Smiley's People

by John le Carré

  I too believe in Otto, Smiley thought stupidly, recalling Herr Kretzschmar’s words. Not in every detail but in the big things. So do I, he thought. He believed in him, at that moment, as surely as he believed in death, and in the Sandman. As for Vladimir, so for Otto Leipzig: death had ruled that he was telling the truth.

  From the direction of the shore, he heard a woman yelling: “What’s he found? Has he found something? Who is he?”

  He returned aloft. The old man had shipped his oars and let the dinghy drift. He sat with his back to the ladder, head hunched into his big shoulders. He had finished his cigarette and lit a cigar as if it were Sunday. And at the same moment as Smiley saw the old man, he also saw the chalk mark. It was in the same line of vision, but very close to him, swimming in the misted lenses of his spectacles. He had to lower his head and look over the top of them to fix on it. A chalk mark, sharp and yellow. One line, carefully drawn over the rust of the balustrade, and a foot away from it a reel of fishing-line, made fast with a sailor’s knot. The old man was watching him; so, for all he knew, was the growing group of watchers on the shore, but he had no option. He pulled at the line and it was heavy. He pulled steadily, hand over hand, till the line changed to gut, and he found himself pulling that instead. The gut grew suddenly tight. Cautiously he kept pulling. The people on the shore had grown expectant; he could feel their interest even across the water. The old man had put back his head and was watching through the black shadow of his cap. Suddenly, with a plop, the catch jumped clear of the water and a peal of ribald laughter rose from the spectators: one old gym-shoe, green, with the lace still in it, and the hook that held it to the line was big enough to beach a shark. The laughter slowly died. Smiley unhooked the shoe. Then, as if he had other business there, he lumbered back into the cabin till he was out of sight, leaving the door ajar for light.

  But happening to take the gym-shoe with him.

  An oilskin packet was hand-stitched into the toe of the shoe. He pulled it out. It was a tobacco pouch, stitched along the top and folded several times. Moscow Rules, he thought woodenly. Moscow Rules all the way. How many more dead men’s legacies must I inherit? he wondered. Though we value none/But the horizontal one. He had unpicked the stitching. Inside the pouch was another wrapping, this time a latex-rubber sheath knotted at the throat. And secreted inside the sheath, one hard wad of cardboard smaller than a book of matches. Smiley spread it open. It was half a picture postcard. Black-and-white, not even coloured. Half a dull picture of Schleswig-Holstein landscape with half a herd of Friesian cattle grazing in grey sunlight. Ripped with a deliberate jaggedness. No writing on the back, no address, no stamp. Just half a boring, unposted postcard; but they had tortured him, then killed him for it, and still not found it, or any of the treasures it unlocked. Putting it, together with its wrapping, into the inside pocket of his jacket, he returned to the deck. The old man in his dinghy had drawn alongside. Without a word, Smiley climbed slowly down the ladder. The crowd of camp people on the shore had grown still larger.

  “Drunk?” the old man asked. “Sleeping it off?”

  Smiley stepped into the dinghy and, as the old man pulled away, looked back at the Isadora once more. He saw the broken porthole, he thought of the wreckage in the cabin, the paper-thin sides that allowed him to hear the very shuffle of feet on the shore. He imagined the fight and Leipzig’s screams filling the whole camp with their din. He imagined the silent group standing where they were standing now, without a voice or a helping hand between them.

  “It was a party,” the old man said carelessly while he made the dinghy fast against the jetty. “Lots of music, singing. They warned us it would be loud.” He tugged at a knot. “Maybe they quarrelled. So what? Many people quarrel. They made some noise, played some jazz. So what? We are musical people here.”

  “They were police,” a woman called from the group on the shore. “When police go about their business, it is the duty of the citizen to keep his trap shut.”

  “Show me his car,” Smiley said.

