Smiley's People

by John le Carré

  Totally committed to his part as bureaucratic messenger of the inevitable, Smiley signed once more and primly turned to another page of his notebook.

  “Counsellor, may I ask you what time you expect your wife and family to return from their picnic?”

  Still dabbing with the handkerchief, Grigoriev appeared too preoccupied to hear.

  “Grigorieva and the children are taking a picnic in the Elfenau woods,” Smiley reminded him. “We have some questions to ask you, but it would be unfortunate if your absence from home were to cause concern.”

  Grigoriev put away the handkerchief. “You are spies?” he whispered. “You are Western spies?”

  “Counsellor, it is better that you do not know who we are,” said Smiley earnestly. “Such information is a dangerous burden. When you have done as we ask, you will walk out of here a free man. You have our assurance. Neither your wife, nor even Moscow Centre, will ever be the wiser. Please tell me what time your family returns from Elfenau—” Smiley broke off.

  Somewhat half-heartedly, Grigoriev was affecting to make a dash for it. He stood up, he took a bound towards the door. Paul Skordeno had a languid air for a hard-man, but he caught the fugitive in an armlock even before he had taken a second step, and returned him gently to his chair, careful not to mark him. With another stage groan, Grigoriev flung up his hands in vast despair. His heavy face coloured and became convulsed, his broad shoulders started heaving as he broke into a mournful torrent of self-recrimination. He spoke half in Russian, half in German. He cursed himself with a slow and holy zeal, and after that, he cursed his mother, his wife and his bad luck and his own dreadful frailty as a father. He should have stayed in Moscow, in the Trade Ministry. He should never have been wooed away from academia merely because his fool wife wanted foreign clothes and music and privileges. He should have divorced her long ago but he could not bear to relinquish the children, he was a fool and a clown. He should be in the asylum instead of the girl. When he was sent for in Moscow, he should have said no, he should have resisted the pressure, he should have reported the matter to his Ambassador when he returned.

  “Oh, Grigoriev!” he cried. “Oh, Grigoriev! You are so weak, so weak!”

  Next, he delivered himself of a tirade against conspiracy. Conspiracy was anathema to him, several times in the course of his career he had been obliged to collaborate with the hateful “neighbours” in some crackpot enterprise, every time it was a disaster. Intelligence people were criminals, charlatans, and fools, a masonry of monsters. Why were Russians so in love with them? Oh, the fatal flaw of secretiveness in the Russian soul!

  “Conspiracy has replaced religion!” Grigoriev moaned to all of them, in German. “It is our mystical substitute! Its agents are our Jesuits, these swine, they ruin everything!”

  Bunching his fists now, he pushed them into his cheeks, pummelling himself in his remorse, till with a movement of the notepad on his lap, Smiley brought him dourly back to the matter in hand:

  “Concerning Grigorieva and your children, Counsellor,” he said. “It really is essential that we know what time they are due to return home.”

  In every successful interrogation—as Toby Esterhase likes to pontificate concerning this moment—there is one slip which cannot be recovered; one gesture, tacit or direct, even if it is only a half smile, or the acceptance of a cigarette, which marks the shift away from resistance, towards collaboration. Grigoriev, in Toby’s account of the scene, now made his crucial slip.

  “She will be home at one o’clock,” he muttered, avoiding both Smiley’s eye, and Toby’s.

  Smiley looked at his watch. To Toby’s secret ecstasy, Grigoriev did the same.

  “But perhaps she will be late?” Smiley objected.

  “She is never late,” Grigoriev retorted moodily.

  “Then kindly begin by telling me of your relationship with the girl Ostrakova,” said Smiley, stepping right into the blue—says Toby—yet contriving to imply that his question was the most natural sequel to the issue of Madame Grigorieva’s punctuality. Then he held his pen ready, and in such a way, says Toby, that a man like Grigoriev would feel positively obliged to give him something to write down.

  For all this, Grigoriev’s resistance was not quite evaporated. His amour propre demanded at least one further outing. Opening his hands, therefore, he appealed to Toby: “Ostrakova!” he repeated with exaggerated scorn. “He asks me about some woman called Ostrakova? I know no such person. Perhaps he does, but I do not. I am a diplomat. Release me immediately. I have important engagements.”

