“They tell me you and Ben took your bits of leave together. Where did you go?”
“Twickenham. Lord’s. Bit of fishing. Mainly we stayed with one another’s people.”
“Ah.”
I couldn’t understand why Smiley’s words were scaring me. Perhaps I was so scared for Ben that I was scared by everything. Increasingly I had the feeling Smiley assumed I was guilty of something, even if we had still to find out what. His recitation of events was like a summary of the evidence.
“First comes Willis,” he said, as if we were following a difficult trail. “Willis is the Berlin Head of Station, Willis has overall command. Then comes Haggarty, and Haggarty is the senior field officer under Willis and Ben’s direct boss. Haggarty is responsible for the day-to-day servicing of the Seidl network. The network is twelve agents strong, or was—that is to say, nine men and three women, now all under arrest. An illegal network of that size, communicating partly by radio and partly by secret writing, requires a base team of at least the same number to maintain it, and I’m not talking about evaluating or distributing the product.”
“I know.”
“I’m sure you do, but let me tell you all the same,” he continued at the same ponderous pace. “Then you can help me fill in the gaps. Haggarty is a powerful personality. An Ulsterman. Off duty, he drinks, he’s noisy and unpleasant. But when he’s working he’s none of those things. He’s a conscientious officer with a prodigious memory. You’re sure Ben never mentioned him to you?”
“I told you. No.”
I had not intended this to sound so adamant. There’s always a mystery about how often you can deny a thing without beginning to sound like a liar, even to yourself; and of course this was the very mystery Smiley was playing upon in order to bring hidden things to the surface in me.
“Yes, well you did tell me no,” he agreed with his habitual courtesy, “And I did hear you say no. I merely wondered whether I had jogged your memory?”
“No.”
“Haggarty and Seidl were friends,” he continued, speaking, if it were possible, even more slowly. “So far as their business allowed, they were close friends. Seidl had been a prisoner of war in England, Haggarty in Germany. While Seidl was working as a farm labourer near Cirencester in 1944, under the relaxed conditions for German prisoners of war that prevailed by then, he succeeded in courting an English landgirl. His guards at the camp took to leaving a bicycle for him outside the main gates with an army greatcoat tossed over the handlebar to cover Seidl’s prisoner-of-war tunic. As long as he was back in his own bed by reveille, the guards turned a blind eye. Seidl never forgot his gratitude to the English. When the baby came along, Seidl’s guards and fellow prisoners came to the christening. Charming, isn’t it? The English at their best. But the story doesn’t ring a bell?”
“How could it? You’re talking about a joe!”
“A blown joe. One of Ben’s. Haggarty’s experiences of German prison camp were not so uplifting. Never mind. In 1948 while Haggarty was nominally working with the Control Commission, he picked up Seidl in a bar in Hannover, recruited him and ran him back into East Germany, to his home town of Leipzig. He has been running him ever since. The Haggarty-Seidl friendship has been the linchpin of the Berlin Station for the last fifteen years. At the time of his arrest last week, Seidl was fourth man in the East German Foreign Ministry. He had served as their Ambassador in Havana. But you’ve never heard of him. Nobody ever mentioned him to you. Not Ben. Not anyone.”
“No,” I said, as wearily as I could manage.
“Once a month Haggarty was accustomed to going into East Berlin and debriefing Seidl—in a car, in a safe flat, on a park bench, wherever—the usual thing. After the Wall there was a suspension of service for a while, before the meetings were cautiously resumed. The game was to cross in a Four Power vehicle—say, an army jeep— introduce a substitute, hop out at the right moment and rejoin the vehicle at an agreed point. It sounds perilous and it was, but with practice it worked. If Haggarty was on leave or sick, there was no meeting. A couple of months ago Head Office ruled that Haggarty should introduce Seidl to be a successor. Haggarty is past retiring age, Willis has had Berlin so long he’s blown sky high, and besides he knows far too many secrets to go wandering around behind the Curtain. Hence Ben’s posting to Berlin. Ben was untarnished. Clean. Haggarty in person briefed him—I gather exhaustively. I’m sure he was not merciful. Haggarty is not a merciful man, and a twelve-strong network can be a complicated matter: who works to whom and why; who knows whose identity; the cut-outs, codes, couriers, covernames, symbols, radios, dead-letter boxes, inks, cars, salaries, children, birthdays, wives, mistresses. A lot to get into one’s head all at once.”
