Leonard’s a black-letter lawyer’ – and seeing my eyebrows go up – ‘which

merely

means that he’s versed in every legal wrinkle in the book and some that aren’t even in the book. Puts run-of-the-mill lawyers like me in the shade.’

‘Oh come,’ says Leonard.

‘And the reason Laura is

not

here today, Peter, since you don’t ask, is that Leonard and I, together, felt it would be rather better for

all

parties, including you, if this was a boys-only discussion.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘Good old-fashioned tact, for starters. Respect for your personal privacy.

And

the outside possibility that we might just for once get the truth out of you.’ Naughty smile. ‘Which would then enable Leonard to take a view about how to proceed generally. Fair comment, Leonard? Or too much?’

‘Oh, quite fair, I think,’ says Leonard.

‘And of course to address in

rather

more detail the issue of whether your personal interests are best represented by having your

own

legal representative,’ Bunny goes on. ‘In the unhappy event, for instance, that the All-Partygoers simply tiptoe off the stage – which we’re told is not by any means unknown – leaving Blind Justice to have her way with you. Us.’

‘How about a black belt?’ I suggest.

My witticism goes unnoticed. Or perhaps it

is

noticed, if only as evidence that I am particularly on edge today.

‘In which case the Circus has a shortlist of eligible

candidates –

acceptable

candidates, let us say – and Leonard, I think you said you were willing to guide Peter’s eye if it comes to that, which we dearly hope and pray it won’t’ – deferring with a collegial smile to Leonard.

‘Absolutely, Bunny. The trouble is, there are not

that

many of us who are cleared this far up. I do feel Harry is coming on awfully well, as you know,’ says Leonard. ‘He’s applied for silk and the judges adore him. So personally, not wishing to influence in

any

way – go for Harry. He’s a man, and they like a man defending a man. They may not know it, but they do.’

‘Who pays for him?’ I ask. ‘Or her?’

Leonard smiles at his hands. Bunny takes the question:

‘Well, I think in the

large

, Peter, much may depend on the

course

of the hearing – and, shall we say, your own personal bearing, your sense of duty, and your loyalty to your old Service.’

But Leonard hasn’t heard a word of this, as I can tell by the steadfast way he goes on smiling at his hands.

‘So, Peter,’ says Bunny, as if coming to the easy part. ‘Yes or no.’ Squeeze of the eyes. ‘Between men. Did you or did you not fuck Tulip?’

‘No.’

‘Absolutely no?’

‘Absolutely.’

‘Irrevocably no, here and now in this room, in the presence of a five-star witness?’

‘Bunny, forgive me’ – Leonard with his hand up in friendly reproach – ‘I think you’ve momentarily forgotten your law. Given my duties to the court, and my obligations to act as counsel for my client, I cannot possibly appear as a witness.’

‘All right. Once again, if you please, Peter.

I, Peter Guillam, did not fuck Tulip at the Hotel Balkan in Prague on the night before her exfiltration to the United Kingdom

. True or false?’

‘True.’

‘Which is a relief for all of us, as I’m sure you can imagine. Particularly as you seem to have fucked everyone else in sight.’

‘Immense,’ Leonard agrees.

‘And even

more

particularly, since Rule One of a Service that hasn’t otherwise got many rules dictates that serving officers don’t ever,

ever

fuck their joes, as you call them, even out of politeness. Other people’s joes when operationally desirable, yes, open season. Just not

ever

their own. You are aware of that rule?’

‘I am.’

‘And were so aware at the time in question?’

‘Yes.’

‘And would you agree that, if you

had

fucked her, which we know you didn’t, it would constitute not only a monumental breach of Service discipline, but clear evidence of your louche and uncontrollable nature, and your disregard for the sensitivities of a fugitive mother in mortal peril who has just been deprived of her only child? You agree with that statement?’

‘I agree with that statement.’

‘Leonard, you have a question?’

Leonard plucks at his pretty lower lip with his fingertips, and frowns a creaseless frown.

‘You know, Bunny, it sounds awfully rude, but I really

don’t

think I

do

have a question,’ he confesses, with a startled smile at himself. ‘Not after that. I think

pro tem

we’ve all gone as far as we can

go

. And further.’ And to me, confidentially: ‘I’ll send you that shortlist, Peter. And you never heard me mention Harry. Or maybe better I slip it to Bunny.

Collusion

,’ he explains, bestowing another doting smile on me and reaching for his black briefcase, indicating that the lengthy meeting I had been anticipating is over. ‘But I do think a man would be good, all the same,’ he says to Bunny, not to me, as an aside. ‘When it comes to the

hard questions, men rather have the edge in these cases. Less puritanical. See you at the All-Party beano, Peter.

Tschüss

.’

*

Did I fuck her? No, I bloody well didn’t. I made mute, frenzied love to her in pitch darkness for six life-altering hours, in an explosion of tension and lust between two bodies that had desired each other from birth and had only the night to live.

And I was supposed to

tell

them this? I demand of the orange-tinted darkness as I lie sleepless on my prison cot in Dolphin Square.

I, who was taught from the cradle to deny, deny and deny again – taught by the very Service that is seeking to drag a confession out of me?

*

‘You slept well, Pierre? You are happy? You have made a great speech? You are coming home today?’

I must have called her.

‘How’s Isabelle?’ I ask.

‘She is beautiful. She misses you.’

‘Has he come back? That impolite friend of mine?’

‘No, Pierre, your terrorist friend has not come back. You have watched football with him?’

‘We don’t do that any more.’

9

There was nothing I could see on file – and thank the Lord there wasn’t – of the days and nights of eternity that I spent in Brittany after handing Doris over to Joe Hawkesbury, our Paris Head of Station, at Le Bourget airport at seven o’clock on a misty winter’s morning. As our plane landed and a voice called out for Professor and Madame Lessif, I was in a state of delirious relief. As we descended the gangway side by side, the sight of Hawkesbury sitting below us in a black Rover car with CD plates and a young woman assistant from his Station in the back seat set my heart plunging.

‘And my

Gustav

?’ Doris demanded, seizing my arm.

‘It’ll be all right. It’ll happen,’ I said, hearing myself parroting Alec’s empty assurances.

‘When?’

‘As soon as they can. They’re good people. You’ll see. I love you.’

Hawkesbury’s girl was holding the back door. Had she heard me? My insane outburst, spoken by someone else inside me? Never mind whether she knew German. Every bloody fool knows

Ich liebe Dich

. I coaxed Doris forward. With a jolt she landed reluctantly on the back seat. The girl hopped in after her and slammed the door. I got into the passenger seat beside Hawkesbury.

‘Nice flight?’ he enquired, as we raced across the tarmac behind a flashing Jeep.

We entered an aircraft hangar. Ahead of us in the gloom, a twin-engined RAF plane, propellers slowly turning. The girl sprang out. Doris stayed put, whispering German words to herself that I couldn’t make out. My own mad words seemed to have made no impression on her. Perhaps she hadn’t heard them. Perhaps I hadn’t spoken them. The girl tried to jockey her, but she wouldn’t budge. I got in beside her and took her hand. She pressed her head into my shoulder while Hawkesbury watched us in the driving mirror.

‘

Ich kann nicht

,’ she whispered.

‘

Du musst

, it’ll be all right.

Ganz ehrlich

. Honestly.’

‘

Du kommst nicht mit?

’ – you’re not coming?

‘Later. After you’ve talked to them.’

I got out of the car and offered her my hand. She ignored it and climbed out of her own accord. No, she hasn’t heard me. She can’t have done. A uniformed aircraftwoman with a clipboard came marching towards us. With Hawkesbury’s girl one side and the aircraftwoman the other, Doris let herself be led towards the plane. Reaching the gangway, she stopped, looked upwards and, having steeled herself, began climbing, using both hands. I waited for her to look back. The cabin door closed.

‘All done then,’ said Hawkesbury briskly, still without turning his head to me. ‘So the word from on high is: bravo, you’ve done a great job, now go home to Brittany, dry out and wait for the great call. Gare Montparnasse suit you?’

‘Gare Montparnasse would be fine, thanks.’

And you may be the darling of Joint Steering, brother Hawkesbury, but that didn’t prevent Bill Haydon from offering me your job.

*

Even today, I’d be hard put to describe the torrent of conflicting emotions that swirled through me on my return to the farmstead, whether I was driving a tractor, spreading muck in the fields or otherwise striving to make my presence felt as the young master. One minute I was basking in the sensations of a night too momentous to define; the next, I was lost in awe at the monstrous irresponsibility of the compulsive, reckless act I had committed, and the words I had, or hadn’t, spoken.

Invoking the silent darkness in which our embraces were fought out, I tried to persuade myself that our lovemaking had been only in the mind, an illusion brought on by the fear that at any minute Czech security might smash down our bedroom door. But one look at the imprint of her fingers on my body told me I was fooling myself.

And no imagining on my part could have delivered the moment when, with the coming of first light, and still not a word between us, she wrapped away one part of her body after another, first standing before me naked and sentinel, as she had stood before me on the Bulgarian beach, then covering herself piece by piece in her French finery until there was nothing left to desire but a sensible workaday skirt and black jacket buttoned to the neck: except that I desired her more desperately than ever.

And how, as she dressed, the light of triumph or desire quieted from her face, and we became by her own choice estranged, first on the bus to Prague airport when she refused my hand, and again on the plane to Paris when, for reasons that eluded me, we were placed in separate rows – until the plane halted and we stood up and started to file out, and our hands found each other again, only to part.

On the laborious railway journey to Lorient – no high-speed trains in those days – an episode had occurred which with hindsight fills me to this day with a sense of the horror to come.

Barely an hour out of Paris, our train came to an abrupt halt, with no explanation offered. Muffled voices from outside were followed by a single unsourced scream, male or female I never knew. Still we waited. Some of us exchanged glances. Others remained determinedly engrossed in their books and newspapers. A uniformed guard appeared in the carriage doorway, a boy of no more than twenty. I remember very well the silence that preceded his prepared speech, which after taking a deep breath he delivered with commendable calm:

‘Ladies and gentlemen. I regret to inform you that our progress has been inhibited by human intervention. We shall continue on our way in a few minutes.’

And it was not I, but the studious old gentleman in stiff white collar seated beside me who raised his head and demanded brusquely:

‘Intervention of what nature?’

To which the boy could only answer in the voice of a penitent:

‘A suicide, monsieur.’

‘Of whom?’

‘A man, sir. It is believed he was a man.’

Within a few hours of my arrival at Les Deux Eglises, I took myself down to the cove:

my

cove, my place of solace. First the trudge down the matted slope to the edge of my land, then another trudge along the cliff path, and at its base the little patch of sand, and to either side of it low-lying rocks like dozing crocodiles. This was where I’d done my boyhood thinking. This was where I’d brought my women over the years – the loves, half-loves, quarter-loves. But the only woman I craved was Doris. I taunted myself with the thought that we had never conducted a single conversation that wasn’t cover. But hadn’t I shared every vicarious hour of her life, sleeping and waking, for a whole bloody year? Hadn’t I responded to her every impulse, every

lurch of purity, lust, revolt and vengeance? Tell me of another woman I had known so long, and so intimately, before I even slept with her.

She had empowered me. She had made me the man I had never been till now. More than one woman over the years had told me – kindly, bluntly, or in outright disenchantment – that I had no aptitude for sex; that I could neither take nor give with abandon; was inept, restrained; that I lacked the true instinctual fire.

But Doris

knew

all that, before we ever embraced. She had known it as we brush-passed, and she knew it as she took me naked into her arms, welcomed me, absolved me, showed me; then formed herself around me until we were old friends, then careful lovers, and finally triumphant rebels, broken free of everything that presumed to control our two lives.

Ich liebe Dich

. I meant it. I would always mean it. And when I got back to England, I would say it to her again, and I would tell George that I had said it to her and I would tell him I had served my time and more, and if I had to quit the Service to marry Doris and fight the good fight for Gustav, I would do that too. I would stick to my guns and not even George, with all his velvet arguments, was going to talk me round.

But no sooner had I made this great, irreversible decision than Doris’s well-documented promiscuity came to haunt me. Was that her real secret? That she made love to all her men with equal, indiscriminate generosity? I even half persuaded myself that Alec had been there before me: two whole nights spent together, for Christ’s sake! All right, the first with Gustav in tow. But what about the second night, crammed into the Trabant, one to one, snuggled up for warmth – her head on his shoulder, his own words! – while she bared her soul to him – and whatever else she bared – whereas I, blind courier, could practically count the words that Doris and I had managed to exchange in our entire lives.

But even as I conjured this spectre of imaginary betrayal, I knew I was deluding myself, which made the ignominy more painful. Alec wasn’t that man. If Alec, instead of me, had spent the night with Doris in the Hotel Balkan, he would have sat smoking placidly in a corner, just as he had done that night in Cottbus, while Doris held Gustav, not Alec, in her arms.

I was still staring out to sea, reasoning fruitlessly to and fro in these terms, when I realized that I wasn’t alone. In my self-absorption I had even failed to notice that I was being followed. Worse, that I had been followed by the least appetizing member of our community, Honoré the poison dwarf, trader in manure, used car tyres and worse. He cut an elfin figure, and a sinister one: squat, broad-shouldered, evil-faced in Breton cap and smock, standing feet astride at the cliff’s edge, peering down.

I called up to him. I asked him, with a certain disdain, how I could be of help. What I was really asking him to do was go away and leave me to my thoughts. His answer was to skip down the cliff path, and with not so much as a glance at me, perch himself on a rock near the sea. Dark was gathering. Across the bay, the lights of Lorient were starting to shine. After a while, he raised his head and stared at me, as if in enquiry. Receiving no response, he drew a bottle from the depths of his smock and, having filled two paper beakers from his other pocket, beckoned me to join him, which for civility’s sake I duly did.

‘Thinking of death?’ he asked lightly.

‘Not consciously.’

‘A woman? Another one?’

I ignored him. I was struck, despite myself, by his mysterious courtliness. Was it new? Or had I not noticed it before? He raised his beaker; I raised mine to him. In Normandy, they would call it Calvados, but to us Bretons it’s Lambig. In Honoré’s version, it was the stuff they put on horses’ hooves to harden them.

‘To your sainted father,’ he said, talking out to sea. ‘The great Resistance hero. Killed a lot of Huns.’

‘So they say,’ I replied warily.

‘Medals too.’

‘A couple.’

‘They tortured him. Then they killed him. Hero twice over. Bravo,’ he said, and drank again, still looking out to sea. ‘My father was a hero too,’ he went on. ‘

Big

hero. Mega. Bigger than yours by two metres.’

‘What did he do?’

‘Collaborated with the Huns. They promised him they’d give Brittany her independence when they won the war. Arsehole believed them. War ended, the heroes of the Resistance strung him up in the town square, what was left of it. Big crowd. Lot of applause. You could hear it all over town.’

Had he heard it too, perhaps? With his hands over his ears, cowering in some kind person’s cellar? I had a feeling he might have done.

‘So better you buy your horseshit from someone else,’ he went on. ‘Or maybe they’ll hang you too.’

He waited for me to say something but nothing came to me, so he replenished our beakers and we went on looking out to sea.

*

In those days the peasants still played

boules

in the village square and sang Breton songs when they were drunk. Determined to count myself a normal human being, I shared their

cidre

and listened to the Grand Guignol that passed for village gossip: the post office couple who have locked themselves in their upper room and won’t emerge because their son has killed himself; the district tax collector whose wife has left him because his father

has dementia and is coming down to breakfast fully dressed at two in the morning; the dairy farmer in the next-door village who has gone to prison for sleeping with his daughters. To all of which I did my best to nod my head in the right places while the questions that wouldn’t let me go multiplied and deepened.

*

The sheer, unnatural bloody ease of it, for Christ’s sake!

Why had everything gone like clockwork when, in any other operation I had ever been involved in, nothing had gone like clockwork even when it had creaked to a successful finish?

A Stasi woman officer on the run in a neighbouring police state seething with informants? Czech Security notorious for their ruthlessness and efficiency? Yet far from being scrutinized, followed, listened to and even interrogated, we are gently ushered towards the exit gates?

And since when, tell me, had French Intelligence been so bloody immaculate? Torn apart by internal rivalries was more what I’d heard. Incompetent and penetrated from top to bottom, and why does

that

ring a bell? Yet suddenly they’re grand masters of the art – or are they?

And if those were my suspicions, which they were, and becoming more deafening by the minute, what did I propose to do about them? Confess that to Smiley too before I throw in the towel and resign?

Even now, for all I knew, Doris was cloistered with her debriefers in some rural keep. Was she telling them what ardent love we had made? In matters of the heart, self-restraint was scarcely her strong suit.

And if her debriefers should begin to suspect, as I had, that her escape through East Germany and Czecho had been made unnaturally easy, what conclusions might they draw?

That it was all a put-up job? That she was a plant, a double, part of a high-stakes deception game? And that Peter Guillam, fool of fools, had slept with the enemy? – which was what I myself was beginning to believe by the time Oliver Mendel called me at five in the morning and ordered me in George’s name to make my way to the city of Salisbury by the fastest possible route. Not a ‘How are you, Peter?’ Not a ‘Sorry to haul you out of bed at crack of dawn.’ Just a ‘George says get your backside over here to Camp 4 in double-quick time, son.’

Camp 4: Joint Steering’s safe house in the New Forest.

*

Squeezing myself into the last remaining seat of a small plane from Le Touquet, I picture the summary tribunal that awaits me. Doris has confessed to being a double agent. She is using our night of passion as some kind of diversion.

But then the other half of me takes over. She’s the same Doris, for pity’s sake. You love her. You told her you do, or you think you did, and it’s still true either way. So don’t rush to judgement just because you’re about to be judged yourself!

By the time I landed at Lydd, there was no logic to any of it. By the time my train pulled in to Salisbury station, still none. But at least I’d found time to puzzle over the choice of Camp 4 as a place to take Doris for her debriefing. It was not, by Circus standards, the most secret of its archipelago of safe houses, or the most secure. On paper, it had everything going for it: small estate in the heart of the New Forest, can’t be seen from the road, low-lying two-storey building, walled garden, a stream, bit of lake, ten acres of land, part wooded, and the whole lot enclosed by a six-foot-high fence of wire mesh, overgrown and concealed by shrubs.

But for the debriefing of a prized agent, snatched only days

ago from the jaws of the Stasi that employed her? A little tarnished surely, a little more visible than George might have wished if Joint hadn’t owned the operation.

At Salisbury station a Circus driver named Herbert, known to me from my time in Scalphunters’ section, stood holding up a sign reading ‘Passenger for Barraclough’, one of George’s worknames. But when I tried a bit of light conversation, Herbert said he wasn’t authorized to talk to me.

We entered the long, pitted drive. Trespassers would be prosecuted. Low-hanging branches of lime and maple brushed the roof of the van. From the shadows loomed the unlikely figure of Fawn, first name unknown, a former unarmed-combat instructor at Sarratt and occasional strongarm man for Covert. But what on earth was

Fawn

doing here, of all people, when Camp 4 boasted its own security guards in the form of that celebrated gay couple beloved of all trainees, Messrs Harper and Lowe? Then I remembered that Smiley had a professional regard for Fawn, and had used him for a number of sticky assignments.

The driver pulled up, Fawn peered in at me, no smile, then with a tilt of his head beckoned us through. The track rose. A pair of solid wooden gates parted and closed behind us. To our right the main house, a fake-Tudor mansion built for a brewer. To our left, the coach house, a couple of Nissen huts and a majestic thatched tithe barn called the Stoop. Three Ford Zephyrs and one black Ford van were parked in the courtyard; and in front of them, the one human being in sight, Oliver Mendel, retired police inspector and longstanding ally of George, holding a walkie-talkie to his ear.

Scramble out of van, haul my rucksack after me. Shout ‘Hi, Oliver! I made it!’ But Oliver Mendel doesn’t move a muscle, he just murmurs into his walkie-talkie while he watches me walk towards him. I again start to greet him, think better of it. Oliver murmurs, ‘Will do, George,’ and switches off.

‘Our friend is somewhat

occupied

at the present time, Peter,’ he says gravely. ‘We’ve had a small incident. If you don’t mind, you and me will take a stroll round the precincts.’

I have the message. Doris has told all, up to and including

Ich liebe Dich

. Our friend George is

occupied

, meaning he is disgusted, furious, sickened by the chosen disciple who has failed him. He can’t bring himself to speak to me, so he has deputed his ever-reliable Inspector Oliver Mendel to give young Peter the dressing-down of a lifetime, and probably his marching orders as well. But why Fawn? And why this feeling of a camp deserted in a hurry?

We have climbed a stretch of lawn and are standing obliquely to each other, which I don’t doubt is Mendel’s intention. Our eyes are fixed on some uncertain object in the middle distance: a pair of silver birch trees, an old dovecote.

‘I have a sad message for you, Peter.’

Here we go.

‘I’m very sorry to inform you that sub-source Tulip, the lady you successfully exfiltrated from Czecho, was certified dead this morning.’

*

And since nobody ever quite knows what they said at such a moment, and I am no different, I won’t award myself the mandatory cry of pain, horror or disbelief. I know I ceased to see anything clearly, neither the silver birches nor the dovecote. I know it was sunny and warm for the time of year. I know that I wanted to vomit but, true to my inhibited nature, managed not to. I know that I followed Mendel to the derelict summerhouse which lies at the most southern point of the estate, cut off from the main house by a dense coppice of macrocarpa trees. And that when we sat down on the rickety verandah we

were looking at an overgrown croquet lawn, because I remember the rusted hoops poking out of the grass.

‘Hung by the neck till she was dead, I’m afraid, son,’ Mendel was saying, mouthing the words of the death sentence. ‘A do-it-yourself job. From the low bough of a tree just the other side of that slope there. By the footbridge. Point 217 on the map. Life extinct certified at 0800 hours by Dr Ashley Meadows.’

Ash Meadows, fashionable Harley Street shrink, improbable friend of George. Circus Occasional with a corner in neurotic defectors.

‘Ash is here?’

‘With her now.’

I digest this news slowly. Doris is dead. Ash is with her. A doctor stands guard over the dead.

‘Did she leave a note or anything?

Tell

anyone what she was going to do?’

‘She just hanged herself, son. With a length of spliced nylon climbing rope she appears to have found on the premises. Nine feet in length. Presumed left over from a training course. Somewhat negligently, in my personal view.’

‘Has anyone told Alec?’ I ask, thinking now of her head resting on his shoulder.

His policeman’s voice again. ‘George will tell your friend Alec Leamas what Alec needs to know when Alec needs to know it, not before, son. And George will pick his own time to do that. Understood?’

Understood that Alec still believes he delivered Tulip to safety.

‘Where is he now? Not Alec. George,’ I ask stupidly.

‘Just at this moment in time, George is engaged in conversation with a chance Swiss gentleman, as a matter of fact. Caught himself in a snare in the grounds, poor fellow. Not a snare, more a mantrap, placed there by an unscrupulous poacher after a bit of venison, we can only assume. A rusty one, lying in the long

grass, we’re told. Could have been there for I don’t know how long. But the spring wasn’t bothered. And those dragon’s teeth – they could have cut his foot clean off, I’m told. So he was lucky.’ And to my continued silence, in the same conversational tone: ‘The Swiss individual concerned is an ornithologist by hobby, which I respect, being in the way of one myself, and he was birdwatching. He didn’t intend to intrude on the premises, but he did, which he regrets. Which I would too. What shocks me, between you and me, is Harper and Lowe not coming across it on their rounds of the estate. They’re lucky they didn’t walk into it themselves is all I can say.’

‘Why’s George seeing him now?’ – and I suppose I meant,

at a time like this

.

‘The Swiss gentleman? Well, he’s a material witness, isn’t he, son? The Swiss gentleman. Like it or not. He was in the grounds – all right, in error, a fellow birdwatcher like myself, these things can happen – but at the relevant time, to his misfortune. George naturally wishes to know if the gentleman saw or heard anything of interest that could shed light. Maybe poor Tulip addressed him in some manner. It’s a delicate situation, if you think about it. We’re in a highly secret facility, and Tulip is not officially landed in the UK, so the Swiss gentleman stumbled into what we might call a security hornets’ nest. That has to be taken into account, regardless.’

I was hearing him but not really listening: ‘I need to see her, Oliver,’ I said.

To which, unsurprised, he replied: ‘Then remain right here, son, while I refer that one upward, and don’t move on any account.’

With which he strode into the long grass of the abandoned croquet lawn, once more murmuring into his walkie-talkie. At his gesture, I followed him down to the massive door of the Stoop. He rapped, then stood back. After a delay, the door

creaked open, and there stood Ash Meadows himself, a fifty-year-old former rugby player in red braces and check flannel shirt, smoking his habitual pipe.

‘Sorry about this, old chap,’ he said, standing back for me; so I said I was sorry too.

On a ping-pong table at the centre of the great barn lay the effigy of a slender woman in a zipped-up body bag. She was lying on her back, toes upward.

‘Poor girl never knew she was called Tulip till she got here,’ Ash was reminiscing in the breezy voice he had evidently developed for speaking in the presence of the dead. ‘Soon as she knew she was Tulip, God help anyone who called her anything else. Sure you want to do this?’

He meant: was I ready for him to pull back the zip fastener. I was.

Her face, for the first time since I knew it, expressionless. Her auburn hair plaited and bound with green ribbon, the plait lying beside her head. Eyes closed. I never till now saw her sleep. The neck a slough of blues and greys.

‘All done, Peter, old boy?’

He closed the zip anyway.

*

I follow Mendel into the fresh air. Ahead of me, the grass mound rises to a clump of chestnut trees. There’s a nice view from the top: the main house, a pine forest, surrounding fields. But I have scarcely started my ascent when Mendel puts a hand across my path.

‘We stay down here, if you don’t mind, son. No point in being conspicuous,’ he says.

And I suppose it’s not surprising that I didn’t think to question his reason for saying this.

Then there’s a period – I can’t do the minutes – when we just

seem to wander about pointlessly. Mendel tells me about his beekeeping. Then he tells me about this rescue dog Poppy, a Golden Labrador, that his wife is mad about. Poppy, I seem to remember, was a dog not a bitch. I also remember being secretly surprised, because I don’t think I knew Oliver Mendel had a wife.

Bit by bit I talk back at him. When he asks me how things are going in Brittany, and how the crops are looking, and how many cows we keep, I give him an accurate and lucid account, which presumably is what he’s waiting for, because when we get to the gravel path that leads past the Stoop to the coach house, he steps away from me and says something curt into his walkie-talkie. And when he comes back to me, he’s no longer the casual conversationalist, he’s all copper once more:

‘Now, son. Your attention, please. You’re about to meet the other half of the story. You’ll see what you see, you won’t react in any shape or form, and you will remain entirely silent regarding what you have seen thereafter. That’s not my orders. That’s George’s, personal for you. Furthermore, son, if by any chance you’re still blaming yourself for that poor lady’s suicide, you can lay off

now

. Got that? That’s not George speaking. That’s me. Do you speak Swiss at all?’

He was smiling, and to my surprise so was I. The direction of our casual walk took on a chilling purpose. I had momentarily forgotten the Swiss gentleman. I had assumed Mendel was making kindly small talk. Now the mysterious birdwatcher who had trespassed by mistake came rushing back in full force. At the further end of the defile stood Fawn. Behind him rose the stone steps to an olive-green entrance marked

DANGER OF DEATH, KEEP OUT

.

We climbed. Fawn led the way. We arrived in a hayloft. Mildewed horses’ tack hung from old hooks. We passed between bales of rotting hay until we came to the Submarine, a purpose-built isolation cell for instructing trainees in the unlovely arts

of resisting and administering harsh interrogation. No refresher course I had attended was complete without a taste of its windowless padded walls, hand-to-foot manacles and head-splitting sound effects. The door was of blackened steel, with a sliding eyehole for seeing in, but never out.

Fawn keeps his distance. Mendel advances to the Submarine, ducks forward, slides back the eyehole, backs away again, nods to me: your turn. And under his breath, in a rush:

‘Only she never hanged herself, did she, son? Our birdwatching friend did it for her.’

On my training stints, there had never been furniture inside the Submarine. You either lay on the stone floor or paced it in pitch darkness while the loudspeakers screamed at you until you couldn’t take it any more, or the directing staff decided you’d had enough. But these two unlikely occupants of the Submarine have been provided with the luxury of a red-baize card table and two perfectly decent chairs.

In one chair sits George Smiley, looking the way only George looks when he’s conducting an interrogation: a bit put out, a bit pained, as if life is one long discomfort for him and no one can make it tolerable except just possibly you.

And across from George in the other chair sits a powerful blond man of my own age with fresh bruises round his eyes, one bare leg bandaged and stuck in front of him, and his hands manacled, palms upward on the table like a beggar’s.

And when he turns his head, I see exactly what by now I’m expecting to see: an old scar like a sabre-slash, running the length of his right cheek.

And though I can barely see them for the bruises, I know he has blue eyes, because that’s what it said in the criminal record that three years back I had stolen for George Smiley after he’d been bludgeoned nearly to death by the man who is sitting in front of him now.

Interrogating – or negotiating? The prisoner’s name – how could I forget it? – is Hans-Dieter Mundt. He is a former member of the East German Steel Mission in Highgate, which enjoyed official but not diplomatic status.

During his London tour, Mundt killed an East London car dealer who knew too much for his liking. When he tried to kill George, it was for the same reason.

And now here’s the same Mundt sitting in the Submarine, a KGB-trained Stasi assassin pretending to be a Swiss ornithologist caught in a deer trap, while Doris who wished to be known only as Tulip is lying dead not fifty feet away from him. Mendel is plucking at my arm. It’s only a short car ride to wherever we’re going, Peter. George will be joining us later.

‘What’s happened to Harper and Lowe?’ I ask him when we’re safely in the car, this being the only topic that comes to mind.

‘Meadows sent Harper off to hospital to get his face fixed. Lowe’s holding his hand. Our ornithologist friend didn’t come quietly when he was released from that trap he walked into, put it that way. He required some serious assistance, as you will have observed.’

*

‘I have two pieces of paper for you, Peter,’ Smiley is saying, and hands me the first of them.

It is two o’clock in the morning. We are alone in the same front room of the same semi-detached police house somewhere on the edge of the New Forest. Our host, an old friend of Mendel’s, has lit us a coal fire and brought us a tray of tea and sugar biscuits before retiring upstairs with his wife. We have neither drunk the tea nor touched the biscuits. The first piece of paper is a plain white English postcard, no stamp. There are scratch marks on it as if it’s been shoved through something

narrow, perhaps under a door. The address side is blank. On the business side, there is an inked, blue-black, hand-printed message in German, capitals only.

I AM A GOOD SWISS FRIEND WHO CAN TAKE YOU TO YOUR GUSTAV. MEET ME AT THE FOOTBRIDGE 0100 HOURS. ALL WILL BE ARRANGED. WE ARE CHRISTIAN PEOPLE

. [No signature.]

‘Why wait till she got all the way to England?’ I manage to ask George after a long delay. ‘Why not kill her in Germany?’

‘To protect their source, obviously,’ Smiley replies in a tone to reproach me for my slow-wittedness. ‘The tip-off came from Moscow Centre, who very naturally insisted on discretion. Not a car accident or some equally contrived event. Better a self-inflicted death that will cause the greatest possible dismay in the enemy camp. I see that as entirely logical, don’t you? Well, don’t you, Peter?’

The anger is in the iron control of his habitually gentle voice, in the rigidity of his normally fluid features. Anger as self-disgust. Anger at the monstrosity of what he has had to do, in defiance of every decent instinct.

‘

Shepherded

is Mundt’s expression of choice,’ he continues, neither waiting for my answer nor expecting one. ‘We

shepherd

her to Prague, we

shepherd

her to England, we

shepherd

her to Camp 4. Then we strangle her and hang her up. Never

I

. Always the collective

we

. I told him that he was despicable to me. I like to think it got through.’ And as if he has forgotten: ‘Oh, and the other piece of paper is for you’ – handing me a folded sheet of Basildon Bond stationery with ‘Adrien’ scrawled large across it, this time in soft pencil. The handwriting neat and painstaking. No needless flourishes. An earnest German schoolgirl writes to her English penfriend.

My darling Adrien, my Jean-François.

You are all the men I love. Please God love you also.

Tulip

‘I asked you whether you propose to keep it as a memento or burn it?’ Smiley is repeating to my dazed ear in the same voice of frozen anger. ‘I suggest the second. Millie McCraig happened on it. It was propped against Tulip’s vanity mirror.’

Then without apparent emotion he watches me as I kneel before the fire and lay Doris’s letter, still folded, like an offering on the burning coals. And it occurs to me, amid all the turbulent feelings that are wrenching at me, that George Smiley and I are closer than we wish to know in matters of failed love. I dance badly. George, according to his errant wife, refuses to dance at all. And still I have not spoken a word.

‘There are certain useful conditions attached to the arrangement I have just made with Herr Mundt,’ he goes on relentlessly. ‘The tape recording of our conversation, for example. His masters in Moscow and Berlin would not be impressed by it, we agreed. We also agreed that his work for us, capably managed by both sides, will advance him in his distinguished career in the Stasi. He will return to his comrades a conquering hero. The bigwigs in the Directorate will be pleased with him. Moscow Centre will be pleased with him. Emmanuel Rapp’s job is going begging. Let him apply for it. He assured me that he would. As his fortunes rise in Berlin and Moscow, and his access rises accordingly, perhaps a day will come when he will be able to tell us who betrayed Tulip and certain others of our agents who have met a premature end. We have much to look forward to, you and I, have we not?’

And still, so far as I remember it, I say nothing, whereas Smiley in closing has something very important to say.

‘You, I and only the very fewest are owners of this extremely

privileged information, Peter. As far as Joint Steering and the Service at large are concerned, we were greedy, we brought Tulip here too hastily, we paid no regard to her deeper feelings. In consequence she hanged herself. Which is the version that must be trumpeted to Head Office and all out-stations. There must be no exceptions anywhere where Joint holds sway. And that, I am afraid, inevitably includes our friend Alec Leamas.’

*

We cremated her in the name of Tulip Brown, a Russian-born woman of faith who had fled the Communist persecution and settled to a solitary life in England.

Brown

, it was explained to the retired Orthodox priest unearthed by the ladies of Covert who also arranged the tulips on the coffin, was the name she had given herself out of fear of retribution. The priest, an old Occasional, asked no inconvenient questions. We were six: Ash Meadows, Millie McCraig, Jeanette Avon and Ingeborg Lugg from Covert, Alec Leamas and me. George had business elsewhere. The service over, the women departed and we three men went off in search of a pub.

‘What the fuck did the stupid bloody woman go and do it for?’ Alec complained, head in hands, as we sat over our Scotches. ‘All the trouble we went to.’ And in the same tone of mock indignation: ‘If she’d told me what she was going to do, I’d never have bloody bothered.’

‘Me neither,’ I said loyally, taking myself to the bar and ordering three more of the same.

‘Suicide’s a decision certain people have taken early in their lives,’ Doc Meadows was pontificating when I returned. ‘They may not

know

it, but it’s

in

them, Alec. Then one day, something comes along that triggers it. Can be totally trivial, like leaving

your wallet on the bus. Can be drastic, like your best pal dying. But the

intention

was always there. And the result’s the same.’

We drank. Another silence, broken this time by Alec:

‘Maybe all joes are suicides. Some just don’t get around to it, poor bastards.’ And then: ‘Anyway, who’s going to tell the boy?’

Boy? Of course. He meant Gustav.

‘George says we leave that one to the opposition,’ I replied, to which Alec growled, ‘Jesus, what a planet,’ and went back to his whisky.

10

I have ceased staring at the library wall: Nelson, who has replaced Pepsi, is troubled by my inattention. I dutifully resume reading the report that in my grief and remorse I compiled on Smiley’s orders, omitting no detail, however extraneous, in my mission to observe the one secret that none but the fewest would ever share.

SUB-SOURCE TULIP

.

DEBRIEF AND SUICIDE

.

Debrief conducted by Ingeborg Lugg (Covert) and Jeanette Avon (Covert). In periodic attendance: Dr med. Ashley Meadows, Covert Occasional.

Drafted and collated by PG and approved by H/Covert Marylebone for submission to Treasury Oversight Committee. Advance copy to H/Joint Steering for comment.

Avon and Lugg are Covert’s star debriefers, middle-aged, mid-European women of long operational experience.

1. Reception of TULIP and transfer to Camp 4.

On her arrival by RAF plane at Northolt, Tulip underwent no landing formalities, thereby at no point officially entering the UK. Describing himself as ‘the appointed representative of a Service that is very proud of you’, Dr Meadows made a

brief speech of welcome in the VIP reception room in the transit area, and presented her with a bouquet of English roses which appeared to affect her deeply, for she held them silently to her face throughout the journey.

She was then driven directly by closed van to Camp 4. Avon (workname ANNA), being a qualified nurse with befriending skills, sat with Tulip in the back, providing comfort and conversation. Lugg (workname LOUISA) and Dr Meadows (workname FRANK) sat forward with the driver, it being felt that a bonding between Avon and Tulip was more likely to succeed if the two were left alone in the rear of the vehicle. All three of us are fluent German-speakers, Level 6.

On the drive Tulip alternately dozed and excitedly pointed out features of the landscape that would entertain her son Gustav on his arrival in the UK, which she appeared to consider imminent. She also indicated with enthusiasm paths and areas where she would like to bicycle, also with Gustav. She asked twice after ‘Adrien’ and, on being told we knew of no Adrien, changed the object of her enquiry to Jean-François. Dr Meadows then informed her that the courier Jean-François had been called away on urgent duty, but would no doubt make himself known in due course.

Accommodation in the guest wing of Camp 4 comprises a master bedroom, living room, kitchenette and sunroom, the latter being a nineteenth-century glass and timber extension overlooking the outdoor (unheated) swimming pool. All spaces, including the sunroom and pool area, are equipped with concealed microphones and special facilities.

Directly behind the swimming pool stands a coppice of coniferous trees from which some, not all, lower branches have been stripped. Fallow deer are commonplace, and frequently to be seen disporting themselves in the swimming pool. Due to the wire perimeter, the deer are effectively a

domestic herd confined to the estate, thereby adding to Camp 4’s air of cultivated charm and tranquillity.

First, we introduced Tulip to Millie McCraig (ELLA) who, at the request of the H/Covert Ops, had already that day been installed as safe house keeper. At the request of H/Covert, microphones were installed at salient positions, and those still active from previous operations, disconnected.

The safe house keeper’s personal quarters at Camp 4 are situated directly behind the guest suite, at the end of a short corridor. An internal telephone connects the two apartments, enabling the guest to summon assistance at any time of night. At McCraig’s suggestion, Avon and Lugg occupied bedrooms in the main house, thereby providing Tulip with an all-female environment.

Camp 4’s permanent security guards, Harper and Lowe, share quarters in the coach house. Both men are keen gardeners. Harper as a qualified gamekeeper controls the estate’s wildlife population. The coach house also contains a spare bedroom, which was commandeered by Dr Meadows.

2. Debriefing, days 1–5.

The initial period of debriefing was set at 2–3 weeks extendable, plus follow-up sessions of unspecified length, although this was not revealed to Tulip. Our immediate task was to settle her in, reassure her that she was among friends, speak confidently of her future (with Gustav), which by the end of the first evening we felt we had achieved to our cautious satisfaction. She was informed that Dr Meadows (Frank) was one of several interviewers with special interests, and that there would be others who, like Frank, would come and go during our sessions. She was further informed that the

Herr Direktor

(H/Covert) was absent while attending to urgent matters relating to Dr Riemeck (MAYFLOWER) and other

members of the network, but was greatly looking forward to the honour of shaking her hand on his return.

It being the general rule that debriefings should commence while the subject is still ‘hot’, our team reassembled in the living room of the main house prompt at 0900 hours next morning. The session continued with intermissions until 2105 hours. Tape recording was monitored by Millie McCraig from her apartment, who also used the opportunity to make a thorough search of Tulip’s suite and possessions. Questioning was led by Lugg (Louisa) according to brief, with subsidiaries from Avon (Anna), and interjections from Dr Meadows (Frank) whenever an opportunity was offered to explore Tulip’s mind-set and motivation.

Despite attempts to disguise the purpose of Frank’s seemingly innocent enquiries, however, Tulip was quick to identify their psychological nature and, on being informed that he was a medical doctor, mocked him for being a disciple of ‘that arch-liar and forger Sigmund Freud’. Whipping herself into a fury, she then announced that she had only ever had one doctor in her life and his name was Karl Riemeck; that Frank was an arsehole, and ‘if you [Dr Meadows] wish to make yourself useful to me, bring me my son!’ Not wishing to be a negative presence, Dr Meadows felt it sensible to return to London but to remain on hand should his services be required.

For the next two days, despite such periodic outbursts, debriefing sessions proceeded efficiently in an atmosphere of relative calm, the tapes of each session being shuttled nightly to Marylebone.

Of primary interest to H/Covert was the flow of Soviet intelligence on British targets, slight though it was, coming into Rapp’s office from Moscow. While accepting that very little of such intelligence had featured in the documents Tulip had

succeeded in photographing, were there perhaps matters she had read or overheard in respect of Moscow’s live sources in the United Kingdom that she had either forgotten or considered unworthy of report? Was there any hint, any boasting, for instance, of highly placed live sources inside the British political or intelligence establishment? Of British codes and cyphers penetrated?

Despite putting such questions to Tulip in many different guises, and it must be said to her increasing irritation, we are not able to point to any positive outcome. The value of Tulip’s product should nevertheless in our assessment be rated high to very high, bearing in mind that her reporting has been severely hampered by operational conditions. For as long as she was operative, she reported only to Mayflower, never to Berlin Station direct. Questions of potential sensitivity had not been conveyed to her on the grounds that, if divulged under interrogation, they would reveal weaknesses in our own intelligence armour. These could now be put without restraint: for example, enquiries regarding the reliability of other potential or active sub-sources; identity of foreign diplomats and politicians under Stasi control; the possible explanation of covert pay-streams revealed in documents that she had photographed on Rapp’s desk, but not otherwise handled; the location and appearance of secret signals installations she had visited while in Rapp’s company, their layout, their entry procedures, the size, shape and direction of their antennae, and any evidence of Soviet or other non-German presence on the site; and broadly any other intelligence which until now had effectively gone to waste due to the scarcity of time available for treffs with Mayflower, the scattershot nature of their conversations and the limitations imposed by clandestine methods of communication.

While frequently expressing frustration and venting it in

abusive language, Tulip also appeared to relish being the centre of attention, even bantering flirtatiously when allowed with Camp 4’s two security guards, Harper, the younger one, being particularly favoured. With the coming of each evening, however, her mood swiftly changed to one of guilty despair, its prime object being her son Gustav, but also her sister Lotte, whose life she claimed to have ruined by her defection.

Safe house keeper Millie McCraig sat up with her intermittently through the night. Having discovered a mutual Christian faith, the two frequently prayed together, Tulip’s saint of choice being St Nicholas, a miniature icon of whom had accompanied her throughout her exfiltration. Their shared interest in cycling provided further common ground. At Tulip’s urging, McCraig (Ella) obtained a catalogue of children’s bicycles. Excited to discover that McCraig was Scottish, Tulip immediately demanded a map of the Scottish Highlands so that the two of them could discuss cycling routes together. An Ordnance Survey map was delivered from Head Office next day. However, her mood remained uneven, and tantrums were frequent. The sedatives and sleeping pills that McCraig provided at her request appeared to be of little avail.

At any point in our debriefing sessions, Tulip would demand to know on what date Gustav would be exchanged, and even whether he had been exchanged already. In reply, she was assured according to brief that the matter was being negotiated at the highest level by the

Herr Direktor

and could not be resolved overnight.

3. TULIP’s recreational needs.

From the moment of her arrival in the UK, Tulip made clear her need for physical exercise. The RAF fighter plane had been cramped, the drive to Camp 4 had made her feel like a prisoner, confinement of any sort was unbearable to her, etc.

Since the Camp 4 paths are not suitable for cycling, she would run. Having obtained her shoe size, Harper went into Salisbury for a pair of plimsolls and for the next three mornings Tulip and Avon (Anna), a keen exercise person, jogged the perimeter paths together before breakfast, Tulip taking with her a light shoulder bag for any fossil or rare stone that might interest Gustav. Borrowing the Russian jargon, she called it her ‘perhaps bag’. The estate also offers a small gymnasium which, when other means failed, provided Tulip with temporary relief from her evident stress. Regardless of the hour, Millie McCraig never failed to accompany her to the gymnasium.

Tulip’s normal practice was to stand ready-dressed at the French window of her living room at 0600 hours and wait for Avon to appear. However on this particular morning, Tulip was not standing at her window. Avon therefore entered the guest suite from the garden side, calling out her name, rattling the bathroom door and, on receiving no response, opening it in vain. Avon then enquired of McCraig over the interconnecting phone where Tulip was to be found, but McCraig was unable to enlighten her. By now seriously concerned, Avon then set off at a fast pace along the perimeter path. As a precaution, McCraig meanwhile alerted Harper and Lowe that our guest had ‘gone runabout’, and the two security guards at once began quartering the estate.

4. Discovery of TULIP. Personal Statement by J. Avon.

Entered from the eastern side, the circuit path of the estate rises steeply for some twenty yards, and plateaus out for about a quarter of a mile before turning north and descending into a marshy dell crossed by a wooden footbridge leading in turn to an ascending wooden staircase of nine steps, the upper steps being partly overshadowed by a spreading chestnut tree.

On turning north and beginning my descent to the dell, I

caught sight of Tulip hanging by the neck from a low branch of the chestnut, eyes open and hands to her sides. It is my memory that the clearance between her feet and the nearest wooden step was no more than twelve inches. The noose around her neck was so thin that at first sight she appeared to be floating in thin air.

I am a woman of 42. I must emphasize that I have recorded these impressions as they remain in my mind today. I am Service-trained and have experience of operational emergency. It is therefore humbling to confess that my only impulse on seeing Tulip hanging from a tree was to run back to the house as fast as possible and summon help rather than attempt to cut her down and resuscitate her. I deeply regret this lapse of operational composure, although I am now assured categorically that Tulip had been dead for at least six hours when I found her, which is a major relief to me. Plus the fact that I had no knife, and the rope was out of my reach.

Supplementary report by Millie McCraig, safe house keeper, Camp 4, career officer Grade 2, on the care, maintenance and suicide of sub-source TULIP. Copy to George Smiley H/Covert (only).

Millie as I knew her then: bride of the Service, devout daughter of a minister of the Free Presbyterian Church. Climbs the Cairngorms, rides to hounds and has a history of dangerous places. Lost her brother to the war, her father to cancer, and her heart, according to rumour, to a married older man who loved honour more. There were tongues that said the man in the case was George, though nothing I ever saw between them led me to believe it. But woe betide any of us young bloods who tried to lay a finger on her, for Millie would have none of us.

1. Disappearance of TULIP.

Having been informed by Jeanette Avon at 0610 hours that Tulip had set out for a morning run on her own, I immediately requested security (Harper and Lowe) to institute a search of the estate, concentrating on the perimeter path, which I understood from Avon to be Tulip’s preferred route. As a precaution I then undertook an inspection of the guest suite and established that her tracksuit and running shoes were still in her wardrobe. The French day clothes and underclothes with which she had been issued in Prague, on the other hand, were not. Although she had neither identity papers nor money in her possession, her handbag, which I had earlier established contained nothing beyond personal necessities, was also missing.

The situation being beyond the competence of Covert, and H/Covert being absent on urgent duty in Berlin, I took the executive decision to call the duty officer at Joint Steering and request him to inform police liaison that an escaped mental patient answering Tulip’s description was at large in the vicinity, that she was non-violent, spoke no English and was undergoing psychiatric treatment. If found, she should be returned to this Institute.

I then called Dr Meadows at his consulting rooms in Harley Street and left word with his secretary that he should please return asap to Camp 4, to be told that, having received word from HO, he was already on his way.

2. Discovery of an unauthorized intruder at Camp 4.

I had scarcely completed these calls when I received word from Harper over the Camp 4 internal intercommunication system advising me that, in the course of his search for Tulip, he had discovered, at a wooded point close to the eastern perimeter, an injured person, male, apparently an intruder,

who having made his way through a freshly cut hole at a point close to the bypass, had stepped on, and activated, an ancient snare, partly overgrown, and presumably left there by a poacher in the days before the Circus acquired the premises.

The said snare, an illegal and antiquated device, consisted of rusted dragon’s teeth, still sprung. The intruder, according to Harper, had caught his left leg in the mechanism and, by thrashing about, entangled himself further. He spoke good English, but with a foreign accent, and insisted that, on seeing the hole in the fence, he had climbed through it in order to perform a natural function. He also explained that he was a passionate birdwatcher.

With the arrival of Lowe, the two men between them had released the intruder, whereupon he had punched Lowe in the stomach, then head-butted Harper in the face. After a further struggle, the two men had pacified the intruder and delivered him to the Stoop, which lay conveniently close. He was now confined in the holding cell (Submarine), with a temporary dressing to his left leg. In accordance with standing security procedure, Harper had reported the incident, providing as full a description as possible of the intruder directly to HO Internal Security and to H/Covert, now on his way back from Berlin. On my enquiring of Harper whether he or Lowe had meanwhile sighted the missing Tulip, he replied that the intruder had temporarily diverted them from their search, which they would immediately resume.

3. News of TULIP’s death.

It was approximately at this point of time that Jeanette Avon appeared at the porch of the main house in a distraught condition to announce that she had seen Tulip hanging by the neck from a tree, presumably dead, at point 217 on the estate

map. I immediately passed this information to Harper and Lowe and, having confirmed that their intruder was immobilized, instructed them to proceed with all speed to point 217 and apply necessary assistance.

I then sounded a Red Alert requiring all resident support staff to assemble immediately in the main house. This included the two cooks, one driver, one maintenance man, two cleaners and two laundrymen: see list at Appendix A. I informed them that a dead body had been found on the estate, and they should all remain in the main house until further notice. I did not consider it necessary to inform them that an unauthorized intruder had also been found.

Fortunately at this juncture Dr Meadows appeared, having driven himself at high speed in his Bentley car. He and I at once set out along the eastern perimeter path in the direction of point 217. We arrived to find Tulip cut down and clearly dead, lying on the ground with a ligature in place around her neck, and Harper and Lowe standing watch over her. Harper, bleeding from the face having been head-butted by the intruder, was minded to summon the police, Lowe an ambulance. In the event, I advised that neither should be summoned without the approval of H/Covert who was on his way to Camp 4. Dr Meadows, after a preliminary examination of the body, was of a similar opinion.

I accordingly instructed Harper and Lowe to return to the Stoop, contact nobody, await further orders and on no account attempt to engage their prisoner in conversation. Once they had departed the scene, Dr Meadows confided to me that Tulip had been dead for several hours before discovery.

While Dr Meadows continued his examination of the dead woman, I took note of her attire, which consisted of her French twinset, pleated skirt and court shoes. The pockets of the twinset jacket were empty except for two used paper tissues.

Tulip had been complaining of a slight cold. Her ‘perhaps bag’ was stuffed with her remaining French underclothes.

Our instructions, which by now were being relayed non-stop from Head Office over the Camp 4 intercom, were to transfer the body immediately to the Stoop. I therefore summoned Harper and Lowe to act as stretcher party. This was promptly done, despite the fact that Harper by now was bleeding profusely from his wound.

Together with Dr Meadows, I returned to the main house. To her credit, Avon had collected herself and was distributing tea and biscuits to the staff, and generally enlivening them. The Head Office crisis party under H/Covert was now expected to arrive by mid-afternoon. Meantime all but Harper and Lowe were to remain in the main house while Dr Meadows cleaned Harper’s facial contusions and attended the injured intruder now incarcerated in the Submarine.

A discussion meanwhile took place among those confined to the main house. Jeanette Avon insisted on counting herself the person most responsible for Tulip’s suicide, but I took it upon myself to contradict this suggestion. Tulip was clinically depressed, her sense of guilt and longing for Gustav were unbearable, she had destroyed the life of her sister Lotte. Suicide was probably in her mind by the time she arrived in Prague, and certainly by the time she reached Camp 4. She had made her choices and paid the ultimate price.

And now enter George, bearing false messages:

4. Arrival of H/Covert

[Smiley]

and Inspector Mendel.

H/Covert (Smiley) arrived at 1555 hours accompanied by Inspector (retd) Oliver Mendel, a Covert Occasional. Dr Meadows and I immediately escorted them to the Stoop.

I then returned to the main house, where Ingeborg Lugg and Jeanette Avon together continued to soothe the agitations of the assembled staff. It was another two hours before Mr Smiley returned from the Stoop accompanied by Inspector Mendel. Calling the staff together, Mr Smiley offered his personal condolences, together with the assurance that sub-source Tulip had only herself to blame for her death, and nobody in Camp 4 had cause to reproach themselves.

Evening was now coming on. With the shuttle bus waiting in the forecourt and many of the team anxious to get home to Salisbury, H/Covert took a moment to put their minds at rest regarding the discovery of a ‘mystery intruder’ of whom some might have heard. With Inspector Mendel smiling reassurance beside him, he confessed that he was about to ‘blab’ to the team a secret they would never normally share, but in the circumstances he had decided that they deserved nothing less than full disclosure.

The mystery intruder was no mystery, he explained. He was a valued member of an elite and little-known section of our sister service, MI5, tasked to penetrate by lawful and unlawful means the defences of our country’s most sensitive and secret facilities. As it happened, he was also a personal and professional friend of Inspector Mendel here. Laughter. It was in the nature of such live exercises that the facility targeted should not be informed, and the fact that the exercise had been scheduled for the same day that Tulip had elected to do away with herself was no more than ‘the act of a malign Providence’, to use Smiley’s words. The same Providence had guided the intruder’s feet into the deer trap. Laughter. Harper and Lowe had acquitted themselves nobly. Both had had the situation explained to them and ruefully accepted it, even if they felt, understandably, that ‘our friend had somewhat overdone his violent reaction’ – H/Covert, to more laughter.

And for our further disinformation:

H/Covert further confided to the gathering that the intruder, who was in fact no foreigner but an honest-to-God, all British native of Clapham, was already on his way to Casualty in Salisbury where he would receive a tetanus injection and have his injuries attended to. Inspector Mendel would be visiting his old friend shortly, and taking him a bottle of whisky with the compliments of Camp 4. Applause.

*

It’s the Bunny and Laura show again. No Leonard. Bunny leads. Laura listens sceptically.

‘So you compiled your report. In tedious detail, if I may say so. You took all available evidence, and then some. You sent an advance copy to Joint Steering. You then

stole the same copy back

from Circus archives. Does that about sum it up?’

‘No, it doesn’t.’

‘Then why is your report lodged here in the Stables, among a whole lot of papers that you

did

steal?’

‘Because it never went out on submission.’

‘To anyone?’

‘To anyone.’

‘None of it? Not even a shortened form?’

‘The Treasury Committee decided not to meet.’

‘You’re talking about the so-called committee of the Three Wise Men, I take it? Of whom the Circus lived in supposed dread?’

‘It was chaired by Oliver Lacon. Lacon concluded after much soul-searching that a report served no useful purpose. Even in shortened form.’

‘On the grounds?’

‘That an inquiry into the suicide of a woman who had not landed in the United Kingdom was not a valid use of taxpayers’ money.’

‘Was Lacon by any conceivable chance prompted in this decision by George Smiley?’

‘How should I know?’

‘Easily, I’d have thought. If it was your arse among others that Smiley was protecting, if – for instance, taking a purely hypothetical case at random – we assume Tulip hanged herself on your account. Was there perhaps a particular element or episode of the report that Smiley considered too disturbing for Treasury’s tender ears?’

‘For Joint’s tender ears, conceivably. Not Treasury’s. Joint was already much too deep into the Mayflower operation for George’s comfort. He may have thought an inquiry would open the door even wider. And advised Lacon accordingly. That’s only my guess.’

‘You don’t think by any chance that the real reason the inquiry was binned was that Tulip wasn’t the cooperative defector she is painted to be – not least by your arse-kissing report – and paid the price?’

‘What

price

? What on earth are you talking about?’

‘She was a woman of great determination. We know that. She was also, when she wished to be, a harridan. And she wanted her child back. I’m suggesting she refused to cooperate with the interrogation team until her son was returned to her, and her interrogators took a dim view of that, and their report – your report – was a fudge, cobbled together on Smiley’s orders. And Camp 4, since scrapped, boasted as we know a special confinement cell for people like her. It was dubbed the Submarine. It was used for what these days we are pleased to call enhanced interrogation, and it was the preserve of a couple of rather perverted security guards not known for their gentle ways. I’m

suggesting she had the benefit of their attentions. You look shocked. Have I touched a nerve?’

It took me a moment to get there:

‘Tulip wasn’t

interrogated

, for Christ’s sake! She was in the process of being debriefed, humanely and decently, by professional people who liked her and were grateful to her, and understood a defector’s tantrums!’

‘So laugh this one off,’ Bunny suggests. ‘We have another

letter before action

, and another potential litigant if the case comes to law. One Gustav Quinz, son of Doris, apparently but not certainly at the instigation of Christoph Leamas, has added his name to those who are intent on suing the shit out of this Service. We, this Service, largely in the person of yourself, seduced his dear mother, blackmailed her into spying for us, smuggled her out of the country against her will, tortured her to hell and back, thereby causing her to hang herself from the nearest tree. True? Not true?’

I thought he had finished, but he hadn’t.

‘And since these allegations, being dignified by the passage of time, cannot be suppressed by the draconian legislation that has been available to us in more recent cases of the same nature, there’s a good chance that the All-Party Group, and/or any subsequent litigation, will be used to pry into matters of considerably more relevance to us today. You seem amused.’

Amused. Perhaps I was. Gustav, I was thinking. Well done you. You’ve decided to collect your due after all, even if you’ve come to the wrong address for it.

*

I have ridden across France and Germany at breakneck speed through driving rain. I am standing at Alec’s graveside. The same rain sweeps the little cemetery in East Berlin. I am wearing my

motorcycle leathers, but out of respect for Alec I have removed my helmet and the rain is pouring down my bare face as we silently exchange banalities. The elderly sacristan or whatever he is ushers me into his cabin and shows me the condolence book with Christoph’s name among the mourners.

And perhaps that was the

point d’appui

, the spur: first to Christoph, then to the carrot-haired Gustav with the buckwheat grin who had sung his patriotic songs to me, and then to Alec: the same boy who from the day of his mother’s death I had secretly, if only notionally, taken into my care, picturing him first in some gruesome East German borstal for children of the disgraced, then tossed out into an uncaring world.

Secretly too, I had from time to time brazenly transgressed standing Circus regulations, tracking him through the archives under a pretext and vowing to myself – or, you may say, fantasizing – that one day, if ever the world turned an inch or two on its axis, I would seek him out and, for love of Tulip, provide him with a leg-up in some undefined way that circumstance would determine.

The rain was still pelting down as I got on my bike and headed, not westward to France, but southward to Weimar. The last possible address I had for Gustav was ten years old: a hamlet west of the city, a house registered in the name of his father, Lothar. After two hours’ ride I was standing on the doorstep of a dismal, Soviet-style slab house built ten yards from the village church as an act of Socialist aggression. The slabs were parting. Some of the windows were papered over from inside. Spray-paint swastikas adorned the crumbling porch. Quinz’s apartment was 8D. I pressed the bell to no avail. A door opened, a suspicious old woman looked me up and down.

‘

Quinz?

’ she repeated, in distaste. ‘

Der Lothar? Längst tot.

’ – long dead.

And Gustav? I asked. The son?

‘You mean the

waiter

?’ she asked, in contempt.

The hotel was called the Elephant and overlooked Weimar’s historic main square. It wasn’t new. As a matter of fact it had been Hitler’s favourite hotel: the old woman had told me that too. But it had been dramatically refurbished, and its façade glistened like a beacon of Western prosperity shoved in the face of its poorer, beautiful neighbours. At the reception desk, a girl in a new black suit mistook my enquiry: we have no Herr Quinz staying in the house. Then she blushed and said, ‘Oh, you mean Gustav,’ and told me that staff were forbidden to receive visits and I must wait till Herr Quinz came off duty.

When would that be? At six o’clock. And best to wait where, please? At the delivery entrance, where else?

The rain had not relented, the day was darkening. I stood at the delivery entrance as directed. A gaunt unsmiling man who somehow looked older than his age emerged from a basement staircase, pulling on an old army raincoat with a hood. A bicycle was chained to the railing. He stooped to it, and set to work undoing the padlock.

‘Herr Quinz?’ I said. ‘

Gustav?

’

His head rose until he stood his full height under the faltering light of an overhead street lamp. His shoulders were set in a premature stoop. The once red hair was sparse and turning grey.

‘What do you want?’

‘I was a friend of your mother’s,’ I said. ‘You may remember me. We met on a beach in Bulgaria – long ago. You sang me a song.’ And I gave him my workname, the same name I’d given him on the beach while his mother stood naked behind him.

‘You were a

friend

of my mother?’ he repeated, getting used to the idea.

‘That’s what I said.’

‘French?’

‘That’s right.’

‘She died.’

‘I heard that. I’m very sorry. I wondered if there was anything I could do for you. I happened to have your address. I was in Weimar. It seemed an opportunity. Maybe we could have a drink together. Talk about it.’

He stared at me. ‘Did you sleep with my mother?’

‘We were friends.’

‘Then you slept with her,’ he said, as a matter of historical fact, his voice neither rising nor falling. ‘My mother was a whore. She betrayed the homeland. She betrayed the revolution. She betrayed the Party. She betrayed my father. She sold herself to the English and she hanged herself. She was an enemy of the people,’ he explained.

And, mounting his bicycle, he rode away.

11

‘I think the very

first

thing we should do, heart,’ Tabitha is saying in her perennially diffident voice – ‘you don’t mind if I call you heart, do you? I call all my best clients heart. It reminds them that I’ve got one, just as they have, even if mine’s necessarily on hold. So the

first

thing we do is make a hit-list of all the disgraceful things the other side are saying about us, then we’ll knock them down one by one. Just so long as you’re sitting comfortably. Are you? Good. You are hearing me, aren’t you? I never know whether those things work. Are they the National Health ones?’

‘French.’

Tabitha, so far as I remembered from my childhood reading of Beatrix Potter, was the harassed mother of three disobedient children. I was wryly amused therefore to note that outwardly at least the woman of the same name who sat before me shared many of her characteristics: motherly, sweet-faced, forty-something, plump, a little breathless, and heroically tired. She was also, I had been given to understand, my defence lawyer. Leonard had supplied Bunny with the promised shortlist of names, names that Bunny admired

hugely

– would fight for you like absolute

rottweilers

, Peter – and two he was a

teensy

bit doubtful about, not sufficiently road-tested to his mind but don’t quote him, and

one

–

entirely

off the record, Peter, and you

must

protect me on this – that he wouldn’t touch with a bargepole: doesn’t

know when to stop, and not the

haziest

idea of how the courts work, and the judges absolutely detest her. That was Tabitha.

I said she sounded just right for me and asked to see her in her chambers. Bunny said her chambers weren’t rated secure and offered me his headquarters in the bastion. I told him I didn’t rate his headquarters secure. So here we are back in the library, with the full-length figures of Hans-Dieter Mundt and his arch-rival Josef Fiedler scowling down on us.

*

In time present, only one sleepless night has passed since we cremated Tulip, but the world that Tabitha is trying to come to grips with has taken an historic step backwards.

The Berlin Wall has gone up.

Every agent and sub-agent of the Mayflower network has gone missing, been arrested, executed or all three.

Karl Riemeck, the heroic doctor of Köpenick, the network’s accidental founder and its inspiration, has himself been mercilessly shot down while attempting to escape to West Berlin on his workman’s bicycle.

To Tabitha, these are facts of history. For those of us who endured them, they are a time of despair, bewilderment and frustration.

Is our agent Windfall for us or against us? From our redoubt in the Stables, we the indoctrinated few had followed with awe his mercurial rise through the Stasi’s ranks to his present position as head of its special operations wing.

We had received, processed and disseminated, under the generic title Windfall, highest-quality intelligence on a raft of economic, political and strategic targets, to muted cries of delight from Whitehall customers.

Yet for all Mundt’s undoubted power – or maybe because of

it – he had been unable to halt or even abate the relentless cull of Covert’s agents and sub-agents, as conducted by his rival Josef Fiedler.

In this grisly duel for the favour of Moscow Centre and command of the Stasi, Hans-Dieter Mundt, alias source Windfall, claimed he had no option but to present himself as even more fervent than Fiedler in the business of cleansing the utopian German Democratic Republic of spies, saboteurs and other lackeys of bourgeois imperialism.

As one faithful agent after another fell to the competing fury of Mundt or his arch-rival, so the morale of the Windfall team sank to a new depth.

And no one was more affected than Smiley himself, locked night after night in the Middle Room, with only the occasional visit from Control to lower his spirits still further.

*

‘Why can’t I read the plaintiffs’ statements for myself?’ I ask Tabitha. ‘The letters-before-action or whatever they are?’

‘Because your former Service in its wisdom has applied to slap a Top Secret classification on all correspondence on the grounds of national security, and you’re not cleared. They won’t get away with it in a month of Sundays, but it will gum up the works and make way for a temporary reporting restriction, which is what they’re after. Meanwhile, I’ve scrounged what scraps I can for you. Go?’

‘Where have Bunny and Laura disappeared to?’

‘I’m afraid they think they’ve got all they need. And Leonard has accepted their brief. I’ve had a first peek in the other side’s locker. Unfortunately, poor Doris Gamp seems to have had the hots for you from the day she set eyes on you, and she couldn’t wait to tell her sister Lotte all about you. And by the time Lotte

had poured her heart out to the Stasi interrogators, there wasn’t much left of you at all. Did you

really

scamper naked on the beach with her in the Bulgarian moonlight?’

‘No.’

‘Good. And there’s a night of love and laughter you supposedly spent together in a Prague hotel, where nature again took her course.’

‘It didn’t.’

‘Good. Now to the two other deaths: Alec Leamas and Elizabeth Gold, our Berliners. Elizabeth first, as formulated against you by her daughter Karen. It’s alleged that you personally contacted her –

either

on your own initiative

or

at the instigation of George Smiley and other conspirators unnamed – that you then

inveigled, seduced or otherwise obtained

her to become

human fodder

– the other side’s beastly expressions, not mine – in an

abortive, grandiose and ill-conceived attempt

– who comes up with that stuff, I

can’t

imagine – to undermine the Stasi leadership. Did you?’

‘No.’

‘Good. You begin to see the picture? You’re a professional Lothario hired by the British Secret Service, and you roped in susceptible girls as unwitting accomplices in hare-brained operations that fell apart at the seams. True?’

‘Untrue.’

‘Of course it is. You also pimped Elizabeth Gold for your colleague Alec Leamas. Did you?’

‘No.’

‘Good. You also, because you do a lot of it,

bedded

Elizabeth Gold. Or if you didn’t, you warmed her up for Alec. Did you do either of those things?’

‘No.’

‘I never for a moment thought you did. And the supposed end effect of your evil machinations: Elizabeth Gold is shot dead at the Berlin Wall, her lover Alec Leamas tries to save her skin,

or simply decides to die with her. Either way he gets shot for his pains, and it’s all your fault. Time for a cup of tea, or bomb on? Bomb on. Now to

Christoph Leamas’s

allegation, which is meatier because his father Alec is the victim of all that goes before. Alec – by the time you inveigled him, lured, bribed, conned, et cetera, into becoming the luckless plaything of your compulsively manipulative nature – was a broken man, in no fit state to cross the road on his own, let alone front a fiendishly intricate deception operation, to wit:

pretend

to defect to the Stasi while actually remaining under your evil influence. True?’

‘No.’

‘Of course it isn’t. So what I suggest is, with your permission, take a big pull of that water, cast your beady eye over what I turned up in the wee hours of this morning when I was

finally

allowed a very limited look at a

tiny

part of your dear Service’s historical archive. Question one, does this episode mark the beginning of your friend Alec’s decline? And question two, if it does, is it

real

decline or is it

simulated

decline? In other words, are we looking at stage one of Alec making himself insufferable to his own Service and hugely attractive to Moscow Centre’s or the Stasi’s talent-spotters?’

*

Circus telegram from H/Station Berlin

[M

C

Fadyen]

to H/Joint Steering, copy to H/Covert Ops, H/Personnel Most Urgent, 10 July 1960.

Subject: Immediate transfer of Alec Leamas from Berlin Station on disciplinary grounds.

At 0100 hours this morning, the following episode occurred at the Altes Fass nightclub in West Berlin between DH/Berlin

Station Alec Leamas and Cy Aflon, DH/CIA Station Berlin. The facts are not disputed by either party. The two men have a long-running enmity, for which, as previously stated, I regard Leamas as exclusively to blame.

Leamas entered the nightclub alone and headed for the

Damengalerie

, a bar set aside for single women in search of custom. He had been drinking but was not in his own judgement drunk.

Aflon was seated with two female colleagues from his Station, watching the cabaret and enjoying a quiet drink.

Catching sight of Aflon and his party, Leamas changed direction, walked over to their table and, leaning forward, addressed Aflon in low tones with the following words:

Leamas:

You ever try to buy one of my sources again, I’ll break your fucking neck.

Aflon:

Whoa, Alec. Whoa. Not in front of the ladies, if you don’t mind.

Leamas:

Two thousand dollars a month for first bite of anything he gets before he sells it to us second hand. And you call that fighting a fucking war? Maybe he gets a French kiss from these nice ladies thrown in?

As Aflon rose to his feet in protest at this flagrant insult, Leamas struck him across the face with his right elbow, causing him to fall to the ground, then kicked him in the groin. West Berlin police were called, who summoned the US military police. Aflon was delivered to the US military hospital where he is presently recovering. Fortunately, no fractures or life-threatening injuries are as yet reported.

I have submitted my abject apologies to Aflon personally and to his H/Station, Milton Berger. This is the most recent of a series of regrettable incidents involving Leamas.

While I acknowledge that recent losses to the Mayflower network have placed the Station and Leamas personally under

considerable strain, this in no way justifies the damage he has done to our relations with our most important ally. Leamas’s anti-Americanism has long been apparent. It has now become totally unacceptable. Either he goes or I do.

And after Control’s green scrawl, Smiley’s lapidary reply:

I have already ordered Alec back to London

.

*

‘So, Peter,’ Tabitha is saying. ‘Simulated?

Not

simulated? Are we looking at the official beginning of his downhill slide?’

And when, in genuine doubt, I prevaricate, she offers her own answer:

‘Control certainly thought it was the beginning’ – indicating the handwritten green scrawl at the bottom of the page. ‘Look at his footnote to your Uncle George.

A very promising start

, signed C. You can’t get clearer than that, can you, even in

your

murky world?’

No, Tabitha, you can’t. And murky it is, no question.

*

It’s a funeral. It’s a wake. It’s a thieves’ conference held in desperation at dead of night in this very room, with Josef Fiedler and Hans-Dieter Mundt staring down on us with the same lugubrious intensity. We are the six Windfalls, as Connie Sachs, our latest recruit, has dubbed us: Control, Smiley, Jim Prideaux, Connie, myself and Millie our near-silent partner. Jim Prideaux is just returned from yet another undercover run, this time to Budapest, where he has brought off a rare treff with our most precious asset Windfall. Connie Sachs, in her early twenties already the unchallenged wunderkind of research into Soviet

and Satellite intelligence agencies, has recently flounced out of Joint Steering in a huff, straight into George’s waiting arms. She is a brisk, chubby little body, bluestocking, born into the clover, and impatient of lesser minds like mine.

Stately, remote, raven-haired Millie McCraig moves among us like a ministering nurse in a field hospital, handing out coffee and Scotch to the needy. Control wants his usual foul green tea, takes one peck at it, leaves the rest. Jim Prideaux chain-smokes his usual foul Russian cigarettes.

And George? Looks so withdrawn, so unapproachable, has an air of introspection so forbidding, that it would take a brave man to interrupt his reverie.

When Control speaks, he trails his tobacco-stained fingertips across his lips as if he is checking them for sores. He is silvery, dapper, ageless and reportedly friendless. He has a wife somewhere but, according to the gossip, she thinks her husband’s in the Coal Board. When he stands, his stooped shoulders come as a surprise. You wait for them to straighten, but they never do. He has been in the job since the mists of time, but I have spoken to him precisely twice and heard him lecture once, and that was on my pass-out day at Sarratt. The voice is knife-thin like the man – nasal, monotonous and irritable as a spoilt child’s. And it doesn’t warm naturally to questions, not even his own.

‘So do we or do we not

believe

,’ he demands through his fluttering fingertips, ‘that we’re still getting the best material out of Herr bloody Mundt? Is it second pickings? Is it chickenfeed? Is it smoke? And is he leading us up the garden path? George?’

With Control, nobody uses cover names, house rule. Doesn’t care for them. Says they glorify too much. Better to call a spade a bloody shovel than a holy relic.

‘Mundt’s product seems to be as good as it ever was, Control,’ Smiley replies.

‘Pity he didn’t tip us off about the bloody Wall then. Or did he forget? Jim?’

Jim Prideaux, after reluctantly taking the cigarette from his lips: ‘Mundt says Moscow cut him out of the loop. They told Fiedler. They didn’t tell Mundt. And Fiedler kept it to himself.’

‘The swine killed Riemeck, didn’t he? That wasn’t friendly. What made him do that?’

‘He says he just happened to get there an hour or two ahead of Fiedler,’ Prideaux replies in his habitually gruff monotone. And again we wait for Control, who in return lets us wait for him.

‘So we don’t believe the opposition has turned Mundt back on us,’ Control drones on irritably. ‘He’s still ours. Well, he bloody well should be. We can toss him to the wolves any time we feel like it. He’s power mad. He wants to be Moscow Centre’s golden boy. Well,

we

want him to be Moscow’s golden boy. And

our

golden boy too. So our interests are mutual. But Herr Josef bloody Fiedler is blocking his way. And

our

way. Fiedler suspects Mundt is ours, and he is. So Fiedler’s out to expose him and claim the credit. That about the sum of it, George?’

‘It would seem to be, Control.’

‘

Seems

to be. Everything

seems

. Nothing

is

. I thought we dealt in facts in this job. Yes or no: Herr Josef Fiedler – a saintly man, we are told, by Stasi standards, a true believer in the cause and a Jew to boot – thinks that his esteemed colleague Hans-Dieter Mundt, unreformed Nazi, is the running dog of British Intelligence. And he’s not all wrong, is he?’

George glances at Jim Prideaux. Jim rubs his jaw and glares at the worn carpet. Control again:

‘So do we believe Herr Mundt? Another question. Or is he talking up a storm, same as a lot of other agents we know? Is he spinning you along, Jim? You agent-runners are a soft lot

where your joes are concerned. Even a Class A shit like Mundt gets the benefit of the doubt.’

But Jim Prideaux, as Control well knows, is about as soft as flint.

‘Mundt’s got people inside Fiedler’s camp. He’s told me who they are. He’s listened to them. He knows Fiedler’s out to get him. Fiedler has as good as told him so to his face. Fiedler has his own friends in Moscow Centre too. Mundt thinks they could make a move pretty soon.’

Again we wait for Control, who decides after all that he needs to take a sip of cold green tea; and needs us to watch him do it too.

‘Which begs the question,

doesn’t it

, George?’ he complains wearily. ‘If Josef Fiedler was out of the way – means to be discussed – might Moscow love Mundt more? And if they

do

love him more, might we finally discover who the bugger is who is betraying our agents to Moscow Centre?’ – and receiving no answer from the company: ‘How about you, Guillam? Does youth have an answer to that question? I am being relative.’

‘I’m afraid it doesn’t, sir.’

‘Pity. George and I think we may have found an answer, you see. But George can’t stomach it. Well, I can. I’ve arranged to see your friend Alec Leamas tomorrow. Test the water with him. See what he feels about it all, now he’s lost his network to the Mundt– Fiedler shooting club. A fellow in his position might welcome a chance to finish his career on an up-note. Don’t you agree?’

*

Tabitha is provoking me, I suspect deliberately:

‘The trouble with you spies, nothing personal, is that none of you know the truth from your elbows. Which does make it

awfully hard to defend you. I’ll give it my best endeavours, mind you, I always do.’ And when I return her sweet smile, but otherwise fail to respond: ‘Elizabeth Gold kept a diary, that’s the trouble. And Doris Gamp told all to poor Lotte, her sister. Women do these things – gossip with each other, keep diaries, write silly letters. Bunny’s lot are making hay with it all. They’re comparing you with our modern undercover police informants who go about stealing the hearts of their women victims and giving them babies. I did take a peek at the dates to see if you could have given Elizabeth her Karen, but you’re absolutely in the clear, which was a bit of a relief, frankly. And Gustav, thank God, is too old even to have been a twinkle in your eye.’

*

It’s a balmy autumn afternoon on Hampstead Heath, and one week after Control’s announcement that he would be testing the water with Alec. I’m sitting with George Smiley at an outdoor table in the gardens of Kenwood House. It’s a weekday, hardly a soul about. We could just as well have met in the Stables, but George has managed to imply that our conversation is so private that we need the open air. He’s wearing a Panama hat that blacks out his eyes, with the result that, just as I’m getting only part of the secret, I’m getting only part of George.

We have done the small talk, or I assume we have. Am I happy in my work? I am, thank you. Have I got over the Tulip thing? I have, thank you. Nice of Oliver Lacon to bury my draft; there was always a danger Joint would make too much of that mystery Swiss intruder at Camp 4. I say I’m glad too, although I sweated blood and tears over it.

‘I want you to befriend a

girl

for me, Peter,’ Smiley confides, puckering his brow for greater earnestness. Then, realizing I might be misinterpreting this request: ‘Oh my goodness, not to

accommodate any needs on

my

part, I assure you! Strictly for operational purposes. Might you be willing to do that? In principle? For the good of the cause? Acquire her trust?’

‘The cause being Windfall,’ I suggest guardedly.

‘Yes. Entirely. Solely. For the continued successful outcome of Operation Windfall. Its preservation. As a necessary and urgent adjunct,’ he replies, and we sip our apple juice and watch the people come and go in the sunshine. ‘Also at the specific request of Control, I may add,’ he goes on, either as a further inducement or to pass the buck. ‘He actually proposed your name:

that young Guillam fellow.

Singled you out.’

Am I supposed to take this as a compliment – or a veiled warning? George, I suspected, had never much liked Control, and Control didn’t like anybody.

‘I’m sure there are lots of ways of bumping into her,’ he goes on, looking on the bright side. ‘She’s a member of her local branch of the Communist Party, for one. Sells the

Daily Worker

at weekends. But I don’t really see you buying a copy from her, do you?’

‘If you mean, do I think I come over as a natural

Daily Worker

reader? – no, I don’t think I do.’

‘No, no, and you mustn’t try. Please don’t on any account try to be someone who doesn’t add up. Much better your usual genial middle-class self. She runs,’ he adds as an afterthought.

‘

Runs?

’

‘Every morning early, she runs. I find it charming. Don’t you? Fitness runs. Wellbeing runs. Round and round the local sports track. Alone. Then off to work in a book store in Fulham. Not a book

shop

, a store. But books, for all that. Dispatching them to wholesalers in bulk. It may sound tedious to us, but she sees it as a cause. We must all have books, the huddled masses especially. And of course she marches too.’

‘As well as runs?’

‘For Peace, Peter. For peace with a capital P. From Aldermaston

to Trafalgar Square, then on to Hyde Park Corner for more of the same. If only Peace were so easy.’

Is he expecting me to smile? I try to.

‘But I don’t see you assisting her with a banner, either, of course I don’t. You’re a decent bourgeois fellow, making his way in the world, a species quite unknown to her, and therefore all the more interesting. A good pair of running shoes and your puckish smile, you’ll be friends in no time. And if you put on your French persona, you’ll be able to make a graceful exit when the time comes. Then it will be all done and dusted. You can forget about her. And she about you. Yes.’

‘It might be a help if I knew her name,’ I suggest.

He thinks about this too – painfully, problematically: ‘Yes, well, they’re immigrants. The family are. The parents are first generation, she’s second. And they have settled, after some deliberation, on the name of

Gold

,’ he concedes, as if I have dragged the name out of him. ‘First name

Elizabeth

. Liz to her friends.’

I too take my time. I’m drinking apple juice on a sunny afternoon with a tubby gentleman in a Panama hat. Nobody is hurrying.

‘And when I’ve acquired her trust, as you put it, what do I do then?’

‘Why, you come and tell me, of course,’ he snaps, as if suddenly all the hesitation in him has been replaced by anger.

*

I am a young French commercial traveller named Marcel Lafontaine, presently based in an Indian-owned boarding house in Hackney, East London, and I have the documents to prove it. It’s day five. Each morning at crack of dawn, I take a bus to the memorial park and run. Most mornings there are six or seven

of us. We run, we stand panting on the sports hall steps, we check our times, we compare. We exchange a couple of words, divide to the shower rooms, say cheers and see you tomorrow maybe. My companions are vaguely amused by my French name, but disappointed that I have no French accent. I explain that I had an English mother, now dead.

In a cover story, kill off any loose thread before it gets out of hand.

Of our three regular female runners, Liz (we have no surnames) is the tallest, but by no means the fastest. In truth, she’s not much of a natural runner at all. She runs as an act of will, or self-discipline, or liberation. She is reserved and apparently unaware that she is beautiful, if in a tomboy sort of way. She’s leggy, has dark hair cropped short, a wide brow and big, brown, vulnerable eyes. Yesterday, we traded our first smiles.

‘Busy day coming up?’ I ask.

‘We’re out on strike,’ she explains breathlessly. ‘Got to be up the gates at eight.’

‘What gates are they then?’

‘Where I work. Management’s trying to sack our shop steward. Could go on for weeks.’

Then it’s see you, see you, till next time.

And next time is tomorrow which is Saturday so apparently there’s no picketing, people need to shop. We do a coffee together in the canteen, she asks me what I do. I explain I’m travelling for this French pharmaceutical company, selling products to local hospitals and GPs. She says that must be really interesting. I say well, not

really

, because what I’d like to be doing is studying medicine, but my dad doesn’t want me to do that because the company I represent is our family firm and he wants me to learn it from the ground up and take it over. I show her my business card. My firm bears my fictitious father’s name. She studies it with a frown and a smile, but the frown wins:

‘You think that’s right, do you? Like socially? The son of the family inheriting the family firm just because he’s the son?’

And I say no, I don’t think it’s right, it bothers me. And it bothers my fiancée too, which is why I want to be a doctor like her, because I admire my fiancée as well as love her, I think she’s a real blessing to mankind.

And the reason I’ve given myself a fiancée is because, although I find Liz disturbingly attractive, I’m never going to do another Tulip as long as I live. It’s also thanks to my mythical fiancée that Liz and I are able to walk beside the canal and earnestly swap our aspirations, now that she knows I’m lost in love and admiration for a woman doctor in France.

When we have traded our hopes and dreams, we talk parents, and how it is to be part foreign, and she asks me whether I’m Jewish, and I say no.

Over a carafe of red wine at the Greek, she asks me whether I’m a Communist, and instead of saying no again I take the frivolous route and say I just can’t make up my mind whether to be a Bolshevik or a Menshevik, and can she please advise?

And after that, we get serious, or she does, and we start talking about the Berlin Wall, which is so present in my mind that it never occurred to me that it might be in hers too.

‘My dad says it’s a barrier to keep the Fascists out,’ she says.

And I say, ‘Well, that’s a view, I suppose,’ which annoys her.

‘So what do

you

think it is?’ she demands.

‘I just don’t think the Wall’s there to keep people out,’ I say. ‘I think it’s more there to keep people in.’

To which I get the unanswerable reply, again delivered after earnest thought:

‘Dad doesn’t think like that, you see, Marcel. The Fascists killed his family. That’s good enough for Dad.’

*

‘Poor Liz’s diary simply

gushes

about you, Peter,’ Tabitha is saying, with her pitying, sweet smile. ‘You’re such a gallant French gentleman. Your English is so good she keeps forgetting you’re French at all. If only there were more men like you in the world. You’re a lost cause as far as the Party’s concerned, but you’re a humanist, you know the true meaning of love, and with a bit of work you might see the light one day. She doesn’t say she’d like to put arsenic in your fiancée’s coffee, but she doesn’t have to. She also took a photograph of you, in case you’ve forgotten. This one. She borrowed her father’s Polaroid camera specially.’

I’m in my running gear, propped against a bit of railing, which was how she posed me. Then told me to be natural, not to smile.

‘And I’m afraid it’s in their submission too. Exhibit A, so to speak. You’re the wicked Romeo who stole a poor girl’s heart away and led her to the slaughter. There’s practically a song about you.’

*

‘We’re friends,’ I announce to Smiley, not over an apple juice on sunny Hampstead Heath this time, but back in the Stables to the background putter of the cypher machine upstairs and the Windfall sisters at their manual typewriters.

I tell him the rest of the operational intelligence. She lives with her parents. No brothers or sisters. Doesn’t go out. Her parents quarrel. The father dickers between Zionism and Communism. Never misses synagogue or shirks a meeting of the comrades. Mother determinedly secular. Dad wants Liz in the garment trade. Mum wants Liz to do teacher training. But I have a feeling that George knows all this already, for why else would he have chosen her in the first place?

‘But what does Elizabeth want for

herself

, we wonder?’ he muses.

‘She wants

out

, George,’ I reply more impatiently than I intend.

‘

Out

in any stated direction? Or just

out

for its own sake?’

Her best thing would be a library, I say. Maybe a Marxist library. There’s one in Highgate she wrote to, but they didn’t answer. She’s already a volunteer at her local public library, I tell him. And she reads stories in English to immigrant kids who are still learning the language. But George probably knows that too.

‘Then we must see what we can do for her, mustn’t we? It would be helpful if you could remain alongside her for a little longer before you vanish to French shores. Are you comfortable with that?’

‘Not very.’

I don’t think George is comfortable with it either.

*

It’s five days and two canal walks later. And night again at the Stables.

‘You might see if

this

appeals to her,’ George suggests, handing me a page ripped from a quarterly journal called

Paranormal Gazette

. ‘You happened on it by chance in a doctor’s waiting room while you were doing your pharmaceutical rounds. The pay is dismal, but I suspect she won’t mind that too much.’

The Bayswater Library for Psychical Research is seeking an assistant librarian. Apply with photograph and handwritten curriculum vitae to Miss Eleanora Crail.

*

‘Marcel, I

got

it, Marcel!’ Liz is saying, laughing and weeping as she waves the letter at me in the sports club canteen. ‘I got it, I

got it! Dad says I should be ashamed of myself, it’s bourgeois superstition gone mad and sure to be anti-Semitic. Mum says go for it, it’s the first step on the ladder. So I’ve gone for it. Starting first Monday of next month!’

And when she has put down the letter, she jumps up and hugs me and tells me I’m the best pal she’s ever had. And not for the first time I wish I hadn’t invented that steady girlfriend waiting for me in France. And I think she’s wishing it too.

*

It wasn’t taking much to annoy me, as Tabitha was beginning to find out.

‘So as soon as you’d thrown your magic dust in her eyes, you ran off and told your friend Alec what a dear, nice Communist girl you’d found for him, and all he had to do was get himself a job at the same kooky library, and the two of them would be in bed in no time. Is that how it worked?’

‘There was no question of telling Alec anything. I had made contact with Liz Gold as part of Windfall. Alec wasn’t Windfall cleared. Whatever happened between Alec and Liz once she’d got the job at the library was nothing to do with me, and I wasn’t informed.’

‘So your orders from Smiley regarding Alec Leamas in his simulated decline into drink, dissolution and betrayal were

what

exactly?’

‘To remain his friend and do whatever came naturally as things developed. Bearing in mind that, as the operation advanced, my actions would be as liable to scrutiny by the opposition as Alec’s were.’

‘So Control’s instruction to Leamas, meanwhile, would have been broadly this, correct me: we know you hate Americans, Alec, so go out there and hate them a bit more. We know you

drink like a fish, so double the dose. And we know you like a fight when the drink’s on you, so don’t feel you’ve got to hold back, and while you’re about it, just generally go to hell in a handcart. Does that about sum it up?’

‘Alec was to trail his coat any way he thought best. That’s all he told me.’

‘All

Control

told you?’

What’s she driving at? Who does she belong to, one minute coming within touching distance of the truth, then veering away as if it’s about to burn her?

‘All Smiley told me.’

*

I’m having a lunchtime drink with Alec in a pub a few minutes’ walk from the Circus. Control has given him one last chance to behave himself, and put him in Banking Section on the ground floor, with instructions to pilfer whatever he can get his hands on, although Alec doesn’t tell me this, and I’m not sure he knows how much I know. It’s half past two and we met at one, and if you’re on the ground floor you get an hour for lunch and no excuses.

After a couple of pints, he’s into the Scotch, and all he’s had for lunch is a bag of crisps sprinkled with Tabasco. He has grumbled loudly about what a shitload of weirdos the Circus is these days, and where are all the good guys from the war, and how the only thing the top floor cares about is kissing the American arse.

And I’ve listened and not said a lot because I’m not entirely sure how much is real Alec, and how much he’s living the part, and I’m not sure he is, which is exactly as it should be. It’s only when we’re out on the pavement with the traffic rolling by that he grabs my arm. For a moment I think he’s going to punch me.

Instead, he flings his arms wide and hugs me to him like the emotional Irish drunk he’s pretending to be, while tears roll down his stubbly cheeks.

‘I love you, hear me, Pierrot?’

‘And I love you, Alec’ – dutifully.

And before he shoves me away: ‘Tell us. Just for information. What the fuck’s Windfall?’

‘Just a Covert source we run. Why?’

‘Something that ponce Haydon said to me in his cups the other day. Covert’s got this great new source out there, and why’s nobody cutting Joint in on the action? Know what I told him?’

‘What did you tell him?’

‘If I was running Covert, I said, and somebody from Joint came up to me and said, who’s your big source? – I’d kick him in the balls.’

‘And what did Bill say to you?’

‘Told me to go fuck myself. You know something else I told him?’

‘Not yet.’

‘Keep your poofy little hands off George’s wife.’

*

It’s late at night in the Stables. It always is. The Stables is a house that lives by night, in unpredictable surges. One minute we’re all bored stiff with waiting, the next there’s a scuffle at the front door and a yell of

Shop!

and in strolls Jim Prideaux with Windfall’s latest batch of crown jewels. They’ve flown in by microdot or carbon; Jim’s hand-lifted them from a dead letter box in denied territory; they’ve been passed to him personally by Windfall in a one-minute treff in a Prague back alley. Suddenly I’m dashing up and down stairs with telegrams, I’m crouching at my desk

alerting Whitehall customers by green phone, the Windfall sisters’ manual typewriters are rattling away, and Ben’s cypher machine is burping through the floorboards. For the next twelve hours we will be breaking up Mundt’s raw material, spreading it across a range of fictitious sources – a bit of signals intelligence here, a telephone or microphone intercept there – and only rarely, to keep the mix alive, the odd highly placed and reliable informant, but all of it under the one magic name of Windfall, for indoctrinated readers only. Tonight it’s a lull between the storms. For once George is all on his own in the Middle Room.

‘I bumped into Alec a couple of days ago,’ I begin.

‘I thought we had agreed you would allow your relationship with your friend Alec to cool, Peter.’

‘There’s something about the Windfall operation I don’t understand and feel I should,’ I say, moving into my prepared speech.

‘

Should?

By what authority? My goodness me, Peter.’

‘It’s just a simple question, George.’

‘I didn’t know we dealt in simple questions.’

‘What’s Alec’s remit, that’s all?’

‘To do what he’s doing, as you well know. To become one of life’s angry failures. A Service reject. To appear resentful, vengeful, seducible, buyable.’

‘With what

intent

though, George? To what end?’

His impatience was getting the better of him. He started to answer, drew a breath and started again.

‘Your friend Alec Leamas is under orders to parade his well-attested character defects in all their glory. To make sure they catch the eye of the opposition’s talent-spotters – with a little help from the traitor or traitors in our midst – and place his considerable fund of secret intelligence on the market, for us then to add a few misleading items of our own.’

‘So a standard double-agent disinformation operation.’

‘With embellishments, yes. A standard operation.’

‘Only he seems to think he’s on a mission to kill Mundt.’

‘Well, he’s quite right, isn’t he?’ he retorts, with no delay, no alteration to his tone.

He was peering furiously up at me through his rounded spectacles. I had expected we would be sitting down by now, but we were still standing, and I am substantially taller than George. But what struck me was the aridity of his voice, which reminded me of our meeting in the police house just hours after he had struck his devil’s pact with Mundt.

‘Alec Leamas is a professional, as you are, Peter, and as I am. If Control hasn’t invited him to read the fine print of his mission, so much the better for Alec and for us. He can’t misstep and he can’t betray. If his mission succeeds in ways he has not anticipated, he will not feel deceived. He will feel he has accomplished what was required of him.’

‘But Mundt’s

ours

, George! He’s our joe – he’s Windfall!’

‘Thank you. Hans-Dieter Mundt is an agent of this Service. And as such he must be protected at all costs from those who correctly suspect him of being what he is, and dream only of putting him against a wall and taking over his job.’

‘What about Liz?’

‘Elizabeth Gold?’ – as if he’s forgotten the name, or I have mispronounced it. ‘Elizabeth Gold will be invited to do precisely what comes naturally to her: speak the truth and nothing but the truth. Do you now have all the information you require?’

‘No.’

‘I envy you.’

12

It’s another morning, a grey one for a change, and a fine rain is falling over Dolphin Square as I board my bus. As it happens, I arrive early at the Stables, but Tabitha is already sitting waiting for me, very pleased with herself for having acquired a sheaf of Special Branch surveillance reports which she claims landed on her doorstep. She doesn’t know whether they’re authentic, of course, or whether she could ever make use of them down the line, but I mustn’t on any account bubble to anyone that she’s got them. All of which tells me she has a friend in Special Branch, and the reports are exactly what they say they are.

‘So let’s kick off with the first day of live action, this one. No hint of who actually

asked

Special Branch to put its dogs on to Alec. Just, at the request of Box – Box, I gather, being police-speak for the Circus in those days. Yes?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you have any idea

who

in Box might have placed the request to Special Branch?’

‘Joint, probably.’

‘Who particularly in Joint?’

‘Could have been any one of them. Bland, Alleline, Esterhase. Even Haydon himself. More likely he delegated it to one of his underlings so that he didn’t get his feet wet.’

‘And Special Branch to conduct the surveillance, and not

your dear friends in the Security Service? Is that normal procedure?’

‘Absolutely.’

‘Because?’

‘Because the two Services didn’t like each other.’

‘And our splendid police?’

‘Disliked the Security Service for meddling and the Circus because we were a bunch of stuck-up pansies whose mission in life was to break the law.’

She thought about this, then about me, frankly studying me with her sad blue eyes.

‘You’re very

assured

sometimes. Anyone might think you had superior knowledge. We’re going to have to watch out for that. A junior official caught up in the slipstream of historic events is what we’re after. Not somebody with a big secret to hide.’

*

Commander Special Branch to Box. Top Secret & Guard.

Subject: OPERATION GALAXY

.

Prior to taking up their positions my officers made discreet background enquiries regarding the known activities of subject couple, as per their mode of employment, lifestyle and cohabitation.

Both parties are currently employed full time at the Bayswater Library for Psychical Research, a privately funded institute managed by Miss Eleanora Crail, a single woman aged fifty-eight of eccentric manner and appearance, not previously known to police. Unaware that she was confiding in one of my officers, Miss Crail freely volunteered the following background information regarding the pair.

VENUS, whom she refers to as her ‘darling Lizzie’, has

been in her full employment as an assistant librarian for the last six months and in the view of Miss Crail is without blemish, being punctual, respectful, intelligent, clean in her habits, a fast and conscientious learner with good handwriting, and is ‘well spoken considering her class’. Miss Crail has no objection to her Communist views, of which she makes no secret, ‘provided she doesn’t bring them into my library’.

MARS, whom she calls her ‘nasty Mr L’, has been in her full employment as second assistant librarian pending the redesign of the library, and is not in her opinion ‘at all satisfactory’. She has twice complained to the Bayswater Labour Exchange regarding his behaviour, without result. She describes him as slovenly, discourteous, overstays his lunch hours, and frequently ‘smells of alcoholic beverage’. She resents his habit of affecting a thick Irish accent when rebuked, and she would have dismissed him after one week had not her darling Lizzie (Venus) interceded on his behalf, there being an ‘unhealthy’ mutual attraction between the two, despite their differences in age and outlook, which in Miss Crail’s opinion may already have flowered into full-on intimacy. Why else, after a mere two weeks of acquaintance, would they arrive simultaneously in the morning, plus on more than one occasion she has observed them holding hands, and not just because they are passing books.

Asked casually by my officer what previous employment Mars had claimed, she replied that according to the Employment Exchange he had been ‘some kind of insignificant clerk in a banking house’ to which she could only say that no wonder the banks were what they were coming to these days.

Surveillance.

For their first day of observation my officers selected the second Friday of the month, this being the day on which the

Goldhawk Road Branch of the British Communist Party sponsors its Open Day to all shades of left-wing opinion at the Oddfellows’ Hall, Goldhawk Road, Venus having recently transferred her Party affiliations from Cable Street to Goldhawk Road on taking up residence in Bayswater. Regular attendees include members of the International Socialists, Militant, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, plus two undercover officers from my own Force – one male, one female – thereby providing cover for toilets.

On departing the library at 1730 hours, the target couple paused at the Queen’s Arms in Bayswater Street, where Mars drank a large whisky and Venus a Babycham, arriving as anticipated at the Oddfellows’ Hall at 1912 hours, the theme of the evening being ‘Peace at What Price?’ and the hall, which accommodates 508, containing on this occasion an estimated 130 persons of varying skin colours and stations in life. Mars and Venus duly seated themselves side by side at the rear, close to the exit, with Venus, a popular figure among the comrades, receiving smiles and nods.

After a short opening address by R. Palme Dutt, Communist activist and journalist, who then immediately left the hall, lesser speakers took the stand, the last being Bert Arthur Lownes, owner of Lownes the People’s Grocer, Bayswater Road, self-styled Trotskyist and well known to the police for incitement to violence, affray, and other acts calculated to cause a breach of the peace in a public place.

Until Lownes took to the microphone, Mars had behaved in a sullen and bored manner, yawning, nodding off and periodically refreshing himself from a flask, contents unknown. The hectoring manner of Lownes, however, roused him from his slumbers, to quote my officer, prompting him unexpectedly to raise his arm in order to catch the eye of the Chairman conducting the meeting, also treasurer of the Goldhawk Road

Branch, Bill Flint, who duly invited Mars to state his name then put his question to the speaker in accordance with Open Day rules. My officers’ records of the exchange, taken during and after the meeting, are uniform and read as follows:

Mars

[Irish accent. States name]

:

Librarian. Here’s a question for you, Comrade. You’re telling us we should lay off arming ourselves to the teeth against the Soviet threat because the Sovs aren’t threatening anybody. Am I right there? Get out of the arms race now, and spend the money on beer?

[Laughter.]

Lownes

:

Well, that’s an over-simplification, if ever I heard one, Comrade. But all right. If you want to put it like that. Yes.

Mars

:

Whereas, according to you, the real enemy we should be worrying about is America. American imperialism. American capitalism. American aggression. Or is that another over-simplification I’m making?

Lownes

:

What’s your question, Comrade?

Mars

:

Well it’s this, you see, Comrade. Should we not be arming ourselves to the teeth against the

American threat

, if they’re the boys to be afraid of?

Lownes’s reply drowned by laughter, angry jeers and scattered applause. Mars and Venus exit through rear door. On the pavement, they at first appear to engage in a lively altercation. However, their differences are short-lived, and they walk arm in arm to the bus stop, pausing only to embrace.

Addendum.

On comparing notebooks, two of my officers separately recorded the presence of the same well-dressed thirty-year-old man of medium height, wavy fair hair and effeminate

appearance who, having left the meeting directly after the pair, followed them to the bus stop and boarded the same bus, thereupon seating himself on the lower deck while the pair favoured the upper deck, enabling Mars to smoke. When the pair alighted, the same individual also alighted, and having seen them as far as their apartment building and waited until a light appeared on the third floor, he repaired forthwith to a phone box. My officers not being under instruction to pursue ancillary targets, no attempt was made to identify or house this individual.

*

‘So the grand plan was working. The beasts of the forest were starting to sniff at your tethered goat. As represented by our well-dressed thirty-year-old man of effeminate appearance. Yes?’

‘Not my goat. Control’s.’

‘Not Smiley’s?’

‘When it came to planting Alec on the opposition, Smiley played second fiddle.’

‘Which was the way he wanted it?’

‘Presumably.’

I’m detecting a new Tabitha. Or the real one, showing her claws.

‘Had you seen this report before?’

‘Heard about it. The substance.’

‘Here in this house? Together with your Windfall-cleared colleagues?’

‘Yes.’

‘So, great rejoicing all round. Hurrah, they’ve taken the bait.’

‘Pretty much.’

‘You don’t sound very sure. You weren’t feeling queasy about the operation at all, you personally? Wishing you could get out of it, and not seeing how?’

‘We were on course. The op was going to plan. Why should I be feeling queasy?’

She seemed about to question this assertion, then changed her mind.

‘I

love

this one,’ she said, pushing another report at me.

*

Commander Special Branch to Box. Top Secret & Guard.

Subject: OPERATION GALAXY

.

REPORT No. 6

.

Unprovoked assault on Bert Arthur LOWNES, owner of LOWNES THE PEOPLE’S GROCER, a business run on cooperative lines in the Bayswater Road, at 1745 hours, 21 April 1962.

The following information was taken informally from witnesses not called for trial in view of the uncontested nature of the case.

Over the week preceding the incident, it appears that Mars had made a habit of calling in at Lownes’s emporium at all odd hours of day in an inebriated state, ostensibly to make a purchase on a personal monthly savings account kept in the name of Venus, to which he had access, but in reality to engage in verbal exchanges with Lownes conducted in a loud and provocative Irish voice. On the day in question, my officer observed Mars loading up a basket with a large quantity of comestibles, including whisky, in the approximate value of £45. On being asked whether the intended purchases were to be paid for in cash, or debited to the Venus account, Mars responded with, I quote, ‘Credit, you arsehole, what d’you effing think?’ plus words to the effect that being a fully paid-up member of the starving masses, he was entitled to his fair share of the world’s riches. Ignoring Lownes’s warning that, the Venus account being overdrawn, no further credit was

available, he thereupon advanced towards the main exit carrying the heavily laden basket of unpaid-for goods in front of him. At which point the said Lownes advanced from behind the counter and in robust language ordered Mars to give up his basket forthwith and remove himself from the premises. Instead of which, without further argument, Mars delivered a rapid succession of blows to Lownes’s stomach and groin area, culminating in an elbow-blow to the right face.

Making no attempt to escape while customers screamed and Mrs Lownes dialled 999, Mars exhibited no remorse, but continued to pour insults on his luckless victim.

As one of my younger officers afterwards remarked, he was highly grateful not to have been present at the scene since he would have felt obligated to cast aside cover and intervene. Moreover, he frankly doubted his ability to confront the assailant single-handed.

In the event, uniformed police quickly attended, and the assailant did not resist arrest.

*

‘So my question is: did you personally know in advance that Alec was going to beat up poor Mr Lownes?’

‘In principle.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘They wanted a moment when Alec burned his last bridge. He’d come out of prison, be on his uppers, have no way back.’

‘They being Control and Smiley.’

‘Yes.’

‘But not you. It wasn’t your own brilliant idea, cooked up by you and poached by your elders and betters?’

‘No.’

‘What worries me is that you personally might have put Alec

up to it, you see. Or the other side will suggest you did. Urged your poor broken friend to even greater depths of depravity. But you didn’t. Which is a relief. The same with the money Alec filched from Circus’s Banking Section. That was six other people telling him to do it, not you?’

‘Control, I assume.’

‘Good. So Alec was trailing his coat for his superiors, you were his pal, not his evil genius. And Alec was aware of that, presumably. Yes?’

‘I assume so. Yes.’

‘So did Alec also know that you were Windfall cleared?’

‘Of course he bloody didn’t! How could he? He didn’t know anything

about

Windfall!’

‘Yes, well, I was afraid you’d be indignant. I’m going off to do some homework if you don’t mind, while you browse through this horror. The English translation is dire. But so, I’m told, is the original text. Makes one long for Special Branch’s magic way with words.’

EXTRACTS FROM HITHERTO UNRELEASED STASI FILES MARKED NOT TO BE RELEASED TILL 2050 AS EXCERPTED AND TRANSLATED BY ZARA N. POTTER ASSOCIATES, COURT-APPROVED INTERPRETERS AND TRANSLATORS AS COMMISSIONED BY MESSRS SEGROVE, LOVE & BARNABAS, SOLICITORS AT LAW, LONDON W.C

.

As the door closed after her, I was seized by an irrational anger. Where had she gone, damn her? Why did she walk out on me like that? To render a breathless account to her pals in the bastion? Is that the game she’s playing? They hand her a bunch of Special Branch reports and say:

try these on him for size

? Is that how it works? But it wasn’t how it worked. I knew that. Tabitha

was every defendant’s good angel. And her soft sad eyes saw a sight further than Bunny’s or Laura’s. I knew that too.

*

Alec is propped against the grimy window, peering out. I am sitting in the only armchair. We are in an upstairs bedroom of a commercial hotel in Paddington that lets out rooms by the hour. This morning he called me on an unlisted line at Marylebone reserved for joes: ‘Meet me at the Duchess, six o’clock.’ The Duchess of Albany, Praed Street, one of his old haunts. He is haggard, red-eyed and twitchy. The glass in his drinking hand trembles. Short, grudging sentences, bitten out between pauses.

‘There’s this girl,’ he is saying. ‘Bloody Communist. Can’t blame her. Not where she comes from. Anyway, who blames who for what any more?’

Wait. Don’t ask. He’ll tell you what he wants.

‘I told Control. Keep her out of it. I don’t trust the old bastard. Never know what he’s up to. Wonder whether he does himself.’ Long contemplation of street below. Continued sympathetic silence from me. ‘Anyway, where the fuck’s George hiding?’ – swinging round on me accusingly. ‘I had a treff with Control in Bywater Street the other night. George didn’t bloody show up.’

‘George is doing a lot of Berlin, just now,’ I say untruthfully, and again I wait.

Alec has decided to mimic Control’s donnish bray:

‘

I want you to get rid of Mundt for me, Alec. Make the world a better place. Are you up for that, old man?

Course I’m bloody up for it. Bastard killed Riemeck, didn’t he? Killed half my bloody network. Had a go at George too, a year or two back. Can’t have that, can we, Pierrot?’

‘No, we can’t,’ I agree heartily.

Did he catch a false note in my voice? He takes a pull of Scotch, and goes on staring at me.

‘You don’t happen to have

met

her by any chance, Pierrot?’

‘Met who?’

‘My girl. You know bloody well who I mean.’

‘How the hell could I have met her, Alec? What are you bleating about? Jesus, man.’

He turns away at last. ‘Someone she’d met, a man. Sounded a bit like you. That’s all.’

I shake my head in mystification, shrug, smile. Alec goes back to his contemplations, peering down at the passers-by on the pavement as they scurry through the rain.

*

SUBJECT: FALSE ACCUSATIONS MADE AGAINST COMRADE HANS-DIETER MUNDT BY FASCIST BRITISH INTELLIGENCE AGENTS. FULL, TOTAL AND COMPLETE EXONERATION OF H-D MUNDT BY PEOPLE’S TRIBUNAL. LIQUIDATION OF IMPERIALIST SPIES WHILE ATTEMPTING TO ESCAPE. SUBMITTED TO SED PRAESIDIUM.

28 OCTOBER 1962

.

If the Star Chamber that sat in judgement over Hans-Dieter Mundt was a travesty, the official account of it was worse. The prologue might have been written by Mundt himself. Perhaps it was.

The odious and corrupt counter-revolutionary agitator Leamas was a known degenerate, a drunken bourgeois opportunist, liar, womanizer, thug, obsessed by money and a hatred of progress.

The devoted Stasi operatives who had procured the false

testimony of this evil Judas had done so in good faith and could not be blamed for introducing a viper into the heartland of those dedicated to combating the forces of Fascist imperialism.

The trial was a triumph of Socialist justice and a call for ever-greater vigilance against the intrigues of capitalist spies and provocateurs.

The woman who called herself Elizabeth Gold was a political simpleton of pro-Israel sympathies, brainwashed by the British Secret Service, besotted by her older lover and lured wide-eyed into a web of Western intrigue.

Even after the impostor Leamas had made a full confession of his crimes, the woman Gold had treacherously assisted him in his escape, and paid the full price for her duplicity.

And a closing word of congratulation to that fearless guardian of Democratic Socialism who didn’t hesitate to shoot her down as she made her escape.

*

‘So, Peter. A quick replay of the truly awful kangaroo trial in plain English. Are we up for that?’

‘Whatever.’

But her voice was brisk and purposeful, and she had plonked herself down directly in front of me across the table like a People’s Commissar.

‘Alec arrives in the Star Chamber as Fiedler’s prize witness with best-laid plans to dish the dirt on Mundt. Yes? Fiedler tells the court all about the bogus money trail that leads to Mundt’s front door. Yes? He makes a whole mouthful of Mundt’s time as a pseudo-diplomat in England which, according to Fiedler, was when he was picked up and turned by the forces of reactionary imperialism, alias the Circus. Then we have a list of all the shocking State secrets Mundt has allegedly sold to his

Western masters for his thirty pieces of silver, and it’s all going down a storm with the tribunal’s judges. Until

what

?’

The sweet smile is long gone.

‘Until Liz, I suppose,’ I reply grudgingly.

‘Until Liz, indeed. Up pops poor Liz and, because she doesn’t know any better, she puts the kibosh on everything her beloved Alec has just told the court. Did you know she was going to do that?’

‘Of course I didn’t! How the devil could I?’

‘How could you indeed? And did you notice, by any chance, what actually

sank

Liz –

and

her Alec? It was the moment when she brought up George Smiley’s name. Her absolutely innocent admission to the Star Chamber that one

George Smiley

, accompanied by a younger man, had dropped in to see her soon after Alec’s mysterious disappearance, and

told

her that her Alec was doing a marvellous job – implicitly for his

country

– and everything was going to be hunkydory. Your George then left his

visiting card

with her to make sure she didn’t forget.

Smiley

being anyway a name effortlessly remembered, and by no means unknown to the Stasi.

Such

an inept thing to do, don’t you think, for a sly old fox like George?’

I said something to the effect that even George could slip up now and then.

‘And were you the younger man who tagged along with him, by any chance?’

‘No I wasn’t! How could I be? I was

Marcel

– remember?’

‘So who was it?’

‘Jim, probably. Prideaux. He’d come across.’

‘Across?’

‘From Joint to Covert.’

‘And was also Windfall cleared?’

‘I believe so.’

‘Only believe?’

‘He was cleared.’

‘Then tell me this, if you’re allowed to. When Alec Leamas was sent off on his mission to shaft Mundt at any price, who did he believe was the

anonymous source

who was providing the Circus with all its lovely Windfall material?’

‘No idea. Never discussed it with him. Probably Control did. Don’t know.’

‘Let me put it another way, if it’s simpler. Would it be fair to say, on balance, by inference, by a process of elimination, by certain hints half dropped, that by the time Alec Leamas sets out on his fatal voyage he has taken it into his fuddled head that Josef Fiedler is the vital source he is protecting, which is why the odious Hans-Dieter Mundt has to be eliminated?’

I heard my voice rise and couldn’t stop it:

‘How the

hell

am

I

supposed to know what

Alec

thought or didn’t think? Alec was a

fieldman

. You don’t think round corners if you’re a fieldman. There’s a Cold War on. You’ve got a job to do. You get on with it!’

Was I talking about Alec? Or myself?

‘So help me solve this knotty little conundrum, if you will. You, P. Guillam, were Windfall cleared. Yes? One of the very, very few. Can I go on? I can. Alec was emphatically

not

so cleared. He knew there was an East German super-source, or bunch of sources, with the generic name Windfall. He knew Covert had the running of him, her or them. But he didn’t know anything about this place we’re sitting in now, or what it was actually up to. True?’

‘I suppose so.’

‘And it was vital that he should

not

be Windfall cleared, which has been your refrain from the outset.’

‘

So?

’ – in my dead weary voice.

‘Well, if

you

were Windfall cleared, and Alec Leamas

wasn’t

Windfall cleared, what did

you

know that

Alec

wasn’t allowed to

know? Or are we exercising our right to silence? I wouldn’t recommend it. Not with the All-Party lot waiting to tear into you.

Or

when you’re sitting in front of a tame jury.’

*

This is what Alec went through, I’m thinking: defending a hopeless case and watching it fall apart in his hands, with the difference that nobody’s dying except of old age. I’m clinging for dear life to a great untenable lie I promised I’d never betray, and it’s sinking under my weight. But Tabitha has no mercy:

‘So our

feelings

. Can we talk about

them

for a change? So much more illuminating than facts, I always think. What did

you

feel, you yourself, when you heard that poor Liz suddenly stood up and trashed all Alec’s marvellous hard work? Trashed poor Fiedler too, while she was about it?’

‘I

didn’t

hear.’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘Nobody picked up the phone and said,

heard the latest about the trial?

First thing we got was an East German newsflash. Traitor unmasked. That was Fiedler down the drain. Senior security official totally exonerated. That was Mundt in the clover. Then we got the prisoners’ dramatic escape, and a nationwide hunt for them. And then we got—’

‘The shootings at the Wall, presumably?’

‘George was there. George saw it. I didn’t.’

‘And your

feelings

again? As you sat here, in this very room, or stood here, paced, or whatever you did, and the awful news came trickling through in bits and pieces? Now hear

this

, now hear

that

? On and on?’

‘What d’you think I bloody did? Whistled up the champagne?’ Pause, while I collect myself. ‘I thought, Jesus God, that poor girl. Caught up in it all. Refugee family. Head over heels in love

with Alec. Meant no harm to anyone. What a bloody awful thing to have to do.’

‘

Have

to? You mean she

intended

to appear before the tribunal? She

intended

to save the Nazi and kill the Jew? That doesn’t sound like Liz at all. Whoever would have told her to do a thing like that?’

‘Nobody bloody told her!’

‘The poor girl didn’t even know why she was at the trial. She’d been invited to a comrades’ jamboree in the sunny GDR, and all of a sudden she’s testifying against her lover in a kangaroo court. How did you

feel

when you heard that? You personally. Then to hear they’d both been mown down at the Wall. Shot while escaping, allegedly. Anguish, it must have been. Utter, surely?’

‘Course it was.’

‘For all of you?’

‘All.’

‘Control too?’

‘Not an expert on Control’s feelings, I’m afraid.’

That sad smile of hers. It’s come back.

‘And your Uncle George?’

‘What about him?’

‘Just how did he take it?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Why not?’ – sharply.

‘He disappeared. Took himself down to Cornwall alone.’

‘Why?’

‘To walk, I assume. It’s where he goes.’

‘For how long?’

‘A few days. Maybe a week.’

‘And when he came back. Was he an altered man?’

‘George doesn’t alter. He just gets his composure back.’

‘And he did?’

‘He didn’t talk about it.’

She thought about this, seemed reluctant to let the subject go.

‘And no little smidgeon of triumph

anywhere

?’ she resumed after further thought. ‘On the

other

front? The

operational

front – no sense anywhere of – well, that was the collateral damage, it’s tragic and it’s awful, but mission accomplished nonetheless. Nothing of

that

kind, so far as we’re aware?’

Nothing has changed. Not her gentle voice, not her creamy smile. Her manner, if anything, even kindlier than before.

‘What I’m asking you is: when

did

you know, in your own mind, that Mundt’s triumphant vindication was

not

the fuck-up it was made out to be, but a grand-scale intelligence coup in disguise? And that Liz Gold was the necessary catalyst that made it all happen? It’s about your defence, you see. Your intent, your foreknowledge, your complicity. You could stand or fall by any one of them.’

A silence for the dead. Broken by Tabitha in a voice of casual enquiry.

‘You know what I dreamed last night?’

‘Why the hell should I?’

‘I was doing my due diligence, wading through that endless draft report that Smiley made you write and decided not to circulate. And I got to wondering about that peculiar Swiss ornithologist who turned out to be an undercover member of the Circus’s domestic security arm. And then I asked myself

why

didn’t Smiley want your report circulated? So I did some more due diligence, and nosed around wherever I was allowed to nose, and for the life of me I couldn’t turn up a single thing about anybody testing the defences of Camp 4 over that period. And absolutely

nothing

about an overzealous undercover operator who punched out Camp 4’s security guards. So it didn’t exactly take an epiphany to stitch together the rest. No death certificate for Tulip. Well, we know the poor girl hadn’t landed

officially, but not many doctors like putting their names to a bogus death certificate, even Circus doctors.’

I glowered into the distance, and tried to pretend I thought she was mad.

‘So my reading is: Mundt was sent over to murder Tulip. He murdered her, but the good Lord wasn’t on his side and he got caught. George put the hard word on him. Spy for us or else. He does. Cornucopia of lovely intelligence, suddenly at risk. Fiedler looks like rumbling him. Enter Control with his revolting plan. George may not have cared for it but, as ever with George, duty called. Nobody reckoned on Liz and Alec getting shot. That would have been Mundt’s big idea: shoot the messengers and get a better night’s sleep. Not even Control could have spotted that one on the horizon. Your George went straight into retirement, vowing never to spy again. Which we love him for, although it didn’t last. He still had to come back and catch Bill Haydon, which he did wonderfully well, bless him. And you were for him all the way, which we can only applaud.’

Nothing came to mind, so I said nothing.

‘And to twist the knife in what was already a very large wound, no sooner had the Star Chamber done its business than Hans-Dieter was summoned to a power conference in Moscow, never to be seen again. So goodbye to any last hopes that he might get his nose under the wire at Centre, and tell us who the Circus traitor was. Presumably Bill Haydon had got there ahead of him. Can we talk a little more about

you

?’

I couldn’t stop her, so why try?

‘If I was allowed to argue that Windfall was

not

the cock-up of all time but a fiendishly clever operation that was wildly productive of top-grade intelligence and only went off the rails at the last minute, I have very little doubt that the All-Partygoers would roll over and put their paws in the air. Liz and Alec? Tragic, yes, but in the circumstances, acceptable losses in the cause of

the greater good. Am I winning? I’m not. Oh dear. Only suggesting. Because I don’t think I can defend you any other way. In fact I’m quite sure I can’t.’

She had started to pack her things together: spectacles, cardigan, paper tissues, Special Branch reports, Stasi reports.

‘You spoke, heart?’

Did I? Neither of us is sure. She’s called a halt to her packing. She’s holding her briefcase open on her lap, waiting for me to speak. Eternity ring on second finger. Odd I haven’t noticed it till now. Wonder who the husband is. Probably dead.

‘Look here.’

‘Still looking, heart.’

‘Accepting for one moment your absurd hypothesis—’

‘That the fiendishly clever operation worked—?’

‘Accepting it,

theoretically

, which I absolutely do not – are you seriously telling me that – in the impossible event that documentary proof to that effect should ever come to light—’

‘Which we know it won’t, but if it ever did, it would have to be cast iron—’

‘Are you telling me that in such an improbable eventuality, the charges – the accusations – litigation – the whole bang shooting-match against whomever – me, George, if he can be found, even the Service – would go away?’

‘You find me the evidence, I’ll find you the judge. The vultures are gathering as we speak. If you don’t show up for the hearing, the All-Partygoers will fear the worst, and act accordingly. I asked Bunny for your passport. The brute won’t part with it. But he will extend your stay at Dolphin Square on the same miserly terms. All to be discussed. Will same time tomorrow morning suit you?’

‘Could we make it ten?’

‘I’ll be on the dot,’ she replied, and I said I would too.

13

When the truth catches up with you, don’t be a hero, run. But I took care to walk, slowly, into Dolphin Square and up to the safe flat I knew I would never sleep in again. Draw curtains, sigh resignedly for the television set, close bedroom door. Extract French passport from dead letter box behind fire precautions notice. There is a calming ritual to escape. Don clean set of clothes. Shove razor in raincoat pocket, leave the rest in place. Make my way down to grill room, order light meal, settle to my boring book like a man reconciled to a solitary evening. Chat up Hungarian waitress in case she has reporting responsibility. Actually I live in France, I tell her, but I’m over here to talk business with a bunch of English lawyers, can she imagine anything worse, ha ha? Pay bill. Saunter into courtyard with retired ladies in white hats and croquet skirts, seated in pairs along garden benches, enjoy the unseasonable sunshine. Prepare to join exodus to Embankment, never to return.

Except that I do neither of these last two things, because by now I have spotted Christoph, son of Alec, in his long black coat and Homburg hat, lounging twenty yards away on a bench all to himself, with one arm thrown affectionately along the back of it, and one large leg slung over the other for leisure, and his right hand buried, ostentatiously to my eye, in his overcoat pocket. He is staring straight at me and he is smiling, which is

not something I have seen him do before, whether as a child watching a football match or as a man eating steak and chips. And perhaps the smile is new to him too, because it comes with a peculiar whiteness in the face, intensified by the blackness of his hat, and there is a flicker to his smile like a faulty light bulb that doesn’t know whether it’s on or off.

And I am as much at a loss as he appears to be. A tiredness has come over me which I suspect is fear. Ignore him? Give him a cheery wave and continue with my planned escape? He will come after me. He will raise a hue and cry. He’s got a plan too, but what is it?

The sickly-pale smile continues to flicker. There is something about his lower jaw, an irritation he seems unable to control. And has he actually

broken

his right arm? Is that why it’s jammed so awkwardly in his coat pocket? He makes no effort to get up. I set out towards him, closely observed by the seated ladies in white hats. In the whole courtyard, we are the only two males and Christoph cuts an eccentric, not to say gargantuan figure, occupying a whole stage to himself. What is my business with him? they are wondering. So am I. I come to a halt in front of him. Nothing of him moves. He could be one of those bronze statues of great men you see seated in public places: a Churchill, a Roosevelt. The same moist complexion, the same unconvincing smile.

The statue comes slowly to life in a way that other statues don’t. He uncrosses his legs, then with his right shoulder high and his right hand still jammed in his overcoat pocket, shuffles his big body until there is space on the bench for me at his left side. And yes, he is sickly pale, and agitated around the jaw, now smiling, now grimacing, and his gaze is feverish.

‘Who told you where to find me, Christoph?’ I ask him as cheerfully as I may, because by now I am grappling with the far-fetched notion that Bunny or Laura, or even Tabitha, has

put him on to me, with the aim of negotiating some other kind of underhand deal between the Service and its litigants.

‘I remembered’ – the smile widening with dreamy pride – ‘I’m a memory genius, okay? The brain of fucking Germany. So we have our nice meal and you tell me to go fuck myself. Okay, you didn’t tell me. I go away. I sit down with my friends. I smoke a little, I snort a little, I listen. Who do I hear? Want a guess?’

I shake my head. I’m smiling too.

‘My daddy. I hear my daddy. His voice. On one of our little walks together round the prison courtyard. I’m doing time, he’s trying to play catch-up, be the ever-faithful father he never was. So he’s talking about himself, entertaining me, telling me about the years we didn’t spend together, like pretending we did. What it was like to be a spook. How special you all were, how dedicated. Such naughty boys you were. And you know what? He’s talking about

Hood House

. The house of hoods. This joke you all had. How the Circus owned these crappy safe flats in a place called Hood House. We’re all hoods, so that’s where they put us.’ The smile becomes a scowl of indignation. ‘You know your shit Service has even got you

registered

here under your own name, for fuck’s sake? P. Guillam. How’s

that

for security? Did you

know

that?’ he demanded.

No. I didn’t know. Neither was I marvelling, as I should have done, that in more than half a century, the Service hadn’t thought to change its habits.

‘So why don’t you tell me what you’ve come for?’ I asked him, unsettled by his smile, which he seemed unable to shake off.

‘To kill you, Pierrot,’ he explained, with no lift or variation to his voice. ‘To shoot your fucking head off. Bingo. You’re dead.’

‘Here?’ I asked. ‘In front of all these people? How?’

With a Walther P38 semi-automatic pistol: the one he has drawn from the right-hand pocket of his overcoat and is now brandishing in plain sight; and only after plenty of time for me

to admire it does he restore it to his overcoat pocket while keeping his hand on it and, in the best tradition of gangster movies, pointing the barrel at me through the folds of his coat. What the ladies in white hats make of this display, if anything at all, I shall never know. Perhaps we’re a film unit. Perhaps we’re just silly grown-up boys, playing a game with a toy gun.

‘Good gracious me,’ I exclaim – a term I had never consciously used in my life until now – ‘wherever did you get

that

from?’

The question annoyed him, extinguishing the smile.

‘You think I don’t know wise guys in this fucking town? People who will lend me a gun like

that

?’ he demanded, flicking the thumb and forefinger of his free hand in my face.

Prompted by the word

lend

, I peered instinctively round for the rightful owner, since I was not imagining a long-term loan: which was how my eye came to settle on a Volvo saloon repaired in various colours and parked on a double yellow line directly opposite the archway on the Embankment side; and its one bald male driver with both hands on the wheel, staring hard ahead of him through the windscreen.

‘Do you have a particular reason for killing me, Christoph?’ I asked him, maintaining as best I could the same note of casual enquiry. ‘I’ve told the powers that be of your offer, if that’s what you’re worried about,’ I threw in mendaciously. ‘They’re thinking about it. Her Majesty’s bean-counters don’t cough up a million euros overnight, naturally.’

‘I was the best thing in his lousy rotten life. He told me that.’

Spoken in a low tone, forced from between rigid teeth.

‘I never doubted that he loved you,’ I said.

‘You killed him. You lied to my dad and you killed him. Your friend, my dad.’

‘Christoph, that’s not true. Your dad and Liz Gold weren’t killed by me or anyone else in the Circus. They were killed by Hans-Dieter Mundt of the Stasi.’

‘You’re all sick. All you spies. You’re not the cure, you’re the fucking disease. Jerk-off artists, playing jerk-off games, thinking you’re the biggest fucking wise guys in the universe. You’re nothings, hear me? You live in the fucking dark because you can’t handle the fucking daylight. Him too. He told me that.’

‘He did? When?’

‘In prison, where the fuck d’you think? My first prison. Kids’ prison. Pervs, cokeheads and me.

Somebody to see you, Christoph. Says he’s your best pal

. They cuff me and take me to him. It’s my dad. Hear this, he says. You’re a lost cause and there’s fuck all that I or anybody else can do for you any more. But Alec Leamas loves his son, so don’t fucking forget it. You speak?’

‘No.’

‘Stand the fuck up. Walk. That way. Through the archway. Like the rest of the people. You fuck with me, I kill you.’

I stand up. I walk towards the archway. He follows me, his right hand still in his pocket and the gun pointed at me through the cloth. There are things you’re supposed to do in these cases, like wheel round and catch him with your elbow before he has time to fire. We rehearsed it with water pistols at Sarratt, and more often than not the water squirted past you on to the gym mat. But this isn’t a water pistol, and it isn’t Sarratt. Christoph’s walking four feet behind me, which is where the well-taught gunman should be.

We have passed through the archway. The bald man sitting in the multi-coloured Volvo still has his hands on the steering wheel and although we’re walking straight towards him he pays us no attention, he’s too busy staring ahead. Does Christoph intend to take me for the proverbial ride before he puts me out of my misery? If he does, my best chance of breaking free will come when he tries to get me into the Volvo. I’d done that once

long ago: broken a man’s hand for him with the car door when he was trying to get me to climb into the back seat.

Other cars are passing in both directions, and we have to wait for a gap in the traffic before we cross the road, and I’m wondering whether I’ll get a chance to grapple with him and in the worst case shove him at an oncoming car. We’ve reached the opposite pavement and I’m still wondering. We’ve also walked past the Volvo without a sign or word passing between Christoph and its bald driver, so maybe I’ve got it wrong and they’re nothing to do with each other, and whoever lent Christoph the Walther is sitting in Hackney or somewhere, playing a game of cards with his fellow wise guys.

We are standing on the Embankment and there’s a brick parapet about five feet high and I’m standing facing it, with the river in front of me and the lights of Lambeth on the other bank because it’s dusk already, still mild for the time of day, a nice breeze coming up and quite big boats gliding by, and I have my hands on the parapet and my back to him and I’m hoping that he’ll come close enough for me to try the water-pistol trick, but I can’t feel his presence, and he’s not talking.

Keeping my hands wide where he can see them, I turn slowly round and he’s standing six feet away from me, still with his hand in his pocket. He’s breathing in gulps and his big pale face is moist and luminous in the half-light. People pass us by, but they don’t pass between us. Something about us tells them to step around us. More accurately it’s something about Christoph’s bulk, overcoat and Homburg hat. Is he brandishing the gun again, or is it in his pocket? Is he still adopting his gangster posture? It occurs to me, late in the day, that the man who dresses like that wants to be feared; and the man who wants to be feared is afraid himself, and perhaps this is what gives me the bravado to challenge him.

‘Come on, Christoph, do it,’ I say, as a middle-aged couple

scurry past. ‘Shoot me, if that’s what you’ve come for. What’s another year to a man of my age? I’ll settle for a good clean death any time. Shoot me. Then spend the rest of your life congratulating yourself while you rot in jail. You’ve seen old men die in prison. Be another.’

By now the muscles in my back are squirming and there’s a pulse beating in my ears and I couldn’t have told you whether it came from a passing barge or was something going on inside my own head. My mouth had gone dry from all the speaking and my gaze must have misted over, because it took me a while to acknowledge that Christoph was beside me, slouched over the parapet, retching and sobbing in gulps of pain and anger.

I put an arm across his back and eased his right hand free of his pocket. When it came out with no gun in it, I drew out the gun for him and slung it as far as I could into the river, but heard nothing in reply. He had his arms on the parapet and had sunk his head into them. I fished around in his other pocket, on the off-chance that he had provided himself with a spare magazine to embolden him, and sure enough he had. I had just thrown that into the river too when the bald man from the multi-coloured Volvo, who by contrast with Christoph was very small and looked half starved, seized him by the waist from behind and hauled at him, to no effect.

Between us we prised him away from the parapet and between us we manhandled him as far as the Volvo. As we did so, he began to howl. I made to open the passenger door, but my companion-in-arms had already opened the back door. Between us we bundled him in and slammed the door after him, damping but not silencing the howls. The Volvo drove away. I stood alone on the pavement. Slowly the traffic and the sounds returned. I was alive. I hailed a cab and asked the driver to take me to the British Museum.

*

First the cobbled alley. Then the private car park that stank of rotting rubbish. Then the six kissing gates: ours was the end one on the right. If Christoph’s howls were still ringing in my head, I refused to hear them. The fastener on the gate squeaked. I heard that all right. It always had done, however many times we oiled it. If we knew Control was coming we’d leave the gate open so we wouldn’t have to listen to the old devil’s sour comment about being heralded by the clashing of cymbals. Slabs of York stone. Mendel and I had laid them. And sowed grass between. Our birdhouse. No bird turned away. Three steps to the kitchen door, and Millie McCraig’s motionless shadow looking down on me through the window, holding her hand up, forbidding me to enter.

We stand in an improvised garden shed, built against the wall to shelter her dustbins and the remnants of her ladies’ upright bicycle, exiled from the house by Laura, draped in a tarpaulin and stripped of its wheels for security. We are speaking in murmurs. Perhaps we always did. The classified cat watches from the kitchen window.

‘I don’t know what they’ve put where, Peter,’ she confides. ‘I don’t trust my telephone. Well, I never did. I don’t trust my walls either. I don’t know what they’ve got these days, nor where they put it.’

‘You heard what Tabitha said to me about evidence?’

‘Part, I did. Enough.’

‘Have you still got everything we gave you? The original statements, correspondence, whatever else George asked you to hide away?’

‘Microdotted by myself. Cached. I have too.’

‘Where?’

‘In my garden. In my birdhouse. In their cassettes. In oilskins. In that’ –

that

being the remnants of her bicycle. ‘They don’t

know where to

look

these days, Peter. They’ve no proper

training

,’ she adds indignantly.

‘Including George’s interview with Windfall at Camp 4? The recruitment interview? The deal?’

‘I do. As part of my classic collection of gramophone records. Transferred for me by Oliver Mendel. I listen to them now and then. For George’s voice. I still love it. Are you married at all, Peter?’

‘Just the farm and the animals. Who have you got, Millie?’

‘I’ve my memories. And my Maker. The new lot have given me till Monday to get out. I’ll not keep them waiting.’

‘Where will you go?’

‘I’ll die. Same as you. I’ve a sister in Aberdeen. I’ll not let you have them, Peter, if that’s what you’ve come for.’

‘Not for the greater good?’

‘There’s no greater good without George’s say-so. There never was.’

‘Where is he?’

‘I don’t know. And I’d not tell you if I did. Alive, for sure. The cards I get on my birthday and at Christmas. He never forgets. Always to my sister, never here, security. Same as always.’

‘If I had to find him, who would I go to? There’s someone, Millie. You know who it is.’

‘Maybe Jim. If he’ll tell you.’

‘Can I call him? What’s his number?’

‘Jim’s not a telephone man. Not any more.’

‘But he’s in the same place?’

‘So I believe.’

Without another word she grasps my shoulders in her fierce, spindly hands and grants me one stern kiss of her sealed lips.

*

I got as far as Reading that night, and lay up in a hostel near the railway station where no one bothered with names. If I hadn’t by now been reported missing from Dolphin Square, the first person to notice my absence would be Tabitha at ten next morning, not nine. If there was going to be a hue and cry, I didn’t see it breaking before midday. I breakfasted at leisure, bought a ticket to Exeter and stood in the corridor of an overcrowded train as far as Taunton. By way of the car park, I headed for the outskirts of town and hung around waiting for the dusk to fall.

I hadn’t clapped eyes on Jim Prideaux since Control had sent him on the abortive mission to Czecho that had cost him a bullet in the back and the unsleeping attention of a Czech torture team. By birth, we were both mongrels: Jim part Czech and part Norman, where I’m Breton. But there the comparison stopped. The Slav in Jim ran deep. As a boy, he had run messages and cut German throats for Czech Resistance. Cambridge may have educated him, but it never tamed him. When he joined the Circus, even Sarratt’s close-combat instructors learned to be wary of him.

A cab dropped me at the main gates. A muddy green sign read

NOW OPEN FOR GIRLS

. A pitted drive wound towards a dilapidated stately home surrounded by low prefabricated buildings. Picking my way between potholes, I passed a playing field, a tumbledown cricket pavilion, a couple of labourers’ cottages and a group of shaggy ponies grazing in a paddock. Two boys on bicycles rode by, the larger with a violin on his back, the smaller a cello. I waved them down.

‘I’m looking for Mr Prideaux,’ I said. They peered blankly at each other. ‘A member of your staff here, I’m told. Teaches languages. Or used to.’

The larger boy shook his head and started to ride on.

‘You don’t mean

Jim

, do you?’ the younger one said. ‘Old bloke

with a limp. Lives in a caravan in the Dip. Does French Extra and Junior Rugby.’

‘What’s the Dip?’

‘Keep left past School House, down the track till you see an old Alvis. We’re late actually.’

I keep left. Behind tall windows, small boys and girls crouch at desks under white neon lights. Reaching the other side of the building, I passed through an avenue of temporary classrooms. A track descended towards a clump of pine trees. In front of them, under a tarpaulin, the outlines of a vintage car; and beside it a caravan with one light burning in the curtained window. Strains of Mahler issued from it. I knocked on the door and a gruff voice responded in fury.

‘Go away, boy!

Fous-moi la paix!

Look it up.’

I went round to the curtained window and, with a pen from my pocket, reached up and tapped out my pinpoint, then gave him time to put away his gun, if that’s what he was doing, because with Jim you never knew.

*

A bottle of slivovitz on the table, half drunk. Jim has produced a second glass and switched off his record player. By the paraffin lamp his craggy face is crooked with pain and age, his uneven back propped against the meagre upholstery. The tortured are a class apart. You can imagine – just – where they’ve been, but never what they’ve brought back.

‘Bloody school collapsed,’ he barks, with a burst of hectic laughter. ‘Thursgood, fellow’s name was. Headmaster. Perfectly good wife. Couple of kids. Turned out to be a bloody pansy,’ he declared, with exaggerated derision. ‘Did a moonlight flit with the school chef. Took the fees with him. New Zealand or somewhere. Not enough in the kitty to pay the staff till the end

of the week. Never thought he had it in him.

Well

’ – chuckling, as he tops up our glasses – ‘what to

do

, eh? Can’t leave the kids in the lurch, middle of a school year. Exams coming up. First Eleven fixtures. School prizes. I had my pension, plus a bit of extra for getting myself knocked about. Couple of parents chipped in. George knew a banker. Well, after that, school’s not going to sling me out, is it?’ He drank, eyeing me over his glass. ‘Not going to pack me off to Czecho on another wild goose chase, are you? Not now they’re cosying up to Moscow again.’

‘I need to talk to George,’ I said.

For a while nothing happened. From the darkening world outside, just the rustle of trees and the moan of cattle. And in front of me, Jim’s lopsided body hoisted motionless against the wall of the little caravan, and his Slav gaze glowering at me from under ragged black brows.

‘Been bloody good to me over the years, old George has. Welfaring a clapped-out joe, not everybody’s taste. Not sure he needs you, frankly. Have to ask him.’

‘How would you do that?’

‘Not a natural player of the spying game, George. Don’t know how he got himself into it. Took it all on his own shoulders. Can’t do that in our trade. Can’t feel all the other chaps’ pain as well as your own. Not if you want to carry on. That bloody wife of his had a lot to answer for, my view. Hell she think she was up to?’ he demanded, and once again fell silent, grimacing, daring me to answer his question.

But Jim had never cared much for women, and there was no answer I could offer him that didn’t include the name of his nemesis and former lover Bill Haydon, who had recruited him to the Circus, betrayed him to his masters and slept with Smiley’s wife for cover along the way.

‘Got himself all cut up about

Karla

, of all people,’ he was

complaining, still on the subject of Smiley. ‘The clever bastard in Moscow Centre who recruited all those long-term joes against us.’

Of whom Bill Haydon was the most spectacular, he might have added, if he could have brought himself to speak the name of the man whose neck he had reputedly broken with his bare hands while Haydon was languishing at Sarratt, waiting to be shipped to Moscow as part of an agent-swapping deal.

‘First, old George persuades Karla to come over to the West. Finds his weak spot, works on it, all credit to him. Debriefs the fellow. Gets him a name and a job in South America. Teaching Russian Studies to Latinos. Resettles him. Nothing too much trouble. Year later the bloody man shoots himself and breaks George’s heart. How the devil did

that

happen? I

said

to him: hell’s got into you, George? Karla topped himself. Good luck to him. Always George’s problem, seeing both sides of everything. Wore him out.’

With a grunt of pain or censure, he poured us both another shot of slivovitz.

‘You on the run, by any chance?’ he enquired.

‘I am.’

‘To France?’

‘Yes.’

‘What sort of passport?’

‘British.’

‘Has the Office put your name about yet?’

‘I don’t know. I’m gambling it hasn’t.’

‘Southampton’s your best bet. Keep your head down, take a crowded midday ferry.’

‘Thanks. That’s what I’m planning.’

‘Not about

Tulip

, is it? Not dragging

that

stuff up, are you?’ – clenching a fist and driving it across his mouth as if to punch away an intolerable recollection.

‘It’s the whole Windfall operation,’ I said. ‘There’s a king-sized parliamentary inquiry getting its knife into the Circus. In George’s absence, they’ve cast me as the villain of the piece.’

I had barely got the words out before he slammed his fist on the table between us, setting the glasses chiming.

‘Bugger all to

do

with George! That bastard Mundt killed her! Killed them all! Killed Alec, killed his girl!’

‘Well, that’s something we need to be able to say in court, Jim. They’re throwing the whole book at me. Maybe at you too, if they can dig your name out of the files. So I need George badly.’ And when he still didn’t respond: ‘So how do I get in touch with him?’

‘You can’t.’

‘How do you?’

Another angry silence.

‘Phone boxes, if you want to know. Nothing local, I wouldn’t touch ’em. Never the same one twice. Always agree the next treff in advance.’

‘You to him? Him to you?’

‘Bit of both.’

‘Is his own telephone number the same one each time?’

‘Could be.’

‘Is it a landline?’

‘Could be.’

‘Then you know where to find him, don’t you?’

Grabbing a school exercise book from a heap at his elbow, he ripped a blank page from it. I handed him a pencil.

‘

Kollegiengebäude drei

,’ he intoned as he wrote. ‘Library. Woman called Friede. Good enough for you?’ – and having handed me the page, sat back with his eyes closed, waiting for me to leave him in peace.

*

It was not true that I proposed to catch a crowded midday ferry from Southampton. It was not true that I was travelling on a British passport. I didn’t like deceiving him, but with Jim you never quite knew.

An early-morning flight from Bristol took me to Le Bourget. Stepping down the gangway, I was assailed by memories of Tulip:

this was my last sight of you alive; this was where I promised you that you would soon be reunited with Gustav; this was where I prayed for you to turn your head, but you never did.

From Paris, I took a train to Basel. By the time I got out at Freiburg, all the anger and perplexity I had suppressed over the days of my inquisition came racing to the surface. Who was to blame for my lifetime of dutiful dissembling, if not George Smiley? Was it

I

who had suggested I should befriend Liz Gold? Was it

my

idea to lie to Alec, our tethered goat, as Tabitha had called him – then watch him walk into the trap George had set for Mundt?

Well, now for the reckoning at last. Now for some straight answers to hard questions, like: did you, George, consciously set out to suppress the humanity in me, or was I just collateral damage too? Like: what about

your

humanity, and why did it always have to play second fiddle to some higher, more abstract cause that I can’t quite put my finger on any more, if I ever could?

Or put another way: how much of our human feeling can we dispense with in the name of freedom, would you say, before we cease to feel either human or free? Or were we simply suffering from the incurable English disease of needing to play the world’s game when we weren’t world players any more?

The library of Kollegiengebäude Number Three, the helpful lady called Friede at reception told me with some vigour, was in the building straight across the courtyard, through the big doorway, and turn right. It wasn’t

marked

LIBRARY

, and actually

it wasn’t a library, just a long, quiet reading room set aside for visiting scholars.

And would I kindly bear in mind that silence was the rule?

*

I don’t know whether Jim had somehow told George I was on my way to him, or whether he simply sensed my presence. He was sitting at a desk strewn with papers, in a window bay with his back to me, an angle that gave him light to read by and, when he needed it, a view of the surrounding hills and forests. There was nobody else in the room so far as I could see: just a row of timbered alcoves with desks and empty, comfortable chairs. I moved round until we could see each other. And since George had always seemed older than his years, I was relieved to see that no unpleasant surprise awaited me. It was the same George, just grown into the age he had always seemed to be: but George in red pullover and bright-yellow corduroys, which startled me because I’d only ever seen him in a bad suit. And if his features in repose retained their owlish sadness, there was no sadness in his greeting as, with a burst of energy, he bounded to his feet and grasped my hand in both of his.

‘So whatever are you

reading

there?’ I protest erratically, keeping my voice low because silence was the rule.

‘Oh my dear boy, don’t even ask. An old spy in his dotage seeks the truth of ages. You look disgracefully young, Peter. Have you been up to your usual mischief?’

He is gathering up his books and papers and loading them into a locker. Out of old habit, I give him a helping hand.

And since this is no sort of place for my planned confrontation, I ask him instead how Ann is.

‘She is

well

, thank you, Peter. Yes.

Very

well, considering’ – locking the cupboard and slipping the key into his pocket. ‘She

visits now and then. We walk. In the Black Forest. Not quite the marathons of old, I admit. But we walk.’

Our hushed exchanges come to an end as an elderly woman enters and, having with difficulty detached herself from her shoulder bag, spreads out her papers, puts on her reading spectacles, ear by ear, and with a loud sigh settles herself in an alcove. And I think it was her sigh that undermined the last of my resolve.

*

We sit in George’s spartan bachelor flat on a hillside overlooking the city. He listens like nobody I ever knew. His little body goes into a kind of hibernation. The long eyelids half close. Not a frown, not a nod, not so much as a raising of the eyebrows until you have done. And when you have done – and he has made sure you have, by holding you to account on some obscure point you have omitted or fudged – still no surprise, no judgemental moment of approval or the other thing. All the more surprising then that when I ground to the end of my overlong narrative – dusk falling and the city beneath us disappearing under shrouds of evening mist with the lights poking through – he should with great energy slam shut the curtains on the world and give vent to such unbridled fury as I had never heard in him.

‘The

cowards

. The

utter cowards

. Peter, this is damnable. Karen, you say her name is? I shall seek Karen out at once. Perhaps she will let me come and talk to her. Better I fly her over, if she’ll agree. And if Christoph wishes to speak to me, he’d better do it.’ And after a somewhat unnerving pause: ‘And Gustav too, of course. A date has been set for the hearing, you tell me? I shall make a deposition. I shall swear to it. I shall offer myself as a witness to the truth. In whatever court they choose.’

‘I knew nothing of this,’ he went on, in the same furious tone.

‘Nothing. Nobody sought me out, nobody informed me. I have been eminently findable, even in retreat,’ he insisted, without explaining what he was retreating from. ‘

The Stables?

’ he ran on indignantly. ‘I had assumed they were long closed. When I departed the Circus I returned my power of attorney to the lawyers. What happened after that, I can’t imagine. Nothing, apparently. Of parliamentary inquiries? Lawsuits? Not a word, not a whisper. Why not? I’ll tell you why not. Because they didn’t wish me to know. I was too high up in the pecking order for their taste. I see it all. A former Head of Covert in the dock? Admitting he sacrificed a fine agent and an innocent woman in a cause the world barely remembers? And all of it planned and condoned by the Chief of the Service personally? That wouldn’t sit at all well with our modern masters. Nothing must sully the hallowed image of the Service. Dear God. It goes without saying that I shall immediately instruct Millie McCraig to release all papers and whatever else we entrusted to her care,’ he resumed in a calmer voice. ‘Windfall haunts me to this day. It will always haunt me. I blame myself entirely. I counted on Mundt’s ruthlessness, but I underrated it. The temptation to kill off the witnesses was simply too much for him.’

‘But George,’ I protest. ‘Windfall was Control’s operation. You just went along with it.’

‘Which is by far the greater sin, I fear. I may offer you the sofa, Peter?’

‘I’ve booked myself a room in Basel, actually. It’s only a hop. Take the Paris train in the morning.’

It was a lie, and I think he guessed it was.

‘Then your last train is at ten minutes past eleven. I may give you dinner before you go on your way?’

For reasons too deep in me to contest, I had not seen fit to tell him about Christoph’s abortive attempt to kill me, still less

about his father Alec’s tirade against the Service that he nonetheless loved. Yet George’s next words might have been devised as an answer to Christoph’s peroration:

‘We were not pitiless, Peter. We were

never

pitiless. We had the larger pity. Arguably, it was misplaced. Certainly it was futile. We know that now. We did not know it then.’

For the first time in my memory of him, he ventured to lay a hand on my shoulder, only to withdraw it as if I had burned him.

‘But

you

knew, Peter! Of course you did. You and your good heart. Why else would you seek out poor Gustav? I admired you for that. True to Gustav, true to his poor mother. She was a great loss to you, I’m sure.’

I had had no idea that he was aware of my half-baked effort to offer Gustav a helping hand, but I was not unduly surprised. This was the George I remembered: all-knowing about the frailty of others, while stoically refusing to acknowledge his own.

‘And your Catherine is well?’

‘Yes, indeed, very, thank you.’

‘And her son, is it?’

‘Daughter, actually. She’s fine.’

Had he forgotten that Isabelle was a girl? Or was he still thinking of Gustav?

*

An ancient coaching inn close to the cathedral. Hunting trophies on black panelling. The place has been here for ever, or it was bombed flat and reassembled with the help of old prints. Today’s house speciality is jugged venison. George recommends it, and a Baden wine to match. Yes, I still live in France, George. He is pleased with me. Has he made his home in Freiburg? I ask. He hesitates. Temporarily, yes, Peter, he has. How temporary

remained to be seen. Then, as if the thought has only now come to him, though I suspect it has been between us all this while:

‘I believe you came to accuse me of something, Peter. Am I right?’ And while it is my turn to hesitate: ‘Was it for the things we did, would you say? Or why we did them at all?’ he enquired in the kindliest of tones. ‘Why did

I

do them, which is more to the point. You were a loyal foot soldier. It wasn’t

your

job to ask why the sun rose every morning.’

I might have questioned this, but I feared to interrupt the flow.

‘For world peace, whatever

that

is? Yes, yes, of course. There will be no war, but in the struggle for peace not a stone will be left standing, as our Russian friends used to say.’ He fell quiet, only to rally more vigorously: ‘Or was it all in the great name of

capitalism

? God forbid. Christendom? God forbid again.’

A sip of wine, a smile of puzzlement, directed not at me, but at himself.

‘So was it all for

England

, then?’ he resumed. ‘There was a time, of course there was. But

whose

England?

Which

England? England all alone, a citizen of nowhere? I’m a European, Peter. If I had a mission – if I was ever aware of one beyond our business with the enemy, it was to Europe. If I was heartless, I was heartless for Europe. If I had an unattainable ideal, it was of leading Europe out of her darkness towards a new age of reason. I have it still.’

A silence, deeper, longer than any I remembered, even from the worst times. The fluid contours of the face frozen, the brow tipped forward, shadowy eyelids lowered. A forefinger rises absently to the bridge of his spectacles, checking that they are still in place. Until, with a shake of the head as if to rid it of a bad dream, he smiled.

‘Forgive me, Peter. I am pontificating. We have a ten-minute walk to the station. You will allow me to escort you?’

14

I write this as I sit at my desk in the farmhouse at Les Deux Eglises. The events I have described happened long ago, but they are as real to me today as that pot of begonias sitting over there on the windowsill, or my father’s medals glistening in their mahogany case. Catherine has acquired a computer. She tells me she is making strides. Last night we made love, but it was Tulip I held in my arms.

I still go down to the cove. I take my stick. It’s tough going, but I manage. Sometimes my friend Honoré is there ahead of me, squatting on his customary bit of rock with a flagon of

cidre

wedged between his boots. In the spring, the two of us took the bus to Lorient, and on his insistence walked the waterfront where my mother used to take me to watch the big ships set out for eastern parts. Today it is defaced by monstrous concrete bastions built by the Germans for their U-boats. No amount of Allied bombing could dent them, but the town was laid flat. So there they stand, six storeys high, as eternal as the pyramids.

I was wondering why Honoré had brought me here until he came to a sudden halt and gesticulated angrily up at them.

‘The bastard sold them the cement,’ he protested in his quirkish Breton voice.

Bastard? It takes me a moment to cotton on. Of course: he is referring to his late father, who was hanged for collaborating

with the Germans. He is wishing me to be shocked, and is gratified that I am not.

On Sunday we had the first snow of winter. The cattle are desolate at being locked up. Isabelle is a big girl now. Yesterday when I spoke to her, she smiled straight into my face. We believe that one day she will speak after all. And here comes Monsieur le Général, weaving up the hill in his yellow van. Perhaps he will have a letter from England.

Acknowledgements

My sincere thanks to Théo and Marie Paule Guillou for their generous and illuminating guidance through Southern Brittany; to Anke Ertner for her tireless researches into Berlin East and West in the nineteen sixties, and the precious tidbits of personal recollection; to Jürgen Schwämmle, scout

extraordinaire

, for finding out the escape route taken by Alec Leamas and Tulip from East Berlin to Prague and escorting me along it; and to our impeccable driver Darin Damjanov, who made the snowy journey a double delight. I must also thank Jörg Drieselmann, John Steer and Steffen Leide of the Stasi museum in Berlin, for a personal tour of their dark domain, and for the gift of my very own

Petschaft

. And finally, my special thanks to Philippe Sands, who, with a lawyer’s eye and a writer’s understanding, guided me through the thickets of parliamentary committees and legal process. The wisdom is his. If there are errors, they are mine.

John le Carré

THE BEGINNING

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First published 2017

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ISBN: 978-0-241-98123-8

CHAPTER 8

fn1 Following Mayflower’s recruitment by this Service, it was decided to reduce his visible trips to West Berlin to a minimum. Berlin Station therefore supplied him with the identity of Friedrich Leibach, construction worker resident in Lichtenberg, East Berlin, where by his own devices Mayflower obtained the use of a garden shed for his pushbike and worker’s clothing.

fn2 Cover name for Tulip.

fn3

Theatre

is a prototype American short-range high-frequency communications system, purpose-built for covert East–West communications within Berlin city area. Leamas has described the system in a DO letter to H/technical dept as ‘unwieldy, bloody fiddly, over-produced and typical Yank’. It has since been abandoned.

Praise for John le Carré

“There are those writer[s] . . . who themselves should be immortal. . . . I would suggest immortality for John le Carré, who I believe one of the most intelligent and entertaining writers. . . . May he write forever!”

—Alan Cheuse,

Chicago Tribune

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“A brilliant linguistic artist with a keen eye for the exotic and not-so-exotic locale, a crafty moralizer.”

—

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—

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“He has reinvented the realistic spy story as the supreme theater of paradox, where heroism breeds vice, and virtue is a quite accidental by-product of impudent crimes.”

—

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PENGUIN BOOKS

A SMALL TOWN IN GERMANY

JOHN LE CARRÉ was born in 1931 and attended the universities of Bern and Oxford. He taught at Eton and served briefly in British Intelligence during the Cold War. For the last 50 years he has lived by his pen. He divides his time between London and Cornwall.

ALSO BY JOHN LE CARRÉ

AND AVAILABLE FROM PENGUIN

Call for the Dead

A Delicate Truth

The Honourable Schoolboy

The Little Drummer Girl

The Looking Glass War

A Murder of Quality

The Naïve and Sentimental Lover

Our Kind of Traitor

A Perfect Spy

A Small Town in Germany

Smiley’s People

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

AVAILABLE FROM VIKING

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First published in Great Britain by William Heinemann Ltd 1968

First published in the United States of America by Coward-McCann, Inc. 1968

Published in Penguin Books 2012

Copyright © le Carré Productions, 1968

Copyright renewed © David Cornwell, 1996

All rights reserved

PUBLISHER’S NOTE

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product
of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

ISBN 978-1-101-60304-8

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Version_4

CONTENTS

Praise for John le Carré

About the Author

Also by John le Carré

Title Page

Copyright Page

Introduction

Prologue: The Hunter and the Hunted

1

Mr Meadowes and Mr Cork

2

‘I Could Hear Their Screaming on the Telephone . . .’

3

Alan Turner

4

Decembers of Renewal

5

John Gaunt

6

The Memory Man

7

De Lisle

8

Jenny Pargiter

9

Guilty Thursday

10

Kultur at the Bradfields

11

Königswinter

12

‘And There Was Leo. In the Second Class.’

13

The Strain of Being a Pig

14

Thursday’s Child

15

The Glory Hole

16

‘It’s All a Fake’

17

Praschko

Epilogue

INTRODUCTION

JOHN LE CARRÉ

March 1991

A

Small Town in Germany

is printed with aversion in my memory, and I can think of little good to say of it until I begin to remember its three principal protagonists: the former refugee, Harting; the acidly pragmatic British diplomat, Bradfield; and the driven and unhappy investigator, Alan Turner, whose part I secretly allocated to myself. Then reluctantly I have to concede that I did, after all, achieve much of what I had wanted to achieve, and that the novel is not the eyesore I always imagine it to be.

The reasons for my aversion are many. The first is that I had set out to write something close to a black comedy about British political manners, and yet the result was widely perceived to be ferociously anti-German.

And perhaps it was. The West Germany of Konrad Adenauer was not all lovely by any means: old players from the Hitler time were two-a-penny, whether they were such men as Adenauer’s own

éminence grise,

Herr Globke, who had had a hand in drafting Hitler’s Nuremberg laws discriminating against the Jews, or such luminaries of the Free Democratic Party as Herr Achenbach, who helped organise the deportation of French Jews from Paris, or the ebullient Herr Zogelmann, who only eighteen years before had been a high-ranking figure in the Hitler Youth. In the West German police, the judiciary, the intelligence fraternity, and the armed services, in industry and science and the teaching professions and, most particularly, in the bureaucracy, old Nazis abounded, either because they had done nothing for which they could be purged, or because they had been deemed indispensable to West Germany’s reconstruction. But most often because their cases had laid gathering dust in someone’s drawer, filed and forgotten as part of a tacit agreement between NATO partners to put the past behind us.

To a young Englishman such as myself, whose fascination for Germany’s culture and history had begun in childhood, Bonn in the early sixties was a spooky place indeed. Sometimes the very streets of the city felt like a perilously thin surface laid hastily upon the recent dreadful past, like one of those nicely mown grass mounds at Belsen concentration camp, covering the mute agony of the innocent dead. The monstrosity, when you allowed yourself to think of it, was so close: in the hewn faces of the over-fifties –
what did

you

do in the war, Mummy? – in the sudden recognition of an undemolished piece of Nazi architecture, in the forgetful use of a phrase of Nazi terminology in the mouth of a German parliamentarian or official. Too frequently, the jargon of forgetting sounded as grating as the jargon that Bonn was trying so busily to forget. The very term “the vanquishing of the past,” spoken in German, has the clatter of a military manoeuvre. Germans, like the English, are branded on their tongues.

Sitting in the Bundestag’s diplomatic gallery, day after day –
I was a Second Secretary in the British Embassy at the time – listening to the succession of classroom speeches, of which the texts were available in advance, I made little effort to prevent my imagination from flying beyond the walls of my confinement, and speculating about the collective memories, some honourable, some tragic, and some shameful, that comprised the experience of these sombrely clad middle-aged men and women seated a few feet below me. Studying their walled-up faces and self-conscious manners as they trooped to the rostrum, I asked myself what stories these people might not tell if ever they were set free.

For we were still wondering, we British, we former Allies, all of us who to a greater or lesser extent had suffered from the dreadful march of German nationalism: who are they now? And who have they yet to become? Could they do it a third time in this century?

And we wonder it to this day. Particularly to this day: aloud in the popular press, and somewhat more quietly in our think tanks and the large backrooms of Whitehall. But not always so quietly; for it is only a few months ago, indeed, that an august body of Germany-watchers assembled at Chequers to address itself to the sixty-four-thousand-dollar German question, and someone blew the gaff. The question seemed to be roughly this: As a reunified Germany acquires superpower status within the European Community, who will she be, can we trust her, and what use will she make of her power?

The leaked conclusions were not pretty, and they said as much about the British character as the German.

And the extraordinary thing is that, fully thirty years ago, between bouts of fighting the Cold War and gamely protesting our support for a reunified Germany (in the confidence it would never be achieved), we too were asking ourselves the same turgid questions, if in slightly different terms. Will the streets split? we asked each other. Will the huge past burst through the wafer-thin surface? For how much longer can the tailor’s dummy of the German Economic Miracle tolerate the sackcloth of defeat, and give blind obedience to NATO?

And always our answer was the same: for as long as they are rich. For as long as the money flows, and they come back with a suntan from their holidays in Italy, we have nothing to fear.

Nevertheless, while we poured our tax-free Scotch down their throats and listened to their monologues on The German Problem and their protestations of eternal Anglophilia, we watched them like hawks for the first sign of a defection. Would they sneak off to the Russians and do a deal behind our backs – a reunified Germany in exchange for an unaligned one? They tried it occasionally, but never with much conviction. Was the Adenauer–de Gaulle love affair a plot to weaken the Anglo-American grasp on the German collar? “De Gaulle wants the same as we do,” Harold Macmillan remarked sadly, in my hearing, after the collapse of the first British attempt to enter the common Market, “but without us.” And each time a daft political grouping of the far right popped up – in Bavaria, in Schleswig-Holstein, in one of the old spawning beds of anti-Semitism or Pan-Germanism – we at once telegraphed our report of it to London, measuring its significance against the prevailing state of the German economy. We were, I think now, fairly simplistic.

But, then, never forget that diplomats are amateurs. They are not politicians, they are not trained analysts or economists or sociologists or lawyers or historians – certainly the British variety aren’t. They are for the most part Oxbridge Arts men posing as local experts, and often quite as wrong-headed as you might expect.

And our Bonn Embassy was precisely what our Embassies are everywhere: a bastion of English phobias about the country in which it was situated. Its style and prejudices were informed by an expatriate vision of suburban England which was certainly long out-of-date, and probably had never existed anyway. It was a place made schizophrenic by Britain’s continuing self-
perception as the victor in the ’39–’45 war, and by our much humbler and more realistic role as supplicant for German support for our belated entry into the European Community. It was further complicated by our continuing military presence in Germany, and by our joint custody, under the Four Power Status, of the former German capital, Berlin. Our best German-watcher was an escapee from Colditz Castle prisoner-of-war camp, then in East Germany. Our Head of Chancery (the Embassy’s Political Section) was a much-decorated former submarine commander from the Royal Navy. Several of our local staff were German Jews who had fled to Britain before the war and, like Harting, returned to Germany as members of the British Control Commission. Both our Ambassadors during my time had previously served in Moscow, both had been privy to the inmost councils of Cold War planning. The social atmosphere, in my recollection, was much as the book describes: neurotic and grudging under the soggy weight of the Nibelung mist.

To pull a single thread out of this world and spin it into a story proved extraordinarily difficult, not least because of the sheer number of possibilities. Theoretically, I wanted a story in which the past haunted the present; which reflected our growing dependence upon a nation we had so recently vanquished; and which spoke also to our anxieties about a resurgence of the nationalist passions that might be smouldering beneath the affluent surface. But what form should such a resurgence take? I certainly did not believe in a crude return of Nazism, a dramatic renaissance of the old guard. I believed that, if a threat came from anywhere, it came from the grey centre, in a form closer to the movement of resentful shopkeepers and small bourgeois that was looming in France under the leadership of Poujade. I was aware also of profound discontent of the frustrated German young, who were beginning to vent their rage against West German affluence, and West German subservience to NATO: does anyone remember Danny the Red any more?

In my fanciful prediction of how those currents might eventually reveal themselves, I was manifestly wrong. But I was right at least in positing a student movement of impotent fury against the West German establishment, even if it ultimately painted itself, at its most extreme, in the disgusting colours of the Baader-Meinhof gang, with its alarming echelons of secret and less secret supporters drawn from German intellectuals. I was right also to imagine that such a force would be virtually apolitical: that its platform would consist of vague, unfinished, anarchistic rhetoric, of which the implementation was the only message.

And anyway, I didn’t expect to be right. I wanted an informed nightmare, not an accurate prophecy. My aim was to tell what I might best call a political ghost story. And for better or worse that’s what the book became.

* * *

The ghost, of course, is Leo Harting. Alan Turner is his exorcist, Rawley Bradfield is the luckless owner of the haunted house. None of these characters had a model in reality: no Harting, to my knowledge, ever lived, though in my day there were dozens of variations of him, manning the little ex–Control Commission offices that continued to function under other names up and down the country, long after the formal ending of the Occupation. No Bradfield with a cuckolding wife commanded our Chancery, no Alan Turner from London came and tore our lives to pieces. No lazy, clever homosexual named de Lisle watched him do it.

But Herr Jünger lived. And Herr Jünger was real, though his name and likeness are nowhere in the book. Herr Jünger was one of our two Embassy fixers, employed by the Administration Section. Do they have such people still? Bet your bottom dollar they do. Herr Jünger had an office on the ground floor, and his job was to get you diplomatic number plates for your car, and diplomatic concessions from the airlines, and diplomatic petrol coupons, and your new radio, and your new television and your new washing-machine, and your cases of Dutch beer or Scotch whisky – and yes, of course, poor Harting’s hair-dryers also – and all at the discounted, duty-free prices offered to pampered diplomats.

Herr Jünger was an old, silky-haired, kindly man, of extraordinary patience, and when he was yelled at by the diplomatic wives with their six-acre voices, he barely flinched. And my private conviction, contrary to everyone else’s, was that Herr Jünger never made a bean out of any of us, because he was so anxious to please. So I stole Herr Jünger’s hair-dryers, and I stole a little of his relationship with his employers also, and I gave them to Leo Harting, in order to beef up the servant’s part that Leo was obliged to play in order to survive. And whether Herr Jünger ever knew it I still don’t know, though about fifteen years ago, quite by accident, I bumped into him at Cologne airport.

He was much older than I remembered him, and his cobwebbed skin had acquired the baby softness of age. I spotted him long before he spotted me. He sat at a corner table of the restaurant in the departure lounge, sipping a beer and watching the modern world go by, and he looked as though he had been at his table all day long. Finally he saw me, and gently accepted my hand, and gently said my name. He had no luggage beside him, not even the obligatory German briefcase. He wore a Fair Isle cardigan with leather patches on the sleeves, something he might have bought long ago from one of his own mail-order catalogues. He looked

englisch.

“Where are you travelling to, Herr Jünger?” I asked him.

Nowhere, he replied with a smile. He came here most weekdays now. Sometimes Sundays also. I think he said his wife had died. Certainly he was alone.

“So are you collecting material for a novel?” I asked him, as a joke.

No, he was writing no novel, sir, he replied with another smile.

“But all day here with no book to read, Herr Jünger,” I protested. “What are you doing here? Are you a spy?”

Herr Jünger held up a finger to command my silence. “Listen,” he said, still smiling.

So I listened, making a special listener’s face for Herr Jünger, because he was an old man who wanted me to listen. But what was I supposed to listen to, when all I could hear was a male announcer telling us in several languages that the flight to somewhere was embarking at gate something?

“That’s my son,” he explained, with a pride which to this day I cannot forget. And I realised that his raised finger was pointing at the loudspeakers.

* * *

I wrote the first drafts of my book in Vienna, where Simon Wiesenthal, the celebrated Nazi-hunter, helped me put together the gruesome past of Klaus Karfeld, the villain of the novel. I lived in the former apartment of the late Herbert von Karajan, the conductor. It was pure accident. At first, whenever I came home, all the doors were magically opened ahead of me by unseen hands, for it turned out that the Maestro was inclined to be tetchy when he returned from his performances, and could not abide opening doors.

In Vienna also I was able to hear at first-hand the language of unvarnished anti-Semitism, and it gave the spike to my writing about Bonn’s old guard. “If you are studying the disease,” Wiesenthal advised, “you have to live in the swamp.” He was referring to Vienna. I brought the book back to England still unfinished, and several times I was within a gnat’s eyelash of giving it up altogether. It was a divorce time in my life, and awful, both for my poor faithful wife and me. And the book blocked me, and I blocked the book, and I kept thinking: With all the hells I am visiting, why do I bother to describe one that I have invented? If you want Alan Turner explained to you, perhaps you should imagine me, or yourself, at a time when we see so much, and feel so much, and yet resist every sensible conclusion to our perceptions.

Then one day I took myself back to Bonn in great secrecy, with pounds and pounds of handwritten manuscript in my good German briefcase, and I holed up in a hotel room in Remagen that overlooked the Rhine. Remember the bridge at Remagen? Why should you? Yet it saw one of the fiercest battles ever fought by the Americans against the Germans, and it took the Allies across the Rhine.

And there, at Remagen, a kind angel helped me bring the project to an end. In some ways, it is still not the book I wanted to write. But what book ever is?

PROLOGUE

The Hunter and the Hunted

Ten minutes to midnight: a pious Friday in May and a fine river mist lying in the market square. Bonn was a Balkan city, stained and secret, drawn over with tramwire. Bonn was a dark house where someone had died, a house draped in Catholic black and guarded by policemen. Their leather coats glistened in the lamplight, the black flags hung over them like birds. It was as if all but they had heard the alarm and fled. Now a car, now a pedestrian hurried past, and the silence followed like a wake. A tram sounded, but far away. In the grocer’s shop, from a pyramid of tins, the handwritten notice advertised the emergency: ‘Lay in your store now!’ Among the crumbs, marzipan pigs like hairless mice proclaimed the forgotten Saint’s Day.

Only the posters spoke. From trees and lanterns they fought their futile war, each at the same height as if that were the regulation; they were printed in radiant paint, mounted on hardboard, and draped in thin streamers of black bunting, and they rose at him vividly as he hastened past. ‘Send the Foreign Workers Home!’ ‘Rid Us of the Whore Bonn!’ ‘Unite Germany First, Europe Second!’ And the largest was set above them, in a tall streamer right across the street: ‘Open the road East, the road West has failed.’ His dark eyes paid them no attention. A policeman stamped his boots and grimaced at him, making a hard joke of the weather; another challenged him but without conviction; and one called ‘Guten Abend’ but he offered no reply; for he had no mind for any but the plumper figure a hundred paces ahead of him who trotted hurriedly down the wide avenue, entering the shadow of a black flag, emerging as the tallow lamplight took him back.

The dark had made no ceremony of coming nor the grey day of leaving, but the night was crisp for once and smelt of winter. For most months, Bonn is not a place of seasons; the climate is all indoors, a climate of headaches, warm and flat like bottled water, a climate of waiting, of bitter tastes taken from the slow river, of fatigue and reluctant growth, and the air is an exhausted wind fallen on the plain, and the dusk when it comes is nothing but a darkening of the day’s mist, a lighting of tube lamps in the howling streets. But on that spring night the winter had come back to visit, slipping up the Rhine valley under cover of the predatory darkness, and it quickened them as they went, hurt them with its unexpected chill. The eyes of the smaller man, straining ahead of him, shed tears of cold.

The avenue curved, taking them past the yellow walls of the University. ‘Democrats! Hang the Press Baron!’ ‘The World belongs to the Young!’ ‘Let the English Lordlings beg!’ ‘Axel Springer to the gallows!’ ‘Long Live Axel Springer!’ ‘Protest is Freedom.’ These posters were done in woodcut on a student press. Overhead the young foliage glittered in a fragmented canopy of green glass. The lights were brighter here, the police fewer. The men strode on, neither faster nor slower; the first busily, with a beadle’s flurry. His stride though swift was stagy and awkward, as if he had stepped down from somewhere grander; a walk replete with a German burgher’s dignity. His arms swung shortly at his sides and his back was straight. Did he know he was being followed? His head was held stiff in authority, but authority became him poorly. A man drawn forward by what he saw? Or driven by what lay behind? Was it fear that prevented him from turning? A man of substance does not move his head. The second man stepped lightly in his wake. A sprite, weightless as the dark, slipping through the shadows as if they were a net: a clown stalking a courtier.

They entered a narrow alley; the air was filled with the smells of sour food. Once more the walls cried to them, now in the tell-tale liturgy of German advertising: ‘Strong Men Drink Beer!’ ‘Knowledge is Power, Read Molden Books!’ Here for the first time the echo of their footsteps mingled in unmistakable challenge; here for the first time the man of substance seemed to waken, sensing the danger behind. It was no more than a slur, a tiny imperfection in the determined rhythm of his portly march; but it took him to the edge of the pavement, away from the darkness of the walls, and he seemed to find comfort in the brighter places, where the lamplight and the policemen could protect him. Yet his pursuer did not relent. ‘Meet us in Hanover!’ the poster cried. ‘Karfeld speaks in Hanover!’ ‘Meet us in Hanover on Sunday!’

An empty tram rolled past, its windows protected with adhesive mesh. A single church bell began its monotonous chime, a dirge for Christian virtue in an empty city. They were walking again, closer together, but still the man in front did not look back. They rounded another corner; ahead of them, the great spire of the Minster was cut like thin metal against the empty sky. Reluctantly the first chimes were answered by others, until all over the town there rose a slow cacophony of uncertain peals. An Angelus? An air raid? A young policeman, standing in the doorway of a sports shop, bared his head. In the Cathedral porch, a candle burned in a bowl of red glass; to one side stood a religious bookshop. The plump man paused, leaned forward as if to examine something in the window; glanced down the road; and in that moment the light from the window shone full upon his features. The smaller man ran forward: stopped; ran forward again; and was too late.

The limousine had drawn up, an Opel Rekord driven by a pale man hidden in the smoked glass. Its back door opened and closed; ponderously it gathered speed, indifferent to the one sharp cry, a cry of fury and of accusation, of total loss and total bitterness which, drawn as if by force from the breast of him who uttered it, rang abruptly down the empty street and, as abruptly, died. The policeman spun around, shone his torch. Held in its beam, the small man did not move; he was staring after the limousine. Shaking over the cobbles, skidding on the wet tramlines, disregarding the traffic lights, it had vanished westward towards the illuminated hills.

‘Who are you?’

The beam rested on the coat of English tweed, too hairy for such a little man, the fine, neat shoes grey with mud, the dark, unblinking eyes.

‘Who are you?’ the policeman repeated; for the bells were everywhere now, and their echoes persisted eerily.

One small hand disappeared into the folds of the coat and emerged with a leather holder. The policeman accepted it gingerly, unfastened the catch while he juggled with his torch and the black pistol he clutched inexpertly in his left hand.

‘What was it?’ the policeman asked, as he handed back the wallet. ‘Why did you call out?’

The small man gave no answer. He had walked a few paces along the pavement.

‘You never saw him before?’ he asked, still looking after the car. ‘You don’t know who he was?’ He spoke softly, as if there were children sleeping upstairs; a vulnerable voice, respectful of silence.

‘No.’

The sharp, lined face broke into a conciliatory smile. ‘Forgive me. I made a silly mistake. I thought I recognised him.’ His accent was neither wholly English nor wholly German, but a privately elected no-man’s-land, picked and set between the two. And he would move it, he seemed to say, a little in either direction, if it chanced to inconvenience the listener.

‘It’s the season,’ the small man said, determined to make conversation. ‘The sudden cold, one looks at people more.’ He had opened a tin of small Dutch cigars and was offering them to the policeman. The policeman declined so he lit one for himself.

‘It’s the riots,’ the policeman answered slowly, ‘the flags, the slogans. We’re all nervous these days. This week Hanover, last week Frankfurt. It upsets the natural order.’ He was a young man and had studied for his appointment. ‘They should forbid them more,’ he added, using the common dictum. ‘Like the Communists.’

He saluted loosely; once more the stranger smiled, a last affecting smile, dependent, hinting at friendship, dwindling reluctantly. And was gone. Remaining where he was, the policeman listened attentively to the fading footfall. Now it stopped; to be resumed again, more quickly – was it his imagination? – with greater conviction than before. For a moment he pondered.

‘In Bonn,’ he said to himself with an inward sigh, recalling the stranger’s weightless tread, ‘even the flies are official.’

Taking out his notebook, he carefully wrote down the time and place and nature of the incident. He was not a fast-thinking man, but admired for his thoroughness. This done, he added the number of the motor-car, which for some reason had remained in his mind. Suddenly he stopped; and stared at what he had written; at the name and the car number; and he thought of the plump man and the long, marching stride, and his heart began beating very fast. He thought of the secret instruction he had read on the recreation-room noticeboard, and the little muffled photograph from long ago. The notebook still in his hand, he ran off for the telephone kiosk as fast as his boots would carry him.

Way over there in a

Small town in Germany

There lived a shoemaker

Schumann was his name

Ich bin ein Musikant

Ich bin für das Vaterland

I have a big bass drum

And this is how I play!

A drinking song sung in British military messes in Occupied Germany, with obscene variations, to the tune of the ‘Marche Militaire’.

1

Mr Meadowes and Mr Cork

‘Why don’t you get out and walk? I would if I was your age. Quicker than sitting with this scum.’

‘I’ll be all right,’ said Cork, the albino cypher clerk, and looked anxiously at the older man in the driving seat beside him. ‘We’ll just have to hurry slowly,’ he added in his most conciliatory tone. Cork was a cockney, bright as paint, and it worried him to see Meadowes all het up. ‘We’ll just have to let it happen to us, won’t we, Arthur?’

‘I’d like to throw the whole bloody lot of them in the Rhine.’

‘You know you wouldn’t really.’

It was Saturday morning, nine o’clock. The road from Friesdorf to the Embassy was packed tight with protesting cars, the pavements lined with photographs of the Movement’s leader, and the banners were stretched across the road like advertisements at a rally: ‘The West has deceived us; Germans can look East without shame.’ ‘End the Coca-Cola culture now!’ At the very centre of the long column sat Cork and Meadowes, becalmed while the clamour of horns rose all round them in unceasing concert. Sometimes they sounded in series starting at the front and working slowly back, so that their roar passed overhead like an aeroplane; sometimes in unison, dash dot dash, K for Karfeld our elected leader; and sometimes they just had a free for all, tuning for the symphony.

‘What the hell do they want with it, then? All the screaming? Bloody good haircut, that’s what half of them need, a good hiding and back to school.’

‘It’s the farmers,’ Cork said, ‘I told you, they’re picketing the Bundestag.’

‘Farmers? This lot? They’d die if they got their feet wet, half of them. Kids. Look at that crowd there then. Disgusting, that’s what I call it.’

To their right, in a red Volkswagen, sat three students, two boys and a girl. The driver wore a leather jacket and very long hair, and he was gazing intently through his windscreen at the car in front, his slim palm poised over the steering wheel, waiting for the signal to blow his horn. His two companions, intertwined, were kissing deeply.

‘They’re the supporting cast,’ Cork said. ‘It’s a lark for them. You know the students’ slogan: “Freedom’s only real when you’re fighting for it.” It’s not so different from what’s going on at home, is it? Hear what they did in Grosvenor Square last night?’ Cork asked, attempting once again to shift the ground. ‘If that’s education, I’ll stick to ignorance.’

But Meadowes would not be distracted.

‘They ought to bring in the National Service,’ he declared, glaring at the Volkswagen. ‘That would sort them out.’

‘They’ve got it already. They’ve had it twenty years or more.’ Sensing that Meadowes was preparing to relent, Cork chose the subject most likely to encourage him. ‘Here, how did Myra’s birthday party go, then? Good show, was it? I’ll bet she had a lovely time.’

But for some reason the question only cast Meadowes into even deeper gloom, and after that Cork chose silence as the wiser course. He had tried everything, and to no effect. Meadowes was a decent, churchy sort of bloke, the kind they didn’t make any more, and worth a good deal of anybody’s time; but there was a limit even to Cork’s filial devotion. He’d tried the new Rover which Meadowes had bought for his retirement, tax free and at a ten per cent discount. He’d admired its build, its comfort and its fittings until he was blue in the face, and all he’d got for his trouble was a grunt. He’d tried the Exiles Motoring Club, of which Meadowes was a keen supporter; he’d tried the Commonwealth Children’s Sports Day which they hoped to run that afternoon in the Embassy gardens. And now he had even tried last night’s big party, which they hadn’t liked to attend because of Janet’s baby being so near; and as far as Cork was concerned, that was the whole menu and Meadowes could lump it. Short of a holiday, Cork decided, short of a long, sunny holiday away from Karfeld and the Brussels negotiations, and away from his daughter Myra, Arthur Meadowes was heading for the bend.

‘Here,’ said Cork trying one more throw, ‘Dutch Shell’s up another bob.’

‘And Guest Keen are down three.’

Cork had resolutely invested in non-British stock, but Meadowes preferred to pay the price of patriotism.

‘They’ll go up again after Brussels, don’t you worry.’

‘Who are you kidding? The talks are as good as dead, aren’t they? I may not have your intelligence but I can read, you know.’

Meadowes, as Cork was the very first to concede, had every excuse for melancholy, quite apart from his investments in British steel. He’d come with hardly a break from four years in Warsaw, which was enough to make anyone jumpy. He was on his last posting and facing retirement in the autumn, and in Cork’s experience they got worse, not better, the nearer the day came. Not to mention having a nervous wreck for a daughter: Myra Meadowes was on the road to recovery, true enough, but if one half of what they said of her was to be believed, she’d got a long way to go yet.

Add to that the responsibilities of Chancery Registrar – of handling, that is, a political archive in the hottest crisis any of them could remember – and you had more than your work cut out. Even Cork, tucked away in Cyphers, had felt the draught a bit, what with the extra traffic, and the extra hours, and Janet’s baby coming on, and the do-this-by-yesterday that you got from most of Chancery; and his own experience, as he well knew, was nothing beside what old Arthur had had to cope with. It was the coming from all directions, Cork decided, that threw you these days. You never knew where it would happen next. One minute you’d be getting off a Reply Immediate on the Bremen riots, or tomorrow’s jamboree in Hanover, the next they’d be coming back at you with the gold rush, or Brussels, or raising another few hundred millions in Frankfurt and Zurich; and if it was tough in Cyphers, it was tougher still for those who had to track down the files, enter up the loose papers, mark in the new entries and get them back into circulation again . . . which reminded him, for some reason, that he must telephone his accountant. If the Krupp labour front was going on like this, he might take a little look at Swedish steel, just an in-and-outer for the baby’s bank account . . .

‘Hullo,’ said Cork brightening. ‘Going to have a scrap, are we?’

Two policemen had stepped off the kerb to remonstrate with a large agricultural man in a Mercedes diesel. First he lowered the window and shouted at them; now he opened the door and shouted at them again. Quite suddenly, the police withdrew. Cork yawned in disappointment.

Once upon a time, Cork remembered wistfully, panics came singly. You had a scream on the Berlin corridor, Russian helicopters teasing up the border, an up-and-downer with the Four Powers Steering Committee in Washington. Or there was intrigue: suspected German diplomatic initiative in Moscow that had to be nipped in the bud, a suspected fiddle on the Rhodesian embargo, hushing up a Rhine Army riot in Minden. And that was that. You bolted your food, opened shop, and stayed till the job was done; and you went home a free man. That was that; that was what life was made of; that was Bonn. Whether you were a dip like de Lisle, or a non-dip behind the green baize door, the scene was the same: a bit of drama, a lot of hot air, then tickle up the stocks and shares a bit, back to boredom and roll on your next posting.

Until Karfeld. Cork gazed disconsolately at the posters. Until Karfeld came along. Nine months, he reflected – the vast features were plump and lifeless, the expression one of flatulent sincerity – nine months since Arthur Meadowes had come bustling through the connecting door from Registry with the news of the Kiel demonstrations, the surprise nomination, the student sit-in, and the little bit of violence they had gradually learnt to expect. Who caught it that time? Some Socialist counter-demonstrators. One beaten to death, one stoned . . . it used to shock them in the old days. They were green then. Christ, he thought, it might have been ten years ago; but Cork could date it almost to the hour.

Kiel was the morning the Embassy doctor announced that Janet was expecting. From that day on, nothing had ever been the same.

The horns broke wildly into song again; the convoy jerked forward and stopped abruptly, clanging and screeching all different notes.

‘Any luck with those files then?’ Cork enquired, his mind lighting upon the suspected cause of Meadowes’ anxiety.

‘No.’

‘Trolley hasn’t turned up?’

‘No, the trolley has

not

turned up.’

Ball-bearings, Cork thought suddenly: some nice little Swedish outfit with a get-up-and-go approach, a firm capable of moving in fast . . . two hundred quid’s worth and away we all go . . .

‘Come on, Arthur, don’t let it get you down. It’s not Warsaw, you know: you’re in Bonn now. Look: know how many cups they’re shy of in the canteen, just in the last six weeks alone? Not broken, mind, just lost: twenty-four.’

Meadowes was unimpressed.

‘Now who wants to pinch an Embassy cup? No one. People are absent-minded. They’re

involved

. It’s the crisis, see. It’s happening everywhere. It’s the same with files.’

‘Cups aren’t secret, that’s the difference.’

‘Nor’s file trolleys,’ Cork pleaded, ‘if it comes to that. Nor’s the two-bar electric fire from the conference room which Admin are doing their nut about. Nor’s the long-carriage typewriter from the Pool, nor – listen, Arthur,

you

can’t be blamed, not with so much going on; how can you? You know what dips are when they get to drafting telegrams. Look at de Lisle, look at Gaveston: dreamers. I’m not saying they aren’t geniuses but they don’t know where they are half the time, their heads are in the clouds. You can’t be blamed for that.’

‘I

can

be blamed. I’m responsible.’

‘All right, torture yourself,’ Cork snapped, his last patience gone. ‘Anyway it’s Bradfield’s responsibility, not yours. He’s Head of Chancery; he’s responsible for security.’

With this parting comment, Cork once more fell to surveying the unprepossessing scene about him. In more ways than one, he decided, Karfeld had a lot to answer for.

* * *

The prospect which presented itself to Cork would have offered little comfort to any man, whatever his preoccupation. The weather was wretched. A blank Rhineland mist, like breath upon a mirror, lay over the whole developed wilderness of bureaucratic Bonn. Giant buildings, still unfinished, rose glumly out of the untilled fields. Ahead of him the British Embassy, all its windows lit, stood on its brown heathland like a makeshift hospital in the twilight of the battle. At the front gate, the Union Jack, mysteriously at half mast, drooped sadly over a cluster of German policemen.

The very choice of Bonn as the waiting house for Berlin has long been an anomaly; it is now an abuse. Perhaps only the Germans, having elected a Chancellor, would have brought their capital city to his door. To accommodate the immigration of diplomats, politicians and government servants which attended this unlooked-for honour – and also to keep them at a distance – the townspeople have built a complete suburb outside their city walls. It was through the southern end of this that the traffic was now attempting to pass: a jumble of stodgy towers and lowflung contemporary hutments which stretched along the dual carriageway almost as far as the amiable sanatorium settlement of Bad Godesberg, whose principal industry, having once been bottled water, is now diplomacy. True, some Ministries have been admitted to Bonn itself, and have added their fake masonry to the cobbled courtyards; true, some Embassies are in Bad Godesberg; but the seat of Federal Government and the great majority of the ninety-odd Foreign Missions accredited to it, not to mention the lobbyists, the press, the political parties, the refugee organisations, the official residences of Federal Dignitaries, the Kuratorium for Invisible Germany, and the whole bureaucratic superstructure of West Germany’s provisional capital, are to be found to either side of this one arterial carriageway between the former seat of the Bishop of Cologne and the Victorian villas of a Rhineland spa.

Of this unnatural capital village, of this island state, which lacks both political identity and social hinterland, and is permanently committed to the condition of impermanence, the British Embassy is an inseparable part. Imagine a sprawling factory block of no merit, the kind of building you see in dozens on the western by-pass, usually with a symbol of its product set out on the roof; paint about it a sullen Rhenish sky, add an indefinable hint of Nazi architecture, just a breath, no more, and erect in the rough ground behind it two fading goalposts for the recreation of the unwashed, and you have portrayed with fair accuracy the mind and force of England in the Federal Republic. With one sprawling limb it holds down the past, with another it smoothes the present; while a third searches anxiously in the wet Rhenish earth to find what is buried for the future. Built as the Occupation drew to its premature end, it catches precisely that mood of graceless renunciation; a stone face turned towards a former foe, a grey smile offered to the present ally. To Cork’s left, as they finally entered its gates, lay the headquarters of the Red Cross, to his right a Mercedes factory; behind him, across the road, the Social Democrats and a Coca-Cola depot. The Embassy is cut off from these improbable neighbours by a strip of waste land which, strewn with sorrel and bare clay, runs flatly to the neglected Rhine. This field is known as Bonn’s green belt and is an object of great pride to the city’s planners.

One day, perhaps, they will move to Berlin; the contingency, even in Bonn, is occasionally spoken of. One day, perhaps, the whole grey mountain will slip down the Autobahn and silently take its place in the wet car parks of the gutted Reichstag; until that happens, these concrete tents will remain, discreetly temporary in deference to the dream, discreetly permanent in deference to reality; they will remain, multiply, and grow; for in Bonn, movement has replaced progress, and whatever will not grow must die.

* * *

Parking the car in his customary place behind the canteen, Meadowes walked slowly round it, as he always did after a journey, testing the handles and checking the coachwork for the marks of an errant pebble. Still deep in thought he crossed the forecourt to the front porch where two British military policemen, a sergeant and a corporal, were examining passes. Cork, still offended, followed at a distance, so that by the time he reached the front door Meadowes was already deep in conversation with the sentries.

‘Who are

you

then?’ the sergeant was wanting to know.

‘Meadowes of Registry. He works for me.’ Meadowes tried to look over the sergeant’s shoulder, but the sergeant drew back the list against his tunic. ‘He’s been off sick, you see. I wanted to enquire.’

‘Then why’s he under Ground Floor?’

‘He has a room there. He has two functions. Two different jobs. One with me, one on the ground floor.’

‘Zero,’ said the sergeant, looking at the list again. A bunch of typists, their skirts as short as the Ambassadress permitted, came fluttering up the steps behind them.

Meadowes lingered, still unconvinced. ‘You mean he’s not come in?’ he asked with tenderness which longs for contradiction.

‘That’s what I do mean. Zero. He’s not come in. He’s not here. Right?’

They followed the girls into the lobby. Cork took his arm and drew him back into the shadow of the basement grille.

‘What’s going on, Arthur? What’s your problem? It’s not just the missing files, is it? What’s eating you up?’

‘Nothing’s eating me.’

‘Then what’s all that about Leo being ill? He hasn’t had a day’s illness in his life.’

Meadowes did not reply.

‘What’s Leo been up to?’ Cork demanded with deep suspicion.

‘Nothing.’

‘Then why did you ask about him? You can’t have lost him as well! Blimey, they’ve been trying to lose Leo for twenty years.’

Cork felt the decent hesitation in Meadowes, the proximity of revelation and the reluctant drawing back.

‘You can’t be responsible for Leo. Nobody can. You can’t be everyone’s father, Arthur. He’s probably out flogging a few petrol coupons.’

The words were barely spoken before Meadowes rounded on him, very angry indeed.

‘Don’t you talk like that, d’you hear? Don’t you dare! Leo’s not like that; it’s a shocking thing to say of anyone; flogging petrol coupons. Just because he’s – a temporary.’

Cork’s expression, as he followed Meadowes at a safe distance up the open-tread staircase to the first floor, spoke for itself. If that was what age did for you, retirement at sixty didn’t come a day too early. Cork’s own retirement would be from it to a Greek island. Crete, he thought; Spetsai. I could swing it at forty if those ball-bearings come home. Well, forty-five anyway.

* * *

A step along the corridor from Registry lay the cypher room and a step beyond that, the small, bright office occupied by Peter de Lisle. Chancery means no more than political section; its young men are the elite. It is here, if anywhere, that the popular dream of the brilliant English diplomat may be realised; and in no one more nearly than Peter de Lisle. He was an elegant, willowy, almost beautiful person, whose youth had persisted obstinately into his early forties, and his manner was languid to the point of lethargy. This lethargy was not affected, but simply deceptive. De Lisle’s family tree had been disastrously pruned by two wars, and further depleted by a succession of small but violent catastrophes. A brother had died in a car accident; an uncle had committed suicide; a second brother was drowned on holiday in Penzance. Thus by degrees de Lisle himself had acquired both the energies and the duties of an improbable survivor. He had much rather not been called at all, his manner implied; but since that was the way of things, he had no alternative but to wear the mantle.

As Meadowes and Cork entered their separate estates, de Lisle was on the point of gathering together the sheets of blue draft paper which lay scattered in artistic confusion on his desk. Having shuffled them casually into order, he buttoned his waistcoat, stretched, cast a wistful look at the picture of Lake Windermere, issued by the Ministry of Works with the kind permission of the London, Midland and Scottish Railway, and drifted contentedly on to the landing to greet the new day. Lingering at the long window, he peered downward for a moment at the spines of the farmers’ black cars and the small islands of blue where the police lights flashed.

‘They have this

passion

for steel,’ he observed to Mickie Crabbe, a ragged, leaky-eyed man permanently crippled by a hangover. Crabbe was slowly ascending the stairs, one hand reassuringly upon the banister, his thin shoulders hunched protectively. ‘I’d quite forgotten. I’d remembered the blood, but forgotten the steel.’

‘Rather,’ Crabbe muttered. ‘Rather,’ and his voice trailed after him like the shreds of his own life. Only his hair had not aged; it grew dark and luxuriant on his little head, as if fertilised by alcohol.

‘Sports,’ Crabbe cried, making an unscheduled halt. ‘Bloody marquee isn’t up.’

‘It’ll come,’ de Lisle assured him kindly. ‘It’s been held up by the Peasants’ Revolt.’

‘Back way empty as a church on the other road; bloody Huns,’ Crabbe added vaguely as if it were a greeting, and continued painfully down his appointed track.

Slowly following him along the passage, de Lisle pushed open door after door, peering inside to call a name or a greeting, until he arrived by degrees at the Head of Chancery’s room; and here he knocked hard, and leaned in.

‘All present, Rawley,’ he said. ‘Ready when you are.’

‘I’m ready now.’

‘I say, you haven’t pinched my electric fan by any chance, have you? It’s absolutely vanished.’

‘Fortunately I am not a kleptomaniac.’

‘Ludwig Siebkron’s asking for a meeting at four o’clock,’ de Lisle added quietly, ‘at the Ministry of the Interior. He won’t say why. I pressed him and he got shirty. He just said he wanted to discuss our security arrangements.’

‘Our arrangements are perfectly adequate as they stand. We discussed them with him last week; he is dining with me on Tuesday. I cannot imagine we need to do any more. The place is crawling with police as it is. I refuse to let him make a fortress of us.’

The voice was austere and self-sufficient, an academic voice, yet military; a voice which held much in reserve; a voice which guarded its secrets and its sovereignty, drawled out but bitten short.

Taking a step into the room, de Lisle closed the door and dropped the latch.

‘How did it go last night?’

‘Adequately. You may read the minute if you wish. Meadowes is taking it to the Ambassador.’

‘I imagined that was what Siebkron was ringing about.’

‘I am not obliged to report to Siebkron; nor do I intend to. And I have no idea why he telephoned at this hour, nor why he should call a meeting. Your imagination is ahead of my own.’

‘All the same, I accepted for you. It seemed wise.’

‘At what time are we bidden?’

‘Four o’clock. He’s sending transport.’

Bradfield frowned in disapproval.

‘He’s worried about the traffic. He thinks an escort would make things easier,’ de Lisle explained.

‘I see. I thought for a moment he was saving us the expense.’

It was a joke they shared in silence.

2

‘I Could Hear Their Screaming
on the Telephone . . .’

The daily Chancery meeting in Bonn takes place in the ordinary way at ten o’clock, a time which allows everyone to open his mail, glance at his telegrams and his German newspapers and perhaps recover from the wearisome social round of the night before. As a ritual, de Lisle often likened it to morning prayers in an agnostic community: though contributing little in the way of inspiration or instruction, it set a tone for the day, served as a roll-call and imparted a sense of corporate activity. Once upon a time, Saturdays had been tweedy, voluntary, semi-retired affairs which restored one’s lost detachment and one’s sense of leisure. All that was gone now. Saturdays had been assumed into the general condition of alarm, and subjected to the discipline of weekdays.

They entered singly, de Lisle at their head. Those whose habit was to greet one another did so; the rest took their places silently in the half circle of chairs, either glancing through their bundles of coloured telegrams or staring blankly out of the big window at the remnants of their weekend. The morning fog was dispersing; black clouds had collected over the concrete rear wing of the Embassy; the aerials on the flat roof hung like surrealist trees against the new dark.

‘Pretty ominous for the sports, I must say,’ Mickie Crabbe called out, but Crabbe had no standing in Chancery and no one bothered to reply.

Facing them, alone at his steel desk, Bradfield ignored their arrival. He belonged to that school of civil servants who read with a pen; for it ran swiftly with his eye from line to line, poised at any time to correct or annotate.

‘Can anyone tell me,’ he enquired without lifting his head, ‘how I translate

Geltungsbedürfnis

?’

‘A need to assert oneself,’ de Lisle suggested, and watched the pen pounce, and kill, and rise again.

‘How very good. Shall we begin?’

Jenny Pargiter was the Information Officer and the only woman present. She read querulously as if she were contradicting a popular view; and she read without hope, secretly knowing that it was the lot of any woman, when imparting news, not to be believed.

‘Apart from the farmers, Rawley, the main news item is yesterday’s incident in Cologne, when student demonstrators, assisted by steel workers from Krupps, overturned the American Ambassador’s car.’

‘The American Ambassador’s

empty

car. There is a difference, you know.’ He scribbled something in the margin of a telegram. Mickie Crabbe from his place at the door, mistakenly assuming this interruption to be humorous, laughed nervously.

‘They also attacked an old man and chained him to the railings in the station square with his head shaved and a label round his neck saying “I tore down the Movement’s posters”. He’s not supposed to be seriously hurt.’

‘Supposed?’

‘Considered.’

‘Peter, you made a telegram during the night. We shall see a copy no doubt?’

‘It sets out the principal implications.’

‘Which are?’

De Lisle was equal to this. ‘That the alliance between the dissident students and Karfeld’s Movement is progressing fast. That the vicious circle continues: unrest creates unemployment, unemployment creates unrest. Halbach, the student leader, spent most of yesterday closeted with Karfeld in Cologne. They cooked the thing up together.’

‘It was Halbach, was it not, who also led the anti-British student delegation to Brussels in January? The one that pelted Haliday-Pride with mud?’

‘I have made that point in the telegram.’

‘Go on, Jenny, please.’

‘Most major papers carry comment.’

‘Samples only.’

‘

Neue Ruhrzeitung

and allied papers put their main emphasis on the youth of the demonstrators. They insist that they are not brownshirts and hooligans, but young Germans wholly disenchanted with the institutions of Bonn.’

‘Who isn’t?’ de Lisle murmured.

‘Thank you, Peter,’ Bradfield said, without a trace of gratitude, and Jenny Pargiter blushed quite needlessly.

‘Both

Welt

and

Frankfurter Allgemeine

draw parallels with recent events in England; they refer specifically to the anti-Vietnam protests in London, the race riots in Birmingham and the Owner Tenants Association protests on coloured housing. Both speak of the widespread alienation of voters from their elected Governments whether in England or Germany. The trouble begins with taxation, according to the

Frankfurter

; if the taxpayer doesn’t think his money is being sensibly used, he argues that his vote is being wasted as well. They call it the new inertia.’

‘Ah. Another slogan has been forged.’

Weary from his long vigil and the sheer familiarity of the topics, de Lisle listened at a distance, hearing the old phrases like an off-station broadcast:

increasingly worried by the anti-democratic sentiments of both left and right . . . the Federal Coalition Government should understand that only a really strong leadership, even at the expense of certain extravagant minorities, can contribute to European unity . . . Germans must recover confidence, must think of politics as the solvent between thought and action . . .

What was it, he wondered idly, about the jargon of German politics which, even in translation, rendered them totally unreal? Metaphysical fluff, that was the term he had introduced into his telegram last night, and he was rather pleased with it. A German had only to embark upon a political topic to be swept away in a current of ludicrous abstracts . . . Yet was it only the abstracts that were so elusive? Even the most obvious fact was curiously implausible; even the most gruesome event, by the time it had travelled to Bonn, seemed to have lost its flavour. He tried to imagine what it would be like to be beaten up by Halbach’s students; to be slapped until your cheeks bled; to be shaved and chained and kicked . . . it all seemed so far away. Yet where

was

Cologne? Seventeen miles? Seventeen thousand? He should get about more, he told himself, he should attend the meetings and see it happen on the ground. Yet how could he, when he and Bradfield between them drafted every major policy despatch? And when so many delicate and potentially embarrassing matters had to be taken care of here . . .

Jenny Pargiter was warming to her task. The

Neue Zürcher

had a speculative piece on our chances in Brussels, she was saying; she considered it vital that everyone in Chancery read it

most

closely. De Lisle sighed audibly. Would Bradfield never turn her off?

‘The writer says we have

absolutely

no negotiating points left, Rawley. None. HMG is as played out as Bonn; no support with the electorate and very little with the parliamentary party. HMG sees Brussels as the magic cure for all the British ills; but ironically can only succeed by the goodwill of another failing Government.’

‘Quite.’

‘And even more ironically, the Common Market has virtually ceased to exist.’

‘Quite.’

‘The piece is called

The Beggar’s Opera

. They also make the point that Karfeld is undermining our chances of effective German support for our application.’

‘It all sounds very predictable to me.’

‘And that Karfeld’s plea for a Bonn–Moscow trade axis to exclude the French

and

the Anglo-Saxons is receiving serious attention in some circles.’

‘What circles, I wonder?’ Bradfield murmured and the pen descended once more. ‘The term Anglo-Saxon is out of court,’ he added. ‘I refuse to have my provenance dictated by de Gaulle.’ This was a cue for the older graduates to raise a judicious intellectual laugh.

‘What do the

Russians

think about the Bonn–Moscow axis?’ someone ventured from the centre. It might have been Jackson, an ex-Colonial man who liked to offer common sense as an antidote to intellectual hot air. ‘I mean, surely that’s half the point, isn’t it? Has anyone put it to them as a proposition?’

‘See our last despatch,’ de Lisle said.

Through the open window he fancied he could still hear the plaintive chorus of the farmers’ horns. That’s Bonn, he thought suddenly: that road is our world; how many names did it have on those five miles between Mehlem and Bonn? Six? Seven? That’s us: a verbal battle for something nobody wants. A constant, sterile cacophony of claim and protest. However new the models, however fast the traffic, however violent the collision, however high the buildings, the route is unchanged and the destination irrelevant.

‘We’ll keep the rest very short, shall we? Mickie?’

‘I say, my God, yes.’

Crabbe, jerking into life, embarked upon a long and unintelligible story he had picked up from the

New York Times

`

always

say he spoke to Ludwig Siebkron. Why the devil shouldn’t the two of them talk to one another? Siebkron’s in charge of public order; Karfeld has a lot of enemies. Tell London,’ he added wearily, making another note. ‘Send them a telegram reporting the rumour. It can do no harm.’ A gust of rain struck suddenly upward at the steel-framed window, and the angry rattle startled them all.

‘Poor old Commonwealth Sports,’ Crabbe whispered, but once again his concern received no recognition.

‘Discipline,’ Bradfield continued. ‘Tomorrow’s rally in Hanover begins at ten-thirty. It seems an extraordinary time to demonstrate but I understand they have a football match in the afternoon. They play on Sundays here. I cannot imagine it will have any effect on us, but the Ambassador is asking all staff to remain at home after Matins unless they have business in the Embassy. At Siebkron’s request there will be additional German police at the front and rear gates throughout Sunday, and for some extraordinary reasons of his own, plainclothes men will be in attendance at the sports this afternoon.’

‘And plainer clothes,’ de Lisle breathed, recalling a private joke, ‘I have

never

seen.’

‘Be quiet. Security. We have received the printed Embassy passes from London and these will be distributed on Monday and shown at all times thereafter. Fire Drill. For your information there will be a practice muster at midday on Monday. Perhaps you should all make a point of being available, it sets an example for the Junior Staff. Welfare. Commonwealth Sports this afternoon in the rear gardens of the Embassy; eliminating races. Once again I suggest you all put in an appearance. With your wives of course,’ he added, as if that placed an even heavier burden on them. ‘Mickie, the Ghanaian Chargé will need looking after. Keep him away from the Ambassadress.’

‘Can I just make a point here, Rawley?’ Crabbe writhed nervously; the cords of his neck were like chicken legs, stiffeners in the declining flesh. ‘The Ambassadress is presenting the prizes at four, you see. Four. Could everyone sort of gravitate to the main marquee at quarter to? Sorry,’ he added. ‘Quarter to four, Rawley. Sorry.’ It was said that he had been one of Montgomery’s aides in the war and this was all that was left.

‘Noted. Jenny?’

Nothing that

they

would listen to, her shrug declared.

De Lisle addressed them all, using as his focal point that middle air which is the special territory of the British ruling class.

‘May I ask whether anyone is working on the Personalities Survey? Meadowes is pestering me for it and I swear I haven’t touched it for months.’

‘Who’s it marked out to?’

‘Well, me apparently.’

‘In that case,’ Bradfield said shortly, ‘presumably you drew it.’

‘I don’t think I did, that’s the point. I’m perfectly happy to take the rap, but I can’t imagine what I would have wanted with it.’

‘Well,

has

anyone got it?’

All Crabbe’s statements were confessions.

‘It’s marked out to me, too,’ he whispered, from his dark place by the door, ‘you see, Rawley.’

They waited.

‘Before Peter, I’m supposed to have had it, and put it back. According to Meadowes, Rawley.’

Still no one helped him.

‘Two weeks, Rawley. Only I never touched it. Sorry. Arthur Meadowes went for me like a maniac. No good, you see. Didn’t have it. Lot of dirt about German industrialists. Not my form. I told Meadowes: best thing is ask Leo. He does Personalities. They’re Leo’s pigeon.’

He grinned weakly along the line of his colleagues until he came to the window where the empty chair was. Suddenly they were all peering in the same direction, at the empty chair; not with alarm or revelation, but curiously, noticing an absence for the first time. It was a plain chair of varnished pine, different from the others and slightly pink in colour, hinting remotely at the boudoir; and it had a small, embroidered cushion on the seat.

‘Where is he?’ Bradfield asked shortly. He alone had not followed Crabbe’s gaze. ‘Where’s Harting?’

No one answered. No one looked at Bradfield. Jenny Pargiter, scarlet in the face, stared at her mannish, practical hands which rested on her broad lap.

‘Stuck on that dreary ferry, I should think,’ said de Lisle, coming too quickly to the rescue. ‘God knows what the farmers are doing

that

side of the river.’

‘Someone find out, will they?’ Bradfield asked, in the most disinterested tone. ‘Ring his house or something, will you?’

It is a matter of record that no one who was present took this instruction as his own; and that they left the room in curious disarray, looking neither at Bradfield nor at one another, nor at Jenny Pargiter, whose confusion seemed beyond all bearing.

* * *

The last sack race was over. The strong wind, whipping over the waste land, dashed pebbles of rain against the flapping canvas. The wet rigging creaked painfully. Inside the marquee, the surviving children, mostly coloured, had rallied to the mast. The small flags of the Commonwealth, creased by storage and diminished by secession, swung unhappy in disarray. Beneath them, Mickie Crabbe, assisted by Cork the cypher clerk, was mustering the winners for the prize-giving.

‘M’butu, Alistair,’ Cork whispered. ‘Where the hell’s he got to?’

Crabbe put the megaphone to his mouth:

‘Will Master Alistair M’butu please come forward. Alistair M’butu . . . Jesus,’ he muttered, ‘I can’t even tell them apart.’

‘And Kitty Delassus. She’s white.’

‘And Miss Kitty Delassus, please,’ Crabbe added, nervously slurring the final ‘s’; for names, he had found by bitter experience, were a source of unholy offence.

The Ambassadress, in ragged mink, waited benignly at her trestle table behind a motley of gift-wrapped parcels from the Naafi. The wind struck again, venomously; the Ghanaian Chargé, despondent at Crabbe’s side, shuddered and pulled up the fur collar of his overcoat.

‘Disqualify them,’ Cork urged. ‘Give the prizes to the runners-up.’

‘I’ll wring his neck,’ Crabbe declared, blinking violently. ‘I’ll wring his bloody neck. Skulking the other side of the river. Whoopsadaisy.’

Janet Cork, heavily pregnant, had located the missing children and added them to the winners’ enclosure.

‘Wait till Monday,’ Crabbe whispered, raising the megaphone to his lips, ‘I’ll tell him a thing or two.’

He wouldn’t though, come to think of it. He wouldn’t tell Leo anything. He’d keep bloody clear of Leo as a matter of fact; keep his head down and wait till it blew over.

‘Ladies and Gentlemen, the Ambassadress will now present the prizes!’

* * *

They clapped, but not for Crabbe. The end was in sight. With a perfect

insouciance

that was as well suited to the launching of a ship as to the acceptance of a hand in marriage, the Ambassadress stepped forward to read her speech. Crabbe listened mindlessly: a family event . . . equal nations of the Commonwealth . . . if only the greater rivalries of the world could be resolved in so friendly a fashion . . . a heartfelt word of thanks to the Sports Committee, Messrs Jackson, Crabbe, Harting, Meadowes . . .

