The Secret Pilgrim

by John le Carré

  No, no, he was a great, good man, and fifteen years our joe. If a man is tall, then clearly he has authority. If he has a golden voice, then his words are also golden. If he looks like Schiller, he must feel like Schiller. If the smile is remote and spiritual, then so for sure is the man within. Thus the visual society.

  Except that just occasionally, as I think now, God amuses Himself by dealing us an entirely different man inside the shell. Some founder and are rumbled. Others expand until they meet the challenge of their looks. And a few do neither, but wear their splendours like a favour granted from above, blandly accepting the homage that is not their due.

  The Professor’s operational history is quickly told. Too quickly, for it was a mite banal. He was born in Debrecen, close to the Romanian border, an only son of indulgent parents of the small nobility who trimmed their sails to every wind. Through them, he inherited money and connections, a thing that happened more often in the so-called Socialist countries, even in those days, than you would suppose. He was a man of letters, a writer of articles for learned journals, a bit of a poet and a lover several times married. He wore his jackets like capes, the sleeves loose. All these luxuries he could well afford, on account of his privileges and discreet wealth.

  In Budapest, where he taught a languid version of philosophy, he had acquired a modest following among his students, who discerned more fire in Teodor’s words than he intended, for he was never cut out to be an orator, rhetoric being something for the rabble. Nevertheless, he had risen a certain distance to their needs. He had observed their passion, and as a natural conciliator he had responded by giving it a voice—moderate enough in all conscience, but a voice for all that, and one they respected, along with his beautiful manners and air of representing an older, better order. He was of an age, by then, to be warmed by youthful adulation, and he was always vain. And through vanity he allowed himself to be carried on the counter-revolutionary tide. So that when the Soviet tanks turned back from the border and surrounded Budapest on the terrible night of November 3, 1956, he had no choice but to run for his life, which he did, into the arms of British Intelligence.

  The Professor’s first act on arriving in Vienna was to telephone a Hungarian friend at Oxford, pressing him in his peremptory way for money, introductions and letters testifying to his excellence. This friend happened also to be a friend of the Circus, and it was the high season for recruitment.

  Within months, the Professor was on the payroll. There was little courtship, no arch approach, no customary fan dance. The offer was made, and accepted as a due. Within a year, with generous American assistance, Professor Teodor had been set up in Munich, in a comfortable house beside the river, with a car and his devoted if distraught wife Helena, who had escaped with him— one suspected, somewhat to his regret. Henceforth, and for an extraordinary length of time, Professor Teodor had been the unlikely spearhead of our Hungarian attack, and not even Haydon had unseated him.

  His cover job was Radio Free Europe’s patrician-at-large on the subject of Hungarian history and culture, and it fitted him like a glove. He had never been much else. In addition, he lectured a little and gave private tuition—mainly, I noticed, to girls. His clandestine job, for which, thanks to the Americans, he was remarkably well paid, was to foster his links with the friends and former students he had left behind, to be a focus for them and a rallying point and, under guidance, to shape them into an operational network, though none, to my knowledge, had ever quite emerged. It was a visionary operation, and better on the page perhaps than on the ground. Yet it ran and ran. It ran for five years, and then another five and by the time I took up the great man’s file, it had completed an extraordinary fifteen years. Some operations are like that, and stagnation favours them. They are not expensive, they are not conclusive, they don’t necessarily lead anywhere—but then neither does political stalemate—they are free of scandal. And each year when the annual audit is taken, they are waved through without a vote, until their longevity becomes their justification.

  Now I won’t say the Professor had achieved nothing for us in all that time. To say so would not only be unfair, it would be derogatory to Toby Esterhase, himself of Hungarian origin, who on his reinstatement After the Fall had become the desk officer handling the Professor’s case. Toby had paid a heavy price for his blind support of Haydon, and when he was given the Hungary desk—never the most exalted of Iron Curtain slots—the Professor promptly became the most important player in Toby’s personal rehabilitation programme.