  They moved in a rabble, no one leading. The old man strode at Smiley’s side, half custodian, half bodyguard, making a way for him with facetious ceremony. The children ran everywhere but they kept well clear of the old man. The Volkswagen stood in a coppice and it was ripped apart like the cabin of the Isadora. The roof lining hung in shreds, the seats had been pulled out and split open. The wheels were missing but Smiley guessed that had happened since. The camp people stood round it reverently, as if it were their show-piece. Someone had tried to burn it but the fire had not caught.

  “He was scum,” the old man explained. “They all are. Look at them. Polacks, criminals, subhumans.”

  Smiley’s Opel stood where he had parked it, at the edge of the track, close to the dustbins, and the two blond boys who were dressed alike were standing over the boot beating the lid with hammers. As he walked towards them, he could see their forelocks bouncing with each blow. They wore jeans and black boots studded with love-daisies.

  “Tell them to stop hitting my car,” Smiley said to the old man.

  The camp people were following at a distance. He could hear again the furtive shuffle of their feet, like a refugee army. He reached his car and had the keys in his hand, and the two boys were still bent over the back hitting with all their might. But when he walked round to take a look, all they had done was beat the lid of the boot right off its hinges, then fold it and beat it flat again till it lay like a crude parcel on the floor. He looked at the wheels but nothing seemed amiss. He didn’t know what else to look for. Then he saw that they had tied a dustbin to the rear bumper with string. Keeping clear, he tugged at the string to break it, but it refused to yield. He tried it with his teeth, without success. The old man lent him a penknife and he cut it, keeping clear of the boys with their hammers. The camp people had made a half ring and they were holding up their children for the farewell. Smiley got into the car and the old man slammed the door after him with a tremendous heave. Smiley had the key in the ignition, but by the time he turned it, one of the boys had draped himself over the bonnet as languidly as a model at a motor show and the other was tapping politely at the window.

  Smiley lowered the window. “What do you want?” he asked.

  The boy held out his palm. “Repairs,” he explained. “Your boot didn’t shut properly. Time and materials. Overheads. Parking.” He indicated his thumb-nail. “My colleague here hurt his hand. It could have been serious.”

  Smiley looked at the boy’s face and saw no human instinct that he understood.

  “You have repaired nothing. You have done damage. Ask your friend to get off the car.”

  The boys conferred, seeming to disagree. They did this under the full gaze of the crowd, in a reasoned manner, slowly pushing each other’s shoulders and making rhetorical gestures that did not coincide with their words. They talked about nature and about politics, and their Platonic dialogue might have gone on indefinitely if the boy who was on the car had not stood up in order to make the best of a debating point. As he did so, he broke off a windscreen wiper as if it were a flower and handed it to the old man. Driving away, Smiley looked in his mirror and saw a ring of faces staring after him with the old man at their centre. Nobody waved goodbye.

  He drove without haste, weighing the chances, while the car clanged like an old fire-engine. He supposed they had done something else to it as well, something he had failed to notice. He had left Germany before, he had come and gone illicitly, he had hunted while on the run, and though he was old now and in a different Germany, he felt as if he had been returned to the wild. He had no way of knowing whether anybody from the water camp had telephoned the police, but he took it for an accomplished fact. The boat was open and its secret out. Those who had looked away would now be the first to come forward as good citizens. He had seen that before as well.

  He entered a sea town, the boot—if it was the boot—still clanking behind him. Or perhaps it’s the exhaust, he thought; the p
ot-hole I crashed into on the way to the camp. A hot, unseasonable sun had replaced the morning mists. There were no trees. An amazing brilliance was opening around him. It was still early, and empty horse carriages stood waiting for the first tourists. The sand was a pattern of craters dug in the summer by sun-worshippers to escape the wind. He could hear the tinny echo of his own progress bouncing between the painted shop-fronts, and the sunlight seemed to make it even louder. Where he passed people, he saw their heads lift to stare after him because of the row the car made.

