Smiley's People

by John le Carré

  “No.”

  “Pity.”

  As Smiley left, Herr Kretzschmar was already at the telephone, attending to other special requests.

  He returned to the hotel. A drunken night porter opened the door to him, full of suggestions about the wonderful girls he could send to Smiley’s room. He woke, if he had ever slept, to the chime of church bells and the honk of shipping in the harbour, carried to him on the wind. But there are nightmares that do not go away with daylight, and as he drove northward over the fens in his hired Opel, the terrors that hovered in the mist were the same as those that had plagued him in the night.

  17

  The roads were as empty as the landscape. Through breaks in the mist, he glimpsed now a patch of cornfield, now a red farmhouse crouched low against the wind. A blue notice said “KAI.” He swung sharply into a slip-road, dropping two flights, and saw ahead of him the wharf, a complex of low grey barracks dwarfed by the decks of cargo ships. A red-and-white pole guarded the entrance, there was a customs notice in several languages, but not a human soul in sight. Stopping the car, Smiley got out and walked lightly to the barrier. The red push-button was as big as a saucer. He pressed it and the shriek of its bell set a pair of herons flapping into the white mist. A control tower stood to his left on tubular legs. He heard a door slam and a ring of metal and watched a bearded figure in blue uniform stomp down the iron staircase to the bottom step. The man called to him, “What do you want then?” Not waiting for an answer, he released the boom and waved Smiley through. The tarmac was like a vast bombed area cemented in, bordered by cranes and pressed down by the fogged white sky. Beyond it, the low sea looked too frail for the weight of so much shipping. He glanced in the mirror and saw the spires of a sea town etched like an old print half-way up the page. He glanced out to sea and saw through the mist the line of buoys and winking lamps that marked the water border to East Germany and the start of seven and a half thousand miles of Soviet Empire. That’s where the herons went, he thought. He was driving at a crawl between red-and-white traffic cones towards a container-park heaped with car tyres and logs. “Left at the container-park,” Herr Kretzschmar had said. Obediently, Smiley swung slowly left, looking for an old house, though an old house in this Hanseatic dumping ground seemed a physical impossibility. But Herr Kretzschmar had said, “Look for an old house marked ‘Office,’” and Herr Kretzschmar did not make errors.

  He bumped over a railway track and headed for the cargo ships. Beams of morning sun had broken through the mist, making their white paintwork dazzle. He entered an alley comprised of control rooms for the cranes, each like a modern signal-box, each with green levers and big windows. And there at the end of the alley, exactly as Herr Kretzschmar had promised, stood the old tin house with a high tin gable cut like fretwork and crowned with a peeling flag-post. The electric wires that led into it seemed to hold it up; there was an old water pump beside it, dripping, with a tin mug chained to its pedestal. On the wooden door, in faded Gothic lettering, stood the one word “BUREAU,” in the French spelling, not the German, above a newer notice saying “P.K. BERGEN, IMPORT-EXPORT.” He works there as the night clerk, Herr Kretzschmar had said. What he does by day only God and the Devil know.

  He rang the bell, then stood well back from the door, very visible. He was keeping his hands clear of his pockets and they were very visible too. He had buttoned his overcoat to the neck. He wore no hat. He had parked the car sideways to the house so that anyone indoors could see the car was empty. I am alone and unarmed, he was trying to say. I am not their man, but yours. He rang the bell again and called “Herr Leipzig!” An upper window opened, and a pretty woman looked out blearily, holding a blanket round her shoulders.

  “I’m sorry,” Smiley called up to her politely. “I was looking for Herr Leipzig. It’s rather important.”

  “Not here,” she replied, and smiled.

  A man joined her. He was young and unshaven, with tattoo marks on his arms and chest. They spoke together a moment, Smiley guessed in Polish.

  “Nix hier,” the man confirmed guardedly. “Otto nix hier.”

  “We’re just the temporary tenants,” the girl called down. “When Otto’s broke, he moves to his country villa and rents us the apartment.”

  She repeated this to her man, who this time laughed.

  “Nix hier,” he repeated. “No money. Nobody has money.”

  They were enjoying the crisp morning, and the company.

  “How long since you saw him?” Smiley asked.