Lamentably unmoved, a plainclothes policeman, posted against the canvas wall, took a pair of gloves from the pocket of his leather coat and stared blankly at a colleague. Hazel Bradfield, wife of the Head of Chancery, caught Crabbe’s eye and smiled beautifully. Such a bore, she managed to imply, but it will soon be over, and then we might even have a drink. He looked quickly away. The only thing, he told himself fervently, is to know nothing and see nothing. Doggo, that’s the word. Doggo. He glanced at his watch. Just one hour till the sun was over the yardarm. In Greenwich if not in Bonn. He’d have a beer first, just to keep his eye in; and afterwards he would have a little of the hard stuff. Doggo. See nothing and slip out the back way.

‘Here,’ said Cork into his ear, ‘listen. You remember that tip you gave me?’

‘Sorry, old boy?’

‘South African Diamonds. Consols. They’re down six bob.’

‘Hang on to them,’ Crabbe urged with total insincerity, and withdrew prudently to the edge of the marquee. He had barely found the kind of dark, protective crevice which naturally appealed to his submerged nature when a hand seized his shoulder and swung him roughly round on his heel. Recovering from his astonishment he found himself face to face with a plainclothes policeman. ‘What the hell –’ he broke out furiously, for he was a small man and hated to be handled. ‘What the hell –’ But the policeman was already shaking his head and mumbling an apology. He was sorry, he said, he had mistaken the gentleman for someone else.

* * *

Urbane or not, de Lisle was meanwhile growing quite angry. The journey from the Embassy had irritated him considerably. He detested motor-bikes and he detested being escorted, and a noisy combination of the two was almost more than he could bear. And he detested deliberate rudeness, whether he or someone else was the object of it. And deliberate rudeness, he reckoned, was what they were getting. No sooner had they drawn up in the courtyard of the Ministry of the Interior than the doors of the car had been wrenched open by a team of young men in leather coats all shouting at once.

‘Herr Siebkron will see you immediately! Now, please! Yes! Immediately, please!’

‘I shall go at my own pace,’ Bradfield had snapped as they were ushered into the unpainted steel lift. ‘Don’t you dare order me about.’ And to de Lisle, ‘I shall speak to Siebkron. It’s like a trainload of monkeys.’

The upper floors restored them. This was the Bonn they knew: the pale, functional interiors, the pale, functional reproductions on the wall, the pale unpolished teak; the white shirts, the grey ties and faces pale as the moon. They were seven. The two who sat to either side of Siebkron had no names at all, and de Lisle wondered maliciously whether they were clerks brought in to make up the numbers. Lieff, an empty-headed parade horse from Protocol Department, sat on his left; opposite him, on Bradfield’s right, an old

Polizeidirektor

from Bonn, whom de Lisle instinctively liked: a battle-scarred monument of a man, with white patches like covered bullet-holes in the leather of his skin. Cigarettes lay in packets on a plate. A stern girl offered decaffeinated coffee, and they waited until she had withdrawn.

What

does

Siebkron want? he wondered for the hundredth time since the terse summons at nine o’clock that morning.

The conference began, like all conferences, with a résumé of what was said at a previous occasion. Lieff read the minutes in a tone of unctuous flattery, like a man awarding a medal. It was an occasion, he implied, of the greatest felicity. The

Polizeidirektor

unbuttoned his green jacket, and lit a length of Dutch cigar till it burned like a spill. Siebkron coughed angrily but the old policeman ignored him.

‘You have no objection to these minutes, Mr Bradfield?’

Siebkron usually smiled when he asked this question, and although his smile was as cold as the north wind, de Lisle could have wished for it today.

‘Off the cuff, none,’ Bradfield replied easily, ‘But I must see them in writing before I can sign them.’

‘No one is asking you to sign.’

De Lisle looked up sharply.

‘You will allow me,’ Siebkron declared, ‘to read the following statement. Copies will be distributed.’

It was quite short.

The

doyen

, he said; had already discussed with Herr Lieff of Protocol Department, and with the American Ambassador, the question of the physical security of diplomatic premises in the event of civil unrest arising out of minority demonstrations in the Federal Republic. Siebkron regretted that additional measures were proving necessary, but it was desirable to anticipate unhappy eventualities rather than attempt to correct them when it was too late. Siebkron had received the

doyen

’s assurance that all diplomatic Heads of Mission would cooperate to the utmost with the Federal authorities. The British Ambassador had already associated himself with this undertaking. Siebkron’s voice had found a hard edge which was uncommonly close to anger. Lieff and the old policeman had turned deliberately to face Bradfield, and their expressions were frankly hostile.

‘I am sure you subscribe to this opinion,’ Siebkron said in English, handing a copy of the statement down the table.

Bradfield had noticed nothing. Taking his fountain pen from an inside pocket, he unscrewed the cap, fitted it carefully over the butt and ran the nib along line after line of the text.

‘This is an

aide-mémoire

?’

‘A memorandum. You will find the German translation attached.’

‘I can see nothing here that requires to be in writing at all,’ Bradfield said easily. ‘You know very well, Ludwig, that we always agree on such matters. Our interests are identical.’

Siebkron disregarded this pleasant appeal: ‘You also understand that Doktor Karfeld is not well disposed towards the British. This places the British Embassy in a special category.’

Bradfield’s smile did not flinch. ‘It has not escaped our notice. We rely on you to see that Herr Karfeld’s sentiments are not expressed in physical terms. We have every confidence in your ability to do so.’

‘Precisely. Then you will appreciate my concern for the safety of all personnel of the British Embassy.’

Bradfield’s voice came quite close to banter. ‘Ludwig, what is this? A declaration of love?’

The rest came very fast, thrown down like an ultimatum: ‘I must accordingly ask you that until further notice all British Embassy staff below the rank of Counsellor be confined to the area of Bonn. You will kindly instruct them that for their own safety they will please be in their residences’ – he was reading again from the folder before him – ‘henceforth and until further notice, by eleven o’clock at night, local time.’

The white faces peered at them through the swathes of tobacco smoke like lamps through an anaesthetic. In the momentary confusion and bewilderment, only Bradfield’s voice, fluent and decisive as the voice of a commander in battle, did not waver.

It was a principle of civil order which the British had learnt by bitter experience in many parts of the world, he said, that unpleasant incidents were actually provoked by over-elaborate precautions.

Siebkron offered no comment.

While making every allowance for Siebkron’s professional and personal concern, Bradfield felt obliged to warn him strongly against any gesture which might be misinterpreted by the outside world.

Siebkron waited.

Like Siebkron, Bradfield insisted, he himself had a responsibility to preserve Embassy morale and thus fortify the Junior Staff against strains yet to come. He could not support any measure at this stage which would look like a retreat in the face of an enemy who as yet had barely advanced . . . Did Siebkron really wish it said that he could not control a handful of hooligans? . . .

Siebkron was standing up, the others with him. A terse inclination of the head replaced the obligatory handshake. The door opened and the leather coats led them briskly to the lift. They were in the wet courtyard. The roar of the motor-cycles deafened them. The Mercedes swept them into the carriageway. What on earth have we done? de Lisle wondered. What on earth have we done to deserve this? Whoever has thrown the rock through teacher’s window?

‘It’s nothing to do with last night?’ he asked Bradfield at last, as they approached the Embassy.

‘There is no conceivable connection,’ Bradfield retorted. He was sitting bolt upright, his expression stiff and angry.

‘Whatever the reason,’ he added, more as a memorandum to himself than by way of a confidence to de Lisle, ‘Siebkron is the one thread I dare not cut.’

‘Quite,’ said de Lisle and they got out. The sports were just ending.

* * *

Behind the English Church, on a wooded hill, in a semi-rural avenue away from the centre of Bad Godesberg, the Embassy has built itself a modest piece of suburban Surrey. Comfortable stockbrokers’ houses, with open fireplaces and long corridors for servants they no longer have, hide behind the exiguous privet and laburnum of splendid isolation. The air trembles to the gentle music of the British Forces Network. Dogs of unmistakably English breed ramble in the long gardens; the pavements are obstructed by the runabout cars of British Counsellors’ wives. In this avenue, on each Sunday throughout the warmer months, a more agreeable ritual replaces the Chancery meeting. At a few minutes before eleven o’clock, dogs are summoned indoors, cats banished to the garden, as a dozen wives in coloured hats and matching handbags emerge from a dozen front doors, followed by their husbands in Sunday suits.

Soon a little crowd has gathered in the road; someone has made a joke; someone has laughed; they glance round anxiously for stragglers, and upwards at the nearer houses. Have the Crabbes overslept? Should someone give them a ring? No, here they come at last. Gently they begin the move downhill to the church, the women leading, men following, their hands deep in their pockets. Reaching the church steps they all pause, smiling invitingly at the senior wife present. She, with a little gesture of surprise, climbs the steps ahead of them and disappears through the green curtain, leaving her inferiors to follow, quite by accident, the order of succession which protocol, had they cared about such things, would exactly have demanded.

That Sunday morning, Rawley Bradfield, accompanied by Hazel, his beautiful wife, entered the church and sat in their customary pew beside the Tills, who by the nature of things had gone ahead of them in the procession. Bradfield, though theoretically a Roman Catholic, regarded it as his iron duty to attend the Embassy Chapel; it was a matter on which he declined to consult either his Church or his conscience. They made a handsome couple. The Irish blood had come through richly in Hazel, whose auburn hair shone where the sunbeams touched it from the leaded window; and Bradfield had a way of deferring to her in public which was both gallant and commanding. Directly behind them, Meadowes the Registrar sat expressionless beside his blonde and very nervous daughter. She was a pretty girl, but the wives in particular were inclined to wonder how a man of her father’s rectitude could tolerate such a quantity of make-up.

Having settled into his pew, Bradfield searched the hymnal for the advertised numbers – there were certain of them which he had proscribed on the grounds of taste – then glanced round the church to check absentees. There being none, he was about to return to his hymnal when Mrs Vandelung, the Dutch Counsellor’s wife, and currently Vice-President of the International Ladies, leaned over her pew to enquire in a breathy, somewhat hysterical undertone why there was no organist. Bradfield glanced at the little lighted alcove, at the empty stool with the embroidered cushion on the seat, and in the same instant he appeared to become aware of the embarrassed silence all round him which was accentuated by the creaking of the west door as Mickie Crabbe, whose turn it was to act as sidesman, closed it without benefit of a Voluntary. Rising quickly Bradfield walked down the aisle. From the front row of the choir, John Gaunt, the Chancery Guard, watched with veiled apprehension. Jenny Pargiter, upright as a bride, looked stiffly ahead of her, seeing nothing but the light of God. Janet Cork, wife of the cypher clerk, stood beside her, her mind upon her unborn child. Her husband was in the Embassy, serving a routine shift in the cypher room.

‘Where the devil’s Harting?’ Bradfield asked, but one glance at Crabbe’s expression told him that his question was wasted. Slipping out into the road, he hastened a short way up the hill and opened a small iron gate leading to the vestry, which he entered without knocking.

‘Harting’s failed to appear,’ he said curtly. ‘Who else plays the organ?’

The Chaplain, who found the Embassy a challenge but believed he was making headway, was a Low Church man with a wife and four children in Wales. No one knew why they would not join him.

‘He’s never missed before. Never.’

‘Who else can play?’

‘Perhaps the ferry isn’t running. There’s a lot of trouble about, I hear.’

‘He could come the long way by the bridge. He’s done it often enough. Can no one stand in for him?’

‘Not that I know,’ said the Chaplain, fingering the tip of his golden stole, his thoughts far away. ‘But there’s never been occasion to enquire, not really.’

‘Then what are you going to do?’

‘Perhaps someone could give a note,’ the Chaplain suggested doubtfully, but his gaze had fixed on a baptismal postcard that was tucked behind a calendar. ‘Maybe that would be the answer. Johnny Gaunt has a nice tenor, being Welsh.’

‘Very well, the choir must lead. You’d better tell them at once.’

‘Trouble

is

, you see, they don’t know the hymns, Mr Bradfield,’ the Chaplain said. ‘He wasn’t at Friday’s choir practice either, you see. He didn’t come, not really. We had to scrap it, see.’

Stepping back into the fresh air, Bradfield found himself face to face with Meadowes, who had quietly left his place beside his daughter and followed him to the back of the church.

‘He’s vanished,’ Meadowes said, dreadfully quietly. ‘I’ve checked everywhere. Sick list, the doctor; I’ve been to his house. His car’s in the garage; he’s not used his milk. No one’s seen or heard of him since Friday. He didn’t come to Exiles. It was a special occasion for my daughter’s birthday, but he didn’t come to that either. He’d got engagements but he was going to look in. He’d promised her a hair-dryer as a present; it’s not like him, Mr Bradfield, it’s not his way at all.’

For one moment, just for one moment, Bradfield’s composure seemed to desert him. He stared furiously at Meadowes, then back at the church, as if undecided which to destroy; as if either in anger or despair he would rush down the path and burst open the doors and cry out the news to those who waited so complacently within.

‘Come with me.’

Even as they entered the main gates of the Embassy and long before the police check cleared them, they could recognise the signs of crisis. Two army motor-cycles were parked on the front lawn. Cork, the cypher clerk on call, was waiting on the steps, an Everyman guide to investments still in his hand. A green German police van, its blue light flashing, had stationed itself beside the canteen, and they could hear the crackle of its radio.

‘Thank the Lord you’ve come, sir,’ said Macmullen the Head Guard, ‘I sent the duty driver down; he must have passed you on the carriageway.’

All over the building bells were ringing.

‘There’s a message in from Hanover, sir, from the Consulate General; I didn’t hear too well. The rally’s gone mad, sir; all hell’s broken loose. They’re storming the library and they’re going to march on the Consulate; I don’t know what the world’s coming to; worse than Grosvenor Square. I could hear their screaming on the telephone, sir.’

Meadowes followed Bradfield hastily up the stairs.

‘You said a hair-dryer? He was giving your daughter a hair-dryer?’

It was a moment of deliberate inconsequence, of deliberate slowness perhaps, a nervous gesture before battle was joined. Meadowes at least construed it thus.

‘He’s ordered it specially,’ he said.

‘Never mind,’ said Bradfield, and was about to enter the cypher room when Meadowes addressed him once more.

‘The file’s gone,’ he whispered. ‘The Green File for the special minutes. It’s been gone since Friday.’

3

Alan Turner

It was a day to be nearly free; a day to stay in London and dream of the country. In St James’s Park, the premature summer was entering its third week. Along the lake, girls lay like cut flowers in the unnatural heat of a Sunday afternoon in May. An attendant had lit an improbable bonfire and the smell of burnt grass drifted with the echoes of the traffic. Only the pelicans, hobbling fussily round their island pavilion, seemed disposed to move; only Alan Turner, his big shoes crunching on the gravel, had anywhere to go; for once, not even the girls could distract him.

His shoes were of a heavy brown brogue and much repaired at the welts. He wore a stained tropical suit and carried a stained canvas bag. He was a big, lumbering man, fair-haired, plain-faced and pale, with the high shoulders and square fingers of an alpinist, and he walked with the thrusting slowness of a barge; a broad, aggressive, policeman’s walk, wilfully without finesse. His age was hard to guess. Undergraduates would have found him old, but old for an undergraduate. He could alarm the young with age, and the aged with his youth. His colleagues had long ceased to speculate. It was known that he was a late entrant, never a good sign, and a former fellow of St Antony’s College, Oxford, which takes all kinds of people. The official Foreign Office publications were reserved. While they shed a merciless light on the origin of all their other Turners, in the matter of Alan they remained tight-lipped, as if, having considered all the facts, they felt that silence was the kindest policy.

‘They’ve called you in too, then,’ said Lambert, catching him up. ‘I must say, Karfeld’s really gone to town this time.’

‘What the hell do they expect us to do? Man the barricades? Knit blankets?’

Lambert was a small, vigorous man and he liked it said of him that he could mix with anyone. He occupied a senior position in Western Department and ran a cricket team open to all grades.

They began the ascent of Clive Steps.

‘You’ll never change them,’ said Lambert. ‘That’s my view. A nation of psychopaths. Always think they’re being got at. Versailles, encirclement, stab in the back; persecution mania, that’s their trouble.’

He allowed time for Turner to agree with him.

‘We’re bringing in the whole of the Department. Even the girls.’

‘Christ, that’ll really frighten them. That’s calling up the reserves, that is.’

‘This could put paid to Brussels, you know. Bang it clean on the nose. If the German Cabinet loses its nerve on the home front, we’re all up a gum-tree.’ The prospect filled him with relish. ‘We shall have to find a quite different solution in that case.’

‘I thought there wasn’t one.’

‘The Secretary of State has already spoken to their Ambassador; I am told they have agreed full compensation.’

‘Then there’s nothing to worry about, is there? We can get on with our weekend. All go back to bed.’

They had reached the top of the steps. The founder of India, one foot casually upon a plateau of vanquished bronze, stared contentedly past them into the glades of the Park.

‘They’ve kept the doors open.’ Lambert’s voice was tender with reverence. ‘They’re on the weekday schedule. My, they

are

going at it. Well,’ he remarked, receiving no admiring echo, ‘you go your way, I go mine. Mind you,’ he added shrewdly, ‘it could do us a lot of good. Unite the rest of Europe behind us against the Nazi menace. Nothing like the stamp of jackboots to stiffen the old alliances.’ With a final nod of undeterred goodwill he was assumed into the imperial darkness of the main entrance. For a moment, Turner stared after him, measuring his slight body against the Tuscan pillars of the great portico, and there was even something wistful in his expression, as if actually he would quite like to be a Lambert, small and neat and adept and unbothered. Rousing himself at last, he continued towards a smaller door at the side of the building. It was a scruffy door with brown hardboard nailed to the inside of the glass and a notice denying entrance to unauthorised persons. He had some difficulty getting through.

‘Mister Lumley’s looking for you,’ said the porter. ‘

When

you can spare a minute, I’m sure.’

He was a young, effeminate man and preferred the other side of the building. ‘He was enquiring

most

particularly, as a matter of fact. All packed for Germany, I see.’

His transistor radio was going all the time; someone was reporting direct from Hanover and there was a roar in the background like the roar of the sea.

‘Well, you’ll get a nice reception by the sound of it. They’ve already done the library, and now they’re having a go at the Consulate.’

‘They’d done the library by lunchtime. It was on the one o’clock. The police have cordoned off the Consulate. Three deep. There’s not a hope in hell of them getting anywhere near.’

‘It’s got worse since then,’ the porter called after him. ‘They’re burning books in the market place; you wait!’

‘I will. That’s just what I bloody well will do.’ His voice was awfully quiet but it carried a long way; a Yorkshire voice, and common as a mongrel.

‘He’s booked your passage to Germany. You ask Travel Section! Overland route and Second Class! Mr Shawn goes First!’

Shoving open the door of his room he found Shawn lounging at the desk, his Brigade of Guards jacket draped over the back of Turner’s chair. The eight buttons glinted in the stray sunbeams which, bolder than the rest, had penetrated the coloured glass. He was talking on the telephone. ‘They’re to put everything in one room,’ he said in that soothing tone of voice which reduces the calmest of men to hysteria. He had said it several times before, apparently, but was repeating it for the benefit of simpler minds. ‘

With

the incendiaries

and

the shredder. That’s point one. Point two,

all

locally employed staff are to go

home

and lie low; we can’t pay compensation to German citizens who get hurt on our behalf. Tell them that first, then call me back. Christ Almighty!’ he screamed to Turner as he rang off, ‘have you

ever

tried to deal with that man?’

‘What man?’

‘That bald-headed clown in E and O. The one in charge of nuts and bolts.’

‘His name is Crosse.’ He flung his bag into the corner. ‘And he’s not a clown.’

‘He’s mental,’ Shawn muttered, losing courage, ‘I swear he is.’

‘Then keep quiet about it or they’ll post him to Security.’

‘Lumley’s looking for you.’

‘I’m not going,’ Turner said. ‘I’m bloody well not wasting my time. Hanover’s a D post. They’ve no codes, no cyphers, nothing. What am I supposed to do out there? Rescue the bloody Crown Jewels?’

‘Then why did you bring your bag?’

He picked up a sheaf of telegrams from the desk.

‘They’ve known about that rally for months. Everyone has, from Western Department down to us. Chancery reported it in March. For once, we saw the telegram. Why didn’t they evacuate staff? Why didn’t they send the kids home? No money, I suppose. No third-class seats available. Well, sod them!’

‘Lumley said immediately.’

‘Sod Lumley too,’ said Turner, and sat down. ‘I’m not seeing him till I’ve read the papers.’

‘It’s

policy

not to send them home,’ Shawn continued, taking up Turner’s point. Shawn thought of himself as

attached

rather than

posted

to Security Department; as resting, as it were, between appointments, and he missed no opportunity to demonstrate his familiarity with the larger political world. ‘Business as usual, that’s the cry. We can’t allow ourselves to be stampeded by mob rule. After all, the Movement is a minority. The British lion,’ he added, making an unconfident joke, ‘can’t allow itself to be upset by the pinpricks of a few hooligans.’

‘Oh it can

not

; my God it can’t.’

Turner put aside one telegram and began another. He read fast and without effort, with the confidence of an academic, arranging the papers into separate piles according to some undisclosed criterion.

‘So what’s going on? What have they got to lose apart from their honour?’ he demanded, still reading. ‘Why the hell call

us

in? Compensation’s Western Department’s baby, right? Evacuation’s E and O’s baby, right? If they’re worried about the lease, they can go and cry at the Ministry of Works. So why the hell can’t they leave us in peace?’

‘Because it’s Germany,’ Shawn suggested weakly.

‘Oh roll on.’

‘Sorry if it

spoilt

something,’ Shawn said with an unpleasant sneer, for he suspected Turner of a more colourful sex life than his own.

The first relevant telegram was from Bradfield. It was marked Flash; it had been despatched at eleven-forty and submitted to the Resident Clerk at two twenty-eight. Skardon, Consul General in Hanover, had summoned all British staff and families to the Residence, and was making urgent representations to the police. The second telegram consisted of a Reuters newsflash timed at eleven fifty-three: demonstrators had broken into the British Library; police were unequal to the situation; the fate of Fräulein Eick [

sic

] the librarian was unknown.

Hard upon this came a second rush telegram from Bonn: ‘

Norddeutscher Rundfunk

reports Eick repeat Eick killed by mob.’ But this was in turn immediately contradicted, for Bradfield, through the good offices of Herr Siebkron of the Ministry of the Interior (‘with whom I have a close relationship’), had by then succeeded in obtaining direct contact with the Hanover police. According to their latest assessment, the British Library had been sacked and its books burned before a large crowd. Printed posters had appeared with anti-British slogans such as ‘The Farmers won’t Pay for your Empire!’ and ‘Work for your own bread, don’t steal ours!’ Fräulein Gerda Eich [

sic

] aged fifty-one of 4 Hohenzollernweg, Hanover, had been dragged down two flights of stone steps, kicked and punched in the face and made to throw her own books into the fire. Police with horses and anti-riot equipment were being brought in from neighbouring towns.

A marginal annotation by Shawn stated that Tracing Section had turned up a record of the unfortunate Fräulein Eich. She was a retired school teacher, sometime in British Occupational employment, sometime secretary of the Hanover Branch of the Anglo-German Society, who in 1962 had been awarded a British decoration for services to international understanding.

‘Another anglophile bites the dust,’ Turner muttered.

There followed a long if hastily compiled summary of broadcasts and bulletins. This, too, Turner studied with close application. No one, it seemed, and least of all those who had been present, was able to say precisely what had triggered off the riot, nor what had attracted the crowd towards the library in the first place. Though demonstrations were now a commonplace of the German scene, a riot on this scale was not; Federal authorities had confessed themselves ‘deeply concerned’. Herr Ludwig Siebkron of the Ministry of the Interior had broken his habitual silence to remark to a Press Conference that there was ‘cause for very real anxiety’. An immediate decision had been taken to provide additional protection for all official and quasi-official British buildings and residences throughout the Federal Republic. The British Ambassador, after some initial hesitation, had agreed to impose a voluntary curfew on his staff.

Accounts of the incident by police, press and even delegates themselves were hopelessly confused. Some declared it was spontaneous; a collective gesture aggravated by the word ‘British’ which happened to be exhibited on the side of the library building. It was natural, they said, that as the day of decision in Brussels drew rapidly closer, the Movement’s policy of opposition to the Common Market should assume a specifically anti-British form. Others swore they had seen a sign, a white handkerchief that fluttered from a window; one witness even claimed that a rocket had risen behind the town hall and emitted stars of red and gold. For some the crowd had surged with a positive impulse, for others it had ‘flowed’; for others again it had trembled. ‘It was led from the centre,’ one senior police officer reported. ‘The periphery was motionless until the centre moved.’ ‘Those at the centre,’ Western Radio maintained, ‘kept their composure. The outrage was perpetrated by a few hooligans at the front. The others were then obliged to follow.’ On one point only they seemed to agree: the incident had taken place when the music was loudest. It was even suggested by a woman witness that the music itself had been the sign which started the crowd running.

The

Spiegel

correspondent, on the other hand, speaking on Northern Radio, had a circumstantial account of how a grey omnibus chartered by a mysterious Herr Meyer of Luneburg conveyed ‘a bodyguard of thirty picked men’ to the town centre of Hanover one hour before the demonstration began and that this bodyguard, drawn partly from students and partly from young farmers, had formed a ‘protective ring’ round the speaker’s podium. It was these ‘picked men’ who had started the rush. The entire action had therefore been inspired by Karfeld himself. ‘It is an open declaration,’ he insisted, ‘that from now on, the Movement proposes to march to its own music.’

‘This Eich,’ Turner said at last. ‘What’s the latest?’

‘She’s as well as can be expected.’

‘How well’s that?’

‘That’s all they said.’

‘Oh fine.’

‘Fortunately neither Eich nor the Library are a British responsibility. The Library was founded during the Occupation but handed over to the Germans quite soon afterwards. It’s not controlled and owned exclusively by the

Land

authority. There’s nothing British about it.’

‘So they’ve burned their own books.’

Shawn gave a startled smile.

‘Well yes, actually,’ he said. ‘Come to think of it, they have. That’s rather a useful point; we might even suggest it to Press Section.’

The telephone was ringing. Shawn lifted the receiver and listened.

‘It’s Lumley,’ he said, putting his hand over the mouthpiece. ‘The porter told him you’re in.’

Turner appeared not to hear. He was studying another telegram; it was quite a short telegram, two paragraphs, not more; it was headed ‘personal for Lumley’ and marked ‘immediate’ and this was the second copy passed to Turner.

‘He wants you, Alan.’ Shawn held out the receiver.

Turner read the text once and then read it again. Rising, he went to the steel cupboard and drew out a small black notebook, unused, which he thrust into the recesses of his tropical suit.

‘You stupid bugger,’ he said very quietly, from the door. ‘Why don’t you learn to read your telegrams? All the time you’ve been bleating about fire extinguishers we’ve had a bloody defector on our hands.’

He held up the sheet of pink paper for Shawn to read.

‘A planned departure, that’s what they call it. Forty-three files missing, not one of them below Confidential. One green classified Maximum and Limit, gone since Friday. I’ll say it was planned.’

Leaving Shawn with the telephone still in his hand, Turner thudded down the corridor in the direction of his master’s room. His eyes were a swimmer’s eyes, very pale, washed colourless by the sea.

Shawn stared after him. That’s what happens, he decided, when you open your doors to the other ranks. They leave their wives and children, use filthy language in the corridors and play ducks and drakes with all the common courtesies. With a sigh, he replaced the receiver, raised it again and dialled News Department. This was Shawn, he said, S-H-A-W-N. He had had rather a good idea about the riots in Hanover, the way one might play it at Press Conference: it was nothing to do with

us

after all, if the Germans decided to burn their own books . . . He thought that might go down pretty well as an example of cool English wit. Yes, Shawn, S-H-A-W-N. Not at all; they might even have lunch together some time.

* * *

Lumley had a folder open before him and his old hand rested on it like a claw.

‘We know nothing about him. He’s not even carded. As far as we’re concerned, he doesn’t exist. He hasn’t even been vetted, let alone cleared. I had to scrounge his papers from Personnel.’

‘And?’

‘There’s a smell, that’s all. A foreign smell. Refugee background, emigrated in the thirties. Farm School, Pioneer Corps, Bomb Disposal. He gravitated to Germany in forty-five. Temporary sergeant; Control Commission; one of the old carpet-baggers by the sound of it. Professional expatriate. There was one in every mess in Occupied Germany in those days. Some survived, some drifted into the consulates. Quite a few of them reverted; went into the night or took up German citizenship again. A few went crooked. No childhood, most of them, that’s the trouble. Sorry,’ Lumley said abruptly, and almost blushed.

‘Any form?’

‘Nothing to set the Thames on fire. We traced the next of kin. An uncle living in Hampstead: Otto Harting. Sometime adoptive father. No other relations living. He was in the pharmaceutical business. More an alchemist by the sound of it. Patent medicines, that kind of thing. He’s dead now. Dead ten years. He was a member of the Hampstead Branch of the British Communist Party from forty-one to forty-five. One conviction for little girls.’

‘How little?’

‘Does it matter? His nephew Leo lived with him for a bit. Something may have rubbed off. The old man might even have recruited him then, I suppose . . . Long-term penetration. That would fit the mould. Or someone may have reminded him of it later on. They never let you go, mind, once you’ve had a taste of it. Bad as Catholics.’

Lumley hated faith.

‘What’s his access?’

‘Obscure. His function is listed as Claims and Consular, whatever that means. He has diplomatic rank, just. A Second Secretary. You know the kind of arrangement. Unpromotable, unpostable, unpensionable. Chancery gave him living space. Not a

proper

diplomat.’

‘Lucky bloke.’

Lumley let that go.

‘Entertainment allowance’ – Lumley glanced at the file – ‘a hundred and four pounds per annum, to be spread over fifty cocktail guests and thirty-four dinner guests. Accountable. Pretty small beer. He’s locally employed. A temporary, of course. He’s been one for twenty years.’

‘That leaves me sixteen to go.’

‘In fifty-six he put in an application to marry a girl called Aickman. Margaret Aickman. Someone he’d met in the Army. The application was never pursued, apparently. There’s no record of whether he’s married since.’

‘Perhaps they’ve stopped asking. What are the missing files about?’

Lumley hesitated. ‘Just a hotchpotch,’ he said casually, ‘a general hotchpotch. Bradfield’s trying to put a list together now.’ They could hear the porter’s radio blaring again in the corridor.

Turner caught the tone and held on to it: ‘What sort of hotchpotch?’

‘Policy,’ Lumley retorted. ‘Not your field at all.’

‘You mean I can’t know?’

‘I mean you needn’t know.’ He said this quite casually; Lumley’s world was dying and he wished no one ill. ‘He’s chosen a good moment, I must say,’ he continued, ‘with all this going on. Perhaps he just took a handful and ran for it.’

‘Discipline?’

‘Nothing much. He got in a fight five years ago in Cologne. A night-club brawl. They managed to hush it up.’

‘And they didn’t sack him?’

‘We like to give people a second chance.’ Lumley was still deep in the file, but his tone was pregnant with innuendo.

He was sixty or more, coarse-spoken and grey; a grey-faced, grey-clothed owl of a man, hunched and dried out. Long ago he had been Ambassador to somewhere small, but the appointment had not endured.

‘You’re to cable me every day. Bradfield is arranging facilities. But don’t ring me up, do you understand? That direct line is a menace.’ He closed the folder. ‘I’ve cleared it with Western Department, Bradfield’s cleared it with the Ambassador. They’ll let you go on one condition.’

‘That’s handsome of them.’

‘The Germans mustn’t know. Not on any account. They mustn’t know he’s gone; they mustn’t know we’re looking for him; they mustn’t know there’s been a leak.’

‘What if he’s compromised secret Nato material? That’s as much their pigeon as ours.’

‘Decisions of that kind are none of your concern. Your instructions are to go gently. Don’t lead with your chin. Understand?’

Turner said nothing.

‘You’re not to disturb, annoy or offend. They’re walking on a knife edge out there;

anything

could tilt the balance. Now, tomorrow, any time. There’s even a danger that the Huns might think we were playing a double game with the Russians. If that idea got about it could balls everything up.’

‘We seem to find it hard enough,’ Turner said, borrowing from Lumley’s vocabulary, ‘playing a single game with the Huns.’

‘The Embassy have got one idea in their heads, and it’s not Harting and it’s not Karfeld and least of all is it you. It’s Brussels. So just remember that. You’d better, because if you don’t you’ll be out on your arse.’

‘Why not send Shawn? He’s tactful. Charm them all, he would.’

Lumley pushed a memorandum across the desk. It contained a list of Harting’s personal particulars. ‘Because you’ll find him and Shawn won’t. Not that I admire you for that. You’d pull down the whole forest, you would, to find an acorn. What drives you? What are you looking for? Some bloody absolute. If there’s one thing I really hate it’s a cynic in search of God. Maybe a bit of failure is what you need.’

‘There’s plenty of it about.’

‘Heard from your wife?’

‘No.’

‘You could forgive her, you know. It’s been done before.’

‘Jesus, you take chances,’ Turner breathed. ‘What the hell do you know about my marriage?’

‘Nothing. That’s why I’m qualified to give advice. I just wish you’d stop punishing us all for not being perfect.’

‘Anything else?’

Lumley examined him like an old magistrate who had not many cases left.

‘Christ, you’re quick to despise,’ he said at last. ‘You frighten me, I’ll tell you that for nothing. You’re going to have to start liking people soon, or it’ll be too late. You’ll need us, you know, before you die. Even if we are a second best.’ He thrust a file into Turner’s hand. ‘Go on then. Find him. But don’t think you’re off the leash. I should take the midnight train if I were you. Get in at lunchtime.’ His hooded yellow eyes flickered towards the sunlit park. ‘Bonn’s a foggy bloody place.’

‘I’ll fly if it’s all the same.’

Lumley slowly shook his head.

‘You can’t wait, can you. You can’t wait to get your hands on him. Pawing the bloody earth, aren’t you? Christ, I wish I had your enthusiasm.’

‘You had once.’

‘And get yourself a suit or something. Try and look as though you belong.’

‘I don’t though, do I?’

‘All right,’ said Lumley, not caring any more. ‘Wear the cloth cap. Christ,’ he added, ‘I’d have thought your class was suffering from too much recognition already.’

‘There’s something you haven’t told me. Which do they want most: the man or the files?’

‘Ask Bradfield,’ Lumley replied, avoiding his eye.

* * *

Turner went to his room and dialled his wife’s number. Her sister answered.

‘She’s out,’ she said.

‘You mean they’re still in bed.’

‘What do you want?’

‘Tell her I’m leaving the country.’

As he rang off he was again distracted by the sound of the porter’s wireless. He had turned it on full and tuned it to the European network. A well-bred lady was giving a summary of the news. The Movement’s next rally would be held in Bonn, she said; on Friday, five days from today.

Turner grinned. It was a little like an invitation to tea. Picking up his bag, he set off for Fulham, an area well known for boarding houses and married men in exile from their wives.

4

Decembers of Renewal

De Lisle picked him up from the airport. He had a sports car that was a little too young for him and it rattled wildly on the wet cobbles of the villages. Though it was quite a new car, the paintwork was already dulled by the chestnut gum of Godesberg’s wooded avenues. The time was nine in the morning but the street lights still burned. To either side, on flat fields, farm-houses and new building estates lay upon the strips of mist like hulks left over by the sea. Drops of rain prickled on the small windscreen.

‘We’ve booked you in at the Adler; I suppose that’s all right. We didn’t know quite what sort of subsistence you people get.’

‘What are the posters saying?’

‘Oh, we hardly read them any more. Reunification . . . alliance with Moscow . . . Anti-America . . . Anti-Britain.’

‘Nice to know we’re still in the big league.’

‘You’ve hit a real Bonn day, I’m afraid. Sometimes the fog is a little colder,’ de Lisle continued cheerfully, ‘then we call it winter. Sometimes it’s warmer, and that’s summer. You know what they say about Bonn: either it rains or the level crossings are down. In fact, of course, both things happen at the same time. An island cut off by fog, that’s us. It’s a very

metaphysical

spot; the dreams have quite replaced reality. We live somewhere between the recent future and the not so recent past. Not

personally

, if you know what I mean. Most of us feel we’ve been here for ever.’

‘Do you always get an escort?’

The black Opel lay thirty yards behind them. It was neither gaining nor losing ground. Two pale men sat in the front and the headlights were on.

‘They’re protecting us. That’s the theory. Perhaps you heard of our meeting with Siebkron?’ They turned right and the Opel followed them. ‘The Ambassador is

quite

furious. And

now

, of course, they can say it’s all vindicated by Hanover: no Englishman is safe without a bodyguard. It’s not our view at all. Still, perhaps after Friday we’ll lose them again. How are things in London? I hear Steed-Asprey’s got Lima.’

‘Yes, we’re all thrilled about it.’

A yellow road sign said six kilometres to Bonn.

‘I think we’ll go round the city if you don’t mind; there’s liable to be rather a hold-up getting in and out. They’re checking passes and things.’

‘I thought you said Karfeld didn’t bother you.’

‘We all say that. It’s part of our local religion. We’re trained to regard Karfeld as an irritant, not an epidemic. You’ll have to get used to that. I have a message for you from Bradfield, by the way. He’s sorry not to have collected you himself, but he’s been rather under pressure.’

They swung sharply off the main road, bumped over a tramline and sped along a narrow open lane. Occasionally a poster or photograph rose before them and darted away into the mist.

‘Was that the whole of Bradfield’s message?’

‘There was the question of who knows what. He imagined you’d like to have that clear at once.

Cover

, is that what you’d call it?’

‘I might.’

‘Our friend’s disappearance has been noticed in a

general

way,’ de Lisle continued in the same amiable tone. ‘That was inevitable. But fortunately Hanover intervened, and we’ve been able to mend a few fences. Officially, Rawley has sent him on compassionate leave. He’s published no details; merely hinted at personal problems and left it at that. The Junior Staff can think what they like: nervous breakdown; family troubles; they can make up their own rumours. Bradfield mentioned the matter at this morning’s meeting: we’re all backing him up. As for yourself . . . ’

‘Well?’

‘A general security check in view of the crisis? How would that sound to you? It seemed quite convincing to us.’

‘Did you know him?’

‘Harting?’

‘That’s right. Did you know him?’

‘I think perhaps,’ de Lisle said, pulling up at a traffic light, ‘we ought to leave the first bite to Rawley, don’t you? Tell me, what news of our little Lords of York?’

‘Who the hell are they?’

‘I’m

so

sorry,’ de Lisle said in genuine discomfort. ‘It’s our local expression for the Cabinet. It was silly of me.’

They were approaching the Embassy. As they filtered left to cross the carriageway, the black Opel slid slowly past like an old nanny who had seen her children safely over the road. The lobby was in turmoil. Despatch riders mingled with journalists and police. An iron grille, painted a protective orange, sealed off the basement staircase. De Lisle led him quickly to the first floor. Someone must have telephoned from the desk because Bradfield was already standing as they entered.

‘Rawley, this is Turner,’ de Lisle said, as if there were not much he could do about it, and prudently closed the door on them.

* * *

Bradfield was a hard-built, self-denying man, thin-boned and well preserved, of that age and generation which can do with very little sleep. Yet the strains of the last twenty-four hours were already showing in the small, uncommon bruises at the corners of his eyes, and the unnatural pallor of his complexion. He studied Turner without comment: the canvas bag clutched in the heavy fist, the battered fawn suit, the unyielding, classless features; and it seemed for a moment as if an impulse of involuntary anger would threaten his customary composure; of aesthetic objection that anything so offensively incongruous should have been set before him at such a time. Outside in the corridor Turner heard the hushed murmur of busy voices, the clip of feet, the faster chatter of the typewriters and the phantom throb of code machines from the cypher room.

‘It was good of you to come at such an awkward time. You’d better let me have that.’ He took the canvas bag and dumped it behind the chair.

‘Christ, it’s hot,’ said Turner. Walking to the window, he rested his elbows on the sill and gazed out. Away to his right in the far distance, the Seven Hills of Königswinter, chalked over by fine cloud, rose like Gothic dreams against the colourless sky. At their feet he could make out the dull glint of water and the shadows of motionless vessels.

‘He lived out that way, didn’t he? Königswinter?’

‘We have a couple of hirings on the other bank. They are never much in demand. The ferry is a great inconvenience.’

On the trampled lawn, workmen were dismantling the marquee under the watchful eye of two German policemen.

‘I imagine you have a routine in such cases,’ Bradfield continued, addressing Turner’s back. ‘You must tell us what you want and we shall do our best to provide it.’

‘Sure.’

‘The cypher clerks have a dayroom where you’ll be undisturbed. They are instructed to send your telegrams without reference to anyone else. I’ve had a desk and a telephone put in there for you. I have also asked Registry to prepare a list of the missing files. If there’s anything more you want, I am sure de Lisle will do his best to provide it. And on the social side’ – Bradfield hesitated – ‘I am to invite you to dine with us tomorrow night. We would be very pleased. It’s the usual Bonn evening. De Lisle will lend you a dinner jacket, I am sure.’

‘There’s lots of routines,’ Turner replied at last. He was leaning against the radiator, looking round the room. ‘In a country like this it should be dead simple. Call in the police. Check hospitals, nursing homes, prisons, Salvation Army hostels. Circulate his photograph and personal description and square the local press. Then I’d look for him myself.’

‘Look for him? Where?’

‘In other people. In his background. Motive, political associations, boy friends, girl friends, contacts. Who else was involved; who knew; who half-knew; who quarter-knew; who ran him; who did he meet and where; how did he communicate; safe houses, pick-up points; how long’s it been going on. Who’s protected him, maybe. That’s what I call looking. Then I’d write a report: point the blame, make new enemies.’ He continued to examine the room, and it seemed that nothing was innocent under his clear, inscrutable eye. ‘That’s one routine. That’s for a friendly country, of course.’

‘Most of what you suggest is quite unacceptable here.’

‘Oh sure. I’ve had all that from Lumley.’

‘Perhaps before we go any further, you had better have it from me as well.’

‘Please yourself,’ said Turner, in a manner which might have been deliberately chosen to annoy.

‘I imagine that in your world, secrets are an absolute standard. They matter more than anything. Those who preserve them are your allies; those who betray them are your quarry. Here that is simply not the case. As of now, the local political considerations far exceed those of security.’

Suddenly, Turner was grinning. ‘They always do,’ he said. ‘It’s amazing.’

‘Here in Bonn we have at present one contribution to make: to maintain at all costs the trust and good will of the Federal Government. To stiffen their resolve against mounting criticism from their own electorate. The Coalition is sick; the most casual virus could kill it. Our job is to pamper the invalid. To console, encourage and occasionally threaten him, and pray to God he survives long enough to see us into the Common Market.’

‘What a lovely picture.’ He was looking out of the window again. ‘The only ally we’ve got, and he’s on crutches. The two sick men of Europe propping one another up.’

‘Like it or not, it happens to be the truth. We are playing a poker game here. With open cards and nothing in our hand. Our credit is exhausted, our resources are nil. Yet in return for no more than a smile, our partners bid and play. That smile is all we have. The whole relationship between HMG and the Federal Coalition rests upon that smile. Our situation is as delicate as that; and as mysterious. And as critical. Our whole future with Europe could be decided in ten days from now.’ He paused, apparently expecting Turner to speak. ‘It is no coincidence that Karfeld has chosen next Friday for his rally in Bonn. By Friday, our friends in the German Cabinet will be forced to decide whether to bow to French pressure or honour their promises to ourselves and their partners in the Six. Karfeld detests the Market and favours an opening to the East. In the short term he inclines to Paris; in the long term, to Moscow. By marching on Bonn and increasing the tempo of his campaign, he is deliberately placing pressure on the Coalition at the most critical moment. Do you follow me?’

‘I can manage the little words,’ Turner said. A Kodachrome portrait of the Queen hung directly behind Bradfield’s head. Her crest was everywhere: on the blue leather chairs, the silver cigarette box, even the jotting pads set out on the long conference table. It was as if the monarchy had flown here first class and left its free gifts behind.

‘That is why I am asking you to move with the greatest possible circumspection. Bonn is a village,’ Bradfield continued. ‘It has the manners, vision and dimensions of the parish pump, and yet it is a State within a village. Nothing matters for us more than the confidence of our hosts. There are already indications that we have caused them offence. I do not even know how we have done that. Their manner, even in the last forty-eight hours, has become noticeably cool. We are under surveillance; our telephone calls are interrupted; and we have the greatest difficulty in reaching even our official ministerial contacts.’

‘All right,’ Turner said. He had had enough. ‘I’ve got the message. I’m warned off. We’re on tender ground. Now what?’

‘Now this,’ Bradfield snapped. ‘We both know what Harting may be, or may have been. God knows, there are precedents. The greater his treachery here, the greater the potential embarrassment, the greater the shock to German confidence. Let us take the worst contingency. If it were possible to prove – I am not yet saying that it is, but there are indications – if it were possible to prove that by virtue of Harting’s activities in this Embassy, our inmost secrets had been betrayed to the Russians over many years – secrets which to a great extent we share with the Germans – then that shock, trivial as it may be in the long term, could sever the last thread by which our credit here hangs. Wait.’ He was sitting very straight at his desk, with an expression of controlled distaste upon his handsome face. ‘Hear me out. There is something here that does not exist in England. It is called the anti-Soviet alliance. The Germans take it very seriously, and we deride it at our peril:

it is still our ticket to Brussels

. For twenty years or more, we have dressed ourselves in the shining armour of the defender. We may be bankrupt, we may beg for loans, currency and trade; we may occasionally . . . reinterpret . . . our Nato commitments; when the guns sound, we may even bury our heads under the blankets; our leaders may be as futile as theirs.’

What was it Turner discerned in Bradfield’s voice at that moment? Self-disgust? A ruthless sense of his own decline? He spoke like a man who had tried all remedies, and would have no more of doctors. For a moment the gap between them had closed, and Turner heard his own voice speaking through the Bonn mist.

‘For all that, in terms of popular psychology, it is the one great unspoken strength we have: that when the Barbarians come from the East, the Germans may count on our support. That Rhine Army will hastily gather on the Kentish hills and the British independent nuclear deterrent will be hustled into service. Now do you see what Harting could mean in the hands of a man like Karfeld?’

Turner had taken the black notebook from his inside pocket. It crackled sharply as he opened it. ‘No. I don’t. Not yet. You don’t want him found, you want him lost. If you had your way you wouldn’t have sent for me.’ He nodded his large head in reluctant admiration. ‘Well, I’ll say this for you: no one’s ever warned me off this early. Christ, I’ve hardly sat down. I hardly know his full names. We’ve not heard of him in London, did you know that? He’s not even had any access, not in our book. Not even one bloody military manual. He may have been abducted. He may have gone under a bus, run off with a bird for all

we

know. But

you

; Christ! You’ve really gone the bank, haven’t you? He’s all the spies we’ve ever had rolled into one. So what

has

he pinched? What do you know that I don’t?’ Bradfield tried to interrupt but Turner rode him down implacably. ‘Or maybe I shouldn’t ask? I mean I don’t want to upset anyone.’

They were glaring at one another across centuries of suspicion: Turner clever, predatory and vulgar, with the hard eye of the upstart; Bradfield disadvantaged but not put down, drawn in upon himself, picking his language as if it had been made for him.

‘Our most secret file has disappeared. It vanished on the same day that Harting left. It covers the whole spectrum of our most delicate conversations with the Germans, formal and informal, over the last six months. For reasons which do not concern you, its publication would ruin us in Brussels.’

He thought at first that it was the roar of the aeroplane engines still ringing in his ears, but the traffic in Bonn is as constant as the mist. Gazing out of the window he was suddenly assailed by the feeling that from now on he would neither see nor hear with clarity; that his senses were being embraced and submerged by the cloying heat and the disembodied sound.

‘Listen.’ He indicated his canvas bag. ‘I’m the abortionist. You don’t want me but you’ve got to have me. A neat job with no aftermath, that’s what you’re paying for. All right; I’ll do my best. But before we all go over the wall, let’s do a bit of counting on our fingers, shall we?’

The catechism began.

* * *

‘He was unmarried?’

‘Yes.’

‘Always has been?’

‘Yes.’

‘Lived alone?’

‘So far as I know.’

‘Last seen?’

‘On Friday morning, at the Chancery meeting. In here.’

‘Not afterwards?’

‘I happen to know the pay clerk saw him, but I’m limited in whom I can ask.’

‘Anyone else missing at all?’

‘No one.’

‘Had a full count, have you? No little long-legged bird from Registry?’

‘People are constantly on leave; no one is unaccountably absent.’

‘Then why didn’t Harting take leave? They usually do, you know. Defect in comfort, that’s my advice.’

‘I have no idea.’

‘You weren’t close to him?’

‘Certainly not.’

‘What about his friends? What do they say?’

‘He has no friends worth speaking of.’

‘Any not worth speaking of?’

‘So far as I know, he has no close friends in the community. Few of us have. We have acquaintances, but few friends. That is the way of Embassies. With such an intensive social life, one learns to value privacy.’

‘How about Germans?’

‘I have no idea. He was once on familiar terms with Harry Praschko.’

‘Praschko?’

‘We have a parliamentary opposition here: the Free Democrats. Praschko is one of its more colourful members. He has been most things in his time: not least a fellow-traveller. There is a note on file to say they were once friendly. They knew one another during the Occupation, I believe. We keep an index of useful contacts. I once questioned him about Praschko as a matter of routine and he told me that the relationship was discontinued. That is all I can tell you.’

‘He was once engaged to be married to a girl called Margaret Aickman. This Harry Praschko was named as a character reference. In his capacity as a member of the Bundestag.’

‘Well?’

‘You’ve never heard of Aickman?’

‘Not a name to me, I’m afraid.’

‘Margaret.’

‘So you said. I never heard of any engagement, and I never heard of the woman.’

‘Hobbies? Photography? Stamps? Ham radio?’

Turner was writing all the time. He might have been filling in a form.

‘He was musical. He played the organ in Chapel. I believe he also had a collection of gramophone records. You would do better to enquire among the Junior Staff; he was more at home with them.’

‘You never went to his house?’

‘Once. For dinner.’

‘Did he come to yours?’

There was the smallest break in the rhythm of their interrogation while Bradfield considered.

‘Once.’

‘For dinner?’

‘For drinks. He wasn’t quite dinner-party material. I am sorry to offend your social instincts.’

‘I haven’t got any.’

Bradfield did not appear surprised.

‘Still, you did go to him, didn’t you? I mean you gave him hope.’ He rose and ambled back to the window like a great moth lured to the light. ‘Got a file on him, have you?’ His tone was very detached; he might have been infected by Bradfield’s own forensic style.

‘Only paysheets, annual reports, a character reference from the Army. It’s all very standard stuff. Read it if you want.’ When Turner did not reply, he added: ‘We keep very little here on staff; they change so often. Harting was the exception.’

‘He’s been here twenty years.’

‘Yes. As I say, he is the exception.’

‘And never vetted.’

Bradfield said nothing.

‘Twenty years in the Embassy, most of them in Chancery. And never vetted once. Name never even submitted. Amazing really.’ He might have been commenting on the view.

‘I suppose we all thought it had been done already. He came from the Control Commission after all; one assumes they exacted a certain standard.’

‘Quite a privilege being vetted, mind. Not the kind of thing you do for anyone.’

The marquee had gone. Homeless, the two German policemen paced the grey lawn, their wet leather coats flapping lazily round their boots. It’s a dream, Turner thought. A noisy unwilling dream. ‘Bonn’s a very metaphysical place,’ de Lisle’s agreeable voice reminded him. ‘The dreams have quite replaced reality.’

‘Shall I tell you something?’

‘I can hardly stop you.’

‘All right: you’ve warned me off. That’s usual enough. But where’s the rest of it?’

‘I’ve no idea what you mean.’

‘You’ve no theory, that’s what I mean. It’s not like anything I’ve ever met. There’s no panic. No explanation. Why not? He worked for you. You knew him. Now you tell me he’s a spy; he’s pinched your best files. He’s garbage. Is it always like that here when somebody goes? Do the gaps seal that fast?’ He waited. ‘Let me help you, shall I? “He’s been working here for twenty years. We trusted him implicitly. We still do.” How’s that?’

Bradfield said nothing.

‘Try again. “I always had my suspicions about him ever since that night we were discussing Karl Marx. Harting swallowed an olive without spitting out the pip.” Any good?’

Still Bradfield did not reply.

‘You see, it’s not usual. See what I mean? He’s unimportant. How you wouldn’t have him to dinner. How you washed your hands of him. And what a sod he is. What he’s betrayed.’

Turner watched him with his pale, hunter’s eyes; watched for a movement, or a gesture, head cocked waiting for the wind. In vain. ‘You don’t even

bother

to explain him, not to me, not to yourself. Nothing. You’re just . . . blank about him. As if you’d sentenced him to death. You don’t mind my being personal, do you? Only I’m sure you’ve not much time: that’s the next thing you’re going to tell me.’

‘I was not aware,’ Bradfield said, ice-cold, ‘that I was expected to do your job. Nor you mine.’

‘Capri. How about that? He’s got a bird. The Embassy’s in chaos, he pinches some files, flogs them to the Czechs and bolts with her.’

‘He has no girl.’

‘Aickman. He’s dug her up. Gone off with Praschko, two on a bird. Bride, best man and groom.’

‘I told you, he has no girl.’

‘Oh. So you

do

know that? I mean there are some things you

are

sure of. He’s a traitor and he’s got no bird.’

‘So far as anyone knows, he has no woman. Does that satisfy you?’

‘Perhaps he’s queer.’

‘I’m sure he’s nothing of the sort.’

‘It’s broken out in him. We’re all a bit mad, aren’t we, round about our age? The male menopause, how about that?’

‘That is an absurd suggestion.’

‘Is it?’

‘To the best of my knowledge, yes.’ Bradfield’s voice was trembling with anger; Turner’s barely rose above a murmur.

‘We never know though, do we? Not till it’s too late. Did he handle money at all?’

‘Yes. But there’s none missing.’

Turner swung on him. ‘Jesus,’ he said, his eyes bright with triumph. ‘You checked. You

have

got a dirty mind.’

* * *

‘Perhaps he’s just walked into the river,’ Turner suggested comfortingly, his eyes still upon Bradfield. ‘No sex. Nothing to live for. How’s that?’

‘Ridiculous, since you ask.’

‘Important to a bloke like Harting, though, sex. I mean if you’re alone, it’s the only thing. I mean I don’t know how some of these chaps manage, do you? I know I couldn’t. About a couple of weeks is as long as I can go, me. It’s the only reality, if you live alone. Or that’s what I reckon. Apart from politics of course.’

‘Politics? Harting? I shouldn’t think he read a newspaper from one year to the next. He was a child in such matters. A complete innocent.’

‘They often are,’ said Turner. ‘That’s the remarkable thing.’ Sitting down again, Turner folded one leg over the other and leaned back in the chair like a man about to reminisce. ‘I knew a man once who sold his birthright because he couldn’t get a seat on the Underground. I reckon there’s more of that kind go wrong than was ever converted to it by the Good Book. Perhaps that

was

his problem? Not right for dinner parties; no room on the train. After all, he was a temporary, wasn’t he?’

Bradfield did not reply.

‘And he’d been here a long time. Permanent staff, sort of thing. Not fashionable, that isn’t, not in an Embassy. They go native if they’re around too long. But then he

was

native, wasn’t he? Half. Half a Hun, as de Lisle would say. He never talked politics?’

‘Never.’

‘You sensed it in him, a political spin?’

‘No.’

‘No crack-up? No tension?’

‘No.’

‘What about that fight in Cologne?’

‘What fight?’

‘Five years back. In the night club. Someone worked him over; he was in hospital for six weeks. They managed to hush it up.’

‘That was before my time.’

‘Did he drink a lot?’

‘Not to my knowledge.’

‘Speak Russian? Take lessons?’

‘No.’

‘What did he do with his leave?’

‘He seldom claimed any. If he did, I understand he stayed at his home in Königswinter. He took a certain interest in his garden, I believe.’

For a long time Turner frankly searched Bradfield’s face for something he could not find.

‘He didn’t screw around,’ he said. ‘He wasn’t queer. He’d no friends, but he wasn’t a recluse. He wasn’t vetted and you’ve no record of him. He was a political innocent but he managed to get his hands on the one file that really matters to you. He never stole money, he played the organ in Chapel, took a certain interest in his garden and loved his neighbour as himself. Is that it? He wasn’t any bloody thing, positive or negative. What was he then, for Christ’s sake? The Embassy eunuch? Haven’t you any opinion at all’ – Turner persisted in mock supplication – ‘to help a poor bloody investigator in his lonely task?’

A watch chain hung across Bradfield’s waistcoat, no more than a thread of gold, a tiny devotional token of ordered society.

‘You seem deliberately to be wasting time on matters which are not at issue. I have neither the time nor the interest to play your devious games. Insignificant though Harting was, obscure though his motive may be, for the last three months he unfortunately had a considerable access to secret information. He obtained that access by stealth, and I suggest that instead of speculating on his sexual proclivities, you give some attention to what he has stolen.’

‘Stolen?’ Turner repeated softly. ‘That’s a funny word,’ and he wrote it out with deliberate clumsiness in tall capital letters along the top of one page of the notebook. The Bonn climate had already made its mark upon him: dark dabs of sweat had appeared on the thin fabric of his disgraceful suit.

‘All right,’ he said with sudden fierceness, ‘I’m wasting your bloody time. Now let’s start at the beginning and find out why you love him so.’

Bradfield examined his fountain pen. You could be queer, Turner’s expression said, if you didn’t love honour more.

* * *

‘Will you put that into English?’

‘Tell me about him from your own point of view. What his work was, what he was like.’

‘His sole task when I first arrived was handling German civilian claims against Rhine Army. Tank damage to crops; stray shells from the range; cattle and sheep killed on manoeuvres. Ever since the end of the war that’s been quite an industry in Germany. By the time I took over Chancery two and a half years ago, he had made a corner of it.’

‘You mean he was an expert.’

‘As you like.’

‘It’s just the emotive terms, you see. They put me off. I can’t help liking him when you talk that way.’

‘Claims was his

métier

then, if you prefer. They got him into the Embassy in the first place; he knew the job inside out; he’s done it for many years in many different capacities. First for the Control Commission, then for the Army.’

‘What did he do

before

that? He came out in forty-five.’

‘He came out in uniform, of course. A sergeant or something of the sort. His status was then altered to that of civilian assistant. I’ve no idea what his work was. I imagine the War Office could tell you.’

‘They can’t. I also tried the old Control Commission archive. It’s mothballs for posterity. They’ll take weeks to dig out his file.’

‘In any event, he had chosen well. As long as British units were stationed in Germany, there would be manoeuvres; and German civilians would claim reparations. One might say that his job, though specialised, was at least secured by our military presence in Europe.’

‘Christ, there’s not many would give you a mortgage on

that

,’ said Turner with a sudden, infectious smile, but Bradfield ignored him.

‘He acquitted himself perfectly adequately. More than adequately; he was good at it. He had a smattering of law from somewhere. German as well as military. He was naturally acquisitive.’

‘A thief,’ Turner suggested, watching him.

‘When he was in doubt, he could call upon the Legal Attaché. It wasn’t everybody’s cup of tea, acting as a broker between the German farmers and the British Army, smoothing their feathers, keeping things away from the press. It required a certain instinct. He possessed that,’ Bradfield observed, once more with undisguised contempt. ‘On his own level, he was a competent negotiator.’

‘But that wasn’t your level, was it?’

‘It was no one’s,’ Bradfield replied, choosing to avoid the innuendo. ‘Professionally, he was a solitary. My predecessors had found it best to leave him alone and when I took over I saw no reason to change the practice. He was attached to Chancery so that we could exert a certain disciplinary control; no more. He came to morning meetings, he was punctual, he made no trouble. He was liked up to a point but not, I suppose, trusted. His English was never perfect. He was socially energetic at a certain level; mainly in the less discriminating Embassies. They say he got on well with the South Americans.’

‘Did he travel for his work?’

‘Frequently and widely. All over Germany.’

‘Alone?’

‘Yes.’

‘And he knew the Army inside out: he’d get the manoeuvre reports; he knew their dispositions, strengths, he knew the lot, right?’

‘He knew far more than that; he heard the mess gossip up and down the country; many of the manoeuvres were inter-allied affairs. Some involved the experimental use of new weapons. Since they also caused damage, he was obliged to know the extent of it. There is a great deal of loose information he could have acquired.’

‘Nato stuff?’

‘Mainly.’

‘How long’s he been doing that work?’

‘Since nineteen forty-eight or – nine, I suppose. I cannot say, without reference to the files, when the British first paid compensation.’

‘Say twenty-one years, give or take a bit.’

‘That is my own calculation.’

‘Not a bad run for a temporary.’

‘Shall I go on?’

‘Do. Sure. Go on,’ Turner said hospitably, and thought: if I was you I’d throw me out for that.

‘That was the situation when I took over. He was a contract man; his employment was subject to annual revision. Each December his contract came up for renewal, each December renewal was recommended. That was how matters stood until eighteen months ago.’

‘When Rhine Army pulled out.’

‘We prefer to say here that Rhine Army has been added to our strategic reserve in the United Kingdom. You must remember the Germans are still paying support costs.’

‘I’ll remember.’

‘In any event, only a skeleton force remained in Germany. The withdrawal occurred quite suddenly; I imagine it took us all by surprise. There had been disputes about offset agreements, there were riots in Minden. The Movement was just getting under way; the students in particular were becoming extremely noisy; the troops were becoming a provocation. The decision was taken at the highest level; the Ambassador was not even consulted. The order came; and Rhine Army had gone in a month. We had been making a great number of cuts around that time. It’s all the rage in London these days. They throw things away and call it economy.’ Once more Turner glimpsed that inner bitterness in Bradfield, a family shame to which no guest alluded.

‘And Harting was left high and dry.’

‘For some time, no doubt, he had seen which way the wind was blowing. That doesn’t lessen the shock.’

‘He was still a temporary?’

‘Of course. Indeed his chances of establishment, if they ever seriously existed, were diminishing rapidly. The moment it became apparent that Rhine Army must withdraw, the writing was on the wall. For that reason alone, I felt that it would have been quite mistaken to make any permanent arrangement for him.’

‘Yes,’ said Turner, ‘I see that.’

‘It is easily argued that he was unjustly treated,’ Bradfield retorted. ‘It could equally be argued that he had a damn good run for his money.’ The conviction came through like a stain, suppress it as he might.

‘You said he handled official cash.’ Turner thought: this is what doctors do. They probe until they can diagnose.

‘Occasionally he passed on cheques for the Army. He was a postbox, that was all. A middle man. The Army drew the money, Harting handed it over and obtained a receipt. I checked his accounts regularly. The Army Auditors, as you know, are notoriously suspicious. There were no irregularities. The system was watertight.’

‘Even for Harting?’

‘That’s not what I said. Besides, he always seemed quite comfortably off. I don’t think he’s an avaricious person; I don’t have that impression.’

‘Did he live above his means?’

‘How should I know what means he has? If he lived on what he got here, I suppose he lived up to them. His house in Königswinter was quite large; certainly it was above his grade. I gather he maintained a certain standard there.’

‘I see.’

‘Last night I made a point of examining his cash drawings for the last three months preceding his departure. On Friday, after Chancery meeting, he drew seventy-one pounds and fourpence.’

‘That’s a bloody odd sum.’

‘On the contrary, it’s a very logical sum. Friday was the tenth of the month. He had drawn exactly one third of his monthly entitlement of pay and allowances, less tax, insurance, stoppages for dilapidation and personal telephone calls.’ He paused. ‘That is an aspect of him which perhaps I have not emphasised: he was a very self-sufficient person.’

‘You mean he

is

.’

‘I have never yet caught him in a lie. Having decided to leave, he seems to have taken what was owing to him and no more.’

‘Some people would call that honourable.’

‘Not to steal? I would call that a negative achievement. He might also know, from his knowledge of the law, that an act of theft would have justified an approach to the German police.’

‘Christ,’ said Turner, watching him, ‘you won’t even give him marks for conduct.’

Miss Peate, Bradfield’s personal assistant, brought coffee. She was a middle-aged, under-decorated woman, stitched taut and full of disapproval. She seemed to know already where Turner came from, for she cast him a look of sovereign contempt. It was his shoes, he noticed to his pleasure, that she most objected to; and he thought: bloody good, that’s what shoes are for.

* * *

Bradfield continued: ‘Rhine Army withdrew at short notice and he was left without a job. That was the nub of it.’

‘And without access to Nato military intelligence? That’s what you’re telling me.’

‘That is my hypothesis.’

‘Ah,’ said Turner, affecting enlightenment, and wrote laboriously in his notebook

hypothesis

as if the very word were an addition to his vocabulary.

‘On the day Rhine Army left, Harting came to see me. That was eighteen months ago, near enough.’

He fell silent, struck by his own recollection.

‘He is so

trivial

,’ he said at last, in a moment of quite uncharacteristic softness. ‘Can’t you understand that? So utterly lightweight.’ It seemed to surprise him still. ‘It’s easy to lose sight of now: the sheer insignificance of him.’

‘He never will be again,’ Turner said carelessly. ‘You might as well get used to it.’

‘He walked in; he looked pale, that was all; otherwise quite unchanged. He sat down in that chair over there. That is his cushion, by the way.’ He permitted himself a small, unloving smile. ‘The cushion was a territorial claim. He was the only member of Chancery who reserved his seat.’

‘And the only one who might lose it. Who embroidered it?’

‘I really have no idea.’

‘Did he have a housekeeper?’

‘Not to my knowledge.’

‘All right.’

‘He didn’t say anything at all about his altered situation. They were actually listening to the radio broadcast in Registry, I remember. The regiments were being piped on to the trains.’

‘Quite a moment for him, that.’

‘I suppose it was. I asked him what I could do for him. Well, he said, he wanted to be useful. It was all very low-key, all very delicate. He’d noticed Miles Gaveston was under strain, what with the Berlin disturbances and the Hanover students and various other pressures: might he not help out? I pointed out to him he was not qualified to handle internal matters; they were the preserve of regular members of Chancery. No, he said, that wasn’t what he meant at all. He wouldn’t for a minute presume to trespass upon our major effort. But he had been thinking: Gaveston had one or two little jobs; could he not take them over? He had in mind for instance the Anglo-German Society, which was pretty well dormant by then but still entailed a certain amount of low-level correspondence. Then there was Missing Persons: might he not take over a few things of that kind in order to disencumber the busier Chancery Officers? It made some sense, I had to admit.’

‘So you said yes.’

‘I agreed to it. On a purely provisional basis, of course. An interim arrangement. I assumed we would give him notice in December when his contract ran out; until then, he could fill in his time with whatever small jobs he could find. That was the thin end of the wedge. I was no doubt foolish to listen to him.’

‘I didn’t say that.’

‘You don’t have to. I gave him an inch; he took the rest. Within a month he had gathered them all in; all the end-clippings of Chancery work, all the dross a big Embassy attracts: Missing Persons, Petitions to the Queen, Unannounced Visitors, Official Tours, the Anglo-German Society, letters of abuse, threats, all the things that should never have come to Chancery in the first place. By the same token, he spread his talents across the social field as well. Chapel, the choir, the Catering Committee, the Sports Committee. He even started up a National Savings group. At some point he asked to be allowed to use the title “Consular” and I consented. We have no Consular duties here, you understand; that all goes up to Cologne.’ He shrugged. ‘By December he had made himself useful. His contract was brought forward’ – he had taken up his fountain pen and was again staring at the nib – ‘and I renewed it. I gave him another year.’

‘You treated him well,’ Turner said, his eyes all the time upon Bradfield. ‘You were quite kind to him really.’

‘He had no standing here, no security. He was already on the doorstep and he knew it. I suppose that plays a part. We are more inclined to care for the people we can easily get rid of.’

‘You were sorry for him. Why won’t you admit it? It’s a fair enough reason, for God’s sake.’

‘Yes. Yes I suppose I was. That first time, I was actually sorry for him.’ He was smiling, but only at his own stupidity.

‘Did he do the work well?’

‘He was unorthodox, but not ineffectual. He preferred the telephone to the written word, but that was only natural; he had had no proper instruction in drafting. English was not his native language.’ He shrugged. ‘I gave him another year,’ he said again.

‘Which expired last December. Like a licence really. A licence to work; to be one of us.’ He continued to watch Bradfield. ‘A licence to spy. And you renewed it a second time.’

‘Yes.’

‘Why?’

Once more Turner was aware of that hesitation which seemed to signify concealment.

‘You weren’t sorry for him, were you? Not this time?’

‘My feelings are irrelevant.’ He put down the pen with a snap. ‘The reasons for keeping him on were totally objective.’

‘I didn’t say they weren’t. But you can still be sorry for him.’

‘We were understaffed and overworked. The Inspectors had already reduced us by two against my most strenuous advice. The allowances had been halved. Not just Europe was in flux. There were no constants anywhere any more. Rhodesia, Hong Kong, Cyprus . . . British troops were running from one to the other trying to stamp out a forest fire. We were half-way into Europe and half-way out again. There was talk of a Nordic Federation; God knows what fool gave birth to that idea!’ Bradfield declared with utter contempt. ‘We were putting out feelers in Warsaw, Copenhagen and Moscow. One minute we were conspiring against the French, the next we were conspiring with them. While that was going on we found the energy to scrap three-quarters of the Navy and nine-tenths of our independent deterrent. It was our worst time; our most humiliating time, and our busiest. To crown everything, Karfeld had just taken over the Movement.’

‘So Harting took you through the act again.’

‘Not the same act.’

‘What do you mean?’

A pause.

‘It had more purpose. It had more urgency. I felt it and I did nothing about it. I blame myself. I was conscious of a new mood in him and I did not pursue it.’ He continued: ‘At the time I put it down to the general state of intensity in which we were all living. I realise now that he was playing his biggest card.’

‘Well?’

‘He began by saying he still didn’t feel he was pulling his weight. He had had a good year, but he felt he could do more. These were bad days; he would like to feel he was really helping to get things on an even keel. I asked him what he had in mind; I thought he’d just about swept the board by then. He said, well, it

was

December – that was the nearest he ever came to referring to his contract – and he had naturally been wondering about the Personalities Survey.’

‘The what?’

‘Biographies of prominent figures in German life. Our own confidential

Who’s Who

. We prepare it every year, each of us takes a hand and contributes something on the German personalities with whom he deals. The Commercial people write about their commercial contacts, the Economists about the economists, the Attachés, Press, Information, they all add their bit. Much of the material is highly unflattering; some of it is derived from secret sources.’

‘And Chancery edits?’

‘Yes. Once again he had chosen very accurately. It was another of those chores which interfered with our proper duties. It was already overdue. De Lisle, who should have compiled it, was in Berlin; it was becoming a confounded nuisance.’

‘So you gave him the job.’

‘On a provisional basis, yes.’

‘Until the next December, for instance?’

‘For instance. It is easy now to think of reasons why he wanted that particular job. The survey provided him with a

laissez-passer

to any part of the Embassy. It runs across the board; it covers the whole range of Federal affairs: industrial, military, administrative. Once charged with the survey, he could call on whomever he liked without questions being asked. He could draw files from any other Registry: Commercial, Economic, Naval, Military, Defence – they all opened their doors to him.’

‘And the question of vetting never crossed your mind?’

The self-critical note returned: ‘Never.’

‘Well, we all have our moments,’ said Turner quietly. ‘And that’s how he got his access?’

‘There’s more to it than that.’

‘More? That’s just about the lot, isn’t it?’

‘We not only have archives here; we have a Destruction programme as well. It has been running for years. The purpose is to keep Registry space available for new files and to get rid of old ones we no longer need. It sounds a somewhat academic project and in many ways it is; nevertheless, it happens to be vital. There is a clearly defined economic limit to the amount of paper Registry can handle, and to the amount of paper it will hold. The problem is akin to that of road traffic: we are constantly creating more paper than we can digest. Very naturally, it was another of those jobs we took up and put down as time allowed; it was also an absolute curse. For a while it would be forgotten; then the Office would write and ask for our latest figures.’ He shrugged. ‘As I say, it’s very simple. We can’t go on indefinitely, even in a place this size, building up more files than we destroy. Registry’s bursting at the seams already.’

‘So Harting proposed himself for the task.’

‘Precisely.’

‘And you agreed.’

‘On a provisional basis. He should try his hand and see how it went. He has been working at it off and on for five months. When in doubt, I told him, he was to consult de Lisle. He never did so.’

‘Where did he actually do this work? In his room?’

Bradfield barely hesitated. ‘In Chancery Registry, where the most sensitive documents are kept. He had the run of the strong-room. He could draw whatever he wanted provided he didn’t overplay his hand. There isn’t even any record of what he did look at. There are also some letters missing; the Registrar will give you the details.’

Slowly Turner stood up, brushing his hands together as if they had sand on them.

‘Of the forty-odd missing files, eighteen are drawn from the Personality Survey and contain the most sensitive material on high-ranking German politicians. A careful reading would point clearly to our most delicate sources. The rest are Top Secret and cover Anglo-German agreements on a variety of subjects: secret treaties, secret codicils to published agreements. If he wished to embarrass us, he could hardly have chosen better. Some of the files go right back to forty-eight or – nine.’

‘And the one special file? “Conversations Formal and Informal”?’

‘Is what we call a Green. It is subject to special procedures.’

‘How many Greens are there in the Embassy?’

‘This is the only one. It was in its place in Registry strong-room on Thursday morning. The Registrar noticed its absence on Thursday evening and assumed it was in operation. By Saturday morning he was deeply concerned. On Sunday he reported the loss to me.’

‘Tell me,’ said Turner at last. ‘What happened to him during last year? What happened between the two Decembers? Apart from Karfeld.’

‘Nothing specific.’

‘Then why did you go off him?’

‘I didn’t,’ Bradfield replied with contempt. ‘Since I never had any feeling for him either way, the question does not arise. I merely learnt during the intervening year to recognise his technique. I saw how he operated on people; how he wheedled his way in. I saw through him, that’s all.’

Turner stared at him.

‘And what did you see?’

Bradfield’s voice was as crisp and as finite and as irreducible as a mathematical formula. ‘Deceit. I’d have thought I had made that plain by now.’

Turner got up.

‘I’ll begin with his room,’ he said.

‘The Chancery Guard has the keys. They’re expecting you. Ask for Macmullen.’

‘I want to see his house, his friends, his neighbours; if necessary I’ll talk to his foreign contacts. I’ll break whatever eggs I’ve got to, no more no less. If you don’t like it, tell the Ambassador. Who’s the Registrar?’

‘Meadowes.’

‘Arthur Meadowes?’

‘I believe so.’

Something held him back: a reluctance, a hint of uncertainty, almost of dependence, a middle tone quite out of character with anything that had gone before.

‘Meadowes was in Warsaw, wasn’t he?’

‘That’s correct.’

Louder now: ‘And Meadowes has a list of the missing files, has he?’

‘And letters.’

‘And Harting worked for him, of course.’

‘Of course. He is expecting you to call on him.’

‘I’ll see his room first.’ It was a resolution he seemed to have reached already.

‘As you wish. You mentioned you would also visit his house–’

‘Well?’

‘I am afraid that at present it is not possible. It is under police protection since yesterday.’

‘Is that general?’

‘What?’

‘The police protection?’

‘Siebkron insists upon it. I cannot quarrel with him now.’

‘It applies to all hirings?’

‘Principally the more senior ones. I imagine they have included Harting’s because it is remote.’

‘You don’t sound convinced.’

‘I cannot think of any other reason.’

‘What about Iron Curtain Embassies; did Harting hang around them at all?’

‘He went to the Russians occasionally; I cannot say how often.’

‘This man Praschko, the friend he had, the politician. You said he used to be a fellow-traveller.’

‘That was fifteen years ago.’

‘And when did the association end?’

‘It’s on the file. About five years ago.’

‘That’s when he had the fight in Cologne. Perhaps it was with Praschko.’

‘Anything is possible.’

‘One more question.’

‘Well?’

‘That contract he had. If it had expired . . . say last Thursday?’

‘Well?’

‘Would you have renewed it? Again?’

‘We are under great strain. Yes, I would have renewed it.’

‘You must miss him.’

The door was opened from the outside by de Lisle. His gentle features were drawn and solemn.

‘Ludwig Siebkron rang; the exchange had orders not to put through your calls. I spoke to him myself.’

‘Well?’

‘About the librarian, Eich: the wretched woman they beat up in Hanover.’

‘About her?’

‘I’m afraid she died an hour ago.’

Bradfield considered this intelligence in silence. ‘Find out where the funeral is. The Ambassador must make a gesture; a telegram to the dependants rather than flowers. Nothing too conspicuous; just his deepest sympathy. Talk to them in Private Office, they’ll know the wording. And something from the Anglo-German Society. You’d better handle that yourself. And send a cable to the Association of Assistant Librarians; they were enquiring about her. And ring Hazel, will you, and tell her? She asked particularly to be kept informed.’

He was poised and perfectly in control. ‘If you require anything,’ he added to Turner, ‘tell de Lisle.’

Turner was watching him.

‘Otherwise we shall expect you tomorrow night. About five to eight? Germans are very punctual. It is the local custom that we assemble before they arrive. And if you’re going down to his room, perhaps you would take that cushion. I see no point in our having it up here.’

* * *

Albino Cork, stooped over the cypher machines while he coaxed the strips of print from the rollers, heard the thud and turned his pink eyes sharply towards the large figure in the doorway.

‘That’s my bag. Leave it where it is; I’ll be in later.’

‘Righty-ho,’ said Cork and thought: a Funny. Just his luck, with the whole ruddy world blowing up in his face, and Janet’s baby due any minute, and that poor woman in Hanover turning up her toes, to be landed with a Funny in the dayroom. This was not his only grudge. The German steel strike was spreading nicely; if he had only thought of it on Friday and not Saturday, that little flutter on Swedish steel would have shown a four-bob capital profit in three days; and five per cent per day, in Cork’s losing battle with clerical status, was what villas in the Adriatic were made of. Top Secret, he read wearily, Personal for Bradfield and Decypher Yourself: how much longer will

that

go on? Capri . . . Crete . . . Spetsai . . . Elba . . .

Give me an Island to myself

, he sang, in a high-pitched pop improvisation – for Cork had dreams of cutting his own discs as well –

Give me an Island to myself, Any Island, Any Island but Bonn

.

5

John Gaunt

The crowd in the lobby had thinned. The Post Office clock above the sealed lift said ten thirty-five; those who dared not risk a trip to the canteen had gathered at the front desk; the Chancery Guard had made mid-morning tea, and they were drinking it and talking in subdued voices when they heard his approaching footsteps. His heels had metal quarters and they echoed against the pseudo-marble walls like shots on a valley range. The despatch riders, with that nose for authority which soldiers have, gently set down their cups and fastened the buttons of their tunics.

‘Macmullen?’

He stood on the lowest step, one hand propped massively on the banister, the other clutching the embroidered cushion. To either side of him, corridors haunted with iron riot grilles and free-standing pillars of chrome led into the dark like ghettos from a splendid city. The silence was suddenly important, making a fool of all that had gone before.

‘Macmullen’s off duty, sir. Gone down to Naafi.’

‘Who are you?’

‘Gaunt, sir. I’m standing in for him.’

‘My name’s Turner. I’m checking physical security. I want to see Room Twenty-one.’

Gaunt was a small man, a devout Welshman, with a long memory of the Depression inherited from his father. He had come to Bonn from Cardiff, where he had driven motor-cars for the police. He carried the keys in his right hand, low down by his side, and his gait was square and rather solemn, so that as he preceded Turner into the dark mouth of the corridor, he resembled a miner making for the pithead.

‘Shocking really, all that they’ve been up to,’ Gaunt chanted, talking ahead of him and letting the sound carry backwards. ‘Peter Aldock, he’s my stringer, see, he’s got a brother in Hanover, used to be with the Occupation, married a German girl and opened a grocer’s shop. Terrified he was for sure: well, he says, they all know my George is English. What’ll happen to

him

? Worse than the Congo. Hullo there, Padre!’

The Chaplain sat at a portable typewriter in a small white cell opposite the telephone exchange, beneath a picture of his wife, his door wide open for confession. A rush cross was tucked behind the cord. ‘Good morning, John then,’ he replied in a slightly reproving tone which recalled for both of them the granite intractability of their Welsh God; and Gaunt said, ‘Hullo there,’ again but did not alter his pace. From all around them came the unmistakable sounds of a multi-lingual community: the lonely German drone of the Head Press Reader dictating a translation; the bark of the travel clerk shouting into the telephone; the distant whistling, tuneful and un-English, that seemed to come from everywhere, piped in from other corridors. Turner caught the smell of salami and second breakfasts, of newsprint and disinfectant and he thought: all change at Zurich, you’re abroad at last.

‘It’s mainly the locally employed down here,’ Gaunt explained above the din. ‘They aren’t allowed no higher, being German.’ His sympathy for foreigners was felt but controlled: a nurse’s sympathy, tempered by vocation.

A door opened to their left; a shaft of white light broke suddenly upon them, catching the poor plaster of the walls and the tattered green of a bilingual noticeboard. Two girls, about to emerge from information Registry, drew back to let them by and Turner looked them over mechanically, thinking: this was his world. Second class and foreign. One carried a thermos, the other laboured under a stack of files. Beyond them, through an outer window protected with jeweller’s screens, he glimpsed the car park and heard the roar of a motor-bike as a despatch rider drove off. Gaunt had ducked away to the right, down another passage; he stopped, and they were at the door, Gaunt fumbling with the key and Turner staring over his shoulder at the notice which hung from the centre panel: ‘Harting, Leo, Claims and Consular’, a sudden witness to the living man, or a sudden monument to the dead.

The characters of the first two words were a good two inches high, ruled at the edges and cross-hatched in red and green crayon; the word ‘Consular’ was done a good deal larger, and the letters were outlined in ink to give them that extra substance which the title evidently demanded. Stooping, Turner lightly touched the surface; it was paper mounted on hardboard, and even by that poor light he could make out the faint ruled lines of pencil dictating the upper and lower limits of each letter; defining the borders of a modest existence perhaps; or of a life unnaturally curtailed by deceit.

Deceit. I’d have thought I’d have made that plain by now

.

‘Hurry,’ he said.

Gaunt unlocked the door. As Turner seized the handle and shoved it open, he heard his sister’s voice on the telephone again and his own reply as he slammed down the receiver: ‘Tell her I’ve left the country.’ The windows were closed. The heat struck up at them from the linoleum. There was a stink of rubber and wax. One curtain was slightly drawn. Gaunt reached out to pull it back.

‘Leave it. Keep away from the window. And stay there. If anyone comes, tell them to get out.’ He tossed the embroidered cushion on to a chair and peered round the room.

The desk had chrome handles; it was better than Bradfield’s desk. The calendar on the wall advertised a firm of Dutch diplomatic importers. Turner moved very lightly, for all his bulk, examining but never touching. An old army map hung on the wall, divided into the original zones of military occupation. The British was marked in bright green, a fertile patch among the foreign deserts. It’s like a prison cell, he thought, maximum security; maybe it’s just the bars. What a place to break out of, and who wouldn’t? The smell was foreign but he couldn’t place it.

‘Well, I

am

surprised,’ Gaunt was saying. ‘There’s a lot gone, I must say.’

Turner did not look at him.

‘Such as what?’

‘I don’t know. Gadgets, all sorts. This is Mr Harting’s room,’ he explained. ‘Very gadget-minded, Mr Harting is.’

‘What sort of gadgets?’

‘Well, he had a

tea

machine, you know the kind that wakes you up? Made a lovely cup of tea, that did. Pity that’s gone, really.’

‘What else?’

‘A fire. The new fan type with the two bars over. And a lamp. A smashing one, Japanese. Go all directions, that lamp would. Turn it half-way and it burned

soft

. Very cheap to run as well, he told me. But I wouldn’t have one, you know, not now they’ve cut the allowances. Still,’ he continued consolingly, ‘I expect he’s taken them home, don’t you, if that’s where he’s gone.’

‘Yes. Yes, I expect he has.’

On the window-sill stood a transistor radio. Stooping until his eyes were on a level with the panel, Turner switched it on. At once they heard the mawkish tones of a British Forces announcer commenting on the Hanover riots and the prospects for a British victory in Brussels. Slowly Turner rolled the tuning needle along the lighted band, his ear cocked all the time to the changing babel of French, German and Dutch.

‘I thought you said physical security.’

‘I did.’

‘You haven’t hardly looked at the windows. Or the locks.’

‘I will, I will.’ He had found a Slav voice and he was listening with deep concentration. ‘Know him well, did you? Come in here often for a cup?’

‘Quite. Depends on how busy, really.’

Switching off the radio, Turner stood up. ‘Wait outside,’ he said. ‘And give me the keys.’

‘What’s he done then?’ Gaunt demanded, hesitating. ‘What’s gone wrong?’

‘Done? Nothing. He’s on compassionate leave. I want to be alone, that’s all.’

‘They say he’s in trouble.’

‘Who?’

‘Talkers.’

‘What sort of trouble?’

‘I don’t know. Car smash maybe. He wasn’t at choir practice, see. Nor Chapel.’

‘Does he drive badly?’

‘Can’t say really.’

Part defiant, part curious, Gaunt stayed by the door, watching as Turner pulled open the wooden wardrobe and peered inside. Three hair-dryers, still in their boxes, lay on the floor beside a pair of rubber overshoes.

‘You’re a friend of his, aren’t you?’

‘Not really. Only from choir, see.’

‘Ah,’ said Turner, staring at him now. ‘You sang for him. I used to sing in choir myself.’

‘Oh really now, where’s that then?’

‘Yorkshire,’ Turner said with awful friendliness, while his pale gaze continued to fix upon Gaunt’s plain face. ‘I hear he’s a lovely organist.’

‘Not at all bad, I will say,’ Gaunt agreed, rashly recognising a common interest.

‘Who’s his

special

friend; someone else in the choir, was it? A lady perhaps?’ Turner enquired, still not far from piety.

‘He’s not close to anyone, Leo.’

‘Then who does he buy these for?’

The hair-dryers were of varying quality and complexity; the prices on the boxes ran from eighty to two hundred marks. ‘Who for?’ he repeated.

‘All of us. Dips, non-dips; it didn’t signify. He runs a service, see; works the diplomatic discounts. Always do you a favour, Leo will. Don’t matter what you fancy: radios, dish-washers, cars; he’ll get you a bit off, like; you know.’

‘Knows his way round, does he?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Takes a cut too, I expect. For his trouble,’ Turner suggested coaxingly. ‘Quite right too.’

‘I didn’t say so.’

‘Do you a girl as well, would he? Mister Fixit, is that it?’

‘Certainly not,’ said Gaunt, much shocked.

‘What was in it for him?’

‘Nothing. Not that I know of.’

‘Just a little friend of all the world, eh? Likes to be liked. Is that it?’

‘Well, we all do really, don’t we?’

‘Philosopher, are we?’

‘Always

willing

,’ Gaunt continued, very slow to follow the changes in Turner’s mood. ‘You ask Arthur Meadowes now, there’s an example. The moment Leo’s in Registry, not hardly a day after, he’s down here collecting the mail. “Don’t you bother,” he says to Arthur. “Save your legs, you’re not so young as you were and you’ve plenty to worry about already. I’ll fetch it for you, look.” That’s Leo. Obliging. Saintly really, considering his disadvantages.’

‘What mail?’

‘Everything. Classified or Unclassified, it didn’t make no difference. He’d be down here signing for it, taking it up to Arthur.’

Very still, Turner said, ‘Yes, I see that. And maybe he’d drop in here on the way, would he? Check on his own room; brew up a cup of tea.’

‘That’s it,’ said Gaunt, ‘always ready to oblige.’ He opened the door. ‘Well, I’ll be leaving you to it.’

‘You stay here,’ said Turner, still watching him. ‘You’ll be all right. You stay and talk to me, Gaunt. I like company. Tell me about his disadvantages.’

Returning the hair-dryers to their boxes, he pulled out a linen jacket, still on its hanger. A summer jacket; the kind that barmen wear. A dead rose hung from the buttonhole.

‘What disadvantages?’ he asked, throwing the rose into the wastebag. ‘You can tell me, Gaunt,’ and he noticed the smell again, the wardrobe smell he had caught but not defined, the sweet, familiar, continental smell of male unguents and cigar.

‘Only his childhood, that’s all. He had an uncle.’

‘Tell me about the uncle.’

‘Nothing; only how he was daft. Always changing politics. He had a lovely way of narrative, Leo did. Told us how he used to sit down in the cellar in Hampstead with his uncle while the bombs were falling, making pills in a machine. Dried fruit. Squashed them all up and rolled them in sugar, then put them in the tins, see. Used to spit on them, Leo did, just to spite his uncle. My wife was very shocked when she heard that – I said don’t be silly, that’s deprivation. He hasn’t had the love, see, not what you’ve had.’

Having felt the pockets, Turner cautiously detached the jacket from the hanger and held the shoulders against his own substantial frame.

‘Little bloke?’

‘He’s a keen dresser,’ said Gaunt, ‘always well turned out, Leo is.’

‘Your size?’

Turner held the jacket towards him, but Gaunt drew back in distaste.

‘Smaller,’ he said, his eyes still on the jacket. ‘More the dancer type. Butterfly. You’d think he wore pumps all the time.’

‘Pansy?’

‘Certainly not,’ said Gaunt, very shocked again, and colouring at the notion.

‘How do you know?’

‘He’s a decent fellow, that’s why,’ said Gaunt, fiercely. ‘Even if he has done something wrong.’

‘Pious?’

‘Respectful, very. And about religion. Never cheeky or brash, although he was foreign.’

‘What else did he say about his uncle?’

‘Nothing.’

‘What else about his politics?’ He was looking at the desk, examining the locks on the drawers.

Tossing the jacket on to a chair, he held out his hand for the keys. Reluctantly Gaunt released them.

‘Nothing. I don’t know nothing about his politics.’

‘Who says anything about him doing something wrong?’

‘You. All this hunting him. Measuring him; I don’t fancy it.’

‘What would he have done, I wonder? To make me hunt him like this?’

‘God only knows.’

‘In his wisdom.’ He had opened the top drawers. ‘Have you got a diary like this?’

It was bound in blue rexine and stamped in gold with the royal crest.

‘No.’

‘Poor Gaunt. Too humble?’ He was turning the pages, working back. Once he stopped and frowned; once he wrote something in his black notebook.

‘It was Counsellors and above, that’s why,’ Gaunt retorted. ‘I wouldn’t accept it.’

‘He offered you one, did he? That was another of his fiddles, I suppose. What happened? He scrounged a bundle did he, from Registry, and handed them out to his old chums on the Ground Floor. “Here you are, boys: the streets are paved with gold up there. Here’s a keepsake from your old winger.” Is that the way of it, Gaunt? And Christian virtue held you back, did it?’ Closing the diary, he pulled open the lower drawers.

‘What if he did? You’ve no call to go rifling through his desk there, have you? Not for a little thing like that! Pinching a handful of diaries; well, that’s hardly all the world, is it?’ His Welsh accent had jumped all the hurdles and was running free.

‘You’re a Christian man, Gaunt. You know how the devil works better than I do. Little things lead to big things, don’t they? Pinch an apple one day, you’ll be hi-jacking a lorry the next.

You

know the way it goes, Gaunt. What else did he tell you about himself? Any more little childhood reminiscences?’

He had found a paper knife, a slim, silver affair with a broad, flat handle, and he was reading the engraving by the desk lamp.

‘L. H. from Margaret. Now who was Margaret, I wonder?’

‘I never heard of her.’

‘He was engaged to be married once, did you know that?’

‘No.’

‘Miss Aickman. Margaret Aickman. Ring a bell?’

‘No.’

‘How about the Army. Did he tell you about that?’

‘He loved the Army. In Berlin, he said, he used to watch the cavalry going over the jumps. He loved it.’

‘He was in the infantry, was he?’

‘I don’t really know.’

‘No.’

Turner had put the knife aside, next to the blue diary, made another note in his pocket-book and picked up a small flat tin of Dutch cigars.

‘Smoker?’

‘He liked a cigar. Yes. That’s all he smoked, see. Always

carried

cigarettes, mind. But I only ever saw him smoke those things. There was one or two in Chancery complained, so I hear. About the cigars. Didn’t fancy them. But Leo could be stubborn when he had the mind, I will say.’

‘How long have you been here, Gaunt?’

‘Five years.’

‘He was in a fight in Cologne. That in your time?’

Gaunt hesitated.

‘Amazing the way things are hushed up here, I must say. You give a new meaning to the “need to know”, you do. Everyone knows except the people who need to. What happened?’

‘It was just a fight. They say he asked for it, that’s all.’

‘How?’

‘I don’t know. They say he deserved it, see. I heard from my predecessor: they brought him back one night, you couldn’t hardly recognise him, that’s what he said. Serve him right, he said; that’s what they told him. Mind you, he could be pugnacious, I’m not denying it.’

‘Who? Who told him?’

‘I don’t know. I didn’t ask. That would be prying.’

‘Often fighting, is he?’

‘No.’

‘Was there a woman involved? Margaret Aickman perhaps?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Then why’s he pugnacious?’

‘I don’t know,’ Gaunt said, torn once more between suspicion and a native passion for communication. ‘Why are you then for that matter?’ he muttered, venturing aggression, but Turner ignored him.

‘That’s right. Never pry. Never tell on a friend. God wouldn’t like it. I admire a man who sticks to his principles.’

‘I don’t care what he’s done,’ Gaunt continued, gathering courage as he went. ‘He wasn’t a bad man. He was a bit sharp maybe, but so he would be, being continental, we all know that.’ He pointed to the desk and the open drawers. ‘But he wasn’t bad like this.’

‘No one is. Know that? No one’s ever this bad. That’s what mercy’s about. We’re all lovely people, really. There’s a hymn about that, isn’t there? One of the hymns he used to play, and you and I used to sing, Gaunt, before we grew up and got elegant. That’s a lovely thing about hymns: we never forget them, do we. Like limericks. God knew a thing or two when he invented rhyme I will say. What did he learn when he was a kid, tell me that? What did Leo learn on his uncle’s knee, eh?’

‘He could speak Italian,’ Gaunt said suddenly, as if it were a trump card he had been holding back.

‘He could, could he?’

‘And he learnt it in England. At the Farm School. The other kids wouldn’t speak to him, see, him being German, so he used to go out on a bicycle and talk to the Italian prisoners of war. And he’s never forgotten it, never. He’s got a lovely memory, I tell you. Never forgets a word you say to him, I’m sure.’

‘Wonderful.’

‘A real brain he could have been, if he’d had your advantages.’

Turner looked at him blankly. ‘Who the hell says I’ve got any advantages?’

He had opened another drawer; it was filled with the small junk of any private life in any office: a stapler, pencils, elastic bands, foreign coins and used railway tickets.

‘How often was choir, Gaunt? Once a week, was it? You’d have a nice sing-song and a prayer and afterwards you’d slip out and have a beer down the road, and he’d tell you all about himself. Then there were outings, I suppose. Coach trips, I expect. That’s what we like, isn’t it, you and I? Something corporate but spiritual. Coaches, institutions, choirs. And Leo came along, did he? Got to know everyone, hear their little confidences, hold their little hands. Quite the entertainer he must have been by the sound of it.’

All the while they spoke, he continued to record items in his notebook: sewing materials, a packet of needles, pills of different colours and descriptions. Fascinated despite himself, Gaunt drew nearer.

‘Well, not only that, see. Only I live on the top floor, there’s a flat up there: it should have been Macmullen’s but he can’t occupy it, him having too many children, they couldn’t have

them

running wild up there now, could they? We practised in the Assembly Room first, Fridays, see, that’s on the other side of the lobby next to the pay office, and then he’d come on up after, for a cup of tea, like. Well, you know, I had a few cups here too for that matter; quite a joy to pay back it was, after all he done for us; things he bought for us and that. He loved a cup of tea,’ said Gaunt simply. ‘He loved a fire too. I always had that feeling, he loved a family, him not having one.’

‘He told you that, did he? He told you he’d no family?’

‘No.’

‘Then how do you know?’

‘It was too evident to be talked about, really. He’d no education either; dragged up really, you could tell.’

Turner had found a bottle of long yellow pills and he was shaking them into the palm of his hand, sniffing cautiously at them.

‘And that’s been going on for years, has it? Cosy chats after practice?’

‘Oh no. He didn’t hardly notice me really, not till a few months ago and I didn’t like to press him at all, him being a dip, see. It’s only recently he took the interest. Same as Exiles.’

‘Exiles?’

‘Motoring Club.’

‘How recent? When did he take you up?’

‘New Year,’ Gaunt said, now very puzzled. ‘Yes. Since January I’d say. He seems to have had a change of heart January.’

‘This January?’

‘That’s right,’ Gaunt said, as if he were seeing it for the first time. ‘Late January. Since he started with Arthur, really. Arthur’s had a

great

influence on Leo. Made him more

contemplative

, you know. More the meditating kind. A great improvement, I’d say. And my wife agrees, you know.’

‘I’ll bet. How else did he change?’

‘That’s it really. More reflective.’

‘Since January when he took you up. Bang: in comes the New Year and Leo’s reflective.’

‘Well, steadier. Like he was ill. We did wonder, you know. I said to my wife’ – Gaunt lowered his voice in reverence at the notion – ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if the doctor hadn’t warned him.’

Turner was looking at the map again, first directly and then sideways, noting the pin-holes of vanished units. In an old bookcase lay a heap of census reports, press cuttings and magazines. Kneeling, he began working through them.

‘What else did you talk about?’

‘Nothing serious.’

‘Just politics?’

‘I like serious conversation myself,’ Gaunt said. ‘But I didn’t somehow fancy it with him, you didn’t quite know where it would end.’

‘Lost his temper, did he?’

The cuttings referred to the Movement. The census reports concerned the rise of public support for Karfeld.

‘He was too gentle. Like a woman in that way; you could disappoint him dreadfully; just a word would do it. Vulnerable he was.

And

quiet. That’s what I never did understand about Cologne, see. I said to my wife, “Well, I don’t know I’m sure, but if Leo started that fight, it was the devil got hold of him.” But he had

seen

a lot, hadn’t he?’

Turner had come upon a photograph of students rioting in Berlin. Two boys were holding an old man by the arms and a third was slapping him with the back of his hand. His fingers were turned upwards, and the light divided the knuckles like a sculpture. A line had been drawn round the frame in red ball point.

‘I mean you never knew when you were being

personal

, like,’ Gaunt continued, ‘touching him too near. I used to think sometimes, I said to my wife as a matter of fact, she was never quite at home with him herself, I said, “Well, I wouldn’t like to have his dreams.” ’

Turner stood up. ‘What dreams?’

‘Just dreams. Things he’s seen, I suppose. They say he saw a lot, don’t they? All the atrocities.’

‘Who does?’

‘Talkers. One of the drivers, I think. Marcus. He’s gone now. He had a turn with him up there in Hamburg in forty-six or that. Shocking.’

Turner had opened an old copy of

Stern

which lay on the bookcase. Large photographs of the Bremen riots covered both pages. There was a picture of Karfeld speaking from a high wooden platform; young men shouted in ecstasy.

‘I think that bothered him, you know,’ Gaunt continued, looking over his shoulder. ‘He spoke a lot about Fascism off and on.’

‘Did he though?’ Turner asked softly. ‘Tell us about that, Gaunt. I’m interested in talk like that.’

‘Well, just sometimes.’ Gaunt sounded nervous. ‘He could get very worked up about that. It could happen again, he said, and the West would just stand by; and the bankers all put in a bit, and that would be it. He said Socialist and Conservative, it didn’t have no meaning any more, not when all the decisions were made in Zurich or Washington. You could see that, he said, from recent events. Well, it was true really, I had to admit.’

For a moment, the whole sound-track stopped: the traffic, the machines, the voices, and Turner heard nothing but the beating of his own heart.

‘What was the remedy then?’ he asked softly.

‘He didn’t have one.’

‘Personal action for instance?’

‘He didn’t say so.’

‘God?’

‘No, he wasn’t a believer. Not truly, in his heart.’

‘Conscience?’

‘I told you. He didn’t say.’

‘He never suggested you might put the balance right? You and he together?’

‘He wasn’t

like

that,’ Gaunt said impatiently. ‘He didn’t fancy company. Not when it came to . . . well, to his own

matters

, see.’

‘Why didn’t your wife fancy him?’

Gaunt hesitated.

‘She liked to keep close to me when he was around, that’s all. Nothing he ever said or did, mind; but she just liked to keep close.’ He smiled indulgently. ‘You know how they are,’ he said. ‘Very

natural

.’

‘Did he stay long? Did he sit and talk for hours at a time? About nothing? Ogling your wife?’

‘Don’t say that,’ Gaunt snapped.

Abandoning the desk, Turner opened the cupboard again and noted the printed number on the soles of the rubber overshoes.

‘Besides he didn’t stay long. He liked to go off and work night times, didn’t he? Recently I mean. In Registry and that. He said to me: “John,” he said, “I like to make my contribution.” And he did. He was proud of his work these last months. It was beautiful; wonderful to see, really. Work half the night sometimes, wouldn’t he? All night, even.’

Turner’s pale, pale eyes rested on Gaunt’s dark face.

‘Would he?’

He dropped the shoes back into the cupboard and they clattered absurdly in the silence.

‘Well, he’d a lot to do, you know; a great lot. Loaded with responsibilities, Leo is. A fine man, really. Too good for this floor; that’s what I say.’

‘And that’s what happened every Friday night since January. After choir. He’d come up and have a nice cup of tea and a chat, hang about till the place was quiet, then slip off and work in Registry?’

‘Regular as clockwork. Come in prepared, he would. Choir practice first, then up for a cup of tea till the rest had cleared out like, then down to Registry. “John,” he’d say. “I can’t work when there’s bustle, I can’t stand it, I love peace and quiet, to be truthful. I’m not as young as I was and that’s a fact.” Had a bag with him, all ready. Thermos, maybe a sandwich. Very efficient man, he was; handy.’

‘Sign the night book, did he?’

Gaunt faltered, waking at long last to the full menace in that quiet, destructive monotone. Turner slammed together the wooden doors of the cupboard. ‘Or didn’t you bloody well bother? Well, not right really, is it? You can’t come over all official, not to a guest. A dip too, at that, a dip who graced your parlour. Let him come and go as he pleased in the middle of the bloody night, didn’t you? Wouldn’t have been respectful to check up at all, would it? One of the family really, wasn’t he? Pity to spoil it with formalities. Wouldn’t be Christian, that wouldn’t. No idea what time he left the building, I suppose? Two o’clock, four o’clock?’

Gaunt had to keep very still to catch the words, they were so softly spoken.

‘It’s nothing

bad

, is it?’ he asked.

‘And that bag of his,’ Turner continued in the same terribly low key. ‘It wouldn’t have been proper to look inside, I suppose? Open the thermos, for instance. The Lord wouldn’t fancy that, would he? Don’t you worry, Gaunt, it’s nothing bad. Nothing that a prayer and a cup of tea won’t cure.’ He was at the door and Gaunt had to watch him. ‘You were just playing happy families, weren’t you; letting him stroke your leg to make you feel good.’ His voice picked up the Welsh intonation and lampooned it cruelly. ‘ “Look how virtuous we are . . . How much in love . . . Look how grand, having the dips in . . . Salt of the earth, we are . . . Always something on the hod . . . And sorry you can’t have her, but that’s my privilege.” Well, you’ve bought it, Gaunt, the whole book. A guard they called you: he’d have charmed you into bed for half a crown.’ He pushed open the door. ‘He’s on compassionate leave, and don’t you forget it or you’ll be in hotter water than you are already.’

‘That may be the world you’ve come from,’ Gaunt said suddenly, staring at him as if in revelation, ‘but it isn’t mine, Mr Turner, so don’t come taking it out on me, see. I did my best by Leo and I would again, and I don’t know what’s all twisted in your mind. Poison, that’s what it is; poison.’

‘Go to hell.’ Turner tossed him the keys, and Gaunt let them fall at his feet.

‘If there’s something else you know about him, some other gorgeous bit of gossip, you’d better tell me now. Fast. Well?’

Gaunt shook his head. ‘Go away.’

‘What else do the talkers say? A bit of fluff in the choir was there, Gaunt? You can tell me, I won’t eat you.’

‘I never heard.’

‘What did Bradfield think of him?’

‘How should I know? Ask Bradfield.’

‘Did he like him?’

Gaunt’s face had darkened with disapproval.

‘I’ve no occasion to say,’ he snapped. ‘I don’t gossip about my superiors.’

‘Who’s Praschko? Praschko a name to you?’

‘There’s nothing else. I don’t know.’

Turner pointed at the small pile of Leo’s possessions on the desk. ‘Take those up to the cypher room. I’ll need them later. And the press cuttings. Give them to the clerk and make him sign for them, understand? Whether you fancy him or not. And make a list of everything that’s missing. Everything he’s taken home.’

* * *

He did not go immediately to Meadowes, but went outside and stood on the grass verge beside the car park. A veil of mist hung over the barren field and the traffic stormed like an angry sea. The Red Cross building was dark with scaffolding and capped by an orange crane: an oil rig anchored to the tarmac. The policemen watched him curiously, for he remained quite still and his eyes seemed to be trained upon the horizon, though the horizon was obscure. At last – it might have been in response to a command they did not hear – he turned and walked slowly back to the front steps.

‘You ought to get a proper pass,’ the weasel-faced sergeant said, ‘coming in and out all day.’

Registry smelt of dust and sealing wax and printer’s ink. Meadowes was waiting for him. He looked haggard and deeply tired. He did not move as Turner came towards him, pushing his way between the desks and files, but watched him dully and with contempt.

‘Why did they have to send you?’ he asked. ‘Haven’t they got anyone else? Who are you going to wreck this time?’

6

The Memory Man

They stood in a small sanctum, a steel-lined tank which served both as a strong-room and an office. The windows were barred twice over, once with fine mesh and once with steel rods. From the adjoining room came the constant shuffle of feet and paper. Meadowes wore a black suit. The edges of the lapels were studded with pins. Steel lockers like sentinels stood along the walls, each with a stencilled number and a combination lock.

‘Of all the people I swore I’d never see again –’

‘Turner was at the top of the list. All right. All right, you’re not the only one. Let’s get it over, shall we?’

They sat down.

‘She doesn’t know you’re here,’ said Meadowes. ‘I’m not going to tell her you’re here.’

‘All right.’

‘He met her a few times; there was nothing between them.’

‘I’ll keep away from her.’

‘Yes,’ said Meadowes. He did not speak to Turner, but past him, at the lockers. ‘Yes, you must.’

‘Try and forget it’s me,’ Turner said. ‘Take your time.’ For a moment his expression seemed to yield, as the shadows formed upon his plain complexion, until in its way his face was as old as Meadowes’, and as weary.

‘I’ll tell it you once,’ Meadowes said, ‘and that’s all. I’ll tell you all I know, and then you clear out.’

Turner nodded.

‘It began with the Exiles Motoring Club,’ Meadowes said. ‘That’s how I met him really. I like cars, always have done. I’d bought a Rover, Three Litre, for retirement –’

‘How long have you been here?’

‘A year. Yes, a year now.’

‘Straight from Warsaw?’

‘We did a spell in London in between. Then they sent me here. I was fifty-eight. I’d two more years to run and after Warsaw I reckoned I’d take things quietly. I wanted to look after her, get her right again –’

‘All right.’

‘I don’t go out much as a rule but I joined this club, UK and Commonwealth it is mainly, but decent. I reckoned that would do us nicely: one evening a week, the rallies in the summer, get-togethers in the winter. I could take Myra, see; get her back into things, keep an eye on her. She wanted that herself, in the beginning. She was lost; she wanted company. I’m all she’s got.’

‘All right,’ Turner said.

‘They were a good lot when we joined, though it’s like any other club, of course, it goes up and down; depends who runs it. Get a good crowd in and you have a lot of fun; get a bad crowd, there’s jiving and all the rest.’

‘And Harting was big there, was he?’

‘You let me go at my own speed, right?’ Meadowes’ manner was firm and disapproving: a father corrects his son. ‘No. He was not big there, not at that time. He was a member there, that’s all, just a member. I shouldn’t think he showed up, not once in six meetings. Well, he didn’t

belong

really. After all he was a diplomat, and the Exiles isn’t meant for dips. Mid-November, we have the Annual General Meeting. Haven’t you got your black notebook then?’

‘November,’ Turner said, not moving, ‘The AGM. Five months ago.’

‘It was a funny sort of do really. Funny atmosphere. Karfeld had been on the go about six weeks and we were all wondering what would happen next, I think. Freddie Luxton was in the chair and he was just off to Nairobi; Bill Aintree was Social Secretary and they’d warned him for Korea, and the rest of us were in a flutter trying to elect new officers, get through the agenda and fix up the winter outing. That’s when Leo pipes up and in a way that was his first step into Registry.’

Meadowes fell silent. ‘I don’t know what kind of fool I am,’ he said. ‘I just don’t know.’

Turner waited.

‘I tell you: we’d never

heard

of him, not really, not as somebody keen on the Exiles. And he had this reputation, you see –’

‘What reputation?’

‘Well, they said he was a bit of a gypsy. Always on the fiddle. There was some story about Cologne. I didn’t fancy what I’d heard, to be frank, and I didn’t want him mixed up with Myra.’

‘What story about Cologne?’

‘Hearsay, that’s all it is. He was in a fight. A night-club brawl.’

‘No details?’

‘None.’

‘Who else was there?’

‘I’ve no idea. Where was I?’

‘The Exiles, AGM.’

‘The winter outing. Yes. “Right,” says Bill Aintree. “Any suggestions from the floor?” And Leo’s on his feet straight away. He was about three chairs down from me. I said to Myra: “Here, what’s

he

up to?” Well, Leo had a proposal, he said. For the winter outing. He knew an old man in Königswinter who owned a string of barges, very rich and very fond of the English, he said; quite high in the Anglo-German. And this old fellow had agreed to lend us two barges and two crews to run the whole club up to Koblenz and back. As some kind of

quid pro quo

for a favour the British had done him in the Occupation. Leo always knew people like that,’ said Meadowes; and a brief smile of affection illuminated the sadness of his features. ‘There’d be covered accommodation, rum and coffee on the way and a big lunch when we got to Koblenz. Leo had worked the whole thing out; he reckoned he could lay it on at twenty-one marks eighty a head including drinks and a present for his friend.’ He broke off. ‘I can’t go any quicker, it’s not my way.’

‘I didn’t say anything.’

‘You’re pressing all the time, I can feel it,’ Meadowes said querulously, and sighed. ‘They fell for it, we all did, Committee or not. You know what people are like: if one man knows what he wants . . . ’

‘And he did.’

‘I suppose some reckoned he’d got an axe to grind, but no one cared. There was a few of us thought he was taking a cut to be honest, but well, maybe he deserved it. And the price was fair enough any time. Bill Aintree was getting out:

he

didn’t care. He seconded. The motion’s carried and recorded without a word being said against, and as soon as the meeting’s over, Leo comes straight across to me and Myra, smiling his head off. “She’ll love that,” he says, “Myra will. A nice trip on the river. Take her out of herself.” Just as if he’d done it specially for her. I said yes, she would, and bought him a drink. It seemed wrong really, him doing so much and no one else paying him a blind bit of notice, whatever they say about him. I was sorry for him.

And

grateful,’ he added simply. ‘I still am: we had a lovely outing.’

Again he fell silent, and again Turner waited while the older man wrestled with private conflicts and private perplexities. From the barred window came the tireless throb of Bonn’s iron heartbeat: the far thunder of drills and cranes, the moan of vainly galloping cars.

‘I thought he was after Myra to be honest,’ he said at last. ‘I watched out for that, I don’t mind admitting. But there wasn’t a breath of it, not on either side. Goodness knows, I’m sharp enough on

that

after Warsaw.’

‘I believe you.’

‘I don’t care whether you believe me or not. It’s the truth.’

‘He had a reputation for that as well, did he?’

‘A bit.’

‘Who with?’

‘I’ll go on with the story if you don’t mind,’ Meadowes said, looking at his hands. ‘I’m not going to pass on that kind of muck. Least of all to you. There’s more nonsense talked in this place than is good for any of us.’

‘I’ll find out,’ Turner said, his face frozen like a dead man’s. ‘It’ll take me longer, but that needn’t worry you.’

* * *

‘Dreadfully cold, it was,’ Meadowes continued. ‘Lumps of ice on the water, and beautiful, if that means anything to you. Just like Leo said: rum and coffee for the grown-ups, cocoa for the kids, and everyone happy as a cricket. We started from Königswinter and kicked off with a drink at his place before we went aboard, and from the moment we get there, Leo’s looking after us. Me and Myra. He’d singled us out and that was it. We might have been the only people there for him. Myra loved it. He put a shawl round her shoulders, told her jokes . . . I hadn’t seen her laugh like it since Warsaw. She kept saying to me: “I haven’t been so happy for years.” ’

‘What sort of jokes?’

‘About himself mainly . . . running on. He had a story about Berlin, him shoving a cartload of files across the parade ground in the middle of a cavalry practice, and the sergeant-major on his horse, and Leo down there with the handcart . . . He could do all the voices, Leo could; one minute he was up on his horse, the next minute he’s the Guard corporal . . . He could even do the trumpets and that. Wonderful really; wonderful gift. Very entertaining man, Leo . . . very.’

He glanced at Turner as if he expected to be contradicted, but Turner’s face was without expression. ‘On the way back, he takes me aside. “Arthur, a quiet word,” he says; that’s him, a quiet word. You know the way he talks.’

‘No.’

‘Confiding. Everyone’s special. “Arthur,” he says, “Rawley Bradfield’s just sent for me; they want me to move up to Registry and give you a hand up there, and before I tell him yes or no, I’d like to hear what

you

feel.” Putting it in my hands, you see. If I didn’t fancy the idea, he’d head it off; that’s what he was hinting at. Well, it came as a surprise, I don’t mind telling you. I didn’t quite know what to think; after all he was a Second Secretary . . . it didn’t seem right, that was my first reaction. And to be frank I wasn’t sure I believed him. So I asked him: “Have you any experience of archives?” Yes, but long ago, he said, though he’d always fancied going back to them.’

‘When was that then?’

‘When was what?’

‘When was he dealing with archives?’

‘Berlin, I suppose. I never asked. You didn’t ask Leo about his background really; you never knew what you might hear.’

Meadowes shook his head. ‘So here he was with this suggestion. It didn’t seem right, but what could I say? “It’s up to Bradfield,” I told him. “If he sends you, and you want to come, there’s work enough.” Well, it worried me for a bit, to be honest. I even thought of talking to Bradfield about it but I didn’t. Best thing is, I thought, let it blow over; I’ll probably hear no more of it. For a time that’s just what happened. Myra was bad again, there was the leadership crisis at home and the gold row in Brussels. And as for Karfeld, he was going hammer and tongs all over the place. There were deputations out from England, Trade Union protests, old comrades and I don’t know what. Registry was a beehive, and Harting went clean out of my mind. He was Social Secretary of the Exiles by then, but otherwise I hardly saw him. I mean he didn’t rate. There was too much else to think of.’

‘I get it.’

‘The next thing I knew was, Bradfield sends for me. It was just before the holiday – about 20th December. First, he asks me how I’m getting along with the Destruction programme. I was a bit put out; we’d really been going it those last months. Destruction was about the last thing anyone had been bothering with.’

‘Go carefully now: I want the fat as well as the lean.’

‘I said it was hanging fire. Well, he says, how would I feel if he sent me someone to help out with it, come and work in Registry and bring it up to date? There’s been the suggestion, he said, nothing definite, and he wanted to sound me out first, there’d been the suggestion Harting might be able to lend a hand.’

‘Whose suggestion?’

‘He didn’t say.’

It was suddenly upon them; and each in his way was mystified.

‘Whoever suggested anything to Bradfield?’ Meadowes asked. ‘It makes no sense.’

‘That’s rather what I wondered,’ Turner confessed, and the silence returned.

‘So you said you’d have him?’

‘No, I told him the truth. I said I didn’t need him.’

‘You didn’t

need

him? You told Bradfield that?’

‘Don’t press me like that. Bradfield knew very well I didn’t need anyone. Not for Destruction anyway. I’d been on to Library in London and spoken to them, back in November that was, once the Karfeld panic began. I’d told them I was worried about the programme, I was way behind, could I let it go till the crisis was over? Library told me to forget it.’

Turner stared at him.

‘And Bradfield knew that? You’re certain Bradfield knew?’

‘I’d sent him a minute of the conversation. He never even referred to it. Afterwards I asked that PA of his and she was certain she’d put it up to him.’

‘Where is it? Where’s the minute now?’

‘Gone. It was a loose minute: it was Bradfield’s responsibility whether he preserved it or not. But they’ll know about it in Library all right; they were quite surprised later on to find we’d bothered with Destruction at all.’

‘Who did you speak to in Library?’

‘Once to Maxwell, once to Cowdry.’

‘Did you remind Bradfield of that?’

‘I began to, but he just cut me off. Closed right down on me. “It’s all arranged,” he says. “Harting’s joining you mid-January and he’ll manage Personalities and Destruction.” So lump it, in other words. “You can forget he’s a diplomat,” he said. “Treat him as your subordinate. Treat him how you like. But he’s coming mid-January and that’s a fact.” You know how he throws people away. Specially Harting.’

Turner was writing in his notebook but Meadowes paid no attention.

‘So that’s how he came to me. That’s the truth. I didn’t want him, I didn’t trust him, not completely anyway, and to begin with I suppose I let him know it. We were just too busy:

I

didn’t want to waste time breaking in a man like Leo. What was I supposed to do with him?’

A girl brought tea. A brown woolly cosy covered the pot and the cubes of sugar were individually wrapped and stamped with the Naafi’s insignia. Turner grinned at her but she ignored him. He could hear someone shouting about Hanover.

‘They do say things are bad in England too,’ Meadowes said. ‘Violence; demonstrations; all the protests. What is it that gets into your generation? What have we

done

to you? That’s what I don’t understand.’

‘We’ll start with when he arrived,’ Turner said. That’s what it would be like, he thought, to have a father you believed in: values for their own sake and a gap as wide as the Atlantic.

‘I said to Leo when he came, “Leo, just keep out of the way. Don’t get between my feet, and don’t go bothering other people.” He took it like a lamb. “Right-ho, Arthur, whatever you say.” I asked him whether he’d got something to get on with. Yes, he said, Personalities would keep him going for a bit.’

‘It’s like a dream,’ Turner said softly, looking up at last from his notebook. ‘It’s a lovely dream. First of all he takes over the Exiles. A one-man takeover, real Party tactics; I’ll do the dirty work, you go back to sleep. Then he cons you, then he cons Bradfield, and within a couple of months he’s got the pick of Registry. How was he? Cocky? I should think he could hardly stand up for laughing.’

‘He was quiet. Not cocky at all. Subdued I’d say. Not at all what they told me he was like.’

‘Who?’

‘Oh . . . I don’t know. There’s a lot didn’t like him; there’s a lot more were jealous of him.’

‘Jealous?’

‘Well, he was a diplomat, wasn’t he. Even if he was a temporary. They said he’d be running the place in a fortnight, taking ten per cent on the files. You know the way they talk. But he’d changed. They all admitted that, even young Cork and Johnny Slingo. You could almost date it, they said, from when the crisis began. It sobered him down.’ Meadowes shook his head as if he hated to see a good man go wrong. ‘And he was useful.’

‘Don’t tell me. He took you by surprise.’

‘I don’t know how he managed it. He knew nothing about archives, not our kind anyway; and I can’t for the life of me see how he got near enough to anyone in Registry to ask; but by mid-February, that Personalities Survey was drafted, signed off and away, and the Destruction programme was back on the rails. We were working all round him: Karfeld, Brussels, the Coalition crisis and the rest of it. And there was Leo, still as a rock, working away at his own bits and pieces. No one told him anything twice, I think that was half the secret. He’d a lovely memory. He’d scrounge a bit of information, tuck it away, and bring it out weeks later when you’d forgotten all about it. I don’t think he forgot a word anyone ever said to him. He could listen with his eyes, Leo could.’ Meadowes shook his head at the reminiscence: ‘The memory man, that’s what Johnny Slingo used to call him.’

‘Handy. For an archivist of course.’

‘You see it all differently,’ Meadowes said at last. ‘You can’t distinguish the good from the bad.’

‘You tell me when I go wrong,’ Turner replied, writing all the time. ‘I’ll be grateful for that. Very.’

‘Destruction’s a weird game,’ Meadowes said, in the reflective tone of a man reviewing his own craft. ‘To begin with, you’d think it was simple. You select a file, a big one, say a subject file with twenty-five volumes. I’ll give you an example:

Disarmament

. There’s a real rag-bag. You turn up the back numbers first to check the dates and the material, all right? So what do you find? Industrial dismantling in the Ruhr, 1946; Control Commission policy on the allocation of shotgun licences, 1949. Re-establishment of German military potential, 1950. Some of it’s so old you’d laugh. You take a look at the current columns to compare, and what do you find? Warheads for the Bundeswehr. It’s a million miles away. All right, you say, let’s burn the back papers, they’re irrelevant. There’s fifteen volumes at least we can chuck out. Who’s the desk officer for disarmament? Peter de Lisle: put it up to him: “Please may we destroy up to nineteen-sixty?” No objection, he says, so you’re off.’ Meadowes shook his head. ‘Only you’re not. You’re not even half-way to off. You can’t just carve off the back ten volumes and shove them in the fire. There’s the ledger for a start: who’s going to cancel all the entries? There’s the card index; that’s got to be weeded. Were there treaties? Right: clear with legal department. Is there a military interest? Clear it with the MA. Are there duplicates in London? No. So we all sit back and wait another two months: no destruction of originals without written permission from Library. See what I mean?’

‘I get the idea,’ said Turner, waiting.

‘Then there’s all the cross-references, the sister files in the same series: will

they

be affected? Should they be destroyed as well? Or should we make up residuals to be on the safe side? Before you know where you are, you’re wandering all over Registry, looking in every nook and cranny; there’s no end to it once you start; nothing’s holy.’

‘I should think it suited him down to the ground.’

‘There’s no

restriction

,’ Meadowes observed simply, as if replying to a question. ‘It may offend you, but it’s the only system I can understand. Anyone can look at anything, that’s my rule. Anyone sent up here, I trust them. There’s no other way to run the place. I can’t go sniffing round asking who’s looking at what, can I?’ he demanded, ignoring Turner’s bewildered gaze.

‘He took to it like a duck to water. I was amazed. He was happy, that was the first thing. It tickled him, working in here, and quite soon it tickled me having him. He liked the company.’ He broke off. ‘The only thing we ever

really

minded,’ he said with an unexpected smile, ‘was those ruddy cigars he smoked. Javanese Dutch I believe they were. Stank the place out. We used to tease him about them but he wouldn’t budge. Still, I think I miss them now.’ He continued quietly: ‘He’d been out of his depth in Chancery, he’s not their sort at all, and the ground floor didn’t have much time for him either in my opinion, but this place was just right.’ He inclined his head towards the closed door. ‘It’s like a shop in there, sometimes: you have the customers and you have one another. Johnny Slingo, Valerie . . . well, they took to him too and that’s all there is to it. They were all against him when he came, and they all took to him within a week, and that’s the truth of it. He’d got a

way

with him. I know what you’re thinking: it flattered my ego, I suppose you’d say. All right, it did. Everyone wants to be liked and he liked us. All right, I’m lonely; Myra’s a worry, I’ve failed as a parent and I never had a son; there was a bit of that about it too, I suppose, although there’s only ten years between us. Perhaps it’s him being little that makes the difference.’

‘Go for the girls, did he?’ Turner asked, more to break the uncomfortable silence than because he had been preparing questions in his mind.

‘Only banter.’

‘Ever hear of a woman called Aickman?’

‘No.’

‘Margaret Aickman. They were engaged to be married, her and Leo.’

‘No.’

Still they did not look at one another.

‘He liked the work too,’ Meadowes continued. ‘In those first weeks. I don’t think he’d ever realised till then how much he

knew

by comparison with the rest of us. About Germany, I mean, the

soil

of it.’

He broke off, remembering, and it might have been fifty years ago. ‘He knew

that

world too,’ he added. ‘He knew it inside out.’

‘What world?’

‘Post-war Germany. The Occupation; the years they don’t want to know about any more. He knew it like the back of his hand. “Arthur,” he said to me once, “I’ve seen these towns when they were car parks. I’ve heard these people talk when even their language was forbidden.” It used to knock him clean off course sometimes. I’d catch sight of him deep in a file, still as a mouse, just fascinated. Or he’d look away, look round the room, for someone with a moment to spare, just so he could tell them about something he’d come across: “Here,” he’d say. “See that? We disbanded that firm in 1947. Look at it now!” Other times, he’d go right off into a dream, and then you’d lost him altogether; he was on his own. I think it bothered him to

know

so much. It was queer. I think he almost felt guilty sometimes. He went on quite a lot about his memory. “You’re making me destroy my childhood,” he says one time – we were breaking up some files for the machine – “You’re making an old man of me.” I said, “If that’s what I’m doing you’re the luckiest man alive.” We had a good laugh about that.’

‘Did he ever mention politics?’

‘No.’

‘What did he say about Karfeld?’

‘He was concerned. Naturally. That’s why he was so glad to be helping out.’

‘Oh sure.’

‘It was trust,’ Meadowes said defiantly. ‘You wouldn’t understand that. And that was true, what he said: it

was

the old stuff we were trying to get rid of; it

was

his childhood; it

was

the old stuff that meant the most to him.’

‘All right.’

‘Listen: I’m not holding any brief for him. He’s ruined my career for all I know, what there was left after you finished with it. But I’m telling you: you’ve got to see the

good

in him too.’

‘I’m not arguing with you.’

‘It did

bother

him, his memory. I remember once with the music: he got me listening to gramophone records. Mainly so that he could sell them to me, I suppose; he’d worked some deal he was very proud of, with one of the shops in town. “Look,” I said. “It’s no good, Leo; you’re wasting your time. I get to know one record so I learn another. By that time I’ve forgotten the first one.” He comes right back at me, very fast: “Then you ought to be a politician, Arthur,” he says. “That’s what they do.” He meant it, believe me.’

Turner grinned suddenly. ‘That’s quite funny.’

‘It would have been,’ said Meadowes, ‘if he hadn’t looked so darned fierce with it. Then another time we’re talking about Berlin, something to do with the crisis, and I said, “Well, never mind, no one thinks of Berlin any more,” which is true really. Files I mean; no one draws the files or bothers with the contingencies; not like they used to, anyway. I mean

politically

it’s a dead duck. “No,” he says. “We’ve got the big memory and the small memory. The small memory’s to remember the small things and the big memory’s to forget the big ones.” That’s what he said; it touched me, that did. I mean there’s a lot of us think that way, you can’t help it these days.’

‘He came home with you, did he, sometimes? You’d make an evening of it?’

‘Now and then. When Myra was out. Sometimes I’d slip over there.’

‘Why when Myra was out?’ Turner pounced quite hard on that: ‘You

still

didn’t trust him, did you?’

‘There’s rumours,’ Meadowes said evenly. ‘There was talk about him. I didn’t want her connected.’

‘Him and who?’

‘Just girls. Girls in general. He was a bachelor and he liked his fun.’

‘

Who

?’

Meadowes shook his head. ‘You’ve got it wrong,’ he said. He was playing with a couple of paper clips, trying to make them interlock.

‘Did he ever talk about England in the war? About an uncle in Hampstead?’

‘He told me once he arrived at Dover with a label round his neck. That wasn’t usual either.’

‘What wasn’t –’

‘Him talking about himself. Johnny Slingo said he’d known him four years before he came to Registry and he’d never got a word out of him. He was all opened up, that’s what Johnny said, it must be old age setting in.’

‘Go on.’

‘Well, that was all he had, a label: Harting Leo. They shaved his head and deloused him and sent him to a Farm School. He was allowed to choose apparently: domestic science or agriculture. He chose agriculture because he wanted to own land. It seemed daft to me, Leo wanting to be a farmer, but there it is.’

‘Nothing about Communists? A left-wing group of kids in Hampstead? Nothing like that at all?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Would you tell me if there was something?’

‘I doubt it.’

‘Did he ever mention a man called Praschko? In the Bundestag.’

Meadowes hesitated. ‘He said one night that Praschko had walked out on him.’

‘How? Walked out

how

?’

‘He wouldn’t say. He said they’d emigrated to England together, and returned here together after the war; Praschko had chosen one path and Leo had chosen another.’ He shrugged. ‘I didn’t press him. Why should I? After that night he never mentioned him again.’

‘All that talk about his

memory

: what do you think he had in mind?’

‘Something historical, I suppose. He thought a lot about history, Leo did. Mind you, that’s a couple of months back now.’

‘What difference does that make?’

‘That was before he went on his track.’

‘His what?’

‘He went on a track,’ Meadowes said simply. ‘That’s what I’m trying to tell you.’

‘I want to hear about the missing files,’ Turner said. ‘I want to check the ledgers and the mail.’

‘You’ll wait your turn. There’s some things that aren’t just

facts

, and if you’ll only pay attention you’ll maybe hear about them. You’re like Leo, you are: always wanting the answer before you’ve even heard the question. What I’m trying to tell you is, I knew from the day he came here that he was looking for something. We all did. You felt it with Leo. You felt he was looking for something real. Something you could almost touch, it meant so much to him. That’s rare in this place, believe me.’

* * *

It was a whole life which Meadowes seemed to draw upon.

‘An archivist is like an historian; he has time-periods he’s faddy about; places, Kings and Queens. All the files here are related, they’re bound to be. Give me any file from next door; any file you want, I could trace you a path clean through the whole Registry, from Icelandic shipping rights to the latest guidance on gold prices. That’s the fascination of files; there’s nowhere to stop.’

Meadowes ran on. Turner studied the grey, parental face, the grey eyes clouded with concern, and he felt the dawning of excitement.

‘You think you run an archive,’ Meadowes said. ‘You don’t. It runs you. There’s qualities to an archive that just get you, and there’s not a thing you can do about it. Take Johnny Slingo now. You saw him as you came in, on the left there, the old fellow in the jacket. He’s the intellectual type, college and all the rest. Johnny’s only been at it a year, came to us from Admin as a matter of fact, but he’s stuck with the nine-nine-fours: Federal Germany’s relations with Third Parties. He could sit where you are and recite the date and place of every single negotiation there’s ever been about the Hallstein Doctrine. Or take my case, I’m mechanical. I like cars, inventions, all that world. I reckon I know more about German infringement of patent rights than any desk officer in Commercial Section.’

‘What was Leo’s track?’

‘Wait. It’s important what I’m telling. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about it in the last twenty-four hours, and you’re going to hear it

right

, whether you like it or not. The files get hold of you; you can’t help it. They’d rule your life if you ever let them. They’re wife and child to some men, I’ve seen it happen. And times they just

take

you, and then you’re on a track and you can’t get off it; and that’s what they did to Leo. I don’t know how it happens. A paper catches your eye, something silly: a threatened strike of sugar-workers in Surabaya, that’s our favourite joke at the moment. “Hullo,” you say to yourself, “why hasn’t Mr So-and-So signed that off?” You check back: Mr So-and-So never saw it. He never read the telegram at all. Well, he must see it then, mustn’t he? Only it all happened three years ago, and Mr So-and-So is Ambassador in Paris. So you start trying to find out what action was taken, or wasn’t taken. Who was consulted? Why didn’t they inform Washington? You chase the cross-references, draw the original material. By then it’s too late; you’ve lost your sense of proportion; you’re away, and by the time you shake yourself out of it you’re ten days older and none the wiser, but maybe you’re safe again for a couple of years. Obsession, that’s what it is. A private journey. It happens to all of us. It’s the way we’re made.’

‘And it happened to Leo?’

‘Yes. Yes, it happened to Leo. Only from the first day he came here, I had that feeling he was . . . well, that he was waiting. Just the way he looked, the way he handled paper . . . Always peering over the hedge. I’d glance up and catch sight of him and there were those little brown eyes looking all the time. I know you’ll say I’m fanciful; I don’t care. I didn’t make a lot of it, why should I? We all have problems, and besides it was like a factory in here by then. But it’s true all the same. I’ve thought about it and it’s true. It was nothing much to begin with; I just noticed it. Then gradually he got on his track.’

A bell rang suddenly; a long, assertive peal up and down the corridors. They heard the slamming of doors and the sound of running feet. A girl was calling: ‘Where’s Valerie, where’s Valerie?’

‘Fire practice,’ Meadowes said. ‘We’re running to two or three a week at present. Don’t worry. Registry’s exempt.’

Turner sat down. He looked even paler than before. He ran a big hand through his tufted, fair hair.

‘I’m listening,’ he said.

‘Ever since March now he’s been working on a big project: all the seven-o-sevens. That’s Statutes. There’s about two hundred of them or more, and mainly to do with the handover when the Occupation ended. Terms of withdrawal, residual rights, rights of evocation, phases of autonomy and God knows what. All forty-nine to fifty-five stuff, not relevant here at all. He might have started in half a dozen places on the Destruction, but the moment he saw the seven-o-sevens, they were the ones for him. “Here,” he said. “That’s just right for me, Arthur, I can cut my milk teeth on them. I know what they’re talking about; it’s familiar ground.” I shouldn’t think anyone had looked at it for fifteen years. But

tricky

, even if it was obsolete. Full of technical talk. Surprising what Leo knew, mind. All the terms, German and English, all the legal phrases.’ Meadowes shook his head in admiration. ‘I saw a minute of his go to the Legal Attaché, a résumé of a file;

I

couldn’t have put it together I’m sure, and I doubt whether there’s anyone in Chancery could either. All about the Prussian Criminal Code and regional sovereignty of justice. And half of it in German, too.’

‘He knew more than he was prepared to let on: is that what you’re saying?’

‘No, it’s not,’ said Meadowes. ‘And don’t you go putting words into my mouth. He was being

used

, that’s what I mean; he had a lot of knowledge in him that he hadn’t done anything with for a long time. All of a sudden, he could put it to work.’

Meadowes resumed: ‘With the seven-o-sevens there wasn’t any real question of

destruction

: more of sending it back to London and getting it stored out of the way, but it all had to be read and submitted the same as everything else, and he’d been getting very deep in it these last few weeks. I told you he was quiet up here; well, he was. And once he got tucked into the Statutes he got quieter and quieter. He was on a track.’

‘When did this happen?’

At the back of Turner’s notebook there was a diary; he had it open before him.

‘Three weeks ago. He went further and further

in

. Still jolly, mind; still bouncing up and down to get the girls a chair or help them with a parcel. But something had got hold of him, and it meant a lot to him. Still quizzy: no one will ever cure him of that; he had to know exactly what each of us was up to. But subdued. And he got worse. More and more thoughtful; more and more

serious

. Then on Monday, last Monday, he changed.’

‘A week ago today,’ said Turner. ‘The fifth.’

‘Seven days. Is that all? My God.’ There was a sudden smell of hot wax from next door, and the muffled thud of a large seal being pressed on to a packet.

‘That’ll be the two o’clock bag they’re getting ready,’ he muttered inconsequentially, and glanced at his silver pocket watch. ‘It’s due down there at twelve thirty.’

‘I’ll come back after lunch if you like.’

‘I’d rather be done with you before,’ Meadowes said. ‘If you don’t mind.’ He put the watch away. ‘Where is he? Do

you

know? What’s happened to him? He’s gone to Russia, is that it?’

‘Is that what you think?’

‘He might have gone anywhere, you couldn’t tell. He wasn’t like us. He tried to be, but he wasn’t. More like you, I suppose, in some ways. Perverse. Always busy but always doing things back to front. Nothing was simple, I reckon that was his trouble. Too much childhood. Or none. It comes to the same thing really. I like people to grow

slowly

.’

‘Tell me about last Monday. He changed: how?’

‘Changed for the better. He’d shaken himself out of it, whatever it was. The track was over. He was smiling when I came in, really happy. Johnny Slingo, Valerie, they both noticed it, same as I did. We’d all been going full tilt of course; I’d been in most of Saturday, all Sunday; the others had been coming and going.’

‘What about Leo?’

‘Well, he’d been busy too, there was no doubt to that, but we didn’t see him around an awful lot. An hour up here, three hours down there –’

‘Down where?’

‘In his own room. He did that sometimes, took a few files downstairs to work on. It was quieter. “I like to keep it warm,” he said. “It’s my old room, Arthur, and I don’t like to let it grow cold.” ’

‘And he took his files down there, did he?’ Turner asked, very quiet.

‘Then there was Chapel: that took up a part of Sunday, of course. Playing the organ.’

‘How long’s he been doing that, by the way?’

‘Oh, years and years. It was reinsurance,’ Meadowes said with a little laugh. ‘Just to keep himself indispensable.’

‘So Monday he was happy.’

‘Serene. There’s no other word for it. “I like it here, Arthur,” he said. “I want you to know that.” Sat down and got on with his work.’

‘And he stayed that way till he left?’

‘More or less.’

‘What do you mean, “More or less”?’

‘Well, we had a bit of a row. That was Wednesday. He’d been all right Tuesday, happy as a sandboy, then Wednesday I caught him at it.’ He had folded his hands before him on his lap and he was looking at them, head bowed.

‘He was trying to look at the Green File. The Maximum Limit.’ He touched the top of his head in a small gesture of nervousness. ‘He was always quizzy, I told you. Some people are like that, they can’t help it. Didn’t matter what it was; I could leave a letter from my own mother on the desk: I’m damn sure that if Leo had half a chance he’d have read it. Always thought people were conspiring against him. It drove us mad to begin with; look in anything, he would. Files, cupboards, anywhere. He hadn’t been here a week before he was signing for the mail. The whole lot, down in the bag room. I didn’t care for that at all at first, but he got all huffy when I told him to stop and in the end I let it go.’ He opened his hands, seeking an answer. ‘Then in March we had some Trade Contingency papers from London – special guidance for Econ on new alignments and forward planning, and I caught him with the whole bundle on his desk. “Here,” I said. “Can’t you read? They’re subscription only, they’re not for you.” He didn’t turn a hair. In fact he was really angry. “I thought I could handle anything!” he says. He’d have hit me for two pins. “Well, you thought wrong,” I told him. That was March. It took us both a couple of days to cool down.’

‘God save us,’ said Turner softly.

‘Then we had this Green. A Green’s rare.

I

don’t know what’s in it; Johnny doesn’t, Valerie doesn’t. It lives in its own despatch box. H. E.’s got one key, Bradfield’s got the other and he shares it with de Lisle. The box has to come back here to the strong-room every night. It’s signed in and signed out, and only I handle it. So anyway: lunchtime Wednesday it was. Leo was up here on his own; Johnny and me went down to the canteen.’

‘Often here on his own lunchtimes, was he?’

‘He liked to be, yes. He liked the quiet.’

‘All right.’

‘There was a big queue at the canteen and I can’t stand queuing, so I said to Johnny, “You stay here, I’ll go back and do a spot of work and try again in half an hour.” So I came in unexpectedly. Just walked in. No Leo, and the strong-room was open. And there he was; standing there, with the Green despatch box.’

‘What do you mean,

with

it?’

‘Just holding it. Looking at the lock as far as I could make out. Just curious. He smiled when he saw me, cool as anything. He’s sharp, I’ve told you that. “Arthur,” he says, “you’ve caught me at it, you’ve discovered my guilty secret.” I said, “What the hell are you up to? Look what you’ve got there in your hands!” Like that. “You know me,” he says, very disarming. “I just can’t help it.” He puts down the box. “I was

actually

looking for some seven-o-sevens, you don’t happen to have seen them anywhere, do you? For March and February fifty-eight.” Something like that.’

‘So then what?’

‘I read him the Riot Act. What else could I do? I said I’d report him to Bradfield, the lot. I was furious.’

‘But you didn’t?’

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘You wouldn’t understand,’ Meadowes said at last. ‘You think I’m soft in the head, I know. It was Myra’s birthday Friday; we were having a special do at the Exiles. Leo had choir practice and a dinner party.’

‘Dinner party? Where?’

‘He didn’t say.’

‘There’s nothing in his diary.’

‘That’s not my concern.’

‘Go on.’

‘He’d promised to drop in sometime during the evening and give her her present. It was going to be a hair-dryer; we’d chosen it together.’ He shook his head again. ‘How can I explain it? I’ve told you: I felt responsible for him. He was that kind of bloke. You and I could blow him over with one puff if we wanted.’

Turner gazed at him incredulously.

‘And I suppose there was something else too.’ He looked Turner full in the face. ‘If I tell Bradfield, that’s it. Leo’s had it. There’s nowhere for him to go, is there? See what I mean. Like now, for instance: I mean I hope he

has

gone to Moscow, because there’s nowhere else going to take him.’

‘You mean you suspected him?’

‘I suppose so, yes. Deep down I suppose I did. Warsaw’s done that for me, you know. I’d like Myra to have settled there. With her student. All right, they put him up to it; they made him seduce her. But he did say he’d marry her, didn’t he? For the baby. I’d have loved that baby more than I can say. That’s what you took away from me. From her as well. That’s what it was all about. You shouldn’t have done that, you know.’

He was grateful for the traffic then, for any noise to fill that damned tank and take away the accusing echo of Meadowes’ flat voice.

‘And on Thursday the box disappeared?’

Meadowes shrugged it away. ‘Private Office returned it Thursday midday. I signed it in myself and left it in the strong-room. Friday it wasn’t there. That was that.’

He paused.

‘I should have reported it at once. I should have gone running to Bradfield Friday afternoon when I noticed. I didn’t. I slept on it. I brooded about it all Saturday. I chewed Cork’s head off, went for Johnny Slingo, made their lives hell. It was driving me mad. I didn’t want to raise a hare. We’d lost all manner of things in the crisis. People get light-fingered. Someone’s pinched our trolley, I don’t know who: one of the Military Attachés’ clerks, that’s my guess. Someone else has lifted our swivel chair. There’s a long-carriage typewriter from the Pool; diaries, all sorts, cups from the Naafi even. Anyway, those were the excuses. I thought one of the users might have taken it: de Lisle, Private Office . . .’

‘Did you ask Leo?’

‘He’d gone by then, hadn’t he?’

* * *

Once more Turner had slipped into the routine of interrogation.

‘He carried a briefcase, didn’t he?’

‘Yes.’

‘Was he allowed to bring it in here?’

‘He brought in sandwiches and a thermos.’

‘So he was allowed?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did he have the briefcase Thursday?’

‘I think so. Yes, he would have done.’

‘Was it big enough to hold the despatch box?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did he have lunch in here Thursday?’

‘He went out at about twelve.’

‘And came back?’

‘I told you: Thursday’s his special day. Conference day. It’s a left-over from his old job. He goes to one of the Ministries in Bad Godesberg. Something to do with outstanding claims. Last Thursday he had a lunch date first I suppose. Then went on to the meeting.’

‘Has he always been to that meeting? Every Thursday?’

‘Ever since he came into Registry.’

‘He had a key, didn’t he?’

‘What for? Key to where?’

Turner was on unsure ground. ‘To let himself in and out of Registry. Or he knew the combination.’

Meadowes actually laughed.

‘There’s me and Head of Chancery knows how to get in and out of here, and no one else. There’s three combinations and half a dozen burglar switches and there’s the strong-room as well. Not Slingo, not de Lisle,

no one

knows. Just us two.’

Turner was writing fast.

‘Tell me what else is missing,’ he said at last.

* * *

Meadowes unlocked a drawer of his desk and drew out a list of references. His movements were brisk and surprisingly confident.

‘Bradfield didn’t tell you?’

‘No.’

Meadowes handed him the list. ‘You can keep that. There’s forty-three of them. They’re all box files, they’ve all disappeared since March.’

‘Since he went on his track.’

‘The security classifications vary from Confidential to Top Secret, but the majority are plain Secret. There’s Organisation files, Conference, Personality and two Treaty files. The subjects range from the dismantling of chemical concerns in the Ruhr in 1947 to minutes of unofficial Anglo-German exchanges at working level over the last three years. Plus the Green and that’s Formal and Informal Conversations –’

‘Bradfield told me.’

‘They’re like pieces, believe me, pieces in a puzzle . . . that’s what I thought at first . . . I’ve moved them round in my mind. Hour after hour. I haven’t slept. Now and then –’ he broke off. ‘Now and then I thought I had an idea, a sort of picture, a half picture, I’d say . . .’

Stubbornly he concluded: ‘There’s no clear pattern to it, and no reason. Some are marked out by Leo to different people; some are marked “certified for destruction” but most are just plain missing. You can’t tell, you see. You just can’t keep tabs, it’s impossible. Until someone

asks

for the file you don’t know you haven’t got it.’

‘

Box

files?’

‘I told you. All forty-three. They weigh a couple of hundredweight between them I should think.’

‘And the letters? There are letters missing too.’

‘Yes,’ Meadowes said reluctantly. ‘We’re short of thirty-three incoming letters.’

‘Never entered, were they? Just lying about for anyone to pick up? What were the subjects? You haven’t put it down.’

‘We don’t know. That’s the truth. They’re letters from German Departments. We know the references because the bag room’s written them in the log. They never reached Registry.’

‘But you’ve checked the references?’

Very stiffly Meadowes said: ‘The missing letters belong on the missing files. The references are the same. That’s all we can tell. As they’re from German Departments, Bradfield has ruled that we do not ask for duplicates until the Brussels decision is through: in case our curiosity alerts them to Harting’s absence.’

Having returned his black notebook to his pocket, Turner rose and went to the barred window, touching the locks, testing the strength of the wire mesh.

‘There was something about him. He was special. Something

made

you watch him.’

From the carriageway they heard the two-tone wail of an emergency horn approach and fade again.

‘He was special,’ Turner repeated. ‘All the time you’ve been talking, I’ve heard it. Leo this, Leo that. You had your eye on him; you

felt

him, I know you did. Why?’

‘There was nothing.’

‘What were these rumours? What was it they said about him that frightened you? Was he somebody’s fancy-boy, Arthur? Something for Johnny Slingo, was he, in his old age? Working the queers’ circuit was he, is that what all the blushing’s for?’

Meadowes shook his head. ‘You’ve lost your sting,’ he said. ‘You can’t frighten me any more. I know you; I know your worst. It’s nothing to do with Warsaw. He wasn’t that kind. I’m not a child and Johnny’s not a homosexual either.’

Turner continued to stare at him. ‘There’s something you heard. Something you knew. You watched him, I know you did. You watched him cross a room; how he stood, how he reached for a file. He was doing the silliest bloody job in Registry and you talk about him as if he was the Ambassador. There was chaos in here, you said so yourself. Everyone except Leo chasing files, making up, entering, connecting, all standing on your heads to keep the ball rolling in a crisis. And what was Leo doing? Leo was on Destruction. He could have been making flax for all his work mattered. You said so, not me. So what

was

it about him?

Why

did you watch him?’

‘You’re dreaming. You’re twisted and you can’t see anything straight. But if by any chance you were right, I wouldn’t even whisper it to you on my deathbed.’

* * *

A notice outside the cypher room said: ‘Back at two fifteen. Phone 333 for emergencies.’ He banged on Bradfield’s door and tried the handle; it was locked. He went to the banister and looked angrily down into the lobby. At the front desk a young Chancery Guard was reading a learned book on engineering. He could see the diagrams on the right-hand page. In the glass-fronted waiting-room, the Ghanaian Chargé in a velvet collar was staring thoughtfully at a photograph of Clydeside taken from very high up.

‘All at lunch, old boy,’ a voice whispered from behind him.

‘Not a Hun will stir till three. Daily truce. Show must go on.’ A hanging, vulpine figure stood among the fire extinguishers. ‘Crabbe,’ he explained, ‘Mickie Crabbe, you see,’ as if the name itself were an excuse. ‘Peter de Lisle’s just back, if you don’t mind. Been down at the Ministry of the Interior, saving women and children. Rawley’s sent him to feed you.’

‘I want to send a telegram. Where’s room three double three?’

‘Proles’ rest room, old boy. They’re having a bit of a kip after all the hoohah. Troubled times. Give it a break,’ he suggested. ‘If it’s urgent it’ll keep, if it’s important it’s too late, that’s what I say.’ Saying it, Crabbe led him along the silent corridor like a decrepit courtier lighting him to bed. Passing the lift, Turner paused and stared at it once more. It was firmly padlocked and the notice said ‘Out of order.’

* * *

Jobs are separate, he told himself, why worry, for God’s sake? Bonn is not Warsaw. Warsaw was a hundred years ago. Bonn is today. We do what we have to do and move on. He saw it again, the Rococo room in the Warsaw Embassy, the chandelier dark with dust, and Myra Meadowes alone on the daft sofa. ‘Another time they post you to an Iron Curtain country,’ Turner was shouting, ‘you bloody well choose your lovers with more care!’

Tell her I’m leaving the country, he thought; I’ve gone to find a traitor. A full-grown, four-square, red-toothed, paid-up traitor.

Come on, Leo, we’re of one blood, you and I: underground men, that’s us. I’ll chase you through the sewers, Leo; that’s why I smell so lovely. We’ve got the earth’s dirt on us, you and I. I’ll chase you, you chase me and each of us will chase ourselves.

7

De Lisle

The American club was not as heavily guarded as the Embassy. ‘It’s no one’s gastronomic dream,’ de Lisle explained, as he showed his papers to the GI at the door, ‘but it does have a gorgeous swimming-pool.’ He had booked a window table overlooking the Rhine. Fresh from their bathe, they drank Martinis and watched the giant brown helicopters wavering past them towards the landing-strip up river. Some were marked with red crosses, others had no markings at all. Now and then white passenger ships, sliding through the mist, bore huddled groups of tourists towards the land of the Nibelungs; the boom of their own loudspeakers followed them like small thunder. Once a crowd of schoolchildren passed, and they heard the strains of the Lorelei banged out on an accordion, and the devoted accompaniment of a heavenly, if imperfect, choir. The seven hills of Königswinter were much nearer now, though the mist confused their outline.

With elaborate diffidence de Lisle pointed out the Petersberg, a regular wooded cone capped by a rectangular hotel. Neville Chamberlain had stayed there in the thirties, he explained: ‘That was when he gave away Czechoslovakia, of course. The first time, I mean.’ After the war it had been the seat of the Allied High Commission; more recently the Queen had used it for her State Visit. To the right of it was the Drachenfels, where Siegfried had slain the dragon and bathed in its magic blood.

‘Where’s Harting’s house?’

‘You can’t quite see it,’ de Lisle said quietly, not pointing any more. ‘It’s at the foot of the Petersberg. He lives, so to speak, in Chamberlain’s shadow.’ And with that he led the conversation into more general fields.

‘I suppose the trouble with being a visiting fireman is that you so often arrive on the scene after the fire’s gone out. Is that it?’

‘Did he come here often?’

‘The smaller Embassies hold receptions here if their drawing-rooms aren’t big enough. That was rather his mark, of course.’

Once again his tone became reticent, though the dining-room was empty. Only in the corner near the entrance, seated in their glass-walled bar, the inevitable group of foreign correspondents mimed, drank and mouthed like sea horses in solemn ritual.

‘Is

all

America like this?’ de Lisle enquired. ‘Or worse?’ He looked slowly round. ‘Though it does give a sense of

dimension

, I suppose. And optimism. That’s the trouble with Americans, isn’t it, really? All that emphasis on the future. So dangerous. It makes them destructive of the present. Much kinder to look

back

, I always think. I see no hope at all for the future, and it gives me a

great

sense of freedom. And of caring: we’re much nicer to one another in the condemned cell, aren’t we? Don’t take me too seriously, will you?’

‘If you wanted Chancery files late at night, what would you do?’

‘Dig out Meadowes.’

‘Or Bradfield?’

‘Oh, that would be really going it. Rawley has the combinations, but only as a long stop. If Meadowes goes under a bus, Rawley can still get at the papers. You really

have

had a morning of it, haven’t you,’ he added solicitously. ‘I can see you’re still under the ether.’

‘What would

you

do?’

‘Oh, I’d draw the files in the afternoon.’

‘Now; with all this working at night?’

‘If Registry’s open on a crisis schedule there’s no problem. If it’s closed, well, most of us have safes and strong-boxes, and they’re cleared for overnight storage.’

‘Harting didn’t have one.’

‘Shall we just say

he

from now on?’

‘So where would he work? If he drew files in the evening, classified files, and worked late: what would he do?’

‘He’d take them to his room I suppose, and hand in the files to the Chancery Guard when he left. If he’s not working in Registry. The Guard has a safe.’

‘And the Guard would sign for them?’

‘Oh Lordy, yes. We’re not

that

irresponsible.’

‘So I could tell from the Guard’s night book?’

‘You could.’

‘He left without saying good-night to the Guard.’

‘Oh my,’ said de Lisle, clearly very puzzled. ‘You mean he took them home?’

‘What kind of car did he have?’

‘A mini shooting-brake.’

They were both silent.

‘There’s nowhere else he might have worked, a special reading room, a strong-room on the ground floor?’

‘Nowhere,’ de Lisle said flatly. ‘Now I think you’d better have another of those things, hadn’t you, and cool the brain a little?’

He called the waiter.

‘Well, I’ve had a simply

ghastly

hour at the Ministry of the Interior with Ludwig Siebkron’s faceless men.’

‘What doing?’

‘Oh, mourning the poor Miss Eich. That was gruesome. It was also very

odd

,’ he confessed. ‘It really was very odd indeed.’ He drifted away. ‘Did you know that blood plasma came in tins? The Ministry now say that they want to store some in the Embassy canteen, just in case. It’s the most Orwellian thing I’ve ever heard; Rawley’s going to be quite furious. He thinks they’ve gone much too far already. Apparently none of us belongs to groups any more:

uniblood

. I suppose it makes for equality.’ He continued, ‘Rawley’s getting pretty cross about Siebkron.’

‘Why?’

‘The lengths he insists on going to, just for the sake of the poor English. All right, Karfeld is desperately anti-British and anti–Common Market. And Brussels is crucial, and British entry touches the nationalist nerve and maddens the Movement, and the Friday rally is alarming and everyone’s very much on edge. One accepts all that wholeheartedly. And nasty things happened in Hanover. But we still don’t deserve

so

much attention, we really don’t. First the curfew, then the bodyguards, and now these wretched motor-cars. I think we feel he’s crowding us on purpose.’ Reaching past Turner, de Lisle took the enormous menu in his slender, woman’s hand. ‘How about oysters? Isn’t that what real people eat? They have them in all seasons here. I gather they get them from Portugal or somewhere.’

‘I’ve never tried them,’ Turner said with a hint of aggression.

‘Then you must have a dozen to make up,’ de Lisle replied easily and drank some more Martini. ‘It’s so nice to meet someone from

outside

. I don’t suppose you can understand that.’

A string of barges chased up river with the current.

‘The unsettling thing is, I suppose, one doesn’t feel that ultimately all these precautions are for our own good. The Germans seem suddenly to have their horns drawn in, as if we were being deliberately provocative; as if

we

were doing the demonstrating. They barely talk to us down there. A

total

freeze up. Yes. That’s what I mean,’ he concluded. ‘They’re treating us as if we were hostile. Which is doubly frustrating when all we ask is to be loved.’

‘He had a dinner party on Friday night,’ Turner said suddenly.

‘Did he?’

‘But it wasn’t marked in his diary.’

‘Silly man.’ He peered round but no one came. ‘Where

is

that wretched boy?’

‘Where was Bradfield on Friday night?’

‘Shut up,’ said de Lisle crisply. ‘I don’t like that kind of thing. And then there’s Siebkron himself,’ he continued as if nothing had happened. ‘Well, we all know

he’

s shifty; we all know he’s juggling with the Coalition and we all know he had political aspirations. We also know he has an appalling security problem to cope with next Friday, and a lot of enemies waiting to say he did it badly. Fine –’ He nodded his head at the river, as if in some way it were involved in his perplexities – ‘So why spend six hours at the deathbed of poor Fräulein Eich? What’s so fascinating about watching her die? And why go to the ridiculous lengths of putting the sentries on every tiny British hiring in the area? He’s got an obsession about us, I swear he has; he’s worse than Karfeld.’

‘Who is Siebkron? What’s his job?’

‘Oh, muddy pools. Your world in a way. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said that.’ He blushed, acutely distressed. Only the timely arrival of the waiter rescued him from his embarrassment. He was quite a young boy, and de Lisle addressed him with inordinate courtesy, seeking his opinion on matters beyond his competence, deferring to his judgment in the selection of the Moselle and enquiring minutely after the quality of the meat.

‘They say in Bonn,’ he continued when they were alone again, ‘to borrow a phrase, that if you have Ludwig Siebkron for a friend you don’t need an enemy. Ludwig’s very much a local species. Always someone’s left arm. He keeps saying he doesn’t want any of us to die. That’s exactly why he’s frightening: he makes it so possible. It’s easy to forget,’ he continued blandly, ‘that Bonn may be a democracy but it’s

frightfully

short of democrats.’ He fell silent. ‘The trouble with

dates

,’ he reflected at last, ‘is that they create compartments in time. Thirty-nine to forty-five. Forty-five to fifty. Bonn isn’t pre-war, or war, or even post-war. It’s just a small town in Germany. You can no more slice it up than you can the Rhine. It plods along, or whatever the song says. And the mist drains away the colours.’

Blushing suddenly, he unscrewed the cap of the Tabasco and applied himself to the delicate task of allocating one drop to each oyster. It claimed his entire attention. ‘We all apologise for Bonn. That’s how you recognise the natives. I wish I collected model trains,’ he continued brightly. ‘I would like to place

far

greater emphasis on trivia. Do you have anything like that: a hobby, I mean?’

‘I don’t get the time,’ said Turner.

‘

Nominally

he heads something called the Ministry of the Interior Liaison Committee; I understand he chose the name himself. I asked him once: liaison with whom, Ludwig? He thought that was a great joke. He’s our age of course. Front generation minus five; slightly cross at having missed the war, I suspect, and can’t

wait

to grow old. He also flirts with the CIA, but that’s a status symbol here. His principal occupation is knowing Karfeld. When anyone wants to conspire with the Movement, Ludwig Siebkron lays it on. It

is

a bizarre life,’ he conceded, catching sight of Turner’s expression. ‘But Ludwig revels in it. Invisible Government: that’s what he likes. The fourth estate. Weimar would have suited him down to the ground. And you have to understand about the Government here:

all

the divisions are very artificial.’

Compelled, apparently, by a single urge, the foreign correspondents had left their bar and were floating in a long shoal towards the centre table already prepared for them. A very large man, catching sight of de Lisle, pulled a long strand of black hair over his right eye, and extended his arm in a Nazi greeting. De Lisle lifted his glass in reply.

‘That’s Sam Allerton,’ he explained in an aside. ‘He really

is

rather a pig. Where was I? Artificial divisions. Yes. They absolutely bedevil us here. Always the same: in a grey world we reach frantically for absolutes. Anti-French, pro-French, Communist, anti-Communist. Sheer nonsense, but we do it time and again. That’s why we’re so wrong about Karfeld. So dreadfully wrong. We argue about

definitions

when we should be arguing about

facts

. Bonn will go to the gallows arguing about the width of the rope that hangs us.

I

don’t know how you define Karfeld; who does? The German Poujade? The middle-class revolution? If that’s what he is then we

are

ruined, I agree, because in Germany they’re

all

middle class. Like America: reluctantly equal. They don’t want to be equal, who does? They just are. Uniblood.’

The waiter had brought the wine, and de Lisle pressed Turner to taste it. ‘I’m sure your palate is fresher than mine.’ Turner declined, so he sampled it himself, elaborately. ‘How very clever,’ he said appreciatively to the waiter. ‘How

good

.

‘All the smart definitions apply to him, every one, of course they do; they apply to anyone. Just like psychiatry: presume the symptoms and you can

always

find a name for them. He’s isolationist, chauvinist, pacifist, revanchist. And he wants a trade alliance with Russia. He’s progressive, which appeals to the German old, he’s reactionary, which appeals to the German young. The young are so

puritanical

here. They want to be cleansed of prosperity; they want bows and arrows and Barbarossa.’ He pointed wearily towards the Seven Hills. ‘They want all that in modern dress. No wonder the old are hedonistic. But the young –’ He broke off. ‘The young,’ he said, with deep distaste, ‘have discovered the cruellest of all truths: that the most effective way of punishing their parents is to imitate them. Karfeld is the students’ adopted grown-up . . . I’m sorry. This is my hobby-horse.

Do

tell me to shut up.’

Turner appeared not to have heard. He was staring at the policemen who stood at intervals along the footpath. One of them had found a dinghy tethered under the bank, and he was playing with the sheet, swinging it round and round like a skipping rope.

‘They keep asking us in London: who are his supporters? Where does he get his money from? Define, define. What am I to tell them? “The man in the street,” I wrote once, “traditionally the most elusive social class.” They adore that kind of answer until it reaches Research Department. “The disenchanted,” I said, “the orphans of a dead democracy, the casualties of coalition government.” Socialists who think they’ve been sold out to conservatism, anti-Socialists who think they’ve been sold out to the reds. People who are just too intelligent to vote at all. Karfeld is the one hat that covers all their heads. How do you

define

a mood?

God

, they are obtuse. We get no instructions any more: just questions. I told them: “Surely you have the same kind of thing in England? It’s all the rage everywhere else.” And after all, no one suspected a world plot in Paris: why look for it here? Mood . . . ignorance . . . boredom.’ He leaned across the table. ‘Have

you

ever voted? I’m sure you have. What’s it like? Did you feel altered? Was it like Mass? Did you walk away ignoring everybody?’ De Lisle ate another oyster. ‘I think London has been bombed. Is that the answer? And you’re just a blind to cheer us up. Perhaps only Bonn is left. What a frightful thought. A world in exile. That’s what we are though. Inhabited by exiles, too.’

‘Why does Karfeld hate the British?’ Turner asked. His mind was far away.

‘That, I confess, is one of life’s unsolved mysteries. We’ve all tried our hand at it in Chancery. We’ve talked about it, read about it, argued about it. No one has the answer.’ He shrugged. ‘Who believes in motive these days, least of all in a politician? We did

try

to define that. Something we once did to him, perhaps. Something he once did to us. It’s the childhood impressions that last the longest they say. Are you married, by the way?’

‘What’s that got to do with it?’

‘

My

,’ said de Lisle admiringly, ‘you

are

prickly.’

‘What does he do for money?’

‘He’s an industrial chemist; he runs a big plant outside Essen. There’s a theory the British gave him a rough time during the Occupation, dismantled his factory and ruined his business. I don’t know how true it all is. We’ve attempted a certain amount of research but there’s very little to go on and Rawley, quite rightly, forbids us to enquire outside. God knows,’ he declared with a small shudder, ‘what Siebkron would think of us if we started

that

game. The press just says he hates us, as if it required no explanations. Perhaps they’re right.’

‘What’s his record?’

‘Predictable. Graduated before the war, drafted into the Engineers. Russian front as a demolitions expert; wounded at Stalingrad but managed to get out. The disillusionment of peace. The hard struggle and the slow build-up. All very romantic. The death of the spirit, the gradual revival. There are the usual boring rumours that he was Himmler’s aunt or something of the sort. No one pays them much heed; it’s a sign of arriving in Bonn these days, when the East Germans dig up an improbable allegation against you.’

‘But there’s nothing to it?’

‘There’s always something; there’s never enough. Anyway, it doesn’t impress anyone except us, so why bother? He came by degrees to politics, he says; he speaks of his years of sleep and his years of awakening. He has a rather Messianic turn of phrase, I fear, at least when he talks about himself.’

‘You’ve never met him, have you?’

‘Good God no. Just read about him. Heard him on the radio. He’s very

present

in our lives in some ways.’

Turner’s pale eyes had returned to the Petersberg; the sun, slanting between the hills, glinted directly upon the windows of the grey hotel. There is one hill over there that is broken like a quarry; small engines, white with dust, shuffle at its feet.

‘You have to hand it to him. In six months he’s changed the whole

galère

. The cadre, the organisation, the jargon. They were cranks before Karfeld; gypsies, wandering preachers, Hitler’s risen, all that nonsense. Now they’re a patrician, graduate group. No shirt-sleeved hordes for him, thank you; none of your socialist nonsense, apart from the students, and he’s very clever about tolerating them. He knows what a narrow line there is between the pacifist who attacks the policeman and the policeman who attacks the pacifist. But for most of us Barbarossa wears a clean shirt and has a doctorate in chemical engineering.

Herr Doktor Barbarossa

, that’s the cry these days. Economists, historians, statisticians . . . above all, lawyers, of course. Lawyers are the great German gurus, always have been; you know how illogical lawyers are. But not

politicians

: politicians aren’t a bit respectable. And for Karfeld, of course, they smack far too much of representation; Karfeld doesn’t want anyone representing him, thank you. Power without rule, that’s the cry. The right to know better, the right not to be responsible. It’s the

end

, you see, not the beginning,’ he said, with a conviction quite disproportionate to his lethargy. ‘Both we and the Germans have been through democracy and no one’s given us credit for it. Like shaving. No one

thanks

you for shaving, no one

thanks

you for democracy. Now we’ve come out the other side. Democracy was only possible under a class system, that’s why: it was an indulgence granted by the privileged. We haven’t time for it any more: a flash of light between feudalism and automation, and now it’s gone. What’s left? The voters are cut off from parliament, parliament is cut off from the Government and the Government is cut off from everyone. Government by silence, that’s the slogan. Government by alienation. I don’t need to tell

you

about that; it’s a British product.’

He paused, expecting Turner to make some further interjection but Turner was still lost in thought. At their long table, the journalists were arguing. Someone had threatened to hit someone else; a third was promising to bang their heads together.

‘

I

don’t know what I’m defending. Or what I’m representing; who does? “A gentleman who lies for the good of his country,” they told us with a wink in London. “Willingly,” I say. “But first tell me what truth I must conceal.” They haven’t the least idea. Outside the Office, the poor world dreams we have a book bound in gold with POLICY written on the cover . . . God, if only they knew.’ He finished his wine. ‘Perhaps

you

know? I am supposed to obtain the maximum advantage with the minimum of friction. What do they mean by advantage? Perhaps we

should

go into decline. Perhaps we need a Karfeld? A new Oswald Mosley? I’m afraid we would barely notice him. The opposite of love isn’t hate; it’s apathy. Apathy is our daily bread here. Hysterical apathy. Have some more Moselle.’

‘Do you think it’s possible,’ Turner said, his gaze still upon the hill, ‘that Siebkron already

knows

about Harting? Would that make them hostile? Would that account for the extra attention?’

‘Later,’ de Lisle said quietly. ‘Not in front of the children if you don’t mind.’

The sun landed upon the river, lighting it from nowhere like a great gold bird, spreading its wings over the whole valley, frisking the water’s surface into the light-hearted movements of a new spring day. Ordering the boy to bring two of his

nicest

brandies to the tennis garden, de Lisle picked his way elegantly between the empty tables to the side door. At the centre of the room the journalists had fallen silent; sullen with drink, slumped in their leather chairs, they gracelessly awaited the stimulus of new political catastrophe.

‘Poor old thing,’ he observed as they entered the fresh air. ‘What a bore I’ve been. Do you get this wherever you go? I suppose we all unburden our hearts to the stranger, do we? And do we all finish up like little Karfelds? Is that it? Middle-class patriotic anarchists? How awfully dreary for you.’

‘I’ve got to see his house,’ Turner said. ‘I’ve got to find out.’

‘You’re out of court,’ de Lisle replied evenly. ‘Ludwig Siebkron’s got it picketed.’

* * *

It was three o’clock; a white sun had broken through the clouds. They sat in the garden under beach umbrellas, sipping their brandy and watching the diplomatic daughters volley and laugh in the wet, red clay of the tennis courts.

‘Praschko, I suspect, is a baddie,’ de Lisle declared. ‘We used to have him on the books long ago, but he went sour on us.’ He yawned. ‘He was quite dangerous in his day; a political pirate. No conspiracy was complete without him. I’ve met him a few times; the English still bother him. Like all converts, he does hanker for the lost loyalties. He’s a Free Democrat these days; or did Rawley tell you? That’s a home for lost causes if ever there was one; they’ve got some

very

weird creatures over there.’

‘But he was a friend.’

‘You are innocent,’ de Lisle said drowsily. ‘Like Leo. We can know people all our lives without becoming friends. We can know people five minutes and they’re our friends for life. Is Praschko so important?’

‘He’s all I’ve got,’ said Turner. ‘He’s all I’ve got to go on. He’s the only person I’ve heard of who knew him outside the Embassy. He was going to be best man at his wedding.’

‘

Wedding? Leo?

’ De Lisle sat bolt upright, his composure gone.

‘He was engaged long ago to someone called Margaret Aickman. They seem to have known one another in Leo’s pre-Embassy days.’

De Lisle fell back in apparent relief.

‘If you’re thinking of approaching Praschko –’ he said.

‘I’m not, don’t worry; that’s one message I have got.’ He drank. ‘But someone tipped Leo off.

Someone

did. He went mad. He knew he was living on borrowed time and he took whatever he could get his hands on. Anything. Letters, files . . . and when he finally ran for it, he didn’t even bother to apply for leave.’

‘Rawley wouldn’t have granted it; not in this situation.’

‘Compassionate leave; he’d have got that all right, it was the first thing Bradfield thought of.’

‘Did he pinch the trolley too?’

Turner did not answer.

‘I suppose he helped himself to my nice electric fan. He’ll need

that

in Moscow for sure.’ De Lisle leaned even further back into his chair. The sky was quite blue, the sun as hot and intense as if it came through glass. ‘If

this

keeps up, I’ll have to get a new one.’

‘Someone tipped him off,’ Turner insisted. ‘It’s the only explanation. He panicked. That’s why I thought of Praschko, you see: he’s got a left-wing past. Fellow-traveller was Rawley’s term. He was old chums with Leo; they’d even spent the war together in England.’ He stared at the sky.

‘You’re going to advance a

theory

,’ de Lisle murmured. ‘I can hear it ticking.’

‘They come back to Germany in forty-five; do some army service; then part. They go different ways: Leo stays British and covers

that

target, Praschko goes native and gets himself mixed up in German politics. They’d be a useful pair, those two, as long-term agents, I must say. Maybe they were both at the same game . . . recruited by the same person back in England when Russia was the ally. Gradually they run down their relationship. That’s standard, that is. Not safe to associate any more . . . bad security to have our names linked; but they keep it up; keep it up in secret. Then one day Praschko gets word. Just a few weeks ago. Out of the blue perhaps. He hears it on the Bonn grapevine you’re all so proud of: Siebkron’s on the trail. Some old trace has come up; someone’s talked; we’re betrayed. Or maybe they’re only after Leo. Pack your bags, he says, take what you can and run for it.’

‘What a horrid mind you must have,’ de Lisle said luxuriously. ‘What a nasty, inventive mind.’

‘The trouble is, it doesn’t work.’

‘Not really, does it? Not in

human

terms. I’m glad you recognise that. Leo wouldn’t

panic

, that’s not his way. He had himself much under control. And it sounds very silly, but he loved us. Modestly, he loved us. He was

our

kind of man, Alan. Not theirs. He expected dreadfully little from life. Pit pony. That’s how I used to think of him in those wretched ground-floor stables. Even when he came upstairs, he seemed to bring a bit of the dark with him. People thought of him as

jolly

. The jolly extrovert . . .’

‘No one I’ve talked to thought he was jolly.’

De Lisle turned his head and looked at Turner with real interest.

‘Didn’t they? What a horrifying thought. Each of us thought the other was laughing. Like clowns at the tragedy. That’s very nasty,’ he said.

‘All right,’ Turner conceded. ‘He wasn’t a believer. But he might have been when he was younger, mightn’t he?’

‘Might.’

‘Then he goes to sleep . . . his conscience goes to sleep, I mean –’

‘Ah.’

‘Until Karfeld wakes him up again – the new Nationalism . . . the old enemy. . . . Wakes him with a bang. “Hey, what’s going on?” He saw it all happening again; he told people that: history repeating itself.’

‘Was it really Marx who said that: “History repeats itself, but the first time it’s tragedy, and the second time it’s comedy?” It seems

far

too witty for a German. Though I will admit: Karfeld does make Communism awfully inviting.’

‘What was he

like

?’ Turner insisted. ‘What was he really

like

?’

‘Leo? God, what are any of us like?’

‘You knew him. I didn’t.’

‘You won’t interrogate me, will you?’ he asked, not altogether as a joke. ‘I’m damned if I’ll buy you lunch for you to unmask me.’

‘Did Bradfield like him?’

‘Who does Bradfield like?’

‘Did he keep a close eye on him?’

‘On his work, no doubt, where it was relevant. Rawley’s a professional.’

‘He’s Roman Catholic too, isn’t he?’

‘My goodness,’ de Lisle declared with quite unexpected vehemence, ‘what an awful thing to say. You really mustn’t compartmentalise people like that, it won’t do. Life just isn’t made up of so many cowboys and so many Red Indians. Least of all diplomatic life. If

that’s

what you think life is, you’d better defect yourself.’ With this he threw back his head and closed his eyes, letting the sun restore him. ‘After all,’ he added, his equability quite revived, ‘that’s what you object to in Leo, isn’t it? He’s gone and attached himself to some silly faith. God is dead. You can’t have it both ways, that would be

too

medieval.’ He lapsed once more into a contented silence.

‘I have a particular vision of Leo,’ he said at last. ‘Here’s something for your little notebook. What do you make of this? One gorgeous winter afternoon, I’d been to a boring German conference and it was half past four and I’d nothing much to do, so I took myself for a drive up into the hills behind Godesberg. Sun, frost, a bit of snow, a bit of wind . . . it was how I imagine ascending into Heaven. Suddenly, there was Leo. Indisputably, unquestionably, positively Leo, shrouded to the ears in Balkan black, with one of those dreadful Homburg hats they wear in the Movement. He was standing at the edge of a football field watching some kids kicking a ball and smoking one of those little cigars everyone complained about.’

‘Alone?’

‘All alone. I thought of stopping but I didn’t. He hadn’t any car that I could see and he was miles from anywhere. And suddenly I thought, no; don’t stop; he’s at Church. He’s looking at the childhood he never had.’

‘You were fond of him, weren’t you?’

De Lisle might have replied, for the question did not seem to disconcert him, but he was interrupted by an unexpected intruder.

‘Hullo. A new flunkey?’ The voice was slurred and gritty. As its owner was standing directly in the sun, Turner had to screw up his eyes in order to make him out at all; at length he discerned the gently swaying outline and the black unkempt hair of the English journalist who had saluted them at lunch. He was pointing at Turner, but his question, to judge by the cast of his head, was addressed to de Lisle.

‘What is he,’ he demanded, ‘pimp or spy?’

‘Which do you want to be, Alan?’ de Lisle asked cheerfully, but Turner declined to answer. ‘Alan Turner, Sam Allerton,’ he continued, quite unbothered. ‘Sam represents a lot of newspapers, don’t you, Sam? He’s enormously powerful. Not that he cares for power of course. Journalists never do.’

Allerton continued to stare at Turner.

‘Where’s he come from then?’

‘London Town,’ said de Lisle.

‘What part of London Town?’

‘Ag and Fish.’

‘Liar.’

‘The Foreign Office, then. Hadn’t you guessed?’

‘How long’s he here for?’

‘Just visiting.’

‘How long for?’

‘You know what visits are.’

‘I know what

his

visits are,’ said Allerton. ‘He’s a bloodhound.’ His dead, yellow eyes slowly took him in: the heavy shoes, the tropical suit, the blank face and the pale, unblinking gaze.

‘Belgrade,’ he said at last. ‘That’s where. Some bloke in the Embassy screwed a female spy and got photographed. We all had to hush it up or the Ambassador wasn’t going to give us any more port.

Security

Turner, that’s who you are. The Bevin boy. You did a job in Warsaw, didn’t you? I remember that too. That was a balls-up, wasn’t it? Some girl tried to kill herself. Someone you’d been too rough with. We had to sweep that under the carpet as well.’

‘Run away, Sam,’ said de Lisle.

Allerton began laughing. It was quite a terrible noise, mirthless and cancered; indeed it seemed actually to cause him pain, for as he sat down, he interrupted himself with low, blasphemous cries. His black, greasy mane shook like an ill-fitted wig; his paunch, hanging forward over his waistband, trembled uncertainly.

‘Well, Peter, how was Luddi Siebkron? Going to keep us safe and sound, is he? Save the Empire?’

Without a word, Turner and de Lisle got up and made their way across the lawn towards the car park.

‘Heard the news, by the way?’ Allerton called after them.

‘What news?’

‘You chaps don’t know a thing, do you? Federal Foreign Minister’s just left for Moscow. Top-level talks on Soviet–German trade treaty. They’re joining Comecon and signing the Warsaw pact. All to please Karfeld and bugger up Brussels. Britain out, Russia in. Non-aggressive Rappallo. What do you think of that?’

‘We think you’re a bloody liar,’ said de Lisle.

‘Well, it’s nice to be fancied,’ Allerton replied, with a deliberate homosexual lisp. ‘But don’t tell me it won’t happen, lover boy, because one day it will. One day they’ll do it. They’ll have to. Slap Mummy in the face. Find a Daddy for the Fatherland. It isn’t the West any more, is it? So who’s it going to be?’ He raised his voice as they continued walking. ‘That’s what you stupid flunkies don’t understand! Karfeld’s the only one in Germany who’s telling the truth: the Cold War’s over for everyone except the fucking diplomats!’ His Parthian shot reached them as they closed the doors. ‘Never mind, darlings,’ they heard him say. ‘We can all sleep soundly now Turner’s here.’

* * *

The little sports car nosed its way slowly down the sanitary arcades of the American Colony. A church bell, much amplified, was celebrating the sunlight. On the steps of the New England Chapel, a bride and groom faced the flashing cameras. They entered the Koblenzerstrasse and the noise hit them like a gale. Overhead, electronic indicators flashed out theoretical speed checks. The photographs of Karfeld had multiplied. Two Mercedes with Egyptian lettering on their number plates raced past them, cut in, swung out again and were gone.

‘That lift,’ Turner said suddenly. ‘In the Embassy. How long’s it been out of action?’

‘God, when was anything? Mid-April I suppose.’

‘You’re sure of that?’

‘You’re thinking of the trolley? Which also disappeared in mid-April?’

‘You’re not bad,’ Turner said. ‘You’re not bad at all.’

‘And you would be making a most terrible mistake if you ever thought you were a specialist,’ de Lisle retorted, with that same unpredictable force which Turner had discerned in him before. ‘Just don’t go thinking you’re in a white coat, that’s all; don’t go thinking we’re all laboratory specimens.’ He swung violently to avoid a double lorry and at once a motorised scream of fury rose from behind them. ‘I’m saving your soul though you may not notice it.’ He smiled. ‘Sorry. I’ve got Siebkron on my nerves, that’s all.’

‘He put P. in his diary,’ Turner said suddenly. ‘After Christmas: meet P. Give P. dinner. Then it faded out again. It could have been Praschko.’

‘It could have been.’

‘What Ministries are there in Bad Godesberg?’

‘Buildings, Scientific, Health. Just those three so far as I know.’

‘He went to a conference every Thursday afternoon. Which one would that be?’

De Lisle pulled up at the traffic lights and Karfeld frowned down on them like a cyclops, one eye ripped off by a dissenting hand.

‘I don’t think he

did

go to a conference,’ de Lisle said cautiously. ‘Not recently anyway.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Just that.’

‘For Christ’s sake!’

‘Who told you he went?’

‘Meadowes. And Meadowes got it from Leo and Leo said it was a regular weekly meeting and cleared with Bradfield. Something to do with claims.’

‘Oh my God,’ said de Lisle softly. He pulled away, holding the left-hand lane against the predatory flashing of a white Porsche.

‘What does “Oh my God” mean?’

‘I don’t know. Not what you think perhaps. There was no conference, not for Leo. Not in Bad Godesberg, not anywhere else; not on Thursdays, not on any other day. Until Rawley came, it’s true, he attended a low-level conference at the Buildings Ministry. They discussed private contracts for repairing German houses damaged by Allied manoeuvres. Leo rubber-stamped their proposals.’

‘Until Bradfield came?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then what happened? The conference had run down, had it? Like the rest of his work.’

‘More or less.’

Instead of turning right into the Embassy gateway, de Lisle filtered to the left bay and prepared to make the circuit a second time.

‘What do you mean? “

More or less

”?’

‘Rawley put a stop to it.’

‘To the conference?’

‘I told you: it was mechanical. It could be done by correspondence.’

Turner was almost in despair. ‘Why are you fencing with me? What’s going on? Did he stop the conference or not? What part’s he playing in this?’

‘Take care,’ de Lisle warned him, lifting one hand from the steering-wheel. ‘Don’t rush in. Rawley sent me instead of him. He didn’t like the Embassy to be represented by someone like Leo.’

‘Someone like –’

‘By a temporary. That’s all! By a temporary without full status. He felt it was wrong so he got me to go along in his place. After that, Leo never spoke to me again. He thought I’d intrigued against him. Now that’s enough. Don’t ask me any more.’ They were passing the Aral garage again, going north. The petrol attendant recognised the car and waved cheerfully to de Lisle. ‘That’s your mede or measure. I’m not going to discuss Bradfield with you if you bully me till you’re blue in the face. He’s my colleague, my superior and –’

‘And your friend! Christ forgive me: who do you represent out here? Yourselves or the poor bloody taxpayer? I’ll tell you who: the Club.

Your

Club. The bloody Foreign Office; and if you saw Rawley Bradfield standing on Westminster Bridge hawking his files for an extra pension, you’d bloody well look the other way.’

Turner was not shouting. It was rather the massive slowness of his speech which gave it urgency.

‘You make me puke. All of you. The whole sodding circus. You didn’t give a twopenny damn for Leo, any of you, while he was here. Common as dirt, wasn’t he? No background, no childhood, no nothing. Shove him the other side of the river where he won’t be noticed! Tuck him away in the catacombs with the German staff! Worth a drink but not worth dinner! What happens now? He bolts, and he takes half your secrets with him for good measure, and suddenly you’ve got the guilts and you’re blushing like a lot of virgins holding your hands over your fannies and not talking to strange men. Everybody: you, Meadowes, Bradfield. You

know

how he wormed his way in there, how he conned them all; how he stole and cheated. You know something else too: a friendship, a love affair, something that made him special for you, made him interesting. There’s a whole world he lived in and none of you will put a name to it. What was it? Who was it? Where the hell did he go on Thursday afternoons if he didn’t go to the Ministry? Who ran him? Who protected him? Who gave him his orders and his money and took his information off him? Who held his hand? He’s a spy, for Christ’s sake! He’s put his hand in the till! And the moment you find out, you’re all on his side!’

‘No,’ said de Lisle. They were pulling up at the gate; the police were converging on them, tapping on the window. He let them wait. ‘You’ve got it wrong. You and Leo form a team of your own. You’re the other side of the wire. Both of you. That’s your problem. Whatever definitions, whatever labels. That’s why you’re beating the air.’

They entered the car park and de Lisle drove round to the canteen side where Turner had stood that morning, staring across the field.

‘I’ve got to see his house,’ Turner said. ‘I’ve got to.’ They were both looking ahead of them, through the windscreen.

‘I thought you’d ask me that.’

‘All right, forget it.’

‘Why should I? I’ve no doubt you’ll go anyway. Sooner or later.’

They got out and walked slowly over the tarmac. The despatch riders were lying on the lawn, their motor-bikes stacked round the flagpole. The geraniums, martially arranged, glinted like tiny guardsmen along the verges.

‘He loved the Army,’ de Lisle said, as they climbed the steps. ‘He really loved it.’

As they paused to show their passes yet again to the weasel sergeant, Turner chanced to look back at the carriageway.

‘Look!’ he said suddenly. ‘That’s the pair that picked us up at the airport.’

A black Opel had lumbered into the filter bay; two men sat in the front; from his vantage point on the steps, Turner could make out easily the multiple reflectors of the long driving mirror glittering in the sunlight.

‘Ludwig Siebkron took us to lunch,’ de Lisle said with a dry smile, ‘and now he’s brought us home. I told you: don’t go thinking you’re a specialist.’

‘Then where were you on Friday night?’

‘In the woodshed,’ de Lisle snapped, ‘waiting to murder Lady Ann for her priceless diamonds.’

* * *

The cypher room was open again. Cork lay on a truckle bed, a handbook on Caribbean bungalows lay beside him on the floor. On the desk in the dayroom was a blue Embassy envelope addressed to Alan Turner Esquire. His name was typewritten; the style was stiff and rather gauche. There were a number of things, the writer said, which Mr Turner might care to know about in connection with the matter which had brought him to Bonn. If it were convenient, the writer continued, he might care to call for a glass of sherry wine at the above address at half past six o’clock. The address was in Bad Godesberg and the writer was Miss Jenny Pargiter of Press and Information Section, presently on attachment to Chancery. She had signed her name and typed it beneath the signature for reasons of clarity; the P was written rather large, Turner decided; and as he opened the blue rexine diary he permitted himself a rare if puzzled smile of anticipation. P for Praschko; P for Pargiter. And P was the initial on the diary. Come on, Leo, let’s have a look at your guilty secret.

8

Jenny Pargiter

‘I assume,’ Jenny Pargiter began, in a prepared statement, ‘that you are used to dealing in delicate matters.’

The sherry stood between them on the glass-topped sofa table. The flat was dark and ugly: the chairs were Victorian wicker, the drapes German and very heavy. Constable reproductions hung in the dining alcove.

‘Like a doctor, you have standards of professional confidence.’

‘Oh sure,’ said Turner.

‘It was mentioned at Chancery meeting this morning that you were investigating Leo Harting’s disappearance. We were warned not to discuss it, even among ourselves.’

‘You’re allowed to discuss it with me,’ said Turner.

‘No doubt. But I naturally would wish to be told how much further any confidence might go. What, for instance, is the relationship between yourselves and Personnel Department?’

‘It depends on the information.’

She had raised the sherry glass to the level of her eye and appeared to be measuring the fluid content. It was an attitude evidently designed to demonstrate her sophistication and her ease of mind.

‘Supposing someone – supposing I myself had been injudicious. In a personal matter.’

‘It depends who you’ve been injudicious

with

,’ Turner replied, and Jenny Pargiter coloured suddenly.

‘That is not what I meant at all.’

‘Look,’ said Turner, watching her, ‘if you come and tell me in confidence that you’ve left a bundle of files in the bus, I’ll have to give details to Personnel Department. If you tell me you’ve been going out with a boy friend now and then, I’m not going to fall over in a faint. Mainly,’ he said, pushing his sherry glass across the table for her to replenish, ‘Personnel Department don’t want to know we exist.’ His manner was very casual, as if he barely cared. He sat impassively, filling the whole chair.

‘There is the question of protecting other people, third parties who cannot necessarily speak for themselves.’

Turner said, ‘There’s also the question of security. If you didn’t think it was important, you wouldn’t ask to see me in the first place. It’s up to you. I can’t give you any guarantees.’

She lit a cigarette with sharp, angular movements. She was not an ugly girl, but she seemed to dress either too young or too old, so that whatever Turner’s age, she was not his contemporary.

‘I accept that,’ she said and regarded him darkly for a moment, as if assessing how much Turner could take. ‘However, you have misunderstood the reason why I asked you to call here. It is this. Since you are quite certain to be told all manner of rumours about Harting and myself, I thought it best if you heard the truth from me.’

Turner put down his glass and opened his notebook.

‘I arrived here just before Christmas,’ Jenny Pargiter said, ‘from London. Before that I was in Djakarta. I returned to London intending to be married. You may have read of my engagement?’

‘I think I must have missed it,’ said Turner.

‘The person to whom I was engaged decided at the last minute that we were not suited. It was a very courageous decision. I was then posted to Bonn. We had known one another for many years; we had read the same subject at university and I had always assumed we had much in common. The person decided otherwise. That is what engagements are for. I am perfectly content. There is no

reason

for anyone to be sorry for me.’

‘You got here at Christmas?’

‘I asked particularly to be here in time for the holiday. In previous years, we had always spent Christmas together. Unless I was in Djakarta of course. The . . . separation on this occasion was certain to be painful to me. I was most anxious to mitigate the distress with a new atmosphere.’

‘Quite.’

‘As a single woman in an Embassy, one is very often overcome with invitations at Christmas. Almost everyone in Chancery invited me to spend the festive days with them. The Bradfields, the Crabbes, the Jacksons, the Gavestons: they all asked me. I was also invited by the Meadowes. You have met Arthur Meadowes no doubt.’

‘Yes.’

‘Meadowes is a widower and lives with his daughter, Myra. He is in fact a B3, though we no longer use those grades. I found it very touching to be invited by a member of the Junior Staff.’

Her accent was very slight, provincial rather than regional, and for all her attempts at disowning it, it mocked her all the time.

‘In Djakarta we always had that tradition. We

mixed

more. In a larger Embassy like Bonn, people tend to remain in their groups. I am not suggesting there should be total assimilation: I would even regard that as

bad

. The A’s, for instance, tend to have different tastes as well as different intellectual interests to the B’s. I am suggesting that in Bonn the distinctions are too

rigid

, and too many. The A’s remain with the A’s and the B’s with the B’s even inside the different sections: the economists, the attachés, Chancery; they all form cliques. I do not consider that right. Would you care for more sherry?’

‘Thanks.’

‘So I accepted Meadowes’ invitation. The other guest was Harting. We spent a pleasant day, stayed there till evening, then left. Myra Meadowes was going out – she had been very ill, you know; she had a liaison in Warsaw, I understand, with a local undesirable and it very nearly ended in tragedy. Personally I am against anticipated marriages. Myra Meadowes was going to a young people’s party and Meadowes himself was invited to the Corks’, so there was no question of our remaining. As we were leaving, Harting suggested we went for a walk. He knew a place not far away; it would be nice to drive up there and get some fresh air after so much food and drink. I am very fond of exercise. We had our walk and then he proposed that I should go back with him for supper. He was very insistent.’

She was long looking at him. Her fingertips were pressed together on her lap, making a basket of her hands.

‘I felt it would be wrong to refuse. It was one of those decisions which women find extremely difficult. I would have been quite glad of an early night, but I did not wish to cause offence. After all, it was Christmas Day, and his behaviour during the walk had been perfectly unobjectionable. On the other hand it must be said that I had barely seen him before that day. In the event, I agreed, but I said that I would not wish to be late home. He accepted this provision and I followed him to Königswinter in my car. To my surprise I found that he had prepared everything for my arrival. The table was laid for two. He had even persuaded the boilerman to come and light the fire. After supper, he told me that he loved me.’ Picking up her cigarette she drew sharply upon it. Her tone was more factual than ever: certain things had to be said. ‘He told me that in all his life he had never felt such emotion. From that first day that I had appeared at Chancery meeting, he had been going out of his mind. He pointed to the lights of the barges on the river. “I stand at my bedroom window,” he said, “and I watch every one of them, right through the night. Morning after morning, I watch the dawn rise on the river.” It was all due to his obsession for me. I was dumbfounded.’

‘What did you say?’

‘I had no chance to say anything. He wished to give me a present. Even if he never saw me again, he wished me to have this Christmas gift as a token of his love. He disappeared into the study and came back with a parcel, all wrapped up and ready, with a label, “To my love.” I was naturally completely at a loss. “I can’t accept this,” I said. “I refuse. I can’t allow you to give me things. It puts me at a disadvantage.” I explained to him that though he was completely English in many ways, in this respect the English did things differently. On the Continent, it was quite customary to take women by storm, but in England courtship was a long and thoughtful matter. We would have to get to know one another, compare our views. There was the discrepancy in our ages; I had my career to consider. I didn’t know what to do,’ she added helplessly. The brittleness had vanished from her voice: she was helpless and a little pathetic. ‘He kept saying, after all it was

Christmas

; I should think of it as just an ordinary Christmas present.’

‘What was in the parcel?’

‘A hair-dryer. He said he admired my hair above everything. He watched the sun shine on it in the mornings. During Chancery meeting, you understand. He must have been speaking figuratively; we were having a wretched winter.’ She took a short breath. ‘It must have cost him twenty pounds. No one, not even my ex-fiancé during our most intimate period, has ever given me anything so valuable.’

She performed a second ritual with the cigarette box, ducking her hand forward and arresting it suddenly, selecting a cigarette as if it were a chocolate, not this one but that one, lighting it with a heavy frown. ‘We sat down and he put on a gramophone record. I am afraid I am not musical, but I thought that music might distract him. I was extremely sorry for him, and most reluctant to leave him in that condition. He just stared at me. I didn’t know where to look. Finally he came over and tried to embrace me, and I said I had to go home. He saw me to the car. He was very correct. Fortunately we had two more days of holiday. I was able to decide what to do. He telephoned twice to invite me to supper and I refused. By the end of the holiday, I had made up my mind. I wrote him a letter and returned the gift. I felt no other course was open to me. I went in early and left the parcel with the Chancery Guard. I explained in my letter that I had given great thought to all he had said and I was convinced I would never be able to return his affection. It would therefore be wrong for me to encourage him, and since we were colleagues and would be seeing a lot of each other, I felt it was only prudent to tell him this immediately, before –’

‘Before what?’

‘The gossip started,’ she said with sudden passion. ‘I’ve never known anywhere for such gossip. You can’t move without them making up some wicked story about you.’

‘What story have they made up about you?’

‘God knows,’ she said uselessly. ‘God knows.’

‘Which Guard did you leave the parcel with?’

‘Walter, the younger one. Macmullen’s son.’

‘Did he tell other people?’

‘I particularly asked him to regard the matter as confidential.’

‘I should think that impressed him,’ Turner said.

She stared at him angrily, her face red with embarrassment.

‘All right. So you gave him the bird. What did he do about it?’

‘That day he appeared at Chancery meeting and wished me good morning as if nothing had happened. I smiled at him and that was that. He was pale but brave . . . sad but in command. I felt that the worst was over . . . Fortunately he was about to begin a new job in Chancery Registry and I hoped that this would take his mind off other things. For a couple of weeks I barely spoke to him. I saw him either in the Embassy or at social functions and he seemed quite happy. He made no allusion to Christmas evening or to the hair-dryer. Occasionally at cocktail parties he would come and stand quite close to me and I knew that . . . he wished for my proximity. Sometimes I would be conscious of his eyes on me. A woman can tell these things; I knew that he had still not completely given up hope. He had a way of catching my eye that was . . . beyond all doubt. I cannot imagine why I had not noticed it before. However, I continued to give him no encouragement. That was the decision I had taken, and whatever the short-term temptations to alleviate his distress, I knew that in the long term no purpose could be served by . . . leading him on. I was also confident that anything so sudden and . . . irrational would quickly pass.’

‘And did it?’

‘We continued in this way for about a fortnight. It was beginning to get on my nerves. I seemed unable to go to a single party, to accept a single invitation without seeing him. He didn’t even address me any more. He just looked. Wherever I went, his eyes followed me . . . They are very dark eyes. I would call them soulful. Dark brown, as one would expect, and they imparted a remarkable sense of dependence . . . In the end I was almost frightened to go out. I’m afraid that at that stage, I even had an unworthy thought. I wondered whether he was reading my mail.’

‘Did you now?’

‘We all have our own pigeonholes in Registry. For telegrams and mail. Everyone in Registry takes a hand at sorting the incoming papers. It is of course the custom here as in England that invitations are sent unsealed. It would have been quite possible for him to look inside.’

‘Why was the thought unworthy?’

‘It was untrue, that’s why,’ she retorted. ‘I taxed him with it and he assured me it was quite untrue.’

‘I see.’

Her voice became even more pedagogic; the tones came very crisply, brooking no question whatever.

‘He would never do such a thing. It was not in his nature, it had not crossed his mind. He assured me categorically that he was not . . . stalking me. That was the expression I used; it was one I instantly regretted. I cannot imagine how I came on such a ridiculous metaphor. To the contrary, he said, he was merely following his usual social pattern; if it bothered me he would change it, or decline all further invitations until I instructed him otherwise. Nothing was further from his mind than to be a burden to me.’

‘So after that you were friends again, were you?’

He watched her search for the wrong words, watched her balance awkwardly at the edge of truth, and awkwardly withdraw.

‘Since the twenty-third of January he has not spoken to me again,’ she blurted. Even in that sad light, Turner saw the tears running down her rough cheeks as her head fell forward and her hand rose quickly to cover them. ‘I can’t go on. I think of him all the time.’

Rising, Turner opened the door of the drinks cupboard and half filled a tumbler with whisky.

‘Here,’ he said gently, ‘this is what you like; drink it up and stop pretending.’

‘It’s overwork.’ She took the glass. ‘Bradfield never relaxes. He doesn’t like women. He hates them. He wants to drive us all into the ground.’

‘Now tell me what happened on the twenty-third of January.’

* * *

She was sitting sideways in the chair, her back towards him and her voice had risen beyond her control.

‘He ignored me. He pretended to lose himself in work. I’d go into Registry to collect my papers and he wouldn’t even look up. Not for me. Not any more. He might for other people, but not for me. Oh no. He had never taken much interest in work – you only had to watch him in Chancery meetings to realise that. He was idle at heart. Glib. But the moment he heard me come along, he couldn’t work hard enough. He saw through me, even if I greeted him. Even if I walked straight into him in the corridor, it was the same. He didn’t notice me. I didn’t exist. I thought I’d go off my head. It wasn’t right: after all, he’s only a B, you know, and a temporary; he’s nothing really. He carries no weight at all, you only have to hear how they talk about him . . . Cheap, that’s what they say of him. A quick mind but quite unsound.’ For a moment she was far above his grade. ‘I wrote him letters. I rang his number at Königswinter.’

‘They all knew, did they? You made a display of it, did you?’

‘First of all he chases after me . . . besieges me with declarations of love . . . like a gigolo really. Of course, I mean there’s part of me that sees through

that

all right, don’t you worry. Running hot and cold like that: who does he think he is?’

She lay across the chair, her head buried in the crook of her elbow, her shoulders shaking to the rhythm of her sobbing.

‘You’ve got to tell me,’ Turner said. He was standing over her, his hand on her arm. ‘Listen. You’ve got to tell me what happened at the end of January. It was something important, wasn’t it? Something he asked you to do for him. Something political. Something special you’re afraid of. First of all he made up to you. He worked on you, took you by surprise . . . then he got what he wanted: something very simple he couldn’t get for himself. And when he’d got it he didn’t want you any more.’

The sobbing started.

‘You told him something he needed to know; you did him a favour: a favour to help him along the line. All right, you’re not unique. There’s a good few others have done the same thing one way or the other, believe me. So what is it?’ He knelt down beside her. ‘What was it that was injudicious? What was it that involved third parties? Tell me! It was something that frightened the life out of you!

Tell me what it was!

’

‘Oh God, I lent him the keys. I lent him the keys,’ she said.

* * *

‘Hurry.’

‘The Duty Officer’s. The whole lot. He came to me and begged me . . . no, not begged. No.’

She was sitting up, white in the face. Turner refilled her glass and put it back in her hand.

‘I was on duty. Night Duty Officer. Thursday January the twenty-third. Leo wasn’t allowed to be Duty Officer. There are things temporaries can’t see: special instructions . . . contingency plans. I’d stayed in to cope with a rush of telegrams; it must have been half past seven, eight o’clock. I was leaving the cypher room . . . just going to Registry, and I saw him standing there. As if he’d been waiting. Smiling. “Jenny,” he said, “what a nice surprise.” I was so happy.’

The sobbing broke out again.

‘I was so happy. I’d been longing for him to speak to me again. He’d been waiting for me, I knew he had; he was pretending it was an accident. And I said to him: “Leo.” I’d never called him that before. Leo. We just talked, standing in the corridor. What a

lovely

surprise, he kept saying. Perhaps he could give me dinner? I reminded him, in case he had forgotten, that I was on duty. That didn’t bother him either. What a pity, how about tomorrow night? Then the weekend? He would ring me on Saturday morning, how would that be? That would be fine, I said, I’d like that. And we could go for a walk first, he said, up on the football field? I was so happy. I still had the telegrams in my arms, a whole bundle, so I said well, I’d better get along, post these into Arthur Meadowes. He wanted to take them for me but I said no, I could manage them, it was all right. I was just turning away . . . I wanted to be first to go, you see, I didn’t want him walking away from me. I was just going and he said, “Oh Jenny, look here, by the way . . .” You know the way he talks. “Well, a ridiculous thing has happened, the choir are all hanging around downstairs and no one can unlock the Assembly Room door. Somebody’s locked it and we can’t find the key and we wondered whether you had one.” It seemed a bit odd really; I couldn’t think why anyone should

want

to lock it in the first place. So I said, yes, I’d come down and open it; I’d just have to check in some telegrams for distribution. I mean he knew I’d got a key; the Duty Officer has a spare key for every room in the Embassy. “Don’t bother to come down,” he says. “Just give me the key and I’ll do it for you. It won’t take two minutes.” And he saw me hesitate.’

She closed her eyes.

‘He was so

little

,’ she burst out. ‘You could hurt him so easily. I’d already accused him of opening my letters. I loved him . . . I swear I’ve never loved anyone . . .’ Gradually her crying stopped.

‘So you gave him the keys? The whole bunch? That’s room keys, safe keys –’

‘Keys to all desks and steel cupboards; to the front and rear doors of the building and the key to turn off the alarm in Chancery Registry.’

‘Lift keys?’

‘The lift wasn’t bolted by then . . . the grilles weren’t up . . . They did that the next weekend.’

‘How long did he have them for?’

‘Five minutes. Maybe less. It’s not long enough, is it?’ She had seized his arm beseeching him. ‘Say it’s not long enough.’

‘To take an impression? He could take fifty impressions if he knew what he was about.’

‘He’d need wax or plasticine or something: I asked. I looked it up.’

‘He’d have had it ready in his room,’ Turner said indifferently. ‘He lived on the ground floor. Don’t worry,’ he added gently. ‘He may just have been letting in the choir. Don’t let your imagination run away with you.’

She had stopped crying. Her voice calmed. She spoke with a sense of private recognition: ‘It wasn’t choir practice night. Choir practice is on Fridays. This was Thursday.’

‘You found out, did you? Asked the Chancery Guard?’

‘I knew already! I knew when I handed him the keys! I tell myself I didn’t, but I did. But I had to trust him. It was an act of giving. Don’t you see? An act of giving, an act of love. How can I expect a man to understand that?’

‘And after you’d given,’ Turner said, getting up, ‘he didn’t want you any more, did he?’

‘That’s like all men, isn’t it?’

‘Did he ring you Saturday?’

‘You know he didn’t.’ Her face was still buried in her forearm. He closed the notebook.

‘Can you hear me?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did he ever mention a woman to you; a Margaret Aickman? He was engaged to her. She knew Harry Praschko as well.’

‘No.’

‘No other woman?’

‘No.’

‘Did he ever talk politics?’

‘No.’

‘Did he ever give you any cause to suppose he was a person of strong left-wing leanings?’

‘No.’

‘Ever see him in the company of suspicious persons?’

‘No.’

‘Did he talk about his childhood? His uncle? An uncle who lived in Hampstead. A Communist who brought him up?’

‘No.’

‘Uncle Otto?’

‘No.’

‘Did he ever mention Praschko? Well, did he? Did he ever mention Praschko, do you hear?’

‘He said Praschko was the only friend he’d ever had.’ She broke down again, and again he waited.

‘Did he mention Praschko’s politics?’

‘No.’

‘Did he say they were still friends?’

She shook her head.

‘Somebody had lunch with Harting last Thursday. The day before he left. At the Maternus. Was that you?’

‘I told you! I swear to you!’

‘Was it?’

‘No!’

‘He’s marked it down as you. It’s marked P. That’s how he wrote you down other times.’

‘It wasn’t me!’

‘Then it was Praschko, was it?’

‘How should I know?’

‘Because you had an affair with him! You told me half and not the rest! You were sleeping with him up to the day he left!’

‘It’s not true!’

‘Why did Bradfield protect him? He hated Leo’s guts; why did he look after him like that? Give him jobs? Keep him on the payroll?’

‘Please go,’ she said. ‘Please go. Never come back.’

‘Why?’

She sat up.

‘Get out,’ she said.

‘You had dinner with him Friday night. The night he left. You were sleeping with him and you won’t admit it!’

‘No!’

‘He asked you about the Green File! He made you get the despatch box for him!’

‘He didn’t! He didn’t! Get out!’

‘I want a cab.’

He waited while she telephoned. ‘

Sofort

,’ she said, ‘

sofort

,’ come at once and take him away.

He was at the door.

‘What will you do when you find him?’ she asked with that slack voice that follows passion.

‘Not my business.’

‘Don’t you care?’

‘We never will find him, so what does it matter?’

‘Then why look for him?’

‘Why not? That’s how we spend our lives, isn’t it? Looking for people we’ll never find.’

He walked slowly down the stairs to the hall. From another flat came the growl of a cocktail party. A group of Arabs, very drunk, swept past him pulling off their coats and shouting. He waited on the doorstep. Across the river, the narrow lights of Chamberlain’s Petersberg hung like a necklace in the warm dark. A new block stood directly before him. It seemed to have been built from the top, beginning with the crane and working downwards. He thought he had seen it before from a different angle. A railway bridge straddled the end of the avenue. As the express thundered over it, he saw the silent diners grazing at their food.

‘The Embassy,’ he said. ‘British Embassy.’

‘

Englische Botschaft?

’

‘Not English. British. I’m in a hurry.’

The driver swore at him, shouting about diplomats. They drove extremely fast and once they nearly hit a tram.

‘Get a bloody move on, can’t you?’

He demanded a receipt. The driver kept a rubber stamp and a pad in his glove tray, and he hit the paper so hard that it crumpled. The Embassy was a ship, all its windows blazing. Black figures moved in the lobby with the slow coupling of a ballroom dance. The car park was full. He threw away the receipt. Lumley didn’t countenance taxi fares. It was a new rule since the last cut. There was no one he could claim from. Except Harting, whose debts appeared to be accumulating.

* * *

Bradfield was in conference, Miss Peate said. He would probably be flying to Brussels with the Ambassador before morning. She had put away her papers and was fiddling with a blue leather

placement

tray, fitting the names round a dinner table in order of precedence, and she spoke to him as if it were her duty to frustrate him. And de Lisle was at the Bundestag, listening to the debate on Emergency Legislation.

‘I want to see the Duty Officer’s keys.’

‘I’m afraid you can only have

them

with Mr Bradfield’s consent.’

He fought with her and that was what she wanted. He overcame her and that was what she wanted too. She gave him a written authority signed by Administration Section and countersigned by the Minister (Political). He took it to the front desk where Macmullen was on duty. Macmullen was a big, steady man, sometime sergeant of Edinburgh constabulary, and whatever he had heard about Turner had given him no pleasure.

‘And the night book,’ Turner said. ‘Show me the night book since January.’

‘Please,’ said Macmullen and stood over him while he looked through it in case he took it away. It was half past eight and the Embassy was emptying. ‘See you in the morning,’ Mickie Crabbe whispered as he passed. ‘Old boy.’

There was no reference to Harting.

‘Mark me in,’ Turner said, pushing the book across the counter. ‘I’ll be in all night.’

As Leo was, he thought.