“I know.”
“Ben told you, did he?”
I did not rise to him this time. I was determined not to. “We learned it on the course. Ad infinitum,” I said.
“Yes. Well, I suppose you did. The trouble is, the theory’s never quite the same as the real thing, is it? Who’s his best friend, apart from you?”
“I don’t know.” I was startled by his sudden change of tack. “Jeremy, I suppose.”
“Jeremy who?”
“Galt. He was on the course.”
“And women?”
“I told you. No one special.”
“Haggarty wanted to take Ben into East Berlin with him, make the introduction himself,” Smiley resumed. “The Fifth Floor wouldn’t wear that. They were trying to wean Haggarty away from his agent, and they don’t hold with sending two men into badland where one will do. So Haggarty took Ben through the rendezvous procedures on a street map, and Ben went into East Berlin alone. On the Wednesday, he did a dry run and reconnoitred the location. On the Thursday he went in again, this time for real. He went in legally, driven in a Control Commission Humber car. He crossed at Checkpoint Charlie at three in the afternoon and slipped out of the car at the agreed spot. His substitute rode in it for three hours, all as planned. Ben rejoined the car successfully at six-ten, and recrossed into West Berlin at six-fifty in the evening. His return was logged by the checkpoint. He had himself dropped at his flat. A faultless run. Willis and Haggarty were waiting for him at Station Headquarters, but he telephoned from his flat instead. He said the rendezvous had gone to plan, but he’d brought nothing back except a high temperature and a ferocious stomach bug. Could they postpone their debriefing till morning? Lamentably they could. They haven’t seen him or heard from him since. He sounded cheerful despite his ailment, which they put down to nerves. Has Ben ever been ill on you?”
“No.”
“He said their mutual friend had been in great form, real character and so forth. Obviously he could say no more on the open telephone. His bed wasn’t slept in, he took no extra clothes with him. There’s no proof that he was in his flat when he rang, there’s no proof he’s been kidnapped, there’s no proof he hasn’t been. If he was going to defect, why didn’t he stay in East Berlin? They can’t have turned him round and played him back at us or they wouldn’t have arrested his network. And if they wanted to kidnap him, why not do it while he was their side of the Wall? There’s no hard evidence that he left West Berlin by any of the approved corridors— train, autobahn, air. The controls are not efficient, and as you say, he was trained. For all we know, he hasn’t left Berlin at all. On the other hand, we thought he might have come to you. Don’t look so appalled. You’re his friend, aren’t you? His best friend? Closer to him than anyone? Young Galt doesn’t compare. He told us so himself. ‘Ben’s great buddy was Ned,’ he said. ‘If Ben was going to turn to any of us, it would have to be Ned.’ The evidence rather bears that out, I’m afraid.”
“What evidence?”
No pregnant pause, no dramatic change of tone, no warning of any kind: just dear old George Smiley being his apologetic self. “There’s a letter in his flat, addressed to you,” he said. “It’s not dated, just thrown in a drawer. A scrawl rather than a letter. He was probably dru
nk. It’s a love letter, I’m afraid.” And, having handed me a photocopy to read, he fetched us both another whisky.
Perhaps I do it to help me look away from the discomfort of the moment. But always when I set that scene in my memory I find myself switching to Smiley’s point of view. I imagine how it must have felt to be in his position.
What he had before him is easy enough to picture. See a striving trainee trying to look older than his years, a pipe-smoker, a sailor, a wise nodder, a boy who could not wait for middle age, and you have the young Ned of the early sixties.