  More conference. Was it this day or that day? Smiley had the impression they had lost track of time.

  “Thursday,” the girl announced, smiling again.

  “Thursday,” her man repeated.

  “I’ve got good news for him,” Smiley explained cheerfully, catching her mood. He patted his side pocket. “Money. Pinkapinka. All for Otto. He’s earned it in commission. I promised to bring it to him yesterday.”

  The girl interpreted all this and the man argued with her, and the girl laughed again.

  “My friend says don’t give it to him or Otto will come back and move us out and we’ll have nowhere to make love!”

  Try the water camp, she suggested, pointing with her bare arm. Two kilometres along the main road, over the railway and past the windmill, then right—she looked at her hands, then curved one prettily towards her lover—yes, right; right towards the lake, though you don’t see the lake till you get to it.

  “What is the place called?” Smiley asked.

  “It has no name,” she said. “It’s just a place. Ask for holiday houses to let, then drive on towards the boats. Ask for Walther. If Otto is around, Walther will know where to find him.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Walther knows everything!” she called. “He is like a professor!”

  She translated this also, but this time her man looked angry.

  “Bad professor!” he called down. “Walther bad man!”

  “Are you a professor too?” the girl asked Smiley.

  “No. No, unfortunately not.” He laughed and thanked them, and they watched him get into his car as if they were children at a celebration. The day, the spreading sunshine, his visit—everything was fun for them. He lowered the window to say goodbye and heard her say something he couldn’t catch.

  “What was that?” he called up to her, still smiling.

  “I said, ‘Then Otto is twice lucky, for a change!’” the girl repeated.

  “Why?” asked Smiley, and stopped the engine. “Why is he twice lucky?”

  The girl shrugged. The blanket was slipping from her shoulders and the blanket was all she wore. Her man put an arm round her and pulled it up again for decency.

  “Last week the unexpected visit from the East,” she said. “And today the money.” She opened her hands. “Otto is Sunday’s child for once. That’s all.”

  Then she saw Smiley’s face, and the laughter went clean out of her voice.

  “Visitor?” Smiley repeated. “Who was the visitor?”

  “From the East,” she said.

  Seeing her dismay, terrified she might disappear altogether, Smiley with difficulty resurrected his appearance of good humour.

  “Not his brother, was it?” he asked gaily, all enthusiasm. He held out one hand, cupping it over the mythical brother’s head. “A small chap? Spectacles like mine?”

  “No, no! A big fellow. With a chauffeur. Rich.”

  Smiley shook his head, affecting light-hearted disappointment. “Then I don’t know him,” he said. “Otto’s brother was certainly never rich.” He succeeded in laughing outright. “Unless he was the chauffeur, of course,” he added.

  He followed her directions exactly, with the secret calmness of emergency. To be conveyed. To have no will of his own. To be conveyed, to pray, to make deals with your Maker. Oh, God, don’t make it happen, not another Vladimir. In the sunlight the brown fields had turned to gold, but the sweat on Smiley’s back was like a cold hand s
tinging his skin. He followed her directions seeing everything as if it were his last day, knowing that the big fellow with the chauffeur had gone ahead of him. He saw the farmhouse with the old horse-plough in the barn, the faulty beer sign with its neon blinking, the window-boxes of geraniums like blood. He saw the windmill like a giant pepper-mill and the field full of white geese all running with the gusty wind. He saw the herons skimming like sails over the fens. He was driving too fast. I should drive more often, he thought; I’m out of practice, out of control. The road changed from tarmac to gravel, gravel to dust, and the dust blew up round the car like a sandstorm. He entered some pine trees and on the other side of them saw a sign saying “HOLIDAY HOUSES TO LET,” and a row of shuttered asbestos bungalows waiting for their summer paint. He kept going and in the distance saw a coppice of masts, and brown water low in its basin. He headed for the masts, bumped over a pot-hole, and heard a frightful crack from under the car. He supposed it was the exhaust, because the noise of his engine was suddenly much louder, and half the water birds in Schleswig-Holstein had taken fright at his arrival.