9

Guilty Thursday

There were about fifty keys and only half a dozen were labelled. He stood in the first-floor corridor where Leo had stood, drawn back into the shadow of a pillar, staring at the cypher-room door. It was about seven thirty, Leo’s time, and he imagined Jenny Pargiter coming out with a bundle of papers in her arms. The corridor was very noisy now, and the steel trap on the cypher-room door was rising and falling like a guillotine for the Registry girls to hand in telegrams and collect them; but that Thursday night had been a quiet time, a lull in the mounting crisis, and Leo had spoken to her

here

, where Turner stood now. He looked at his watch and then at the keys again and thought: five minutes. What

would

he have done? The noise was deafening; worse than day; not only the voices but the very pounding of the machines proclaimed a world entering emergency. But that night was calm, and Leo was a creature of silence, waiting here to draw his quarry and destroy. In five minutes.

He walked along the corridor as far as the lobby and looked down into the stair well and watched the evening shift of typists slip into the dark, survivors from a burning ship, letting the night recover them. Brisk but nonchalant would be his manner, for Jenny would watch him all the way till here; and Gaunt or Macmullen would see him descend these stairs; brisk but not triumphant.

He stood in the lobby. But

what

a risk, he thought suddenly; what a hazardous game. The crowd parted to admit two German officials. They were carrying black briefcases and they walked portentously as though they had come to perform an operation. They wore grey scarves put on before the overcoat, and folded broad and flat like Russian tunics.

What

a risk. She could revoke; she could pursue him; she would know within minutes, if she had not known already, that Leo was lying, she would know the moment she reached the lobby and heard no singing from the Assembly Room, saw no trace at all of a dozen singers entered in the night book, saw no hats and coats on those very pegs beside the door where the German officials were even now disencumbering themselves; she would know that Harting Leo, refugee, fringe-man, lover

manqué

and trader in third-rate artifices, had lied to her to get the keys.

‘A gift of love, an act of love: how can I expect a

man

to understand that?’

Before entering the corridor, he stopped and examined the lift. The gold-painted door was bolted; the central panel of glass was black, boarded from the inside. Two heavy steel bars had been fastened horizontally for added security.

‘How long’s that been there?’

‘Since Bremen, sir,’ Macmullen said.

‘When was Bremen?’

‘January, sir. Late January. The Office advised it, sir. They sent a man out specially. He did the cellars and the lift, sir.’ Macmullen gave information as if it were evidence before the bailies of Edinburgh, in a series of verbal drill movements, breathing at regulation intervals. ‘He worked the whole weekend,’ Macmullen added with awe; for he was a self-indulgent man and readily exhausted by work.

He made his way slowly through the gloom to Harting’s room thinking:

these

doors would be closed; these lights extinguished, these rooms silent. Was there a moon to shine through the bars? Or only these blue night lights burning for a cheaper Britain, and his own footsteps echoing in the vaults?

Two girls passed him, dressed for the emergency. One wore jeans and she looked at him very straight, guessing his weight. Jesus, he thought, quite soon I’m going to grab one, and he unlocked the door to Leo’s room and stood there in the dark. What

were

you up to, he wondered, you little thief?

Tins. Cigar tins would do, filled with white hardening putty; a child’s plasticine from that big Woolworths in Bad Godesberg would do; a little white talc to ensure a clean imprint. Three movements of the key, this side, that side, a straight stab into the flesh, and make sure the shoulders are clearly visible. It may not be a perfect fit; that depends on the blanks and the print, but a nice soft metal will yield a little in the womb and form itself to fit the inner walls . . . Come on, Turner, the sergeant used to say, you’d find it if it had hairs round it. He had them ready, then. All fifty tins? Or just one?

Just one key. Which? Which Aladdin’s cave, which secret chamber hid the secret treasures of this grumbling English house?

Harting, you thief. He began on Harting’s own door, just to annoy him, to bring it home to an absent thief that

his

door can be fiddled with as well, and he worked slowly along the passage fitting the keys to the locks, and each time he found a key that matched he took it off the ring and dropped it into his pocket and thought: what good did

that

do you? Most of the doors were not even locked, so that the keys were redundant anyway: cupboards, lavatories, washrooms, rest rooms, offices, a first-aid room that stank of alcohol and a junction box for electric cables.

A microphone job? Was that the nature of your technical interest, thief? The gimmicks, the flex, the hair-dryers, the bits and pieces: was that all a lovely cover for carting in some daft conjuring set for eavesdropping? ‘Balls,’ he said out loud, and with a dozen keys already tapping against his thigh, he plodded up the stairs again straight into the arms of the Ambassador’s private secretary, a strutting, fussy man who had borrowed a good deal of his master’s authority.

‘H. E. will be leaving in a minute; I should make yourself scarce if I were you,’ he said with chilling ease. ‘He’s not awfully keen on you people.’

In most of the corridors it was daytime. Commercial Section was celebrating Scottish week. A mauve grouse moor, draped in Campbell tartan, hung beside a photograph of the Queen in highland dress. Miniatures of Scotch whisky were mounted in a

collage

with dancers and bagpipes, and framed in plywood battens. In the Open Plan, under radiant exhortations to buy from the North, pale-faced clerks struck doggedly at machines for adding and subtracting.

Deadline Brussels!

a placard warned them, but the machines seemed unimpressed. He climbed a floor and was in Whitehall with the Service Attachés, each with his tiny Ministry and his stencilled title on the door.

‘What the hell are you up to?’ a sergeant clerk demanded, and Turner told him to keep a civil tongue in his head. Somewhere a military voice wrestled gallantly with dictation. In the Typing Pool, the girls sat forlornly in schoolroom lines: two juniors in green overalls gently nursed a mammoth duplicator while a third laid out the coloured telegrams as if they were fine linen for going away. Raised above them all, the Head Girl, blue haired and fully sixty, sat on a separate dais checking stencils. She alone, scenting the enemy, looked up sharply, nose towards the wind. The walls behind here were lined with Christmas cards from Head Girls in other missions. Some depicted camels, others the royal crest.

‘I’m going over the locks,’ he muttered, and her look said, ‘Go over what you like, but not my girls.’

Christ, I could do with one, I’m telling you. Surely you could spare just one for a quick drop into paradise? Harting, you thief.

* * *

It was ten o’clock. He had visited every room to which Harting had acquired access; he had gained nothing but a headache for his trouble. Whatever Harting wanted was no longer there, or else so hidden as to require weeks of searching; or so obvious as to be invisible. He felt the sickness which follows tension and his mind was racing with uncoordinated recollections. Christ: one single day. From enthusiasm to frustration in one day. From an aeroplane to the dayroom desk, all the clues and none; I’ve lived a whole bloody life and it’s only Monday. He stared at the blank foolscap pages of the telegram form, wondering what the hell to write. Cork was asleep and the robots were silent. The keys lay in a heap before him. One by one he began threading them back on to the ring. Put together, he thought;

construct

. You will not go to bed until you are at least aware of the trail you must follow. The task of an intellectual, his fart-arsed tutor brayed, is to make order out of chaos. Define anarchy. It is a mind without a system. Please, teacher, what is a system without a mind? Taking a pencil he lazily drew a chart of the days of the week and divided each day into panels of one hour. He opened the blue diary. Re-form the fragments, make of all the pieces one piece. You’ll find him and Shawn won’t. Harting Leo, Claims and Consular, thief and hunter, will hunt you down.

‘You don’t know anything about shares by any chance?’ Cork enquired, waking with a start.

‘No, I don’t.’

‘My query is, you see,’ he continued, rubbing his pink eyes, ‘if there’s a slump on Wall Street and a slump in Frankfurt and we don’t make the Market on this run, how will it affect Swedish steel?’

‘If I were you,’ Turner said, ‘I’d put the whole lot on red and forget it.’

‘Only I have this firm intention,’ Cork explained. ‘We’ve got a bit of land lined up in the Caribbean –’

‘Shut up.’

Construct. Put your ideas on a blackboard and

then

see what happens to them. Come on, Turner, you’re a philosopher, tell us how the world goes round. What little absolute will we put into Harting’s mouth, for instance? Facts. Construct. Did you not, after all, my dear Turner, abandon the

contemplative

life of the academic in favour of the

functional

life of the civil servant? Construct; put your theories to work and de Lisle will call you a real person.

Mondays first. Mondays are for invitations out. Buffet parties are favoured, de Lisle had told him in an aside at luncheon; they eliminate the pains of

placement

. Mondays are reserved for away matches. England plays the wogs. Away to a different kind of slavery. Harting was essentially a second-division man. The minor Embassies. Embassies with small drawing-rooms. The B team played away on Mondays.

‘– and if it’s a girl, I reckon we could get a coloured nanny, an Amah; she could do the teaching, up to O-level at least.’

‘Can’t you keep quiet?’

‘Provided we have the funds,’ Cork added. ‘You can’t get them for nothing, I’m sure.’

‘I’m working, can’t you understand?’

I’m trying, he thought, and his mind drifted into other fields. He was with the little girl in the corridor, whose full unpainted lips faded so reluctantly into the feathery skin; he imagined that long appraising stare upon his nascent paunch and he heard her laughing as his own wife had laughed: Alan darling, you’re supposed to take me, not fight me. It’s rhythm, it’s like dancing, can’t you understand? And Tony’s such a

beautiful

dancer, Alan darling, and I shall be a little late tonight, and I shall be away tomorrow, playing an away match with my Monday lover. Alan, stop. Stop! Alan, please don’t hit me! I’ll never touch him again, I swear. Until Tuesday.

Harting, you thief.

Tuesdays were for entertaining at home. Home is a Tuesday; home is having people in. He made a list of them and thought: it’s worse than Blackheath. It’s worse than her bloody mother fighting for her fragment of power; it’s worse than Bournemouth and seed cake for the minister; it’s worse than black Sundays in Yorkshire and weddings timed for six o’clock tea; it is a custom-built, unassailable preventive detention of vacuous social exchange. The Vandelungs (Dutch) . . . the Canards (Canadian) . . . the Obutus (Ghanaian) . . . the Cortezanis (Italian) . . . the Allertons, the Crabbes, and once, sure enough, the Bradfields; this happy band was mingled with no fewer than forty-eight accountable bores defined only by their quantity: the Obutus plus six . . . the Allertons plus two . . . the Bradfields alone. You gave them your

full

attention, didn’t you? ‘I understand he maintains a certain standard there.’ Champagne and two veg

that

night. Plover’s eggs paid for by the Russian taxpayer. His wife interrupted him: darling, why don’t we go out tonight? The Willoughbys won’t mind, they know I loathe cooking and Tony

adores

Italian food. Oh sure, sure: anything to please Tony.

‘– And if it’s a boy,’ Cork said, ‘I’ll take it on myself. There must be

some

facilities for boys, even in a place like that. I mean it’s a paradise, isn’t it, specially for teachers.’

Wednesday was welfare. Ping-pong night. Sing-song night. The sergeants’ mess: ‘Have a little something in that gin and whisky, Mr Turner, sir, just to give it bite. The boys say one thing about you, sir, and I’m sure you won’t mind me repeating it, sir, seeing it’s Christmas: Mr Turner, they say – they always give you the Mister, sir, it’s not something they do for everyone – Mr Turner is tough; Mr Turner is firm. But Mr Turner is

fair

. Now, sir, about my leave . . .’ Exiles night. A night for worming an inch or two further into the flesh of the Embassy; come back, little girl, and just slip off those jeans. A night strictly for business. He studied the engagements in detail and thought: you really did work for your secrets, I will admit. You really hawked yourself, didn’t you? Scottish Dancing, Skittles Club, Exiles Motoring, Sports Committee. Sooner you than me, boy; you really believed. I’ll say that for you too. You really went for goal, didn’t you? You kept the ball and you went through the lot of them, you thief.

Which left – since the weekends were not marked with anything but references to gardening and a couple of trips to Hanover – which left Thursdays.

Guilty Thursdays.

Draw a box round Thursday, telephone the Adler and find out what time they lock up. They don’t. Draw another box round

that

box, measuring one and a half inches by half an inch, and decorate the margins in between with sinuous snakes; cause their forked tongues to lick suggestively at the sweet Gothic curves of the letter T, and wait for the throbbing of a tormented head to be assumed into the waking drumbeat of the cypher machines. And the result?

Silence. Bloody silence.

The result is a Thursday shrouded in sexual mystery, tantalised by abstinence. A Thursday surrounded by meticulous entries written in a swollen, boring mayoral hand by a man with nothing to do and a lot of time to do it in. ‘Remember Mary Crabbe’s coffee grinder,’ the worshipful mayor of Turner’s home town in Yorkshire warned his fortunate biographer; remember to grind Mary Crabbe, you thief. ‘Speak to Arthur about Myra’s birthday,’ Mr Crail the Minister, well known throughout all Yorkshire for the inanity of his sermons, whispered in a benevolent aside; ‘Anglo-German Society Buffet Luncheon for Friends of the Free City of Hamburg,’ ‘International Ladies Subscription Luncheon, Costumes of All Nations, DM. 1500. Incl. wine,’ the Master of Ceremonies proclaimed, puffing his Mess-Night capitals over the lined pages. And make a mental note to ruin Jenny Pargiter’s career. And Meadowes’ retirement. And Gaunt? And Bradfield? And who else along the path? Myra Meadowes? You wrecker, Harting.

‘Can’t you turn those bloody things off?’

‘I wish I could,’ said Cork. ‘Something’s up, don’t ask me what. Personal for Bradfield decypher yourself. Following for Bradfield by hand of officer . . . it must be his bloody birthday.’

‘Funeral more likely,’ Turner growled and returned to the diary.

* * *

But on Thursdays Harting

did

have something to do, something real; and not yet realised. Something he kept quiet about. Very. Something urgent and constructive; something secret. Something that made all the other days worthwhile, something to believe in. On Thursdays, Leo Harting touched the hem; and kept his mouth shut. Not even the weekly lie was recorded. Only last Thursday carried any entry at all, and that read: ‘

Maternus. One o’clock. P.

’ The rest were as blank, as innocent and as unrevealing as the little virgins in the ground-floor corridor.

Or as guilty.

All Harting’s life took place that day. He had lived from Thursday to Thursday as others live from year to year. What

kind

of meeting did they have, Harting and his master? What kind of relationship after all these years of collaboration? Where did they meet? Where did he unpack those files and letters and breathlessly recite his intelligence? In the tower room of a slate-roofed villa? In a soft, linen bed with a soft silk girl and the jeans hanging on the bedpost? Under the bridge where the train went over? Or in the crumbling Embassy with a dusty chandelier, and old father Meadowes holding his little hand on the gilded sofa? In a pretty baroque bedroom of a Godesberg hotel? In a grey block on the new housing estate? In a coy bungalow with a wrought-iron name and stained glass let into the door? He tried to imagine them, Harting and his master, furtive yet assured, the whispered jokes and the whispered laughter. Here: this is a good one, the porno seller whispers; I hardly like to part with this myself. You do

like

it straight, don’t you? ‘Well, it’s nice to be fancied,’ Allerton lisped. Did they sit over a bottle as they casually planned their next assault upon the citadel, while in the background the camera clicked and the assistant gently shuffled the papers? Give it me once more, darling, but gently, like Tony. You’re not confident, dear, you haven’t read the manuals and learned the parts of the rifle.

Or was it a hasty pick-up? A back-street encounter, a frantic exchange as they drove through the small alleys and prayed to God they had no accident? Or on a hilltop? By a football field, where Harting wore the Balkan hat and the grey uniform of the Movement?

Cork was on the telephone to Miss Peate, and a note of awe had entered his voice:

‘Stand by for seven hundred groups from Washington. London please pass and decypher yourself. You’d better warn him now: he’s going to be in all night. Look, dear, I don’t care whether he’s conferring with the Queen of England. This one’s top priority, and it’s my job to let him know so if you won’t I will.

Ooh

, she is a bitch.’

‘I’m glad you think that,’ Turner said with one of his rare grins.

‘I reckon she captains the team.’

‘England versus the Rest of the World,’ Turner agreed and they both laughed.

* * *

Was it with Praschko, then, that he had lunched at the Maternus? If so, Praschko could hardly be his regular contact, for

he

would not add the tell-tale P, that Harting, who covered his tracks so well; and would not lunch with Praschko in public either, after the trouble he had taken to sever his relationship. Was there, in that case, a middle-man, a cut-out, between Praschko and Harting? Or was this the day the system failed? Hold the line Turner, hold on to reason, for unreason will be your downfall. Make order out of chaos. Was this P the sign that Praschko proposed to see him in person, to warn him perhaps that Siebkron was on his trail? To order him – here was a chance – to order him

at any risk

and

at all costs

to steal the Green File before he ran?

Thursday.

He lifted the keys and swung them gently from his finger. Thursday was the day for meeting . . . pressure day . . . the day he was warned . . . the day before he left . . . the day of the weekly briefing and de-briefing . . . the day he borrowed the keys from Pargiter.

Christ: had he really slept with Pargiter? There are certain sacrifices, General Shlobodovitch, which not even Leo Harting will make in the service of Mother Russia.

The useless keys. What did he suppose he would get from them? Entry to the coveted despatch box? Balls. He would have observed the procedure; Meadowes had even instructed him in it. He would know very well there were no spare keys to the despatch box in the Duty Officer’s bunch. Entry to Registry itself then? Balls again. He would know at a glance that Registry was protected with better locks than these.

So what key did he want?

What key did he want so desperately that he imperilled his whole career as a spy in order to get a copy of it? What key did he want, that he made up to Jenny Pargiter and risked the disapproval of the Embassy – incurred it, indeed, if Meadowes and Gaunt were anything to go by. What key? The key to the lift, so that he could smuggle out his files, dump them in some hideaway on an upper floor and remove them singly and at leisure in his briefcase? Was that what the missing trolley meant?

Fantastic visions presented themselves. He saw the little figure of Harting sprinting down the dark corridor, pushing the trolley ahead of him into the open lift, saw the pyramid of box files trembling on the upper shelf, and on the lower shelf the accidental by-product: the stationery, the seal, the diaries, the long-carriage typewriter from the pool . . . He saw the mini van waiting at the side entrance and Harting’s nameless master holding the door and he said, ‘Oh bugger it,’ schoolboy-style at the very moment when Miss Peate came to fetch the telegrams, and Miss Peate’s sigh was a statement of sexual abstinence.

‘He’ll want his code books too,’ Cork warned her.

‘He happens to be quite aware of the decoding procedure, thank you.’

‘Here, what’s up then, what’s going on in Brussels?’ Turner asked.

‘Rumours.’

‘What of?’

‘If they wanted you to know

that

, they would hardly use the person-to-person procedure, would they?’

‘You don’t know London,’ said Turner.

As she left she managed even in her walk – in her loping, English touch-nothing, feel-nothing, sex-is-for-the-lower-classes walk – to convey her particular contempt for Turner and all his works.

‘I could murder her,’ Cork said confidently, ‘I could cut her nasty throat. I wouldn’t have a moment’s regret. Three years she’s been here and the only time she smiled was when the Old Man creased his Rolls-Royce.’

* * *

It was absurd. No questions; he knew it was absurd. Spies of Harting’s calibre do not steal; they record, memorise, photograph; spies of Harting’s calibre act by graft and calculation, not by impulse. They cover their tracks and survive to deceive again tomorrow.

Nor do they tell transparent lies.

They do not tell Jenny Pargiter that choir practice takes place on Thursdays when she can find out within five minutes that it takes place on Fridays. They do not tell Meadowes that they are attending conferences in Bad Godesberg, when both Bradfield and de Lisle know that they are not; and have not done so for two years or more. They do not draw their balance of pay and allowances before they defect, as a signal to anyone who happens to be interested; they do not risk the curiosity of Gaunt in order to work late at night.

Work

where

?

He wanted privacy. He wanted to do by night things he could not do by day. What things? Use his camera in some remote room where he had concealed the files, where he could turn the lock upon himself? Where

was

the trolley? Where

was

the typewriter? Or was their disappearance, as Meadowes had assumed, really unconnected with Harting? At present there was only one answer: Harting had hidden the files in a cache during the day, he had photographed them at night in privacy, and he returned them the next morning . . . Except that he hadn’t returned them. So why steal?

A spy does not steal. Rule one. An Embassy, discovering a loss, can change its plans, re-make or revoke treaties, take a dozen prophylactic measures to anticipate and minimise the harm that has been done. The best girl is the girl you don’t have. The most effective deceit is the deceit which is never discovered. Then why steal? The reason was already clear. Harting was under pressure. Calculated though his actions might be, they had all the marks of a man racing against time. What was the hurry? What was the deadline?

Slowly, Alan; gently, Alan; be like Tony, Alan. Be like lovely, slow, willowy, rhythmical, anatomically conversant, friendly Tony Willoughby, well known in the best clubs and famous for his copulative technique.

‘I’d rather have a boy really, first,’ said Cork. ‘I mean, when you’ve got one behind you, you can branch out. Mind you, I don’t hold with large families I will say. Not unless you can solve the servant problem. Are you married by the by? Oh dear, sorry I asked.’

Suppose for a moment that that furious private journey in Registry was the result of a dormant Communist sympathy re-awakened by the events of last autumn; suppose that was what had driven him. Then to what hasty end was his fury

directed

? Merely to the deadline dictated by a greedy master? The first stage was easily deduced: Karfeld came to power in October. From then on, a popular nationalist party was a reality; even a nationalist government was not impossible. For a month, two months, Harting broods. He sees Karfeld’s face on every hoarding, hears the familiar slogans. ‘He really

is

an invitation to Communism,’ de Lisle had said . . . The awakening is slow and reluctant, the old associations and sympathies lie deep and are slow in coming to the surface. Then the moment of decision, the turning point. Either alone, or as a result of Praschko’s persuasion, he determines to betray. Praschko approaches him: the Green File. Get the Green File and our old cause will be served. . . . Get the Green File by decision-day in Brussels . . . The contents of that file, Bradfield had said, could effectively compromise our entire posture in Brussels . . .

Or was he being blackmailed? Was that the nature of the race? Must he choose between satisfying a greedy master or being compromised by an unknown indiscretion? Was there something in the Cologne incident, for example, which reflected to his discredit: a woman, an involvement in some seedy racket? Had he embezzled Rhine Army funds? Was he selling off tax-free whisky and cigarettes? Had he drifted into a homosexual entanglement? Had he, in fact, succumbed to any one of the dozen classic temptations which are the staple diet of diplomatic espionage? Girl, replace those jeans immediately.

It was not in character. De Lisle was right: there was a thrust, a driving purpose to Harting’s actions which went beyond self-preservation; an aggression, a ruthlessness, a fervour which was infinitely more positive than the reluctant compliance of a man under threat. In this underworld life which Turner was now investigating, Harting was not a servant but a principal. He was not deputed but appointed; he was not oppressed, but an oppressor, a hunter, a pursuer. In that, at least, there was an identity between Turner and Harting. But Turner’s quarry was named. His tracks, up to a point, were clear. Beyond that point they vanished into the Rhine mist. And most confusing of all was this: though Harting hunted alone, Turner reflected, he had not wanted for patronage . . .

Was Harting blackmailing Bradfield?

Turner asked the question suddenly, sitting up quite straight. Was that the explanation of Bradfield’s reluctant protection? Was that why he had found him work in Registry, allowed him to vanish without explanation on Thursday afternoons, to wander round the corridors with a briefcase?

He looked once more at the diary and thought: question fundamentals. Madam, show this tired schoolboy your fundamentals, learn the parts, read the book from scratch . . . that was your tutor’s advice and who are you to ignore the advice of your tutor. Do not ask

why

Christ was born on Christmas Day, ask whether he was born at all. If God gave us our wit, my dear Turner, He gave us also the wit to see through His simplicity. So why Thursday at all? Why the afternoon? Why

regular

meetings? However desperate, why did Harting meet his contact in the daylight, in working hours, in Godesberg, when his absence from the Embassy had to be the occasion of a lie in the first place? It was absurd. Balls, Turner, such as they are. Harting could meet his contact at any time. At night in Königswinter; on the forest slopes of Chamberlain’s Petersberg; in Cologne, Koblenz, in Luxembourg or over the Dutch border at weekends when no excuse, truthful or untruthful, need be offered to anyone.

He dropped his pencil and swore out loud.

‘Trouble?’ Cork enquired. The robots were chattering wildly and Cork was tending them like hungry children.

‘Nothing that prayer won’t cure,’ said Turner, recalling something he had said to Gaunt that morning.

‘If you want to send that telegram,’ Cork warned him, unperturbed, ‘you’d better hurry.’ He was moving quickly from one machine to the other, tugging at papers and knobs as if his task were to keep them all at work. ‘The balloon’s going up in Brussels by the look of it. Threat of a complete Hun walk-out if we don’t raise our ante on the Agricultural Fund. Haliday-Pride says he thinks it’s a pretext. In half an hour I’ll be taking bookings for June if we go on at this rate.’

‘What sort of pretext?’

Cork read out loud. ‘A convenient door by which to leave Brussels until the situation in the Federal Republic returns to normal.’

Yawning, Turner pushed the telegram forms aside. ‘I’ll send it tomorrow.’

‘It is tomorrow,’ said Cork gently.

* * *

If I smoked I’d smoke one of your cigars. I could do with a bit of soma just now, he thought; if I can’t have one of

those

, I’ll have a cigar instead. From beginning to end, he knew the whole thesis was wrong.

Nothing worked, nothing interlocked, nothing explained the

energy

, nothing explained itself. He had constructed a chain of which no one link was capable of supporting the others. Holding his head in his hand, he let the Furies loose and watched them posture in grotesque slow motion before his tired imagination: the faceless Praschko, master spy, controlling from a position of parliamentary impregnability a network of refugee agents; Siebkron, the self-seeking custodian of public security, suspecting the Embassy of complicity in a massive betrayal to Russia, alternately guarding and persecuting those whom he believes to be responsible. Bradfield, rigorous, upper-class academic, hater and protector of spies, inscrutable for all his guilty knowledge, keeper of the keys to Registry, to the lift and the despatch box, about to vanish to Brussels after staying up all night; fornicating Jenny Pargiter, compelled into far more sinister complicity by an illusory passion which had already blackened her name all over the Embassy; Meadowes, blinded by a frustrated father’s love for the little Harting, precariously loading the last of the forty files on to his trolley; de Lisle, the ethical queer, fighting for Harting’s right to betray his friends. Each, magnified and distorted, looked towards him, danced, twisted and vanished in the face of Turner’s own derisive objections. The very facts which only hours before had brought him to the brink of revelation now threw him back into the forests of his own doubt.

Yet how else, he told himself, as he locked away his possessions in the steel cupboard and abandoned Cork to the protesting machines; how else, the minister would ask, breaking the seed cake on the little plate with his soft, enormous hand, how else do fancies multiply, how else is wisdom forged, and a course of Christian action finally resolved upon, if not through doubt? Surely, my dear Mrs Turner, doubt is Our Lord’s greatest gift to those in need of faith? As he walked into the corridor feeling giddy and very sick, he asked himself once more: what secrets are kept in the magic Green File? And who the hell is going to tell me: me, Turner, a temporary?

The dew was rising out of the field and rolling on to the carriageway like steam. The roads glistened under the wet grey clouds, the wheels of the traffic crackled in the heavy damp. Back to the grey, he thought wearily. No more hunt today. No little angel to submit to this old hairless ape. No absolutes yet at the end of the trail; nothing to make a defector of me.

The night porter at the Adler looked at him kindly. ‘You were entertained?’ he asked, handing him the key.

‘Not much.’

‘One should go to Cologne. It is like Paris.’

De Lisle’s dinner jacket was draped carefully over his armchair with an envelope pinned to the sleeve. A bottle of Naafi whisky stood on the table. ‘If you want to take a look at that property,’ Turner read, ‘I’ll collect you on Wednesday morning at five.’ A postscript wished him a pleasant evening at the Bradfields’, and requested him in a facetious aside not to pour tomato soup down the lapels as de Lisle did not wish to have his politics misread; particularly, he added, since Herr Ludwig Siebkron of the Federal Ministry of the Interior was expected to be of the company.

Turner ran a bath, took the tumbler from the basin and half filled it with whisky. Why had de Lisle relented? Out of compassion for a lost soul? Save us. And since this was the end to a night of silly questions, why was he being invited to meet Siebkron? He went to bed and half slept until afternoon, dreaming of Bournemouth and the spiky, unclimbable conifers that ran along the bare cliffs at Branksome; and he heard his wife say, as she packed the children’s clothes into the suitcase, ‘I’ll find my road, you find yours, and let’s see who gets to Heaven first.’ And he heard Jenny Pargiter’s crying again, on and on, a call for pity in an empty world. Don’t worry, Arthur, he thought, I wouldn’t go near Myra to save my life.

10

Kultur at the Bradfields

‘You should forbid them more, Siebkron,’ Herr Saab declared recklessly, his voice thick with burgundy. ‘They are crazy damn fools, Siebkron. Turks.’ Saab had out-talked and out-drunk them all, forcing them into embarrassed silence. Only his wife, a little blonde doll of unknown origin and a sweet, revealed bosom, continued to vouchsafe him admiring glances. Invalids, incapable of retaliation, the remaining guests sat dying under the sheer tedium of Herr Saab’s diatribe. Behind them, two Hungarian servants moved like nurses along the beds, and they had been told – there was no doubt in Turner’s mind – that Herr Ludwig Siebkron merited more attention than all the other patients put together. And needed it. His pale, magnified eyes were already drained of all but the last drops of life; his white hands were folded like napkins beside his plate, and his entire listless manner was that of a person waiting to be moved.

Four silver candlesticks, 1729, by Paul de Lamerie, octagonal based and, in the words of Bradfield’s father, quite decently marked, joined Hazel Bradfield to her husband like a line of diamonds down the long table. Turner sat at the centre, midway between the second and third, held rigid by the iron bands of de Lisle’s dinner jacket. Even the shirt was too small for him. The head porter had obtained it for him in Bad Godesberg for more money than he had ever paid for a shirt in his life, and now it was choking him and the points of the half-starched collar were stabbing the flesh of his neck.

‘Already they are coming in from the villages. Twelve thousand people they will have in that damn Market Place. You know what they are building? They are building a

Schaffott

.’ His English had once more defeated him. ‘What the hell is

Schaffott

?’ he demanded of the company at large.

Siebkron stirred as if he had been offered water. ‘Scaffold,’ he murmured, and the dying eyes, lifting in Turner’s direction, flickered and went out.

‘Siebkron’s English is fantastic!’ Saab cried happily. ‘Siebkron dreams of Palmerston in the daytime and Bismarck in the dark. Now is evening, you see: he is in the middle!’ Siebkron heard the diagnosis and it gave him no comfort at all. ‘A

scaffold

. I hope they maybe hang the damn fellow on it. Siebkron, you are too kind to him.’ He lifted his glass to Bradfield and proposed a long toast pregnant with unwelcome compliments.

‘Karl-Heinz also has fantastic English,’ the little doll said. ‘You are too modest, Karl-Heinz. It is just as good as Herr Siebkron’s.’ Between her breasts, deep down, Turner glimpsed a tiny flash of white. A handkerchief? A letter? Frau Saab did not care for Siebkron; she cared for no man, indeed, whose virtue was extolled above her husband’s. Her interjection had cut the thread; once more the conversation lay like a fallen kite, and for a moment not even her husband had the wind to lift it.

‘You said forbid him.’ Siebkron had picked up a silver nutmeg grater in his soft hand and was gently turning it in the candlelight, searching for tell-tale flaws. The plate before him was licked quite clean, a cat’s plate on a Sunday. He was a sulky, pale man, well scrubbed and no more than Turner’s age, with something of the hotelier about him, a man used to walking on other people’s carpets. His features were rounded but unyielding; his lips autonomous, parting to perform one function, closing to perform another. His words were not a help but a challenge, part of a silent interrogation which only fatigue, or the deep cold sickness of his heart, prevented him from conducting aloud.

‘

Ja

. Forbid him,’ Saab assented, leaning well across the table in order to reach his audience. ‘Forbid the meetings, forbid the marching, forbid it all. Like the Communists, that’s the only damn thing they understand.

Siebkron, Sie waren ja auch in Hannover!

Siebkron was there also: why don’t he forbid it? They are wild beasts out there. They have a power,

nicht wahr, Siebkron?

My God, I have also made my experiences.’ Saab was an older man, a journalist who had served a number of newspapers in his time, but most of them had disappeared since the war. No one seemed in much doubt what sort of experiences Herr Saab had made. ‘But I have never hated the English. Siebkron, you can confirm that.

Das können Sie ja bestätigen

. Twenty years I have written about this crazy Republic. I have been critical – sometimes damn critical – but I have never been

hard

against the English. That I never was,’ he concluded, jumbling his last words in a way which at once cast doubt upon the whole assertion.

‘Karl-Heinz is fantastically strong for the English,’ the little doll said. ‘He eats English, he drinks English.’ She sighed as if the rest of his activities were rather English too. She ate a great deal, and some of it was still in her mouth as she spoke, and her tiny hands held other things that she would eat quite soon.

‘We owe you a debt,’ said Bradfield with heavy cheerfulness. ‘Long may you keep it up, Karl-Heinz.’ He had arrived back from Brussels half an hour ago, and his eye was on Siebkron all the time.

Mrs Vandelung, the wife of the Dutch Counsellor, drew her stole more snugly over her ample shoulders. ‘We are going to England every year,’ she said complacently, apropos of nothing at all. ‘Our daughter is at school in England, our son is at school in England . . .’ She ran on. Nothing she loved, cherished or possessed was not of an English character. Her husband, a shrivelled, nautical man, touched Hazel Bradfield’s beautiful wrist and nodded with reflected fervour.

‘Always,’ he whispered, as if it were a pledge. Hazel Bradfield, waking from her reverie, smiled rather solemnly at him while her eyes regarded with detachment the grey hand that still held her. ‘Why, Bernhard,’ she said gently, ‘what a darling you are tonight. You will make the women jealous of me.’ It was not, all the same, a comfortable joke. Her voice had its ugly edge; she could be one of several daughters, Turner decided, intercepting her angry glance as Saab resumed his monologue; but she was not merciful to her plainer sisters. ‘Am I sitting in Leo’s place?’ he wondered. ‘Eating Leo’s portion?’ But Leo stayed at home on Tuesdays . . . and besides, Leo was not allowed here, he reminded himself, raising his glass to answer a toast from Saab, except for a drink.

Saab’s subject, miraculously, was still the British, but he had enriched it with autobiographical matter on the discomforts of bombing: ‘You know what they say about Hamburg? Question: what is the difference between an Englishman and a man of Hamburg? Answer: the man of Hamburg speaks German. You know in those cellars, what we were saying?

Thank God they are British bombs!

Bradfield,

prosit

! Never again.’

‘Never again indeed,’ Bradfield replied, and wearily toasted him in the German style, looking at him over the brim of his glass, drinking and looking again.

‘Bradfield, you are the

best piece

. Your ancestors fought at Waterloo, and your wife is as beautiful as the Queen. You are the best piece in the British Embassy and you didn’t invite the damn Americans and you didn’t invite the damn French. You are a good fellow. Frenchmen is bastards,’ he concluded to everyone’s alarm, and there was a moment’s startled silence.

‘Karl-Heinz, I’m sure that isn’t very loyal,’ said Hazel and a little laugh went up at her end of the table, originated by a pointless elderly Gräfin summoned at the last moment to partner Alan Turner. An unwelcome shaft of electric light broke upon the company. The Hungarians marched in from the kitchen like the morning shift and cleared away bottles and china with inconsiderate

panache

.

Saab leaned still further across the table and pointed a big, not very clean finger at the guest of honour. ‘You see this fellow Ludwig Siebkron here is a damn odd fellow. We all admire him in the Press Corps, because we can’t never damn well get hold of him, and in journalism we admire only what we cannot have. And do you know why we cannot have Siebkron?’

The question amused Saab very much. He looked happily round the table, his dark face glistening with delight. ‘Because he is so damn busy with his good friend and . . .

Kumpan

.’ He snapped his fingers in frustration. ‘

Kumpan

,’ he repeated. ‘

Kumpan?

’

‘

Drinking companion

,’ Siebkron suggested. Saab stared at him lamely, bewildered by assistance from such an unexpected quarter.

‘Drinking companion,’ he muttered; ‘Klaus Karfeld,’ and fell silent.

‘Karl-Heinz, you must remember

Kumpan

,’ his wife said softly, and he nodded and smiled at her valiantly.

‘You have come to join us, Mister Turner?’ Siebkron enquired, addressing the nutmeg grater. Suddenly the lights were on Turner, and Siebkron, risen from his bed, was conducting the rare surgery of a private practice.

* * *

‘For a few days,’ Turner said. The audience was slow in gathering, so that for a moment the two men faced one another in secret communion while the others continued their separate pursuits. Bradfield had engaged in a desultory cross-talk with Vandelung; Turner caught a reference to Vietnam. Saab, suddenly returning to the field, took up the subject and made it his own.

‘The Yanks would fight in Saigon,’ he declared, ‘but they wouldn’t fight in Berlin. Seems a bit of a pity they didn’t build the Berlin Wall in Saigon.’ His voice was louder and more offensive, but Turner heard it out of the dark that was beyond Siebkron’s unflinching gaze. ‘All of a sudden the Yanks are going crazy about self-determination. Why don’t they try it in East Germany a little bit? Everyone fights for the damn Negroes. Everyone fights for the damn jungle. Maybe it’s a pity we don’t wear no feathers.’ He seemed to be challenging Vandelung, but without effect: the old Dutchman’s grey skin was as smooth as a coffin, and nothing would sprout there any more. ‘Maybe it’s a pity we don’t have no palm trees in Berlin.’ They heard him pause to drink. ‘Vietnam is shit. But at least this time maybe they can’t say we started it,’ he added with more than a trace of self-pity.

‘War is terrible,’ the Gräfin whickered, ‘we lost everything,’ but she was talking after the curtain had gone up. Herr Ludwig Siebkron proposed to speak, and had put down the silver nutmeg grater in order to signify his will.

* * *

‘And where do you come from, Mister Turner?’

‘Yorkshire.’ There was silence. ‘I spent the war in Bournemouth.’

‘Herr Siebkron meant which Department,’ Bradfield said crisply.

‘Foreign Office,’ said Turner. ‘Same as everyone else,’ and looked at him indifferently across the table. Siebkron’s white eyes neither condemned nor admired, but waited for the moment to insert the scalpel.

‘And may we ask Mr Turner which section of the Foreign Office is so fortunate as to have his services?’

‘Research.’

‘He’s also a distinguished mountaineer,’ Bradfield put in from far away, and the little doll cried out with the sharp surprise of sexual delight, ‘

Die Berge!

’ Out of the corner of his eye Turner saw one china hand touch the halter of her dress as if she would take it clean off in her enthusiasm. ‘Karl-Heinz – ’

‘Next year,’ Saab’s brown voice assured her in a whisper. ‘Next year we go to the mountains,’ and Siebkron smiled to Turner as if that were one joke they could surely share.

‘But now Mr Turner is in the valley. You are staying in Bonn, Mr Turner?’

‘Godesberg.’

‘In a hotel, Mr Turner?’

‘The Adler. Room Ten.’

‘And what kind of research, I wonder, is conducted from the Hotel Adler, Room Ten?’

‘Ludwig, my dear chap,’ Bradfield interposed – his jocularity was not so very hollow – ‘surely you recognise a spy when you see one. Alan’s our Mata Hari. He entertains the Cabinet in his bedroom.’

Laughter, Siebkron’s expression said, does not last for ever; he waited until it had subsided. ‘Alan,’ he repeated quietly. ‘Alan Turner from Yorkshire, working in Foreign Office Research Department and staying at the Adler Hotel, a distinguished mountaineer. You must forgive my curiosity, Mr Turner. We are all on edge here in Bonn, you know. As, for my sins, I am charged with the physical protection of the British Embassy, I have naturally a certain interest in the people I protect. Your presence here is reported to Personnel Department no doubt? I must have missed the bulletin.’

‘We put him down as a technician,’ Bradfield said, clearly irritated now to be questioned before his own guests.

‘How sensible,’ said Siebkron. ‘So much simpler than Research. He does research but you put him down as a technician. Your technicians on the other hand are all engaged in research. It’s a perfectly simple arrangement. But your research is of a practical nature, Mr Turner? A statistician? Or you are an academic perhaps?’

‘Just general.’

‘General research. A very catholic responsibility. You will be here long?’

‘A week. Maybe more. Depends how long the project lasts.’

‘The research project? Ah. Then you have a project. I had imagined at first you were replacing someone. Ewan Waldebere, for instance; he was engaged in commercial research, was he not, Bradfield? Or Peter McCreedy, on scientific development. Or Harting: you are not replacing Leo Harting, for instance? Such a pity he’s gone. One of your oldest and most valuable collaborators.’

‘Oh Harting!’ Mrs Vandelung had taken up the name, and it was already clear she had strong views. ‘You know what they are saying now already? That Harting is drunk in Cologne. He goes on

fits

, you know.’ She was much entertained to hold their interest. ‘All the week he wears angels’ wings and plays the organ and sings like a Christian; but at weekends he goes to Cologne and fights the Germans. He is quite a Jekyll and Hyde I assure you!’ She laughed indulgently. ‘Oh he is very wicked. Rawley, you remember André de Hoog I am sure. He has heard it all from the police here: Harting made a great fight in Cologne. In a night club. It was all to do with a bad woman. Oh, he is

very

mysterious I assure you. And now we have no one to play the organ.’

Through the mist Siebkron repeated his question.

‘I’m not replacing anyone,’ Turner said and he heard Hazel Bradfield’s voice, quite steady from his left, but vibrant for all that with anger unexpressed.

‘Mrs Vandelung, you know our silly English ways. We are supposed to leave the men to their jokes.’

Reluctantly the women departed. Little Frau Saab, desolated to leave her husband, kissed his neck and made him promise to be sober. The Gräfin said that in Germany one expected a cognac after a meal: it aided the digestion. Only Frau Siebkron followed without complaint; she was a quiet, deserted beauty who had learnt very early in her marriage that it paid not to resist.

* * *

Bradfield was at the sideboard with decanters and silver coasters; the Hungarians had brought coffee in a Hester Bateman jug which sat in unremarked magnificence at Hazel’s end of the table. Little Vandelung was lost in memories; he was standing at the French windows, staring down the sloping dark lawn at the lights of Bad Godesberg.

‘Now we will get port,’ Saab assured them all. ‘With Bradfield that is always a fantastic experience.’ He selected Turner. ‘I have had ports here, I can tell you, that are older than my father. What are we getting tonight, Bradfield? A Cockburn? Maybe he will give us a Cruft’s. Bradfield knows all the brands.

Ein richtiger Kenner:

Siebkron, what is

Kenner auf Englisch

?’

‘Connoisseur.’

‘French!’ Saab was outraged. ‘The English have no word for

Kenner

? They use a French word? Bradfield! Telegram! Tonight!

Sofort an Ihre Majestät!

Personal recommendation top secret to the damn Queen. All Connoisseurs are forbidden. Only

Kenner

permitted! You are married, Mister Turner?’

Bradfield, having sat himself in Hazel’s chair, now passed the port to his left. The coaster was a double one, joined elaborately with silver cords.

‘No,’ said Turner, and it was a word thrown down hard for anyone to pick up who wanted it. Saab, however, heard no music but his own.

‘Crazy! The English should breed! Many babies. Make a culture. England, Germany and Scandinavia! To hell with the French, to hell with the Americans, to hell with the Africans.

Klein-Europa

, do you understand me, Turner?’ He held up his clenched fist, stiff from the elbow. ‘Tough and good. What can speak and think. I am not so damn crazy.

Kultur

. You know what that means,

Kultur

?’ He drank. ‘Fantastic!’ he cried. ‘The best ever! Number one.’ He held up his glass to the candle. ‘The best damn port I ever had. You can see the blood in the heart. Bradfield, what is it? A Cockburn for sure, but he always contradicts me.’

Bradfield hesitated, caught in a genuine dilemma. His eye turned first to Saab’s glass, then to the decanters, then to his glass again.

‘I’m delighted you enjoyed it, Karl-Heinz,’ he said. ‘I rather think, as a matter of fact, that what you are drinking is Madeira.’

Vandelung, from the french windows, began laughing. It was a cracked, vengeful laugh and it went on for a long time, while his whole body shook to the tune of it, rising and falling with the bellows of his old lungs.

‘Well now, Saab,’ he said at last, walking slowly back to the table, ‘maybe you will bring a little of your culture to the Netherlands as well.’

He began laughing again like a schoolboy, holding his knobbly hand to his mouth in order to conceal the gaps, and Turner was sorry for Saab just then, and did not care for Vandelung at all.

* * *

Siebkron had taken no port.

‘You went to Brussels today. I hope very much that you had a successful journey, Bradfield? I hear there are renewed difficulties. I am sorry. My colleagues tell me New Zealand presents a serious problem.’

‘Sheep!’ Saab cried. ‘Who will eat the sheep? The English have made a damn farm out there and now no one won’t eat the sheep.’

Bradfield’s voice was all the more deliberate. ‘No new problem has been raised at Brussels. The questions of New Zealand and the Agricultural Fund have both been on the table for years. They present no problems that cannot be ironed out between friends.’

‘Between good friends. Let us hope you are right. Let us hope the friendship is good enough and the difficulties small enough. Let us hope so.’ Siebkron’s gaze was on Turner again. ‘So Harting is gone,’ he remarked, laying his hands flatly together in prayer. ‘Such a loss to our community. Particularly for the Church.’ And looking directly at Turner he added: ‘My colleagues tell me you know Mr Sam Allerton, the distinguished British journalist. You spoke with him today, I believe.’

Vandelung had given himself a glass of Madeira and was sampling it ostentatiously. Saab, sullen and dark faced, stared from one of them to the other, comprehending little.

‘Ludwig, what an extraordinary idea. What do you mean, “Harting is gone”? He’s on leave. I cannot imagine how all these silly rumours have got about. Poor fellow, his only crime was not to tell the Chaplain.’ Bradfield’s laughter was wholly artificial, but it was an act of courage in itself. ‘Compassionate leave. It is not like you, Ludwig, to get your information wrong.’

‘You see, Mr Turner, I have great difficulties here. For my sins, I am responsible for civil order during the demonstrations. Responsible to my Minister, you understand; and only in a modest capacity. But responsible all the same.’

His modesty was saintly. Put a ruff on him and a surplice and he could sing in Harting’s choir any time. ‘We are expecting a little demonstration on Friday. I am afraid that among certain minority groups the English are at present not very popular. You will appreciate that I don’t want anybody to get hurt; anybody at all. Naturally therefore I like to know where everybody is. So that I can protect them. But poor Mister Bradfield is often so overworked he does not tell me.’ He broke off and glanced once at Bradfield, and then no more. ‘Now I am not

blaming

Bradfield that he does not tell me. Why should he?’ The white hands parted in concession. ‘There are many little things and there are even one or two big things which Bradfield does not tell me. Why should he? That would not be consistent with his vocation as a diplomat. I am correct, Mister Turner?’

‘It’s not my problem.’

‘But it is mine. Let me explain what happens. My colleagues are observant people. They look around, count heads and notice that somebody is missing. They make enquiries, question servants and friends perhaps, and they are told that he has disappeared. Immediately I am worried for him. So are my colleagues. My colleagues are compassionate people. They don’t like anyone to go astray. What could be more human? They are boys, some of them. Just boys. Harting has gone to England?’

The last question was spoken directly to Turner, but Bradfield took it on himself and Turner blessed him.

‘He has family problems. Clearly we cannot advertise them. I don’t propose to put a man’s private life upon the table in order to satisfy your files.’

‘That is a very excellent principle. And one we must all follow. Do you hear that, Mr Turner?’ His voice was remarkably emphatic. ‘What is the point of a paper chase? What

is

the point?’

‘Why on earth are you so bothered about Harting?’ Bradfield demanded, as if it were a joke of which he had tired. ‘I’m astonished you even know of his existence. Let’s go and get some coffee, shall we?’

He stood up; but Siebkron remained where he was.

‘But of

course

we know of his existence,’ he declared. ‘We admire his work. We admire it very much indeed. In a department such as mine, Mr Harting’s ingenuity finds many admirers. My colleagues speak of him constantly.’

‘What are you talking about?’ Bradfield had coloured in anger. ‘What

is

all this? What work?’

‘He used to be with the Russians, you know,’ Siebkron explained to Turner. ‘In Berlin. That was a long time ago, of course, but I am sure that he learnt a great deal from them, don’t you think so, Mr Turner? A little technique, a little ideology perhaps? And

grip

. The Russians

never

let go.’

Bradfield had put the two decanters on a tray and was standing at the doorway waiting for them to go ahead of him.

‘What work was that?’ Turner asked gruffly, as Siebkron reluctantly rose from his chair.

‘Research. Just general research, Mr Turner. Like yourself, you see. It is nice to think that you and Harting have common interests. As a matter of fact that is why I asked whether you would replace him. My colleagues understand from Mr Allerton that you and Harting have

many

things in common.’

Hazel Bradfield looked up anxiously as they entered, and the glance she exchanged with Bradfield was eloquent of the emergency. Her four women guests sat on a single sofa. Mrs Vandelung was working at a sampler; Frau Siebkron in church black had laid her hands on her lap and was staring in private fascination at the open fire. The Gräfin, consoling herself for the untitled company she was obliged to keep, sipped morosely at a large brandy. Her parsimonious face was lit with small red flowers like poppies on a battlefield. Only little Frau Saab, her bosom freshly powdered, smiled to see them enter.

* * *

They were settled, resigned to boredom.

‘Bernhard,’ said Hazel Bradfield, patting the cushion beside her, ‘come and sit by me. I find you

specially

cosy this evening.’ With a foxy smile the old man took his place obediently beside her. ‘Now you’re to tell me

all

the horrors I am to expect on Friday.’ She was playing the spoilt beauty, and playing it well, but there was an undercurrent of anxiety in her voice which not even Bradfield’s tuition had taught her wholly to suppress.

At a separate table, Siebkron sat alone like a man who travelled by a better class. Bradfield talked to his wife. No, she conceded, she had not been to Brussels; she did not go often with her husband. ‘But you must insist!’ he declared and launched at once upon a description of a favourite Brussels hotel. The Amigo; one should stay at the Amigo; it had the best service he had ever encountered. Frau Siebkron did not care for large hotels; she took her holidays in the Black Forest; that was what the children liked best. Yes; Bradfield loved the Black Forest himself; he had close friends at Dornstetten.

Turner listened in grudging admiration to Bradfield’s inexhaustible flow of small-talk. He expected no help from anyone. His eyes were dark with fatigue, but his dialogue was as fresh, as considerate and as aimless as if he were on holiday.

‘Come along, Bernhard; you’re just a wise old owl and nobody ever tells me anything. I’m just the

Hausfrau

. I’m supposed to look at

Vogue

and make canapés all day.’

‘You know the saying,’ Vandelung replied. ‘What else must happen in Bonn before something happens? They can do nothing we have not seen before.’

‘They can trample all over my roses,’ Hazel remarked, lighting herself a cigarette. ‘They can steal my husband away at all hours of the night. Day trips to Brussels indeed! It’s quite absurd. And look what they did in Hanover. Can you imagine what would happen if they broke

these

windows? Dealing with that wretched Works Department? We’d all be sitting here in overcoats while they worked out who pays. It’s

too

bad, it really is. Thank goodness we have Mr Turner to protect us.’ As she said this her gaze rested upon him, and it seemed to him both anxious and enquiring. ‘Frau Saab, does

your

husband travel all over the place these days? I am sure journalists make

far

better husbands than diplomats.’

‘He is very true.’ The little doll blushed unhappily.

‘She means

loyal

.’ Saab kissed her hand with love.

Opening her tiny handbag, she took out a powder compact and parted its gold petals one by one. ‘We have been married one year tomorrow. It is so beautiful.’

‘

Du bist noch schöner

,’ Saab cried and the conversation disintegrated into an exchange of domestic and financial intelligence on the Saabs’ newly formed household. Yes, they had bought a plot of land up by Oberwinter. Karl-Heinz had bought it last year for the engagement and already the value had risen four marks per

Quadratmeter

.

‘Karl-Heinz, how do you say

Quadratmeter

?’

‘The same,’ Saab asserted, ‘quadrate meter,’ and glowered at Turner in case he should dare to contradict him.

Suddenly Frau Saab was talking and no one could stop her any more. Her whole little life was spread before them in an oriental tinkle of hopes and disappointments; the colour which had mounted so prettily to her cheeks stayed there like the warm flush of sexual success.

They had hoped that Karl-Heinz would get the Bonn

Büro

of his newspaper. Bonn editor: that had been their expectation. His salary would go up another thousand and he would have a real

position

. What had happened instead? The paper had appointed

den Flitzdorf

and the

Flitzdorf

was just a boy, with no experience and nothing and

completely

homosexual and Karl-Heinz, who had worked now eighteen years for the paper and had so many contacts, was still only second man and was having to make extra by writing for all the cheese-papers.

‘Yellow press,’ said her husband, but for once she quite ignored him.

Well, when that had happened they had had a long discussion and decided they would go ahead with their building plans although the

Hypothek

was appalling; and no sooner had they paid over the money to the

Makler

than a really terrible thing happened: the Africans had come to Oberwinter. It was quite awful. Karl-Heinz was always very sharp against Africans, but now they had actually taken the next-door plot and were building a

Residenz

for one of their Ambassadors, and twice a week they all came up and climbed like monkeys over the bricks and shouted they wanted it different; and in no time they would have a whole colony up there, with Cadillacs and children and music all night, and as for herself, she would be all alone when Karl-Heinz was working late, and they were already putting special bolts on the doors so that she would not be –

‘They talk fantastic!’ Saab shouted, loudly enough for Siebkron and Bradfield to look round at him sharply; for the two men had drawn away to the window and were murmuring quietly into the night. ‘But we don’t get nothing to drink!’

‘Karl-Heinz, my poor chap, we are completely neglecting you.’ With a final word to Siebkron, Bradfield walked down the room to where the decanters stood on their bright-cut silver tray. ‘Who else would like a nightcap?’

Vandelung would have joined him, but his wife forbade it.

‘And take

great

care,’ she warned the young Frau Saab in a dreadfully audible aside, ‘or he will have a heart attack. So much eating and drinking and shouting: it affects the heart. And with a young wife not easily satisfied,’ she added contentedly, ‘he could die easy.’ Taking her little grey husband firmly by the wrist, Frau Vandelung led him into the hall. In the same instant Hazel Bradfield leaned purposefully across the abandoned chair. ‘Mr Turner,’ she said quietly, ‘there is a matter in which you can help me. May I take you away a moment?’

* * *

They stood in the sun room. Potted plants and tennis rackets lay on the window-sills; a child’s tractor, a pogo stick and a bundle of garden canes were strewn over the tiled floor. There was a mysterious smell of honey.

‘I understand you’re making enquiries about Harting,’ she said. Her voice was crisp and commanding; she was very much Bradfield’s wife.

‘Am I?’

‘Rawley’s worrying himself to death. I’m convinced that Leo Harting’s at the back of it.’

‘I see.’

‘He doesn’t sleep and he won’t even discuss it. For the last three days he’s hardly spoken to me. He even sends messages by way of other people. He’s cut himself off entirely from everything except his work. He’s near breaking point.’

‘He didn’t give me that impression.’

‘He happens to be my husband.’

‘He’s very lucky.’

‘What’s Harting taken?’ Her eyes were bright with anger or determination. ‘What’s he stolen?’

‘What makes you think he’s stolen anything?’

‘Listen. I, not you, am responsible for my husband’s welfare. I have a

right

to know if Rawley is in trouble; tell me what Harting has done. Tell me where he is. They’re all whispering about it; everyone. This ridiculous story about Cologne; Siebkron’s curiosity: why can’t

I

know what’s going on?’

‘That’s what I was wondering myself,’ Turner said.

He thought she might hit him, and he knew that if she did, he would hit her back. She was beautiful, but the arch corners of her mouth were drawn down in the frustrated fury of a rich child, and there were things about her voice and manner which were dreadfully familiar.

‘Get out. Leave me alone.’

‘I don’t care who you are. If you want to know official secrets you can bloody well get them at source,’ Turner said, and waited for her to rise to him again.

Instead, she swept past him into the hall and ran upstairs. For a moment he remained where he was, staring confusedly at the muddle of children’s and adult toys, the fishing rods, the croquet set and all the casual, wasteful equipment of a world he had never known. Still lost in thought, he made his way slowly back to the drawing-room. As he entered, Bradfield and Siebkron, side by side at the French window, turned as one man to stare at him, the object of their shared contempt.

* * *

It was midnight. The Gräfin, drunk and quite speechless, had been loaded into a taxi. Siebkron had gone; his farewell had been confined to the Bradfields. His wife must have gone with him, though Turner had not noticed her departure; the cushion where she had sat was barely depressed. The Vandelungs had also gone. Now the five of them sat round the fire in a state of post-festive depression, the Saabs on the sofa holding hands and staring at the dying coals, Bradfield quite silent sipping his thin whisky; while Hazel herself, in her long skirt of green tweed, curled like a mermaid into an armchair, played with the Blue Russian cat in self-conscious imitation of an eighteenth-century dream. Though she rarely looked at Turner, she did not trouble to ignore him; occasionally she even addressed a remark to him. A tradesman had been impertinent, but Hazel Bradfield would not do him the compliment of taking away her custom.

‘Hanover was fantastic,’ Saab muttered.

‘Oh not again, Karl-Heinz,’ Hazel pleaded, ‘I think I’ve heard enough of that to last for ever.’

‘

Why

did they run?’ he asked himself. ‘Siebkron was also there. They

ran

. From the front. They ran like crazy for that library. Why did they do that? All at once:

alles auf einmal

.’

‘Siebkron keeps asking me the same question,’ Bradfield said, in an exhausted moment of frankness. ‘Why did they run?

He

should know if anyone does: he was at Eich’s bedside; I wasn’t. He heard what she had to say, I suppose; I didn’t. What the hell’s got into him? On and on: “What happened at Hanover mustn’t happen in Bonn.” Of course it mustn’t, but he seems to think it’s my fault it happened in the first place. I’ve never known him like that.’

‘You?’ Hazel Bradfield said with undisguised contempt. ‘Why on earth should he ask

you

? You weren’t even there.’

‘He asks me all the same,’ said Bradfield, standing up, in a moment so utterly passive and tender that Turner was moved suddenly to speculate on their relationship. ‘He asks me all the same.’ He put his empty glass on the sideboard. ‘Whether you like it or not. He asks me repeatedly: “Why did they run?” Just as Karl-Heinz was asking now. “What made them run? What was it about the library that attracted them?” All I could say was that it was British, and we all know what Karfeld thinks about the British. Come on, Karl-Heinz: we must put you young people to bed.’

‘And the grey buses,’ Saab muttered. ‘You read what they found about the buses for the bodyguard? They were

grey

, Bradfield,

grey

!’

‘Is that significant?’

‘It

was

, Bradfield. About a thousand years ago, it was damn significant, my dear.’

‘I’m afraid I’m missing the point,’ Bradfield observed with a weary smile.

‘As usual,’ his wife said; no one took it as a joke.

They stood in the hall. Of the two Hungarians, only the girl remained.

‘You have been damn good to me, Bradfield,’ Saab said sadly as they took their leave. ‘Maybe I talk too much.

Nicht wahr, Marlene:

I talk too much. But I don’t trust that fellow Siebkron. I am an old pig, see? But Siebkron is a young pig. Pay attention!’

‘Why shouldn’t I trust him, Karl-Heinz?’

‘Because he don’t never ask a question unless he knows the answer.’ With this enigmatic reply, Karl-Heinz Saab fervently kissed the hand of his hostess and stepped into the dark, steadied by the young arm of his adoring wife.

Turner sat in the back while Saab drove very slowly on the left-hand side of the road. His wife was asleep on his shoulder, one little hand still scratching fondly at the black fur which decorated the nape of her husband’s neck.

‘Why did they run at Hanover?’ Saab repeated, weaving happily between the oncoming cars. ‘Why those damn fools run?’

At the Adler, Turner asked for morning coffee at half past four, and the porter noted it with an understanding smile, as if that were the sort of time he expected an Englishman to rise. As he went to bed, his mind detached itself from the distasteful and mystifying interrogations of Herr Ludwig Siebkron in order to dwell on the more agreeable person of Hazel Bradfield. It was just as mysterious, he decided as he fell asleep, that a woman so beautiful, desirable and evidently intelligent could tolerate the measureless tedium of diplomatic life in Bonn. If darling upper-class Anthony Willoughby ever took a shine to her, he thought, what on earth would Bradfield do then? And why – the chorus that sang him to sleep was the same chorus which had kept him awake throughout the long, tense, meaningless evening – why the hell was he invited in the first place?

And

who

had asked him? ‘I am to invite you to dinner on Tuesday,’ Bradfield had said: don’t blame

me

for what happens.

And Bradfield, I

heard

! I heard you submit to pressure; I felt the softness of you for the first time; I took a step in your direction, I saw the knife in your back and I heard you speak with my own voice. Hazel, you bitch; Siebkron, you swine; Harting, you thief: if

that’

s what you think about life, queer de Lisle simpered in his ear, why don’t you defect yourself. God is dead. You can’t have it both ways, that would be too medieval . . .

He had set his alarm for four o’clock, and it seemed to be ringing already.

11

Königswinter

It was still dark when de Lisle collected him and Turner had to ask the night porter to unlock the hotel door. The street was cold, friendless and deserted; the mist came at them in sudden patches.

‘We’ll have to go the long way over the bridge. The ferry’s not running at this hour.’ His manner was short to the point of abruptness.

They had entered the carriageway. To either side of them, new blocks, built of tile and armoured glass, sprang like night weeds out of the untilled fields, crested by the lamps of small cranes. They passed the Embassy. The dark hung upon the wet concrete like the smoke of a spent battle. The Union Jack swung limply from its standard, a single flower on a soldier’s grave. Under the weary light of the front porch, the lion and the unicorn, their profiles blurred with repeated coats of red and gold, fought bravely on. In the waste land, the two rickety goalposts leaned drunkenly in the twilight.

‘Things are warming up in Brussels,’ de Lisle remarked in a tone which promised little elaboration. A dozen cars were parked in the forecourt, Bradfield’s white Jaguar stood in its private bay.

‘For us or against us?’

‘What do you think?’ He continued: ‘We have asked for private talks with the Germans; the French have done the same. Not that they want them; it’s the tug-of-war they enjoy.’

‘Who wins?’

De Lisle did not reply.

The deserted town hung in the pink unearthly glow which cradles every city in the hour before dawn. The streets were wet and empty, the houses soiled like old uniforms. At the University arch, three policemen had made a lane of barricades and they flagged them down as they approached. Sullenly they walked round the small car, recording the licence number, testing the suspension by standing on the rear bumper, peering through the misted windscreen at the huddled occupants within.

‘What was that they shouted?’ Turner asked as they drove on.

‘Look out for the one-way signs.’ He turned left, following the blue arrow. ‘Where the hell are they taking us?’

An electric van was scrubbing the gutter; two more policemen in greatcoats of green leather, their peak caps bent, suspiciously surveyed its progress. In a shop window a young girl was fitting beach clothes to a model, holding one plastic arm and feeding the sleeve along it. She wore boots of heavy felt and shuffled like a prisoner. They were in the station square. Black banners stretched across the road and along the awning of the station. ‘Welcome to Klaus Karfeld!’ ‘A hunter’s greeting, Klaus!’ ‘Karfeld! You stand for our self-respect!’ A photograph, larger than any which Turner had so far seen, was raised on a massive new hoarding. ‘

Freitag!

’ said the legend: Friday. The floodlights shone upon the world and left the face in darkness.

‘They’re arriving today. Tilsit, Meyer-Lothringen; Karfeld. They’re coming down from Hanover to prepare the ground.’

‘With Ludwig Siebkron playing host.’

They were running along some tramlines, still following the diversion signs. The route took them left and right again. They had passed under a small bridge, doubled back, entered another square, halted at some improvised traffic lights and suddenly they were both sitting forward in their cramped seats, staring ahead of them in astonishment, up the gentle slope of the market place towards the Town Hall.

Immediately before them, the empty stalls stood in lines like beds in a barrack hut. Beyond the stalls, the gingerbread houses offered their jagged gables to the lightening sky. But de Lisle and Turner were looking up the hill at the single pink and grey building which dominated the whole square. Ladders had been laid against it; the balcony was festooned in swathes of black; a flock of Mercedes were parked before it on the cobble. To its left, in front of a chemist’s shop, floodlit from a dozen places, rose a white scaffolding like the outline of a medieval storming tower. The pinnacle reached as high as the dormer windows of the adjacent building; the giant legs, naked as roots grown in the dark, splayed obscenely over their own black shadows. Workmen were already swarming at its base. Turner could hear the piping echo of hammers and the whine of powered saws. A stack of timber struggled upwards on a silent pulley.

‘Why are the flags at half mast?’

‘Mourning. It’s a gimmick. They’re in mourning for national honour.’

They crossed the long bridge. ‘That’s better,’ said de Lisle with a small grunt of satisfaction, and pushed down his collar as if he had entered a warmer world.

He was driving very fast. They passed a village and another. Soon they had entered the country and were following a new road along the eastern bank. To their right the tor of Godesberg, divided by tiers of mist, stood grimly over the sleeping town. They skirted the vineyard. The furrows, picked out by the mysterious darkness, were like seams stitched to the zig-zag patterns of the staves. Above the vineyard, the forests of the Seven Hills; above the forests, broken castles and Gothic follies black against the skyline. Abandoning the main road, they entered a short avenue which led directly to an esplanade bordered by unlit lamps and pollarded trees. Beyond it lay the Rhine, smouldering and undefined.

‘Next on the left,’ de Lisle said tersely. ‘Tell me if there’s anyone on guard.’

A large white house loomed before them. The lower windows were shuttered, the front gates open. Turner left the car and walked a short way along the pavement. Picking up a stone, he flung it hard and accurately against the side of the house. The sound echoed crookedly across the water, and upwards towards the black slopes of the Petersberg. Scanning the mist, they waited for a cry or a footstep. There was none.

‘Park up the road and come back,’ said Turner.

‘I think I’ll just park up the road. How long will you need?’

‘You know the house. Come and help me.’

‘Not my form. Sorry. I don’t mind bringing you but I’m not coming in.’

‘Then why bring me?’

De Lisle did not reply.

‘Don’t dirty your fingers, will you.’

Keeping to the grass verge, Turner followed the drive towards the house. Even by that light, he was conscious of the same sense of order which had characterised Harting’s room. The long lawn was very tidy, the rose beds trimmed and weeded, the roses ringed with grass-cuttings and separately labelled with metal tags. At the kitchen door, three dustbins, numbered and licensed according to the local regulation, stood in a concrete bay. About to insert the key, he heard a footstep.

It was unmistakably a footstep. It had the double imprint, slurred yet infallibly human, of a heel falling on gravel and the toe immediately following. A cautious footstep perhaps; a gesture half made and then withheld, a message sent and revoked; but beyond all argument a footstep.

‘Peter?’ He’s changed his mind again, he thought. He’s being soft-hearted. ‘Peter!’

There was still no answer.

‘Peter, is that you?’ He stooped, quickly picked up an empty bottle from the wooden crate beside him and waited, his ears tuned to the lightest sound. He heard the crowing of a cock in the Seven Hills. He heard the prickling of the sodden earth, like the tingling of pine needles in a wood; he heard the rustling of tiny waves along the river’s shore; he heard the distant throbbing of the Rhine itself, like the turning of an unearthly machine, one tone made of many, breaking and joining like the unseen water; he heard the mutter of hidden barges, the shoot of anchor chains suddenly released; he heard a cry, like the lowing of lost cattle on a moor, as a lonely siren echoed on the cliff face. But he did not hear another footstep, nor the comfortable tones of de Lisle’s courteous voice. Turning the key he pushed open the door, hard; then stood still and listened again, the bottle rigid in his hand, while the faint aroma of stale cigar rose lovingly to his nostrils.

* * *

He waited, letting the room come to him out of the cold gloom. Gradually, the new sounds began. First from the direction of the serving hatch came the chink of glass; from the hall, the creak of wood; in the cellar, a hollow box was dragged over a concrete floor; a gong rang, one tone, imperious and distinctive; and from everywhere now, all about him there rose a vibrant, organic hum, obscure yet very close, pressing upon him, louder with every minute, as if the whole building had been struck with a flat hand and were trembling from the blow. Running to the hall, he charged into the dining-room, put on the lights with a single sweeping movement of his palm and glared savagely round him, shoulders hunched, bottle clenched in his considerable fist.

‘Harting!’ he shouted now. ‘Harting?’ He heard the shuffle of scattering feet, and thrust back the partition door.

‘Harting!’ he called again, but his only answer was the soot slipping in the open hearth, and the banging of an errant shutter on the poor stucco outside. He went to the window and looked across the lawn towards the river. On the far bank, the American Embassy, brilliant as a power house, drove yellow shafts through the mist deep into the elusive water. Then at last he recognised the nature of his tormentor: a chain of six barges, flags flying, radar-lights glittering above them like the blue stars nailed to the mast, was swiftly disappearing into the fog. As the last vessel vanished, so the strange domestic orchestra put aside its instruments. The glass ceased to chime, the stairs to creak, the soot to fall, the walls to tremble. The house settled again, ruminative but not yet reassured, waiting for the next assault.

* * *

Putting the bottle on the window-sill, Turner straightened himself and walked slowly from room to room. It was a wasteful, thinly built barrack of a place, built for a colonel out of reparation costs, at a time when the High Commission was stationed on the Petersberg; one of a colony, de Lisle had said, but the colony was never completed, for by then the Occupation had ended and the project was abandoned. A left-over house for a left-over man. It had a light side and a dark side according to whether the rooms looked on to the river or the Petersberg; the plaster was rough and belonged out of doors. The furniture was equivocal, as if no one had ever decided how much prestige Harting was entitled to. If there was emphasis, it fell upon the gramophone. Flexes ran from it in all directions and speakers to either side of the chimney had been set upon pivots to assist directional adjustment.

The dining table was laid for two.

At the centre, four porcelain cherubs danced in a circle. Spring pursued Summer, Summer recoiled from Autumn, Winter drew them all forward. To either side, two places were set for dinner. Fresh candles, matches, a bottle of Burgundy, unopened, in the wine basket; a cluster of roses withering in a silver bowl. Over it all lay a thin layer of dust.

He wrote quickly in his notebook, then continued to the kitchen. It might have been confected for a women’s magazine. He had never seen so many gadgets. Mixers, cutters, toasters, openers. A plastic tray lay on the counter, the remnants of a single breakfast. He lifted the lid of the teapot. It was a herbal tea, bright red. Dregs of it remained in the teacup, staining the spoon. A second cup lay upside down in the plate rack. A transistor radio, similar to the one he had seen in the Embassy, stood on top of the refrigerator. Having once again noted the wavelengths, Turner went to the door, listened, then began pulling open cupboards, extracting tins and bottles, peering inside. Occasionally he recorded what he found. In the refrigerator half-litre cartons of Naafi milk stood in neat order along the inside shelf. Taking out a bowl of pâté he gently sniffed it, testing its age. On a white plate, two steaks were set side by side. Strips of garlic had been threaded into the flesh. He prepared it on the Thursday night, he thought suddenly. On Thursday night he

still

didn’t know he was going to defect on Friday.

* * *

The upstairs corridor was carpeted with thin runners of coconut matting. The pine furniture was very rickety. He pulled out the suits one by one, thrusting his hands into the pockets, then throwing them aside as if they were spent. Their cut, like that of the house, was military; the jackets were waisted, with a small pocket midway on the right side; the trousers were tapered and had no turn-ups. Occasionally, as he continued his search, he drew out a handkerchief, a scrap of paper or a bit of pencil, and these he would examine, and perhaps record, before tossing the suit aside and seizing another from the rickety wardrobe. The house was trembling again. From somewhere – it seemed this time to be from the very depths of the building – came the sound of clanking metal like a goods train braking, one place calling and another answering, ascending from floor to floor. Barely had it died before he heard another footfall. Dropping the suit he sprang to the window. He heard it again. Twice. Twice he had heard the solid tread of feet. Pushing back the shutter he leaned into the twilight and stared down at the driveway.

‘Peter?’

Was it the dark that moved, or a man? He had left the lights on in the hall and they cast a patchwork of shadows on the drive. There was no wind to set the beech trees nodding. A man then? A man hurrying past the window on the inside? A man whose shape had flickered on the gravel?

‘Peter?’

Nothing. No car, no guard. The neighbouring houses still lay in darkness. Above him, Chamberlain’s mountain woke slowly to the dawn. He closed the window.

He worked faster now. In the second wardrobe another half dozen suits confronted him. Recklessly he dragged them from their hangers, struck at the pockets and cast them away; and then that extra sense warned him: go slowly. He had come upon a suit of dark blue gabardine, a summer suit but very much for formal wear, more creased than the others and set aside from them as if it were awaiting the cleaner, or tomorrow. He weighed it cautiously in his hand. Laying it on the bed, he felt in the pockets and drew out a brown envelope carefully folded upon itself. A brown OHMS envelope, the kind of thing they use for income tax. There was no writing on the outside and the flap had been sealed and ripped open. It was a key: a Yale key of dull, leaden colour, not newly cut but worn with age or use, a long, old-fashioned, complicated key for a deep and complicated lock, quite unlike the standard keys which comprised the Duty Officer’s bunch. A despatch-box key? Returning it to the envelope, he put it between the pages of his notebook and carefully examined the remaining pockets. Three cocktail sticks, one with grime at the point as if he had used it for cleaning his nails. Olive stones. Some loose change, four marks eighty, made up in small denominations. And a bill for drinks, undated, from a hotel in Remagen.

* * *

He left the study till last. It was a mean room, filled with cartons of whisky and tinned food. An ironing board stood beside the shuttered window. On an old card table, piles of catalogues, trade brochures and diplomatic price lists lay in uncharacteristic confusion. A small notebook recorded the commodities which Harting was evidently pledged to obtain. Turner glanced through it, then put it in his pocket. The tins of Dutch cigars were in a wooden box; there must have been a gross of them or more.

The glass-fronted bookcase was locked. Crouching, Turner studied the titles, rose, listened again, then fetched a screwdriver from the kitchen and with a single powerful wrench ripped the wood so that the brass came through suddenly like a bone through flesh, and the door swung uselessly open. The first half dozen volumes were German bound and pre-war, heavily ribbed and gilded. He could not read all the titles precisely, but some he guessed; Stundinger’s

Leipziger Kommentar zum Strafgesetzbuch; Verwaltungsrecht;

and someone else on the Statute of Limitations. In each was written the name, Harting Leo, like the name on the coathanger; and once he came upon the printed emblem of a Berlin bear over-written in a spiky German hand, very faint on the curves and very bold on the downstrokes, ‘

Für meinen geliebten Sohn Leo

’. The lower shelf was a medley: a Code of Conduct for British Officers in Germany, a German paperback on the flags of the Rhine, and an English–German phrase book published in Berlin before the war, annotated and very fingered. Reaching right to the back, he drew out a handful of slim, cloth-bound monthly newsletters of the Control Commission of Germany for the years forty-nine to fifty-one; some volumes were missing. As he opened the first volume the spine creaked and the dust rose swiftly to his nostrils. ‘No. 18 Field Investigation Unit, Hanover,’ the inscription read, written out, every word, in a good clerical hand, very bold on the downstrokes and refined at the curves, in a black, powdery ink which only governments can buy. A thin line cancelled the title and a second title replaced it: ‘No. 6 General Enquiry Unit, Bremen.’ Beneath it again (for Bremen too had been crossed out) he read the words: ‘Property of the Judge Advocate General’s Department, Moenchengladbach,’ and beneath that again, ‘Amnesty Commission, Hanover. Not to be taken away.’ Selecting a page at random, he found himself suddenly arrested by a retrospective account of the operation of the Berlin airlift. Salt should be slung under the wings of the aircraft and on no account carried inside the fuselage . . . the transportation of petrol presented high risks on landing and taking off . . . it was found preferable, in the interests of morale if not of economy, to fly in coal and corn rather than to make the bread in advance and deliver it ready-baked . . . by using dehydrated instead of fresh potatoes, seven hundred and twenty tons could be saved on a daily ration of nine hundred tons for the civilian population. Fascinated, he slowly turned the yellow pages, his eye halting at phrases of unexpected familiarity. ‘

The first meeting of the Allied High Commission was held on 21st September at the Petersberg, near Bonn

 . . .’ A German Tourist Office was to be opened in New York . . . The festivals of Bayreuth and Oberammergau were to be resuscitated as swiftly as time allowed . . . He glanced at the summary of minutes of the High Commission meetings: ‘

Methods of broadening opportunities and responsibilities of the Federal Republic of Germany in the field of foreign and economic activity were considered . . . The wider powers for the German Federal Republic in the field of foreign trade, decided upon under the Occupation statute, were defined . . . Direct German participation in two more international organisations was authorised

 . . .’

The next volume opened naturally at a page dealing with the release of German prisoners detained under certain arrest categories. Once again, he found himself compelled to read on: three million Germans presently in captivity . . . those detained were faring better than those at liberty . . . the Allies faced with the impossibility of separating the wheat from the chaff . . . Operation Coalscuttle would send them down the mines, Operation Barleycorn would send them to the harvest . . . One passage was sharply sidelined in blue ballpoint:

On

31st M

ay, 1948, therefore, as an act of clemency, an amnesty was granted from proceedings under Ordinance 69 to all members of the

SS not in automatic arrest categories, except for those who had been active as concentration camp guards

. The words ‘act of clemency’ had been underscored, and the ink looked uncommonly fresh.

Having examined each, he grasped hold of the covers and with a savage twist wrenched them from the binding as if he were breaking the wings of a bird; then turned over what remained and shook it, searching for hidden matter; then rose and went to the door.

The clanking had begun again and it was far louder than before. He remained motionless, his head to one side, his colourless eyes vainly searching the gloom; and he heard a low whistle, a long monotone, resonant and mournful, patiently summoning, softly coaxing, eerily lamenting. A wind had risen; it was the wind for sure. He could hear the shutter again, slamming against the wall: yet surely he had closed the shutter? It was the wind: a dawn wind which had come up the river valley. A strong wind, though, for the creaking of the stairs was taut, and mounted its own scale like the creaking of a ship’s ropes as the sails fill; and the glass, the dining-room glass, it was jingling absurdly; far louder than before.

‘Hurry,’ Turner whispered. He was talking to himself.

He pulled open the drawers of the desk. They were not locked. Some were empty. Light bulbs, fuse wire, sewing materials; socks, spare cuffs for shirts; an unframed print of a galleon in full sail. He turned it over and read: ‘To darling Leo from Margaret, Hanover 1949. With fondest affection.’ The script was clearly continental. Folding it roughly, he put it in his pocket. Under the print was a box. It was a square, hard box by the feel of it, bound in a black silk handkerchief, wrapped like a parcel and pinned upon itself. Unfastening the pins he cautiously drew out a tin of dull silvery metal; it must have been painted once, for the metal had the matt uneven texture of a surface scratched clean with a fine instrument. Loosening the lid, he looked inside, then gently, almost reverently, emptied the contents on to the handkerchief. Five buttons lay before him. They were each about one inch in diameter, wooden and hand-made to the same pattern, crudely but with the greatest care, as if the maker wanted for instruments but not for application, and they were pierced twice, generously, to admit a very broad thread. Under the tin was a German text book, the property of a Bonn library, stamped and annotated by the librarian. He could not understand it very well, but it seemed to be a technical treatise on the use of military gases. The last borrower had taken it out in February of that year. Certain passages were sidelined and there were small notes in the margin: ‘Toxic effect immediate . . . symptoms delayed by cold weather.’ Training the light full upon them, Turner sat at the desk, his head cupped in his hand and studied them with the greatest concentration; so that only instinct made him swing round and face the tall figure in the doorway.

* * *

He was quite an elderly man. He wore a tunic and a peaked cap of the kind that German students used to wear, or merchant sailors in the First World War. His face was dark with coaldust; he held a rusted riddling-iron like a trident across his body, and it trembled dreadfully in his old hands; but his red, stupid eyes were turned downwards to the pile of desecrated books, and he looked very angry indeed. Very slowly, Turner stood up. The old man did not move, but the riddling-iron shook wildly, and the white of his knuckles shone white through the soot. Turner ventured a pace forward.

‘Good morning,’ he said.

One black hand detached itself from the shaft and rose mechanically to the peak of his hat. Turner strode to the corner where the cartons of whisky were stacked. He ripped open the top carton, pulled out a bottle, tore off the lid. The old man was mumbling, shaking his head, still staring at the books.

‘Here,’ said Turner softly, ‘have a drink,’ and held the bottle forward into the old man’s line of sight.

Listlessly he let the iron fall, took the bottle and held it to his thin lips while Turner charged past him to the kitchen. Opening the door, he shouted at the top of his voice.

‘De Lisle!’

The echo carried wildly into the deserted street and outwards to the river.

‘De Lisle!’

Even before he had returned to the study, the lights were going on in the windows of neighbouring houses.

* * *

Turner had pulled open the wood shutters to let in the new daylight, and now the three of them stood in a baffled group, the old man blinking at the broken books and clutching the whisky in his shaking hand.

‘Who is he?’

‘The boilerman. We all have them.’

‘Ask him when he last saw Harting.’

The old man did not immediately reply, but instead, waking again to the whisky, drank a little more, then passed it to de Lisle, whom he appeared instinctively to trust. De Lisle set it on the desk beside the silk handkerchief and Turner quietly repeated his question, while the old man stared from one to the other, and then at the books.

‘Ask him when he last saw Harting.’

At last he spoke. His voice was timeless: a slow peasant drawl, the murmur of the confessional, querulous yet subjugate, the voice of an underdog in the hopeless quest for consideration. Once he reached out his black fingers to touch the smashed beading of the bookcase; once he nodded towards the river, as if the river was where he lived; but the murmur continued through his gestures as if it came from someone else.

‘He sells tickets for a pleasure cruise,’ de Lisle whispered. ‘He comes at five in the evening on the way home, and first thing in the morning on the way to work. He stokes the boilers, does the dustbins and the empties. In summer he cleans the boats before the charabancs arrive.’

‘Ask him again. When did he last see Harting? Here’ – he produced a fifty-mark note – ‘show him this – say I’ll give it him if he tells me what I want to know.’

Seeing the money, the old man examined Turner carefully with his dry, red eyes. His face was lined and hollow, starved at some time and held up by the long cords of his shrivelled skin, and the soot was worked into it like pigment into canvas. Folding the banknote carefully down the centre he added it to the wad from his hip pocket.

‘When?’ Turner demanded. ‘

Wann?

’

Cautiously the old man began putting his words together, picking them one by one, articles in the bargain. He had taken off his hat; a sooty stubble covered his brown skull.

‘Friday,’ de Lisle quietly interpreted. His eye was on the window and he seemed distracted. ‘Leo paid him on Friday afternoon. He went round to his house and paid him on the doorstep. He said he was going on a long journey.’

‘Where to?’

‘He didn’t say where.’

‘When will he come back? Ask him that.’

Once more, as de Lisle translated and Turner caught the half-familiar words:

kommen

 . . .

zurück

.

‘Leo gave him two months’ pay. He says he has something to show us. Something that is worth another fifty marks.’

The old man was glancing quickly from one to the other of them, fearful but expectant, while his long hand nervously explored the canvas tunic. It was a sailor’s tunic, shapeless and bleached, and it hung without relation to his narrow frame. Finding what he was looking for, he cautiously rolled back the lower hem, reached upward and detached something from his neck. As he did so he began murmuring again, but faster than before, nervous and voluble.

‘He found it on Saturday morning in the rubbish.’

It was a holster made of green webbing, army issue, suitable for a three-eight pistol. It had ‘Harting Leo’ stencilled on the inside and it was empty.

‘In the dustbin, right on top; the first thing he saw when he lifted the lid. He didn’t show it to the others. The others shouted at him and threatened to kick his face in. The others reminded him of what they’d done to him in the war and they said they’d do it again.’

‘What others? Who?’

‘Wait.’

Going to the window, de Lisle peered casually out. The old man was still talking.

‘He says he distributed anti-Nazi pamphlets in the war,’ he called, still watching. ‘By mistake. He thought they were ordinary newspapers and the others caught him and hung him upside down. That’s who the others seem to be. He says he likes the English best. He says Harting was a real gentleman. He says he wants to keep the whisky too. Leo always gave him Scotch. And cigars. Little Dutch cigars, a kind you can’t get in the shops. Leo had them sent specially. And last Christmas he gave his wife a hair-dryer. He would also like fifty marks for the holster,’ he added, but by then the cars had entered the drive, and the little room was filled with the double wail of a police horn and the double flash of a blue light. They heard the shout and the stamp of feet as the green figures gathered at the windows, pointing their guns into the room. The door was open and a young man in a leather coat held a pistol in his hand. The boilerman was crying, wailing, waiting to be hit and the blue light was rolling like a light for dancing. ‘Do nothing,’ de Lisle had said. ‘Obey no orders.’

He was talking to the boy in the leather coat, offering his red diplomatic card for examination. His voice was quiet but very firm, a negotiator’s voice, neither flippant nor concessive, stiffened with authority and hinting at injured privilege. The young detective’s face was as blank as Siebkron’s. Gradually de Lisle appeared to be gaining the ascendancy. His tone changed to one of indignation. He began asking questions, and the boy became conciliatory, even evasive. Gradually Turner gathered the trend of de Lisle’s complaint. He was pointing at Turner’s notebook and then at the old man. A list, he was saying, they were making a list. Was it forbidden for diplomats to make a list? To assess dilapidation, to check the inventory of Embassy furniture? It was surely a natural enough thing to do at a time when British property was in danger of destruction. Mr Harting had gone on extended leave of absence; it was expedient to make certain dispositions, to pay the boilerman his fifty marks . . . And since when, de Lisle wished to know, were British diplomats forbidden entry to British Embassy livings? By what right, de Lisle wished to know, had this great concourse of militia burst upon the privacy of extra-territorial persons?

More cards were exchanged, more documents mutually examined; names and numbers mutually recorded. The detective was sorry, he said; these were troubled times, and he stared at Turner for a long time as if he recognised a colleague. Troubled times or not, de Lisle appeared to reply, the rights of diplomats must be respected. The greater the danger, the more necessary the immunity. They shook hands. Somebody saluted. Gradually they all withdrew. The green uniforms dispersed, the blue lights vanished, the vans drove away. De Lisle had found three glasses and was pouring a little whisky into each. The old man was whimpering. Turner had returned the buttons to their tin and put the tin in his pocket together with the little book on military gases.

‘Was that them?’ he demanded. ‘Were those the ones who questioned him?’

‘He says:

like

the detective, but a little older. Whiter, he says: a richer kind of man. I think we both know who he’s talking about. Here, you’d better look after this yourself.’

Tugging the holster from the folds of his brown overcoat, de Lisle thrust it without pride into Turner’s waiting hand.

* * *

The ferry was hung with the flags of the German Federation. The crest of Königswinter was nailed to the bridge. Militia packed the bow. Their steel helmets were square, their faces pale and sad. They were very quiet for such young men and their rubber boots made no sound on the steel deck, and they stared at the river as if they had been told to remember it. Turner stood apart from them, watching the crew cast away, and he perceived everything very clearly because he was tired and frightened and because it was still early morning: the heavy vibration of the iron deck as the cars thumped over the ramp and pressed forward to the best berth; the howl of the engines and the clatter of chains as the men shouted and cast away, the strident bell that put out the fading chimes of the town’s churches, the uniform hostility of the drivers as they rose from their cars and picked the change from their pigskin purses as if men were a secret society and could not acknowledge each other in public; and the pedestrians, the bronzed and the poor, coveting the cars from which they were kept apart. The river bank receded; the little town drew its spires back into the hills like scenery at the opera. Gradually they described their awkward course, steering a long arc with the current to avoid the sister ferry from the opposite bank. Now they slowed almost to a halt, drifting down river as the

John F. Kennedy

, loaded with equal pyramids of fine coal, bore swiftly down upon them, the children’s washing sloping in the wet air. Then they were rocking in its wake and the women passengers were calling in amusement.

‘He told you something else. About a woman. I heard him say

Frau

and

Auto

. Something about a woman and a car.’

‘Sorry, old boy,’ de Lisle said coolly, ‘it’s the Rhineland accent. Sometimes it simply defeats me.’

Turner stared back at the Königswinter bank, shielding his eyes with his gloved hand because even in that miserable spring the light came sharply off the water. At last he saw what he was looking for: to each side, like mailed hands pointing to the Seven Hills of Siegfried, turreted brown villas built with the wealth of the Ruhr; between them a splash of white against the trees of the esplanade. It was Harting’s house receding in the mist.

‘I’m chasing a ghost,’ he muttered. ‘A bloody shadow.’

‘Your own,’ de Lisle retorted, his voice rich with disgust.

‘Oh, sure, sure.’

‘I shall drive you back to the Embassy,’ de Lisle continued. ‘From then on, you find your own transport.’

‘Why the hell did you bring me if you’re so squeamish?’ And suddenly he laughed. ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘What a bloody fool I am! I’m going to sleep! You were frightened I might find the Green File and you thought you’d wait in the wings. Unsuitable for temporaries. Christ!’

* * *

Cork had just heard the eight o’clock news. The German delegation had withdrawn from Brussels during the night. Officially the Federal Government wished to ‘reconsider certain technical problems which had arisen in the course of discussions’. Unofficially, as Cork put it, they had run away from school. Blankly he watched the coloured paper stutter out of the rollers and fall into the wire basket. It was about ten minutes before the summons came. There was a knock on the door and Miss Peate’s stupid head appeared at the little trap. Mr Bradfield would see him at once. Her mean eyes were alive with pleasure. Once and for all, she meant. As he followed her into the corridor, he caught sight of Cork’s brochure on plots of land in the Bahamas and he thought: that’s going to be useful by the time he’s done with me.

12

‘And There Was Leo.
In the Second Class.’

‘I have already spoken to Lumley. You go home tonight. Travel Section will attend to your tickets.’ Bradfield’s desk was piled high with telegrams. ‘And I have apologised in your name to Siebkron.’

‘

Apologised?

’

Bradfield dropped the latch on the door. ‘Shall I spell it out for you? Like Harting, you are evidently something of a political primitive. You are here on a temporary diplomatic footing; if you were not, you would undoubtedly be in prison.’ He was pale with anger. ‘God alone knows what de Lisle thought he was up to. I shall speak to him separately. You have deliberately disobeyed my instruction; well, you people have your own code, I suppose, and I am as suspect as the next man.’

‘You flatter yourself.’

‘In this case, however, you were placed specifically under my authority, by Lumley, by the Ambassador and by the necessities of the situation here, and specifically ordered to make no move which could have repercussions outside the Embassy. Be quiet and listen to me! Instead of showing the minimal consideration that was asked of you, however, you go round to Harting’s house at five in the morning, frighten the wits out of his servant, wake the neighbours, bellow for de Lisle, and finally attract a full-scale police raid which, in a matter of hours, will no doubt be the talking point of the community. Not content with that, you are party to a stupid lie to the police about conducting an inventory; I imagine that will bring a smile even to Siebkron’s lips, after the description you offered him of your work last night.’

‘Any more?’

‘A great deal, thank you. Whatever Siebkron suspected that Harting had done, you have by now delivered the proof. You saw his attitude for yourself. Heaven knows what he does not think we are up to.’

‘Then tell him,’ Turner suggested. ‘Why not? Ease his mind. Christ, he knows more than we do. Why do we make a secret of something they all know? They’re in full cry. The worst we can do is spoil their kill.’

‘I will not have it

said

! Anything is better, any doubts, any suspicions on their part, than our admission at this moment in time that for twenty years a member of our diplomatic staff has been in Soviet employment. Is there nothing you will understand of this? I will not have it

said

! Let them think and do what they like, without our cooperation they can

only

surmise.’

It was a statement of personal faith. He sat as still and as upright as a sentry guarding a national shrine.

‘Is that the lot?’

‘You people are supposed to work in secret. One calls upon you expecting a standard of discretion. I could tell you a little about your behaviour here, had you not made it abundantly clear that manners mean nothing to you whatever. It will take a long time to sweep up the mess you have left behind you in this Embassy. You seem to think that nothing reaches me. I have already warded off Gaunt and Meadowes; no doubt there are others I shall have to soothe.’

‘I’d better go this afternoon,’ Turner suggested. He had not taken his eyes from Bradfield’s face. ‘I’ve ballsed it up, haven’t I? Sorry about that. Sorry you’re not satisfied with the service. I’ll write and apologise; that’s what Lumley likes me to do. A bread and butter letter. So I’ll do that. I’ll write.’ He sighed, ‘I seem to be a bit of a Jonah. Best thing to do really, chuck me out. Be a bit of a wrench for you, that will. You don’t like getting rid of people, do you? Rather give them a contract.’

‘What are you suggesting?’

‘That you’ve a damn good reason for insisting on discretion! I said to Lumley – Christ, that was a joke – I asked him, see: does he want the files or the man? What the hell

are

you up to? Wait! One minute you give him a job, the next you don’t want to know him. If they brought his body in now you couldn’t care bloody less: you’d pat the pockets for papers and wish him luck!’

He noticed, quite inconsequentially, Bradfield’s shoes. They were hand-made and polished that dark mahogany which is only captured by servants, or by those who have been brought up with them.

‘What the devil do you mean?’

‘I don’t know who’s putting the finger on you: I don’t care. Siebkron, I would guess, from the way you crawl to him. Why did you bring us together last night if you were so bloody worried about offending him? What was the point to that, for one?

Or did he order you to?

Don’t answer yet, it’s my turn. You’re Harting’s guardian angel, do you realise that? It sticks out a mile, and I’ll write it six foot high when I get back to London. You renewed his contract, right? Just that, for a start. Although you despised him. But you didn’t just

give

him work; you

made

work for him. You knew bloody well the Foreign Office didn’t give a damn about the Destruction programme. Or for the Personalities Index either, I shouldn’t wonder. But you pretended; you built it up for him. Don’t tell me it was compassion for a man who didn’t belong.’

‘Whatever there was of

that

has worn pretty thin by now,’ Bradfield remarked, with a hint of that dismay, or self-contempt, which Turner now occasionally discerned in him.

‘Then what about the Thursday meeting?’

A look of sheer pain crossed Bradfield’s face.

‘My God, you are insufferable,’ he said, more as a mental note, a privately recorded judgment, than an insult directly intended.

‘The Thursday conference that never was! It was you who took Harting off that conference; you who gave the job to de Lisle. But Harting still went out Thursday afternoons all right. Did you stop him? Did you hell. I expect you even know where he went, don’t you.’ He held up the gunmetal key he had taken from Harting’s suit. ‘Because there’s a special place, you see. A hideaway. Or maybe I’m telling you something you know already. Who did he meet out there? Do you know that too? I used to think it was Praschko, until I remembered

you

fed me that idea, you yourself. So I’m going bloody carefully with Praschko.’

Turner was leaning across the desk, shouting at Bradfield’s bowed head. ‘As to Siebkron, he’s rolling up a whole bloody network, like as not. Dozens of agents, for all we know; Harting was just one link in a chain. You can’t begin to control what Siebkron knows and doesn’t know. We’re dealing with reality, you know, not diplomacy.’ He pointed to the window and the blurred hills across the river. ‘They sell horses over there! They screw around, talk to friends, make journeys; they’ve been beyond the edge of the forest, they know what the world looks like!’

‘It requires very little, in an intelligent person, to know that,’ said Bradfield.

‘And that’s what I’m going to tell Lumley when I get back to the smoke. Harting didn’t work alone! He had a patron as well as a controller and for all I know, they were the same man! And for all I bloody well know, Leo Harting was Rawley Bradfield’s fancy boy! Having a bit of public school vice on the side!’

Bradfield was standing up, his face contracted with anger. ‘Tell Lumley what you like,’ he whispered, ‘but get out of here and don’t ever come back,’ and it was then that Mickie Crabbe put his red, bubbling face round Miss Peate’s connecting door.

He was looking puzzled and slightly indignant, and he was chewing absurdly at his ginger moustache. ‘Rawley, I say,’ he said and began again, as if he had started in the wrong octave. ‘Sorry to burst in, Rawley. I tried the door in the corridor but the latch was down. Sorry, Rawley. It’s about Leo,’ he said. The rest came out with rather a rush. ‘I’ve just seen him down at the railway station. Bloody well having a beer.’

* * *

‘Be quick,’ said Bradfield.

‘Doing a favour for Peter de Lisle. That’s all,’ Crabbe began defensively. Turner caught the smell of drink on his breath, mingling with the smell of peppermint. ‘Peter had to go down to the Bundestag. Debate on Emergency Legislation, big thing apparently, second day, so he asked me to cover the jamboree at the railway station. The Movement’s leaders, coming in from Hanover. Watch the arrivals, see who turned up. I often do odd jobs for Peter,’ he added apologetically. ‘Turned out to be a Lord Mayor’s Show. Press, television lights, masses of cars lined up in the road’ – he glanced nervously at Bradfield – ‘where the taxis stand, Rawley,

you

know. And crowds. All singing rah-rah and waving the old black flags. Bit of music.’ He shook his head in private wonder. ‘That square is

plastered

with slogans.’

‘And you saw Leo,’ Turner said, pressing. ‘In the crowd?’

‘Sort of.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, the back of his head. Head and shoulders. Just a glimpse. No time to grab him: gone.’

Turner seized him with his big stone hands. ‘You said you saw him having a beer!’

‘Let him go,’ said Bradfield.

‘Hey steady!’ For a moment Crabbe looked almost ferocious. ‘Well, I saw him later, you see. After the show was over. Face to face sort of thing.’

Turner released him.

‘The train came in and everyone started cheering pretty loud, and shoving about and trying to get a glimpse of Karfeld. There was even a bit of fighting at the edges, I think, but that was mainly the journalists.

Sods

,’ he added with a spark of real hatred. ‘That shit Sam Allerton was there, by the way. I should think

he

started it.’

‘For Christ’s sake!’ Turner shouted, and Crabbe regarded him quite straightly, with an expression which spoke of bad form.

‘First of all Meyer-Lothringen came out – the police had made a gangway for him out of cattle pens – then Tilsit, then Halbach, and everyone shouting like gyppos. Beatles,’ he said uncomprehendingly. ‘Kids mainly, they were, long-haired student types, leaning over the railings trying to touch the chaps’ shoulders. Karfeld didn’t make it. Some fellow near me said he must have gone out the other side, gone down the passage to avoid the crowd. He doesn’t like people coming too close, that’s what they say; that’s why he builds these damn great stands everywhere. So half the crowd charges off to see if they can find him. The rest hang around in case, and then there’s this announcement over the blower: we can all go home because Karfeld’s still in Hanover. Lucky for Bonn, that’s what I thought.’ He grinned. ‘What?’

Neither spoke.

‘The journalists were furious and I thought I’d just give Rawley a ring to let him know Karfeld hadn’t turned up. London likes to keep track, you see. Of Karfeld.’ This for Turner. ‘They like to keep tabs on him, not have him talking to strange men.’ He resumed: ‘There’s an all-night Post Office by the hall there, and I was just coming out when it occurred to me’ – he made a feeble attempt to drag them into the conspiracy – ‘that maybe I ought to have a quick cup of coffee to collect my thoughts, and I happened to look through the glass door of the waiting-room. Doors are side by side, you see. Restaurant one side, waiting-room the other. It’s a sort of buffet in there with a few places to sit as well. I mean sit and not drink,’ he explained, as if that were a particular type of eccentricity he had occasionally met with. ‘There’s the first class on the left and the second class on the right, both glass doors.’

‘For pity’s sake!’ Turner breathed.

‘And there was Leo. In the second class. At a table. Wearing a trench coat, a sort of army-looking thing. Seemed in rather bad shape.’

‘Drunk?’

‘I don’t know. Christ, that would be going it, wouldn’t it: eight in the morning.’ He looked very innocent. ‘But tired out and, well, not dapper, you know, not like he usually is. Gloss, bounce: all gone. Still,’ he added stupidly, ‘comes to all of us I suppose.’

‘You didn’t speak to him?’

‘No thanks. I know him in that mood. I gave him a wide berth and came back and told Rawley.’

‘Was he carrying anything?’ Bradfield said quickly. ‘Did he have a briefcase with him? Anything that could hold papers?’

‘Nothing

about

,’ Crabbe muttered, ‘Rawley old boy. Sorry.’

They stood in silence, all three, while Crabbe blinked from one face to the other.

‘You did well,’ Bradfield muttered at last. ‘All right, Crabbe.’

‘

Well?

’ Turner shouted. ‘He did bloody badly! Leo’s not in quarantine. Why didn’t he talk to him, drag him here by the neck, reason with him? God Almighty, you’re not bloody well alive, either of you!

Well?

He may be gone by now; that was our last chance! He was probably waiting for his final contact; they’ve dirtied him up for the journey out! Did he have anyone with him?’ He pulled open the door. ‘I said, did he have anyone with him? Come on!’

‘A kid,’ said Crabbe. ‘Little girl.’

‘A

what?

’

‘Six or seven years old. Someone’s kid. He was talking to it.’

‘Did he recognise you?’

‘Doubt it. Seemed to look through me.’

Turner seized his raincoat from the stand.

‘I’d rather not,’ said Crabbe, answering the gesture rather than the exhortation. ‘Sorry.’

‘And you! What are

you

standing there for?

Come on!

’

Bradfield did not move.

‘

For God’s sake!

’

‘I’m staying here. Crabbe has a car. Let him take you. It must be nearly an hour since he saw him, or thought he did, with all that traffic. He’ll be gone by now. I don’t propose to waste my own time.’ Ignoring Turner’s astonished gaze, he continued, ‘The Ambassador has already asked me not to leave the building. We expect word from Brussels any minute; it is highly likely that he will wish to call upon the Chancellor.’

‘Christ, what do you think this is? A tripartite conference? He may be sitting there with a caseful of secrets! No wonder he looks under the weather! What’s got into you now? Do you

want

Siebkron to find him before we do? Do you want him to be caught red-handed?’

‘I have already told you: secrets are not sacrosanct. We would prefer them kept, it is true. In relation to what I have to do here –’

‘

Those

secrets are, aren’t they? What about the bloody Green File?’

Bradfield hesitated.

‘

I’ve

no authority over him,’ Turner cried. ‘I don’t even know what he looks like! What am

I

supposed to do when I see him? Tell him you’d like a word with him? You’re his boss, aren’t you? Do you

want

Ludwig Siebkron to find him first?’ Tears had started absurdly to his eyes. His voice was one of utter supplication. ‘Bradfield!’

‘He was all alone,’ Crabbe muttered, not looking at Bradfield, ‘just him and himself, old boy. And the kid. I’m sure of that.’

Bradfield stared at Crabbe, and then at Turner, and once again his face seemed crowded by private pains scarcely held at bay.

‘It’s true,’ he said at last, very reluctantly, ‘I am his superior. I am responsible. I had better be there.’ Carefully double-locking the outer door, he left word with Miss Peate that Gaveston should stand in for him, and led the way downstairs.

* * *

New fire extinguishers, just arrived from London, stood like red sentinels along the corridor. At the landing, a consignment of steel beds awaited assembly. A file-trolley was loaded with grey blankets. In the lobby two men, mounted on separate ladders, were erecting a steel screen. Dark Gaunt watched them in bewilderment as they swept through the glass doors into the car park, Crabbe leading. Bradfield drove with an arrogance which took Turner by surprise. They raced across the lights on amber, keeping to the left lane to make the turn into the station road. At the traffic check he barely halted; both he and Crabbe had their red cards ready at the window. They were on wet cobble, skidding on the tramlines and Bradfield held the wheel still, waiting patiently for the car to come to its senses. They approached an intersection where the sign said ‘Yield’, and ran straight over it under the wheels of an oncoming bus. The cars were fewer, the streets were packed with people.

Some carried banners, others wore the grey gabardine raincoats and black Homburg hats which were the uniform of the Movement’s supporters. They yielded reluctantly, scowling at the number plates and the glittering foreign paintwork. Bradfield neither sounded his horn nor changed gear, but let them wake to him and avoid him as they might. Once he braked for an old man who was either deaf or drunk; once a boy slapped the roof of the car with his bare hand, and Bradfield became very still and pale. Confetti lay on the steps, the pillars were covered with slogans. A cab driver was yelling as if he had been hit. They had parked in the cab rank.

‘Left,’ Crabbe called as Turner ran ahead of him. A high doorway admitted them to the main hall.

‘Keep left,’ Turner heard Crabbe shout for the second time.

Three barriers led to the platform; three ticket collectors sat in their glass cages. Notices warned him in three languages not to ask them favours. A group of priests, whispering, turned to eye him disapprovingly: haste, they said, is not a Christian quality. A blonde girl, her face chestnut brown, swung dangerously past him with a rucksack and well-worn skis, and he saw the trembling of her pullover.

‘He was sitting just there,’ Crabbe whispered, but by then Turner had flung open the glazed swing door and was standing inside the restaurant, glaring through the cigarette smoke at each table in turn. A loudspeaker barked a message about changing at Cologne. ‘Gone,’ Crabbe was saying. ‘Sod’s flown.’

The smoke hung all around, lifting in the glow of the long tube lights, curling into the darker corners. The smell was of beer and smoked ham and municipal disinfectant; the far counter, white with Dutch tiles, glinted like an ice wall in the fog. In a brown-wood cubicle sat a poor family on the move; the women were old and dressed in black, their suitcases were bound with rope; the men were reading Greek newspapers. At a separate table a little girl rolled beermats to a drunk, and that was the table Crabbe was pointing at.

‘Where the kiddie is, you see. He was having a Pils.’

Ignoring the drunk and the child, Turner picked up the glasses and stared at them uselessly. Three small cigar ends lay in the ashtray. One was still slightly smouldering. The child watched him as he stooped and searched the floor and rose again empty handed; she watched him stride from one table to the next, glaring into the faces, seizing a shoulder, pushing down a newspaper, touching an arm.

‘Is this him?’ he yelled. A lonely priest was reading

Bildzeitung

in a corner; beside him, hiding in his shadow, a dark-faced gypsy ate roast chestnuts out of a bag.

‘No.’

‘This?’

‘Sorry, old boy,’ said Crabbe, very nervous now. ‘No luck. I say, go easy.’

By the stained-glass window two soldiers were playing chess. A bearded man was making the motions of eating, but there was no food before him. Outside on the platform a train was arriving, and the vibration shook the crockery. Crabbe was addressing the waitress. He was hanging over her, whispering, and his hand was on the flesh of her upper arm. She shook her head.

‘We’ll try the other one,’ he said, as Turner joined them. They walked across the room together, and this woman nodded, proud to have remembered, and made a long story, pointing at the child and talking about ‘

der kleine Herr

’, the little gentleman, and sometimes just about ‘

der Kleine

’, as if ‘gentleman’ were a tribute to her interrogators rather than to Harting.

‘He was here till a few minutes ago,’ Crabbe said in some bewilderment. ‘Her version, anyway.’

‘Did he leave alone?’

‘Didn’t see.’

‘Did he make any impression on her?’

‘Steady. She’s not a big thinker, old boy. Don’t want her to fly away.’

‘What made him leave? Did he see someone? Did someone signal to him from the door?’

‘You’re stretching it, old son. She didn’t see him leave. She didn’t worry about him, he paid with every order. As if he might leave in a hurry. Catch a train. He went out to watch the hoo-hah, when the boys arrived, then came back and had another cigar and a drink.’

‘What’s the matter then? Why are you looking like that?’

‘It’s bloody odd,’ Crabbe muttered, frowning absurdly.

‘What’s bloody odd?’

‘He’s been here all night. Alone. Drinking but not drunk. Played with the kid part of the time. Greek kid. That was what he liked best: the kid.’ He gave the woman a coin and she thanked him laboriously.

‘Just as well we missed him,’ Crabbe declared. ‘Pugnacious little sod when he gets like this. Go for anyone when he’s got his dander up.’

‘How do you know?’

Crabbe grimaced in painful reminiscence: ‘You should have seen him that night in Cologne,’ he muttered, still staring after the waitress. ‘Jesus.’

‘In the fight? You were there?’

‘I tell you,’ Crabbe repeated. He spoke from the heart. ‘When that lad’s really going, he’s best avoided altogether. Look.’ He held out his hand. A wooden button lay in the palm and it was identical to the buttons in the scratched tin in Königswinter. ‘She picked this up from the table,’ he said. ‘She thought it might be something he needed. She was hanging on to it in case he came back, you see.’

Bradfield came slowly through the doorway. His face was taut but without expression.

‘I gather he’s not here.’

No one spoke.

‘You still say you saw him?’

‘No mistake, old boy. Sorry.’

‘Well, I suppose we must believe you. I suggest we go back to the Embassy.’ He glanced at Turner. ‘Unless you prefer to stay. If you have some further theory to test.’ He looked round the buffet. Every face was turned towards them. Behind the bar, a chrome machine was steaming unattended. Not a hand moved. ‘You seem to have made your mark here anyway.’ As they walked slowly back to the car, Bradfield said, ‘You can come into the Embassy to collect your possessions but you must be out by lunchtime. If you have any papers, leave them with Cork and we’ll send them on by bag. There’s a flight at seven. Take it. If you can’t get a seat, take the train. But go.’

They waited while Bradfield spoke to the policemen and showed them his red card. His German sounded very English in tone but the grammar was faultless. The policeman nodded, saluted and they took their leave. Slowly they returned to the Embassy through the sullen faces of the aimless crowd.

‘Extraordinary place for Leo to spend the night,’ Crabbe muttered, but Turner was fingering the gunmetal key in the OHMS envelope in his pocket, and still wondering, for all his sense of failure, whose door it had unlocked.

13

The Strain of Being a Pig

He sat at the cypher-room desk, still in his raincoat, packing together the useless trophies of his investigation: the army holster, the folded print, the engraved paper knife from Margaret Aickman; the blue-bound diary for counsellors and above, the little notebook for diplomatic discounts, and the scratched tin of five wooden buttons cut to size; and now the sixth button and the three stubs of cigar.

‘Never mind,’ said Cork kindly. ‘He’ll turn up.’

‘Oh sure. Like the investments and the Caribbean dream. Leo’s everybody’s darling. Everybody’s lost son, Leo is. We all love Leo, although he cut our throats.’

‘Mind you, he couldn’t half tell the tale.’ He was sitting on the truckle bed in his shirt-sleeves, pulling on his outdoor shoes. He wore metal springs above the elbows and his shirt was like an advertisement on the Underground. There was no sound from the corridor. ‘That’s what

got

you about him. Quiet, but a sod.’

A machine stammered and Cork frowned at it reprovingly.

‘Blarney,’ he continued. ‘That’s what he had. The magic. He could tell you

any

bloody tale and you believed it.’

He had put them into a paper waste-bag. The label on the outside said ‘SECRET. Only to be disposed of in the presence of two authorised witnesses.’

‘I want this sealed and sent to Lumley,’ he said, and Cork wrote out a receipt and signed it.

‘I remember the first time I met him,’ Cork said, in the cheerful voice which Turner associated with funeral breakfasts. ‘I was

green

. I was really

green

. I’d only been married six months. If I hadn’t twigged him I’d have –’

‘You’d have been taking his tips on investment. You’d have been lending him the code books for bedside reading.’ He stapled the mouth of the bag, folding it against itself.

‘Not the code books. Janet. He’d have been reading

her

in bed.’ Cork smiled happily. ‘Bloody neck! You wouldn’t credit it. Come on then. Lunch.’

For the last time Turner savagely clamped together the two arms of the stapler. ‘Is de Lisle in?’

‘Doubt it. London’s sent a brief the size of your arm. All hands on deck. The dips are out in force.’ He laughed. ‘They ought to have a go with the old black flags. Lobby the deputies. Strenuous representations at all levels. Leave no stone unturned.

And

they’re going for another loan. I don’t know where the Krauts get the stuff from sometimes. Know what Leo said to me once? “I tell you what, Bill, we’ll score a big diplomatic victory. We’ll go down to the Bundestag and offer them a million quid. Just you and me. I reckon they’d fall down in a faint.” He was right, you know.’

Turner dialled de Lisle’s number but there was no reply.

‘Tell him I rang to say goodbye,’ he said to Cork, and changed his mind. ‘Don’t worry.’

He called Travel Section and enquired about his ticket. It was all in order, they assured him; Mr Bradfield had sent down personally and the ticket was waiting for him at the desk. They seemed impressed. Cork picked up his coat.

‘And you’d better cable Lumley and give him my time of arrival.’

‘I’m afraid H. of C.’s done that already,’ Cork said, with something quite near to a blush.

‘Well. Thanks.’ He was at the door, looking back into the room as if he would never see it again. ‘I hope it goes all right with the baby. I hope your dreams come true. I hope everyone’s dream comes true. I hope they all get what they’re looking for.’

‘Look: think of it this way,’ Cork said sympathetically. ‘There’s things you just don’t give up, isn’t there?’

‘That’s right.’

‘I mean you can’t pack everything up neat and tidy. Not in life, you can’t. That’s for girls, that is. That’s just romantic. You get like Leo otherwise: you can’t leave a thing alone. Now what are you going to do with yourself this afternoon? There’s a nice matinée at the American cinema . . . No. Wouldn’t be right for you: lot of screaming kids.’

‘What do you mean, he can’t leave a thing alone?’

Cork was drifting round the room, checking the machines, the desks and the secret waste.

‘Vindictive. Vindictive wasn’t in it. He had a feud with Fred Anger once; Fred was Admin. They say it ran five years till Fred was posted.’

‘What about?’

‘Nothing.’ He had picked a scrap of paper from the floor and was reading it. ‘Absolutely sweet Fanny Adams. Fred cut down a lime tree in Leo’s garden, said it was endangering the fence. Which it was. Fred told me: “Bill,” he said, “that tree would have

fallen

down in the autumn.” ’

‘He had a thing about land,’ Turner said. ‘He wanted his own patch. He didn’t like being in limbo.’

‘Know what Leo did? He made a wreath out of its leaves. Brought it into the Embassy and nailed it on to Fred’s office door. With bloody great two-inch nails. Crucified it near enough. The German staff thought Fred had snuffed it. Leo didn’t laugh though. He wasn’t joking; he really meant it. He was

violent

, see. Now dips don’t notice that. All oil and how-d’-you-do, he was to them. And helpful, I’m not saying he wasn’t helpful. I’m just saying that when Leo had a grudge, I wouldn’t fancy being the other end of it. That’s all I’m saying.’

‘He went for your wife, did he?’

‘I put a stop to that,’ said Cork. ‘Just as well. Seeing what happened elsewhere. The Welfare Dance, that was. A couple of years back. He started coming it. Nothing

nasty

, mind. Wanted to give her a hair-dryer and that. Meet me up on the hill, that lark. I said to him, “You find your own hair to dry,” I said. “She’s mine.” You can’t blame him though, can you? Know what they say about refugees: they lose everything except their accents. Dead right, you know. Trouble with Leo was, he wanted it all back. So I suppose that’s it: take the pick of the files and run for it. Flog them to the highest bidder. It’s no more than what we owe him, I don’t suppose.’ Satisfied with his security check, Cork stacked together his brochures and came towards the door where Turner stood. ‘You’re from the North, aren’t you?’ he asked. ‘I can tell by your voice.’

‘How well did you know him?’

‘Leo? Oh, like all of us really. I’d buy this and that, give him a saucer of milk now and then; put an order in for the Dutchman.’

‘Dutchman?’

‘Firm of diplomatic exporters. From Amsterdam. Cheaper if you can be bothered; you know. Do you anything: butter, meat, radios, cars, the lot.’

‘Hair-dryers?’

‘Anything. There’s a rep. calls every Monday. Fill in your form one week, chuck it in to Leo and you get the order the next. I expect there was a bit in it for him;

you

know. Mind you, you could never catch him out. I mean you could check up till you were blue in the face: you’d never find out where he took his divi. Though I

think

it was those bloody cigars. They were really shocking, you know. I don’t think he enjoyed them; he just smoked them because they were free. And because we pulled his leg about them.’ He laughed simply. ‘He conned the lot of us, that’s the truth of it. You too, I suppose. Well, I’ll be slipping on then. So long.’

‘You were saying about that first time you met him.’

‘Was I? Oh well, yes.’ He laughed again. ‘I mean you couldn’t believe

anything

. My first day: Mickie Crabbe took me down there. We done the rounds by then. “Here,” says Mickie, “just one more port of call,” and takes me downstairs to see Leo. “This is Cork,” he says. “Just joined us in Cyphers.” So then Leo moves in.’ Cork sat down on the swivel chair beside the door and leaned back like the rich executive he longed to be. ‘ “Glass of sherry,” he says. We’re supposed to be dry here, but that never bothered Leo; not that he drank himself, mind. “We must celebrate the new arrival. You don’t

sing

by any chance, do you, Cork?” “Only in the bath,” I says and we all have a nice laugh. Recruiting for the choir, see: that always impressed them. Very pious gentleman, Mr Harting, I thought. Not half. “Have a cigar, Cork?” No thanks. “A fag then?” Don’t mind if I do, Mr Harting. So then we sit there like a lot of dips, sipping our sherry, and I’m thinking, “Well, I must say you’re quite the little king around here.” Furniture, maps, carpet . . . all the trappings. Fred Anger cleared a lot of it out, mind, before he left. Nicked, half of it was.

Liberated

, you know. Like in the old Occupation days. “So how are things in London, Cork?” he asks. “Everything much the same I suppose?” Putting me at my ease, cheeky sod. “That old porter at the main door: still saucy with the visiting Ambassadors, is he, Cork?” He really came it. “And the coal fires: still lighting the coal fires every morning, are they, Cork?” “Well,” I says, “they’re not doing too bad, but it’s like everything else, it takes its time.” Some crap like that. “Oh, ah, really,” he says, “because I had a letter from Ewan Waldebere only a few months back telling me they were putting in the central heating. And that old bloke who used to pray on the steps of Number Ten, still there is he, Cork, morning and night, saying his prayers? Doesn’t seem to have done us much good, does he?” I tell you: I was practically calling him sir. Ewan Waldebere was Head of Western Department by then, all set to be God. So then he comes on about the choir again and the Dutchman and a few other things besides, anything he can do to help, and when we get outside I look at Mickie Crabbe and Mickie’s

pissing

himself. Doubled up, Mickie is. “Leo?” he says. “Leo? He’s never been inside the Foreign Office in his life. He hasn’t even been back to England since forty-five.” ’ Cork broke off, shaking his head. ‘Still,’ he repeated, with an affectionate laugh, ‘you can’t blame him, can you?’ He got up. ‘And I mean, we all saw through him, but we still fell for it, didn’t we? I mean Arthur and . . . I mean everybody. It’s like my villa,’ he added simply, ‘I know I’ll never get there, but I believe in it all the same. I mean you have to really . . . you couldn’t live, not without illusions. Not here.’

Taking his hands out of his mackintosh pockets, Turner stared first at Cork and then at the gunmetal key in his big palm, and he seemed to be torn and undecided.

‘What’s Mickie Crabbe’s number?’

Cork watched with apprehension as he lifted the receiver, dialled and began talking.

‘They don’t

expect

you to go on looking for him,’ Cork said anxiously. ‘I don’t really think they do.’

‘I’m not bloody well looking for him, I’m having lunch with Crabbe and I’m catching the evening flight and nothing on God’s earth would keep me in this dream box for an hour longer than I need.’ He slammed down the receiver and stalked out of the room.

* * *

De Lisle’s door was wide open but his desk was empty. He wrote a note: ‘Called in to say goodbye. Goodbye. Alan Turner,’ and his hand was shaking with anger and humiliation. In the lobby, small groups were sauntering into the sunlight to eat their sandwiches or lunch in the canteen. The Ambassador’s Rolls-Royce stood at the door; the escort of police outriders waited patiently. Gaunt was whispering to Meadowes at the front desk and he fell suddenly quiet as Turner approached.

‘Here,’ he said, handing him the envelope. ‘Here’s your ticket.’ His expression said, ‘Now go back to where you belong.’

‘Ready when you are, old son,’ Crabbe whispered from his habitual patch of darkness. ‘You see.’

* * *

The waiters were quiet and awfully discreet. Crabbe had asked for snails which he said were very good. The framed print in their little alcove showed shepherds dancing with nymphs, and there was just a suggestion of expensive sin.

‘You were with him that night in Cologne. The night he got into the fight.’

‘Extraordinary,’ said Crabbe. ‘Really. Do you like water?’ he asked, and added a little to each of their glasses, but it was no more than a tear shed for the sober. ‘Don’t know what came over him.’

‘Did you often go out with him?’

He grinned unsuccessfully and they drank.

‘That was five years ago, you see. Mary’s mother was ill; kept on flogging back to England. I was a grass widower, so to speak.’

‘So you’d push off with Leo occasionally; have a drink and chase a few pussycats.’

‘More or less.’

‘In Cologne?’

‘Steady, old boy,’ said Crabbe. ‘You’re like a bloody lawyer.’ He drank again and as the drink went into him he shook like a poor comedian reacting late. ‘Christ,’ he said. ‘What a day. Christ.’

‘Night clubs are best in Cologne, are they?’

‘You can’t do it

here

, old boy,’ Crabbe said with a nervous start. ‘Not unless you want to screw half the Government. You’ve got to be

bloody

careful in Bonn.’ He added needlessly, ‘

Bloody

careful.’ He jerked his head in wild confirmation. ‘Cologne’s the better bet.’

‘Better girls?’

‘Can’t make it, old boy. Not for years.’

‘But Leo went for them, did he?’

‘He liked the girls,’ said Crabbe.

‘So you went to Cologne that night. Your wife was in England, and you went on the razzle with Leo.’

‘We were just sitting at a table. Drinking, you see.’ He suited the gesture to the word. ‘Leo was talking about the Army: remember old so-and-so. That game. Loved the Army, Leo did, loved it. Should have stayed in, that’s my feeling. Not that they’d have had him, not as a regular. He needed the discipline, in my opinion. Urchin really. Like me. It’s all right when you’re young, you don’t mind. It’s later. They knocked hell out of me at Sherborne. Hell. Used to hold the taps, head in the basin, while the bloody prefects hit me. I didn’t care then. Thought it was life.’ He put a hand on Turner’s arm. ‘Old boy,’ he whispered. ‘I

hate

them now. Didn’t know I had it in me. It’s all come to the surface. For two pins I’d go back there and shoot the buggers. Truth.’

‘Did you know him in the Army?’

‘No.’

‘Then who were you remembering?’

‘I ran across him in the CCG a bit. Moenchengladbach. Four Group.’

‘When he was on Claims?’

Crabbe’s reaction to harassment was unnerving. Like his namesake he seemed in some mysterious way to draw the extremities of his presence under a protective shell, and to lie passive until the danger had passed. Ducking his head into his glass he kept it there, shoulders hunched, while he peered at Turner with pink, hooded eyes.

‘So you were drinking and talking.’

‘Just quietly. Waiting for the cabaret. I like a good cabaret.’ He drifted away into a wholly incredible account of an attempt he had made upon a girl in Frankfurt on the occasion of the last Free Democrats’ Conference: ‘Fiasco,’ he declared proudly. ‘Climbing over me like a bloody monkey and I couldn’t do a thing.’

‘So the fight came after the cabaret?’

‘Before. There was a bunch of Huns at the bar kicking up a din; singing. Leo took offence. Started glaring at them. Pawing the earth a bit. Suddenly he’d called for the bill. “

Zahlen!

” Just like that. Bloody loud too. I said “Hoi! Old boy, what’s up?” Ignored me. “I don’t want to go,” I said. “Want to see the tit show.” Blind bit of notice. The waiter brings the bill, Leo tots it up, shoves his hand in his pocket and puts a button on the plate.’

‘What kind of button?’

‘Just a button. Like the one the dolly found down at the Bahnhof. Bloody wooden button with holes in it.’ He was still indignant. ‘You can’t pay bloody bills with a

button

. Can you? Thought it was a joke at first. Had a bit of a laugh. “What happened to the rest of her?” I said. Thought he was joking, see. He wasn’t.’

‘Go on.’

‘ “Here you are,” he said. “Keep the change,” and gets up cool as anything. “Come on, Mickie, this place stinks.” Then they go for him. Jesus. Fantastic. Never thought he had it in him. Three down and one to go and then somebody cracks him with a bottle. All the blows; East End stuff. He could really mix it. Then they got him. They bent him over the bar backwards and just worked him over. Never seen anything like it. No one said a word. No how-d’you-do, nothing. System. Next thing we knew was, we were out in the street. Leo was on his hands and knees and they came out and gave him a few more for luck, and I was coughing my guts out on the pavement.’

‘Pissed?’

‘Sober as a bloody judge, old boy. They’d kicked me in the stomach, you see.’

‘You?’

His head shook dreadfully as it sank to meet the glass: ‘Tried to bail him out,’ he muttered. ‘Tried to mix it with the other chaps while he got away. Trouble is,’ he explained, taking a deep draught of whisky, ‘I’m not the fellow I used to be. Praschko had hoofed it by then.’ He giggled. ‘He was half-way out of the door by the time the button hit the plate. He seemed to know the form. Don’t blame him.’

Turner might have been asking after an old friend. ‘Praschko came often, did he? Back in those days?’

‘First time I met him, old boy. And the last. Parted brass rags after that. Don’t blame him. MP and all that. Bad for business.’

‘What did

you

do?’

‘Jesus. Trod gently, old boy.’ He shuddered. ‘Home posting loomed large. Bloody flea pit in Bushey or somewhere. With Mary. No thanks.’

‘How did it end?’

‘I reckon Praschko got on to Siebkron. Coppers dumped us at the Embassy. Guard got us a cab and we sloped off to my place and called a doctor. Then Ewan Waldebere turned up, he was Minister Political. Then Ludwig Siebkron in a dirty great Mercedes. Christ knows what didn’t happen. Siebkron grilled him. Sat in my drawing-room and grilled him no end. Didn’t care for it, I must say. All the same, pretty serious when you think of it. Bloody diplomat tearing the arse off night clubs, assaulting citizenry. Lot of fences to mend.’

The waiter brought some kidneys cooked in vinegar and wine.

‘God,’ said Crabbe. ‘Look at that. Delicious. Lovely after snails.’

‘What did Leo tell Siebkron?’

‘Nix. Nothing. You don’t know Leo. Close isn’t the word. Waldebere, me, Siebkron: not a syllable to any of us. Mind you, they’d really gone for him. Waldebere faked him some leave; new teeth, stitches, Christ knows what. Told everybody he’d done it swimming in Yugoslavia. Diving into shallow water. Bashed his face in. Some water: Christ.’

‘Why do you think it happened?’

‘No idea, old boy. Wouldn’t go out with him after that. Not safe.’

‘No opinions?’

‘Sorry,’ said Crabbe. His face sank beneath the surface, misted with meaningless wrinkles.

‘Ever seen this key?’

‘Nope.’ He grinned affectionately. ‘One of Leo’s, was it? Screw anything in the old days, Leo would. Steadier now.’

‘Any names attached to that?’

He continued staring at the key.

‘Try Myra Meadowes.’

‘Why?’

‘She’s willing. She’s had one baby already. In London. They say half the drivers go through her every week.’

‘Did he ever mention a woman called Aickman? Someone he was going to marry?’

Crabbe assumed an expression of puzzled recollection.

‘Aickman,’ he said. ‘Funny. That was one of the old lot. From Berlin. He did talk about her. When they worked with the Russkies. That’s it. She was another of those inbetweeners. Berlin, Hamburg, all that game. Stitched those bloody cushions for him. Care and attention.’

‘What was he

doing

with the Russians?’ Turner asked after a pause. ‘What work was it?’

‘Quadripartite, bi-partite . . . one of them. Berlin’s on its own, see. Different world, specially in those days. Island. Different sort of island.’ He shook his head. ‘Not like him,’ he added. ‘All that Communist kick. Not his book at all. Too bloody hard-nosed for all that balls.’

‘And this Aickman?’

‘Miss Brandt, Miss Etling and Miss Aickman.’

‘Who are they?’

‘Three dollies. In Berlin. Came out with them from England. Pretty as pictures, Leo said. Never seen girls like it. Never seen girls at all if you ask me. Emigré types going back to Germany. Join the Occupation. Same as Leo. Croydon airport, sitting on a crate, waiting for the plane, and these three dollies come along in uniform, waggling their tails. Miss Aickman, Miss Brandt and Miss Etling. Posted to the same unit. From then on he never looked back. Him and Praschko and another fellow. All went out together from England in forty-five. With these dollies. They made up a song about it: Miss Aickman, Miss Etling and Miss

Brandt

 . . . drinking song, saucy rhymes. They sang it that night as a matter of fact. Going along in the car, happy as sandboys. Jesus.’

He’d have sung it himself for two pins.

‘Leo’s girl was Aickman. His first girl. He’d always go back to her, that’s what he said. “There’ll never be another like the first one,” that’s what he said. “All the rest are imitations.” His very words. You know the way Huns talk. Introspective beggars.’

‘What became of her?’

‘Dunno, old boy. Fizzled away. What they all do, isn’t it? Grow old. Shrivel up. Whoopsadaisy.’ A piece of kidney fell from his fork and the gravy splashed on his tie.

‘Why didn’t he marry her?’

‘She took the other road, old boy.’

‘Which other road?’

‘She didn’t like him being English, he said. Wanted him to be a Hun again and face facts. Big on metaphysics.’

‘Perhaps he’s gone to find her.’

‘He always said he would one day. “I’ve drunk at a good few pools, Mickie,” he said. “But there’ll never be another girl like Aickman.” Still, that’s what we all say, isn’t it?’ He dived into the Moselle as if it were a refuge.

‘Is it?’

‘You married, old boy, by the by? Keep away from it.’ He shook his head. ‘It would be all right if I could manage the bedroom. But I can’t. It’s like a bloody grease-pot for me. I can’t make it.’ He sniggered. ‘Marry at fifty-five, my advice. Little sixteen-year-old dolly. Then they don’t know what they’re missing.’

‘Praschko was up there, was he? In Berlin? With the Russians and Aickman?’

‘Stable companions.’

‘What else did he tell you about Praschko?’

‘He was a Bolshie in those days. Nothing else.’

‘Was Aickman?’

‘Could be, old boy. Never said; didn’t interest him that much.’

‘Was Harting?’

‘Not Leo, old boy. Didn’t know his arse from his elbow where politics are concerned. Restful that was. Trout,’ he whispered. ‘I’d like trout next. Kidneys are just in between. If it’s on the secret vote, I mean.’

The joke entertained him off and on for the remainder of the meal. Only once would he be drawn on the subject of Leo, and that was when Turner asked him whether he had had much to do with him in recent months.

‘Not bloody likely,’ Crabbe whispered.

‘Why not?’

‘He was getting broody, old boy. I could tell. Sizing up for another crack at someone. Pugnacious little beast,’ he said, baring his teeth in a sudden grimace of alcoholic cramp. ‘He’d started leaving those buttons about.’

* * *

He got back to the Adler at four; he was fairly drunk. The lift was occupied so he used the stairs. That’s it, he thought. That is the sweet end. He would go on drinking through the afternoon and he would drink on the plane and with any luck by the time he saw Lumley he would be speechless. The Crabbe answer: snails, kidneys, trout and Scotch and keep your head down while the big wheels roll over. As he reached his own floor he noticed vaguely that the lift had been wedged with a suitcase and he supposed the porter was collecting more luggage from someone’s bedroom. We’re the only lucky people in the place, he thought. We’re leaving. He tried to open the door to his room but the lock was jammed; he wrestled with the key but it wouldn’t give. He stepped back quite quickly when he heard the footsteps, but he didn’t really have much chance. The door was pulled open from inside. He had a glimpse of a pale round face and fair hair carefully combed back, a bland brow furrowed with anxiety; he saw the stitching of the leather as it moved down on him in slow motion and he wondered whether the stitches cut the scalp the way they cut the face. He felt the nausea strike him and his stomach fold, and the wooden club buffet at the back of his knees; he heard the soft surgeon’s voice calling from the darkness as the warm grass of the Yorkshire Dales prickled against his child’s face. He heard the taunting voice of Tony Willoughby, soft as velvet, clinging like a lover, saw his pianist’s hands drift over her white hips, and heard Leo’s music whining to God in every red-timber tabernacle of his own childhood. He smelt the smoke of the Dutch cigars, and there was Willoughby’s voice again offering him a hair-dryer: I’m only a temporary, Alan old boy, but there’s ten per cent off for friends of the family. He felt the pain again, the thudding as they began slapping him and he saw the wet black granite of the orphanage in Bournemouth and the telescope on Constitution Hill. ‘If there’s one thing I really hate,’ Lumley observed, ‘it’s a cynic in search of God.’ He had a moment’s total agony as they hit him in the groin, and as it slowly subsided he saw the girl who had left him drifting in the black streets of his own defiant solitude. He heard the screaming of Myra Meadowes as he broke her down, lie for lie, the scream as they took her from her Polish lover, and the scream as she parted from her baby; and he thought he might be crying out himself until he recognised the towel they had shoved into his mouth. He felt something cold and iron hard hit the back of his head and stay there like a lump of ice, he heard the door slam and knew he was alone; he saw the whole damned trail of the deceived and the uncaring; heard the fool voice of an English Bishop praising God and war; and fell asleep. He was in a coffin, a smooth cold coffin. On a marble slab with polished tiles and the glint of chrome at the far end of a tunnel. He heard de Lisle muttering to him in kindly moderation and Jenny Pargiter’s sobbing like the moan of every woman he had left; he heard the fatherly tones of Meadowes exhorting him to charity and the cheerful whistling of unencumbered people. Then Meadowes and Pargiter slipped away, lost to other funerals, and only de Lisle remained, and only de Lisle’s voice offered any comfort.

‘My dear fellow,’ he was saying, as he peered curiously downward, ‘I dropped in to say goodbye, but if you’re going to take a bath, you might at least take off that dreadful suit.’

* * *

‘Is it Thursday?’

De Lisle had taken a napkin from the rail and was soaking it under the hot tap.

‘Wednesday. Wednesday as ever was. Cocktail time.’

He bent over him and began gently dabbing the blood from his face.

‘That football field. Where you saw him. Where he took Pargiter. Tell me how I get there.’

‘Keep still. And don’t talk or you’ll wake the neighbours.’

With the gentlest possible movements he continued touching away the caked blood. Freeing his right hand Turner cautiously felt in the pocket of his jacket for the gunmetal key. It was still there.

‘Have you ever seen this before?’

‘No. No, I haven’t. Nor was I in the greenhouse at 3 a.m. on the morning of the second. But how

like

the Foreign Office,’ he said, standing back and critically surveying his handiwork, ‘to send a bull to catch a matador. You won’t mind my reclaiming my dinner jacket, will you?’

‘Why did Bradfield ask me?’

‘Ask you what?’

‘To dinner. To meet Siebkron. Why did he invite me on Tuesday?’

‘Brotherly love; what else?’

‘What’s in that despatch box that Bradfield’s so frightened of?’

‘Poisonous snakes.’

‘That key wouldn’t open it?’

‘No.’

De Lisle sat down on the edge of the bath. ‘You shouldn’t be doing this,’ he said. ‘I know what you’ll tell me: somebody had to get their hands dirty. Just don’t expect me to be pleased it’s you. You’re not just

somebody

: that’s your trouble. Leave it to the people who were born with blinkers.’ His grey, tender eyes were shadowed with concern. ‘It is totally absurd,’ he declared. ‘People crack up every day under the strain of being saints. You’re cracking up under the strain of being a pig.’

* * *

‘Why doesn’t he go? Why does he hang around?’

‘They’ll be asking that about you tomorrow.’

Turner was stretched out on de Lisle’s long sofa. He held a whisky in his hand and his face was covered in yellow antiseptic from de Lisle’s extensive medicine chest. His canvas bag lay in a corner of the room. De Lisle sat at his harpsichord, not playing it but stroking the keys. It was an eighteenth-century piece, satinwood, and the top was bleached by tropical suns.

‘Do you take that thing everywhere?’

‘I had a violin once. It fell to pieces in Leopoldville. The glue melted. It’s awfully hard,’ he observed dryly, ‘to pursue culture when the glue melts.’

‘If Leo’s so damn clever, why doesn’t he go?’

‘Perhaps he likes it here. He’d be the first, I must say.’

‘And if

they’

re so damned clever, why don’t they take him away?’

‘Perhaps they don’t know he’s on the loose.’

‘What did you say?’

‘I said perhaps they don’t know he’s run for it. I’m not a spy, I’m afraid, but I am human and I do know Leo. He’s extremely perverse. I can’t imagine for a moment he would do exactly what they told him. If there is a “they”, which I doubt. He wasn’t a

natural

servant.’

Turner said, ‘I try all the time to force him into the mould. He won’t fit.’

De Lisle struck a couple of notes with his finger.

‘Tell me, what do you

want

him to be? A goodie or a baddie? Or do you just want the freedom of the search? You want

something

, don’t you? Because anything’s better than nothing. You’re like those beastly students: you can’t stand a vacuum.’

Turner had closed his eyes and was lost in thought.

‘I expect he’s dead. That would be very macabre.’

‘He wasn’t dead this morning, was he?’ Turner said.

‘And you don’t like him to be in limbo. It annoys you. You want him to land or take off. There are no

shades

for you, are there? I suppose that’s the fun of searching for extremists: you search for their convictions, is that it?’

‘He’s still on the run,’ Turner continued. ‘Who’s he running

from

? Us or them?’

‘He could be on his own.’

‘With fifty stolen box files? Oh sure. Sure.’

De Lisle examined Turner over the top of the harpsichord.

‘You complement one another. I look at you and I think of Leo. You’re Saxon. Big hands, big feet, big heart and that lovely reason that grapples with ideals. Leo’s the other way round. He’s a performer. He wears our clothes, uses our language but he’s only half tamed. I suppose I’m on your side, really: you and I are the concert audience.’ He closed the harpsichord. ‘We’re the ones who glimpse, and reach, and fall back. There’s a Leo in all of us but he’s usually dead by the time we’re twenty.’

‘What are you then?’

‘Me? Oh, reluctantly, a conductor.’ Standing up, he carefully locked the keyboard with a small brass key from his chain. ‘I can’t even play the thing,’ he said, tapping the bleached lid with his elegant fingers. ‘I tell myself I will one day; I’ll take lessons or get a book. But I don’t really care: I’ve learnt to live with being half-finished. Like most of us.’

‘Tomorrow’s Thursday,’ Turner said. ‘If they don’t know he’s defected, they’ll be expecting him to turn up, won’t they?’

‘I suppose so,’ de Lisle yawned. ‘But then they know where to go, don’t they, whoever they are? And you don’t. That is something of a drawback.’

‘It might not be.’

‘Oh.’

‘We know where

you

saw him, at least, that Thursday afternoon, don’t we, when he was supposed to be at the Ministry? Same place as he took Pargiter. Seems quite a hunting-ground for him.’

De Lisle stood very still, the keychain still in his hand.

‘It’s no good telling you not to go, I suppose?’

‘No.’

‘Asking you? You’re acting against Bradfield’s instructions.’

‘Even so.’

‘And you’re sick. All right. Go and look for your untamed half. And if you

do

find that file, we shall expect you to return it unopened.’

And that, quite suddenly, was an order.

14

Thursday’s Child

The weather on the plateau was stolen from other seasons and other places. It was a sea wind from March which sang in the wire netting, bending the tufts of coarse grass and crashing into the forest behind him; and if some mad aunt had planted a monkey-puzzle in the sandy earth, Turner could have hopped straight down the path and caught the trolley-bus to Bournemouth Square. It was the frost of November whose icy pipes encased the bracken stems; for there the cold had hidden from the wind and it gripped like arctic water at his ankles; the frost of a stone crevice on a north face, when only fear will set your hands to work, and life is treasured because it is won. The last strips of an Oxford sun lay bravely dying on the empty playing-field; and the sky was a Yorkshire evening in autumn, black and billowing and fringed with grime. The trees were curved from childhood, bent by the blustering wind, Mickie Crabbe’s boyhood bent at the taps in the washroom, and when the gusts had gone they waited still, backs arched for the next assault.

The cuts on his face were burning raw and his pale eyes were bright with sleepless pain. He waited, staring down the hill. Far below to his right lay the river, and for once the wind had silenced it, and the barges called in vain. A car was climbing slowly towards him; a black Mercedes, Cologne registration, woman driver; and did not slow down as it passed. On the other side of the wire, a new hut was shuttered and padlocked. A rook had settled on the roof and the wind tugged at its feathers. A Renault, French diplomatic registration, woman driver, one male passenger: Turner noted the number in his black book. His script was stiff and childish, and the letters came to him unnaturally. He must have hit back after all, for two knuckles on his right hand were badly cut, as if he had punched an open mouth and caught the front teeth. Harting’s handwriting was neat, rounding the rough corners, but Turner’s was big and downright, promising collision.

‘You are both

movers

, you and Leo,’ de Lisle had said some time last night, as they sat in their deep armchairs. ‘Bonn is stationary but you are movers . . . You are fighting one another, but it is you against us . . . The opposite of love is not hate but apathy . . . You must come to terms with apathy.’

‘For Christ’s sake,’ Turner complained.

‘This is your stop,’ de Lisle had said, opening the car door for him. ‘And if you’re not back by tomorrow morning I shall tell the coastguards.’

He had bought a spanner in Bad Godesberg, a monkey wrench, heavy at the head, and it lay like a lead weight against his hip. A Volkswagen bus, dark grey, Registration SU, full of children, stopping at the changing hut. Their noise came at him suddenly, a flock of birds racing with the wind, a tattered jingle of laughter and complaint. Someone blew a whistle. The sun hit them low down, like torch beams shining along a corridor. The hut swallowed them. ‘I have never known anyone,’ de Lisle had cried in despair, ‘make such a meal of his disadvantages.’

He drew back quickly behind the tree. One Opel Rekord; two men. Registration Bonn. The spanner nudged him as he wrote. The men were wearing hats and overcoats and were professionally without expression. The side windows were of smoked glass. The car continued, but at a walking pace. He saw their blank blond faces turned towards him, twin moons in the artificial dark.

Your

teeth? Turner wondered. Was it your teeth I knocked in? I can’t tell you apart. Trust you to come to the ball. All the way up the hill, they could not have touched ten miles an hour. A van passed, followed by two lorries. Somewhere a clock chimed; or was it a school bell? Or Angelus, or Compline, or sooty sheep in the Dales, or the ring of the ferry from the river? He would never hear it again; yet there is no truth, as Mr Crail would say, that cannot be confirmed. No, my child; but the sins of others are a sacrifice to God. Your sacrifice. The rook had left the roof. The sun had gone. A little Citroën was wandering into sight. A

deux chevaux

, dirty as fog, with one bashed wing, one illegible number plate, one driver hidden in the shadow, and one headlight flashing on and off and one horn blaring for the hunt. The Opel had disappeared. Hurry, moons, or you will miss His coming. The wheels jerk like dislocated limbs as the little car turns off the road and bumps towards him over the frozen mud ruts of the timber track, the pert tail rocking on its axle. He hears the blare of dance music as the door opens, and his mouth is dry from the tablets, and the cuts on his face are a screen of twigs. One day, when the world is free, his fevered mind assured him, clouds will detonate as they collide and God’s angels will fall down dazed for the whole world to look at. Silently he dropped the spanner back into his pocket.

* * *

She was standing not ten yards away, her back towards him, quite indifferent to the wind, or the children who now burst upon the playground.

She was staring down the hill. The engine was still running, shaking the car with inner pains. A wiper juddered uselessly over the grimy windscreen. For an hour she barely moved.

For an hour she waited with oriental stillness, heeding nothing but whoever would not come. She stood like a statue, growing taller as the light left her.

The wind dragged at her coat. Once her hand rose to gather in the errant strands of hair, and once she walked to the end of the timber track to look down into the river valley, in the direction of Königswinter; then slowly returned, lost in thought, and Turner dropped to his knees behind the trees, praying that the shadows protected him.

Her patience broke. Getting noisily back into the car she lit a cigarette and slapped the horn with her open hand. The children forgot their game and grinned at the hoarse burp of the exhausted battery. The silence returned.

The windscreen wiper had stopped but the engine was still running and she was revving it to encourage the heater. The windows were misting up. She opened her handbag and took out a mirror and a lipstick.

She was leaning back in the seat, eyes closed, listening to dance music, one hand gently beating time on the steering wheel. Hearing a car, she opened the door and looked idly out, but it was only the black Rekord going slowly down the hill again and though the moons were turned towards her, she was quite indifferent to their interest.

The playing-field was empty. The shutters were closed on the changing hut. Turning on the overhead lamp, she read the time by her watch, but by then the first lights were coming up in the valley and the river was lost in the low mist of dusk. Turner stepped heavily on to the path and pulled open the passenger door.

* * *

‘Waiting for someone?’ he asked and sat down beside her, closing the door quickly so that the light went out again. He switched off the wireless.

‘I thought you’d gone,’ she said hotly, ‘I thought my husband had got rid of you.’ Fear, anger, humiliation seized hold of her. ‘You’ve been spying on me all the time! Crouching in the bushes like a detective! How dare you? You vulgar, bloody little man!’ She drew back her clenched fist and perhaps she hesitated when she saw the mess his face was in, but it wouldn’t have made much difference because at the same moment Turner hit her very hard across the mouth so that her head jerked back against the pillar with a snap. Opening his door he walked round the car, pulled her out and hit her again with his open hand.

‘We’re going for a walk,’ he said, ‘and we’ll talk about your vulgar bloody lover.’

He led her along the timber path to the crest of the hill. She walked quite willingly, holding his arm with both her hands, head down, crying silently.

* * *

They were looking down on to the Rhine. The wind had fallen. Already above them, the early stars drifted like sparks of phosphorus on a gently rocking sea. Along the river the lights kindled in series, faltering at the moment of their birth and then miraculously living, growing to small fires fanned by the black night breeze. Only the river’s sounds reached them; the chugging of the barges and the nursery chime of the clocks telling off the quarters. They caught the mouldering smell of the Rhine itself, felt its cold breath upon their hands and cheeks.

‘It began as a dare.’

She stood apart from him, gazing into the valley, her arms clutching round her body as if she were holding a towel.

‘He won’t come any more. I’ve had it. I know that.’

‘Why won’t he?’

‘Leo never

said

things. He was far too much of a puritan.’ She lit a cigarette. ‘Because he’ll never stop searching, that’s why.’

‘What for?’

‘What do any of us look for? Parents, children, a woman.’ She turned to face him. ‘Go on,’ she challenged. ‘Ask the rest.’

Turner waited.

‘When intimacy took place, isn’t that what you want to know? I’d have slept with him that same night if he’d asked me, but he didn’t get round to it because I’m Rawley’s wife and he knew that good men were scarce. I mean he knew he

had

to survive. He was a creep, don’t you realise? He’d have charmed the feathers off a goose.’ She broke off. ‘I’m a fool to tell you anything.’

‘You’d be a bigger fool not to. You’re in big trouble,’ Turner said, ‘in case you don’t know.’

‘I can’t remember when I haven’t been. How else do I beat the system? We were two old tarts and we fell in love.’

* * *

She was sitting on a bench, playing with her gloves.

‘It was a buffet. A bloody Bonn buffet with lacquered duck and dreadful Germans. Someone’s welcome to someone. Someone’s farewell. Americans I should think. Mr and Mrs Somebody the Third. Some dynastic feast. It was appallingly provincial.’ Her voice was her own, swift and falsely confident, but for all her efforts it still possessed that note of hard-won dexterity which Turner had heard in British diplomatic wives all over the world: a voice to talk through silences, cover embarrassments, retrieve offences; a voice that was neither particularly cultured nor particularly sophisticated but, like a nanny in pursuit of lost standards, doggedly trod its course. ‘We’d come straight from Aden and we’d been here exactly a year. Before that we were in Peking and now we were in Bonn. Late October: Karfeld’s October. Things had just hotted up. In Aden we’d been bombed, in Peking we were mobbed and now we were going to be burned in the Market Place. Poor Rawley: he seems to attract humiliation. He was a prisoner of war as well, you know. There ought to be a name for him: the humiliated generation.’

‘He’d love you for that,’ said Turner.

‘He loves me without it.’ She paused. ‘The funny thing is, I’d never noticed him before. I thought he was just a rather dull little . . . temporary. The prissy little man who played the organ in Chapel and smoked those filthy cigars at cocktail parties . . . Nothing there . . . Empty. And that night, the moment he came in, the moment he appeared at the doorway I felt him choose me and I thought: “Look out. Air raid.” He came straight over to me. “Hullo, Hazel.” He’d never called me Hazel in my life and I thought: “You cheeky devil, you’ll have to work for this.” ’

‘Good of you to take the risk,’ said Turner.

‘He began to talk. I don’t know what about; I never much noticed

what

he said; any more than he did. Karfeld I suppose. Riots. All the stamping and shouting. But I noticed

him

. For the first time, I really did.’ She fell silent. ‘And I thought, “Hoi: where have you been all my life?” It was like looking in an old bank book and finding you’ve got a credit instead of an overdraft. He was

alive

.’ She laughed. ‘Not like you a bit.

You’

re about the deadest thing I ever met.’

Turner might have hit her again, were it not for the awful familiarity of her mockery.

‘It was the tension you noticed first. He was

patrolling

himself. His language, his manners . . . it was all a fake. He was on guard. He listened to his own voice the way he listened to yours, getting the cadence right, putting the adverbs in the right order. I tried to place him: who would I

think

you were if I didn’t

know

? South American German? . . . Argentine trade delegate? One of those. Glossy latinised Hun.’ Again she broke off, lost in recollection – ‘He had those velvety German endbits of language and he used them to trim the balance of every sentence. I made him talk about himself, where he lived, who cooked for him, how he spent his weekends. The next thing I knew, he was giving me advice. Diplomatic advice: where to buy cheap meat. The Post Report. The Dutchman was best for this, the Naafi for that; butter from the Economat, nuts from the Commissary. Like a woman. He had a thing about herbal teas; Germans are mad about digestion. Then he offered to sell me a hair-dryer. Why are you laughing?’ she asked in sudden fury.

‘Was I?’

‘He knew some way of getting a discount: twenty-five per cent, he said. He’d compared all the prices, he knew all the models.’

‘He’d been looking at your hair too.’

She rounded on him: ‘You keep your place,’ she snapped. ‘You’re not within shouting distance of him.’

He hit her again, a long swinging blow deep into the flesh of the cheek and she said, ‘You bastard,’ and went very pale in the darkness, shivering with anger.

‘Get on with it.’

At last she began again: ‘So I said yes. I was fed up anyway. Rawley was buried with a French Counsellor in the corner; everyone else was fighting for food at the buffet. So I said yes, I

would

like a hair-dryer. At twenty-five per cent off. I was afraid I hadn’t got the money on me; would he take a cheque? I might just as well have said, yes I’ll go to bed with you. That was the first time I saw him smile; he didn’t smile often as a rule. His whole face was lit up. I sent him to get some food, and I watched him all the way, wondering what it was going to be like. He had that egg walk . . .

Eiertanz

they call it here . . . just like in Chapel really, but

harder

. The Germans were crowding the bar, fighting for the asparagus, and he just darted between them and came out with two plates loaded with food and the knives and forks sticking out of his handkerchief pocket; grinning like mad. I’ve got a brother called Andrew who plays scrum-half at rugger. You could hardly have told the difference. From then on, I didn’t worry. Some foul Canadian was trying to get me to listen to a lecture on agriculture and I bit his head off. They’re about the only ones left who still believe in it all, the Canadians. They’re like the British in India.’

Hearing some sound she turned her head sharply and stared back along the path. The tree trunks were black against the low horizon; the wind had dropped; a night dew had damped their clothes.

‘He won’t come. You said so yourself. Get on with it. Hurry.’

‘We sat on a stair and he started talking about himself again. He didn’t need any prompting. It just came out . . . it was fascinating. About Germany in the early days after the war. “Only the rivers were whole.” I never knew whether he was translating German or using his imagination or just repeating what he’d picked up.’ She hesitated, and again glanced down the path. ‘How at night the women built by arclight . . . passing stones as if they were putting out a fire . . . How he learnt to sleep in a fifteen hundredweight using a fire extinguisher as a pillow. He did a little act, putting his head on one side and twisting his mouth to show his stiff neck. Bedroom games.’ She stood up abruptly. ‘I’m going back. If he finds the car empty, he’ll run away; he’s as nervous as a kitten.’

He followed her to the timber track, but the plateau was deserted except for the Opel Rekord parked in the lay-by with its lights out.

‘Sit in the car,’ she said. ‘Never mind them.’ For the first time she really noticed the marks on his face by the interior light and she drew in her breath sharply.

‘Who did that?’

‘They’ll do it to Leo if they find him first.’

* * *

She was leaning back in the seat, her eyes closed. Someone had torn the cloth on the roof and it hung down in beggar’s shreds. There was a child’s driving wheel on the floor with a plastic tube attached to it and Turner pushed it out of the way with his foot.

‘Sometimes I thought: “You’re empty. You’re just imitating life.” But you daren’t think that of a lover. He was a negotiator, an actor, I suppose. He was caught between all those worlds: Germany and England, Königswinter and Bonn, Chapel and the discounts, the first floor and the ground floor. You can’t expect anyone to fight all those battles and stay alive. Sometimes he just served us,’ she explained simply. ‘Or me. Like a headwaiter. We were all his customers; whatever he wanted. He didn’t live, he survived. He’s always survived. Till now.’ She lit another cigarette. The car was very cold. She tried to start the engine and put the heater on, but the ignition failed.

‘After that first evening it was all over bar bed. Rawley came and found me and we were the last to go. He’d been having a row with Lésère about something and he was pleased at having come off best. Leo and I were sitting on the stairs, drinking coffee, and Rawley just came over and kissed me on the cheek. What was that?’

‘Nothing.’

‘I saw a light down the hill.’

‘It was a bicycle crossing the road. It’s gone now.’

‘I hate him kissing me in public; he knows I can’t stop him. He never does it in private. “Come on, my dear, it’s time to go.” Leo stood up when he saw him coming, but Rawley didn’t even notice him. He took me over to Lésère. “This is the person you should really apologise to,” he said. “She’s been sitting alone on the stairs all evening.” We were going out of the door and Rawley stopped to collect his coat, and there was Leo, holding it for him.’ She smiled, and it was the smile of real love, rejoicing at the memory. ‘He didn’t seem to notice me any more. Rawley turned his back on him and put his arms into the sleeves and I actually saw Leo’s own arms stiffen and his fingers curl. Mind you, I was glad. I

wanted

Rawley to behave like that.’ She shrugged. ‘I was hooked,’ she said. ‘I’d been looking for a fly and now I’d got one, feathers and all. Next day I looked him up in the Red Book. You know what that is by now: nothing. I rang up Mary Crabbe and asked her about him. Just for fun. “I ran into an extraordinary little man last night,” I said. Mary had a fit. “My dear, he’s poison. Keep

right

away from him. He dragged Mickie to a night club once and got him into

awful

trouble. Mercifully,” she said, “his contract’s running out in December and he’ll be gone.” I tried Sally Askew, she’s terrifically worthy. I could have died’ – she broke out laughing, then drew her chin down into her chest to copy the sonorous tones of the Economic Minister’s wife: ‘ “A useful bachelor, if Huns are in short supply.” They often are here, you know; there are more of us than them. Too many diplomats chasing too few Germans: that’s Bonn. The trouble was, Sally said, the Germans were getting rather old school again about Leo’s kind, so she and Aubrey had reluctantly given him up. “He’s an unconscious irritant, my dear, if you know what I mean.” I was absolutely thrilled. I put down the receiver and I shot into the drawing-room and I wrote him a great long letter about absolutely nothing.’

She tried the engine again but it didn’t even cough. She gathered her coat more tightly round her.

‘Cor,’ she whispered. ‘Come on, Leo. You don’t half put a strain on friendship.’

In the black Opel a tiny light went on and off like a signal. Turner said nothing, but his thick fingertips lightly touched the spanner in his pocket.

* * *

‘A schoolgirl letter. Thank you for being so attentive. Sorry for claiming all your time and please remember about the hair-dryer. Then a lovely long made-up story about how I went shopping in the

Spanischer Garten

and an old lady dropped a two-mark piece into an orange-crate and no one could find it and she said it was payment because she’d left it in the shop. I delivered the letter to the Embassy myself and he rang up that afternoon. There were two models, he said, the more expensive one had different speeds and you didn’t need an adapter.’

‘Transformer.’

‘What about colour? I just listened. He said it would be very difficult to make a decision for me, what with the speeds and the colour. Couldn’t we meet and discuss it? It was a Thursday and we met up here. He said he came up every Thursday to get some fresh air and watch the children. I didn’t believe him, but I was very happy.’

‘Is that all he said about coming up here?’

‘He said once they owed him time.’

‘Who did?’

‘The Embassy. Something Rawley had taken away from him and given to someone else. A job. So he came up here instead.’ She shook her head in real admiration. ‘He’s as stubborn as a mule,’ she declared. ‘ “They owe it me,” he said, “so I take it. And that’s the only way I live.” ’

‘I thought you said he didn’t say things?’

‘Not the best things.’

He waited.

‘We just walked and looked at the river and on the way back we held hands. As we were leaving he said, “I forgot to show you the hair-dryer.” So I said, “What a pity. We’ll have to meet here next Thursday too, won’t we.” He was

enormously

shocked.’ She had a special voice for him as well: it was both mocking and possessive and it seemed to exclude Turner rather than draw him in. ‘ “My

dear

Mrs Bradfield –” I said, “If you come next week I’ll let you call me Hazel.” I’m a whore,’ she explained. ‘That’s what you’re thinking.’

‘And after that?’

‘Every Thursday. Here. He parked his car down the lane and I left mine in the road. We were lovers but we hadn’t been to bed. It was very grown-up. Sometimes he talked; sometimes he didn’t. He kept showing me his house across the river as if he wanted to sell it me. We’d go all along the path from one little hilltop to another so that we could see it. I teased him once. “You’re the devil. You’re showing me the whole kingdom.” He didn’t care for that. He never forgot anything, you see. That was the survivor in him. He didn’t like me to talk about evil, or pain or anything. He knew all

that

inside out.’

‘And the rest?’

He saw her face tilt and the smile break.

‘Rawley’s bed. A Friday. There’s an avenger in Leo, not far down. He always knew when Rawley was going away: he used to check in the Travel Offfice, look at the Travel Clerk’s bookings. He’d say to me: he’s in Hanover next week . . . he’s in Bremen.’

‘What did Bradfield go there for?’

‘Oh God. Visiting the Consulates . . . Leo asked me the same question: how should

I

know? Rawley never tells

me

anything. Sometimes I thought he was following Karfeld round Germany . . . he always seemed to go where the rallies were.’

‘And from then on?’

She shrugged. ‘Yes. From then on. Whenever we could.’

‘Did Bradfield know?’

‘Oh God. Know? Don’t know? You’re worse than the Germans. It was in between. You want things spelt out for you, don’t you? Some things can’t be. Some things aren’t true till they’re said. Rawley knows that better than anyone.’

‘Christ,’ Turner whispered. ‘You give yourself all the chances,’ and he remembered he had said the same thing to Bradfield three days ago.

She stared ahead of her through the windscreen.

‘What are people

worth

? Children, husbands, careers. You go under and they call it sacrifice. You survive and they call you a bitch. Chop yourself in bits. For what? I’m not God. I can’t hold them all up on my shoulders. I live for them; they live for someone else. We’re all saints. We’re all fools. Why don’t we live for ourselves and call

that

service for a change?’

‘

Did he know?

’

He had seized her arm.

‘Did he!’

The tears trickled sideways over the bridge of her nose. She wiped them away.

‘Rawley’s a diplomat,’ she said at last. ‘The art of the possible, that’s Rawley. The limited aim, the trained mind. “Let’s not get overheated. Let’s not put a name to things. Let’s not negotiate without knowing what we want to achieve.” He can’t . . . he can’t go mad, it isn’t in him. He can’t live for anything. Except me.’

‘But he knew.’

‘I should think so,’ she said wearily. ‘I never asked him. Yes, he knew.’

‘Because you made him renew that contract, didn’t you. Last December. You worked on him.’

‘Yes. That was awful. That was quite awful. But it had to be done,’ she explained, as if she were referring to a higher cause of which they were both aware. ‘Or he’d have sent Leo away.’

‘And that was what Leo wanted. That’s why he picked you up.’

‘Rawley married me for my money. For what he could get out of me,’ she said. ‘He stayed with me for love. Does that satisfy you?’

Turner did not reply.

‘He never put it into words. I told you. He never said the big things. “One more year is all I need. Just one year, Hazel. One year to love you, one year to get what they owe me. One year from December and then I’ll go. They don’t realise how much they need me.” So I invited him for drinks. When Rawley was there. It was early on, before the gossip started. We were just the three of us; I made Rawley come back early. “Rawley, this is Leo Harting, he works for you and he plays the organ in Chapel.” “Of course. We’ve met,” he said. We talked about nothing. Nuts from the Commissary. Spring leave. What it was like in Königswinter in the summer. “Mr Harting has asked us to dinner,” I said. “Isn’t he kind?” Next week we went to Königswinter. He gave us all the bits and pieces: ratafia biscuits with the sweet, halva with the coffee. That was all.’

‘What was all?’

‘Oh Christ, can’t you see? I’d shown him! I’d shown Rawley what I wanted him to buy me!’

* * *

It was quite still now. The rooks had perched like sentinels on slowly rocking branches, and there was no wind any more to stir their feathers.

‘Are they like horses?’ she asked. ‘Do they sleep standing up?’

She turned her head to look at him but he did not reply.

‘He hated silence,’ she said dreamily. ‘It frightened him. That’s why he liked music; that’s why he liked his house . . . it was full of noise. Not even the dead could have slept there. Let alone Leo.’

She smiled remembering.

‘He didn’t live in it, he manned it. Like a ship. All night he’d be hopping up and down fixing a window or a shutter or something. His whole life was like that. Secret fears, secret memories; things he would never tell but expected you to know about.’ She yawned. ‘He won’t come now,’ she said. ‘He hated the dark too.’

‘Where is he?’ Turner said urgently. ‘What’s he doing?’

She said nothing.

‘Listen: he whispered to you. In the night he boasted, told you how he made the world turn for him. How clever he was, the tricks he played, the people he deceived!’

‘You’ve got him wrong. Utterly wrong.’

‘Then tell me!’

‘There’s nothing to tell. We were pen friends, that’s all. He was reporting from another world.’

‘

What

world? Bloody Moscow and the fight for peace?’

‘I was right. You are vulgar. You want all the lines joined up and all the colours flat. You haven’t got the guts to face the half-tones.’

‘Has he?’

She seemed to have put him out of her mind. ‘Let’s go, for God’s sake,’ she said shortly, as if Turner had been keeping her waiting.

He had to push the car quite a distance along the track before it started. As they careered down the hill, he saw the Opel pull out from the lay-by and hurriedly take up its position thirty yards behind them. She drove to Remagen, to one of the big hotels along the waterfront run by an old lady who patted her arm as she sat down. Where was the little man? she asked,

der nette kleine Herr

who was always so jolly and smoked cigars and spoke such excellent German.

‘He talked it with an accent,’ she explained to Turner. ‘A slight English accent. It was something he’d taught himself.’

The sun room was quite empty except for a young couple in the corner. The girl had long, blonde hair. They stared at him oddly because of the cuts on his face. From their window table Turner saw the Opel park in the esplanade below them. The number plate had changed but the moons were just the same. His head was aching terribly. He had not taken more than half his whisky before he wanted to vomit. He asked for water. The old lady brought a bottle of local health water and told him all about it. They had used it in both wars, she explained, when the hotel was a first-aid post for those who were wounded while trying to cross the river.

‘He was going to meet me here last Friday,’ she said. ‘And take me home to dinner. Rawley was leaving for Hanover. Leo cried off at the last minute.’

* * *

‘On the Thursday afternoon he was late. I didn’t bother. Sometimes he didn’t turn up at all. Sometimes he worked. It was different. Just the last month or so. He’d changed. I thought at first he’d got another woman. He was always slipping off to places –’

‘What places?’

‘Berlin once. Hamburg. Hanover. Stuttgart. Rather like Rawley. So he said anyway; I was never sure. He wasn’t strong on truth. Not your kind.’

‘He arrived late. Last Thursday.

Come on!

’

‘He’d had lunch with Praschko.’

‘At the Maternus,’ Turner breathed.

‘They’d had a

discussion

. That was another Leo-ism. It didn’t commit you. Like the Passive Voice, that was another favourite. A

discussion

had taken place. He didn’t say what about. He was preoccupied. Broody. I knew him better than to try and jerk him out of it so we just walked around. With

them

watching us. And I knew this was it.’

‘This was what?’

‘This was the year he’d wanted. He’d found it, whatever it was, and now he didn’t know what to do with it.’ She shrugged. ‘And by then, I’d found it too. He never realised. If he’d lifted a finger I’d have packed and gone with him.’ She was looking at the river. ‘Not children, husbands or any bloody thing would have stopped me. Not that he would have wanted me.’

‘

What’

s he found?’ Turner whispered.

‘I don’t know. He found it and he talked to Praschko and Praschko was no good. Leo knew he wouldn’t be any good; but he had to go back and find out. He had to make sure he was on his own.’

‘How do you know that? How much did he tell you?’

‘Less than he thought, perhaps. He assumed I was part of him and that was that.’ She shrugged. ‘I was a friend and friends don’t ask questions. Do they?’

‘Go on.’

‘Rawley was going to Hanover, he said; Friday night Rawley would go to Hanover. So Leo would give me dinner at Königswinter. A special dinner. I said, “To celebrate?” “No. No, Hazel, not a

celebration

.” But everything was special now, he said, and there wasn’t much time any more. He wouldn’t be getting another contract. No more years after December. So why not have a good dinner once in a while? And he looked at me in a frightfully shifty way and we plodded round the course again, him leading. We’d meet in Remagen, he said; we’d meet here. And then: “I say, Hazel, what the devil is Rawley

up to

, look here, in Hanover? I mean, two days before the rally?” ’

She had a ready-made face for Leo as well, a frown, a heavy German frown of exaggerated sincerity with which she surely teased him when they were together.

‘What

was

Rawley up to, then?’ Turner demanded.

‘Nothing as it turned out. He didn’t go. And Leo must have got wind of that, because he cried off.’

‘When?’

‘He rang up on Friday morning.’

‘What did he say?

Exactly

what did he say?’

‘Exactly, he said he couldn’t make it that night. He didn’t give a reason. Not a real one. He was awfully sorry; there was something he had to do. It had become urgent. It was his boardroom voice: “Awfully sorry, Hazel.” ’

‘That was all?’

‘I said all right.’ She was acting against tragedy. ‘And good luck.’ She shrugged. ‘I haven’t heard from him since. He disappeared and I was worried. I rang his house day and night. That’s why you came to dinner. I thought you might know something. You didn’t. Any fool could see that.’

The blonde girl was standing up. She wore a long suit of fitted suede and she had to pull tightly at the crotch to straighten the sharp creases. The old lady was writing a bill. Turner called to her and asked for more water and she left the room to get it.

‘Ever seen this key?’

Clumsily he drew it from the official buff envelope and laid it on the tablecloth before her. She picked it up and held it cautiously in her palm.

‘Where did you get this from?’

‘Königswinter. It was in a blue suit.’

‘The suit he wore on Thursday,’ she said examining it.

‘It’s one you gave him, is it?’ he asked with unconcealed distaste. ‘Your house-key?’

‘Perhaps it’s the one I wouldn’t give him,’ she replied at last. ‘That was the only thing I wouldn’t do for him.’

‘Go on.’

‘I suppose that’s what he wanted from Pargiter. That bitch Mary Crabbe told me he’d had a fling with

her.

’ She stared down at the esplanade, at the waiting Opel parked in the shadow between the lights; then across the river to Leo’s side.

‘He said the Embassy had got something that belonged to him. Something from long ago. “They

owe

me, Hazel.” He wouldn’t say what it was. Memories, he said. It was to do with long ago, and I could get him the key so that he could take it back. I told him: “Talk to them. Tell Rawley, he’s human.” He said, No, Rawley was the last person on earth he could talk to. It wasn’t anything valuable. It was locked away and they didn’t even know they had it. You’re going to interrupt. Don’t. Just listen. I’m telling you more than you deserve.’

She drank some whisky.

‘About the third time . . . in

our

house. He lay in bed and just went on about it: “Nothing

bad,

” he said, “nothing

political,

but something owed.” If he was Duty Officer it wouldn’t matter, but he wasn’t allowed to do Duty, being what he was. There was one key, they’d never miss it, no one knew how many there were anyway. One key he must have.’ She broke off. ‘Rawley fascinated him. He loved his dressing-room. All the trappings of a gent. He loved to

see.

Sometimes that’s what I was to him: Rawley’s wife. The cuff links, the Edward Lear . . . He wanted to know all the backstairs things like who cleaned his shoes, where he had his suits made. That was when he played his card: while he was dressing. He pretended to remember what he’d been talking about all night. “I say, Hazel, look here.

You

could get me the key. When Rawley’s working late one night, couldn’t you? I mean, call on him, say you’d left something in the Assembly Room. It would be

frightfully

simple. It’s a different key,” he said. “It’s not like the others. Very easily recognised, Hazel.” That key,’ she remarked flatly handing it back to him. ‘ “You’re clever,” I said. “You’ll find a way.” ’

‘That was before Christmas?’

‘Yes.’

‘What a bloody fool I am,’ Turner whispered. ‘Jesus Christ!’

‘Why? What is it?’

‘Nothing.’ His eyes were bright with success. ‘Just for a moment, I forgot he was a thief, that’s all. I thought he’d copy that key, and he just stole it. Of course he would!’

‘He’s not a thief! He’s a man. He’s ten times the man you are.’

‘Oh sure, sure. You were big scale you two. I’ve heard all that crap, believe me. You lived in the big unspoken part of life, didn’t you? You were the artists, and Rawley was the poor bloody technician. You had souls, you two, you heard voices; Rawley just picked up the bits because he loved you. And all the time I thought they were sniggering about Jenny Pargiter. Christ Almighty! Poor sod,’ he said, looking out of the window. ‘Poor bastard. I’ll never like Bradfield, that’s for sure; but Christ, he has my full sympathy.’

Leaving some money on the table he followed her down the stone steps. She was frightened.

‘He never mentioned Margaret Aickman to you, I suppose? He was going to marry her, you know. She was the only woman he loved.’

‘He never loved anyone but me.’

‘But he didn’t mention her? He did to other people, you see. Everyone except you. She was his

big

love!’

‘I don’t believe it, I’ll never believe it!’

He pulled open the car door and leaned in after her. ‘You’re all right, aren’t you? You’ve touched the hem. He

loved

you. The whole bloody world can go to war as long as you have your little boy!’

‘Yes. I’ve touched the hem. He was real with me. I made him real. He’s real whatever he’s doing now. That was our time, and I’m not going to let you destroy it: you or anyone else. He found me.’

‘What else did he find?’

Miraculously, the car started.

‘He found me, and whatever he found down there was the other part of coming alive.’

‘

Down?

Down where? Where did he go? Tell me! You know! What was it he said to you?’

She drove away, not looking back, quite slowly, up the esplanade into the evening and the small lights.

* * *

The Opel drew out, preparing to follow her. Turner let it pass, then ran across the road and jumped into a taxi.

The Embassy car park was full, the guard was doubled at the gate. Once more, the Ambassador’s Rolls-Royce waited at the door like an ancient ship to bear him to the storm. As Turner ran up the steps, his raincoat flying behind him, he held the key ready in his hand.

15

The Glory Hole

Two Queen’s messengers stood at the desk, their black leather pouches hung like parachute harnesses over their regimental blazers.

‘Who’s Duty Officer?’ Turner snapped.

‘I thought you’d gone,’ said Gaunt. ‘Seven o’clock yesterday, that’s what –’

There was a creak of leather as the messengers hastily made room for him.

‘I want the keys.’

Gaunt saw the cuts on Turner’s face and his eyes opened wide.

‘Ring the Duty Officer.’ Turner picked up the receiver and offered it to him across the desk. ‘Tell him to come down with the keys. Now!’

Gaunt was protesting. The lobby swung a little and held still. Turner heard his silly Welsh bleat, half complaining, half flattering, and he grasped him roughly by the arm and pulled him into the dark corridor.

‘If you don’t do as I say, I’ll see they post the hell out of you for the rest of your natural life.’

‘The keys aren’t drawn, I tell you.’

‘Where are they?’

‘I’ve got them here. In the safe. But you can’t have them, not without a signature, you know that very well!’

‘I don’t want them. I want you to count them, that’s all. Count the bloody keys!’

The messengers, ostentatiously discreet, were talking to one another in awkward undertones, but Turner’s voice cut through them like an axe: ‘How many should there be?’

‘Forty-seven.’

Summoning the younger guard, Gaunt unlocked the safe that was built into the corner and drew out the familiar bunch of bright-cut brass keys. Overcome by curiosity, the two messengers watched while the square, miner’s fingers told off each key like a bead on the abacus. He counted them once and he counted them a second time, and he handed them to the boy who counted them again.

‘Well?’

‘Forty-six,’ said Gaunt grudgingly. ‘No doubt.’

‘Forty-six,’ the boy echoed. ‘One short.’

‘When were they last counted?’

‘ ’Tisn’t hardly possible to say,’ Gaunt muttered. ‘They’ve been going in and out for weeks.’

Turner pointed to the shining new grille that cut off the basement stairway.

‘How do I get down there?’

‘I told you. Bradfield has the key. It’s a riot gate, see. Guards don’t have the authority.’

‘How do the cleaners get down there then? What about the boilermen?’

‘The boiler-room’s separate access, now, ever since Bremen, see. They’ve put grilles down there as well. They can use the outside stairs but they can’t go no further than the boiler on account of being prevented.’ Gaunt was very scared.

‘There’s a fire escape . . . a service lift.’

‘Only the back staircase, but that’s locked too, see. Locked.’

‘And the keys?’

‘With Bradfield. Same as for the lift.’

‘Where does it lead from?’

‘Top floor.’

‘Up by your place?’

‘What of it then?’

‘Up by your place or not?’

‘Near.’

‘Show me!’

Gaunt looked down, looked at the boy, looked at Turner and then back at the boy again. Reluctantly he dropped the keys into the boy’s hand and without a word to the messengers led Turner quickly upstairs.

It might have been daytime. All the lights were on, doors open. Secretaries, clerks and diplomats, hastening down corridors, ignored them as they passed. The talk was of Brussels. The city’s name was whispered like a password. It lay on every tongue and was stammered out by every typewriter; it was cut into the white wax of the stencils and rung on every telephone. They climbed another flight to a short corridor that smelt of a swimming-pool. A draught of fresh air struck them from their left. The door ahead of them said ‘Chancery Guard Private’ and the label underneath, ‘Mr and Mrs J. Gaunt, British Embassy, Bonn.’

‘We don’t have to go in, do we?’

‘This is where he came and saw you? Friday evenings after choir? He came up here?’

Gaunt nodded.

‘What happened when he left? Did you see him out?’

‘He wouldn’t let me. “You stay there, my boy, and watch your telly, I’ll see myself off the premises.” ’

‘And that’s the door: the back staircase.’

He was pointing to his left where the draught came from.

‘It’s locked though, see. Hasn’t been opened for years.’

‘That’s the only way in?’

‘Straight down to the basement it goes. They were going to have a rubbish chute till the money ran out so they put stairs instead.’

The door was solid and unrelieved, with two stout locks that had not been disturbed for a long time. Shining a pencil torch on to the lintels, Turner gently fingered the wooden beading that ran down the two sides, then took a firm grip on the handle.

‘Come here. You’re his size. You try. Take the handle. Don’t turn it. Push. Push hard.’

The door yielded without a sound.

The air was suddenly very cold and stale; American air when the conditioners fail. They stood on a half landing. The stairs under them were very steep. A small window gave on to the Red Cross field. Directly below, the cowl of the canteen chimney puffed floodlit smoke into the darkness. The plaster was peeling in large blisters. They heard the drip of water. On the reverse side of the door post, the wood had been neatly sawn away. By the thin light of the torch they began their descent. The steps were of stone; a narrow strip of coconut matting ran down the centre. ‘Embassy Club this way,’ a very old poster ran. ‘All welcome.’ They caught the sound of a kettle bobbing on a ring and heard a girl’s voice reading back a passage of dictation: ‘While the official statement of the Federal Government describes the reason for the withdrawal as merely technical, even the most sober commentators . . .’ and instinctively they both stopped, heart in mouth, listening to the clear words precisely spoken into the stairwell.

‘It’s the ventilation,’ Gaunt whispered. ‘It’s coming through the shaft, see.’

‘Shut up.’

They heard de Lisle’s voice languidly correcting her. ‘

Moderate

,’ he said. ‘

Moderate

would be

much

better. Change

sober

to

moderate

, will you, my dear? We don’t want them to think we’re drowning our sorrows in drink.’

The girl giggled.

They must have reached the ground floor, for a bricked doorway stood ahead of them, and fragments of wet plaster lay on the linoleum. A makeshift noticeboard advertised vanished entertainments: the Embassy Players would present a Christmas performance of Gogol’s

Government Inspector.

A grand Commonwealth Children’s Party would be held in the Residence; names, together with details of any special dietary requirements, should be submitted to the Private Office by 10th December. The year was 1954 and the signature was Harting’s.

For a moment Turner fought with his sense of time and place, and almost lost. He heard the barges again and the chink of the glasses, the fall of soot and the creak of the rigging. The same throbbing, the same inner pulse beyond the register of sound.

‘What did you say?’ Gaunt asked.

‘Nothing.’

Giddy and confused, he led the way blindly into the nearest passageway, his head wildly beating.

‘You’re not well,’ said Gaunt. ‘Who did that to you then?’

They were in a second chamber occupied by nothing but an old lathe, the filings rusted at its base. There was a door in the further wall. He pushed it open, and for a moment, his composure left him as he drew back with a short cry of disgust, but it was only the iron bars of the new grille reaching from the ceiling to the floor, only the wet overalls hanging from the wire and the moisture pattering on the concrete. There was a stink of washday and half-burnt fuel; the fire had set a red glow trembling on the brickwork; small lights danced on the new steel. Nothing apocalyptic, he told himself, as he moved cautiously along the gangway towards the next door, just a night train in the war; a crowded compartment and we’re all asleep.

It was a steel door, flush against the plaster, a flood door deep below the water line, rusty at the frame and lintel with KEEP OUT done long ago in flaking Government paint. The wall on his left side had been painted white at some time, and he could see the scratches where the trolley had passed. The light above him was shielded with a wire basket and it laid dark fingers on his face. He fought recklessly for consciousness. The lagged water pipes which ran along the ceiling chugged and gurgled in their housings, and the stove behind the iron grille spat white sparks which turned small shadows on and off. Christ, he thought: it’s enough to power the

Queen Elizabeth

, it’s enough to brand an army of prisoners; it’s wasted on one lonely dream factory.

He had to fight with the key; he had to shake the lever handle hard before the lock would turn. Suddenly it had snapped like a stick and they heard the echo fly away and resound in distant rooms. Keep me here; oh God keep me here, he thought. Don’t change my nature or my life; don’t change the place or move the path that I’m following . . . There must have been a piece of grit beneath the door for it shrieked, then stopped and Turner had to force it with his whole body, force it against the water, while Gaunt the Welshman stood back, watching and lusting but not daring to touch. At first, fumbling for the switch, he saw only the darkness; then a single window thick with cobwebs come gloomily forward and it frightened him because he hated prison. It was high in the wall and arched like a brick oven and barred for security. Through its topmost panes he glimpsed the wet gravel of the car park. While he stood there watching and swaying, the beam of a headlight groped slowly along the ceiling, a prison spotlight searching for escapers, and the whole catacomb filled with the roar of a departing engine. An army blanket lay on the sill and he thought: you remembered to black out the window; you remembered the firewatching in London.

His hand found the light switch; it was domed like a woman’s breast, and when he pressed it down it thumped like a punch against his own body and the dust rolled longingly towards him over the black concrete.

‘They call it the Glory Hole,’ Gaunt whispered.

The trolley was in an alcove beside the desk. Files on top, stationery below, all in varying sizes, nicely crested, with long and standard envelopes to match, all laid out ready to hand. At the centre of the desk, next to the reading light, square on its felt pad and neatly covered with a grey plastic cape, lay the missing typewriter with the long carriage and beside it three or four tins of Dutch cigars. On a separate table, a thermos and a quantity of Naafi cups; the tea machine with the clock; on the floor a small electric fan in two tones of plastic, trained conveniently upon the desk to help dispel the unfortunate effects of damp; on the new chair with the rexine seat, a pink cushion partially embroidered by Miss Aickman. All these he recognised at a glance, dully, greeting them curtly as we greet old friends, while he stared beyond them at the great archive which lined the walls from floor to ceiling; at the slim black files each with a rusted loop and a rounded thumb-hole, some grey with bloom, some wrinkled and bent with damp, column after column in their black uniforms, veterans trained and waiting to be called.

He must have asked what they were, for Gaunt was whispering. No, he couldn’t suggest what they were. No. Not his place. No. They had been here longer than anyone could remember. Though some did say they were Jag files, the Judge Advocate General’s Department he meant, that’s what talkers said and the talkers said they came from Minden in lorries, just dumped here for living space they were, twenty years ago that must be now, all of twenty years, when the Occupation packed up. That’s all he could say really, he was sure; that’s all he’d happened to hear from the talkers, just overheard it by chance, for Gaunt was not a gossip, that was the one thing they

could

say about him. Oh

more

than twenty years . . . the lorries turned up one summer evening . . . Macmullen and someone else had spent half the night helping to unload them . . . Of course in

those

days it was thought the Embassy might need them . . . No, nobody had access, not these days, didn’t want it really; who would? Long ago, the odd Chancery officer would ask for the key and look something up but that was

long

ago, Gaunt couldn’t remember that at all, and no one had been down here for years, though Gaunt couldn’t say for sure, of course; he had to watch his words with Turner, he’d learnt that now, he was sure . . . They must have kept the key separate for a while, then added it to the Duty Officer’s bunch . . . But a while back now, Gaunt couldn’t say when, he had heard them talking about it; Marcus, one of the drivers, gone now; saying they weren’t Jag files at all but

Group

files, it was a specialist British contingent . . . His voice pattered on, urgent and conspiratorial, like an old woman in church. Turner was no longer listening. He had seen the map.

A plain map, printed in Polish.

It was pinned above the desk, pinned quite freshly into the damp plaster, in the place where some might put the portraits of their children. No major towns were marked, no national borders, no scale, no pretty arrows showing the magnetic variation: just the places where the camps had been. Neuengamme and Belsen in the north, Dachau, Mauthausen to the south, to the east, Treblinka, Sobibor, Majdanek, Belzec and Auschwitz; in the centre Ravensbrück, Sachsenhausen, Kulmhof and Gross Rosen.

‘They

owe

me,’ he thought suddenly. ‘They

owe

me.’ God in Heaven what a fool, what a plain, blundering, clumsy fool I have been. Leo, you thief, you came here to forage in your own dreadful childhood.

‘Go away. If I want you I’ll call you.’ Turner stared at Gaunt sightlessly, his right hand pressed against a shelf. ‘Don’t tell anyone. Bradfield, de Lisle, Crabbe . . . no one, do you understand.’

‘I won’t,’ Gaunt said.

‘I’m not here. I don’t exist. I never came in tonight. Do you understand.’

‘You ought to see a doctor,’ said Gaunt.

‘Fuck off.’

Pulling back the chair, he tipped the little cushion to the floor and sat down at the desk. Resting his chin in his hand, he waited for the room to steady. He was alone. He was alone like Harting, contraband smuggled in, living like Harting on borrowed time; hunting, like Harting, for a missing truth. There was a tap beside the window and he filled the tea machine and played with the knobs until it began to hiss. As he returned to the desk he nearly tripped over a green box. It was the size of a narrow briefcase, but stiff and rectangular, made of the kind of reinforced leather-cloth used for bridge-sets and shotgun cases. It had the Queen’s initials just beneath the handle and reinforced corners of thin steel; the locks had been ripped open and it was empty.

That’s what we’re all doing, isn’t it? Looking for something that isn’t there?

He was alone, with only the files for company and the stink of warm damp from the electric fire; and the pale breeze of the plastic fan and the muttering of the tea machine. Slowly he began turning the pages. Some of the files were old, taken from the shelves, half in English and half in a cruel Gothic script jagged as barbed wire. The names were set out like athletes, surname first and Christian name second, with only a couple of lines at the top and a hasty signature at the bottom to authorise their ultimate disposal. The files on the trolley were new, and the paper was rich and smooth, and the minutes signed with familiar names. And some were folders, records of mail despatched and mail received, with titles underlined and margins ruled.

He was alone, at the beginning of Harting’s journey, with only his track for company, and the sullen grumbling of the water pipes in the corridor outside, like the shuffling of clogs upon a scaffold.

Are they like horses?

Hazel Bradfield’s voice enquired.

Do they sleep standing up?

He was alone.

And whatever he found there was the other part of coming alive.

* * *

Meadowes was asleep. He would not for a moment have admitted it; and Cork would not, in charity, for a moment have accused him of it; and it is true that technically, like Hazel Bradfield’s horses, his eyes were open. He was reclining in his upholstered library chair in an attitude of well-deserved retirement, while the sounds of dawn floated through the open window.

‘I’m handing over to Bill Sutcliffe,’ Cork said, loud and deliberately careless. ‘Nothing you want, is there, before I knock off? We’re brewing a cup of tea if you fancy it.’

‘It’s all right,’ Meadowes said indistinctly, sitting forward with a jerk. ‘Be all right in a minute.’ Cork, staring down through the open window into the car park, allowed him time to collect himself.

‘We’re brewing a cup of tea if you fancy it,’ he repeated. ‘Valerie’s got the kettle on.’ He was clutching a folder of telegrams. ‘There hasn’t been a night like that since Bremen. Talk, that’s all it is. Words. By four this morning they’d forgotten about security altogether. H. E. and the Secretary of State were just chatting direct on the open line. Fantastic. Blown the lot I should think: codes, cyphers, the whole bloody orchestra.’

‘They’re blown already,’ Meadowes replied, more for himself than for Cork; and came to join him at the window. ‘By Leo.’

No dawn is ever wholly ominous. The earth is too much its own master; the cries, the colours and the scents too confident to sustain our grim foreboding. Even the guard at the front gate, doubled since evening, had a restful, domestic look. The morning light which glistened on their long leather coats was soft and strangely harmless; their pace as they slowly walked the perimeter was measured and wise. Cork was moved to optimism.

‘I reckon today might be the day,’ he said. ‘A father by lunchtime: how’s that, Arthur?’

‘They’re never that quick,’ Meadowes said, ‘not the first ones,’ and they fell to counting off the cars.

‘Full house, near as nothing,’ Cork declared; and it was true. Bradfield’s white Jaguar, de Lisle’s red sports car, Jenny Pargiter’s little Wolseley, Gaveston’s shooting-brake with the baby chair mounted on the passenger seat, Jackson’s rugged Two Thousand; even Crabbe’s broken down Kapitän, twice personally banished from the car park by the Ambassador, had crept back in the crisis, its wings bent outward like crooked claws.

‘Rover looks all right,’ said Cork. In reverent silence they duly admired its distinguished outlines against the fencing on the other side of the canteen. Nearer at hand, the grey Rolls stood in its own bay, guarded by an army corporal.

‘He saw him, did he?’ Meadowes asked.

‘Sure.’ Cork licked his finger, selected the relevant telegram from the folder which he carried under his arm and began reading out loud, in a facetious, nursery-rhyme voice, the Ambassador’s account of his dialogue with the Federal Chancellor . . . ‘ “I replied that as Foreign Secretary you had implicit trust in the many undertakings already given to you personally by the Chancellor, and that you had every confidence that the Chancellor would not for a moment consider yielding to the pressure of vociferous minorities. I reminded him also of the French attitude to the question of German reunification, describing it not merely as unsound but as downright anti-American, anti-European and above all anti-German – ” ’

‘Listen,’ said Meadowes suddenly. ‘Shut up and listen.’

‘What the –’

‘Be quiet.’

From the far end of the corridor they could hear a steady drone like the sound of a car climbing a hill.

‘It can’t be,’ Cork said shortly. ‘Bradfield’s got the keys and he –’ They heard the clank of the folding gate and the small sigh of a hydraulic brake.

‘It’s the beds! That’s what it is. More beds. They’ve got it going for the beds; he’s opened it up for them.’ In confirmation of his theory, they heard the distinct clank of metal on metal, and the squeak of springs.

‘This place will be a Noah’s Ark by Sunday, I’ll tell you. Kids, girls, even the bloody German staff: Babylon, that’s what it’ll be. Sodom and Gomorrah, that’s better. Here, what happens if it comes on while they’re demonstrating? Just my luck, that would be, wouldn’t it? My first kid: baby Cork, born in captivity!’

‘Go on. Let’s hear the rest.’

‘ “The Federal Chancellor took note of the British anxiety which he thought misplaced; he assured me he would consult his Ministers and see what could be done to restore calm. I suggested to him that a statement of policy would be very useful; the Chancellor on the other hand thought repetition had a weakening effect. At this point he asked that his best wishes be conveyed to yourself as Secretary of State, and it became clear that he regarded the interview as closed. I asked him whether he would consider reserving fresh hotel accommodation in Brussels as a means of ending uninformed speculation, since you were personally distressed by reports that the German delegation had paid its bills and cancelled its bookings. The Chancellor replied that he was sure something of that sort should be done.” ’

‘Zero,’ said Meadowes distractedly.

‘ “The Chancellor asked after the Queen’s health. He had heard she had a touch of influenza. I said I thought she was over the worst but would make enquiries and let him know. The Chancellor said he hoped Her Majesty would take care of herself; it was a tricky time of year. I replied that all of us sincerely hoped that the climate would be more settled by Monday and he had the grace to laugh. We left on good terms.” Ha ha ha. They also had a little chat about today’s demonstration. The Chancellor said we weren’t to worry. London are copying to the Palace. ‘The meeting,’” Cork added with a yawn, ‘ “ended with the customary exchange of compliments at twenty-two twenty hours. A joint communiqué was issued to the press.” Meanwhile, Econ are going up the wall and Commercial are totting up the cost of a run on the pound. Or gold or something. Or maybe it’s a slump. Who cares?’

‘You ought to sit the exam,’ Meadowes said. ‘You’re too quick for in there.’

‘I’ll settle for twins,’ said Cork, and Valerie brought in the tea.

Meadowes had actually raised the mug to his lips when he heard the sound of the trolley and the familiar trill of the squeaky wheel. Valerie put down the tray with a bang, and some tea slopped out of the pot into the sugar bowl. She was wearing a green pullover, and Cork, who liked to look at her, noticed as she turned to face the door that the polo neck had brought up a light rash at the side of her throat. Cork himself, quicker than the rest, handed Meadowes the folder, went to the door and looked down the corridor. It was their own trolley, loaded high with red and black files and Alan Turner was pushing it. He was in his shirt-sleeves and there were heavy bruises under both his eyes. One lip was cut clean through and had been summarily stitched. He had not shaved. The despatch box was on the top of the pile. Cork said later that he looked as though he had pushed the trolley through enemy lines single-handed. As he came down the passage, doors opened one after another in his wake: Edna from the Typists’ Pool, Crabbe, Pargiter, de Lisle, Gaveston: one by one their heads appeared, followed by their bodies, so that by the time he had arrived at Registry, slammed back the flap of the steel counter and shoved the trolley carelessly into the centre of the room, the only door that remained closed was that of Rawley Bradfield, Head of Chancery.

‘Leave it there. Don’t touch it, any of it.’

Turner crossed the corridor and without knocking, went straight in to Bradfield.

16

‘It’s All a Fake’

‘I thought you’d gone.’ His tone was weary rather than surprised.

‘I missed the plane. Didn’t she tell you?’

‘What the devil have you done to your face?’

‘Siebkron sent his boys to search my room. Looking for news of Harting. I interrupted them.’ He sat down. ‘They’re anglophiles. Like Karfeld.’

‘The matter of Harting is closed.’ Very deliberately Bradfield laid aside some telegrams. ‘I have sent his papers to London together with a letter assessing the damage to our security. The rest will be handled from there. I have no doubt that in due course a decision will be taken on whether or not to inform our Nato partners.’

‘Then you can cancel your letter. And forget the assessment.’

‘I have made allowances for you,’ Bradfield snapped, with much of his former asperity. ‘Every kind of allowance. For your unsavoury profession, your ignorance of diplomatic practice and your uncommon rudeness. Your stay here has brought us nothing but trouble; you seem determined to be unpopular. What the devil do you mean by remaining in Bonn when I have told you to leave? Bursting in here in a state of undress? Have you no idea what is going on here? It’s Friday! The day of the demonstration, in case you have forgotten.’

Turner did not move, and Bradfield’s anger at last got the better of fatigue. ‘Lumley told me you were uncouth but effective: so far you have merely been uncouth. I am not in the least surprised you have met with violence: you attract it. I have warned you of the damage you can do; I have told you my reasons for abandoning the investigation at this end; and I have overlooked the needless brutality with which you have treated my staff. But now I have had enough. You are forbidden the Embassy. Get out.’

‘I’ve found the files,’ Turner said. ‘I’ve found the whole lot. And the trolley. And the typewriter and the chair. And the two-bar electric fire, and de Lisle’s fan.’ His voice was disjointed and unconvincing, and his gaze seemed to be upon things that were not in the room. ‘And the teacups and all the rest of the hardware he pinched at one time or another. And the letters he collected from the bag room and never handed to Meadowes. They were addressed to Leo, you see. They were answers to letters he’d sent. He ran quite a department down there: a separate section of Chancery. Only you never knew. He’s discovered the truth about Karfeld and now they’re after him.’ His hand lightly touched his cheek. ‘The people who did this to me: they’re after Leo. He’s on the run because he knew too much and asked too many questions. For all I know they’ve caught him already. Sorry to be a bore,’ he added flatly. ‘But that’s the way it is. I’d like a cup of coffee if you don’t mind.’

Bradfield did not move.

‘What about the Green File?’

‘It’s not there. Just the empty box.’

‘He’s taken it?’

‘I don’t know. Praschko might. I don’t.’ He shook his head.‘I’m sorry.’ He continued: ‘You’ve to find him before they do. Because if you don’t they’ll kill him. That’s what I’m talking about. Karfeld’s a fraud and a murderer and Harting’s got the proof of it.’ He raised his voice at last. ‘Do I make myself clear?’

Bradfield continued to watch him, intent but not alarmed.

‘When did Harting wake to him?’ Turner asked himself. ‘He didn’t want to notice at first. He turned his back. He’d been turning his back on a lot of things, trying not to remember. Trying not to notice. He held himself in like we all do, sticking to the discipline of not being involved and calling it sacrifice. Gardening, going to parties. Working his fiddles. Surviving. And not interfering. Keeping his head down and letting the world go over him. Until October, when Karfeld came to power. He knew Karfeld, you see. And Karfeld

owed

him. That mattered to Leo.’

‘Owed him

what

?’

‘Wait. Gradually, bit by bit he began to . . . open up. He allowed himself to feel. Karfeld was tantalising him. We both know what that means, don’t we: to be tantalised. Karfeld’s face was everywhere, like it is now. Grinning, frowning, warning . . . His name kept ringing in Leo’s ears: Karfeld’s a fraud; Karfeld’s a murderer. Karfeld’s a fake.’

‘What are you talking about? Don’t be so utterly ridiculous.’

‘Leo didn’t like that any more: he didn’t like fakes any more; he wanted the truth. The male menopause: that is it. He was disgusted with himself . . . for what he’d failed to do, sins of omission . . . sins of commission. Sick of his own tricks and his own routine. We all know that feeling, don’t we? Well, Leo had it. In full measure. So he decided to get what he was owed: justice for Karfeld. He had a long memory, you see. That’s not fashionable these days, I understand. So he plotted. First to get into Registry, then to renew his contract, then to get hold of the files: the Personalities Survey . . . the old files, the files that were due for destruction . . . the old case histories in the Glory Hole. He would put the case together again, reopen the investigation . . .’

‘I have no idea what you are referring to. You’re sick; you are wandering and sick. I suggest you go and lie down.’ His hand moved to the telephone.

‘First of all he got the key, that was easy enough. Put that down! Leave that telephone alone!’ Bradfield’s hand hovered and fell back on to the blotter. ‘Then he started work in the Glory Hole, set up his little office, made his own files, kept minutes, corresponded . . . he moved in. Anything he needed from Registry, he stole. He was a thief; you said that. You should know.’ For a moment, Turner’s voice was gentle and understanding. ‘When was it you sealed off the basement? Bremen wasn’t it? A weekend? That was when he panicked. The only time. That was when he stole the trolley. I’m talking about Karfeld. Listen! About his doctorate, his military service, the wound at Stalingrad, the chemical factory –’

‘These rumours have been going the rounds for months. Ever since Karfeld became a serious political contestant, we have heard nothing but stories of his past and each time he has successfully refuted them. There’s hardly a politician of any standing in Western Germany whom the Communists have not defamed at one time or another.’

‘Leo’s not a Communist,’ Turner said with profound weariness. ‘You told me yourself: he’s a primitive. For years he kept away from politics because he was afraid of what he might hear. I’m not talking rumours. I’m talking fact: home-grown British fact. Exclusive. It’s all in our own British files, locked away in our own British basement. That’s where he got them from and not even you can bury them any more.’ There was neither triumph nor hostility to his tone. ‘The information’s in Registry now if you want to check. With the empty box. There’s some things I didn’t follow, my German’s not that good. I’ve given instructions that no one’s to touch the stuff.’ He grinned in reminiscence, and it might have been his own predicament that he recalled. ‘You bloody nearly marooned him if you did but know it. He got the trolley down there the weekend they put up the grilles and sealed off the lift. He was terrified of not being able to carry on; of being cut off from the Glory Hole. Until then, it was child’s play. He only had to hop into the lift with his files – he could go anywhere, you see; the Personalities Survey gave him the right – and take them straight down to the basement. But you were putting an end to all that though you didn’t know it; the riot grilles queered his pitch. So he shoved everything he might need on to the trolley and waited down there the whole weekend until the workmen had done. He had to break the locks on the back staircase to get out. After that, he relied on Gaunt to invite him up to the top floor. Innocently of course. Everyone’s innocent in a manner of speaking. And I’m sorry,’ he added, quite graciously, ‘I’m sorry for what I said to you. I was wrong.’

‘This is hardly the time for apologies,’ Bradfield retorted, and rang Miss Peate for some coffee.

* * *

‘I’m going to tell you the way it is on the files,’ Turner said. ‘The case against Karfeld. You’d do me a favour not interrupting. We’re both tired, and we’ve not much time.’

Bradfield had set a sheet of blue draft paper on the blotter before him; the fountain pen was poised above it. Miss Peate, having poured the coffee, took her leave. Her expression, her single disgusted glance at Turner, was more eloquent than any words she could have found.

‘I’m going to tell you what he’d put together. Pick holes in it afterwards if you want.’

‘I shall do my best,’ Bradfield said with a momentary smile that was like the memory of a different man.

‘There’s a village near Dannenberg, on the Zonal border. Hapstorf it’s called. It has three men and a dog and it lies in a wooded valley. Or used to. In thirty-eight, the Germans put a factory there. There was an old paper mill beside a fast-flowing river, with a country house attached to it, right up against the cliff. They converted the mill and built laboratories alongside the river, and turned the place into a small hush-hush research station for certain types of gas.’

He drank some coffee and took a bite of biscuit, and it seemed to hurt him to eat, for he held his head to one side and munched very cautiously.

‘Poison Gas. The attractions were obvious. The place was difficult to bomb; the stream was fast-flowing, and they needed that for the effluent; the village was small and they could chuck out anyone they didn’t like. All right?’

‘All right.’ Bradfield was writing down key points as Turner spoke. Turner could see the numbers down the left side and he thought: what difference does it make about the numbers? You can’t destroy facts by giving them numbers.

‘The local population claims it didn’t know what was going on there, which is probably true. They knew the mill had been stripped and they knew that a lot of expensive plant had been installed. They knew the warehouses at the back were specially guarded, and they knew the staff weren’t allowed to mix with the locals. The labour was foreign: French and Poles, who weren’t allowed out at all, so there was no mixing at the lower level either. And everyone knew about the animals. Monkeys mainly, but sheep, goats and dogs as well. Animals that went in there and didn’t come out. There’s a record of the local

Gauleiter

receiving letters of complaint from animal lovers.’

He looked at Bradfield in wonder. ‘He worked down there, night after night, putting it all together.’

‘He had no business down there. The basement archive has been out of bounds for many years.’

‘He had business there all right.’

Bradfield was writing on his pad.

‘Two months before the end of the war, the factory was destroyed by the British. Pinpoint bombing. The explosion was enormous. The place was wiped out, and the village with it. The foreign labourers were killed. They say the sound of the blast carried miles, there was so much went up with it.’

Bradfield’s pen sped across the paper.

‘At the time of the bombing, Karfeld was at home in Essen; there’s no doubt of that at all. He says he was burying his mother; she’d been killed in an air raid.’

‘Well?’

‘He was in Essen all right. But he wasn’t burying his mother. She’d died two years earlier.’

‘Nonsense!’ Bradfield cried. ‘The press would long ago –’

‘There’s a photostat of the original death certificate on the file,’ Turner said evenly. ‘I’m not able to say what the new one looks like. Nor who faked it for him. Though I should think we could both guess without rupturing our imaginations.’

Bradfield glanced at him with appreciation.

‘After the war, the British were in Hamburg and they sent a team to look at what was left of Hapstorf, collect souvenirs and take photographs. Just an ordinary Intelligence team, nothing special. They thought they might pick up the scientists who’d worked there . . . get the benefit of their knowledge, see what I mean? They reported that nothing was left. They also reported some rumours. A French labourer, one of the few survivors, had a story about experiments on human guinea pigs. Not on the labourers themselves, he said, but on other people brought in. They’d used animals to begin with, he said, but later on they wanted the real thing so they had some specially delivered. He said he’d been on gate duty one night – he was a trusty by then – and the Germans told him to return to his hut, go to bed and not appear till morning. He was suspicious and hung around. He saw a strange thing: a grey bus, just a plain grey single-decker bus, went through one gate after another without being documented. It drove round the back, towards the warehouses, and he didn’t hear any more. A couple of minutes later, it drove out again, much faster. Empty.’ Again he broke off, and this time he took a handkerchief from his pocket and very gingerly dabbed his brow. ‘The Frenchman also said a friend of his, a Belgian, had been offered inducements to work in the new laboratories under the cliff. He went for a couple of days and came back looking like a ghost. He said he wouldn’t spend another night over there, not for all the privileges in the world. Next day he disappeared. Posted, they said. But before he left he had a talk to his pal, and he mentioned the name of Doctor Klaus. Doctor Klaus was the administrative supervisor, he said; he was the man who arranged the details and made things easy for the scientists. He was the man who offered him the job.’

‘You call this evidence?’

‘Wait. Just wait. The team reported their findings and a copy went to the local War Crimes Group. So they took it over. They interrogated the Frenchman, took a full statement but they failed to produce corroboration. An old woman who ran a flower shop had a story about hearing screams in the night, but she couldn’t say which night and besides it might have been animals. It was all very flimsy.’

‘Very, I should have thought.’

‘Look,’ Turner said. ‘We’re on the same side now aren’t we? There are no more doors to open.’

‘There may be some to close,’ Bradfield said, writing again. ‘However.’

‘The Group was overworked and understaffed so they threw in the case. File and discontinue. They’d many bigger cases to worry about. They carded Doctor Klaus and forgot about him. The Frenchman went back to France, the old lady forgot the screams and that was it. Until a couple of years later.’

‘Wait.’

Bradfield’s pen did not hurry. He formed the letters as he always formed them: legibly, with consideration for his successors.

‘Then an accident happened. The kind we’ve come to expect. A farmer near Hapstorf bought an odd bit of waste land from the local council. It was rough ground, very stony and wooded, but he thought he could make something of it. By the time he’d dug it and ploughed it, he’d unearthed thirty-two bodies of grown men. The German police took a look and informed the Occupational authority. Crimes against Allied personnel were the responsibility of the Allied judiciary. The British mounted an investigation and decided that thirty-one of the men had been gassed. The thirty-second man was wearing the tunic of a foreign labourer and he’d been shot in the back of the neck. There was something else . . . something that really threw them. The bodies were all messed up.’

‘Messed up?’

‘Researched. Autopsied. Someone had got there first. So they reopened the case. Somebody in the town remembered that Doctor Klaus came from Essen.’

Bradfield was watching him now; he had put down his pen and folded his hands together.

‘They went through all the chemists with the qualification to conduct high-grade research who lived in Essen and whose first names were Klaus. It didn’t take them long to unearth Karfeld. He’d no doctorate; that comes later. But then everyone assumed by then that the staff were working under pseudonyms, so why not give yourself a title too? Essen was also in the British zone, so they pulled him in. He denied the whole thing. Naturally. Mind you: apart from the bodies there was little enough to go by. Except for one incidental piece of information.’

Bradfield did not interrupt this time.

‘You’ve heard of the Euthanasia scheme?’

‘Hadamar.’ With a nod of his head Bradfield indicated the window. ‘Down the river. Hadamar,’ he repeated.

‘Hadamar, Weilmunster, Eichberg, Kalmenhof: clinics for the elimination of unwanted people: for whoever lived on the economy and made no contribution to it. You can read all about it in the Glory Hole, and quite a lot about it in Registry. Among the files for Destruction. At first they had categories for the type of people they’d killed off. You know: the deformed, the insane, severely handicapped children between the ages of eight and thirteen. Bed-wetters. With very few exceptions, the victims were German citizens.’

‘They called them patients,’ Bradfield said, with intense distaste.

‘It seems that now and then certain selected patients were set aside and put to medical uses. Children as well as adults.’

Bradfield nodded, as if he knew that too.

‘By the time the Hapstorf case broke, the Americans and Germans had done a fair bit of work on this Euthanasia programme. Among other things, they’d unearthed evidence of one busload of “hybrid workers” being set aside for “dangerous duties at the Chemical Research Station of Hapstorf”. One busload was thirty-one people. They used grey buses by the way, if that reminds you of anything.’

‘Hanover,’ Bradfield said at once. ‘The transport for the bodyguard.’

‘Karfeld’s an administrator. Everyone admires him for it. Then as now. It’s nice to know he hasn’t lost the old touch, isn’t it? He’s got one of those minds that runs in grooves.’

‘Stop stringing beads. I want the whole thing, quickly.’

‘Grey buses then. Thirty-one seats and room left over for the guard. The windows were blackened from the inside. Where possible, they moved them at night.’

‘You said there were thirty-two bodies, not thirty-one –’

‘There was the Belgian labourer, wasn’t there? The one who worked under the cliff and talked to the French trusty? They knew what to do about him all right. He’d found out a bit too much, hadn’t he? Like Leo, now.’

‘Here,’ said Bradfield, getting up and bringing the coffee over to him. ‘You’d better have some more of this.’ Turner held out his cup and his hand was fairly steady.