But what he had behind him was not half so easy, and it was capable of altering his reading of me drastically. The Circus, though I couldn’t know it at the time, was in low water, dogged by unaccountable failure. The arrest of Ben’s agents, tragic in itself, was only the latest in a chain of catastrophes reaching across the globe. In northern Japan, an entire Circus listening station and its three-man staff had vanished into thin air. In the Caucasus, our escape lines had been rolled up overnight. We had lost networks in Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria, all in a space of months. And in Washington our American Cousins were voicing ever-louder dissatisfaction with our reliability, and threatening to cut the special cord for good.
In such a climate, monstrous theories became daily fare. A bunker mentality develops. Nothing is allowed to be accidental, nothing random. If the Circus triumphed, it was because we were allowed to do so by our opponents. Guilt by association was rife. In the American perception, the Circus was nurturing not one mole but burrows of them, each cunningly advancing the career of every other. And what joined them was not so much their pernicious faith in Marx—though that was bad enough—it was their dreadful English homosexuality.
I read Ben’s letter. Twenty lines long, unsigned, on white unwatermarked Service stationery, one side. Ben’s handwriting but awry, no crossings out. So yes, probably he was drunk.
It called me “Ned my darling.” It laid Ben’s hands along my face and drew my lips to his. It kissed my eyelids and my neck and, thank God, on the physical front it stopped there.
It was without adjectives, without art, and the more appalling for its lack of them. It was not a period piece, it was not affected. It was not arch, Greek or nineteen-twenties. It was an unobstructed cry of homosexual longing from a man I had known only as my good companion.
But when I read it, I knew it was the real Ben who had written it. Ben in torment confessing feelings I had never been aware of, but which when I read them I accepted as true. Perhaps that already made me guilty—I mean, to be the object of his desire, even if I had never consciously attracted it, and did not desire him in return. His letter said sorry, then it ended. I didn’t think it was unfinished. He had nothing more to say.
“I didn’t know,” I said.
I handed Smiley back the letter. He returned it to his pocket. His eyes didn’t leave my face.
“Or you didn’t know you knew,” he suggested.
“I didn’t know,” I repeated hotly. “What are you trying to make me say?”
You must try to understand Smiley’s eminence, the respect his name awoke in someone of my generation. He waited for me. I shall remember all my life the compelling power of his patience. A sudden shower of rain fell, with the handclap that London showers make in narrow sweets. If Smiley had told me he commanded the elements, I would not have been surprised.
“In England you can’t tell anyway,” I said sulkily, trying to collect myself. God alone knows what point I was trying to make. “Jack Arthur’s not married, is he? Nowhere to go in the evenings. Drinks with the lads till the bar closes. Then drinks a bit more. No one says Jack Arthur’s queer. But if they arrested him tomorrow in bed with two of the cooks, we’d say we’d known it all along. Or I would. It’s imponderable.” I stumbled on, all wrong, groping for a path and finding none. I knew that to protest at all was to protest too much, but I went on protesting all the same.
“Anyway, where was the letter found?” I demanded, trying to recover the initiative.
“In a drawer of his desk. I thought I told you.”
“An empty drawer?”
“Does it matter?”
“Yes, it does! If it was jammed in among old papers, that’s one thing. If it was put there to be found by you people, that’s another. Maybe he was forced to write it.”
“Oh, I’m sure he was forced,” said Smiley. “It’s just a question of what by. Did you know he was so lonely? If there was no one in his life but you, I’d have thought it would have been rather obvious.”
“Then why wasn’t it obvious to Personnel?” I said, bridling again. “My God, they grilled us for long enough before they appointed us. Sniffed round our friends and relations and teachers and dons. They know far more about Ben than I do.”
“Why don’t we just assume that Personnel fell down on the job? He’s human, this is England, we’re the clan. Let’s begin again with the Ben who’s disappeared. The Ben who wrote to you. There was no one close to him but you. Not anyone that you knew of, anyway. There could have been lots of people you didn’t know of, but that’s not your fault. As far as you knew, there was no one. We have that settled. Don’t we?”
“Yes!”
“Very well then, let’s talk about what you did know. How’s that?”