  But the steam, as well as the logic, was fast going out of his protests. Grigoriev knew this as well as anyone.

  “Alexandra Borisovna Ostrakova,” Smiley intoned, while he polished his spectacles on the fat end of his tie. “A Russian girl, but has a French passport.” He replaced his spectacles. “Just as you are Russian, Counsellor, but have a Swiss passport. Under a false name. Now how did you come to get involved with her, I wonder?”

  “Involved? Now he tells me I was involved with her! You think I am so base I sleep with mad girls? I was blackmailed. As you blackmail me now, so I was blackmailed. Pressure! Always pressure, always Grigoriev!”

  “Then tell me how they blackmailed you,” Smiley suggested, with barely a glance at him.

  Grigoriev peered into his hands, lifted them, but let them drop back onto his knees again, for once unused. He dabbed his lips with his handkerchief. He shook his head at the world’s iniquity.

  “I was in Moscow,” he said, and in Toby’s ears, as he afterwards declares, angel choirs sang their hallelujahs. George had turned the trick, and Grigoriev’s confession had begun.

  Smiley, on the other hand, betrayed no such jubilation at his achievement. To the contrary, a frown of irritation puckered his plump face.

  “The date, please, Counsellor,” he said, as if the place were not the issue. “Give the date when you were in Moscow. Henceforth, please give dates at all points.”

  This too is classic, Toby likes to explain: the wise inquisitor will always light a few false fires.

  “September,” said Grigoriev, mystified.

  “Of which year?” said Smiley, writing.

  Grigoriev looked plaintively to Toby again. “Which year! I say September, he asks me which September. He is a historian? I think he is a historian. This September,” he said sulkily to Smiley. “I was recalled to Moscow for an urgent commercial conference. I am an expert in certain highly specialized economic fields. Such a conference would have been meaningless without my presence.”

  “Did your wife accompany you on this journey?”

  Grigoriev let out a hollow laugh. “Now he thinks we are capitalists!” he commented to Toby. “He thinks we go flying our wives around for two-week conferences, first-class Swissair.”

  “‘In September of this year, I was ordered to fly alone to Moscow in order to attend a two-week economic conference,’” Smiley proposed, as if he were reading Grigoriev’s statement aloud. “‘My wife remained in Berne.’ Please describe the purpose of the conference.”

  “The subject of our high-level discussions was extremely secret,” Grigoriev replied with resignation. “My Ministry wished to consider ways of giving teeth to the official Soviet attitude towards nations who were selling arms to China. We were to discuss what sanctions could be used against the offenders.”

  Smiley’s faceless style, his manner of regretful bureaucratic necessity, were by now not merely established, says Toby, they were perfected: Grigoriev had adopted them wholesale, with philosophic, and very Russian, pessimism. As to the rest of those present, they could hardly believe, afterwards, that he had not been brought to the flat already in a mood to talk.

  “Where was the conference held?” Smiley asked, as if secret matters concerned him less than formal details.

  “At the Trade Ministry. On the fourth floor . . . in the conference room. Opposite the lavatory,” Grigoriev retorted, with hopeless facetiousness.
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br />   “Where did you stay?”

  At a hostel for senior officials, Grigoriev replied. He gave the address and even, in sarcasm, his room number. Sometimes, our discussions ended late at night, he said, by now liberally volunteering information; but on the Friday, since it was still summer weather and very hot, they ended early in order to enable those who wished, to leave for the country. But Grigoriev had no such plans. Grigoriev proposed to stay in Moscow for the week-end, and with reason: “I had arranged to pass two days in the apartment of a girl called Evdokia, formerly my secretary. Her husband was away on military service,” he explained, as if this were a perfectly normal transaction among men of the world; one which Toby at least, as a fellow soul, would appreciate, even if soulless commissars would not. Then, to Toby’s astonishment, he went straight on. From his dalliance with Evdokia, he passed without warning or preamble to the very heart of their enquiry:

  “Unfortunately, I was prevented from adhering to these arrangements by the intervention of members of the Thirteenth Directorate of Moscow Centre, known also as the Karla Directorate. I was summoned to attend an interview immediately.”