‘So when they’d pulled him in they took Karfeld up to Hamburg and confronted him with the bodies and the evidence, such as they had, and he just laughed at them. Bloody nonsense, he said, the whole story. Never been to Hapstorf in his life. He was an engineer. A demolitions man. He gave a very detailed account of his work at the Russian front – they’d even given him campaign medals and Christ knows what. I suppose they did that for them in the SS and he made a great

spiel

about Stalingrad. There were discrepancies but not that many, and he just held out all the time against interrogation and denied ever having set foot in Hapstorf or possessing any knowledge of the plant. No, no, no all the way. For months on end. “Okay,” he kept saying, “if you’ve got the proof, bring a case. Put it to the Tribunal. I’m not bothered; I’m a hero. I never administered anything in my life except our family factory in Essen, and the British have pulled that to pieces, haven’t they? I’ve been to Russia, I haven’t been poisoning hybrids; why should I? I’m a little friend of all the world. Find a live witness, find anybody.” They couldn’t. At Hapstorf, the chemists had lived in complete segregation, and presumably the desk-men had done the same. The records were destroyed by bombing, and everyone was known by his Christian name or an alias.’ Turner shrugged. ‘That seemed to be that. He even threw in a story about helping the anti-Nazi resistance in Russia, and since the units he mentioned were either taken prisoner

en masse

or shot to pieces, they couldn’t get any further with that either. He doesn’t seem to have come out with that since, the resistance bit.’

‘It’s no longer fashionable,’ said Bradfield shortly. ‘Particularly in his sphere.’

‘So the case never reached the courts. There were plenty of reasons why not. The War Crimes investigation units themselves were near to disbandment; there was pressure from London and Washington to bury the hatchet and hand over all responsibility to the German courts. It was chaos. While the Unit was trying to prepare charges, their Headquarters were preparing amnesties. And there were other reasons, technical reasons for not going ahead. The crime was against French, Belgians and Poles if anyone, but since there was no method of establishing the nationality of the victims, there were problems about jurisdiction. Not material problems, but incidental ones, and they contributed to the difficulty of deciding what to do. You know how it is when you

want

to find difficulties.’

‘I know how it was then,’ Bradfield said quietly. ‘It was bedlam.’

‘The French weren’t keen; the Poles were

too

keen and Karfeld himself was quite a big wheel by then. He was handling some big Allied contracts. Even sub-contracting to competitors to keep up with demand. He was a good administrator, you see. Efficient.’

‘You say that as if it were a crime.’

‘His own factory had been dismantled a couple of times but now it was running a treat. Seemed a pity to disturb it really. There was even some rumour,’ Turner added without changing the tone of his voice, ‘that he’d had a head start on everyone else because he’d come by a special consignment of rare gases, and stored them underground in Essen at the end of the war. That’s what he was up to while the RAF was bombing Hapstorf. While he was supposed to be burying his poor old mother. He’d been pinching the goods to feather his own nest.’

‘As you have described the evidence so far,’ Bradfield said quietly, ‘there is nothing whatever which attaches Karfeld to Hapstorf, and nothing at all to associate him with the complicity in a murder plot. His own account of himself may very well be true. That he fought in Russia, that he was wounded –’

‘That’s right. That’s the view they took at Headquarters.’

‘It is even unproven that the bodies came from Hapstorf. The

gas

may have been theirs; it hardly proves that the chemists themselves administered it to the victims, let alone that Karfeld knew of it, or was in any way an accessory to –’

‘The house at Hapstorf had a cellar. The cellar wasn’t affected by the bombing. The windows had been bricked in and pipes had been run through the ceiling from the laboratories above. The brick walls of the cellar were torn.’

‘What do you mean: “torn”?’

‘By hands,’ Turner said. ‘Fingers, it could have been.’

* * *

‘Anyway they took your view. Karfeld kept his mouth shut, there was no fresh evidence. They didn’t prosecute. Quite rightly. The case was shelved. The unit was moved to Bremen, then to Hanover, then to Moenchengladbach and the files were sent here. Together with some odds and sods from the Judge Advocate General’s Department. Pending a decision regarding their ultimate disposal.’

‘And this is the story Harting has got on to?’

‘He was always on to it. He was the sergeant investigating. Him and Praschko. The whole file, minutes, memoranda, correspondence, interrogation reports, summaries of evidence, the whole case from beginning to end – it has an end now – is recorded in Leo’s handwriting. Leo arrested him, questioned him, attended the autopsies, looked for witnesses. The woman he nearly married, Margaret Aickman, she was in the unit as well. A clerical researcher. They called them headhunters: that was his life . . . They were all very anxious that Karfeld be properly arraigned.’

Bradfield remained lost in thought. ‘And this word

hybrid

 –’ he asked finally.

‘It was a Nazi technical term for half Jewish.’

‘I see. Yes, I see. So he would have a personal stake, wouldn’t he? And that mattered to him. He took everything personally. He lived for himself; that was the only thing he understood.’ The pen remained quite still. ‘But hardly a case in law.’ He repeated it to himself: ‘But hardly a case in law. In fact hardly a case by any standards. Not on the merest, most partisan analysis. Not any kind of case. Interesting of course: it accounts for Karfeld’s feelings about the British. It doesn’t begin to make a criminal of him.’

‘No,’ Turner agreed, rather to Bradfield’s surprise. ‘No. It’s not a case. But for Leo it rankled. He never forgot; but he pressed it down as far as it would go. Yet he couldn’t keep away from it. He had to find out; he had to take another look and make sure, and in January this year he went down to the Glory Hole and re-read his own reports and his own arguments.’

Bradfield was sitting very still again.

‘It may have been his age. Most of all, it was a sense of something left undone.’ Turner said this as if it were a problem which applied to his own case, and to which he had no solution. ‘A sense of history if you like.’ He hesitated. ‘Of time. The paradoxes caught up with him and he had to do something about it. He was also in love,’ he added, staring out of the window. ‘Though he might not have admitted it. He’d made use of somebody and picked up more than he bargained for . . . He’d escaped from lethargy. That’s the point, isn’t it: the opposite of love isn’t hate. It’s lethargy. Nothingness. This place. And there were people about who let him think he was in the big league . . .’ he added softly. ‘So for whatever reasons, he reopened the case. He re-read the papers from beginning to end. He studied the background again, went through all the contemporary files, in Registry and in the Glory Hole. Checked all the facts from the beginning, and he began making his own enquiries.’

‘What sort of enquiries?’ Bradfield demanded. They were not looking at one another.

‘He set up his own office. He wrote letters and received replies. All on Embassy paper. He headed off the Chancery mail as it came in and extracted anything addressed to him. He ran it like he ran his own life: secretly and efficiently. Trusting nobody, confiding in nobody; playing the different ends off against each other . . . Sometimes he made little journeys, consulted records, Ministries, church registers, survivor groups . . . all on Embassy paper. He collected press cuttings, took copies, did his own typing and put on his own sealing wax. He even pinched an official seal. He headed his letters Claims and Consular, so most of them came to him in the first place anyway. He compared every detail: birth certificates, marriage, death of mother, hunting licences – he was looking for discrepancies all the time: anything to prove that Karfeld hadn’t fought at the Russian front. He put together a bloody great dossier. It’s hardly surprising Siebkron got on to him. There’s scarcely a Government agency he hasn’t consulted under one pretext or another –’

‘Oh my God,’ Bradfield whispered, laying down his pen in a momentary gesture of defeat.

‘By the end of January, he’d come to the only possible conclusion: that Karfeld had been lying in his teeth, and someone – it looked like someone high up, and it looked very much like Siebkron – someone had been covering up for him. They tell me Siebkron has ambitions of his own – hitch his wagon to any star as long as it was on the move.’

‘That’s true enough,’ Bradfield conceded, lost in private thoughts.

‘Like Praschko in the old days . . . You see where we’re getting, don’t you? And of course before long, as he very well knew, Siebkron was going to notice that the Embassy was making some pretty way-out enquiries, even for Claims and Consular. And that somebody was going to be bloody angry, and perhaps a bit rough as well. Specially when Leo found the proof.’

‘What proof? How can he possibly prove such a charge now, twenty or more years after the crime?’

‘It’s all in Registry,’ Turner said, with sudden reluctance. ‘You’d do better to see for yourself.’

‘I’ve no time and I am used to hearing unsavoury facts.’

‘And discounting them.’

‘I insist that you tell me.’ He made no drama of his insistence.

‘Very well. Last year, Karfeld decided to take a doctorate. He was a big fellow by then; he was worth a fortune in the chemical industry – his administrative talent had paid off in a big way – and he was making fair headway in local politics in Essen, and he wanted to be Doctor. Maybe he was like Leo; he’d left a job undone and he wanted to get the record straight. Or maybe he thought a handle would be a useful asset: Vote for Doctor Karfeld. They like a doctorate here in a Chancellor . . . So he went back to school and wrote a learned thesis. He didn’t do much research and everyone was very impressed, specially his tutors. Wonderful, they said, the way he found the time.’

‘And?’

‘It’s a study of the effects of certain toxic gases on the human body. They thought very highly of it apparently; caused quite a little stir at the time.’

‘That is hardly conclusive.’

‘Oh yes it is. Karfeld based his whole analysis on the detailed examination of thirty-one fatal cases.’

Bradfield had closed his eyes.

* * *

‘It is not proof,’ Bradfield said at last; he was very pale but the pen, once more in his hand, was as firm as ever. ‘You know it is not proof. It raises suppositions I agree. It suggests he was at Hapstorf. It is not even half-way to proof.’

‘Pity we can’t tell Leo.’

‘The information came to him in the course of his industrial experience; that is what Karfeld would argue. He acquired it from a third party; that would be his fall-back position.’

‘From the real bastards.’

‘Even if it could be shown that the information came from Hapstorf, there are a dozen explanations as to how it came into Karfeld’s hands. You said yourself, he was not even engaged in research –’

‘No. He sat at a desk. It’s been done before.’

‘Precisely. And the very fact that he made use of the information at all would tend to exonerate him from the charge of acquiring it.’

‘The trouble is, you see,’ Turner said, ‘Leo’s only half a lawyer: a hybrid. We have to reckon with the other half as well. We have to reckon with the thief.’

‘Yes.’ Bradfield was distracted. ‘And he has taken the Green File.’

‘Still, as far as Siebkron and Karfeld are concerned, he seems to have got near enough to the truth to be a pretty serious risk, doesn’t he?’

‘A prima facie case,’ Bradfield remarked, examining his notes once more. ‘Grounds for reinvestigation, I grant you. At best, a public prosecutor might be persuaded to make an initial examination.’ He glanced at his telephone directory. ‘The Legal Attaché would know.’

‘Don’t bother,’ Turner said comfortingly. ‘Whatever he’s done or hasn’t done, Karfeld’s in the clear. He’s past the post.’ Bradfield stared at him. ‘No one can prosecute him now, even with a cast-iron confession, signed by Karfeld himself.’

‘Of course,’ Bradfield said quietly. ‘I was forgetting.’ He sounded relieved.

* * *

‘He’s protected by law. The Statute of Limitations takes care of that. Leo put a note on the file on Thursday evening. The case is dead. There’s nothing anyone can do.’

‘There’s a procedure for reviving it –’

‘There is,’ Turner conceded. ‘It doesn’t apply. That’s the fault of the British as it happens. The Hapstorf case was a British investigation. We never passed it to the Germans at all. There was no trial, no public report, and when the German judiciary took over sole responsibility for Nazi war crimes we gave them no note of it. Karfeld’s whole case fell into the gap between the Germans and ourselves.’ He paused. ‘And now Leo’s done the same.’

‘What did Harting intend to do? What was the purpose of all this enquiring?’

‘He had to know. He had to complete the case. It taunted him, like a messed-up childhood or a life you can’t come to terms with. He had to get it straight. I think he was playing the rest by ear.’

‘When did he get this so-called proof?’

‘The thesis arrived on the Saturday before he left. He kept a date-stamp, you see; everything was entered up in the files. On the Monday he arrived in Registry in a state of elation. He spent a couple of days wondering what to do next. Last Thursday he had lunch with Praschko –’

‘What the devil for?’

‘I don’t know. I thought about it. I don’t know. Probably to discuss what action they should take. Or to get a legal opinion. Maybe he thought there was still a way of prosecuting –’

‘There is none?’

‘No.’

‘Thank God for that.’

Turner ignored him: ‘Or perhaps to tell Praschko that the pace was getting too hot. To ask him for protection.’

Bradfield looked at Turner very carefully. ‘And the Green File has gone,’ he said, recovering his strength.

‘The box was empty.’

‘And Harting has run. Do you know the reason for

that

as well?’ His eyes were still upon Turner. ‘Is that also recorded in his dossier?’

‘He kept writing in his memoranda: “I have very little time.” Everyone who speaks of him describes him as being in a fight against time . . . the new urgency . . . I suppose he was thinking of the Statute.’

‘But we know that, under the Statute, Karfeld was already a free man, unless of course some kind of stay of action could be obtained. So why has he left? And what was so pressing?’

Turner shrugged away the strangely searching, even taunting tone of Bradfield’s questions.

‘So you don’t know

exactly

why? Why he has chosen this particular moment to run away? Or why he chose that one file to steal?’

‘I assume Siebkron has been crowding him. Leo had the proof and Siebkron knew he had it. From then on, Leo was a marked man. He had a gun,’ Turner added, ‘an old army pistol. He was frightened enough to take it with him. He must have panicked.’

‘Quite,’ Bradfield said, with the same note of relief. ‘Quite. No doubt that is the explanation.’ Turner stared at him in bewilderment.

* * *

For perhaps ten minutes Bradfield had not moved or said a word.

There was a lectern in a corner of the room made of an old Bible box and long, rather ugly metal legs which Bradfield had commissioned of a local blacksmith in Bad Godesberg. He was standing with his elbows upon it, staring out of the window at the river.

‘No wonder Siebkron puts us under guard,’ he said at last; he might have been talking about the mist. ‘No wonder he treats us as if we were dangerous. There can hardly be a Ministry in Bonn, not even a journalist, who has not by now heard that the British Embassy is engaged in a blood-hunt for Karfeld’s past. What do they expect us to do? Blackmail him in public? Reappear after twenty-five years in full-bottom wigs and indict him under the Allied Jurisdiction? Or do they simply think we are wantonly vindictive, and propose to have our revenge on the man who is spoiling our European dreams?’

‘You’ll find him, won’t you? You’ll go easy with him? He needs all the help he can get.’

‘So do we all,’ said Bradfield, still gazing at the river.

‘He isn’t a Communist. He isn’t a traitor. He thinks Karfeld’s a threat. To us. He’s very simple. You can tell from the files –’

‘I know his kind of simplicity.’

‘He’s our responsibility, after all. It was us who put it into his mind back in those days: the notion of absolute justice. We made him all those promises: Nuremberg, de-Nazification. We

made

him believe. We can’t let him be a casualty just because we changed our minds. You haven’t seen those files . . . you can’t imagine how they thought about the Germans then. Leo hasn’t changed. He’s the stay-behind man.

That’

s not a crime, is it?’

‘I know very well how they thought. I was here myself. I saw what he saw; enough. He should have grown out of it; the rest of us did.’

‘What I mean is, he’s worthy of our protection. There’s a kind of integrity about him . . . I felt that down there. He’s not put off by paradox. For you and me there are always a dozen good reasons for doing nothing. Leo’s made the other way round. In Leo’s book there’s only one reason for doing something: because he must. Because he feels.’

‘I trust you are not offering him as an example to be followed?’

‘There’s another thing that puzzled him.’

‘Well?’

‘In cases like this, there are always external documents. In the SS headquarters; with the clinic or the transport unit. Movement orders, letters of authority,

related

documents from somewhere else that would give the game away. Yet nothing’s come to light. Leo kept on pencilling annotations: why no record in Koblenz? Why no this or that? As if he suspected that other evidence had been destroyed . . . by Siebkron for instance.

‘We can honour him, can’t we?’ Turner added, almost in supplication.

‘There are no absolutes here.’ His gaze had not left the distant scene. ‘It is all doubt. All mist. The mist drains away the colours. There are no distinctions, the Socialists have seen to that. They are all everything. They are all nothing. No wonder Karfeld is in mourning.’

What was it that Bradfield studied on the river? The small boats struggling against the mist? The red cranes and the flat fields, or the far vineyards that have crept so far away from the south? Or Chamberlain’s ghostly hill and the long concrete box where they had once kept him?

‘The Glory Hole is out of bounds,’ he said at last and again fell silent. ‘Praschko. You said he lunched with Praschko on Thursday?’

‘Bradfield –’

‘Yes?’ He was already moving to the door.

‘We feel differently about him now, don’t we?’

‘Do we? Perhaps he is still a Communist after all.’ There was a strain of irony in Bradfield’s tone. ‘You forget he has stolen a file. You seem to think all of a sudden you can look into his heart.’

‘Why did he steal it? What was in that file?’

But Bradfield was already pushing his way between the beds and the clutter of the corridor. Notices had sprung up everywhere: First Aid Post this Way . . . Emergency Rest Room . . . No Children Allowed Beyond this Point. As they passed Chancery Registry, they heard a sudden cheer followed by a desultory handclap. Cork, white in the face, ran out to greet them.

‘She’s had it,’ he whispered. ‘The hospital just telephoned. She wouldn’t let them send for me while I was on shift.’ His pink eyes were wide with fear. ‘She didn’t even need me. She didn’t even want me there.’

17

Praschko

There is a tarmac driveway at the back of the Embassy. It leads from the eastern part of the perimeter northwards through a settlement of new villas too costly for British habitation. Each has a small garden of great value in terms of real estate, each is distinguished from its neighbour by those cautious architectural deviations which are the mark of modern conformity. If one house has a brick-built barbecue and a patio of reconstituted stone, the next will match it with an external wall of blue slate, or quarried rock daringly exposed. In summer, young wives sun themselves beside minuscule swimming-pools. In winter black poodles burrow in the snow; and every midday from Monday to Friday, black Mercedes bring the masters home for meals. The air smells all the time, if distantly, of coffee.

It was a cold grey morning still, but the earth was lit with the clarity which follows rain. They drove very slowly, with the windows right down. Passing a hospital, they entered a more sombre road where the older suburb had survived; behind shaggy conifers and blue-black laurel bushes, leaden spires which once had painted donnish dreams of Weimar stood like lances in a mouldering forest. Ahead of them rose the Bundestag, naked, comfortless and uncomforted; a vast motel mourned by its own flags and painted in yellowing milk. At its back, straddled by Kennedy’s Bridge and bordered by Beethoven’s hall, the brown Rhine pursued its uncertain cultural course.

Police were everywhere: seldom could a seat of democracy have been so well protected from its democrats. At the main entrance, a line of schoolchildren waited in a restless queue, and the police guarded them as if they were their own. A television team was setting up its arclights. In front of the camera a young man in a suit of mulberry corduroy thoughtlessly pirouetted, hand on hip, while a colleague measured his complexion; the police watched dangerously, bewildered by his freedom. Along the kerb, scrubbed as jurymen, their banners straight as Roman standards, the grey crowd obediently waited. The slogans had changed:

German Unity First European Unity Second: This is a Proud Nation Too: Give us Back our Country First!

The police faced them in line abreast, controlling them as they controlled the children.

‘I’ll park down by the river,’ Bradfield said. ‘God knows what it will be like by the time we come out.’

‘What’s going on?’

‘A debate. Amendments to the Emergency Legislation.’

‘I thought they’d finished with that long ago.’

‘In this place, nothing is resolved.’

Along the embankment as far as they could see on either side, grey detachments waited passively like unarmed soldiers. Makeshift banners declared their provenance: Kaiserslautern, Hanover, Dortmund, Kassel. They stood in perfect silence, waiting for the order to protest. Someone had brought a transistor radio and it blared very loud. They craned their necks for a sight of the white Jaguar.

Side by side they walked slowly back, up the hill, away from the river. They passed a kiosk; it seemed to contain nothing but coloured photographs of Queen Soraya. Two columns of students made an avenue to the main entrance. Bradfield walked ahead, stiff backed. At the door the guard objected to Turner and Bradfield argued with him shortly. The lobby was dreadfully warm and smelt of cigar; it was filled with the ringside murmur of dispute. Journalists, some with cameras, looked at Bradfield curiously and he shook his head and looked away. In small groups, deputies talked quietly, vainly glancing all the time over one another’s shoulders in search of someone more interesting. A familiar figure rose at them.

‘The best piece! My very words. Bradfield, you are the best piece! You have come to see the end of democracy? You have come for the debate? My God, you are so damn

efficient

over there! And the Secret Service is still with you? Mr Turner, you are loyal, I hope? My God, what the devil’s happened to your face?’ Receiving no answer he continued in a lower voice, furtively. ‘Bradfield, I must speak to you. Something damned urgent, look here. I tried to get you at the Embassy but for Saab you are always out.’

‘We have an appointment.’

‘How long? Tell me how long. Sam Allerton wishes also; we wish together to have a discussion.’

He had bent his black head to Bradfield’s ear. His neck was still grimy; he had not shaved.

‘It’s impossible to say.’

‘Listen, I will wait for you. A most

important matter.

I will tell Allerton: we will wait for Bradfield. Deadlines, our newspapers: small fish. We must talk with Bradfield.’

‘There’s no comment, you know that. We issued our statement last night. I thought you had a copy. We accept the Chancellor’s explanation. We look forward to seeing the German team back in Brussels within a few days.’

They descended the steps to the restaurant.

‘Here he is. I’ll do the talking. You’re to leave him entirely to me.’

‘I’ll try.’

‘You’ll do better than that. You’ll keep your mouth shut. He’s a very slippery customer.’

* * *

Before anything else, Turner saw the cigar. It was very small and lay in the corner of his mouth like a black thermometer; and he knew it was also Dutch, and that Leo had been providing them for nothing.

He looked as if he had been editing a newspaper half the night. He appeared from the door leading to the shopping arcade, and he walked with his hands in his pockets and his jacket pulled away from his shirt, bumping into the tables and apologising to no one. He was a big dirty man with grizzly hair cut short and a wide chest that spread to a wider stomach. His spectacles were tipped back over his brow like goggles. A girl followed him, carrying a briefcase. She was an expressionless, listless girl, either very bored or very chaste; her hair was black and abundant.

‘Soup,’ he shouted across the room, as he shook their hands. ‘Bring some soup. And something for her.’ The waiter was listening to the news on the wireless, but when he saw Praschko he switched it low and sauntered over, prepared to oblige. Praschko’s braces had brass teeth which held doggedly to the grimy waistband of his trousers.

‘You been working too? She doesn’t understand anything,’ he explained to them. ‘Not in any damn language.

Nicht wahr, Schatz?

You are as stupid as a sheep. What’s the problem?’ His English was fluent, and whatever accent he possessed was heavily camouflaged by the American intonation. ‘You Ambassador these days?’

‘I’m afraid not.’

‘Who’s this guy?’

‘Visiting.’

Praschko looked at Turner very carefully and then at Bradfield, then at Turner again.

‘Some girl get angry with you?’

Only his eyes moved. His shoulders had risen a little into his neck, and there was a tautening, an instinctive alertness in his manner. His left hand settled on Bradfield’s forearm.

‘That’s

nice

,’ he said. ‘That’s fine. I like a change. I like new people.’ His voice was on a single plane; heavy but short; a conspirator’s voice, held down by the experience of saying things which should not be overheard.

‘What you guys come for? Praschko’s personal opinion? The voice of the opposition?’ He explained to Turner: ‘When you got a coalition, the opposition’s a damned exclusive club.’ He laughed very loud, sharing the joke with Bradfield.

The waiter brought a goulash soup. Cautiously, with small, nervous movements of his butcher’s hand, he began feeling for the meat.

‘What you come for? Hey, maybe you want to send a telegram to the Queen?’ He grinned. ‘A message from her old subject? OK. So send her a telegram. What the hell does she care what Praschko says? What does anyone care? I’m an old whore’ – this too for Turner – ‘they tell you that? I been English, I been German, I been damn nearly American. I been in this bordello longer than all the other whores. That’s why no one wants me any more. I been had all ways. Did they tell you that? Left, Right and Centre.’

‘Which way have they got you now?’ Turner asked.

His eyes still upon Turner’s battered face, Praschko lifted his hand and rubbed the tip of his finger against his thumb. ‘Know what counts in politics? Cash. Selling. Everything else is a load of crap. Treaties, policies, alliances: crap . . . Maybe I should have stayed a Marxist. So now they’ve walked out of Brussels. That’s sad. Sure, that’s very sad. You haven’t got anyone to talk to any more.’

He broke a roll in two and dipped one half into the soup.

‘You tell the Queen that Praschko says the English are lousy, lying hypocrites. Your wife okay?’

‘Well, thank you.’

‘It’s a long time since I got to dinner up there. Still live in that ghetto, do you? Nice place. Never mind. Nobody likes me for too long. That’s why I change parties,’ he explained to Turner. ‘I used to think I was a Romantic, always looking for the blue flower. Now I think I just get bored. Same with friends, same with women, same with God. They’re all true. They all cheat you. They’re all bastards. Jesus. Know another thing: I like new friends better than old ones. Hey, I got a new wife: what do you think of her?’ He held up the girl’s chin and adjusted her face a little to show her to the best advantage and the girl smiled and patted his hand. ‘I’m amazing. There was a time,’ he continued before either of them could make an appropriate comment, ‘there was a time when I would have laid down on my fat belly to get the lousy English into Europe. Now you’re crying on the doorstep and I don’t care.’ He shook his head. ‘I’m truly amazing. Still, that’s history I guess. Or maybe that’s just me. Maybe I’m only interested in power: maybe I loved you because you were strong and now I hate you because you’re nothing. They killed a boy last night, you hear? In Hagen. It’s on the radio.’

He drank a Steinhäger from the tray. The mat stuck to the stem of the glass. He tore it off. ‘One boy. One old man. One crazy woman librarian. Okay, so it’s a football team; but it isn’t Armageddon.’

Through the window, the long grey columns waited on the esplanade. Praschko waved a hand round the room. ‘Look at this crap. Paper. Paper democracy, paper politicians, paper eagles, paper soldiers, paper deputies. Doll’s house democracy; every time Karfeld sneezes, we wet our pants. Know why? Because he comes so damn near the truth.’

‘Are you in favour of him then? Is that it?’ Turner asked, ignoring Bradfield’s angry glance.

Praschko finished his soup, his eyes on Turner all the time. ‘The world gets younger every day,’ he said. ‘Okay, so Karfeld’s a load of crap. Okay. We’ve got rich, see, boy? We’ve eaten and drunk, built houses, bought cars, paid taxes, gone to church, made babies. Now we want something

real.

Know what this is, boy?’

His eyes had not left Turner’s damaged face.

‘Illusions. Kings and queens. The Kennedys, de Gaulle, Napoleon. The Wittelsbachs, Potsdam. Not just a damn village any more. Hey, so what’s this about the students rioting in England? What does the Queen think about that? Don’t you give them enough cash? Youth. Want to know something about youth? I’ll tell you.’ Turner was his only audience now. ‘ “German youth is blaming its parents for starting the war.” That’s what you hear. Every day some crazy clever guy writes it in another newspaper. Want to hear the true story? They’re blaming their parents for

losing

the damn war, not for starting it! “Hey! Where the hell’s our Empire?” Same as the English I guess. It’s the same horseshit. The same kids. They want God back.’ He leaned across the table until his face was quite close to Turner’s. ‘Here. Maybe we could do a deal: we give you cash, you give us illusions. Trouble is, we tried that. We done that deal and you gave us a load of shit. You didn’t deliver the illusions. That’s what we don’t like about the English any more. They don’t know how to do a deal. The Fatherland wanted to marry the Motherland but you never showed up for the wedding.’ He broke out in another peal of false laughter.

‘Perhaps the time has now come to

make

the union,’ Bradfield suggested, smiling like a tired statesman.

Out of the corner of his eye, Turner saw two men, blond-faced, in dark suits and suede shoes, quietly take their places at an adjoining table. The waiter went to them quickly, sensing their profession. At the same moment a bevy of young journalists came in from the lobby. Some carried the day’s newspapers; the headlines spoke of Brussels or Hagen. At their head Karl-Heinz Saab, father of them all, stared across at Bradfield in flatulent anxiety. Beyond the window, in a loveless patio, rows of empty plastic chairs were planted like artificial flowers into the breaking concrete.

‘Those are the real Nazis, that scum.’ His voice pitched high enough for anyone to hear, Praschko indicated the journalists with a contemptuous wave of his fat hand. ‘They put out their tongues and fart and think they’ve invented democracy. Where’s that damn waiter: dead?’

‘We’re looking for Harting,’ Bradfield said.

‘Sure!’ Praschko was used to crisis. His hand, drawing the napkin across his cracked lips, moved at the same steady pace. The eyes, yellow in their parched sockets, barely flickered as he continued to survey the two men.

‘I haven’t seen him around,’ he continued, carelessly. ‘Maybe he’s in the gallery. You guys have a special box up there.’ He put down the napkin. ‘Maybe you ought to go look.’

‘He’s been missing since last Friday morning. He’s been missing for a week.’

‘Listen: Leo? That guy will always come back.’ The waiter appeared. ‘He’s indestructible.’

‘You’re his friend,’ Bradfield continued. ‘Perhaps his only friend. We thought he might have consulted you.’

‘What about?’

‘Ah, that’s the problem,’ Bradfield said with a little smile. ‘We thought he might have told

you

that.’

‘He never found an English friend?’ Praschko was looking from one to the other. ‘Poor Leo.’ There was an edge to his voice now.

‘You occupied a special position in his life. After all, you did a great many things together. You shared a number of experiences. We felt that if he had needed advice, or money, or whatever else one needs at certain crises in one’s life, he would instinctively seek you out. We thought he might even have come to you for protection.’

Praschko looked again at the cuts on Turner’s face.

‘Protection?’ His lips barely parted as he spoke; it was as if he would prefer not to have known that he had spoken at all. ‘You might as well protect a –’ The moisture had risen suddenly on his brow. It seemed to come from outside, and to settle on him like steam. ‘Go away,’ he said to the girl. Without a word she stood up, smiled distractedly at them all and sauntered out of the restaurant, while Turner, for a moment of irrelevant, light-headed joy, followed the provocative rotation of her departing hips; but Bradfield was already talking again.

‘We haven’t much time.’ He was leaning forward and speaking very quickly. ‘You were with him in Hamburg and Berlin. There are certain matters known perhaps only to the two of you. Do you follow me?’

Praschko waited.

‘If you can help us to find him without fuss; if you know where he is and can reason with him; if there’s anything you can do for the sake of an old friendship, I will undertake to be very gentle with him, and very discreet. I will keep your name out of it, and anyone else’s as well.’

It was Turner’s turn to wait now, as he stared from one to the other. Only the sweat betrayed Praschko; only the fountain pen betrayed Bradfield. He clenched it in his closed fist as he leaned across the table. Outside the window, Turner saw the grey columns waiting; in the corner, the moon men watched dully, eating rolls and butter.

‘I’ll send him to England; I’ll get him out of Germany altogether if necessary. He has put himself in the wrong already; there is no question of re-employing him. He has done things – he has behaved in a way which puts him beyond our consideration; do you understand what I mean? Whatever knowledge he may have is the property of the Crown . . .’ He sat back. ‘We must find him before they do,’ he said, and still Praschko watched him with his small hard eyes, saying nothing.

‘I also appreciate,’ Bradfield continued, ‘that you have special interests which must be served.’

Praschko stirred a little. ‘Go careful,’ he said.

‘Nothing is further from my mind than to interfere in the internal affairs of the Federal Republic. Your political ambitions, the future of your own party in relation to the Movement, these are matters far outside our sphere of interest. I am here to protect the alliance, not to sit in judgment over an ally.’

Quite suddenly, Praschko smiled.

‘That’s fine,’ he said.

‘Your own involvement with Harting twenty years ago, your association with certain British Government agencies –’

‘Nobody knows about that,’ Praschko said quickly. ‘You go damn carefully about that.’

‘I was going to make the very same point,’ said Bradfield with a reciprocal smile of relief. ‘I would not for a moment wish to have it said of the Embassy that we harbour resentments, persecute prominent German politicians, rake up old matters long dead; that we side with countries unsympathetic to the German cause in order to smear the Federal Republic. I am quite certain that in your own sphere, you would not like to have the same things said about yourself. I am pointing to an identity of interest.’

‘Sure,’ said Praschko. ‘Sure.’ His harrowed face remained inscrutable.

‘We all have our villains. We must not let them come between us.’

‘Jesus,’ said Praschko with a sideways glance at the marks on Turner’s face. ‘We got some damn funny friends as well. Did Leo do that to you?’

‘They’re sitting in the corner,’ Turner said. ‘They did it. They’re waiting to do it to him if they get a chance.’

‘Okay,’ said Praschko at last. ‘I’ll go along with you. We had lunch together. I haven’t seen him since. What does that ape want?’

‘Bradfield,’ Saab called across the room. ‘How soon?’

‘I told you, Karl-Heinz. We have no statement to make.’

* * *

‘We just talked, that’s all. I don’t see him so often. He called me up: how about lunch some time? I said make it tomorrow.’ He opened his palms to show there was nothing up his sleeve.

‘What did you talk about?’ Turner asked.

He shrugged to both of them. ‘You know how it is with old friends. Leo’s a nice guy, but – well, people change. Or maybe we don’t like to be reminded that they don’t change. We talked about old times. Had a drink. You know the kind of thing.’

‘Which old times?’ Turner persisted, and Praschko flared at him, very angry.

‘Sure: England times. Shit times. You know why we went to England, me and Leo? We were kids. Know how we got there? His name began with an H, my name began with P. So I changed it to a B. Harting Leo, Braschko Harry. Those times. Lucky we weren’t Weiss or Zachary, see: they were too low down. The English didn’t like the second half of the alphabet. That’s what we talked about: sent to Dover, free on board. Those damn times. The damn Farm School in Shepton Mallet, you know that shit place? Maybe they painted it by now. Maybe that old guy’s dead who knocked the hell out of us for being German and said we got to thank the English we’re alive. You know what we learnt in Shepton Mallet? Italian. From the prisoners of war. They were the only bastards we ever got to talk to!’ He turned to Bradfield. ‘Who is this Nazi anyway?’ he demanded, and burst out laughing. ‘Hey, am I crazy or something? I was having lunch with Leo.’

‘And he talked about his difficulties, whatever they may be?’ Bradfield asked.

‘He wanted to know about the Statute,’ Praschko replied, still smiling.

‘The Statute of Limitations?’

‘Sure. He wanted to know the law.’

‘Applied to a particular case?’

‘Should it have been?’

‘I was asking you.’

‘I thought maybe you had a particular case in mind.’

‘As a general matter of legal principle?’

‘Sure.’

‘What policy would be served by

that

, I wonder? It is not in the interests of any of us that the past be resurrected.’

‘That’s true, huh?’

‘It’s common sense,’ Bradfield said shortly. ‘Which I imagine carries more weight with you than any assurances I could give. What did he want to know?’

Praschko went very slowly now: ‘He wanted to know the

reason.

He wanted to know the philosophy. So I told him: “It’s not a new law, it’s an old one. It’s to make an end of things. Every country has a final court, a point you can’t go beyond, okay? In Germany there has to be a final day as well.” I spoke to him like he was a child – he’s so damned innocent, do you know that? A monk. I said, “Look, you ride a bicycle without lights, okay? If nobody’s found out after four months, you’re in the clear. If it’s manslaughter, then it’s not four months but fifteen years; if it’s murder, twenty years. If it’s Nazi murder, longer still, because they gave it extra time. They waited a few years before they began to count to twenty. If they don’t open a case, the offence lapses.” I said to him: “Listen, they’ve fooled around with this thing till it damn near died. They amended it to please the Queen and they amended it to please themselves; first they dated it from forty-five, then from forty-nine and now already they’ve changed it again.” ’ Praschko opened his hands – ‘So then he shouts at me, “What’s so damn holy about twenty years?” “There’s nothing holy about twenty years; there’s nothing holy about any number of damn years. We grow old. We grow tired. We die.” I told him that. I said to him: “I don’t know what you’ve got in your fool head, but it’s all crap. Everything’s got to have an end. The moralists say it’s a moral law, the apologists say it’s expedient. Listen, I’m your friend and I’m telling you; Praschko says: it’s a fact of life, so don’t fool about with it.” Then he got angry. You ever seen him angry?’

‘No.’

‘After lunch I brought him back here. We were still arguing, see. All the way in the car. Then we sat at this table. Right here where we are now. “Maybe I’ll find new information,” he said. I told him: “If you find new information, forget it, because there won’t be a darn thing you can do: don’t waste your time. You’re too late. That’s the law.” ’

‘He didn’t suggest by any chance that he already

had

that information?’

‘Has he?’ Praschko asked, very quickly indeed.

‘I cannot imagine it exists.’

Praschko nodded slowly, his eyes on Bradfield all the time.

‘So then what happened?’ said Turner.

‘That’s all. I said to him: “OK, so you prove manslaughter: you’re too late by years already. So you prove murder: you’re too late since last December. So get screwed.” That’s what I told him. So then he gets hold of my arm and he whispers to me, like a crazy priest: “No law will ever take account of what they did. You and I know that. They teach it in the churches: Christ was born of a virgin and went to Heaven in a cloud of light. Millions believe it. Listen, I play the music every Sunday, I hear them.” Is that true?’

‘He played the organ in Chapel,’ said Bradfield.

‘Jesus,’ said Praschko, lost in wonder. ‘Leo did that?’

‘He’s done it for years.’

‘So then he goes on: “But you and I, Praschko, in our own lifetime, we have seen the living witness of evil.” That’s what he says. “Not on a mountain top, not at night, but there, in the field where we all stood. We’re privileged people.

And now it’s all happening again.

” ’

Turner wanted to interrupt, but Bradfield restrained him.

‘So then I got damned angry. I said to him, see: “Don’t come playing God to me. Don’t come screaming to me about the thousand year justice of Nuremberg that lasted four years. At least the Statute gave us twenty. And who imposed the Statute anyway? You British could have made us change it. When you handed over, you could have said to us: here, you bloody Germans, take over these cases, hear them in your own courts, pass sentence according to your penal code but first abolish the Statute. You were party to it then; be party to it now. It’s finished. It’s damn well, damn well finished.” That’s what I said to him. And he just went on looking at me, saying my name. “Praschko, Praschko.” ’

Taking a handkerchief from his pocket, he dabbed his brow and wiped his mouth.

‘Don’t pay any attention to me,’ he said. ‘I get excited. You know what politicians are. I said to him, while he stared at me, I said, “This is my home: look. If I’ve got a heart left, it’s here, in this bordello. I used to wonder why. Why not Buckingham Palace? Why not the Coca-Cola Culture? But this is my country. And that’s what you should have found: a country. Not just a bloody Embassy.” He went on looking at me; I tell you I was going crazy myself. I said to him: “So suppose you do find that proof, tell me what it’s all about: to commit a crime at thirty, to be punished at sixty? What does that mean? We’re old men,” I said to him, “you and I. You know what Goethe told us: no man can watch a sunset for more than quarter of an hour.” He said to me: “It’s happening again. Look at the faces, Praschko, listen to the speeches. Somebody has to stop that bastard or you and me will be wearing the labels again.” ’

Bradfield spoke first. ‘If he

had

found the proof, which we know he has not, what would he have done? If instead of still searching for it, he had already found it, what then?’

‘Oh Jesus; I tell you: he’d have gone crazy.’

‘Who’s Aickman?’ Turner said, ending the long silence.

‘What’s that, boy?’

‘Aickman. Who is she? Miss Aickman, Miss Etling and Miss Brandt . . . He was engaged to her once.’

‘She was just a woman he had in Berlin. Or was it Hamburg? Both maybe. Jesus, I forget everything. Thank God, eh?’

‘What became of her?’

‘I never heard,’ Praschko said. His little eyes were roughly hacked in the old bark.

From their corner still, the clean faces watched without expression; four pale hands lay on the table like weapons put to rest. The loudspeaker was calling Praschko: the

Fraktion

was waiting for him to appear.

‘You betrayed him,’ Turner said. ‘You put Siebkron on to him. You sold him down the river. He told you the lot and you warned Siebkron because you’re climbing on the bandwagon too.’

‘Be quiet,’ said Bradfield. ‘Be quiet.’

‘You rotten bastard,’ Turner hissed. ‘You’ll kill him. He told you he’d found the proof; he told you what it was and he asked you to help him, and you put Siebkron on to him for his trouble. You were his friend and you did that.’

‘He’s crazy,’ Praschko whispered. ‘Don’t you realise he’s crazy? You didn’t see him back in those days. You never saw him back with Karfeld in the cellar. You think those boys worked you over? Karfeld couldn’t even

speak

: “Talk! Talk!” ’ Praschko’s eyes were screwed up very tight. ‘After we saw those bodies in the field . . . They were tied together. They’d been tied together before they were gassed. He went crazy. I said to him: “Listen, it’s not your

fault.

It’s not your

fault

you survived!” Did he show you the buttons, maybe? The money from the camp? You never saw that either, did you? You never went out with him and a couple of girls to have a drink? You never saw him play with the wooden buttons to start a fight? He’s crazy I tell you.’ The recollection moved him to despair. ‘I said to him, sitting here: “Come on, let’s go. Who the hell ever built Jerusalem in Germany? Don’t eat your heart out, come and screw some girls!” I said, “Listen! We got to get hold of our minds and press them in or we

all

go crazy.” He’s a monk. A crazy monk that won’t forget. What do you think the world is? A damn playground for a lot of crazy moralists? Sure I told Siebkron. You’re a clever boy. But you got to learn to forget as well. Christ, if the British can’t who can?’

* * *

There was shouting as they entered the lobby. Two students in leather coats had broken the cordon at the door and were standing on the stairs, fighting with the janitors. An elderly deputy was holding a handkerchief to his mouth and the blood was running over his wrist. ‘Nazis!’ someone was shouting. ‘Nazis!’ But he was pointing to a student on the balcony and the student was waving a red flag.

‘Back to the restaurant,’ Bradfield said. ‘We can get out the other side.’

The restaurant was suddenly empty. Drawn or repelled by the fuss in the lobby, deputies and visitors had vanished in their chosen directions. Bradfield was not running, but striding at a long military pace. They were in the arcade. A leather shop offered black attaché cases in fine box calf. In the next window a barber was working up a lather on the face of an invisible customer.

‘Bradfield, you must hear me: my God, can’t I even warn you what they are saying?’

Saab was dreadfully out of breath. His portly body was heaving under his greasy jacket; tears of sweat lay in the pouches under his yellow eyes. Allerton, his face crimson under his black mane, peered over his shoulder. They drew back into a doorway. At the end of the corridor, calm had descended on the lobby.

‘What who is saying?’

Allerton answered for him: ‘All Bonn, old boy. The whole bloody paper mill.’

‘Listen. There are whispers. Listen. Fantastic what they are saying. You know what happened at Hanover? You know why they rioted? They are whispering it in all the cafés: the delegates; Karfeld’s men are telling it. Already the rumours are all over Bonn. They have been instructed to say nothing; it is all a fantastic secret.’

Saab glanced quickly up and down the arcade.

‘It’s the best for years,’ said Allerton. ‘Even for this

doorp

.’

‘Why they broke the line at the front and ran like mad dogs for the Library? Those boys who came on the grey buses? Somebody shot at Karfeld. In the middle of the music: shot at him from the window of the Library. Some friend of the woman, the librarian: Eich. She worked for the British in Berlin. She was an

émigrée,

she changed her name to Eich. She let him in to shoot from the window. Afterwards she told it all to Siebkron before she died. Eich. The bodyguard saw him fire, Karfeld’s bodyguard. In the middle of the music! They saw the fellow shooting from the window and ran to catch him. The bodyguard, Bradfield, that came in the grey buses! Listen, Bradfield! Listen what they say! They found the bullet, a pistol bullet from an English pistol. You see now? The English are assassinating Karfeld: that is the fantastic rumour. You must stop them saying it; talk to Siebkron. Karfeld is terrified; he is a great coward. Listen: that is why he is so careful, that is why he is building everywhere such a damn

Schaffott.

How do I say

Schaffott

, for God’s sake?’

‘Scaffold,’ said Turner.

The crowd from the lobby swept them outwards into the fresh air.

‘Scaffold! An absolute secret, Bradfield! For your own information!’ They heard him cry, ‘You must not quote me, for God’s sake. Siebkron would be fantastically angry!’

‘Rest assured, Karl-Heinz,’ the even voice replied, absurdly formal in the turmoil, ‘your confidence will be respected.’

‘Old boy,’ Allerton put his head close to Turner’s ear. He had not shaved, the black locks were tipped with sweat. ‘What’s happened to Leo these days? Seems to have faded all away. They say old Eich was quite a swinger in her day . . . used to work with the scalphunters up in Hamburg. What have they done to your face, old boy? Close her legs too soon, did she?’

‘There’s no story,’ Bradfield said.

‘Not yet there isn’t,’ said Allerton, ‘old boy.’

‘There never will be.’

‘They say he bloody nearly got him in Bonn the night before the Hanover rally. Just wasn’t quite sure enough of his man. Karfeld was walking away from a secret conference; walking to the pick-up point and Leo damn nearly got him then. Siebkron’s chicks turned up just in time.’

Along the embankment the motionless columns waited in patient echelons. Their black flags barely lifted in the poor breeze. Across the river, behind a line of blue trees, distant factory chimneys puffed their smoke lazily into the drab morning light. Small boats, dabs of brilliance, lay marooned on the grey grass bank. To Turner’s left stood an old boathouse which no one had yet pulled down. A notice on it proclaimed it the property of the Institute of Physical Exercise of the University of Bonn.

* * *

They stood on the bank, side by side. The palest mist, like breath upon a glass, drew in the brown horizons and filled the near bridge. There were no sounds but the echoes of absent things, the cry of lost gulls and the moan of the lost barges, the inevitable whine of unseen drills. There were no people but the grey shadows along the waterfront and the unrelated tread of feet; it was not raining, but sometimes they felt the moisture in the mist, like the prickling of blood upon a heated skin. There were no ships, but funeral hulks drifting towards the Gods of the North; and there was no smell but the inland smell of coal and industries which were not present.

‘Karfeld is hidden until tonight,’ Bradfield said. ‘Siebkron has seen to that. They’ll expect him to try again this evening. And he will.’ He went over it again, rehearsing it as if it were a formula.

‘Until the demonstration, Karfeld is hidden. After the demonstration, Karfeld will again be hidden. Harting’s own resources are severely limited; he cannot reckon to be at large much longer. He will try tonight.’

‘Aickman’s dead,’ said Turner. ‘They killed her.’

‘Yes. He will want to try tonight.’

‘Make Siebkron cancel the rally.’

‘If it were in my power I would. If it were in Siebkron’s power, he would.’ He indicated the columns. ‘It’s too late.’

Turner stared at him.

‘No, I cannot see Karfeld cancelling the rally, however frightened he is,’ Bradfield continued, as if a moment’s doubt had crossed his mind. ‘The rally is the culmination of his campaign in the provinces. He has organised it to coincide with the most critical moment in Brussels. He is already halfway to success.’

He turned and walked slowly along the footpath towards the car park. The grey columns watched him silently.

‘Go back to the Embassy. Take a taxi. From now on there’s to be a total ban on movement. No one is to leave the Embassy perimeter on pain of dismissal. Tell de Lisle. And tell him what has happened and put aside the Karfeld papers for my return. Anything that incriminates him: the investigation report, the thesis . . . anything from the Glory Hole that tells the tale. I shall be back by early afternoon.’

He opened the car door.

‘What’s the bargain with Siebkron?’ Turner said. ‘What’s the small print?’

‘There is no bargain. Either they destroy Harting, or he will destroy Karfeld. In either case I have to disown him. That is the only thing that matters. Is there something you would prefer me to do? Do you see a way out? I shall inform Siebkron that order must be restored. I shall give him my oath that we had no part in Harting’s work, and no knowledge of it. Can you suggest an alternative solution? I would be grateful.’

He started the engine. The grey columns stirred with interest, pleased by the white Jaguar.

‘Bradfield!’

‘Well.’

‘I beg you. Five minutes. I’ve got a card to play as well. Something we’ve never mentioned. Bradfield!’

Without a word, Bradfield opened the door and got out.

‘You say we have no part in it. We have. He’s our product, you know that, we made him what he was, crushed him between all those worlds . . . we ground him down into himself, made him see things no one should ever see, hear things that . . . we sent him on that private journey . . . you don’t know what it’s like down there. I do! Bradfield, listen! We

owe

him. He knew that.’

‘All of us are owed. Very few of us are paid.’

‘You

want

to destroy him! You

want

to make him nothing! You

want

to disown him because he was her lover! Because –’

‘My God,’ Bradfield said softly, ‘if that were the task I had set myself I would have to kill more than thirty-two. Is that all you wanted to tell me?’

‘Wait! Brussels . . . the Market . . . all this. Next week it’s gold, the week after it’s the Warsaw pact. We’d join the bloody Salvation Army if it pleased the Americans. What does it matter about the names? . . . You see it clearer than any of us: the drift. Why do you go on with it like this? Why don’t you say stop?’

‘What am I to do about Harting? Tell me what else I can do but disown him? You know us here now. Crises are academic. Scandals are not. Haven’t you realised that only appearances matter?’

Turner searched frantically about him. ‘It’s not true! You

can’t

be so tied to the surface of things.’

‘What else is there when the underneath is rotten? Break the surface and we sink. That’s what Harting has done. I am a hypocrite,’ he continued simply. ‘I’m a great believer in hypocrisy. It’s the nearest we ever get to virtue. It’s a statement of what we ought to be. Like religion, like art, like the law, like marriage. I serve the appearance of things. It is the worst of systems; it is better than the others. That is my profession and that is my philosophy. And unlike yourself,’ he added, ‘I did not contract to serve a powerful nation, least of all a virtuous one. All power corrupts. The loss of power corrupts even more. We thank an American for that advice. It’s quite true. We are a corrupt nation, and we need all the help we can get. That is lamentable and, I confess, occasionally humiliating. However, I would rather fail as a power than survive by impotence. I would rather be vanquished than neutral. I would rather be English than Swiss. And unlike you, I expect nothing. I expect no more from institutions than I expect from people. You have no suggestion then? I am disappointed.’

‘Bradfield, I

know

her. I know you, and I know what you feel! You hate him! You hate him more than you dare admit. You hate him for

feeling

: for loving, even for hating. You hate him for deceiving and for being honest. For waking her. For putting you to shame. You hate him for the time she spent on him . . . for the thought, the dream she had of him!’

‘But you have no suggestion. I imagine your five minutes are over. He

has

offended,’ he added casually, as if passing the topic once more in review. ‘Yes. He has. Not as much against myself as you might suppose. But against the order that results from chaos; against the built-in moderation of an aimless society. He had no business to hate Karfeld and none to . . . He had no business to remember. If you and I have a purpose at all any more, it is to save the world from such presumptions.’

‘Of all of you – Listen! – Of all of you he’s the only one who’s real, the only one who believed, and acted! For you, it’s a sterile, rotten game, a family word game, that’s all; just play. But Leo’s

involved

! He knows what he wants and he’s gone to get it!’

‘Yes. That alone should be enough to condemn him.’ He had forgotten Turner now. ‘There’s no room for his kind any more. That’s the one thing we

have

learnt, thank God.’ He stared at the river. ‘We’ve learnt that even

nothing

is a pretty tender flower. You speak as if there were those who contribute and those who do not. As if we were all working for the day when we are no longer needed; when the world could pack up and cultivate its allotment. There

is

no product. There

is

no final day. This

is

the life we work for. Now. At this moment. Every night, as I go to sleep, I say to myself: another day achieved. Another day added to the unnatural life of a world on its deathbed. And if I never relax, if I never lift my eye, we may run on for another hundred years. Yes.’ He was talking to the river. ‘Our policy is that tide, taken at its three-inch flood. Three inches of freedom up and down the bank. That’s the limit of our action. Beyond it is anarchy, and all the romantic claptrap of protest and conscience. We are all looking for the wider freedom, every one of us. It doesn’t exist. As long as we accept that, we can dream at will. Harting should never have gone down there in the first place. And you should have returned to London when I told you. The Statute has made a law of forgetting. He broke it. Praschko is quite right: Harting has broken the law of moderation.’

‘We’re

not

automatons! We’re born free, I believe that! We can’t control the processes of our own minds!’

‘Good Lord, whoever told you that?’ He faced Turner now and the small tears showed. ‘I have controlled the processes of my own mind for eighteen years of marriage and twenty years of diplomacy. I have spent half of my life learning not to look, and the other half learning not to feel. Do you think I cannot also learn to forget? God, sometimes I am bowed down by the things I do not know! So why the devil couldn’t he forget as well? Do you think I take pleasure in what I have to do? Do you think he does not challenge me to do it?

He

set all this in motion, not I! His

damned

immodesty –’

‘Bradfield! What about Karfeld? Hasn’t Karfeld stepped over the line as well?’

‘There are quite different ways of dealing with his case.’ The shell had closed again around his voice.

‘Leo found one.’

‘The wrong one as it happens.’

‘Why?’

‘Never mind why.’

He began walking slowly back to the car, but Turner was calling to him.

‘What made Leo run? Something he read. Something he stole. What

was

in that Green File? What were those Formal and Informal Conversations with German Politicians? Bradfield! Who was talking to who?’

‘Lower your voice, they’ll overhear.’

‘Tell me! Have you been having conversations with Karfeld? Is that what sent Leo on his night walk? Is that what it was all about?’

Bradfield did not reply.

‘Holy God,’ Turner whispered. ‘We’re like the rest of them, after all. Like Siebkron and Praschko; we’re trying to make our number with tomorrow’s lucky winner!’

* * *

‘Take care!’ Bradfield warned.

‘Allerton . . . what Allerton said –’

‘Allerton? He knows nothing!’

‘Karfeld came in from Hanover that Friday night. Secretly to Bonn. For a conference. He even arrived and left on foot, it was so secret. You didn’t go to Hanover after all, did you, that Friday night? You changed your plans, cancelled your ticket. Leo found that out from the Travel Clerks –’

‘You’re talking utter nonsense.’

‘You met Karfeld in Bonn. Siebkron laid it on, and Leo followed you because he knew what you were up to!’

‘You’re out of your mind.’

‘No, I’m not. But Leo is, isn’t he? Because Leo suspected. All the time, in the back of his mind, he knew that you were secretly reinsuring against the Brussels failure. Until he saw that file, until he actually saw and knew, he thought he might still act within the law. But when he saw the Green File he

knew

: it really

was

happening again. He knew. That’s why he was in a hurry. He had to stop you, he had to stop Karfeld before it was too late!’

Bradfield said nothing.

‘What was in the Green File, Bradfield? What’s he taken with him as a keepsake? Why was

that

the only file he stole? Because it contained the minutes of

those

meetings, was it? And that’s what’s drawn your fire! You’ve got to get the Green File back! Did you sign them, Bradfield? With that willing pen of yours?’ His pale eyes were alight with anger. ‘When did he steal the despatch box, let’s just think: Friday . . . Friday morning he had his verification, didn’t he? He saw it in black and white:

that

was the other proof he was looking for. He took it to Aickman . . . “They’re up to their old tricks, we’ve got to stop it before it’s too late . . . we’re the chosen ones.” That’s why he took the Green File! To show them!

Children, look,

he wants to say,

history really is repeating itself, and it isn’t comedy at all!

’

‘It was a document of the highest secrecy. He could go to prison for years for that alone.’

‘But he never will, because you want the file and not the man. That’s another part of the three-inch freedom, is it?’

‘Would you prefer me to be a fanatic?’

‘What he’d suspected for months, picked up in the wind of Bonn gossip and the scraps he got from

her;

now he had the proof: that the British were hedging their bets. Taking out a with-profits policy on the Bonn–Moscow axis. What’s the deal, Bradfield? What’s the small print

now?

Christ, no wonder Siebkron thought you were playing a treble game! First you put all your chips on Brussels and very wise too. “Let nothing disturb the enterprise.” Then you hedge the bet with Karfeld and you get Siebkron to hold your stake. “Bring me secretly to Karfeld,” you say to him. “The British also are interested in a Moscow axis.” Very informally interested, mind. Purely explanatory talks and no witnesses, mind. But an eventual trade alignment with the East is not at all out of the question,

Herr Doktor Karfeld

, if you should ever happen to become a credible alternative to a crumbling coalition! As a matter of fact we’re quite anti-American ourselves these days, it’s in the blood, you know,

Herr Doktor Karfeld

 . . .’

‘You missed your vocation.’

‘And then what happens? No sooner has Siebkron brought Karfeld to your bed than he learns enough to make his blood run cold: the British Embassy is compiling a dossier on Karfeld’s unsavoury past! The Embassy already has the records – the

only

records, Bradfield – and now they’re sizing up to blackmail him on the side. And that’s not all!’

‘No.’

‘Siebkron and Karfeld have hardly got used to that little shock before you provide a bigger one. One that really rocks them. Not even Albion, they thought, could be that perfidious: the British are actually trying to assassinate Karfeld. It makes no sense of course. Why kill the man you want to blackmail? They must have been puzzled to death. No wonder Siebkron looked so sick on Tuesday night!’

‘Now you know it all. You share the secret: keep it.’

‘Bradfield!’

‘Well?’

‘Who do you want to win? This afternoon, out there, who’s your money on this time, Bradfield? On Leo; or the cut-price ally?’

Bradfield switched on the engine.

‘Cut-price friends! They’re the only kind we can afford! They’re the only kind we’ve got the guts to make! We’re a proud nation, Bradfield! You can get Karfeld for twenty-five per cent off now, can’t you! Never mind if he hates us. He’ll come round! People change! And he thinks about us all the time! That’s an encouraging start! A little push now and he’ll run for ever.’

‘Either you’re in or you’re out. Either you’re involved or you’re not. Or would you rather be Swiss?’

Without another word or glance, Bradfield drove up the hill, turned right and vanished in the direction of Bonn. Turner waited until he was out of sight before walking back along the river path towards the cab rank. As he went there rose suddenly behind him an unearthly rumble of feet and voices, the saddest, deepest sound he had ever heard in his life. The columns had begun to move; they were shuffling slowly forward, mediocre, ponderous and terrifying, a mindless grey monster that could no longer be held back, while beyond them, almost hidden in the mist, stood the wooded outline of Chamberlain’s hill.

Epilogue

Bradfield led the way; de Lisle and Turner followed. It was early evening and the streets were empty of traffic. In all Bonn, nothing stirred but the mute, grey-clad strangers who swarmed the alleys and hastened towards the market square. The black bunting, becalmed, drifted in idle swathes over the ebbing tide.

Bonn had never seen such faces. The old and the young, the lost and the found, the fed and the hungry, the clever, the dull, the governed and the ungoverned, all the children of the Republic, it seemed, had risen in a single legion to march upon her little bastions. Some were hillsmen, dark-haired, straddle-legged and scrubbed for the outing; some were clerks, Bob Cratchits nipped by the quick air; some were Sunday men, the slow infantry of the German promenade, in grey gabardine and grey Homburg hats. Some carried their flags shamefully, as if they had outgrown them, some as banners borne to the battle, others as ravens strung for market. Birnam Wood had come to Dunsinane.

Bradfield waited for them to catch up.

‘Siebkron reserved space for us. We should enter the square higher up. We shall have to force our way to the right.’

Turner nodded, barely hearing. He was looking everywhere, into every face and every window, every shop, corner and alley. Once he seized de Lisle’s arm, but whoever it was had gone, lost again in the changing mass.

Not just the square itself: balconies, windows, shops, every foothold and crevice was filled with grey coats and white faces, and the green uniforms of soldiers and police. And still they came, more of them, cramming the mouths of the darkening alleys, craning their necks for a sight of the speaker’s stand, searching for a leader, faceless men searching for one face; while Turner peered desperately among them for a face he had never seen. Overhead, in front of the floodlights, loudspeakers hung like warnings from their wires; beyond them, the sky was failing.

He’ll never make it, Turner thought dully; he’ll never penetrate a crowd like this. But Hazel Bradfield’s voice came back to him:

I had a younger brother, he played scrum-half, you could hardly tell them apart.

‘To the left,’ Bradfield said. ‘Make for the hotel.’

‘You are English?’ a woman’s voice enquired, teatime in a friendly house. ‘My daughter lives in Yarmouth.’ But the tide carried her away. Furled banners barred their path, dropped like lances. The banners formed a ring, and the gypsy students stood inside it, gathered round their own small fire. ‘Burn Axel Springer,’ one boy shouted, not with much conviction, and another broke a book and threw it on the flames. The book burned badly, choking before it died. I shouldn’t have done that to the books, Turner thought; I’ll be doing it to people next. A group of girls lounged on mattresses and the fire made poems of their faces.

‘If we’re separated, meet on the steps of the

Stern

,’ Bradfield ordered. A boy heard him and ran forward, encouraged by the others. Two girls were already shouting in French. ‘You are English!’ the boy cried, though his face was young and nervous. ‘English swine!’ Hearing the girls again, he swung his small fist wildly over the lances. Turner hastened forward, but the blow fell on Bradfield’s shoulder and he paid it no attention. The crowd gave way, suddenly, its will mysteriously gone, and the Town Hall appeared before them at the far end of the square, and that was the night’s first dream. A magic baroque mountain of candy pink and merchant gold. A vision of style and elegance, of silk and filigree and sunlight. A vision of brilliance and Latin glory, palaces where de Lisle’s unplayed minuets pleased the plumper burgher’s heart. To its left the scaffold, still in darkness, cut off by the screen of arclights trained upon the building, waited like an executioner upon the imperial presence.

‘Herr Bradfield?’ the pale detective asked. He had not changed his leather coat since that dawn in Königswinter, but there were two teeth missing from his black mouth. The moon faces of his colleagues stirred in recognition of the name.

‘I’m Bradfield, yes.’

‘We are ordered to free the steps for you.’ His English was rehearsed: a small part for a newcomer. The radio in his leather pocket crackled in urgent command. He lifted it to his mouth. The diplomatic gentlemen had arrived, he said, and were safely in position. The gentleman from Research was also present.

Turner looked pointedly at the broken mouth and smiled.

‘You sod,’ he said with satisfaction. The lip was badly cut as well, though not as badly as Turner’s.

‘Please?’

‘Sod,’ Turner explained. ‘Sodomite.’

‘Shut up,’ said Bradfield.

The steps commanded a view of the entire square. Already the afternoon had turned to twilight; the victorious arclights divided the numberless heads into white patches which floated like pale discs upon a black sea. Houses, shops, cinemas had fallen away. Only their gables remained, carved in fairytale silhouette against the dark sky, and that was the second dream,

Tales of Hoffman,

the woodcut world of German make-believe to prolong the German childhood. High on a roof a Coca-Cola sign, winking on and off, tinged the surrounding tiles with cosmetic pink; once an errant spotlight ran across the facades, peering with a lover’s eye into the empty windows of the stores. On the lower step, the detectives waited, backs towards them, hands in pockets, black against the haze.

‘Karfeld will come in from the side,’ de Lisle said suddenly.

‘The alley to the left.’

Following the direction of de Lisle’s outstretched arm, Turner noticed for the first time directly beneath the feet of the scaffold a tiny passageway between the pharmacy and the Town Hall, not more than ten foot wide and made very deep by the high walls of the adjacent buildings.

‘We remain here, is that clearly understood? On these steps. Whatever happens. We are here as observers; merely observers, nothing more.’ Bradfield’s strict features were strengthened by dilemma. ‘If they find him they will deliver him to us. That is the understanding. We shall take him at once to the Embassy for safe custody.’

Music, Turner remembered. In Hanover he tried when the music was loudest. The music is supposed to drown the shot. He remembered the hair-dryers too and thought: he’s not a man to vary the technique; if it worked before, it will work again, and that’s the German in him; like Karfeld and the grey buses.

His thoughts were lost to the murmur of the crowd, the pleasurable growl of expectation which mounted like an angry prayer as the floodlights died. Only the Town Hall remained, a pure and radiant altar, tended by the little group which had appeared upon its balcony. The names rose in countless mouths as, all around him, the slow liturgical commentary began:

Tilsit, Tilsit was there, Tilsit the old General, the third from the left, and look, he is wearing his medal, the only one they wanted to deny him, his special medal from the war, he wears it round his neck, Tilsit is a man of courage. Meyer-Lothringen, the economist! Yes,

der Grosse

, the tall one, how elegantly he waves, it is well known that he is of the best family; half a Wittelsbach, they say; blood will tell in the end; and a great academic; he understands everything. And priests! The Bishop! Look, the Bishop himself is blessing us! Count the movements of his holy hand! Now he is looking to his right! He has reached out his arm! And Halbach the young hothead: look, he is wearing a pullover! Fantastic, his impertinence: a pullover on such an occasion! In Bonn?

Halbach! Du toller Hund!

But Halbach is from Berlin, and Berliners are famous for their arrogance; one day he will lead us all, so young and yet already so successful.

The murmur rose to a roar, a visceral, hungry, loving roar, deeper than any single throat, more pious than any single soul, more loving than any single heart; and died again, whispering down, as the first quiet chords of music struck. The Town Hall receded and the scaffolding stood before them. A preacher’s pulpit, a captain’s bridge, a conductor’s rostrum? A child’s cradle, a plain coffin of boldly simple wood, grandiose yet virtuous, a wooden grail, housing the German truth. Upon it, alone but valiant, the truth’s one champion, a plain man known as Karfeld.

‘Peter.’ Turner gently pointed into the tiny alley. His hand was shaking but his eye was quite steady. A shadow? A guard taking up his post?

‘I wouldn’t point any more if I was you,’ de Lisle whispered. ‘They might misunderstand you.’

But in that moment, no one paid them any heed, for Karfeld was all they saw.

‘Der Klaus!’ the crowd was calling. ‘Der Klaus is here!’ Wave to him, children; der Klaus, the magic man, has walked all the way to Bonn on stilts of German pine.

‘He is very English, der Klaus,’ he heard de Lisle murmur. ‘Although he hates our guts.’

* * *

He was such a little man up there. They said he was tall; and it would have been easy enough, with so much artifice, to raise him a foot or so, but he seemed to wish to be diminished, as if to emphasise that great truths are found in humble mouths; for Karfeld was a humble man, and English in his diffidence.

And Karfeld was a nervous man too, bothered by his spectacles, which he had not had time to clean, apparently, in these busy days, for now he took them off and polished them as if he did not know he was observed: it is the others who make the ceremony, he was telling them, before he had said a word; it is you and I who know why we are here.

Let us pray.

‘The lights are too bright for him,’ someone said. ‘They should reduce the lights.’

He was one of them, this isolated Doctor; a good deal of brain power no doubt, a good deal above the ears, but still one of them at the end of it, ready to step down at any time from that high place if someone better came along. And not at all a politician. Quite without ambition, in fact, for he had only yesterday promised to stand down in favour of Halbach if that was the people’s will. The crowd whispered its concern. Karfeld looks tired, he looks fresh; he looks well; Karfeld looks ill, older, younger, taller, shorter . . . It is said he is retiring; no, he will give up his factory and work full time on politics. He cannot afford it; he is a millionaire.

Quietly he began speaking.

No one introduced him, he did not say his name. The note of music which announced his coming had no companions, for Klaus Karfeld is alone up there, quite alone, and no music can console him. Karfeld is not a Bonn windbag; he is one of us for all his intellect: Klaus Karfeld, doctor and citizen, a decent man decently concerned about the fate of Germany, is obliged, out of a sense of honour, to address a few friends.

It was so softly, so unobtrusively done, that to Turner it seemed that the whole massive gathering actually inclined its ear in order to save Karfeld the pain of raising his voice.

* * *

Afterwards, Turner could not say how much he had understood, nor how he had understood so much. He had the impression, at first, that Karfeld’s interest was purely historical. The talk was of the origin of war and Turner caught the old catch-words of the old religion: Versailles, chaos, depression and encirclement; the mistakes that had been made by statesmen on both sides, for Germans cannot shirk their own responsibilities. There followed a small tribute to the casualties of unreason: too many people died, Karfeld said, and too few knew the cause. It must never happen again, Karfeld knew: he had brought back more than wounds from Stalingrad: he had brought back memories, indelible memories, of human misery, mutilation and betrayal . . .

He has indeed, they whispered, the poor Klaus. He has suffered for us all.

There was no rhetoric still. You and I, Karfeld was saying, have learnt the lessons of history; you and I can look on these things with detachment: it must never happen again. There were those, it was true, who saw the battles of fourteen and thirty-nine as part of a continuing crusade against the enemies of a German heritage, but Karfeld – he wished it to be known to all his friends – Klaus Karfeld was not, altogether, of this school.

‘Alan.’ It was de Lisle’s voice, steady as a captain’s. Turner followed his gaze.

A flutter, a movement of people, the passing of a message? Something was stirring on the balcony. He saw Tilsit, the General, incline his soldier’s head and Halbach the student leader whisper in his ear, saw Meyer-Lothringen leaning forward over the filigree rail, listening to someone below him. A policeman? A plain clothes man? He saw the glint of spectacles and the patient surgeon’s face as Siebkron rose and vanished; and all was still again except for Karfeld, academic and man of reason, who was talking about today.

* * *

Today, he said, as never before, Germany was the plaything of her allies. They had bought her, now they were selling her. This was a

fact

, Karfeld said, he would not deal in theory. There were too many theories in Bonn already, he explained, and he did not propose to add to the confusion. This was

fact

, and it was necessary, if painful, to debate among good and reasonable friends how Germany’s allies had achieved this strange state of affairs. Germany was rich, after all: richer than France, and richer than Italy. Richer than England, he added casually, but we must not be rude to the English for the English won the war after all, and were a people of uncommon gifts. His voice remained wonderfully reasonable as he recited all the English gifts: their mini-skirts, their pop singers, their Rhine Army that sat in London, their Empire that was falling apart, their national deficit . . . without these English gifts, Europe would surely fail. Karfeld had always said so.

Here they laughed; it was a warming, angry laugh, and Karfeld, shocked and perhaps the tiniest fraction disappointed that these beloved sinners, whom God had appointed him in his humility to instruct, should fall to laughing in the temple; Karfeld waited patiently until it died.

How then, if Germany was so rich, if she possessed the largest standing army in Europe, and could dominate the so-called Common Market, how was it possible for her to be sold in public places like a whore?

* * *

Leaning back in the pulpit, he removed his spectacles and made a cautious, pacifying gesture of the hand, for there were noises now of protest and indignation, and Karfeld quite clearly did not care for this at all. We must try to resolve this question in a pious, reasonable and wholly

intellectual

manner, he warned, without emotion and without rancour, as befits good friends! It was a plump, round hand and it might have been webbed, for he never separated his fingers, but used the whole fist singly like a club.

In seeking, then, a rational explanation for this curious – and, for Germans at least, highly relevant – historical fact, objectivity was essential. In the first place – the fist shot upward again – we had had twelve years of Nazism and thirty-five years of anti-Nazism. Karfeld did not understand what was so

very

wrong about Nazism that it should be punished eternally with the whole world’s hostility. The Nazis had persecuted the Jews: and that was wrong. He wished to go on record as saying it was wrong. Just as he condemned Oliver Cromwell for his treatment of the Irish, the United States for their treatment of the blacks and for their campaigns of genocide against the Red Indians and the yellow peril of South East Asia; just as he condemned the Church for its persecution of heretics, and the British for the bombing of Dresden, so he condemned Hitler for what he had done to the Jews; and for importing that British invention, so successful in the Boer War: the concentration camp.

Directly in front of him Turner saw the young detective’s hand softly feel for the partition of his leather coat; he heard again the little crackle of the radio. Once more he strained his eyes, scanning the crowd, the balcony, the alleys; once more he searched the doorways and the windows; and there was nothing. Nothing but the sentinels posted along the rooftops and the militia waiting in their vans; nothing but a countless throng of silent men and women, motionless as God’s anointed before the Presence of the Word.

* * *

Let us examine, Karfeld suggested – since it will help us to arrive at a logical and objective solution to the many questions which presently assail us – let us examine what happened after the war.

After the war, Karfeld explained, it was only just that the Germans should be treated as criminals; and, because the Germans had practised racism, that their sons and grandsons should be treated as criminals too. But, because the Allies were

kind

people, and

good

people, they would go some way towards rehabilitating the Germans: as a very special treat, they would admit them to Nato.

The Germans were shy at first; they did not

want

to rearm, many people had had enough of war. Karfeld himself belonged to that category: the lessons of Stalingrad were like acid in the young man’s memory. But the Allies were determined as well as kind. The Germans should provide the army, and the British and the Americans and the French would command it . . . And the Dutch . . . And the Norwegians . . . And the Portuguese; and any other foreign general who cared to command the vanquished:

‘Why: we might even have had African generals commanding the Bundeswehr!’

A few – they belonged to the front, to that protective ring of leather-coated men beneath the scaffold – a few started laughing, but he quelled them at once.

‘Listen!’ he told them. ‘My friends, you must listen! That is what we

deserved

! We lost the war! We persecuted the Jews! We were not

fit

to command! Only to pay!’ Their anger gradually subsided. ‘That,’ he explained, ‘is why we pay for the

British

Army as well. And

that

is why they let us into Nato.’

‘Alan!’

‘I have seen them.’

Two grey buses were parked beside the pharmacy. A floodlight touched their dull coachwork, and was moved away. The windows were quite black, sealed from inside.

And we were grateful, Karfeld continued. Grateful to be admitted to such an exclusive club. Of course we were. The club did not exist; its members did not like us; the fees were very high; and as the Germans were still children they must not play with weapons which might damage their enemies; but we were grateful all the same, because we were Germans and had lost the war.

Once more the indignant murmur rose, but he scotched it again with a terse movement of his hand. ‘We want no emotion here,’ he reminded them. ‘We are dealing with facts!’

High up, on a tiny ledge, a mother held her baby. ‘Look down,’ she was whispering. ‘You will not see his like again.’ In the whole square, nothing moved; the heads were still, staring with cavernous eyes.

To emphasise his great impartiality, Karfeld once more drew back in the pulpit and, taking all his time, tilted his spectacles a little and examined the pages before him. This done, he hesitated, peered doubtfully downwards at the faces nearest him and deliberated, unsure how far he could expect his flock to follow what he was about to say.

What then was the

function

of the Germans in this distinguished club? He would put it this way. He would state the formula first and afterwards he would give one or two simple examples of the method by which it could be applied. The function of the Germans in Nato was briefly this: to be

docile

towards the West and

hostile

towards the East; to recognise that even among the victorious Allies there were

good

victors and

bad

victors . . .

Again the laughter rose and fell.

Der Klaus

, they whispered,

der Klaus

knows how to make a joke; what a club that Nato is. Nato, the Market, it’s all a cheat, it’s all the same; they are applying the same principles to the Market which they applied to Nato. Klaus has told us so and that is why the Germans must stay away from Brussels. It is just another trap, it is encirclement all over again . . .

‘That’s Lésère,’ de Lisle murmured.

A small, greying man who obscurely reminded Turner of a bus conductor had joined them on the steps and was writing contentedly in his notebook.

‘The French counsellor. Big chum of Karfeld’s.’

About to return his gaze to the scaffold, Turner happened to look into the side street; and thus he saw for the first time the mad, dark, tiny army that waited for the signal.

* * *

Directly across the square, assembled in the unlit side street, the silent concourse of men waited. They carried banners that were not quite black in the twilight and there stood before them, Turner was certain there stood before them, the remnants of a military band. The oblique arclights glinted on a trumpet, caught the laced panels of the drum. At its head stood a solitary figure; his arm, raised like a conductor’s, held them motionless.

Again the radio crackled, but the words were drowned in laughter as Karfeld made another joke; a harsh joke, enough to raise their anger, a reference to the decay of England and the person of the monarch. The tone was new and hard: a light blow on their backs, brisker, a purposeful caress, promising the sting to come, tracing like a whip’s end the little vertebrae of their political resentment. So England, with her allies, had re-educated the Germans. And who better qualified? After all, Churchill had let the savages into Berlin; Truman had dropped atom bombs on undefended cities; between them they had made a ruin of Europe: who better qualified, then, to teach the Germans the meaning of civilisation?

In the alley, nothing had stirred. The leader’s arm was still raised before the little band as he waited for the signal to begin the music.

‘It’s the Socialists,’ de Lisle breathed. ‘They’re staging a counter-demonstration. Who the devil let them in?’

So the Allies set to work: the Germans must be taught how to behave. It was wrong to kill the Jews, they explained; kill the Communists instead. It was wrong to attack Russia, they explained; but we will protect you if the Russians attack you. It was wrong to fight for your borders, they explained; but we support your claims for the territories of the East.

‘We all know that kind of support!’ Karfeld held out his hands, palms upwards. ‘Here you are, my dear, here you are! You can borrow my umbrella as long as you like; until it rains!’

Was it Turner’s imagination or did he detect, in this piece of theatre, a hint of that wheedling tone which once in German music-halls traditionally denoted the Jew? They began to laugh, but again he silenced them.

In the alley, the conductor’s arm was still raised. Will he never tire, Turner wondered, of that gruesome salute?

‘They’ll be murdered,’ de Lisle insisted. ‘The crowd will murder them!’

And so, my friends, this is what happened. Our victors in all their purity, and all their wisdom, taught us the meaning of

democracy.

Hurray for democracy. Democracy is like Christ; there is nothing you cannot do in the name of democracy.

‘Praschko,’ Turner declared quietly, ‘Praschko wrote that for him.’

‘He writes a lot of his stuff,’ de Lisle said.

‘Democracy is shooting Negroes in America and giving them gold beds in Africa! Democracy is to run a colonial empire, to fight in Vietnam and to attack Cuba; democracy is to visit your conscience on the Germans!

Democracy is to know that whatever you do, you will never, never be as bad as the Germans!

’

He had raised his voice to give the sign, the sign the band expected. Once more Turner looked across the crowd into the alley, saw the white hand, white as a napkin, fall lazily in the lamplight, glimpsed the white face of Siebkron himself as he quickly relinquished his place of command and withdrew into the shadow of the pavement, saw the first head turn in front of him, then a second, as he himself heard it also: the distant sound of music, of a percussion band, and men’s voices singing; saw Karfeld peer over the pulpit and call to someone beneath him; saw him draw back into the furthest recess while he continued speaking, and heard, as Karfeld assumed his sudden tone of indignation, heard through all Karfeld’s new anger and his high-pitched exhortation, through all the conjuration, the abuse and the encouragement, the unmistakable note of fear.

‘The Sozis!’ the young detective cried, far out across the crowd. His heels were together and his leather shoulders drawn well back and he bellowed through cupped hands. ‘The Sozis are in the alley! The Socialists are attacking us!’

‘It’s a diversion,’ Turner said, quite matter of fact. ‘Siebkron’s staging a diversion.’

To lure him out

, he thought;

to lure out Leo and make him chance his hand. And here’s the music to drown the shot

, he added to himself, as the ‘Marseillaise’ began.

It’s all set up to make him have a go.

No one moved at first. The opening strains were barely audible; little, irrelevant notes played by a child on a mouth organ. And the singing which accompanied it was no more than the male chant from a Yorkshire pub on a Saturday night, remote and unconfident, proceeding from mouths unused to music; and to begin with the crowd really ignored it, because of its interest in Karfeld.

But Karfeld had heard the music, and it quickened him remarkably.

‘I am an old man!’ he shouted. ‘Soon I shall be an old man. What will you say to yourselves, young men, when you wake in the morning? What will you say when you look at the American whore that is Bonn? You will say this: how long, young men, can we live without honour? You will look at your Government and say; you will look at the Sozis and say: must we follow even a dog because it is in office?’

He quoted

Lear,

Turner thought absurdly, and the floodlights were extinguished at one turn, at one black fall of the curtain: deep darkness filled the square, and with it, the louder singing of the ‘Marseillaise’. He detected the acrid smell of pitch carried on the night air, as in countless places the sparks flickered and wheeled away; he heard the whispered call and the whispered answer, he heard the order passed from mouth to mouth in hasty conspiracy. The singing and the music rose to a roar, picked up suddenly and quite deliberately by the loudspeakers: a mad, monstrous, plebeian, unsubtle roar, amplified and distorted almost beyond recognition, deafening and maddening.

Yes

, Turner repeated to himself with Saxon clarity,

that is what I would do if I were Siebkron. I would create this diversion, rouse the crowd, and make enough noise to provoke him into shooting.

The music boomed still louder. He saw the policeman turn and face him and the young detective hold up a hand in warning. ‘Stay here, please, Mister Bradfield! Mister Turner, stay here please!’ The crowd was whispering excitedly; all round them they heard the sibilant, greedy hiss.

‘Hands out of pockets, please!’

Torches were lit all round them; someone had given the signal. They rose like wild hopes gilding the sullen faces with belief, making mad dreams of their prosaic features, setting into their dull eyes the devotion of apostles. The little band was advancing into the square; it could not have been more than twenty strong, and the army that marched in its wake was ragged and undecided, but now their music was everywhere, a Socialist terror magnified by Siebkron’s loudspeakers.

‘The Sozis!’ the crowd cried again. ‘The Sozis are attacking us!’

The pulpit was empty, Karfeld had gone, but the Socialists were still marching for Marx, Jewry and War. ‘Strike them, strike our enemies! Strike the Jews! Strike the Reds!’ Follow the dark, the voices whispered, follow the light, follow the spies and saboteurs; the Sozis are responsible for everything.

Still the music grew louder.

‘Now,’ de Lisle said evenly. ‘They’ve drawn him.’

A busy, silent group had gathered round the raw, white legs of Karfeld’s scaffold; leather coats were stooping, moon faces flitting and conferring.

‘The Sozis! Kill the Sozis.’ The crowd was in mounting ferment; the scaffold was forgotten. ‘Kill them!’ Whatever you resent, the voices whispered, kill it here: Jews, Negroes, moles, conspirators, rejectors, wreckers, parents, lovers; they are good, they are bad, foolish or clever.

‘Kill the Socialist Jews!’ Swimmers leaping, the voices whispered; march! march!

We’ve got to kill him, Praschko,

Alan Turner told himself in his confusion,

or we shall be wearing the labels again

. . . .

‘Kill who?’ he said to de Lisle. ‘What are they doing?’

‘Chasing the dream.’

The music had risen to a single note, a raucous, crude, deafening roar, a call to battle and a call to anger, a call to kill ugliness, to destroy the sick and the unwieldy, the maimed, the loathsome and the incompetent. Suddenly by the light of the torches the black flags lifted and trembled like waking moths, the crowd seemed to drift and lean until the edges broke and the torches floated away into the alley, driving the band before them, acclaiming it their hero, smothering it with close kisses, dancing in upon it in playful fury, smashing the windows and the instruments, causing the red banners to flourish and dip like spurts of blood, then vanish under the mass which, cumbersome and murmuring, led by its own wanton torches, had reached into the alley and beyond. The radio crackled. Turner heard Siebkron’s voice, cool and perfectly clear, he heard the mordant command and the one word:

Schaffott.

And then he was running through the waves, making for the scaffold, his shoulder burning from the blow; he felt the survivors’ hands holding him and he broke them like the hands of children. He was running. Hands held him and he shook them off like twigs. A face rose at him and he struck it away, riding the waves to reach the scaffold. Then he saw him.

‘Leo!’ he shouted.

He was crouched like a pavement artist between the motionless feet. They stood all round him but no one was touching him. They were packed in close, but they had left room for him to die. Turner saw him rise, and fall again, and once more he shouted, ‘Leo.’ He saw the dark eyes turn to him and heard his cry answered, to Turner, to the world, to God or pity, to the mercy of any man who would save him from the fact. He saw the scrum bow, and bury him, and run; he saw the Homburg hat roll away over the damp cobble and he ran forward, repeating the name.

‘Leo!’

He had grasped a torch and smelt the singeing of cloth. He was wielding the torch, driving away the hands, and suddenly there was no resistance any more; he stood on the shore, beneath the scaffold, looking at his own life, his own face, at the lover’s hands grasping the cobble, at the pamphlets which drifted across the little body like leaves in the gathering wind.

There was no weapon near him; nothing to show how he had died, only the crooked arrangement of the neck where the two pieces no longer fitted. He lay like a tiny doll who had been broken into pieces and carefully put together, pressed down under the warm Bonn air. A man who had felt, and felt no more; an innocent, reaching beyond the square for a prize he would never find. Far away, Turner heard the cry of anger as the grey crowd followed the vanished music of the alleys; while from behind him came the rustle of the light, approaching footsteps.

‘Search his pockets,’ someone said, in a voice of Saxon calm.

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A PERFECT SPY

JOHN LE CARRÉ was born in 1931 and attended the universities of Bern and Oxford. He taught at Eton and served briefly in British Intelligence during the Cold War. For the last 50 years he has lived by his pen. He divides his time between London and Cornwall.

ALSO BY JOHN LE CARRÉ

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Our Kind of Traitor

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A Small Town in Germany

Smiley’s People

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

A Delicate Truth

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First published in the United States of America by Alfred A. Knopf 1986
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For R, who shared the journey, lent me his dog, and tossed me a few pieces of his life

A man who has two women loses his soul.

But a man who has two houses loses his head.

Proverb

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Introduction

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

INTRODUCTION

JOHN LE CARRÉ

November 2000

W

ith the exception perhaps of the much later

The Constant Gardener, A Perfect Spy

remains for me the preferred novel of all my work, the one I sweated blood for, and ultimately, for that reason, the most rewarding.

All my writing life until then I had lived with the unexpressed memories of an extraordinary childhood, endured and sometimes enjoyed at the hands of an extraordinary father whose zigzag life is mirrored in my fictional character Rick Pym, father to my hero Magnus. Those members of my real-life family who had known my father and were able to read the novel were for the greater part amused and relieved by the portrait I had painted of him, though all of us knew of a darker side that is only hinted at in the novel and which today still haunts me.

Not so long ago, when

The Constant Gardener

was still only a twinkle in my eye, I had an idea that in the event proved abortive: I would write an autobiography, but of an experimental kind. On the left side of each double page I would write my life as I remember it now, with all the evasions and self-exculpations that are inherent in all our memories—and my own, I am sure, is no exception. And on the right side I would print the historical record wherever it could be traced, for my father had left some pretty heavy footprints in his wake, from court records and press cuttings of his first criminal conviction, to police and prison records of countries as far flung as Singapore, Indonesia, Hong Kong, Switzerland, and Austria. In addition, there would be the living memory, whatever was still to be found, of those who had brushed up against him, loved him, as many did, or been stung by him financially, as many were. And these were not necessarily different people, for on one point they were all likely to agree: Ronnie Cornwell was a most beguiling and persuasive con artist.

To this end, I went to the unusual lengths of hiring a pair of highly recommended private investigators who I felt were better equipped than I was to get their hands on documents that had never been put into the public domain and which, though perhaps scheduled for destruction, were still in my wishful imagination hovering between life and death in the dusty pigeonhole of some neglected official archive.

As to living memory, I had every reason to believe there were splendid riches to be found. In Hong Kong in the early eighties, while I was enjoying the hospitality of the trading house of Jardine Matheson—in those days the

taipans

of the Colony—in the company’s box at Happy Valley racecourse, a burly English gentleman of the official sort shyly plucked at my sleeve. He had been my father’s gaoler while the Colony was waiting to deport him, he confided to me in a murmur, and he had never in his life encountered a finer, more inspiring gentleman, let alone prisoner. “I am retiring soon,” he said. “And when I get back to Blighty, your dad is going to fix me up in a business.” Did I warn the poor fellow to watch his step? I doubt it. My father did not care for unbelievers, and neither did his disciples. Somewhere in their hearts, they were taking part in the process of their own delusion. Where is the gaoler now? If I had written down his name, I had long ago lost the bit of paper. But surely, I thought, my investigators could get onto the Hong Kong police and track him down.

On another occasion, I was staying at the Royal Hotel in Copenhagen, as it was then called, and the manager summoned me to his office, where two Danish Special Branch detectives proceeded to interview me. My father, they said, had made an illegal entry into Denmark with the connivance of two senior pilots of the Scandinavian Airlines System, and had since disappeared. Did I know where to find him? I didn’t, but they were reluctant to believe me. Ronnie, it transpired, had picked up the hapless SAS men in a bar in New York, and won a lot of money from them at poker. Rather than collect the debt, he had proposed that they fly him to Copenhagen, which unwisely they had proceeded to do. The Danish police had since established that Ronnie was wanted in New York for fraud, and now he was wanted in Denmark for illegal entry and half a dozen other offences, from corruption to evading Customs and I don’t remember what else. Surely, once again, my investigators could track down the Danish papers and even, perhaps, the unfortunate airmen—or so I wanted to believe.

Or there was the time when I was swanning around Chicago, helping to promote “British Week,” and an urgent telegram arrived from our British Ambassador to Indonesia, one Gilchrist, enquiring of the Consul General, one Haley, whether I would be willing to fork out a few thousand dollars to get my father out of gaol in Djakarta, where he had been arrested for currency offences after being chucked out of Singapore.

Or the other time when, not long before his death, Ronnie rang me collect from Zurich district gaol to tell me in a choked voice, “I can’t do any more prison, son.” Mercifully, my late literary agent Rainer Heumann was on hand in Zurich at the time, and with the aid of his chequebook had Ronnie sprung within hours. The problem?

Hotelschwindel;

defrauding a hotel, which in Switzerland is practically a hanging offence.

“But that was years ago, son! That wasn’t now.”

Ronnie in his last years was a bit like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. He hadn’t cottoned on to the way communications had speeded up since he pulled his first trick. And Swiss police records would be immaculate, I once again reasoned; on the Swiss thing, my investigators would be home free.

Except they weren’t, and wouldn’t be. In my impatience, I had credited them with powers they simply didn’t possess, nor could they. Ronnie was as unscalable to them as he had been to me. Time had worked for him; the cost of going after him would be astronomic, and even when we got there—wherever

there

was—we were unlikely to find the riches I dreamed of. It was the same with his army record.

Though he was of eligible age and physically fit, Ronnie had contrived to dance his way through the 1939 – 45 war almost without the inconvenience of being conscripted at all. Several times, it was true, he had been summoned to begin his basic military training with the Royal Corps of Signals in Bradford, but each time he had managed to frustrate the army’s plans for him. At first, he pleaded the hardships of a single parent. He had a case, for my mother had wisely removed herself from our lives without leaving a forwarding address. But that didn’t mean Ronnie himself suffered any hardship. To the contrary, my mother was abundantly and frequently replaced, and if hardship ever loomed on Ronnie’s horizon, my brother and I were packed off to friends or holiday schools until the spectre passed. And when pleas of hardship ceased to soften the army’s heart, Ronnie ingeniously put his name forward as a candidate in a parliamentary by-election, thereby obliging them to release him so that he could exercise his democratic right. And having failed to be elected as the Independent Progressive candidate for Chelmsford—unsurprisingly, since he did not campaign—he returned to Bradford with his suitcase to begin his basic training all over again, because that’s how armies work.

All the same, the lure of the Mother of Parliaments had stayed with him, and in 1950 he stood for real—this time in a General Election—as Liberal candidate for Great Yarmouth. You will find a fictionalised account of his campaign in this book, but the reality was slightly different. The Conservative agent, frightened that Ronnie would split the vote, learned about his chequered past and faced him with it: stand down or we’ll expose you. Ronnie didn’t stand down and the Tories exposed him. But he still split the vote.

In his last years, Ronnie had a single obsession. It was directed at a piece of land outside London, in a designated “green belt” area where builders were forbidden to intrude. Nevertheless, by means we can only guess at, Ronnie obtained the local council’s planning permission for his piece of green belt, and on the strength of it he negotiated a mammoth deal with one of the country’s largest construction companies, entitling them to build God knows how many houses on what would otherwise have been common land. The promised sum was huge, and I’m sure Ronnie ran up corresponding debts in anticipation of it, for his policy was to spend today what you hope to earn tomorrow.

But there was one snag. Local protest groups became vocal and unpleasant. Aware that it was on shaky ground, the council caved in and withdrew its planning permission, upon which the construction company understandably refused to pay the astronomic sum that had been negotiated. Several times in the years that followed Ronnie tried to persuade me to put up money for legal fees so that he could pursue the matter in the courts but, as always when he asked me to finance his projects, I refused, restricting my offer of support to maintenance and accommodation. But such proposals cut no ice with him. “You’re paying me to sit on my arse,” he would protest indignantly, and indeed I was. Yet somehow he got the cash together and fought the case, probably by offering the lawyers a slice of the action, which in those days was illegal. He won, but was dead before he could witness his triumph. It was in any case short-lived. No sooner had the court found in Ronnie’s favour than a hitherto mute lawyer rose to his feet and, revealing himself to be the arm of the Inland Revenue, collared every last penny of the spoils.

I have quoted Graham Greene a thousand times: childhood is the credit balance of the novelist. Ronnie liked to boast that he had never read a book in his life, including mine, but Greene’s dictum would have pleased him nonetheless. It was always Ronnie’s claim that without him I would have been nothing. And probably, in ways I prefer not to think of, he was right.

1

I

n the small hours of a blustery October morning in a south Devon coastal town that seemed to have been deserted by its inhabitants, Magnus Pym got out of his elderly country taxicab and, having paid the driver and waited till he had left, struck out across the church square. His destination was a terrace of ill-lit Victorian boarding-houses with names like Bel-a-Vista, The Commodore and Eureka. In build he was powerful but stately, a representative of something. His stride was agile, his body forward-sloping in the best tradition of the Anglo-Saxon administrative class. In the same attitude, whether static or in motion, Englishmen have hoisted flags over distant colonies, discovered the sources of great rivers, stood on the decks of sinking ships. He had been travelling in one way or another for sixteen hours but he wore no overcoat or hat. He carried a fat black briefcase of the official kind and in the other hand a green Harrods bag. A strong sea wind lashed at his city suit, salt rain stung his eyes, balls of spume skimmed across his path. Pym ignored them. Reaching the porch of a house marked “No Vacancies” he pressed the bell and waited, first for the outside light to go on, then for the chains to be unfastened from inside. While he waited a church clock began striking five. As if in answer to its summons Pym turned on his heel and stared back at the square. At the graceless tower of the Baptist church posturing against the racing clouds. At the writhing monkey-puzzle trees, pride of the ornamental gardens. At the empty bandstand. At the bus shelter. At the dark patches of the side streets. At the doorways one by one.

“Why Mr. Canterbury, it’s you,” an old lady’s voice objected sharply as the door opened behind him. “You bad man. You caught the night sleeper again, I can tell. Why ever didn’t you telephone?”

“Hullo, Miss Dubber,” said Pym. “How are you?”

“Never mind how I am, Mr. Canterbury. Come in at once. You’ll catch your death.”

But the ugly windswept square seemed to have locked Pym in its spell. “I thought Sea View was up for sale, Miss D,” he remarked as she tried to pluck him into the house. “You told me Mr. Cook moved out when his wife died. Wouldn’t set foot in the place, you said.”

“Of course he wouldn’t. He was allergic. Come in this instant, Mr. Canterbury, and wipe your feet before I make your tea.”

“So what’s a light doing in his upstairs bedroom window?” Pym asked as he allowed her to tug him up the steps.

Like many tyrants Miss Dubber was small. She was also old and powdery and lopsided, with a crooked back that rumpled her dressing-gown and made everything round her seem lopsided too.

“Mr. Cook has rented out the upper flat, Celia Venn has taken it to paint in. That’s you all over.” She slid a bolt. “Disappear for three months, come back in the middle of the night and worry about a light in someone’s window.” She slid another. “You’ll never change, Mr. Canterbury. I don’t know why I bother.”

“Who on earth is Celia Venn?”

“Dr. Venn’s daughter, silly. She wants to see the sea and paint it.” Her voice changed abruptly. “Why Mr. Canterbury, how dare you? Take that off this instant.”

With the last bolt in place Miss Dubber had straightened up as best she could and was preparing herself for a reluctant hug. But instead of her customary scowl, which nobody believed in for a moment, her poky little face had twisted in fright.

“Your horrid black tie, Mr. Canterbury. I won’t have death in the house, I won’t have you bring it. Who is it for?”

Pym was a handsome man, boyish but distinguished. In his early fifties he was in his prime, full of zeal and urgency in a place that knew none. But the best thing about him in Miss Dubber’s view was his lovely smile that gave out so much warmth and truth and made her feel right.

“Just an old Whitehall colleague, Miss D. No one to flap about. No one close.”

“Everyone’s close at my age, Mr. Canterbury. What was his name?”

“I hardly knew the fellow,” said Pym emphatically, untying his tie and slipping it into his pocket. “And I’m certainly not going to tell you his name and have you hunting the obituaries, so there.” His eye as he said this fell on the visitors’ book, which lay open on the hall table beneath the orange nightlight that he had fitted to her ceiling on his last visit. “Any casuals at all, Miss D?” he asked as he scanned the list. “Runaway couples, mystery princesses? What happened to those two lover-boys who came at Easter?”

“They were not lover-boys,” Miss Dubber corrected him severely as she hobbled towards the kitchen. “They took single rooms and in the evenings they watched football on the television. What was that you said, Mr. Canterbury?”

But Pym had not spoken. Sometimes his gushes of communication were like phone calls cut off by some inner censorship before they could be completed. He turned back a page and then another.

“I don’t think I’ll do casuals any more,” Miss Dubber said through the open kitchen doorway as she lit the gas. “Sometimes when the doorbell goes I sit here with Toby and I say: ‘You answer it, Toby.’ He doesn’t of course. A tortoiseshell cat can’t answer a door. So we go on sitting here. We sit and we wait and we hear the footsteps go away again.” She cast a sly glance at him. “You don’t think our Mr. Canterbury is smitten, do you, Toby?” she enquired archly of her cat. “We’re very

bright

this morning. Very

shiny.

Ten years younger, by the look of our coat, Mr. Canterbury is.” Receiving no helpful response from the cat, she addressed herself to the canary. “Not that he’d ever tell us, would he, Dickie? We’d be the last to know. Tzuktzuk? Tzuktzuk?”

“John and Sylvia Illegible of Wimbledon,” said Pym, still at the visitors’ book.

“John makes computers, Sylvia programs them, and they’re leaving tomorrow,” she told him sulkily. For Miss Dubber hated to admit there was anyone in her world but beloved Mr. Canterbury. “Now what have you done to me this time?” she exclaimed angrily. “I won’t have it. Take it back.”

But Miss Dubber was not angry; she would have it, and Pym would not take it back: a thickly knitted cashmere shawl of white and gold, still in its Harrods box and swathed in its original Harrods tissue paper which she seemed to treasure almost above their contents. For having taken out the shawl she first smoothed the paper and folded it along its creases before replacing it in the box, then put the box on the cupboard shelf where she kept her greatest treasures. Only then did she let him wrap the shawl round her shoulders and hug her in it, while she scolded him for his extravagance.

Pym drank tea with Miss Dubber, Pym appeased her, Pym ate a piece of her shortbread and praised it to the skies although she told him it was burned. Pym promised to mend the sink plug for her and unblock the waste-pipe and take a look at the cistern on the first floor while he was about it. Pym was swift and over-attentive and the brightness she had shrewdly remarked on did not leave him. He lifted Toby on to his lap and stroked him, a thing he had never done before, and which gave Toby no discernible pleasure. He received the latest news of Miss Dubber’s ancient Aunt Al, when normally the mention of Aunt Al was enough to hurry him off to bed. He questioned her, as he always did, about the local goings-on since his last visit, and listened approvingly to the catalogue of Miss Dubber’s complaints. And quite often, as he nodded her through her answers, he either smiled to himself for no clear reason or became drowsy and yawned behind his hand. Till suddenly he put down his teacup and stood up as if he had another train to catch.

“I’ll be staying a decent length of time if it’s all right with you, Miss D. I’ve a bit of heavy writing to do.”

“That’s what you always say. You were going to live here for ever last time. Then it’s up first thing and back to Whitehall without your egg.”

“Maybe as much as two weeks. I’ve taken some leave of absence so that I can work in peace.”

Miss Dubber pretended to be appalled. “But whatever will happen to the country? How shall Toby and I stay safe, with no Mr. Canterbury at the helm to steer us?”

“So what are Miss D’s plans?” he asked winningly, reaching for his briefcase, which by the effort he needed to lift it looked as heavy as a chunk of lead.

“Plans?” Miss Dubber echoed, smiling rather beautifully in her mystification. “I don’t make plans at my age, Mr. Canterbury. I let God make them. He’s better at them than I am, isn’t he, Toby? More reliable.”

“What about that cruise you’re always talking about? It’s time you gave yourself a treat, Miss D.”

“Don’t be daft. That was years ago. I’ve lost the urge.”

“I’ll still pay.”

“I know you will, bless you.”

“I’ll do the phoning if you want. We’ll go to the travel agent together. I looked one out for you as a matter of fact. There’s the

Orient Explorer

leaves Southampton just a week away. They’ve got a cancellation. I asked.”

“Are you trying to get rid of me, Mr. Canterbury?”

Pym took a moment to laugh. “God and me together couldn’t dislodge you, Miss D,” he said.

From the hall Miss Dubber watched him up the narrow stairs, admiring the youthful springiness of his tread despite the heavy briefcase. He’s going to a high-level conference. A weighty one too. She listened to him step lightly along the corridor to room 8 overlooking the square, which was her longest let ever, in her whole long life. His loss has not affected him, she decided in relief as she heard him unlock the door and close it softly behind him. Just some old colleague from the Ministry, no one close. She wanted nothing to disturb him. He was to remain the same perfect gentleman who had appeared on her doorstep years ago, looking for what he had called a sanctuary without a telephone even though she had a perfectly good one in the kitchen. And had paid her in advance six-monthly ever since, cash-cash, no receipts. And had built the little stone wall beside the garden path for her, all in an afternoon to surprise her on her birthday, bullied the mason and the bricklayer. And had put the slates back on the roof with his own hands after the storm in March. And had sent her flowers and fruit and chocolates and souvenirs from amazing foreign places without properly explaining what he did there. And had helped her with the breakfasts when she had too many casuals, and listened to her about her nephew who had all the schemes for making money that never came to anything : the latest was starting up a bingo hall in Exeter but first he needed the capital for his overdraft. And received no mail or visitors and played no instrument except the wireless in foreign, and never used the telephone except for local tradesmen. And never told her anything about himself except that he lived in London and worked in Whitehall but travelled a lot, and that his name was Canterbury like the city. Children, wives, parents, sweethearts—not a soul on earth had he ever called his own, except his one Miss D.

“He could have a knighthood by now for all we know,” she told Toby aloud as she held the shawl to her nose and inhaled its woolly smell. “He could be Prime Minister and we’d only ever hear it from the television.”

Very faintly Miss Dubber heard above the rattle of the wind the sound of singing. A man’s voice, tuneless but agreeable. First she thought it was “Greensleeves” from the garden, then she thought it was “Jerusalem” from the square, and she was halfway to the window to yell out. Only then did she realise it was Mr. Canterbury from upstairs, and this amazed her so much that when she opened her door to rebuke him, she paused instead to listen. The singing stopped of its own accord. Miss Dubber smiled. Now

he’s

listening to

me,

she thought. That’s my Mr. Canterbury all over.

In Vienna three hours earlier, Mary Pym, wife of Magnus, stood at her bedroom window and stared out upon a world which, in contrast to the one elected by her husband, was a marvel of serenity. She had neither closed the curtains nor switched on the light. She was dressed to receive, as her mother would have said, and she had been standing at the window in her blue twin-set for an hour, waiting for the car, waiting for the doorbell, waiting for the soft turn of her husband’s key in the latch. And now in her mind it was an unfair race between Magnus and Jack Brotherhood which of them she would receive first. An early autumn snow still covered the hilltop, a full moon rode above it, filling the room with black and white bars. In elegant villas up and down the avenue, the last camp fires of diplomatic entertainment were going out one by one. Frau Minister Meierhof had been having a Force Reduction Talks dance with a four-piece band. Mary should have been there. The van Leymans had had a buffet dinner for old Prague hands, both sexes welcome and no

placement.

She should have gone, they both should, and swept up the stragglers for a scotch-and-soda afterwards, vodka for Magnus. And put on the gramophone, and danced till now or later—the swinging diplomatic Pyms, so popular—just the way they had entertained so famously in Washington when Magnus was Deputy Head of Station and everything was absolutely fine. And Mary would have made bacon and eggs while Magnus joked and picked people’s brains and acquired new friends, which he was so tirelessly good at. For this was Vienna’s high season, when people who have clammed up all year talked excitedly of Christmas and the Opera, and tossed out indiscretions like old clothes.

But all that was a thousand years ago. All that was until last Wednesday. The only thing that mattered now was that Magnus should drive up the avenue in the Metro he had left at the airport and beat Jack Brotherhood to the front door.

The telephone was ringing. By the bed. His side. Don’t run, you idiot, you’ll fall. Not too slowly or he’ll ring off. Magnus, darling, oh dear God, let it be you, you’ve had an aberration and you’re better, I’ll never even ask what happened, I’ll never doubt you again. She lifted the receiver and for some reason she couldn’t work out sat in a heap on the duvet, plonk, grabbing the pad and pencil with her spare hand in case of phone numbers to take down, addresses, times, instructions. She didn’t blurt “Magnus?” because that would show she was worried about him. She didn’t say “Hullo” because she couldn’t trust her voice not to sound excited. She said their whole number in German so that Magnus would know it was she, hear that she was normal and all right and not angry with him, and that everything was just fine to come back to. No fuss, no problems, I’m here and waiting for you like always.

“It’s me,” said a man’s voice.

But it wasn’t me. It was Jack Brotherhood.

“No word of that parcel, I suppose?” Brotherhood asked in the rich, confident English of the military classes.

“No word from anyone. Where are you?”

“Be there in about half an hour, less if I can. Wait for me, will you.”

The fire, she thought suddenly. My God, the fire. She hastened downstairs, no longer capable of distinguishing between small and large disasters. She had sent the maid out for the night and forgotten to bank up the drawing-room fire. It was out for sure. But it was not. It was burning merrily, and all that was needed was another log to make the early morning hour less funereal. She put it on, then floated round the room prinking things—the flowers, the ashtrays, Jack’s whisky tray—making everything outside herself perfect because nothing inside herself was perfect in the least. She lit a cigarette and puffed out the uninhaled smoke in angry kisses. Then she poured herself a very large whisky, which was what she had come down for in the first place. After all, if we were still dancing I’d be having several.

Mary’s Englishness, like Pym’s, was unmistakable. She was blonde and strong-jawed and forthright. Her one mannerism, inherited from her mother, was the slightly comic stoop from which she addressed the world, and foreigners in particular. Mary’s life was a record of fine deaths. Her grandfather had died at Passchendaele, her one brother, Sam, more recently in Belfast, and for a month or more it had seemed to Mary that the bomb that had blown Sam’s jeep to pieces had killed her soul too, but it was her father, not Mary, who had died of a broken heart. All of her men had been soldiers. Between them they had left her with a decent inheritance, a fiercely patriotic soul and a small manor house in Dorset. Mary was ambitious as well as intelligent, she could dream and lust and covet. But the rules of her life had been laid down for her before she entered it and had been entrenched with every death since: in Mary’s family the men campaigned while the women lent succour, mourned and carried on. Her worship, her dinner parties, her life with Pym had all been conducted on this same sturdy principle.

Until last July. Until our holiday in Lesbos. Magnus, come home. I’m sorry I raised a stink at the airport when you didn’t show up. I’m sorry I bellowed at the British Airways clerk in what you call my six-acre voice and I’m sorry I waved my diplomatic pass around. And I’m sorry—I’m terribly sorry—I phoned Jack to say where the hell’s my husband? So please—just come home and tell me what to do. Nothing matters. Just be here. Now.

Finding herself standing before the double doors to the dining room, she pushed them open, switched on the chandeliers, and, whisky in hand, surveyed the long empty table glistening like a lake. Mahogany. Eighteenth-century repro. Counsellor’s grade, nobody’s taste. Seats fourteen with comfort, sixteen if you double up on the curved ends. That bloody burn mark, I’ve tried everything. Remember, she told herself. Force your mind back. Get the whole story straight in your stupid little head before Jack Brotherhood rings that doorbell. Step outside yourself and look in.

Now.

It is a night like this one was, crisp and exciting. It is Wednesday and our night for entertaining. And the moon is like the moon tonight except for a bite out of one side. In the bedroom, that fool Mary Pym who notched up one A-level and never went to university stands with her feet too wide apart putting on her family pearls while brilliant Magnus her husband, a First at Oxford and already in his dinner-jacket, kisses the nape of her neck and does his Balkan gigolo number to try to get her in the party mood. Magnus of course is in whatever mood he needs to be in.

“For God’s sake,” Mary snaps more roughly than she intends. “Stop fooling and fix this bloody clasp for me.”

Sometimes my military family gets the better of my language.

And Magnus obliges. Magnus always obliges. Magnus mends and fixes and carries better than a butler.

And when he has obliged he puts his hands over my breasts and breathes hotly on my bare neck: “Please, my dullink, have we not time for most divine perfect moment? No? Yes?”

But Mary is, as usual, too nervous even to smile and orders him downstairs to make sure Herr Wenzel the hired manservant has fetched the ice from Weber’s fish-shop. And Magnus goes. Magnus always goes. Even when a sharp smack across Mary’s chops would be the wiser course, Magnus goes.

Pausing, Mary lifted her head and listened. A car engine. In this snow they come up on you like bad memories. But, unlike a bad memory, this one passed.

It is dinner; it is the diplomatic happy hour, it is as good as Georgetown in the days when Magnus was still an upwardly mobile Deputy Head of Station with the post of Chief of Service squarely in his sights and everything is mended between Magnus and Mary except for a black cloud that night and day hangs over Mary’s heart, even when she is not thinking of it, and that cloud is called Lesbos, a Greek island in the Aegean wholly surrounded by monstrous memories. Mary Pym, wife to Magnus, Counsellor for Certain Unmentionable Matters at the British Embassy in Vienna and actually the Head of Station here as everyone unmentionable knows, proudly faces her husband across Mary’s silver candelabra while the servants hand round Mary’s venison, jugged according to her mother’s recipe, to twelve unmentionably distinguished members of the local intelligence community.

“Now you also have a daughter,” Mary firmly reminds an Oberregierungsrat Dinkel from the Austrian Ministry of Defence in her well-learned German. “Name Ursula—right? She was studying piano at the Conservatorium when last heard of. Tell me about her.” And to the servant, quietly as she passes: “Frau Wenzel. Mr. Lederer two down has no red sauce. Fix.”

It was a pretty night, Mary had decided as she listened to a recitation of the Oberregierungsrat’s family woes. It was the sort of night she worked for, had worked for all her married life, in Prague and Washington while they were rising and now here where they were marking time. She was happy, she was flying the flag, the black cloud of Lesbos was as good as blown away. Tom was doing well at boarding-school and would soon be home for the Christmas holidays, Magnus had rented a chalet in Lech for skiing, the Lederers had said they would join them. Magnus was so resourceful these days, so attentive to her despite his father’s illness. And before Lech he would take her to Salzburg for

Parsifal

and, if she pressed him, to the Opera ball because, as they liked to say in Mary’s family, a gal loves a hop. And with luck the Lederers could join them for that too—the children could spend the night together and share a baby-sitter—and somehow with Magnus these days extra people were a comfort. Glimpsing Pym down the candlelight she darted a smile at him just as he slipped away to engage a deaf mute on his left. Sorry about being touchy earlier, she was saying. All forgotten, he was telling her. And when they’ve gone we’ll make love, she was saying, we’ll stay sober and make love and everything will be fine.

Which was when she heard the phone ring. Exactly then. As she was transmitting those loving thoughts to Magnus and having a desperately happy time with them. She heard it ring twice, three times, she started to get cross, then to her relief she heard Herr Wenzel answer it. Herr Pym will return your call later unless it’s urgent, she rehearsed in her mind. Herr Pym should not be disturbed unless it is essential. Herr Pym is far too busy telling a funny story in that perfect German of his which so annoys the Embassy and surprises the Austrians. Herr Pym can also do you an Austrian accent on demand, or funnier still a Swiss one, from his days at school there. Herr Pym can put you a row of bottles in a line, and by pinging them with a table-knife, make them chime like the bells of the old Swiss railway, while he chants the stations between Interlaken and the Jungfraujoch in the tones of a local station-master and his audience collapses in tears of nostalgic mirth.

Mary lifted her gaze to the far end of the empty table. And Magnus—how was he doing at that moment, apart from flirting with Mary?

Going great guns was the answer. On his right sat the dread Frau Oberregierungsrat Dinkel, a woman so plain and rude, even by the standards of official wives, that some of the toughest troopers in the Embassy had been reduced to stunned silence by her. Yet Magnus had drawn her to him like a flower to the sun and she could not get enough of him. Sometimes, watching him perform like this, Mary was moved to involuntary pity by the absoluteness of his dedication. She wished him more ease, if only for a moment. She wanted him to know that he had earned his peace whenever he chose to take it, instead of giving, giving all the time. If he were a real diplomat, he’d be an Ambassador easily, she thought. In Washington, Grant Lederer had privately assured her, Magnus had exerted more influence than either his Station Chief or the perfectly awful Ambassador. Vienna—though of course he was enormously respected here and enormously influential too—was an anticlimax, obviously. Well it was meant to be, but when the dust settled, Magnus would be back on course, and the thing here was to be patient. Mary wished she was not so young for him. Sometimes he tries to live down to me, she thought. On Magnus’s left, similarly mesmerised, sat Frau Oberst Mohr, whose German husband was attached to the Signals Bureau at Wiener Neustadt. But Magnus’s real conquest, as ever, was Grant Lederer III, “he of the little black beard and little black eyes and little black thoughts,” as Magnus called him, who six months ago had taken over the American Embassy’s Legal Department, which meant of course the reverse, for Grant was the Agency’s new man, though he was an old friend from Washington.

“Grant’s a piss artist,” Magnus would complain of him, as he complained of all his friends. “He has us all round a big table once a week inventing words for things we’ve been doing perfectly well for twenty years without them.”

“But he is fun, darling,” Mary would remind him. “And Bee’s

terribly

dishy.”

“Grant’s an alpinist,” Magnus said another time. “He’s stacking us all in a neat line so he can climb over our backs. You just wait and see.”

“But at least he’s bright, darling. At least he can keep up with you, can’t he?”

For the truth was, of course, that given the limitations of any diplomatic friendship, the Pyms and the Lederers were one of the great quartets, and it was just Magnus’s perverse way of liking people to kick at them and pick holes in them and swear he would never talk to them again. The Lederers’ daughter Becky was the same age as Tom and they were practically lovers already; Bee and Mary got on like a house on fire. As to Bee and Magnus—well frankly Mary did wonder sometimes whether they weren’t the tiniest bit

too

friendly. But, on the other hand, she had noticed that with quartets there was always one strong diagonal relationship even if it never came to anything. And if it ever

did

come to something between them—well, to be absolutely

totally

frank, Mary would be quite willing to take her revenge with Grant, whose lurking intensity she found increasingly to be rather a turn-on.

“Mary, cheers, okay? A great party. We’re loving it.”

It was Bee, for ever toasting everyone. She was wearing diamond earrings and a décolleté which Mary had been eying all evening. Three children and breasts like that: it was bloody unfair. Mary lifted her glass in return. Bee has typist’s fingers, she noticed, crooked at the tips.

“Now Grant, old boy, come on now,” Magnus was saying, in his half-serious banter. “Give us a break, be fair. If everything your gallant President tells us about the Communist countries is true, how the devil can we do a deal with any of them?”

Out of the corner of her eye Mary saw Grant’s droll smile stretch until it looked like snapping in itchy admiration of Pym’s wit.

“Magnus, if I had my way, we’d set you up on a big Embassy carpet with a shaker full of dry Martinis and an American passport and magic you right back to Washington and have you pick up the Democratic ticket. I never heard a seditious case put so well.”

“Draft Magnus for President?” Bee purred, sitting up straight and pressing out her breasts as if somebody had offered her a chocolate. “Oh goody.”

At which point the ostentatiously menial Herr Wenzel appeared and, bowing elaborately over Magnus, murmured in his left ear that he was required urgently—forgive, Excellency—on the telephone from London—Herr Counsellor, excuse.

Magnus excused. Magnus excuses everybody. Magnus picked his way delicately between imaginary obstacles to the door, smiling and empathising and excusing, while Mary chatted all the more brightly to provide him with covering fire. But as the door closed behind him something unforeseen occurred. Grant Lederer glanced at Bee, and Bee Lederer glanced at Grant. And Mary caught them at it and her blood ran cold.

Why? What had passed between them in that one unguarded look? Was Magnus really sleeping with Bee—and had Bee

told

Grant? Were they momentarily joined, the two of them, in perplexed admiration of their departed host? In all the turmoil since, Mary’s answer to those questions had not budged an inch. It wasn’t sex, it wasn’t love, it wasn’t envy and it wasn’t friendship. It was conspiracy. Mary was not fanciful. But Mary had seen and she knew. They were a pair of murderers telling each other “soon” and the soon was about Magnus. Soon we shall have him. Soon his hubris will be purged and our honour restored. I saw them hate him, thought Mary. She had thought it then, she thought it now.

“Grant is a Cassius looking for a Caesar,” Magnus had said. “If he doesn’t find a back to stab soon, the Agency will give his dagger to someone else.”

Yet in diplomacy nothing lasts, nothing is absolute, a conspiracy to murder is no grounds for endangering the flow of conversation. Chatting busily, talking children and shopping—hunting frantically for an explanation for the Lederers’ bad look—waiting, above all, for Magnus to return to the party and re-enchant his end of the table in two languages at once—Mary still found time to wonder whether this urgent telephone call from London might be the one her husband had been waiting for all these weeks. She had known for some while that he had something big going on, and she was praying it was the promised reinstatement.

And it was at this moment, as Mary remembered it while she was still chatting and still praying for her husband’s luck to change, that she felt his fingertips skip knowingly over her naked shoulders as he returned to his place at the head of the table. She hadn’t even heard the door, though she’d been listening for it.

“Everything all right, darling?” she called to him over the candelabra, playing it openly because the Pyms were so frightfully happily married.

“Her Maj in good shape, Magnus?” she heard Grant enquire in his insinuating drawl. “No rickets? Croup?”

Pym’s smile was radiant and relaxed but that didn’t always mean too much, as Mary knew. “Just one of Whitehall’s little rumbles, Grant,” he replied with magnificent casualness. “I think they must have a spy here who tells them when I’m giving a dinner party. Darling, are we out of claret? Jolly mingy rations, I must say.”

Oh, Magnus, she had thought excitedly: you chancer.

It was time to get the women upstairs for a pee before coffee. The Frau Oberregierungsrat, who held herself to be modern, was inclined to resist. A scowl from her husband dislodged her. But Bee Lederer, who by this time in the evening was disposed to become the great American feminist—Bee left like a lamb, peremptorily handed out by her sexy little husband.

“Now comes the punch,” says Jack Brotherhood contentedly, in Mary’s imagination.

“There is no punch.”

“Then why are we shaking, dear?” says Brotherhood.

“I’m not shaking. I’m just pouring myself a small drink waiting for you to arrive. You know I always shake.”

“I’ll have mine straight, please, same as you. Just give it me the way it happened. No ice, no fizz, no bullshit.”

Very well then, damn you, have it.

The night is ending as perfectly as it began. In the hall Mary and Magnus help the guests to their coats and Mary cannot help noticing how Magnus, whose life is service, stiffens his arms and curls his fingers with each successfully negotiated sleeve. Magnus has invited the Lederers to linger but Mary has covertly countermanded this by telling Bee, with a giggle, that Magnus needs an early night. The hall empties. The diplomatic Pyms, ignoring the cold—they are English after all—stand valiantly on their doorstep and wave farewell. Mary has an arm around Pym’s waist and she is secretly poking her thumb inside the waistband of his trousers at the back and down the partition of his buttocks. Magnus does not resist her. Magnus does not resist. Her head rests affectionately on his shoulder as she whispers sweet nothings into the same ear Herr Wenzel employed to summon him to the telephone and she hopes that Bee will notice their lovey-doveyness. Under the porch light—Mary luminously youthful in her long blue dress, Magnus so distinguished in his dinner-jacket—we must have looked the picture of harmonious married life. The Lederers leave last and are the most effusive. “Dammit, Magnus, I don’t remember when I had such a good time,” says Grant, with his quaint, rather faggy indignation. They are followed by their bodyguard in a second car. Side by side the very English Pyms enjoy a moment of shared disdain for the American way.

“Bee and Grant are terrific fun, really,” says Mary. “But would

you

have a bodyguard if Jack offered you one?” There is more to her question than mere curiosity. She has been wondering recently about the odd people who seem to loiter outside the house with nothing to do.

“Not bloody likely,” Pym retorts with a shudder. “Not unless he’ll promise to protect me from Grant.”

Mary extracts her thumb, they turn and arm in arm go indoors. “Is everything all right?” she asks, thinking of the phone call. Everything is absolutely fine, he replies. “I want you,” Mary whispers boldly and lets her hand brush across his thighs. Smiling, Pym nods and pulls at his tie, loosening it apparently in preparation. In the kitchen the Wenzels are waiting to leave. Mary can smell cigarette smoke but decides to ignore it because they have worked so hard. On her deathbed she will remember that she took the conscious decision to ignore their cigarette smoke: that her life at that moment was so relaxed, Lesbos so far away, her sense of service so complete, that she was able to consider matters of such massive triviality. Pym has the Wenzels’ money ready for them in an envelope plus a handsome tip. Magnus will tip with his last fiver, thinks Mary indulgently. His generosity is something she has learned to love even when her more frugal upper-class approach tells her he overdoes it: Magnus is so seldom vulgar. Even when at times she wonders whether he is overspending and she should offer him some from her private income. The Wenzels leave. Tomorrow night they will do another party at another house. The Pyms in close harmony move to the drawing-room, hands linking and breaking and ranging freely for the ritual foreplay of a nightcap and a gossipy post-mortem. Pym pours a scotch for Mary and a vodka for himself but unusually does not remove his jacket. Mary is fondling him explicitly. Sometimes in these cases they don’t manage to get up the stairs.

“Super venison, Mabs,” says Pym. Which was what he always does first: congratulate her. Magnus congratulates everyone all the time.

“They all thought Frau Wenzel cooked it,” says Mary, feeling for the top of his zip.

“Then sod them,” says Pym gallantly, rejecting the whole fatuous diplomatic world for her with a sweep of his forearm. For a moment Mary fears that Magnus has had one too many. She hopes not for she is not pretending: after the worries and fatuities of the evening she wants him very much. Handing Mary her glass, Magnus raises his own and drinks to her silently: well done, old girl. He is smiling straight down at her, his knees are almost touching hers and steady. Affected by the tension in him Mary wants him urgently here and now and gives him further clear evidence of this with her hands.

“If Grant Lederer is the

third,”

she asks, thinking again for a moment of that murderous look, “what on earth were the first two like?”

“I’m free,” says Pym.

Mary fails to understand. She thinks he is capping her joke in some way.

“I don’t get it,” she says a little shamefacedly. I’m so slow for him, poor love. A sudden awful thought. “You don’t mean they’ve sacked you?” she says.

Magnus shakes his head. “Rick’s dead,” he explains. “Who?” Which Rick does he mean? Rick from Berlin? Rick from Langley? Which Rick is dead who can be setting Magnus free and, who knows, making space for his promotion?

Magnus begins again. Perfectly reasonably. Clearly the poor girl has not understood. She is tired from her long evening. She’s had a couple too many. “Rick, my father, is dead. He died of a heart attack at six this evening while we were changing. They thought he was okay after the last one but it turns out he wasn’t. Jack Brotherhood phoned from London. Why the hell Personnel gave it to Jack to break to me rather than break it to me themselves is a secret not ours to share, presumably. But they did.”

And Mary even then doesn’t get it right.

“What do you mean—free?” she shouts wildly as all constraint leaves her. “Free of what?” Then very sensibly she bursts out weeping. Loud enough for both of them. Loud enough to drown her own dreadful questions from Lesbos all the way here.

And she has half a mind to weep again now, for Jack Brotherhood, as the front doorbell sounds through the house like a bugle call, three short peals as ever.

Pym briskly drew the curtains and switched on the light. He had stopped singing. He felt nimble. Setting down his briefcase with a little grunt, he peered gratefully around him, letting everything greet him in its own good time. The brass bedstead. Good morning. The embroidery picture above it exhorting him to love Jesus: I tried, but Rick always got in the way. The roll-top desk. The Bakelite wireless that had listened to dear old Winston Churchill. Pym had imposed nothing of himself on this room. He was its guest, not its coloniser. What had drawn him here, back in those dark ages, all those lives ago? Even now, with so much else clear to him, a sleepiness came over him when he tried to make himself remember. So many lonely journeys and aimless walks in foreign cities led me here, so much fallow, solitary time. He had been catching trains, looking for somewhere, escaping from somewhere else. Mary was in Berlin—no, she was in Prague—they had been transferred a couple of months earlier, and it was being made clear to him even then that if he kept his nose clean in Prague, the Washington appointment would be next on the list. Tom was—good God, Tom was scarcely out of nappies. And Pym was in London for a conference—no, he wasn’t, he was attending a three-day course on the latest methods of clandestine communication in a beastly little training house off Smith Square. The course over, he had taken a cab to Paddington. Mindlessly, the instinct guiding him. His head still crammed with useless knowledge about anodes and squash transmissions. He jumped on a train that was about to pull out and at Exeter crossed the platform and took another. What greater freedom than not knowing where you are going or why? Finding himself in the middle of nowhere, he spotted a bus bearing a vaguely familiar destination and boarded it.

This was granny-land. This was Sunday, when aunts rode to church with collection coins inside their gloves. From his spaceship on the upper deck, Pym gazed down fondly on chimney-pots, churches, dunes and slate roofs that looked as though they were waiting to be lifted up to Heaven by their topknots. The bus stopped, the conductor said “Far as we go, sir,” and Pym alighted with a most curious sense of accomplishment. I’m there, he thought. I’ve found it at last, and I wasn’t even looking for it. The very town, the very beach, exactly as I left them all those years ago. The day was sunny and the world empty. Probably it was lunchtime. He had lost count. What was certain was that Miss Dubber’s steps were scrubbed so white it was a shame to tread on them, and a hymn tune issued from the house, together with a smell of roast chicken, blue bag, carbolic soap and godliness.

“Go away!” a thin voice shouted. “I’m on the top step and I can’t reach the fuse and if I stretch any more I’ll pop.”

Five minutes later this room was his. His sanctuary. His safe house away from all the other safe houses. “Canterbury. The name is Canterbury,” he heard himself say as, the fuse safely mended, he pressed a deposit on her. A city had found a home.

Stepping to the desk, Pym now slid back the top and began turning the contents of his pockets on to the leatherette surface. As a stock-taking preparatory to a shift in personality and premises. As a retrospective examination of today’s events till now. One passport in the style of Mr. Magnus Richard Pym, colour of eyes green, hair light brown, member of Her Majesty’s Foreign Service, born far too long ago. There was always something rather shocking after a lifetime of symbols and codenames, about seeing his own name, naked and undisguised, splurged over a travel document. One calfskin wallet, a Christmas present from Mary. In the left side credit cards, in the right two thousand Austrian schillings and three hundred English pounds in various and elderly notes, his escape money cautiously assembled, more available in the desk. The Metro car keys. She’s got the other set. Photo of family on Lesbos, everybody absolutely fine. Scribbled address of girl he had met somewhere and forgotten. He put the wallet aside and, continuing with his inventory, drew from the same pocket one green airport boarding-card still valid for last night’s British Airways flight to Vienna. The sight and touch of it intrigued him. This was when Pym voted with his feet, he thought. In all his life till now, perhaps the first completely selfish gesture he had made, with the noble exception of the room where he now sat. The first time he had said “I want” rather than “I ought.”

At the cremation in a silent suburb he had had a suspicion that the tiny number of mourners was unnaturally inflated by somebody’s watchers. There was nothing he could prove. He could hardly as chief mourner stand at the door of the chapel challenging each of his nine guests to state his business. And it was true that Rick’s erratic path through life had attracted a host of people Pym had never set eyes on and never wished to. All the same the suspicion remained with him and grew as he drove to London Airport, and became a near certainty when he returned his car to the hire company, where two grey men were taking much too long to fill in their contract forms. Undeterred, he checked his suitcase to Vienna and, with this very boarding-card in his hand, passed through immigration and sat himself in the insanitary lounge behind his

Times.

When his flight was delayed, he almost concealed his irritation, but still contrived to let it show. When it was called, he hurried obediently forward to join the straggling crowd on its walk to the departure gate, the very picture of a dutiful conformer. As he did so he could almost feel, if he could not see, the two men peel away for tea and ping-pong back at base: let the Vienna bastards have him and good riddance, they were saying to each other. He turned a corner and advanced towards a moving walkway but did not board it

.

Instead he ambled, peering behind him as if in search of a delayed companion, then imperceptibly allowing himself to be borne backward by the opposing flow of passengers. Moments later he was showing his passport at the arrivals desk and receiving the quiet “Welcome home, sir” that is reserved for those with certain serial numbers. As a last and spontaneous precaution he had taken himself to the domestic airlines counter and enquired in a loose and general way that was calculated to annoy the busier clerk about flights to Scotland. Not Glasgow, thank you, just Edinburgh. Well hang on, you’d better give me Glasgow as well. Ah, a printed timetable, fantastic. Look, thank you

very

much. And you can issue me with a ticket if I buy one? Oh I see. Over there. Great.

Pym tore the boarding-card into small pieces and put them in the ashtray. How much did I plan, how much was spontaneous? It scarcely mattered. I am here to act, not brood. One coach ticket, Heathrow-Reading. It had rained on the journey. One single rail ticket, Reading-London, unused, bought to deceive. One night-sleeper ticket, Reading-Exeter, issued on board the train. He had worn a beret and kept his face in shadow while buying it from the drunk attendant. Tearing these also into small pieces, Pym added them to the pile in the ashtray and, whether out of habit or for some more aggressive reason, set a match to them and gazed into the flames with an unblinking fixity. He’d half a mind to burn his passport, too, but a residual squeamishness restrained him, which he found quaint about himself and rather endearing. I planned it to the last detail—I who have never taken a conscious decision in my life. I planned it on the day I joined the Firm in a part of my head I never knew about until Rick died. I planned everything except Miss Dubber’s cruise.

The flames dwindled, he broke up the ash, took off his coat and hung it over the back of the chair. From a chest of drawers he hauled an old cardigan, hand-knitted by Miss Dubber, and put it on.

I’ll talk to her about it again, he thought. I’ll think of something she’d like more. I’ll pick my moment better. The important thing for her is to have a change of scene, he thought. Somewhere she doesn’t have to worry.

Suddenly needing an activity, he switched out the lights, slipped quickly to the window, opened the curtains and set to work checking out the little square, life by life and window by window as the morning woke it, while he searched for tell-tale signs of watchers. In her kitchen, the wife of the Baptist minister, wearing her lovat dressing-gown, is unpegging her son’s football gear from the washing line in preparation for today’s match. Pym draws back swiftly. He has caught a glint of steel in the manse gateway, but it is only the minister’s bicycle still chained to the trunk of a monkey-puzzle tree as a precaution against unchristian covetousness. In the frosted bathroom window of Sea View a woman in a grey slip is stooped over a handbasin soaping her hair. Celia Venn, the doctor’s daughter who wants to paint the sea, is evidently expecting company today. Next door to her at number 8 Mr. Barlow the builder and his wife are watching breakfast television. Pym’s eye passes methodically on, until a parked van holds his attention. The passenger door opens, a girlish figure flits stealthily through the central gardens and vanishes into number 28. Ella, the daughter of the undertaker, is discovering life.

Pym closed the curtains and put the lights back on. I will make my own daytime and my own night. The briefcase stood where he had left it, strangely rigid from its steel lining. Everybody carried cases, he remembered, as he stared at it. Rick’s was pigskin, Lippsie’s was cardboard, Poppy’s was a scruffy grey thing with marks printed on it to look like hide. And Jack—dear Jack—you have your marvellous old attaché case, faithful as the dog you had to shoot.

Some people, you see, Tom, they leave their bodies to a teaching hospital. The hands go to this class, the heart to that one, the eyes to another, everyone gets something, everyone is grateful. Your father, however, has only his secrets. They’re his provenance and his curse.

With a bump, he sat down at the desk.

To tell it straight, he rehearsed. Word for word the truth. No evasions, no fictions, no devices. Just my overpromised self set free.

To tell it to no one in particular, and to everyone. To tell it to all of you who own me, to whom I have given myself with such unthinking liberality. To my handlers and paymasters. To Mary and all the other Marys. To anyone who had a piece of me, was promised more and duly disappointed. And to whatever of myself remained after the great Pym share-out.

To all my creditors and co-owners incorporated, here once and for all the settlement of arrears that Rick so often dreamed of and that shall now be achieved in his only acknowledged son. Whoever Pym was to you, whoever you are or were, here is the last of many versions of the Pym you thought you knew.

Pym took a deep breath and puffed it out again.

You do it once. Once in your life and that’s it. No rewrites, no polishing, no evasions. No would-it-be-better-this-ways. You’re the male bee. You do it once, and die.

He took up a pen, then a single sheet of paper. He scribbled some lines, whatever came into his head. All work and no play makes Jack a dull spy. Poppy, Poppy, on the wall. Miss Dubber must a-cruising go. Eat good bread, poor Rickie’s dead. Rickie-Tickie father. His hand ran smoothly, not a crossing-out. Sometimes, Tom, we have to do a thing in order to find out the reason for it. Sometimes our actions are questions, not answers.

2

A

black and gusty day then, Tom, as sabbaths in these parts mostly are, I saw a crop of them as a child and I don’t remember a sunny one. I hardly remember outdoors at all except when I was hurried through it like a child criminal on my way to church. But I am running ahead already, for Pym on this particular day was not yet born. The time is all your father’s life ago plus half-a-dozen months, the place a seaboard town not too far from this one, with more of a slope to it and a thicker tower—but this one will do quite as well. A swirling, sopping, doom-laden midmorning, take my word for it, and myself, as I say, an unborn ghost, not ordered, not delivered and certainly not paid for: myself a deaf microphone, planted but inactive in any but the biological meaning. Old leaves, old pine needles and old confetti stick to the wet church steps as the humble flow of worshippers files in for its weekly dose of perdition or salvation, though I never saw that much to choose between the two of them. And myself a mute and foetal spy, unconsciously fulfilling his first mission in a place normally devoid of targets.

Except that today something is up. There’s a buzz around, and its name is Rick. There’s a spark of mischief to their piety today they can’t keep dim and it comes from inside themselves, from the smouldering centre of their dark little sphere, and Rick is its owner and its origin and its instigator. You can read it everywhere: in the portentous, rolling tread of the brown-suited deacon, in the fluttering and exhaling of the hatted women who arrive in a rush imagining they are late, then sit blushing through their white face-powder because they are early. Everyone agog, everyone on tiptoe and a first-class turnout, as Rick would have remarked proudly, and probably he did, for he loved a full house whatever happened, never mind it was his own hanging. A few of them have come by car—such wonders of the day as Lanchesters and Singers—others by trolley-bus, and some have walked; and God’s sea rain has given them beards of cold inside their cheap fox stoles, and God’s sea wind is cutting through the threadbare serge of their Sunday best. Yet there is not one of them, however he has come, who does not brave the weather a second longer to pause and goggle at the notice-board and confirm with his own eyes what the bush telegraph has been telling him these several days. Two posters are fixed to it, both smeared by rain, both to the passer-by as dreary as cups of cold tea. Yet to those who know the code they transmit an electrifying signal. The first in orange proclaims the five-thousand-pound appeal, mounted by the Baptist Women’s League, to provide a reading-room—though all of them know that no book will ever be read in it, that it will be a place to set out homemade cakes and photographs of leprous children in the Congo. A plywood thermometer, designed by Rick’s best craftsmen, is fastened to the railings revealing that the first thousand has already been achieved. The second notice, green, declares that today’s address will be given by the minister, all welcome. But this information has been corrected. A rigid bulletin has been pinned over it, typed in full like a legal warning, with the comically misplaced capital letters that in these parts signal omens.

Due to unforeseen Circumstances, Sir Makepeace Watermaster, Justice of the Peace and Liberal Member of Parliament for this Constituency, will provide today’s Message. Appeal Committee please to Remain behind Afterwards for an Extraordinary meeting.

Makepeace Watermaster himself! And they know why!

Elsewhere in the world, Hitler is winding himself up to set fire to the universe, in America and Europe the miseries of the Depression are spreading like an incurable plague, and Jack Brotherhood’s forebears are abetting them or not according to whatever spurious doctrine of the day prevails in the deniable corridors of Whitehall. But the congregation doesn’t presume to hold opinions on these impenetrable aspects of God’s purpose. Theirs is the dissenting church and their temporal overlord is Sir Makepeace Watermaster, the greatest preacher and Liberal ever born, and one of the Highest in the Land, who gave them this very building out of his own purse. He didn’t, of course. His father Goodman gave it to them, but Makepeace, having succeeded to the fiefdom, has a way of forgetting that his father existed. Old Goodman was a Welshman, a preaching, singing, widowed, miserable potteryman with two children twenty-five years apart of whom Makepeace is the elder. Goodman came here, sampled the clay, sniffed the sea air and built a pottery. A couple of years later he built two more and imported cheap migrant labour to man them, first Low Welsh like himself and afterwards and cheaper still and lower, the persecuted Irish. Goodman lured them with his tied cottages, starved them with his rotten wages, and beat the fear of Hell into them from his pulpit before himself being taken off to Paradise, witness the unassuming monument to him six thousand feet high that stood in the pottery forecourt until a few years ago when the whole lot was ripped down to make way for a bungalow estate and good riddance.

And today

due to unforeseen Circumstances

that same Makepeace, Goodman’s only son, is coming down from his mountain-top—though the circumstances have been foreseen by everyone except himself, the circumstances are as palpable as the pews we wait in, as immovable as the Watermaster tiles the pews are bolted to, as fateful as the rasping clock that wheezes and whistles between every chime like a dying sow fighting off the awful end. Picture the gloom of it—how it stultified its young and dragged them down, its prohibition of everything exciting that they cared about: from Sunday newspapers to Popery, from psychology to art, from flimsy underwear to high spirits to low spirits, from love to laughter and back again, I don’t think there was a corner of the human state where their disapproval did not fall. Because if you don’t understand the gloom of it, you’ll not understand the world that Rick was running away from or the world he was running towards, or the twisting relish that buzzes and tickles like a flea in every humble breast this dark sabbath as the last chimes merge with the drumming of the rain and the first great trial of young Rick’s life begins. “Rick Pym’s for the high jump at last,” says the word. And what more awesome executioner than Makepeace himself, Highest in the Land, Justice of the Peace and Liberal Member of Parliament, to adjust the noose around his neck?

With the last chime of all, the strains of the voluntary die also. The congregation holds its breath and starts counting to a hundred while it seeks out its favourite actors. The two Watermaster women have arrived early. They sit shoulder to shoulder in the pew for notables directly beneath the pulpit. On almost any other Sunday, Makepeace would have been roosting there between them, all six foot six of him, his long head cocked to one side while he listened to the voluntary with his moist little rosebud ears. But not today because today is extra, today Makepeace is in the wings conferring with our Minister and certain worried trusties from the Appeal Committee.

Makepeace’s wife, known as Lady Nell, is not yet fifty but already she is hunched and shrivelled like a witch, with a habit of flicking her greying head without warning as if she were shaking off flies. And next to her—a tiny, earnest statue beside Nell’s pecking and stupidity—perches Dorothy, rightly called Dot, an immaculate speck of a lady, young enough to be Nell’s daughter instead of Makepeace’s sister—and she is praying, praying to her Maker, she is pushing her tiny scrumpled fists into her eyes while she pledges her life and death to Him if only He will hear her and make it right. Baptists do not kneel before God, Tom. They squat. But my Dorothy would have stretched herself flat on the Watermaster tiles and kissed the Pope’s big toe that day if God would have let her off the hook.

I have one photograph of her and there have been times—though no longer, I swear it, she is dead for me—when I would have given my soul for just one more. I found it in an old scuffed Bible when I was Tom’s age, in a suburban mansion we were hastily vacating. “To Dorothy with all my special love, Makepeace,” runs the inscription on the inside page. One in all the world. One spotted sepia-brown photograph is all, taken like a pause in flight as she steps down from the taxi, licence number not in frame, clutching a homemade posy of small flowers that could be wild, and her big eyes have too much behind them for our comfort. Is she on her way to a wedding? To her own? Is she calling on a sick relative—on Nell? Where is she? Where is she escaping to this time? She has the flowers to her chin and her elbows pressed together. Her forearms form a vertical line from waist to neck. Long sleeves nipped at the wrist. Muslin gloves, therefore no rings visible, though I have a suspicion of a bulge in the third joint of the third finger of the left hand. A cloche bonnet covers her hair and throws a shadow like a mask across the scaring eyes. Shoulders on a slant, as if she is on the point of losing her balance, and one tiny foot tipped sideways to prevent her. Her pale stockings have the zigzag sheen of silk; her shoes are of patent leather, pointed, buttoned. And somehow I know they pinch her, that they were bought against the clock like the rest of her outfit, in a shop where she is not known and does not wish to be. Her lower face pale as a plant grown in the dark—think of The Glades, the house she was brought up in! An only child, as I was, you can see it at a glance—never mind she has a brother twenty-five years ahead of her.

Shall I tell you what I found once, in the summerhouse in the Watermasters’ great dark orchard, where I myself, a child like her, was wandering? The colouring book she had won at Bible class,

The Life of Our Saviour in Pictures.

And do you know what my darling Dot had done with it? Scored out every saintly face with savage crayoning. I was shocked at first, until I understood. Those faces were the dreaded ones from the real world she had no part of. They enjoyed all the companionship and kindly smiles she never had. So she coloured them out. Not in rage. Not in hate. Not even in envy. But because their ease of living was beyond her grasp. Look again at the photograph. The jaw. The stern unsmiling jaw locking out expression. The little mouth clamped shut and downward to keep its secrets safe. That face cannot discard a single bad memory or experience, because it has nobody to share them with. It is condemned to store every one of them away until the day when it will break from overloading.

Enough. I’m running out ahead. Dot, a.k.a. Dorothy, family name Watermaster. No connection with any other firm. An abstraction. Mine. An unreal, empty woman permanently in flight. If she had had her back to me and not her face, I could not have known her less or loved her more.

And behind the Watermaster women, far behind, by chance as far as the great long aisle allows, at the very back of the church, in their chosen pew directly beside the closed doors, sits the flower of our young men, their neckties pulled up and outward from their stiff collars, their slicked hair parted in a razor slash. These are the Night School Boys, as they are affectionately known, our Tabernacle’s apostles of tomorrow, our white hopes, our future ministers of religion, our doctors, missionaries, and philanthropists, our future Highest in the Land, who will one day go out into the world and Save it as it has never been Saved before. It is they who by their zeal have acquired the duties customarily entrusted to older men: the distributing of hymn books and special notices, the taking of collection money and the hanging up of overcoats. It is they who once a week, by bicycle, motorcycle and kindly parents’ motorcars, distribute our church magazine to every god-fearing front door, including that of Sir Makepeace Watermaster himself, whose cook has standing orders that a piece of cake and a glass of lemon barley be always waiting for the bringer; they who collect the few shillings of rent from the church’s poor cottages, who pilot the pleasure boats on Brinkley Mere at children’s outings, host the Band of Hope’s Christmas bunfights and put fire into Christian Endeavour action week. And it is they who have taken upon themselves as a direct commission from Jesus the burden of the Women’s League Appeal, target five thousand pounds, at a time when two hundred would maintain a family for a year. Not a doorbell they have not pressed along their pilgrimage. Not a window they have not offered to clean, flower-bed to weed and dig for Jesus. Day after day the young troops have marched out, to return, reeking of peppermint, long after their parents are asleep. Sir Makepeace has sung their praises, so has our minister. No sabbath is complete without a reminder to Our Father regarding their devotion. And bravely the red line on the plywood thermometer at the church gates has climbed through the fifties, the hundreds to the first thousand, where for a while now, for all their efforts, it has seemed to stick. Not that they have lost momentum, far from it. Failure is not in their thoughts. No need for Makepeace Watermaster to remind them of Bruce’s spider, though he often does. The Night School Boys are “crackerjack,” as our saying goes. The Night School Boys are Christ’s own vanguard and they will be the Highest in the Land.

There are five of them and at their centre sits Rick, their founder, manager, guiding spirit and treasurer, still dreaming of his first Bentley. Rick, full names Richard Thomas after his dear old father, the beloved TP, who fought in the Great War trenches before he became our mayor, and passed away these seven years ago, though it seems like only yesterday, and what a preacher

he

was before his Maker took him back! Rick, your grandfather without portfolio, Tom, because I would never let you meet him.

I have two versions of Makepeace’s Message, both incomplete, both shorn of time or place or origin: yellowed press-cuttings, hacked apparently with nail-scissors from the ecclesiastical pages of the local press, which in those days reported our preachers’ doings as loyally as if they were our footballers. I found them in Dorothy’s same Bible with her photograph. Makepeace accused nobody outright, Makepeace framed no charge. This is the land of innuendo; straight speaking is for sinners. “M.P. sounds Stern Warning against Youthful Covetousness, Greed,” sings the first. “Perils of young Ambition splendidly Highlighted.” In Makepeace’s imposing person, the anonymous writer declares, “are met the poet’s Celtic grace, the Statesman’s eloquence, the lawgiver’s Iron sense of Justice.” The congregation was “spellbound unto the Meekest of its Members,” and none more so than Rick himself, who sits in an enraptured trance, nodding his broad head to the cadences of Makepeace’s rhetoric, even though every Welsh note of it—to the excited ears and eyes of those around him—is hurled at Rick personally down the length of the aisle, and rammed home with a botched stab of the lugubrious Watermaster forefinger.

The second version takes a less apocalyptic tone. The Highest in the Land was not ranting against youth’s sinfulness, far from it. He was offering succour to the youthful falterer. He was extolling youth’s ideals, likening them to stars. To believe this second version, you would suppose Makepeace had gone star crazy. He couldn’t get away from the things, nor could the writer. Stars as our destiny. Stars that guide Wise Men across deserts to the very Cradle of Truth. Stars to lighten the darkness of our despair, yea even in the pit of sin. Stars of every shape, for every occasion. Shining above us like God’s very light. The writer must have been Makepeace Watermaster’s property, body and soul, if it wasn’t Makepeace himself. Nobody else could have sweetened that awesome, forbidding apparition in the pulpit.

Though my eyes were not yet open on this day, I see him as clearly as I saw him later in the flesh, and shall see him always: tall as one of his own factory chimneys, and as tapered. Rubbery, with weak pinched shoulders and a wide bendy waist. One jointless arm tipped out at us like a railway signal, one baggy hand flapping on the end of it. And the wet, elastic little mouth that should have been a woman’s, too small even to feed him by, stretching and contracting as it labours to deliver the indignant vowels. And when at long, long last, enough awesome warnings have been uttered, and the penalties of sin outlined in sufficient detail, I see him brace himself and lean back and moisten his lips for the kiss-off, which we children have been begging for these forty minutes while we crossed our legs and died for a pee however often we had peed before we left home. One cutting gives this final preposterous passage in full, and I will give it again now—their text, not mine—though no Watermaster sermon I ever heard later was complete without it, though the words became part of Rick’s very nature, and remained with him all his life and consequently mine, and I would be amazed if they did not ring in his ears as he died, and accompany him as he strode towards his Maker, two pals reunited at last:

“Ideals, my young brethren . . .” I see Makepeace pause here, shoot another glare at Rick and start again: “Ideals, my beloved brethren all, are to be likened unto those splendid stars above us”—I see him lift his sad, starless eyes to the pine roof—“we cannot reach them. Millions of miles separate us from them.” I see him hold out his drooping arms as if to catch a falling sinner. “But oh my brethren, how greatly do we profit from their presence!”

Remember them, Tom. Jack, you’ll think I’m mad, but those stars, however fatuous, are a crucial piece of operational intelligence, for they lend a first image to Rick’s unquenchable conviction of his destiny, and it didn’t stop with Rick either; how could it, for what is a prophet’s son but himself a prophecy, even if nobody on God’s earth ever discovers what either one of them is prophesying? Makepeace, like all great preachers, must do without a final curtain or applause. Nevertheless, quite audibly in the silence—I have witnesses who swear to it—Rick is heard to whisper “beautiful” twice over. Makepeace Watermaster hears it too—slurs his big feet and pauses on the pulpit steps, blinking round him as if somebody has called him a rude name. Makepeace sits down, the organ strikes up “what purpose burns within our hearts?” Makepeace stands again, unsure where to put his ridiculously tiny backside. The hymn is sung to its dreary end. Night School Boys, with Rick star-struck at their centre, process down the aisle and in a practised drill movement fan out to their appointed posts. Rick, smart as paint today and every Sunday, proffers the collecting plate to the Watermaster ladies, his blue eyes glistening with divine intelligence. How much will they give? How quickly? The silence lends tension to these massive questions. First comes Lady Nell, who keeps him waiting while she pecks in her handbag and curses, but Rick is all forbearance, all love, all stars today, and each lady regardless of age or beauty receives the benefit of his thrilled and saintly smile. But where daft Nell simpers at him and tries to muss his slicked hair and pull it forward over his broad, Christian brow, my little Dot is looking nowhere but at the ground, still praying, praying even while she stands, and Rick has actually to touch her forearm with his finger in order to alert her to his Godlike nearness. I can feel his touch now upon my own arm, and it sends a healer’s charge through me of weak-kneed loathing and devotion. The boys line up before the Lord’s table, the minister accepts the offerings, says a perfunctory blessing, then orders everyone but the Appeal Committee to leave at once and quietly. The unforeseen Circumstances are about to begin, and with them the first great trial of Richard T. Pym—the first of many, it is true, but this is the one that really whetted his appetite for Judgment.

I have seen him a hundred times as he stood that morning. Rick alone, brooding at the doorway of a crowded room. Rick his father’s son, the glory of a great heritage creasing on his brow. Rick waiting, like Napoleon before the battle, for Destiny to sound the trumpets for his assault. He never made a lazy entrance in his life, he never fluffed his timing or his impact. Whatever you had in mind till then, you could forget it: the topic of the day had just walked in. So it is in the Tabernacle on this rainy sabbath, while God’s wind booms in the pine rafters high above and the disconsolate huddle of humanity in the front pews waits awkwardly for Rick. But stars, we know, are like ideals and elusive. Heads begin to crane, chairs creak. Still no Rick. The Night School Boys, already in the dock, moisten their lips, tip nervously at their ties. Rickie’s done a bunk. Rickie can’t face the music. The deacon in his brown suit hobbles with an artisan’s mysterious discomfort towards the vestry where Rick may have hidden. Then a thump. Round whips every head to the sound, till they stare straight back down the aisle at the great west door, which has been opened from outside by a mysterious hand. Silhouetted against the grey sea clouds of adversity, Rick T. Pym, until now David Livingstone’s natural heir if ever we knew one, gravely bows to his judges and his Maker, closes the great door behind him, and all but vanishes once more against its blackness.

“Message from old Mrs. Harmann for you, Mr. Philpott.” Philpott being the name of the minister. The voice being Rick’s and everyone as usual remarking its beauty, rallying to it, loving it, scared and drawn by its unflinching self-assurance.

“Oh yes then?” says Philpott, very alarmed to be addressed so calmly from so far away. Philpott is a Welshman too.

“She’d be glad of a lift to Exeter General to see her husband before his operation tomorrow, Mr. Philpott,” says Rick with just the tiniest note of a reproach. “She doesn’t seem to think he’ll pull through. If it’s any bother to you I’m sure one of us can take care of her, can’t we, Syd?”

Syd Lemon is a cockney whose father not long ago came south for his arthritis and in Syd’s view will shortly die of boredom instead. Syd is Rick’s best-loved lieutenant, a small, punchy fighter with the townie’s nimbleness and twinkle, and Syd is Syd for ever to me, even now, and the nearest I ever came to a confessor, excluding Poppy.

“Sit with her all night if we have to,” Syd affirms with strenuous rectitude. “All next day too, won’t we, Rickie?”

“Be quiet,” Makepeace Watermaster growls. But not to Rick, who is bolting the church doors from the inside. We can just make him out among the lights and darks of the porch. Clang goes the first bolt, high up, he has to reach for it.

Clang

the second, low down as he stoops to it. Finally, to the visible relief of the susceptible, he consents to embark on his forward journey to the scaffold. For by now the weaker of us are dependent on him. By now in our hearts we are begging a smile from him, the son of old TP, sending him messages assuring him that there is nothing personal, enquiring of him after the dear lady his poor mother—for the dear lady, as everybody knows, does not feel sufficiently herself today and nobody can budge her. She sits with a widow’s majesty at home in Airdale Road behind drawn curtains under the tinted giant photograph of TP in his mayoral regalia, weeping and praying one minute to have her late husband given back to her, the next to have him stay put exactly where he is and be spared the disgrace, and the next rooting for Rick like the old punter she secretly is—“Hand it to them, son. Fight them down before they do the same to you, same as your dad did and better.” By now the less worldly officers of our improvised tribunal have been converted if not actually corrupted to Rick’s side. And as if to undermine their authority still further, Welsh Philpott in his innocence has made the error of placing Rick beside the pulpit in the very spot from which in the past he has read us the day’s lesson with such brio and persuasion. Worse still, Welsh Philpott ushers Rick to this position and twitches the chair for Rick to sit on. But Rick is not so biddable. He remains standing, one hand rested comfortingly on the chair’s back as if he has decided to adopt it. Meanwhile he engages Mr. Philpott in a few more easy words of talk.

“I see Arsenal came a cropper Saturday, then,” says Rick. Arsenal, in better times, being Mr. Philpott’s second greatest love, as it was TP’s.

“Never mind that now, Rick,” says Mr. Philpott, all of a flurry. “We’ve business to discuss, as well you know.”

Looking poorly the minister takes his place beside Makepeace Watermaster. But Rick’s purpose is achieved. He has made a bond where Philpott wanted none; he has presented us with a feeling man instead of a villain. In recognition of his achievement Rick smiles. On all of us at once: grand of you to be among us here today. His smile sweeps over us; it is not impertinent, it is impressive in its compassion for the forces of human fallibility that have brought us to this unhappy pass. Only Sir Makepeace himself and Perce Loft the great solicitor from Dawlish, known as Perce the Writ, who sits beside him with the papers, preserve their granite disapproval. But Rick is not awed by them. Not by Makepeace and certainly not by Perce, with whom Rick has formed a fine relationship in recent months, based it is said on mutual respect and understanding. Perce wants Rick to read for the bar. Rick is bent upon it but meanwhile wants Perce to advise him on certain business transactions he is contemplating. Perce, ever an altruist, is supplying his services free.

“That was a wonderful sermon you gave us, Sir Makepeace,” says Rick. “I never heard better. Those words of yours will ring inside my head like the bells of Heaven for as long as I’m spared, sir. Hullo, Mr. Loft.”

Perce Loft is too official to reply. Sir Makepeace has had flattery before, and receives it as no more than his due.

“Sit down,” says our Liberal Member of Parliament for this Constituency and Justice of the Peace.

Rick obeys at once. Rick is no enemy of authority. To the contrary he is a man of authority himself, as we waverers already know, a power and a justice in one.

“Where’s the Appeal money gone?” Makepeace Watermaster demands without delay. “There was close on four hundred pound donated last month alone. Three hundred the month before, three hundred in August. Your accounts for the same period show one hundred and twelve pound received. Nothing put by and no cash in hand. What have you done with it, boy?”

“Bought a motor coach,” says Rick, and Syd—to use his own words—seated in the dock with all the rest of them, has a hard time not corpsing.

Rick spoke for twelve minutes by Syd’s dad’s watch and when he’d done only Makepeace Watermaster stood between him and victory, Syd is sure of it: “The minister, he was won over before your dad ever opened his mouth, Titch. Well he had to be, he gave TP his first pulpit. Old Perce Loft—well, Perce had fish to fry by then, didn’t he? Rick had stitched him up. The rest of them, they was going up and down like a tart’s knickers from waiting to see which way The Lord High Make-water’s going to jump.”

First of all, Rick magnanimously claims full responsibility for everything. Blame, says Rick, if blame there be, should be laid squarely at his own door. Stars and ideals are nothing to the metaphors he flings at us: “If a finger is to be pointed, point it here.” A stab at his own breast. “If a price is to be paid, here’s the address. Here I am. Send me the bill. And leave them to learn by his mistakes who got them into this, if such there have been,” he challenges them, beating the English language into submission with the blade of his plump hand by way of an example. Women admired those hands till the end of Rick’s days. They drew conclusions from the girth of his fingers, which never parted when he made a gesture.

“Where did he get his rhetoric from?” I once asked Syd reverently, enjoying what he and Meg called “a small wet” at their fireside in Surbiton. “Who were his models, apart from Makepeace?”

“Lloyd George, Hartley Shawcross, Avory, Marshall Hall, Norman Birkett and other great advocates of his day,” replied Syd promptly, as if they were the runners and starters for the two thirty at Newmarket. “Your dad had more respect for the law than any man I ever knew, Titch. Studied their speeches, followed their form better than what he did the geegees. He’d have been a top judge if TP had given him the opportunities, wouldn’t he, Meg?”

“He’d have been Prime Minister,” Meg affirms devoutly. “Who else was there but him and Winston?”

Rick next passes to his Theory of Property which I have since heard him expound many times in many different ways but I believe this was its unveiling. The burden is that any money passing through Rick’s hands is subject to a redefinition of the laws of property, since whatever he does with it will improve mankind, whose principal representative he is. Rick, in a word, is not a taker but a giver and those who call him otherwise lack faith. The final challenge comes in a mounting bombardment of passionate, grammatically unnerving pseudo-Biblical phrases. “And if any one of you here present today—can find evidence of a single advantage—one single benefit—be it in the past, be it stored away for the future—directly or indirectly from this enterprise—which I have derived—ambitious though it may have been, make no two ways about it—let him come forward now, with a clear heart—and point the finger where it belongs.”

From there it is but a step to that sublime vision of the Pym & Salvation Coach Company Ltd., which will bring profit to piety and worshippers to our beloved Tabernacle.

The magic box is unlocked. Flinging back the lid Rick displays a dazzling confusion of promises and statistics. The present bus fare from Farleigh Abbott to our Tabernacle is twopence. The trolley bus from Tambercombe costs threepence, four-up in a cab from either spot costs sixpence, a Granville Hastings motor coach costs nine hundred and eight pounds discounted for cash, and seats thirty-two fully loaded, eight standing. On the sabbath alone—my assistants here have made a most thorough survey, gentlemen—more than six hundred people travel an aggregate of over four thousand miles to worship at this fine Tabernacle. Because they love the place. As Rick does. As we all do, every man and woman here present—let’s make no bones about it. Because they want to feel

drawn from the circumference to the centre,

in the spirit of their faith. (This last is one of Makepeace Watermaster’s own expressions and Syd says it was a bit cheeky of Rick to throw it back in his face.) On three other days in the week, gentlemen—Band of Hope, Christian Endeavour and Women’s League Bible Group—another seven hundred miles are travelled leaving three days clear for normal commercial operation, and if you don’t believe me watch my forearm as it beats the doubters from my path in a series of convulsive elbow blows, the cupped fingers never parting. From such figures it is suddenly clear there can be only one conclusion.

“Gentlemen, if we charge

half

the standard fare

and

give a free ticket to every disabled and elderly person, to every child under the age of eight—with full insurance—observing all the fine regulations which rightly apply to the operation of commercial transport carriages in this increasingly hectic age of ours—with fully professional drivers with every awareness of their responsibilities, god-fearing men recruited from our own number—allowing for depreciation, garaging, maintenance, fuel, ticketing and sundries, and assuming a fifty-percent capacity on the three days of commercial operation—there’s a forty-percent clear profit for the Appeal and room left over to see everybody right.”

Makepeace Watermaster is asking questions. The others are either too full or too empty to speak at all.

“And you’ve bought it?” says Makepeace.

“Yes, sir.”

“You’re not of age, half of you.”

“We used an intermediary, sir. A fine lawyer of this district who in his modesty wishes to remain anonymous.”

Rick’s reply draws a rare smile from the improbably tiny lips of Sir Makepeace Watermaster. “I never knew a lawyer who wished to remain anonymous,” he says.

Perce Loft frowns distractedly at the wall.

“So where is it now?” Sir Makepeace continues.

“What, sir?”

“The coach, boy.”

“They’re painting it,” says Rick. “Green with gold lettering.”

“With whose permission, at any stage, have you embarked on this project?” asks Watermaster.

“We’re asking Miss Dorothy to cut the tape, Sir Makepeace. We’ve drafted the invite already.”

“Who gave you permission? Did Mr. Philpott here? Did the deacons? Did the committee? Did I? To spend nine hundred and eight pounds of Appeal funds, widows’ mites, on a motor coach?”

“We wanted the element of surprise, Sir Makepeace. We wanted to sweep the board with them. Once you spread the word beforehand, talk it round town, you take the air out of it. P.S.C. is going to be sprung upon an unsuspecting world.”

Makepeace now enters what Syd calls the dicey part.

“Where are the books?”

“Books, sir? There’s only one Book I know of—”

“Your files, boy. Your figures. You alone kept the accounts, we heard.”

“Give me a week, Sir Makepeace. I’ll account for every penny.”

“That’s not keeping accounts. That’s fudging them. Did you learn nothing at all from your father, boy?”

“Rectitude, sir. Humbleness before Jesus.”

“How much have you spent?”

“Not spent, sir. Invested.”

“How much?”

“Fifteen hundred. Rounded up.”

“Where’s the coach at present?”

“I said, sir. Being painted.”

“Where?”

“Balham’s of Brinkley. Coach-builders. Some of the finest Liberals in the county. Christians to a man.”

“I know Balham’s. TP sold timber to Balham’s for ten years.”

“They’re charging cost.”

“You propose to ply for trade in public, you say?”

“Three days a week, sir.”

“Using the public coach stages?”

“Certainly.”

“Are you familiar with the likely attitude to be taken by the Dawlish & Tambercombe Transport Corporation of Devon to this venture?”

“A popular demand like this—those boys can’t block it, Sir Makepeace. We’ve got God driving for us. Once they see the ground-swell, feel the pulse, they’ll back away and give us our heads all the way to the top. They can’t stop progress, Sir Makepeace, and they can’t stop the march of Christian people.”

“Can’t they,” says Sir Makepeace, and scribbles figures on a piece of paper in front of him. “There’s eight hundred and fifty pound in rent money missing as well,” he remarks as he writes.

“We invested the rent money too, sir.”

“That’s more than the fifteen hundred then.”

“Call it two thousand. Rounded up. I thought you only meant the Appeal money.”

“What about the collection money?”

“Some of it.”

“Counting all monies from any source, what’s the total capital? Rounded up.”

“Including private investors, Sir Makepeace—”

Watermaster sat up straight: “So we’ve private investors too, have we? My gracious, boy, you’ve been going it a bit. Who are they?”

“Private clients.”

“Of whom?”

Perce Loft looks as though he is about to fall asleep out of sheer boredom. His eyelids are two inches long, his goatish head has slipped forward on his neck.

“Sir Makepeace, I am not at liberty to reveal this. When P.S.C. promises confidentiality, that’s what she delivers. Our watchword is integrity.”

“Has the company been incorporated?”

“No, sir.”

“Why not?”

“Security, sir. Keep it under wraps. Like I said.”

Makepeace begins jotting again. Everybody waits for more questions. None come. An uncomfortable air of completeness settles over Makepeace, and Rick senses it faster than anybody. “It was like being up the old doctor’s, Titch,” Syd told me, “when he’s made up his mind what you’re dying of, only he’s got to write out this prescription before he gives you the good news.”

Rick speaks again. Unprompted. It was the voice he used when he was cornered. Syd heard it then, I heard it later only twice. It was not a pretty tone at all.

“I could bring those accounts up to you this evening, as a matter of fact, Sir Makepeace. They’re in safekeeping, you see. I’ll have to get them out.”

“Give them to the police,” says Makepeace, still writing. “We’re not detectives here, we’re churchmen.”

“Miss Dorothy might think a bit different, though, mightn’t she, Sir Makepeace?”

“Miss Dorothy has nothing to do with this.”

“Ask her.”

Then Makepeace stops writing and his head comes up a bit sharpish, says Syd, and they look at each other, Makepeace with his little baby eyes uncertain. And Rickie, suddenly his gaze has the glint of a flick-knife in the dark. Syd does not go as far as I shall in describing that stare because Syd won’t touch the black side of his lifelong hero. But I will. It looks out of him like a child through the eyeholes of a mask. It denies everything it stood for not a half-second earlier. It is pagan. It is amoral. It regrets your decision and your mortality. But it has no choice because you cannot go back.

“Are you telling me Miss Dorothy is an investor in this project?” says Makepeace.

“You can invest more than money, Sir Makepeace,” says Rick, from far away but close.

Now the point is, says Syd rather hastily here, Makepeace should never have driven Rick to use that argument. Makepeace was a weak man acting hard and they’re the worst, says Syd. If Makepeace had been reasonable, if he’d been a believer like the rest and thought a little better of poor TP’s boy instead of lacking faith and undermining everybody else’s into the bargain, things could have been settled in a friendly, positive way and everyone could have gone home happy, believing in Rick and his coach the way he needed them to. As it was, Makepeace was the last barrier and he left Rickie no alternative but to knock him down. So Rickie did, didn’t he? Well he had to, Titch.

I strain and stretch, Tom, I shove with every muscle of my imagination as deep as I dare into the heavy shadows of my own pre-history. I put down my pen and stare at the hideous church tower across the square, and I can hear as plain as Miss Dubber’s television downstairs the ill-contrasted voices of Rick and Sir Makepeace Watermaster matched against each other. I see the dark drawing-room of The Glades where I was so seldom admitted and I picture the two men closeted together there that evening alone, and my poor Dorothy trembling in our murky upper room reading the same hand-stitched homilies that now adorn Miss Dubber’s landings as she tries to suck comfort from God’s flowers, God’s love, God’s will. And I could tell you, I think near enough to a sentence or two, what passed between them by way of continuing their unfinished chat of that morning.

Rick’s spirits are back, because the flick-knife never shows for long and because he has already achieved the object that is more important to him than any other in his human dealings, even if he himself does not yet know it. He has inspired Makepeace to hold two totally divergent opinions of him and perhaps more. He has shown him the official and unofficial versions of his identity. He has taught him to respect Rick in his complexity and to reckon as much with Rick’s secret world as with his overt one. It is as if in the privacy of that room each player revealed the many cards, fake or real is of no account, that comprised his hand: and Makepeace was left without a chip in front of him. But the fact is, both men are dead, both took their secret to the grave, Sir Makepeace going ahead by thirty years. And the one person who may still know it cannot speak, because if she exists at all any more, then it is only as a ghost, haunting her own life and mine, killed long ago by the very consequences of the two men’s fateful dialogue that evening.

History records two meetings between Rick and my Dorothy before that sabbath. The first when she made a royal visit to the Young Liberals Club, of which Rick was at that time an elected officer—I believe, God help them, treasurer. The second when Rick was captain of the Tabernacle’s football team and one Morrie Washington, a Night School Boy and another of Rick’s lieutenants, was goalie. Dorothy, as sister of the Sitting Member, was invited to present the cup. Morrie remembers the line-up ceremony, with Dorothy walking along the troops and pinning a medal to each victorious breast, starting with Rick himself as captain. It seems she fumbled the clasp, or that Rick pretended she did. Either way, he let out a playful cry of pain and went down on one knee, clutching his bosom and insisting she had pierced him to the heart. It was a bold and rather naughty number and I am surprised he took it so far. Even in burlesque, Rick was normally very protective of his dignity, and at fancy-dress balls, which were the rage until the war came, he preferred to go as Lloyd George rather than risk ridicule. But down he went, Morrie remembered it like yesterday, and Dorothy laughed, a thing nobody had ever seen her do: laugh. What assignations followed we can never know, except that, according to Morrie, Rick did once boast that there was more than cake and lemon barley waiting for him up at The Glades when he delivered the church magazine. Syd, I think, knows more than Morrie. Syd saw a lot. And people tell him things because he keeps his counsel. Syd, I believe, knows most of the secrets that lurked in the wooded house that Makepeace Watermaster called his home, even if in old age he has done his best to bury them six foot under. He knows why Lady Nell drank and why Makepeace was so ill-at-ease with himself, and why his damp little eyes were so tormented, and his mouth unequal to his appetites, and why he was able to castigate sin with such passionate familiarity. And why he wrote of a special love when he put his wretched name in my Dorothy’s Bible. And why it was that Dorothy had taken herself to the furthest corner of the house to sleep, far from Lady Nell’s rooms and further still from Makepeace’s. And why Dorothy was so accessible to the smart-tongued upstart from the football team who spoke as if he could build her a road to anywhere, and drive her there in his coach. But Syd is a good man and a Mason. He loved Rick and gave the best years of his life, now to roistering with him, now to hanging on to his coattails. Syd would have a laugh, he would tell a story, provided it hurt nobody too much. But Syd won’t touch the black side.

History records also that Rick took no account books to that meeting, though Mr. Muspole the great accountant, another Night School Boy, offered to help him write some and probably did. Muspole could invent accounts the way others can write postcards on holiday or rattle off anecdotes into a microphone. And that in order to prepare himself, Rick took a stroll over Brinkley Cliffs, alone, which I believe is the first known walk of this kind, though Rick, like myself after him, was always a one for striding out in search of a decision or a voice. And that he returned from The Glades wearing an air of high office not unlike Makepeace Watermaster’s, except that it had more of the natural radiance in it that comes, we are told, of inner cleanliness. The matter of the Appeal had been attended to, he informed his courtiers. The problem of liquidity had been solved, he said. Everybody was going to be seen right. How? they begged him; how, Rickie? But Rick preferred to remain their magician and allowed nobody to look up his sleeve. Because I am blessed. Because I steer events. Because I am destined to become one of the Highest in the Land.

His other good news was not vouchsafed to them. This was a cheque drawn on Watermaster’s personal account in the sum of five hundred pounds to set himself up in life—presumably, said Syd, in outer Australia. Rick endorsed it, Syd cashed it, since Rick’s own bank account, as so often in later years, was temporarily indisposed. A few days afterwards, on the strength of this subsidy, Rick presided over a lavish if sombre banquet at the Brinkley Towers Hotel, attended by the entire court as then composed and several local Lovelies who were always an off-screen feature. Syd recalls a mood of historic change pervading the occasion though no one knew precisely what was over or what was about to begin. Speeches were made, mostly on the theme of old pals sticking together and keeping a straight bat through life, but when Rick’s health was drunk he responded with uncharacteristic brevity, and it was whispered that he was in the grip of an emotion, for he was seen to weep, which he did often, even in those days; he could weep buckets, on the drop of a handkerchief. Perce Loft, the great lawyer, attended the gathering to the surprise of some, and to their greater surprise brought with him a beautiful, if incongruous, young music student named Lippschitz, first name Annie, who put the other Lovelies in the shade even though she’d hardly a coat to cover her back. They dubbed her “Lippsie.” She was a refugee from Germany who had come to Perce in some immigration matter, and Perce in his goodness had decided to extend a helping hand to her, much as he had extended one to Rick. To close proceedings Morrie Washington the court jester sang a song, and Lippsie joined the other women in the chorus, though she sang too well and didn’t fully appreciate the dirty bits, being foreign. It was by then dawn. A sleek taxi took Rick away, and he was not seen in those parts for many years.

History records further that one Richard Thomas Pym, bachelor, and Dorothy Godchild Watermaster, spinster, both very temporarily of this parish, were the next day solemnly and discreetly married in the presence of two co-opted witnesses in a newly opened registry office off the Western by-pass, just where you turned left for Northolt Aerodrome. And that a little boy christened Magnus Richard and weighing in at very few pounds at all was born to them not six months later, whom the Lord protect. The Companies Registry, which I have consulted, also records the event, though in different terms. Within forty-eight hours of the birth, Rick had unveiled the Magnus Star Equitable Insurance Company Ltd., with a share capital of two thousand pounds. Its stated purpose was the Provision of life insurance to the Needy, Disabled, and Elderly. Its accountant was Mr. Muspole, its legal adviser Perce Loft. Morrie Washington was company secretary, and the late Alderman Thomas Pym, affectionately known as TP, its patron saint.

“So was there really a coach then or was it all flannel?” I ask Syd.

Syd is always cautious in how he replies. “Now there

could

have been a coach, Titch. I’m not saying there wasn’t, I’d be a liar if I did. I’m just saying I never heard about a coach till your dad happened to mention it in church that morning. Put it that way.”

“So what had he done with the money—if there was no coach?”

Syd really doesn’t know. So many thousands of pounds have floated under the bridge since then. So many great visions come and gone. Maybe Rick gave it away, Syd says awkwardly. Your dad couldn’t say no to anyone, specially the Lovelies. Never right with himself unless he was giving. Maybe a con came and took it off him, your dad always loved a con. Then to my amazement Syd blushes. And I hear faintly but clearly from the side of his mouth the ratta-tat-tat he used to make for me when I was a child and wanted him to do the clip of horses’ hoofs.

“You mean he used the Appeal money to lay bets?” I ask.

“Titch, I’m only saying that that coach of his could have been horse-drawn. That’s all I’m saying, isn’t it, Meg?”

Oh but there was a coach all right! And it was not horse-drawn at all. That coach was the most splendid, powerful ever made. The golden lettering of the Pym & Salvation Coach Company shone from its lustrous sides like the illuminated chapter headings of all the Bibles of Rick’s youth. Its green was the racing green of England. Sir Malcolm Campbell himself was going to drive it. The Highest in the Land would ride in it. When the people of our town saw that coach they were going to go down on their knees and put their hands together and thank God and Rick in equal portion for it. The grateful crowds would gather outside Rick’s house and call him out on to his balcony till late into the night. I have seen him practising his wave in expectation of them. With both hands as if rocking me above his head, while he beams and weeps into the middle distance: “I owe it all to old TP.” And if, as doubtless happened, it turned out that Balham’s of Brinkley, some of the finest Liberals in the county, had never strictly speaking heard of Rick’s coach, let alone painted it for cost out of the goodness of their hearts, then they were in the same state of provisional reality as the coach was. They were waiting for Rick’s wand to beckon them into being. It was only when meddlesome unbelievers such as Makepeace Watermaster had difficulty accepting this state of affairs that Rick found himself with a religious war on his hands, and like others before him was compelled to defend his faith by unpleasant means. All he demanded was the totality of your love. The least you could do in return was give it to him blindly. And wait for him, as God’s Banker, to double it over six months.

3

M

ary had prepared herself for everything except for this. Except for the pace and urgency of the intrusion and the number of the intruders. Except for the sheer scale and complexity of Jack Brotherhood’s anger, and for his bewilderment, which seemed greater than her own. And for the awful comfort of his being there.

Admitted to the hall he had barely looked at her. “Did you have any inkling of this?”

“If I had I’d have told you,” she said, which was a quarrel before they had even begun.

“Has he phoned?”

“No.”

“Has anybody else?”

“No.”

“No word from

anyone?

No change?”

“No.”

“Brought you a brace of house guests.” He jabbed a thumb at two shadows behind him. “Relatives from London, come to console you for the duration. More to follow.” Then he swept through her like a great ragged hawk on its journey to another prey, leaving her one frozen impression of his lined and punctured face and shaggy white forelock as he stormed towards the drawing-room.

“I’m Georgie from Head Office,” said the girl on the doorstep. “This is Fergus. We’re so sorry, Mary.”

They had luggage and she showed them to the foot of the stairs. They seemed to know the way. Georgie was tall and sharp-edged, with straight, sensible hair. Fergus was not quite Georgie’s class, which was the way the Office worked these days.

“Sorry about this, Mary,” Fergus echoed as he followed Georgie up the stairs. “Don’t mind if we take a look round, do you?”

In the drawing-room Brotherhood had switched out the lights and wrenched open the curtains to the French windows. “I need the key for this thing. The Chubb. The whatever they have here.”

Mary hastened to the mantelpiece and groped for the silver rose bowl where she kept the security key. “Where is he?”

“He’s anywhere in the world or out of it. He’s using trade-craft. Ours. Who does he know in Edinburgh?”

“No one.” The rose bowl was full of pot-pourri she had made with Tom. But no key.

“They think they’ve traced him there,” said Brotherhood. “They think he took the five-o’clock shuttle from Heathrow. Tall man with a heavy briefcase. On the other hand, knowing our Magnus as we do, he might just be in Timbuctoo.”

Looking for the key was like looking for Magnus. She didn’t know where to begin. She seized the tea-caddy and shook it. She was getting sick with panic. She grabbed the silver Achievement Cup that Tom had won at school and heard something metal skid inside it. Taking the key to him, she barked her shin so hard her eyes blurred. That bloody piano stool.

“The Lederers ring?”

“No. I told you. No one did. I didn’t get back from the airport till eleven.”

“Where’s the holes?”

She located the top keyhole for him and guided his hand to it. I should have done it myself then I wouldn’t have had to touch him. She knelt and began fumbling for the lower one. I’m practically kissing his feet.

“Has he ever vanished before and you not told me?” Brotherhood demanded while she continued to grope.

“No.”

“I want it level, Mary. I’ve got the whole of London at my throat. Bo’s having the vapours and Nigel’s cloistered with the Ambassador now. The RAF doesn’t fly us out in the middle of the night for nothing.”

Nigel is Bo Brammel’s hangman, Magnus had said. Bo says three-bags-full to everyone and Nigel pads behind him chopping off their heads.

“Never. No. I swear,” she said.

“Did he have a favourite place anywhere? Some hideaway he talked of going to?”

“He said once Ireland. He’d buy a croft overlooking the sea and write.”

“North or south?”

“I don’t know. South, I suppose. As long as it was sea. Then suddenly the Bahamas. That was more recent.”

“Who does he have there?”

“Nobody. Not as far as I know.”

“Did he ever talk of going over to the other side? Little dacha on the Black Sea?”

“Don’t be a fool.”

“So Ireland, then the Bahamas. When did he say the Bahamas?”

“He didn’t. He just marked the property advertisements in

The Times

and left them for me to see.”

“As a sign?”

“As a reproach, as a come-on, as a signal that he wanted to be somewhere else. Magnus has a lot of ways of talking.”

“Has he ever talked about doing away with himself? They’ll ask you, Mary. I might as well do it first.”

“No. No, he hasn’t.”

“You don’t sound sure.”

“I’m not. I’ll have to think.”

“Has he ever been physically frightened for himself?”

“I can’t answer it all at once, Jack! He’s a complicated man—I’ve got to think!” She steadied herself. “In principle, no. No to all of it. It’s all a total shock.”

“But you still rang very fast from the airport. As soon as he wasn’t on that plane, you were on the phone: ‘Jack, Jack, where’s Magnus?’ You were right, he’d vanished.”

“I saw his suitcase going round the bloody apron, didn’t I? He’d checked himself in! Why wasn’t he on the plane?”

“How about his drinking?”

“Less than before.”

“Less than Lesbos?”

“Miles less.”

“What about his headaches?”

“Gone.”

“Other women?”

“I don’t know. I wouldn’t know. How could I? If he says he’s out for the night, he’s out for the night. It could be a woman, it could be a Joe. It could be Bee Lederer. She’s always after him. Ask her.”

“I thought wives could always tell the difference,” said Brotherhood.

Not with Magnus they can’t, she thought, beginning to settle to his pace.

“Does he still bring papers back at night to work on?” Brotherhood asked, peering into the snow-clad garden.

“Now and then.”

“Any here now?”

“Not that I know of.”

“American papers? Liaison stuff?”

“I don’t read them, Jack, do I? So I don’t know.”

“Where does he keep them?”

“He brings them at night, takes them back in the morning. Just like everyone else.”

“And keeps them where, Mary?”

“By the bed. In the desk. Wherever he’s been working on them.”

“And Lederer hasn’t rung?”

“I told you. No.”

Brotherhood stood back. Two men, muffled against the night, tumbled into the room. She recognised Lumsden, the Ambassador’s private secretary. She had recently had a row with his wife, Caroline, about starting a bottle-bank in the Embassy forecourt as an example to the Viennese. Mary thought it essential. Caroline Lumsden thought it irrelevant and explained why in an angry outburst to an inner caucus of the Diplomatic Wives Association: Mary was not a real Wife, said Caroline. She was an Unmentionable, and the only reason she was accepted as a Wife

at all

was to protect her husband’s half-baked cover.

They must have soldiered up the bridlepath from the school, she thought. Waded through half a metre of snow in order to be discreet about Magnus.

“Hail, Mary,” Lumsden said brightly in his best scoutmaster’s voice. He was a Catholic but that was how he always greeted her, so he did it tonight. To be normal.

“Did he bring any papers back on the night of the party?” Brotherhood asked, closing the curtains once more.

“No.” She put on the light.

“Know what’s in this black briefcase of his that he’s carrying ?”

“He didn’t take it from here so he must have collected it at the Embassy. All he took from here was the suitcase that’s at Schwechat.”

“Was,” said Brotherhood.

The second man was tall and sickly-looking. He carried a bulging bag in each gloved hand. Enter the abortionist. It was practically a full plane, she thought stupidly; Head Office must have a permanent defection team on twenty-four-hour standby.

“Meet Harry,” Brotherhood said. “He’s going to put some clever boxes on your telephones. Use them normally. Don’t think of us. Any objection?”

“How can I?”

“You can’t, you’re right. I’m being polite, so why don’t you do the same? You’ve got two cars. Where are they?”

“The Rover’s outside, the Metro’s in the airport carpark waiting for him to pick it up.”

“Why did you go to the airport if he had a car there?”

“I just thought he might like me to be there so I took a taxi and went.”

“Why not take the Rover?”

“I wanted to ride back with him, not drive in convoy.”

“Where’s the Metro key?”

“In his pocket presumably.”

“Got a spare?”

She searched her handbag till she found it. He dropped it in his pocket.

“I’ll get it lost,” he said. “If anybody asks, it’s gone for repair. I don’t want it kicking round the airport.”

She heard a heavy thud from upstairs.

She watched Harry pull off his gumboots and place them neatly on the mat beside the French windows.

“His father died Wednesday. What’s he been up to in London apart from burying him?” Brotherhood continued.

“I assumed he’d be dropping in at Head Office.”

“He never did. He didn’t ring, he didn’t visit.”

“Then probably he was busy.”

“Did he have any plans for London—anything he told you of?”

“He said he’d go and see Tom at school.”

“Well, he did that. He went. Anything else? Friends—dates—women?”

She was suddenly very tired of him. “He was burying his father and tidying up, Jack. The whole visit was one long date. If you’d had a father and he died, you’d know how it was.”

“Did he phone you from London?”

“No.”

“Steady, Mary. Think now. That’s five days already.”

“No. He didn’t. Of course he didn’t.”

“Would he usually?”

“If he can use the Office phone, yes.”

“And if he can’t?”

She thought for him. She really tried. She had been thinking for so long. “Yes,” she conceded. “He’d phone. He likes to know we’re all right, all the time. He’s a worrier. I suppose that’s why I went off with such a bang when he didn’t show up. I think I was worried already.”

Lumsden was stalking round the room in his stockinged feet, pretending to admire Mary’s water-colours of Greece.

“You’re so, so talented,” he marvelled, his face pressed against a view of Plomari. “Did you go to art school or simply do it?”

She ignored him. So did Brotherhood. It was a tacit bond between them. The only decent diplomat is a deaf Trappist, Jack liked to say. Mary was beginning to agree.

“Where’s the servant?” said Brotherhood.

“You told me to get rid of her. On the phone. When I rang.”

“She smell a rat?”

“I don’t think so.”

“It mustn’t get out, Mary. We’ve got to sit on it as long as we possibly can. You know that, don’t you?”

“I guessed.”

“There’s his Joes to think of, there’s everything to think of. Far more than you can know. London’s stiff with theories and begging for time. You quite sure Lederer hasn’t phoned?”

“Jesus,” she said.

His eye fell on Harry, who was unpacking his clever boxes. They were grey-green and possessed no apparent controls. “You can tell the servant they’re transformers,” he said.

“Umformer,”

Lumsden piped helpfully from the wings. “Transformer is

Umformer. ‘Die kleinen Büchsen sind Umformer.’”

Once again they ignored him. Jack’s German was almost as good as Magnus’s, and about three hundred times better than Lumsden’s.

“When’s she due back?” Brotherhood asked.

“Who?”

“Your servant, for God’s sake.”

“Tomorrow lunchtime.”

“Be a good girl and see if you can get her to stay away a couple more days.”

She went to the kitchen and phoned Frau Bauer’s mother in Salzburg. Sorry about the outrageous hour but with a death that’s how it goes, she said. Herr Pym is remaining in London for a few days, she said. Why don’t you take advantage of Herr Pym’s absence and have a nice rest? she said. When she came back it was Lumsden’s turn to say his piece. She got his drift immediately and after that she deliberately stopped hearing him. “Just to fill in any awkward blanks, Mary . . . So that we’re all speaking the same language, Mary . . . While Nigel is still closeted with Ambass . . . In case, which God forbid, the odious press gets on to it before it’s all cleared up, Mary . . .” Lumsden had a cliché for every occasion and a reputation for being nimble-minded. “Anyway, that’s the route Ambass would like us all to go,” he ended, using the very latest in daring jargon. “Not unless we’re asked, naturally. But if we are. And Mary he sends terrific love. He’s with you all the way. And with Magnus too naturally. Terrific condolences, all that.”

“Just nothing to Lederer’s crowd,” said Brotherhood. “Nothing to anyone but for God’s sake nothing to Lederer. There’s no disappearance, nothing abnormal. He’s gone back to London to bury his father, he’s staying on for talks at Head Office. End of message.”

“It’s the same route I’ve been going already,” Mary said, appealing to Brotherhood as if Lumsden didn’t exist. “It’s just that Magnus didn’t apply for compassionate leave before taking it.”

“Yes, well now I think that’s the part Ambass wants us

not

to say, if you don’t mind,” said Lumsden, showing the steel. “So I think we won’t, please.”

Brotherhood squared to him. Mary was family. Nobody messed her around in front of Brotherhood, least of all some overeducated flunkey from the Foreign Office.

“You’ve done your job,” said Brotherhood. “Fade away, will you? Now.”

Lumsden left the way he had come, but faster.

Brotherhood turned back to Mary. They were alone. He was as broad as an old blockhouse and, when he wanted to be, as rough. His white forelock had fallen across his brow. He put his hands on her hips the way he used to, and drew her into him. “God damn it, Mary,” he said as he held her. “Magnus is my best boy. What the devil have you done with him?”

From upstairs she heard the squeak of castors and another loud thud. It’s the bow-fronted chest of drawers. No, it’s our bed. Georgie and Fergus are taking a look round.

The desk was in the old servants’ room next to the kitchen, a sprawling, spidery half-cellar to which no servant had been consigned for forty years. Near the window among Mary’s plant pots stood her easel and water-colours. Against the wall, the old black-and-white television and the agonising sofa for watching it. “There’s nothing like a little discomfort,” Magnus liked to say primly, “for deciding whether a programme is worth its salt.” In an alcove under lanes of piping stood the ping-pong table where Mary did her bookbinding and on it lay her hides and buckram and glues and clamps and threads and marbled end-papers and powering knives, and the bricks in Magnus’s old socks that she used instead of lead weights, and the wrecked volumes she had bought for a few schillings at the flea market. Beside it, next to the defunct boiler, stood the desk, the great, crazy Hapsburg desk bought for a song at a sale in Graz, sawn up to get it through the door and glued together again all by clever Magnus. Brotherhood pulled at the drawers.

“Key?”

“Magnus must have taken it.”

Brotherhood lifted his head. “Harry!”

Harry kept his lock picks on a chain the way other men keep keys, and held his breath to help him listen while he probed.

“Does he do all his homework here or is there somewhere else?”

“Daddy left him his old campaign table. Sometimes he uses that.”

“Where is it?”

“Upstairs.”

“Where upstairs?”

“Tom’s room.”

“Keep his documents there too, does he? . . . Firm’s papers?”

“I don’t think so. I don’t know where.”

Harry walked out smiling with his head down. Brotherhood pulled open a drawer.

“That’s for the book he was writing,” she said as he extracted a meagre file. Magnus keeps everything inside something. Everything must wear a disguise in order to be real.

“Is it though?” He was pulling on his glasses, one red ear at a time. He knows about the novel too, she thought, watching him. He’s not even pretending to be surprised.

“Yes.” And you can put his bloody papers back where you got them from, she thought. She did not like how cold he had become, how hard.

“Gave up his sketching, did he? I thought you two were in that together.”

“It didn’t satisfy him. He decided he preferred the written word.”

“Doesn’t seem to have written much here. When did he switch?”

“On Lesbos. On holiday. He’s not writing it yet. He’s preparing.”

“Oh.” He began another page.

“He calls it a matrix.”

“Does he though?”—still reading—“I must show some of this to Bo. He’s a literary man.”

“And when we retire—when he does—if he takes early retirement, he’ll write, I’ll paint and bookbind. That’s the plan.”

Brotherhood turned a page. “In Dorset?”

“At Plush. Yes.”

“Well, he’s taken early retirement all right,” he remarked not very nicely as he resumed his reading. “Wasn’t there sculpture, too, at some point?”

“It wasn’t practical.”

“I shouldn’t think it was.”

“You encourage those things, Jack. The Firm does. You’re always saying we should have hobbies and recreations.”

“What’s the book about, then? Anything special?”

“He’s still finding the line. He likes to keep it to himself.”

“Listen to this: ‘When the most horrible gloom was over the household; when Edward himself was in agony and behaving as prettily as he knew how.’ Not even a main verb, far as I can make out.”

“He didn’t write that.”

“It’s in his handwriting, Mary.”

“It’s from something he read. When he reads a book he underlines things in pencil. Then when he’s finished it he writes out his favourite bits.”

From upstairs she heard a sharp snap like the cracking of timber or the firing of a pistol back in the days when she had been taught.

“That’s Tom’s room,” she said. “They don’t need to go in there.”

“Get me a bag, dear,” Brotherhood said. “A bin bag will do. Will you find me one?”

She went to the kitchen. Why do I let him do this to me? Why do I let him march into my house, my marriage and my mind and help himself to everything he doesn’t like? Mary was not usually compliant. Tradesmen did not rob her twice. In the English school, the English church, in the Diplomatic Wives Association, she was regarded as quite the little shrew. Yet one hard stare of Jack Brotherhood’s pale eyes, one growl of his rich, careless voice, was enough to send her running to him.

It’s because he’s so like Daddy, she decided. He loves our kind of England and the rest can go hang.

It’s because I worked for Jack in Berlin when I was an empty-headed schoolgirl with one small talent. Jack was my older lover at a time when I thought I needed one.

It’s because he steered Magnus through his divorce for me when he was dithering and gave him to me “for afters” as he called it.

It’s because he loves Magnus too.

Brotherhood was flipping the pages of her desk diary.

“Who’s P?” he demanded, tapping a page. “ ‘ Twenty-fifth September, six-thirty p.m. P.’ There’s a P on the sixteenth too, Mary. That’s not ‘P’ for Pym, is it, or am I being stupid again? Who’s this P he’s meeting?”

She began to hear the scream inside herself and had no whisky left to quell it. Of all the entries, the dozens and dozens, and he has to pick that one. “I don’t know. A Joe. I don’t know.”

“You wrote it, didn’t you?”

“Magnus asked me to. ‘Put down I’m meeting P.’ He didn’t keep a diary of his own. He said it was insecure.”

“And he made you write the entries for him.”

“He said if anybody looked, they wouldn’t know which were his dates and which were mine. It was part of sharing.” She felt Brotherhood’s stare. He’s making me speak, she thought. He wants to hear the quaver in my voice.

“Sharing what?”

“His work.”

“Explain.”

“He couldn’t tell me what he was doing, but he could show me that he was doing it and when.”

“Did he say that?”

“I could feel it.”

“What could you feel?”

“That he was proud! He wanted me to know!”

“Know what?”

Brotherhood could drive her mad even when she knew he meant to. “Know that he had another life! An important one. That he was being used.”

“By us?”

“By you, Jack. By the Firm! Who do you think—the Americans?”

“Why do you say that—the Americans? Did he have a thing about them?”

“Why should he? He served in Washington.”

“Needn’t stop him. Might even encourage him. Did you know the Lederers in Washington?”

“Of course we did.”

“But better here, eh? I hear she’s quite an armful.”

He was turning forward to the days yet to be endured. Tomorrow and the day after. To the weekend, which was already gaping at her like a hole in her shattered universe.

“Mind if I keep this?” he asked.

Mary damn well did mind. She possessed no spare diary and no spare life either. She snatched it back and let him wait while she copied out her future on a sheet of paper: Drinks Lederer . . . dinner Dinkels . . . Tom’s school term ends.... She came to “meet P” and left it out.

“Why’s this drawer empty?” he asked.

“I didn’t know it was.”

“So what was it full of?”

“Old photographs. Mementoes. Nothing.”

“How long’s it been empty?”

“I don’t know, Jack. I don’t know! Get off my back, will you?”

“Did he put papers in his suitcase?”

“I didn’t watch him pack.”

“Did you hear him down here while he was packing?”

“Yes.”

The telephone rang. Mary’s hand shot out to take it, but Brotherhood was already grasping her wrist. Still holding her, he leaned towards the door and yelled for Harry while the phone went on ringing. It was rising four a.m. already. Who the hell calls at four in the morning except Magnus? Inside herself Mary was praying so loud she hardly heard Brotherhood’s shout. The phone kept calling her, and she knew now that nothing mattered except Magnus and her family.

“It might be Tom!” she shouted while she struggled. “Let go, damn you!”

“It might be Lederer, too.”

Harry must have flown downstairs. She counted two more rings before he was standing in the doorway.

“Trig this call,” Brotherhood ordered, loud and slow. Harry vanished. Brotherhood released Mary’s hand. “Make it very, very long, Mary. Spread it right out. You know how to play those games. Do it.”

She lifted the phone and said, “Pym residence.”

Nobody answered. Brotherhood was conducting her with his powerful hands, willing her, pressing her to talk. She heard a metallic ping and crammed her hand over the mouthpiece. “It could be a call code,” she breathed. She held up one finger for one ping. Then a second. Then a third. It was a call code. They had used them in Berlin: two for this, three for that. Private and prearranged between the Joe and base. She opened her eyes to Brotherhood to say what shall I do? He shook his head to say I don’t know either.

Speak, he mouthed.

Mary drew a deep breath. “Hullo? Speak up, please.” She took refuge in German. “This is the residence of Counsellor Magnus Pym of the British Embassy. Who is that? Will you speak, please? Mr. Pym is not here at the moment. If you wish to leave a message, you may do so. Otherwise, please call later. Hullo?”

More, Brotherhood was urging. Give me more. She recited her telephone number in German and again in English. The line was open and she could hear a noise like traffic and a noise like scratchy music played at half speed, but no more pings. She repeated the number in English. “Speak up, please. The line is dreadful. Hullo. Can you hear me? Who’s that calling, please? Do—please—speak—up.” Then she couldn’t help herself. Her eyes closed and she screamed, “Magnus, for God’s sake say where you are!” But Brotherhood was miles ahead of her. With a lover’s knowledge he had felt her outburst coming and clapped his hand over the cradle.

“Too short, sir,” Harry lamented from the doorway. “I’d need another minute at the least.”

“Was it foreign?” Brotherhood said.

“Could be foreign, could be next door, sir.”

“That was naughty, Mary. Don’t do those things again. We’re on the same side in this and I’m boss.”

“Someone’s kidnapped him,” she said. “I know they have.”

Everything froze: herself, his pale eyes, even Harry in the doorway. “Well, well,” said Brotherhood at last. “That would make you feel better, would it? A kidnapping? Now why do you say that, dear? What’s worse than kidnapping, I wonder?”

Trying to meet his gaze Mary experienced a violent time warp. I don’t know anything. I want Plush. Give me back the land that Sam and Daddy died for. She saw herself as a school-leaver seated in front of the careers mistress in the middle of her last term. A second woman is with her, London and tough. “This lady is a recruiting officer for the Foreign Service, dear,” says the careers mistress. “A special bit of it,” says the tough woman. “She’s terribly impressed by the way you

draw,

dear,” says the careers mistress. “She so admires your draughtsmanship, as we all do. She wonders whether you’d be interested in taking your folder to London for a day or two, so that some other people can look at it.” “It’s for your country, dear,” the tough woman says with meaning, to the child of English patriots.

She remembered the training house in East Anglia, girls like herself, our class. She remembered the jolly lessons in copying and engraving and colouring, in papers and cardboards and linens and threads, how to make watermarks and how to alter them, how to cut rubber stamps, how to make paper look older and how to make it look younger, and she tried to remember just when it was exactly that they had realised they were being taught to forge documents for British spies. And she saw herself standing before Jack Brotherhood in his rickety upstairs office in Berlin, not a stone’s throw from the Wall, Jack the Stripper, Jack the Stoat, Jack the Black and all the other Jacks he was known as. Jack who had charge of Berlin Station and liked to meet all newcomers personally, particularly if they were pretty girls of twenty. She remembered his bleached gaze running slowly over her body while he guessed her shape and sexual weight and she remembered again hating him on sight, as she was trying to hate him now as she watched him flip through a folder of family correspondence he had pulled from the desk.

“You realise half of those are Tom’s letters from boarding-school, I suppose,” she said.

“Why doesn’t he write to both of you?”

“He does write to both of us, Jack. Tom and I have one correspondence. Magnus and Tom have a separate correspondence.”

“No interconsciousness,” said Brotherhood, using a bit of trade talk he had taught her in Berlin. He lit one of his fat yellow cigarettes and watched her theatrically through the flame. There’s a poseur in all of them, she thought. Magnus and Grant included.

“You’re absurd,” she said in nervous anger.

“It’s an absurd situation and Nigel will be here any minute to make it more absurd still. What caused it?” He opened another drawer.

“His father. If it’s a situation at all.”

“Whose camera’s this?”

“Tom’s. But we all use it.”

“Any other cameras around?”

“No. If Magnus needs one for his work he brings it from the Embassy.”

“Any here from the Embassy now?”

“No.”

“Maybe his father caused it or maybe a lot of things did. Maybe a marital tiff I don’t know about caused it.”

He was examining the camera’s settings, turning it over in his big hands as if he were thinking of buying it.

“We don’t have them,” she said.

His knowing eyes lifted to her. “How do you manage that?”

“He doesn’t offer a fight, that’s why.”

“You do though. You’re a right little demon when you get going, Mary.”

“Not any more,” she said, mistrusting his charm.

“You never met his dad, did you?” said Brotherhood as he wound the film through the camera. “There was something about him, I seem to remember.”

“They were estranged.”

“Ah.”

“Nothing dramatic. They’d drifted apart. They’re that sort of family.”

“What sort, dear?”

“Scattered. Business people. He’d said he’d let them in on his first marriage and once was enough. We hardly talked about it.”

“Tom go along with that?”

“Tom’s a child.”

“Tom was the last person Magnus saw before he vanished, Mary. Apart from the porter at his club.”

“So arrest him,” Mary suggested rudely.

Dropping the film into the bin bag Brotherhood picked up Magnus’s little transistor radio.

“This the new one they do with all the shortwave on it?”

“I believe so.”

“Take it with him on holiday, did he?”

“Yes, he did.”

“Listen to it regularly?”

“Since, as you once told me, he runs Czechoslovakia single-handed out here, it would be fairly startling if he didn’t.”

He switched it on. A male voice was reading the news in Czech. Brotherhood stared blankly at the wall while he let it continue for what seemed like hours. He switched off the radio and put it in the bag. His gaze lifted to the uncurtained window, but it was still a long while before he spoke. “Not displaying too many lights for the time of morning, are we, Mary?” he asked distractedly. “Don’t want to set neighbours chattering, do we?”

“They know Rick’s dead. They know it’s not a normal time.”

“You can say that again.”

I hate him. I always did. Even when I fell for him—when he was taking me up and down the scale and I was weeping and thanking him—I still hated him. Tell me about the night in question, he was saying. He meant the night they heard of Rick’s death. She told it to him exactly as she had rehearsed it.

He had found the cloakroom and was standing before the worn dufflecoat that hung between Tom’s loden and Mary’s sheepskin. He was feeling in the pockets. The din from upstairs was monotonous. He extracted a grimy handkerchief and a half-consumed roll of Polo mints.

“You’re teasing me,” he said.

“All right, I’m teasing you.”

“Two hours in the freezing snow in his dancing pumps, Mary? In the middle of the night? Brother Nigel will think I’m making it up. What did he do in them?”

“Walked.”

“Where to, dear?”

“He didn’t tell me.”

“Ask him?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Then how do you know he didn’t take a cab?”

“He’d no money. His wallet and change were upstairs in the dressing-room with his keys.” Brotherhood replaced the handkerchief and mints in the duffle.

“And none in here?”

“No.”

“How d’you know?”

“He’s methodical in those things.”

“Maybe he paid the other end.”

“No.”

“Maybe someone picked him up.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“He’s a walker and he was in shock. That’s why. His father was dead, even if he didn’t particularly like him. It builds up in him. The tension or whatever it is. So he walks.” And I hugged him when he came back, she thought. I felt the cold on his cheek and the trembling of his chest and the hot sweat clean through his coat from his hours of walking. And I’ll hug him again, as soon as he comes through that door. “I said to him: ‘Don’t go. Not tonight. Get drunk. We’ll get drunk together.’ But he went. He had his look.” She wished she hadn’t said that, but for a moment she was as cross with Magnus as she was with Brotherhood.

“What look is that, Mary? ‘Had his look.’ I don’t think I follow you.”

“Empty. Like an actor without a part.”

“A

part?

His father takes up and

dies

and Magnus doesn’t have a

part

any more? What the hell does that mean?”

He’s closing in on me, she thought, resolutely not answering. In a minute I’m going to feel his sure hands on me, and I’m going to lie back and let it happen because I can’t think of any more excuses.

“Ask Grant,” she said, trying to hurt him. “He’s our tame psychologist. He’ll know.”

They had moved to the drawing-room. He was waiting for something. So was she. For Nigel, for Pym, for the telephone. For Georgie and Fergus upstairs.

“You’re not doing too much of this, are you?” Brotherhood asked, pouring her another whisky.

“Of course not. When I’m alone, almost never.”

“Well, don’t. It’s too damn easy. And when Brother Nigel’s here, nothing. Keep it under wraps completely. Yes, Jack?”

“Yes, Jack.” You’re a lecherous priest scavenging the last of God’s grace, she told him, watching his slow purposeful movements as he filled his own glass. First the wine, now the water. Now lower your eyelids and lift the chalice for a sanctimonious word with Him who sent you.

“And he’s free,” he remarked. “‘I’m free.’ Rick’s dead, so Magnus is free. He’s one of your Freudian types who can’t say ‘Father.’”

“It’s perfectly normal at his age. To call a father by his Christian name. More normal still, if you haven’t seen each other for fifteen years.”

“I do like you to defend him,” Brotherhood said. “I admire your loyalty. So will they. And you never let me down. I know you didn’t.”

Loyalty, she thought. Keeping my silly mouth shut round the Station in case your wife finds out.

“And you wept. Quite the old weeper, you are, Mary, I didn’t know. Mary weeps, Magnus consoles her. Odd, that, to the casual observer, seeing as how Rick was

his

daddy, not yours. A rôle reversal with a vengeance, that is: you doing his mourning for him. Who were the tears for exactly? Any idea?”

“His father had died, Jack. I didn’t sit down and say, ‘I’ll cry for Rick, I’ll cry for Magnus.’ I just cried.”

“I thought it might be for yourself.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You’re the one person you didn’t mention. That’s all. Defensive: that’s how you sound.”

“I am not being defensive!”

She was too loud. She knew it and once more so did Brotherhood and he was interested.

“And when Magnus is done with consoling Mary,” he continued, picking a book from the table and flipping through it, “he slips on his duffle and he goes for a walk in his dancing pumps. You try to restrain him—you beg him, which is hard for me to visualise, but I’ll try—but no, he will go. Any phone calls before he leaves?”

“No.”

“No incoming, no outgoing?”

“I said no!”

“Direct dial, after all, you’d think a bereaved man would want to share the bad news with other members of his family.”

“They’re not that kind of family. I told you.”

“There’s Tom for a start. What about him?”

“It was much too late to ring Tom and anyway Magnus thought it better to tell him himself.”

He was looking at the book. “Another gem he’s underlined. ‘If I am not for myself who is for me; and being for my own self what am I? If not now when?’ Well, well. I’m enlightened. Are you?”

“No.”

“Nor am I. He’s free.” He closed the book and put it back on the table. “He didn’t take anything with him on his walk, did he? Like a briefcase?”

“A newspaper.”

You’re going deaf. Admit it. You’re worried that a hearing-aid will spoil your self-image. Speak, damn you!

She

had

said it. She knew she had. She had been waiting all evening to say it, prepared it from every possible angle, practised it, rehearsed it, denied it, forgotten it, revived it. And now it was echoing in her head like an explosion while she took a frightfully careless pull at her whisky. Yet his eyes, straight at her, were still waiting.

“A newspaper,” she repeated. “Just a newspaper. What of it?”

“Which newspaper?”

“The

Presse

.”

“That’s a daily.”

“Correct.

Die Presse

is a daily.”

“A local daily newspaper. And Magnus took it with him. To read in the dark. Dressed in his dancing pumps. Tell me about it.”

“I just did, Jack.”

“No, you didn’t. And you’re going to have to, Mary, because when we get the heavy guns here you’re going to need all the help you can get.”

She had perfect recall. Magnus was standing by the door, a step from where Brotherhood stood now. He was pale and untouchable, the dufflecoat flung crookedly over his shoulders while he glared round in stiff phases: fireplace, wife, clock, books. She heard herself telling him the things she had already recounted to Brotherhood, but more of them. For God’s sake, Magnus, stay. Don’t get the blacks, stay. Don’t sink into one of your moods. Stay. Make love. Get drunk. If you want company, I’ll get Grant and Bee back, or we’ll go there. She saw him smile his rigid, bright-lit smile. She heard him put on his awfully easy voice. His Lesbos voice. And she heard herself repeat his words exactly, to Brotherhood, now.

“He said, ‘Mabs, where’s the bloody paper, darling?’ I thought he meant

The Times

for looking at the Scottish property market, so I said, ‘Wherever you put it when you brought it back from the Embassy.’”

“But he didn’t mean

The Times,”

said Brotherhood.

“He went over to the rack—there—” She looked at it but didn’t point, because she was terrified of giving too much importance to the gesture. “And helped himself. To

Die Presse.

From the rack, where the

Presse

is kept. Till the end of each week. He likes me to keep the back numbers. Then he walked out,” she ended, making it all sound perfectly normal, which of course it was.

“Did he look at it at all when he took it out?”

“Just the date. To check.”

“What did you suppose he wanted it for?”

“Maybe there was a late-night film.” Magnus had never gone to a late-night film in his life. “Maybe he wanted something to read in the café.” With no money on him, she thought, as she filled the void of Brotherhood’s silence. “Maybe he was looking for distraction. As we all might be. Have been. Anyone might when they’re bereaved.”

“Or free,” Brotherhood suggested. But he did not otherwise help her.

“Anyway, he was so upset he took the wrong day’s,” she said brightly, clinching the matter.

“You looked, did you, dear?”

“Only when I was throwing away.”

“When were you doing that?”

“Yesterday.”

“Which one did he take?”