  “Teodor, I would say, Ned—Teodor is our absolutely total star,” he had assured me before I left London, over a lunch he nearly paid for. “Old school, total discretion, lot of years in the saddle, loyal like a leech. Teodor is our ace, totally.”

  And certainly one of the Professor’s more striking accomplishments had been to escape the Haydon axe—either because he had been lucky or, less charitably, because the Professor had never produced enough intelligence to merit the interest of a busy traitor. For I could not help noticing as I prepared myself for the takeover—my predecessor having dropped dead of a stroke while on leave in Ibiza—that whereas Teodor’s personal file ran to several volumes, his product file was unusually slender. Partly this could be explained by the fact that his main function had been to spot talent rather than exploit it, partly that the few sources he had guided into our net over the long period he had been working for us were still relatively unproductive.

  “Hungary, Ned, that’s actually a damned hard target, I would say,” Toby assured me when I delicately pointed this out to him. “It’s too open. An open target, you get a lot of crap you know already. If you don’t get the Crown jewels, you get the common knowledge—who needs it? What Teodor produces for the Americans, it’s fantastic.”

  This seemed to be the nub. “So what does he produce for them actually?” I asked. “Apart from hearts and minds on the radio, and articles no one reads?”

  Toby’s smile became unpleasantly superior. “Sorry, Ned, old boy. ‘Need to know,’ I’m afraid. You’re not on the list for this one.”

  A few days later, as protocol required, I called on Russell Sheriton in Grosvenor Square to say my goodbyes. Sheriton was the Cousins’ Head of Station in London, but he was also responsible for their Western European operations. I bided my time, then dropped the name of Teodor.

  “Ah now, that’s for Munich to say, Ned,” Sheriton said quickly. “You know me. Never trespass on another man’s preserves.”

  “But is he doing you any good? That’s all I want to know. I mean joes do burn out, don’t they? Fifteen years.”

  “Well now, we thought he was doing you some good, Ned. To hear Toby speak, you’d think Teodor was propping up the free world single-handed.”

  No, I thought. To hear Toby speak, you’d think Teodor was propping up Toby single-handed. But I was not cynical. In spying, as in much of life, it is always easier to say no than yes. I arrived in Munich prepared to believe that Teodor was the star Toby had cracked him up to be. All I wanted was to be assured.

  And I was. At first I was. He was magnificent. I thought my marriage to Mabel had ridded me of such swift enthusiasms, and in a way it had, until the evening when he opened the door to me and I decided I had walked in on one of those perfectly preserved relics of mid-European history, and that all I could decently do was sit at his feet like the rest of his disciples and drink in his wisdom. This is what the Service is for! I thought. Such a man is worth saving on his own account! The culture, I thought. The breadth. The years and years of service.

  He received me warmly but with a certain distance, as became his age and distinction. He offered me a glass of fine Tokay and treated me to a discourse on its provenance. No, I confessed, I knew little about Hungarian wines, but I was keen to learn. He talked music, of which I am also sadly ignorant, and played a few bars for me on his treasured violin, the very one he had brought with him when he escaped from Hungary, he explained, and made not by Stradivarius bu
t someone infinitely better, whose name has long escaped me. I thought it a wonderful privilege to be running an agent who had fled with his violin. He talked theatre. A Hungarian theatrical company was presently on tour in Munich with an extraordinary Othello, and though Mabel and I had yet to see the production, his opinion of it enchanted me. He was dressed in what German’s call a Hausjacke, black trousers and a pair of splendidly polished boots. We talked of God and the world, we ate the best gulyás of my life, served by the distraught Helena, who whispered her excuses and left us. She was a tall woman and must once have been beautiful, but she preferred to wear the signs of her neglect. We rounded off the meal with an apricot palinká.

  “Herr Ned, if I may call you so,” said the Professor, “there is one matter which weighs heavily on my mind, and which you will permit me to raise with you at the outset of our professional relationship.”

  “Please do,” I said generously.

