Smiley's People

by John le Carré

  Here Smiley drew his first tentative conclusion. A step—not a large one, but he had enough large steps on his mind already. A technical step, call it: a modest technical step. The photograph had every mark of being what the trade called stolen. And stolen moreover with a view to burning, meaning “blackmail.” But the blackmail of whom? To what end?

  Weighing the problem, Smiley probably fell asleep. The telephone was on Ann’s little desk, and it must have rung three or four times before he was aware of it.

  “Yes, Oliver?” said Smiley cautiously.

  “Ah. George. I tried you earlier. You got back all right, I trust?”

  “Where from?” asked Smiley.

  Lacon preferred not to answer this question. “I felt I owed you a call, George. We parted on a sour note. I was brusque. Too much on my plate. I apologise. How are things? You are done? Finished?”

  In the background Smiley heard Lacon’s daughters squabbling about how much rent was payable on a hotel in Park Place. He’s got them for the week-end, thought Smiley.

  “I’ve had the Home Office on the line again, George,” Lacon went on in a lower voice, not bothering to wait for his reply. “They’ve had the pathologist’s report and the body may be released. An early cremation is recommended. I thought perhaps if I gave you the name of the firm that is handling things, you might care to pass it on to those concerned. Unattributably, of course. You saw the press release? What did you think of it? I thought it was apt. I thought it caught the tone exactly.”

  “I’ll get a pencil,” Smiley said and fumbled in the drawer once more until he found a pear-shaped plastic object with a leather thong, which Ann sometimes wore around her neck. With difficulty he prised it open, and wrote to Lacon’s dictation: the firm, the address, the firm again, followed yet again by the address.

  “Got it? Want me to repeat it? Or should you read it back to me, make assurance double sure?”

  “I think I have it, thank you,” Smiley said. Somewhat belatedly, it dawned on him that Lacon was drunk.

  “Now, George, we have a date, don’t forget. A seminar on marriage with no holds barred. I have cast you as my elder statesman here. There’s a very decent steak-house downstairs and I shall treat you to a slap-up dinner while you give me of your wisdom. Have you a diary there? Let’s pencil something in.”

  With dismal foreboding Smiley agreed on a date. After a lifetime of inventing cover stories for every occasion, he still found it impossible to talk his way out of a dinner invitation.

  “And you found nothing?” Lacon asked, on a more cautious note. “No snags, hitches, loose ends. It was a storm in a teacup, was it, as we suspected?”

  A lot of answers crossed Smiley’s mind, but he saw no use to any of them.

  “What about the phone bill?” Smiley asked.

  “Phone bill? What phone bill? Ah, you mean his. Pay it and send me the receipt. No problem. Better still, slip it in the post to Strickland.”

  “I already sent it to you,” said Smiley patiently. “I asked you for a breakdown of traceable calls.”

  “I’ll get on to them at once,” Lacon replied blandly. “Nothing else?”

  “No. No, I don’t think so. Nothing.”

  “Get some sleep. You sound all in.”

  “Good night,” said Smiley.

  With Ann’s magnifying glass in his plump fist once more, Smiley went back to his examination. The floor of the pit was carpeted, apparently in white; the quilted sofas were formed in a horseshoe following the line of the drapes that comprised the rear perimeter. There was an upholstered door in the background and the clothes the two men had discarded—jackets, neckties, trousers—were hanging from it with hospital neatness. There was an ashtray on the table and Smiley set to work trying to read the writing round the edge. After much manipulation of the glass he came up with what the lapsed philologist in him described as the asterisk (or putative) form of the letters “A-C-H-T,” but whether as a word in their own right—meaning “eight” or “attention,” as well as certain other more remote concepts—or as four letters from a larger word, he could not tell. Nor did he at this stage exert himself to find out, preferring simply to store the intelligence in the back of his mind until some other part of the puzzle forced it into play.

  Ann rang. Once again, perhaps, he had dozed off, for his recollection ever afterwards was that he did not hear the ring of the phone at all, but simply her voice as he slowly lifted the receiver to his ear: “George, George,” as if she had been crying for him a long time, and he had only now summoned the energy or the caring to answer her.

  They began their conversation as strangers, much as they began their love-making.

  “How are you?” she asked.

  “Very well, thank you. How are you? What can I do for you?”

  “I meant it,” Ann insisted. “How are you? I want to know.”

  “And I told you I was well.”

  “I rang you this morning. Why didn’t you answer?”

  “I was out.”

  Long silence while she appeared to consider this feeble excuse. The telephone had never been a bother to her. It gave her no sense of urgency.

  “Out working?” she asked.

  “An administrative thing for Lacon.”

  “He begins his administration early these days.”

  “His wife’s left him,” Smiley said by way of explanation.

  No answer.

  “You used to say she would be wise to,” he went on. “She should get out fast, you used to say, before she became another Civil Service geisha.”

  “I’ve changed my mind. He needs her.”

  “But she, I gather, does not need him,” Smiley pointed out, taking refuge in an academic tone.

  “Silly woman,” said Ann, and another longer silence followed, this time of Smiley’s making while he contemplated the sudden unwished-for mountain of choice she had revealed to him.