  He passed a farm and entered the protective darkness of trees, then emerged in a stark and brilliant frame of whiteness of which a broken jetty and a few faint olive-coloured reeds made up the foreground, and an enormous sky the rest. The boats lay to his right, beside an inlet. Shabby caravans were parked along the track that led to them, grubby washing hung between the television aerials. He passed a tent in its own vegetable patch and a couple of broken huts that had once been military. On one, a psychedelic sunrise had been painted, and it was peeling. Three old cars and some heaped rubbish stood beside it. He parked and followed a mud path through the reeds to the shore. In the grass harbour lay a cluster of improvised houseboats, some of them converted landing-craft from the war. It was colder here, and for some reason darker. The boats he had seen were day boats, moored in a huddle apart, mostly under tarpaulins. A couple of radios played, but at first he saw nobody. Then he noticed a backwater, and a blue dinghy made fast in it. And, in the dinghy, one gnarled old man in a sailcloth jacket and a black peaked cap, massaging his neck as if he had just woken up.

  “Are you Walther?” Smiley asked.

  Still rubbing his neck, the old man seemed to nod.

  “I’m looking for Otto Leipzig. They told me at the wharf I might find him here.”

  Walther’s eyes were cut almond-shaped into the crumpled brown paper of his skin.

  “Isadora,” he said.

  He pointed at a rickety jetty farther down the shore. The Isadora lay at the end of it, a forty-foot motor launch down on her luck, a Grand Hotel awaiting demolition. The portholes were curtained; one of them was smashed, another was repaired with Scotch tape. The planks of the jetty yielded alarmingly to Smiley’s tread. Once he nearly fell, and twice, to bridge the gaps, he had to stride much wider than seemed safe to his short legs. At the end of the jetty, he realised that the Isadora was adrift. She had slipped her moorings at the stern and shifted twelve feet out to sea, which was probably the longest journey she would ever make. The cabin doors were closed, their windows curtained. There was no small boat.

  The old man sat sixty yards off, resting on his oars. He had rowed out of the backwater to watch. Smiley cupped his hands and yelled: “How do I get to him?”

  “If you want him, call him,” the old man replied, not seeming to lift his voice at all.

  Turning to the launch, Smiley called “Otto.” He called softly, then more loudly, but inside the Isadora nothing stirred. He watched the curtains. He watched the oily water tossing against the rotting hull. He listened and thought he heard music like the music in Herr Kretzschmar’s club, but it might have been echo from another boat. From the dinghy, Walther’s brown face still watched him.

  “Call again,” he growled. “Keep calling, if you want him.”

  But Smiley had an instinct against being commanded by the old man. He could feel his authority and his contempt and he resented both.

  “Is he in here or not?” Smiley called. “I said, ‘Is he in here?’”

  The old man did not budge.

  “Did you see him come aboard?” Smiley insisted.

  He saw the brown head turn, and knew the old man was spitting into the water.

  “The wild pig comes and goes,” Smiley heard him say. “What the hell do I care?”

  “So when did he come last?”

  At the sound of their voices a couple of heads had lifted out of other boats. They stared at Smiley without expression: the little fat stranger standing at the end of the broken jetty. On the shore a ragtag group had formed: a girl in shorts, an old woman, two blond teen-aged boys dressed alike. There was something that linked them in their disparity: a prison look; submission to the same bad laws.

  “I’m looking for Otto Leipzig,” Smiley called to all of them. “Can anyone tell me, please, whether he’s around?” On a houseboat not too far away, a bearded man was lowering a bucket into the water. Smiley’s eye selected him. “Is there anyone aboard the Isadora?” he asked.

  The bucket gurgled and filled. The bearded man pulled it out, but didn’t speak.

  “You should see his car,” a woman shouted shrilly from the shore, or perhaps it was a child. “They took it to the wood.”

  The wood lay a hundred yards back from the water, mostly saplings and birch trees.

  “Who did?” Smiley asked. “Who took it there?”

  Whoever had spoken chose not to speak again. The old man was rowing himself towards the jetty. Smiley watched him approach, watched him back the stern towards the jetty steps. Without hesitating, Smiley clambered aboard. The old man pulled him the few strokes to the Isadora’s side. A cigarette was jammed between his cracked old lips and, like his eyes, it shone unnaturally against the evil gloom of his weathered face.