  They’ll know the car, he thought. Even if nobody at the water camp remembered the number, the smashed boot would give him away. He turned off the main street. The sun was really very bright indeed. “A man came, Herr Wachtmeister,” they would be saying to the police patrol. “This morning, Herr Wachtmeister. He said he was a friend. He looked in the boat and then drove away. He asked us nothing, Captain. He was unmoved. He fished a shoe, Herr Wachtmeister. Imagine—a shoe!”

  He was heading for the railway station, following the signs, looking for a place where you could park a car all day. The station was red brick and massive, he supposed from before the war. He passed it and found a big car-park to his left. A line of shedding trees ran through it, and there were leaves on some of the cars. A machine took his money and issued him a ticket to stick on his windscreen. He backed into the middle of a line, the boot as far out of sight as possible against a mud bank. He stepped out and the extraordinary sun hit him like a slap. There was not a breath of wind. He locked the car and put the keys in the exhaust-pipe, he didn’t quite know why, except that he felt apologetic towards the hire company. He kicked up the leaves and sand till the front number-plate was almost hidden. In an hour, in this St. Luke’s summer, there would be a hundred and more cars in the park.

  He had noticed a men’s clothes shop in the main street. He bought a linen jacket there but nothing more, because people who buy whole outfits are remembered. He did not wear it, but carried it in a plastic bag. In a side-street full of boutiques he bought a gaudy straw hat and, from a stationer’s, a holiday map of the area, and a railway timetable of the region Hamburg, Schleswig-Holstein, and Lower Saxony. He didn’t wear the hat either, but kept it in its bag like the jacket. He was sweating from the unexpected heat. The heat was upsetting him; it was as absurd as snow in summer. He went to a telephone-box and again consulted local directories. Hamburg had no Claus Kretzschmar, but one of the Schleswig-Holstein directories had a Kretzschmar who lived in a place Smiley had never heard of. He studied his map and found a small town by that name on the main railway line to Hamburg. This pleased him very much.

  Calmly, all other thoughts bound down with iron bands, Smiley once more did his sums. Within moments of finding the car, the police would be talking to the hire firm in Hamburg. As soon as they had spoken to the hire firm and obtained his name and description, they would put a watch on the airport and other crossing places. Kretzschmar was a night-bird and would sleep late. The town where he lived was an hour away by stopping train.

  He returned to the railway station. The main concourse was a Wagnerian fantasy of a Gothic court, with an arched roof and a huge stained-glass window that poured out coloured sunbeams onto the ceramic floor. From a telephone-box, he rang Hamburg Airport, giving his name as “Standfast, initial J,” which was the name on the passport he had collected from his London club. The first available flight to London was this evening at six but only first-class was open. He booked a first-class seat and said he would upgrade his economy ticket on arrival at the airport. The girl said, “Then please come half an hour before check-in.” Smiley promised he would—he wanted to make an impression—but no, alas, Mr. Standfast had no phone number where he could be reached meanwhile. There was nothing in her tone to suggest she had a security officer standing behind her with a Telex in his hand, whispering instructions in her ear, but he guessed that within a couple of hours Mr. Standfast’s seat reservation was going to ring a lot of bells, because it was Mr. Standfast who had hired the Opel car. He stepped back into the concourse, and the shafts of coloured light. There were two ticket counters and two short queues. At the first, an intelligent girl attended him and he bought a second-class single ticket to Hamburg. But it was a deliberately laboured purchase, full of indecision and nervousness, and when he had made it he insisted on writing down times of departure and arrival: also on borrowing her ball-point and a pad of paper.

  In the men’s room, having first transferred the contents of his pockets, beginning with the treasured piece of postcard from Leipzig’s boat, he changed into the linen jacket and straw hat, then went to the second ticket counter where, with a minimum of fuss, he bought a ticket on the stopping train to Kretzschmar’s town. To do this, he avoided looking at the attendant at all, concentrating instead on the ticket and his change, from under the brim of his loud straw hat. Before leaving he took one last precaution. He made a wrong-number phone call to Herr Kretzschmar and established from an indignant wife that it was a scandal to telephone anybody so early. As a last measure, he folded the plastic carrier-bags into his pocket.

