Smiley's People

by John le Carré

  He heaved the door wide open, swaying on the threshold, offering his plump face as a sacrifice to the midnight air, to the shimmering black leather figure, crash helmet under his arm, standing before him like death’s sentinel.

  “I didn’t mean to alarm, sir, I’m sure,” the stranger said. Clutching the doorway, Smiley could only stare at his intruder. He was tall and close cropped, and his eyes reflected unrequited loyalty.

  “Ferguson, sir. You remember me, sir, Ferguson? I used to manage the transport pool for Mr. Esterhase’s lamplighters.”

  His black motor cycle with its side-car was parked on the kerb behind him, its lovingly polished surfaces glinting under the street lamp.

  “I thought lamplighter section had been disbanded,” Smiley said, still staring at him.

  “So they have, sir. Scattered to the four winds, I regret to say. The camaraderie, the spirit, gone for ever.”

  “So who employs you?”

  “Well no one, sir. Not officially, as you might say. But still on the side of the angels, all the same.”

  “I didn’t know we had any angels.”

  “No, well that’s true, sir. All men are fallible, I do say. Specially these days.” He was holding a brown envelope for Smiley to take. “From certain friends of yours, sir, put it that way. I understand it relates to a telephone account you were enquiring about. We get a good response from the Post Office generally, I will say. Good night, sir. Sorry to bother you. Time you had some shut-eye, isn’t it? Good men are scarce, I always say.”

  “Good night,” said Smiley.

  But still his visitor lingered, like someone asking for a tip. “You did remember me really, didn’t you, sir? It was just a lapse, wasn’t it?”

  “Of course.”

  There were stars, he noticed as he closed the door. Clear stars swollen by the dew. Shivering, he took out one of Ann’s many photograph albums and opened it at the centre. It was her habit, when she liked a snap, to wedge the negative behind it. Selecting a picture of the two of them in Cap Ferrat—Ann in a bathing-dress, Smiley prudently covered—he removed the negative and put Vladimir’s behind it. He tidied up his chemicals and equipment and slipped the print into the twelfth volume of his 1961 Oxford English Dictionary, under Y for Yesterday. He opened Ferguson’s envelope, glanced wearily at the contents, registered a couple of entries and the word “Hamburg,” and tossed the whole lot into a drawer of the desk. Tomorrow, he thought; tomorrow is another riddle. He climbed into bed, never sure, as usual, which side to sleep on. He closed his eyes and at once the questions bombarded him, as he knew they would, in crazy uncoordinated salvoes.

  Why didn’t Vladimir ask for Hector? he wondered for the hundredth time. Why did the old man liken Esterhase, alias Hector, to the City banks who took your umbrella away when it rained?

  Tell Max it concerns the Sandman.

  To ring her? To throw on his clothes and hurry round there, to be received as her secret lover, creeping away with the dawn?

  Too late. She was already suited.

  Suddenly, he wanted her dreadfully. He could not bear the spaces round him that did not contain her, he longed for her laughing trembling body as she cried to him, calling him her only true, her best lover, she wanted none other, ever. “Women are lawless, George,” she had told him once, when they lay in rare peace. “So what am I?” he had asked, and she said, “My law.” “So what was Haydon?” he had asked. And she laughed and said, “My anarchy.”

  He saw the little photograph again, printed, like the little stranger himself, in his sinking memory. A small man, with a big shadow. He remembered Villem’s description of the little figure on the Hamburg ferry, the horns of flicked-up hair, the grooved face, the warning eyes. General, he thought chaotically, will you not send me your magic friend once more?

  Maybe. Everything is maybe.

  Hamburg, he thought, and got quickly out of bed and put on his dressing-gown. Back at Ann’s desk, he set to work seriously to study the breakdown of Vladimir’s telephone account, rendered in the copperplate script of a post-office clerk. Taking a sheet of paper, he began jotting down dates and notes.

  Fact: in early September, Vladimir receives the Paris letter, and removes it from Mikhel’s grasp.

  Fact: at about the same date, Vladimir makes a rare and costly trunk-call to Hamburg, operator-dialled, presumably so that he can later claim the cost.

