Smiley's People

by John le Carré

  They shook hands, each keeping his distance.

  “Hullo, Mr. Benati,” Smiley said, and followed him to an inner room and through it to a second, where Mr. Benati closed the door and gently leaned his back against it, perhaps as a bulwark against intrusion. For a while after that, neither man spoke at all, each preferring to study the other in a silence bred of mutual respect. Mr. Benati’s eyes were brown and they looked nowhere long and nowhere without a purpose. The room had the atmosphere of a sleazy boudoir, with a chaise longue and a pink hand-basin in one corner.

  “So how’s trade, Toby?” Smiley asked.

  Toby Esterhase had a special smile for that question and a special way of tilting his little palm.

  “We have been lucky, George. We had a good opening, we had a fantastic summer. Autumn, George”—the gesture again—“autumn I would say is on the slow side. One must live off one’s hump actually. Some coffee, George? My girl can make some.”

  “Vladimir’s dead,” said Smiley after another longish gap. “Shot dead on Hampstead Heath.”

  “Too bad. That old man, huh? Too bad.”

  “Oliver Lacon has asked me to sweep up the bits. As you were the Group’s postman, I thought I’d have a word with you.”

  “Sure,” said Toby agreeably.

  “You knew, then? About his death?”

  “Read it in the papers.”

  Smiley let his eye wander round the room. There were no newspapers anywhere.

  “Any theories about who did it?” Smiley asked.

  “At his age, George? After a lifetime of disappointments, you might say? No family, no prospects, the Group all washed up—I assumed he had done it himself. Naturally.”

  Cautiously, Smiley sat himself on the chaise longue and, watched by Toby, picked up a bronze maquette of a dancer that stood on the table.

  “Shouldn’t this be numbered if it’s a Degas, Toby?” Smiley asked.

  “Degas, that’s a very grey area, George. You got to know exactly what you are dealing with.”

  “But this one is genuine?” Smiley asked, with an air of really wishing to know.

  “Totally.”

  “Would you sell it to me?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Just out of academic interest. Is it for sale? If I offered to buy it, would I be out of court?”

  Toby shrugged, slightly embarrassed.

  “George, listen, we’re talking thousands, know what I mean? Like a year’s pension or something.”

  “When was the last time you had anything to do with Vladi’s network, actually, Toby?” Smiley asked, returning the dancer to its table.

  Toby digested this question at his leisure.

  “Network?” he echoed incredulously at last. “Did I hear network, George?” Laughter in the normal run played little part in Toby’s repertoire but now he did manage a small if tense outburst. “You call that crazy Group a network? Twenty cuckoo Balts, leaky like a barn, and they make a network already?”

  “Well, we have to call them something,” Smiley objected equably.

  “Something, sure. Just not network, okay?”

  “So what’s the answer?”

  “What answer?”

  “When did you last have dealings with the Group?”

  “Years ago. Before they sacked me. Years ago.”

  “How many years?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Three?”

  “May be.”

  “Two?”

  “You trying to pin me down, George?”

  “I suppose I am. Yes.”

  Toby nodded gravely as if he had suspected as much all along: “And have you forgotten, George, how it was with us in lamplighters? How overworked we were? How my boys and I played postman to half the networks in the Circus? Remember? In one week how many meetings, pick-ups? Twenty, thirty? In the high season once—forty? Go to Registry, George. If you’ve got Lacon behind you, go to Registry, draw the file, check the encounter sheets. That way you see exactly. Don’t come here trying to trip me up, know what I mean? Degas, Vladimir—I don’t like these questions. A friend, an old boss, my own house—it upsets me, okay?”

  His speech having run for a deal longer than either of them apparently expected, Toby paused, as if waiting for Smiley to provide the explanation for his loquacity. Then he took a step forward, and turned up his palms in appeal.

  “George,” he said reproachfully. “George, my name is Benati, okay?”

  Smiley seemed to have lapsed into dejection. He was peering gloomily at the stacks of grimy art catalogues strewn over the carpet.

  “I’m not called Hector, definitely not Esterhase,” Toby insisted. “I got an alibi for every day of the year—hiding from my bank manager. You think I want trouble round my neck? Émigrés, police even? This an interrogation, George?”