  “Unfortunately, your most recent predecessor—a good man, of course”—he broke off, evidently unable to speak ill of the recent dead—“and, like yourself, a man of culture—”

  “Please,” I repeated.

  “It concerns my British passport.”

  “I didn’t know you had one!” I exclaimed in surprise.

  “That is the point. I haven’t. One understands there are problems. It is so with all bureaucracies. Bureaucracies are the most evil of man’s institutions, Herr Ned. They enshrine the worst of us and bring low the best of us. An exiled Hungarian living in Munich in the employment of an American organisation is not naturally eligible for British citizenship. I understand that. Nevertheless, after my many years of collaboration with your department; I am owed this passport. A temporary travel document is not a dignified alternative.”

  “But I understood the Americans were giving you a passport! Wasn’t that the deal right from the beginning? The Americans to be responsible for your citizenship and resettlement? That includes a passport, surely. It must!”

  I was upset that a man who had given us so much of his life should have been denied this simple dignity. But the Professor had learned a more philosophical attitude.

  “The Americans, Herr Ned, are a young people and a mercenary people. Having used the best of me, they can scarcely regard me as a man of the future. For the Americans, I belong already to the garbage heap of obsolescence.”

  “But didn’t they promise—subject to satisfactory service? I’m sure they did!”

  He made a gesture I shall never forget. He lifted his hands from the table as if he were raising a prodigiously heavy rock. He brought them almost to the level of his shoulders, before letting them crash at full force back onto the table, the imaginary rock between them. And I remember his eyes, indignant from the exertion, accusing me in the silence. So much for your promises, he was saying. Yours and the Americans, both.

  “Just get me my passport, Herr Ned.”

  As a loyal case officer, concerned to do the best for my joe, I threw myself upon the problem. Knowing Toby of old, I decided to take an official tone from the beginning: no half promises, no vaporous reassurances for me. I informed Toby of Teodor’s request and asked for guidance. He was my desk officer after all, my London anchor. If it was true that the Americans were sliding out of their undertaking to give the Professor citizenship, the matter would have to he dealt with in London or Washington, I said, not Munich. And if, for reasons outside my knowledge, a British passport was to be granted after all, this too would require the energetic endorsement of the Fifth Floor. The days were gone for good when the Home Office handed out free British citizenship to every ex-Circus Tom, Dick and Teodor. The Fall had seen to that.

  I did not signal my request, but sent it by bag, which in Circus lore gives greater formality. I wrote a fighting letter and a couple of weeks later followed it with a reminder. But when the Professor asked for a progress report, I was noncommittal. It’s in the pipeline, I assured him; London does not take kindly to being hustled. But I still wondered why Toby took so long to answer.

  Meanwhile, at my meetings with Teodor, I strove to unravel what precisely he was doing for us that made him the star of Toby’s underpopulated firmament. My investigations were not made easier by the Professor’s prickliness, and at first I wondered whether he was withholding his cooperation until the question of his passport was settled. Gradually I realised that where our secret work was concerned, this was his normal demeanour.

  One of his more humdrum jobs was maintaining a one-roomed student flat in the Schwabing district, which he used as a safe address for receiving mail from certain of his Hungarian contacts. I persuaded him to take me there. He unlocked the door and there must have been a dozen envelopes lying on the mat, all with Hungarian stamps.

  “My goodness, when did you last come here, Professor?” I asked him as I watched him gather them laboriously together.

  He shrugged, I thought gracelessly.

  “How many letters do you normally reckon to receive in a week, Professor?”

  I took the envelopes from him and went through the postmarks. The oldest had been posted three weeks ago, the most recent, one. We moved to the tiny desk, which was covered in dust. With a sigh he settled himself in the chair, opened a drawer and withdrew a couple of bottles of chemicals and a paintbrush from a concealed recess. Taking up the first envelope, he examined it gloomily, then slit it open with a pocket knife.

  “Who’s it from?” I asked, with more curiosity than he appeared to consider warranted.