  Fact: three days after that again, the eighth, Vladimir accepts a reverse-charge call from Hamburg at a cost of two pounds eighty, origin, duration, and time all given, and the origin is the same number that Vladimir had called three days before.

  Hamburg, Smiley thought again, his mind flitting once more to the imp in the photograph. The reversed telephone traffic had continued intermittently till three days ago; nine calls, totalling twenty-one pounds, and all of them from Hamburg to Vladimir. But who was calling him? From Hamburg? Who?

  Then suddenly he remembered.

  The looming figure in the hotel room, the imp’s vast shadow, was Vladimir himself. He saw them standing side by side, both in black coats, the giant and the midget. The vile hotel with Muzak and tartan wallpaper was near Heathrow Airport, where the two men, so ill-matched, had flown in for a conference at the very moment of Smiley’s life when his professional identity was crashing round his ears. Max, we need you. Max, give us the chance.

  Picking up the telephone, Smiley dialled the number in Hamburg, and heard a man’s voice at the other end: the one word “Yes,” spoken softly in German, followed by a silence.

  “I should like to speak to Herr Dieter Fassbender,” Smiley said, selecting a name at random. German was Smiley’s second language, and sometimes his first.

  “We have no Fassbender,” said the same voice coolly after a moment’s pause, as if the speaker had consulted something in the meantime. Smiley could hear faint music in the background.

  “This is Leber,” Smiley persisted. “I want to speak to Herr Fassbender urgently. I’m his partner.”

  There was yet another delay.

  “Not possible,” said the man’s voice flatly after another pause—and rang off.

  Not a private house, thought Smiley, hastily jotting down his impressions—the speaker had too many choices. Not an office, for what kind of office plays soft background music and is open at midnight on a Saturday? A hotel? Possibly, but a hotel, if it was of any size, would have put him through to reception, and displayed a modicum of civility. A restaurant? Too furtive, too guarded—and surely they would have announced themselves as they picked up the phone?

  Don’t force the pieces, he warned himself. Store them away. Patience. But how to be patient when he had so little time?

  Returning to bed, he opened a copy of Cobbett’s Rural Rides and tried to read it while he loosely pondered, among other weighty matters, his sense of civitas and how much, or how little, he owed to Oliver Lacon: “Your duty, George.” Yet who could seriously be Lacon’s man? he asked himself. Who could regard Lacon’s fragile arguments as Caesar’s due?

  “Émigrés in, émigrés out. Two legs good, two legs bad,” he muttered aloud.

  All his professional life, it seemed to Smiley, he had listened to similar verbal antics signalling supposedly great changes in Whitehall doctrine; signalling restraint, self-denial, always another reason for doing nothing. He had watched Whitehall’s skirts go up, and come down again, her belts being tightened, loosened, tightened. He had been the witness, or victim—or even reluctant prophet—of such spurious cults as lateralism, parallelism, separatism, operational devolution, and now, if he remembered Lacon’s most recent meanderings correctly, of integration. Each new fashion had been hailed as a panacea: “Now we shall vanquish, now the machine will work!” Each had gone out with a whimper, leaving behind it the familiar English muddle, of which, more and more, in retrospect, he saw himself as a lifelong moderator. He had forborne, hoping others would forbear, and they had not. He had toiled in back rooms while shallower men he
ld the stage. They held it still. Even five years ago he would never have admitted to such sentiments. But today, peering calmly into his own heart, Smiley knew that he was unled, and perhaps unleadable; that the only restraints upon him were those of his own reason, and his own humanity. As with his marriage, so with his sense of public service. I invested my life in institutions—he thought without rancour—and all I am left with is myself.

  And with Karla, he thought; with my black Grail.