Somehow he brought me down to earth and we talked into the small grey hours. Long after the rain had stopped and the starlings had begun, we were talking. Or I was—and Smiley was listening as only Smiley can, eyes half closed, chins sunk into his neck. I thought I was telling him everything I knew. Perhaps he thought I was too, though I doubt it, for he understood far better than I the levels of self-deception that are the means of our survival. The phone rang. He listened, muttered “Thank you” and rang off. “Ben’s still missing and there are no new pointers,” he said. “You’re still the only clue.” He took no notes that I remember and I don’t know to this day whether he had a recorder running. I doubt it. He hated machines, and besides, his memory was more reliable than theirs.
I talked about Ben but I talked as much about myself, which was what Smiley wanted me to do: myself as the explanation for Ben’s actions. I described again the parallel nature of our lives. How I had envied him his heroic father—I, who had no father to remember. I made no secret of our shared excitement, Ben’s and mine, when we began to discover how much we had in common. No, no, I said again, I knew of no one woman—except his mother, who was dead. And I believed myself. I am sure I did.
In childhood, I told Smiley, I used to wonder whether somewhere in the world there was not another version of myself, some secret twin who had the same toys and clothes and thoughts that I did, even the same parents. Perhaps I’d read a book based on this story. I was an only child. So was Ben. I told Smiley all this because I was determined to talk directly to him from my thoughts and memories as they came to me, even if they incriminated me in his eyes. I only know that, consciously, I held nothing back from him, even if I reckoned it potentially ruinous to myself. Somehow Smiley had convinced me that was the least I owed to Ben. Unconsciously—well, that’s another matter altogether. Who knows what a man hides, even from himself, when he is telling the truth for his survival?
I told him of our first meeting—mine and Ben’s—in the Circus training house in Lambeth where the newly selected entrants were convened. Until then, none of us had met any of his fellow novices. We had hardly met the Circus either, for that matter, beyond the recruiting officer, the selectors and the vetting team. Some of us had only the haziest notion of what we’d joined. Finally we were to be enlightened—about each other, and about our calling—and we gathered in the waiting room like so many characters in a Foreign Legion novel, each with his secret expectations and his secret reasons for being there, each with his overnight bag containing the same quantity of shirts and underpants, marked in Indian ink with his personal number, in obedience to the printed instructions on the unheaded notepaper. My number was nine and Be
n’s was ten. There were two people ahead of me when I walked into the waiting room, Ben and a stocky little Scot called Jimmy. I nodded at Jimmy, but Ben and I recognised each other at once—I don’t mean from school or university but as people who bear a physical and temperamental similarity to one another.
“Enter the third murderer,” he said, shaking my hand. It seemed a wonderfully inappropriate moment to be quoting Shakespeare. “I’m Ben, this is Jimmy. Apparently we’ve got no surnames any more. Jimmy left his in Aberdeen.”
So I shook Jimmy’s hand as well, and waited on the bench beside Ben to see who came through the door next.
“Five to one he’s got a moustache, ten to one a beard, thirty to one green socks,” said Ben.
“And evens on a cloak,” I said.
I told Smiley about the training exercises in unfamiliar towns when we had to invent a cover story, meet a contact and withstand arrest and interrogation. I let him sense how such exploits deepened our companionship, just as sharing our first parachute jumps deepened it, or compass-trekking at night across the Scottish Highlands, or looking out dead-letter boxes in godforsaken inner cities, or making a beach landing by submarine.
I described to him how the directing staff would sometimes drop a veiled reference to Ben’s father, just to emphasise their pride in having the son to teach. I told him about our leave weekends, how we would go once to my mother’s house in Gloucestershire and once to his father’s in Shropshire. And how, each parent being widowed, we had amused ourselves with the notion that we might broker a marriage between them. But the chances in reality were small, for my mother was stubbornly Anglo-Dutch, with jolly sisters and nephews and nieces who all looked like Breughel models, whereas Ben’s father had become a scholarly recluse whose only known surviving passion was for Bach.
“And Ben reveres him,” said Smiley, prodding again at the same spot.
“Yes. He adored his mother but she’s dead. His father has become some sort of icon for him.”
The Secret Pilgrim Page 5