  The town was leafy and secluded, the lawns large, the houses carefully zoned. Whatever there had been of country life had long fallen before the armies of suburbia, but the brilliant sunlight made everything beautiful. Number 8 was on the right-hand side, a substantial two-story residence with steep Scandinavian roofs, a double garage, and a wide selection of young trees planted much too close together. There was a swing chair in the garden with a flowered plastic seat and a new fish-pond in the romantic idiom. But the main attraction, and Herr Kretzschmar’s pride, was an outdoor swimming-pool in its own patio of shrieking red tile, and it was there that Smiley found him, in the bosom of his family, on this unlikely autumn day, entertaining a few neighbours at an impromptu party. Herr Kretzschmar himself, in shorts, was preparing the barbecue and as Smiley dropped the latch on the gate he paused from his labours and looked round to see who had come. But the new straw hat and the linen jacket confused him and he called instead to his wife.

  Frau Kretzschmar strode down the path, bearing a champagne glass. She was clad in a pink bathing-dress and a diaphanous pink cape, which she allowed to flow behind her daringly.

  “Who is that then? Who is the nice surprise?” she kept asking in a playful voice. She could have been talking to her puppy.

  She stopped in front of him. She was tanned and tall and, like her husband, built to last. He could see little of her face, for she wore dark glasses with a white plastic beak to protect her nose from burning.

  “Here is family Kretzschmar, going about its pleasures,” she said not very confidently when he had still not introduced himself. “What can we do for you, sir? In what way can we serve?”

  “I have to speak to your husband,” Smiley said. It was the first time he had spoken since he bought his ticket, and his voice was thick and unnatural.

  “But Cläuschen does no business in the daytime,” she said firmly, still smiling. “In the daytime by family decree the profit motive has its sleep. Shall I put handcuffs on him to prove to you he is our prisoner till sunset?”

  Her bathing-dress was in two parts and her smooth, full belly was oily with lotion. She wore a gold chain round her waist, presumably as a further sign of naturalness. And gold sandals with very high heels.

  “Kindly tell your husband that this is not business,” Smiley said. “This is friendship.”

  Frau Kretzschmar took a sip of her champagne, then removed her dark glasses and beak, as if she were declaring herself at the bal masqué. She had a snub nose. Her face, though kindly, was a good deal older than her body.

  “But how can it be friendship when I don’t know your name?” she demanded, no longer certain whether to be winsome or discouraging.

  But by then Herr Kretzschmar himself had walked down the path after her, and stopped before them, staring from his wife to Smiley, then at Smiley again. And perhaps the sight of Smiley’s set face and manner,
and the fixity of his gaze, warned Herr Kretzschmar of the reason for his coming.

  “Go and take care of the cooking,” he said curtly.

  Guiding Smiley by the arm, Herr Kretzschmar led him to a drawing-room with brass chandeliers and a picture window full of jungle cacti.

  “Otto Leipzig is dead,” Smiley said without preliminary as soon as the door was closed. “Two men killed him at the water camp.”

  Herr Kretzschmar’s eyes opened very wide; then unashamedly he swung his back to Smiley and covered his face with his hands.

  “You made a tape-recording,” Smiley said, ignoring this display entirely. “There was the photograph which I showed you, and somewhere there is also a tape-recording which you are keeping for him.” Herr Kretzschmar’s back showed no sign that he had heard. “You talked about it to me yourself last night,” Smiley went on, in the same sentinel tone. “You said they discussed God and the world. You said Otto was laughing like an executioner, speaking three languages at once, singing, telling jokes. You took the photographs for Otto, but you also recorded their conversation for him. I suspect you also have the letter which you received on his behalf from London.”

  Herr Kretzschmar had swung round and he was staring at Smiley in outrage.

  “Who killed him?” he asked. “Herr Max, I ask you as a soldier!”

  Smiley had taken the torn piece of picture postcard from his pocket.

  “Who killed him?” Herr Kretzschmar repeated. “I insist!”