  At which moment, the telephone rang. Toby took the call, rang off, and spoke to Smiley.

  “She’s arrived back at the house,” he said, still in German.

  Without demur, Smiley turned straight to Grigoriev: “Counsellor, we are advised that your wife has returned home. It has now become necessary for you to telephone her.”

  “Telephone her?” Horrified, Grigoriev swung round on Toby. “He tells me, telephone her! What do I say? ‘Grigorieva, here is loving husband! I have been kidnapped by Western spies!’ Your commissar is mad! Mad!”

  “You will please tell her you are unavoidably delayed,” Smiley said.

  His placidity added fuel to Grigoriev’s outrage: “I tell this to my wife? To Grigorieva? You think she will believe me? She will report me to the Ambassador immediately. ‘Ambassador, my husband has run away! Find him!’”

  “The courier Krassky brings your weekly orders from Moscow, does he not?” Smiley asked.

  “The commissar knows everything,” Grigoriev told Toby, and wiped his hand across his chin. “If he knows everything, why doesn’t he speak to Grigorieva himself?”

  “You are to adopt an official tone with her, Counsellor,” Smiley advised. “Do not refer to Krassky by name, but suggest that he has ordered you to meet him for a conspiratorial discussion somewhere in the town. An emergency. Krassky has changed his plans. You have no idea when you will be back, or what he wants. If she protests, rebuke her. Tell her it is a secret of State.”

  They watched him worry, they watched him wonder. Finally, they watched a small smile settle over his face.

  “A secret,” Grigoriev repeated, to himself. “A secret of State. Yes.”

  Stepping boldly to the telephone, he dialled a number. Toby stood over him, one hand discreetly poised to slam the cradle should he try some trick, but Smiley with a small shake of the head signalled him away. They heard Grigorieva’s voice saying “Yes?” in German. They heard Grigoriev’s bold reply, followed by his wife—it is all on tape—demanding sharply to know where he was. They saw him stiffen and lift his chin, and put on an official face; they heard him snap out a few short phrases, and ask a question to which there was apparently no answer. They saw him ring off again, bright-eyed and pink with pleasure, and his short arms fly in the air with delight, like someone who has scored a goal. The next thing they knew, he had burst out laughing, long, rich gusts of Slav laughter, up and down the scale. Uncontrollably, the others began laughing with him—Skordeno, de Silsky, and Toby. Grigoriev was shaking Toby’s hand.

  “Today I like very much conspiracy!” Grigoriev cried, between further gusts of cathartic laughter. “Conspiracy is very good today!”

  Smiley had not joined in the general festivity, however. Having cast himself deliberately as the killjoy, he sat turning the pages of his notebook, waiting for the fun to end.

  “You were describing how you were approached by members of the Thirteenth Directorate,” Smiley said, when all was quiet again. “Known also as the Karla Directorate. Kindly continue with your narrative, Counsellor?”

  25

  Did Grigoriev sense the new alertness round him—the discreet freezing of gestures? Did he notice how the eyes of Skordeno and de Silsky, both, hunted out Smiley’s impassive face and held it in their gaze? How Millie McCraig slipped silently to the kitchen to check her tape recorders yet again, in case, by an act of a malevolent god, both the main set and the reserve had failed at once? Did he notice Smiley’s now almost Oriental self-effacement—the very opposite of interest—the retreat of his whole body into the copious folds of his brown tweed travelling coat, while he patiently licked his thumb and finger and turned a page?

  Toby, at least, noticed these things. Toby in his dark corner by the telephone had a grandstand seat from which he could observe everyone and remain as good as unobserved himself. A fly could not have crossed the floor, but Toby’s watchful eyes would have recorded its entire odyssey. Toby even describes his own symptoms—a hot feeling around the neckband, he says, a knotting of the throat and stomach muscles—Toby not only endured these discomforts, but remembered them faithfully. Whether Grigoriev was responsive to the atmosphere is another matter. Most likely he was too consumed by his central rôle. The triumph of the telephone call had stimulated him, and revived his self-confidence; and it was significant that his first statement, when he once more had the floor, concerned not the Karla Directorate, but his prowess as the lover of little Natasha: “Fellows of our age need a girl like that,” he explained to Toby with a wink. “They make us into young men again, like we used to be!”