  “Pali,” he replied gloomily.

  “Pali at the Agriculture Ministry?”

  “Pali from Debrecen. He has been visiting Romania.”

  “What for? Not the toxic-weapons conference? That could be a scoop!”

  “We shall see. An academic conference of some kind. His field is cybernetics. He is undistinguished.”

  I watched him dip the brush into the first bottle and paint the back of the handwritten letter with it. He rinsed the brush in water and applied the second chemical. And it seemed to me he was determined to demonstrate his disdain for such menial employment. He repeated the process for every letter, sometimes varying the routine by spreading open the envelope and treating the inside of it, or by painting between the lines of the visible handwriting. In the same slow motion, he sat himself at an upright Remington and wearily tapped out in translation the texts that had emerged: anticipated mineral and power deficiencies in the new industries . . . bauxite quotas for mines in the Bakony Mountains . . . low metal content of iron ore recently extracted in the region of Miskolc . . . projected yield of maize and sugar-beet harvest in the region of somewhere else . . . rumours of five-year plan to revitalise State railway network . . . disruptive action against Party officials in Sopron . . . I could almost hear the yawns of the Third Floor analysts as they waded through such turgid stuff. I remembered Toby’s boast that Teodor was only interested in the highest quality of intelligence. If this was the highest, what in heaven’s name was the lowest? Patience, I told myself. Great agents have to be humoured.

  The next day I received a reply to my letter about the passport. The problem, Toby explained, was that there had been a lot of changes among the Cousins’ Hungarian Section in recent years. An effort was now being made, he said—making suspicious use of the passive voice—to establish the terms of any undertakings given by the Americans or ourselves. Meanwhile I should avoid discussing the matter with Teodor, he added—as if it were I, not the Professor, who was making the running.

  The matter was still in the air three weeks later when I lunched with Milton Wagner at the Cosmo. Wagner was an old hand and my American opposite number. Now he was winding up his career as the Cousins’ Chief of Eastern Operations, Munich. The Cosmo was the kind of place Americans make anywhere, with crisp potato skins and garlic dip, and club sandwiches impaled on enormous plastic hairpins.

  “How are you getting along with our distinguished academic friend?” he asked, in his southern drawl
, after we had despatched our other business.

  “Splendidly,” I replied.

  “Couple of our people seem to think Teodor’s been having himself a free ride these how many years,” said Wagner lazily.

  This time I said nothing.

  “The boys back home have been holding a retrospective of his work. Not good, Ned. Not good at all. Some of the ‘Hello, Hungary’ stuff he’s been pushing out on the radio. It’s been said before. They’ve found one passage makes a perfect fit with an article published in Der Monat back in ’48. The original writer recognised his own words soon as he heard them on the air and flipped.” He helped himself liberally to ketchup. “Could be any day now we haul him in for a full and frank exchange.”

  “Probably going through a bad patch,” I said.

  “Fifteen years is a long bad patch, Ned.”

  “Is he aware you’re checking on him?”

  “In Radio Free Europe, Ned? Among Hungarians? Gossip? You must be joking.”

  I could no longer contain my anxiety. “But why has nobody warned London? Why haven’t you?”

  “Understand we did, Ned. Understand the message fell on pretty deaf ears. Bad time for you boys. Don’t we know it.”

  By now the momentous force of his news had got through to me. If the Professor was cheating with his broadcasts, whom else might he not be cheating?”

  “Milt, can I ask you a silly question?”

  “Be my guest, Ned.”

  “Has Teodor ever done good work for you? In all his time? Secret work? Very secret work, even?”

  Wagner pondered this, determined to give the Professor the benefit of the doubt. “Can’t say he has, Ned. We did consider using him as an intermediary for one of our big fish one time, but we kind of didn’t like the old man’s manners.”

  “Can I believe that?”

  “Would I ever lie to you, Ned?”

  So much for the fantastic work he’s doing for the Americans, I thought. So much for the years of loyal service nobody can quite recall.