  To be together again, as she sometimes called it.

  To forget the hurts, the list of lovers; to forget Bill Haydon, the Circus traitor, whose shadow still fell across her face each time he reached for her, whose memory he carried in him like a constant pain. Bill his friend, Bill the flower of their generation, the jester, the enchanter, the iconoclastic conformer; Bill the born deceiver, whose quest for the ultimate betrayal led him into the Russians’ bed, and Ann’s. To stage yet another honeymoon, fly away to the South of France, eat the meals, buy the clothes, all the let’s pretend that lovers play. And for how long? How long before her smile faded and her eyes grew dull and those mythical relations started needing her to cure their mythical ailments in far-off places?

  “Where are you?” he asked.

  “Hilda’s.”

  “I thought you were in Cornwall.”

  Hilda was a divorced woman of some speed. She lived in Kensington, not twenty minutes’ walk away.

  “So where’s Hilda?” he asked when he had come to terms with this intelligence.

  “Out.”

  “All night?”

  “I expect so, knowing Hilda. Unless she brings him back.”

  “Well then, I suppose you must entertain yourself as well as you can without her,” he said, but as he spoke he heard her whisper “George.”

  A profound and vehement fear seized hold of Smiley’s heart. He glared across the room at the reading chair and saw the contact photograph still on the book-rest beside her magnifying glass; in a single surge of memory, he reconstructed all the things that had hinted and whispered to him throughout the endless day; he heard the drum-beats of his own past, summoning him to one last effort to externalise and resolve the conflict he had lived by; and he wanted her nowhere near him. Tell Max that it concerns the Sandman. Gifted with the clarity that hunger, tiredness, and confusion can supply, Smiley knew for certain she must have no part in what he had to do. He knew—he was barely at the threshold—yet he still knew that it was just possible, against all the odds, that he had been given, in late age,
a chance to return to the rained-out contests of his life and play them after all. If that was so, then no Ann, no false peace, no tainted witness to his actions should disturb his lonely quest. He had not known his mind till then. But now he knew it.

  “You mustn’t,” he said. “Ann? Listen. You mustn’t come here. It has nothing to do with choice. It’s to do with practicalities. You mustn’t come here.” His own words rang strangely to him.

  “Then come here,” she said.

  He rang off. He imagined her crying, then getting out her address book to see who from her First Eleven, as she called them, might console her in his place. He poured himself a neat whisky, the Lacon solution. He went to the kitchen, forgot why, and wandered into his study. Soda, he thought. Too late. Do without. I must have been mad, he thought. I’m chasing phantoms, there is nothing there. A senile General had a dream and died for it. He remembered Wilde: the fact that a man dies for a cause does not make that cause right. A picture was crooked. He straightened it, too much, too little, stepping back each time. Tell him it concerns the Sandman. He returned to the reading chair and his two prostitutes, fixing on them through Ann’s magnifying glass with a ferocity that would have sent them scurrying to their pimps.

  Clearly they were from the upper end of their profession, being fresh-bodied and young and well-groomed. They seemed also—but perhaps it was coincidence—to be deliberately distinguished from each other by whoever had selected them. The girl at the left was blonde and fine and even classical in build, with long thighs and small high breasts. Whereas her companion was dark-haired and stubby, with spreading hips and flared features, perhaps Eurasian. The blonde, he recorded, wore earrings in the shape of anchors, which struck him as odd because, in his limited experience of women, earrings were what they took off first. Ann had only to go out of the house without wearing them for his heart to sink. Beyond that he could think of nothing very clever to say about either girl and so, having swallowed another large gulp of raw Scotch, he transferred his attention to the men, once more—which was where it had been, if he would admit it, ever since he had started looking at the photograph in the first place. Like the girls, they were sharply differentiated from each other, though in the men—since they were a deal older—the differences had the appearance of greater depth and legibility of character. The man supporting the blonde girl was fair and at first sight dull, while the man supporting the dark girl was not merely dark-complexioned but had a Latin, even Levantine, alertness in his features, and an infectious smile that was the one engaging feature of the photograph. The fair man was large and sprawling, the dark man was small and bright enough to be his jester: a little imp of a fellow, with a kind face and flicked-up horns of hair above his ears.

  A sudden nervousness—in retrospect perhaps foreboding—made Smiley take the fair man first. It was a time to feel safer with strangers.

  The man’s torso was burly but not athletic, his limbs ponderous without suggesting strength. The fairness of his skin and hair emphasised his obesity. His hands, one splayed on the girl’s flank, the other round her waist, were fatty and artless. Lifting the magnifying glass slowly over the naked chest, Smiley reached the head. By the age of forty, someone clever had written ominously, a man gets the face he deserves. Smiley doubted it. He had known poetic souls condemned to life imprisonment behind harsh faces, and delinquents with the appearance of angels. Nevertheless, it was not an asset as a face, nor had the camera caught it at its most appealing. In terms of character, it appeared to be divided into two parts: the lower, which was pulled into a grin of crude high spirits as, open-mouthed, he addressed something to his male companion; the upper, which was ruled by two small and pallid eyes round which no mirth had gathered at all and no high spirits either, but which seemed to look out of their doughy surroundings with the cold, unblinking blandness of a child. The nose was flat, the hair-style full and mid-European.