“Monday’s. It was all of three days old. So I mean obviously he was in considerable shock.”

“Obviously.”

“All right, his father wasn’t the great love of his life. But he was still dead. Nobody’s rational when a thing like that happens. Not even Magnus.”

“So what did he do next? After he’d looked at the date and taken the wrong day’s?”

“He went out. As I told you. For a walk. You don’t listen. You never did.”

“Did he fold it?”

“Really, Jack! What does it matter how somebody carries a newspaper?”

“Just tuck in your ego a minute and answer. What did he do with it?”

“Rolled it.”

“And then?”

“Nothing. He carried it. In his hand.”

“Did he carry it back again?”

“Here to the house? No.”

“How do you know he didn’t?”

“I was waiting for him in the hall.”

“And you noticed: no newspaper. No rolled newspaper, you said to yourself.”

“Purely incidentally, yes.”

“Incidentally nothing, Mary. You had it in your mind to look. You knew he’d gone out with it and you spotted at once he’d come back without it. That’s not incidental. That’s spying on him.”

“Please yourself.”

He was angry. “It’s you who’s going to have to do the pleasing, Mary,” he said, loud and slow. “You’re going to have to please Brother Nigel in about five minutes from now. They’re in spasm, Mary. They can see the ground opening up at their feet again and they do not know what to do. They literally do not know what to do.” His anger passed. Jack could do that. “And later—as soon as you had a chance—you incidentally searched his pockets. And it wasn’t there.”

“I didn’t

look

for it, I simply noticed it was missing. And yes, it wasn’t there.”

“Does he often go out with old newspapers?”

“When he needs to keep abreast—for his work—he’s a conscientious officer—he takes a newspaper with him.”

“Rolled up?”

“Sometimes.”

“Bring them back ever?”

“Not that I remember.”

“Ever remark on it to him?”

“No.”

“He to you?”

“Jack. It’s a habit he has. Look, I’m not going to have a marital row with you!”

“We’re not married.”

“He rolls up a newspaper and walks with it. The way a child carries a stick or something. As a comforter or something. Like his Polos. There. He had Polos in his pocket. It’s the same thing.”

“Always the wrong date?”

“Not always—don’t make so much of everything!”

“And always loses it?”

“Jack, stop. Just stop. Okay?”

“Does he do it on any special occasion? Full moon? Last Wednesday of the month? Or only when his father dies? Have you noticed a pattern to it? Go on, Mary, you have!”

Beat me, she thought. Grab me. Anything is better than that ice-cold stare.

“It’s sometimes when he meets P,” she said, trying to sound as if she were pacifying a spoilt child. “Jack, for God’s sake, he runs Joes, he lives that life, you trained him! I don’t ask him what his tricks are, what he’s doing with who. I’m trained too!”

“And when he came back—how was he?”

“He was absolutely fine. Calm, completely calm. He’d walked it out of himself, I could feel. He was absolutely fine in every way.”

“No phone calls while he was out?”

“No.”

“None after?”

“One. Very late. But we didn’t answer it.”

It was not often she had seen Jack surprised. Now he almost was. “You didn’t answer it?”

“Why should we?”

“Why shouldn’t you? It’s his job, as you said. His father had just died. Why shouldn’t you answer the phone?”

“Magnus said don’t.”

“Why

did he say don’t?”

“We were making love!” she said, and felt like the worst whore ever.

Harry was looming in the doorway again. He was wearing blue overalls and had a red face from his exertions. He was holding a long screwdriver in his hand and he looked shamefully joyful.

“Care to pop upstairs a jiffy, Mr. Brotherhood?” he said.

It’s like our bedroom before the Diplomatic Wives’ jumble sale, with our cast-off clothes all over the bed, she thought. “Magnus, darling, do you really need three worn-out cardigans ?” Clothes over the chairs. Over the dressing-table and the towel-horse. My summer blazer that I haven’t worn since Berlin. Magnus’s dinner-jacket hung from the cheval mirror like a drying hide. There was nothing on the floor because there was no floor. Fergus and Georgie had removed the carpet and most of the floorboards underneath it, and stacked them like sandwiches beneath the window, leaving the joists and the odd plank for a walkway. They had taken the bedside lamps to pieces and the bedside furniture and the telephone and the wake-up wireless. In the bathroom, it was the floor again, and the panel to the bath, and the medicine chest, and the sloped attic door that led to the sloped attic where Tom had hidden for a whole half hour last Christmas playing Murder, and nearly died of fright from being so brave. At the basin, Georgie was working her way through Mary’s things. Her face-cream. Her diaphragm.

“What’s yours is his, for them, dear, and vice versa,” said Brotherhood as they paused to stare in from the doorless doorway. “There’s no his and hers, not for them—there can’t be.”

“Not for you either,” she said.

Tom’s bedroom was across the corridor from theirs. His luminous Superman lay sprawled over the bed, together with his thirty-one Smurfs and three Tiggers. Her father’s campaign table was folded against the wall. The toy chest had been pulled to the centre of the floor, revealing the marble fireplace behind. It was a fine fireplace. Works Department had wanted to board it over to reduce draughts but Magnus hadn’t let them. Instead he had bought this old chest to put across the opening, leaving the mantel visible over it, so that Tom could have a bit of old Vienna all his own. Now the fireplace stood free and the girl Georgie knelt respectfully before it in her fifty-guinea freedom fighter’s tunic. And before Georgie lay a white shoe box with its lid off, and inside the shoe box was a rag bundle, then several smaller bundles around it.

“We found it on the ledge up above the grate, sir,” said Fergus. “Where it joins the main flue.”

“Not a speck of dust on it,” said Georgie.

“Reach up and it’s there,” said Fergus. “Dead handy.”

“You don’t even have to shove the chest out really, once you get the knack,” said Georgie.

“Seen it before?” Brotherhood asked.

“It’s obviously something of Tom’s,” said Mary. “Children will hide anything.”

“Seen it before?” Brotherhood repeated.

“No.”

“Know what’s in it?”

“How could I if I haven’t seen it?”

“Easily.”

Brotherhood did not stoop but held his arms out. Georgie passed the box up to him and Brotherhood took it to the table where Tom did his Spirograph and his Lego and his endless drawings of German aeroplanes being shot down against a Plush sunset, with family in the background, everybody waving, everybody absolutely fine. Brotherhood picked out the biggest bundle first and they looked on while he started to unwrap it and changed his mind.

“Here,” he said, handing it to Georgie. “Woman’s fingers.”

She’s one of his mistresses, Mary suddenly realised. She wondered why on earth it hadn’t dawned on her before.

Georgie rose elegantly to her full height, one leg, other leg, and having fixed her straight hair behind her ears, applied her woman’s fingers to unwinding the strips of bedsheet that Magnus had said he wanted for the car, revealing at last a small, clever-looking camera with a clever steel harness round it. And after the camera a thing like a telescope with a bracket on it which, when you pulled it to its full length, made a stand that you could screw the camera to, face downwards and at a fixed distance, for photographing documents on your father-in-law’s campaign table. After the telescope came a succession of films and lenses and filters and rings and other bits of equipment she could not identify offhand. And underneath these a pad of flimsy cloth-paper with columns of numbers on the top sheet and thickly rubberised edges so that you could only see the top page. Mary knew the type of paper. She had worked on it in Berlin. It shrivelled into fern the moment you put a match near it. The pad was half used. Underneath the pad again, an aged cardboard-backed military jotting pad marked “W.D. Property,” standing for War Department and consisting of unwritten-on lined paper of blotchy wartime quality. And inside it, when Brotherhood continued searching, two pressed red flowers of great age, poppies, but just possibly roses, she was not entirely certain, and anyway by then she was shouting.

“It’s for the Firm! It’s for his work for you!”

“Of course it is. I’ll tell Nigel. No problem.”

“Just because he didn’t tell me about it, it doesn’t mean it’s wrong! It’s for in case he gets landed with documents in the house! At weekends!” And then, realising what she had said: “It’s for his Joes—if they bring him documents, you fool! If Grant does, and he’s got to turn them round at short notice! What’s so fucking sinister about that?”

Fergus was fingering the half-used pad, turning it over and over, tilting it in the beam of Tom’s Anglepoise lamp.

“Looks more like your Czech, sir, frankly,” said Fergus, tilting the pad to the light. “It could be Russian but I think Czech’s more likely, frankly. Yes,” he said pleasantly as his eye caught some unexplained feature of the rubber edge. “That’s it. Czech. Mind you, that’s only where they’re made. Who’s dishing them out is another matter. Specially these days.”

Brotherhood was more interested in the pressed flowers. He had laid them on his palm and was staring at them as if they told his future.

“I think you’re a bad girl, Mary,” he said deliberately. “I think you know a lot more than you told me. I don’t think he’s in Ireland or the bloody Bahamas. I think that was a lot of smoke. I think he’s a bad man and I’m wondering whether you’re bad together.”

All constraint left her. She screamed “You shit!” and hit at him with her open hand but he blocked her. He put an arm round her and swung her off the ground as if she had no legs left. He carted her across the corridor to Frau Bauer’s bedroom which was the only room that hadn’t so far been ripped apart. He dumped her on the bed and whisked her shoes off exactly as he used to in the squalid safe flat where he did his screwing. He rolled her into the eiderdown, making a straitjacket of it. Then he lay on her, grappling her into submission while Georgie and Fergus looked on. But somehow, amazingly, throughout all these antics and dramatics, Jack Brotherhood had still contrived to keep hold of the two pressed poppies in his left fist, and kept hold of them even when the doorbell went again, one long peal for authority.

4

“T

o be above the fray,” Pym wrote to himself on a separate sheet of paper. “A writer is King. He should look down with love upon his subject, even when the subject is himself.”

Life began with Lippsie, Tom, and Lippsie happened long before you came along or anyone else did, and long before Pym was what the Firm calls of marriageable age. Before Lippsie all Pym remembered was an aimless trek through different-coloured houses and a lot of shouting. After her everything seemed to flow in the one unstoppable direction and all he had to do was sit in his boat and let the current carry him. From Lippsie to Poppy, from Rick to Jack, it was all one jolly stream, however much it wriggled and divided itself along the way. And not only life but death began with her as well, for it was actually Lippsie’s dead body that got Pym going, though he never saw it. Others saw it, and Pym could have made the journey because it was in the bell yard and no one covered it for ages. But the little fellow was going through a squeamish and self-centred period at the time and had a notion that if he didn’t see it she might not be dead after all, but pretending. Or that her death was a judgment upon himself for taking part in the recent killing of a squirrel in the empty swimming-pool. The hunt had been led by a wall-eyed maths master called Corbo the Crow. When the squirrel was safely trapped, Corbo sent three boys down the pool ladder with hockey sticks, and Pym was one. “On you go, Pymmie. Give it to him!” Corbo urged. Pym had watched the crippled creature limp towards him. Scared by its pain he had caught it a great swipe, harder than he meant. He had seen it catapult to the next player and lie still. “Good man, Pymmie! Good shot.”

His other thought was that the Sefton Boyd gang had made the whole thing up to tease him, always possible. So as a stopgap Pym gave himself the desk job of gathering descriptions and forming, in that first rush before the school went silent, a mind’s picture of her that was probably as clear as anybody’s. She lay in a running position, sideways on the flagstones, her forward hand punched towards the finishing line and her rear foot pointing the wrong way. Sefton Boyd, who made the original sighting and alerted the Headmaster during school breakfast, actually thought she

was

running, he said, until he saw the wonky foot. He thought she was doing a special exercise on her side, a sort of kicking, bicycling exercise. And he thought the blood round her was a cape or a towel that she was lying on until he noticed how the old chestnut leaves stuck to it and wouldn’t blow away. He didn’t go close because bell yard was out of bounds, even to sixth-formers, on account of the dangerous roof above it. And he didn’t throw up, he boasted, because us Sefton Boyds own simply masses of land and I’ve done a lot of shooting with my father and I’m accustomed to seeing blood and innards all the time. But he did run up sixth-form staircase to the tower window, which the police said later was where she had fallen from; she must have been leaning out to do something. And it must have been something urgent and important she was leaning out for because she had been wearing her nightdress, having bicycled up the mile-long drive from the Overflow House in the middle of the night. Her bicycle with its tartan cover on the saddle was still leaning against the dustbin shed behind the kitchens.

Sefton Boyd’s theory, excitedly culled from his father’s life-style, was that she was drunk. Except that he didn’t call her “she” but “Shitlips,” which was his gang’s witty play on Lippschitz. But then again, as he had been suggesting for some time, Shitlips may have been a German spy who had slipped up the tower to send messages after blackout, sir. Because from tower window you can see right the way across the valley to the Brace of Partridges, so it would be a wizard place for signalling to German bombers, sir. The trouble was she had no light with her except her bike lamp, which was still securely on the handlebars. So perhaps she had hidden it in her vagina, which Sefton Boyd claimed to have seen clearly because the fall had ripped her nightdress off.

Thus the stories went round that morning while Pym stood on the fine wood seat of the staff lavatory which he had made his safe house after the first furore, and held his breath and blushed and turned white in front of the mirror in a series of puzzled efforts to make his face appropriate to his grief. Using the Swiss Army penknife from his pocket, he had sawn off a bit of his forelock as a sort of useless tribute, then loitered, fiddling with the taps and hoping someone was looking for him. Where’s Pym? Pym’s run away! Pym’s dead, too! But Pym hadn’t run away, nor was he dead, and in the chaos of having Lippsie’s body lying in bell yard and ambulance and police arriving, nobody was looking for anybody, least of all in the staff lavatory which was the most out-of-bounds place in the school, so forbidden that Sefton Boyd himself was in awe of it. Classes were cancelled and what you were supposed to do after all the shouting and the clamour was go quietly to your form room and revise—unless, like Pym, you were in the second form which overlooked bell yard, in which case you were to go to the arts hall. This was the converted Nissen hut built by Canadian soldiers where Lippsie taught music and painting and drama and held remedial exercises for boys with flat feet. It was also where she did her typing and paperwork in her capacity as school dogsbody: collecting school fees, paying school bills for the Bursar, ordering taxis for boys in confirmation class and, as such people do, just about running the place single-handed and unthanked. But Pym wouldn’t go to the arts hall either, though he had a half-finished balsa model of a Dornier to work on with his penknife, as well as a half-made plan to copy out some obscure poems from an old book there and claim they were his own. What he had to do, when he found his courage and the moment, was get back to the Overflow House where he had lived till now with Lippsie and the eleven other Overflow Boys. Until he had done that and done something about the letters, he daren’t go anywhere because Rick would go back to prison.

How he had got himself into this pass, how he had acquired the training that was to stand him in such fine stead in this, his first clandestine operation, was pretty much the story of his life this far, which was ten years and three terms of boarding-school old.

Even today, trying to trace Lippsie through Pym’s life is like pursuing an errant light through an impenetrable thicket. For Perce Loft, now dead himself, she was simply deniable—“Titch’s figment” he called her, meaning my invention, my fabrication, my nothing. But Perce the great lawyer could have made a figment out of the Eiffel Tower after he had banged his nose on it, if he needed to. That was his job. And this despite the testimony of Syd and others that it was Perce himself who first had the use of her, Perce who had introduced her to the court back in the dark ages before Pym’s birth. Mr. Muspole, that marvel with the books—also now passed on—understandably backed Perce up. He would. He was up to his neck in the business himself. Even Syd, the one surviving source, is not much more helpful. She was a German Four-by-Two, he said, using the affectionate cockney rhyming slang for Jew. He thought she came from Munich, could have been Vienna. She was lonely, Titch. Adored the kids. Adored you. He didn’t say she adored Rick but in the court that was taken for granted. She was a Lovely and in court ethic that was what Lovelies were there for: to be seen right by Rick and to bathe in his glory. And Rick in his goodness had her learn secretarial and qualify, says Syd. And your Dorothy, she thought the world of Lippsie and taught her English, which was meant, says Syd—after which he clams up, remarking only that it was a shame and we should all learn from it, and maybe your dad worked her a bit too hard because she never had your advantages. Yes, he admits, she was a looker. And she had a drop of class to her which some of the others, let’s face it, didn’t always have, Titch. And she loved a joke till she started to think of her poor family and what had been done to them by those Jerries.

My furtive record checks have not been more enlightening. Finding myself with the run of Registry during a stint as night duty officer not too many years back, I chased Lippschitz, first name Annie, right through the general index but drew a blank on all spellings. Old Dinkel in Vienna, who heads up the personnel side of the Austrian service, recently ran a similar search for me when I spun him a story; so, on another occasion, did his German counterpart in Cologne. Both reported no trace.

In my memory, however, she is anything but no trace. She is a tall, soft-haired, vital girl with large scared eyes and an air of flounce about her stride, nothing happening slowly. And I remember—it must have been a summer holiday in some house where we were temporarily sheltering—I remember how Pym longed more than anything to see her naked, and devoted his waking hours to contriving it. Which Lippsie must have guessed somehow for one afternoon she suggested he share her bath with her to save hot water. She even measured the water with her hand: patriots were allowed five inches and Lippsie was never less than a patriot. She stooped, naked, and let me watch her while she put her hand’s span in the tub, I’m sure she did, and brought it out again: “See, Magnus!”—showing me the wet spread hand—“how we may be sure we do not help the Germans.”

Or so I fervently believe, though try as I may I cannot to this day remember what she looked like. And I know that in the same house or one like it her room was opposite to Pym’s own across a corridor, and that it contained her cardboard suitcase and photographs of her bearded brother and solemn sisters in black hats and silver frames which stood like tiny polished gravestones on her dressing-table. And there was the room where she screamed at Rick and warned him she would rather die than be a thief, and where Rick laughed his brown rich laugh, the one that went on longer than it needed and made everything all right again until next time. And though I do not remember a single lesson, she must have taught Pym German because years later when he came to learn the language formally he discovered that he possessed a repository of information about her—

Aaron war mein Bruder. Mein Vater war Architekt

—all in the same past tense to which she herself by then belonged. He also realised still later in life that when she had called him her

Mönchlein

she had meant her “little monk” and was referring to the hard path of Martin Luther—“little monk, go your own way”—whereas at the time he had thought she had cast him as the organ-grinder’s tethered monkey and Rick as his organ-grinder. The discovery raised his self-respect no end, until he realised she had been telling him that he must get along without her.

And I know she was in Paradise with us because without Lippsie there was no Paradise. Paradise was a golden land between Gerrard’s Cross and the sea, where Dorothy wore an angora pullover for her ironing and a blue ulster for her shopping. Paradise was where Rick and Dorothy fled after their runaway marriage, a Metroland of new beginnings and exciting futures, but I don’t remember a day of it without Lippsie flouncing somewhere at the edge, or telling me what was right and wrong in a voice I didn’t mind. One hour eastward by Bentley motorcar lay Town and in Town lay the West End and that was where Rick had his office; the office had a big tinted photograph of Granddad TP wearing his mayor’s necklace, and the office was what kept Rick late at night, which was the infant Pym’s best thing because he was allowed to climb into Dorothy’s bed and keep her warm, she was so small and shivery even to a child. Sometimes Lippsie stayed behind with us, sometimes she went to London with Rick because she had to qualify and, as I now understand, justify her own survival when so many of her kind were dead.

Paradise was a string of shiny racehorses that Syd called “neverwozzers” and a succession of even shinier Bentleys which, like the houses, wore out as fast as the credit they were bought on and had to be changed with thrilling rapidity for yet newer and more expensive models. Sometimes the Bentleys were so precious they had actually to be driven round the side of the house and hidden in the back garden for fear they might become tarnished by the gaze of the Unfaithful. At other times Pym drove them at a thousand miles an hour sitting on Rick’s lap, down sandy unmade roads lined with cement mixers, hammering the big deep horn at the builders while Rick shouted “How are you, boys?” and invited them all back to the house for a glass of bubbly. And Lippsie was there beside us in the passenger seat, straight as a coachman and as distant, until Rick chose to speak to her or make a joke. Then her smile was like holiday sunshine and she loved us both.

Paradise was also St. Moritz where Swiss Army penknives come from, though somehow the Bentleys and those two pre-war winters in Switzerland become fused in my memory as one place. Even today I have only to sniff the leather interior of a grand car and I am wafted willingly away to the great hotel drawing-rooms of St. Moritz in the wake of Rick’s riotous love of festival. The Kulm, the Suvretta House, the Grand—Pym knew them as a single gigantic palace with different sets of servants but always the same court: Rick’s private household of jesters, tumblers, counsellors, and jockeys; he barely went anywhere without them. In the daytime, Italian doormen with long brooms flipped the snow off your boots every time you went through the swing doors. In the evenings, while Rick and the court banqueted with local Lovelies and Dorothy was too tired, Pym would venture on Lippsie’s hand through snowy alleys clutching his penknife in his pocket while he pretended to himself he was some kind of Russian prince protecting her from everyone who laughed at her for being serious. And in the morning after an early levee, he would tiptoe unescorted to the landing and gaze down through the banisters on his army of serfs toiling in the great hall below him, while he sniffed the stale cigar smoke and women’s perfume and the wax polish that glistened like dew on the parquet as they buffed it with long sweeps of their mops. And that was how Rick’s Bentleys smelt ever after: of the Lovelies, of beeswax, of the smoke of his millionaire’s cigars. And very faintly, from sledge rides through the freezing forest at Lippsie’s side, of the cold and the horse dung, while she chatted away in German to the coachman.

Back home again, and Paradise was pyramids of polished tangerines in silver paper, and pink chandeliers in the dining-room and roaring visits to distant racetracks to flash our Owners’ badges and watch the neverwozzers lose, and a tiny black-and-white television set in a huge mahogany case that showed the boat race behind a sky of white spots, and when we watched the Grand National the horses were so far off that Pym wondered how they ever found their way home, but I’m afraid now that Rick’s very often didn’t which was why Syd called them neverwozzers. And cricket in the garden with Syd, sixpence if he didn’t get Titch out in six balls. And boxing in the drawing-room with Morrie Washington, the court expert on the Fight Game, for Morrie was our Minister for the Arts: he had spoken to Bud Flanagan and shaken hands with Joe Louis, he had played conjuror’s stooge for the Man with X-Ray Eyes. And having half-crowns pulled out of your ears by Mr. Muspole the great accountant, though Mr. Muspole was never my favourite; there was too much of making me do arithmetic in my head. And watching sugar-knobs vanish from under Perce Loft’s legal Homburg: they were being turned to figments before my very eyes. And piggybacks round the garden on the waistcoated shoulders of the jockeys, who had names like Billie and Jimmy and Gordon and Charlie and were the best magic-makers in the world, the best elves, and read all my comics and left me theirs when they’d finished them.

But always somewhere in this pageant I can still find Lippsie, now mother, now typist, musician, cricketer and always Pym’s own private moral tutor, flouncing through the outfield in pursuit of a high catch while everyone yelled

“Achtung!”

at her, and “Whoopsie, mind the flower-beds!” It was in Paradise too that Rick kicked a brand-new full-size football slap into Pym’s young face, which was like being hit by the inside of all the Bentleys at once, the same leather travelling at the same breakneck speed. When he came round, Dorothy was bending over him with a handkerchief crammed between her teeth, whimpering “Oh, don’t, please, dear God, don’t,” because the blood was everywhere. The football had only cut his forehead but Dorothy insisted it had shoved the whole eyeball deep into his head never to be got out again. The poor heart, she was too scared to dab away the blood so Lippsie had to do it for her, because Lippsie could touch me as she touched wounded animals and birds. I never met a woman since with so much touching in her hands. And I believe now that was what I meant to her: a thing to touch and cherish and protect, after everything else had been removed from her. I was her bit of hope and love in the gilded prison where Rick kept her.

In Paradise when Rick was in residence there was no night and nobody went to bed but Dorothy, the court’s self-appointed Sleeping Beauty. Pym could join the festival any time he chose and there they all were, Rick and Syd and Morrie Washington and Perce Loft and Mr. Muspole and Lippsie and the jockeys, lying on the floor amid piles of money, watching the roulette ball hopping over the tin walls while TP in his regalia looked down on them, so there must have been a picture of him in the houses too. And I see us all dancing to the gramophone and telling stories about a chimpanzee called Little Audrey who laughed and laughed at jokes that were beyond Pym’s intellectual reach. But he laughed louder than anyone because he was learning to be a pleaser, with funny voices, acts and anecdotes to make himself attractive. In Paradise everybody loved everybody because once Pym found Lippsie sitting on Rick’s lap and another time he was dancing cheek to cheek with her, a cigar between his teeth, while he sang “Underneath the Arches” with his eyes shut. And it seemed a pity that Dorothy was once again too tired to put on the frilly dressing-gown Rick had bought her—pink for Dorothy, white for Lippsie—and come on down and have some fun. But the louder Rick yelled to her up the stairs the deeper Dorothy slept, as Pym discovered for himself when he was dispatched on Rick’s instruction to talk her round. He knocked and had no answer. He tiptoed to the enormous bed and brushed what looked at first like cobwebs from her cheek. He whispered to her, then he tried shouting at her, but with no useful result. Dorothy was crying in her sleep, he reported when he returned downstairs. But next morning everything was all right again because there they were the three of them in bed together with Rick in the middle, and Pym was allowed to wriggle in beside Lippsie while Dorothy went down and made the toast and Lippsie held him gravely to her, and gave him her troubled, moral frown, which I suppose now was her way of telling me she was ashamed of her weakness and infatuation, and wished to cleanse it with her concern for me.

In Paradise, it was true, Rick roared but never at Pym. He never once raised his voice at me; his will was strong enough without it and his love was stronger still. He roared at Dorothy, he cajoled and warned her about things Pym could not understand. More than once he carted her bodily to the telephone and made her talk to people—to Uncle Makepeace, to shops, and to others who were threatening us somehow, and only Dorothy could appease them, because Lippsie refused to do that, and anyway her accent wasn’t right. I believe now that this was the first time Pym heard the name Wentworth, for I remember Dorothy holding my hand for courage while she told Mrs. Wentworth it would be all right about the money if only everyone would stop pressing. So the name Wentworth was ugly to Pym from early. It became synonymous with fear and an end to things.

“Who’s Wentworth?” Pym asked Lippsie, and it was the only time she told him to be quiet.

And I remember how Dorothy knew all the operators’ names at the exchange, and what their husbands and fiancés did, and where their children were at school, because when she was alone with Pym and shaky in her angora pullover, she’d pick up the white phone and have a good chat with them, she seemed to find comfort in a world of disembodied voices. Rick roared at Lippsie too when she stood up to him, and I think now that she stood up to him more as I grew up. And sometimes he roared at Dorothy and Lippsie together, making them both weep at the same time until they all patched it up in the great bed where he had his toast for breakfast and dripped the butter on the pink sheets. But no one hurt Pym or made him cry. I think, even in those days, Pym understood that Rick measured his relationships with women against his relationship with Pym, and found them wanting by comparison. Sometimes Rick took Dorothy and Lippsie skating. Rick wore a black tail suit and a white tie, but Dorothy and Lippsie dressed like pantomime boys, each holding an arm of him, and avoiding one another’s eye.

The Fall occurred in darkness. We had been moving house a great deal recently, in what must have been a giddy ascent through the local real-estate market, and our palace of the day was a mansion on a hill and the day was a black winter afternoon near Christmas. Pym had been making paper decorations with Lippsie, and I have a notion that if I could ever find the place, if it is not a council estate or a bypass by now, they would still be hanging there exactly as we left them, stars of David and stars of Bethlehem—she taught me the difference precisely—twinkling in enormous empty rooms. First the lights went out in Pym’s vast nursery, then the electric fire faded, then his brand-new ten-track Hornby O electric train set wouldn’t work, then Lippsie gave a kind of shriek and vanished. Pym went downstairs and pulled open the walnut lid of Rick’s brand-new de-luxe cocktail cabinet. The mirrored interior refused to light up and it wouldn’t play “Someone’s in the Kitchen with Dinah.”

Suddenly, in the whole house, the brass balls of the barometric perpetual clock were the only thing that had retained their energy. Pym ran to the kitchen. No Cookie and no Mr. Roley the gardener, whose children stole his toys but couldn’t be blamed because they hadn’t his advantages. He ran upstairs again and feeling very cold made an urgent reconnaissance of the long corridors, calling “Lippsie, Lippsie,” but no one answered. From the arched landing window of stained glass, he glared into the garden and made out black cars in the drive. Not Bentleys but two police Wolseleys. And police drivers with peaked caps sitting at the wheel. And men in brown mackintoshes standing round them talking to Mr. Roley while Cookie twisted her handkerchief and wrung her hands like the dame in the Crazy Gang pantomime that Rick had taken the court to see only a week before. People under siege go upwards, I now know, which may explain why Pym’s reaction was to race up the narrow staircase to the attic. There he found Rick in a great flurry, with files and papers on the floor all round him, and he was loading them by the armful into an old chipped green filing cabinet that Pym in all his explorations had never seen before.

“The electricity’s broken and Lippsie’s scared and the police have come and they’re in the garden arresting Mr. Roley,” Pym told Rick in one breath.

He said this several times, louder each time, because of the great moment of his message. But Rick wouldn’t hear him. He was rushing between the papers and the cabinet, loading up the drawers. So Pym went to him and punched him hard on the upper arm, as hard as he could on the soft bit just above the steel spring he wore to keep his silk shirt sleeve straight, and Rick flung round on him and his hand went back to strike him, and his face looked like Mr. Roley’s when he was about to make a huge last heave at a log to split it: red and strained and damp. Then he dropped into a crouch and seized Pym by each shoulder with his thick cupped hands. And his face worried Pym much more than the axe-heave, because his eyes were scared and crying without the rest of his face knowing it and his voice was smooth and holy.

“Don’t ever hit me again, son. When I’m judged, as judged we shall all be, God will judge me on how I treated you, make no bones about it.”

“Why are the police here?” said Pym.

“Your old man’s got a temporary problem of liquidity. Now clear a way to that cupboard and open the door for us like a good chap. Quick.”

The cupboard was in a corner behind a pile of old clothes and attic junk. Somehow Pym fought his way to the door and hauled it open. With a series of crashes Rick was slamming shut the drawers of the filing cabinet. He turned the lock, grabbed Pym by the arm and poked the key deep into his trouser pocket, which was small and woolly and only big enough for a key and a small bag of sweets.

“You give that to Mr. Muspole, do you hear, son? Nobody but Muspole. Then you show him where this cabinet is. You bring him here and you show him. No one else. Do you love your old man?”

“Yes.”

“Well then.”

Proud as a sentry, Pym held back the door while Rick swivelled and rolled the cabinet past him on its castors into the cupboard, then into the dark wainscotting beyond. Then he threw in a lot of junk after it, which hid it completely.

“See where it went, son?”

“Yes.”

“Close the door.”

Pym did so, then stomped downstairs with his chest out because he wanted to take another look at the police cars. Dorothy was in the kitchen dressed in her new fur coat and her new fluffy bedroom slippers, stirring a tin of tomato soup. She had one of those bubbles over her mouth that people get when they are too choked to speak. Pym loathed tomato soup, so did Rick.

“Rick’s mending the water-pipes,” he announced grandly, in order to keep his secret intact. This was the only meaning he could place on Rick’s reference to liquidity. Yelling even louder for Lippsie he charged into the corridor, straight into the path of two policemen labouring under the weight of a great desk that was Rick’s office when he was at home.

“That’s my dad’s,” he said aggressively, putting a hand over the pocket where he had the key.

The first policeman is the only one I remember. He was kindly and had a white moustache like TP’s, and he was taller than God.

“Yes, well, I’m afraid it’s ours now, lad. Hold open that door for us, will you, and mind your toes.”

Pym the official door-holder obliged.

“Your dad got any more desks, has he?” the tall policeman asked.

“No.”

“Cupboards? Anywhere he keeps his papers?”

“They’re all in there,” said Pym, pointing firmly at the desk while he kept his other hand over the pocket.

“Do you want a wee then?”

“No.”

“Where’s some rope?”

“I don’t know.”

“Yes you do.”

“It’s in the stable. On a big saddle hook next to the new mower. It’s a halter.”

“What’s your name?”

“Magnus. Where’s Lippsie?”

“Who’s Lippsie?”

“She’s a lady.”

“She work for your dad?”

“No.”

“Slip and fetch the rope for us, will you, Magnus, there’s a lad. Me and my friends here we’re going to take your dad on a working holiday for a bit and we need his papers or nobody can work.”

Pym raced off to the shed which was across the other side of the grounds between the pony paddock and Mr. Roley’s cottage. On the shelf stood a green tea-tin where Mr. Roley kept his nails. Pym put the key into it, thinking: green tin, green filing cabinet. By the time he returned with the halter Rick was standing between two men in brown raincoats. And I picture it still exactly: Rick so pale that not all the holidays in the world would see him right, commanding loyalty of me with his eyes. And the tall policeman letting Pym try his flat cap on and push the button that made the silver bell ring under the hood of the black Wolseley. And Dorothy looking as though she needed a holiday even more than Rick did, not choking any more, but standing still as an effigy with her white hands folded across her fur coat.

Memory is a great temptress, Tom. Paint the tragic tableau. The little group, the winter’s day, Christmas in the air. The convoy of Wolseleys bumping away down the lane that Pym has spent so long patrolling with his new Harrods six-shooter. Rick’s desk lashed to the last car with the aid of the halter from the stable. Motionless they stare after the cortège as it vanishes into the tunnel of the trees, taking our one Provider to Lord knows where. Mrs. Roley weeping. Cookie howling in Irish. Pym’s little head pressed against his mother’s bosom. A thousand violins playing “Will Ye No Come Back Again?”—there is no limit to the pathos I could squeeze out of that lemon if I worked on it. Yet the truth, when I make the effort to recall it, is different. With the departure of Rick a great calm descended over Pym. He felt refreshed and freed of an intolerable burden. He watched the cars leave, Rick’s desk last. And he continued to stare anxiously after them, but only for fear that Rick would talk them into turning back. As he watched, Lippsie stepped out of the woods wearing her headscarf and struggled towards him weighed down by the cardboard suitcase that contained her life’s possessions. The sight of her made Pym even more furious than he’d been when he’d found Dorothy making soup. You hid, he accused her in the secret dialogue he constantly conducted with her. You were so scared you hid in the woods and missed the fun. I realise now, of course, but could not at the time, that Lippsie had seen people taken away before: her brother Aaron and the architect her father, to mention only two. But Pym in common with the rest of the world cared little about pogroms in those days and all he could feel was a deep resentment that his life’s love had failed to rise to a historic moment.

Muspole came that evening. He arrived at the side door with a cooked chicken for us and a rhubarb pie and thick custard and a thermos of hot tea, and he said he was making arrangements for us and everything would be fine tomorrow. To get him on his own, Pym said, “Come and see my Hornby” and at once Dorothy cried because by then there was no Hornby: the distraining bailiffs had fought a pitched battle with the repossessing shopkeepers and the Hornby had been one of the first things to go. But Mr. Muspole went with Pym anyway and Pym took him to the shed and gave him the key, then led him to the attic and showed him the secret. And everybody watched again while Mr. Roley and Mr. Muspole heaved and puffed and loaded the cabinet on to Mr. Muspole’s car. And waved again when Mr. Muspole drove into the twilight in his hat.

After the Fall came, very properly, Purgatory, and Purgatory possessed no Lippsies—I guess she was trying to make one of her breaks from me, using Rick’s absence to cut herself off. Purgatory was where Dorothy and I served out our sentence, Tom, and Purgatory is just over the hill from here, a few of Rick’s fare-stages along the coast, though the new time-share apartments have removed much of its sting. Purgatory was the same wooded hollow of clefts and chines and dripping laurels where Pym had been conceived, with red windswept beaches always out of season, and creaking swings and sodden sandpits that were closed to enjoyment on the sabbath and for Pym on any other day as well. Purgatory was Makepeace Watermaster’s great sad house, The Glades, where Pym was forbidden to leave the walled orchard if it was dry or enter the main rooms if it was raining. Purgatory was the Tabernacle with the Night School Boys written clean out of the history books; and Makepeace Watermaster’s frightful sermons; and Mr. Philpott’s sermons; and sermons from every aunt, cousin and neighbourhood philosopher who felt moved to words by Rick’s misfortune and saw the young criminal as the proper person to address.

Purgatory possessed no cocktail cabinets, television sets, jockeys, Bentleys or neverwozzers, and served bread and margarine instead of buttered toast. When we sang, we droned, “There Is a Green Hill Far Away,” and never “Underneath the Arches” or one of Lippsie’s

Lieder.

Contemporary photographs show a grinning toothy child, well grown and well looking enough, but stooped as if from living under low ceilings. All are out of focus; all have a furtive, stolen look about them, and I try to love them only because I believe Dorothy must have taken them, though it was Lippsie whom Pym was missing. In a couple the child is tugging at the arm of whatever mother happens to attend him, probably trying to persuade her to come away with him. In one he is wearing sloppy white gloves like puppets’ hands, so I suppose he suffered from some skin disease, unless Makepeace was worried about fingerprints. Or perhaps he was intending to become a waiter.

The mothers, all large, all dressed in the same strict uniform, have such an air of the wardress about them that I seriously wonder whether Makepeace obtained them from an agency specialising in the care of delinquents. One wears a medal like an Iron Cross. I do not mean they are without kindness. Their smiles are alight with pious optimism. But there is something in their glance that assures me they are alert at all times to the latent criminality of their charge. Lippsie is not featured, and my poor Dorothy, Pym’s one cellmate in the dark rear wing to which the two of them were confined, was even more useless than before. If Pym was thrashed, Dorothy would dress his wounds but never question the need for them. If he was put into shameful nappies as a punishment for wetting his bed, Dorothy would urge him not to drink in the second part of the day. And if he was denied tea altogether, Dorothy would save him her biscuits and pass them to him in the privacy of their upper room, poking them one by one between the invisible bars. In Paradise on good days Pym and Dorothy had managed to share the occasional joke together. Now the guilty silence of her house reclaimed her. Each day drove her further into herself and though he told her his best jokes and did his best acts for her, and painted the best pictures for her that he knew, nothing he could do was able to wake her smile for long. At night she moaned and ground her teeth and when she switched the light on, Pym lay awake beside her, thinking of Lippsie and watching Dorothy’s unblinking eyes staring up at the parchment star of Bethlehem that was their lampshade.

If Dorothy had been dying Pym could have gone on nursing her for ever, no question. But she wasn’t so he resented her instead. In fact soon he began to weary of her altogether and wonder whether the wrong parent had gone on holiday, and whether Lippsie was his real mother and he had made an awful mistake, the one that accounted for everything. When war broke out Dorothy was incapable of rejoicing at the marvellous news. Makepeace turned on the wireless and Pym heard a solemn man saying he had done everything he could to prevent it. Makepeace turned off the wireless and Mr. Philpott, who had come for tea, asked mournfully where, oh where, would the battlefield be? Makepeace, never at a loss, replied that God would decide. But Pym, spilling over with excitement, for once presumed to question him.

“But Uncle Makepeace! If God can decide where the battlefield is, why doesn’t He stop the battle altogether? He doesn’t want to. He could if He wanted to, easy. He doesn’t!” Even to this day, I do not know which was the greater sin: to question Makepeace or to question God. In either case the remedy was the same: put him on bread and water like his father.

But the worst monster in The Glades was not rubbery Uncle Makepeace with his little rose ears, but mad Aunt Nell in her liver-coloured spectacles, who chased after Pym with no reason, waving her stick at him and calling him “my little canary” because of the yellow pullover Dorothy had managed to knit him while she wept. Aunt Nell had a white stick for seeing with and a brown stick for walking with. She could see perfectly well, except when she carried her white stick.

“Aunt Nell gets her wobblies out of a bottle,” Pym told Dorothy one day, thinking it might make her smile. “I’ve seen. She’s got a bottle hidden in the greenhouse.”

Dorothy did not smile but became very frightened, and made him swear never to say such a thing again. Aunt Nell was ill, she said. Her illness was a secret and she took secret medicine for it, and nobody must ever know or Aunt Nell would die and God would be very angry. For weeks afterwards Pym carried this wonderful knowledge round with him much as, briefly, he had carried Rick’s, but this was better and more disgraceful. It was like the first money he had ever owned, his first piece of power. Who to spend it on? he wondered. Who to share it with? Shall I let Aunt Nell live or shall I kill her for calling me her little canary? He decided on Mrs. Bannister, the cook. “Aunt Nell gets her wobblies out of a bottle,” he told Mrs. Bannister, careful to use exactly the form of words that had so appalled Dorothy. But Aunt Nell did not die, and Mrs. Bannister knew about the bottle already and cuffed him for his forwardness. Worse still, she must have taken his story to Uncle Makepeace who that night made a rare visit to the prison wing, swaying and roaring and sweating and pointing at Pym while he talked about the Devil who was Rick. When he had gone Pym made his bed across the door in case Makepeace decided to come back and do some more roaring, but he never did. Nevertheless the burgeoning spy had acquired an early lesson in the dangerous business of intelligence: everybody talks.

His next lesson was no less instructive and concerned the perils of communication in occupied territory. By now Pym was writing to Lippsie daily and posting his letters in a box that stood at the rear gate of the house. They contained to his later shame priceless information, almost none of it in code. How to break into The Glades at night. His hours of exercise. Maps. The character of his persecutors. The money he had saved. The precise location of the German guards. The route to be followed through the back garden and where the kitchen key was kept. “I have been kidnapped to a dangerous house, please get me quick,” he wrote, and enclosed a drawing of Aunt Nell with canaries coming out of her mouth as a further warning of the hazards that surrounded him. But there was a snag. Having no address for Lippsie, Pym could only hope that somebody at the post office would know where she was to be found. His confidence was misplaced. One day the postman delivered the whole top-secret bundle to Makepeace personally, who summoned the prevailing mother, who summoned Pym, and led him like the convict he was to Makepeace for chastisement, though he simpered and begged and blandished him for all he was worth, for Pym somewhat unsportingly hated the lash and was seldom gallant about receiving it. After that he contented himself with looking for Lippsie on buses and, where he could do so deniably, asking people who happened to be passing the rear gate whether they had seen her. Particularly he asked policemen, whom he now smiled at richly wherever he found them.

“My father’s got an old green box with secrets in,” he told a constable one day, strolling in the memorial gardens with a mother.

“Has he then, son? Well, thanks for telling us,” said the constable and pretended to write in his notebook.

Meanwhile word of Rick, though not of Lippsie, reached Pym like the unfinished whispers of a distant radio transmitter. Your father is well. His holiday is doing him good. He has lost weight, lots of good food, we’re not to worry, he’s getting exercise, reading his law books, he’s gone back to school. The source of these priceless snippets was the Other House, which lay in a poorer part of Purgatory down by the coking station and must never be mentioned in front of Uncle Makepeace, since it was the house that had spawned Rick and brought disgrace on the great family of Watermaster, not to mention the memory of TP. Hand in hand, Dorothy and Pym rode there in fireside darkness, sticky mesh against bomb blast on the windows of the trolley-bus, and the lights inside burning blue to baffle German pilots. At the Other House, a steadfast little Irish lady with a rock jaw gave Pym half-a-crown out of a ginger jar and squeezed his arm muscles approvingly and called him “son” like Rick, and on the wall hung a copy of the same tinted photograph of TP, framed not in gold but in coffin wood. Jolly-faced aunts made sweets for Pym out of their sugar ration, and hugged and wept and treated Dorothy like the royalty she once had been, and hooted when Pym did his funny voices and clapped when he sang “Underneath the Arches.” “Go on, Magnus, give us Sir Makepeace then!” But Pym dared not for fear of God’s anger, which he knew from the Aunt Nell affair to be swift and awful.

The aunt he loved most was Bess. “Tell us, Magnus,” whispered Aunt Bess to him, alone in the scullery, drawing his head close to her own. “Is it true your dad ever owned a racehorse called Prince Magnus, after you?”

“It’s not true,” said Pym without a second’s thought, remembering the excitement as he sat beside Lippsie on her bed, listening to the commentary of Prince Magnus coming nowhere. “It is a lie made up by Uncle Makepeace to hurt my father.”

Aunt Bess kissed him and laughed and wept in relief, and held him even tighter. “Never say I asked you. Promise.”

“I promise,” said Pym. “God’s honour.”

The same Aunt Bess, one glorious night, smuggled Pym out of The Glades and into the Theatre Pier, where they saw Max Miller and a row of girls with long bare legs like Lippsie’s. On the trolley-bus back, brimming over with gratitude, Pym told her everything he knew in the world, and made up whatever he didn’t. He said he had written a book by Shakespeare and it was in a green box in a secret house. One day he would find and print it and make a lot of money. He said he would be a policeman and an actor and a jockey, and drive a Bentley like Rick, and marry Lippsie and have six children all called TP like his granddad. This pleased Bess enormously, except for the bit about the jockey, and sent her home saying Magnus was a card, which was what he wanted most. His gratification was short-lived. This time Pym had made God very angry indeed, and as usual He was not slow to do something about it. On the very next day before breakfast the police came and took away his Dorothy for ever, though the reigning mother said they were only ambulance.

And once again—though Pym dutifully wept for Dorothy and refused food for her, and flailed with his fists at the long-suffering mothers—he could not but see their rightness in removing her. They were taking her to a place where she would be happy, the mothers said. Pym envied her luck. Not to the same place as Rick, no, but somewhere nicer and quieter, with kind people to look after her. Pym planned to join her. Escape, till now a fantasy, became his serious aim. A celebrated epileptic at Sunday school acquainted him with his symptoms. Pym waited a day, ran into the kitchen with his eyes rolling, and collapsed dramatically before Mrs. Bannister, shoving his hands into his mouth and writhing for good measure. The doctor, who must have been a rare imbecile, prescribed a laxative. Next day in a further attempt to draw attention to himself, Pym hacked off his forelock with paper scissors. No one noticed. Improvising now, he released Mrs. Bannister’s cockatoo from its cage, sprinkled soap flakes into the Aga cooker and blocked the lavatory with a feather boa belonging to Aunt Nell.

Nothing happened. He was beating the air. What he needed was a great dramatic crime. All night he waited, then early in the morning when his courage was highest, Pym walked the length of the house to Makepeace Watermaster’s study in his dressing-gown and slippers and relieved himself prolifically over the centre of the white carpet. Terrified, he threw himself on to the patch he had created, hoping to dry it out with the heat of his body. A maid entered and screamed. A mother was summoned and from his anguished position on the carpet Pym was treated to a formative example of how history rewrites itself in a crisis. The mother touched his shoulder. He groaned. She asked him where it hurt. He indicated his groin, the literal cause of his distress. Makepeace Watermaster was fetched. What were you doing in my study in the first place? The pain, sir, the pain, I wanted to tell you about the pain. With a screech of tyres the doctor returned and now everything was remembered while he bent over Pym and probed his stomach with his stupid fingertips. The collapse before Mrs. Bannister. The nightly moans, the daily pallor. Dorothy’s madness, discussed in hushed terms. Even Pym’s bed-wetting was taken down and used in evidence on his behalf.

“Poor boy, it’s got him here as well,” said the mother as the patient was lifted cautiously to the sofa and the maid was hurried off to fetch Jeyes disinfectant and a floor-cloth. Pym’s temperature was read and grimly observed to be normal. “Doesn’t mean a thing,” said the doctor, now battling to make good his earlier negligence, and ordered the mother to pack the poor boy’s things. She did so and in the course of it must inevitably have discovered a number of small objects that Pym had taken from other people’s lives in order to improve his own: Nell’s jet earrings, Cook’s letters from her son in Canada and Makepeace Watermaster’s

Travels with a Donkey

which Pym had selected for its title, the only part he had read. In the crisis even this black evidence of his criminality was ignored.

The outcome was more effective than Pym could have hoped. Not a week later, in a hospital newly fitted to receive victims of the approaching blitz, Magnus Pym, aged eight and a half years, yielded up his appendix in the interests of operational cover. When he came round, the first thing he saw was a blue and black koala bear larger than himself seated on the end of his bed. The second was a basket of fruit bigger than the bear, which looked like a piece of St. Moritz that had landed by mistake in wartime England. The third was Rick, slim and smart as a sailor, standing to attention with his right hand lifted in salute. Beside Rick again, like a scared ghost dragged unwillingly from the shades of Pym’s chloroformed realm, came Lippsie, hunched at the shoulders by a new fur cape, and supported by Syd Lemon looking like his own younger brother.

Lippsie knelt to me. The two men looked on while we embraced.

“That’s the way then,” Rick kept saying approvingly. “Give him a good old English hug. That’s the way.”

Softly, like a bitch recovering her pup, Lippsie picked me over, lifting the remains of my forelock and staring gravely into my eyes as if fearing that bad things had got into them.

How they celebrated their release! Shorn of all possessions except the clothes they stood up in and the credit they could muster as they went along, Rick’s reconstituted court took to the open road and became crusaders through wartime Britain. Petrol was rationed, Bentleys had vanished for the duration, all over the country posters asked “Is Your Journey Really Necessary?” and every time they passed one they slowed down to yell back, “Yes, it is!” in chorus through the open windows of their cab. Drivers either became accomplices or left in a hurry. A Mr. Humphries threw them all into the street in Aberdeen after a week, calling them crooks, and drove away without his money, never to be seen again. But a Mr. Cudlove whom Rick had met on holiday—and who got the court a week’s tick at the Imperial at Torquay on the strength of an aunt who worked in the accounts department—he stayed for ever, sharing their food and fortunes and teaching Pym tricks with string. Sometimes they had one taxi, sometimes Mr. Cudlove’s special friend Ollie brought his Humber and they had day-long races for Pym’s sole benefit, with Syd leaning out of the back window giving the car the whip. Of mothers they had a dazzling and varying supply and often acquired them at such short notice they had to cram them into the back two deep, with Pym squeezed into an exciting, unfamiliar lap. There was a lady called Topsie who smelt of roses and made Pym dance with his head against her breast; there was Millie who let him sleep with her in her siren-suit because he was frightened of the black cupboard in his hotel bedroom, and who bestowed frank caresses on him while she bathed him. And Eileens and Mabels and Joans, and a Violet who got carsick on cider, some into her gas-mask case and the rest over Pym. And when they were all got out of the way, Lippsie materialised, standing motionless in the steam of a railway station, her cardboard suitcase hanging from her slim hand. Pym loved her more than ever, but her deepening melancholy was too much for him and in the whirl of the great crusade he resented being the object of it.

“Old Lippsie’s got a touch of the what’s-its,” Syd would say kindly, noting Pym’s disappointment, and they’d heave a bit of a sigh of relief together when she left.

“Old Lippsie’s on about her Jews again,” said Syd sadly another time. “They keep telling her another lot’s been done.”

And once: “Old Lippsie’s got the guilts she isn’t dead like them.”

Pym’s intermittent enquiries after Dorothy led him nowhere. Your mum’s poorly, Syd would say; she’ll be back soon, and the best thing our Magnus here can do for her meantime is not fret over her, because it will only get to her and make her worse.

Rick took a wounded line. “You’ll just have to put up with your old man for a while. I thought we were having fun then. Aren’t we having fun?”

“All the fun in the world,” said Pym.

On the subject of his recent absence Rick was as sparing as the rest of the court, so that soon Pym began to wonder whether they had ever been on holiday at all. Only the occasional hint convinced him that they had shared a cementing experience. Winchester had been worse than Reading because of those bloody gypsies off of Salisbury Plain, Pym once overheard Morrie Washington tell Perce Loft. Syd backed him up. “Those Winchester gyppos was rough you wouldn’t believe,” said Syd with feeling. “The screws was no better, either.” And Pym noticed that their holiday had made hearty eaters of them. “Eat your peas now, Magnus,” Syd urged him amid much laughter. “There’s worse hotels than this one,

we

can tell you.”

It wasn’t till a year or more later, when Pym’s vocabulary had grown equal to his intelligence gathering, that he realised they had been talking about prison.

But their leader did not share these jokes and they ceased abruptly, for Rick’s

gravitas

was something no man tampered with lightly, least of all those appointed to uphold it. Rick’s superiority was manifest in everything he did. In the way he dressed even when we were very broke, his clean laundry and clean shoes. In the food he required and the style to eat it in. The rooms he had in the hotel. In the way he needed brandy for his snooker, and scared everyone into silence with his brooding. In his preoccupation with good works, which involved visiting hospitals where people had taken bad knocks and seeing the old people right while their children were away at the war.

“Will you see Lippsie right too, when the war’s over?” Pym asked one day.

“Old Lippsie’s crackerjack,” said Rick.

Meanwhile we traded. What in, Pym never rightly knew and nor do I now. Sometimes in rare commodities, such as hams and whisky, sometimes in promises, which the court called Faith. Other times in nothing more solid than the sunny horizons that sparkled ahead of us down the empty wartime roads. When Christmas approached somebody produced sheets of coloured crêpe paper, thousands of them. For days and nights on end, augmented by extra mothers recruited for this vital war-work, Pym and the court crouched in an empty railway carriage at Didcot, twisting the paper into crackers that contained no toys and would not crack, while they told each other wild stories and cooked toast by laying it on top of the paraffin stove. Some of the crackers, it was true, had little wooden soldiers inside them, but these were called “samples” and kept separate. The rest, Syd explained, was for decoration, Titch, like flowers when there isn’t any. Pym believed it all. He was the most willing child labourer in the world, so long as there was approval waiting for him round the corner.

Another time they towed a trailer filled with crates of oranges which Pym refused to eat because he overheard Syd saying they were hot. They sold them to a pub on the road to Birmingham. Once they had a load of dead chickens that Syd said they could only move at night when it was cold enough, so perhaps that was what had gone wrong with the oranges. And there is a clip of film running for ever in my memory. It shows a scraggy moonlit hilltop on the moors, and our two cabs with their lights out winding nervously to the crest. And the dark figures standing waiting for us on the back of their lorry. And the masked lamp that counted out the money for Mr. Muspole the great accountant while Syd unloaded the trailer. And though Pym watched from a distance because he hated feathers, no night frontier crossing later in his life was ever more exciting.

“Can we send the money to Lippsie now?” Pym asked. “She hasn’t got any left.”

“Now how do you know a thing like that, old son?”

From her letters to you, Pym thought. You left one in your pocket and I read it. But Rick’s eyes had their flick-knife glint so he said “I made it up,” and smiled.

Rick did not come on our adventures. He was saving himself. What for was a question nobody asked within Pym’s hearing and certainly he never asked it for himself. Rick was devoting himself to his good works, his old people and his hospital visiting. “Is that suit of yours pressed, son?” Rick would say when as a special privilege father and son embarked together on one of these high errands. “God in heaven, Muspole, look at the boy’s suit, it’s a damned shame! Look at his hair!” Hastily a mother would be ordered to press the suit, another to polish his shoes and get his fingernails proper, a third to comb his hair till it was orderly and sensitive. With flimsy patience Mr. Cudlove tapped his keys on the car roof while Pym was given a final check-over for signs of unintentional irreverence. Then away at last they sped to the house or bedside of some elderly and worthy person, and Pym sat fascinated to see how swiftly Rick trimmed his manner to suit theirs, how naturally he slipped into the cadences and vernacular that put them most at ease, and how the love of God came into his good face when he talked about Liberalism and Masonry and his dear dead father, God rest him, and a first-class rate of return, ten percent guaranteed plus profits for as long as you’re spared. Sometimes he brought a ham with him as a gift and was an angel in a hamless world. Sometimes a pair of silk stockings or a box of nectarines, for Rick was always the giver even when he was taking. When he was able Pym threw his own charm into the scales by reciting a prayer he had composed, or singing “Underneath the Arches,” or telling a witty story with a range of regional accents that he had picked up in the course of the crusade. “The Germans are killing all the Jews,” he said once, to great effect. “I’ve got a friend called Lippsie and all her other friends are dead.” If his performance was wanting, Rick let him know this without brutality. “When somebody like Mrs. Ardmore asks you whether you remember her, son, don’t scratch your old head and pull a face. Look her in the eye and smile and say, ‘

Yes.’

That’s the way to treat old people,

and

to be a credit to your father. Do you love your old man?”

“Of course I do.”

“Well then. How was your steak last night?”

“It was super.”

“There’s not twenty boys in England ate steak last night, do you know that?”

“I know.”

“Give us a kiss then.”

Syd was less reverent. “If you’re going to learn to shave people, Magnus,” he said over a lot of winks, “you’ve got to learn how to rub the soap in first!”

Somewhere near Aberdeen, without warning, the court became interested only in chemists’ shops. We were a limited company by then, which to Pym was as good as being a policeman. Rick had found a new banker with Faith, Mr. Cudlove’s live-in friend Ollie signed the cheques. And our product was a concoction of dried fruit that we pulped with a handpress in the kitchens of a great country house belonging to a dashing new mother called Cherry. It was a large house with white pillars at the front door and white statues all like Lippsie in the garden. Even in Paradise the court had never stayed anywhere so grand. First we stewed the fruit and pulped it in the press, which was the best bit; then we added gelatine to make lozenges out of it, which Pym rolled round and round in Company sugar with his bare palm, licking it clean between batches. Cherry had evacuees and horses, and gave parties for American soldiers who presented her with cans of petrol in the tithe barn. She owned farms and a great park with deer, and an absent husband in the Navy whom Syd referred to as “the Admiral.” In the evenings before dinner, a pack of King Charles spaniels was whipped by an old gamekeeper. They swarmed over the sofas yapping till they were whipped out again. At Cherry’s, for the first time since St. Moritz, Pym saw silver candles on the dinner table lighting bare shoulders.

“There’s a lady called Lippsie who’s in love with my father and they’re going to marry and have babies,” Pym told Cherry helpfully one evening as they walked together down the ride; and was greatly impressed by how seriously Cherry took this news, and how intently she questioned Pym concerning Lippsie’s accomplishments. “I’ve seen her in the bath and she’s beautiful,” said Pym.

And when they left a few days later, Rick took something of the dignity of the place with him, and something of its proprietor also, for I remember him striding down the great stone steps with a white hide suitcase in each hand—Rick always loved a fine suitcase—and sporting a smart country outfit of the sort no admiral would wear to sea. Syd and Mr. Muspole followed after him like circus midgets, clutching the chipped green filing cabinet between them and shouting, “Your end, Deirdre!” and “Gently down the stairs, Sybil!”

“Don’t you ever talk to Cherry about Lippsie again, son,” Rick warned him, in his heaviest moralistic tone. “It’s high time you learned it’s not polite to mention one woman to another. Because if you don’t learn that, you’ll waste your advantages and that’s a fact.”

It was through Cherry also, I suspect, that Rick formed the determination to turn Pym into a gentleman. Until now it has been assumed that Pym was already of the aristocracy. But Cherry, a forceful and superior woman, taught Rick that true English privilege was obtained by hardship, and that the best hardship was to be found at English boarding-schools. She also had a nephew at Mr. Grimble’s academy by the name of Sefton Boyd, but better known to her as my darling Kenny. A second and less tender influence was the army. First Muspole became its casualty, then Morrie Washington, then Syd. Each with a rueful smile of failure packed his little suitcase and disappeared, returning only seldom and with very short hair. Then one day to his hurt surprise Rick himself was summoned to the flag. In later life he took a more tolerant view of the pettiness of the society entrusted to his care, but the sight of his call-up papers on the breakfast table provoked an outburst of righteous anger.

“God damn it, Loft, I thought we’d taken care of all that,” he raged at Perce, who was exempt from everything.

“We did take care of it,” said Perce, jabbing a thumb in my direction. “Delicate kid, mother in the nut-house, it’s watertight compassion.”

“Well where the devil’s their compassion now then?” Rick demanded, shoving the buff document under Perce’s nose. “It’s a damn shame, Loft. That’s what it is. Get after it.”

“You never ought to have told old Cherry about Lippsie,” Perce Loft fumed at Pym later. “She went and peached on your dad out of spite.”

But the army declined to surrender, and the depleted court, consisting of Perce Loft, a clutch of mothers, Ollie and Mr. Cudlove, duly uprooted itself to a drab hotel in Bradford, where Rick was obliged to reconcile the ignominy of the parade ground with the burdens of financial generalship. Using the hotel’s coin box and the hotel’s credit, typing and filing in the hotel’s bedrooms, storing their mysterious wares in the hotel’s garage, the court fought a gallant rearguard action against dissolution, but in vain. It was Sunday evening in the hotel. Rick in his private’s uniform, freshly pressed, was preparing to return to barracks. A new dartsboard was wedged under his arm, which he planned to present to the sergeants’ mess, for Rick had his heart set on the post of catering clerk, which would enable him to see us right in the shortages.

“Son. It’s time for you to set those fine feet of yours on the hard road of becoming Lord Chief Justice and a credit to your old man. There’s been too much lazy fare about and you’re part of it. Cudlove, look at his shirt. No man ever did business in a dirty shirt. Look at his hair. He’ll be an airy-fairy before you can say Jack Robinson. It’s boarding-school for you, son, and God bless you and God bless me too.”

One more bear-hug, a final staunching of the tears, one noble handshake for the absent cameras as, dartsboard at the ready, the great man rode away to war. Pym watched him out of sight, then stealthily climbed the stairs to the provisional State Apartments. The door was unlocked. He smelt woman and talc. The double bed was in disarray. He pulled the pigskin briefcase from beneath it, tipped out the contents and, as he had often done before, puzzled over unintelligible files and correspondence. The Admiral’s country suit, donned for a few hours and still warm, was hanging in the wardrobe. He poked in the pockets. The green filing cabinet, more chipped than ever, lurked in its habitual darkness. Why does he always keep it in cupboards? Pym tugged vainly at the locked drawers. Why does it travel separately from everything as if it had a disease?

“Looking for money, are we, Titch?” a woman’s voice asked him, from the bathroom doorway. It was Doris, typist elect and good scout. “Spare yourself the trouble, I would. It’s all tick with your dad. I’ve looked.”

“He told me he’d left me a bar of chocolate in his room,” Pym replied resolutely, and continued delving while she watched.

“There’s three gross of army milk-and-nut sitting in the garage. Help yourself,” Doris advised. “Petrol coupons too, if you’re thirsty.”

“It was a special kind of bar,” said Pym.

I have never fathomed the machinations that sent Pym and Lippsie to the same school. Were they infiltrated singly or as a package, the one to be taught, the other to supply her labour in payment? I suspect as a package but have no proof beyond a general knowledge of Rick’s methods. All his life, Rick maintained a work-force of devoted women whom he regularly discarded and revived. When they were not required in the court they were put out to work for him in the great world, easing his crusade with remittances they could ill afford, selling their jewellery for him, cashing their savings and lending their names to bank accounts from which Rick’s name was banned. But Lippsie had no jewellery and no credit with the banks. She had only her lovely body and her music and her brooding guilt, and a little English schoolboy who held her to the world. I suspect now that Rick had already read the warning signs collecting in her, and decided to give her to me to look after. Nevertheless there was profit to our partnership and Rick was nothing if not an opportunist.

If Pym possessed any learning by the time he presented himself to Mr. Grimble’s country academy for the sons of gentlemen, then he owed it to Lippsie and not to any of the dozen or so infant schools, Bible schools and kindergartens scattered along the hectic road of Rick’s progress. Lippsie taught him writing, and to this day I write a German “t” and put a stroke through my small “z”s. She taught him spelling, and it was always a great joke between them that they could not remember how many “d”s there were in the English version of “address,” and to this day I can’t be sure of the answer until I have written out the German first. Whatever else Pym knew, apart from meaningless passages of the Scriptures, was contained in her cardboard suitcase, for she never came to see him anywhere without whisking him to her room and foisting some piece of geography or history on him, or making him play scales on her flute.

“See, Magnus, without informations we are nothing. But with informations we can go anywhere in the world, we are like turtles, our houses always on our backs. You learn to paint, you can paint anywhere. A sculptor, a musician, a painter, they need no permits. Only their heads. Our world must be inside our heads. That is the only safe way. Now you play Lippsie a nice tune.”

The arrangement at Mr. Grimble’s was the perfect flowering of this relationship. Their world was inside their heads, but it was also contained in a brick-and-flint gardener’s cottage at the end of Mr. Grimble’s long drive, designated the Overflow House and occupied by the Overflow Boys of whom Pym was the newest recruit. And Lippsie, his lovely lifelong Lippsie, their best and most attentive mother. They knew at once they were outcasts. If they didn’t, the eighty boys up the drive made it plain to them. They had a pallid grocer’s son without an “h” to his name, and tradesmen were ridiculous. They had three Jews whose speech was spattered with Polish, and a hopeless stammerer called M-M-Marlin, and an Indian with knock-knees whose father was killed when the Japanese took Singapore. They had Pym with his spots and wet beds. Yet under Lippsie they contrived to glory in all these disadvantages. If the boys up the drive were the crack regiment, the Overflow Boys were the irregulars who fought all the harder for their medals. For staff, Mr. Grimble took what he could get, and what he could get was whatever the country didn’t need. A Mr. O’Mally punched a boy so hard across the ear he knocked him out cold, a Mr. Farbourne beat heads together and fractured someone’s skull. A science master thought the marauding village boys were Bolsheviks and fired his shotgun into their retreating rumps. At Grimble’s, boys were flogged for tardiness and flogged for untidiness, flogged for apathy and flogged for cheek, and flogged for not improving from the flogging. The fever of war encouraged brutality, the guilt of our noncombatant staff intensified it, the intricacies of the British hierarchical system provided a natural order for the exercise of sadism. Their God was the protector of English country gentlemen and their justice was the punishment of the ill-born and disadvantaged, and it was meted out with the collaboration of the strong, of whom Sefton Boyd was the strongest and most handsome. It is the saddest of all the ironies of Lippsie’s death, as I see it now, that she died in the service of a Fascist state.

Each leave-out day, on Rick’s standing orders, Pym presented himself at the entrance to the school drive in readiness for Mr. Cudlove’s arrival. When nobody appeared, he hurried gratefully to the woods in search of privacy and wild strawberries. Come evening he returned to the school boasting of the great day he had had. Just occasionally the worst happened and a carload would appear—Rick, Mr. Cudlove, Syd in private’s uniform, and a couple of jockeys crammed in anyhow—all well refreshed after a pause at the Brace of Partridges. If a school match was in progress they would roar support for the home side and hand round unheard-of oranges from a crate in the boot of the car. If none, then Syd and Morrie Washington would press-gang any boy who happened to be passing on his bicycle, and mount a handicap race round the playing fields while Syd belted out the commentary through his cupped hands. And Rick personally, dressed in the Admiral’s suit, would start them off with a mayoral wave of his handkerchief, and Rick personally would present an unimaginable box of chocolates to the winner, while the pound notes changed hands around the court. And when evening came Rick never failed to install himself at the Overflow House, bringing a bottle of bubbly along to cheer old Lippsie up because she seemed so glum—“What’s got into her, son?” And Rick cheered her up all right; Pym heard it going on, thump, creak and scream, while he crouched outside her door in his dressing-gown wondering whether they were fighting or pretending. Back in bed, he would hear Rick tiptoeing down the stairs, though Rick could tread as lightly as a cat.

Till a morning came when Rick did not leave quietly at all. Not for Pym, not for the rest of the Overflow Boys, who were greatly excited to be woken by the clamour. Lippsie was bawling and Rick was trying to quell her, but the nicer he was to her the more unreasonable she became. “You made me to be a

teef!”

she was yelling between great big whoops while she took another gulp of air. “You made me

teef

to punish me. You were bad priest, Rickie Pym. You made me to steal. I was honest woman. I was refugee but I was honest woman.” Why did she speak as if it was all last year? “My father was honest man. My broder also was honest man. They was good men, not bad like me. You made me to steal until I was criminal like you. Maybe God punish you one day, Rickie Pym. Maybe He make you to weep, too. I hope He will. I hope, I hope!”

“Old Lippsie’s having a touch of her wobblies, son,” Rick explained to Pym, finding him on the stairs as he made to leave. “Slip in there and see if you can make her laugh with one of your stories. Is old Grimble feeding you up there?”

“It’s super,” said Pym.

“Your old man is seeing them right, know that? The healthiest school in Britain, this is. Ask them at the Ministry. Want a half-crown? Well then.”

To reach Lippsie’s bicycle Pym used a walk he had acquired from Sefton Boyd. You kept your hands lightly linked behind your back, shoved your head forward and fixed your eyes upon some vaguely pleasing object on the horizon. You stalked wide and high, smiling slightly, as if listening to other voices, which is how the flower of us wear authority. He was too small to sit on the tartan saddle but a lady’s bicycle has a hole and not a bar, as Sefton Boyd was always happy to point out, and Pym swayed through the hole pumping his legs from side to side as he swung the handlebars between the rain-filled craters in the tarmac. I am the official bicycle collector. To his right was the kitchen garden where he and Lippsie had Dug for Victory, to his left the coppice where the German bomb had fallen, hurling bits of blackened twig against the window of the bedroom he shared with the Indian and the grocer’s boy. But behind him in his terrified imagination was Sefton Boyd with his lictors in full cry, mimicking Lippsie at him because they knew he loved her: “Vere are you goink, mein little black market? Vot are you doink mit your sweetheart, mein little black market, now she be dead?” Ahead of him was the gate where he had waited for Mr. Cudlove, and to the left of the gate was the Overflow House with its iron railings ripped away for the war effort, and a policeman standing in the gap.

“I’ve been sent to collect my nature-study book,” said Pym to the policeman, looking him straight in the eye as he leaned Lippsie’s bicycle against a brick post. Pym had lied to policemen before and knew you must look honest.

“Your nature book, have you?” said the policeman. “What’s your name, then?”

“Pym, sir. I live here.”

“Pym who?”

“Magnus.”

“Hop along then, Pym Magnus,” said the policeman but Pym still walked slowly, refusing to show any sign of eagerness. Lippsie’s silver-framed family was queued up on the bedside table, but Rick’s heavy head dominated the lot of them, sensitive and political in its pigskin frame, and Rick’s sage eyes followed him wherever he went. He opened Lippsie’s wardrobe and breathed the smell of her, he shoved aside her frilly white dressing-gown, her fur cape and the camel-hair overcoat with the pixie’s hood that Rick had bought her in St. Moritz. From the back of her wardrobe he pulled out her cardboard suitcase. He set it on the floor and opened it with the key she kept hidden in the Toby jug on the tiled mantelpiece next to the soft toy chimp who was Little Audrey who laughed and laughed and laughed. He took out the book like a Bible that was written in little black sword blades, and the music books and reading books he didn’t understand and the passport with her picture in it when she was young, and the wads of letters in German from her sister Rachel, pronounced “Ra-ha-el,” who no longer wrote to her, and from the very bottom of the case Rick’s letters, tied into bundles with bits of harvest twine. Some he knew almost by heart, though he had difficulty unravelling the portent seething beneath their verbiage:

“It is a matter of weeks no days my darling before the present besetting clouds will be dispersed away as a permanency. Loft will have obtained my Discharge and you and I can enjoy our well-deserved Reward.... Look after that boy of mine who regards you as a Mother and make sure he doesn’t turn out airy-fairy. . . .

“Your doubts regarding Trust completely misplaced . . . you should not trouble your Head as it is a further worry to me here waiting for the Bugle’s summons Perhaps never to Return . . . what is involved here will bring untold benefits to Many such as Wentworth . . . don’t go on at me about W or his wife, that woman is a professional troublemaker of the worst kind out....

“My regards to Ted Grimble whom I consider a great Educationist and Headmaster. Tell him a further Hundredweight of prunes on its way . . . he should prepare kitchen for Two gross best fresh oranges also. Loft has got me Out on three weeks compassionate which means I Recommence my basic from scratch if I am recalled. Regarding Another Matter, Muspole says to continue sending items as before. Please oblige quickly owing purely Temporary problem of liquidity this end which is preventing decent people like Wentworth being seen right....

“If you don’t send more fee cheques immediately, you may as well send me back to Prison and all the Boys excepting Perce as usual and that’s a Fact.... Talk about killing yourself is Foolishness with so many Killing each other round the World in this Senseless and Tragic war. . . . Muspole says if you send post restaurant express Tomorrow he will be at P.O. when they open Saturday and send on to Wentworth immediately. . . .”

Lippsie’s letter, which he had left till last, was by contrast a marvel of conciseness:

“My dear darling Magnus,

“You must be good boy always, darling, play your music and be strong like a man to your father, I love you.

Lippsie”

Pym made a bundle of them, Lippsie’s included, stuffed them inside his nature book and the nature book inside his belt. He rode past the policeman slowly, feeling cats’ claws on his back. The school boiler was a brick furnace built into the basement, fed by a chute in the kitchen yard. To approach the chute was a beatable offence, to burn paper was a Quisling act and sailors would drown for it. A fierce rain was blowing from the Downs, the chalk hills were olive against the storm-clouds. Standing before the open chute, shoulders high against his neck, Pym shoved the letters into it and watched them disappear. A dozen people must have seen him, staff and inmates, and some for sure were allies of Sefton Boyd. But the openness with which he had proceeded convinced them he was acting on authority. Certainly it convinced Pym. He shoved in the last letter, which was the one that told him to be strong, and walked away without once turning to see if he was being noticed.

He needed the staff lavatory again. He needed his secret St. Moritz with its panelled seclusion, he needed the secret majesty of its brass taps and mahogany-framed mirror, for Pym loved luxury as only those can who have had love taken from them. He gained the forbidden staircase to the staffroom; he reached the half-landing. The lavatory door was ajar. He pushed it, slipped inside, locked it behind him. He was alone. He stared at his face, making it harder, then softer, then harder. He ran the taps and washed his cheeks till they shone. His sudden isolation, added to the grandeur of his achievement, made him unique in his own eyes. His mind whirled with the vertigo of greatness. He was God. He was Hitler. He was Wentworth. He was the king of the green filing cabinet, TP’s noble descendant. Henceforth, nothing on earth need happen without his intervention. He took out his penknife, opened it and held its big blade uppermost before his face in the mirror, taking an Arthurian vow. By Excalibur I swear. The lunch bell rang but there was no roll-call for lunch and he was not hungry; he would never be hungry again, he was an immortal knight. He thought of cutting his throat but his mission was too important. He thought of names. Who has the best family in the school? I have. The Pyms are crackerjack and Prince Magnus is the fastest horse in the world. He pressed his cheek against the wood panelling, smelling cricket bats and Swiss forests. The knife was still in his hand. His eyes went hot and blurred, his ears sang. The divine voice inside him told him to look, and he saw the initials “KS-B” carved very deeply into the best panel. Stooping, he gathered the splinters at his feet and put them into the lavatory where they floated. He pulled the plug but they still floated. He left them there, went to the arts hut and completed his Dornier bomber.

All afternoon he waited, confident nothing had happened. I didn’t do it. If I went back it wouldn’t be there. It was Maggs in third form. It was Jameson who owns a kukri, I saw him go in. An oik from the village did it, I saw him sneaking round the grounds with a dagger in his belt, his name is Wentworth. At evensong he prayed that a German bomb would destroy the staff lavatory. None did. Next day, he presented Sefton Boyd with his greatest treasure, the koala bear Lippsie had given him after his appendix operation. In break he buried his penknife in the loose earth behind the cricket pavilion. Or as I would say today, cached it. It was not until evening line-up that the full name of the Honourable Kenneth Sefton Boyd was called out in a voice of doom by the duty master, the sadist O’Mally. Mystified, the young nobleman was led to Mr. Grimble’s study. Mystified himself, Pym watched him go. Whatever can they want him for—my friend, my best friend, the owner of my koala bear? The mahogany door closed, eighty pairs of eyes fixed upon its fine workmanship, Pym’s also. Pym heard Mr. Grimble’s voice, then Sefton Boyd’s raised in protest. Then a great silence while God’s justice was administered, blow by blow. Counting, Pym felt cleansed and vindicated. So it wasn’t Maggs, it wasn’t Jameson and it wasn’t me. Sefton Boyd did it himself, otherwise he would not have been beaten. Justice, he was beginning to learn, is only as good as her servants.

“It had a hyphen,” Sefton Boyd told him next day. “Whoever did it gave us a hyphen when we haven’t got one. If I ever find the sod I’ll kill him.”

“So will I,” Pym promised loyally and meant every word. Like Rick he was learning to live on several planes at once. The art of it was to forget everything except the ground you stood on and the face you spoke from at that moment.

The effects of Lippsie’s death upon the young Pym were many and not by any means all negative. Her demise entrenched him as a self-reliant person, confirming him in his knowledge that women were fickle and liable to sudden disappearances. He learned the great lesson of Rick’s example, namely the importance of a respectable appearance. He learned that the only safety was in seeming legitimacy. He developed his determination to be a secret mover of life’s events. It was Pym, for instance, who let down Mr. Grimble’s tyres and poured three six-pound bags of cooking salt into the swimming-pool. But it was Pym who led the hunt for the culprit too, throwing up many tantalising clues and casting doubt on many solid reputations. With Lippsie gone, his love for Rick became once more unobstructed and, better, he could love him from a distance, for Rick had once more disappeared.

Had he gone back to prison, as he had promised Lippsie that he would? Had the police found the green filing cabinet? Pym did not know then and Syd, I suspect by choice, does not know now. Army records grant Rick an abrupt discharge six months before the period in question, referring the reader to the Criminal Records Office for an explanation. None is available, perhaps because that Perce had a friend who worked there, a lady who thought the world of him. Whatever the reason Pym floated out alone once more, and had a fair amount of fun. For weekend leave Ollie and Mr. Cudlove received him at their basement flat in Fulham and pampered him in every imaginable way. Mr. Cudlove, fit as ever from his exercises, taught him how to wrestle, and when they all went out for a toot on the river together, Ollie wore ladies’ clothes and did a squeaky voice so well that only Pym and Mr. Cudlove in all the world ever knew there was a man inside them. For his longer holidays, Pym was obliged to trek over Cherry’s vast estates with Sefton Boyd, listening to ever more awful stories about the great public school of which he would soon become a member : how new boys were tied into laundry baskets and flung down flights of stone stairs, how they were harnessed to pony traps with fish-hooks through their ears and made to haul the prefect round school yard.

“My father’s gone to prison and escaped,” Pym told him in return. “He’s got a pet jackdaw that looks after him.” He imagined Rick in a cave on Dartmoor, with Syd and Meg taking him pies wrapped in a handkerchief while the hounds sniffed his trail.

“My father’s in the Secret Service,” Pym told him another time. “He’s been tortured to death by the Gestapo but I’m not allowed to say. His real name is Wentworth.”

Having surprised himself by this pronouncement Pym worked on it. A different name and a gallant death suited Rick excellently. They gave him the class Pym was beginning to suspect he lacked and made things right with Lippsie. So when Rick came bouncing back one day, not tortured or altered in any way, but accompanied by two jockeys, a box of nectarines and a brand-new mother with a feather in her hat, Pym thought seriously of working for the Gestapo and wondered how you joined. And would have done so, too, for sure, had not the peace ungraciously robbed him of the chance.

A last word is also needed here about Pym’s politics during this instructive period. Churchill sulked and was too popular. De Gaulle, with his tilted pineapple head, was too much like Uncle Makepeace, while Roosevelt, with his stick and spectacles and wheelchair, was clearly Aunt Nell in disguise. Hitler was so wretchedly unloved that Pym had more than a fair regard for him, but it was Joseph Stalin whom he appointed to be his proxy father. Stalin neither sulked nor preached. He spent his time chuckling, and playing with dogs, and picking roses in news cinemas while his loyal troops won the war for him in the snows of St. Moritz.

Putting down his pen, Pym stared at what he had written, first in fear, then gradually in relief. Finally he laughed.

“I didn’t break,” he whispered. “I stayed above the fray.”

And poured himself a Poppy-sized vodka for old times’ sake.

5

F

rau Bauer’s bed was as narrow and lumpy as a servant’s bed in a fairy-tale and Mary lay in it exactly as Brotherhood had dumped her there, roly-polyed in the eiderdown, knees drawn up in self-protection, clutching her shoulders with her hands. He had slid off her, she could no longer smell his sweat and breath. But she could feel his bulk at the foot of the bed and sometimes she had a hard time remembering that they had not made love a few moments earlier, for his habit in those days had been to leave her dozing while he sat as he was sitting now, making his phone calls, checking his expenses or doing whatever else served to restore the order of his all-male life. He had found a tape-recorder somewhere and Georgie had a second in case his didn’t work.

For a hangman Nigel was small but extremely dapper. He wore a waisted pinstripe suit and a silk handkerchief in his sleeve.

“Ask Mary to make a voluntary statement, will you, Jack?” Nigel said, as if he did this every week. “Voluntary but formal is the tone. Could be used, I’m afraid. The decision is not Bo’s alone.”

“Who the hell says voluntary?” said Brotherhood. “She signed the Official Secrets Act when she joined, she signed it again when she left. She signed it again when she married Pym. Everything you know is ours, Mary. Whether you heard it on top of a bus or saw the smoking gun in his hand.”

“And your nice Georgie can witness it,” said Nigel.

Mary heard herself talking but didn’t understand a lot of what she said because she had one ear in the pillow and the other was listening to the morning sounds of Lesbos through the open window of their little brown terrace house halfway up the hill that Plomari was built on, to the clatter of mopeds and boats and bouzouki music and lorries revving in the alleys. To the scream of sheep having their throats cut at the butcher’s and the slither of donkey hoofs on cobble and the yells of the vendors in the harbour market. If she squeezed her eyes tight enough, she could look over the orange rooftops across the street, past the chimneys and the clotheslines and the roof gardens full of geraniums, down to the waterfront and out to the long jetty with its red light winking on the point and its evil ginger cats soaking themselves in the sunshine while they watched the tramper putter out of the mist.

And that was how Mary saw her story henceforth as she told it to Jack Brotherhood: as a nightmarish film she dared look at only piecemeal, with herself as the meanest villain ever. The tramper draws alongside, the cats stretch, the gangway is lowered, the English family Pym—Magnus, Mary and son Thomas—file ashore in search of yet another perfect place away from it all. Because nowhere is far enough any more, nowhere is remote enough. The Pyms have become the Flying Dutchmen of the Aegean, scarcely landing before they pack again, changing boats and islands like driven souls, though only Magnus knows the curse, only Magnus knows who is pursuing them and why, and Magnus has locked that secret behind his smile with all his others. She sees him striding gaily ahead of her, clutching his straw hat against the breeze and his briefcase dangling from his other hand. She sees Tom stalking after him in the long grey flannels and school blazer with his Cub colours on the pocket, which he insists on wearing even when the temperature is in the eighties. And she sees herself still doped with last night’s drink and oil fumes, already planning to betray them both. And following them in their bare feet she sees the native bearers with the Pyms’ too-much luggage, the towels and bed linen and Tom’s Weetabix and all the other junk she packed in Vienna for their great sabbatical, as Magnus calls this once-in-a-lifetime family holiday they have all apparently been dreaming of, though Mary cannot remember it being mentioned until a few days before they left, and to be honest she would rather have gone back to England, collected the dogs from the gardener and the long-haired Siamese from Aunt Tab, and spent the time in Plush.

The bearers set down their burdens. Magnus, generous as ever, tips each of them from Mary’s handbag while she holds it open for him. Stooped gawkily over the reception committee of Lesbos cats, Tom declares they have ears like celery. A whistle sounds, the bearers hop up the gangway, the tramper is returned to the mist. Magnus, Tom and Mary the traitor stare after it like every sad story of the sea, their life’s luggage dumped around them and the red beacon dripping slow fire on their heads.

“Can we go back to Vienna after this?” asks Tom. “I’d like to see Becky Lederer.”

Magnus does not answer him. Magnus is too busy being enthusiastic. He will be enthusiastic for his own funeral and Mary loves him for this as she loves him for too much else, does still. Sometimes his sheer goodness accuses me.

“This is it, Mabs!” he cries, waving an arm grandly at the treeless conical hill of brown houses that is their newest home. “We’ve found it. Plush-sur-mer.” And he turns to her with the smile she has not seen until this very holiday—so gallant, so tired-bright in its despair. “We’re safe here, Mabs. We’re okay.”

He throws an arm around her, she lets him. He draws her to him, they hug. Tom squeezes between, an arm round each of them. “Hey, let

me

have some of that,” he says. Locked together like the closest allies in the world, the three move off down the jetty, leaving their luggage till they have found a place to put it. Which they achieve within the hour, for clever Magnus knows just the right taverna to go to first time, whom to charm and whom to recruit in the surprisingly passable Greek identity he has somehow cobbled together for himself on their journeying. But there is the evening yet to come and the evenings are getting worse and worse, they hang over her from when she wakes, she can feel them creeping up on her all through her day. To celebrate their new home Magnus has brought a bottle of scotch though they have agreed several times in the last few days to lay off the hard stuff and stick to local wine. The bottle is nearly empty and Tom, thank God, is finally asleep in his new bedroom. Or so Mary prays, for Tom has recently become a fag-ender, as her father would have said, hanging around them for whatever he can pick up.

“Hey, come on, Mabs, that’s a bit of a bad face, isn’t it?” says Magnus, jollying her up. “Don’t you like our new

Schloss?”

“You were being funny and I smiled.”

“Didn’t look like a smile,” says Magnus, smiling himself to show her how. “More like a bit of a grimace from where I sits, m’dear.”

But Mary’s blood is rising and as usual she cannot stop herself. The prospect of her uncommitted crime is already laying its guilt on her.

“That’s what you’re writing about, is it?” she snaps. “How you waste your wit on the wrong woman?”

Appalled by her own unpleasantness Mary bursts out weeping and drives her fists on to the arms of the rush chair. But Magnus is not appalled at all. Magnus puts down his glass and comes to her, he taps her gently on the arm with his fingertips, waiting to be let in. He puts her glass delicately out of reach. Moments later the springs of their new bed are pinging and whining like a brass band tuning up, for a desperate erotic fervour has latterly come to Magnus’s aid. He makes love to her as if he will never see her again. He buries himself in her as if she is his only refuge and Mary goes with him blindly. She climbs, he draws her after him, she is shouting at him—“Please, oh Christ!” He hits the mark for her, and for a blessed moment Mary can kiss the whole bloody world goodbye.

“We’re using Pembroke, by the way,” Magnus says later but not quite late enough. “I’m sure it’s unnecessary but I want to be on the safe side in case.”

Pembroke is one of Magnus’s worknames. He keeps the Pembroke passport in his briefcase, she has already located it. It has an artfully muddy photograph that might be Magnus or might not. In the forgery workshop in Berlin they used to call photographs like that floaters.

“What do I tell Tom?” she asks.

“Why tell him anything?”

“Our son’s name is Pym. He might take a little oddly to being told he’s Pembroke.”

She waits, hating herself for her intractability. It is not often that Magnus has to hunt for an answer even when it concerns guidance on how to deceive their child. But he hunts now, she can feel him do it as he lies wakefully beside her in the dark.

“Yes, well tell him the Pembrokes own the house we’re in, I should. We’re using their name to order things from the shop. Only if asked, naturally.”

“Naturally.”

“Those two men are still there,” says Tom from the door, who turns out to have been part of their conversation all this while.

“What men?” says Mary.

But her skin is pricking on her nape, her body is clammy with panic. How much has Tom heard? Seen?

“The ones who are mending their motorbike by the river. They’ve got special army sleeping-bags and a torch and a special tent.”

“There are campers all over the island,” says Mary. “Go back to bed.”

“They were on our ship too,” says Tom. “Behind the lifeboat, playing cards. Watching us. Speaking German.”

“Lots of people were on the ship,” says Mary. Why don’t you say something, you bastard? she screams at Magnus in her head. Why do you lie dead instead of helping me when I’m still wet from you?

With Tom on one side of her, Magnus on the other, Mary listens to the bells of Plomari tolling out the hours. Four more days, she tells herself. On Sunday, Tom flies back to London for the new school term. And on Monday I’ll do it and be damned.

Brotherhood was shaking her. Nigel had said something to him: ask her about the beginning—pin her down.

“We want you to come back a stage, Mary. Can you do that? You’re running ahead of yourself.”

She heard murmuring, then the sound of Georgie changing a reel on her tape-recorder. The murmuring was her own.

“Tell us how you came to be taking the holiday in the first place, will you, dear? Who proposed it? . . . Oh Magnus, did he? I see. And was that here in this house? . . . It was.... Now what time of day would that have been? Sit up, will you?”

So Mary sat up and began again where Jack had told her: on a sweet, early summer evening in Vienna when everything was still absolutely fine and neither Lesbos nor all the islands that came before it were a glint in clever Magnus’s eye. Mary was in the basement in her overalls, binding a first edition of

Die letzten Tage der Menschheit,

by Karl Kraus which Magnus had found in Leoben while meeting a Joe there and Mary—

“That a regular one—Leoben?”

“Yes, Jack, Leoben was regular.”

“How often did he go there?”

“Twice a month. Three times. It was an old Hungarian he had, no one special.”

“He told you that, did he? I thought he kept his Joes to himself.”

“An old Hungarian wine dealer from way back, with offices in Leoben and Budapest. Mostly Magnus kept his secrets to himself. Sometimes he told me. Now can I go on?”

Tom was at school, Frau Bauer was out praying, said Mary. It was some kind of Catholic bean feast, Assumption, Ascension, Prayer and Repentance, Mary had lost count. Magnus was supposed to be at the American Embassy. The new committee had just started meeting and she wasn’t expecting him back till late. She was bang in the middle of glueing when suddenly, without hearing a sound, she saw him standing in the doorway—God knows how long he’d been there—looking very pleased with himself and watching her the way he liked to.

“How was that, dear? Watched you how?” Brotherhood cut in.

Mary had surprised herself. She faltered. “Superior, somehow. Pained superiority. Jack, don’t make me hate him, please.”

“All right, he’s watching you,” said Brotherhood.

He is watching her and when she catches sight of him he bursts out laughing and shuts her mouth with passionate kisses doing his Fred Astaire number, then it’s upstairs for a full and frank exchange of views, as he calls it. They make love, he hauls her to the bath, washes her, hauls her out and dries her, and twenty minutes later Mary and Magnus are bounding across the little park on the top of Döbling like the happy couple they nearly are, past the sandpits and the climbing-frame that Tom is too big for, past the elephant cage where Tom kicks his football, down the hill towards the Restaurant Teheran which is their improbable pub because Magnus so adores the black-and-white videos of Arab romances they play for you with the sound down while you eat your couscous and drink your Kalterer. At the table he holds her arm fiercely and she can feel his excitement racing through her like a charge, as if having her has made him want her more.

“Let’s get away, Mabs. Let’s really get away. Let’s live life for a change instead of acting it. Let’s take Tom and all our mid-tour leave and bugger off for the whole of the summer. You paint, I’ll write my book, and we’ll make love until we fall apart.”

Mary says where to, Magnus says who cares, I’ll go to the travel agent on the Ring tomorrow. Mary says what about the new committee. He is holding her hand inside his own, touching it with his fingertips into little peaks, and she is going mad for him again, which is what he likes.

“The new committee, Mary,” Magnus pronounces, “is the most stupid bloody charade I’ve been mixed up in, and believe me, I’ve seen a few. All it is, it’s a talking-shop to goose up the Firm’s ego and allow them to tell whoever will listen to them that we’re hugger-mugger in bed with the Americans. Lederer can’t possibly imagine we’re going to unveil our networks to him, and as for Lederer, he wouldn’t tell me the name of his tailor, let alone his agents—assuming he’s got either, which I doubt.”

Brotherhood again: “Did he tell you

why

Lederer mightn’t be inclined to talk to him?”

“No,” said Mary.

Nigel for a change: “And no other reasons offered as to why or how the committee might be a charade?”

“It was a charade, it was a sham, it was makework. That’s all he said. I asked about his Joes, he said the Joes could look after themselves and if Jack was bothered about them he could send a locum. I asked what Jack would think—”

“And what

would

Jack think?” said Nigel, all open curiosity.

“He said Jack’s a sham too: ‘I’m not married to Jack, I’m married to you. The Firm should have retired him ten years ago. Sod Jack.’ Sorry. That’s what he said.”

Hands shoved in his pockets, Brotherhood took a stroll round the little room, poking at Frau Bauer’s photographs of her illegitimate daughter, poring over her shelf of paperback romances.

“Anything else about me?” he asked.

“Jack’s had too many miles in the saddle. The Boy Scout era’s over. It’s a new scene and he’s not up to it.”

“Any more?” said Brotherhood.

Nigel had lowered his chin into his hand and was studying one small but perfectly formed shoe.

“No,” said Mary.

“Did he go for a walk that night? Meet P?”

“He’d been the night before.”

“I said that night. Answer the bloody question!”

“And I said the night before!”

“With a newspaper. The whole bit?”

“Yes.”

His hands still in his pockets, his head high against his shoulders, Brotherhood turned stiffly to Nigel. “I’m going to tell her,” he said. “You want to throw a fit?”

“Are you asking me formally?” Nigel asked.

“Not particularly.”

“If you are, I’ll have to pass it to Bo,” said Nigel and looked respectfully at his gold watch as if he took orders from it.

“Lederer knows and we know. If Pym knows too, who’s left?” Brotherhood insisted.

Nigel thought about this. “Up to you. Your man, your decision, your tail-end. Frankly.”

Brotherhood leaned over Mary and put his head close to her ear. She remembered his smell: tweedy and paternal. “Listening?”

She shook her head. I’m not, I never will be, I wish I never had.

“The new committee that your Magnus derided was shaping up to be a very high-powered outfit. Maybe the best potential working relationship at field level that we’ve had with the Americans for years. The name of the game was mutual trust. Not as easy to establish these days as it used to be, but we managed it. Are you going to sleep?”

She nodded.

“Your Magnus was not only aware of this, he was one of the prime movers in getting the committee off the ground. If not

the

prime mover. He even went so far as to complain to me, when we were negotiating the deal, that London was being small-minded in its interpretation of the barter terms. He thought we should give the Americans more. In exchange for more. That’s number one.”

I have absolutely nothing else to say. You can have my home address, my next of kin and that’s your lot. You taught me that yourself, Jack, in case they ever grabbed me.

“Number two is that for reasons which I regarded at the time as specious and insulting, the Americans objected to your husband’s presence on that committee not three weeks after it met, and asked me to replace him with somebody more to their liking. Since Magnus was kingpin of the Czecho operation and of several other little shows in Eastern Europe besides, this was a totally unrealistic demand. They’d raised the same objections about him in Washington the year before and Bo had bowed to them, in my view mistakenly. I wasn’t about to let them do it again. I happen not to care for American gentlemen or anybody else telling me how to run my shop. I said no and ordered Magnus to take himself off on mid-tour leave and stay clear of Vienna till I told him to come back. That’s the truth, and I think it’s time you heard some.”

“It’s also very secret,” said Nigel.

She waited in vain to be amazed. No surge of protest, no flash of the celebrated family temper. Brotherhood had taken himself to the window and was staring out. Morning had come early because of the snow. He looked old and beaten. His white hair was fluffed against the light and she could see the pink skin of his scalp.

“You defended him,” she said. “You were loyal.”

“Seems as if I was a bloody fool as well.”

The house had turned itself upside down. The thump of shifting furniture came from below them in the drawing-room. The safest place to be was here. Upstairs with Jack.

“Oh don’t be so hard on yourself, Jack,” Nigel said.

Brotherhood had sat Mary in the chair and handed her a whisky. You get one only, he had said; make it last. Nigel had taken over the bed and was lounging on it with one suited little leg stuck out in front of him as if he’d sprained it trying to get up the steps of his club. Brotherhood had turned his back on both of them. He preferred the view from the window.

“So first you go to Corfu. Your auntie has a house there. You borrowed it from her. Tell that bit. Carefully.”

“Aunt Tab,” said Mary.

“In full, I think,” said Nigel.

“Lady Tabitha Grey. Daddy’s sister.”

“Sometime member of the Firm,” Brotherhood murmured to Nigel. “There’s hardly a member of her family hasn’t been on our books at one time or another, come to think of it.”

She had telephoned Aunt Tab as soon as they got back from their drink that evening, and by a miracle there’d been a cancellation and her house was free. They took it, phoned Tom’s school and arranged for him to fly there direct when term ended. As soon as the Lederers heard, they wanted to come too of course. Grant said he would drop everything but Magnus wouldn’t hear of it. The Lederers are exactly the kind of social prop I need to kick away, he had said. Why the hell should I take my work with me on holiday? Five days later they were settled into Tab’s house and everything was absolutely fine. Tom took tennis lessons at the hotel up the road, swam, fed the landlady’s goats and pottered around the boat with Costas who looked after it and watered the garden. But his best thing was the crazy cricket matches on the edge of town that Magnus took him to in the evenings. Magnus said the Brits had brought the game to the island when they were defending it against Napoleon. Magnus knew those things. Or pretended to.

At the cricket in Corfu Magnus was closer to Tom than he had ever been. They lay on the grass, munched ice creams, rooted for their favourite players and had those mannish chats that were so crucial to Tom’s happiness: for Tom loved Magnus to distraction; he was a man’s boy, always had been. As to Mary, she had taken up pastels because Corfu in summer was really too hot for her style of water-colours, the paint just dried on the page before she could get near it. But she was drawing well, getting nice likenesses and shapes, and playing hostess to half the dogs on the island because the Greeks don’t feed them or look after them or

anything.

So everyone was happy, everyone absolutely fine and Magnus had a cool conservatory to write in, and inland walks for his restlessness, which came to him first thing in the morning and again in late evening after he had held it off all day. They lunched late, usually in a taverna—and often rather a liquid affair, to be honest, but why not, they were on holiday. Then long sexy siestas while Mary and Magnus made love on the balcony and Tom lay on the beach studying the nudies across the bay with Magnus’s binoculars, so as Magnus put it everybody was getting his pound of flesh. Until one day the clock stopped dead and Magnus came back from a late walk and confessed he had hit a bit of a block with his writing. He just strode in, poured himself a stiff ouzo, flung himself into a chair and said it straight out:

“Sorry, Mabs. Sorry, Tom, old chap. But this place is too damned idyllic. I need roughing up a bit. I need

people,

for Christ’s sake. Smoke and dirt and a bit of suffering around us. It’s like being on the moon here, Mabs. Worse than Vienna. Truly.”

He was sweet about it but he was adamant. He’d been drinking, obviously, but that was because he was upset. “I’m going bonkers, Mabs. It’s really getting to me. I told Tom. Didn’t I, Tom? I said I really can’t take much more of this and I feel a shit because you two are having such a good time.”

“Yes, he did,” said Tom.

“Several times. And today it’s just hit me, Mabs. You’ve got to help me out. Both of you.”

So of course they both said they would. Mary rang Tab at once, so that she could put the house back on the market, they all had a bear-hug and went to bed feeling resolved, and next day Mary packed while Magnus went off to town to do tickets and fix the next stage of their odyssey. But Tom, over washing-up which was always a talkative time for him, had a different version of why they were leaving Corfu. Daddy had met this mystery man at cricket. It was a really super match, Mum, the best two teams on the island, a real vendetta. We were watching it like mad and suddenly there was this wise, stringy man with a sad moustache like a conjuror’s and a limp, and Dad got all uptight. He came up to Dad smiling, they talked a bit, they walked round and round the ground together with the thin man going slowly like an invalid, but he was terribly kind to Dad although Dad got so emanated.

“Animated,” Mary corrected him automatically. “Don’t talk too loud, Tom. I think Daddy’s working somewhere.”

And there was this really incredible batsman, said Tom. Called Phillippi. Just the absolute best batsman Tom had seen

ever.

“He scored eighteen in one over and the crowd went absolutely ape, but Dad didn’t notice, he was so busy listening to the kind man.”

“How do you know he was so kind?” said Mary with a strange irritation. “Keep your voice down.” There was no light in the conservatory, but sometimes Magnus sat there in the dark.

“He was like a father with him, Mum. He’s senior to him but sort of calm. He kept offering Dad a ride in his car. Dad kept saying no. But he didn’t get angry or anything, he was too wise. He gentled him and smiled.”

“What car? It’s just a great big romance, Tom. You know it is.”

“The Volvo. Mr. Kaloumenos’s Volvo. One man was driving and another man in the back. They kept up with them on the other side of the fence when they went round and round talking. Honestly, Mum. The thin man never lost his temper or anything, and he really likes Dad, you can tell. It’s not just holding arms. They’re friends to each other. Much more than Uncle Grant. More like Uncle Jack.”

Mary asked Magnus that night. They’d packed, she was excited to be moving, and really looking forward to the Athens museums.

“Tom says you were harassed by some tiresome man at the cricket match,” said Mary while they enjoyed a rather stiff nightcap after their heavy day.

“Was I?”

“Some little man who chased you round and round the ground. Sounded like an angry husband to me. He had a moustache, unless Tom imagined it.”

Then vaguely Magnus did remember. “Oh that’s right. He was some boring ancient Brit who kept pressing me to go and see his villa. Wanted to flog it. Bloody little pest actually.”

“He spoke German,” said Tom, next day at breakfast while Magnus was out walking.

“Who did?”

“Dad’s thin friend. The man who picked Dad up at the cricket. And Dad spoke German back to him too. Why did Dad say he was an ancient Brit?”

Mary flew at him. She hadn’t been so angry with him for years. “If you want to listen to our conversations, you bloody well come in and listen to them and don’t skulk outside the door like a spy.”

Then she was ashamed of herself and played tennis with him till the boat left. On the boat Tom was sick as a dog and by the time they reached Piraeus he had a temperature of a hundred and three so her guilt was unconfined. At the Athens hospital a Greek doctor diagnosed shrimp rash which was absurd because Tom loathed shrimps and hadn’t touched a single one; by now his face was swollen like a hamster’s, so they took expensive rooms and put him to bed with an icepack and Mary read fantasy to him while Magnus listened or sat in Tom’s room to write. But mainly he liked to listen because the best thing in his life, he always said, was watching her comfort their child. She believed him.

“Didn’t he go out at all?” Brotherhood asked.

“Not to begin with. He didn’t want to.”

“Make any phone calls?” said Nigel.

“The Embassy. To check in. So that you’d know where he was.”

“He tell you that?” said Brotherhood.

“Yes.”

“You weren’t there when he made them?” Nigel said.

“No.”

“Hear him through the wall?” Nigel again.

“No.”

“Know who he spoke to?” Still Nigel.

“No.”

From his place on the bed Nigel lifted his eyes to Brotherhood. “But he phoned

you,

Jack,” he said encouragingly. “Little chats from out-of-the-way places with his old boss now and then? That’s practically mandatory, isn’t it? Check on the Joes—‘How’s our old buddy from you-know-where?’”

Nigel is one of the new non-professionals, Mary remembered Magnus telling her. He’s one of the idiots who are supposed to be introducing a breath of Whitehall realism. If ever I heard a contradiction in terms, that’s it, said Magnus.

“Not a peep,” Brotherhood was replying. “All he did was send me a string of stupid postcards saying ‘Thank God you’re not here’ and giving me his latest address.”

“When did he start going out?” said Nigel.

“When Tom’s temperature went down,” Mary replied.

“A week?” said Nigel invitingly. “Two?”

“Less,” said Mary.

“Describe,” said Brotherhood.

It was evening, probably their fourth day. Tom’s face was normal again so Magnus suggested Mary go shopping while he baby-sat Tom to give her a break. But Mary wasn’t keen on braving the Athens streets alone so Magnus went instead; Mary would do a museum in the morning. He came back around midnight very pleased with himself saying he’d found this marvellous old Greek travel agent in a basement opposite the Hilton, a tremendously cultured fellow, and how they had drunk ouzo together and solved the problems of the universe. The old man ran a villa-renting service for the islands and hoped to turn up a cancellation in a week or so when they’d all had enough of Athens.

“I thought islands were out,” Mary said.

For a moment it seemed that Magnus had forgotten the reason they had left Corfu. He smiled lamely and said something about not every island being the same. After that, she seemed to lose count of the days. They moved to a smaller hotel; Magnus wrote and wrote, went out in the evenings and when Tom was well enough took him swimming. Mary sketched the Acropolis and took Tom to a couple of museums but he preferred swimming. Meanwhile they waited for the old Greek to come up with something.

Brotherhood was once more interrupting. “This writing of his. How much did he talk about it exactly?”

“He wanted to preserve his secrecy. Scraps. That was all he gave me.”

“Like his Joes. The same,” Brotherhood suggested.

“He wanted to keep me fresh for when he’d really got something to show me. He didn’t want to talk it out of himself.”

It was a quiet and, as Mary now remembered it, strangely furtive time until one night Magnus vanished. He went out after dinner saying he was going to give the old boy a prod. Next morning he hadn’t come back and by lunchtime Mary was scared. She knew she should phone the Embassy. On the other hand she didn’t want to start a scare unnecessarily or do anything that might get Magnus into trouble.

Yet again Brotherhood cut in. “What sort of trouble?”

“If he’d gone on a bender or something. It wouldn’t exactly have looked well on his file. Just when he was hoping for promotion.”

“Had he gone on benders before?”

“Absolutely not. He and Grant got drunk together occasionally but that was as far as it went.”

Nigel sharply lifted his head. “But why should he be expecting promotion? Who said anything about promotion to him?”

“I did,” said Brotherhood without a whiff of repentance. “I reckoned after all the messing him around he was about owed it with his reinstatement.”

Nigel made a neat little note in his book and smiled mirthlessly as he wrote. Mary went on.

Anyway, she waited till evening then took Tom up to the Hilton and together they explored all the houses opposite until they found the cultured old Greek in his basement, exactly as Magnus had described him. But the Greek hadn’t seen Magnus for a week and Mary wouldn’t stay for coffee. When they got back to the taverna they found Magnus with two days’ beard, dressed in the clothes he had disappeared in, sitting in the courtyard and eating bacon and eggs, drunk. Not silly drunk, he couldn’t do that. Not angry drunk, or maudlin, or aggressive, and least of all indiscreet, because drink only ever fortified his defences. Courteous drunk, therefore, and amiable to a fault as ever, and his cover story perfectly intact except for one rare mistake.

“Sorry, gang. Got a bit pissed with Dimitri. Swine drank me clean under the table. Hullo, Tom.”

“Hullo,” said Tom.

“Who’s Dimitri?” Mary asked.

“You know who Dimitri is. Old Greek travel agent who does his beads across the road from the Hilton.”

“The cultured one.”

“That’s him.”

“Last night?”

“Far as I can remember, old girl, last night as ever was.”

“Dimitri hasn’t seen you since last Monday. He told us himself an hour ago.”

Magnus considered this. Tom had found a copy of the

Athens News

and was standing at the next table intently studying the film page.

“You checked on me, Mabs. You shouldn’t have done that.”

“I wasn’t checking on you, I was looking for you!”

“Don’t make a scene now, girl. Please. Other people eating here, you see.”

“I’m not making a scene. You are. It’s not me who disappears for two days and comes back with a lie. Tom, go to your room, darling. I’ll be up in a minute.”

Tom left, smiling brightly to show he hadn’t heard anything. Magnus took a long drink of coffee. Then he grasped Mary’s hand and kissed it and gently pulled her down on to the chair beside him.

“Which would you rather I told you, Mabs? I was carousing with a whore or I’ve got problems with a Joe?”

“Why don’t you just tell me the truth?”

The suggestion amused him. Not cruelly or cynically. Merely, he received it with the rueful indulgence that he would show towards Tom when he came through with one of his solutions for ending world poverty or the arms race.

“Know something?” He kissed her hand again and held it against his cheek. “Nothing goes away in life.” To her surprise she felt moisture in his stubble and realised he was weeping. “I’m in Constitution Square, right? Coming out of the Grande Bretagne bar. Minding my own business. What happens? I walk straight into the arms of a Czech Joe I used to run. Real tough egg, fabricator, caused us a lot of problems. Holds my arm like this. ‘Colonel Manchester! Colonel Manchester!’ Threatens to call the police, expose me as a British spy if I don’t give him money. Says I’m the only friend he’s got left in the world. ‘Come and drink with me, Colonel Manchester. Like we used to.’ So I did. Drank him right under the table. Then gave him the slip. I’m afraid I got a bit pissed myself. Line of duty. Let’s go to bed.”

And they do. And make love. The desperate screwing of strangers while Tom reads fantasy next door. And two days later they leave for Hydra, but Hydra is too cramped, too ominous, there is suddenly nowhere to go but Spetsai: at this time of year we’ll have no problem. Tom asks if Becky can join them, Magnus says no she absolutely can’t because they’ll all want to come and he’s not going to have a pride of Lederers sitting on his head while he’s trying to write. Otherwise, apart from his drinking, Magnus has never been more caring and polite than now.

She had stopped. Like standing back from a painting halfway. Studying the story so far. She drank some whisky, lit a cigarette.

“Christ,” said Brotherhood softly. Then nothing.

Nigel had found a bit of dead skin on the back of one undersized finger and was picking it off meticulously.

It is Lesbos again, it is another dawn but the same Greek bed and Plomari is once more waking up though Mary is praying it will go back to sleep again, that the sounds will fade and the sun flop behind the rooftops where it came from, because it is Monday and yesterday Tom went back to school. Mary has the evidence under her pillow where she promised to put the rabbitskin he gave her to keep her safe—and as if she needed it to strengthen her resolve—the terrible memory of his last words to her before he left. Mary and Magnus have driven him to the airport, weighed him in for yet another departure. Tom and Mary are standing about unable to touch each other while they wait for the flight to be called, Magnus is at the bar buying Tom a bag of pistachios for the journey and an ouzo for himself while he’s about it. Mary has six times confirmed that Tom has his passport and his money and his letter to Matron about his shrimp rash, and his letter to Granny to be handed to her the

moment

you meet her at London Airport, darling, so that you don’t forget. But Tom is even more than usually distracted; he is looking back to the main entrance, watching the people going through the swing doors, and there is something desperate in his face, so desperate that Mary really wonders whether he is thinking of making a dash for it.

“Mums?” Sometimes, when he is distracted, he still calls her that.

“Yes, darling.”

“They’re here, Mums.”

“Who are?”

“Those two campers from Plomari. They’re sitting in the airport carpark on their motorbike, watching Dad.”

“Now darling just

stop,”

Mary retorts firmly, determined to drive away these shadows, one and all. “Just completely stop, okay?”

“Only I’ve recognised them, you see. I worked it out this morning. I remembered. They’re the men who drove the car round the outside of the cricket ground at Corfu while Dad’s friend tried to make him come for a drive.”

For a moment, though Mary has been through this agonising procedure a dozen times before, she wants to scream out: “Stay—don’t go—I don’t care a damn about your bloody education—stay with me!” But instead the fool waves him through the barrier and saves her tears for the journey back while Magnus is absolutely sweet to her as ever. And now it is next morning, Tom is just about arriving at his school, and Mary is staring at the prison bars of Kyria Katina’s rotting shutters while the sky remorselessly whitens through the cracks and she is trying not to hear the clanking of the water-pipes beneath her and the rush of water free-falling onto the flagstones as Magnus celebrates his morning shower.

“Wowee! Christ! You awake, girl? It’s brass monkeys down here, believe me!”

Believe you, she repeats to herself and draws deeper into the bedclothes. In fifteen years he never called me girl till here. Now suddenly she is girl all day as if he has woken to her gender. A single width of floorboard separates her from him and if she dares look over the bedside she will glimpse his stranger’s naked body through the gaps between the planks. Receiving no reply from her, Pym starts singing his one piece of Gilbert and Sullivan while he sloshes water.

“‘ Rising early in the morning, We proceed to light the fire . . .’ How’m I doing?” he calls when he has sung all he knows.

Mary in another life has a small reputation for her music. In Plush she led a passable group in madrigals. When she was doing her stint at Head Office she sang solo in the Firm choir. It’s just that nobody’s ever played records for you, she used to tell him in a veiled criticism of his first wife, Belinda. One day your singing voice will be as good as your spoken one, darling.

She summons her breath. “Better than Caruso!” she shouts.

The exchange is accomplished, Magnus can resume his showering.

“It went well, Mabs. Really well. Seven pages of deathless prose. Undercoat but good.”

“Great.”

He has started shaving. She can hear him empty the kettle into the plastic washing-up bowl. Contour blades, she thinks: oh God, I forgot to buy him his bloody Contour blades. All the way to the airport and back she had known there was something she had forgotten, for little things are as dreadful to her as big things these days. Now I will buy cheese for lunch. Now I will buy bread to go with the cheese. She closes her eyes and takes another enormous breath.

“Did you sleep?” she asks.

“Like the dead. Didn’t you notice?”

Yes, I noticed. I noticed how you slipped out of bed at two in the morning and crept downstairs to your workroom. How you paced and stopped pacing. I heard the creak of your chair and the whisper of your felt-tipped pen as you began to write. Who to? In what voice? Which one?

A boom of music drowns the sound of his shaving. He has switched on his clever radio for the BBC

World News.

Magnus knows the time to the minute, all through the day and night. If he looks at his watch it is only to confirm the schedules in his brain. She listens numbly to a recitation of events no one is able to control. A bomb has gone off in Beirut. A town has been wiped out in El Salvador. The pound has fallen. Or risen. The Russians are out of the next Olympics—or into them after all. Magnus follows politics like a gambler who is too wise to bet. The noise grows steadily louder as Magnus carries the radio upstairs, slop, slop, naked except for his sandals. He bends over her and she smells his shaving soap and the flat Greek cigarettes he has taken to smoking while he writes.

“Still sleepy?”

“A bit.”

“How’s Rat?”

Mary has been tending a half-eviscerated rat she found in the garden. It is lying in a straw box in Tom’s room.

“I haven’t looked,” she says.

He kisses her close to the ear, an explosion, and starts to fondle her breast as a sign to her to take him, but she grunts an awkward “Later” and rolls over. She hears him slop to the wardrobe, she hears the old door resist and jolt open. If he chooses shorts he’s going for a walk. If he chooses jeans he’s going into town to drink with the deadbeats. Colonel call-me-Parkie Parker, with my Greek fancy-boy and my Sea-lyham dog that I hold on the lead like a teapot. Elsie and Ethel, retired dyke schoolteachers from Liverpool. Jock somebody, I’ve a wee business in Dundee. Magnus pulls out a shirt and slips it on. She hears him fastening his shorts.

“Where are you going?” she says.

“For a walk.”

“Wait for me. I’ll come with you. You can tell me about it.”

Who was this speaking out of her suddenly—this mature straight-to-the-point woman?

Magnus is as surprised as she is: “About what, for heaven’s sake?”

“Whatever it is that’s worrying you, darling. I don’t mind. Just tell me, whatever it is, so that I don’t have to . . .”

“Don’t have to what?”

“Bottle it up. Look away.”

“Nonsense. Everything’s fine. We’re just both a bit blue without Tom.” He comes to her and lays her back on the pillow as if she were an invalid. “You sleep it off, I’ll walk it off. See you at the taverna round three.”

Only Magnus can make Kyria Katina’s front door close so softly.

Suddenly Mary is strong. His departure has released her. Breathe. She goes to the north window, everything planned. She has done these things before and remembers now that she is good at them, often steadier than the men. In Berlin when Jack needed a spare girl Mary had kept watch, gulled room keys out of concierges, replaced stolen documents in dangerous desks, driven scared Joes to safe flats. I knew the game better than I realised, she thought. Jack used to praise my coolness and my sharp eye. From the window she sees the new tarmac road winding into the hills. Sometimes he goes that way, but not today. Opening the window, she leans out as if savouring the place and morning. That witch Katina has milked her goats early; that means she’s gone to market. Only one fleeting glance does Mary allow herself towards the dried-up river bed where, in the shadow of the stone footbridge, the same two boys are tinkering with their German-registered motorbike. If they had appeared outside the house in Vienna like this, Mary would have been on to Magnus in an instant—phoned him if need be at the Embassy. “Looks like the angels are flying rather low today,” she’d have said. And Magnus would have done whatever he did—alerted the diplomatic patrol, sent his people down to check them out. But now in their separated lives it is as if they have agreed between them that angels, even suspected ones, are not to be remarked upon.

His workroom is on the ground floor. He does not lock the door on her but there is an ethic between them that she does not enter except at his specific beckoning. She turns the handle and steps inside. The shutters are closed but they do not cover the upper window panes and there is light for her to see by. Tread heavily, she tells herself, remembering her training. If you have to make a noise, make a bold one. The room is sparse, which is what Magnus likes. A desk, a chair, a single bed to crash on between bursts of creative matrix-writing. She pulls back the chair and sends a bottle of vodka skidding. The desk is covered with books and papers but she touches nothing. His old buckram-bound copy of

Simplicissimus

occupies pride of place as usual. His mascot. His something. It is a source of permanent offence to Mary that he will never let her bind it. Because I like it the way it is, he says stubbornly. That’s how it was given to me. By some woman no doubt. “For Sir Magnus who will never be my enemy” reads the inscription in German. Screw her. And screw fancy nicknames.

Brotherhood had again interrupted.

“Where’s it now, this book?”

With difficulty and a slight resentment Mary returned to time present.

But Brotherhood insisted: “It’s not in his desk downstairs. I didn’t see it lying about in the drawing-room either. It’s not in the bedroom or in Tom’s room. Where is it?”

“I told you,” she said. “He takes it everywhere.”

“You didn’t, but thank you,” Brotherhood retorted.

She is wearing a pair of cotton gloves against sweat and grime marks. He’ll use a trick. He does those things instinctively. His old briefcase lies on the floor, wide open, but she doesn’t touch that either. Other books are strewn like paperweights to hold down the manuscript and seemingly at random. She reads a title. It is in German:

Freedom and Conscience

by someone she has never heard of. Beside it, a copy of Madox Ford’s

Good Soldier,

which Magnus reads incessantly these days; it has become his Bible. Beside this again, an old photograph album. Gently she lifts the unfamiliar cover and without moving it turns a few pages. Magnus aged eight in football gear, a team group. Magnus aged five in alpine setting holding a toboggan. Magnus at Tom’s age already with his overwilling smile, inviting you in but not expecting to be invited. Magnus on honeymoon with Belinda, neither of them looking more than about twelve years old. She has not seen these photographs before. Letting the cover fall, Mary steps back and again surveys the arrangement on the desk. As she does so his bit of tradecraft becomes apparent to her. Each of the three books, lying seemingly haphazardly across the papers, is aligned to the point of the paper scissors at their centre. Going to the kitchen Mary grabs the tablecloth, comes back and lays it on the floor beside the desk, then measures the distances between each object on the desk with her gloved hand. As gently as if she is lifting bandages from a wound she lays them in the same pattern on the tablecloth. The papers on the desk now lie free for her inspection. She has not reckoned with so much dust. Just by crossing the floor she has set up clouds of it. I’m a tomb robber, she thinks, as the dust burns her throat. She is gazing at a wad of handwritten manuscript. The top page is dark with crossings-out. She picks up the wad, leaving everything else lying. She takes it to the little bed, sits down. At Plush when she was a girl they had called it “Kim’s Game” and played it every New Year’s Eve along with acting games and Murder and reels. At the training house, when she was supposed to be adult, they called it Observation and played it round the sleepy villages of Dedham, Manningtree and Bergholt: who’s had their door painted this week, pruned their roses, bought a new car; how many bottles of milk did No. 18 have on its doorstep? But wherever they play it Mary always comes top by miles; she is cursed with a snapshot memory from which very little ever goes away.

Bits of novel, she told Brotherhood, all beginnings.

A dozen Chapter Ones, some typed and some in longhand, all stiff with crossings-out. Mostly they told about the orphan childhood of a boy called Ben.

Doodles. Drawings of an arm stretched out to steal. A woman’s crotch.

Notes to himself, all abusive: “sentimental crap” . . . “rewrite or destroy” . . . “You’ve missed the curse we pass from man to child” . . . “One day a Wentworth will get us all.”

A pink folder marked “Random Passages.” Ben gives himself up to the authorities. Ben discovers there is another, real Secret Service, and joins it in the nick of time. A blue folder marked “Final Scenes,” several of them addressed to “Poppy, dear bloody Poppy.” A sheet of cartridge paper stolen from her sketch block on which Magnus has drawn a pattern of linked think-bubbles to form a flow chart of his ideas, exactly as Tom is taught to prepare his essays at school. Bubble: “If all Nature abhors a vacuum, how does a vacuum feel about all Nature?” Bubble: “Duplicity is when you please one person at the expense of another.” Bubble: “We are patriots because we are afraid to be cosmopolitan, cosmopolitan because we are afraid to be patriots.”

There was a tapping at the door but Brotherhood shook his head at Georgie, telling her to ignore it.

“It wasn’t his true writing,” Mary said. “It was all spiky. It ran for a while then seized up. It seemed to hurt him to go on.”

Brotherhood didn’t give a damn whom it hurt.

“More,” he said. “More. Hurry.”

“It’s me, sir,” Fergus called through the door. “Urgent message, sir. Very.”

“I said wait,” Brotherhood ordered.

“‘ The systems of Ben’s life are all collapsing,’” Mary continued. “‘ All his life he’s been inventing versions of himself that are untrue. Now the truth is coming to get him and he is on the run. His Wentworth is standing at the door.’”

“More,” said Brotherhood, towering over her.

“‘ Rick invented me, Rick is dying. What will happen when Rick drops his end of the string?’”

“Keep going.”

“A quotation from Saint Luke. I never saw him open a Bible in his life. ‘He who is faithful in a very little is faithful also in much.’”

“And?”

“‘He who is dishonest in a very little is dishonest also in much.’ He’d illuminated the edges of the page for hours on end. Different inks.”

“And?”

“‘ Wentworth was Rick’s Nemesis. Poppy was mine. We each spent our lives trying to put right what we’d done to them.’”

“And again!”

“‘ Now everyone’s after me. The Firm’s after me, the Americans are after me, you’re after me. Even poor Mary is after me, and she doesn’t know you exist.’”

“You

being who? Who’s

you

in this poem?”

“‘ Poppy. My destiny. Dearest Poppy, best of best friends, get your bloody dogs off my doorstep.’”

“Poppy like the flowers,” Brotherhood suggested, shoving away Georgie’s microphone as he knelt beside her. “Like the flowers in the chimney. But singular. One Poppy.”

“Yes.”

“And Wentworth like the place. Sunny Wentworth, in tasteful Surrey?”

“Yes.”

“Know him—her—anyone of that name?”

“No.”

“Or Poppy?”

“No.”n

“On.”

“There was a Chapter Eight,” she said. “Out of the blue. No Two to Seven, but this Chapter Eight, all in his own handwriting and without a crossing-out. Titled ‘Overdue Bills,’ whereas the Chapter Ones were untitled. Describing a day when Ben revolts against all his promises. Slipping from third to first person and staying there, whereas the Chapter Ones were ‘he’ and ‘Ben.’ ‘The creditors are beating at the door, Wentworth to the fore, but Ben doesn’t give a damn. I lower my head and lift my shoulders, I wade at them, I punch and flail and butt them while they smash my face in. But even with no face left I am doing what I should have done thirty-five years ago, to Jack and Rick and all the mothers and fathers, for stealing my life off my plate while I watched you do it. Poppy, Jack, the rest of you, driving me into a lifetime’s—a lifetime’s—a lifetime’s—’”

She had stopped. Iron clamps had squeezed the breath out of her. The door opened and Fergus gatecrashed, a flouting of discipline for which he would surely be punished. Nigel was staring at him expressionlessly. Georgie was rolling her eyes at him, pointing at the door and mouthing Get out, get out, but Fergus stood his ground.

“A lifetime’s what, for God’s sake?” Brotherhood was shouting in her ear.

She was whispering. She was screaming. She was fighting the word inside her mouth, heaving and pressing at it but nothing came out. Brotherhood shook her, at first gently, then much harder, then very hard indeed.

“Betrayal,” she said. “‘We betray to be loyal. Betrayal is like imagining when the reality isn’t good enough.’ He wrote that. Betrayal as hope and compensation. As the making of a better land. Betrayal as love. As a tribute to our unlived lives. On and on, these ponderous aphorisms about betrayal. Betrayal as escape. As a constructive act. As a statement of ideals. Worship. As an adventure of the soul. Betrayal as travel: how can we discover new places if we never leave home? ‘You were my Promised Land, Poppy. You gave my lies a reason.’”

And that was the very phrase she had got to in her reading, she explained—the one about Poppy and the Promised Land—when she turned round and saw Magnus in his shorts standing in the open doorway to his workroom, holding a big blue envelope in one hand and the telegram in the other, smiling like the head boy of one of his schools.

“There was someone else inside him,” Mary said, shocking herself. “It wasn’t him.”

“What the hell does that mean? You just said it was Magnus, standing in the doorway. What are you getting at?”

She didn’t know either. “It was something that had happened to him when he was young. Someone standing in doorways watching him. He was doing it back somehow. I could see the recognition in his face.”

“What did he

say?”

Nigel suggested helpfully.

She had a voice for Magnus, or perhaps it was just a facial expression. Empty yet impenetrable. Tirelessly polite: “Hullo, old love. Catching up with the great novel, are we? Not exactly Jane Austen, I’m afraid, but some of it may be usable when I get a proper run at it.”

The tablecloth was spread on the floor, his books and half his papers on it. But his smile flashed victory and relief as he held the telegram towards her. She took it from his hand and walked with it to the window in order to read it. Or to distract his attention from the desk.

“It was from you, Jack,” she said, “using your cover name of Victor. Addressed to Pym care of Pembroke. Return at once, you said. All is forgiven. Committee reassembles Vienna Monday 10 a.m. Victor.”

Taking his time, Brotherhood had turned to Fergus at last.

“What the hell do you want?” he said.

Fergus spoke the way Tom did when he had been holding back too long, waiting for the grown-ups to let him in.

“Crash message from the Station clerk at the Embassy, sir,” he blurted. “He phoned it through in word code. I’ve just unbuttoned it. The Station burnbox is missing from the strongroom.”

Nigel had a funny little gesture designed to ease a charged atmosphere. He raised his beloved hands and, with the fingertips pointing loosely toward Heaven, flapped them as if he were drying his nails. But Brotherhood, still kneeling at Mary’s side, seemed suddenly to have been seized by lethargy. He rose slowly, then slowly passed his hand across his mouth as if he had a bad taste on the tip of his tongue.

“Since when?”

“Not known, sir. Not signed out. They’ve been searching for it for this last hour. They can’t find it. That’s all they know. There’s a diplomatic courier card that goes with it. The card’s disappeared too.”

Mary had not yet grasped the mood. The synchronisation has gone wrong, she thought. Who is in the doorway, Fergus or Magnus? Jack’s gone deaf. Jack who questions in salvoes has run out of ammunition.

“Chancery guard says Mr. Pym called at the Embassy first thing Thursday morning on his way to the airport, sir. The guard hadn’t thought to mention it because he hadn’t put him into his log. It was upstairs, down again and sorry about your father, sir. But when he came down the stairs he was carrying this heavy black pouch.”

“And the guard didn’t think to question him at all?”

“Well he wouldn’t, sir, would he? Not with his father dead and him being in a hurry.”

“Anything else missing?”

“No, sir, just the burnbox, sir, so far as he’s got. And the card like I said.”

“Where are you going?” said Mary.

Nigel was on his feet, tugging at the points of his waistcoat, while Brotherhood was loading things into his jacket pocket for a long journey on his own. His yellow cigarettes. His pen and notebook. His old German lighter.

“What’s a burnbox?” Mary said, close on panic. “Where are you going? I’m talking! Sit down!”

Finally Brotherhood remembered her, and stared down at her where she sat.

“You wouldn’t know, would you,” he said. “Of course you wouldn’t. You were grade nine. You never got high enough to find out.” Explaining was a chore but he managed it for old times’ sake. “A burnbox is what it says. Little metal box. In this instance it’s a diplomatic pouch, steel-lined. Burns whatever is inside it as soon as you tell it to. It’s where a Station Chief keeps his crown jewels.”

“So what’s in it?”

Nigel and Brotherhood exchanged glances. Fergus still had his eyes wide open.

“What’s in it?” she repeated as a different and more elusive fear began to grip her.

“Oh. Not much,” said Brotherhood. “Agents in place. All our Czechs. A few Poles. Hungarian or two. Just about everything we have that’s run from Vienna. Or used to be. Who’s Wentworth?”

“You asked. I don’t know. A place. What else is in the burnbox ?”

“So it is. A place.”

She had lost him. Jack. Gone. Lost him as a lover, as a friend, as an authority. His face was her father’s face when she took him the news of Sam’s death. The love had gone out of him and the last of his faith with it.

“You knew,” he said casually. He was halfway to the door, not even looking at her. “You bloody knew, for years and years.”

We all did, she thought. But she hadn’t the heart to say it to him or, for that matter, the interest.

As if the bell had rung for the end of visiting time, Nigel also prepared to make his exit. “Now, Mary, I’m leaving you Georgie and Fergus for company. They’ll agree their cover with you and tell you how to play everything. They’ll report to me all the time. From now on, so will you. Only to me. Do you understand? If you need to leave a message or anything like that, I’m Nigel, I’m Head of Secretariat, my P.A. is called Marcia. Don’t talk to anybody else in the Firm at all. I’m afraid that’s an order. Even Jack,” he added, meaning Jack particularly.

“What else is in the burnbox?” she repeated.

“Nothing. Nothing at all. Routine stores. Don’t you worry yourself.” He came to her and, emboldened by Brotherhood’s intimacy with her, placed a hand awkwardly on her shoulder. “Listen. This needn’t all be as bad as it sounds. We have to take precautions, naturally. We have to assume the worst and cover ourselves. But Jack does have a rather Gothic way of looking at things sometimes. The less dramatic explanations are often a lot closer to home. Jack’s not the only one with experience.”

6

A

dark sea rain had enveloped Pym’s England and he strode in it warily. It was early evening and he had been writing for longer than he had written in his whole life and now he was empty and accessible and afraid. A foghorn sounded—one short, two long—a lighthouse or a ship. Pausing under a lamp he again studied his watch. A hundred and ten minutes to go, fifty-three years gone. Bandstand empty, bowling green awash. Shop-windows still wearing their fly-blown yellow cellophane against the summer’s sun.

He was heading out of town. He had bought a plastic cape from Blandy the haberdasher.

“Good

evening, Mr. Canterbury, sir, what can we be doing

you

for?” In the rain its hood pattered round him like a tin roof. Inside its skirts he carried his shopping for Miss Dubber: the bacon from Mr. Aitken, only mind and tell him he’s to cut it on number five, give him half a chance he’ll make it thicker. And tell that Mr. Crosse three of his tomatoes were rotten last week, not just bad,

rotten.

If I don’t have replacements I’ll never go to him again. Pym had followed her instructions to the letter, though not with the ferocity she would have wished, for both Crosse and Aitken were recipients of his secret subventions, and for years had been sending Miss Dubber bills for only half what she had spent. From Farways the travel agent he had also obtained details of a senior citizens’ tour of Italy departing Gatwick in six days. I’ll phone her cousin Melanie in Bognor, he thought. If I offer to pay for Melanie as well, Miss Dubber won’t be able to refuse.

A hundred and six minutes. Only four gone. From countless pressing memories in his head clamouring to be acknowledged, Pym selected instead Washington and the balloon. Of all the crazy ways we ever had of talking, really that balloon took the biscuit. You wanted a chat, I wouldn’t meet you. I was running scared and had appointed you my unperson. But you wouldn’t be put down, you never would. To humour me, you launched a miniature silver-coated gas balloon over the rooftops of Washington, D.C. Half a metre diameter; sometimes Tom gets them free at the supermarkets. As we drove our separate cars on either side of town, you told me in German what a fool I was to do a Garbo on you. Over matched handsets that hopped like bedbugs between the frequencies and must have sent the listeners just as frantic.

He was climbing the cliff path, past lighted bungalows cut from the gardens of a great house. I’ll phone that doctor of hers and get him to persuade her that a break is what she needs. Or the vicar, she’d listen to him. Below him the fairy lights of the Amusement Palace glowed like fat berries in the mist. Alongside them he could make out the blue-white neons of the Softa Ice Parlour. Penny, he thought. You’ll never see me again unless it’s my face in the newspaper. Penny belonged to his secret army of lovers, so secret she didn’t know she was a member. Five years ago she was selling fish and chips from a Portacabin on the promenade and was in love with a leather-boy called Bill who beat her up, until Pym ran the licence number of Bill’s motorbike across the Firm computer and established he was married and had kids in Taunton. In a disguised hand he sent the details to the local vicar and a year later Penny was married to a jolly Italian ice-cream seller called Eugenio. But not tonight she wasn’t. Tonight, as Pym had approached her café for his regular two scoops of Cornish, she was head to head with a burly man in a trilby whom Pym hadn’t liked the look of one bit. It was just an ordinary traveller, he told himself as a gust of wind filled his cape. A food salesman, a taxman. Who hunts alone these days apart from Jack? And Jack it isn’t, not by thirty years. It was the car, he thought. Those clean wings, the smart aerial. The pitch of his head as he listened.

“Any callers, Miss D?” said Pym, setting out his packages on the sideboard.

Miss Dubber was sitting in the kitchen watching American soap-opera and having her one of the day. Toby sat in her lap.

“They’re so wicked, Mr. Canterbury,” she said. “There’s not one among them we’d have here even for a night, would we, Toby? What’s that tea you bought? I said Assam, you silly man, take it back.”

“It is Assam,” Pym said gently, stooping to show her. “They’ve put it in a new packing and given you three pence off. Any callers while I was out?”

“Only the gasman for the meter.”

“That usual? Or someone new?”

“New, dear. They’re all new these days.” Lightly kissing her cheek he straightened her new shawl over her shoulders. “Give yourself a nice stiff vodka, darling,” she said.

But Pym declined, saying he must work.

Regaining his room he checked the papers on his desk. Stapler to handle of teacup. Book matches to pencil. Burnbox aligned to desk leg, ignore. Miss Dubber is no Mary. Shaving, he caught himself thinking of Rick. I saw your ghost, he thought. Not here but in Vienna. Just as I used to see you in the flesh in Denver, Seattle, San Francisco, Washington. I saw your ghost in every shop-window and autumn doorway while I tried to clear my itchy back. You were wearing your camel-hair coat and smoking the cigar you never drew on without frowning. Following me, you were, and your blue eyes shadowed like a drowned man’s, the pupils stuck against the upper lids to scare me. “Where are you off to, old son, where are those fine legs of yours taking you so late at night? Got a nice lady, have you? Someone who thinks the world of you? Come on, old son. You can tell your old man. Give us a hug.” In London you were lying on your deathbed but I wouldn’t go to you, I wouldn’t know about you or talk about you, it was my way of mourning you. “No, I will not. No, I will not,” I used to say each time my heel hit the cobble. So you came to me instead. To Vienna and did a Wentworth on me. Every corner I turned you were there. Until I felt your loving stare like a heat on the back I could never clear. Get off me, damn you, I whispered. What death was I wishing you? All of them by turns. Die, I told you. Do it on the pavement where everyone can see. Stop adoring me. Stop believing in me. Did you want money? Not any more. You had waived your claim to it in favour of the greatest claim of all. You wanted Magnus. You wanted my living spirit to enter your dying body and give you back the life I owed you. “Having a bit of fun, are we, son? Old Poppy’s crackerjack, I can see that for openers. What are you two hatching up together there? Come on, you can tell your old pal! Got some piece of business, have you? Putting a few bob in your pockets, are you, the way your old man taught you?”

Three minutes. I always like to cut it fine. Pym wiped his face clean and from an inside pocket drew his faithful copy of Grimmelshausen’s

Simplicissimus,

bound in worn brown buckram and much travelled. He laid it ready on the desk beside a pad of paper and a pencil, crossed the room and knelt down in front of dear old Winston’s wireless, spinning the Bakelite tuning dial until he had the wavelength.

Volume down. Switch on. Wait. A man and a woman discussing in Czech the economics of a fruit cooperative. Discussion fades in midsentence. Time signal announces evening news. Stand by. Pym is calm. Operational calm.

But he is also a little bit transported. There is a serenity here that is not quite of this world, a hint of mystical affinity in his youthful loving smile that says “Hullo there” to someone not quite of this earth. Of all those who have known him, other than this extraterrestrial stranger, perhaps only Miss Dubber has seen the same expression.

Item one, harangue against American imperialists following breakdown of latest round of arms talks. Sound of page turning, signal for get ready. Noted. You are going to talk to me. I am thankful. I appreciate this gesture. Item two coming up. Presenter introduces college professor from Brno. Good evening, Professor, and how is the Czech Secret Service this evening? The professor speaks, a passage for translation. All nerves extended, the all of me at full stretch. First sentence: THE TALKS HAVE ENDED IN DEADLOCK. Ignore. IN ANOTHER BID. Write it down. Slowly. Don’t rush. Patience again while we wait for the first numeral. Here it is. A FIFTY-FIVE-YEAR-OLD WELDER FROM PLZEŇ. He switched off the wireless and, pad in hand, returned to his desk, eyes straight ahead of him. Opening his Grimmelshausen at page 55, he found five lines down without even counting and on a fresh sheet of paper wrote out the first ten letters of that line, then converted them to numerals according to their position in the alphabet. Subtract without carrying. Don’t reason, do it. He was adding again, still not carrying. He was converting numbers into letters. Don’t reason. NEV . . . VER . . . RMI . . . IND . . . DEW . . . There’s nothing here. It’s gobbledegook. Tune in again at ten and take a fresh reading. He was smiling. He was smiling like a saint when the agony is over. The tears were starting to his eyes. Let them. He was standing, holding the page in both hands above his head. He was weeping. He was laughing. He could scarcely read what he had written. NEVER MIND, E. WEBER LOVE YOU ALWAYS. POPPY.

“You cheeky sod,” he whispered aloud, punching away more tears. “Oh Poppy. Oh my.”

“Is anything wrong, Mr. Canterbury? ” Miss Dubber demanded sternly.

“I came to take that vodka off you, Miss D. Vodka,” he explained. “Vodka and something.”

He was already mixing it.

“You’ve only been upstairs an hour, Mr. Canterbury. We don’t call that working, do we, Toby? No wonder the country’s in a fuss.”

Pym’s smile widened. “What fuss is that?”

“The football crowds. Setting such a bad example to the foreigners.

You’d

never have let that happen, would you, Mr. Canterbury?”

“Of course I wouldn’t.”

Warm orange juice from the bottle, oh glory! Chalky water from the tap, where else would you find it? He sat with her for an hour, bubbling on about the charms of Naples, before he returned to his task of saving the country.

How Rick won the peace I’ll never rightly know, Tom, but win it he did, overnight as usual, and none of us will ever have to worry again, son, there’s plenty for everyone and your old man’s made it. In the zeal of the new prosperity father and son took up the profession of country gentleman. With victory in Europe still wet on the hoardings the newly adolescent Pym bought himself a charcoal Harrods suit with its coveted long trousers, a black tie and a stiff white collar, all on the account, and steeled himself to have Sefton Boyd’s promised fish-hooks poked through his earlobes. Rick meanwhile in his immense maturity acquired a twenty-acre mansion in Ascot with white fencing down the drive, and a row of tweed suits louder than the Admiral’s, and a pair of mad red setters, and a pair of two-toned country shoes for walking them, and a pair of Purdey shotguns for his portrait with them, and a mile-long bar to while away his rustic evenings over bubbly and roulette, and a bronze bust of TP’s head on a plinth in the hall beside a larger one of his own. A platoon of displaced Poles was hauled in to staff the place, a new mother wore high heels on the lawn, bawled at the servants and gave Pym tips on the hygiene and diction of the upper classes. A Bentley appeared and was not changed or hidden for several weeks though a Pole with a grudge contrived to fill it with water from a hose-pipe through a crack in the window and drench Rick’s dignity when he opened the door next morning. Mr. Cudlove got a mulberry uniform and a cottage in the grounds where Ollie grew geraniums, sang

The Mikado,

and painted the kitchen for his nerves. Livestock and a surly cowman supplied the character of a farm, for Rick had become a taxpayer which I know now marked the summit of his heroic struggle for liquidity: “It’s a damn shame, Maxie,” he declared proudly to a Major Maxwell-Cavendish who had been brought in to advise on matters of the Turf. “Lord in Heaven if a man can’t enjoy the fruits of his labours these days what the devil did we fight the war for?” The major, who wore a tinted monocle, said “What indeed?” and pursed his lips into a holly leaf. And Pym, agreeing wholeheartedly, topped up the major’s glass. Still waiting to be sent to school, he was going through a faceless period and would have topped up anything.

Up in London the court commandeered a pillared Reichskanzlei in Chester Street staffed by a troupe of Lovelies who were changed as often as they wore out. A stuffed jockey in the Pym sporting colours waving his little whip at them, photographs of Rick’s neverwozzers, and a Tablet of Honour commemorating the unfallen companies of the latest Rick T. Pym & Son empire completed the Wall of Fame. Their names live in me for ever more, apparently, for it took me years of sworn statements to disown them and I have most of them by heart to this day. The best celebrate the victory at arms that Rick by now was convinced he had obtained for us single-handed: the Alamein Sickness & Health Company, the Military & Permanent Pensions Fund, the Dunkirk Mutual & General, the T.P. Veteran Alliance Company—all seemingly unlimited, yet all satellites of the great Rick T. Pym & Son holding company, whose legal limitations as a receptacle of widows’ mites were only gradually revealed. I have enquired, Tom. I have asked lawyers who know things. A hundred pounds of capital was enough to cover the lot. And we had books, fancy! Winfield on Tort, MacGillivray on Insurance, Snell on Equity, somebody else on Rome, hoary old lawyers that they were, they were always the first to disappear in adversity and the first to come back smiling when the struggle was won. And beyond Chester Street lay the clubs, tucked like safe houses around the quieter corners of Mayfair. The Albany, the Burlington, the Regency, the Royalty—their titles were nothing to the glories that awaited us inside. Do such places exist today? Not on the Firm’s expenses, Jack, that’s for sure. And if so, then in a world already dedicated to pleasure, not austerity. They don’t sell you illegal petrol coupons at the bar, illegal steaks in the grill-room or take illegal bets in the illegal sporting room. They don’t have illegal mothers in low gowns who swear you’ll break a lot of hearts one day. Or real live members of our beloved Crazy Gang leaning gloomily at the bar, an hour before reducing us to tears of laughter in the stalls. Or jockeys scurrying round the snooker table that was too high for them, a hundred quid a corner and Magnus why aren’t you at school yet and where’s that bloody jigger? Or Mr. Cudlove standing outside in his mulberry, reading

Das Kapital

against the Bentley steering wheel while he waited to whisk us to our next important conference with some luckless gentleman or lady requiring the divine touch.

Beyond the clubs again lay the pubs: Beadles at Maidenhead, the Sugar Island at Bray, the Clock here, the Goat there, the Bell at somewhere else, all with their silver grills and silver pianists and silver ladies at the bar. At one of them Mr. Muspole was called a bloody profiteer by a small waiter he was insulting and Pym contrived to leap in with a funny word in time to stop the fight. What the word was I don’t remember, but Mr. Muspole had once shown me a brass knuckleduster he liked to take to the races and I know he had it with him that night. And I know the waiter’s name was Billy Craft and that he took me home to meet his underfed wife and children in their Bob Cratchit flat on the edge of Slough, and that Pym spent a jolly night with them and slept on a bony sofa under everybody’s woollies. Because fifteen years later at a resources conference at Head Office who should loom out of the crowd but this same Billy Craft, supremo of domestic surveillance section. “I thought I’d rather follow them than feed them, sir,” he said with a shy laugh as he shook my hand about fifty times. “No disrespect to your father, mind. He was a great man, naturally.” Pym, it turned out, had not been the only one to redress Mr. Muspole’s ill-behaviour. Rick had sent him a case of bubbly and a dozen pairs of nylons for Mrs. Craft.

After the pubs, if we were lucky, came a dawn raid on Covent Garden for a nice touch of bacon and eggs to perk us up before the hundred-mile-an-hour dash to the stables where the jockeys put on brown caps and jodhpurs and became the Knights Templar Pym had always known they were, galloping the neverwozzers down frosty runways marked by pine sprigs, till in his loyal imagination they rode off into the sky to win the Battle of Britain for us all over again.

Sleep? I remember it just the once. We were driving to Torquay for a nice weekend’s rest at the Imperial, where Rick had set up an illegal game of chemin de fer in a suite overlooking the sea, and it must have been one of those times when Mr. Cudlove had resigned, for suddenly we found ourselves in the middle of a moonlit cornfield that Rick, smelling strongly of the cares of office, had mistaken for the open road. Stretched side by side on the Bentley roof, father and son let the hot moon scorch their faces.

“Are you all right?” Pym asked, meaning, are you liquid, are we on our way to prison?

Rick gave Pym’s hand a fierce squeeze. “Son. With you beside me, and God sitting up there with His stars, and the Bentley underneath us, I’m the most all-right fellow in the world.” And he meant it, every word as ever, and his proudest day was going to be when Pym was at the Old Bailey on the right side of the rails wearing the full regalia of the Lord Chief Justice, handing down the sentences that had once been handed down to Rick in the days we never owned to.

“Father,” said Pym. And stopped.

“What is it, son? You can tell your old man.”

“It’s just that—well, if you can’t pay the first term’s boarding fees in advance, it’s all right. I mean I’ll go to day school. I just think I ought to go somewhere.”

“Is that all you’ve got to say to me?”

“It doesn’t matter. Really.”

“You’ve been reading my correspondence, haven’t you?”

“No, of course not.”

“Have you ever wanted for anything? In your whole life?”

“Never.”

“Well then,” said Rick and nearly broke Pym’s neck with an armlock embrace.

“So where did the money come from, Syd?” I insist again and again. “Why did it ever end?” Even today in my incurable earnestness I long to find a serious centre to the mayhem of these years, even if it is only the one great crime that lies, according to Balzac, behind every fortune. But Syd was never an objective chronicler. His bright eye mists over, a far smile lights his birdy little face as he takes a sip of his wet. Deep down he still sees Rick as a great wandering river which each of us can only ever know the stretch that Fate assigns to us. “Our big one was Dobbsie,” he recalls. “I’m not saying there wasn’t others, Titch, there was. There was fine projects, many very visionary, very fantastic. But old Dobbsie was our big one.”

With Syd there must always be the big one. Like gamblers and actors he lived for it all his life, does still. But the Dobbsie story as he told it to me that night over God knows how many wets can serve as well as any, even if it left the darkest reaches unexplored.

For some time, Titch—says Syd while Meg gives us a drop more pie and turns the log fire up—as the ebb and flow of war, Titch, with God’s help, naturally, increasingly favours the Allies, your dad has been very concerned to find a new opening to suit those fantastic talents of his that we are all fully aware of and rightly. By 1945 the shortages cannot be counted on to last for ever. Shortages have become, let’s face it, Titch, a risk business. With the hazards of peace upon us, your chocolate, nylons, dried fruit and petrol could flood the market in a day. The coming thing, Titch, says Syd—out of whom Rick’s cadences ring like tunes I cannot shake off—is your Reconstruction. And your dad, with that brain of his he’s got, is as keen as any other fine patriot to get his piece of it, which is only right. The snag, as ever, is to find the toehold, for not even Rick can corner the British property market without a penny piece of capital. And quite by accident, says Syd, this toehold is provided through the unlikely agency of Mr. Muspole’s sister Flora—well

you

remember Flora! Of course I do. Flora is a good scout, a favourite with the jockeys on account of her stately breasts and the generous use she puts them to. But her true allegiance, Syd reminds me, is pledged to a gentleman named Dobbs, who works for Government. And one evening in Ascot over a glass—your dad being away at a conference at the time, Titch—Flora casually lets slip that her Dobbsie is by vocation a city architect and that he has landed this important job. What job is that, dear? the court enquires politely. Flora falters. Long words are not her suit. “Assessing the compensation,” she replies, quoting something she has not fully understood. Compensation for what, dear? the court asks, pricking up its ears, for compensation never hurt anyone yet. “Bomb-damage compensation,” says Flora and glowers round her with growing uncertainty.

“It was a natural, Titch,” says Syd. “Dobbsie hops on his bicycle, slips round to a bombed house, picks up the blower to Whitehall. ‘Dobbs here,’ he says. ‘I’ll have twenty thousand quids’ worth by Thursday and no backchat.’ And Government pays up like a lady. Why?” Syd jabs my upper knee with his forefinger—Rick’s gesture to the life. “Because Dobbsie is impartial, Titch, and never you forget it.”

Dimly I remember Dobbsie too, a whipped, untruthful little man plastered on two glasses of bubbly. I remember being ordered to be nice to him—and when was Pym ever not? “Son, if Mr. Dobbs here asks you for something—if he wants that fine picture off the wall there—you give it to him. Understand?”

Pym eyed the picture of ships on a red sea in a different light from that day on but Dobbsie never asked for it.

With Flora’s amazing secret on the table, Syd continues, the wheels of commerce are flung into top gear. Rick is recalled from his conference, a meeting with Dobbsie is arranged, a mutuality established. Both men are Liberals or Masons or the Sons of Great Men, both follow Arsenal, admire Joe Louis, think Noël Coward is a sissy or share the same vision of men and women of all races marching arm in arm towards the one great Heaven which, let’s face it, is big enough for all of us, whatever our colour or creed may be—this being one of Rick’s set speeches, guaranteed to make him weep. Dobbs becomes an honorary member of the court and within days introduces a loved colleague named Fox, who also likes to do good for mankind, and whose job is selecting building land for the post-war Utopia. Thus the ripples of conspiracy multiply, find each other and spread.

The next to be blessed is Perce Loft. While pursuing a line of business in the Midlands Perce has heard voices about a moribund Friendly Society that is sitting on a fortune, and makes enquiries. The Chairman of the Society, name of Higgs—Destiny has decreed that all conspirators bear monosyllables—turns out to be a lifelong Baptist. So is Rick; he could never have got where he is today without it. The fortune derives from a family trust watched over by a country solicitor named Crabbe, who went off to the war the moment it became available, leaving the trust to watch over itself as it thought best. As a Baptist, Higgs can fiddle no funds without Crabbe to cover him. Rick secures Crabbe’s release from his regiment, whisks him by Bentley to Chester Street where he can inspect the Wall of Fame, the law books and the Lovelies, and thence to the dear old Albany where he can have a nice talk and relax.

Crabbe turns out to be a cantankerous, idiotic little man who sticks out his elbow to take his drink, sir, wiggles his moustache to demonstrate his military shrewdness and after a few glasses demands to know what you stripe-arsed civilians were doing while I was taking part in a certain contest, sir, risking one’s neck amid shot and shell? At the Goat some drinks later, however, he declares Rick to be the kind of chap he’d have liked to have as commandant and if need be die for, which one damn nearly did a few times but mum’s the word. He even calls Rick “Colonel,” thus triggering a bizarre interlude in the great man’s rise, for Rick is so taken with the rank that he decides to award it to himself in earnest, much as in later life he convinces himself he has been knighted secretly by the Duke of Edinburgh and keeps a set of calling-cards for those admitted to this confidence.

Yet none of these added responsibilities holds up Rick’s breathless waltz for one minute. All night long, all weekend, the house in Ascot receives a pageant of the great, the beautiful and the gullible, for Rick has become a collector of celebrities as well as fools and horses. Test cricketers, jockeys, footballers, fashionable Counsel, corrupt parliamentarians, glistening Under Secretaries from helpful Whitehall Ministries, Greek shipowners, cockney hairdressers, unlisted maharajahs, drunk magistrates, venal mayors, ruling princes of countries that have ceased to exist, prelates in suède boots and pectoral crosses, radio comedians, lady singers, aristocratic layabouts, war millionaires and film stars—all pass across our stage as the bemused beneficiaries of Rick’s great vision. Lubricious bank managers and building-society chairmen who have never danced before throw off their jackets, confess to barren lives and worship Rick the giver of their sun and rain. Their wives receive unobtainable nylons, perfumes, petrol coupons, discreet abortions, fur coats and, if they are among the lucky ones, Rick himself—for everyone must have something, everyone must be taken care of, everyone must think the world of him. If they have savings, Rick will double them. If they like a flutter, Rick will get them better odds than the bookies—slip me the cash, I’ll see you right. Their children are passed to Pym for entertainment, exempted from National Service by the intervention of dear old somebody, given gold watches, tickets to the Cup Final, red setter puppies and, if they are ailing, the finest doctors to attend them. There was a time when such liberality dismayed the growing Pym and made him envious. Not today. Today I would call it no more than normal agent welfare.

And among them, casual as cats, stalk the quiet men of the enlarged court, the men from Mr. Muspole’s side, in broadshouldered suits and brown pork-pie hats, calling themselves consultants and holding the telephone receiver to their ear but not speaking into the mouthpiece. Who they were, how they came there, where they went—to this day only the Devil and Rick’s ghost know, and Syd refuses point-blank to speak of them, though with time I think I have put together a fair idea of what they did. They are the axemen of Rick’s tragicomedy, now yielding at the knees and covered in false smiles, now posted like Shakespearean sentries round his stage, white-eyed in the gloom as they wait to disembowel him.

And tiptoeing between this entire menagerie—as if between their legs, although he was already as tall as half of them—I glimpse Pym again, willing potboy, blank page, Lord Chief Justice designate, clipping their cigars and topping them all up. Pym the credit to his old man, the diplomat in embryo, scurrying to every summons: “Here, Magnus—what have they done to you at that new school of yours, poured fertiliser over you?” “Here, Magnus, who cut your hair then?” “Here, Magnus, tell us the one about the cabbie who puts his wife in the family way!” And Pym—the most compelling raconteur for his age and weight in all of Greater Ascot—obliges, smiles and sidesteps between their anomalous, colliding masses, and for relaxation attends late-night classes in radical politics with Ollie and Mr. Cudlove in their cottage, at which it is heartily agreed over stolen canapés and cocoa that all men are brothers but nothing against your dad. And though political doctrines are at root as meaningless to me today as they were to Pym then, I remember the simple humanity of our discussions as we promised to mend the world’s ills, and the truthful goodheartedness with which, as we went off to bed, we wished each other peace in the spirit of Joe Stalin who, let’s face it, Titch, and nothing against your dad

ever,

won the war for all these capitalist bastards.

Court holidays are restored to the curriculum, for no man can give of his best without relaxation. St. Moritz is off the map following Rick’s unsuccessful bid to buy the resort as a substitute for paying his bills there, but as compensation, now a favourite word, Rick and his advisers have espoused the South of France, sweeping down on Monte in the Train Bleu, banqueting the journey away in a brass-and-velvet dining-car, only pausing to tip the Froggie engine driver, who’s a first-rate Liberal, before dashing off to the Casino, illicit currency at the ready. There, standing at Rick’s shoulder in the

grande salle,

Pym can watch a year’s school fees vanish in seconds and nobody has learned a thing. If he prefers the bar he can exchange views with a Major de Wildman of Lord knew whose army, who calls himself King Farouk’s equerry and claims to have a private telephone link to Cairo so that he can report the winning numbers and take royal orders inspired by soothsayers on how to dissipate the wealth of Egypt. For our Mediterranean dawns we have the sombre march to the all-night pawnbroker on the waterfront, where Rick’s gold watch, gold cigarette case, gold swizzle-stick and gold cufflinks with the Pym sporting colours are sacrificed to the elusive god liquidity. For our reflective afternoons, we have the

tir aux pigeons

at which the court, well lunched, lies face down in the butts and pots away at luckless doves as they emerge from their tunnels and start out into the blue sky before crashing into the sea in a crumpled swirl. Then home again to London with the bills all taken care of, which meant signed, and the concierges and headwaiters seen right, which meant tipped lavishly with the last of our cash, to resume the ever-mounting cares of the Pym & Son empire.

For nothing may stand still, too much is not enough, as Syd himself admits. No income is so sacrosanct that expenditure cannot exceed it; no expenditure is so great that more loans cannot be raised to hold the dam from breaking altogether. If the building boom is put temporarily out of service by the passing of an unfriendly Building Act, then Major Maxwell-Cavendish has a plan that speaks deeply to Rick’s sporting soul: it is to buy up everyone who has drawn a horse in the Irish Sweep and so win first, second and third prizes automatically. Mr. Muspole knows a derelict newspaper proprietor who has got in with a bad crowd and needs to sell out fast; Rick has ever seen himself as a shaper of the human mind. Perce Loft the great lawyer wants to buy a thousand houses in Fulham; Rick knows a building society whose chairman has Faith. Mr. Cudlove and Ollie are on intimate terms with a young dress designer who has acquired the donkey-ride concession for the projected Festival of Britain; Rick likes nothing better than to give our English kids a break, and my God, son, if anybody has earned it they have. An amphibious motorcar has been designed by Morrie Washington’s nephew, a National Cricket Pool is envisaged to complement the winter Football Pools, Perce has yet another scheme for contracting an Irish village to grow human hair for the wig market which is expanding fast thanks to the munificence of the newly formed National Health Service. Automatic orange-peelers, pens that can write under water, the spent shell cases of temporarily discontinued wars: each project engages the great thinker’s interest, attracts its experts and its alchemists, adds another line to the Pym & Son Tablet of Honour at the house in Chester Street.

So what went wrong? I ask Syd again, glancing ahead to the inevitable end. What quirk of fate, this time round, Syd, checked the great man’s stride? My question sparks unusual anger. Syd sets down his glass.

“Dobbsie went wrong, that’s what. Flora wasn’t enough for him any more. He had to have the lot. Dobbsie went woozy in the head from all his women, didn’t he, Meg?”

“Dobbsie done his little self too well,” says Meg, ever a stern student of human frailty.

Poor Dobbs, it transpires, became so lulled that he awarded a hundred thousand pounds of compensation to a housing estate that had not been built till a year after the bombing ended.

“Dobbsie spoilt it for everyone,” says Syd, bristling with moral indignation. “Dobbsie was selfish, Titch. That’s what Dobbsie was. Selfish.”

One later footnote belongs to this brief but glorious high point of Rick’s affluence. It is recorded that in October 1947 he sold his head. I chanced upon this information as I was standing on the steps of the crematorium covertly trying to puzzle out some of the less familiar members of the funeral. A breathless youth claiming to represent a teaching hospital waved a piece of paper at me and demanded I stop the ceremony. “In Consideration of the sum of fifty pounds cash I, Richard T. Pym of Chester Street W., consent that on my death my head may be used for the purposes of furthering medical science.” It was raining slightly. Under cover of the porch I scribbled the boy a cheque for a hundred pounds and told him to buy one somewhere else. If the fellow was a confidence trickster, I reasoned, Rick would have been the first to admire his enterprise.

And always somewhere in this clamour the name of Wentworth ringing softly in Pym’s secret ear like an operational codename known only to the initiated: Wentworth. And Pym—the outsider, not on the list—struggling to join, to know. Like a buzzword passed between older hands in the senior officers’ bar at Head Office and Pym the new boy, hearing from the edge, not knowing whether to pretend knowledge or deafness: “We picked it up on Wentworth.” “Top Secret and Wentworth—have you been Wentworth-cleared?” Till the very name became to Pym a teasing symbol of wisdom denied, a challenge to his own desirability. “The bugger’s doing a Wentworth on us,” he hears Perce Loft grumble under his breath one evening. “That Wentworth woman’s a tiger,” says Syd another time. “Worse than her stupid husband ever was.” Each mention spurred Pym to renew his searches. Yet neither Rick’s pockets nor his desk drawers, not his bedside table or his pigskin address book or pop-up plastic telephone book, not even his briefcase, which Pym reconnoitred weekly with the key from Rick’s Asprey key chain, yielded a single clue. Nor did the impenetrable green filing cabinet which like a travelling icon had come to mark the centre of Rick’s migrant faith. No known key fitted it, no fiddling or prising made it yield.

And finally there was school. The cheque was sent, the cheque was cleared.

The train lurched. In the window Mr. Cudlove and other people’s mothers dipped their faces into handkerchiefs and vanished. In his compartment, children larger than himself whimpered and chewed the cuffs of their new grey jackets. But Pym with one turn of his head glanced backward on his life thus far, and forward to the iron path of duty curling into the autumn mist, and he thought: here I come, your best recruit ever. I’m the one you need so take me. The train arrived, school was a mediaeval dungeon of unending twilight, but Saint Pym of the Renunciation was on hand immediately to help his comrades hump their trunks and tuck-boxes up the winding stone staircases, wrestle with unfamiliar collar-studs, find their beds, lockers and clothes-pegs and award himself the worst. And when his turn came to be summoned before his housemaster for an introductory chat Pym made no secret of his pleasure. Mr. Willow was a big homely man in tweeds and a cricket tie, and the Christian plainness of his room after Ascot filled Pym at once with an assurance of integrity.

“Well, well, what’s in here then?” Mr. Willow asked genially as he lifted the parcel to his great ear and shook it.

“It’s scent, sir.”

Mr. Willow misunderstood his meaning. “Sent? I thought you brought it with you,” he said, still smiling.

“It’s for Mrs. Willow, sir. From Monte. They tell me it’s about the best those Frenchies make,” he added, quoting Major Maxwell-Cavendish, a gentleman.

Mr. Willow had a very broad back and suddenly that was all Pym saw. He stooped, there was a sound of opening and closing, the parcel vanished into his enormous desk. If he’d had a nine-foot grappling iron he couldn’t have treated Pym’s gift with greater loathing.

“You want to watch out for Tit Willow,” Sefton Boyd warned. “He beats on Fridays so that you have the weekend to recover.”

But still Pym strove, bled, volunteered for everything and obeyed every bell that summoned him. Terms of it. Lives of it. Ran before breakfast, prayed before running, showered before praying, defecated before showering. Flung himself through the Flanders mud of the rugger field, scrambled over sweating flagstones in search of what passed for learning, drilled so hard to be a good soldier that he cracked his collarbone on the bolt of his vast Lee-Enfield rifle, and had himself punched to kingdom come in the boxing ring. And still he pulled a grin and raised his paw for the loser’s biscuit as he tottered to the dressing-room and you would have loved him, Jack; you would have said that children and horses needed to be broken, public school was the making of me.

I don’t think it was at all. I think it damn near killed me. But not Pym—Pym thought it all perfectly wonderful and shoved out his plate for more. And when it was required of him by the rigid laws of a haphazard justice, which in retrospect seems like every night of the week, he pressed his limp forelock into a filthy washbasin, clutched a tap in each throbbing hand, and expiated a string of crimes he didn’t know he had committed until they were thoughtfully explained to him between each stroke by Mr. Willow or his representatives. Yet when he lay at last in the trembling dark of his dormitory, listening to the creaks and kennel coughs of adolescent longing, he still contrived to persuade himself that he was a prince in the making and, like Jesus, taking the rap for his father’s divinity. And his sincerity, his empathy for his fellow man flourished unabated.

In a single afternoon, he could sit down with Noakes the groundsman, eat cake and biscuits in his cottage beside the cider factory and bring tears to the old athlete’s eyes with his fabricated tales of the antics of the great sportsmen who had let their hair down at the Ascot feasts. All nonsense, yet all perfectly true to him as he spun his magic. “Not the Don?” Noakes would cry incredulously. “The great Don Bradman himself, dancing on the kitchen table? In your house, Pymmie ? Go on!” “And singing ‘When I Was a Child of Five’ while he was about it,” said Pym. Then while Noakes was still glowing from these insights, straight up the hill went Pym to faded Mr. Glover, the assistant drawing master, who wore sandals, to help him wash palettes and remove the day’s daubs of powder paint from the genitals of the marble cherub in the main hall. Yet Mr. Glover was the absolute opposite of Noakes. Without Pym the two men were irreconcilable. Mr. Glover thought school sports a tyranny worse than Hitler’s and I wish they’d throw their bloody football boots into the river, I do, and plough up their games fields and get on with some Art and Beauty for a change. And Pym wished they would as well and swore his father was going to send a donation to rebuild the arts school to twice its size—probably millions, but keep it secret.

“I’d shut up about your father if I were you,” said Sefton Boyd. “They don’t like spivs here.”

“They don’t like divorced mothers either,” said Pym, biting back for once. But mainly his strategy was to pacify and reconcile, and keep all the threads in his own hands.

Another conquest was Bellog the German master who seemed physically crumpled by the sins of his adopted country. Pym beleaguered him with extra work, bought him an expensive German beer mug on Rick’s account at Thomas Goode’s, walked his dog and invited him to Monte all expenses paid, which by a mercy he declined. Today I would blush for such an unsophisticated pass and agonise about whether Bellog had gone sour and been turned. Not Pym. Pym loved Bellog as he loved them all. And he needed that German soul, he had been hard on its path since Lippsie’s day. He needed to give himself away to it, right into Mr. Bellog’s startled hands, though Germany meant nothing whatever to him, except escape to an unpopular preserve where his talents would be appreciated. He needed the embrace of it, the mystery, the privacy of another side of life. He needed to be able to close the door on his Englishness, love it as he might, and carve a new name somewhere fresh. He even went so far on occasion as to affect a light German accent which drove Sefton Boyd to paroxysms of fury.

And women? Jack, no one was more alive than Pym to the potential virtues of a female agent well handled, but in that school they were the devil to come by and handling anybody, including yourself, was a beatable offence. Mrs. Willow, though he was prepared to love her any time, appeared to be permanently pregnant. Pym’s languishing glances were wasted on her. The house matron was personable enough but when he called on her late at night with a fictitious headache in the vague hope of proposing marriage to her, she ordered him sharply back to bed. Only little Miss Hodges who taught the violin showed a short-lived promise: Pym presented her with a pigskin music case from Harrods and said he wished to turn professional, but she wept and advised him to take up a different instrument.

“My sister wants to do it with you,” said Sefton Boyd one night as they lay in Pym’s bed embracing without enthusiasm. “She read your poem in the school rag. She thinks you’re Keats.”

Pym was not altogether surprised. His poem was certainly a masterpiece, and Jemima Sefton Boyd had several times scowled at him through the windscreen of the family Land Rover when it came to collect her brother for weekends.

“She’s panting for it,” Sefton Boyd explained. “She does it with everybody. She’s a nympho.”

Pym wrote to her at once, a poet’s letter.

“A tale must linger in your soft hair. Do you ever have the feeling beauty is a kind of sin? Two swans have settled on the Abbey moat. I watch them often, dreaming of your hair. I love you.”

She replied by return, but not before Pym had suffered agonies of remorse at his recklessness.

“Thank you for your letter. I get a long exeat from school starting twenty-fifth which is one of your exeat weekends also. How fateful that they coincide. Mama will invite you for Sunday night and obtain Mr. Willow’s permission for you to sleep with us. Are you considering elopement?”

A second letter was more precise:

“The servants’ staircase is quite safe. I will kindle a light and have wine waiting in case you get thirsty. Bring any work you have in progress and please caress me first. On my door you will find the red rosette I won last holidays for jumping Smokey.”

Pym was scared stiff. How could he acquit himself with a woman of such experience? Breasts he knew about and loved. But Jemima appeared to have none. The rest of her was an unintelligible thicket of dangers and disease, and his memories of Lippsie in the bath became hazier by the minute.

A card came:

“We would all be so pleased if you would visit us at Hadwell for the weekend of the twenty-fifth. I am writing separately to Mr. Willow. Don’t worry about clothes as we do not dress in the evenings during summer.

Elizabeth Sefton Boyd”

On the hill above Mr. Willow’s house stood a girls’ school peopled by brown vestals. Boys who penetrated its grounds were flogged and expelled. But Elphick in Nelson House maintained that if you stood beneath the footbridge when the girls were crossing on their way to hockey much could be learned. Alas, all Pym saw when he followed this advice was a few cold knees that looked much like his own. Worse, he had to suffer the coarse humour of a games mistress who leaned over the bridge and invited him to come and play. Disgusted, Pym stalked back to his German poets.

The town library was run by an elderly Fabian, a Pym agent. Pym skipped lunch and hunted his way unchecked through the section marked “Adults Only.”

Guidance on Marriage

appeared to be a handbook on mortgages.

The Art of the Chinese Pillow Book

started well but descended into a description of games of darts and leaping white tigers.

Amor and Rococo Woman,

on the other hand, richly illustrated, was a different matter, and Pym arrived at Hadwell expecting naked Graces frolicking with their gallants in the park. At dinner, which to his relief was taken dressed, Jemima cut Pym dead, hiding her face in her hair and reading Jane Austen. A plain girl called Belinda, billed as Jemima’s dearest friend, declined speech in sympathy.

“That’s how Jem gets when she’s horny,” Sefton Boyd explained within Belinda’s hearing, at which Belinda tried to punch him, then stormed off in a rage.

Dispatched to bed Pym wound his way up the great staircase while a dozen clocks tolled his death knell. How often had Rick not warned him against women who wanted nothing but his money? How dearly he longed for the safety of his bed at school. Crossing the landing he saw a rosette glinting like blood in the low light. He climbed another flight and saw Belinda’s head scowling at him round her door. “You can come in here if you like,” she said rudely.

“It’s all right, thanks,” said Pym. He entered his room.

On his pillow lay his eight love letters and four poems to Jemima, bound with ribbon and smelling of saddle soap.

“Please take back your letters which I find oppressive since I regret we are no longer compatible. I do not know what possessed you to slick down your forelock like an errand boy but henceforth we meet as strangers.”

Dashed down by humiliation and despair Pym hastened back to school and the same night wrote to every mother, active or retired, whose name and address he could put his hands on.

“Dearest Topsie, Cherry, darling Mrs. Ogilvie, Mabel, darling Violet, I am being beaten mercilessly for writing poetry and I am very unhappy. Please take me away from this awful place.” But when they answered his appeal, the readiness of their love revolted him and he threw away their letters scarcely read. And when one of them, the best, dropped everything and travelled a hundred expensive miles to buy him a mixed grill at the Feathers, Pym met her enquiries with a remote politeness. “Yes, thank you, school is super, everything is absolutely fine. How

are you?”

Then led her an hour early to the railway station so that he could be a good chap at kickabout.

“Dear Belinda”—he wrote in his poet’s cursive hand—“Thanks very much for your letter explaining that Jem is unstable. I know girls are terrifically sensitive at this age and going through all sorts of changes so it’s really all right. Our house side won Juniors which is a bit of a sensation here. I often think of your beautiful eyes. Magnus.”

“Dear Father”—he wrote in a gruff Edwardian manner copied from Sefton Boyd—“I am doing lots of essential entertaining here which is very much the thing and gets me on. Everyone is very grateful for what I do, but prices at the tuckshop have risen and I wondered whether you could send me another five pounds to see me right.”

To his surprise, Rick sent him nothing, but came down from the mountain in person, bringing not money but love, which was what Pym had written to him for in the first place.

It was Rick’s first visit. Until now Pym had forbidden him the place, explaining that distinguished parents were considered bad form. And Rick with unwonted diffidence had accepted his exclusion. Now with the same diffidence he came, looking trim and loving and mysteriously humble. He didn’t venture into the school but sent a letter in his own hand proposing a rendezvous on the road to Farleigh Abbott, which was on the sea. When Pym arrived by bicycle as instructed, expecting the Bentley and half the court, round the corner instead rode Rick alone, also on a bicycle, with a lovely smile that Pym could see from miles off and humming “Underneath the Arches” out of tune. In the bicycle basket he had brought a picnic of their favourite things, a bottle of ginger pop for Pym, bubbly for himself and a football left over from Paradise. They rode their bicycles on the sand and skimmed pebbles on the waves. They lay in the dunes munching foie gras and Ryvita. They wandered through the little town and wondered whether Rick should buy it. They stared at the church and promised never to forget their prayers. They made a goal out of a broken gateway and kicked the football at each other all the way across the world. They kissed and wept and bear-hugged and swore to be pals all their lives and go bicycling every Sunday even when Pym was Lord Chief Justice and married with grandchildren.

“Has Mr. Cudlove resigned?” Pym asked.

Rick just managed to hear, though his face had already acquired the dreamy expression that overcame it at the approach of a direct question.

“Well, son,” he conceded, “old Cuddie’s been having his ups and downs over the years and he’s decided it’s time to give himself a bit of a rest.”

“How’s the swimming-pool coming along?”

“Nearly done. Nearly done. We must be patient.”

“Super.”

“Tell me, son,” said Rick, now at his most venerable. “Have you got a pal or two who might like to do you the favour of supplying you with a bed and some accommodation during the school holidays that are already looming on the horizon?”

“Oh, masses,” said Pym, striving to sound careless.

“Well I think you would be well advised to accept their invitations, because with all that rebuilding going on at Ascot, I don’t think you’re going to enjoy the rest and privacy that fine mind of yours is entitled to.”

Pym at once said he would, and made an even greater fuss of Rick in order to persuade him that he did not suspect anything was amiss.

“I’m in love with a rather super girl too,” said Pym when it was nearly time to part, in a further effort to persuade Rick of his happiness. “It’s quite amusing. We write to each other every day.”

“Son, there’s no finer thing in this life than the love of a good woman and if anybody’s earned it, you have.”

“Tell me, boy,” said Willow one evening, during an intimate confirmation class. “What does your father do, exactly?”

To which Pym with a natural instinct for the way to Willow’s heart replied that he appears to be some kind of, well, freewheeling businessman, sir, I don’t know. Willow changed the subject but at their next session obliged Pym to give an account of his mother. His first instinct was to say she had died of syphilis, an ailment that featured large in Mr. Willow’s lectures on Sowing the Seed of Life. But he restrained himself.

“She just sort of vanished when I was young, sir,” he confessed with more truth than he intended.

“Who with?” said Mr. Willow. So Pym, for no particular reason he could afterwards think of, said, “With an army sergeant, sir, he was already married so he took her off to Africa to elope.”

“Does she write to you, boy?”

“No, sir.”

“Why not?”

“I suppose she’s too ashamed, sir.”

“Does she send you money?”

“No, sir. She hasn’t any. He swindled her out of everything she had.”

“We are speaking of the sergeant still, I take it?”

“Yes, sir.”

Mr. Willow pondered. “Are you familiar with the activities of a company known as The Muspole Friendly and Academic Limited?”

“No, sir.”

“You appear to be a director of this company.”

“I didn’t know, sir.”

“Then you also have no knowledge, presumably, as to why this company should be paying your school fees? Or not paying them, perhaps?”

“No, sir.”

Mr. Willow pushed up his jaw and narrowed his eyes, indicating a sharpening of his interrogation technique. “And does your father live in some luxury, would you say, by comparison with the kind of standards that apply to other parents here?”

“I suppose he does, sir.”

“Suppose?”

“He does, sir.”

“Do you disapprove of his life-style?”

“I do a bit, I suppose.”

“Does it occur to you that you may one day be obliged to choose between God and Mammon?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Have you discussed this with Father Murgo?”

“No, sir.”

“Do so.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Have you ever thought of entering the Church?”

“Often, sir,” said Pym, putting on his soulful face.

“We have a fund here, Pym, for impecunious boys wishing to enter the Church. It occurs to the Bursar that you might be eligible to benefit from this fund.”

“Yes, sir.”

Father Murgo was a toothy, driven little soul whose unlikely task, considering his proletarian origins, was to act as God’s itinerant talent-spotter to the public schools. Where Willow was thunderous and craggy, a sort of Makepeace Watermaster without a secret, Murgo writhed inside his habit like a ferret roped into a bag. Where Willow’s fearless gaze was unruffled by knowledge, Murgo’s signalled the lonely anguish of the cell.

“He’s nuts,” Sefton Boyd declared. “Look at the scabs on his ankles. The swine picks them while he’s praying.”

“He’s mortifying himself,” said Pym.

“Magnus?” Murgo echoed in his sharp northern twang. “Whoever called you that? God’s Magnus. You’re Parvus.” His quick red smile glinted like a stripe that would not heal. “Come this evening,” he urged. “Allenby staircase. Staff guest-room. Knock.”

“You mad bugger, he’ll touch you up!” Sefton Boyd shouted, beside himself with jealousy. But Murgo never touched anyone as Pym had guessed. His lonely hands remained lashed inside his sleeves by invisible thongs, emerging only to eat or pray. For the rest of that summer term Pym floated on clouds of undreamed freedom. Not a week earlier Willow had sworn to flog a boy who had dared to describe cricket as a recreation. Now Pym had only to mention that he proposed to take a stroll with Murgo to be excused what games he wished. Neglected essays were mysteriously waived, beatings vaguely due to him deferred. On breathless walks, on bicycle rides, in little teahouses in the country, or at night crammed into a corner of Murgo’s miserable bedroom, Pym eagerly offered versions of himself that alternately shocked and thrilled them both. The shiftless materialism of his home life. His quest for faith and love. His fight against the demons of self-abuse and such tempters as Kenneth Sefton Boyd. His brother-and-sister relationship with the girl Belinda.

“And the holidays?” Murgo proposed one evening as they loped down a bridlepath past lovers fondling in the grass. “Fun, are they? High living?”

“The holidays are a desert,” said Pym loyally. “So are Belinda’s. Her father’s a stockbroker.”

The description acted on Murgo like a goad.

“Oh, a desert, are they? A wilderness? All right. I’ll go along with that. Christ was in the wilderness too, Parvus. For a bloody long time. So was Saint Anthony. Twenty years he served, in a filthy little fort on the Nile. Perhaps you’ve forgotten.”

“No I hadn’t at all.”

“Well he did. And it didn’t stop him talking to God or God talking to him. Anthony didn’t have privilege. He didn’t have money or property or fine cars or stockbrokers’ daughters. He prayed.”

“I know,” said Pym.

“Come to Lyme. Answer the call. Be like Anthony.”

“What the fuck have you done to the front of your hair?” Sefton Boyd screamed at him the same evening.

“I’ve cut it off.”

Sefton Boyd stopped laughing. “You’re going to be a monkey Murgo,” he said softly. “You’ve fallen for him, you mad tart.”

Sefton Boyd’s days were numbered. Acting on information received—even now I blush to contemplate the source of it—Mr. Willow had decided that young Kenneth was getting a little too old for the school.

So there’s yet another Pym for you, Jack, and you had better add him to my file even if he is neither admirable nor, I suspect, comprehensible to you, though Poppy knew him inside out from the first day. He’s the Pym who can’t rest till he’s touched the love in people, then can’t rest till he’s hacked his way out of it, the more drastically the better. The Pym who does nothing cynically, nothing without conviction. Who sets events in motion in order to become their victim, which he calls decision, and ties himself into pointless relationships, which he calls loyalty. Then waits for the next event to get him out of the last one, which he calls destiny. It’s the Pym who passes up a two-week invitation to stay with the Sefton Boyds in Scotland, all found including Jemima, because he is pledged to hurl himself over the Dorset hills in the wake of a tortured Mancunian zealot, preparing for a life he has not the smallest intention of leading, among people who chill him to the root. It’s the Pym who writes daily to Belinda because Jemima has cast doubts on his divinity. It’s Pym the Saturday night juggler bounding round the table and spinning one stupid plate after another because he can’t bear to let anyone down for one second and so lose their esteem. So off he goes and half chokes himself on incense and sleeps in a cell that stinks like a wet dog and nearly dies of nettle stew in order to become pious and pay his school fees and be adored by Murgo. Meanwhile he heaps fresh promises on old and convinces himself that he is on the path to Heaven while he digs himself deeper into his own mess. By the end of a week he is promised to a boys’ camp in Hereford, a pan-denominational retreat in Shropshire, a Trade Unionists’ pilgrimage in Wakefield and a Celebration of Witness in Derby. By the end of two weeks there isn’t a county in England where he hasn’t pledged his holiness six different ways—which is not to deny that intermittently he has visions of himself as a haggard apostle of the life renounced, converting beautiful women and millionaires to Christian poverty.

It was a full month before God provided the escape that Pym was waiting for.

YOUR IMMEDIATE PRESENCE CHESTER STREET ESSENTIAL
IN MATTER OF VITAL NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL
IMPORTANCE RICHARD T. PYM MANAGING DIRECTOR PYMCORP.

“You must go,” said Murgo with tears of misery rolling down his hollowed cheeks as he handed him the fatal telegram after Terce.

“I don’t think I can face it,” said Pym, no less affected. “It’s just money, money all the time.”

They walked past the print shop and the basket shop, through the kitchen gardens to the little wicker gate that kept Rick’s world at bay.

“You didn’t send it to yourself, did you, Parvus?” Murgo asked.

Pym swore he had not, which was the truth.

“You don’t understand what a force you are,” Murgo said. “I don’t think I’ll be the same again.”

It had never occurred to Pym until now that Murgo was capable of change.

“Well,” said Murgo with a last sad writhe.

“Goodbye,” said Pym. “And thanks.”

But there is cheer in sight for both of them. Pym has promised to be back for Christmas, when the tramps come.

Mad swings, Tom. Mad leaps and loves, madder round the corner. I wrote to Dorothy too somewhere in that time. Care of Sir Makepeace Watermaster at the House of Commons, though I knew he was dead. I waited a week then forgot until one day out of the blue my ploy was rewarded with a tatty little letter, blotchy with tears or drink, on ruled paper torn from a notepad, no address but postmark East London, a country I had never visited. It is before me now.

“Yours was a voice down many Coridors of Years, my dear, I put it in the kitchen cuboard with my Tableware to view at leasure. I will be at Euston Station the up platform 3 p.m. Thursday without my Herbie and I will be carrying a posy of lavender which you always loved.”

Already greatly regretting his decision, Pym arrived at the station late and placed himself in the gunman’s corner beneath an iron arch close to some mail bags. Quite a bevy of mothers was milling about, some eligible, some less so, but there was none he wanted and several who were drunk. And one of them seemed to be clutching a posy of flowers wrapped in newspaper but by then he had decided he had the wrong platform. It was his darling Dorothy that Pym had wanted, not some lolloping old biddy in a pantomime hat.

A weekday evening, Tom. The traffic in Chester Street burps and crackles in the rain, but inside the Reichskanzlei it is a Green Hill Sunday. Still pious from his monastery Pym presses the bell but hears no answering chime. He drives the great brass door knocker against its stud. A lace curtain parts and closes. The door opens, but not far.

“Cunningham’s the name, squire,” says a heavy man in a thick expatriate cockney, as he shuts the door fast after him as if scared of letting in germs. “Half cunning, half ham. You’ll be the son and heir. Greetings, squire, Salaams.”

“How do you do,” says Pym.

“I’m optimistic, squire, thank you,” Mr. Cunningham replies with a Middle-European literalness. “I think we’re on a road to understanding. Some resistance at first is to be expected. But I believe I see a light begin to shine.”

It is more than Pym does for the passage down which Mr. Cunningham leads him with such assurance is pitch black and the only light comes from the pale patches on the wall left by the departed law books.

“You’re a German scholar, I understand, squire,” says Mr. Cunningham more thickly, as if the exertion has affected his adenoids. “A fine language. The people, I’m not sure. But a lovely tongue in the right hands, you can quote me.”

“Why are we going upstairs?” says Pym, who has by now recognised several familiar omens of impending pogrom.

“Trouble with the lift, squire,” Mr. Cunningham replies. “I understand an engineer has been sent for and is at this moment hastening on his way.”

“But Rick’s office is on the ground floor.”

“But upstairs has the privacy, squire,” Mr. Cunningham explains, pushing open a double door. They enter a gutted State Apartment lit by the glow of street lamps. “Your son, sir, fresh from his worship,” Mr. Cunningham announces, and bows Pym ahead of him.

At first Pym sees only Rick’s brow glinting in the candlelight. Then the great head forms round it, followed by the broad bulk of the body as it advances swiftly to envelop him in a damp and fervent bear-hug.

“How are you, old son?” he asks urgently. “How was the train?”

“Fine,” says Pym, who has hitchhiked owing to a temporary problem of liquidity.

“Did they give you a bit to eat then? What did they give you?”

“Just a sandwich and a glass of beer,” says Pym who has had to make do on a piece of rocklike bread from Murgo’s refectory.

“My own boy, as you see me!” Mr. Cunningham exclaims with zest. “Never satisfied unless he’s eating.”

“Son, you want to watch that drinking of yours,” says Rick in an almost unconscious reflex, as he clutches Pym under the armpit and marches him over bare floorboards towards an imperial-sized bed. “There’s five thousand pounds for you in cash if you don’t smoke or take liquor until you’re twenty-one. All right, my dear, what do you think of this boy of mine?”

A darkly dressed figure has risen like a shade from the bed.

It’s Dorothy, thinks Pym. It’s Lippsie. It’s Jemima’s mother lodging a complaint. But as the darkness lifts, the aspiring monk observes that the figure before him is wearing neither Lippsie’s headscarf nor Dorothy’s cloche hat, nor has she the daunting authority of Lady Sefton Boyd. Like Lippsie she sports the antiquarian uniform of pre-war Europe but there the comparison ends. Her flared skirt has a nipped waist. She wears a blouse with a lace ruff and a feathery bit of hat that makes the whole outfit jaunty. Her breasts are in the best tradition of

Amor and Rococo Woman,

and the dim light flatters their roundness.

“Son, I want you to meet a noble and heroic lady who has known great advantages and misfortunes and fought great battles and suffered cruelly at the hands of fate. And who has paid me the greatest compliment a woman can pay a man by coming to see me in her hour of need.”

“Rot-schilt, darling,” the lady says softly, lifting her limp hand to a level where Pym may kiss or shake it.

“Heard that name anywhere, have you, son, with your fine education?

Baron

Rothschild?

Lord

Rothschild?

Count

Rothschild? Rothschild’s

Bank?

Or are you going to tell me you’re not conversant with the name of a certain great Jewish family with all the wealth of Solomon at its fingertips?”

“Well yes, of course I’ve heard of it.”

“Well then. Just you sit yourself here and listen to what she has to say because this is the baroness. Sit down, my dear. Come here between us. What do you think of him, Elena?”

“Beautiful, darling,” says the baroness.

He’s selling me to her, thinks Pym, not at all unwilling. I’m his last desperate deal.

So there we all are, Tom. Everyone on the go and madness here to stay. Your father and grandfather seated buttock to buttock with a Jewish baroness in the half-furnished director’s knocking-shop of a West End palace without electricity, and Mr. Cunningham, as I gradually realise, keeping guard at the door. An air of daft conspiracy comparable only with later daft conspiracies mounted by the Firm, as her soft voice embarks on one of those patient refugee monologues that your Uncle Jack and I have listened to more times than either of us can remember, except that tonight Pym is a virgin in these matters, and the baroness’s thigh is pressed cosily against that of the aspiring monk.

“I am a humble widow of simple but pious family, married happily but oh so briefly to the late Baron Luigi Svoboda-Rothschild, the last of the great Czech line. I was seventeen, he twenty-one, imagine our pleasure. My greatest regret is I bore him no child. Our country seat was the Palais of Nymphs at Brno, which first the Germans then the Russians rape worse than a woman literally. My Cousin Anna she marry to the head man from De Beers diamonds Cape Town, got houses like you not imagine, too much luxury I don’t approve.” Pym does not approve either, as he tries to tell her with a monkish smirk of sympathy. “With my Uncle Wolfram I never speak and thanks God I say. He collaborate with the Nazis. The Jews hang him upside down.” Pym sets his jaw in grim approval. “My Granduncle David give all his tapestries to the Prado. Now he is poor like a kulak, why don’t the museum give him something so he can eat?” Pym rolls his head in despair at the baseness of the Spanish soul. “My Auntie Waldorf—” She breaks down beautifully while Pym wonders whether the agitation of his body is visible to her in the darkness.

“It’s a damn shame!” cries Rick, while the baroness composes herself. “My God, son, those Bolsheviks could swoop down on Ascot tomorrow without a by-your-leave and help themselves to a fortune. Go on, my dear. Son, tell her to go on. Call her Elena, she likes it. She’s not a snob. She’s one of us.”

“Weiter, bitte,”

says Pym.

“Weiter,”

the baroness echoes approvingly and pats her eyes with Rick’s handkerchief.

“Jawohl,

darling.

Sehr gut!”

“Oh but you should hear his accent,” Mr. Cunningham calls from the door. “Not a wrinkle, you can quote me, same as my own boy.”

“What does she say, son?”

“She can manage,” says Pym. “She can handle it.”

“She’s a damned gem. I’m going to see her right, you mark my words.”

So is Pym. He is going to marry her at least. But meanwhile, to his irritation, he must hear more praise for my dear late husband the baron. My Luigi was not only the proprietor of a great palace, he was a financial genius and until the outbreak of war the Chairman of the House of Rothschild in Prague.

“They were the richest of the lot,” says Rick. “Weren’t they, son? You’ve read your history. What’s your verdict?”

“They couldn’t even count it,” Mr. Cunningham confirms from the door with the pride of an impresario. “Could they, Elena? Ask her. Don’t be shy.”

“We give such concerts, darling,” the baroness confides to Pym. “Princes from all countries. We got house from marble. We got mirrors, culture. Like here,” she adds graciously, indicating a priceless oil painting of Prince Magnus in his paddock, done from a photograph. “We lose everything.”

“Not quite everything,” says Rick under his breath.

“When the Germans come, my Luigi he refuse to flee. He face the Nazi pigs from the balcony, got a pistol in his hand, don’t never been heard of since.”

Another necessary break follows in which the baroness allows herself a delicate sip of brandy from a row of crystal decanters on the floor, and Rick to Pym’s fury takes over the story, partly because Rick is already tired of listening, but more particularly because a secret is approaching, and secrets in court etiquette are Rick’s alone to divulge.

“That baron was a fine man and a fine husband, son, and he did what any fine husband would do, and believe me, if your mother was in a position to appreciate it, I’d do the same for her tomorrow—”

“I know you would,” says Pym hastily.

“That baron got some of the best treasures out of that palace, he put them in a box and he gave that box to certain very good friends of his and friends of this fine lady here, and he gave orders that when the British won the war this same box should be handed over to his lovely young wife, with everything it contained, however much it may have risen in value in the meantime.”

The baroness knows the menu from memory and again selects Pym as her audience, for which purpose it is necessary for her to arrest his attention with a delicate hand placed on his wrist.

“One Gutenberg Bible, nice condition, darling, one Renoir early, two Leonardo medical. One first edition Goya caprices, artist annotation, three hundred best gold American dollar, Rubens a couple cartoons.”

“Cunningham says it’s worth a bomb,” says Rick when she seems to have finished.

“It’s Hiroshima,” says Mr. Cunningham from the door.

Pym contrives an ethereal smile intended to indicate that great art knows no price. The baroness intercepts it and understands.

It is an hour later. The baroness and her protector have departed, leaving father and son alone in the great unlighted room. The traffic below the window has subsided. Shoulder to shoulder on the bed they are eating fish and chips which Pym has been dispatched to buy with precious pound notes from Rick’s back pocket. They wash it down with a bottle of Château d’Yquem from a Harrods crate.

“Are they still there, son?” says Rick. “Did they see you? Those men in the Riley. Heavy built.”

“I’m afraid they are,” says Pym.

“You believe in her, don’t you, son? Don’t spare my feelings. Do you believe in that fine woman or do you think she’s a blackhearted liar and adventuress to boot?”

“She’s fantastic,” says Pym.

“You don’t sound convinced. Spit it out, son. She’s our last chance, I’ll tell you that for nothing.”

“It’s just I wasn’t quite sure why she hadn’t gone to her own people.”

“You don’t know those Jews the way I do. They’re some of the finest people in the world. There’s others, they’d have the coat off her back as soon as look at her. I asked her the same question. I didn’t pull my punches either.”

“Who’s Cunningham?” says Pym, barely able to conceal his distaste.

“Old Cunnie’s first class. I’m bringing him into the business when this is over. Exports and Foreign. He’ll be a tear-away. His sense of humour alone is worth five thousand a year to us. He wasn’t on form tonight. He was tense.”

“What’s the deal?” says Pym.

“Faith in your old man, that’s the deal. ‘Rickie,’ she says to me—that’s what she calls me, she doesn’t pull her punches either—‘Rickie, I want you get that box for me, sell the contents and invest the money in one of your fine enterprises, and I want you to take the cares off my shoulders and give me ten percent a year for life for as long as I’m spared, with all the necessary provisions of insurance and endowment if you go before me. I want that money to be yours to see the world right in whatever way you deem in your wisdom.’ That’s a big responsibility, son. If I had a passport I’d go myself. I’d send Syd if he was available. Syd would go. Cattle and pigs. That’s what I’m going to do after this. Just a few acres and some livestock. I’m retiring.”

“What’s happened to your passport?” said Pym.

“Son, I’m going to level with you, which I always do. That airy-fairy school of yours are hard bargainers. They want cash and they want it on the due day and that’s it. You speak her language, that’s the point. She likes you. She trusts you. You’re my son. I could send Muspole but I’d never be sure he’d come back. Perce Loft’s too legal. He’d scare her. Now slip to the window and see if that Riley’s gone. Don’t get the light on your face. They can’t come in. They haven’t got a warrant. I’m an honest citizen.”

Half hidden behind the chipped green filing cabinet, Pym squints steeply downward into the street in covert counter-surveillance. The Riley is still there.

There are no blankets for the bed so they make do with curtains and dust-sheets. Pym sleeps fitfully and freezes, dreaming of the baroness. Once Rick’s arm falls violently across him, once he is roused by Rick’s strangled voice calling out invective against a bitch called Peggy. And some time in the early hours he feels the soft female weight of Rick’s nether body in silk shirt and underpants backing inexorably against him, which persuades him it is more restful on the floor. In the morning Rick still will not leave the house, so Pym walks alone to Victoria Station carrying his few possessions in a splendid white box-calf suitcase with Rick’s initials in brass underneath the handle. He wears one of Rick’s camel-hair coats though it is too large for him. The baroness, looking more delectable than ever, is waiting on the platform. Mr. Cunningham is there to wave them off. In the train lavatory, Pym opens the envelope Rick gave him and extracts a wad of white ten-pound notes and his first-ever instructions for a clandestine encounter.

“You are to proceed to Bern and take Rooms at the Grand Palace Hotel. Mr. Bertl the under-manager is first Rate, the Bill is taken care of. Signor Lapadi will Contact the Baroness and guide you to the Austrian border. When Lapadi has given you the Box and you have Confirmed in our Language that it’s all there, see him right with the Enclosed and not until. This is going to be the Saving of us, son. That Money you are Carrying took a lot of earning, but when this is over none of us will ever have to Worry again.”

I shall be brisk with the operational details of the Rothschild assignment, Jack—the days of hope, the days of doubt, the sudden leaps from one to the other. And I truly forget which street corners or codewords preceded the slow descent into inconclusion that has been my memory of so many operations since—just as I forget, if I ever knew, in what quantities of skepticism and blind faith Pym pursued his mission to its inevitable end. Certainly I have known operations since that have been mounted on quite as little likelihood of success, and have cost a great deal more than money. Signor Lapadi spoke only to the baroness, who relayed his information with disdain.

“Lapadi he talk mit his

Vertrauensmann,

darling.” She smiles indulgently when Pym asks what a

Vertrauensmann

is. “The

Vertrauensmann

is man we are trusting. Not yesterday, maybe not tomorrow. But today we are trusting him for ever.”

“Lapadi he need one hundred pound, darling”—a day or two later—“the

Vertrauensmann

know a man whose sister know the head from customs. Better he pay him now for friendship.”

Remembering Rick’s instructions Pym offers token resistance but the baroness already has her hand out and is rubbing her finger and thumb together with delightful insinuation. “You want to paint the house, darling, first you got to buy the brush,” she explains and to Pym’s amazement lifts her skirts to the waist and pops the banknotes into the top of her stocking. “Tomorrow we buy you nice suit.”

“Gave her the money, son?” Rick roars that night across the Channel. “God in Heaven, what do you think we are? Fetch me Elena.”

“Don’t shout me, darling,” the baroness says calmly into the telephone. “You got lovely boy here, Rickie. He very strict with me. I think one day he be great actor.”

“The baroness says you’re first rate, son. Are you talking our language with her out there?”

“All the time,” says Pym.

“Have you had an honest-to-God English mixed grill yet?”

“No, we’re sort of saving it.”

“Well have one on me. Tonight.”

“We will, Father. Thanks.”

“God bless you, son.”

“And you too, Father,” says Pym politely and, butler-like, keeps his knees and feet together while he puts the phone down.

More important to me by far are my memories of Pym’s first platonic honeymoon with a wise lady. With Elena beside him, Pym wandered Bern’s old city, drank the light small wines of the Valais, watched

thés dansants

in the great hotels and consigned his past to history. In scented, frilly boutiques that she seemed to find by instinct, they exchanged her battered wardrobe for fur capes and Anna Karenina riding boots that slithered on the frosty cobble, and Pym’s dismal school habit for a leather jacket and trousers without buttons for his braces. Even in her disarray, the baroness would insist on Pym’s judgment, beckoning him into the little mirrored box to help her choose, and permitting him, as if unknowingly, delicious glimpses of her Rococo charms: now a nipple, now the cup of a buttock carelessly uncurtained, now an amazing shadow at the centre of her rounded thighs as she whisked from one skirt to another. She is Lippsie, he thought excitedly; she is how Lippsie would have been if she hadn’t thought so much of death.

“Gefall’ ich dir,

darling?”

“Du gefällst mir sehr.”

“One day you have pretty girl, you talk to her just like this, she go crazy. You don’t think too tarty?”

“I think perfect.”

“Okay, we buy two. One for my sister Zsa-Zsa, she my size.”

A tilt of the white shoulders, a careless pull at a straying hem of lingerie, the bill was brought, Pym signed it and addressed it to the provident Herr Bertl, turning his back on her and crouching forward in order to conceal the evidence of his perturbation. From a jeweller in the Herrengasse they bought a pearl necklace for another sister in Budapest and as an afterthought a topaz ring for her mother in Paris which the baroness would take to her on her way home. And I see that ring now, winking on her freshly manicured finger as she traces a trout back and forth across the fish tank in the grill-room of our grand hotel while the headwaiter stands above her with his net poised to strike.

“Nein, nein,

darling,

nicht

this one,

that

one!

Ja, ja, prima.”

It was at one such dinner, in the event their last, that Pym was so moved by love and confusion that he felt obliged to confide to the baroness his intention of leading a monastic life. She put down her knife and fork with a clatter.

“Don’t tell me no more from monks!” she commanded him angrily. “I see too many of monks. I see monks of Croatia, monks of Serbia, Russia. God He ruin the damn world with monks.”

“Well, it’s not completely certain,” said Pym.

It took a lot of funny voices from him, and a lot of intimate fabrications, before the light came cautiously back to her brown eyes.

“And her name was Lippsie?”

“Well that’s what we called her. I mustn’t tell you her real name.”

“And she slept with such a young boy like you? You made love with her so young? She was a whore, I think.”

“Probably just lonely,” said Pym wisely.

But her thoughtfulness remained and when Pym as usual saw her to her bedroom door she studied him closely before taking his head between her hands and kissing him on the mouth. Suddenly her mouth opened, Pym’s also. The kiss became intense, he felt an unfamiliar mound plying irresistibly against his thigh. He felt its warmth, he felt soft hair slipping against silk as she pressed more rhythmically. She whispered

“Schatz,”

he heard a squeak and wondered whether he had hurt her somehow. Her head twisted, her neck pressed against his lips. With confiding fingers she handed him the key to her bedroom door and looked away while he opened it. He found the keyhole, turned the key and held the door for her. He put the key into her palm and saw the light in her eyes fade.

“So, my dear,” she said. She kissed him, one cheek other cheek, she stared at him as if searching for something she had lost. It was not till next morning that he discovered she had been kissing him goodbye.

“Darling”—she wrote—“You are good man, got body from Michelangelo but your Papi got bad problems. Better you stay in Bern. Never mind. E. Weber love you always.”

In the envelope were the gold cufflinks we had bought for her cousin in Oxford, and two hundred of the five hundred pounds that Pym had given her for the invisible Mr. Lapadi. I wear the cufflinks as I write. Gold with tiny diamonds in a crown. The baroness always loved a touch of royalty.

It was morning at Miss Dubber’s also. Through the closed curtains, Pym heard the milk van clinking on its rounds. Pen in hand he drew a pink file towards him marked simply “R.T.P.,” licked his forefinger and thumb and began methodically turning through the entries until he had extracted some half dozen.

Copy letter Richard T. Pym to Father Guardian, Lyme Regis, dated 1 October 1948, threatening legal proceedings for the abduction of his son Magnus. (Ex R.T.P.’s files.)

Memorandum of 15 September 1948, Fraud Squad to Passport Control Department, recommending impounding of R.T.P.’s passport pending criminal investigations in the matter of one J. R. Wentworth. (Obtained informally through Head Office police liaison section.)

Letter from school bursar to R.T.P. declining to accept either dried fruit, tinned peaches or any other commodity in part or full payment of fees and regretting that the governing board cannot see its way to educating Pym for nothing. “I note also with regret that you refuse to describe yourself as an impecunious parent whose son is destined for the clergy.” (Ex R.T.P.’s files.)

Furious letter from lawyers representing Herr Eberhardt Bertl, sometime under-manager of the Grand Palace Hotel in Bern, addressed to Colonel Sir Richard T. Pym, D.S.O., one of a succession, demanding payment in the order of eleven thousand and eighteen Swiss francs forty centimes, plus interest at four percent per month. (Ex R.T.P.’s files.)

Extract from London

Chronicle

dated November 8, 1949, declaring personal bankruptcy R.T.P., and compulsory liquidation of the eighty-three companies of the Pym empire including, no doubt, The Muspole Friendly & Academic Ltd.

Extract from

Daily Telegraph

dated October 9, 1948, recording the death in Truro Hospital, Cornwall, of one John Reginald Wentworth, after a long illness resulting from his injuries, beloved husband to Peggy.

And a quaint little cutting, culled from God knows where, recording the arrest at sea, on the cruise ship S.S.

Grande Bretagne,

of the notorious confidence tricksters Weber and Woolfe alias Cunningham, masquerading as the Duke and Duchess of Seville.

One by one, with a red pen, Pym numbered each document in the top right corner, then entered the same numbers at the appropriate points in his text by way of reference. With a bureaucrat’s neat manners he stapled the exhibits together and inserted them in a file marked “Annexe.” Closing the file he stood up, gave an unrestrained sigh and thrust down his arms behind him like a man slipping off a harness. The ghostly formlessness of adolescence was over. Manhood and maturity beckoned, even if he never made the distance. He was in his beloved Switzerland at last, the spiritual home of natural spies. Crossing to the window he made a last inspection of the square, the tired lights of England fading as he watched. Gravely he undressed, drank a last vodka, gravely took a look at himself in the mirror and prepared to put himself to bed. But lightly, very lightly. Almost on tiptoe. Almost as if he were afraid to wake himself up. On his way he paused at the desk and read again the decoded message that for once he had not bothered to destroy.

Poppy, he thought, stay exactly where you are.

7

F

ive years ago Jack Brotherhood had shot his Labrador bitch. She was in her basket, rheumatic and shaking; he’d given her the pills but she’d sicked them up, then shamed herself by messing the carpet. And when he threw on his windcheater and took his 12-bore from behind the door, willing her, she looked at him like a criminal because she knew she was finally too sick to find for him. He ordered her to get up but she couldn’t. When he yelled “Seek!” she rolled herself on to her forepaws and lay down again with her head stuck stupidly over the basket. So he put down the gun and got a shovel from the shed and dug her a hole in the field behind the cottage, a bit up the slope with a decent view across the estuary. Then he wrapped her in his favourite tweed jacket and carried her up there and shot her in the back of the head, smashing the spinal cord at the nape, and buried her. After that he sat beside her with a half-bottle of scotch while the Suffolk dew settled itself over him and he decided she had probably had the best death anyone was likely to have in a world not distinguished by good deaths. He didn’t leave a headstone or a coy wood cross for her but he had taken bearings on the spot, using the church tower, the dead willow tree and the windmill, and whenever he passed it by he’d send her a gruff mental greeting, which was as near as he had ever come to pondering on the afterlife, until this empty Sunday morning as he drove through deserted Berkshire lanes and watched the sun lifting on the Downs. “Jack’s had too many miles in the saddle,” Pym had said. “The Firm should have retired him ten years ago.”

And how long ago should we have retired you, my boy? he wondered. Twenty years? Thirty? How many miles have you had in the saddle? How many miles of exposed film have you rolled into how many newspapers? How many miles of newspaper have you dropped into dead letter boxes and tossed over cemetery walls? How many hours have you listened to Prague radio, seated over your code pads?

He lowered his window. The racing air smelt of silage and wood smoke and it thrilled him. Brotherhood was country stock. His forebears were gypsies and clergymen, gamekeepers and poachers and pirates. With the morning wind pouring into his face, he became a raggedy-arsed boy again, galloping Miss Sumner’s hunter bareback across her park and getting the hiding of his life for it. He was freezing to death in the flat mud of the Suffolk fens, too proud to go home without a catch. He was making his first drop from a barrage balloon at Abingdon Aerodrome and discovering how the wind kept his mouth open after he yelled. I’ll leave when they throw me out. I’ll leave when you and I have had our word, my boy.

He had slept six hours in forty-eight, most of them on a lumpy camp bed in a room set aside for typists with the vapours, but he was not tired. “Can we have you for a minute, Jack?” said Kate, the Fifth Floor vestal, with a look that stayed on him a beat too long. “Bo and Nigel would like another small word.” And when he wasn’t sleeping or answering the telephone or thinking his usual puzzled thoughts about Kate, he had watched his life go by in a kind of bewildered free fall into enemy territory: so this is what it’s like, this is badland and these are my feet spinning towards it like a sycamore twig. He had contemplated Pym in all the stages he had grown up with him, drunk with him and worked with him, including a night in Berlin he had totally forgotten until now when they had ended up screwing a couple of army nurses in adjoining rooms. He had remembered contemplating his own mangled arm on the winter’s day in 1943 when it had hung beside him embellished with three German machine-gun bullets, and he had experienced the same feeling of incredulous detachment.

“If you could only have let us know a little earlier, Jack. If only you could have seen it coming.”

Yes, I’m sorry, Bo. Careless of me.

“But Jack, he was practically your own son, we used to say.”

Yes, we did, didn’t we, Bo. Silly really, I agree.

And Kate’s reproving eyes, as ever, saying, Jack, Jack, where are you?

There had been other cases in his lifetime, naturally. Ever since the war had ended, Brotherhood’s professional life had been regularly turned upside down by the Firm’s latest terminal scandal. While he was Head of Station in Berlin, it had happened to him not twice but three times: night telegrams, flash, for Brotherhood’s eyes only. Phone call—where is he? Jack, get off your elbows and get in here

now.

Race through wet streets, dead sober. Telegram one, the subject of my immediately following telegram is a member of this service and has now been revealed as a Soviet Intelligence agent. You will inform your official contacts of this in confidence before they read it in the morning papers. Followed by the long wait beside the codebooks while you think: is it him, is it her, is it me? Telegram two, spell a name of six letters, who the hell do I know who’s got six letters? First group M—Christ, it’s Miller! Second group A—oh my God, it’s Mackay! Until up comes a name you never heard of, from a section you didn’t know existed, and when the expurgated case history finally arrives on your desk all you have is a vision of an under-welfared little nancy-boy in the cypher room in Warsaw who thought he was playing the world’s game when what he really wanted was to shaft his employers.

But these distant scandals had been till now the gunfire of a war he was certain would never come his way. He had regarded them not as warnings but as confirmation of everything he disliked about the way the Firm was going: its retreat into bureaucracy and semi-diplomacy, its pandering to American methods and example. By comparison his own hand-picked staff had only looked better to him, and when the witch-hunters had gathered at his door, led by Grant Lederer and his nasty little Mormon bag-carriers, baying for Pym’s blood and brandishing fanciful suspicions based on nothing more than a few computerised coincidences, it was Jack Brotherhood who had banged his open hand upon the conference table and made the water-glasses hop: “Stop this

now.

There’s not a man or woman in this room who won’t look like a traitor once you start to pull our life stories inside out. A man can’t remember where he was on the night of the tenth? Then he’s lying. He

can

remember? Then he’s too damn flip with his alibi. You go one more yard with this and everyone who tells the truth will become a barefaced liar, everyone who does a decent job will be working for the other side. You carry on like this and you’ll sink our service better than the Russians ever could. Or is that what you want?”