  “Come far?” the old man asked.

  “I’m a friend of his,” Smiley said.

  There was rust and weed on the Isadora’s ladder, and as Smiley reached the deck it was slippery with dew. He looked for signs of life and saw none. He looked for footprints in the dew, in vain. A couple of fixed fishing-lines hung into the water, made fast to the rusted balustrade, but they could have been there for weeks. He listened, and heard again, very faintly, the strains of slow band music. From the shore? Or from farther out? From neither. The sound came from under his feet, and it was as if someone were playing a seventy-eight record on thirty-three.

  He looked down and saw the old man in his dinghy, leaning back, and the peak of his cap pulled over his eyes, while he slowly conducted to the beat. He tried the cabin door and it was locked, but the door did not seem strong—nothing did—so he walked around the deck till he found a rusted screwdriver to use as a jemmy. He shoved it into the gap, worked it backwards and forwards, and suddenly to his surprise the whole door went, frame, hinges, lock, and everything else, with a bang like an explosion, followed by a shower of red dust from the rotten timber. A big slow moth thudded against his cheek and left it stinging strangely for a good while afterwards, till he began to wonder whether it was a bee. Inside, the cabin was pitch dark, but the music was a little louder. He was on the top rung of the ladder, and even with the daylight behind him the darkness below remained absolute. He pressed a light switch. It didn’t work, so he stepped back and spoke down to the old man in his dinghy: “Matches.”

  For a moment Smiley nearly lost his temper. The peaked cap didn’t stir, nor did the conducting cease. He shouted, and this time a box of matches landed at his feet. He took them into the cabin and lit one, and saw the exhausted transistor radio that was still putting out music with the last of its energy, and it was about the only thing intact, the only thing still functioning, in all the devastation round it.

  The match had gone out. He pulled the curtains, but not on the landward side, before he lit another. He didn’t want the old man looking in. In the grey sideways light, Leipzig was ridiculously like his tiny portrait in the photograph taken
by Herr Kretzschmar. He was naked, he was lying where they had trussed him, even if there was no girl and no Kirov either. The hewn Toulouse-Lautrec face, blackened with bruising and gagged with several strands of rope, was as jagged and articulate in death as Smiley had remembered it in life. They must have used the music to drown the noise while they tortured him, Smiley thought. But he doubted whether the music would have been enough. He went on staring at the radio as a point of reference, a thing to go back to when the body became too much to look at before the match went out. Japanese, he noticed. Odd, he thought. Fix on the oddness of it. How odd of the technical Germans to buy Japanese radios. He wondered whether the Japanese returned the compliment. Keep wondering, he urged himself ferociously; keep your whole mind on this interesting economic phenomenon of the exchange of goods between highly industrialised nations.

  Still staring at the radio, Smiley righted a folding stool and sat on it. Slowly, he returned his gaze to Leipzig’s face. Some dead faces, he reflected, have the dull, even stupid look of a patient under anaesthetic. Others preserve a single mood of the once varied nature—the dead man as lover, as father, as car driver, bridge player, tyrant. And some, like Vladimir’s, have ceased to preserve anything. But Leipzig’s face, even with the ropes across it, had a mood, and it was anger: anger intensified by pain, turned to fury by it; anger that had increased and become the whole man as the body lost its strength.

  Hate, Connie had said.

  Methodically, Smiley peered about him, thinking as slowly as he could manage, trying, by his examination of the debris, to reconstruct their progress. First the fight before they overpowered him, which he deduced from the smashed table-legs and chairs and lamps and shelves, and anything else that could be ripped from its housing and either wielded or thrown. Then the search, which took place after they had trussed him and in the intervals while they questioned him. Their frustration was written everywhere. They had ripped out wall-boards and floor-boards, and cupboard drawers and clothes and mattresses and by the end anything that came apart, anything that was not a minimal component, as Otto Leipzig still refused to talk. He noticed also that there was blood in surprising places—in the wash-basin, over the stove. He liked to think it was not all Otto Leipzig’s. And finally, in desperation, they had killed him, because those were Karla’s orders, that was Karla’s way. “The killing comes first, the questioning second,” Vladimir used to say.