  He could not help himself: his restless mind would not leave him alone. Staring ahead of him into the gloom, he imagined he saw Karla standing before him, breaking and reforming in the shifting specks of dark. He saw the brown, attendant eyes appraising him, as once they had appraised him from the darkness of the interrogation cell in Delhi jail a hundred years before: eyes that at first glance were sensitive and seemed to signal companionship; then like molten glass slowly hardened till they were brittle and unyielding. He saw himself stepping onto the dust-driven runway of Delhi airport, and wincing as the Indian heat leapt up at him from the tarmac: Smiley alias Barraclough, or Standfast, or whatever name he had fished from the bag that week—he forgot. A Smiley of the Sixties, anyway, Smiley the commercial traveller, they called him, charged by the Circus to quarter the globe, offering resettlement terms to Moscow Centre officers who were thinking of jumping ship. Centre was holding one of its periodical purges at the time, and the woods were thick with Russian field officers scared of going home. A Smiley who was Ann’s husband and Bill Haydon’s colleague, whose last illusions were still intact. A Smiley close to inner crisis all the same, for it was the year Ann lost her heart to a ballet dancer: Haydon’s turn was yet to come.

  Still in the darkness of Ann’s bedroom, he relived the rattling, honking jeep-ride to the jail, the laughing children hanging to the tailboard; he saw the ox-carts and the eternal Indian crowds, the shanties on the brown river bank. He caught the smells of dung and ever-smouldering fires—fires to cook and fires to cleanse; fires to remove the dead. He saw the iron gateway of the old prison engulf him, and the perfectly pressed British uniforms of the warders as they waded kneedeep through the prisoners:

  “This way, your honour, sir! Please be good enough to follow us, your excellency!”

  One European prisoner, calling himself Gerstmann.

  One grey-haired little man with brown eyes and a red calico tunic, resembling the sole survivor of an extinguished priesthood.

  With his wrists manacled: “Please undo them, officer, and bring him some cigarettes,” Smiley had said.

  One prisoner, identified by London as a Moscow Centre agent, and now awaiting deportation to Russia. One little cold war infantryman, as he appeared, who knew—knew for certain—that to be repatriated to Moscow was to face the camps or the firing squad or both; that to have been in enemy hands was in Centre’s eyes to have become the enemy himself: to have talked or kept his secrets was immaterial.

  Join us, Smiley had said to him across the iron table.

  Join us and we will give you life.

  Go home and they will give you death.

  His hands were sweating—Smiley’s, in the prison. The heat was dreadful. Have a cigarette, Smiley had said—here, use my lighter. It was a gold one, smeared by his own damp hands. Engraved. A gift from Ann to compensate some misdemeanour.

  To George from Ann with all my love. There are little loves and big loves, Ann liked to say, but when she had composed the inscription she awarded him both kinds. It was probably the only occasion when she did.

  Join us, Smiley had said. Save yourself. You have no right to deny yourself survival. First mechanically, then with passion, Smiley had repeated the familiar arguments while his own sweat fell like raindrops onto the table. Join us. You have nothing to lose. Those in Russia who love you are already lost. Your return will make things worse for them, not better. Join us. I beg. Listen to me, listen to the arguments, the philosophy.

  And waited, on and on, vainly, for the slightest response to his increasingly desperate entreaty. For the brown eyes to flicker, for the rigid lips to utter a single word through the billows of cigarette smoke—yes, I will join you. Yes, I will agree to be debriefed. Yes, I will accept your money, your promises of resettlement, and the leftover life of a defector. He waited for the freed hands to cease their restless fondling of Ann’s lighter, to George from Ann with all my love.

  Yet the more Smiley implored him, the more dogmatic Gerstmann’s silence became. Smiley pressed answers on him, but Gerstmann had no questions to support them. Gradually Gerstmann’s completeness was awesome. He was a man who had prepared himself for the gallows; who would rather die at the hands of his friends than live at the hands of his enemies. Next morning they parted, each to his appointed fate: Gerstmann, against all odds, flew back to Moscow to survive the purge and prosper. Smiley, with a high fever, returned to his Ann and not quite all her love; and to the later knowledge that Gerstmann was none other than Karla himself, Bill Haydon’s recruiter, case officer, mentor; and the man who had spirited Bill into Ann’s bed—this very bed where he now lay—in order to cloud Smiley’s hardening vision of Bill’s greater treason, against the service and its agents.

  Karla, he thought, as his eyes bored into the darkness, what do you want with me now? Tell Max it concerns the Sandman.