  “You know me, Toby.”

  “Sure. I know you, George. You want matches so you can burn my feet?”

  Smiley’s gaze remained fixed upon the catalogues. “Before Vladimir died—hours before—he rang the Circus,” he said. “He said he wanted to give us information.”

  “But this Vladimir was an old man, George!” Toby insisted—protesting, at least to Smiley’s ear, altogether too much. “Listen, there’s a lot of guys like him. Big background, been on the payroll too long; they get old, soft in the head, start writing crazy memoirs, seeing world plots everywhere, know what I mean?”

  On and on, Smiley contemplated the catalogues, his round head supported on his clenched fists.

  “Now why do you say that exactly, Toby?” he asked critically. “I don’t follow your reasoning.”

  “What do you mean, why I say it? Old defectors, old spies, they get a bit cuckoo. They hear voices, talk to the dicky-birds. It’s normal.”

  “Did Vladimir hear voices?”

  “How should I know?”

  “That’s what I was asking you, Toby,” Smiley explained reasonably, to the catalogues. “I told you Vladimir claimed to have news for us, and you replied to me that he was going soft in the head. I wondered how you knew. About the softness of Vladimir’s head. I wondered how recent was your information about his state of mind. And why you pooh-poohed whatever he might have had to say. That’s all.”

  “George, these are very old games you are playing. Don’t twist my words. Okay? You want to ask me, ask me. Please. But don’t twist my words.”

  “It wasn’t suicide, Toby,” Smiley said, still without a glance at him. “It definitely wasn’t suicide. I saw the body, believe me. It wasn’t a jealous husband either—not unless he was equipped with a Moscow Centre murder weapon. What we used to call them, those gun things? ‘Inhumane killers,’ wasn’t it? Well, that’s what Moscow used. An inhumane killer.”

  Smiley once more pondered, but this time—even if it was too late—Toby had the wit to wait in silence.

  “You see, Toby, when Vladimir made that phone call to the Circus he demanded Max. Myself, in other words. Not his postman, which would have been you. Not Hector. He demanded his vicar, which for better or worse was me. Against all protocol, against all training, and against all precedent. Never done it before. I wasn’t there of course, so they offered him a substitute, a silly little boy called Mostyn. It didn’t matter because in the event they never met anyway. But can you tell me why he didn’t ask for Hector?”

  “George, I mean really! These are shadows you are chasing! Should I know why he doesn’t ask for me? We are responsible for the omissions of others, suddenly? What is this?”

  “Did you quarrel with him? Would that be a reason?”

  “Why should I quarrel with Vladimir? He was being dramatic, George. That’s how they are, these old guys when they retire.” Toby paused as if to imply that Smiley himself was not above these foibles. “They get bored, they miss the action, they want stroking, so they make up some piece of mickeymouse.”

  “But not all of them get shot, do they, Toby? That’s the worry, you see: the cau
se and effect. Toby quarrels with Vladimir one day, Vladimir gets shot with a Russian gun the next. In police terms that’s what one calls an embarrassing chain of events. In our terms too, actually.”

  “George, are you crazy? What the hell is quarrel? I told you: I never quarrel with the old man in my life!”

  “Mikhel said you did.”

  “Mikhel? You go talking to Mikhel?”

  “According to Mikhel, the old man was very bitter about you. ‘Hector is no good,’ Vladimir kept telling him. He quoted Vladimir’s words exactly. ‘Hector is no good.’ Mikhel was very surprised. Vladimir used to think highly of you. Mikhel couldn’t think what had been going on between the two of you that could produce such a severe change of heart. ‘Hector is no good.’ Why weren’t you any good, Toby? What happened that made Vladimir so passionate about you? I’d like to keep it away from the police if I could, you see. For all our sakes.”

  But the fieldman in Toby Esterhase was by now fully awake, and he knew that interrogations, like battles, are never won but only lost.

  “George, this is absurd,” he declared with pity rather than hurt. “I mean it’s so obvious you are fooling me. Know that? Some old man builds castles in the air, so you want to go to the police already? Is that what Lacon is hiring you for? Are these the bits you are sweeping up? George?”