And God help him, with his reputation and his anger and his connections and with his section’s record, in the modern jargon that he loathed, of low cost and high productivity, he had carried the day, never thinking for a moment that another day might come where he wished he hadn’t.

Closing his window Brotherhood stopped the car in a village where no one knew him. He was too early. He had needed to get out of London, out of touch, away from Kate’s brown stare. Give him one more hopeless damage-limitation conference, one more session on how to keep it from the Americans, one more glance of pity or reproach from Kate, or of plain hatred from Bo’s grey army of suburban mandarins, and possibly, just possibly, Jack Brotherhood might have said things that everyone, but most of all himself, would afterwards have regretted. So he had volunteered for this errand instead, and Bo with rare promptness had said what a good idea, who better? And he knew as soon as he cleared Bo’s doorway that they were as glad to see him go as he was to leave. Except for Kate.

“Just do keep phoning in if you don’t mind,” Bo called after him. “Three-hourly at most. Kate will know the score. Won’t you, Kate?”

Nigel followed him down the corridor. “When you phone in, I want you coming through Secretariat. You’re not to use his direct line and I shall need to speak to you first.”

“And that’s an order,” Brotherhood suggested.

“It’s a temporary licence and it can be withdrawn at any time.”

The church had a wooden porch, a footpath led beside a playing field. He passed a farmyard with brick barns and smelt warm milk on the autumn air.

“We evacuate them in echelons, Jack,” Frankel is saying in his hand-pressed Euro-English. “That’s if we evacuate them at all.”

“And on my say-so,” Nigel adds from the wings.

The room is low and windowless and overlit. A uniformed guard mans the peephole. Spaced along the wall sit Frankel’s greying female assistants at their trestle desks. They have brought thermos flasks and share each other’s cigarettes. They have done it all before, like a day at the races. Frankel is fat and ugly, a Latvian headwaiter. Brotherhood recruited him, Brotherhood promoted him. Now he was taking over Brotherhood’s mess. So it goes. It is three in the morning. It is today, six hours ago.

“Day one, Jack, we move only head agents,” says Frankel with a doctor’s false assurance. “Conger and Watchman in Prague, Voltaire in Budapest, Merryman in Gdansk.”

“When do we begin?” says Brotherhood.

“When Bo waves the flag, and not before,” says Nigel. “We’re still evaluating and we still regard Pym’s loyalties as

quite possibly impeccable,”

says Nigel, like somebody mastering a tongue-twister.

“We move them very quietly, Jack,” says Frankel. “No goodbyes, no flowers for the neighbours, no finding somewhere for the cat. Day two radio operators, day three the cut-outs, subagents. Day four whoever’s left.”

“How do we reach them?” Brotherhood asks.

“You don’t, we do,” says Nigel. “If and when the Fifth Floor says it’s necessary, which at the moment, I repeat, is pure hypothesis.”

Kate has followed them in. Kate is our widowed English spinster, pale and sculptural and beautiful, who at forty mourns the loves she never had. And Kate is still Kate, he can see it as clear as ever in her eyes.

“Maybe we pick them off the street when they go to work,” Frankel continues. “Maybe we bang on the door, tell a friend, leave a note somewhere. Just anything we think of, so long as it wasn’t done before.”

“That’s where you’ll be able to help if we get that far,” Nigel explains. “Telling us what’s been done before.”

Frankel has paused before a map of Eastern Europe. Brotherhood waits a step behind him. Head agents red, subagents blue. So much easier to kill a pushpin than a man. Still gazing at the map Brotherhood remembers an evening in Vienna. Pym is playing host, Brotherhood is Colonel Peter bringing London’s thanks for ten years’ service. He remembers Pym’s gracious speech in Czech, the champagne and medals, the handshakes, the assurances, the quiet waltzes to the gramophone. And this dumpy couple in brown, he a physicist, she a senior lady in the Czech Ministry of the Interior, lovers in betrayal, their faces glistening with excitement as they whirl round the drawing-room to the strains of Johann Strauss.

“So when do you start?” Brotherhood asks again.

“Jack, that is Bo’s judgment,” Nigel insists, dangerously patient.

“Jack, the Fifth Floor has ruled that the most important thing is to look busy, act natural, keep everything normal,” says Frankel, picking a sheaf of telegrams from his desk. “They use letter boxes? So clear the letter boxes like normal. They got radio? So send radio like normal, stick to all the normal schedules, hope the opposition are listening.”

“That’s the most important thing at the moment,” Nigel says, as if anything Frankel says is invalid until he says it too. “Total normality in all areas. One premature step would be fatal.”

“So would a late one,” Brotherhood says as his blue eyes start to catch fire.

“They’re waiting for you, Jack,” Kate says, meaning, come away, there’s nothing you can do.

Brotherhood does not move. “Do it now,” he tells Frankel. “Take them into the embassies. Broadcast a warning. Abort.”

Nigel doesn’t say a word. Frankel looks to him for help but Nigel has folded his arms and is looking over the shoulder of one of Frankel’s women while she types a signal.

“Jack, no way do we take those Joes into embassies or consulates,” Frankel says, making faces in Nigel’s direction.

“Verboten.

The most we can do when we get the order from the Fifth Floor is fresh escape papers, is money, transport, a couple of prayers. That right, Nigel?”

“

If

you get the order,” Nigel corrects him.

“Conger will head east,” Brotherhood says. “His daughter’s at university in Bucharest. He’ll go to her.”

“Okay, so where does he go from Bucharest?” says Frankel.

Brotherhood is nearly shouting. There is nothing Kate can do to stop him. “South into bloody Bulgaria, what do you think! If we give him a date and place, we can put a plane in, hedgehop him into Yugoslavia!”

Now Frankel also lifts his voice. “Jack. Hear me, okay? Nigel, confirm this for me so I don’t sound too negative all the time. No little planes, no embassies, no frontier crashes of any kind. This is not the sixties any more. Not the fifties, not the forties. We don’t drop planes and pilots around Eastern Europe like birdseed. We are not enthusiastic about reception committees for ourselves or our Joes that are laid on by the opposition.”

“He’s got it straight,” Nigel confirms with just enough surprise.

“I got to tell you this, Jack. Your networks are so contaminated at this moment that the Foreign Office wouldn’t even drop them in the trash can, would they, Nigel? You are isolated, Jack. Whitehall’s got to cover itself in polythene before it shakes your hand. Is this correct, Nigel?” Frankel hears himself and stops. He looks to Nigel yet again but receives no comforting word. He catches Brotherhood’s eye and stares at him with a long and unexpected fearfulness, the way we look at monuments and find ourselves contemplating our own mortality. “I take orders, Jack. Don’t look at me that way. Cheers.”

Brotherhood slowly climbs the stairs. Climbing them ahead of him, Kate slows down and trails a couple of fingers for him to take hold of. He pretends he hasn’t seen.

“When will I see you?” she says.

Brotherhood has gone deaf as well.

The responsibilities that rested on the shoulders of Tom Pym that morning were as heavy as any he had been obliged to face during his first month as a school prefect and captain of Pandas. Today was the first of Pandas’ duty week. Today, and for the six awesome days to follow, Tom must ring the morning bell, assist Matron to supervise showers and call the roll before breakfast. Today being Sunday he must keep charge of letter-writing in the day room, read the Lesson in chapel and inspect the changing rooms for untidiness and impropriety. When evening came at last he must preside over the boys’ committee that receives suggestions about the management of school life and, after editing, submit them to the agonised consideration of Mr. Caird the Headmaster, for Mr. Caird could do nothing lightly and saw all sides of every argument. And when he had somehow got through all this and rung the bell for lights out, there was Monday to wake up to. Last week it had been Lions’ turn for duty and Lions had done well. Lions, Mr. Caird had pronounced in a rare show of conviction, had displayed a democratic approach to power, holding votes and forming committees on every contentious issue. In chapel, waiting for the last lines of the hymn to die, Tom prayed earnestly for his dead grandfather’s soul, for Mr. Caird and for victory in Wednesday’s squash match against St. Saviour’s, Newbury, away, though he feared it would be another humiliating defeat, for Mr. Caird was divided on the merits of athletic competition. But most fervently he prayed that come next Saturday—if Saturday ever did come—Pandas too would earn Mr. Caird’s favour, because Mr. Caird’s disappointment was actually more than Tom could bear.

Tom was a very tall boy and affected already the British administrator’s bobbing walk that characterised his father. His receding hair-line gave him an air of maturity that may have accounted for his advancement to high position in the school. To watch him, hands linked behind his back, detach himself from the prefect’s pew, step into the aisle, duck his head at the altar and mount the two steps to the lectern, you could have been forgiven for wondering whether this was a pupil at all and not a member of Mr. Caird’s impressively youthful staff. Only his froggy voice as he barked the day’s text betrayed the changeling inside the senatorial exterior. Tom heard little of what he was reading. The Lesson was the first he had read and he had practised it till he knew it by heart. Yet now that he came to perform it, the red and black print before him had neither sound nor meaning. Only the sight of his chewed thumbs stuck either side of him on the lectern, and the white head floating above them in the back row of the congregation, held him to the world at all. Without them, he decided, he could have taken off, smack through the chapel ceiling and into the sky, and thereafter levitated, like his gas balloon on Commemoration Day, which flew all the way to Maidenhead and landed with his name on it in an old lady’s back garden, earning him five pounds in book tokens and a letter from her saying she too had a son called Tom, who worked at Lloyd’s.

“I have trodden the winepress alone,” he bellowed to his surprise. “And of the people there was none with me: for I will tread them in mine anger and trample them in my fury.” The threat alarmed him and he wondered why he had uttered it and to whom. “And their blood shall be sprinkled upon my garments, and I will stain all my raiment.”

Still reading, feeling the backs of his knees batting against his trousers, Tom considered a number of other matters that turned out to be weighing on his mind, some of which were new to him until this moment. He had no expectation any more that his mind would be ruled by what was going on around it, even in work. In Friday’s gym class he had found himself thinking out a problem of Latin grammar. In yesterday’s Latin he had worried about his mother’s drinking. And in the middle of French construe he had discovered that he was no longer in love with Becky Lederer, despite their ardent correspondence, but preferred instead one of the Bursar’s daughters. Under the pressures of high office his mind had become a slice of undersea cable like the one in the science lab. First there was this bunch of wires, all carrying their proper messages and doing their appointed jobs; and then, swimming around them like a shoal of invisible fish, ran a whole lot more messages which for some reason did not need wires at all. And that was how his mind felt now, while he honked out the sacred words in his deepest possible voice only to hear them tinkling like cracked bells in a distant room.

“For the day of vengeance is in mine heart, and the year of my redeemed is come,” he said.

He thought of gas balloons and of the Tom who worked in Lloyd’s, and of the forthcoming apocalypse when he failed his common entrance examination, and of the Bursar’s daughter when she rode her bicycle with her blouse flattened against her chest by the wind. And he fretted about whether Carter Major, who was Pandas’ vice-captain, had the qualities of democratic leadership to handle afternoon kickabout. But there was one thought he refused to have at all because really all these other thoughts were surrogates for it. There was one thought he could not put in words or even pictures, because it was so bad that even thinking it could turn it into truth.

“How’s your beef, son?” Jack Brotherhood asked, what seemed about twenty seconds later, over lunch in the Digby Hotel where they always went.

“Super, Uncle Jack, thank you,” said Tom.

Otherwise they ate in the silence that they mostly observed till lunch was past. Brotherhood had his

Sunday Telegraph,

Tom a fantasy novel he was reading over and over again, because it was a book in which everything came right and other books could be dangerous. Nobody understands better than Uncle Jack how you take people out from school, Tom decided, while he read and ate and thought of his mother. Not even his father had such a clear idea of how everything should be the same each time yet exquisitely different in tiny ways. How you had to be completely calm and unfussed yet draw out the day by doing masses of different things until the last moment. How school was a place that for most of the day must not exist, so that there was never any question of going back there. Only during the last countdown must it be sufficiently reconstructed to make return a possibility.

“Want a second?”

“No, thank you.”

“More Yorkshire?”

“Yes, please. A bit.”

Brotherhood lifted his eyebrows to the waiter and the waiter came at once, which was what waiters did for Uncle Jack.

“Heard from your father?”

Tom did not answer at once because his eyes suddenly hurt and he couldn’t breathe.

“Here, now,” said Brotherhood softly, putting down his newspaper. “What’s this, then?”

“It’s just the Lesson,” said Tom, fighting away his tears. “It’s all right now.”

“You made a damn good job of reading that Lesson. Anyone tells you different, knock him down.”

“It was the wrong day’s,” Tom explained, still fighting to get back above water. “I should have turned to the next bookmark and I forgot.”

“Bugger the wrong day’s,” Brotherhood growled, so emphatically that the old couple at the next table swung their heads round at him. “If yesterday’s Lesson was any good, it won’t do anyone an ounce of harm to hear it twice. Have another ginger beer.”

Tom nodded and Brotherhood ordered it before once more taking up his

Sunday Telegraph.

“Probably didn’t even understand it the first time anyway,” he said with contempt.

But the real trouble was Tom had not read the wrong Lesson; he had read the right one. He knew very well he had, and he had a suspicion Uncle Jack knew it too. He just needed something easier to cry about than the fish that were swimming round the cable in his head and the thought he refused to have.

They agreed to do without pudding so as not to waste the fine weather.

Sugarloaf Hill was a chalky hump in the Berkshire Downs with Ministry of Defence barbed wire round it and a warning to the public to keep out, and probably in all Tom’s life there was nowhere better in the world to be, except at home in Plush at lambing time. Not Lech and skiing with his father, not Vienna and riding with his mother: nowhere he had ever been or dreamed of was as private, as amazingly privileged, as this secret hilltop compound with barbed wire to keep out enemies, where Jack Brotherhood and Tom Pym, godfather and godson and the best friends ever, could take turns to loose off clay pigeons from the launcher, and shoot them down or miss them with Tom’s 20-bore. The first time they had come here, Tom hadn’t believed it. “It’s all locked, Uncle Jack,” he had objected as Uncle Jack stopped the car. It had been a good day till then. Now suddenly it had gone all wrong. They had driven ten miles by the map and to his chagrin ended at a pair of high white gates that were locked and forbidden by order. The day was over. He had wished he could be back at school again, doing his voluntary-punishment prep.

“Then go over and yell ‘Open sesame!’ at it,” Uncle Jack had advised, handing Tom a key from his pocket. And the next thing was, the white gates of authority had closed again behind them and they were special people with a special pass to be up here on the hilltop with the boot open, pulling out the rusted launcher that Uncle Jack had kept secret all through lunch. And the next thing after

that

was that Tom scored nine clays out of twenty, and Uncle Jack nineteen, because Uncle Jack was the best shot ever, the best at everything, although he was so old, and he wouldn’t give away a match to please anybody, not even Tom. If Tom ever beat Uncle Jack, he would beat him fair, which was what they both wanted without needing to say it. And it was what Tom wanted more than anything today: a normal exchange, a normal competition, with normal conversation, the kind that Uncle Jack was brilliant at. He wanted to hide his worst thoughts in a deep hole and not have to show them to anybody ever until he died for England.

It was the outdoors that set Tom free. Uncle Jack had nothing to do with it. He didn’t like too much talk and certainly not about things that were private. It was the sense of daytime that was like a resurrection. It was the din of gunfire, the clatter of the October wind that buffeted his cheeks and slid inside his school pullover. Suddenly these things got him talking like a man instead of whimpering under the bedclothes with the stuffed animals which progressive Mr. Caird encouraged. Down in the river valley there had been no wind at all, just a tired autumn sun and brown leaves along the towpath. But up here on the bare chalk hilltop the wind was going like a train through a tunnel, taking Tom with it. It was clanking and laughing in the new Ministry of Defence pylon that had gone up since they had last come here.

“If we shoot the pylon down we’ll let the bloody Russians in!” Uncle Jack yelled at him through cupped hands. “Don’t want to do that, do we?”

“No!”

“All right, then. What do we do?”

“Pitch the launcher right next to the pylon and shoot away from it!” Tom had shouted back joyfully, and as he shouted he felt the last bits of worry go out of his chest, and his shoulders settle on his back, and he knew that with a wind like this whipping over the hilltop he could tell anything he wanted to anybody. Uncle Jack launched ten clays for him and he brought down eight with eleven cartridges, which was his absolute best yet considering the wind. And when it was Tom’s turn to launch, Uncle Jack had a fight on his hands just to match him. But match him he did and Tom loved him for it. He didn’t want to beat Uncle Jack. His father maybe, but not Uncle Jack; there would be nothing left. In his second ten Tom did less well but he didn’t mind because his arms were aching, which wasn’t his fault. But Uncle Jack stayed steady as a castle. Even when he was reloading, the white head stayed forward to meet the rising butt.

“Fourteen eighteen to you,” Tom shouted as he galloped about collecting empty cartridges. “Well shot!” And then, just as loud and cheerful: “And Dad’s all right, is he?”

“Why wouldn’t he be?” Brotherhood shouted back.

“He seemed a bit down when he came to see me after Granddad’s funeral, that’s all.”

“I should think he bloody well

was

down. How would you feel if you had just buried

your

old man?”

Still shouting in the wind, both of them. Small talk while they loaded the 20-bore and cranked back the launcher for another go.

“He talked about freedom all the time!” Tom yelled. “He said nobody could ever give it to us, we’ve got to grab it for ourselves. I got rather bored with it, actually.”

Uncle Jack was so busy reloading that Tom even wondered whether he had heard. Or if he had, whether he was interested.

“He’s dead right,” said Brotherhood snapping the gun shut. “Patriotism’s a dirty word these days.”

Tom released the clay and watched it curl and burst to powder under Uncle Jack’s perfect aim.

“He wasn’t talking about patriotism exactly,” Tom explained, delving for another couple of cartridges.

“Oh?”

“I think he was telling me that if I was unhappy I should run away. He said it in his letter too. It’s sort—”

“Well?”

“It’s as if he wanted me to do something he hadn’t done himself when

he

was at the school. It’s a bit weird actually.”

“I shouldn’t think it’s weird at all. He’s testing you, that’s all. Saying the door’s open if you want to bolt. More like a gesture of trust by the sound of it. No boy had a better father, Tom.”

Tom fired and missed.

“What do you mean letter, anyway?” said Brotherhood. “I thought he came and saw you.”

“He did. But he wrote to me as well. A great long letter. I just thought it was weird,” he said again, unable to get away from a favourite new adjective.

“All right, he was cut up. What’s wrong with that? His old man dies, he sits down and writes to his son. You should feel honoured—good shot, boy. Good shot.”

“Thanks,” said Tom and looked on proudly while Uncle Jack marked a hit on his scorecard. Uncle Jack always kept the score.

“That’s not what he said, though,” Tom added awkwardly. “He wasn’t cut up. He was pleased.”

“He wrote that, did he?”

“He said Granddad had gobbled up the natural humanity in him and he didn’t want to gobble it up in me.”

“That’s just another way of being cut up,” said Brotherhood, unbothered. “Your dad ever talk about a secret place, by the by? Somewhere he could find his well-earned peace and quiet, ever?”

“Not really.”

“He had one though, didn’t he.”

“Not really.”

“Where is it?”

“He said I was never to tell anyone.”

“Then don’t,” said Uncle Jack firmly.

Suddenly, after that, talking about one’s father became the necessary function of a democratic prefect. Mr. Caird had said it was the duty of people of privilege to sacrifice what they held most dear in life, and Tom loved his father beyond bearing. He felt Brotherhood’s gaze on him and was pleased to have aroused his interest even though it did not seem to be particularly approving.

“You’ve known him a very long time, haven’t you, Uncle Jack?” said Tom, getting into the car.

“If thirty-five years is a long time.”

“It is,” said Tom, for whom a week was still an age. Inside the car there was suddenly no wind at all. “So if Dad’s all right,” he said with false boldness as he buckled on his seat belt, “why are the police looking for him? That’s what

I

want to know.”

“Going to tell our fortunes today, Mary Lou?” Uncle Jack asked.

“Not today, darling, I’m not in the mood.”

“You’re always in the mood,” said Uncle Jack, and the two of them had a huge laugh while Tom blushed.

Mary Lou was a gypsy, Uncle Jack said, though Tom thought her more like a pirate. She was fat-bottomed and black-haired and had false lips drawn over her mouth like Frau Bauer in Vienna. She cooked cakes and served cream teas in a wooden café at the edge of the Common. Tom asked for poached eggs on toast and the eggs were creamy and fresh like the eggs at Plush. Uncle Jack had a pot of tea and a piece of her best fruitcake. He seemed to have forgotten everything Tom had been talking about, which Tom was grateful for, because he was feeling headachey from the fresh air and embarrassed by his own thoughts. It was two hours and eight minutes till he had to ring the bell for evensong. He was thinking he might take his father’s advice and run away.

“So what was all this about the police again?” said Brotherhood a little vaguely, long after Tom had decided he had forgotten or not heard.

“They came and saw Caird. Then Caird sent for me.”

“

Mr

. Caird, son,” Brotherhood corrected him perfectly kindly and took a grateful pull of tea. “When?”

“On Friday. After house rugger. Mr. Caird sent for me and there was this man in a raincoat sitting in Mr. Caird’s armchair, and he said he was from Scotland Yard about Dad, and did I by any chance have his leave address because in his absentmindedness after Granddad’s funeral Dad had taken leave and not told anyone where he was.”

“Bollocks,” Brotherhood said after a long time.

“It’s true, sir. It really is.”

“You said they.”

“I meant he.”

“Height?”

“Five foot ten.”

“Age?”

“Forty.”

“Colour of hair?”

“Like mine.”

“Clean-shaven?”

“Yes.”

“Eyes?”

“Brown.”

It was a game they had played often in the past.

“Car?”

“He took a taxi from the station.”

“How do you know?”

“Mr. Mellor brought him. He takes me to cello and works from the station cab-rank.”

“Be accurate, boy. He came in Mr. Mellor’s car. Did he tell you he’d come by train?”

“No.”

“Did Mellor?”

“No.”

“So who says he was a policeman?”

“Mr. Caird, sir. When he introduced me.”

“What was he wearing?”

“A suit, sir. Grey.”

“Did he give his rank?”

“Inspector.”

Brotherhood smiled. A wonderful, comforting affectionate smile. “You silly chump, he was a

Foreign Office

inspector. That’s just a flunkey from your dad’s shop. That’s not a

policeman,

son; that’s a half-arsed clerk from Personnel Department with too little to do. Caird got it wrong as usual.”

Tom could have kissed him. He nearly did. He straightened up and felt about nine feet taller, and he wanted to bury his face in the thick tweed of Uncle Jack’s sports coat. Of course he wasn’t a policeman! He didn’t talk like a policeman, he didn’t feel like a policeman, he didn’t have big feet or short hair like a policeman, or a policeman’s way of being separate from you even when he was being nice. It’s all right, Tom told himself in glory. Uncle Jack’s made it right, the way he always can.

Brotherhood was holding out his handkerchief and Tom scrubbed his eyes with it.

“So what did you tell him anyway?” Brotherhood said. And Tom explained that he didn’t know where his father was either, he’d talked about losing himself in Scotland for a few days before returning to Vienna. Which had made Dad somehow seem at fault, a sort of criminal or worse. And when Tom had told his Uncle Jack everything else he remembered about the interview, the questions, and the telephone number in case Dad surfaced—Tom didn’t have it, but Mr. Caird did—Uncle Jack went to the phone in Mary Lou’s parlour and rang Mr. Caird, and got an extension for Tom till nine o’clock, on the grounds that there were family matters that needed talking about.

“But what about my bells?” said Tom in alarm.

“Carter Major’s doing them,” said Uncle Jack, who understood absolutely everything.

He must have rung London too, because he took a long time and gave Mary Lou an extra five pounds to fill what he called her Christmas stocking, which had them both in fits again, and this time Tom joined in.

How they came to be talking about Corfu, Tom was afterwards never sure and perhaps there was no real path to their conversation any more; it was just chat about what they had both been up to since they had last met, which after all was before the summer holidays so there was masses to talk about if you were in a talking mood. And Tom was; he hadn’t talked like this for ages, maybe ever, but Uncle Jack had the ease, he had that mixture of tolerance and discipline that for Tom was the perfect blend, for he loved to feel the strength of Uncle Jack’s frontiers as well as the safe ground inside.

“How’s your confirmation going?” Brotherhood had asked.

“All right, thanks.”

“You’re of an age now, Tom. Got to face it. In some countries you’d be in uniform already.”

“I know.”

“Work still a problem?”

“A bit, sir.”

“Still got your eye on Sandhurst?”

“Yes, sir. And my uncle’s regiment says they’d take me if I do all right.”

“Well you’ll have to swot, won’t you?”

“I’m really trying actually.”

Then Uncle Jack drew nearer and his voice dropped. “I’m not sure I should tell you this, son. But I’m going to anyway because I think you’re ready to keep a secret. Can you do that?”

“I’ve got lots of secrets I’ve never told to anyone, sir.”

“Your father is rather a secret man himself actually. I expect you knew that, didn’t you?”

“You are too, aren’t you?”

“Quite a great man as well, he is. But he’s got to keep it quiet. For his country.”

“And for you,” said Tom.

“A lot of his life is blocked off completely. You could almost say from human gaze.”

“Does Mummy know?”

“In principle, yes, she does. In detail, next to nothing. That’s the way we work. And if your father has ever given the impression of lying, or being evasive, less than truthful sometimes, you can bet your boots it was his work and his loyalty that were the reason. It’s a strain for him. It is for all of us. Secrets are a strain.”

“Is it dangerous?” Tom asked.

“Can be. That’s why we give him bodyguards. Like boys on motorbikes who follow him round Greece and hang about outside his house.”

“I saw them!” Tom declared excitedly.

“Like tall thin men with moustaches who come up to him at cricket matches—”

“He did, he did! He had a straw hat!”

“And sometimes what your dad does is so secret he has to disappear completely. And not even the bodyguards can have his address.

I

know. But the rest of the world doesn’t and it mustn’t. And if that inspector comes to you again, or to Mr. Caird, or if anybody else does, you must tell them whatever you know and report to me immediately afterwards. I’m going to give you a special phone number and have a special word with Mr. Caird too. He deserves a lot of help, your father does. And gets it.”

“I’m really glad,” said Tom.

“Now then. That letter of his he wrote to you. The long one that came after he’d gone. Did it talk about things like that?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t read it all. There was a whole lot of stuff about Sefton Boyd’s penknife and some writing in the staff loo.”

“Who’s Sefton Boyd?”

“He’s a boy in the school. He’s my friend.”

“Is he your dad’s friend too?”

“No, but his father was. His father was in the school too.”

“Now what have you done with this letter?”

Punished himself with it. Squidged it up till it was tight and prickly and kept it in his trousers pocket where it jabbed his thigh. But Tom didn’t say that. He just handed the remnants gratefully to Uncle Jack, who promised to take proper care of them and talk everything over with him next time—if there was anything that needed talking over, which Uncle Jack very much doubted that there would be.

“Got the envelope, have you?”

Tom hadn’t.

“Where did he post it from then? There’s a clue there, I expect, if we look for it.”

“The postmark was Reading,” said Tom.

“What day?”

“The Tuesday,” said Tom unhappily, “but it could have been after post on Monday. I thought he was going back to Vienna on Monday afternoon. If he didn’t go to Scotland, that is.”

But Uncle Jack didn’t seem to hear because he was talking about Greece again, playing what the two of them called report writing about this weedy fellow with a moustache who had shown up at the cricket ground in Corfu.

“I expect you were worried about him, weren’t you, son? You thought he was up to no good with your dad, I expect, although he was so friendly. I mean, if they knew each other

that

well, why didn’t your dad ask him home to meet your mum? I can see that would have bothered you on reflection. You didn’t think it very nice your dad should have a secret life on Mum’s doorstep.”

“I suppose I didn’t,” Tom admitted, marvelling as ever at Uncle Jack’s omniscience. “He held Dad’s arm.”

They had returned to the Digby. In the great joy of his release from worry, Tom had rediscovered his appetite and was having a steak and chips to fill the gap. Brotherhood had ordered himself a whisky.

“Height?” said Brotherhood, back at their special game.

“Six foot.”

“All right, well done. Six foot exactly is correct. Colour of hair?”

Tom hesitated. “Sort of mousy fawny with stripes,” he said.

“What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”

“He wore a straw hat. It was hard to see.”

“I know he wore a straw hat. That’s why I’m asking you. Colour of hair?”

“Brown,” said Tom finally. “Brown with the sun on it. And a big forehead like a genius.”

“Now how the hell does the sun get under the brim of a hat?”

“Grey brown,” said Tom.

“Then say so. Two points only. Hatband?”

“Red.”

“Oh dear.”

“It was red.”

“Keep trying.”

“It was red, red, red!”

“Three points. Colour of beard?”

“He hasn’t got a beard. He’s got a shaggy moustache and thick eyebrows like yours but not so bushy, and crinkly eyes.”

“Three points. Build?”

“Stoopy and hobbly.”

“What the hell’s hobbly?”

“Like chumpy. Chumpy’s when the sea is choppy and bumpy. Hobbly is when he walks fast and hobbles.”

“You mean limps.”

“Yes.”

“Say so. Which leg?”

“Left.”

“One more try?”

“Left.”

“Certain?”

“Left!”

“Three points. Age?”

“Seventy.”

“Don’t be damn stupid.”

“He’s old!”

“He’s not seventy. I’m not seventy. I’m not sixty. Well only just. Is he older than me?”

“The same.”

“Carry anything?”

“A briefcase. A grey thing like elephant skin. And he was stringy like Mr. Toombs.”

“Who’s Toombs?”

“Our gym master. He teaches aikido and geography. He’s killed people with his feet, though he’s not supposed to.”

“All right, stringy like Mr. Toombs, carried an elephant skin briefcase. Two points. Another time, omit the subjective reference.”

“What’s that?”

“Mr. Toombs. You know him, I don’t. Don’t compare one person I don’t know with another I don’t know.”

“You said you knew him,” said Tom, very excited to catch Uncle Jack out.

“I do. I’m fooling. Did he have a car, your man?”

“Volvo. Hired from Mr. Kaloumenos.”

“How do you know that?”

“He hires it to everyone. He goes down to the harbour and hangs about and if anyone wants to hire a car Mr. Kaloumenos gives them his Volvo.”

“Colour?”

“Green. And it’s got a bashed wing and a Corfu registration and a fox’s tail from the aerial and a—”

“It’s red.”

“It’s green!”

“No points,” said Brotherhood firmly, to Tom’s outrage.

“Why not?”

Brotherhood pulled a wolfish smile. “It wasn’t his car, was it? How do you know it was the bloke with the moustache who hired it when two other blokes were riding in it? You lost your objectivity, son.”

“He was in charge!”

“You don’t

know

that. You’re guessing it. You could start a war, making up things like that. Ever met an Auntie Poppy at all, son?”

“No, sir.”

“Uncle?”

Tom giggled. “No, sir.”

“A Mr. Wentworth a name to you?”

“No, sir.”

“No bells at all?”

“No, sir. I thought it was a place in Surrey.”

“Well done, son. Never make it up if you think you don’t know and ought to. That’s the rule.”

“You were teasing again, weren’t you?”

“Maybe I was at that. When did your dad say he’d see you again?”

“He didn’t.”

“Does he ever?”

“Not really.”

“Then there’s no fuss, is there?”

“It’s just the letter.”

“What about the letter?”

“It’s as if he’s dead.”

“Bollocks. You’re imagining. Want me to tell you something else you know? That secret hideaway of your dad’s that he’s gone to. It’s all right. We know about it. Did he give you the address?”

“No.”

“Name of the nearest Scottish town?”

“No. He just said Scotland. On the sea in Scotland. A place to write where he’s safe from everyone.”

“He’s told you all he can, Tom. He’s not allowed to tell you any more. How many rooms has he got?”

“He didn’t say.”

“Who does his shopping then?”

“He didn’t say. He’s got a super landlady. She’s old.”

“He’s a good man. And a wise man. And she’s a good woman. One of us. Now don’t you worry any more.” Uncle Jack glanced sideways at his watch. “Here. Finish that up and order yourself a ginger beer. I need to see a man about a dog.” Still smiling, he strode to the door marked toilets and telephone. Tom was nothing if not an observer. Points of happy colour on Uncle Jack’s cheeks. A sense of merriness like his own and everybody absolutely fine.

Brotherhood had a wife and a house in Lambeth, and in theory he could have gone to them. He had another wife in his cottage in Suffolk, divorced it was true but given notice willing to oblige. He had a daughter married to a solicitor in Pinner and he wished them both to the devil and it was mutual. Nevertheless they would have had him as a duty. And there was a useless son who scratched a living on the stage and if Brotherhood was feeling charitable towards him, which oddly enough these days he sometimes was, and if he could stomach the squalor and the smell of pot, which he sometimes could, he would have been welcome enough to the heap of greasy coverlets that Adrian called his spare bed. But tonight and for every other night until he had had his word with Pym he wanted none of them. He preferred the exile of his stinking little safe flat in Shepherd Market with sooty pigeons humping each other on the parapet and the tarts doing sentry go along the pavement below him, the way they used to in the war. Periodically the Firm tried to take the place away from him or deduct the rent from his salary at source. The desk jockeys hated him for it and said it was his fuck-hutch, which occasionally it was. They resented his claims for hospitality booze and cleaners he didn’t have. But Brotherhood was hardier than all of them and more or less they knew it.

“Research have turned up more stuff about the use of newspapers by Czech Intelligence,” Kate said into the pillow. “But none of it’s conclusive.”

Brotherhood took a long pull of his vodka. It was two in the morning. They had been here an hour. “Don’t tell me. The great spy pricks the letters of his message with a pin and posts the newspaper to his spymaster. Said spymaster holds the newspaper to the light, and reads the plans for Armageddon. They’ll be using semaphore next.”

She lay white and luminous beside him on the little bed, a forty-year-old Cambridge débutante who had lost her way. The grey-pink glow through the grimy curtains cut her into classic fragments. Here a thigh, here a calf, here the cone of a breast or the knifeline of a flank. She had turned her back to him, one leg slightly bent. God damn it, what does she want of me, this sad, beautiful bridge-player of the Fifth Floor, with her air of lost love and her prim carnality? After seven years of her, Brotherhood still had no idea. He’d be out touring the stations, he’d be in Bongabonga land. He’d not speak or write to her for months. Yet he’d hardly unpacked his toothbrush before she was in his arms, demanding him with her sad and hungry eyes. Does she have a hundred of us—are we her fighter pilots, claiming her favours each time we limp home from another mission? Or am I the only one who storms the statue?

“And Bo’s called in some top shrink to join the feast,” she said, in her impeccable vowels. “Somebody who specialises in harmless nervous breakdowns. They’ve thrown Pym’s dossier at him and told him to assemble the profile of a loyal Englishman under severe stress who is arousing anxiety in other people, particularly Americans.”

“He’ll be calling in a medium next,” said Brotherhood.

“They’ve checked flights to the Bahamas, Scotland and Ireland. That’s as well as everywhere else. They’ve checked ships, car-hire firms and goodness knows what. They’ve got warrants running on every telephone he ever used and a blanket warrant for the rest. They’ve cancelled leave and weekends for all transcribers and put the surveillance teams on twenty-four-hour alert, and they still haven’t told anybody what it’s about. The canteen’s a funeral parlour, nobody talking to anybody. They’re questioning anyone who shared an office with him or bought a secondhand car from him, they’ve turned the tenants out of the Pyms’ house in Dulwich and stripped the place from top to bottom pretending to be woodworm experts. Now Nigel’s talking of moving the whole search team to a safe house in Norfolk Street, it’s getting so big. Including the help, that’s about a hundred and fifty staff. What’s in the burnbox?”

“Why?”

“There’s a shadow over it. Not in front of the children. Bo and Nigel clam up as soon as anybody mentions it.”

“Press?” said Brotherhood, as if he had answered her question instead of deflecting it.

“Sewn up as usual. From

TitBits

downwards. Bo had lunch with the editors yesterday. He’s already written their leaders for them in case anything gets out. How rumours weaken our security. Uninformed speculation as the true Enemy Within. Nigel’s been leaning his full weight on the radio and television people.”

“All two stone of it. What about the phoney copper?”

“Whoever called on Tom’s Headmaster wasn’t family. He wasn’t from the Firm and he wasn’t police.”

“Maybe he was from the competition. They don’t have to ask us first, do they?”

“Bo’s terror is that the Americans are launching their own manhunt.”

“If he’d been American there’d have been three of him. He was a cheeky Czech. That’s the way they work. Same as they used to fly in the war.”

“The Headmaster describes him as up-market English, not a whiff of foreign. He didn’t come or leave by train. He gave his name as Inspector Baring of Special Branch. There isn’t one. The taxi bill return between the station and the school was twelve pounds and he didn’t ask the driver for a receipt. Imagine a policeman not wanting a receipt for twelve pounds. He left a fake visiting card. They’re looking for the printer, the paper-maker and for all I know the ink manufacturers, but they won’t bring in police, the competition or liaison. They’ll make any enquiry they can think of as long as it doesn’t frighten the horses.”

“And the London phone number he gave?”

“Bogus.”

“I could nearly laugh about that if humour was my mood. What does Bo think about the moustachioed gentleman with a handbag who holds Pym’s arm at cricket matches?”

“He refuses to take a view. He says if we all had our friends checked at cricket matches, we’d have no friends and no cricket. He’s drafted extra girls to comb the Czech personalities index and he’s signalled Athens Station to send someone to Corfu to talk to the car-hire man. It’s delay and pray, and Magnus please come home.”

“Where do I stand? In the corner?”

“They’re terrified you’ll pull down the Temple.”

“I thought Pym had done that already.”

“Then perhaps it’s guilty contact,” Kate said in her crisp Queen Bee voice.

Brotherhood took another long swallow of vodka. “If they’d get the bloody networks out. If they’d do the obvious thing, just for once.”

“They won’t do anything that might alert the Americans. They’d rather lie all the way to the grave. ‘We’ve had three major traitors in three minor years. One more and we might as well admit the party’s over.’ That’s Bo speaking.”

“So the Joes will die for the Special Relationship. I like that. So will the Joes. They’ll understand.”

“Will they find him?”

“Maybe.”

“Maybe’s not enough. I’m asking you, Jack. Will they find him? Will you?”

She sounded suddenly imperious and urgent. She took the glass from his hand and drank the rest of his vodka while he watched her. She leaned over the side of the bed and fished a cigarette from her handbag. She handed him the matches and he lit it for her.

“Bo’s put a lot of monkeys in front of a lot of typewriters,” Brotherhood said, still watching her intently. “Maybe one of them will come up with the goods. I didn’t know you smoked, Kate.”

“I don’t.”

“You’re drinking well too, I’m pleased to see. I don’t remember you hitting the vodka as hard as this, I’m sure I don’t. Who taught you to drink vodka that way?”

“Why shouldn’t I?”

“More to the point is why should you? You’re trying to tell me something, aren’t you? Something I don’t think I like at all. I thought you were spying for Bo for a minute there. I thought you were doing a bit of a Jezebel on me. Then I thought, no, she’s trying to tell me something. She’s attempting a small and intimate confession.”

“He’s a blasphemer.”

“Who is, dear?”

“Magnus.”

“Oh he is, is he? Magnus a blasphemer. Now why is that?”

“Hold me, Jack.”

“Like hell I will.” He pulled away from her and saw that what he had mistaken for arrogance was a stoical acceptance of despair. Her sad eyes stared straight at him, and her face was set in resignation.

“‘ I love you, Kate,’” she said. “‘ Get me clear of this and I’ll marry you and we’ll live happily ever after.’”

Brotherhood took her cigarette and drew on it.

“‘ I’ll dump Mary. We’ll go and live abroad. France. Morocco. Who cares?’ Phone calls from the other end of the earth. ‘I rang to say I love you.’ Flowers, saying ‘I love you.’ Cards. Little notes folded into things, shoved under the door, personal for my eyes only in top-secret envelopes. ‘I’ve lived too long with the what-ifs. I want action, Kate. You’re my escape-line. Help me. I love you. M.’”

Once again, Brotherhood waited.

“‘ I love you,’” she repeated. “He kept saying it. Like a ritual he was trying to believe in. ‘I love you.’ I suppose he thought if he said it to enough people enough times, one day it might be true. It wasn’t. He never loved a woman in his life. We were enemy, all of us. Touch me, Jack!”

To his surprise he felt a wave of kinship overcome him. He drew her to him and held her tightly to his chest.

“Is Bo wise to any of this?” he said.

He could feel the sweat collecting on his back. He could smell Pym’s nearness in the crevices of her body. She rolled her head against him but he gently shook her, making her say it aloud: Bo knows nothing. No, Jack. Bo’s got no idea.

“Magnus wasn’t interested till he was calling the whole game,” she said. “He could have had me any time. That wasn’t enough for him. ‘Wait for me, Kate. I’m going to cut the cable and be free. Kate, it’s me, where are you?’ I’m here, you idiot, or I wouldn’t be answering the phone, would I? . . . He doesn’t have affairs. He has lives. We’re on separate planets for him. Places he can call while he floats through space. You know his favourite photograph of me?”

“I don’t think I do, Kate,” Brotherhood said.

“I’m naked on a beach in Normandy. We’d stolen the weekend. I’ve got my back to him, I’m walking into the sea. I didn’t even know he had a camera.”

“You’re a beautiful girl, Kate. I could get quite hot about a picture like that myself,” said Brotherhood, pulling back her hair so that he could see her face.

“He loved it better than he loved me. With my back to him I was anyone—his girl on the beach—his dream. I left his fantasies intact. You’ve got to get me out of it, Jack.”

“How deep in are you?”

“Deep enough.”

“Write him any letters yourself?”

She shook her head.

“Do him any little favours? Bend the rules for him? You better tell me, Kate.” He waited, feeling the increasing pressure of her head against him. “Can you hear me?” She nodded. “I’m dead, Kate. But you’ve got a while to go. If it ever comes out that you and Pym so much as had a strawberry milkshake together at McDonald’s while you were waiting for your bus home, they will shave your head and post you to Economic Development before you can say Jack anybody. You know that, don’t you?”

Another nod.

“What did you do for him? Steal a few secrets, did you? Something juicy out of Bo’s own plate?” She shook her head. “Come on, Kate. He fooled me too. I’m not going to throw you to the wolves. What did you do for him?”

“There was an entry in his P.F.,” she said.

“So?”

“He wanted it taken out. It was from long ago. An army report from his National Service time in Austria.”

“When did you do this?”

“Early. We’d been going for about a year. He was back from Prague.”

“And you did it for him. You raided his file?”

“It was trivial, he said. He was very young at the time. A boy still. He’d been running some low-grade Joe into Czechoslovakia. A frontier crosser, I think. Really small stuff. But there was this girl called Sabina who’d got in on the act and wanted to marry him and defected. I didn’t listen to it very clearly. He said if anybody picked through his file and came on the episode he’d never make it to the Fifth Floor.”

“Well that’s not the end of the world now, is it?”

She shook her head.

“Joe have a name, did he?” Brotherhood asked.

“A codename. Greensleeves.”

“That’s fanciful. I like that. Greensleeves. An all-English Joe. You fished the paper from the file and what did you do with it? Just tell it to me, Kate. It’s out now. Let’s go.”

“I stole it.”

“All right. What did you do with it?”

“That’s what he asked me.”

“When?”

“He rang me.”

“When?”

“Last Monday evening. After he was supposed to have left for Vienna.”

“What time? Come on, Kate, this is good. What time did he ring you?”

“Ten. Later. Ten-thirty. Earlier. I was watching

News at Ten.”

“What bit?”

“Lebanon. The shelling. Tripoli or somewhere. I turned the sound down as soon as I heard him and the shelling went on and on like a silent movie. ‘I needed to hear your voice, Kate. I’m sorry for everything. I rang to say I’m sorry. I wasn’t a bad man, Kate. It wasn’t all pretend.’”

“Wasn’t?”

“Yes. Wasn’t. He was conducting a retrospective. Wasn’t. I said it’s just your father’s death, you’ll be all right, don’t cry. Don’t talk as if you’re dead yourself. Come round. Where are you? I’ll come to you. He said he couldn’t. Not any more. Then about his file. I should feel free to tell everyone what I’d done, not try to shield him any more. But to give him a week. ‘One week, Kate. It’s not a lot after all those years.’ Then, had I still got the paper I took out for him? Had I destroyed it, kept a copy?”

“What did you say?”

She went to the bathroom and returned with the embroidered spongebag she kept her kit in. She drew a folded square of brown paper from it and handed it to him.

“Did you give him a copy?”

“No.”

“Did he ask for one?”

“No. I wouldn’t have done that. I expect he knew. I took it and I said I’d taken it and he should believe me. I thought I’d put it back one day. It was a link.”

“Where was he when he rang you on Monday?”

“A phone box.”

“Reverse charges?”

“Middle distance. I reckoned four fifty-pence pieces. Mind you, that could still be London, knowing him. We were on for about twenty minutes but a lot of the time he couldn’t speak.”

“Describe. Come on, old love. You’ll only have to do it once, I promise you, so you might as well do it thoroughly.”

“I said, ‘Why aren’t you in Vienna?’”

“What did he say to that?”

“He said he’d run out of small change. That was the last thing he said to me. ‘I’ve run out of small change.’”

“Did he have a place he ever took you? A hideaway?”

“We used my flat or went to hotels.”

“Which ones?”

“The Grosvenor at Victoria was one. The Great Eastern at Liverpool Street. He has favourite rooms that overlook the railway lines.”

“Give me the numbers.”

Holding her against him, he walked her to the desk and scribbled down the two numbers to her dictation, then pulled on his old dressing-gown and knotted it round his waist and smiled at her. “I loved him too, Kate. I’m a bigger fool than you are.” But he won no smile in return. “Did he ever talk about a place away from it all? Some dream he had?” He poured her some more vodka and she took it.

“Norway,” she said. “He wanted to see the migration of the reindeer. He was going to take me one day.”

“Where else?”

“Spain. The north. He said he’d buy a villa for us.”

“Did he talk about his writing?”

“Not much.”

“Did he say where he’d like to write his great book?”

“In Canada. We’d hibernate in some snowy place and live out of tins.”

“The sea—nothing by the sea?”

“No.”

“Did he ever mention Poppy to you? Someone called Poppy, like in his book?”

“He never mentioned any of his women. I told you. We were separate planets.”

“How about someone called Wentworth?”

She shook her head.

“‘ Wentworth was Rick’s Nemesis,’” Brotherhood recited. “‘ Poppy was mine. We each spent our lives trying to put right the wrong we’d done to them.’ You heard the tapes. You’ve seen the transcripts. Wentworth.”

“He’s mad,” she said.

“Stay here,” he said. “Stay as long as you like.”

Returning to the desk, he wiped the books and papers off it with a single sweep of his arm, switched on the reading lamp, sat down and laid the sheet of brown paper beside Pym’s crumpled letter to Tom, postmark Reading. The London telephone directories were on the floor at his side. He chose the Grosvenor Hotel, Victoria, first and asked the night porter to put him through to the room number Kate had given him. A drowsy man answered.

“House detective here,” Brotherhood said. “We’ve reason to believe you’ve got a lady in your room.”

“Of course I’ve got a fucking lady in my room. This is a double room I’m paying for, and she’s my wife.”

It wasn’t any of Pym’s voices.

He laughed for her, rang the Great Eastern Hotel, and got a similar result. He rang Independent Television News and asked for the night editor. He said he was Inspector Markley of Scotland Yard with an urgent enquiry: He wanted the time of transmission of the item on the Lebanese bombing story on Monday night

News at Ten.

He held on for as long as it took, while he continued to leaf through the pages of Pym’s letter. Postmark Reading. Posted Monday night or Tuesday morning.

“Ten-seventeen and ten seconds. That’s when he rang you,” he said, and glanced round to make sure she was all right. She was sitting up against the pillow, head back like a boxer between rounds.

He rang the post office investigation unit and got the night officer. He gave her the Firm’s codeword and she responded with a doom-laden “I hear you,” as if the third world war was about to happen.

“I’m asking the impossible and I want it by yesterday,” he said.

“We’ll try our best,” she said.

“I want a backtrack on any cash call to London made from a Reading area telephone box between ten-eighteen and ten-twenty-one on Monday night. Duration around twenty minutes.”

“Can’t be done,” she said promptly.

“I love her,” he told Kate over his shoulder. She had rolled over and was lying on her stomach with her face buried in her arm.

He rang off and addressed himself in earnest to Kate’s purloined pages from Pym’s personal file. Three of them, extracted from the army record of First Lieutenant Magnus Pym, number supplied, of the Intelligence Corps, attached No. 6 Field Interrogation Unit, Graz, described in a footnote as an offensive military intelligence-gathering unit with limited permission to run local informants. Dated 18 July 1951, writer unknown, relevant passage sidelined by Registry. Date of entry to Pym’s P.F., 12 May 1952. Reason for entry, Pym’s formal candidature for admission to this service. The extract was from his commanding officer’s conduct report at the close of Pym’s tour of duty in Graz, Austria: “. . . exceptional young officer . . . popular and courteous in the mess . . . earned a high reputation for his skilful running of source GREENSLEEVES who over the last eleven months has supplied this unit with secret and top-secret intelligence on the Soviet Order of Battle in Czechoslovakia.”

“You all right there?” he called to Kate. “Listen. You did nothing wrong. Nobody even missed this stuff. Nobody would have been the wiser for it. Nobody ever tried to follow it up.”

He turned a page: “. . . close personal relationship established between source and case officer . . . Pym’s calm authority during crisis . . . source’s insistence on operating through Pym only . . .” He read fast to the end then began again at the beginning more slowly.

“His C.O. was in love with him too,” he called to Kate. “‘ . . . his excellent memory for detail,’” he read, “‘. . . lucid report writing, often done in the early hours of the morning after a long debriefing . . . high entertainment value...’

“Doesn’t even mention Sabina,” he complained to Kate. “Can’t see what the devil he was so worried about. Why risk his hotline to you to suppress a bit of paper from the dark ages that did him nothing but credit? Must be something in his own nasty little mind, not ours at all. That doesn’t surprise me either.”

The phone was ringing. He glanced round. The bed was empty, the bathroom door closed. Scared, he sprang up and pulled it quickly open. She was standing safely at the basin, chucking water in her face. He closed the door again and hastened back to the telephone. It was a mossy green scrambler with chrome buttons. He picked up the receiver and growled “Yes?”

“Jack? Let’s go over. Ready? Now.”

Brotherhood pressed a button and heard the same tenor voice trilling in the electronic storm.

“You’ll enjoy this, Jack—Jack, can you hear me? Hullo?”

“I can hear you, Bo.”

“I’ve just had Carver on the line.” Carver was the American Head of Station in London. “He insists his people have come up with fresh leads concerning our mutual friend. They want to reopen the story on him immediately. Harry Wexler’s flying over from Washington to see fair play.”

“That all?”

“Isn’t it enough?”

“Where do they think he is?” said Brotherhood.

“That’s exactly the point. They didn’t ask, they weren’t worried. They assume he’s still coping with his father’s affairs,” said Brammel, very pleased. “They actually made the point that this would be an excellent time to meet. While our friend is occupied with his personal affairs. Everything is still in its place as far as they’re concerned. Except for the new leads of course. Whatever they are.”

“Except for the networks,” Brotherhood said.

“I’ll want you with me at the meeting, Jack. I want you in there punching for me, just like your usual self. Will you do that?”

“If it’s an order, I’ll do anything.”

Bo sounded like someone organising a jolly party: “I’m having everyone we’d normally have. Nobody’s to be left out or added. I want nothing to stick out, not a ripple while we go on looking for him. This whole thing could still be a storm in a teacup. Whitehall is convinced of it. They argue that we’re dealing with follow-on from the last thing, not a new situation at all. They’ve got some awfully clever people these days. Some of them aren’t even civil servants. Are you sleeping?”

“Not a lot.”

“None of us is. We must stick together. Nigel’s over at the Foreign Office at this moment.”

“Is he though?” said Brotherhood aloud as he rang off. “Kate?”

“What is it?”

“Just keep your fingers away from my razor blades, hear me? We’re too old for dramatic gestures, both of us.”

He waited a second, dialled Head Office and asked for the night duty officer.

“You got a rider there?”

“Yes.”

“Brotherhood. There’s a War Office file I want. British Army of Occupation in Austria, old field case. Operation Greensleeves, believe it or not. Where will it be?”

“Ministry of Defence, I suppose, seeing that the War Office was disbanded about two hundred years ago.”

“Who are you?”

“Nicholson.”

“Well, don’t bloody suppose. Find out where it is, fetch it and phone me when it’s on your desk. Got a pencil, have you?”

“I don’t think I have actually. Nigel has left instructions that any request from you has to be processed by Secretariat first. Sorry, Jack.”

“Nigel’s at the Foreign Office. Check with Bo. While you’re about it, ask Defence to give you the name of the Commandant of Number Six Interrogation, Graz, Austria, on July 18, 1951. I’m in a hurry. Greensleeves, have you got it? Maybe you’re not musical.”

He rang off and pulled Pym’s battered letter to Tom savagely towards him.

“He’s a shell,” Kate said. “All you have to do is find the hermit crab that climbed into him. Don’t look for the truth about him. The truth is what we gave him of ourselves.”

“Sure,” said Brotherhood. He set a sheet of paper ready to jot on while he silently read:

“If I don’t write to you for a while, remember I’m thinking of you all the time.”

Maudlin slush.

“If you need help and don’t want to turn to Uncle Jack, this is what you do.”

He continued reading, writing out Pym’s instructions to his son, one by one.

“Don’t worry your head so much about religious things, just try to trust in God’s goodness.”

“Damn the man!” he expostulated aloud for Kate’s sake and, slamming down his pencil, pressed both fists against his temple as the phone rang again. He let it ring a moment, recovered and picked it up, glancing at his watch, which was his habit always.

“Anyway the file you want went missing

years

ago,” said Nicholson with pleasure.

“Who to?”

“Us. They say it’s marked out to us and we never returned it.”

“Who of

us

in particular?”

“Czech section. It was requisitioned by one of our own London desk officers in 1953.”

“Which one?”

“M.R.P. That would be Pym. Do you want me to ring Vienna and ask him what he did with it?”

“I’ll ask him myself in the morning,” he said. “What about the C.O.?”

“A Major Harrison Membury of the Education Corps.”

“The

what?”

“He was on secondment to Army Intelligence for the period 1950 to ’54.”

“Christ Almighty. Any address?”

He wrote it down, remembering a quip of Pym’s, paraphrased from Clemenceau: “Military intelligence has about as much to do with intelligence as military music has to do with music.”

He rang off.

“They haven’t even indoctrinated the poor bloody duty officer!” Brotherhood expostulated, again for Kate.

He went back to his homework better pleased. Somewhere beyond Green Park a London clock was striking three.

“I’m going,” Kate said. She was standing at the door, dressed.

Brotherhood was on his feet in a moment.

“Oh no you’re not. You’re staying here until I hear you laugh.”

He went to her and undressed her again. He put her back to bed.

“Why do you think I’m going to kill myself?” she said. “Has somebody done that to you once?”

“Let’s just say once would be too often,” he replied.

“What’s in the burnbox?” she asked, for the second time that night. But for the second time, too, Brotherhood appeared too busy to reply.

8

M

y memory gets selective here, Jack. More than usual. He’s in my sights as I expect he begins to be in yours. But you are in them too. Whatever doesn’t point to you both slips by me like landscape through a railway window. I could paint for you Pym’s distressing conversations with the luckless Herr Bertl in which, on Rick’s instruction, he assured him repeatedly it was in the post, it was taken care of, everybody would be seen right, and his father was on the point of making an offer for the hotel. Or we could have some fun with Pym, languishing for days and nights in his hotel bedroom as a hostage to the mountain of unpaid bills downstairs, dreaming of Elena Weber’s milky body reflected in its many delightful poses in the mirrored changing rooms of Bern, kicking himself for his timidity, living off hoarded continental breakfasts, running up more bills and waiting for the telephone. Or the moment when Rick went off the air. He did not ring and when Pym tried his number the only response was a howl, like the cry of a wolf stuck on one note.

When he tried Syd he got Meg, and Meg’s advice was strikingly similar to E. Weber’s. “You’re better off where you are, dear,” she said in the pointed voice of someone who is telling you she is overheard. “There’s a heat wave here and a lot of people are getting burned.” “Where’s Syd?” “Cooling himself, darling.” Or the Sunday afternoon when everything in the hotel fell mercifully silent and Pym, having packed together his few possessions, stole heart in mouth down the staff staircase and out through a side door into what was suddenly a hostile foreign city—his first clandestine exit, and his easiest.

I could offer you Pym the infant refugee, though I never starved, had a valid British passport and in retrospect seldom wanted for a kindly word. But he did dip tallows for a religious candlemaker, sweep the aisle of the Minster, roll beer barrels for a brewer and unstitch sacks of carpets for an old Armenian who kept urging him to marry his daughter, and come to think of it he might have done worse; she was a beautiful girl and kept sighing and draping herself over the sofa but Pym was too polite to approach her. All those things he did and more. All of them at night, a night animal on the run through that lovely candlelit city with its clocks and wells and cobble and arcades. He swept snow, carted cheeses, led a blind dray-horse and taught English to aspiring travel agents. All under cover while he waited for Herr Bertl’s hounds to sniff him out and bring him to justice, though I know now the poor man bore me no grudge whatever, and even at the height of his rage avoided mentioning Pym’s part in the affair.

“Dear Father,

“I am really happy out here and you must not worry about me at all as the Swiss are kindly and hospitable and have all sorts of remarkable bursaries for young foreigners keen on reading law.”

I could sing of another great hotel, not a stone’s throw from the first, where Pym went to earth as a night waiter and became a schoolboy again, sleeping under avenues of lagged piping in a basement dormitory as big as a factory where the lights never went out; how he took gratefully once more to his little iron bed and how he jollied his fellow waiters as he had jollied his fellow new boys, for they turned out to be peasants from Ticino who wanted only to go home. How he rose willingly with every bell and donned a white dicky that, though thick with last night’s grease, was not half as constricting as Mr. Willow’s collars. And how he took trays of bubbly and foie gras to ambiguous couples who sometimes wanted him to stay, Amor and Rococo beckoning from their glances. But once again he was too polite and too unknowing to oblige. His manners in those days were a barbed-wire cage. He only lusted when he was alone. Yet even as I allow my memory to brush past these tantalising episodes, my heart is hurtling ahead to the night I met the saintly Herr Ollinger in the third-class buffet of Bern railway station and, through his charity, stumbled into the encounter that altered all my life till here—and I fear your life as well, Jack, though you have yet to learn by how much.

Of the university, how Pym enrolled there and why, my recollections are equally impatient. It was for cover. All for cover as usual, leave it there. He had been working in a circus at its winter home, which was a patch of land just beneath the same railway station where his footsteps so often finished after his all-day walks. Somehow the elephants had drawn him. Any fool can wash an elephant, but he was surprised to learn how hard it was to dip the head of a twenty-foot brush into a bucket when the only light comes in shafts from the spotlights in the apex of the marquee. Each dawn when his work was done he made his way home to the Salvation Army hostel that was his temporary Ascot. Each dawn he saw the green dome of the university rising above him through the autumn mist like an ugly little Rome challenging him to convert. And somehow he had to get inside the place, for he had a second terror, greater than Herr Bertl’s hounds: namely that Rick despite his problems of liquidity would appear in a cloud of Bentley and whisk him home.

He had fabricated for Rick handsomely and imaginatively. I have won that foreigners’ scholarship I was talking about. I am reading Swiss law and German law and Roman law and all the other laws there are. I am attending night school on the side to keep myself out of mischief. He had praised the erudition of his non-existent tutors and the piety of the university chaplains. But Rick’s systems of intelligence, though erratic, were impressive. Pym knew he was not safe until he had given substance to his fictions. One morning therefore he found the courage and marched up there. He lied first about his qualifications and then about his age, for the one could not have been earned without an adjustment to the other. He paid out the last of E. Weber’s white banknotes to a crew-cut cashier, and in return received a grey cloth-card with his photograph on it, describing him as legitimate. I have never in my life been so gratified by the sight of a false document. Pym would have given his whole fortune for it, which was a further seventy-one francs.

Philosophie Zwei

was Pym’s faculty and I still have only the sketchiest notion of what it comprised, for Pym had asked for law but somehow been rerouted. He learned more from translating the students’ bulletins on the notice-board, which invited him to a string of unlikely forums and gave him his first rumblings of political gunfire since Ollie and Mr. Cudlove had vented their anger against the rich and Lippsie had warned him of the hollowness of possessions. You remember those forums too, Jack, though from a different aspect, and for reasons we shall come to soon enough.

It was from the university notice-board also that Pym discovered the existence of an English church in Elfenau, the diplomatic fairyland. Along he went—he could hardly wait—often two or three Sundays running. He prayed, he hovered outside the doors afterwards, shaking hands with anything that moved, though little did. He gazed soulfully at elderly mothers, fell in love with several, consumed cake and lifeless tea in their thickly curtained houses and charmed them with extravagant accounts of his parentless upbringing. Soon the expatriate in him couldn’t get along without its weekly shot of the English banality. The English church with its iron-back diplomatic families, ancient Britons and dubious Anglophiles became his school chapel and all the other chapels he had defected from.

Its counterpart was the third-class railway buffet where, if he wasn’t working, he could sit all night smoking himself sick on Disque Bleus over a single beer and fancying himself the most stateless, world-weary globe-trotter he had ever met. Today the station is an indoor metropolis of smart boutiques and plastic-coated restaurants, but in the immediate post-war years it was still an ill-lit Edwardian staging post, with stuffed stages in the concourse and murals of freed peasants waving flags, and a scent of Bockwurst and fried onion that never went away. The first-class buffet was full of gentlemen in black suits with napkins round their necks, but the third class was shadowed and beery, with a whiff of Balkan lawlessness and drunks who sang out of tune. Pym’s favourite table was in a panelled corner near the coats where a sacred waitress called Elisabeth gave him extra soup. It must have been Herr Ollinger’s favourite also for he homed on it as soon as he entered and having bowed lovingly at Elisabeth, who wore a low-cut

Tracht

with perforated smocking, bowed at Pym too, and fidgeted with his poor briefcase, and hauled at his disobedient hair, and asked, “Do we disturb you?” in a tone of breathless anxiety while he stroked an old yellow chow dog that hung grumbling on its lead. Thus as I now know does our Maker disguise His best agents.

Herr Ollinger was ageless but I guess now fifty. His complexion was doughy, his smile regretful, his cheeks were dimpled and pendulous like an old man’s bottom. Even when he did finally allow that his chair was not taken by superior beings, he lowered his round body so gingerly into it that you would think he expected to be shooed away any minute by someone more deserving. With the assurance of an habitué Pym took the brown raincoat from his unresisting arm and threaded a hanger into it. He had decided he needed Herr Ollinger and his yellow chow dog urgently. His life was going through a fallow period at the time and he had not exchanged more than a few words with anyone for a week. His gesture threw Herr Ollinger into a vortex of hopeless gratitude. Herr Ollinger beamed and declared Pym most friendly. He grabbed a copy of

Der Bund

from the rack and buried his face in it. He whispered to the dog to behave itself and tapped it ineffectually on the snout, though it was behaving with exemplary tolerance. But he had spoken, which gave Pym reason to explain, in a set sentence, that unfortunately I am foreign, sir, and not yet equal to your local dialect. So please be kind enough to speak High German and excuse me. After this, as he had learned to, he added his surname, “Pym,” at which Herr Ollinger confessed that he was Ollinger, as if the name implied some frightful slur, and afterwards presented the chow as Herr Bastl, which for a moment rang uncomfortably of the luckless Bertl.

“But you speak excellent German!” Herr Ollinger protested. “I would immediately have thought you are from Germany! You are not? Then where do you come from, if I may be so impertinent?”

And this was kind of Herr Ollinger for nobody in his right mind, in those days, could have confused Pym’s German with the real thing. So Pym told Herr Ollinger the story of his life, which was what he had intended from the first, and dazzled him with tender questions about himself, and in every way he knew laid upon Herr Ollinger the full burden of his sensitive charm—which as it later turned out was a totally needless exertion on Pym’s part since Herr Ollinger was unselective in his acquaintance. He admired everybody, pitied everybody from below—not least for their dreadful misfortune in having to share the world with him. Herr Ollinger said he was married to an angel, and possessed three angel daughters who were musical prodigies. Herr Ollinger said he had inherited his father’s factory in Ostermundigen, which was a great worry to him. And so indeed it should have been, for in retrospect it is clear that the poor man rose diligently every morning in order to run it further into the earth. Herr Ollinger said Herr Bastl had been with him three years but only temporarily, because he was still trying to find the dog’s owner.

Reciprocating with equal generosity, Pym described his experiences in the blitz, and the night he had been visiting his aunt in Coventry when they hit the cathedral; how she lived but a hundred yards from the main doors and her house by a miracle was unscathed. When he had destroyed Coventry, he described himself in an imaginative tour de force as an admiral’s son standing at his dormitory window in his dressing-gown, calmly watching the waves of German bombers flying over his school and wondering whether this time they were going to drop the parachutists dressed as nuns.

“But did you have no shelters?” Herr Ollinger cried. “That’s a disgrace! You were a child, my God! My wife would be completely furious. She is from Wilderswil,” he explained, while Herr Bastl ate a pretzel and farted.

Thus Pym skipped on, piling one fiction on another, appealing to Herr Ollinger’s Swiss love of disaster, enthralling the neutral in him with the dire realities of war.

“But you were so young,” Herr Ollinger protested again when Pym related the rigours of his early military training at the Signals Depot in Bradford. “You had no nest warmth. You were a child!”

“Well, thank God they never had to use us,” said Pym in a throw-away voice as he called for his bill. “My grandfather died in the first one, my father was given up for dead in the second, so I can’t help feeling it’s time our family had a break.” Herr Ollinger would not hear of Pym paying. Herr Ollinger might be breathing the free air of Switzerland, he said, but he had three generations of English to thank for the privilege. Pym’s sausage and beer were a mere step in the mercurial progress of Herr Ollinger’s generosity. It was followed by the offer of a room, for as long as Pym wished to do him the honour, in the narrow little house in the Länggasse that Herr Ollinger had inherited from his mother.

It was not a big room. It was actually a very small room indeed. An attic, one of three, and Pym’s was in the middle, and only the middle of it was big enough for him to stand in, and even then he was more comfortable with his head poked through the skylight. In summer the daylight lasted all night, in winter the snow blacked out the world. For heating he had a great black radiator cut into the party-wall, which he heated from a wood stove in the corridor. He had to choose between freezing and boiling, depending on his mood. Yet, Tom, I have not been so content anywhere until I found Miss Dubber. Once in our lives, it is given us to know a truly happy family. Frau Ollinger was tall and luminous and frugal. On a routine patrol of the house Pym once watched her through a crack in a doorway while she slept, and she was smiling. I am sure she was smiling when she died. Her husband fussed round her like a fat tug, upsetting the economy, dumping every waif and sponger on her that he came upon, adoring her. The daughters were each plainer than the next, played musical instruments atrociously, to the fury of the neighbours, and one by one they married even plainer men and worse musicians whom the Ollingers thought brilliant and delightful—and by thinking made them so. From morning till night a trail of migrants, misfits and undiscovered geniuses drifted through their kitchen, cooking themselves omelettes and treading out their cigarettes on the linoleum. And woe if you left your bedroom unlocked, for Herr Ollinger was quite capable of forgetting you were there—or, if need be, of persuading himself you would be out tonight, or that you wouldn’t mind a stranger just until he’s got somewhere. What we paid I don’t remember. What we could afford was next to nothing and certainly not enough to subsidise the factory in Ostermundigen, for the last I heard of Herr Ollinger he was working happily as a clerk in Bern’s main post office, enchanted by the erudite company. The only possession I associate with him apart from Herr Bastl is a collection of erotica with which he consoled himself in his shyness. Like everything else about him it was there to be shared, and it was a great deal more revealing than

Amor and Rococo Woman.

Such then was the household on which Pym’s crow’s-nest was built. For once his life was as good as complete. He had a bed, he had a family. He was in love with Elisabeth in the third-class buffet and contemplating marriage and early fatherhood. He was locked in a tantalising correspondence with Belinda, who felt it her duty to inform him of Jemima’s love affairs, “which I’m sure she only has because you are so far away.” If Rick was not extinct he was at least quiescent, for the only sign of him was a flow of homilies on Being Ever True to your Advantages, and avoiding the Foreign Temptations and the Snares of Synicism, which either he or his secretary could not spell. These letters had the distinct air of being typed on the run, and never came from the same place twice: “Write care Topsie Eaton at the Firs, East Grinstead, no need to put my name on envelope.” “Write to Colonel Mellow post restaurant the main G.P.O. Hull who obliges by collecting my mail.” On one occasion a handwritten love letter varied the diet, beginning: “Annie, my sweet Pet, your body means more to me than Riches of the earth.” Rick must have put it into the wrong envelope.

The only thing Pym missed therefore was a friend. He met him in Herr Ollinger’s basement on a Saturday at midday, when he took down his laundry for his weekly wash. Upstairs in the street the first snowfall was driving out the autumn. Pym had an armful of damp clothes in front of his face and was concerned about the stone steps. The basement light was operated by a time switch; any second he could be plunged into darkness and trip over Herr Bastl, who owned the boiler. But the light stayed on and as he brushed past the switch he noticed that somebody had ingeniously jammed a matchstick into it, a very sleek matchstick trimmed with a knife. He smelt cigar smoke but Bern was not Ascot—anyone who had a few pence could smoke a cigar. When he saw the armchair he mentally assigned it to the junk Herr Ollinger set aside as a gift to Herr Rubi the rag-and-bone man who came on Saturdays on his horse-drawn float.

“Don’t you know it is forbidden for foreigners to hang their clothes in Swiss basements?” said a male voice, not in dialect but in a crisp High German.

“I’m afraid I didn’t,” said Pym. He peered round for someone to apologise to and saw instead the unclear form of a slender man curled on the armchair, clutching a patchwork blanket to his neck with one long white hand and a book with the other. He wore a black beret and had a drooping moustache. No feet showed, but his body had the look of something spiky and wrongly folded, like a tripod that had stuck halfway. Herr Ollinger’s walking-stick was propped against the chair. A small cigar smouldered between the fingers that clutched the blanket.

“In Switzerland it is forbidden to be poor, it is forbidden to be foreign, it is

completely

forbidden to hang clothes. You are an inmate of this establishment?”

“I am a friend of Herr Ollinger’s.”

“An English friend?”

“My name is Pym.”

Discovering the moustache, the fingers of one white hand began stroking it reflectively downward.

“Lord Pym?”

“Just Magnus.”

“But you are of aristocratic stock.”

“Well, nothing very special.”

“And you are the war hero,” the stranger said, and made a sucking noise that in English would have sounded skeptical.

Pym did not like the description at all. The account of himself that he had given to Herr Ollinger was obsolete. He was dismayed to hear it revived.

“So who are you, if I may ask?” said Pym.

The stranger’s fingers rose to claw at some irritation in his cheek while he appeared to consider a range of alternatives. “My name is Axel and since one week I am your neighbour, so I am obliged to listen to you grinding your teeth at night,” he said, drawing on his cigar.

“Herr

Axel?” said Pym.

“Herr Axel Axel. My parents forgot to give me a second name.” He put down the book and held out a slim hand in greeting. “For God’s sake,” he exclaimed with a wince as Pym grasped it. “Go easy, will you? The war’s over.”

Too challenged for his comfort Pym left his washing for another day and took himself upstairs.

“What is Axel’s other name?” he asked Herr Ollinger next day.

“Maybe he hasn’t one,” Herr Ollinger replied mischievously. “Maybe that’s why he has no papers.”

“Is he a student?”

“He is a poet,” said Herr Ollinger proudly but the house was stiff with poets.

“They must be very long poems. He types all night,” said Pym.

“Indeed he does. And on my typewriter,” said Herr Ollinger, his pride complete.

My husband found him in the factory, Frau Ollinger said while Pym helped her prepare vegetables for the evening meal. That is to say, Herr Harprecht the night-watchman found him. Axel was sleeping on sacks in the warehouse and Herr Harprecht wanted to hand him over to the police because he had no papers and was foreign and smelly, but thank goodness my husband stopped Herr Harprecht in time and gave Axel breakfast and took him to a doctor for his sweating.

“Where does he come from?” Pym asked.

Frau Ollinger became uncharacteristically guarded. Axel comes from

drüben,

she said—

drüben

being across the border,

drüben

being those irrational tracts of Europe that were not Switzerland, where people rode in tanks instead of trolley-buses, and the starving had the ill manners to pick their food from rubble instead of buying it from shops.

“How did he get here?” Pym asked.

“We think he walked,” Frau Ollinger said.

“But he’s an invalid. He’s all crippled and thin.”

“We think he had a strong will and a great necessity.”

“Is he German?”

“There are many sorts of German, Magnus.”

“Which sort is Axel?”

“We don’t ask. Maybe you should not ask either.”

“Can you guess from his voice?”

“We don’t guess either. With Axel it is better we are completely without curiosity.”

“What’s he ill of?”

“Maybe he suffered in the war, as you did,” Frau Ollinger suggested with a smile of rather too much understanding. “Don’t you like Axel? Is he disturbing you up there?”

How can he disturb me when he doesn’t speak to me? thought Pym. When all I hear of him is the clicking of Herr Ollinger’s typewriter, the cries of ecstasy from his lady callers in the afternoons and the shuffle of his feet as he hauls himself to the lavatory on Herr Ollinger’s walking-stick? When all I see of him is his empty vodka bottles and the blue cloud of his cigar smoke in the corridor and his pale empty body disappearing down the stairs?

“Axel’s super,” he said.

Pym had already appointed Christmas to be the jolliest of his life and so it was—despite a letter of appalling misery from Rick describing the privations of “a small Private hotel in the wilds of Scotland where the meagrest of life’s Necessities are a Godsend.” He meant, I discovered later, Gleneagles. Christmas Eve came. Pym as youngest lit the candles and helped Frau Ollinger lay the presents round the tree. It had been wonderfully dark all day and in the afternoon thick snowflakes began swirling in the streetlights and clogging the tramlines. The Ollinger daughters arrived with their escorts, followed by a shy married couple from Basel over whom some shadow hung, I forget what. Next a French genius called Jean-Pierre who painted fish in profile, always on a sepia background. And after him an apologetic Japanese gentleman called Mr. San—enigmatically so since, as I now know, San is itself a term of Japanese address. Mr. San was working at Herr Ollinger’s factory as some sort of industrial spy, which in retrospect strikes me as very funny indeed, because if the Japanese ever tried copying Herr Ollinger’s methods, they must have set back their industrial output by a decade.

Finally Axel himself came slowly down the wood stairs and made his entry. For the first time Pym could regard him at his leisure. Though desperately thin, his face was by nature rounded. His brow was tall but the hank of brown hair that grew sideways over it gave it a curved and saddening air. It was as if his Maker had put His thumb and forefinger to either temple and yanked the whole face downward as a warning to his frivolity: first the hooped eyebrows, then the eyes, then the moustache which was a shaggy horseshoe. And somehow inside all this was Axel himself, his eyes twinkling out of their own shadows, the grateful survivor of something Pym was not allowed to share. One of the daughters had knitted him a sloppy cardigan which he wore like a cape over his wasted shoulders.

“Schön guten Abend,

Sir Magnus,” he said. He was carrying a straw bonnet upside down. Pym saw parcels in it, beautifully wrapped. “Why do we never speak to each other up there? We could be kilometres apart instead of twenty centimetres. Are you still fighting the Germans? We are allies, you and I. Soon we shall be fighting the Russians.”

“I suppose we shall,” said Pym feebly.

“Why don’t you bang on my door once when you are lonely? We can have a cigar together, save the world a little. You like to talk nonsense?”

“Very much.”

“Okay. We talk nonsense.” But on the point of shuffling away to greet Mr. San, Axel stopped and turned. And over his caped shoulder he vouchsafed Pym a quizzical, almost challenging glare, as if asking himself whether he had invested his trust too easily.

“Aber dann können wir doch Freunde sein,

Sir Magnus?”—then we may be friends after all?

“Ich würde mich freuen!”

Pym replied heartily, meeting his gaze without fear—I would be happy!

They shook hands again, but this time lightly. At the same moment Axel’s features broke into such a smile of sparkling good fun that Pym’s heart filled for him in response, and he promised himself that he would follow Axel anywhere for all the Christmases that he was spared. The party began. The girls played carols and Pym sang with the best, using English words where he lacked the German. There were speeches and after them a toast to absent friends and relations, at which Axel’s long eyelids almost hid his eyes and he fell quiet. But then, as if shaking off bad memories, he stood up abruptly and began unpacking the bonnet he had brought while Pym hovered at hand to help him, knowing that this was what Axel had always done at Christmas, wherever Christmas was. For the daughters he had made musical pipes, each with her name carved along the underneath. How had he carved with such wispy white hands? So exquisitely, without Pym hearing him through the partition? Where had he found his wood, his paint and brushes? For the Ollingers he produced what I later realised was another emblem of prison life, a matchstick model. This one was an ark with painted figures of our extended family waving from the portholes. For Mr. San and Jean-Pierre he had squares of cloth of a sort that Pym had once made for Dorothy on a homemade handloom between nails. For the Basel couple a patterned woollen eye to ward off whatever was afflicting them. And for Pym—I still take it as a compliment that he left me until last—for Sir Magnus he had a much used copy of Grimmelshausen’s

Simplicissimus,

bound in old brown buckram, which Pym had not heard of but could not wait to read since it would give him an excuse to bang on Axel’s door. He opened it and read the inscription. “For Sir Magnus, who will never be my enemy.” And in the top left corner, in an older ink but in a younger version of the same hand: “A. H. Carlsbad August 1939.”

“Where is Carlsbad?” Pym asked before he had allowed himself a second’s thought, and noticed at once an awkwardness round him as if everybody had heard the bad news except for himself who was deemed not old enough to receive it.

“Carlsbad no longer exists, Sir Magnus,” Axel replied politely. “When you have read

Simplicissimus

you will understand why.”

“Where was it?”

“It was my home town.”

“Then you have given me a treasure from your own past.”

“Would you prefer me to give you something I did not value?”

And Pym—what had he brought? God help him, the Chairman and Managing Director’s son was not used to ceremonies with meaning, and had thought of nothing better than a box of cigars to see dear old Axel right.

“Why does Carlsbad no longer exist?” Pym asked Herr Ollinger as soon as he could get him alone. Herr Ollinger knew everything except how to run a factory. Carlsbad was in the Sudetenland, he explained. It was a beautiful spa city and everybody used to go there: Brahms and Beethoven, Goethe and Schiller. First it was Austria, then it became Germany. Now it was Czechoslovakia and had a new name and the Germans had all been chucked out.

“So who does Axel belong to?” Pym asked.

“Only to us, I think,” said Herr Ollinger gravely. “And we must be careful of him or they will take him away from us, you may be sure.”

“He has women in his room,” said Pym.

Herr Ollinger’s face turned pink with impish pleasure. “I think he has all the women of Bern,” he agreed.

A couple of days passed. On the third Pym banged on Axel’s door and found him standing smoking at the open window with several heavy-looking books before him on the sill. He must have been freezing but he seemed to need the open air to read by.

“Come for a stroll,” said Pym boldly.

“At my speed?”

“Well we can’t go at mine, can we?”

“My constitution dislikes crowded places, Sir Magnus. If we are to walk, better we stay out of town.”

They borrowed Bastl and wandered with him along the empty towpath beside the racing Aare while Herr Bastl peed and refused to follow and Pym did his best to keep an eye open for anyone who looked like a policeman. In the sunless river valley the frost drifted about in evil clouds and the cold was merciless. Axel seemed not to notice. He puffed at his cigar while he tossed out questions in his soft, amused voice. If this is how he walked from Austria, thought Pym, shivering in his wake, he must have taken years.

“How did you reach Bern, Sir Magnus? Were you advancing or retreating?” Axel asked.

Never able to resist an opportunity to portray himself on a fresh page, Pym went to work. And though, as was his wont, he took care to improve upon the reality, rearranging the facts to fit his prevailing image of himself, an instinctive caution nevertheless counselled him restraint. True, he endowed himself with a noble and eccentric mother, and true, when he came to describe Rick he awarded him many of the qualities Rick unsuccessfully aspired to, such as wealth, military distinction and daily access to the Highest in the Land. But in other respects he was frugal and self-mocking and when he came to the story of E. Weber, which he had not told anyone till now, Axel laughed so much he had to sit on a bench and light another cigar to get his wind back, while Pym laughed with him, delighted by his success. And when he showed him her very letter saying, “Never mind. E. Weber love you always,” he shouted,

“Nochmal!

Tell it again, Sir Magnus! I order you! And make sure it is completely different this time. Did you sleep with her?”

“Of course.”

“How many times?”

“Four or five.”

“All in one night? You are a tiger! Was she grateful?”

“She was very, very experienced.”

“More than your Jemima?”

“Well, jolly nearly.”

“More than your wicked Lippsie who seduced you when you were still a little boy?”

“Well, Lippsie was in a class of her own.”

Axel slapped him gaily on the back. “Sir Magnus, you are a prince, no question. You are a dark horse, you know that? Such a good little boy, yet you sleep with dangerous adventuresses and young English aristocrats. I love you, hear me? I love all English aristocrats, but you best.”

Walking again, Axel had to shove his arm through Pym’s to support himself, and from then on used him unashamedly as his walking-stick. For the rest of our lives we have seldom walked in any other way.

Somewhere that evening under a bridge, Pym and Axel found an empty café and Axel insisted on paying for two vodkas from the black purse he kept on a leather thong round his neck. Somewhere on the freezing journey home they agreed that Axel and Pym must begin the education they had never had, and that they would appoint tomorrow the first day of the world, and that Grimmelshausen would be their first subject because he taught that the world was a mad place and getting madder by the moment, with everything that appeared right almost certainly wrong. They agreed that Axel would take charge of Pym’s spoken German and not rest till he spoke it to perfection. Thus, in a day and an evening, Pym became Axel’s legs and Axel’s intellectual companion and, though it was not initially meant that way, Axel’s pupil, for over the next few months he unveiled for Pym the German muse. If Axel’s knowledge was greater than Pym’s, his curiosity was no less, his energy equally relentless. Perhaps by resuscitating his country’s culture for an innocent, he was reconciling himself to its recent past.

As to Pym, he was gazing at last on the glories of the kingdom he had dreamed of for so long. The German muse had no particular draw for him, then or later, for all his loud enthusiasm. If she had been Chinese or Polish or Indian, it would have made no earthly odds. The point was, she supplied Pym with the means, for the first time, to regard himself intellectually as a gentleman. And for that Pym was eternally grateful to her. By willing Pym night and day to accompany Axel on his explorations, she gave him the world inside his head that Lippsie had said he would be able to take with him anywhere. And Lippsie was right, because when he went down to the warehouse in Ostring where Herr Ollinger had obtained illegal nightwork for him at the hands of a fellow philanthropist, he neither walked nor took the tram but rode with Mozart in his coach to Prague. When he washed his elephants at night he endured the humiliations of Lenz’s

Soldaten.

When he sat in the third-class buffet bestowing soulful looks on Elisabeth, he imagined himself as the young Werther, planning his wardrobe before committing suicide. And when he considered all his failures and hopes together, he was able to compare his

Werdegang

with Wilhelm Meister’s years of apprenticeship, and planned even then a great autobiographical novel that would show the world what a noble sensitive fellow he was compared with Rick.

And yes, Jack, the other seeds were there, of course they were: a crash diet of Hegel, as much as they both could swallow at a time, a burst of Marx and Engels and the bad bears of Communism—for after all, said Axel, this was the first day of the world. “If we are to judge Christianity by the misery it has caused mankind, who would ever be a Christian? We accept no prejudices, Sir Magnus. We believe everything as we read it and only afterwards reject it. If Hitler hated these fellows so much, they can’t be all bad, I say.” Out came Rousseau and the revolutionaries, and

Das Kapital,

and

Anti-Dühring,

and in went the sun for several weeks, though I swear we came to no conclusions that I remember, except that we were glad when it was over. And I honestly doubt now whether the substance of Axel’s teaching was of importance beside Pym’s joy that he was teaching him at all. What counted was that Pym was happy from the moment he got up until the early hours of the following morning; and that when they finally went to bed on either side of their black radiator, sleeping, to use Axel’s phrase, like God in France, Pym’s mind went on exploring in his sleep.

“Axel’s got the Order of the Frozen Meat,” Pym told Frau Ollinger proudly one day, carving bread for family fondue.

Frau Ollinger gave an exclamation of disgust. “Magnus, what nonsense are you talking now?”

“It’s true! It’s German soldiers’ slang for a Russian campaign medal. He volunteered from his

Gymnasium.

His father could have got him a safe post in France or Belgium. A

Druckposten,

somewhere he could keep his head down. Axel wouldn’t let him. He wanted to be a hero like his classmates.”

Frau Ollinger was not pleased. “Then better you keep quiet about where he fought,” she said sternly. “Axel is here to study, not to boast.”

“He has women up there,” said Pym. “They creep up the stairs in the afternoons and scream when he makes love to them.”

“If they give him happiness and help him to study they are welcome. Do you wish to invite your passionate Jemima?”

Furious, Pym stalked to his room and penned a long letter to Rick about the unfairness of the average Swiss in daily matters. “Sometimes I think the law here does duty for common kindness,” he wrote stuffily. “Particularly where women are concerned.”

Rick wrote back by return, urging chastity: “Better you remain Clean until you have made the choice that is Meant for you.”

“Dear Belinda,

“Things are a bit sticky here at the moment. Some of the foreign students in the house are taking things a bit far with their womenfolk and I have had to step in or I’ll never get my work done. Perhaps if you adopted the same firm line with Jem, you might in the long run be doing her a favour.”

A day came when Axel fell ill. Pym hurried back from the zoo full of funny stories about his adventures to find him in bed, where he hated most to be. His tiny room was heavy with cigar smoke, his pale head darkened with stubble and shadows. A girl was hanging about but Axel ordered her out when Pym arrived.

“What’s wrong with him?” Pym asked Herr Ollinger’s doctor, peering over his shoulder, trying to decipher the prescription.

“What is wrong with him, Sir Magnus, is that he was bombed by the heroic British,” said Axel savagely from the bed, in a barbed unfamiliar voice. “What is wrong with him is that he got half a British shell up his arse and is having trouble shitting it out.”

The doctor was sworn not just to secrecy but to silence and with a friendly pat for Pym departed.

“Maybe it was you who fired it at me, Sir Magnus. Did you land in Normandy, by any chance? Perhaps you led the invasion?”

“I didn’t do anything like that at all,” said Pym.

So Pym became Axel’s legs again, fetching his medicines and cigars and cooking for him and ransacking the university libraries for ever more books which he could read aloud to him.

“No more Nietzsche, thank you, Sir Magnus. I think we know enough about the cleansing effect of violence. Kleist is not as bad but you don’t read him properly. You must bark Kleist. He was a Prussian officer, not an English hero. Get the painters.”

“Which ones?”

“Abstractionists. Decadents. Jews. Anyone who was

entartet

or forbidden. Give me a holiday from these mad writers.”

Pym consulted Frau Ollinger. “Then you must ask the librarian for whomever the Nazis did not like, Magnus,” she explained in her governess voice.

The librarian was an émigré who knew Axel’s needs by heart. Pym brought Klee and Nolde, Kokoschka and Klimt, Kandinsky and Picasso. He stood their picture books and catalogues open on the mantelshelf where Axel could see them without moving his head. He turned the pages and read the captions out loud. When women came, Axel again sent them away. “I am being attended to. Wait till I am well.” Pym brought Max Beckmann. He brought Steinlen, then Schiele and more Schiele. Next day the writers were reinstated. Pym fetched Brecht and Zuckmayer, Tucholsky and Remarque. He read them aloud, hours of them. “Music,” Axel commanded. Pym borrowed Herr Ollinger’s wind-up gramophone and played him Mendelssohn and Tchaikovsky until Axel fell asleep. He woke delirious, the sweat falling off him like raindrops while he described a retreat through snow with the blind hanging on to the lame and the blood freezing in the wounds. He talked of a hospital, two to a bed and the dead lying on the floor. He asked for water. Pym fetched it and Axel took the glass in both hands, shaking wildly. He lifted the glass till his hands froze, then he lowered his head in jerks until his lips reached the brim. Then he sucked the water like an animal, spilling it while his fevered eyes kept guard. He drew up his legs and wetted himself and sat shaking and grumpy in an armchair while Pym changed his sheets.

“Who are you afraid of?” Pym asked again. “There’s no one here. It’s just us.”

“Then I must be afraid of you. What’s that poodle in the corner?”

“It’s Herr Bastl and he’s a chow chow, not a poodle.”

“I thought it was the Devil.”

Till a day when Pym woke to find Axel standing fully dressed at his bedside. “It is Goethe’s birthday and it’s four in the afternoon,” he announced in his military voice. “We must go into town and listen to the idiot Thomas Mann.”

“But you’re ill.”

“Nobody who stands up is ill. Nobody marches who is ill. Dress.”

“Was Mann on the forbidden list too?” Pym asked as he pulled on his clothes.

“He never made it.”

“Why’s he an idiot?”

Herr Ollinger supplied a raincoat that could have gone twice round Axel’s body, Mr. San provided a broad black hat. Herr Ollinger drove them to the door in his broken car two hours early and they took their places at the back before the great hall filled. When the lecture was over, Axel marched Pym backstage and hammered on the dressing-room door. Pym had not cared for Thomas Mann till now. He found his prose perfumed and unwieldy, though he had tried his best for Axel’s sake. But now, there stood God Himself, tall and angular like Uncle Makepeace. “This young English nobleman wishes to shake your hand, sir,” Axel advised him with authority from underneath Mr. San’s broad hat. Thomas Mann peered at Pym, then at Axel so pale and ethereal from his fever. Thomas Mann frowned at the palm of his own right hand as if asking himself whether it could take the strain of an aristocratic embrace. He held out his hand and Pym shook it, waiting to feel Mann’s genius flow into him like one of those electric shocks you used to be able to buy at railway stations—hold this knob and let my energy revive you. Nothing happened, but Axel’s enthusiasm was enough for both of them:

“You touched him, Sir Magnus! You are blessed! You are immortal!”

Within a week, they had saved enough cash to take themselves to Davos to visit the shrine of Mann’s diseased souls. They travelled in the lavatory, Pym standing and Axel, in his beret, sitting patiently on the seat. The conductor knocked on the door and yelled,

“Alle Billette, bitte”;

Axel gave a girlish whimper of discomfort and pushed their one ticket under the door. Pym waited, his eyes fixed on the shadows of the conductor’s feet. He felt the conductor stoop, he heard him grunt as he straightened up. He heard a snap that felt like his own nerve breaking as the ticket reappeared under the door with a hole punched in it. The shadows moved on. This is how you walked here, thought Pym with admiration, as they silently shook hands. These are the tricks that got you to Switzerland. In Davos that evening Axel told Pym all about his nightmare journey from Carlsbad to Bern. Pym felt so proud and rich he decided that Thomas Mann was the best writer in the world.

“Dear Father”—he wrote jubilantly as soon as he was back in the attic—“I am having a really wizard time here now and getting some first-rate instruction. I cannot tell you how much I miss your worldly counsel and how grateful I am for your wisdom in sending me to Switzerland for my studies. Today I met lawyers who really seem to know life in all its aspects, and I am sure they will be a help in furthering my career.”

“Dear Belinda,

“Now that I have put my foot down, things are much better.”

Meanwhile there was good old you, wasn’t there, Jack? Jack the other war hero, Jack the other side of my head. I will describe to you who you were because I don’t expect we know the same person any more. I will describe what you were to me and what I did for you and as best I can why, because there again I doubt whether we share the same interpretation of events and personalities. I doubt it very much. To Jack, Pym was just another baby Joe, one more addition to his private army in the making, not broken and certainly not trained, but with the halter already slipped nicely round his neck and willing to run a long way for his lump of sugar. You probably don’t remember—why should you?—how you picked him up or made your overtures to him. All you knew was he was the type the Firm liked, and so did you, and so did part of me. Short back and sides, speaks the King’s English, decent linguist, good country public school. A games player, understands discipline. Not an arty chap, certainly not one of your overintellectual types. Levelheaded, one of us. Comfortably off but not too grand, father some sort of minor tycoon—how typical that you never bothered to check Rick out. And where else should you meet this paragon of tomorrow’s men but at the English church, where the flag of Saint George fluttered victorious in the neutral Swiss breeze?

How long you had been tracking Pym I don’t know. I’ll bet you don’t either. You liked the way he read the Lesson, you said, so you must have had your eye on him from at least before Christmas because it was an early Advent text. You seemed surprised when he told you he was studying at the university, so I guess your first enquiries were made before he enrolled there and you hadn’t topped them up. It was on Christmas Day after matins that Pym shook your hand for the first time. The church porch was like a crowded lift with everyone rattling umbrellas and making rah-rah English noises, and the diplomatic kids pelting each other with snowballs in the street. Pym was wearing his E. Weber jacket, and you, Jack, you were a tweedy, unscalable English mountain of twenty-four. In terms of war and peace the seven years between us were a generation, more like two. Much as they were with Axel, as a matter of fact; you both had those crucial years on me, still do.

Do you know what else you wore apart from your good brown suit? Your Airborne tie. Prancing silver-winged horses and crowned Britannias on a maroon field, congratulations. You never told me where you had been for it, but the reality as I now know it is no less impressive than my imaginings: with the Partisans in Yugoslavia and the Resistance in Czechoslovakia, behind the lines with the Long Range Desert Group in Africa and even, if I remember right, in Crete. You are an inch taller than I, but I remember as if it were yesterday how, as Pym grasped your great dry hand, that Airborne tie looked him in the eye. He lifted his head, he saw your rock jaw and your blue eyes—the ferocious bushy eyebrows even then—and he knew he was standing face to face with the character he was supposed to have become at all his schools, and sometimes in his fancy had: a straight-backed English brave of the officer class, the one who keeps his head when all about him are losing theirs. You wished him Happy Christmas and when you spoke your name he thought you were making a sort of Everyman’s joke to do with Christmas Day—you are Good Fellowship and I will be Brotherhood.

“No, no, old boy, it’s real,” you insisted with a laugh. “Why should a nice chap like me use a false name?”

Why indeed, when you had diplomatic cover? You invited him for a glass of sherry before lunch tomorrow, Boxing Day, and you said you would have sent him an invitation if you’d known his address, which was clever of you, because of course you knew it perfectly well: address, date of birth, education and all the other nonsense we imagine gives us ascendancy over those we seek to obtain. Then you did an amusing thing. You took an invitation card from your pocket and in the crammed porch while everyone went on woof-woofing you spun Pym round and, using his back to press on, wrote his name along the middle line and handed it to him: “Captain and Mrs. Jack Brotherhood request the pleasure.” You scratched out the “RSVP” to emphasise that the deal was done, and you scratched out the “Captain” to show what pals we were. “If you want to stay on afterwards you can help us eat up the cold turkey. Rough clothes,” you added. Pym watched you stride off through the rain exactly as he knew you had carried yourself through the gunfire of all the battlefields where you had triumphed single-handed over Jerry, while Pym was doing nothing braver than carve Sefton Boyd’s initials on the wall of the staff lavatory.

Next day he presented himself punctually at your little diplomatic house, and as he pressed the bell he read your visiting card framed in the panel above it. “Captain J. Brotherhood, Assistant Passport Officer, British Embassy, Bern.” You were married to Felicity in those days, you may remember. Adrian was six months old. Pym played with him for hours in order to impress you, a habit that soon became a feature of his dealings with the younger members of your trade. You questioned him in a perfectly agreeable way and, where you left off, Felicity as the good Secret Service squaw took over, God forgive her: “But what

friends

have you got, Magnus, you must be so

lonely

here?” she cried. “What do you do for

fun,

Magnus?” And was there much in the way of an extracurricular life at the university, for instance—she asked—political groups and so forth? Or was it all a bit flat and dreary like the rest of Bern? Pym didn’t find Bern flat or dreary at all, but for Felicity he pretended he did. In the chronology, Pym’s friendship with Axel was by now twelve hours old, but he didn’t give him a thought—why should he when he was so taken up with impressing you both with himself?

I remember asking what crowd you fought with, sir, expecting you to say “Fifth Airborne,” or “Artists’ Rifles” so that I could look suitably awed. Instead you went a bit gruff and said, “General List.” I know now that you were exercising the double standard of diplomatic cover: you wanted it to cover you, but you also wanted Pym to see through it. You wanted him to know you were an irregular, and not one of those intellectual little ponces from the Foreign Office, as you call them. You asked him whether he got around the country and suggested that, on occasions when you were making an official car journey somewhere, he might like to come aboard and amuse himself the other end. The two of us put on boots and went for what you called a bash: meaning a forced march through the Elfenau woods. In the course of it you told Pym he needn’t call you “sir,” and when we came back, Felicity had fed Adrian, and there was an older, smirking man sitting talking to her. You introduced him as Sandy from the Embassy and Pym sensed you were colleagues and vaguely that Sandy was your boss. I know now that he was your Station Head and you were his number two, and that he was performing his standard task of looking over the property before allowing you to buy your way any further in. But at the time Pym just thought of Sandy as headmaster and you as housemaster, a construction you would not have disapproved of.

“How good’s your German, by the by?” Sandy asked Pym through his smirk while the three of us munched Felicity’s mince pies. “Bit hard to learn here, isn’t it, with all this Swissie dialect about?”

“Magnus knows rather a lot of university émigrés,” you explained for me, underlining a selling point. Sandy let out a silly laugh and slapped his knee.

“Does he, does he though? I’ll bet there’s some rum characters among

that

crowd!”

“He could probably tell us a good deal about them too, couldn’t you, Magnus?” you said.

“You wouldn’t mind?” said Sandy quizzically, still smirking.

“Why should I?” said Pym.

Sandy forced the card cleverly. He sensed that Pym liked taking rash decisions in front of people, and he used this knowledge to press a commitment out of him before he knew what he was committing to.

“No high-minded scruples about the sanctity of academic study or anything like that?” Sandy insisted.

“None at all,” said Pym boldly. “Not if it’s for my country,” and was rewarded by Felicity’s smile.

What version of himself Pym supplied that day, and had to live with for the coming months, I do not remember, which means it must have been a fairly restrained one, short on those awkward story-points that too often had to be paid for later. As best he could, he gave you what he thought you were looking for. He was prudent enough not to admit he was earning money, which went down well with you, for you knew already he was working “black,” as the Germans call it—meaning illegally, and at night. Shrewd chap, you thought; resourceful; not above a bit of larceny. He played down family life with the Ollingers since proxy parents undermined his self-image as a mature exile. When you asked him whether he knew any girls—the shadow of homosexuality, is he one of those?—Pym got the message at once, and wove a harmless fantasy around an Italian beauty called Maria whom he had met at the Cosmo Club and was keen on, but only as a stopgap for his regular girlfriend Jemima, back in England.

“Jemima who?” you asked, and Pym said Sefton Boyd, which produced an audible sigh of social satisfaction. A real Maria did indeed exist and was indeed beautiful but Pym’s adoration of her was private to himself, for he had never spoken to her.

“Cosmo?” said you. “Don’t think I’ve heard of that one. Have you, Sandy?”

“Can’t say I have, old boy. Sounds fishy to me.”

Pym explained that the Cosmo was a sort of foreigners’ political forum, and Maria was some sort of officer of it, like treasurer.

“Any particular complexion?” Sandy asked.

“Well she’s dark,” said Pym ingenuously and you and Felicity and Sandy laughed and laughed, like Little Audrey, and Felicity remarked that it was

quite

clear what Magnus’s politics were. After that no meeting was complete without somebody asking after Maria’s complexion, and everyone cracking up over such a marvellously healthy misunderstanding. It was evening by the time Pym left your house and you had given him a present of a duty-free bottle of scotch to keep out the cold. Cost to the Firm in those days: I guess around five shillings. You offered to run him home but he said he loved to walk, thus earning further Brownie points. And walk he did, on air. He skipped and laughed and hugged his bottle and himself; he hadn’t felt so blessed in all his seventeen years. In a single Christmas, God had dished him up two saints. The one was on the run and couldn’t walk, the other was a handsome English warlord who served sherry on Boxing Day and had never had a doubt in his life. Both admired him, both loved his jokes and his voices, both were clamouring to occupy the empty spaces of his heart. In return he was giving to each man the character he seemed to be in search of. His decision to keep them secret from each other was never taken. Let each be the mistress that keeps the other home intact, Pym thought. If he thought at all.

“From whom did you steal it, Sir Magnus?” Axel asked in his formal English, looking curiously at the label.

“The chaplain,” said Pym without a second’s hesitation. “He’s a terrific bloke. Ex-army. I didn’t steal it. He gave it me, actually. A free bottle for regular attenders. They get it at diplomatic rates, of course. They don’t have to pay like in the shops.”

“He didn’t offer you cigarettes as well, did he?” said Axel.

“Why should he?”

“A bar of chocolate for a night with your sister?”

“I haven’t got a sister.”

“Good. Then let’s drink it.”

Do you remember our car journeys, Jack? I begin to think you do. Have you ever wondered how our forebears managed to run their agents in the days before the motorcar? Our first trip could not have come more handy. You had a date in Lausanne. You would need three hours. You gave no reason why you needed three hours in Lausanne, though you could have given me any cover story under the sun. Once again with the advantage of hindsight I know that you were deliberately admitting me to the secrecy of your work without letting on what the work was. You asked nothing of Pym on that occasion. You were building intimacy. The most you did was give him a rendezvous and a fallback and see whether he managed them. “Look here, it’s just possible I’ll have to make another call. If I’m not outside the Hotel Dora at three, be at the west side of the main post office at three-twenty.” Pym wasn’t good at east and west but he asked about six people till one of them got it right for him, and he made the fallback at three-twenty exactly, even if he was panting his heart out. You circled the square and the second time round you kept the car rolling and pushed open the door, and Pym hopped in like an airborne soldier to show you how able he was.

“I’ve been talking to Sandy,” you said as we drove to Geneva a week later. “He wants you to do a job for him. Mind?”

“Of course not.”

“You any good at translation?”

“What sort?”

“Can you keep your mouth shut?”

“I think so.”

You gave him his first Target for Tonight: “We get technical stuff in from time to time. Mainly about funny little Swissie firms that are manufacturing things we don’t much like. Nasty things that blow up,” you added with a smile. “It’s not exactly secret, but we hire a lot of local labour in the Embassy so we’d rather have it done by someone outside. Preferably a Brit. Someone we trust. You game?”

“Of course.”

“We pay. Not much, but it’ll buy you a dinner with Maria now and then. Heard from Jemima recently?”

“Jem’s fine, thanks.”

Pym had never been so scared in his life. You handed him the envelope, he put it in his pocket, you gave him your Master of Intrigue look and said “Good luck, old chap”—Yes, Jack, you did! We talked to each other like that—and Pym walked home changing that damned envelope from one pocket to another so many times he must have looked like a bookie on the run. And what was in it? Don’t tell me, I’ll tell you: junk. Photocopied junk from out-of-date armaments catalogues. It was Pym’s soul you were after, not the piffling translation. He lost the envelope about six times in his attic too. Under the bed, under the mattress, behind the mirror, up the chimney. He translated its contents in hours even Axel didn’t know he had. You paid Pym twenty francs. The technical dictionary had cost twenty-five but he knew that gentlemen didn’t mention things like that, even if Rick’s cheques, if they came at all, tended to meet with failure.

“Been to the Cosmo Club recently?” you enquired lightly as we headed towards Zurich, where you said you had a man to see about a dog. Pym confessed he had not. With Axel and Jack Brotherhood as his cosmos, who needed another?

“I’m told some of the people who go along there are a bit outspoken. Nothing against Maria, mind. Those outfits always have a broad spectrum. Part of democracy. Might be a good idea all the same if you took a closer look,” you said. “Don’t stick out. If they expect you to be a Leftie, let them think you are one. If they’re looking for a Right-of-centre Brit, give ’em one. If necessary give ’em both. But don’t go overboard. We don’t want you getting into trouble with the Swissies. Any other Brits there, apart from you?”

“There are a couple of Scottish medical students but they told me they come for the girls.”

“A few names would help,” you said.

With that one conversation, looking back, Pym was Pym no longer. He was our man in the Cosmo, don’t use the telephones for anything delicate. He was a symbolised agent, graded semiconscious, which is our sweet way of saying he sort of half knows what he is sort of doing and sort of why. He was seventeen years old, and if he needed you urgently he was to ring Felicity and say his uncle was in town. If you needed him you’d phone the Ollingers from a callbox and say you were Mac from Birmingham passing through. Otherwise it was meeting-to-meeting, which means we always fix the next one at this one. Float, Magnus, you said. Get in there and be your own charming self, Magnus. Keep your ears and eyes open, see what sticks, but for God’s sake don’t get us into trouble with the Swissies. And here’s your next month’s alimony, Magnus. And Sandy sends his love. I tell you, Jack: we reap as we sow, even if the harvest is thirty-five summers in the growing.

The secretary of the Cosmo was a vapid Rumanian royalist called Anka who wept unaccountably in lectures. She was gangly and wild and walked with her wrists turned inside out, and when Pym stopped her in the corridor she scowled at him with red eyes and told him to go away because she had a headache. But Pym was on spy’s business and brooked no rejection.

“I’m thinking of starting a Cosmo newsletter,” he announced. “I thought we might include a contribution from each group.”

“The Cosmo don’t got no groups. The Cosmo don’t want no newsletter. You are stupid. Go away.”

Pym pursued Anka to the tiny office that was her lair.

“All I need is a list of members,” he said. “If I have a list of members I can send out a circular and find out who is interested.”

“Why don’t you come to next meeting and ask them?” Anka said, sitting down and putting her head in her hands as if she were about to be sick.

“Not everyone comes to meetings. I want to test all shades. It’s more democratic.”

“Nothing is democratic,” said Anka. “Is all illusion.”

“He is an English,” she explained to herself aloud as she hauled open a drawer and began to pick through its chaotic contents. “What does an English know about illusion?” she demanded of some private confessor. “He is mad.” She handed him a grimy sheet of names and addresses. Most of them, it turned out later, were misspelt.

“Dearest Father” wrote Pym excitedly—“I am having one or two amazing successes here despite my youth, and I gather the Swissies are considering offering me some kind of academic honour.”

“I love you”—he wrote to Belinda—“I’ve never written that to anyone before.”

It is night. It is Bern’s darkest winter. The city will never see day again. A smothering brown fog rolls down the wet cobble of the Herrengasse and the good Swiss hurry dutifully through it like reservists headed for the front. But Pym and Jack Brotherhood sit snugly in a corner of their little restaurant and Sandy has sent his extra-special love, together with his absolutely warmest congratulations. It is the first time agent and controller have eaten together in public in their target city. An ingenious cover story has been agreed in the event of a chance encounter. Jack has appointed himself secretary of the Embassy’s Anglo-Swiss Christian Society and wishes to attract elements of the university. What more natural than he should turn to Magnus whom he knows from the English church? For deeper cover still he has brought the lovely Wendy who works in Chancery and is honey-haired and well-born, and has a slight but prominent protrusion of the upper lip as if she is permanently blowing out a candle just below her chin. Wendy loves both men equally; she is a natural and spontaneous toucher, with shallow, unfrightening breasts. When Pym has finished describing how he landed his great coup, Wendy cannot resist laying a hand along his cheek and saying, “God, Magnus, that was

so

brave. I mean marvellous. Wouldn’t Jemima be proud if she was allowed to know. Don’t you think so, Jack?” But all very quietly, in the soft-fall voice that even the horsiest must learn before they are let out of the paddock. And going very near to Jack with her hair to speak to him.

“You did a damn good job,” says Brotherhood with his military smile. “Church should be proud of you,” he adds, straight at his agent. They drink to Pym’s good job for the church.

It is coffee time and Brotherhood has taken an envelope from one jacket pocket and from the other a pair of steel-framed half-moon spectacles which give a mysteriously finite authority to his British-brave face. Not alimony this time, for alimony comes in a white unwatermarked envelope, not a mousy-brown one like this. He does not hand it to Pym but opens it himself in full view of everyone who cares to watch, and asks Wendy for a pencil, dear, your flashy gold one, don’t tell me how you earned

that.

And Wendy says, “For you, darling, anything,” and drops it into his cupped hands, which close on hers. Jack spreads the paper out before him.

“Just want to check on a few of these addresses,” he says. “Don’t want to start sending out literature till we’re sure. Okay?”

“Okay” meaning: Have you decoded this brilliant

double entendre?

Pym says absolutely fine and Wendy trails a loving fingernail down the list, stopping at one or two lucky names that are marked with ticks and crosses.

“Only it seems that one or two members of our choir have been quite unduly modest about their personal particulars. Almost as if they wanted to hide their lights under a bushel,” says Brotherhood.

“I didn’t really look,” says Pym.

Brotherhood’s voice drops. “Nor should you. That’s our job.”

“We couldn’t find your lovely Maria

anywhere,”

says Wendy, frightfully disappointed. “What have you done with her?”

“I’m afraid she has gone back to Italy,” says Pym.

“Not looking for a replacement, Magnus, are you, darling?” says Wendy, and all laugh uproariously, Pym loudest, though he would have given the rest of his life just for the sight of one of her breasts.

Brotherhood mentions names that have no addresses. Pym can help with none of them, cannot put faces to them, cannot supply character descriptions. In other circumstances, he would gladly have made some up but Brotherhood has an uncomfortable way of knowing answers before he asks questions and Pym is getting wise to this. Wendy refills the men’s glasses and keeps the dregs for herself. Brotherhood passes to addresses that have no names.

“A.H.,” he says carelessly. “Ring a bell? A.—H.?”

Pym confesses it does not. “I really haven’t been to enough meetings yet,” he says apologetically. “I’ve been having rather a hard slog at my work before exams.”

Brotherhood is still smiling, still perfectly relaxed. Does he know that Pym is sitting no exams? Pym notices that Wendy’s pencil has nearly vanished inside his closed fist. Its sharp end peeks out of it like a tiny gun barrel.

“Think a bit,” Brotherhood suggests. And says it again, mouthing it slowly like a password: “A.—H.”

“Perhaps it’s A.H. somebody else,” says Pym. “A. H. Smith. Schmidt. I could find a way of asking if you like. It’s all quite open really.”

Wendy has frozen in the way you freeze in party games when the music stops. Her smile has frozen with her. Wendy has the private secretary’s art of suspending her personality until it is required and something has told her it is not required at present. The waiter is clearing plates. Brotherhood’s fist is covering the paper so that quite by accident no names are visible to the passer-by.

“Would it help if I told you that A.H., whoever he is—or she is—shares a certain address in the Länggasse. Or says he does. Care of Ollinger. That’s your place too, isn’t it?”

“Oh you mean Axel,” says Pym.

Somewhere a cock was crowing but Pym didn’t hear it. His ears were full of a kind of waterfall, his heart was bursting with a sense of righteous duty. He was in Rick’s dressing-room, looking for a way of stealing back the love he had given to a wrong cause. He was in the staff lavatory, doing a knife job on the classiest boy in the school. There were the stories Axel had told him when he was delirious and spilling his drinking water with both hands. There were the stories he had told him in Davos when they went to visit Thomas Mann’s sanatorium. There were the crumbs he had gleaned for himself on his occasional precautionary inspections of Axel’s room. And there was Brotherhood’s clever prompting that dragged things out of him he hadn’t realised he knew. Axel’s father had fought with the Thälmann brigade in Spain, he said. He was an old-style Social Democrat, so he was lucky to die before the Nazis could arrest him.

“So he’s a Leftie?”

“He’s dead.”

“I meant the son.”

“Well not really, not that he’s said. He’s just catching up on his education. He’s uncommitted.”

Brotherhood pressed his eyebrows together and penciled “Thälmann” on his choir list. Axel’s mother was Catholic but his father had been a member of the anti-Catholic

Los von Rom

movement, which was Lutheran, Pym said. His mother lost her right to confession because she had married a Protestant.

“And a Socialist,” Brotherhood reminded Pym, under his breath, as he wrote.

At the

Gymnasium

Axel’s friends all wanted to fly planes against England but Axel was persuaded by the visiting recruiting teams to volunteer for the army. He was posted to Russia, taken prisoner and escaped, but when the Allies invaded France he was pulled out to fight in Normandy where he was wounded in the spine and hip.

“Did he tell you

how

he escaped from the Russians?” Brotherhood cut in.

“He said he walked.”

“Like he walked to Switzerland,” said Brotherhood with a hard smile and Pym began to see a pattern that he had not thought of until Brotherhood suggested it.

“How long was he there?”

“I don’t know. But long enough to learn Russian anyway. He’s got books in Cyrillic in his room.”

Back in Germany he went ill from his wounds but as soon as he was well enough to walk he was sent to fight the Americans. He was wounded again and sent back to Carlsbad where his mother was laid up with jaundice, so he put her on a cart with her possessions and pushed her to Dresden, a beautiful city that the Allies had recently bombed flat. He took his mother to the district where the Silesian refugees had gathered but she died soon after he got her there, so he was alone. By now Pym’s head was swimming. The colours on the wall behind Brotherhood’s head were merging and sliding. It’s not me. It’s me. I’m doing my duty for my country. Axel, help me.

“Right-ho, now it’s peacetime. Forty-five. What does he do?”

“Gets out of the Soviet Zone.”

“Why?”

“He was scared the Russians would find him and put him back in prison. He didn’t like them and he didn’t like prison and he didn’t like the way the Communists were taking over Eastern Germany.”

“Good story so far. What does he do about it?”

“He burns his paybook and buys another one.”

“Where from?”

“A soldier he met in Carlsbad. Somebody who came from Munich who looked fairly like him. He said that in 1945 nobody in Germany looked like their photograph anyway.”

“Why didn’t this accommodating soldier want his papers?”

“He wanted to stay in the East.”

“Why?”

“Axel didn’t know.”

“Bit thin, isn’t it?”

“I suppose it is.”

“On we go.”

“He boarded the repatriation train to Munich and everything worked fine till he got to the other end, when the Americans pulled him straight off the train and put him into prison and beat him up.”

“Why’d they do a thing like that?”

“It was because of his papers. He’d bought the papers of a wanted man. He’d just walked completely into a trap.”

“Unless of course they were his own papers in the first place and he never bought them from anybody,” Brotherhood suggested, writing again. “Sorry, old boy. Didn’t mean to shatter your illusions. Way of the world, I’m afraid. How long did he do?”

“I don’t know. He got ill again and they put him into hospital and he escaped from hospital.”

“Pretty good at escaping, I must say. You say he walked here?”

“Well, walked and bummed rides on trains. They had to shorten one of his legs. The Germans did. After he came back from Russia. That’s why he limps. I should have said that earlier. So I mean even with trains it was quite a walk. Munich to Austria, then Austria over the border at night to Switzerland. Then to Ostermundigen.”

“To where?”

“That’s where Herr Ollinger has his factory.” Pym heard himself trying to make excuses. “He hasn’t any papers at all, you see. He destroyed his own in Carlsbad. The Americans kept the ones he bought and he can’t find anyone to give him a new set. Meanwhile he’s still on the Allied wanted list. He says he’d have confessed everything the Americans asked if only he’d known what he was supposed to have done wrong. But he didn’t, so they went on beating him.”

“Heard that one before too,” said Brotherhood under his breath, once more writing. “How does he spend his days here, Magnus? Who are his buddies?”

Far, far too late, voices were whispering Pym caution.

“He’s afraid to go out in case the

Fremdenpolizei

arrest him. If he goes into town he borrows a big hat. It isn’t only the

Fremdenpolizei.

If the ordinary Swissies knew about him they’d inform against him too. He says they do that. It’s a national sport. He says they do it out of envy and call it civic-mindedness. It’s just household gossip I’m telling you.”

“Pity you didn’t tell it to us earlier.”

“It didn’t mean anything. It wasn’t anything you were interested in. Herr Ollinger told me most of it. He gossips all the time.”

Brotherhood had his car outside. Man and boy were sitting in it but Brotherhood didn’t drive anywhere. Wendy had gone home. Brotherhood asked about Axel’s politics. Pym said Axel despised established attitudes. Brotherhood said, “Describe.” He wasn’t writing any more and his head was very still in the window frame. Pym said Axel had once remarked that pain was democratic.

“Reading habits?” said Brotherhood.

“Well, everything really. Everything he’s missed from the war. He types a lot. Mostly at night.”

“What does he type?”

“He says it’s a book.”

“What does he read?”

“Well, everything. Sometimes when he’s ill I get books out of the library for him.”

“In your own name?”

“Yes.”

“That’s a bit rash. What do you get?”

“The whole spectrum.”

“Describe.”

Pym described and came inevitably to Marx and Engels and the bad bears, and Brotherhood wrote all of them down, asking him who Dühring was when he was at home.

Brotherhood asked about Axel’s habits. Pym said he liked cigars and vodka and sometimes kirsch. He didn’t mention whisky.

Brotherhood asked about Axel’s sex-life. Sweeping aside his own limitations in this respect, Pym declared it mixed.

“Describe,” said Brotherhood again.

Pym did his best, though he knew even less about Axel’s sexuality than his own, except that whatever form it took, unlike Pym he was on terms with it.

“He does sometimes have women,” said Pym deprecatingly, as if that were something all of us did. “Usually she’s some token beauty from the Cosmo, cooking for him or polishing his room. He calls them his Marthas. I thought at first he meant martyr.”

“Dearest Father”—Pym wrote that night, alone and miserable in his attic—“I am absolutely fine and my head is buzzing from all the seminars and lectures, though I miss you terribly as ever. One bad thing however is that I had a pal who recently let me down.”

How Pym loved Axel in the weeks that followed! For a day or so, it was true, he would not go near him, he resented him so much. He resented everything about him, every move on the other side of the radiator. He patronises me. He sneers at my ignorance without respecting my strengths. He is an arrogant German of the worst sort and Jack is right to keep his eye on him. Pym resented the mail he received, Herr Axel care of Ollinger. He resented more than ever the Marthas tiptoeing like shy disciples up the stairs to the great thinker’s sanctum, and down again two hours later. He is dissolute. He is unnatural. He is turning their heads for them, exactly as he tried to turn mine. Diligently he kept a log of these developments to give to Brotherhood at their next meeting. He also spent a lot of time in the third-class buffet wearing his clouded look for the benefit of Elisabeth. But these exercises in separation did not endure and the line to Axel grew tighter with every day. He discovered he could gauge his friend’s mood from the tempo of his typing: whether he was excited or angry or tired. He is reporting on us, he told himself without conviction. He is selling out the foreign students to his German paymaster. He is a Nazi war criminal turned Communist spy in the image of his Leftie father.

“When do we ever get to read it?” Pym had asked him once shyly in the days when they were close.

“If I ever finish it, and the publisher ever publishes it.”

“Why can’t I read it now?”

“Because you will take the cream off it for me, and leave me with the curds.”

“What’s it about?”

“Mysteries, Sir Magnus, and if they are spoken aloud they will never be written down.”

He’s writing his Wilhelm Meister autobiography, thought Pym indignantly. That was my idea, not his.

He could tell when Axel could not sleep by the striking of his matches as he lit his cigars. He could tell when his body was driving him mad. He told it by the altered rhythm of his movements and the determined gaiety of his singing as he clomped the wooden corridor to crouch for hours in their shared lavatory with its porcelain footprints. After several nights had passed that way Pym was able to loathe Axel for his incontinence. Why doesn’t he go back to hospital? “He sings German marching songs,” he wrote to Brotherhood in his notebook. “Tonight he sang the whole Horst Wessel Lied in the lavatory.” On the third night, long after Pym had gone to bed, his door suddenly flew open and there stood Axel wrapped in Herr Ollinger’s dressing-gown.

“Well? Have you forgiven me yet?”

“What have I got to forgive you for?” Pym replied, discreetly pushing his secret logbook under the bedclothes.

Axel stayed in the doorway. The dressing-gown was ridiculously large for him. Sweat had made black fangs of his moustache. “Give me some of your priest’s whisky,” he said.

After that Pym couldn’t let Axel go until he had wiped the shadows of suspicion from his face. The weeks passed and spring began and Pym knew that nothing was happening, and that he had never betrayed Axel in the first place, because if he had they would have done something long ago. Occasionally Brotherhood asked a couple of follow-up questions but they had the ring of routine. Once he asked, “Can you tell me an evening when you know for certain he will be out?” But Pym was able to answer that there were no certainties in Axel’s life. “Well look here. Why don’t you take him out to a slap-up dinner at our expense?” said Brotherhood. One night Pym tried. He told Axel he had had a windfall from his father and wouldn’t it be fun to put on disguise again like the time they called on Thomas Mann? Axel shook his head with a wisdom Pym dared not explore. After that Pym studied and strove for Axel in every way he knew, now denying to himself that Brotherhood existed anywhere but in his mind, now congratulating himself on Axel’s continued survival, which was owed entirely to Pym’s nimble manipulation of irresistible forces.

They came in the small hours of a spring morning, just when we fear them most: when we want to live the longest and are most afraid of dying. Soon, unless I make their journey unnecessary, they will come for me in the same way. If so, I trust I shall see the justice of it and relish the circularity of life. They had acquired a key to the front door and some method of detaching Herr Ollinger’s chains which were not unlike Miss Dubber’s. They knew the house inside out because they had been watching it for months, photographing our visitors, sending in their bogus meter men and window cleaners, delaying the mail while they read it and no doubt listening to Herr Ollinger’s forlorn telephone conversations with his creditors and lame ducks. Pym knew there were three of them because he could count their stealthy Father Christmas footsteps on the squeaky top stair. They looked in the lavatory before they placed themselves outside Axel’s door. Pym knew this because he heard the lavatory door squeak and stay open. He also heard a rattle as they removed the lavatory-door key in case their desperate criminal should attempt to lock himself inside. But Pym could do nothing personally because at the time he lay deeply dreaming in all the scared beds of his childhood. He dreamt about Lippsie and her brother Aaron and how he and Aaron together had pushed her off the rooftop at Mr. Grimble’s school. He dreamt that an ambulance was waiting outside the house like the one that called at The Glades for Dorothy, and that Herr Ollinger was trying to stop the men coming up the stairs but was being ordered back to his quarters in a fury of Swiss dialect. He dreamt that he heard a shout of “Pym, you bastard, where are you?” from the direction of Axel’s room and directly afterwards the awful brief thundering noise of a man with uneven legs struggling against three healthy intruders and the furious opposition of Bastl whom Axel had once accused of being his Faustian Devil. But when he lifted his head from the pillow and listened to the real world, there was silence and everything was absolutely fine.

I held it against you, Jack, I confess. I argued with you in my head for years, uphill, downhill, and long after I had joined the Firm. Why had you done it to him? He wasn’t English, he wasn’t a Communist, he wasn’t the war criminal the Americans claimed he was. He was nothing to do with you. His only crimes were his poverty, his illegal presence and his lameness—plus a certain freedom in his way of thinking, which in the eyes of some is what we are there to protect. But I did nurse a grudge and I’m sorry. Because now of course I know you hardly gave it a thought. Axel was another bit of barter material. You wrote him up; he came back into your in-tray looking formidable and sinister in Wendy’s flawless type. You lit your pipe and admired your handiwork, and you thought: Hullo, I’ll bet the old Swissies will like a smell of this one; I’ll pop it down to them and earn myself a Brownie point. You made a phone call or two and invited some contact in the Swiss Security Service to join you for an extended luncheon at your favourite restaurant. Over the coffee and the schnapps you slipped him an anonymous brown envelope. As an afterthought you slipped a copy to your American colleague too, because if you’re going to earn one favour, why not earn a second while you’re about it? After all, it was the Yanks who put him in the cooler, even if they got his record wrong.

You were junior then, too, weren’t you? You had your way to make. As we all have. Maturer now, both of us. Sorry to be so lengthy in the remembering, but the episode took me rather a long time to forget. I’ve got it straight now. Served me right for having a friend outside the service.

“Mr. Canterbury! Mr. Canterbury! You’ve got a man!”

Pym had put down his pen. He had not looked towards the door. Almost before he was aware of it, he had leapt to his slippered feet and was flying across the room to where the metal-lined black briefcase, still locked, stood against the wall. Dropping to a crouch beside it, he inserted the complicated key in the first lock and sprung it. Then the second: anti-clockwise or it fires.

“What man’s that, Miss D?” he said in his softest and most reassuring tone, one hand already in the case.

“With a

cabinet,

Mr. Canterbury,” Miss Dubber replied with disapproval through the keyhole. “You’ve never had a cabinet before. You’ve never had anything. You’ve never locked your door either. What’s wrong?”

Pym laughed. “Nothing’s wrong. It’s just a cabinet. I ordered it. How many of them are there?”

Taking the briefcase with him, he tiptoed to the window and squared his back against the wall while he squinted cautiously through the gap in the curtain.

“Just one—isn’t that enough? A great green ugly one made of iron. If you’d wanted a cabinet why didn’t you tell me? You could have had Mrs. Tutton’s cupboard from room two.”

“I meant how many men?”

It was daylight. A yellow taxi-truck was parked outside the house, the driver at the wheel. He glanced round the rest of the square. Fast. Checking everything. Then slowly. Checking everything again.

“What does it matter how many men, Mr. Canterbury? Why do we have to count the men when it’s a cabinet?”

Relaxing, Pym replaced the briefcase in its corner and relocked it. Clockwise or it fires. He returned the keys to his pocket. He opened the door.

“Sorry, Miss D. I think I must have been dozing.”

She watched him down the stairs, then went after him and watched again as he looked first at the two men, then shyly at the green cabinet, lightly touching its chipped paintwork, up and down, tugging at each drawer in turn.

“It’s a bloody weight, governor, I’ll tell you,” said the first.

“Who’s it got in it then?” said the second.

She watched him lead the men up to his room, the cabinet between them, and lead them down again. She watched him pay their bill in cash from his back pocket, and give them an extra five pounds for themselves.

“Sorry about that, Miss D,” he said as they drove off. “Some old Ministry archives I’m working on. Here. This is for you.” He handed her a travel brochure he had brought down with him from his room. There was a whiff of Rick about the capitals. “Discover Tunisia in the Luxury of our air-conditioned Coach. Seniors a Speciality. Shades of the East in the Mediterranean. Enough to make your mouth Water.”

But Miss Dubber would not accept the brochure. “Toby and I aren’t going anywhere any more, Mr. Canterbury,” she said. “Whatever’s troubling you won’t go away with us. That’s for sure.”

9

B

rotherhood had bathed and shaved and cut himself and put on a suit. He had listened to the news on the BBC and afterwards tuned to the Deutsche Welle because sometimes the foreign press got hold of stories while Fleet Street was still obediently suppressing them. But he had heard no lighthearted mention of a senior officer of the British Secret Service going walkabout or turning up in Moscow. He had eaten a piece of toast and marmalade, he had made a few phone calls but six till eight of an English morning were the dead hours when nobody except himself was about. On a normal day he would have walked across the park to Head Office and given himself a couple of hours at his desk reading the night’s crop of Station reports and preparing himself for the ten-o’clock prayer session in Bo’s sanctum. “So how’s our Eastern Front this rainy morning, Jack?” Bo would say in a tone of jokey veneration, when Brotherhood’s turn came round. And a respectful quiet would follow while the great Jack Brotherhood gave his chief the score. “Some quite nice stuff from Conger on the Comecon trading figures for last year, Bo. We’ve sent it up to Treasury by special bag. Otherwise it’s the silly season. Joes are on holiday, so’s the opposition.”

But this was not a normal day and Brotherhood was no longer the grand old man of covert operations that Bo cracked him up to be when he introduced him to visiting firemen from Western liaison services. He was the latest unperson in the latest looming scandal and, as he stepped into the street below his flat, his quick gaze was more than usually vigilant. It was eight-thirty. First he headed south across Green Park, walking as fast as ever and perhaps a little faster, so that Nigel’s watchers, if they were on him, would either have to gallop or radio for somebody to get ahead of him. The night’s rain had stopped. Warm, unhealthy mist hung over the ponds and willows. Reaching the Mall he hailed a cab and told the driver Tottenham Court Road. He walked again and took a second cab to Kentish Town. His destination was a grey hillside of Victorian villas. The lower reaches were still run down, their windows plugged with corrugated iron against squatters. But higher up Volvo estate cars and teak-framed dormer windows testified to the safe arrival of the middle classes, and the long gardens boasted coloured climbing frames and half-made dinghies. Here Brotherhood was no longer in a hurry. He trudged up the hill slowly, noting everything at his leisure: this is the pace I have earned in life, this is the smile. A pretty girl passed him on her way to work and he greeted her indulgently. She winked pertly back at him, proving for all time that she was not a watcher. At number 18 he paused and in the manner of a prospective purchaser stood back and surveyed the house. Bach and a smell of breakfast issued from the ground-floor kitchen. A wooden arrow marked “18A” pointed down the basement steps. A man’s bicycle was chained against the railings, a poster for the Social Democratic Party hung in the bay window. He pressed the bell. A girl in a blazer opened the door to him. At thirteen she already wore an air of superiority.

“I’ll get Mummy,” she said before he could speak, and turned sharply so that he could watch her skirt swing. “Mummy. It’s a man. For you,” she said and, sweeping past him down the steps, set off for her decent school.

“Hullo, Belinda,” Brotherhood said. “It’s me.”

Coming out of the kitchen, Belinda paused at the foot of the stairs, drew a breath and yelled up them at a closed door. “Paul! Come down at once, please. Jack Brotherhood is here. I assume he wants something.”

Which more or less was what he knew she’d shout—though not quite so loud—because Belinda had always reacted badly first and put it right rather sweetly later.

They sat in a pine drawing-room on low basketwork chairs that creaked like swings when you moved. A gigantic lampshade of white paper rocked crookedly above them. Belinda had made coffee in hand-thrown mugs and sweetened it with natural sugar. Her Bach still played defiantly in the kitchen. She was dark-eyed and angry about something in her childhood—at fifty her face was still set ready for another quarrel with her mother. She had greying hair bound in a sensible bun and wore a necklace of what looked like nutmeg. When she walked, she waded through her kaftan as if she hated it. When she sat, she spread her knees and scraped at the knuckles of one hand. Yet her beauty clung to her like an identity she was trying to deny and her plainness kept slipping like a bad disguise.

“They’ve already been here in case you don’t know, Jack,” she said. “At ten at night as a matter of fact. They were waiting for us on the doorstep when we got back from the cottage.”

“Who’s they?”

“Nigel. Lorimer. Two more I didn’t know. All men, of course.”

“What did they say they were here for?” Brotherhood asked, but Paul stopped him.

You could never be angry with Paul. He smiled so wisely through his pipe smoke even when he was being rude. “What is this actually, Jack?” he said, taking his pipe from his mouth and lowering it until it became a hand microphone. “Interrogations about interrogations? You people have no constitutional position, you know, Jack. You’re only a chartered body even under this government, I’m afraid.”

“You probably don’t know it, but Paul has written extensively on the rise and rise of the para-military services under the Tories,” Belinda said in a voice that struggled to be harsh. “You’d know if you’d bother to read

The Guardian,

but you don’t. They gave him a whole page for the last one.”

“So screw you actually, Jack,” said Paul just as pleasantly.

Brotherhood smiled. Paul smiled. An old English sheepdog wandered in and settled at Brotherhood’s feet.

“Do you want to smoke, by the way?” said Paul, ever sensitive to people’s needs. “I’m afraid Belinda draws the line at fags but I can offer you a nifty little brown one if you’re pushed.”

Brotherhood pulled out a packet of his foul cigarettes and lit one. “Screw you too, Paul,” he said equably.

Paul had peaked early in life. Twenty years ago he had written promising plays for fringe theatres. He wrote them still. He was tall but reassuringly unathletic. Twice, to Brotherhood’s knowledge, he had applied to join the Firm. Each time he had been turned down flat, even without Brotherhood’s intervention.

“They came here because they were vetting Magnus for a top appointment, if you want to know,” Belinda said all in one breath. “They were in a hurry because they wanted to promote him immediately so that he could get on with the job.”

“Nigel?” Brotherhood echoed with an incredulous laugh. “Nigel and Lorimer plus two other men? Doing their own vetting at ten o’clock at night? You’ve got half the brass of secret Whitehall on your doorstep there, Bel. Not a vetting team of old crocks on half pay.”

“It’s a senior appointment so he has to be vetted by senior people,” Belinda retorted, blushing scarlet.

“Did Nigel tell you that?”

“Yes, he did!” said Belinda.

“Did you believe it?”

But Paul had decided it was time to show his mettle. “Actually, fuck off will you, Jack?” he said. “Get out of the house. Now. Darling, don’t answer him. It’s all too theatrical and stupid for words. Come on, Jack. Out. You’re welcome for a drink any time, as long as you phone first. But not for this nonsense. Sorry. Out.”

He had opened the door and was flapping his big soft hand as if scooping water but neither Brotherhood nor the sheepdog stirred.

“Magnus has jumped ship,” Brotherhood explained to Belinda, while Paul put on his I-can-be-violent glower. “Nigel and Lorimer sold you a load of cock. Magnus has bolted and gone into hiding while they cook up a case against him as the big traitor of the Western world. I’m his boss so I’m not quite as enthusiastic as they are. I think he’s strayed but not lost and I’d like to get to him first and talk to him.” Addressing Paul, he didn’t even bother to turn his head. He just lifted it far enough to make the difference. “They’ve put a muzzle on your editor for the time being, same as everybody else, Paul. But if Nigel has his way, in a few days’ time your colleagues will be plastering Belinda’s previous marriage all over their nasty little columns and taking your picture every time you go to the launderette. So you’d better start thinking about how to get your act together. In the meantime, fetch us some more coffee and leave us in peace for an hour.”

Alone, Belinda was much stronger than when protected by her mate. Her face, though dazed, had relaxed. Her gaze had fixed itself steadfastly on a spot a few feet from her eyes, as if to suggest that although she might not see as far as others, her faith in what she saw burned twice as bright. They sat at a round table in the window bay and the Venetian blind sliced the Social Democratic Party into strips.

“His father’s dead,” Brotherhood said.

“I know. I read. Nigel told me. He asked me how it might have affected Magnus. I suppose that was a trick.”

Brotherhood took a moment to answer this. “Not entirely,” he said. “No. Not a complete trick, Belinda. I think they’re reasoning that it could have turned his head a little.”

“Magnus always wanted me to save him from Rick. I did my best. I tried to explain that to Nigel.”

“How save him, Belinda?”

“Hide him. Answer the phone for him. Say he was abroad when he wasn’t. I sometimes think that’s why Magnus joined the Firm. As a hiding place. Just as he married me because he was scared to risk it with Jemima.”

“Who’s Jemima?” said Brotherhood, playing ignorant.

“She was a close friend of mine at school.” She scowled. “Too close.” The scowl softened and became melancholy. “Poor Rick. I only ever saw him once. That was at our wedding. He turned up uninvited in the middle of the reception. I never saw Magnus look happier. Otherwise he was just a voice on the telephone. He had a nice voice.”

“Magnus have any other hiding places in those days?”

“You mean women, don’t you? You can say it if you want. I don’t mind any more.”

“Just somewhere he might have hidden. That’s all. Little cottage somewhere. An old buddy. Where would he go, Belinda? Who’d have him?”

Her hands, now that she had unlocked them, were elegant and expressive. “He’d have gone anywhere. He was a new man every day. He’d come home one person, I’d try to match him. In the morning he’d be someone else. Do you think he did it, Jack?”

“Do you?”

“You always answer one question with another. I’d forgotten. Magnus had the same trick.” He waited. “You could try Sef,” she said. “Sef was always loyal.”

“Sef?”

“Kenneth Sefton Boyd. Jemima’s brother. ‘Sef’s too rich for my blood,’ Magnus used to say. That meant they were equals.”

“Could Magnus have gone to him?”

“If it was bad enough.”

“Could he have gone to Jemima?”

She shook her head.

“Why not?”

“I understand she’s gone off men these days,” she said and blushed again. “She’s not predictable. She never was.”

“Ever heard of anyone called Wentworth?”

She shook her head, still thinking of something different. “Since my time,” she said.

“Poppy?”

“My time ended with Mary. If there’s a Poppy, that’s Mary’s bad luck.”

“When did you last hear from him, Belinda?”

“That’s what Nigel asked me.”

“What did you say to Nigel?”

“I said there was no reason to hear from him after we divorced. We’d been married six years. There were no children. It was a mistake. Why relive it?”

“Was that the truth?”

“No. I lied.”

“What were you concealing?”

“He rang. Magnus did.”

“When?”

“Monday night. Paul was out, thank God.” She paused, listening for the sound of Paul’s typewriter, which was tapping reassuringly from upstairs. “He sounded strange. I thought he was drunk. It was late.”

“What time?”

“It must have been around eleven. Lucy was still doing her homework. I won’t let her work after eleven as a rule but she was doing a French mock O-level. He was in a phone box.”

“Cash?”

“Yes.”

“Where?”

“He didn’t say. He just said, ‘Rick’s dead. I wish we’d had a child.’”

“That all?”

“He said he’d always hated himself for marrying me. Now he was reconciled. He understood himself. And he loved me for trying so hard. Thanks.”

“That all?”

“‘ Thanks. Thanks for everything. And please forgive the bad parts.’ Then he rang off.”

“Did you tell Nigel this?”

“Why do you keep asking me that? I didn’t think it was Nigel’s business. I didn’t want to say he was being drunk and sentimental on the phone late at night just at the time when they were considering him for promotion. Serves him right for deceiving me.”

“What else did Nigel ask you?”

“Just character stuff. Had I ever had any reason to suppose Magnus might have had Communist sympathies. I said Oxford. Nigel said they knew about that. I said I didn’t think university politics meant much anyway. Nigel agreed. Had he ever been erratic in any way? Unstable—alcoholic—depressive? I said no again. I didn’t reckon one drunken phone call constituted drunkenness, but if it did I wasn’t going to tell four of Magnus’s colleagues about it. I felt protective of him.”

“They ought to have known you better, Belinda,” said Brotherhood. “Would you have given him the job yourself, by the way?”

“What job? You said there wasn’t one.” She was being sharp with him, belatedly suspecting him too of duplicity.

“I meant suppose there had been a job. A high-level, responsible job. Would you give it to him?”

She smiled. Very prettily. “I did, didn’t I? I married him.”

“You’re wiser now. Would you give it to him today?”

She was biting her forefinger, frowning angrily. She could change moods in moments. Brotherhood waited but nothing came so he asked her another question: “Did they ask you about his time in Graz, by any chance?”

“Graz? You mean his army time? Good heavens, they didn’t go back

that

far.”

Brotherhood shook his head as if to say he would never be equal to the wicked ways of the world. “Graz is where they’re trying to say it all started,” he said. “They’ve got some grand theory he fell among thieves while he was doing his National Service there. What do you make of that?”

“They’re absurd,” she said.

“Why are you so sure?”

“He was happy there. When he came back to England he was a new man. ‘I’m complete,’ he kept saying. ‘I’ve done it, Bel. I’ve got my other half together.’ He was proud he’d done such good work.”

“Did he describe the work?”

“He couldn’t. It was too secret and too dangerous. He just said I would be proud of him if I knew.”

“Did he tell you the name of any of the operations he was mixed up in?”

“No.”

“Did he tell you the names of any of his Joes?”

“Don’t be absurd. He wouldn’t do that.”

“Did he mention his C.O.?”

“He said he was brilliant. Everyone was brilliant for Magnus when they were new.”

“If I said ‘Greensleeves’ to you in a loud voice, would that ring any bells?”

“It would mean English traditional music.”

“Ever hear of a girl called Sabina?”

She shook her head. “He told me I was his first,” she said.

“Did you believe him?”

“It’s hard to tell when it’s the first for you too.”

With Belinda, he remembered, the quiet was always good. If her charges into the lists had something comic about them, there was always dignity to the calm between.

“So Nigel and his friends went away happy,” he suggested. “Did you?”

Her face against the window was in silhouette. He waited for it to lift or turn to him, but it didn’t.

“Where would you look for him?” he said. “If you were me?”

Still she did not move or speak.

“Some place by the sea somewhere? He had these fantasies, you know. He chopped them up and gave a bit to each person. Did he ever give a version to you? Scotland? Canada? The migration of the reindeer? Some kind lady who’d take him in? I need to know, Belinda. I really do.”

“I won’t talk to you any more, Jack. Paul’s right. I don’t have to.”

“Not whatever he’s done? Not to save him perhaps?”

“I don’t trust you. Specially when you’re being nice. You invented him, Jack. He’d have done whatever you told him. Who to be. Who to marry. Who to divorce. If he’s done wrong it’s as much your fault as his. It was easy to get rid of me—he just gave me the latch key and went to a lawyer. How was he supposed to get rid of you?”

Brotherhood moved towards the door.

“If you find him, tell him not to ring again. And Jack?” Brotherhood paused. Her face was soft again, and hopeful. “Did he write that book he was always on about?”

“Which book was that?”

“The great autobiographical novel that was going to change the world.”

“Should he have done?”

“‘ One day I’m going to lock myself away and tell the truth.’ ‘Why do you have to lock yourself away? Tell it now,’ I said. He didn’t seem to think he could. I’m not going to let Lucy marry early. Nor’s Paul. We’re going to put her on the pill and let her have affairs.”

“Lock himself away

where,

Belinda?”

The light once more faded from her face. “You brought it on yourselves, Jack. All of you. He’d have been all right if he’d never met people like you.”

Wait, Grant Lederer told himself. They all hate you. You hate most of them. Be a clever boy and wait your turn. Ten men sat in a room inside a room. In the false walls, false windows looked onto plastic flowers. From places like this, thought Lederer, America lost her wars against the little brown men in black pyjamas. From places like this, he thought—from smoked-glass rooms, cut off from humankind—America will lose all her wars except the last. A few yards beyond the walls lay the placid diplomatic backwaters of St. John’s Wood. But here inside they could have been in Langley or Saigon.

“Harry, with the greatest

possible

respect,” Mountjoy of the Cabinet Office piped with very little respect at all. “These early indicators of yours could perfectly easily have been dumped on us by an unscrupulous opposition, as some of us have been saying all along. Is it really fair to trot them out yet again? I thought we put all this stuff to bed back in August.”

Wexler stared at the spectacles he was holding in both hands. They are too heavy for him, thought Lederer. He sees too clearly through them. Wexler lowered them to the table and scratched his veteran’s crew cut with his stubby fingertips. What’s holding you up? Lederer demanded of him silently. Are you translating English into English? Are you paralysed by jet-lag after flying Concorde all the way from Washington? Or are you in awe of these English gentlemen who never tire of telling us how they set up our service in the first place and generously invited us to sup at their high table? You’re a top man of the best intelligence agency in the world, for Christ’s sake. You’re my boss. Why don’t you stand up and be counted? As if in response to Lederer’s silent pleading, Wexler’s voice started functioning again with all the animation of a machine that speaks your weight.

“Gentlemen,” Wexler resumed—except that he said “junnlemen.” Reload, aim again, take your time, thought Lederer. “Our position, Sir Eric,” Wexler resumed, with something unpleasantly close to a bow in the direction of Mountjoy’s knighthood, “that is—the ah Agency position overall on this thing—at this important meeting, and at this moment in time—is that we have here an accumulation of indicators from a wide range of sources on the one hand, and new data on the other which we consider pretty much conclusive in respect of our unease.” He moistened his lips. So would I, thought Lederer. If I’d spoken that mouthful, I’d spit at least. “It looks to us therefore that the ah logistics here require us to go back over the ah course a little distance and—when we’ve done that—to ah slot the new stuff in where we can all take a good look at it in light of what has—ah latterly gone before.” He turned to Brammel and his lined but innocent face broke into an apologetic smile. “You want to do it different in any way, Bo, why don’t you just say so and see if we can accommodate you?”

“My dear chap, you must do exactly whatever makes you feel most comfortable,” said Brammel hospitably, which was what he had been saying to everybody all his life. So Wexler went back to his brief, first centering the folder before him on the table then tilting it cautiously to the right, as if landing it on one wingtip. And Grant Lederer III, who has the impression that the inside surfaces of his skin have been afflicted by an itchy rash, tries to lower his pulse rate and his blood heat and believe in the high level of this conference. Somewhere, he argues to himself, there is worth and secrecy and an all-knowing intelligence service. The only trouble is, it’s in Heaven.

The British had fielded their usual intractable, over-fluent team. Hobsbawn, seconded from the Security Service, Mountjoy from the Cabinet Office and Dorney from the Foreign Office all lolled in varying positions of disbelief or outright contempt. Only the placement had changed, Lederer noticed: whereas Jack Brotherhood had hitherto been placed symbolically at Brammel’s side, today that position had gone to Brammel’s bagman, Nigel, and Brotherhood had been promoted to head of the table, where he presided like an old grey bird glowering down on his prey. On the American side of the table they were a mere four. How typical that in our Special Relationship the Brits should outnumber the Americans, thought Lederer. In the field the Agency outguns these bastards by about ninety to one. In here we’re a persecuted minority. To Lederer’s right, Harry Wexler, having cleared his throat not before time, had at last begun wrestling with the intricacies of what he insisted on calling the ongoing ah situation. To Lederer’s left lounged Mick Carver, Head of the London Station, a spoilt Bostonian millionaire considered brilliant on no evidence Lederer was aware of. Below him the egregious Artelli, a distraught mathematician from Signals Intelligence, looked as though he had been hauled from Langley by his hair. And, between them, here sit I, Grant Lederer III, unlovable even to myself, the pushy law boy from South Bend, Indiana, whose tireless efforts in the interest of his own promotion have dragged everyone together this one more time to prove what could have been proved six months ago: namely, that computers do not fabricate intelligence, do not sidle over to the opposition in return for favours, do not voluntarily compose slanders against men in high standing in the British service. They tell the disgraceful truth without regard to charm, race or tradition and they tell it to Grant Lederer III, who is busy making himself as unpopular as possible.

As Lederer listened impotently to Wexler’s floundering, he decided that it was himself not Wexler who was the alien. Here is the great Harry E. Wexler, he reasoned, who in Langley sits at the right hand of God. Who has been featured in

Time

as America’s Legendary Adventurer. Who played a star part in the Bay of Pigs and fathered some of the finest intelligence fuck-ups of the Vietnam War. Who has destabilised more bankrupt economies in Central America than are dreamed of, and conspired with the greatest in the land from the heads of the Mafia downwards. And here is me, an ambitious jerk. And what am I thinking? I am thinking that a man who cannot speak clearly cannot think clearly. I am thinking that selfexpression is the companion to logic and that Harry E. Wexler is by this criterion circumcised from the neck up, even if he does hold my precious future in his hands.

To Lederer’s relief, Wexler’s voice suddenly acquired new confidence. This was because he was reading directly from Lederer’s brief.

“In March

’

81 a reliably assessed defector reported that

. . .” Cover name Dumbo, Lederer remembered automatically, himself becoming the computer: resettled Paris with a hooker supplied by Resources Section. A year later, it was the hooker who defected.

“In May

’

81 Signals Intelligence reported that

. . .” Lederer glanced at Artelli, hoping to catch his eye, but Artelli was hearing signals of his own.

“In March again of

’

82 a source inside Polish Intelligence while on a liaison visit to Moscow was advised that . . .”

Cover name Mustapha, Lederer recalled with a fastidious shiver: died of over-enthusiasm while assisting Polish security in its enquiries. With a fumble and a near fall the great Wexler delivered his first punchline of the morning and managed not to fluff it. “And the burden of these indicators, junnlemen, is in every case the same,” he announced, “namely

that the entire Balkan effort of an unnamed Western intelligence service is being orchestrated by Czech Intelligence in Prague, and that the leak is occurring under the noses of the Anglo-American intelligence fraternity in Washington.”

Nobody leaps in the air however. Colonel Carruthers does not remove his monocle to exclaim “By God, the fiendish cunning!” The sensational force of Wexler’s revelation is six months old. The sedge is withered from the case and no spooks sing.

Lederer decided to listen instead to what Wexler does not say. Nothing about my interrupted tennis training, for example. Nothing about my imperilled marriage, my truncated sex-life, my total noncontribution as a father, starting the morning they hauled me off all other duties and assigned me to the great Wexler as his superslave for twenty-five hours a day. “You have a lawyer’s training, you have Czech language and Czech expertise,” Personnel had told him in as many words. “More appropriately you have a thoroughly sleazy mind. Apply it, Lederer. We expect terrible things of you.” Nothing about the night hours in front of my computer while I typed my damned fingers off, feeding in acres of disconnected data. Why did I do it? What got into me? Mom, I just felt my talent striding out inside of me, so I got on its back and rode away to my destiny. Names and records of all Western intelligence officers past or present in Washington with access to the Czech target, whether central or peripheral consumers: Lederer cans the whole ridiculous assembly in four days cold. Names of all their contacts, details of their travel movements, behaviour patterns, sexual and recreational appetites: Lederer nets them all in a manic Friday-to-Monday while Bee does the praying for both of us. Names of all Czech couriers, officials, legal and illegal travellers passing in and out of the United States, plus separately entered personal descriptions to counteract false passports. Dates and ostensible purpose of such journeys, frequency and duration of stay. Lederer delivers them bound and gagged in three short days and nights while Bee convinces herself he is making it with Maisie Morse from Collation, who has pot smoke coming out of her ears.

Still disdaining these and the many other noble sacrifices of his subordinate, Wexler has embarked on a disastrous paragraph about “incorporating our general awareness of the Czechoslovak methodology in regard to the servicing

of

and the ah communication

with

their agents in the field.” An impressed silence follows while the meeting mentally paraphrases.

“Ah, you mean

tradecraft,

Harry,” says Bo Brammel, who never could resist a quip if he thought it would adorn his reputation, and little Nigel next to him restrains his laughter by patting down his hair.

“Well, yes, sir, I guess that is what I do mean,” Wexler confesses, and Lederer to his surprise feels a yawn of nervous excitement pass over him as the tousled Artelli takes the stage.

Artelli uses no notes and has a mathematician’s frugality with words. Despite his name, he speaks with a slight French accent that he disguises beneath a Bronx drawl. “As the indicators continued to multiply,” he says, “my section was ordered to make a reappraisal of clandestine radio transmissions beamed from the roof of the Czech Embassy in Washington as well as from certain other identified Czech facilities in the United States, throughout the years ’81 and ’82, notably their consulate in San Francisco. Our people reconsidered skip distances, frequency variations and probable reception zones. They backtracked over all intercepts of that period though we had not been able to break them at the time of their original transmission. They prepared a schedule of such transmissions so that they could be matched against the movements of eligible suspects.”

“Hold on a minute, will you?”

Little Nigel’s head snaps round like a weathervane in a gale. Even Brammel shows distinct signs of human interest. From his exile at the end of the table, Jack Brotherhood is pointing a .45-calibre forefinger straight at Artelli’s navel. And it is symptomatic of the many paradoxes of Lederer’s life that of all the people in the room, Brotherhood is the one whom he would most wish to serve, if ever he had the opportunity, even though—or perhaps because—his occasional efforts to ingratiate himself with his adopted hero have met with iron rebuff.

“Look here, Artelli,” Brotherhood says. “You people have made rather a lot out of the point that every time Pym left the precincts of Washington, whether on leave or in order to visit another town, a particular series of coded transmissions from the Czech Embassy was discontinued. I suspect you are going to make that point again now.”

“With embellishments, yes, I am,” says Artelli pleasantly enough.

Brotherhood’s forefinger remains trained on its mark. Artelli keeps his hands on the table. “The assumption being that if Pym was out of range of their Washington transmitter, the Czechs wouldn’t bother to talk to him?” Brotherhood suggests.

“This is correct.”

“Then every time he came back to the capital they’d pop up again. ‘Hullo it’s you and welcome home.’ Correct?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well turn it round for a moment, will you? If you were framing a man, isn’t that precisely what you would do too?”

“Not today,” he says equably. “And not in 1981 or ’82. Ten years ago, maybe. Not in the eighties.”

“Why not?”

“I wouldn’t be that dumb. We all know it’s standard intelligence practice to continue transmitting whether or not the party is listening at the other end. It’s my hunch they—” He stops. “Maybe I should leave this one to Mr. Lederer,” he says.

“No you don’t—you tell it to them yourself,” Wexler orders without looking up.

Wexler’s terseness is not unexpected. It is a feature of these meetings, known to everybody present, that a curse, if not an outright embargo, hangs over the use of Lederer’s name. Lederer is their Cassandra. Nobody ever asked Cassandra to preside over a meeting on damage limitation.

Artelli is a chess-player and takes his time. “The communication techniques we were required to observe here were out of fashion even at the time of their use. You get a feel. A smell. A smell of age. A sense of long habituation, one human being to another. Years of it maybe.”

“Well now that’s

very

special pleading,” Nigel exclaims, quite angry, and continues to sit bolt upright before keeling towards his master, who appears to be trying to shake his head and nod at the same time. Mountjoy says “Hear, hear.” A couple of Brammel’s supporters’ club are making similar farmyard noises. There is hostility in the air, and it is forming on national lines. Brotherhood says nothing but has coloured. Whether anyone apart from himself has noticed this, Lederer does not know. He has coloured, he has lowered his fist, and for a second he appears to have dropped his guard entirely. Lederer hears him growl, “Fanciful twaddle,” but misses the rest because Artelli has decided to continue.

“Our more important discovery relates however to the types of code in these transmissions. As soon as we had the notion of an older type of system, we subjected the transmissions to different analytical methods. Like you don’t immediately look for a steam engine inside the hood of a Cadillac. We decided to read the messages on the assumption they were being received by a man or woman in the field who is of a certain generation of training, and who cannot or dare not store modern coding materials. We looked for more elementary keys. We looked in particular for evidence of non-random texts that would serve as base keys for transposition.”

If anybody here understands what he’s saying, they are not showing it, thinks Lederer.

“When we did this, we at once began to detect a progression in the structure. Right now it’s still algebra. But it’s there. It’s a logical linguistic progression. Maybe it’s a piece of Shakespeare. Maybe it’s a Hottentot nursery rhyme. But there is a pattern emerging that is based upon the continuous text of some such analogue. And that analogue is in effect the codebook for those transmissions. And we feel—maybe it’s a little mystical—that the analogue is—well, like a bond between the field and base. We see it as having almost a human identity. All we need is one word. Preferably but not necessarily the first. After that it’s only a question of time before we identify the rest of the text. Then we’ll break those messages wide open.”

“So when will that be?” says Mountjoy. “About 1990, I suppose.”

“Could be. Could be tonight.”

Suddenly it becomes apparent that Artelli means more than he is saying. The hypothetical has become the specific. Brotherhood is the first to take him up on his innuendo.

“So why tonight?” he says. “Why not 1990?”

“There’s something very peculiar going on with the Czech transmissions overall,” Artelli confesses with a smile. “They’re throwing stuff out at random everywhere. Last night Prague Radio put out a world-wide spook call using some phoney professor who doesn’t exist. Like a cry for help to somebody who’s only in a position to receive spoken word. Then all around the clock we get Mayday calls—for example a high-speed transmission from your Czech Embassy here in London. For four days now, they’ve been bumping high-speed signals into your mainline BBC transmissions. It’s as if the Czechs had lost a kid in the forest and were shouting out any messages that might conceivably get through to him.”

Even before Artelli’s echoless voice has died, Brotherhood is speaking. “Of

course

there’s a London transmission,” he declares vehemently, laying his fist on the table like a challenge. “Of course the Czechs are stirring it. My goodness, how many times do we have to put this to you? For two damned years, there have been Czech transmissions in any part of the globe where Pym sets foot and they do, naturally, coincide with his movements. It’s a radio game. That’s how you play the radio game when you’re framing a man. You persist and you repeat and you wait till the other fellow’s nerve cracks. The Czechs are not fools. Sometimes I think we are.”

Unbothered, Artelli turns his twisted smile to Lederer as if to say, “See if

you

can impress them.” At which Grant Lederer allows himself an irrelevant memory of his wife Bee splayed above him in her naked glory, making love to him like all the angels in Heaven.

“Sir Michael, I have to start at the other end,” Lederer says brightly in a prepared opening, straight at Brammel. “I have to pick up in Vienna just ten days ago, if you don’t mind, sir, and track back from there to Washington.”

Nobody is looking at him. Start wherever you must, they were saying, and get it over with.

A different Lederer has broken loose inside him and he greets this version of himself with pleasure. I am the bounty hunter, shuttling between London, Washington and Vienna with Pym perpetually in my sights. I am the Lederer who, as Bee vociferously complained when we were safe from microphones, took Pym into bed with us every night, woke sweating with self-doubt in the fitful hours, woke again in the morning with Pym once more firmly between us: “I’ll get you, boy. I’ll nail you.” The Lederer who for the last twelve months—ever since Pym’s name began to wink at me from the computer screen—has tracked him first as an abstraction, then as a fellow screwball. Has posed with him on spurious committees as his earnest and admiring colleague. Shared jolly drunken picnics with family Pym in the Vienna woods, then rushed back to my desk and set to work with fresh vigour to rip apart what I have just enjoyed. I am the Lederer who too easily attaches himself, then punishes whatever holds him tight; the Lederer who is grateful for every wiry smile and casual pat of encouragement from the great Wexler, my master, only to round on him minutes later, lampooning him, degrading him in my overheated mind, punishing him for being yet another disappointment to me.

Never mind that I am twenty years Pym’s junior. What I recognise in Pym is what I recognise in myself: a spirit so wayward that, even while I am playing a game of Scrabble with my kids it can swing between the options of suicide, rape and assassination. “He’s one of

us,

for Christ’s sake!” Lederer wants to scream at the sleeping potentates around him. “Not one of you. One of

me.

We’re howling psychopaths, the both of us.” But of course Lederer doesn’t scream that or anything else. He talks sanely and wisely about his computer. And about a man named Petz, also known as Hampel and Zaworski, who travels almost as much as Lederer and exactly as much as Pym, but takes more trouble than either of us to conceal his tracks.

But first, in the same perfectly balanced and dispassionate voice, Lederer describes the situation as it had stood in August, when it was agreed on both sides—Lederer casts a respectful glance towards his hero Brotherhood—that the Pym case should be abandoned and the committee of investigation dissolved.

“But it wasn’t abandoned, was it?” Brotherhood says, not bothering this time to give warning of his interruption. “You kept a watch going on his house and I don’t mind betting you left a few other meters ticking too.”

Lederer glances at Wexler. Wexler scowls into his hands to say keep me ah out of this. But Lederer has no intention of fielding that ball, and waits boorishly for Wexler to do it for him.

“The determination on our side, Jack, was that we should capitalise the ah existing appropriation of resources,” Wexler says reluctantly. “We opted here for a gradual reduction of a—ah phased and undramatic running down.”

In the silence Brammel gives a sporting smile. “So you mean you did keep the surveillance going? Is that what you’re saying?”

“On a limited basis only, very low key, very minimal at all levels, Bo.”

“I rather thought we said we’d all call off our dogs at once, Harry. We certainly kept

our

half of the bargain, I know.”

“The ah Agency decided here to honour that agreement in spirit, Bo, but also in light of what was deemed operationally expedient having regard to ah all the known facts and indicators.”

“Thanks,” says Mountjoy and tosses down his pencil like a man refusing food.

But this time Wexler bites back and Wexler can do that: “I think you may find your gratitude is well placed, sir,” he snaps, and pushes his knuckles combatively across the tip of his nose.

The case of Hans Albrecht Petz, Lederer continues, surfaced six months ago in a context that at first sight had nothing whatever to do with the case against Pym. Petz was simply another Czech journalist who had appeared at an East-West conference in Salzburg and been talent-spotted as a new face. An older man, withdrawn but intelligent, passport details supplied. Lederer put his name on watch and signalled Langley for a routine background check. Langley signalled “nothing recorded against” but warned that it was irregular that a man of Petz’s age and profession should not have come to notice. A month later Petz surfaced again in Linz, purportedly to cover an agricultural fair. He didn’t hobnob with other journalists, didn’t try to ingratiate himself, was seen seldom at the tents and contributed nothing. When Lederer had his press readers comb the Czech press for contributions by Petz, the most they came up with was two paragraphs in the

Socialist Farmer,

signed “H.A.P.,” on the limitations of Western heavy tractors. Then, just when Lederer was disposed to forget about him, Langley came back with a positive identification. Hans Albrecht Petz was identical with one Alexander Hampel, a Czech intelligence officer, who had recently attended a conference of non-aligned journalists in Athens. Do not approach Petz-Hampel without an authorisation. Stand by for more information.

Hearing himself say “Athens,” Lederer has a feeling that the air pressure has dropped inside the safe room.

“Athens

when?”

Brotherhood growls irritably. “How can we follow this stuff without dates?”

Nigel’s hair has become a sudden and intense worry to him. He is shaping the greying horns above one ear again and again with his immaculate fingertips while he frowns in pain.

Wexler once more cuts in, and to Lederer’s pleasure he is beginning to shed his shyness and respect. “Athens conference was July 15 to 18, Jack. Hampel was sighted on the first day only. He kept his hotel room the three nights but didn’t sleep in it once. Paid cash. According to Greek records he arrived Athens on July 14 and never left the country. Most likely he went out on a different passport. Looks like he flew to Corfu. Greek flight lists are the usual pig’s breakfast, but looks like he flew to Corfu,” he repeats. “By this time we’re getting very interested in this man.”

“Aren’t we running ahead?” says Brammel, whose sense of the proprieties is never sharper than in moments of crisis. “I mean damn it, Harry, it’s the same old game. It’s guilt by coincidence. It’s no different to the radio stuff. If

we

were looking to frame a man, we’d play the same game on them. We’d get some old member of the Firm, a bit tarnished but nothing discreditable, and we’d run him parallel to some poor chap’s movements and wait for the opposition to say ‘W hoo-hoo, our man’s a spy.’ Get them to shoot themselves in the foot. Dead easy. All right. Hampel is trailing Pym around. But what’s to show that Pym’s an active partner?”

“At that point in time nothing, sir,” Lederer confesses with false humility, stepping in on Wexler’s behalf. “However we had by then established a retrospective link between Pym and Hans Albrecht Petz. At the time of the Salzburg conference, Pym and his wife were attending a music festival there. Petz was staying about two hundred yards from the Pyms’ hotel.”

“Same story over again,” says Brammel doggedly. “It’s a set-up. Sticks out a mile. Right, Nigel?”

“It’s awfully tenuous actually,” Nigel says.

The air pressure again. Maybe the machines kill the oxygen as well as the sound, thinks Lederer. “Do you mind telling us the date when that Athens trace came through?” asks Brotherhood, still on the matter of the timing.

“Ten days ago, sir,” says Lederer.

“Bloody slow about advising us, weren’t you?”

In anger Wexler finds his words faster: “Well now, Jack, we were pretty damn reluctant to present you people prematurely with yet another series of computerised coincidences.” And to Lederer, his whipping boy: “What the hell are you waiting for?”

It is ten days ago. Lederer is crouched in the communications room in the Station in Vienna. It is night and he has bowed out of two cocktail invitations and one dinner by pretending a light flu. He has phoned Bee and let her hear the excitement in his voice and he has half a mind to rush back and tell her then and there, because he has always told her everything anyway—and sometimes when trade was poor a little more than everything in order to keep the image going. But he holds on to himself. And though his fingers are frozen in the joints from the sheer tension of it, he keeps on typing. First he calls up the most recent schedules of Pym’s known movements in and out of Vienna and establishes, almost as a matter of course, that he visited both Salzburg and Linz on precisely the same dates as Petz alias Hampel.

“Linz too?” Brotherhood interrupts sharply.

“Yes, sir!”

“You followed him there, I suppose—contrary to our agreement?”

“No, sir, we did not follow Magnus to Linz. I had my wife Bee call Mary Pym. Bee elicited the information in the course of an innocent conversation, woman to woman, on another matter, Mr. Brotherhood.”

“He might still not have gone to Linz. Could have told his wife a cover story.”

Lederer is at pains to concede that this is possible but gently suggests that it hardly matters, sir, in view of Langley’s signal of that same night, which signal he now reads aloud to his assembled Anglo-American lords of intelligence. “It arrived on my desk five minutes after we had the Linz connection, sir. I quote: ‘Petz-Hampel also identical with Jerzy Zaworski, born Carlsbad 1925, West German journalist of Czech origin who made nine legal journeys to United States in 1981, ’82.’”

“Perfect,” says Brammel under his breath.

“Birthdates are of course approximations in these cases,” Lederer continues undaunted. “It is our experience that alias passports have the tendency to give the bearer a year or two.”

The signal is hardly on Lederer’s desk, he says, before he is typing in the dates and destinations of Herr Zaworski’s visits to America. And then it was—says Lederer, though not in as many words—that with one touch of the button everything came together, continents merged, three journalists in their late fifties became a single Czech spy of uncertain age, and Grant Lederer III, thanks to the flawless insulation of the signals room, was able to scream “Hallelujah!” and “Bee, I love you!” to the padded walls.

“Every American city visited by Petz-Hampel-Zaworski in 1981 and 1982 was visited by Pym on the same dates,” Lederer intones. “During those dates the relevant clandestine transmissions from the Czech Embassy roof were discontinued, the reason in our estimation being that a personal encounter was occurring between the agent in the field and his visiting controller. Radio transmissions were accordingly superfluous.”

“It’s beautiful,” says Brammel. “I’d like to find the Czech intelligence officer who thought this one up and give him my private Oscar immediately.”

With a pained discretion Mick Carver lifts a briefcase gently to the table and extracts a bunch of folders.

“This is Langley’s profile as of now on Petz-Hampel-Zaworski, Pym’s presumed controller,” he explains in the patient manner of a salesman bent on showing off a new technology, despite the obstruction of the older element. “We expect a couple more updates in the next immediate while, maybe even tonight. Bo, when does Magnus return to Vienna, do you mind telling us, please?”

Brammel like all the rest of them is peering into his folder, so it is natural he should not reply at once. “When we tell him to, I suppose,” he says carelessly, turning a page. “Not before, that’s for certain. As you say, his father’s death was rather providential. Old man left quite a mess, I gather. Magnus has a lot to sort out.”

“Where is he now?” says Wexler.

Brammel looks at his watch. “Having dinner, I should imagine. Nearly time, isn’t it?”

“Where’s he staying?” Wexler insists.

Brammel smiles. “Now Harry, I don’t think I’m going to tell you that. We do have some rights in our own country, you know, and your chaps have been a bit overeager on the surveillance stakes.”

Wexler is nothing if not stubborn. “Last we heard of him, he was at London Airport checking in to his flight to Vienna. Our information is he’d wrapped up his affairs over here and was heading back to his post. What the hell happened?”

Nigel has clasped his hands together. He sets them, still clasped, on the table to indicate that, small or not, he is speaking. “You haven’t been following him over here too, have you? That really would be going it.”

Wexler rubs his chin. His expression is rueful but undefeated. He turns again to Brammel. “Bo, we need a piece of this. If this is a Czech deception operation it’s the damnedest, most ingenious case I ever heard of.”

“Pym is a most ingenious officer,” Brammel countered. “He’s been a thorn in the Czechs’ side for thirty years. He’s worth a lot of trouble on their part.”

“Bo, you’ve got to pull Pym in and you’ve got to interrogate the living shit out of him. If you don’t, we’re going to go around and around this thing till we’ve all got grey hairs and some of us are in our graves. Those are our secrets he’s been fooling with as well as yours. We have some very heavy questions to put to him and some fine people trained to put them.”

“Harry, you have my word that when the moment is ripe, you and your people shall have as much of him as you want.”

“Maybe the moment’s right now,” Wexler says, sticking out his jaw. “Maybe we should be there from when he starts to sing. Hit him while he’s soft.”

“And maybe you should trust sufficiently in our judgment to bide your time,” Nigel purrs sleekly in reply, and casts Wexler a very reassuring glance over the top of his reading spectacles.

A most strange impulse, meanwhile, is taking hold of Lederer. He feels it rising in him and can no more check himself than if it were an urge to vomit. In this self-renewing cycle of compromise and double-think he needs to externalise the secret affinity between himself and Magnus. To assert his monopoly of understanding of the man and underline the personal nature of his triumph. To be at the centre still, and not shoved out to the bleachers where he came from.

“Sir, you mentioned Pym’s father,” he bursts out, talking straight at Brammel. “Sir, I know about that father. I have a father who is not in certain ways dissimilar, only in degree. Mine’s a small-time iffy lawyer and honesty is not his strong suit. No, sir. But that father of Pym’s was a total crook. A con artist. Our psychiatrists have assembled a really disturbing profile of that man. Do you know that when Richard T. Pym was in New York he faked a whole

empire

of bogus companies? Borrowed money from the most unlikely people, really some important people? I mean listed. There’s a serious strain of controlled instability here. We have a paper on this.” He was overrunning himself but couldn’t stop. “I mean Jesus, do you know Magnus made the most wild pass at my own wife? I don’t grudge him that. She’s an attractive woman. What I mean is the guy’s everywhere. He’s all over the place. That English cool of his is just veneer.”

Not for the first time Lederer has just committed suicide. Nobody hears him, nobody shouts “Wow, you don’t say!” And when Brammel speaks, his voice is as cold as charity and as late in arriving.

“Yes, well, I always assume that businessmen are crooks, don’t you, Harry? I’m sure we all do.” He glances round the table at everyone but Lederer and comes back to Wexler. “Harry, why don’t you and I get our heads together for an hour, shall we? If there’s to be a hostile interrogation at some stage, I’m sure we should agree on some guidelines in advance. Nigel, why don’t you come along to see fair play? The rest of us—” His gaze falls on Brotherhood and he awards him a particularly confiding smile. “Well, we’ll simply say see you all later. You will leave in pairs, won’t you, when you’ve done your reading? Not all at once, it scares the local peasants. Thank you.”

Brammel leaves, Wexler waddles boldly after him, a man who has made his point and doesn’t care who knows it. Nigel waits till they have all left, then like a busy undertaker hastens round the table and takes Brotherhood’s arm in a fraternal gesture.

“Jack,” he whispers. “Well put, well played. We absolutely stymied them. A word in your ear away from the microphones, yes?”

It was early afternoon. The safe house where they had met was a pseudo-Regency villa with jewellers’ screens across the windows. A warm fog hung over the gravel drive and Lederer loitered in it like a murderer waiting for Brotherhood’s hulk to fill the lighted porch. Mountjoy and Dorney passed by him without a word. Carver, accompanied by Artelli and his briefcase, was more explicit. “I have to live here, Lederer. I just hope that this time either you make it stick or they post the hell out of you.”

Bastard, thought Lederer.

At last Jack Brotherhood emerged, speaking cryptically to Nigel. Lederer watched them jealously. Nigel turned and went back inside. Brotherhood walked forward.

“Mr. Brotherhood, sir? Jack? It’s me. Lederer.”

Brotherhood came slowly to a halt. He was wearing his usual grimy raincoat and a muffler, and he had lit one of his yellow cigarettes.

“What do you want?”

“Jack. I want to tell you that whatever happens, and whatever he’s done or not done, I’m sorry it’s him and I’m sorry it’s you.”

“Probably hasn’t done anything at all. Probably recruited one of the other side and hasn’t told us, knowing him. My guess is you’ve got the story inside out.”

“Would he do that, Magnus? Play a lone hand with the enemy and not tell anybody? Jesus, that’s dynamite! If I ever tried that, Langley would skin me.”

Unbidden, he fell in beside Brotherhood. A policeman stood at the gate. They passed the Royal Horse Artillery Barracks. The sound of hoofs clattered at them from the parade ground but the horses were hidden in the fog. Brotherhood was striding fast. Lederer had difficulty keeping up.

“I feel really bad, Jack,” Lederer confessed. “Nobody seems to understand what it’s been like for me to have to do this to a friend. It’s not just Magnus. It’s Bee and Mary and the kids and everybody. Becky and Tom are real sweethearts. It kind of made all of us consider ourselves in many ways. There’s a pub right here. Can I buy you a drink?”

“Got to see a man about a dog, I’m afraid.”

“Can I drop you somewhere? I have a car and driver right here around the corner.”

“Prefer to walk if you don’t mind.”

“Magnus told me a lot about you, Jack. I guess he broke some of the rules but that’s how we were. We really shared. It was a great liaison. That’s the crazy thing. We really

were

the Special Relationship. And I believe in that. I believe in the Anglo-Saxon alliance, the Atlantic Pact, the whole bit. You remember that burglary you and Magnus did together in Warsaw?”

“Don’t think I do, I’m afraid.”

“Oh come on, Jack. How you lowered him through a skylight ? Like in the Bible? And you had these fake Polish cops downstairs on the doorstep in case the quarry came home unexpectedly? He said you were like a father to him. You know how he referred to you once? ‘Grant,’ he said to me. ‘Jack is the true champion of the great game.’ You know what I feel? I think if Magnus’s writing had ever worked for him, he’d have been okay. There’s just too much inside him. He has to put it somewhere.” He was breathing a little hastily between his words, but he insisted on keeping up; he had to get it right with Brotherhood. “You see, sir, I’ve read a great deal recently about the creativity of the criminal mind.”

“Oh he’s a criminal now, is he?”

“Please. Let me quote you something I read.” They had reached a crossing and were waiting for the lights. “‘ What is the difference, in morality, between the totally anarchic criminality of the artist, which is endemic in all fine creative minds, and the artistry of the criminal?’”

“Can’t do it, I’m afraid. Too many long words. Sorry about that.”

“Hell, Jack, we’re licensed crooks, that’s all I’m saying. What’s our racket? Know what our racket is? It is to place our larcenous natures at the service of the state. So I mean why should I feel different about Magnus just because maybe he got the mix a little wrong? I can’t. Magnus is still exactly the same man I spent these great times with! And I’m still the same man who had these times with Magnus. Nothing’s changed except we’ve landed on different sides of the net. You know we talked about defection once? Where we would go if we ever cut and run? Left our wives and kids and work, and just stepped into the blue? We were that close, Jack. We literally thought the unthinkable. We really did. We were amazing.”

They had entered St. John’s Wood High Street, and were heading towards Regent’s Park. Brotherhood’s pace had increased.

“Where did he say he’d go, then?” Brotherhood snapped. “Back to Washington? Moscow?”

“Home. He said there was only ever one place. Home. I mean this shows you. The man loves his country, Mr. Brotherhood. Magnus is no renegade.”

“Didn’t know he had a home,” said Brotherhood. “Vagrant childhood, he always told me.”

“Home is a little seaside town in Wales. It has a very ugly Victorian church. It has a very strict landlady who shuts him in at 10 p.m. And one of these days Magnus is going to lock himself in that upstairs room and write his ass off till he comes out with all twelve volumes of Pym’s answer to Proust.”

Brotherhood might not have heard. He strode faster.

“Home is childhood re-created, Mr. Brotherhood. If defection is a self-renewal, it requires also a rebirth.”

“That his stupid phrase or yours?”

“Mine and his equally. We discussed all this and we discussed much, much more. Know why so many defectors redefect? We had that one straight too. It’s in and out of the womb all the time. Have you ever noticed that about defectors—the one common factor in all that crazy band? They’re immature. Forgive me, they are

literally

motherfuckers.”

“Have a name, this place?”

“Pardon?”

“This Welsh paradise of his. What’s it called?”

“He never said a name. All he said was it was near the castle where he grew up with his mother, in an area with great houses, where he and his mother used to go to the hunts, dance at the Christmas balls and mix quite democratically with the servants.”

“Have you ever come across Czechs using back numbers of newspapers?” Brotherhood asked.

Momentarily thrown by the change of tack, Lederer was obliged to pause and consider.

“It’s a case a colleague of mine is running,” Brotherhood said. “He asked me. Czech agent always grubbing around for last week’s newspapers before he takes a walk up the road. Why would he do that?”

“I’ll tell you why. It’s a standard thing,” said Lederer, recovering. “Old hat, but standard. We had a Joe like that, a double. The Czechs trained him for days, just in how to roll exposed film into newspaper. Took him out into the streets at night, made him find a dark area. Poor bastard nearly froze his fingers off. It was twenty below.”

“I said back numbers,” Brotherhood said.

“Sure. There’s two ways. One way they use the day of the month, the other way they use the day of the week. Day of the month is a nightmare: thirty-one standard messages to be learned by heart. It’s the eighteenth of the month so it’s ‘Meet me behind the gentleman’s convenience in Brno at nine-thirty and don’t be late.’ It’s the sixth so ‘W here the hell’s my monthly pay cheque?’” He giggled breathlessly but Brotherhood did not reciprocate. “The days of the week, that’s a shortened version of the same thing.”

“Thanks, I’ll pass it on,” said Brotherhood, drawing to a halt at last.

“Sir, I can imagine no greater honour than taking you out to dinner tonight,” Lederer said, now quite desperate for Brotherhood’s absolution. “I cast aspersions on one of your men, that’s duty. But if I were ever able to separate the personal and the official sides, I’d be a happy man, sir. Jack?”

The taxi was already drawing up.

“What is it?”

“Do you think you could give Magnus a message for me—a friendly one?”

“What is it?”

“Tell him any time—when it’s over—any place. I’ll be there as his friend.”

With a nod Brotherhood climbed into the taxi and rode away before Lederer could hear his destination.

What Lederer did next should go into history, if not into the larger history of the Pym affair then at least into his own exasperating personal chronicle of seeing everything with perfect vision and being repeatedly dismissed as an unwelcome prophet. Lederer struggled into a phone box intending to call Carver, only to discover he had no English coins. He dived into the Mulberry Arms, fought his way to the bar and bought a beer he did not want in order to have change. He returned to the phone box to find it didn’t work, so he pelted back down the road in search of his driver, who, having watched Lederer march by with Brotherhood, had assumed he was no longer required and had driven home to Battersea where he had a friend. At nine o’clock, Lederer burst in upon Carver at the U.S. Embassy, where Carver was drafting a signal on the day’s events.

“They’re lying!” Lederer shouted.

“Who are?”

“The fucking Brits! Pym’s flown the coop. They don’t know where he is from the man in the fucking moon. I asked Brotherhood to pass him this totally subversive message and he sweet-mouthed me to keep me off the track. Pym jumped ship at London Airport and they’re looking for him the same way we are. Those Czech radio transmissions are kosher. The Brits are looking for him, we’re looking for him. And the fucking Czechs are looking for him all over. Listen to me!”

Carver had listened. Carver continued to listen. He took Lederer through his conversation with Brotherhood and concluded it should not have taken place and that Lederer had exceeded his competence. He did not say this to Lederer but he made a note of it, and later that night in a separate telegram to the Agency’s personnel people he took care that this note was added to Lederer’s file. At the same time he accepted that Lederer might well have stumbled upon the truth, even if by the wrong route, and said this also. Thus Carver covered his back all ways, while at the same time knifing an unpleasing interloper. Never bad.

“The British are not playing this straight,” he confided to people he knew at the top. “I am going to have to watch this very carefully.”

The Headmaster’s study smelt of killing bottles. Mr. Caird, though he hated violence, was a passionate lepidopterist. A grim portrait of our founder G. F. Grimble glowered down on cracked leather chairs. In one of them sat Tom. Brotherhood sat opposite him. Tom was looking at the photograph from the Langley folder on Petz-Hampel-Zaworski. Brotherhood was looking at Tom. Mr. Caird had shaken Brotherhood’s hand and left them to it.

“That the one who walked your dad round the cricket ground in Corfu?” said Brotherhood, watching Tom.

“Yes, sir.”

“You weren’t far wrong with your description then, were you?”

“No, sir.”

“I thought you’d be amused.”

“I am.”

“He doesn’t limp in the photograph, so he doesn’t look so hobbly. Had any more letters from your dad? Phone calls?”

“No, sir.”

“Written to him?”

“Don’t know where to send it, sir.”

“Why don’t you give it to me?”

Tom delved inside his grey pullover and unearthed a sealed envelope with no name or address on it. Brotherhood took it from him, and took back the photograph too.

“That inspector fellow hasn’t been back to trouble you, has he?”

“No, sir.”

“Anyone else been?”

“Not really, sir.”

“What does that mean?”

“It’s just so odd you coming tonight.”

“Why?”

“It’s maths prep,” said Tom. “It’s my worst thing.”

“I expect you’d like to get back to it then.” He took Pym’s crushed letter from his pocket and handed it across the gap. “Thought you might like this back, too. It’s a fine letter. You should be proud.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Your dad talks there about an Uncle Syd. Who’s that? ‘If you’re ever down on your luck,’ he says, ‘or if you need a warm meal and a laugh or a bed for the night, don’t forget your Uncle Syd.’ Who’s Uncle Syd, when he’s at home?”

“Syd Lemon, sir.”

“Where does he live?”

“Surbiton, sir. By a railway.”

“Old man, is he? Youngish?”

“He looked after Dad when he was small. He was a friend of Granddad’s. He’s got a wife called Meg but she’s dead.”

They both stood up.

“Dad’s still all right, isn’t he, sir?” said Tom.

Brotherhood’s shoulders stiffened. “You’re to go to your mother, d’you hear? Your mother or me. No one else. That’s if things get tough.” He pulled an old leatherbound box from his jacket pocket. “This is for you.”

Tom opened it. A medal lay inside with a piece of ribbon attached to it—crimson with narrow dark blue stripes on either side.

“What did you get it for?” said Tom.

“Sticking out dark nights alone.” A bell was ringing. “Now run along and do your job,” said Brotherhood.

The night was foul. Gusts of rain tore across the windscreen as Brotherhood negotiated the narrow lane. The car was a souped-up Ford from the Firm’s pool and he had only to stroke the accelerator for it to lunge towards the hedge. Magnus Pym, he thought: traitor and Czech spy. If I know, why don’t they? How many times, in how many ways, do they need the proof before they act on it? A pub loomed suddenly out of the rain. He pulled into the forecourt and drank a scotch before going to the phone. Call me on my private line, old boy, Nigel had said expansively.

“The man in the picture is our friend from Corfu. No question about it,” Brotherhood reported.

“You’re sure?”

“I’m sure. The boy’s sure. I’m sure he’s sure. When are you going to give the order to evacuate?”

A muffled crackle while Nigel put his fist over the mouthpiece the other end. But not, presumably, the earpiece.

“I want those Joes out, Nigel. Get them out. Tell Bo to get his head out of the sand and give the order.”

Long silence.

“We’re tuning in at 0500 tomorrow,” said Nigel. “Come back to London and get some sleep.” He rang off.

London was east. Brotherhood headed south, following the signs to Reading. In every operation there is an above the line and a below the line. Above the line is what you do by the book. Below the line is how you do the job.

The letter to Tom was postmarked Reading, he rehearsed. Posted Monday night or first thing Tuesday morning.

He rang me on Monday evening, Kate had said.

He rang me on Monday evening, Belinda had said.

Reading station resembled a low redbrick stable set at one end of a tawdry square. A poster in the concourse gave the times of coaches to and from Heathrow. That’s what you did, he thought. That’s what I’d do. At Heathrow you put up your smokescreen about planes to Scotland, then you hopped a coach to Reading to keep things nice and private. He considered the coach stop, then cast a long slow look around the square until his eye fell at last on the ticket kiosk. He wandered over to it. The clerk wore a small metal wheel in the buttonhole of his jacket. Brotherhood put five pounds in the tray.

“I’d like some change, please, to telephone.”

“Sorry, mate. Can’t do,” the clerk said, and went on with his newspaper.

“You could do it last Monday night though, couldn’t you?” The clerk’s head came up fast.

Brotherhood’s office pass was green with a red diagonal line drawn in transparent ink across his photograph. A notice on the back said that if found it should be returned to the Ministry of Defence. The clerk looked at both sides of it and gave it back.

“I haven’t seen one like that before,” he said.

“Tall fellow,” Brotherhood said. “Carried a black briefcase. Probably wore a black tie as well. Well spoken, nice manner. Had a lot of calls to make. Remember?”

The clerk vanished, to be replaced a minute later by a tubby Indian with exhausted, visionary eyes.

“Were you on duty here Monday evening?” Brotherhood said.

“Sir, I was the man who was on duty on Monday evening,” he replied warily, as if he might not be that man any more.

“A pleasant gentleman in a black tie.”

“I know, I know. My colleague has acquainted me with all the details.”

“How much change did you give him?”

“Good heavens above, what does that matter? If I elect to give a man change, that is my personal preference, a matter for my pocket and my conscience that has nothing to do with anybody.”

“How much change did you give him?”

“Five pounds exactly. Five he wanted, five he got.”

“What in?”

“Fifty p’s exclusively. He wished to make no local calls at all. I questioned him about this and he was entirely consistent in his answers. I mean where is the hardship in this? Where is the sinister element?”

“What did he pay you with?”

“To my recollection, he gave me a ten-pound note. I cannot be completely certain but that is my imperfect recollection: that he gave me a ten-pound note from his wallet, accompanied by the words ‘Here you are.’”

“Did the ten pounds cover his rail ticket too?”

“This was totally unproblematical. The price of a second-class single fare to London is four pounds and thirty pence exactly. I gave him ten fifties and the balance in small change. Now have you further questions? I seriously hope not. Police, police, you know. If it’s one enquiry a day, it’s half a dozen.”

“Is this the man?” said Brotherhood. He was holding a photograph showing Pym and Mary at their wedding.

“But that is you, sir. In the background. I think you are giving the bride away. Are you sure you are engaged in an official enquiry? This is a most irregular photograph.”

“Is this the man?”

“Well I’m not saying it is not, put it that way.”

Pym would take him off perfectly, thought Brotherhood. Pym would catch that accent to a tee. He stood at the barrier studying the timetable of trains leaving Reading station after eleven o’clock on a weekday night. You went anywhere except to London because London is where you bought your ticket to. You had time. Time to make your maudlin telephone calls. Time to write your maudlin letter to Tom. Your plane left Heathrow at eight-forty without you. By eight o’clock latest you had done your turnaround. By eight-fifteen, according to the testimony of the airport travel clerk, you had put up your little smokescreen about planes to Scotland. After that you hightailed it to the Reading-bound coach, pulled down the brim of your hat and said goodbye to the airport as quickly and quietly as you knew how.

Brotherhood walked back to the coach timetable. Time to kill, he repeated to himself. Say you caught the eight-thirty from Heathrow. Between nine- and ten-thirty there were half a dozen trains in both directions out of Reading but you caught none of them. You wrote to Tom instead. Where from? He went back to the square. In the neon-lit pub there. In the fish-and-chip shop. In the all-night café where the tarts sit. Somewhere in this dowdy square you sat down and told Tom what to do when the world ended.

The telephone box stood at the station entrance, under a bright light that was supposed to deter vandals. Smashed glass and paper cups cluttered the floor. Graffiti and promises of love defaced the awful grey paint. But it was a good telephone, for all that. You could watch the whole square from it while you said your goodbyes. A mail box was let into the wall close by. And that’s where you posted it, saying whatever happens, remember that I love you. After which you went to Wales. Or to Scotland. Or you popped over to Norway to watch the migration of the reindeer. Or you hightailed it to Canada and prepared to eat out of tins. Or you did something that was all these things and none of them, in an upstairs room with a view of the church and the sea.

Reaching his flat in Shepherd Market, Brotherhood was still not quite done. The Firm’s official police contact was a Detective Superintendent Bellows at Scotland Yard. Brotherhood rang his home number.

“What have you got for me on that ennobled gentleman I mentioned to you this morning?” he asked, and to his relief detected no note of reservation in Bellows’s voice as he read him out the details. Brotherhood wrote them down.

“Can you do me another one for tomorrow?”

“It’ll be a pleasure.”

“Lemon, believe it or not. First name Syd or Sydney. Old chap, widowed, lives in Surbiton, close to a railway.”

Reluctantly Brotherhood phoned Head Office and asked for Nigel of Secretariat. Belatedly, and in the teeth of more larcenous instincts, he knew he must conform. Just as he had conformed this afternoon when he poured scorn on the Americans. Just as in the end he had always conformed, not out of slavishness but because he believed in the fight and, despite everything, the team. A lot of atmospherics followed while Nigel was located. They went over to scramble.

“What’s the matter?” said Nigel rudely.

“The book Artelli was talking about. The analogue, he called it.”

“I thought he was perfectly ridiculous. Bo is going to take it to the

highest

level.”

“Tell them to try Grimmelshausen’s

Simplicissimus.

On a hunch. Tell them to be sure to use an early text.”

A long silence. More atmospherics. He’s in the bath, thought Brotherhood. He’s in bed with a woman, or whatever he likes.

“Now how are you spelling that?” said Nigel warily.

10

O

nce again a willed brightness was overtaking Pym as he listened to the many voices in his mind. To be king, he repeated to himself. To look with favour on this child that was myself. To love his defects and his strivings, and pity his simplicity.

If there was such a thing as a perfect time in Pym’s life, a time when all the versions of himself were appreciated and playing nicely and he would never want for anything again, then surely it was his first few terms at Oxford University whither Rick had dispatched him as a necessary interlude to having him appointed Lord Chief Justice and thus securing him a place among the Highest in the Land. The relationship between the two pals had never been better. Following Axel’s departure, Pym’s final lonely months in Bern had seen a dramatic flowering of their correspondence. With Frau Ollinger barely speaking to him and Herr Ollinger increasingly absorbed in the problems of Ostermundigen, Pym walked the city streets alone, much as he had done at the beginning. But at night, with the wall beside him silent, he penned long and intimate letters of affection to Belinda and his one true anchor, Rick. Stimulated by his attentions, Rick’s letters in reply took on a sudden stylishness and prosperity. The anguished missives from outer England ceased. The stationery thickened, stabilised and acquired illustrious headings. First the Richard T. Pym Endeavour Company wrote to him from Cardiff, advising him that the Clouds of Misfortune which had appeared to Gather had been swept Away one and All by a Providence I can only regard as crackerjack. A month later, the Pym & Partners Property and Finance Enterprise of Cheltenham was advising him that certain Steps were now in Hand for Pym’s future with a view to Insuring that he would never want for Anything again. Most recently a printed card of regal elegance was pleased to announce that following a Merger Agreeable to all Parties, matters relating to the above Companies should henceforth be referred to the Pym & Permanent Mutual Property Trust (Nassau), of Park Lane W.

Jack Brotherhood and Wendy treated him to a farewell fondue on the Firm; Sandy came and Jack gave Pym two bottles of whisky and hoped their paths would cross. Herr Ollinger accompanied him to the railway station and they drank a last coffee. Frau Ollinger stayed home. Elisabeth served them but she was distracted. She had put on bulk around the tummy, though she wore no ring. As the train pulled out of the station, Pym took a look downward at the circus and its elephant house, then a look upward at the university and its green dome and by the time he reached Basel he knew that Bern had sunk with all hands. Axel was illegal. The Swiss informed against him. I was lucky to get out myself. Standing in the corridor somewhere south of Paris he observed tears on his cheeks and vowed not to be a spy again. At Victoria Mr. Cudlove was waiting for him with a new Bentley.

“What do we call you now, sir? Doctor or Professor?”

“Just Magnus will do fine,” said Pym handsomely as they pumped hands. “How’s Ollie?”

The new Reichskanzlei in Park Lane was a monument to prosperous stability. The bust of TP was back in place. Law books, glass doors and a new jockey with the Pym colours winked assurance at him while he waited on leather cushions for a Lovely to admit him to the State Apartments.

“Our Chairman will see you now, Mr. Magnus.”

They bear-hugged, both for a moment too proud to speak. Rick palmed Pym’s back, moulded his cheeks and wiped away his tears. Mr. Muspole, Perce and Syd were summoned by separate buzzers to pay homage to the returning hero. Mr. Muspole produced a sheaf of documents and Rick read the best bits of them aloud. Pym was appointed International Legal Adviser for life and awarded five hundred pounds a year to be reconsidered as appropriate on the strict understanding he worked for no other firm. His law studies at Oxford were thus taken care of; he need never want for anything again. A second Lovely brought bubbly. She seemed to have nothing else to do. Everybody drank the health of the company’s newest employee. “Come on, Titch, let’s have it in the parley-voo!” cried Syd excitedly, and Pym obliged by saying something fatuous in German. Father and son hugged again, Rick wept again and said if only he had had the advantages. The same evening, at a mansion in Amersham called The Furlong, his homecoming was again celebrated by an intimate party of two hundred old friends, few of whom Pym had seen before, including the heads of several world-famous corporations, leading stars of stage and screen and several Great Barristers who one by one took him aside and claimed the credit for obtaining a place for him at Oxford. The party over, Pym lay wakefully in his fourposter listening to the expensive slamming of car doors.

“You did a fine job out there in Switzerland, son,” said Rick from the dark where he had been standing for some while. “You fought a good fight. It’s been noticed. Enjoy your dinner?”

“It was really good.”

“A lot of people said to me, ‘Rickie,’ they said, ‘you’ve got to get that boy back. Those foreigners will make a whore of him.’ You know what I said to them?”

“What did you say to them?”

“I said I had faith in you. Have you got faith in me, son?”

“Masses.”

“What do you think of the house?”

“It’s wonderful,” said Pym.

“It’s yours. It’s in your name. I bought it from the Duke of Devonshire.”

“Thank you very much, anyway.”

“Nobody can ever take it away from you, son. You can be twenty. You can be fifty. Where your old man is, that’s home. Did you talk to Maxie Moore at all?”

“I don’t think I did.”

“The fellow who scored the winning goal for Arsenal against Spurs? Go on. Of course you did. What do you think of Blottsie?”

“Which one was he?”

“G. W. Blott? One of the most famous names in the retail grocery world you’ll ever meet. That marvellous dignity. He’ll be a lord one day. So will you. What do you think of Sylvia?”

Pym recalled a bulky, middle-aged woman in blue with an aristocratic smile that could have been the bubbly.

“She’s nice,” he said cautiously.

Rick seized on the word as if he had been hunting for it half his life:

“Nice.

That’s what she is. She’s a damned nice woman with two first-class husbands to her credit.”

“She’s really attractive, even for my age.”

“Did you get yourself involved out there? There’s nothing can’t be put right in this world by good pals.”

“Just the odd affair. Nothing serious.”

“No woman’s ever going to come between us, son. Once those Oxford girls know who your old man is, they’ll be after you like a pack of wolves. Promise you’ll keep yourself clean.”

“I promise.”

“And learn your law as if your life depended on it? You’re being paid, remember.”

“I promise.”

“Well, then.”

The stealthy weight of Rick’s body landed like a sixteen-stone cat at Pym’s side. He pulled Pym’s head towards his own until their two cheeks were pressed stubble to stubble. His fingers found the fatty parts of Pym’s chest under his pyjama top and kneaded them. He wept. Pym wept too, thinking again of Axel.

The next day Pym moved hastily into his college, claiming a variety of urgent reasons for going up two weeks early. Declining the services of Mr. Cudlove, he travelled by bus and gazed in mounting wonder on flowing hills and mown cornfields glowing in the autumn sunlight. The bus passed through country towns and villages, down lanes of russet beech trees and dancing hedgerows, till slowly the golden stone of Oxford replaced the Buckinghamshire brick, the hills flattened and the city’s spires lifted into the thickening rays of afternoon. He dismounted, thanked the driver, and drifted through the enchanted streets, asking his way at every corner, forgetting, asking again, not caring. Girls in bell skirts skimmed past him on their bicycles. Dons in billowing gowns clutched their mortarboards against the wind; bookshops beckoned to him like houses of delight. He was lugging a suitcase but it weighed no more than a hat. The college porter said staircase five, across the Chapel Quad. He climbed the winding wooden stairs until he saw his name written on an old oak door: M. R. Pym. He pushed the door and saw darkness and another door beyond. He pushed the second door and closed the first. He found the switch and closed the second door on his whole life till now. I am safe inside the city walls. Nobody will find me, nobody will recruit me. He tripped over a case of legal tomes. A vaseful of orchids wished him “Godspeed, son, from your best pal.” A Harrods invoice debited them to the newest Pym consortium.

University was a conventional sort of place in those days, Tom. You would have a good laugh at the way we dressed and talked and the things we put up with, though we were the blessed of the earth. They shut us in at night and let us out in the morning. They gave us girls for tea but not for dinner and God knows not for breakfast. The college scouts doubled as the Dean’s Joes and ratted on us if we broke the rules. Our parents had won the war—or most people’s had—and since we couldn’t beat them our best revenge was to imitate them. Some of us had done National Service. The rest of us dressed like officers anyway, hoping no one would notice the difference. With his first cheque, Pym bought a dark blue blazer with brass buttons. With his second, a pair of cavalry twill trousers and a blue tie with crowns that radiated patriotism. After that there was a moratorium because the third cheque took a month to clear. Pym polished his brown shoes, sported a handkerchief in his sleeve, and groomed his hair like a gentleman’s. And when Sefton Boyd, who was a year ahead of him, feasted him in the exalted Gridiron Club, Pym made such strides with the language that in no time he was talking it like a native, referring to his inferiors as Charlies, and to our own lot as the Chaps, and pronouncing bad things Harry Awful, and vulgar things Poggy, and good things Fairly Decent.

“Where did you pick up that Vincent’s tie, by the by?” Sefton Boyd asked him kindly enough as they sauntered down the Broad for a game of shove-ha’penny with some Charlies at the Trinity pub. “Didn’t know you were a boxing blue in your spare time.”

Pym said he had admired it in the window of a shop called Hall Brothers in the High Street.

“Well, put it on ice for a bit, I should. You can always get it out again when they elect you.” Carelessly he put a hand on Pym’s shoulder. “And while you’re about it, get your scout to sew some ordinary buttons on that jacket. Don’t want people thinking you’re the Pretender to the Hungarian throne, do we?”

Once more Pym embraced everything, loved everything, stretched every sinew to excel. He joined the societies, paid more subscriptions than there were clubs, became college secretary of everything from the Philatelists to the Euthanasians. He wrote sensitive articles for university journals, lobbied distinguished speakers, met them at the railway station, dined them at the society’s expense and brought them safely to empty lecture halls. He played college rugger, college cricket, rowed in his college eight, got drunk in college bar and was by turn rootlessly cynical towards society and stalwartly British and protective of it, depending on whom he happened to be with. He threw himself afresh upon the German muse and scarcely faltered when he discovered that at Oxford she was about five hundred years older than she had been in Bern, and that anything written within living memory was unsound. But he quickly overcame his disappointment. This is quality, he reasoned. This is academia. In no time he was immersing himself in the garbled texts of mediaeval minstrels with the same energy that, in an earlier life, he had bestowed on Thomas Mann. By the end of his first term he was an enthusiastic student of Middle and Old High German. By the end of his second he could recite the

Hildebrandslied

and intone Bishop Ulfila’s Gothic translation of the Bible in his college bar to the delight of his modest court. By the middle of his third he was romping in the Parnassian fields of comparative and putative philology, where youthful creativity has ever had its fling. And when he found himself briefly transported into the perilous modernisms of the seventeenth century, he was pleased to be able to report, in a twenty-page assault on the upstart Grimmelshausen, that the poet had marred his work with popular moralising and undermined his validity by fighting on both sides in the Thirty Years’ War. As a final swipe he suggested that Grimmelshausen’s obsession with false names cast doubt upon his authorship.

I shall stay here for ever, he decided. I shall become a don and be hero to my pupils. To entrench this ambition he worked up a selective stammer and a self-denying smile, and at night sat long hours at his desk keeping himself awake on Nescafé. When daylight came he ventured downstairs unshaven so that all might see the lines of study etched upon his eager face. It was on one such morning that he was surprised to find a case of vintage port waiting for him, accompanied by a note from the Regius Professor of Law:

“Dear Mr. Pym,

“Yesterday, Messrs. Harrods delivered the enclosed to me, together with a charming letter from your father which appears to commend you to me as my pupil. While it is not my habit to turn away such generosity, I fear that the gesture is better directed to my colleague in the Modern Languages school, since I understand from your Senior Tutor that you are reading German.”

For half the day, Pym did not know where to put himself. He turned up his collar, wandered miserably in Christ Church Meadows, cut his tutorial for fear of being arrested and wrote letters to Belinda who was working as an unpaid secretary to a London charity. In the afternoon he sat in a dark cinema. In the evening, still in despair, he carted his guilty parcel to Balliol, determined to tell Sefton Boyd the whole story. But by the time he got there he had thought of a better version.

“Some rich shit in Merton is trying to get me to go to bed with him,” he protested, in the tone of healthy exasperation he had been practising all the way to the gates. “He sent me a Harry great case of port to buy me over.”

If Sefton Boyd doubted him he did not let it show. Between them they carried their booty to the Gridiron Club where six of them drank it at a sitting, fitfully toasting Pym’s virginity till morning. A few days later Pym was elected a member. When the vacation came he took a job selling carpets at a shop in Watford. A lawyers’ vacation course, he told Rick. Similar to the holiday seminars he had attended in Switzerland. In reply Rick sent him a five-page homily, warning him against airy-fairy intellectuals, and a cheque for fifty pounds that bounced.

A summer term was devoted entirely to women. Pym had never been so in love. He swore his love to every girl he met, he was so anxious to overcome what he assumed would be their poor opinion of him. In intimate cafés, on park benches or strolling beside the Isis on glorious afternoons, Pym held their hands and stared into their puzzled eyes and told them everything he had ever dreamed of hearing. If he felt awkward today with the one, he swore he would feel better tomorrow with the next, for women of his own age and intelligence were a novelty to him and he became disconcerted when they did not assume a subordinate position. If he felt awkward with all of them he wrote to Belinda, who never failed to reply. His love-talk was never duplicated; he was not a cynic. To one he spoke of his ambitions to return to the Swiss stage, where he had been such a runaway success. She should learn German and come with him, he said; they would act together. To another he painted himself as a poet of the futile and described his persecution at the hands of the murderous Swiss police.

“But I thought they were so terrifically neutral and humane!” she cried, appalled by his descriptions of the beatings he had received before being marched over the border into Austria.

“Not if you’re different,” Pym said grimly. “Not if you refuse to conform with the bourgeois norm. Those Swissies have two laws that really matter out there. Thou shalt not be poor and thou shalt not be foreign. I was both.”

“You’ve really been through it,” she said. “It’s fantastic. I haven’t done anything at all.”

And to a third he portrayed himself as a novelist of the tortured life, with work that he had yet to show his publishers, all stashed away in an old filing cabinet at home.

One day Jemima came. Her mother had sent her to an Oxford secretarial college to learn typing and go to dances. She was long-legged and distraught like someone always late. She was more beautiful than ever.

“I love you,” Pym told her, handing her bits of fruitcake in his room. “Wherever I was, whatever I was having to endure, I loved you all the time.”

“But what were you having to endure?” Jemima asked.

For Jemima an extra kind of specialness was needed. Pym’s reply took him by surprise. Afterwards, he decided that it had been lying in wait inside him and leapt out before he could prevent it. “It was for England,” he said. “I’m lucky to be alive. If I tell anyone about it they’ll kill me.”

“Why ever will they do that?”

“It’s secret. I swore never to tell.”

“Then why are you telling me?”

“I love you. I had to do awful things to people. You can’t imagine what it’s like, carrying secrets like that alone.”

As Pym heard himself saying this he remembered something that Axel had told him shortly before the end: There is no such thing as a life that does not return.

The next time he met Jemima, he described a brave girl he had worked with when he was doing his terribly secret work. He had in mind one of those muddy war photographs of beautiful women who win George Medals for being parachuted weekly into France.

“Her name was Wendy. We did secret missions into Russia together. We became partners.”

“Did you do it with her?”

“It wasn’t that kind of relationship. It was professional.”

Jemima was fascinated. “You mean she was a tart?”

“Of course she wasn’t. She was a secret agent like me.”

“Have you ever done it with a tart?”

“No.”

“Kenneth has. He’s done it with two. One each end.”

Each end of what? thought Pym, in rampant indignation. Me a secret hero, and she talks to me about sex! In his despair he wrote Belinda a twelve-pager about his platonic love for her, but by the time her reply came he had forgotten the context of his feelings. Sometimes Jemima came uninvited, wearing no make-up and her hair shoved behind her ears. She lay on the bed and read Jane Austen on her tummy, while she kicked a bare leg in the air or yawned.

“You can put your hand up my skirt if you like,” she said.

“I’m fine, thanks,” said Pym.

Too polite to disturb her further he sat in the chair and read

A Handbook of Old High German Literature

till she made a grimace and left. For a while after that, she didn’t visit him. He kept glimpsing her in cinemas of which there were seven so he got round them nicely in a week. Always she was with another man and once, like her brother, she had two. Once during this same period Belinda came to stay with her, but told Pym she should keep away from him because it wasn’t fair on Jem. Pym’s need to impress Jemima now took on wild dimensions. He ate his meals alone and looked haunted, but she still didn’t come to him. One evening, passing a brick wall, he deliberately dashed his knuckles against it until they bled, then hurried to her expensive lodgings in Merton Street, where he found her drying her long hair before the electric fire.

“Who’ve you been fighting?” she asked as she dabbed on iodine.

“I can’t talk about it. Some things never go away.”

Laying the fire on its back she cooked him toast while she went on brushing her hair and watching him through the strands.

“If

I

were a man,” she said, “I wouldn’t waste my energy hitting anybody. I wouldn’t play rugger, I wouldn’t box, I wouldn’t spy for people. I wouldn’t even ride. I’d save everything I had for fucking, again and again and again.”

Pym departed, once more smouldering at the frivolity of those who failed to perceive his higher calling.

“Dearest Bel,

“Is there nothing you can do for Jemima? I simply cannot bear to see her go to the devil like this.”

Did Pym know that he had tempted God? Certainly I know it now, this blowy night beside the sea as I try to write it so many years later. Whom else but his Maker was he provoking as he spun his stupid stories? Pym was calling down his fate on himself as surely as if he had begged for it by name in his prayers, and God dealt him the favour as God often did. Pym’s fantasy version of himself waited out there like a decoy that no celestial eye could overlook, and the divine response was lying in his cubbyhole in the porter’s lodge not twenty-four hours later when he came down to see who loved him this Saturday morning before breakfast. Ah! A letter! Blue in colour! Can it be perhaps from Jemima? Or is it from the virtuous Belinda, Jemima’s friend? Is it from Lalage, perhaps—or Polly, or Prudence, or Anne? The answer, Jack, was none of them. It came, like so many bad things, from you. You were writing to Pym from Oman, care of the Trucial-Oman Scouts, though the stamp was true-blue British and the postmark Whitehall, because it had come to England by bag.

“My dear Magnus,

“As you will see from the letter heading, I have abandoned the fleshpots of Bern for harsher fare and am presently attached to the Military Mission here, where life is certainly a little more exciting! I still do the odd spot of church work, and I must say some of these Arabs sing pretty nicely. The purpose of my letter is twofold.

“1. To wish you all the best with your studies and to repeat my interest in your progress.

“2. To tell you that I have passed your name to our sister church back in the old country, since I gather they are a bit short of tenors in your region. So if you should chance to hear from a chap called Rob Gaunt, who tells you he is a friend of mine, I trust you will allow him to buy you a meal on my behalf, and make sure he does you proud! Incidentally, he is a Lieutenant Colonel, nominally a Gunner.”