  Sandman, he thought: why do you wake me up when you are supposed to put me back to sleep?

  Still incarcerated in her little Paris apartment, tormented equally in spirit and body, Ostrakova could not have slept even if she had wanted. Not all the Sandman’s magic would have helped her. She turned on her side and her squeezed ribs screamed as if the assassin’s arms were still flung round them while he prepared to sling her under the car. She tried her back and the pain in her rump was enough to make her vomit. And when she lay on her belly, her breasts became as sore as when she had tried to feed Alexandra in the months before she abandoned her, and she hated them.

  It is God’s punishment, she told herself, without too much conviction. Not till morning came and she was back in Ostrakov’s armchair with his pistol across her knees did the waking world, for an hour or two, release her from her thoughts.

  13

  The gallery was situated in what the art trade calls the naughty end of Bond Street, and Smiley arrived on its doorstep that Monday morning long before any respectable art dealer was out of bed.

  His Sunday had passed in mysterious tranquillity. Bywater Street had woken late, and so had Smiley. His memory had served him while he slept, and it continued to serve him in modest spasms of enlightenment throughout the day. In terms of memory at least, his black Grail had drawn a little nearer. His telephone had not rung once; a slight but persistent hangover had kept him in the contemplative mood. There was a club he belonged to, against his better judgment, near Pall Mall, and he lunched there in imperial solitude on warmed-up steak-and-kidney pie. Afterwards, from the head porter, he had requested his box from the club safe and discreetly abstracted a few illicit possessions, including a British passport in his former workname of Standfast, which he had never quite managed to return to Circus Housekeepers; an international driving licence to match; a sizeable sum of Swiss francs, his own certainly, but equally certainly retained in defiance of the Exchange Control Act. He had them in his pocket now.

  The gallery had a dazzling whiteness and the canvases in its armoured glass window were much the same: white upon white, with just the faintest outline of a mosque or St. Paul’s Cathedral—or was it Washington?—drawn with a finger in the thick pigment. Six months ago the sign hanging over the pavement had proclaimed The Wandering Snail Coffee Shop. Today it read “ATELIER BENATI, GOÛT ARABE, PARIS, NEW YORK, MONACO,” and a discreet menu on the door proclaimed the new chef’s specialties: “Islam classique-moderne. Conceptual Interior Design. Contracts catered. Sonnez.”

  Smiley did as he was bidden, a buzzer screamed, the glass door yielded. A shop-worn girl, ash blonde and half awake, eyed him warily over a
white desk.

  “If I could just look round,” said Smiley.

  Her eyes lifted slightly towards an Islamic heaven. “The little red spots mean sold,” she drawled, and, having handed him a typed price-list, sighed and went back to her cigarette and her horoscope.

  For a few moments Smiley shuffled unhappily from one canvas to another till he stood in front of the girl again.

  “If I could have a word with Mr. Benati,” he said.

  “Oh, I’m afraid Signor Benati is fully involved right now. That’s the trouble with being international.”

  “If you could tell him it’s Mr. Angel,” Smiley proposed in the same diffident style. “If you could just tell him that. Angel, Alan Angel, he does know me.”

  He sat himself on the S-shaped sofa. It was priced at two thousand pounds and covered in protective cellophane, which squeaked when he moved. He heard her lift the phone and sigh into it.

  “Got an angel for you,” she drawled, in her pillow-talk voice. “As in Paradise, got it, angel?”

  A moment later he was descending a spiral staircase into darkness. He reached the bottom and waited. There was a click and half a dozen picture lights sprang on to empty spaces where no pictures hung. A door opened revealing a small and dapper figure, quite motionless. His full white hair was swept back with bravado. He wore a black suit with a broad stripe and shoes with pantomime buckles. The stripe was definitely too big for him. His right fist was in his jacket pocket, but when he saw Smiley he drew it slowly out and held it at him like a dangerous blade.

  “Why, Mr. Angel,” he declared in a distinctly mid-European accent, with a sharp glance up the staircase as if to see who was listening. “What pure pleasure, sir. It has been far too long. Come in, please.”