  “Very well, you flew to Moscow alone,” Smiley said, quite snappishly. “The conference got under way, you were approached for an interview. Please continue from there. We have not got all afternoon, you know.”

  The conference started on the Monday, Grigoriev agreed, obediently resuming his official statement. When the Friday afternoon came, I returned to my hostel in order to fetch my belongings and take them to Evdokia’s apartment for our little week-end together. Instead of this, however, I was met by three men who ordered me into their car with even less explanation than you did—a glance at Toby—saying to me only that I was required for a special task. During the journey they advised me that they were members of the Thirteenth Directorate of Moscow Centre, which everybody in official Moscow knows to be the élite. I formed the impression that they were intelligent men, above the common run of their profession, which, saving your presence, sir, is not high. I had the impression they could be officers rather than mere lackeys. Nevertheless I was not unduly worried. I assumed that my professional expertise was being required for some secret matter, that was all. They were courteous and I was even somewhat flattered . . .

  “How long was the journey?” Smiley interrupted, as he continued writing.

  Across town, Grigoriev replied vaguely. Across town, then into countryside till dark. Till we reached this one little man like a monk, sitting in a small room, who seemed to be their master.

  Once again, Toby insists on bearing witness here to Smiley’s unique mastery of the occasion. It was the strongest proof yet of Smiley’s tradecraft, says Toby—as well as of his command of Grigoriev altogether—that throughout Grigoriev’s protracted narrative, he never once, whether by an over-hasty follow-up question or the smallest false inflection of his voice, departed from the faceless rôle he had assumed for the interrogation. By his self-effacement, Toby insists, George held the whole scene “like a thrush’s egg in his hand.” The slightest careless movement on his part could have destroyed everything, but he never made it. And as the crowning example, Toby likes to offer this crucial moment, when the actual figure of Karla was for the first time introduced. Any other inquisitor, he says, at the very mention of a “little man like a monk who seemed to be their master,” would have pressed for a description�
��his age, rank, what was he wearing, smoking, how did you know he was their master? Not Smiley. Smiley with a suppressed exclamation of annoyance tapped his ballpoint pen on his pad, and in a long-suffering voice invited Grigoriev, then and for the future, kindly not to foreshorten factual detail:

  “Let me put the question again. How long was the journey? Please describe it precisely as you remember it and let us proceed from there.”

  Crestfallen, Grigoriev actually apologised. He would say they drove for four hours at speed, sir; perhaps more. He remembered now that they twice stopped to relieve themselves. After four hours they entered a guarded area—no, sir, I saw no shoulder-boards, the guards wore plain clothes—and drove for at least another half hour into the heart of it. Like a nightmare, sir.

  Yet again, Smiley objected, determined to keep the temperature as low as possible. How could it have been a nightmare, he wanted to know, since Grigoriev had only a moment before claimed that he was not frightened?

  Well, not a nightmare exactly, sir, more a dream. At this stage, Grigoriev had had an impression he was being taken to the landlord—he used the Russian word, and Toby translated it—while he himself felt increasingly like a poor peasant. Therefore he was not frightened, sir, because he had no control over events, and accordingly nothing for which to reproach himself. But when the car finally stopped, and one of the men put a hand on his arm, and addressed a warning to him: at this point, his attitude changed entirely, sir: “You are about to meet a great Soviet fighter and a powerful man,” the man told him. “If you are disrespectful to him, or attempt to tell lies, you may never again see your wife and family.”

  “What is the name of this man?” Grigoriev had asked.

  But the men replied, without smiling, that this great Soviet fighter had no name. Grigoriev asked whether he was Karla himself; knowing that Karla was the code name for the head of the Thirteenth Directorate. The men only repeated that the great fighter had no name.