  This time, the long silence seemed to create some resolution in Smiley, and when he spoke again it was as if he had not much time left. His tone was brisk, even impatient.

  “Vladimir came to see you. I don’t know when but within the last few weeks. You met him or you talked to him over the phone—call-box to call-box, whatever the technique was. He asked you to do something for him. You refused. That’s why he demanded Max when he rang the Circus on Friday night. He’d had Hector’s answer already and it was no. That’s also why Hector was ‘no good.’ You turned him down.”

  This time Toby made no attempt to interrupt.

  “And if I may say so, you’re scared,” Smiley resumed, studiously not looking at the lump in Toby’s jacket pocket. “You know enough about who killed Vladimir to think they might kill you too. You even thought it possible I wasn’t the right Angel.” He waited, but Toby didn’t rise. His tone softened. “You remember what we used to say at Sarratt, Toby—about fear being information without the cure? How we should respect it? Well, I respect yours, Toby. I want to know more about it. Where it came from. Whether I should share it. That’s all.”

  Still at the door, his little palms pressed flat against the panels, Toby Esterhase studied Smiley most attentively and without the smallest decline in his composure. He even contrived to suggest by the depth and question of his glance that his concern was now for Smiley rather than himself. Next, in line with this solicitous approach, he took a pace, then another, into the room—but tentatively, and somewhat as if he were visiting an ailing friend in hospital. Only then, with a passable imitation of a bedside manner, did he respond to Smiley’s accusations with a most perceptive question, one that Smiley himself, as it happened, had been deliberating in some depth over the last two days.

  “George. Kindly answer me something. Who is speaking here actually? Is it George Smiley? Is it Oliver Lacon? Mikhel? Who is speaking, please?” Receiving no immediate answer, he continued his advance as far as a grimy satin-covered stool where he perched himself with a catlike trimness, one hand over each knee. “Because for an official fellow, George, you are asking some pretty damn unofficial questions, it strikes me. You are taking rather an unofficial attitude, I think.”

  “You saw Vladimir and you spoke to him. What happened?” Smiley asked, quite undeflected by this challenge. “You tell me that, and I’ll tell you who is speaking here.”

  In the farthest corner of the ceiling there was a yellowed patch of glass about a metre square and the shadows that played over it were the feet of passers-by in the street. For some reason Toby’s eyes had fixed on this strange spot and he seemed to read his decision there, like an instruction flashed on a screen.

  “Vladimir put up a distress rocket,” Toby said in exactly the same tone as before, of neither conceding nor confiding. Indeed, by some trick of tone or inflection, he even managed to bring a note of warning to his voice.

  “Through the Circus?”

  “Through friends of mine,” said Toby.

  “When?”

  Toby gave a date. Two weeks ago. A crash meeting. Smiley asked where it took place.

  “In the Science Museum,” Toby replied with new-found confidence. “The café on the top floor, George. We drank coffee, admired the old aeroplanes hanging from the roof. You going to report all this to Lacon, George? Feel free, okay? Be my guest. I got nothing to hide.”

  “And he put the proposition?”

  “Sure. He put me a proposition. He wanted me to do a lamplighter job. To be his camel. That was our joke, back in the old Moscow days, remember? To collect, carry across the desert, to deliver. ‘Toby, I got no passport. Aidez-moi. Mon ami, aidez-moi.’ You know how he talked. Like de Gaulle. We used to call him that—‘the other General.’ Remember?”

  “Carry what?”

  “He was not precise. It was documentary, it was small, no concealment was needed. This much he tells me.”

  “For somebody putting out feelers, he seems to have told you a lot.”

  “He was asking a hell of a lot too,” said Toby calmly, and waited for Smiley’s next question.

  “And the where?” Smiley asked. “Did Vladimir tell you that too?”

  “Germany.”

  “Which one?”

  “Ours. The north of it.”

  “Casual encounter? Dead-letter boxes? Live? What sort of meeting?”

  “On the fly. I should take a train ride. From Hamburg north. The hand-over to be made on the train, details on acceptance.”