Pym had not long to wait, though every minute seemed a year. On the following Tuesday, returning from a testing tutorial on the theory of Ablaut, he found a second envelope waiting for him. This one was brown and of exceptional thickness, of a type I never saw in later years. Faint lines ran across it, giving it the appearance of corrugated cardboard though the texture was oily and smooth. There was no crest on the back, no address of sender. Even the manufacturer was secret. Yet Pym’s name and address were immaculately typed, the stamp perfectly centred, and when he probed at the flap in the safety of his room, he discovered that it was stuck down with a rubberised bonding, which smelt of acid drops and parted in sticky threads like chewing gum. Inside lay a single sheet of thick white paper that was not so much folded as ironed. Prising it open the great spy observed at once the absence of a watermark. The type was large, as if for the partially sighted, the alignment faultless:

Box 777
The War Office
Whitehall S.W.I

My dear Pym,

Our mutual friend Jack tells me excellent things about you and I would greatly like the opportunity to get to know you, as there are important matters of mutual interest that you might help us out with. Unfortunately I have a full programme at the moment, and shall be abroad by the time you receive this letter. I wonder therefore whether as an interim measure you would care to have a conversation with a colleague of mine who will be down your way on Monday of next week. If you are willing, why not take the bus to Burford and be in the saloon bar of the Monmouth Arms a little before midday? For ease of recognition he will be carrying a copy of Rider Haggard’s

Allan Quatermain,

and I suggest you provide yourself with a

Financial Times,

which has a distinctive pink. His name is Michael and, like Jack, he had a valuable war. I have no doubt the two of you will hit it off famously.

With all good wishes,

Yours sincerely,
R. Gaunt
(Lt. Col., R.A., ret.)

For the next five days Pym abandoned work. He paced the back streets of the city, turning in his tracks to see who was following him. He bought a sheath knife and practised throwing it at trees until the blade broke. He wrote a Will and sent it to Belinda. When he entered his rooms he did so with circumspection, never descending or climbing his staircase without first listening for unfamiliar sounds. Where should he hide the secret letters? They were far too precious to throw away. Remembering something he had read, he gouged out the centre of his brand-new copy of Kluge’s

Etymological Dictionary

to make a nest for them. From then on, his eviscerated Kluge became the first thing his eye fell upon when he returned from his sorties. To buy his copy of the

Financial Times

without attracting notice, he walked all the way to Littlemore but the village post office had never heard of it. By the time he returned to Oxford everything was shut. After a sleepless night he made a dawn raid on the Junior Common Room before anyone was up, and stole a back number from the racks.

Two buses went to Burford on weekday mornings but the second left him only twenty minutes to find the Monmouth Arms, so he took the first and got there at nine-forty, only to discover that the bus dropped him at the door. In his overalert condition the inn sign with its bold lettering struck him as a breach of national security and he strode past it with averted eyes. The rest of the morning crawled by on feet of lead. By eleven o’clock his notebook was already crammed with the number of every parked car in Burford, as well as copious notes on suspicious passers-by. By two minutes to twelve, duly seated in the saloon bar of the Monmouth Arms, he was seized by panic. Was he in the Monmouth Arms or the Golden Pheasant ? Had Colonel Gaunt said the Horn of Plenty? In the furnace of Pym’s mind these possibilities fused themselves into a brilliant and appalling alloy. He stepped into the forecourt and covertly reread the inn sign before hastening to the outdoor gentlemen’s to throw cold water in his face. Standing at a stall he heard the sound of wind breaking and divined a bulky figure in a navy-blue mackintosh standing at his side. The body was tilted backwards and sideways, the eyes were cast upward in agony. For a frightful moment Pym feared the man was shot, until he realised that these contortions were caused by the difficulties of retaining a thick volume wedged under his armpit. Unable to perform, Pym buttoned himself, hurried back to the saloon and, laying

Financial Times

on the bar, ordered himself a bitter.

“Make that two, will you, sport?” a breezy voice told the barman. “Uncle’s in the chair today. How are you? What about over there in the corner? Don’t forget your paper.”

I won’t give you much of our courtship, Jack. When two people have decided to go to bed with each other, what passes between them before the event is a matter of form rather than of content. Nor do I remember very clearly what justifications we cooked up, for Michael was a shy man who had spent most of his life at sea, and his rare snatches of philosophy came out of him like escaping steam signals while he pummelled his mouth with a check handkerchief. “Somebody’s got to dredge the drains, o’ boy—fire with fire, only way. Unless we want the buggers to steal the ship from under us, which I

don’t,

thank you.” This last being a tensely underplayed statement of personal faith, which he at once smothered with a swig of beer. Michael was the first of your surrogates, Jack, so let him do duty for the rest. After Michael, if I remember, came David, and after David an Alan, and after Alan I forget. Pym would see no flaw in any of them. Or if he did, he translated it at once into a fiendishly clever piece of deception. Today of course I know the poor souls for what they were: members of that large, lost family of the British unprofessional classes that seems to wander by right between the secret services, the automobile clubs and the richer private charities. Not bad men by any means. Not dishonest men. Not stupid. But men who see the threat to their class as synonymous with the threat to England and never wandered far enough to know the difference. Modest men, practical, filling in their expense accounts and collecting their salaries, and impressing their Joes with their quiet expertise beneath the banter. Yet still, in their secret hearts, nourishing themselves on the same illusions that in those days nourished Pym. And needing their Joes to help them do it. Worried men, touched with an odour of pub meals and club squash, and a habit of looking round them while they paid, as if wondering whether there was a better way to live. And Pym, as he was passed from hand to hand, did his best to honour and obey each one of them. He believed in them; he cheered them with witty stories from his ever-increasing store. He strained to give them treats and make their day exciting. And when it was time for them to go he was always careful to have saved for them some last nugget of information to take home to their parents, even if he sometimes had to make it up.

“How’s the colonel?” Pym ventured one day, belatedly recalling that Michael was still officially the stand-in for a Colonel Gaunt.

“Not a question I ever ask, personally, old boy,” said Michael and to Pym’s surprise began snapping his fingers as if he were summoning a dog.

Did Rob Gaunt exist? Pym never met him and later, when he was in a better position to ask, he could find nobody who would admit to having heard of him.

Now the brown envelopes flow in thick and fast, often two or three a week. The college porter grows so used to them he chucks them into Pym’s pigeonhole without reading the address and Pym has to gouge out the centre of another dictionary to accommodate them. Always they contain instructions, and sometimes they contain small sums of cash, which the Michaels call his hard-lying money. Better still is Pym’s float for operational expenses, which is kept at a fabulous twenty pounds: to entertaining secretary O. U. Hegelian Society, seven and ninepence . . . contribution to Peace in Korea campaign, five shillings . . . bottle of sherry for Society of Cultural Relations with the USSR get-together, fourteen shillings . . . coach trip to Cambridge for good-will visit to C.U. Branch members, plus entertainment, one pound fifteen shillings and ninepence. At first Pym is timid of these claims, fearing that by making them he is straining his masters’ indulgence. The colonel will find someone cheaper, someone richer, someone who knows that gentlemen do not count the cost. But slowly he comes to realise that, far from displeasing his masters, his expenditures are taken as evidence of his industry.

“Dear Old Friend,” wrote Michael—observing his own dictum that names must be avoided lest the enemy intercept our correspondence—

“Eleven. Thanks for your Eight safely to hand, a pearl as usual. I took the liberty of passing your rendering of the clans’ latest choral to our lord and master upstairs and I haven’t seen the old boy laugh so much since his aunt caught her left doodah in the you’ve-got-it. Brilliant and informative, dear sir, and be advised that the great man himself remarked upon your perseverance. Now to the usual shopping list.

“1. Are you certain that our distinguished clan treasurer spells his name with a Z and not an S? The Doomsday Book contains an Abraham S, mathematician, late of Manchester Grammar School who fits the bill, but definitely no Z. (Though it’s always possible of course that a gentleman of his tartan spells it both ways anyway . . .) Don’t force it, as the Bishop said, but if Lady Luck pushes the answer your way, let us know. . . .

“2. Please keep your Eversharp ear open for talk about our gallant Scottish brethren getting up a delegation to attend the Sarajevo Youth Festival in July. The powers that be are getting unaccountably miffed about gents who accept large government grants only to oil off abroad and spit on said government’s shadow.

“3. Regarding the distinguished visiting vocalist from Leeds University who is slated to address the clan on March 1st, do please keep an eye and an ear open for his faithful spouse, Magdalene (God bless us!), who by repute is quite as musical as her old man, but prefers to keep her head down owing to her delicate scientific interests. All comments gleefully received . . .”

Why did Pym do it, Tom? In the beginning was the deed. Not the motive, least of all the word. It was his own choice. It was his own life. No one forced him. Anywhere along the line, or right at the start of it, he could have yelled no and surprised himself. He never did. It took another ten university generations before he threw in the sponge, and by then the lines were drawn for good, all the lines. Why chuck away his freedom and good luck, you will ask, his good looks and good humour and good heart, just when they were coming into their own at last? Why befriend a bunch of grimy and unhappy people of alien background and mentality, press himself upon them, all smiling and obliging—because, believe me, there was no glamour to the university Left by then; Berlin and Korea had put paid to that for good—merely in order to be able to betray them? Why sit whole nights away in back rooms among sullen girls from the provinces who scowled and ate nut cutlets and took Firsts in Economics, in order to profess a view of the world that he had to learn as he went along, twisting his mind inside out, killing himself on cheap cigarettes while passionately agreeing that everything that was fun in life was a damn shame? Why do a Father Murgo on them, offering his bourgeois origins for their condemnation, abasing himself, revelling in their disapproval, yet gaining no absolution from it—only to rush off and bang the scales down the other way in a gush of embellished reports of the night’s proceedings? I should know. I have done it and I have made others do it, and I was never less than cogent in my persuasion. For England. So that the free world can sleep safely in its bed at night while the secret watchers guard her in their rugged care. For love. To be a good chap, a good soldier.

Abie Ziegler’s name, whether with a Z or an S, was written, you may be sure, in capitals on every left wing poster in every college lodge of the university. Abie was a publicity-crazed pipe-smoking sex maniac about four feet high. His one ambition in life was to be noticed and he saw the depleted Left as a fast lane to this end. There were a dozen painless ways in which Michael and his people could have found out whatever they wanted about Abie, but Pym had to be their man. The great spy would have walked all the way to Manchester just to look up Siegler or Ziegler in the phone book, such was the drive with which he had flung himself into his secret mission. This is not betrayal, he told himself when he was being the Michaels’ man; this is the real thing. These strident men and women with their college scarves and funny accents who refer to me as our bourgeois friend are my own countrymen planning to upset our social order.

For his country, or whatever he called it, Pym addressed envelopes and memorised the addresses, played steward at public meetings, marched in dispirited processions, and afterwards wrote down whoever came. For his country he took any menial job going if it earned him favour. For his country or for love or for the Michaels, he stood at street corners late at night, offering unreadable Marxist pamphlets to passers-by who told him he ought to be in bed. Then dumped the surplus copies in a ditch and put his own money into the Party kitty because he was too proud to reclaim it from the Michaels. And if occasionally, as he sat up still later writing his meticulous reports on tomorrow’s revolutionists, the ghost of Axel materialised before him and Axel’s cry of “Pym you bastard where are you” whispered in his ear, Pym had only to wave him away with a combination of the Michaels’ logic and his own: “You were my country’s enemy even if you were my friend. You were unsound. You had no papers. Sorry.”

“Hell are you running with all those Reds for?” Sefton Boyd asked drowsily one day, face downward in the grass. They had driven out to Godstow in his sports car for lunch, and were lying in a meadow above the weir. “Somebody told me they’d seen you at the Cole Group. You made a piss-awful speech about the madness of war. Hell’s the Cole Group when it’s at home?”

“It’s a discussion group run by G. D. H. Cole. It explores avenues of Socialism.”

“Are they queer?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Well, explore somebody else’s avenue. I also saw your nasty name on a poster. College secretary of the Socialist Club. I mean, Christ, you’re supposed to be in the Grid.”

“I like to see all sides,” said Pym.

“They’re not all sides. We are. They’re one side. They’ve pinched half Europe and they’re a band of absolute shits. Take my words for it.”

“I’m doing it for my country,” Pym said. “It’s secret.”

“Bollocks,” said Sefton Boyd.

“It’s true. I get instructions from London every week. I’m in the Secret Service.”

“Like you were in the German Army at Grimble’s,” Sefton Boyd suggested. “Like you were Himmler’s aunt at Willow’s. Like you fucked Willow’s wife and your father carried messages for Winston Churchill.”

A day came, long spoken of and frequently postponed, when Michael took Pym home to meet his family. “Double First material,” Michael warned him in an advance write-up of his spouse. “Mind like a dart. No mercy.” Mrs. Michael turned out to be a ravenous, fast-fading woman in a slashed skirt and a low blouse over an unappetising chest. While her husband did things in his shed, where he appeared to live, Pym inexpertly mixed the Yorkshire pudding and fought off her embraces until he was obliged to take refuge with the children on the lawn. When it rained he marched them to the drawing-room and posted them round him in self-defence while he pushed their Dinky toys.

“Magnus, what are your father’s initials?” Mrs. Michael said bossily from the doorway. I remember her voice, querulous and interrogative, as if I had just eaten her last chocolate instead of refusing to pop upstairs with her to bed.

“R.T.,” said Pym.

She was trailing a copy of a Sunday newspaper in her hand and must have been reading it in the kitchen.

“Well, it says here that there’s an R. T. Pym standing as Liberal Candidate for Gulworth North. He’s described as a philanthropist and property broker. There can’t be two, can there?”

Pym took the paper from her. “No,” he agreed, staring at Rick’s Portrait of Self with Red Setter. “There can’t.”

“Only you could have told us. I mean you’re terribly rich and superior, I know, but a thing like that is jolly exciting if you’re people like us.”

Sick with apprehension Pym returned to Oxford and forced himself to read, if only glancingly, the last four letters from Rick that he had tossed unopened in his desk drawer, next to Axel’s copy of Grimmelshausen and other unpaid bills.

Inside his camel-hair dressing-gown Pym at fifty-three was shivering. It had come over him suddenly, as it sometimes did, a fever without a temperature. He had been writing for as long as he had been awake, which to judge by his beard was a long time. The shiver turned to a shake, which was how it went. It twisted his neck muscles and gnawed at the backs of his thighs. He started to sneeze. The first sneeze was long and speculative. The second followed it like an answering shot. They’re fighting over me, he thought: the good guys and the bad guys are shooting it out inside me. Whoops: O God receive my soul. Whoops: O Lord forgive him, for he knew not what he did. Rising, he held one hand over his mouth and with the other turned up the gas fire. Clutching himself, he began a prisoner’s tour of the room’s perimeter, dipping into his knees with each stride. From a corner of Miss Dubber’s carpet he paced ten feet, made a right angle and paced eight more. He stopped and surveyed the rectangle he had measured. How did Rick endure it? he asked himself. How did Axel? He raised his arms, comparing the cell’s breadth with his own wingspan. “Christ,” he whispered aloud. “I’ll hardly fit.”

Picking up the reinforced briefcase which he had still not opened, he carried it to the fire and sat there, brows drawn, eyes glowering at the flames while the shaking grew more violent. Rick should have died when I killed him. Pym whispered the words out loud, daring himself to hear it. “You should have died when I killed you.” He returned to his desk and took up his pen. Every line written is a line behind me. You do it once, then die. He wrote fast. And as he wrote, he began to smile again. Love is whatever you can still betray, he thought. Betrayal can only happen if you love.

Mary too was praying. She was kneeling on her school hassock with her eyes plunged into the night-time of her palms and she was praying that she was not at school any more but at their little Saxon church in Plush that went with the estate, with her father and brother kneeling protectively to either side of her and their Colonel the Reverend High Anglican vicar barking out his fire orders and rattling the incense like a mess-gong. Or that she was kneeling at her own bedside in her own room in her nightdress with her hair brushed and her bottom pushed out, praying that nobody would make her go to boarding-school again. Yet however much Mary prayed and begged, she knew that she wasn’t going anywhere but where she was: in the English church in Vienna where I come every Wednesday for early service, in common with the usual band of upwardly mobile Christians led by the British Ambassadress and the American Minister’s wife and supported by Caroline Lumsden, Bee Lederer and a heavy contingent of Dutch, Norwegians and also-rans from the German Embassy next door. Fergus and Georgie are roosting in the pew behind me without a pious thought between them, it’s Tom not me who is at boarding-school and it is Magnus not God who is all-pervasive, all-knowing yet invisible and who holds the keys to all our destinies. So Magnus you bastard, if there is any truth left in you at all, do me a favour will you and lean out of your firmament and advise me, of your infinite goodness and wisdom—just for once with no lies, evasion or decoration—what the hell I am supposed to do about your dear old friend from Corfu cricket ground who is sitting not praying in the same pew as myself just across the aisle on the bride’s side—is slender and drooping with a pepper-and-salt moustache and bottleneck shoulders, exactly as Tom described him right down to the cobwebby lines of laughter round his eyes and the grey raincoat wrapped around his shoulders like a cape. For this is neither the first appearance of your grey angel nor the second. It is the third and the most imaginative in two days, and each time that I do nothing about it I feel him draw a step nearer to me, and if you don’t come back soon and tell me what to do, you may very well find us in bed together, because after all, as you used to assure me in Berlin, you can’t beat a little sex for breaking the tension and removing social barriers.

Giles Marriott the English chaplain was inviting all those of a pure heart and humble mind to draw near with faith. Mary stood up, straightened her skirt and stepped into the aisle. Caroline Lumsden and her husband were ahead of her but the ethics of piety required that they greet one another after and not before the Sacrament. Georgie and Fergus stayed firmly in their pew, too high-minded to sacrifice their agnosticism for cover. More likely they just don’t know what to do, thought Mary. Clasping her hands to her chin, she quickly ducked her head again in prayer. Oh God, oh Magnus, oh Jack, tell me what to do now! He is standing a foot behind me, I can smell his stale cigar smoke. Tom had mentioned that too. At the airport, as an afterthought: “He smoked little cigars, Mum, like Dad used to when he was giving up cigarettes!” And he has

limped

along his pew. He has

limped

into the aisle. A dozen people or more had fallen in behind Mary, including the Ambassadress, her spotty daughter and a flock of Americans. Yet a limp is a limp and good Christians stop for it and smile and let it go ahead, and there he was behind her, the privileged recipient of everybody’s charity. And still each time the queue takes a pace nearer to the altar he

limps

as intimately as if he were patting me on the bum. Mary had never known such an insinuating, impudent, flagrant limp in all her life. His merry eyes were burning her back, she could feel them. She could feel her neck burning and her face heating as the moment of divine consummation approached. At the altar rail Jenny Forbes, the Administration Officer’s wife, was genuflecting before retiring to her seat. As well she might, the way she’s carrying on with the new young Chancery guard. Mary stepped forward gratefully and kneeled in her place. Get off my back you creep, stay your own side. The creep did, but by then his softly murmured words were bellowing inside her head like a bullhorn. “I can help you find him. I will send a message to the house.”

In choral unison the questions were shrieking inside Mary’s head. Send how? A message saying what? To instruct her in the causes of her disloyalty? To explain to her why, as she was leaving yesterday’s International Ladies’ bunfight, she had not flung out an accusing arm at him as he smiled at her from across the street? Why she had not screamed “Arrest that man!” to Georgie and Fergus who were parked not forty feet from the doorway he emerged from—jauntily, no hood was ever like that? Or again when he appeared not six yards from her at Swab’s supermarket?

Giles Marriott was gazing down at her in puzzlement, offering her for the second time the body of Christ which was given for her. Hastily Mary placed her hands as she had been taught since childhood—right over left and make a cross with them. He laid the wafer on her palm. She raised it to her lips and felt it stick, then lie like a log on her dry tongue. No, I am not worthy, she thought wretchedly as she waited for the chalice. It’s true. I am not worthy to come to this Thy table or anybody else’s table either. Every moment I fail to denounce him is another moment of disloyalty. He is tempting me and I am hearing him for all I am worth. He is drawing me to him and I am saying yes please. I am saying, “I will come to you for the sake of Magnus and my child.” I am saying, “I will come to you if you are clarity, even if you are evil. Because I am searching for a light, any light at all, and going half off my head in the darkness. I will come to you because you are the other half of Magnus, and therefore the other half of me.”

As she walked back to her seat she caught Bee Lederer’s eye. They exchanged pious smiles.

11

T

here was never a by-election like it, Tom, there was never an election like it. We are born, we get married, we divorce, we die. But somewhere along the way, if we get the chance, we should also stand as Liberal Candidate for the ancient fishing and weaving constituency of Gulworth North situated in the remoter fens of East Anglia in the unlit post-war years before television replaced the Temperance Hall, and communications were such that a man’s character could be born again by removing it a hundred and fifty miles north-east of London. If we do not have the luck to stand ourselves, then the least we can do is drop everything from crypto-Communism to unconsummated sexual exploration and, forgetting the later

Minnesänger,

hasten to our father’s side in the Hour of his Greatest Test to shiver on icy doorsteps for him, and charm votes out of old ladies in the manner in which he has instructed us, and see them right if it kills us, and tell the world by loudspeaker what a crackerjack fellow he is, and that they will never want for anything again, and promise ourselves, and mean it, that as soon as polling day is over we will forsake all other lives and take our place among the working classes where our hearts and origins have always been, as witness our clandestine espousal of the workers’ cause during the formative years of our studentship.

It was deep winter when Pym arrived and it is winter still, for I have never been back, I never dared. The same snow lies over the fens and marshes and freezes Quixote’s windmills to a standstill against the cindery Flemish sky. The same steepled towns dangle from the sea’s horizon, the Brueghel faces of our electorate are as pink with zeal as they were those three decades ago. Our Candidate’s convoy, led by the lifelong Liberal Mr. Cudlove and his precious cargo, still bears the message from chalky schoolroom to paraffin-heated hall, skidding and cursing over country lanes while Our Candidate broods and downs another wet, and Sylvia and Major Maxwell-Cavendish fight in undertones over the Ordnance Survey map. In my memory our campaign is a drama tour of the theatre of the politically absurd as we advance across snow and marshland upon Gulworth’s majestic Town Hall itself—hired against all advice from those who said we’d never fill it, but we did—for Our Candidate’s Positively Last Appearance. There suddenly the comedy stops dead. The masks and fools’ bells come clattering to the stage as God in one simple question presents us with His bill for all our fun till here.

Evidence, Tom. Facts.

Here is Rick’s rosette of yellow silk that he wore for his great night. It was run up for him by the same luckless tailor who made his racing colours. Here is the centre-page spread from the

Gulworth Mercury

next day. Read all about it for yourself. CANDIDATE DEFENDS HIS HONOUR. SAYS LET GULWORTH NORTH BE THE JUDGE. See the picture of the podium with its illuminated organ pipes and curving staircase? All we need is Makepeace Watermaster. See your grandfather, Tom, centre stage, hacking at the speckled beams of the spotlights, and your father peeking coyly from behind him, forelock at the slope? Hear the thunder of the great saint’s piety rising into the wagon roof, do you? Pym knows every word of Rick’s speech by heart, every hammy gesture and inflection. Rick is describing himself as an honest trader who will devote “my life for as long as I am spared, and as long as you deem in your wisdom that you require me,” to the service of the constituency, and he’s about five seconds from making a swipe with his left forearm to cut off the heads of the Unbelievers. Fingers closed and slightly curled as ever. He is telling us that he’s a humble Christian and a father and a straight dealer, and he’s going to rid Gulworth North of the twin heresies of High Toryism and Low Socialism, though sometimes in his teetotal fervour he gets them the wrong way round. He also hates excess. It really churns him up. Now comes the good news. You can hear it from the faith in his voice. With Rick as its Member of Parliament, Gulworth North will undergo a Renaissance beyond its dreams. Its moribund herring trade shall rise from its bed and walk. Its decaying textile industry shall bring forth milk and honey. Its farms shall be freed of Socialist bureaucracy and become the envy of the world. Its crumbling railways and canals shall be miraculously cut loose from the toils of the Industrial Revolution. Its streets shall run with liquidity. Its aged shall have their savings protected against Confiscation by the State, its menfolk shall be spared the ignominies of conscription. Pay-As-You-Earn taxation shall go and so shall all the other iniquities that are featured in the Liberal Manifesto which Rick has partly read but believes in totally.

So far so good, but tonight is our final curtain and Rick has worked up something special. Daringly he turns his back to the punters and addresses his faithful supporters ranged behind him on the dais. He is about to thank us. Watch. “First my darling Sylvia, without whom nothing could have been accomplished—thank you, Sylvia, thank you! Let’s have a big hand for Sylvia my Queen!” The punters oblige with enthusiasm. Sylvia pulls the gracious smile for which she is retained. Pym is expecting to be called next but he is not. Rick’s blue gaze has steel in it tonight, the glow is on him. More voice and less breath to his bombast. Shorter sentences but the champ throws them harder. He thanks the Chairman of the Gulworth Liberal Party and

his

very lovely lady wife—Marjory, my dear, don’t be shy, where are you?—He thanks our miserable Liberal agent, an unbeliever called Donald Somebody, see the caption, who since the court’s arrival on his territory has retired into a fuming sulk from which he has only tonight emerged. He thanks our transport lady whom Mr. Muspole claims to have favoured in the snooker room, and a Miss Somebody Else who made sure Your Candidate was never once late for a meeting—laughter—though Morrie Washington swears she isn’t safe to be sat with in the back. He passes “to these other gallant and faithful helpers of mine.” Morrie and Syd leer like a pair of reprieved murderers from the back row, Mr. Muspole and Major Maxwell-Cavendish prefer to scowl. It is there in the photograph, Tom, look for yourself. Next to Morrie roosts an inebriated radio comedian whose failing reputation Rick has contrived to harness to our campaign, just as in the last weeks he has wheeled in witless cricketers and titled owners of hotel chains and other so-called Liberal personalities, marching them through town like prisoners and tossing them back to London when they have served their brief span of usefulness.

Now take another look at Magnus seated on the right hand of his maker. Rick arrives at him last and every word he shouts at him is replete with secret knowledge and reproach. “He won’t tell you himself so I will. He’s too modest. This boy of mine here is one of the finest students of law this country has yet seen and not only this country either. He could hold this speech in five different languages and do it better than I can in any one of them.” Laughter. Cries of “Shame!” and “No, no.” “But that never stopped him from working his feet off for his old man throughout this campaign. Magnus, you’ve been crackerjack, old son, and your old man’s best pal. Here’s to you!”

But the dinning ovation does nothing to alleviate Pym’s anguish. In the lonely reality of being Pym and listening to Rick resume his speech, his heart is beating in terror while he counts off the clichés and waits for the explosion that will destroy the candidate and his bold tissue of deceptions forevermore. It will blow the wagon roof and its gilded bearings into the night sky. It will smash the very stars that provide the grand finale of Rick’s speech.

“People will say to you,” cries Rick, on a note of ever-mounting humility, “and they’ve said it to me—they’ve stopped me in the street—touched my arm—‘Rick,’ they say, ‘what is Liberalism except a package of ideals? We can’t

eat

ideals, Rick,’ they say. ‘Ideals don’t buy us a cup of tea or a nice touch of English lamb chop, Rick, old boy. We can’t put our ideals in the collection box. We can’t pay for our son’s education with ideals. We can’t send him out into the world to take his place in the highest law courts of the land with nothing but a few ideals in his pocket. So what’s the point, Rick?’ they say to me, ‘in this modern world of ours, of a party of ideals?’” The voice drops. The hand, till now so agitated, reaches out palm downward to cup the head of an invisible child. “And I say to them, good people of Gulworth, and I say to you too!” The same hand flies upward and points to Heaven as Pym in his sickly apprehension sees the ghost of Makepeace Watermaster leap from its pulpit and fill the Town Hall with a dismal glow. “I say this. Ideals are like the stars. We cannot reach them, but we profit by their presence!”

Rick has never been better, more passionate, more sincere. The applause rises like an angry sea, the faithful rise with it. Pym rises with the faithful, pummelling his hands together loudest of us all. Rick weeps. Pym is on the brink. The good people have their Messiah, the Liberals of Gulworth North have too long been a flock without a shepherd; no Liberal candidate has stood here since the war. At Rick’s side our local Liberal Party Chairman is smacking his yeoman’s paws together and rhubarbing ecstatically into Rick’s ear. At Rick’s back, the whole court is following Pym’s example, standing, clapping, rah-rahing “Rick for Gulworth!” Thus reminded, Rick turns to them yet again and, taking his cue from any number of the variety shows he loves, indicates the court to the people, saying: “You owe it to them, not to me.” But once more his blue eyes are on Pym, saying, “Judas, patricide, murderer of your best pal.”

Or so it seems to Pym.

For this is exactly the moment, this is exactly where everyone is standing and beaming and clapping, when the bomb that Pym has planted goes off: Rick with his back to the enemy, his face upon Pym and his beloved helpers, half ready, I think, to break into a rousing song. Not “Underneath the Arches,” it is too secular, but “Onward, Christian Soldiers” will be first rate. When suddenly the din takes sick and dies on its feet in front of us, and a freezing silence slips in after it as if somebody has flung open the great doors of the Town Hall and let in the vengeful angels of the past.

Someone unreliable has spoken from under the minstrel gallery where the press sits. At first the acoustics are so lousy they do not allow us more than a few querulous notes, but already the notes are subversive. The speaker tries again but louder. She is not a person yet, merely a damned woman, with the kind of piping, strident Irish voice that menfolk instinctively detest, wheedling you with its impotence in the same breath as its cause. A man shouts “Silence, woman,” then “Be quiet,” and then “Shut up, you bitch!” Pym recognises the port-fed voice of Major Blenkinsop. The major is a Free-Trader and a rural Fascist from the embarrassing Right of our great movement. But the scratchy Irish voice prevails like a door squeak that will not go away, and no amount of slamming or oiling seems able to silence it. Some tiresome Home-Ruler probably. Ah good, somebody has got hold of her. It is the major again—see his bald head and yellow rosette of office. He is calling her “My good

madame,”

of all things, and manhandling her towards the door. But the freedom of the press prevents him. The hacks are leaning over the balcony shouting “What’s your name, miss?” and even “Yell it at him again!” Major Blenkinsop is suddenly neither a gentleman nor an officer but an upper-class lout with a screaming Irishwoman on his hands. Other women are yelling “Leave her be!” and “Get your hands off her, you dirty swine.” Somebody shouts “Black and Tan bastard!”

Then we hear her, then we see her, both clearly. She is small and furious in black, a widowed shrew. She wears a pill-box hat. A bit of black veil hangs from it by a corner, ripped aside by herself or someone else. With the perversity of a crowd, everybody wants to hear her. She begins her question for perhaps the third time. Her brogue comes from the front of the mouth and appears to be spoken through a smile, but Pym knows it is no smile but the grimace of a hatred too powerful to be kept inside her. She speaks each word as she has learned it, in the order she has arranged them. The formulation is offensive in its clarity.

“I wish to know please—whether it is true—if you would be so kind, sir—that the Liberal Parliamentary Candidate for the Constituency of Gulworth North—has served a prison sentence for swindle and embezzlement. Thank you very much for your consideration.”

And Rick’s face on Pym while her arrow shoots him in the back. Rick’s blue eyes opening wide on impact, but still steady on Pym—exactly as they were five days ago, when he lay in his ice-bath with his feet crossed and his eyes open, saying, “Killing me is not enough, old son.”

Come back ten days with me, Tom. The excited Pym has arrived from Oxford light of heart, determined as a protector of the nation to throw his changeful weight behind the democratic process and have some fun in the snow. The campaign is in full cry but the trains to Gulworth have a way of petering out at Norwich. It is weekend and God has ruled that English by-elections be held on Thursdays, even if He has long forgotten why. It is evening: the Candidate and his cohorts are on the stomp. But as Pym alights bag in hand at Norwich’s imposing railway station, there stands faithful Syd Lemon at the barrier with a campaign car plastered with the Pym regalia waiting to whisk him to the main meeting of the evening, scheduled for nine o’clock in the village of Little Chedworth-on-the-Water, where according to Syd the last missionary was eaten for tea. The car’s windows are darkened with posters saying “PYM THE PEOPLE’S MAN.” Rick’s great head—the one, as I now know, that he had quite likely sold—is pasted to the boot. A loudspeaker bigger than a ship’s cannon is wired to the roof. A full moon is up. Snow covers the fields and Paradise is all around.

“Let’s drive to St. Moritz,” Pym says as Syd hands him one of Meg’s meat pies, and Syd laughs and musses Pym’s hair. Syd is not an attentive driver but the lanes are empty and the snow is kind. He has brought a ginger ale bottle filled with whisky. As they meander between the laden hedges they swallow big mouthfuls. Thus fortified, Syd briefs Pym on the state of the battle.

“We favour free worship, Titch, and we’re mustard for Home Ownership for All with Less Red Tape.”

“We always were,” says Pym, and Syd gives him the hairy eyeball in case he’s being cheeky.

“We take a poor view of ubiquitous High Toryism in all its forms—”

“Iniquitous,” Pym corrects him, sipping again from the ginger ale bottle.

“Our Candidate is proud of his record as an English Patriot and Churchman. He’s a Merchantman of England who has fought for his country, Liberalism being the only right road for Britain. He’s been educated in the University of the World, he’s never touched a drop of the hard stuff in his life, nor have you, and don’t forget it.” He grabbed back the ginger ale bottle and took a long, teetotal draught.

“But will he win?” said Pym.

“Listen. If you’d have come in here with ready money on the day your dad announced his intention, you could have had fifty to one. By the time me and Lord Muspole showed up he was down to twenty-fives and we took a ton each. Next morning after he done his adoption you couldn’t get tens. He’s nine to two now and shrinking and I’ll have a small wager with you that come polling day he’s evens. Now ask me whether he’ll win.”

“What’s the competition?”

“There isn’t any. The Labour boy’s a Scottish schoolmaster from Glasgow. Got a red beard. Small bloke. Looks like a mouse peering out of a red bear’s backside. Old Muspole sent a couple of the lads round the other night to cheer up one of his meetings. Put them in kilts and gave them football rattles and had them roaring round the streets till morning. Gulworth doesn’t hold with rowdiness, Titch. They take a very poor view of the Labour Candidate’s drunken friends singing ‘Little Nellie of the Glen’ at three in the morning on the church steps.”

The car slides gracefully towards a windmill. Syd rights it and they proceed.

“And the Tory?”

“The Tory is everything a Tory candidate should be with knobs on. He’s a landed pukka sahib who toils one day a week in the City, rides to hounds, gives beads to the natives and wants to bring back the thumbscrew for first offenders. His wife opens garden fêtes with her teeth.”

“But who’s our traditional mainstay?” asks Pym, remembering his social history.

“The God-thumpers are solid for him, so’s the Masons, so’s the Old Nellies. The teetotallers are a Cakewalk, so’s the anti-betting league so long as they don’t read the form books and I’ll thank you not to mention the neverwozzers, Titch, they’ve been put out to grass for the duration. The rest are a pig in a poke. The sitting member was a Red but he’s dead. The last election gave him five thousand majority on a straight race with the Tory, but look at the Tory. The total poll was thirty-five thousand but since then another five thousand juvenile delinquents have been enfranchised and two thousand geriatrics have passed on to a better life. The farmers are nasty, the fishermen are broke and the hoi polloi don’t know their willies from their elbows.”

Switching on the interior light Syd allows the car to steer itself while he reaches into the back and fishes out an imposing red-and-black pamphlet with a photograph of Rick on the front cover. Flanked by somebody’s adoring spaniels, he is reading a book before an unfamiliar fireside, a thing he has never done in his life. “A Letter to the Electorate of Gulworth North,” runs the caption. The paper, in defiance of the prevailing austerity, is high gloss.

“We are also supported by the ghost of Sir Codpiece Make-water, V.C.,” Syd adds with particular relish. “Peruse our rear page.”

Pym did so and discovered a ruled box resembling a Swiss obituary notice:

A FINAL NOTE

Your Candidate derives his proudest political inspiration from his childhood Mentor and Friend, Sir Makepeace Watermaster, M.P., the World Famous Liberal and Christian Employer whose stern but Fair hand following his Father’s untimely Death guided him past Youth’s many Pitfalls to his present Highly consolidated position which brings him into daily Contact with the Highest in the Land.

Sir Makepeace was a man of God-fearing Family, an Abstainer, an orator who knew no Equal without whose Shining inspiration it is safe to say Your Candidate might never have presumed to put myself forward for the Historic Judgment of the people of Gulworth North which has already become a Home from home for me, and if elected I shall obtain a Major property here at the earliest convenience.

Your Candidate proposes to Dedicate himself to your interests with the same Humility as was ever displayed by Sir Makepeace, who went to his grave preaching Man’s Moral right to Property, free Trading and a fair Crack of the Whip for Women.

Your future Humble Servant,

Richard T. Pym

“You’ve got the learning, Titch. What do you think of it?” asks Syd, with vulnerable earnestness.

“It’s beautiful,” says Pym.

“Of course it is,” says Syd.

A village, then a church spire glide towards them. As they enter the main street a yellow banner proclaims that Our Liberal Candidate will be speaking here tonight. A few old Land Rovers and Austin Sevens, already snowbound, stand dejectedly in the carpark. Taking a last pull from the ginger ale bottle, Syd carefully parts his hair before the mirror. Pym notices that he is dressed with unaccustomed sobriety. The frosted air smells of cow dung and the sea. Before them rises the archaic Temperance Hall of Little Chedworth-on-the-Water. Syd slips him a peppermint and in they go.

The ward chairman has been speaking for some time but only to the front row, and those of us at the back hear nothing. The rest of the congregation either stares into the rafters or at the display cards of the Common Man’s Candidate: Rick at Napoleon’s desk with his law books ranged behind him. Rick on the factory floor for the first and only time in his life, sharing a cup of tea with the Salt of the Earth. Rick as Sir Francis Drake gazing towards the misted armada of Gulworth’s dying herring fleet. Rick the pipe-sucking agriculturalist intelligently appraising a cow. To one side of the ward chairman, under a festoon of yellow bunting, sits a lady officer of the ward committee. To the other runs a row of empty chairs waiting for the Candidate and his party. Periodically, while the chairman labours on, Pym catches a stray phrase like the Evils of Conscription or the Curse of Big Monopolies—or worse still an apologetic interjection such as “as I was saying to you only a moment ago.” And twice, as nine o’clock becomes nine-thirty, then ten past ten, an elderly Shakespearean messenger hobbles painfully from a vestry, clutching his earlobe to tell us in a quavering voice that the Candidate is on his way, he has a busy schedule of meetings tonight, the snow is holding him up. Till just when we have given up hope, Mr. Muspole strides in accompanied by Major Maxwell-Cavendish, both prim as beadles in their greys. Together the two men march up the aisle and mount the dais, and while Muspole shakes hands with the chairman and his lady, the major draws a sheaf of notes from a briefcase and lays them on the table. And though Pym by the end of the campaign had heard Rick speak on no less than twenty-one occasions between that night and his Eve of Poll address in the Town Hall, he never once saw him refer to the major’s notes or so much as recognise their presence. So that gradually he concluded they were not notes at all, but a piece of stage business to prepare us for the Coming.

“What’s Maxie done with his moustache?” Pym whispers excitedly to Syd, who has sat up with a jolt after a bit of a nap. “Mortgaged it?” If Pym expects a witticism in return, he is disappointed.

“It’s not deemed appropriate—that’s what he’s done with it,” says Syd shortly. In the same moment Pym sees the light of pure love suffuse Syd’s face as Rick sweeps in.

The order of appearance never changed, neither did the allocation of duties. After Muspole and the major come Perce Loft and poor Morrie Washington who is already getting bother with his liver. Perce holds open the door. Morrie steps through and sometimes, as tonight, gets a bit of a clap because the uninitiated mistake him for Rick, which is not surprising since Morrie, though a third Rick’s size, spends most of his life and all his money in an effort to achieve Total Assumption with his idol. If Rick buys a new camel-hair coat, Morrie rushes off and buys two like it. If Rick is in two-tone shoes, so is Morrie, and white socks as well. But tonight Morrie has dressed like the rest of the court in churchy grey. For love of Rick he has even managed to get some of the booze out of his complexion. He steps in, he takes up his place across the door from Perce and fiddles with his rosette to make sure it is working properly. Then Morrie and Perce together crane their heads back in the direction they have come from, straining, as the audience is, to catch a first sight of their champion. And look!—they are clapping! And look, so are we!—as enter Rick, at a spanking pace, for we statesmen have no time to lose, and even as he comes striding up the aisle he is earnestly conferring with the Highest in the Land. Is that Sir Laurence Olivier with him?—looks more like Bud Flanagan to me. It is neither, as we shall quickly learn. It is none other than the great Bertie Tregenza, the Radio Bird Man, a lifelong Liberal. On the dais Muspole and the major present the other notables to the chairman and guide them to their seats. At last the moment we have come for is upon us when the only man left standing is the man in the photographs around him. Syd leans forward, listening with his eyes. Our Candidate begins speaking. A deliberate, unimpressive opening. Good evening and thank you for coming here in such numbers on this cold winter’s night. I am sorry to have had to keep you waiting. A joke for the Nellies: they tell me I kept my mother waiting a whole week. Laughter from the Nellies as the joke is turned to account. But I’ll promise you this, people of Gulworth North: nobody here is going to be kept waiting by your next Member of Parliament! More laughter and some applause from the faithful as the Candidate’s tone stiffens.

“Ladies and Gentlemen, you have ventured out on this inhospitable night for one reason only. Because you care about your country. Well that makes two of us, because I care about it too. I care about the way it’s run and the way it’s not run. I care because Politics are People. People with hearts to tell them what they want, for themselves and for one another. People with minds to tell them how to achieve it. People with the Faith and Guts to send Adolf Hitler back to where he came from. People like ourselves. Gathered here tonight. The Salt of the Earth and make no bones about it. English people, root and bough, worried about their country, and looking for the man to see them right.”

Pym peers round the little hall. Not a face but is turned flower-like towards Rick’s light. Save one, a little woman in a veiled pill-box hat, sitting like her own shadow, all apart and the black veil hiding her face. She is in mourning, Pym decides, moved at once to sympathy. She has come here for a spot of company, poor soul. On the dais Rick is explaining the meaning of Liberalism for the benefit of those unfamiliar with the differences between the three great parties. Liberalism is not a dogma but a way of life, he says. It is faith in the essential goodness of man regardless of colour, race or creed in a spirit of all pulling together to one end. The fine points of policy thus dispatched, he can proceed to the solid centre of his speech, which is himself. He describes his humble origins and his mother’s tears when she heard him vow to follow in the footsteps of the great Sir Makepeace. If only my father could be here tonight, seated among you good people. An arm lifts and points to the rafters, as if picking out an aeroplane, but it is God whom Rick is indicating.

“And let me say this to the voters of Little Chedworth tonight. Without a certain person up there acting night and day for me as my senior partner—laugh if you will, because I would rather be the object of your mockery than fall prey to the cynicism and Godlessness that is sweeping through our country—without a certain person’s helping hand and you all know who I mean, oh yes you do!—I wouldn’t be where I am today, offering myself—be it never so humbly—to the people of Gulworth North.” He speaks of his understanding of the export market and his pride at selling British products to those foreigners who will never know how much they owe us. His arm strikes out at us again and he issues a challenge. He is British to the core and he doesn’t care who knows it. He can bring British common sense to every problem you throw at him. “Bar none,” says Syd approvingly under his breath. But if we know a better man for the job than Rickie Pym, we had better speak up now. If we prefer the airy-fairy class prejudices of the High Tories who think they own the people’s birthright, whereas in reality they are sucking the people’s blood, then we should stand up here and now and say so without fear or favour and let’s have it out once and for all. Nobody volunteers. On the other hand, if we would rather hand over the country to the Marxists and Communists and the bully-boy trade unions who are bent on dragging this country to its knees—and let’s face it, that’s what the Labour vote is all about—then better to come out with it in the full glare of the public gaze of the voters of Little Chedworth and not skulk in the dark like miserable conspirators.

Once again, nobody volunteers, though Rick and everyone on the dais glowers around the room in search of a miscreant hand or guilty face.

“Now press button B for Beautiful,” Syd whispers dreamily and closes his eyes for extra pleasure as Rick starts the long climb towards the stars, which like Liberal ideals we cannot reach but can only profit from their presence.

Again Pym looks round. Not a face but is wrapt in love for Rick, save the one bereaved woman in her veil. This is what I came for, Pym tells himself excitedly. Democracy is when you share your father with the world. The applause fades but Pym goes on clapping until he realises he is the only one. He seems to hear his name being called, and observes to his surprise that he is standing. Faces turn to him, too many. Some are smiling. He makes to sit but Syd shakes him back to his feet with a hand under his armpit. The ward chairman is speaking and this time he is recklessly audible.

“I understand our candidate’s celebrated young son Maggus is among us here tonight, having interrupted his legal studies at Oggsford in order to assist his father in his great gampaign,” he says. “I’m sure we’d all appreciate a word from you, Maggus, if you’ll favour us. Maggus? Where is he?”

“Over ’ere, governor!” Syd yells. “Not me. Him.”

If Pym is resisting, he is not aware of it. I have fainted. I am an accident. Syd’s ginger ale has knocked me out. The crowd separates, strong hands bear him towards the dais, floating voters gaze down on him. Pym ascends, Rick seizes him in a bear-hug; a yellow rosette is nailed to Pym’s collarbone by the ward chairman. Pym is speaking, and a cast of thousands is staring up at him—well, sixty, at least—smiling at his first brave words.

“I expect you are all asking yourselves,” Pym begins long before anything has occurred to him. “I expect that many of you here tonight, even after that fine speech, are asking yourselves, what manner of man my father is.”

They are. He can see it in their faces. They want the confirmation of their faith, and Maggus the Oggsford lawyer supplies it without a blush. For Rick, for England, and for fun. As he speaks he believes as usual every word he says. He paints Rick as Rick has painted himself, but with the authority of a loving son and legal brain who picks his words but never splits them. He refers to Rick as the plain man’s honest friend—“and I should know, he’s been the best friend I’ve had these twenty years or more.” He depicts him as the reachable star in his childlike firmament, shining before him as an example of chivalrous humility. The image of the singer Wolfram von Eschenbach wanders through his mind and he considers offering them Rick as Little Chedworth’s soldier-poet, wooing and jousting his way to victory. Caution prevails. He describes the influence of our patron saint TP, “marching on long after the old soldier has fought his last fight.” How whenever we had to move house—a nervous moment—TP’s portrait was the first thing to be hung up. He speaks of a father blessed with a fair man’s sense of justice. With Rick as my father, he asks, how could I have contemplated any other calling than the law? He turns to Sylvia, who roosts at Rick’s side in her rabbitskin collar and stay-press smile. With a choke he thanks her for taking up the burdens of motherhood where my own poor mother was obliged to lay them down. Then, as quickly as it all began, it is over, and Pym is hastening after Rick down the aisle towards the door, brushing away his tears and clasping hands in Rick’s wake. He reaches the door and takes a misty look back. He sees again the woman in the veiled pill-box hat, seated by herself. He catches the glint of her eye inside the mask and it seems to him baleful and disapproving just when everyone else is being so admiring. A guilty fret replaces his elation. She is not a widow, she is the risen Lippsie. She is E. Weber. She is Dorothy, and I have wronged them all. She is an emissary of the Oggsford Communist Party here to observe my treacherous conversion. The Michaels sent her.

“How was I, son?”

“Fantastic!”

“So were you, son. By God, if I’m spared to be a hundred, I’ll never be a prouder man. Who cut your hair?”

Nobody has cut it for a long time, but Pym lets this go. They are crossing the carpark with difficulty for Rick is holding Pym’s arm in an ambulant bear-hug and they are advancing at an angle like a pair of crookedly hung overcoats. Mr. Cudlove has the Bentley door open and is weeping a teacher’s tears of pride.

“Beautiful, Mr. Magnus,” he says. “It was Karl Marx come alive, sir. We shall never forget it.”

Pym thanks him distractedly. As so often when on the crest of a phoney triumph, he is gripped by an unfocussed sense of God’s approaching retribution. What have I done wrong to her? he keeps asking himself. I’m young and fluent and Rick’s son. I’m wearing my new unpaid-for suit from Hall Brothers, the tailor. Why won’t she love me like the rest of them? He is thinking, like every artist before or since him, of the only member of the audience who did not applaud.

It is the following Saturday, it is approaching midnight. Campaign fever is mounting fast. In a few minutes, it will be Eve of Poll Day minus three. A new poster saying “He Needs YOU on Thursday” is stuck to Pym’s window, yellow bunting with the same message is strung from the sash, across the street to the pawnbroker’s opposite. Yet Pym is lying fully dressed and smiling on his bed, and not a thought of the campaign is going through his mind. He is in Paradise with a girl called Judy, the daughter of a Liberal farmer who has lent her to us to drive Old Nellies to the booths, and Paradise is the front of her parked van on the way to Little Kimble. The taste of Judy’s skin is on his lips, the smell of her hair is in his nostrils. And when he cups his hands over his eyes they are the same hands that for the first time in human history enclosed a young girl’s breasts. The bedroom is on the first floor of a rundown corner house called Mrs. Searle’s Temperance Rest, though rest and temperance are the last things it sells. The pubs have closed, the shouts and sighs have taken themselves to another part of town. A woman’s voice shrieks from the alley, “Got a bed for us, Mattie? It’s Jessie. Come on, you old bugger, we’re freezing.” An upper window bangs open and the blurred voice of Mr. Searle advises Jessie to take her client behind the bus shelter. “What do you think we are, Jess?” he complains. “A bloody doss house?” Of course we aren’t. We are the Liberal Candidate’s campaign headquarters and dear old Mattie Searle our landlord, though he didn’t know it till a month ago, has been a Liberal all his life.

Careful not to wake himself from his erotic reverie, Pym tiptoes to the window and squints steeply downward into the hotel courtyard. To one side the kitchen. To the other the residents’ dining room, now the campaign’s committee rooms. In its lighted window Pym makes out the bowed grey heads of Mrs. Alcock and Mrs. Catermole, our tireless helpers, as they determinedly seal the last envelopes of the day.

He returns to his bed. Wait, he thinks. They can’t stay up all night. They never do. His conquest in one field is inspiring him to conquest in another. Tomorrow being the sabbath, Our Candidate rests his troops and contents himself with pious appearances at the best-attended Baptist churches where he is disposed to preach on simplicity and service. Tomorrow at eight o’clock Pym will stand at the bus stop for Nether Wheatley and Judy will meet him there in her father’s van and in the boot she will have the toboggan the gamekeeper made for her when she was ten. She knows the hill, she knows the barn beside it, and it is agreed between them without fallbacks that somewhere around ten-thirty, depending on how much tobogganing they do, Judy Barker will take Magnus Pym to the barn and anoint him her full and consummated lover.

But in the meantime Pym has a different slope to scale or descend. Beyond the committee rooms lies a staircase to the cellar, and in the cellar—Pym has seen it—stands the chipped green filing cabinet that he has aspired to for three-quarters of his life and too often tried in vain to penetrate. In Pym’s wallet beneath his pillow nestles the pair of blue steel dividers with which the Michaels have taught him to spring cheap locks. In Pym’s mind, heated by voluptuous ambitions, is the calm conviction that a man who can gain access to Judy’s breasts can burst open the fortress of Rick’s secrets.

His hands over his face once more, he relives each delicious moment of the day. He was bounced from sleep as usual by Syd and Mr. Muspole, who have taken to shouting Crazy Gang obscenities through his bedroom door.

“Come on, Magnus, give it a rest. You’ll go blind, you know.”

“It’ll drop off, Magnus, dear, if you don’t let it grow. Doctor will have to strap it up with a matchstick. What will Judy say then?”

Over early breakfast, Major Maxwell-Cavendish bawls out Saturday’s orders to the court. Pamphlets are obsolete, he announces. The only thing we can hit them with now is loudspeakers and more loudspeakers, backed by frontal attacks on their own doorsteps. “They know we’re here. They know we mean business. They know we’ve got the best candidate and the best policy for Gulworth. What we’re after now is every single, individual vote. We’re going to pick them off one by one and drag them to the polls by sheer force of will. Thank you.”

Now the detail. Syd will take number one loudspeaker and two ladies—laughter—down to that bit of scrubland beside the race course where the gyppos hang out—gyppos have votes same as everyone else. Shouts of “Put a fiver on Prince Magnus for us while you’re about it!

”

Mr. Muspole and another lady will take loudspeaker number two and pick up Major Blenkinsop and our miserable agent from the Town Hall at nine. Magnus will take Judy Barker again and cover Little Kimble and the five outlying villages.

“You can cover Judy too while you’re about it,” says Morrie Washington. The joke, though brilliant, receives only token laughter. The court is uneasy about Judy. It distrusts her composure and resents her claim on their mascot. Barker looks down her nose at you, they complain behind her back. Barker’s not the good scout we thought she was. But Pym these days cares less than he used to about the court’s opinion. He shrugs off their gibes and, while the committee rooms are unguarded, slips down the steps to the cellar where he inserts the Michaels’ dividers in the lock of the chipped green filing cabinet. One prong to hold back the spring, one to turn the chamber. The lock pops open. I am in the presence of a miracle and the miracle is me. I will return. Quickly relocking the cabinet he hastens back upstairs and not one minute after establishing his ascendancy over life’s secrets he is standing innocently on the hotel doorstep in time for Judy’s van to pull up beside him, the loudspeaker fixed to its roof with harvest twine. She smiles but does not speak. This is their third morning together but on the first they were accompanied by another lady helper. Nevertheless Pym contrived several times to brush his hand against Judy’s as she changed gear or passed him the microphone, and when they parted at lunchtime and he made to kiss her cheek, she boldly redirected him to her lips by placing a long hand on the back of his neck. She is a tall, sunny girl with fair skin and an agricultural voice. She has a long mouth and playful eyes inside her serious spectacles.

“Vote for Pym, the People’s Man,” Pym booms into the loudspeaker as they head through Gulworth’s suburbs towards open country. He is holding Judy’s hand quite openly, first on her lap and now, at Judy’s instigation, on his own. “Save Gulworth from the scourge of party politics.” Then he recites a limerick about Mr. Lakin the Conservative Candidate, composed by Morrie Washington the great poet, which the major vows is winning votes everywhere.

“There’s a bossy old buffer called Lakin,

Whose manners are frightfully takin’.

But if he thinks Rickie Pym

Can be beaten by him,

It’s a deuce of a bloomer he’s makin’.”

Reaching across him, Judy switches off the instrument. “I think your dad’s got a cheek,” she says cheerfully when the city is safely behind them. “Who does he think we are? Bloody idiots?”

Steering the car into an empty side lane, Judy turns off the engine, unbuttons her jacket and then her blouse. And where Pym had been expecting more impediments he discovers only her small and perfect breasts with nipples rigid from the cold. She watches him proudly as he puts his hands over them.

For the rest of the day, Pym walked on clouds of light. Judy had to return to the farm to help her father with the milking, so she dropped him at an inn on the road to Norwich, where he had agreed to meet up with Syd and Morrie and Mr. Muspole for a discreet wet on neutral territory clear of the constituency. With polling day so near, an end-of-term hilarity has infected the gathering and, having remained upright until closing time, the four of them piled into Syd’s car and sang “Underneath the Arches” over the loudspeaker all the way to the border, where they once more put on their jackets and their pious faces. In the early evening Pym attended Rick’s final Saturday pep talk to his helpers. Henry V on the eve of Agincourt could have done no better. They should not flinch from the final push. Remember Hitler. They should carry a straight bat to victory, they should keep the left elbow up through life, praise God and give her the whip in the final straight. Their ears ringing with these exhortations, the team scrambled for the cars. By now Pym’s speech is a fully incorporated feature of the programme. The punters love him and inside the court he has the status of a star. In the Bentley, the two champions can squeeze each other’s hands and exchange notes over a glass of warm bubbly to keep them going between triumphs.

“That gloomy woman was there again,” said Pym. “I think she’s following us round.”

“What woman’s that, son?” said Rick.

“I don’t know. She wears a veil.”

And somewhere, amid these pressures and activities, Pym contrived to undertake the most perilous foray of his sexual career till now. Having located an all-night chemist in Ribsdale on the other side of town, he took a tram there and made a series of passes to check his back before marching boldly to the counter and purchasing a packet of three contraceptive sheaths from an old reprobate who neither arrested him nor asked whether he was married. And there is his prize now, winking at him in its mauve-and-white wrapping from its hiding place at the centre of a stack of “Vote Pym” circulars as he tiptoes once more to his bedroom window and looks down.

The committee rooms are in darkness. Go.

The way is clear but Pym is too old a hand to make straight for his target. Time spent on reconnaissance is never time wasted, Jack Brotherhood used to say. I will fight my way to the heart of the enemy and earn her. He begins in the hall, affecting to read the day’s notices. The ground floor is by now deserted. Mattie’s filthy office is empty, the front door chained. He begins his slow ascent. Two doors past his own on the next floor lies the residential lounge. Pym opens the door and smiles in. Syd Lemon and Morrie Washington are playing a four of snooker against a couple of dear old friends of Mattie Searle who look like horse thieves but they could be sheep rustlers. Syd wears his hat. Two locally obtained Lovelies are chalking cues and dispensing comfort. The mood is fraught.

“What are you playing?” says Pym as if hoping for a game.

“Polo,” says Syd. “Piss off, Titch, and don’t be funny.”

“I meant how many frames.”

“Best of nine,” says Morrie Washington.

Syd misses his shot and swears. Pym closes the door. They are settled. No danger there for at least an hour. He continues his patrol. Another flight upwards the atmosphere tightens, as it will in any secret building. Here is the quiet room where invited guests may kick off their shoes and take part in a relaxing hand of poker with Our Candidate and his circle. Pym enters without knocking. At a table strewn with cash and brandy glasses, Rick and Perce Loft are locked in a sharp piece of betting with Mattie Searle. The pot is a stack of petrol coupons, which in the court are preferred as hard currency. Mattie raises Rick and Rick sees him. Rick looks on with forbearance while Mattie scoops the pool.

“They tell me you and Colonel Barker had a crack at Little Kimble this morning, old son.”

I forget exactly why Rick called Judy Colonel. I have an idea it was a reference to a celebrated lesbian who had been involved in a court case. Whatever the reason, Pym did not care for it.

“The boy had them kissing the ground, Rickie,” Perce Loft confirms.

“Not the only thing he’s been kissing, if you ask me,” says Rick and everybody laughs because it is Rick’s joke.

Pym leans in for the good-night bear-hug and hears Rick sniff his cheek, which has Judy’s smell on it.

“Just you keep that old mind of yours on the election, son,” he says, patting the same cheek in warning.

Down the corridor lies Morrie Washington’s publicity department which doubles as disinformation section. Cases of whisky and nylons are stacked against the wall waiting to pave the way to the last electoral favours. It was from Morrie’s desk that the baseless rumours went out regarding the Tory Candidate’s support of Sir Oswald Mosley, and the Labour Candidate’s overaddiction to his pupils. Springing the locks with his dividers, Pym flicks quickly through the drawers. One bank statement, one set of indecent playing cards. The statement is in the name of Mr. Morris Wurzheimer and is overdrawn by a hundred and twenty pounds. The playing cards would be impressive if Judy’s reality did not eclipse them. Relocking everything neatly after him Pym climbs halfway up the last flight, then hovers listening to Mr. Muspole murmuring on the telephone. The top floor is the sanctum. It is safe room, cypher room and operations centre combined. At the end of the corridor lie Our Candidate’s State Apartments which not even Pym has penetrated so far, for Sylvia now spends erratic hours in bed having headaches or trying to grill herself brown with a mysterious hand lamp she has bought from Mr. Muspole. He can therefore never be sure of a safe run. Next door resides the so-called Action Committee, where big money and support are mustered and promises traded. What promises is still half a mystery to me, though Syd once spoke of a plan to fill the ancient harbour with cement and make a carpark of it, to the pleasure of many influential contractors.

Abruptly Mr. Muspole rings off. Without a sound, Pym swivels on his heel and prepares to beat an orderly retreat down the stairs. He is saved by the whirr of Mr. Muspole dialling again. He is talking to a lady, asking tender questions and purring at the answers. Muspole can carry on like this for hours. It is his little pleasure.

Having waited till his voice has settled to a reassuring flow Pym returns to the ground floor. The darkness of the committee rooms smells of tea and deodorant. The door to the courtyard is locked from the inside. Pym softly turns the key and pockets it. The cellar staircase stinks of cat. Boxes are stored on the steps. Groping his way down, unwilling to put on the light lest it be visible from the courtyard, Pym has an unmistakable mental reprise of a day in Bern when he carried his damp washing down the stone steps to another cellar and was scared of tripping over Herr Bastl. And as he reaches the bottom step he does indeed miss his footing. Lurching forward he falls heavily on to the cellar door and pushes it open with both hands as he tries to steady himself. The door screeches in the grime. The impetus of his body is enough to carry him into the cellar which to his surprise is lit by a pale light. By its glow Pym makes out the green filing cabinet and standing before it a woman holding what appears to be a chisel, examining its locks by the ailing beam of a bicycle lamp. Her eyes, which are turned to him, are dark and pugnacious. There is not a flicker of guilt about her. And it is a thing I wonder at still that it never seriously occurred to him to doubt that she was the same woman, with the same gaze, and the same intense and disapproving quietness, whose veiled face had fixed on him after his triumph on the hustings of Little Chedworth, and stalked him through a dozen meetings since. Even asking her name Pym realises that he knows it already though he is blessed with no faculty of premonition. She wears a long skirt that could have been her mother’s. She has a hard, pebble face and young hair turned to grey. Her eyes are disconcertingly straight and bright, even in the gloom.

“My name is Peggy Wentworth,” she replies defiantly in a tough Irish brogue. “Shall I spell it for you, Magnus? Peggy short for Margaret, have you heard that? Your father, Mr. Richard Thomas Pym, killed my husband John, and as good as killed me too. And if it takes me the rest of my living death till they put me in the grave beside him, I’ll find the proof of it, and bring the brute to justice.”

Seeing a flicker of moving light Pym glances sharply behind him. Mattie Searle is standing in the doorway with a blanket over his shoulders. His head is hung sideways to favour his good ear while he squints first at Pym then at Peggy over the top of his spectacles. How much has he heard? Pym has no idea. But his mind is made fertile by alarm.

“This is Emma from Oxford, Mattie,” he says boldly. “Emma, this is Mr. Searle who owns the hotel.”

“Pleased to meet you,” says Peggy calmly.

“Emma and I are in a college play next month, Mattie. She came up to Gulworth so that we could rehearse together. We thought we’d be out of your way down here.”

“Oh yes,” says Mattie. His eyes slip from Peggy to Pym and back again, with a knowledge that makes nonsense of Pym’s lies. They hear his lazy shuffle going up the stairs.

I can’t tell you very accurately any more, Tom, which bits she told Pym where. His first thought on escaping the hotel was to keep going, so they hopped a bus and went as far as it took them, which turned out to be the oldest, most broken-down bit of waste dockland you could imagine: gutted warehouses with windows you could see the moon through, idle cranes that rose like gallows straight out of the sea. A bunch of roving knife-bladers had pitched camp there, they must have worked at night and slept by day, because I remember their Romany faces rocking over their wheels as they trod their treadles, and the sparks gushing over the watching children. I remember girls with men’s muscles flinging fish baskets while they yelled ribaldries at each other, and fishermen strutting among them in their oilskins, too grand to be bothered with anyone but themselves. I remember with a leap of gratitude every flash of face or voice outside the windows of the prison she had locked me in with her relentless monologue.

At a tea-stall on the waterfront while they stood shivering with a crowd of down-and-outs, Peggy told Pym the story of how Rick had stolen her farm. She had begun it the moment they got on the bus, for the benefit of anyone who’d care to hear it, and had continued it without a comma or a full stop since, and Pym knew that it was all true, all terrible, even if quite often the sheer venom in her drove him secretly to Rick’s protection. They walked to get warm but she didn’t stop talking for one second. When he bought her beans and egg at a Seamen’s Mission hut called the Rover, still she went on talking as she spread her elbows and sawed the toast and used her teaspoon to get up the sauce. It was at the Rover that she told Pym about Rick’s great trust fund that took possession of the nine thousand pounds of insurance money paid to her husband John after he fell into the thresher and lost both legs below the knee and all the fingers of one hand. As she told this part she drew the lines of amputation on her own scant limbs without looking at them, and Pym sensed her obsession again and was scared of it. The one voice I never did for you, Tom, is Peggy’s Irish brogue dropping into Rick’s chapel cadences as she repeated his silver-tongued promises: twelve and a half percent plus profits, my dear, year in and year out, enough to see dear old John right for as long as he’s spared, and enough for yourself when he’s gone, and enough left over after that, my dear, to put some by for that first-rate boy of yours for when he goes to college and reads his law just the way my own son will—they’re birds of a feather. It was a Thomas Hardy story that she told, full of casual disasters that seemed to have been timed by an angry God to obtain the maximum of misfortune. And she was Hardy’s woman to go with it: lured forward by her obsession, and only her own destiny left to deal with.

John Wentworth, as well as being a victim, was an ass, she explained, and was ready to be swayed by the first charmer who walked into the room. He went to his grave convinced that Rick was a saviour and a pal. His farm was a Cornish manor called Tamar Rose where every grain of wheat had to be wrestled from the sea wind. He had inherited it from a wiser father, and Alastair their son was his only heir. When John died there was not a penny for anybody. Everything signed away, every bloody thing mortgaged to the neck, Magnus—on which word Peggy passed her bean-stained knife across her throat. She told about Rick visiting John in hospital soon after his accident and the flowers and the chocolates and the bubbly—and Pym in his mind’s eye saw the basket of black-market fruit beside his own hospital bed when he woke up after his operation. He remembered Rick’s noble caring for the aged and decrepit that he had helped him with during the war years of the great crusade. He remembered Lippsie’s sobbing voice calling Rick a

teef,

and Rick’s letters to her promising to see her right.

“And a free train ticket for myself,” Peggy is saying, “to come up to Truro Hospital to visit him. And your father driving me home after, Magnus, nothing too much trouble for him until he has our man’s money.” The documents he made John sign, Magnus, always witnessed by the prettiest nurses. How your father always had the patience for John, always explaining to him whatever he couldn’t understand, over and again if necessary, but John won’t listen, the deluded man is too trusting and lazy in his mind.

A fit of fury seizes her: “Me up at four in the morning for the milking and falling asleep over my accounts at midnight!” she shouts as sleepy heads turn to her from other tables. “And that stupid husband of mine lying warm in his bed in Truro signing it all away behind my back while your father sits by his bedside playing the saint to him, Magnus. And my Alastair needing a pair of shoes to walk to school in, while you’re living on the hog there with your fine schools and your fine clothes, Magnus, God save you!” For it turns out, of course, on John’s death, that for reasons outside everyone’s control the great trust fund has suffered a purely temporary problem of liquidity and can’t pay the twelve and a half percent plus profits after all. It can’t refund the capital either. And that to tide everyone over this sticky patch, John Wentworth took the wise precaution, just before his death, of mortgaging the farm and land and livestock, and bloody nearly his wife and child as well, so that nobody will ever want for anything again. And had given the proceeds to his dear old pal Rick. And that Rick has brought down a distinguished lawyer, name of Loft, all the way from London with him, just to explain the implications of this smart move to John on his deathbed. And John, to please everyone as usual, has written out a special long letter all in his own hand, assuring whom it may concern that his decision has been taken while he was of sound mind and in full possession of his mental faculties and was not in any manner subjected to undue influence by a saint and his lawyer while he was lying gasping out his last. All this in case Peggy, or for that matter Alastair, should later have the bad manners to dispute the document in court or try to get John’s nine thousand pounds back, or should otherwise show a lack of faith in Rick’s selfless stewardship of John’s ruin.

“When did all this happen?” says Pym.

She tells him the dates, she tells him the day of the week and the hour of the day. She pulls a wad of letters from her handbag signed by Perce and regretting that “our Chairman, Mr. R. T. Pym, is unavailable, being absent indefinitely on a mission of national necessity,” and assuring her that “the documents relating to the Freehold of Tamar Rose are at present being processed with a view to acquiring a large Figure in your interest.” And she watches him with her mad cold eyes as he reads them by the light of a street lamp while they sit huddled on a broken bench. She takes back the letters and returns them to their envelopes lovingly, careful of the edges and the folds. As she continues talking, Pym wants to close his ears or slap a hand over her mouth. He wants to get up and run to the sea-wall and throw himself over. He wants to scream “Shut up!” But all he does is ask her, please, I beg you, if you would be so kind, don’t continue with your story.

“Why not, pray?”

“I don’t want to hear it. It’s not my business, this part. He robbed you. The rest doesn’t make any difference,” says Pym.

Peggy doesn’t agree. She is flailing her Irish back with her Irish guilt and using Pym’s presence as the excuse to do it. She is talking in a gush. It is what she has been waiting to tell him best.

“And why not—seeing as the bloody man possesses you anyway? If he’s already got his filthy arms around you sure as if he had you in his fancy bed with the frills and the fancy mirrors”—it is Rick’s bedroom in Chester Street she is describing—“seeing as he’s already got the power of life and death over you and you’re a foolish lonely woman in the world with a sickly boy to care for and a bankrupt farm to mind, and not a soul but the stupid bailiff to say nice day to for a week at a time?”

“It’s enough to know he’s done you wrong,” Pym insists. “Please, Peggy. The rest is private.”

“Seeing as he can beckon you up to London first-class, send the tickets, just with a flick of his fingers the moment he gets back from his national necessity, because he thinks you’re going to put the lawyers on him? Well, you go, don’t you? If you haven’t had a man for two years and more and only your own body to look at withering in the mirror every day, you go!”

“I’m sure you do. I’m sure there was every reason,” Pym says. “Please don’t tell me any more.”

She is doing Rick’s voice again: “‘ Let’s sort this matter out once and for all, Peggy my dear. I’m not having a sour bit of business come between us when all I ever wanted was to see you right.’ Well, you go, don’t you?” Her voice is echoing in the empty square and out over the water. “My God, you go. You pack your bag, you take your boy and lock the door because you’re off to get your money and some justice. You scurry up there bursting to have the fight of your life just the moment you set eyes on him. You leave the washing and the dishes and the milking and the penny-pinching life he’s put you to. And you tell the stupid bailiff to mind the shop for you, me and Alastair we’re going up to London. And when you arrive, instead of a business conference with Mr. Percy Loft and Mr. Bloody Muspole and the gang of them, the man buys you fine clothes in Bond Street and treats you like a princess, with the limousines and the restaurants and the fancy petticoats and silks—well you can always have your row with him later, can’t you?”

“No,” says Pym. “You can’t. You’ve got to have it then or never.”

“If he’s trodden you into the mud these years the least you can do is get a bit back from him, in exchange for all the misery, take him for every penny he’s robbed you of.” Yet again she does Rick’s voice: “‘ I always fancied you, Peggy, you know that. You’re a good scout, the best. Always had my eye on that pretty Irish smile of yours and not only the smile either.’ So all right, he’s got a treat prepared for the boy as well. Takes him to the Arsenal and we sit up there like gods in the special box with the lords and grandees, and dinner at Quaglino’s after, him the People’s Man, with a two-foot cake with the boy’s name written on it, you should see Alastair’s face. And next day a Harley Street specialist laid on to listen to his cough and a gold watch for the boy after, for being the brave one, with his initials on it, ‘From RTP to a fine young man.’ Come to think of it, it’s not at all unlike the one you’re wearing now—is that a gold one too? So when a man’s done all that for you and been a bastard—well you have to admit to yourself after a couple of days of it, there’s many worse bastards than him in the world. Most of them wouldn’t split their bloody Bath bun with you, let alone a two-foot cake at Quaglino’s and somebody to take the boy home to bed after, so that the grown-ups can go to a nightclub and have a bit of fun—why not if he always fancied me? There’s not many women wouldn’t put off a fight for a day or two for some of that, I suppose—so why not?”

She is speaking as if Pym is no longer there and she is right. She has deafened him but he can still hear her. As I hear her still, an endless, needling babble of destruction. She is speaking to the derelict cattle market with its broken pens and stopped clock, but Pym is numb and dead and anywhere but here. He is in the Overflow House at his prep school and Rick’s raised voice and Lippsie’s weeping keep waking him in his sleep. He is on Dorothy’s bed at The Glades and bored to bloody death, with his head against her shoulder staring at the white sky through the window all day long. He is in an attic somewhere in Switzerland, wondering to God why he has killed his friend to please an enemy.

She is describing Rick’s madness with her own. Her voice is a nagging, querulous torrent and he hates it to distraction. The way the man boasted. He’d not a foot on the earth when he started with his lying. How he had been Lady Mountbatten’s lover and she’d assured him he was better than Noël Coward. How they’d wanted him for Ambassador in Paris but he’d turned it down; he’d no patience with the airy-fairies. And about the stupid green filing cabinet with his rotten secrets in it, imagine the madness of a fellow who spends his hours weaving the rope they ought to hang him with! How he’d led her barefoot to it in her nightdress, look at this my child. The record, he called it. All the rights and the wrongs he’d done. All the evidence of his innocence—his bloody righteousness. How, when he was judged, as judged he would surely be, everything in this stupid cabinet would be put into the balance, rights and wrongs together, and we would see him for what he was, up alongside of the angels while us poor sinners down here bleed and starve for the glory of him. It’s what he’s put together to con the Almighty with and that’s the short of it—imagine the impertinence, and him a bloody Baptist too!

Pym asks her how she has known where to find it. I saw the stupid thing being delivered, she says. I was keeping a watch on Searle’s hotel the first day of the campaign. The pansy Cudlove drove it up specially in his limousine, the cost alone. The bastard Loft helped him carry it to the cellar, first time he’s got his hands dirty. Rick didn’t dare leave it in London while they were all up here. “I have to put the proof on him, Magnus,” she keeps repeating as he leads her through the dawn to her miserable lodging-house, her voice whining and insisting in his ear like a machine that nobody can stop. “If he’s got the proof there like he says, I’ll have it off of him and turn it back on him, I swear I will. All right, I’ve taken a drop of money off him, it’s true. But what’s the money when he’s cheated me in love? What’s the money when he can walk down the street a grandee and there’s my John rotting in his grave? And the people in the street all clapping for him, for Rickie boy? And con his way to Heaven into the bargain? What’s the use of a poor deluded victim like me who let him have his will with her and will burn in Hell for it, if she won’t do her duty by the world and point him up for the devil that he is? Where’s the proof? I’m asking.”

“Please stop,” said Pym. “I know what you want.”

“Where’s the justice? If he’s got it there I’ll have it from him, thank you. I’ve no letters above a couple of procrastinators from Perce Loft, and what do they say? It’s like trying to nail a raindrop to the wall, I tell you.”

“Try to be calm now,” Pym said. “Please.”

“I took myself to that stupid Lakin, the Tory. Half a day it took of waiting but I got to him. ‘Rick Pym’s a shark,’ I tell him. What’s the good of telling that to a Tory when they’re all sharks anyway? I told the Labour but they kept saying ‘What’s he done?’ They said they’ll enquire and thank you, but what will they find, the poor innocents?”

Mattie Searle is sweeping the courtyard. Pym is indifferent to his scrutiny. Pym carries himself with authority, using the same walk that got him to Lippsie’s bicycle and past the policeman to the Overflow House. I am authority. I am British. Will you kindly get out of my way.

“I left something in the cellar,” he says carelessly.

“Oh yes,” says Mattie.

Peggy Wentworth’s bandsaw voice is cutting into his soul. What dreadful echoes has it woken in him? In what empty house of his childhood is it nagging and whining at him? Why is he so abject before its dredging insistence? She is the risen Lippsie, speaking out from the grave at last. She is the world inside my head made strident. She is the sin I can never expiate. Put your head in the basin, Pym. Hold these taps and listen to me while I explain why no punishment will ever be enough for you. Put him on bread and water, his father’s child. Why do you wet your bed, old son? Don’t you know there’s a thousand quid in cash waiting for you at the end of your first dry year? He switches on the committee-room lights, throws open the door to the cellar steps and stomps heavily down them. Cardboard boxes. Commodities. A glut to fill the shortages. The Michaels’ dividers to the fore again, better than a Swiss penknife. He trips the lock of the green cabinet and pulls out the first drawer as the glow begins to spread over him.

Lippschitz first name Anna, two volumes only. Why Lippsie, it’s you at last, he thinks calmly. Well it was a short life, wasn’t it? No time now, but rest where you are and I’ll come back and claim you later. Watermaster Dorothy, Marital, one volume only. Well it was a short marriage too, but wait for me, Dot, for I’ve other ghosts I must attend to first. He closes the first drawer and pulls open the second. Rick, you bastard, where are you? Bankruptcy, the whole drawer full of it. He opens the third. The imminence of his discovery is setting his body on fire: the eyelids, the surfaces of his back and waist. But his fingers are light and quick and agile. This is what I was born for, if I was born at all. I am God’s detective, seeing everybody right. Wentworth, a dozen of them, tagged in Rick’s handwriting. Foremost in his mind Pym has the dates of Muspole’s letter regretting Rick’s absence for his national necessity. He remembers the Fall and Rick’s long healthy holiday while he and Dorothy were sweating out their imprisonment in The Glades. Rick you bastard where were you? “Come on, old son, we’re pals, aren’t we?” In a minute I shall hear Herr Bastl barking.

He opens the last drawer and sees Rex versus Pym 1938, three fat files, and beside it Rex versus Pym 1944, one only. He pulls out the first of the 1938 batch, replaces it and selects the last instead. He turns to the final page first and reads the judge’s summing-up, verdict, sentence, the immediate disposal of the prisoner. In calm ecstasy he turns back to the beginning and starts again. No camera in those days. No copier, no tape-recorders. Only what you can see and hear and memorise and steal. He reads for an hour. A clock strikes eight but it means nothing to him. I am following my vocation. Divine service is in progress. You women want nothing but to drag us down.

Mattie is still sweeping the courtyard but his outlines are blurred.

“Find it then?” says Mattie.

“Eventually, thanks, yes.”

“That’s the way then,” says Mattie.

He gains his bedroom, turns the key in the lock, pulls a chair to the washstand, starts writing at once, from the memory straight on to the paper, not a thought for style. A clock strikes again and once he hears a knock, first timid then louder. Then a soft and pessimistic “Magnus?” before the feet slowly descend the stairs. But Pym is at the heart of things, women are temporarily abhorrent to him, even Judy is irrelevant to his destiny. He hears her feet clip across the forecourt and the sound of her van driving away, slow at first, then suddenly much faster. Good riddance.

“Dear Peggy”—he is writing—“I hope that the enclosed will be of use to you.”

“Dear Belinda”—he is writing—“I really must own to being fascinated by this glimpse of the democratic process at work. What seems at first to be such a rough instrument turns out to be equipped with all sorts of refined checks and balances. Do let’s meet as soon as I return to London.”

“Dearest Father”—he is writing—“Today is Sunday and in four days we shall know our fate and yours. But I do want you to know how much I have learned to admire the courage and conviction with which you have fought your arduous campaign.”

On the dais, Rick had not moved. His flick-knife stare was still fixed on Pym. Yet he appeared quite calm. Nothing had happened behind him in the hall that could not be dealt with, apparently. His preoccupation was with his son, whom he was regarding with dangerous intensity. He was wearing his statesman’s silver tie that night and a handmade shirt of cream silk with double cuffs and the great big RTP links from Asprey’s. He had had his hair cut earlier in the day, and Pym could smell the barber’s lotion as father and son continued to face each other. Once, Rick’s gaze switched to Muspole and it was Pym’s later impression Muspole nodded to him in some signal. The silence in the hall was absolute. No coughs or creaks that Pym could hear, not even from the Old Nellies whom Rick, as always, had appointed to the front row where they could remind him of his dear mother and his beloved father who had died so many heroes’ deaths.

At last Rick turned, and advanced towards the audience with the dutiful Goodman Pym walk that so often preceded an act of particular hypocrisy. He reached the table but did not stop. He reached the microphone and switched it off: let no machine come between us at this moment. He went on walking till he had reached the edge of the dais, at the point where it meets the fine curving staircase. He set his jaw, he looked out over the faces, he allowed his features to betray a moment’s soul-searching before he set himself to speak. Somewhere on his way between Pym and the audience he had unbuttoned his jacket. Strike me here, he was saying. Here is my heart. At last, he spoke. His voice higher than usual. Hear the emotion clenching it.

“Would you mind repeating that question, please, Peggy? Very loudly, my dear, so that everyone can hear?”

Peggy Wentworth did as she was bidden. But as Rick’s guest now as well as his accuser.

“Thank you, Peggy.” Then he asked for a chair for her so that she could sit down like everybody else. It was brought by Major Blenkinsop himself. Peggy sat on it in the aisle, obediently, a child in disgrace, waiting to hear some home truths. So it seemed to Pym, and still does, for I have long believed that everything Rick did this night was prepared in advance. If they had popped a dunce’s cap on her head Pym would not have been surprised. I believe they had seen Peggy haunting them and Rick had laid out his mental defences in advance of her, as he had often done before. Muspole’s people could have snatched her for the evening. Major Blenkinsop could have been advised she was not welcome inside the hall. There were a dozen ways in the court’s book to keep a crazed and penniless little blackmailer like Peggy at bay for a crucial night. Rick used none of them. He wanted the trial, as ever. He wanted to be judged and found spotless.

“Ladies and gentlemen. This lady’s name is Mrs. Peggy Wentworth. She is a widow whom I have known and tried to help for many years, who has been desperately wronged in life, and who blames me for her misfortune. I hope that after this meeting you will all hear whatever Peggy has to tell you, give her every indulgence at your command, show her every patience. And in your wisdom judge for yourselves where the truth may lie. I hope you will show charity to Peggy, and to me, and remember how hard it is for all of us to accept misfortune without pointing the finger of blame.”

He placed his hands behind his back. His feet were close together.

“Ladies and gentlemen, my old friend Peggy Wentworth is quite right.” Not even Pym, who thought he knew all the instruments in Rick’s orchestra, had heard him so straight and simple in his delivery, so bereft of rhetoric. “Many years ago, ladies and gentlemen, when I was a very young man, striving to get on in life—as we all were once, overeager, ready to cut a few corners—I found myself in the position of the office boy who had borrowed a few stamps from the till and been caught before he had a chance to put them back. I was a first offender, it is true. My mother, like Peggy Wentworth here, was a widow. I had a great father to live up to and only sisters in the family. The responsibilities that weighed upon me, I will admit, blew me across the borders of what Justice, in her blind wisdom, deemed right. Justice exacted her penalty. I paid it in full measure. As I shall pay for it all my life.”

Then the jaw went up and the thick hands untied themselves, and one arm struck out towards the Old Nellies in the front while his eyes and voice reached into the darkness at the back.

“My friends—Peggy, my dear, I still count you as one too—my loyal friends of Gulworth North, I see among you here tonight men and women still young enough to be impulsive. I see others with the experience of life upon them, whose children and grandchildren have gone out into the world to follow their impulses, to strive and make mistakes and overcome them. I want to ask you older people this. If one of these young people—children, grandchildren, or if this son of mine who sits behind me here, poised to collect some of the highest prizes the law of this country can offer—if one of them should ever make a mistake, and pay the price that society exacts, and come home and say, ‘Mum, it’s me. Dad, it’s me’—which one of you sitting here among us tonight is going to slam the door in his face?”

They were standing. They were calling his name. “Rickie—good old Rickie—you get our vote, Rickie boy.” On the dais behind him we were standing too, and Pym saw through his own tears that Syd and Morrie were embracing each other. For once Rick did not acknowledge the applause. He was casting round theatrically for Pym and calling “Magnus, where are you, son?” though he knew perfectly well where he was. Affecting to find him he seized his arm, raised it and drew him forward, almost lifting him off the ground even as he offered him as champion to the jubilant crowd, shouting “Here’s one, here’s one!” I suppose he meant a penitent who has paid the price and come home, though I’ll never be certain because of the roar, and perhaps he said, “Here’s my son.” As to Pym, he could no longer contain himself. He had never adored Rick more. He was choking and clapping, he was shaking Rick’s hand for them with both of his, bear-hugging him and patting his great shoulder for them and telling him he was crackerjack. As he did so, he thought he saw Judy’s pale face and big pale eyes behind their serious spectacles, watching him from the centre of the crowd. My father needed me, he wanted to explain to her. I forgot where the bus stop was. I lost your phone number. I did it for my country. The Bentley was waiting at the front steps, Cudlove at the door. Riding away at Rick’s side, Pym imagined he heard Judy calling out his name: “Pym. You bastard. Where are you?”

It was dawn. Unshaven, Pym sat at his desk, not wanting the daylight. Chin in hand he stared at the last page he had written. Change nothing. Don’t look back, don’t look forward. You do it once, then die. A miserable vision assailed him of the women in his life vainly waiting at every bus stop along his chaotic path. Rising quickly he mixed himself a Nescafé and drank it while it was still too hot for him. Then took up his stapler and marker pen and set himself busily to work—I am a clerk, that is all I am—stapling his cuttings and cross-indexing the helpful references.

Extracts from

Gulworth Mercury

and

Evening Star

reporting Liberal Candidate’s fighting stand on Eve of Poll night in the Town Hall. For libel reasons writers omit direct reference to Peggy Wentworth’s accusations, referring only to Candidate’s spirited self-defence against personal attack. Enter at 21a. Bloody stapler doesn’t work. This sea air rusts everything.

Cutting from London

Times

giving results of Gulworth North by-election:

McKechnie (Labour) 17,970
Lakin (Cons.) 15,711
Pym (Lib.) 6,404.
Semi-literate leader ascribes victory to “miscalculated intervention” of Liberals. Enter at 22a.

Extract from Oxford University

Gazette

notifying waiting world that Magnus Richard Pym has been awarded a B.A. Hons. degree in Modern Languages, Class I. No reference to night hours spent studying previous examination papers, or informal exploration of tutor’s desk drawers with the aid of the Michaels’ ever-handy steel dividers. Entered at 23a.

But actually not entered at all, for in the act of marking this cutting, Pym set it down before him and stared at it, head in hands, with an expression of revulsion.

Rick knew. The bastard knew. His head still between his hands, Pym returns himself to Gulworth later the same night. Father and son are riding in the Bentley, their favourite place. The Town Hall lies behind them, Mrs. Searle’s Temperance Rest is approaching. The tumult of the crowd still rings in their ears. It will be another twenty-four hours before the world will learn the name of the winning candidate, but Rick knows it already. He has been judged and applauded for all his life till now.

“Let me tell you something, old son,” he says in his mellowest and kindest voice. The passing streetlights are switching his wise features on and off, making his triumph appear intermittent. “Never lie, son. I told them the truth. God heard me. He always does.”

“It was fantastic,” says Pym. “Could you possibly let go of my arm, please?”

“No Pym was ever a liar, son.”

“I know,” says Pym, taking back his arm anyway.

“Why couldn’t you have come to me, son? ‘Father,’ you could have said—‘Rickie’ if you like; you’re old enough—‘I’m not reading law any more. I’m building up my languages because I want the gift of tongues. I want to go out into the world like my best pal, and be heard wherever men gather regardless of colour, race or creed.’ Because do you know what I’d have answered if you’d come to me and said that to your old man?”

Pym is too mad, too dead to care.

“You’d have been super,” he says.

“I’d have said: ‘Son, you’re grown up now. You take your own decisions. All your old man can do is play wicket-keeper while Magnus here bats and God does the bowling.’” He grasps Pym’s hand, nearly breaking the fingers. “Don’t shrink away from me like that, old son. I’m not angry with you. We’re pals, remember? We don’t have to tiptoe round each other looking in one another’s pockets, poking in drawers, talking to misguided women in hotel cellars. We come out with it straight. On the table. Now dry those old peepers of yours and give your old pal a hug.”

With his monogrammed silk handkerchief the great statesman magnanimously wipes away the tears of Pym’s rage and impotence.

“Want a good English steak tonight, son?”

“Not much.”

“Old Mattie’s cooking us one with onions. You can invite Judy if you like. We’ll all have a game of chemmy afterwards. She’d like that.”

Raising his head, Pym recovered his marker pen and went back to work.

Extract of Branch minutes of Oxford University Communist Party regretting departure of Comrade M. Pym, tireless worker on behalf of cause. Fraternal thanks for his tremendous efforts. Entered at 24a.

Pained letter from Bursar of Pym’s college enclosing his cheque for his last term’s battles, marked “Refer to Drawer.” Similar letters and cheques from Messrs. Blackwell, Parker (Booksellers), and Hall Brothers (Tailors), entered at 24c.

Pained letter from Pym’s bank manager regretting that following return of cheque drawn in Pym’s favour by the Magnus Dynamic & Astral Company (Bahamas) Ltd., in the sum of two hundred and fifty pounds, he has had no alternative but to refer to drawer the cheques as at 24c.

Extract from London

Gazette

dated March 29, 1951, appointing official receiver in yet another petition for bankruptcy of R.T.P. and eighty-three associated companies.

Letter from Director of Public Prosecutions inviting Pym to present himself for interview on named date in order to explain his relationship with above companies. Entered at 36a.

Military call-up papers offering Pym sanctuary. Grabbed with both hands.

“If I could just sit with you for a bit, Miss D,” said Pym, softly pushing open her kitchen door.

But her chair was empty and the fire out. It was not evening as he had thought, but dawn.

12

I

t was the same dawn. It was time minus ten minutes. It was the moment Brotherhood had lain wakeful and alone for in his rotten flat that was becoming a solitary cell for him, staring at the images of his past in the restless London sky. It was an outdoor game being played by indoor people who didn’t know they were awake. How many times had he sat like this, in rubber boats, on arctic hillsides, pressing the headphones into his ears with kapok mittens to catch the whisper that meant life was not extinct? Here in the communications room on the top floor of the Head Office there were no headphones, no subzero winds to rip through sodden clothing and freeze the operator’s fingers off, no bicycle generator that some poor bastard had to pump at till his legs failed. No aerial that collapsed on you when you most needed it. No two-ton suitcase to be cached in iron-hard soil while the Huns were breathing down your neck. Up here we have dimpled grey-green boxes freshly dusted, with pretty pin-lights and shiny switches. And tuners and amplifiers. And dials to cut out atmospherics. And comfortable chairs for the barons here assembled to rest their candy arses on. And a mysterious compression of the air that clenches your scalp while you watch the green numerals sliding through their prison window as quickly as the later years of life: now I am forty, now I am forty-five, now I am seventy, now I am ten minutes to being dead.

On the raised platform two boys in headphones were patrolling the dials. They’ll never know what it was like, thought Brotherhood. They’ll go to their graves thinking life came out of a packet. Bo Brammel and Nigel sat below them like producers at a preview. Behind them a dozen shadows that Brotherhood had barely bothered with. He noticed Lorimer, Head of Operations. He saw Kate and thought thank heaven she’s alive. At the edge of the stage, Frankel was lugubriously reporting a string of failures. His mid-European accent has thickened.

“Nine-twenty yesterday morning local time, Prague Station has its chief cut-out dial the Watchman household from a callbox, Bo,” he said. “Number engaged. He makes five calls in two hours from round town. Still engaged. He tries Conger. Number out of order. Everybody vanished, everybody out of touch. Midday the Station sends a little girl they own to the canteen where Conger’s daughter goes for lunch. Conger’s daughter is conscious so maybe she knows where her father is. Our little girl is a sixteen-year-old kid, very small, very hardy. She hangs around two hours, checks both sittings, checks the queue. No daughter. She checks the attendance sheets at the factory gate, tells the guards she is the daughter’s room-mate. She’s so innocent they let her. Conger’s daughter is not reported present, is not reported sicklisted. Vanished.”

In the tension nobody spoke to anybody. Everyone spoke to himself. The room was still filling up. How many people does it take to give a network a decent burial? thought Brotherhood. Eight minutes to go.

Frankel continued his dirge. “Seven o’clock yesterday morning local time, Gdansk Station puts two of their local boys to mend a telegraph pole at the end of the street where Merryman lives. His house is in a cul-de-sac. He’s got no other way out. Every day normally he goes to work by car, leaves his house seven-twenty. But yesterday his car is not outside his house. Every other day it is parked outside his house. Not yesterday. From where the boys work they can see his front door. The front door stays closed. No Merryman, nobody at all leaves or enters that house by that door. Downstairs is curtained, no lights, no fresh tracks in the drive. Merryman’s good friend is an architect. Merryman likes to take a coffee with him sometimes on his way to work. This architect is not a Joe, he is not whitelisted.”

“Wenzel,” said Brotherhood.

“Wenzel is the architect’s name, Jack. One of the boys calls up Mr. Wenzel and tells him Merryman’s mother is ill. ‘Where can I get hold of him to give him this bad news?’ he says. Mr. Wenzel says try the laboratory, how ill? The boy says she’s maybe dying, Merryman ought to get to her fast. ‘Give him this message,’ the boy says. ‘Tell him please that Maximilian says he better get to his mother’s bedside fast.’ Maximilian, that’s the codeword for it’s all over. Maximilian means abort, means run, means get the hell out by any known means, don’t bother with customary procedures, run. The boy is resourceful. When he has ceased to speak to Mr. Wenzel, he calls the laboratory where Merryman works. ‘This is Mr. Maximilian. Where’s Merryman? It’s urgent. Tell him Maximilian got to speak to him about his mother.’ Merryman don’t come in today, they tell him. Merryman got a conference in Warsaw.”

Brotherhood was already objecting. “They wouldn’t say that,” he growled. “The labs don’t give out details of staff movements. They’re a top-secret installation, for Christ’s sake. Somebody’s playing games with us.”

“Sure, Jack. My own reaction entirely. You want I go on?”

A couple of heads turned to locate Brotherhood at the back of the room.

“When the line to Merryman went dead we instructed Warsaw to try to reach Voltaire direct,” Frankel continued. He paused. “Voltaire is sick.”

Brotherhood let out an angry laugh. “Voltaire? He hasn’t had a day’s sickness in his life.”

“His Ministry says he’s sick, Jack, his wife says he’s sick, his mistress says he’s sick. He ate some bad mushrooms, gone to hospital. He’s sick. Official. They all say the same.”

“I’ll say it’s official.”

“What do you want me to do, Jack? Tell me something I should do that you would do yourself and I have not done. Okay? It’s a blackout, Jack. Like a silence everywhere. Like a bomb fell.”

“You said you’d keep filling the letter boxes,” Brotherhood said.

“We filled for Merryman yesterday. Money and instructions. We filled.”

“So what happened?”

“Still there. Money and instructions so much he want. Fresh papers, maps, you name it. For Conger we put up two visuals, one for call us, one for evacuate. One curtain on a first floor, one light in a basement window. Is that correct, Jack? Does that accord with the agreed procedures?”

“It accords.”

“Okay. So he doesn’t answer. He doesn’t call, he doesn’t write, he doesn’t run.”

For five minutes there was no sound but the sounds of waiting: the sighing of soft chairs, the striking of lights and matches and the squeaky-soled footsteps of the boys. Kate glanced at Brotherhood and he smiled confidence back. Bo said, “We’re thinking of you, Jack,” but Brotherhood did not reply and he was certainly not thinking of Bo. A bell rang. From the platform a boy said, “Conger, sir, on schedule,” and trimmed some dials. A white pin-light winked above his head. The second boy dropped a switch. Nobody clapped, nobody got to his feet or cried, “they’re alive!”

“Conger operator’s come in and say he’s ready to send, Bo,” Frankel said gratuitously. Behind him, the boys were moving automatically, deaf to everything outside their headphones. “Now we make our first transmission. We use all tape, no handwriting. Conger does the same. Accelerated Morse, we unroll it both ends. Transmission takes maybe one and a half minutes, two. Unroll and decode takes maybe five.... See that? . . . ‘We are ready to receive you. Talk.’—this is what we say to him. Now Conger is talking again. Watch the red light left, please. It burns, he’s talking—he’s finished.”

“Wasn’t very long, was it?” Lorimer drawled, not to anyone in particular. Lorimer had buried agents before.

“Now we wait for the decode,” Frankel told his audience a little too brightly. “Three minutes, maybe five. Time to smoke a cigarette, okay? Everybody relax. Conger’s alive and well.”

The boys were transferring spools, resetting instruments.

“Let’s just be grateful he’s alive,” said Kate, and several heads turned sharply, remarking this unaccustomed display of feeling from a Fifth Floor lady.

The grey spools were rolling, one on to the other. For a moment they heard the unrhythmic piping of Morse code. It stopped.

“Hey,” said Lorimer softly.

“Run it through again,” said Brotherhood.

“What’s happened?” said Kate.

The boys rewound the spools and switched again to forward. The Morse resumed and stopped as before.

“Could it be a fault the other end?” Lorimer asked.

“Sure,” Frankel said. “Possible his winder’s on the blink, possible he hit some bad ionosphere. In a minute he comes through again. No problem.”

The taller of the two boys was pulling off his headphones. “Mind if we decode, Mr. Frankel?” he said. “Sometimes when they’ve got a hitch they tell us about it in the message.”

On a nod from Frankel he shifted a spool to a machine at the far end of the bank. The printer began chattering immediately. Nigel and Lorimer moved quickly towards the platform. The printer stopped. Nigel magisterially ripped out the sheet and held it for Lorimer and himself to read. Brotherhood was already striding down the aisle. Mounting the platform, he snatched the script from their unresisting hands.

“Jack, don’t,” said Kate under her breath.

“Don’t what?” Brotherhood said, suddenly out of patience with her. “Don’t care about my agents? Don’t do what exactly?”

“Tell them to print another copy, will you, Frankel?” Nigel said smoothly. “Then we can all look at it together without shoving.”

Brotherhood was holding the sheet before him. Nigel and Lorimer had meekly arranged themselves to either side of him and were reading it over his shoulder.

“Routine intelligence report, Bo,” Nigel announced reading aloud. “Promised length, three hundred and seven groups. Actual length so far forty-one. Subject, restationing of Soviet missile bases in mountains north of Pilsen. Subsource Mirabeau reporting ten days ago. Mirabeau in turn reporting her Soviet Army boyfriend codename Leo—Leo’s done us rather well in the past, I seem to remember. Message reads as follows: Subsource Talleyrand confirms empty low-loaders leaving area—message ends in midsentence. Obviously the winder. Unless, as you say, his signal hit freak conditions.”

Frankel was already giving orders to the taller boy. “Send them ‘Your signal garbled.’ Do it immediately. Tell them we want a rerun. Tell them if they can’t transmit now we’ll remain on standby till they can. Tell them we want a roll-call of all members of the network. You got set phrases for that or you want I draft something?”

“Tell them damn all,” Brotherhood ordered very loud. “And stop crying, everybody. No one’s hurt.”

He had thrust his hands into his raincoat pockets. He was halfway down the aisle. Nigel and Lorimer were still on stage, a pair of choirboys clutching their hymn sheet between them. Brammel sat stoically upright in the auditorium. Kate was staring at him, not stoical at all.

“You can tell them you want a roll-call or a rerun, you can tell them to abort, you can tell them to jump in the Vistula. It doesn’t make a dime of difference,” said Brotherhood.

“Poor man,” said Nigel to Lorimer. “They’re his Joes, you see. It’s the strain.”

“They’re not my Joes and they never were. You can have them with my blessing.” He looked around him for men with sense. “Frankel. For Christ’s sake. Lorimer. When this service catches someone else’s Joe, if it ever does these days, what does it do? If he’s willing to be played, we play him back. If he’s not we send him to the Tower. Is it different now? I wouldn’t know.”

“So?” said Nigel, humouring him.

“If we decide to play him back, we do it as naturally and as fast as we can. Why? Because we want to show the opposition that nothing has changed. We want it seamless. We don’t hide his car and close his house. We don’t let him or his daughter or anybody else vanish into thin air. We don’t ignore dead letter boxes or invent fatuous stories about people eating bad mushrooms. We don’t sandbag radio operators in the middle of their high-speed transmissions. That is the last, the very last thing we do. Unless.”

“I don’t read you, Jack, old boy,” Nigel said, whom Brotherhood had deliberately ignored. “I don’t think anybody does, to be truthful. I think you are very naturally upset and you are getting a bit metaphysical, if you don’t mind my saying.”

“Unless what, Jack?” said Frankel.

“Unless we

want

the opposition to know we’re rolling up their network.”

“But why would anybody want that, Jack?” Frankel asked earnestly. “Explain to us. Please.”

“Why not explain it another time?” said Nigel.

“There never was a bloody network. They owned those networks from day one. They paid the actors, wrote the script. They owned Pym and near enough they owned me. They owned all of you as well. You just haven’t woken up to it.”

“Then why do they bother to tell us anything at all?” Frankel objected. “Why send us a fake interrupted signal? Why rig the disappearance of the Joes?”

Brotherhood smiled. Not kindly, not with humour. But he did turn to Frankel and he did smile at him. “Because, old boy, they want us to think they’ve got Pym when they haven’t,” he said. “That is the only lie they’ve got left to sell us. They want us to call off the hunt and go home to our high tea. They want to find him for themselves. That’s the good news of the day. Pym is still on the run and they want him as much as we do.”

They watched him turn and stride down the aisle and slide the locks back on the padded door. Poor old Jack, they said to each other with their eyes as the light went up: his life’s work. Lost all his Joes and can’t face it. Dreadful to see him so cut up. Only Frankel seemed to wish he hadn’t gone.

“Have you ordered the rerun yet?” said Nigel. “I said have you ordered a rerun?”

“I’ll do it now,” said Frankel.

“Good man,” said Bo appreciatively from the stalls.

In the corridor, Brotherhood paused to light himself a cigarette. The door opened and closed again. It was Kate.

“I can’t go on,” she said. “It’s mad.”

“Well it’s going to get a damn sight madder,” snapped Brotherhood, still angry. “That was just the trailer.”

It was night once more and Mary had got through another day without throwing herself politely from a top-floor window or scrawling filthy words on the dining-room walls. Seated on her bed still moderately sober, she stared at the book and then at the phone. The phone had a second wire fed into it. The wire led to a grey box and seemed to stop. Since my time, she thought. Can’t be doing with these modern gadgets. She poured another generous tot of whisky and set the glass on the table at her elbow in order to end the argument she had been having with herself for the last ten minutes. There you are, damn you. If you want one, have one. If you don’t, leave the bloody thing where it is. She was fully dressed. She was supposed to have a headache but the headache was a lie to escape the excruciating company of Fergus and the girl Georgie who had begun to treat her with the deference of warders before her hanging. “How about a nice game of Scrabble, Mary? . . . Not in the mood are we? Never mind.... I say, that shepherd’s pie

did

go down a treat, didn’t it, Georgie? I haven’t had a shepherd’s pie like that since my nan went. Do you think it’s the freezing that does it? Sort of ripens it, does it, the freezing?” At eleven o’clock, screaming inside, she had left them to the washing-up and brought herself up here to the book and to the note that had accompanied it. A deckled card. Silver-edged, my wedding anniversary. In a deckled envelope. Vile cherub blowing trumpet top left.

“Dear Mary,

“So sorry to hear about M’s calamity. Picked this up for pennies this morning and wondered whether you would like to bind it for me, same as all the others, full hide, buckram and the title printed in gold capitals between the first and second band on the spine. The end-papers look kind of new to me, maybe just rip them out? Grant’s away too so I guess I know how you feel. Could you do it quickly, as a surprise for him? Usual fee, of course!

“My love, darling,

Bee”

Keeping her hand away from the whisky and her mind clear of thoughts of a certain moustached phantom, Mary applied her training to the note. The handwriting was not Bee Lederer’s. It was a forgery and to anyone who knew the game a dismal one. The writer had paid lip-service to Bee’s all-American copperplate but the Germanic influence was clear in the spiky “u”s and “n”s and the “t”s without tails. “Whether” instead of “if,” she thought: when did an American write “whether”? The spelling wasn’t Bee’s either: a word like “calamity.” Bee couldn’t spell for toffee. She doubled every consonant on sight. Her letters to Mary in Greece, penned on similar stationery, had contained such family gems as menipullate and phallassy. As to “full hide”: Mary had bound just three books for Bee, and Bee hadn’t known from green apples how she wanted them, except she thought they looked great on Grant’s shelf, just like the old libraries you have in England. Full hide, buckram, the placing of the lettering: these were the writer talking, not Bee. And if Bee suspected that the end-papers might not be original—well bully for Bee because a month ago she had asked Mary wherever had she bought that cute wallpaper stuff she stuck on the inside of her covers?

The note was so bad, Mary concluded—and so unlike Bee—that it was almost deliberately bad: good enough to fool Fergus when it was delivered to the door this afternoon, bad enough to be a signal to Mary that it meant something different.

Something she had been warned of, for instance.

She had read the clues from the moment she opened the door to the vanman, while Fergus the idiot lurked in the coat cupboard with a bloody great Howitzer in his hand in case the vanman turned out to be a Russian in disguise—which perhaps on reflection he was, because Bee had never used a private delivery service in her life. Bee would have dropped the book in herself on the way back from Becky’s school, coo-eeing through the letter box. Bee would have buttonholed Mary at the International Ladies on Tuesday, leaving her to hump the damn thing home as best she could.

“Mind if I read the card, Mary?” Fergus had said. “It’s just routine, only you know what they’re like in London. Bee. That’ll be Mrs. Lederer, wife of the American gentleman?”

“That’s who it will be,” Mary had confirmed.

“Well it’s a nice book, I will say. In English too. Looks really old, it does.” He was turning through it with practised fingers, pausing at pencil marks, holding occasional pages to the light.

“It’s 1698,” Mary had said, pointing to the Roman numerals.

“My goodness, you can read that stuff.”

“Can I have it back now, please?”

The grandfather clock in the hall was striking twelve. Fergus and Georgie were by now no doubt lying blissfully in each other’s arms. Over the interminable days of her secret imprisonment Mary had watched their romance ripen. Tonight when she came down to dinner Georgie had the indisguisable glow of someone who had been screwing minutes before. In a year’s time the two of them would become yet another his-and-hers couple in one of the resources sections where the Other Ranks held sway: surveillance, microphone installation, sweeping, steaming mail. A year later when they had pooled their fiddled overtime and their cooked-up mileage and inflated their out-of-town subsistence they would make a down payment on a house in East Sheen, have two children and become eligible for the Firm’s subsidised education scheme. I’m being a jealous bitch, thought Mary, unrepentant. Right now, I wouldn’t mind an hour with Fergus myself. She picked up the receiver and waited.

“Who are you ringing, Mary?” said Fergus’s voice immediately.

Wherever he was in his love-life just then, Fergus was very awake indeed when it came to cutting in on Mary’s outgoing phone calls.

“I’m lonely,” Mary replied. “I want to have a chat with Bee Lederer. Anything wrong with that?”

“Magnus is still in London, Mary. He’s been delayed.”

“I know where he is. I know the story. I am also grown up.”

“He’s been contacting you regular by phone, you’ve had nice chats with him, he’ll be back in a day or two. Head Office has nabbed him for a briefing while he’s over there. That’s all that happened.”

“I’m all right, Fergus. I’m word perfect.”

“Would you normally ring her as late as this?”

“If both Magnus and Grant are away, yes I would.”

Mary heard a click and then the dialling tone. She dialled the number and Bee started moaning at once. She was having her damned period, she said, a real bastard, cramps, the bends, you name it. It always grabbed her this way in winter, specially when Grant wasn’t there to service her. Giggle. “Oh shit, Mary, I really miss it. Does that make me a whore?”

“I’ve had a lovely long letter from Tom,” said Mary. A lie. It was a letter and it was long but it was not lovely. It was an account of the great time Tom had had with Uncle Jack last Sunday and it had made Mary’s flesh creep.

Bee declared that Becky just adored Tom so much it was indecent. “Can you imagine what is going to happen the day those kids wake up and discover

la différence?”

Yes, I can, thought Mary. They’re going to hate each other’s guts. She took Bee through her day. Hell, just screwing around, said Bee. She’d had a squash date with Cathie Krane from the Canadian Embassy but they’d agreed on a coffee instead because of Bee’s condition. Salad at the Club, and Jesus somebody

really

ought to teach these damned Austrians how to make a decent salad. This afternoon a cruddy Bring and Buy at the Embassy in aid of the Contras in Nicaragua and who gives a fly’s elbow about the Contras in Nicaragua?

“You should go out and buy yourself something,” Mary suggested. “A dress or an antique or something.”

“Listen, I can’t even

move.

You know what he did, the little runt? He turned the Audi in for servicing on his way to the airport. I don’t get the car, I don’t get a lay.”

“I’d better ring off,” Mary said. “I’ve got a feeling Magnus is going to pull one of his dead-of-night calls and there’ll be all hell if the number is engaged.”

“Yeah, how’s he taken it?” said Bee vaguely. “Is he all weepy or is he sort of reconciled? Some men, I think they really want to castrate their fathers all their lives. You should hear Grant sometimes.”

“I’ll know when he’s back,” said Mary. “Before he left he hardly spoke a word.”

“Too cut up, huh? Grant never gets cut up about anything, the creep.”

“It hit him badly at first,” Mary confessed. “He sounds much better now.” She had scarcely rung off before the phone gave its in-house buzz.

“Why didn’t you mention the beautiful book she sent you, Mary?” Fergus complained. “I thought that was why you’d be ringing.”

“I told you why I was ringing. I was ringing because I was lonely. Bee Lederer sends me about fifteen books a week. Why should I talk to her about a bloody book to please you?”

“I wasn’t meaning to offend, Mary.”

“She didn’t mention the book so why should I? She gave me all the necessary instructions in her bloody note.” I’m protesting too much, she thought, cursing herself. I’m putting questions in his mind. “Listen, Fergus. I’m tired and liable to bite, okay? Leave me alone and go back to what you both do best.”

She picked up the book. Nothing, not a book on earth, could have authenticated the sender so perfectly. “De Arte Graphica. The Art of Painting by C. A. DU FRESNOY with REMARKS. Translated into English together with an Original Preface containing a Parallel between Painting and Poetry. By Mr. DRYDEN.” She drained the glass of whisky. It was the same book. She had no doubt. The same book Magnus brought to me in Berlin when I still belonged to Jack. Came bounding up the stairs with it. Knocking on the steel door of Special Ordnance which was our cover while he clutched it in his hand. “Hey, Mary, open up!” It was before we had become lovers. Before he had started to call me Mabs. “Listen I want you to do a rush job for me. Can you put a CD into the binding of this? It’s to take one standard sheet of code cloth. Can you do it by tonight?” Then I staged a misunderstanding because we were already flirting. I pretended I hadn’t heard of CDs except on diplomatic cars, which allowed Magnus to explain to me in his earnest way that CD meant concealment device and Jack Brotherhood had told him Mary was the best person for the job. “We’re using a bookshop as a dead letter box,” Magnus explained. “I’ve got this Joe who’s an antiquarian-book fiend.” Case officers were not usually so generous about their operations.

And I took off the end-paper, she remembered as she began gently prodding the covers. I scraped away a patch of cover board until I was nearly at the hide. Other people would have taken off the hide and gone under it from the front. Not our Mary. For Magnus nothing but perfection would do. Next night he gave me dinner. The night after that we went to bed together. Next morning I told Jack what had happened and he was gallant and sweet and said we were both very lucky, and that he’d withdraw from the field and let us get on with it, if that was what I wanted. I said it was. And I told Jack in my happiness that what had brought me and Magnus together was de Arte Graphica, a Parallel between Painting and Poetry, which was rather extraordinary when you remembered that I was mad about painting and Magnus was hell-bent on writing the great novel of his life.

“Where are you going, Mary?” Fergus said, looming before Mary in the corridor. She had the book in her hand. She shoved it at him. “I can’t sleep. I’m going down to the cellar to fool around with this. Now go back to your nice lady and leave me alone.”

Closing the cellar door she went quickly to the workbench. In minutes Georgie is going to saunter in with a nice cup of tea for me in order to make sure I haven’t defected or cut my wrists. Filling a bowl with warm water she damped a rag and set to work soaking off the end-paper. The writer of the note knew what he was talking about. On a book of that age the original glue was animal and would have crystallised. Mary, when she had doctored it for Magnus, had used animal glue too. But the new paper had been stuck on with flour paste which responded quickly to water. She was using a cloth and scrubbing. Normally she would have used blotting paper and a pressing tin. The end-paper came away. The board remained. Taking a scalpel she began scuffing it with the blade. If they’ve used rope board, I’ve had it. Rope board was made of real old rope taken from a man-of-war. It was tarred and twisted and packed solid. To scrape into it would take hours. She need not have worried. It was modern millboard and disintegrated like dry earth. She kept scuffing and suddenly the code cloth lay before her, flat against the inside of the hide, exactly where she had put it for Magnus. Except that this one had capital letters instead of figure groups. This one began “Dear Mary.” She stuffed it quickly down her front, retrieved the scalpel, and set about removing the rest of the end-paper as if she were going to rebind from the beginning, full hide as Bee had requested.

“I just thought I

had

to come and see how you do it,” Georgie explained, sitting down beside her. “I really

need

a hobby like that myself, Mary. I just don’t ever seem able to relax.”

“Poor you,” said Mary.

It was night and Brotherhood was angry. Though he was out in the streets and away from the Firm and the Firm’s ken, though he had work to do and action to relieve him, he was angry. His anger had been mounting for two days. This morning’s outburst about the Joes was not the start of it. It had been kindled yesterday, like a slow-burning fuse, as he was leaving the conference room in St. John’s Wood after perjuring himself to save Brammel’s neck. It had stuck with him like a faithful friend through his meeting with Tom and his excursion to Reading station: Pym has broken the moral laws. He has outlawed himself by choice. It had touched flashpoint in the signals room this morning and gathered more heat with every pointless conference and frittered hour since. From his position of half-pitied and wholly blamed has-been, Brotherhood had listened to his own arguments being used against him and had looked on as, under his very eyes, his old defence of Pym had been adopted and updated into a policy of institutionalised inertia.

“But, Jack, it’s all so circumstantial—you said so yourself,” Brammel brayed, never stronger than when demonstrating that two positives made a negative. “‘ If you run any succession of coincidences through a computer, you will find that everything looks possible and most things look highly likely.’ Who said that, pray? I’m quoting you deliberately, Jack. We’re sitting at your feet, remember? Good heavens, I never thought I’d have to defend Pym against

you!”

“I was wrong,” said Brotherhood.

“But who says you were? Only you, I think. So Pym has a Czech code pad in his chimney place,” Brammel conceded. “He has a camera we didn’t know about with a document-copying attachment or whatever. Good heavens, Jack, think of all the bits of equipment you’ve picked up in your time, just in the ordinary way of playing agents back and forth! Gold bars, cameras, microdot lenses, concealment devices, I don’t know what. You could have started your own pawnbroker’s shop with them. All right I grant you he should have turned the stuff in. I see him as being rather in the position of a police detective who has taken a lot of swag off one of his informants. He shoves it in a drawer—or in the fireplace—hides it from his family and one day it’s all discovered. But it doesn’t make him a burglar. It makes him an efficient policeman who’s been cavalier or at worst careless.”

“He’s not careless,” said Brotherhood. “He’s not a risk taker.”

“All right, so now he is. The fellow’s had a nervous breakdown, he’s acting clean out of character, he’s hidden himself away somewhere, he’s putting out the usual cries for help,” Brammel reasoned, in a note of saintly tolerance. “Probably a girlfriend, knowing him. We shall find out soon enough. But look at the scenario, Jack. His father dies. He’s the artistic type of officer, always wanting to write the great novel, paint, sculpt, take sabbaticals, I don’t know what. He’s hit a menopausal age in life. He’s been living under a cloud of suspicion for far too long. Do you wonder he’s had a bit of a crack-up? Be a wonder if he hadn’t, if you ask me. All right, I don’t condone it. And I shall want to know why he took that burnbox, though you tell me he knew everything that was in it anyway and wrote most of it himself, so what’s the difference? And when we find him, I may pull him out of the field for a while. There is still no justification for me to raise a public hue and cry. To go to my Minister and say ‘We’ve found another one.’ Least of all to the Americans. Bang go the barter treaties. Bang goes the intelligence pooling and the private line to Langley that often means so much more than normal diplomatic links. Do you want me to risk all that until we

know?”

“Bo feels you should stop flying solo,” Nigel said when they were back on the servants’ side of Brammel’s door. “I’m afraid I agree. From now on you’ll make no field enquiries without my personal authority. You’re to remain on call and you’re to start nothing. Is that clear?”

It is clear, thought Brotherhood, examining the house from across the road. It is clear that the rewards of my old age are dangerously threatened. He tried to remember who it was in mythology who was cursed to live long enough to witness the consequences of his bad advice. The house was in the best of Chelsea’s many beautiful backwaters, set at the end of a long garden only partly visible above the gate. An air of decadence pervaded its genteel shabbiness, an unworldly languor inhabited its flaking stucco. Brotherhood walked past it several times, checking the upper windows, studying the skyline for sight of a church, for Pym’s mental substitutions were becoming rooted in his mind like spy talk. On the fourth floor a dormer window was lit and curtained. As he watched he saw a figure pass across it, too quickly and too far away for him to tell whether it was man or woman.

He took a last look up and down the road. A brass bellpush was set into the gatepost. He pressed it and waited but not long. He shoved the gate, it creaked and opened, he stepped inside and closed it after him. The garden was a secret patch of English countryside walled on three sides. Nothing overlooked it. The sounds of traffic ceased miraculously. The flagstone path was slippery with unswept leaves. Home, he rehearsed again. Home in Scotland, home in Wales. Home by the sea. Home as an upper window and a church. Home as an aristocratic mother who took him visiting great houses. He passed the statue of a draped woman, one stone breast offered to the autumn night. Home as a series of concentric fantasies, all with the same truth at the centre. Who had said that?—Pym or himself? Home as promises to women he didn’t love. The front door was opening as he reached it. A young manservant was watching him approach. His monkey jacket had a regimental cut. Behind him, unrestored gilt mirrors and a chandelier glinted against dark wallpaper. “He’s got a boy name of Stegwold living there,” Superintendent Bellows of police liaison had reported. “If you were old enough, I’d read you his record of convictions.”

“Sir Kenneth in, son?” said Brotherhood pleasantly as he wiped his shoes on the mat and shook off his raincoat.

“I don’t know, do I? Who shall I say?”

“Mr. Marlow, son, and I’d like ten minutes with him alone on a mutual matter.”

“From?” said the boy.

“His constituency, son,” said Brotherhood just as pleasantly.

The boy tripped quickly upstairs. Brotherhood’s gaze skimmed the hall. Hats, idiosyncratic. Coaching overcoat, green with age. One Guards bowler, ditto. Army service cap with Colds-tream badge. Blue china urn stuffed with ancient golf clubs, walkingsticks and warped tennis racquets. The boy came mincing down the stairs again, trailing one hand on the banisters, unable to resist an entrance.

“He’ll see you now, Mr. Marlow,” he said.

The stairs were lined with portraits of rude men. In a dining-room, two places were laid with enough silver for a banquet. A decanter, cold meats, and cheeses lay on the sideboard. It was not till Brotherhood noticed a couple of dirty plates that he realised the meal was already over. The library smelled of mildew and the fumes of paraffin from a stove. A gallery ran along three walls. Half the balustrade was missing. The stove had been shoved into the fireplace and in front of it stood a clothes-horse hung with socks and underpants. In front of the clothes-horse stood Sir Kenneth Sefton Boyd. He wore a velvet smoking jacket and an open-necked shirt and old satin slippers with gold-stitched monograms worn away. He was burly and thick-necked, with uneven pads of flesh round his jaw and eyes. His mouth was bent to one side as if by a clenched fist. He spoke with the bent side while the other stayed still.

“Marlow?”

“How do you do, sir,” said Brotherhood.

“What do you want?”

“I’d like to speak to you alone if I may, sir.”

“Policeman?”

“Not quite, sir. Something like.”

He handed Sir Kenneth a card. This is to certify that the bearer is engaged in enquiries affecting the national security. For confirmation please ring Scotland Yard extension so-and-so. The extension led to Superintendent Bellows’s department, which knew all Brotherhood’s names. Unimpressed, Sir Kenneth handed the card back.

“So you’re a spy.”

“Of a sort, I suppose. Yes.”

“Want a drink? Beer? Scotch? What do you want to drink?”

“A scotch would be very welcome, sir, now you mention it.”

“Scotch, Steggie,” said Sir Kenneth. “Get him a scotch, will you? Ice? Soda? What do you want in your scotch?”

“A little water would be welcome.”

“All right. Give him water. Bring him a jug. Put it on the table. Over there by the tray. Then he can help himself. You can go away. And top mine up, while you’re about it. Want to sit down, Marlow? Over there do you?”

“I thought we were going to the Albion,” said Steggie from the door.

“Can’t now. Got to talk to this chap.”

Brotherhood sat. Sir Kenneth sat opposite him; his gaze was yellowed and unresponsive. Brotherhood had seen dead men whose eyes were more alive. His hands had fallen into his lap and one of them kept flipping like a beached fish. On the table between them lay a backgammon board with the pieces in mid-battle. Who was he playing with? thought Brotherhood. Who dined with him? Who was sharing his music with him? Who warmed my chair before I sat in it?

“You surprised to see me, sir?” said Brotherhood.

“Take a bit more than that to surprise me, old boy.”

“Anyone else been here recently, making funny enquiries? Foreign gentlemen? Americans?”

“Not that I know of. Why should they?”

“There’s a bunch going round from our own vetting side as well, I’m told. I wondered whether any of them had been here. I tried to find out before I left the office but there’s a lack of coordination, it’s all moving so fast.”

“What is?”

“Well, sir, it seems that your old school friend Mr. Magnus Pym has disappeared. They’re looking into everyone who might have knowledge of his whereabouts. That will include you naturally.”

Sir Kenneth’s eye lifted to the door.

“Something out there bothering you, sir?” said Brotherhood.

Sir Kenneth rose, went to the door and pulled it open. Brotherhood heard a scuffle of footsteps on the stairs but he was too late to see who it was, though he jostled Sir Kenneth aside in his haste to look.

“Steggie, I want you to go to the Albion ahead of me,” Sir Kenneth called into the well. “Go now. I’ll join you later. I don’t want him hearing this stuff,” he told Brotherhood as he closed the door. “What he doesn’t know can’t hurt him.”

“With his record I don’t blame you,” said Brotherhood. “Mind if I look upstairs now we’re standing?”

“Yes, I damn well do. And don’t lay hands on me again. I don’t fancy you. Got a warrant?”

“No.”

Resuming his chair, Sir Kenneth took a spent matchstick from the pocket of his smoking jacket and set to work on his fingernails with its charred end. “Get a warrant,” he advised. “Get a warrant and I might let you look. Other hand I mightn’t.”

“Is he here?” said Brotherhood.

“Who?”

“Pym.”

“Don’t know. Didn’t hear. Who’s Pym?”

Brotherhood was still standing. He was unnaturally pale, and it took him a moment to steady his voice before he spoke again.

“I’ve got a deal for you,” he said.

Sir Kenneth still did not hear.

“Hand him over to me. You go upstairs. Or you ring him. You do whatever you’ve agreed to do between you. And you hand him over to me. In return I’ll keep your name out of it, and Steggie’s name out of it. The alternative is ‘Baronet M.P. shelters very old friend on the run.’ It’s also a serious possibility that you will be charged as an accomplice. How old is Steggie?”

“Old enough.”

“How old was he when he started here?”

“Look it up. Don’t know.”

“I’m Pym’s friend too. There are worse people than me coming looking for him. Ask him. If he agrees, I agree. I’ll keep your name out of it. Just give him to me and you and Steggie need never hear from him or me again.”

“Sounds to me as though you’ve more to lose than we have,” said Sir Kenneth, surveying the results of his manicure.

“I doubt it.”

“Question of what we’ve all got left, I suppose. Can’t lose what you haven’t got. Can’t miss what you don’t care about. Can’t sell what isn’t yours.”

“Pym can, apparently,” said Brotherhood. “He’s been selling his nation’s secrets by the looks of it.”

Sir Kenneth continued to admire his fingernails. “For money?”

“Probably.”

Sir Kenneth shook his head. “Didn’t care about money. Love was all he cared about. Didn’t know where to find it

.

Clown really. Tried too hard.”

“Meanwhile he’s wandering around England with a lot of papers that aren’t his to give away, and you and I are supposed to be patriotic Englishmen.”

“Lot of chaps do a lot of things they shouldn’t do. That’s when they need their chums.”

“He wrote to his son about you. Do you know that? Some drivel about a penknife. Does that ring a bell?”

“Matter of fact it does.”

“Who’s Poppy?”

“Never heard of her.”

“Or him?”

“Nice thought, but no.”

“Wentworth?”

“Never been there. Hate the place. What about it?”

“There was a girl called Sabina he apparently got caught up with in Austria. He ever mention her?”

“Not that I remember. Pym got caught up with a lot of girls. Not that it did him much good.”

“He rang you, didn’t he? On Monday night, from a callbox.”

With startling abruptness, Sir Kenneth flung up one arm in pleasure and gave a hoot of merriment. “Pissed out of his skull,” he declared, very loud. “Ossified. Haven’t heard him so pissed since Oxford when six of us put away a case of his father’s port. Pretended some queen from Merton gave it to him, I don’t know why. There weren’t any queens in Merton in those days. Not rich ones. We were all at Trinity.”

It was after midnight. Back in the confinement of his Shepherd Market flat with the pigeons on the parapet Brotherhood poured himself another vodka and added orange juice from a carton. He had thrown his jacket on the bed, his pocket tape-recorder lay before him on the desk. He was jotting as he listened.

“. . . don’t go to Wiltshire a lot as a rule while Parliament’s in session but Sunday was my second wife’s birthday and our boy was down from school so I went and did my stuff and thought I’d stay on for a day or two and see what gives in the constituency. . . .”

Forward again: “. . . don’t normally answer the phone in Wiltshire but Monday’s her bridge night and I was in the library playing a game of backgammon so when the phone rang I thought I might as well take it rather than spoil her four. Half past eleven it must have been but Jean’s bridge nights go on for ever. Chap’s voice. Must be her boyfriend, I thought. Bloody cheek, really, this time of night. ‘Hullo? Sef? That Sef?’ ‘Who the hell’s that?’ I said. ‘It’s me. Magnus. My father’s died. Over here to bury him.’ I thought, Poor old chap. Nobody likes to have his old man die on him. . . . That right for you? More water? Help yourself.”

Brotherhood hears himself roar “Thanks” as he leans towards the water jug. Then the sounds of a flood as he pours.

“‘ How’s Jem?’ he says. Jemima’s my sister. They had a dingdong once, never came to much. Married a florist. Extraordinary thing. Chap grows flowers all along the road to Basing-stoke. Puts his name up on a board. Doesn’t seem to bother her. Not that she sees much of him. Navigational problems, our Jem. Same as me.”

Forward again: “. . . pissed. Couldn’t tell whether he was laughing or crying. Poor chap, I thought. Drowning his sorrows. I’d do the same. Next thing I know, he’s prosing on about our private school. I mean Christ, we’d done two or three schools together, Oxford, not to mention a couple of holidays, yet all he wants to talk about forty years later, on the blower middle of the night, party going on, is how he carved my initials in the staff loo at our private and got me flogged for it. ‘Sorry I carved your initials, Sef.’ All right. He did it. He carved’em. I never doubted he carved ’em. Cocked it up too. He would. Know what he did? Bloody fool put a hyphen between the ‘S’ and the ‘B’ where we don’t have one. I told old Grimble, the headmaster. ‘Why would I put a hyphen in?’ I said. ‘Not how I spell my name,’ I said. ‘No hyphen in it. Look at the school list.’ Not a blind bit of difference, flogged me. Way it goes, you see. No justice. I don’t know I minded much. Everybody flogged everybody in those days. Besides, I wasn’t very nice to him myself. Always ragging him about his people. Father was a con man, you know. Nearly ruined my aunt. Had a go at my mother too. Tried to bed her but she was too fly. Some scheme to build a new airport in Scotland somewhere. He’d squared the locals, all he needed was buy the land, get the formal permission, make a fortune. Cousin of mine owns half Argyll. I asked him about it. Hokum, the whole thing. Extraordinary. I stayed with ’em once. Tarts’ parlour in Ascot. All these crooks hanging about and Magnus calling them ‘sir’. Father tried to get into Parliament once. Pity he didn’t. He’d have been good company. . . .”

Forward again: “. . . banging in the cash. I asked him where he was, he said London but he had to use phone boxes, he was being followed. I said, ‘Whose initials have you been carving now?’ Joke actually, but he didn’t see it. I was sorry about his old man, you see. Didn’t want him moping. Dramatic chap, always has been. Nothing going on in his life unless he’s got some frightful problem on his hands. You could have sold him the Egyptian pyramids long as you said they were falling down. I said, give me the number of your phone, I’ll ring you back. He said somebody must have told me to say that. I said, ‘Absolute bilge, hell are you talking about? Half my friends are on the run.’ He said his father was dead and he was looking at his life for the first time. Fundamental. Always has been. Then he went back to these initials he’d carved. ‘I’m really sorry, Sef.’ I said, ‘Look here, old boy, I always knew it was you and I don’t think we should go through life wearing hairshirts about what we did at our private. Do you need cash? Want a bed? Take a cottage on the estate.’ ‘I’m really sorry, Sef. Really sorry.’ I said, ‘You tell me what I can do, I’ll do it. I’m in the book in London, give me a buzz if I can help.’ Well, I mean damn it, he’d been on for twenty minutes. I put the phone down and half an hour later he’s back. ‘Hullo, Sef. Me again.’ Jean was pretty shirty this time. Thought it was Steggie having a tantrum. ‘Got to talk to you, Sef. Listen to me.’ Well, you can’t ring off on an old chum when he’s down, can you?”

Brotherhood heard Sir Kenneth’s clock chime twelve. He was jotting fast. Concentric fantasies, he repeated to himself, defining the truth at the centre. He had reached the passage he was waiting for.

“. . . said he was in secret work. That didn’t surprise me, who isn’t these days? . . . Said there was this Englishman he worked for, called him the Brotherhood. I don’t think I listened to all of it, to be honest. There was the Brotherhood and there was this other chap. Said he was working for both of ’em. They were like two parents for him. Kept him going. I said bully for you, if they keep you going, you stick to them. Said he had to write this book about them, put the record right. What record? God knows. He’d write to the Brotherhood, write to the other chap, then he’d take himself off to a secret place and do his number.” Brotherhood heard his own patient murmur in the background. “. . . Well maybe I got that one a bit wrong then. Maybe he was going to hunker down in his secret place first and write to them from there. I wasn’t listening to all of it. Drunks bore me. I’m one myself.”

Prompt from Brotherhood.

Long pause.

Renewed prompt from Brotherhood.

Sir Kenneth indistinct: “Said he was his runner.”

“Who was whose runner?”

“Pym was t’other chap’s runner. Not the Brotherhood’s. The other fellow’s. Said he’d crippled him somehow. Pissed, I told you.”

Brotherhood again, riding him a little harder: “. . . name for this person?”

“Don’t think so. Don’t think it stuck. Sorry. No, it didn’t.”

“And the secret place? Where was that?”

“Didn’t say. His business.”

Brotherhood let the tape continue. Avalanche as Sefton Boyd lights himself a cigarette. Cannon-blast of the front door being slammed open and shut again, signalling Steggie’s petulant return.

Brotherhood and Sir Kenneth are on the landing.

“What’s that, old boy?” Sir Kenneth very loud.

“I said, so where do you think he might be?” says Brotherhood.

“Upstairs, old boy. That’s what you said.” In his memory’s eye, Brotherhood sees Sir Kenneth’s pouch face approach close to his own, smiling its downward twist. “Get a warrant, maybe you can have a look. Maybe you can’t. Don’t know. Have to see.”

Brotherhood heard his own heels clumping down Sir Kenneth’s stairs. He heard himself reach the hall and Steggie’s lighter footsteps mingle with his own. He heard Steggie’s pointed “Good night” and the clatter of bolts as he unlocks the door for him. Followed by Steggie’s muffled shriek as Brotherhood hauls him out of the house, one hand over his mouth, the other at the back of his head. Then the thump as he taps Steggie’s head against the plaster pillar of Sir Kenneth’s gracious porch, and his own voice, very near to Steggie’s ear.

“Have they done this before to you, have they? Put you up against a wall?”

A whimper for an answer.

“Who else is living in the house, son?”

“No one.”

“Who was on the top floor this evening, back and forth in front of the window?”

“Me.”

“Why?”

“It’s my room!”

“I thought you two would share the bridal chamber.”

“I’ve still got my own room, haven’t I? I’m entitled to my privacy, same as he is.”

“Nobody else in the house at all?”

“No!”

“Not all week?”

“No. I told you. Hey, stop!”

“What’s the matter?” says Brotherhood, already halfway down the path.

“I haven’t got my key. How do I get back in?”

A clang as Brotherhood slams the gate.

He phoned Kate. No answer.

He phoned his wife. No answer.

He phoned Paddington and wrote down the times and places along the route of the night sleeper from Paddington to Penzance via Reading.

For an hour he tried to sleep, then returned to his desk, pulled Langley’s folder towards him and stared yet again at the eaten-out features of Herr Petz-Hampel-Zaworski, Pym’s presumed controller, lately of Corfu. “. . . Real name unknown . . . query member Czech archaeological team visiting Egypt 1961 (Petz) . . . query 1966 att. Czech Military Mission East Berlin (Hampel). . . height 6 ft., stoops, limps slightly with left leg . . .”

“There was the Brotherhood and there was this other chap,” Sefton Boyd had said. “They were like two parents for him. Said he was his runner.”

“You brought it on yourselves,” he heard Belinda say. “You invented him.”

He continued to stare at the photograph. The down-turned eye-lids. The down-turned moustache. The twinkly eyes. The hidden Slav smile. Who the devil are you? Why do I recognise you when I have never set eyes on you?

Grant Lederer had never stood so high in the world, or felt so rounded as a human being. Justice lives! he assured himself in the perfect peacefulness of his triumph. My masters are worthy of their authority. A noble service has tried me to the limit and found me worthy of my hire. All round him the sealed operations room on the sixth floor of the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square was filling up with people he had not known existed. They came from the remote corners of London Station, yet each as he entered appeared to bestow a glance of kinship on him. As fine a looking bunch of Americans as you’d wish to meet, he thought. The Agency really knows how to pick us these days. They had hardly settled before Wexler began speaking.

“Time to wrap this thing up,” he said grimly as the door was locked. “Meet Gary, everybody. Gary’s head of SISURP. He’s here to report an important breakthrough on Pym and discuss action.”

SISURP, Lederer had recently learned, was the acronym for Surveillance Intelligence, Southern Europe. Gary was your typical Kentuckian—tall, spare and amusing. Lederer already admired him intensely. An aide sat at his elbow with a heap of papers, but Gary did not refer to them. Our quarry, he said baldly, was Petz-Hampel-Zaworski, now known to the indoctrinated familiarly as PHZ. A SISURP team picked him up Tuesday 10:12 a.m. emerging from the Czech Embassy in Vienna. Lederer listened enthralled as Gary noted each tiny detail of PHZ’s day. Where PHZ took his coffee. Where PHZ took his leaks. The bookshops where PHZ browsed. Who PHZ lunched with. Where. What he ate. PHZ’s limp. His ready smile. His charm, particularly with women. His cigars, where he lit them, bought them. PHZ’s ease of association, his apparent unawareness that he was being observed by a field force eighteen strong. The two occasions when “wittingly or otherwise” PHZ placed himself in the vicinity of Mrs. Mary Pym. On one of these occasions, said Gary, eye contact was confirmed. On the other, surveillance was inhibited by the presence of a British pair believed to be the escorts of Mrs. Pym. And thence at last to the crowning moment of the operation and the high point of Grant Lederer’s brilliant marriage and dazzling career so far, when at 8 a.m. local time today three members of Gary’s team found themselves stuck in the rear pews of the English church in Vienna, while twelve more were staked out around the outside of it—mobile units, necessarily, because this was diplomatic-land where loiterers were not well regarded—and PHZ and Mary Pym were placed either side of the aisle. Lederer’s cue had arrived. Gary was looking expectantly towards him.

“Grant, I guess you should take over here. We’re a little out of our depth,” he said, with pleasing gruffness.

As heads at the table shifted in curiosity, Lederer felt the warmth of their interest bear him to new heights. He began speaking at once. Modestly.

“Well hell, I mean I see this whole thing as Bee’s achievement and not mine. Bee is Mrs. Lederer,” he explained to an older man across the table from him, then realised too late that it was Carver, Head of London Station, never a Lederer fan. “She’s Presbyterian. Her parents were Presbyterian too. Mrs. Lederer latterly has been able to reconcile her spirituality with organised religion and has been attending regularly at the Christchurch Anglican church, Vienna, known as the English church, and frankly just the sexiest little church you ever saw. Right, Gary? Cherubs, angels—more like a religious boudoir than a regular church at all. You know, Mick, if anybody’s name is going up in lights at Langley over this, I guess it should be Bee’s,” he added, still somehow not quite able to get to his story.

The rest came out faster. It was Bee after all and not the surveillance team who had managed to slide out into the aisle after PHZ and stand in line right behind him as he and Mary queued for the Sacrament. It was Bee who from a distance of maybe five feet had watched as PHZ leaned forward and whispered real words into Mary’s ear, and watched again as Mary first leaned back to catch them, then went ahead with her devotions as if nothing in the world had happened.

“So I mean it was actually my wife, my helpmate throughout all of this long operation, who witnessed the spoken contact.” He shook his head in marvel. “And it was Bee again who, the first moment the service ended, raced back to our apartment to phone me right here at the Embassy and describe the whole amazing occurrence, using the domestic codewords the two of us had hashed out together for just such a contingency. And I mean Bee did not even

know

that an Agency surveillance team was present in that church at all. She just went because Mary was going, as much as anything. Yet she scooped SISURP single-handed by like six

hours,

more. Harry,” said Lederer a little breathlessly, finding Wexler as he put the finishing touch to his narrative, “my only regret is that Mrs. Lederer never learned to lip-read.”

Lederer had not expected applause. It was in the nature of the community he had joined that there should be none. The pregnant silence struck him as a more fitting tribute.

Artelli the cryptographer was the first to break it. “Here at the Embassy,” he repeated, not quite as a question.

“Pardon me?” said Lederer.

“Your wife called you here at the Embassy? From Vienna? Directly after the happening in the church? On the open phone from your apartment?”

“Yes, sir, and I took her news straight upstairs to Mr. Wexler. He had it on his desk by nine a.m.”

“Nine-thirty,” Wexler said.

“And what were these domestic codewords that she used, please?” said Artelli while he wrote.

Lederer was happy to explain: “Well really what we did in

fact

was borrow the names of Bee’s aunts and uncles. We have always considered there was a similarity in the psychological profiles of Mary Pym and Bee’s Aunt Edie. So we kind of worked it up from there. ‘You know what Aunt Edie did in church today?’ . . . Bee is very subtle.”

“Thanks,” said Artelli.

Next Carver spoke, and his question did not seem entirely friendly.

“You mean your wife is

conscious

to this operation, Grant? I thought the Pym case was strictly a no-wives thing. Harry, didn’t we make a ruling on that a little while back?”

“Strictly it is no wives,” Lederer agreed handsomely. “However since Mrs. Lederer has effectively been out in the field with me on this one it would be somewhat illusory to suppose she would not be aware of the general level of suspicion in relation to the Pyms. Well, to Magnus anyway. And I may add that it was always Bee’s contention that somewhere at the bottom of this heap we are going to find Mary playing a very deep and laid-back rôle. Mary is a rôle-player.”

Carver again. “Is Mrs. Lederer also conscious to PHZ? He’s a pretty hot addition to the cast, Grant. He could be a big fish. But she’s in on that, huh?”

There was nothing Lederer could do to stop the colour rushing to his face, or his voice developing its strident edge: “Mrs. Lederer had an instinct regarding that encounter and she acted on it. You want to censure her for that, Carver, you censure me first, okay?”

Artelli again, with his damned French drawl. “What was your domestic codename for PHZ?”

“Uncle Bobby,” Lederer snapped.

“But then Bobby is more than instinct, Grant,” Carver objected. “Bobby is an agreed thing between you. How could you have agreed Bobby if you hadn’t given her the story on Petz-Hampel-Zaworski?”

Wexler had taken back the meeting. “Okay, okay, okay,” he growled unhappily. “Cope with that later. Meantime what do we do? SISURP splits and stays with the both of them. PHZ and Mary. That right, Gary? Wherever they go.”

“I’m calling for fresh horses right now,” said Gary. “Should have two full teams by this time tomorrow.”

“Next question, what the hell do we tell the Brits and when and how?” said Wexler.

“Looks like we told them already,” said Artelli, with a lazy glance at Lederer. “That’s unless the Brits have given up tapping U.S. Embassy telephone lines these days, which I tend to doubt.”

Justice lives, but justice, as Grant Lederer discovered before morning, also dies. His health was found to have suffered a sudden lapse, his appointment in Vienna terminated for him in his absence. His wife, far from receiving the commendations Lederer dreamed of, was ordered to follow him back to Langley, Virginia, at once.

“Lederer overheats and overrelates,” wrote one of the Agency’s ever-expanding team of house psychiatrists. “He requires a less hysterical environment.”

The prescribed calm was eventually found for him in Statistics, and it drove him nearly mad.

13

T

he green cabinet stood in the centre of Pym’s room like a discarded fieldpiece that had once been its regiment’s pride. Its chrome was peeling from the handles, a heavy boot or fall had stove in one corner, so that the slightest touch could set it trembling and worrying. The chips had rusted into sores, the rust had spread to the screw holes and underneath the paint-work, causing it to lift in humiliating pimples. Pym walked round it with the awe and loathing of a primitive. It has arrived from Heaven. It is destined to return there. I should have put it in the incinerator with him so that he can show it to his Maker as he intended. Four dense drawers of innocence, the Gospel according to Saint Rick.

He gave the cabinet a push and heard a sagging sound from inside as the files slipped obediently to his command.

I should write you witches along his path, Tom. The full moon should be turning red and the owl doing whatever the owl did that was so unnatural when foul murder was afoot. But Pym is deaf and blind to them. He is Second Lieutenant Magnus Pym riding in his private train across occupied Austria, entering by way of that very border town where, long ago, in the less mature existence of a different Pym, E. Weber’s fictitious crock of gold had supposedly awaited Mr. Lapadi’s collection. He is a Roman conqueror on his way to taking up his first appointment. He is oven-fired against human frailty and his own destiny, as you may observe from the scowls of military abstinence he bestows upon the bare breasts of the Barbarian peasant women harvesting corn in the sunlit fields. His preparation has passed with the ease of an English Sunday, not that Pym ever asked for ease. The privileged English assets of good manners and bad learning have never been more to his advantage. Even his murky political affiliations at Oxford have turned out to be a blessing. “If the Pongos ask you whether you are now or ever have been a member of the clan, look ’em slap in the eye and tell ’em

never,”

the last of the Michaels advised him, over a sporting lunch beside the swimming-pool at the Lansdowne, as they watched the pure bodies of suburban girls wriggle through the disinfected water.

“Pongos?” said Pym, mystified.

“Licentious soldiery, old boy. The War Office. Wood from here up. The Firm is fixing your clearance direct. Tell them to mind their damn business.”

“Thanks terribly,” said Pym.

The same evening, glowing from the best of nine games of squash, Pym was led to the presence of a Very Senior Member of the service, in a plain, forgettable office not far from Rick’s newest Reichskanzlei. Was this the Colonel Gaunt who had first approached him? He’s higher, Pym was told. Don’t ask.

“We want to thank you,” said the Senior Member.

“I really enjoyed it,” said Pym.

“It’s a filthy job, mixing with those people. Somebody has to do it.”

“Oh, it’s not that bad, sir.”

“Look here. We’re leaving your name on the books. I can’t promise you anything, we’ve got a selection board these days. Besides, you belong to those chaps across the park and we make it a rule not to fish in one another’s preserves. All the same if you ever do decide that protecting your country at home is more to your liking than playing Mata Hari abroad, let us know.”

“I will, sir. Thank you,” said Pym.

The Very Senior Member was crisp and brown and ostentatiously nondescript like one of his own envelopes. He had the testy manners of a country solicitor, which was what he had been before answering the Great Call. Leaning across his desk he pulled a puzzled smile. “Don’t tell me if you don’t want. How ever did you get mixed up with that crowd in the first place?”

“The Communists?”

“No, no, no. Our sister service.”

“In Bern, sir. I was a student there.”

“In Switzerland,” said the great man, consulting a mental map.

“Yes, sir.”

“My wife and I went skiing near Bern once. Little place called Mürren. The British run it so there aren’t any cars. We rather liked it. What did you do for them?”

“Much the same as for you, sir, really. It was just a bit more dangerous.”

“In what way?”

“You don’t feel you have the protection out there. It’s eyeball to eyeball, I suppose.”

“Seemed such a peaceful spot to me. Well good luck to you, Pym. Look out for those chaps. They’re good but they’re slippery. We’re good but we’ve got a bit of honour left. That’s the difference.”

“He’s brilliant,” Pym told his guide. “He pretends to be completely ordinary but he sees right into you.”

His elation had not left him when a few days later he presented himself, suitcase in hand, at the guardroom of his basic-training regiment where for two months he reaped the plentiful rewards of his upbringing. While Welsh miners and Glaswegian cut-throats wept unashamedly for their mothers, went absent without leave and were carted off to a place of punishment, Pym slept soundly and wept for no one. Long before reveille had dragged his comrades smoking and cursing from their beds, he had polished his boots and belt-brasses and cap badge, made his bed and dressed his bedside locker, and was all ready, should anybody ask it of him, to take a cold shower, dress again, and read the first of the Day Hours with Mr. Willow before a disgusting breakfast. On the parade ground and the football ground he excelled. He neither took fright at being shouted at nor expected logic of authority.

“Where’s Gunner Pym?” the colonel barked one day, in the middle of a lecture on the battle of Corunna, and looked up angrily as if someone else had spoken. Every sergeant in the drill hall screamed Pym’s name until he stood.

“Are you Pym?”

“Sir!”

“See me after this lecture.”

“Sir!”

Company Headquarters lay on the other side of the parade ground. Pym marched there and saluted. The colonel’s aide-de-camp left the room.

“At ease, Pym. Sit down.”

The colonel spoke carefully, with a soldier’s mistrust of words. He had a soft honey-coloured moustache and the limpid gaze of an entirely stupid man.

“It has been put to me by certain people that, assuming you are commissioned, you would do well to attend a certain training course at a certain establishment, Pym.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I am therefore to submit a personal report on you.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Which I shall do. Favourable, as a matter of fact.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“You are keen. You are not cynical. You are not marred, Pym, by the luxuries of peace. You are somebody this country needs.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Pym.”

“Yes, sir.”

“If ever those people you’re mixed up with happen to be looking for a rather fit retired army colonel with a certain amount of

je ne sais quoi,

I trust you to remember me. I speak some French. I ride decently. I know my wines. Tell them that.”

“I shall, sir. Thank you, sir.”

Possessing little in the way of memory, the colonel had a habit of returning to conversations as if they were new to him.

“Pym.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Pick your moment. Don’t rush in with it. They don’t like that. Be subtle. That’s an order.”

“I will, sir.”

“You know my name?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Spell it.”

Pym did.

“I’ll change it if they want. They’ve only to let me know. I hear you took a First, Pym.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Carry on.”

In the evenings, seated beside lonely men, Pym the ever-willing obliged by dictating letters of love to their girlfriends. Where the physical feat of writing eluded them, he acted as their amanuensis, adding personalised endearments to their specification. Sometimes, fired by his own rhetoric, he would burst into song on his own account, in the lyrical style of a Blunden or a Sassoon:

“Dearest Belinda,

“I cannot tell you what fun and simple human goodness are to be found among one’s working-class comrades. Yesterday—great excitement—we drove our twenty-five-pounders to a remote firing range Somewhere in England for our first Shoot, embussing before dawn and not reaching the r.v. till eleven. The slatted seats of a fifteen-hundredweight are designed to split the spine in several places. We had no cushions and only iron rations to munch. Yet the chaps whistled and sang in tremendous spirits all the way, acquitted themselves superbly and endured the journey back with only the most cheerful grumbles. I felt privileged to be one of them and am seriously considering refusing a commission. . . .”

When a commission came his way, however, Pym contrived without difficulty to accept it, as witness the erogenous hillocks of khaki thread backed on green cloth, one to each shoulder of his battledress, whose existence he covertly confirms whenever the train enters another tunnel. The bare breasts of the peasant girls are his first since the election. With each new valley, he strains his disapproving gaze to see more of them and is seldom disappointed. “We’ll send you to Vienna first,” his commanding officer at the Intelligence Depot had said. “Chance to get the feel of the place before you’re pushed out into the field.”

“It sounds ideal, sir,” said Pym.

Austria in those days was a different country from the one we have come to love, Tom, and Vienna was a divided city like Berlin or your father. A few years later to everyone’s lasting amazement the diplomats agreed they wouldn’t bother with a sideshow while there was Germany to squabble over, so the occupying powers signed a treaty and went home, thus notching up the British Foreign Office’s one positive achievement in my lifetime. But in Pym’s day the sideshow was going great guns. The Americans had Salzburg as their capital, the French Innsbruck and the Brits Graz, and everyone had a piece of Vienna to play with. At Christmastime the Russians gave us wooden buckets of caviar and we gave the Russians plum puddings, and there was a story still going the rounds when Pym arrived that when the caviar was served to the men as a prelude to their dinner, a corporal of Argylls complained to the duty officer that the jam tasted of fish. The brains of British Vienna was a sprawling villa called Div. Int., and that was where Second Lieutenant Pym was launched upon his duties, which consisted of reading reports on the movements of everything from Soviet mobile laundries to Hungarian horse cavalry, and pushing coloured pins into maps. His most exciting map showed the Soviet Zone of Austria which began a mere twenty minutes’ drive from where he worked. Pym had only to look at its borders to feel intrigue and danger prickle on his skin. At other times, when he was tired or forgot himself, his eye would lift to the western tip of Czechoslovakia, to Karlovy Vary formerly Carlsbad, the charming eighteenth-century spa once favoured by Brahms and Beethoven. But he knew of no personal connection with the place and his interest was purely historical.

He lived an odd life those first months, for his destiny did not lie in Vienna, and it seems to me in fanciful moments now that the capital was itself waiting to release him to the sterner laws of nature. Too lowly to be taken seriously by his brother officers, prevented by protocol from mixing with the Other Ranks, too poor to revel in the swagman’s restaurants and nightclubs, Pym floated between his commandeered hotel room and his maps, much as he had floated round Bern in the days of his illegality. And I will admit now but never then that, more than once, listening to the Viennese chattering their zany German on the pavements, or taking himself to one of the struggling small theatres that were cropping up in cellars and bombed houses, he had a pang of nostalgic longing to turn his head and discover a good friend limping at his side. But he knew of none. It is merely my German soul reviving, he told himself; it is the German nature to feel incomplete. On other nights, the great secret agent would take himself on reconnaissance through the Soviet Sector disguised in a green Tyrolean hat he had bought specially for the purpose, to observe from beneath its brim the stubby Russian sentries with their submachine guns posted outside the Soviet headquarters at twenty-yard intervals down the street. If they challenged him Pym had only to show his military pass for their Tartar faces to crack in friendly recognition as they took a pace back in their soft leather boots and tossed up a grey-gloved hand in salute.

“English good.”

“But Russian good too,” Pym would insist with a laugh. “Russian very good, honestly.”

“Kamarad!”

“Tovarich. Kamarad,”

the great internationalist responded.

He would offer a cigarette and take one. He would light them with his big-flamed American Zippo lighter obtained from one of the many clandestine merchants operating inside Div. Int. He would let it glow on the sentry’s features and his own. Then Pym in his goodheartedness had half an urge, though fortunately not the language, to explain that although he had spied on the Communists at Oxford, and was spying on them again in Vienna, he was still a Communist at heart and cared more for the snows and cornfields of Russia than ever he did for the musical cocktail cabinets and roulette wheels of Ascot.

And sometimes, very late, returning through empty squares to his monkish little bedroom with its army fire extinguisher and photograph of Rick, he would pause, and drink the clean night air in gusts until he was elated, and gaze down misted cobble streets, and pretend that he saw Lippsie walking towards him through the lamplight in her refugee’s headscarf, carrying her cardboard suitcase. And he would smile at her and valiantly congratulate himself that, whatever his outward longings, he was still living in the world inside his head.

He had been in Vienna three months when Marlene asked him for his protection. Marlene was a Czech interpreter and celebrated beauty.

“You are Mr. Pym?” she enquired one evening with a civilian’s delightful shyness as he descended the great staircase behind a bevy of high-ranking officers. She wore a baggy mackintosh nipped at the waist and a hat with little horns.

Pym confessed that he was.

“You are walking to the Weichsel Hotel?”

Pym said that he did so every evening.

“You allow I walk with you, please, once? Yesterday a man tried to rape me. You will guide me to my door? I am not trouble?”

Soon the intrepid Pym was guiding Marlene to her door each evening and collecting her from it in the mornings. His day unfolded between these radiant interludes. But when he invited her to have dinner with him after payday, he was summoned by a furious captain of Fusiliers who had charge of new arrivals.

“You are a lecherous little swine, do you hear?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Div. Int. subalterns do not, repeat not, fraternise in public with civilian personnel. Not unless they’ve put a lot more service in than you have. D’you hear?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Do you know what a shit is?”

“Yes, sir.”

“No, you don’t. A shit, Pym, is an officer whose tie is of a lighter khaki than his shirt. Have you seen your tie recently?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Have you seen your shirt?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Compare them, Pym. And ask yourself what sort of young officer you are. That woman isn’t even cleared above restricted.”

It’s all training, thought Pym, as he changed his tie. I’m being hardened for the field. Nevertheless it worried him that Marlene had asked him so many questions about himself and he wished that he had not been quite so frank in his replies.

Not long after this, Pym was mercifully deemed to have got the feel of the place. Before departing he was again summoned by the captain who showed him two photographs. One depicted a pretty young man with soft lips, the other a chubby drunk with a sneer.

“If you see either of these men you will report that information to a senior officer immediately, do you hear?”

“Who are they?”

“Hasn’t anyone taught you not to ask questions? If you can’t find a senior officer, arrest them yourself.”

“How?”

“Use your authority. Be courteous but firm. ‘You men are under arrest.’ Then bring them to the nearest senior officer.”

Their names, Pym learned a few days later from the

Daily Express,

were Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean and they were members of the British Foreign Service. For several weeks, he continued to look for them everywhere, but he never found them because they had already defected to Moscow.

So which of us is responsible, Tom, tell me? Is it Pym’s wistful soul or God’s wry humour that contrives to deal him a spell of Paradise before every Fall? I told you of the Ollingers in Bern that it was given to us once only in a lifetime to know a truly happy family, but I had forgotten Major Harrison Membury, formerly of the British Library in Nairobi and one-time officer in the Education Corps, who had strayed by a delicious caprice of military logic into the ragtag ranks of Field Security. I had forgotten his beautiful wife and their many grimy daughters who were Fräulein Ollingers in the making, except that they kept goats and a boisterous piglet in preference to making music, which made mayhem of their military hiring, to the rage of the garrison Administration officer, who was powerless because the Memburys were Intelligence and immune. I had forgotten Number 6 Field Interrogation Unit, Graz, a pink baroque villa in a wooded cleft of hills a mile from the city’s edge. Bunches of telephone cable led into it, aerials desecrated the spired roof. It had a gateway with a gatehouse and a wild-eyed blond mess waiter called Wolfgang who rushed down the steps in a pressed white coat to hand you out of your jeep. But the best thing about it as far as Membury was concerned was the lake, which he spent his days stocking, for he was mad on fish and lavished a sizable part of our secret imprest on encouraging rare breeds of trout. You must imagine a big, genial man, quite strengthless, with the elegant gestures of an invalid. And of a dreamy religious eye and disposition. A civilian to his soft fingertips if ever I met one, yet when I see him now it is always in army battledress with worn suède boots and a webbing belt either above his belly or below it, standing amid the dragonflies at the edge of his beloved lake in the heat of a scorching afternoon, exactly as Pym discovered him on the day he reported for duty, poking a thing like a shrimping net into the water while he muttered shy imprecations against a marauding pike.

“Oh my goodness. You’re Pym. Yes, well, so glad you’ve come. Look here, I’m going to clear away the weed and drag the whole bed to see exactly what we’ve got. What do you think of that?”

“It sounds great, sir,” said Pym.

“I’m so glad. Are you married?”

“No, sir.”

“Marvellous. Then you’ll be free at weekends.”

And I think of him for some reason as one of a pair of brothers, though I don’t recall ever hearing he had a brother. His home-based staff consisted of a sergeant whom I barely remember and a cockney driver called Kaufmann who had a degree in Economics at Cambridge. His second in command was a pink-cheeked young banker named Lieutenant McLaird who was returning to the City. In the cellars, dutiful Austrian clerks tapped telephones, steamed open mail and dumped their unread product in a row of army dustbins which were emptied by the Graz authorities punctiliously once a week because it was a nightmare of Membury’s that some fish-hating vandal would tip them in the lake. On the ground floor he kept his stable of locally recruited lady interpreters who ranged from the maternal to the nubile, and Membury, when he remembered their existence, admired them all. And finally he had his wife Hannah, a painter of trees, and Hannah, as is so often the way with the wives of very large men, was as fragile as a wisp. Hannah made painting attractive to me, and I remember her best seated at her easel in a low white dress while the girls roll shrieking down a grass bank and Membury and myself in bathing costumes toil in the brown water. Even today it is impossible to imagine her as the mother of all those daughters.

The rest of Pym’s life could scarcely have been more to his liking. For commodities he had Naafi whisky at seven shillings a bottle and cigarettes at twelve shillings a hundred. He could barter or, if he preferred, convert them without effort into the local currency, though it was safest to rely on the services of an elderly Hungarian Rittmeister who sat around Registry reading secret files and gazing lovingly at Wolfgang, much as Mr. Cudlove liked to gaze at Ollie. All of it was familiar, all of it was necessary to Pym for the continuation of his unlived orthodox childhood. On Sundays, he escorted the Memburys to mass and over lunch looked down the front of Hannah’s dress. Membury is a genius, Pym exulted as he moved his desk into the great man’s ante-room. Membury is Renaissance Man made spy. Within weeks he had his own imprest. Within a few more he had a second pip for Wolfgang to sew on his shoulder, for Membury said he looked silly with only one.

And he had his Joes.

“This is Pepi,” McLaird explained with a droll smile, over a discreet dinner out of town. “Pepi fought the Reds for the Germans and now he’s fighting them for us. You’re a fanatic anti-Communist, aren’t you, Pepi? That’s why he takes his motorbike into the Zone and sells pornographic photographs to the Russian soldiery. Four hundred Players Medium a month. In arrears.”

“This is Elsa,” McLaird said, presenting a dumpy Carinthian housewife with four children, in the grill-room of the Blue Rose. “Her boyfriend runs a café in St. Pölten. Sends her the registration numbers and insignia of the Russian lorries that go past his window, doesn’t he, Elsa? All in secret writing on the back of his love letters. Three kilos of medium-roast coffee a month. In arrears.”

There were a dozen of them and Pym set to work immediately to develop and welfare them in every way he knew. Today when I play them through my memory they are as fine a bunch of neverwozzers as ever came the way of an aspiring spymaster. But to Pym they were simply the best scouts ever and he would see them right if it killed him.

And I have left till last Sabina, Jack, who like her friend Marlene in Vienna was an interpreter, and like Marlene was the most beautiful girl in the world, plucked straight from the pages of

Amor and Rococo Woman.

She was small like E. Weber, with broad, fluid hips and intense demanding eyes. Her breasts in summer or winter were high and very strong and, like her buttocks, pushed their way through the most workaday clothes, insistently demanding Pym’s attention. Her features were those of a gloomy Slav elf haunted by sadness and superstition but capable of amazing bursts of sweetness, and if Lippsie had been reincarnated and made twenty-three again, she could have done a great deal worse than take Sabina’s form.

“Marlene says you are respectable,” she informed Pym with contempt as she clambered aboard Corporal Kaufmann’s jeep, not bothering to conceal her Rococo legs.

“Is that a crime?” Pym asked.

“Don’t worry,” she replied ominously, and away they drove to the camps. Sabina spoke Czech and Serbo-Croat as well as German. In her spare time she was studying economics at Graz University, which gave her an excuse to talk to Corporal Kaufmann.

“You are believing in mixing agararian economy, Kaufmann?”

“I don’t believe in any of it.”

“You are Keynesian?”

“I wouldn’t be one with my own money, I’ll tell you that,” said Kaufmann.

Thus the conversation went back and forth while Pym searched for ways of brushing carelessly against her white shoulder, or causing her skirt to open a fraction further to the north.

Their destination on these journeys was the camps. For five years the refugees of Eastern Europe had been pouring into Austria through every fast-closing gap in the barbed wire: crashing frontiers in stolen cars and lorries, across minefields, clinging to the underneath of trains. They brought their hollow faces and their shorn children and their puzzled old and their frisky dogs, and their Lippsies in the making, to be corralled and questioned and decided over in their thousands, while they played chess on wooden packing cases and showed each other photographs of people they would never see again. They came from Hungary and Rumania and Poland and Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia and sometimes Russia, and they hoped they were on their way to Canada and Australia and Palestine. They had travelled by devious routes and often for devious reasons. They were doctors and scientists and bricklayers. They were truck drivers, thieves, acrobats, publishers, rapists and architects. All passed across Pym’s vision as he rode in his jeep from camp to camp with Kaufmann and Sabina, questioning, grading and recording, then hastening home to Membury with his booty.

At first his sensitivity was offended by so much misery and he had a hard time disguising his concern for everyone he spoke to: yes, I will see you to Montreal if it kills me; yes, I will send word to your mother in Canberra that you are safely here. At first Pym was also embarrassed by his lack of suffering. Everyone he questioned had had more experience in a day than he had in his whole young life and he resented them. Some had been crossing borders since they were children. Others spoke of death and torture so casually that he became indignant at their unconcern, until his disapproval sparked their anger and they flung back at him with mockery. But Pym the good labourer had work to do, and a commanding officer to please and, when he armed himself, a quick and covert mind to do it with. He had only to consult his own nature to know when someone was writing in the margin of his memory and excluding the main text. He knew how to make small talk while he was watching, and how to read the signals that came back to him. If they described a night crossing over the hills, Pym crossed with them, lugging their Lippsie suitcases and feeling the icy mountain air cutting through their old coats. When one of them told a lie direct, Pym rapidly took back-bearings on likely versions of the truth with the aid of his mental compass. Questions teemed in him and, budding lawyer that he was, he learned quickly to shape them into a pattern of accusation. “Where do you come from? What troops did you see there? What colour shoulder boards did they wear? What did they drive around in, what weapons did they have? Which route did you take, what guards, obstructions, dogs, wire, minefields did you meet along your way? What shoes were you wearing? How did your mother manage, your grandmother, if the mountain pass was so steep? How did you cope with two suitcases and two small children when your wife was so heavily pregnant? Is it not more likely that your employers in the Hungarian secret police drove you to the border and wished you luck as they showed you where to cross? Are you a spy and if so, would you not prefer to spy for us? Or are you merely a criminal, in which case you would surely like to take up spying, rather than be tossed back across the border by the Austrian police?” Thus Pym drew from his own criss-cross lives in order to unravel theirs, and Sabina with her scowls and moods and occasional gorgeous smiles became the sultry voice in which he did it. Sometimes he let her translate into German for him, in order to give himself the secret advantage of hearing everything twice.

“Where you learn to play these stupid games?” she asked him sternly one evening as they danced together at the Hotel Wiesler, to the disapproval of the army wives.

Pym laughed.

On the brink of manhood, with Sabina’s thigh riding against his own, why should he owe anything to anybody? So he invented a story for her about this cunning German he’d known at Oxford who had turned out to be a spy.

“We had a rather weird battle of wits,” he confessed, drawing upon hastily created memories. “He used all the tricks in the book and to start with I was as innocent as a babe and believed everything he told me. Gradually the contest got a bit more even.”

“He was Communist?”

“As it turned out, yes. He made a show of hiding it, but it slipped out when you really went for him.”

“He was hommsexual?” Sabina asked, voicing an ever-ready suspicion as she squirmed more deeply into him.

“Not so far as I could see. He had women in regiments.”

“He slept only with military women?”

“I meant he had large quantities of them. I was using a metaphor.”

“I think he was wishing to disguise his hommsexuality. This is normal.”

Sabina spoke of her own life as if it belonged to someone she hated. Her stupid Hungarian father had been shot at the border. Her fool mother had died in Prague attempting to produce a baby for a worthless lover. Her older brother was an idiot and studying to be a doctor in Stuttgart. Her uncles were drunkards and had got themselves shot by the Nazis and the Communists.

“You want I give you Czech lesson Saturday?” she asked him one evening in an even stricter tone than usual, as they drove home three abreast.

“I would like that very much,” Pym replied, holding her hand at her side. “I’m really beginning to enjoy it.”

“I think we make love this time. We shall see,” she said severely, at which Kaufmann nearly drove into a ditch.

Saturday came and neither Rick’s shadow nor Pym’s terrors could prevent him from ringing Sabina’s doorbell. He heard a footstep softer than her usual practical tread. He saw the light-spots of her eyes regard him through the eye-slit in the door, and did his best to smile in a rugged, reassuring manner. He had brought enough Naafi whisky to banish the guilt of ages, but Sabina had no guilt and when she opened the door to him she was naked. Incapable of speech he stood before her clutching his carrier bag. In a daze he watched her reset the security chain, take the bag from his lifeless hands, stalk to the sideboard and unpack it. The day was warm but she had lit a fire and turned back the bedcovers.

“You have had many women, Magnus?” she demanded. “Women in regiments like your bad friend?”

“I don’t think I have,” said Pym.

“You are hommsexual like all English?”

“I’m really not.”

She led him to the bed. She sat him down and unbuttoned his shirt. Severely, like Lippsie when she needed something for the laundry van outside. She unbuttoned the rest of him and arranged his clothes over a chair. She guided him on to his back and spread herself over him.

“I didn’t know,” said Pym aloud.

“Please?”

He started to say something, but there was too much to explain and his interpreter was already occupied. He meant: I didn’t know, for all my longing, what I was longing for till now. He meant: I can fly, I can swim on my front and on my back and on my side and on my head. He meant: I’m whole and I’ve joined the men at last.

It was a balmy Friday afternoon in the villa six days later. In the gardens below the windows of Membury’s enormous office, the Rittmeister in his lederhosen was shelling peas for Wolfgang. Membury sat at his desk, his battledress unbuttoned to the waist while he drafted a questionnaire for trawler captains that he proposed to send in hundreds to the major fishing fleets. For weeks now he had set his heart on tracing the winter routes of sea trout, and the unit’s resources had been hard pressed to accommodate him.

“I’ve had a rather rum approach made to me, sir,” Pym began delicately. “Somebody claiming to represent a potential defector.”

“Oh but how interesting for you, Magnus,” Membury said politely, prising himself with difficulty from his preoccupations. “I hope it’s not another Hungarian frontier guard. I’ve rather had my fill of them. So has Vienna, I’m sure.” Vienna was a growing worry to Membury, as Membury was to Vienna. Pym had read the painful correspondence between them that Membury kept safely locked at all times in the top left drawer of his flimsy desk. It might be only a question of days before the captain of Fusiliers arrived in person to take charge.

“He’s not Hungarian, actually, sir,” said Pym. “He’s Czech. He’s attached to HQ Southern Command based outside Prague.”

Membury tilted his large head to one side as if shaking water out of his ear. “Well that’s heartening,” he remarked doubtfully. “Div. Int. would give their eye-teeth for some good stuff about Southern Czecho. Or anywhere else in Czecho for that matter. The Americans seem to think they have a monopoly of the place. Somebody said as much to me on the telephone only the other day, I don’t know who.”

The telephone line to Graz ran through the Soviet Zone. In the evenings Russian technicians could be heard on it, singing drunken Cossack music.

“According to my source he’s a disgruntled clerk sergeant working in their strongroom,” Pym persisted. “He’s supposed to be coming out tomorrow night. If we’re not there to receive him he’ll go to the Americans.”

“You didn’t hear of him through the Rittmeister, did you?” said Membury nervously.

With the skill of long habituation, Pym entered the risky ground. No, it was not the Rittmeister, he assured Membury. At least it didn’t sound like the Rittmeister. The voice sounded younger and more positive.

Membury was confused. “Could you possibly explain?” he said.

Pym did.

It was just an ordinary Thursday evening, he said. He’d been to the movies to see

Liebe 47,

and on his way back he thought he’d drop in at the Weisses Ross for a beer.

“I don’t think I know the Weisses Ross.”

“It’s just another pub, sir, really, but the Czech émigrés use it a lot and everyone sits at long tables. I’d been there literally two minutes when the waiter called me to the phone.

‘Herr Leutnant, fur Sie.’

They know me a bit there so I wasn’t too surprised.”

“Good for you,” said Membury, impressed.

“It was a man’s voice, speaking High German. ‘Herr Pym? Here is an important message for you. If you do exactly as I tell you, you will not be disappointed. Have you pen and paper?’ I had, so he started reading to me at dictation speed. He checked it back with me and rang off before I could ask him who he was.”

From his pocket Pym produced the very sheet of paper, torn from the back of a diary.

“But if this was last night, why on earth didn’t you tell me earlier?” Membury objected, taking it from him.

“You were at the Joint Intelligence Committee meeting.”

“Oh my hat, so I was. He asked for you by name,” Membury remarked with pride, still looking at the paper. “‘ Only Lieutenant Pym will do.’ That’s rather flattering, I must say.” He pulled at a protruding ear. “Well look here, you take jolly good care,” he warned, with the sternness of a man who could refuse Pym nothing. “And don’t go too near the border in case they try and haul you over.”

This was not by any means the first advance tip-off of a defector’s arrival that had come Pym’s way in recent months, not even the sixth, though it was the first that had been whispered to him by a naked Czech interpreter in a moonlit orchard. Only a week before, Pym and Membury had sat out a night in the Carinthian lowlands waiting to receive a captain of Rumanian Intelligence and his mistress who were supposedly approaching in a stolen aeroplane crammed with priceless secrets. Membury had the Austrian police close off the area, Pym fired coloured Very lights into the empty air as they had been instructed in secret messages. But when dawn came no aeroplane had arrived.

“What are we supposed to do now?” Membury had complained with pardonable irritation as they sat shivering in the jeep. “Sacrifice a bloody goat? I do wish the Rittmeister were more precise. It makes one look so silly.”

A week before that, disguised in green loden coats, they had taken themselves to a remote inn on the zonal border in search of a Heimkehrer from a Soviet uranium mine who was expected any moment. As they pushed open the door the conversation in the bar stopped dead and a score of peasants gawped at them.

“Billiards,” Membury ordered with rare decisiveness, from under his hand. “There’s a table over there. We’ll get a game going. Fit in.”

Still in his green loden, Membury stooped to play his ball, only to be interrupted by the resounding clang of heavy metal striking the tiled floor close at hand. Glancing down, Pym saw his commanding officer’s .38 service revolver lying at his large feet. He had recovered it for him in a moment, never quicker. But not quick enough to prevent the stampede to the door as the terrified peasants scattered in the darkness and the landlord locked himself in the cellar.

“Can I go back now, sir?” said Kaufmann. “I’m not a soldier at all, you see. I’m a coward.”

“No you can’t,” said Pym. “Now be quiet.”

The barn stood by itself as Sabina had said it would, at the centre of a flat field lined with larches. A yellow path led to it; behind it lay a lake. Behind the lake a hill and on the hill, as the evening darkened, a single watchtower overlooked the valley.

“You will wear civilian clothes and park your car at the crossroads to Klein Brandorf,” Sabina had whispered to his thighs as she kissed and fondled and revived him. The orchard had a brick wall and was occupied by a family of large brown hares. “You will leave sidelights burning. If you cheat and bring protection he will not appear. He will stay in the forest and be angry.”

“I love you.”

“There is a stone, painted white. This is where Kaufmann must stand. If Kaufmann passes the white stone, he will not appear, he will stay in the forest.”

“Why can’t you come too?”

“He does not wish it. He wishes only Pym. Perhaps he is hommsexual.”

“Thanks,” said Pym.

The white stone glinted ahead of them.

“Stay here,” Pym ordered.

“Why?” said Kaufmann.

Evening mist lay in strips across the field. The surface of the lake popped with rising fish. With the sun setting, the larches threw mile-long shadows across the golden meadow. Sawn logs lay beside the barn door, boxes of geraniums adorned the windows. Pym thought again of Sabina. Her enfolding flanks, the broad spaces of her back. “What I tell you I have not told to any Englishman. In Prague I have a younger brother who is called Jan. If you tell this to Membury he will already dismiss me immediately. The British do not allow us to have close family inside a Communist country. Do you understand?” Yes, Sabina, I understand. I have seen the moonlight on your breasts, your moisture is on my lips, it is sticking to my eyelids. I understand. “Listen. My brother sends me this message for you. Only for Pym. He trusts you because of me and because I have told him only good things about you. He has a friend who wishes to come out. This friend is very gifted, very brilliant, top access. He will bring you many secrets about the Russians. But first you must invent a story for Membury to explain how you received this information. You are clever. You can invent many stories. Now you must invent one for my brother and his friend.” Yes, Sabina, I can invent. For you and your beloved brother I can invent a million stories. Get me my pen, Sabina. Where did you put my clothes? Now tear me a piece of paper from your diary and I will invent a story about a strange man who telephoned me at the Weisses Ross and made me an irresistible proposal.

Pym unbuttoned his loden. “Always draw across the body,” his weapons instructor had advised at the sad little depot in Sussex where they had taught him how to fight Communism. “It gives you better protection when the other laddie shoots first.” Pym was not sure this was good advice. He reached the door and it was closed. He walked round the barn, trying to find a place to peep in. “His information will be good for you,” Sabina had said. “It will make you very famous in Vienna, Membury also. Good intelligence from Czechoslovakia is extremely rare at Div. Int. Mostly it comes from the Americans and is therefore corrupt.”

The sun had set and the dusk was gathering fast. From across the lake Pym heard the yelping of a fox. Rows of chicken coops stood at the back of the barn and the straw in them was clean. Chickens in no-man’s-land, he thought frivolously. Stateless eggs. The chickens tucked their necks at him and blew out their feathers. A grey heron lifted from the lake and set course toward the hills. He returned to the front of the barn.

“Kaufmann!”

“Sir?”

A hundred metres lay between them but their voices were as close as lovers in the evening stillness.

“Did you cough?”

“No, sir.”

“Well, don’t.”

“I expect I was sobbing, sir.”

“Keep guard, but whatever you see, don’t come any nearer unless I order you.”

“I’d like to desert, if I may, sir. I’d rather be a defector than this, honestly. I’m a sitting target. I’m not a human being at all.”

“Do some mental sums or something.”

“I can’t. I’ve tried. Nothing comes.”

Pym lifted the door latch, stepped inside and smelt cigar smoke and horse. St. Moritz, he thought, lightheaded in his apprehension. The barn was cavernous and beautiful and raised at one end like an old ship. On the dais stood a table and on the table, to Pym’s surprise, a lighted oil lamp. By its glow he admired the ancient beams and roof. “Wait inside and he will come,” Sabina had said. “He will want to see you go in first. My brother’s friend is very cautious. Like many Czechs, he has a great and cautious mind.” Two high-backed wooden chairs were pulled to the table and magazines were strewn on it like in a dentist’s waiting-room. Must be where the farmer does his paperwork. At the end of the barn, he noticed a rustic ladder leading to a loft. At the weekend I’ll bring you here. I’ll bring wine and cheese and bread, and blankets in case it’s prickly, and you can wear your flouncy skirt with nothing underneath. He climbed halfway up the ladder and peered over. Sound floor, dry hay, no sign of rats. An admirable location for rustic Rococo. He returned to the ground floor and made his way towards the dais where the light burned, intending to settle down in one of the chairs. “You must be patient, if necessary all night,” Sabina had said. “Crossing the border is extremely dangerous now. It is late summer and the doubters are coming over before the passes close. Therefore they have many guards and spies.” A stone pathway ran between two cattle drains. His feet echoed thickly in the roof. The echo stopped, his feet with it. A slender figure was seated at the head of the table. He was leaning alertly forward, posing for something. He held a cigar in one hand and an automatic pistol in the other. His gaze, like the barrel of the automatic, was fixed on Pym.

“Keep walking towards me, Sir Magnus,” Axel urged in a tone of considerable anxiety. “Put your arms up and for heaven’s sake don’t go imagining you are a great cowboy or a war hero. Neither of us is a member of the shooting classes. We put our guns away and we have a nice chat. Be reasonable. Please.”

It would take our Maker himself, Tom, with help from all of us, to describe the range of thoughts and emotions charging at that moment through Pym’s poor head. His first response, I am sure, was disbelief. He had encountered Axel very often in the last few years and this was merely another example of the phenomenon. Axel watching him in his sleep, Axel standing at his bedside with his beret on—“Let’s take another look at Thomas Mann.” Axel laughing at him for his addiction to Old High German and remonstrating with him for his bad habit of protesting loyalty to everyone he met: to the Oxford Communists, to all women, to the Jacks and Michaels and to Rick. “You are a serious fool, Sir Magnus,” he had warned him once, when Pym returned to his rooms after a particularly deft night of juggling girls and social opposites. “You think that by dividing everything you can pass between.” Axel had limped at his side along the Isis towpath and watched him dash his knuckles against the wall in order to impress Jemima. At the election Pym could not have told you how often Axel’s glistening white dome had popped up in the audience, or his long, restive hands flapped in sarcastic applause. With Axel so much upon his conscience, therefore, Pym knew for a fact that Axel did not exist. And with this certainty in his head it was perfectly reasonable that his next response to seeing Axel was downright indignation that someone so thoroughly forbidden, someone who had been literally, for whatever reason, banished out of sight or mention over the borders of Pym’s kingdom, should presume to be sitting here, smoking and smiling and pointing a pistol at him—at me, Pym, a bulletproof, fornicating member of the British Occupational classes gifted with supernatural powers. And after that, of course, paradoxical as ever, Pym was more exultant, more thrilled and more happy to see Axel than anyone since the day Rick rode round the corner on his bicycle singing “Underneath the Arches.”

Pym walked then ran to Axel’s side. He kept his arms above his head as Axel ordered him. He waited impatiently while Axel flashed his army revolver from his waistband and laid it with his own respectfully at the further end of the table. Then at last he dropped his arms far enough to fling them round Axel’s neck. I don’t remember that they had ever embraced before or did so afterwards. But I remember that evening as the last of childish sentiments between them, the last day of Bern, because I see them hugging and laughing chest to chest, Slav style, before they hold one another at a distance to see what damage the years of separation have done to each of them. And we may assume from contemporary photographs and from my own memories of the mirror in those days, which still played a large part in the young officer’s contemplations, that Axel saw the typical, uncut Anglo-Saxon features of a good-looking, fair young man still trying hard to put on the mantle of experience, whereas in Axel’s face Pym witnessed at once a hardening, a hollowing-out, a shaping that was there for ever. Axel would look like this for the rest of his days. Life had had its say. He had the manly, human face that he deserved. The softer contours had gone, leaving an etched jauntiness and assurance. His hairline had retreated but consolidated. Streaks of grey had joined the black, giving it a practical and military appearance. The clown’s moustache, the clown’s hooped eyebrows had acquired a sadder humour. But the twinkling dark eyes, peering beneath their languid eyelids, were as merry as ever, while everything around them seemed to give depth to their perception.

“You look well, Sir Magnus!” Axel declared exuberantly, still holding him. “You are a fine fellow, my God. We should buy you a white horse and give you India.”

“But who are you?” Pym cried in equal excitement. “Where are you? What are you doing here? Should I arrest you?”

“Maybe I arrest you. Maybe I did already. You put your hands up, do you remember? Listen. We are in no-man’s-land here. We can arrest each other.”

“You’re under arrest,” Pym said.

“You too,” said Axel. “How’s Sabina?”

“Fine,” Pym said with a grin.

“She knows nothing, you understand? Only what her brother told her. You will protect her?”

“I promise I will,” Pym said.

Here a slight pause as Axel pretended to clap his hands over his ears. “Don’t promise, Sir Magnus. Just don’t promise.”

For a frontier crosser Axel had come well equipped, Pym noticed. There was not a trace of mud on his boots, his clothes were pressed and official-looking. Releasing Pym, he grabbed a briefcase, plonked it on the table and drew from it a pair of glasses and a bottle of vodka. Then gherkins, sausage and a loaf of the black bread he used to send Pym out to buy in Bern. They toasted each other gravely, the way Axel had taught him. They refilled their glasses and drank again, a drink for each man. And it is my recollection that by the time they separated they had finished the bottle, for I remember Axel chucking it out into the lake to the outrage of about a thousand moorhens. But if Pym had drunk a case of the stuff it would not have affected him, such was the intensity of his feeling. Even while they began to talk, Pym kept secretly blinking into corners to make sure everything was how it was when he had last looked, so eerily similar at times was the barn to the Bern attic, right down to the soft wind that used to whirr in the skylights. And when he heard the fox again in the distance, he had the certain feeling it was Bastl barking on the wooden staircase after everyone had gone. Except that, as I say, those sentimental days were over. Magnus had killed them dead; the manhood of their friendship was beginning.

Now it is the way of old friends when they bump into each other, Tom, to put aside the immediate cause of their meeting until last. They prefer as a prelude to account for the years between, which gives a kind of tightness to whatever they have met to discuss. And that is what Pym and Axel did, though you will understand, now that you are familiar with the workings of Pym’s mind, that it was he and not Axel who led this passage of the conversation, if only in order to show to himself as well as to Axel that he was totally without sin in the tricky matter of Axel’s disappearance. He did it well. He was a polished performer these days.

“Honestly, Axel, nobody ever went out of my life so abruptly,” he complained in a tone of jocular reproach as he sliced sausage, buttered the bread and generally occupied himself with what actors call business. “You were there all safely tucked up in the evening, we’d got a bit drunk, said good night. Next morning I hammered on your wall, no answer. I go downstairs and walk into poor old Frau O crying her heart out. ‘Where’s Axel? They’ve taken away our Axel! The Fremdenpolizei carried him down the stairs and one of them kicked Bastl.’ From all they said, I must have been sleeping like the dead.”

Axel smiled his old warm smile. “If we only knew how the dead sleep,” he said.

“We held a sort of wake, hung around the house, half expecting you to come back. Herr Ollinger made some useless phone calls and got absolutely nowhere, naturally. Frau O remembered she had a brother in one of the Ministries,

he

was no good. In the end I thought, To hell with it, what have we got to lose? So I went down to the Fremdenpolizei myself. Passport in hand. ‘My friend’s missing. Some men dragged him from the house early this morning, said they came from you. Where is he?’ I banged the table a bit and got nowhere. Then two rather creepy gentlemen in raincoats took me into another room and told me that if I made any more trouble the same thing would happen to me.”

“That was brave of you, Sir Magnus,” said Axel. Reaching out a pale fist he tapped Pym lightly on the shoulder to say thanks.

“No, it wasn’t. Not really. I mean I did have somewhere to go. I was British and I had rights.”

“Sure. And you knew people at the Embassy. That’s true also.”

“And they’d have helped me out too. I mean they tried to. When I went to them.”

“You did?”

“Absolutely. Later, of course. Not immediately. Rather as a last resort. But they had a go.... So anyway, back I went to the Länggasse and we—honestly, we buried you. It was awful. Frau O was up in your room still crying, trying to sort out whatever you’d left behind without looking at it. Which wasn’t much. The Fremdenpolizei seemed to have pinched most of your papers. I took your library books back. Your gramophone records. We hung your clothes in the cellar. Then we sort of wandered round the house as if it had been bombed. ‘To think this could happen in Switzerland,’ we kept saying. Really just like a death.”

Axel laughed. “It was good of you to mourn me at least. Thank you, Sir Magnus. Did you hold a funeral service also?”

“With no body and no forwarding address? All Frau O wanted to do was look for the culprit. She was convinced you’d been informed against.”

“Who did she think did it?”

“Everyone in turn really. The neighbours. The shopkeepers. Maybe someone from the Cosmo. One of the Marthas.”

“Which one did she choose?”

Pym picked the prettiest and frowned. “I seem to remember there was a leggy blonde one who was reading English.”

“Isabella?

Isabella informed against

me?”

said Axel incredulously. “But she was in love with me, Sir Magnus. Why would she do that?”

“Maybe that was the reason,” said Pym boldly. “She came round a few days after you’d gone, you see. Asked for you. I told her what had happened. She howled and wept and said she was going to kill herself. But when I mentioned to Frau O that she’d called, she promptly said, ‘Isabella is the one. She was jealous of his other women so she informed against him.’”

“What did you think?”

“Seemed a bit far-fetched to me, but then everything else did too. So yes, maybe Isabella did it. She did seem a bit crazy sometimes, to be honest. I could sort of imagine her doing something awful out of jealousy—on an impulse, you know—then persuading herself she hadn’t done it in the first place. It’s a sort of syndrome, isn’t it, with jealous people?”

Axel took his time to reply. For a defector in the throes of negotiating his terms, Pym reflected, he was remarkably relaxed. “I don’t know, Sir Magnus. I don’t have your gifts of imagination sometimes. Do you have any other theories?”

“Not really. It could have happened so many ways.”

In the silence of the night, Axel replenished their glasses, smiling broadly. “You all seem to have thought about it far more than I have,” he confessed. “I’m very touched.” He lifted his palms, Slav style, languidly. “Listen. I was illegal. I was a bum. No money, no papers. On the run. So they caught me, they threw me out. That’s what happens to illegals. A fish gets a hook in its throat. A traitor gets a bullet in his head. An illegal gets marched across the border. Don’t frown so much. It’s over. Who gives a damn who did it? To tomorrow!”

“Tomorrow,” Pym said, and they drank. “Hey—how did the great book go by the way?” he asked in the secret euphoria of his absolution.

Axel laughed louder. “Go? My God, it went! Four hundred pages of immortal philosophising, Sir Magnus. Imagine the Fremdenpolizei wading their way through that!”

“You mean they kept it—stole it? That’s outrageous!”

“Maybe I was not too polite about the good Swiss burghers.”

“But you’ve written it again since?”

Nothing could quench his laughter. “Written it again? It would have been twice as bad next time. Better we bury it with Axel H. You still have

Simplicissimus?

You haven’t sold him?”

“Of course not.”

A pause intervened. Axel smiled at Pym. Pym smiled at his hands, then raised his eyes to Axel.

“So here we both are,” said Pym.

“That’s right.”

“I’m Lieutenant Pym and you’re Jan’s intelligent friend.”

“That’s right,” Axel agreed, still smiling.

Having thus, in his own estimation, skilfully circumvented the one awkwardness that might have stood between them, the intelligence predator in Pym now artfully advanced upon the pertinent question of what had become of Axel since his eviction, and what his access had been, and so by extension—as Pym hoped—what cards he held, and what price he proposed to put on them as a reward for favouring the British over the Americans or even—dreadful thought—the French. In this he met at first with no unpleasant inhibition on Axel’s part since, doubtless out of deference to Pym’s position of authority, he seemed resigned to take the passive rôle. Nor could Pym fail to notice that his old friend in rendering account of himself assumed the familiar meekness of the displaced person in the presence of his betters. The Swiss had marched him across the German border, he said—and for ease of reference he mentioned the frontier point in case Pym wished to check. They had handed him over to the West German police who, having dealt him a ritual beating, handed him to the Americans, who beat him again, first for escaping, then for returning, and finally of course for being the red-toothed war criminal that he was not, but whose identity he had unwisely purloined. The Americans put him in prison while they prepared a fresh case against him, they brought in fresh witnesses who were too frightened not to identify him, they set a date to try him, and still Axel could reach nobody who would vouch for him or say he was just Axel from Carlsbad and not a Nazi monster brother. Worse still, as the rest of the evidence began to look increasingly thin, said Axel with an apologetic smile, his own confession became increasingly important, so they had naturally beaten him harder in order to obtain it. No trial was held, however. War crimes, even fictitious ones, were becoming out of date, so one day the Americans had thrown him on another train and handed him over to the Czechs who, not to be out-done, beat him for the double crime of having been a German soldier in the war and an American prisoner after it.

“Then one day they stopped beating me and let me out,” he said, smiling and opening his hands once more. “For this, it seems, I had my dear dead father to thank. You remember the great Socialist who had fought in the Thälmann brigade in Spain?”

“Of course I do,” said Pym, and it occurred to him as he watched Axel’s quick hands gesticulating and his dark eyes twinkling that Axel had put aside the German in him and put on the Slav for good. “I had become an aristocrat,” he said. “In the new Czechoslovakia I was Sir Axel suddenly. The old Socialists had loved my father. The new ones had been my friends at school and were already in the Party apparatus. ‘Why do you beat up Sir Axel?’ they asked my guards. ‘He’s got a good brain, stop hitting him and let him out. Okay, so he fought for Hitler. He’s sorry. Now he’ll fight for us, won’t you, Axel?’ ‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Why not?’ So they sent me to university.”

“But what did you study?” said Pym amazed. “Thomas Mann? Nietzsche?”

“Better. How to use the Party to advance oneself. How to rise in the Youth Union. Shine in the committees. How to purge the faculties and students, climb over the backs of friends and the reputation of one’s father. Which arses to kick and which to kiss. Where to talk too much and where to shut your mouth. Maybe I should have learned that earlier.”

Feeling he was close to the heart of things, Pym wondered whether it was time for him to take notes but decided not to destroy Axel’s flow.

“Somebody had the nerve to call me a Titoist the other day,” Axel said. “Since ’49 it’s the latest insult.” Pym secretly wondered whether this was why Axel had come over. “Know what I did?”

“What?”

“I informed against him.”

“No! What for?”

“I don’t know. Something bad. It’s not what you say, it’s who you say it to. You should know that. You’re a big spy, I hear. Sir Magnus of the British Secret Service. Congratulations. Is Corporal Kaufmann all right out there? Maybe you should take him something?”

“I’ll deal with him later, thank you.”

There was a hiatus while each in his separate way savoured the effect of this disciplinary note. They drank another toast, shaking their heads at one another over their luck. But inside himself Pym was less at ease than he let on. He had a sense of slipping standards and complicated undertones.

“So what work have you actually been up to these last days?” Pym asked, struggling to reclaim the ascendancy. “How does a sergeant from HQ Southern Command come to be wandering round the Soviet Zone of Austria, planning his defection?”

Axel was lighting himself a fresh cigar so Pym had to wait a minute for his answer.

“A sergeant I don’t know. In my unit we have only aristos. Like you, I am also a great spy, Sir Magnus. It’s a boom industry these days. We did well to select it.”

Needing suddenly to tend his outward appearance, Pym smoothed his hair back in a reflective gesture he was working on. “But you are still proposing to come over to us—assuming that we can offer you the right sort of terms of course?” he asked, with hard-edged courtesy.

Axel waved away such a stupid idea. “I’ve paid my ticket same as you. So it’s not perfect but it’s my country. I’ve crossed my last frontier. They’ve got to put up with me.”

Pym had a sensation of dangerous disconnection. “Then why are you here—if you don’t want to defect—if I may ask.”

“I heard about you. The great Lieutenant Pym of Div. Int., more latterly of Graz. Linguist. Hero. Lover. I was so excited to think of you spying on me. And me spying on you. It was so beautiful to think we were back in our old attic together, just that little thin wall between us—knock, knock! ‘I’ve got to get in touch with this fellow,’ I thought. Shake his hand. Give him a drink. Maybe we can set the world to rights, same as we used to in the old days.”

“I see,” said Pym. “Great.”

“ ‘Maybe we can put our heads together. We are reasonable men. Maybe he doesn’t want to fight any more wars. Maybe I don’t. Maybe we are tired of being heroes. Good men are scarce,’ I thought. ‘How many people in the world have shaken hands with Thomas Mann?’”

“Nobody but me,” said Pym with a burst of real laughter and they drank again.

“I owe you so much, Sir Magnus. You were so generous. I never knew a better heart. I yelled at you, cursed you. What did you do? Held my head when I threw up. Cooked me tea, cleaned the vomit and the shit off me, fetched me books—back and forth to the library—read to me all night. I owe this man, I thought. I owe this man a step or two forward in his career. I should make him a gesture that is painful to me. If I can help him achieve a position of influence in the world, that’s rare, that’s already good. For the world as well as for him. Not many good men achieve a position of influence today. So I’ll play a little trick and go and see him. And shake his hand. And say, thank you, Sir Magnus. And take him a gift to pay my debt to him and help him in his career, I thought. Because I love this man, do you hear?”

He had brought no straw hat filled with coloured packages but from the briefcase at his side he drew a folder and handed it to Pym across the table.

“You have landed a great coup, Sir Magnus,” he declared proudly as Pym lifted the cover. “Took me a lot of spying to get it for you. A lot of risks. Never mind. It’s better than Grimmelshausen, I think. If they ever find out what I’ve done, I can bring you my balls as well.”

Pym closes his eyes and opens them again, but it is the same night in the same barn. “I’m a little fat Czech sergeant who loves his vodka,” Axel is explaining while Pym continues in a dream to turn the pages of his gift. “I’m a good soldier Schweik. Did we read that book? My name is Pavel. Hear me? Pavel.”

“Of course we read it. It was great. Is this genuine, Axel? It isn’t a joke or anything?”

“You think fat Pavel takes a risk like this to bring you a joke? He has a wife who beats him, kids who hate him, Russian bosses who treat him worse than a dog. Are you listening?”

With half his head, yes, Pym is listening. He is reading too.

“Your good friend Axel H, he doesn’t exist. You never met him tonight. In Bern long ago, sure, you met a sickly German soldier who was writing a great book and maybe his name was Axel, what’s a name? But Axel vanished. Some bad guy informed against him, you never knew what happened. Tonight you are meeting fat Sergeant Pavel of Czech Army Intelligence who likes garlic and screwing and betraying his superiors. He speaks Czech and German, and the Russians use him as a dogsbody because they don’t trust the Austrians. One week he’s hanging around their headquarters in Wiener Neustadt playing messenger boy and interpreter, the next he’s freezing his arse off on the zonal border looking for small spies. The week after that he’s back in his garrison in Southern Czecho being kicked around by more Russians.” Axel is tapping Pym’s arm. “See this? Pay attention. Here’s a copy of his paybook. Look at it, Sir Magnus. Concentrate. He brought it for you because he doesn’t expect anybody ever to believe anything he says unless it is accompanied by

Unterlagen.

You remember

Unterlagen?

Papers? They are what I didn’t have in Bern. Take it with you. Show it to Membury.”

Reluctantly Pym lifts his eyes from his reading long enough to notice the wad of glossy paper Axel is holding up for him to admire. A photocopy in those days is a big matter: plate photographs, tied into a looseleaf book with bootlaces through the holes. Axel presses it upon Pym and again rouses him sufficiently from the material in the folder to make him study the portrait of the bearer: a piggy, part-shaven little man with puffy eyes and a pout.

“That is

me,

Sir Magnus,” Axel says, and bangs Pym on the shoulder quite hard to assure his attention, exactly as he used to in Bern. “Look at him, will you? He’s a greedy, grubby fellow. Farts a lot, scratches his head, steals his Commandant’s chickens. But he doesn’t like his country to be occupied by a bunch of sweating Ivans who swagger round the streets of Prague and tell him he’s a stinking little Czech, and he doesn’t like being packed down to Austria at somebody’s whim to play toady to a lot of drunk Cossacks. So he’s brave too, you follow me? He’s a brave little greasy coward.”

Pym again pauses in his reading, this time to register a bureaucratic complaint which later causes him some shame. “It’s all very well inventing this delightful character, Axel, but what am I to do with him?” he reasons in an aggrieved tone. “I’m supposed to produce a defector, not a paybook. They want a warm body back there in Graz. I haven’t got one, have I?”

“You idiot!” cries Axel, pretending to be exasperated by Pym’s obtuseness. “You guileless English baby! Have you never heard of a defector in place? Pavel

is

a defector! He’s defecting but staying where he is. In three weeks’ time he’ll come here again, bring you more material. He’ll defect not just once but if you are sensible twenty times, a hundred. He’s an intelligence clerk, a courier, a low-grade fieldman, a bottlewasher, a coding sergeant and a pimp. Don’t you understand what that means in terms of access? He will bring you wonderful intelligence again and again. His friends in the frontier unit will help him cross. Next time we meet you will have Vienna’s questions for him. You will be at the centre of a fantastic industry : ‘Can you get us this, Pavel? What does this mean, Pavel?’ If you’re polite to him, if you come alone, bring him a nice present, maybe he’ll answer them.”

“And will it be you—will I see you?”

“You will see Pavel.”

“And will you be Pavel?”

“Sir Magnus. Listen.” Pushing aside the briefcase that lay between them, Axel bangs his glass beside Pym’s and yanks his chair so close that his shoulder is nudging against Pym’s shoulder and his mouth is at Pym’s ear. “Are you being very, very attentive now?”

“Of course I am.”

“Because I think you are so fantastically stupid you better not play this game at all. Listen.” Pym is grinning exactly as he used to grin when Axel was explaining why he was a

Trottel

for not understanding Kant. “What Axel is doing for you tonight, he can never undo in his whole life. I am risking my bloody neck for you. Like Sabina gave you her brother, Axel gives you Axel. Do you understand? Or are you too shit-stupid to recognise that I am putting my future in your hands?”

“I don’t want it, Axel. I’d rather give it back.”

“It’s too late. I have stolen the papers, I have come over, you have seen them, you know what they contain. Pandora’s box cannot be closed again. Your nice Major Membury—those clever aristos in Div. Int.—none of them ever saw such information. Do you follow this?”

Pym nods, Pym shakes his head. Pym frowns, smiles, and tries to look in every way he can the worthy and mature custodian of Axel’s destiny.

“In return, you must swear me one thing. I told you earlier you must not promise. Now I tell you you must. To me, Axel, you must promise loyalty. Sergeant Pavel, he’s a different matter. Sergeant Pavel you can betray and invent as much as you like—he is an invention anyway. But I, Axel—this Axel here—look at me—

I do not exist.

Not for Membury, not for Sabina, not even for yourself. Even when you are lonely and bored and you need to impress somebody or buy somebody or sell somebody, I am not a creature in your game. If your own people threaten you, if they torture you, you must still deny me. If they put you on the cross in fifty years from now, will you lie for me? Answer.”

Pym finds time to marvel that after energetically denying Axel’s existence for so long he should be promising him to deny it for still longer. And that it must be a very rare thing indeed to be offered a second chance to prove one’s loyalty after failing so miserably at the first attempt.

“I will,” says Pym.

“What will you?”

“I will keep you secret. I’ll lock you in my memory and give you the key.”

“For always. Sabina’s brother Jan also?”

“For always. Jan too. That’s the whole Soviet Order of Battle in Czechoslovakia you’ve given me,” says Pym in a trance. “If it’s genuine.”

“It’s a little bit old, but you British know how to value antiquity. Your maps in Vienna and Graz are older. And they are not so genuine. You like Membury?”

“I think so. Why?”

“Me too. You are interested in fish? You are helping him to restock the lake?”

“Sometimes. Yes.”

“That’s important work. Do it with him. Help him. It’s a lousy world, Sir Magnus. A few happy fish will make it better.”

It was six in the morning when Pym left. Kaufmann had long ago put himself to bed in the jeep. Pym could see his boots sticking over the tailboard. Pym and Axel walked as far as the white stone, Axel leaning on his arm the way he used to when they walked beside the Aare. As they reached it Axel stooped and picked a harvest poppy and handed it to Pym. Then he picked another for himself which on reflection he handed to Pym also.

“There is one of me and one of you, Sir Magnus. There will never be another of either of us. You are the keeper of our friendship. Give my love to Sabina. Tell her that Sergeant Pavel sends her a special kiss to thank her for her help.”

A man with a highly regarded source is an admired man and a well-fed one, Tom, as Pym quickly discovered in the next few weeks. Visiting Very Senior Officers from Vienna take him to dinner just for the touch of him and the vicarious feel of his achievement. Membury comes too, a grinning, loping Caesar dwarfing his Antony, hauling on his ear, dreaming of fish and smiling at the wrong people. Other officers less senior but still substantial alter their opinion of Pym overnight and send him swarmy notes by interzonal bag. “Marlene sends her love and is so sad that you had to leave Vienna without saying goodbye to her. It looked for a moment as if I might become your C.O. but fate decreed otherwise. M and I hope to be engaged as soon as we get clearance from the War Office.” He is a cult of one and to know him is to be an insider: “The fantastic work young Pym is doing—if I had my way, I’d give him a third pip, national serviceman or not.” “You should have heard London on the scrambler, they’re sending it to the top.” On London’s orders, no less, Sergeant Pavel receives the codename Greensleeves and Pym a commendation. Voluptuous Czech interpreters are proud of him, and demonstrate their pleasure in refined ways.

“You must never tell me what happened, it is a rule,” Sabina ordered him, biting him half to death between her deep sad lips.

“I never will.”

“He is handsome, Jan’s friend? He is beautiful? Like you? I would love him immediately, yes?”

“He is tall and beautiful and very intelligent.”

“Sexy also?”

“Very sexy.”

“Hommsexual like you?”

“Totally.”

The description pleased her in some deep and satisfying way.

“You are good man, Magnus,” she assured him. “You have good taste that you protect this man like my brother.”

The due day came round when Sergeant Pavel was to make his second appearance. As Axel had predicted, Vienna had prepared a dense crop of follow-up questions for him concerning his first offering. Pym arrived with them written out in a shorthand notebook. He also brought brown smoked-salmon sandwiches and an excellent Sancerre from Membury. He brought cigarettes and Naafi mint chocolates and everything else the gastronomic experts of Div. Int. could think of to fill the tummy of a brave defector in place. While they ate the smoked salmon and drank vodka, they cleared up the outstanding points.

“So what have you got for me this time round?” Pym enquired cheerfully when they had reached a natural break in the proceedings.

“Nothing,” Axel replied comfortably, helping himself to more vodka. “We let them starve a little. Gives them a better appetite next time.”

“Pavel’s having a crisis of conscience,” Pym reported next day to Membury, obeying Axel’s instructions to the letter. “He’s having wife trouble and his daughter is going to bed with a no-good Russian officer every time Pavel is sent down to Austria. I didn’t press him. I told him we were there and he could trust us and we’re not adding to his pressures. I believe in the long run he’s going to thank us for that. But I did ask him our questions about the concentrated armour east of Prague and he was interesting.”

A visiting colonel from Vienna was sitting in. “What did he say?” asked the colonel, following Pym closely.

“He said he thinks it’s guarding something.”

“Any idea what?”

“Weaponry of some sort. Could be rockets.”

“Stay with him,” the colonel advised, and Membury puffed out his cheeks and looked like the proud father he had become.

At their third meeting source Greensleeves solved the mystery of the concentrated armour and produced in addition a breakdown of the total Soviet air strength in Czechoslovakia as of November last. Or nearly total. Vienna was in any case amazed, and London authorised the payment of two small gold bars on condition that the British assay marks first be removed for reasons of deniability. Sergeant Pavel was thus characterised as a greedy man which made everybody feel easier. For several months after this Pym scampered back and forth between Axel and Membury like a butler serving two masters. Membury wondered whether he should meet Greensleeves in person: Vienna seemed to think it would be a good idea. Pym tried for him but came back with the sad news that he would treat only with Pym. Membury resigned himself. It was the breeding season for trout. Vienna summoned Pym and dined him. Colonels, air commodores, and naval persons vied to stake their claim to him. But it was Axel, as it turned out, who was his true proprietor and parent company.

“Sir Magnus,” Axel whispered. “Something very terrible has happened.” His smile had lost its bounce. His eyes were haunted and there were heavy shadows under them. Pym had brought any number of Naafi delicacies but he refused them all. “You have to help me, Sir Magnus,” he said, darting scared looks towards the barn door. “You’re my only hope. Help me, for Christ’s sake. Do you know what they do to people like me? Don’t look at me like that! Think of something for a change! It’s your turn!”

I am in the barn at this moment, Tom. I have lived there these thirty and more years. Miss Dubber’s stippled ceiling has rolled away, leaving the old rafters and the upside-down bats dangling from the roof. I can smell his cigar smoke as I sit here and I can see the holes of his dark eyes in the lamplight as he whispers Pym’s name like the invalid he used to be: get me music, get me painting, get me bread, get me secrets. But there is no self-pity in his voice, no supplication or regret. That was never Axel’s way. He demands. His voice is sometimes soft, it is true. But it is never less than powerful. He is his man, as ever. He is Axel, he is owed. He has crossed frontiers and been beaten. Of myself I am thinking nothing at all. Not now, not then.

“They are arresting my friends back home, did you hear? Two of our group were dragged from their beds yesterday morning in Prague. Another vanished on his way to work. I had to tell them about us. It was the only way.”

The import of this statement takes a moment to penetrate Pym’s worried understanding. Even when it has done so, his voice remains mystified: “About us? Me? What did you say? Who to, Axel?”

“Not in detail. In principle. Nothing bad. Not your name. It’s okay, just more complicated, takes more handling. I’ve been more cunning than the others. In the end it may be better.”

“But what did you tell them about

us?”

“Nothing. Listen. For me it’s different. The others, they work in factories, in the universities, they’ve no back door. When they’re tortured they tell the truth and the truth kills them. But me, I’m a big spy, I’ve got a strong position, same as you. ‘Sure,’ I say to them. ‘I go over the border. That’s my job. I collect intelligence, remember?’ . . . I act indignant, I demand to see my senior officer. He’s not bad, this senior officer. Not a hundred percent, maybe sixty. But he hates the Ivans too. ‘I’m cultivating a British traitor,’ I tell him. ‘He’s a big fish. An army officer. I have kept it secret from you because of the many Titoists inside our organisation. Get the secret police off my back and you can share his product with me when I put the heat on him.’”

Pym has given up speech by now. He doesn’t bother to ask what the senior officer says in reply, or to what extent the real life of Axel may be compared with the fictitious life of Sergeant Pavel. The cells are dying all over him, in his head, his groin, his bone marrow. His loving thoughts about Sabina are as old as childhood memories to him. There is only Pym and Axel and disaster in the world. He is changing into an old man even while he listens. The ignorance of ages is descending on him.

“He says I’ve got to bring him proof,” says Axel a second time.

“Proof?” Pym mumbles. “What sort of proof? Proof? I don’t follow you.”

“Intelligence.” Axel rubs his finger against his thumb, exactly as E. Weber once did. “Pinka-pinka. Product. Money. Something a British traitor like you could give me when I blackmailed him. It doesn’t have to be the secrets of the atom bomb but it has to be good. Good enough to keep him quiet. No junk, you understand? He’s got senior officers too.” Axel smiles, though it is not a smile I care to recollect even now. “There’s always one guy higher up the ladder, isn’t there, Sir Magnus? Even when you think you’re at the top. Then when you reach the top, there they are again below you, swinging on your boots. That’s how it is in a system like ours. ‘No fabrication,’ he says to me. ‘Whatever it is, it’s got to have quality. Then we can fix it.’ Steal for me, Sir Magnus. As you love my freedom, get me something wonderful.”

“You look as though you’ve been seeing things,” Corporal Kaufmann says as Pym returns to the jeep.

“It’s my stomach,” says Pym.

But on the journey back to Graz he began to feel better. Life is duty, he reflected. It’s just a question of establishing which creditor is asking loudest. Life is paying. Life is seeing people right if it kills you.