  Greedy, Ann would have said, who was given to passing absolute judgment on people merely by studying their portraits in the press. Greedy, weak, vicious. Avoid. A pity she had not reached the same conclusion about Haydon, he thought; or not in time.

  Smiley returned to the kitchen and rinsed his face, then remembered that he had come to fetch water for his whisky. Settling again in the reading chair, he trained the magnifying glass on the second of the men, the jester. The whisky was keeping him awake, but it was also putting him to sleep. Why doesn’t she ring again? he thought. If she rings again, I’ll go to her. But in reality his mind was on this second face, because its familiarity disturbed him in much the way that its urgent complicity had disturbed Villem and Ostrakova before him. He gazed at it and his tiredness left him, he seemed to draw energy from it. Some faces, as Villem had suggested this morning, are known to us before we see them; others we see once and remember all our lives; others we see every day and never remember at all. But which was this?

  A Toulouse-Lautrec face, Smiley thought, peering in wonder—caught as the eyes slid away to some intense and perhaps erotic distraction. Ann would have taken to him immediately; he had the dangerous edge she liked. A Toulouse-Lautrec face, caught as a stray shard of fair-ground light fired one gaunt and travelled cheek. A hewn face, peaked and jagged, of which the brow and nose and jaw seemed all to have succumbed to the same eroding gales. A Toulouse-Lautrec face, swift and attaching. A waiter’s face, never a diner’s. With a waiter’s anger burning brightest behind a subservient smile. Ann would like that side less well. Leaving the print where it lay, Smiley clambered slowly to his feet in order to keep himself awake, and lumbered round the room, trying to place it, failing, wondering whether it was all imagining. Some people transmit, he thought. Some people—you meet them, and they bring you their whole past as a natural gift. Some people are intimacy itself.

  At Ann’s writing-table he paused to stare at the telephone again. Hers. Hers and Haydon’s. Hers and everybody’s. Trimline, he thought. Or was it Slimline? Five pounds extra to the Post Office for the questionable pleasure of its outmoded, futuristic lines. My tart’s phone, she used to call it. The little warble for my little loves, the loud woo-hoo for my big ones. He realised it was ringing. Had been ringing a long while, the little warble for the little loves. He put down his glass, still staring at the telephone while it trilled. She used to leave it on the floor among her records when she was playing music, he remembered. She used to lie with it—there, by the fire, over there—one haunch carelessly lifted in case it needed her. When she went to bed, she unplugged it and took it with her, to comfort her in the night. When they made love, he knew he was the surrogate for all the men who hadn’t rung. For the First Eleven. For Bill Haydon, even though he was dead.

  It had stopped ringing.

  What does she do now? Try the Second Eleven? To be beautiful and Ann is one thing, she had said to him not long ago; to be beautiful and Ann’s age will soon be another. And to be ugly and mine is another again, he thought furiously. Taking up the contact print, he resumed, with fresh intensity, his contemplations.

  Shadows, he thought. Smudges of light and dark, ahead of us, behind us, as we lurch along our ways. Imp’s horns, devil’s horns, our shadows so much larger than ourselves. Who is he? Who was he? I met him. I refused to. And if I refused to, how do I know him? He was a supplicant of some kind, a man with something to sell—intelligence, then? Dreams? Wakefully now, he stretched out on the sofa—anything rather than go upstairs to bed—and with the print before him, began plodding through the long galleries of his professional memory, holding the lamp to the half-forgotten portraits of charlatans, gold-markers, fabricators, pedlars, middlemen, hoods, rogues, and occasionally heroes who made up the supporting cast of his multitudinous acquaintance; looking for the one hollowed face that, like a secret sharer, seemed to have swum out of the little contact photograph to board his faltering consciousness. The lamp’s beam flitted, hesitated, returned. I was deceived by the darkness, he thought. I met him in the light. He saw a ghastly, neon-lit hotel b
edroom—Muzak and tartan wallpaper, and the little stranger perched smiling in a corner, calling him Max. A little ambassador—but representing what cause, what country? He recalled an overcoat with velvet tabs, and hard little hands jerking out their own dance. He recalled the passionate, laughing eyes, the crisp mouth opening and closing swiftly, but he heard no words. He felt a sense of loss—of missing the target—of some other, looming shadow being present while they spoke.

  Maybe, he thought. Everything is maybe. Maybe Vladimir was shot by a jealous husband after all, he thought, as the front doorbell screamed at him like a vulture, two rings.

  She’s forgotten her key as usual, he thought. He was in the hall before he knew it, fumbling with the lock. Her key would do no good, he realised; like Ostrakova, he had chained the door. He fished at the chain, calling “Ann. Hang on!” and feeling nothing in his fingers. He slammed a bolt along its runner and heard the whole house tingle to the echo. “Just coming!” he shouted. “Wait! Don’t go!”