  “And it was to be a private arrangement. No Circus, no Max?”

  “For the time being, very private, George.”

  Smiley picked his words with tact. “And the compensation for your labours?”

  A distinct scepticism marked Toby’s answer: “If we get the document—that’s what he called it, okay? Document. If we get the document, and the document is genuine, which he swore it was, we win immediately a place in Heaven. We take first the document to Max, tell Max the story. Max would know its meaning, Max would know the crucial importance—of the document. Max would reward us. Gifts, promotion, medals, Max will put us in the House of Lords. Sure. Only problem was, Vladimir didn’t know Max was on the shelf and the Circus has joined the Boy Scouts.”

  “Did he know that Hector was on the shelf?”

  “Fifty-fifty, George.”

  “What does that mean?” Then, with a “never mind,” Smiley cancelled his own question again and lapsed into prolonged thought.

  “George, you want to drop this line of enquiry,” Toby said earnestly. “That is my strong advice to you, abandon it,” he said, and waited.

  Smiley might not have heard. Momentarily shocked, he seemed to be pondering the scale of Toby’s error.

  “The point is, you sent him packing,” he muttered, and remained staring into space. “He appealed to you and you slammed the door in his face. How could you do that, Toby? You of all people?”

  The reproach brought Toby furiously to his feet, which was perhaps what it was meant to do. His eyes lit up, his cheeks coloured, the sleeping Hungarian in him was wide awake.

  “And you want to hear why, maybe? You want to know why I told him, ‘Go to hell, Vladimir. Leave my sight, please, you make me sick’? You want to know who his connect is out there—this magic guy in North Germany with the crock of gold that’s going to make millionaires of us overnight, George—you want to know his full identity? Remember the name Otto Leipzig, by any chance? Holder many times of our Creep of the Year award? Fabricator, intelligence pedlar, confidence man, sex maniac, pimp, also various sorts of criminal? Remember that great hero?”

  Smiley saw the t
artan walls of the hotel again, and the dreadful hunting prints of Jorrocks in full cry; he saw the two black-coated figures, the giant and the midget, and the General’s huge mottled hand resting on the tiny shoulder of his protégé. “Max, here is my good friend Otto. I have brought him to tell his own story.” He heard the steady thunder of the planes landing and taking off at Heathrow Airport.

  “Vaguely,” Smiley replied equably. “Yes, vaguely I do remember an Otto Leipzig. Tell me about him. I seem to remember he had rather a lot of names. But then so do we all, don’t we?”

  “About two hundred, but Leipzig he ended up with. Know why? Leipzig in East Germany; he liked the jail there. He was that kind of crazy joker. Remember the stuff he peddled, by any chance?” Believing he had the initiative, Toby stepped boldly forward and stood over the passive Smiley while he talked down at him: “George, do you not even remember the incredible and total bilge which year for year that creep would push out under fifteen different source names to our West European stations, mainly German? Our expert on the new Estonian order? Our top source on Soviet arms shipments out of Leningrad? Our inside ear at Moscow Centre, our principal Karla-watcher, even?” Smiley did not stir. “How he took our Berlin resident alone for two thousand Deutschmarks for a rewrite from Stern magazine? How he foxed that old General, worked on him like a sucking-leech, time and again—‘us fellow Balts’—that line? ‘General, I just got the Crown jewels for you—only trouble, I don’t have the air fare’? Jesus!”

  “It wasn’t all fabrication, though, was it, Toby?” Smiley objected mildly. “Some of it, I seem to remember—in certain areas, at least—turned out to be rather good stuff.”

  “Count it on one finger.”

  “His Moscow Centre material, for instance. I don’t remember that we faulted him on that, ever?”

  “Okay! So Centre gave him some decent chicken-feed occasionally, so he could pass us the other crap! How else does anyone play a double, for God’s sake?”

  Smiley seemed about to argue this point, then changed his mind.

  “I see,” he said finally, as if overruled. “Yes, I see what you mean. A plant.”

  “Not a plant, a creep. A little of this, a little of that. A dealer. No principles. No standards. Work for anyone who sweetens his pie.”