There were half a dozen reconstructed Pyms wandering the streets of Graz that night, Tom, and there isn’t one of them I need now feel ashamed of, or wouldn’t happily embrace as a long-lost son who had paid his debt to society and come home, if he knocked on Miss Dubber’s door at this moment and said, Father, it’s me. I don’t think there was a night in his life when he thought less about himself and more about his obligation to others than when he was patrolling his city kingdom under the shadows of crumbling Hapsburg glories, pausing now at the leafy gates of Membury’s spacious married quarters, now at the doorway to Sabina’s unprepossessing apartment house, while he made his plan and flashed them reassuring promises. “Don’t worry about a thing,” he told Membury in his heart. “You will suffer no humiliation, your lake will continue to be stocked and your post will be safe for as long as you care to adorn it. The Highest in the Land will continue to respect you as the presiding genius of the Greensleeves operation.” “Your secrets are in my hands,” he whispered to Sabina’s unlit window. “Your employment by the British, your heroic brother Jan, your exalted opinion of your lover Pym are all secure. I shall cherish them as I cherish your soft warm body sleeping its troubled sleep.”

He took no decisions because he had no doubts. The lone crusader had identified his mission, the skilled spy would take care of the detail, the loyal attacher would never again betray his friend in exchange for the illusion of being a servant of national necessity. His loves, his duties and allegiances had never been clearer. Axel, I owe you. Together we can change the world. I will bring you gifts as you brought gifts to me. I will never again send you to the camps. If he contemplated alternatives, then it was only to reject them as disastrous. Over the last months the inventive Pym had built Sergeant Pavel into a figure of joy and admiration in the secret corridors of Graz, Vienna and Whitehall. Under his skilful hand the choleric little hero’s drinking, womanising and quixotic bursts of courage had become a legend. Even if Pym were prepared to break Axel’s trust a second time, how could he go to Membury and say: “Sir. Sergeant Pavel does not exist. Greensleeves is my friend Axel, who requires that we give him genuine British secrets”? Membury’s kindly eyes would pop open, his innocent face would collapse in lines of sadness and despair. His trust in Pym would wither, his reputation with it: Membury to the lantern, sack Membury; Membury, his wife and all his daughters, go home. An even worse disaster would result if Pym were to strike a compromise by visiting Axel’s dilemma upon the fictitious Sergeant Pavel. He had played that scene, too, in his imagination: “Sir. Sergeant Pavel’s frontier-crossings have been noticed. He has told the Czech secret police that he has a British agent in play. We must therefore give him chickenfeed to back his story.” Div. Int. had no mandate to run double agents. Graz even less so. Even a defector in place was stretching things. Only Greensleeves’ insistence on being handled by Pym personally had prevented a takeover by London long ago, and there was already a lot of earnest talk going on about who would get Pavel when Pym’s military service expired. To place Sergeant Pavel in the position of a double agent would unloose a string of immediate consequences, all frightful : Membury would lose Greensleeves to London; Pym’s successor would discover the deception in five minutes; Axel would once more be betrayed and his chances of survival forfeit ; the Memburys would be posted to Siberia.

No, Tom. As Pym walked the momentous night away under a canopy of unreachable ideals, eschewing Sabina’s bed in his purity of soul, he was not tormenting himself over great choices. He was not examining his immortal spirit in anticipation of what purists might call a treasonable act. He did not consider that tomorrow was the day set for his irrevocable execution—the day on which all hope for Pym would die and your father would be born. He was watching the dawn rise on a day of beauty and harmony. A day when a bad record could be put straight, when the fate of everyone he was responsible for rested in his care, when the electors of his secret constituency would go down on their knees and thank Pym and his Maker that he had been born to see them right. He was glowing and exulting. He was letting his goodwill and self-faith fill him up with courage. The secret crusader had placed his sword upon the altar and was transmitting fraternal messages to the God of Battles.

“Axel, come over!” Pym had begged him. “Forget about Sergeant Pavel. You can be an ordinary defector. I’ll look after you. I’ll get you everything you need. I promise.”

But Axel was as fearless as he was determined. “Do not advise me to betray my friends, Sir Magnus. I am the only one who can save them. Did I not tell you I have crossed my last frontier? If you help me, we can win a great victory. Be here on Wednesday at the same time.”

Briefcase in hand Pym makes quickly for the top floor of the villa and unlocks the door to his office. I am a morning man, it is known of me. Pym is an early riser, Pym is keen, Pym has done a day’s work while most of us are still shaving. Membury’s office is linked to his own by a pair of grand doors. Pushing them open, Pym steps inside. As he does so, his sense of well-being becomes unbearable: a dizzying blend of resolution, rightness and release. I am blessed. Membury’s tin desk is no Reichstag desk. It has an old tin back and Pym’s Swiss Army penknife knows the four screws well. In the third drawer down, on the left side, Membury keeps his basic works of reference : standing orders for the unit,

Brown Fish of the World,

classified telephone directory,

Lakes and Waterways of Austria,

Order of Battle of Military Intelligence in London, a list of leading aquaria and a chart for Div. Int., Vienna, showing units and their functions but no names. Pym reaches a hand in. Not an invasion. Not a retribution. No initials are being carved into the panelling. I am here to administer a caress. Folders, loose-leaf manuals. Signals instructions marked “Top Secret, Guard” which Pym has never seen. I am here to borrow, not to steal. Opening his briefcase he extracts an army-issue Agfa camera with a one-foot measuring chain fastened to the lens front. It is the same camera that he uses when Axel brings out raw material and Pym has to photograph it on the spot. He cocks it and sets it on the desk. This is what I was born for, he thinks, not for the first time. In the beginning was the spy.

From a file with the word “Vertebrates” crossed out on the cover, he selects the Order of Battle of Div. Int. Axel knows it anyway, he reasons. Nevertheless, there are impressive “Top Secret” stamps at top and bottom, and a distribution stamp to guarantee authenticity. As you love my freedom, get me something wonderful. He photographs it once, then again, and is left with a feeling of anticlimax. There are thirty-six frames on this film. Why do I cheesepare and give him only two? I could do something for our mutual understanding. Axel, you deserve better. He remembers a recent War Office assessment of the Soviet threat. If they will read that, they’ll read anything. It is in the top drawer, beside

A Handbook of Water Mammals,

and begins with a summary of conclusions. He photographs each page and finishes the film nicely. Axel, I’ve done it! We’re free. We’ve put the world to rights, exactly as you said we would! We are men of the middle ground—we have founded our own country with a population of two!

“Promise you will never bring me anything so good again, Sir Magnus,” said Axel at their next meeting. “If you do, they will make me a general and we shall not be able to meet any more.”

“Dear Father”—Pym wrote to the Majestic Hotel, Karachi, where Rick appeared to be living for his health—“Thanks for your two letters. I am so glad to hear you are hitting it off with the Aga Khan. I believe I am doing good work out here and you would be proud of me.”

14

W

hen Mary Pym at the age of sixteen decided it was time to lose her virginity she faked a heavy dose of adolescent vapours and had herself put to bed by Matron instead of playing hockey. There she lay in the sick wing staring at the wall till the three-o’clock bell rang, telling her that Matron was off duty until five. She waited five more minutes exactly by her Confirmation watch, held her breath for thirty seconds which always helped to get her courage up, then tiptoed down the stone back stairs past the kitchens and the laundry and across a bit of sour grass to an old brick potting shed where the under-gardener had made a provisional bed of blankets and old sacking. The results were more spectacular than she had reason to hope, but what she relished afterwards was not the event so much as the anticipation of it: the lying boldly in the bed with her skirt rucked round her waist knowing nothing was going to stop her now she had made up her mind; the sense of freedom as she took herself across the border into a state of sin.

And that was the feeling she had now, sitting demurely in the centre row in Caroline Lumsden’s overfurnished drawing-room, with her hideous Thai tables and her garish Chinese paintings and her shelf full of factory-made Buddhas, listening to Caroline trying to sound like the Queen as she moaned out the minutes of the last meeting of the Vienna Branch of the Diplomatic Wives Association in her plummy swansong. I’ll do it, Mary told herself, dead calm. If it doesn’t work one way, I’ll make it work another. She glanced to the window. In their hired Mercedes across the street, Georgie and Fergus were sitting with their heads together, two lovers pretending to study a street map while they kept an eye on the front door and her Rover parked in Caroline’s drive. I’ll take the back way out. It worked then, it’ll work now.

“It was therefore

unanimously

agreed,” Caroline was lamenting, “that the Foreign Office Inspectors’

report

on the local cost of living was both distorted

and

unfair, and that a Finance subcommittee would be formed

immediately,

headed, I am pleased to say, by

Mrs.

McCormick”—respectful hush. Ruth McCormick was the wife of the Economic Minister and therefore a financial genius. Nobody mentioned that she was screwing the Dutch military attaché. “The subcommittee will itemise

all

our points and, having done so, submit a

written

objection to our association in London for submission

through

the proper channels to the Head of the Inspectorate

himself.”

Patter of soprano applause from fourteen pairs of female hands, Mary’s included. Great, Caroline, great. In another life, it will be your turn to be the rising young diplomat and your husband’s to stay home and imitate you.

Caroline had turned to Any Other Business. “Next

Monday,

our weekly transatlantic lunch at Manzi’s. Twelve-thirty

sharp

and four hundred schillings a head, cash, please, to include two glasses of wine, and please

don’t

be late as Herr Manzi took an

awful

lot of persuading to give us a private

room.”

Pause. Say it, you fool, Mary urged her. Caroline didn’t. Not yet. “Then on Friday, one week today, please, Marjory de Weever will be

giving

her really

fascinating

lantern lecture

here

on aerobics which she taught

very

successfully to an all-ranks class in the Sudan where her husband was second

man.

Right, Marjory?”

“Well, chargé really,” Marjory roared from the front row. “The Ambassador was only there for three months out of fourteen. Not that Brian got paid for it but that’s beside the point.”

For pity’s sake! thought Mary furiously.

Now!

But she had forgotten about Penny Sharlow’s bloody husband landing a medal.

“And I’m sure we’d

all

like to congratulate Penny on the fantastic support she’s given to James over the years, without which I’ll bet he wouldn’t have got anything at

all.”

This was apparently a joke because there was hysterical laughter by too few voices, which Caroline quelled with a mournful stare into the middle distance. She put on her Official Mourning voice.

“And Mary darling—you did say you wouldn’t mind if I mentioned it.” Mary looked hastily downward to her lap. “I’m sure

everyone

would like me to say how

sorry

we are about the death of your

father-in-law.

We know Magnus has been hit

very

hard and we do hope he will get over it

soon,

and be back among us in his usual

high

spirits that we

all

find so refreshing.”

Sympathetic murmurs. Mary whispered “Thank you” and keeled forward not too far. She sensed the anxious pause while everyone waited for her head to come up, but it didn’t. She began to shake and was impressed to see real tears flopping on to her clenched hands. She let out a little choke and from her willed darkness heard cheerful Mrs. Simpson, wife of the Chancery guard, say “Come here, lovey,” as she put an enormous arm round Mary’s back. She choked again, pushed Mrs. Simpson half heartedly away and struggled to her feet, tears everywhere: tears for Tom, tears for Magnus, tears for being deflowered in the potting shed and I bet I’m pregnant. She let Mrs. Simpson take her arm, she shook her head and stammered “I’m fine.” She reached the hall to find that Caroline Lumsden had followed her out. “No thanks . . . really I don’t want to lie down. Far rather just take a walk . . . get my coat, please? . . . Blue with a foul fur collar . . . Rather be alone if you don’t mind.... You’ve been so kind. Oh Christ, I’m going to cry again. . . .”

Once in the Lumsdens’ long back garden, she wandered, still hunched, along the path until it dropped out of sight behind the trees. Then she moved fast. Training, she thought gratefully, as she unlatched the back gate; nothing quite like it for cooling the blood. She headed quickly for the bus stop. There was one every fourteen minutes. She had looked them up.

“How terribly good of them!” cried Mrs. Membury, with the greatest satisfaction, as she topped up Brotherhood’s glass with her homemade elderflower wine. “Oh I do think that’s farsighted and sensible. I’d never supposed the War Office would have

half the

wit. Would

you,

Harrison? Not deaf,” she explained to Brotherhood while they waited. “Just slow-thinking. Would you, darling?”

Harrison Membury had come up from the stream at the end of the garden where he had been cutting reeds, and he was still wearing his waders. He was large and loping and at seventy still boyish, with pink immature cheeks and silk white hair. He sat at the far end of the table washing down homemade cake with tea from a huge pottery mug with “Gramps” written on it. He moved, Brotherhood reckoned, at exactly half his wife’s pace and spoke at half the volume.

“Oh I don’t know,” he said when everyone else had forgotten the question. “There were some quite clever chaps scattered around the place. Here and there.”

“Ask him about fish and you’ll get a

far

quicker answer,” said Mrs. Membury, hurtling off to the corner of the room and pulling out some albums from among the collected works of Evelyn Waugh. “How are the trout, Harrison?”

“Oh they’re all right,” said Membury with a grin.

“We’re not allowed to eat them, you know. Only the pike can do that. Now would it be fun to look at my photographs? I mean is it going to be an

illustrated

history? Don’t tell me. It doubles the cost. It said so in the

Observer.

Pictures double the cost of a book. But then I do think they double the attractiveness too. Specially with biographies. I can’t be doing with biography if I can’t

look

at the people who are being biogged. Harrison can. He’s cerebral. I’m visual. Which are you?”

“I think I must be more your way,” said Brotherhood with a smile, playing his ponderous rôle.

The village was one of those half-urbanised Georgian settlements on the edge of Bath where English Catholics of a certain standing have elected to gather in their exile. The cottage lay at the country end of it, a tiny sandstone mansion with a steep narrow garden descending to a stretch of river, and they sat in the cluttered kitchen on wheelback chairs, surrounded by washing-up, and vaguely votive bric-a-brac: a cracked ceramic plaque of the Virgin Mary from Lourdes; a disintegrating rush cross jammed behind the cooker; a child’s paper mobile of angels rotating in the draught; a photograph of Ronald Knox. While they talked, filthy grandchildren wandered in and stared at them before tall mothers swept them off. It was a household in permanent and benevolent disorder, pervaded by the gentle thrill of religious persecution. A white morning sun was poking through the Bath mist. There was a sound of slow water dripping in the gutters.

“You an academic chap?” Membury enquired suddenly, from the end of the table.

“Darling, I

told you.

He’s an

historian.”

“Well, more a retired trooper, I suppose, sir, to be honest,” Brotherhood replied. “I was lucky to get the job. I’d have been on the shelf by now, if this hadn’t come along.”

“Now when will it come out?” Mrs. Membury shouted, as if everyone were deaf. “I’ve got to know

months

in advance so that I can put my name down with Mrs. Lanyon. Tristram, don’t tug. We have a mobile library here, you know. Magda darling, do something about Tristram, he’s trying to tear a page out of history. They come once a week and they’re an absolute godsend as long as you don’t mind waiting. Now this is Harrison’s villa where he had his office and everyone worked for him. The main bit’s 1680, the wing’s new. Well nineteenth. This is his pond. He stocked it from scratch. The Gestapo had thrown grenades into it and blown up all the fish. They would. Pigs.”

“From what my masters say, it will start out as a work of internal reference,” Brotherhood said. “Then afterwards they’ll publish a sanitised version for the open market.”

“You’re not M. R. D. Foot, are you?” said Mrs. Membury. “No, you can’t be. You’re Marlow. Well I think they’re inspired, anyway. So sensible to get hold of the actual people before they peg out.”

“Who did you troop with?” Membury said.

“Let’s just say I did a little of this and a little of that,” Brotherhood suggested with deliberate coyness, while he pulled on his reading glasses.

“There he is,” said Mrs. Membury, stabbing a tiny finger at a group photograph. “There. That’s the young man you were asking about. Magnus. He did all the really brilliant work. That’s the old Rittmeister, he was an absolute darling. Harrison, what was the mess waiter’s name—the one who ought to have become a novice but didn’t have the gump?”

“Forget,” said Membury.

“And who are the girls?” said Brotherhood, smiling.

“Oh my dear, they were all sorts of trouble. Each one dottier than the next and if they weren’t pregnant they were running off with unsuitable lovers, cutting their wrists. I could have opened a Marie Stopes clinic for them full time if we’d believed in birth control in those days. Now we’re hybrids. Our girls are on the pill, but they still get pregnant by mistake.”

“They did the interpreting for us,” Membury said, filling himself a pipe.

“Was there an interpreter involved in the Greensleeves operation?” Brotherhood said.

“No need,” said Membury. “Chap spoke German. Pym handled him alone.”

“Completely alone?”

“Solo. Greensleeves insisted on it. Why don’t you talk to Pym?”

“But who took him over when Pym left?”

“I did,” said Membury proudly, brushing wet tobacco from the front of his disgraceful pullover.

There is nothing like a red-backed notebook to instill order into desultory conversation. Having spread one very deliberately among the débris of several meals, and shaken out his big right arm as a prelude to becoming what he called a little bit official, Brotherhood drew a pen from his pocket with as much ceremony as a village policeman at the scene of the occurrence. The grandchildren had been removed. From an upper room came the sounds of someone trying to coax religious music from a xylophone.

“If we could get it all down first I can come back to the individual specifics later,” said Brotherhood.

“Jolly good idea,” said Mrs. Membury sternly. “Harrison, darling, listen.”

“Unfortunately, as I have already told you, most of the raw material on Greensleeves has been destroyed, lost or misplaced, which puts even greater responsibility on the shoulders of surviving witnesses. That’s you. Now then.”

For a while after this forbidding warning there was relative sanity while Membury with surprising accuracy recalled the dates and content of Greensleeves’ principal triumphs and the part played by Lieutenant Magnus Pym of the Intelligence Corps. Brotherhood wrote diligently and prompted little, only pausing to wet his thumb and turn the pages of his notebook.

“Harrison, darling, you’re being slow again,” Mrs. Membury interposed occasionally. “Marlow hasn’t got all day.” And once: “Marlow’s got to get back to

London,

darling. He’s not a fish.”

But Membury continued swimming at his own good pace, now describing Soviet military emplacements in southern Czechoslovakia; now the laborious procedure for prising small gold bars out of the Whitehall war chests which Greensleeves insisted on receiving in payment; now the fights he had had with Div. Int. to protect his pet agent from being overused. And Brotherhood, despite the little tape-recorder that nestled once more in his wallet pocket, set it all out for them to see, dates left, material centre.

“Greensleeves didn’t have any other codename at any time, did he?” he asked casually as he jotted. “Sometimes a source gets rechristened for security reasons or because the name’s already been bagged.”

“Think, Harrison,” Mrs. Membury urged.

Membury took his pipe from his mouth.

“Source Wentworth?” Brotherhood suggested, turning a page.

Membury shook his head.

“There was also a source”—Brotherhood faltered slightly as if the name had nearly escaped him—“Serena, that was it—no it wasn’t—Sabina. Source Sabina, operating out of Vienna. Or was it Graz? Maybe it was Graz before your time. Used to be a popular thing that, anyway, mixing up the sexes with the cover names. A quite general trick of disinformation, I’m told.”

“Sabina?” cried Mrs. Membury. “Not

our

Sabina?”

“He’s talking about a source, darling,” Membury said firmly, coming in much more quickly than was his habit. “Our Sabina was an interpreter, not an agent. Quite different.”

“Well

our

Sabina was an absolute—”

“She wasn’t a source,” said Membury firmly. “Now, come on, don’t tittle-tattle. Poppy.”

“I beg your pardon?” said Brotherhood.

“Magnus wanted to call him Poppy. We did for a bit. Source Poppy. I rather liked it. Then up came Remembrance Day and some ass in London decided Poppy was derogatory to the fallen—poppies are for heroes, not traitors. Absolutely typical of those chaps. Probably got promoted for it. Total buffoon. I was furious, so was Magnus. ‘Poppy

is

a hero,’ he said. I liked him for that. Nice chap.”

“That’s the bare bones done, then,” said Brotherhood, surveying his handiwork. “Now let’s flesh them out, can we?” He was reading from the subject headings he had written at the beginning of his notebook before he came. “Personalities, well, we’re touching on that. Value or otherwise of national servicemen to the peacetime intelligence effort, were they a help or a hindrance—we’ll come to it. Where they all went afterwards—did they attain positions of interest in their chosen walk of life? Well, you may have kept up with them, and there again you may not. That’s more for us to worry about than you.”

“Yes, well now, whatever

did

happen to Magnus?” Mrs. Membury demanded. “Harrison was so upset he never wrote. Well so was I. He never even told us whether he converted. He was awfully

close,

we felt. All he needed was one more shove. Harrison was exactly like that for years. It took a jolly good talking to from Father D’Arcy before Harrison saw the light, didn’t it, darling?”

Membury’s pipe had gone out and he was peering disappointedly into the bowl.

“I never liked the chap,” he explained with a kind of embarrassed regret. “Never thought much of him.”

“Darling, don’t be silly. You adored Magnus. You practically adopted him. You know you did.”

“Oh Magnus was a splendid chap. The other chap. The source. The Greensleeves chap. I thought he was a bit of a fraud, to be honest. I didn’t say anything—it didn’t seem useful. With Div. Int. and London waving their caps in the air, why should we complain?”

“Nonsense,” said Mrs. Membury, very firmly indeed. “Marlow, don’t listen. Darling, you’re being far too modest, as usual. You were the linchpin of the operation, you know you were. Marlow’s writing a

history,

darling. He’s going to write about

you.

You mustn’t spoil it for him, must he, Marlow? That’s the fashion these days. Put down, put down. I get absolutely sick of it. Look at what they did to poor Captain Scott on the television. Daddy knew Scott. He was a marvellous man.”

Membury continued as if she hadn’t spoken. “All the brigadiers from Vienna beaming away like sand boys. Roars of applause from the War Office. No point in me killing the golden goose if they were all happy, was there? Young Magnus cocka-hoop. Well I didn’t want to spoil

his

fun.”

“And

he was taking instruction,” said Mrs. Membury pointedly. “Harrison had arranged for him to go to Father Moynihan twice a week.

And

he was running garrison cricket.

And

he was learning Czech. You can’t do that in a day.”

“A h now, that’s interesting. About the learning Czech, I mean. Was this because he had a Czech source then?”

“It’s because Sabina set her cap at him, the little minx,” said Mrs. Membury, but this time her husband actually spoke through her.

“His stuff was all so flashy, somehow,” he was saying, undeterred. “Always looked good on the plate, but when you came to chew it over, nothing really there. That’s how it seemed to me.” He gave a puzzled giggle. “Same as trying to eat a pike. All bones. You’d get a report in, look it over. I say, that’s jolly good, you’d think. But when you took a closer look it was boring. Yes, that’s true because we already know it.... Yes, that’s possible but we can’t verify it because we’ve nothing on that region. I didn’t like to say anything, but I think the Czechs could have been batting and bowling at the same time. I always thought that was why Greensleeves didn’t show up after Magnus went back to England. He wasn’t so sure he could hoodwink an older chap. Mean of me, I expect. I’m just a failed fish freak, aren’t I, Hannah? That’s what she calls me. Failed fish freak.”

The description pleased them both so much that they broke out laughing for some while, so that Brotherhood had to laugh with them and keep back his question until Membury was able to hear him clearly.

“You mean you never met Greensleeves? He never came to the rendezvous? I’m sorry, sir,” he said, returning to his notebook, “but didn’t you say just now you yourself took over source Greensleeves when Pym left Graz?”

“I did.”

“And now you say you never met him.”

“Perfectly true. I didn’t. Stood me up at the altar, didn’t he, Hannah? She got me into my best suit, packed together all these stupid special foods he was supposed to like—how that started, God knows—he never turned up.”

“Harrison probably got the wrong night,” said Mrs. Membury, with a fresh gust of laughter. “Harrison’s frightful about time, aren’t you, darling? He was never

trained

for Intelligence, you know. He was librarian in Nairobi. A jolly good one too. Then he met someone on the ship and got roped in.”

“And out,” said Membury cheerfully. “Kaufmann came along. He was the driver. Charming chap. Well he knew the meeting place like the back of his hand. I didn’t get the wrong night, darling. I got the right one, I know I did. Sat in an empty barn all night. No word from him, nothing. We’d no means of getting hold of him, it was all one way. Ate a bit of his stupid food. Drank some of his booze, I enjoyed that. Went home. Same again the next night and the next. I waited for a message of some sort, phone call like the first time. Absolute blank. Chap was never heard of again. We should have had a formal handover with Pym present, of course, but Greensleeves wouldn’t allow it. Prima donna, you see, like all agents. ‘One chap at a time.’ Iron rule.” Membury absently helped himself from Brotherhood’s glass. “Vienna was furious. Blamed it all on me. Then I told them he was no good anyway and that didn’t help.” He gave another rich laugh. “I should think it got me sacked if truth were known. They didn’t say so, but I’ll bet it jolly well helped!”

Mrs. Membury had made a tuna-fish risotto because it was Friday, and a trifle with cherries on it which she refused to let Membury eat. When lunch was over she and Brotherhood stood on the river bank watching Membury hacking cheerfully at the reeds. Nets and fine wires were stretched all ways across the water. Among the breeding boxes, an old punt was sinking at its mooring. The sun, freed of the mist, beat brightly.

“So tell us about the wicked Sabina,” Brotherhood suggested artfully, out of Membury’s earshot.

Mrs. Membury couldn’t wait. An absolute minx, she repeated: “One look at Magnus and she saw herself with a British passport, a jolly good British husband and nothing to worry about for the rest of her life. But Magnus was a bit too sly for her, I’m pleased to say. He must have stood her up. He never said so, but that was the way we read it. In Graz one day. Gone the next.”

“Where did she go then?” Brotherhood said.

“Home to Czechoslovakia, that was the story. With her tail between her legs was our theory. Left a note for Harrison saying she was homesick and she was going back to her old boyfriend, despite the beastly régime. Well

that

didn’t please London, as you can imagine. It didn’t raise Harrison’s stock one bit. They said he should have seen it coming and done something about it.”

“I wonder what became of her,” Brotherhood mused with an historian’s dreaminess. “You don’t remember her other name, do you?”

“Harrison. What was Sabina’s other name?”

With surprising swiftness the answer rang back across the water. “Kordt. K-O-R-D-T. Sabina Kordt. Very beautiful girl. Charming.”

“Marlow says what became of her?”

“God knows. Last we heard she’d changed her name and landed herself a job in one of the Czech Ministries. One of the defectors said she’d been working for ’em all along.”

Mrs. Membury was not so much astonished as proved right. “Now there you are! Married getting on for fifty years, thirtysomething years since Austria, and he doesn’t even tell me she turned up in Czechoslovakia working for one of the Ministries! I expect Harrison had an affair with her himself if truth were known. Practically everybody did. Well my dear she must have been a spy, mustn’t she? It sticks out a mile. They’d never have taken her back if they hadn’t their hooks on her all along, they’re far too vindictive. So Magnus was well rid of her then, wasn’t he? Are you sure you won’t stay for tea?”

“If I could take a few of those old photographs,” Brotherhood said. “We’ll give you a credit in the book, naturally.”

Mary knew the technique exactly. In Berlin she had watched Jack Brotherhood use it a dozen times, and helped him often. At training camp they had called it paperchasing: how to make an encounter with someone you don’t trust. The only difference was, today it was Mary who was the subject of the operation, and the anonymous writer of the note who didn’t trust her:

“I have information that could lead us both to Magnus. You will please do the following. Any morning between ten and twelve, you will sit in the lobby of the Hotel Ambassador. Any afternoon between two and six you will take a coffee at the Café Mozart. Any evening between nine and midnight, the lounge of the Hotel Sacher. Mr. König will collect you.”

The Mozart was half empty. Mary sat at a centre table where she could be seen and ordered herself a coffee and a brandy. They’ve watched me arrive and now they’re watching to see whether I am followed. Pretending to consult her diary, she took covert note of the people round her and the parked charabancs and fiacres in the street outside the big windows, looking for anything that could resemble a stake-out. When you’ve got a conscience like mine, everything stinks anyway, she thought: from the two nuns frowning at the stock exchange prices in the window of the bank to the huddle of bowler-hatted young coachmen stamping their feet and watching the girls go by. In a corner of the café, a fat Viennese gentleman was expressing interest in her. I should have worn a hat, she thought. I’m not a respectable single woman. She got up, went to the newspaper rack and without thinking chose

Die Presse.

Now I suppose I roll it up and take it for a walk in my stockinged feet, she thought stupidly, as she opened it at the film page.

“Frau Pym?”

A woman’s voice, a woman’s bosom. A woman’s deferentially smiling face. It was the girl from the cash desk.

“That’s right,” said Mary, smiling in return.

From behind her back she produced an envelope with “Frau Pym” written on it in pencil. “Herr König left this message for you. He is very sorry.”

Mary gave her fifty schillings and opened the envelope.

“Please pay your bill and leave the café at once, turning right into the Maysedergasse, and remaining on the right-hand pavement. When you reach the pedestrian precinct turn left, and keep to the left side, walking slowly and admiring the shop windows.”

She wanted the loo but she didn’t like to go in case he thought she was tipping someone off. She put the note in her handbag, finished her coffee and took her bill to the cash desk where the girl gave her another smile.

“These men are all the same,” the girl said while the change rattled down the chute.

“You’re telling me,” said Mary. They both laughed.

As she left the café a young couple entered and she had a feeling they were disguised Americans. But then a lot of Austrians were. She turned right and came at once to the Maysedergasse. The two nuns were still at their stock prices. She kept to the right-hand pavement. It was twenty past three and the Wives’ meeting was sure to end by five so that they could all get home to change into halter dresses and sequin handbags for the evening cattle market. But even when everyone had gone and only Mary’s car remained in the Lumsdens’ drive, Fergus and Georgie might well assume she had stayed on for a quiet drink with Caroline on her own. If I make it back by quarter to six I stand a chance, she reckoned. She paused before a woman’s lingerie shop and found herself admiring a pair of tart’s black cami-knickers in the window. Who buys that stuff anyway? Bee Lederer, a pound to a penny. She hoped something would happen soon, before the Ambassadress came out with an armful of the stuff, or one of the many unattached men tried to pick her up.

“Frau Pym? I am from Herr König. Please come quickly.”

The girl was pretty and badly dressed and nervous. Following her Mary had an overwhelming memory of being back in Prague visiting a painter the authorities did not approve of. The side street was one minute packed with shoppers, the next empty. All Mary’s senses were alight. She smelt delicatessen, frost and tobacco. She glanced into a shop doorway and recognised the man from the Café Mozart. The girl turned left then right, then left again. Where am I? They entered a paved square. We’re in the Kärtnerstrasse. We’re not. A hippie boy took Mary’s photograph and tried to press a card on her. She brushed him aside. A red plastic bear was holding his mouth open for contributions to some charity. An Asian pop group was singing Beatles music. Across the square lay a dual carriageway and at the near side of it a brown Peugeot waited with a man at the wheel. As they approached, he pushed the back door open at them. The girl grabbed the door and said, “Get in, please.” Mary got in and the girl followed. Must be the Ring, she thought. If so it was not a part of the Ring she recognised. She saw a black Mercedes dawdling behind them. Fergus and Georgie, she thought, knowing that it wasn’t. Her driver glanced both ways, then pointed the car straight at the central reservation—bump, it’s the front tyres, bump, that was my backside you just broke. Everything hooted and the girl peered anxiously through the back window. They left the carriageway and shot down a side street, across a square and as far as the Opera where they stopped. The door on Mary’s side opened. The girl ordered her out. Mary had hardly made the pavement before a second woman squeezed past her and took her place. The car drove away at speed, as neat a substitution as Mary had seen. A black Mercedes followed it but she didn’t think it was the same one. A dapper, embarrassed young man was guiding her through a wide doorway to a courtyard.

“Take the lift, please, Mary,” said the young man, in Euro-American, handing her a piece of paper. “Apartment six, please. Six. You go up alone. You have that?”

“Six,” Mary said.

He smiled. “Sometimes when we are scared we kind of forget everything.”

“Sure,” she said. She walked to the doorway and he smiled and waved at her. She pushed it open and saw an old lift waiting with its doors open, and an old janitor smiling too. They’ve all been to the same charm school, she thought. She got into the lift and told the janitor, “Six, please,” and the janitor launched her on her climb. As the doorway sank below her she had a last glimpse of the boy standing in the courtyard still smiling and a couple of well-dressed girls standing behind him, consulting some bit of paper. The bit of paper in her own hand read “Six, Herr König.” Odd, she thought as she slipped it into her handbag. With me it works the other way. When I’m scared I don’t forget a damn thing. Like the car number. Like the number of the second Mercedes behind us. Like the fringe of dyed black hair on the driver’s neck. Like the Opium perfume that the girl was wearing and Magnus always insists on bringing me when he goes on air journeys. Like the fat gold ring with the red seal on the boy’s left hand.

The door to number 6 stood open. A brass plate beside it read “Interhansa Austria A.G.” She walked in and the door closed behind her. A girl again but not pretty. A sullen, strong girl with a flat Slav face and resentful, anti-Party manner. With a scowl she nodded Mary forward. She entered a dark drawing-room and saw nobody. At the far end of it stood another pair of doors, also open. The furnishings were old Vienna, phoney. Phoney old chests and oil paintings slipped by her as she advanced. Phoney lamp brackets reached at her from phoney imperial wallpaper. As she kept walking she had a reprise of the erotic expectation she had felt at the Wives’ meeting. He’s going to order me to undress and I shall obey. He’s going to lead me to a red fourposter and have me raped by footmen for his pleasure. But the second room contained no fourposter, it was a drawing-room like the first, with a desk and two armchairs and a heap of out-of-date

Vogue

s on the coffee table. It was otherwise empty. Angry, Mary swung round intending to say something rude to the flat-faced Slav. Instead she found herself staring at him. He was standing in the doorway smoking a cigar and for a second she was puzzled she couldn’t smell it, but in some eerie way she knew that nothing about him was ever going to surprise her. The next moment the aroma had reached her and she was shaking his lazy hand as if this was the way they always greeted each other when they met fully dressed in Viennese apartments.

“You are a courageous woman,” he remarked. “Are they expecting you back soon or what is the arrangement? What can we do to make life easier for you?”

That’s perfectly right, she thought in absurd relief. The first thing you always ask your agent is how long you’ve got him for. The second is whether he needs immediate help. Magnus is in good hands. But she knew that already.

“Where is he?” she said.

He had the authority that enabled him to own to failure. “If only we knew, how happy we would both be!” he agreed as if her question had been a statement of despair, and with his long hand showed her to the chair that he required her to sit on. We, she thought. We are equals yet you are in command. No wonder Tom fell in love with you on sight.

They were sitting opposite one another, she on the gilded sofa, he on the gilded chair. The Slav girl had brought a tray of vodka and some gherkins and black bread and her devotion to him was obscene, she preened and smirked so. She’s one of his Marthas, thought Mary, which was what Magnus called his Station secretaries. He poured two stiff ones, holding each glass carefully by turn. He drank to her, looking over the brim. That’s what Magnus does, she thought. And it’s you he learned it from.

“Has he telephoned?” he asked.

“No. He can’t.”

“Of course not,” he agreed sympathetically. “The house is bugged and he knows that. Has he written?”

She shook her head.

“He’s wise. They are watching for him everywhere. They are immoderately angry with him.”

“Are you?”

“How can I be angry when I owe the man so much? His last message to me was that he didn’t want to see me any more. He said he was free and goodbye. I felt a genuine pang of jealousy. What freedom has he found so suddenly that he cannot share it with us?”

“He said the same to me—I mean about being free. I think he said it to several people. To Tom as well.”

Why do I talk to you as if you were an old lover? What sort of whore am I that I can throw off my loyalties with my clothes? If he had reached out to her and taken her hand she would have let him. If he had drawn her to him—

“He should have come to me when I told him,” he said in the same philosophically reproachful tone. “‘It’s over, Sir Magnus,’ I said to him. That’s my name for him. Forgive me.”

“In Corfu,” she said.

“In Corfu, in Athens, everywhere I could speak to him. ‘Come with me. We are passé, you and I. It’s time for us oldies to leave the field to the next anguished generation.’ He wouldn’t see it. ‘Do you want to be like one of those poor old actors one has literally to drag from the stage?’ I said. He wouldn’t listen. He was so adamant they would clear him.”

“They almost did. Maybe they did. He thought so.”

“Brotherhood won a little time and that was all. Not even Jack could sweep back the tide for ever. Besides—Jack has joined the bad guys now. Hell hath no fury like a deceived protector.”

He taught Magnus his style, she thought, in another spurt of recognition. The style he was always wanting for his novel. He taught him how to be superior to human foibles and how to give a Godlike laugh at himself as a way of fending off morbidity. He did all the things for him that a woman is grateful for, except that Magnus is a man.

“His father seems to have been quite a mystery man,” he said, lighting himself another cigar. “What’s all that about, do you think?”

“I don’t know. I never met him. Did you?”

“Many times. In Switzerland when Magnus was a student, his father was a great British sea captain who had gone down with his ship.”

She laughed. Heaven help me, I’m actually laughing. Now it’s me who’s found the style.

“Oh yes. Then when I next heard of him he was a great financial baron. His tentacles extended to every banking house in Europe. He had miraculously recovered from being drowned.”

“Oh Christ,” she said. And burst out again in cathartic, uncontrollable laughter.

“Since I was German at the time I naturally felt greatly relieved. I had had a really bad conscience about sinking his father until then. What is it about your husband, do you know, that gives us such a bad, bad conscience?”

“His potential,” she said unthinkingly, and took a long pull of vodka. She was trembling and her cheeks were burning hot. He watched her calmly, helping her to steady.

“You’re his other life,” she said.

“He always told me I was his oldest friend. If you know different, please don’t destroy my illusions.”

She was getting it back. Her head. The room was clearing and her head with it. “I understood that position was reserved for somebody called Poppy,” she said.

“Where did you hear that name?”

“It’s in the great book he’s been writing. ‘Poppy, my dearest, oldest friend.’”

“Is that all?”

“Oh no. There’s much more. Poppy gets a big hand on every fifth page. Poppy this, Poppy that. When they found the camera and the codebook they found dried poppies with them, as a keepsake.”

She had hoped to disconcert him, but all she drew from him was a smile of gratification.

“I’m flattered. Poppy is the fanciful codename he awarded me many years ago. I have been Poppy for most of our lives.”

Somehow she stayed in there fighting. “So what is he?” she demanded. “Is he a Communist? He can’t be. It’s too ridiculous.”

He opened his long hands. He smiled again, infectiously, offering an immediate bond of his bewilderment. He was invulnerable. “I’ve asked myself the same question many times. And then I think—well, who believes in marriage these days? He’s a searcher. Isn’t that enough? In our profession I am sure we should not ask for more. Can you imagine being married to a sedentary ideologist? I had an uncle once who was a Lutheran pastor. He bored us all to death.”

She was getting stronger. Less mad. More indignant. “What did Magnus do for you?” she asked.

“He spied. Selectively, it is true. But treasonably it is also true. And often very energetically—something you will understand about him. When his life is happy he believes in God and wants everyone to have a gift. When he is down he will sulk and refuse to go to church. Those of us who run him have to live with that.”

Nothing had happened to her. She was upright and drinking vodka in a stranger’s safe flat. He has pronounced the sentence, she thought calmly, as if she were attending someone else’s trial. Magnus is dead. Mary is dead. Their marriage is dead. Tom is an orphan with a traitor for a father. Everybody’s absolutely fine.

“But then I don’t run him,” she objected, answering his point quite calmly.

He appeared not to notice the new coldness in her voice. “Allow me to sell myself to you a little. I am fond of your husband.”

And so you should be, she thought. After all, he sacrificed us to you.

“I also owe him,” he continued. “Whatever he wants for the rest of his life, I can give it to him. I am greatly to be preferred to Jack Brotherhood and his service.”

You’re not, she thought. You are absolutely not.

“Did you say something?” he asked.

She smiled sadly for him and shook her head.

“Brotherhood wishes to catch your husband and punish him. I am the opposite. I wish to find him and reward him. Whatever he will allow us to give, we will give it.” He drew on his cigar.

You’re a sham, she thought. You seduce my husband and call yourself his friend and mine.

“You know this trade, Mary. I don’t need to tell you that a man in his position is a most desirable commodity. Put more frankly, we cannot afford to lose him. The last thing we want is to have him sitting in an English prison for the rest of his useful life, telling the authorities what he’s been doing these thirty and more years. Nor do we particularly want him to write a book.”

You want, she thought. What about us?

“We would much prefer him to enjoy a well-earned retirement with us—distinction, medals, his family around him if they wish it—where we can still consult him as we need. I can’t guarantee that we will permit him to lead the double life he is accustomed to but in every other respect we shall do our best to meet his needs.”

“He doesn’t want you any more though, does he? That’s why he’s hiding.”

He puffed at his cigar, flapping a hand between them to stop the smoke from bothering her. But it bothered her anyway. It would shame and disgust and accuse her for the rest of her life. He was talking again. Reasonably.

“I am at my wits’ end, to be frank. I have done all I can to put Brotherhood and everyone else off the scent and to find your husband ahead of them. I still have not the least idea where he is and I feel a complete fool.”

“What happened to the people he betrayed?” she said.

“Magnus? Oh he hates bloodshed. He always made that clear.”

“That never stopped anybody yet from shedding blood.”

Once more a pause for his private gravity. “You are right,” he agreed. “And he chose a hard profession. I’m afraid it’s a little late for us all to ponder our moralities.”

“Some of us are rather new to them,” she said. But she could not move him. “Why did you ask me here?”

She met his gaze and saw that though nothing had changed in his expression his face was different, which was what happened sometimes when she looked at Magnus.

“Before you came I had ideas that you and your son might care to start a new life in Czechoslovakia and that Magnus would therefore be strongly tempted to join you.” He indicated a briefcase at his side. “I brought passports for you and all that nonsense. I was absurd. Having met you, I realise you are not defector material. However, it still occurs to me as a possibility that you do know where he is, and that you have managed, because you are a capable woman, not to tell anybody. You cannot suppose he is better off with his pursuers than he would be with me. So if you do know, I think you should tell me now.”

“I don’t know where he is,” she said. And closed her mouth before she could add: and if I did, you would be the last person on earth I would ever tell.

“But you have theories. You have ideas. You have been thinking of nothing else night and day ever since he left, surely. Magnus, where are you? It’s your one thought, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know. You know more about him than I do.”

She was beginning to hate his sanctimony. His manner of pondering before he spoke to her, as if wondering whether she was up to his next question.

“Did he ever talk to you about a woman called Lippsie?”

“No.”

“She died when he was young. She was Jewish. All her friends and relations had been killed by the Germans. It seems she adopted Magnus as some kind of support. Then changed her mind and killed herself instead. The reasons, as usual with Magnus, are clouded. It was a curious example for a child, nonetheless. Magnus is a great imitator, even when he doesn’t know it. Really I sometimes think he is entirely put together from bits of other people, poor fellow.”

“He never told me about her,” she repeated doggedly.

He brightened. Just as Magnus might. “Come, Mary. Do you not have the consoling feeling there is someone looking after him? I am sure there is. My understanding of him has always been that he is attracted only to human beings, not to ideas at all. He hates to be alone because then his world is empty. So who is looking after him? Let us try to think whom he would like—I’m not talking of women, you see. Only of friends.”

She was smoothing her skirt, looking for her coat. “I’ll take a cab,” she said. “You don’t need to ring for one. There’s a stand just on the corner. I saw it as I came.”

“Why not his mother? She would be a good person.”

She stared at him, unable for a moment to believe her ears.

“Not long ago he talked to me about his mother for the first time,” he explained. “He said he had taken to visiting her again. I was surprised. Also flattered, I confess. He unearthed her somewhere and put her in a house. Does he see her much?”

She had the wit. Still in the nick of time she felt her cunning come rushing back to take command of her. Magnus hasn’t got a mother, you idiot. She’s dead, he hardly knew her, and he doesn’t care. The one true thing I know of him, and will swear for him on the Last Day, is that Magnus Pym is not now and never has been the adult son of any woman. But Mary kept her head. She didn’t fling insults at him, or sneer at him, or laugh out loud in relief that Magnus had lied to his oldest, dearest friend with the same precision with which he had lied to his wife, his child and his country. She spoke reasonably and sensibly as a good spy always does.

“He likes to chat with her now and then, certainly,” she conceded. Picking up her handbag she peered inside it as if to make sure she had money for her taxi.

“Then might he not have taken himself off to Devon and stayed with her? She was so grateful to have her bit of sea air at last. And Magnus was so proud he had been able to work the magic for her. He spoke interminably of the wonderful walks they had together on the beach. How he took her to church on Sundays and fixed her garden for her. Maybe he is doing something as innocent as that?”

“Her house was the first place they looked,” Mary lied, closing her handbag. “They frightened the poor old lady out of her skin. How do I get in touch with you if I need you? Throw a newspaper over the wall?”

She stood up. He stood up also, though not so easily. His smile was still in place, his eyes were still as wise and sad and merry in the style that Magnus envied so.

“I don’t think you will need me, Mary. And perhaps you are right that Magnus does not want me any more either. Just as long as he wants someone. That’s all we must worry about if we love him. There are so many ways of taking vengeance on the world. Sometimes literature is simply not enough.”

The alteration in his tone momentarily halted her in her hurry to get out.

“He’ll find an answer,” she said carelessly. “He always does.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of.”

They walked towards the front door, slowly in order to allow for his limp. He summoned the lift for her and held back the grille. She got in. Her last sight of him was through the bars, still watching her. By then she was liking him again, and frightened stiff.

She had worked out what she would do. She had her passport and she had her credit card. She had checked both when she looked inside her handbag. She had her plan, because it was the one she had used on training exercises in little English towns, and later with modifications in Berlin. In the world of ordinary mortals it was dusk. In the courtyard, two priests were talking in low voices with their heads together, swinging their rosaries behind their backs. The street was packed with shoppers. A hundred people could have been watching her, and when she began to count the possibilities in her mind, a hundred seemed about the likely figure. She imagined a kind of Vienna Quorn, with Nigel as Master and Georgie and Fergus as Whips, and bearded little Lederer heading up the bunch, and teams of Czech hoods in hot pursuit. And poor old Jack, unhorsed, plodding over the horizon after them.

She chose the Imperial which Magnus loved for its pomp.

“I’ve no luggage, I’m afraid, but I’d like a room for the night,” she said to the silver-haired receptionist, handing him the credit card, and the receptionist, who recognised her at once, said, “How is your husband, madam?”

A chasseur showed her to a magnificent bedroom on the first floor. Room 121 that everybody asks for, she thought; the very room I brought him to on his birthday for dinner and a night of love. The memory did not move her in the least. She phoned down to the same receptionist and asked him to book her on tomorrow morning’s flight to London: “Of course, Frau Pym.” Smoke, she remembered. Smoke was what we called deception. She sat on the bed listening to the footsteps go quiet in the corridor as the dinner hour drew nearer. Double doors, twelve foot high. Painting called

Evening on the Bosphorus

by Eckenbrecher. “I’ll love you till we’re both too old,” he’d said, with his head on that very pillow. “Then I’ll go on loving you.” The phone rang. It was the concierge to say only club class was available. Mary said, then take club. She kicked her shoes off and held them in her hand while she softly opened the door and peered out. If I think I’m being watched I’ll put my shoes out to be cleaned. Burble and canned music from the bar. A whiff of dill sauce from the dining-room. Fish. They have such good fish. She stepped onto the landing, waited but still no one came. Marble statues. Portrait of bewhiskered nobleman. She pulled her shoes on, climbed one staircase, called the lift and descended to the ground floor, emerging in a side corridor out of sight of the reception area. A darkened passage led towards the rear of the hotel. She followed it, heading for a service door at the far end. The door was ajar. She pushed it, already smiling apologetically. An elderly waiter was adding the finishing touches to a private dinner table. Another door stood open behind him, leading to a side street. With a jolly

“Guten Abend”

to the waiter, Mary stepped quickly into the fresh air and hailed a cab. “Wienerwald,” she told the driver and heard him announce it over the intercom: “Wienerwald.” Nothing was following. Approaching the Ring she gave him a hundred schillings, hopped out at a pedestrian crossing and took a second cab to the airport where she sat reading in the ladies’ loo for an hour until the last flight to Frankfurt.

It was earlier on the same evening.

The house was semi-detached and backed on to a railway embankment exactly as Tom had described. Once again Brotherhood reconnoitred it before making his approach. The road was as straight as the railway and seemingly as long. Nothing but the setting autumn sun disturbed the skyline. There was the road, there was the embankment with its telegraph lines and water tower, and there was the huge sky of Brotherhood’s raggedy-arsed childhood which was always filled with white cloud left by the stop-go trains as they trundled across the fens to Norwich. The houses were all of the same design, and as he studied them their symmetry became beautiful to him without his understanding why. This was the order of life, he thought. This line of little English coffins is what I thought I was preserving. Decent white men in ordered rows. Number 75 had replaced his wooden gate with a wrought-iron one, with “Eldorado” done in curly handwriting. Number 77 had laid himself a concrete path with seashells bedded in it. Number 81 had faced himself in rustic teak. And number 79, upon which Brotherhood now advanced, was resplendent with a Union Jack fluttering from a fine white flagpole planted just inside his territory. The tyre marks of a heavy vehicle were cut into the little gravel drive. An electric speaker was set beside the polished doorbell. Brotherhood pressed and waited. A gasp of atmospherics greeted him, followed by a wheezing male voice.

“Who the bloody hell’s that?”

“Are you Mr. Lemon?” Brotherhood said into the microphone.

“What if I am?” said the voice.

“My name is Marlow. I wondered whether I might have a quiet word with you on a private matter.”

“I’ve got two of them and they both work. Piss off.”

In the window bay the net curtain parted far enough for Brotherhood to glimpse a bronzed, shiny little face, very wrinkled, observing him from the darkness.

“Let me put it this way,” said Brotherhood more softly, still into the microphone. “I’m a friend of Magnus Pym.”

A further crackling while the voice at the other end seemed to regather strength. “Well why the hell didn’t you say so in the first place? Come in and have a wet.”

Syd Lemon was a tiny, thickset old man these days, dressed all in brown like a rabbit. His brown hair, without a fleck of grey, was parted down the centre of his skull. His brown tie had horses’ heads looking doubtfully at his heart. He wore a trim brown cardigan and pressed brown trousers and his brown toecaps shone like conkers. From amid a maze of sunbaked wrinkles two bright animal eyes shone merrily, though his breath came hard to him. He carried a blackthorn stick with a rubber ferrule, and when he walked he swung his little hips like a skirt to get himself along.

“The next time you press that bell, just say you’re an Englishman,” he advised as he led the way down the tiny, spotless hall. On the walls Brotherhood saw photographs of racehorses, and a younger Syd Lemon wearing Ascot rig. “After that you state your business clearly and I’ll tell you to piss off again,” he ended with a gush of laughter and pivoted awkwardly on his stick so that he could wink at Brotherhood and show him it was just his joke.

“How is the young tyke then?” said Syd.

“In excellent shape, thank you,” said Brotherhood.

Without warning Syd sat himself abruptly on a high-backed chair, then leaned cautiously forward on his stick like a tiny dowager until he had the angle that cost him least discomfort. Brotherhood saw dark shadows under his eyes and a film of sweat on his forehead.

“You’ll have to do the honours for us today, squire, I’m not myself,” he said. “It’s in the corner. Lift the lid. I’ll take a drop of the scotch one for my health and you’ll please yourself.”

A thick maroon carpet ran wall to wall. A lurid painting of a Swiss scene hung above the tiled fireplace, to one side of which stood a fine burr-walnut cocktail cabinet. As Brotherhood lifted the lid, a music box began playing a tune, which was what Syd had been waiting for it to do.

“Know that one, do you?” said Syd. “Listen to it. Put the lid down again—that’s right—now pull it up. There we go.”

“It’s ‘Underneath the Arches,’” Brotherhood said with a smile.

“Course it is. His dad give it me. ‘Syd,’ he says. ‘I can’t afford a gold watch just now, and I’m afraid there’s a temporary problem of liquidity about your pension. But there’s an article of furniture I possess which has given us a lot of fun down the corridor of years which is worth a bob or two and I’d like you to have it as a small token.’ So we run the van up, me and Meg, before the repossession artists got their hands on it. Five years ago that was. He’d bought six of them from Harrods to see his contacts right. There was this one left. He never asked for it back, not once. ‘Still playing, is she, Syd?’ he’d say. ‘Many a good tune played on an old fiddle, you know. I can still surprise them myself.’ He could too. The bloody keyholes wasn’t safe when he was around. Right till the end. I couldn’t get to the funeral. I was indisposed. How was it?”

“I’m told it was beautiful,” said Brotherhood.

“Well it would be. He’d made his mark. They weren’t burying just anybody, you know. That man had shaken hands with some of the Highest in the Land. He called the Duke of Edinburgh ‘Philip.’ Did they write about him when he died? I looked in a few papers but I didn’t see a lot. Then I thought, Well they’re probably saving it up for the Sundays. Of course you can never tell with Fleet Street. I’d have slipped up there if I’d been well, offered them a few bob to make sure. Are you a bogey, sir?”

Brotherhood laughed.

“You look like a bogey. I did time for him, you know. A lot of us did as a matter of fact. ‘Lemon,’ he says—always called me by my surname when he wanted something very badly, I never knew why—‘Lemon, they’ll get me on my signature on those documents. Now if I was to deny it was my signature, and you was to say you’d forged it, nobody would be the wiser, would they?’ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I would. I’d do a lot of time for it,’ I said to him. ‘If doing time makes you wise, I’m going to be as wise as Methuselah,’ I said. I still did it, mind. I don’t know why. He said I’d have fifty grand when I come out. I knew I wouldn’t. I suppose you could call it friendship really. A cocktail cabinet like that, you couldn’t get one to save your life these days. Here’s to him. Mud in your eye.”

“Cheers,” said Brotherhood and drank while Syd looked on approvingly.

“So what are you if you’re not a bogey? Are you one of his airy-fairy Foreign Office friends? You don’t look like an airy-fairy. More like a boxer to me, if you’re not a bogey. Ever do that at all, did you, the fight game? Ringside seats we used to have, every time. We was there the night Joe Baksi said goodbye to poor old Bruce Woodcock. We had to have a bath afterwards, get the blood off. Then round to the Albany Club and there was Joe standing at the bar without a mark on him, a couple of Lovelies beside him there, and Rickie says to him, ‘Why didn’t you finish him off, Joe? Why did you spin it out like that, round after round?’ Wonderful way with words he had. ‘Rickie,’ says Joe, ‘I couldn’t do it. I hadn’t got the heart and that’s a fact. Every time I hit him he was going “oooh—oooh”—like that—I couldn’t put the finisher in and that’s a fact.’”

While he continued to listen, Brotherhood allowed his eye to fall idly upon the imprint of an absent piece of furniture in a corner of the room. The shape of it was square, perhaps two foot by two, and it had cut through the carpet pile to the canvas backing underneath. “Did Magnus come along that night as well?” he enquired jovially, turning the conversation delicately back upon the purpose of his visit.

“He was too young, sir,” Syd replied stoutly. “Too tender he was. Rickie would have took him but Meg she said no. ‘You leave him with me,’ she said. ‘You boys can go out, you can have your fun. But Titch stays here with me and we’ll go to a flick and have a nice evening and that’s it.’ Well, you didn’t quarrel with Meg when she said a thing like that, not twice you didn’t. I’d be broke today without her. I’d have given him every penny I had. But Meg, she put a bit away. She knew her Syd. Knew her Rickie too—a bit too well, I thought sometimes. Still you can’t blame her. He was bent, you see. We was all bent, but Titch’s dad was very bent indeed. Took me a long time to realise that. Still, if he came back, I suppose we’d all do the same.” He laughed though it hurt him to do so. “We’d do the same and more, I’ll bet we would. Is Titch in trouble, then?”

“Why should he be?” said Brotherhood, lifting his gaze away from the corner of the room.

“You tell me. You’re the bogey, not me. You could run a prison with a face like that. I shouldn’t be talking to you. I can feel it. I’d walk into the office one day. Audley Street. Mount Street. Chester Street. Old Burlington. Conduit. Park Lane. Always the best addresses. Nothing altered. Everything nice and tidy. Receptionist there, sitting at her desk like the Mona Lisa. ‘Morning, Mr. Lemon.’ ‘Morning, sweetheart.’ But I’d know. I’d see it in her face. I’d hear the quiet. Hullo, I’d say to myself. It’s the bogies. They’ve been having a word with Rickie. Off you go, Syd, it’s out the back door fast. I was never wrong. Not once. Even if it was another twelve months without the option when they nicked me, I always had the nose for when the trouble started.”

“When did you last see him then?”

“Couple of years ago. Maybe more. He stayed away after Meg went, I don’t know why. I’d have thought he’d come more but he didn’t like it. Didn’t like people dying on him, I suppose. Didn’t like people being poor, or no-hopers. He stood for Parliament once, you know. He’d have got in too if we’d started a week earlier. Same as his horses. Always leaving it too late at the finish. He’d ring up of course. Loved the telephone, always did. Never happy if the blower wasn’t ringing.”

“I was meaning Magnus,” said Brotherhood patiently. “Titch.”

“I thought you might be,” said Syd. He began coughing. His whisky stood on the table in front of him but he hadn’t touched it although it was in reach. He doesn’t drink any more, thought Brotherhood. It’s there for the decorum. The coughing ended and left him breathless.

“Magnus came and saw you,” said Brotherhood.

“Did he? I didn’t notice. When was that?”

“On his way to see Tom. After the funeral.”

“How did he do that then?”

“Drove out here. Sat with you. Chatted about old times. He was pleased he came. He told young Tom afterwards. ‘I had a lovely talk with Syd,’ he said. ‘It was just like old times.’ He wanted everyone to know.”

“Did he tell you that?”

“He told Tom.”

“Didn’t tell you though. Or you wouldn’t need to come here. I always reasoned that. I was never wrong. ‘If the bogies ask, it’s because they don’t know. So don’t tell them. If they ask and they do know, they’re trying to catch you out. So don’t tell’em either.’ I used to say the same to Rickie but he wouldn’t listen. It was being a Mason partly. It made him feel immune if he talked enough. That’s how they got him, nine times out of ten. He talked himself into it.” He barely paused. “Listen, squire. I’ll do a deal with you. You tell me what you want and I’ll tell you to piss off. How’s that?”

A long silence followed but Brotherhood’s patient smile did not tire. “Tell me something. What’s that Union Jack doing out there?” he suggested. “Does it have a meaning at all, or is it just a big flower for the garden?”

“It’s a scarecrow for keeping off foreigners and bogies.”

As if he were producing a photograph of his family, Brotherhood drew out his green card, the one he had shown to Sefton Boyd. Syd drew a pair of spectacles from his pocket and read it back and front. A train thundered past but he appeared not to hear it.

“Is this a con?” he asked.

“I’m in the same business as that flag,” Brotherhood said. “If that’s a con.”

“Could be. Everything could be.”

“You were Eighth Army, weren’t you? I understand you picked up a small medal at Alamein as well. Was that a con, too?”

“Could have been.”

“Magnus Pym is in a little bit of trouble,” said Brotherhood. “To be perfectly honest with you, which I always am with people, he seems to have temporarily disappeared.”

Syd’s small face had tightened. His breathing became harsh and quick. “Who’s disappeared him, then? You? He hasn’t been messing with Muspole’s boys, has he?”

“Who’s Muspole?”

“Friend of Rickie’s. He knew people.”

“He may have been lifted, he may have gone into hiding. He was playing a dangerous game with some very bad foreigners.”

“Foreigners eh? Well he had the parley-voo, didn’t he?”

“He was working under cover. For his country. And for me.”

“Well he’s a silly little bugger then,” said Syd angrily and, hauling a perfectly ironed handkerchief from his pocket, dusted his shiny face. “I’ve no patience with him. Meg saw it. ‘He’ll go to the bad,’ she said. ‘There’s a copper in that boy, you mark my words. He’s a natural grass. Born to it.’”

“This wasn’t grassing, this was risking his neck,” said Brotherhood.

“That’s what you say. That’s what you think perhaps. Well you’re wrong. Never satisfied, that boy wasn’t. God wasn’t half good enough for him. Ask Meg. You can’t. She’s gone. She was a wise one, Meg was. She was a woman, but she had more sense in one eye than you and me and half the world together. He’s been playing both ends against the middle,

I

know. Meg always said he would.”

“How did he look when he came and saw you?”

“Healthy. Everyone does. Roses in his nasty little cheeks. I always know when he wants something. He’s charming, like his dad. I said, ‘A bit more mourning would become you by the look of you.’ He wouldn’t hear of it. ‘It was a beautiful service, Syd,’ he says. ‘You’d have loved it.’ Well, that was smoke up my arse for a start. ‘They was packed together like sardines and there still wasn’t room for them in the church.’ ‘Moonshine,’ I said. ‘They was in the square outside, they were queuing down the street, Syd. There must have been a thousand people there. If the Irish had let a bomb off, they’d have deprived this country of its finest brains.’ ‘Was Philip there?’ I said. ‘Course he was.’ Well, I mean he couldn’t have been, could he, or they’d have had it in the papers and the telly. Well, I suppose he could have gone incognito. I’m told they do that a lot these days, thanks to the Irish. He had a friend once. Kenny Boyd. His mum was a lady. Rick had a how d’you do with his aunt. Maybe he went to young Kenny. He might.”

Brotherhood shook his head.

“Belinda? She was straight, always, although he bilked her. He could go to Belinda any time.”

Brotherhood shook it again.

“I mean, a thousand mourners,” Syd objected.

“Creditors,

if you like. Not mourners. You don’t mourn Rick. Not really. You heave a bit of a sigh of relief, to be frank. Then you look in your wallet and thank old Meg there’s still a bit left over for yourself. I didn’t tell Titch that. It wouldn’t have been appropriate.... Did Philip go? Did

you

hear anything about Philip going?”

“It was a lie,” said Brotherhood.

Syd was shocked. “Ah now, that’s a bit hard, that is. That’s copper’s talk. Magnus was conning me, put it that way, same as his dad did.”

“Why?” said Brotherhood.

Syd didn’t hear.

“What did he want?” said Brotherhood. “Why would he take so much trouble to con you?”

Syd was overacting. He frowned. He pursed his lips. He dusted the tip of his brown nose. “Wanted to see me right, didn’t he?” he said too brightly. “Flannel me along. I’ll go and chat up old Syd. Make him feel nice.’ Oh we was always friends. Great friends. A father to him I was, quite often. And Meg was a truly incredible mother.” Perhaps with old age he had lost the liar’s art. Or perhaps he had never quite had it in the first place. “He just wanted a social, that’s all. Comfort, that’s what it comes down to. I’ll comfort you, you comfort me. He was always fond of Meg, you see. Even when she saw through him. Loyal. I’ll say that.”

“Who’s Wentworth?” Brotherhood said.

Syd’s face had slammed tight as a prison door. “Who’s who, old boy?”

“Wentworth.”

“No. No, I don’t think so. I don’t think I know a Wentworth. More a place. Why, is a Wentworth giving him trouble then?”

“Sabina. Did he ever mention a Sabina?”

“That’s a racehorse, isn’t it? Wasn’t there a Princess Sabina who was fancied for the Gold Cup last year?”

“Who’s Poppy?”

“Here. Is Magnus playing the Lovelies again? Mind you, he wouldn’t be his dad’s son if he didn’t.”

“What did he come here for?”

“I told you. Comfort.” Then, by a kind of cruel magnetism, Syd’s gaze slid to the spot where a piece of furniture had stood, before returning, too brazenly, to Brotherhood.

“Well then,” said Syd.

“Tell us something, do you mind?” said Brotherhood. “What was in that corner there?”

“Where?”

“There.”

“Nothing.”

“Furniture? Keepsakes?”

“Nothing.”

“Something of your wife’s you’ve sold?”

“Meg’s? I wouldn’t sell anything of Meg’s if I was starving.”

“What made those lines then?”

“What lines?”

“Where I’m pointing. In the carpet. What made them?”

“Fairies. What’s it to do with you?”

“What’s it to do with Magnus?”

“Nothing. I told you. Don’t repeat things. It annoys me.”

“Where is it?”

“Gone. It isn’t anything. It’s nothing.”

Leaving Syd sitting in his chair, Brotherhood ran up the narrow stairs two at a time. The bathroom was ahead of him. He looked inside then stepped to the main bedroom left. A frilly pink divan filled most of the room. He looked under it

,

felt beneath the pillows, looked under them. He pulled open the wardrobe and swept aside rows of camel-hair coats and costly women’s dresses. Nothing. A second bedroom lay across the landing but it contained no piece of heavy furniture two feet by two, just heaps of very beautiful white hide suitcases. Returning to the ground floor he inspected the dining-room and kitchen and, from the rear window, the tiny garden leading to the embankment. There was no hut, no garage. He returned to the parlour. Another train was passing. He waited for the sound of it to fade before he spoke. Syd was sitting hard forward in his chair. His hands were clasped over the handle of his blackthorn, his chin rested passively upon them.

“And the tyre marks in your drive,” said Brotherhood. “Did the fairies make them too?”

Then Syd spoke. His lips were tight and the words seemed to hurt him. “Do you swear to me, Scout’s honour, copper, that this is for his country?”

“Yes.”

“Is what he done, which I don’t believe and don’t want to know, unpatriotic or could be?”

“It could be. The most important thing for all of us is to find him.”

“And may you rot if you’re lying to me?”

“And may I rot.”

“You will, copper. Because I love that boy but I never did wrong by my country. He come here to con me, that’s true. He wanted the filing cabinet. Old green filing cabinet Rick gave me to look after when he went off on his travels. ‘Now Rick’s dead, you can release his papers. It’s all right,’ he says. ‘It’s legal. They’re mine. I’m his heir, aren’t I?’”

“What papers?”

“His dad’s life. All his debts. His secrets, you might say. Rickie always kept them in this special cabinet. What he owed us all. One day he was going to see everybody right, we’d never want for anything again. I said no at first. I’d always said no when Rickie was alive, and I didn’t see nothing had changed it. ‘He’s dead,’ I said. ‘Let him have his peace. Nobody never had a better pal than your old dad and you know it, so just you stop asking questions and get on with your own life,’ I says. There’s some bad things in that cabinet. Wentworth was one of them. I don’t know the other names you said. Maybe they’re in there too.”

“Maybe they are.”

“He argued around and so finally I said ‘Take it.’ If Meg had been here, he’d never have had it off me, legal heir or not, but she’s gone. I couldn’t refuse him, that’s the truth. I never could, no more than what I could his dad. He was going to write a book. I didn’t like that either. ‘Your dad never held with books, Titch,’ I said. ‘You know that. He was educated in the university of the world.’ He didn’t listen. He never would when he wanted something. ‘All right,’ I said. ‘Take it. And maybe that’ll get him off your back. Shove it in the car and piss off,’ I said, ‘I’ll get the big Mick from next door to help you lift it.’ He wouldn’t. ‘The car’s not right for it,’ he says. ‘It’s not going where the cabinet’s going.’ ‘All right,’ I says, ‘then leave it here and shut up.’”

“Did he leave anything else here?”

“No.”

“Was he carrying a briefcase?”

“A black airy-fairy job with the Queen’s badge on it and two keyholes.”

“How long did he stay?”

“Long enough to con me. An hour, half an hour, what do I know? Wouldn’t even sit down. Couldn’t. He walked back and forth all the time in his black tie, smiling. Kept looking out of the window. ‘Here,’ I said, ‘which bank have you robbed, then? I’ll go and take my money out.’ He used to laugh at jokes like that. He didn’t, but he was smiling all the time. Well, funerals, they take you in a lot of ways, don’t they? I could have done without his smiling all the same.”

“So then he left. With the cabinet?”

“Course he didn’t. He sent the lorry, didn’t he?”

“Of course he did,” said Brotherhood, cursing himself for his stupidity.

He was seated close to Syd and he had put his whisky beside Syd’s on the beaten-brass Indian table that Syd kept polished till it shone like the Eastern sun. Syd was speaking very reluctantly, and his voice had almost died.

“How many?”

“Two blokes.”

“Did you give them a cup of tea?”

“Course I did.”

“See their lorry?”

“Course I did. I was looking out for them, wasn’t I? That’s a major entertainment, that is, round here, a lorry.”

“What was the firm?”

“I don’t know. It wasn’t written, was it? It was a plain lorry. More like a hired one.”

“Colour?”

“Green.”

“Hired from who?”

“How should I know?”

“Did you sign anything?”

“Me? You’re daft. They had a tea, loaded up, and buggered off.”

“Where were they taking it?”

“The depot, weren’t they?”

“Where’s the depot?”

“Canterbury.”

“You sure?”

“Course I’m sure. Canterbury. Package for Canterbury. Then they complained about the weight. They always do that, they think it gets them more dropsy.”

“Did they say package for Pym?”

“Canterbury. I told you.”

“Did they have a name at all?”

“Lemon. Call at Lemon’s, get the package for Canterbury. I’m Lemon. The answer is a Lemon.”

“Did you see the number of the lorry?”

“Oh yes. Wrote it down. I mean that’s my hobby, lorry numbers.”

Brotherhood managed a smile. “Well, can you at least remember what make of lorry it might have been?” he asked. “Distinguishing marks and whatnot?”

It was a harmless enough question, harmlessly put. Brotherhood himself had little expectation of it. It was the kind of question that unasked leaves a gap, but asked produces no dividend: part of the necessary luggage of the interrogator’s trade. Yet it was the last that Brotherhood put to Syd on that dying autumn evening, and as a matter of fact it was the last in his short but desperate search for Magnus Pym, because after it he had only answers to concern him. Yet Syd refused point-blank to address himself to it. He started to speak, but then he changed his mind and clapped his mouth shut with a little pop. His chin came off his hands, his head lifted, then by degrees his whole little body lifted too, painfully but strictly from the chair, as if a distant bugle had summoned him to a last parade. His back arched, he held his stick to his side.

“I don’t want that boy doing prison,” he said with a husk to his voice. “Do you hear me? And I’m not going to help you put him there. His dad did prison. I did prison. And I don’t want the boy there. It bothers me. Nothing personal, copper, but on your way.”

It’s over, thought Brotherhood calmly, staring round the crowded conference table in Brammel’s suite on the Fifth Floor. This is my last feast with you. I shall walk out of this door a gamekeeper’s son of sixty. A dozen pairs of hands lay under the downlight like corpses waiting to be identified. To his left languished the tailor-made worsted sleeves of the Foreign Office representative named Dorney. Heraldic lions postured on his gold cufflinks. Beyond Dorney reposed the unspoiled fingertips of his master Brammel, whose mid-Surrey heredity needed no advertisement. Beyond Bo sat Mountjoy from Cabinet. Then the rest. In his mood of increasing alienation Brotherhood found it difficult to put the voices to the hands. Not that it mattered any more because tonight they were one voice and one dead hand. They are the body corporate I once believed was greater than the sum of its parts, he thought. In my lifetime I have witnessed the birth of the jet airplane and the atom bomb and the computer, and the demise of the British institution. We have nothing to clear away but ourselves. The musty midnight air smelt of decay. Nigel was reading the death certificate.

“They waited outside the Lumsden house till six-twelve, then telephoned the house from a callbox down the road. Mrs. Lumsden replied that she and her maid were looking for Mrs. Pym at this moment. Mary had taken herself for a walk in the back garden and not returned. She’d been out more than an hour. The garden was empty. Lumsden himself was at the Residence. The Ambassador apparently required him.”

“I hope nobody’s going to try and blame the Lumsdens for this,” said Dorney.

“I’m sure not,” said Bo.

“She left no note, no word to anyone,” Nigel continued. “She’d been preoccupied during the day but that was natural. We checked the airlines and found she was booked to London on tomorrow morning’s British Airways flight club class. She gave her address as the Imperial Hotel, Vienna.”

“This morning’s,” somebody corrected, and Brotherhood saw Nigel’s gold watch tilt sharply towards him.

“This morning’s flight then,” Nigel agreed testily. “When we checked the Imperial she wasn’t in her room and when we tried the airport a second time we established she’d taken a standby seat on the last flight of the day, Lufthansa to Frankfurt. Unfortunately we did not come by this information until after the Frankfurt flight had landed at its destination.”

She diddled you, thought Brotherhood with a satisfaction bordering on pride. She’s a good girl and knows the game.

“Isn’t it rather a pity you couldn’t have found out about Frankfurt the

first

time you went to the airport?” said an unbeliever boldly from the end of the table.

“Of course it’s a pity,” Nigel snapped. “But if you had been listening a little more closely, I think you would have heard me say that she took a standby seat. The official flight list bearing her name was therefore not complete until literally the moment when the plane took off.”

“Sounds a bit of a muddle all the same,” said Mountjoy. “What about the unofficial flight list?”

No, thought Brotherhood. It is not a muddle. To make a muddle you must first have order. This is inertia, this is normality. What was once a great service has become an immovable hybrid—half bureaucrat, half freebooter, and using the arguments of the one to negate the other.

“So where is she?” somebody asked.

“We don’t know,” said Nigel with satisfaction. “And short of asking the Germans—and incidentally of course the Americans—to search every hotel in Frankfurt, which seems a long shot to say the least, I fail to see what more we can do. Or could have done. Frankly.”

“Jack?” said Brammel.

Brotherhood heard an older version of his own voice ebb into the darkness. “God knows,” he said. “Probably sitting on her backside in Prague by now.”

Nigel again. “She’s done nothing

wrong

as far as anyone knows. We can’t keep her prisoner against her will, you know. She’s a free citizen. If her son wants to join her there next week there’s not much we can do about

that

either.”

Mountjoy voiced a previous worry. “I do think the telephone intercept from the American Embassy

is

fairly extraordinary. This woman Lederer, sitting in Vienna, screaming to her husband in London about two people exchanging messages in church. That was our church she was talking about. Mary was

there.

Couldn’t we have made a few deductions from that?”

Nigel had his answer pat: “Only long after the event, I’m afraid. Perfectly understandably, the transcribers saw nothing dramatic in the intercept and passed it to us twenty-four hours after the phone call had taken place. The information that

would

have put us on the alert—namely that Mary had been seen

possibly

emerging from a Czech safe flat where this man Petz and so forth had previously been housed—therefore reached us

before

the intercept. You can hardly blame us because we didn’t put the cart before the horse, can you?”

Nobody seemed to know whether they could or couldn’t.

Mountjoy said it was time to take a view. Dorney said they really must decide whether to call in the police and circulate Pym’s photograph, and be damned. At this Brammel came sharply to life.

“If we do that, we may as well put up the shutters,” he said. “We’re so nearly there. We’re so

warm,

aren’t we, Jack?”

“I’m afraid we’re not,” said Brotherhood.

“But of course we are!”

“It’s guesswork. Still. We need the furniture van. That won’t be a simple job either. He’ll have used cut-outs, halfway houses. The police know how to do those things. We don’t have a chance. He’s using the name of Canterbury. Or we think he is. That’s because in the past all his worknames have been places—he’s got a tic about that. Colonel Manchester, Mr. Hull, Mr. Gulworth. On the other hand they just may have taken the cabinet to Canterbury and Canterbury is where he is. Or they’ve taken it to Canterbury and Canterbury is where he isn’t. We need a square beside the sea and a house with a woman in it whom he apparently loves. She’s not in Scotland or Wales because that’s where he says she is. We are not in a position to comb every seaside town in the United Kingdom. The police are.”

“He’s mad,” said a ghost.

“Yes, he’s mad. He’s been betraying us for more than thirty years and so far we have failed to certify him. Our error. So we may as well agree that he makes a pretty decent show of being sane when he needs to, and that his tradecraft is damn good. Is anybody nearer to him than I am?”

The door opened and closed. Kate was standing before them with an armful of red striped folders. She was pale and very steady, like a sleepwalker. She laid one folder before each guest.

“These have just come up from Sig. Int.,” she said, to Bo only. “They ran the

Simplicissimus

bookcode across the Czech transmissions. The results are positive.”

At seven in the morning the London streets were empty but Brotherhood marched in them as if they were full, keeping a straight back among the falterers and weaklings, a man of bearing in a crowd. A solitary policeman wished him good morning. Brotherhood was the kind of man policemen greeted. Thank you, Officer, he thought, striding yet more purposefully. You have just smiled on the man who befriended tomorrow’s newest traitor—the man who fought off criticism of him until the case became unanswerable, then fought off his apologists when it became unfaceable. Why do I begin to understand him? he wondered, marvelling at his own tolerance. Why is it that in my heart if not my intellect I sense a stirring of sympathy for the man who all his life has made a failure of my successes? What I made him do, he made me pay for.

You brought it on yourself, Belinda had said. Then why was it that, as with his dangling arm at the moment it was shot to pieces, he had yet to feel the pain?

He’s in Prague, he thought. The chase game of the last few days was a Czech fan dance to keep us looking the wrong way while they smuggled him to safety. Mary would never have gone there unless Magnus was ahead of her. Mary would never have gone there, period.

Would she? Wouldn’t she? He didn’t know and he wouldn’t have trusted anybody who said they did. To leave Plush and all her Englishness behind? For Magnus now?

She’d never do it.

She’d do it for Magnus.

Tom will come first for her.

She’ll stay.

She’ll take Tom with her.

I need a woman.

An all-night coffee shop stood at the corner of Half Moon Street and on other early mornings Brotherhood might have stopped there and let the tired whores make a fuss of his dog, and Brotherhood in return would have made a fuss of the whores, bought them a coffee and chatted them up, because he liked their tradecraft and their guts and their mixture of human canniness and stupidity. But his dog was dead and so for the time being was his sense of fun. He unlocked his door and headed for the sideboard where the vodka was. He poured himself a warm half tumbler and drank it down. He ran a bath, switched on his transistor radio and took it to the bathroom. The news reported disasters everywhere but no British diplomatic couple surfacing in Prague. If the Czechs want to blow the whistle they’ll do it at midday in order to catch the evening television and tomorrow’s papers, he thought. He began shaving. The phone was ringing. It’s Nigel saying we’ve found him, he was at his club all the time. It’s the duty officer reporting that the Prague Foreign Ministry has put out a midday press call for foreign correspondents. It’s Steggie, saying he likes strong men.

He switched off the radio, walked naked to the drawing-room, snatched up the receiver, said “Yes?” and heard a ping, then nothing. He pressed his lips together as a warning to himself not to speak. He was praying. He was definitely praying. Speak, he prayed. Say something. Then he heard it: three short taps of a coin or a nail-file on the drum of the mouthpiece:

Prague procedures.

Casting round for something metal, he saw his fountain pen on the writing table and managed to seize it without relinquishing the telephone. He tapped once in return:

I am reading you.

Two more taps, then three again.

Stay where you are,

said the message.

I have information for you.

With his pen he gave four taps to the mouthpiece and heard two in reply before the caller rang off. He ran his fingers through his stubble hair. He took his vodka to the desk and sat down, put his face in his hands. Keep alive, he prayed. It’s the networks. It’s Pym, putting it all right. Keep clever. I’m here, if that’s what you’re asking. I’m here and waiting for your next signal. Don’t call again until you’re ready.

The phone screamed a second time. He lifted the receiver but it was only Nigel. Pym’s description and photograph were on their way to every police station in the country, he said. The Firm was switching to the operational telephone lines only. Bo had ordered the Whitehall lines disconnected. The press contacts were already beating down the doors. Why is he talking to me? Brotherhood wondered. Is he lonely or is he giving me a chance to say I’ve just had this funny phone call from a Joe using Prague procedures? It’s the funny call, he decided.

“Some joker just phoned me with a Czech call sign,” he said. “I gave him the signal to speak but he wouldn’t. God alone knows what it was about.”

“Well if anything comes through, let us know at once. Use the operational line.”

“So you said,” said Brotherhood.

Waiting again. Thinking of every Joe who had ever come through badland. Take your time. Move carefully and with confidence. Don’t panic. Don’t run. Take your time. Pick your phone box. He heard a knock at the door. It’s some bloody hawker. Kate’s taken her overdose. It’s that fool Arab boy who lives downstairs and always thinks my bathroom’s leaking on him. He pulled on a dressing-gown, opened the door and saw Mary. He hauled her inside and slammed the door. Whatever seized him after that he didn’t know. Relief or fury, remorse or indignation. He slapped her once, then he slapped her again and on a clear day he would have taken her straight to bed.

“There’s a place called Farleigh Abbott near Exeter,” she said.

“What of it?”

“Magnus told him he’d put his mother in a house beside the sea in Devon.”

“Told who?”

“Poppy. His Czech controller. They were students together in Bern. He thinks Magnus is going to kill himself. I suddenly realised. That’s what’s in the burnbox with the secrets. The Station gun. Isn’t it?”

“How do you know it’s Farleigh Abbott?”

“He talked about his mother in Devon. He hasn’t got a bloody mother. His only place in Devon is Farleigh Abbott. ‘When I was in Devon,’ he’d say. ‘Let’s go to Devon for a holiday.’ It was Farleigh Abbott, always. We never went and he stopped talking about it. Rick used to take him there from school. They used to picnic and bicycle on the beach. It’s one of his ideal places. He’s there with a woman. I know he is.”

15

Y

ou will imagine, Tom, with what glory in his youthful heart the brilliant intelligence officer and lover celebrated the completion of his two years of devoted service to the flag in distant Austria and set about returning to civilian England. His leave-taking from Sabina was not as heart-rending as he had feared, for as the day approached she feigned a Slav indifference to his departure.

“I shall be happy woman, Magnus. Your English wives will not make sour faces at me. I shall be economist and free woman, not the courtesan of a frivolous soldier.” Nobody had ever called Pym frivolous before. She even took herself on leave ahead of him to forestall the agony of parting. She is being brave, Pym told himself. His farewell from Axel, though haunted by rumours of fresh purges, had a similarly rounded feel to it.

“Sir Magnus, whatever happens to me, we have done a great work together,” he said as, in the evening light, they faced each other outside the barn that had become Pym’s second home. “Never forget you owe me two hundred dollars.”

“I never will,” Pym said.

He began the long walk back to Sergeant Kaufmann’s jeep. He turned to wave but Axel had vanished into the forest.

The two hundred dollars were a reminder of their increasing closeness during the final months of their relationship.

“My father’s pressing me for money again,” Pym had said one evening while they photographed a codebook he had borrowed from Membury’s cricket locker. “The Burmese police are proposing to arrest him.”

“Then send it to him,” Axel had replied, winding back the film of his camera. He slipped the film in his pocket and inserted a fresh one. “How much does he want?”

“Whatever it is, I haven’t got it. I’m a subaltern on thirteen shillings a day, not a millionaire.”

Axel had appeared to pay no further interest, and they turned instead to the topic of Sergeant Pavel. Axel said it was time to stage a fresh crisis in Pavel’s life.

“But he had a crisis only last month,” Pym had objected. “His wife threw him out of his apartment for drunkenness and we had to help him buy his way in again.”

“We need a crisis,” Axel had repeated firmly. “Vienna is beginning to take him for granted and I do not care for the tone of their follow-up questions.”

Pym found Membury sitting at his desk. The afternoon sun was shining on one side of his friendly head while he read a fish book.

“I’m afraid Greensleeves wants a bonus of two hundred dollars cash,” he said.

“But my dear chap, we’ve paid him a pot of money this month already! What on earth can he want two hundred dollars for?”

“He’s got to buy his daughter an abortion. The doctor only takes U.S. dollars and it’s getting urgent.”

“But the child’s a mere fourteen. Who’s the man? They ought to throw him into prison.”

“It’s that Russian captain from headquarters.”

“The pig. The utter swine.”

“Pavel’s a Roman Catholic too, you know,” Pym reminded him. “Not a very good one, I agree. But it’s not easy for him either.”

The next night Pym counted two hundred dollars across the barn table. Axel tossed them back at him.

“For your father,” he said. “A loan from me to you.”

“I can’t do that. Those are operational funds.”

“Not any more. They belong to Sergeant Pavel.” Pym still did not pick up the money. “And Sergeant Pavel lends them to you as your friend,” Axel said, tearing a sheet of paper from his notebook. “Here—write me an I.O.U. Sign it and one day I shall make you pay it back.”

Pym rode away in good heart, confident that Graz and all its responsibilities, like Bern, would cease to exist the moment he entered the first tunnel.

Laying down his arms at the Intelligence Corps Depot in Sussex, Pym was handed the following PRIVATE & CONFIDENTIAL letter by the demobilisation officer:

The Government Overseas Research Group
P. O. Box 777
The Foreign Office
London, S.W. I

Dear Pym,

Mutual friends in Austria have passed your name to me as someone who might be interested in longer term employment. If this is so, would you care to lunch with me at the Travellers’ Club for an informal chat on Friday the nineteenth at 12:45?

(Signed) Sir Alwyn Leith, C.M.G.

For several days a mysterious squeamishness held Pym back from replying. I need new horizons, he told himself. They are good people but limited. Feeling strong one morning, he wrote regretting he was considering a career in the Church.

“There’s always Shell, Magnus,” said Belinda’s mother, who had taken Pym’s future much to heart. “Belinda’s got an uncle in Shell, haven’t you, darling?”

“He wants to do something

worthwhile,

Mummy,” Belinda said, stamping her foot and making the breakfast table rattle.

“Time somebody did,” said Belinda’s father from behind his

Telegraph,

and for some reason found this very funny, and went on laughing through his gapped teeth while Belinda stormed into the garden in a rage.

A more interesting contender for Pym’s services was Kenneth Sefton Boyd, who had come into an inheritance and was proposing that he and Pym should open a nightclub. Keeping this intelligence from Belinda, who had views on nightclubs and the Sefton Boyds, Pym pleaded an engagement at his old school and took himself to the family estate in Scotland, where Jemima met him at the station. She was driving the very Land Rover from which she had glowered at him when they were children. She was more beautiful than ever.

“How was Austria?” she asked as they bumped cheerfully over purple Highlands towards a monstrous Victorian castle.

“Super,” said Pym.

“Did you box and play rugger all the time?”

“Well not all the time, actually,” Pym confessed.

Jemima cast him a look of protracted interest.

The Sefton Boyds lived in a parentless world. A disapproving retainer served them dinner. Afterwards they played backgammon until Jemima was tired. Pym’s bedroom was as large as a football field and as cold. Sleeping lightly, he woke without stirring to see a dismembered red spark switching like a firefly across the darkness. The spark descended and disappeared. A pale shape advanced on him. He smelt cigarette and toothpaste and felt Jemima’s naked body arrange itself softly around him, and Jemima’s lips find his own.

“You won’t mind if we turf you out on Friday, will you?” said Jemima while the three breakfasted in bed from a tray brought in by Sefton Boyd. “Only we’ve got Mark coming for the weekend.”

“Who’s Mark?” said Pym.

“Well I’m going to sort of marry him, actually,” said Jemima. “I’d marry Kenneth if I could, but he’s so conventional about those things.”

Renouncing women, Pym wrote to the British Council offering to distribute culture among primitives, and to his old housemaster, Willow, asking for a position teaching German. “I greatly miss the school’s discipline and have felt a keen loyalty towards it ever since my father failed to pay my fees.” He wrote to Murgo booking himself in for an extended retreat, though he had the prudence to be vague about dates. He wrote to the Catholics of Farm Street asking to continue the instruction he had begun in Graz. He wrote to an English school in Geneva and an American school in Heidelberg, and to the BBC, all in a spirit of self-negation. He wrote to the Inns of Court about opportunities for reading law. When he had thus surrounded himself with a plethora of choices, he filled in an enormous form detailing his brilliant life till now and followed it to the Oxford Appointments Board in search of more. The morning was sunny; his old university city dazzled him with carefree memories of his days as a Communist informer. His interlocutor was whimsical if not downright fey. He pushed his spectacles to the top of his nose. He shoved them into his greying locks like an effeminate racing driver. He gave Pym sherry and put a hand on his backside in order to propel him to a long window that gave on to a row of council houses.

“How about a life in filthy industry?” he suggested.

“Industry would be fine,” said Pym.

“Not unless you like eating with the crew. Do you like eating with the crew?”

“I’m really not very class-conscious actually, sir.”

“How charming. And do you like having grease up to your elbows?”

Pym said he didn’t mind grease either, actually, but by then he was being guided to a second window that gave on to spires and a lawn.

“I’ve a menial librarianship at the British Museum and a sort of third assistant clerkship to the House of Commons, which is the proletarian version of the Lords. I’ve bits and bobs in Kenya, Malaya, and the Sudan. I can do you nothing in India, they’ve taken it away from me. Do you like abroad or hate it?”

Pym said abroad was super, he had been to university in Bern. His interlocuter was puzzled. “I thought you went to university here.”

“Here too,” said Pym.

“Ah. Now do you like danger?”

“I love it, actually.”

“You poor boy. Don’t keep saying ‘actually.’ And will you give unquestioning allegiance to whoever is rash enough to employ you?”

“I will.”

“Will you adore your country right or wrong so help you God and the Tory Party?”

“I will again,” said Pym, laughing.

“Do you also believe that to be born British is to be born a winner in the great lottery of life?”

“Well, yes, to be honest, that too.”

“Then be a spy,” his interlocutor suggested and drew from his desk yet another application form and handed it to Pym. “Jack Brotherhood sends his love, and says why on

earth

haven’t you been in touch with him, and why won’t you have lunch with his nice recruiter?”

I could write whole essays for you, Tom, on the voluptuous pleasures of being interviewed. Of all the arts of affiliation Pym mastered, and throughout his life improved upon, the interview must stand in first place. We didn’t have Office trick-cyclists in those days, as your Uncle Jack likes to call them. We didn’t have anybody who wasn’t himself a citizen of the secret world, blessed with the unlined innocence of privilege. The nearest they had come to life’s experience was the war, and they saw the peace as its continuation by other means. Yet in the terms of the world outside their heads they had led lives so untested, so childlike and tender in their simplicities, so inward in their connections, that they required echelons of cut-outs to reach the society they honestly believed they were protecting. Pym sat before them, calm, reflective, resolute, modest. Pym composed his features in one mould after another, now of reverence, now of awe, zeal, passionate sincerity or spiritual good humour. He paraded pleasurable surprise when he heard that his tutors thought the world of him, and a stern-jawed pride on learning that the army loved him too. He modestly demurred or modestly boasted. He weeded out the half-believers from the believers and did not rest until he had converted the pack of them to paid-up life membership of the Pym supporters’ club.

“Now tell us about your father, will you, Pym?” said a man with a droopy moustache uncomfortably reminiscent of Axel’s. “Sounds a bit of a colourful sort of type to me.”

Pym smiled ruefully, sensing the mood. Pym delicately faltered before rallying.

“I’m afraid he’s a bit

too

colourful sometimes, sir,” he said amid a hubble-bubble of male laughter. “I don’t see a lot of him to be honest. We’re still friends, but I rather steer clear of him. I have to, actually.”

“Yes. Well, I don’t think we can hold you responsible for the sins of your old man, can we?” said the same questioner indulgently. “It’s you we’re interviewing, not your papa.”

How much did they know of Rick, or care? Even today I can only guess, for the question was never raised again and I am sure that in any formal way it went forgotten within days of Pym’s acceptance. English gentlemen, after all, do not discriminate against each other on the grounds of percentage, only of breeding. Occasionally they must have read of one of Rick’s more lurid collapses, and perhaps allowed themselves an amused smile. Here and there, presumably, word trickled down to them by way of their commercial contacts. But my suspicion is that Rick was an asset. A healthy streak of criminality in a young spy’s background never did him any harm, they reasoned. “Grown up in a hard school,” they told one another. “Could be useful.”

The last question of the interview and Pym’s answer echo for ever in my head. A military man in tweeds put it.

“Look here, young Pym,” he demanded, with a thrust of his bucolic head. “You’re by way of being a Czech buff. Speak their language a bit, know their people. What d’you say to these purges and arrests they’re having over there? Worry you?”

“I think the purges are quite appalling, sir. But they are to be expected,” said Pym, fixing his earnest gaze upon a distant, unreachable star.

“Why

expected?”

demanded the military man, as if nothing ought to be.

“It’s a rotten system. It’s superimposed on tribalism. It can only survive by the exercise of oppression.”

“Yes, yes. Granted. So what would you do about it—

do?”

“In what capacity, sir?”

“As one of us, you fool. Officer of this service. Anyone can talk. We

do.”

Pym had no need to think. His patent sincerity was out there speaking for him already.

“I’d play their game, sir. I’d divide them against themselves. Spread rumour, false accusation, suspicion. I’d let dog eat dog.”

“You mean you wouldn’t mind getting innocent chaps chucked into prison by their own police, then? Being a bit harsh, aren’t you? Bit immoral?”

“Not if it shortens the life of the system. No, sir, I don’t think I am. And I’m not persuaded about the innocence of these men of yours either, I’m afraid.”

In life, says Proust, we end up doing whatever we do second best. What Pym might have done better, I shall never know. He accepted the Firm’s offer. He opened his

Times

and read with a similar detachment of his engagement to Belinda. That’s me taken care of, then, he thought. With the Firm getting one half of me and Belinda the other, I’ll never want for anything again.

Turn your eye to Pym’s first great wedding, Tom. It occurs largely without his participation, in his last months of training, in a break between silent killing and a three-day seminar entitled Know Your Enemy, led by a vibrant young tutor from the London School of Economics. Imagine Pym’s enjoyment of this unlikely preparation for his married state. The fun of it. The free-wheeling unreality! He has chased Buchan’s ghost across the moors of Argyll. He has messed about in rubber boats, made night landings on sandy shores, with hot chocolate awaiting him in the vanquished enemy’s headquarters. He has fallen out of aeroplanes, dipped into secret inks, learned Morse and tapped scatological radio signals into the bracing Scottish air. He has watched a Mosquito aeroplane glide a hundred feet above him through the darkness, dropping a boxful of boulders in place of genuine supplies. He has played secret games of fox-and-geese in the streets of Edinburgh, photographed innocent citizens without their knowledge, fired live bullets at pop-up targets in simulated drawing-rooms, and plunged his dagger into the midriff of a swinging sandbag, all for England and King Harry. In spells of quiet he has been dispatched to genteel Bath to improve his Czech at the feet of an ancient lady called Frau Kohl, who lives in a crescent house of impoverished splendour. Over tea and muffins, Frau Kohl shows him albums of her childhood in Carlsbad, now called Karlovy Vary.

“But you know Karlovy Vary very well, Mr. Sanderstead!” she cries when Pym shows off his knowledge. “You have been there, yes?”

“No,” says Pym. “But I have a friend who has.”

Then back to base camp Somewhere in Scotland to resume the red thread of violence that has been spun into every new thing he is learning. This violence is not only of the body. It is the ravishment that must be done to truth, friendship and, if need be, honour in the interest of Mother England. We are the chaps who do the dirty work so that purer souls can sleep in bed at night. Pym of course has heard these arguments before from the Michaels, but now he must hear them again, from his new employers, who make pilgrimages from London in order to warn the uncut young of the wily foreigners they will one day have to tangle with. Do you remember your own visit, Jack? A gala night it was, close to Christmas: the great Brotherhood is coming! We had streamers hanging from the rafters. You sat at the directing staff’s table in the excellent canteen, while we young ’uns craned our necks to catch a glimpse of one of the great players of the Game. After dinner we gathered round you in a half circle, clutching our subsidised port, and you told us tales of derring-do until we crept off to bed and dreamed of being like you—though alas we could never really have your lovely war, even if that was what we were rehearsing for. Do you remember how in the morning, before you left, you called on Pym while he was shaving, and congratulated him on a damn good showing so far?

“Nice girl you’re marrying, too,” you said.

“Oh, do you know her, sir?” said Pym.

“Just good reports,” you said complacently.

Then off you went, confident you had scattered a pinch more stardust in Pym’s eyes. Which you had, Jack. You had. Except that what goes up with Pym has a way of coming down, and it annoyed him to discover that his impending marriage had received the Firm’s approval while it still awaited his.

“So what

exactly

are you doing for a living, old boy? Don’t quite understand,” Belinda’s father asked, not for the first time, during a discussion about whom to invite.

“It’s a government-sponsored language lab, sir,” said Pym, in accordance with the Firm’s sketchy guidelines on cover. “We work out exchanges of academics from various countries and arrange courses for them.”

“Sounds more like the Secret Service to me,” said Belinda’s father, with that queer cracked laugh of his that always seemed to know too much.

To his future spouse, on the other hand, Pym told everything he knew about his work, and more. He showed her how he could break her windpipe with a single blow, and put her eyes out with two fingers easily. And how she could smash the small bones in someone’s foot if they were annoying her under the table. He told her everything that made him a secret hero of England, seeing the world right single-handed.

“So how many people have you killed?” Belinda asked him grimly, discounting those that he had merely maimed.

“I’m not allowed to say,” said Pym, and with a crisping of the jaw stared away from her towards the stark wastelands of his duty.

“Well don’t then,” Belinda said. “And don’t tell Daddy

anything,

or he’ll tell Mummy.”

“Dear Jemima”—Pym wrote on an off chance, a week before his great day—

“It seems so odd we are both getting married within a month of each other. I keep wondering whether we are doing the right thing. I’m sick of the boring work I’m doing, and considering a change. I love you. Magnus.”

Pym waited eagerly for the mail and scanned the moors around the training camp for a sight of her Land Rover as she dashed over the horizon to save him. But nothing came, and by the eve of his wedding he was left with himself again, walking the night streets of London, and pretending they reminded him of Karlovy Vary.

And what a husband he was, Tom! What a match was celebrated! Priests of upper-class humility, the great church famed for its permanence and previous successes, the frugal reception in a tomblike Bayswater hotel, and there at the centre of the throng, our Prince Charming himself, chatting brilliantly to the crowned heads of suburbia. Pym forgot no one’s name, was fluent and informative on the subject of government-sponsored language laboratories, vouchsafed Belinda long and tender glances. All this, at least, until somebody switched off the soundtrack, Pym’s included, and the faces of his audience turned mysteriously away from him, looking for the cause of breakdown. Suddenly the interconnecting doors at the far end of the room, until now locked, were flung open by unseen hands. And Pym knew in his toes at once, just by the timing and the pause, and by the way people parted before the empty space, that somebody had rubbed the lamp. Two waiters entered with the grace of well-tipped men, bearing trays of uncorked bubbly and chargers of smoked salmon, though Belinda’s mother had not ordered smoked salmon, and had decreed that no champagne be served before the toast to the bride and groom. After that it was the Gulworth election all over again, because first Mr. Muspole appeared, followed by a thin man with a razor slash, and each commandeered a door-post as Rick swept between them in full Ascot rig, leaning backwards and holding his arms wide, and smiling everywhere at once. “Hullo, old son! Don’t you recognise your old pal? Have this one on me, boys! Where’s that bride of his? By Jove, son, she’s a beauty! Come here, my dear. Give your old father-in-law a kiss! My God, there’s some flesh here, son. Where have you been hiding her all these years?”

One on each arm, Rick marched the nuptial pair to the hotel forecourt, where a brand-new Jaguar car, painted Liberal yellow, stood parked in everybody’s way, with white wedding ribbons tied to the bonnet, and a mile-high bunch of Harrods gardenias crammed into the passenger seat, and Mr. Cudlove at the wheel with a carnation in his mulberry buttonhole.

“Seen one of those before then, son? Know what it is? It’s your old man’s gift to both of you and nobody will ever take it away from you as long as I’m spared. Cuddie’s going to drive you wherever you want to go and leave it with you, aren’t you, Cuddie?”

“I wish you both all good fortune in your chosen walk of life, sir,” Mr. Cudlove said, his loyal eyes filling with tears.

Of Rick’s long speech, I remember only that it was beautiful and modest, and free of all hyperbole, and rested upon the theme that when two young people love each other, us old ’uns who have had our day should stand aside, because if anyone has deserved it, they have.

Pym never saw the car again, and it was a long while before he saw Rick either, because when they went back outside Mr. Cudlove and the yellow Jaguar had vanished, and two very obvious plainclothes police detectives were talking in low tones to the confused hotel manager. But I have to tell you, Tom, that it was the best of our wedding presents, barring perhaps the posy of red poppies, thrust into Pym’s arms, without a card of explanation, by a man in a Polish-looking Burberry raincoat as Pym and Belinda rode into the sunset for a week at Eastbourne.

“Put him into the field while he’s unsullied,” says Personnel, who has a way of speaking about people as if they weren’t seated across the desk from him.

Pym is trained. Pym is complete. Pym is armed and ready and only one question remains. What mantle shall he wear? What disguise shall cover the secret frame of his maturity? In a series of unconsummated interviews reminiscent of the Oxford Appointments Board, Personnel unlocks a bedlam of possibilities. Pym will be a freelance writer. But can he write and will Fleet Street have him? With disarming openness Pym is marched through the offices of most of our great national newspapers, whose editors inanely pretend they do not know where he has come from, or why, though henceforth they will know him for ever as a creature of the Firm, and he them. He is already halfway to stardom with the

Telegraph

when a Fifth Floor genius has a better plan: “Look here, how would you like to join up with the Corns again, trade on your old allegiances, get yourself a billet in the international left wing set? We’ve always wanted to chuck a stone into that pond.”

“It sounds fascinating,” says Pym as he sees himself selling

Marxism Today

on street corners for the rest of his life.

A more ambitious plan is to get him into Parliament where he can keep an eye on some of these fellow-travelling M.P.s: “Any particular preference as to party, or aren’t we fussy?” asks Personnel, still in tweeds from his weekend in Wiltshire.

“I’d rather prefer it not to be the Liberals if it’s all the same to you,” says Pym.

But nothing lasts long in politics and a week later Pym is destined for one of the private banks whose directors wander in and out of the Firm’s Head Office all day long, moaning about Russian gold and the need to protect our trade routes from the Bolsheviks. At the Institute of Directors, Pym is lunched by a succession of captains of finance who think they may have an opening.

“I knew a Pym,” says one, over a second brandy or a third. “Kept a dirty great office in Mount Street somewhere. Best man at his job I ever knew.”

“What was his job, sir?” Pym asks politely.

“Con man,” says his host with a horsy laugh. “Any relation?”

“Must be my distant wicked uncle,” says Pym, laughing also, and hurries back to the sanctuary of the Firm.

On goes the dance, how seriously I’ll never know, for Pym is not yet privy to these backstage deliberations, though it isn’t for want of peeking into a few desk drawers and locked steel cupboards. Then suddenly the mood changes.

“Look here,” says Personnel, trying to hide his aggravation. “Why the devil didn’t you remind us you spoke Czech?”

Within a month, Pym is attached to an electrical-engineering company in Gloucester as a management trainee, no previous experience necessary. The managing director, to his lasting regret, was at school with the Firm’s reigning Chief, and has made the mistake of accepting a series of valuable government contracts at a time when he needed them. Pym is given to the exports department, charged with opening up the East European market. His first mission is nearly his last.

“Well, why don’t you just sort of take a general swing through Czecho and test the market?” says Pym’s notional employer wanly. And beneath his breath: “And do

please

remember that whatever else you get up to is

nothing

to do with

us,

will you?”

“A quick in and out,” Pym’s controller tells him gaily, in the safe house in Camberwell where cub agents receive their operational briefing before cutting their milk-teeth. He hands Pym a portable typewriter with hidden cavities in the carriage.

“I know it seems silly,” says Pym, “but I can’t actually type.”

“Everyone can type a

bit,”

says Pym’s controller. “Practise over the weekend.”

Pym flies to Vienna. Memories, memories. Pym hires a car. Pym crosses the border without the smallest difficulty, expecting to see Axel waiting for him the other side.

The countryside was Austrian and beautiful. Many barns lay beside many lakes. In Plzeň Pym toured a despondent factory in the company of square-faced men. In the evening he kept the safety of his hotel, watched by a pair of secret policemen who drank one coffee apiece until he went to bed. His next calls were in the north. On the road to Ústí he saw army lorries and memorised their unit insignia. To the east of Ústí lay a factory that the Firm suspected of producing isotope containers. Pym was unclear what an isotope was, or what it should be contained in, but he drew a sketch of the main buildings and hid it in his typewriter. Next day he continued to Prague and at the arranged hour sat himself in the famous Tyn church, which has a window looking into Kafka’s old apartment. Tourists and officials wandered about unsmiling.

“So K. began to move off slowly,”

Pym read as he sat in the south aisle, third row from the altar, pretending to study his guidebook.

“K. felt forlorn and isolated as he advanced between the rows of empty pews, with the priest’s eyes fixed on him for all he knew. . . .”

Needing a rest, Pym knelt down and prayed. With a grunt and a puff, a heavy man shuffled in beside him and sat down. Pym smelt garlic and thought of Sergeant Pavel. Through a crack in his fingers, he identified the recognition signals: smear of white paint on left fingernail, splash of blue on left cuff, a mass of disgraceful black hair, black coat. My contact is an artist, he realised. Why didn’t I think of that before? But Pym did not sit back, he did not ease the little package from his pocket as a prelude to laying it between them on the pew. He remained kneeling and soon discovered why he had done so. The sound of trained feet was crunching towards him down the aisle. The footsteps stopped. A male voice said, “Come with us, please,” in Czech. With a sigh of resignation, Pym’s neighbour clambered wearily to his feet and followed them out.

“Sheer coincidence,” Pym’s controller assured him, much amused, when he got back. “He’s already been on to us. They were pulling him in for a routine questioning. He comes up for one every six weeks. Never even crossed their minds he might be making a clandestine pickup. Let alone with a chap your age.”

“You don’t think he’s—well, told them?” Pym said.

“Old Kyril? Blown

you?

You must be joking. Don’t worry. We’ll give you another shot in a few weeks’ time.”

Rick was not pleased to hear of Pym’s contribution to the British export drive, and told him so on one of his secret visits from Ireland, where he had established his winter quarters while he cleared up certain misunderstandings with Scotland Yard, and fought his way into the crowded new profession of West End property evictions.

“Working as a commercial traveller—my own boy?” he exclaimed, to the alarm of the adjoining tables. “Selling electric shavers to a bunch of foreign Communists? We

did

all that, son. It’s over. What did I pay your education for? Where’s your patriotism?”

“They’re not electric shavers, Father. I sell alternators, oscillators and sparking plugs. How’s your glass?”

Hostility towards Rick was a new and giddying notion for Pym. He vented it cautiously, but with growing excitement. If they ate a meal, he insisted on paying in order to savour Rick’s disapproval at seeing his own boy put down good money where a signature would have done the trick.

“You’re not mixed up with some racket out there, are you?” said Rick. “The doors of tolerance only open a certain distance, you know, son. Even for you. What are you up to? Tell us.”

The pressure on Pym’s arm was suddenly dangerous. He made a joke of it, smiling broadly. “Hey, Father, that hurts,” he said, awfully amused. It was Rick’s thumbnail that he was most aware of, boring into an artery. “Could you possibly stop doing that, Father?” he said. “It really is uncomfortable.” Rick was too busy pursing his lips and shaking his head. He was saying it was a damned shame when a father who had given up everything for his own son was treated like a “poor ayah.” He meant pariah but the notion had never properly formed in him. Placing his elbow on the table, Pym relaxed his whole arm and let it ride about with Rick’s pressure—flop one way, flop the other. Then abruptly stiffened it and, exactly as he had been taught, smacked the fat of Rick’s knuckles on to the table-edge, causing the glasses to jump and the cutlery to dance and slide off the table. Taking back his bruised hand, Rick turned away to bestow a resigned smile on his subjects feasting around him. Then with his good hand he lightly pinged the edge of his Drambuie glass to indicate that he required another nice touch. Just as, by unlacing his shoes, he used to let it be known that somebody should fetch his bedroom slippers. Or by rolling on to his back, after a lengthy banquet, and spreading his knees, he declared a carnal appetite.

Yet, as ever, nothing is one thing for long with Pym, and soon a strange calm begins to replace his early nervousness as he continues his secret missions. The silent, unlit country that at first sight appeared so threatening to him becomes a secret womb where he can hide himself, rather than a place of dread. He has only to cross the border for the walls of his English prisons to fall away: no Belinda, no Rick—and very nearly no Firm either. I am the travelling executive of an electronic company. I am Sir Magnus, roving free. His solitary nights in unpeopled provincial towns, where at first the yapping of a dog had been enough to bring him sweating to his window, now inspire him with a sense of protection. The air of universal oppression that hangs over the entire country enfolds him in its mysterious embrace. Not even the prison walls of his public school had given him such a sense of security. On car and train rides through river valleys, over hills capped by Bohemian castles, he drifts through realms of such inner contentment that the very cattle seem to be his friends. I shall settle here, he decides. This is my true home. How foolish of me to have supposed that Axel could ever leave it for another! He begins to relish his stilted conversations with officials. His heart leaps when he unlocks a smile from their faces. He takes pride in his slowly filling order book, feels a fatherly responsibility for his oppressors. Even his operational detours, when he is not blocking them from his mind, can be squeezed beneath the broad umbrella of his munificence: “I am a champion of the middle ground,” he tells himself, using an old phrase of Axel’s, as he prises a loose stone from a wall, fishes out one package and replaces it with another. “I am giving succour to a wounded land.”

Yet even with all this preliminary self-conditioning, it takes another six journeys on Pym’s part before he can coax Axel out of the shadows of his perilous existence.

“Mr. Canterbury! Are you all right, Mr. Canterbury? Answer!”

“Of course I’m all right, Miss D. I’m always all right. What is it?”

Pym pulled back the door. Miss Dubber was standing in the darkness, her hair in papers, holding Toby for protection.

“You thump so, Mr. Canterbury. You grind your teeth. An hour ago you were humming. We’re worried that you’re ill.”

“Who’s

we?”

said Pym sharply.

“Toby and me, you silly man. Do you think I’ve got a lover?”

Pym closed the door on her and went swiftly to the window. One parked van, probably green. One parked car, white or grey, Devon registration. An early milkman he had not seen before. He returned to the door, put his ear to it and listened intently. A creak. A slippered footstep. He pulled the door open. Miss Dubber was halfway down the corridor.

“Miss D?”

“Yes, Mr. Canterbury?”

“Has anybody been asking you questions about me?”

“Why should they, Mr. Canterbury?”

“I don’t know. Sometimes people just do. Have they?”

“It’s time you slept, Mr. Canterbury. I don’t mind how much the country needs you, it can always wait another day.”

The town of Strakonice is more famous for its manufacture of motorcycles and Oriental fezzes than for any great cultural gem. Pym made his way there because he had filled a dead letter box in Pisek, nineteen kilometres to the north-east, and Firm tradecraft required he should not register his presence in a target town where a dead letter box was waiting to be cleared. So he drove to Strakonice feeling flat and bored, which was how he always felt after a bit of Firm’s business, and booked himself into an ancient hotel with a grand staircase, then drifted round the town trying to admire the old butchers’ shops on the south side of the square, and the Renaissance church which, according to his guidebook, had been changed to baroque; and the church of St. Wenceslaus which, though originally Gothic, had been altered in the nineteenth century. Having exhausted these excitements, and feeling even wearier from the long heat of the summer’s day, he trudged up the stairs to his bedroom thinking how pleasant it would be if they were leading him to Sabina’s apartment in Graz, in the days when he had been a penniless young double agent without a care in the world.

He put his key in the keyhole but it was not locked. He was not unduly surprised by this for it was still the evening hour when servants turned back bedcovers, and secret policemen took a last look round. Pym stepped inside and discerned, half hidden behind a sloping shaft of sunlight from the window, the figure of Axel, waiting as the old wait, his domed head propped against the chair’s back, pitched a little sideways so that he could make out, among the lights and shades, who was coming in. And not in all the Firm’s unarmed combat lessons, and dagger-play lessons, and close-contact shooting lessons, had anybody thought to teach Pym how to terminate the life of an emaciated friend seated behind a sunbeam.

Axel was prison-pale and a stone lighter. Pym could not have supposed, from his parting memory of him, that he had more flesh to give. But the purgers and interrogators and gaolers had managed to find it, as they usually do, and they had helped themselves to it in handfuls. They had taken it from his face, his wrists, his finger-joints and ankles. They had drained the last blood from his cheeks. They had also helped themselves to one of his teeth, though Pym did not discover this immediately, because Axel had his lips tight shut, and one twiglike forefinger raised to them in warning while he waved the other at the wall of Pym’s hotel bedroom, indicating microphones at work. They had smashed his right eyelid too, which drooped over its parent eye like a cocked hat, adding to his piratical appearance. But his coat, for all that, still hung over his shoulders like a musketeer’s cape, his moustache flourished, and he had inherited a marvellous pair of boots from somewhere, rich as timber, with soles like the running-boards of a vintage car.

“Magnus Richard Pym?” he demanded with theatrical gruffness.

“Yes?” said Pym after a couple of unsuccessful attempts to speak.

“You are charged with the crimes of espionage, provocation of the people, incitement to treason and murder. Also sabotage on behalf of an imperialist power.”

Still slouched languidly in his chair, Axel drove his hands together with improbable vigour, producing a thwack that echoed round the great bedroom, and no doubt impressed the microphones. After it, he offered the prolonged grunt of a man coming to terms with a heavy punch in the stomach. Delving in his jacket pocket, he then detached a small automatic pistol from the lining and, finger to his lips again, waved it about so that Pym got a healthy sight of it.

“Face the wall!” he barked, clambering with difficulty to his feet. “Place your hands on your head, you Fascist swine! March.”

Laying a hand gently round Pym’s shoulder, Axel guided him towards the door. Pym stepped ahead of him into the gloomy corridor. Two burly men in hats ignored him.

“Search his room!” Axel commanded them. “Find what you can but do not remove anything! Pay attention to the typewriter, his shoes and the lining of his suitcase. Do not leave his room until you receive orders from me personally. Walk slowly down the stairs,” he told Pym, prodding him in the small of the back with the gun.

“This is an outrage,” Pym said lamely. “I demand to see a British consul immediately.”

At the reception desk the female concierge sat knitting like a hag at the guillotine. Axel prodded Pym past her to a waiting car outside. A yellow cat had taken shelter underneath it. Pulling open the passenger door, Axel nodded Pym to get in and, having shooed the cat into the gutter, climbed in after him and started the engine.

“If you collaborate completely you will not be harmed,” Axel announced in his official voice, indicating a patch of crude perforations in the dashboard. “If you attempt to escape you will be shot.”

“This is a ridiculous and scandalous act,” Pym muttered. “My government will insist that those responsible be punished.”

But once again, his words had none of the confident ring they had possessed in the cosy barrack hut in Argyll where he and his colleagues had practised the skills of resisting interrogation.

“You have been watched from the moment you arrived here,” said Axel loudly. “All your movements and contacts have been observed by the protectors of the people. You have no alternative but to make an immediate admission of your guilt on all charges.”

“The free world will see this senseless act as the latest evidence of the brutality of the Czech régime,” Pym declared, with increasing strength. Axel nodded approvingly.

The streets were empty, the old houses also. They entered what had once been a rich suburb of patrician villas. Sprawling hedges hid the lower windows. The iron gateways, wide enough to ride a coach through, were blocked with ivy and barbed wire.

“Get out,” Axel commanded.

The evening was young and beautiful. The full moon shed a white, unearthly light. Watching Axel lock the car, Pym smelt hay and heard the clamour of insects. Axel guided him down a narrow path between two gardens until they came to a gap in the yew hedge to his right. Grabbing Pym’s wrist, he led him through it. They were standing on the terrace of what had once been a great garden. A many-towered castle lifted into the sky behind them. Ahead, almost lost to a thicket of roses, stood a decrepit summerhouse. Axel wrestled with the door but it refused to yield.

“Kick it for me, Sir Magnus,” he said. “This is Czechoslovakia.”

Pym drove his foot against the panel. The door gave, they stepped inside. On a rusted table stood the familiar bottle of vodka and a tray of bread and gherkins. Grey stuffing was bleeding from the ripped covers of the wicker chairs.

“You are a very dangerous friend, Sir Magnus,” Axel complained as he stretched out his thin legs and surveyed his fine boots. “Why in God’s name couldn’t you have used an alias? Sometimes I think you have been put on earth in order to be my black angel.”

“They said I would be better being me,” Pym replied stupidly as Axel twisted the cap from the vodka bottle. “They call it natural cover.”

For a long time after that, Axel appeared unable to think of anything useful to say at all, and Pym did not feel it was his place to interrupt his captor’s reverie. They were sitting legs parallel and shoulder to shoulder like a retired couple on the beach. Below them, squares of cornfield stretched towards a forest. A heap of broken cars, more than Pym had ever seen on the Czech roads, littered the lower end of the garden. Bats wheeled decorously in the moonlight.

“Do you know this was my aunt’s house?” said Axel.

“Well, no, I didn’t, actually,” said Pym.

“Well, it was. My aunt was a witty woman. She once described to me how she broke the news to her father that she wished to marry my uncle. ‘But why do you want to marry him?’ said her father. ‘He has no money. He is very small and you are small too. You will have small children. He is like the encyclopedias you make me buy you every year. They look pretty but once you have opened them and seen inside, you don’t bother with them any more.’ He was wrong. Their children were large and she was happy.” He scarcely paused. “They want me to blackmail you, Sir Magnus. That is the only good news I have for you.”

“Who do?” said Pym.

“The aristos I work for. They think I should show you the photographs of the two of us coming out of the barn together in Austria, and play you the recordings of our conversations. They say I should wave the I.O.U. in your face that you signed to me for the two hundred dollars we tricked out of Membury for your father.”

“How did you answer them?” said Pym.

“I said I would. They don’t read Thomas Mann, these guys. They’re very crude. This is a crude country, as you no doubt noticed in your journeys.”

“Not at all,” said Pym. “I love it.”

Axel drank some vodka and stared into the hills. “And you people don’t make it any better. Your hateful little department has been seriously interfering in the running of my country. What are you? Some kind of American butler? What are you doing, framing our officials, sowing suspicion, and seducing our intellectuals? Why do you cause people to be beaten unnecessarily, when a few years in prison would be enough? Do they teach you no reality over there? Have you no reality at all, Sir Magnus?”

“I didn’t know the Firm was doing that,” said Pym.

“Doing what?”

“Interfering. Causing people to be tortured. That must be a different section. Ours is just a sort of postal service for small agents.”

Axel sighed. “Maybe they’re not doing it. Maybe I have been brainwashed by our own stupid propaganda these days. Maybe I’m blaming you unfairly. Cheers.”

“Cheers,” said Pym.

“So what will they find in your room?” Axel asked when he had lit himself a cigar and puffed at it several times.

“Pretty well everything, I suppose.”

“What’s everything?”

“Secret inks. Film.”

“Film from your agents?”

“Yes.”

“Developed?”

“I assume not.”

“From the dead letter box in Pisek?”

“Yes.”

“Then I wouldn’t bother to develop it. It’s cheap pedlar material. Money?”

“A bit, yes.”

“How much?”

“Five thousand dollars.”

“Codebooks?”

“A couple.”

“Anything I might have forgotten? No atom bomb?”

“There’s a concealed camera.”

“Is that the talcum-powder tin?”

“If you peel the paper off the lid, it makes a lens.”

“Anything else?”

“A silk escape map. In one of my neckties.”

Axel drew on his cigar again, his thoughts seemingly far away. Suddenly he drove his fist on to the iron table. “We have got to get ourselves

out

of this, Sir Magnus!” he exclaimed angrily. “We have got to get ourselves

out.

We’ve got to rise in the world. We’ve got to help each other until we become aristos ourselves and we can kick the other bastards goodbye.” He stared into the gathering darkness. “You make it so difficult for me, you know that? Sitting in that prison, I had bad thoughts about you. You make it very, very difficult to be your friend.”

“I don’t see why.”

“Oh, oh! He doesn’t see why! He does not see that when the bold Sir Magnus Pym applies for a business visa, even the poor Czechs can look in their card index and discover there was a gentleman of the same name who was a Fascist imperialist militarist spy in Austria, and that a certain running dog named Axel was his fellow conspirator.” His anger reminded Pym of the days of his fever in Bern. His voice had acquired the same unpleasant edge. “Are you really so ignorant of the manners of the country you are spying on that you do not understand what it means these days for a man like me even to have been in the same continent as a man like you, let alone his fellow conspirator in a spying game? Do you really not know that in this world of whisperers and accusers, I may literally die of you? You’ve read George Orwell, haven’t you? These are the people who can rewrite yesterday’s weather!”

“I know,” said Pym.

“Do you also know then, that I may be fatally contaminated like all those poor agents and informers you are showering with money and instructions? Do you not know that you are delivering them to the scaffold, unless they belong to us already? You know at least what they will do with you, I assume, unless I make them hear me, these aristos of mine, if we can’t satisfy their appetites by other means? They mean to arrest you and parade you before the world’s press with your stupid agents and associates. They plan to have another show trial, hang some people. When they start to do that, it will be sheer oversight if they don’t hang me too. Axel, the imperialist lackey who spied for you in Austria! Axel, the revanchist Titoist Trotskyist typist who was your accomplice in Bern! They would prefer an American but in the meantime they will stretch a point and hang an Englishman until they can get hold of the real thing.” He flopped back, his fury exhausted. “We’ve got to get

out

of this, Sir Magnus,” he repeated. “We’ve got to rise, rise,

rise.

I am sick of bad superiors, bad food, bad prisons and bad torturers.” He drew angrily on his cigar again. “It’s time I looked after your career and you looked after mine. And this time properly. No bourgeois shrinking back from the big scoops. This time we are professionals, we make straight for the biggest diamonds, the biggest banks. I mean it.”

Suddenly, Axel turned his chair until it was facing Pym, then sat on it again and laughed, and tapped Pym smartly on the shoulder with the back of his hand to cheer him up.

“You got the flowers okay, Sir Magnus?”

“They were super. Someone handed them into our cab as we were leaving the reception.”

“Did Belinda like them?”

“Belinda doesn’t know about you. I never told her.”

“Who did you say the flowers were from?”

“I said I’d no idea. Probably for another wedding altogether.”

“That was good. What’s she like?”

“Super. We were childhood sweethearts together.”

“I thought Jemima was your childhood sweetheart.”

“Well, Belinda was too.”

“At the same time—both of them? That’s quite a childhood you had,” Axel said with a fresh laugh as he refilled Pym’s glass.

Pym managed to laugh too, and they drank together.

Then Axel began speaking, kindly and gently without irony or bitterness, and it seems to me that he spoke for about thirty years because his words are as loud in my ear now as they ever were in Pym’s then, never mind the din of the cicadas and the cheeping of the bats.

“Sir Magnus, you have in the past betrayed me but, more important, you have betrayed yourself. Even when you are telling the truth, you lie. You have loyalty and you have affection. But to what? To whom? I don’t know all the reasons for this. Your great father. Your aristocratic mother. One day maybe you will tell me. And maybe you have put your love in some bad places now and then.” He leaned forward and there was a kindly, true affection in his face and a warm long-suffering smile in his eyes. “Yet you also have morality. You search. What I am saying is, Sir Magnus: for once nature has produced a perfect match. You are a perfect spy. All you need is a cause. I have it. I know that our revolution is young and that sometimes the wrong people are running it. In the pursuit of peace we are making too much war. In the pursuit of freedom we are building too many prisons. But in the long run I don’t mind. Because I know this. All the junk that made you what you are: the privileges, the snobbery, the hypocrisy, the churches, the schools, the fathers, the class systems, the historical lies, the little lords of the countryside, the little lords of big business, and all the greedy wars that result from them, we are sweeping that away for ever. For your sake. Because we are making a society that will never produce such sad little fellows as Sir Magnus.” He held out his hand. “So. I’ve said it. You are a good man and I love you.”

And I remember that touch always. I can see it any time by looking into my own palm: dry and decent and forgiving. And the laughter: from the heart as it always was, once he had ceased to be tactical and become my friend again.

16

H

ow appropriate, Tom, that looking back over all the years that follow our meeting in the Czech summerhouse, I see nothing but America, America, her golden shores glittering on the horizon like the promise of freedom after the repressions of our troubled Europe, then leaping towards us in the summer joy of our attainment! Pym still has more than a quarter of a century in which to serve his two houses according to the best standards of his omnivorous loyalty. The trained, married, case-hardened, elderly adolescent has still to become a man, though who will ever break the genetic code of when a middle-class Englishman’s adolescence ends and his manhood takes over? Half a dozen dangerous European cities, from Prague to Berlin to Stockholm to the occupied capital of his native England, lie between the two friends and their goal. Yet it seems to me now they were no more than staging places where we could provision and refurbish and watch the stars in preparation for our journey. And consider for a moment the dreadful alternative, Tom: the fear of failure that blew like a Siberian wind on our unprotected backs. Consider what it would have meant, to two men such as ourselves, to have lived out our lives as spies without ever having spied on America!

It must be said quickly, lest there is any doubt of it left in your mind, that after the summerhouse, Pym’s path was set for life. He had renewed his vow and in the terms your Uncle Jack and I have always lived by, Tom, there was no way out. Pym was owned and hooked and pledged. Finish. After the barn in Austria, well, yes, there had been a little latitude still, though never any prospect of redemption. And you have seen how, if feebly, he did try to jump clear of the secret world and brave the hazards of the real one. Not with any conviction, true. But he made a stab at it, even if he knew he would be about as much use out there as a beached fish dying of too much oxygen. But after the summerhouse, God’s brief to Pym was clear: no more dithering; stay put in your proper station, in the element to which nature has appointed you. Pym needed no third telling.

“Make a clean breast of it,” I hear you cry, Tom. “Hurry home to London, go to Personnel, pay the penalty, begin again!” Well now, Pym thought of that, naturally he did. On the drive back to Vienna, on the aeroplane home, on the bus to London from Heathrow, Pym did a lot of energetic agonising along those lines, for it was one of the occasions when the whole of his life was pinned up in a vivid strip cartoon inside his skull. Begin where? he asked himself, not unreasonably. With Lippsie, whose death, in his gloomier hours, he was still determined to take upon himself? With Sefton Boyd’s initials? With poor Dorothy whom he had driven off her head? With Peggy Wentworth, screaming her dirt at him, another victim for sure? Or with the day he first picked the locks of Rick’s green cabinet or Membury’s desk? How many of the systems of his life exactly are you proposing that he bare to the guilt-bestowing gaze of his admirers?

“Then resign! Bolt to Murgo! Take the teaching job at Willow’s.” Pym thought of that too. He thought of half a dozen dark holes where he could bury his leftover life and hide his guilty charm. Not one of them attracted him for five minutes.

Would Axel’s people really have exposed Pym if he had cut and run? I doubt it, but that isn’t the point. The point is, Pym quite frequently loved the Firm as much as he loved Axel. He adored its rough, uncomprehending trust in him, its misuse of him, its tweedy bear-hugs, flawed romanticism and cock-eyed integrity. He smiled to himself each time he stepped inside its Reichskanzleis and safe palaces, accepted the unsmiling salute of its vigilant janitors. The Firm was home and school and court to him, even when he was betraying it. He really felt he had a lot to give it, just as he had a lot to give to Axel. In his imagination, he saw himself with cellars full of nylons and black-market chocolate, enough to see everybody right in every shortage—and intelligence is nothing if not an institutionalised black market in perishable commodities. And this time Pym himself was the hero of the fable. No Membury stood between himself and the fraternity.

“Suppose that on a lonely drive to Plzeň, Sir Magnus, you stopped your car to give a lift to a couple of workmen on their way to work. You would do that?” Axel had suggested, in the small hours of the morning in the summerhouse, when he had put Pym back together again.

Pym conceded that he might.

“And suppose, Sir Magnus, that as simple fellows will, they had confided to you, as you drove along, their fears about handling radioactive material without sufficient protective clothing. You would prick up your ears?”

Pym laughed and agreed that he would.

“And suppose also that as a great operator and a generous spirit, Sir Magnus, you had written down their names and addresses and promised to bring them a pound or two of good English coffee next time you visited their region?”

Pym said he would certainly have done this.

“And suppose,” Axel continued, “that having driven these fellows to the outer perimeter of the protected area where they work, you had the courage, and the initiative, and the officer qualities—as you assuredly have—to park your car in a discreet spot and climb this hill.” Axel was indicating the very hill on a military map he happened to have brought along with him and spread over the iron table. “And from its apex you photographed the factory, using the convenient protection of a thicket of lime trees whose lower branches are later discovered to have slightly marked the pictures? Your aristos would admire your enterprise? They would applaud the great Sir Magnus? They would instruct him to recruit the two loquacious workmen and obtain further details of the factory’s output and purpose?”

“They surely would,” said Pym vigorously.

“Congratulations, Sir Magnus.”

Axel drops the very film into Pym’s waiting palm. The Firm’s own issue. Wrapped in anonymous green. Pym secretes it in his typewriter. Pym hands it to his masters. The wonder does not stop there. When the product is rushed to the Whitehall analysts, the factory turns out to be the very plant recently photographed from the air by an American overflight! With a show of reluctance, Pym supplies the personal particulars of his two innocent and, thus far, fictitious informants. The names are filed, carded, checked, processed and bandied round the senior officers’ bar. Until finally, under the divine laws of bureaucracy, they are the subject of a special committee.

“Look here, young Pym, what makes you think these chaps aren’t going to turn you in next time you show up on their doorstep?”

But Pym is in interview mode, he has a large audience and is invincible: “It’s a hunch, sir, that’s all.” Count two slowly. “I think they trusted me. I think they’re keeping their mouths shut and hoping I’ll show up one evening exactly as I said I would.”

And events prove him right, as they would, wouldn’t they, Jack? Braving all, our hero returns to Czecho and repairs, regardless of risk, to their very doorsteps—how can he fail to, since he is escorted there by Axel, who makes the introductions? For this time there will be no Sergeant Pavels. A loyal, bright-eyed repertory company of actors has been born, Axel is its producer and these are its founder-members. Painfully and dangerously, the network is built upon. By Pym, a cool number if ever we knew one. Pym, the latest hero of the corridors, the chap who put Conger together.

The Firm’s system of natural selection, accelerated by Jack Brotherhood’s promptings, can no longer be resisted.

“Joined the

Foreign Office?”

Belinda’s father echoes, in heavy, artificial mystification. “Posted it to

Prague?

How do you do

that

from a dead-beat electronics firm? Well, well, I must say.”

“It’s a contract appointment. They need Czech speakers,” says Pym.

“He’s boosting British trade, Daddy. You wouldn’t understand. You’re just a stockbroker,” says Belinda.

“Well they might at least give him a decent cover story, mightn’t they?” says Belinda’s father, laughing his infuriating laugh.

In the Firm’s newest and most secret safe flat in Prague, Pym and Axel drink to Pym’s instatement as Second Secretary Commercial and Visa Officer at the British Embassy. Axel has fattened, Pym observes with pleasure. The lines of suffering are clearing from his haggard features.

“To the land of the free, Sir Magnus.”

“To America,” says Pym.

“My dearest Father,

“I am so glad you approve of my appointment. Unfortunately, I am not yet in a position to persuade Pandit Nehru to grant you an audience so that you can put your football pool scheme to him, though I can well imagine the boost it might give to the struggling Indian economy.”

So were there no genuine Joes at all? I hear you asking, Tom, in a tone of disappointment. Were they

all

pretend? Indeed there were genuine Joes. Never fear! And very good they were too, the best. And every one of them profited from Pym’s improved tradecraft, and looked up to Pym as he looked up to Axel. And Pym and Axel looked up to the genuine Joes also, in their fashion, regarding them as the unwitting ambassadors of the operation, testifying to its smooth running and integrity. And used their good offices to shield and advance them, arguing that every improvement in their circumstances brought glory to the networks. And smuggled them to Austria for clandestine training and rehabilitation. The genuine Joes were our mascots, Tom. Our stars. We made sure they would never want for anything again, so long as Pym and Axel were there to see them right. Which, as a matter of fact, is how it all went wrong. But later.

I wish I could adequately describe to you, Jack, the pleasure of being really well run. Of jealousy, of ideology, nothing. Axel was as keen for Pym to love England as he was to direct him at America, and it was part of his genius throughout our partnership to praise the freedoms of the West while tacitly implying that Pym had it within his reach, if not his duty as a free man, to bring some of this freedom to the East. Oh, you may laugh, Jack! And you may shake your grey hairs at the depths of Pym’s innocence! But can you not imagine how easily it came to Pym to take a tiny, impoverished country into his protection, when his own was so favoured, so victorious and wellborn? And, from where he saw it, so absurd? To love poor Czecho like a rich protector through all her terrible vicissitudes, for Axel’s sake? To forgive her lapses in advance? And blame them on the many betrayals that his parent England had perpetrated against her? Does it honestly amaze you that Pym, by making bonds with the forbidden, should be once more escaping from what held him? That he who had loved his way across so many borders should now be loving his way across another, with Axel there to show him how to walk and where to cross?

“I’m sorry, Bel,” Pym would say to Belinda as he abandoned her yet again to the Scrabble board in their dark apartment in Prague’s diplomatic ghetto. “Got to go up country. May be a day or two. Come on, Bel. Kiss-kiss. You wouldn’t rather be married to a nine-till-five man, would you?”

“I can’t find

The Times,”

she said, shaking him aside. “I suppose you left it at the bloody Embassy again.”

But however frayed Pym’s nerves when he arrived at the rendezvous, Axel reclaimed him every time they met. He was never hasty, never importunate. He was never anything but respectful of the pains and sensibilities of his agent. It was not stasis one side and all movement the other either, Tom, far from it. Axel’s ambitions were for himself as well as Pym. Was not Pym his ricebowl, his fortune in all its meanings, his passport to the privileges and status of a paid-up Party aristo? Oh, how he studied Pym! Such obsessive, flattering concentration on a single man! How delicately he coaxed and gentled him! How meticulous he was, always to put on the clothes Pym needed him to wear—now the mantle of the wise and steady father Pym had never had, now the bloody rags of suffering that were the uniform of his authority, now the soutane of Pym’s one confessor, his Murgo absolute. He had to learn Pym’s codes and evasions. He had to read Pym faster than ever he could read himself. He had to scold and forgive him like the parents who would never slam the door in his face, laugh where Pym was melancholy and keep the flame of all Pym’s faiths alive when he was down and saying, I can’t, I’m lonely and afraid.

Above all, he had to keep his agent’s wits constantly alert against the seemingly limitless tolerance of the Firm, for how could we ever dare believe, either of us, that the dear, dead wood of England was not a cladding for some masterly game being played inside? Imagine the headaches Axel had, as Pym went on producing his mountains of intelligence material, to persuade his masters they were not the victims of some grand imperialist deception! The Czechs admired you so much, Jack. The old ones knew you from the war. They knew your skills and respected them. They knew the dangers, every day, of underestimating their wily adversary. Axel had to fight toe to toe with them, more than once. He had to argue with the very henchmen who had tortured him, in order to prevent them from pulling Pym out of the field and giving him a little of the medicine they periodically dished out to one another, on the off chance of extracting a true confession from him: “Yes, I am Brotherhood’s man!” they wanted him to scream. “Yes, I am here to plant disinformation on you. To distract your eye from our anti-Socialist operations. And yes, Axel is my accomplice. Take me, hang me, anything but this.” But Axel prevailed. He begged and bullied and slammed the table, and when still more purges were planned to explain the chaos left behind by the last ones, he scared his enemies into silence by threatening to expose them for their insufficient appreciation of the historically inevitable imperialist decay. And Pym helped him every inch of the distance. Sat again at his sickbed—if only metaphorically—gave him nourishment and courage, held up his spirits. Ransacked the Station files. Armed him with outrageous examples of the Firm’s incompetence worldwide. Until, fighting thus for their mutual survival, Pym and Axel drew still closer together, each laying the irrational burdens of his country at the other’s feet.

And once in a while, when a battle was over and won, or a great scoop had been achieved on one side or the other, Axel would put on the play clothes of the libertine and arrange a midnight dash to his frugal equivalent of St. Moritz, which was a small white castle in the Giant Mountains, set aside by his service for people they thought the world of. The first time they went there was for an anniversary celebration, in a limousine with blackened windows. Pym had been in Prague two years.

“I have decided to present you with an excellent new agent, Sir Magnus,” Axel announced as they zigzagged contentedly up the gravel road. “The Watchman network is lamentably short of industrial intelligence. The Americans are pledged to the collapse of our economy, but the Firm is providing nothing to support their optimism. How would you regard a middle executive from our great National Bank of Czechoslovakia, with access to some of our most serious mismanagements?”

“Where am I supposed to have found him?” Pym countered cautiously, for these were delicate decisions, requiring lengthy correspondence with Head Office before the approach to a new potential source was licensed.

The dinner table was laid for three, the candelabra lit. The two men had taken a long, slow walk in the forest and now they were drinking an apéritif before the fire, waiting for their guest.

“How is Belinda?” said Axel.

This was not a subject they often discussed, for Axel had little patience with unsatisfactory relationships.

“Fine, thank you, as always.”

“That’s not what our microphones tell us. They say you fight like two dogs day and night. Our listeners are becoming thoroughly depressed by you both.”

“Tell them we’ll mend our ways,” said Pym with a rare flash of bitterness.

A car was coming up the hill. They heard the footsteps of the old servant crossing the hall, and the rattle of bolts.

“Meet your new agent,” Axel said.

The door banged open and Sabina marched in. A little more matronly, perhaps, at the hips: one or two hard lines of officialdom around the jaw; but his delicious Sabina all the same. She was wearing a stern black dress with a white collar, and clumpy black court shoes that must have been her pride, for they had green brilliants on the straps and the sheen of imitation suède. Seeing Pym, she drew up sharply and scowled at him in suspicion. For a moment, her manner reflected the most radical disapproval. Then to his delight she burst out laughing her crazy Slav laugh, and ran to cover him with her body, much as she had done in Graz when he took his first faltering lessons in Czech.

And so it was, Jack. Sabina rose and rose until she became the head agent of the Watchman network, and the darling of her successive British case officers, though you knew her either as Watchman One or as the intrepid Olga Kravitsky, secretary to the Prague Internal Committee on Economic Affairs. We retired her, if you remember, when she was expecting her third baby by her fourth husband, at a special dinner for her in West Berlin while she was attending her last conference of Comecon bankers in Potsdam. Axel kept her on a little longer, before he decided to follow your example.

“I’ve been posted to Berlin,” Pym told Belinda, in the safety of a public park, at the end of his second tour in Prague.

“Why are you telling me?” said Belinda.

“I wondered whether you’d like to come,” Pym replied, and Belinda began coughing again, her long unquenchable cough that she must have picked up from the climate.

Belinda went back to London and took an Open University course in journalism, though none in silent killing. Eventually, in her thirty-seventh year, she launched herself upon the hazardous path of fashionable liberal causes, where after encountering several Pauls, she married one, and had an unruly daughter who criticised her for everything she did, which gave Belinda the feeling of being reconciled with her own parents. And Pym and Axel embarked on the next leg of their pilgrims’ voyage. In Berlin, a brighter future awaited them, and a maturer treason.

c/o Colonel Evelyn Tremaine, D.S.O.
Pioneer Corps, ret.
P.O. Box 9077
MANILA

To His Excellency Sir Magnus Richard Pym, Decorations The British High Mission

BERLIN

My dearest Son,

Merely a note which I hope does not Inconvenience you on your way to the Top, since none should expect gratitude until it is his turn to stand before the Father of us all which I expect to be doing at an early Date. Medical Science being still at a primitive Stage here, it appears notwithstanding that this Cruel summer is likely to be the writer’s Last, despite Sacrifice of alcohol and other Comforts. If you are Sending for Treatment or Funeral be sure to make out cheque and envelope to the Colonel, not Self, as the name of Pym is Persona non Gratis to the natives, and anyway may be Dead.

Praying to be Spared.

Rick T. Pym

P.S. Am advised that 916 Gold may be had in Berlin at knockdown price, the Diplomatic Bag being available to those in High Position seeking opportunity for informal Reward. Perce Loft is at old Address and will assist for ten percent but watch him.

Berlin. What a garrison of spies, Tom! What a cabinet full of useless, liquid secrets, what a playground for every alchemist, miracle-worker, and rat-piper that ever took up the cloak and turned his face from the unpalatable constraints of political reality! And always at the centre, the great good American heart, bravely drumming out its honourable rhythms in the name of liberty, democracy, and setting the people free.

In Berlin, the Firm had agents of influence, agents of disruption, subversion, sabotage and disinformation. We even had one or two who supplied us with intelligence, though these were an underprivileged crowd, kept on more out of a traditional regard than any intrinsic professional worth. We had tunnellers and smugglers, listeners and forgers, trainers and recruiters and talent-spotters and couriers and watchers and seducers, assassins and balloonists, lip-readers and disguise artists. But whatever the Brits had, the Americans had more, and whatever the Americans had, the East Germans had five of it and the Russians ten of it. Pym stood before these marvels like a child let loose in a sweet shop, not knowing what to grab first. And Axel, slipping in and out of the city on any number of false passports, padded softly behind him with his basket. In safe flats and dark restaurants, never the same one twice, we ate quiet meals, exchanged our goods and gazed upon each other with the incredulous contentment that passes between mountaineers when they are standing on the peak. But even then, we never forgot the bigger peak that lay ahead of us as we raised our vodka glasses to each other and whispered, “Next year in America!” across the candlelight.

And the committees, Tom! Berlin was not safe enough to contain them. We assembled in London, in gilded imperial chambers appropriate to players of the world’s game. And such a bold, diverse, brilliantly inventive cross-section of our society’s leaders we were, for these were the new years of England, when the country’s hidden talent would be winkled from its shell and harnessed to the nation’s service. Spies are blinkered! went the cry. Too incestuous. For Berlin we must open the doors to the real world of dons, barristers and journalists. We need bankers and trade unionists and industrialists, chaps who put their money where their mouths are and know what makes the world tick. We need Members of Parliament who can supply a whiff of the hustings and utter stern words about taxpayers’ money!

And what happened to these wise men, Tom, these shrewd no-nonsense outsiders, watchdogs of the secret war? They rushed in where even the spies might have feared to tread. Too long frustrated by the limitations of the overt world, these brilliant, unfettered minds fell overnight in love with every conspiracy, skulduggery and short cut you can imagine.

“Do you know what they’re dreaming up now?” Pym raged, pacing the carpet of the service flat in Lowndes Square which Axel had rented for the duration of an Anglo-American conference on unofficial action.

“Calm yourself, Sir Magnus. Have another drink.”

“Calm myself? When these lunatics are seriously proposing to plug themselves into the Soviet ground control, talk a MiG over American airspace, blow it out of the sky and, if the pilot by any chance survives, offer him the choice of being put on trial for espionage or staging a public defection in front of the microphones? That’s the defence editor of the

Guardian

newspaper speaking, for Christ’s sake! He’ll start a war. He wants to. It will give him something to report at last. He was backed by a nephew of the Archbishop of Canterbury and a deputy director general of the BBC.”

But Axel’s love of England would not be spoiled by Pym’s prissiness. Through the passenger window of a self-drive Ford from the Firm’s carpool, he gazed at Buckingham Palace and softly clapped his hands when he saw the royal pennant fluttering in its arclight.

“Go back to Berlin, Sir Magnus. One day it will be the Stars and Stripes.”

His Berlin apartment was in the centre of Unter den Linden, on the top floor of a sprawling Biedermeier house that had miraculously survived the bombing. His bedroom was on the garden side so he didn’t hear their car pull up, but he heard their spongy footsteps on the stairs and had a memory of the Fremdenpolizei stealing up Herr Ollinger’s wooden staircase in the early hours of the morning that policemen like the best. Pym knew it was the end, though of all the ways he had imagined the end he hadn’t expected it to come this way. Fieldmen feel those things and learn to trust them, and Pym was a fieldman twice over. So he knew it was the end and in a quiet way he was neither surprised nor disconcerted. He was out of bed and into the kitchen in a second, because the kitchen was where he had been concealing the rolls of film for his next rendezvous with Axel. By the time they pressed the doorbell he had unrolled six reels and exposed them, and touched off the instant-ignition code pad that he had hidden in an oilskin inside the lavatory cistern. In his clear-eyed acceptance of his fate, he even contemplated something rather more drastic, for Berlin was no Vienna and he kept a pistol in his bedside locker and another in a drawer in the hall. But something about the apologetic way they murmured “Herr Pym, wake up, please,” through the letter box discouraged him, and when he looked through the peephole and saw the amiable shape of Police Lieutenant Dollendorf and the young sergeant at his side, a shaming awareness came over him of the shock he would cause them if he took that path. So they’re pulling a soft entry, he thought as he opened the door: first you spread your wolf-children round the building, then you put in Mr. Nice Guy by the front door.

Lieutenant Dollendorf, like most people in Berlin, was a client of Jack Brotherhood, and earned a small retainer by looking the other way when agents were being hustled back and forth across the profitable stretch of Wall in his district. He was a cosy Bavarian fellow with all the Bavarian appetites, and his breath smelt permanently of

Weisswurst.

“Forgive us, Herr Pym. Excuse the disturbances, so late,” he began, smiling too broadly. He was in uniform. His gun was still in its holster. “Our Herr Kommandant asks that you come immediately to headquarters on a personal and urgent matter,” he explained, still not touching his gun.

There was resolution in Dollendorf’s voice as well as embarrassment, however, and his sergeant was peering sharply up and down the stairwell. “The Herr Kommandant assures me that everything can be arranged discreetly, Herr Pym. He wishes at this stage to be delicate. He has made no approach to your superiors,” Dollendorf insisted, as Pym still hesitated. “The Kommandant has high respect for you, Herr Pym.”

“I have to dress.”

“But quickly, if you are so kind, Herr Pym. The Kommandant would like the matter dealt with before he has to hand it over to the day shift.”

Pym turned and walked carefully to his bedroom. He waited to hear the policemen following him, or a barked order, but they preferred to remain in the hall, looking at the Cries of London prints, courtesy of the Firm’s accommodation section.

“May I use your telephone, Herr Pym?”

“Go ahead.”

He dressed with the door open, hoping to overhear the conversation. But all he heard was: “Everything in order, Herr Kommandant. Our man is coming immediately.”

They walked down the broad stairs three abreast, to a parked police car with its light flashing. Nothing behind it, no late-night loiterers in the street. How typical of the Germans to disinfect the entire area before arresting him. Pym sat in the front with Dollendorf. The sergeant sat tensely behind. It was raining and two in the morning. A red sky was seething with black cloud. Nobody spoke any more.

And at the police station Jack will be waiting, thought Pym. Or the Military Police. Or God.

The Kommandant rose to receive him. Dollendorf and his sergeant had faded away. The Kommandant considered himself a man of supernatural subtlety. He was tall and grey and hollow-backed, with staring eyes and a narrow rattling mouth that operated at self-destructive speed. He leaned back in his chair and put his fingertips together. He spoke in an anguished monotone to an etching of his birthplace in East Prussia that was hanging on the wall above Pym’s head. He spoke, in Pym’s calm estimation, for about six hours without a break and without appearing to draw breath, which for the Kommandant was the equivalent of a quick warm-up before they got down to a serious discussion. The Kommandant said that he was a man of the world and a family man, conversant with what he called the “intimate sphere.” Pym said he respected this. The Kommandant said he was not didactic, he was not political, though he was a Christian Democrat. He was Evangelical but Pym could rest assured that he had no quarrel with Roman Catholics. Pym said he would have expected no less. The Kommandant said that misdeeds were a spectrum that ran between pardonable human error and calculated crime. Pym agreed, and heard a footfall in the corridor. The Kommandant begged Pym to bear in mind that foreigners in a strange country frequently felt a sense of false security when contemplating what might strictly be regarded as a felonious act.

“I may speak frankly, Herr Pym?”

“Please do,” said Pym, in whom by now a fearful premonition was beginning to form that it was Axel, not himself, who was under arrest.

“When they brought him to me, I looked at him. I listened to him. I said, ‘No, this cannot be. Not Herr Pym. The man is an impostor.’ I said. ‘He is trading upon a distinguished connection.’ However as I continued to listen to him, I detected a sense of, shall I say, vision? There is an energy here, an intelligence, I may say also a charm. Possibly, I thought, this man is who he says he is. Only Herr Pym can tell us, I thought.” He pressed a button on his desk. “I may confront him with you, Herr Pym?”

An old turnkey appeared, and waddled ahead of them down a painted brick corridor that stank of carbolic. He unlocked a grille and closed it behind them. He unlocked another. It was the first time I had seen Rick in prison, Tom, and I have made sure ever since that it was the last. In future times, Pym sent him food, clothes, cigars, and, in Ireland, Drambuie. Pym emptied his bank account for him, and if he had been a millionaire he would have bankrupted himself rather than see him there again, even in his mind’s eye. Rick sat in the corner and Pym knew at once that he did this in order to give himself a bigger view of the cell, for ever since I had known him he always needed more space than God had given him. He sat with his great head tipped forward, scowling with a convict’s sullenness, and I swear he had closed off his hearing with his thinking and hadn’t heard us coming.

“Father,” said Pym. “It’s me.”

Rick came to the bars and put a hand each side and his face between. He stared first at Pym, then at the Kommandant and the turnkey, not understanding Pym’s position. His expression was sleepy and bad-tempered.

“So they got you too, did they, son?” he said—not, I thought, without a certain satisfaction. “I always thought you were up to something. You should have read your law like I told you.” Slowly the truth began to dawn on him. The turnkey unlocked his door, the good Kommandant said, “Please, Herr Pym,” and stood aside for Pym to enter. Pym went to Rick, and put his arms round him, but delicately, in case they had been beating him and he was sore. Gradually the puff began to fill Rick up again.

“God in heaven, old son, what the devil are they doing to me? Can’t an honest fellow do a bit of business in this country? Have you seen the food they give you here, these German sausages? What do we pay our taxes for? What did we fight the war for? What’s the good of a son who’s head of the Foreign Office if he can’t keep these German thugs away from his old man?”

But by then Pym was bear-hugging Rick, slapping his shoulders and saying it was good to see him in whatever circumstances. So Rick took to weeping also, and the Kommandant delicately removed himself to another room while, reunited, each pal celebrated the other as his saviour.

I don’t mean to disappoint you, Tom, but I do honestly forget, perhaps deliberately, the details of Rick’s Berlin transactions. Pym was expecting his own judgment at the time, not Rick’s. I remember two sisters and that they were of noble Prussian stock and lived in an old house in Charlottenburg, because Pym called on them to pay them off for the usual missing paintings Rick was selling for them, and the diamond brooch he was getting cleaned for them, and the fur coats that were being remodelled by a first-rate tailor friend of his in London who would do it free because he thought the world of Rick. And I remember the sisters had a bent nephew who was involved in a shady arms racket, and that somewhere in the story Rick had an aeroplane for sale, the finest, best-preserved fighter-bomber you could wish for, in mint condition inside and out. And for all I know it was being painted by those lifelong Liberals, Balham’s of Brinkley, and guaranteed to fly everyone to Heaven.

It was in Berlin also that Pym courted your mother, Tom, and took her away from his boss and hers, Jack Brotherhood. I am not sure that you or anybody else has a natural right to know what accident conceived you, but I’ll try to help you as best I can. There was mischief in Pym’s motive, I won’t deny it. The love, what there was of it, came later.

“Jack Brotherhood and I seem to be sharing the same woman,” Pym remarked impishly to Axel one day, during a callbox-to-callbox conversation.

Axel required to know immediately who she was.

“An aristo,” said Pym, still teasing him. “One of ours. Church and spy Establishment, if that means anything to you. Her family’s connections with the Firm go back to William the Conqueror.”

“Is she married?”

“You know I don’t sleep with married women unless they absolutely insist.”

“Is she amusing?”

“Axel, we are talking of a lady.”

“I mean is she social?” Axel demanded impatiently. “Is she what you call diplomatic geisha? Is she bourgeois? Would Americans like her?”

“She’s a top Martha, Axel. I keep telling you. She’s beautiful and rich and frightfully British.”

“Then maybe she is the ticket that will get us to Washington,” said Axel, who had recently been expressing anxieties about the number of random women drifting through Pym’s life.

Soon afterwards, Pym received similar advice from your Uncle Jack.

“Mary has told me what’s going on between you, Magnus,” he said, taking him aside in his most avuncular manner. “And if you ask me you could travel further and fare a damned sight worse. She’s one of the best girls we’ve got, and it’s time you looked a little less disreputable.”

So Pym, with both his mentors pushing in the same direction, followed their advice and took Mary, your mother, to be his truly wedded partner at the High Table of the Anglo-American alliance. And really, after all that he had given away already, it seemed a very reasonable sacrifice.

“Hold his hand, Jack”—Pym wrote—“He’s the dearest thing I had.”

“Mabs, forgive”—Pym wrote—”Dear, dear Mabs, forgive. If love is whatever we can still betray, remember that I betrayed you on a lot of days.”

He began a note to Kate and tore it up. He scribbled “Dearest Belinda” and stopped, scared by the silence around him. He looked sharply at his watch. Five o’clock. Why hasn’t the clock chimed? I’ve gone deaf. I’m dead. I’m in a padded cell. From across the square the first chime sounded. One. Two. I can stop it any time I want, he thought. I can stop it at one, at two, at three. I can take any part of any hour and stop it dead. What I cannot do is make it chime midnight at one o’clock. That’s God’s trick, not mine.

A shocked stillness had descended over Pym and it was the literal stillness of death. He was standing at the window once more, watching the leaves drift across the empty square. An ominous inactivity marked everything he saw. Not a head in a window, not an open doorway. Not a dog or cat or squirrel or a single squawking child. They have taken to the hills. They are waiting for the raiders from the sea. But in his head he is standing in the cellar flat of a run-down office block in Cheapside, watching the two faded Lovelies on their knees as they tear open the last of Rick’s files and lick their crabbed fingertips to speed them in their paperchase. Paper lies in growing mounds around them, it flutters through the air like swirling petals as they rummage and discard what they have vainly plundered: bank statements written in blood, invoices, furious solicitors’ letters, warrants, summonses, love letters dripping with reproach. The dust of them is filling Pym’s nostrils as he watches, the clang of the steel drawers is like the clang of his prison grilles, but the Lovelies heed nothing; they are avid widows ransacking Rick’s record. At the centre of the débris, drawers and cupboard askew, stands Rick’s last Reichskanzlei desk, its serpents twining themselves round its bombé legs like gilded garters. On the wall hangs the last photograph of the great TP in mayoral regalia and on the chimney piece, above a grate stuffed with false coals and the last of Rick’s cigar butts, stands the bronze bust of your Founder and Managing Director himself, beaming out the last of his integrity. On the open door at Pym’s back hangs the memorial tablet to Rick’s last dozen companies, but a sign beside the bell reads “Press here for attention,” because when Rick has not been saving his nation’s faltering economy, he has been working as night porter for the block.

“What time did he die?” says Pym, before remembering that he knows.

“Evening, dearie. The pubs was just opening,” says one of the Lovelies through her cigarette as she heaves another batch of paper on to the rubbish heap.

“He was having a nice drop next door,” says the other, who like the first has not for one moment relaxed her labours.

“What’s next door?” says Pym.

“Bedroom,” says the first Lovely, tossing aside another spent file.

“So who was with him?” Pym asks. “Were you with him? Who was with him, please?”

“We both were, dearie,” says the second. “We was having a little cuddle, if you want to know. Your dad loved a drink and it always made him amorous. We’d had a nice tea early because of his commitments, steak with onion, and he’d had a bit of a barney on the blower with the telephone exchange about a cheque that was in the post to them. He was depressed, wasn’t he, Vi?”

The first Lovely, if reluctantly, suspends her researches. The second does likewise. Suddenly they are decent London women, with kindly faces and puffed, overworked bodies.

“It was over for him, dearie,” she says, pushing away a hank of hair with her chubby wrist.

“What was?”

“He said if he couldn’t have that phone no more, he’d have to go. He said that phone was his lifeline and if he couldn’t have it, it was a judgment on him, how would he do his business without a blower and a clean shirt?”

Mistaking Pym’s silence for rebuke, her companion flares at him. “Don’t look at us like that, darling. He’d had all we’ve got long ago. We done the gas, we done the electric, we cooked his dinners, didn’t we, Vi?”

“We done all we could,” says Vi. “And given him the comfort, too.”

“We pulled tricks for him more than was natural, didn’t we, Vi? Three a day for him, sometimes.”

“More,” says Vi.

“He was very lucky to have you,” says Pym sincerely. “Thank you very much for looking after him.”

This pleases them, and they smile shyly.

“You haven’t got a nice bottle in that big black briefcase of yours, I suppose, dearie?”

“I’m afraid not.”

Vi goes to the bedroom. Through the open doorway Pym sees the great imperial bed from Chester Street, its upholstery ripped and stained with use. Rick’s silk pyjamas lie sprawled across the coverlet. He smells Rick’s body lotion and Rick’s hair oil. Vi returns with a bottle of Drambuie.

“Did he talk about me at all, in the last days?” says Pym while they drink.

“He was proud of you, dear,” says Vi’s friend. “Very proud.” But she seems dissatisfied with her reply. “He was going to catch you up, mind. That was nearly his last words, wasn’t it, Vi?”

“We was holding him,” says Vi, with a sniff. “You could see he was going from the breathing. ‘Tell them I forgive them at the telephone exchange,’ he says. ‘And tell my boy Magnus we’ll both be ambassadors soon.’”

“And after that?” says Pym.

“‘ Give us another touch of the Napoleon, Vi,’” says Vi’s friend, now weeping also. “It wasn’t Napoleon though, it was the Drambuie. Then he says: ‘There’s enough in those files, girls, to see you right till you join me.’”

“He just nodded off really,” says Vi, into her handkerchief. “He mightn’t have been dead at all, if it hadn’t been for his heart.”

There is a rustle at the door. Three knocks. Vi opens it an inch, then all the way, then stands back disapprovingly to admit Ollie and Mr. Cudlove, armed with buckets of ice. The years have not been kind to Ollie’s nerves, and the tears at the corners of his eyes are stained with mascara. But Mr. Cudlove is unchanged, down to his chauffeur’s black tie. Transferring the bucket to his left side, Mr. Cudlove seizes Pym’s right hand in a manly grip. Pym follows them down a narrow corridor lined with photographs of neverwozzers. Rick is lying in the bath with a towel round his middle, his marbled feet crossed over each other as if in accordance with some Oriental ritual. His hands are curled and cupped in readiness to harangue his Maker.

“It’s just that there wasn’t the funds, sir,” Mr. Cudlove murmurs while Ollie pours in the ice. “Not a penny piece anywhere, to be frank, sir. I think those ladies may have taken a liberty.”

“Why didn’t you close his eyes?” says Pym.

“We did, sir, to be frank, but they would open again, and it didn’t seem respectful.”

On one knee before his father, Pym writes out a cheque for two hundred pounds, and nearly makes it dollars by mistake.

Pym drives to Chester Street. The house has been in other hands for years but tonight it stands in darkness, as if once more waiting for the Distraining Bailiffs. Pym approaches gingerly. On the doorstep, a nightlight burns despite the rain. Beside it like a dead animal lies an old boa in the mauve of half mourning, similar to the one belonging to Aunt Nell that he had used to block the lavatory at The Glades so long ago. Is it Dorothy’s? Or Peggy Wentworth’s? Is it some child’s game? Is it put there by Lippsie’s ghost? No card attaches to its dew-soaked feathers. No sequestrator has pinned his claim to it. The only clue is the one word “Yes,” scrawled in trembling chalklines on the door, like a safety signal in a target town.

Turning his back on the deserted square Pym strode angrily to the bathroom and opened the skylight that years ago he had daubed with green paint for Miss Dubber’s greater decency. Through a gun slit, he examined the gardens at the side of the house and concluded that they too were unnaturally empty. No Stanley, the Alsatian, tethered to the rain tub of number 8. No Mrs. Aitken, the butcher’s wife, who spends every waking hour at her roses. Closing the skylight with a bang, he stooped over the basin and sluiced water in his face, then glowered at his reflection till it gave him a false and brilliant smile. Rick’s smile, put on to taunt him, the one that is too happy even to blink. The one that cuddles up against you and presses into you like a thrilled child. The one Pym hated most.

“Fireworks, old son,” said Pym, mimicking Rick’s cadences at their holy worst. “Remember how you loved a firework? Remember dear old Guy Fawkes night, and the great setpiece there, with your old man’s initials on it, RTP, going up in lights all over Ascot? Well then.”

Well then, Pym echoed in his soul.

Pym is writing again. Joyously. No pen can take the strain of this. Reckless free letters are careering over the paper. Lightpaths, rocket tails, stars and stripes are zipping above his head. The music of a thousand transistor radios plays around him; the bright faces of strangers laugh into his own, and he is laughing back at them. It is July 4th. It is Washington’s night of nights. The diplomatic Pyms have arrived a week ago to take up his appointment as Deputy Head of Station. The island of Berlin is sunk at last. They have a spell in Prague behind them, Stockholm, London. The path to America was never easy, but Pym has gone the distance, Pym has made it, he is assumed and almost risen into the reddened dark that is repeatedly blasted into whiteness by the floodlights, fireworks and searchlights. The crowd is bobbing round him and he is part of it, the free people of the earth have taken him among them. He is one with all these grown-up happy children celebrating their independence of things that never held them. The Marine Band, the Breckenridge Boys Choir and the Metropolitan Area Symposium Choral Group have wooed and won him unopposed. At party after party Magnus and Mary have been celebrated by half the intelligence aristos of Georgetown, have eaten swordfish by candlelight in red-brick yards, chatted under lights strung in overhanging branches, have embraced and been embraced, shaken hands and filled their heads with names and gossip and champagne. Heard a lot about you, Magnus—Magnus, welcome aboard! Jesus, is that your wife? That’s

criminal!

Till Mary, worried about Tom—the fireworks have overexcited him—is determined to go home and Bee Lederer has gone with her.

“I’ll join you soon, darling,” Pym murmurs as she leaves. “Must pop in on the Wexlers or they’ll think I’m cutting them.”

Where am I? In the Mall? On the Hill? Pym has no idea. The bare arms and thighs and unhampered breasts of young American womanhood are brushing contentedly against him. Friendly hands make space for him to pass; laughter, pot-smoke, din pack the scalding night. “What’s your name, man?” “You British? Here, let’s shake your hand—take a swig of this.” Pym adds a mouthful of bourbon to the impressive mixture he has already taken in. He is climbing a slope, whether of grass or tarmac he cannot determine. The White House glistens below him. Before it, erect and floodlit, the white needle of the Washington Monument cuts its light-path to the unreachable stars. Jefferson and Lincoln, each in his eternal patch of Rome, lie to either side of him. Pym loves them both. All the patriarchs and founding fathers of America are mine. He crests the slope. A black man offers him popcorn. It is salt and hot like his own sweat. Further up the valley, the harmless battles of other firework shows boom and splash into the sky. The crowd is denser up here but still they smile at him and part for him while they ooh and aah at the fireworks, call friendship to each other, break into patriotic song. A pretty girl is teasing him. “Hey, man, why won’t you dance?” “Well, thank you, I will with pleasure but just let me take off my coat,” Pym replies. His answer is too woody, she has found another partner. He is shouting. At first he does not hear himself but as he enters a quieter place his own voice bursts on him with startling distinctness. “Poppy! Poppy! Where are you?” Helpfully, the good people round him take up the cry. “Hurry on over, Poppy, your boyfriend’s here!” “Come on, Poppy, you bad bitch, where you bin?” Behind and above him the rockets become a ceaseless fountain against the swirling crimson clouds. Before him a gold umbrella opens, embracing the whole white mountain and lighting the emptying street. Instructions are ringing remotely in Pym’s head. He is reading the numbers of the streets and doorways. He finds the door and with a final surge of joy feels the familiar bony hand close round his wrist and the familiar voice admonishing him.

“Your friend Poppy cannot come tonight, Sir Magnus,” says Axel softly. “So will you please stop shouting her name?”

Shoulder to shoulder the two men sit on the steps of the Capitol, gazing down into the Mall on the uncountable thousands they have taken into their protection. Axel has a basket containing a thermos flask of ice-cold vodka, and the best gherkins and brown bread America can supply.

“We made it, Sir Magnus,” he breathes. “We are home at last.”

“My dearest Father,

“I am very pleased to be able to tell you of my new appointment. Cultural Counsellor may not sound much to you, but it is a post that commands a deal of respect among the highest circles here, and even gets me into the White House. I am also the proud owner of what is called a Cosmic Pass, which means literally that no doors are closed to me any more.”

17

O

h my heaven, Tom, the fun we had! The glorious freewheeling last honeymoon, even as the clouds gathered!

You would be pardoned for thinking that the duties of a Deputy Head of Station, though elevated, are inferior to those of his boss. Not so. The Head of Station in Washington floats in the upper air of intelligence diplomacy. His task is to massage the corpse of the Special Relationship and convince everybody, including himself, that it is alive and well. Every morning, poor Hal Tresider rose early, put on his old Shirburnian tie and sweat-patched tropical suit, and pedalled his push-bike earnestly away to the sodden dreamland of the committee rooms, leaving your father free to ransack the Station Registry, supervise the out-stations in San Francisco, Boston, and Chicago, or dart off to welfare a field agent in transit to Central America, China, or Japan. Another chore was shepherding grey-faced British boffins through the battery farms of American high technology, where the scientific secrets that are traded in Washington have their artificial conception. Dining the poor souls, Tom, where others would have left them mouldering in their motels. Consoling them in their woman-less, under-financed foreign exile. Chatting hastily memorised jargon at them, about nose cones, turning radius, underwater communication and captive-carry. Borrowing their working documents from them to give back in the morning. “Hullo—

that

looks interesting. Mind if I sneak a sight of that for our Naval Attaché? He’s been badgering the Pentagon about that one for years, but they’ve been holding out on him.”

The Naval Attaché had a sight, London had a sight, Prague had a sight. For what use is a Cosmic Pass without a Cosmic readership?

Poor stolid, worthy Hal! How meticulously Pym misused your trust and torpedoed your innocent ambitions! Never mind. If the National Trust won’t have you, you can always count on the Royal Automobile Club or a favoured City company.

“I say, Pymmie, there’s some ghastly group of physicists visiting the Livermore weapons laboratory next month,” you would say, all apology and diffidence. “You don’t think you could pop down there and feed and water a few of them and see they don’t blow their noses on the tablecloth, could you? Why on earth this service has to behave like a lot of flat-footed security officers these days, I really don’t know. I’ve a good mind to do a letter to London about it, if I can squeeze a moment.”

No country was ever easier to spy on, Tom, no nation so openhearted with its secrets, so quick to air them, share them, confide them, or consign them too early to the junk heap of planned American obsolescence. I am too young to know whether there was a time when Americans were able to restrain their admirable passion to communicate, but I doubt it. Certainly the path has been downhill since 1945, for it was quickly apparent that information which ten years ago would have cost Axel’s service thousands of dollars in precious hard currency could by the mid-seventies be had for a few coppers from the

Washington Post.

We could have resented this sometimes, if we had been smaller natures, for there are few things more vexing in the spy world than landing a great scoop for Prague and London one week, only to read the same material in

Aviation Weekly

the next. But we did not complain. In the great fruit garden of American technology, there were pickings enough for everyone and none of us need ever want for anything again.

Cameos, Tom, little tiles for your mosaic are all I need to give you now. See the two friends romping under a darkening sky, catching the last rays of the sunlight before the game is over. See them thieving like children, knowing the police are round the corner. Pym did not take to America in a night, not in a month, for all the splendid fireworks of the Fourth. His love of the place grew with Axel’s. Without Axel he might never have seen the light. Pym set out, believe it or not, determined to disapprove of everything he saw. He found no holding point, no stern judgment to revolt against. These vulgar pleasure-seeking people, so frank and clamorous, were too uninhibited for his shielded and involuted life. They loved their prosperity too obviously, were too flexible and mobile, too little the slaves of place, origin and class. They had no sense of that hush which all Pym’s life had been the background music of his inhibition. In committee, it was true, they reverted soon enough to type, and became the warring princelings of the European countries they had left behind. They could run you up a cabal that would make mediaeval Venice blush. They could be Dutch and stubborn, Scandinavian and gloomy, Balkan and murderous and tribal. But when they mixed with one another they were American and loquacious and disarming, and Pym was hard put to find a centre to betray.

Why had they done him no harm? Why had they not cramped him, frightened him, forced his limbs into impossible positions from the cradle up? He found himself longing for the empty, darkened streets of Prague and the reassuring embrace of chains. He wanted his dreadful schools back. He wanted anything but the marvellous horizons that led to lives he had not lived. He wanted to spy upon hope itself, look through keyholes at the sunrise and deny the possibilities he had missed. And all this time, ironically, Europe was coming to get him. He knew that. So did Axel. Not a year had passed before the first insidious whispers of suspicion began to reach their ears. Yet it was this very intimation of mortality that shook Pym out of his reluctance, and inspired him to take the upper hand in their relationship just as Axel was saying, “End it, get out.” A mysterious gratitude for America the Just and her impending retribution seized him as, like a ponderous, puzzled giant, she bore steadily down on him, clutching in her great soft fist the multiplying evidence of his duplicity.

“Certain aristos in Langley and London are getting worried about our Czecho networks, Sir Magnus,” Axel warned him in his stiff, dry English at a crash meeting at the carpark of the Robert F. Kennedy Stadium. “They have begun to discern certain unfortunate patterns.”

“What patterns? There are no patterns.”

“They have noticed that the Czecho networks provide better intelligence when we are running them and almost nothing when we are not. That is the pattern. They have computers these days. It takes them five minutes to turn everything upside down and wonder what is the right way up. We have been careless, Sir Magnus. We were too greedy. Our parents were right. If you want a thing done well, you must do it yourself.”

“Jack Brotherhood can run those networks as well as we can. The head agents are genuine, they report whatever they can get hold of. All networks go moribund now and then. It’s normal.”

“These networks only go moribund when we are not there, Sir Magnus,” Axel repeated patiently. “That is Langley’s perception. It bothers them.”

“Then give the networks better material. Signal Prague. Tell your aristos we need a scoop.”

Axel sadly shook his head. “You know Prague, Sir Magnus. You know my aristos. The man who is absent is the man they conspire against. I have no power to persuade them.”

Calmly Pym contemplated the option that remained to him. Over dinner in their smart house in Georgetown, while Mary played gracious hostess, gracious English lady, gracious diplomatic geisha, Pym wondered whether it was time to persuade Poppy to cross one more frontier after all. He saw himself free of taint, a husband, son and father in good standing at last. He remembered an old Revolutionary farmhouse he and Poppy had admired in Pennsylvania, set among rolling fields and stone fences, with thoroughbred horses that loomed at them out of the sun-stained morning fog. He remembered the whitewashed churches, so sparkling and hopeful after the musty crypts of his childhood, and imagined the resettled family Pym at work and prayer there, and Axel rocking on the garden swing while he drank vodka and shelled peas for lunch.

I shall sell Axel to Langley and buy my freedom, he thought as he dazzled a pearly-toothed matron with a witty anecdote. I shall negotiate an administrative amnesty for myself, and put the record straight.

He never did, he never would. Axel was his keeper and his virtue, he was the altar on which Pym had laid his secrets and his life. He had become the part of Pym that was not owned by anybody else.

Do I need to tell you, Tom, how bright and dear the world looks when we know our days are numbered? How all life swells and opens to you, and says “Come in” just when you had thought you were unwanted? What a paradise America became once Pym knew the writing was on the wall. All his childhood, rushing back to him! He took Mary to point-to-points at Winterthur in the château country and dreamed of Switzerland and of Ascot. He wandered Georgetown’s beautiful Oak Hill Cemetery and imagined he was with Dorothy at The Glades, confined to the dripping orchard where his guilty face could be hidden from the passers-by. Minnie Wilson was our letter box at Oak Hill, Tom. Our first in all America—go and take a look at her one day. She lies on a curled plinth a short way down the terraced bowl, a small dead Victorian girl in marble drapes. We left our messages in a leafy recess between Minnie’s backside and her protector, one Thomas Entwistle, who had died in later age. The doyen of the graveyard rested higher up, near the gravel sweep where Pym parked his diplomatic car. Axel found him, Axel made sure Pym found him too. He was Stefan Osusky, co-founder of the Czechoslovak Republic, died in exile, 1973. No concealed offering to Axel seemed complete without a silent prayer of greeting to our brother Stefan. After Minnie, as the volume of our business grew, we were obliged to appoint postmen nearer to the centre of the town. We selected forgotten bronze generals, mostly French, who had fought on the American side in order to annoy the British. We relished their soft hats and telescopes and horses, and the flowers in red uniform at their feet. Their battlefields were grass squares filled with lounging students, our letter boxes anything from the stubby cannon that protected them to the stunted conifers whose inner branches made convenient brown nests of pine needles. But Axel’s favourite place of all was the newly opened Air and Space Museum, where he could gaze his heart out at the

Spirit of St. Louis

and John Glenn’s

Friendship 7,

and touch the Moon Relic with his forefinger as devoutly as if he were taking water from a holy shrine. Pym never saw him do these things. He could only hear about them afterwards. The trick was to leave their packages in separate lockers in the cloakroom, and swap keys in the darkness of the Samuel P. Langley projection theatre while the audience gasped and clutched the handrails as the screen dazzled them with the thrills of flight.

And away from the eyes and ears of Washington, Tom? What shall I give you first? Silicon Valley, perhaps, and the little Spanish village south of San Francisco where Murgo’s monks sang plainsong to us after dinner. Or the Dead Sea landscape of Palm Springs, where the golf carts had Rolls-Royce grilles, and the Mountains of Moab looked down on the pastel stucco and artificial-rock pools of our walled motel while illegal Mexicans wandered the lawns with backpacks, blowing away unsightly leaves that could offend the sensibilities of our fellow millionaires. Can you imagine Axel’s ecstasy as he beheld the outdoor air-conditioning machines that moistened the desert air and blew micro-mist over the sunbathers with faces covered in green mud? Shall I tell you of the Palm Springs Humane Society’s dog-adoption dinner we attended to celebrate Pym’s acquisition of the very latest blueprint for the nose cone of the Stealth bomber? How the dogs were led on stage groomed and ribboned, to be auctioned to humane ladies, while everybody wept as if they were Vietnamese orphans? Of the all-day Bible-thumpers’ radio channel that portrayed the Christian God as the champion of wealth, since wealth was the enemy of Communism? “God’s waiting room” is what they call Palm Springs. It has one swimming-pool for every five inhabitants, and lies a couple of hours’ drive from the biggest killing factories in the world. Its industries are charity and death. That night, unknown to the retired bandits and senile comedians who made up its geriatric court, Pym and Axel added espionage to the list of its accomplishments.

“We shall never fly so high again, Sir Magnus,” Axel said as he reverently surveyed Pym’s offering in the silence of their six-hundred-dollar-a-night suite. “I think we may retire also.”

Shall I give you Disneyland and another projection room, with a circular screen that showed us the American dream? Can I convince you that Pym and Axel wept sincere tears as they watched the refugees from European persecution set foot on American soil while the commentator spoke of a Nation of Nations and the Land of the Free? We believed it, Tom. And Pym believes it still. Pym never felt more free in his life until the night Rick died. Everything he still contrived to love in himself was here to love in the people round him. A willingness to open themselves to strangers. A guile that was only there to protect their innocence. A fantasy that fired but never owned them. A capacity to be swayed by everything, while still remaining sovereign. And Axel loved them too, but he was not so confident that his affection was reciprocated.

“Wexler is setting up an investigation team, Sir Magnus,” he warned one night in Boston as they dined in the Colonial dignity of the Ritz Hotel. “Some bad defector has been telling stories. It’s time we got out.”

Pym said nothing at all. They walked through the park and watched the swan boats on the pond. They sat in a tense, bare Irish pub that seethed with crimes the English had forgotten. But Pym still refused to speak. A few days later, however, visiting an English don at Yale who occasionally supplied the Firm with tidbits, he found himself in front of the effigy of the American hero Nathan Hale, who was hanged by the British as a spy. His hands were bound behind his back. Below him were inscribed his last words: “I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country.” For several weeks after this, Pym went to ground.

Pym was talking. Pym was on the move. Pym was somewhere in the room, arms locked at his sides, palms splayed like someone wishing to fly or swim. He was sinking into his knees, rolling his shoulders against the wall. He was clutching the green cabinet and shaking it and the cabinet was hobbling in his grasp like an old grandfather clock about to flatten him with its embrace, and the burnbox was bobbing and swaying on top of it saying, “Take me.” He was swearing, all in his head. He was talking, all in his head. He wanted calm from his surroundings but they wouldn’t give it him. He was at his desk again and the sweat was patting on the paper round him. He was writing. He was calm, but the damned room still wouldn’t settle, it was interfering with his prose.

Boston again.

Pym has been visiting the golden semicircle that lies along Route 128. Welcome to America’s Technological Highway. It is a place like a crematorium without a smokestack. Discreet, low-lying factories and laboratories crouch amid shrubberies and landscaped mounds. He has picked the brains of a British delegation and taken a few forbidden photographs with a concealed camera in his briefcase. He has lunched privately at the home of a great American patriarch of industry named Bob, whom he has befriended for his indiscretion. They have sat on the verandah, they have gazed across a garden of descending lawns which a black man is sedately mowing with a triple cutter. After lunch Pym drives to Needham, where Axel is waiting for him beside a bend in the Charles River, which serves them as their local Aare. A heron skims over the blue-green rushes. Red-tailed hawks eye them from dead trees. Their path climbs deep into the woods, along a raised esker.

“So what’s the matter?” says Axel finally.

“Why should anything be the matter?”

“You are tense and you are not speaking. It is reasonable to assume something is the matter.”

“I’m always tense for a debriefing.”

“Not tense like this.”

“He wouldn’t talk to me.”

“Bob wouldn’t?”

“I asked him how the

Nimitz

refitting contract was going. He replied that his corporation was making great strides in Saudi Arabia. I asked him about his discussions with the Admiral of the Pacific Fleet. He asked me when I was going to bring Mary up to Maine for the weekend. His face has changed.”

“How?”

“He’s angry. Somebody’s warned him about me. I think he’s more angry with them than he is with me.”

“What else?” says Axel patiently, knowing that with Pym there is always one more door.

“I was followed to his house. A green Ford, smoked windows. There’s nowhere to hang around and American watchers don’t walk, so they left again.”

“What else?”

“Stop asking what else!”

“What else?”

Suddenly a great gulf of caution and mistrust separated them.

“Axel,” said Pym finally.

It was unusual for Pym to address him by name; the proprieties of espionage normally restrained him.

“Yes, Sir Magnus.”

“When we were in Bern together. When we were students. You weren’t, were you?”

“Not a student?”

“You weren’t spying on anyone. On the Ollingers. On the Cosmo. On me. You hadn’t got people running you in those days. You were just you.”

“I was not spying. Nobody was running me. Nobody owned me.”

“Is that true?”

But Pym knew already that it was. He knew it by the rare glow of anger that shone in Axel’s eyes. By the solemnity and distaste in his voice.

“It was your idea that I was a spy, Sir Magnus. It was never mine.”

Pym watched him light a fresh cigar and noticed how the flame of the match trembled.

“It was Jack Brotherhood’s idea,” Pym corrected him.

Axel drew on the cigar and his shoulders slowly relaxed. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “It is simply unimportant at our age.”

“Bo’s authorised a hostile interrogation,” said Pym. “I’m flying back to London on Sunday to face the music.”

Who should talk to Axel of interrogation? And of a hostile one at that? Who should dare compare the nocturnal posturings of a couple of the Firm’s tame barristers in a safe house in Sussex with the beatings and electric shocks and deprivations that for two decades had been Axel’s irregular fare? I blush now to think I used the word to him at all. In ’52, as I learned later, Axel had denounced Slansky and demanded the death sentence for him—not very loud because he was half dead himself.

“But that’s terrible!” Pym had cried. “How can you serve a country that does that to you?”

“It was not terrible at all, thank you. I should have done it earlier. I secured my survival and Slansky would have died whether I denounced him or not. Give me another vodka.”

In ’56 he went down again: “That time it was less problematic,” he explained, lighting himself a fresh cigar. “I denounced Tito and nobody even bothered to go and kill him.”

In the early sixties, while Pym was in Berlin, Axel had rotted for three months in a mediaeval dungeon outside Prague. What he promised that time has always been unclear to me. It was the year when the Stalinists themselves were purged, if only halfheartedly, and Slansky was declared alive again, if only posthumously. (Though he was still ruled to be guilty of his offences, you will remember, if only innocently.) In any case, Axel came back looking ten years older, and for some months had a soft “r” in his speech that was very like a stammer.

Beside experience like this, the inquisition of Pym was watery stuff indeed. Jack Brotherhood was there to defend him. Personnel fussed over him like an old hen, assuring him it was just a matter of answering a few questions. Some chinless flunkey from Treasury kept warning my persecutors they were in danger of exceeding their brief, and my two gaolers insisted on talking to me about their children. After five days and nights of it, Pym felt as spry as if he had been taking a country holiday, and his interrogators were out on their feet.

“Good trip, darling?” Mary asked, back in Georgetown, after a morning in bed in which Pym had temporarily slaked the tension.

“Great,” said Pym. “And Jack sends love.”

But on his walk to the Embassy he saw a new white arrow chalked on the brickwork of the Fayre-deal wine shop, which was Axel’s warning to attempt no contact until further notice.

And here, Tom, it is time for me to tell you what Rick was doing, for your grandfather had one last trick to play before the end. It was his best, as you would suppose. Rick shrank. He abandoned monstrosity as a way of life, and came weeping and cringing to me like a whipped animal. And the smaller and more encompassable he became, the less secure Pym felt. It was as if the Firm and Rick were closing in on him from either side, each with his regretful, hangdog banality, and Pym, like an acrobat on the high wire between them, suddenly had nothing to support him. Pym implored him in his mind. He screamed at him: Stay bad, stay monstrous, keep your distance, don’t give up! But on Rick came, shuffling and smirking like a pauper, knowing his power was greatest now that he was weak. “I did it all for you, son. It’s thanks to me you’ve taken your place among the Highest in the Land. Got a few coppers for your old man, have you? How about a nice mixed grill, or are you ashamed to take your old pal out?”

He struck first one Christmas Day, not six weeks after Pym had received a formal apology from Head Office. Georgetown had two feet of snow and we had asked the Lederers to lunch. Mary was putting the food on the table as the phone rang. Will Ambassador Pym accept a collect call from New Jersey? He will.

“Hullo, old son. How’s the world using you?”

“I’ll take this upstairs,” says Pym grimly to Mary, and everybody looks understanding, knowing that the secret world never sleeps.

“Happy Christmas, old son,” says Rick as Pym picks up the bedroom phone.

“And Happy Christmas to you, too, Father. What are you doing in New Jersey?”

“God’s the twelfth man on the cricket team, son. It’s God who tells us to keep the left elbow up through life. No one else.”

“So you always said. But it’s not the cricket season. Are you drunk?”

“He’s umpire, judge and jury rolled into one and never you forget it. There’s no conning God. There never was. Are you glad I paid for your education, then?”

“I’m not conning God, Father, I’m trying to celebrate with my family.”

“Say hullo to Miriam,” says Rick, and there is muffled protest before Miriam comes on the line.

“Hullo, Magnus,” says Miriam.

“Hullo, Miriam,” says Pym.

“Hullo,” says Miriam a second time.

“They feed you all right in that Embassy of yours, son, or is it all Thousand Island and French fries?”

“We have a perfectly decent canteen for the lower staff but at the moment I’m trying to eat at home.”

“Turkey?”

“Yes.”

“English bread sauce?”

“I expect so.”

“That grandson of mine all right then, is he? He’s got the forehead, has he, the one I gave you that everybody talks about?”

“He’s got a very good brow.”

“Blue eyes, same as mine?”

“Mary’s eyes.”

“I hear she’s first class, son. I hear first-rate reports of her. They say she’s got a fine piece of property down in Dorset that’s worth a bob or two.”

“It’s in trust,” says Pym sharply.

But Rick has already begun drowning in the gulf of his own self-pity. He weeps, the weep becomes a howl. In the background, Miriam is weeping, too, in a high-pitched whimper, like a small dog locked in a big house.

“But darling,” says Mary as Pym resumes his place as head of the family. “Magnus. You’re upset. What’s the matter?”

Pym shakes his head, smiling and crying at once. He grabs his wineglass and lifts it.

“To absent friends,” he calls out. “To

all

our absent friends!” And later, for a wife’s ears only: “Just an old, old Joe, darling, who managed to track me down and wish me happy bloody Yule.”

Would you ever have supposed, Tom, that the greatest country in the world could be too small for one son and his old man? Yet that is what happened. That Rick should head for wherever he could use his son’s protection was, I suppose, only natural and after Berlin, probably inevitable. He went first, as I now know, to Canada, unwisely trusting in the bonds of Commonwealth. The Canadians quickly tired of him and when they threatened to repatriate him he made a small down payment on a Cadillac and headed south. In Chicago, my enquiries show that he succumbed to the many enticing offers from property companies to move into new developments on the edge of town and live rent-free for three months as an inducement. A Colonel Hanbury resided at Farview Gardens, a Sir William Forsyth graced Sunleigh Court, where he extended his tenancy by conducting protracted negotiations to buy the penthouse for his butler. What either of them did for liquidity is, as ever, a mystery, though no doubt there were grateful Lovelies in the background. The one clue is a prickly letter from the stewards of a local turf club, advising Sir William that his horses will be welcome when his stable fees have been settled. Pym was still only vaguely aware of these distant rumblings, and his absences from Washington gave him a false sense of protection. But in New Jersey something changed Rick for ever, and whatever it was, from then on Pym became his only industry. Was the same wind of reckoning blowing over both men simultaneously? Was Rick really ill? Or was he, like Pym, merely conscious of impending judgment? Certainly Rick thought he was ill. Certainly he thought he ought to be:

“Am obliged to use strong walking-stick (twenty-nine dollars cash) at all times owing to Heart and other more sinister Ailments”—he wrote—“My doctor keeps the Worst from me and recommends that Frugal diet (plain foods and Champagne only, no Californian) could Prolong this Meagre existence and enable me to Fight back for a few more Months before I am Called.”

Certainly he took to wearing liver-coloured spectacles like Aunt Nell. And when he fell foul of the law in Denver, the prison doctor was so impressed by him that he was released the moment Pym had paid the medical fees.

And after Denver you decided you were already dead, didn’t you, and set out to haunt me with your smallness? Every town I went to, I walked in fear of your pathetic ghost. Every safe house I entered, I expected to see you waiting at the gate, parading your willed, deliberate littleness. You knew where I would be before I got there. You would con a ticket and travel five thousand miles just to show me how small you had become. And off we’d go to the best restaurant in town, and I would buy you your treat and boast to you about my diplomatic doings and listen to your boastings in return. I would shower you with all the money I could afford, praying that it would enable you to add a few more Wentworths to the green cabinet. But even while I fawned on you and exchanged radiant smiles with you and held hands with you and bolstered you in your idiotic schemes, I knew that you had pulled the best con of them all. You were nothing any more. Your mantle had passed to me, leaving you a naked little man, and myself the biggest con I knew.

“Why don’t those fellows give you your knighthood, then, old son? They tell me you ought to be Permanent Under Secretary by now. Got a skeleton in your cupboard, have you? Maybe I should slip over to London and have a word with those Personnel boys of yours.”

How did he find me? How could it be that his systems of intelligence were better than those of the Agency’s leash dogs who were fast becoming my regular, unwelcome companions? At first I thought he was using private detectives. I began collecting the numbers of suspicious cars, noting the times of dead-end phone calls, trying to distinguish them from Langley’s. I bearded my secretary: has someone calling himself my sick father been pestering you for information? Eventually I discovered that the Embassy travel clerk had an addiction to playing English snooker at some Masonic hostel in the dirty part of town. Rick had found him there and pitched him a fatuous cover story: “I’ve got this dicky heart,” he’d said to the fool. “It could get me any time, you see, but don’t you go telling my boy. I don’t like to bother him when he’s got enough on his plate as it is. What you’re to do, you’re to get on the blower to me and give me the wink whenever that boy of mine leaves town, so that I know where to find him when the end comes.” And no doubt there was a gold watch in it somewhere. And tickets for next year’s Cup Final. And seeing the boy’s dear old mother right next time Rick slipped home for a drop of English air.

But my discovery had come too late. We had had San Francisco by then, and Denver, and Seattle, and Rick had homed on every one of them, weeping and shrinking before my very eyes, until all that was left of Rick was what he owned of Pym; and all that was left of Pym, it seemed to me, as I wove my lies and blandished, and perjured myself before one kangaroo court after another, was a failing con man tottering on the last legs of his credibility.

And that’s how it was, Tom. Betrayal is a repetitious trade and I will not bother you with more of it. We have reached the end, though it seems from here to look quite like the beginning. The Firm pulled Pym out of Washington and sent him to Vienna so that he could take back his networks and so that his growing army of accusers could draw its wretched computer pattern tighter round his neck. There was no saving him. Not in the end. Poppy knew that. So did Pym, though he would never admit it, even to himself. Just one more con, Pym kept saying to himself; one more con will see me right. Poppy pressed him, begged him, threatened him. Pym was adamant: Leave me in place, I’ll win through, they love me, I’ve given my life to them.

But the truth is, Tom, that Pym preferred to test the limits of the tolerance of those he loved. He preferred to sit here in Miss Dubber’s upper room and wait for God to come, while he looked down the gardens to the beach where the best pals ever had kicked a football from one end of the world to the other, and ridden their Harrods bicycles across the sea.

18

I

t’s fireworks night at Plush, thought Mary, staring into the darkness of the square. It’s an unlit bonfire waiting for Tom. Through the windscreen of their parked car she gazed at the empty bandstand and pretended she saw the last of her family and retainers crammed into the old cricket pavilion. The muffled footsteps were the footsteps of the gamekeepers as they gathered to her brother Sam, back for his last leave. She pretended she could hear her brother’s voice, a little too parade-ground for her liking, still scratchy from the strain of Ireland. “Tom?” he calls. “Where’s old Tom?” ... Not a move. Tom is stuck inside Mary’s sheepskin coat, his head jammed against her thigh and nothing short of Christmas is going to lure him out. “Come on, Tom Pym, you’re the youngest!” cries Sam. “Where is he? ... You’ll be too old next year, you know, Tom.” Then his brutal dismissal. “Fuck it. Let’s have someone else.” Tom is shamed, the Pyms are disgraced, Sam as usual is angry that Tom has no taste for blowing up the universe. A braver child puts the match and the world ignites. Her brother’s military rockets race over it in perfect salvoes. Everyone is small, looking at the night sky.

She sat at Brotherhood’s side and he was holding her wrist the way the doctor held it when she was about to bear her little coward. To reassure her. To steady her. To say “I am in charge here.” The car was parked in a side street and behind them stood the police van and behind the police van stood a caravan of about six hundred parked police cars and radio vans and ambulances and bomb lorries, all occupied by Sam’s familiars who spoke soundlessly to one another without moving their eyes. Beside her was a shop called Sugar Novelties with a neon-lit window and a plastic gnome pushing a wheelbarrow laden with dusty sweets, and next to it a granite workhouse with “Public Library” engraved over a funereal door. Across the street stood a hideous Baptist church that told you God was no fun either. Beyond the church lay God’s square and His bandstand and His monkey-puzzle trees, and between the fourth and fifth tree from the left, as she had counted twenty times, and three-quarters of the way up, hung an arched lighted window with the orange curtains drawn, which my officers advise me is where your husband’s room is situated, madam, though our enquiries indicate that he is known locally by the name of Canterbury and is well liked in the community.

“He’s always liked,” Mary snapped.

But the superintendent was saying this to Brotherhood. He was speaking through Brotherhood’s window and deferring to Brotherhood as her keeper. And Mary knew that the superintendent had been ordered to speak to her as little as possible, which came hard to him. And that Brotherhood had given himself the job of answering for her, which the superintendent seemed to accept was as near to godliness as he was likely to get without having his ears blasted off. The superintendent was a Devon man, and ponderously traditional. I’m so

frightfully

glad he’s being arrested by a

Devon

man, she thought cruelly, in Caroline Lumsden’s Sloane-Ranger twitter. I always think it’s

so

much

nicer

to be taken prisoner by a man of the soil.

“Are you quite sure you wouldn’t like to come into the Church Hall, madam?” the superintendent was saying for the hundredth time. “It’s much warmer in the Church Hall and there’s some quite fine company. Cosmopolitan, counting the Americans.”

“She’s best here,” Brotherhood murmured in reply.

“Only we can’t allow the gentleman to switch on the engine, you see, to be truthful, madam. And if he can’t switch on the engine, well you can’t have the heating, if you see what I mean.”

“I’d like you to go away,” Mary said.

“She’s all right as she is,” said Brotherhood.

“Only it could be all night, you see, madam. Could be all tomorrow too. If our friend decides to stick it out, kind of thing, to be truthful.”

“We’ll play it as it comes,” Brotherhood said. “When you need her, this is where she’ll be.”

“Well I’m afraid she won’t, sir, to be truthful, not when we go in, if we have to. I’m afraid she’ll have to withdraw to a somewhat safer position, to be truthful, same as you. Only the rest of them are back in the Church Hall, if you follow me, sir, and the chief constable says that’s where all non-combatants have got to be at that stage in the proceedings, including the Americans.”

“She doesn’t want to be with the rest of them,” said Mary before Brotherhood could speak. “And she’s not American. She’s his wife.”

The superintendent went away and came back almost immediately. He’s the go-between. They’ve chosen him for his bedside manner.

“Message from the roof, sir,” he began apologetically, crouching yet again to Brotherhood’s window. “Do you happen to know, please, the precise type and calibre of the weapon our friend is alleged to have in his possession?”

“Standard Browning three-eight automatic. An old one. Shouldn’t think it’s been cleaned for years.”

“Any theories regarding the type of ammunition at all, sir? Only it would be nice for them to know the carry, you see.”

“Short nose, I should think.”

“But not a stopper, for instance, or a dumdum?”

“Why the hell should he want a dumdum?”

“I don’t know, sir, do I? Information is gold dust on this one, the way it’s being passed around, if I may say so. I haven’t seen so many tight lips in one room for, oh, a long time. How many rounds has our friend got, do you think?”

“One magazine. Maybe a spare.”

Mary was suddenly furious. “For God’s sake. He’s not a maniac! He’s not going to start a—”

“Start a what?” said the superintendent, whose country manners had a way of slipping when he wasn’t spoken to respectfully.

“Just assume it’s one magazine and one spare,” Brotherhood said.

“Well, then, perhaps you can tell us how our friend’s marksmanship is,” the superintendent suggested as if stepping on to safer ground. “You can’t blame them for asking that, can you?”

“He’s been trained and topped up all his life,” said Brotherhood.

“He’s good,” Mary said.

“Now how do you know that, madam, if I may be allowed to ask a simple question?”

“He shoots Tom’s air pistol with him.”

“Rats and that? Or something larger?”

“Paper targets.”

“Does he now? And gets a high score then, does he, madam?”

“Tom says so.”

She glanced at Brotherhood and knew what he was thinking. Just let me go in and get him, gun or no. She was thinking much the same herself: Magnus, come out of there and stop making yourself so bloody ridiculous. The superintendent was speaking again, this time to Brotherhood directly.

“Now there’s a query from our disposal people this time, sir,” he said, as if it were all a little bit unreasonable but we must humour them. “Regarding this box device our friend is carrying with him. I’ve tried them in the Church Hall but they’re all a bit above the technicalities like, and they said to ask you. Our boys do appreciate they’re not allowed to know too much about it, but they would like the benefit of your wisdom regarding the charge it contains.”

“It’s self-consuming,” Brotherhood replied. “It’s not a weapon.”

“Ah, but could it be used as a weapon, put it that way, if it got into the hands of one who might for instance have lost the balance of his mind?”

“Not unless he put somebody inside it,” Brotherhood replied and the superintendent let out a mellow country laugh.

“I’ll tell that one to the boys,” he promised. “They like a joke up there, the boys do, it gets the tension out of them.” His voice fell and he spoke to Brotherhood alone. “Has our friend ever fired his gun in anger, sir?”

“It’s not his gun.”

“Ah, now you didn’t quite answer the question there, sir, did you?

“To my knowledge he’s never been in a shoot-out.”

“Our friend doesn’t get angry,” Mary said.

“Has he ever taken anybody prisoner, sir?”

“Us,” Mary said.

Pym had made the cocoa and Pym had put the new shawl over Miss Dubber’s shoulders although she said she didn’t feel the chill. Pym had chopped up the piece of chicken for Toby that he had bought at the supermarket as a treat for him, and if she had let him he would have cleaned out the canary’s cage as well; for the canary was his secret pride ever since a night when he had found it dead after Miss Dubber had gone to bed, and contrived, unknown to her, to exchange it for a live one with Mr. Loring of the pet shop. But Miss Dubber wanted no more fussing from him. She wanted him sitting beside her where she could keep an eye on him and listen to him reading Aunt Al’s latest letter from distant Sri Lanka, which came in yesterday, Mr. Canterbury, but you never had the interest.

“Is that Ali the dhobi who stole her lace last year?” she enquired sharply, interrupting him. “Why does she go on employing him if he stole from her? I thought we’d seen the last of Ali long ago.”

“I expect she forgave him,” said Pym. “He had all those wives, if you remember. She probably couldn’t bear to chuck him into the street.” His voice was very clear to him and beautiful. It was good to speak aloud.

“I do wish she’d come home,” Miss Dubber said. “It can’t be good for her, the heat, after all these years.”

“Ah but then she’d have to do her own washing, wouldn’t she, Miss D?” said Pym. And his smile warmed him as he knew it was warming her.

“You’re better now, aren’t you, Mr. Canterbury? I’m so glad. It’s got out of you, whatever it is. You can have a nice rest now.”

“What from?” said Pym gently, still smiling at her.

“Whatever you’ve been doing all these years. You can let somebody else run the country for a while. Did he leave you a lot of work to do, the poor gentleman who died?”

“I suppose he did really. It’s always difficult when you don’t have a proper handover.”

“But you’ll be all right now, won’t you? I can see.”

“I will when you say you’ll take that holiday, Miss D.”

“Only if you come.”

“I can’t

do

that. I told you! I’ve run out of leave!”

His voice had lifted more than he intended. She looked at him and he saw the scare in her face, which was how he had caught her looking at him ever since the green cabinet had arrived, or when he had smiled and pampered her too much.

“Well I’m not going,” she replied tartly. “I don’t like putting Toby into prison and Toby doesn’t like going to prison and we’re not going to do it just to please you, are we, Toby? You’re very kind but don’t mention it again. Is that all she says?”

“The rest is about the race riots. She thinks there are more on the way. I didn’t think you’d like it.”

“You’re quite right, I would

not,

” said Miss Dubber firmly and her eyes stayed on him as he crossed the room, folded the letter and put it in the ginger jar. “You can read it to me in the morning when I don’t mind so much. Why’s the square quiet? Why isn’t Mrs. Peel playing her television next door? She should be watching that announcer she’s in love with.”

“Probably gone to bed,” said Pym. “More cocoa, Miss D?” he asked, taking the mugs to the scullery. The curtains were drawn, but beside the window was an extractor fan that Pym had built into the wooden wall and it was made of transparent plastic. Putting his eye to it he quickly surveyed the square but saw no sign of life.

“Don’t be so silly, Mr. Canterbury,” Miss Dubber was saying. “You know I never have a second cup. Come back and watch the news.”

At the far end of the square, in the shadow of the church, a small light went on and off.

“Not tonight, Miss D, if you don’t mind,” he called to her. “I’ve had nothing but politics all week.” He ran the tap and waited till the Crimean War geyser caught before he rinsed the mugs. “I’m going to put myself to bed and give the world a rest, Miss D.”

“Well you’d better answer the telephone first,” she replied. “It’s for you.”

She must have lifted the receiver at once for he had not heard it above the sobbing of the geyser. It had never rung for him before. He returned to the kitchen and she was holding the receiver out to him and he saw the scare in her face again, accusing him, as he reached out a steady hand to take it. He put the phone to his ear and said “Canterbury.” The line went dead but he kept the phone to his ear and gave a quick bright smile of recognition to the middle distance of Miss Dubber’s kitchen, somewhere between the picture of Pilgrim slogging up the hill past the hookers, and the picture of the little girl in bed with her hair brushed, about to eat her boiled egg.

“Thank you,” he said. “Well thank you very much indeed, Bill. Well that’s very handsome of you. And of the Minister. Thank him for me, will you, Bill? Let’s have lunch about it next week. On me.”

He rang off. There was a lot of heat in his face and he was no longer quite sure, now that he looked at Miss Dubber, what her expression was doing, or whether she was aware of the pains he was getting around the shoulders and neck and in the right knee, which he had ricked when he was skiing at Lech with Tom.

“Apparently the Minister’s rather pleased with the work I did for him,” he explained to her a little blindly. “He wanted me to know that my efforts hadn’t been in vain. That was his private secretary. Bill. Sir William Wells. Friend of mine.”

“I see,” Miss Dubber said. But she was not enthusiastic.

“The Minister’s not terribly appreciative as a rule, to be honest. Doesn’t let it show. Hard man to please. Practically never been known to hand out a compliment in his life. But we’re all rather devoted to him. Warts and all, as you might say. We do all rather tend to be a bit fond of him notwithstanding, if you follow. We’ve all rather decided to accept that he’s part of life’s rich pageant, and not some sort of monster. Yes, well I’m tired, Miss D. Let’s put you to bed.”

She had not moved. He talked harder.

“It wasn’t Himself of course. He’s in all-night session. Liable to be there on and off for a long while. This was his private secretary.”

“So you told me.”

“‘That’s medal material, Pym dear boy,’ he said. ‘The old man actually smiled.’ The old man, that’s what we call the Minister. Sir William to his face, but ‘the old man’ behind his back. Be nice to have a gong, wouldn’t it, Miss D? Put it over the fireplace. Polish it at Easter and Christmas. Our own private medal. Earned on the premises. If anyone’s deserved it, you have.”

He stopped speaking for a while because he was blurting a bit and his mouth was dry and he had the worst ear-and-throat thing he could remember. I really ought to go to one of those private health clinics and have the complete sheep-dip. So instead of speaking he stood over her with his hands dangling so that he could haul her to her feet and give her the old good-night bear-hug that meant so much to her. But Miss Dubber did not oblige. She did not want the hug.

“Why do you call yourself Canterbury if your name is Pym?” she demanded sternly.

“That’s my first name. Pym. Like Pip. Pym Canterbury.”

She had thought for a long time about that. She studied his dried-up eyes and his cheek muscles that were writhing for no known reason. And he noticed that she didn’t like much what she saw, and was disposed to quarrel. But as he strained his smile at her, and willed her with all the life that was left in him, he was rewarded by a strict nod of acceptance.

“Well we’re both too old for Christian names now, Mr. Canterbury,” she said. After which she did finally hold out her arms and he did gently take hold of them above the elbows, and he did have to remember not to pull too hard, because he was so keen to have her against him and get himself off to bed where he belonged.

“Now I’m glad about that medal,” she announced as he led her along the passage. “I’ve always admired a man who gets a medal, Mr. Canterbury. Whatever he’s done.”

The stairs belonged to the houses of his childhood so he skipped up them lightly and forgot his aches and pains. The star-of-Bethlehem lampshade on the landing, though it shed a lousy light, was an old friend from The Glades. Everything is kind to me, he noticed. When he pushed open the door of his room, everything winked and laughed at him like a surprise party. The parcels were all as he had prepared them but it never did any harm to check. So he checked them now. Envelope for Miss Dubber, lots of money and apologies. Envelope to Jack, no money and come to think of it, precious few apologies. Poppy, how odd that you are such a distant sound at last. That stupid filing cabinet, I don’t know why I bothered with it all these years. I haven’t even looked inside. The burnbox, what a weight it is for so few secrets. Nothing to Mary but he’d really nothing much more to say to her: “Sorry I married you for cover. Glad I managed a bit of love along the way. Hazards of the trade, m’dear. You’re a spy too, remember? Rather better than Pym was, come to think of it. Class will tell in the end.” Only the envelope to Tom bothered him, and he tore open the sealed flap feeling that a last word of explanation was after all required.

“You see, Tom, I am the bridge,” he wrote in a hand that was irritatingly sluggish. “I am what you must walk over to get from Rick to life.”

Then he added his initials, as one always should with a postscript, and addressed a fresh envelope and put the old one in the waste-paper basket because he had been taught from early in his life that untidiness was the sister of insecurity.

Then he hauled the burnbox from the top of the cabinet to the desk and with the two keys from his chain disarmed it and fished out first the files which were too secret to be classified at all and which gave a lot of bogus information about the networks he and Poppy had so painstakingly composed. He chucked them in the waste-paper basket too. When he’d done that he pulled out the gun and loaded it and cocked it, all rather swiftly, and set it on the desk thinking of the many times he had carried a gun and not fired it. He heard a scraping sound from the roof, and said to himself: must be a cat. He shook his head as if to say those damned cats, they get everywhere these days, don’t give the birds a chance. He glanced at his gold watch, a wide gesture, remembering that Rick had given it to him and that he might forget to take it off in the bath. So he took it off now and laid it on Tom’s envelope and drew a cheerful moon face right next to it, the sign they drew for one another to say “Smile.” He undressed and laid his clothes neatly by the bed, then he put on his dressing-gown and took both his towels from the clothes-horse, the big one for the bath, the small one for hands and face. He slipped the gun into the dressing-gown pocket, leaving the safety catch in the “off” position because it was the laborious ethic of the trainers that a safed gun was more dangerous than a live one. He was only going across the corridor but it’s a violent world these days and you can’t be too careful. About to open the bathroom door he was annoyed to discover that the porcelain knob had stiffened up and scarcely turned. Damned doorknob. Look at that. It took him all the strength of both his hands to twist it and, more annoying still, some idiot must have left soap on it, because his hands kept slithering and he had to use a towel to get a grip. It’s probably dear old Lippsie, he thought with a smile: always living in that world inside her head. Placing himself for the last time before the shaving mirror, he arranged the towels around his head and shoulders, making a bonnet of the small one and a cape of the large one, because if there was one thing Miss Dubber hated above another, it was mess. Then he held the gun to where his right ear was, forgetting, as anybody might in the circumstances, whether the trigger of your Browning .38 automatic had two pressures or just the one. And he noticed how he was leaning: not away from the gun, but into it, like someone a little deaf, straining for a sound.

Mary never heard the shot. The superintendent was crouching at Brotherhood’s window again, this time to tell him that Magnus’s presence inside the house had now been positively confirmed by a ruse and that he had orders to assemble non-combatants in the Church Hall without delay. Brotherhood was contesting this, and Mary still had her eye on the four men playing Grannie’s Footsteps among the chimneypots across the square. For half an hour now they had been reeling out rope to one another and adopting classic postures of stealth, and Mary loathed the lot of them more than she could have imagined possible. A society that admires its shock troops had better be bloody careful about where it’s going, Magnus liked to say. The superintendent was confirming that there were no other male lodgers on the premises apart from the said Canterbury, and he was asking Mary whether she would hold herself in readiness to speak to her husband on the telephone in a conciliatory manner if this became necessary during the course of operations. And Mary was retorting: “Of

course

I will,” in an overbold whisper intended to deflate all this theatrical nonsense. All those things in her later memory were taking place or had just done so as Brotherhood shoved open the driver’s door, sending the superintendent flying to one side, one boot for ever frozen in the window frame. After that she had a forward image of Jack pelting towards the house at a young man’s pace because sometimes she had a dream of him doing exactly that, and the house was always Plush and he was coming to make love to her. But with the clamour all around him he was standing still. Lights had come on, ambulances were racing to the spot without apparently knowing where the spot was, police and plainclothesmen were falling over each other and the fools on the roof were shouting at the fools in the square and England was being saved from things it didn’t know were threatening it. But Jack Brotherhood was standing to attention like a dead centurion at his post, and everyone was watching a dignified little lady in a dressing-gown coming down the steps of her house.

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